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Unix-style programmers just think that B- is more important than A- for the success of most projects.
The issue is that when you care too much about A, especially if you try to make it easy for people who don't even know what they are trying to do with the software, you might fail to accomplish making a good, useful program for those who need it to get work done.

Unix-style programmers just think that B- is more important than A- for the success of most projects.
The issue is that when you care too much about A, especially if you try to make it easy for people who don't even know what they are trying to do with the software, you might fail to accomplish making a good, useful program for those who need it to get work done.

Unix-style programmers just think that B- is more important than A- for the success of most projects.
The issue is that when you care too much about A, especially if you try to make it easy for people who don't even know what they are trying to do with the software, you might fail to accomplish making a good, useful program for those who need it to get work done.

At least you'd be speaking the truth, unlike your above statement.

Oh really? You can search for 'boxen' on any nerd-slang site*, and you'll find out I'm right. It has absolutely nothing to do with German, and never did. Do you think the English word 'die' was imported from German too? There is, after all, an identically spelt German word.

* You can start with the Jargon File

The author is envisioning a utopian world where /everyone/ sets aside their differences and comes together to build something great.

It never happens that way. What typically happens is accidental successes, such as the success of Linux over Hurd. Someone comes up with a better way of working, whether intentional or not (e.g. Linus and "the bazaar"), and it wins in the marketplace of ideas.

While there's a lot of distributions out there, I'd argue that the important benefits of consolidation are being recognized. Many are derivatives of other distros, with Debian being one of the most popular starting points. Alternate distributions serve as a development ground for mainstream distributions - e.g. there's a lot of great hardware detection code from Knoppix that is getting pulled into many other distributions. The "yum" component of Fedora is pulled out of Yellow Dog.

I imagine after Linux goes mainstream, there will be one or two dominant distributions. At least one of them will probably have a very "standard" feel to it, i.e. it'll be hard to imagine that the desire for a "community" distribution will ever go away (hence the new trend toward foundations such as Fedora and Ubuntu foundations). I'm just not going to make any bets on who comes out on top, though I am writing this from a laptop with Ubuntu on it. ;-)

Rob

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/boxen.html

I said: It is sad that slashdot focuses on the tabloid side of the interview....

desine sarcastically opined: Ya...because real nerds are into land management.

I think that maybe you disagree with the bazaar model, but it certainly doesn't fail to adress your concerns:

Here's a quote:

"The history of Unix should have prepared us for what we're learning from Linux (and what I've verified experimentally on a smaller scale by deliberately copying Linus's methods [EGCS]). That is, while coding remains an essentially solitary activity, the really great hacks come from harnessing the attention and brainpower of entire communities. The developer who uses only his or her own brain in a closed project is going to fall behind the developer who knows how to create an open, evolutionary context in which feedback exploring the design space, code contributions, bug-spotting, and other improvements come from from hundreds (perhaps thousands) of people."

taken from:http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-b azaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s11.html

At some critical level of users Raymond compares Linux (the kernel) to an atomic explosion in terms of critical mass, basically stating that the single most important thing is a thundering herd of users and developers. Individual talent of a single person be damned! (or, at least, it's not as important as one would naturally assume).

So, individual talent is definitely taken into account. It's just deemed surprisingly unimportant: what you really need is the largest group possible.

I was going to say on the gripping hand but I edited it out before posting because it made me sound like too much of a nerd.

Don't worry. They have wizards, but RMS could probably count on the aid of the avatar of a god.

Does that mean that being a briliant, enthusiastic programmer will be a crime now? I mean... Crap...

Oh... You mean the pop-culture, retard, backwards meaning of hacker... As in hackers the movie? Whew... I thought I will have to outsource myself somewhere else :P Heh, silly normal people and their miss-appropriation of technical jargon...

That pretty much covers it. Tear it apart, see how it works. That's been the way to "hack" for at least 50 years.

Don't we want a little more from a hacker than this definition demands? Some crafty reverse-engineering, a nifty bit of design or code, or a surprising re-use of some existing object? Opening up a coffee pot is interesting, and credit to the authors for writing up the page, but it's not what I would want to call a hack. Here's the definition of "hack" in the Jargon File, A.K.A. The Hacker's Dictionary.

Well, it helps that most of what the rest of the world considers worthy expenditure of free time is exactly the kind of thing hackers "detest and avoid". http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/
Watch the Superbowl? There's 6+ hours you could have had at least your own text editor right there. Watch TV at all? That's costing you a whole operating system per year. Carry a cell phone? I did the math once and figured out that I have added the effective 15 years to my life I lost from smoking by not carrying a cell phone. Little things like that add up, you cut corners...

And yeah, you may work 70 hour weeks, but only for short stretches so you can pile away the money, take some time off, and work on your own again...

I'm reminded of the adage:

"Perfection is not when there is nothing left to add, but rather when there is nothing left to take away."

Upon hearing this the c-book writer was enlightened.

See the term reference here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/dead-tree-v ersion.html

And the whole jargon file listing here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/

(Personally I think it's oddly fitting that, not only would geeks (myself included) develop quite a number of terms relating to the technical field, but then compile them into a dictionary reference with definitions)

See the term reference here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/D/dead-tree-v ersion.html

And the whole jargon file listing here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/

(Personally I think it's oddly fitting that, not only would geeks (myself included) develop quite a number of terms relating to the technical field, but then compile them into a dictionary reference with definitions)

Sigh
And agin.
And again.

If universities actively use their resources to push the Napster service, they are actively using their resources to help MS break the law in two ways: extend the desktop monopoly and break into the audio/video market.

The captive market for music already exists. Their options are to either spend a lot of time blocking packets to unclog their network, spend more money on better networking, or subscribe to this service, which unclogs the network and removes fear of legal liability if they can make it work.

Or the MPAA/RIAA could modernize its business. Being a bottleneck in distribution of entertainment doesn't work once you go beyond distribution fof physical media and enter the world of networked computing. Nor does the current move towards extortion seem to be either popular nor sustainable. Just because they once had a model that used to be profitable doesn't mean the world owes them a handout to keep them in money once that model becomes antiquated. The times don't fit the MPAA/RIAA's outmoded business model, they need to adapt or die.

The rest of your post is just anti-MS FUD.

Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's FUD. And just because it doesn't favor MS doesn't mean it's FUD either. MS has worked hard over many years to earn the poor reputation it has among the tech community for it's shoddy software and predatory business methods.

What you want these systems to do? Integrate into AD? Any Linux can do that... You *need* to pay for some kind of Linux? Well if you just *need* then toss the coin and decide... :)

To be honest I don't quite get the problem. Maybe you should read: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html - cause now you ask like "Which is better?".

Maybe you're looking for one of the many devices that utilize write-only memory?

Zawinskis Law

Goatse and tubgirl were 'popular' because it amuses some people to horrificly grose out other people. As to geeks being sexual deviants... Well I'm certinaly rather kinky, but I can't speek for the rest of the geek population, but ESR seems to think a lot of is are pervs.

"We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway)."

And it's true IME too.

I'm not really worried by the fact that many people these days weren't taught English very well. I wasn't taught it very well, and have had to discover many things myself and make my own corrections. School isn't the be-all and end-all of learning.

No, what really distresses me is that other people don't care -- they simply don't see it as important. Slashdotters who are perfectly happy spotting single-symbol mistakes in source code, shell commands, or whatever, and deride those who use the wrong words for technical concepts, simply don't apply the same standards to English.

And I have no idea why this should be. Do people care less about communicating with humans than they do with computers? Do they assume that people will always be able to understand their meaning? (I can tell you from experience that that's not true! It often doesn't take more than a couple of mistakes before you're having to guess between several contradictory meanings.) Do they care so little that they're genuinely unable to see their mistakes, or to use a spelling checker (which, while limited and hardly a full solution, is still a useful tool)?

For myself, I naturally apply the same sort of precision to human language as I do to computer language. (I even tend to use the same style where possible.) I care about expressing myself correctly and well; I'm going to the effort of typing or writing -- I want people to be able to understand the results!

I could go on at length about particular mistakes ('rediculous' is one which particularly irritates me: it always makes me wonder whether things would be worse if they were 'greeniculous' or 'blueiculous'), but I'm sure plenty of others will get mentioned. I could also go on about economies of scale (if a thousand people are reading something, it makes much more sense for the writer to take a bit longer fixing it than for every single reader to puzzle over it). But what I really what to know is why people don't care about English? And how can we get them to care? Once people care, then the rest will take care of itself. People will either learn to spot their own problems, or will accept constructive criticism without lashing out and using hateful terms like 'grammar Nazi'...

(2) Hackers may be native English speakers, but they speak many languages...or rather, write them. When I've finished a hairy C coding session, put a Bash shell script wrapper around the C program, added a supporting feature in Python, all the while talking to my system and compiler in terse "gcc -o -Wall" and "ls -lh" syntax, and finally post the code to share online, which requires translating it into an HTML-friendly format, my English is shot to hell by then. Whose wouldn't be? Ever done this: "Why the hell won't it take a semi-colon at the end of this line? Oh, wait, I'm writing in Lisp!!!" ? After that, you're not prone to remember the twelve words that are an exception to "I before E".

(3) The internet environment. The internet kills spelling. Chats, emails, and other type-written communication lend themselves easily to abbreviation and jargon. Command-line environments especially strip the non-essential letters and syllables away, leaving you typing "man" for manual for instance. *nix users especially forget how to type in the "real world" because they're used to a system where you can just type in the first few letters of a word and hit "tab" and the computer completes it for you.

(4) Then there's the special circumstances of hacking itself. Hackers may be relieved when they type English, because when they type any other language (programming languages) they get errors and bugs every time they get a comma in the wrong place or leave out a closing brace. If the keyboard itself had an "English compiler" that said:
"Error 4085: Line 22: Dangling Participle"
Things might be different. Yes, I know, interactive spell-checkers in fancy Word-Office applications...but hackers compose in ed!

If /. had a spell-check button on this page I'm posting from, I'd use it...

Might be because we realized that the IPV6 protocol was unnecessary. Once people were forced to NAT, it suddently dawned on the great mass of people that workstations shouldn't be getting public IPs for security and management reasons.

NAT imposes a number of design constraints and generally makes a lot of complex things even more difficult than they need to be.

For example, I once had to diagnose problems with an FTP transfer between two machines. This would have been easy if it were not for the fact that there were three layers of NAT (two of which translated both source and destination addresses) between the two. These NAT layers were translating the source address of the original DNS query twice, the destination address of the DNS query (three times), the source address of the DNS response packet (three times), the destination address of the DNS response packet (twice), the contents of the DNS response itself (twice), the source (twice) and destination (thrice) addresses of the resulting TCP connection for the FTP control channel, modifying the PORT commands passing over the control channel (twice, I think), and the source (three times) and destination (twice) addresses of the FTP data connection.

Suffice to say that when the FTP transfers weren't working, diagnosing where the problem lay was rather complex, especially as more than one organisation was involved (two of the NAT layers were in one organisation, and the third was in another).

You can't implement NAT fully without performing data changes at the application-level protocol layer (for example FTP PORT commands), and that's evil (in the hackish sense of the word).

this should answer your questions.

I believe this is totally off base. *Hackers* tend to spell things correctly, and generally have an excellent sense of the English language, as explained by the jargon file. *Script kiddies*, however, are clearly guilty of the charges you laid out. They are yet young and foolish, though they may learn. But do not apply this to hackers, as they might feel inclined to respond and leave you long exacting diatribes in return.

Gosh, I could google it faster than slashdot will let me finish a post: http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/P/pumpking.html

"... Am I missing something here?"

Yes, you are. From How to Ask Smart Questions, "We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway). Answering questions for careless and sloppy thinkers is not rewarding; we'd rather spend our time elsewhere.

So expressing your question clearly and well is important. If you can't be bothered to do that, we can't be bothered to pay attention. Spend the extra effort to polish your language. It doesn't have to be stiff or formal -- in fact, hacker culture values informal, slangy and humorous language used with precision. But it has to be precise; there has to be some indication that you're thinking and paying attention.

Spell, punctuate, and capitalize correctly. Don't confuse "its" with "it's", "loose" with "lose", or "discrete" with "discreet". Don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS, this is read as shouting and considered rude. (All-smalls is only slightly less annoying, as it's difficult to read. Alan Cox can get away with it, but you can't.)

More generally, if you write like a semi-literate boob you will very likely be ignored. Writing like a l33t script kiddie hax0r is the absolute kiss of death and guarantees you will receive nothing but stony silence (or, at best, a heaping helping of scorn and sarcasm) in return."

Personally, poor grammar and frequent errors in spelling cause an obscure form of mental anguish. I reflexively correct people online, which causes no end of irritation, but i really don't care. Sloppy expression is tied up with sloppy thought, which makes getting work done nigh upon impossible.

Orwell talks about this a bit, actually, if in a tangential fashion. Read Politics and the English Language for more.

Only in this industry can we get a WOMBAT to market.

I am sorry for your skepticism. It's in the jargon file and also the OED.

Q: How fast can a helicoptor travel?
A: Mu

A lot of the posts seem to imply that conservative justices are to blame here. If anything, the *liberal* and moderate justices are the majority opinion in this case, not the other way around.

If you find yourself generally liberal, especially on social issues, but also strongly respect private property rights and such, you should really look at the libertarians (it was a group of libertarian lawyers ( http://www.ij.org/ ), representing the people whose homes are being seized).

lp.org is a decent place to start for that, and there are several "libertarian faqs" out there. ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/libertarianism.html ) is one.

A liberal refutation (that I *personally* think is largely strawman attacks, as the arguments he debunks are neither convincing nor the ones that I had heard of) is the "Non libertarian FAQ", one mirror at http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html .

No, this is just a typical AOL "Me too!" response.

2.) AC's. Really, that's what kills slashdot. If AC posting was removed, there would be a lot less crap. Making an ID is free, easy, and doesn't require you to give out any personal information. Why not tie stuff to an ID so its easier to get rid of the crap? Instead of IP bans, you can setup an IP 'greylist' that means if you create an account from the greylist, they can't post much or have to wait a couple days after registration to post

The problem with ACs is that people get away with posting outrageous trolls without their karma suffering one iota. Perhaps there should be a middle ground, a "Hide my ID with this post and delete all records of it after 24 hours automatically" option. This will mean they'll still suffer karma losses if modded down, but the privacy aspect would only be infringed by an extremely fast lawyer.

SLOW DOWN COWBOY! Slow down.

Apparently it's been four minutes since my last posting. Whoppie doo.

I've inserted this dot as a page widening feature: .

Six minutes now. I'm wondering if the system is designed so that once it hits 60 minutes it changes to hours. I could post a bug fix to Slashcode to help with that if it doesn't.

Ok, this isn't helping, here's a post to another great troll site: Don't click! Disgusting!

Ok, this one's totally gross: Don't look! Argh!

Ok, here's the bad news for anyone still reading this after so many hours of not being postable. Fort Knox? That's actually the Slashdot ID of Linus Torvalds. You thought he was a nice guy right? Ha. No he isn't. This is about the only way Torvalds can actually express his true feelings about the "Open Source" community, by posting under a nick. If he didn't, people would be abandoning Linux in droves. It's worse than that, of course. The_Mad_Poster? That's Al Gore that is. Yes, Al. You don't think the previous administration's biggest geek wouldn't read Slashdot do you? Well, he does.

There are some other surprises too. If I told you that Newt Gingrich posts here under a pseudonym, who would you think he is? Your answer may well be right, you have at least three answers you can give that would be correct.

Ok, let's hit that damned Submit button again.

Fourteen minutes? Fourteen? Wow.

Ok, let's play "Guess the nick". There's Bill Gates (doesn't post often, but he has a login registered under a pseudonym - and NO, he doesn't astroturf. Actually, chances are if you've been in a .NET related discussion, which doesn't happen often on /. for obvious reasons, and asked a genuine technical question, he probably answered you. He knows his stuff. Who is he? Clue, he once actually corrected Miguel, and signed his post "Hope this helps. Good luck!")

Another (in)famous one is John C. Dvorak. Here's something you didn't know: when there's a flame war about a Dvorak article, he's normally one of the most hostile, anti-Dvorak, flamers.

And if you want obnoxious, try Bill Joy. Not a difficult nick to work out, especially with the "penguin suit" comment in his .sig.

Can I post yet?

This is all just part of a well-known cycle, with its own jargon file entry. In a few years they're going to be saying, "Hey, CPUs are so fast, it'd be cheaper to build a dumber network card and spend the money upgrading the CPU to compensate" and they're going to say that that's a new idea, too.

You can't give away huge quantities of something that has intrinsic value and expect it not to have an effect on market pricing.

I was just going by what I'd read in the jargon file.

Or was it Eric S. Raymond who illegally stole the credit card information?

The press may co-opt our sub-cultural language for their own gross-oversimplification purposes. That doesn't mean Slashdot has to follow suit.

Definition from the Jargon File:
hacker n. [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe]

1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary.
2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming.
3. A person capable of appreciating hack value.
4. A person who is good at programming quickly.
5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; as in "a Unix hacker". (Definitions 1 through 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.)
6. An expert or enthusiast of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example.
7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information by poking around. Hence "password hacker", "network hacker". The correct term for this sense is cracker.

Old code is subject to bit rot.

`... Today, I wish blogs would fall. This comes from two days of intensive googling while I learned how to netboot an original ibook (no boot from USB, no firewire at all) because of a dead cdrom. I was all over the place: open firmware, tftp, bootp, dhcpd, yaboot, and endless useless tangents. I can't tell you how many pages would come in google where my search terms appeared, but were in completely unrelated parts of some knucklehead's blog. ...`

This post is rings loud and clear with me. But maybe you are searching for information from the wrong end. I`ll give you a personal example.

Ages ago I wanted to resurrect a old `486 to build an OpenBSD firewall. Anyone familiar with old hardware will tell you that, `Its the little things (like *&!!@#$ BIOS) that matter` when installing operating systems. So I read all the manuals, man pages, catalogued the hardware (down to the serial numbers), read every Google, Yahoo newsgroup I could find and formulated a post detailing what I found. Most give up around the Google part.

... gather what you know into a meaningful format, then dump it onto a knowledgeable group and write up your results ...

The key insight I can give you, is to gather what you know into a meaningful format, then dump it onto a knowledgeable group and write up your results. In my case it was misc@openbsd.org. Having given a detailed account of what I wanted to know, I drew out those who had a clue of what was going on. The result was I got that firewall installed, but not without a lot of effort and some very helpful advise. You can read about it here [0], here [1], and here [2].

As for the lame blogs with useless information, I agree.

So the answer is out there, but inside someones head in terms of experience and knowledge. It is up to you to learn as much as possible about what you do and dont know and approach the right domain of knowledge. If you post your knowledge (and verify it) to a list, write it up, then blog about it, the chances of someone else finding the write-up via Google may have better luck.

So if you want to distil this into a repeatable process

• define your problem
• read the esr faq on how to ask questions the smart way [3]
• write up what you know/dont know carefully
• find your expert knowledge domain
• post your question carefully to a newsgroup, forum etc.
• write up the results with meaningful heading, summary.

[0] Peter Renshaw, openbsd on old i386: http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT19 1842.html

[1] Peter Renshaw, i386 install cont ...: http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT20 1637.html

[2] Peter Renshaw, i386 obsd install problem : http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/2003OCT23 0736.html

[3] Eric S. Raymond, How To Ask Questions The Smart Way http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

Eventually, an H got added in, and as computers left the old WOPR in the dust, the term "whopping" came to mean "Yeah, bud, it's really fast!"

... are the principles of the engineering 'tradition' that we have inherited. This doesn't really change dramatically (if at all) depending on the particular Unix each of us use. The received wisdom echoes throughout the last 36 years of Unix software development. There are always some things that are either 'just plain wrong' or 'the right thing' and I believe these become apparent more from exposure and utility of underlying programmatic textual interfaces. These are what truly makes something 'Unix' (if such an adjective can be applied).

Whether it's configuring BIND or implementing an LDAP directory server or a SQL database or whatever - these are all uses of the programmatic textual interface. Everything is in a configuration file - in fact, 'everything is a file'. Hence the extraordinary flexibility and expressive power that all Unices provide.

This book: The Art of Unix Programming provides a fine insight from many Unix pioneers as to why things are the way they are for all users of a Unix system. The meaning from its pages haven't varied from each incarnation of Unix over the last 36 years and certainly haven't lost relevance for today's Unices. I am, admittedly, a tight-wad and seldom pay up for a book I can read for free. I bought a copy of this book before I found out that it was freely available. I have never once regretted that purchase. The same is true for K&R - try telling me (and anyone I know) that that book has lost any relevance since 1978!

I think Linus wouldn't engage in flamebait zealotry (first of all, he ain't a zealot) regarding one platform's capabilities over another because there are universal truths in software design from which Unix (in whatever incarnation) derives its usefulness and power. If it wasn't so damn useful, Linus wouldn't have bothered implementing a Unix kernel for the x86 processors that were so often the woefully underpowered laughing stock of industry. And as a 'hobby' no less!

You have studied well my friend...

No, but there definately needs to be a (-1, Formossa's Law) moderation.

Now that you got your confidence pumped a bit with these news, go on and read this guide!

Seriously, it's not sarcasm, jokes or anything. It's two wpmen giving tips about relationships, building confidence, and so on, specifically for geeks.

And it's all thanks to the good work of ESR...

From the jargon file:

Also, note that all nouns can be verbed. E.g.: "All nouns can be verbed", "I'll mouse it up", "Hang on while I clipboard it over", "I'm grepping the files". English as a whole is already heading in this direction (towards pure-positional grammar like Chinese); hackers are simply a bit ahead of the curve.

Everyone, please send emails to this address of a similar nature:

Dear editor,

I am a computer hacker. By this, I mean that I enjoy learning and exploring computer technology. I have a degree in computer science, and am involved in many not-for-profit computer-technology endeavors. I am not a criminal. I do not violate computer security, I do not write malicious software, and I do not intentionally cause harm to the computer systems that I have access to. Any computer system access that I have has been given to me through legitimate means. It has come to my attention that you have used the term 'hacker' in the article linked below to indicate a person who intentionally violates computer security systems: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/191647 14?source=Evening%20Standard&ct=5

The proper term for such a person is 'cracker' or 'security breaker', i.e. one that "cracks" computer security. By using the term 'hacker' in the way that your publication has done, you spread misinformation about me, and people like me. You are demeaning and destroying a culture that, above all, values learning, knowledge, and wisdom. Please stop insulting hackers by equating them with criminals. For more information, see here: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/appendixc.htm l

Please issue a correction, and please make sure that a clear distinction is made in the future.

(your name here)
A Proud Hacker

It would be foolish to assume that the poster didn't know that s/he was violating the official rules. Say what you will about ESR and/or the jargon file, but this particular page could help you understand why you're wasting your efforts.