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This resembles Free the software, sell the brand. Of course, the brand being sold is not really Linux; it is actually IBM/Red Hat, but the idea is the same.

Well the new Groups really suck - try reading any group that deals with postfix or sendmail - all examples really screwed up.
And now that... - Google is going the same way that all went. Take for instance Microsoft. Ten years ago it was the icon of geekhood, they made a really good compiler, assembler and whatnot. And now? They even had a lapse of sobriety with Win 2k - quite a decent product - but it finally got fscked up by creeping featuritis disease when transformed into Win XP Proffesional.
And now Google. Bill Gates is ready to welcome you in the club.

I think that the Economist's comment demonstrates a cynical naivity about long term research planning, as if suggesting that it's some kind of in-joke committed by the researchers involved. Fact is, the researchers don't know when the research will bear economic fruit, because it's a hard problem. It's not their fault - they're trying to make educated guesses about problems that they haven't encountered yet.

When you're studying and developing ideas, you frequently encounter unexpected hurdles. In jumping those hurdles, you sometimes encounter "sub-hurdles" - problems that must be solved before you can get a grip on the bigger problem. Some problems are almost fractal! - at every layer, there are more details to fill in. Hell, I feel like that when I start tidying my house - sometimes, you can clear up a whole room in a few minutes; other times, I spend a whole day seemingly clearing a single drawer. It depends on what's inside.

Now, the only way you can make a long term estimate is to rely on experience of similar problems, and try and guess the "fractal dimension" of the problem in hand. Turns out that managing fission - explosive and controlled - was reasonably un-nested. Same with building fast microprocessors - these problems have had many sub-problems, but they've turned out to be readily and incrementally soluble.

Fusion hasn't worked out that way. It's always been suspected to be hard, but until the problems are unfolded, the estimates are simply educated judgements based on partial information. And when you're projecting over a long time-scale, you really have no idea whether left-field solutions (such as fast CPUs) might leap in and make apparently difficult problems evaporate. On the one hand, there may be apparently simple things that turn into serious show-stoppers, and on the other, there may be insoluable problems with surprise saviours. And unsurprisingly, the projections end up declaring "oooh, about 30 years" - translates to "not soon, not never".

It's all very similar to the experiences in AI, where so many apparently simple problems have turned out to require a vast associative knowledge store: the "AI completeness" problem. Some problems are like that. Quantum computing may turn out to be another one. I've always suspected that getting printers to work reliably will require some deep insight in state management of which we currently have no understanding! :-)

I have just looked at my intro sentence, and it's actually harsher than I meant - I have a lot of respect for The Economist, and their comment is exactly the kind of semi-humorous thing that draws me in. So I forgive them. Perhaps the rest of the article was about the difficulties of projecting long term research results! (Maybe it was, and I read it, and I'm regurgitating it here! Isn't life complicated?)

Cheers!

No, I think he meant troll . That word is every bit as good as trawl . Where did you think the other sense of the word came from, after all?

Solemn Laws Of The Eric Conspiracy
1. When asked if you are really a initiate of a sinister conspiracy to dominate the net and/or world, silently leave the room, say ``No comment'', smile without speaking or otherwise contrive to leave the questioner nervous, confused, and just a little more paranoid than he/she was before.
source: http://www.catb.org/~esr/ecsl/

And as a result of him doing WHAT YOU ASKED HIM TO, and thus causing you to see ONE piece of spam, you feel entitled to let him in for huge amounts of the crap? Maybe he should be entitled to take $100 from you for each challenge you send him. It would at least give him an incentive not to answer your challenges unless they're replies to messages he's sent, and it's a damned sight easier to cope with losing the odd $100 than to get yourself off huge numbers of mailing lists.

Ahhh, which brings me to one of the geekiest (and my favorite) "Easter Eggs"...
If you refer to the New Testament, and look in the index for "Recursion", the last reference points you to page 269.

Guess which page you are on?

Brilliant!

Note: It doesn't occur in the Old Testament.

Ahhh, which brings me to one of the geekiest (and my favorite) "Easter Eggs"...
If you refer to the New Testament, and look in the index for "Recursion", the last reference points you to page 269.

Guess which page you are on?

Brilliant!

Note: It doesn't occur in the Old Testament.

From the "Not opening everything" return:

Had Aldus been able to get a hold of our source code, Quark's trade secrets, along with the enormous amount of money we had invested in R&D to develop QuarkXPress 3 would have been for naught.

There's nothing easier than copying a software software. Gone are the days of C. Speed is a non-issue. The R in R&D is what matters. I can choose between dozens of languages to write what Quark did. Nowadays you can implement the "algorithms" (from Joe's words) in PHP or Python.

It's not the source code, stupid.

Dreamweaver, for example, had a fantastic feature whereby it would preserve the source code formatting that an HTML developer typed in. FrontPage didn't have it. GoLive didn't have it. PageMill didn't have it. NetObjects Fusion didn't have it.

Hire me. I can write a HTML parser in one day.

We spent a lot of time and money developing that feature, and it ended up being a key competitive advantage for us.

That's because you made it first.

How much investment capital do you think you'll get? How many customers?

Oh yeah, like if code matters when selling a software. That's why most of the financial transactions from major banks and credit card companies depend on either Cobol or Java.

Not every company in the world can just become a services company and compete on price.

That's why Linux isn't ready for the desktop.

Source code exists to serve the programmer, not the user (or costumer).

Yeah, yeah, we've heard it already. And in case you missed it the first time, people that joined in the early 90s were the first big leak in the dike.

Yes, it was fun when computer networks were only available to the smart folks. But that doesn't mean that it should have stayed that way. Free flow of information is a good thing. Open access to the Internet means you can't be leeter than thou anymore, but it doesn't mean that J. Random AOLer shouldn't be let into the playground. Do you use Amazon? Pricewatch? Google? Do you think these would be around if the net were composed of only a technical elite?

Imagine:

I can't tell if you're kidding or not, but the written word has definitely been circling the drain since kings and peasants got involved with it. I've been literate for a long time -- since the early 90s in fact -- and am thus quite aware of the ruinous activities the written word has been subjected to by the typical writer since then. You know, things like people writing off a bunch of gripes and nailing them to a church door, or in the larger picture basically assuming the entire body of written work is there to serve as some form of Piers Plowmanesque entertainment.

If you want to set up exclusive, techhead-only forum, one that requires you to use a custom client that you build from source, then do it. Ignore the web if you want; nobody forces you to open your browser. Start a new Usenet if you feel like it; it's designed to allow more than one in parallel you know. You can be living in the 90s again, where it's just you and a few other eggheads in a circle-jerk about how leet you are, and all the while isolating yourself from the rest of the world.

http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/R/Real-Soon-Now.h tml

Wield the LARG, clue bat, maulinator, whatever.

Seriously, at a very very stressful contract job I once had, I inherited a baseball bat (fine wood Louisville Slugger) from my predecessor (covering whose escape from there was the agreed-upon purpose of my presence there.) I named it "Molly", from the Neuromancer character Molly Millions.

The thing had come into existence years previously, during a horrible project that was totally overbudget and schedule, where a psycho manager had apparently walked around wielding the bat and a sword and screaming things like "I'm gonna break some fuckin' heads!" When he was called into a meeting, someone stole the bat and sword--nobody knows where the blade is now, but generations of network security guys husbanded the bat until I got it.

I brought it to meetings and to server rooms in emergencies, as kind of a safety blanket. We got really good at training our clientele (major international bank) to understand that we were there for them, we'd fix all their problems, but (a) they had to ask nicely, (b) they had to come to us with the issue, and (c) they'd have to trust us.

We always came through, which translated into a lot of credibility, but also meant that we had the best-stocked "thank you" bar in the whole company, but sitting in your office, listening to some flustered manager blubbering about a dead trading system while patting Molly (but always smiling!) was pretty funny.

It got to the point where it became an icon around the bank--people on the internal IRC channels picked up on it, so whenever someone made some horribly stupid security-related remark, there'd be a loaded pause before somebody would make a comment along the lines of "uh, xxx, I think Molly would like to speak with you"...

So as you see, it's all a question of user re-education, tovarich.

Sorry, I only get my sex tips from known experts in the field.

Sendmail was written by Eric Allman, not Eric Raymond. You have become confused by Eric Conspiracy Secret Labs.

Yeah, but that's Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crud.

This includes movies. Look at what we have in the theatres right now. The Incredibles is clever, witty, good fun. Then there's the new Bridget Jones flick, which I understand is significantly less plausible. I won't talk about Christmas With The Kranks, beyond mentioning that their rating of 96% rotten on Rotten Tomatoes is singularly impressive.

IRC is just a telnet hack, so everything's plaintext. They can easily sniff packets at the ISP level.

I'm not sure the word `hack' is appropriate there either. The IRC protocol has many shortcomings, but it's hardly a hack (at least not as defined by the jargon file.) Much effort was put into it, and it's evolved over the years (at least over it's early years.)

But really, it's just the lack of encryption that makes it so easy to sniff. Even if the protocol was binary, the CIA would have no trouble sniffing it as long as it's not encrypted -- after all, the IRC protocol is well documented (though the RFC doesn't cover the many extensions that have come since. For those, you generally have to go to the source code, which also is generally available. But even so, understanding those extensions generally isn't crucial to decoding conversations.)

It's certainly possible to make a plain text protocol that's still encrypted. It would be a bit ... odd ... for something like IRC, but it's certainly possible. THE GLOVELSCHTOP FLIES AT NIGH! GNORPLE VEE?

Were the data in a binary format (like many chat systems that have come since), then the CIA (or anybody else that wants to watch IRC traffic) would just need to add an additional layer that decodes the binary traffic. This would not be difficult, as it would be well documented. (If not documented, then this might be trickier, though I'm sure the NSA/CIA/FBI would have little trouble with it.)

Personally, I suspect that the CIA (and NSA, FBI, etc.) have been sniffing IRC traffic for decades now. I'll bet the Carnivore (or whatever they've being called now) boxes already have that capability. It looks like they're just trying to go beyond looking for `key words' like bomb, terrorist, etc.

I wonder how many of these sniffers are already in place. Alas, we'll probably never know, because I'll bet when they're installed, gag orders are made that prevent the people who do know about them from even speaking of them.

I second that. It is a truly interesting read. It is also available online at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/

I do think we made progress in some areas. However I do not blindly embrace everything new just because it is new. It must be better in my opinion. Unix has it's flaws but it also has some pretty interesting design principles and abstractions. Eric S. Raymond made a nice list in his book The Art of Unix Programming http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s 06.html and while I don't agree with everything he writes I witness the "magic" of things like pipes and clean textual config-files everyday while at the same time I see the problems with more recent approaches. The ideal way to develop something new would be to take the good parts from the old tools and correct the flaws that have shown in practical use and if this means stripping out 3/4 of the "features" then this is a good thing even though marketing might say otherwise.

I also tend to like a choice about the tool I use for every single task instead of buying everything as a package (e.g. IDE). I would like a language with the power of C and the power and syntax of modern scripting languages where you could do things low-level if necessary but don't have to if you don't want/need to and where you could understand a program by reading it without consulting an API Documentation or following the counter-variables of each and every for-loop (better: each-Iterator-concept like in ruby).

Hrmmmmm... You confused me a bit. First you were bashing Scwartz. Then at the end you were saying negative things about Eric Raymond.

Schwartz is making Sun look quite horrible though. He has to have some kind of an agenda. I'd like to believe he isn't mildly retarded and actually just flying off the seat of his pants. No one should be allowed to make this much of a fool of themselves by accident if they are the CEO of a company.

RMS and Linus are one thing, but does ESR really deserve polite and professional criticism?

Seriously. This is a person who links to Steven Milloy's "junk science" page from his personal home page. He's also a rabid pro-war advocate who certainly doesn't address people who disagree with him in any professional or respectful manner. I doubt he'd get much positive publicity on slashdot if people had actually read what he writes.

RMS and Linus are one thing, but does ESR really deserve polite and professional criticism?

Seriously. This is a person who links to Steven Milloy's "junk science" page from his personal home page. He's also a rabid pro-war advocate who certainly doesn't address people who disagree with him in any professional or respectful manner. I doubt he'd get much positive publicity on slashdot if people had actually read what he writes.

You can also obtain and modify Java's code as you wish (see http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/download.jsp) but you can only *distribute* your modifications for the purpose of "research" (so not as part of a commercial product for example).

Java is "bazaar"-like because the JCP provides a mechanism for groups and individuals to create proposals to evolve or extend Java which are ratified by a committe (again of groups and individuals, essentially chosen in a meritocratic manner). This could be compared with Mozilla's team of super-reviewers.

Jonathan's point is that Linux (the kernel) is cathedral-like because decisions about changes to the kernel are made exclusively by Linus Torvalds.

Java has open processes for becoming a member of the change committee (see http://www.jcp.org/en/participation/membership) and for submitting proposals (see http://www.jcp.org/en/procedures/jcp2#1).

"Linux" in the broadest sense (see http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/ColmSmyth/2004111 6#linux_is_an_open_source) has aspects of both the cathedral and the bazaar.

I really find Eric Raymond's seminal CATB article (see http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar /cathedral-bazaar/index.html) to be an essential read, but it's terminology is IMHO too obscure to be used effectively in discussions like this; I find well-known terms like "dictatorship" (Linux kernel), "meritocracy" (Mozilla.org, "Individual Expert"s on the Java JCP Committee) and "feudal" (GNOME.org) are clearer.

http://blogs.sun.com/ColmSmyth/

I'm using programs like fetchmail and bogofilter - both programs developed by ESR.

Read more about programs he has been involved in:

ESR software page

What have you written ?

Learn before you speak. Go here http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html to see the software that he has written, including fetchmail and sed.

Here you go courtesy of google.

Cathedral and Bazaar

the info you seek. it was required reading for us computer engineering students in software design 1.

FUD generally implies deliberate disinformation. All I see here is a clueless reporter. To anyone who knows enough about Linux to make major decisions, Linus Torvalds will fork off Version 2.7 to accommodate the changes should make it clear what's going on, then the rest of the article makes much more sense.

Slashdot, a prominent news web log claiming to be News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters has claimed victory over the Gay Nigger Association of America (GNAA).

With GNAA's trolls resorting to stale material which was relevant for five minutes about three months ago and enabling anyone to cut and paste a press release using the Open Source philosophy has led to GNAA's demise. Netcraft confirms it.

GNAA's founder timecop was seen locking up the headquarters one last time. An unassuming outdoor mens room deep in the heart of Tennessee was once host to numerous sessions of blowjobs, anal and creampies attended only by homosexual African-Americans. I reckon I jest likes fuckin' girls. White girls. [note broken link] was the only statement given to the press at this time. Former lovers and Windows users Lysol and Roloffle were found standing at half-mast upon the sad but inevitable occasion.

Robert W. Malda shared his feelings regarding the event. Oog the Caveman (a pioneer of ALL CAPS == TEH FNY), The Glorious Meept, Trollaxor, The Turd Report, WIPO Troll, Recipe Troll even goatse had something to contribute to our forums. GNAA is populated solely by crybaby attention whores who wouldn't know a rpm if it bit them on their tender, velvety asshole which is barely covered by a fine mist of downy, pre-pubescent hairs. After a brief reverie Mr. Malda conceded At least GNAA uses valid xHTML instead of dicey HTML 3.2

About GNAA: GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) was a troll organization known for its cut and paste style of trolls which are written once every six months. It was founded in July 2001 by timecop, found its heyday with ROR JEWS DID WTC and slowly faded into the background radiation. Its namesake, a Danish humor movie, is freely available via BitTorrent.

About Slashdot:
Slashdot is the first website dedicated entirely to duplicate articles, groupthink and brilliant trolls. Under the aegis of News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters and its connections with Open Source Lobbyists has ensured its continued presence on teh intorweb.

Do you have an Email address ? Do you have a computer ? If you answered Yes to all of the above questions, then Slashdot is exactly what you've been looking for! Join Slashdot today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time Slashdot member. Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!

• First, you have to obtain a copy of Linux and attempt to install it. You can download the operating system using BitTorrent.
• Second, you need to succeed in First Post on slashdot.org, our website.
• Third, you need to join the official S

> What's its behavior? It's undefined, because a pointer-to-NULL is dereferenced, and that's a big C++ no-no.
> It could be anything whatsoever according to the C++ standard.

In other words, Joel was lucky.
He could have ended up with demons flying out of his nose.

"Foo" and "bar" are metasyntactic variables.

But yes, "foobar2000" is still a very silly name for a music player, silly enough for not making me use it - and probably hinders other people's adoption as well. It's bad enough if you're thinking "FUBAR", but it's especially bad if you know what the name really means: The authors were too lazy to come up with a proper name, so they used a temporary name and stuck an year to the end so you know how long they've been avoiding giving it a real name =)

Well, could be worse. Yafray's directory name on the server says "noname" for historical reasons. Anything was better than "no name". I'm glad they came up with a new name =)

Take a look at How to become a hacker by ESR It's the basis of Oreilly's hack series. The books goals are to stimulate "hackers" and get them started. Often the hacks will offer ideas to "hack the hack" but leave it up to the reader to figure out how. I've got Linux Server Hacks and I've found it to be an invaluable resource, a reference book, but much more as it gives me all types of new ideas for my servers.... Nice job Oreilly.

In the Jargon File entry for Candygrammar.

In the Jargon File entry for Candygrammar.

If you're going to tell old stories, you might want to credit the source, Danny Hillis.

This actually just comes down to process. In the software world we call it The Cathedral and the Bazaar. EB is an example of the former and Wikipedia is an example of tha latter.

And as far as I can tell, exactly the same argunments apply. What would be interesting is what he will say of Wikipedia in 10 years time. I am willing to bet that by then it will be considered to be far superior.

I compiled up and played with a "MUSH" server once - I thought having a multi-player text adventure engine that you could program on-the-fly was nifty...

It was interesting to notice that I frequently found myself typing "ls" instead of "look" when I wanted to see the contents of a "room" that I was in. I hadn't previously realized the similarities between the CLI and a text adventure...

Where do I submit a patch to change all of the instances of "(filename): file not found" to "I see no (filename) here" in the standard command-line tools?

Ken Brown, in claiming that Linus did not write Linux, said that one of the problems with open-source (which he called "hybrid", for reasons I still don't understand) was that you can't trace where code comes from.

Besides the fact that ESR refuted this, this is a great practical demonstration of why that claim is completely empty.

Do you have any clue where any of the code for any proprietary programs comes from? I sure don't.

Geekdom owes a lot to MIT Model Railroad Club of half a century ago.

A *nix dd looks like it might work but I thought I would ask slashdot

Instead of, oh I don't know... trying it?

Please, anybody who is thinking of submitting an Ask Slashdot, read How To Ask Questions The Smart Way first. It covers things like RTFA and STFW, which a lot of Ask Slashdotters seem to be unaware of.

I belive it'd be best understood as a sort of corollary to Zawinsky's Law of Software Envelopment. JWZ said "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail". Though email is specified as the featured feature, it's explained as just a special case of the broader tendency of software packages "to evolve into toolkits and application platforms". With desktop search apparently being the "hot new killer app du jour", we can easily see how it makes sense to substitute "perform desktop searches" for "read mail" in the original observation.

Man, you actually paid for visual grep? :p

Seriously, though. This adds one more item to my list of things that make me wonder how people can ever work with Windows. You said it yourself, you need a Real OS. Or just grep for Windows, or a whole bunch of utilities while you're at it.

HTH

A far far better and more informative read IMHO is The Cathedral and The Bazaar. Beware, it's on the long side.

This gives an interesting insight into the open source model through taking over an open source project. It presents lessons learnt, and corresponding cardinal rules when running such a project. It also outlines quite effectively why open source is a viable means to develop quality software, despite the author's initial reservations. In C or C++ even.

to quote from the jargon file

rubber-hose cryptanalysis: n.

[sci.crypt newsgroup] The technique of breaking a code or cipher by finding someone who has the key and applying a rubber hose vigorously and repeatedly to the soles of that luckless person's feet until the key is discovered. Shorthand for any method of coercion: the originator of the term drily noted that it "can take a surprisingly short time and is quite computationally inexpensive" relative to other cryptanalysis methods.

Since there's two replies already that don't get it, parent is referring to the September that never ended

Because of the news that voters picked "moral values" as a main reason they voted, an issue that overwhelmingly favored Bush:

I, for one, welcome our new fundamentalist christian overlords.

(Ha, ha, only serious.)

Remember the Guru meditation numbers on the Amiga? http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/G/guru-meditation .html

>user's perspectives. Face it, Windows XP was a
>very big and impressive release to the average
>user.

Please define "average user". This to me is a rather vague and ambiguous term, and could cause me to make certain assumptions about the type of user you're talking about, which you may not have intended.

>that there are no weak links.That means that >X.Org, Linux, KDE/GNOME, etc will have to fit
>into each other's design very well and as tightly
>as Windows and MacOS X.

No...The different elements of Linux were initially designed as components...seperate pieces...and this decision was made for a number of reasons that developed over quite a long period of time...X Windows in particular predates Linux. This document may be of relevance if you are interested in learning about the rationale behind modular design, and why monolithic design (the philosophy Microsoft have traditionally used) is normally not as effective.

Microsoft's direction is set, broadly speaking, by people whose skillset is oriented a lot more along the lines of economics and marketing than programming as such. The company exists for two reasons that I have been able to discern:-

(a) To make money via appealing to the largest possible demographic of the computer using population. Technical excellence, despite claims to the contrary, has been repeatedly shown as not being one of Microsoft's priorities. I can also cite numerous pieces of evidence in support of that assertion if you are interested.

(b) To maintain control primarily of the software industry, but also potentially of others...for reasons largely unknown, but presumably a continued desire for generation of massive revenue is a factor. This is a more difficult assertion to support, but Bill Gates has on a few occasions outlined visions of a particular future scenario in which Microsoft has a high degree of control of the areas of both computer software and entertainment/journalistic media.

It also would not be accurate to say that Microsoft have any real advantage over Linux, technical or otherwise...and they are well aware of this, and have mentioned it in profit statements. This document, as well as a collection of documents here outline in high detail the specific challenges Microsoft face in dealing with Linux, and the corporation's long term prognosis cannot be honestly described as positive. I believe that the company's best case scenario within the next decade or so is gradual marginalisation and a decreasing degree of market relevance. Worst case scenario (for them) is bankruptcy, probably ten years or so out at the earliest. This is an unlikely scenario, but given the amount of litigation the company has faced in the last few years, its tremendous losses in the court of public opinion, and the degree to which Windows sales have slowed, (not to mention the most devastating element, which is the lack of a genuinely concrete roadmap after Windows NT 4) it is becoming increasingly possible. The other thing that causes this to be more possible now is the fact that while Microsoft are not developing any substantially new products, (despite the claim at the beginning of your comment, most of the changes to Windows XP were cosmetic at best) the insecurity of Windows XP and the associated necessity to release massive and constant amounts of patches for it means that Microsoft can no longer afford to support older versions of its operating system, despite the fact that many people still use them.

I believe I observed the beginning of Microsoft's downfall in around September/October 1997. Although it may not be immediately obvious to the casual observer, the company is now losing blood...a combination of Linux, its own mistakes/misdeeds, and a recent comparitive lack of direction have left it mortally wounded. I also do not believe, no

FTP is quite old, and was quite useful even before gopher and later http made zipping files back and forth trivial. The genius of Berners-Lee was rather like the mythical invention of the Recees Peanut Butter Cup. He figured out a way to combine a hypertext markup scheme with internet file transfer. The individual component ideas had been lying around for at least seven years (and possibly since the dawn of ARPANET) when he put them together in a limited whole. Active scripting was a bit more clever an idea, but only marginally.

I will grant that it's a good thing TELNET is dying in favor of SSH-- security (network and computer alike) has made great progress since then. So has bandwidth. So has accessibility to the general public. But it's no more funamentally different in terms of power than modern desktop computers are compared to those of days of yore.

I think the term you are looking for isn't "User" but rather Bigot . I use a Mac at work. I even like it. I even didn't mind adding Mac troubleshooting skills to my Windows and Linux skills-- it wasn't that different. I would even go so far as to say that I prefer doing 90% of my Real Work at a Mac. (Games are another story.) But I while I think the iPod is kinda cool, I'm not planning on replacing my Archos Jukebox 20 until it keels over dead... which, incidentally, won't be due to the batteries. I have better ways to waste my money than donating to the Church of Steve.

I'd also disagree slightly with the assessment of the review. Based on what's said, there may be some interest in the material to anthropologists (amateur and professional) who study computer nerds. If I see the book at Barnes & Noble, I might sit down and leaf through it for an hour or two. I might check it out if it hits the local library. I wouldn't spend real money on it, though.