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Don't pay, don't comment, don't contribute. Go someplace else and watch the site wither on the vine.

The market only responds to the high-order bit, where the decision about which bit is highest-order is also decided by the market.

Suppose you have a great Chinese restaurant near your house. The food is world-class. The owner is nice. But the service is consistently slower than you wish. You can't simply stop going there and expect a new one, just like it, to pop up to compete. The market doesn't work that way. It can't discriminate why you are failing to send it money. Especially if you're eating Indian food at the restaurant next door in the interim, in which case it will conclude you have stopped liking Chinese, and you're more likely to get two Indian food restaurants than an Indian and a punctual Chinese one.

It's common in US Presidential elections for newly elected Presidents to claim, as our latest president did, that The People actively wanted the whole platform, when in fact mostly all a vote ever shows is that "for some reason(s), you thought this president was better (or less bad) than the other." It certainly does mean "for all reasons" nor does it help you discover for which reason(s).

Salon Magazine tried the same thing as is being complained about here quite a while back. They wanted to charge people for posting on TableTalk , their online forum, but continue to allow people to read for free. I was incensed. Charge the content producers and let the users get things for free? As a sensible poster, I stopped posting and went away. Salon continued, though, in spite of that.

What's hilarious to me about complaining about such matters here is that Slashdot is a haven of free software buffs--that is, people who champion the idea that people should pay to produce stuff (you do have to eat while you code) but you shouldn't have to pay to use stuff (you don't pay for the result of all that free software that it cost someone to produce).

Perhaps the human mind is some sort of capitalist market, deciding what rationales are most and least important based on internal market forces that we can only barely understand because we see only that same, elusive, high order bit of outcome. Maybe understanding the process from the outcome is more than we should expect...

ANSWERS
1. What is BSOD?
BSOD is a shortcut from Blue Screen of Death. BSOD is closely tied with Microsoft's operating systems. Due to large number of system bugs, a blue screen can appear freezing basic operations, an application's work, or even with no occasion, decreasing system's functionality, or permanently hanging it at. BSOD displays as an blue screen, filled with more or less clear error message.
after Jargon File: "The following entry from the Salon Haiku Contest , seems to have predated popular use of the term:

Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death
No one hears your screams." back to top

2. Who supports BSOD? Who develops it?
BSOD exists because of the great creativity of Microsoft's programmers. That's why it works on probably all systems.

back to top

3. How to get BSOD?
BSOD is a part of Windows, so you don't have to install anything to use it. You have to do only a few, usually untypical, sequences, widely described in question 5.

back to top

4. What is Black Screen of Death?
Black Screen of Death is an ancestor of Blue Screen of Death. It was developed in the DOS environment.

back to top

5. Is it hard to execute BSOD?
Putting a little bit of invention to your work with a computer, it is very simple to execute BSOD. But sometimes it depends on what version of Windows you've got. BSOD execution problems are more precisely described in the BSOD-HOWTO, available at bsod.org.

back to top

6. Do other systems support BSOD?
As far as I know, other systems are rather using their own error messaging methods and only Microsoft's systems support it correctly. But there is a small possibility you can get a Blue Screen in other systems, see question 9.

back to top

7. Is BSOD a bug, or a tradition?
According to definition, a bug is a part of program that is not working correctly. Despite so many versions of windows, BSOD still exists so it's a useful feature. The bugs are scattered quite liberally in most of Microsoft's operating systems, so the BSOD, an error reporting system as well as an end to all your current work is in fact a feature. What would it be, if we had no BSOD? It would only cause confusion and chaos, because Windows, without a Blue Screen just is not old good Windows. Your machine would just die with no explanation. A BSOD is like the rolling of the credits at the end of a movie, you know it's The End.

back to top

8. Where can I get more info about BSOD?
Main source of information about BSOD is a web page of an unofficial organization: http://www.bsod.org A lot of interesting information should also have BSOD designers: http://www.microsoft.com And, like always, the best knowledge source is your own computer: 127.0.0.1 (if it's not hung ;))

back to top

9. How to get a BSOD in other operating systems?
Getting a BSOD in system other than Windows is rather difficult, but not impossible. One way to taste bsod, is to install some poor error emulator. This can be for example xscreensaver. By de

• Deconstructing Katz. The definitive word on the Katz phenomenon.
• Some Real Journalism:
  • Salon Books | Internet debate generates hot air!
  • Salon Technology | Quake, Doom and blood lust
• Anyone can do it, see? Katzdot:News for Geeks. Fluff that Matters.

• Deconstructing Katz. The definitive word on the Katz phenomenon.
• Some Real Journalism:
  • Salon Books | Internet debate generates hot air!
  • Salon Technology | Quake, Doom and blood lust
• Anyone can do it, see? Katzdot:News for Geeks. Fluff that Matters.

It's been pointed out that portions of the Linux source might be deemed offensive by some people. Open source advocates believe that access to source code is important for a number of reasons (the ability to fix somthing that's the broken, the ability to learn from the work of others, etc.). The idea that Linux (or any other Open Source software) might be censored because of comment text worries many of us.

Have there been any examples of this actually happening? Do any of the major censorware products block access to Linux or other source code?

• Deconstructing Katz
• Katzdot:News for Geeks. Fluff that Matters
• A Revealing Exchange...
  1. tojonkatz
  2. tokatz1.txt
  3. fromkatz1.txt
  4. tokatz2.txt
  5. fromkatz2.txt
  6. fromkatz3.txt
  7. fromkatz4.txt
• Salon Books | Internet debate generates hot air!
• "Jon Katz is a [...] cheese grater on my butt"
• Salon Technology | Quake, Doom and blood lust

• Deconstructing Katz
• Katzdot:News for Geeks. Fluff that Matters
• A Revealing Exchange...
  1. tojonkatz
  2. tokatz1.txt
  3. fromkatz1.txt
  4. tokatz2.txt
  5. fromkatz2.txt
  6. fromkatz3.txt
  7. fromkatz4.txt
• Salon Books | Internet debate generates hot air!
• "Jon Katz is a [...] cheese grater on my butt"
• Salon Technology | Quake, Doom and blood lust

The suppression of Christians in the United States is already under way. It will get a great deal worse before it gets better. To protect my family from acts of violent retribution, I must conceal my identity. If you were a Christian, you'd understand that we live every day of our lives under threat of murder or imprisonment for our beliefs. It has happened to thousands already. It will happen to millions more. Even as we speak, two innocent men now languish in a California prison, destined for the electric chair when the corrupt court inevitably denies them a fair trial. Their only "crime"? Worshipping God. Obeying the commandments of God their Creator. They will be murdered for their worship, in cold blood and with the blessing of a criminal and illegitimate government.

It is precisely because of the truth of my statements that I must post as an AC.

I read TBG before Neverness; fortunately, I read the two a few years apart so that TBG didn't ruin Neverness for me. Both are very good. I haven't finished the series yet; they're hard books to find.

Other SF authors in the same vein, writing literate SF, are the aforementioned Ia in Banks (make sure you consider this website), the well-known Ste phen R. Donaldson and Dan Simmons (in particular his Hyperion series). Iain Banks writes non-genre fiction as Iain M. Banks and is hugely popular in the UK. Donaldson, lambasted and praised for his Unbeliever Chronicles, also wrote The Gap Series, a dark DF space opera based on the Ring Cycle. Simmons writes a lot of horror and other dark fiction.

Another author in the vein is Steven Brust (whose Taltos series is his masterwork), as well as the other members of his writing circle, the Pre-Joycean Fellowship, including Emma Bull.

Another fine but relatively obscure author is the powerful writer George Alec Effinger. Lordy lordy, is this man good. If I'm not mistaken, he's also worked on comix with Neil Gaiman and wrote for the supercool SF cartoon Galaxy Rangers, along with another great author, Tom De Haven.

More old-school authors who wrote very post-modern SF include the amazing Avram Davidson (check out the great Treasury) who wrote primarily short stories, and the odd and great Polish author Stanislaw Lem (whose career began in 1951 and continues to this day). Starting from Lem, you get into the great European (including S. America) "fantastic philosophers" Borges and Calvino. And if you like them, then you're sure to like Pynchon, and so on to David Foster Wallace and Don DeLillo, who all write SF-tinged fiction.

And the list goes on.

Basically the original page was set up as a practical joke by one of his friends. The details are metioned on Salon some time back.

Another friend sent him a joke email saying she thought he was a stud and he replied back in a serious manner which would suggest it wasn't a joke.

Personally I think you should check out the Brandon and Rick never get laid it's much more funnier. Or if you want to make a bit of cash, check out the 10K for a wife page.

You can find out more here, where you might then follow to this place over here. The whole idea of trademarking and imbuing goodwill into a word like "shack" is ludicrous.

See this Salon article on computerized essay analysis and the ETS.

Salon also has a piece on this and the Cringely article http://ww w.salonmagazine.com/tech/log/1999/10/08/geek_journ alism/index.html. They're pretty favorable (hint: they read both articles, unlike Cringely)

--jeff

Andrew Leonard in Salon has a piece ('Open Source Journalism') too. He is more positive to the /. comment process and says "sites like Slashdot are pioneering new territory as they facilitate access to that knowledge, to the great and lasting benefit of us all".

Lars
Lars

--

IPO's can be used by *people with a surplus of stored value (ca$h or credit) to multiply said surplus as much and as fast as possible and preferably with the least possible effort. If successful, such users earn themselves even more "freedom". (from what: fear? envy? lack of sex appeal? who knows?;) anyways..

Companies which conduct these IPO's exploit such human virtues to raise money (needed to finance international legal and customer aquisition costs.. (remember, you are now an Internet company dotcom(tm), or you are roadkill, and this web grows global fast)). Founders and early investors of Internet companies can also use these IPO's to amass fabulous fortunes for themselves to diversify and secure by investing in new IPO's, politicians , etc.

Now, partially owned by the "public" (see above*), stock prices reflect "our" confidence in the company's potential to profit. Company managers, typically holding stakes of their own, spur the company to attract the highest possible share price. Bottom line. Period.

Whether our grandchildren or theirs will regard this behavior as blatently criminal is another question.

Whether there are alternatives to inequity exacerbating IPO and "street" methods of idea "ownership" is a question I hope /. will address and soon. After all, the MAN(tm), his law(tm) and by-laws(IPO Corp.) are forms of "code", right? (They instruct energetic systems to behave predictably. Or try to.)

So how do IPO's and like ownership models perpetuate "code"? Openly? How does it affect our capacity to trade our learning and creativity? Are there alternatives? Here may be a interesting one:

"Chaord" or "chaordic". [haHA! 2nd post:] It's shocking that Dotters of Slash completely ignore an archetypical business structure that seems to effectively trade creativity and borderlessly: Visa International. Growth? 20% annually, since way before any long boom, past $ 1.2trillion in '98 sales, no end in sight. Method? Better attract human ingenuity, (the most valuable AND abundant resource on the planet.) Blend competition with cooperation, seamlessly. Failure? Dee Hock, who founded Visa, says it could have been four times more powerful if ownership had been extended to merchants and cardholders.. Customers owning the business? COOL! bu..WTF!? How to hack that???

IPO? Stock? Forget it. Visa can't bought, sold, traded or raided. Ownership is shared in non-transferable rights of participation.

It's a very unusual "learning organization": commanders don't control it from the center. Instead, chaos organizes itself at the edges, adapting locally, learning and evolving. Advantages arise out of individual initiative. Ideally, "chaorganizations" are "equitable owned by all participants." Sound like a more "open source" code for biz? IMHO, /. and RHAT and MP3c may have kinda choked if they didn't consider more "open" ownership models, proven successful by Visa..

Anyway, a more positive way to look at IPO's and Public Companies is as forms of "currency". If you have some to spare, you could buy gold, but you have to pay someone to guard it, and gold's value is dropping. You could guard U.S.Gov't(tm) printed dead prezidents, but why do it when your banker will pay you interest to borrow them? Still, who wants a measly 6% when brand-name "currency" like yahoo! or rhat or idealab! may earn me 600%? In this light, it's more rewarding to invest in people and ideas rather than self-obsoleting systems or hoarding stores of value. Currency users now have more options, can better "vote with their pocketbook", perpetuate what they value, and maybe earn themselves some more "freedom". More options, more freedom? Who knows?

links, again, on dee hock, visa, and chaords:
http://www.chaordic.org/chaordic /chaos_is_good.htm
http://www.cascadepolicy.org/dee_hock.htm ">
http://www.fastcompany.com/online /05/deehock.html

But mention Red Hat and Linux to Aubrey Edwards, group product manager for Microsoft's forthcoming Windows NT upgrade Windows 2000, and he seems almost on the verge of stifling a yawn. ''When you look at the hype versus the reality today,'' says Edwards, ''there is a big disconnect.''

Never trust a man who uses the word "disconnect" inappropriately. It's a variety of corporate slang common to PHBs.

Discrepancy. Difference. Not disconnect.

For example, Java was originally designed to prevent users from saving files to a computer's hard drive - a good security precaution, but worse than useless for word processing.

Once again, a journalist who can't differentiate between Java and Applets. Java applications have always been able to read from hard drives. Say what you want about the language, but it's not a toy. (It may not be possible to make this statement of applets.)

Talk to Microsoft executives and they'll tell you that a similar fate awaits Linux. Charles Fitzgerald, director of business development in Microsoft's software development unit, says the Linux hype has already peaked. ''Cold hard reality is coming to bear,'' he says.

>sarcasm<
If I were looking for a good source of unbiased Linux coverage, I'd look to IT professionals. Hey, the director of business development for Microsoft looks like a good choice!
>/sarcasm<

Seriously - doesn't anyone find it odd that Troan's comments only address the comparison of Linux to Java, and not allegations by Microsoft executives? I'd like to see a little bit more balance in this story.

Fitzgerald points to recent benchmark tests by the research firm Mindcraft Inc., which found Windows NT performs a variety of tasks faster than Linux.

What more needs to be said about this?

The posts fails to grasp why we are moving back to large systems sitting in the middle of the network instead of little machines talking to each other.

Way back when, Moore noticed and projected his Moore's law saying that the speed and size of an individual processor would keep doubling. Great. So little iron gets the low costs of making millions of the little guys, mass market support, and low upgrade costs. Big iron only benefits from Moore's law, and falls behind. This happens for a decade or two.

Now the decade is over, and the tide turns the other way. Sun Microsystems, especially, has figured out a scaling law that says it can effectively (linearly) network an increasing number of processors. Over some period of time both the number of processors and the speed of processors double. Add in the shift from hardware costs to software costs, and big iron makes a comeback.

So, we've got a reason for big centralized machines to come back. If you want to make a case against this tide of technology, make it. If you can't, protest only as a luddite.

The Devout Capitalist
thalia4242@excite.com (Don't you hate the broken login script).

What you fail to realize is the price you pay for happily being fed the microsoft version of "these aren't the droids you're looking for". You want to talk development cost? Tell me about the development cost when bugs crop up and your only response is "gee, I just did what the wizard told me to do". There is an advantage to re-implementing the wheel: you implemented it, you can fix it. Open Source however, is the next best thing.

To put it another way, anything worth doing is worth doing right; most importantly when it comes to software. Microsofts MSDN-style development culture is a snake-oil salesman that convinces you to trust it and treats the symptoms of your ills SO WELL you forget that the CAUSE is still there. This is NOT "doing it right". Anyone who wakes up in a cold sweat at night over Y2k should take a look at the way the "Rapid Application Development" concept is bought, sold, and out there running goods and services.

The always-informative Andrew Leonard has whipped up a quick response to this article. Read it here. :)
--

In salon.com Andrew Leonard has an article about it.

>Now finally with South Park the danger is clear. >South Park is animated characters saying swear >words *out of context* it would certainly be rated >only R it is so offensive only because of the >ideas it presents.


Oh, come now. Next you'll be telling me that a country could ban an operating system because of language contained in...er, never mind :-)

JL Culp
Chairman, LPSC

The real story here isn't the cancelation of the final episode of a TV show- its about the power of the Internet. I think we all know deep down how powerfull it is- therein lies the huge draw for so many of us.

I wont assume to preach to the choir on this point, but I will illustrate with an anecdote. One of my friends runs a fairly major X-files website and listserv. A whole culture has developed around this with people submiting scripts and info on shows in advance (I think they pull them off of satelites or something...) I suspect this is much like the buffy crowd.

The Internet poses a phantom menace for any and all who censor. We are seeing some censoring already. I.E. Australian censorship, or in Shangh ai, or those slowly disapearing textfiles.

Let us hope that the Internet continues to be successful as an outlet for free speach.

Don't believe everything you read :)

From what I've read over here in Aus the legislation isn't exactly well put together. An ISP only has to make a "reasonable effort" to block a site when requested. "reasonable effort" is undefined I believe.

Also, for a site to be blocked/taken down (depending if it's overseas or australian), the Australian Broadcasting Authority has to receive a few complaints about the content on a site. It will then ask the Classification Board to give the site a classification - same as used for films. If the site is given R (18+), then some form of adult verification must be installed.. again, undefined. If the site is rated X, or RC (banned), then the site is to be taken down if Australian, or blocked if overseas.

It's fairly obvious that this is unworkable, and I think it will die fairly quickly. All you'd need to do is send the output of an Altavista search on "free XXX" to the ABA and claim it offends you, and the ABA now has a few years of work ahead of them. I don't exactly think they'll appreciate it either..

The filter software mentioned in the article is what was presented to govt to show them that it was all possible.. No one actually has to use that software afaik.

Oh and I don't think the linux sources are in much danger. The ABA is pretty tolerant of swearing in film and tv in Australia - much more than in the US. It would take a fair bit of language alone to get given an R rating here :)

This Salon article has a bit more info..

Glyn.

MS says the Linux community is slow to respond?
Everyone remember the recent Salon article at
http://w ww.salonmagazine.com/tech/feature/1999/04/27/mindc raft/index1.html?

Read it again to refresh your memory on how cooperative Mindcraft has been.

Couple of quotes:

"I've traded a couple of e-mails with Mindcraft people about this," says Alan Cox. "They seem solely intent on trying to re-create their existing pro-Microsoft results and hoping, by attaching some kind of 'Linux top mind' credibility to it, they can do more damage."

"The whole thing has been fairly painful," says Torvalds. "Mostly because these people don't actually let us know what the hell they are doing. We've been offering to be on site to see what the hell is going on, but so far they've refused."

Except it is "normal" (as in like most other people) to be born heterosexual. Therefore it is natural to question why someone is not "normal".

Watch what you call normal here. There are a couple hundred species of mammals and birds which have exhibited homosexual behavior.

Check out this Salon magazine story about a new research book. I think you'll find it interesting and it most likely will make you question the "choice vs. genetics" debate all over again.

Does it seem to Gy's that many self-proclaimed Gg's are just wannabes or poseurs? IOW, are many of them closet girlbots who happen to admire geekiness?

I don't mean to imply a personal opinion one way or the other.

Here's a salon article full of quotes from psychologist types and others. On the second page they've got a few nifty paragraphs from Dan Savage, who as usual sees things very clearly. It's really worth a read.

As a current Salon employee, I can assure you that Salon cares *most deeply* about community. Unlike big fat cat sites (like, say, Geocities or Lycos), Salon actually works really hard to foster beneficial communication and develop friendships.

Matter of fact, one of *my* personal issues at Salon has been writing about how other companies destroy their online communities. To wit: a recent story on the demise of Netscape's community and a scathing critique of Geocities. Believe me, Salon will not make the same mistakes. Just check out our Table Talk areas.

The Matrix , starring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne began showing yesterday (Wed 03/31). The basic premise of the film is the "brains in a vat" theory that you learned about in PHIL 101. Humans in the future (circa 2099) have been conquered and subjugated by the same reproductive machines that they created. In the human-machine war preceding subjugation, machines used solar power for energy. A last ditch effort by H. sapiens to stop the machines' energy source by nuclear detonation and the consequent pollution of the atmosphere with impenetrable clouds fails because the machines discover a new, abundant, self-replicating power source at their fingertips: human bioenergy.

Humans are grown in fields and maturated singly in hollow nests covering the sides of massive cliffs. These nests are filled with a pink liquid reminiscent of the liquid oxygen used in The Abyss. All subjugates are networked together by a massive computer program which produces through direct neurochemical stimulation an almost perfect replica of the peak of human civilization in 1999. This virtual reality is known commonly as the Matrix.

The only non-subjugate humans are a small group of crackers who "enter" the Matrix on pirate signal generated from their small hovership and an unconquered city known as Zion located hundreds of miles beneath the Earth's crust, near the core where it is still warm. This band of revolutionaries seeks the prophesied savior who can bend the Matrix at will and bring humankind out of subjugation and into the bittersweet darkness of the real world. Positive

Maybe I have seen Dune way too many times, but I still like the idea of a Kwisatz Haderach ubermensch savior of the future (even if it is Keanu Reeves, see below). The religious imagery, though drawn from different sources, is not Bible-, Ramayana-, or Koran-thumping. Carrie-Anne Moss' character's name, Trinity, is the identifier of the prophetic connection between Neo (Reeves), Morpheus (Fishburne), and herself. A young English boy, in monks' robes, bends a spoon with his mind and speaks Hindu philosophy to Neo to explain it, which makes sense within the context of the Matrix. The notion of jihad does not go unnoticed as the underdog H. sapiens battles the incarnately evil Darwinian machines in their pursuit of unfettered self-evolution. And there are others as well, but none seem overdone to me.

The setting in the real world was phenomenal. A blend of Descent, Geiger, the Borg, the Terminator future, and a few other splashes like the abovementioned pink fluid, the world is nicely rendered and extremely immersive. Bordering on sensory overload, this film was like a Matrix unto itself for me. Make sure you see this in a good theatre. Negative why? His deadpan (is he ever not deadpan?) portrayal lacks chemistry with the other actors and is generally boring. The character itself has plenty of room for working out various elements so he really does not have an excuse except that he is always that way. Alas, I think my friend said it best: "I think they chose him because of the way he says 'Whoa' in the Jump program scene." Though I am not a huge Fishburne fan, his religious Morpheus is much better than Reeves' normal-guy-[h,cr]acker-turns-savior-wannabe.

Item 2: This is sort of a nitpick, but is not out of place on /. A Sentient, a machine which can enter the Matrix disguised as a human, accuses Neo of numerous incidents of illegal "hacking." Now we all know that he should have said "cracking," not only because that is the correct term but because it would have been a good opportunity to educate movie-goers about this term. One would have thought that by 2099 they would have gotten it right.

Item 3: To find out where in the Matrix to send themselves, the revolutionaries have to have a real world visual interface to it. Since they do not have the computing power or whatever to display it in 3D on their LCD panels, they just read the object code, which looks like horizontal streams of cuneiform or ideograms, directly. Two words: yeah right. Now this is not quite so bad for a bunch of film people who would not know about what they are talking anyway. However, it is their further artistic indulgence that bugged the hell out of me. Neo, when he figures out all of his powers, starts to see all of the Matrix in object code, and not just strings of it in his head, but object code forming the outlines of everything in the Matrix (like using just ASCII to make a picture). ARGH! Conclusion

On the whole, I really enjoyed this film. It probably will not win any awards for being a groundbreaking artistic masterpiece, but the imagery is engrossing and immersive and the plot has that nice mixture of believability and unbelievability that makes for good science fiction. Go see it at a matinee tomorrow all you people who have Friday off, or Saturday even.

I know, I know: This review sucks, I suck, /. sucks, Rob is an idiot, Katz is a windbag, etc.

Here is the Salon review http://www.s alonmagazine.com/ent/movies/reviews/1999/04/02revi ewa.html

-l

At the same time, I also feel that the system is working because it means that someone else thought my ideas were worth reading. After all, I couldn't vote my own score higher even if I were a moderator, nor would I want to if I could. Part of being an intelligent person means being critical of one's own ideas, and being willing to admit when you've said something stupid, because it's going to happen sooner or later.

The payoff comes when you achieve the respect you deserve for writing something that is truly useful. Before the new moderators, all of my posts (good and bad) would be buried among all of everyone else's posts (good and bad). It was almost not worth bothering to post because with 250 or more posts for the more inflammatory topics, even if I felt I had something really useful to say, it would get buried in the noise. Now, I can post anyway, and if peer review deems it good, it shoots to the top, and I feel good. I also benefit when reading slashdot, because I get to see the best of what everyone else has to offer first.

To some extent, I think this is the trap ESR has fallen into: if he truly follows the beliefs that he's written, then he deserves to be called a hacker just as much as any of us, but for him to seek out the spotlight (and especially to seek out getting his name in print as some sort of Open Source guru) can only blind him to his true position in the community, whatever that may be.

Yes, it was an ego boost the first (and only) time someone asked me if I was "the" Jake Hamby, but it's not something I expect to hear any time soon, nor am I seeking that out. I hope to find myself in a position in the next few years where more people will know my name, but only through writing more (and cooler) software, not because I want to get my name out there (before you ask, no I haven't yet written any software worth mentioning).

It's a slippery slope, and to tie this to another slashdot thread, I think that in the balance between getting the recognition one deserves for doing cool stuff and indulging oneself in shameless self-promotion, people like CmdrTaco, Bruce Perens, and Linus Torvalds fall on one side, and people like ESR, RMS, and Jon Katz fall on the other.

Either way, they're not nearly as bad as this guy. Follow the link to read a Salon mag story about an author of a crummy sci-fi book who, upset because his book was being trashed in viewer comments on amazon.com, retaliated by logging in under several fictitious identities, giving himself five stars and glowing reviews to boost the average! Even more shocking, rather than hiding in shame over such a dastardly act, he turns around and writes a Salon article saying exactly what he did, without even bothering to apologize for it in any way. Unbelievable.

So what's the problem? His pieces leaven my daily diet of lame-ass code and self-important Salon articles.

So what if he doesn't jack-off your ego or write technoporn?

So what if he flogs his latest book?
1)He's writing for free, but he still has to pay rent and
2)Ever listen to Art Bell's show and the major hucksterism that happens there?

Y'all SPOILED.

I fell out of my chair when he talked about doing a "Saving Private Ryan kind of thing."

----------
mphall@cstone.nospam.net

Raymond said, "important strains of it [free software] (such as the BSD Unix tradition) predated him [RMS] and remain both technically and ideologically independent of his Free Software Foundation." (emphasis added)

See:

http://www.salonm agazine.com/21st/feature/1998/09/11feature2.html.

Rob does have better things to do than talk to those people. Most of the trade press is clue-impaired. There are only a few journalists I can think of who consistently "get it": Andrew Leonard of Salon Magazine's "21st" section is probably the best out there, and Dan Gillmor of the San Jose Mercury News has a clue.

Notice that what these guys have in common is that commercial software companies aren't paying their bills: they write for more general-interest publications. This means they get to stay honest. Folks who write for Ziff-Davis or IDG publications are under great pressure to be whores.

Jon, you mention how cool it was to watch the pppd attempt to dial out. I can promise you, it just gets better. Eventually it will become old hat, and you'll move on to other things. At each point you'll think "Wow, I couldn't do this with such-and-such an operating system, I don't know how I ever did without it." You'll acquire a need to mess around with more and more things. Maybe you'll try a few other window managers, write a script to automate some daily task, or something similar. That's one of the neat things.

Part of the Unix way of thinking is that first you need some basic grounding. Things like how to edit a config file, how to kill a process, how to navigate the drive, how to read a log file, how to find the documentation. Once you've got that under your belt (and you're well on your way), nothing new is terribly hard. It's just a matter of finding the right configuration file, reading the right log file, finding the documentation.

The power to fix things is one of the reasons for the vilification of Windows and MacOS among Unix lovers. I've never had any Unix-esque operating system simply decide that it was going to die for no reason. I've never had to reinstall the operating system to fix a software problem. The Windows and MacOS way of thinking is "The user doesn't want to be bothered, so try to fix things yourself." The down side of this is that there is little support for fixing those problems that do sneak by. Most Unix tools on the other hand, cheerfully complain when they are unhappy, and many provide useful messages allowing you to track down the problem and squish it. People complain about the cryptic error messages from Unix, but once you've learned a basic bit of jargon, many of those error messages are quite helpful. This is as opposed to such stunning error messages as "Error -14", "The operation failed because 'The operation completed successfully'", or a blue screen of death.

Put simply, when something goes wrong on my Linux box, I can hunt the problem down and fix it so it doesn't happen again. It may not be easy, put it's possible. When my Windows box isn't happy, well, often all I can do is hope it doesn't happen again. Or I can reinstall the software, and occasionally the operating system.

For those that haven't seen it yet (it's been mentioned on slashdot before), a good article on the dangers of making computers easier to use (in particular, it's a discussion on "Wizards" in Visual C++, but it touches on the general topic) is The Dumbing Down of Programming.

Oh, and as a suggestion Jon, stop using the root account ASAP. I suspect you know this (most books on linux mention it explicitly), but it's one of the most important things to learn. While you're setting things up, you certainly need to use root, and you'll occasionally need to use root later to tweak things or install new software, but with great power comes great responsibility. It's easy to make a mistake that takes a few hours to fix, and it's possible to make a mistake that requires reinstalling the system. The nice thing about user accounts is that if your system is reasonably configured, it is very hard for you to muck things up, making it all the safer to boldly mess with things you don't understand.

Thanks, Jon, for an excellent article. The last two were a little fluffy (fun to read, but nothing that left a lasting impression). This article reminded me of my first installations, and the fun it was.

Salon is carrying today an article echoing Davie Bowie's raves about MP3 and the culture it allows.

Ha det!

--algebraist

Salon is carrying today an article echoing Davie Bowie's raves about MP3 and the culture it allows.

Ha det!

--algebraist