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Yes. This is an established fact, assuming you consider Eric S. Raymond a hacker and paganism a mystical religion. See his Dancing With The Gods. He's also the maintainer of the Neopaganism FAQ.

Not to mention I'm YATP (Yet Another TechnoPagan) myself...

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Yes. This is an established fact, assuming you consider Eric S. Raymond a hacker and paganism a mystical religion. See his Dancing With The Gods. He's also the maintainer of the Neopaganism FAQ.

Not to mention I'm YATP (Yet Another TechnoPagan) myself...

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There is certainly a connection between scientists and mystics; Mystics are scientists.

Consider the following questions:

• How do things work?
• How does consciousness work?
• Does consciousness ever work differently?
• How is it that we are aware?

These are questions that scientists and other technically minded people ask, and they are questions that mystics ask as well. Note that the word "Gnostic", used in this Slashdot intro, means "Understanding".

Of all religious devotees, Mystics are the most scientific, since they constantly try to find the truth through observation, trial, and error. Mystics generally find that the the written word takes second place to first hand repeatable experiments, usually in the form of meditation.

If there is any one thing that would make a mystic out of a scientifically minded person (assuming that the scientist hasn't already taking Socrates' advice to heart and studying their own awareness), it would have to be the hard problem of consciousness, which is essentially, the problem of how we are ever aware of anything at all; why it is that there is something like to be a person (or a butterfly).

If you can explain the universe, but can't explain how it is that you're even aware of it in the first place, you may have just as well just explained a very nice and very neat little dream. Universes are probably a dime a dozen.

Let me put it a completely different way:

If you were a computer programmer, electronics enthusiast, or some other kind of tinkerer, and you come across these concepts of awareness, something called "God", different dimensions, and this mystery of light and sound, which of the following would appeal most to you:

1. Get a book telling you what the truth is, and then say, "Oh, okay; I'll just go along with what this says here."
2. Give up, and say that the problems too hard for you; let someone else bother with such things.
3. Get yourself a DSL connection with the spirit world, have a few chat sessions with God, play around with some different dimensions, and try and figure out what the hell is going on and try to have have some fun.

(Necessary plug: Personally, I practice Surat Shabda Yoga).

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked.

I know, I know, I shouldn't encourage him... Oh well. :-)

It always makes you think when you see the words "ego-free" and "Eric Raymond" in consecutive paragraphs.

Well, let's try this out... ``Eric Raymond has stated that open-source programming is often an ego-free activity.'' Look! They're in the same sentence! By your logic, that sentence is an even larger load of bollocks than the original article. Pity that it's true. And that the sub-clause (``Open-source programming is often an ego-free activity.''), while not proven, certainly seems to be true in practice. (Yes, there are exceptions. See that word often up there?)

And Brooks' Law doesn't hold because Eric Raymond said so. Better still, he quoted someone else saying so.

He stated that Brook's Law doesn't hold---as originally stated---for debugging---in an open source project. He then provided a justification that holds up under current information theory (there isn't a direct link to the explanation in CatB, but it's on thi s page. Exercise for the reader, I guess. (Anyone know why the comment system keeps sticking a space in ``this''? I'd look it up, but I'm working on my resume, which is slightly more important to me right now.)). And then, he provided an empirical example (Linux). And then, he tested his theory (fetchmail).

The outright lie; Mozilla has been coded "from the ground up".

Agreed. That's a lie. Of course, you're the only person I have ever seen say this. To the best of my knowledge, nobody involved with Mozilla says this. Even the flakiest of news sites never seem to make this mistake. The article this discussion is about doesn't make this mistake.

What are those funny lines supposed to mean? Is it some sort of code that people in this site use? I'm sorry if I don't know the conventions you people use to communicate. I'm new to this site, and I'm not very technical oriented. All I want is to learn from you.

The "funny lines" are snippets of code in the C language. Many (perhaps even most) of us here on this site read at least a little bit of C, but if you don't, that's just fine. The poster was simply pointing out the correct way to use the printf() function.

/. is a great site, but it's not really a tutorial. I would suggest taking a look at Eric Raymond's Hacker Howto. Install Linux on a machine (it's not that hard) and get a good book on Python. Join a Linux Users Group, or just hang out on some of the excellent Linux mailing lists or IRC sites.

Good Luck

Algorithms and big-O notation

When, how and why to normalize a database

Compiler theory, parsing and grammers

How to elicit a requirements document from a customer

Various software development models from Waterfall to Spiral

How to write a design document for a 3 tier project including UML diagrams, Entity-Relationship diagrams and architectural diagrams

How to work well with others (numerous team projects)

Time management skills

Distributed computing (CORBA/DCOM/Java-RMI)

How hardware works down to the most miniscule level

The above list is stuff I have learned in 3 years of college that I am very sure I would not have learned if I rushed off into industry to become some C++ developer.

Ask yourself this question, how far do people without college degrees go in industry? Besides the prodigies who create their own companies (e.g. Shawn Fanning, Bill Gates, etc) most people who rush into industry will spend their lives as code monkeys instead of software engineers. Companies rarely high school/college dropouts project managers or lead developers and when they do that is usually their glass ceiling.

Frankly my time in college has given me a larger skill set and more knowledge than if I was just cranking out C++ for some company for the past 2 years. This means I am more valuable as an employee and more able to set my own career path unlike a high school graduate who knows how to hack C/C++/Java but not how to engineer projects or exactly how and why certain things work.

QT has been released under GPL -- something RMS has been stumping for for years. He could have posted an editorial entitle "Hooray for Troll Trech!"; he could have congratulated the parties that be; he could have politely stated his admiration for the skills of all involved in the the KDE project; he could, in a word, have been a gracious winner. But apparently that's not RMS's style. Instead he launches immediately into the picking of nits of such mind-boggling irrelevance it quite takes one's breath away.

There used to be a word for people who were always looking for fights to pick. Bully. RMS seems unwilling to surrender a pulpit from which he loves to hear himself speak.

I'm neither a KDE nor a Gnome partisan; merely an observer who is glad the tired old tirades against KDE for what amount to issues irrelevant to the technology involved can now finally be given a rest (that is, if RMS will let them).

There is no diffenrence between retroactively attacking King Leopold for his business practices in the Congo and retroactively attacking Hitler for his rehabilitation of the German economy.

Per the strictures of Godwin's Law you have just forfeited the argument.

Lee Kai Wen -- Taiwan, ROC

just because it is a backronym doesn't mean it is a bad name. As for being a network object model, I think you have the word grouping wrong. Think (Network (object model)) not ((network object) model).

``Finally, I can start.. err.. learning. (goes and sits in stupid corner..)''

No biggie. Everyone's gotta start sometime. Hell, I'm learning new languages every day and I've been hacking for years.

Anyway, good luck. Just remember to always check your input!!! Especially with languages like Perl that have a knack of making your hard drive world readable. (yeah, I've done it ... goes and sits next to ya in the stupid corner...) ;-)

My available space is now needed for people, so storage is no longer an option. I have given away as many as I can (not a lot of geeks here). I suppose I will shudder when I toss my volumes of Knuth into the woodstove.

I would love to get my hands on a few books on anything technical: programming, chemistry, stress analysis (I'm a Mechanical Engineer), eco-anything, astro-anything, physics, (or non-technical), history, political science, biographies, philosophy, etc. Put some info in your bio/sig, and you'll probably have a dozen emails before Saturday.

Good luck saving your books. (Whenever I think about throwing a book away, I see the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where the young Nazis are burning a pile of books; even ratty old copies of books I have two other editions of. Anything printed seems almost sacred. I can't bring myself to destroy it.)

If you do want to get rid of them, post or email. I'll probably take a few dozen off of your hands.
chris_cantrall@bigfoot.com

Louis Wu

"Where do you want to go ...

Septem ber that never ended
<O
( \
XGNOME vs. KDE: the game!

This post is obviously a troll.

Any student of computer history (or anyone with a book with a chapter on computer history such as this one)can tell you that the IBM PC was released in 1981 and by the end of that year was outselling Apple machines. 15 years ago [1985] IBM compatible PCs were already the dominant player in the desktop market. Thus the above post is either a troll(very likely from it's insulting manner) or was written by some prepubescent teen who thinks that just because he and his friends had Apple ]['s in 1985, they were somehow the dominant desktop platform.


(-1 Troll)

Following are the definitions for daemon, demon, dragon and phantom, all related terms, taken from the hackers-jargon dictionary compiled and maintained at Stanford and MIT. Enjoy!

Tony Hansen

DAEMON (day'mun, dee'mun) [archaic form of "demon", which has slightly different connotations (q.v.)] n.

A program which is not invoked explicitly, but which lays dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon). For example, writing a file on the lpt spooler's directory will invoke the spooling daemon, which prints the file. The advantage is that programs which want (in this example) files printed need not compete for access to the lpt. They simply enter their implicit requests and let the daemon decide what to do with them. Daemons are usually spawned automatically by the system, and may either live forever or be regenerated at intervals.

Usage: DAEMON and DEMON (q.v.) are often used interchangeably, but seem to have distinct connotations. DAEMON was introduced to computing by CTSS people (who pronounced it dee'mon) and used it to refer to what is now called a DRAGON or PHANTOM (q.v.). The meaning and pronunciation have drifted, and we think this glossary reflects current usage.

<snip>

Ahh.. and I thought it stood for something boring like Device Access and Execution MONitor. I like Randall Howard's thought that it is something that lies halfway between God and Man.
Incidentally, Randall I deduce that you are a fellow Britain.

Thanks for the information everbody.
Mark Callow

And now, from www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon /html/entry/daemon.html

daemon /day'mn/ or /dee'mn/ n.

[from the mythological meaning, later rationalized as the acronym `Disk And Execution MONitor']

A program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is that the perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon). For example, under ITS writing a file on the LPT spooler's directory would invoke the spooling daemon, which would then print the file. The advantage is that programs wanting (in this example) files printed need neither compete for access to nor understand any idiosyncrasies of the LPT. They simply enter their implicit requests and let the daemon decide what to do with them. Daemons are usually spawned automatically by the system, and may either live forever or be regenerated at intervals.

Daemon and demon are often used interchangeably, but seem to have distinct connotations. The term `daemon' was introduced to computing by CTSS people (who pronounced it /dee'mon/) and used it to refer to what ITS called a dragon; the prototype was a program called DAEMON that automatically made tape backups of the file system. Although the meaning and the pronunciation have drifted, we think this glossary reflects current (2000) usage.

Not that I would have expected anything else, I guess..

t_t_b
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I think not; therefore I ain't®

The entry for "emoticon" in The Jargon File says:

It appears that the emoticon was invented by one Scott Fahlman on the CMU {bboard} systems sometime between early 1981 and mid-1982.

The entry for "emoticon" in The Jargon File says:

It appears that the emoticon was invented by one Scott Fahlman on the CMU {bboard} systems sometime between early 1981 and mid-1982.

Well, I guess that The Jargon File would have to be updated (-:
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this post was brought to you by Andreas Fuchs.

Having just quit my job as a defense contractor, the largest problem is getting the local DAA (Designated approval authority, or something like that...) to approve the use of the software.

Pretty much. Taking a look at the big picture, it pretty much comes down to one thing: The DoD loves paperwork. They thrive on it. Whether or not the product you're choosing actually works or not doesn't matter, as long as it has all its certification paperwork. This isn't likely to change any time soon.

This tends to conflict with the open, rapid, community-effort, bazaar style of development. The rapid revs and loose organization don't lend themselves to certification. Even if they did, most certs require you to retest for every change. Since many of Open Source's strengths stem from the rapid revs, this makes things difficult.

And, yes, I realize that you could "freeze" a particular distribution, certify it, and then rev less often. But again: Taking full advantage of Open Source means you have to accept rapid revs.

This isn't to say things are impossible, or that we should give up, or anything else. I'm just pointing out a source of conflict.

Internet Explorer. IE started life as Mosaic, one of the original browsers. Like all of the origninal browsers, Mosaic was open source. Microsoft bought the browser idea from its Open Source inventors.

Apache. This is the direct descendant of the original web server (it too was open source), and it dominates the web. Microsoft has tried to copy Apache's functions, but has had a tough time keeping up with Apache's pace of innnovation.

sendmail . Essentially all of the email that goes across the internet does so thanks to sendmail. The orginal (open source) developers now also run a company, but the orignal accomplishments all happened open-source.

BIND The Internet works on IP addresses (eg. 135.23.43.121). Any time you type a URL (letters) into your browswer, you are using BIND. This was invented open source (the B is for Berkely).

TCP/IP These are the two protocols (among others) that make the internet possible. In a sense, they define what is "internet." Developed and implemented open source

Eric Raymond addresses "creativity" issues in his essays.

Surely, Open Source has its own share of these nutters, starting with Eric "Love and altruism don't scale up very well" Raymond (the linked piece, btw, is the single stupidest piece of political polemic on the internet, IMO

I think you need to put down the bag and stop breathing vapors.

Well congrats. You're friends with a lot of warez d00dz. Unfortunately, this has obviously colored your view of humanity, or at least your view of Internet users. See the thing is, these days the two are getting more and more synonymous. Napster has over 20 million users these days, and chances are only a very very few of them are like your illustrious friends, willing to spend hours of their time working on entirely suboptimal solutions for avoiding paying for a CD. (i.e. downloading MP3s, converting them to .wav and recording on a CD-R. Gak! Talk about a humongous waste of time for a finished product barely more listenable than a tape!)

As it turns out, there is apparently a large body of independent evidence backing up my claims that most Napster users engage in significant fair uses like sampling and space-shifting, and that the majority of their "non-fair uses" (if even there are any, since the AHRA explicitly legalizes all noncommercial copying of audio recordings) do not displace purchases which would otherwise be made. The Jupiter study is the only one I can find which has been released to the news media. (Sorry for relying on the press release; the actual study, like all their studies, is only available for a very large fee. However, it's worth noting that this was an independent study, not commissioned by Napster.) However, there are references to many others which substantially agree with the Jupiter study in Napster's court filings. I suggest you read the Opposition to RIAA's Motion for Preliminary Injunction (182 kB PDF) and Napster's Brief Appealing Preliminary Injunction to the Ninth Circuit (216kB PDF) in particular. They not only include quite a lot of information on the various independent studies of Napster (plus the ones commissioned by Napster and the RIAA), but a lot of other data indicating that much if not most Napster traffic is non-infringing, even if the AHRA's safeguarding of non-commercial copying is disregarded, and that Napster use helps CD sales.

Beyond that general statement, I'd like to point out a few specific places where your argument is particularly lacking.

[re: the health of the publishing industry in the face of libraries] It's been empirically proven. The industry is healthy, despite the existence numerous of libraries.

LOL! This in no way precludes the fact that libraries have damaged book sales; all it says is that libraries haven't put the publishers out of business. Meanwhile, not only are the RIAA-member labels "empirically" "healthy", but their profits are the highest they have ever been in history, rising a remarkable 8% in the first half of 2000 over a year earlier, all whilst Napster's user base was ramping from 0 to 20 million! There are probably more Napster users than library users, and the recording industry has never had it this good.

[re: the Jupiter study]I don't see how they could gather a reliable sample. Napster is essentially anonymous, it would be virtually impossible to get a truely random sample here. They obviously did not do a before and after, and most likely it was not random in the least. The biggest hint we get is:
"But when we conducted our consumer survey, controlled for key music purchasing factors-such as existing spending level, age, income, gender, and online tenure-we still found that Napster usage is one of the strongest determinants of increased music buying." If you ever studied statistics, you would know this does not mean anything like: Those who start using napster, start buying more music. Quite the contrary, it means: Those who use napster, are more likely to buy music. In other words, Jupiter looked at a certain population based on the above controls, and determined that those who used napster were 45% more likely to buy CDs than those who appeared the same based on those criteria and did not use the service. The problem with this statistic is that it does not tell you whether or not those same music lovers in the selected populations would be more inclined to use napster and would be self-selecting in the survey. It does not deny the possibility that those users DECREASED their CD purchases since they started using napster

Unfortunately, your reading comprehension is apparently not so good. How, pray tell, do you conclude that Jupiter "obviously did not do a before and after" study when one of the factors they controlled for was "existing spending level"??? When the press release specifically said on numerous occasions that Napster users had "increased" spending levels rather than "greater" or "larger" or "higher" spending levels?? (For the English-challenged "increase" is a verb meaning to become greater or larger; it explicitly implies a period of time and a before-and-after comparison.) And for crying out loud, why on earth would a firm as respected as Jupiter release a study which made the horrifically obvious error of only measuring whether Napster users (i.e. music fans) buy more music than non-Napster users (non-music fans)? And by the way, in case you have never taken a statistics course, it is dreadfully easy to find a random selection of people and to measure their before/after music buying. One simple method for doing so:

1) Call random people on the phone (all telephone-based poll studies are seeded with randomly generated telephone numbers, checked only to make sure they are valid numbers).

2) Ask the person answering if they have ever used Napster. If no, thank them for their time and call someone else.

3) If yes, ask them a variety of questions on their demographic information/Napster using habits/music buying habits. For example, "how many CD's a month did you buy before you started using Napster?" and, "how many CD's a month have you bought since you started using Napster?"

4) Compile and realize that Napster use causes a 45% increase in CD buying over before the same person used Napster.

Obviously you lack experience with the internet and the vast quantities of warez (pirated software) available to those who know how to get it. If you had, you'd know that the warez groups are able to distribute warez out to thousands, and millions, of people with just one copy, in a compressed format, such that if even one byte is corrupt, the entire package is bad. Similar systems could easily be setup within napster, and in fact, there were atleast such groups when I used mp3s more regularly. They took responsibility for ensuring a clean rip and a decent encoding, not to mention distribution [which is largely moot now] With decreased file size sensitivity, these groups could essentially gaurantee very high quality mp3s.

...Combine this with the above mentioned "mp3 group", and it could happen with reliability [i.e., check summing schemes] What's more, these groups can get and distribute the songs before others can even buy them, they don't even half to wait....but people do anyways. I encourage you to look at the warez groups, it may give you a little insight here.

And I encourage you to actually go on Napster, as it will give you a great deal more insight into how songs actually get uploaded these days. Alright, I'll do it for you. Since we've used the new N'Sync CD as our example, I just searched for "It's Gonna Be Me" off of that album. In its current incarnation, Napster is limited to returning 100 results. But of those 100 results, there were fully 40 different filesizes. Thus we find that out of 100 files shared, there were 40 different rips. (To be fair, a couple of these were from N'Sync's performance at the MTV Music Awards; on the other hand, I believe all these live performances had the same filesize, so it's possible we would have gotten more source files if they were excluded.) To make sure that "It's Gonna Be Me" wasn't a bit of a fluke, I did the same experiment with Britney Spears' "Baby One More Time". 60 different source files in the first 100 results. I think this pretty much demolishes your argument. Now let's take a look at why.

You made the comparison to the warez scene and to the early MP3 scene, both of which you are apparently more familiar with than with Napster. First, let's go through the typical process by which a new game gets warezed.

1) A member of a warez cl4n, typically picked out in advance, buys the game the first day it comes out.

2) Then they get out their debugger and their disassembler and get to work. Most games these days ship with either a CD check mechanism or a key input mechanism as copy protection.

3) The cracker determines which is at work, or whether a more novel copy protection scheme has been utilized.

4a) If it's a CD check mechanism, the cracker "simply" needs to find the routine called in memory by the CD check (with his debugger), go there and figure out how it works (with his disassembler), find out where it is called from, and what it calls when the CD check is passed (debugger and disassembler needed here), then go back to the original calling function and hand edit the hex machine code to skip the CD check and call the function called after the check would normally be passed. Also they need to hope the scheme isn't more complicated than this, that the CD isn't expected any other time during the game. Oh, it is? You just need to change all of those functions too. And repackage the game with a new installer which copies files which would have otherwise been left on the CD off it. And maybe edit out any wasteful pieces of code, like video and CD audio tracks, that would make a full HD installation too large. All of this with your hex editor working on assembly or with an editor working on obfuscated decompiled junk. Then you need to test your edited game, make sure all the packaging works and installs correctly, and ship it out.

4b) If it's a key check, well you're in luck--you might be able to bypass it according to the above method. Or maybe you can't. In which case you need to code your own key generator. Don't worry; it's just a matter of finding the key-checking function with your debugger/disassembler, and reverse engineering it. In possibly obfuscated assembly code. What if it's a true cryptographic one-way hash? Well, it's back to square one. If you're lucky, though, you'll be able to figure it out and generate working keys. Now you just need to code that algorithm into your own app, package it with the original game, and ship it out.

5) Where do you post to? Well, you probably ship it to your warez d00dz buddies first, and then maybe you go on IRC for a couple hours to brag and barter for other warez. Or maybe you upload it to a ratio FTP site. Or maybe you post it on your own warez website, in which case you have to set up banner ads which will pay you a lot for click-throughs, because you'll require a password which can only be gotten by clicking on a series of ads.

6) Be sure to include a little text file detailing your crack, shouting out to your warez budz, etc. Sign it with a clever handle, hopefully something with lots of z's and x's. Be sure to include some neat ASCII art to top it off!

Phew. I may have gotten the process a bit off (you might be able to correct me; I was never into the whole BBS/warez scene, although some friends were), but I think it's mostly right. And who actually goes through the trouble to get warez? Kids with a lot of time on their hands. There's emphatically no Napster for warez, so the only way to get some is to have some (i.e. for ratio sites) or to jump through a lot of hoops on IRC or the web. Even if noncommercial software sharing were legal like noncommercial music sharing (it's not; the AHRA explicitly excludes software), little of what goes on in the warez community would qualify; ratio sites, barter exchanges on IRC, and even forced banner ad clicks all qualify as "commercial" under current law (the DMCA). Sharing files on Napster, on the other hand, is not, because there is no quid pro quo exchange.

Alrighty. Now, let's take a look at how the average song gets on Napster.

1) Someone buys a CD.

2) They are one of the millions of people who want to listen to it on their Rio/other portable MP3 player.

3) They rip it using one-click ripping software included with their Rio etc.

4) Some (large) portion of users will have their default MP3 directory shared on Napster; others may have to *gasp* move the file to their Napster directory.

5) Log onto Napster to get more MP3's, and don't even notice that you are sharing a new file.

That's it. In other words, there is a vast vast population (we're talking in the millions) who doesn't have to do anything intentional to provide a source file for Napster. Most of them certainly must realize what's going on, and probably many are slightly proud of providing new source material to Napster, since it's a form of giving back to a great service and community. But they don't have to go out of their way to do so. Furthermore, there is emphatically no subculture surrounding MP3's to increase one's standing in, and no way of signing "your" rips anyways (technically you could use the ID3 tags, although no one ever looks at those). There is no ego boost to doing something that thousands of people are going to do "accidentally" just by using their Rio's and signing on to Napster.

Frankly, your notion of an "MP3 ripping group" is anachronistic and laughable. The proportion of the 20 million Napster users who would even care who ripped their MP3s, much less be impressed by them the way warez kids are by warez clans, is miniscule. And in any case, they are the sort of people you used to hang out with on #mp3--the ones who would trade MP3s just as easily if Napster and every other peer-to-peer program were shut down.

They are the type who will actually buy huge hard drives and work out the technicalities of hooking up real speakers to a computer (or converting MP3's to .wav and recording on a CD-R! God that's funny!) just so they can "save money" and be all b4d4ss. They used to make up a significant proportion of the MP3 sharing community; now the vast majority of MP3 users also buy CD's, and indeed buy more CD's then they did before, as a result of their MP3 collections. For them, for most people, MP3 complements purchased music, not replaces it.

Books build on each other and on the mind in a way that music does not [part of the reason why libraries are key]. One can go to a library, and providing they have enough diligence, teach themselves hundreds of usefull things--even more than you think you know. The reader can improve themselves in ways that society can grasp and appreciate.

Music may be marvelous, but it is simply not interchangable with the many forms of books. Society has long placed a preference on reading, and has regarded music as a form of entertainment. Consider, for a moment, what portion of your curiculuum has been dedicated to books versus music. Most likely, your answer is something around 1/40th. If you were told that your kids weren't going to read anymore, but would listen to music in class instead, how would you react? You know damn well how you would react...It's a question of priorities, just one more reason why you can't quite make that analogy.

Books are more informational than music. Books have several academic uses that music has no analogue for. There is no musical equivalent to the textbook. However, the majority of library check-outs are for entertainment and artistic pleasure, and from a cultural or artistic perspective, there is no arguing that books are any more or less "superior" than music. As for why literature is more often studied in schools than is music, it's generally for the following reasons:

1) Music, like visual art, is more difficult to appreciate than are books. Most music is either not terribly artisticly redeeming, or is too subtle and complex for serious study much below the college level.

2) Furthermore, books tend to be more concrete and thus easier to teach than music or visual art. It's easier to write a paper on a book than a song, especially when you have more practice with the first. This doesn't mean they're any less worthy of individual study or appreciation, though.

3) Habit and prejudice.

In any case, there is no good argument that fictional books are more socially redeeming than music, and no good argument why we should have an almost infinite selection of (government-subsidized no less!) free books while we have to either pay for music or listen to the 150 predetermined hits/year the RIAA purchases radio time for.

It's right here. It was added a couple years ago, IIRC. "Dirty genitals" on the other hand....

I have several friends who have completed PhD's in established fields: philosophy, biology, and computer science. The process of getting PhD was a monumental struggle. Then getting a job is a challenge -- though not for the computer science PhD: he got a research job outside of academia.

Once you get an academic job your struggle has just begun. You are pitted against other young professors in a battle to get tenure. You either get tenure or you are asked to leave after a number of years of intense politics, research, writing, and brown nosing. Very stressful And these people were in established fields.

I am not saying don't pursue this if you have a real passion for it but consider other alternatives. Get a practical career as say a compter programmer and make history your hobby. You can get good enough at it to write books and papers without being dependent on the academy for approval. For example, look at Eric Raymond. He is a geek who has established himself as an excellent historian, anthropologist, and philosopher -- but he does not depend on academia for his livelehood. He has written some well respected papers and books.

b&

A nice piece, but he missing one of ESRs key points: Economic Viability.

His discussion of peer approval being crucial reinforces ESRs insight that a "gift economy" lies at the heart of Open Source culture, but the author gives no hint of how his (or anyone elses) open source coding would be compatible with long term economic self-interest

ESR does so in the Magic Cauldron

A nice piece, but he missing one of ESRs key points: Economic Viability.

His discussion of peer approval being crucial reinforces ESRs insight that a "gift economy" lies at the heart of Open Source culture, but the author gives no hint of how his (or anyone elses) open source coding would be compatible with long term economic self-interest

ESR does so in the Magic Cauldron

--Cycon

one seems to care about the software running it.

Because it doesn't sell cars.

Seriously: when new cars come out, they try to sell you on the sexy things: how powerful the engine is, how fast it accelerates or handles, how luxurious the ride is, and if it's an SUV, how rugged you'll look when you drive it through old-growth pine forests - or, at least, while picking up the kids from band rehersal.

But in our rush to go faster and look better, the only time that automotive ads seriously push the economics issue is when a) they're trying to clear out old inventory and have slashed financing rates, or b) there's an energy crisis and they're selling low gas-consumption cars.

In the computer world, there's never an energy crisis, thanks to Moore's Law (or whatever). Many people who are buying computers are buying far more power than they actually need, or are ever likely to use. The only people who are really worried about computational overhead are wonks like us - professionals. Lots of folks are willing to plunk down for a 700 GHz machine on which to check e-mail and browse Sports Illustrated online.

If all you want is a pretty interface, then maybe all you need is a basic GUI client. If you want power, though, you should look into MH, which allows you to do anything you could possibly want directly from a terminal window, or within one of several front ends (including a fine GUI client). You can even chain together commands to do complicated things (or write shell or Perl scripts that do), search, sort, and filter messages, have custom commands for writing to or replying to mail from mailing lists, and so forth. The big downside with MH is that each message is its own file, and each folder is a directory, which can mean some wasted disk space. On the other hand, having every message be its own file means that you can manipulate each message separately with shell or Perl scripts.

The main front ends for MH (outside of the various shell commands) are mh-e , an Emacs interface, and exmh , a TCL/Tk GUI client (previously mentioned by Tet). (xmh included with the X Window System, is severely outdated.) Several graphical clients can also be used as front ends for MH (although that support mostly consists of being able to read from or write messages to MH-style folders). (The links in this paragraph are to sections of the on-line version of O'Reilly's MH & xmh: Email for Users & Programmers, now called MH & nmh: Email for Users & Programmers. How many other e-mail tools have an O'Reilly book dedicated to them?)

Emacs itself gives you several additional mail reading alternatives, including mh-e (of course), VM, rmail, MEW, and gnus, which is primarily a newsreader, but can also be used to read mail. (Especially good for very high-traffic lists, as it will do threading and scoring just like it does for newsgroups.)

Both exmh and mh-e (with mailcrypt) support PGP and GPG encryption, signing, and decryption.

If you don't just trust me and devote your life to MH, your best bet is to do a search on freshmeat and try all the mail clients that sound interesting. That's lots easier if you're using a Debian system or one with RPMs that will allow you to install packages, play with them, and then easily remove them and all their assorted fluff. As always, be sure to make a backup of your mail spool before you start messing around with it!

My first e-mail experiences were with VAXen and IBM mainframes. I started using MH with my first Unix account, and I've never found anything more powerful or flexible. I've tried lots of graphical clients, including Novell GroupWise 4, Eudora, Outlook, Communicator, Outlook Express, and NeXT's Mail.app, and found them all frustrating in one way or another.

My current setup uses nmh as the base system; exmh as my main reader; and mh-e for replying to mail. I use fetchmail to download my mail, and mailagent (from CPAN) to filter it, catching most spam and automatically filing real messages into the appropriate MH folders.

(To be perfectly fair, Outlook was the prettiest client I ever used, but it was still too complicated to set up and too limiting. Not to mention the nightmare that is Exchange.)

Someone should point them at The Magic Cauldron where ESR points out that the majority of software is written for in-house use, not sale. how then, are firms to function if ANY inhouse development or tweeking of their custom software is to be banned as too unpredictable?
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Basically, youd have to recode parts of the OS and recompile anyway.

You're fundamentally misunderstanding what a "gift culture" is. A gift culture is not one in which I am obligated to reciprocate any gift you give me -- that's an exchange culture. A gift culture (at least as Homesteading the Noosphere defines it) is one in which social status is determined by what you give away.

Your post indicates a misunderstanding of Open Source, as well. The cool thing about it is not its commerical potential -- it's the community which springs up to support and improve it. Because of this, the only way to truely "backstab" the Open Source world would be to refuse to participate in it to the extent your skills allow you to.

There are also plenty of examples of Open Source authors who have no trouble providing for themselves and their families. Software needs to be written whether it is bought or not, and there will (hopefully) always be people who will pay to have it written.

> Movie companies usually destroy films when the copyright expires rather than allow them to enter the public domain.

> How spiteful! It's a wonder how society limps along at all when nobody is willing to cooperate even minimally with others...

Looked at the right way, Copyrights (and all other laws) ARE an agreement to cooperate with each other. When you abide by the law because it's what you'd do anyway, it's worthless. When you abide by the law because it's the law, you are making a decision that the public good (being able to rely on certain rules of behavior) is worth sacrificing personal liberties (e.g. by not yelling "fire!" in a crowded room, or by not stealing music just because someone else CAN rip a CD and CAN post it on the web and you CAN download it for "free" (like beer)). Society CAN be tightly restricted by laws, but a basic level of law CAN insure that the majority of people have the elbow-room to live decent lives without someone sticking a gun in their face to get their wallet or selling bootleg copies of the CD their band works on.

Violating copyright is tresspassing on someone's Homestead (see ESR's page) on the Noosphere - people who care about software development should consider whether they think this is akin to tresspassing in their physical home. The answer will vary for each of us - but in some sense Copyright law does (or can) give each of us the right to make that choice (let people in - OSS; keep people out - traditional) just as physical property laws allow me to protect my home (or open it up, whether for a weekend party, or every day).

He has fallen for the biggest myth of today's software industry - the myth that the OS and the user-interface are two sides of the same coin.

They are not and they don't have to be. One size does not fit all. Most users do not want to administer their own systems, they just want the computer to work when they switch it on. Soccer-moms and business executives should not have to understand client-server architecture in order to use their PCs.

When he says "When you develop applications, keep the end user in mind." he is assuming that application development and user interface are so completely and utterly entertwined that the user interface must necessarily mirror the application development paradigm - and so he argues that changing the application development paradigm will simplify things for users. This is utter twaddle.

He then uses this argument for justification of his claim that a 'better way' to write Unix applications would be to use a component architecture built on top of CORBA.

I'm much more inclined to agree with esr, who says

The only way to write complex software that won't fall on its face is hold its global complexity down -- to build it out of simple pieces connected by well-defined interfaces, so that most problems are local and you can have some hope of fixing or optimizing a part without breaking the whole.

Unix tradition puts a lot of emphasis on writing programs to read and write simple, textual, stream-oriented, device-independent formats. Mythology to the contrary, this is not because Unix programmers hate graphical user interfaces. It's because if you don't write programs this way, it's much more difficult to hook them together.

First, get a user-interface design specialist, and a bunch of users, and figure out how they would like to use your application. Then do your coding in whatever suits you/your environment/the application best. Your users will thank you, and your code will be better written.

ai731

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Miguel de Icaza seems like an otherwise intelligent guy, so I have to assume that CORBA is forcing the use of reference counting here. If that's so, then CORBA sucks even worse than I thought.

You need to update your stats. A recent study by a prof at the U. Chicago estimates ~2 million uses of guns each year for self defense. Most of the time the criminal just runs away.

When someone successfully defends themselves, it is hardly ever reported in the media. See this page for a bunch of references. Including this pertinent group of stats:

> Each year, potential victims kill between 2,000
> and 3,000 criminals; they wound an additional
> 9,000 to 17,000. Moreover, mishaps are rare.
> Private citizens mistakenly kill innocent people
> only thirty times a year, compared with about
> 330 mistaken killings by police.

You are almost right. Of course developers must listen to their users. But both this AC and the suck.com piece are not giving feedback that developers can use. For what this forum is worth, asking AOL to bury Mozilla isn't an advice, but an attack. Ok, it's not "marketing shit", but why do people complain about something they haven't even tested this year? Call it sour grapes, Mozilla is indeed late according to IE's scheme. But that's no reason to doom Mozilla to hell.
Btw, hats off to Hard_Code for his great post.

I was thinking about what ESR said in The Cathedral and the Bazaar and putting it together with the early Linux kernel - Linus (you know, that guy from Finland) only released the first kernel when it was bootable - and just bearly.

Release early is "A Good Thing"(tm) but too early isn't good - I've seen so many useful and intresting projects die because they were released with unusable code.

The Magic Cauldron is a discussion of different models of opensourcing your project.
It's a very well written article, has some examples, etc.

As said by ESR in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

ESR has a lot of good advice on this.. See www.tuxedo.org/~esr.
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author: Pulina Borsook
publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1891620789
pages: 256
rating: 8/10
summary: A Critical Romp Through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech

I heard about Cyberselfish when driving around Vermont Memorial Day weekend from used bookstore to used bookstore. The NPR station was broadcasting an interview with Cyberselfish author Paulina Borsook, a writer who worked for Wired during its glory years. I was put off by the book's wretched title, but engrossed by the subject: the powerful undercurrent of libertarianism that flows through high-tech circles. I have been astounded but not amazed at the deeply adolescent and peevish libertarian attitudes that so many techies cling to, from gun worship to fear of governmental Internet regulation. Listening to Borsook speak intelligently and cogently about technolibertarianism made me want her book very much.

This month I garnered a copy of Cyberselfish, and I'm still appalled with the title (which comes from an eponymous essay for Mother Jones she wrote in July 1996, when such cyberlanguage wasn't so cybertrite). Cyberselfish is a book-length essay, in fact a somewhat thinly edited series of linked essays. There's a rush of immediacy and wit; for a random example, "Polyamory is the preferred term of art; it's gender-neutral, where polygamy and polyandry are not, and allows for all persuasions of partner choice (gay/straight/bi/it depends)." With the freshness and informality comes flaws. There is too much repeated material in the book. It's clear that essays written at different times have been cobbled together. Reading the book straight through is like reading some multivolume series straight through, in which the characters and history are rehashed at the beginning of each book.

Cyberselfish looks at a few specific examples of technolibertarianism in depth: Bionomics, cypherpunks, Wired magazine, and Silicon Valley's impressive lack of philanthropy. Each time Borsook exposes the compassionless, fearful, posturing, politically myopic core, without dismissing the good aspects of the high-tech culture and individuals. For example, she thinks fighting for privacy rights is good, but obsessing about it and descending into rabid, paranoid ranting on alt.cypherpunks is scary. She moves smoothly from the historical to the academic to the personal, deliberately exposing her own frailities and biases while she examines those of others.

To give a deeper example of the content of Cyberselfish, Bionomics is the use of biological (and particularly Darwinian) metaphors to describe economic processes, as popularized by Michael Rothschild (Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem) and then the The Bionomics Institute (TBI). Borsook convincingly points out through both empirical observation and reasoned analysis that Bionomics boils down to economic libertarianism, where government involvement is wrong and the most cut-throat, efficient and entrepeneurial businesses are the best. Ecological metaphors are used in Bionomics only when they're useful and sexy: The ecosystem of Hawaii was used as a metaphor for the fragility of protected industries. Under Bionomics logic, Hawaii's beautiful, lush, peaceful ecosystem is to be derided. Bionomics uses metaphors to draw syllogistic conclusions. Doing that can be powerfully convincing but amounts to hand-waving and emotional appeals. Borsook cuts through the smoke and mirrors.

After a few years, the Bionomics Institute conferences were (literally) taken over by the Cato Institute, the premier libertarian think tank in the nation. The annual Bionomics conterences began in 1993. The 1997 conference was the Cato/Bionomics Conference; 1998, the "Annual Cato Institute/Forbes ASAP Conference on Technology and Society." TBI morphed into software-startup Maxager, which intends to offer Bionomical tools to companies. Borsook wonders what meaning can be ascribed to the success or the failure of the company. If Maxager fails, is it because it wasn't Bionomically good enough, or just because of the many uncontrollable factors that cause the vast majority of startups to fail? If it succeeds, does it validate Bionomics, or just the good connections the founder has with Silicon Valley venture capitalists?

The other chapters are just as interesting. Cyberselfish sharply describes all the archetypes of the technolibertarians, from the neo-hippie polyandric Burning Man attendee to the Lexus-driving, 100-hour-a-week, plugged-in entrepeneur with a sprawling bungalow in Santa Clara county.

One of the most crystalline passages in the book describes Eric Raymond's leaking of the Halloween Document, written by Microsoft program manager Vinod Valloppillil. The two clearly have vast ideological differences, the open-source cowboy and the Evil Empire functionary, but they're both hard-core libertarians, an entirely unreported fact. In Borsook's words, "It was rather like discovering that both a liberal and a conservative senator had both acquired their law degrees from Yale: no news here."

As I said before, the book is somewhat haphazardly put together, and nearly every sentence is to some degree contentious; even someone who agrees with her basic position will find reason to quibble. Cyberselfish doesn't come near to answering all the questions it raises. Borsook doesn't really tackle the paradox that "libertarians celebrate the cult of the individual" but Open Source celebrates the collective. What does it mean to be an Open Source libertarian?

I personally think it's somewhat unfair to attack those flaws, as they're inexorably part of Cyberselfish's loose, immediate, opinionated, and conversational style. It's kind of like how Slashdot's open forums allow for a review like this and the inevitable "hot grits" responses.

Ah, must have been a relative link in the HTML from the Jargon File. Here's the link for your enjoyment =)

Real World

beta /bay't*/, /be't*/ or (Commonwealth) /bee't*/ n.

1. Mostly working, but still under test; usu. used with `in': `in beta'. In the Real World , systems (hardware or software) software often go through two stages of release testing: Alpha (in-house) and Beta (out-house?). Beta releases are generally made to a group of lucky (or unlucky) trusted customers. 2. Anything that is new and experimental. "His girlfriend is in beta" means that he is still testing for compatibility and reserving judgment. 3. Flaky; dubious; suspect (since beta software is notoriously buggy).

Historical note: More formally, to beta-test is to test a pre-release (potentially unreliable) version of a piece of software by making it available to selected (or self-selected) customers and users. This term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the industry. `Alpha Test' was the unit, module, or component test phase; `Beta Test' was initial system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that the engineering model functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production design, and the D test was the C test repeated after the model had been in production a while.

People tried natural-language interfaces in the 70's and 80's, and they failed miserably to scale up. I don't believe anything has changed.

Exchange's native protocol is, if I recall correctly, basically a bad IMAP implementation with a proprietary authentication scheme called NTLM. NTLM is supported by Fetchmail, which is under the GPL just like Evolution. Expect to see someone (maybe even you ;-) port Exchange Server support to Evolution in the not-too-distant future.

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what? The news file doesn't mention it. With IMAP or POP3 fetchmail will, however, co-operate with a excange server. OTOH, if you use calendar and stuff, you will still need lookout. Maybe the exchage web interface would work in your case, however.

Probably stating the obvious here, but as an earlier poster pointed out, things don't stay around for long in the world of software. If people just let this dedication stay as it is, a dedication, Espy's name may be just part of history fairly quickly.

What I think would be a great way to remember him, and keep his name alive, is to do all you can to make his name part of the common parlance. Refer to Debian 2.2 as "Espy release". Talk about installing "Espy Debian", and so on.

It would be a wonderful tibute if, in a couple of years, the Jargon File included an entry for "Espy". That would truly be a lasting memorial.

"There are some men who should have mountains to bear their names to time" - Leonard Cohen.

ÐÆ

It wasn't until someone actually wrote some code that the Great Beast was forced to roll-over and grumble. Corporate entities do not respond to warnings. Corporate entities only respond to crisis. There is no crisis until someone codes the bitch.

A very amusing example of this is buried amidst the Jargon File pages:

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/The-Meaning -of-Hack.html

Regrettably, "killall" would probably stop this hack in its tracks now, but it's still very amusing reading.