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1. a form of socialism that abolishes private ownership

(1) Library acquisitions are and must be governed by local community standards.

(2) There are no local community standards on the internet.

(3) Therefore, if libraries are going to make use of the internet, they will have to find a way to impose local standards on it, EVEN if that means much desirable content is lost.

Premise 1 is not quite accurate. Library acquisitions are governed by library staff. Public library staff may or may not follow some sort of government guidelines. While the guidelines may qualify as some sort of prior restraint, "community standards" have always been the standard for determining obscenity, which is the one of three forms of speech not protected by the first amendment of the US Constitution. The other two are slander/libel, and inciting criminal acts or major disturbances (e.g., shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater).

As a semi-public environment (like a restaurant or a store), a library is subject to more potential restrictions than a private venue. That doesn't change the fact that the only thing a government might legally restrict at all is one of the three unprotected forms of speech. I.e., it is not legal to block playboy.com, or even hustlermag.com.

Premise 2 is not strictly true either, unless you consider the Internet to be one single location. Lots of mailing lists and news groups have "community standards" as to what is permissible speech and what is not (and as these are not government-imposed forms of restraint, they aren't covered by the First Amendment).

Even if Premises 1 and 2 were correct, Premise 3 does not strictly follow. If you're on the Internet, you are at least participating in a different community (even if you don't want to allow that you are actually in a different community in the locational sense). The library applies the correct local standards, that of the Internet, and so filtering is no longer appropriate.

Of course, in one sense you're right, in that people (or at least, politicians) will swallow Premise 3 as stated every time "to protect the children" (or at least appear to voters that they are). This reminds me of Eric Raymond's observation on the failure of democracy, where he observes that Pre-WWII Germany overwhelmingly elected Hitler, knowing full well what kind of regime he was planning.

This is why I'm an anarchist, too (at least, when I'm optimistic about human nature) - government is fundamentally broken.

Did the Geeks create the Net or the Net create the Geeks? There is no answer to this question. Each generation of geeks creates the foundation for those that follow. The Net has become a gathering place for many small and widely dispersed, self-selected groups because it makes possible community divorced from location. Large cities have often drawn minorities to them in the past. If you are a minority (linguistic, racial, religious, or otherwise), you stand a better chance of being able to get together with your fellows in a high concentration of people, even if they are no more common there.

If you draw the definition of geek broadly enough, then it fits any marginalized minority. True enough, it is frequently used almost that broadly. And oddly enough, I suspect there are some other odd commonalities among those of us who fit the definition of 20 years ago, bright, focused on intellectual interests to the exclusion of more common hobbies, socially awkward to some degree.
Many of us have never been called geeks by anyone who isn't actually a geek. As The Jargon File points out in A Portrait of J. Random Hacker, the typical hacker is a voracious reader on a surprisingly wide range of subjects. Reading that description, I saw more of myself in it than I saw in Katz's piece above. I knew when I read it that the person or people who wrote it understood.

Not surprisingly, geeks can harbor a xenophobic streak of their own. Geeks often see the workplace, and the world, as split into two camps-those who get it and those who don't. The latter are usually derided as clueless "suits," irritating obstacles to efficiency and technological progress. "We make the systems that the suits screw up," is how one geek described this conflict.

This particular statement reminded me instantly of The Programmers' Stone. It describes the tension between what The Stone referred to as mappers and packers. One of the things that I regret about print media is that it must, of necessity, be more self-contained. Readers are less well served by references to other sources rather than led to further clarification. In this case, I believe that the discussion in The Stone about the effect of education on children's natural tendency towards mapping may shed more light on what geeks are than any single other source I have read recently. We are the ones who have not forgotten how to map, but who in many cases felt isolated because of that. Another article that examines this same issue from the perspective of intelligence and psychology is The Outsiders. If you've had a difficulty communicating with non-geeks, both of these articles are worth reading.

Did the Geeks create the Net or the Net create the Geeks? There is no answer to this question. Each generation of geeks creates the foundation for those that follow. The Net has become a gathering place for many small and widely dispersed, self-selected groups because it makes possible community divorced from location. Large cities have often drawn minorities to them in the past. If you are a minority (linguistic, racial, religious, or otherwise), you stand a better chance of being able to get together with your fellows in a high concentration of people, even if they are no more common there.

If you draw the definition of geek broadly enough, then it fits any marginalized minority. True enough, it is frequently used almost that broadly. And oddly enough, I suspect there are some other odd commonalities among those of us who fit the definition of 20 years ago, bright, focused on intellectual interests to the exclusion of more common hobbies, socially awkward to some degree.
Many of us have never been called geeks by anyone who isn't actually a geek. As The Jargon File points out in A Portrait of J. Random Hacker, the typical hacker is a voracious reader on a surprisingly wide range of subjects. Reading that description, I saw more of myself in it than I saw in Katz's piece above. I knew when I read it that the person or people who wrote it understood.

Not surprisingly, geeks can harbor a xenophobic streak of their own. Geeks often see the workplace, and the world, as split into two camps-those who get it and those who don't. The latter are usually derided as clueless "suits," irritating obstacles to efficiency and technological progress. "We make the systems that the suits screw up," is how one geek described this conflict.

This particular statement reminded me instantly of The Programmers' Stone. It describes the tension between what The Stone referred to as mappers and packers. One of the things that I regret about print media is that it must, of necessity, be more self-contained. Readers are less well served by references to other sources rather than led to further clarification. In this case, I believe that the discussion in The Stone about the effect of education on children's natural tendency towards mapping may shed more light on what geeks are than any single other source I have read recently. We are the ones who have not forgotten how to map, but who in many cases felt isolated because of that. Another article that examines this same issue from the perspective of intelligence and psychology is The Outsiders. If you've had a difficulty communicating with non-geeks, both of these articles are worth reading.

Why would this be a good thing? Because DocBook is vastly more expressive.

• It supports diagrams and pictures, well.
• It supports interlinking between document components, and does so very well.
• It supports man page markup, so that one can combine man page documentation with tutorial material and other reference material, interlinking as needed.
• It provides a vastly richer set of structural tags for providing logical markup.

  Strewing fonts across pages, like chunky peanut butter across bread, does not lead to building decent documents.

  It is, on the other hand, reasonably useful to have tags to indicate such things as a filename , application, command line, perhaps even differentiating between what you type in, what the system responds with, and what is a variable to be entered.

• I've got a copy of the O'Reilly DocBook manual.

  If Eric Raymond found it useless, then I daresay that says more about him than it does about the book.

  I remember him doing some "bungee management" on the SGMLTools mailing list; he bounced in for a couple days, saying (essentially) that "It's really, really critical that you do these things that I think you need to do," and then bouncing on to whatever else it is that he does. He also spent a lot of time claiming that Trove was tremendously important, and we've not seen a useful release of that yet, after a goodly two years.

ESR believes passionately in Open source and I see nothing wrong with that. Why do you mock someone how has worked so hard for the Linux community! And anyway I think you'll find he runs Red Hat.

Other companies (Redhat, VA Linux) have shown that they understand how to maintain the goodwill of the open source community. Eric Raymond's article The Magic Cauldron spells out several ways to make money in open source. I'd like to know more about Corel's plans, but I think we'll just have to wait and watch. They have certainly done the right things on Wine, so I'm hopefully that we will see more good things from them in the future.

Not really how Godwin's Law works, but I understand the sentiment.

The actual definition of Godwin's Law here.

September that never ended

All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers' capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before hand, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups. See also AOL!.

...but now, the new users are unaware of Usenet's existence. The only traffic increasing is binaries (porn, mp3 & warez, mainly).

So the influx has finally stopped! The newbies will be assimilated, as they always have. So it was, and so it shall remain...

Now if we can just sort out this spam, Usenet is back in business :)

Yours optimistically,

Martin Ling

I live in Chester County; according to his site ESR currently lives in Malvern, about 15-20 minutes from where I live. There are tons of tech jobs out here. Our market is one of the top five in the US. I am getting ready to look for a new job and with all the possibilities job hunting becomes fun. Philadelphia is trying to attract more technology companies. So is Pittsburg.
Who would have thought that Penn's Woods would become a technology haven?

[...] it is just not possible to be sure not to damage something.

We seem to be making different assumptions, and I don't really know who is right: was the damage accidental, due to bugs in the software and/or the (granted) impossible task of anticipating every possible configuration, or did the software deliberately wipe out the other configurations so as to make AOL your only ISP? From what I read, I assumed the latter, though I admit I didn't follow this too closely (who cares about AOL anyway?)

Either way, though, I would refer you to a few Jargon File entries:

evil: "does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's."

evil and rude: "Both evil and rude, but with the additional connotation that the rudeness was due to malice rather than incompetence."

rude: "[sense 3] Anything that manipulates a shared resource without regard for its other users in such a way as to cause a (non-fatal) problem."

Basic manners among applications that run together on a system dictate that it is incredibly rude for one piece of software to modify configuration files that belong to another piece of software. You just don't do that. AOL did. Aside from the sheer aesthetics, one reason why this is so bad is precisely because it is a recognized fact that you can't anticipate all possible cases (e.g., those that involve programs that are written after yours), and so doing this is practically guaranteed to cause trouble for someone, somewhere. Hence, even if they didn't do it maliciously, it is still almost inexcusably bad.

It was clearly rude, and intentionally blowing away the other configurations would definitely strike me as evil, though of course I don't know whether or not it was actually intentional.

I gather that the dialog asked "Do you want to make AOL your default ISP?" To me, "default" does not mean the same thing as "only", so, at most, an affirmative reply would authorize them to tell the system to make their configuration the default, while leaving the others intact. That doesn't seem like something that should be very hard, so if that's all they tried to do, and the side effect was "just" a bug, I do think it's one for which they should be accountable. If they were trying to modify the other configurations non-maliciously, e.g., for some sort of integration purposes, and accidentally broke them, then I still think they should be accountable: sure, it's not reasonable to expect anyone to do something that complicated successfully, but any idiot could have told them that, and they should have known better than to try.


David Gould

[...] it is just not possible to be sure not to damage something.

We seem to be making different assumptions, and I don't really know who is right: was the damage accidental, due to bugs in the software and/or the (granted) impossible task of anticipating every possible configuration, or did the software deliberately wipe out the other configurations so as to make AOL your only ISP? From what I read, I assumed the latter, though I admit I didn't follow this too closely (who cares about AOL anyway?)

Either way, though, I would refer you to a few Jargon File entries:

evil: "does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's."

evil and rude: "Both evil and rude, but with the additional connotation that the rudeness was due to malice rather than incompetence."

rude: "[sense 3] Anything that manipulates a shared resource without regard for its other users in such a way as to cause a (non-fatal) problem."

Basic manners among applications that run together on a system dictate that it is incredibly rude for one piece of software to modify configuration files that belong to another piece of software. You just don't do that. AOL did. Aside from the sheer aesthetics, one reason why this is so bad is precisely because it is a recognized fact that you can't anticipate all possible cases (e.g., those that involve programs that are written after yours), and so doing this is practically guaranteed to cause trouble for someone, somewhere. Hence, even if they didn't do it maliciously, it is still almost inexcusably bad.

It was clearly rude, and intentionally blowing away the other configurations would definitely strike me as evil, though of course I don't know whether or not it was actually intentional.

I gather that the dialog asked "Do you want to make AOL your default ISP?" To me, "default" does not mean the same thing as "only", so, at most, an affirmative reply would authorize them to tell the system to make their configuration the default, while leaving the others intact. That doesn't seem like something that should be very hard, so if that's all they tried to do, and the side effect was "just" a bug, I do think it's one for which they should be accountable. If they were trying to modify the other configurations non-maliciously, e.g., for some sort of integration purposes, and accidentally broke them, then I still think they should be accountable: sure, it's not reasonable to expect anyone to do something that complicated successfully, but any idiot could have told them that, and they should have known better than to try.


David Gould

[...] it is just not possible to be sure not to damage something.

We seem to be making different assumptions, and I don't really know who is right: was the damage accidental, due to bugs in the software and/or the (granted) impossible task of anticipating every possible configuration, or did the software deliberately wipe out the other configurations so as to make AOL your only ISP? From what I read, I assumed the latter, though I admit I didn't follow this too closely (who cares about AOL anyway?)

Either way, though, I would refer you to a few Jargon File entries:

evil: "does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's."

evil and rude: "Both evil and rude, but with the additional connotation that the rudeness was due to malice rather than incompetence."

rude: "[sense 3] Anything that manipulates a shared resource without regard for its other users in such a way as to cause a (non-fatal) problem."

Basic manners among applications that run together on a system dictate that it is incredibly rude for one piece of software to modify configuration files that belong to another piece of software. You just don't do that. AOL did. Aside from the sheer aesthetics, one reason why this is so bad is precisely because it is a recognized fact that you can't anticipate all possible cases (e.g., those that involve programs that are written after yours), and so doing this is practically guaranteed to cause trouble for someone, somewhere. Hence, even if they didn't do it maliciously, it is still almost inexcusably bad.

It was clearly rude, and intentionally blowing away the other configurations would definitely strike me as evil, though of course I don't know whether or not it was actually intentional.

I gather that the dialog asked "Do you want to make AOL your default ISP?" To me, "default" does not mean the same thing as "only", so, at most, an affirmative reply would authorize them to tell the system to make their configuration the default, while leaving the others intact. That doesn't seem like something that should be very hard, so if that's all they tried to do, and the side effect was "just" a bug, I do think it's one for which they should be accountable. If they were trying to modify the other configurations non-maliciously, e.g., for some sort of integration purposes, and accidentally broke them, then I still think they should be accountable: sure, it's not reasonable to expect anyone to do something that complicated successfully, but any idiot could have told them that, and they should have known better than to try.


David Gould

[...] it is just not possible to be sure not to damage something.

We seem to be making different assumptions, and I don't really know who is right: was the damage accidental, due to bugs in the software and/or the (granted) impossible task of anticipating every possible configuration, or did the software deliberately wipe out the other configurations so as to make AOL your only ISP? From what I read, I assumed the latter, though I admit I didn't follow this too closely (who cares about AOL anyway?)

Either way, though, I would refer you to a few Jargon File entries:

evil: "does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's."

evil and rude: "Both evil and rude, but with the additional connotation that the rudeness was due to malice rather than incompetence."

rude: "[sense 3] Anything that manipulates a shared resource without regard for its other users in such a way as to cause a (non-fatal) problem."

Basic manners among applications that run together on a system dictate that it is incredibly rude for one piece of software to modify configuration files that belong to another piece of software. You just don't do that. AOL did. Aside from the sheer aesthetics, one reason why this is so bad is precisely because it is a recognized fact that you can't anticipate all possible cases (e.g., those that involve programs that are written after yours), and so doing this is practically guaranteed to cause trouble for someone, somewhere. Hence, even if they didn't do it maliciously, it is still almost inexcusably bad.

It was clearly rude, and intentionally blowing away the other configurations would definitely strike me as evil, though of course I don't know whether or not it was actually intentional.

I gather that the dialog asked "Do you want to make AOL your default ISP?" To me, "default" does not mean the same thing as "only", so, at most, an affirmative reply would authorize them to tell the system to make their configuration the default, while leaving the others intact. That doesn't seem like something that should be very hard, so if that's all they tried to do, and the side effect was "just" a bug, I do think it's one for which they should be accountable. If they were trying to modify the other configurations non-maliciously, e.g., for some sort of integration purposes, and accidentally broke them, then I still think they should be accountable: sure, it's not reasonable to expect anyone to do something that complicated successfully, but any idiot could have told them that, and they should have known better than to try.


David Gould

• Obfuscated FoxPro
• Obfuscated Java Programming Contest
• The 1st Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest
• Obfuscated PostScript Contest

• Obfuscated FoxPro
• Obfuscated Java Programming Contest
• The 1st Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest
• Obfuscated PostScript Contest

Oh yeah, so where's the obfuscated Intercal code contest?

Oh, maybe we should drop that...

Yeah, this proposal is AI complete. As a matter of fact, it is more or less exactly a Turing test.

But then, the Turing test can be passed with some success on unsuspecting examinators, for some time at least. When the Doctor program was written (see for example M-x doctor under Emacs), some people were fooled for some time. IRC would be a likely place to fool people. Usenet - or Slashdot - even more so, because the conversation delay makes it even easier to stick a lot of coined phrases without being spotted out. (How many karma points could a Slashdot robot collect? That's an interesting question.)

Douglas Hofstadter, in ``Metamagical Themas'' has an interesting example of a Turing test transcript, in which he was almost fooled - not quite the way you'd want it, but the transcript is really fun reading.

--
Assertion "signature!=NULL" in ai/output/slashdot.c at line 1729 failed (core dumped).

For years, especially while Y2K fears were building, I advocated the One True Date Format: YYYY-MM-DD (punctuation is optional and either dots or dashes may be substituted). It sorts correctly. It is locale-independent. It is Y3K-compliant. You need not use it for human interaction, but it should be used to store the dates and transmit them in internal protocols whenever they must be in a printable form. Binary equivalents are acceptable, but may not easily extend to Y10K compliance (see RFC 2550: Y10K and Beyond).

When you use this format, placing the most significant digits first (2000-02-02, see Jargon File 4.2.0: big-endian), it is painfully obvious that there is going to be a 2 in the high-order digit for the rest of our expected lifespan.

In the hacker-howto, ESR recommends starting with Python. C/C++ are used widely, but they're not a good idea for raw beginners. Avoid Basic and Visual Basic.

If Open Source is to win, REALLY win, it must defeat not the armies of the Sauron (the MPA) or the Orcs and Trolls of Sauruman (the RIAA) but the One Ring (Power Over Others). Yes, that means -fighting- those armies, but as in Tolkein's depiction, those battles can be won or lost by either side, and it doesn't matter. It really doesn't. All that matters is whether The Ring is destroyed or handed over.

Ordinarily I don't like facile literary analogies when trying to analyze complex issues involving lots of parties. There is too much of a tendency to assign to each of these parties one of the roles from the book. You avoided that error while bring the point straight home. The true heroes of Lord of the Rings were Frodo, of course, and Sam. Frodo is obvious, a reluctant hero, an ordinary person who takes on a tremendous burden because the task must be done...

Sam is less obvious, but I suspect that Tolkien wanted to emphasize the heroic aspects of his personality as highly as anyone else in the story. Sam wanted happiness, comfort and friendship. The few times he thought about uses for The One Ring, he sould have turned his corner of the Shire into a garden and a breadbasket. The only control he ever wanted was what he needed to make himself and his own comfortable. The world would have been a better place with Sam in charge simply because he would have done nothing to anyone. The desire for power over anyone else had no hold on him.

Now, what does this have to do with open source? Well, why would anyone spend countless hours of his own time working on software for his own use and for the possible accolades of his peers when he could pay much less than that time is worth and get a shrink-wrapped package that did the job? Control over his own life, his own data, his own computer. We want to make tools to make our own lives easier or more fulfilling. As Eric Raymond said in The Cathedral and the Bazaar:

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.

And we not only do we not object when other people benefit from it, we have realized that the collaboration that the open source model makes possible can provide us with useful enhancements in return. The guarantee of control over the software on our systems, the source code and the right to modify it, and distribute those modifications is control over our own lives.

Perhaps you missed Eric's article on Linux Today about the DVD CCA's lawsuit. I think Eric covers the situation quite well in that article, and I haven't seen anything that would require an update to that article.

Perhaps you've missed out on Eric's speaking engagements over the last month, but I know that he's been on the road, unpaid, for well over 50% of the time in the last several months, including the Eighth Annual Python Conference last week, and Linux World this coming week. What I want to know is this: where have you been? Where have your letters to the editor been published? Where are your articles on what's wrong posted?

To paraphrase John F. Kennedy, "Ask not what the Linux Community can do for you, ask what you can do for the Linux Community". That means doing more than writing derisive posts on Slashdot that take cheap shots at people you don't like. Or, as in the words of my (and I'm sure everyone else's) mother: "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all".

Considering that the hero of the open source movement Eric Raymond has an essay on his Web site exemplifying the threatened white male mentality, I'm certainly not surprised to see it in evidence on slashdot.

• Richard Stallman who brought us Emacs (among other things), and the GNU Public License
• Eric Raymond, author of Fetchmail and The Cathedral and the Bazaar
• Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and all of the big names of Perl who can write code, documentation, and insightful commentary.
• CmdrTaco, et al at Slashdot who have built both the code and much of the content required to make this one of the liveliest places on the net
• Linus himself. Although he doesn't write much prose, he summarizes things very well. The Linux motto, "Do it yourself."

Coaxial raises up off the couch and prepares to lay the smacketh down on someone who greatly deserves it.

I find it almost impossible to read Slashdot when it comes to certain words. It seems as if the words are being used in multiple ways and it makes the discussion very confusing.

So? English is like that. Secondly, that's the terminology. Learn it. This comment makes me remember my first grade teacher, and her "conference" with my mother.

Teacher: I wish Jonathan wouldn't use certain words.
Mom: He's swearing?!?
Teacher: Oh no! He uses certain..."big words"; and I'm afraid that the other children don't know what he's talking about.
Mom:There isn't a chance in hell I'm going to tell my son not to use his vocabulary. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard; and you call yourself an "educator"?

(This "educator" also liked to get on me for reading ahead, counting beyond 10, and bringing books from home. A fine example of the public school system. (conform obey never question)

We seem to do fine with "open source" and "gpl" and even know the difference between Linux and Linus, but some words just don't make sense anymore.

Who's "we"? Since you're DEFINATLY not including me in that statment; I'm going to assume "we" means "you".

Of course "open source" != "GPL". One is a concept, the other is a legal document.

Only an idiot confuses "Linux" and "Linus". One is a operating system, the other is a person.


nanotechnology: Either the ability to work with a material at an extremly small level or a self replicating machine.

I have NEVER seen "nanotechnology" ::= "self-replicating machine". They're two entirely different concepts. I can build a self-replicating machine today.

hacker: Either a war3z d00d or script kiddie or a person capable of coming up with an elegant solution involving technology.

What's your point? A "pig" is either a swine or cop. A flame is either a small piece of fire or an Internet message such as this. I suggest you read the Jargon File.

government, law, tax, etc.: Either a function of the United States that only applies to the United States, despite the fact that my log indicates that the U.S. is a minority in Slashdot or a vague concept that may or may not apply to any country.

Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! What's this about "your log"? You're not one of the Intergalactic Blockstackers. How the hell do have any logs about who accesses slashdot? That makes no sense.

Secondly the US is still the dominate county on the Internet. Sure some other countries are coming up, but they haven't matched us yet. It's definatly the dominate country on /., because if it wasn't you wouldn't be having this problem. When I read a site in Europe, I would expect it to be Eurocentric. This is based out of Michigan, so It's going to be Americancentric.

(To avoid any more confusion, "American" means "pertaining to the United States of America". Why? Because we claimed the word first. I'd like to see someone try stop us from using it.

Thrirdly, how is "government", "tax" or "law" vauge concepts? They've existed since the beginning of civilization. And what's that crack about "may or may not apply to any contry"?

-------------
And now for the moderators:

How the hell is this "informative"? There is ZERO information in that post!

From one of the INTERCAL enthusiasts' webpages:

• Abandon All Sanity, Ye Who Enter Here

  So, you think you've seen it all, eh?

  OK. You've coded in C. You've hacked in LISP. Fortran and BASIC hold no terrors for you. You write Emacs modes for fun. You eat assemblers for breakfast. You're fluent in half a dozen languages nobody but a handful of übergeeks have ever heard of. You grok TECO. Possibly you even know COBOL.

  Maybe you're ready for the ultimate challenge...INTERCAL.

  INTERCAL. The language designed to be Turing-complete but as fundamentally unlike any existing language as possible. Expressions that look like line noise. Control constracts that will make you gasp, make you laugh, and possibly make you hurl. Data structures? We don't need no steenking data structures!

  INTERCAL. Designed very early one May morning in 1972 by by two hackers who are still trying to live it down. Initially implemented on an IBM 360 running batch SPITBOL. Described by a manual that circulated for years after the short life of the first implementation, reducing strong men to tears (of laughter). Revived in 1990 by the C-INTERCAL compiler, and now the center of an international community of technomasochists.

This is an excerpt of a program that does ROT-13, written in INTERCAL. Being a non-INTERCAL developer, I chose what seemed to be a representative sample of the code.

• (10) PLEASE DON'T GIVE UP
  (1) DO .2 <- '?.1$#64'~'#0$#65535'
  DO .2 <- '&"'.1~.2'~'"?'?.2~.2'$#32768"~"#0$#65535"'"$".2~. 2"'~#1
  DO .3 <- '?#91$.1'~'#0$#65535'
  DO .3 <- '&"'#91~.3'~'"?'?.3~.3'$#32768"~"#0$#65535"'"$".3~ .3"'~#1
  DO (11) NEXT
  DO (2) NEXT
  DO (12) NEXT
  (11) DO (13) NEXT
  PLEASE FORGET #1
  DO (12) NEXT
  (13) DO (14) NEXT
  PLEASE FORGET #2
  DO (12) NEXT
  (14) DO STASH .1
  DO .1 <- .3
  DO (1000) NEXT
  DO .1 <- .3
  DO .2 <- #1
  

And so on.

Yeah, I can see how writing Space Invaders or Quake bots or a MUD would be MUCH better in this language.

i am shocked by the incredible ignorance displayed in this article, by the way it covers such a tiny division of the programming languages in wide use, and such bad languages at that. This person seems to think that everyone in the world uses obscure, cumbersome languages like C, C++, objective C, java, perl, lisp, PHP, Bash, FORTRAN, Cobol, Forth, smalltalk or some form of assembly. What an isolated world this person must live in! He seems to have some extreme bias toward use of functional programming languages.

Specically i am very annoyed by the total lack of any discussion of INTERCAL, umlambda, or orthogonal--what i feel to be the most important languages out there, especially for games. None of these were even mentioned! Why would you write an first person shooter in C++ instead of INTERCAL? Why, as far as i'm aware there isn't even opengl available for c-based languages!

If you don't like these three above for some silly reason, at LEAST use Forth. any language where you can't redefine the value of four is for wimps. Or use Visual Basic-- its usefulness, portability, flexibility and sheer power are unparalleled. (i'm sorry, that last bit was a little over the top, wasn't it?)

-mcc
hmm. that reminds me, i need to learn objective c..
2B OR NOT 2B == FF

According to the Hacker lexicon
Term coined in March 1998 following the Mozilla release to describe software distributed in source under licenses guaranteeing anybody rights to freely use, modify, and redistribute, the code.
As for the rest - the directx guy is a pretty lame. Strikes me as someone who's read too many PC magazines.
.oO0Oo.

take the Cathedral and the Bazaar, do a code fork and replace all the text with the Circus Midget and the Fossilized Dinosaur Turd.

2600 is calling for demonstrations against the MPAA, and I for one agree. We need to educate ordinary people on the fact that their right to free speech is in serious jeopardy thanks to the greed and stupidity of an organization (the MPAA) that fell for the DVD-security snake oil and can't admit that it's been had.

• If you're not a member of EFF or the ACLU, join now.
• If you are a member, or want to be more active, contact your local 2600 cell or Linux User's Group and help to organize a demonstration.
• If you have a DVD player, and you're too sick to even look at it, consider donating it to a local Geeks with Guns outing, in exchange for plenty of photos. Post them on a website, and mail them to DVD CAA and the members of the MPAA (listed on the 2600 announcement of the injunction).
• Consider buying a DeCSS source shirt; or if you're really radical, consider becoming a DOE (one of the 500+ anonyous people mentioned in the first injunction hearing).
• Boycott movies and videos until the MPAA drops the lawsuit!
• Most importantly: SPREAD THE WORD to other geeks and non-geeks. This is too important for us to keep silent!

This and the Etoy lawsuit are probably the most significant fights to hit our commmunity since the Clipper Chip fiasco. The lines are drawn, ladies and gentlemen; we need to fight with everything we've got to prevent Internet from becoming nothing but a huge, suburban shopping mall. Get involved in an historical fight and have something that you'll be proud to tell your kids and grandkids about, twenty years from now.

Now a days you have to buy a battery what every two years, or when ever you get a new computer. So you hyave to plug it in every once in a while. I would much rather have to plug it in a still be able to use it then have to worry about buying 365 batteries for each year, at the price that they are saying:

Consumers could easily check the methanol level to find out when to replace the fuel cell, which will likely cost as much as or less than traditional rechargeables, Ooms said.

That will be much more then I'm willing to spend per year just so that I can have 20 hours of battery life. Also that's assumeing that you only use your laptop 20 hours a day, not good enough for your run-of-the-mill hacker

Well that all I have to rant about

Now a days you have to uy a battery what every two years, or when ever you get a new computer. So you hyave to plug it in every once in a while. I would much rather have to plug it in a still be able to use it then have to worry about buying 365 batteries for each year, at the price that they are saying:

Consumers could easily check the methanol level to find out when to replace the fuel cell, which will likely cost as much as or less than traditional rechargeables, Ooms said.

That will be much more then I'm willing to spend per year just so that I can have 20 hours of battery life. Also that's assumeing that you only use your laptop 20 hours a day, not good enough for your run-of-the-mill hacker

Well that all I have to rant about

MS did not neccessarily beat Netscape by giving away their browser. They beat them by unfairly using their monopoly on the desktop market against them by integrating IE into Windows and preventing the users from uninstalling it. They also threatened any OEM that preloaded NS on their machines. Microsoft beat Netscape by misusing their monopoly to smother them. Giving away the IE browser only contributed to that.

I use both Borland and g++. How could you possibly compare these two? Borland is for Windows. G++ is for Linux. Two completely different platforms; they aren't in competition. Now, sometimes commercial software is better. I'll probably pick up a copy of Code Fusion sometime--because there really isn't an Open alternative that's better.

The vital difference between commercial and open source software is that the latter is dedicated to code quality, while the former is dedicated to their bottom line. Commercial venders knowingly ship software with hundreds of bugs--and they usually never intend to fix them. If you report a bug to an open Source project, it will eventually be fixed.

The point I am finally meandering to is that open source will not be the death of commercial software. Not likely. But for certain types of programs, you just can't trust closed source. Esr puts it better than I.

The link you provided doesn't respond well. I think they've been slashdotted. So I did a search at Google for Hamsterdeath and found this. Enjoy!

Mike-
A potential middle finger emoticon:

..|.. or how about oo!oo (for emphasis, of course *grin*)

Or maybe the "binary four" notation referenced in The Jargon File , which is 00100

Of course, one could always just type "fsck you" and be done with it, but where's the fun in that? *laugh*

Rafe

V^^^^V

You haven't studied your INTERCAL manual... ABSTAIN FROM is a keyword in that wonderful language.

No, I don't say that you should try to write anything useful in intercal, but "he who knows the most programming languages when he dies wins" :-)

Go read The Magic Cauldron, dammit! He never asks you to take his words for it, he explains exactly how it is, and can, be done!

I see, you just refer people to other people's arguments. No thoughts for yourself.

Of course we think for ourselves. That fact is, though, that we agree completely with esr, and he says it far better than we will ever be able to.

Sturgeon's Law prov.

"Ninety percent of everything is crap". Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." Oddly, when Sturgeon's Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to `crap'. Compare Hanlon's Razor, Ninety-Ninety Rule. Though this maxim originated in SF fandom, most hackers recognize it and are all too aware of its truth.

Sturgeon's Law prov.

"Ninety percent of everything is crap". Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." Oddly, when Sturgeon's Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to `crap'. Compare Hanlon's Razor, Ninety-Ninety Rule. Though this maxim originated in SF fandom, most hackers recognize it and are all too aware of its truth.

Okay, I can't answer your question. But, I think it is worthwhile as an exercise to go through the funding models that Eric Raymond presents in two chapters of The Magic Cauldron: Use-Value Funding Models and Indirect Sale-Value Models. Asking yourself how each of these models could apply to you, or why it couldn't, might help clarify the question.

It may be that you don't have a product to sell directly to customers (I'm not familiar with the project). What you might have to do is pitch the idea to somebody for whom the project would have value, still as an open source project.

Okay, I can't answer your question. But, I think it is worthwhile as an exercise to go through the funding models that Eric Raymond presents in two chapters of The Magic Cauldron: Use-Value Funding Models and Indirect Sale-Value Models. Asking yourself how each of these models could apply to you, or why it couldn't, might help clarify the question.

It may be that you don't have a product to sell directly to customers (I'm not familiar with the project). What you might have to do is pitch the idea to somebody for whom the project would have value, still as an open source project.

Okay, I can't answer your question. But, I think it is worthwhile as an exercise to go through the funding models that Eric Raymond presents in two chapters of The Magic Cauldron: Use-Value Funding Models and Indirect Sale-Value Models. Asking yourself how each of these models could apply to you, or why it couldn't, might help clarify the question.

It may be that you don't have a product to sell directly to customers (I'm not familiar with the project). What you might have to do is pitch the idea to somebody for whom the project would have value, still as an open source project.

Okay, I can't answer your question. But, I think it is worthwhile as an exercise to go through the funding models that Eric Raymond presents in two chapters of The Magic Cauldron: Use-Value Funding Models and Indirect Sale-Value Models. Asking yourself how each of these models could apply to you, or why it couldn't, might help clarify the question.

It may be that you don't have a product to sell directly to customers (I'm not familiar with the project). What you might have to do is pitch the idea to somebody for whom the project would have value, still as an open source project.

1. The corporation can't release to anyone external. They can't hire an outside contractor to work on it for them. That would be restricting the third party's right to redistribute the source. That restriction may apply even to providing it to their own employees. It would not apply to a team voluntarily restricting their own rights to redistribute their enhancements, I think. Ask a lawyer.
2. Because of the first issue, they would have to merge in any changes happening on the public fork entirely through their own effort or forego the benefits of any additional development there. As time went on the value of their version to them would fall. And the value of their changes to the rest of the world would as well.

1. The corporation can't release to anyone external. They can't hire an outside contractor to work on it for them. That would be restricting the third party's right to redistribute the source. That restriction may apply even to providing it to their own employees. It would not apply to a team voluntarily restricting their own rights to redistribute their enhancements, I think. Ask a lawyer.
2. Because of the first issue, they would have to merge in any changes happening on the public fork entirely through their own effort or forego the benefits of any additional development there. As time went on the value of their version to them would fall. And the value of their changes to the rest of the world would as well.

From The Hacker Jargon File:

"...almost anything ending in `x' may form plurals in `-xen'... But note that `Unixen' and `Twenexen' are never used; it has been suggested that this is because `-ix' and `-ex' are Latin singular endings that attract a Latinate plural."

sneakernet /snee'ker-net/ n.

Term used (generally with ironic intent) for transfer of electronic information by physically carrying tape, disks, or some other media from one machine to another. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with magtape, or a 747 filled with CD-ROMs." Also called `Tennis-Net', `Armpit-Net', `Floppy-Net' or `Shoenet'; in the 1990s, `Nike network' after a well-known sneaker brand.

(from the jargon file)
--

The creation of new algorithms is difficult. It's one of the things that cannot be done easily by the open source community, which has brought us a lot of very high-quality products in other areas, because you need a very specialized knowledge (signal processing, lossless compression etc.) that only few people have. There was a very well-written comment by Eric Scheirer on this on Slashdot months (a year?) ago, but I couldn't find it.

This webnoise article, linked on slashdot in may is probably what's being referred to here. The comment in question is toward the end of the article.

Now, generally people say this sort of thing for two reasons. Most commonly, they actually believe that no one else on the planet is as smart/knowlegeable/experienced as they are, and couldn't possibly produce rocket science of the requisite level. This is despressingly common, and one of the psychological hurdles (like fear of being judged on work-in-progress as if it's the best one could do in a polished effort) that holds people back from adopting open development practices. This is another strain of what RMS called the Cathedral style of development. It's what was said about writing compilers, operating system kernels and desktop applications, and I don't buy it here either.

The other reason is when the authors are trying to create a aura of "professionalization" around their work, usually so they can remain well placed in their employer's finances. The arguments are similar: "We're trained professionals. Do not try this at home," but the motivation usually has more to do with greed (or at least comfort) than fear.

Neither of these arguments are in line with the values of Open Source, and they amount to arrogant selfishness from that point of view. I'm not arguing that codec design doesn't require specialized knowledge, clever research, etc. Just that it's a fallacy that no one but Eric Schrier &c. can do it.

He did make some other points that a little harder to refute. For example, that the unfair 'fair licensing' patent situation is an historic artefact of the designing bodies being large corporations I can't dispute. He also makes the argument that allowing patented technology into the mpeg standard helps ensure that major corporate players use the standard, that the standard includes the best technology, and that the best technology be patented, rather than buried in an undisclosed proprietary standard. This appears to be well-reasoned, and is certainly consistent with his other claims.

I differ about this being the best course, mostly based on what we've learned about network effects and life in an exponentially-growing market. And vis á vis the dvd stuff, it appears that patents are more restrictive than trade secrets in an open source context.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Don Martin create the veeblefetzer name/character? That's the first thing that pops into my mind when I think of Don Martin.

Martin was never one my favorites, though he did have funny stuff. I really liked Spy vs. Spy, Aragones' "Marginal Art", and Mort Drucker's great caricatures in the movie parodies. And of course Al Jaffee's fold-ins ("The Almighty Dollar??" say Bart and Milhouse...)

I knew Mad was going downhill when Dave Berg stopped doing "The Lighter Side of..." with a single theme for the entire segment and instead had a different theme for each piece.

You obviously do not grok Open Source. Go read The Cathedral and the Bazaar before you criticize.