Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot is Giving Away $100,000
So to kick off the new year, Andover.Net decided that we ought to give away a lot of money. We're excited to announce the 2000 Slashdot Beanie Awards. No, we're not giving away 2000 beanies, but we are giving away prizes ranging from $30k for Most Improved Open Source Project to $10k awards for things like Unsung Hero and Best Community Advocate. You can read the
awards index, where you can also discuss the categories as well as place your nominations. Or you can read on to see a list of awards and a description of the nomination and voting process.
Nomination
Let's be honest here. If Hemos and I sat down in a room and tried to pick the nominees for each catagory ourselves, either we would have the five members of Monty Python nominated for every category or only one of us would emerge from the room alive. And then whoever lived would get flamemail because we forgot to include Carol Cleveland (who really deserved to be nominated for Best Unix Eyecandy).
We didn't want to deal with that. So instead we've opened up the nominations. Each registered Slashdot user is allowed to nominate one person or project in each category. Each category will have a Slashdot discussion attached to it where you can chit chat about the nominees. And everyone can change their vote as many times as they want (until the nominations close in 2 weeks).
The nominations are blind... you can't see who is winning until...
Voting Voting will function the same way. You can talk amongst yourselves, and each registered user is allowed one vote which can be changed all you want until we close the contest. The winners will be announced at the next LinuxWorld in New York. The Categories The Grand Prize ($30,000)- Most Improved Open Source Project
- Most Improved Kernel Module
- Unsung Hero
- Best Newbie Helper
- Most Deserving Open Source Charity
- Best Open Source Advocate
- Best Unix Desktop Eyecandy
- Best Unix Desktop Earcandy
- Best Desktop Theme
- Best Open Source-Related Book
- Best Perl Module
- Best Apache Module
- Best Open Source Text Editor
- Best Deserving of a $2,000 Award
- Best Designed Interface in a Graphical Application
- Best Designed Interface in a Non-Graphical Application
- Best Dressed
- Favorite Slashdot Comment Poster
- Favorite Slashdot Author
- Best Slashdot Story of 1999
- Big Dumb Patent Bully
- Big Dumb Domain Bully
- Clue Stick Award for FUD in Journalism
- The Hemos Award (only Hemos is eligible)
It's not clear whether you intend this to be a linux-only deal, or whether any free software related people can be nominated. For instance, is 'best kernel module' supposed to be 'best linux kernel module' or what?
Seems to me that a large portion of the Open Source stuff out there is just rewriting things that've already been invented. The people who are inventing new things don't get the attention they deserve.
Why not give an award for new ideas? If Open Source wants to survive, it needs to innov... inn... innova... invent new things. (Sorry, couldn't bring myself to say it... the term has been tarnished forever...)
Could you give out one of those battery powered motor-beanies
Blender And Linux Fan
maybe I just got to work too early, but the first thing that popped to mind when I read that title was that slashdot was giving away $100k worth of Beanie Babies.
:)
I'm glad to see I was wrong.
I've nominated Mike Heins as a unsung hero in open source software. His package, Minivend (www.minivend.com), is important to e-commerce behind the scenes and rivals the most expensive propietary systems. He works very hard on this software and releases it all under the GPL.
Shouldn't we all know better than to use 10k or 30k when we really mean 10000 or 30000? C'mon, when is all this k nonsense going to stop?
Often there are competitions in usa and trade shows that in fine print say USA residents only for legal reasons etc...
DOes this mean, yet again a USA only centric self gratification big dick competition?
Another point is that, are all awards 100% tax free in cash (or gold) under the table? In some nice countries awards or lotteries are tax free, but i know in usa that if you win some $$$ you gota pay tax which kinda ( really ) sucks. So whats the deal?
Prices are tax free and in cash in an envelope? or money orders that are not traced by any govt? How about $2000 worth of Amazon vouchers, which are tax free.
It also drives the many passionate fans of Open Source to keep promoting the virtues of Open Source.
Without the Evil Empire, the whole Open Source movement would be without a focal point and without direction!
All hail Microsoft for creating the environment where a whole new culture could develop and thrive!!
If US giveaway restrictions bug you so much, why aren't you sponsoring a giant cash giveaway of your own?
Remember: that's the whole point of open-source. If something bugs you, take it and make it better. So, what are you personally doing to improve the situation?
NOTHING. You're just adding to the noise. Go crawl back in your cave, or at least drink some more coffee before trying to say anything else. You're giving the rest of us non-US people a bad name (Hi! Canadian here!)
how bout contributing $100K to freshmeat so they can mirror all the opensource projects on their site ? That way, if a website shuts down we dont loose that project forever...and its a helluva lot better than giving it away for nothing.
"Person most deserving $2000" What kind of award is that? Better to call it best ballot stuffer. Unsung hero? If no one knows about someone's work, who is going to know to vote for them?
I always hated school sponsored popularity contests, where all the jocks and cheerleaders get to give themselves awards and see who had the most friends. Is this really all that different? Doing stuff like this creates resent among all those who feel left out. Especially since most open source work is a group effort, to single one person out is a slap in the face to all those whose work is ignored.
I suppose none of this matters, since we already know who will get all these awards, Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, Larry Wall, Apache, XFree86, etc.
Not only is this whole idea going to single out individuals in what is supposedly a group effort, but it also proves that Andover.net has waaaaaaay too much money if they're just giving it away.
If people are going to be doing "open source" just to win awards now, just declare Microsoft the winner already -- because you're buying into their way of doing things.
Being some of the only Linux groups that get favorable postings on Slashdot, I'm sure members of the three groups in the subject will be pleased. And I'm sure the rest of us can go pound sand.
I, for one, will not be voting for this very reason. Slashdot occasionally presents an even handed view of the Linux landscape, but the congretation here is so biased I find it odd that Andover.net would authorize something like this contest to take place. It's like opening up a vote on whether gun control is a good idea knowing that only NRA members have received word of the contest. This contest is guaranteed to be skewed.
Don't even get me started on all the perl hackers out there who -- as we speak -- are customizing their scripts to help skew the results.
If Andover was serious about this contest, it would set up another web site (rumor has it that it's an Internet company, after all), leave the Slashdot moniker off of it, then let ALL Linux news sites carry word of its existence and let the community in general vote. Without that, I can't take this contest seriously.
Flame away...
Clearly this is a plot by Andover.net to start the flamewar of a lifetime and leave the open source community a smoldering plain of ashes. Microsoft must be behind this.
--
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
We are very aware there are some very good coders out there...
What we need to do with awards like this is support the folks who write howtos and help pages and even books about Linux and open source.
Some of us, ( I am thinking of me ) used to be great C and ASM coders back about 15 years ago and now ( at least me ) is far to tired to keep up with you young smart dudes. However i want to and am going to write a few articles and perhaps a newbie book about Linux.
I recognize your skills.. i used to have them but they are gone. But I am sure I can write...
In your awards consider those folks too.
Bitcoin pyramid: Join here: http://www.bitcoinpyramid.com/r/1427 it's FREE!
Seriously, I agree with the other posts. What happened to Slashdot the news organization? I'm getting sick of Slashdot the open source advocate.
Not that I'm against open source, but you guys have gone way off course. Suck.com's parody was right on target when one of the headlines read "Linux possibly defamed somewhere"
"News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." Not anymore.
- overflow
Every time someone uses K to mean 1000, someone pops up and says that we shouldn't do that because K means 1024. I have news for you, the metric system is older than your PC. 10K runs have been 10000 meters and will be 10000 meters for a long time. K means kilo in most circumstances in the metric sense and predates kilo (tied to byte) by quite a bit. Quit demanding that K mean 1024 when it is tied to anything other than data size.
I nominate Hemos for The Hemos Award.
What's the point of retroactively awarding people? Why not use the money as an incentive to coders, like a contest?
Especially since there are glaring problems in the categories. The first issue is the ones where I can already pick the final winner.
Big Dumb Patent Bully == Amazon
Big Dumb Domain Bully == etoys
Clue Stick Award for FUD in Journalism = MSNBC
Is there any point to these, when all they'll do is attract flamebait?
Then there's the ones where 90% of the voters will go "Huh??". Like:
Best Perl Module
Most Improved Kernel Module
Best Newbie Helper
Does the standard Slashdot reader have any clue on these? Personally, I can't even suggest a single nomination off the top of my head.
So wouldn't this money be better served by using it for a CONTEST? That $30,000 for "Most Improved Open Source Project" is one hell of an incentive for the lone coder to get off their ass and start developing. Instead we'll probably just award some crappy half assed Microsoft UI imitator that has a lot of name recognition. *cough* KDE *cough* Go Slashdot!
Interesting this was moderated as Funny, since I did laugh at you when I read it.
Stop whining and do something about it, you stinking foreigner. :)
My favorite gnu utility has to be screen.
For those of you that don't know what screen does, its basically a window manager for your shell sessions. screen 3.09.05 lets you connect more than one session to a screen. I can run my text windows at home, and then connect to them from work seamlessly. It's a cool toy, and probably the most useful gnu thing i've installed lately.
:wq
contact (816) 246 6160.. and let the colonel know.
I didn't nominate too many categories, but the following rationale applies three of those I did:
...
Most Improved OS Project: Livid (the Linux DVD Project) - Not only has playing DVDs under Linux gone from a pipe-dream to reality (if still a little rough around the edges) in a very short time, but with the help of DeCSS/css-auth it could be ready for prime time in the very near future. Additonally, the project is very important for the consumer/desktop usability of Linux, and could use the $10k cash to fend off additional legal thuggary from the DVD Forum.
Best UNIX desktop earcandy: xmms - the audio app I use more often than my television or stereo. (Though Myth2 Soul Blighter was a temptation)
Clue Stick Award for FUD in Journalism: Declan McCullagh of Wired -- not only did this person's poor reporting precipitate serious legal troubles for developers of css-auth (the Linux DVD css component), but he remained unapologetic throughout and, even worse, followed up with even more damaging FUD after having been informed of the errors in his reporting. His behavior on the livid development mailing list was unprofessional and reprehensibe, where he even went so far as to flame Livid developers without provocation. I only wish the archives were still up to link to here
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Not only was I shocked to see Andover buy Slashdot from the geeks, but I am even more shocked to see the amount of money they're putting into it. Sure, Slashdot is good publicity for Andover, as we all know Slashdot has a large, and somewhat dedicated following. Having looked at the pictures of Andover's area at a few conferences / events in the Linux world, and couldn't help but laugh at the Slashdot sign, tilted up for all to see. It's quite interesting that a website that started as a fun way for Malda to show the world about Linux, and the news that surrounded it, became a website that is sponsored by a huge company with lots of money, and a website that is gaining more and more attention everyday.
Don't get me wrong, I love Slashdot, and I commend each and every person who's put work into the Slash code and who has made Slashdot into what it is today, but I think that if Andover can afford $100,000 for a simple contest, the amount Malda, Bates and Oostendorp (sorry if I spelt that wrong) are getting should also be remotely close to that high figure. By the way the authors post on Slashdot, this high figure is not being received.. unless they just don't want us to know that they make 3 times the amount of the prizes in the "Beanie Awards".
Slashdot for me used to be a place where I didn't have to worry about commercializing everything available, but now I see it as a de-sensitized company jumping on the bandwagon of all the other profitable websites. Too bad this one story changed my point of view.
Matthew
_____________________________________
sortakinda.ca | canadian paraphrasing.
I could NOT agree more. /. seems to have forgotten (if ever they knew) that there are plenty of us nerds/geeks out here who aren't really involved in the open source movement, don't work with Linux, and frankly aren't that interested in it either.
I think the "Linux/open source" focus was just to boost their IPO. After all, now they're *giving* away money. Sheesh.
Ah, well, there are better sites out there nowadays.... just
Clearly, I deserve the unsung hero award. You say you've never heard of me, or my work? Yep, that proves that no one's singing my praises.
I refuse, on principle, to have a
Ralf has been a big submitter to the RTEMS project and I would like to see him recognized. Among numerous other development projects, he has ported RTEMS to the Hitachi SH family, converted much of the RTEMS Makefile structure to GNU automake, and ported other open source packages such as Tcl to RTEMS.
so vote for me. I'll give you a cookie. One per vote if I win
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
It's not "community money", so if they want to skew the results, then FINE!
If they wanted to, they could just pick people out of a hat and toss them the cash. But no, they at least TRY to be vaguely fair, and people like you jump all over them for it.
It's a wonder anyone gets ANYTHING done these days, what with the incessant whining going on in the background about how things aren't perfect . . .
Whine, whine, whine. Things aren't perfect. Life isn't perfect. Get used to it, and make do.
I suggest a three-way, cage-match between Perens, Raymond and Stallman to determine this award.
Last man standing wins.
C'mon, guys, why link to the domain of some slob trying to get the Python people to buy a domain from him? Link to the real site.
--Matt
*ahem* Naked and petrified guy
I nominate Advogato for best open source advocate. While the better-known open source advocates have been racking up major publicity points for themselves and doing the impossibly hard work of selling big business the idea of software that doesn't cost them anything, Advogato has been working for the most part quietly to help the community of open source developers, the people who actually write all this code the rest of you are so fond of evangelizing.
:)
P.S. The rules said nothing about nominations not being allowed to be self-serving
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
Take for instance
most improved kernel module, $10,000
What happens when you give it to some group like the SCSI guys?
Who in the group decides how to distribute the money? How will the amount be distributed to those of us who live in Europe? How will you confirm that the hard workers get a share of it?
Do any of these prizes go to individuals? What about giving it to an entire group, what does the money buy? A new machine for testing? A web server and 2 years co-lo at a major backbone site? Beer?
Many questions, and the slashdot guys haven't given us any answers, yet.
Hey, who ELSE but Jesse Berst could win the Clue Stick award?
And since BOredAtWork coined the "clue stick", make him Best Poster.
What we really need is a Best Troll category.
- The late, great Rich Stevens's children's college fund
- Larry Wall's children's college fund
- Dennis Ritchie's retirement fund.
(Perhaps those count as charitiesConsidering the US is the only country that makes a real difference...
Considering you are using Microsoft Hotmail.
It's interesting to see that half of these awards apply to Linux, or open source unixes only. Getting an award for a closed sourrce BeOS or Windows developer is definately a lot harder then it is for a Linux one (Which fits in virtually every category) Very dissapointing indeed. If Slashdot wishes to be percieved as an "unbiased news source" this is definately not the way to go.
Flame away~
I nominate Tom Christiansen for best poster. His articles ranged from the hilarious to the insightful to the informative. And yes, I've been saving his links. :-)
Mark Pauline: Head of Survival Research Laboratories and fundrasing manager for the etoy projects. His projects have been an inspiration to hardware and software hackers alike, blowing away anything you can make with a lego mindstorm. (You try shooting two-by-fours at a high rate of speed with legos...)
Mark Pauline is the Bob Geldorf of cool technology projects. Where would we be without him pushing the limits?
By the way. Toywar is up and running
No Zen is good zen
I refuse to believe that this is for Linux alone. I'm nominating a BSD kernel module, even if it does have to do with Linux. :-)
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
An `anal-suppository' is redundant. :-)
I wish you'd log into the nominations forum
and post these there because your list has some
of the best suggestions I've seen so far and
yet this needs to be posted in the niminations
forums not here.
That's the best posting so far. I don't agree with all of it, but it's the most thorough treatment yet.
Allow me to be one of the many, many people to nominate the Ziff-Davis (ZD Group) in it's many forms.
Their particular style of "rip and read" journalism, and complete lack of objectivity over the years, has earned them the respect and honor of only the most "clue starved" trolls all over the world. It is my belief that this perverse propagation of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) puts the ZD Group among the front runners in the race for a firm twack with the /. Cluestick.
More to the point, I would like to nominate the hard work and dedication of the many ZDnet interns who (like so many sweatshop workers in a Nike factory) tirelessly toil to cut and paste microsoft press releases into Jerry Bursts' article of the day.
ZDs' blatant pursuit of mediocrity makes them a prime candidate for The Cluestick Award for FUD in Journalism.
_________________________
I hearby announce my candidacy for 'Best dressed'.
Some of you may be asking yourself why you should vote for me. Simple. Best dressed isn't what label you wear, whither or not the cufflinks are real gold, etc. It's how you use attitude to make the look work.
Speaking as someone who successfully pulled off wide lapelled mohair at the formal company Christmas party, combat boots and leather jacket at innumerable weddings, and constantly gets positive comments about his misuse of military-surplus gear in the corporate work environment, I feel I deserve the award.
.sig: Now legally binding!
"The people who are inventing new things don't get the attention they deserve."
That's because the people inventing things are getting paid for it and not doing it Open Source. Plain and simple. And could you imagine if Slashdot gave an award to a dirty capitalist? The world would implode.
No, it's not. What about vaginal suppositories?
yeah! Give away shares instead of money and make a few millionaires!
Look, we all know that we spend more time playing games than most of these other things combined... so how about a category for best freely available game?
Anyone can post those nominations in those other forii. Why can't we just vote for them here? Anyway, I'll go post them if the author doesn't. Hm... but we can just vote for them, right? I can't figure out how voting works.
Thanks for the link. The one in my bookmarks was no longer valid, and I couldn't find it on the new livid sight.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
I made a point of producing all these textures in .xpm format (_months_ ago) so they could be native Linux tiles and background textures. On the agenda, I need to go make .bmp versions of everything available for the underprivileged- I didn't know until recently that Windows could not use a simple gif or jpg as a background unless the hapless Windows user turned on Active Desktop.
All these things are absolutely original work, put out there just to use with no strings attached and the sincere request of 'Just don't claim these as your own OK?'.
http://www.airwindows.com/desktops/index.html- Desktop pictures
http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/backgrounds/ind ex.html- Tiling backgrounds
http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/tiles/index.htm l- Window manager tiles, including treatments such as vertically tiling effects and 3D effects, plus stuff like wood tiles with binding like on a guitar
http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/titlebars/index .html- Intended as Window Maker titlebars, very likely usable in other WMs as well
http://www.airwindows.com/graphics/webgifs/index.h tml- Textured but undistracting 'paper' backgrounds. All available in .xpm as well: designed to be completely compliant with the Web Safe 216 color palette.
Anyone griping about there being gifs should be pleased that at least I don't have Windows .bmps yet ;) well, whatever. I'm sure Enlightenment is going to win or something, but I don't care- I have been fighting for a loan to get an ADAT recorder (to help people record unauthorized music and put out mp3s ;) ) and will keep on doing so. If I win $2000 I pledge I will buy a x86 Linux box to go with my PPC dualboot :)
Cheers, slashdotters. *back to real life*
No. Please. Not "forii"! Arghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
This is a truly visionary document that takes the open-source message beyond software and technology and applies it to the world around us.
I have great faith in fools. Self confidence, my friends call it.
Americans always admire themselves, proclaiming themselves heroes and everything non-American is brainwashed as hostile and coward. The US army is the most coward army in the world. All their so-called technology is based on hiding themselves (Stealth, which was invented by a Russian by the way), stay at long distance (Apache) and not appear at all (unmanned Black Hawk). Why don't you cowards fight like men, instead of acting like wusses that you are?! You're not only coward, but also the most egoistic and snobbish country there is. New Year greets to all countries, except the U.S.!
forii?
it's fora, anyway. Just like datum/data, etc.
Cactus/cacti, appendix, appendices.
latin is such an annoying language.. but it's much easier than russian!
-karma whore, so posting AC
Sure. "Forii" is like "virii".
Give Grits Boy all of the money! He's ten times better than all of you losers put together!
I smell the pen
of a Christiansen.
I would like to nominate Anonymous Coward to recieve all rewards.
...I can't find any information on this person
Slashdot throwing money around? Remember back when Malda was a poor college kid? My how thing have changed.
--Lenny
Um, could I get an English translation to that garbledy gook?
Unsung Hero - Donald Becker. This guy is the lone wolf of the /usr/src/linux/net/* tree. I mean you can't swing a dead cat around linux networking documentation without hitting his name. Not to mention I see his name damn near every time my machine machine's boots (network driver credits).
I, for one, will not be voting for this very reason.
Umm... if you don't vote, how the hell do you expect ANY of your "groups" to get dick in the way of support?
If you don't vote, your cause will have one less vote. If everyone behind your cause doesn't vote, then your cause gets no votes. Seems simple to me. Why not nominate whoever it is you want to see win, THEN vote for them. If they lose, whine some more, THEN, as you so elequently put it, go pound sand.
A. a live coward, standing amid the smoking ruins of your cities, listening to the wailing of your orphaned children while my attack drones sweep overhead searching for survivors to terminate.
OR B. a dead hero, lying in a bloody pool after being hacked to pieces by an axe.
. . . I'll choose A every time. Cowardice is in the eye of the loser . . .
it has been obvious for a long time, that when the writers on slashdot think opensource, they are actually just thinking linux. and this is why i have been reading slashdot less and less, and will certinaly not be wasting my time voting on these stupid categorys.
where is the support for the tiny, just starting out, os's? why do the writers for slasdot still keep disilusioning themselves that linux is best for EVERYTHING, when it clearly is not? (infact, nothing is)
1.For Incompetence above and beyond call of normal yellow journalism. 2.For piss poor trade show with almost no new technology (Networld+Interop 99 )both Atlanta and Las Vegas,do yourself a favor sell the shows to IDG , Linux world is better. 3.For 24x7 Fud on Zdtv. I nominate Ziff Davis. The multi function fud media masters. p.s ZD should have left Softbank alone
I just pooped my pants!
Carol was born in London but moved to America at age five. She was schooled in Texas and California before returning to England in 1960 to study at R.A.D.A. Her early tv credits include The Saint, The Avengers, Man in a Suitcase, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and the comidies Doctors at Large, Father Dear Father and The Two Ronnies.
Aside from her appearances in the Monty Python's Flying Circus series for BBC, she has been featured in all the Python films, stage shows and record albums, becoming known as The Python Girl
More recently she has been seen in Are You Being Served? and Only Fools and Horses. She has done much stage work, covering a wide variety of comedy drama and pantomimes. She has also written and performed her own one-woman show entitled Carol Cleveland Reveals All, an autobiographical and humorous look at the glamour business.
and now you know the rest of the story ;-)
Bad things often happen to good people,
It is up to them to see that they remain good.
This includes Andover.net of course. If we Europeans had these kind of financial resources at our disposal, we could come up with some TRULY innovative stuff..
Should only take a couple hundred lines (less?) of perl to: (1) Create unique yahoo email account. (2) Create ./ account using this email account. (3) Fetch POP mail from yahoo and parse ./ password. (4) Logon to ./ and cast vote of choice (5) Goto (1) Perhaps these should be named "best script kiddie" award? Ken
1. The nomination process is wide open so
you are welcome to login and make your case for
whoever your feel deserves the money more than
the usual well-known projects. Imagine that you
could actually post a persuasive argument to help
an under-funded project which you depend on rather
than standing on the sidelines and bitching that
nobody does anything for open source developers.
2. You have to be logged in to vote. I'm not sure
about the internals but I'm sure this is because
there is code under here that will specifically
exclude any vote bots.
3. Andover doesn't allow other Linux news sites to
carry word of these awards??? What are you high?
This was sent out as a press release today and is
already announced on LinuxToday.
So you're the type who doesn't vote because you
feel democracy doesn't work, right? Nice attitude.
Glad to have you in the community. I'm sure all
the open source projects whose software you
depend on really appreciate having you do nothing
on their behalf. They ought to be thanking you.
One thing that crosses my mind when considering these awards are paying tribute to the coders/reverse engineers who have provided us with open source programs that allow us to use gadgets that are released with closed source Windows XX and Mac software only:
So here goes:
"The Snowblind Alliance" --
The fine folks whom without I could not use Linux to transfer files to my portable MP3 software.
"Anyone Involved with Video4Linux" --
All the way from the Kernel modules right down to the application level programs (XawTV, Kwintv) we could give out 3 or 4 of these awards to the people who let me watch TV in Linux while I surf the Web....
"Grip - Mike Olipant"
Anyone who rips MP3's in Linux, knows that this GTK based app is as good as they come in any operating system.
"CDRecord - Joerg Schilling"
Without this valuable tool, that $250.00 CD-RW player/recorder you just bought would be about as good and useful in Linux as that first 1 or 2 speed CD Drive you payed the same $250.00 for 10 years ago.
"Sane - David Mosberger-Tang "
It's really nice to be able to scan with Linux rather than have to maintain a dual boot...
"PHP - The PHP team "
The open source hammer that ensures we do not have to use inferior operating systems to provide easy access to corporate data stores or build dynamic web pages....(Perl is good...but is not quite as easy as PHP)
"Any Linux propaganda or news reporting award on the list should go to Joe Barr and Nicholas Petreley at Linux world....They do a great job in covering the items the rest of us can't find the words to describe...."
The above items (and many others I did not list) are crucial to widespread desktop acceptance of Linux. I did not list many server related items because I believe that any *nix has always been the logical choice for server realted tasks anyway...So in my mind the market is already won.
IMHO
Free Software as a whole owes a lot to IBM and Microsoft. It's apparently hard to develop linux for the Mac because Apple doesn't open their hardware specs. I hear that LinuxPPC doesn't run on the newest Apples because of this.
The IBM-Microsoft relationship of the 80's has created a good environment for free software folks to work by decentralizing things. The IBM-compatible platform has given us an open standard to use. Lots of people make cheap IBM compatible hardware, and anyone with the expertise to do so can write software to run on that hardware. If either IBM or Microsoft made both PC hardware and PC operating systems, things would be much more difficult.
If I've been unfair to Apple, let me know. It would be interesting to see how Apple and LinuxPPC get along.
Sure, projects like KDE/Gnome (no flamewar please) or Mozilla are important, but they are sponsored enough by other sources, we don't need to support them that badly.
/. poll every six months giving out five 1000$ prizes...
What is needed more IMHO is support for all those small coders who use a few weeks of their spare-time to write useful utilities for free (the type of software which would be distributed as 20$ shareware under Windows).
So why not create a foundation?
If the money was invested with a 10% interest, we would have roughly 5000$ dollars per half year available.
We could then have a
You're giving the rest of us non-US people a bad name (Hi! Canadian here!)
You're not a Canadian, you're either an American pretending to be Canadian, or a fucking traitor to your own flag!
I agree. I think it'd be better to have a poll of the slashdot community to vote on what new projects we'd like to see. Then for the top (say 5) projects, put up bounties on those two software bazaar sites. Give it a month or so for people to write up their proposals, and let them get coding.
What's the point of retroactively awarding people? Why not use the money as an incentive to coders, like a contest?
I don't understand your point. Rewarding what people have done is clearly an incentive to be, in the future, one of the have-dones. I don't think most coders or advocates are so short-sighted that they cannot recognize the cause and effect going on between valuable contributions to the Open Source community and rewards given to the contributors by the community.
Especially since there are glaring problems in the categories. The first issue is the ones where I can already pick the final winner.
Big Dumb Patent Bully == Amazon
Big Dumb Domain Bully == etoys
Clue Stick Award for FUD in Journalism = MSNBC
The rewards in those catagories are a beanie and a hug from Cowboy Neal. I guess they forgot to label that part It's Funny, Laugh . However, I don't really see how including an obvious joke, that's relevant to the topic, would discredit the rest of the awards.
Then there's the ones where 90% of the voters will go "Huh??". Like:
Best Perl Module
Most Improved Kernel Module
Best Newbie Helper
Certainly, not everybody is a kernel hacker. Not everybody is a perl hacker. Not everybody is a newbie. But that does not mean these people do not make valuabe contributions. After all, where would Linux be, without that kernel? And if not everybody feels qualified to vote on every category, that's okay. After all, these awards are to reward contributions, not to entertain the voters.
AND I NOMINATER MYSELF FOR BEST TROLL!
Half the awards look like they're going to be given out to people who are heavily sponsored by corporations already.
Spend some more money on people who make games for no finacial reward.
It's turtles all the way down.
> ExoPC warrants some mention as an innovative Open Source OS. It's a whole new approach to
> OS design, taking the microkernel concept to the point where there are actual significant gains.
Like what, using better optimization and a new compiler when building the kernel? Microkernels are dead for a reason -- they're not efficient.
Actually, I voted with you on this one. Natalie Portman *is* deserving of the Best Dressed award. The television news journals as well as the print media were incredibly obsessed with the style of clothing she wore in Star Wars. It was the geek fashion event of 1999, if there ever was one.
I want to be an upstanding, responsible member of the Slashdot community. Could someone please explain to me why that post has been deemed Flamebait, instead of being recognized as a joke that apparently didn't come off, so that I may avoid committing such heinous errors in the future?
I refuse, on principle, to have a
(* Sigh! *)
Exokernels are =NOT THE SAME= as Microkernels, although they borrow from the same basic idea. They take it to new heights, though, putting -everything- but the kitchen sink in User Space, rather than Kernel Space.
This gives you the same benefits of Microkernels, but without the drawback. By having only an absolute minimum in Kernel Space, you don't have the context switching overhead that Microkernels had, which slowed them down. Instead, you only dive into kernel space when absolutely necessary. The practical upshot is that you get even fewer context switches than you do in a monolithic kernel, so you're not wasting as much time on such trivia.
In the benchtest on their website, ExoPC was shown to be nearly 1,000 times faster than FreeBSD at basic network operations. That's not a bad speed improvement, given FreeBSD is hardly a laggard.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So I don't want to hear this turn your back on us crap. The US will come to the rescue of just about any country in the world, and don't try to say they wouldn't, they've done it before, and they'll do it again. The way I look at it we have saved this world twice this century, you like the freedom's you have (especially if you live anywhere in Europe) be glad we whooped Germany (twice) and Japan's asses. Even the people in those countries are better of now than they would have been had they won (What the hell is up with your last sentence, it makes absolutely no sense, you are a collection of our people.
Well, no shit every country is a collection of (insert country emigrated from here) people, 99% of the people on this planet emigrated from somewhere else, whether it was 1 year ago or 100,000 years ago, everywhere except the area around Ethiopia, where the modern human evolved from. But that's a totally different discussion.
Where exactly are you from? If it is anywhere in the Western Hemisphere you had to have come from somewhere else, and yes the native Americans came from Asia from 40,000 to 12,000 years ago. But what defines when a person is no longer an immigrant and a native born person, I was always under the impression it was the first generation of children born in the country. And then you say that this country is composed of traitors, how exactly do you figure that, when the vast majority of the people in the country emigrate here for more opportunities and better standards of living You anti-American people piss me off to no end, you bitch about how we are not really as good as we claim we are, you say our educational system sucks ass, our murder rate it too high (no argument here), we are arrogant pricks, we have a fucked up president (again no argument here), we have a cowardly army, etc.
Does everyone from other countries want to know why our educational systems score so low in comparison to other countries, it is because, now I don't know for sure if this is true for all countries but I know some for some of the countries it is true, Canada, Japan, China, France, maybe England, Russia, Australia, etc. All of these countries test their entire population of students and only select the best students and use their test score; they don't sample from the entire population. Argue with me if you want but I have read in the past that these countries do modify the scores. We don't, we use very last dumbass in figuring out our average test score.
Yes some of us are arrogant pricks, and I am no exception to this rule, I can get very nationalistic at times, like now. But so can most other person in the world.
This whole idea about us having a cowardly army is just ludicrous, you complain that we are too scared to fight you, so we use stealth technology and laser guided bombs and other technologies. Well you know what that sounds like, pure and simple envy. We have the best technology and you are pissed because you don't have it, or don't have enough money to develop it. It is not cowardice, it is intelligence, why send troops into a hostile area to take down a radar station when you can just launch a missile at it from 10 miles away. General Patton, I think, once said "no man ever won a war by dying for his country", I hope you can figure that one out for yourself, otherwise read the previous sentence.
In conclusion you ended your statement by saying that our people turned our backs on you, well I would have to say there is probably a good reason for that, I wonder what it could be, a little word that begins with FREE and ends in DOM, put it together and what's that spell, NOT YOU.
PS: That little part above doesn't pertain to places canada, australia, and western europe(at least today).
"Most Improved"? Duh, GNOME. Going from barely runnable to almost stable is pretty dramatic.
"Best Advocate?" You just KNOW everyone on slashdork is going to parrot "Miguel! Miguel! Miguel!"
"Eye Candy?" Again, what else is GNOME good for?
But remember, Slashdot isn't about news, it's about locker-room politics. If you aren't on the 'team' (which consists of Redhat, GNOME and the Slashdot droolers) then you suck rocks. Slashdot's pathetic editorial bias has been getting worse and worse by the day.
You think they want to alienate themselves? I doubt it'd endear 'em to the masses that they make 10x more than their average reader.
I present to you, the Linux using public, the single most influential man on the newbie scene today...
(crowd screaming)
...The grand master of all distros, the father of newbie-ized help files...
(crowd on feet, roof rattling)
...The one...
(crowd going wild)
...the only...
(crowd insane, young women passing out)
..."Sensei" of www.linuxnewbie.org!
(crowd loses control, bras/panties/hotel room keys being thrown on stage)
they're called pessaries