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Voting Begins for $100k Beanie Awards
So the 2000 Beanie Awards have
now entered phase two: Intense Voting. The
nominees have been chosen in each category by you readers, and now
you get to choose who wins the money in exciting catagories like
'Best Designed Interface in a non graphical application' and
'Best Newbie Helper'. Each category has a discussion so you can talk about your choices all you want. You may change your vote whenever you like. And the final winners will be announced at LinuxWorld in NY in feb.
How about some of that cash, instead of a man-thing and a beanie...?
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Just lurking, thanks!
assuming it wasnt something like road salt.
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I'm disappointed, especially in the big prize area. I wish more effort was put into giving the money to people who don't have an corporate support. Let's look at some of the various canidates:
GNOME - funded by RedHat
Wine - funded by Corel
Mozilla - funded by AOL
XMMS - funded by OSS
Not that these projects deserve recognition, but come on! Now the whole "best open source book" topic makes me cringe. Who does the money go to? The author? The publisher?
I just want to see more projects succeed. These projects have gotten what they deserve. I just want to see new projects grow.
It is silly to speculate about whether someone who is giving away their own money are or can "cheat". Also, the first step was not a vote, it was a nomination.
Yes, he would have been perfect for the award. Apart from his i18n work, he has done a lot of work maintaining various GNU utilities of the kind that everyone uses, but few people think about.
Actually, I voted for the projects where I think the money will do most good to the community as a whole. This may be against the spirit on one level (it is not what the question states), but probably in the spirit at another level (it helps the open source community).
Unsung Hero
Here, I removed the names that pop up constantly, and checked that the remaining person had done somthing worthwhile.
Best Open Source-Related Book
Here, I chose the one whose authors and creation best fitted with my idea of open source.
Most of the "Unsung Heros" were a bit surprising, though. I -kind- of think most of them not only get sung about, they practically have their own operas about them. Whoever nominated them should look up "unsung", sometime. It does -not- mean "most popular", "best known", or "all-time celebrity".
Having said that, I think these awards are a great idea, and that the nominations put forward were great! Can we do this again, next month?
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)
In any case, as the subject says, PICO == PIne COmposer. I don't believe Pilot (the sucky PINE-style directory browser) stands for anything. While we're at it, PINE stands for two things; the official name is "Program for Internet News and Email," but as every real UNIX-head knows, it's really "PINE Is Not ELM," which expands to "PINE Is Not ELM Is Not ELectronic Mail" and so forth. Yay. Depending on how you parse it, it might end up meaning, to you anyway, "${PINE} is not Electronic Mail;" I don't know what PINE is supposed to be then.
I just use Mutt nowadays though. I got sick of PINE changing its semantics and doing evil stuff behind my back (such as suddenly deciding, when the university admins upgraded to 4.10, to use the broken, not-very-well-hidden-at-all ~/mbox file instead of just keeping stuff in my nice, quota-free /var/spool/mail file). Now my stuff goes exactly where I want it, and I could still use PICO for editing if I wanted (but I don't, so I just use vim instead).
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a .
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
Yeah, this is a funny comment. Not true, though. A good dose of tchrist is the very thing a newbie needs to get them thinking for themselves. No, really! I learned Unix from The Unix Programming Environment, which I think is the book equivalent of tc: "here's the gen, now go figure!".
In short, what have you done to ensure that who we vote for *really is* who we get? Where are the exit polls to give independant input?
Keep in mind the bag must be open for this to be effective and the wound must be about the size of your chest... in which case learning to program is probably not your highest priority. =)
Isn't that amazing? And yet, people still expect newbies to read the copious amounts of (free|installed by default| amazingly complete)+ documentation compiled, written, and maintained by Tom.
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how to invest, a novice's guide
Well, allow me to rant.
;-). Those people selected in this category don't quite fit. Some of them even have fan pages and people are actually spending time reading their personal diary.
"Now, which award are we going to give Linus this month?"
Folks are nominating the same old people and projects over and over again, and this award is no exception, despite its original announcement.
Yes, I am a little disappointed that David Hinds and his great PCMCIA kernel modules have not been selected in either category.
He *is* an unsung hero (now that he hasn't been selected, he's an even more unsung hero
I am also unhappy with the kernel module selection. With the exception of Video4Linux, none of them are ready for prime time yet and still *need* to improve.
Oh my.
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You may like my a cappella music
Somehow I got that feeling that that's what people were thinking :( Well, this is /.'s first time at this. I guess we should give them a margin of error. Hopefully they'll learn a few lessons for next time.
-BrentHow can you have a "Favorite Slashdot Poster" award without Signal 11 as one of the candidates? Of course, I mighta still voted for BOredAtWork, but Signal 11 certainly has more of a clue than that other candidate, AC.
Pico is nice for editing config files, but not extendible enough when your really using it a lot on C/PERL/whatever files. But they didn't list jed :-(
Sure.
Several months ago, I was a newbie in a couple Perl newsgroups (but not a newbie to programming in general) -- and all I thought of him was "pompus ass".
Of course, before I can help to change your mind, you first have to tell why you think the way you do. What makes you think he's a "pompus ass"?
Within the first week of watching the groups, I saw a listing of his supposed kill list including keywords that would pretty much nuke 95% of newbie messages.
Perhaps if you flag your postings with "NEWBIE", "PERL 4", "WINDOWS" or similar things, you get nuked. For that matter, I do the same as well. But if you post a Perl question, chose an appropriate subject, and can be bothered to look at the manual and FAQ first, you would have had a pretty good chance of getting your question answered by Tom. Of course, I speak in the past tense. All the whining of the form "why don't you spoon feed me?" have made Tom follow Larry Walls way, and he no longer posts in clp.misc. Which is a big loss, specially for newbies.
IMO, that's not what newbie help is about.
Then, do tell us, what is newbie help about?
-- Abigail
LiViD may very well be the most important consumer open-source project being undertaken. Linux simply won't be able to be competitive as a mainstream consumer OS without eye-candy like DVD playback.
... There is even the risk that DeCSS would be commercialized and offered to the general public, either in the form of retail software or as part of a DVD player
Time is also a key issue here. The sooner DVD playback finds it's way into Red Hat and other distributions, the more difficult it will be for the MPAA and the DVDCCA to convince a judge to ban the project.
Here's an excerpt from a recent MPAA court filing:
DeCSS remains (for the moment) a "hacker phenomenon." One of our principal concerns is that, in the absence of a judicial finding that DeCSS is illegal, its use will become more widespread.
Let's make the MPAA's fears come true!
Tom Christiansen? LOL!!!
Okay, he's a good author (or has really good editors), and he knows a lot -- but I've seen rants in Perl newsgroups that probably scare newbies away forever (or at least make them very afraid to ask anything).
IMO, that's not what newbie help is about.
Maybe I've missed his efforts elsewhere, or maybe he was just joking -- but I don't remember seeing any 's.
Honestly, can someone help me change my impression of him?
Several months ago, I was a newbie in a couple Perl newsgroups (but not a newbie to programming in general) -- and all I thought of him was "pompus ass".
Within the first week of watching the groups, I saw a listing of his supposed kill list including keywords that would pretty much nuke 95% of newbie messages.
-- CP
Thank you for nominating us! We have a great team
.org pavillion.
of people on the project and we are working hard
to bring better video to Linux.
Check us out at the LinuxWorld Expo. We have a
booth in the
Alan Cox - Linus' #2 man and maintainer of the stable kernels (2.2.x and 2.0.x).
David Dawes - XFree86 leader
Donald Becker - Wrote nearly ever ethernet driver in the kernel, invented Beowulf
Jordan Hubbard - FreeBSD's leader
Brian Paul - Wrote the Mesa OpenGL-alike library used by eg. Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc.
Too bad Mindcraft wasn't an option for the FUD though. I nominated them, would have voted for them...
Compared to their benchmarks, every other piece of FUD was second rate IMO.
Cheers,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
> Most Improved Open Source Project / Most Improved Kernel Module
> Have you benchmarked it? Done regression testing? Checked the source for comments? No? Then abstain, 'cos you don't know!
What is this nonsense? The concept that you have to be a programmer and look at source code, or run benchmarks to know how a module/project has improved is absurd!
What about driving a car? "This car rides better than a Yugo. It's faster too." What? did you run fifth wheel tests on it to time accelerations? Did you measure suspension travel, and spring rates? No of course not. But you can tell whether something is better by using it:
"Gee, before half my PCMCIA devices didn't work... now they all do"
"Last time I tried GNOME it was barely useable, but now it has every feature I expect of an advanced window manager."
I'd say those are improved....
And don't forget that what's better/worse is an individual opinion! Just because you have one standard of evaluating something as better/worse doesn't mean that others feel the same things are important.
Pico... the 'other' UNIX editor.
:-)
It always seems to get lost among the constant vi vs. emacs holy wars, and the code is (fairly) easy to customize. A job ago, while working at an ISP, I had Pico customized eight ways to Sunday, with automatic comment block generation, line gotos and indentation of C code to my exacting, anal standards. It was fast and efficient and perfect for C coding.
So what if it doesn't have all the features of emacs, or the power of vi? Emacs is like the kid with all the cool toys, and vi's the kid with the Lego. But you always liked to play with Pico best, because he's the kid with the big cardboard box that you would always turn into a little house or racecar. He's the most fun to play with.
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Tempfiles fugit.
Who's this abstain character?
And why does he/she qualify for the Hemos award?
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I know it's too late now, but I would like to see write in candidates as well next time. I'm more interested in hearing about who has done what for open source than I really am about who wins. Since the spaces aren't there on the forms, I'd be delighted to hear from people here about people who didn't make the list. They probably didn't have the chance for the widespread recognition necessary to win, but let's mention them publically anyway. I'll start.
I nominated François Pinard, leader of the Free Translation Project for the unsung hero award. He has managed to gather support for the project a little at a time and keep it going largely through his own effort. There are certainly plenty of translators working on many of the individual languages, but he has done the organizational work to connect software projects with translation teams. If you are competent to translate, especially into a minority language, one of the best ways I can think of to thank him is to join or form a translation team.
The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.
I feel that the choices in the different categories are too limited.
/. is purchasing support from well knowns with this contest than awarding excellence (not that excellence is not rampant in the nominations..... Just my opinion and we all know how that goes..)
What we have here is a popularity contest with well known names and is a very poor representation of the thousands of applications/authors/and groups which are out there.
I don't deny that any of the listed people are worthy of the individiual awards, I just feel that the number of choices is too limited. There were lots of good nominations which did not make it to the vote cycle.
This is not meant to be a flame, or perhaps it is... It just seems more and more that this place is becoming a clique culture and very unwelcoming to newcommers.
For this reason, You'll find my vote for abstain in all categories as the nominees are not a fair representation of the many more canidates nominated. It seems more that
They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen
Fish! LipHo
Hemos is shelfish by having the only sure win. Vote Abstain on the Hemos award. Don't let a single vote in for Hemos. Long live abstain!!!
has to be Tom Christiansen under Best Newbie Helper. Unless they count his books as being a newbie helper, Tom Christiansen is about as helpful as throwing a bag of salt on an open wound.
Thanks for making me laugh Slashdot gang!
Hates people who have stupid little sigs
Abstain when you don't know. Don't just go for the one that rings a bell, if you don't know, don't vote.
Most Improved Open Source Project / Most Improved Kernel Module
Have you benchmarked it? Done regression testing? Checked the source for comments? No? Then abstain, 'cos you don't know!
Unsung Hero
Do you know what each of these people has done? Have you done research to find out how "unsung" they actually are? (Alan Cox has been on TV - thats not unsung!)
Best Open Source-Related Book
Have you actually read *all* of these books? No? Well then don't vote, 'cos you don't know!
I could go on, but your smart people, you know what I'm getting at. Don't just vote off the cuff, vote for what you know, and let those who are in the know's votes count by reducing the "noise" and keeping your uninformed opinion out of it. Like me.
Oh, and before I get moderated down as an opiniated know it all, I've abstained on almost everyting, because I'm honest enough to say "I Don't Know".
Thankyou for your time
ThadThad
Really, I appreciate it so much that you voted for me in MASS! I'm almost crying! I called mom and she said, "son, I've never believe you'd make it, but now I'm proud of you!". Thank you all for all those votes! And I'd like to emphasize the fact that this is a team work, that nothing would have been possible without me, myself, and I!
I plan to give most of the money to my crack dealer, who's in a dire need. THANKS AGAIN! (where's that pipe)