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How's Your Whuffie? Interview with Cory Doctorow
Richard Koman writes "My interview with EFF's Cory Doctorow just went up on O'Reilly. The interview is largely about his book, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," but naturally veers towards discussing his view of Disney, programmers, and peer to peer. Then there's this: Doctorow: I think that Disney's art and technology kicks ass. But one thing you discover in the technology world, especially in free software, is that being a good programmer and being a good person are not necessarily correlated, or at least being a good programmer and being a person with whom other people want to spend a lot of time, who has good hygiene and good social skills, are not correlated."
...or at least being a good programmer and being a person with whom other people want to spend a lot of time, who has good hygiene and good social skills, are not correlated
I take offense to that... I have poor hygiene and poor social skills, and it hasn't made me a good programmer!
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Take it from me. I live in Orlando, FL. HOME of Disney. Not a lot of people here like them very much. Every other person I know has worked for them in some capacity and HATES them.
At least everyone I work with smells the same as me. That way I don't stick out.
He does mention in the article, though, that it's first-time authors that lack reputation: maybe this is an indication that he's doing this for his first book to build reputation and then he will be getting a 'traditional' book contract for future books? Either way I support him. More work in the commons is always a good thing.
Karma: pi (Mostly due to circular reasoning in posts).
being a good programmer and being a person with whom other people want to spend a lot of time, who has good hygiene and good social skills, are not correlated
Are people really still saying this about programmers? It's not 1989 any more. We may not be movie stars, but all the coders I know have sex at least semi-regularly, with people they don't have to pay. That indicates some level of grooming and social skills.
If you fall off a building, go real limp, because maybe you'll look like a dummy and people will be like hey, free dummy
wheres the fucking content?
Of course, anyone that spends enough time in front of a computer (i.e. not showering, not shaving, eating things that create a large amount of flagulence (sp)) to be a "good" programmer is not usually a socialite. But then, since the majority of society suffer from "Pretty People" syndrome, it is not surprising.
Scott, Keeper of the Crystal Flame
I am pretty sure that's an old logo.. just one that doesn't get used often.
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Hey, I'm a good programmer, and I have ... hmmm... well at least I'm a good programmer!
Is he the guy that was on that tlc show about hackers, standing on the golden gate bridge, reciting the hackers manifesto, and generally acting like a complete jackass? Singlehandedly made me stop donating to the eff.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
I heard that RMS smells, never changes his clothes and throws used condoms behind the couch? Can anyone confirm?
US-UK-Israel: The real Axis of Evil
no, click on it and you see the past stories from the subject. this only has one story: Cory doctorow
"I code AND I bathe." It's a slogan for the new millenium!
It amazes me just how many coders or software professionals do not understand the power regular showers and GOOD DEODERANT. I mean if you want people to talk to you, you shouldn't reek like a bridge troll - no matter how well you code.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
I can deal with the poor hygiene and even the seriously lacking social skills, but, DAMN, I can't stand that ego!e -so-you're-an-idiot-stop-wasting-my-precious-time" , attitude!
If anything pisses me off more when having to deal with them it's when I have to face that fucking snobbish, "I'm-part-of-an-elite-group-and-you-haven't-a-clu
How long will it take for people to realize that just putting stuff on the net for the world to download will not bring riches? Hell just doing that will incur serious bandwidth charges that....gasp.... you won't be able to pay!
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Your programing is sub-par, and it took you way to long to complete the program! However, I find you breath minty fresh and unoffensive.
and doing infomercials for this company.
These matter to a programmer not! When in coding arts skilled you are, is all that matters.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Programmers and other artisans frequently get absorbed in their craft. This is good for their output and all those who receive it. They naturally attach lesser importance to impressing people with their conversational or sartorial skills. I resent gregarious people expecting everyone to share their high value on impressing others.
Hygiene only becomes a problem when it causes skin or GI infections. Odor is a matter of taste. I've found female smokers to be the most easily offended. The Pot is calling the Kettle black ...
"I'm an electric car! I don't go very fast, or very far, and when people see you driving me, they'll think you're gay!
"One of us! One of us! One of us!"
He says that they are not correlated. This does not mean that they are anticorrelated . His claim is that they have nothing to do with each other.
Now that I think about it, "Whuffie" more accurately describes what's called "Karma" here on Slashdot. Perhaps a change is in order?
02/27/2003
... and telling people about stuff I like is way, way easier if I can just send it to 'em. Way easier."
...
e thing, also is capable of figuring out how you feel about any given thing anywhere in the world that you have any opinion about--without asking you. And as a consequence of this, you can first of all make some guesses about how you're going to feel about something. You don't have to remember whether you've been to this restaurant because the system remembers and tells you what other good restaurants are nearby. But the second-order effect is it will figure out who you hold in high esteem, who has an opinion about some restaurant you've never been to. And this opinion, and this esteem is called Whuffie.
...
... there's the nonviolent revolution, where you have TAs ousting their professors and offering courses that are credited in different ways. But the violent parts would be the complete collapse of the stock market, and massive poverty and economic and political destabilization, and public corporations just withering way, and thousands of people turning out on the streets and looting and arson. Because this is a massively disruptive technological change that they undergo. It is what happened to the recording industry happening to all of us. And the recording industry certainly went berserk when it happened to them, and behaved in a way that was completely nonlinear, not in their best interests, ungovernable, and so on. I have no reason to believe the general public would behave in a way that's anymore laudable. So I think what happened to the Disney Corporation is that money became massively deflationary, and it died, the same way that even worthy Argentinian corporations died when the Argentinian currency went wildly inflationary.
...
...
... Walt pulled off this amazing coup when he got this special economic zone incorporated, straddling two counties but not a part of either, and built Disney World in the middle of it. That kind of techno-utopic thing is very influential in the way I grew up.
"When Epcot Center first opened, long, long ago, there'd been an ugly decade or so in ride design. Imagineering found a winning formula for Spaceship Earth, the flagship ride in the big golf ball, and, in their drive to establish thematic continuity, they'd turned the formula into a cookie-cutter, stamping out half a dozen clones for each of the "themed" areas in the Future Showcase. It went like this: first, we were cavemen, then there was ancient Greece, then Rome burned (cue sulfur-odor FX), then there was the Great Depression, and, finally, we reached the modern age. Who knows what the future holds? We do! We'll all have videophones and be living on the ocean floor. Once was cute--compelling and inspirational, even--but six times was embarrassing. Like everyone, once Imagineering got themselves a good hammer, everything started to resemble a nail. Even now, the Epcot ad hocs were repeating the sins of their forebears, closing every ride with a scene of Bitchun utopia."
-- Cory Doctorow, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
What to make of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the first novel by Cory Doctorow, dot-com survivor, inveterate blogger, and now, outreach coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation? Part organizational-intrigue novel, part post-apocalyptic sci-fi, and part Swiftian satire of the tech mentality, revolutionary impulses, and Disney itself, the book has acquired quite a bit of notice, at least in part for its bold use of the Net.
Published in hard cover by Tor Books and released on the Net under a Creative Commons license (the details: free distribution, attribution required, commerical uses prohibited), Down and Out is also available from Doctorow's web site, not only in ASCII and PDF formats, but also, thanks to an enthusiastic community of Down-and-Outers, formats for Palm, Mobibook, Psion, Rocket eBook, Franklin eBookMan, and Hiebook. It's a testament to what programmers will do for free when you hand them some copyright-friendly content to play with.
Doctorow's reasoning, as an outspoken advocate of open source software and the virtues of peer-to-peer, is that your odds of success go way up if you can put something in people's hands and then figure out how to get paid for it. As he says in his note for the electronic version, "First-time novelists have a tough row to hoe. Our publishers don't have a lot of promotional budget to throw at unknown factors like us. Mostly, we rise and fall based on word of mouth
Thus, he'd rather have you email your friend a copy of this book than send a link to Amazon, or better yet, put it on a peer-to-peer Net. If this happens a lot, that's success. And maybe, some percentage of folks will choose to own the book. Or maybe not. In any case, some percentage of folks will choose to port it to another text-reading device. And maybe someone will choose to translate it to languages the publisher doesn't plan on.
In the world of Down and Out, there is no material scarcity, and people don't die, because they're just backed up to a hard disk and their personalities are poured into a young, sprightly clone. In a world without scarcity, the intangible things that are scarce become all the more valuable. In the world of the "Bitchun' Society," what's scarce is esteem, called Whuffie. For content, we should already be living in the world of the Bitchun Society--any digital file can be copied endlessly without degradation.
Only it can't, because we have accepted the notion of intellectual property and adopted laws that punish people for the wholesale copying of stuff. Doctorow's Net move is an opening to the Bitchun' world, and it poses plenty of questions. Why will anyone buy the book if they can get it online for free? On the other hand, things that are popular are far more likely to generate income streams than things that are not popular; so won't some number of people buy the book just because they've heard about it? In any case, books don't just get published online, they get criticized and raved about. They get people devoting themselves to them, porting them, creating alternative, animated storylines set in the original universe. Think that happens only for a paperback book?
Tor did a print run of 8,500 copies for Down and Out. In all likelihood, that's the total amount of bound books that will ever be created. There have been 75,000 downloads of the book directly from Doctorow's site, and no one knows how many other copies have been emailed between friends or downloaded from KaZaa. So, point proven: for those of us who believe in the Net to spread information and knowledge, Doctorow gets lots of Whuffie.
Richard Koman: So you have this sort of post-apocalyptic book in which these ad hoc committees have taken over Disney World; it's essentially a corporate intrigue story
Cory Doctorow: Except there's no corporation.
Koman: A post-corporate intrigue story, then. But for anyone who's been around the computer industry awhile, it's hard not to see glimmers of a very familiar world.
Doctorow: I had someone write me today and ask me if it was a subtle commentary on rapid application development, and in fact it is. One of my reference materials was the Microsoft Press Rapid Application Development book, as I was exploring the multifarious ways that organizations get into giant fights over how they should be organized, as opposed to what they should be doing.
Koman: So, talk about some of the references and experiences that formed this book.
Doctorow: It was the confluence of a bunch of technical and social ideas from a bunch of technical and social eras. Walt Disney himself was a technological innovator and very skilled, and an organizational innovator as well. The legend of Disneyland is that he was going to build this theme park, and he went to his brother Roy, who ran the money in the shop, and said "I'd like $17 million to build a theme park," and Roy said, "You can't have it and what's a theme park?" So he went out and raised private capital and hired some engineers to help him build his theme park, and of course, the engineers had never heard of theme parks and they spent a lot of time telling Walt he couldn't do this or that, so he wound up firing them all and going back to the studio and poaching all of the best animators. The animators at Disney studios had spent the 25 years previous, since the creation of the studio, inventing lots of little interesting engineering. So Walt recruited them to come build the park and he called them Imagineers, for lots of reasons: he liked the sound of it and he was always one for coinages, but it was illegal to call them engineers if they weren't really engineers.
The other slice of inspiration was the big technology/Internet boom and the clash of engineering cultures you had there, where there were a lot of people advocating something much like a favor economy, which eventually got formalized into stuff like free software, where you had major, multifarioius, multiuse applications built out of enlightened self-interest.
Koman: Tell us about the lives of the people in the Magic Kingdom in terms of collaborative filtering, being always online, having a data-rich existence. It all sounds a lot like peer-to-peer.
Doctorow: So there's this world I've written about called the Bitchun Society. And in the Bitchun Society there's no more scarcity, there's a kind of Clarke's Law technology that allows them to reproduce anything at zero incremental cost. And what's more, they don't die. You regularly check yourself into a clinic or terminal and make a copy of your brain and if you die they make a new you and pour that back into it. Lucky for me it's science fiction and not science so I don't have to explain the workings of this stuff.
Cory Doctorow will participate in the panel discussion, DRM in Practice: Rights, Restrictions, and Reality at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. The panel will draw on the experiences of current developers, reviewers, and users of multimedia technology to explore the practical effect of digital rights management on technological innovation.
I also don't have to explain the working of the neural interface, which in addition to allowing them to do this suck-your-brains-out-and-drop-it-onto-a-hard-driv
Koman: And there's left-handed Whuffie and right-handed Whuffie.
Doctorow: That's right, well, it's idiosyncratic. Unlike things like Google PageRank, it's not a beauty contest; it doesn't tell you what the average person thinks is right, or beautiful, or worthy of esteem, it tells you what people like you--people who bought this book also bought clean underwear--think about this resource. And because it's not domain-specific, because it spans all these domains, it's got this incredibly rich dataset, so it's like people who are like you on lots of different axes telling you what to think.
Now, everyone sort of runs their lives as a consequence of this because those few resources that are scarce--like esteem itself, attention, locations--are themselves regulated or apportioned according to Whuffie. The way that happens is that someone asserts that they are in a position to control the distribution of that resource. A group of people--an ad hoc--comes along and says this is our restaurant. And if people behave as if it's their restaurant, if people sit at the tables when they're told to sit, if they order food when they're told to order, if they eat the food when it comes on a plate, then in fact, those people are running the restaurant. But they're only running the restaurant for as long as someone else doesn't come in and successfully assert that they are now running the restaurant. And so there's this built-in incentive to always behave in a way that always makes everyone feel good.
Koman: So this is not unlike deciding who's going to run Venezuela.
Doctorow: Or Argentina, for that matter. One of the things I explore in this book is that it's not all sweetness and light, because there's a lot of sweetness and light. I mean, you end up with people who act in a way that winds up being fundamentally saccharine and conflict-avoiding, because no one wants to get in trouble with anyone, and you wind up with power-law distributions, where people who are popular wind up with the most opportunity to do things that make them popular, which makes them more popular, which gives them more opportunties to be more popular, and even though it's not supposed to be a beauty contest, when you get yourself into a good niche, when you end up running Disney World, that opportunity itself creates more opportunities.
Koman: How does this map to our reality?
Doctorow: I think cash is a rough approximation of Whuffie. Cash is supposed to reflect how much esteem you're held in. Although in a Whuffie society, there's no such thing as a rich a--hole, because "rich" and "a--hole" are the opposite of each other. But I think that in our real world we are plagued with positive returns to scale and power-law distributions. We see this in cash societies, where the rich get richer and have more opportunities to get rich. Certainly that was a characterstic of the technology bubble, where the people who had opportunities to buy in before IPO were the people who didn't need it, essentially. It's a characteristic in publishing, where the authors who get the publicity budget are the authors who are already famous. And it's certainly the case in Google, where being found when you're searched for increases the probability that someone will make a link to you, which increases the probability that you'll be found when you're searched for. That problem, although probably not intractable, is found in both cash and reputation societies. There needs to be some kind of antitrust law or garbage collector that periodically comes along and randomizes Whuffie if you're going to get anything like a merit-based distribution.
Koman: There's a scene in the book, where they ask the Imagineers, "How long to build?" And the guy says, "Five years." And they say, "No, without reviews, and approvals, and sign-offs." And the answer is eight weeks. You've had this experience of pulling together some entrepreneurial programmers but being completely stymied in being able to release your code
Doctorow: Well, both points of view are correct. One of the things that happens is they say, "Oh, by all means, go do whatever you want, just deliver in eight weeks, and what they find is that without all this planning and oversight, the engineers just wind up ratholing. They take these tiny little parts of the project that are interesting and they don't wind up delivering the actual project. On the other hand, command and control systems are prone to creating these enormous delays where you get sign-off and sign-off and sign-off, and then the CEO says, "Does it have to be gray, can't it be blue?" There's a happy medium somewhere in there.
I think that the thing about venture capital is that despite its risk-taking, it's inherently conservative. One of the best pieces of advice an entrepreneur can get is "retain control of your company." You want to be sure that the oversight from the VCs is board-level oversight, not operational oversight. You want the VCs to sit down and say, "Given that you're spending our money we want to make sure you're doing x." Not, "Why does that guy have two monitors, couldn't he just use one?"
One of the things that has happened in the Bitchun Society is that something that is inherently entrepreneurial has calcified into something quite bureaucratic, hide-bound, slow to change, run by committee, very risk-averse. That's a characteristic of revolutions, too. There's a speech by Abraham Lincoln that's reproduced in the Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln exhibit at Disneyland: "... if destruction be our lot, then we ourselves must be its author and its finisher. It cannot come from abroad; it will spring up from among us." Basically, the only thing that will destroy America is America. The only thing that will destroy the Bitchun Society is the Bitchun Society. And the only thing that will destroy an entrepreneurial company is to stop being entrepreneurial.
Koman: What's the backstory of the book? What happened to the Disney Corporation? How did the ad hoc groups come to rule?
Doctorow: That's never really made explicit, because I want the book to be fundamentally optimistic. But one of the things about the revolution is that you have to break some eggs to make the omelet. I have little bits and pieces of it
Koman: You speak of the recording industry as though it's already dead, or at least it will never get back to the way it was.
Doctorow: Well, sure, even the recording industry understands it will never get back to the way it was. I don't think it's dead. I think it is fundamentally changed and I think they're slowly coming to grips with that, although not as fast as we would like them to. But the recording industry has a story of, "We do two really important roles. One is to make music available and the other is to compensate artists." But one of the things we know is that 80 percent of all of the music ever released isn't for sale anywhere in the world. And another thing we know is that 97 percent of the artists signed to a recording contract earn less than $600 per year off of it. So Napster doesn't have a better track record at compensating artists, but it sure as shit had a better track record of making music available.
Napster filled a niche that the music industry was actually incapable of filling for legal and organizational reasons. I've had very earnest conversations with recording industry executives who told me it took forever to get the clearances to put 100 tracks online. Napster put 100 tracks online in the first eight seconds of its existence. So whatever happens, I can't believe that the hundreds of millions of people around the world currently enjoying filesharing--not just filesharers, but the people who get CDs from filesharers--those people aren't going to willingly say, "Yes, let's take the lion's share of our shared musical heritage and throw it away again, put it back in the vault for another 30 years until we can figure out how to make it available--minus whatever disappears between now and then because all known copies of it are destroyed." That isn't a possible outcome to the current struggle. There are lots of other possible outcomes, like serious damage to the rights to build general-purpose tools and so on, which I'm very concerned about. But I'm not concerned that the solution to this will involve throwing that music back in the vault.
Koman: Which goes to the question the Supreme Court wrestled with in Eldred, or the question they should have wrestled with anyway, which is, "What is the best way to ensure the dissemination of creative work?"
Doctorow: Or even more broadly, what is the best way to ensure continuity of our cultural heritage; what is the best way to ensure that things don't vanish? It really is an important question and it was in our side's brief, and unfortunately, it seems to me the Court didn't really address it at all. They said, "Well, Disney's stewardship of Mickey Mouse is above reproach, and therefore Disney deserves to continue holding the rights to the Mickey Mouse cartoons, which would enter the public domain if it weren't for the Sonny Bono act. And why do we want Mickey Mouse back in the public domain? It's not as if there's any absence of creative work being created with his likeness on it." And what they missed is that this has nothing to do with Mickey Mouse. The problem is that in order to keep Mickey Mouse in Disney's hands we are keeping everything that was made contemporaneous with Mickey Mouse out of the public's hands, and in many cases, those works are abandoned, very few copies survive, no one knows who the rights holders are, and before they go into the public domain, if indeed they ever do, all known copies will have vanished forever.
Koman: There's this ideal: univeral access to all human knowledge. The Internet is supposed to be the medium for that. It seems that Napster was doing that for music; peer-to-peer systems in general could enable the dissemination of all public domain stuff on the Net. And yet, probably no one has the chutzpah to suggest that anymore because they're likely to be prosecuted
Doctorow: Our common cultural heritage is basically distributed across attics across the world. The one thing that a centralized system could never do--I mean, eBay has shown this--is catalogue the contents of everyone's attics. What eBay demonstrated is that the only way to get the contents of everyone's attic catalogued is to ask everyone to catalogue their own attic. This is also true of cultural information. All the information that has ever been digitized is on someone's hard drive somewhere and the solution to making this all available isn't putting it all in one place; with apologies to Brewster, the solution is in keeping it in situ and finding ways for us to exchange it, and ensuring that whenever we exchange it, we increase its availablility, so we have nonrivalrous use of the information.
Koman: So what is your emotional relationship with Disney? You seem to have quite a warm spot in your heart for Walt
Doctorow: Yeah, everyone loves that crazy old Nazi corpsicle.
Koman: And yet in your day job, you see Disney as doing a lot of harm to the culture.
Doctorow: Well, it's possible to love the sin and hate the sinner. Yeah, I'm a tremendous fan of both Walt Disney and the Disney Corporation in a lot of spheres, not universally, but in a lot of valances. It's the only (publicly traded) company I've ever owned stock in. I grew up going to Disney parks in Florida. It really was one of the formative experiences of my childhood, these annual trips to Disney World to see this kind of techno-utopic autonomous zone. The Florida property especially exists in this kind of extralegal framework where it's not subject to state law--it can do things like build its own nuclear reactor without getting permission from the state government, it doesn't have to pay taxes
The Disney Corporation, when it's not being terrible, is wonderful. It's one of the most enlightened employers in terms of equal rights and gay rights. It's the largest gay employer in the Southland. It has amazing benefits packages, it's a great company to work for if you have kids.
In addition to this, I think that their art and technology kicks ass. But one thing you discover in the technology world, especially in free software, is that being a good programmer and being a good person are not necessarily correlated, or at least being a good programmer and being a person with whom other people want to spend a lot of time, who has good hygiene and good social skills, are not correlated.
Koman: Agree with you on hygiene, but what do you mean by being a "good person?"
Doctorow: There are people who have written great code who are d--ks.
Koman: Is that a greater number of d--ks than the random distribution of d--ks in the larger population?
Doctorow: Maybe not, but I'm not arguing that they're correlated. I'm arguing that eschewing someone's code because the person who wrote it is a d--k is a losing strategy. So there's a corollary in Disney in that they have built undeniably fantastic technology; they have built really interesting and innovative organizations around that technology; they continue to innovate all the time, as art and as science; it's good stuff. And the company does some stuff I'm really angry about in employment law, and in pollution, and in trade practices abroad, and in copyright law, and in technology. There's a lot of things about this company I'm very upset about as a shareholder and as a citizen of the world.
Richard Koman is a freelance writer and editor. He has written for Salon, New Architect, Internet World, and the O'Reilly Network.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
I'd like to take this opportunity to state that I am an excellent programmer with excellent hygene and social skills. Resume at link below.
Schnapple
From the article:
Having just finished the book, I can tell you what to make of it: A poor ripoff of John Varley's The Phantom of Kansas with karma added. Oh, and whereas Varley managed to pack his ideas into a well-paced short story, this one dragged out for 208 pages as it subjected us to Disney technical minutiae on the way to a disappointing resolution.
At least I found out how the ghost hall works in the Haunted Mansion.
"200 Quatloos on the newcomer!" "300 Quatloos against!"
Yeah, I hate to say this, but just because many programmers have sex, doesn't mean that you have to go far to find some that are stinky and/or socially unpleasant.
Bear in mind that "not correllated" means that there is no link between one and the other. If he said that being a programmer and having good hygeine were negatively correllated, then that could be a myth, since it indicates a link.
Mind you, compared to other professions where you sit at a desk, there probably is a weak negative correllation between programming and bathing habits. Unless I've just been really lucky in my jobs. Who knows, maybe it's just the games industry.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
I think this is a new category for shameless plugging of your own articles.
In the world of the 'Bitchun' Society,' what's scarce is esteem, called Whuffie. For content, we should already be living in the world of the Bitchun Society--any digital file can be copied endlessly without degradation. Only it can't, because we have accepted the notion of intellectual property and adopted laws that punish people for the wholesale copying of stuff. Doctorow's Net move is an opening to the Bitchun' world, and it poses plenty of questions. Why will anyone buy the book if they can get it online for free?
Considering that Whuffie is essentially used as cash in his universe, we'd have to set up an automatic micropayment system the deducts from our bank account whenever we like something. f course, this will never work because if we disliked something, the transaction would go the other way. Furthermore, he never discusses why no one ever tried to hack their Whuffie higher.
This is weird.... They talk of Disney as being cutting-edge.
While I know that disney is renowned for it's use of technology at their theme parks, I can't say that I've heard of any of it being cutting-edge. From what I've heard (and seen), Disney is still using 8-track tapes for the audio tracks of many of their (older) rides, as well as the for the control of animatronics, using the age old argument: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". Pneumatic tubes are still used for transporting paperwork (and garbage, but that's another story).
Of course, on the newer stuff they build, they're using, they've turned to using CDs, DAT, and of course, computers. But I certainly think their views on outdated technology (from what I have heard in the bast) make a lot of sense.
Do animatronic robots really need to be controlled by 2ghz computers over a secure fiber-optic TCP/IP link? No. Disney still uses their old system which has worked for several decades, and uses the old technology on some of the new stuff they build.
Just because it's old doesn't mean it's bad.
I suppose this is where a lot of the conflict in the company originates from. They used to be a really great company, but as of late, I've taken to strongly disliking their marketing strategies and overall business model - WE DICTATE YOUR CULTURE, BUY OUR PRODUCTS.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I code, therefore I stink.
Well, thank you captain Obvious!
Everybody has a purpose in life, maybe mine is to lurk in slashdot.
OK, fine, I give. They mention it and Cory doesn't step up to explain it. I've read the book twice and I don't get it: what's the difference between left-handed and right-handed Whuffie?
I also seriously doubt that sex truly comes first for you. If it did, you would probably know nothing about programming, and instead be a doctor or bartender. Or is that your craft?
We may not be movie stars, but all the coders I know have sex at least semi-regularly, with people they don't have to pay.
Free sex? Remember, you get what you pay for.
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
Hey man, where did you get that great GWB quote? Do you have a link to the article it was in?
Thanks!
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
remember you can't smell yourself.
you can't expect people to treat with you on a civilized level just because you're an Ubercoder if you *also* are a maloderous trogolodyte.
Correcting the argument while leaving out the conclusion is just as deceptive as missinterpreting the argument.
KFG
You ALWAYS pay for sex. It just may not be with money...
Download my free songs!
Woo, I feel honored. :)
Since when did programmers start becoming good at social interractions ? Why do you need to interract in the first place ? There is email, IM, IRC and other ways to communicate. All you need to be a good programmer is bitter coffee and hard rock music. As far as good person thing goes, programmers are always good people, you just have to get accustomed to their way of goodness :-) And no, being a good person is not same as being good at interracting socially...
Gods, I'm so tired of this. Some of us are good programmers (or used to be, before we burned out) and take showers daily. But neither good code nor smelling good means you can talk to other people. None of these have anything to do with the others.
As a burned-out programmer who can't talk to people very well, I'm only taking daily showers to help occupy the time between now and when I die.
I get enough of Doctorow's self-promotion from boingboing... this is getting ridiculous.
Maybe I'm just guessing here, but your choice of terms is misleading.
If you say that personal hygene and being a high quality programmer are have no correlation, it doesn't mean that most programmers don't bathe.
In fact, it's a statistic term that means there is no relationship between the two variables. Or, that it's just as likely to find a well dressed clean good programmer as a slob good programmer.
Maybe you were trying to imply there is an inverse correlation between the two?
I bought the book, and read it last week. It's a good story, but the ending is a letdown if a little bit suprising.
Most of the effort is in dreaming up the world of the near-future and the implants and wuffie.
I was more disappointed with the book before someone asked me what it was about. It turns out that you have to nearly recite the entire plot just to give a summary because of all the new ideas and setting.
Without explaining dead-heading, whuffie, the bitchun society, and the adhocs in disney, the rest of the story doesn't make any sense at all.
so, maybe the actual plot isn't as important as the environment that the story takes place in.
anyway -- it's a good quick read that will probably become a fixture in the scifi book world similar to Neuromancer or Burning Chrome.
some people really don't think Gibson is a good writer either
Oops, right you are. My bad.
>> being a good programmer and being a good person are not necessarily correlated
Most of my favorite artists, musicians, and writers were/are pretty $#itty human beings. It's discouraging to the point where I've stopped reading biographies about anyone who's work I admire. There are no heroes in the modern age.
and make them hang out with you and your programmer friends for a while. Maybe they will start picking up your good habits and get laid occassionally.
The truth doesn't care what I think.
You CAN smell yourself. The problem is by the time you do, everyone else has been smelling you long enough to give you an unflattering nickname.
True for body odor and doubly true for your breath.
And remember the rule of thumb: yes, you DO smell like pot and/or alcohol, very strongly in fact, you stinky motherfucker.
Flamebait?!?!
Obviously your moderator's SQ (Simpsons-Quotient) is woefully low.
And there is of course the assumption that if you aren't a freak then you obviously have no credibility. It's amazing to watch people cultivate their excentricity in a futile attempt to translate it into coolness. Posers are part of every culture, even the mass media mono-culture, and they are uniformly boring.
I wish people could just be OK with who they actually are.
-- "Most people prefer a popular myth to an unpopular truth"
Anyone who has met and spent any amount of time with RMS will know this description fits him more than it fits anyone you'll ever met in your lifetime.
a popular figure in the free software world. Anyone who has met him knows exactly who the author is talking about.
I work in the same building as Disney's ESPN.com and let me just say there are no smelly geeks on those floors. When the elevator door opens, its like looking into a frat house.
I seen a horse could do math.
Literary reference to Randell Jarell's _Pictures_from_an_Institution: - she was a great human animal, but a terrible human being
UNIX Trix
/etc/passwd
For those of you in the reseller business, here is a helpful tip that will
save your support staff a few hours of precious time. Before you send your
next machine out to an untrained client, change the permissions on
to 666 and make sure there is a copy somewhere on the disk. Now when they
forget the root password, you can easily login as an ordinary user and correct
the damage. Having a bootable tape (for larger machines) is not a bad idea
either. If you need some help, give us a call.
-- CommUNIXque 1:1, ASCAR Business Systems
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