Slashdot Mirror
ESR Recasts Jargon File in Own Image
don.g writes "As reported by NTK, ESR appears to have embarked apon the process of recasting the Jargon File in his own image, adding terms like "Aunt Tillie" and "GhandiCon" that he dreamt up and seemingly no-one else uses, and various terms from (of all places) the warblogging community, where he is active. He's also updated the "Hacker Politics" page to be more closely aligned with his own views."
And here I thought ESR was a level-headed, objective advocate of OSS.
levine
Great... an arbitrary geek. Can't really say i know much about said jargon file. It seems tho that this would cause problems if noone else used some of this.
The guy's an egomaniac, both online and off; if he's the maintainer of a project, he's god of the project. Whoever handed that one off to him is to blame, not ESR himself, because it's not like he's gone through some horrible, recent metamorphosis. :)
Linux: Bastardisation of GNU/Linux used by entities that simply don't care about all my hard work.
who has no idea who this guy is? Whould someone care to enlighten the rest of us?
... or as he was better known, Eric the Fsckhead. A real ladykiller at the SF cons, mm hmm.
Who the heck is ESR, and why is he messing with my jargon file!??
You can run but you can't hide, except, apparently, along the Afghan-Pakistani border.
that microsoft paid him to do it
Oh come now...ever since APL and C the geek community has relied on write-only, only-original-author-understands languages. This is just maintaining the great tradition.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
- There lived a man once who was called Gandhi. If you see the Jargon file, he uses Gandhi and Ghandi as if they were interchangeable. Then again, as long as you inventing you own Jargon, what's a spelling here and there?
- What, no gun advocacy yet?
What is wrong with adding phrases from the warbloggers and what is with singling that out as something "bad" (of all places)? Especially since that is an area where he is familiar.
A better objection, or better phrasing, would be the non-admittance of other phrases from other collectives. It sounds so juch more inclusive that way, much less of that pot-kettle business you know.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
He likes talking about guns a lot. I wouldn't mess
with him. If he wants to make up some words and
stuff, aweshum. At least he isn't climbing a tower
with a rifle, or 'liberating' anyone to death. YET.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
When a single person has that much control over the content of what is ostensibly a "living document", these things are bound to occur. I'm glad that he informed me that I'm supposed to reject hard-left political thinking, otherwise I may have embarassed myself in the near future.
Since the Netscape release in March 1998, I have been inundated with requests to speak at technical conferences, address user groups, and talk to corporate meetings about the Open Source concept. See my calendar of speaking engagements to find out when I might have time free.
What I will do
I'm willing to do all kinds of appearances. Open-source evangelism is my job now. I'll come to your meeting or presentation and donate my time. Yes, that's right, I'll do it for free (the first time, anyway). I accept honoraria, but I don't expect them and don't want to know about them in advance. I'm not doing this for money.
If you are not a local Linux user's group, you can make your request more attractive to me by scheduling a double-header with the local LUG or university.
In general, I like and will prefer proposals that allow me to do two or more events on the same out-of-town trip, so please look at my calendar and be creative. If I'm going to be in a city near you, consider coordinating with my sponsors to arrange a joint itinerary and lower costs for everybody.
(I'm free the first time. But if you're a profit-making entity and you decide you want my time on a regular basis, I'll have to think up a consulting rate.)
I can give talks or workshops on the following subjects:
The Open Source revolution: How software engineering might finally grow up
The Zen of Unix: Unix's design as philosophy, and vice versa.
Freedom, Power, and Software: What the Internet teaches us about ethics and politics.
Twenty Years Among the Hackers: My life as an accidental ethnographer.
My standard road show is basically `The Open Source Revolution', with five modules on (a) the bazaar development model, (b) socio-anthropology of hacker customs, (c) open source economics and business models, (d) effective open-source advocacy, (e) a long strange trip report (my life as an accidental revolutionary). I do whichever of these modules the audience tells me it wants in the time available.
I don't use visuals, nor will I require an operating computer nearby for my talks. I prefer to work without a podium and with a hand microphone (cordless if possible, lavalieres have poor sound quality and don't give me volume control). A bare stage is best; I move around and gesture a lot when I talk. Please also have a roving microphone available so the audience can ask questions.
What you need to do
I don't have a regular income, so I can't afford to let these trips cost me money. Also, I hate sweating details and filling out expense forms. So you need to cover my travel and lodging expenses, and I want you to do it so I never have to lay out cash or fill out forms. (Also please bear in mind that I do not have a credit card. This is deliberate; I value my privacy.)
If there's air travel involved, I want my plane fare prepaid and prebooked. If there's a hotel stay needed I want the room tab guaranteed, incidentals and meals and all (no chintzy base-rate-plus-tax-only stuff; I loathe having to argue with the front desk).
Let me emphasize that last, because conference organizers seem to have trouble following through on this. If I am asked for a credit card at checkin time, you have screwed up. Don't screw up, or I won't come back.
If you're a cash-strapped user's group or small startup company, I'm a cheap date -- economy class and space on somebody's daybed, or half of an inexpensive hotel room, will do fine.
If you're a big company or a conference that charges admission, I expect you to pony up for business class or first class (so my travel exhaustion will be minimized) and I don't ever want to have to even look at the hotel bill. I don't use booze or have any other expensive tastes I can gratify on the road, so you don't have to worry about a bar tab or anything like that.
If you want me to be in the air for longer than four hours, y
ESR's been doing this for years - ever since he took over maintenance of the Jargon File, he's been adding crap definitions that exist only to push his views.
That's why I treasure my original copy of the GLS-edited Hacker's Dictionary...
Just glancing over the site I see that the first entry in the changelog is the Entry called '404' - clicking upon that entry gives you what?
A 404 - page not found error.
I wonder how that'll be represented in the paper version of the book, perhaps listing it in the index as page 2.5?
1 ESR is basically redefining everyone around you to only exist in your own personal universe, where you of course are the most important person alive. Thus 1 ESR is the maximum this unit can ever attain, anything above 1 would mean instant insanity.
With apologies to Douglas Adams.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
This is not new. Ever since ESR first took over the dictionary he has been writing it around his own image. I guess he just found some time now to do a worse job and go full out.
A dictionary should not have opinions in it and the lexicon is full of it.
Once again, it's Gandhi, not Ghandi.
Also, while the changelog spells it correctly, the link there again points to the "Ghandi" spelling. This is the correct link.
And for the curious and lazy, this is the corresponding entry:
GandhiCon
There is a quote from Mohandas Gandhi, describing the stages of establishment resistence to a winning strategy of nonviolent activism, that partisans of open source and especially Linux have embraced as almost an explanatory framework for the behaviors they observe while trying to get corporations and other large institutions to take new ways of doing things seriously:
First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.
In hacker usage this quote has miscegenated with the U.S military's DefCon terminology describing âdefense conditionsâ(TM) or degrees of war alert. At GhandiCon One, you're being ignored. At GhandiCon Two, opponents are laughing at you and dismissing the idea that you could ever be a threat. At GhandiCon Three, they're fighting you on the merits and/or attempting to discredit you. At GhandiCon Four, you're winning and they are arguing to save face or stave off complete collapse of their position.
Somebody should fork this project now.
I always did think that the section at the back entitled "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker" read more like "A Portrait of Eric S. Raymond".
-Stephen
And in other news, it has been reported that the sky is blue and the grass is green. Move along folks, nothing to see here.
..it's ESR.
This piece at NTK sounds like flamebait. For the following reasons.
1) They claim he's added terms to the jargon file that... "on closer search-engine examination, appear to have been used almost exclusively by Raymond himself."
The concept that a term that is (by the very context of it's entry) "jargon" would have to have any search engine presence seems like a very bad assumption. Though it's not a common part of net-speech, I'd had the word "Fucktard" taunted at me in Half-Life TFC games long before I'd read it in anything a search engine could reference. The fact that one of the hacker communities most literate advocates would have the majority of hits for a new bit of jargon sounds more like probability mechanics at work than any sinister plot by ESR to reshape the vocabulary of the Internet.
2) They take issue with his update of the "politics" section. It's 77 words long, and seems like as good a summary as one could come up with. http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/politics.html
3) I've put together documents like his rebuttal to the SCO mess, and they are an nightmare of fact checking and redesign. When someone makes claims as preposterous as SCO did regarding Linux it's hard to know where to start. It's even harder to know how much background is needed to explain your points to non-unixphiles. I read the whole document and it was a work of art. It was clear, it had links to piles of substantiating data, I'd be surprised if the IBM legal team didn't throw a party when they first read it.
Did anyone pay ESR for this massive effort?
Does anyone else find it thoughtless and ungrateful to criticize one of the communities greatest single person assets because the tremendous efforts he puts forth FOR FREE are colored by his personal experiences?
That ESR is the deity of hackers. He made all of hackerdom in his own image, and is only now shaping his page into his own hacker holybook. I can't wait to read the Apocalypse according to ESR.
Ruchard Stallman could have changed it and added "GNU/" in front of every word!
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
They gave ESR more free time to waste by not accepting his CML2. Linus, you should measure your decisions more carefully.
sgis ddo ekil t'nod i
I wept when, inexplicably, I could no longer access esr/jargon.
/Const Woe=Me
Now, it is back; the same, yet different. And I weep again.
Such is this "life" thing.
ESRian: someone so obsessed with himself that sometimes believed he's Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Bogus
I saw ESR speak a few years ago. It was a pretty small group (~50 people or so), and so the floor was constantly open to questions for him. He was an absolute dickhead. I asked him simply why he didn't include computer security experts in his definition of hacker and he went off on me for 20 minutes. I then countered with a perfectly valid point. To which he countered with a school-boyish sneer, and nothing more.
He is also the most self-centered geek I've encountered. I can remember vividly a few years ago that he published "10 Sex Tips for Geeks" on Valentines day. If you have ever layed eyes on the man, you know that he is the last person you would ever want to be accepting sex tips from.
If we want this open source movement to take off, we need somebody who's a little more socially adept as our spokesperson. Don't even get me started on how outrageous the whole bazaar and geek-gift culture are.
__________________________________________
Take comfort in your ignorance.
Grandmaster Plague
i see what u mean.
Yet Socrates himself is particularly missed.
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he's pissed.
Base, n
All belong to us!
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Or, rather, "attacking the dictionary".
If the gang at NTK are so wound up about this, there is a simple solution - create a fork of the Jargon File (and maintain it, themselves). Quoting from the introduction:
So ... they have a choice between whining about what ESR has done, or doing something about it, and they chose to whine.
Heh. I guess I'm whining about them whining about ESR. Pot. Kettle. Oopsie.
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley
I certainly don't.
I'll do it for free (the first time, anyway)
In other news, Microsoft, creators of the "Open Source is like a virus" theory, have unveiled the "Open source is like drug dealership" theory.
By reading this comment, you immediately waive any and all rights regarding it.
Finally (and not included in the changelogs), Eric has tweaked the Hacker Politics page, from its previous description as "vaguely liberal-moderate" to "moderate-to-neoconservative (hackers too were affected by the collapse of socialism)". Go tell that to the Kuro5hinners, Eric.
Unless he's been holding surveys, the claims made for politics (both past and current) are impossible to verify. My guess is that the original statement reflected the people he associated with, and the current one does as well. (And if he's active in "warblogging", the people he hangs out with are probably conservative) Unless someone puts together a survey and figures out how to administer it to a representative cross section of the community, we won't have enough statistical data to back up any claim.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Fork.
______
Like any public domain or copyleft project, it doesn't really matter what kind of job the maintainer does with the Jargon File, since alternate versions may be created effortlessly. ESR should be free to do whatever he likes with the thing, even if it's a bit silly. And since ESR isn't bothering anymore to host the definitive version himself, and hasn't for like a year or something, and 90% of the jargon file mirrors found on google are old versions anyway, it isn't like a forking would even be noticed.
I read the article after writing this comment and noticed NTK kind of makes this point themselves, but I think it's worth reiterating. Esp. since no one reads the article around here.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
ESR's secret slashdot user name...
I think this line gave you away
" Does anyone else find it thoughtless and ungrateful to criticize one of the communities greatest single person assets because the tremendous efforts he puts forth FOR FREE are colored by his personal experiences?"
Just because some isn't paid to do something selfish and egotistical, doesn't mean we have to like it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
if he has polluted it, anyone have any reccomendations on where i can get a clean non bastardized version of jargon ? everything2.com ? whatis.com ?
thanks
regards
David Saddle
If they can get him laid, then they should be able to get anyone laid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
GandhiCon: 779 hits
GandhiCon -eric -raymond -esr: 681 hits
At most 13% of all uses references Eric Raymond.
I'll just add that all the complaints about ESR's ego, bring to my mind how well he must have done in keeping his, supposedly gigantic, ego out of the orignal jargon file.
I, myself, am curious why ANY ONE PERSON, would have such control over something like this. My suggestion is to make the f^cking thing WikiWiki, and let the whole hacker community edit it and add to it. Donâ(TM)t know why the hell it wasnâ(TM)t done that way in the first place. Thereâ(TM)s no denying itâ(TM)s right in line with ERSâ(TM)s philosophy, so he should embrace it. He should, but he wonâ(TM)t. Heâ(TM)ll go against his very philosophy because he likes the power heâ(TM)s got now. And since he wonâ(TM)t, my suggestion would be to take the advice that don gives in the article. Fork the file, and make it the âtrueâ(TM) version by making it the collaborative voice of the entire community, and make ESRâ(TM)s little diatribe irrelevant.
ESR is a drooling retarded moron, you just have to watch "The Code" to see what I mean.
About six months ago I looked for copies of the older versions of the Jargon File. That was not as easy as it sounds. I don't know if ESR has been intentionally ridding the internet of the older versions, but I wasn't too happy about how difficult they were to find. If the older versions of the Jargon File completely disappear, then a valuable part of computer history will be lost. In it's place will be the mindless, egotistical rants of someone who thinks the Open Source community revolves around himself.
That's why I treasure my original copy of the GLS-edited Hacker's Dictionary...
ME TOO!
Seriously. I found "The Hacker's Dictionary" in a bookstore in Ketchikan, Alaska, in 1984. Until then, I felt as if I was the only geek in the world. After that, I realized I was the only geek in Alaska, and there was a real world Out There.
If these allegations are true, and ESR is allowing editorial power to overcome the editor's responsibility to accurately reflect hacker culture, then this is a Very Bad Day for our collective family.
I propose a new rule for the editor of the Jargon File: the editor cannot contribute entries, and instead is relegated to the role of researching and selecting entries, and possibly editing them for language and content (rather like TNT does to movies).
However, as others have pointed out, the Jargon File is ESR's baby. If Guy L. Steele trusted him, I guess we have very little to say. The most we could do would be to fork the Jargon File and create a project called "The Hacker's Dictionary," with CVS access, an XML schema, etc.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I thought you were gonna suggest eating him, which, though it would accomplish an admirable end, it would be quite difficult to find anyone to eat him, let alone touch him. I suggest sharks.
Meyer criticizes the self-assumed ethical superiority of ESR, RMS, and others, and in particular notes the "gun evangelism" ESR intertwines with his open-source evangelism.
This thoughtful article should be required reading for all overly-strident geeks.
Nah, that's just plain old ESR (a bit younger and thinner, though).
I'd say this picture shows more of a metamorphosis. :-)
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
Where does Raymond get off claiming authority over the "Hacker's Dictionary". He's not even mentioned in the original edition. The real "Hacker's Dictionary", of course, comes from the MIT AI Lab, and the MIT Jargon File. The original book publication was in 1983 (Steele, Guy. New York, Harper & Row, ISBN 0-06-091082-8). That's the Hacker's Dictionary. Everything else is popular trash by people who weren't there.
And where was the open/free graphical OS back in 1991? To compete with Windows 3.1 and the Mac? With things like PageMaker and WordPerfect and Excel and so on?
Especially amusing is this:
It always seemed to me that he's describing himself.http://www.maxwell.com/ultracapacitors/products/PC 2500.html
Actually, the fellow who was giving space on tuxedo.org for Eric kicked him off in the obviously impolite manner that you can see from your link. Rather than insert a redirect to catb.org, or put in his own explanation for why he broke all of Eric's URLs, he's just redirecting to J. Random pages. Jerk. Eric is in fact still hosting the definitive version.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Documentation makes the code (of ethics) easier to read, Eric.
That's free as in free association, not free as in free to be you and me, as he never said.
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
ESR is on retainer to IBM making money hand over fucking fist as a consultant on the SCO case. I'm not going to say how I know this, and I'm posting as an AC. But suffice to say, yes he's getting paid, and paid VERY well.
Unfortunately, Betrand Meyer is probably one of the few people *more* bombastic and annoying than ESR. Really, there is nothing of interest in Meyer's bogus ad hominem attack against ESR. I don't like guns either, but what in the hell does that have to do with software?
And the whole "Tartuffe" attack against RMS was just sickening. Does anyone have any evidence that RMS is *not* sincere? Just because a famous French play showed that some noble-seeming people are hypocrites, doesn't mean that all are hypocrites.
Chrisd
Co-Editor, Open Sources
Open Source Program Manager, Google, Inc.
and
You can keep the personal attacks...I don't buy them because they seem to spring from either long-held grudges or unsubstantiated claims against Eric's character.
What bothers me is the apparent willingness of this community to attack a person that has done a lot to bring us all here in the first place. If you don't like ESR's version of the jargon file, feel free to fork your own, or email ESR with your specific complaints and work it out.
I'm not disappointed that Taco posted this story because it's not a bad idea to question those we consider leaders in this loose society that is the FOSS community...but I'm surprised and a bit disappointed at how quickly we turn into a bunch of sharks willing to devour each other. The tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy theory part of my brain thinks that any proprietary-software-funded trolls have certainly earned their money in this thread.
--K.
Sig: Bad people happen. Try to avoid being one of them.
Now if people would just stop saying "It's called cracker, not hacker. Teh jargon file even says so."
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Eric Raymond sat at his computer terminal, the blue glow bathing his balding scalp in radiation. Using his favorite open-source tools, he gave a final review of the portable network graphics image. Eric smiled subconsciouly at the face beaming back at him - an old, black and white photo of Ricardo Montalban, made up for his groundbreaking role as Armando in Escape from the Planet of the Apes.
;)," he replied.
Eric gave the image a final cropping, trimming it down to the bare essentials before saving it to the 3.2 gigabyte Fujitsu hard drive paid for with his newfound wealth. Using more open-source tools, he attached the image to his GPL'ed ICQ client and sent the image to the fourteen year old girl nicknamed CherryDeelite.
He waited patiently.
"wow, u r a hotee," came the reply.
Eric smiled and wiped back a few greasy strands of hair with his sweating and trembling hand. Quickly, he prepared his notebook of sex-tips and dipped his quil into a bottle of freshly-opened ink.
"thanx, u r 2
"who is ur fave backstreet boy?"
Eric turned even more pale than normal. His mind reeled. Without thinking, he blurted out the first name he thought of, "Ringo."
A long pause greeted him. He wiped the perspiration from his forhead.
"u r funee!"
Eric breathed a sigh of relief. He grabbed his quil and scribbled in his sex-tips notebook, "women like humor."
"what is ur fave subject in school?"
An easy one, "open-source software."
"wow, u must be smart!"
"women like intelligence," he noted.
And then he finds out the cute teen girl is really RMS and he becomes gay or something.
yawn
Some links
8 94 139
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=63272&cid=5
"My little town has a eight little churches"
"heated but friendly arguments over MVPs like Bruce, Eric, and Richard"
http://www.catb.org/~esr/personal.html
"I live in Malvern, Pennsylvania"
http://www.churchangel.com/WEBPA/malvern.htm
Reading the account's comments, it has an "us vs. them" attitude WRT open source, and claims long-time involvement, yet it's a very recent account. Oh, and most damning of all, ESR has a cat.
whoever moderated you as flamebait was metamod unfair.
"Gandhicon" may not be a word in common use, but it has a lot of nice features. Why should WSR not be able to use his position of influence on hacker vocabulary to expose neologisms he likes?
Take everything he says with a grain of salt. Hell, take everything anyone says with a grain of salt. (Except maybe Linus himself. All hail Linus.)
Raymond says a lot of silly things and a lot of interesting things. Do you think the right way to respond to this is to ask him to shut up? The cost of silly things is small compared to the benefit of interesting things. Raymond easily manages a high enough ratio that it's worth paying attention to him.
mt
Let's be fair here, this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. I used to read NTK until I got sick of the snotty political commentary they tended to work into many of of their (quite interesting and witty) reports. In particular, IIRC, they've always been fond of slinging mud at ESR, who's views happen to be about as far as you can get from the generally leftist slant of NTK. There's no question that ESR puts his own spin on just about everything he does, but NTK calling him on it is a bit like IndyMedia accusing CNN of being "controlled by the Man". I don't really expect neutral content from either source.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
Someone should tell ESR there are hackers outside of Texas. Neo Conservatism is virtually inexistant in Europe, where the corporate brain washing procedures are much less developped than they are in ESR's trailer park, and have to actually compete with a working education system.
Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
He's been doing this FOR YEARS.
It's very easy to see an agenda by it's editor when you read the Jargon file. Problem is, there's a lot of good stuff in there that isn't poisoned by ESR...yet. Hope someone made a copy before he became a maintainer.
The latest OED also seems to have trouble with adding some slang terms that are obscure or will quickly vanish from common use.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
One rainy night, I was on Warren Avenue in Malvern, PA, walking towards the Septa station...
And... I really had to go the the bathroom. Badly. But. The closest public bathroom was at Anthony's Pizza, some blocks down.
So I peed on somebody's lawn.
I'm pretty sure it was his.
Though I've never met the man.
Okay, Eric *might* have coined the term GandhiCon, but I've heard quite a number of other people cite the Gandhi quote as an explanation for the Linux adoption process.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
are you just talking or do you really want to do it? anybody else interested in reclaiming that project from the malignant hands of ESR?
Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
As a general rule, anyone in the OSS community who is referred to by their 3 initials is likely to be nuts.
He's the maintainer, he has the power, he uses it. Show me the guy who wouldn't put in some of their own stuff and their own views. I would, and so would 99.9% of people.
I was recently reading the rough draft to ESR's 'The Art of Unix Programming' (or something like that) which is available on his website. The guy certainly has the right to write whatever he wants, but there were a couple of comments in the 'history of Unix' (or something like that) part that came off as really self-aggrandizing. Mention of The Cathedral and the Bazaar is very important, but as far as I can tell ESR really overstated the importance of OSI and his open-source definition. According to ESR the 1998 conference which decided on the definition was some sort of seminal moment in the history of software, but as a geek who was around at the time, I can't say I even remember it.
*sigh* http://www.everything2.com?node=Neoconservative.
Neoconservatives tend not to own guns.
Here's a new word for you --- "ESRhole"
...or something like that.
..which I hope somebody will do:
ESRhole - one who takes command of something, proclaiming himself God and is no longer subject to criticism.
As for applicable fixes, wget yourself a mirror of v4.2 here
I know, it's still got a bit of ESR in there, but it's free from the latest bugs, and so therefore more easily cleaned...
Fork it! *kerrack* Fork it good!
With the slightly older version, all one needs to do is set up a new tribunal or something to clean it, repost it, and then add to it as a team. Split the power three or five ways-- hold monthly or bimonthly meetings to discuss submissions, and Make It So.
THAT would be a Good Thing.
Barak Michener
The pre-ESR version of the Hacker's Dictionary is online as well. http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html
For those too busy to read the article summary above, here's a summary summary:
Seriously, if the editors of Slashdot bitching about someone else's editorial bias isn't an example of the pot calling the kettle black, then I have no idea what is.
I can't believe this guy. He thinks he's God or something. I started reading "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" a week ago, and still haven't finished it. I couldn't read more than a page at a time because it was so dripping with his egoism. I mean, it makes me sick to read that stuff.
the toothpaste is frozen
A few years back at Geekfest in Cambridge (MA), a co-worker of mine observed ESR telling a local newspaper reporter with a straight face that all geeks are libertarians. I don't think that the idea that every single last one of his fellow engineers might not subscribe to every last one of his pet political causes would ever occur to the man.
Raymond has always been an egomaniac blowhard with a self-opinion exceeding his actual worth by several orders of magnitude, and if you don't believe me, just ask any member of the linux kernel mailing list.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
If only someone had taught him to keep his finger off the trigger...
To be fair, I'm certain a gun enthusiast like ESR knows better; still, it sucks to have your lapse in gun safety photographed and spread across the internet.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
...is a Smith & Wesson.
Graham
Linux - Fast Pane Relief
For what it's worth, the name's Gandhi, not Ghandi.
Pronunciation from M-W.com
-Shaunak.
This isn't the first time ESR has added the terms of his cronies to the Jargon File. In the last version he added a whole bunch of stuff from alt.mail.abuse.admins. It reeked of "5h0u75 o|_|T5 2 /\/\Y k-R4d |-|()m3 80y33Z!!@#!@#!@#!!"j
That is *SO* true. He's the one responsible for all the "the proper term is cracker" threads that break out here. The term cracker was *never* widely used. Old time computer nerds of any hat color were "hackers". According to was Obscure Images of the cDc:
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
A couple of years ago I made a post complaining about ESR in general and the Jargon file specifically. One of ESR's 'claims to fame' was being the maintainer of the Jargon file, but he was doing a pretty poor job. It contained mostly obsolete terms, and missed out on obvious things like Quake, Apache, JDK (it has an entry for java, but simply said that it sucked and hackers would stay away from it.).
Someone flamed me saying that it was for 'serious things', i.e. not quake, yet the file contained Nethack.
The future of the Jargon file lays in places like everything2, which has far more information then the jargon file, and other computerized, database systems.
To be honest, I really wish people simply stop talking about ESR and ignore him. Hopefully he'll go away.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The Emperor Has No Clothes
What's an Idiotarian? To my way of interpreting this writing, it's basically anyone ESR or his adherents disgrees with. At first, an idiotarian is anyone who supports terrorists and tyrants, a/k/a the American Left. However, the screed goes on to assail the American Right, who are most often in support of eliminating terrorists and tyrants. So, yeah, anyone who doesn't subscribe to ESR's version of militant libertarianism is an idiotarian.
A lot of people here were really beating up on ESR; I decided to my own checking and decided that the guy is veering dangerously close to Unabomber material. Guns, anarchy, manifestos against both political sides, whatever. Time to get a cabin in the woods and issue forth open-source decrees. Just don't wrap 'em around pipe bombs and everything will be okay.
Raymond, Eric S. Raymond. master spy..
See, he's so ugly no one would suspect a thing.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
that a gun-wielding egomaniac should be quoting Gandhi. LOL.
Actually, breaking copy-protection schemes was 'cracking' and people who did that were called 'crackers'. It never had anything to do with network security until ESR got his grubby little mitts on it. And thankfully that use seems to have died out.
If ESR had any brains he would have picked something not being used alredy, like a translation of the chinese term 'dark guest'. But he didn't.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
fucktard first apeared on usenet in 1994. half life was released in 1998.
A fucktard is you.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
We all feel we can do it better than Eric so let's engage in some bikeshedding by picking at minor details and criticizing ad-nauseum.
Eric Raymond has spent considerable time and invested a *lot* of work over the years - and not just on the jargon file but as an advocate of open source and hackerdom generally. For-goodness-sake, he was the main author of Fetchmail, so that makes him a *real* unix hacker who has written *real* working open source code that is on just about every unix/linux box around (unlike some wannabe losers as I suspect most of the anti-ESR posters might be). He wrote "The Cathedral & the Bazaar" which has been described as having persuaded Netscape to open source thier browser and thereby create the mozilla project. How many of us can say that ! I can't, so I wont criticize, even if I don't agree with everything he puts in the file. So those wannabes who feel like they have the stature to criticize... go ahead, flame away. Spend all day and night flaming about what color the bikeshed should be.
If the everybody feels that the hacker lexicon should be a "scholarly work" with only substantiated widespread usage included, set up a forum or mail-list and accept submissions for new words and phrases with proof of actual usage (like links to mailing list entries and boards where the word has actually been used). Measure occurances and if an entry gets enough "critical mass", then submit it to Eric for inclusion. Hey - maybe you can get your sociology doctorate that way. Participate, just don't sit there throwing flames.
I would bet ESR would describe this as, "some snotty know it all wanted to start an argument, but I ignored him and moved on with my talk so I wouldn't bore the hell out of the audience."
It's also a no-brainer, on grounds of pure self-interest, to take reasonable precautions against STDs. I'm going to buck the current wisdom here and point out that, statistically, AIDS is a negligible risk for white heterosexuals in the U.S. unless your partner has needle tracks or you have an ulcerating STD like chancroids. Outside those circumstances, people in the U.S. and other developed countries probably get killed by lightning strikes more often than they catch AIDS through unprotected heterosexual intercourse (which is why the disease is now in decline here and has been for years).
Of course, we all know all geeks are White, and that race is the most important determinant of AIDS-yness
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The other half being to include terms which are politically incorrect by ESR's right-wing standards.
So, it's a matter of inclusion, as well as filtering.
Of course, I love the tuxedo.org idea...unless the man who runs tuxedo.org is another gun nut, and they simply fell out over implementation.
Warblogging is simply blogging about military politics. Quite stupid, really.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It is for these people that MacOS 9 was created.
Not MacOS X, mind you...there are just enough unixisms to allow a random luser to make a complete mess of it. MacOS 9 has no daemons running by default (ditch Web Sharing to make sure) and no way to remotely login unless you install third-party programs like VNC or RumpusFTP. (For godsake keep 'em away from P2P programs!)
Aside from the occasional Word Macro Virus (easily avoided by keeping Ma and Pa away from Office 2001 or Office98) and a few random worms like HK Autostart and Sevendust (Freeware proggies like WormScanner and Agax will get them) they are virus-free. I don't think even the Mac version of Lookout Excess is prone to the kind of trojan horses the Windows version is prone to.
Just find a used iMac (CRT kind, not LCD kind...they are going cheap on eBay) and if you're lucky, it will come with a MacOS "system restore" disk. Before you start up, buy a low-priced USB mouse or trackball to replace the ergonomic nightmare that is the "hockey puck" mouse. Boot the iMac with one of those puppies, open up Drive Setup, and initialize that HD. Then do a reinstall of the system. Put Eudora on it for mail, Mozilla for the web* (IE for Mac is a POS) and then put the machine behind a Linksys and have the Linksys handle the DHCP authentication for the cable modem. Don't activate the DHCP server in the Linksys, just give the iMac a static IP in the range of the Linksys and give it the Linksys' LAN IP as its gateway.
You do that, Bob's your uncle, and your parents can surf 'til the cows come home. And they won't come home with back doors, trojans or viruses.
*Even easier: AOHell BYO Access program. $10 over and above their cable bill each month, unless they are on Time Warner Cable and if memory serves me right it is included. A "Walled Garden" designed for n00bz.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Sir:
You state: "Thus 1 ESR is the maximum this unit can ever attain, anything above 1 would mean instant insanity"
You are wrong.Let me realign your thinking for you, since I know whats best anyway.
ESR himself is still in a developmental stage.
His ego is still maturing and growing. If an ESR unit can attain a max value of 1, then what happens when ESR himself exceeds his own level of egosity(not to mention bogosity)?
Well I'll tell you:
ESR will under go what is known as spontaneous fission of mind. Thus there will be two ESRs WITHIN the skullcase of one ESR. Therefore ESR himself will have achieved a ESR unit level of two.
I suggest to you that you make yourself familiar with the concept of "molar weight" in chemistry- you will see that the ESR unit of egosity is similar to that!. (ESR has a lot of moles where you can't seem 'em)
Thank you for you attention,
ESR
Sir:
You state:
"If the gang at NTK are so wound up about this, there is a simple solution - create a fork of the Jargon File (and maintain it, themselves)."
That would be less fun
urbandictionary.com has the best format for this sort of thing (IMO).
The only thing ESR did for the OSS community was attach his name to it and cash in.
And write a few utilities.
Name one thing that wouldn't have happend without him. Unlike linux (you can't say we would have had linux without him) or RMS (you can't say we would have had anything like the GPL at all without him) ESR has produced nothing but hot air. The OSI was created with Parens and probably would have come about if ESR never existed.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I mean. Fortunetly for you the slashdot editors didn't say anything about ESR, they just posted a link and comments that were sent to them.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
ESR didn't write the thing, he just took the public domain text, added a few entries, and declared himself a god.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
This ESR sounds like a real fuckin' asshole.
and I've noticed that most geeks that carry handguns give them a feeling of power that is generally nonexistant in thier lives.
you know, no balls without a gun in thier hand.
I have nothing aginst guns, It is a constitutional right to own a gun in the US. it just seems that rednecks, criminals and geeks are the majority.
What's worse, some of those definitions may have been stolen from SCO.
SCO is threatening to sue but they refuse to identify the stolen definitions.
...ESR with RMS.
It is funny. Really!
RMS was the most hated person on the planet. Bill Gates et. al. hated him for obvious reasons; then hackers and open-source/free-software guys also started hating him, calling him a communist (which he isn't).
ESR was able to get loved by at least a small part of the corporate world, and by a huge chunk of the open-source/free-software world. And now, the newst wave ESR-hating has begun. Why? Because he is not a communist (which is true by the way).
Come on people, decide what you want to think of people? You can either think of them as communist or not and hate/love them for it (irrespective of what they really are). But, not both way. Or, better yet, just shut up.
... all our catch phrase are belong to ESR ...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
... for a /. poll. It would by no means be the scientific evidence you're looking for, but it would certainly be interesting thought fodder.
i an?i c?
Where do you see yourself in the Political Spectrum?
NeoConservative?
Paleoconservative?
Liberitar
Traditionally well-established Liberal (hippie)?
Post-Scarcity Gift Cultural?
Redmondcentric?
PaleoNeoCowboyNealist
Neoconservative? Get fucking real man!
What a fucking idiot.
The politics entry makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
Yes, I'm sure hackers in India and the United Arab Emirates are big NeoCons!
Fucking typical "the world revolves around me and my hick neighborhood out in East Bumfuck USA" bullshit.
Oh and here's a newsflash fuckio just because the Soviet Union collapsed doesn't mean people in those countries don't still like socialism. The Communist Party is still very strong in those countries so to say that since socialism fell into a pit of freemarket chaos that everyone turned conservative is to be a fucking idiot. Trust me, all the people who are unemployed (most of those countries are running 20% unemployement right now) or are dying because they can't get healthcare anymore or their kids can't get an education anymore, those people long for the days of socialism instead of this freemarket savagery.
I have no beef with the entry on GandhiCon, which I thought was witty and deserving of a place.
There are a few entries where the ESR-factor is bothering me, though, with the hacker politics page being the worst.
I love the line "Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day." which rings very true to my ears, and how the geeks (including myself) view politics. (I know people of both category a and b.)
However, that category "b" definitely includes socialistic (esp. anarchistic) views, especially (but not limited to) outside the US. I've met plenty of hackers who hate all lefties and I've met plenty who see themselves as socialist. The phrase "affected by the collapse of socialism" just sounds like what I read in plenty of rightwing-oriented literature (I like to read stuff from both sides of the camp), but it seems false. The latest years I've seen a great strengthening in various leftlibertarian/anarchist movements. The only thing that's crumbling with the Berlin wall is leninism (and part of marxism), not the socialistic ideals themselves.
Tonight, being in a good mood since it's a nice summer night here, I feel like suggesting that hackers should view each other with kindness regardness of immediate political view. Most hackers have a fondness for freedom, and even though some of us think that corporatism and capitalism are the greatest contemporary threat to that freedom while others think that capitalism is the best means to reach and uphold a state of freedom, the entry in the jargon file should reflect that hackerdom is not a homogenous political movement.
I saw him speak once downtown (NYC) and was turned off by the fact that some lady got up during "question time" and asked somethiing related to propriatery software. He then stated he would not answer her question because she was talking about closed-source. I'm sure he's done wonderful things for the community, but that doesn't matter. I'm not impressed.
-- A cat is no trade for integrity!
The only change that ESR has recently made to the hacker politics page is adding one clause reflecting the slight conservative shift after the collapse of the USSR. And I've been using the term "Aunt Tillie" for a while now. Whomever posted this article obviously has a bug up his ass about ESR - which is understandable if you don't like his politics - but the accusations leveled at him here are totally groundless.
ESR claims to be an anarchist. He is not. Anarchists believe in the abolishion of all domination and oppression. ESR supports corporate hierachical strutures and capitalism - these are both paradigms of domination.
With all the money he has, Eric surely has time to fix it.
I hate how Eric Raymond tries to define an entire culture of hackers. Many of his ideas are not true, such as Java REPLACING C++. I'm a mix of Republican and Libertarian, but I believe that most hackers/geeks are anarchists/socialists. He claims his ideas came from a survey of Usenet, but where are the numbers? I think he wrote it all himself.
The article makes a specific claim about ESR's recent changes to the Jargon file, a document that he himself maintains, and I will comment on those claims and attempt to explain why I do not believe the claim has merit with respect to the "indications" (evidence) the article suggests.
It claims he added terms he dreamed up that no-one else seems to use as evidenced by search engine use and cited as examples: "Aunt Tillie", "GhandiCon".
He added terms from the warblogging community where he is active.
He aligned the Hacker Politics page to his own views.
Firstly The article links to a site that begins with: "*the* weekly high-tech sarcastic update for the uk>" This should start the warning bell, "The text is probably intended to be humor"
As to the particular instances, individually:
[1] Is perhaps true, that is if ESR goes by many aliases, as there seem to be multiple people using these terms, however:
[2] I expect it to be true that he writes definitions mostly for words he is the most familiar with. This doesn't mean he's rewriting The Jargon File in his own image: it means that he is expanding it to include terms that he knows about and is likely to use, he is not entering junk bytes, he's entering informed bytes.
I for one expect that he would focus on writing the terms that he is most familiar with and hoping that others will take the effort to contribute defintions for terms that they are more familiar with and feel are jargon, so he doesn't end up writing definitions for jargon used by groups he's less involved with. Definitions that could turn out to be less informative or less accurate.
Moreover, adding definitions is not rewriting anything, let alone The Jargon File in his own image, but adding to it, i.e.: making it more useful, and this is a good thing.
If some extra words are added to the Jargon File that suit ESR, then no loss, many only notice the jargon defintions for words they see or use anyhow. (In any event, a small price to pay to have the Jargon File, nobody else is maintaining it.)
I don't believe adding a word or two that is jargon within the warblogging groups to the Jargon File is a thing that has anything to do with ESR's personal image; although, it is a fact and an expected one that the personal experience of any author will effect what they write about.
[3] I recall a mention of Kuro5hin with regard to the fall of
His religious section really takes insanity to the nth degree. I'd much rather talk to RMS, because although RMS has strong convictions, at least he seems mostly sane.
on 12 Feb, a megalomaniac was born.
(ignore this - for school source)
That's definitely not cool by me, especially since, back in 1993, I submitted several terms I made up with fabricated histories, and ESR failed to include them in the dictionary.
OTOH, some other putative references have been happily absorbing all the bullshit I can make up for some time now, so I guess it all evens out in the end.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
In the entry on Hacker Personality, ESR tells about how he managed to remember the 477 pages of the TeX-book in 4 days. By itself this is quite impressive.
However, I cannot help but get the impression of someone bragging of themselves. Such personal anecdotes do not really belong in a reference work. And I am not really sure about whether this is a good example of what hackers do. To me, their main trait is that they create, rather than memorize, things.
One might argue that one never should call oneself a hacker, but this appears to be OK once the title has been bestowed by others.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Between him, RMS, Bruce Perens and Eric Lee Green, and a gaggle of other self-appointed spokesmen, we make ourselves look closed-minded, egotistical and stupid. Except for RMS, these guys are just a bunch of hangers-on (and RMS is just freaking crazy!).
Thats it kids, work it out of your system. He was there from the beggining, dealing with a healthy portion of what defines us and you were not. I know It's killing you. Is it his ego thats hurting or yours? Whos making the rabid attacks, him or you?. I love it when people trash the mountain that was built before their time. Of course if you've given more (or even a fraction more) for our community feel free to tell me off, otherwise don't even bother pressing "reply". Why do you go visit his website if it pisses you off? Does he owe you something? Have you paid him for a service that he is not giving you?
If you outlaw the law, only criminals will have laws
ESR has many less than pleasent characteristics. But he does get out and do stuff that others don't.
If you don't like what he puts in the hackers dictionary then contribute the stuff _you_ see in everyday use. If ESR doesn't accept it then fork a version.
Remember dictionaries don't contain stuff that is immutable, they contain current usage. Meanings and usage change with time, live with it.
I don't know if there's any list of things cut out before version 4.0, but if you want to compare the current version with older ones, there are three print versions from before 4.0 that should still be available from libraries. They are listed in the Jargon File's revision history.
A: All they're interested in is eyeballs. Terrorists go for symbolic targets, and body count is secondary. If they had weapons capable of killing millions instead of thousands, they'd be something more than terrorists.
A. For the sickos that flew those plans into the WTC, mass body count has a symbology all its own. It makes its own statement, like "we hate you, and we can kill thousands of you anytime we want so you must submit to our demands!" The terror is the point of the whole operation; what will strike the most terror in the victims - and a mass body count will do it. If they were only interested in bombing "symbols" they could blow lots of statues in parks with no victims, but instead they choose crowded places, like when Hamas and Islamic Jihad blow up crowded cafes. Don't confuse the old-style terrorists who hijacked planes for pure publicity with Al-Qada. They old terrorists were not suicidal and they had semi-rational demands (like a prisoner exchange of hostages for terrorists in prision). The modern terrorists of Al-Qada are a new thing, they are suicidal fanatics who hijack planes to kill as many people as possible. They have only one aim, the complete supremacy of islam over the world.
If you want massive casualties, you'll need to look at organized warfare and genocide. There's where you find the routine killings of hundreds and thousands of people. Terrorists are penny-ante killers. I'm not denying that killing a lot of people pleased the terrorists at the Trade Center, but I am saying that their primary goal was to put the killing on television, body count being secondary. The rest of your comment shows you've drunk the anti-idiotarian koolaid. In lieu of ipecac, I can't help you there. But I will leave you with this thought: Just because someone hates idiots doesn't mean he isn't an idiot himself.
You recognize that political beliefs aren't a simple single-dimensional space. But economic beliefs aren't either.
Capitalism does not require a strong governement. Does communism? Either can exist with or without a government to enforce the system on the population. The origins of lasse-faire capitalism were in societies that had small governments, and capitalism was far more of a social emergence than a politcal imposition. In early 18th century England, for example, government was far smaller than in any developed country these days.
If you're referring to things like copyrights, then take note: Advocating Copyrights or IP rights != capitalism. Having a police force, military, militia or societal traditions that discourage people from stealing other's "stuff" is necessary for capitalism, but does not imply a large, dictatorial government. Having law and order, and not having rampant raping, looting and pillaging, is necessary for virtually any form of civilised society, not just capitalism.
I suppose what I'm saying is that not everyone who advocates "capitalism" is talking about the same thing, just as talking about "liberalism" or "conservatism" can mean a wide variety of different things.
You're obviously a terrorist-sympathizing commie scumbag. Go the fuck back to Afghanistan^W Iraq^W France.
"it's ex-liberals".
Apache, Quake, JDK aren't jargon, they are product names. Anyone curious about what they are can punch them into google and find their home pages. The Jargon file documents common to ultra-obscure terms that have become a part of the shared language of hackers. It isn't a comprehensive product listing, nor is it a comprehensive listing of technical terms. If you want technical terms defined, use FOLDOC.
Now, I think certain slang terms (such as "fragging") from the Quake community have become sufficiently common in the wider geek lexicon that they could legitimately be called "Jargon" at this point. And, lo and behold, there is in fact an entry for "frag", with a note to see also "gib". Looks like ESR is doing a fine job of keeping up with the times.
--
CPAN rules. - Guido van Rossum
"There is a strong libertarian contingent which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only safe generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian; thus, both paleoconservatism and âhardâ(TM) leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day."
Simple enough!!
Eric has done alot for the open source community, but clearly many people on /. and in the community like to spend more time sniping than offering constructive critcism or helping on a project.
That is, if you like what it's been. Will probably
take a while to update the printed one.
Nobody really gets it for the articles, duh!
Sorry... Couldn't resist.
This space intentionally left blank
of someone who says 'pwn' on a regular basis considering themselves a hacker?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
So would 1 RMS be the unit for 1000 ESRs of ego? Or would that be 1024?
The parent is funny, this is not.
What has Eric done? He's made almost no useful source code (except for a rewrite of the tiny utility program fetchmail). He's gone around ranting and raving a lot, bringing a lot of incorrect ideas (bazaar and gift economy, etc.) to corporations that pushed open source into the mainstream maybe 6 months earlier than it would have (very generously), but generate a severe backlash. Otherwise, he goes around claiming credit for other people's work, and claiming to be a spokesperson for people who generally don't like him. If you can name some specifics, I'd be really interested.