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IRC as a World-Changing Medium
khaladan writes "Wired has an interesting article titled Chat Room That Built the World that talks about the power of developers helping each other on IRC. The article covers the case of #winprog on EFnet, where people such Justin Frankel (creator of Winamp), John Johansen (DVD Jon), and Shawn Fanning (of Napster fame) have come to chat, hang out, and get help. Many from Microsoft visit the channel as well. Ben Knauss calls it 'innovation in its purest form, without ego, money or fame as its goal.'"
I don't know where this article comes from but even in the late 90s [e.g. 97 and on] IRC was laregely bunk. The "best" rooms were always invite only private rooms. The rest were full of dialup junkies trying to get warez or bots annoying the fuck out of others.
You can still have software development as a hobby though you are right that depending on the project you have to use some capitalism judgement here and there [e.g. I make a living by doing commercial support for my public domain software].
The spirit isn't dead, it's just lost in the S/N ratio that is modern day "capitalism".
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I would have thought that the "world changing medium" would be that IRC services chat rooms both directly and indirectly (through its protocol), game servers (Tiberian Sun, etc. are now played through an IRC derivative), and plays host to countless other apps.
So yep, it's a world changing medium, but man, the world its changed is so, so much larger than a single chat room.
And oh -- it's probably landed some 1337 k1dz in jail. So it's changed their world, too.
don't know about efnet, but i got this when I joined: :D
"New channel peak: 294"
These days on most channels (for example #C, #C++ and #winprog on efnet) people paste their code (and things like error messages, output dumps etc) using a paste server like http://www.rafb.net/paste/
STOP JOINING THE FUCKING CHANNEL.
It's enought that website get slashdotted, but lets leave the poor chan out of this, its getting impossible to talk:
If you havn't been there before today: Leave it till tomorrow, hey!
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
DISAGREE!
Maybe in the larger none specific channels, but the ones I've visited reciently for support for some OSS have been first class.
I had a problem reciently with the subversion server at work running out of random entropy (tho I didn't know this was the problem - just showed itself as people being unable to auth). The guys over at the subversion channel on Freenode helped me locate the problem (dodgy ebuild script for apr in Gentoo), and gave me a posible solution. (saved my neck that day, I had upgraded to svn 1.2.x for locking = none of the 50 developers can commit or get latest).
I agree if you go into say #gentoo and ask for anything other than a 1 line fix your out of luck, but smaller community channels are still excellent.
September that never ended
All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, nearly overwhelming the old-timers' capacity to acculturate them; to those who nostalgically recall the period before, this triggered an inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups. Syn. eternal September.
From the Jargon File
I suggest irssi, good on both gui and terminal. Very helpful community too
http://www.irssi.org/