I think the point I was trying to make is that GitHub and GDocs feels very different. One is methodical and peer reviewed, one is kind of an editing free-for-all. But as I was trying to boil down what makes them different, it really just came down to how the collaboration is timed. I still maintain that it makes a big difference, but you're not disputing that. As you say, my complaint was made-up and pedantic, and upon further reflection, I agree with you that it's a better analogy than I gave it initial credit for. I retract my complaint.
First of all, this is easily the worst description of any technological subject I've seen on Slashdot for a long time: "The startup operates a sort of Google Docs for programmers, giving them a place to store, share and collaborate on their work." It does give you a way to store, share, and collaborate, but the mechanisms are drastically different. Google Docs collaboration is synchronous, GitHub's is serial.
I think GitLab has emerged rapidly the last two years or so as a very viable alternative to GitHub. If you want to use their hosted service, it's free for as many collaborators as you want, for as many projects as you want, that don't have to be public. It includes built-in continuous integration services, Kanban-style issue boards, Slack-style chat, and way more all for free. They're iterating and adding new features at an incredible rate. If you want to host your own, that's also free if you don't need any of the enterprise-edition features, which leaves the community offering still quite good.
Early this year, when the open letter to GitHub was posted, GitLab made their own post ( https://about.gitlab.com/2016/... )about how they're working to solve the problems presented, even though they weren't specifically the addressee of the letter. I never did hear about GitHub actually responding to that letter, and I've seen very little iteration or change from GitHub in a very long time.
Just to add a bit more in-depth analysis and information. I'm not a chemist, but I was trying to find once if the "Crystalline entity" was at all feasible in nature, and I found an absolutely fascinating article from Scientific American.
https://www.scientificamerican...
Basically, the answer is no, silicon would have a very very hard time being the basis for life. For one thing, carbon (which is used for storing energy in carbohydrate chains) oxidizes to CO2 and water, and silicon oxidizes to a solid, which clogs up the system. For two, something about handedness that I didn't really understand. Maybe you'll make more sense of it than I could.
As much as I'm sure you're right, I think this is a great way to perform advertising. No flash animations, no autoplay video or sound clips, no clickbait... Just pure data-driven performance benchmarking. It's like they're saying "Let's attract tech-savvy customers by publishing something that will actually be informative and/or interesting to them, and then maybe some of them will be interested in what we sell" I can totally get behind this form of marketing!
For non-savvy users: I recommend Tresorit. I really like the interface, and they seem to have security as one of their primary focuses. Everything you store on Tresorit is encrypted before it leaves your computer / device.
For more savvy users: SpiderOak. Its interface is... more than a little bit convoluted. But it's got all the same security and encryption that I like about Tresorit, plus file versioning and a web interface.
I actually think I would enjoy something like this, as I'm really enjoying using Kindle on Android lately. But not to the tune of $10 / month. The thing is for the $15 / mo you pay for Netflix, you could buy one movie. You watch one movie during that month that you otherwise would have bought, and you break even. It takes you one evening, and you still have 29 more days in the month to get more than your money's worth out of it. For the $10 they want per month for this service, you can buy one paperback book. But I know very few people who read more than one book per month right now. Maybe that's just because me and a lot of the people I know are all obsessed with the huge fantasty epics for now... (*cough*BrandonSanderson*cough) But personally, I really don't think I'd sign up for more than $2 or $3 per month. Good luck to them though.
Lua has some notable differences from more prominent languages like Java, but as a World of Warcraft addon developer, I find it a surprisingly robust and fun language to program in. I look forward to this change to Wikipedia and hope it works well for all of their contributors.
I disagree with your black-and-white view of microtransactions, and cite my experience in League of Legends as an example. The game is free to play. There are no ads on their website, annoying or otherwise, or in the game. About the smallest useful "microtransaction" would be around $2, which you could use to unlock a very cheap champion or skin for a champion. Other skins cost what would be close to $10. However, the skins have no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever, and nothing that does impact gameplay cannot be purchased with the currency you earn for playing and (at a faster rate) winning games.
I think $10 is a little much for a single champion skin, but that's me. I did buy one skin so far for ~$5. So far, I've probably enjoyed 200-300 hours worth of gameplay. That's a WAAAAY better ratio of dollars spent to hours of fun than almost any other game I've ever played. If they were to stop their system of microtransactions tomorrow, then... Riot Games would cease earning any money at all, development would cease, servers would go down, and the game would be dead. In the interest of keeping them alive and well, I feel no compunction whatsoever about choosing to support Riot by buying the various boosts and vanity items they offer that appeal to me. It's an absolutely *fantastic* implementation of microtransactions.
So yes, I believe there is a "non-evil" way to do microtransactions, and I'm grateful that at least one company has found it.
I should also note that I keep Firefox open, about 18 hours per day, every day, and I hibernate my computer at night with FF still open. So it doesn't get rebooted very often, it hardly ever crashes, and it's still only consuming 475 MB. I don't know why so many other people are seeing 450 MB for one or two tabs. Maybe it's my computer?
Win 7 Pro on a Phenom II X4 940 3.0 GHz with 8 GB of RAM.
Although I agree that browsers in general are "consuming more and more memory", I'm seeing a slightly different story than you are. I abuse Firefox 4's new tab grouping functionality horribly, and keep tons of tabs open regularly. I use to have to pare them down just so I had room to read the titles on my tab bar, but now I can have upwards of 50 tabs open at a time.
Right now, I've only got 15, including my 5 pinned "App Tabs" (Four Google apps + FB). My Firefox is consuming 475 MB.
I was curious, and decided to see how much RAM Internet Explorer 9 would take with the exact same 15 tabs open. It appears to have spawned four child processes totalling approximately 1,283 MB.
My data: http://i51.tinypic.com/fualq0.jpg (Sorry, no pic of the tabs I've got going, you'll just have to believe that I really did open all the same tabs)
And yes, I should include data for Opera and Chrome, but I didn't have those installed, and want to get this posted in time for a chance at being modded up. ^_^
Personally, for how extensible, and how many great features Firefox brings to my online life, I've never considered its memory consumption unreasonable. And it certainly appears to be doing better than the competition.
From the perspective of liking my software free and open-source, I was actually a little excited about this announcement when I first heard it. And then I started thinking about all the implications.
I've been a fan of QuestHelper for quite awhile now, and I never saw a donation "reminder". And I didn't get it through WoWMatrix either, I downloaded it straight off WoWInterface manually, every time it was updated. I think it's a shame that Zorba is being forced to mothball that project due to this. The inability to even have the chance to pay my favorite mod authors to keep addons I like functioning is a mistake, IMO.
Another good addon that they've killed with this announcement is nUI. This is the Mazzle of 3.0, but instead of a collection of addons automatically configured, Scott has written an entire UI to replace the default. If I weren't so addicted to many of my addons that don't mesh with his, I'd use his in a heartbeat, it's very very nice. But he's been out of work for awhile as I understand it, and now that he can't have a seperate free and premium version, he's said it may not be worth his time anymore to continue development on. This one, I beleive, is truly tragic.
Last of all, I just noticed Mundocani taking down his postings of GroupCalendar and Outfitter from all the hosting websites. He doesn't even ask for donations as far as I can recall, but he's done that in protest. I don't disagree with him either, but I do regret the loss of such talent from the UI Dev pool.
Blizzard is not making any of their fans love them for this, and I sincerely hope they reverse this policy.
http://www.gotapi.com/ It's got all the good reference sites in one. You click the reference site, it adds a tab to the gotAPI webpage. It has a really good search box. No signup required. Best all-in-one reference ever.
The moment I read this I thought that they must have heard this song and said to themselves, "You know, this guy's got a great point here!"
http://www.dontdownloadthissong.com/
K, I know this horse has already been pretty much kicked to death, but at the company I was currently hired at, I was originally here as a 3-month intern to document program flow. I was given a TiddlyWiki http://www.tiddlywiki.org/, which is a super-easy local wiki. It requires no setup, and anybody could figure out how to use it effectively in about 2 minutes (and that's factoring in stupid people). For anyone looking for a very small-scale wiki, or who don't have the resources to setup a full MediaWiki installation, or who just want a useful personal type wiki, I would highly recommend this thing. It's absolutely great!
The first post on this article summary was hilarious. Zerg Rush FTW! Great, now I don't have to defend myself in making the comparison to Blizzard here. With that out of the way, here's my biggest fear for this project: WoW is such a big success because of the sense of satisfaction it gives you. There's so much to do, and everytime you [levlup, earn a new epic item, kill a boss, buy a new mount, hit 70, advance your professions] you feel really good. You feel you're making progress.
But think of how you start a game of WoW. A very short cinematic sequence explaining the race you've chosen, then you're there. You're first effective quest (after the quest that tells you to go talk to the real questgiver) is to go kill 8 mana wyrms, or whatever the local lowest-level-mob-ever is. The satisfaction you get for being big, bad, and powerful for killing lots of monsters being immediately.
Now, granted I don't know how they're going to design it. But I can just see them making this thing so intellectual that nobody's going to be able to get into it. Even the "geeks", whom it's previously been begged they tailor this thing for, would conceivably get very easily bored with "researching things", and go back to raiding Karazhan.
Upon reading up on digital projection, I found that 2048 pixels wide is not going to be 2048x1536 like a 3.1 MP digital photo, because it's a widescreen projector. Consequently, 2048x1080 is only 2.2 MP, so we're going to multiply $208,569 by (33 MP / 2.2 MP = ) 14.9 = $3,111,787.92 for one year's worth of storage for one average length movie produced for a 33 MP screen.
There was a recent article about the cost of maintaining digital film as well as the tailings of production, versus real film. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/26/1727237 One of the earlier comments suggested that digital cinema is currenty using 2K projectors (2048 pixels wide), which would effectively be 3.1 MP. If we're going to 33 MP video then, the quote from the other article of $208,569 being the annual cost of preserving a digital movie would be multiplied by a factor of 10.5 (33 MP / 3.1 MP) to equal a rough annual cost of $2,187,975.88 just to preserve each video that is produced for this format. WOW As much as I enjoy high-rez video, I think this may be a little too much.:(
I live in a place where the computer industry is doing well, and programmers seem to be in high demand, admittedly. But I'm also a Jr. in CS right now, and here's what I've observed so far between my own job experience and those of my other friends in school:
Find something you enjoy and do it well. One of my friends got into ASP and C# real heavy, and is now the lead dev of a team working on his university's intranet. I'm very detail oriented, and got a job documenting an undocumented system, for which now I'm pretty much the sole dev type person around here, and I don't think they would dare to fire me, even though my school schedule's a pain in the butt.
The point is, there is such a plethora of work available, you won't know ahead of time what you need. You just need to get all the experience in _something_ that you can. You'll find a way to use it, somewhere, sometime.
If you learn it, they [jobs] will come?
Good luck!
Star Trek? All-in-one probes? I'm at school right now, but if I were home, I'd pull out either the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual, or the latest edition of the Star Trek Encyclopedia and show you all the different classes of probes they use for different usage conditions and types of data to be gathered. Granted, the 15 some-odd predefined types would be a step up from one custom satellite for every imaginable configuration, but there is still hardware specialization, even in Star Trek.
This is exactly the realization that drives MMORPGs. Blizzard doesn't care if you distribute WoW. NCSoft also has a link to download the Guild Wars client off their website. The real money here is of course in the characters themselves. (i.e., the save file) When you buy WoW, all you really buy is a code that you then link to an account, and can use to access your save file from anywhere at any time. Can you imagine what Blizzard would have to go through if they lost a server or cluster or whatever with some players' accounts on them? Chaos!
A few months ago, one of my friends quit playing WoW. He posted his 70 on eBay just to explore the possibility of selling it. In the brief period of time before his post got taken down, he got an offer on it for a few hundred dollars. He thought this was a great deal -- a couple HUNDRED dollars, just for playing a game! But then he looked his/played time (like, 70 days or so, I think) and compared that to the offer, and realized the guy was offering to compensate him at like, $0.30 / hour or something like that. He didn't sell.
You're absolutely right, there are certain expectations, but they're not only one-way. When you invite Richard M. Stallman to your campus, you can expect a number of things that you wouldn't expect from very many people, including but not limited to wearing a t-shirt and no shoes.
If the person who invited him to speak there in the first place expected him to show up clean-cut, well combed, and wearing a suit coat and tie, then either (a) he was wildly disillusioned or (b) had no idea who RMS was. "Oh, hey, when I google 'anti drm' this RMS guy shows up a whole bunch. Let's invite him!"
Slashdot Mirror
I think the point I was trying to make is that GitHub and GDocs feels very different. One is methodical and peer reviewed, one is kind of an editing free-for-all. But as I was trying to boil down what makes them different, it really just came down to how the collaboration is timed. I still maintain that it makes a big difference, but you're not disputing that. As you say, my complaint was made-up and pedantic, and upon further reflection, I agree with you that it's a better analogy than I gave it initial credit for. I retract my complaint.
First of all, this is easily the worst description of any technological subject I've seen on Slashdot for a long time: "The startup operates a sort of Google Docs for programmers, giving them a place to store, share and collaborate on their work." It does give you a way to store, share, and collaborate, but the mechanisms are drastically different. Google Docs collaboration is synchronous, GitHub's is serial.
I think GitLab has emerged rapidly the last two years or so as a very viable alternative to GitHub. If you want to use their hosted service, it's free for as many collaborators as you want, for as many projects as you want, that don't have to be public. It includes built-in continuous integration services, Kanban-style issue boards, Slack-style chat, and way more all for free. They're iterating and adding new features at an incredible rate. If you want to host your own, that's also free if you don't need any of the enterprise-edition features, which leaves the community offering still quite good.
Early this year, when the open letter to GitHub was posted, GitLab made their own post ( https://about.gitlab.com/2016/... )about how they're working to solve the problems presented, even though they weren't specifically the addressee of the letter. I never did hear about GitHub actually responding to that letter, and I've seen very little iteration or change from GitHub in a very long time.
Just to add a bit more in-depth analysis and information. I'm not a chemist, but I was trying to find once if the "Crystalline entity" was at all feasible in nature, and I found an absolutely fascinating article from Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican... Basically, the answer is no, silicon would have a very very hard time being the basis for life. For one thing, carbon (which is used for storing energy in carbohydrate chains) oxidizes to CO2 and water, and silicon oxidizes to a solid, which clogs up the system. For two, something about handedness that I didn't really understand. Maybe you'll make more sense of it than I could.
Yeah, if by "now" you mean 18 years ago...
I can't believe I don't see this anywhere in the comments yet, but this is the bigger issue at hand. https://xkcd.com/538/
As much as I'm sure you're right, I think this is a great way to perform advertising. No flash animations, no autoplay video or sound clips, no clickbait... Just pure data-driven performance benchmarking. It's like they're saying "Let's attract tech-savvy customers by publishing something that will actually be informative and/or interesting to them, and then maybe some of them will be interested in what we sell" I can totally get behind this form of marketing!
For non-savvy users: I recommend Tresorit. I really like the interface, and they seem to have security as one of their primary focuses. Everything you store on Tresorit is encrypted before it leaves your computer / device.
For more savvy users: SpiderOak. Its interface is ... more than a little bit convoluted. But it's got all the same security and encryption that I like about Tresorit, plus file versioning and a web interface.
I actually think I would enjoy something like this, as I'm really enjoying using Kindle on Android lately. But not to the tune of $10 / month. The thing is for the $15 / mo you pay for Netflix, you could buy one movie. You watch one movie during that month that you otherwise would have bought, and you break even. It takes you one evening, and you still have 29 more days in the month to get more than your money's worth out of it. For the $10 they want per month for this service, you can buy one paperback book. But I know very few people who read more than one book per month right now. Maybe that's just because me and a lot of the people I know are all obsessed with the huge fantasty epics for now... (*cough*BrandonSanderson*cough) But personally, I really don't think I'd sign up for more than $2 or $3 per month. Good luck to them though.
Lua has some notable differences from more prominent languages like Java, but as a World of Warcraft addon developer, I find it a surprisingly robust and fun language to program in. I look forward to this change to Wikipedia and hope it works well for all of their contributors.
I disagree with your black-and-white view of microtransactions, and cite my experience in League of Legends as an example. The game is free to play. There are no ads on their website, annoying or otherwise, or in the game. About the smallest useful "microtransaction" would be around $2, which you could use to unlock a very cheap champion or skin for a champion. Other skins cost what would be close to $10. However, the skins have no bearing on the gameplay whatsoever, and nothing that does impact gameplay cannot be purchased with the currency you earn for playing and (at a faster rate) winning games.
... Riot Games would cease earning any money at all, development would cease, servers would go down, and the game would be dead. In the interest of keeping them alive and well, I feel no compunction whatsoever about choosing to support Riot by buying the various boosts and vanity items they offer that appeal to me. It's an absolutely *fantastic* implementation of microtransactions.
I think $10 is a little much for a single champion skin, but that's me. I did buy one skin so far for ~$5. So far, I've probably enjoyed 200-300 hours worth of gameplay. That's a WAAAAY better ratio of dollars spent to hours of fun than almost any other game I've ever played. If they were to stop their system of microtransactions tomorrow, then
So yes, I believe there is a "non-evil" way to do microtransactions, and I'm grateful that at least one company has found it.
Incidentally, if anyone wants to try it out, you can sign up for your own free account and help me out in the process by going to http://signup.leagueoflegends.com/?ref=4ceace9718e1b841855707
I should also note that I keep Firefox open, about 18 hours per day, every day, and I hibernate my computer at night with FF still open. So it doesn't get rebooted very often, it hardly ever crashes, and it's still only consuming 475 MB. I don't know why so many other people are seeing 450 MB for one or two tabs. Maybe it's my computer?
Win 7 Pro on a Phenom II X4 940 3.0 GHz with 8 GB of RAM.
Although I agree that browsers in general are "consuming more and more memory", I'm seeing a slightly different story than you are. I abuse Firefox 4's new tab grouping functionality horribly, and keep tons of tabs open regularly. I use to have to pare them down just so I had room to read the titles on my tab bar, but now I can have upwards of 50 tabs open at a time.
Right now, I've only got 15, including my 5 pinned "App Tabs" (Four Google apps + FB). My Firefox is consuming 475 MB.
I was curious, and decided to see how much RAM Internet Explorer 9 would take with the exact same 15 tabs open. It appears to have spawned four child processes totalling approximately 1,283 MB.
My data: http://i51.tinypic.com/fualq0.jpg (Sorry, no pic of the tabs I've got going, you'll just have to believe that I really did open all the same tabs)
And yes, I should include data for Opera and Chrome, but I didn't have those installed, and want to get this posted in time for a chance at being modded up. ^_^
Personally, for how extensible, and how many great features Firefox brings to my online life, I've never considered its memory consumption unreasonable. And it certainly appears to be doing better than the competition.
From the perspective of liking my software free and open-source, I was actually a little excited about this announcement when I first heard it. And then I started thinking about all the implications.
I've been a fan of QuestHelper for quite awhile now, and I never saw a donation "reminder". And I didn't get it through WoWMatrix either, I downloaded it straight off WoWInterface manually, every time it was updated. I think it's a shame that Zorba is being forced to mothball that project due to this. The inability to even have the chance to pay my favorite mod authors to keep addons I like functioning is a mistake, IMO.
Another good addon that they've killed with this announcement is nUI. This is the Mazzle of 3.0, but instead of a collection of addons automatically configured, Scott has written an entire UI to replace the default. If I weren't so addicted to many of my addons that don't mesh with his, I'd use his in a heartbeat, it's very very nice. But he's been out of work for awhile as I understand it, and now that he can't have a seperate free and premium version, he's said it may not be worth his time anymore to continue development on. This one, I beleive, is truly tragic.
Last of all, I just noticed Mundocani taking down his postings of GroupCalendar and Outfitter from all the hosting websites. He doesn't even ask for donations as far as I can recall, but he's done that in protest. I don't disagree with him either, but I do regret the loss of such talent from the UI Dev pool.
Blizzard is not making any of their fans love them for this, and I sincerely hope they reverse this policy.
http://www.gotapi.com/ It's got all the good reference sites in one. You click the reference site, it adds a tab to the gotAPI webpage. It has a really good search box. No signup required. Best all-in-one reference ever.
JavaScript
The moment I read this I thought that they must have heard this song and said to themselves, "You know, this guy's got a great point here!" http://www.dontdownloadthissong.com/
K, I know this horse has already been pretty much kicked to death, but at the company I was currently hired at, I was originally here as a 3-month intern to document program flow. I was given a TiddlyWiki http://www.tiddlywiki.org/, which is a super-easy local wiki. It requires no setup, and anybody could figure out how to use it effectively in about 2 minutes (and that's factoring in stupid people). For anyone looking for a very small-scale wiki, or who don't have the resources to setup a full MediaWiki installation, or who just want a useful personal type wiki, I would highly recommend this thing. It's absolutely great!
The first post on this article summary was hilarious. Zerg Rush FTW! Great, now I don't have to defend myself in making the comparison to Blizzard here. With that out of the way, here's my biggest fear for this project: WoW is such a big success because of the sense of satisfaction it gives you. There's so much to do, and everytime you [levlup, earn a new epic item, kill a boss, buy a new mount, hit 70, advance your professions] you feel really good. You feel you're making progress.
But think of how you start a game of WoW. A very short cinematic sequence explaining the race you've chosen, then you're there. You're first effective quest (after the quest that tells you to go talk to the real questgiver) is to go kill 8 mana wyrms, or whatever the local lowest-level-mob-ever is. The satisfaction you get for being big, bad, and powerful for killing lots of monsters being immediately.
Now, granted I don't know how they're going to design it. But I can just see them making this thing so intellectual that nobody's going to be able to get into it. Even the "geeks", whom it's previously been begged they tailor this thing for, would conceivably get very easily bored with "researching things", and go back to raiding Karazhan.
Upon reading up on digital projection, I found that 2048 pixels wide is not going to be 2048x1536 like a 3.1 MP digital photo, because it's a widescreen projector. Consequently, 2048x1080 is only 2.2 MP, so we're going to multiply $208,569 by (33 MP / 2.2 MP = ) 14.9 = $3,111,787.92 for one year's worth of storage for one average length movie produced for a 33 MP screen.
There was a recent article about the cost of maintaining digital film as well as the tailings of production, versus real film. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/26/1727237 One of the earlier comments suggested that digital cinema is currenty using 2K projectors (2048 pixels wide), which would effectively be 3.1 MP. If we're going to 33 MP video then, the quote from the other article of $208,569 being the annual cost of preserving a digital movie would be multiplied by a factor of 10.5 (33 MP / 3.1 MP) to equal a rough annual cost of $2,187,975.88 just to preserve each video that is produced for this format. WOW As much as I enjoy high-rez video, I think this may be a little too much. :(
I live in a place where the computer industry is doing well, and programmers seem to be in high demand, admittedly. But I'm also a Jr. in CS right now, and here's what I've observed so far between my own job experience and those of my other friends in school: Find something you enjoy and do it well. One of my friends got into ASP and C# real heavy, and is now the lead dev of a team working on his university's intranet. I'm very detail oriented, and got a job documenting an undocumented system, for which now I'm pretty much the sole dev type person around here, and I don't think they would dare to fire me, even though my school schedule's a pain in the butt. The point is, there is such a plethora of work available, you won't know ahead of time what you need. You just need to get all the experience in _something_ that you can. You'll find a way to use it, somewhere, sometime. If you learn it, they [jobs] will come? Good luck!
Star Trek? All-in-one probes? I'm at school right now, but if I were home, I'd pull out either the Star Trek TNG Technical Manual, or the latest edition of the Star Trek Encyclopedia and show you all the different classes of probes they use for different usage conditions and types of data to be gathered. Granted, the 15 some-odd predefined types would be a step up from one custom satellite for every imaginable configuration, but there is still hardware specialization, even in Star Trek.
This is exactly the realization that drives MMORPGs. Blizzard doesn't care if you distribute WoW. NCSoft also has a link to download the Guild Wars client off their website. The real money here is of course in the characters themselves. (i.e., the save file) When you buy WoW, all you really buy is a code that you then link to an account, and can use to access your save file from anywhere at any time. Can you imagine what Blizzard would have to go through if they lost a server or cluster or whatever with some players' accounts on them? Chaos! A few months ago, one of my friends quit playing WoW. He posted his 70 on eBay just to explore the possibility of selling it. In the brief period of time before his post got taken down, he got an offer on it for a few hundred dollars. He thought this was a great deal -- a couple HUNDRED dollars, just for playing a game! But then he looked his /played time (like, 70 days or so, I think) and compared that to the offer, and realized the guy was offering to compensate him at like, $0.30 / hour or something like that. He didn't sell.
You're absolutely right, there are certain expectations, but they're not only one-way. When you invite Richard M. Stallman to your campus, you can expect a number of things that you wouldn't expect from very many people, including but not limited to wearing a t-shirt and no shoes. If the person who invited him to speak there in the first place expected him to show up clean-cut, well combed, and wearing a suit coat and tie, then either (a) he was wildly disillusioned or (b) had no idea who RMS was. "Oh, hey, when I google 'anti drm' this RMS guy shows up a whole bunch. Let's invite him!"