Jobs is an abusive jerk. For those of us who have had to work near him, he's a toxic atmospheric pollutant. It's no surprise when he turns on the profanity. It's emblematic of his utter contempt for other human beings. What surprises me is the times when he stops swearing. That's when you'd better watch out, because he's acting.
I'm waiting for the day when I can fly a radio controlled airplane with stereo (wireless) cameras transmitting to a VR headset I'm wearing -- an amateur RPV (remotely piloted vehicle). This is heading in that direction, but doesn't sound good enough yet.
Does anyone know of cameras that could do this for a reasonable price?
I loved living in Japan because of all the fun little gadgets I could buy. Few of them are commercially successful because they never connected with a large enough market niche to make them worth exporting, but I loved being a part of the experiment.
Love the sig, BTW. Here's another ancient Japanese proverb: o-wasuremono nai you ni gochuui kudasai... If you pronounce it in a voice that sounds like Popeye the Sailor Man breathing helium, you may reach chikatetsu satori;-)
...but they changed the arrow keys from fullsize keys in an inverted T (normal modern arrangement) to a diamond of half-wit(dth) keys, rendering them unusable without looking at them. If they had done this to narrow the keyboard, I might have understood (but still disagreed), but they crippled the usability by narrowing the keys, but didn't (significantly) narrow the keyboard itself.
They also gave the keys a MUCH nicer feel, IMHO. So, if you want the MS Natural these days, you'll get a better key feel and nearly unusable special keys, with almost the same my-shoulder-hurts-from-reaching-for-the-mouse extra width as before.
Not just because Stroustrup says so. If I were your teacher, I'd rap your knuckles with a ruler, too.
I'm a member of an architecture committee that both buys and develops enterprise-class software systems for one of the twenty busiest sites on the Web.
It's very frustrating to be forced to build a system that we would be willing to pay millions of dollars for because the commercial products were based on "old C-style" code that causes all kinds of problems when anyone tries to upgrade it or integrate it with other, more modern, systems.
Fixed-length arrays are a primitive approach that should be reserved for those rare cases where optimization at that level is called for. When such optimization is performed, the work involved is not the only cost. C-style arrays and const char* strings are probably responsible for more bugs, security holes, and code brittleness than any other programming technique I can think of. Intentionally using such approaches in a serious project when not forced to reflects a lack of professional maturity on the part of the architects of the project.
I would hope that an AP CS class would teach the modern professional approach as the general approach and teach the other later, when the students are prepared to appreciate how much you lose in exchange for some additional speed.
If MS made this cheap enough, it would be better than the current situation. Cheap enough would have to be quite cheap, though, since I can keep using an old version of Office forever currently, making the annual rate almost arbitrarily low, depending on how long I'm willing to put up with it.
I think the growth of open source alternatives to Office will eventually exert great price pressure on Office. Also, clearly the thought of having to pay over and over again for what was once a "use for a lifetime" product will shake a lot of users out of their inertial rut. If they make the subscription rate anything other than cheap, customers will rebel and switch to less capable, but free open source solutions in droves. Eventually, those open source solutions will be the best products and Office will either be free or dead.
This AC is either an ignorant buffoon or an agent provacateur. As an American myself, I assure you that there are some of us who are willing to discuss these issues with courtesy and respect toward the French people. Our opinions may differ somewhat, but I assure you that this AC doesn't speak for us.
While that's true, few non-commercial developers are tuned in to what's going on outside their own small circle of buddies well enough to recognize the necessity of Unicode. Those who do see the writing on the wall often aren't sure how to deal with it. They're not sure how to write code to work with a Unicode config file.
Since *all* XML-compliant applications are required to support Unicode (and not required to support anything else), it would be easier to support Unicode config files by just making them XML files and using open source XML libraries for their config file manipulation.
Most Internet software isn't of the standalone local variety, like old "productivity apps" were. For this reason, the old style of localizing separate versions for separate locales is obsolete. Internationalization is the way to go. Even if your interface isn't localized, your *functionality* should still work everywhere because your code goes everywhere.
The big multinationals have all figured this out. Sun, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc. wouldn't even consider creating a new system that wasn't based on Unicode. "Scratch my own itch" Linux developers usually have a more provincial perspective of the problems they are trying to solve, unfortunately.
That's changing, though. As the major tools and protocols all update to Unicode, users will demand that all their tools work seamlessly with Unicode.
XML, for example, is UTF-8 unicode by default. XML-compliant systems are *required* to support unicode and not required to support anything else. Larry Wall recognized this trend and the upgrade to UTF-8 was the biggest reason for the jump to Perl 5.6. He saw the exponential increase in Unicode-encoded (esp. UTF-8) text and realized that the world's best text manipulator was going to have to be rearchitected to deal with the new standard text encoding.
The xterm developers saw this, too, and have now upgraded xterm to handle (UTF-8) Unicode. Now, we can all reimplement ls, cat, head, tail, etc. in Perl 5.6 and work in xterm.
Creating your own versions of standard tools is really doing it the hard way, though. We need all of our standard tools to work in Unicode. Old favorites like vi should work seamlessly with multilingual text encoded in UTF-8. All of the tools, and all of the glue (pipes, the X clipboard, all forms of copy and paste), the file system, the fonts, should all be Unicode. Copying Japanese text out of an email and pasting it into a French file in vi should be seamless. Copying a Korean word off a Web page and pasting it as an argument on the command line should work the same as if it were English -- on everybody's Linux box. It's just text.
That's the future of all other software systems (even most *new* handheld platforms are Unicode-based), so I hope it's the future of Linux. This business of having to tweak each tool separately for some subset of Unicode functionality, if it's available at all, is very primitive. A more universal, ubiquitous, transparent use of the ASCII-compatible UTF-8 Unicode is sorely needed.
XML is a way of giving plain-text data enough structure that it becomes possible to automate complex manipulation of the data.
There would be lots of both GUI and command line tools available to manipulate such config files. This would make life a lot easier for users.
There would also be a lot of libraries for manipulating standard XML, so application developers wouldn't have to spend much time writing the config file maintenance portions of their apps and could concentrate on creating better apps.
I REALLY don't want disgruntled customers to have access to my home address. I can't give the registrars a phony address, though, because I can't risk losing my domain name because the renewal notice doesn't reach me. I also don't want to have to shell out the money for an outside mailbox service just for one letter a year. (With that volume of mail, I might miss my letter anyway.)
Add that to the registrar's claim that *they* really own my domain name anyway, and if they take it from me or accidentally "lose" it ("oops, well too bad for you") I'm out of business.
What can you say about a company that claims ownership of your property, can cost you your job, and puts your family's lives at risk?
What are they going to do next? Poison our water supply?
my wife and i just launched our first product this weekend. he's fast asleep in one arm, like a warm football, while i learn to type with one hand without waking him...
We've seen Biafra-style *freedom* before. I'm surprised more people here don't recognize it, but perhaps it's because Slashdotters are mostly teenagers whose knowledge of history is limited to the history of operating systems since 1970 or so.
Mao and Stalin were "anti-establishment" the same way Biafra is: they wanted to *be* the establishment. Biafra wanted to be the president, not abolish the presidency.
Biafra wants to fight for "freedom", he says. His techniques? He would need to know exactly how much money everybody is making so that *he* could confiscate anything that *he* decided he deserves more than *you*. Your opinion would be irrelevant if he had his way.
He would pass out "yuppie scum" stickers, paid for with money he confiscated from rich Enemies of the People, to be used by "The People" to vandalize those possessions that he didn't approve of.
What sort of people would consider this sort of thing "freedom"? Well, it would have made perfect sense to both Mao and Stalin. So, if you like the "free" societies created by Mao and Stalin, you should promote Biafra, too.
"Think about it. What products, in the real world, use the possessive "My" in their names? Products for small children, like "My First Sony." How foolish would it sound, say, to buy something called "My Telephone" or "My VCR". Obviously, they're yours--you own it! Using "My" on a Web site encourages this childish sense of propriety, a propriety which, as was pointed out earlier, is already unfounded."
MS products run on all those versions of Windows, but that doesn't mean that they can't detect what version they're on. There are all kinds of "if WIN95...else if WIN98...chunks of code.
If they could discover a subtle way to detect most (not even all) of the time when they are on Wine, they wouldn't even need to create an "if WINE" branch. They would probably be able to find ways of getting it to go down the wrong Windows branch on occasion, instead of going down the branch of whichever Windows WINE emulates. That would result in strange, irreproducible crashers that would create FUD around Wine.
This would be a lot more devastating than just preventing it from working at all. It would cast serious doubts on Wine's reliability without making MS look guilty of anything. Even looking at the source code, you wouldn't see any "if WINE" case statements, so it would be hard to pin anything on MS.
I think WINE should go forward as a way to run Win32 apps from vendors other than MS. Other ISVs would love to have the additional revenue stream.
At the same time, I think there have to be some serious open source competitors to the MS-Office apps. Those are important enough that they need to run well natively, and not be hampered by the tradeoffs of an emulator. At the same time, we don't want MS to have another revenue stream from the Linux market.
Check the CPU count on those benchmarks. Are those really "virtually identical" configurations? (They may be, because I haven't read the fine print and may be misunderstanding something, but they don't appear identical to me.)
Preventing people from expressing their opinions online *is* "Internet fascism". Certainly if those neo-nazis you talk about were in charge, they would agree with you, not me, and eliminate this "misguided freedom of speech" you and they deplore.
Don't confuse my support for free speech with my support of everything every wacko has to say.
When the government doesn't allow people to express certain opinions, it is often because there are dark political secrets that those in power don't want the people to find out about. Even when those things the government doesn't allow are untrue, how are people supposed to know that? If the government only allows me to hear one side of an argument -- by law -- I have to assume that I don't have enough information to be sure which side is correct. All I know is which side the government wants me to believe.
Those who are into conspiracy theories are likely to favor whatever side the government covers up.
When wackos can make their best arguments, and their opponents can do likewise, then I'm a lot more confident that I understand the real issues.
Yeah, right. How silly of our founding fathers to have neglected to specify what opinions we were and weren't allowed to hold...by law.
The Best is the Enemy of the Good
on
The First Mouse
·
· Score: 1
My title is the correct quote, and it's very old. Unfortunately, I think "the good is the enemy of the great" (i.e., the reverse of the true quote) is a much cleverer statement than the correct quote. That puts you in a tough position: do you want to say something that's cleverer or more correct?
The reversed form of the quote is far more popular, too, so I'm not the only one who feels that way. "The good is the enemy of the great" means that something that is good enough unfortunately removes the incentive to change to something better.
Lots of technologies follow this pattern. Something better is invented but never gets adopted because something well established is good enough that it's not worth all the trouble to make the change.
Yes, check on that oil sheikh statement and post what you find out. Sounds like an urban legend to me.
To the original poster of that claim, do you have a URL containing details of this? If it's just claimed on Slashdot, it's hard to believe but if it is on a Web page, then it's just gotta be true...;-)
"Martyrdom"? Sometimes the preposterous, self-righteous bs here on Slashdot gets so deep I feel like putting on my rubber boots.
So you want to do some noble "power to the people" project that "corporate America won't like". Well, two things come to mind. One possibility is that you want to create something wonderful, like an extraordinary browser (Mozilla), or a whole operating system (Linux), or any number of other superb products that legitimately compete ferociously with products of "corporate America" like IE, Solaris, Oracle, etc. If that's the case, then the number of ways you could contribute to the world is virtually limitless, and you don't need to sneak around to do it. "Corporate America" calls it "competition", and it goes on above ground, in the light of day.
The other possibility is that instead of creating something of value yourself, you feel an adolescent urge to be a big hero to other adolescents by finding ways of stealing things of value created by others. You have some cartoonish image of "corporate America" as The Evil Empire from Star Wars, and you're some noble code Jedi with a compiler for a light saber. I suspect you're in this camp. I'm mistaken, then these comments apply to those who are, but not to you.
"Corporate America", in reality, isn't one entity, and it isn't even American. It is the majority of working people in the developed world and the relatively consistent conventions they've established for cooperating as groups and individuals to convert the hours of their lives into things of value, which they then trade with other groups and individuals. It is also the relatively consistent conventions they've established to prevent people and groups from stealing from one another, forcing them to have to produce things of value themselves that can be used in voluntary trades. That increases the pot of goods and services rather than just shifting them around.
There are plenty of areas in commerce where reasonable people of good will legitimately disagree on areas of legal policy. There are also countless inequities and inefficiencies in a system that still requires human lawyers to argue the edge cases. Those with the biggest legal budgets tend to win more than their fair share of edge cases.
Unfortunately, there are also a lot of people who think it's their right to steal anything that they can get away with stealing. They frequently point to the inequities of the system as a rationalization for their base desire to simply steal something rather than trading for it.
Instead of pouring your energies into finding ways to steal from your neighbors, whom you refer to as "Corporate America" to make it sound noble, why don't you find a charity that can't afford to pay for "enterprise software" and build something for them from open source components?
Or why don't you find a way to extend the features of some open-source system to cover the needs of a group that doesn't yet have the necessary level of computer literacy to do it for themselves?
Or why don't you go out and create music or great films or whatever, and then give away what you've traded the hours of your life to produce, instead of trying to give away the hours of other peoples' lives?
The only group I remember posting to was sf-lovers, but I also remember that there was an ongoing debate about who really owned a symbolic math package called Macsyma. It was a huge flamefest. Macsyma had been developed with federal tax dollars, and yet MIT had sole commercial rights, IIRC (it has been a long time, and I've forgotten the details). I worked at SAI at the time (which later became SAIC, which spawned NSI, the domain name registrar of ill repute). MIT was essentially our "ISP" at the time, and we didn't want to bite the hand that fed us, but we thought we should all have free access to Macsyma (which was a *lot* less powerful than Mathematica is today).
It's funny how that debate is echoed in today's arguments about open source vs. proprietary. Ah, memories....
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry. It sounds interesting, but it's just another TLA that I don't recognize. It can be my TLA of the Day. Any links?
Jobs is an abusive jerk. For those of us who have had to work near him, he's a toxic atmospheric pollutant. It's no surprise when he turns on the profanity. It's emblematic of his utter contempt for other human beings. What surprises me is the times when he stops swearing. That's when you'd better watch out, because he's acting.
I'm waiting for the day when I can fly a radio controlled airplane with stereo (wireless) cameras transmitting to a VR headset I'm wearing -- an amateur RPV (remotely piloted vehicle). This is heading in that direction, but doesn't sound good enough yet.
Does anyone know of cameras that could do this for a reasonable price?
I loved living in Japan because of all the fun little gadgets I could buy. Few of them are commercially successful because they never connected with a large enough market niche to make them worth exporting, but I loved being a part of the experiment.
;-)
Love the sig, BTW. Here's another ancient Japanese proverb: o-wasuremono nai you ni gochuui kudasai... If you pronounce it in a voice that sounds like Popeye the Sailor Man breathing helium, you may reach chikatetsu satori
...but they changed the arrow keys from fullsize keys in an inverted T (normal modern arrangement) to a diamond of half-wit(dth) keys, rendering them unusable without looking at them. If they had done this to narrow the keyboard, I might have understood (but still disagreed), but they crippled the usability by narrowing the keys, but didn't (significantly) narrow the keyboard itself.
They also gave the keys a MUCH nicer feel, IMHO. So, if you want the MS Natural these days, you'll get a better key feel and nearly unusable special keys, with almost the same my-shoulder-hurts-from-reaching-for-the-mouse extra width as before.
Sheesh...
Have her type the Lakota with two fingers. It moves the stress from the hands to the arms if you do it right, and that should be more comfortable.
Not just because Stroustrup says so. If I were your teacher, I'd rap your knuckles with a ruler, too.
I'm a member of an architecture committee that both buys and develops enterprise-class software systems for one of the twenty busiest sites on the Web.
It's very frustrating to be forced to build a system that we would be willing to pay millions of dollars for because the commercial products were based on "old C-style" code that causes all kinds of problems when anyone tries to upgrade it or integrate it with other, more modern, systems.
Fixed-length arrays are a primitive approach that should be reserved for those rare cases where optimization at that level is called for. When such optimization is performed, the work involved is not the only cost. C-style arrays and const char* strings are probably responsible for more bugs, security holes, and code brittleness than any other programming technique I can think of. Intentionally using such approaches in a serious project when not forced to reflects a lack of professional maturity on the part of the architects of the project.
I would hope that an AP CS class would teach the modern professional approach as the general approach and teach the other later, when the students are prepared to appreciate how much you lose in exchange for some additional speed.
If MS made this cheap enough, it would be better than the current situation. Cheap enough would have to be quite cheap, though, since I can keep using an old version of Office forever currently, making the annual rate almost arbitrarily low, depending on how long I'm willing to put up with it.
I think the growth of open source alternatives to Office will eventually exert great price pressure on Office. Also, clearly the thought of having to pay over and over again for what was once a "use for a lifetime" product will shake a lot of users out of their inertial rut. If they make the subscription rate anything other than cheap, customers will rebel and switch to less capable, but free open source solutions in droves. Eventually, those open source solutions will be the best products and Office will either be free or dead.
This AC is either an ignorant buffoon or an agent provacateur. As an American myself, I assure you that there are some of us who are willing to discuss these issues with courtesy and respect toward the French people. Our opinions may differ somewhat, but I assure you that this AC doesn't speak for us.
While that's true, few non-commercial developers are tuned in to what's going on outside their own small circle of buddies well enough to recognize the necessity of Unicode. Those who do see the writing on the wall often aren't sure how to deal with it. They're not sure how to write code to work with a Unicode config file.
Since *all* XML-compliant applications are required to support Unicode (and not required to support anything else), it would be easier to support Unicode config files by just making them XML files and using open source XML libraries for their config file manipulation.
Most Internet software isn't of the standalone local variety, like old "productivity apps" were. For this reason, the old style of localizing separate versions for separate locales is obsolete. Internationalization is the way to go. Even if your interface isn't localized, your *functionality* should still work everywhere because your code goes everywhere.
The big multinationals have all figured this out. Sun, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, etc. wouldn't even consider creating a new system that wasn't based on Unicode. "Scratch my own itch" Linux developers usually have a more provincial perspective of the problems they are trying to solve, unfortunately.
That's changing, though. As the major tools and protocols all update to Unicode, users will demand that all their tools work seamlessly with Unicode.
XML, for example, is UTF-8 unicode by default. XML-compliant systems are *required* to support unicode and not required to support anything else. Larry Wall recognized this trend and the upgrade to UTF-8 was the biggest reason for the jump to Perl 5.6. He saw the exponential increase in Unicode-encoded (esp. UTF-8) text and realized that the world's best text manipulator was going to have to be rearchitected to deal with the new standard text encoding.
The xterm developers saw this, too, and have now upgraded xterm to handle (UTF-8) Unicode. Now, we can all reimplement ls, cat, head, tail, etc. in Perl 5.6 and work in xterm.
Creating your own versions of standard tools is really doing it the hard way, though. We need all of our standard tools to work in Unicode. Old favorites like vi should work seamlessly with multilingual text encoded in UTF-8. All of the tools, and all of the glue (pipes, the X clipboard, all forms of copy and paste), the file system, the fonts, should all be Unicode. Copying Japanese text out of an email and pasting it into a French file in vi should be seamless. Copying a Korean word off a Web page and pasting it as an argument on the command line should work the same as if it were English -- on everybody's Linux box. It's just text.
That's the future of all other software systems (even most *new* handheld platforms are Unicode-based), so I hope it's the future of Linux. This business of having to tweak each tool separately for some subset of Unicode functionality, if it's available at all, is very primitive. A more universal, ubiquitous, transparent use of the ASCII-compatible UTF-8 Unicode is sorely needed.
XML is a way of giving plain-text data enough structure that it becomes possible to automate complex manipulation of the data.
There would be lots of both GUI and command line tools available to manipulate such config files. This would make life a lot easier for users.
There would also be a lot of libraries for manipulating standard XML, so application developers wouldn't have to spend much time writing the config file maintenance portions of their apps and could concentrate on creating better apps.
I REALLY don't want disgruntled customers to have access to my home address. I can't give the registrars a phony address, though, because I can't risk losing my domain name because the renewal notice doesn't reach me. I also don't want to have to shell out the money for an outside mailbox service just for one letter a year. (With that volume of mail, I might miss my letter anyway.)
Add that to the registrar's claim that *they* really own my domain name anyway, and if they take it from me or accidentally "lose" it ("oops, well too bad for you") I'm out of business.
What can you say about a company that claims ownership of your property, can cost you your job, and puts your family's lives at risk?
What are they going to do next? Poison our water supply?
my wife and i just launched our first product this weekend. he's fast asleep in one arm, like a warm football, while i learn to type with one hand without waking him...
We've seen Biafra-style *freedom* before. I'm surprised more people here don't recognize it, but perhaps it's because Slashdotters are mostly teenagers whose knowledge of history is limited to the history of operating systems since 1970 or so.
Mao and Stalin were "anti-establishment" the same way Biafra is: they wanted to *be* the establishment. Biafra wanted to be the president, not abolish the presidency.
Biafra wants to fight for "freedom", he says. His techniques? He would need to know exactly how much money everybody is making so that *he* could confiscate anything that *he* decided he deserves more than *you*. Your opinion would be irrelevant if he had his way.
He would pass out "yuppie scum" stickers, paid for with money he confiscated from rich Enemies of the People, to be used by "The People" to vandalize those possessions that he didn't approve of.
What sort of people would consider this sort of thing "freedom"? Well, it would have made perfect sense to both Mao and Stalin. So, if you like the "free" societies created by Mao and Stalin, you should promote Biafra, too.
from Merholz:
"Think about it. What products, in the real world, use the possessive "My" in their names? Products for small children, like "My First Sony." How foolish would it sound, say, to buy something called "My Telephone" or "My VCR". Obviously, they're yours--you own it! Using "My" on a Web site encourages this childish sense of propriety, a propriety which, as was pointed out earlier, is already unfounded."
from Perl:
my $computer="Wintel";
my $documents="MS-Office";
---------------------------------------
MS products run on all those versions of Windows, but that doesn't mean that they can't detect what version they're on. There are all kinds of "if WIN95...else if WIN98...chunks of code.
If they could discover a subtle way to detect most (not even all) of the time when they are on Wine, they wouldn't even need to create an "if WINE" branch. They would probably be able to find ways of getting it to go down the wrong Windows branch on occasion, instead of going down the branch of whichever Windows WINE emulates. That would result in strange, irreproducible crashers that would create FUD around Wine.
This would be a lot more devastating than just preventing it from working at all. It would cast serious doubts on Wine's reliability without making MS look guilty of anything. Even looking at the source code, you wouldn't see any "if WINE" case statements, so it would be hard to pin anything on MS.
I think WINE should go forward as a way to run Win32 apps from vendors other than MS. Other ISVs would love to have the additional revenue stream.
At the same time, I think there have to be some serious open source competitors to the MS-Office apps. Those are important enough that they need to run well natively, and not be hampered by the tradeoffs of an emulator. At the same time, we don't want MS to have another revenue stream from the Linux market.
Just wondering. Linguistics. ;-)
Check the CPU count on those benchmarks. Are those really "virtually identical" configurations? (They may be, because I haven't read the fine print and may be misunderstanding something, but they don't appear identical to me.)
Preventing people from expressing their opinions online *is* "Internet fascism". Certainly if those neo-nazis you talk about were in charge, they would agree with you, not me, and eliminate this "misguided freedom of speech" you and they deplore.
Don't confuse my support for free speech with my support of everything every wacko has to say.
When the government doesn't allow people to express certain opinions, it is often because there are dark political secrets that those in power don't want the people to find out about. Even when those things the government doesn't allow are untrue, how are people supposed to know that? If the government only allows me to hear one side of an argument -- by law -- I have to assume that I don't have enough information to be sure which side is correct. All I know is which side the government wants me to believe.
Those who are into conspiracy theories are likely to favor whatever side the government covers up.
When wackos can make their best arguments, and their opponents can do likewise, then I'm a lot more confident that I understand the real issues.
Yeah, right. How silly of our founding fathers to have neglected to specify what opinions we were and weren't allowed to hold...by law.
My title is the correct quote, and it's very old. Unfortunately, I think "the good is the enemy of the great" (i.e., the reverse of the true quote) is a much cleverer statement than the correct quote. That puts you in a tough position: do you want to say something that's cleverer or more correct?
The reversed form of the quote is far more popular, too, so I'm not the only one who feels that way. "The good is the enemy of the great" means that something that is good enough unfortunately removes the incentive to change to something better.
Lots of technologies follow this pattern. Something better is invented but never gets adopted because something well established is good enough that it's not worth all the trouble to make the change.
Yes, check on that oil sheikh statement and post what you find out. Sounds like an urban legend to me.
;-)
To the original poster of that claim, do you have a URL containing details of this? If it's just claimed on Slashdot, it's hard to believe but if it is on a Web page, then it's just gotta be true...
"Martyrdom"? Sometimes the preposterous, self-righteous bs here on Slashdot gets so deep I feel like putting on my rubber boots.
So you want to do some noble "power to the people" project that "corporate America won't like". Well, two things come to mind. One possibility is that you want to create something wonderful, like an extraordinary browser (Mozilla), or a whole operating system (Linux), or any number of other superb products that legitimately compete ferociously with products of "corporate America" like IE, Solaris, Oracle, etc. If that's the case, then the number of ways you could contribute to the world is virtually limitless, and you don't need to sneak around to do it. "Corporate America" calls it "competition", and it goes on above ground, in the light of day.
The other possibility is that instead of creating something of value yourself, you feel an adolescent urge to be a big hero to other adolescents by finding ways of stealing things of value created by others. You have some cartoonish image of "corporate America" as The Evil Empire from Star Wars, and you're some noble code Jedi with a compiler for a light saber. I suspect you're in this camp. I'm mistaken, then these comments apply to those who are, but not to you.
"Corporate America", in reality, isn't one entity, and it isn't even American. It is the majority of working people in the developed world and the relatively consistent conventions they've established for cooperating as groups and individuals to convert the hours of their lives into things of value, which they then trade with other groups and individuals. It is also the relatively consistent conventions they've established to prevent people and groups from stealing from one another, forcing them to have to produce things of value themselves that can be used in voluntary trades. That increases the pot of goods and services rather than just shifting them around.
There are plenty of areas in commerce where reasonable people of good will legitimately disagree on areas of legal policy. There are also countless inequities and inefficiencies in a system that still requires human lawyers to argue the edge cases. Those with the biggest legal budgets tend to win more than their fair share of edge cases.
Unfortunately, there are also a lot of people who think it's their right to steal anything that they can get away with stealing. They frequently point to the inequities of the system as a rationalization for their base desire to simply steal something rather than trading for it.
Instead of pouring your energies into finding ways to steal from your neighbors, whom you refer to as "Corporate America" to make it sound noble, why don't you find a charity that can't afford to pay for "enterprise software" and build something for them from open source components?
Or why don't you find a way to extend the features of some open-source system to cover the needs of a group that doesn't yet have the necessary level of computer literacy to do it for themselves?
Or why don't you go out and create music or great films or whatever, and then give away what you've traded the hours of your life to produce, instead of trying to give away the hours of other peoples' lives?
Yes, I did, beginning in the summer of '81.
The only group I remember posting to was sf-lovers, but I also remember that there was an ongoing debate about who really owned a symbolic math package called Macsyma. It was a huge flamefest. Macsyma had been developed with federal tax dollars, and yet MIT had sole commercial rights, IIRC (it has been a long time, and I've forgotten the details). I worked at SAI at the time (which later became SAIC, which spawned NSI, the domain name registrar of ill repute). MIT was essentially our "ISP" at the time, and we didn't want to bite the hand that fed us, but we thought we should all have free access to Macsyma (which was a *lot* less powerful than Mathematica is today).
It's funny how that debate is echoed in today's arguments about open source vs. proprietary. Ah, memories....