I want to read from the angry, the illiterate, the strange and the vicious. They have clarity.
No they don't. They have no idea what they think, generally because they cannot and do not think. They have "feelings", but their feelings are generally disgusting. They're morons. It is a very rare thing when somebody who is angry, illiterate, and vicious is worth listening to. What you're calling "illiteracy" (obviously, all Slashdotters are at least minimally capable of coping with written English) is in fact ignorance and incoherence. Thoughtful speakers of english as a second language come off as more "literate" than native speakers with muddled, vague "ideas". The ones who whine about how "grammar doesn't count" are missing the point -- if they knew what they thought, or why, they'd be able to express it competently. It might be full of shit and dead wrong, but it would at least make sense.
I read their posts because they're amusing. It's like going to the zoo and watching animals fuck.
Don't get me wrong: We should still let those people vote, because they're no more irresponsible in their use of power than anybody else. The ability to use power wisely is a separate issue. Furthermore, it's only fair to let all interested parties have an equal hand in destroying whatever small traces of value there may be in this miserable culture. It's the only game in town. Everybody should get to play. Unfortunately, money equals power, so the chandala will never get to do their fair share of damage until they start a revolution. That's a serious flaw in any human political system, but since the end result is always the same (what did Orwell say, "a boot stepping on a human face, forever"?) it really doesn't make a damn bit of difference in practical terms.
i want a default where I only see the posts from -10s and worse...
Conscientious moderators encourage better, and more posting. My goal is clear: Get ratings of 3-4 on all my posts!
It also hands out a treat (moderator status) to people who post well, which is a better and more concrete motivator than just "being well thought of".
Anyhow, your post gave me a nifty thought:
It might be cool to have multiple, separate-but-equal moderation "subcultures".
Invent some number of arbitrary descriptive names, and let everybody choose which one they want to belong to. Each one would be the whole deal you've got now. If I decide that I want to belong to the (hypothetical) "Beavis and Butthead Subculture", then I'd see scores determined by the "Beavis and Butthead Subculture" moderators. They would be chosen by the same system as now -- but only the scores given them by *other* B&BS moderators would affect that. And only B&BS "members" would ever be subjected to their scores. If I posted, my posts would end up with n different scores -- one for each set of moderators. Only the one given by the B&BS moderators would count towards (or against) my becoming a moderator myself.
This would be groovy. Just by starting out with arbitrary names, people would choose a "subculture" with a name they liked -- and then it would gradually mutate to fit that name. The moderators now in place would get to choose their "subculture", and there they'd be. There would be many different Slashdots, all parallel.
I suppose that if you changed "subcultures", your moderator status would be determined by the scores you've gotten from the moderators over there.
You could also have a Preferences thing to block out members of a particular "subculture".
Half the comments would be "Rob, dammit, I paid good money for this, so do it my way!" I don't think that Rob would find that crap to be worth $29 per knucklehead per year.
Ha ha. Think about it, though. How much dissent do you see on network TV? It's not nearly as bad as the Soviets were, but it's not as different as most people would like to think.
isn't that an underlying ideal of communism... stamp out those who disagree?
The significant "underlying ideal[s] of communism" are mainly stuff like redistribution of wealth, workers' control of the means of production, full employment, u.s.w.
It's depressing that people often use communism as an excuse for imposing dictatorships, but it's also depressing that anarchies generally harden into feudal warlordism, completely unregulated free markets coagulate into monopolies, etc.
slashdot . . . refuses to set my userlogin cookie anymore.
Identify yourself! Since you refuse to stand behind your comments, there's no reason why anybody should listen to them. This goes double for complaints, which your post clearly is. Any complaint from an Anonymous Coward is prima facie (or ipso facto or ex post facto, or quid pro quo or, uh, whatever) null and void.
It gets a bit tiring to see people crank out half a page of text about how somebody's views aren't worth hearing merely because of the name attached to the post. With equal justice, I could say that your remarks are invalid because you call yourself "caferace".
Maybe Rob could code a "logical fallacy detector" of some kind. Or else just flag certain phrases: "While I generally approve of the AC concept", "Some of my best friends are AC's", "why don't you have an account", "you refuse to be accountable for your writings", etc.
I'd also like to see plural/singular disagreement be stigmatized, but I'm probably whistling in the dark on that one.:)
I find your requests for moderator accountability flawed, given the context of your AC status.
Um, well, I find your remarks flawed due to the fact that your post is just one long non sequitur. Okay, you don't like AC's. That's cool, it's a free country. But why not just say, "I hate AC's", and leave it at that?
This is groovy because many of us will now try very hard to make reasonable, thoughtful contributions -- in the hope of becoming moderators so we can zap those damn (KDE|GNOME|RedHat|Caldera|Liberal|Libertarian|you- name-it) bastards!
Well, its up to the author, of course, but pretty silly as far as I can see. As if Linux users are some kind of elite that are worthy of your program, while other OS's are used by twits who should just be charged to support the core development. If you view of users is that biased, it doesn't say much about you as an author.
True -- but there's a very closely related reason which seems valid to me: When you write good software for a given platform, that tends to increase the viability of that platform. When you write something cool for a proprietary OS (especially free beer), you're increasing the value of that OS. This is good for the user, but it's good for the vendor as well. Okay, that's cool. The benefit to the vendor is really incidental. But it seems to me that if I'm helping somebody else make a buck, I may as well make a buck too. It's an uneven trade otherwise. By contrast, if I write something cool for Lignux, I'm just making yet another contribution. How could anybody mind giving stuff to Linus? He's given us stuff already. There's a big difference between my relationship with Linus (or Stallman, or the XFree86 people) and my relationship with proprietary vendors.
A practical example: Cygnus made windows usable. They've exposed some new people to the joys of a good command line interface, and they've passed out a hell of a lot of free (beer) compilers, but they also made it a lot easier and more pleasant to keep on paying a proprietary vendor.
I'm not sure this argument is justified, but I think it's worth some thought anyway.
The marketplace has given us no ideas, no beauty, no creation. People have given us those things -- often in disregard of the marketplace which can offer only material rewards.
So, to hell with the marketplace. Even in the most utopian of marketplace ideals, it is dull and dead. Thankfully not everyone has given up on thought and, yes, morallity for the seductive void of the marketplace.
He thinks that software should be free, even if its creators don't want it to be. (And so, for example, if you write some piece of software he likes, he thinks it is his right, and perhaps even his obligation, to clone it and make his version free.)
Is O'Reilly suggesting that Stallman is the only one who thinks we've got a right to clone other peoples' products? I don't think that's the case, because cloning, per se, is as popular among proprietary developers as among free ones. I mean, you'd have to walk an awful damn long way to find anybody at all who'd tell you you don't have a perfect right to clone somebody else's program. (All the way to Cupertino:)
Hmmph. Given the "And so . .." there, I was sort of expecting what followed to in some way follow from, or depend on, the first part. The thing is, they're quite unrelated. If Stallman clones proprietary programs, that has nothing to do with making those programs free; he's making clones of those programs free. The original developers can continue to do as they please. GCC or no GCC, a lot of people are making a lot of money selling compilers.
I'm not quite sure why O'Reilly has this thing going on about Stallman, anyway. [insert standard yeah-i-got-a-shelf-of-O'Reilly-books disclaimer]
at my day job I use the Talking Moon visual tools (C++ and J++) and nearly all the time I simply use cout and System.out.print to debug as the visual debugger is so horribly slow (On a PII450/128MB).
At work I've got a PII400 w/ 128MB RAM; I use VC and it ain't that bad. Actually I sometimes use VC at home on a 266 MHZ K6 with 32MB ram and it's not unbearable. While it's contemplating its navel, I get some time to think:)
What *does* piss me off is the "visual" parts of MSVC. For example the resource editor, and the dreaded "#include "afxres.h"". The lcc-win32 resource editor doesn't float my boat, but writing dialog resources in a text editor blows. So it'd be nice if I could use MSVC's resource editor without having to strain out a lot of portability-prevention crapola after every time I save the file. No such luck. Hey, fine, they can make their own products however they like -- but I'm equally free to say they suck. It's a basic problem with the competitive-market approach to software design: There's often a great competitive advantage to be gained by deliberately breaking one's own products.
I refuse to use MFC on non-work projects (it's horrible, it's dying anyway, to hell with it), but at work I have to. So I have to use the loathsome "class wizard", because there's no other practical way to do MFC event handlers (. . . that I know of, anyway; the prototypes are AFAIK undocumented). But the wizard thing is so fucking fragile, it's not funny. It's also not even remotely type-safe. You can assign a function with a totally wrong prototype and never know it. The problem is that, as far as I can see, you have to either use the stupid "visual" crap for literally everything (which is very time-consuming and annoying), or else waste years of your life becoming an MFC guru.
MFC doesn't make very many things that much easier, and it makes some things harder. The depressing thing is that there are "programmers" out there who don't know anything else. In fact, for small projects, it's easier and quicker to do it all in straight C. For large projects, you've got time to roll your own framework (typesafe, well-designed, suited to your particular program) and do it right. Ummm . . . for some 2-3 month sized projects, MFC makes sense.
Compared to a sensible, well-thought-out "RAD" tool like Delphi, MFC/MSVC doesn't look very good. Part of that is the lack of abstraction and so forth, part of it is the fragile, afterthought-ish nature of most of the "visual" things, part of it is the bizarre lack of anything like a layout manager (Delphi is very nice in that respect), and a big, big part is the fact that it's all tied to their "dominant[sic]-view architecture", which is well-suited only to a small subset of the actual programs that people actually write. It's the usual Talking Moon one-size-fits-all Procrustean Bed approach: "Sir, these sleeves are too short. Pardon me while I remove Sir's hands. Ah yes, much better."
TCL is a jit byte-compiled platform-independent scripting language with a feature-set to rival even Perl.
Yeah, but the shell-interperter-ish syntax is too awful to contemplate. Regardless of its capabilities, if it's hellish to use, I want no part of it.
It also comes with TK, a platform independent widget toolkit that works seamlessly and with native look-and-feel under X, Windows, and MacOS.
There are tk bindings for a lot of languages like perl, python, etc. (In fairness, AFAIK tcl had tk first, right?) It's a strength, certainly, but since it shows up on both sides you kinda have to cancel it out IMHO.
All this comparing of languages is silly anyway; so what if I don't like tcl? If you find it useful, you find it useful, and that's that. It's hard to argue against that, because there's really no other objective measure of the worth of a language. Nobody's making me use it, so it's no skin off my ass one way or another.
c't experienced from well informed source that in talking moon . ..
Man, that's nice. Lovely.
Those Hamburg star division makes its star available Office for the non-commercial application even free of charge. Whether Microsoft can struggle through itself to a similar selling concept, remains being waiting still.
I betcha it'll be free [beer] on the same terms. MS can afford to do it, and they'll want to own this market quickly.
It's depressing, though. Only a few weeks ago I was confidently predicting that MS would be too arrogant to sell Linux software, thereby giving others a shot at that market. No such luck. Stupid Borland hasn't even announced plans to port Delphi yet. They'll be beaten to market by VB on a new platform -- a platform they could have owned if they'd had some sense. That class library is abstract enough to make it very, very damn nearly possible to write source-portable RAD GUI programs in a real language. Of course, if there's one company on earth more arrogant, unresponsive, and fucked up than MS, it's Borland. They just have this annoying habit of releasing enough good products to keep our hopes up. Thank god, thank god for gcc.
-j
"So true" -- but what in god's name does it mean?!
on
OSI APSL Response
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· Score: 1
Can't posts like that be close-captioned for the Trek-impaired? Some of us are totally perplexed by that stuff.
it might be argued that from a dedicated free/open software perspective, one would be hypocritical to accept/respect/etc a licence that contradicts the ethics and spirits of the open software movement.
"Ethics and spirit" indeed! I couldn't agree more. Now find a minyan to back us up. "This, too, shall pass". -j
It's not just one person's socks here.
on
OSI APSL Response
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· Score: 1
But there are still a lot of people watching.
TANSTAAFL, I guess. We get free parallel debugging, but we also get this crap:)
I thought Bruce . . . tried as hard as he could not to start a flamewar. I think Eric was pretty reasonable too.
I agree about Perens. Raymond's response got on my nerves a bit, but Raymond always does that to me. Oh, well.
Isn't the point to have a board of clueful people who are trusted by the community to make rational decisions, thereby saving a lot of time and bureaucracy?
Um, do you trust people who don't care to hear your input, even though they claim to represent you?
If everything has to go to the Community, then why have OSI at all?
. . .
Do people *really* want to have OpenSource policy guided by/. poll?
There is ample middle ground between a star chamber and a Slashdot poll.
And, as I said, I wouldn't be complaining if Raymond had been willing to accept debate more gracefully. Apple is Apple. I doubt that they would have been willing to negotiate with Raymond in public anyway. Being who they are, they want secrecy followed by . . . an ANNOUNCEMENT! Drama! PR! Humor, pathos, tragedy! Etc. Okay, that's the game they're in. But if that's the case, it's especially important for there to be open debate after the cat is out of the bag.
If you don't like the decisions, lobby for a change in the membership of the OSI board.
In other words: "If you're pissed off, bitch and moan!" This is good advice:) I think it's being taken.
the real secrets in Cupertino are along the lines of "Which SUV-driving, yuppie-wanna-be, middle-manager w/ two kids & a husband did seven lines of coke off her boss's backside then nailed two -boys- in the bathroom at comdex back in '89?"
A. You keep returning to this. I'm not gonna ask.:)
Slashdot Mirror
I FIGURED OUT HOW TO BOOST MY SCORE REAL HIGH!!!
Just write interesting stuff.
Um, yeah.
Define "interesting".
My own definition bears not the slightest resemblance to that of the moderators. I'm not complaining, actually. But that's the way it goes.
-j
I want to read from the angry, the illiterate, the strange and the vicious. They have clarity.
No they don't. They have no idea what they think, generally because they cannot and do not think. They have "feelings", but their feelings are generally disgusting. They're morons. It is a very rare thing when somebody who is angry, illiterate, and vicious is worth listening to. What you're calling "illiteracy" (obviously, all Slashdotters are at least minimally capable of coping with written English) is in fact ignorance and incoherence. Thoughtful speakers of english as a second language come off as more "literate" than native speakers with muddled, vague "ideas". The ones who whine about how "grammar doesn't count" are missing the point -- if they knew what they thought, or why, they'd be able to express it competently. It might be full of shit and dead wrong, but it would at least make sense.
I read their posts because they're amusing. It's like going to the zoo and watching animals fuck.
Don't get me wrong: We should still let those people vote, because they're no more irresponsible in their use of power than anybody else. The ability to use power wisely is a separate issue. Furthermore, it's only fair to let all interested parties have an equal hand in destroying whatever small traces of value there may be in this miserable culture. It's the only game in town. Everybody should get to play. Unfortunately, money equals power, so the chandala will never get to do their fair share of damage until they start a revolution. That's a serious flaw in any human political system, but since the end result is always the same (what did Orwell say, "a boot stepping on a human face, forever"?) it really doesn't make a damn bit of difference in practical terms.
i want a default where I only see the posts from -10s and worse...
So do I. Just not for the same reasons.
-j
-j
Conscientious moderators encourage better, and more posting. My goal is clear: Get ratings of 3-4 on all my posts!
It also hands out a treat (moderator status) to people who post well, which is a better and more concrete motivator than just "being well thought of".
Anyhow, your post gave me a nifty thought:
It might be cool to have multiple, separate-but-equal moderation "subcultures".
Invent some number of arbitrary descriptive names, and let everybody choose which one they want to belong to. Each one would be the whole deal you've got now. If I decide that I want to belong to the (hypothetical) "Beavis and Butthead Subculture", then I'd see scores determined by the "Beavis and Butthead Subculture" moderators. They would be chosen by the same system as now -- but only the scores given them by *other* B&BS moderators would affect that. And only B&BS "members" would ever be subjected to their scores. If I posted, my posts would end up with n different scores -- one for each set of moderators. Only the one given by the B&BS moderators would count towards (or against) my becoming a moderator myself.
This would be groovy. Just by starting out with arbitrary names, people would choose a "subculture" with a name they liked -- and then it would gradually mutate to fit that name. The moderators now in place would get to choose their "subculture", and there they'd be. There would be many different Slashdots, all parallel.
I suppose that if you changed "subcultures", your moderator status would be determined by the scores you've gotten from the moderators over there.
You could also have a Preferences thing to block out members of a particular "subculture".
-j
Charge $29 a year
Half the comments would be "Rob, dammit, I paid good money for this, so do it my way!" I don't think that Rob would find that crap to be worth $29 per knucklehead per year.
-j
Ha ha. Think about it, though. How much dissent do you see on network TV? It's not nearly as bad as the Soviets were, but it's not as different as most people would like to think.
isn't that an underlying ideal of communism
The significant "underlying ideal[s] of communism" are mainly stuff like redistribution of wealth, workers' control of the means of production, full employment, u.s.w.
It's depressing that people often use communism as an excuse for imposing dictatorships, but it's also depressing that anarchies generally harden into feudal warlordism, completely unregulated free markets coagulate into monopolies, etc.
-j
slashdot . . . refuses to set my userlogin cookie anymore.
Identify yourself! Since you refuse to stand behind your comments, there's no reason why anybody should listen to them. This goes double for complaints, which your post clearly is. Any complaint from an Anonymous Coward is prima facie (or ipso facto or ex post facto, or quid pro quo or, uh, whatever) null and void.
-j
I put my threashold at 10 for the intelligent comments and got nothing...
Hmmm . . . I wonder what that means?
(This, my friends, is how one prevents oneself from becoming a moderator!)
-j
Seriously.
It gets a bit tiring to see people crank out half a page of text about how somebody's views aren't worth hearing merely because of the name attached to the post. With equal justice, I could say that your remarks are invalid because you call yourself "caferace".
Maybe Rob could code a "logical fallacy detector" of some kind. Or else just flag certain phrases: "While I generally approve of the AC concept", "Some of my best friends are AC's", "why don't you have an account", "you refuse to be accountable for your writings", etc.
I'd also like to see plural/singular disagreement be stigmatized, but I'm probably whistling in the dark on that one.
I find your requests for moderator accountability flawed, given the context of your AC status.
Um, well, I find your remarks flawed due to the fact that your post is just one long non sequitur. Okay, you don't like AC's. That's cool, it's a free country. But why not just say, "I hate AC's", and leave it at that?
-j
I've been wishing for that for a long time.
-j
This is groovy because many of us will now try very hard to make reasonable, thoughtful contributions -- in the hope of becoming moderators so we can zap those damn (KDE|GNOME|RedHat|Caldera|Liberal|Libertarian|you- name-it) bastards!
:)
-j
heh heh heh.
-j
3. To discriminate against Windows users.
Well, its up to the author, of course, but pretty silly as far as I can see. As if Linux users are some kind of elite that are worthy of your program, while other OS's are used by twits who should just be charged to support the core development. If you view of users is that biased, it doesn't say much about you as an author.
True -- but there's a very closely related reason which seems valid to me: When you write good software for a given platform, that tends to increase the viability of that platform. When you write something cool for a proprietary OS (especially free beer), you're increasing the value of that OS. This is good for the user, but it's good for the vendor as well. Okay, that's cool. The benefit to the vendor is really incidental. But it seems to me that if I'm helping somebody else make a buck, I may as well make a buck too. It's an uneven trade otherwise. By contrast, if I write something cool for Lignux, I'm just making yet another contribution. How could anybody mind giving stuff to Linus? He's given us stuff already. There's a big difference between my relationship with Linus (or Stallman, or the XFree86 people) and my relationship with proprietary vendors.
A practical example: Cygnus made windows usable. They've exposed some new people to the joys of a good command line interface, and they've passed out a hell of a lot of free (beer) compilers, but they also made it a lot easier and more pleasant to keep on paying a proprietary vendor.
I'm not sure this argument is justified, but I think it's worth some thought anyway.
-j
The marketplace has given us no ideas, no beauty, no creation. People have given us those things -- often in disregard of the marketplace which can offer only material rewards.
So, to hell with the marketplace. Even in the most utopian of marketplace ideals, it is dull and dead. Thankfully not everyone has given up on thought and, yes, morallity for the seductive void of the marketplace.
Right on.
-j
He thinks that software should be free, even if its creators don't want it to be. (And so, for example, if you write some piece of software he likes, he thinks it is his right, and perhaps even his obligation, to clone it and make his version free.)
Is O'Reilly suggesting that Stallman is the only one who thinks we've got a right to clone other peoples' products? I don't think that's the case, because cloning, per se, is as popular among proprietary developers as among free ones. I mean, you'd have to walk an awful damn long way to find anybody at all who'd tell you you don't have a perfect right to clone somebody else's program. (All the way to Cupertino
Hmmph. Given the "And so . .
I'm not quite sure why O'Reilly has this thing going on about Stallman, anyway. [insert standard yeah-i-got-a-shelf-of-O'Reilly-books disclaimer]
-j
Heh. "NT: The software that works". Okay, it's a deliberate troll.
Still. Just because he's a moron doesn't justifiy zapping him. A lot of morons in favor of free software do not get zapped on Slashdot. It's unfair.
-j
Can you please try tcl/tk before complaining about it?
I did. IMHO tcl is an ugly and painful language to write in.
You can start creating GUIs that run in Windows, Linux and Macs in an afternoon
Hey, I did that too. It was pretty neat. tk is groovy.
-j
at my day job I use the Talking Moon visual tools (C++ and J++) and nearly all the time I simply use cout and System.out.print to debug as the visual debugger is so horribly slow (On a PII450/128MB).
At work I've got a PII400 w/ 128MB RAM; I use VC and it ain't that bad. Actually I sometimes use VC at home on a 266 MHZ K6 with 32MB ram and it's not unbearable. While it's contemplating its navel, I get some time to think
What *does* piss me off is the "visual" parts of MSVC. For example the resource editor, and the dreaded "#include "afxres.h"". The lcc-win32 resource editor doesn't float my boat, but writing dialog resources in a text editor blows. So it'd be nice if I could use MSVC's resource editor without having to strain out a lot of portability-prevention crapola after every time I save the file. No such luck. Hey, fine, they can make their own products however they like -- but I'm equally free to say they suck. It's a basic problem with the competitive-market approach to software design: There's often a great competitive advantage to be gained by deliberately breaking one's own products.
I refuse to use MFC on non-work projects (it's horrible, it's dying anyway, to hell with it), but at work I have to. So I have to use the loathsome "class wizard", because there's no other practical way to do MFC event handlers (. . . that I know of, anyway; the prototypes are AFAIK undocumented). But the wizard thing is so fucking fragile, it's not funny. It's also not even remotely type-safe. You can assign a function with a totally wrong prototype and never know it. The problem is that, as far as I can see, you have to either use the stupid "visual" crap for literally everything (which is very time-consuming and annoying), or else waste years of your life becoming an MFC guru.
MFC doesn't make very many things that much easier, and it makes some things harder. The depressing thing is that there are "programmers" out there who don't know anything else. In fact, for small projects, it's easier and quicker to do it all in straight C. For large projects, you've got time to roll your own framework (typesafe, well-designed, suited to your particular program) and do it right. Ummm . . . for some 2-3 month sized projects, MFC makes sense.
Compared to a sensible, well-thought-out "RAD" tool like Delphi, MFC/MSVC doesn't look very good. Part of that is the lack of abstraction and so forth, part of it is the fragile, afterthought-ish nature of most of the "visual" things, part of it is the bizarre lack of anything like a layout manager (Delphi is very nice in that respect), and a big, big part is the fact that it's all tied to their "dominant[sic]-view architecture", which is well-suited only to a small subset of the actual programs that people actually write. It's the usual Talking Moon one-size-fits-all Procrustean Bed approach: "Sir, these sleeves are too short. Pardon me while I remove Sir's hands. Ah yes, much better."
As a text editor, MSVC is very nice
-j
TCL is a jit byte-compiled platform-independent scripting language with a feature-set to rival even Perl.
Yeah, but the shell-interperter-ish syntax is too awful to contemplate. Regardless of its capabilities, if it's hellish to use, I want no part of it.
It also comes with TK, a platform independent widget toolkit that works seamlessly and with native look-and-feel under X, Windows, and MacOS.
There are tk bindings for a lot of languages like perl, python, etc. (In fairness, AFAIK tcl had tk first, right?) It's a strength, certainly, but since it shows up on both sides you kinda have to cancel it out IMHO.
All this comparing of languages is silly anyway; so what if I don't like tcl? If you find it useful, you find it useful, and that's that. It's hard to argue against that, because there's really no other objective measure of the worth of a language. Nobody's making me use it, so it's no skin off my ass one way or another.
-j
c't experienced from well informed source that in talking moon . .
Man, that's nice. Lovely.
Those Hamburg star division makes its star available Office for the non-commercial application even free of charge. Whether Microsoft can struggle through itself to a similar selling concept, remains being waiting still.
I betcha it'll be free [beer] on the same terms. MS can afford to do it, and they'll want to own this market quickly.
It's depressing, though. Only a few weeks ago I was confidently predicting that MS would be too arrogant to sell Linux software, thereby giving others a shot at that market. No such luck. Stupid Borland hasn't even announced plans to port Delphi yet. They'll be beaten to market by VB on a new platform -- a platform they could have owned if they'd had some sense. That class library is abstract enough to make it very, very damn nearly possible to write source-portable RAD GUI programs in a real language. Of course, if there's one company on earth more arrogant, unresponsive, and fucked up than MS, it's Borland. They just have this annoying habit of releasing enough good products to keep our hopes up. Thank god, thank god for gcc.
-j
Can't posts like that be close-captioned for the Trek-impaired? Some of us are totally perplexed by that stuff.
:)
-j
it might be argued that from a dedicated free/open software perspective, one would be hypocritical to accept/respect/etc a licence that contradicts the ethics and spirits of the open software movement.
"Ethics and spirit" indeed! I couldn't agree more. Now find a minyan to back us up. "This, too, shall pass".
-j
But there are still a lot of people watching.
TANSTAAFL, I guess. We get free parallel debugging, but we also get this crap
I thought Bruce . . . tried as hard as he could
not to start a flamewar. I think Eric was pretty reasonable too.
I agree about Perens. Raymond's response got on my nerves a bit, but Raymond always does that to me. Oh, well.
And look! It still started one around here.
Can you name anything that wouldn't?
-j
My letter was non-confrontational, and it was taken that way by the people it was addressed to.
I don't think I'm the only one who's very relieved to hear that.
Thanks.
-j
Isn't the point to have a board of clueful people who are trusted by the community to make rational decisions, thereby saving a lot of time and bureaucracy?
Um, do you trust people who don't care to hear your input, even though they claim to represent you?
If everything has to go to the Community, then why have OSI at all?
. . .
Do people *really* want to have OpenSource policy guided by
There is ample middle ground between a star chamber and a Slashdot poll.
And, as I said, I wouldn't be complaining if Raymond had been willing to accept debate more gracefully. Apple is Apple. I doubt that they would have been willing to negotiate with Raymond in public anyway. Being who they are, they want secrecy followed by . . . an ANNOUNCEMENT! Drama! PR! Humor, pathos, tragedy! Etc. Okay, that's the game they're in. But if that's the case, it's especially important for there to be open debate after the cat is out of the bag.
If you don't like the decisions, lobby for a change in the membership of the OSI board.
In other words: "If you're pissed off, bitch and moan!" This is good advice
-j
the real secrets in Cupertino are along the lines of "Which SUV-driving, yuppie-wanna-be, middle-manager w/ two kids & a husband did seven lines of coke off her boss's backside then nailed two -boys- in the bathroom at comdex back in '89?"
A. You keep returning to this. I'm not gonna ask.
B. Um . . . Is Apple hiring?
:)
-j