Earlier in this thread, someone was talking about how much getting a degree helps a person improve their social skills. Thank you for demonstrating the actual extent to which that is true. I hope it will be a valuable lesson for all concerned.
The problem I have with disobedience is that it reenforces the Valenti-way of looking at the world. Copyright hoarders demand increasingly extreme rights so that they may exercise almost perfect control over how their content gets used. In response, the civil disobedience movement sends a message that they should have no control over how their content gets used at all. Between perfect control and no control, most would choose perfect control. And hence, we lose.
I disagree. I find that most people are easy to win over to the side of no control, especially if you give them a taste of what that forbidden thing called freedom tastes like. The only people who want to enforce total control are the people who would have total control, and they are few and far between. The vast majority of people would be controlled by these laws, and nobody who really understands that position wants to be in it. The more we flaunt the uninforcability of these stupid laws, the sooner we will be free of them. It is too late for comprimises: congress has already shown that it cannot be trusted to leave the laws alone in any sort of reasonable state. If they demand all or nothing, I will give them nothing!
This verbatim copy of a legally protected work is a clear violation of copyright law. You are stealing the potential revenue of Ed Post, the legal copyright holder. If he wanted to charge a million dollars to read this copyrighted text, then you have cost him a million dollars for every single slashdot reader who read it here for free. Thus, you have stolen thousands of millions of dollars from Ed Post, and should be punished accordingly!
Now some people might argue that no slashdot reader would pay even a single dollar to read this twenty-year-old letter to the editor of a defunct industry rag, much less a million dollars, and would simply choose not to read it if they could not do it for free. To these people I reply: STEALING IS BAD! STEALING IS WRONG! STEALING IS ILLEGAL! YOU WILL BE PUNISHED!
Settling down with my book, the one-volume, 1969 India paper edition, I read or skimmed for an hour or so. It was as I remembered it. The trilogy is mostly about leaving places, going places, being places, and going on to other places, all amid fearful portents and speculations. There are a great many mountains, valleys, streams, villages, caves, residences, grottos, bowers, fields, high roads, low roads, and along them the Hobbits and their larger companions travel while paying great attention to mealtimes.
Gahh! That is exactly why I hated the book. Sure it has a few cool scenes, but you had to hear about every miserable little pebble and stick they passed by along the way. If that is what is missing from the movie, I say good riddance! Give me action and adventure any day!
For me, understanding people's facial expressions is a little bit like trying to understand what a monkey is thinking. I can forgive a monkey for not just telling me what they think, because they are physically and mentally incapable of speech. What is your excuse?
Besides, normal people use body language to express ideas that are too ugly and selfish to say out loud. They say things like "I resent your being smarter than me" and "I want all your candy". I avoid looking at people's expressions because I learned long ago that I would not like what I see.
It is hard for me to worry about how evil some dead author may have been, when George Bush is in the white house and the CIA is openly spying on US citizens.
As for physical pleasure, I've had enough of it for my taste. Physical pleasures have natural limits: you can only have so much sex, and you can only eat so much ice cream, before you get sick of it. Intellectual pleasures never wear out. No matter where I am or what I am doing, all I need to do is think about computers and I am happy. I doubt most normal people, who seem to spend more time persuing happiness than experiencing it, can say the same thing.
It is my observation that people criticise spelling when they have run out of real objections, but still want to say something nasty.
Sociotism is a mental disorder characterised by an undue obsession with social interaction and eye contact, which often interferes with healthy interests such as computer programming and science fiction.
Sociotistic people often band together in tightly-knit heirarchies, where social status is determined by subtle shifts in "body language" rather than skill or experience. Sociotistic children often play cruel tricks on their healthier playmates for no logical reason. They prefer brutal team-oriented games like football over healthy, abstract tests of individual merit, such as video games.
Victims of sociotism of all ages tend to be less intelligent than healthy people. They are capable of learning skills that have an obvious and immediate short-term benifit, but profoundly lack the social independance and intellectual curiosity needed to explore new frontiers of knowledge. As a result, sociotistic people rarely succeed in feilds such as science or engineering, and when they do succeed in these feilds it is usually only in a managerial capacity.
If you know anyone that fits the description of a sociotistic person, please pat them on the head in a sympathetic but condecending manner and tell them to get professional help for their obvious deficiencies. With any luck, we will some day discover powerful mind-altering drugs that will force these people to be as healthy and well-adjusted as we are.
People who break traffic laws endanger the lives of innocent human beings. Software pirates copy software that they would probably never pay for under any circumstances. Most hard-core pirates are so busy copying stuff, they don't even have time to use the software that they do not pay for. What exactly do THEY endanger?
Now let us consider the people who feel they are "entitled" to get money for every single copy of a peice of software. They have people thrown in jail for the so-called "theft" of something that was never missing at any point of time. The fact that they currently have the law on their side does not make them right. If anyone deserves to be beaten with a clue-stick as badly as dangerous drivers, it is the big "intellectual property" owners.
I've seen plenty of people complain about the fact that they could find their old posts. Is there anyone else out there like me who couldn't find any old posts? I made plenty of usenet posts in my day, but you would never know it by searching google for them. I am sure that some of my old posts are better off forgotten, but I remember some of them were pretty good too. Wah.
It is bad enough when someone like Eric Raymond pontificates on the open source movement. At least he is one of us, and has some clue about what he is talking about. But I really can't stand it when some over-educated pinhead trys to cram thousands of people across the entire planet into one neat little pigeon-hole, and then acts like it's our fault that we don't fit. They use big words to ask stupid questions like "do hackers write software because it is useful, because it is fun, or because it will make them popular?" as if it can't be all three at the same time. Duh!
We are not an abstract theory. We exist whether or not you will ever understand us. Closing your eyes and muttering big words will not make us disappear, or transform us into something less confusing. Get over it!
The fact that he did not take this slashdot interview seriously is hardly proof that he does not take his job seriously. I would rather he spend his time working on the kernel than answering tedious questions about what he would do if Linus got hit by a bus. Being a good kernel maintainer means showing respect for the valuable contributions of smart people, but it also requires the ability to recognise and reject the valueless contributions of stupid people. I only wish that this interview did not give him such ample opportunities to demonstrate his skill in the latter activity. If these are the best questions the slashdot community could come up with, I have to wonder just how many real geeks are still hanging out here.
They are talking about putting ethernet ports on guitars... which means there will be little computers embedded in the guitars. Add linux and apache, and you get a web server that REALLY "rocks"!
I was just reading Asimov's autobiography, so this is still fresh in my memory. Asimov is credited with first using the term "robotics", but he was as suprised as anyone else to discover that nobody else had thought of it first.
As for the laws of robotics, Campbell was the first to articulate them explicitly, but he drew his inspiration for the laws from Asimov's writing.
You say that the application is sufficient for your own needs. Isn't that enough? Rest on your laurels, and be satisfied with the project as it is. Don't go looking for someone to take it over, if someone is truly suited for the task, they will come looking for you.
The X server is quite capable of doing things much faster than the human eye can follow. Even the non-accellerated "put image" method, the slowest and least efficient operation in X windows, can be used to implement semi-decent animation. We are talking about delays measured in milliseconds at most.
If an X application is slow, that is the application's fault.
It is true that there is little future in making money "selling free software", but that is only part of the larger picture: in the long run, there just isn't much future in selling any software, when free alternatives exist.
Software companies will switch from selling "software" to selling "services", not because services are going to become more profitable, but because software will become much less profitable. Companies that don't make the transition will eventually fade away. Microsoft is perfectly aware of this... what do you think the whole ".NET" thing is about?
Hopefully this isn't just yet another nail in the coffin for Debian...
Progeny is basically admitting that the free version of Debian is getting to be just as good as their proprietary distribution ever was. That might or might not be a bad thing for Progeny, but how could it possibly be a bad thing for Debian?
As an example, look at the mp3, CDR, DVD products out there. Is there a single product (game console, entertainment device or otherwise) that can play mp3s, read and write CDR, CDRW, DVD, DVD-ROM/RAM/RW and any other format? No. It is much better business sense to force the consumer to buy a couple of different devices than one do-it all device.
In other words, it makes "better business sense" to screw your customers than to give them a fair deal. That is only true for as long as you can get away with it.
When times are good, consumers are willing to waste their exess money on lots of little toys without worrying about how useful and practical they really are. Now that money is getting tighter, I think you can expect consumers to look a little closer at what they actually get for their money. They will demand products that are more useful, but less expensive. Companies that assume people will buy whatever they decide to sell will lose the market to companies that sell what people actually want to buy.
So to put it in a nutshell: It's hard to play favorites based on who is good and who is bad for their own people, so let's play favorites based on who will sell us cheap oil.
There is a third alternative, you know. It's called "not playing favorites". Why can't we just wash our hands of the entire matter, and let those people deal with their own problems? Why should we care if dictator X kills dictator Y? If brutal dictators want to supress the people of the middle east, they can at least do it without our help.
You speak of self-interest, but look at the big picture: we have been meddling with their affairs for half a century, and what do we have to show for it? A giant smoking crater in New York City, that's what. If those Americans died in the name of bringing freedom and democracy to repressed people, that would be one thing: But if they only died for cheap oil, I say to hell with it.
Evidently we need to optimize some joint measure of a number's width (how many digits it has) and its depth (how many different symbols can occupy each digit position). An obvious strategy is to minimize the product of these two quantities. In other words, if r is the radix and w is the width in digits, we want to minimize rw while holding r^w constant.
This may be an "obvious" strategy, but is it a useful one? A modern computer typically contains hundreds of millions of digits in base two. According to this theory, the cost of a computer (ie, the value we are trying to minimize) is equal to the radix times the width. If this is true, we can reverse the radix and the width to get a system that has precisely the same cost: thus, a machine that stores one hundred million digits in base two costs the same as a machine that stores two digits in base one hundred million, because two times one hundred million equals one hundred million times two.
In practice, building an electronic computers capable of distinguishing between one hundred million distinct voltage levels is a practical impossibility. Early attempts to build machines that had just ten distinct voltage levels were abandoned, not because of any theoretical arguments about data density, but because these devices turned out to be extremely difficult to manufacture and notoriously unreliable in operation. A computer with one hundred million distinct voltage levels, if it could be built at all, would certianly cost several million dollars to construct, and it would probably require a special power supply and several pounds of electromagnetic sheilding. It would certianly not "cost the same" as a typical desktop computer.
Even if we were to ignore the absurdity of the basic premise of the theory, and take for granted that the trinary computer is better than binary in some abstract way, there is still no compelling reason to switch. We have already invested billions of dollars into binary technology, and the benifits of that investment are undeniable. If you think companies like Sun and Apple has a hard time selling theoretically superior hardware in a market dominated by cheap PC clones, imagine how much harder it would be to introduce a computer that is so fundamentally incompatable that it does not even work with binary data. The dominance of the Windows platform proves that people don't want theoretical perfection: they want something that gets the job done, they want it to be cheap, and they want it now.
What exactly is it about threads that "encourage" people to use a one-thread-per-client model?
What is it about RPC that encourages people to to ignore network overhead?
What is it about table saws that encourage people to cut off their thumbs?
In all of these cases, the correct answer is nothing at all. Idiots do not need to be encouraged to do stupid stuff... they are quite able to do it on their own initiative. Powerful tools give people the ability to do amazing things, for good or for bad. Just be glad you can't cut your thumb off with a bad RPC call.
If you take a closer look at those projects, you will find that a lot of the project descriptions tend to sound something like "this project will implement a brand-new, object-oriented, buzzword-compliant operating system with a really cool graphical user interface, all written in a new programming language that I haven't actually designed yet, but it should be really cool and object-oriented."
Annoying people with big ideas and no talent start these projects, and assume that everyone else on the internet is going to do all the real work for them so that they can take the credit.
No wonder they fail.
As for the vast majority of people who download your hard-written code and don't feed anything back, don't feel too bad about that. Most of them are morons, and couldn't give you a single useful suggestion if you put a gun to their head. Just be glad they don't pester you with their "ideas".
No industry is ever obligated to provide customer support for a product they give away for free. If they do provide it anyway, it is usually in the hope that the customer will eventually pay for the "full" product, or a related service. A legally binding customer support contract always costs money, whether it is factored into the base price of the product or sold seperately.
When it comes right down to it, the only support a customer can demand for a free product is a full refund of zero dollars.
Why don't real-world objects, like books, come in more interesting shapes and sizes? Books have been around for longer than I can remember, maybe even more than a decade, so they have no excuse for not developing the useless features I clamor for. I once saw a really cool book in the children's library that was cut out in the shape of a teddy bear, and was full of bright, colorful pictures, but that was an exception to the rule. Most books are boring, box-shaped things, and they are full of nothing but little tiny words! What do they expect us to do, READ? If I had the attention span for that...
As it works now, the internet is only a means of distributing enormous amounts of information across the globe at the speed of light. If things continue the way they are going now, the most we can hope for is that the internet will become the storehouse of all human knowledge, instantly and effortlessly acessable to anyone, no matter how poor or underprivileged. What a sad, ignoble fate for a scheme that at one time held promise for serving a much higher goal: making greedy opportunists such as myself wealthy beyond the dreams of avarace.
Why should impoverished citizens of third-world nations learn how to filter their own drinking water, when once-proud executives in silicon vally are forced to actually work for a living? It is simply not fair I tell you, and I say we need to change the system now to protect those neglected executives. Forcing people to pay for the privilege of reading tiny columns of text surrounded by blinking banner ads would be a good start.
In short, the internet should not be about sharing human knowledge and enriching society. It should be about making big fat fistfuls of money, and enriching my wallet!
Now, could one of you geeks out there figure out how to make this "penny-per-page" system actually work? I am far too important to bother with such trivial details...
Slashdot Mirror
Earlier in this thread, someone was talking about how much getting a degree helps a person improve their social skills. Thank you for demonstrating the actual extent to which that is true. I hope it will be a valuable lesson for all concerned.
The problem I have with disobedience is that it reenforces the Valenti-way of looking at the world. Copyright hoarders demand increasingly extreme rights so that they may exercise almost perfect control over how their content gets used. In response, the civil disobedience movement sends a message that they should have no control over how their content gets used at all. Between perfect control and no control, most would choose perfect control. And hence, we lose.
I disagree. I find that most people are easy to win over to the side of no control, especially if you give them a taste of what that forbidden thing called freedom tastes like. The only people who want to enforce total control are the people who would have total control, and they are few and far between. The vast majority of people would be controlled by these laws, and nobody who really understands that position wants to be in it. The more we flaunt the uninforcability of these stupid laws, the sooner we will be free of them. It is too late for comprimises: congress has already shown that it cannot be trusted to leave the laws alone in any sort of reasonable state. If they demand all or nothing, I will give them nothing!
This verbatim copy of a legally protected work is a clear violation of copyright law. You are stealing the potential revenue of Ed Post, the legal copyright holder. If he wanted to charge a million dollars to read this copyrighted text, then you have cost him a million dollars for every single slashdot reader who read it here for free. Thus, you have stolen thousands of millions of dollars from Ed Post, and should be punished accordingly!
Now some people might argue that no slashdot reader would pay even a single dollar to read this twenty-year-old letter to the editor of a defunct industry rag, much less a million dollars, and would simply choose not to read it if they could not do it for free. To these people I reply: STEALING IS BAD! STEALING IS WRONG! STEALING IS ILLEGAL! YOU WILL BE PUNISHED!
I hope I have made my point.
Settling down with my book, the one-volume, 1969 India paper edition, I read or skimmed for an hour or so. It was as I remembered it. The trilogy is mostly about leaving places, going places, being places, and going on to other places, all amid fearful portents and speculations. There are a great many mountains, valleys, streams, villages, caves, residences, grottos, bowers, fields, high roads, low roads, and along them the Hobbits and their larger companions travel while paying great attention to mealtimes.
Gahh! That is exactly why I hated the book. Sure it has a few cool scenes, but you had to hear about every miserable little pebble and stick they passed by along the way. If that is what is missing from the movie, I say good riddance! Give me action and adventure any day!
For me, understanding people's facial expressions is a little bit like trying to understand what a monkey is thinking. I can forgive a monkey for not just telling me what they think, because they are physically and mentally incapable of speech. What is your excuse?
Besides, normal people use body language to express ideas that are too ugly and selfish to say out loud. They say things like "I resent your being smarter than me" and "I want all your candy". I avoid looking at people's expressions because I learned long ago that I would not like what I see.
It is hard for me to worry about how evil some dead author may have been, when George Bush is in the white house and the CIA is openly spying on US citizens.
As for physical pleasure, I've had enough of it for my taste. Physical pleasures have natural limits: you can only have so much sex, and you can only eat so much ice cream, before you get sick of it. Intellectual pleasures never wear out. No matter where I am or what I am doing, all I need to do is think about computers and I am happy. I doubt most normal people, who seem to spend more time persuing happiness than experiencing it, can say the same thing.
It is my observation that people criticise spelling when they have run out of real objections, but still want to say something nasty.
Sociotism is a mental disorder characterised by an undue obsession with social interaction and eye contact, which often interferes with healthy interests such as computer programming and science fiction.
Sociotistic people often band together in tightly-knit heirarchies, where social status is determined by subtle shifts in "body language" rather than skill or experience. Sociotistic children often play cruel tricks on their healthier playmates for no logical reason. They prefer brutal team-oriented games like football over healthy, abstract tests of individual merit, such as video games.
Victims of sociotism of all ages tend to be less intelligent than healthy people. They are capable of learning skills that have an obvious and immediate short-term benifit, but profoundly lack the social independance and intellectual curiosity needed to explore new frontiers of knowledge. As a result, sociotistic people rarely succeed in feilds such as science or engineering, and when they do succeed in these feilds it is usually only in a managerial capacity.
If you know anyone that fits the description of a sociotistic person, please pat them on the head in a sympathetic but condecending manner and tell them to get professional help for their obvious deficiencies. With any luck, we will some day discover powerful mind-altering drugs that will force these people to be as healthy and well-adjusted as we are.
People who break traffic laws endanger the lives of innocent human beings. Software pirates copy software that they would probably never pay for under any circumstances. Most hard-core pirates are so busy copying stuff, they don't even have time to use the software that they do not pay for. What exactly do THEY endanger?
Now let us consider the people who feel they are "entitled" to get money for every single copy of a peice of software. They have people thrown in jail for the so-called "theft" of something that was never missing at any point of time. The fact that they currently have the law on their side does not make them right. If anyone deserves to be beaten with a clue-stick as badly as dangerous drivers, it is the big "intellectual property" owners.
I've seen plenty of people complain about the fact that they could find their old posts. Is there anyone else out there like me who couldn't find any old posts? I made plenty of usenet posts in my day, but you would never know it by searching google for them. I am sure that some of my old posts are better off forgotten, but I remember some of them were pretty good too. Wah.
It is bad enough when someone like Eric Raymond pontificates on the open source movement. At least he is one of us, and has some clue about what he is talking about. But I really can't stand it when some over-educated pinhead trys to cram thousands of people across the entire planet into one neat little pigeon-hole, and then acts like it's our fault that we don't fit. They use big words to ask stupid questions like "do hackers write software because it is useful, because it is fun, or because it will make them popular?" as if it can't be all three at the same time. Duh!
We are not an abstract theory. We exist whether or not you will ever understand us. Closing your eyes and muttering big words will not make us disappear, or transform us into something less confusing. Get over it!
The fact that he did not take this slashdot interview seriously is hardly proof that he does not take his job seriously. I would rather he spend his time working on the kernel than answering tedious questions about what he would do if Linus got hit by a bus. Being a good kernel maintainer means showing respect for the valuable contributions of smart people, but it also requires the ability to recognise and reject the valueless contributions of stupid people. I only wish that this interview did not give him such ample opportunities to demonstrate his skill in the latter activity. If these are the best questions the slashdot community could come up with, I have to wonder just how many real geeks are still hanging out here.
They are talking about putting ethernet ports on guitars... which means there will be little computers embedded in the guitars. Add linux and apache, and you get a web server that REALLY "rocks"!
I was just reading Asimov's autobiography, so this is still fresh in my memory. Asimov is credited with first using the term "robotics", but he was as suprised as anyone else to discover that nobody else had thought of it first.
As for the laws of robotics, Campbell was the first to articulate them explicitly, but he drew his inspiration for the laws from Asimov's writing.
You say that the application is sufficient for your own needs. Isn't that enough? Rest on your laurels, and be satisfied with the project as it is. Don't go looking for someone to take it over, if someone is truly suited for the task, they will come looking for you.
Unlimited growth is the creed of the cancer cell.
The X server is quite capable of doing things much faster than the human eye can follow. Even the non-accellerated "put image" method, the slowest and least efficient operation in X windows, can be used to implement semi-decent animation. We are talking about delays measured in milliseconds at most.
If an X application is slow, that is the application's fault.
It is true that there is little future in making money "selling free software", but that is only part of the larger picture: in the long run, there just isn't much future in selling any software, when free alternatives exist.
Software companies will switch from selling "software" to selling "services", not because services are going to become more profitable, but because software will become much less profitable. Companies that don't make the transition will eventually fade away. Microsoft is perfectly aware of this... what do you think the whole ".NET" thing is about?
Hopefully this isn't just yet another nail in the coffin for Debian...
Progeny is basically admitting that the free version of Debian is getting to be just as good as their proprietary distribution ever was. That might or might not be a bad thing for Progeny, but how could it possibly be a bad thing for Debian?
As an example, look at the mp3, CDR, DVD products out there. Is there a single product (game console, entertainment device or otherwise) that can play mp3s, read and write CDR, CDRW, DVD, DVD-ROM/RAM/RW and any other format? No. It is much better business sense to force the consumer to buy a couple of different devices than one do-it all device.
In other words, it makes "better business sense" to screw your customers than to give them a fair deal. That is only true for as long as you can get away with it.
When times are good, consumers are willing to waste their exess money on lots of little toys without worrying about how useful and practical they really are. Now that money is getting tighter, I think you can expect consumers to look a little closer at what they actually get for their money. They will demand products that are more useful, but less expensive. Companies that assume people will buy whatever they decide to sell will lose the market to companies that sell what people actually want to buy.
In the end, the customer is king.
As for me, I consider stories on slashdot only to be as reputable as the "real" news site the stories link to.
So to put it in a nutshell: It's hard to play favorites based on who is good and who is bad for their own people, so let's play favorites based on who will sell us cheap oil.
There is a third alternative, you know. It's called "not playing favorites". Why can't we just wash our hands of the entire matter, and let those people deal with their own problems? Why should we care if dictator X kills dictator Y? If brutal dictators want to supress the people of the middle east, they can at least do it without our help.
You speak of self-interest, but look at the big picture: we have been meddling with their affairs for half a century, and what do we have to show for it? A giant smoking crater in New York City, that's what. If those Americans died in the name of bringing freedom and democracy to repressed people, that would be one thing: But if they only died for cheap oil, I say to hell with it.
To quote the core argument of the article:
Evidently we need to optimize some joint measure of a number's width (how many digits it has) and its depth (how many different symbols can occupy each digit position). An obvious strategy is to minimize the product of these two quantities. In other words, if r is the radix and w is the width in digits, we want to minimize rw while holding r^w constant.
This may be an "obvious" strategy, but is it a useful one? A modern computer typically contains hundreds of millions of digits in base two. According to this theory, the cost of a computer (ie, the value we are trying to minimize) is equal to the radix times the width. If this is true, we can reverse the radix and the width to get a system that has precisely the same cost: thus, a machine that stores one hundred million digits in base two costs the same as a machine that stores two digits in base one hundred million, because two times one hundred million equals one hundred million times two.
In practice, building an electronic computers capable of distinguishing between one hundred million distinct voltage levels is a practical impossibility. Early attempts to build machines that had just ten distinct voltage levels were abandoned, not because of any theoretical arguments about data density, but because these devices turned out to be extremely difficult to manufacture and notoriously unreliable in operation. A computer with one hundred million distinct voltage levels, if it could be built at all, would certianly cost several million dollars to construct, and it would probably require a special power supply and several pounds of electromagnetic sheilding. It would certianly not "cost the same" as a typical desktop computer.
Even if we were to ignore the absurdity of the basic premise of the theory, and take for granted that the trinary computer is better than binary in some abstract way, there is still no compelling reason to switch. We have already invested billions of dollars into binary technology, and the benifits of that investment are undeniable. If you think companies like Sun and Apple has a hard time selling theoretically superior hardware in a market dominated by cheap PC clones, imagine how much harder it would be to introduce a computer that is so fundamentally incompatable that it does not even work with binary data. The dominance of the Windows platform proves that people don't want theoretical perfection: they want something that gets the job done, they want it to be cheap, and they want it now.
What exactly is it about threads that "encourage" people to use a one-thread-per-client model?
What is it about RPC that encourages people to to ignore network overhead?
What is it about table saws that encourage people to cut off their thumbs?
In all of these cases, the correct answer is nothing at all. Idiots do not need to be encouraged to do stupid stuff... they are quite able to do it on their own initiative. Powerful tools give people the ability to do amazing things, for good or for bad. Just be glad you can't cut your thumb off with a bad RPC call.
If you take a closer look at those projects, you will find that a lot of the project descriptions tend to sound something like "this project will implement a brand-new, object-oriented, buzzword-compliant operating system with a really cool graphical user interface, all written in a new programming language that I haven't actually designed yet, but it should be really cool and object-oriented."
Annoying people with big ideas and no talent start these projects, and assume that everyone else on the internet is going to do all the real work for them so that they can take the credit.
No wonder they fail.
As for the vast majority of people who download your hard-written code and don't feed anything back, don't feel too bad about that. Most of them are morons, and couldn't give you a single useful suggestion if you put a gun to their head. Just be glad they don't pester you with their "ideas".
No industry is ever obligated to provide customer support for a product they give away for free. If they do provide it anyway, it is usually in the hope that the customer will eventually pay for the "full" product, or a related service. A legally binding customer support contract always costs money, whether it is factored into the base price of the product or sold seperately.
When it comes right down to it, the only support a customer can demand for a free product is a full refund of zero dollars.
Why don't real-world objects, like books, come in more interesting shapes and sizes? Books have been around for longer than I can remember, maybe even more than a decade, so they have no excuse for not developing the useless features I clamor for. I once saw a really cool book in the children's library that was cut out in the shape of a teddy bear, and was full of bright, colorful pictures, but that was an exception to the rule. Most books are boring, box-shaped things, and they are full of nothing but little tiny words! What do they expect us to do, READ? If I had the attention span for that...
Uh, what was I talking about?
As it works now, the internet is only a means of distributing enormous amounts of information across the globe at the speed of light. If things continue the way they are going now, the most we can hope for is that the internet will become the storehouse of all human knowledge, instantly and effortlessly acessable to anyone, no matter how poor or underprivileged. What a sad, ignoble fate for a scheme that at one time held promise for serving a much higher goal: making greedy opportunists such as myself wealthy beyond the dreams of avarace.
Why should impoverished citizens of third-world nations learn how to filter their own drinking water, when once-proud executives in silicon vally are forced to actually work for a living? It is simply not fair I tell you, and I say we need to change the system now to protect those neglected executives. Forcing people to pay for the privilege of reading tiny columns of text surrounded by blinking banner ads would be a good start.
In short, the internet should not be about sharing human knowledge and enriching society. It should be about making big fat fistfuls of money, and enriching my wallet!
Now, could one of you geeks out there figure out how to make this "penny-per-page" system actually work? I am far too important to bother with such trivial details...