Everybody I know who has ever attended a computer class has had the same experience. And it's been the same for me when I've had to attend compulsory classes in some application-or-other at work.
I suspect it's driven partly by the economics of the situation: "show 'em step one, step two, step three, then shove 'em out the door in time for the next class" is a hell of a lot cheaper than genuine education.
I've been driven to apoplexy by work situations like being called on to help somebody update a web page on the corporate Intranet, and finding that the sum total of the guidance they've received from a consultant making thousands of dollars a day is a hand-written sheet of step-by-step instructions. The person has no clue what they are doing or why. They don't know what the effect of the following the instructions is. They just know that every morning, they have to go through step one, step two, step three...
This is in no way analagous to driving a car without knowing how to assemble the engine, as some people have suggested. I've worked with people whose desks have been wallpapered with post-it notes detailing every click and keypress from username and password onwards, but I have yet to see any notes stuck on a dashboard like:
GOING TO WORK
- Put key in ignition (keyhole behind big round thing that turns around)
- Turn key CLOCKWISE
- Press button on lever thing, then press lever down...
Anybody who knows how to drive has some conceptual understanding of how cars work, even if that conceptual understanding has no resemblance to how the enginge actually works. Similarly, when we think of the contents of a hard drive as files and folders, we may know that's not actually the case, but that's the level of abstraction at which we can use them. And you'd be surprised by how many people who use computers every day have no conception of "hard drive" or even "files", they just know what they were working on yesterday is somehow "in" Excel, and they have to follow the instructions sticky-taped to their monitor to get it "out".
That's why I've started giving tutorials to friends and friends-of-friends to try and supplement the abysmal instruction they've had in the past. (Also to earn a bit of beer money. If I turn out to be any good at it I'll get some other people involved and set up as a co-op.) As easy as it is to criticise, it's harder to address the problem constructively.
I was upgrading a friend's PC yesterday, and while I was there she got me to sit down with her 12 year old son and take him through a few things. Nightmare! The blank looks I got took me right back to the blank looks I gave to my guitar teacher when I was twelve years old!
The thing to remember with children is that they are configured for play and exploration, not passive instruction, or even the sort of dialogue you hope to establish with an adult student where they will be able to tell you the direction they want to go. Worse, if the child has had some exposure to school, they've learnt that the safest strategy is to keep their mouth shut at all times.
Difficult situation. If anybody has any advice, I'll gladly listen.
I'm a couple of years on from my first tentative steps in GNU/Linux, and I can assure you you won't regret the move. I originally set up my PC as a multi-boot NT/95/Debian box, then when I bought a new games PC, my old one went exclusively Debian. Now my games PC is dual-boot, and if it weren't for Diablo II, my last Windows partition would be a distant memory.
I haven't used KDE, so I can't comment, but in my experience GNOME as a desktop environment adds little to usability. The GNOME/Gtk+ libs are good for developers (if only someone would document the Perl bindings properly), and provide a nice standard look-and-feel, the CORBA stuff may one day turn out to be useful, but that damn footprint thing, and the associated bells and whistles add nothing but about half a minute to x startup time. I spent about a year with the footprint, waiting for 'apt-get upgrade' to finally give it some discernable purpose, but eventually gave up. Seriously, there are some good things about the GNOME project, but the sooner you comment out exec gnome-session in your.xinitrc file, the better. A good window manager like Enlightenment is all the desktop eye candy you could ever want.
Read the From DOS/Windows to Linux HOWTO. On Debian it's found at/usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-txt/DOS-Win-to-Linux-HOWTO.txt.gz. It shouldn't be far away on other distros.
Most of what you will need to know can be found in the HOWTOs or man pages. Best/quickest way to read HOWTOs is:
If that seems like a lot of typing, refer to this HOWTO for why it isn't.
To supplement the online docs, you may want to get O'Reilly's 'Running Linux'; also 'Linux in a Nutshell' is good on those occasions when you know there's a command to do such-and-such, but you can't remember what it's called. The 'apropos' command is also helpful here (in fact you'll save time if you use 'apropos' before reaching for a book). Your distribution-specific docs should also get at least a skim-through
If you really want to get to know your system, I'd recommend you resist the temptation to do everything in X windows. Steer clear of GUI configuration tools unless the docs for the relevant package explicitly ask you not to edit config files by hand.
Go for a wander about your hard drive, looking at your directory structure and what goes where. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard for POSIX-compliant systems is also helpful for explaining the rationale behind the directory heirarchy. Last I heard, Red Hat doesn't conform to the standard (Debian does, of course), but that may have changed.
Once you've started settling in, you'll need a good text editor and web browser. Forget the vi versus emacs debate. FTE is a thing of beauty, and I can't understand why it isn't raved about more often. I had a friend who installed GNU/Linux purely on the strength of this cool text editor he'd seen me use. It's easy for Windows users to pick up, and in a lot of cases has Windows-style key bindings (Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v) as well as Unixy ones (Ctrl-Ins, Shft-Ins).
Web browser. You'll want Mozilla, so you'll also need one that doesn't suck up all your memory and crash. Links (not Lynx), is jaw-droppingly brilliant. Runs in text mode, yet displays tables and frames. Supports cookies, launches helper apps, has right-click context-sensitive menus, and so on. Good for those occasions when you've stuffed up X-windows and you need to search www.deja.com for a fix.
Now you've got a web browser up and running, check out:
In my experience, unstable breaks things quite often - if you're in the habit of upgrading nightly (which, because it's so easy to do, can be very tempting), or even weekly.
The trick that's worked well for me up to now has been to settle on a snapshot that is behaving well, and thenceforth apt-get install the latest and greatest stuff on a package-by-package basis when and if you hear about something new you can't live without.
Now, thanks to the 'testing' tree, I can apt-get upgrade with relative confidence and have the latest versions (well, a fortnight old) of my favourite apps appear automagically without breaking anything. Hopefully.
This is an argument that I find as perplexing as it is pervasive. Who's being forced to do what?
If you don't like the GPL, don't use it. Nobody can force you to use it. Publish your work as freeware, or proprietary software for that matter. Nobody's going to stop you. However, you should expect that people who care about their freedom won't use your product.
Now where is the element of force that the anti-GNU libertarians get their knickers in a twist over? Presumably it's the so-called viral aspect of the GPL, the requirement that free software can only beget more free software. If I, as a software author, distribute my work under the GPL, I have violated your freedom to take my work and use it to make a proprietary work. Therefore free software is the enemy of freedom, QED.
Of course this is just semantics. In the real world most would accept that it's ridiculous to speak of the sanctity of, for instance, the freedom to enslave. Freedom of action is rarely an absolute good, but must be judged in the context in which the action is taken, and with regard to consequenses. As RMS says, "Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose."
Now as a software author, I must make my decision on how to distribute the product of my labour in the same way, recognising that peoples' interests conflict, and that the protection of certain freedoms depend on the restriction of others. In other words, I must make an ethical decision based on an evaluation of which freedoms are the most valuable. Let's assume I find proprietary software harmful to society as a whole. I can choose to protect the freedom of those who may wish to base proprietary software on my work, or I can restrict that freedom, in the interests of enhancing the freedom of others.
Another way of looking at it is that of Henry David Thoreau (who as far as I know was not a hacker):
It is not a man's duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.
In other words, no matter how objectionable I find proprietary software, I may be justified in thinking that what Bill Gates chooses to do is no business of mine. However, it is important that I ensure that my work is not used to further a harmful enterprise.
The freedom to determine what you work for (or indeed against) is a fundamental good, and a prerequisite for being a full human being, as opposed to a machine. It's curious that people who are outraged by the limitations on their freedom imposed by the GPL, are not at all bothered by the impositions of, for instance, a standard employment contract, which are without question an order of magnitude greater.
The author of this article seems to be under the impression that Microsoft is a software company. It's not. Microsoft's core business is what economists call 'rent seeking'; leveraging it's ubiquity to impose a 'Microsoft tax' every time a PC is purchased (or possibly every time an application is run, if.NET is successful), and 'double-dipping' by forcing upgrades (introducing incompatible file formats, APIs, etc) every couple of years.
It's hard to imagine how rolling their own Linux distro would help them to pursue this strategy. They would have to add something proprietary that was so compelling that they could reasonably persuade OEMs and IT managers that no device should be without it. What could that be? Some GUI middleware layer? Networking daemons for their own proprietary protocols?
Sure Microsoft could choose to work on a really beautiful distro, and apply their overwhelming resourses to compete with Red Hat or whoever, but when has Microsoft ever been interested in competing? It's just not going to secure them the money-for-nothing position they currently enjoy.
'Windows Everywhere' is not just an ego trip, it's the keystone of their business plan. Without it, they have nothing they can use to generate a practically zero-cost revenue stream. Supporting a platform that competes in the server space or on the desktop (in a way which it can be argued that BeOS and MacOS don't) can only jeopardise the ubiquity that is the Microsoft cash-cow.
I've been toying with with the idea of setting up something along these lines in Sydney, Australia for some time. I had thought of it as somewhat unfeasable until I met someone who works at "The Bower Inner Sydney Repair and Reuse Co-operative," which has apparently been a roaring success, having been in operation since 1998, and now able to pay wages more often than not!
My reasons for wanting to start something like this are partly based on my own loopy ideas about the desirability of working at something you think is useful rather than anything that comes along that's likely to get you money, and partly because I see some scope for applying the principles behind the GPL to working life in general; "Free Work," as well as "Free Software".
I'm not 100% clear on how to go about setting up something like this. I hope to meet with some people from the Bower soon to talk about the legal and other hurdles they've come across. In the meantime, if anyone in Australia (particularly Sydney) has an interest in getting involved, please email me. I also hope to have some sort of discussion paper up on my home page soon.
The CIA should know all about the character of the crazies, because they largely gave them this character, enthusiastically arming and supporting them during the USSR's 'Vietnam' war in Afghanistan. It can also hardly have escaped their intention that the Mujahaddin (as the crazies were known when they were the good guys) were using drug money to finance themselves, but of course this wasn't the first time nor the last that the CIA turned a blind eye to the source of the funding for their exploits.
A bit of perspective: the White House has long preferred to install berserk fundamentalist dictatorships, because in return for the arms to keep them in power they are generally happy to service the demands of US-based capital with little or no regard for the the welfare of their own citizens. Now to hop on-topic for a moment, what would happen if Afghanistan's position on intellectual property were considered important?
Well, the ruling party would have two options, follow the US line, and be suitably rewarded, or don't, and find that their human rights abuses (which arguably they wouldn't be in a position to commit without US assistance) are suddenly grounds for 'humanitarian intervention', meaning cluster bombs, napalm, depleted uranium, wholesale slaughter of the defenceless civilian population, and years of economic strangulation, in conformity with the US government's definition of what it is to be a 'humanitarian'.
It is more likely however, that Afghanistan will continue to be regarded as insignificant, serving mainly as fuel for the "Clash of Civilisations" doctrine, which holds that all strife and misery in the world is a result of culture and religion, and not a consequence of unprincipled and powerful agents persuing more wealth and power.
The anger about this issue is not just some loopy over-reaction by a bunch of nutcases. I'm an ex-web developer precisely because this keeps happening.
It is worse, worse, FAR worse, to partially and imperfectly implement a technology than to leave it out altogether. CSS and the DOM are unusable because of the half-assed implementations by both Microsoft and Netscape. What's more developers won't be able to use them with confidence, and without agonising work-arounds (the if browser='Netscape6.0' kludges) until the last buggy implementation is out of circulation. How long will it be until the last of your audience stop using the current crop of browsers? Three years? Four? Five? However long it is, Netscape have just added another year or two for you. Thank you Netscape.
This is in no way a minor issue, when the platforms you're writing for are so flaky that you can actually crash them using nothing but Style Sheets!
Well, you may argue that Netscape had no option but to demonstrate it's utter contempt for it's users and developers yet again; the hard-headed realities of the marketplace made them do it. They had to release a browser before standards compliance was complete, therefore they had to release a browser that breaks the standands. No, here's the other option:
Release Netscape 3.0. Throw in the some pretty themes, the irritating sidebars, the instant messaging, crappy mail client, crappier authoring tool, pile on the new bells and whistles to your hearts content and call it Netscape Everything Suite 6.0 Platinum Professional Millenium Edition. Who's gonna care that is doesn't even attempt to handle HTML4, CSS, or the DOM? Not most users. Not the "web designers" who create tables full of gifs in Dreamweaver.
And here's the best part: people can put together sites that are standards compliant, confident that their content will be ready for future browsers that will implement the standards properly, and "degrade gracefully" in browsers that don't.
In the meantime, we can encourage people to use Links. It may not look too pretty, or support the latest standards, but at least it doesn't break them.
The GNU and FSF view is that it is OK to sell anything except software.
This is just plain wrong. RMS supported himself financially by selling tapes of Emacs for a while. The man must know he's confusing (deliberately?) "speech" and "beer" here.
The unquestioned assumption running through this McCarthyite diatribe is that investors of money are entitled to rights that investors of work are not.
At the risk of sounding (gasp! swoon!) socialistic, the authors of commercial software in most cases don't sell their work, they sell their labour. They get paid a wage, and benefit not one whit from the monopolistic control over the use of the product of their labour that is granted to their employer.
Okay, maybe you can formulate an argument to support this. Maybe the work just wouldn't get done if there aren't benevolent capitalists donating money to worthy causes like Windows 2K. I think not. On the most obvious assumptions about how the world really works, commercial software fails any sane test of efficiency you can dream up:
Decisions on which commercial software projects are to be funded are based on expectations of future return on investment, not on the needs of users.
The cost of distributing free software is virtually nil (even physical copies can be shared around, reducing the cost of distribution). The cost of distributing shrink-wrapped license agreements, plus CD, plus inadequate "Quick-Start" documentation, plus cataloges of other products you might like to purchase, is high and almost totally waste. Even the administrative costs alone of running a for-profit organisation are huge, and add nothing to the value of the product.
Commercial software marketing is market-distorting. Decisions on which product to use may ultimately rest on which publishing house has the most money to spend on promotion. An adequate product with a huge marketing budget will outsell a good product with no marketing budget. If you've got deep pockets, you're in a good position to control de-facto standards, and enhance your return on investment still further, to the detriment of the community.
Commercial software is taxpayer funded. The profit margin on commercial software is a tax. It just goes to Redmond or wherever instead of Capitol Hill. Complaining that RMS used public money to develop Emacs, therefore Emacs is rightfully the property of MIT (although not, interestingly enough, the property of all taxpayers) is a load of piffle. Any software is publicly funded in one way or another.
And on, and on...
As a system for generating public good, commercial software is hopelessly inefficient. However, as a system designed to increase and concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few, it works fairly well.
The challenge for software developers with an intrest in seeing that their work is self-directed, in harmony with their talents, their interests, and their concern for the broader community, is to develop and disseminate an alternative view of society which recognises the true costs of totalitarian control of software and the benefits of freedom.
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Everybody I know who has ever attended a computer class has had the same experience. And it's been the same for me when I've had to attend compulsory classes in some application-or-other at work.
I suspect it's driven partly by the economics of the situation: "show 'em step one, step two, step three, then shove 'em out the door in time for the next class" is a hell of a lot cheaper than genuine education.
I've been driven to apoplexy by work situations like being called on to help somebody update a web page on the corporate Intranet, and finding that the sum total of the guidance they've received from a consultant making thousands of dollars a day is a hand-written sheet of step-by-step instructions. The person has no clue what they are doing or why. They don't know what the effect of the following the instructions is. They just know that every morning, they have to go through step one, step two, step three...
This is in no way analagous to driving a car without knowing how to assemble the engine, as some people have suggested. I've worked with people whose desks have been wallpapered with post-it notes detailing every click and keypress from username and password onwards, but I have yet to see any notes stuck on a dashboard like:
GOING TO WORK - Put key in ignition (keyhole behind big round thing that turns around) - Turn key CLOCKWISE - Press button on lever thing, then press lever down...Anybody who knows how to drive has some conceptual understanding of how cars work, even if that conceptual understanding has no resemblance to how the enginge actually works. Similarly, when we think of the contents of a hard drive as files and folders, we may know that's not actually the case, but that's the level of abstraction at which we can use them. And you'd be surprised by how many people who use computers every day have no conception of "hard drive" or even "files", they just know what they were working on yesterday is somehow "in" Excel, and they have to follow the instructions sticky-taped to their monitor to get it "out".
That's why I've started giving tutorials to friends and friends-of-friends to try and supplement the abysmal instruction they've had in the past. (Also to earn a bit of beer money. If I turn out to be any good at it I'll get some other people involved and set up as a co-op.) As easy as it is to criticise, it's harder to address the problem constructively.
I was upgrading a friend's PC yesterday, and while I was there she got me to sit down with her 12 year old son and take him through a few things. Nightmare! The blank looks I got took me right back to the blank looks I gave to my guitar teacher when I was twelve years old!
The thing to remember with children is that they are configured for play and exploration, not passive instruction, or even the sort of dialogue you hope to establish with an adult student where they will be able to tell you the direction they want to go. Worse, if the child has had some exposure to school, they've learnt that the safest strategy is to keep their mouth shut at all times.
Difficult situation. If anybody has any advice, I'll gladly listen.
I'm a couple of years on from my first tentative steps in GNU/Linux, and I can assure you you won't regret the move. I originally set up my PC as a multi-boot NT/95/Debian box, then when I bought a new games PC, my old one went exclusively Debian. Now my games PC is dual-boot, and if it weren't for Diablo II, my last Windows partition would be a distant memory.
I haven't used KDE, so I can't comment, but in my experience GNOME as a desktop environment adds little to usability. The GNOME/Gtk+ libs are good for developers (if only someone would document the Perl bindings properly), and provide a nice standard look-and-feel, the CORBA stuff may one day turn out to be useful, but that damn footprint thing, and the associated bells and whistles add nothing but about half a minute to x startup time. I spent about a year with the footprint, waiting for 'apt-get upgrade' to finally give it some discernable purpose, but eventually gave up. Seriously, there are some good things about the GNOME project, but the sooner you comment out exec gnome-session in your .xinitrc file, the better. A good window manager like Enlightenment is all the desktop eye candy you could ever want.
Read the From DOS/Windows to Linux HOWTO. On Debian it's found at /usr/share/doc/HOWTO/en-txt/DOS-Win-to-Linux-HOWTO .txt.gz. It shouldn't be far away on other distros.
Most of what you will need to know can be found in the HOWTOs or man pages. Best/quickest way to read HOWTOs is:
cdgunzip -c DOS-Win-to-Linux-HOWTO.txt.gz |less
If that seems like a lot of typing, refer to this HOWTO for why it isn't.
To supplement the online docs, you may want to get O'Reilly's 'Running Linux'; also 'Linux in a Nutshell' is good on those occasions when you know there's a command to do such-and-such, but you can't remember what it's called. The 'apropos' command is also helpful here (in fact you'll save time if you use 'apropos' before reaching for a book). Your distribution-specific docs should also get at least a skim-through
If you really want to get to know your system, I'd recommend you resist the temptation to do everything in X windows. Steer clear of GUI configuration tools unless the docs for the relevant package explicitly ask you not to edit config files by hand.
Go for a wander about your hard drive, looking at your directory structure and what goes where. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard for POSIX-compliant systems is also helpful for explaining the rationale behind the directory heirarchy. Last I heard, Red Hat doesn't conform to the standard (Debian does, of course), but that may have changed.
Once you've started settling in, you'll need a good text editor and web browser. Forget the vi versus emacs debate. FTE is a thing of beauty, and I can't understand why it isn't raved about more often. I had a friend who installed GNU/Linux purely on the strength of this cool text editor he'd seen me use. It's easy for Windows users to pick up, and in a lot of cases has Windows-style key bindings (Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v) as well as Unixy ones (Ctrl-Ins, Shft-Ins).
Web browser. You'll want Mozilla, so you'll also need one that doesn't suck up all your memory and crash. Links (not Lynx), is jaw-droppingly brilliant. Runs in text mode, yet displays tables and frames. Supports cookies, launches helper apps, has right-click context-sensitive menus, and so on. Good for those occasions when you've stuffed up X-windows and you need to search www.deja.com for a fix.
Now you've got a web browser up and running, check out:
In my experience, unstable breaks things quite often - if you're in the habit of upgrading nightly (which, because it's so easy to do, can be very tempting), or even weekly.
The trick that's worked well for me up to now has been to settle on a snapshot that is behaving well, and thenceforth apt-get install the latest and greatest stuff on a package-by-package basis when and if you hear about something new you can't live without.
Now, thanks to the 'testing' tree, I can apt-get upgrade with relative confidence and have the latest versions (well, a fortnight old) of my favourite apps appear automagically without breaking anything. Hopefully.
One more reason to love Debian.
This is an argument that I find as perplexing as it is pervasive. Who's being forced to do what?
If you don't like the GPL, don't use it. Nobody can force you to use it. Publish your work as freeware, or proprietary software for that matter. Nobody's going to stop you. However, you should expect that people who care about their freedom won't use your product.
Now where is the element of force that the anti-GNU libertarians get their knickers in a twist over? Presumably it's the so-called viral aspect of the GPL, the requirement that free software can only beget more free software. If I, as a software author, distribute my work under the GPL, I have violated your freedom to take my work and use it to make a proprietary work. Therefore free software is the enemy of freedom, QED.
Of course this is just semantics. In the real world most would accept that it's ridiculous to speak of the sanctity of, for instance, the freedom to enslave. Freedom of action is rarely an absolute good, but must be judged in the context in which the action is taken, and with regard to consequenses. As RMS says, "Your right to swing your fist ends at the tip of my nose."
Now as a software author, I must make my decision on how to distribute the product of my labour in the same way, recognising that peoples' interests conflict, and that the protection of certain freedoms depend on the restriction of others. In other words, I must make an ethical decision based on an evaluation of which freedoms are the most valuable. Let's assume I find proprietary software harmful to society as a whole. I can choose to protect the freedom of those who may wish to base proprietary software on my work, or I can restrict that freedom, in the interests of enhancing the freedom of others.
Another way of looking at it is that of Henry David Thoreau (who as far as I know was not a hacker):
In other words, no matter how objectionable I find proprietary software, I may be justified in thinking that what Bill Gates chooses to do is no business of mine. However, it is important that I ensure that my work is not used to further a harmful enterprise.
The freedom to determine what you work for (or indeed against) is a fundamental good, and a prerequisite for being a full human being, as opposed to a machine. It's curious that people who are outraged by the limitations on their freedom imposed by the GPL, are not at all bothered by the impositions of, for instance, a standard employment contract, which are without question an order of magnitude greater.
The author of this article seems to be under the impression that Microsoft is a software company. It's not. Microsoft's core business is what economists call 'rent seeking'; leveraging it's ubiquity to impose a 'Microsoft tax' every time a PC is purchased (or possibly every time an application is run, if .NET is successful), and 'double-dipping' by forcing upgrades (introducing incompatible file formats, APIs, etc) every couple of years.
It's hard to imagine how rolling their own Linux distro would help them to pursue this strategy. They would have to add something proprietary that was so compelling that they could reasonably persuade OEMs and IT managers that no device should be without it. What could that be? Some GUI middleware layer? Networking daemons for their own proprietary protocols?
Sure Microsoft could choose to work on a really beautiful distro, and apply their overwhelming resourses to compete with Red Hat or whoever, but when has Microsoft ever been interested in competing? It's just not going to secure them the money-for-nothing position they currently enjoy.
'Windows Everywhere' is not just an ego trip, it's the keystone of their business plan. Without it, they have nothing they can use to generate a practically zero-cost revenue stream. Supporting a platform that competes in the server space or on the desktop (in a way which it can be argued that BeOS and MacOS don't) can only jeopardise the ubiquity that is the Microsoft cash-cow.
I've been toying with with the idea of setting up something along these lines in Sydney, Australia for some time. I had thought of it as somewhat unfeasable until I met someone who works at "The Bower Inner Sydney Repair and Reuse Co-operative," which has apparently been a roaring success, having been in operation since 1998, and now able to pay wages more often than not!
My reasons for wanting to start something like this are partly based on my own loopy ideas about the desirability of working at something you think is useful rather than anything that comes along that's likely to get you money, and partly because I see some scope for applying the principles behind the GPL to working life in general; "Free Work," as well as "Free Software".
I'm not 100% clear on how to go about setting up something like this. I hope to meet with some people from the Bower soon to talk about the legal and other hurdles they've come across. In the meantime, if anyone in Australia (particularly Sydney) has an interest in getting involved, please email me. I also hope to have some sort of discussion paper up on my home page soon.
The CIA should know all about the character of the crazies, because they largely gave them this character, enthusiastically arming and supporting them during the USSR's 'Vietnam' war in Afghanistan. It can also hardly have escaped their intention that the Mujahaddin (as the crazies were known when they were the good guys) were using drug money to finance themselves, but of course this wasn't the first time nor the last that the CIA turned a blind eye to the source of the funding for their exploits.
A bit of perspective: the White House has long preferred to install berserk fundamentalist dictatorships, because in return for the arms to keep them in power they are generally happy to service the demands of US-based capital with little or no regard for the the welfare of their own citizens. Now to hop on-topic for a moment, what would happen if Afghanistan's position on intellectual property were considered important?
Well, the ruling party would have two options, follow the US line, and be suitably rewarded, or don't, and find that their human rights abuses (which arguably they wouldn't be in a position to commit without US assistance) are suddenly grounds for 'humanitarian intervention', meaning cluster bombs, napalm, depleted uranium, wholesale slaughter of the defenceless civilian population, and years of economic strangulation, in conformity with the US government's definition of what it is to be a 'humanitarian'.
It is more likely however, that Afghanistan will continue to be regarded as insignificant, serving mainly as fuel for the "Clash of Civilisations" doctrine, which holds that all strife and misery in the world is a result of culture and religion, and not a consequence of unprincipled and powerful agents persuing more wealth and power.
The anger about this issue is not just some loopy over-reaction by a bunch of nutcases. I'm an ex-web developer precisely because this keeps happening.
It is worse, worse, FAR worse, to partially and imperfectly implement a technology than to leave it out altogether. CSS and the DOM are unusable because of the half-assed implementations by both Microsoft and Netscape. What's more developers won't be able to use them with confidence, and without agonising work-arounds (the if browser='Netscape6.0' kludges) until the last buggy implementation is out of circulation. How long will it be until the last of your audience stop using the current crop of browsers? Three years? Four? Five? However long it is, Netscape have just added another year or two for you. Thank you Netscape.
This is in no way a minor issue, when the platforms you're writing for are so flaky that you can actually crash them using nothing but Style Sheets!
Well, you may argue that Netscape had no option but to demonstrate it's utter contempt for it's users and developers yet again; the hard-headed realities of the marketplace made them do it. They had to release a browser before standards compliance was complete, therefore they had to release a browser that breaks the standands. No, here's the other option:
Release Netscape 3.0. Throw in the some pretty themes, the irritating sidebars, the instant messaging, crappy mail client, crappier authoring tool, pile on the new bells and whistles to your hearts content and call it Netscape Everything Suite 6.0 Platinum Professional Millenium Edition. Who's gonna care that is doesn't even attempt to handle HTML4, CSS, or the DOM? Not most users. Not the "web designers" who create tables full of gifs in Dreamweaver.
And here's the best part: people can put together sites that are standards compliant, confident that their content will be ready for future browsers that will implement the standards properly, and "degrade gracefully" in browsers that don't.
In the meantime, we can encourage people to use Links. It may not look too pretty, or support the latest standards, but at least it doesn't break them.
This is just plain wrong. RMS supported himself financially by selling tapes of Emacs for a while. The man must know he's confusing (deliberately?) "speech" and "beer" here.
The unquestioned assumption running through this McCarthyite diatribe is that investors of money are entitled to rights that investors of work are not.
At the risk of sounding (gasp! swoon!) socialistic, the authors of commercial software in most cases don't sell their work, they sell their labour. They get paid a wage, and benefit not one whit from the monopolistic control over the use of the product of their labour that is granted to their employer.
Okay, maybe you can formulate an argument to support this. Maybe the work just wouldn't get done if there aren't benevolent capitalists donating money to worthy causes like Windows 2K. I think not. On the most obvious assumptions about how the world really works, commercial software fails any sane test of efficiency you can dream up:
As a system for generating public good, commercial software is hopelessly inefficient. However, as a system designed to increase and concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few, it works fairly well.
The challenge for software developers with an intrest in seeing that their work is self-directed, in harmony with their talents, their interests, and their concern for the broader community, is to develop and disseminate an alternative view of society which recognises the true costs of totalitarian control of software and the benefits of freedom.
Matthew.