Off the top of my head, some impressions of the Expo:
Camraderie seemed to be running pretty high, over in the non-profit corner (wrapped around the slashdot lounge,
which was a bunch of laptop zombies on slashdot beanbag chairs)... it seemed like there was a lot of action at the Debian booth, the postgresql booth, and so on (though there was no perl foundation presence this year, not sure why). Lots of people were passing out free CDs for this-and-that.
Out in the corporate world, there was a pretty elaborate demo of Suse 10 handled by Novell: a class room layout
with enough laptops setup for a few dozen people to play along with the demos. These demos were extremely slick, very impressive... it's too bad RedHat ("linux isn't ready for the desktop") wasn't present at the Expo.
Running Suse might seem like an excessive compromise with proprietary software (it does to me -- it looks like I'm going with Knoppix and Kubuntu these days) but there's no question it would be better than being locked into the offerings of Windows or Apple.
In the light of these Suse 10 demos, the OpenSuse project -- which had a small booth off in the aforementioned corner -- seems very interesting. They were passing out disks that apparently included a few non-"open" components though (flash, etc).
The O'Reilly booth had it's fair share of people browsing, though there didn't seem to be all that much excitement about their present offerings, at least not to my eye. They had a nice series of talks going that I appreciated (e.g. two seperate talks by Bill Childers and Kyle Rankin, the authors of the new Ubuntu Hacks).
Out in hardware land, there was a nice array of server hardware (e.g. impressive booths by Tyan and Supermicro)... I always appreciate this kind of thing, because not being a sysadmin type I don't often get that close to high-end hardware like this.
Emperor penguin was in the house, with demo models of all of their laptop models. Still no AMD64 versions, I'm afraid: apparently they're waiting for Dell to get on it...
It seemed like the general theme out on the floor was "virtualization"... I was hanging around with a friend of mine, listening to a sales pitch on the subject (by EMC, I think), trying to figure out what was so cool about it, but without much success. Hardware is cheap enough that it wouldn't seem all that onerous to stick with one box per OS installation... and after all, you can run NFS if you want to use large disk arrays more efficiently.
But everywhere I turned someone was talking about it... Bill Childers mentioned in passing that his company had gotten a 12 to 1 reduction in servers by using vmware (which has a freeware version, but is not free/open), and one of the Debian folks was talking about how it's really good for some random legacy app that needs a particular platform that otherwise you wouldn't want to run.
You also might ask your favorite vendors to speak up on the
subject. The Show Director tells me that the reasons for the
change is complaints from exhibitors about too many students.
It seems a little ridiculous that a 17-year old kernel hacker
would be turned away at the door by Linuxworld. I gather that
this is a bone tossed to vendors complaining about poor sales
at the Expo, but it strikes me as being fairly short-sighted...
in the computer biz, you really want to get 'em while they're
young, before they settle in on a particular OS.
It seems that, due to FDA restrictions on various artificial sweeteners in the U.S., Coca-Cola was not able to come up with a sugar free formula that tasted exactly like regular Coke. Instead, they decided not to try -- they came up with a new formula that tasted something like Coke, but different. Thus was Diet Coke born. Diet Coke has never been based on the same formula as the product we now know as Coca-Cola Classic.
All plausible enough, but where's your information from?
I've got a different theory, which I admit is just a guess: it had to do with the war on drugs. "Classic" Coke was (and probably still is) made with extracts from Coca leaves, albiet with the coccaine removed -- interestingly enough, there's a common belief that this is an "urban legend", but myself I believe that that's the urban legend (take a look at the wikipedia discussion page on Coke some time, if you're interested). As the
"war on drugs" business was heating up, my guess is that the folks at Coke were nervous about the fact that their product was based on a plant we were supposed to be hell bent on erradicating. So they started thinking about changing the formula, dropping the coca-based flavoring agents, hence "New Coke", which not conicidentally tasted more like the competing non-coca based colas.
Such is my theory, at any rate.
By the way, the current version of the wikipedia page Coca-Cola says:
Today's Coca-Cola uses "spent" coca leaves, those that have been through a cocaine extraction process, to flavor the beverage.
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 1
I still say don't bash Flash for how some people choose to use it.
Is this a good place to attach some flash bashing? I was just dropping by to say something like
"Can't you guys just go back to watching TV and playing video games, and stop messing up the web?"
Admittedly my heart isn't really in it at the moment.
Anyway, another point that I'm not really enthusastic about repeating again
is "technology is not neutral". I realize it would be convienient in some ways
if the world were that simple, but it just isn't: particular technologies
carry with them certain biases, and Flash in particular has the potential
to radically screw-up the web-as-we-know-it.
Not to mention the danger that Macromedia may someday be tempted to
go for the proprietary-format attack on open standards (Microsoft is
not the only quarter a threat can come from...).
You want to read gonzo writing about technology? Try Bruce Sterling.
The author of the article, however, is not really interested
in "technology", he's really just a gamer dork, and
he's having trouble grasping the idea that maybe
the heavy, cool, intelligent, ground breaking writers
are saying a lot about gaming because they think
it's trivial bullshit. Bruce Sterling, for example, has spent a decade or
so trying to deal with global warming. Can someone
here say with a straight face the world would be
better off if only he was reviewing computer games?
Would anyone want to hear a semi-relevant complaint about Firefox?
There's some major suckage in the installer as far as Linux is concerned.
If you make the mistake of trying to put the new version of firefox
where the existing version is, it's entirely too easy to end up blowing
away an entire directory -- e.g. your "/usr/bin".
Try to imagine writing a shell script that would cheerfully do a
cd/usr/bin; rm *. Can you? Now look at this bug report:
bug 234479
One of the programmers (Andrew Schultz) can't imagine any way of dealing with
version skew problems outside of completely erasing the installation
directory in order to start from scratch.
I saw one estimate of nearly six times as many miles travelled per barrel of oil consumed, assuming an oil-fired power station.
Where? What's the physical basis of the analysis?
Greater thermodynamic efficiencies at the plant have to overcome transmission losses and so on. My first guess is that it would be a wash... haven't seen any numbers.
I never liked reading Rheingold because he always said the most obvious things using the most buzzwords possible. Very tiring, like one long endless Wired article.
And Bruce Sterling wrote about "Smart Mobs" back in 1998. See the beginning of the novel "Distraction".
Rheingold is making a living with a throwaway detail from a Sterling novel.
And just to RTFA a bit:
the success of YouTube and Google Video, del.icio.us and Flickr, are all evidence that smartmob phenomena continues to grow
Anything at all that involves people doing stuff on-line is evidence that the "smartmob" trend
is proceeding full steam ahead.
Oh, by the way, in Sterling's version of a "smart mob", he has people engaging in the action
in order to earn points from an online reputation server -- you know, the kind of thing that slashdot could have been, but copped out on. If you're going to be a "futurist", maybe you should think a little bit about things that haven't happened yet instead of just being a "cheerleader" for
what's already going on.
This would stop "casual vandals". But it's ineffective against organised politics and lobby groups. If anything a "cooling off period" can be counter productive, since it does little to put off (even quite loosely) organised groups and fanatics. Whilst being likely to deter an average person.
I'm glad someone has noticed this problem. You would think that it would be pretty obvious, but everyone seems obsessed with the silly vandal scenarios.
Wikipedia is at risk of going the way of all volunteer organizations that try to use "consensus" decision-making: the most annoying people win. The reasonable people bail.
And here's a nightmare scenario for you: wikipedia continues to increase in popularity, to the point where it's actually politically significant what gets said in wikipedia articles. A Karl Rove-type hires 100 people and tells them to each get five wikipedia accounts, and develop reputations as responsible contributors.
A year later, he's got 500 accounts he can play with to do spin control.
Variation: substitute slashdot for wikipedia. The 500 accounts all mod each other up.
Conclusion: anonymity is only good for toy sites; it's not for serious use.
Indeed. He sneers at graphic design and pretty much anything
beyond plaintext, claiming that "gimmicks" like animation
impair usability.
You're behind the times. He moderated his stance once he was "put on the board" of Macromedia.
What he fails to understand is that when properly
applied, these very same techniques can aid usability
substantially Hm... another out of work "web designer", eh?(e.g. Genie effect to tell you where your windows
are going)
I have no idea what you're talking about, and I suspect I don't want to know.
An interview with Jim Gray, in which he talks about this subject (he apparently helped out the North Carolina group with some of this work):
"Deconstructing databases with Jim Gray".
Meanwhile, back at the article, we have a prime example of Steve Job's one truly amazing talent at work:
This leads to the third, most important and least obvious of the iPod's trumps: the power of 'pull'. Most companies distribute their product by 'push'. They estimate demand, build according to the estimate and then sell ('push') what they have built. This is essentially business as central planning, and it works little better at company than at country level - hence the need for advertising and promotional price-cuts to reconcile sales with estimates [...]
When, as with iTunes, the product is 'pulled' by the customer, on the other hand, the engines required for 'push' are redundant. It's like using gravity instead of fighting against it.
This man actually thinks that the iPod was put over without marketing. I don't know about you, but I can't ride the bus without seeing silouettes of cool kids cavorting about with white wires drooping from the electrodes in their control centers.
Steve Jobs is by no means an idiot about product design -- myself, I usually can't stand his crap, but I can see why other people might like it -- but this is his real talent at work: the reality warp field. Apple is never percieved as Just Another Company. Closed architectures, hardware lock-in, yet another proprietary fork of the BSD code base, and now "DRM" weirdness... oh shut up you whiners, what are you complaining about?
The author of this article is extremely confused, but it's a pretty common confusion, so maybe it's worth pointing it out:
However, basing your entire site, or even a larger percentage of it, on quoted content is viewed differently. Being a source in a larger article is one thing, but having your content be the majority of the article on another site another. What distinguishes one from the other is unclear at best. There are no math formulas or systems for determining what is right or what is too much.
It hardly matters whether someone using a quote is doing something creative with it, or taking the trouble to add some additional information. The question of whether it's copyright infringement has to do with whether you hurt the financial interests of the copyright holder (i.e. the party with a temporary, government granted, limited monopoly on the material). Quoting for purposes of review is expressly allowed as part of the "fair use" provision. A magazine could run a regular
feature composed of nothing but quotations of recent books, and provided they were relatively brief quotations, that's perfectly okay, even if there's no commentary added to it. A customary rule of thumb is less than 500 words, though there's nothing written into the law about that as far as I know.
So, if you attribute the quote, you're not engaged in plagarism. If you've only quoted a small portion of the work, you're not engaged in copyright infringement. There are indeed gray areas in
that boundary, but the situation is by no means as hard to deal with as the author makes it sound.
One thing I've wondered about though... on the web it's relatively easy to quote *entire* works.
Is this okay provided you pass through the advertising that originally accompanied them, and also provide a link back to the original site? Note that in the new context the work might appear in a frame surrounded by other material the original publisher might not like: negative comments, additional ads, etc...
What does that mean? What kind of load can a dynamic
site using RoR take before it bogs down?
The reason I ask is that RoR and all the competing fast-dev web app frameworks (of which there are many, e.g. "Jifty") sound to me like they speed up dev time by crippling the RDMS, and the database is the real bottleneck in a heavily used site...
So the questions in my mind are how far can you push it before the database
bogs down, and two, how easy is it to step around the default design and refactor
it into something that really will scale?
No one pushing Rails (and things like it) seem to want to talk about these aspects...
And since you bring it up, to stay on topic a bit,
Heresy.
I think perl could be an interesting choice as a first language to teach children.
Sure, no question. I've talked to some people who started out as humanities majors who turned into programmers by learning perl. One of the interesting things that happened with the web boom of the mid-90s was that a lot of non-programmers suddenly started trying to write code in perl, and the fact that actually got some things working is something of a testament to the ease of getting things done with perl. (And some of them created some extrememly sucessful companies, and no, not all of them evaporated when the bubble burst.)
Now it is true that a lot of these folks wrote some pretty awful, unmaintainable
code, but it is by no means proven that they would've been better off trying to wear an elegant straight-jacket.
There's something to be said for a "hello world" program that's only one line long...
For most tasks, languages shouldn't be chosen for their reductionist beauty, but instead, for their ease of use for forming complex structures with human psychology in mind.
Yes, precisely. And you're not a perl programmer? It often seems like the perl community is the only group of techies who understand this.
There's a lot of lip service paid to the idea that you should try
to learn lots of different kinds of languages that take different approaches in order to broaden your horizens, but if you get a language that really takes a different approach (like, "mathematical elegance is irrelevant") you get nothing but whining about how bad and wrong it all is.
All languages that aren't perl slow perl's development and are therefor evil.
Your concern is noted, but I fear your fear is misplaced. All languages which are not perl are another source of ideas for the perl community to steal, and re-implement in an "inferior" form that nevertheless will be used by a larger community of programmers.
This is one of the first things I noticed about the "Creative Commons" licenses:
there are too many of them. If you do a websearch on "Creative Commons" you
have no idea what kind of controls are on the materials that are going to turn
up. You need to look pretty closely (or use an alternate method of searching
for the materials).
Also, some of the licenses seem superficially reasonable, but actually have a lot
of problems, e.g. a lot of people slap a "non-commercially use only" restriction
on their stuff without thinking about it very much.
(Notably the GPL is not a non-commercial license.
RMS is not noted for his love of the profit motive.
If it made any sense at all to use a non-commercial license, don't you think
RMS would've done it?)
IP, aka "Intellectual Property" has always been a pretty
dubious term to apply to things like copyright and
patent, but trying to stretch it to include things like the reputations
of the people working for you is pretty crazy.
What you're saying is what I was saying: they
have a brand. They have no "IP" to speak of.
What exactly do they mean by IP? They don't seem to
understand that RedHat releases all the code
the write under the GPL, and most of the code
in their distro doesn't belong to them in any
sense at all. RedHat has a brand, it doesn't
have "Intellectual Property".
They know absolutely nothing about what happened to
LinuxCare, except that it tanked. My impression
is that it's a good example of a geek-founded company
taking on Professional Management to keep the VCs happy
and getting royally fucked over by the Professional
Management with the Impressive Credentials.
Suits never want to take the rap when suits
screw-up. You can bet that if the geeks had
tried to maintain control and tanked the company,
the business press would never stop yammering
on about how they obviously needed
Professional Management.
The growing problem at the 'pedia (and largely unnoticed to date)
isn't malicious attacks, but what I call 'ignorance attacks'.
Malicious attacks are actively defended against. A large portion
of the userbase (but a proportion that is decreasing over time)
actively watches for new articles, large numbers of edits by
contributors who are not logged in, check controversial articles
regularly, etc... etc... On the other hand, the single IP that
makes a few minor edits and then gets bored almost always 'gets
away', because he doesn't trip the flags of the watchers. In the
pages I maintain - I have to revert or remove these minor (and
incorrect) edits from one of more on almost a daily basis
I don't know why you'd assume that this problem is
unnoticed... certainly I've noticed it. One of the articles that
I'm the primary author of is a target for flakes and weirdos
(what this says about me, I leave open), which means that if I go
away for a month and come back, I'm guaranteed to find a pile of
edits that need to be reverted with one or two dubious ones
intermixed that I need to think about carefully to decide if they
have any value.
There are other articles I could be working on, but instead it
seems that my life's work as far as wikipedia is concerned is to
be the guardian and protector of this one damn node.
The really big problem for me is not that I need to do a bunch of
reverts, but the borderline cases that aren't clear if they
should be reverted. If some flake wanders in and blathers
something that seems incoherent at first, it's at least possible
that it's merely badly written. Maybe there's something *like*
it that needs to be said (certainly there's one person who seemed
to think so), and so I end up researching aspects of the subject that
I really don't care about...
So yeah, there's a potential burnout problem in the wikipedia
model, but that's probably solveable with some tweaks (e.g.
no more anonymous edits). It seems to me that the long run
difficulties have to do with intentional, professional
deception. What if a Karl Rove hired 100 people and told them
their job was just to earn a reputation as responsible wikipedia
members? And then a year later those well-respected IDs started
to subtlety tweak the spin of articles of political significance?
College radio is great listening too, and most college stations have online
streams. I like WTBU out of Boston University -- amazingly eclectic
programming schedule.
Exactly, I was wondering when someone was going to point this out.
Of course, as someone else has pointed out, it depends on the DJ in the
studio at the time -- college radio sticks to no particular
format, usually -- so you have to watch the schedules,
keep an eye out for favorite DJs who do things that you like, and
so on... the web has made this a little easier with
on-line schedules.
There's a bunch of good stations out there... a quick list that I've got on hand:
Also, there are other sorts of non-commercial radio out there...
I don't often bother with NPR, but there's some
good stuff on the Pacifica stations (KPFA, WBAI, etc).
Today I just got word about a live perfromance of "MOE! STAIANO" (frenetic industrial percussion)
tonight on KPFA:
Midnight, Tuesday, September 20, 2005 KPFA
Pacifica Radio Berkeley,
94.1 FM Northern California
Thanks. I figured if I whined about that someone would prove me wrong. All I can tell you is the last time I looked I kept coming up with a list of train stations with the name of the town, but no address. The trick is to find the right two clicks.
Slashdot Mirror
Camraderie seemed to be running pretty high, over in the non-profit corner (wrapped around the slashdot lounge, which was a bunch of laptop zombies on slashdot beanbag chairs)... it seemed like there was a lot of action at the Debian booth, the postgresql booth, and so on (though there was no perl foundation presence this year, not sure why). Lots of people were passing out free CDs for this-and-that.
Out in the corporate world, there was a pretty elaborate demo of Suse 10 handled by Novell: a class room layout with enough laptops setup for a few dozen people to play along with the demos. These demos were extremely slick, very impressive... it's too bad RedHat ("linux isn't ready for the desktop") wasn't present at the Expo. Running Suse might seem like an excessive compromise with proprietary software (it does to me -- it looks like I'm going with Knoppix and Kubuntu these days) but there's no question it would be better than being locked into the offerings of Windows or Apple.
In the light of these Suse 10 demos, the OpenSuse project -- which had a small booth off in the aforementioned corner -- seems very interesting. They were passing out disks that apparently included a few non-"open" components though (flash, etc).
The O'Reilly booth had it's fair share of people browsing, though there didn't seem to be all that much excitement about their present offerings, at least not to my eye. They had a nice series of talks going that I appreciated (e.g. two seperate talks by Bill Childers and Kyle Rankin, the authors of the new Ubuntu Hacks).
Out in hardware land, there was a nice array of server hardware (e.g. impressive booths by Tyan and Supermicro) ... I always appreciate this kind of thing, because not being a sysadmin type I don't often get that close to high-end hardware like this.
Emperor penguin was in the house, with demo models of all of their laptop models. Still no AMD64 versions, I'm afraid: apparently they're waiting for Dell to get on it...
It seemed like the general theme out on the floor was "virtualization"... I was hanging around with a friend of mine, listening to a sales pitch on the subject (by EMC, I think), trying to figure out what was so cool about it, but without much success. Hardware is cheap enough that it wouldn't seem all that onerous to stick with one box per OS installation... and after all, you can run NFS if you want to use large disk arrays more efficiently. But everywhere I turned someone was talking about it... Bill Childers mentioned in passing that his company had gotten a 12 to 1 reduction in servers by using vmware (which has a freeware version, but is not free/open), and one of the Debian folks was talking about how it's really good for some random legacy app that needs a particular platform that otherwise you wouldn't want to run.
You also might ask your favorite vendors to speak up on the subject. The Show Director tells me that the reasons for the change is complaints from exhibitors about too many students.
It seems a little ridiculous that a 17-year old kernel hacker would be turned away at the door by Linuxworld. I gather that this is a bone tossed to vendors complaining about poor sales at the Expo, but it strikes me as being fairly short-sighted... in the computer biz, you really want to get 'em while they're young, before they settle in on a particular OS.
I've got a different theory, which I admit is just a guess: it had to do with the war on drugs. "Classic" Coke was (and probably still is) made with extracts from Coca leaves, albiet with the coccaine removed -- interestingly enough, there's a common belief that this is an "urban legend", but myself I believe that that's the urban legend (take a look at the wikipedia discussion page on Coke some time, if you're interested). As the "war on drugs" business was heating up, my guess is that the folks at Coke were nervous about the fact that their product was based on a plant we were supposed to be hell bent on erradicating. So they started thinking about changing the formula, dropping the coca-based flavoring agents, hence "New Coke", which not conicidentally tasted more like the competing non-coca based colas.
Such is my theory, at any rate.
By the way, the current version of the wikipedia page Coca-Cola says: Today's Coca-Cola uses "spent" coca leaves, those that have been through a cocaine extraction process, to flavor the beverage.
The author of the article, however, is not really interested in "technology", he's really just a gamer dork, and he's having trouble grasping the idea that maybe the heavy, cool, intelligent, ground breaking writers are saying a lot about gaming because they think it's trivial bullshit. Bruce Sterling, for example, has spent a decade or so trying to deal with global warming. Can someone here say with a straight face the world would be better off if only he was reviewing computer games?
Try to imagine writing a shell script that would cheerfully do a cd /usr/bin; rm *. Can you? Now look at this bug report:
bug 234479
One of the programmers (Andrew Schultz) can't imagine any way of dealing with version skew problems outside of completely erasing the installation directory in order to start from scratch.
Greater thermodynamic efficiencies at the plant have to overcome transmission losses and so on. My first guess is that it would be a wash... haven't seen any numbers.
Rheingold is making a living with a throwaway detail from a Sterling novel.
And just to RTFA a bit:
Anything at all that involves people doing stuff on-line is evidence that the "smartmob" trend is proceeding full steam ahead.Oh, by the way, in Sterling's version of a "smart mob", he has people engaging in the action in order to earn points from an online reputation server -- you know, the kind of thing that slashdot could have been, but copped out on. If you're going to be a "futurist", maybe you should think a little bit about things that haven't happened yet instead of just being a "cheerleader" for what's already going on.
I'm glad someone has noticed this problem. You would think that it would be pretty obvious, but everyone seems obsessed with the silly vandal scenarios.
Wikipedia is at risk of going the way of all volunteer organizations that try to use "consensus" decision-making: the most annoying people win. The reasonable people bail.
And here's a nightmare scenario for you: wikipedia continues to increase in popularity, to the point where it's actually politically significant what gets said in wikipedia articles. A Karl Rove-type hires 100 people and tells them to each get five wikipedia accounts, and develop reputations as responsible contributors. A year later, he's got 500 accounts he can play with to do spin control.
Variation: substitute slashdot for wikipedia. The 500 accounts all mod each other up.
Conclusion: anonymity is only good for toy sites; it's not for serious use.
An interview with Jim Gray, in which he talks about this subject (he apparently helped out the North Carolina group with some of this work): "Deconstructing databases with Jim Gray".
Steve Jobs is by no means an idiot about product design -- myself, I usually can't stand his crap, but I can see why other people might like it -- but this is his real talent at work: the reality warp field. Apple is never percieved as Just Another Company. Closed architectures, hardware lock-in, yet another proprietary fork of the BSD code base, and now "DRM" weirdness... oh shut up you whiners, what are you complaining about?
So, if you attribute the quote, you're not engaged in plagarism. If you've only quoted a small portion of the work, you're not engaged in copyright infringement. There are indeed gray areas in that boundary, but the situation is by no means as hard to deal with as the author makes it sound.
One thing I've wondered about though... on the web it's relatively easy to quote *entire* works. Is this okay provided you pass through the advertising that originally accompanied them, and also provide a link back to the original site? Note that in the new context the work might appear in a frame surrounded by other material the original publisher might not like: negative comments, additional ads, etc...
What does that mean? What kind of load can a dynamic site using RoR take before it bogs down?
The reason I ask is that RoR and all the competing fast-dev web app frameworks (of which there are many, e.g. "Jifty") sound to me like they speed up dev time by crippling the RDMS, and the database is the real bottleneck in a heavily used site...
So the questions in my mind are how far can you push it before the database bogs down, and two, how easy is it to step around the default design and refactor it into something that really will scale?
No one pushing Rails (and things like it) seem to want to talk about these aspects...
Now it is true that a lot of these folks wrote some pretty awful, unmaintainable code, but it is by no means proven that they would've been better off trying to wear an elegant straight-jacket.
There's something to be said for a "hello world" program that's only one line long...
There's a lot of lip service paid to the idea that you should try to learn lots of different kinds of languages that take different approaches in order to broaden your horizens, but if you get a language that really takes a different approach (like, "mathematical elegance is irrelevant") you get nothing but whining about how bad and wrong it all is.
Also, some of the licenses seem superficially reasonable, but actually have a lot of problems, e.g. a lot of people slap a "non-commercially use only" restriction on their stuff without thinking about it very much.
(Notably the GPL is not a non-commercial license. RMS is not noted for his love of the profit motive. If it made any sense at all to use a non-commercial license, don't you think RMS would've done it?)
What you're saying is what I was saying: they have a brand. They have no "IP" to speak of.
They know absolutely nothing about what happened to LinuxCare, except that it tanked. My impression is that it's a good example of a geek-founded company taking on Professional Management to keep the VCs happy and getting royally fucked over by the Professional Management with the Impressive Credentials.
Suits never want to take the rap when suits screw-up. You can bet that if the geeks had tried to maintain control and tanked the company, the business press would never stop yammering on about how they obviously needed Professional Management.
*Real* tricksters stencil political slogans on police cars outside of donut shops.
Before you tell someone else to "get over themselves", stop calling yourself a fucking "trickster". ("Troll", I might believe).
There are other articles I could be working on, but instead it seems that my life's work as far as wikipedia is concerned is to be the guardian and protector of this one damn node.
The really big problem for me is not that I need to do a bunch of reverts, but the borderline cases that aren't clear if they should be reverted. If some flake wanders in and blathers something that seems incoherent at first, it's at least possible that it's merely badly written. Maybe there's something *like* it that needs to be said (certainly there's one person who seemed to think so), and so I end up researching aspects of the subject that I really don't care about...
So yeah, there's a potential burnout problem in the wikipedia model, but that's probably solveable with some tweaks (e.g. no more anonymous edits). It seems to me that the long run difficulties have to do with intentional, professional deception. What if a Karl Rove hired 100 people and told them their job was just to earn a reputation as responsible wikipedia members? And then a year later those well-respected IDs started to subtlety tweak the spin of articles of political significance?
There's a bunch of good stations out there... a quick list that I've got on hand:
- Pittsburg: WRCT
- Georgia: WREK
- New York: WFUV
- Los Altos, CA: KFJC
- Berkeley, CA: KALX
- San Francisco, CA KUSF
- Davis, CA: KDVS
- Stanford, CA: KZSU
Also, there are other sorts of non-commercial radio out there... I don't often bother with NPR, but there's some good stuff on the Pacifica stations (KPFA, WBAI, etc). Today I just got word about a live perfromance of "MOE! STAIANO" (frenetic industrial percussion) tonight on KPFA: Midnight, Tuesday, September 20, 2005KPFA Pacifica Radio Berkeley, 94.1 FM Northern California
Thanks. I figured if I whined about that someone would prove me wrong. All I can tell you is the last time I looked I kept coming up with a list of train stations with the name of the town, but no address. The trick is to find the right two clicks.