Re:This book fills a niche
on
Perl & LWP
·
· Score: 2
Well, I'll agree that this is a follow-up subject-wise, but really
this book has an entirely different author and title than the first
book, so it's hard to call it a second edition, in my opinion.
Yes, I agree. You got me. It only just occured
to me to check to see if I'm the one who was
confused.
Re:This book fills a niche
on
Perl & LWP
·
· Score: 2
There seems to be a surprising amount of confusion
about a simple point here: this book is the
second edition of "Web Client Programming in
Perl", it's just been re-titled "Perl & LWP".
This is a *vast* improvement, in my opinion...
once upon a time O'Reilley books had seriously
geeky titles (e.g. "lex & yacc") where you would
pick up the book just to figure out what the
hell the title meant. Then they started trying
to branch out with more "comprehensible" titles
that actually turned out to be more confusing
in a lot of cases. Like, when I was getting into
mod_perl it took me a year to realize that that
the book "Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C"
was what I should have been reading.
Anyway, "Web Client Programming" was a nice slim
volume that did a good job of introducing the LWP
module, but had an unfortunately narrow focus
on writing crawlers. If you needed to do something
like do a POST of form values to enter some
information there wasn't any clear example in
the text. (The perldoc/man page for HTML::LWP
on the other hand had a great, very prominent
example. Though shalt not neglect on-line docs.)
I flipped through this new edition at LinuxWorld,
and it looks like it's fixed these kind of
omissions it's a much beefier book.
BUT... even at a 20% discount it wasn't worth
it to me to shell out my own money for it.
If you don't know your way around the LWP module,
this is probably a great deal, if you do it's
a little harder to say.
Couldn't you just pay for advertising on a
number of popular sites? Then all of a sudden,
a bunch of highly ranked sites are "voting" for
you.
At a guess, Google does something clever to
try and ignore banner ads, so you make some
guesses as to how Google spots an ad, and
only pay for ads that don't look like ads...
(like, what if you paid for a "banner" ad,
and then requested that the site just stick
in an ordinary text link rather than a banner
graphic?).
As a New York resident, let me say that if something Bad
happened to the city, I hope it is built anew rather than
trying to recreate the 1910-era buildings that make up
half the city's housing. An "Old New York" in the
Metaverse might be fun to visit, though.
As a San Francisco resident who has seen the difference
between buildings put up at the turn of this century and at
the turn of the last one, I would sincerely vote for
building replicas of 100 year old designs.
Somewhere along the way, modern industrial culture lost the
ability or the desire to build anything that isn't a piece
of crap. If anyone can explain why that is exactly, this
thread might not be a totally useless fluff magnet.
I'm a big fan of Bruce Sterling, I'm even a
big fan of his free-wheeling public speaking
gigs like this, but this is just not that great
a Sterling rap. He just doesn't know enough
about what he's talking about, and -- a rare
event, for Sterling -- hasn't suceeded in
coming up with any unusual insights into the
subject.
By all means, read it for fun... e.g. note
Sterling's attempt at categorizing proprietary
software company strategies as relationship
headgames, where Linux comes in as this weird
hippie chick that likes doing geeky guys...
just don't expect too much of it.
Sometimes I think Slashdot may have painted
itself into a corner... they ended up running
a link to *this* Sterling rap, because it's
about the sterotypic concerns of slashdot,
not because it's a particularly interesting one.
Try this one:
Without Vision, The People Perish. There's
at least a chance that he's on to something there.
There's no need to mess with economic theory to explain Open Source.
There's nothing new there. Each programmer, as a rational operator,
contributes for a number of possible reasons. For example, they may
value creative control and consulting opportunities more than they
value a salary. In other words, someone who waits tables at night and
codes for free during the day isn't necessarily a radical leftwing
crackpot--as long as they are doing it for the future hope of
consulting $$$ and/or the right to maintain control of their work
(witness the not insignificant number of people who have un-Opened
their work).
Let's consider taking the bold step of reading Benkler's
paper to see what he's talking about. Here's a few quotes:
In the late 1930s, Ronald Coase wrote his article, The
Nature of the Firm, 5 in which he explained why firms
clusters of resources and agents that interact through
managerial command systems rather than markets emerge. In
that paper Coase introduced the concept of transaction costs
that is, that there are costs associated with defining and
enforcing property and contract rights which are a necessary
incident of organizing any activity on a market model. Coase
explained the emergence and limits of firms based on the
differences in the transaction costs associated with
organizing production through markets or through
firms. People would use the markets when the gains from
doing so, net of transaction costs, exceed the gains from
doing the same thing in a managed firm, net of the
organization costs. Firms would emerge when the opposite was
true. Any individual firm would stop growing when its
organization costs exceeded the organization costs of a
newly formed, smaller firm.
And further:
The emergence of free software as a substantial force in the
software development world poses a puzzle for this
conception of organization theory. Free software projects do
not rely either on markets or on managerial hierarchies to
organize production. Programmers do not, generally,
participate in a project because someone who is their boss
told them to. They do not participate in a project because
someone offers them a price to do so. I will spend
substantial space in this article explaining why
peer-production processes appear to respond mostly to cues
other than price signals. Some participants may indeed be
focused on long-term appropriation through money-oriented
activities like consulting or service contracts. But the
critical mass of participation in projects, at any given
level of activity, cannot be explained by the direct
presence of a price that differentiates different projects
and effort levels. In other words, programmers participate
in free software projects without following the normal
signals generated by market-based, firm-based, or hybrid
models.
So, Benkler is not saying that he has proof that "rational
acting" money-grubbing greedy bastards are lame and cause
more harm than good (whew, that's a relief, eh?).
He's talking about a problem in social organization.
Previously economists have focused on two ways of organizing
things:
direct command and control by centralized management,
aka "the firm".
competition between firms, controlled by the "invisible
hand" of the market.
If Gnu, Apache, Linux, etc fit into either of those two
categories, it is not easy to see how.
If there are other examples of sucessful products being
produced in a similar cooperative manner -- as their
probably are -- Benkler seems to be saying that economists
have not paid sufficient attention to them.
Let me try a simple, general thesis here:
Social organization is influenced by available technologies
of communication and transportation.
That doesn't sound like too much of a stretch does it?
It's generally accepted that the viable size
of a nation state was smaller in the days of the ancient
greeks than it is now. So it would seem that a radical
change in our communication technology -- like, oh, say, the
development of the internet -- might change the kind of
cooperative organizations that are viable.
istartedi wrote:
In all of these cases, software included, there is a
rational economic model that has given rise to support
for some free riders.
[...]
The OSS model could be regarded as a "natural tax". Once again, there
is nothing irrational about it. Advocates just have to realize that
neither model is "superior". The free market sometimes moves us
towards paying for goods directly. Other times it moves us towards
indirect payment (somebody pays for OSS, because TANSTAAFL).
Of course, I doubt that advocates will stop advocating. There is a
demand for politics just like anything else, and they supply it.
Some exercises for after class:
Could it be that this libertarian inistance that all human
motivation can be ecompassed as a form of profit motive is
purely an article of faith?
Can you imagine any hypothetical form of behavior for
which it would not be possible to explain away as the result
of "self-interest" in some contorted way?
If there is no way to falsify the "rational actor", then is there
any utility in the concept? Why is it useful to re-state
motivations in a "selfish" form rather than an "altruistic"
form?
If you want to start with early historical electronic music, the very
first (even before Kraftwerk) was Walter Carlos's "Switched On Bach"
series of albums.
Electronic music actually started a number of
decades before this (e.g. Therimen invented the
Theriment in the 1920s, if I remember right).
Also "Switched on Bach", despite it's popularity,
is a classic example of the abuse of a new
instrument... it uses the Moog to nearly perfectly
mimic an already existing sound. Interesting
novelty, but artisitically there's not much
point in doing this kind of thing...
(On the other hand, her cover of the "What's up
pussycat?" theme was just brilliant.)
Let's see, you should start by looking up
Leon Therimen, maybe some of the Clara Rockmore
recordings, then move on to Edgard Varese
("Ionization" is a fave of mine), then maybe
some Todd Dockstander, some early Pauline Oliveras
("Bog/Beautiful Soop" was re-released on CD not
too long ago). Oh and maybe some Xenakis and
John Cage would be a good idea.
And if you want to start making some of your
own, you'll want to get a reel-to-reel tape
recorder, a razor blade and some scotch tape.
You might lookup the plans on-line for a Therimen.
Oh, and lookup a guy named "Moog" while you're
at it.
Evidentally, this story is a re-typing of the
press release from "mi2g", so you might as well
look at the original:
Digital attacks on Open Source systems soar.
It includes a bunch of pointers to pdfs of graphs
of their data (none of which I can read because
of some sort of "can't find colorspace cs8" error).
But they don't appear to include any additional
information, they're just graphs.
The source of the data is supposed to be the
"mi2g SIPS database", about which they say:
The mi2g SIPS (Security Intelligence Products and Systems) database has
information on over 6,000 hacker groups and maintains a record of over 60,000
individual hacking events since 1995. The SIPS intelligence citations include the
2002 Computer Security Institute (CSI) / Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
Computer Security Issues and Trends Survey [Vol. VIII, No. 1 - Spring 2002]
(Do you need me to toss in some editorializing
about how this is evidentally a company that
specializes in publishing alarmist press releases
to encourage people to buy their products? Oh,
and take a look at key clients...
yup, includes Microsoft).
Most of the world can do without page
transitions. If you need some special eye candy, it can
most likely be done with Java, Flash, or plain old DHTML
coded properly. The flash plugin exists for the major
browsers (and works under linux too) and can be done
properly, but again that takes some work on the
developers part.
I agree with most of your rant here, but I want to make the
point that "Flash" is definitely *not* a standards-based
technology. In principle, a Macromedia dominated web would
be no better than a Microsoft dominated web.
Take a look [the5k.org] at the 5K contest this year. The rules were
relaxed a bit this time around, and in my totally random browsing of
the entries I found that at least half of them do not work in my
trusty Mozilla sans java, flash, etc. Disgusting, what used to be a
contest to showcase novel design has become a wasteland of cheesy
javascript and flash.
Sadly, the 256b [wildmag.de] contest seems to be going the same route.
Check the first 5 entries, they are all IE only or require javascript.
Web designers are sucking more and more latley. Learn proper CSS and
stop designing broken pages.
No, the *unemployed* web designers are sucking more these
days. Once these guys are gainfully employed in the food
service industry, the web will get a lot more useful,
and commercial web sites might actually start turning a
profit.
But he hasn't done anything except rest on his laurels for
a long time now. Perhaps if he stopped
scheduling/cancelling talks and getting involved in
petty naming disputes, and sat down and actually _wrote
some code_ for Hurd, he'd regain some of the respect
that most of us have lost for him
Do you understand the RMS has some bad RSI injuries?
He was one of the first people to come down with
this. He pretty much trashed his hands cranking out
code for the GNU project.
However, his 'GNU/Linux v Linux' crusade is
petty and ego driven and is worthy of contempt.
I see you include mind-reading in with your other skills.
There's a certain kind of person who always seems
to be putting down activists as just being merely out
for ego gratification. What other motive could they
possibly have, eh? No one could possibly care about
that idealistic stuff, right?
A suggestion:
If you think the "GNU/Linux" thing is trivial, symbolic
bullshit, then just ignore it.
If it's so trivial, what's the point of bringing it up
over and over again?
After reviewing the moderated comments on this thread, I have come to
the conclusion that RMS has become the joke of the Open Source
movement like Milli Vanilli became the joke of music industry.
Everyone of the higher modded posts was "Funny".
Actually, the attitude of the average slashdot commentator
towards RMS says a lot more about slashdot than it does
about RMS.
The slash crowd seems to be a bunch of "technical" guys who
can't get beyond personalities.
Hey guys, written any good C compilers lately? Come up with
any revolutionary social institutions, like the GPL?
On those two grounds alone, you would think that RMS would
be revered at least as much as Linus Torvalds, but no...
"RMS, he's that nasty guy with a beard who keeps talking about
politics. Let's go get him."
nagora wrote:
Someone has come up with a way of earning a living under the following
circumstances:
A lone programmer has a written a new program. Lets say it's an
industrial level Cad system for Linux based on 20 years experience
as an architect.
S/he releases it under the GPL but also writes a nice thick manual
which is available as a PDF (let's assume s/he can't afford a
minimal print run for this) to go with it.
The program works and works well and the manual is good enough to
actually use the program; support is not a major issue.
The programmer continues on development of the program into new
versions which are also GPL'd.
How does this programmer buy food to eat?
Here are some of the answers people have come up with:
Go into business as a consultant adding features to the code
that are requested by the major corporate users of it.
Polish up the PDF a bit, and get O'Reilly/SAMS/whoever publish it in printed form.
Use the success of the free project to attract the attention
or proprietary software developers, and sell your services
to them at the highest rate possible.
Another question you might want to ask yourself is how is it
possible for the programmer to make money selling closed
source binaries? You think you're going to beat Autodesk
at this game? Is that at all realistic?
Use what? CVS? No, because it doesn't meet my needs. So use what?
Nothing at all? Something that doesn't work?
I trust you have evaluated cvs and have found it to "not meet your
needs" and "not work at all"? Or maybe you are just buying completely
into Larry's anti-CVS propaganda. Hint: mozilla, a project much larger
than the Linux kernel and with more developers, uses CVS.
Yes, thanks for pointing this out. I read the McVoy
interview, and I've heard from some bitkeeper enthusiasts,
but I still don't quite see why the distributed repository
model is supposed to be inherently superior...
It would seem to me that even the really large open source
development projects don't really have enough programmers to run
a centralized code repository into the ground.
So in theory I can see how it would be kind of cool that you
can sync up to any tree of code managed by bitkeeper as
though it were another repository, but why is that so
wonderfully useful? McVoy essential resorts to what I call
"the mysticism argument" in this interview (Which always
goes something like "It's hard to explain why this is good,
but once you embrace it and use it for awhile you suddenly
grok the Tao of GazongaTech, and you never ever want to be
without GazongaTech ever again.").
People like to whine about CVS (and it does have real
problems, e.g. watch-it if you want to check in binaries; if
you need to move a directory around, you're going to lose
the history on it; I gather branch management is a bit of a
pain, etc). But the real reason there's not free replacement
for it is that it works well enough for most programmers to
live with it.
In a similar vein, am I the only one who is sick of RMS whining about
the naming of Linux?
Why no. I've never heard anyone say that before. What a
strange, unconventional attitude you have there. With
ground-breaking thinking like this, I expect you're
destined for great things. Call us when you get your
MacArthur prize.
Fair enough, although I didn't quote Shalizi for his insights on any
of the myriad topics that he's not an expert on. He is a paid up
specialist on cellular automata and self-organization, though.
I don't think I agree that this is very fair at
all. For one thing, I think Shalizi is a pretty
bright guy, and I've been a fan of his web site
for a long time (he was putting his personal
notebooks on line back when most of you guys
were still looking for sexy star trek shots).
Or course it could be that I'm just another
pompous, arrogant, intellectual dude who
appreciates someone else's efforts at synthesis.
But more to the point, what difference does it make
if
Wolfram
Shalizi
or I
are arrogant? How do you guys think you should settle an issue, go looking
for the pundit with the best humble act?
And the whole "trust the experts" thing can
never be anything but a rule of thumb. If you
want to look at it logically, believing someone
because they've got a degree in a related subject
isn't any better than "ad hominem" argument (like .
accusing your opponent of being arrogant).
(If you care: current state of my uninformed
opinion of this work by Wolfram is that I've yet
to hear what you can learn from this book
that you can't get from Gleick's "Chaos".)
I just thought I throw in a bit of praise for
what David Packard has done with the Stanford
Theater. It's now the place to go to see classic
hollywood movies in their natural environment...
it's also one of the few improvements I can think
of that took place in Palo Alto during the ten
years that I lived there; the place was (and is)
hemorrhaging what little character it had at a
tremendous rate.
(It's actually a serious criticism I've got
of market forces these days: far from
being an engine of diversity, they seem to be
driving the United States toward a rather boring
and bland monoculture. I look at changes in
Palo Alto, and I can think of a dozen bad losses,
and one gain, and that's the result of a
non-profit organization...)
But anyway, if you happen to be hanging on the
Bay Area peninsula for any reason, definitely
check out the Stanford Theater on University Ave.
With any luck, you may get to see Edward Everett
Horton and/or Eric Blore.
(One complaint though: David Packard is a little
too tasteful for my tastes. Silicon Valley needs
more bad SF movies. I want to see a Roger Corman festival. )
But did they hit you with advertising?
on
Review: Spiderman
·
· Score: 2
Maybe I'm weird, but what I want to know
is did they plaster the damn thing with
advertising?
I don't bother with a lot of Hollywood
movies, but the last few that I saw
(Lord of the Rings, and X-Men, I
think), they preceeded the trailers
with a string of bigname coporate
television-style advertising for crap
like Coca-cola, Nike and Microsoft.
I might go see a Spider-man movie for
the hell of it (without expecting
much from it), but I will not pay to
see Microsoft ads.
At a bear minimum, please do scream
"bullshit" when you they push an ad on
you. An entire audience chanting
"Linux! Imac! Linux! Imac!" in response
to a Microsoft ad would definitely warm
the heart.
because x.0 version are generally known to be "buggy" versions.
therefore, if they release version 7.3 which is quite,possibly a stable
one, then people will buy it.
And you know, I think I buy this explanation. I'm afraid
that I was thinking more along the lines of: "Wow, they must
be really embarassed about the poor quality of the 7.2
release. I mean, this used to be a joke around the time of
'7.2', as in 'Uh, maybe I should wait for 7.3, huh guys?'".
But it's a good thing I didn't say that, or the moderators
might have slammed me senseless.
(Moderation Totals: Funny: +5, Flamebait: -7, Redundant: -3, Insightful:+1)
By the way, here's my standard RedHat 7.2 era rant: Changing
the default file system is *not* a small change. Handing a
relatively new, unproven filesystem to newbies to play with
is a fundamentally a bad idea. Even if you did go beserk
testing it, then there were almost certainly other quality
issues you were neglecting. If you feel the need to toss
new features in every release, here's a thought: "Quality is
a feature". Learn to sell it.
Use nmh. Messages are stored in separate files rather than an entire
folder in one file. You can then auto-archive by date with something
like:
refile `pick +inbox -before '1 apr 2002'` -src +inbox +archive
Yeah, I was wondering a bit about what
"text mining" your email is supposed to be
about exactly...
Personally, I use mh (using the emacs
mh-rmail frontend). I refile stuff automatically
typically just based on the '-from' (using commands much like the above pick/refile).
And if I'm looking
for something I remember seeing awhile back, a grep on one or two
mail folders (which are just directories full of text files for us mh users) does a pretty good job...
I won't say that there's no way to improve
on this, but any fancy system that someone
proposes has got to beat some pretty effective
simple tools...
I mean, if you're really after identifying a
burst of activity on a given topic... wouldn't
a combination of text searches and visual scans of subject headers sorted by date
get you 90% of the way there?
While we're on the subject, anyone taken
a look at this old jwz idea:
Intertwingle
Larry Wall at SVLUG tonight
on
Exegesis 4 Out
·
· Score: 2
If you happen to be in or near Silicon Valley,
you can go bug Larry Wall in person tonight.
Wednesday, April 3rd., 2002, 7PM-9PM
Speaker: Larry Wall
at Cisco Building 9, the land of numbers.
Topic: An Evening with Larry Wall
And even if you're not in Silicon Valley,
you should take a look at the directions they
put up to this building:
Cisco 9.
Truly amazing, anal-geek overkill.
There's a lot of interesting points being made
here, but the thing I expected to see is almost
totally missing: why isn't everyone pointing
at cool, fun stuff that still exists on the web?
I never paid a lot of attention to "The Cool Site
of the Day", but if I wanted a substitute I might
go over here: Infinite Matrix, where
you'll find people like Bruce Sterling writing
web log entries pointing at neat stuff they've
come across: Schism Matrix.
So there are fewer stupid novelty sites on the
web. Is that supposed to be something to be
upset about?
... many users say they would rather chat with their friends than
spend their time surfing the Web
Well, duh.
There are other signs that all is not well in Webville. For the first
time, the number of expiring domain names outnumbers those being
registered or renewed
That's supposed to be a *bad* sign? It's a great
sign that (a) some totally mindless companies best thought of as venture
capital backed stock scams and (b) some scuzzy
domain name speculators have faded from the scene.
Other users say they are less inclined to hunt for innovative sites
because many of them require plug-ins or browser updates that force
users into bothersome downloading.
Well, duh. Memo to web designers: put away your
toys and do your job.
Memo to NYT authors: when stuck for a story idea,
you can always go for the "Is _____ Dead?" formula.
Run a bunch of random comments slanted to make
it sound like something's going wrong, then you
can "provide balance" by running a bunch of quotes
saying that it isn't really going wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, "Web Client Programming" was a nice slim volume that did a good job of introducing the LWP module, but had an unfortunately narrow focus on writing crawlers. If you needed to do something like do a POST of form values to enter some information there wasn't any clear example in the text. (The perldoc/man page for HTML::LWP on the other hand had a great, very prominent example. Though shalt not neglect on-line docs.) I flipped through this new edition at LinuxWorld, and it looks like it's fixed these kind of omissions it's a much beefier book.
BUT... even at a 20% discount it wasn't worth it to me to shell out my own money for it. If you don't know your way around the LWP module, this is probably a great deal, if you do it's a little harder to say.
At a guess, Google does something clever to try and ignore banner ads, so you make some guesses as to how Google spots an ad, and only pay for ads that don't look like ads... (like, what if you paid for a "banner" ad, and then requested that the site just stick in an ordinary text link rather than a banner graphic?).
Somewhere along the way, modern industrial culture lost the ability or the desire to build anything that isn't a piece of crap. If anyone can explain why that is exactly, this thread might not be a totally useless fluff magnet.
By all means, read it for fun... e.g. note Sterling's attempt at categorizing proprietary software company strategies as relationship headgames, where Linux comes in as this weird hippie chick that likes doing geeky guys... just don't expect too much of it.
Sometimes I think Slashdot may have painted itself into a corner... they ended up running a link to *this* Sterling rap, because it's about the sterotypic concerns of slashdot, not because it's a particularly interesting one. Try this one: Without Vision, The People Perish. There's at least a chance that he's on to something there.
He's talking about a problem in social organization. Previously economists have focused on two ways of organizing things:
- direct command and control by centralized management,
aka "the firm".
- competition between firms, controlled by the "invisible
hand" of the market.
If Gnu, Apache, Linux, etc fit into either of those two categories, it is not easy to see how.If there are other examples of sucessful products being produced in a similar cooperative manner -- as their probably are -- Benkler seems to be saying that economists have not paid sufficient attention to them.
Let me try a simple, general thesis here: Social organization is influenced by available technologies of communication and transportation. That doesn't sound like too much of a stretch does it? It's generally accepted that the viable size of a nation state was smaller in the days of the ancient greeks than it is now. So it would seem that a radical change in our communication technology -- like, oh, say, the development of the internet -- might change the kind of cooperative organizations that are viable.
istartedi wrote:
Some exercises for after class:Also "Switched on Bach", despite it's popularity, is a classic example of the abuse of a new instrument... it uses the Moog to nearly perfectly mimic an already existing sound. Interesting novelty, but artisitically there's not much point in doing this kind of thing...
(On the other hand, her cover of the "What's up pussycat?" theme was just brilliant.)
And if you want to start making some of your own, you'll want to get a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a razor blade and some scotch tape. You might lookup the plans on-line for a Therimen. Oh, and lookup a guy named "Moog" while you're at it.
The source of the data is supposed to be the "mi2g SIPS database", about which they say:
(Do you need me to toss in some editorializing about how this is evidentally a company that specializes in publishing alarmist press releases to encourage people to buy their products? Oh, and take a look at key clients... yup, includes Microsoft).
There's a certain kind of person who always seems to be putting down activists as just being merely out for ego gratification. What other motive could they possibly have, eh? No one could possibly care about that idealistic stuff, right?
A suggestion: If you think the "GNU/Linux" thing is trivial, symbolic bullshit, then just ignore it. If it's so trivial, what's the point of bringing it up over and over again?
The slash crowd seems to be a bunch of "technical" guys who can't get beyond personalities.
Hey guys, written any good C compilers lately? Come up with any revolutionary social institutions, like the GPL?
On those two grounds alone, you would think that RMS would be revered at least as much as Linus Torvalds, but no... "RMS, he's that nasty guy with a beard who keeps talking about politics. Let's go get him."
nagora wrote: Someone has come up with a way of earning a living under the following circumstances:
- A lone programmer has a written a new program. Lets say it's an
industrial level Cad system for Linux based on 20 years experience
as an architect.
- S/he releases it under the GPL but also writes a nice thick manual
which is available as a PDF (let's assume s/he can't afford a
minimal print run for this) to go with it.
- The program works and works well and the manual is good enough to
actually use the program; support is not a major issue.
- The programmer continues on development of the program into new
versions which are also GPL'd.
How does this programmer buy food to eat?Here are some of the answers people have come up with:
Another question you might want to ask yourself is how is it possible for the programmer to make money selling closed source binaries? You think you're going to beat Autodesk at this game? Is that at all realistic?
AxelBoldt wrote:
Yes, thanks for pointing this out. I read the McVoy interview, and I've heard from some bitkeeper enthusiasts, but I still don't quite see why the distributed repository model is supposed to be inherently superior...It would seem to me that even the really large open source development projects don't really have enough programmers to run a centralized code repository into the ground.
So in theory I can see how it would be kind of cool that you can sync up to any tree of code managed by bitkeeper as though it were another repository, but why is that so wonderfully useful? McVoy essential resorts to what I call "the mysticism argument" in this interview (Which always goes something like "It's hard to explain why this is good, but once you embrace it and use it for awhile you suddenly grok the Tao of GazongaTech, and you never ever want to be without GazongaTech ever again.").
People like to whine about CVS (and it does have real problems, e.g. watch-it if you want to check in binaries; if you need to move a directory around, you're going to lose the history on it; I gather branch management is a bit of a pain, etc). But the real reason there's not free replacement for it is that it works well enough for most programmers to live with it.
But more to the point, what difference does it make if
- Wolfram
- Shalizi
- or I
are arrogant? How do you guys think you should settle an issue, go looking for the pundit with the best humble act?And the whole "trust the experts" thing can never be anything but a rule of thumb. If you want to look at it logically, believing someone because they've got a degree in a related subject isn't any better than "ad hominem" argument (like . accusing your opponent of being arrogant).
(If you care: current state of my uninformed opinion of this work by Wolfram is that I've yet to hear what you can learn from this book that you can't get from Gleick's "Chaos".)
But software development is a collaborative process, so you're always stuck working in the social realm, and political issues will always be an issue.
Disagree with Stallman's ideals or tactics all you want, but "politics doesn't matter" is just not the right answer.
Sometimes you need to think about problems that can't be solved just by looking up the answer in Knuth.
(It's actually a serious criticism I've got of market forces these days: far from being an engine of diversity, they seem to be driving the United States toward a rather boring and bland monoculture. I look at changes in Palo Alto, and I can think of a dozen bad losses, and one gain, and that's the result of a non-profit organization...)
But anyway, if you happen to be hanging on the Bay Area peninsula for any reason, definitely check out the Stanford Theater on University Ave. With any luck, you may get to see Edward Everett Horton and/or Eric Blore.
(One complaint though: David Packard is a little too tasteful for my tastes. Silicon Valley needs more bad SF movies. I want to see a Roger Corman festival. )
I don't bother with a lot of Hollywood movies, but the last few that I saw (Lord of the Rings, and X-Men, I think), they preceeded the trailers with a string of bigname coporate television-style advertising for crap like Coca-cola, Nike and Microsoft. I might go see a Spider-man movie for the hell of it (without expecting much from it), but I will not pay to see Microsoft ads.
At a bear minimum, please do scream "bullshit" when you they push an ad on you. An entire audience chanting "Linux! Imac! Linux! Imac!" in response to a Microsoft ad would definitely warm the heart.
But it's a good thing I didn't say that, or the moderators might have slammed me senseless. (Moderation Totals: Funny: +5, Flamebait: -7, Redundant: -3, Insightful:+1)
By the way, here's my standard RedHat 7.2 era rant: Changing the default file system is *not* a small change. Handing a relatively new, unproven filesystem to newbies to play with is a fundamentally a bad idea. Even if you did go beserk testing it, then there were almost certainly other quality issues you were neglecting. If you feel the need to toss new features in every release, here's a thought: "Quality is a feature". Learn to sell it.
Postfix is also supposed to support the
maildir format.
Personally, I use mh (using the emacs mh-rmail frontend). I refile stuff automatically typically just based on the '-from' (using commands much like the above pick/refile). And if I'm looking for something I remember seeing awhile back, a grep on one or two mail folders (which are just directories full of text files for us mh users) does a pretty good job...
I won't say that there's no way to improve on this, but any fancy system that someone proposes has got to beat some pretty effective simple tools...
I mean, if you're really after identifying a burst of activity on a given topic... wouldn't a combination of text searches and visual scans of subject headers sorted by date get you 90% of the way there?
While we're on the subject, anyone taken a look at this old jwz idea: Intertwingle
I never paid a lot of attention to "The Cool Site of the Day", but if I wanted a substitute I might go over here: Infinite Matrix, where you'll find people like Bruce Sterling writing web log entries pointing at neat stuff they've come across: Schism Matrix.
So there are fewer stupid novelty sites on the web. Is that supposed to be something to be upset about?
Well, duh. That's supposed to be a *bad* sign? It's a great sign that (a) some totally mindless companies best thought of as venture capital backed stock scams and (b) some scuzzy domain name speculators have faded from the scene. Well, duh. Memo to web designers: put away your toys and do your job.Memo to NYT authors: when stuck for a story idea, you can always go for the "Is _____ Dead?" formula. Run a bunch of random comments slanted to make it sound like something's going wrong, then you can "provide balance" by running a bunch of quotes saying that it isn't really going wrong.