I'm finding it increasingly amazing the way that some people can obessess with one field of knowledge (e.g. law, economics, etc.) and think that this reasoning settles everything.
Here we are, a large group of concerned people annoyed at the direction that a particular corporation is taking. We're part of their target market. We're the people they (ultimately) need to sell to. Does it make any sense that they can ignore the way we feel about what they're doing? How can it possible be that the value of "good will" is now zero?
The argument "Amazon has a legal obligation to be greedy bastards" is nutty. Annoying the hell out of your customer base is not the way to make money. Some hypothetical investor law suit could almost certainly be shot down, if not this time, definitely in the future after we show them what happened to Amazon when they tried to flex their patent muscles.
The idea that Amazon is too big to be shot down by the slashdot crowd is similarly nutty. If you believe this, you've got an exagerated idea about how big Amazon is, and how small slashdot is, and you have no clue about how much leverage a small dedicated group of people have in running a boycott. It wasn't that long ago that the Nike corporation was forced to backpeddle on it's overseas hiring practices because of pressure started by Global Exchange (a small non-profit with a few dozen employees). Recently they've turned their sites on the Gap Corporation for using what amounts to indentured servitude in a US territory, and the Gap's sales are now flat. The same people helped organize the protests of the WTO in Seattle (heard about this one, yes? Mass action organized by the internet... ha, what a silly idea, eh?).
And yes, Amazon is currently running sales at below cost, so why should we try and reduce their sales? That doesn't make any economic sense does it? Probably not, but this is because the simple straight-forward economic reasoning is completely besides the point. Amazon's stock is a bubble waiting to be pricked. If investors lose confidence in them, they will be in the toliet in a second. Let's see, if you're holding a lot of Amazon stock, how would you feel about an organized consumer uprising calling for a boycott of Amazon? Will you say to yourself "Good, this will help Amazon save some money?" The thing is that it doesn't necessarily even *matter* how many people chose to support the boycott, just the fact that there are a lot of people talking about it is enough to put some pressure on Amazon. If they've got half a brain, they'll be looking for a way to gracefully back out of this one.
One final point: Is this the right way to do it? Wouldn't it be better to implement a political solution, and restrain (or eliminate?) the patent office? Sure that would be better, it would also be a lot harder. In a winner-takes-all Democracy, if you can't get 51% behind you, you're a mere minority. In the market, if you get even ten percent behind you, you're a force to be reckoned with... proportional representation is a built-in feature.
Well, emacs users aren't the only people who have such problems, but what I'd say is that it's a combination of emacs and awful keyboards that do you in. Needing to lean on the control key all the time when some bozo decided to move it down under the shift key isn't going to do you any good.
The solution I recommend to my fellow emacs abusers is the Kinesis contoured keyboard: Kinesis Keyboards. If you look at that URL, the contoured keyboard is the model on the left. It has the control and alt keys moved into the center, under your thumbs, which is particularly good for using emacs.
What isn't so good is the teeny ESC key, and the CAPS LOC next to the A, but all of the keys are easily reprogrammable. I use the CAPS LOC as a second ESC.
And if you're really nervous about Emacs "chording" combinations, you can always try M-x viper. You can switch to a vi-like keystroke layout without abandoning emacs's power and flexibility.
The more programming languages you learn, the better off you are. Good for you to learn Python. Everyone should.
The older I get, the further away I get from this attitude. Currently, my feeling is the fewer things you need to learn to get the job done, the better off you are. I know Perl pretty well (if you already know Unix, Perl comes easy), the documentation for it is excellent (arguably the best of any language, ever), and there's a huge base of written code on CPAN for me to draw on. I'm not going to learn Python because some math geeks think it's more elegant. In fact, I will learn another scripting language if, and only if, someone holds a gun to my head. I will be perfectly happy if I can spend the rest of my life learning in more depth the things that I already know something about (on my personal shortlist is perl, SQL, C++ and elisp).
For you newbies, I'd suggest that you consider the fact that you're probably not going to be able to get by without learning some Perl, but you *can* probably get by without learning any Python. Perl has a reputation for being difficult to learn in some circles, but I think that this is grossly exaggerated. There's a school of thought that says that languages should be stripped to their essentials, and have nothing in them but the absolute core set of things that they need... but in practice this never works, they always accumulate complications, and Perl has always just ignored that "elegance through oversimplification" philosophy. I'm actually beginning to think that Larry Wall is right about Perl being more "language-like" than most computer languages... it appeals to a different kind of head, with a different style of thinking.
In many ways, I think the book Mastering Algorithms with Perl is a blow in this war with the academic CS geeks. It *assumes* that you're someone who's learned Perl on the street without any formal CS background, and lets you in on the secrets using what may be the "lingua franca" of the software world: Perl.
Yes, that's a point, but it's also worth noting that boycotts can be effective even with relatively small percentages of people respecting the boycott.
The nice thing about the free market as a "democracy with dollar votes" is that proportional representation is built-in. A consumer revolt that reaches 5% of the market cuts that companies income by 5%.
Whereas a politcial revolt that only gets 5% of the votes is likely to leave the same weasels in power, feeling no immediate penalty.
(I almost said "profit" rather than "income" above. Then I remembered we were talking about Amazon.)
Well, looks like that doesn't work. When you click "Post Anonymously", it's not the same thing as logging out:
Undoing moderation to Comment #8 Undoing moderation to Comment #61 Undoing moderation to Comment #70 Undoing moderation to Comment #71 Undoing moderation to Comment #146
So I just wasted an hour or so carefully reading and moderating. I think I'm going on strike.
Boycotts are not *always* effective, but they *can* be (e.g. Nike's overseas employment practices were turned around by a campaign started by a few dozen people working for a small non-profit organization).
You only need to be sucessful with a few boycotts like this before corporations will start thinking about getting less trigger happy with the lawyers. In my opinion, this will be eaisier than convincing the US government to fix the patent laws.
If you don't have the sympathy of the people you're working with, you're already doomed. A snotty attitude on the part of the security experts rarely helps.
Example: sysadmin abruptly changes policy to frequently expiring passwords, with no recycling of old passwords.
Result: users start picking passwords that are dead easy to guess, in fear that they may forget them. They're also very careful to write down their password somewhere near their machine.
I know someone who's been doing "erotic massage" for a living who says that repetetive stress disorders are a real fear. This story doesn't strike me as *completely* ridiculous.
What I don't understand is why this woman never learned to fake orgasm. What are mother's teaching young women these days, anyway?
Of course, there's no reason to assume that the facts have been reported anywhere near accurately. We're talking ABC news here.
Unfortunately, publicly traded corporations are legally bound to make the most profit that they can through legal methods for their shareholders. If they aren't breaking the law, and if their action is more likely to produce increased profits rather than a loss for whatever reason, they would be hard-pressed to justify to their shareholders why they didn't do it.
And if pulling sleazy legal shit like this is likely to produce a firestorm of consumer resentment, then they owe it to their shareholders to knock off the legal shit.
So boycott Amazon. Why is this such a hard concept for people to get?
> 3. Remove metamoderation. It was a good idea, > but how many people activly meta-moderate > anyway? It's just more time spent not reading > things that matter.
You mean you *don't* metamoderate? And you're complaining about poor moderation?
According to the James Fallows book "The Nation", the Viet Cong were in the habit of stripping the corpses of fallen soldiers of anything remotely useful: belts, boots, etc.
I think the most likely explanation for Homeopathy is that it really is hokum, and just doesn't work. See: Homeopathy: The Ultimate Fake. My fave quote:
Since many homeopathic remedies contain no detectable amount of active ingredient, it is impossible to test whether they contain what their label says.
I guess you're suggesting that the reason that an absurdly low concentration of a substance can supposedly have some sort of medical effect is that the molecules of the substance are breeding more of themselves through some sort of "self-assembly" process. Don't you think that a chemist would notice if this was going on? "Huh, I mixed in a small amount of X into Y, but now the concentration of X has gone up." This kind of thing is pretty easy to measure these days.
I know people who have used the RealAudio G2 player over Ricochet modems. They said it sounded okay... haven't heard it myself. I would think that streaming mp3, like icecast (or shoutcast) signals would sound better.
As for battery life, well, one can always hack a battery pack large enough to support any indefinite length of service.
And I might point out that the "internet car radio" version wouldn't have any problem with battery life.
Sony was vague about its plans for future devices. It said only in the joint announcement with Palm that the collaboration would result in "an entirely new line of handheld electronics products that will not be limited to electronic organizers but are expected to include a wide range of mobile wireless telecommunications-enabled AV/IT consumer electronics products."
I've been waiting for someone to pull this off for some time. All it takes is something like a palm pilot with built in Richochet and an audio jack (there have been PDAs with one but not the other), and then someone like me in California will be able to walk around listening to a small college radio station in New Zealand.
If you've been paying any attention to what the radio industry is like in the United States you'd know how supremely cool this is. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) controls access to the airwaves. No new frequencies have been allocated to radio in most urban areas in over half a century, and there's been a huge amount of corporate consolidation in radio: it all sounds the same because it's all owned by the same people. And on top of this, the FCC has censorship power, with some very vaugely defined rules about what you're allowed to say on the air (nothing "obscene", "indeceny" is allowed only late at night, announcers can make "no direct calls to action", and there's that odd distinction between advertising and underwriting announcments, etc).
The Sony/Palm deal at least has the potential to produce something that can break this corporate/government monopoly on the airwaves. Imagine, never having to listen to country music, just because you're in texas...
Questions remain: will it handle streaming MP3 like ala icecast, or will it force you to use something like RealAudio (or worse, will they invent a third format, and try and force people to adopt yet another server-side technology)? Will they go beserk making it (sl)easy to use and therefore inflexible (e.g. make it hard to access any unusual content by providing people with a limited number of channels to flip through)?
The one thing that I find distressing about this announcement is that it's Sony doing it... I was hoping it would be a small start-up -- preferably one with an IPO I could ride -- though that's not the main reason. Sony does a great job with economies of scale, but I'd feel better about a world that has a few more sources for consumer electronics.
Okay, this may very well be a nice set of instructions for recompiling your kernel, but the stated reasons for doing so strike me as completely insane. The idea that you're going to get some kind of noticeable performance boost by tuning up your kernel is pretty ridiculous. You've really got to have some pretty specific needs to want to do this.
Me, I recompile my kernels to include support for an old SCSI card, and I'm actually beginning think that even this is nutty: I should just replace the damn card with something supported by default.
You want to know what an Operating System is? Here's the definitive definition, from Judge Jackson:
2. An "operating system" is a software program that controls the allocation and use of computer resources (such as central processing unit time, main memory space, disk space, and input/output channels). The operating system also supports the functions of software programs, called "applications," that perform specific user-oriented tasks. The operating system supports the functions of applications by exposing interfaces, called "application programming interfaces," or "APIs." These are synapses at which the developer of an application can connect to invoke pre-fabricated blocks of code in the operating system. These blocks of code in turn perform crucial tasks, such as displaying text on the computer screen. Because it supports applications while interacting more closely with the PC system's hardware, the operating system is said to serve as a "platform."
All you software engineers can now sit down. You don't count.
My primary experience with meeting women online is feeling stupid for not taking them seriously because they were just someone I'd met online (and hence must have something wrong with them, etc.). Quite often, when I finally got around to meeting them, I regretted not having met them sooner.
Though, for this to work, you need to spend some time hanging out in places on the net that roughly correspond to your physical location, so you don't have to blow a plane ticket to put a face on the words.
My first experiences on-line were with Stanford-only bboards. Currently I spend a fair amount of time on bay area related mailing lists. Notably, there's a "ba.*" usenet hierarchy, and some of them organize gatherings on ocassion (e.g. ba.singles does Bike Boinks). That's the kind of stuff that I mean.
And it's often seemed to me that as the net accumulates more users, global forums will get too crowded to be useable, and one way to manage the influx will be to split off into geographically related groups (e.g. a ny.talk.politics newsgroup rather than just talk.politics).
I picture a open fountain, gushing water mixed with a torrent of punctuation marks (heavy on the semicolons and the curly braces, with some bars, slashes, hypens, angle brackets, etc). The source is open, get it?
If you want, you could have a penguin swimming in the fountain. You could also add some other figures, like the FreeBSD demon and so on. (My inclination would be to take it easy on the cutsey stuff, though.)
You can change the slant by turning it from a fountain to a kitchen sink, or a fire hydrant. Drowning Bill Gates under the torrent is an option.
Floating a boat in the stream is another option. Linus torvalds at the helm?
I dunno, I thought that was pretty funny, myself. Of course, they've been having trouble hacking support for proportional fonts into emacs, I have a feeling that graphics is going to be even further behind (though I'm certainly beserk enough to use something like that if it was available).
And as for w3: one of the things I thought was interesting about that Stallman interview awhile back is that he mentioned in passing that he uses lynx. If even RMS leaves emacs to run a webrowser, there must really be problems with w3.
Hey, thanks for posting that. I thought we might as well use it to do the obvious:
Hackers. You can't even use the word without ticking someone off. Life is a POPULARITY CONTEST! I'm REFRESHINGLY CANDID!! Upholders of the status quo hate that the existing state of affairs is being undermined by sociopathic cybervandals.
[...] Of course, we don't endorse hacking of any kind. But it's an integral part of Web culture, and like anybody else, we love a sensational story. I'm meditating on the FORMALDEHYDE and the ASBESTOS leaking into my PERSONAL SPACE!! So read on for our favorite hacks of all time
You guys are right: BSD code doesn't just magically disappear if someone does a proprietary fork. The old code is still there. But have you ever heard people talk about how code needs to be maintained or "bit rot" sets in? A free software project is more than just the code, the code also needs a critical mass of developer (and user) attention in order to keep going.
If the energy of the community becomes split by a proprietary fork, it may turn out that the free project that you've been investing time in has suddenly vaporized. All your bug reports, all the patches you've written, all the time you've spent learning to use the software, *and* all the time you've spent evangelizing, trying to get other people on board, all of this is now at risk. There's now someone out their dangling checks, bribing your friends to run off and hide and play by themselves. If you want to stay in the community, you now have to send them a check (or accept one of their checks, along with their non-disclosure agreements).
In practice the project may not survive this split, and despite everyone's dreams of avarice, the piles of money may not even appear for the defectors.
So, in my opinion it's kind of a mistake to focus on just the raw code. And what the GPL is *really* for is not exactly the preservation of freedom (though don't tell RMS I said that), it's more a matter of preserving a community. (You could call this "communitarianism" but that term is taken already.)
-- Joe Brenner, part-time GPL zealout
(The example I have in mind here is postgresql, which has been through *two* proprietary splits in it's history. On the one hand, it now looks like it's doing okay, but on the other hand those forks clearly were pretty bad blows that it took a long time to recover from.)
Slashdot Mirror
Here we are, a large group of concerned people annoyed at the direction that a particular corporation is taking. We're part of their target market. We're the people they (ultimately) need to sell to. Does it make any sense that they can ignore the way we feel about what they're doing? How can it possible be that the value of "good will" is now zero?
The argument "Amazon has a legal obligation to be greedy bastards" is nutty. Annoying the hell out of your customer base is not the way to make money. Some hypothetical investor law suit could almost certainly be shot down, if not this time, definitely in the future after we show them what happened to Amazon when they tried to flex their patent muscles.
The idea that Amazon is too big to be shot down by the slashdot crowd is similarly nutty. If you believe this, you've got an exagerated idea about how big Amazon is, and how small slashdot is, and you have no clue about how much leverage a small dedicated group of people have in running a boycott. It wasn't that long ago that the Nike corporation was forced to backpeddle on it's overseas hiring practices because of pressure started by Global Exchange (a small non-profit with a few dozen employees). Recently they've turned their sites on the Gap Corporation for using what amounts to indentured servitude in a US territory, and the Gap's sales are now flat. The same people helped organize the protests of the WTO in Seattle (heard about this one, yes? Mass action organized by the internet... ha, what a silly idea, eh?).
And yes, Amazon is currently running sales at below cost, so why should we try and reduce their sales? That doesn't make any economic sense does it? Probably not, but this is because the simple straight-forward economic reasoning is completely besides the point. Amazon's stock is a bubble waiting to be pricked. If investors lose confidence in them, they will be in the toliet in a second. Let's see, if you're holding a lot of Amazon stock, how would you feel about an organized consumer uprising calling for a boycott of Amazon? Will you say to yourself "Good, this will help Amazon save some money?" The thing is that it doesn't necessarily even *matter* how many people chose to support the boycott, just the fact that there are a lot of people talking about it is enough to put some pressure on Amazon. If they've got half a brain, they'll be looking for a way to gracefully back out of this one.
One final point: Is this the right way to do it? Wouldn't it be better to implement a political solution, and restrain (or eliminate?) the patent office? Sure that would be better, it would also be a lot harder. In a winner-takes-all Democracy, if you can't get 51% behind you, you're a mere minority. In the market, if you get even ten percent behind you, you're a force to be reckoned with... proportional representation is a built-in feature.
Bill Joy uses emacs now.
The solution I recommend to my fellow emacs abusers is the Kinesis contoured keyboard: Kinesis Keyboards. If you look at that URL, the contoured keyboard is the model on the left. It has the control and alt keys moved into the center, under your thumbs, which is particularly good for using emacs.
What isn't so good is the teeny ESC key, and the CAPS LOC next to the A, but all of the keys are easily reprogrammable. I use the CAPS LOC as a second ESC.
And if you're really nervous about Emacs "chording" combinations, you can always try M-x viper. You can switch to a vi-like keystroke layout without abandoning emacs's power and flexibility.
The older I get, the further away I get from this attitude. Currently, my feeling is the fewer things you need to learn to get the job done, the better off you are. I know Perl pretty well (if you already know Unix, Perl comes easy), the documentation for it is excellent (arguably the best of any language, ever), and there's a huge base of written code on CPAN for me to draw on. I'm not going to learn Python because some math geeks think it's more elegant. In fact, I will learn another scripting language if, and only if, someone holds a gun to my head. I will be perfectly happy if I can spend the rest of my life learning in more depth the things that I already know something about (on my personal shortlist is perl, SQL, C++ and elisp).
For you newbies, I'd suggest that you consider the fact that you're probably not going to be able to get by without learning some Perl, but you *can* probably get by without learning any Python. Perl has a reputation for being difficult to learn in some circles, but I think that this is grossly exaggerated. There's a school of thought that says that languages should be stripped to their essentials, and have nothing in them but the absolute core set of things that they need... but in practice this never works, they always accumulate complications, and Perl has always just ignored that "elegance through oversimplification" philosophy. I'm actually beginning to think that Larry Wall is right about Perl being more "language-like" than most computer languages... it appeals to a different kind of head, with a different style of thinking.
In many ways, I think the book Mastering Algorithms with Perl is a blow in this war with the academic CS geeks. It *assumes* that you're someone who's learned Perl on the street without any formal CS background, and lets you in on the secrets using what may be the "lingua franca" of the software world: Perl.
Yes, that's a point, but it's also worth noting
that boycotts can be effective even with
relatively small percentages of people
respecting the boycott.
The nice thing about the free market as a
"democracy with dollar votes" is that
proportional representation is built-in.
A consumer revolt that reaches 5% of the
market cuts that companies income by 5%.
Whereas a politcial revolt that only gets 5%
of the votes is likely to leave the same
weasels in power, feeling no immediate
penalty.
(I almost said "profit" rather than "income"
above. Then I remembered we were talking
about Amazon.)
Well, looks like that doesn't work.
When you click "Post Anonymously", it's not
the same thing as logging out:
Undoing moderation to Comment #8
Undoing moderation to Comment #61
Undoing moderation to Comment #70
Undoing moderation to Comment #71
Undoing moderation to Comment #146
So I just wasted an hour or so carefully reading
and moderating. I think I'm going on strike.
You only need to be sucessful with a few boycotts like this before corporations will start thinking about getting less trigger happy with the lawyers. In my opinion, this will be eaisier than convincing the US government to fix the patent laws.
But VA Linux sells Intel-only hardware.
Example: sysadmin abruptly changes policy to frequently expiring passwords, with no recycling of old passwords.
Result: users start picking passwords that are dead easy to guess, in fear that they may forget them. They're also very careful to write down their password somewhere near their machine.
I know someone who's been doing "erotic massage"
for a living who says that repetetive stress
disorders are a real fear. This story doesn't
strike me as *completely* ridiculous.
What I don't understand is why this woman never
learned to fake orgasm. What are mother's
teaching young women these days, anyway?
Of course, there's no reason to assume that
the facts have been reported anywhere near
accurately. We're talking ABC news here.
Unfortunately, publicly traded corporations are legally bound to make the most profit that they can through legal methods for their shareholders. If they aren't breaking the law, and if their action is more likely to produce increased profits rather than a loss for whatever reason, they would be hard-pressed to justify to their shareholders why they didn't do it.
And if pulling sleazy legal shit like this is likely to produce a firestorm of consumer resentment, then they owe it to their shareholders to knock off the legal shit.
So boycott Amazon. Why is this such a hard concept for people to get?
> 3. Remove metamoderation. It was a good idea,
> but how many people activly meta-moderate
> anyway? It's just more time spent not reading
> things that matter.
You mean you *don't* metamoderate? And you're
complaining about poor moderation?
According to the James Fallows book "The Nation",
the Viet Cong were in the habit of stripping
the corpses of fallen soldiers of anything
remotely useful: belts, boots, etc.
They left behind the M-16s.
I guess you're suggesting that the reason that an absurdly low concentration of a substance can supposedly have some sort of medical effect is that the molecules of the substance are breeding more of themselves through some sort of "self-assembly" process. Don't you think that a chemist would notice if this was going on? "Huh, I mixed in a small amount of X into Y, but now the concentration of X has gone up." This kind of thing is pretty easy to measure these days.
Try reading Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler. Then you'll know where Neal Stephenson got his material.
Or take a look at the website for Zyvex, "the first molecular nanotechnology development company".
> Problems:
>
> (1) Bandwidth
> (2) Battery life
Sure, these are problems, but not *big* problems.
I know people who have used the RealAudio G2 player over Ricochet modems. They said it
sounded okay... haven't heard it myself. I would
think that streaming mp3, like icecast (or
shoutcast) signals would sound better.
As for battery life, well, one can always hack
a battery pack large enough to support any
indefinite length of service.
And I might point out that the "internet car
radio" version wouldn't have any problem with
battery life.
I've been waiting for someone to pull this off for some time. All it takes is something like a palm pilot with built in Richochet and an audio jack (there have been PDAs with one but not the other), and then someone like me in California will be able to walk around listening to a small college radio station in New Zealand.
If you've been paying any attention to what the radio industry is like in the United States you'd know how supremely cool this is. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) controls access to the airwaves. No new frequencies have been allocated to radio in most urban areas in over half a century, and there's been a huge amount of corporate consolidation in radio: it all sounds the same because it's all owned by the same people. And on top of this, the FCC has censorship power, with some very vaugely defined rules about what you're allowed to say on the air (nothing "obscene", "indeceny" is allowed only late at night, announcers can make "no direct calls to action", and there's that odd distinction between advertising and underwriting announcments, etc).
The Sony/Palm deal at least has the potential to produce something that can break this corporate/government monopoly on the airwaves. Imagine, never having to listen to country music, just because you're in texas...
Questions remain: will it handle streaming MP3 like ala icecast, or will it force you to use something like RealAudio (or worse, will they invent a third format, and try and force people to adopt yet another server-side technology)? Will they go beserk making it (sl)easy to use and therefore inflexible (e.g. make it hard to access any unusual content by providing people with a limited number of channels to flip through)?
The one thing that I find distressing about this announcement is that it's Sony doing it... I was hoping it would be a small start-up -- preferably one with an IPO I could ride -- though that's not the main reason. Sony does a great job with economies of scale, but I'd feel better about a world that has a few more sources for consumer electronics.
Okay, this may very well be a nice set of
instructions for recompiling your kernel,
but the stated reasons for doing so strike
me as completely insane. The idea that you're
going to get some kind of noticeable performance
boost by tuning up your kernel is pretty
ridiculous. You've really got to have some
pretty specific needs to want to do this.
Me, I recompile my kernels to include support
for an old SCSI card, and I'm actually
beginning think that even this is nutty:
I should just replace the damn card with
something supported by default.
You want to know what an Operating System is? Here's the definitive definition, from Judge Jackson:
All you software engineers can now sit down. You don't count.> What happened to choice?
You've got a choice. Don't use GPL'd software
if you don't like the GPL. Got it?
My primary experience with meeting women online
is feeling stupid for not taking them seriously
because they were just someone I'd met online
(and hence must have something wrong with them,
etc.). Quite often, when I finally got around
to meeting them, I regretted not having met
them sooner.
Though, for this to work, you need to spend
some time hanging out in places on the net
that roughly correspond to your physical
location, so you don't have to blow a plane
ticket to put a face on the words.
My first experiences on-line were with
Stanford-only bboards. Currently I spend a
fair amount of time on bay area related
mailing lists. Notably, there's a "ba.*"
usenet hierarchy, and some of them organize
gatherings on ocassion (e.g. ba.singles does
Bike Boinks). That's the kind of stuff that
I mean.
And it's often seemed to me that as the net
accumulates more users, global forums will get
too crowded to be useable, and one way to
manage the influx will be to split off into
geographically related groups (e.g. a ny.talk.politics newsgroup rather than just
talk.politics).
discussion group
I picture a open fountain, gushing water
mixed with a torrent of punctuation marks
(heavy on the semicolons and the curly braces,
with some bars, slashes, hypens, angle
brackets, etc). The source is open, get it?
If you want, you could have a penguin swimming
in the fountain. You could also add some other
figures, like the FreeBSD demon and so on.
(My inclination would be to take it easy on
the cutsey stuff, though.)
You can change the slant by turning it from a
fountain to a kitchen sink, or a fire hydrant.
Drowning Bill Gates under the torrent is an
option.
Floating a boat in the stream is another option.
Linus torvalds at the helm?
I dunno, I thought that was pretty funny, myself.
Of course, they've been having trouble hacking
support for proportional fonts into emacs, I
have a feeling that graphics is going to be
even further behind (though I'm certainly
beserk enough to use something like that if
it was available).
And as for w3: one of the things I thought
was interesting about that Stallman interview
awhile back is that he mentioned in passing
that he uses lynx. If even RMS leaves emacs
to run a webrowser, there must really be
problems with w3.
Hey, thanks for posting that. I thought we might as well use it to do the obvious:
You guys are right: BSD code doesn't just
magically disappear if someone does a proprietary
fork. The old code is still there. But have
you ever heard people talk about how code needs
to be maintained or "bit rot" sets in?
A free software project is more than just the
code, the code also needs a critical mass of
developer (and user) attention in order to keep
going.
If the energy of the community becomes split
by a proprietary fork, it may turn out
that the free project that you've been
investing time in has suddenly vaporized.
All your bug reports, all the patches you've
written, all the time you've spent learning
to use the software, *and* all the time
you've spent evangelizing, trying to get
other people on board, all of this is
now at risk. There's now someone out their
dangling checks, bribing your friends to run
off and hide and play by themselves. If you want
to stay in the community, you now have to send
them a check (or accept one of their checks,
along with their non-disclosure agreements).
In practice the project may not survive this
split, and despite everyone's dreams of avarice,
the piles of money may not even appear for
the defectors.
So, in my opinion it's kind of a mistake to
focus on just the raw code. And what the GPL is
*really* for is not exactly the preservation
of freedom (though don't tell RMS I said
that), it's more a matter of preserving a
community. (You could call this
"communitarianism" but that term is taken
already.)
-- Joe Brenner, part-time GPL zealout
(The example I have in mind here is postgresql,
which has been through *two* proprietary
splits in it's history. On the one hand, it
now looks like it's doing okay, but on the
other hand those forks clearly were pretty
bad blows that it took a long time to recover
from.)