Of course, the _community_ is what makes StackOverFlow great, so no matter how many neat features Shapado has, they're gonna have trouble getting as big...
I don't know if this is totally redundant now, but there's a little article on this on http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp? topic_id=349817 too. Since I don't have the time to play games nowadays, I'm hoping this movie might give me a hint what the big deal about Halo is heh.
Hmm, well, I personally do not believe that morality boils down to rationality. Corporate morals may be rational, but if your main goal is to raise shareholder value, then it doesn't matter how rational your way of reaching that goal. Of course if there's a logical flaw in your moral system, then, well, the system is flawed, it's not worthwhile. But morals can't be found by just applying rational thought without searching for the underlying values. Even in a value-system where "death to all humanity" is the goal, there has to be some (messed up) values underlying that goal. You can't _prove_ that those values are wrong though, you can only point out why some values seem better (most of us would like to live, and live well). You can find an error in the reasoning from the value-system which says that "death is beautiful" to the goal "humanity must die" (or whatever the line of reasoning was), but you can't prove that death is not better. You can disagree with the fundamental values, or try to expand upon them and somehow change what the reasoning that comes from them turns into, but how would you deduct what is meaningful in life/death, whether God is a magic frog who tricked us into wasting time over this on slashdot etc. I believe morals need actual complex life experience, and that those values and the reasoning out from them are things you have to be constantly trying to improve on. The complexity of all life makes it impossible to deem a moral system evil. It may be flawed, misunderstood, egotistical or founded on illusions, all of these are different descriptions which have meaning to them. "Evil", on the other hand, tells you nothing other than that it's (founded on) something you don't like. Someone with a different moral system might deem you or me (or our values) "evil", how does that bring any light to a discussion?
I don't see that I'm getting any deeper in this discussion though, sorry if this was rambling a bit. And probably very, very offtopic.
morals only exist when you have already laid down the fundamental premises of your value system
Ergo, they are not universal laws for us to discover. That was my meaning of "absolute", and also the reason for me objecting to the universal definition Google = Good & Hacking Google Code = Bad. As for the rest of what you said there, I think I just have to agree. I've never found any point in going with the "what's right for them"-line of thought, because - I feel that - you as a person have a right to act on your moral values, while understanding that others will have different value systems. The search for the Right ethics is not in vain, it will just never result in anything that can be absolutely proven.
As regards the Google, I still stand by my view that They Knew What They Were Doing When They Went With Open Source. And what they knew was this: No one outside the two Yahoo-readers with.NET and the Slashdot-crowd are going to bother using that patch (possibly an overstatement, but you get the point: Google is a tank opening the window a crack and not caring about the fly that flew in to hack).
Heh, I see I didn't formulate that sentence very well. Let my try again. There is no way for us human beings full of mistakes to find absolute morals where "absolute" means "true in everyone's eyes" in the same way that 2+2=4 (I'm not going to into discussing any higher values of 2 here). That's why it's so hard to impose your morals onto others. I'm not at all saying one shouldn't follow one's morals for one's own sake, but to divide something into universally Good and Evil is too simplistic, especially when thinking of why someone else chose to do something.
First of all: Morals are not absolute. The concept of Evil is not at all easy to define. Google can not be deemed Good as in always, forever and whatever Good; no matter how much open source they release, and no matter how much good (sic) they do for the geek community. They're a corporation like any other, they know that by acting the way they do, they will make a good impression with hackers, and they know that they'll gain a lot more from that than they would by acting microsoftical. But also, they will do / have done less nice things (like using MPEG-4 instead of Ogg Theora in their video player, for one, and that whole Orkut "W3 0wN j00r wR1t1ng"-copyright-thing). No one - and corporations are persons too, in the US, at least - is perfect.
Second: Jon Lech Johansen is not raising hell. He's modifying an open-source program. It may be against the original intent of the code, but, read it again: it's open-source. You're supposed to hack around in the code, fixing obvious bugs (ehm) like the one Jon fixed. Like others here have pointed out, google wouldn't release it o-s if they didn't know this too.
I hope I don't sound too biased now, but I still have a feeling they're gonna use this to somehow stuff some Hotmail-like advertisement into the feeds - "Did you know you can get all these informative newsletters for free straight into your inbox/feed?" (Last line of the article: "applications of RSS that aren't about news.")
But I guess they're right in that RSS could have some more ways of organizing, at least I have trouble getting much useful info out of my messy del.icio.us feeds.
True, it is a problem if you don't give your comments their own line. Soo... looking on the bright side (or: following the style of the article mentioned here), it might make you comment better;)
Not that you need it now, but... for my first introductory class, we had the book "Objects first with BlueJ", which I must say is the absolutely best (introductory) programming book I've ever opened, partly because it does just what "should be done": Teaches you to read and understand code, and add your own code to it. I was amazed at how little the next book I read after it taught me in comparison...
And this is bad, why? 70 million Americans will be free from the eternal cycle of 5 minutes of Hollywood news, switch to 4 minutes of commercials and back to 5 more minutes of hi-carb, low protein entertainment. Hey, maybe those 70 million with so much more time on their hands will go vote or something, that'd be nice.
I'd go careful with generalizing from one example though... there are an incredible amount of factors (fiscal, political, cultural etc.) that contribute to a country having something as vague as "top research" - or "creative research", for that matter.
Users: learn English. Translators: keep translating. Not just because of the importance of keeping languages alive (which is a controversial and "feely" issue no matter what), but because there'll always be users who don't have that much comprehension of English (and it's better to have some understanding of a program than none), and it'll expand the Linux user base. All of M$' programs are translated into my native language, why should free software be behind there? And users of free programs have the choice of using the original languages, whereas users of say Office buy a version in just one language. Keep translating...
Slashdot Mirror
http://shapado.com/ is an AGPL "StackOverFlow clone", just recently started, but has some neat features ( http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/9mzjg/hey_reddit_checkout_my_agpl_stackoverflow_like/ ).
Of course, the _community_ is what makes StackOverFlow great, so no matter how many neat features Shapado has, they're gonna have trouble getting as big...
I don't know if this is totally redundant now, but there's a little article on this on http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp? topic_id=349817 too. Since I don't have the time to play games nowadays, I'm hoping this movie might give me a hint what the big deal about Halo is heh.
I hope Blender signs up too (unless they have already, the site's a bit too /.ed to find out right now)
Ah. Square Enix. That explains a lot =D
Eh. Ditto. Whatever.
Would you PM me the title? Please?
Hmm, well, I personally do not believe that morality boils down to rationality. Corporate morals may be rational, but if your main goal is to raise shareholder value, then it doesn't matter how rational your way of reaching that goal. Of course if there's a logical flaw in your moral system, then, well, the system is flawed, it's not worthwhile. But morals can't be found by just applying rational thought without searching for the underlying values. Even in a value-system where "death to all humanity" is the goal, there has to be some (messed up) values underlying that goal. You can't _prove_ that those values are wrong though, you can only point out why some values seem better (most of us would like to live, and live well). You can find an error in the reasoning from the value-system which says that "death is beautiful" to the goal "humanity must die" (or whatever the line of reasoning was), but you can't prove that death is not better. You can disagree with the fundamental values, or try to expand upon them and somehow change what the reasoning that comes from them turns into, but how would you deduct what is meaningful in life/death, whether God is a magic frog who tricked us into wasting time over this on slashdot etc. I believe morals need actual complex life experience, and that those values and the reasoning out from them are things you have to be constantly trying to improve on. The complexity of all life makes it impossible to deem a moral system evil. It may be flawed, misunderstood, egotistical or founded on illusions, all of these are different descriptions which have meaning to them. "Evil", on the other hand, tells you nothing other than that it's (founded on) something you don't like. Someone with a different moral system might deem you or me (or our values) "evil", how does that bring any light to a discussion?
I don't see that I'm getting any deeper in this discussion though, sorry if this was rambling a bit. And probably very, very offtopic.
morals only exist when you have already laid down the fundamental premises of your value system
.NET and the Slashdot-crowd are going to bother using that patch (possibly an overstatement, but you get the point: Google is a tank opening the window a crack and not caring about the fly that flew in to hack).
Ergo, they are not universal laws for us to discover. That was my meaning of "absolute", and also the reason for me objecting to the universal definition Google = Good & Hacking Google Code = Bad. As for the rest of what you said there, I think I just have to agree. I've never found any point in going with the "what's right for them"-line of thought, because - I feel that - you as a person have a right to act on your moral values, while understanding that others will have different value systems. The search for the Right ethics is not in vain, it will just never result in anything that can be absolutely proven.
As regards the Google, I still stand by my view that They Knew What They Were Doing When They Went With Open Source. And what they knew was this: No one outside the two Yahoo-readers with
Heh, I see I didn't formulate that sentence very well. Let my try again. There is no way for us human beings full of mistakes to find absolute morals where "absolute" means "true in everyone's eyes" in the same way that 2+2=4 (I'm not going to into discussing any higher values of 2 here). That's why it's so hard to impose your morals onto others. I'm not at all saying one shouldn't follow one's morals for one's own sake, but to divide something into universally Good and Evil is too simplistic, especially when thinking of why someone else chose to do something.
First of all: Morals are not absolute. The concept of Evil is not at all easy to define. Google can not be deemed Good as in always, forever and whatever Good; no matter how much open source they release, and no matter how much good (sic) they do for the geek community. They're a corporation like any other, they know that by acting the way they do, they will make a good impression with hackers, and they know that they'll gain a lot more from that than they would by acting microsoftical. But also, they will do / have done less nice things (like using MPEG-4 instead of Ogg Theora in their video player, for one, and that whole Orkut "W3 0wN j00r wR1t1ng"-copyright-thing). No one - and corporations are persons too, in the US, at least - is perfect.
Second: Jon Lech Johansen is not raising hell. He's modifying an open-source program. It may be against the original intent of the code, but, read it again: it's open-source. You're supposed to hack around in the code, fixing obvious bugs (ehm) like the one Jon fixed. Like others here have pointed out, google wouldn't release it o-s if they didn't know this too.
And, um, open just 1 and 2. It Moves!!! As if that changed anything.
I hope I don't sound too biased now, but I still have a feeling they're gonna use this to somehow stuff some Hotmail-like advertisement into the feeds - "Did you know you can get all these informative newsletters for free straight into your inbox/feed?" (Last line of the article: "applications of RSS that aren't about news.")
But I guess they're right in that RSS could have some more ways of organizing, at least I have trouble getting much useful info out of my messy del.icio.us feeds.
True, it is a problem if you don't give your comments their own line. Soo... looking on the bright side (or: following the style of the article mentioned here), it might make you comment better ;)
M-<
C-Space
M->
C-M-\
Tabs normalized.
M-
C-M-\
Tabs normalized.
Not that you need it now, but... for my first introductory class, we had the book "Objects first with BlueJ", which I must say is the absolutely best (introductory) programming book I've ever opened, partly because it does just what "should be done": Teaches you to read and understand code, and add your own code to it. I was amazed at how little the next book I read after it taught me in comparison...
And this is bad, why? 70 million Americans will be free from the eternal cycle of 5 minutes of Hollywood news, switch to 4 minutes of commercials and back to 5 more minutes of hi-carb, low protein entertainment. Hey, maybe those 70 million with so much more time on their hands will go vote or something, that'd be nice.
I'd go careful with generalizing from one example though... there are an incredible amount of factors (fiscal, political, cultural etc.) that contribute to a country having something as vague as "top research" - or "creative research", for that matter.
Users: learn English. Translators: keep translating.
Not just because of the importance of keeping languages alive (which is a controversial and "feely" issue no matter what), but because there'll always be users who don't have that much comprehension of English (and it's better to have some understanding of a program than none), and it'll expand the Linux user base. All of M$' programs are translated into my native language, why should free software be behind there? And users of free programs have the choice of using the original languages, whereas users of say Office buy a version in just one language. Keep translating...