They ask far too general questions. "How do I get on the net with Linux?". Of course, if you decide to help with this question, they'll get irritated when you start getting into the details of how things work. You see, newbies want to gloss over everything without having at least some fundamental knowledge of how things work.
If they ask you how to do something, and you respond by telling them how something works, you're not paying attention to their question. And then you complain that "newbies" don't pay attention the documentation! Sheesh.
If a newbie asks you a question, listen (or read) carefully enough to give a relevant answer. "I know how to do that, but I don't know how to teach it to you" is a relevant answer, and one which demonstrates respect for the person who asked. -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
When programmers write documentation for a program or system of programs, they usually organize it according to how the program is written, or how the modules of the system interact, or the functions of the modules.
Configuring Linux's implementation of the protocols (chapters 5 through 8)
Various network applications (chapter 9)
Services useful in a LAN (chapters 10 and 11)
UUCP (chapter 12)
Email (chapters 13 through 15)
Netnews (chapters 16 through 19)
What's wrong with that approach, you may ask?
When non-programmers approach a computer system, they don't care about how it's put together; they care about doing something with it. The division of tasks that can be done with a computer system is mostly orthogonal to the division of modules in it.
For example, if you want to download mail from an ISP to a Linux box over a dial-up connection, that will involve booting the computer, logging in, executing a program that lives somewhere on my hard drive, making a PPP connection, etc., etc. The information relevant to that task is spread through the above two books. How can a newbie who wants to read mail with Linux, but doesn't want to become a Unix wizard, know where the relevant information is in those hundreds of pages -- not to mention HOWTOs and man pages? If something goes wrong, how can a newbie know where to look for the solution? -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
I've seen Treks I (The Motionless Picture), II, III, IV, VI, and First Contact. I think Galaxy Quest beats all of those except II.
Of course, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan actually had a plot, with characters consistently demonstrating IQs of at least 100. You can't say that for a lot of Trek movies... or TV episodes... or other Hollywood movies.... -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
This isn't the greatest parody in the world (Mel Brooks pretty well has a lock on that between Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Spaceballs)
The people behind Galaxy Quest were able to parody Trek and Trekkies while simultaneously respecting them. It's a hard line to walk: I think Brooks pulled off a similar balance in Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, but failed in Spaceballs.
I'd love to know what people associated with Trek think of the movie. Does Shatner recognize himself (and his toupee) in Tim Allen? -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
What do you think of capability-based systems, such as EROS? The folks who are working on these systems say they are fundamentally more secure (against both malicious code and heisenbugs) than Unix derivatives, Windows NT, and other ACL-based operating systems. Do you agree with this assessment? Do these systems have security weaknesses that Unix-like systems don't have? -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
A lesser known operating system developed in 1970 at the University of California, Berkeley, called the BSD (Berkeley Software Design) is, in fact, the oldest free operating system.
The first free version of BSD (Networking Release 2) was distributed in June 1991, but got tied up in lawsuits from 1992 to 1994. By the time that was cleared up, early versions of Linux were already available. -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
I simply won't purchase, contribute, or have anything to do with this company. Neither will many others, I suspect.
Well, if you want to gamble, then you could try selling the stock short:
Borrow a certain number of shares, promising to pay them back in a month.
Sell the shares.
At the end of the month, buy the shares and give them back from the lender.
If the stock goes down over the month, you win. Of course, if the stock goes up in that period of time, you lose. Furthermore, while a stock's price has a lower limit of zero (duh), it has no upper limit, so you can lose even more money by selling short than you can by traditional forms of investment.... -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
(Disclaimer #2: Remember, this lawsuit is being brought in France, not the US.)
In American civil law, you can file a motion to dismiss a case (or for the judge to grant a "summary judgement" to one side) at the very beginning. You can do this if your opponent's case is so weak that even if all of your opponent's facts are correct, there's no reasonable interpretation of the law that would allow your opponent to win.
If you bring a lawsuit that is extremely bogus (e.g., suing the Department of the Interior for beaming mind-control rays at you through your houseplants), then the judge can fine you for wasting the Court's time. That doesn't happen too often, though. -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
Expect to see a flurry of people trying to get their names in a few of the contributor lists...
In this message from last week, I suggested pretty much the same thing. A day later, I got the following email. As Dave Barry would say, I swear I am not making this up.
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 10:38:18 -0800 (PST)
From: censored to protect the guilty To: sethg@ropine.com Subject: help please on uploading helloworld to freshmeat.net
hi, i read slashdot today and you stated that a person can post a helloworld program to freshmeat.net/org/whatever.
guess i missed the ipo boat for valinux. can you pleez help w/ instructions on how to create/upload the helloworld program for next ipo's?
i use rh6.0 w/ gnome and enlightenment- thanks!
\begin{joke} The answer to his question, of course, is to join the Free Software Developers' Network. The FSDN offers freshmeat access, and a whole bunch of other valuable services, for a mere $19.95 per year. If you're interested in joining the FSDN, just email me your credit-card number and expiration date, and I'll pass along your application. \end{joke} -- "But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
According to the latest Wired quotes, VA has a market cap of 10.21B, Compaq is 44.55B, and Dell is 115.79B. So VA's valuation, strictly speaking, is not higher than Dell's. Unless I misunderstand these financial terms, which is quite possible....
Post your "hello world" program on freshmeat!
on
VA Reprices Again
·
· Score: 3
That way, you will be listed in a database of open-source software authors, and the next time someone does a Linux IPO, they will let you in on the ground floor along with all the other hackers.
"I spilt hot coffee on my leg and it hurt. It's not my fault, I didn't expect coffee to be made with hot water"
According to this Web page, in the Lieback vs. McDonald's case, McDonald's was serving coffee at 180-190 degrees Farenheit, while most restaurants serve it at 135-145 degrees. The coffee didn't merely "hurt" Ms. Lieback; she had to be hospitalized for weeks and get skin grafts, with hospital bills over $10,000. She tried to get McDonald's to reimburse her medical expenses, and they turned her down. So she sued.
In pre-trial discovery, her lawyers discovered that McDonald's had been sued seven hundred other times for similar injuries, and settled out of court every time, requiring the injured parties to keep quiet about the agreements.
The jury awarded Ms. Lieback $2.7M in punitive damages, but the judge reduced that to $480K, and the parties settled for even less (presumably to save everyone the hassle of going through an appeals court).
McDonald's knew they were doing something that could get them sued again and again. They had an opportunity to change their policies to prevent more lawsuits. They even had an opportunity to settle Ms. Lieback's complaint without any lawsuit or trial. They passed up their opportunities. So who was irresponsible?
Save the sea turtles. Go fig, at a trade conference?
There was a US law that required: All tuna sold in the US must be caught with certain kinds of nets, in order to prevent endangered sea turtles from being caught along with the tuna. Some countries that exported tuna, and whose fishing companies did not use these nets, filed a complaint with the WTO. They claimed that since the law prevented them from exporting tuna to the US, it was a barrier to free trade. The WTO tribunal agreed, and ordered the US to strike down the law.
But if the people of Washington, Oregon, or California use their referendum powers to pass a law that has some effect on international trade, and the appropriate WTO tribunal decides that it violates the USA's treaty obligations under the WTO, then the law will be struck down.
In the late 19th century, the development of the Industrial Revolution and the market economy went hand-in-hand with increased government regulation.
Why? Preindustrial societies could usually control their members with social pressure, religious sanctions, and village-level regulations. Capitalism made it easier for people to evade (or stop caring about) these kinds of sanctions, and so in more and more cases, the State was called in to regulate commerce. Entrepreneurs under Gilded-Age capitalism had more freedom in certain areas (setting wages and prices, for example), but they also faced new regulations in other areas (such as food purity and workplace safety, if I remember correctly).
Karl Polyani, in The Great Transformation, has many interesting things to say about this.
I wouldn't be surprised if, by the same token, as the Net grows more popular and influential, the State takes on more and more responsibility to clean up after it.
IMHO, the biggest legal issue with the GPL is that the user does not necessarily agree with the licensing terms: that is, they didn't actually
sign anything.
The GPL isn't a contract, in the sense that shrink-wrap licenses want to be contracts.
Through the GPL, the author of a program is unilaterally granting permission for the recipient to copy the program -- under certain circumstances. If the recipient doesn't want to abide by the terms of the GPL, that's fine -- but then the recipient, under copyright law, then has no right (except for the usual fair-use conditions) to copy the GPL'ed program.
By contrast, shrink-wrap or click-wrap licenses try to give a software vendor more power than mere copyright law grants. That's why they have these "if you click this button you are agreeing to these ten pages of fine print" messages. They (might) create a contract between the vendor and the consumer: in exchange for the privilege of using the vendor's software, the consumer agrees not to reverse-engineer it, not to benchmark it, not to install it on more than one computer, etc., etc. Under copyright law, the courts would laugh at restrictions like this, but if clicking on the appropriate button does create a contract, then the vendor can enforce the license through contract law.
(As contracts, click-wrap licenses are iffy, because by the time you see the license, you've already coughed up your money and taken the disk home, and the click-wrap license is now trying to renegotiate the terms of a sale that's already taken place. But that's an argument for another thread.)
The GPL hasn't been tested in court, but companies with a strong financial incentive to violate it, and whose IP lawyers could find any loophole in the GPL worth exploiting, have decided that they'd rather comply with it than challenge it in court.
See, for example, the "Pragmatic Idealism" essay on the FSF's Web site. NeXT made an Objective-C front end to the GNU C compiler, and wanted to make this front end proprietary. The FSF's lawyer told them this would violate the GPL, and NeXT gave in.
(The Talmud is, umm, sort of like the 2,500-year-old archives of soc.culture.jewish, back when you had to be a rabbi to get on the Net.)
As I was saying, there's a story in the Talmud about a little crisis the Jewish sages faced, when there were only three Torah scrolls left in the world. (A "Torah scroll" is a single scroll containing the first five books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy, in the original Hebrew.) All three scrolls had slight variations in the text, and the sages had no way of knowing which variation was more likely to be correct. Since the sages believed that every word of the Torah is from God, and sometimes a single word had vast legal consequences, this was a problem.
So they copied out a new scroll based on the other three, as follows: Whenever the old scrolls disagreed about a certain verse, the new scroll would follow the "majority opinion" of the old scrolls. After the transcription was complete, they declared the new scroll to be The Canonical Sacred Text, and the old scrolls were declared Unfit For Ritual Use.
in a lot of situations the pre-industrial peasants were "working for somebody else" because they didn't own the land
Marx et al. cover this. If I remember correctly, the argument goes:
In a feudal economy, the lower class consists of peasants. Feudal systems place all sorts of restrictions on peasants (they can't just pick up and move, for example), but the feudal lord's power over the peasants is also constrained (he can't just evict them, either).
In a capitalist economy, the lower class is the proletariat (a.k.a. "the working class"), who own their own labor power, but can only sell it to members of the bourgeoisie (a.k.a. "the bosses"). If you're in the proletariat and you can't find anyone to buy your labor, you're SOL.
The bourgeoisie buys the proletariat's labor for as little as it can pay, and sells the products of the labor for as much as it can charge, to whoever is willing to pay. (There's the alienation of labor -- once the widget leaves the worker's hands, he or she has no special relationship with it.)
The bourgeoisie can then plow the profits into exploiting the workers further: for example, skilled craftsmen, who own their own tools, get replaced by unskilled (therefore easy-to-replace, therefore low-paid) factory workers whose tools (the factory machines) belong to the bourgeoisie.
Marx and Engels predicted that economic forces would (a) drive businesses in every field to either merge with or bankrupt competitors, creating monopolies protected or controlled by business-friendly governments; (b) drive the bourgeoisie to tighten the screws further and further on the proletariat, until everyone in that class was paid no more than enough to survive. Then, they thought, the proletariat would get sick of it all, seize control of all these centralized industries, and manage them for the benefit of all of society rather than for profit.
We all know it didn't work out that way, but in the 1880s, this was not an unreasonable theory.
Care to show us some correct one, specific to communism?
With apologies to President Clinton, that depends on what the meaning of "specific to communism" is.
In the late 19th century, there were a whole bunch of political movements that we would call "left-wing". Several of these movements, not just Marx's, called themselves "Communist". Sometimes they took one another's theories and techniques, and sometimes they bickered (sounds familiar, eh?). A big chunk of the Communist Manifesto is devoted to flaming other movements, such as utopian socialism and anarchism, that were popular at the time.
Over the past century, some of the ideas that circulated through these movements, such as the legalization of trade unions, became pretty much mainstream. Some, such as the inevitable immiseration of the working class, became pretty much discredited. Some, such as full employment, are still being argued about (this particular issue is big in France, as I recall). Newer movements, such as environmentalism and gay rights, have added ideas and issues to the mix that Marx and his buddies never considered.
Also, why does everyone think that just because _most_ communist ideals are mistaken, that they all are?
Care to show us some correct ones?
Unfortunately, I don't have a copy of The Communist Manifesto at hand, but if memory serves, their agenda included such radical and dangerous (for the 1880s) ideas as the abolition of child labor and the legalization of trade unions.
Slashdot Mirror
If a newbie asks you a question, listen (or read) carefully enough to give a relevant answer. "I know how to do that, but I don't know how to teach it to you" is a relevant answer, and one which demonstrates respect for the person who asked.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
When programmers write documentation for a program or system of programs, they usually organize it according to how the program is written, or how the modules of the system interact, or the functions of the modules.
For example, the chapters of the Linux System Administrator's Guide seem to be organized as follows:
- Introduction/overview (chapters 1 and 2)
- Files and disks (chapters 3, 4, and 5)
- Booting, shutting down, logging in, logging out (chapters 6, 7, and 8)
- Backups (chapter 10)
- Time (chapter 11)
The Network Administrator's Guide goes like this:What's wrong with that approach, you may ask?
When non-programmers approach a computer system, they don't care about how it's put together; they care about doing something with it. The division of tasks that can be done with a computer system is mostly orthogonal to the division of modules in it.
For example, if you want to download mail from an ISP to a Linux box over a dial-up connection, that will involve booting the computer, logging in, executing a program that lives somewhere on my hard drive, making a PPP connection, etc., etc. The information relevant to that task is spread through the above two books. How can a newbie who wants to read mail with Linux, but doesn't want to become a Unix wizard, know where the relevant information is in those hundreds of pages -- not to mention HOWTOs and man pages? If something goes wrong, how can a newbie know where to look for the solution?
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
Of course, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan actually had a plot, with characters consistently demonstrating IQs of at least 100. You can't say that for a lot of Trek movies ... or TV episodes ... or other Hollywood movies....
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
I'd love to know what people associated with Trek think of the movie. Does Shatner recognize himself (and his toupee) in Tim Allen?
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
What do you think of capability-based systems, such as EROS? The folks who are working on these systems say they are fundamentally more secure (against both malicious code and heisenbugs) than Unix derivatives, Windows NT, and other ACL-based operating systems. Do you agree with this assessment? Do these systems have security weaknesses that Unix-like systems don't have?
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
The first free version of BSD (Networking Release 2) was distributed in June 1991, but got tied up in lawsuits from 1992 to 1994. By the time that was cleared up, early versions of Linux were already available.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
- Borrow a certain number of shares, promising to pay them back in a month.
- Sell the shares.
- At the end of the month, buy the shares and give them back from the lender.
If the stock goes down over the month, you win. Of course, if the stock goes up in that period of time, you lose. Furthermore, while a stock's price has a lower limit of zero (duh), it has no upper limit, so you can lose even more money by selling short than you can by traditional forms of investment....--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
(Disclaimer #2: Remember, this lawsuit is being brought in France, not the US.)
In American civil law, you can file a motion to dismiss a case (or for the judge to grant a "summary judgement" to one side) at the very beginning. You can do this if your opponent's case is so weak that even if all of your opponent's facts are correct, there's no reasonable interpretation of the law that would allow your opponent to win.
If you bring a lawsuit that is extremely bogus (e.g., suing the Department of the Interior for beaming mind-control rays at you through your houseplants), then the judge can fine you for wasting the Court's time. That doesn't happen too often, though.
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
The answer to his question, of course, is to join the Free Software Developers' Network. The FSDN offers freshmeat access, and a whole bunch of other valuable services, for a mere $19.95 per year. If you're interested in joining the FSDN, just email me your credit-card number and expiration date, and I'll pass along your application.
\end{joke}
--
"But, Mulder, the new millennium doesn't begin until January 2001."
According to the latest Wired quotes, VA has a market cap of 10.21B, Compaq is 44.55B, and Dell is 115.79B. So VA's valuation, strictly speaking, is not higher than Dell's. Unless I misunderstand these financial terms, which is quite possible....
That way, you will be listed in a database of open-source software authors, and the next time someone does a Linux IPO, they will let you in on the ground floor along with all the other hackers.
In pre-trial discovery, her lawyers discovered that McDonald's had been sued seven hundred other times for similar injuries, and settled out of court every time, requiring the injured parties to keep quiet about the agreements.
The jury awarded Ms. Lieback $2.7M in punitive damages, but the judge reduced that to $480K, and the parties settled for even less (presumably to save everyone the hassle of going through an appeals court).
McDonald's knew they were doing something that could get them sued again and again. They had an opportunity to change their policies to prevent more lawsuits. They even had an opportunity to settle Ms. Lieback's complaint without any lawsuit or trial. They passed up their opportunities. So who was irresponsible?
Therefore, we can expect some people to keep readjusting their schedule for the Apocalypse until 2033.
I'm an Orthodox Jew.
(And politically "left-wing" rather than libertarianBut if the people of Washington, Oregon, or California use their referendum powers to pass a law that has some effect on international trade, and the appropriate WTO tribunal decides that it violates the USA's treaty obligations under the WTO, then the law will be struck down.
In the late 19th century, the development of the Industrial Revolution and the market economy went hand-in-hand with increased government regulation.
Why? Preindustrial societies could usually control their members with social pressure, religious sanctions, and village-level regulations. Capitalism made it easier for people to evade (or stop caring about) these kinds of sanctions, and so in more and more cases, the State was called in to regulate commerce. Entrepreneurs under Gilded-Age capitalism had more freedom in certain areas (setting wages and prices, for example), but they also faced new regulations in other areas (such as food purity and workplace safety, if I remember correctly).
Karl Polyani, in The Great Transformation, has many interesting things to say about this.
I wouldn't be surprised if, by the same token, as the Net grows more popular and influential, the State takes on more and more responsibility to clean up after it.
Through the GPL, the author of a program is unilaterally granting permission for the recipient to copy the program -- under certain circumstances. If the recipient doesn't want to abide by the terms of the GPL, that's fine -- but then the recipient, under copyright law, then has no right (except for the usual fair-use conditions) to copy the GPL'ed program.
By contrast, shrink-wrap or click-wrap licenses try to give a software vendor more power than mere copyright law grants. That's why they have these "if you click this button you are agreeing to these ten pages of fine print" messages. They (might) create a contract between the vendor and the consumer: in exchange for the privilege of using the vendor's software, the consumer agrees not to reverse-engineer it, not to benchmark it, not to install it on more than one computer, etc., etc. Under copyright law, the courts would laugh at restrictions like this, but if clicking on the appropriate button does create a contract, then the vendor can enforce the license through contract law.
(As contracts, click-wrap licenses are iffy, because by the time you see the license, you've already coughed up your money and taken the disk home, and the click-wrap license is now trying to renegotiate the terms of a sale that's already taken place. But that's an argument for another thread.)
Disclaimer: IANAL.
See, for example, the "Pragmatic Idealism" essay on the FSF's Web site. NeXT made an Objective-C front end to the GNU C compiler, and wanted to make this front end proprietary. The FSF's lawyer told them this would violate the GPL, and NeXT gave in.
(The Talmud is, umm, sort of like the 2,500-year-old archives of soc.culture.jewish, back when you had to be a rabbi to get on the Net.)
As I was saying, there's a story in the Talmud about a little crisis the Jewish sages faced, when there were only three Torah scrolls left in the world. (A "Torah scroll" is a single scroll containing the first five books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy, in the original Hebrew.) All three scrolls had slight variations in the text, and the sages had no way of knowing which variation was more likely to be correct. Since the sages believed that every word of the Torah is from God, and sometimes a single word had vast legal consequences, this was a problem.
So they copied out a new scroll based on the other three, as follows: Whenever the old scrolls disagreed about a certain verse, the new scroll would follow the "majority opinion" of the old scrolls. After the transcription was complete, they declared the new scroll to be The Canonical Sacred Text, and the old scrolls were declared Unfit For Ritual Use.
...what settlement would you propose making with the DOJ?
And how is a starving peasant in North Korea going to "amass great amounts of digital cash"? By sending chain letters? Sheesh.
In a feudal economy, the lower class consists of peasants. Feudal systems place all sorts of restrictions on peasants (they can't just pick up and move, for example), but the feudal lord's power over the peasants is also constrained (he can't just evict them, either).
In a capitalist economy, the lower class is the proletariat (a.k.a. "the working class"), who own their own labor power, but can only sell it to members of the bourgeoisie (a.k.a. "the bosses"). If you're in the proletariat and you can't find anyone to buy your labor, you're SOL.
The bourgeoisie buys the proletariat's labor for as little as it can pay, and sells the products of the labor for as much as it can charge, to whoever is willing to pay. (There's the alienation of labor -- once the widget leaves the worker's hands, he or she has no special relationship with it.)
The bourgeoisie can then plow the profits into exploiting the workers further: for example, skilled craftsmen, who own their own tools, get replaced by unskilled (therefore easy-to-replace, therefore low-paid) factory workers whose tools (the factory machines) belong to the bourgeoisie.
Marx and Engels predicted that economic forces would (a) drive businesses in every field to either merge with or bankrupt competitors, creating monopolies protected or controlled by business-friendly governments; (b) drive the bourgeoisie to tighten the screws further and further on the proletariat, until everyone in that class was paid no more than enough to survive. Then, they thought, the proletariat would get sick of it all, seize control of all these centralized industries, and manage them for the benefit of all of society rather than for profit.
We all know it didn't work out that way, but in the 1880s, this was not an unreasonable theory.
In the late 19th century, there were a whole bunch of political movements that we would call "left-wing". Several of these movements, not just Marx's, called themselves "Communist". Sometimes they took one another's theories and techniques, and sometimes they bickered (sounds familiar, eh?). A big chunk of the Communist Manifesto is devoted to flaming other movements, such as utopian socialism and anarchism, that were popular at the time.
Over the past century, some of the ideas that circulated through these movements, such as the legalization of trade unions, became pretty much mainstream. Some, such as the inevitable immiseration of the working class, became pretty much discredited. Some, such as full employment, are still being argued about (this particular issue is big in France, as I recall). Newer movements, such as environmentalism and gay rights, have added ideas and issues to the mix that Marx and his buddies never considered.