Doesn't bother me one bit if it doesn't aim towards non-geeks. Geek all the way, IMHO. RedHat/Corel/Mandrake/etc. may need to market to non-geeks. I could give two.
Linux in and of itself gets along just fine without having GUI installers and "looks just like Windows(tm)!" crap interfaces. If someone wants them, however they will be written and people can use them.
The mistake people seem to make is to think that somehow if Linux becomes the prevalent operating system -- since it has been more stable, more secure, more robust, etc., than the crapware M$ alternative -- that the World Will Be A Better Place. But to do that everyone seems to believe that Linux has to offer the same eye candy, bloat, and useless processor drag that made M$ so popular to get it into the hands of the common man.
If Linux provides all these features it will undoubtedly (IMHO) become just like windows. O.k., maybe it will be more stable, and the code will be available, but the average friggin' moron will have a drop-in windows replacement. The average friggin' moron will be just as friggin' moronic as he is today. For the bulk of the populace (the non-geeks) the world will not be a better place. What did a person like me (who is happy to have the source code, happy with Linux not being a Windows drop-in replacement) gain from all of this? A graphical installer that crashes? A desktop that looks like Windows(tm)?
So, you say, I don't have to use those "improvements" -- which puts me at making my own distro from tarballs and CVS pulls, fine. But, if there is any benefit of a "distribution" it is first the elimination of hand compilation. If I (a self-proclaimed geek from way back) have lost that benefit then everything else is no advantage to the rest of the geek community -- in fact we are worse off for having Big Business in our once-quiet community.
So, "Linux needs to aim towards non geeks"? Bullshit.
My take is that the sequence of "press p.. press d" cryptic commands is what they're displaying there. Face facts -- the typical PHB or M$ drone in corporate America goes to MS' site for the definitive word on matters technical. They hear something about Linux, they enter it as a search term at the M$ site, and this page comes up. They look down it and see that cryptic business with no explanation and are secretly glad they aren't using that cryptic Linux thing ("those stupid Linux people don't know what's good for 'em; buncha commies and hippies I betcha"). And another M$ buying tool spends more dollars on another broken M$ product.
This is masterful propaganda, and it's disgusting.
For example, take a sailing race. Once you are in the lead, you should always be able to win. You just do EXACTLY the same thing as your opponent. Even if you think he turns in a stupid direction, you follow him, just in case it turns out to be a good move. In this way you can stay the same distance ahead, and never lose ground. In fact, its considered very amateurish to NOT match your opponents moves
If you're following this example I can always beat you by exploiting any difference in our positions and forcing you to act in my favor.
Actually, tinderbox is limited to the architectures running it. If you have a common but different installation which causes build problems compiling on your system will expose this, which can be filed as a bug, and fixed...
Must be some early shots (as most of the mods aren't there). Now I'm nearly as open-minded as the next {guy,lizard,wookie}, and more Libertarian than most (hey, what you do to yourself is your business so long as it ain't messing up my jolly good time). And I'd be the last to judge the guy's character or abilities based upon the fact that he's got a Klingon cranium or has to brush between his tongue...
Dude, power on if you're doing what you feel to be your calling in life. Congratulations. But, I can think of about 1,000 other ways to express one's creativity, be rebellious, get press, etc., that (1) leave you multiple options in the job market, (2) don't make you look like a moron when (or possibly WAAAAY before) you turn 60, (3) won't get your ass kicked between the pinball machines if you happen to have a layover in San Antonio, and (4) are reversible.
On a social level, I see the word "extreme" batted around in relation to this. "Extreme", as in "probably a bad idea", yes. "Extreme" as in "cool and MTV-televisable", who gives a shit? If we, as a society, took more notice of the things right and wrong around us, with an eye to making things more equitable for our fellow {men,women,lizards,klingons,lawyers,etc.}, than we do of someone making an arguable artistic statement by spending his government loan stipend and circus checks on scale tattoos and tooth filing, do you think maybe we wouldn't be completely fucked up as a race?
Some of us have blocked ads from more than just doubleclick.net. They are polluting my downstream bandwidth. Whether they patented web ads or not they are a bunch of marketing shills -- more "whores at the capitalist gangbang" (to quote Bill Hicks) and I'd send a frigging anti-tank rocket back up the line at them if it were possible.
It's amazing what a 30-line (Perl) filtering proxy server can do to banner ads. If you do it like I do it the images maintain their sizes but the content comes from/dev/null -- so the pages render properly. If you really want to allow the click-throughs to bring you to the advertising site that only takes 7 more lines (at least in my implementation).
And, by the way, I have never bought the fallacious argument these marketfucks propagate -- that without the revenue from banner ads the 'Net would collapse, etc., etc., etc. Give me a break. The majority of the useful sites in my bookmarks list (which is > 1500 links) don't use banner ads.
Re:Why is LISP superior?
on
RMS The Coder
·
· Score: 5
Anybody have any examples of problems that can be solved in LISP and no other language? Or is this just standard RMS hyperbole?
Your question is based upon false presumptions -- that such problems exist. Since one can write a lisp interpreter in a number of languages: C, C++, Perl, Pascal, numerous variants of assembly, etc.; it must be true that any problem solvable in Lisp can be solvable in these other languages (if it seems that you have an instance where this is not true then write your LISP solution, and feed it into a LISP interpreter written in the other language).
This, however, does little to address issues of usability and suitedness of languages to problems. Just as C++ is an arguable improvement over C (and that is an ongoing argument at that), but C can do everything that C++ can do (think about what it takes to write a C++ compiler in C; while not trivial, with name-mangling things get easy quickly). Still there are many who can develop large systems more quickly in C++ than they could while writing in C, due primarily to the types of abstractions made available.
I read RMS as saying that the fact that programs in LISP are represented not as character strings but native list data structures which preserve program structure as data while remaining executable is one reason to conclude that LISP is a "more powerful" language than the others. It is more powerful in that it enables skilled LISP programmers to do things "better" than skilled programmers of other languages. I take this to mean that LISP is a "more beautiful" language -- i.e., that makes sense, is complete, and self-reflective.
Take that for what you will. I do the majority of my programming in C/C++/Perl with odds-and-ends languages for special tasks. But, I spent a few years doing a lot of LISP and it is a beautiful language. Ever see a LISP interpreter written in LISP? Takes about a page of type for a full-featured interpreter. In my Principles of Programming Languages class in graduate school one of the problems on our final examination was "given the LISP interpreter written in LISP on the previous page, modify the interpreter to support call by reference argument passing semantics." The solution was a couple of lines of code. There's a certain Zen to LISP programming that you don't find anywhere else.
Unfortunately, there isn't much call for LISP programs out there in the business world or the OSS world, and the art languishes. [ IMHO one of the reasons is that the average programmer can't find the Zen between the parentheses -- not a problem with a language, but a problem with the average programmer ]. LISP is arguably a "more powerful" language than the others in wide use, but unfortunately the programmers in wide use are not as powerful as RMS.
YMMV. My $.02. Do not taunt happy fun LISP. Please keep hands inside vehicle. Not for olfactory use. Keep away from eyes. etc.
I'm waiting for the conclusion to this argument, which presumably goes "but since we are here in abundance there must have been divine intervention. And therefore my particular flavor of restrictive dogma must be true and you will go to hell."
Microsoft has chained themselves to a big rock with a Windows view. Where I can learn to work in the Windows world they are in too deep to learn how to move their code to the Unix world. It just won't happen.
You are right, but not for the reasons you gave. Microsoft is bound legally by agreements from their transaction with SCO regarding Xenix. They cannot sell a Unix operating system and therefore have a vested interest in the success of Windows. They have had IE ported to Solaris for quite some time now. They have enough capital and enough good minds there to crank out a Unix/Linux/whatever port of any app very quickly, they choose not to as it would not be in their best interests.
On the contrary, Sun's actions with regard to Blackdown were discussed months ago, and again about a month ago. The relationship has been decidedly one-way for a long time (since August '98) -- Blackdown submits fixes to Sun's broken reference implementation, Sun occasionally releases some PR which hypes their commitment to Linux, Sun applies Blackdown patches, lather, rinse, repeat.
This is nothing new, and the reason that my companies (as in the companies I run) dropped Java a few months ago. Sun doesn't want a viable leading edge Linux platform. Linux Java (if Sun has its way) will always trail the Solaris/Win32 versions by at least a minor release.
The wild card is the recent emergence of viable IBM JDK products. You will see Sun fight this on a legal and PR level and they will begin to change Java (a la Microsoft tactics) to keep IBM and others from using a standard Java unowned by Sun. This is also the reason why the ECMA standards submission was retracted.
I hope those of you still counting on Sun for a good portable Java implementation enjoy yourselves.
Re:Hang onto the ink jet... (and the driver too)
on
IDs in Color Copies
·
· Score: 2
How's that for yet another reason to go Open Source?
Edit the chrome XUL's in chrome/global/default and chrome/navigator/default. Trim out the bloat from the main interface. Components which are not used will not be loaded at runtime.
XUL is cool and all, and, were I on AOL (thank you Allah, Buddha, Krishna, et al that I am not) it would take me 30 seconds to trim that fat. That's how cool XUL is.
@Home's policies will be contested within the next year -- there are two many people sick of their profit-mongering tactics. Either they will be legislated into acceptance (unlikely), or they will be regulated out of the practice -- assuming the market doesn't take care of them.
I avoided @Home for 6 months until ADSL was deployed in my area and now I have better speed (in BOTH directions) for the same price, I can run whatever servers I want, and I'm not on 24.*.*.*
While it is true that at some point we're all on a shared medium, with @Home it often happens right outside your house. With ADSL it generally happens at the back end of the CO. I've got something pretty close to a clean feed onto their backbone - regulated to 1.5Mb - with phone connectivity being multiplexed in between the CO and me. So long as their big outbound pipe can handle all of us (and having taken a tour of the facilities with an engineer I can guarantee you that's not an issue) I could give 2 whether everyone or noone in my neighborhood are connected. With @Home if you put your neighborhood on their system your bandwidth turns to crap.
The thing about it is that it's cheaper for telco-supplied ADSL (which I have) to supply me data than it is for me to do dial-up over existing POTS. While they can sell leftover bandwidth on their pipe, having wide deployment of ADSL out of a CO doesn't do a hell of a lot (IIUC) to their profit margin. The accounting for/Mb usage would cost them more than charging for it.
Not only is/Mb not the only way to go, it is the backwards way to go. It generally reeks of mismanagement and/or profiteering. It is not supported in the market unless there is a local monopoly. Any such local monopoly will cease to exist as more competitors deploy (where there was only ISDN and @Home here a year ago, there are now multiple ISDN providers, @Home, and 3 home ADSL providers... and this ain't one of the 10 biggest metro areas in the country, either). Everyone here charges fixed rate because otherwise they'll get beat out by any competitor that charges fixed rate. If they team up and all offer/Mb rates I know some VCs more than ready to fund other ISP vendors dying to move into the broadband deployment market -- i.e., a new competitor giving what the people want.
Is it just me or does X seem big, slow, bloated, and old? It can't keep up with pretty environments like GNOME
What are you smoking? What do you think X is? What do you think GNOME is?
There are more regulations and standards than anyone cares to read.
"Man, there's too many regulations and standards to this Internet thing. Nobody wants to read that."... Again, what are you smoking? Noone has to read a single regulation or standard to use X, or even GNOME:-), but those standards are what makes it possible for me to launch a Netscape on a Solaris box behind a firewall in NY and have it appears on MI/X on a WindowsNT box in Tennessee. That's a simple example of what the standardization allows.
We need a new windowing protocol that addresses the need of the modern PC user
You've got one. It's called Windows. What's that you say? Windows is a shameless rip-off of the significant UI advances over the past 20 years? Oh, Windows is poorly written bloatware? I'm sorry. Maybe we should use a standardized system that has been refined over a decade and which allows extensible network-transparent sessions over multiple architectures. Hey, why not make an OpenSource version that's also compatible with the system that runs on Crays SGI's, Unix Mainframes, and PC's?
The continued development of X seems pointless to me - I think we need something new altogether.
Your continued ignorance seems pointless to me. However, regardless, why don't you scurry along and work on that dream of bringing a real GUI to the masses. Go sign up for any of a number of projects (browse through freshmeat and sourceforge) in this area. Heck, if you're uber-1337 maybe you can even get PAID for your efforts by working for a company developing such projects.
Having used X over the past decade on everything from Heavy Iron visualization systems (with graphics hardware the likes of which YOU CAN'T GET for a PC), to mainframes, to Unix workstations, to Linux/*BSD boxen, to win16/32 machines, to wierd-ass closed network devices... I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find a viable alternative to X anytime in the next 5 years. The flexibility, scalability, portability, and customizability (X+GNOME+Enlightenment, for instance is slicker than eel snot) of X beats the pants of the competitors.
But, if someone develops an alternative that exists on a wide range of platforms, enables the productivity that X enables, and runs something as nice as Enlightenment (not to mention WindowMaker/FVWM/etc.), and something as minimal as twm, then you might find me using it as well.
So get your ass to work if you're so dissatisfied.
It's a Netscape problem. And Mozilla doesn't seem to be making any headway towards fixing this.
I almost thought you weren't ignorant. For the umpteenth time: Mozilla is not Netscape. In fact, there is virtually 0 shared code between the two. Additionally, Mozilla (which should be considered a completely new application) is still in a pre-alpha state -- probably will be "alpha" in a couple of weeks -- and crashes about as much as Communicator 4.7 (a ".7" release of a RELEASED product).
I agree that Communicator is garbage. I don't agree that Mozilla is. Mozilla may not be a panacea, but it will expose Communicator and IE as the worthless crap they are.
I don't mean to put a damper on your excitement, but given the heavy package load this time of year, and the fact that 2.5 took a few weeks to arrive just a month ago (when 2.6 was imminent)...
It took place before the letter. This was cited on hack the planet yesterday.
The IRC conversation shows that Napster and one of his "partners" were being idiotic dickheads about the whole situation. I took it that de Icaza et al got motivated due in good part to the IRC conversation.
The arrogance and stupidity of the Napster partners is staggering. Based upon their hype one would think they were going public next week and had a staff of thousands. Based upon their technical discussions one would think they were trying to figure out pointers to get through "Intro to C". These guys will fortunately point the way to more capable companies who wish to accomplish the same thing. Their blatant mistakes will be avoided by smarter people next time around.
Slashdot Mirror
you've exposed my bald-faced lies.
"and I would've gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for those stinkin' kids!!!"
Is that right?
Doesn't bother me one bit if it doesn't aim towards non-geeks. Geek all the way, IMHO. RedHat/Corel/Mandrake/etc. may need to market to non-geeks. I could give two.
Linux in and of itself gets along just fine without having GUI installers and "looks just like Windows(tm)!" crap interfaces. If someone wants them, however they will be written and people can use them.
The mistake people seem to make is to think that somehow if Linux becomes the prevalent operating system -- since it has been more stable, more secure, more robust, etc., than the crapware M$ alternative -- that the World Will Be A Better Place. But to do that everyone seems to believe that Linux has to offer the same eye candy, bloat, and useless processor drag that made M$ so popular to get it into the hands of the common man.
If Linux provides all these features it will undoubtedly (IMHO) become just like windows. O.k., maybe it will be more stable, and the code will be available, but the average friggin' moron will have a drop-in windows replacement. The average friggin' moron will be just as friggin' moronic as he is today. For the bulk of the populace (the non-geeks) the world will not be a better place. What did a person like me (who is happy to have the source code, happy with Linux not being a Windows drop-in replacement) gain from all of this? A graphical installer that crashes? A desktop that looks like Windows(tm)?
So, you say, I don't have to use those "improvements" -- which puts me at making my own distro from tarballs and CVS pulls, fine. But, if there is any benefit of a "distribution" it is first the elimination of hand compilation. If I (a self-proclaimed geek from way back) have lost that benefit then everything else is no advantage to the rest of the geek community -- in fact we are worse off for having Big Business in our once-quiet community.
So, "Linux needs to aim towards non geeks"? Bullshit.
This is masterful propaganda, and it's disgusting.
If you're following this example I can always beat you by exploiting any difference in our positions and forcing you to act in my favor.
Dude, power on if you're doing what you feel to be your calling in life. Congratulations. But, I can think of about 1,000 other ways to express one's creativity, be rebellious, get press, etc., that (1) leave you multiple options in the job market, (2) don't make you look like a moron when (or possibly WAAAAY before) you turn 60, (3) won't get your ass kicked between the pinball machines if you happen to have a layover in San Antonio, and (4) are reversible.
On a social level, I see the word "extreme" batted around in relation to this. "Extreme", as in "probably a bad idea", yes. "Extreme" as in "cool and MTV-televisable", who gives a shit? If we, as a society, took more notice of the things right and wrong around us, with an eye to making things more equitable for our fellow {men,women,lizards,klingons,lawyers,etc.}, than we do of someone making an arguable artistic statement by spending his government loan stipend and circus checks on scale tattoos and tooth filing, do you think maybe we wouldn't be completely fucked up as a race?
It's amazing what a 30-line (Perl) filtering proxy server can do to banner ads. If you do it like I do it the images maintain their sizes but the content comes from /dev/null -- so the pages render properly. If you really want to allow the click-throughs to bring you to the advertising site that only takes 7 more lines (at least in my implementation).
And, by the way, I have never bought the fallacious argument these marketfucks propagate -- that without the revenue from banner ads the 'Net would collapse, etc., etc., etc. Give me a break. The majority of the useful sites in my bookmarks list (which is > 1500 links) don't use banner ads.
Your question is based upon false presumptions -- that such problems exist. Since one can write a lisp interpreter in a number of languages: C, C++, Perl, Pascal, numerous variants of assembly, etc.; it must be true that any problem solvable in Lisp can be solvable in these other languages (if it seems that you have an instance where this is not true then write your LISP solution, and feed it into a LISP interpreter written in the other language).
This, however, does little to address issues of usability and suitedness of languages to problems. Just as C++ is an arguable improvement over C (and that is an ongoing argument at that), but C can do everything that C++ can do (think about what it takes to write a C++ compiler in C; while not trivial, with name-mangling things get easy quickly). Still there are many who can develop large systems more quickly in C++ than they could while writing in C, due primarily to the types of abstractions made available.
I read RMS as saying that the fact that programs in LISP are represented not as character strings but native list data structures which preserve program structure as data while remaining executable is one reason to conclude that LISP is a "more powerful" language than the others. It is more powerful in that it enables skilled LISP programmers to do things "better" than skilled programmers of other languages. I take this to mean that LISP is a "more beautiful" language -- i.e., that makes sense, is complete, and self-reflective.
Take that for what you will. I do the majority of my programming in C/C++/Perl with odds-and-ends languages for special tasks. But, I spent a few years doing a lot of LISP and it is a beautiful language. Ever see a LISP interpreter written in LISP? Takes about a page of type for a full-featured interpreter. In my Principles of Programming Languages class in graduate school one of the problems on our final examination was "given the LISP interpreter written in LISP on the previous page, modify the interpreter to support call by reference argument passing semantics." The solution was a couple of lines of code. There's a certain Zen to LISP programming that you don't find anywhere else.
Unfortunately, there isn't much call for LISP programs out there in the business world or the OSS world, and the art languishes. [ IMHO one of the reasons is that the average programmer can't find the Zen between the parentheses -- not a problem with a language, but a problem with the average programmer ]. LISP is arguably a "more powerful" language than the others in wide use, but unfortunately the programmers in wide use are not as powerful as RMS.
YMMV. My $.02. Do not taunt happy fun LISP. Please keep hands inside vehicle. Not for olfactory use. Keep away from eyes. etc.
exactly.
You are right, but not for the reasons you gave. Microsoft is bound legally by agreements from their transaction with SCO regarding Xenix. They cannot sell a Unix operating system and therefore have a vested interest in the success of Windows. They have had IE ported to Solaris for quite some time now. They have enough capital and enough good minds there to crank out a Unix/Linux/whatever port of any app very quickly, they choose not to as it would not be in their best interests.
This is nothing new, and the reason that my companies (as in the companies I run) dropped Java a few months ago. Sun doesn't want a viable leading edge Linux platform. Linux Java (if Sun has its way) will always trail the Solaris/Win32 versions by at least a minor release.
The wild card is the recent emergence of viable IBM JDK products. You will see Sun fight this on a legal and PR level and they will begin to change Java (a la Microsoft tactics) to keep IBM and others from using a standard Java unowned by Sun. This is also the reason why the ECMA standards submission was retracted.
I hope those of you still counting on Sun for a good portable Java implementation enjoy yourselves.
Want my public keys?... I think you meant "private".
Simple.
I avoided @Home for 6 months until ADSL was deployed in my area and now I have better speed (in BOTH directions) for the same price, I can run whatever servers I want, and I'm not on 24.*.*.*
While it is true that at some point we're all on a shared medium, with @Home it often happens right outside your house. With ADSL it generally happens at the back end of the CO. I've got something pretty close to a clean feed onto their backbone - regulated to 1.5Mb - with phone connectivity being multiplexed in between the CO and me. So long as their big outbound pipe can handle all of us (and having taken a tour of the facilities with an engineer I can guarantee you that's not an issue) I could give 2 whether everyone or noone in my neighborhood are connected. With @Home if you put your neighborhood on their system your bandwidth turns to crap.
The thing about it is that it's cheaper for telco-supplied ADSL (which I have) to supply me data than it is for me to do dial-up over existing POTS. While they can sell leftover bandwidth on their pipe, having wide deployment of ADSL out of a CO doesn't do a hell of a lot (IIUC) to their profit margin. The accounting for /Mb usage would cost them more than charging for it.
Not only is /Mb not the only way to go, it is the backwards way to go. It generally reeks of mismanagement and/or profiteering. It is not supported in the market unless there is a local monopoly. Any such local monopoly will cease to exist as more competitors deploy (where there was only ISDN and @Home here a year ago, there are now multiple ISDN providers, @Home, and 3 home ADSL providers... and this ain't one of the 10 biggest metro areas in the country, either). Everyone here charges fixed rate because otherwise they'll get beat out by any competitor that charges fixed rate. If they team up and all offer /Mb rates I know some VCs more than ready to fund other ISP vendors dying to move into the broadband deployment market -- i.e., a new competitor giving what the people want.
What are you smoking? What do you think X is? What do you think GNOME is?
There are more regulations and standards than anyone cares to read.
"Man, there's too many regulations and standards to this Internet thing. Nobody wants to read that."... Again, what are you smoking? Noone has to read a single regulation or standard to use X, or even GNOME :-), but those standards are what makes it possible for me to launch a Netscape on a Solaris box behind a firewall in NY and have it appears on MI/X on a WindowsNT box in Tennessee. That's a simple example of what the standardization allows.
We need a new windowing protocol that addresses the need of the modern PC user
You've got one. It's called Windows. What's that you say? Windows is a shameless rip-off of the significant UI advances over the past 20 years? Oh, Windows is poorly written bloatware? I'm sorry. Maybe we should use a standardized system that has been refined over a decade and which allows extensible network-transparent sessions over multiple architectures. Hey, why not make an OpenSource version that's also compatible with the system that runs on Crays SGI's, Unix Mainframes, and PC's?
The continued development of X seems pointless to me - I think we need something new altogether.
Your continued ignorance seems pointless to me. However, regardless, why don't you scurry along and work on that dream of bringing a real GUI to the masses. Go sign up for any of a number of projects (browse through freshmeat and sourceforge) in this area. Heck, if you're uber-1337 maybe you can even get PAID for your efforts by working for a company developing such projects.
Having used X over the past decade on everything from Heavy Iron visualization systems (with graphics hardware the likes of which YOU CAN'T GET for a PC), to mainframes, to Unix workstations, to Linux/*BSD boxen, to win16/32 machines, to wierd-ass closed network devices... I'd say you'd be hard pressed to find a viable alternative to X anytime in the next 5 years. The flexibility, scalability, portability, and customizability (X+GNOME+Enlightenment, for instance is slicker than eel snot) of X beats the pants of the competitors.
But, if someone develops an alternative that exists on a wide range of platforms, enables the productivity that X enables, and runs something as nice as Enlightenment (not to mention WindowMaker/FVWM/etc.), and something as minimal as twm, then you might find me using it as well.
So get your ass to work if you're so dissatisfied.
I almost thought you weren't ignorant. For the umpteenth time: Mozilla is not Netscape. In fact, there is virtually 0 shared code between the two. Additionally, Mozilla (which should be considered a completely new application) is still in a pre-alpha state -- probably will be "alpha" in a couple of weeks -- and crashes about as much as Communicator 4.7 (a ".7" release of a RELEASED product).
I agree that Communicator is garbage. I don't agree that Mozilla is. Mozilla may not be a panacea, but it will expose Communicator and IE as the worthless crap they are.
Actually, you're wrong. Check out OPIE
Other than sound, PCMCIA networking is often reported to suffer on sleep/resume.
The IRC conversation shows that Napster and one of his "partners" were being idiotic dickheads about the whole situation. I took it that de Icaza et al got motivated due in good part to the IRC conversation.
The arrogance and stupidity of the Napster partners is staggering. Based upon their hype one would think they were going public next week and had a staff of thousands. Based upon their technical discussions one would think they were trying to figure out pointers to get through "Intro to C". These guys will fortunately point the way to more capable companies who wish to accomplish the same thing. Their blatant mistakes will be avoided by smarter people next time around.