i'd be very surprised if any library chose to censor Sartre or Camus, Darwin or Freud. what is more likely is that offensive sexually explicit materials will be blocked. (unsuccessfully, i might add, but that's a technical issue.)
unless human physiology has radically changed since i was an adolescent punk, sexually explicit materials tend to divert blood flow to the primary male attribute and away from his brain.
i've found that cognitive functions are reduced when the brain is drained of blood in this fashion.
thus, censorship of sexually explicit materials as being more likely to *encourage* thinking.
what adolescent punks do at home with their own time is their business and not mine. it is my business when they use my tax dollars for bandwidth that *discourages* thinking. i don't want Algore to tax me just so some pimple faced kid can get a hard-on. If the kid wants to *think* he'll find Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Voltaire and Descartes w/o any impediment.
Better yet, give the kid Perl. That'll encourage thinking.
1. if i were named in such a suit and refused to appear, wouldn't VA need an extradition order or something to get me into the VA court? would the VA Militia invade Michigan to drag me off to a prison cell next to Manuel Noriega? how can a moronic decision in a distant state do anything more than keep me from ever vacationing there?
if enough folks became VA scofflaws, the VA tourist bureau would take notice.
2. does the sovereign state of VA have standing in the case because the AOL server is located in VA? if that's the case, then we should inform anyone running a server in VA that we can't do business with them because of this stupidity. this will encourage those running servers in VA to relocate. once AOL & a bunch of other big guys move their servers to DC or MD, the VA chamber of commerce would take notice.
What I want to know is: what can VA do to me if I never go there? what can VA do if the server is out of state?
MS P++ may well have a clicky drag-and-drop forms design front end before they're done. so that folks can design things that look like Perl/Tk apps without thinking. We can safely ignore this if we refuse to lobotomize ourselves by consorting with wizard interfaces & what-you-see-is-all-you-get dialog designers.
MS will probably come up with MSPAN is to promulgate Win32-specific P++ modules. It'll only become insidious if MSPAN has better stuff than CPAN. That'll only be a problem if Perl Mongers start thinking in a Win32-centric way. Figure MS will come up with P++ modules for every conceivable Win32-specific feature and every embraced and extended standard they've assimilated. I hope that MS spends their own billions funding that effort. I also hope the Forces of Good will spend our own efforts on platform-agnostic modules that will dwell in Light in Holy CPAN with the Saints.
The Dark Lord will not succeed in embracing Perl and extending it into MS P++ unless we yield to the temptations we know that he'll extend.
GEB is a marvelous and wonderful book and every moment working through it is well spent. and it is work.
A key notion that undergirds the book is that of Strong AI. to wit, the notion that every mind you ever encounter is purely software running on some sort of computational hardware: be it a neural net or a termite hill or a massively computer.
I suggest that a good counter-point to GEB is Roger Penrose' _The Emperor's New Mind_ that suggests that the mind emerges from some kinda quantum process within the neurons.
Penrose notes that if Strong AI is correct, then each mind can be implemented on a Turing machine. this gives the mind an ontological status similar to that of the theorem of pythagorus or the quicksort algorithm. This is a delightfully ironic platonic consequence of a decidedly non-platonic start-point.
ok, as i understand it, the middleware stuff in Corba is going to use JavaBeans. Now, the big that's Bad News is that Java is a specific language, we'd prefer a language-agnostic middleware thang.
so, is there any possibility of taking JavaBeans and decaffinating them? to wit, create a non-Java implementation of the exact same set of protocols for doing the job and imlement them in something you can call C++Beans, or PerlBeans, or PythonBeans, or maybe even (caution flame-bait ahead) VisualBasicBeans
one embarks upon an course of murder/suicide only after one does not believe in hell.
our society is very careful to train everyone that not only is hell a useless myth, but that it is something no "good" diety would have anything to do with. the whole concept of good and evil has been systematically replaced with some kind of amoral clinical psychology.
the notion that a "good" diety would not enforce justice beyond the grave does violence to the whole concept of justice. Kant argued that in order for any kind of morality or justice to be meaningful, some cosmic ref must assign penalties and force repayment in the hereafter all unpaid debts of the here and now.
we live in a society of feckless relativism. that's why we're surprised at the metaphor shear of being slapped in the face by evil.
why do kids like that go shoot up the school? they were evil. they'll burn in hell. the'll get what they deserve, nothing more, nothing less.
when i use a GUI, i do different things than when i use a cmd line UI. over time these different things accrete changing the interconnects in my mind.
i started out in '73 using the same lash-up Neal describes in his essay. it had an effect on my mind. it evoked certain patterns of thinking and approaches toward problems. my mind adapted to the UI available to it.
years later, i got an Amiga and its UI was different, and i intereacted with it differently. in some ways more effectively, in others, less. nevertheless, the GUI has evoked a different pattern of thinking and different interconnects were forged.
the only way i could observe this effect on my thinking was to experience at an expert level *both* command-line UI and GUI.
the two ways are different, but to say one is good and the other is evil is to miss the point. one way does some things effectively and has some consequences, and the other way has different effectivenesses (sic) and different cognitive consequences. neither way is "better" both ways are "different."
anyone who has been spammed should appreciate this fundamental human right. moreover, if i know that X is a twit, all the more reason for me to be freed from his intrusive expression.
if software can assist me by matching unknowns agains known twit profiles, i will insist upon it.
Lacking such software, folks simply tune out of low SNR media.
If there is some obligation of the twit to be heard, then those who now tune out must be forced to listen. Perhaps on one of those 1984 television sets that cannot be turned off.
... the man who single handedly invented the internet figured we'd all leave our free-love communes to program his website. (leaving him more time for shaking down his golfing buddy BillGatus of borg.)
to use the slashdot effect as a means of intimidation and blackmail is a Bad Thing. its the stuff of Union Thugs.
it should be noted that internet-mediated rage never happens to speculators who camp on 1000s of domain names in hopes of selling out to a megacorporation or a politician.
it might be more neighborly for inflammatory events to be hotlinked to a "this situation sucks" site that would be configured to withstand slashdotting.
this would let all the polite, "you're silly" emails to CEOs and "you suck" emails to lawyers to be compiled and submitted to the guilty parties without becoming a denial of service attack and bringing down their servers. it could be accompanied with a nice cover letter explaining the facts of life, internet-PR-wise.
but it sure feels good to hear about the angry villagers taking down intimidating pond-scum.
Fusion that occurs in the hearts of stars does so at a relatively high temperature. Millions of degrees. Various fusion research projects focused upon somehow replicating this temperature on earth. (This is relatively hard to do unless a nuclear explosion is going on in the immediate vicinity.)
"Cold Fusion" demonstrations took place at room temperature. Since room temperature even in August w/o air conditioning is far less than several million degrees is so much cooler (relatively speaking) as to be deemed "cold."
Cold Fusion would be a Bad Thing, too, since it would permit Bad Guys to build nuclear weapons materials using their Mr. Fusion power generators' neutron flux.
btw, after the Elbonians cook up cheap fissionables, they can design their nukes using Beowolf clusters of 486s.
Here's why you should not be happy about this story. This device doesn't produce useful fusion energy, but it does produce hot neutrons, and it does so cheaply. What good are hot neutrons? They can be used to transmute non-fissionable isotopes of into fissionable isotopes.
Fissionable isotopes are rare. Denying third-world bohemian have-nots access to fissionable isotopes is the linchpin of our nuclear non-proliferation strategy. Therefore, if someone can easily cook up fissionables in his basement, then a future imperialist meddling in some irrelevant nowhere country's civil war could provoke a nuclear response by the Elbonians.
i own the std leatherman model. i prefer it to my gerber. i want to get a SOG tool. i'd like a complete list of such gadgets so i can get one of each (and more thoroughly cheese off my wife).
nevertheless, i've never heard of a "wave" model of leatherman. is there a leatherman web site that describes the "wave"?
the tone of the comments about "arrogant" sound as if that is a Bad Thing.
i have always relished the company of the arrogant. unless of course, they didn't have the genius to back it up. what i *like* is being around folks Smarter Than Me, and those folks generally have good reason to be arrogant. my first Masters was in Math and mathematicians are a naturally arrogant bunch.
conversely, i've been in the presence of bankers. and that combination of arrogance and STUPIDITY does make for comic relief in small doses. i make a practise of staying out of debt simply to keep my exposure to stupidity+arrogance to a minimum.
i've long said that Postmodernism was a transitional form. its very name says it is *not* modernism, yet derivative from the modernism *not*.
The obvious truth since the 1920s Dada-movement has been that modernism (aka the enlightment) was dying, and the obvious truth of the 60s was its death. what has followed, postmodernism, is the agent of putrifaction converting the corpse of modernism to into "whatever comes next."
Larry Wall's comments about Perl being a postmodern language are well put and should give pause. the constructive aspect of postmodernism is to produce new things from recycled bits of the old. but in a sense, isn't the earth that is fertilized by the dead fish just that, the recycling bits of the old to create something new like a cornstalk.
the drat and double drat is that Paul Katz has come along to state the obvious and recite the old tired old refrain that "forces of reaction" are out there just waiting to "censor and repress." we are living thru the turn-over of one culture (modernism) to another culture (the one we're inventing right now) its stupid to respond the *new* culture's birth with the weapons and tactics that attended the *old* culture's birth.
Ok, Mr. Katz, what law is the United States Congress going to pass that'll be legally binding to someone in Finland? What ecclesiastical council in the Vatican is going to burn at the stake any neopagan in Massachusetts?
You can't digitize Torquemada. You can only flame idiots. But "you suck" flammage has no credibility. What has credibility is coherent ideas well put that disclose the suckiness of the idiot's ideas.
the exchange of ideas is exactly what we're talking about. What the internet brings to our culture is a denial of the argument of force.
The open exchange of ideas opens the flood gates to a lot of moronic, trite, stereotypical non-thoughts expressed by the likes of Mr. Katz. And the proper response in the internet age (just as in every prior age) is not to censor (for censorship is impossible) but to meet in the arena of ideas and duke it out rhetorically.
The best thoughts will win. We are geeks, as geeks, we use logic every day to do our jobs. Software calls us back from our bigoted opinions to something tangible, something real in the logical structure of whatever is. This day-in-day out exposure to unforgiving logic changes the geek brain, making it more fitted to rational thought.
The english majors can pool their bigotry and use politics to suppress those they find unfashionable, or politically incorrect. The internet gives such arbiters of culture the middle-finger salute and builds on whatever works and jettisons that which does not.
i long for the day the internet jettisons Mr. Katz.
the biblical model of prophet was not as much a soothsayer as a person to confront society and say, "dammit, you're doing it wrong."
RMS is a voice crying out in the wilderness. Voices like that generally don't lead pep rallys. Prophets generally don't make friends in The Establishment they criticize. Being a prophet was an effective way to get yourself crucified.
Yet, we see a certain Rightness in what they are saying, even if we disagree with much, we see they're at least part right. Yes, RMS is strident and political. Yes, we need a paranoid voice calling us to a better way.
No, RMS is not the most effective guy to rally the troups and take us forward. We need positive voices like Linus' who are primarily focused on the getting the result of software
i recall listening to a Baygen interview and he was talking about using the generator in alternate ways of converting potential energy to kinetic energy: instead of a windup spring, a person could lift buckets of sand high overhead (like from trees). then over the course of the next several days, the rope holding the bucket unwinds powering the Baygen generator
Hey, i just installed Linux on two machines. the first one i did from scratch RedHat 5.2 over RedHat 4.2 and that install (over a year ago) was overtop of Win95 blowing it away completely. This second install of Linux i did was on a virgin hard drive. NONE are dual boot machines.
I also did three installs of Win98 in December on virgin machines. all I did was feed a CD into the machine and click boxes. I learnt nothing in the process.
I worked a *lot* harder on the Linux installs than the Winblows installs.
Both Linux installs began with opening the cover and *carefully* identifying every hardware component. Knowing *exactly* which video card, sound card, network card and even some of the key chips thereon. Only after that did I do the RedHat 5.2 install. (i had painful memories of many 4.2 false starts.) Autoprobing really helped a lot. It took me a *lot* longer because i *had* to add my knowledge to the process. Knowledge i had to learn along the way. RedHat has the easiest install for the semi-clueless like me.
Oh, but RedHat didn't support the Matrox G200 in 5.2 & I had to d/l updated rpms. The first time i got X working (on that other machine with a supported video card, and a noname monitor i had to guess about) I spent an all-nighter getting X working. Do you know *any* one who didn't scratch his head once getting X going?
Now, during these two installs of Linux, I've made becoming a Linux guru my hobby. its more fun than using Windows. its also hard work. It was a lot more work than my Win98 game boxes going. Next time I install Win98 and Linux on separate machines, the Linux install will go faster *ONLY* BECAUSE NOW I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING.
I couldn't install Linux without learning; with Windows, i could.
if cave man grog go to Best Buy, point to the glowing thing & adjacent box, & buy, it come with Win98 preinstalled. perceived installation effort for cave man grog is zero.
If cave man grog's brother in law who is "into computers" does a Win98 system upgrade it means feeding a CDROM and clicking buttons in a half-clueful way. This installation effort is epsilon.
until cave man grog can buy Linux preinstalled, or his half-clueful brother-in-law can mindlessly click on wizards, the Microserfs will have a credible claim that Linux is harder to install.
Let's build a startup daemon into the linux kernel that checks for the P3 cpu id: and if it finds it, installs a wedge to always report a CPU id of 666
Slashdot Mirror
i'd be very surprised if any library chose to censor Sartre or Camus, Darwin or Freud. what is more likely is that offensive sexually explicit materials will be blocked. (unsuccessfully, i might add, but that's a technical issue.)
unless human physiology has radically changed since i was an adolescent punk, sexually explicit materials tend to divert blood flow to the primary male attribute and away from his brain.
i've found that cognitive functions are reduced when the brain is drained of blood in this fashion.
thus, censorship of sexually explicit materials as being more likely to *encourage* thinking.
what adolescent punks do at home with their own time is their business and not mine. it is my business when they use my tax dollars for bandwidth that *discourages* thinking. i don't want Algore to tax me just so some pimple faced kid can get a hard-on. If the kid wants to *think* he'll find Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Voltaire and Descartes w/o any impediment.
Better yet, give the kid Perl. That'll encourage thinking.
1. if i were named in such a suit and refused to appear, wouldn't VA need an extradition order or something to get me into the VA court? would the VA Militia invade Michigan to drag me off to a prison cell next to Manuel Noriega? how can a moronic decision in a distant state do anything more than keep me from ever vacationing there?
if enough folks became VA scofflaws, the VA tourist bureau would take notice.
2. does the sovereign state of VA have standing in the case because the AOL server is located in VA? if that's the case, then we should inform anyone running a server in VA that we can't do business with them because of this stupidity. this will encourage those running servers in VA to relocate. once AOL & a bunch of other big guys move their servers to DC or MD, the VA chamber of commerce would take notice.
What I want to know is: what can VA do to me if I never go there? what can VA do if the server is out of state?
let's not get our knickers in a twist over this.
MS P++ may well have a clicky drag-and-drop forms design front end before they're done. so that folks can design things that look like Perl/Tk apps without thinking. We can safely ignore this if we refuse to lobotomize ourselves by consorting with wizard interfaces & what-you-see-is-all-you-get dialog designers.
MS will probably come up with MSPAN is to promulgate Win32-specific P++ modules. It'll only become insidious if MSPAN has better stuff than CPAN. That'll only be a problem if Perl Mongers start thinking in a Win32-centric way. Figure MS will come up with P++ modules for every conceivable Win32-specific feature and every embraced and extended standard they've assimilated. I hope that MS spends their own billions funding that effort. I also hope the Forces of Good will spend our own efforts on platform-agnostic modules that will dwell in Light in Holy CPAN with the Saints.
The Dark Lord will not succeed in embracing Perl and extending it into MS P++ unless we yield to the temptations we know that he'll extend.
if the critics hate it, then...
it must be good.
we'll see for ourselves soon enuf.
GEB is a marvelous and wonderful book and every moment working through it is well spent. and it is work.
A key notion that undergirds the book is that of Strong AI. to wit, the notion that every mind you ever encounter is purely software running on some sort of computational hardware: be it a neural net or a termite hill or a massively computer.
I suggest that a good counter-point to GEB is Roger Penrose' _The Emperor's New Mind_ that suggests that the mind emerges from some kinda quantum process within the neurons.
Penrose notes that if Strong AI is correct, then each mind can be implemented on a Turing machine. this gives the mind an ontological status similar to that of the theorem of pythagorus or the quicksort algorithm. This is a delightfully ironic platonic consequence of a decidedly non-platonic start-point.
ok, as i understand it, the middleware stuff in Corba is going to use JavaBeans. Now, the big that's Bad News is that Java is a specific language, we'd prefer a language-agnostic middleware thang.
so, is there any possibility of taking JavaBeans and decaffinating them? to wit, create a non-Java implementation of the exact same set of protocols for doing the job and imlement them in something you can call C++Beans, or PerlBeans, or PythonBeans, or maybe even (caution flame-bait ahead) VisualBasicBeans
curious,
sdp
one embarks upon an course of murder/suicide only after one does not believe in hell.
our society is very careful to train everyone that not only is hell a useless myth, but that it is something no "good" diety would have anything to do with. the whole concept of good and evil has been systematically replaced with some kind of amoral clinical psychology.
the notion that a "good" diety would not enforce justice beyond the grave does violence to the whole concept of justice. Kant argued that in order for any kind of morality or justice to be meaningful, some cosmic ref must assign penalties and force repayment in the hereafter all unpaid debts of the here and now.
we live in a society of feckless relativism. that's why we're surprised at the metaphor shear of being slapped in the face by evil.
why do kids like that go shoot up the school? they were evil. they'll burn in hell. the'll get what they deserve, nothing more, nothing less.
when i use a GUI, i do different things than when i use a cmd line UI. over time these different things accrete changing the interconnects in my mind.
i started out in '73 using the same lash-up Neal describes in his essay. it had an effect on my mind. it evoked certain patterns of thinking and
approaches toward problems. my mind adapted to
the UI available to it.
years later, i got an Amiga and its UI was different, and i intereacted with it differently. in some ways more effectively, in others, less. nevertheless, the GUI has evoked a different pattern of thinking and different interconnects were forged.
the only way i could observe this effect on my thinking was to experience at an expert level *both* command-line UI and GUI.
the two ways are different, but to say one is good and the other is evil is to miss the point. one way does some things effectively and has some consequences, and the other way has different effectivenesses (sic) and different cognitive consequences. neither way is "better" both ways are "different."
'nuff said
anyone who has been spammed should appreciate this fundamental human right. moreover, if i know that X is a twit, all the more reason for me to be freed from his intrusive expression.
if software can assist me by matching unknowns agains known twit profiles, i will insist upon it.
Lacking such software, folks simply tune out of low SNR media.
If there is some obligation of the twit to be heard, then those who now tune out must be forced to listen. Perhaps on one of those 1984 television sets that cannot be turned off.
have you noticed that there are two kinds of "leaders" in our "movement"?
there's the guys who do the work, and make things like Linux kernels and Perl compilers happen.
then there are other guys who are esteemed most highly as they code and least lightly as they flame.
can anyone explain to me how radio energy is transmitted without radio waves, as the article claims?
the reporter must have taken the sound of explosions (propagating in vacuum) in Star Wars too seriously.
i think the notion of a radio carrier wave is what went over the reporter's head
if some microserf at nowhere.com says something stupid, why generate a lot of slashdot traffic to that site?
if someone *has* to know exactly what the microserv said on Bill Gates' old partner's web site, a little work can find it.
ergo, he's insightful not sleepy
... the man who single handedly invented the internet figured we'd all leave our free-love communes to program his website. (leaving him more time for shaking down his golfing buddy BillGatus of borg.)
if i were the type of person to build a virus, i'd make a point of embedding Bill Gates' GUID in it.
that'd be an interesting research question. what is Bill's GUID?
Then we can attach it to every Word document that we see.
to use the slashdot effect as a means of intimidation and blackmail is a Bad Thing. its the stuff of Union Thugs.
it should be noted that internet-mediated rage never happens to speculators who camp on 1000s of domain names in hopes of selling out to a megacorporation or a politician.
it might be more neighborly for inflammatory events to be hotlinked to a "this situation sucks" site that would be configured to withstand slashdotting.
this would let all the polite, "you're silly" emails to CEOs and "you suck" emails to lawyers to be compiled and submitted to the guilty parties without becoming a denial of service attack and bringing down their servers. it could be accompanied with a nice cover letter explaining the facts of life, internet-PR-wise.
but it sure feels good to hear about the angry villagers taking down intimidating pond-scum.
Fusion that occurs in the hearts of stars does so at a relatively high temperature. Millions of degrees. Various fusion research projects focused upon somehow replicating this temperature on earth. (This is relatively hard to do unless a nuclear explosion is going on in the immediate vicinity.)
"Cold Fusion" demonstrations took place at room temperature. Since room temperature even in August w/o air conditioning is far less than several million degrees is so much cooler (relatively speaking) as to be deemed "cold."
Cold Fusion would be a Bad Thing, too, since it would permit Bad Guys to build nuclear weapons materials using their Mr. Fusion power generators' neutron flux.
btw, after the Elbonians cook up cheap fissionables, they can design their nukes using Beowolf clusters of 486s.
Sleep well, America.
Here's why you should not be happy about this story. This device doesn't produce useful fusion energy, but it does produce hot neutrons, and it does so cheaply. What good are hot neutrons? They can be used to transmute non-fissionable isotopes of into fissionable isotopes.
Fissionable isotopes are rare. Denying third-world bohemian have-nots access to fissionable isotopes is the linchpin of our nuclear non-proliferation strategy. Therefore, if someone can easily cook up fissionables in his basement, then a future imperialist meddling in some irrelevant nowhere country's civil war could provoke a nuclear response by the Elbonians.
Be afraid, be very very afraid.
i own the std leatherman model. i prefer it to my gerber. i want to get a SOG tool. i'd like a complete list of such gadgets so i can get one of each (and more thoroughly cheese off my wife).
nevertheless, i've never heard of a "wave" model of leatherman. is there a leatherman web site that describes the "wave"?
the tone of the comments about "arrogant" sound as if that is a Bad Thing.
i have always relished the company of the arrogant. unless of course, they didn't have the genius to back it up. what i *like* is being around folks Smarter Than Me, and those folks generally have good reason to be arrogant. my first Masters was in Math and mathematicians are a naturally arrogant bunch.
conversely, i've been in the presence of bankers. and that combination of arrogance and STUPIDITY does make for comic relief in small doses. i make a practise of staying out of debt simply to keep my exposure to stupidity+arrogance to a minimum.
drat and double drat.
i've long said that Postmodernism was a transitional form. its very name says it is *not* modernism, yet derivative from the modernism *not*.
The obvious truth since the 1920s Dada-movement has been that modernism (aka the enlightment) was dying, and the obvious truth of the 60s was its death. what has followed, postmodernism, is the agent of putrifaction converting the corpse of modernism to into "whatever comes next."
Larry Wall's comments about Perl being a postmodern language are well put and should give pause. the constructive aspect of postmodernism is to produce new things from recycled bits of the old. but in a sense, isn't the earth that is fertilized by the dead fish just that, the recycling bits of the old to create something new like a cornstalk.
the drat and double drat is that Paul Katz has come along to state the obvious and recite the old tired old refrain that "forces of reaction" are out there just waiting to "censor and repress." we are living thru the turn-over of one culture (modernism) to another culture (the one we're inventing right now) its stupid to respond the *new* culture's birth with the weapons and tactics that attended the *old* culture's birth.
Ok, Mr. Katz, what law is the United States Congress going to pass that'll be legally binding to someone in Finland? What ecclesiastical council in the Vatican is going to burn at the stake any neopagan in Massachusetts?
You can't digitize Torquemada. You can only flame idiots. But "you suck" flammage has no credibility. What has credibility is coherent ideas well put that disclose the suckiness of the idiot's ideas.
the exchange of ideas is exactly what we're talking about. What the internet brings to our culture is a denial of the argument of force.
The open exchange of ideas opens the flood gates to a lot of moronic, trite, stereotypical non-thoughts expressed by the likes of Mr. Katz. And the proper response in the internet age (just as in every prior age) is not to censor (for censorship is impossible) but to meet in the arena of ideas and duke it out rhetorically.
The best thoughts will win. We are geeks, as geeks, we use logic every day to do our jobs. Software calls us back from our bigoted opinions to something tangible, something real in the logical structure of whatever is. This day-in-day out exposure to unforgiving logic changes the geek brain, making it more fitted to rational thought.
The english majors can pool their bigotry and use politics to suppress those they find unfashionable, or politically incorrect. The internet gives such arbiters of culture the middle-finger salute and builds on whatever works and jettisons that which does not.
i long for the day the internet jettisons Mr. Katz.
the biblical model of prophet was not as much a soothsayer as a person to confront society and say, "dammit, you're doing it wrong."
RMS is a voice crying out in the wilderness. Voices like that generally don't lead pep rallys. Prophets generally don't make friends in The Establishment they criticize. Being a prophet was an effective way to get yourself crucified.
Yet, we see a certain Rightness in what they are saying, even if we disagree with much, we see they're at least part right. Yes, RMS is strident and political. Yes, we need a paranoid voice calling us to a better way.
No, RMS is not the most effective guy to rally the troups and take us forward. We need positive voices like Linus' who are primarily focused on the getting the result of software
i recall listening to a Baygen interview and he was talking about using the generator in alternate ways of converting potential energy to kinetic energy: instead of a windup spring, a person could lift buckets of sand high overhead (like from trees). then over the course of the next several days, the rope holding the bucket unwinds powering the Baygen generator
Hey, i just installed Linux on two machines. the first one i did from scratch RedHat 5.2 over RedHat 4.2 and that install (over a year ago) was overtop of Win95 blowing it away completely. This second install of Linux i did was on a virgin hard drive. NONE are dual boot machines.
I also did three installs of Win98 in December on virgin machines. all I did was feed a CD into the machine and click boxes. I learnt nothing in the process.
I worked a *lot* harder on the Linux installs than the Winblows installs.
Both Linux installs began with opening the cover and *carefully* identifying every hardware component. Knowing *exactly* which video card, sound card, network card and even some of the key chips thereon. Only after that did I do the RedHat 5.2 install. (i had painful memories of many 4.2 false starts.) Autoprobing really helped a lot. It took me a *lot* longer because i *had* to add my knowledge to the process. Knowledge i had to learn along the way. RedHat has the easiest install for the semi-clueless like me.
Oh, but RedHat didn't support the Matrox G200 in 5.2 & I had to d/l updated rpms. The first time i got X working (on that other machine with a supported video card, and a noname monitor i had to guess about) I spent an all-nighter getting X working. Do you know *any* one who didn't scratch his head once getting X going?
Now, during these two installs of Linux, I've made becoming a Linux guru my hobby. its more fun than using Windows. its also hard work. It was a lot more work than my Win98 game boxes going. Next time I install Win98 and Linux on separate machines, the Linux install will go faster *ONLY* BECAUSE NOW I KNOW WHAT I'M DOING.
I couldn't install Linux without learning; with Windows, i could.
if cave man grog go to Best Buy, point to the glowing thing & adjacent box, & buy, it come with Win98 preinstalled. perceived installation effort for cave man grog is zero.
If cave man grog's brother in law who is "into computers" does a Win98 system upgrade it means feeding a CDROM and clicking buttons in a half-clueful way. This installation effort is epsilon.
until cave man grog can buy Linux preinstalled, or his half-clueful brother-in-law can mindlessly click on wizards, the Microserfs will have a credible claim that Linux is harder to install.
Let's build a startup daemon into the linux kernel that checks for the P3 cpu id: and if it finds it, installs a wedge to always report a CPU id of 666
daemons like 666 don't they?