From reading this article, one would think that open sourcing a project also refers to open firing on that product. As long as we in the opensource community insist on being "the huns at the gate", companies will treat us as such, and horde their gold from us.
Is anyone out there saying Raster is right??? Regardless of the situation with his manager, that should have been kept private. I won't argue against his skill, I think his work is great, but if I was looking to hire him, I would certaintly think about his poor behaviour and decide against. He is reminiscient of a salesman that gets fired, and then calls all of the clients to tell them something bad about the company. But he didn't get fired, he quit, and then he took his grief out in public, and further damaged the reputation of a company that was limping already.
But the author of this article seems to be of the mind that this is the price that we have to pay to reap the gleaming jewel of opensource. If this is true, I say forget it. How much money can be lost due to bad press? Tons. Enough to fill our building with quality programmers who will take direction and will keep their problems out of the public eye.
So, if open source has the unfortunate drawback of airing you dirty laundry to the world, I, and I think most companies, can pass. Or better yet, we can donate some lame piece of garbage like the PFAT filesystem. Look, I've opensourced CPM! Now if I could just find that old MSAI....
Well, the usual boring stuff can be found at the local Comp USA or Babbages, including Circuit Board Keychains, Clipboards, and Day-Books... But isn't the essence of geek ware to make it yourself?? I work at newspaper where we used to use the bullets and pneumatic tubes, and the left over bullets make great change holders, pen holders, and attaching a handle makes a groovy tranparent lexan tool kit for screwdrivers and such. Also a left over tampon dispenser made a great "help request form" holder for the front door to my office.
Gut the sheetmetal from an old PC case, preferably the screwless kind, and add a handle, and you have a breifcase. AT ports become a great place to make a pencil/pen holder that is accessible from the outside, as well as the old serial port holes making useful for an eraser etc... A slimline calculator can be put on tracks inside the floppy slot. Mine is my olde Packard Bell 286, and I just joke with people that I have finally found a use for a Packard Bell... Again, put your "Hacker Inside" logo on the front and you'll be the envy of Linux Expo.
But c'mon, you're a geek! Use your imagination. I have even used the old platters from our RLL hard drives to make an attractive desk cover. I'm talking the big suckers that used to attach to our PDP-7's. An Autokon front panel with a light bulb and a rotating multicolored transparent sheet makes an attractive wall covering.
Hmmm, Maybe I sould start a website selling this stuff....
Dof! The nintendo power glove is great for garage VR applications. I use mine as a mouse, and can still type with that hand.
Basically it's just some fiber-optic strands that react to a finger bend. Replace the inner material with something breatheable and comfortable, get the pin outs right, and you are in business. Now, combine that with a glove keyboard design, and you have a great wearable design.
There is an old analogy that I once heard used to explain the choice between MacOS and DOS. "An operating system is like a record player, if I sold you the world's greatest record player, but it would only play "Tom Jones' Greatest Hits", you'd better really like Tom Jones, or buy another record player."
For my part, I like the applications on Linux, and with the advent of KDE, and all of the KDE games, my wife the techophobe has even started asking that I leave my computer up in linux. (Dual booting and all that)
That said, occasionally I want to listen to something different. Baldur's Gate does not run under Linux, neither do many of the entertainment titles that I play. Linux still does not support many of the top cards out there, or any EAX cards, etc... And I like IE 4.0. The full screen mode appeals to me. And when the guy comes with the cable modem, I'm not going to tell him to forget it because there's no Linux driver.
We Linux guys need to face facts. If you aren't a programmer, not a technophile, and you load up Red Hat 5.2, (the curent version as far as CompUSA is concerned) with the default set to FVWM95 (shudder) it looks like a rinky-dink OS, it runs like a rinky-dink OS, and it quacks like a rinky-dink OS. You have Apache running in the background by default chewing up memory (10-20MB), FVWM95 runs like molasses on a P200 with 64MB of RAM. And what can you do? Use the GIMP? A photoshop 3.0 clone? Only if you also get the RH power tools, And then everything is marked "ALPHA - This will blow up your machine and burn your toast."
As we fire off our flames to anybody who says that Linux is not for everbody, remember that it is not for everbody. 99% of computer people don't care how good the compiler is, don't really mind rebooting once a day, wouldn't look at the source code even if it was included, and don't understand why you have to be root to change a menu in your WM.
And I will also remind you that we've got FUD down cold. A typical Slashdot post goes in to great detail about how Win9x will crash on you every 2 minutes, and that Bill Gates is the devil tyring to subvert you into a MS slave. I'd say that this article holds up a mirror to how silly our community anti-Mickeysoft sentiment really is.
And when the average home user trys out Linux and spends an hour trying to get X-windows set up on their video card, downloads a new program and runs it only to get a screen full of missing library file errors, tries to get a PNP sound card set up, needs to be a scripter to get a PPP connection to their ISP, gets told to look for the.Xdefaults file in their home directory and can't find it, (but I ran ls like you told me to... Oh! ls -a!) it makes for articles like this one.
Indeed, I know people that have started running Linux that can't figure out how to use vi, but the all swear it's great... Why? Because everybody says it's great, that's why.
Do you really want to have some fun with this guy? Send him an e-mail congratulating him on pointing out some flaws in our OS, and ask him where he feels that improvements need to be made. For each point that he brings up let him know how to better set up his machine if it relates to that, let him know that it's being worked on and point him to the web site of the developer, driver issues, explain that the attitude of hardware manufacturers is changing, and that with that so is the availability of hardware support, basically show him that linux does work, and well. It would be more fun to make him eat his words. We might find that he has no idea how to make it better... then we post his e-mail message on slashdot and show the world that he is just mumbling out his butt.
This also accomplishes a loftier goal, it shows him the greatest strength of our OS, _community_.
What has red hat done bad? It has introduced Linux to the masses.
I think that alot of flack gets dished out to Red Hat because they attract a large # of newbies that ask questions in newsgroups like "Why doesn't X-windows work? I am running Red Hat 5.2."
I run a little corner of linux machines in our company, and I also happen to be the office that home users go to to ask linux questions. And for all of my paitence I get tired of explaining that Disk Druid is buggy in the 5.1 release, I don't use netcfg, so don't ask me why it doesn't work, and yes, your system seems very slow because FVWM95 makes KDE look like TWM.
But I also explain that SuSE users should go ahead and do away with running Apache local as soon as they have a good PPP connection, etc... But some of the slackware eletists feel that anybody who runs YAST to add a user is running a podunk watered-down distro. So herein lies the problem.
I am not a Red Hat fan, because I feel that they try to sell too many packages as additional to the distro. The Red Hat Power tools are an add on, and they charge you again. SuSE includes that on the standard distro.
Using MS Visual C++, (sorry, but it has to be cross platform around here...) A single user interface that I can design in 2-3 hours comes out to about 1,000 lines of code with a splash screen, an about box, etc... In Unix, the same thing can be accomplished with Tk libraries in about 100 lines of code.
So, I write the program for Unix, and use 100 lines. The guy sitting next to me ports the program to Win95, and uses 1,000 lines, and half the time, because I have already made all of the components cross-platform. Who just did more work?
And how long is a line anyway?
cout So, the above is 4 lines or 1?
cout How about now?
cout cout cout cout And just to be obtuse, one more example:
cout Hmmm, change my answer in the poll. I guess I wrote over 20,000 lines last year, I just did it in 6,000 lines.
Hamnrye /*Gather up the gold you found you fool, it's only moonlight*/
Consider $50 of my cash set aside for this one. My only complaint is that this will probably distract me from the Linux RPG that I've been working on. Need anyone to help with the port?
I completely agree with RMS, this has gotten out of hand. When we no longer appreciate the hard work he's done, and refuse to rename the operating system and further confuse the press and newbies, we are doing the FSF a disservice.
I for one refer to my computer in order of the programs that I use most often. I call my OS KDE/GCC/VI/Apache/Gimp/Blender/StarOffice/DF. Notice that I do not use the term "Linux" in there, because how many times have I invoked linux from the command line? Never.
And I can't understand why this wasn't an issue for RMS two years ago... It has been repeatedly stated that for him it is not a popularity contest, but it somehow seems that he wants his due in the recent popularity hand out of the press. I for one cannot help but think that his recent behaviour is either a deliberate attempt to undermine mainstream acceptance of Linux, or the lunacy of an ego run amok.
And, I would like to see that the other contributors to PERL get their due. Whenever I put the directive "-Wall/Christiansen strict" in a make file, GCC gives me an error. Down with the facist reign of Larry Wall and his simple minions. I will not rest until the following name changes have been made: Tom/PERL Raster/RedHat E/Gnome Qt/KDE Gates/Samba GNU/Linux And Lib/Everything
Also I suggest that any program written in C be prefaced with "Brian", because without him you wouldn't even have a language to program in.
For my part, I learned to program from a book by Ivor Horton, so I will call all of my packages Ivor/Brian/Lib/iostream.h/XXX.
Ok, I might just be a predjudiced SOB, but I'm always shocked when someone is able to use a MS app to do anything useful.
I would like to make some points about Melissa. 1) As far as viruses go, Melissa was lame. Any body remember the Manilow Virus? I was hit by that, and I laughed until I found out that my HD was wiped clean. Ouch! Now that was a malicious virus. But Melissa just sends out e-mail messages to people in your address book, 50 for the sake of argument. I am a sysadmin for over 500 windows users, and I would bet you 4 of them know that they have an address book much less use it. And if you never open the attachment, nothing happens. And who opens attached files from people they don't know? I sure as heck don't. Any one who actually opened Melissa would have most likely opened the darn thing if it was called "I'll screw up your computer.exe"
The more dangerous thing that is happening is that we are now creating a new "Super Cracker" here that will be basking in the attention of his script kiddie peers. And worst of all he's a lamer. He can't even write a decent virus. (Attention/.ers, I do of course realize that there will be a Jon Katz article tomorrow about his trials with the Melissa "Super Virus" that threatened to ruin X-mas by making you read doofy e-mails that resemble porn spam, causing you to overcook your turkey right on the big day.)
Where was I? Ahhh... Yes! So, this lame VB scripter writes a lame VB virus, and turns it into an alt.sex ually transmitted disease (forgive the pun) and gets caught by some lame GUID. The fact is that he probably wanted to get caught, so that he could gloat about it. The first question that he asked his attorney was probably this, "So will I get on 20/20?"
The basis for this summation (I will not call it an essay) seems to be that we "need" a spokesmodel (sorry Linus) for the @#$% OS, therefore Stallman should be quiet while Linus flashes a boy scout smile and generally make all of the suits feel better.
How important is it for the suits to feel better? I for one enjoyed working with Linux much more in the kernel 1.2 days, there was a general air of camaraderie (sp?) among us all and we felt like we were really doing something neat. Now when I come to work I get 100 questions about why doesn't this or that work, why can't this stupid linux box work like my Win95 box, etc... These are all from people who know I'm a linux user for long time.
Our new problem will be convincing the suits that there are other distributions other than IBM Linux, Compaq Linux, and major-vendor-who-buys-out Red Hat Linux. If you are worried about the comfort level of the suits, Big blue and crew will take care of that.
I applaud every one of the developers in the Linux community for putting out something that got me more excited than my first MSAI, but this new need for acceptance will be the thing that drags us down. I applaud Stallman for standing up and saying "this is our OS, it will stay our OS. You don't like it? Here's the source code, make it your OS." (this of course does not guarntee that our tools will work with your OS)
So, if Stallman is against a "Linux Standards Organization" headed by IBM, HP, Intel, Compaq, et.al., I'm with Stallman.
My experience with the onboard boards has been dismal. Add in the idea that you can buy a bargain basement MB for 50-60$, add in a sb16 PnP for 20-30$ and an inexpensive 4 Meg video card for 40$. All of that together is about 130$ and that's a high estimate. You now know all of the stuff in your machine, can take it out at will, and if you add in a celeron 300A (60$) 64MB ram (100$) and case/power (80$) and you have a decent PC for 370$. OOPS! Add 30$ for keyboard and mouse and 20$ for a floppy. 420$. And the harddrive question boils down to size. I usually can find 2 gig hard drives for close to nothing. And 2 gig works fine for most of my linux installations. I think even with the purchase of a hard drive we have still come in at right about $500.
*/Anything is possible once it happens/* ~Jason Maggard
Slashdot Mirror
From reading this article, one would think that open sourcing a project also refers to open firing on that product. As long as we in the opensource community insist on being "the huns at the gate", companies will treat us as such, and horde their gold from us.
Is anyone out there saying Raster is right??? Regardless of the situation with his manager, that should have been kept private. I won't argue against his skill, I think his work is great, but if I was looking to hire him, I would certaintly think about his poor behaviour and decide against. He is reminiscient of a salesman that gets fired, and then calls all of the clients to tell them something bad about the company. But he didn't get fired, he quit, and then he took his grief out in public, and further damaged the reputation of a company that was limping already.
But the author of this article seems to be of the mind that this is the price that we have to pay to reap the gleaming jewel of opensource. If this is true, I say forget it. How much money can be lost due to bad press? Tons. Enough to fill our building with quality programmers who will take direction and will keep their problems out of the public eye.
So, if open source has the unfortunate drawback of airing you dirty laundry to the world, I, and I think most companies, can pass. Or better yet, we can donate some lame piece of garbage like the PFAT filesystem. Look, I've opensourced CPM! Now if I could just find that old MSAI....
Well, the usual boring stuff can be found at the local Comp USA or Babbages, including Circuit Board Keychains, Clipboards, and Day-Books... But isn't the essence of geek ware to make it yourself?? I work at newspaper where we used to use the bullets and pneumatic tubes, and the left over bullets make great change holders, pen holders, and attaching a handle makes a groovy tranparent lexan tool kit for screwdrivers and such. Also a left over tampon dispenser made a great "help request form" holder for the front door to my office.
Gut the sheetmetal from an old PC case, preferably the screwless kind, and add a handle, and you have a breifcase. AT ports become a great place to make a pencil/pen holder that is accessible from the outside, as well as the old serial port holes making useful for an eraser etc... A slimline calculator can be put on tracks inside the floppy slot. Mine is my olde Packard Bell 286, and I just joke with people that I have finally found a use for a Packard Bell... Again, put your "Hacker Inside" logo on the front and you'll be the envy of Linux Expo.
But c'mon, you're a geek! Use your imagination. I have even used the old platters from our RLL hard drives to make an attractive desk cover. I'm talking the big suckers that used to attach to our PDP-7's. An Autokon front panel with a light bulb and a rotating multicolored transparent sheet makes an attractive wall covering.
Hmmm, Maybe I sould start a website selling this stuff....
Jason Maggard
Richmond Times-Disgrace
Dof! The nintendo power glove is great for garage VR applications. I use mine as a mouse, and can still type with that hand.
Basically it's just some fiber-optic strands that react to a finger bend. Replace the inner material with something breatheable and comfortable, get the pin outs right, and you are in business. Now, combine that with a glove keyboard design, and you have a great wearable design.
There is an old analogy that I once heard used to explain the choice between MacOS and DOS. "An operating system is like a record player, if I sold you the world's greatest record player, but it would only play "Tom Jones' Greatest Hits", you'd better really like Tom Jones, or buy another record player."
.Xdefaults file in their home directory and can't find it, (but I ran ls like you told me to... Oh! ls -a!) it makes for articles like this one.
For my part, I like the applications on Linux, and with the advent of KDE, and all of the KDE games, my wife the techophobe has even started asking that I leave my computer up in linux. (Dual booting and all that)
That said, occasionally I want to listen to something different. Baldur's Gate does not run under Linux, neither do many of the entertainment titles that I play. Linux still does not support many of the top cards out there, or any EAX cards, etc... And I like IE 4.0. The full screen mode appeals to me. And when the guy comes with the cable modem, I'm not going to tell him to forget it because there's no Linux driver.
We Linux guys need to face facts. If you aren't a programmer, not a technophile, and you load up Red Hat 5.2, (the curent version as far as CompUSA is concerned) with the default set to FVWM95 (shudder) it looks like a rinky-dink OS, it runs like a rinky-dink OS, and it quacks like a rinky-dink OS. You have Apache running in the background by default chewing up memory (10-20MB), FVWM95 runs like molasses on a P200 with 64MB of RAM. And what can you do? Use the GIMP? A photoshop 3.0 clone? Only if you also get the RH power tools, And then everything is marked "ALPHA - This will blow up your machine and burn your toast."
As we fire off our flames to anybody who says that Linux is not for everbody, remember that it is not for everbody. 99% of computer people don't care how good the compiler is, don't really mind rebooting once a day, wouldn't look at the source code even if it was included, and don't understand why you have to be root to change a menu in your WM.
And I will also remind you that we've got FUD down cold. A typical Slashdot post goes in to great detail about how Win9x will crash on you every 2 minutes, and that Bill Gates is the devil tyring to subvert you into a MS slave. I'd say that this article holds up a mirror to how silly our community anti-Mickeysoft sentiment really is.
And when the average home user trys out Linux and spends an hour trying to get X-windows set up on their video card, downloads a new program and runs it only to get a screen full of missing library file errors, tries to get a PNP sound card set up, needs to be a scripter to get a PPP connection to their ISP, gets told to look for the
Indeed, I know people that have started running Linux that can't figure out how to use vi, but the all swear it's great... Why? Because everybody says it's great, that's why.
Do you really want to have some fun with this guy? Send him an e-mail congratulating him on pointing out some flaws in our OS, and ask him where he feels that improvements need to be made. For each point that he brings up let him know how to better set up his machine if it relates to that, let him know that it's being worked on and point him to the web site of the developer, driver issues, explain that the attitude of hardware manufacturers is changing, and that with that so is the availability of hardware support, basically show him that linux does work, and well. It would be more fun to make him eat his words. We might find that he has no idea how to make it better... then we post his e-mail message on slashdot and show the world that he is just mumbling out his butt.
This also accomplishes a loftier goal, it shows him the greatest strength of our OS, _community_.
~hamnrye
P.S. Where can I get an asbestos keyboard?
What has red hat done bad? It has introduced Linux to the masses.
I think that alot of flack gets dished out to Red Hat because they attract a large # of newbies that ask questions in newsgroups like "Why doesn't X-windows work? I am running Red Hat 5.2."
I run a little corner of linux machines in our company, and I also happen to be the office that home users go to to ask linux questions. And for all of my paitence I get tired of explaining that Disk Druid is buggy in the 5.1 release, I don't use netcfg, so don't ask me why it doesn't work, and yes, your system seems very slow because FVWM95 makes KDE look like TWM.
But I also explain that SuSE users should go ahead and do away with running Apache local as soon as they have a good PPP connection, etc... But some of the slackware eletists feel that anybody who runs YAST to add a user is running a podunk watered-down distro. So herein lies the problem.
I am not a Red Hat fan, because I feel that they try to sell too many packages as additional to the distro. The Red Hat Power tools are an add on, and they charge you again. SuSE includes that on the standard distro.
That's my $0.02.
Using MS Visual C++, (sorry, but it has to be cross platform around here...) A single user interface that I can design in 2-3 hours comes out to about 1,000 lines of code with a splash screen, an about box, etc... In Unix, the same thing can be accomplished with Tk libraries in about 100 lines of code.
So, I write the program for Unix, and use 100 lines. The guy sitting next to me ports the program to Win95, and uses 1,000 lines, and half the time, because I have already made all of the components cross-platform. Who just did more work?
And how long is a line anyway?
cout
So, the above is 4 lines or 1?
cout
How about now?
cout cout cout cout
And just to be obtuse, one more example:
cout
Hmmm, change my answer in the poll. I guess I wrote over 20,000 lines last year, I just did it in 6,000 lines.
Hamnrye
/*Gather up the gold you found you fool, it's only moonlight*/
Attentiones Firaxis!
Consider $50 of my cash set aside for this one. My only complaint is that this will probably distract me from the Linux RPG that I've been working on. Need anyone to help with the port?
Some days life is actually good...
~hamnrye
I completely agree with RMS, this has gotten out of hand. When we no longer appreciate the hard work he's done, and refuse to rename the operating system and further confuse the press and newbies, we are doing the FSF a disservice.
I for one refer to my computer in order of the programs that I use most often. I call my OS KDE/GCC/VI/Apache/Gimp/Blender/StarOffice/DF. Notice that I do not use the term "Linux" in there, because how many times have I invoked linux from the command line? Never.
And I can't understand why this wasn't an issue for RMS two years ago... It has been repeatedly stated that for him it is not a popularity contest, but it somehow seems that he wants his due in the recent popularity hand out of the press. I for one cannot help but think that his recent behaviour is either a deliberate attempt to undermine mainstream acceptance of Linux, or the lunacy of an ego run amok.
And, I would like to see that the other contributors to PERL get their due. Whenever I put the directive "-Wall/Christiansen strict" in a make file, GCC gives me an error. Down with the facist reign of Larry Wall and his simple minions. I will not rest until the following name changes have been made:
Tom/PERL
Raster/RedHat
E/Gnome
Qt/KDE
Gates/Samba
GNU/Linux
And Lib/Everything
Also I suggest that any program written in C be prefaced with "Brian", because without him you wouldn't even have a language to program in.
For my part, I learned to program from a book by Ivor Horton, so I will call all of my packages Ivor/Brian/Lib/iostream.h/XXX.
I thank you and good night.
~hamnrye
Ok, I might just be a predjudiced SOB, but I'm always shocked when someone is able to use a MS app to do anything useful.
I would like to make some points about Melissa. 1) As far as viruses go, Melissa was lame. Any body remember the Manilow Virus? I was hit by that, and I laughed until I found out that my HD was wiped clean. Ouch! Now that was a malicious virus. But Melissa just sends out e-mail messages to people in your address book, 50 for the sake of argument. I am a sysadmin for over 500 windows users, and I would bet you 4 of them know that they have an address book much less use it. And if you never open the attachment, nothing happens. And who opens attached files from people they don't know? I sure as heck don't. Any one who actually opened Melissa would have most likely opened the darn thing if it was called "I'll screw up your computer.exe"
The more dangerous thing that is happening is that we are now creating a new "Super Cracker" here that will be basking in the attention of his script kiddie peers. And worst of all he's a lamer. He can't even write a decent virus. (Attention /.ers, I do of course realize that there will be a Jon Katz article tomorrow about his trials with the Melissa "Super Virus" that threatened to ruin X-mas by making you read doofy e-mails that resemble porn spam, causing you to overcook your turkey right on the big day.)
Where was I? Ahhh... Yes! So, this lame VB scripter writes a lame VB virus, and turns it into an alt.sex ually transmitted disease (forgive the pun) and gets caught by some lame GUID. The fact is that he probably wanted to get caught, so that he could gloat about it. The first question that he asked his attorney was probably this, "So will I get on 20/20?"
The basis for this summation (I will not call it an essay) seems to be that we "need" a spokesmodel (sorry Linus) for the @#$% OS, therefore Stallman should be quiet while Linus flashes a boy scout smile and generally make all of the suits feel better.
How important is it for the suits to feel better? I for one enjoyed working with Linux much more in the kernel 1.2 days, there was a general air of camaraderie (sp?) among us all and we felt like we were really doing something neat. Now when I come to work I get 100 questions about why doesn't this or that work, why can't this stupid linux box work like my Win95 box, etc... These are all from people who know I'm a linux user for long time.
Our new problem will be convincing the suits that there are other distributions other than IBM Linux, Compaq Linux, and major-vendor-who-buys-out Red Hat Linux. If you are worried about the comfort level of the suits, Big blue and crew will take care of that.
I applaud every one of the developers in the Linux community for putting out something that got me more excited than my first MSAI, but this new need for acceptance will be the thing that drags us down. I applaud Stallman for standing up and saying "this is our OS, it will stay our OS. You don't like it? Here's the source code, make it your OS." (this of course does not guarntee that our tools will work with your OS)
So, if Stallman is against a "Linux Standards Organization" headed by IBM, HP, Intel, Compaq, et.al., I'm with Stallman.
My experience with the onboard boards has been dismal. Add in the idea that you can buy a bargain basement MB for 50-60$, add in a sb16 PnP for 20-30$ and an inexpensive 4 Meg video card for 40$. All of that together is about 130$ and that's a high estimate. You now know all of the stuff in your machine, can take it out at will, and if you add in a celeron 300A (60$) 64MB ram (100$) and case/power (80$) and you have a decent PC for 370$. OOPS! Add 30$ for keyboard and mouse and 20$ for a floppy. 420$. And the harddrive question boils down to size. I usually can find 2 gig hard drives for close to nothing. And 2 gig works fine for most of my linux installations. I think even with the purchase of a hard drive we have still come in at right about $500.
*/Anything is possible once it happens/*
~Jason Maggard
It's Saturday around 4:00, and their site is unreachable. I guess their NT server crashed.