The best 'geek bar' I have ever been in: the former Liberty Cafe in Central Square. They had "the Bomb" - six shots of espresso straight up, and Net access back in like 96 or 97. Then the guys that ran it were kicked out to make way for the gentrification of CentSqu, and the infusion of Starbucks, "luxury" apartments" and the Gap.
(I wouldn't normally pursue this but half the people posting seem to be from the Boston area...)
I lived in Central Square for four years, until recently, and am hardly a fan of corporate monoculture. In fact, I've never set foot in either Starbucks or the Gap since they've opened here.
But this stuff I keep hearing about Central Square as Paradise Lost really strikes me as the false glow of memory. The Liberty Cafe was OK, if not especially busy, but most of the businesses that got pushed out were just plain awful. The clubs, Indian restaurants and music stores are mostly still there. If the people who complain now had patronized the filthy Chinese food / donut shop, the $39 tuxedo store or that dentist who was straight out of Marathon Man they'd all still be there too. And how many neighborhoods outside of Pyongyang could support two Communist bookstores within three blocks? I don't revere market forces as an all-good force but, come on - you've got to try a little.
Meanwhile, I'm loving life in Somerville now. No unshoveled sidewalks, no idiot yuppies who can't be troubled to clean up after their golden retrievers...
Well, there's two different ideas being mingled here: transgenic animals (being called "biotech" here, also referred to as "Frankensteins" or other such FUD) and biological pest control (which is considered politically correct and envirronmentally sound for reasons which baffle me). You're right that it's the introduction of the foreign species that is the danger here - the "mutant" aspect is largely irrelevant.
This was announced yesterday and since dot.kde.org is down with ISP trouble I figured I'd mention it here:
since some minutes ago the audiocd: io-slave can save the ripped audio
files in mp3- (using LAME) or Ogg-Vorbis format (using libvorbis). Kudos
go to Carsten Duvenhorst . There are additional
top-level dirs "MP3" and "Ogg Vorbis", under them the tracks are listed
with extension ".mp3" and ".ogg". When copied from there the destination
is automatically compressed by one of the methods. If the CD-info was
backed by CDDB also Id3V1 tags are created for the mp3 case, and normal
tags for vorbis.
You can now simply rip the contents of a complete CD from konqui by simply
opening the "MP3/" directory selecting all files there, and copy them to
another real directory, which is rather cool. (The only thing which must
be done, is to give the dest dir a good name, as the mp3 dir has no subdir
identifying the CD). The bitrate for mp3 can be selected by an "br=196"
(e.g. to set it to 196 KBps) query argument to the URL.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Re:A Theory is a Theory -- Social or Mathematical
on
The Hacker Ethic
·
· Score: 1
A central tenet of all systems of logic is that if one, and only one if necessary, contradictory counterexample is found then the theory is disproved.
That's precisely the point - a "theory" in this context isn't a formal statement of logic, it's a meaningful generalization.
I read the review a couple of times and I'm still not exactly sure what the point of it is. Maybe I need to read the book to really get it but it sounds like a rehash of Cathedral / Bazaar-driven hype circa 1998. (Hackers! Internet! Linux! Sleepless nights! Conventional organizations - you are doomed. Listen to Eric Raymond or suffer the consequences.)
Years later, the cathedral builders may have given up a little market share to the bazaar (or, as in the case of IE vs. Mozilla, gained some at its expense). But the idea that free-floating collaborations are going to drive organizations out of existence should be laughable on its face.
At least this is better than the Salon piece about this book (ripped to shreds on Slashdot) where Andrew Leonard rhapsodizes for pages over an admin in his office who hoses his system while trying to install 2.4 and then wastes the next few days "hacking" to recompile KDE.
Scott and Chris: Assuming you were, at one point, a fan of Star Trek, are you still one now? How do you feel about the current state of the franchise?
Berke: I quit cartooning because I wanted to go out before things exhausted themselves. Its a pity others don't do the same. Haven't watched in ten years. Although I did sit with Jonathan Frakes the other day while he directed a movie. I had to pretend that I had watched more Trek than I had. Seemed the right thing to do.
I know, spelling flames are obnoxious and petty. But I swear I don't mean this as a flame - it just made me laugh when I deciphered it:
I was completely uphauled by this, and so promptly turned around and tried to get as many people interested as I could in Linux.
I guess I've been reading too many Aubrey/Maturin novels lately but I pondered that for a couple of minutes before realizing it wasn't meant to be a nautical metaphor...
I spend a lot of time on OPN (#kde, #ppclinux and #windowmaker) and think it's a great resource. It contributes greatly to development and support and Linux corporations could (and frequently do) make investments with much thinner returns than helping out OPN.
That said, it wasn't clear to me what they're planning to do except have a bigger, faster, more stable and secure IRC network. Not that there's anything wrong with that - that's exactly what they should be doing. But isn't running an IRC net a pretty standard activity? What is this "Mr. Toad metaproject" adding?
Capitalism does not reward innovation in anything but marketing. The best car is not always the best-selling car for example, it's an image thing.
Uh, yeah. That explains those lousy Accords and Saturns we're driving around while various Central Ministries of Industry were forcing their subjects to properly appreciate Ladas and Trabants.
Of course, people are generally idiots and need to be told what to do by -- wait, let me guess -- you and your *cough* cyber-vandal cronies.
Katz makes these odd pronouncements like "Another problem is the selective nature of the Justice Department's prosecution of Microsoft, which suggests the government is regulating predatory corporations when it certainly is not. In the Corporate Republic, the land of AOL/Time-Warner and the Disney Corp., is Microsoft really that unusual, or even particularly predatory?" What's regulated by antitrust law is the behavior of a company in a monopoly situation, not the behavior of whichever company is currently impinging on someone's idea of political correctness. Disney has a monopoly on what, exactly?
Come on, it's not like we're covering fresh ground here.
...and, in fact, Slashdot moderation has turned into a cat and mouse struggle very similar to the nethack situation you describe. That's precisely the problem with turning things into a game. It's fun for the players but annoying for those of us who are trying to read this site during the time between when an idiot troll discovers some new vulnerability and when the hole is patched.
Nethack still requires a direct line for ranged attacks? That sucks - Angband fixed that years ago.
The introduction of karma in Slashdot was an interesting psychological experiment - look how nuts people can go over something that has absolutely no value. I mean, I know I can't do anything with it but I've still effectively retired my low-four-digit-id account in large part because I've been conditioned to value karma and it bothers me at some level to see it get whittled away.
Anyway, the lesson is that you can't "just" introduce some scoring system without people getting crazy over it. If you decide to go with such a plan, get ready for ad karma whoring, trolling, bot and script hogging and all the rest of the headaches that are going to accompany it.
Sorry, I was wavering between moderating you up and chiming in and the opportunity to run my mouth took priority...
You're absolutely right and this is precisely the kind of panicked, low-ball-price marketing that's killed Corel for years. They love to do these bursts of "WordPerfect for $3.99" with no regard for the long-term efects on their brand names. It's no wonder people think of Corel software as one notch above the shovelware CDs near the registers at CompUSA.
Sorry, I was responding on the assumption that you're one of those bonehead Americans who thinks this is the worst place on earth to live because he's never been anyplace else. Looking at your email address, I see it's more likely that you're a bonehead European who thinks he's learned everything about the US from Slashdot posts.
For you and the others like you: The depiction of life in the US by Slashdot posters is about as accurate as the depiction of Microsoft software. There's plenty of room for improvement but idiocy like "The only important kind of entity in the US is the campaign-contributing and lobbying corporations. The well-being of the individual has not been an issue for a very, very long time." is about as accurate as "WinBlows is completely unusable! You have to reboot every five minutes!"
Think about it: are you free? What freedoms do you enjoy? Are these freedoms _real_ or just percieved? What freedoms do you lack? Which freedoms are significant? Are you able to think _beyond_ current laws and legal principles and think about what is _morally_ better?
Well, let's see:
I can vote for the officials who are going to govern me
I can practice my religion openly, in contrast to two of my grandparents who were literally the only members of the families to survive the Nazis
I can criticize the government without fear of retribution
And here's what I can't do:
Buy one copy of Quicken and install it on two computers
Make my own carbonated beverage and sell it as Coka-Cola
Break into computer systems I'm not supposed to be in
Cause everyone else to vote for Ralph Nader
Yes, on the whole I think I'm way ahead of people in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia or China.
You remind me of the Ask Slashdot where the questioner was waxing enthusiastic about life in countries that dodn't belong to the WIPO, like Afghanistan. Know what? If the right to warez is so important to you, go live in Afghanistan. Of course, the Taliban won't let you own a TV.
Err, Microsoft invested in Corel, destroyed it and is leaving.. Seriously, so many people saying that - can anyone point to anything that's happened there since Microsoft came in?
Anyway, here's my refined theory: Microsoft needs to keep its competitors afloat and will intercede to rescue them, Apple being the most obvious example. Unfortunately, keeping Corel solvent is beyond even Bill Gates' power. When MS realized Corel was doomed no matter what, they decided to bail so they at least couldn't be blamed for being present at the death scene.
With 20 posts already, no one has mentioned the fact that the Corel acquisition was getting them into deeper trouble with the antitrust people at the DOJ. I don't know why they'd be bothered about that now and not before, but maybe they didn't think it would raise eyebrows. Anyway, that seems to be the most likely explanation for why they're bailing now.
For the people claiming "Microsoft invested in Corel, destroyed and is leaving the body for the vultures." -could you please elaborate on what they did to accomplish that? Persuade them that there was a meaningful Linux desktop market to target?
Oh yeah? I just went up to that goddess who works down the hall from me, told her about how I've already updated my boxes to the 2.4.2 kernel (making sure to emphasize the word boxes) and asked if her if she'd go out with me. She still laughed and said no.
Shows how much you know! Probably I need to get a better graphics card. Then I'll get some, for sure.
(Just kidding - I applaud your efforts. Could you also try to get people to stop saying "fsck" instead of "fuck?" And "sheeple" and "BZZT! Wrong!")
How does the fact that an NT box somewhere has a 3 day uptime means the guy you're responding to doesn't have a 342 day uptime?
And why are you assuming that whatever web server Netcraft is tracking is part of the Datacenter Server setup that's supposed to be providing the 99.999% uptime?
Come on, my Linux box at home isn't even on now - does that mean Linux doesn't run at all?
In the linux world we have kernel releases more often. You can upgrade if you want to, if you are satisfied with the older kernel but need a bug fixed you can usually patch just that bug.
I don't know if that makes much difference. Let's say SP 1 == kernel x.y.1 through 5. How many people will be running x.y.5 without the changes introduced in the 2->3 transition? Yes, I know you can do it and yes, I know how to do it. But realistically there's almost no one doing that. For most users, using kernel x.y.z means using all the patches introduced between 0 and z.
First of all, the headline seems misleading. The linked article says Stallman studied the new APSL and decided it didn't meet his standards. It doesn't say anywhere that Apple requested anything from him.
The reality is that the people who want to work on Darwin - BSD and NeXT types, for the most part - are. The folks who were screaming their heads off about APSL 1.0 didn't start contributing after Apple released 1.1 to address Bruce Perens' objections, didn't start contributing after 1.2 was released and aren't going to start even if 1.3 meets FSF standards.
And now it's time for all the "As a result of this, I'll never do business with Apple again!" posts from people who have never owned a Mac and never plaaned to. And the usual "Everything Apple makes sucks, and furthermore they won't GPL it all so we can use it."
Absolutely - this article, the Stephen J. Gould thing a few days ago and much of the reporting on this topic is written as though the last 30 years of molecular biology research all took place last week.
Of course, it doesn't help that the Genome Project leaders and publicists are doing their utmost to give that impression.
The reality is that assembly isn't quite finished and we're not close to having the tools to really make sense of the new information that's just come in. What can be done right now is to confirm all sorts of things that were already well known on a smaller scale, and all those are being dressed up as "Look what we've learned from the human genome!"
Everyone is seeking their own selfish gratification in being recognized for adding a new feature to a program, but no one is willing to try and make the existing features work properly. I'd like to see this issue addressed more often in programming circles, because something desperately needs to be done.
I agree with you about the problem but there's no reason why debugging, usability improvements and documentation have to be considered less important contributions than adding new, marginally useful features. The celebrity-worshipping pecking order that's built up around free software makes that judgement. Slashdot raves about shaded transparent pull-down menus and the guy who added them - not about the person who translated the app into Japanese, wrote the documentation or made the interface more intuitive. If that situation were reversed, you'd see a lot more people doing translation and documentation and fewer stupid features like text preview in file manager icons.
Everyone knows who Miguel is - how many people can name the heads of the KDE and Gnome documentation projects?
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. An "online commercial real estate start-up" called "Zethus?" That should have been warning sign number one.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
(I wouldn't normally pursue this but half the people posting seem to be from the Boston area...)
I lived in Central Square for four years, until recently, and am hardly a fan of corporate monoculture. In fact, I've never set foot in either Starbucks or the Gap since they've opened here.
But this stuff I keep hearing about Central Square as Paradise Lost really strikes me as the false glow of memory. The Liberty Cafe was OK, if not especially busy, but most of the businesses that got pushed out were just plain awful. The clubs, Indian restaurants and music stores are mostly still there. If the people who complain now had patronized the filthy Chinese food / donut shop, the $39 tuxedo store or that dentist who was straight out of Marathon Man they'd all still be there too. And how many neighborhoods outside of Pyongyang could support two Communist bookstores within three blocks? I don't revere market forces as an all-good force but, come on - you've got to try a little.
Meanwhile, I'm loving life in Somerville now. No unshoveled sidewalks, no idiot yuppies who can't be troubled to clean up after their golden retrievers...
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
since some minutes ago the audiocd: io-slave can save the ripped audio files in mp3- (using LAME) or Ogg-Vorbis format (using libvorbis). Kudos go to Carsten Duvenhorst . There are additional top-level dirs "MP3" and "Ogg Vorbis", under them the tracks are listed with extension ".mp3" and ".ogg". When copied from there the destination is automatically compressed by one of the methods. If the CD-info was backed by CDDB also Id3V1 tags are created for the mp3 case, and normal tags for vorbis.
You can now simply rip the contents of a complete CD from konqui by simply opening the "MP3/" directory selecting all files there, and copy them to another real directory, which is rather cool. (The only thing which must be done, is to give the dest dir a good name, as the mp3 dir has no subdir identifying the CD). The bitrate for mp3 can be selected by an "br=196" (e.g. to set it to 196 KBps) query argument to the URL.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
That's precisely the point - a "theory" in this context isn't a formal statement of logic, it's a meaningful generalization.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Years later, the cathedral builders may have given up a little market share to the bazaar (or, as in the case of IE vs. Mozilla, gained some at its expense). But the idea that free-floating collaborations are going to drive organizations out of existence should be laughable on its face.
At least this is better than the Salon piece about this book (ripped to shreds on Slashdot) where Andrew Leonard rhapsodizes for pages over an admin in his office who hoses his system while trying to install 2.4 and then wastes the next few days "hacking" to recompile KDE.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Scott and Chris: Assuming you were, at one point, a fan of Star Trek, are you still one now? How do you feel about the current state of the franchise?
Berke: I quit cartooning because I wanted to go out before things exhausted themselves. Its a pity others don't do the same. Haven't watched in ten years. Although I did sit with Jonathan Frakes the other day while he directed a movie. I had to pretend that I had watched more Trek than I had. Seemed the right thing to do.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
I was completely uphauled by this, and so promptly turned around and tried to get as many people interested as I could in Linux.
I guess I've been reading too many Aubrey/Maturin novels lately but I pondered that for a couple of minutes before realizing it wasn't meant to be a nautical metaphor...
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
That said, it wasn't clear to me what they're planning to do except have a bigger, faster, more stable and secure IRC network. Not that there's anything wrong with that - that's exactly what they should be doing. But isn't running an IRC net a pretty standard activity? What is this "Mr. Toad metaproject" adding?
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Uh, yeah. That explains those lousy Accords and Saturns we're driving around while various Central Ministries of Industry were forcing their subjects to properly appreciate Ladas and Trabants.
Of course, people are generally idiots and need to be told what to do by -- wait, let me guess -- you and your *cough* cyber-vandal cronies.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Katz makes these odd pronouncements like "Another problem is the selective nature of the Justice Department's prosecution of Microsoft, which suggests the government is regulating predatory corporations when it certainly is not. In the Corporate Republic, the land of AOL/Time-Warner and the Disney Corp., is Microsoft really that unusual, or even particularly predatory?" What's regulated by antitrust law is the behavior of a company in a monopoly situation, not the behavior of whichever company is currently impinging on someone's idea of political correctness. Disney has a monopoly on what, exactly?
Come on, it's not like we're covering fresh ground here.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Nethack still requires a direct line for ranged attacks? That sucks - Angband fixed that years ago.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
Anyway, the lesson is that you can't "just" introduce some scoring system without people getting crazy over it. If you decide to go with such a plan, get ready for ad karma whoring, trolling, bot and script hogging and all the rest of the headaches that are going to accompany it.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
You're absolutely right and this is precisely the kind of panicked, low-ball-price marketing that's killed Corel for years. They love to do these bursts of "WordPerfect for $3.99" with no regard for the long-term efects on their brand names. It's no wonder people think of Corel software as one notch above the shovelware CDs near the registers at CompUSA.
Unsettling MOTD at my ISP.
For you and the others like you:
The depiction of life in the US by Slashdot posters is about as accurate as the depiction of Microsoft software. There's plenty of room for improvement but idiocy like "The only important kind of entity in the US is the campaign-contributing and lobbying corporations. The well-being of the individual has not been an issue for a very, very long time." is about as accurate as "WinBlows is completely unusable! You have to reboot every five minutes!"
Well, let's see:
- I can vote for the officials who are going to govern me
- I can practice my religion openly, in contrast to two of my grandparents who were literally the only members of the families to survive the Nazis
- I can criticize the government without fear of retribution
And here's what I can't do:- Buy one copy of Quicken and install it on two computers
- Make my own carbonated beverage and sell it as Coka-Cola
- Break into computer systems I'm not supposed to be in
- Cause everyone else to vote for Ralph Nader
Yes, on the whole I think I'm way ahead of people in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia or China.You remind me of the Ask Slashdot where the questioner was waxing enthusiastic about life in countries that dodn't belong to the WIPO, like Afghanistan. Know what? If the right to warez is so important to you, go live in Afghanistan. Of course, the Taliban won't let you own a TV.
Anyway, here's my refined theory: Microsoft needs to keep its competitors afloat and will intercede to rescue them, Apple being the most obvious example. Unfortunately, keeping Corel solvent is beyond even Bill Gates' power. When MS realized Corel was doomed no matter what, they decided to bail so they at least couldn't be blamed for being present at the death scene.
For the people claiming "Microsoft invested in Corel, destroyed and is leaving the body for the vultures." -could you please elaborate on what they did to accomplish that? Persuade them that there was a meaningful Linux desktop market to target?
Shows how much you know! Probably I need to get a better graphics card. Then I'll get some, for sure.
(Just kidding - I applaud your efforts. Could you also try to get people to stop saying "fsck" instead of "fuck?" And "sheeple" and "BZZT! Wrong!")
How does the fact that an NT box somewhere has a 3 day uptime means the guy you're responding to doesn't have a 342 day uptime?
And why are you assuming that whatever web server Netcraft is tracking is part of the Datacenter Server setup that's supposed to be providing the 99.999% uptime?
Come on, my Linux box at home isn't even on now - does that mean Linux doesn't run at all?
I don't know if that makes much difference. Let's say SP 1 == kernel x.y.1 through 5. How many people will be running x.y.5 without the changes introduced in the 2->3 transition? Yes, I know you can do it and yes, I know how to do it. But realistically there's almost no one doing that. For most users, using kernel x.y.z means using all the patches introduced between 0 and z.
The reality is that the people who want to work on Darwin - BSD and NeXT types, for the most part - are. The folks who were screaming their heads off about APSL 1.0 didn't start contributing after Apple released 1.1 to address Bruce Perens' objections, didn't start contributing after 1.2 was released and aren't going to start even if 1.3 meets FSF standards.
And now it's time for all the "As a result of this, I'll never do business with Apple again!" posts from people who have never owned a Mac and never plaaned to. And the usual "Everything Apple makes sucks, and furthermore they won't GPL it all so we can use it."
Of course, it doesn't help that the Genome Project leaders and publicists are doing their utmost to give that impression.
The reality is that assembly isn't quite finished and we're not close to having the tools to really make sense of the new information that's just come in. What can be done right now is to confirm all sorts of things that were already well known on a smaller scale, and all those are being dressed up as "Look what we've learned from the human genome!"
I agree with you about the problem but there's no reason why debugging, usability improvements and documentation have to be considered less important contributions than adding new, marginally useful features. The celebrity-worshipping pecking order that's built up around free software makes that judgement. Slashdot raves about shaded transparent pull-down menus and the guy who added them - not about the person who translated the app into Japanese, wrote the documentation or made the interface more intuitive. If that situation were reversed, you'd see a lot more people doing translation and documentation and fewer stupid features like text preview in file manager icons.
Everyone knows who Miguel is - how many people can name the heads of the KDE and Gnome documentation projects?