It's stories like this (I have heard similar tales from other people) that put me off emailing ESR. I have some suggestions for the Jargon File, but I shan't bother if I'm likely to get a response like this.
I guess he'd have a point. I've been a member of the "geek community" for only a few years. What could I possibly have to offer?
Most of my geek-related knowhow is derived from stuff I learned at college. I ddin't learn it from the staff though. They were mostly on another planet; caught up in their research and out of touch with the students.
I became the geek I am today through hanging around in a computer lab with other geeks. We learned off each other. A lot of them had their own Linux boxes and thus knew tons about sysadmining. They were able to pass that knowledge along to those of us who didn't admin our own boxes. I spent a lot of time at college just messing about with Unix, compiling and installing software; just getting a "feel" for the system. If I ever got stuck, there were a whole bunch of other geeks in the room to help me. In my final year, I knew enough to help the proto-geeks in the years below me.
(the degree I managed to scrape through came in handy when I started applying for jobs too:-)
If Kosovo is an "Internet war", then was VietNam a "TV war", or World War II a "radio war"?
Nowadays, the Web can be used as TV and radio are used - as a mass communications medium to broadcast to the world. It can carry truth, and it can carry propaganda, in the same way that TV and radio do. In the past (and indeed in this war), opposing forces have worked to knock out the opposition's communications, by destroying TV and radio transmitters and jamming signals. Cracking NATO's website is analagous to this kind of activity; the difference being that Web-based attacks aren't purely the domain of the military.
The war isn't being fought with the Net. It's being fought with aircraft, missiles, bombs and guns. Those are the things that are killing people.
Although I shudder to think what he'd put together (would EMACS be used for everything?;^)
There's no reason why it couldn't be your login shell. Log in, do ^X!startx and watch your window manager and a bunch of xterms pop up, with an Emacs in each one! ("Stephen, you are twisted" - everyone else on Slashdot)
Haven't used SFS (though I've heard a lot of good things about it); however, I do use PFS2 on my Amiga's hard drive and Zip disks. It's a similar idea to SFS; a file system that is organized in a less stupid way than FFS, and promises data coherency no matter what horrible things you do to your machine. It works perfectly; when the Amiga crashes in the middle of a write (which happens a lot to me, since there's no memory protection and I do a lot of silly things), it boots straight back up again. No corrupted filesystems, no waits while the filesystem is revalidated.
It's waaaaaaaay faster than FFS too, and has a hidden directory in the root of each filesystem which stores copies of the last thirty deleted files, so people who rm first and think later (like me) don't have to spend ages trawling through backups;-)
I strongly recommend Amigans who still use FFS to check it out. UK Amigans can buy it from Ramjam Consultants.
You'll stay in a luxury beachhouse through Saturday, May 29 and enjoy all the sites of Wrightsville Beach and Wilmington, NC, as you have fun in the sun.
At the risk of sounding like a stereotypical geek, I personally don't find "fun in the sun" to be much of a motivator. I never have been into doing stuff outside, and haven't set foot on a beach for years.
Everyone seems to want the File as flat ASCII
on
Jargon File v4.1.0
·
· Score: 2
From reading the above comments, I see I'm not the only one who wants the Jargon File as flat ASCII, like the previous versions. Here's the plan: we all write scripts to make a flat version of the File, and decide on something to call them (e.g. "JFF"). Then, the next version of the File will have an entry something like this:
:JFF:/J-F-F/ 1./n./ Abbreviation of "Jargon File Flattener", a script written to convert the HTML versions of the Jargon File to flat ASCII. 2/v./ The action of applying a JFF to the File.
:-)
What's the point of grouping people like this ?
on
Jargon File v4.1.0
·
· Score: 2
I assume you're referring to the hacker profile section at the back; I've always found it to be very correct - it sounds like *most* of the hackers I know
In some places, it's different to most of the hackers I know, but we all differ from the File in the same way. For example, ESR asserts that hackers don't watch much television. The hackers I know don't watch much mainstream television, but enjoy TV programmes which could be described as "cult TV" (Star Trek in all its incarnations, Babylon 5, The Simpsons, South Park, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf etc etc).
Have you read much of the Jargon File? Have a nice, long read; you'll see that most of it is really hacker slang, not tech jargon as such.
As ESR points out in the File, slang is a vital part of any subculture, used as a tool of communication, inclusion and exclusion. As Al Gore is discovering.
Trying to fit in with a subculture simply by using their jargon just makes you appear silly. If you were to visit East London and start talking in rhyming slang because you thought it'd make you fit in, you'd just end up sounding an idiot (and would probably attract the attention of some burly Cockney lads who thought you were taking the mickey). So it is with Al.
Nah, it's sufficiently different:-) "Debenhams GNU/Linux" would make an interesting parody of some sort though. I'd do it myself if I had a sufficiently well-developed sense of humour.
(I hope Debian Linux fits my new computer as well as Debenhams jeans fit me. I have a 28" waist and a 29" inside leg measurement, so it's kinda hard to get trousers that fit. Most manufacturers start at 30").
guatamnlad's design looks the best to me. I think it's really professional: simple, memorable, and eyecatching. Also, having the "official" and "open use" logos so similar, with one a simplified variation on the other, makes a lot of sense IMHO.
Mind you, the "Debian Linux" caption is likely to upset someone...
Sorry, but there's only one problem with this arguement - who would buy a bunch of "information appliances" if you have 1 that does everything (even if it costs more).
You might as well ask "who wants all those single-purpose Unix text processing tools? Why bother with sed, grep, awk, perl, troff and some random editor when you can get BogoWord '99 which does everything in one package?" Some people prefer one big monolithic application, some people prefer lots of small tools.
I have a feeling that the same argument can be applied to hardware. Some people will want to keep their all-in-one computing box. Other people will prefer several small appliances.
Whether this would stand up in court is another matter. I hope it never comes to that. There is also the worry that some corporation could subpoena (is that the right word? I'm not well up on American legalese) Rob and make him hand over the account details of a poster. I think this happened on a Yahoo message board recently.
Um.... if it's april foolery, it's terribly annoying.:P
Like April Fools' Day itself:-)
I've made a point of being extra vigilant ever since my mother fooled me when I was a kid. I ran downstairs in my pyjamas to get a glimpse of the rare furry animal she said was in our back garden, only to be told "April Fool!". No-one's caught me out since.
This guy doesn't seem to distinguish between "clueless" and "newbie". IMHO, someone who doesn't know very much but is eager and willing to learn is a "newbie". Someone who may have been using a system for years, but who wants to be spoonfed, doesn't want to think for h(im|er)self and won't listen to what you say is "clueless".
All being well, I will be attempting my first Linux install in a few months time (probably the m68k version of Debian). I'm not afraid of reading documentation. Actually, I love reading documentation. I've started already - I tend to start soaking up information weeks ahead of time, so I'm prepared for things when they happen. However, if worst comes to worst, and I need help from another human being, it looks like I can expect to be hit over the head with a bunch of HOWTOs and told I didn't try hard enough.
Note to the condescending hackers reading this - you were newbies once. If nobody helped you, then I'm sorry you had such a hard time, but this doesn't justify you giving a hard time to other people who want to learn.
I tried IE4 for HP-UX last year. It used a proprietary widget set that looked almost like the Windows GUI. It created a.microsoft directory in my home directory, containing a registry, of all things. Basically, they did the bare minimum to get it running under Unix. It didn't behave like I'd expect a Unix browser to behave.
To add insult to injury, it was one of the slowest pieces of software I've ever had the misfortune to use. It was like swimming in thick treacle.
It was rated zero because it was an Anonymous Coward post, which default to zero unless moderated up. This tends not to happen unless ACs have something really insightful to say, so you can set your threshold to 1 and ignore most AC posts.
The commercialization of the 'net/www has caused all this.
The commercialization of the Net has done a lot of damage. I've wondered on a couple of occasions how viable it would be to create new, smaller, geek-only TCP/IP-based network, totally separate from the Internet. A sort of breakaway Internet. "Splinternet", if you like.
[yes, I know, totally non-viable. It's not really a serious suggestion. Don't flame me over this:-) I just tend to think like this when I get fed up with "e-commerce" *spit*]
By "graphics interface", I wonder if he's talking about a graphics API like DirectX. GUIs like Windows/KDE/Gnome/whatever are usually referred to as "graphical" interfaces.
Of course, I may well be reading too much into the difference in terminology. This may well just have been more FUD.
Bill Gates is either very badly informed, or spreading FUD. Quotes like "because it's free software there's no central point of control" demonstrate this. Linux's development model is cool because, whilst anybody can have a go, there is a "central point of control", i.e. Linus, who ultimately decides what goes in and what doesn't.
I think "Comment Highlight Threshold" needs a "disable" checkbox by it, so I can elect to never have any posts expanded on the top level index page. I have "Comment Spill" set to zero, and I want it to mean zero:-)
Slashdot keeps getting better and better. Anyone who thinks Rob sucks is just plain wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
It's stories like this (I have heard similar tales from other people) that put me off emailing ESR. I have some suggestions for the Jargon File, but I shan't bother if I'm likely to get a response like this.
I guess he'd have a point. I've been a member of the "geek community" for only a few years. What could I possibly have to offer?
Most of my geek-related knowhow is derived from stuff I learned at college. I ddin't learn it from the staff though. They were mostly on another planet; caught up in their research and out of touch with the students.
I became the geek I am today through hanging around in a computer lab with other geeks. We learned off each other. A lot of them had their own Linux boxes and thus knew tons about sysadmining. They were able to pass that knowledge along to those of us who didn't admin our own boxes. I spent a lot of time at college just messing about with Unix, compiling and installing software; just getting a "feel" for the system. If I ever got stuck, there were a whole bunch of other geeks in the room to help me. In my final year, I knew enough to help the proto-geeks in the years below me.
(the degree I managed to scrape through came in handy when I started applying for jobs too :-)
If Kosovo is an "Internet war", then was VietNam a "TV war", or World War II a "radio war"?
Nowadays, the Web can be used as TV and radio are used - as a mass communications medium to broadcast to the world. It can carry truth, and it can carry propaganda, in the same way that TV and radio do. In the past (and indeed in this war), opposing forces have worked to knock out the opposition's communications, by destroying TV and radio transmitters and jamming signals. Cracking NATO's website is analagous to this kind of activity; the difference being that Web-based attacks aren't purely the domain of the military.
The war isn't being fought with the Net. It's being fought with aircraft, missiles, bombs and guns. Those are the things that are killing people.
There's no reason why it couldn't be your login shell. Log in, do ^X!startx and watch your window manager and a bunch of xterms pop up, with an Emacs in each one! ("Stephen, you are twisted" - everyone else on Slashdot)
No; IIRC it was started by two people called Debra and Ian, hence the name.
Haven't used SFS (though I've heard a lot of good things about it); however, I do use PFS2 on my Amiga's hard drive and Zip disks. It's a similar idea to SFS; a file system that is organized in a less stupid way than FFS, and promises data coherency no matter what horrible things you do to your machine. It works perfectly; when the Amiga crashes in the middle of a write (which happens a lot to me, since there's no memory protection and I do a lot of silly things), it boots straight back up again. No corrupted filesystems, no waits while the filesystem is revalidated.
It's waaaaaaaay faster than FFS too, and has a hidden directory in the root of each filesystem which stores copies of the last thirty deleted files, so people who rm first and think later (like me) don't have to spend ages trawling through backups ;-)
I strongly recommend Amigans who still use FFS to check it out. UK Amigans can buy it from Ramjam Consultants.
At the risk of sounding like a stereotypical geek, I personally don't find "fun in the sun" to be much of a motivator. I never have been into doing stuff outside, and haven't set foot on a beach for years.
From reading the above comments, I see I'm not the only one who wants the Jargon File as flat ASCII, like the previous versions. Here's the plan: we all write scripts to make a flat version of the File, and decide on something to call them (e.g. "JFF"). Then, the next version of the File will have an entry something like this:
:JFF: /J-F-F/ 1. /n./ Abbreviation of "Jargon File Flattener", a script written to convert the HTML versions of the Jargon File to flat ASCII. 2 /v./ The action of applying a JFF to the File.
:-)
In some places, it's different to most of the hackers I know, but we all differ from the File in the same way. For example, ESR asserts that hackers don't watch much television. The hackers I know don't watch much mainstream television, but enjoy TV programmes which could be described as "cult TV" (Star Trek in all its incarnations, Babylon 5, The Simpsons, South Park, Doctor Who, Red Dwarf etc etc).
Have you read much of the Jargon File? Have a nice, long read; you'll see that most of it is really hacker slang, not tech jargon as such.
As ESR points out in the File, slang is a vital part of any subculture, used as a tool of communication, inclusion and exclusion. As Al Gore is discovering.
...but doesn't walk the walk.
Trying to fit in with a subculture simply by using their jargon just makes you appear silly. If you were to visit East London and start talking in rhyming slang because you thought it'd make you fit in, you'd just end up sounding an idiot (and would probably attract the attention of some burly Cockney lads who thought you were taking the mickey). So it is with Al.
Nah, it's sufficiently different :-) "Debenhams GNU/Linux" would make an interesting parody of some sort though. I'd do it myself if I had a sufficiently well-developed sense of humour.
(I hope Debian Linux fits my new computer as well as Debenhams jeans fit me. I have a 28" waist and a 29" inside leg measurement, so it's kinda hard to get trousers that fit. Most manufacturers start at 30").
guatamnlad's design looks the best to me. I think it's really professional: simple, memorable, and eyecatching. Also, having the "official" and "open use" logos so similar, with one a simplified variation on the other, makes a lot of sense IMHO.
Mind you, the "Debian Linux" caption is likely to upset someone...
You might as well ask "who wants all those single-purpose Unix text processing tools? Why bother with sed, grep, awk, perl, troff and some random editor when you can get BogoWord '99 which does everything in one package?" Some people prefer one big monolithic application, some people prefer lots of small tools.
I have a feeling that the same argument can be applied to hardware. Some people will want to keep their all-in-one computing box. Other people will prefer several small appliances.
I very much doubt that Slashdot would be targeted in this way. Other than the "Bill Gates of Borg" icon, I don't recall seeing anything on Slashdot that Microsoft could complain to Rob about. Read the disclaimer at the bottom of each Slashdot page: "All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective companies. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-99 Rob Malda." Whilst some of the comments posted to Slashdot are clearly inflammatory, Rob makes it clear that, as far as he is concerned, the buck stops with the person who made the comment, and not with him.
Whether this would stand up in court is another matter. I hope it never comes to that. There is also the worry that some corporation could subpoena (is that the right word? I'm not well up on American legalese) Rob and make him hand over the account details of a poster. I think this happened on a Yahoo message board recently.
Um.... if it's april foolery, it's terribly annoying. :P
Like April Fools' Day itself :-)
I've made a point of being extra vigilant ever since my mother fooled me when I was a kid. I ran downstairs in my pyjamas to get a glimpse of the rare furry animal she said was in our back garden, only to be told "April Fool!". No-one's caught me out since.
This guy doesn't seem to distinguish between "clueless" and "newbie". IMHO, someone who doesn't know very much but is eager and willing to learn is a "newbie". Someone who may have been using a system for years, but who wants to be spoonfed, doesn't want to think for h(im|er)self and won't listen to what you say is "clueless".
All being well, I will be attempting my first Linux install in a few months time (probably the m68k version of Debian). I'm not afraid of reading documentation. Actually, I love reading documentation. I've started already - I tend to start soaking up information weeks ahead of time, so I'm prepared for things when they happen. However, if worst comes to worst, and I need help from another human being, it looks like I can expect to be hit over the head with a bunch of HOWTOs and told I didn't try hard enough.
Note to the condescending hackers reading this - you were newbies once. If nobody helped you, then I'm sorry you had such a hard time, but this doesn't justify you giving a hard time to other people who want to learn.
I tried IE4 for HP-UX last year. It used a proprietary widget set that looked almost like the Windows GUI. It created a .microsoft directory in my home directory, containing a registry, of all things. Basically, they did the bare minimum to get it running under Unix. It didn't behave like I'd expect a Unix browser to behave.
To add insult to injury, it was one of the slowest pieces of software I've ever had the misfortune to use. It was like swimming in thick treacle.
It was rated zero because it was an Anonymous Coward post, which default to zero unless moderated up. This tends not to happen unless ACs have something really insightful to say, so you can set your threshold to 1 and ignore most AC posts.
The commercialization of the 'net/www has caused all this.
The commercialization of the Net has done a lot of damage. I've wondered on a couple of occasions how viable it would be to create new, smaller, geek-only TCP/IP-based network, totally separate from the Internet. A sort of breakaway Internet. "Splinternet", if you like.
[yes, I know, totally non-viable. It's not really a serious suggestion. Don't flame me over this :-) I just tend to think like this when I get fed up with "e-commerce" *spit*]
Have you ever jubilently screamed "YES!!" when some new hardware/software product that you've been waiting for gets released?
Ohhhhh, yes. My jaw literally dropped today when I discovered that Emacs v20 has been ported to AmigaOS. Boy, I'm sad :-)
By "graphics interface", I wonder if he's talking about a graphics API like DirectX. GUIs like Windows/KDE/Gnome/whatever are usually referred to as "graphical" interfaces.
Of course, I may well be reading too much into the difference in terminology. This may well just have been more FUD.
Bill Gates is either very badly informed, or spreading FUD. Quotes like "because it's free software there's no central point of control" demonstrate this. Linux's development model is cool because, whilst anybody can have a go, there is a "central point of control", i.e. Linus, who ultimately decides what goes in and what doesn't.
I can't watch it because I'm in England. We probably won't get it until the year 3000.
I think "Comment Highlight Threshold" needs a "disable" checkbox by it, so I can elect to never have any posts expanded on the top level index page. I have "Comment Spill" set to zero, and I want it to mean zero :-)
Slashdot keeps getting better and better. Anyone who thinks Rob sucks is just plain wrong.