Any tech journalist who has covered Linux over the past year knows about RMS, the Free Software Foundation, the GNU project, and the years of hard work that went into bringing open source/free software to the masses. Any journalist worthy of the title (keep yer wisecracks to yerself) should already have a grip on the history and philosophy.
But man...have you ever tried to pitch a story about history and philosophy to an editor? Might as well go write about the Commodore 64. Tech outlets are looking for the new stuff, the trends, the really nifty stuff. The best we can hope to do is make mention, every now and again, of just what open source is, where it came from, and what it can do.
Hence my earlier post on RMS and this whole debate being a shame. To me, and a number of other tech reporters, RMS is looking for credit for stuff already done. Well...it's already done. If he could bring something new, refreshing and thought-provoking to the table -- instead of correcting us everytime we forget to say GNU/Linux around him -- then all of the things you're talking about will once again come to light.
Probably shouldn't be speaking for all tech reporters here. So all of that is really just pertaining to me. But that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
First off, that editorial, IMHO, was dead on. Can't much argue with that.
But what irks me more is that we have people like RMS, and those who feel the need to respond to him, tied up in a useless debate when they could be making significant contributions to the rest of the open source community. I mean, geez...let it go! It seems as though RMS is focused more on getting attention for past glory instead of using his considerable talents and energy for future projects.
And as for the people who respond to him and spend the time and energy defending/fighting him...you folks can end it. If you no longer pay any attention to RMS, then he'll either get the picture and move on to better things, or he'll end up irrelevant. Either way, the community and the movement moves on.
Suggestion: next time RMS gets an ant in his pants about GNU/Linux, whether it's in a post online or at a live conference, ignore it. Move on. Call it Linux, call it BSD/X/GNU/Linux/GNOME whatever. But don't give in. Either he'll see the light and drop the subject, or he'll get tossed out on his keister for causing a scene.
And everyone else gets to move on. Enough of this, already. A rose by any other name....
Just download the GNU binutils and configure it for the appropriate host & target (in your case, probably host=Linux, target=PPC). Here's another hot tip -- they've got a couple of other packages you might be interested in: gcc & gdb, also available for a variety of different hosts and targets. Have fun...
Living in a small (under 35K people) town, lucky that I even have 56K (more like 45333) dialin access, making a lowly $34K/year, could all constitute having a pathetic existence. I do however know how to cook (not just nuke stuff), interact in public (both professionally and personally), actually buy software and music, and...gasp... even go out on the occasional date.
Katz could not have two more cliche-ish geeks, could he?? I was somewhat offended. Granted there are a lot of geeks like them out there. There are, however, a lot like me, as well.
Moreover, I really have to wonder how these guys would do in a situation where it actually means that they are going to have to interact with people (lusers). They are more symptomatic of overall large problem in the IT field. Companies pay lots of money for IT people, and get employees whose "people skills are retarded" (actual quote from a CIO-type). Notice Katz didn't get info on how these guys do at work. That would be interesting.
Don't get me wrong - I wish the guys well and success in whatever they endeavour. My sincere hope is they find something real eventually. Actual reality can be fun, as well. Helps me deal those lusers....
The jargon file is more than a simple collection of terms, it's also a compendium of knowledge.
Point in case. A couple of years ago when pentiums first started hitting the market, the file upload/download software for PDT's that I'd written about six years ago suddenly stopped working. The reason was that the host PC was transmitting the response ( ACK/NAK ) before the PDT was ready to receive it.
One solution to the problem would have been to incorporate a delay before response transmission, but since the programming language was Quick Basic, that would have meant waiting a whole second before transmitting the response ( which would have really slowed things down ) since Quick Basic can only resolve time to an increment of one second.
It was at that point that I remembered an item from the 1993 version of the Jargon file. It was about a system that broke the timing control on a piece of software that played music when the system was run in fast mode, and that this problem was fixed by adding a bit of code to determine how fast the machine was running.
Suffic to say, after thinking about this for a while, I realised how I could do the same thing ( even though the QBasic time function can only resolve down to a single second ). To cut a long story short, I was able to work out how to pause for only 1/20 of a second, regardless of how fast the host PC was. Being fairly unimaginative, it's unlikely that I would have done so without the hint from the 1993 Jargon file.
So no, your wrong dude. The Jargon file is more than a collection of terms ( or even slang, as some of the other responses to your posting have stated ). It's also a collection of useful historical and technical information, and therefore well worth a read.
I like how these are being called "thin" at $1500. I built a linux based server for under $500, which will handle email, web services, etc. What a joke.
a hardware company can make all of the proprietary and substandard products they want, but if the software companies don't go along with it, the products will fail. 3dfx isn't forcing Glide down anyone's throat; no one *has* to use it to get 3dfx graphics on their computers. the fact, then, that some games rely on Glide does not make 3dfx evil. indeed, the game companies have the free will to completely ignore 3dfx altogether. simply because they have not done so, 3dfx is not guilty of any great crime against humanity. it stands to reason, then, that the game companies are at fault for the implementation of such bad design.
I find it interesting how the RIAA claims they are protecting the artists, when they are really covering thier own asses. Mp3 could make them obsolete by allowing musicians to eliminate the middleman (and the main piece of income they steal). Now they have gone too far with what happened to lyrics.ch. They really need to stop harassing the music enthusiasts or they will alienate thier biggest fans.
[first 2 paragraphs are my personal life, skip them if you want to get to the computer part of my life] I just spent the past 2 hours reading the article and I loved it. It gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling to know that there are others out there like me. While I probably have had less struggles than these two, and I have yet to move across the country and get a job making > $30K/yr, I can relate a lot with their personal lives and struggles through adolescence. I was born in Montana, lived in Nevada for several years, and only within this decade have lived in California (btw, we have Cable Modem access here Jesse and Eric). My father dropped out of high school when he was 15, and my mother graduated from high school, but didn't further her education. Both my mother and father left Los Angeles and San Diego, respectively, and headed for the "wide open skies and fresh air of Montana", as they would say . My father worked on drilling rigs and was sometimes away from my brother, mom, and I for several months at a time. My mom worked in a cafe as a cook after I was born and could be babysat. My brother (step) came to live with us when I was just a baby and he was five. Anyway, we moved to Nevada after my mom got a job in the airline industry, and that opened up a whole range of oppurtunities for her, as well as me. It got us out of the rural state of Montana, and into Nevada which had some more oppurtunity. My dad continued to work in the drilling industry, and when I was ~10, my brother left to go live with his real mom. When I was 12, my mom and dad split up, and that kind of devastated me. Then, next year I made a new friend who was into computers, and lived on my street. He showed me Wolfenstein 3d, and the like, and at that time I really liked the gaming aspect of computers. A few years later I moved to California, and the $3,000 I had saved my entire life through working (mowing lawns, etc), I spent on a shiny new computer (this was ~December 1995). It had Windows 95 preloaded on it with too much software (sound familiar?), and I thought it was the coolest operating system in the world. Then, we got AOL, and I used that for awhile, but I had been reading the local ComputorEdge magazine in San Diego, and noticed people arguing about having "direct" Internet access. So I managed to get the "WOW!" service that Compuserve was offering because it was somewhat of a direct Internet access option (although it was still proprietary in nature). I got tired of that, and got an account with a local ISP with my 28.8 modem. It was a dream come true - I could finally use all the 32-bit Internet applications such as "The Internet" icon on my desktop (IE 2.0), and Eudora e-mail. I then started using that for a few months, and naturally being a geek I got bored with Windows 95 and wanted to venture into new and more interesting things. (this is ~March 1996). I had still been a straight A student in my high school during this time, but I noticed a lot of my time was being consumed by my overwhelming urge to search for new and interesting things to do with my computer. I discovered the interactive side of the Internet, started browsing newsgroups and online bulletin boards, and used Online Traveler for awhile (saw it on MTV). Then I was talking in one of the virtual world's and someone said something about how you could download free software on this thing called "EFNet". I thought that was kind of convenient, so I tried that out for awhile, and started using all the latest and greatest software on my home computer.
Now, I would like to defend Jesse & Eric on this subject - downloading commercial software. I see absolutely nothing wrong with it if you are just a geek at home interested in learning new software programs, but I DO see it as wrong to use commercial software in your business where you are making money with it. The businesses are the main generators of revenue for commercial software vendors, not teenagers who use the Internet all day long.
After awhile, I got bored with all the latest and greatest Windows software, and had heard about another operating system that people on the 'Net had been starting to use quite a lot - Linux. (this is ~May 1996) So I tried Slackware '96 out, and it was somewhat interesting to me, although I felt I was going back in time with the command line (felt a lot like DOS). I hadn't even realized the power of having a UNIX operating system on my PC back then, but I did after a few months of using it. I continued to try out all the latest and most expensive (I thought it was interesting to be using $20,000 software programs like Softimage|3D for free) Windows software on my PC, but I began to get tired of the instability of Windows 95, and moved on to Windows NT Workstation 4.0 when it was released in August of '96. This was after 3 months working my first computer job that summer doing marketing analysis at a plumbing supply company. Anyway, I really liked Windows NT Workstation as a client operating system, and I continue to like it to this day, due to it having the majority of off-the-shelf applications on the market (althought Linux is improving greatly in the client area). I managed to graduate high school after my grades dropped from straight A's to D'c & C's due to my obsessive/compulsive use of the computer, although I did take AP computer science and other computer classes in high school. My year of graduation was 1998 (last June), and I wanted to work around _people_ for once in my life, so I got a complete BS job working at a fast-food place for 3 months until I could afford my own car. I then moved on to a $7 / hr job in a retail store, and worked there for ~ 6 months. All this time after graduating high school and having much free time (due to this being my year to take off before college) I immersed myself into every aspect of computers. I finally bought my own hub and ethernet cards, and got another computer, and setup my own LAN at home with Linux being the server. I got tired of working my retail job, and knew I could do something better with my life, so a friend of someone I know (who is a software engineer) gave me a programming job for his software company. He wooed me, and promised "$20 and hr in just a couple months", and told me about making more than my mom. I started working for awhile, and I loved the work, but I got stressed out to the point where I got sad and lonely, and took a leave from the job for a week, my boss was cool about the whole thing. It was so bad that I had to go to the hospital and get medication. (this is ~1 month ago) Now I come back to the job, and my boss starts giving me a few projects, but I get stressed out again (medication takes ~1 month to kick in) and don't work for a few days. Now I can tell my boss is getting a little annoyed, but he assures me that "the brightest minds in this world always have some personal problems". (this is ~2 weeks ago) Now, he hasn't called or anything, and I am feeling hopeless. My medication is now kicking in and making me a lot more stable, so I am at the point where I can work day in and day out and be productive, but he is not even calling any more. I have ~$900 in the bank, and I almost feel like doing the same exact thing that Jesse and Eric have done.
So, I am now at home (still living with mom), and 8 months graduated from high school with no prospects in my life as of yet. I have 3 years of intense experience with computers (due to my enourmous amounts of free time), and some experience at my current programming "job". (but my boss doesn't call anymore)
I don't know what to do now, but I know a few things - I would love to continue working in the computer industry, and hopefully make enough money to get me through a good college. I have great people skills (due to my recent job in the retail store industry), and I have great computer skills (lots of *NIX, lots of Windows NT, Windows 9x, Pascal, some C++ experience in AP computer science mostly, ASP (Microsoft) / VB, etc). What should I do? Should I try my luck driving across the country or up north to Silicon Valley and see if I can make something of myself and get myself through college?
Actually, it doesn't appear to be completely slashdotted just yet, it was just excrutiatingly unbearably slow. Of course, I didn't wait to SEE any of the pages, so the theory is there...
Well I just couldn't wait. I bought it for windoze, and will try and figure something out when it comes to Linux release.
As Far as features: 320 Meg Minimum install with an extra 80 Megs of swap required. After this I installed and "Quartz.dll not found" (out of curiousity I submitted a service request with my error, 2 days still no response). I ended up downloading DirectX 6.1, and having to do the "full install" of 590 MB (ouch!), this cleared it up.
Speed: It seem to be going fine for me, although admittadly I don't have 40 cities yet, but my P2 300 with 64MB doesn't slow much.
I am eternally amazed at how inflated salaries become when quoted in articles of this ilk. Very, very few salaried engineers (approximately 5% according to the last EETimes survey) make more than $100K, and most of those are in the ASIC or embedded software design areas. Some of your best web designers may exceed $100K, but they're probably unusually talented. I'm glad that the two kids in this article are doing allright, but I'm also a little worried that others like them might foresake a CS or EE degree for a high-paying job right out of high school. I know it's not in vogue to say you need a degree these days, but believe it or not, you're better off taking some classes and interacting with your fellow students than sitting by yourself in the glow of a CRT. These kids are making more than I did while co-oping for my degree, so they are definitely doing well. Best of luck to them...
1) Katz has never said he was a geek? Have you ever read any of his articles?
2) I dislike Katz's pseudo-intellectual spew and so I blocked articles posted by him. Are we now going to be treated to articles written by him but posted by you? If so, I have to wonder why go to all the trouble of creating a filter system.
He didn't "screw up", he's had the assorted BIOSs for a long time, including the Neo Geo one. However, Sony apparently decided to get pissy all of a sudden and shut him down for it. Which is strange, as the only emulator needing the PSX BIOS is PSEmuPro which is far from being a replacement for a PSX. The Bleem team might have looked at a decompilation of the BIOS, but Bleem(which is more of a "threat" than PSEmuPro) doesn't use any part of the BIOS.
What you say is true. I would never claim that it is immoral for people to benefit from another's voluntary contribution.
All I claim is that it is not always in the best interests of the Creator to do things that maximize other peoples' benefit at their own expense. Here is the situation I imagine:
You are somebody who loves to paint houses, but nobody knows about you, and you don't have enough money to buy new houses so you can paint them.
And so, you make your own house a masterpiece, hoping that it will attract a buyer, so that you can move out of it and use the profits to buy another house (which you will then paint).
Sensing there is money to be made, a large corporation moves to your neighbourhood, and buys everybody else's house (but not yours). Then they use their extensive wealth to advertise your house on the front page of every paper.
The neighbourhood is in huge demand. People visit and move there in droves so that they can look at your beautiful house all day. The corporation makes a lot of money from selling the other, unadorned houses (especially the ones that have a clear view of your house).
However, you see none of that money. No matter how beautiful you make your house, nobody ever offers to buy it. No matter how many people you talk to, all you meet are people who want to look at your house, not live in it.
In fact, the corporation and your neighbours get extremely hostile when you talk about moving to another neighbourhood. In all senses of the word, they own you and your house, but they have not paid you for it.
The only payment they offer is advice and offers to improve the house. At first you accept them with great pleasure, but later you realize that many of them only care about the house, not you.
And so, shaking your head in disgust, you leave the neighbourhood. Some people miss you, others are angry at you, but you have already been replaced by teams of people who continue to paint your house, and make it into a greater masterpiece than even you could do.
Next time you begin painting a house, you think twice: ``Why will this be different than the last time?''
That is the question I had to ask myself after I quit working on GNU Libtool, and moved on to Debian GNU/Hurd.
The FIG License is an attempt to answer that question. I do not care about Free Software as much as I care about Creativity. I firmly believe that it is possible to be both moral and profitable, and I'm looking to make this dream a reality.
I want to eliminate SAS (Starving Artist Syndrome) from our world. Come and help me, if you believe in the cause. The only thing we Creators have to lose are our self-imposed chains.
Al Gore once again shows his stupidity and utter arrogance. He thinks he can use the magic words "open source" to win over the technical communities? I just can't wait to see what utter nonsense he utters during the campaigns. What a dufus.
What an exercise in self-gratification
on
Jargon File v4.1.0
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· Score: 0
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
ESR never sounded like such a pumpous ass. He spends a good 10 paragraphs in the intro preening and stroking himself. I don't remember the actual guide being as insipid... look at the kind of shit he wrote
>...an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence...
are you a hacker, ESR? do you realize how arrogant this looks to people who don't have their heads up their ass?
Why does it always have to be a choice between listening to misspelled uneducated drivel (read JonKatz) and semi-educated pontification?
Ok, I was exaggerating a bit, I've actually seen inner classes used twice before in one interesting manner. (Once on the patterns mail list, and later at a client) Essentially, it was used as a sort of inverted proxy pattern.
So you have this sort of doWith operation.
class With { public static void doWith(SomethingToBeDoneWith s);
All that this "open source" web site will cause is confusion, Not all publicity is good, if it confuses the issues (Which politicians enjoy) then it will hurt the open source movement, imagine all the hard core Republicans that must now despise open source because Mr. Gore is publicly waving it about.
Slashdot Mirror
Posted by Mike@ABC:
Any tech journalist who has covered Linux over the past year knows about RMS, the Free Software Foundation, the GNU project, and the years of hard work that went into bringing open source/free software to the masses. Any journalist worthy of the title (keep yer wisecracks to yerself) should already have a grip on the history and philosophy.
But man...have you ever tried to pitch a story about history and philosophy to an editor? Might as well go write about the Commodore 64. Tech outlets are looking for the new stuff, the trends, the really nifty stuff. The best we can hope to do is make mention, every now and again, of just what open source is, where it came from, and what it can do.
Hence my earlier post on RMS and this whole debate being a shame. To me, and a number of other tech reporters, RMS is looking for credit for stuff already done. Well...it's already done. If he could bring something new, refreshing and thought-provoking to the table -- instead of correcting us everytime we forget to say GNU/Linux around him -- then all of the things you're talking about will once again come to light.
Probably shouldn't be speaking for all tech reporters here. So all of that is really just pertaining to me. But that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Posted by Mike@ABC:
First off, that editorial, IMHO, was dead on. Can't much argue with that.
But what irks me more is that we have people like RMS, and those who feel the need to respond to him, tied up in a useless debate when they could be making significant contributions to the rest of the open source community. I mean, geez...let it go! It seems as though RMS is focused more on getting attention for past glory instead of using his considerable talents and energy for future projects.
And as for the people who respond to him and spend the time and energy defending/fighting him...you folks can end it. If you no longer pay any attention to RMS, then he'll either get the picture and move on to better things, or he'll end up irrelevant. Either way, the community and the movement moves on.
Suggestion: next time RMS gets an ant in his pants about GNU/Linux, whether it's in a post online or at a live conference, ignore it. Move on. Call it Linux, call it BSD/X/GNU/Linux/GNOME whatever. But don't give in. Either he'll see the light and drop the subject, or he'll get tossed out on his keister for causing a scene.
And everyone else gets to move on. Enough of this, already. A rose by any other name....
Posted by Nick Carraway:
Just download the GNU binutils and configure it for the appropriate host & target (in your case, probably host=Linux, target=PPC). Here's another hot tip -- they've got a couple of other packages you might be interested in: gcc & gdb, also available for a variety of different hosts and targets. Have fun...
Posted by LarkMan:
...gasp... even go out on the occasional date.
Living in a small (under 35K people) town, lucky that I even have 56K (more like 45333) dialin access, making a lowly $34K/year, could all constitute having a pathetic existence. I do however know how to cook (not just nuke stuff), interact in public (both professionally and personally), actually buy software and music, and
Katz could not have two more cliche-ish geeks, could he?? I was somewhat offended. Granted there are a lot of geeks like them out there. There are, however, a lot like me, as well.
Moreover, I really have to wonder how these guys would do in a situation where it actually means that they are going to have to interact with people (lusers). They are more symptomatic of overall large problem in the IT field. Companies pay lots of money for IT people, and get employees whose "people skills are retarded" (actual quote from a CIO-type). Notice Katz didn't get info on how these guys do at work. That would be interesting.
Don't get me wrong - I wish the guys well and success in whatever they endeavour. My sincere hope is they find something real eventually. Actual reality can be fun, as well. Helps me deal those lusers....
-dan
Posted by AnnoyingMouseCoward:
The jargon file is more than a simple collection of terms, it's also a compendium of knowledge.
Point in case. A couple of years ago when pentiums first started hitting the market, the file upload/download software for PDT's that I'd written about six years ago suddenly stopped working. The reason was that the host PC was transmitting the response ( ACK/NAK ) before the PDT was ready to receive it.
One solution to the problem would have been to incorporate a delay before response transmission, but since the programming language was Quick Basic, that would have meant waiting a whole second before transmitting the response ( which would have really slowed things down ) since Quick Basic can only resolve time to an increment of one second.
It was at that point that I remembered an item from the 1993 version of the Jargon file. It was about a system that broke the timing control on a piece of software that played music when the system was run in fast mode, and that this problem was fixed by adding a bit of code to determine how fast the machine was running.
Suffic to say, after thinking about this for a while, I realised how I could do the same thing ( even though the QBasic time function can only resolve down to a single second ). To cut a long story short, I was able to work out how to pause for only 1/20 of a second, regardless of how fast the host PC was. Being fairly unimaginative, it's unlikely that I would have done so without the hint from the 1993 Jargon file.
So no, your wrong dude. The Jargon file is more than a collection of terms ( or even slang, as some of the other responses to your posting have stated ). It's also a collection of useful historical and technical information, and therefore well worth a read.
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
I like how these are being called "thin" at $1500. I built a linux based server for under $500, which will handle email, web services, etc. What a joke.
Posted by Fleeno:
That's exactly what I meant by my post, which was attacked. I don't want to call myself a geek if people think a geek is a common criminal.
Posted by djfisty:
a hardware company can make all of the proprietary and substandard products they want, but if the software companies don't go along with it, the products will fail. 3dfx isn't forcing Glide down anyone's throat; no one *has* to use it to get 3dfx graphics on their computers. the fact, then, that some games rely on Glide does not make 3dfx evil. indeed, the game companies have the free will to completely ignore 3dfx altogether. simply because they have not done so, 3dfx is not guilty of any great crime against humanity. it stands to reason, then, that the game companies are at fault for the implementation of such bad design.
DJ
Posted by DarkGamer:
I find it interesting how the RIAA claims they are protecting the artists, when they are really covering thier own asses. Mp3 could make them obsolete by allowing musicians to eliminate the middleman (and the main piece of income they steal). Now they have gone too far with what happened to lyrics.ch. They really need to stop harassing the music enthusiasts or they will alienate thier biggest fans.
Posted by 1funnyguy:
If you go back and check your Net Craft, he's now running "Apache/1.2.0 Ben-SSL/1.8 on Linux"
Maybe someone there actually reads? (Can't spell worth potatoes but...
Posted by DiegoGuy:
[first 2 paragraphs are my personal life, skip them if you want to get to the computer part of my life]
I just spent the past 2 hours reading the article and I loved it. It gave me a warm, fuzzy feeling to know that there are others out there like me. While I probably have had less struggles than these two, and I have yet to move across the country and get a job making > $30K/yr, I can relate a lot with their personal lives and struggles through adolescence. I was born in Montana, lived in Nevada for several years, and only within this decade have lived in California (btw, we have Cable Modem access here Jesse and Eric). My father dropped out of high school when he was 15, and my mother graduated from high school, but didn't further her education. Both my mother and father left Los Angeles and San Diego, respectively, and headed for the "wide open skies and fresh air of Montana", as they would say . My father worked on drilling rigs and was sometimes away from my brother, mom, and I for several months at a time. My mom worked in a cafe as a cook after I was born and could be babysat. My brother (step) came to live with us when I was just a baby and he was five.
Anyway, we moved to Nevada after my mom got a job in the airline industry, and that opened up a whole range of oppurtunities for her, as well as me. It got us out of the rural state of Montana, and into Nevada which had some more oppurtunity. My dad continued to work in the drilling industry, and when I was ~10, my brother left to go live with his real mom. When I was 12, my mom and dad split up, and that kind of devastated me. Then, next year I made a new friend who was into computers, and lived on my street. He showed me Wolfenstein 3d, and the like, and at that time I really liked the gaming aspect of computers.
A few years later I moved to California, and the $3,000 I had saved my entire life through working (mowing lawns, etc), I spent on a shiny new computer (this was ~December 1995). It had Windows 95 preloaded on it with too much software (sound familiar?), and I thought it was the coolest operating system in the world. Then, we got AOL, and I used that for awhile, but I had been reading the local ComputorEdge magazine in San Diego, and noticed people arguing about having "direct" Internet access. So I managed to get the "WOW!" service that Compuserve was offering because it was somewhat of a direct Internet access option (although it was still proprietary in nature). I got tired of that, and got an account with a local ISP with my 28.8 modem. It was a dream come true - I could finally use all the 32-bit Internet applications such as "The Internet" icon on my desktop (IE 2.0), and Eudora e-mail. I then started using that for a few months, and naturally being a geek I got bored with Windows 95 and wanted to venture into new and more interesting things. (this is ~March 1996). I had still been a straight A student in my high school during this time, but I noticed a lot of my time was being consumed by my overwhelming urge to search for new and interesting things to do with my computer. I discovered the interactive side of the Internet, started browsing newsgroups and online bulletin boards, and used Online Traveler for awhile (saw it on MTV). Then I was talking in one of the virtual world's and someone said something about how you could download free software on this thing called "EFNet". I thought that was kind of convenient, so I tried that out for awhile, and started using all the latest and greatest software on my home computer.
Now, I would like to defend Jesse & Eric on this subject - downloading commercial software. I see absolutely nothing wrong with it if you are just a geek at home interested in learning new software programs, but I DO see it as wrong to use commercial software in your business where you are making money with it. The businesses are the main generators of revenue for commercial software vendors, not teenagers who use the Internet all day long.
After awhile, I got bored with all the latest and greatest Windows software, and had heard about another operating system that people on the 'Net had been starting to use quite a lot - Linux. (this is ~May 1996) So I tried Slackware '96 out, and it was somewhat interesting to me, although I felt I was going back in time with the command line (felt a lot like DOS). I hadn't even realized the power of having a UNIX operating system on my PC back then, but I did after a few months of using it. I continued to try out all the latest and most expensive (I thought it was interesting to be using $20,000 software programs like Softimage|3D for free) Windows software on my PC, but I began to get tired of the instability of Windows 95, and moved on to Windows NT Workstation 4.0 when it was released in August of '96. This was after 3 months working my first computer job that summer doing marketing analysis at a plumbing supply company. Anyway, I really liked Windows NT Workstation as a client operating system, and I continue to like it to this day, due to it having the majority of off-the-shelf applications on the market (althought Linux is improving greatly in the client area). I managed to graduate high school after my grades dropped from straight A's to D'c & C's due to my obsessive/compulsive use of the computer, although I did take AP computer science and other computer classes in high school. My year of graduation was 1998 (last June), and I wanted to work around _people_ for once in my life, so I got a complete BS job working at a fast-food place for 3 months until I could afford my own car. I then moved on to a $7 / hr job in a retail store, and worked there for ~ 6 months. All this time after graduating high school and having much free time (due to this being my year to take off before college) I immersed myself into every aspect of computers. I finally bought my own hub and ethernet cards, and got another computer, and setup my own LAN at home with Linux being the server. I got tired of working my retail job, and knew I could do something better with my life, so a friend of someone I know (who is a software engineer) gave me a programming job for his software company. He wooed me, and promised "$20 and hr in just a couple months", and told me about making more than my mom. I started working for awhile, and I loved the work, but I got stressed out to the point where I got sad and lonely, and took a leave from the job for a week, my boss was cool about the whole thing. It was so bad that I had to go to the hospital and get medication. (this is ~1 month ago) Now I come back to the job, and my boss starts giving me a few projects, but I get stressed out again (medication takes ~1 month to kick in) and don't work for a few days. Now I can tell my boss is getting a little annoyed, but he assures me that "the brightest minds in this world always have some personal problems". (this is ~2 weeks ago) Now, he hasn't called or anything, and I am feeling hopeless. My medication is now kicking in and making me a lot more stable, so I am at the point where I can work day in and day out and be productive, but he is not even calling any more. I have ~$900 in the bank, and I almost feel like doing the same exact thing that Jesse and Eric have done.
So, I am now at home (still living with mom), and 8 months graduated from high school with no prospects in my life as of yet. I have 3 years of intense experience with computers (due to my enourmous amounts of free time), and some experience at my current programming "job". (but my boss doesn't call anymore)
I don't know what to do now, but I know a few things - I would love to continue working in the computer industry, and hopefully make enough money to get me through a good college. I have great people skills (due to my recent job in the retail store industry), and I have great computer skills (lots of *NIX, lots of Windows NT, Windows 9x, Pascal, some C++ experience in AP computer science mostly, ASP (Microsoft) / VB, etc). What should I do? Should I try my luck driving across the country or up north to Silicon Valley and see if I can make something of myself and get myself through college?
Posted by keithk:
Actually, it doesn't appear to be completely
slashdotted just yet, it was just excrutiatingly
unbearably slow. Of course, I didn't wait to
SEE any of the pages, so the theory is there...
Posted by aeolian:
Well I just couldn't wait. I bought it for windoze, and will try and figure something out when it comes to Linux release.
As Far as features: 320 Meg Minimum install with an extra 80 Megs of swap required. After this I installed and "Quartz.dll not found" (out of curiousity I submitted a service request with my error, 2 days still no response). I ended up downloading DirectX 6.1, and having to do the "full install" of 590 MB (ouch!), this cleared it up.
Speed: It seem to be going fine for me, although admittadly I don't have 40 cities yet, but my P2 300 with 64MB doesn't slow much.
Posted by Nick Carraway:
I am eternally amazed at how inflated salaries become when quoted in articles of this ilk. Very, very few salaried engineers (approximately 5% according to the last EETimes survey) make more than $100K, and most of those are in the ASIC or embedded software design areas. Some of your best web designers may exceed $100K, but they're probably unusually talented. I'm glad that the two kids in this article are doing allright, but I'm also a little worried that others like them might foresake a CS or EE degree for a high-paying job right out of high school. I know it's not in vogue to say you need a degree these days, but believe it or not, you're better off taking some classes and interacting with your fellow students than sitting by yourself in the glow of a CRT. These kids are making more than I did while co-oping for my degree, so they are definitely doing well. Best of luck to them...
Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:
1) Katz has never said he was a geek? Have you ever read any of his articles?
2) I dislike Katz's pseudo-intellectual spew and so I blocked articles posted by him. Are we now going to be treated to articles written by him but posted by you? If so, I have to wonder why go to all the trouble of creating a filter system.
Posted by Scott Francis[Mechaman]:
He didn't "screw up", he's had the assorted BIOSs for a long time, including the Neo Geo one. However, Sony apparently decided to get pissy all of a sudden and shut him down for it. Which is strange, as the only emulator needing the PSX BIOS is PSEmuPro which is far from being a replacement for a PSX. The Bleem team might have looked at a decompilation of the BIOS, but Bleem(which is more of a "threat" than PSEmuPro) doesn't use any part of the BIOS.
Posted by caitin:
I'm amazed that there is a politician that knows the term "open-source" regardless of whether they know what it means or not.
Posted by GrapefruitJuice:
Al Gore invented algorithms didn't he?
What you say is true. I would never claim that it is immoral for people to benefit from another's voluntary contribution.
All I claim is that it is not always in the best interests of the Creator to do things that maximize other peoples' benefit at their own expense. Here is the situation I imagine:
You are somebody who loves to paint houses, but nobody knows about you, and you don't have enough money to buy new houses so you can paint them.
And so, you make your own house a masterpiece, hoping that it will attract a buyer, so that you can move out of it and use the profits to buy another house (which you will then paint).
Sensing there is money to be made, a large corporation moves to your neighbourhood, and buys everybody else's house (but not yours). Then they use their extensive wealth to advertise your house on the front page of every paper.
The neighbourhood is in huge demand. People visit and move there in droves so that they can look at your beautiful house all day. The corporation makes a lot of money from selling the other, unadorned houses (especially the ones that have a clear view of your house).
However, you see none of that money. No matter how beautiful you make your house, nobody ever offers to buy it. No matter how many people you talk to, all you meet are people who want to look at your house, not live in it.
In fact, the corporation and your neighbours get extremely hostile when you talk about moving to another neighbourhood. In all senses of the word, they own you and your house, but they have not paid you for it.
The only payment they offer is advice and offers to improve the house. At first you accept them with great pleasure, but later you realize that many of them only care about the house, not you.
And so, shaking your head in disgust, you leave the neighbourhood. Some people miss you, others are angry at you, but you have already been replaced by teams of people who continue to paint your house, and make it into a greater masterpiece than even you could do.
Next time you begin painting a house, you think twice: ``Why will this be different than the last time?''
That is the question I had to ask myself after I quit working on GNU Libtool, and moved on to Debian GNU/Hurd.
The FIG License is an attempt to answer that question. I do not care about Free Software as much as I care about Creativity. I firmly believe that it is possible to be both moral and profitable, and I'm looking to make this dream a reality.
I want to eliminate SAS (Starving Artist Syndrome) from our world. Come and help me, if you believe in the cause. The only thing we Creators have to lose are our self-imposed chains.
Committed to freedom and diversity.
Posted by GrapefruitJuice:
Sue 'em
Posted by US Marine:
Al Gore once again shows his stupidity and utter arrogance. He thinks he can use the magic words "open source" to win over the technical communities? I just can't wait to see what utter nonsense he utters during the campaigns. What a dufus.
Posted by The Mongolian Barbecue:
...an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play with the discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence...
ESR never sounded like such a pumpous ass. He spends a good 10 paragraphs in the intro preening and stroking himself. I don't remember the actual guide being as insipid... look at the kind of shit he wrote
>
are you a hacker, ESR? do you realize how arrogant this looks to people who don't have their heads up their ass?
Why does it always have to be a choice between listening to misspelled uneducated drivel (read JonKatz) and semi-educated pontification?
Posted by Buffy the Overflow Slayer:
Well of course, the G in GNU stands for Gore.
-buffy
If the titanic filled with lawyers, it would not
have been a disaster.
Posted by alanx:
///
Ok, I was exaggerating a bit, I've actually seen inner classes used twice before in one interesting manner. (Once on the patterns mail list, and later at a client) Essentially, it was used as a sort of inverted proxy pattern.
So you have this sort of doWith operation.
class With
{
public static void doWith(SomethingToBeDoneWith s);
doSomethingInteresting();
try
{
s.doSomethingSpecific();
}
catch (Exception e)
{
}
finally
{
endSomethingInteresting();
}
}
where SomethingToBeDoneWith was implemented with an inner class.
Thanks for the feedback.
alan
Posted by Kragen:
All that this "open source" web site will cause is
confusion, Not all publicity is good, if it
confuses the issues (Which politicians enjoy) then
it will hurt the open source movement, imagine all
the hard core Republicans that must now despise
open source because Mr. Gore is publicly waving it
about.