In a move hailed by the Green Party, Christopher Hitchens, and Italian PM Massimo d'Alema, the Labour Party announced that they will use Slackware instead.
"Finally Labour is going back to its proletarian roots" an enthusiastic Christopher Hitchens was quoted as saying, expressing his hope that the adoption of OpenSource "will hasten the demise of that bunch of inbred, brain-addled morons". Asked to specify who he was refering to (Labour or the Crown), Hitchens declined to comment.
Others were not so thrilled. An angry Richard Stallman summoned the British consul to his Boston office and upbraided the diplomat for "the imperial arrogance" shown by the crown by not referring to "Red Hat GNU/Linux".
Meanwhile the Conservative Party expressed regret that the Queen had not "shown support for free enterprise and Capitalism" by adopting Microsoft's Internet Server. A spokesman for the Tories added, "we'll have lots more to say about this on our web site, just as soon as we reboot".
Mentioning the $2 million sounds more like an effort to stir up interest in this lame "challenge".
Getting a computer to generate text is not that big of a deal (unlike, say, getting it to play chess really well). The postmodernism generator does a pretty good job (and funny, too) and I'd venture to say for far less money.
Well, bacteria may or may not have a soul, but the Old Testament commands respect and kindness towards every living thing (which of course doesn't preclude killing and eating certain living things, so there you go).
One ethical/theological question for the future might be: what kinds (if any) of genetic manipulation constitute cruelty to these living things? And under what conditions (medical research, maybe?) might such cruelty be permissible?
An article or thread could be marked as "Inflamatory" or something like that, with suitably low scoring (-5?) The Inflamatory rating (the idea is, something worse than an ordinary troll) could be earned with a mechanism like this:
Each moderator can rate the article or thread as Inflamatory. This rating would be orthogonal to the usual moderating up or down, i.e. no moderation points would be spent in this special case.
If only one or two moderators do this, nothing happens. But if a plurality/majority of moderators coincide on this rating, then the article/thread would be red-flagged as such. Since moderators don't know who the other moderators are (I think) collusion between them would not be an issue.
Sorry if something like this has been posted already. Don't have the bandwidth today to check on all the other messages.
It will happen. Linux will become more user-friendly by completely hiding the CLI from the user just as Windows -or MacOS for that matter- does.
At that point the computer will become like a VCR. You push a button, and watch it do stuff. No input required. Reading the manual? Forget it.
When we reach that point, the kernel will cease to matter. Could be Linux, could be an NT kernel, could be anything, really. From the user's point of view, it will all look pretty much the same, just as the "Play" button looks the same in most VCRs regardless of how the internal electronics work.
It's user-centric vision of the future, focused on the needs and wants of today's user (italics to point out an inherent contradiction, which I'm not going to address just yet.) The vision is: a featureful point-and-click desktop interface, with a stable kernel running underneath.
Currently Linux has the stable kernel and Microsoft has the full-blown complement of user features. Linux will (probably) catch up with Microsoft in the latter area, but who's to say that MS won't eventually come up with a stable kernel? At least stable enough for most users, this will become a reality very soon if it hasn't happened already. So Linux and Microsoft will converge, and everything else (BeOS, MacOS) will too, if they haven't done so already. Cosmetic differences notwithstanding ("KDE Rocks!" "Loser, GNOME is boss!" "Pah! BeOS is king!") it will all be pretty much the same.
Is this sensible? I don't think so, but leaving aside the desirability of such a turn of events, I think that people who argue for more user-convenience (or, more stridently, for "world domination") should clearly see what exactly it is they want. Be careful of what you wish for, you might get it.
To repeat the question, is this sensible? Here's one reason why it might be:
The consumer will win. Not the least because proprietary OSes will become a bit (or a lot) more stable than current incarnations of Windows.
...and here are a couple reasons why it might not (be sensible):
Fighting for control over the desktop is fighting the last war. GUI is old technology already.
In a world of cookie-cutter GUIs and stable kernels, Linux will be one player among several. Good for consumer choice, you might say, but ultimately bad for non-commercial software in general. Because the advantage of one OS over the other (from the buyer's point of view) will depend more on non-technological factors such as marketing. Say what you will about Microsoft, they have marketed their product extremely well. I doubt that Linux can out-Microsoft Microsoft in this particular arena. (Notice I don't mention "bloat" as a factor. Bloatware is aesthetically offensive to me as a programmer, but with hardware capabilities increasing exponentially bloat is not a show-stopper from the consumer's point of view).
It's a grim vision of the future (for one thing, programmers as we know them today will cease to exist, if you think about it for a second). Down the road towards World Domination(TM) lies madness and mediocrity. And that's exactly where we appear to be headed.
And afterwards, what happens? That's the really interesting question. Beyond the battle for control of the desktop, beyond the GUI wars, beyond the browser wars; lies --hopefully-- a new world where none of that stuff matters. Twenty years from now the whole desktop environment will be, I believe, a backwards and primitive thing; and the real action will be elsewhere. I just wish I was smart enough to figure out exactly where it will be. Probably can't be anticipated; but the GUI will run its course and will be knocked out of the way by something different. That's where bright people's energies should be focusing (but of course there's no immediate payoff, and it's impossible to figure out in advance.)
Meantime, it will be interesting to watch Linux's march towards boredom. My hope is that it will only be a temporary detour; because I sure will hate it if Linux becomes just like Windows, only better.
It will happen. Linux will become more user-friendly by completely hiding the CLI for the user just as Windows -or MacOS for that matter- does.
At that point the computer will become like a VCR. You push a button, and watch it do stuff. No input required. Reading the manual? Forget it.
When we reach that point, the kernel will cease to matter. Could be Linux, could be an NT kernel, could be anything, really. From the user's point of view, it will all look pretty much the same, just as the "Play" button looks the same in most VCRs regardless of how the internal electronics work.
It's user-centric vision of the future, focused on the needs and wants of today's user (italics to point out an inherent contradiction, which I'm not going to address just yet.) The vision is: a featureful point-and-click desktop interface, with a stable kernel running underneath.
Currently Linux has the stable kernel and Microsoft has the full-blown complement of user features. Linux will (probably) catch up with Microsoft in the latter area, but who's to say that MS won't eventually come up with a stable kernel? At least stable enough for most users, this will become a reality very soon if it hasn't happened already. So Linux and Microsoft will converge, and everything else (BeOS, MacOS) will too, if they haven't done so already. Cosmetic differences notwithstanding ("KDE Rocks!" "Loser, GNOME is boss!" "Pah! BeOS is king!") it will all be pretty much the same.
Is this sensible? I don't think so, but leaving aside the desirability of such a turn of events, I think that people who argue for more user-convenience (or, more stridently, for "world domination") should clearly see what exactly it is they want. Be careful of what you wish for, you might get it.
To repeat the question, is this sensible? Here's one reason why it might be:
The consumer will win. Not the least because proprietary OSes will become a bit (or a lot) more stable than current incarnations of Windows.
...and here are a couple reasons why it might not (be sensible):
Fighting for control over the desktop is fighting the last war. GUI is old technology already.
In a world of cookie-cutter GUIs and stable kernels, Linux will be one player among several. Good for consumer choice, you might say, but ultimately bad for non-commercial software in general. Because the advantage of one OS over the other (from the buyer's point of view) will depend more on non-technological factors such as marketing. Say what you will about Microsoft, they have marketed their product extremely well. I doubt that Linux can out-Microsoft Microsoft in this particular arena. (Notice I don't mention "bloat" as a factor. Bloatware is aesthetically offensive to me as a programmer, but with hardware capabilities increasing exponentially bloat is not a show-stopper from the consumer's point of view).
It's a grim vision of the future (for one thing, programmers as we know them today will cease to exist, if you think about it for a second). Down the road towards World Domination(TM) lies madness and mediocrity. And that's exactly where we appear to be headed.
And afterwards, what happens? That's the really interesting question. Beyond the battle for control of the desktop, beyond the GUI wars, beyond the browser wars; lies --hopefully-- a new world where none of that stuff matters. Twenty years from now the whole desktop environment will be, I believe, a backwards and primitive thing; and the real action will be elsewhere. I just wish I was smart enough to figure out exactly where it will be. Probably can't be anticipated; but the GUI will run its course and will be knocked out of the way by something different. That's where bright people's energies should be focusing (but of course there's no immediate payoff, and it's impossible to figure out in advance.)
Meantime, it will be interesting to watch Linux's march towards boredom. My hope is that it will only be a temporary detour; because I sure will hate it if Linux becomes just like Windows, only better.
To me, the first half of the article was meaningless nonsense. The second half argues, in essence, that Windows is the current "OS for the Masses",a fact that retroactively validates the Windows philosophy. And since the philosophy is valid -so the argument goes- Linux must buy into it in order to compete.
IMHO, this "Linux for the Masses" argument boils down to copy-catting the philosophy of an operating environment that assumes the users are dumb, and produces more dumb users as a consequence.
What bothers Metcalf is that Linux, itself, is not listed in NASDAQ.
These are interesting times. Bill Gates is the richest man on the planet and Microsoft one of the highest-valued companies in the world, and arguably there is tangible market value behind it. But there are also all these other hi-tech and internet stocks flying high. A secretary at the place I work for owns a piece of AOL and the stock has split N times and she's delighted. Maybe there's some tangible value in AOL too, but you start going down the list and the stock valuations look increasingly fictitious. It smells to me like a giant speculative bubble (take a look at the P/E ratios of the star companies in NASDAQ sometime), but for the time being the market is sweet and people are having a grand old time.
And the thing is, the players in the internet stock frenzy are big (at least on paper) and getting bigger. Microsoft, AOL, Sun, Cisco, Amazon.com, etc. These are names that capture the attention of the people playing the market like the lottery.
Where does that leave Linux? An OS developed by a widely dispersed band of volunteers, not by a monolithic entity. An OS where the profit stream has so far been laughable by comparison with Microsoft and the rest of the merry gang ot "technology stocks".
This is what bothers Metcalf. He can't see the potential for billions of dollars' worth of profit in such a model, so he says it's communism. Perhaps it bothers him too that under the decentralized nature of Linux (so far), not so much Microsoft's dominance; but *American* dominance of the computer world would be somewhat diluted --though not destroyed, to be sure.
The thing is, the secretary in my office might agree with him. Right now Linux is not on her radar screen, bless her. But if Linux makes a credible challenge for the desktop market (a big if, to be sure); I very much suspect that she would be actively hostile towards it. You see, there is no Linux, Inc. that can give her the same delight she gets from seeing her AOL stocks zooming upwards, at least on paper. And that would not be, in a manner of speaking, the American way.
And what should worry Linux supporters (I consider myself one) is the reality that in today's world a products' worth is measured by the value of the parent company's stock; at least in the eyes of the general public and the so-called market analysts.
In this view, Microsoft (or AOL, for that matter) is good because it's big. That's a mindset that's going to be hard to break.
Well, they are a leaked internal report, nobody made them up, so this would not apply to them (I can't be defaming you if I simply divulge something you actually said/wrote).
But on the other hand, Micros~1 could claim otherwise. So there would be a dispute concerning the facts of these documents bet. Microsoft and ESR. And so it could well go to trial.
Sure, in the end it would be proven (I think) that they are legitimate and not slander, but after how many hours of court and $$ for lawyers' fees?
I'm the admin. for a machine that is a list server for a dozen lists. When the worm.explore thing hit I didn't want the lists possibly helping to propagate it; so on Sunday I hacked together a program to filter out.exe attachments from mailing lists. Then, there was a security hole (another one) that was discovered in Sun's statd and I had to deal with that.
Needless to say, I am very pleased at this initiative. All I would need to do is light a candle to St. Isidore to cleanse and protect me from the nasty little viruses, trojan horses and security holes that are clearly the work of Satan.
Hell, the Vatican was ahead even of the Discordians on this one.
I can't disagree with a book I haven't read. However, if the point is to make the connection with magic and mysticism based on plumbing the spiritual or intellectual depths of geekdom, there are probably simpler explanations for this phenomenon.
For the sake of argument, one could say that it's all sociological.
Magic and Mythology: The power of a wizard comes from esoteric knowledge. Knowing the secret spell and how to use it. The appeal of a mythological hero is the hero's journey towards virtue. The hero achieves virtue by performing some heroic (pun intended) deed, sometimes with the assistance of a god or wizard, from whom the hero learns some of the secrets of the universe.
Heroes often show some of the traits associated with chivalry: loyalty, honor, fidelity and courage. This is probably one reason of the appeal of such things as SCA to geeks, for example.
Knowledge and virtue, that's the thing that makes so much of this stuff appealing to geekdom. Because society often places greater value in quite different things.
Certainly in capitalist societies like the US you reap more rewards by being aggressive, competitive, reckless (risk-taking), and self-assured than by being smart; which is a major reason why Microsoft and Mr. Gates are so thoroughly despised by a lot of us.
Geeks (in the US at least) begin their education in the ways of the world early on. In school, your place in the social pecking order is inversely related to knowledge and virtue. The US high school is particularly brutal in this regard, but I think that all over the world, kids who are overly excited about knowledge are ostracized by their schoolmates and vice-versa.
So there's nothing for the young geek but to retreat from the world. Geeks band together and form what to them is the ideal society: an aristocracy of the intellect.
The interesting thing about it is that you can't really characterize it as escapism. You know full well the consequences of choosing to be different (not being popular), yet you do it anyway. It's a conscious choice, one which you know has a downside.
Paganism seems to me another such deliberate choice. All pagans please forgive me; but I don't think paganism is a natural thing for anybod raised in the West to be drawn to. You will yourself to be a pagan, because nature worship is in direct conflict with all the major Western religions. If you are already withdrawing from the values of mainstream society, paganism helps make the point forcefully. Plus it has all these cool magic spells and stuff, which is a symbolic reminder of the importance of esoteric knowledge.
If anybody has any info on this, I would greatly appreciate it.
I've used GNU tar v 1.12 with great success on my home machine, doing full and incremental backups. I've even rebuilt my system from the backups without any problems.
Like those mountain people in Tatooine (forget their name) taking potshots at the pod racers, ROTFL!
Jaba the Hutt sounding the gong...
Jaba the Hutt as "Himself" in the credits
Darth Maul's facial expression when he is chopped along the Equator... way cool.
Granted, I've only seen the movie once --so far-- but it seemed to me there was very little in the way of a story or character development. That may be by design. I think this movie was just setting up the basics for the major stuff that's yet to come (the fall of the Republic, Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader, etc.)
But the special effects were spectacular and there are enough good moments to compensate for the lack of an actual story and other annoyances. I'll watch it again.
One annoying thing that I haven't seen commented on is Anakin's mother. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, eh?
> Linux distributions contain more software than BSD systems, and the documentation exists in various >forms. (not all of it is in man format) >I agree that a few more man pages should be written for Linux, though.
Yet, GNU have declared man pages "obsolete" by fiat. That really rubs me the wrong way.
I imagine some people were saying the same thing about television a few decades ago. The potential may be there but when you look at non-government-controlled television it's clear that a) most people prefer entertainment over information, and b) providing the same by technological means can be pretty profitable.
TV must have started with high hopes of educating millions across the globe. Today we have Larry King, hour-long infomercials, soap operas, Jerry Springer and all kinds of other crap.
It's not yet clear whether companies and advertisers can reliably make the same kinds of money from the internet as they currently can from TV. But if this turns out to be the case, Dyson can forget about his dream; entertainment will win.
Slashdot Mirror
In a move hailed by the Green Party, Christopher Hitchens, and Italian PM Massimo d'Alema, the Labour Party announced that they will use Slackware instead.
"Finally Labour is going back to its proletarian roots" an enthusiastic Christopher Hitchens was quoted as saying, expressing his hope that the adoption of OpenSource "will hasten the demise of that bunch of inbred, brain-addled morons". Asked to specify who he was refering to (Labour or the Crown), Hitchens declined to comment.
Others were not so thrilled. An angry Richard Stallman summoned the British consul to his Boston office and upbraided the diplomat for "the imperial arrogance" shown by the crown by not referring to "Red Hat GNU/Linux".
Meanwhile the Conservative Party expressed regret that the Queen had not "shown support for free enterprise and Capitalism" by adopting Microsoft's Internet Server. A spokesman for the Tories added, "we'll have lots more to say about this on our web site, just as soon as we reboot".
Mentioning the $2 million sounds more like an effort to stir up interest in this lame "challenge".
Getting a computer to generate text is not that big of a deal (unlike, say, getting it to play chess really well). The postmodernism generator does a pretty good job (and funny, too) and I'd venture to say for far less money.
Well, bacteria may or may not have a soul, but the Old Testament commands respect and kindness towards every living thing (which of course doesn't preclude killing and eating certain living things, so there you go).
One ethical/theological question for the future might be: what kinds (if any) of genetic manipulation constitute cruelty to these living things? And under what conditions (medical research, maybe?) might such cruelty be permissible?
An article or thread could be marked as "Inflamatory" or something like that, with suitably low scoring (-5?) The Inflamatory rating (the idea is, something worse than an ordinary troll) could be earned with a mechanism like this:
Each moderator can rate the article or thread as Inflamatory. This rating would be orthogonal to the usual moderating up or down, i.e. no moderation points would be spent in this special case.
If only one or two moderators do this, nothing happens. But if a plurality/majority of moderators coincide on this rating, then the article/thread would be red-flagged as such. Since moderators don't know who the other moderators are (I think) collusion between them would not be an issue.
Sorry if something like this has been posted already. Don't have the bandwidth today to check on all the other messages.
At that point the computer will become like a VCR. You push a button, and watch it do stuff. No input required. Reading the manual? Forget it.
When we reach that point, the kernel will cease to matter. Could be Linux, could be an NT kernel, could be anything, really. From the user's point of view, it will all look pretty much the same, just as the "Play" button looks the same in most VCRs regardless of how the internal electronics work.
It's user-centric vision of the future, focused on the needs and wants of today's user (italics to point out an inherent contradiction, which I'm not going to address just yet.) The vision is: a featureful point-and-click desktop interface, with a stable kernel running underneath.
Currently Linux has the stable kernel and Microsoft has the full-blown complement of user features. Linux will (probably) catch up with Microsoft in the latter area, but who's to say that MS won't eventually come up with a stable kernel? At least stable enough for most users, this will become a reality very soon if it hasn't happened already. So Linux and Microsoft will converge, and everything else (BeOS, MacOS) will too, if they haven't done so already. Cosmetic differences notwithstanding ("KDE Rocks!" "Loser, GNOME is boss!" "Pah! BeOS is king!") it will all be pretty much the same.
Is this sensible? I don't think so, but leaving aside the desirability of such a turn of events, I think that people who argue for more user-convenience (or, more stridently, for "world domination") should clearly see what exactly it is they want. Be careful of what you wish for, you might get it.
To repeat the question, is this sensible? Here's one reason why it might be:
...and here are a couple reasons why it might not (be sensible):
It's a grim vision of the future (for one thing, programmers as we know them today will cease to exist, if you think about it for a second). Down the road towards World Domination(TM) lies madness and mediocrity. And that's exactly where we appear to be headed.
And afterwards, what happens? That's the really interesting question. Beyond the battle for control of the desktop, beyond the GUI wars, beyond the browser wars; lies --hopefully-- a new world where none of that stuff matters. Twenty years from now the whole desktop environment will be, I believe, a backwards and primitive thing; and the real action will be elsewhere. I just wish I was smart enough to figure out exactly where it will be. Probably can't be anticipated; but the GUI will run its course and will be knocked out of the way by something different. That's where bright people's energies should be focusing (but of course there's no immediate payoff, and it's impossible to figure out in advance.)
Meantime, it will be interesting to watch Linux's march towards boredom. My hope is that it will only be a temporary detour; because I sure will hate it if Linux becomes just like Windows, only better.
At that point the computer will become like a VCR. You push a button, and watch it do stuff. No input required. Reading the manual? Forget it.
When we reach that point, the kernel will cease to matter. Could be Linux, could be an NT kernel, could be anything, really. From the user's point of view, it will all look pretty much the same, just as the "Play" button looks the same in most VCRs regardless of how the internal electronics work.
It's user-centric vision of the future, focused on the needs and wants of today's user (italics to point out an inherent contradiction, which I'm not going to address just yet.) The vision is: a featureful point-and-click desktop interface, with a stable kernel running underneath.
Currently Linux has the stable kernel and Microsoft has the full-blown complement of user features. Linux will (probably) catch up with Microsoft in the latter area, but who's to say that MS won't eventually come up with a stable kernel? At least stable enough for most users, this will become a reality very soon if it hasn't happened already. So Linux and Microsoft will converge, and everything else (BeOS, MacOS) will too, if they haven't done so already. Cosmetic differences notwithstanding ("KDE Rocks!" "Loser, GNOME is boss!" "Pah! BeOS is king!") it will all be pretty much the same.
Is this sensible? I don't think so, but leaving aside the desirability of such a turn of events, I think that people who argue for more user-convenience (or, more stridently, for "world domination") should clearly see what exactly it is they want. Be careful of what you wish for, you might get it.
To repeat the question, is this sensible? Here's one reason why it might be:
...and here are a couple reasons why it might not (be sensible):
It's a grim vision of the future (for one thing, programmers as we know them today will cease to exist, if you think about it for a second). Down the road towards World Domination(TM) lies madness and mediocrity. And that's exactly where we appear to be headed.
And afterwards, what happens? That's the really interesting question. Beyond the battle for control of the desktop, beyond the GUI wars, beyond the browser wars; lies --hopefully-- a new world where none of that stuff matters. Twenty years from now the whole desktop environment will be, I believe, a backwards and primitive thing; and the real action will be elsewhere. I just wish I was smart enough to figure out exactly where it will be. Probably can't be anticipated; but the GUI will run its course and will be knocked out of the way by something different. That's where bright people's energies should be focusing (but of course there's no immediate payoff, and it's impossible to figure out in advance.)
Meantime, it will be interesting to watch Linux's march towards boredom. My hope is that it will only be a temporary detour; because I sure will hate it if Linux becomes just like Windows, only better.
To me, the first half of the article was meaningless nonsense. The second half argues, in essence, that Windows is the current "OS for the Masses",a fact that retroactively validates the Windows philosophy. And since the philosophy is valid -so the argument goes- Linux must buy into it in order to compete.
IMHO, this "Linux for the Masses" argument boils down to copy-catting the philosophy of an operating environment that assumes the users are dumb, and produces more dumb users as a consequence.
What bothers Metcalf is that Linux, itself, is not listed in NASDAQ.
These are interesting times. Bill Gates is the richest man on the planet and Microsoft one of the highest-valued companies in the world, and arguably there is tangible market value behind it. But there are also all these other hi-tech and internet stocks flying high. A secretary at the place I work for owns a piece of AOL and the stock has split N times and she's delighted. Maybe there's some tangible value in AOL too, but you start going down the list and the stock valuations look increasingly fictitious. It smells to me like a giant speculative bubble (take a look at the P/E ratios of the star companies in NASDAQ sometime), but for the time being the market is sweet and people are having a grand old time.
And the thing is, the players in the internet stock frenzy are big (at least on paper) and getting bigger. Microsoft, AOL, Sun, Cisco, Amazon.com, etc. These are names that capture the attention of the people playing the market like the lottery.
Where does that leave Linux? An OS developed by a widely dispersed band of volunteers, not by a monolithic entity. An OS where the profit stream has so far been laughable by comparison with Microsoft and the rest of the merry gang ot "technology stocks".
This is what bothers Metcalf. He can't see the potential for billions of dollars' worth of profit in such a model, so he says it's communism. Perhaps it bothers him too that under the decentralized nature of Linux (so far), not so much Microsoft's dominance; but *American* dominance of the computer world would be somewhat diluted --though not destroyed, to be sure.
The thing is, the secretary in my office might agree with him. Right now Linux is not on her radar screen, bless her. But if Linux makes a credible challenge for the desktop market (a big if, to be sure); I very much suspect that she would be actively hostile towards it. You see, there is no Linux, Inc. that can give her the same delight she gets from seeing her AOL stocks zooming upwards, at least on paper. And that would not be, in a manner of speaking, the American way.
And what should worry Linux supporters (I consider myself one) is the reality that in today's world a products' worth is measured by the value of the parent company's stock; at least in the eyes of the general public and the so-called market analysts.
In this view, Microsoft (or AOL, for that matter) is good because it's big. That's a mindset that's going to be hard to break.
I hope this judgement gets thrown out.
I'm the admin. for a machine that is a list server for a dozen lists. When the worm.explore thing hit I didn't want the lists possibly helping to propagate it; so on Sunday I hacked together a program to filter out .exe attachments from mailing lists. Then, there was a security hole (another one) that was discovered in Sun's statd and I had to deal with that.
Needless to say, I am very pleased at this initiative. All I would need to do is light a candle to St. Isidore to cleanse and protect me from the nasty little viruses, trojan horses and security holes that are clearly the work of
Satan.
Hell, the Vatican was ahead even of the Discordians on this one.
All hail St. Isidore!
I can't disagree with a book I haven't read. However, if the point is to make the connection with magic and mysticism based on plumbing the spiritual or intellectual depths of geekdom, there are probably simpler explanations for this phenomenon.
:-) )
For the sake of argument, one could say that it's all sociological.
Magic and Mythology: The power of a wizard comes from esoteric knowledge. Knowing the secret spell and how to use it. The appeal of a mythological hero is the hero's journey towards virtue. The hero achieves virtue by performing some heroic (pun intended) deed, sometimes with the assistance of a god or wizard, from whom the hero learns some of the secrets of the universe.
Heroes often show some of the traits associated with chivalry: loyalty, honor, fidelity and courage. This is probably one reason of the appeal of such things as SCA to geeks, for example.
Knowledge and virtue, that's the thing that makes so much of this stuff appealing to geekdom. Because society often places greater value in quite different things.
Certainly in capitalist societies like the US you reap more rewards by being aggressive, competitive, reckless (risk-taking), and self-assured than by being smart; which is a major reason why Microsoft and Mr. Gates are so thoroughly despised by a lot of us.
Geeks (in the US at least) begin their education in the ways of the world early on. In school, your place in the social pecking order is inversely related to knowledge and virtue. The US high school is particularly brutal in this regard, but I think that all over the world, kids who are overly excited about knowledge are ostracized by their schoolmates and vice-versa.
So there's nothing for the young geek but to retreat from the world. Geeks band together and form what to them is the ideal society: an aristocracy of the intellect.
The interesting thing about it is that you can't really characterize it as escapism. You know full well the consequences of choosing to be different (not being popular), yet you do it anyway. It's a conscious choice, one which you know has a downside.
Paganism seems to me another such deliberate choice. All pagans please forgive me; but I don't think paganism is a natural thing for anybod raised in the West to be drawn to. You will yourself to be a pagan, because nature worship is in direct conflict with all the major Western religions. If you are already withdrawing from the values of mainstream society, paganism helps make the point forcefully. Plus it has all these cool magic spells and stuff, which is a symbolic reminder of the importance of esoteric knowledge.
There's also the debauchery (or so I'm told
If anybody has any info on this, I would greatly appreciate it.
I've used GNU tar v 1.12 with great success on my home machine, doing full and incremental backups. I've even rebuilt my system from the backups without any problems.
Granted, I've only seen the movie once --so far-- but it seemed to me there was very little
in the way of a story or character development.
That may be by design. I think this movie was just setting up the basics for the major stuff that's yet to come (the fall of the Republic, Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader, etc.)
But the special effects were spectacular and there are enough good moments to compensate for the lack of an actual story and other annoyances. I'll watch it again.
One annoying thing that I haven't seen commented on is Anakin's mother. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, eh?
> Linux distributions contain more software than BSD systems, and the documentation exists in various
>forms. (not all of it is in man format)
>I agree that a few more man pages should be written for Linux, though.
Yet, GNU have declared man pages "obsolete" by
fiat. That really rubs me the wrong way.
I am user most (all?) Slashdot people know about this, but just in case:
http://www.anybrowser.org/campaign/
I imagine some people were saying the same thing about television a few decades ago. The potential may be there but when you look at non-government-controlled television it's clear that a) most people prefer entertainment over information, and b) providing the same by technological means can be pretty profitable.
TV must have started with high hopes of educating millions across the globe. Today we have Larry King, hour-long infomercials, soap operas, Jerry Springer and all kinds of other crap.
It's not yet clear whether companies and advertisers can reliably make the same kinds of money from the internet as they currently can from TV. But if this turns out to be the case, Dyson can forget about his dream; entertainment will win.
I think Gore has an inferiority complex.