They only have the 100-question version of the purity test. I'll send them the 500-question version, along with the other 3 MB of stuff I have sitting around...
Selling Books Is Wrong? OF COURSE NOT! READ PLS
on
Salon on Bruce Perens
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· Score: 1
Here are the relevant bits of the GNU Manifesto. First, we see RMS noting that copyrights on books are different from copyrights on software:
"The copyright system was created expressly for the purpose of encouraging authorship. In the domain for which it was invented--books, which could be copied economically only on a printing press--it did little harm, and did not obstruct most of the individuals who read the books. "
Next, RMS talks about how programmers can make a living and still write free software:
"There are plenty of ways that programmers could make a living without selling the right to use a program. This way is customary now because it brings programmers and businessmen the most money, not because it is the only way to make a living. It is easy to find other ways if you want to find them. Here are a number of examples.
"A manufacturer introducing a new computer will pay for the porting of operating systems onto the new hardware... The sale of teaching, hand-holding and maintenance services could also employ programmers... People with new ideas could distribute programs as freeware, asking for donations from satisfied users, or selling hand-holding services."
So, nothing less than the very GNU Manifesto says that selling teaching services is OK - selling hand-holding is OK - and copyrights on books are OK. So why do the flipping purists have their shorts in a bind?
One can only assume it is, at root, an ego problem. Their movement has been yanked from under their feet, and the only recourse they have is to throw a fit over what are, in essence, relatively minor tresgressions of their original vision.
And the fact that Perens has hurt the movement with this kind of fuss is apparently a non-factor. For purists, if the movement isn't pure in their vision, it doesn't count. So one cannot go quietly into the night - one must publicly announce one's departure, gain attention, throw tantrums, send global e-mails, etc.
With these kinds of moral leaders we'll soon be back to 1989 - Windows as king, the FSF as a minor speck in the eye of 100% proprietary software. But at least their movement will be pure.
Just because you know your cutting board is Y2K compliant, doesn't mean you won't have problems! When your neighbor's cutting board won't work, and your neighbor's neighbor's cutting board won't work, the resulting panic will be trouble for everyone! There'll be a wood shortage, to begin with! Who knows what else could happen from that! And since you can't prove a negative, you can't really say this won't happen! So start stockpiling tuna fish cans and make sure your powder's dry!
And don't walk by any cash machines on January 1! Those little lasers on the inside of the monitor will be flying everywhere! You could get blinded for life!
I used to get a lot of their stuff when I was a big 6 consultant. Last year at this time, they were predicting that four Unixii would survive the long haul. Who made their list?
HP-UX
Solaris
Digital Unix
SCO
Now keep in mind, this wasn't five years ago, this wasn't three years ago, this was LAST YEAR. I can well believe the first two; that's fine. This week we saw the re-branding of Digital Unix to a name that... hell, I can't even remember what it was, but it was an attempt to leverage 64-bit Unix in a brand name. And SCO - sorry, if they aren't dead yet, at best someone's on the intercom calling code blue.
Linux wasn't even on their radar screens, and six months later MS themselves were saying that Linux was evidence that they had competition. You'd think someone getting big bucks for their crystal ball would have some idea of the biggest paradigm shift since the web. At that time it was like a tsunami about to hit the shore. But on Gartner - nothing. Gartner is standard safety-oriented corporate farina for their standard safety-oriented corporate customers. I pity the people who follow them like lapdogs.
It says volumes about our times that when most Americans talk about the year 2000 they think not of the many symbolic or mystic implications of the Millenium, but of the mundane but potentially significant programming glitch that threatens many computer systems.
What an overstatement.
First of all, this says nothing about our times. Look back in history and you see that, in EVERY time, in EVERY era, human beings have been convinced that armageddon is just around the corner. If it's not the ending of computing as we know it, it's nuclear annihilation, the rapture, or volcanos and earthquakes wrought by wrathful gods. If we have nothing else to be concerned about, we have the ever-present gigantic meteor from outer space, which I'm sure will return to its number-one status of probable source of global peril on January 2, 2000. (Don't worry, Katz, ecological dysfunction will be number two.)
Secondly, it is humans' concern with symbolism and/or mysticism that brings about this sort of hand-wringing in the first place.
Lastly, if one is to be concerned with problems that one does not understand and cannot possibly do anything about, it is a tad bit more rational to be primarily concerned with the ones that might lead to one's OWN peril.
If he is "attention-seeking", I'm sure it's only an outgrowth of both his enthusiasm over the ideas involved, and an understanding of the nature of competing for mindshare. The fact that the term "open source" has become standard terminology is due to his hard work on this front. This is a gent who knows what's up and although it seems a part of both the/. and the hacker communities to bash what's hot, this is one case where we should take a step back and avoid biting the hand that's feeding the open source frenzy.
I don't understand where you "Eudora sucks" people are coming from. Bloated? You don't have to use the bloat features. But if you DO, you get the benefits.
With 4.1, you get mail checking and filtering in the background. The filtering is serious - I'm on about 15 mailing lists, I have six POP accounts on three different servers and I have 18 Eudora mailboxes to handle it, and it handles it beautifully. I have it playing different sounds each time mail comes in from certain mailing lists, so I'm alerted to various things going on during the day.
I NEED the bloat features to do what I do. I need multiple mail personalities, color-coded labels, and quick-sorting by subject, author, or date. I need it to automatically expand nicknames into real addresses.
I guess if you just get 10 messages a day from your friends, you don't need that kind of thing, but I can't work without it anymore.
The DVD media will not go through the same abuse as game console CDs, for the obvious reason that most DVD media will not be regularly handled by 8-year-olds.
Why don't they allow anyone to create a Netcenter channel? Netscape could define a protocol for regular submissions. It would increase Netcenter usage, since people could get all their regular news from a single portal. Word of mouth on people's favorite micro-portals would push Netcenter as well. What a win-win situation that would be... any hope for it?
1. For all those who say there's nothing magical about college, I gotta point out that the real world is an entirely crappier experience on almost all points. I would prefer to be in school, by far. I doubt anyone who's done both for any length of time would disagree.
2. If I didn't learn to be a great hacker in college, I did learn everything else I needed to be successful and to be an interesting human being. Interpersonal relations, american poetry (LIT 205 and 206), running a small organization (I ran the radio station), logic (PHI 201), ethics (PHI 203), the basic workings of the mind (PSY 101), how society operates on a basic level (ECON 101), how it used to operate before (HIST 106) and so much more.
Q. What if they gave away DIVX disks for free? A. There would be a huge load of DIVX disks in the landfills for the next few centuries.
But they can't do this anyway. The manufacturing cost of DIVX movies is higher than that of open DVD; each DIVX disk has to be serialized with a different serial number so that its usage can be tracked. Also, part of the scheme is that they hope profit margins on DIVX disks is high enough so supermarkets and drug stores will sell them (which none have agreed to do yet, and none will, IMO).
Also, never in a million billion years would they give away a DIVX of a film that's in current release. They put a bastardization into DVD players as it is, called regional encoding, so that international consumers couldn't buy DVDs from America of films in international release.
DIVX is different from renting in many ways. For one thing, it's intentionally monopolistic: you can only rent DIVX from DIVX. If DIVX decides they don't like you, your player will stop playing DIVX.
And regardless of what they think of you, they WILL sell your address to anyone who asks, along with a list of genres of movies you watch and the times when you watch them. (Including DVDs you watch.)
DIVX won't catch on... one big reason is that because of the DES encryption, players can't be exported. Finally a reason to celebrate the crappy encryption export regulation!
It's not that older people are necessarily "set in their ways" or otherwise unable to learn; it's that your employer generally expects you to work 40-50 hours on things that are critical to the operation, and not on what will be critical in 2-3 years or 4-5 years.
Most people with a full-time job make a choice between continuing to keep up and learning, and having any resemblance of a life. Add a family to the mix and suddenly your choices are tied to the welfare of other people. Let's see, neglect your family, or keep up with technology?
I notice that you "not in it for the money" folks are posting from.edu addresses. Not to be the grizzled old veteran but I've seen so many "go bad" after being in the real world for a while. You need another $200 a month to have an apartment with its own laundry, and pretty soon the "not in it for the money" turns into employer resentment. "Hey, I could work over *there* for another 20 thou a year!" This effect doubles if you have a family, wherein most people adapt some sort of policy whereby their entire life is devoted to their children and they are stuck in the shittiest job just because it pays well.
The most important thing is that you're happy in your work. Never take a job just for the money. You will absolutely regret it.
Slashdot Mirror
- Mitchell
- Manos: The Hands of Fate
- The Girl in Lover's Lane
- Girls Town
- Day the Earth Froze
- Laserblast
- I Accuse My Parents
- This Island Earth
WORST episodes:- Red Zone Cuba
- Stranded in Space (note: don't confuse with "Space Travellers" with Gene Hackman (who is good in anything))
- Crash of the Moons
PERSONAL quirky favorites, though not the best:- The Brain that Wouldn't Die
- Master Ninja I
- Alien from L.A. (with Kathy Ireland)
- Deathstalker and the Warriors from Hell
- Eegah!
Best SHORTS:And we hope to someday use DHTML and/or Javascript to develop the first web-based messaging interface that doesn't suck.
They only have the 100-question version of the purity test. I'll send them the 500-question version, along with the other 3 MB of stuff I have sitting around...
"The copyright system was created expressly for the purpose of encouraging authorship. In the domain for which it was invented--books, which could be copied economically only on a printing press--it did little harm, and did not obstruct most of the individuals who read the books. "
Next, RMS talks about how programmers can make a living and still write free software:
"There are plenty of ways that programmers could make a living without selling the right to use a program. This way is customary now because it brings programmers and businessmen the most money, not because it is the only way to make a living. It is easy to find other ways if you want to find them. Here are a number of examples.
"A manufacturer introducing a new computer will pay for the porting of operating systems onto the new hardware... The sale of teaching, hand-holding and maintenance services could also employ programmers... People with new ideas could distribute programs as freeware, asking for donations from satisfied users, or selling hand-holding services."
So, nothing less than the very GNU Manifesto says that selling teaching services is OK - selling hand-holding is OK - and copyrights on books are OK. So why do the flipping purists have their shorts in a bind?
One can only assume it is, at root, an ego problem. Their movement has been yanked from under their feet, and the only recourse they have is to throw a fit over what are, in essence, relatively minor tresgressions of their original vision.
And the fact that Perens has hurt the movement with this kind of fuss is apparently a non-factor. For purists, if the movement isn't pure in their vision, it doesn't count. So one cannot go quietly into the night - one must publicly announce one's departure, gain attention, throw tantrums, send global e-mails, etc.
With these kinds of moral leaders we'll soon be back to 1989 - Windows as king, the FSF as a minor speck in the eye of 100% proprietary software. But at least their movement will be pure.
And don't walk by any cash machines on January 1! Those little lasers on the inside of the monitor will be flying everywhere! You could get blinded for life!
- HP-UX
- Solaris
- Digital Unix
- SCO
Now keep in mind, this wasn't five years ago, this wasn't three years ago, this was LAST YEAR. I can well believe the first two; that's fine. This week we saw the re-branding of Digital Unix to a name that... hell, I can't even remember what it was, but it was an attempt to leverage 64-bit Unix in a brand name. And SCO - sorry, if they aren't dead yet, at best someone's on the intercom calling code blue.Linux wasn't even on their radar screens, and six months later MS themselves were saying that Linux was evidence that they had competition. You'd think someone getting big bucks for their crystal ball would have some idea of the biggest paradigm shift since the web. At that time it was like a tsunami about to hit the shore. But on Gartner - nothing. Gartner is standard safety-oriented corporate farina for their standard safety-oriented corporate customers. I pity the people who follow them like lapdogs.
What an overstatement.
First of all, this says nothing about our times. Look back in history and you see that, in EVERY time, in EVERY era, human beings have been convinced that armageddon is just around the corner. If it's not the ending of computing as we know it, it's nuclear annihilation, the rapture, or volcanos and earthquakes wrought by wrathful gods. If we have nothing else to be concerned about, we have the ever-present gigantic meteor from outer space, which I'm sure will return to its number-one status of probable source of global peril on January 2, 2000. (Don't worry, Katz, ecological dysfunction will be number two.)
Secondly, it is humans' concern with symbolism and/or mysticism that brings about this sort of hand-wringing in the first place.
Lastly, if one is to be concerned with problems that one does not understand and cannot possibly do anything about, it is a tad bit more rational to be primarily concerned with the ones that might lead to one's OWN peril.
If he is "attention-seeking", I'm sure it's only an outgrowth of both his enthusiasm over the ideas involved, and an understanding of the nature of competing for mindshare. The fact that the term "open source" has become standard terminology is due to his hard work on this front. This is a gent who knows what's up and although it seems a part of both the /. and the hacker communities to bash what's hot, this is one case where we should take a step back and avoid biting the hand that's feeding the open source frenzy.
With 4.1, you get mail checking and filtering in the background. The filtering is serious - I'm on about 15 mailing lists, I have six POP accounts on three different servers and I have 18 Eudora mailboxes to handle it, and it handles it beautifully. I have it playing different sounds each time mail comes in from certain mailing lists, so I'm alerted to various things going on during the day.
I NEED the bloat features to do what I do. I need multiple mail personalities, color-coded labels, and quick-sorting by subject, author, or date. I need it to automatically expand nicknames into real addresses.
I guess if you just get 10 messages a day from your friends, you don't need that kind of thing, but I can't work without it anymore.
The DVD media will not go through the same abuse as game console CDs, for the obvious reason that most DVD media will not be regularly handled by 8-year-olds.
Why don't they allow anyone to create a Netcenter channel? Netscape could define a protocol for regular submissions. It would increase Netcenter usage, since people could get all their regular news from a single portal. Word of mouth on people's favorite micro-portals would push Netcenter as well. What a win-win situation that would be... any hope for it?
2. If I didn't learn to be a great hacker in college, I did learn everything else I needed to be successful and to be an interesting human being. Interpersonal relations, american poetry (LIT 205 and 206), running a small organization (I ran the radio station), logic (PHI 201), ethics (PHI 203), the basic workings of the mind (PSY 101), how society operates on a basic level (ECON 101), how it used to operate before (HIST 106) and so much more.
A. There would be a huge load of DIVX disks in the landfills for the next few centuries.
But they can't do this anyway. The manufacturing cost of DIVX movies is higher than that of open DVD; each DIVX disk has to be serialized with a different serial number so that its usage can be tracked. Also, part of the scheme is that they hope profit margins on DIVX disks is high enough so supermarkets and drug stores will sell them (which none have agreed to do yet, and none will, IMO).
Also, never in a million billion years would they give away a DIVX of a film that's in current release. They put a bastardization into DVD players as it is, called regional encoding, so that international consumers couldn't buy DVDs from America of films in international release.
DIVX is different from renting in many ways. For one thing, it's intentionally monopolistic: you can only rent DIVX from DIVX. If DIVX decides they don't like you, your player will stop playing DIVX.
And regardless of what they think of you, they WILL sell your address to anyone who asks, along with a list of genres of movies you watch and the times when you watch them. (Including DVDs you watch.)
DIVX won't catch on... one big reason is that because of the DES encryption, players can't be exported. Finally a reason to celebrate the crappy encryption export regulation!
Most people with a full-time job make a choice between continuing to keep up and learning, and having any resemblance of a life. Add a family to the mix and suddenly your choices are tied to the welfare of other people. Let's see, neglect your family, or keep up with technology?
The most important thing is that you're happy in your work. Never take a job just for the money. You will absolutely regret it.