You realize Schmidt's wife's boats are sailboats?
on
In the Google Navy
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Carbon footprint of racing sailboat is pretty much 0, at least while it's actually racing. I'll grant you that construction and the diesel auxiliary contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, and especially if they're having it moved around on a container ship so it's ready to go in exotic locations, and then flying in to sail on it, they're pretty much at the head of the line in terms of their individual contribution to future generations' climate-related misery. But overall, I think sailboats should be way down your list if you're making a catalog of climate-hostile consumption.
Still, I realize this is slashdot. Let the poorly-informed outrage fly!
I ended up using MS Word for the ugly monkey book, because O'Reilly only offered me that or LaTex, and I didn't want the hassle of figuring out the latter, which I'd never used. It worked out okay; I just used their template, and made a point of religiously applying the styles they'd set up. And yeah, I kept copies of the Word files (one per chapter) in revision control, though I don't think I ever used that for anything other than backup purposes.
The biggest lesson I gained from it was that while outlining and proposing a book is exciting, and getting it accepted by the publisher was really exciting, actually writing the thing was way more work than I'd expected. I'd written and edited professionally for years in the magazine business, so the writing part was familiar, but the difference between a 3,000-word article and a 500-page book turned out to be much bigger in practice than it had looked in theory. Especially late in the process, when it was all about plowing through everything again to get it all to the highest possible standard, the book was a huge undertaking.
It didn't sell particularly well, which was a disappointment, but the fact that I had believed (and continue to believe) in the book's premise made it possible for me to invest the work required. And in hindsight, I think of the book as a success, at least for me personally. Not because it sold a lot of copies, but because the process of writing it taught me more about its subject matter than I could have learned any other way.
I never would have finished it if I hadn't been sustained by my naive hopes of big sales, and I'm glad I wrote it, so I guess I'm glad I was naive. Presumably you have high hopes for your own book. That's great. Hang onto those. They will be essential as you close in on completion, and the mountain of remaining work just seems to reach higher and higher.
I thought this sounded familiar, and a quick check showed me why: CNN ran a humorous item on the nanopants concept in January of last year: Little robots in your pants.
My own take on this, for what it's worth, is that at least in the early days of the Web, DIY with Perl was a far superior solution for almost everyone, since the commercial alternatives were few and lame. Over time that balance is clearly going to be shifting in favor of the commercial tools, since the commercial vendors will have had time to identify the features that their customers really need and to deliver those features effectively.
At the same time, there's a philosophical position that says the Web in its basic design is not about shrink-wrapped commercial solutions that lock users into a particular set of proprietary file formats and menu choices. It's about doing exactly the opposite of that. It's about freeing up users to do their own thing, to design their own web-based applications free of the constraints that inevitably get imposed by commercial vendors' marketing research and closed implementations. It's about letting users stop functioning as "users" so much, and start functioning more as programmers, able to build their own tools and pioneer their own paths.
That said, I realize there is a counter-position that says I'm being naive; that there's absolutely no point in having a million accidental-programmer monkeys lamely re-inventing the same wheels over and over again. You want a database backend that is integrated with a template-based presentation layer? You buy it from a commercial vendor, so you get something that actually works, and you limit the users to going clickee, clickee on menus all day so won't put their eyes out.
Both positions have merit. The fact is, I've always operated in small-scale settings, where money was a real concern, and big, expensive web-development applications weren't really an option. And I've really enjoyed learning to do stuff myself, and have come to take for granted that I can be master of my own destiny when it comes to the features I'm going to implement and the way I'm going to implement them.
If I'd traveled a different path, I'd probably be singing the praises of tools like WebObjects. Realistically, I have no business offering a comparison of the two approaches, since I've only ever really used the one. When all you have is a hammer, and all that.
I think there's room for both approaches, but for the kinds of web development I've been involved with, I very much prefer the DIY one. For better or worse, that's the only approach I talk about in my book.
When I started writing the book, I believed (naively) that I would indeed be able to cover some of those things. I at least thought I'd be able to get far enough to talk about some database administration and SQL.
Didn't happen. Once I got into the specifics of everything I needed to explain to get my target reader up to speed, I realized that there was no way to get there while being true to the needs of my intended audience. So I didn't try. Things like Apache installation, DNS, HTML, and graphic design I assumed that the reader either had somebody else to take care of or knew enough about for their current purposes already.
The TOC in Dave's review gives a pretty clear picture of what the book does and doesn't manage to cover. In the end, it's very much a beginner's book. It's a "See Dick code. Code, Dick, code!" type of book. It's about helping the reader make a good start, and doesn't pretend to take them all the way to the end of the journey. I like to think that that makes the book more honest, and more useful, at least for its intended audience, than all those brightly-colored ones crowding it off the bookstore shelves that do promise to teach all those things, but then fail to deliver.
I talk about PHP (albeit very briefly) toward the end of the book, in the "Where to Go Next" chapter. While PHP's relative simplicity obviously makes it a great choice for a non-programmer needing to automate web stuff, I was driven to make Perl the focus of the book by several factors:
It's more flexible for the random data munging that makes up a big part of the book (things like mass-editing a collection of documents, generating reports from the server's access logs, and so on).
In the happy event that the non-programmers who are the book's target audience find themselves wanting to go beyond web-specific programming tasks, Perl will provide them a better platform for doing that.
CPAN.
I didn't know much (well, any) PHP when I started writing the book. When I started bugging my knowledgeable friends to tell me how to do web things more efficiently, PHP didn't exist yet. If it had, they might well have steered me toward it. As it was, they steered me towards Perl - and overall, I'm really happy that they did.
A book like mine that focused on PHP rather than Perl could be really useful for non-programmers looking to automate their web development. Unfortunately, someone else would have to write it. In the meantime, for someone willing to take on the challenge of learning a more powerful language like Perl, the potential rewards make it, in my view at least, a viable alternative.
The isbn.nu site offers some of the functionality you're describing. You can input an ISBN, and get a set of standard information about the title. Granted, it's not the same thing as having a public API to the underlying data, but maybe with sufficient encouragement they could see the wisdom of following the Google model in that regard.
One useful thing about it in its current form, by the way, is that it will do a realtime search of various book sites (those evil patent-wielders at Amazon, BN.com, etc.), and display a table letting you comparison by price or reported delivery time. So that's pretty cool.
Showing a bare minimum of respect for the memory of the recently dead is one of those cultural things that separate the braying jackasses from the more thoughtful types. You don't have to say Jim Varney was a great guy. You just give the Earnest-movies-in-Hell joke a pass. Easy.
Getting one's news/opinions unfiltered is one of the cool things about slashdot, but in a perfect world Rob would have been cool enough to cut the Jim Varney joke on his own without needing an editor to tell him it 1) made him (Rob) look like an ass, and 2) wasn't terribly funny, anyway.
Also the "paying...for the enjoyment that you get out of seeing them live" is the same the ticket price--which ALSO largely goes to the label.
I don't believe that's correct. Labels rarely get a piece of the revenue produced by ticket sales at live performances. That's one of the main arguments one could make against Courtney Love's claims that the artists are slaves to the label: The artists can make money from touring. (I still don't think it's fair for the label to keep the lion's share of the revenue from CD sales, but that's another issue.)
It seems to me that you've got at least a couple of potential problems: Taking the money *now*, before you've defined how, exactly, you're going to distribute it to the artist, is going to put you in the middle of endless contention. Bands have group membership that changes over time. Who is the "band" for the purposes of your payout? Jimmy left last year; does he get a cut?
Also, people won't trust you unless your operations are completely open. I should be able to go to your site and see exactly who is legally "the band" or "the artist" for purposes of my donation, how much has been donated, and so on.
Sure they sucked (or rather, suck). I was really thinking of boo.com in my original rant, but both CDNow and Reel.com qualify, if only to a lesser degree. Both are based on the belief that what Web users really want is a site that pushes old-media marketing hype at them in as many finely-chopped-up pieces of animated screen real estate as possible. Both are usability nightmares. And both have overspent so dramatically on high-priced Web "talent" to deliver their uninspired content that even in the face of modest sales they haven't a prayer for profitability.
Those dead or dying sites you mention have died/are dying not because the Web doesn't allow independent voices to survive. They're dying because they suck(ed). They were created by people who don't understand the Web.
Since the days of gopher servers, archie, and the Internet Hunt, the net has offered an amazingly useful and revolutionary resource for giving people access to information. This process took a quantum leap forward with the appearance of the Web, and we've only seen the beginning.
The next phase will see a layering of additional layers of usefulness atop the substrate of the Web. The creation of compelling information products using the net will continue to become easier and cheaper.
In the meantime, the clueless who came storming in from whatever failures they had engineered in other industries, who started slinging a few buzzwords around and got tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from greedy investors, are turning belly-up as it becomes clear that their sites are uninteresting, or unusable, or just plain stupid.
Speaking for myself, I have no doubt that Rob and Jon and everyone else connected with putting this book out are doing it with the best of intentions. It may well be, too, that the result will be, on balance, beneficial to society, or at least to that subset of it voicing its opinions in the excerpted posts.
With that said, though, I want to point out that people pursuing noble goals can sometimes do unintended harm, and the people associated with this project should think long and hard on that point (if they haven't already) before deciding that they know best how others would like their words to be used.
Here's one potential nightmare: Many of the people who posted these messages were clearly very concerned about maintaining their anonymity. You say that all identifying information has been removed, but how can you be sure that someone won't recognize a turn of phrase, or a particular set of circumstances, and figure out who actually posted something? Even one person being unintentionally exposed that way could result in serious consequences. Only the original posters know how serious those consequences might be - so how can you presume to decide on their behalf that the benefit of printing their words in the book is worth running that risk?
From a strict legal standpoint, you may well be violating the rights of the posters by reusing their words in printed form without their permission. From where I sit, it's really their call, not yours.
You're concerned about the original authors having changed ISPs, such that you can't contact them, but with 20,000 messages to choose from, I'd think you could get permission from enough of them to serve your book's nobler goals without compromising the original authors' right to control what happens to their words.
Actually, I've been interested in this issue for a while now. As a longtime observer of political movements, it's been very interesting to me to see the geek community working its way through the very early stages of political awareness.
RMS will never play a central role in any tech-savvy political movement, though he'll be important as an agitator on the fringes, shifting the center of debate in the direction of his views, and allowing those advocating less-extreme positions to appear rational by comparison.
If current events continue to evolve as they have been, I predict we'll see a Tim O'Reilly/ Eric Raymond presidential ticket within the next 20 years. You heard it here first!
One obscure aspect of the SJG incident that was interesting to me was the WWIV BBS that SJG was running at the time of the raid. Wayne Bell, who wrote WWIV, testified at the trial about how he was able to look at the files on the confiscated computer and tell that someone had used the sysop privilege to read through all the private email on the BBS one by one, deleting them as he/she went. Because of a peculiarity of how the BBS was written, the evidence that someone had done that was retained on the BBS until (I think, not sure now) the user actually logged in again. Since that never happened, Bell was able to provide a smoking gun that the authorities not only took the BBS, but actually read through the private communication stored on it. This was a significant factor in SJG's victory, since this sort of behavior was specifically outlawed by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (or something like that).
I was a WWIV sysop at the time, and found this whole aspect of the case very interesting.
Even though I've moved on, to Usenet and Web development and all that, I still think back fondly on the amazingly vibrant communities that sprang up around old 286s running WWIV off a single phone line and a 2400-baud modem. That's our history (for some of us, anyway). It's where we came from, and it's where a lot of the sensibilities we share came from. I think about that sometimes when I'm trying to explain to a marketing droid why our company shouldn't use spam as a promotional tool, or should be concerned about the privacy rights of people who submit information on our Web site.
I've been an obsessive collector of O'Reilly books for a number of years, and The Perl Cookbook is hands-down the most useful one in my collection. I can't begin to think how much work went into creating it.
I liked both installments of Geeks in Space, but in the interest of honest feedback I wanted to offer a suggestion that it might be worth holding off on reflexively making light of people dying. I realize that making jokes about very public tragedies is supposed to be some kind of healthy societal coping mechanism, and I likewise understand the view that the boomers' fascination with John-John's death is more about their own ongoing self-absorbtion than about anything newsworthy, but, with all that said, I found the "Live from Martha's Vineyard" bits fairly unfunny.
I was reminded of the time in college when my campus security officer job required me to do a shift guarding the entrance to Rock Hudson's room at the campus medical center. He was dying of AIDS, and reporters were crawling all over the place, so we were posted at his door to help him get some privacy. There were *lots* of jokes making the rounds back then about his particular predicament, but after my session standing outside his door they all seemed profoundly cruel and twisted. He was just a person -- a very sick, tired person -- and after being confronted with that reality the jokes just stopped being funny to me.
Rob & Co. are young, smart, and irreverent, and that's a big part of what makes Slashdot (and the Geeks in Space stuff) interesting and fun. In this particular case, though, I think a little more compassion (at least as far as not making jokes about the search for someone's body) would be worth considering.
I was ready to be the first to start using another registrar (*any* other registrar) besides NSI, but register.com doesn't seem to be trying to differentiate themselves at all. In particular, they have picked up NSI's evil dispute resolution policy more or less verbatim, meaning anyone with a trademark who covets your domain name can screw you over, even if they can't make a credible claim of trademark infringement.
If any other potential registrars are reading this, please consider the following approaches to differentiating yourselves from those evil bastards at NSI:
Charge a *reasonable* renewal fee.
Commit to maintaining a domain name in the face of trademark infringement claims until or unless a court of appropriate jurisdiction tells you otherwise.
Train your customer service reps to treat customers like customers.
Hopefully one or more of the new registrars will be willing to do one or more of these things.
This is actually somewhat interesting. It marks the first time I'm aware of that a presidential candidate has actively courted the hard-core geek community. Of *course* he comes off as inept and clueless to those in the know, but seriously, this is significant. This represents the first inkling that the net community might have some (not much, but some) actual bargaining power on the national political stage. Presumably, this is because Al wants to burnish his carefully crafted image as Father of All Things Digital.
Please don't think I'm going Jon Katzian on you; the amount of political power that all of the Net's geeks have by virtue of Al's aspirations is approximately equal to that of one local chapter of the American Association for the Advancement of Retired Persons (AARP). But still, that's better than nothing.
So, if Al want's some high-level geek endorsements, let's talk turkey. For starters, can we count on a presidential veto the next time something as awful as the orginal CDA comes down the pike? Joe Random Slashdotter is not about to pursue a deal like that, but some of our Exalted Leaders might very well be sitting down at the table with His Goreship before this is all out.
If/when that happens, just remember not to be so thrilled at your own newfound importance that you sell the farm without getting anything real in return. He's still a politician, after all. I know plenty of gays, for example, who are still smarting about how they were taken in by Clinton in '92, endorsing him in return for a promise to end anti-gay discrimination in the military, only to get the shaft when that turned out to require something akin to actual backbone on the part of the Commander in Chief.
Are there any people who actually _enjoy_ pizza delivery?
Hiro Protagonist did, at least until he crashed the Mafia's car into that empty swimming pool and had to change jobs -- and he turned to pizza delivery as a welcome change from hacking, when that proved too boring.
Slashdot Mirror
Carbon footprint of racing sailboat is pretty much 0, at least while it's actually racing. I'll grant you that construction and the diesel auxiliary contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, and especially if they're having it moved around on a container ship so it's ready to go in exotic locations, and then flying in to sail on it, they're pretty much at the head of the line in terms of their individual contribution to future generations' climate-related misery. But overall, I think sailboats should be way down your list if you're making a catalog of climate-hostile consumption.
Still, I realize this is slashdot. Let the poorly-informed outrage fly!
I ended up using MS Word for the ugly monkey book, because O'Reilly only offered me that or LaTex, and I didn't want the hassle of figuring out the latter, which I'd never used. It worked out okay; I just used their template, and made a point of religiously applying the styles they'd set up. And yeah, I kept copies of the Word files (one per chapter) in revision control, though I don't think I ever used that for anything other than backup purposes.
The biggest lesson I gained from it was that while outlining and proposing a book is exciting, and getting it accepted by the publisher was really exciting, actually writing the thing was way more work than I'd expected. I'd written and edited professionally for years in the magazine business, so the writing part was familiar, but the difference between a 3,000-word article and a 500-page book turned out to be much bigger in practice than it had looked in theory. Especially late in the process, when it was all about plowing through everything again to get it all to the highest possible standard, the book was a huge undertaking.
It didn't sell particularly well, which was a disappointment, but the fact that I had believed (and continue to believe) in the book's premise made it possible for me to invest the work required. And in hindsight, I think of the book as a success, at least for me personally. Not because it sold a lot of copies, but because the process of writing it taught me more about its subject matter than I could have learned any other way.
I never would have finished it if I hadn't been sustained by my naive hopes of big sales, and I'm glad I wrote it, so I guess I'm glad I was naive. Presumably you have high hopes for your own book. That's great. Hang onto those. They will be essential as you close in on completion, and the mountain of remaining work just seems to reach higher and higher.
Good luck!
I thought this sounded familiar, and a quick check showed me why: CNN ran a humorous item on the nanopants concept in January of last year: Little robots in your pants.
Another O'Reilly title that might arguably have been suitable for inclusion, but that wasn't, is the one I wrote, Perl for Web Site Management.
Sigh. If a web programming book gets written in a forest, and no one actually reads it, did it really get written?
Actually, I did write part of chapter eight sitting under some trees during a hike in the Inyo National Forest. That was fun, at least.
At the same time, there's a philosophical position that says the Web in its basic design is not about shrink-wrapped commercial solutions that lock users into a particular set of proprietary file formats and menu choices. It's about doing exactly the opposite of that. It's about freeing up users to do their own thing, to design their own web-based applications free of the constraints that inevitably get imposed by commercial vendors' marketing research and closed implementations. It's about letting users stop functioning as "users" so much, and start functioning more as programmers, able to build their own tools and pioneer their own paths.
That said, I realize there is a counter-position that says I'm being naive; that there's absolutely no point in having a million accidental-programmer monkeys lamely re-inventing the same wheels over and over again. You want a database backend that is integrated with a template-based presentation layer? You buy it from a commercial vendor, so you get something that actually works, and you limit the users to going clickee, clickee on menus all day so won't put their eyes out.
Both positions have merit. The fact is, I've always operated in small-scale settings, where money was a real concern, and big, expensive web-development applications weren't really an option. And I've really enjoyed learning to do stuff myself, and have come to take for granted that I can be master of my own destiny when it comes to the features I'm going to implement and the way I'm going to implement them.
If I'd traveled a different path, I'd probably be singing the praises of tools like WebObjects. Realistically, I have no business offering a comparison of the two approaches, since I've only ever really used the one. When all you have is a hammer, and all that.
I think there's room for both approaches, but for the kinds of web development I've been involved with, I very much prefer the DIY one. For better or worse, that's the only approach I talk about in my book.
John
Didn't happen. Once I got into the specifics of everything I needed to explain to get my target reader up to speed, I realized that there was no way to get there while being true to the needs of my intended audience. So I didn't try. Things like Apache installation, DNS, HTML, and graphic design I assumed that the reader either had somebody else to take care of or knew enough about for their current purposes already.
The TOC in Dave's review gives a pretty clear picture of what the book does and doesn't manage to cover. In the end, it's very much a beginner's book. It's a "See Dick code. Code, Dick, code!" type of book. It's about helping the reader make a good start, and doesn't pretend to take them all the way to the end of the journey. I like to think that that makes the book more honest, and more useful, at least for its intended audience, than all those brightly-colored ones crowding it off the bookstore shelves that do promise to teach all those things, but then fail to deliver.
Of course, I may be biased. :-)
John
- It's more flexible for the random data munging that makes up a big part of the book (things like mass-editing a collection of documents, generating reports from the server's access logs, and so on).
- In the happy event that the non-programmers who are the book's target audience find themselves wanting to go beyond web-specific programming tasks, Perl will provide them a better platform for doing that.
- CPAN.
- I didn't know much (well, any) PHP when I started writing the book. When I started bugging my knowledgeable friends to tell me how to do web things more efficiently, PHP didn't exist yet. If it had, they might well have steered me toward it. As it was, they steered me towards Perl - and overall, I'm really happy that they did.
A book like mine that focused on PHP rather than Perl could be really useful for non-programmers looking to automate their web development. Unfortunately, someone else would have to write it. In the meantime, for someone willing to take on the challenge of learning a more powerful language like Perl, the potential rewards make it, in my view at least, a viable alternative.John
One useful thing about it in its current form, by the way, is that it will do a realtime search of various book sites (those evil patent-wielders at Amazon, BN.com, etc.), and display a table letting you comparison by price or reported delivery time. So that's pretty cool.
John
lies.com
Showing a bare minimum of respect for the memory of the recently dead is one of those cultural things that separate the braying jackasses from the more thoughtful types. You don't have to say Jim Varney was a great guy. You just give the Earnest-movies-in-Hell joke a pass. Easy.
Getting one's news/opinions unfiltered is one of the cool things about slashdot, but in a perfect world Rob would have been cool enough to cut the Jim Varney joke on his own without needing an editor to tell him it 1) made him (Rob) look like an ass, and 2) wasn't terribly funny, anyway.
John
If you want to contribute to the Damian fund, you can pay online with a credit card at:
http://registration.yapc.org/
Also the "paying...for the enjoyment that you get out of seeing them live" is the same the ticket price--which ALSO largely goes to the label.
I don't believe that's correct. Labels rarely get a piece of the revenue produced by ticket sales at live performances. That's one of the main arguments one could make against Courtney Love's claims that the artists are slaves to the label: The artists can make money from touring. (I still don't think it's fair for the label to keep the lion's share of the revenue from CD sales, but that's another issue.)
Taking the money *now*, before you've defined how, exactly, you're going to distribute it to the artist, is going to put you in the middle of endless contention. Bands have group membership that changes over time. Who is the "band" for the purposes of your payout? Jimmy left last year; does he get a cut?
Also, people won't trust you unless your operations are completely open. I should be able to go to your site and see exactly who is legally "the band" or "the artist" for purposes of my donation, how much has been donated, and so on.
Like I said, good riddance.
Since the days of gopher servers, archie, and the Internet Hunt, the net has offered an amazingly useful and revolutionary resource for giving people access to information. This process took a quantum leap forward with the appearance of the Web, and we've only seen the beginning.
The next phase will see a layering of additional layers of usefulness atop the substrate of the Web. The creation of compelling information products using the net will continue to become easier and cheaper.
In the meantime, the clueless who came storming in from whatever failures they had engineered in other industries, who started slinging a few buzzwords around and got tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from greedy investors, are turning belly-up as it becomes clear that their sites are uninteresting, or unusable, or just plain stupid.
Good riddance.
With that said, though, I want to point out that people pursuing noble goals can sometimes do unintended harm, and the people associated with this project should think long and hard on that point (if they haven't already) before deciding that they know best how others would like their words to be used.
Here's one potential nightmare: Many of the people who posted these messages were clearly very concerned about maintaining their anonymity. You say that all identifying information has been removed, but how can you be sure that someone won't recognize a turn of phrase, or a particular set of circumstances, and figure out who actually posted something? Even one person being unintentionally exposed that way could result in serious consequences. Only the original posters know how serious those consequences might be - so how can you presume to decide on their behalf that the benefit of printing their words in the book is worth running that risk?
From a strict legal standpoint, you may well be violating the rights of the posters by reusing their words in printed form without their permission. From where I sit, it's really their call, not yours.
You're concerned about the original authors having changed ISPs, such that you can't contact them, but with 20,000 messages to choose from, I'd think you could get permission from enough of them to serve your book's nobler goals without compromising the original authors' right to control what happens to their words.
Actually, I've been interested in this issue for a while now. As a longtime observer of political movements, it's been very interesting to me to see the geek community working its way through the very early stages of political awareness.
RMS will never play a central role in any tech-savvy political movement, though he'll be important as an agitator on the fringes, shifting the center of debate in the direction of his views, and allowing those advocating less-extreme positions to appear rational by comparison.
If current events continue to evolve as they have been, I predict we'll see a Tim O'Reilly/ Eric Raymond presidential ticket within the next 20 years. You heard it here first!
One obscure aspect of the SJG incident that was interesting to me was the WWIV BBS that SJG was running at the time of the raid. Wayne Bell, who wrote WWIV, testified at the trial about how he was able to look at the files on the confiscated computer and tell that someone had used the sysop privilege to read through all the private email on the BBS one by one, deleting them as he/she went. Because of a peculiarity of how the BBS was written, the evidence that someone had done that was retained on the BBS until (I think, not sure now) the user actually logged in again. Since that never happened, Bell was able to provide a smoking gun that the authorities not only took the BBS, but actually read through the private communication stored on it. This was a significant factor in SJG's victory, since this sort of behavior was specifically outlawed by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (or something like that).
I was a WWIV sysop at the time, and found this whole aspect of the case very interesting.
Even though I've moved on, to Usenet and Web development and all that, I still think back fondly on the amazingly vibrant communities that sprang up around old 286s running WWIV off a single phone line and a 2400-baud modem. That's our history (for some of us, anyway). It's where we came from, and it's where a lot of the sensibilities we share came from. I think about that sometimes when I'm trying to explain to a marketing droid why our company shouldn't use spam as a promotional tool, or should be concerned about the privacy rights of people who submit information on our Web site.
I've been an obsessive collector of O'Reilly books for a number of years, and The Perl Cookbook is hands-down the most useful one in my collection. I can't begin to think how much work went into creating it.
I was reminded of the time in college when my campus security officer job required me to do a shift guarding the entrance to Rock Hudson's room at the campus medical center. He was dying of AIDS, and reporters were crawling all over the place, so we were posted at his door to help him get some privacy. There were *lots* of jokes making the rounds back then about his particular predicament, but after my session standing outside his door they all seemed profoundly cruel and twisted. He was just a person -- a very sick, tired person -- and after being confronted with that reality the jokes just stopped being funny to me.
Rob & Co. are young, smart, and irreverent, and that's a big part of what makes Slashdot (and the Geeks in Space stuff) interesting and fun. In this particular case, though, I think a little more compassion (at least as far as not making jokes about the search for someone's body) would be worth considering.
If any other potential registrars are reading this, please consider the following approaches to differentiating yourselves from those evil bastards at NSI:
- Charge a *reasonable* renewal fee.
- Commit to maintaining a domain name in the face of trademark infringement claims until or unless a court of appropriate jurisdiction tells you otherwise.
- Train your customer service reps to treat customers like customers.
Hopefully one or more of the new registrars will be willing to do one or more of these things.I *hate* NSI.
Just where the hell do you think you're going today? And what makes you think you can go there without Microsoft?
http://www.lies.com/dec97/121897.html
Please don't think I'm going Jon Katzian on you; the amount of political power that all of the Net's geeks have by virtue of Al's aspirations is approximately equal to that of one local chapter of the American Association for the Advancement of Retired Persons (AARP). But still, that's better than nothing.
So, if Al want's some high-level geek endorsements, let's talk turkey. For starters, can we count on a presidential veto the next time something as awful as the orginal CDA comes down the pike? Joe Random Slashdotter is not about to pursue a deal like that, but some of our Exalted Leaders might very well be sitting down at the table with His Goreship before this is all out.
If/when that happens, just remember not to be so thrilled at your own newfound importance that you sell the farm without getting anything real in return. He's still a politician, after all. I know plenty of gays, for example, who are still smarting about how they were taken in by Clinton in '92, endorsing him in return for a promise to end anti-gay discrimination in the military, only to get the shaft when that turned out to require something akin to actual backbone on the part of the Commander in Chief.
Hiro Protagonist did, at least until he crashed the Mafia's car into that empty swimming pool and had to change jobs -- and he turned to pizza delivery as a welcome change from hacking, when that proved too boring.
So there. Neeners.