Ummm, we realized there is no money to be made by showing ads for free...
It's an interesting comment on our culture that AdCritic existed in the first place; that ads have become entertainment. While *insert-network-here* would probably be rather upset if a site copied and posted *insert-hit-tv-show-here* onto a web site, I don't think advertisers (product or agency) ever complained about getting extra viewers for their ads...
Are we moving towards a society where the value of product placement will cover the whole cost of entertainment and we'll be able to get free copies of *insert-new-hit-movie-here* because it'll be completely filled with Dr. Pepper backdrops?
Although personally, I don't feel any grief that humanity has just eradicated the last known resovoir of "Where's the Beef!" I bet the CDC felt this way when they eradicated Smallpox.
I had an acquantance once (RF Hacker) who noticed that for almost all brands of garage door opener, you can purchase a spare remote control at Sears...
Because there are a finite # of possible combinations, he was thinking about building a frob that basically did:
for I in 0.. N
send code I
done
I don't know if he ever actually built it, but I can imagine him having lots of fun driving through residental neighbourhoods with it in his car.
Now I don't know for sure, but do you really
think that $79 remote car starter is using triple-DES or PKC in it's over-the-air protocol?
Some dememnted RF engineer could ruin a lot of people's days filling garages with carbon monoxide.
Notably absent from the email exchange are any of the emails, ICB logs, or anything that show the basis for the whole problem.
Basically, Theo had a history of being abusive
and petty to anyone who didn't meet his standards
of cluefulness. He pretty much admits this himself in the interview. This was alienating a large number of NetBSD developers who ended up leaving
the project (I was one of them.)
The Core team repeatedly asked him to tone it down; their feeling seemed more of a "anyone who wants to help with NetBSD will be welcome," instead of "You must be this elite to code NetBSD." Theo maintained that he was doing nothing wrong.
Eventually, they shut Theo down, which is where
the email thread starts. A large part of the thread deals with Theo's requests to regain CVS
access. The Core group was willing to submit his code as patches themselves, but Theo would only submit code if he could have CVS write access. Core was worried that Theo might decide to get "revenge" by damaging the CVS tree; This might seem worry-warting, except they all knew that Theo had been previously fired from a SysAdmin job at the U of C for doing something like that.
Eventually, Theo started OpenBSD and now has his own sandbox where nobody can tell him what to do. In the end, I guess that's good, because both
OpenBSD and NetBSD regularly crib from each other's trees anyways and people now get the choice of whether they want to deal with Theo or not.
The system promises fewer computer
crashes and will allow users to delete data
from their hard drive.
Now I know it's time to switch from unix to windows: They finally have the 'rm' program!
No more having to buy a new hard drive every time
it fills up! Wheeee!
Yes, if I stop fattening some other company's profits by paying for upgrades, I can claim the savings and get an even bigger bonus.
Once again, follow the money...
OBNonCynical: It is good to see awareness moving up the corporate hierarchy - Previous large companies I worked for always seemed to have the local IS/IT people running apache and trying to keep the CIO from forcing them to run Netscape-Enterprise or IIS...
The canonical phone song: "Mary had a li-tle lamb." Is that prior art or public domain?
Good thing I'm not six years old anymore and no longer so easilly amused; I'd hate to have to retain a lawyer just to determine if I could do that; especially on a six-year-old's allowance.
Dig past the "headline" pages to the "normal" news and find interesting things...
From the Globe and Mail, a story about how 5 days ago the U.S. banned novelist Salman Rushdie from all air travel in the U.S.::
On Thursday, the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority in Washington issued an emergency directive banning Mr. Rushdie from all flights in and out of the United States, reflecting a heightened state of alert.
Same alert? Did they know? Conspiricy theorists, come crawling out of the woodwork...
[...] staffed by senior scientists from Novosibirsk's Akademgorodok [...]
Novo (Noviiy) + Sibirsk = New + Siberia
Akadem (Akademiiy) + Gorod = Academic + Town
So, New Siberia's Academic Town
Gotta love state controlled naming. If only we had that in the west, we could rename San Jose to something meaning "Town full of dickless internet yuppies crying over their repossesed SUV's"
How many Linux people will buy a boxed copy
of this when there is a free version.
How about all those people that linux is supposedly trying to attract; the people who just use computers and aren't tall enough for the "You must be this elite to use this operation system" gates.
How many windows people will buy this being that it is a simple game
from an unfamiliar company?
The market for "casual gamers" is way larger than the hardcore gaming market. That's why games like "Who wants to be a millionaire" outsell ones like "Doom 62."
What is there to gain by closing it?
Money? A chance for the author to work on it full time instead of part time? Moving out of the crowd of n-thousand other linux programs that all work the same and are never finished?
am currently in the process of developing a GPL'ed-forever Linux game that will surpass
most everything before it.
Good luck with it. Hopefully it won't turn out to be one of the 75% of all SourceForge games that languishes forever at status "1-Planning"
When I interviewed prospective sysadmins, the one thing I was looking for was curiosity. You have to be able to dig into stuff that you don't understand to be able to do the job and if you're a curious person, you're gonna be inclined to do so.
Example questions:
Q1. What scripting languages are you familiar with
A1. (should be lots)
Q2. Which is your favourite?
A3. (doesn't matter)
Q3. Why?
A3. (should be able to articulate answer)
To test experience, I ask:
Q: You install a new version of a 3rd party closed source app and it doesn't work. What do you do?
A: (bad) call vendor
A: (good) strace/ptrace
If they're arrogant about their knowledge (most are,) I ask some old-time questions, like:
Q: How do you get a directory listing without ls, du or find?
Q: What's the ed command to do X?
Old timers will know the answers. Good new-timers will have been curious enough to explore and find the answers already...
What books would you recommend for a desert-island library collection?
I got my first computer book in Grade 4 (1978 to the rest of you) and it was called "Computers at Work." If this question had been asked at that time, I'd expect (from the replies here) that the list would have looked like:
IBM 370 Assembly
JCL: The complete reference
Fundamental Algorithms in Algol
APL Quick Reference
Application development in COBOL
&c...
Were I rescued today with those books, I don't think I would have much luck programming, because they all are based on the "flavours of the time."
Would someone 30 years from now find a C++ manual useful? Probably only if they wanted to be like a COBOL programmer today, forever fighting to keep legacy code alive.
Programming evolves. All languages live, die or transform beyond recognition; knowing Algol doesn't mean you will be able to code in (insert modern language here) without a learning curve.
Because of this, the "timeless" books are the ones that are rooted in that which doesn't change: Pure theory or mathmatics. The ones we hardly ever look at after we graduate.
But even if you spend 25 years on that island memorizing "Data structures using pure recursion" and "Elements of the Theory of Computation," your
skills still aren't going to help you program. Prepare you for a Ph.D. program, well...
> It's very unfortunate IMO that this is the case. The way I see it is if you don't know how to use the tool, either learn
how or don't use it.
I guess you've never flown anyplace, or do you know how to build a modern jetliner from scratch?
Never nuked food, or do you know how to build a microwave from scratch? Hope you never have an MI, or do you understand cardiac rhythms, the effects of drugs on them and the theory behind
defibrilation?
Computers are just tools - people use them to
accomplish some task, be that writing letters, doing budgets or looking at porn. Almost anything
has its own "elite subculture;" look at the the people who only use $10k BBQ's or spend $40k upgrading their honda civic. Perhaps they also spend time complaining about how if everyone else was "elite" they would finally find justification.
For me, my $149 BBQ can burn a tuna steak just
fine. My stock Tercel gets me from point A to B
just the same as any other car. And I've never been able to pick up girls by saying "I use Linux."
> keep remembering the days back in the 80's when people had comodore 64s and 386s running DOS.
I remember soldering 4K memory boards for my
NorthStar S-100 system. Man, those lamers who bought computers like the 64 and XT sucked, because they didn't understand how computers worked at an electrical level.
And of course, I will be trumped by someone who
had to enter his boot loader in octal on the front
panel of his IMASI S-100, whereas mine was in
_lamer rom_. And he will be trumped by someone
who had to wire their boot loader on a plugboard.
Cmdr Taco is right; Linux will never gain wide
acceptance because it's aimed straight at the "elite subculture." And like all elite subcultures, they have no comprehension of how anyone would not want to be "elite." I mean really, why would anyone want to just _use_ a computer when they could flame about it, fork other people's code to prove "I'm more elite than you," etc.?
And the poor non-elite user... Who just wants some program to organize recipes. First they have to choose which of the 54 window managers is the most "elite" and god help them if they are wrong. No wonder they just want to _buy_ software if it means they can avoid spending their whole life trying to become "elite."
f I buy 2 cds every week, how am I supposed to feel when the RIAA tells me I'm not allowed to space shift it
Because "space shifting" it is deriving them of revenue! You're supposed to pay to translate it to a different media-of-the-week.
78 RPM, 33-1/3 RPM, 8-track, casette, CD, Minidisk, MP3, DVD-Audio... Now that there's a "new" format about every 5 years, they want you to pay to continue to play...
OpenBSD positions itself as a "Canadian" operating system to get around U.S. gov't regulations and the U.S. gov't doesn't like giving
anything to Canada (except acid rain and fugitive
criminals.)
They offered but Theo had one of his Turette-esque attacks during the negotiations and things went downhill from there.
Easier to convince Kirk to license the BSD
daemon for the new $1 bill.
Tells me the hostname (which is all you need to know) and has the advantage that I can include the prompt in cut&paste command lines with 3-clicks in Xterm and they will still run.
Try that with your PS1="IMSOELEET\033[c" prompts!:)
Microsoft is like your bitter older brother who cooks your dinner, says "This is good enough for you," and shoves it down your throat.
Linux is like 50 hyperactive kindergarden students each waving their home-made dinners, screaming "Try Mine!" "No, Try Mine!" "Mine's Better than Yours!" "Jimmy's a poo-poo head!" "Joey wrecked my dinner! Bwaaaaa!" "I added salt to Kim's, so mine is better!" "Me! Me! Me!" "Jeffy called me a poo-poo head so I'm gonna fork his dinner! Then he'll be sorry!" "Look at Me!"
At least with your older brother, you were fed and could get on with doing other things in your life... Everything in life is a compromise.
And in 2024, the latest crop of 18 year old programmers will be saying "Go Microsoft! You're our saviour! Smash the evil X" the same way people talk about IBM now?
People who don't know history are doomed to think that bell bottoms look cool.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an interesting comment on our culture that AdCritic existed in the first place; that ads have become entertainment. While *insert-network-here* would probably be rather upset if a site copied and posted *insert-hit-tv-show-here* onto a web site, I don't think advertisers (product or agency) ever complained about getting extra viewers for their ads...
Are we moving towards a society where the value of product placement will cover the whole cost of entertainment and we'll be able to get free copies of *insert-new-hit-movie-here* because it'll be completely filled with Dr. Pepper backdrops?
Although personally, I don't feel any grief that humanity has just eradicated the last known resovoir of "Where's the Beef!" I bet the CDC felt this way when they eradicated Smallpox.
I had an acquantance once (RF Hacker) who noticed that for almost all brands of garage door opener, you can purchase a spare remote control at Sears...
Because there are a finite # of possible combinations, he was thinking about building a frob that basically did:
for I in 0 .. N
send code I
done
I don't know if he ever actually built it, but I can imagine him having lots of fun driving through residental neighbourhoods with it in his car.
Now I don't know for sure, but do you really think that $79 remote car starter is using triple-DES or PKC in it's over-the-air protocol? Some dememnted RF engineer could ruin a lot of people's days filling garages with carbon monoxide.
Basically, Theo had a history of being abusive and petty to anyone who didn't meet his standards of cluefulness. He pretty much admits this himself in the interview. This was alienating a large number of NetBSD developers who ended up leaving the project (I was one of them.)
The Core team repeatedly asked him to tone it down; their feeling seemed more of a "anyone who wants to help with NetBSD will be welcome," instead of "You must be this elite to code NetBSD." Theo maintained that he was doing nothing wrong.
Eventually, they shut Theo down, which is where the email thread starts. A large part of the thread deals with Theo's requests to regain CVS access. The Core group was willing to submit his code as patches themselves, but Theo would only submit code if he could have CVS write access. Core was worried that Theo might decide to get "revenge" by damaging the CVS tree; This might seem worry-warting, except they all knew that Theo had been previously fired from a SysAdmin job at the U of C for doing something like that.
Eventually, Theo started OpenBSD and now has his own sandbox where nobody can tell him what to do. In the end, I guess that's good, because both OpenBSD and NetBSD regularly crib from each other's trees anyways and people now get the choice of whether they want to deal with Theo or not.
Now I know it's time to switch from unix to windows: They finally have the 'rm' program! No more having to buy a new hard drive every time it fills up! Wheeee!
Once again, follow the money...
OBNonCynical: It is good to see awareness moving up the corporate hierarchy - Previous large companies I worked for always seemed to have the local IS/IT people running apache and trying to keep the CIO from forcing them to run Netscape-Enterprise or IIS...
Cost of a poloroid back for 4x5 camera: ~ $400
Cost of a digital back: ~ $20000
I know I'm starting to stockpile type 55 film in case they go away...
and get spammed with MAKE WHEAT FAST!
Good thing I'm not six years old anymore and no longer so easilly amused; I'd hate to have to retain a lawyer just to determine if I could do that; especially on a six-year-old's allowance.
Was the second one Make Money Fast! with QWERTYUIOP! ?
That would have made Apollo 11 a really boring movie: write(nasafd,"houston, we have a problem",31)
People that can't factor binomials shouldn't be allowed to vote.
OBQuoteSource: Chris Nadovich, from a newsgroup post
Can we please stop seeing what it's like to live everyday in other countries in the world?
Can we go back to pretending the world is a happy and safe place soon?
Can we please do so before my favourite television program is on tonight? Because I'll be really mad if it's pre-empted because of this.
Disclaimer: If you need a disclaimer to recognize sarcasm, then you should read more.
Dig past the "headline" pages to the "normal" news and find interesting things...
From the Globe and Mail, a story about how 5 days ago the U.S. banned novelist Salman Rushdie from all air travel in the U.S.::
Same alert? Did they know? Conspiricy theorists, come crawling out of the woodwork...
Full Story on www.globeandmail.com
[...] staffed by senior scientists from Novosibirsk's Akademgorodok [...]
Novo (Noviiy) + Sibirsk = New + Siberia
Akadem (Akademiiy) + Gorod = Academic + Town
So, New Siberia's Academic Town
Gotta love state controlled naming. If only we had that in the west, we could rename San Jose to something meaning "Town full of dickless internet yuppies crying over their repossesed SUV's"
> Actualy it is a shame that Redhat 7.2's installer won't allow you to select ReiserFS during install. One might argue that 'takes away choice'.
If a user is elite enough to care about the differences between different journalling file systems, what are they doing using an installer anyways?
Real users don't do mkfs, they do dd if=/dev/tty of=/dev/hda1
How about all those people that linux is supposedly trying to attract; the people who just use computers and aren't tall enough for the "You must be this elite to use this operation system" gates.
How many windows people will buy this being that it is a simple game from an unfamiliar company?
The market for "casual gamers" is way larger than the hardcore gaming market. That's why games like "Who wants to be a millionaire" outsell ones like "Doom 62."
What is there to gain by closing it?
Money? A chance for the author to work on it full time instead of part time? Moving out of the crowd of n-thousand other linux programs that all work the same and are never finished?
am currently in the process of developing a GPL'ed-forever Linux game that will surpass most everything before it.
Good luck with it. Hopefully it won't turn out to be one of the 75% of all SourceForge games that languishes forever at status "1-Planning"
When I interviewed prospective sysadmins, the one thing I was looking for was curiosity. You have to be able to dig into stuff that you don't understand to be able to do the job and if you're a curious person, you're gonna be inclined to do so. Example questions: Q1. What scripting languages are you familiar with A1. (should be lots) Q2. Which is your favourite? A3. (doesn't matter) Q3. Why? A3. (should be able to articulate answer) To test experience, I ask: Q: You install a new version of a 3rd party closed source app and it doesn't work. What do you do? A: (bad) call vendor A: (good) strace/ptrace If they're arrogant about their knowledge (most are,) I ask some old-time questions, like: Q: How do you get a directory listing without ls, du or find? Q: What's the ed command to do X? Old timers will know the answers. Good new-timers will have been curious enough to explore and find the answers already...
I got my first computer book in Grade 4 (1978 to the rest of you) and it was called "Computers at Work." If this question had been asked at that time, I'd expect (from the replies here) that the list would have looked like:
IBM 370 Assembly
JCL: The complete reference
Fundamental Algorithms in Algol
APL Quick Reference
Application development in COBOL
&c...
Were I rescued today with those books, I don't think I would have much luck programming, because they all are based on the "flavours of the time." Would someone 30 years from now find a C++ manual useful? Probably only if they wanted to be like a COBOL programmer today, forever fighting to keep legacy code alive.
Programming evolves. All languages live, die or transform beyond recognition; knowing Algol doesn't mean you will be able to code in (insert modern language here) without a learning curve.
Because of this, the "timeless" books are the ones that are rooted in that which doesn't change: Pure theory or mathmatics. The ones we hardly ever look at after we graduate.
But even if you spend 25 years on that island memorizing "Data structures using pure recursion" and "Elements of the Theory of Computation," your skills still aren't going to help you program. Prepare you for a Ph.D. program, well...
I guess you've never flown anyplace, or do you know how to build a modern jetliner from scratch? Never nuked food, or do you know how to build a microwave from scratch? Hope you never have an MI, or do you understand cardiac rhythms, the effects of drugs on them and the theory behind defibrilation?
Computers are just tools - people use them to accomplish some task, be that writing letters, doing budgets or looking at porn. Almost anything has its own "elite subculture;" look at the the people who only use $10k BBQ's or spend $40k upgrading their honda civic. Perhaps they also spend time complaining about how if everyone else was "elite" they would finally find justification.
For me, my $149 BBQ can burn a tuna steak just fine. My stock Tercel gets me from point A to B just the same as any other car. And I've never been able to pick up girls by saying "I use Linux."
> keep remembering the days back in the 80's when people had comodore 64s and 386s running DOS.
I remember soldering 4K memory boards for my NorthStar S-100 system. Man, those lamers who bought computers like the 64 and XT sucked, because they didn't understand how computers worked at an electrical level.
And of course, I will be trumped by someone who had to enter his boot loader in octal on the front panel of his IMASI S-100, whereas mine was in _lamer rom_. And he will be trumped by someone who had to wire their boot loader on a plugboard.
Cmdr Taco is right; Linux will never gain wide acceptance because it's aimed straight at the "elite subculture." And like all elite subcultures, they have no comprehension of how anyone would not want to be "elite." I mean really, why would anyone want to just _use_ a computer when they could flame about it, fork other people's code to prove "I'm more elite than you," etc.?
And the poor non-elite user... Who just wants some program to organize recipes. First they have to choose which of the 54 window managers is the most "elite" and god help them if they are wrong. No wonder they just want to _buy_ software if it means they can avoid spending their whole life trying to become "elite."
Because "space shifting" it is deriving them of revenue! You're supposed to pay to translate it to a different media-of-the-week.
78 RPM, 33-1/3 RPM, 8-track, casette, CD, Minidisk, MP3, DVD-Audio... Now that there's a "new" format about every 5 years, they want you to pay to continue to play...
OpenBSD positions itself as a "Canadian" operating system to get around U.S. gov't regulations and the U.S. gov't doesn't like giving anything to Canada (except acid rain and fugitive criminals.)
They offered but Theo had one of his Turette-esque attacks during the negotiations and things went downhill from there.
Easier to convince Kirk to license the BSD daemon for the new $1 bill.
Tells me the hostname (which is all you need to know) and has the advantage that I can include the prompt in cut&paste command lines with 3-clicks in Xterm and they will still run.
Try that with your PS1="IMSOELEET\033[c" prompts! :)
Linux is like 50 hyperactive kindergarden students each waving their home-made dinners, screaming "Try Mine!" "No, Try Mine!" "Mine's Better than Yours!" "Jimmy's a poo-poo head!" "Joey wrecked my dinner! Bwaaaaa!" "I added salt to Kim's, so mine is better!" "Me! Me! Me!" "Jeffy called me a poo-poo head so I'm gonna fork his dinner! Then he'll be sorry!" "Look at Me!"
At least with your older brother, you were fed and could get on with doing other things in your life... Everything in life is a compromise.
People who don't know history are doomed to think that bell bottoms look cool.
Never paid to see a theatre production that was funded by the NEA?
Never bought flour made from wheat subsides by farm subsidies?
Never paid some ISP to get on that Inter-net thingy?