ESR had a colloquiem at Cornell a while ago and I brought up Nikolai Bezroukov's critique of his CatB, which he loudly discredited. I wish this survey would have come up earlier...I would like to ask him to comment on these statements:
"The top 1271 authors, 10% of the total, accounted for 72.3% of the total code base. The top 10 authors alone (0.08% of the total) are credited for 19.8% of the code base. Free software development may be distributed, but it is most certainly very top heavy."
"Our conclusion: Free software development is less a bazaar of several developers involved in several projects, more a collation of projects developed single mindedly by a large number of authors."
The question from Bezroukov's paper I didn't bring up was that open source projects look much more cathedralesque and hierarchical as one moves up. E.g., not just anybody gets patches put right in to the Linux or *BSD kernel.
"The best law, from a therapist's point of view, would be a sliding scale... five years for seventeen, four for sixteen, three for fifteen, two for fourteen and down... I've seen it go to one at twelve, with prosecution shifted to parents, but I'm not sure that's well thought out..."
I don't think I'm understanding you. Are you saying that people who assault/younger/ victims should get/less/ time in jail??
You blew my statement out of proportion. I didn't say the admin or anybody else would attempt to "prove" that you were a pedophile or smear your name. I was just saying, that IF you actually had a completely legitimate reason for attempting to retrieve some file from some server, then I don't see what harm there is in the server admin knowing that. However, most of the people attempting to retrieve files like this will be lamers tricked into it, and should deserve to be embarrassed for not having a legitimate reason. I'm completely comfortable with that if it scares idiots off the network. Since you would have a legitimate reason you shouldn't be scared off.
There are plenty of LEGITIMATE uses for a distributed file sharing architecture like Gnutella. Right now critics have zeroed in on porn and copyright infringement. If this site scares off lusers who would otherwise post or download pron and/or other illegal materials, great. If you have a legitimate reason to look at youngass.jpg, then surely you don't care if you are singled out and perhaps emailed by the server admin asking why you are requesting that file. On the other hand, if you are some lameass that wants to flood the network with porn files (or some other illegitimate material) or requests then you SHOULD be scared off. Go away. We don't want you ruining the quality of the network and giving it a bad name and attracting criticism. If you want porn that damn bad subscribe to the f*cking Playboy channel or to some porn site...it's not that difficult.
If I understand the Gnutella protocol, there is no way to determine who originally requested the file, because each server acts as a client proxy to every other server it knows.
"At the base level, it comes to the same thing. Money bought both the food and the hard drive."
No it f*cking does not. You do not "get it". Money is a human made construct. FOOD is not! There is PLENTY of food on this planet. It is a CRIME that we are allowing a large majority of the world to be malnourished and disease ridden while the other part hordes. It has NOTHING to do with money and technological gadgets are not the same as PREREQUISITES to human life. Because this planet affords us the ability to fulfill the basic living requirements of ALL people, we SHOULD. Anything other is a crime. That people in Bangladesh just aren't as good capitalists as us fat cat Americans is not a valid argument for their starvation, and inability to attain the necessities of life.
"The original poster was whining about sharing and caring. If he cared that much, he wouldn't be posting on/. He'd be on a fucking plane to go help."
That's the same old bullshit response. "You're so concerned, why aren't YOU fixing it." If I told you I were in the Peace Corps would it make a f*cking difference? It doesn't change the facts that things/should/ be changed, whether or not I'm personally changing them. How about some more:
"Nuclear weapons are bad" "Hey, why aren't YOU dismantling nuclear weapons?!"
"Violent crime is bad" "Hey, why aren't YOU patrolling the streets?!"
"Killing whales is bad" "Hey, why aren't YOU out on a ship protecting them?!"
"I donate time to help people in this country that are less well off. I don't need to listen to some whiner complaining that I don't do enough."
You seem to think that change can only come from individual donations. I don't expect you to lift the Communist regime in China this afternoon, and I don't really care/what/ you do, if anything. It is the mentality that it is the third world's "fault" that they are starving, or otherwise unable to come by the necessities of life, because they are just not hard working or capitalistic enough, that has to be changed. Unfortunately too many people in Western countries wear this comfortable delusion.
"There are ecological definitions of overpopulation, but with a global food distribution system, the earth is a long long way from overpopulated.
That there are people starving is a situation created by greed and not by lack of food, or means to distribute it."
I agree somewhat. This planet is resilient and food source rich. That the top medical ailments in western society are due to a decadent lifestyle, while the other three quarters of the world lives in uttor squalor is an indication that something is seriously f*cked up. However, an efficient global food distribution system doesn't exist, and most probably will not exist in the near future, if at all. It is obvious we are artificially reducing the quality of life of a humongous percentage of the human population. But we cannot simply ignore it, relying on the planet to "provide" for us. We are entirely capable of continuing to screw ourselves over until some cataclysm occurs. The answer is to move to renewable non-pollutant energy and food sources, and to more equitably distribute the wealth of this planet. With the abundance this planet provides I can't see access to food/shelter/clothing as anything but a human RIGHT. Anything less is a crime.
"So tell me: Is it fair for 'jon doe' to have this opinion of Free Software because he had a run in with Richard Stallman?"
Yes, probably "fair", just not "rational". It's a matter of degree. Free Software freaks might annoy you. On the other hand religious freaks have a history of bombing planes, staging military coups, and oppressing people. It's much more rational then to hope they "stagger off into some corner and die", than to wish the same of Stallman. When Stallman pipebombs a bus, holds my relatives hostage, or funds political assassinations, then perhaps I will wish him to stagger off into some corner and die.
I was bored just last weekend and went to visit lyrics.ch. I knew that they had been bullied and now had some stupid applet that only scrolled the text for a short amount of time. It was still there. So I busily went about reverse engineering it. Turns out they apparently just dump a jar with the text to the client (well, it is in serialized form, but the text can be easily extracted). This is very easy to get around, but just obfuscated and annoying enough that one would rather not even use the service than attempt to get the lyrics. I bet their visit rate has plummeted. They are now an almost worthless site. Who wants to wait for a goddamn applet to load to give them a glimpse of the lyrics?...that's just insulting. To bad they had to turn their site to shit.
I guess Martin Luther King should not have been able to publish his letter from the Birmingham Jail, and likewise Rubin "Hurricane" Carter should have been prevented from publishing his book?
Ah, the classic "cut everybody down to the lowest common denominator" idea, aka socialism (communism to the West).
Sorry to disappoint you, but it has been tried. Didn't work all that well. The price of the experiment has been quite high, though.
Yes, equalization of "classes" doesn't work well with capitalism, because it stratifies by it's very nature (at least when money==prestige). However, much of Europe is democratic socialism in one form or another. Many countries have very high taxes, but provide for their citizens SOCIALIZED health care and education, and in many (democratic) countries industry is socialized. Heck, Medicare is a socialist healthcare program, and the FCC and Dpt. of Energy does a good job of effectively "socializing" telecommunications and the energy industry ("socializing" being hand picking the few companies that are allow to compete and setting very strict rules).
In a non-capitalist society,/class/ socialism might actually work. In such a case, it is the non-capitalist part that is the detriment of the society. The USSR didn't fall because it was socialist or communist...it fell because it could not compete economically.
This would sit better with me if the Church of Subgenius did not require regular donations so that I may be saved from the Xists. To quote Bob: "You'd PAY to know what you REALLY think.", Dobbs, 1961 Also, one of the Subgenii tenets is that of killing and/or endlessly torturing all of our enemies once the Xists come, so his comment seems to implicitly include me, which I can't say I'm particularly fond of.
OMIGOD, Subgenius is a JOKE religion. It's FAKE. Either you are being facetious or are somekinda dense.
But really, is there a market for a voice controlled MP3 robot stereo? And the most important thing - will it run Linux (which is by the way, not Red Hat)?
Pfffffft. Some languages ARE easier to read and maintain than others. The obvious proof would be assembly, but I'll assume you're talking about high level languages. Languages with single, well-defined, ways to do things are easier to read and maintain. Perl is lauded for the fact that the same thing can be written in many ways. That means ten programmers could possibly write the same thing ten different ways...the potential differences in "identical" programs can mushroom. Readability and maintainability sure has a whole lot more than a "little" to do with the language it's written in.
My major gripe with VB is that it is so loosely typed as to appear incredibly sloppy. Whenever I look at VB code, even "good" VB code, it just seems so utterly sloppy to me. Instead of adding structure, as a high level language, it appears to toss it out the window. That just rubs me the wrong way with coarse sandpaper.
But in it's defense, stuff like Perl and writing of large and/or GUI apps with Python or Tcl (for heaven's sake) glue also rubs me the wrong way.
You can probably tell that I'm a strict-typing OO bigot, if the sig hasn't given it away already;)
Man, I think Slashdot needs a new feature, a "Peanut Gallery". It could perhaps be a slashbox or something like the top 10 posts box. I think we really need to save the hilariously worthless posts. The ones that are so stupid and meaningless that they are actually funny. I'm not sure if it would work just to take the/lowest/ scoring posts, because then you'd get tons of completely irrelevant and humorless posts...but the unique and mind boggling non-sequitors and detritus need to be captured I think in some sort of bin people can gawk at. Throw this guy in. Throw OOG in. Throw Natalie Portman's petrified first post grits in.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't the book /already/ published?
"This kind of news-by-discussion has emerged before online. But never before with the robust yeastiness of Slashdot."
Slashdot: Now with robust yeastiness!
ESR had a colloquiem at Cornell a while ago and I brought up Nikolai Bezroukov's critique of his CatB, which he loudly discredited. I wish this survey would have come up earlier...I would like to ask him to comment on these statements:
"The top 1271 authors, 10% of the total, accounted for 72.3% of the total code base. The top 10 authors alone (0.08% of the total) are credited for 19.8% of the code base. Free software development may be distributed, but it is most certainly very top heavy."
"Our conclusion: Free software development is less a bazaar of several developers involved in several
projects, more a collation of projects developed single mindedly by a large number of authors."
The question from Bezroukov's paper I didn't bring up was that open source projects look much more cathedralesque and hierarchical as one moves up. E.g., not just anybody gets patches put right in to the Linux or *BSD kernel.
"If FSF REALLY believed in 100% free, no restrictions software, they would not license but rather put the software into the public domain."
Public domain does not ensure that somebody can't exploit everybody's hard work without also putting the added/modified code back into public domain.
Isn't this what Berlin trying to do??
"The best law, from a therapist's point of view, would be a sliding scale... five years for seventeen, four for sixteen, three for fifteen, two for fourteen and down... I've seen it go to one at twelve, with prosecution shifted to parents, but I'm not sure that's well thought out..."
/younger/ victims should get /less/ time in jail??
I don't think I'm understanding you. Are you saying that people who assault
You blew my statement out of proportion. I didn't say the admin or anybody else would attempt to "prove" that you were a pedophile or smear your name. I was just saying, that IF you actually had a completely legitimate reason for attempting to retrieve some file from some server, then I don't see what harm there is in the server admin knowing that. However, most of the people attempting to retrieve files like this will be lamers tricked into it, and should deserve to be embarrassed for not having a legitimate reason. I'm completely comfortable with that if it scares idiots off the network. Since you would have a legitimate reason you shouldn't be scared off.
There are plenty of LEGITIMATE uses for a distributed file sharing architecture like Gnutella. Right now critics have zeroed in on porn and copyright infringement. If this site scares off lusers who would otherwise post or download pron and/or other illegal materials, great. If you have a legitimate reason to look at youngass.jpg, then surely you don't care if you are singled out and perhaps emailed by the server admin asking why you are requesting that file. On the other hand, if you are some lameass that wants to flood the network with porn files (or some other illegitimate material) or requests then you SHOULD be scared off. Go away. We don't want you ruining the quality of the network and giving it a bad name and attracting criticism. If you want porn that damn bad subscribe to the f*cking Playboy channel or to some porn site...it's not that difficult.
If I understand the Gnutella protocol, there is no way to determine who originally requested the file, because each server acts as a client proxy to every other server it knows.
"At the base level, it comes to the same thing. Money bought both the food and the hard drive."
/. He'd be on a fucking plane to go help."
/should/ be changed, whether or not I'm personally changing them. How about some more:
/what/ you do, if anything. It is the mentality that it is the third world's "fault" that they are starving, or otherwise unable to come by the necessities of life, because they are just not hard working or capitalistic enough, that has to be changed. Unfortunately too many people in Western countries wear this comfortable delusion.
No it f*cking does not. You do not "get it". Money is a human made construct. FOOD is not! There is PLENTY of food on this planet. It is a CRIME that we are allowing a large majority of the world to be malnourished and disease ridden while the other part hordes. It has NOTHING to do with money and technological gadgets are not the same as PREREQUISITES to human life. Because this planet affords us the ability to fulfill the basic living requirements of ALL people, we SHOULD. Anything other is a crime. That people in Bangladesh just aren't as good capitalists as us fat cat Americans is not a valid argument for their starvation, and inability to attain the necessities of life.
"The original poster was whining about sharing and caring. If he cared that much, he wouldn't be posting on
That's the same old bullshit response. "You're so concerned, why aren't YOU fixing it." If I told you I were in the Peace Corps would it make a f*cking difference? It doesn't change the facts that things
"Nuclear weapons are bad" "Hey, why aren't YOU dismantling nuclear weapons?!"
"Violent crime is bad" "Hey, why aren't YOU patrolling the streets?!"
"Killing whales is bad" "Hey, why aren't YOU out on a ship protecting them?!"
"I donate time to help people in this country that are less well off. I don't need to listen to some whiner complaining that I don't do enough."
You seem to think that change can only come from individual donations. I don't expect you to lift the Communist regime in China this afternoon, and I don't really care
Um, there already is a standard SGML/XML documentation markup language: DocBook
b ook/docbook.html
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/docbook/chapter/
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/
http://www.docbook.org/
"There are ecological definitions of overpopulation, but with a global food distribution system, the earth is
a long long way from overpopulated.
That there are people starving is a situation created by greed and not by lack of food, or means to distribute it."
I agree somewhat. This planet is resilient and food source rich. That the top medical ailments in western society are due to a decadent lifestyle, while the other three quarters of the world lives in uttor squalor is an indication that something is seriously f*cked up. However, an efficient global food distribution system doesn't exist, and most probably will not exist in the near future, if at all. It is obvious we are artificially reducing the quality of life of a humongous percentage of the human population. But we cannot simply ignore it, relying on the planet to "provide" for us. We are entirely capable of continuing to screw ourselves over until some cataclysm occurs. The answer is to move to renewable non-pollutant energy and food sources, and to more equitably distribute the wealth of this planet. With the abundance this planet provides I can't see access to food/shelter/clothing as anything but a human RIGHT. Anything less is a crime.
"So tell me: Is it fair for 'jon doe' to have this opinion of Free Software because he had a run in with Richard Stallman?"
Yes, probably "fair", just not "rational". It's a matter of degree. Free Software freaks might annoy you. On the other hand religious freaks have a history of bombing planes, staging military coups, and oppressing people. It's much more rational then to hope they "stagger off into some corner and die", than to wish the same of Stallman. When Stallman pipebombs a bus, holds my relatives hostage, or funds political assassinations, then perhaps I will wish him to stagger off into some corner and die.
Spit out the koolaid man.
"Generation Net or Generation /."
Don't you mean Generation AOL?
I was bored just last weekend and went to visit lyrics.ch. I knew that they had been bullied and now had some stupid applet that only scrolled the text for a short amount of time. It was still there. So I busily went about reverse engineering it. Turns out they apparently just dump a jar with the text to the client (well, it is in serialized form, but the text can be easily extracted). This is very easy to get around, but just obfuscated and annoying enough that one would rather not even use the service than attempt to get the lyrics. I bet their visit rate has plummeted. They are now an almost worthless site. Who wants to wait for a goddamn applet to load to give them a glimpse of the lyrics?...that's just insulting. To bad they had to turn their site to shit.
I guess Martin Luther King should not have been able to publish his letter from the Birmingham Jail, and likewise Rubin "Hurricane" Carter should have been prevented from publishing his book?
You can't have it both ways AC.
Yes, equalization of "classes" doesn't work well with capitalism, because it stratifies by it's very nature (at least when money==prestige). However, much of Europe is democratic socialism in one form or another. Many countries have very high taxes, but provide for their citizens SOCIALIZED health care and education, and in many (democratic) countries industry is socialized. Heck, Medicare is a socialist healthcare program, and the FCC and Dpt. of Energy does a good job of effectively "socializing" telecommunications and the energy industry ("socializing" being hand picking the few companies that are allow to compete and setting very strict rules).
In a non-capitalist society,
Damnit...does this mean I can't sell my nauseating multicolored electronic glowing christ window ornament?
But really, is there a market for a voice controlled MP3 robot stereo? And the most important thing - will it run Linux (which is by the way, not Red Hat)?
Pfffffft. Some languages ARE easier to read and maintain than others. The obvious proof would be assembly, but I'll assume you're talking about high level languages. Languages with single, well-defined, ways to do things are easier to read and maintain. Perl is lauded for the fact that the same thing can be written in many ways. That means ten programmers could possibly write the same thing ten different ways...the potential differences in "identical" programs can mushroom. Readability and maintainability sure has a whole lot more than a "little" to do with the language it's written in.
My major gripe with VB is that it is so loosely typed as to appear incredibly sloppy. Whenever I look at VB code, even "good" VB code, it just seems so utterly sloppy to me. Instead of adding structure, as a high level language, it appears to toss it out the window. That just rubs me the wrong way with coarse sandpaper.
;)
But in it's defense, stuff like Perl and writing of large and/or GUI apps with Python or Tcl (for heaven's sake) glue also rubs me the wrong way.
You can probably tell that I'm a strict-typing OO bigot, if the sig hasn't given it away already
Or Star Trek:
"We are the Borg.
We will assimilate your distinctiveness.
Resistence is futile."
Man, I think Slashdot needs a new feature, a "Peanut Gallery". It could perhaps be a slashbox or something like the top 10 posts box. I think we really need to save the hilariously worthless posts. The ones that are so stupid and meaningless that they are actually funny. I'm not sure if it would work just to take the /lowest/ scoring posts, because then you'd get tons of completely irrelevant and humorless posts...but the unique and mind boggling non-sequitors and detritus need to be captured I think in some sort of bin people can gawk at. Throw this guy in. Throw OOG in. Throw Natalie Portman's petrified first post grits in.
heh, classic
Funny, last time I saw an OOG post it was moderated down to 0 or something. I'm telling you, OOG is a Hank-the-Angry-Drunken-Dwarf protege.