Anyone who feels they could stand to lose a few pounds, but who has ignored dieting because of a perception that it'll turn them into "some kind of crazy hippy health food freak" should stop reading my ramblings and start reading this book now. IMHO The Hacker's Diet should be the unofficial weightloss-HOWTO for the geek set.
I used to be a fat slob myself - 210ish. I'm now just a somewhat-chunky slob at 165. Total time, 5 months since reading The Hacker's Diet. 10 pounds a month, consistently and reliably, with negligible hunger.
What impressed me about The Hacker's Diet was its lack of touchy-feeley new-agey "it's all in your mind" crap as well as its lack of what I call the "magic bullet syndrome". I'd studiously avoided dieting, gaining about 10 pounds a year over the past 5-6 years, because I couldn't be bothered to exercise or change my entire life around for the sake of some book from some quack who obviously had no idea what he was talking about in the first place. 99% of the "diet books" are basically about how to lose 10 pounds of water the first week, and maybe 5 pounds of muscle in the second week. Feh. The rest of the industry - diet programs - are basically "come here for touchy-feely-crap and pay a fortune to the overpriced proprietary food we sell"; little more than glorified brainwashing centres. Come in, get hooked on our One True Plan, and pay us for the rest of your life whether you lose weight or not. No thanks.
Written by a geek for geeks, The Hacker's Diet cut through the crap, explaining the physiological processes involved in weight gain/maintenance/loss in the simple language of thermodynamics, which totally blew me away. "Hey, no crap, just numbers! Nothing to buy, just data on how the body works! Here's something I can understand and follow!" What you eat doesn't matter, only how many calories you consume and how many calories you burn. In retrospect, yeah, that's a "duh" kind of insight - I have newfound grudging respect to the diet industry for its ability to keep such an obvious thing "secret" for so many years.
Anyways, I've been living on 1200 calories per day for the past six months - the rest of my requirements come from burning fat. I still can't be bothered to exercise, but I'm able to wear clothes I haven't been able to fit in for 2-3 years, and can walk about twice as far as I used to be able to before getting winded - no more carrying around the 50-pound laser printer for me - and feel all-around better than I used to. In a month or two, I start running out of fat and get to start eating again, building my caloric intake up to a maintenance level where I'll be able to sit for the forseeable future. (Do you have any idea how much pasta you can make with an extra 500-1000 calories to work with? Every night will be all-you-can-eat spaghetti night!:-)
Another site that will be useful - http://www.dietitian.org". This is a site run by a dietitian (duh:) who is equally unafraid to explain human physiology in technical terms. No BS, no pseudo-scientific crap, and relatively little dumbing-down of the relevant biology.
So, if you're of the globular persuasion, if you can't stand the thought of turning your life over to someone who'll tell you never to eat your favority brand of burnt cow flesh again, if you "don't have the time" to spend hours at the gym (since you'd rather be reading/. anyway), and you still wanna lose a few pounds, check out The Hacker's Diet and the dietitian site I mentioned above.
The moral of the story is, don't futz with the safety interlocks, especially around high-level sources.
Reminds me of an old bit of nuke humor involving safety interlocks and high-level sources. I used to work at a research reactor, and a typical day's work often involved setting up an experiment in front of a "port" - essentially a shuttered hole in the reactor housing that was used to generate a neutron beam from the core. The experiments were set up in very well-shielded enclosed brick constructions around the reactor, each of which was very clearly marked with red warning light that was turned on whenever the beam port was open.
To set up an experiment, you and a buddy would verify that the beam port was shut (and test the warning light!), and then you'd enter the brick construction to place the thing-to-be-fried in the path of the beam. Your buddy would stay outside to make sure that nobody tried to open the port. As the beam was conveniently set at genital (er, waist) level, this led to the obvious gag of a third person bringing in a second red bulb and setting it up next to the real one while you were inside setting up your first experiment and your buddy grinned knowingly. The glare of the second bulb would obscure the warning bulb unless you knew what you were looking for. (Note that at no time was the real bulb ever touched, and a third person was required so that the second person could keep an eye on the beam port switch at all times. We were sick and twisted, not stupid!)
Your buddy and his accomplice would then then put on their best "white-as-a-ghost" faces as you emerged from the construction to see what appeared to be the red warning light. It only took about ten seconds to figure out you'd been had, but oh, the expression on your face during those seconds.
All involved would then collapse in peals of laughter and wait until someone else started working with the team to do it again. (Yes, they did it to me when I started there, yes, it was the funniest thing I'd ever experienced... after I noticed them cracking up while trying in vain to keep a straight face:)
Side note - a few years back, I had the pleasure of encountering someone who worked on the Real Thing - a nuclear power station. It turns out that the type of gallows humor enjoyed by grad students at research reactors isn't unique.
Umm... OK, I'm a little off topic. Maybe you just had to be there:-)
Back to the caffeine thing - while it'll do nothing for the non-ionizing radiation given off by a monitor or a cell phone, it appears from the New Scientist article that megadoses of caffeine may prevent of the effects of high doses of radiation received over short intervals of time.
What I find most interesting is the fact that dosing the mice with caffeine after (assuming "immediately after") frying them didn't help. If the caffeine reacts with the hydroxyl radicals produced during irradiation, my gut tells me that it should be possible to get the protection if the caffeine is administered within a short (admittedly, the window could be very short, on the order of minutes at most) time of irradiation.
Given that the main cause of death was (predictably) bone marrow failure, however, it's conceivable that the time it takes for caffeine to find its way into the marrow is too long to have a useful effect. Things to try (though not at home, kids!):
Mice dosed "only 30 minutes before" irradiation survived. Find out how many minutes before irradiation a mouse needs to receive the caffeine before there's a protective effect.
Mice dosed "after" (for an unreported value of "after" in the URL) irradiation died. Did they try dosing the mice immediately after irradiation? (One would presume "yes", but...)
Attempt to correlate concentrations of caffeine in various tissues, e.g. marrow, at time of irradiation with survival rates.
and of course, if megadosing on caffiene immediately after exposure to radiation is shown to be helpful (or if one can find a way of perfusing bone marrow with caffeine within minutes of irradiation, which sounds unpleasant at best and unlikely at worst)...
Compare the number of mice dropping dead of caffeine-based post-exposure treatments versus the number dropping dead of radiation sickness:-)
Still, if you're ever in a situation where you have a bottle of Vivarin handy and you know you'll soon be walking into a gamma source, it's useful information. About the only application I can think of would be for people onsite at a graphite-core reactor experiencing a catastrophic failure a'la Chernobyl, where you know you're gonna be exposed, but you at least have some say as to when the exposure takes place. (Troops facing imminent attack from enhanced-radiation weapons would be another candidate, but I doubt that a tank crew hopped up on borderline-fatal doses of caffeine would be militarily effective anyways:)
One more side note for non-nuke types: No, a Chernobyl-type disaster can't happen in North America. The vast majority of our reactors are moderated with water (which doesn't burn, but could boil in a worst-case scenario), and have vacuum containment buildings (for just such an emergency). Chernobyl was moderated with graphite (which is quite flammable at the temperatures we're talking about), and had no such containment building. Finally, and most significantly, the reactor operators at Chernobyl were doing something that rivalled "defeating the safety interlocks and walking into a gamma-sterilization plant" for Darwinian stupidity when things went kablooie.
All that said - I know there are some folks at a research reactor having a ball with this one. I can see little empty bottles of Vivarin sitting next to the beam port switch with a note that says "If you don't trust your co-workers, you should have taken these 20 minutes ago!"
Looks like their ordering system is up - at least until the Slashdot Effect takes 'em back down again. Three neat things I've noticed:
The part number for the $5.90 offer now refers to Slashdot, not ZDNet:)
The order server may be a new box - www2.x10.com. (I forget where the orders were processed on Monday. Maybe they did a really quick server upgrade to handle the higher load.)
Linux support for the Firecracker is now mentioned on the home page. Sweet.
On the spam front - note that the conditions associated with the offer explicitly include a term that says that by ordering the kit, you consent to being placed on a mailing list. There's no radio button to opt-out of this, so it's a sure bet that any e-mail address you provide will get lots of mail.
I suppose that it's technically not spam, since you agreed to be placed on the list as a condition of purchase, and the conditions of purchase were disclosed on the home page. Whether it meets the clinical definition of spam or not, anyone ordering should strongly consider the use of an expendable e-mail drop.
So the cost isn't $5.90 - it's $5.90 and giving x10.com the right to send mail to the address you supplied when ordering the kit. IMHO that's still (and especially if you use an expendable e-mail drop for your e-commerce transactions:) a pretty good bang for the buck, especially if you're new to X10. As a previous/. poster said - "The first hit is free".
If Phoenix implements this, it won't get them anywhere, because it's just as easy to hack the ads out. You just look for the bitmap in the flash chip and modify it accordingly. It's a very safe bet are that the bitmap will be in the same location in every BIOS for a given motherboard, and thus, only one person has to find the bitmap, no matter what variation of the ad happens to be loaded on your box.
Programs to hack the EPA logo in your BIOS have been around for a while. Check out the following:
For DOS: http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Chip/4378/
For Linux: http://geggus.net/sven/linux-bootlogo.html
And yes, that last one even has a.BMP that will allow you to see Tux every time you boot:)
I'll accept the author's argument if one's goal in collecting is to have a large mass of "original stuff" to brag about to fellow collectors. If one's goal in music collecting is simply to have a large collection of "stuff to listen to", however, I believe MP3 to be the superior option.
Caveat: My comments only apply to those whose musical tastes are relatively MP3-encoding-friendly, and for those who don't consider themselves audiophiles; that is, those for whom 128k is adequate for their needs, and to whom 160k is indistinguisable from the original. I believe my comments would also extend to most MP3-"unfriendly" music with a sufficiently high bit rate - try VBR, 160, or higher, until your ears don't notice.
The author writes that "there's something about looking at a big mass of music". I get the same feeling when I look at a hard drive full of MP3s - it's just as big a "mass" of music, just in a different form.
Ane yes, you can have the same feeling of "hunting down" MP3s as with other media. I find it odd that the author writes that one can build up a huge library "with a T1 and a healthy dose of spare time" (emphasis added), and then goes on to say in the next paragraph says that only collection of physical media offers the feeling of reward that comes with finding a long-sought item. If the "item" is the experience of being able to listen to the song at any time you like, it's not just a matter of downloading it. Someone else has to have it, rip it, encode it, and post it to USENET or an FTP/WWW site. If an FTP/WWW site, you've gotta find it, and then you've gotta get through to it to make the download. If USENET, you've gotta be reading the appropriate group at the right time, all the pieces have to propagate from the poster's server to yours, or you've gotta hope/pray/beg for a repost. In either case, music that's "rare" on physical media can often be every bi n MP3.
The author's snort of derision ("Oh, how impressive") at the notion of an 18G hard drive of MP3s strikes me as bizarre. I think what we have here is a culture clash. I'm a geek. I think small is cool, and the thought of having 18G of MP3-based music in the palm of one's hands as immensely attractive. Does the author snort just as derisively at a CD of music when the bulkier 78RPM vinyl format could have been used? (A hint - we call them "albums" because a collection of songs from a single artist in the days of "78s" was a hefty book of discs. Each "track" was roughly the mass of a 12" vinyl recording. I snort in derision at the notion of a CD as a tangible item:-)
How many of us have looked at our hard drives and remembered when floppies were king, pondering the question "how many rooms full of floppies are on that drive?", and marvelling at the answer? I think of it the same way - how many shelves of CDs can I fit in the palm of my hand?
As for permanence, I think the/. crowd needs little reminding that backing up an 18G hard drive (or transferring it to some other storage media when "hard drive" technology is replaced by something else) is far simpler than backing up a wall full of vinyl or CD. A safety deposit box in a bank costs as little as $20/year. A spare 18G hard drive, a little over $250 and falling. If you've got 18G of data, a monthly trip to the bank for offsite backup is the least of your worries.
Lastly, getting back to the notion of collecting as a hobby that requires effort - how long does it take to download 18G of data? And given the impermanence of FTP/web sites and USENET binary postings, how long would it take one to replace every track on those 18G worth of MP3s? About as long as it took to find the MP3s in the first place, assuming a random probability of any specific MP3 showing up in any given place. I dunno about you, but at the rate I've been accumulating MP3s, our author's hypothetical 18G collection would represent several years of work.
To recap - yes, if you're interested in "original" material and the ability to say that you have one of the 500 pressings of Foo's limited edition single, maybe an MP3 collection isn't for you. But if it's the music, not the packaging, that you collect, collecting MP3s can be a hobby that's every bit as rewarding as collecting physical media.
EMP weapon? Naah, Microsoft will listen to Reason. *grin*
On a more serious note - those of you who follow the Spam Wars will likely remember Jim Nitchals. The term "Nitchalization" is used when an anti-spammer, rather than blindly wielding the Mallet of Doom, actually treats his or her enemy with sufficient respect that a dialogue develops, a clue is imparted and the former spammer changes his ways. It's harder work, and often fruitless, but when it works, it can work wonders.
Could I do that? Nope. I'm a mallet-swingin', all-spammers-are-subhuman-goo kinda guy all the way. But Jim wasn't. Jim realized that the best way to overcome an enemy is to make him your friend. In the face of harsh criticism and skepticism from his allies, he ended up convincing (of all people) Walt Rines and Sanford Wallace to endorse a strong anti-spam bill in Congress. I distinctly remember seeing a whole squadron of pigs flying outside my window that day.
I also have fond memories of Jim's code from my Apple ][ days, Bug Attack (real music during gameplay - a hell of an accomplishment given that the Apple's only "sound-generating" capability involved toggling whether the speaker cone between an "in" or "out" position!), Hard Hat Mack, Music Construction Set, Archon, and others.
Back to ESR, Stephenson, and Gates.
Will these presentations change the Evil Empire in a day? No. Maybe they'll change nothing at all. But the odds that they'll change things for the better is IMHO far greater than the odds that they'll change things for the worst. If there was one thing that Stephenson made clear in Snow Crash, it's that the voice of Reason doesn't have to speak with a million rounds per second. Sometimes a few well-placed words in the right ears can be far more effective.
ESR and Stephenson know this. Does their audience at Microsoft?
Tools: let your employees choose "best of breed".
on
How to Manage Geeks?
·
· Score: 5
Wherever possible, give your employees the power to choose the right tool for the job. It may not be the tool you might choose, but if they're productive with it, let them use it. Treat heterogeneous environments as opportunities, not as threats.
Geeks get attached to their tools. They love them in the way a senior manager adores his favorite brand of golf club. Just as in golf, the right tool for one person may not be for another. While corporate standards have their place, micromanaging those standards is often a WOMBAT - a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time.
A war story, and a lesson:
A few months ago, I worked at a shop which (among other things) tried to mandate the users' choice of mail tool. It foisted a ported Windows application onto a bunch of UNIX users who were comfortable with Emacs, vi, elm, pine, procmail, and all those other goodies we've come to know and love. The theory was that using the ported Windows application would allow us to "interoperate" more effectively.
The funny part, of course, is that none of the NT users in the company seemed to have trouble reading mail from us UNIX-heads, even though us UNIX-heads often tore our hair out at people who sent six separate binary attachments containing little icons for an e-mail consisting of three lines of text. (Or worse, a three-line-long Word document!)
Actually, that's not the funny part. The really funny part is that the UNIX development team was working on the product on which the company's future had been staked. With the stroke of a pen, the management team had managed to alienate the most valuable segment of the company's intellectual capital pool.
I don't work there any more. I work somewhere else. The pay's better here, as is the coffee. And I can read my mail without swapping to disk. Life is good.
Slashdot Mirror
I used to be a fat slob myself - 210ish. I'm now just a somewhat-chunky slob at 165. Total time, 5 months since reading The Hacker's Diet. 10 pounds a month, consistently and reliably, with negligible hunger.
What impressed me about The Hacker's Diet was its lack of touchy-feeley new-agey "it's all in your mind" crap as well as its lack of what I call the "magic bullet syndrome". I'd studiously avoided dieting, gaining about 10 pounds a year over the past 5-6 years, because I couldn't be bothered to exercise or change my entire life around for the sake of some book from some quack who obviously had no idea what he was talking about in the first place. 99% of the "diet books" are basically about how to lose 10 pounds of water the first week, and maybe 5 pounds of muscle in the second week. Feh. The rest of the industry - diet programs - are basically "come here for touchy-feely-crap and pay a fortune to the overpriced proprietary food we sell"; little more than glorified brainwashing centres. Come in, get hooked on our One True Plan, and pay us for the rest of your life whether you lose weight or not. No thanks.
Written by a geek for geeks, The Hacker's Diet cut through the crap, explaining the physiological processes involved in weight gain/maintenance/loss in the simple language of thermodynamics, which totally blew me away. "Hey, no crap, just numbers! Nothing to buy, just data on how the body works! Here's something I can understand and follow!" What you eat doesn't matter, only how many calories you consume and how many calories you burn. In retrospect, yeah, that's a "duh" kind of insight - I have newfound grudging respect to the diet industry for its ability to keep such an obvious thing "secret" for so many years.
Anyways, I've been living on 1200 calories per day for the past six months - the rest of my requirements come from burning fat. I still can't be bothered to exercise, but I'm able to wear clothes I haven't been able to fit in for 2-3 years, and can walk about twice as far as I used to be able to before getting winded - no more carrying around the 50-pound laser printer for me - and feel all-around better than I used to. In a month or two, I start running out of fat and get to start eating again, building my caloric intake up to a maintenance level where I'll be able to sit for the forseeable future. (Do you have any idea how much pasta you can make with an extra 500-1000 calories to work with? Every night will be all-you-can-eat spaghetti night! :-)
Another site that will be useful - http://www.dietitian.org". This is a site run by a dietitian (duh :) who is equally unafraid to explain human physiology in technical terms. No BS, no pseudo-scientific crap, and relatively little dumbing-down of the relevant biology.
So, if you're of the globular persuasion, if you can't stand the thought of turning your life over to someone who'll tell you never to eat your favority brand of burnt cow flesh again, if you "don't have the time" to spend hours at the gym (since you'd rather be reading /. anyway), and you still wanna lose a few pounds, check out The Hacker's Diet and the dietitian site I mentioned above.
Reminds me of an old bit of nuke humor involving safety interlocks and high-level sources. I used to work at a research reactor, and a typical day's work often involved setting up an experiment in front of a "port" - essentially a shuttered hole in the reactor housing that was used to generate a neutron beam from the core. The experiments were set up in very well-shielded enclosed brick constructions around the reactor, each of which was very clearly marked with red warning light that was turned on whenever the beam port was open.
To set up an experiment, you and a buddy would verify that the beam port was shut (and test the warning light!), and then you'd enter the brick construction to place the thing-to-be-fried in the path of the beam. Your buddy would stay outside to make sure that nobody tried to open the port. As the beam was conveniently set at genital (er, waist) level, this led to the obvious gag of a third person bringing in a second red bulb and setting it up next to the real one while you were inside setting up your first experiment and your buddy grinned knowingly. The glare of the second bulb would obscure the warning bulb unless you knew what you were looking for. (Note that at no time was the real bulb ever touched, and a third person was required so that the second person could keep an eye on the beam port switch at all times. We were sick and twisted, not stupid!)
Your buddy and his accomplice would then then put on their best "white-as-a-ghost" faces as you emerged from the construction to see what appeared to be the red warning light. It only took about ten seconds to figure out you'd been had, but oh, the expression on your face during those seconds.
All involved would then collapse in peals of laughter and wait until someone else started working with the team to do it again. (Yes, they did it to me when I started there, yes, it was the funniest thing I'd ever experienced... after I noticed them cracking up while trying in vain to keep a straight face :)
Side note - a few years back, I had the pleasure of encountering someone who worked on the Real Thing - a nuclear power station. It turns out that the type of gallows humor enjoyed by grad students at research reactors isn't unique.
Umm... OK, I'm a little off topic. Maybe you just had to be there :-)
Back to the caffeine thing - while it'll do nothing for the non-ionizing radiation given off by a monitor or a cell phone, it appears from the New Scientist article that megadoses of caffeine may prevent of the effects of high doses of radiation received over short intervals of time.
What I find most interesting is the fact that dosing the mice with caffeine after (assuming "immediately after") frying them didn't help. If the caffeine reacts with the hydroxyl radicals produced during irradiation, my gut tells me that it should be possible to get the protection if the caffeine is administered within a short (admittedly, the window could be very short, on the order of minutes at most) time of irradiation.
Given that the main cause of death was (predictably) bone marrow failure, however, it's conceivable that the time it takes for caffeine to find its way into the marrow is too long to have a useful effect. Things to try (though not at home, kids!):
- Mice dosed "only 30 minutes before" irradiation survived. Find out how many minutes before irradiation a mouse needs to receive the caffeine before there's a protective effect.
- Mice dosed "after" (for an unreported value of "after" in the URL) irradiation died. Did they try dosing the mice immediately after irradiation? (One would presume "yes", but...)
- Attempt to correlate concentrations of caffeine in various tissues, e.g. marrow, at time of irradiation with survival rates.
and of course, if megadosing on caffiene immediately after exposure to radiation is shown to be helpful (or if one can find a way of perfusing bone marrow with caffeine within minutes of irradiation, which sounds unpleasant at best and unlikely at worst)...Still, if you're ever in a situation where you have a bottle of Vivarin handy and you know you'll soon be walking into a gamma source, it's useful information. About the only application I can think of would be for people onsite at a graphite-core reactor experiencing a catastrophic failure a'la Chernobyl, where you know you're gonna be exposed, but you at least have some say as to when the exposure takes place. (Troops facing imminent attack from enhanced-radiation weapons would be another candidate, but I doubt that a tank crew hopped up on borderline-fatal doses of caffeine would be militarily effective anyways :)
One more side note for non-nuke types: No, a Chernobyl-type disaster can't happen in North America. The vast majority of our reactors are moderated with water (which doesn't burn, but could boil in a worst-case scenario), and have vacuum containment buildings (for just such an emergency). Chernobyl was moderated with graphite (which is quite flammable at the temperatures we're talking about), and had no such containment building. Finally, and most significantly, the reactor operators at Chernobyl were doing something that rivalled "defeating the safety interlocks and walking into a gamma-sterilization plant" for Darwinian stupidity when things went kablooie.
All that said - I know there are some folks at a research reactor having a ball with this one. I can see little empty bottles of Vivarin sitting next to the beam port switch with a note that says "If you don't trust your co-workers, you should have taken these 20 minutes ago!"
On the spam front - note that the conditions associated with the offer explicitly include a term that says that by ordering the kit, you consent to being placed on a mailing list. There's no radio button to opt-out of this, so it's a sure bet that any e-mail address you provide will get lots of mail.
I suppose that it's technically not spam, since you agreed to be placed on the list as a condition of purchase, and the conditions of purchase were disclosed on the home page. Whether it meets the clinical definition of spam or not, anyone ordering should strongly consider the use of an expendable e-mail drop.
So the cost isn't $5.90 - it's $5.90 and giving x10.com the right to send mail to the address you supplied when ordering the kit. IMHO that's still (and especially if you use an expendable e-mail drop for your e-commerce transactions :) a pretty good bang for the buck, especially if you're new to X10. As a previous /. poster said - "The first hit is free".
Programs to hack the EPA logo in your BIOS have been around for a while. Check out the following:
For DOS:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Chip/4378/
For Linux:
http://geggus.net/sven/linux-bootlogo.html
And yes, that last one even has a .BMP that will allow you to see Tux every time you boot :)
Caveat: My comments only apply to those whose musical tastes are relatively MP3-encoding-friendly, and for those who don't consider themselves audiophiles; that is, those for whom 128k is adequate for their needs, and to whom 160k is indistinguisable from the original. I believe my comments would also extend to most MP3-"unfriendly" music with a sufficiently high bit rate - try VBR, 160, or higher, until your ears don't notice.
The author writes that "there's something about looking at a big mass of music". I get the same feeling when I look at a hard drive full of MP3s - it's just as big a "mass" of music, just in a different form.
Ane yes, you can have the same feeling of "hunting down" MP3s as with other media. I find it odd that the author writes that one can build up a huge library "with a T1 and a healthy dose of spare time" (emphasis added), and then goes on to say in the next paragraph says that only collection of physical media offers the feeling of reward that comes with finding a long-sought item. If the "item" is the experience of being able to listen to the song at any time you like, it's not just a matter of downloading it. Someone else has to have it, rip it, encode it, and post it to USENET or an FTP/WWW site. If an FTP/WWW site, you've gotta find it, and then you've gotta get through to it to make the download. If USENET, you've gotta be reading the appropriate group at the right time, all the pieces have to propagate from the poster's server to yours, or you've gotta hope/pray/beg for a repost. In either case, music that's "rare" on physical media can often be every bi n MP3.
The author's snort of derision ("Oh, how impressive") at the notion of an 18G hard drive of MP3s strikes me as bizarre. I think what we have here is a culture clash. I'm a geek. I think small is cool, and the thought of having 18G of MP3-based music in the palm of one's hands as immensely attractive. Does the author snort just as derisively at a CD of music when the bulkier 78RPM vinyl format could have been used? (A hint - we call them "albums" because a collection of songs from a single artist in the days of "78s" was a hefty book of discs. Each "track" was roughly the mass of a 12" vinyl recording. I snort in derision at the notion of a CD as a tangible item :-)
How many of us have looked at our hard drives and remembered when floppies were king, pondering the question "how many rooms full of floppies are on that drive?", and marvelling at the answer? I think of it the same way - how many shelves of CDs can I fit in the palm of my hand?
As for permanence, I think the /. crowd needs little reminding that backing up an 18G hard drive (or transferring it to some other storage media when "hard drive" technology is replaced by something else) is far simpler than backing up a wall full of vinyl or CD. A safety deposit box in a bank costs as little as $20/year. A spare 18G hard drive, a little over $250 and falling. If you've got 18G of data, a monthly trip to the bank for offsite backup is the least of your worries.
Lastly, getting back to the notion of collecting as a hobby that requires effort - how long does it take to download 18G of data? And given the impermanence of FTP/web sites and USENET binary postings, how long would it take one to replace every track on those 18G worth of MP3s? About as long as it took to find the MP3s in the first place, assuming a random probability of any specific MP3 showing up in any given place. I dunno about you, but at the rate I've been accumulating MP3s, our author's hypothetical 18G collection would represent several years of work.
To recap - yes, if you're interested in "original" material and the ability to say that you have one of the 500 pressings of Foo's limited edition single, maybe an MP3 collection isn't for you. But if it's the music, not the packaging, that you collect, collecting MP3s can be a hobby that's every bit as rewarding as collecting physical media.
On a more serious note - those of you who follow the Spam Wars will likely remember Jim Nitchals. The term "Nitchalization" is used when an anti-spammer, rather than blindly wielding the Mallet of Doom, actually treats his or her enemy with sufficient respect that a dialogue develops, a clue is imparted and the former spammer changes his ways. It's harder work, and often fruitless, but when it works, it can work wonders.
Could I do that? Nope. I'm a mallet-swingin', all-spammers-are-subhuman-goo kinda guy all the way. But Jim wasn't. Jim realized that the best way to overcome an enemy is to make him your friend. In the face of harsh criticism and skepticism from his allies, he ended up convincing (of all people) Walt Rines and Sanford Wallace to endorse a strong anti-spam bill in Congress. I distinctly remember seeing a whole squadron of pigs flying outside my window that day.
I also have fond memories of Jim's code from my Apple ][ days, Bug Attack (real music during gameplay - a hell of an accomplishment given that the Apple's only "sound-generating" capability involved toggling whether the speaker cone between an "in" or "out" position!), Hard Hat Mack, Music Construction Set, Archon, and others.
Back to ESR, Stephenson, and Gates.
Will these presentations change the Evil Empire in a day? No. Maybe they'll change nothing at all. But the odds that they'll change things for the better is IMHO far greater than the odds that they'll change things for the worst. If there was one thing that Stephenson made clear in Snow Crash, it's that the voice of Reason doesn't have to speak with a million rounds per second. Sometimes a few well-placed words in the right ears can be far more effective.
ESR and Stephenson know this. Does their audience at Microsoft?
Geeks get attached to their tools. They love them in the way a senior manager adores his favorite brand of golf club. Just as in golf, the right tool for one person may not be for another. While corporate standards have their place, micromanaging those standards is often a WOMBAT - a Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time.
A war story, and a lesson:
A few months ago, I worked at a shop which (among other things) tried to mandate the users' choice of mail tool. It foisted a ported Windows application onto a bunch of UNIX users who were comfortable with Emacs, vi, elm, pine, procmail, and all those other goodies we've come to know and love. The theory was that using the ported Windows application would allow us to "interoperate" more effectively.
The funny part, of course, is that none of the NT users in the company seemed to have trouble reading mail from us UNIX-heads, even though us UNIX-heads often tore our hair out at people who sent six separate binary attachments containing little icons for an e-mail consisting of three lines of text. (Or worse, a three-line-long Word document!)
Actually, that's not the funny part. The really funny part is that the UNIX development team was working on the product on which the company's future had been staked. With the stroke of a pen, the management team had managed to alienate the most valuable segment of the company's intellectual capital pool.
I don't work there any more. I work somewhere else. The pay's better here, as is the coffee. And I can read my mail without swapping to disk. Life is good.