I am posting this from behind my company's network which uses smart filter. I have absolutely no problem going to sourceforge.net or any site in that domain.
So maybe it's just the submitter's network problem or this is just an outright lie.
either way, slashdot editors could at least check before posting. I laughed as soon as I read this "news" story.
A few hours ago, I learned that I am now (at least in theory) absurdly rich.
I was at my machine, hacking, when I got email congratulating me on the success of the VA Linux Systems IPO. I was working on my latest small project -- a compiler for a special-purpose language I've designed called Scriptable Network Graphics, or SNG. SNG is an editable representation of the chunk data in a PNG. What I'm writing is a compiler/decompiler pair, so you can dump PNGs in SNG, edit the SNG, then recompile to a PNG image.
"Congratulations? That's interesting," said I to myself. "I didn't think we were going out till tomorrow." And I oughtta know; I'm on VA's Board of Directors, recruited by Larry Augustin himself to be VA's official corporate conscience, and it's a matter of public record that I hold a substantial share in the company. I tooled on over to Linux Today, chased a link -- and discovered that Larry Augustin had taken the fast option we discussed during the last Board conference call. VA had indeed gone out on NASDAQ -- and I had become worth approximately forty-one million dollars while I wasn't looking.
Well, that didn't last long. In the next two hours, VA dropped from $274 a share to close at $239, leaving me with a stake of only thirty-six million dollars. Which is still a preposterously large amount of money.
You may wonder why I am talking about this in public. The first piece of advice your friends and family will give you, if it looks like you're about to become really wealthy, is: keep it quiet. It's nobody else's business -- you don't want to look like you're gloating, and you don't want to be deluged with an endless succession of charity appeals, business propositions, long-lost best friends, and plain bald-faced mooching.
Trouble with the "keep it quiet" theory is that I've made my bucks in a very public way. When you're already a media figure, and your name is on the S-1 of a hot IPO, and email from friends and journalists starts coming in like crazy as the stock breaks first-day-gain records, playing it coy swiftly ceases to look like a viable option.
Besides, it wouldn't be fair to dissemble. I serve a community. I'm wealthy today because my efforts to spread the idea of open source on behalf of that community helped galvanize the business world, and earned the respect and the trust of a lot of hackers. Larry thought that respect was an asset worth shelling out 150,000 shares of VA for. Fairness to the hackers who made me bankable demands that I publicly acknowledge this result -- and publicly face the question of how it's going to affect my life and what I'll do with the money.
This is a question that a lot of us will be facing as open source sweeps the technology landscape. Money follows where value leads, and the mainstream business and finance world is seeing increasing value in our tribe of scruffy hackers. Red Hat and VA have created a precedent now, with their directed-shares programs designed to reward as many individual contributors as they can identify; future players aiming for community backing and a seat at the high table will have to follow suit. In this and other ways (including, for example, task markets) the wealth is going to be shared.
So while there aren't likely to be a lot more multimillion-dollar bonanzas like mine, lots of hackers are going to have to evolve answers to this question for smaller amounts that will nevertheless make a big difference to individuals; tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, enough to change your life -- or wreck it.
(Gee. Remember when the big question was "How do we make money at this?")
The first part of my answer is "I'll do nothing, until next June". Because I'm a VA board member, under SEC regulations there's a six-month lockout on the shares (a regulation designed to keep people from floating bogus offerings, cashing out, and skipping to Argentina before the share price crashes). So it's not strictly true that I'm wealthy right now. I will be wealthy in six months, unless VA or the U.S. economy craters before then. I'll bet on VA; I'm not so sure about the U.S. economy:-).
Assuming the economy does not in fact crater, how is wealth going to affect my life in six months? Honestly, I think the answer is "not much". I haven't spent the last fifteen years doing the open-source thing for the money. I'm already living pretty much exactly the way I want to, doing the work that matters to me. The biggest difference the money will make to me personally is that now I should be able to keep doing what I love for the rest of my life without worrying about money ever again.
So I expect I'll just keep on as I've been doing. Hacking code. Thinking and spreading subversive thoughts. Traveling and giving talks. Writing papers. Poking various evil empires a good one in the eye whenever I get a chance. Working for freedom.
I expect most other hackers confronted with sudden wealth will make similar choices. Reporters often ask me these days if I think the open-source community will be corrupted by the influx of big money. I tell them what I believe, which is this: commercial demand for programmers has been so intense for so long that anyone who can be seriously distracted by money is already gone. Our community has been self-selected for caring about other things -- accomplishment, pride, artistic passion, and each other.
OK, so maybe I'll break down and finally get a cell phone. And cable broadband so I can surf at smokin' speed. And a new flute. And maybe a nice hotrodded match-grade.45 semi for tactical shooting. But really, I don't want or need a lot of stuff. I'm kind of Buddhist that way; I like to minimize my material attachments. (My family gripes that this makes me hell to buy Christmas presents for.)
I'm not going to minimize my attachments by giving it all away, though, so you evangelists for a zillion worthy causes can just calm down out there and forget about hitting me up for megabucks. I am *not* going to be a soft touch, and will rudely refuse all importunities.
I'm not copping this harsh attitude to protect my money, but rather to protect the far more precious asset of my time. Because I don't want to have to become a full-time specialist in deciding whose urgent pitch to buy, I'm going to turn everybody down flat in advance. Anyone who bugs me for a handout, no matter how noble the cause and how much I agree with it, will go on my permanent shit list. If I want to give or lend or invest money, *I'll* call *you*. (Sigh...)
And yes, there are causes I'll give money to. Worthy hacker projects. Free-speech activism. Firearms-rights campaigns. Tibet, maybe. I might buy a hunk of rainforest for conservation somewhere. Megabucks are power, and with power comes an obligation to use it wisely. I'll give carefully, and in my own time, and only after doing my homework -- too much charity often kills what it means to nurture. And enough about that.
Ironically enough, one result of my getting rich is that I will probably start charging for speaking appearances, now that nobody can plausibly accuse me of doing it for the money. I won't charge open-source user groups or schools, but I will cheerfully extract a per diem from all the business conferences that keep wanting me to to boost their box office. Charging a price for my time will separate the expensive conferences that attract powerful people from the marginal events where the hacker community would get less leverage from my presence.
For the same reason, I'm still going to insist that anybody who wants me to give a talk has to cover my expenses and eliminate hassles. But I also expect I'll still carry my own luggage. And I'll never get too proud to crash on somebody's daybed when the local user group is too broke to cover a hotel.
But enough trivialities; I'm going to get back to work. I've got the SNG compiler stage almost done. Next up, I need to refactor the pngcheck code so I can give it a report-format option that generates SNG syntax. Then, I need to think about supporting MNG...
So is it fair to assume you are a Linux or Mac user then?
If you are, then why all the hate? Why are you Linux zealots out in anger and frothing at the mouth over a product they (supposedly) don't use from a company they so hate?
And if you are using Windows then you are a hypocrite. Why stick with a product that's SO bad, SO evil, So invasive? You do have choices.
where Microsoft (or M$, MicroShaft, Microsucks or whatever you kiddies want to call them) is ridiculed and made to be Satan incarnate? Look at the damn Microsoft topic icon on slashdot! MS as the Borg! har har.
Really, just look at the headlines in the Microsoft section of slashdot and the bitterness and jealousy just reveals itself so obviously.
well said. I'm sure this article would be helpful to those slashdot readers who are planning on going zimbabwe.
These people would also have to be unaware of the larger issue of the current political situation there, where the country is run by a "President" who fixes elections and has total control of the country (sorta like slashdot, huh?).
Slashdot: Fighting for Your Rights Online in Zimbabwe.
First, most of the programming classes I took doing my CS program did not require huge blocks of code. It was mostly pseudocode for the theory classes, and small toy code in language classes. It couldn't have been more than 100-200 LOC to write in one exam. Asking to write 500+ lines of code in a written exam is kind of dumb.
That said, if the other students have the same conditions as you, you'll have to suck it up and deal with it. That's life.
Wait a minute..so it seems you are all for editor trolling (this story's write up is classic trollbait), but you guys are awfully quick with the downmods when users do it. Do as I say, not as I do, anyone?
But as anyone who's been here long enough to see, slashdot hypocrisy is not new.
And the thing is..you guys aren't close to objective, but in your zeal to push your own agendas, you guys are often wrong, and that's the thing that makes this site such a joke.
Does this Service Pack raise the dead? What about walking on water? Does it do cold fusion? Because all those things are "impossible" to achieve to. So without any context, the title is meaningless.
Where is this notion that Microsoft "avoids" paying dividends come from? They have no obligation whatsoever to pay out dividends if management decides not to. You can't avoid doing something where you might otherwise have to.
Shareholders know they don't pay dividends, they invest full well knowing that. They bet that by reinvesting that money back into the company, the shareholder value will increase. That in of itself is better than a dividend.
I think it's a total cop-out to say that slashdot is not journalism. You can say it's bad journalism, but it's still journalism.
From dictionary.com's first definition,"The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts" -slashdot fits the collecting part.
True, slashdot just posts links to the stories, but is that much different than a site or newspaper printing an AP wire story? It's not their story, but the ones posting still have to take responsibility for it.
It's more indicative of the quality of slashdot when people say it's not real journalism. The only people who can fix that is the slashdot staff.
there have been countless stories that slashdot posted that are misleading, based on half-truth or are just outright false. Sometimes they update, sometimes they don't. It really seems to happen only when they feel like it.
So if they don't correct it, then readers have to read thru the comments so an astute comment can correct the "editor" incompetence.
Maybe slashdot should adopt the practice of updating the stories so it tells the truth. I see nothing wrong with news sites doing this. Better to get it right, than wrong.
this movie would have been perfect for Katz to pontificate about the ramifcations from 9/11 on the setting of the movie to how Peter Parker was really just like a Columbine geek, but with superpowers.
Everyone could have an alterier motive. That news caster that was on the local news saying that apples are healthy could have owned an apple farm.
This comparison would work if the newscaster had a stake in the apple farm or a direct competitor. Either way, at least he has a face and name to be accountable for that. This anonymous review has nothing of the sort. It could be just a random guy or it could be not. We have no way of knowing.
Anyways people in the big media have very strict policies on issues like these and oversight to watch for potential problems. Even if slashdot isn't mainstream, it should at least try for some credibility.
really, this was amusing 3 years ago when you were laughing at pointing at Microsoft, but eventually it just gets old and tired. surely you can find more constructive means for this site than endless mindless MS-bashfests.
Slashdot Mirror
So maybe it's just the submitter's network problem or this is just an outright lie.
either way, slashdot editors could at least check before posting. I laughed as soon as I read this "news" story.
.
Surprised By Wealth
:-).
.45 semi for tactical shooting. But really, I don't want or need a lot of stuff. I'm kind of Buddhist that way; I like to minimize my material attachments. (My family gripes that this makes me hell to buy Christmas presents for.)
By Eric S. Raymond
A few hours ago, I learned that I am now (at least in theory) absurdly rich.
I was at my machine, hacking, when I got email congratulating me on the success of the VA Linux Systems IPO. I was working on my latest small project -- a compiler for a special-purpose language I've designed called Scriptable Network Graphics, or SNG. SNG is an editable representation of the chunk data in a PNG. What I'm writing is a compiler/decompiler pair, so you can dump PNGs in SNG, edit the SNG, then recompile to a PNG image.
"Congratulations? That's interesting," said I to myself. "I didn't think we were going out till tomorrow." And I oughtta know; I'm on VA's Board of Directors, recruited by Larry Augustin himself to be VA's official corporate conscience, and it's a matter of public record that I hold a substantial share in the company. I tooled on over to Linux Today, chased a link -- and discovered that Larry Augustin had taken the fast option we discussed during the last Board conference call. VA had indeed gone out on NASDAQ -- and I had become worth approximately forty-one million dollars while I wasn't looking.
Well, that didn't last long. In the next two hours, VA dropped from $274 a share to close at $239, leaving me with a stake of only thirty-six million dollars. Which is still a preposterously large amount of money.
You may wonder why I am talking about this in public. The first piece of advice your friends and family will give you, if it looks like you're about to become really wealthy, is: keep it quiet. It's nobody else's business -- you don't want to look like you're gloating, and you don't want to be deluged with an endless succession of charity appeals, business propositions, long-lost best friends, and plain bald-faced mooching.
Trouble with the "keep it quiet" theory is that I've made my bucks in a very public way. When you're already a media figure, and your name is on the S-1 of a hot IPO, and email from friends and journalists starts coming in like crazy as the stock breaks first-day-gain records, playing it coy swiftly ceases to look like a viable option.
Besides, it wouldn't be fair to dissemble. I serve a community. I'm wealthy today because my efforts to spread the idea of open source on behalf of that community helped galvanize the business world, and earned the respect and the trust of a lot of hackers. Larry thought that respect was an asset worth shelling out 150,000 shares of VA for. Fairness to the hackers who made me bankable demands that I publicly acknowledge this result -- and publicly face the question of how it's going to affect my life and what I'll do with the money.
This is a question that a lot of us will be facing as open source sweeps the technology landscape. Money follows where value leads, and the mainstream business and finance world is seeing increasing value in our tribe of scruffy hackers. Red Hat and VA have created a precedent now, with their directed-shares programs designed to reward as many individual contributors as they can identify; future players aiming for community backing and a seat at the high table will have to follow suit. In this and other ways (including, for example, task markets) the wealth is going to be shared.
So while there aren't likely to be a lot more multimillion-dollar bonanzas like mine, lots of hackers are going to have to evolve answers to this question for smaller amounts that will nevertheless make a big difference to individuals; tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, enough to change your life -- or wreck it.
(Gee. Remember when the big question was "How do we make money at this?")
The first part of my answer is "I'll do nothing, until next June". Because I'm a VA board member, under SEC regulations there's a six-month lockout on the shares (a regulation designed to keep people from floating bogus offerings, cashing out, and skipping to Argentina before the share price crashes). So it's not strictly true that I'm wealthy right now. I will be wealthy in six months, unless VA or the U.S. economy craters before then. I'll bet on VA; I'm not so sure about the U.S. economy
Assuming the economy does not in fact crater, how is wealth going to affect my life in six months? Honestly, I think the answer is "not much". I haven't spent the last fifteen years doing the open-source thing for the money. I'm already living pretty much exactly the way I want to, doing the work that matters to me. The biggest difference the money will make to me personally is that now I should be able to keep doing what I love for the rest of my life without worrying about money ever again.
So I expect I'll just keep on as I've been doing. Hacking code. Thinking and spreading subversive thoughts. Traveling and giving talks. Writing papers. Poking various evil empires a good one in the eye whenever I get a chance. Working for freedom.
I expect most other hackers confronted with sudden wealth will make similar choices. Reporters often ask me these days if I think the open-source community will be corrupted by the influx of big money. I tell them what I believe, which is this: commercial demand for programmers has been so intense for so long that anyone who can be seriously distracted by money is already gone. Our community has been self-selected for caring about other things -- accomplishment, pride, artistic passion, and each other.
OK, so maybe I'll break down and finally get a cell phone. And cable broadband so I can surf at smokin' speed. And a new flute. And maybe a nice hotrodded match-grade
I'm not going to minimize my attachments by giving it all away, though, so you evangelists for a zillion worthy causes can just calm down out there and forget about hitting me up for megabucks. I am *not* going to be a soft touch, and will rudely refuse all importunities.
I'm not copping this harsh attitude to protect my money, but rather to protect the far more precious asset of my time. Because I don't want to have to become a full-time specialist in deciding whose urgent pitch to buy, I'm going to turn everybody down flat in advance. Anyone who bugs me for a handout, no matter how noble the cause and how much I agree with it, will go on my permanent shit list. If I want to give or lend or invest money, *I'll* call *you*. (Sigh...)
And yes, there are causes I'll give money to. Worthy hacker projects. Free-speech activism. Firearms-rights campaigns. Tibet, maybe. I might buy a hunk of rainforest for conservation somewhere. Megabucks are power, and with power comes an obligation to use it wisely. I'll give carefully, and in my own time, and only after doing my homework -- too much charity often kills what it means to nurture. And enough about that.
Ironically enough, one result of my getting rich is that I will probably start charging for speaking appearances, now that nobody can plausibly accuse me of doing it for the money. I won't charge open-source user groups or schools, but I will cheerfully extract a per diem from all the business conferences that keep wanting me to to boost their box office. Charging a price for my time will separate the expensive conferences that attract powerful people from the marginal events where the hacker community would get less leverage from my presence.
For the same reason, I'm still going to insist that anybody who wants me to give a talk has to cover my expenses and eliminate hassles. But I also expect I'll still carry my own luggage. And I'll never get too proud to crash on somebody's daybed when the local user group is too broke to cover a hotel.
But enough trivialities; I'm going to get back to work. I've got the SNG compiler stage almost done. Next up, I need to refactor the pngcheck code so I can give it a report-format option that generates SNG syntax. Then, I need to think about supporting MNG...
--
Eric S. Raymond
If you are, then why all the hate? Why are you Linux zealots out in anger and frothing at the mouth over a product they (supposedly) don't use from a company they so hate?
And if you are using Windows then you are a hypocrite. Why stick with a product that's SO bad, SO evil, So invasive? You do have choices.
Really, just look at the headlines in the Microsoft section of slashdot and the bitterness and jealousy just reveals itself so obviously.
You guys need to grow up.
These people would also have to be unaware of the larger issue of the current political situation there, where the country is run by a "President" who fixes elections and has total control of the country (sorta like slashdot, huh?).
Slashdot: Fighting for Your Rights Online in Zimbabwe.
That said, if the other students have the same conditions as you, you'll have to suck it up and deal with it. That's life.
I don't even know what to say here;
Wow..that hasn't stopped you before, michael. You've put your foot in your mouth using less facts than this.
Can you possibly keep this up and not inject your unasked-for, idiotic, and unhelpful comments?
But as anyone who's been here long enough to see, slashdot hypocrisy is not new.
And the thing is..you guys aren't close to objective, but in your zeal to push your own agendas, you guys are often wrong, and that's the thing that makes this site such a joke.
Does this Service Pack raise the dead? What about walking on water? Does it do cold fusion? Because all those things are "impossible" to achieve to. So without any context, the title is meaningless.
having an actual opinion that diverges from slashbot dogma is not a troll.
I was making an honest and on topic comment about this story.
Mod points are not for you to mark down opinions you don't like.
Why can't you use any space to actually tell what the story is?
Using tabloid headlines to take cheapshots is just sad and pathetic, really.
whoops, damn my dyslexia, that should read.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Linux is GNU/Linux.
War is peace.
Slavery is freedom.
Linux is GNU/Linux.
got it?
Shareholders know they don't pay dividends, they invest full well knowing that. They bet that by reinvesting that money back into the company, the shareholder value will increase. That in of itself is better than a dividend.
C'mon now, the English teacher next door to you would probably fail you if you used such juvenile spelling in an essay.
From dictionary.com's first definition,"The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts" -slashdot fits the collecting part.
True, slashdot just posts links to the stories, but is that much different than a site or newspaper printing an AP wire story? It's not their story, but the ones posting still have to take responsibility for it.
It's more indicative of the quality of slashdot when people say it's not real journalism. The only people who can fix that is the slashdot staff.
So if they don't correct it, then readers have to read thru the comments so an astute comment can correct the "editor" incompetence.
Maybe slashdot should adopt the practice of updating the stories so it tells the truth. I see nothing wrong with news sites doing this. Better to get it right, than wrong.
this movie would have been perfect for Katz to pontificate about the ramifcations from 9/11 on the setting of the movie to how Peter Parker was really just like a Columbine geek, but with superpowers.
Never mind that this Nike case is not even remotely news for nerds, how many geeks come here to read about Nike's free speech?
No, this is just another case where an editor rails against corporations, etc, etc. etc.
Just sickening.
if you found an article that showed "sharing" hurt purchases, you guys would never post it, or at least accuese them of being RIAA lackeys.
Everyone could have an alterier motive. That news caster that was on the local news saying that apples are healthy could have owned an apple farm.
This comparison would work if the newscaster had a stake in the apple farm or a direct competitor. Either way, at least he has a face and name to be accountable for that. This anonymous review has nothing of the sort. It could be just a random guy or it could be not. We have no way of knowing.
Anyways people in the big media have very strict policies on issues like these and oversight to watch for potential problems. Even if slashdot isn't mainstream, it should at least try for some credibility.
No legitimate publication would do so, there are many questions of conflicts of interest.
Does this reviewer work for a competiter of Creative Labs? Until that is anwered, nobody should take this review too seriously.
really, this was amusing 3 years ago when you were laughing at pointing at Microsoft, but eventually it just gets old and tired. surely you can find more constructive means for this site than endless mindless MS-bashfests.
Update: 04/14 15:19 GMT by T: Note: don't get your hopes up -- these are the sources for the game code, not the engine.
Gee thanks for clarifying the story hours after it was posted and after many readers had pointed it out.
Doesn't make you that much of a dumbass after all.
Gotta love how much better the slashdot experience is now that we have subscriptions!