Yes! Me too. I'd never heard of it until that appalling Wired article (one of the reasons I just stopped buying that mag eventually). Every time I see mention of this glorified BBS I can't help but think, "Oh, so pretending they invented rock music isn't enough for Boomer hippies, now they are going to claim they invented e-community too?";P Maybe I'll give them credit for inventing flamers;) seriously... the WELL is nothing. What went on there goes on everywhere there is a network, and it was going on all over the place. The WELL just happened to have Stewart Brand involved. Stewart Brant is pretty cool- he did a book on the MIT Media Lab that I thought was very good- but 'Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link'? You just knew it was going to be proclaimed the revolution and the standard setter for all e-communities, including the ones which had never even heard of it. By some mystical power it cast its influence across all subsequent communities, shaping them even though nobody knew or cared what a bunch of Deadheads were doing on computers in California. (trading tapes and flaming, from the accounts of it). Feh! Thank you, Slashdot, for running this and illustrating to me that lots of Slashdotters and many _moderators_, even, are also going Feh! WELL? Feh!;)
A bulkier, _amber_screen power sucking antique PC _just_ because you want to call Apple 'crapple'?;P and give you 'those' what? Somebody has never seen the apple Tech Info Library archive for stuff over eight years old. Pinouts for all those funky cables etc. ad infinitum. Beating on their historical closedness is just FUD now, half the PC parts from certain vendors are every bit as closed. Sorry, I just had to squawk there- a Plus would be every bit as good a Linux machine as any six microcontrollers. None of them is gonna run X! Enlightenment is RIGHT OUT;) besides, what I was talking about _was_ a glorified term. Just a glorified term running Linux, with a cute form factor and a nice clear little screen and peripherals that are better than you can get today and last longer...
Give me Linux console on a Mac Plus booted from floppy;) Nice clear tiny screen big enough for a terminal, cute form factor, only draws 40W or so including the CRT (hell, some pentia draw more than that all by themselves!), up to 4M of RAM (more likely one, but you never know) and once they make it past the first ten years they're pretty much good for a hundred... why boot from a floppy? (________) meaning SILENCE. It's weird to be running a computer that makes NO noise, no fan (convection cooled!) no drive (floppy spins up as needed) no anything... very peaceful, now imagine instead of System 6 MacOS and teachtext or something, Linux console and vi... perhaps telnet... you have 800K of floppy to work with, and of course if you can switch them like you can with MacOS you could just boot it and then leave it on, only draws as much power as a dim bulb (I'd seriously favor white-on-black text for this too, retro charm and anti-Mac-ness and lower CRT power consumption...)
Sorry RMS- free software is bigger than you are, and more important than wars over some company's stupidities (serious Mac users love and hate Apple's inimitable little ways- we know they're nuts, but they're _our_ nuts) There's at least three GPLed programs that run on MacOS- FSF supported in the sense that they are just as GPLed as anything else, the license is serious and doesn't become invalid when used on a platform RMS doesn't like. He can hold whatever grudges he wants. They do not affect the license he wrote that I use. I don't see that the revisions change it for me. If he does do something that changes it for me, I will fork it and hold it at a previous level which does not ruin the plain and clear GPL concept by playing politics with companies.
Picture RMS scampering over to Gosper's side, sometime after the big LISP machine split-up that wrecked the MIT AI lab. RMS: Hi! Whatcha doin'? Gosper:...I CAN'T TALK ABOUT IT. *turns away*
Why is it so difficult to understand that the whole GPL thing was inspired by the tendency of proprietary software to _close_ lines of communication? How many times have you said, "Damn, I just did the greatest... um, idea, it's an idea I have for a program, but I can't really tell you about it because it's sure to be a trade secret... but it's really great!" It's 'free speech' because the system devised by Stallman encourages chatter among programmers and a _social_ sharing of ideas that is not directly forbidden by proprietary software, but which just withers and dies due to pragmatic proprietary business reasons... In a sense it's like saying, "Rather than just share your trade secrets with no protection for the sake of being able to talk freely about them, join this group where you can talk freely with the other members of the group, but still be protected against the loss of your trade secrets to outsiders!" Doesn't that sound more sane? Only works if you _have_ the group- but he does have the group, now. Software is not little corporate towel designs creatable by trained monkeys. Software is ideas- and I hope the really good ideas get made under the GNU General Public License. That is the group with which I talk freely. The fact is, software may not be all that much like 'free speech'... but proprietary software is very much like restricted speech! Is this such a far flung analogy, really? It makes very good sense to me, and I've abided by NDAs quite virtuously in my time (for whom, I still will not say). I like the idea of not having to, and also not having to watch your back for industrial spies listening in on the conversation...
I don't browse with Javascript or Java on, so the Shredder did nothing. But, hidden away on the Fishdot page was a link to the most demented thing I ever saw, Stick Figure Death Theatre and that was worth the whole trip:) Is there anybody else who, after watching a bunch of stick figure death movies (frighteningly enough, there are good and bad stick figure death movies), who was reduced to hysterical laughter watching the Stick Figure Waiting For Godot? (adapted!)
For all the Red Dwarf fans out there
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Oh, did you know that Microsoft are purposely omitting the word 'gullible' from the new Encarta?:)
I like it better in retrospect ;)
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The brilliant part of this elaborate prank is that it was _so_ well carried off, it had people taking it seriously, just like the War of the Worlds hoax! I myself wasn't certain that somebody hadn't sued Illiad. It's interesting to look at this in context and ask 'WHY was this wicked prank so very credible? You didn't have to be stupid to fall for it- there were some smart and sensible people who weren't ready to lightly dismiss the possibility that Microsoft was overturning amendments to the Constitution... indeed, MS suits reacted to the suggestion with a seriousness that implies they, too, were running around to see if it was TRUE, and they'd theoretically be the first to know it wasn't, right? Yet it fooled the MS suits as well, and yanked their chain. There was some scrambling going on in Redmond as Microsofts ran around going 'What did we do? Who did it? Get the lawyers, we want some answers! What are we sanctioning here?' For this reason especially, I nominate the Siege of '99 as the Great Bastard Joke from Hell, or BJFH, not to be easily outdone. Brilliant, wonderfully evil, and ya got even Microsoft suits to run around in a panic trying to figure out what had gone so horribly wrong:) *APPLAUSE*, and thank god it wasn't real!
Well, since I wanted to support free software anyway... What's wrong with free software? It runs on Macs, and they already _have_ what you list, for the most part. Isn't it _good_ to start using Linux and embrace the whole free software movement? What's so useful about using linux to run proprietary x86 binaries? Can't you use Windows for that?
I would add a bit of emphasis to one point: being a PC hardware expert should have _nothing_ to do with it. Linux is bigger than just that PC, which arguably should be supplanted with iMacs and netwinders anyway;) in any case, it seems acceptable to require a bit of interest and willingness to think to operate something like Linux properly, but this doesn't have to _start_ with hardware, much less PC hardware. As a sort of side note, I can tell you right now that given a distribution that supports, say, the iMac, I could build an installer thing that installed Linux as easy as plugging in a toaster. iMacs are as controlled an environment as a console, except they are capable of hosting linux- I could basically set up a Linux with Window Maker and some kinda iMac theme (bondi blue and ice transparent eterms?;) ) and then arrange an installer that simply replaced the hard drive image with the new arrangement. If you're willing to replace the previous 'toaster' with the new 'toaster' and the 'wall outlet' is properly standardized, the whole thing becomes _very_ simple. Given an adaptive installer that can expand certain partitions to fill available space, and a situation where people can restore their HDs or get new ones easily, vanity Linuxes could be a big hit. You'd make a distribution with your particular arrangement of Linux, right down to the desktop or other window management scheme and the icons and things. There's lots of precedent for this in Kaleidoscope (for Mac) hacking, where people extensively redesign everything including the background and style of system icons- now extend that to programs available and shortcuts and menu items. You could have a 'NeXT Homage' distribution, in which linux is formed into a virtual NeXT cube. No doubt some person would see fit to favor us with the Win95 theme linux;P but you'd also have Giger Enlinuxment, or perhaps one that mostly just does xterms but runs the humble iMac 3D at all times for a _tiltable_ desktop, with the windows composed of square texturemapped polygons (texture is the terminal window!) in a crazed revamp of XFree86! All sorts of possibilities exist. I'd probably try to write some xlock modules and put out my version based on Window Maker but with lots of emphasis on 'live' backgrounds with xlock -inroot, a WM menu to manage it (I already have that) and very term-based linuxhandling rather than any attempt to make a GUI 'desktop'. It'd obliterate the concept of a desktop replacing it with tools to orient you around the lack of a visual representation- for instance I like having several xterms open when cp-ing stuff or whatever, so I know where I'm going and where I came from. I could use CLI tools to quickly flash up the full path (need to RTFM, bet there already are) and I could use a term with Mac-style internal select and drag and drop, not 3-button style. And so on and so on... The point is, when you _treat_ the distribution as a single object that is installed as a preconfigured lump, it becomes as easy as a toaster on predictable enough hardware- and if a _monopoly_ does this it's maddeningly annoying as everybody's fed the same thing, but what if you could get a different, radically different, Linux to play with for every day of the week? What if it was really easy to back up your whole machine and just throw on something new, if it wasn't so much like maintaining some horribly important corporate NT server, but more like playing with new toys on a whim? Commercial software forestalls this because when you buy Photoshop you want to protect it and it won't come on the new different OS you might want to play with. But Linux has a tremendous amount of common software that's free software and permissible to bundle on vanity distributions. Wouldn't it be interesting to throw in a disk, load for half an hour and be running Raster's machine? CmdrTaco's? Linus's, RMS's, Steve Jobs'? (The latter is probably Openstep! He knows how to keep the MacOS engineers hacking like fiends;) ) You can already do this in some ways. Load a Windows machine, and arguably also any Linux desktop environment. You'll be using Bill Gates' vanity distribution. It's time for more vanity distributions. Let me release a preconfigured Linux with my arrangement of WM, my screen geometry for aterm and 'top' et al, my WM menu arrangement with the 'Afterstep Animation Hack' I copied from the Afterstep menus. But wait- I can! Nothing is stopping me (but lack of a CD burner, and possibly of the programs to outright reformat a drive and put an image on it, and possibly insufficient standardization of hardware except for, notably, the iMac) Who else wants to come up with a vanity Linux with all their own style of interface and app bundling, and run off some copies and sell 'em? Customers could take the results and edit them into their own personalized thing- or just install a different one for each day of the week! Could be quite fun. Wouldn't that be fun?
...for me, at any rate. I use only MacOS and Linux, have never owned a copy of Word, and to the best of my knowledge there is nothing vaguely resembling a COM object anywhere on my system, even without my taking special precautions. Of course, in order to be able to say this I had to NOT USE MICROSOFT PROGRAMS, so obviously I'm the loony, right? It's just, well, not normal not to use Microsoft programs. Even Linux users use Microsoft programs (on the average). At least I have the consolation of this: it'll be easier for me to convince the FBI not to have me shot as owner of the GUID, because there's never been any indication that I _could_ write macro virii, due to my lack of Microsoft programs:) Such a world we live in! o_O
I like the analogy of the receivers: as it happens, I have enough other things to deal with that I hadn't been paying much attention to ESR at all. I'm not the guy he's trying to reach. I have no problem with him dressing as a Jedi or whatever- I guess you could say I think he's doing a good job. I'd also say that if he doesn't, somebody else will. Eric, if you're genuinely getting stressed to the point that your life is getting unmanageable, LET IT GO. It's that simple. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is likely to step in and bail you out so long as you're still willing to be the point man and do the job. To get out of it, you have to walk away and leave it undone: only then will somebody else step up, but they can't walk a mile in your shoes until you take them off. That's all. You _can_ keep doing all this- I personally think it's a fine thing to do, albeit not indispensible. You can also stop if you like- mind that you don't cry wolf on that too often- soothes the feelings but blows your credibility. Hope you're a bit less stressed than I am- the things I'm confronted with are less media-driven, but they're still a lot of work to endure. Everybody I know seems to be struggling just to stay afloat- which is why I can't be too distressed at hearing that you, too, are struggling to cope with the demands of your life. Me too, man, me too. Mine may be less important, but it's still a lot of work. Perhaps it's easier if you don't think of comfort and ease as rights? I sure can't, and I'm damn grateful for the merest scraps of security, or for food that I like or the opportunity to take my cat to the vet. Maybe one day I can afford medical care for me, too. But I digress- at least somewhat. Point is, I'm sorry your life stresses you- I don't like hecklers either- but really, it's just about doing what you can, what you believe in, and then when you can't any more, letting it go and discovering that you are not unique and that somebody or something else fills the gap, perhaps in ways you had not imagined. You've written a qualifications brief for being ESR. There can be only one ESR. If you quit the job, no-one will ever fill quite _that_ job again- but the important stuff, at least some of it, will still get done. Consider that, before you do actually stress yourself into ill-health. If you're getting a lot of physical symptoms, take it seriously. There's no reason you should be a martyr- and a _noisy_ martyr is just annoying:)
Let's just view this from a different perspective- just for fun I'm going to argue that the students were not only right but deserved to win. In doing so, I'm going to make some assumptions without which my point becomes stupid;) First, let's postulate this was MCSE training. It may not have been, but suppose it was? It's well known that MCSE training is not free. In fact, it costs quite a lot- thousands of dollars? This is a serious expenditure. It's also well known that MCSE training is not meaningful in terms of education. In fact it is primarily propaganda and an orientation to Microsoft systems that attempts to create workers who choose to tie workplaces hopelessly into MS ways of doing things. It's already been mentioned that MCSE doesn't cover the basics or give a working picture of networking etc: just points people at very MS-centric tricks and tools not available elsewhere. Therefore, what is being paid for is not actually education but a slip of paper giving you a high-paying job. Since the students were not actually paying for education, but were paying thousands of dollars each to MS for a piece of paper, it is not justified to deprive them of that paper simply because they were not educated: nothing about the course seriously attempts to educate them, it only fills them with propaganda and confuses them about reality. So the choices are between them being not educated, and them being not educated plus reciting meaningless drivel that is arbitrary. Since the course description did not assert that they were required to recite meaningless drivel, they cannot be held to that for their failure to recite the correct drivel: since attempts to learn how computers, NT, networking etc. really work could lead to incorrect answers (because the course expects certain sorts of answers- true or not!), inability to learn cannot be considered a penalty either, as that is not what is being tested. If the students were properly informed that they would pass or fail on their ability to memorize foolishness and arbitrary claims, they may have had an easier time of it: there is no reason to assume the students did not attempt to learn the truths about NT and networking and system administration, as this would appear to be the point of the course. Because of this miscommunication, it is appropriate for the students to sue and win at least the MCSE certification which they paid for in good faith. Their money is as good as anyone's, and their inability to learn does not make them worse admins than graduates who, in good faith, learned everything on the MCSE test and ONLY on the test. Both groups would be lousy admins but that is outside the scope of this argument. Therefore, assuming this was over MCSE status from a very expensive course, this argument rules in favor of the students, grants them MCSE status in good standing as certified engineers, and requires Microsoft to add the lines 'Rote memorization in outright defiance of common sense is required' to the course description.;)
Perhaps you'd prefer anarchy, or fascism? If you like the way the USA does things, you might read some of the thinking as the government was formed. I always refer to Federalist Paper #10 here... if you seriously don't believe large factions inevitably want to oppress smaller factions for their own self-interest... if you seriously believe the diversity of smaller factions has no value, that smaller factions have no rights and obliteration by the Winning Faction is their only just fate, then you are a fascist. This talk of 'compete in the free market' is ludicrous. What you're really saying is, 'Let's obliterate actual choice, and end up with only one option, which we can claim is perfect by means of Darwinian selection!' Well, even in _biology_ this leads to mass die-offs, the collapse of the system, and that happens exactly _when_ one 'competitor' 'wins' to that extent. In society we can decide to not fall _into_ that trap. In fact we can decide to consciously look into preventing abuses of the 'losers' and thus keeping a sounder idea 'ecosystem', in politics, and now, it seems, in computer software. Do we decide this? Or do we want to conduct business like animals?
That's kind of the problem. An educated person knows enough to evaluate Katz, and if necessary disregard his opinions and the areas where he hasn't bothered to even learn a thing about his subject. An innocent untutored reader would have no basis for weeding out howling factual errors and serious misrepresentation. How do you think Microsoft convince so many people of nonsensical falsehoods? bflame could tell his mother, who's just found IRC, that Slashdot is a heavy nerd-cred site and what it runs is worth taking seriously. Then when she reads it, Jon Katz could tell her (not that this is likely;P ) that geeks everywhere are turning from coding to praying... and she would have _no_ basis to disbelieve him. Whereupon she becomes the expert on computers among her sewing circle or whatever... and away we go. How many other people visit Slashdot without the required grounding in what we know as reality to spot Katz for what he is? How many people can tell when Katz is erring, or making claims that actually are damaging to the nerd community Slashdot serves?
I pointedly decided to copy neither Windows _or_ my MacOS environment in my Linux environment. I set it up with Window Maker, clip and dock, several workspaces with specific themes ('net', 'editing', 'admin' etc) and even went so far as to rewrite the Afterstep animated desktop menu feature as Window Maker menus. It angers me that this guy can so easily dismiss the notion of anything not working and acting like Windows, because I already felt that your typical Linux desktops (my experience is primarily with KDE, but Gnome does the same things) are simply annoying Windows clones. They are not _worse_ than Windows: there's no reason buttons can't be different or whatever, and there's nothing inherently evil and ugly about even Motif widgets. But they are not better than Windows because they're trying to do all the same things, and this is exactly the trap that approach falls into. How can anyone deny that Linux desktop systems are rips of Windows? I'd pointedly add that I didn't say X: X can and usually has looked and worked _very_ unlike Windows. Set these people in front of FVWM and they won't say it's like Win. Set 'em in front of my menu-driven, xterm-filemanaging Window Maker setup and they won't say it's like Win. Set them in front of KDE and what, exactly, do you expect? Why work so hard to approach that which already has total vendor and user lock-in? Expecting people to go, oh, I'll use this, it's just like what I'm already totally used to only it's not, and I can't run Half-Life? I'm sorry: when I got heavy into linux (now I'm a Mac dude with the capacity for dual, matched, _striped_ IBM SCSI drives and I'm not _using_ that just because it means that much to me to have a linux disk to dualboot off) I knew I wanted to hack it. I'm not much of a coder but at least I could make ChrisOS out of it, and by God I did- and now I read this article where the guy basically informs the world that what I did doesn't even exist! To him, X is KDE, or maybe it was Gnome he saw, and what are the linux desktop people doing to shake that assumption even a little bit? There's nothing I can do about that: those aren't my projects to gripe about. KDE _will_ persist. People _will_ begin using linux and form the idea that KDE _is_ linux, or that it is X, or that linux is X, and so on. I can't stop that, but it doesn't prevent me feeling a sense of betrayal when some guy makes a comment like that- because to more and more people, that's the simple truth. X looks like Windows to them. It acts that way too. And as they clamor for programs that are specially enhanced for their Windows-like X, they will increasingly marginalize me yet again, and there isn't a thing I can do about it:( ...except release more GPLed software, and continue to support the extremity of RMS, the hardcore cadre of Linux: anybody who actually likes to handle stuff in xterms or runs FVWM etc, or decides, hey, this is my virtual home, why should I let my decisions on interior decoration and structure be made by Redmond? Revision of history is a reality. I'll accept that, and that X will come to be known as that which looks almost like Windows, but not really, and that Linux will be most closely associated with whichever desktop, KDE or Gnome, happens to be installed. It's no different, really, from all the anti-Mac fud, of which I've heard some really spectacular examples that were totally false or seriously maliciously deceptive: in this case, assuming people can't be prevented from looking at Linux, the agenda from both the enemy camp and from large numbers of Linux users themselves, is to make sure that those who come to Linux still see all of computing as it was prescribed and planned out in Redmond. In this way, Linux people help to further the eternal legacy of Microsoft even should the latter die- if their user interfaces are never significantly varied from or altered, they will never die: they will have changed the world for good, reaching out even from the grave to set the tone for computer use. ...WITHOUT my help, thank you- ...because I won't go along with that.
I got a nice hardware rig going. This is partly due to connectors and cables... I took my powermac apart, and ripped off (oh all right, desoldered) the tacky little audio jacks, replacing them with sorta litz-wire-on-steroids cables that run directly from the board to RCA plugs, for both input and output. I took this and my crazed mondo homebrew highend turntable, and my original British SHVL 804 'Dark Side of the Moon', and ran the signal directly into the powermac, recording it to digital and then converting it to your usual mp3 (no special high quality, joint stereo 128). Played back over my full studio monitoring system (includes very serious subs), the result was really pretty respectable. It was like CD quality, only slightly dirtied. That's how I'd describe it. The CD version of a good album with a bit of dirt on the needle- it didn't lose all that much from the CD quality level. I'm certainly going to be experimenting with ways of compressing the audio before subjecting it to mp3ing, because it definitely sounds like pre-emphasis would help- one thing I didn't mention was that this funky custom turntable has controls for some circuit elements like feedback loops that are normally fixed- so I was able to pre-emphasise the sound to compensate for the mp3, something that would not be possible with ripping straight from CD. I'm pretty sure I artificially enhanced the results for that reason, but what the hell, call it sweetening:) Again, the result is really pretty respectable. You can listen for sound quality for some extent, and the tonality comes through about as well as it does on CD, only with a certain amount of added grunge. This isn't too horrible a problem.
I have Apple products. Some are really nice products. I'm also concerned about Apple's welfare, and will do what I can to help them out. I agree that it's unhelpful for them to make up their own license and use that, particularly with the retaining control over it- this isn't free software in the classic sense. I also feel there is value in their simply making the information available even if they _didn't_ allow forking and re-use of their code... I always think of it as auditing. Right now it's flat impossible for Apple to build in really low-level hooks that make IE work better, or make Appleworks work better. Now, granted, they never did that anyway... but isn't it good that we can be sure of that? If they tried anything dirty, people would be all over it. That's not insignificant. I'm just going to continue GPLing along, but I do think this is a good thing, even with the funky license, because the world does not begin and end with issues of being able to freely take code and do your thing with it. There are also issues of keeping tabs on what proprietary software companies are up to in their code- and Apple's taken a step to give us the power to audit that, and be sure nobody's twisting their arm to put in special hooks, or Clipper chips, or ID numbers or whatever. I think that's a good thing.
I was getting rather upset in the Katz thread because people were silencing anyone who had a criticism of Katz! I'll admit many of them were just abuse, but not all of them were. In particular, I liked the fellow who said 'Stop coding and pray? No thanks' so much, that I basically restated the idea in such a way that it didn't get immediately moderated.. Now, the bottom limit makes it much harder to silence people saying unpleasant opinions. I don't like unpleasant opinions either- it's just that the unpleasant opinions that _I_ don't like, particularly baseless slams at Apple, get moderated _up_, while unpleasant opinions about Jon Katz get _suppressed_. This does leave me the option of always trying extremely hard to make sure any critique I might have of Katz is so articulate that once it gets suppressed, another moderator more sensitive to controversial opinions will come along and moderate it right back again, either due to agreement or simply on principle... it might not be entirely fair that my viewpoint requires extra effort just to be equally heard, but I _am_ a Mac/Linux user, so I'm very much used to getting marginalized and I don't assume I will automatically get a fair shot. Rob's finetuning is making it easier to feel that if I have something to say, and say it articulately and politely (deferentially? and is that really necessarily? Here it seems to be), then I won't simply be shut up based on the content of my opinion. This is not as easy to accomplish as it sounds, so kudos to Rob for this whole process- it's shaping up well.
He's using Microsoft Word. Compulsively. I could point him at a dozen alternatives for what he's doing, but he's not trying to find anything else. It has _nothing_ to do with his Mac. If you wrote stuff on a Windows box in Word and posted that, you'd have Jon?s posts? disease too.
Is it even remotely appropriate or acceptable to stirringly proclaim on Slashdot, 'Stop writing code'? I was warming to Katz with the Enlightenment article, but this comes as a brutal shock. Was I that wrong to give him a break and lay off bashing? What next, 'Run Windows and embrace the void! Live on a mountaintop without a canopener!'? He can say what he likes, but for him to even say 'Stop writing code and start praying' is a wake-up call that he's not getting it, and should not be treated more significantly by Slashdot Central than any logged-in user (or perhaps moderator: I daresay he has access, and wonder how he moderates). Plus, there?s Katz?s use of Word?s ASCII again! Come on- must we get slapped across the face with this sort of thing? I'd just like to know if anybody else got to proof his work at all, or if he basically has 'write access to the Slashdot article CVS tree'. Slashdot is a resource, and it's not unimportant, and it matters that it make sense and carry a vaguely reasonable message.
What about when somebody posts something that's known to be malicious and false? Being a linuxppc user I see things of that nature that I can recognize, but let's turn it on its head and postulate the opposite- a Macdot.org in which it's all about Mac users and somebody is talking about Linux and somebody else says,
"The problem is, you can't use Linux because it only runs on PCs- and due to the construction of the BIOS, it's impossible to use more than 31.4 megs of RAM with them. The extra RAM, if you have it, gets used as a swap file, but only the kernel gets to use the swap file because user processes don't have permission unless they are SUID root, which is a security hole. Stick with your Mac!"
See what I mean? Now, due to the nature of Slashdot, you can't slip anti-Linux stuff past it, but who knows what people might be saying about Amigas or Macs or Windows? I've seen enough serious disinformation (usually from ACs) about Macs, that I have to wonder whether I can assign much value to posts about things I _don't_ know about. I hope I did a good job of talking complete bollocks while sounding clued, to furnish an example of how prejudiced people can inhibit learning and information- I don't really believe any of that. It's not true. Actually you get thirty-one point _five_ megs of RAM *hehehe* but didn't it sound convincing, if you had no clue about the subject? Maybe our moderators can leave opinion alone, but nuke outright falsehoods and FUD, of whatever flavor. I daresay it'd be hard to resist moderating a post that was _known_ to be not only damaging to the moderator's hobbyhorse, but in fact totally untrue as well...
Absolutely: I've set my preferences to -999:) I'd had a funny feeling something was happening, and sure enough I ended up seeing a certain amount of moderation by content. Interestingly, I've since then seen some anti-moderation by content! I was reading Slashdot the whole time the scores were being established, so I know the sorts of people who traditionally got high original-moderator scores, and they go across all walks of life. The big names naturally would tend to be given higher scores, but there were also good scores for everyone from fervent RMS-disciples to fervent anti-RMS guys to Mac users, even. It really is a pretty good mix- it's actually ideal laissez-faire capitalism in action in a weird way, because abuses and personal feelings can happen, but there's a good mix out there rather than everything being predominantly one viewpoint. Pretty much for every major viewpoint there's a watchdog moderator or six, to guard against the viewpoint's silencing well spoken dissenters. Furthermore, I know from setting prefs to -999 that slashdotters don't like having articulate posts whacked to -27 or so, and they get pumped up despite their personal convictions and bring it back to 1 just on outrage at what looks like content-moderating... The flip side is when somebody posts a 'yaaa, the moderators in black helicopters are persecuting me!' and might easily get down to -412 just as a joke among moderators:) j/k! I think this is a neat idea. It'll take time to see how it develops, but it puts Slashdot's comments content squarely in the hands of the actual readers, which are such a diverse group that it's self-correcting. I especially like the way CmdrTaco just picked people and didn't have them apply for the job or anything- it's rather like the sci-fi/Hitchhiker's concept of, nobody who applies for the job should be allowed to do it! Apparently a whole bunch of people just got confronted with "Whaaaa? What the fsck is thi... Doh! Far out- guess I better be a good little moderator then. *hehehehehe!* Man, Slashdot just keeps getting _weirder_ and _weirder_..."
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! Me too. I'd never heard of it until that appalling Wired article (one of the reasons I just stopped buying that mag eventually). Every time I see mention of this glorified BBS I can't help but think, "Oh, so pretending they invented rock music isn't enough for Boomer hippies, now they are going to claim they invented e-community too?" ;P ;) seriously... the WELL is nothing. What went on there goes on everywhere there is a network, and it was going on all over the place. The WELL just happened to have Stewart Brand involved. Stewart Brant is pretty cool- he did a book on the MIT Media Lab that I thought was very good- but 'Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link'? You just knew it was going to be proclaimed the revolution and the standard setter for all e-communities, including the ones which had never even heard of it. By some mystical power it cast its influence across all subsequent communities, shaping them even though nobody knew or cared what a bunch of Deadheads were doing on computers in California. (trading tapes and flaming, from the accounts of it). ;)
Maybe I'll give them credit for inventing flamers
Feh! Thank you, Slashdot, for running this and illustrating to me that lots of Slashdotters and many _moderators_, even, are also going Feh! WELL? Feh!
A bulkier, _amber_screen power sucking antique PC _just_ because you want to call Apple 'crapple'? ;P and give you 'those' what? Somebody has never seen the apple Tech Info Library archive for stuff over eight years old. Pinouts for all those funky cables etc. ad infinitum. Beating on their historical closedness is just FUD now, half the PC parts from certain vendors are every bit as closed. ;) besides, what I was talking about _was_ a glorified term. Just a glorified term running Linux, with a cute form factor and a nice clear little screen and peripherals that are better than you can get today and last longer...
Sorry, I just had to squawk there- a Plus would be every bit as good a Linux machine as any six microcontrollers. None of them is gonna run X! Enlightenment is RIGHT OUT
Give me Linux console on a Mac Plus booted from floppy ;)
Nice clear tiny screen big enough for a terminal, cute form factor, only draws 40W or so including the CRT (hell, some pentia draw more than that all by themselves!), up to 4M of RAM (more likely one, but you never know) and once they make it past the first ten years they're pretty much good for a hundred... why boot from a floppy? (________) meaning SILENCE. It's weird to be running a computer that makes NO noise, no fan (convection cooled!) no drive (floppy spins up as needed) no anything... very peaceful, now imagine instead of System 6 MacOS and teachtext or something, Linux console and vi... perhaps telnet... you have 800K of floppy to work with, and of course if you can switch them like you can with MacOS you could just boot it and then leave it on, only draws as much power as a dim bulb (I'd seriously favor white-on-black text for this too, retro charm and anti-Mac-ness and lower CRT power consumption...)
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Sorry RMS- free software is bigger than you are, and more important than wars over some company's stupidities (serious Mac users love and hate Apple's inimitable little ways- we know they're nuts, but they're _our_ nuts)
There's at least three GPLed programs that run on MacOS- FSF supported in the sense that they are just as GPLed as anything else, the license is serious and doesn't become invalid when used on a platform RMS doesn't like.
He can hold whatever grudges he wants. They do not affect the license he wrote that I use. I don't see that the revisions change it for me. If he does do something that changes it for me, I will fork it and hold it at a previous level which does not ruin the plain and clear GPL concept by playing politics with companies.
Picture RMS scampering over to Gosper's side, sometime after the big LISP machine split-up that wrecked the MIT AI lab. ...I CAN'T TALK ABOUT IT. *turns away*
RMS: Hi! Whatcha doin'?
Gosper:
Why is it so difficult to understand that the whole GPL thing was inspired by the tendency of proprietary software to _close_ lines of communication? How many times have you said, "Damn, I just did the greatest... um, idea, it's an idea I have for a program, but I can't really tell you about it because it's sure to be a trade secret... but it's really great!"
It's 'free speech' because the system devised by Stallman encourages chatter among programmers and a _social_ sharing of ideas that is not directly forbidden by proprietary software, but which just withers and dies due to pragmatic proprietary business reasons...
In a sense it's like saying, "Rather than just share your trade secrets with no protection for the sake of being able to talk freely about them, join this group where you can talk freely with the other members of the group, but still be protected against the loss of your trade secrets to outsiders!"
Doesn't that sound more sane? Only works if you _have_ the group- but he does have the group, now.
Software is not little corporate towel designs creatable by trained monkeys. Software is ideas- and I hope the really good ideas get made under the GNU General Public License. That is the group with which I talk freely.
The fact is, software may not be all that much like 'free speech'... but proprietary software is very much like restricted speech! Is this such a far flung analogy, really? It makes very good sense to me, and I've abided by NDAs quite virtuously in my time (for whom, I still will not say). I like the idea of not having to, and also not having to watch your back for industrial spies listening in on the conversation...
I don't browse with Javascript or Java on, so the Shredder did nothing. But, hidden away on the Fishdot page was a link to the most demented thing I ever saw, Stick Figure Death Theatre and that was worth the whole trip :)
Is there anybody else who, after watching a bunch of stick figure death movies (frighteningly enough, there are good and bad stick figure death movies), who was reduced to hysterical laughter watching the Stick Figure Waiting For Godot? (adapted!)
We are talking Jape of the Decade...
Oh, did you know that Microsoft are purposely omitting the word 'gullible' from the new Encarta? :)
The brilliant part of this elaborate prank is that it was _so_ well carried off, it had people taking it seriously, just like the War of the Worlds hoax! I myself wasn't certain that somebody hadn't sued Illiad. It's interesting to look at this in context and ask 'WHY was this wicked prank so very credible? You didn't have to be stupid to fall for it- there were some smart and sensible people who weren't ready to lightly dismiss the possibility that Microsoft was overturning amendments to the Constitution... indeed, MS suits reacted to the suggestion with a seriousness that implies they, too, were running around to see if it was TRUE, and they'd theoretically be the first to know it wasn't, right? Yet it fooled the MS suits as well, and yanked their chain. There was some scrambling going on in Redmond as Microsofts ran around going 'What did we do? Who did it? Get the lawyers, we want some answers! What are we sanctioning here?' :)
For this reason especially, I nominate the Siege of '99 as the Great Bastard Joke from Hell, or BJFH, not to be easily outdone. Brilliant, wonderfully evil, and ya got even Microsoft suits to run around in a panic trying to figure out what had gone so horribly wrong
*APPLAUSE*, and thank god it wasn't real!
Well, since I wanted to support free software anyway...
What's wrong with free software? It runs on Macs, and they already _have_ what you list, for the most part. Isn't it _good_ to start using Linux and embrace the whole free software movement? What's so useful about using linux to run proprietary x86 binaries? Can't you use Windows for that?
I would add a bit of emphasis to one point: being a PC hardware expert should have _nothing_ to do with it. Linux is bigger than just that PC, which arguably should be supplanted with iMacs and netwinders anyway ;) in any case, it seems acceptable to require a bit of interest and willingness to think to operate something like Linux properly, but this doesn't have to _start_ with hardware, much less PC hardware. ;) ) and then arrange an installer that simply replaced the hard drive image with the new arrangement. If you're willing to replace the previous 'toaster' with the new 'toaster' and the 'wall outlet' is properly standardized, the whole thing becomes _very_ simple. ;P but you'd also have Giger Enlinuxment, or perhaps one that mostly just does xterms but runs the humble iMac 3D at all times for a _tiltable_ desktop, with the windows composed of square texturemapped polygons (texture is the terminal window!) in a crazed revamp of XFree86! All sorts of possibilities exist. I'd probably try to write some xlock modules and put out my version based on Window Maker but with lots of emphasis on 'live' backgrounds with xlock -inroot, a WM menu to manage it (I already have that) and very term-based linuxhandling rather than any attempt to make a GUI 'desktop'. It'd obliterate the concept of a desktop replacing it with tools to orient you around the lack of a visual representation- for instance I like having several xterms open when cp-ing stuff or whatever, so I know where I'm going and where I came from. I could use CLI tools to quickly flash up the full path (need to RTFM, bet there already are) and I could use a term with Mac-style internal select and drag and drop, not 3-button style. And so on and so on... ;) )
As a sort of side note, I can tell you right now that given a distribution that supports, say, the iMac, I could build an installer thing that installed Linux as easy as plugging in a toaster. iMacs are as controlled an environment as a console, except they are capable of hosting linux- I could basically set up a Linux with Window Maker and some kinda iMac theme (bondi blue and ice transparent eterms?
Given an adaptive installer that can expand certain partitions to fill available space, and a situation where people can restore their HDs or get new ones easily, vanity Linuxes could be a big hit. You'd make a distribution with your particular arrangement of Linux, right down to the desktop or other window management scheme and the icons and things. There's lots of precedent for this in Kaleidoscope (for Mac) hacking, where people extensively redesign everything including the background and style of system icons- now extend that to programs available and shortcuts and menu items.
You could have a 'NeXT Homage' distribution, in which linux is formed into a virtual NeXT cube. No doubt some person would see fit to favor us with the Win95 theme linux
The point is, when you _treat_ the distribution as a single object that is installed as a preconfigured lump, it becomes as easy as a toaster on predictable enough hardware- and if a _monopoly_ does this it's maddeningly annoying as everybody's fed the same thing, but what if you could get a different, radically different, Linux to play with for every day of the week? What if it was really easy to back up your whole machine and just throw on something new, if it wasn't so much like maintaining some horribly important corporate NT server, but more like playing with new toys on a whim? Commercial software forestalls this because when you buy Photoshop you want to protect it and it won't come on the new different OS you might want to play with. But Linux has a tremendous amount of common software that's free software and permissible to bundle on vanity distributions. Wouldn't it be interesting to throw in a disk, load for half an hour and be running Raster's machine? CmdrTaco's? Linus's, RMS's, Steve Jobs'? (The latter is probably Openstep! He knows how to keep the MacOS engineers hacking like fiends
You can already do this in some ways. Load a Windows machine, and arguably also any Linux desktop environment. You'll be using Bill Gates' vanity distribution.
It's time for more vanity distributions. Let me release a preconfigured Linux with my arrangement of WM, my screen geometry for aterm and 'top' et al, my WM menu arrangement with the 'Afterstep Animation Hack' I copied from the Afterstep menus. But wait- I can! Nothing is stopping me (but lack of a CD burner, and possibly of the programs to outright reformat a drive and put an image on it, and possibly insufficient standardization of hardware except for, notably, the iMac)
Who else wants to come up with a vanity Linux with all their own style of interface and app bundling, and run off some copies and sell 'em? Customers could take the results and edit them into their own personalized thing- or just install a different one for each day of the week! Could be quite fun. Wouldn't that be fun?
...for me, at any rate. :)
I use only MacOS and Linux, have never owned a copy of Word, and to the best of my knowledge there is nothing vaguely resembling a COM object anywhere on my system, even without my taking special precautions.
Of course, in order to be able to say this I had to NOT USE MICROSOFT PROGRAMS, so obviously I'm the loony, right? It's just, well, not normal not to use Microsoft programs. Even Linux users use Microsoft programs (on the average). At least I have the consolation of this: it'll be easier for me to convince the FBI not to have me shot as owner of the GUID, because there's never been any indication that I _could_ write macro virii, due to my lack of Microsoft programs
Such a world we live in! o_O
I like the analogy of the receivers: as it happens, I have enough other things to deal with that I hadn't been paying much attention to ESR at all. I'm not the guy he's trying to reach. I have no problem with him dressing as a Jedi or whatever- I guess you could say I think he's doing a good job. :)
I'd also say that if he doesn't, somebody else will.
Eric, if you're genuinely getting stressed to the point that your life is getting unmanageable, LET IT GO. It's that simple. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is likely to step in and bail you out so long as you're still willing to be the point man and do the job. To get out of it, you have to walk away and leave it undone: only then will somebody else step up, but they can't walk a mile in your shoes until you take them off.
That's all. You _can_ keep doing all this- I personally think it's a fine thing to do, albeit not indispensible. You can also stop if you like- mind that you don't cry wolf on that too often- soothes the feelings but blows your credibility.
Hope you're a bit less stressed than I am- the things I'm confronted with are less media-driven, but they're still a lot of work to endure. Everybody I know seems to be struggling just to stay afloat- which is why I can't be too distressed at hearing that you, too, are struggling to cope with the demands of your life. Me too, man, me too. Mine may be less important, but it's still a lot of work. Perhaps it's easier if you don't think of comfort and ease as rights? I sure can't, and I'm damn grateful for the merest scraps of security, or for food that I like or the opportunity to take my cat to the vet. Maybe one day I can afford medical care for me, too.
But I digress- at least somewhat. Point is, I'm sorry your life stresses you- I don't like hecklers either- but really, it's just about doing what you can, what you believe in, and then when you can't any more, letting it go and discovering that you are not unique and that somebody or something else fills the gap, perhaps in ways you had not imagined.
You've written a qualifications brief for being ESR. There can be only one ESR. If you quit the job, no-one will ever fill quite _that_ job again- but the important stuff, at least some of it, will still get done. Consider that, before you do actually stress yourself into ill-health. If you're getting a lot of physical symptoms, take it seriously. There's no reason you should be a martyr- and a _noisy_ martyr is just annoying
Let's just view this from a different perspective- just for fun I'm going to argue that the students were not only right but deserved to win. ;) ;)
In doing so, I'm going to make some assumptions without which my point becomes stupid
First, let's postulate this was MCSE training. It may not have been, but suppose it was?
It's well known that MCSE training is not free. In fact, it costs quite a lot- thousands of dollars? This is a serious expenditure.
It's also well known that MCSE training is not meaningful in terms of education. In fact it is primarily propaganda and an orientation to Microsoft systems that attempts to create workers who choose to tie workplaces hopelessly into MS ways of doing things. It's already been mentioned that MCSE doesn't cover the basics or give a working picture of networking etc: just points people at very MS-centric tricks and tools not available elsewhere. Therefore, what is being paid for is not actually education but a slip of paper giving you a high-paying job.
Since the students were not actually paying for education, but were paying thousands of dollars each to MS for a piece of paper, it is not justified to deprive them of that paper simply because they were not educated: nothing about the course seriously attempts to educate them, it only fills them with propaganda and confuses them about reality. So the choices are between them being not educated, and them being not educated plus reciting meaningless drivel that is arbitrary.
Since the course description did not assert that they were required to recite meaningless drivel, they cannot be held to that for their failure to recite the correct drivel: since attempts to learn how computers, NT, networking etc. really work could lead to incorrect answers (because the course expects certain sorts of answers- true or not!), inability to learn cannot be considered a penalty either, as that is not what is being tested.
If the students were properly informed that they would pass or fail on their ability to memorize foolishness and arbitrary claims, they may have had an easier time of it: there is no reason to assume the students did not attempt to learn the truths about NT and networking and system administration, as this would appear to be the point of the course.
Because of this miscommunication, it is appropriate for the students to sue and win at least the MCSE certification which they paid for in good faith. Their money is as good as anyone's, and their inability to learn does not make them worse admins than graduates who, in good faith, learned everything on the MCSE test and ONLY on the test. Both groups would be lousy admins but that is outside the scope of this argument.
Therefore, assuming this was over MCSE status from a very expensive course, this argument rules in favor of the students, grants them MCSE status in good standing as certified engineers, and requires Microsoft to add the lines 'Rote memorization in outright defiance of common sense is required' to the course description.
Perhaps you'd prefer anarchy, or fascism?
If you like the way the USA does things, you might read some of the thinking as the government was formed. I always refer to Federalist Paper #10 here... if you seriously don't believe large factions inevitably want to oppress smaller factions for their own self-interest... if you seriously believe the diversity of smaller factions has no value, that smaller factions have no rights and obliteration by the Winning Faction is their only just fate, then you are a fascist.
This talk of 'compete in the free market' is ludicrous. What you're really saying is, 'Let's obliterate actual choice, and end up with only one option, which we can claim is perfect by means of Darwinian selection!'
Well, even in _biology_ this leads to mass die-offs, the collapse of the system, and that happens exactly _when_ one 'competitor' 'wins' to that extent.
In society we can decide to not fall _into_ that trap. In fact we can decide to consciously look into preventing abuses of the 'losers' and thus keeping a sounder idea 'ecosystem', in politics, and now, it seems, in computer software.
Do we decide this?
Or do we want to conduct business like animals?
_Sun_ is competing with MS on the consumer desktop?
That's kind of the problem. An educated person knows enough to evaluate Katz, and if necessary disregard his opinions and the areas where he hasn't bothered to even learn a thing about his subject. ;P ) that geeks everywhere are turning from coding to praying... and she would have _no_ basis to disbelieve him. Whereupon she becomes the expert on computers among her sewing circle or whatever... and away we go.
An innocent untutored reader would have no basis for weeding out howling factual errors and serious misrepresentation. How do you think Microsoft convince so many people of nonsensical falsehoods?
bflame could tell his mother, who's just found IRC, that Slashdot is a heavy nerd-cred site and what it runs is worth taking seriously. Then when she reads it, Jon Katz could tell her (not that this is likely
How many other people visit Slashdot without the required grounding in what we know as reality to spot Katz for what he is? How many people can tell when Katz is erring, or making claims that actually are damaging to the nerd community Slashdot serves?
I pointedly decided to copy neither Windows _or_ my MacOS environment in my Linux environment. I set it up with Window Maker, clip and dock, several workspaces with specific themes ('net', 'editing', 'admin' etc) and even went so far as to rewrite the Afterstep animated desktop menu feature as Window Maker menus. :(
...except release more GPLed software, and continue to support the extremity of RMS, the hardcore cadre of Linux: anybody who actually likes to handle stuff in xterms or runs FVWM etc, or decides, hey, this is my virtual home, why should I let my decisions on interior decoration and structure be made by Redmond?
...WITHOUT my help, thank you-
...because I won't go along with that.
It angers me that this guy can so easily dismiss the notion of anything not working and acting like Windows, because I already felt that your typical Linux desktops (my experience is primarily with KDE, but Gnome does the same things) are simply annoying Windows clones. They are not _worse_ than Windows: there's no reason buttons can't be different or whatever, and there's nothing inherently evil and ugly about even Motif widgets. But they are not better than Windows because they're trying to do all the same things, and this is exactly the trap that approach falls into. How can anyone deny that Linux desktop systems are rips of Windows?
I'd pointedly add that I didn't say X: X can and usually has looked and worked _very_ unlike Windows. Set these people in front of FVWM and they won't say it's like Win. Set 'em in front of my menu-driven, xterm-filemanaging Window Maker setup and they won't say it's like Win. Set them in front of KDE and what, exactly, do you expect? Why work so hard to approach that which already has total vendor and user lock-in? Expecting people to go, oh, I'll use this, it's just like what I'm already totally used to only it's not, and I can't run Half-Life?
I'm sorry: when I got heavy into linux (now I'm a Mac dude with the capacity for dual, matched, _striped_ IBM SCSI drives and I'm not _using_ that just because it means that much to me to have a linux disk to dualboot off) I knew I wanted to hack it. I'm not much of a coder but at least I could make ChrisOS out of it, and by God I did- and now I read this article where the guy basically informs the world that what I did doesn't even exist! To him, X is KDE, or maybe it was Gnome he saw, and what are the linux desktop people doing to shake that assumption even a little bit?
There's nothing I can do about that: those aren't my projects to gripe about. KDE _will_ persist. People _will_ begin using linux and form the idea that KDE _is_ linux, or that it is X, or that linux is X, and so on. I can't stop that, but it doesn't prevent me feeling a sense of betrayal when some guy makes a comment like that- because to more and more people, that's the simple truth. X looks like Windows to them. It acts that way too. And as they clamor for programs that are specially enhanced for their Windows-like X, they will increasingly marginalize me yet again, and there isn't a thing I can do about it
Revision of history is a reality. I'll accept that, and that X will come to be known as that which looks almost like Windows, but not really, and that Linux will be most closely associated with whichever desktop, KDE or Gnome, happens to be installed.
It's no different, really, from all the anti-Mac fud, of which I've heard some really spectacular examples that were totally false or seriously maliciously deceptive: in this case, assuming people can't be prevented from looking at Linux, the agenda from both the enemy camp and from large numbers of Linux users themselves, is to make sure that those who come to Linux still see all of computing as it was prescribed and planned out in Redmond.
In this way, Linux people help to further the eternal legacy of Microsoft even should the latter die- if their user interfaces are never significantly varied from or altered, they will never die: they will have changed the world for good, reaching out even from the grave to set the tone for computer use.
I got a nice hardware rig going. This is partly due to connectors and cables... I took my powermac apart, and ripped off (oh all right, desoldered) the tacky little audio jacks, replacing them with sorta litz-wire-on-steroids cables that run directly from the board to RCA plugs, for both input and output. :)
I took this and my crazed mondo homebrew highend turntable, and my original British SHVL 804 'Dark Side of the Moon', and ran the signal directly into the powermac, recording it to digital and then converting it to your usual mp3 (no special high quality, joint stereo 128).
Played back over my full studio monitoring system (includes very serious subs), the result was really pretty respectable. It was like CD quality, only slightly dirtied. That's how I'd describe it. The CD version of a good album with a bit of dirt on the needle- it didn't lose all that much from the CD quality level.
I'm certainly going to be experimenting with ways of compressing the audio before subjecting it to mp3ing, because it definitely sounds like pre-emphasis would help- one thing I didn't mention was that this funky custom turntable has controls for some circuit elements like feedback loops that are normally fixed- so I was able to pre-emphasise the sound to compensate for the mp3, something that would not be possible with ripping straight from CD. I'm pretty sure I artificially enhanced the results for that reason, but what the hell, call it sweetening
Again, the result is really pretty respectable. You can listen for sound quality for some extent, and the tonality comes through about as well as it does on CD, only with a certain amount of added grunge. This isn't too horrible a problem.
I have Apple products. Some are really nice products. I'm also concerned about Apple's welfare, and will do what I can to help them out.
I agree that it's unhelpful for them to make up their own license and use that, particularly with the retaining control over it- this isn't free software in the classic sense. I also feel there is value in their simply making the information available even if they _didn't_ allow forking and re-use of their code... I always think of it as auditing. Right now it's flat impossible for Apple to build in really low-level hooks that make IE work better, or make Appleworks work better. Now, granted, they never did that anyway... but isn't it good that we can be sure of that? If they tried anything dirty, people would be all over it. That's not insignificant.
I'm just going to continue GPLing along, but I do think this is a good thing, even with the funky license, because the world does not begin and end with issues of being able to freely take code and do your thing with it. There are also issues of keeping tabs on what proprietary software companies are up to in their code- and Apple's taken a step to give us the power to audit that, and be sure nobody's twisting their arm to put in special hooks, or Clipper chips, or ID numbers or whatever. I think that's a good thing.
I was getting rather upset in the Katz thread because people were silencing anyone who had a criticism of Katz! I'll admit many of them were just abuse, but not all of them were. In particular, I liked the fellow who said 'Stop coding and pray? No thanks' so much, that I basically restated the idea in such a way that it didn't get immediately moderated..
Now, the bottom limit makes it much harder to silence people saying unpleasant opinions. I don't like unpleasant opinions either- it's just that the unpleasant opinions that _I_ don't like, particularly baseless slams at Apple, get moderated _up_, while unpleasant opinions about Jon Katz get _suppressed_.
This does leave me the option of always trying extremely hard to make sure any critique I might have of Katz is so articulate that once it gets suppressed, another moderator more sensitive to controversial opinions will come along and moderate it right back again, either due to agreement or simply on principle... it might not be entirely fair that my viewpoint requires extra effort just to be equally heard, but I _am_ a Mac/Linux user, so I'm very much used to getting marginalized and I don't assume I will automatically get a fair shot.
Rob's finetuning is making it easier to feel that if I have something to say, and say it articulately and politely (deferentially? and is that really necessarily? Here it seems to be), then I won't simply be shut up based on the content of my opinion.
This is not as easy to accomplish as it sounds, so kudos to Rob for this whole process- it's shaping up well.
He's using Microsoft Word. Compulsively. I could point him at a dozen alternatives for what he's doing, but he's not trying to find anything else. It has _nothing_ to do with his Mac. If you wrote stuff on a Windows box in Word and posted that, you'd have Jon?s posts? disease too.
Is it even remotely appropriate or acceptable to stirringly proclaim on Slashdot, 'Stop writing code'?
I was warming to Katz with the Enlightenment article, but this comes as a brutal shock. Was I that wrong to give him a break and lay off bashing? What next, 'Run Windows and embrace the void! Live on a mountaintop without a canopener!'?
He can say what he likes, but for him to even say 'Stop writing code and start praying' is a wake-up call that he's not getting it, and should not be treated more significantly by Slashdot Central than any logged-in user (or perhaps moderator: I daresay he has access, and wonder how he moderates).
Plus, there?s Katz?s use of Word?s ASCII again! Come on- must we get slapped across the face with this sort of thing? I'd just like to know if anybody else got to proof his work at all, or if he basically has 'write access to the Slashdot article CVS tree'. Slashdot is a resource, and it's not unimportant, and it matters that it make sense and carry a vaguely reasonable message.
Absolutely: I've set my preferences to -999 :) I'd had a funny feeling something was happening, and sure enough I ended up seeing a certain amount of moderation by content. Interestingly, I've since then seen some anti-moderation by content! :) j/k!
I was reading Slashdot the whole time the scores were being established, so I know the sorts of people who traditionally got high original-moderator scores, and they go across all walks of life. The big names naturally would tend to be given higher scores, but there were also good scores for everyone from fervent RMS-disciples to fervent anti-RMS guys to Mac users, even. It really is a pretty good mix- it's actually ideal laissez-faire capitalism in action in a weird way, because abuses and personal feelings can happen, but there's a good mix out there rather than everything being predominantly one viewpoint. Pretty much for every major viewpoint there's a watchdog moderator or six, to guard against the viewpoint's silencing well spoken dissenters.
Furthermore, I know from setting prefs to -999 that slashdotters don't like having articulate posts whacked to -27 or so, and they get pumped up despite their personal convictions and bring it back to 1 just on outrage at what looks like content-moderating...
The flip side is when somebody posts a 'yaaa, the moderators in black helicopters are persecuting me!' and might easily get down to -412 just as a joke among moderators
I think this is a neat idea. It'll take time to see how it develops, but it puts Slashdot's comments content squarely in the hands of the actual readers, which are such a diverse group that it's self-correcting. I especially like the way CmdrTaco just picked people and didn't have them apply for the job or anything- it's rather like the sci-fi/Hitchhiker's concept of, nobody who applies for the job should be allowed to do it! Apparently a whole bunch of people just got confronted with "Whaaaa? What the fsck is thi... Doh! Far out- guess I better be a good little moderator then. *hehehehehe!* Man, Slashdot just keeps getting _weirder_ and _weirder_..."