Re:Can we get past the holier-than-thou dude?
on
Linus Interview
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· Score: 1
Yeah, I sure hope to hell he gets on soon, because I'm bored shitless.
This is annoying enough to turn me Republican.
A great, now I'm listening to a crappy sounding version of some lame song I don't care about. You'd think they could at least kill the noise. This is a digital stream, isn't it?
That swat may consist of patent related lawsuits, huge FUD campaigns, or just an outright buyout. Remember, Intel IS NOT a monoply in the CPU arena (or so says the DOJ) and could probably pull of such a buyout.
Keep in mind that you can't buyout a private company without the consent of the owner. Currently, one man could block any Transmeta buyout no matter what the price. (As far as I understand it. Isn't Transmeta owned by just one guy?)
This shows why we should be very careful in anti-trust actions. Here we have a huge company, with a near monopoly. They are being seriously threatened by a small company and a tiny startup.
Two years ago it seemed as if there were no possible threats to Intel. Now it seems as if Intel is a hopeless dinosaur doomed to fall under its own weight. Or perhaps its own arrogance, rather, which seems to be the Achille's heal of these huge near-monopolies.
People tend to concetrate on the advantages of bigness when talking about these huge comanies, and fail to notice the disadvantages. The halls of huge companies are littered with the carcases of billion dollar failed projects.
Its why I'm not so hot on the Justice Department action against Microsoft. They dominate like IBM did in the seventies. Seems to me that they are headed for a fall. Win2000?
He has it precisely backwards. He talks as if people start out being ostracized and seek solace in technology. The truth is precisely the opposite. I was taking apart calculators and badgering my poor mother for books on astronomy long before I had any sense of being different.
He concentrates far too much on the ostracism, which is really only a symptom of geekdom, and not part of the disease. A lot of us geeks didn't really have all that many problems in high school, despite hanging out in the "science resource center" and the chess club. I hit 6'2" at sixteen, so people rarely messed with me. Does that make me less of a geek?
In terms of "alienation", well, I know I was avoiding what was "popular" as much as the "popular" were avoiding me. Perhaps even more so. And I think that is more of a reflection of geekdom. I didn't hide out in the computer room because I was alienated, and didn't get to join those fun after school activities. Perhaps they wouldn't have let me. Who knows, as I never tried. I hung out there because I thought those after school activities were lame and most of the people who participated in them were idiots, or merely dull.
This article is really about the geek stereotype, not what most people who consider themselves geeks actually are.
When you write an essay, which is the more common occurance?
Something you read, or see, or are just thinking about hits you like a bolt of lightning, and you just have to say something. Having written it down, you decide to submit it.
You sit at your terminal thinking "What am I going to write about today?". After an hour or two of this, you think of something, and write.
The reason I ask is that it is my suspicion that any essay written (whether by you or someone else) in the second matter is almost never worth reading.
Ok, this may seem like a flame, but what the hell. Most of what you submit seems to me at least to be pretty much the same sort of stuff that gets printed in something like Newsweek, or perhaps even something a little more savvy, like Hotwired. I used to read your column regularly on Hotwired, and there it generally "fit". However, most of what you submit just doesn't seem to fit on/.. Most of what is posted here is factual stuff (or at least purports to be) and is written in the fairly straightforward, hackerish way. Most of what you submit is more of the editorial type, and quite frankly, seems to succumb to the "molehills to mountains" style of writing that is so rampant in the general press. So what encouraged you to come here instead of writing for a more traditional magazine (online or otherwise)?
"Extrans (html tags to text)" is broken, but full HTML seems to work still. This seemed to happen around the time that that HTML security warning showed up...
A pain, because I hate having to remember all those paragraph tags.
Well, as someone who has suffered in a number of different Windows environments for a number of years, I have to take some issue with this. Windows makes it easier to use the system in the way Microsoft thinks it ought to be used. This is an important distinction. If you use the system the way Microsoft thinks you ought to, things go very well and you really don't need to know much. It is if you try to do anything out of the ordinary that things go splat.
Anyone who has done much with Windows knows the feeling of fighting the system. You have a very good idea of what you want to do, but Windows has a different idea, so you spend all of your time trying to trick it into doing what you want.
An example: Installing a harddrive in Windows NT is normally fairly easy. Recently, (because of cheap harddrives at CostCo) I ended up replacing my boot drives both at home and at work. It took me three hours to do my home Linux box (and only that long because I quite frankly didn't know what I was doing. I only got around to reading the HowTO 2 hours in.) It took me almost two days to get the Windows drive replaced. Why? Because Windows "knew" what I wanted, and kept screwing things up. For example, it "knew" that the new drive was "E" and that it should change shortcuts to anything I copied there accordingly. This, of course, caused major problems when "E" because "C" and the original "C" went away. (The machine became unbootable as all the drivers were on "missing".)
Anyway, I won't bore you with the details, but in general, Linux really is easier, if you know what you are doing, and are not doing things in a particularly formulaic way. Windows is generally easier for newbies not so much in that it has nice, pretty graphical dialogs, but in that it simply steers them towards doing things a certain way. This is great until they learn enough to try something interesting.
Comparing clock speeds between two different chip types has always been problematic. A 200 Mhz Pentium is slower than a 200 Mhz PII. It all depends on many cycles each instruction takes.
To take it to ridiculous extremes, if you built a x386 chip that could be clocked to 1 Ghz, I'm sure you'd find it pathetically slow.
From my understanding of Crusoe, each instruction takes, on average, a little longer than on a PIII, meaning that a Crusoe won't perform quite as well as a PIII running at the same clock speed. But really, that's no different from any other sort of chip. The 486 took more cycles per instruction than the Pentium, which took more cycles than the PentiumPro, etc, etc. In the case of the Crusoe, this is part of a trade-off made to gain benefits in other areas.
(And this is only between chips with the same instruction sets. Try and compare to something like a G3, and you'll just get arguments.)
Unfortunately, it is human nature to focus on a single number, and ignore than details. This leads to error. A 1.1 Ghz Athlon will almost certainly have different speed characteristics than a 1.1 Ghz Pentium III, or a 1.1 Ghz Transmeta chip. And even real benchmarks can be misleading, as it all depends on what you do with the chip. It is certainly conceivable that an Intel chip will be faster to an identically clocked AMD chip in some situations, and slower in others.
(Insert general rant about CPU speed being only one part of system speed here.)
Uh...don't you see the paradox in your post? If X"-Files" fans are fanatics that think Carter can do know wrong, why then did no one watch "Harsh Realm"?
The GPL (General Public License: www.GNU.org), the open source programming license, has become a significant public document.
Oh, so that is what GPL stands for...
But anyway, facetiousness aside, it is far too early to really say anything about where things are headed in terms of "freedom" and other stuff like that. Things are in ferment. This is a truly revolutionary time and one of the key features of truly revolutionary times is that you don't know what your going to get in the end.
But I think we can talk about what the key factors are. This article mentioned one, which is the influence of money and big corporations. Obviously important. But another, which is mostly unappreciated, is the labor shortage in the technical professions. (Not necessarily a shortage of bodies, but a shortage of competent labor.) This will have a profound effect as when labor is hard to come buy, the people with the required skill end up with more power.
I find Jon's comparison between today's hackers and engineers and architects of yesterday interesting, but after some thought, incorrect. If anything, hackers have could end up with far more power. One of the interesting things about software is that a very large percentage of people simply don't understand it, at least, not at the really root level of a programmer. Certainly most managers don't. More than once I've found myself in a situation where I realized that I could spit out pretty much any bullshit, estimate a project anywhere from 1 day to 6 months, and I'd be believed. I'm sure I'm not alone in that. I used to think this would change as more of the population learned software, but they haven't as yet. To most it truly is magic. And as long as this is the case, those of us who know it have a fair amount of power.
It will be interesting to see how all this plays out as despite however much the megacorps want to code in control, they've still got to hire someone to do the coding. I've often wondered if some of the corporate "failures" have been some sort of "subversion from within". "Oopsy, did I leave that key in memory? Oh dopey me!". I know I've been in a couple of situations where I was tempted to do exactly that sort of thing.
BTW: When is "Tags to text" going to work again? Is this a secret plot to train us all to preview?
Well, it was a decade ago, and the games were different, but I admit to playing a couple of different games on acid. The results were, well, interesting... These were games I was good at, and I found that I was still good at them, though the game seemed to require less thought and matter less. I recall not having quite the same playing style. In one case I was playing the WWII flight sim "Their Finest Hour", and I did quite a few more barrel rolls than I normally would have as I shot down the ME-109s.
In other words, I suspect that Thresh on acid would still kick your ass, but you might see him wandering the corridors looking at the pretty colors just before he fragged you.
They were my ISP briefly, having bought an ISP I'd been happy with. The service plummetted and I was forced to go elsewhere. Perhaps offtopic, but companies that are dumb in one area are often dumb in all the other ones as well.
I usually take that into account when deciding who to give my business to. If I see idiocy, I avoid, even if the idiocy wouldn't necessarily effect what I'd purchase.
Back in the dinosaur ages, oh about 1988 or thereabouts, there was a company that created a really cool compression tool which created files with an "arc" extension. (This was on those icky old DOS systems, Unix guys.) Everybody loved this tool. Everybody used it for everything.
Then came along another company. This second company released a knockoff that could also decompress "*.arc" files as a shareware program. The first company went ballistic. They sued. They got a judge to agree that they, and only they, had legal rights to the ".arc" extension.
So what happened? Well, the second company was forced to modify their program to not decompress ".arc" files. Instead, it demanded that the file be named ".zip".
The first company went out of business. The users were so pissed off by the intimidation tactics they employeed that almost overnight, it became "uncool" to use the ".arc" extension and sales plummetted.
And that, boys and girls, is why we call archives "zip files".
So remember, the law can control who gets to call their products certain things, but it can't control who you buy from.
From what I've heard, Gibson's very approachable. I talked to both Gibson and Sterling at a book signing for "Difference Engine" and found this to be the case. He definitely wasn't playing the stuck up auther.
(Neither was Sterling, for that matter.)
Someone from Slashdot ought to contact his agent.
My signed first edition of "Neuromancer" vanished about a year later. [Sniff.] I remember when it came out. It was the first of an early-eighties series spotlighting first novels by young rising stars (which unfortunately seems to have died with its editor, Terry Carr.) The second and third books were Lucious Shepard's "Green Eyes" and Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Wild Shore". Great stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I sure hope to hell he gets on soon, because I'm bored shitless.
This is annoying enough to turn me Republican.
A great, now I'm listening to a crappy sounding version of some lame song I don't care about. You'd think they could at least kill the noise. This is a digital stream, isn't it?
Keep in mind that you can't buyout a private company without the consent of the owner. Currently, one man could block any Transmeta buyout no matter what the price. (As far as I understand it. Isn't Transmeta owned by just one guy?)
This shows why we should be very careful in anti-trust actions. Here we have a huge company, with a near monopoly. They are being seriously threatened by a small company and a tiny startup.
Two years ago it seemed as if there were no possible threats to Intel. Now it seems as if Intel is a hopeless dinosaur doomed to fall under its own weight. Or perhaps its own arrogance, rather, which seems to be the Achille's heal of these huge near-monopolies.
People tend to concetrate on the advantages of bigness when talking about these huge comanies, and fail to notice the disadvantages. The halls of huge companies are littered with the carcases of billion dollar failed projects.
Its why I'm not so hot on the Justice Department action against Microsoft. They dominate like IBM did in the seventies. Seems to me that they are headed for a fall. Win2000?
I am truly amazed by the number of times the fact that an 'l' looks just like a '1' in most fonts has caused nasty problems.
They ought to change the username choosing procedure to reject usernames that contain other usernames.
Though I suppose then some idiot would choose 'e' as his username.
It was a joke, son.
Someone please moderate that up.
He concentrates far too much on the ostracism, which is really only a symptom of geekdom, and not part of the disease. A lot of us geeks didn't really have all that many problems in high school, despite hanging out in the "science resource center" and the chess club. I hit 6'2" at sixteen, so people rarely messed with me. Does that make me less of a geek?
In terms of "alienation", well, I know I was avoiding what was "popular" as much as the "popular" were avoiding me. Perhaps even more so. And I think that is more of a reflection of geekdom. I didn't hide out in the computer room because I was alienated, and didn't get to join those fun after school activities. Perhaps they wouldn't have let me. Who knows, as I never tried. I hung out there because I thought those after school activities were lame and most of the people who participated in them were idiots, or merely dull.
This article is really about the geek stereotype, not what most people who consider themselves geeks actually are.
Ahah! Now I finally understand the poor quality of Microsoft code...
- Something you read, or see, or are just thinking about hits you like a bolt of lightning, and you just have to say something. Having written it down, you decide to submit it.
- You sit at your terminal thinking "What am I going to write about today?". After an hour or two of this, you think of something, and write.
The reason I ask is that it is my suspicion that any essay written (whether by you or someone else) in the second matter is almost never worth reading."Extrans (html tags to text)" is broken, but full HTML seems to work still. This seemed to happen around the time that that HTML security warning showed up...
A pain, because I hate having to remember all those paragraph tags.
Anyone who has done much with Windows knows the feeling of fighting the system. You have a very good idea of what you want to do, but Windows has a different idea, so you spend all of your time trying to trick it into doing what you want.
An example: Installing a harddrive in Windows NT is normally fairly easy. Recently, (because of cheap harddrives at CostCo) I ended up replacing my boot drives both at home and at work. It took me three hours to do my home Linux box (and only that long because I quite frankly didn't know what I was doing. I only got around to reading the HowTO 2 hours in.) It took me almost two days to get the Windows drive replaced. Why? Because Windows "knew" what I wanted, and kept screwing things up. For example, it "knew" that the new drive was "E" and that it should change shortcuts to anything I copied there accordingly. This, of course, caused major problems when "E" because "C" and the original "C" went away. (The machine became unbootable as all the drivers were on "missing".)
Anyway, I won't bore you with the details, but in general, Linux really is easier, if you know what you are doing, and are not doing things in a particularly formulaic way. Windows is generally easier for newbies not so much in that it has nice, pretty graphical dialogs, but in that it simply steers them towards doing things a certain way. This is great until they learn enough to try something interesting.
Does it? I mean any more than "normal"?
Comparing clock speeds between two different chip types has always been problematic. A 200 Mhz Pentium is slower than a 200 Mhz PII. It all depends on many cycles each instruction takes.
To take it to ridiculous extremes, if you built a x386 chip that could be clocked to 1 Ghz, I'm sure you'd find it pathetically slow.
From my understanding of Crusoe, each instruction takes, on average, a little longer than on a PIII, meaning that a Crusoe won't perform quite as well as a PIII running at the same clock speed. But really, that's no different from any other sort of chip. The 486 took more cycles per instruction than the Pentium, which took more cycles than the PentiumPro, etc, etc. In the case of the Crusoe, this is part of a trade-off made to gain benefits in other areas.
(And this is only between chips with the same instruction sets. Try and compare to something like a G3, and you'll just get arguments.)
Unfortunately, it is human nature to focus on a single number, and ignore than details. This leads to error. A 1.1 Ghz Athlon will almost certainly have different speed characteristics than a 1.1 Ghz Pentium III, or a 1.1 Ghz Transmeta chip. And even real benchmarks can be misleading, as it all depends on what you do with the chip. It is certainly conceivable that an Intel chip will be faster to an identically clocked AMD chip in some situations, and slower in others.
(Insert general rant about CPU speed being only one part of system speed here.)
Uh...don't you see the paradox in your post? If X"-Files" fans are fanatics that think Carter can do know wrong, why then did no one watch "Harsh Realm"?
Oh, so that is what GPL stands for...
But anyway, facetiousness aside, it is far too early to really say anything about where things are headed in terms of "freedom" and other stuff like that. Things are in ferment. This is a truly revolutionary time and one of the key features of truly revolutionary times is that you don't know what your going to get in the end.
But I think we can talk about what the key factors are. This article mentioned one, which is the influence of money and big corporations. Obviously important. But another, which is mostly unappreciated, is the labor shortage in the technical professions. (Not necessarily a shortage of bodies, but a shortage of competent labor.) This will have a profound effect as when labor is hard to come buy, the people with the required skill end up with more power.
I find Jon's comparison between today's hackers and engineers and architects of yesterday interesting, but after some thought, incorrect. If anything, hackers have could end up with far more power. One of the interesting things about software is that a very large percentage of people simply don't understand it, at least, not at the really root level of a programmer. Certainly most managers don't. More than once I've found myself in a situation where I realized that I could spit out pretty much any bullshit, estimate a project anywhere from 1 day to 6 months, and I'd be believed. I'm sure I'm not alone in that. I used to think this would change as more of the population learned software, but they haven't as yet. To most it truly is magic. And as long as this is the case, those of us who know it have a fair amount of power.
It will be interesting to see how all this plays out as despite however much the megacorps want to code in control, they've still got to hire someone to do the coding. I've often wondered if some of the corporate "failures" have been some sort of "subversion from within". "Oopsy, did I leave that key in memory? Oh dopey me!". I know I've been in a couple of situations where I was tempted to do exactly that sort of thing.
BTW: When is "Tags to text" going to work again? Is this a secret plot to train us all to preview?
Well, it was a decade ago, and the games were different, but I admit to playing a couple of different games on acid. The results were, well, interesting... These were games I was good at, and I found that I was still good at them, though the game seemed to require less thought and matter less. I recall not having quite the same playing style. In one case I was playing the WWII flight sim "Their Finest Hour", and I did quite a few more barrel rolls than I normally would have as I shot down the ME-109s.
In other words, I suspect that Thresh on acid would still kick your ass, but you might see him wandering the corridors looking at the pretty colors just before he fragged you.
If you really think that Phillip K. Dick was "the opposite", I strongly suggest you read A Scanner Darkly...
No "King" there. I'm sure you know that. It is an easy to make given his namesake's prominence.
I still have it around here somewhere, assuming that the floppies haven't died. Sigh... that was a simpler time.
Thanks for the improved info. As you can probably tell by the vagueness, I was posting completely from memory.
They were my ISP briefly, having bought an ISP I'd been happy with. The service plummetted and I was forced to go elsewhere. Perhaps offtopic, but companies that are dumb in one area are often dumb in all the other ones as well.
I usually take that into account when deciding who to give my business to. If I see idiocy, I avoid, even if the idiocy wouldn't necessarily effect what I'd purchase.
Back in the dinosaur ages, oh about 1988 or thereabouts, there was a company that created a really cool compression tool which created files with an "arc" extension. (This was on those icky old DOS systems, Unix guys.) Everybody loved this tool. Everybody used it for everything.
Then came along another company. This second company released a knockoff that could also decompress "*.arc" files as a shareware program. The first company went ballistic. They sued. They got a judge to agree that they, and only they, had legal rights to the ".arc" extension.
So what happened? Well, the second company was forced to modify their program to not decompress ".arc" files. Instead, it demanded that the file be named ".zip".
The first company went out of business. The users were so pissed off by the intimidation tactics they employeed that almost overnight, it became "uncool" to use the ".arc" extension and sales plummetted.
And that, boys and girls, is why we call archives "zip files".
So remember, the law can control who gets to call their products certain things, but it can't control who you buy from.
From what I've heard, Gibson's very approachable. I talked to both Gibson and Sterling at a book signing for "Difference Engine" and found this to be the case. He definitely wasn't playing the stuck up auther.
(Neither was Sterling, for that matter.)
Someone from Slashdot ought to contact his agent.
My signed first edition of "Neuromancer" vanished about a year later. [Sniff.] I remember when it came out. It was the first of an early-eighties series spotlighting first novels by young rising stars (which unfortunately seems to have died with its editor, Terry Carr.) The second and third books were Lucious Shepard's "Green Eyes" and Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Wild Shore". Great stuff.
Ah, screw that. If I had root, I'd rather:
/usr/bin/Microsoft /usr/bin/RedHat /usr/bin/VALinux /usr/bin/USMilitary /usr/bin/Congress
chown ucblockhead
chown ucblockhead
chown ucblockhead
chown ucblockhead
chown ucblockhead
But then, I always was kind of selfish.