Just learn to program, it doesn't matter on what machine. In fact it's better if you cover many different machines and types of architecture: learning only one thing in detail would be doing yourself a disservice because platforms change all the time, and skills you learn now would be irrelevant by the time you came to look for a job.
I'd start by writing a couple of different types of game (simple things, Space Invaders, Tetris, etc), on whatever platform you have at hand. Then write some other non-game stuff on some other platform. Keep coding, keep learning new languages and systems, be obsessive, and put together a nice varied showreel of your work.
The main thing is to have absolute mastery of C and C++, which you can only get by writing a large volume of code, and to be versatile enough to pick up other languages and toolsets whenever required. For example, an ideal showreel would probably include some sort of 3D demo (maybe a spaceship flying around a starfield, using OpenGL or D3D, with some nice lighting or whatever), some sort of other game-related demo (eg. pathfinding AI in a 2d tile map game), and whatever other impressive coding work you can come up with (I'd be a bit nervous about hiring someone who had _only_ ever done game stuff).
I'd forget about the Indrema, from what I see it's a kind of interesting but pointless idea since it lacks any unique reason for people to buy it (Linux doesn't count for most console users). In terms of both hardware and software it's almost identical to what you already have sitting on your desk, so just crank up gcc and get working on your OpenGL code...
> Isn't OSS about less obscurity? Does this > kind of article mean that I'm wrong and SOL?
ROTFL. AFAIK, hackers _invented_ the TLA! IMHO the key difference is that ours are intended to be funny (and ideally recursive), plus we have the Jargon file to explain them to newcomers, wheras suits intend them to look impressive and use them to indimidate newcomers.
There's no need for them to do support: unlike many other Linux players, they already have a solid source of income. Hardware manufacturers can't sell cards without drivers, and often only have very minimal internal development resources, so they tend to be delighted to outsource this work to anyone who is willing to take it on. As it becomes increasingly important to sell cards to the growing hordes of Linux users, and since most existing PC video manufacturers lack any experience in this area, I don't think Precision Insight will have any shortage of work to keep them busy...
Hurrah for the GPL! Anyone know if this is the first time a biggie commercial company has decided to use this, rather than inventing their own license?
Perhaps the Debian Free Software guidelines should be updated to use a sliding scale of freeness, with SCSL somewhere around 0.1, the NPL at 0.6, etc. Then we could spend the next decade or so arguing about whether GPL or BSD is most deserving of the 1.0 spot, and whether it is possible for some to even be more free than that:-)
I think the old transmeta website was a pretty damn cool hack. Minimalistic, elegant, and yet perfectly achieved the desired purpose of making everyone interested in them. Hacking the perceptions of their audience: how can you improve on that?
Quite. And also: - VA employ a lot of really talented developers. Who do you know that works for LinuxOne? That, IMHO, says a lot about their future viability. - VA seem quite well in touch with the Linux community, and take pains to work well with it, wheras LinuxOne seems quite unconcerned at much recent bad press.
This all sounds very cool, and I look forward to playing with the final thing, but who out there thinks that the existing KDE file manager is actually pretty damn useful as a lightweight web browser? It can render Slashdot just as nicely as that screenshot, and I've yet to see it crash (in fact it ranks right up their with Lynx on the stability front, which is most unusual for a graphical browser:-)
The only two problems are that it is a little sluggish at downloading (the HTML widget is plenty fast, but pulling down pages is much slower than eg. Netscape), and that a few form related things don't work entirely right, for example I was unable to post this comment using it (although I did sucessfully use it to view the article and comments), because the "reply" button was missing from my display.
> If there's one thing I don't ever feel > towards a commerical organisation, it's > indebted.
Not even when that organisation has been paying people to write cool software, and then releasing it under the GPL?
Personally, I've bought one official Red Hat package (mostly for the manual, back when I was new to Linux), but I've never given money to Cygnus in any shape or form. And yet I use gcc daily, and benefit from it having good C++ support, and a lot of useful optimistations that weren't there before Cygnus added them. So yes, I'm indebted to them for giving me all this cool stuff to play with. Just the same way that I'm indebted to people like Linus and Alan for giving me a decent kernel to run it on, and to RMS for writing the compiler in the first place...
Even if you don't use gcc, the chances are that you use programs which were compiled by it, and the chances are that you didn't pay Cygnus for that, either. So why not thank them for this? Whether they are a commercial outfit or a private individual is irrelvant, as long as they are doing good work and releasing GPL code that makes life better for everyone.
> I'd love to see some of their development > tools and innovations folded back into > gcc/egcs et al...
But Cygnus already _have_ been folding their work back into EGCS: who do you think has been maintaining all that stuff for the last bundle of years? Anyone who uses gcc or gdb is heavily indebted to their work on it.
Their tool stuff (development environments, class browsers, etc), is a whole different thing, and I'd love to see that open sourced, but this is (and should remain) a totally separate thing to the compiler itself. I'd hate to see them go down the MS route of tying it all into one megalithic package. Did you know that the MSVC class browser depends on a special browser database that is generated for it by the compiler? Urgh. Works great, up until the day you want to use some different compiler for a change:-)
> Of course, not putting salaries on the job > description... I can't figure out why they're > doing that, unless they want to possibly get > you for less than what they would have gotten > you for if they had given a price.
It's because they aren't sure who will apply, and how much those people will be expecting. If they get a bright, talented recent graduate without much experience, they might be able to snap you up for 30k and have you feel good about the deal, while someone who's been around for a while and is coming from a high salary job somewhere else won't even consider less than 60k. If they printed 60k, they'd end up having to pay that much to the recent graduate, but if they print 30k, the experienced person wouldn't even bother to apply. Since they don't know which one is out there, they play it safe and don't mention any figures at all.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the currency rates, that translates to about 35k US $. Cost of living is only slightly higher than the US for most things (tax is higher, but we do get some cool stuff back for it like the health service), but as far as hitech products go, most manufacturers keep the figures the same regardless of whether they are charging in US $ or UK £, so this is a bad place to be buying computers, hifi equipment, etc.
Most of the work in a CGI script consists of reading in template HTML files, substituting a few variables in them, and writing out the results. More complex work may involve a few more sophisticated text substitutions, a bit of database access, and perhaps traversing a few internal data structures as well. In all these cases, the work is being done inside library functions rather than in your code: when you call printf() or look something up in a hashtable, the performance is controlled by the implementation of that library function, rather than any code that you wrote yourself.
As your calculations become more sophisticated, the balance shifts. If you are writing a CGI for generating fractal images or raytracing a 3d model, Perl would indeed be a stupid option (and in fact this is when you might even find C to be too highlevel, and prefer to start twiddling those bits around in asm). But if you profile something like the comments.pl that generated this page, I suspect you will find that only a tiny percentage of the time is being spent executing the loops and conditionals written by Mr. Malda, and the vast majority inside the I/O routines, string handling, hash lookups, and regexp functions, that were written (in C) by Mr. Wall:-)
Also, higher level languages decrease development speed and make things easier to tweak. Since websites tend to be in continual development, and new features are required on internet time, this is a major win. In conventional application software it may be a useful tradeoff to spend an extra week coding in order to double your execution speed, but if you know you are going to have to change this program a fortnight from now, that suddenly starts to look much less sensible:-)
> Oooh, about as long as it takes them to > release a full OpenGL driver...
Hehe. Seems to me like these two things could be related: as a wild guess, the time between releasing hardware specs and someone writing a full OpenGL driver is probably significantly less than the time taken for the original manufacturer to write that same driver:-)
Personally I have to go with NVidia as far as graphics hardware is concerned, on grounds of general helpfulness and quality of drivers. Matrox are equally helpful to Linux people, but their Windows OpenGL implementation is way behind the NVidia one, which is an issue for people like me who have to work on both platforms...
Great news! ATI were top on my list of "uncool people who hide their specs", so it is great to see that they might finally be seeing how stupid that is.
So now we have open source drivers for Matrox and NVidia cards, and ATI starting to look more promising. This leaves 3Dfx as the only major 3d accelerator manufacturer who insists on hiding all their hardware details, which is kind of paradoxical since they actually have the best current support under Linux! How long do you reckon it will take them to realise the advantages of being free as in speech as well as just beer?
Everything by Vernor Vinge ("Across Realtime", "A Fire Upon the Deep", and A Deepness in the Sky").
Dan Simmons Hyperion Cantos (at least the first two books, which are "Hyperion" and "The Fall of Hyperion", I also recommend the later pair which are "Endymion" and "The Rise of Endymion", but these are perhaps less obviously geeky).
All books by David Zindell ("Neverness", "The Broken God", "The Wild", and "War in Heaven").
Apart from "Ender's Game" and Neil Stephenson, these three authors are my top must-reads for anyone of an even remotely geeky temperament...
> Yorkshire, UK, for example, still uses > "thee" and "thou".
In bad TV dramas, it is indeed true that the rural Yorkshire farmer might say things like this, but they are no longer a part of even a very broad Yorkshire dialect (based on my experience of living in York for a couple of years, and having relatives from other parts of the county).
> God only knows how it'd cope with Cockney > slang, or even common phrases (eg: "from > the horse's mouth", "a sticky wicket")
But surely this is just a question of how much language is programmed into the converter? Of course a program that only groks standard dictionary words won't know about this kind of dialect, but that just means that it has to be programmed with basic English plus all commonly used slang, if you want it to handle such things in translation. The English that we speak on a daily basis is much larger than the strict language core, but this is only a superset that can be handled in the same ways, not any fundamental shift in concept or grammar, so all you need is a big enough database...
> As I see it, this can ONLY work for formalised > documents, using a formalised subset of the > various languages.
It is certainly easier to automate things if you can restrict the input in some way, but I think this system would be more use for casual conversation. In formal documents you really do need everything to be 100% correct, so you'd still have to pay human translators to check the results unless the software came with some really solid guarantees (which seems unlikely). In a more informal situation, though, it doesn't matter so much if a few things get mangled, as long as the basic sense comes through. Hell, even babelfish is useful at times, and there is plenty of room to do a much better job than this that would make a really valuable, even if still flawed, translation tool...
This is a great book about the experience of being in Antarctica, and a convincing look at how the various interesting characters react to it. The tour guide who loves working in this environment but is held back and frustrated by the limitations of her clients, the ferals who are trying to make a home on this strange continent, the eco-terrorists who want to protect the wilderness no matter what the cost, and the underdog grunt worker who is frustrated by a lack of respect from the scientists he supports, but finally discovers his own way to exist here:it is all great stuff.
Where it falls down, though, is in the plot department: this just isn't a good piece of fiction. The conflicts are interesting enough (commercial exploitation vs. scientific research vs. environmentalists vs. politics vs. some very odd people indeed), but none of these things are fully explored. Instead it just sort of fizzles out with a totally unsatisfying "but then we had enough pages written, so they all decided that none of the problems were really problems at all, and lived happily ever after". Ah well, this book works as a description of places and people rather than events. I just wish he could have backed off enough to admit that and leave out the convoluted now-we-will-change-the-world elements altogether.
In the end, the success of this book is as a wonderful visualisation of what Antarctica is like, and it made me want to go there myself...
I like the idea of a transitional license that is more commerce-friendly, but still encourages people in the direction of using a true GPL distribution, but I think this particular concept is flawed.
If I grabbed the sources to a TGPL program and made some enhancements, I could decide whether to release this as TGPL or GPL, right? But if I went for the TGPL, _I_ wouldn't get any of the special benefits from this license, because those would go to the original company. This being so, I very much doubt that anyone would use it: we would all just put derived works under the GPL, which would essentially fork the project. This might work as long as the originating company was very active in development so that other people felt it was worth merging their changes back into the original source tree, but as soon as some other company made more substantial changes (which is exactly the situation that some licenses are trying to protect against), they would go for the GPL option. I think this would result in a lot of confusion, while simultaneously failing to protect the original company or feel truly free to the hacker community...
This article contains some good background material, and they draw some interesting conclusions, but I can't help being sceptical because of the way they are arguing other political/philosophical points using the keyboard design as an example. It's hard to place much trust in anyone who so obviously cares that the result come out a particular way.
Unfortunately, everyone cares about keyboard design. We've all spent years learning how to type, so we have a large investment in a QWERTY layout, while those few people who've spent the even larger investment to relearn a DVORAK keyboard are extremely unlikely to turn around and admit (even if only to themselves) that this was a mistake!
It would be interesting to do a truly neutral study, using a bunch of kids who haven't yet learned either method, but despite all the research quoted in this article, it seems that nobody has actually done that! Retraining existing typists is a useful test in practical terms, but doesn't tell us anything about which is the best design in an abstract sense.
You've always been involved in hacker projects outside of just coding (eg. the Jargon File), but over the last year or so the spokesperson role seems to have grown into a fulltime job. How long is it since you last sat down to write a major piece of software? Do you expect to go back to fulltime development work anytime soon, and if so, what would you work on? How do you manage to cope with the withdrawal symptoms?
Slashdot Mirror
Just learn to program, it doesn't matter on what machine. In fact it's better if you cover many different machines and types of architecture: learning only one thing in detail would be doing yourself a disservice because platforms change all the time, and skills you learn now would be irrelevant by the time you came to look for a job.
I'd start by writing a couple of different types of game (simple things, Space Invaders, Tetris, etc), on whatever platform you have at hand. Then write some other non-game stuff on some other platform. Keep coding, keep learning new languages and systems, be obsessive, and put together a nice varied showreel of your work.
The main thing is to have absolute mastery of C and C++, which you can only get by writing a large volume of code, and to be versatile enough to pick up other languages and toolsets whenever required. For example, an ideal showreel would probably include some sort of 3D demo (maybe a spaceship flying around a starfield, using OpenGL or D3D, with some nice lighting or whatever), some sort of other game-related demo (eg. pathfinding AI in a 2d tile map game), and whatever other impressive coding work you can come up with (I'd be a bit nervous about hiring someone who had _only_ ever done game stuff).
I'd forget about the Indrema, from what I see it's a kind of interesting but pointless idea since it lacks any unique reason for people to buy it (Linux doesn't count for most console users). In terms of both hardware and software it's almost identical to what you already have sitting on your desk, so just crank up gcc and get working on your OpenGL code...
--
Shawn Hargreaves (professional PS2 developer)
http://www.climax.co.uk
> You might scoff at this, but note that there
- win32/
> *is* no other freely available native
> compiler for ANSI C++ available for the Win32
> platform
http://www.xraylith.wisc.edu/~khan/software/gnu
> Isn't OSS about less obscurity? Does this
> kind of article mean that I'm wrong and SOL?
ROTFL. AFAIK, hackers _invented_ the TLA! IMHO the key difference is that ours are intended to be funny (and ideally recursive), plus we have the Jargon file to explain them to newcomers, wheras suits intend them to look impressive and use them to indimidate newcomers.
There's no need for them to do support: unlike many other Linux players, they already have a solid source of income. Hardware manufacturers can't sell cards without drivers, and often only have very minimal internal development resources, so they tend to be delighted to outsource this work to anyone who is willing to take it on. As it becomes increasingly important to sell cards to the growing hordes of Linux users, and since most existing PC video manufacturers lack any experience in this area, I don't think Precision Insight will have any shortage of work to keep them busy...
Hurrah for the GPL! Anyone know if this is the first time a biggie commercial company has decided to use this, rather than inventing their own license?
:-)
Perhaps the Debian Free Software guidelines should be updated to use a sliding scale of freeness, with SCSL somewhere around 0.1, the NPL at 0.6, etc. Then we could spend the next decade or so arguing about whether GPL or BSD is most deserving of the 1.0 spot, and whether it is possible for some to even be more free than that
I think the old transmeta website was a pretty damn cool hack. Minimalistic, elegant, and yet perfectly achieved the desired purpose of making everyone interested in them. Hacking the perceptions of their audience: how can you improve on that?
Quite. And also: - VA employ a lot of really talented developers. Who do you know that works for LinuxOne? That, IMHO, says a lot about their future viability. - VA seem quite well in touch with the Linux community, and take pains to work well with it, wheras LinuxOne seems quite unconcerned at much recent bad press.
This all sounds very cool, and I look forward to playing with the final thing, but who out there thinks that the existing KDE file manager is actually pretty damn useful as a lightweight web browser? It can render Slashdot just as nicely as that screenshot, and I've yet to see it crash (in fact it ranks right up their with Lynx on the stability front, which is most unusual for a graphical browser :-)
The only two problems are that it is a little sluggish at downloading (the HTML widget is plenty fast, but pulling down pages is much slower than eg. Netscape), and that a few form related things don't work entirely right, for example I was unable to post this comment using it (although I did sucessfully use it to view the article and comments), because the "reply" button was missing from my display.
> If there's one thing I don't ever feel
> towards a commerical organisation, it's
> indebted.
Not even when that organisation has been paying people to write cool software, and then releasing it under the GPL?
Personally, I've bought one official Red Hat package (mostly for the manual, back when I was new to Linux), but I've never given money to Cygnus in any shape or form. And yet I use gcc daily, and benefit from it having good C++ support, and a lot of useful optimistations that weren't there before Cygnus added them. So yes, I'm indebted to them for giving me all this cool stuff to play with. Just the same way that I'm indebted to people like Linus and Alan for giving me a decent kernel to run it on, and to RMS for writing the compiler in the first place...
Even if you don't use gcc, the chances are that you use programs which were compiled by it, and the chances are that you didn't pay Cygnus for that, either. So why not thank them for this? Whether they are a commercial outfit or a private individual is irrelvant, as long as they are doing good work and releasing GPL code that makes life better for everyone.
> I'd love to see some of their development
:-)
> tools and innovations folded back into
> gcc/egcs et al...
But Cygnus already _have_ been folding their work back into EGCS: who do you think has been maintaining all that stuff for the last bundle of years? Anyone who uses gcc or gdb is heavily indebted to their work on it.
Their tool stuff (development environments, class browsers, etc), is a whole different thing, and I'd love to see that open sourced, but this is (and should remain) a totally separate thing to the compiler itself. I'd hate to see them go down the MS route of tying it all into one megalithic package. Did you know that the MSVC class browser depends on a special browser database that is generated for it by the compiler? Urgh. Works great, up until the day you want to use some different compiler for a change
> Of course, not putting salaries on the job
> description... I can't figure out why they're
> doing that, unless they want to possibly get
> you for less than what they would have gotten
> you for if they had given a price.
It's because they aren't sure who will apply, and how much those people will be expecting. If they get a bright, talented recent graduate without much experience, they might be able to snap you up for 30k and have you feel good about the deal, while someone who's been around for a while and is coming from a high salary job somewhere else won't even consider less than 60k. If they printed 60k, they'd end up having to pay that much to the recent graduate, but if they print 30k, the experienced person wouldn't even bother to apply. Since they don't know which one is out there, they play it safe and don't mention any figures at all.
For those of you who aren't familiar with the currency rates, that translates to about 35k US $. Cost of living is only slightly higher than the US for most things (tax is higher, but we do get some cool stuff back for it like the health service), but as far as hitech products go, most manufacturers keep the figures the same regardless of whether they are charging in US $ or UK £, so this is a bad place to be buying computers, hifi equipment, etc.
Most of the work in a CGI script consists of reading in template HTML files, substituting a few variables in them, and writing out the results. More complex work may involve a few more sophisticated text substitutions, a bit of database access, and perhaps traversing a few internal data structures as well. In all these cases, the work is being done inside library functions rather than in your code: when you call printf() or look something up in a hashtable, the performance is controlled by the implementation of that library function, rather than any code that you wrote yourself.
:-)
:-)
As your calculations become more sophisticated, the balance shifts. If you are writing a CGI for generating fractal images or raytracing a 3d model, Perl would indeed be a stupid option (and in fact this is when you might even find C to be too highlevel, and prefer to start twiddling those bits around in asm). But if you profile something like the comments.pl that generated this page, I suspect you will find that only a tiny percentage of the time is being spent executing the loops and conditionals written by Mr. Malda, and the vast majority inside the I/O routines, string handling, hash lookups, and regexp functions, that were written (in C) by Mr. Wall
Also, higher level languages decrease development speed and make things easier to tweak. Since websites tend to be in continual development, and new features are required on internet time, this is a major win. In conventional application software it may be a useful tradeoff to spend an extra week coding in order to double your execution speed, but if you know you are going to have to change this program a fortnight from now, that suddenly starts to look much less sensible
> Oooh, about as long as it takes them to
:-)
> release a full OpenGL driver...
Hehe. Seems to me like these two things could be related: as a wild guess, the time between releasing hardware specs and someone writing a full OpenGL driver is probably significantly less than the time taken for the original manufacturer to write that same driver
Personally I have to go with NVidia as far as graphics hardware is concerned, on grounds of general helpfulness and quality of drivers. Matrox are equally helpful to Linux people, but their Windows OpenGL implementation is way behind the NVidia one, which is an issue for people like me who have to work on both platforms...
Great news! ATI were top on my list of "uncool people who hide their specs", so it is great to see that they might finally be seeing how stupid that is.
So now we have open source drivers for Matrox and NVidia cards, and ATI starting to look more promising. This leaves 3Dfx as the only major 3d accelerator manufacturer who insists on hiding all their hardware details, which is kind of paradoxical since they actually have the best current support under Linux! How long do you reckon it will take them to realise the advantages of being free as in speech as well as just beer?
A good question for "Ask Slashdot", perhaps...
Off the top of my head:
Everything by Vernor Vinge ("Across Realtime", "A Fire Upon the Deep", and A Deepness in the Sky").
Dan Simmons Hyperion Cantos (at least the first two books, which are "Hyperion" and "The Fall of Hyperion", I also recommend the later pair which are "Endymion" and "The Rise of Endymion", but these are perhaps less obviously geeky).
All books by David Zindell ("Neverness", "The Broken God", "The Wild", and "War in Heaven").
Apart from "Ender's Game" and Neil Stephenson, these three authors are my top must-reads for anyone of an even remotely geeky temperament...
> Yorkshire, UK, for example, still uses
> "thee" and "thou".
In bad TV dramas, it is indeed true that the rural Yorkshire farmer might say things like this, but they are no longer a part of even a very broad Yorkshire dialect (based on my experience of living in York for a couple of years, and having relatives from other parts of the county).
> God only knows how it'd cope with Cockney
> slang, or even common phrases (eg: "from
> the horse's mouth", "a sticky wicket")
But surely this is just a question of how much language is programmed into the converter? Of course a program that only groks standard dictionary words won't know about this kind of dialect, but that just means that it has to be programmed with basic English plus all commonly used slang, if you want it to handle such things in translation. The English that we speak on a daily basis is much larger than the strict language core, but this is only a superset that can be handled in the same ways, not any fundamental shift in concept or grammar, so all you need is a big enough database...
> As I see it, this can ONLY work for formalised
> documents, using a formalised subset of the
> various languages.
It is certainly easier to automate things if you can restrict the input in some way, but I think this system would be more use for casual conversation. In formal documents you really do need everything to be 100% correct, so you'd still have to pay human translators to check the results unless the software came with some really solid guarantees (which seems unlikely). In a more informal situation, though, it doesn't matter so much if a few things get mangled, as long as the basic sense comes through. Hell, even babelfish is useful at times, and there is plenty of room to do a much better job than this that would make a really valuable, even if still flawed, translation tool...
This is a great book about the experience of being in Antarctica, and a convincing look at how the various interesting characters react to it. The tour guide who loves working in this environment but is held back and frustrated by the limitations of her clients, the ferals who are trying to make a home on this strange continent, the eco-terrorists who want to protect the wilderness no matter what the cost, and the underdog grunt worker who is frustrated by a lack of respect from the scientists he supports, but finally discovers his own way to exist here:it is all great stuff.
Where it falls down, though, is in the plot department: this just isn't a good piece of fiction. The conflicts are interesting enough (commercial exploitation vs. scientific research vs. environmentalists vs. politics vs. some very odd people indeed), but none of these things are fully explored. Instead it just sort of fizzles out with a totally unsatisfying "but then we had enough pages written, so they all decided that none of the problems were really problems at all,
and lived happily ever after". Ah well, this book works as a description of places and people rather than events. I just wish he could have backed off enough to admit that and leave out the convoluted now-we-will-change-the-world elements altogether.
In the end, the success of this book is as a wonderful visualisation of what Antarctica is like, and it made me want to go there myself...
I like the idea of a transitional license that is more commerce-friendly, but still encourages people in the direction of using a true GPL distribution, but I think this particular concept is flawed.
If I grabbed the sources to a TGPL program and made some enhancements, I could decide whether to release this as TGPL or GPL, right? But if I went for the TGPL, _I_ wouldn't get any of the special benefits from this license, because those would go to the original company. This being so, I very much doubt that anyone would use it: we would all just put derived works under the GPL, which would essentially fork the project. This might work as long as the originating company was very active in development so that other people felt it was worth merging their changes back into the original source tree, but as soon as some other company made more substantial changes (which is exactly the situation that some licenses are trying to protect against), they would go for the GPL option. I think this would result in a lot of confusion, while simultaneously failing to protect the original company or feel truly free to the hacker community...
This article contains some good background material, and they draw some interesting conclusions, but I can't help being sceptical because of the way they are arguing other political/philosophical points using the keyboard design as an example. It's hard to place much trust in anyone who so obviously cares that the result come out a particular way.
Unfortunately, everyone cares about keyboard design. We've all spent years learning how to type, so we have a large investment in a QWERTY layout, while those few people who've spent the even larger investment to relearn a DVORAK keyboard are extremely unlikely to turn around and admit (even if only to themselves) that this was a mistake!
It would be interesting to do a truly neutral study, using a bunch of kids who haven't yet learned either method, but despite all the research quoted in this article, it seems that nobody has actually done that! Retraining existing typists is a useful test in practical terms, but doesn't tell us anything about which is the best design in an abstract sense.
You've always been involved in hacker projects outside of just coding (eg. the Jargon File), but over the last year or so the spokesperson role seems to have grown into a fulltime job. How long is it since you last sat down to write a major piece of software? Do you expect to go back to fulltime development work anytime soon, and if so, what would you work on? How do you manage to cope with the withdrawal symptoms?