First, there certainly _is_ "good" and "bad" code. An experienced programmer has certain tastes, sure, but some code is just downright bad, making it near impossible to maintain or worse, riddled with security flaws.
I've seen plenty of folks start out with BASIC (I'm talking the classic stuff here, Applesoft or GW or some such) and go on to become very good C, C++ and Java programmers.
_Visual_ BASIC, however, I would tend to say is a bad language to start out with. Folks who cut their teeth on VB (again this is just in my experience) do tend to have poor programming style. It's easy to spot VB-raised folks on a PHP forum, for example, and just shake your head at the backwards way they're trying to get things done.
So I don't know if I agree Dijkstra about BASIC itself, but I know that when people "learn" programming in an inconsistant language or where there are assumed to be lots of libraries which become almost more of a focus than the language constructs themselves, they have a very hard time learning a different language and/or better design and style. I doubt it's "beyond hope of regeneration" though.
Microsoft might know all too well why Free software is different than shareware. They may have a huge empire of finances and power, but that hasn't necessarily clouded their cognition so much that they can't comprehend why GNU-type freedom is truly valuable.
BUT... It's in their best interests if those who listen to them (Microsoft employees, Microsoft salespeople, businesses that take Microsoft's word as gold) don't "get it". As long as they can make it sound equivilant to shareware, as long as they can distract businesses with talk of pure dollars-and-cents costs as if that's the single measure of "value", then they will be in good shape. Widespread ignorance and misconceptions are Microsoft's allies.
The less information (or more misinformation) potential Microsoft customers have, the easier it is to influence their choices. Microsoft might come off looking ignorant to some of us, but we're not who they're after, and they're louder than we are.
This is a sweeping generalization, but popular culture in the US says "bigger everything!". Bigger food portions, bigger cars, bigger film special effects, big everything. It's trendy and cool.
Japan's popular culture shares some things with the US, more and more all the time it seems, but one thing that's notably opposite is that smaller is trendy. Big is cumbersome or wasteful or just generally un-cool. Small cel phones, small cars, small game consoles.
But it doesn't stop with the physical size of the X-Box versus a sleek PS2 or a compact Gamecube. Games themselves harbor this attitude. Enter the Matrix? Big on cramming in exclusive video, big on hype and the kind of cross-media tie-ins that are being blasted all over American pop culture. Lord of the Rings? Similar situation, and big on increasingly flashy battles.
You can see the small/compact type of attitude in Japanese games. Pikmin's my favorite and most obvious example, you've got a quarter-sized hero with armies of ant-sized helpers. In Bomberman, instead of huge over-the top US-style pyrotechnics you've got strategic, controlled blasts.
Some games walk both sides of this cultural divide, and do well in both countries. In Final Fantasy, the worlds and bosses where you do your exploring and fighting are big and impressive but the depth in the little details, the statistics and experience levels... Look how compact and efficient the equipment or character status screens are, the parts of the game where you're really doing your role-playing.
Of course there's way more to American and Japanese pop culture than big and small, but those concepts leak into many areas and most certainly influence game design and reception.
In the case of a game server, that's exactly the issue, Blizzard (or whoever) _does_ want responsibility for the network's activity, and since authorized clients represent sold copies of the game, they'd have good reasons to want to only let those clients interact with the server and each other.
In Kazaa's case, the goal is supposedly to share files with as many people as possible. "Unauthorized" clients actually help the system, creating more download sources and more unique files. What's in question then is control. Kazaa would like to control what clients talk to "its" network, but claims no control whatsoever over the content distributed through said network.
This seems a common trend in the software world, companies want more and more _control_, whether or not it means improving the experience of using their product. As a certain convicted monopoly has shown, excessive control can indeed lead to increased profit. What Kazaa should remember, though, is that it can also make users bitter enough to bail on a product.
On a side note, it was largely software companies' control-hungry actions that led me to abandon proprietary software altogether on my home machines. Granted I'm a weird case, but I'm definitely not alone in being fed up with software companies being uptight bullies.
...and the answers were still indicitive of a dangerous attitude. "You're one of very few, so you can't complain"...That's ridiculous!
This guy has won over the minds of Congress to shape this society into one where the most intelligent and potential-filled sliver of the population are made criminals if they pursue certain (harmless, theft-less, victimless!) technical things that interest them.
Certainly different or more general questions could have been asked in the short time the interview had. And you're right, there's no reason for this old guy to be an expert in this stuff, but that's kind of the point. Those influencing these liberty-squashing rights into legislation don't actually understand the far-reaching consequences of their actions. Had he been asked about business and licensing details and the effects these provisions and laws have on big companies' bottom lines, sure he would have been able to speak more intelligently.
He himself said that if his ideas have no bottom they don't deserve to be heard. Their bottom is the ever-thickening lining of pockets, the pockets of big media, the pockets of corporate-funded politicians. That might be the harsh reality of what makes the world go 'round in this day and age, but that doesn't make it right.
Actually yes that is flamebait. Music sharing (or theft/piracy, since you seem to like inflamatory language) is a completely separate issue from kernel module licenses.
Nobody here is looking for a free lunch, it's a simple matter of a 100% non-GPL module passing itself off to the Linux kernel as GPL. If you want to make some analogy with the music industry, it could be something like this: The RIAA has been posing as some indie label, one that's known to give nearly all the profits from distributed music to the artists. The masses wouldn't know or care one way or the other, but the folks that do care see that they're being lied to and manipulated, and are unhappy about it.
Go ahead and accuse people of being hypocritical, if you think they indeed are, but make a sensible argument, not a knee-jerk, holier-than-thou dismissal.
Back when I was a GNU/newbie, my Red Hat box got 0wn3d by some script kiddie due to a buffer overflow exploit in lpd. I use CUPS now, even though I know LPD is generally very safe. One of those irrational, almost subconscious things, you know?
Ahh well, no damage was done, it taught me to keep my software patched and my ports closed, and it gave me a good excuse to rid myself of RPM hell and install Slackware:^)
Just because some of the newest features aren't fully fleshed out yet (quicktime support, multilingual interface, this new audio stuff, etc) doesn't mean things are broken.
Every single blender developer (of which there are many now, thanks to Ton's hard work and the fundraiser resulting in the code being opened) shouldn't have to concentrate on one new feature at a time. So naturally there will be several things being added at a time, at various stages of completion.
By the way, toon shading does work, we've had lots of releases since 2.2.7.
Blender just keeps getting better and better. I personally didn't/don't use the game engine features much, but plenty of people do and I think it's great that they're getting rebuilt now without the proprietary code that had to be removed for 2.2.16 (first release under the GPL). I DO think I'll be using these new audio tools, and I'm glad the people who have been working on them do not share your view that all existing features should be polished before anything new is added.
The GIMP, KDE, GNOME, the Linux kernel itself, are all huge projects with many facets which would never be as sophisticated as they are today without many developers plunging in and doing new stuff. Does the technique make for some rough edges? You bet. But it also results in full-featured and useful software.
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First, there certainly _is_ "good" and "bad" code. An experienced programmer has certain tastes, sure, but some code is just downright bad, making it near impossible to maintain or worse, riddled with security flaws.
I've seen plenty of folks start out with BASIC (I'm talking the classic stuff here, Applesoft or GW or some such) and go on to become very good C, C++ and Java programmers.
_Visual_ BASIC, however, I would tend to say is a bad language to start out with. Folks who cut their teeth on VB (again this is just in my experience) do tend to have poor programming style. It's easy to spot VB-raised folks on a PHP forum, for example, and just shake your head at the backwards way they're trying to get things done.
So I don't know if I agree Dijkstra about BASIC itself, but I know that when people "learn" programming in an inconsistant language or where there are assumed to be lots of libraries which become almost more of a focus than the language constructs themselves, they have a very hard time learning a different language and/or better design and style. I doubt it's "beyond hope of regeneration" though.
Microsoft might know all too well why Free software is different than shareware. They may have a huge empire of finances and power, but that hasn't necessarily clouded their cognition so much that they can't comprehend why GNU-type freedom is truly valuable.
BUT...
It's in their best interests if those who listen to them (Microsoft employees, Microsoft salespeople, businesses that take Microsoft's word as gold) don't "get it". As long as they can make it sound equivilant to shareware, as long as they can distract businesses with talk of pure dollars-and-cents costs as if that's the single measure of "value", then they will be in good shape. Widespread ignorance and misconceptions are Microsoft's allies.
The less information (or more misinformation) potential Microsoft customers have, the easier it is to influence their choices. Microsoft might come off looking ignorant to some of us, but we're not who they're after, and they're louder than we are.
I've always liked the term write-only. I'm pretty sure the poster meant "write-once", but it's just one of those ideas I find wonderfully useless.
Actually, I just burned a few el-cheapo CDRs that were apparently write-only, 'cause I couldn't read them afterwards.
This is a sweeping generalization, but popular culture in the US says "bigger everything!". Bigger food portions, bigger cars, bigger film special effects, big everything. It's trendy and cool.
Japan's popular culture shares some things with the US, more and more all the time it seems, but one thing that's notably opposite is that smaller is trendy. Big is cumbersome or wasteful or just generally un-cool. Small cel phones, small cars, small game consoles.
But it doesn't stop with the physical size of the X-Box versus a sleek PS2 or a compact Gamecube. Games themselves harbor this attitude. Enter the Matrix? Big on cramming in exclusive video, big on hype and the kind of cross-media tie-ins that are being blasted all over American pop culture. Lord of the Rings? Similar situation, and big on increasingly flashy battles.
You can see the small/compact type of attitude in Japanese games. Pikmin's my favorite and most obvious example, you've got a quarter-sized hero with armies of ant-sized helpers. In Bomberman, instead of huge over-the top US-style pyrotechnics you've got strategic, controlled blasts.
Some games walk both sides of this cultural divide, and do well in both countries. In Final Fantasy, the worlds and bosses where you do your exploring and fighting are big and impressive but the depth in the little details, the statistics and experience levels... Look how compact and efficient the equipment or character status screens are, the parts of the game where you're really doing your role-playing.
Of course there's way more to American and Japanese pop culture than big and small, but those concepts leak into many areas and most certainly influence game design and reception.
...even comparing anybody to Hitler or any group to the Nazi party. Poor Godwin's law didn't even have a chance.
In the case of a game server, that's exactly the issue, Blizzard (or whoever) _does_ want responsibility for the network's activity, and since authorized clients represent sold copies of the game, they'd have good reasons to want to only let those clients interact with the server and each other.
In Kazaa's case, the goal is supposedly to share files with as many people as possible. "Unauthorized" clients actually help the system, creating more download sources and more unique files. What's in question then is control. Kazaa would like to control what clients talk to "its" network, but claims no control whatsoever over the content distributed through said network.
This seems a common trend in the software world, companies want more and more _control_, whether or not it means improving the experience of using their product. As a certain convicted monopoly has shown, excessive control can indeed lead to increased profit. What Kazaa should remember, though, is that it can also make users bitter enough to bail on a product.
On a side note, it was largely software companies' control-hungry actions that led me to abandon proprietary software altogether on my home machines. Granted I'm a weird case, but I'm definitely not alone in being fed up with software companies being uptight bullies.
...and the answers were still indicitive of a dangerous attitude. "You're one of very few, so you can't complain" ...That's ridiculous!
This guy has won over the minds of Congress to shape this society into one where the most intelligent and potential-filled sliver of the population are made criminals if they pursue certain (harmless, theft-less, victimless!) technical things that interest them.
Certainly different or more general questions could have been asked in the short time the interview had. And you're right, there's no reason for this old guy to be an expert in this stuff, but that's kind of the point. Those influencing these liberty-squashing rights into legislation don't actually understand the far-reaching consequences of their actions. Had he been asked about business and licensing details and the effects these provisions and laws have on big companies' bottom lines, sure he would have been able to speak more intelligently.
He himself said that if his ideas have no bottom they don't deserve to be heard. Their bottom is the ever-thickening lining of pockets, the pockets of big media, the pockets of corporate-funded politicians. That might be the harsh reality of what makes the world go 'round in this day and age, but that doesn't make it right.
Actually yes that is flamebait. Music sharing (or theft/piracy, since you seem to like inflamatory language) is a completely separate issue from kernel module licenses.
Nobody here is looking for a free lunch, it's a simple matter of a 100% non-GPL module passing itself off to the Linux kernel as GPL. If you want to make some analogy with the music industry, it could be something like this: The RIAA has been posing as some indie label, one that's known to give nearly all the profits from distributed music to the artists. The masses wouldn't know or care one way or the other, but the folks that do care see that they're being lied to and manipulated, and are unhappy about it.
Go ahead and accuse people of being hypocritical, if you think they indeed are, but make a sensible argument, not a knee-jerk, holier-than-thou dismissal.
Back when I was a GNU/newbie, my Red Hat box got 0wn3d by some script kiddie due to a buffer overflow exploit in lpd. I use CUPS now, even though I know LPD is generally very safe. One of those irrational, almost subconscious things, you know? Ahh well, no damage was done, it taught me to keep my software patched and my ports closed, and it gave me a good excuse to rid myself of RPM hell and install Slackware :^)
Just because some of the newest features aren't fully fleshed out yet (quicktime support, multilingual interface, this new audio stuff, etc) doesn't mean things are broken.
Every single blender developer (of which there are many now, thanks to Ton's hard work and the fundraiser resulting in the code being opened) shouldn't have to concentrate on one new feature at a time. So naturally there will be several things being added at a time, at various stages of completion.
By the way, toon shading does work, we've had lots of releases since 2.2.7.
Blender just keeps getting better and better. I personally didn't/don't use the game engine features much, but plenty of people do and I think it's great that they're getting rebuilt now without the proprietary code that had to be removed for 2.2.16 (first release under the GPL). I DO think I'll be using these new audio tools, and I'm glad the people who have been working on them do not share your view that all existing features should be polished before anything new is added.
The GIMP, KDE, GNOME, the Linux kernel itself, are all huge projects with many facets which would never be as sophisticated as they are today without many developers plunging in and doing new stuff. Does the technique make for some rough edges? You bet. But it also results in full-featured and useful software.