Learn a new language and make your irresponsible ravings in that. Language is acquired by age five, and those patterns that you have are identical with the patterns of your parents, older siblings, and the others who were around you speaking your native tongue.
I must disagree. This disallows for the possibility of linguistic innovation. Furthermore, or the course of many generations, it would make the linguistic styles of members of stable populations increasingly indistiguishable from each other.
I know that I speak my own idiolect. Large parts of it come from the people around me. Parts of it don't. Particular bits of wordplay have become in jokes for my friends and family. Each of us originated some of them. Each of us use a subset of them.
I have watched my own "voice" evolve over the years. I can attribute some of the changes to specific influences in my life. I have consciously borrowed from languages that I have learned and people I have met.
Some of my choices in wording also reflect outside influences: profession, location, hobbies, etc. But some are my own choice. This in no way invalidates the theory that stylistic data can identify an author. It would be difficult for me to completely enumerate every identifying characteristic of my writing and hide it effectively. However, some of it I consciously created or chose for myself.
As for learning another language, to a certain extent you are right. One common misconception about multilingual people is that there is a measurable degree of fluency in each language. The granularity is finer than that. I have friends from college who are quite fluent bilingually, but cannot discuss their professions in anything but English. It is the language in which they studied and now work. They don't have a technical vocabulary in their other languages.
There was a guy like this making his way through a sizeable portion of Usenet a couple of years ago. At first I was surprised when he showed up in several completely unrelated groups that I read. The likelihood that someone would not only share my interests, but not be far from my viewpoint was surprising. On one topic, it made sense. By the time he hit the third it was shocking.
However, what he posted was actually on topic, or close to it for most of the newsgroups. He was posting, in pieces, books that had lapsed into the public domain that were relevant to the newsgroup. If I had to guess, he was testing some autoposting software. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a testing of spamming software.
He was not hard to killfile though because he would stick to a particular e-mail address and subject (title, author and incrementing part number) for the duration of each book.
From just my description of his "work", I would bet that several people here can identify him, or at least his pseudonym if it was one, and a list of newsgroups he was seen in. Recognizing trolls when they change addresses has been a popular sport on Usenet for years. I'm looking forward to refining my techniques.
Thanks for the thoughtful commentary! Yes, I did come across somewhat arrogantly. That was the point in this specific case. Arrogance breeds arrogance. When somebody crosses the line in their advocacy of Windows to tell me I should buy it, I treat them a lot differently than I treat someone who says, "I use Windows because it does what I want."
I realize that Windows is a perfectly acceptable operating system for an enormous number of people. And, if you can imagine it, I don't think they are all stupid, gullible twits looking for someone to give their money to. No, a lot of them are just people looking to get a job done.
I hope you'll understand if I don't feel too upset that two Anonymous Cowards decided that I'm arrogant on the basis of a single article. Like most people, I have a range of ideas and opinions. Some of them are a bit harsher than others. I also have my good moments and my bad ones. Not everything I write can be a gem for every reader.
Coasters would be entirely too obvious. I'm sure she has some much more inventive use for them.
And a note to every online service sending me CDs: I have an ISP and a Linux box. If your software doesn't run on Linux or *BSD, thanks for the coaster.
One of the reasons that many people in the open source community are so aggressively anti-MS is the fact that we know what is in our interest much better than Bill Gates. He was never looking out for anyone else's interests other than his own and those of his shareholders, nor should he have been. The success of Microsoft attests to the fact that it has repeatedly built and marketted products that people actually bought which is what exactly what it should be doing. You don't make money in any business without satisfying some customers' needs.
However, there are people in open source who point out all of the things they need or want that MS doesn't provide:
The level of reliability of Linux or *BSD.
Configurability. I have made this point before. Open source opens up hooks for other people besides the core programmer or team to tailor the program without changing the code.
Access to the source to get bug fixes and enhancements done.
Peer review. Which helps achieve items 1 and 3.
Portability. What does Linux run on? Emacs? gcc? Windows?
File formats and interfaces that are easily manipulated with existing tools.
The usual answer from MS or its defenders is that Windows is as good or good enough or that the item isn't necessary. The point that usually goes unstated and shouldn't is really very simple: It's my machine. These are my computing tasks. I say these things are necessary. Attacking my opinions and my best judgement concerning how to fulfill my needs is a quick way to alienate me.
Alienating potential allies is a good way to turn them into opponents. That's no problem when they are your competitors. But when they were potential customers, it isn't good business. Open source OSs for the i386 architecture gave a lot of people like me the option of saying, "Fine, I'll be over here getting some work done." They gave the zealots a rallying point to try to take market share from MS. I'm not in the zealot camp, but every bit of FUD I read pushes me that way.
I am a cynic in some ways. I have eyes and a brain. When someone tells me something that contradicts my experience, I take a look. If I can't find a hole that makes it at least plausible that I am wrong and I find that their version would benefit them, I assume that I am being lied to. Note my choice of wording. When I am told something that in my experience can't possibly be true but would benefit them, I don't assume that the speaker is merely mistaken.
My reason is simple. I hold people to a standard of competence when they demand a change from me. People have a right to be mistaken without a presumption of malice. When they apply their own judgement to me, for their own benefit, I expect them to be right. I don't apply that standard to the neighbor who offers me a cookie with the words, "You'll love this new recipe." I do apply it to the painter who says he can paint my house less expensively than his competitor.
If somebody wants me to buy, use or recommend software, they have to convince me that it can do the job. There are some jobs that Windows can do. All but the most hardcore of zealots will agree to that. I'm not ready to recommend to my mother that she replace Windows with Linux on her machine. There are things that Windows can't do. There is no Windows equivalent to Beowolf that I known of. Windows won't run on a lot of hardware platforms that Linux has been ported to. The middle ground is heavily disputed.
Wanting to be better than the competition isn't enough. Wanting people to believe that you are better than the competition isn't enough. Being better and convincing customers of it is the bottom line. My mind is still open. Windows didn't freeze at 3.1. Linux has evolved since the 1.0 kernel. If MS wants me, I'm out here, but they have to have something to say.
I am not a statistic. I am not a number. I am a minority of one and so is each and every person reading this. Don't let the pollsters tell you what you are likely to do. Go out and read the candidates' web sites. Read the candidate comparisons that are going to appear all over the web over the next 10 months. And make an intelligent decision.
Too many media outlets pretend that nothing matters in a presidential race each the Democratic and Republican Party nominees and the photo ops. They don't dig. They tell the stories that will attract the biggest audiences. The net not only doesn't have to do that, there is really no way to constrain it to do that.
I suggested it here before, and I'll suggest it again. It would be interesting to see Slashdot polls about how Slashdot readers will be voting. I would be particularly interested if a few of us, and I'll volunteer, post links to useful web sites with analyses by a variety of interest groups of the candidates' positions. I'm as interested in what the people I wouldn't trust with a soggy match think of the candidates as I am in what the people I like think of them.
Let's give them participatory democracy and see what happens. I bet there are candidates who will love it. It will attract the underdogs, and probably the lunatic fringe as well... but what a show.
Are hostile environments simply a trade-off for freedom, then, one of the permanent legacies of the talented young men who helped build the Net and are building it still?
Probably. There is really no way to come up with a single right answer to the question of how much freedom is enough. Nearly everyone will agree that an individual's freedom includes everything that doesn't infringe on the rights of another. But that raises obvious questions when multiple parties interact. For example, I am an advocate of nearly unlimited freedom of speech. With that freedom comes the responsibility for what I say. I can make damaging claims about someone, but if they are not true, I have done him harm unjustly. And I am responsible for that. Fine.
Now does the moderator of a web site have the right to restrict my access because of what I say? If that web site is treated like a broadcaster or a publisher, yes. But is a web site more like a public forum? It is hard to say. The analogies break down somewhat. I would lean towards saying that the owner of the site has the right to determine how it is used. Does that come with responsibility for that use? That could depend in complex ways on the moderation policy.
Do the people running websites have any responsibility for creating environments which are truly free, and not dominated by the most hostile members?
I would say no. The responsibility is to have a clear policy posted about the rules, if any, for use of the site. And while that policy will necessarily be rather general, it should be applied as consistently as possible. That will allow free for all environments to compete for mind share with heavily moderated environments. Each community can define its own standards, but should publish them.
Do members of these communities - that's us - have any responsibility to challenge people who assault others online, create environments in which some of the most urgent issues of our lifetimes can be discussed and debated in a coherent, civil and rational way?
No. And I'll happily shout down anyone who says that I do. I'm responsible for my own actions, not those of others. I rarely respond to abusive people. First of all, they are not worth the effort in most cases. Yes, I am saying that they are beneath my contempt. But more importantly, they are often acting abusive to attract attention. They get some amusement out of the annoyance they cause. I don't bother. Short of being able to permanently pull the plug on their net access, we can't get rid of them. The only other option is to ignore them, perhaps by actively filtering them out. Yes, I do maintain a killfill for my newsreader.
And perhaps most importantly, are people responsible for what they say?
Yes. That does not differ from speech in the physical world. The medium does not alter responsibility for the content. What it does change is the range of options available to us. It is possible to create anonymous, persistent, verifiable identities on a network. Most web browsers, web sites, newsreaders, mail clients, etc. don't take advantage of these technologies. That would allow us to maintain anonymity along with all of its advantages along with the ability to attach a reputation and a history to an identity. Just as Karma points on Slashdot link a logged in user to a history of activity, so could a more pervasive technology.
Certainly, there would be people who would create new identities frequently and use them abusively. And the reputation of each one would fall from zero downward. They would be of little use. Identities for which a person had developed a positive reputation would be worth keeping. Just as here on Slashdot, I am motivated to post intelligent comments. People obviously read what I say because my comments are moderated favorably and people reply to my comments.
I value the availability to post as an Anonymous Coward. I value it because it gives people posting subjects that are too hot to handle personally a chance to let us know about them. But perhaps even more valuable, it makes Slashdot accessible to anyone who drops in. It lowers the barriers to posting comments. That encourages new blood and new ideas. The guys at Slashdot have deliberately restricted their own control over the site. They post the articles. They guide the site towards the topics they consider to be the focus of the site. And then the option to comment is not restricted.
Had they stopped there, Slashdot would be very much like Usenet in some ways. The articles posted each day would act as newsgroups with people free to start any threads they wanted, but unable to create their on groups. The additional step of moderation, performed by a large pool of interested users effective means that we are using the abilities and interests of the users of the site to help focus it. It is an extremely powerful mechanism. Without relegating any person or idea completely to the bit bucket, we still have a mechanism that promotes what we, the community of Slashdot, deem to be most worthy of the attention of our fellow users to the front of the queue.
I was wondering if Transmeta was going to ride the wave of their announcement yesterday and be the next IPO we'd hear about. They are not strictly an open source related company, but I think nearly everyone here was listening yesterday. I didn't expect the announcement would come for a few days or even a couple of weeks, but it was the next one I was waiting for.
The evolution of e-mail and the growth of the Web has brought distinctive e-communities into increasing contact with outsiders. "From the perspective of veterans," writes Stefik, "hordes of new users have invaded their discussions over the past few years, using bad etiquette and asking dumb questions. The social problem is analogous to the problem of assimilation when natural disasters or wars lead to mass movements of people to new lands. When the rate of immigration exceeds a certain amount, the resulting chaos and need for adjustment in the host country can evoke resentment and backlash from the resident population."
This plays off of something in the first article in this series rather well. You pointed out that there is a tendency to have a filtered view of the Internet. Each person has his own mental model of it. Those of us who do more than shop online, who actually participate in online communities, believe that the places we visit have residents in a sense and a community identity.
The instincts that lead us to protect a community from being changed beyond recognition are in direct conflict however with the Net's lack of place. Slashdot, is not closer nor farther away from comp.lang.c++ than it is from denask-l (I won't put the exact address here to keep it away from spammers). And all three of these are as easily accessible to people with the technology from anywhere.
There is a tendency to view all of the communities we encounter through the filters of our experience. Old-timers know what the community has been. Newbies believe it to be something different. The old-timers are there because it offers them something they want or need. They are going to resist losing that. And the newbies are seeking something. Where those conflict, there will be friction.
And the point I am driving toward is that this friction is good. We now have the ability to build communities around shared interests that completely transcend place. I have participated in one of these for years that doesn't even have a single fixed location on the net, the online community of Esperantists. You will find us in several newsgroups, mailing lists and web sites. Such communities must resist undermining the central defining characteristics of the community. To the extent that they can succeed in that, the Internet is no longer a homogenizing force. Instead, it allows small, widely dispersed groups to form communities. But to police community identity requires people who are willing to escalate to abrasiveness in order to exclude people who insist on using a forum in ways that will undermine its central purpose.
This resistance to seeing a community destroyed by off-topic use is perhaps the most persuasive argument against spam. Individual people or companies selling online may be able to argue that they are selling to the right groups. Unlike broadcast media, even if they are right, there is no authority, no owner, enforcing a ratio of on-topic content versus advertising. Self-regulation might be tolerated easily (advertising a web site with product information in a.sig) where broader advertise wouldn't be (Green Card Lawyers). But when spam is either off-topic or drowns out the content of the channel, it destroys the very community that it was intended to leverage. This explains the resistance to even on-topic advertising. It is not that commercial use per se is abhorrent to everyone, but we cherish the communities and don't want to risk their loss.
Biology resorts to game theory in some cases to explain the balance achieved between the different strategies pursued by various members of a species. It applies here as well. A community composed entirely of abrasive, aggressive curmugdeons each tenaciously defending it against his own view of what the community should be is no more viable than a community with no one but an army. And yet both virtual and physical communities need their defenders. Such people must be unyielding on certain important points.
For the net to allow communities to form and survive at all will require a certain amount of conflict. It is unavoidable, and desirable. It is part of community identity.
Wouldn't it be cool if they would open source their forecasting code? It isn't like anyone is threatening to take over the job of actually doing the forecasts. Most of us don't have the computing horsepower. And who else has the up-to-date data sources? But I think some of us might take a look under the hood to see how it all works. And if they're lucky, they might get a couple of good patches that would get the a little more speed or fix a bug or two.
And I don't begrudge him the opportunity to donate the proceeds to whatever charity he wants. If he wants suggestions from us, he can ask. He can make a political statement, try to right something that is wrong with the world or whatever. The bottom line on this is that by offering up 4 times what Micros~1 gave him for saving them major bucks, he makes them look awfully petty by comparison. Regardless of where the money goes, he's made his political statement already.
Okay, it isn't new and it isn't my idea originally, but I'll put a new spin on it. Is there a new for a moderated index to the most useful stuff on the web? Hey andover.net, I'm talking to you too. An index to everything open source related would be great. After all, an index to the whole web is a huge project that never ends and eventually sucks up all your free time. But it may be useful to have moderators rate the links on two factors:
General usefulness of the information on the page/site. Good stuff is good, no matter how you got there.
Specific applicability of the index to the page. Getting to the wrong good stuff or seeing too many links for a particular idea doesn't help.
That's what I hate about such "statistics". No information or context is given. One is not told how this estimate of "one billion" is gotten.
Remember, 53.4% of all statistics are invented on the spot. Of those, 63.1% are never checked against any reliable source. The rest are attributed to a survey done by Expensive Management Consultants. You can buy a copy of the report from them for only $2499, which includes the introductory price of a year's subscription to their weekly newletter containing the abstracts of other reports you can purchase, at a substantial 10% discount off the regular price that no one ever pays them anyway.
Why is one of them Hamster Dance? Don't go there with an 18 month old child on your lap. For an adult, this is funny once. For a toddler, it is funny every time the computer is on.
"Ninety percent of everything is crap". Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, "Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." Oddly, when Sturgeon's Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to `crap'. Compare Hanlon's Razor, Ninety-Ninety Rule. Though this maxim originated in SF fandom, most hackers recognize it and are all too aware of its truth.
I know it's too late now, but I would like to see write in candidates as well next time. I'm more interested in hearing about who has done what for open source than I really am about who wins. Since the spaces aren't there on the forms, I'd be delighted to hear from people here about people who didn't make the list. They probably didn't have the chance for the widespread recognition necessary to win, but let's mention them publically anyway. I'll start.
I nominated François Pinard, leader of the Free Translation Project for the unsung hero award. He has managed to gather support for the project a little at a time and keep it going largely through his own effort. There are certainly plenty of translators working on many of the individual languages, but he has done the organizational work to connect software projects with translation teams. If you are competent to translate, especially into a minority language, one of the best ways I can think of to thank him is to join or form a translation team.
The value of an operating system is a complex thing. The bottom line is that it is only worth the value to you of what you can run on it. Honestly, does anyone run a bare Linux kernel with nothing else. Let's see a show of hands. Right
What open source operating systems have done is change the range of options. At one time for the 8088, you could run DOS or CP/M. Other players came and went. Open source OS's are simply now among the choices. The difference is that for free, I can run a stable, powerful, reasonably lightweight OS with compilers, editors, games, text formatters, etc., etc. A competing OS is only worth as much more as the value of the applications that I can run on it and not the free one, or the value of the support that comes with the purchase price.
If corporate IS departments and government agencies can be educated that standardized protocols and file formats, not specific versions of specific applications, are the way to specify how they will distribute data, then stampede will be on. If I didn't have to read documents produced by a particular word processor in its own internal, undocumented, gratuitously changing format, I'd remove it and the OS it runs on from ever machine I controlled. Ooops, wait, I already did that. They won't let me do it at work.
My point here, is that if the artificial barriers that prevent running the pet applications fall, all the geeks in the world can switch to Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, or whatever. Trust me, my boss hasn't seen my PC often enough to know what I am running. All he cares about is that I can read what he writes and that he can read what I write. And the corporate IS folks, when they find out will probably panic. Even if open source OS's were every bit as difficult to use and maintain as commercial ones, people who choose to switch and install it themselves don't generally want support. The first time they make noises about support, we're likely to say, "Fine, don't support us and don't bill our department for it either."
Funding more than one smaller Linux distribution makes a certainly makes some sense. They are buying access to a potential customer base for support contracts. Not necessarily a bad idea. It might also be a way of hedging their bets if the day comes when they have to move their existing customers from their OS to Linux. They will have a couple of different distribution choices with which they have an existing relationship.
the latter [closed source] favors the development of monoliths, since they represent a harder-to-reverse-engineer, and therefore steeper, wall for competitors to climb
It does something else as well. A monolithic product having once garnered customers for one of its features is more likely to seduce them into using it instead of its competition for its other features. And it can be sold against a range of competitors, none of whom offer its full range of features.
I don't know if a Linux-jobs-only setting is the way to go.
It would certainly give us an environment where we don't start fresh every week explaining why Linux would be a better choice for this project or that. It would also be nice to have an environment where it is possible to collaborate with people working on other systems without the threat of being assimilated. And for once it would just be nice to use the words Slashdot, User Friendly, Strenua Interia, and Freshmeat without getting blank looks.;-)
If you're constantly asking someone questions in an attempt to learn the basics of Unix, then you're just being lazy.
Learning styles differ. I know people who learn very quickly when they are mentored. They are quick to master things, but their traditional research skills are weak. Helping them to find the resources they need and cull out the dreck that isn't worth their time is what they need.
"Grasshopper, when you can read the packet from the frame buffer..." is not what they are looking for. They just want someone who is already there to shout, "Over here!" once or twice a day so that they run in the right direction.
Okay, I can't answer your question. But, I think it is worthwhile as an exercise to go through the funding models that Eric Raymond presents in two chapters of The Magic Cauldron: Use-Value Funding Models and Indirect Sale-Value Models. Asking yourself how each of these models could apply to you, or why it couldn't, might help clarify the question.
It may be that you don't have a product to sell directly to customers (I'm not familiar with the project). What you might have to do is pitch the idea to somebody for whom the project would have value, still as an open source project.
CUI command parsers are often big and ugly to write
CUIs tend to adopt a "big is beautiful" approach
Programs having CUIs are hard to combine with other programs
CUIs do not scale well
Most important, CUIs do not take advantage of software leverage
This captures something I was trying to explain to a UI class I took a few weeks ago. The rest of the points tie into it in various ways, but the two things I brought up were:
Any interface that I can't automate out of my way is a bad one because no matter how optimized it is, it forces a certain minimum amount of interaction with me.
Internal protocols and file formats should be documented and accessible to readily available tools.
These two points led me to the statement "Open source is exposing the interfaces" a couple of weeks ago right here on Slashdot. The ideas behind that are simple:
If an open source project is going to thrive, it needs to interface with existing protocols and/or file formats.
Protocols that are published for free on the Web (RFCs, etc.) are the most widely available.
The more widely available the interfaces the greater the number of collaborators the project can potentially attract.
The code itself publishes the interfaces in open source. Since they can't be kept completely secret, there's not much point in hiding them.
Open interfaces encourage interfacing other projects with yours.
The difference between the interfaces in open source and proprietary software is not clear-cut. But there is a tendency for open source to have a more dynamic view of the world. The programmers working on the project aren't going to have complete control over all of the customization. So there is an incentive to give away a rich configuration mechanism, or someone will build it in.
One example, among my favorites, is the Free Translation Project. This project is enhancing quite a number of open source projects with translated messages and documentation in a variety of languages. I suspect that my own team are the entire community of users for the Esperanto translations at the moment. No proprietary software project could ever justify the cost of rolling the translations into the distribution and testing them. Our team has taken on that burden. We translate, we test,.... We have that option because the programmers who got there before us wanted to internationalize and gave us the interface (gettext and the strings to translate).
Stallman's reply and my take on the situation
on
Hole in GNU GPL?
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· Score: 4
RMS wrote:
I agree with that position, as a question of legal interpretation of the GPL. The reason is that the company is not distributing the program in that case.
I don't think it is ethically right to permanently withhold useful improvements. But that is a different question from what the GPL permits.
I saw this hole ages ago. The bottom line is that corporations function largely as fictitious people. Authorized people can enter into contracts on behalf of a corporation. The contract can outlive the person's employment or even the person. And it can enter into contracts on behalf of its employees, assuming that those contracts are legal.
The interesting test case would be one where a company makes changes that they want to keep to themselves to GPL'ed code and one of the employees releases them. What it would be testing is whether the employees could act as individuals with respect to the enhancements to the code.
I agree with RMS that it would be ethically wrong, violating the spirit, if not the letter of the GPL. Furthermore, I don't think it is in the interest of the company doing it. Eric Raymond has written about the reasons that projects don't fork in Homesteading the Noosphere. Nearly all of the reasons that apply to a forked open source project apply in greater measure to an internal project by a company. But there are a couple of other issues that are special in this case:
The corporation can't release to anyone external. They can't hire an outside contractor to work on it for them. That would be restricting the third party's right to redistribute the source. That restriction may apply even to providing it to their own employees. It would not apply to a team voluntarily restricting their own rights to redistribute their enhancements, I think. Ask a lawyer.
Because of the first issue, they would have to merge in any changes happening on the public fork entirely through their own effort or forego the benefits of any additional development there. As time went on the value of their version to them would fall. And the value of their changes to the rest of the world would as well.
In the end, I think it is an unlikely scenerio to last very long. In the short run, I could see a company wanting to keep some development private. A hardware manufacturer might keep drivers secret until they release their product in order not to tip their hand to the competition. I honestly don't think that is something we even want to try to discourage. If allowing them to do that encourages them to release open source drivers after the product release, I applaud them.
Slashdot Mirror
I must disagree. This disallows for the possibility of linguistic innovation. Furthermore, or the course of many generations, it would make the linguistic styles of members of stable populations increasingly indistiguishable from each other.
I know that I speak my own idiolect. Large parts of it come from the people around me. Parts of it don't. Particular bits of wordplay have become in jokes for my friends and family. Each of us originated some of them. Each of us use a subset of them.
I have watched my own "voice" evolve over the years. I can attribute some of the changes to specific influences in my life. I have consciously borrowed from languages that I have learned and people I have met.
Some of my choices in wording also reflect outside influences: profession, location, hobbies, etc. But some are my own choice. This in no way invalidates the theory that stylistic data can identify an author. It would be difficult for me to completely enumerate every identifying characteristic of my writing and hide it effectively. However, some of it I consciously created or chose for myself.
As for learning another language, to a certain extent you are right. One common misconception about multilingual people is that there is a measurable degree of fluency in each language. The granularity is finer than that. I have friends from college who are quite fluent bilingually, but cannot discuss their professions in anything but English. It is the language in which they studied and now work. They don't have a technical vocabulary in their other languages.
There was a guy like this making his way through a sizeable portion of Usenet a couple of years ago. At first I was surprised when he showed up in several completely unrelated groups that I read. The likelihood that someone would not only share my interests, but not be far from my viewpoint was surprising. On one topic, it made sense. By the time he hit the third it was shocking.
However, what he posted was actually on topic, or close to it for most of the newsgroups. He was posting, in pieces, books that had lapsed into the public domain that were relevant to the newsgroup. If I had to guess, he was testing some autoposting software. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if it was a testing of spamming software.
He was not hard to killfile though because he would stick to a particular e-mail address and subject (title, author and incrementing part number) for the duration of each book.
From just my description of his "work", I would bet that several people here can identify him, or at least his pseudonym if it was one, and a list of newsgroups he was seen in. Recognizing trolls when they change addresses has been a popular sport on Usenet for years. I'm looking forward to refining my techniques.
Thanks for the thoughtful commentary! Yes, I did come across somewhat arrogantly. That was the point in this specific case. Arrogance breeds arrogance. When somebody crosses the line in their advocacy of Windows to tell me I should buy it, I treat them a lot differently than I treat someone who says, "I use Windows because it does what I want."
I realize that Windows is a perfectly acceptable operating system for an enormous number of people. And, if you can imagine it, I don't think they are all stupid, gullible twits looking for someone to give their money to. No, a lot of them are just people looking to get a job done.
I hope you'll understand if I don't feel too upset that two Anonymous Cowards decided that I'm arrogant on the basis of a single article. Like most people, I have a range of ideas and opinions. Some of them are a bit harsher than others. I also have my good moments and my bad ones. Not everything I write can be a gem for every reader.
I wonder what Martha Stewart does with hers?
Coasters would be entirely too obvious. I'm sure she has some much more inventive use for them.
And a note to every online service sending me CDs: I have an ISP and a Linux box. If your software doesn't run on Linux or *BSD, thanks for the coaster.
However, there are people in open source who point out all of the things they need or want that MS doesn't provide:
The usual answer from MS or its defenders is that Windows is as good or good enough or that the item isn't necessary. The point that usually goes unstated and shouldn't is really very simple: It's my machine. These are my computing tasks. I say these things are necessary. Attacking my opinions and my best judgement concerning how to fulfill my needs is a quick way to alienate me.
Alienating potential allies is a good way to turn them into opponents. That's no problem when they are your competitors. But when they were potential customers, it isn't good business. Open source OSs for the i386 architecture gave a lot of people like me the option of saying, "Fine, I'll be over here getting some work done." They gave the zealots a rallying point to try to take market share from MS. I'm not in the zealot camp, but every bit of FUD I read pushes me that way.
I am a cynic in some ways. I have eyes and a brain. When someone tells me something that contradicts my experience, I take a look. If I can't find a hole that makes it at least plausible that I am wrong and I find that their version would benefit them, I assume that I am being lied to. Note my choice of wording. When I am told something that in my experience can't possibly be true but would benefit them, I don't assume that the speaker is merely mistaken.
My reason is simple. I hold people to a standard of competence when they demand a change from me. People have a right to be mistaken without a presumption of malice. When they apply their own judgement to me, for their own benefit, I expect them to be right. I don't apply that standard to the neighbor who offers me a cookie with the words, "You'll love this new recipe." I do apply it to the painter who says he can paint my house less expensively than his competitor.
If somebody wants me to buy, use or recommend software, they have to convince me that it can do the job. There are some jobs that Windows can do. All but the most hardcore of zealots will agree to that. I'm not ready to recommend to my mother that she replace Windows with Linux on her machine. There are things that Windows can't do. There is no Windows equivalent to Beowolf that I known of. Windows won't run on a lot of hardware platforms that Linux has been ported to. The middle ground is heavily disputed.
Wanting to be better than the competition isn't enough. Wanting people to believe that you are better than the competition isn't enough. Being better and convincing customers of it is the bottom line. My mind is still open. Windows didn't freeze at 3.1. Linux has evolved since the 1.0 kernel. If MS wants me, I'm out here, but they have to have something to say.
The Internet is a wild card. A lot of us aren't listening to what we are being told we will be doing. I've already considered McCain and Bradley. I won't bother to go into a lengthy discussion of them here. It isn't relevant.
I am not a statistic. I am not a number. I am a minority of one and so is each and every person reading this. Don't let the pollsters tell you what you are likely to do. Go out and read the candidates' web sites. Read the candidate comparisons that are going to appear all over the web over the next 10 months. And make an intelligent decision.
Too many media outlets pretend that nothing matters in a presidential race each the Democratic and Republican Party nominees and the photo ops. They don't dig. They tell the stories that will attract the biggest audiences. The net not only doesn't have to do that, there is really no way to constrain it to do that.
I suggested it here before, and I'll suggest it again. It would be interesting to see Slashdot polls about how Slashdot readers will be voting. I would be particularly interested if a few of us, and I'll volunteer, post links to useful web sites with analyses by a variety of interest groups of the candidates' positions. I'm as interested in what the people I wouldn't trust with a soggy match think of the candidates as I am in what the people I like think of them.
Let's give them participatory democracy and see what happens. I bet there are candidates who will love it. It will attract the underdogs, and probably the lunatic fringe as well... but what a show.
Are hostile environments simply a trade-off for freedom, then, one of the permanent legacies of the talented young men who helped build the Net and are building it still?
Probably. There is really no way to come up with a single right answer to the question of how much freedom is enough. Nearly everyone will agree that an individual's freedom includes everything that doesn't infringe on the rights of another. But that raises obvious questions when multiple parties interact. For example, I am an advocate of nearly unlimited freedom of speech. With that freedom comes the responsibility for what I say. I can make damaging claims about someone, but if they are not true, I have done him harm unjustly. And I am responsible for that. Fine.
Now does the moderator of a web site have the right to restrict my access because of what I say? If that web site is treated like a broadcaster or a publisher, yes. But is a web site more like a public forum? It is hard to say. The analogies break down somewhat. I would lean towards saying that the owner of the site has the right to determine how it is used. Does that come with responsibility for that use? That could depend in complex ways on the moderation policy.
Do the people running websites have any responsibility for creating environments which are truly free, and not dominated by the most hostile members?
I would say no. The responsibility is to have a clear policy posted about the rules, if any, for use of the site. And while that policy will necessarily be rather general, it should be applied as consistently as possible. That will allow free for all environments to compete for mind share with heavily moderated environments. Each community can define its own standards, but should publish them.
Do members of these communities - that's us - have any responsibility to challenge people who assault others online, create environments in which some of the most urgent issues of our lifetimes can be discussed and debated in a coherent, civil and rational way?
No. And I'll happily shout down anyone who says that I do. I'm responsible for my own actions, not those of others. I rarely respond to abusive people. First of all, they are not worth the effort in most cases. Yes, I am saying that they are beneath my contempt. But more importantly, they are often acting abusive to attract attention. They get some amusement out of the annoyance they cause. I don't bother. Short of being able to permanently pull the plug on their net access, we can't get rid of them. The only other option is to ignore them, perhaps by actively filtering them out. Yes, I do maintain a killfill for my newsreader.
And perhaps most importantly, are people responsible for what they say?
Yes. That does not differ from speech in the physical world. The medium does not alter responsibility for the content. What it does change is the range of options available to us. It is possible to create anonymous, persistent, verifiable identities on a network. Most web browsers, web sites, newsreaders, mail clients, etc. don't take advantage of these technologies. That would allow us to maintain anonymity along with all of its advantages along with the ability to attach a reputation and a history to an identity. Just as Karma points on Slashdot link a logged in user to a history of activity, so could a more pervasive technology.
Certainly, there would be people who would create new identities frequently and use them abusively. And the reputation of each one would fall from zero downward. They would be of little use. Identities for which a person had developed a positive reputation would be worth keeping. Just as here on Slashdot, I am motivated to post intelligent comments. People obviously read what I say because my comments are moderated favorably and people reply to my comments.
I value the availability to post as an Anonymous Coward. I value it because it gives people posting subjects that are too hot to handle personally a chance to let us know about them. But perhaps even more valuable, it makes Slashdot accessible to anyone who drops in. It lowers the barriers to posting comments. That encourages new blood and new ideas. The guys at Slashdot have deliberately restricted their own control over the site. They post the articles. They guide the site towards the topics they consider to be the focus of the site. And then the option to comment is not restricted.
Had they stopped there, Slashdot would be very much like Usenet in some ways. The articles posted each day would act as newsgroups with people free to start any threads they wanted, but unable to create their on groups. The additional step of moderation, performed by a large pool of interested users effective means that we are using the abilities and interests of the users of the site to help focus it. It is an extremely powerful mechanism. Without relegating any person or idea completely to the bit bucket, we still have a mechanism that promotes what we, the community of Slashdot, deem to be most worthy of the attention of our fellow users to the front of the queue.
I was wondering if Transmeta was going to ride the wave of their announcement yesterday and be the next IPO we'd hear about. They are not strictly an open source related company, but I think nearly everyone here was listening yesterday. I didn't expect the announcement would come for a few days or even a couple of weeks, but it was the next one I was waiting for.
The evolution of e-mail and the growth of the Web has brought distinctive e-communities into increasing contact with outsiders. "From the perspective of veterans," writes Stefik, "hordes of new users have invaded their discussions over the past few years, using bad etiquette and asking dumb questions. The social problem is analogous to the problem of assimilation when natural disasters or wars lead to mass movements of people to new lands. When the rate of immigration exceeds a certain amount, the resulting chaos and need for adjustment in the host country can evoke resentment and backlash from the resident population."
.sig) where broader advertise wouldn't be (Green Card Lawyers). But when spam is either off-topic or drowns out the content of the channel, it destroys the very community that it was intended to leverage. This explains the resistance to even on-topic advertising. It is not that commercial use per se is abhorrent to everyone, but we cherish the communities and don't want to risk their loss.
This plays off of something in the first article in this series rather well. You pointed out that there is a tendency to have a filtered view of the Internet. Each person has his own mental model of it. Those of us who do more than shop online, who actually participate in online communities, believe that the places we visit have residents in a sense and a community identity.
The instincts that lead us to protect a community from being changed beyond recognition are in direct conflict however with the Net's lack of place. Slashdot, is not closer nor farther away from comp.lang.c++ than it is from denask-l (I won't put the exact address here to keep it away from spammers). And all three of these are as easily accessible to people with the technology from anywhere.
There is a tendency to view all of the communities we encounter through the filters of our experience. Old-timers know what the community has been. Newbies believe it to be something different. The old-timers are there because it offers them something they want or need. They are going to resist losing that. And the newbies are seeking something. Where those conflict, there will be friction.
And the point I am driving toward is that this friction is good. We now have the ability to build communities around shared interests that completely transcend place. I have participated in one of these for years that doesn't even have a single fixed location on the net, the online community of Esperantists. You will find us in several newsgroups, mailing lists and web sites. Such communities must resist undermining the central defining characteristics of the community. To the extent that they can succeed in that, the Internet is no longer a homogenizing force. Instead, it allows small, widely dispersed groups to form communities. But to police community identity requires people who are willing to escalate to abrasiveness in order to exclude people who insist on using a forum in ways that will undermine its central purpose.
This resistance to seeing a community destroyed by off-topic use is perhaps the most persuasive argument against spam. Individual people or companies selling online may be able to argue that they are selling to the right groups. Unlike broadcast media, even if they are right, there is no authority, no owner, enforcing a ratio of on-topic content versus advertising. Self-regulation might be tolerated easily (advertising a web site with product information in a
Biology resorts to game theory in some cases to explain the balance achieved between the different strategies pursued by various members of a species. It applies here as well. A community composed entirely of abrasive, aggressive curmugdeons each tenaciously defending it against his own view of what the community should be is no more viable than a community with no one but an army. And yet both virtual and physical communities need their defenders. Such people must be unyielding on certain important points.
For the net to allow communities to form and survive at all will require a certain amount of conflict. It is unavoidable, and desirable. It is part of community identity.
Wouldn't it be cool if they would open source their forecasting code? It isn't like anyone is threatening to take over the job of actually doing the forecasts. Most of us don't have the computing horsepower. And who else has the up-to-date data sources? But I think some of us might take a look under the hood to see how it all works. And if they're lucky, they might get a couple of good patches that would get the a little more speed or fix a bug or two.
And I don't begrudge him the opportunity to donate the proceeds to whatever charity he wants. If he wants suggestions from us, he can ask. He can make a political statement, try to right something that is wrong with the world or whatever. The bottom line on this is that by offering up 4 times what Micros~1 gave him for saving them major bucks, he makes them look awfully petty by comparison. Regardless of where the money goes, he's made his political statement already.
The link you provided doesn't respond well. I think they've been slashdotted. So I did a search at Google for Hamsterdeath and found this. Enjoy!
I'm willing to help moderate on some subjects.
That's what I hate about such "statistics". No information or context is given. One is not told how this estimate of "one billion" is gotten.
Remember, 53.4% of all statistics are invented on the spot. Of those, 63.1% are never checked against any reliable source. The rest are attributed to a survey done by Expensive Management Consultants. You can buy a copy of the report from them for only $2499, which includes the introductory price of a year's subscription to their weekly newletter containing the abstracts of other reports you can purchase, at a substantial 10% discount off the regular price that no one ever pays them anyway.
Why is one of them Hamster Dance? Don't go there with an 18 month old child on your lap. For an adult, this is funny once. For a toddler, it is funny every time the computer is on.
I know it's too late now, but I would like to see write in candidates as well next time. I'm more interested in hearing about who has done what for open source than I really am about who wins. Since the spaces aren't there on the forms, I'd be delighted to hear from people here about people who didn't make the list. They probably didn't have the chance for the widespread recognition necessary to win, but let's mention them publically anyway. I'll start.
I nominated François Pinard, leader of the Free Translation Project for the unsung hero award. He has managed to gather support for the project a little at a time and keep it going largely through his own effort. There are certainly plenty of translators working on many of the individual languages, but he has done the organizational work to connect software projects with translation teams. If you are competent to translate, especially into a minority language, one of the best ways I can think of to thank him is to join or form a translation team.
The value of an operating system is a complex thing. The bottom line is that it is only worth the value to you of what you can run on it. Honestly, does anyone run a bare Linux kernel with nothing else. Let's see a show of hands. Right
What open source operating systems have done is change the range of options. At one time for the 8088, you could run DOS or CP/M. Other players came and went. Open source OS's are simply now among the choices. The difference is that for free, I can run a stable, powerful, reasonably lightweight OS with compilers, editors, games, text formatters, etc., etc. A competing OS is only worth as much more as the value of the applications that I can run on it and not the free one, or the value of the support that comes with the purchase price.
If corporate IS departments and government agencies can be educated that standardized protocols and file formats, not specific versions of specific applications, are the way to specify how they will distribute data, then stampede will be on. If I didn't have to read documents produced by a particular word processor in its own internal, undocumented, gratuitously changing format, I'd remove it and the OS it runs on from ever machine I controlled. Ooops, wait, I already did that. They won't let me do it at work.
My point here, is that if the artificial barriers that prevent running the pet applications fall, all the geeks in the world can switch to Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, or whatever. Trust me, my boss hasn't seen my PC often enough to know what I am running. All he cares about is that I can read what he writes and that he can read what I write. And the corporate IS folks, when they find out will probably panic. Even if open source OS's were every bit as difficult to use and maintain as commercial ones, people who choose to switch and install it themselves don't generally want support. The first time they make noises about support, we're likely to say, "Fine, don't support us and don't bill our department for it either."
Funding more than one smaller Linux distribution makes a certainly makes some sense. They are buying access to a potential customer base for support contracts. Not necessarily a bad idea. It might also be a way of hedging their bets if the day comes when they have to move their existing customers from their OS to Linux. They will have a couple of different distribution choices with which they have an existing relationship.
the latter [closed source] favors the development of monoliths, since they represent a harder-to-reverse-engineer, and therefore steeper, wall for competitors to climb
It does something else as well. A monolithic product having once garnered customers for one of its features is more likely to seduce them into using it instead of its competition for its other features. And it can be sold against a range of competitors, none of whom offer its full range of features.
I don't know if a Linux-jobs-only setting is the way to go.
;-)
It would certainly give us an environment where we don't start fresh every week explaining why Linux would be a better choice for this project or that. It would also be nice to have an environment where it is possible to collaborate with people working on other systems without the threat of being assimilated. And for once it would just be nice to use the words Slashdot, User Friendly, Strenua Interia, and Freshmeat without getting blank looks.
If you're constantly asking someone questions in an attempt to learn the basics of Unix, then you're just being lazy.
Learning styles differ. I know people who learn very quickly when they are mentored. They are quick to master things, but their traditional research skills are weak. Helping them to find the resources they need and cull out the dreck that isn't worth their time is what they need.
"Grasshopper, when you can read the packet from the frame buffer..." is not what they are looking for. They just want someone who is already there to shout, "Over here!" once or twice a day so that they run in the right direction.
Okay, I can't answer your question. But, I think it is worthwhile as an exercise to go through the funding models that Eric Raymond presents in two chapters of The Magic Cauldron: Use-Value Funding Models and Indirect Sale-Value Models. Asking yourself how each of these models could apply to you, or why it couldn't, might help clarify the question.
It may be that you don't have a product to sell directly to customers (I'm not familiar with the project). What you might have to do is pitch the idea to somebody for whom the project would have value, still as an open source project.
This captures something I was trying to explain to a UI class I took a few weeks ago. The rest of the points tie into it in various ways, but the two things I brought up were:
These two points led me to the statement "Open source is exposing the interfaces" a couple of weeks ago right here on Slashdot. The ideas behind that are simple:
The difference between the interfaces in open source and proprietary software is not clear-cut. But there is a tendency for open source to have a more dynamic view of the world. The programmers working on the project aren't going to have complete control over all of the customization. So there is an incentive to give away a rich configuration mechanism, or someone will build it in.
One example, among my favorites, is the Free Translation Project. This project is enhancing quite a number of open source projects with translated messages and documentation in a variety of languages. I suspect that my own team are the entire community of users for the Esperanto translations at the moment. No proprietary software project could ever justify the cost of rolling the translations into the distribution and testing them. Our team has taken on that burden. We translate, we test,
I agree with that position, as a question of legal interpretation of the GPL. The reason is that the company is not distributing the program in that case.
I don't think it is ethically right to permanently withhold useful improvements. But that is a different question from what the GPL permits.
I saw this hole ages ago. The bottom line is that corporations function largely as fictitious people. Authorized people can enter into contracts on behalf of a corporation. The contract can outlive the person's employment or even the person. And it can enter into contracts on behalf of its employees, assuming that those contracts are legal.
The interesting test case would be one where a company makes changes that they want to keep to themselves to GPL'ed code and one of the employees releases them. What it would be testing is whether the employees could act as individuals with respect to the enhancements to the code.
I agree with RMS that it would be ethically wrong, violating the spirit, if not the letter of the GPL. Furthermore, I don't think it is in the interest of the company doing it. Eric Raymond has written about the reasons that projects don't fork in Homesteading the Noosphere. Nearly all of the reasons that apply to a forked open source project apply in greater measure to an internal project by a company. But there are a couple of other issues that are special in this case:
In the end, I think it is an unlikely scenerio to last very long. In the short run, I could see a company wanting to keep some development private. A hardware manufacturer might keep drivers secret until they release their product in order not to tip their hand to the competition. I honestly don't think that is something we even want to try to discourage. If allowing them to do that encourages them to release open source drivers after the product release, I applaud them.