Compliment something about linux. Say that Open Source allows rapid development, for example. Doesn't necessarily have to be related.
Make a disclaimer: "I use linux, and it's great, but.."
Use any of the following to "soften" the statement: probably, technically speaking, usually, generally speaking. If you're wrong, you don't look as bad.
Stick to the facts. If you offer an unsubstantiated opinion, you'll be flamed and/or moderated to oblivion. Avoid holy-wars! Do not say emacs or vi sucks and joe rules. Again - keep it factual so they don't have a leg to stand on if/when they flame you.
DO NOT make it personal. Don't say Rob sucks, or RMS is a blow-hard. You'll surely be ignored.
Try to quote people already considered 'in' the community. Quoting ESR or RMS is essentially like quoting the Bible to a Christian - who the hell is going to argue with/them/?
This is coming from the guy most-often referred to as the karma whore on slashdot, so I think I know what I'm talking about. If you want, my e-mail (above) is valid, feel free to discuss this in a more private forum. It's also easier to keep track of. =)
In short, argue as you normally would, but don't step on people's toes while doing it. Mud-slinging is out. No matter how stupid somebody else's opinion seems, treat it as equal to your own. ie: respectfully disagree with them. And it lends more credibility to your side if/when you don't resort to such tactics.
I've been working tech support for going on 3 years. I've written my share of documentation, and I've read quite abit more of it. The problem with linux documentation I think is three-fold:
Diverse environment. It's very difficult to write short, concise, documentation when you need to do a writeup for over a dozen possible environments. Take setting up an internet connection on RH6. You could do it in any of the following fashions: pppd, linuxconf (ifup/ifdown), kppp, gnome's modem, etc. Each program does the same thing but has a substantially different interface.
Limited experience. Let's face it, most people hacking code haven't done tech support long enough to aquire good writing skills. Their code is beautiful, but their explanations are severely lacking. Learning how to take the knowledge you have and lay it out to someone who knows nothing about it is very, very difficult in any technical profession.
Different userbase. Until now, the linux community consisted mainly of highly-trained network and systems people, programmers, and well-learned geeks. Now that the balance is shifting to people who are relatively inexperienced, a huge gaping chasm for documentation has opened up.
Sorry for the length, but it was necessary to get to the question. My question is this: What can be done through an online forum to teach [experienced] people on how to convey their knowledge in a format useful to a new linux user?
*THuD!* Wait, too late.. the crowds hit. And they're cheering... "slashdot effect! agggh! Stupid Rob.. no responsibility! My T1.. it's dead! NNNNOOOOooooo! f1r$t p05t d00d!"
Anyway, that aside.. does this strike anyone else as a marketing ploy? Mozilla isn't ready.. yet they're making an announcement. I thought the open source credo for releases was "when it's done". Maybe I'm mistaken... OSS proponents can be influenced by money and prestige. Suprise.
I predict this will put IBM out of business. The reasoning is very simple: small computers aren't impressive.
My company just bought a huge HP server. It's roomy enough to sit seven for dinner, muliple redundant power supplies, a 6 disk RAID system, ad nauseum. It's very impressive to look at. Of course, I could build a system to do the same thing at a fraction of the cost, but nobody would buy it because it's small, and doesn't Look Cool.
That's the hidden thing that many companies don't realize. Why did Intel start making CPU *cartridges*? Simple - a small 2x2 inch slab of silicon looks pathetic. "You paid $800 for *THAT*? Ahahahahaha!" They say. Now, you go and show them a stylish cartridge with a cool hologram on the side and all of the sudden "ooh, ahh!" and they want one too.
Just a quickie - linux has had macro viruses. Check out emacs, which allows auto-interpreting of how many spaces a tab should be in.c files, or in vi where the first line could contain instructions for vi to execute on load.
Such stupidities are not limited to the windows world, nor are they any less rare. Windows simply has a unified interface. Imagine writing a virus that had to be capable of infecting the system in 62 different languages, and now you see why it isn't practical under linux. But it's possible, the means are there.
If I may be so brave as to point out, you're disillusioned. SDS wrote the port huron statement. You're thinking of the radical group that later splintered from theirs and went on to burn down records buildings and do other mischevous things. Amazing how revisionist history works...
Signal degredation occurs because of resistance (whether inductive or capacitive reactance, self-inductance in the wires, or whatelsenot)..
So the key is really to lower the impedance in the circuit. Best way I can figure is to use silver encased in something that prevents it from coming in contact with the atmosphere. Less important (but still a major issue) is to make sure you don't switch metal types. But there's problems with that (as you're no doubt aware).. Anyway, that's only if you want to stick with circuits that need to stay near room temperature.. you can throw that requirement in the trash if you can lower your circuit's temperature to below 300 degrees. I already have word from a few aerospace gearheads I know that think that using a pneumatic drill to get the required pressure to liquify air would work perfectly for this. We can even fit it inside a conventional computer case with alittle bit of engineering muscle. Of course, then you have the problem of temperature differences.. agh. Anyway, it's possible, but right now it isn't plausible. If I had about 5 million dollars I know exactly who I'd hire to build it though.;)
After that, signal degredation becomes a non-issue (no resistance, muwhahaha!) and your op amps operate pretty damn close to their theoretical limits.
I think the bigger benefit will be in making the 'core' of the processor asyncronous. I think something alittle like transmeta's idea for code morphing combined with an async architecture would yield a helluva improvement.
But of course, it's all talk and no circuits.. and I'm atleast 2 years away from even being able to tell you how I'd accomplish this. But, the idea is pretty damn cool - if you have a completely analog core, massive massive massive parallelism becomes possible. I was discussing with a friend of mine how one might go about making the 'state' of the core available to any I/O subsystem in the entire system and we arrived at the conclusion that it would take fiber optics (and courtesy of those nice little lasers recently invented that operate in the fem??? second range) to move that kind of information around inside the case. Aggggghhh.
Great ideas.. but no practical plan to get to them yet. That's what I'm working on..:/ You can see why I'm going slowly insane.
It won't be a march, it'll be a stampede! Just show Katz up onto the stage and it'll break out into rioting not seen since the democractic convention in chicago. The only other person I know of who could inspire such a devout following would be some short guy in glasses who is pitifully rich and took over the world by monopolizing computer operating systems.
Empirical evidence, I think, speaks for itself. 30 years in the running and no sign of 'death' yet. I don't believe any other OS in computing can claim that distinction. Unix is versatile, appears on multiple platforms, and is gaining ground even today in the server market. I'm betting it will continue to survive for another 20 years. Infact, as soon as I raise enough capital to get into the stock market, I'm going to do just that: bet on unix.
Just a quickie - I am building an analog processor. My first task will be to try to build a integer unit that can take two frequencies and do a boolean operation on them and spit the result out on the 'output' side at one-half the input side's frequency.
I know that doesn't make much sense, but I'm not an EE yet either.;) Essentially it will have a large bandwidth pipe going in (analog) and punch through a series of op-amps to invert the signals and then will be filtered by a DSP to produce an intelligible signal (ie, digital) to be handed back to the memory manager to decide what to do with this. The interesting thing is that I plan on making it so that you can 'bounce' a signal back through the integer unit with a different op (instruction) several times. This would make it possible for me to rapidly do several computations without memory delays. I also want to make it an async processor.. that is to say that what goes in first may not be what comes out first. There's some cutting edge researching being done on this that I hope I can adapt once I know more.
For now, it's largely a pipe dream, but I am working on it.. hopefully in about 2 years I'll have a prototype VLSI to interface to a regular computer and do some/real/ work with it.
This all, of course, assumes that I can figure out how to make the circuits in the first place, heh.
And this affects us, how, again? My job is to build things.. networks, servers, applications, and also to keep them working. I'm a typical computer geek - that is to say I know alittle about alot of different areas about computing, but I'm an expert in only a few (at this moment, that's basically security, linux, and networking). Why does it matter what the USPO is doing? Really now.
We're discussing this like a couple of lawyers would enthusiastically discuss their latest injunctions over a cup of hot joe in the morning. I'm not a lawyer.. infact I hate the law and try to avoid it whenever possible. My hobby/job/most-enjoyable-recreational-activity is to put servers together, network them, and then make them do nifty stuff for me. The fact that somebody patented technology for using wormholes or one-click shopping is completely irrelevant to me. Let the lawyers go bash it out - but leave me alone!
Please explain to me why we're getting so worked up about it. Open Source / Free Software does NOT need patents. We design a program/device and release it to the public. If somebody goes off and patents it after that point, we just point to our reference model and say 2 magic words: "prior art", and the problem disappears. Is it also not true that we as a community in general work around patented stupidities on a daily basis without much ado?
Patents are dead and useless... who cares if Amazon patents the one-click shopping model? I'll just use java-script to create a hover-over-this-button shopping setup. Somebody patents the knife and fork? I'll use chopsticks then. Somebody patents the CPU? I'll grab my soldering gun and make an analog computer out of op amps and transistors with a level of parallelism unknown previous to this. The point is that we can move so fast and so far forward that by the time they can say a program this community created is in violation of patent X we've already likely devised a completely new system that makes that system antiquidated!
Stop worrying about the world of patents and just hack code - eventually they won't have any money left because they'll have spent it all purchasing and defending antiquidated patents. Let the system die of it's own excesses.
Just be glad they didn't call the pig "/.". I mean, the pig runs at 400 MPH, speaks intelligently saying that people are either insightful or informative and ocasionally offtopic, and for some unknown reason just stops midstride, falls over, and becomes completely comatose once a week. But, we just accept this. "There is nothing wrong with the pig, and we're working to fix it as fast as possible.";)
Not to disagree with the guy (I believe he's right that internet taxation is a futile endeavor - the IRS would have better luck collecting taxes on black-market transactions), but I couldn't help but notice that he moans about how his opponents "say but don't do".. and then he goes on to say what consumers will do if faced with such a quandry. Uh, hello?
I think he would have done better quoting the Supreme Court as "the power to tax is the power to destroy", a landmark case in which the Supreme Court set limits on how much taxes were reasonable.. and weren't. But, the old wrinkly judges that nobody bothers to listen to aside, did anyone ever consider that the politicians, in a remarkable reversal of all existing laws of physics, might be a step ahead of the rest of us?
Internet taxation is a jolly big problem, but it's obvious that global capitalism / corporatism is the next big thing. 10 or 20 years down the road the idea of a "local economy" will be a complete and udder joke. It's already getting that way right now. Any major purchase I make - computers, computer parts, person-to-person (used car(s)!), office furniture.. you name it, I buy it via mail order. Read: no taxes. They nip me for a buck here, a buck there, and several hundred bucks when income tax comes due, but that's about it.
But I digress, my point is that we're moving towards global capitalism / commercialism. Alan Greenspan had more to do with preventing the complete collapse of the Japanese market a few years ago than the Japanese had themselves (don't believe me? Ask an economist; I'll give you a hint: interest rates). In such an era, tax collection on individual goods and services will be extinct as we know it - it's a good 10-20 years away, but it's out there. In the meantime, the government economists and politicians are busily preparing to either find a new tax base.. or new ways to tax the existing one.
The government will get it's share.. believe me.. it's the ONE thing it's efficient at, if nothing else.
I agree completely, but would add one point: why are we so arrogant to believe that in one generation we can solve what thousands of years of natural evolution could not? There's a very, very, very good reason why we are not all super-intelligent. There's a similarily good reason why some of us are female and others male. Imagine if a society wanted all males due to their "desirable" traits in society. Well, you don't need to imagine: it's called China and it's a problem that is reaching biblical proportions.:(
There are, unfortunately, more examples. I fear that we will likely play with this proverbial fire and burn ourselves. I hope it doesn't kill us.
What will happen if you have two largely polarized groups of people.. and then you bring them together suddenly? Any history book past page 20 will tell you a bad-ass "war to end all wars" style conflict will break out, there will be large casualties, and lots of pain and suffering because both sides think they're "right". There is no right in these situations.. only wrong. We have not evolved yet enough to dispense with physical violence as a tool to promote change...
I'd just as soon we keep genetic engineering to the non-sentient lifeforms until we know more about it. I mean, the last thing we need is to engineer a "super" human which is not backwards-compatible with the current generation. Flip over to Star Trek TNG's story about how generically engineering an immune system to be "perfect" had the unfortunate side-effect of killing it's predecessors (namely, us) because of an unforseen variable: a normally harmless genetic virus for an example. I can think of more - science fiction is replete with these examples. I would say to anyone thinking seriously about this issue to spend some time at the library.. and some time in a movie theatre.
And don't think for a minute that viruses won't take advantage of the host's "improved immume systems" - even if the new super-humans aren't hostile towards the existing generation we're still stuck with the problem of viruses which will more rapidly attack and infect people with less of an immune system (path of least resistance - plant a tree in a sunny spot, plant another in a dark spot, which one uses more of the soil's resources?)...
We are messing with things far above and beyond our comprehension. I hate to say it, but I very nearly side with the conservative elements in our society on this - this is a matter best left to God. For now, anyway. The other sciences have not caught up enough to have enough of a base of knowledge to anticipate what will happen if we start changing genes. Trial and error is NOT an option for human experimentation.
What's the rate of return you guys are averaging? Market penetration? What are your earnings projections over the next year in the linux market?
Other slashdotters here seem interested in the coding challenge, which is cool, but I want to know how good of a return you guys are making on these ports. I'd like to take those statistics over to other companies to encourage them to port their products (not just games, but Real Apps too). These may be unglamorous questions, but they are the meat and potatoes ones that you no doubt answered when you decided to go ahead and port these games to linux.
Jon, I'm stuck in DMCA hell right now. My ISP has quasi-revoked access to my account. I have web access, but no e-mail or web storage right now. The message I got from their abuse department stated I was "distributing copyrighted software". Not pirated, not illegally, just that it was "copyrighted" so they booted me off the network. For the record, I distribute my own GPL'd program mp3db. My requests for additional information have gone unanswered.
The biggest threat the DMCA poses is that corporations are afraid of it. In true CYA (Cover Your Ass) mode these corporations are pre-emptively censoring and removing customers from their networks for things that may be offensive, illegal, or libelous - often with little or no supporting evidence other than an e-mail saying "I don't like so-and-so and will sue if you don't remove him."
The DMCA has locked us into a form of public-censorship by allowing ISPs to do this legally without regard to the evidence. The DMCA removed accountability controls for dozens of services and acts. This is the threat, this is why it MUST be stopped. Corporations are beginning to realize that they were not thinking when they signed on to this.. they are now realizing it is a sword that cuts two ways... and some of the smaller corporations are realizing they are ill-equipped to defend themselves against this. And how can they? The DMCA has removed the ability to fight unfair denial of resources.
Great article, but it says nothing about what to do with the current (broken) standards. IE4 and Netscape are still incompatible in rendering a variety of things. I would have hoped there would be some practical advice to be had in this interview...
Slashdot Mirror
I got the mpeg of that around here somewhere...
This is coming from the guy most-often referred to as the karma whore on slashdot, so I think I know what I'm talking about. If you want, my e-mail (above) is valid, feel free to discuss this in a more private forum. It's also easier to keep track of. =)
In short, argue as you normally would, but don't step on people's toes while doing it. Mud-slinging is out. No matter how stupid somebody else's opinion seems, treat it as equal to your own. ie: respectfully disagree with them. And it lends more credibility to your side if/when you don't resort to such tactics.
~ Signal 11
Diverse environment.
It's very difficult to write short, concise, documentation when you need to do a writeup for over a dozen possible environments. Take setting up an internet connection on RH6. You could do it in any of the following fashions: pppd, linuxconf (ifup/ifdown), kppp, gnome's modem, etc. Each program does the same thing but has a substantially different interface.
Limited experience.
Let's face it, most people hacking code haven't done tech support long enough to aquire good writing skills. Their code is beautiful, but their explanations are severely lacking. Learning how to take the knowledge you have and lay it out to someone who knows nothing about it is very, very difficult in any technical profession.
Different userbase.
Until now, the linux community consisted mainly of highly-trained network and systems people, programmers, and well-learned geeks. Now that the balance is shifting to people who are relatively inexperienced, a huge gaping chasm for documentation has opened up.
Sorry for the length, but it was necessary to get to the question. My question is this: What can be done through an online forum to teach [experienced] people on how to convey their knowledge in a format useful to a new linux user?
Anyway, that aside.. does this strike anyone else as a marketing ploy? Mozilla isn't ready.. yet they're making an announcement. I thought the open source credo for releases was "when it's done". Maybe I'm mistaken... OSS proponents can be influenced by money and prestige. Suprise.
My company just bought a huge HP server. It's roomy enough to sit seven for dinner, muliple redundant power supplies, a 6 disk RAID system, ad nauseum. It's very impressive to look at. Of course, I could build a system to do the same thing at a fraction of the cost, but nobody would buy it because it's small, and doesn't Look Cool.
That's the hidden thing that many companies don't realize. Why did Intel start making CPU *cartridges*? Simple - a small 2x2 inch slab of silicon looks pathetic. "You paid $800 for *THAT*? Ahahahahaha!" They say. Now, you go and show them a stylish cartridge with a cool hologram on the side and all of the sudden "ooh, ahh!" and they want one too.
Nanotech is doomed.. it's too small. =)
Such stupidities are not limited to the windows world, nor are they any less rare. Windows simply has a unified interface. Imagine writing a virus that had to be capable of infecting the system in 62 different languages, and now you see why it isn't practical under linux. But it's possible, the means are there.
Fine, but you're the one responsible for resurrecting Disco then. ;)
So the key is really to lower the impedance in the circuit. Best way I can figure is to use silver encased in something that prevents it from coming in contact with the atmosphere. Less important (but still a major issue) is to make sure you don't switch metal types. But there's problems with that (as you're no doubt aware).. Anyway, that's only if you want to stick with circuits that need to stay near room temperature.. you can throw that requirement in the trash if you can lower your circuit's temperature to below 300 degrees. I already have word from a few aerospace gearheads I know that think that using a pneumatic drill to get the required pressure to liquify air would work perfectly for this. We can even fit it inside a conventional computer case with alittle bit of engineering muscle. Of course, then you have the problem of temperature differences.. agh. Anyway, it's possible, but right now it isn't plausible. If I had about 5 million dollars I know exactly who I'd hire to build it though. ;)
After that, signal degredation becomes a non-issue (no resistance, muwhahaha!) and your op amps operate pretty damn close to their theoretical limits.
I think the bigger benefit will be in making the 'core' of the processor asyncronous. I think something alittle like transmeta's idea for code morphing combined with an async architecture would yield a helluva improvement.
But of course, it's all talk and no circuits.. and I'm atleast 2 years away from even being able to tell you how I'd accomplish this. But, the idea is pretty damn cool - if you have a completely analog core, massive massive massive parallelism becomes possible. I was discussing with a friend of mine how one might go about making the 'state' of the core available to any I/O subsystem in the entire system and we arrived at the conclusion that it would take fiber optics (and courtesy of those nice little lasers recently invented that operate in the fem??? second range) to move that kind of information around inside the case. Aggggghhh.
Great ideas.. but no practical plan to get to them yet. That's what I'm working on.. :/ You can see why I'm going slowly insane.
It won't be a march, it'll be a stampede! Just show Katz up onto the stage and it'll break out into rioting not seen since the democractic convention in chicago. The only other person I know of who could inspire such a devout following would be some short guy in glasses who is pitifully rich and took over the world by monopolizing computer operating systems.
Empirical evidence, I think, speaks for itself. 30 years in the running and no sign of 'death' yet. I don't believe any other OS in computing can claim that distinction. Unix is versatile, appears on multiple platforms, and is gaining ground even today in the server market. I'm betting it will continue to survive for another 20 years. Infact, as soon as I raise enough capital to get into the stock market, I'm going to do just that: bet on unix.
I know that doesn't make much sense, but I'm not an EE yet either. ;) Essentially it will have a large bandwidth pipe going in (analog) and punch through a series of op-amps to invert the signals and then will be filtered by a DSP to produce an intelligible signal (ie, digital) to be handed back to the memory manager to decide what to do with this. The interesting thing is that I plan on making it so that you can 'bounce' a signal back through the integer unit with a different op (instruction) several times. This would make it possible for me to rapidly do several computations without memory delays. I also want to make it an async processor.. that is to say that what goes in first may not be what comes out first. There's some cutting edge researching being done on this that I hope I can adapt once I know more.
For now, it's largely a pipe dream, but I am working on it.. hopefully in about 2 years I'll have a prototype VLSI to interface to a regular computer and do some /real/ work with it.
This all, of course, assumes that I can figure out how to make the circuits in the first place, heh.
We're discussing this like a couple of lawyers would enthusiastically discuss their latest injunctions over a cup of hot joe in the morning. I'm not a lawyer.. infact I hate the law and try to avoid it whenever possible. My hobby/job/most-enjoyable-recreational-activity is to put servers together, network them, and then make them do nifty stuff for me. The fact that somebody patented technology for using wormholes or one-click shopping is completely irrelevant to me. Let the lawyers go bash it out - but leave me alone!
Please explain to me why we're getting so worked up about it. Open Source / Free Software does NOT need patents. We design a program/device and release it to the public. If somebody goes off and patents it after that point, we just point to our reference model and say 2 magic words: "prior art", and the problem disappears. Is it also not true that we as a community in general work around patented stupidities on a daily basis without much ado?
Patents are dead and useless... who cares if Amazon patents the one-click shopping model? I'll just use java-script to create a hover-over-this-button shopping setup. Somebody patents the knife and fork? I'll use chopsticks then. Somebody patents the CPU? I'll grab my soldering gun and make an analog computer out of op amps and transistors with a level of parallelism unknown previous to this. The point is that we can move so fast and so far forward that by the time they can say a program this community created is in violation of patent X we've already likely devised a completely new system that makes that system antiquidated!
Stop worrying about the world of patents and just hack code - eventually they won't have any money left because they'll have spent it all purchasing and defending antiquidated patents. Let the system die of it's own excesses.
Just be glad they didn't call the pig "/.". I mean, the pig runs at 400 MPH, speaks intelligently saying that people are either insightful or informative and ocasionally offtopic, and for some unknown reason just stops midstride, falls over, and becomes completely comatose once a week. But, we just accept this. "There is nothing wrong with the pig, and we're working to fix it as fast as possible." ;)
I think he would have done better quoting the Supreme Court as "the power to tax is the power to destroy", a landmark case in which the Supreme Court set limits on how much taxes were reasonable.. and weren't. But, the old wrinkly judges that nobody bothers to listen to aside, did anyone ever consider that the politicians, in a remarkable reversal of all existing laws of physics, might be a step ahead of the rest of us?
Internet taxation is a jolly big problem, but it's obvious that global capitalism / corporatism is the next big thing. 10 or 20 years down the road the idea of a "local economy" will be a complete and udder joke. It's already getting that way right now. Any major purchase I make - computers, computer parts, person-to-person (used car(s)!), office furniture.. you name it, I buy it via mail order. Read: no taxes. They nip me for a buck here, a buck there, and several hundred bucks when income tax comes due, but that's about it.
But I digress, my point is that we're moving towards global capitalism / commercialism. Alan Greenspan had more to do with preventing the complete collapse of the Japanese market a few years ago than the Japanese had themselves (don't believe me? Ask an economist; I'll give you a hint: interest rates). In such an era, tax collection on individual goods and services will be extinct as we know it - it's a good 10-20 years away, but it's out there. In the meantime, the government economists and politicians are busily preparing to either find a new tax base.. or new ways to tax the existing one.
The government will get it's share.. believe me.. it's the ONE thing it's efficient at, if nothing else.
Who, exactly, approves a license that, by it's very nature, is designed and executed by a community?!
There are, unfortunately, more examples. I fear that we will likely play with this proverbial fire and burn ourselves. I hope it doesn't kill us.
I'd just as soon we keep genetic engineering to the non-sentient lifeforms until we know more about it. I mean, the last thing we need is to engineer a "super" human which is not backwards-compatible with the current generation. Flip over to Star Trek TNG's story about how generically engineering an immune system to be "perfect" had the unfortunate side-effect of killing it's predecessors (namely, us) because of an unforseen variable: a normally harmless genetic virus for an example. I can think of more - science fiction is replete with these examples. I would say to anyone thinking seriously about this issue to spend some time at the library.. and some time in a movie theatre.
And don't think for a minute that viruses won't take advantage of the host's "improved immume systems" - even if the new super-humans aren't hostile towards the existing generation we're still stuck with the problem of viruses which will more rapidly attack and infect people with less of an immune system (path of least resistance - plant a tree in a sunny spot, plant another in a dark spot, which one uses more of the soil's resources?)...
We are messing with things far above and beyond our comprehension. I hate to say it, but I very nearly side with the conservative elements in our society on this - this is a matter best left to God. For now, anyway. The other sciences have not caught up enough to have enough of a base of knowledge to anticipate what will happen if we start changing genes. Trial and error is NOT an option for human experimentation.
~ Signal 11
Collary: The real kicker is that most of our computers say "Made in China".
I suspect that we'll probably find the words "Made in the USA" stamped on the side of their super-massive firewall...
*sarcasm* Atleast you get a stylish new coaster instead of the default AOL ones. */sarcasm*
Other slashdotters here seem interested in the coding challenge, which is cool, but I want to know how good of a return you guys are making on these ports. I'd like to take those statistics over to other companies to encourage them to port their products (not just games, but Real Apps too). These may be unglamorous questions, but they are the meat and potatoes ones that you no doubt answered when you decided to go ahead and port these games to linux.
The biggest threat the DMCA poses is that corporations are afraid of it. In true CYA (Cover Your Ass) mode these corporations are pre-emptively censoring and removing customers from their networks for things that may be offensive, illegal, or libelous - often with little or no supporting evidence other than an e-mail saying "I don't like so-and-so and will sue if you don't remove him."
The DMCA has locked us into a form of public-censorship by allowing ISPs to do this legally without regard to the evidence. The DMCA removed accountability controls for dozens of services and acts. This is the threat, this is why it MUST be stopped. Corporations are beginning to realize that they were not thinking when they signed on to this.. they are now realizing it is a sword that cuts two ways... and some of the smaller corporations are realizing they are ill-equipped to defend themselves against this. And how can they? The DMCA has removed the ability to fight unfair denial of resources.
Then execute kill -9 in the lord's name.
Great article, but it says nothing about what to do with the current (broken) standards. IE4 and Netscape are still incompatible in rendering a variety of things. I would have hoped there would be some practical advice to be had in this interview...