I would like to take the time to thank you personally for resisting pressure from special-interest groups with a vested interest in pushing software patents. Software patents are slowly stifling our industry, and by extension muddling and retarding our technological advancement as a species.
The original aim of a patents was to grant a *temporary* monopoly, for the express purpose of encouraging innovation by allowing inventors to bring a new invention to market without having to worry about plagiarism. Software is not an invention - is is more akin to an idea, which was expressely *not* patentable for most of the history of patents.
The US has (relatively) recently begun to allow the patenting of ideas - software algorithms, "features" of software, even "business models"(!), and this has almost completely co-opted the patent system from an inventor support mechanism to a business weapon - "You do what we want or we'll sue for infringement". This was never the intention of patents, and patenting of ideas instead of inventions has mired the entire US technology industry in litigation, and made independant developers afraid to write useful software in case it infringes upon a patent they didn't even know existed.
Add to this the US patent office's blatant inability to understand the industry, and terrible track-record on prior art (eg, people were able to successfully patent the idea of "hyperlinks", even many years after the web became mainstream), and you have a situation where patents are issued almost carte-blanche, and it is left up to the legal system to decide who owns what (which rapidly becomes a case of "who can afford the most justice"). If it's left up to the legal system to decide on patent claims, invariably the richest company or individual will succeed, and many (most?) smaller developers and inventors are simply priced out of the market - they can't afford to defend their patents, so they aren't worth the paper thay're written on.
This devalues patents as a concept unless the holder can afford hundreds of thousands of pounds of legal fees. This leads invariably to a type of techno-feudalism: the rich and powerful can own all the (intellectual) property they desire, while the poor have no rights they can defend - their right to own (intellectual) property exists in name only.
I doubt this gigantic and unequal division between the "haves" and the "have-nots" is the *intended* consequence of a decision to allow software patents, but it is the inevitable one.
Many thanks for taking the time to read this letter, and please continue to resist pressure from all those who would co-opt our laws and statutes for their own selfish ends. You have the support of the technology worker (even if not the technology companies) behind you.
Hector: With the players of the future, we will be able to schedule personal recordings of incoming broadcast music... a very similar concept to... TiVo. Imagine listening to a certain program or DJ that played a couple nights ago, but at your own leisure. Even better, we would be able to save the recordings into a file for endless playback later. Right now you can record off of an incoming FM signal, but you have to be listening in at the time, and even then you're not sure if they're going to play the song that you want. I want to substantially fill out my music collection.
Ok, not to sound geekier-than-thou here, but these guys are utterly without a fucking clue.
This is an article on the future of digital audio, and the best they can come up with is:
Down-grades of current technology. Here's a clue, chaps: if there was a demand for time-shifted radios, they'd already be here, and be popular. We can already do it with video, and that's way harder than FM radio.
They're like guys looking at a Segway HT and going "You know what the next big thing's going to be? Electric bicycles!".
I mean, really. Time-shifted radio will never be popular, because we've moved almost entirely over to downloading MP3s - a content-on-demand system.
A complete lack of understanding of how content-delivery is progressing. In the quote above they appear to be discussing the future of digital audio as a broadcast system. Maybe I've been living in an extended hallucination for the last few years, but I was under the impression that we were moving away from broadcast media to a more content-on-demand model.
Obviously there will always be some form of broadcast media, but if they're right how do they explain the popularity of CDs/MP3s vs broadcast radio? The popularity of video-on-demand systems? And what's TiVo, but a blatant attempt to turn an entire broadcast medium into a content-on-demand one?
No understanding of the legal issues.
"We should be able to share songs from one person's player to another... You see someone with [an iPod], you know that he or she can beam you a song from their collection with a couple clicks. IR port beaming has been around for ages. Why hasn't someone thought of this yet?".
Because it's the media-production industry's worst fucking nightmare, you cockwits, and anyone who produced and marketed such a player would be handed their own gonads by RIAA and MPAA lawyers. Like nobody's ever thought of player-player music transfers before. I mean, really.
Stating the bleeding obvious. Paraphrasing from various bits of the article: "headphone-quality is going to improve", "convergence is happening", "a universal DRM system would speed uptake of DRM".
I could go on, but it'd just get boring. I don't know who Andru, Hector and Greg are, but I'm pretty sure they aren't industry analysts. Or musically-oriented geeks. Or even regular readers of Slashdot. In fact, they come off more as a bunch of inexperienced and exciteable young teenagers swapping ideas about "this cool MP3 thing off the interweb computer machines".
Hell, I'm not an industry analyst or even musical geek, and I know half of what they're saying is old news and the other half is uninformed twaddle.
Can't say I've run across gearlive.com before, but if this is the standard of their commentary and insight, I think I'll just stick with Slashdot (in all it's flawed glory).
Nope, nope, you'll have to forgive me, I still can't tell... Troll or prat?
The moderation says "Troll", but then we've never had a "-1 Fuckwit" mod-option, have we?
Either way, you've clearly won me over with your well-reasoned and cleverly-argued tirade. But, you know, I would watch that jerking knee - you might want to strap that sucker down before it makes you look like an idiot in an international settin- Oops.
Venom aside, you are indeed correct. I should technically have said GNU/Linux, or GNU/X-Windows/Linux, or GNU/X-Windows/Mozilla/Linux, or... I think you get the point.
At the risk of inciting an ongoing argument, with minor unavoidable breaks I've actually been a Slashdot regular since about 1997. True, I only recently re-registered (after browsing anonymously for several years), but you can be forgiven for reading too much into a UID#.
And granted, there are an awful lot of sloppy or mis-understood "news" items reported on Slashdot, and there are an awful lot of jerking knees amongst the Slashdot crowd. That said, posting a (likely incorrect) disparaging comment without first bothering to RTFA does absolutely nothing to reduce the prevalence of "foaming-at-the-mouth slashbots", and is in fact a perfect example of "laziness and sloppiness" on your part.
Apologies if you take this as a personal attack, but before bitching to all and sundry about the problems with Slashdot, you might want to first make sure you yourself aren't a prime part of the problem... <:-/
I vaguely remember reading that Red Hat was the biggest commercial Linux vendor, but that wasn't what rankled with me:
JS is talking about Operating System wars, so by rights he should have specified Linux (generic).
Had he been talking about enterprise-level vendors (or similar), then yes, Microsoft, Sun and Red Hat would all have been viable examples.
This is a pretty pedantic (and perhaps pointless-seeming) point (confusing "Red Hat's distro" with "Linux as a phenomenon"), but as I recall JS does have a history of using exactly this kind of subtle tactic to erect straw men that he can then (defensibly) burn to the ground.
Wait one second. Are you actually upbraiding CmdrTaco for taking a (possible, merely inferred) shortcut, when in the paragraph above you admit you can't even be arsed to RTFA before commenting?
You, sir, are either an amateurish troll or a world-class prat.
That's actually a very interesting breakdown of the "types" of job in each project, and you're right, both in that different drugs will aid different jobs, and that people will over-generalise from a satori (hmmm, very useful reference) moment to all other moments.
Actually, using Satori as a metaphor (or perhaps not a metaphor) is also interesting. I've always thought there was a under-appreciated similarity between meditation and programming.
Although they seem to be opposites (empty your mind of all thoughts vs. thinking of as many things at once as you can), they do seem to lead in similar directions, and the experience of hack mode/flow state/whatever your preferred term is has always struck me as very, very similar to descriptions of temporary enlightenment.
The intellectual satisfaction when you suddenly "get it", at comprehending exactly how elements of a system fit together, and instinctively understanding the place of each component in the system sounds to me very like descriptions of the "joy" experienced by understanding the entire universe as one entity, and completely comprehending one's place in it.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but the two experiences certainly seem to share much in common - perhaps at opposite ends of the specrum, but the same spectrum nevertheless...
Really? I've never read up on dianetics, but always been mildly curious about it, if for no other reason than it sounds like an attempt to take a computational/systems view of consciousnes[1], which not many other philosophies/ways-of-thought do. However, the dogmatic-exclusionist-$cientology crap that comes with it always put me off actually trying to find out more about it.
Footnotes:
[1] This sentance may well betray the fact that I know sweet FA about dianetics.
Oddly enough, I went throgh a period where I found coding after a couple of drinks or joints actually helped produce better code.
It was during a period where (modesty aside) I was maturing from "someone who could program well"[1] to a "good programmer"[2]. I've always been unusually aware of my own thought processes (as I suspect many programmers/hackers/martial artists/meditators/etc are), and I've noticed that good programmers all seem to go through a stage where they stop programming with their left-brain[3] and start more right-brain-thinking[4].
During this time I discovered that, as long as I already understood the problem fully, a couple of drinks (or joints) seemed to help me internalise the "rules" of a language, and spend more time on the actual creative side of programming - solving tasks without spending the whole time thinking about syntax or grammar.
Of course, some of the code was still pretty squirrely (what a wonderful word), but I do remember on several occasions waking up in the morning, running over my code again to check for bugs, and actually being blown away by how elegant some bits were - I hadn't thought I was capable of writing code like that at that point in my education. I remember one time finding a solution to a problem in linear time that I hadn't even realised sober could be done in less than exponential time, and it quite freaked me out for a while afterwards.
Even now (several years and several languages afterwards), I find coming back to a problem after a drink or toke can sometimes help you see "alternative" ways of solving it, often wildly different to how you'd normally go about it...
Fotonotes:
"Can program well": Can work through a task decomposition, can think in the language concerned, etc.
"Is a good programmer": Task decompositions tend to happen subconsciously and effectively instantaneously (as soon as you understand the problem fully). Can think in "Programming" (rather than any particular language), then convert the design into any particular language automatically, etc.
"Left-brain thinking": Thinking about the rules and syntax of a language and using them like tools to solve a problem, step by step. Yeah, it's a poor metaphor, but people get it easily.
"Right (or whole-)brain thinking": Thinking in terms of "tasks to be completed" and visualising program flow, without the actual syntax consciously occurring to you at any point. More *feeling* than thinking - the point where you just avoid a particular method because you just know "it's wrong", without having to consciously sit down and
think through every implication before you know whether or not to use it.
I'm not so sure about some of the projects in the parent - in my experience of teaching kids the best way to teach them is to engauge their enthusiasm. To do that you need high-impact, exciting projects that also demonstrate the principles behind them.
What's interesting about a rheostat? Or a battery in a beaker? Sure, I find the idea of building a battery interesting, but that's because I (A-level Chemistry) know and understand the principles behind it, and seeing them in action is what makes it fun. Anything that's fun because of an appreciation of the theory behind it is doomed, because you need to already know it before it becomes fun to learn.
I've always found the way to teach kids is to go for something that's interesting/fun/cool-looking up-front (steady-hand game, safe-with-buzzer, etc), and once they're interested, explain how they work. Try demoing one at the beginning of the class, let them play with it, then explain how it works while they're building their own.
It's very important to give a good grounding in the basics, but you can do that in a fun way, slipping in bits of theoretical knowledge while they're blinded by flashing lights and cool noises.
I suppose it depends if your priority is to teach them The Basics, or give them an interest that may extend outside the classroom...:-\
Yo, bad-asshat, step down off that high horse and think carefully about all that self-righteousness before idiot-casting it to all and sundry, eh?
Somebody's been taking too many marketing classes. "Added value"? What, exactly, is the "added value" of something that's free to begin with?
Well, you know... there's the added value of not having to download the entire distro. And the added value of not having to find and burn a CD. And the added value of not having to take the time to research and worry about choosing the right linux installation to start playing with. Note that (flamebait!) all these are issues which have so far stopped me running my own Linux box, and I'm an IT-literate user on broadband who's actually quite curious about Linux. If you allow for the fact that most family & friends aren't, you get the added value of not having to learn how to download distros, not having to learn how to burn CDs, not having to go out and buy CD-Rs (you'd be amazed how many people own CD-R drives but no CD-Rs). As I said, I'm Linux-curious, but haven't had the time/energy to run my own box. If a mate handed me a pre-set-up CD that was guaranteed to work, no questions asked, I'd try it out tomorrow. No, tonight.
What is this guy actually trying to do?... basically force-feeding it to individual people who are apparently your friends and family...
Christ almighty. He's sticking a free CD in a card, not anally violating them while pouring sugar in their gastank. Get some perspective, really.
It's one thing to say to someone you know and like, "hey, you know this thing Linux? Well, it does the same things as Windows, only better, and it's free, so you should download it."
Funnily enough, I find that approach more irritating, opinionated and unhelpful than simply burning me off a CD and going "here y' go... have a look if you're interested". You're basically instructing them as to how great Linux is, then instructing them to do all the learning and work themselves. He's doing all the work himself, and offering me the chance to try Linux risk-, effort- and pressure-free.
They probably won't, but the next step is not to basically get all up in their face and say "HEY. I TOLD YOU TO DOWNLOAD IT AND YOU DIDN'T SO NOW YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE BECAUSE HERE'S A CHRISTMAS CARD FULL OF LINUX." Honestly, even as someone who runs Linux, I'd be borderline offended by this.
Ok, I'm going to explain something to you now. The reason people probably don't respond well to your approach? It's probably because you lecture them on the benefits of Linux, then leave them to go do all the hard work themselves. Family != nerds. Friends != geeks. Make it as easy as possible, and they'll do it. Lecture then abandon them, and don't be surprised if nobody takes a blind bit of notice.
I guess my concern is that this guy is doing this more for himself than for the people he's giving these cards to, out of a misguided sense of altruism.
Ok, this is just ludicrous. If he's doing it out of altruism (even "misguided"), he can't by definition be doing it "more for himself". Look up the definition of altrusim if you don't believe me:
Altruism: altruism (n.)
1. Unselfish concern for the welfare of others; selflessness.
He's not "adding value" by giving people something they can get themselves just as easily. I mean unless he knows a whole bunch of people stuck on dial-up connections that asked him to do this, which I guess is possible but pretty unlikely.
Ah. Oh. Ah. I apologise. I was under the impression we were talking about family, and friends. I didn't realise we were talking about died-in-the-wool linux geeks. I mean, my 90-year-old granny's a Debian admi
Or why not insert tags instead? Ok, so it's not valid in later dialects of (X)HTML, but since when has slashdot's code validated as anything?
Seriously - <WBR> tags either don't render at all, or render as "\n" (if a long string needs to be broken at that point). I've never understood why slashdot uses spaces (which muck up URLs), instead of <WBR>s (which generally don't).
Supposedly, at least one satellite (NASA, IIRC) has already been "moved out of orbit" by hacker group cDC (Cult of the Dead Cow).
Google, Wikipedia, and the other usual suspects are a little light on corroboration though, so I suppose it depends on whether you take (self-admitted fibbers, wind-up merchants and media whores) cDc's word for it...;-)
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to take the time to thank you personally for resisting pressure from special-interest groups with a vested interest in pushing software patents. Software patents are slowly stifling our industry, and by extension muddling and retarding our technological advancement as a species.
The original aim of a patents was to grant a *temporary* monopoly, for the express purpose of encouraging innovation by allowing inventors to bring a new invention to market without having to worry about plagiarism. Software is not an invention - is is more akin to an idea, which was expressely *not* patentable for most of the history of patents.
The US has (relatively) recently begun to allow the patenting of ideas - software algorithms, "features" of software, even "business models"(!), and this has almost completely co-opted the patent system from an inventor support mechanism to a business weapon - "You do what we want or we'll sue for infringement". This was never the intention of patents, and patenting of ideas instead of inventions has mired the entire US technology industry in litigation, and made independant developers afraid to write useful software in case it infringes upon a patent they didn't even know existed.
Add to this the US patent office's blatant inability to understand the industry, and terrible track-record on prior art (eg, people were able to successfully patent the idea of "hyperlinks", even many years after the web became mainstream), and you have a situation where patents are issued almost carte-blanche, and it is left up to the legal system to decide who owns what (which rapidly becomes a case of "who can afford the most justice"). If it's left up to the legal system to decide on patent claims, invariably the richest company or individual will succeed, and many (most?) smaller developers and inventors are simply priced out of the market - they can't afford to defend their patents, so they aren't worth the paper thay're written on.
This devalues patents as a concept unless the holder can afford hundreds of thousands of pounds of legal fees. This leads invariably to a type of techno-feudalism: the rich and powerful can own all the (intellectual) property they desire, while the poor have no rights they can defend - their right to own (intellectual) property exists in name only.
I doubt this gigantic and unequal division between the "haves" and the "have-nots" is the *intended* consequence of a decision to allow software patents, but it is the inevitable one.
Many thanks for taking the time to read this letter, and please continue to resist pressure from all those who would co-opt our laws and statutes for their own selfish ends. You have the support of the technology worker (even if not the technology companies) behind you.
<name>
<e-mail address>
Ok, not to sound geekier-than-thou here, but these guys are utterly without a fucking clue.
This is an article on the future of digital audio, and the best they can come up with is:
They're like guys looking at a Segway HT and going "You know what the next big thing's going to be? Electric bicycles! ".
I mean, really. Time-shifted radio will never be popular, because we've moved almost entirely over to downloading MP3s - a content-on-demand system.
Obviously there will always be some form of broadcast media, but if they're right how do they explain the popularity of CDs/MP3s vs broadcast radio? The popularity of video-on-demand systems? And what's TiVo, but a blatant attempt to turn an entire broadcast medium into a content-on-demand one?
I could go on, but it'd just get boring. I don't know who Andru, Hector and Greg are, but I'm pretty sure they aren't industry analysts. Or musically-oriented geeks. Or even regular readers of Slashdot. In fact, they come off more as a bunch of inexperienced and exciteable young teenagers swapping ideas about "this cool MP3 thing off the interweb computer machines".
Hell, I'm not an industry analyst or even musical geek, and I know half of what they're saying is old news and the other half is uninformed twaddle.
Can't say I've run across gearlive.com before, but if this is the standard of their commentary and insight, I think I'll just stick with Slashdot (in all it's flawed glory).
Nope, nope, you'll have to forgive me, I still can't tell... Troll or prat?
The moderation says "Troll", but then we've never had a "-1 Fuckwit" mod-option, have we?
Either way, you've clearly won me over with your well-reasoned and cleverly-argued tirade. But, you know, I would watch that jerking knee - you might want to strap that sucker down before it makes you look like an idiot in an international settin- Oops.
Venom aside, you are indeed correct. I should technically have said GNU/Linux, or GNU/X-Windows/Linux, or GNU/X-Windows/Mozilla/Linux, or... I think you get the point.
Granted. I thought, given the context of the discussion, that "Linux" was an acceptable shorthand, but you are indeed correct.
Have ten pedant-points, on me. ;-p
At the risk of inciting an ongoing argument, with minor unavoidable breaks I've actually been a Slashdot regular since about 1997. True, I only recently re-registered (after browsing anonymously for several years), but you can be forgiven for reading too much into a UID#.
And granted, there are an awful lot of sloppy or mis-understood "news" items reported on Slashdot, and there are an awful lot of jerking knees amongst the Slashdot crowd. That said, posting a (likely incorrect) disparaging comment without first bothering to RTFA does absolutely nothing to reduce the prevalence of "foaming-at-the-mouth slashbots", and is in fact a perfect example of "laziness and sloppiness" on your part.
Apologies if you take this as a personal attack, but before bitching to all and sundry about the problems with Slashdot, you might want to first make sure you yourself aren't a prime part of the problem... <:-/
I vaguely remember reading that Red Hat was the biggest commercial Linux vendor, but that wasn't what rankled with me:
JS is talking about Operating System wars, so by rights he should have specified Linux (generic).
Had he been talking about enterprise-level vendors (or similar), then yes, Microsoft, Sun and Red Hat would all have been viable examples.
This is a pretty pedantic (and perhaps pointless-seeming) point (confusing "Red Hat's distro" with "Linux as a phenomenon"), but as I recall JS does have a history of using exactly this kind of subtle tactic to erect straw men that he can then (defensibly) burn to the ground.
Wait one second. Are you actually upbraiding CmdrTaco for taking a (possible, merely inferred) shortcut, when in the paragraph above you admit you can't even be arsed to RTFA before commenting?
You, sir, are either an amateurish troll or a world-class prat.
And I'm browsing at work, too... Fuckwits.
That's actually a very interesting breakdown of the "types" of job in each project, and you're right, both in that different drugs will aid different jobs, and that people will over-generalise from a satori (hmmm, very useful reference) moment to all other moments.
Actually, using Satori as a metaphor (or perhaps not a metaphor) is also interesting. I've always thought there was a under-appreciated similarity between meditation and programming.
Although they seem to be opposites (empty your mind of all thoughts vs. thinking of as many things at once as you can), they do seem to lead in similar directions, and the experience of hack mode/flow state/whatever your preferred term is has always struck me as very, very similar to descriptions of temporary enlightenment.
The intellectual satisfaction when you suddenly "get it", at comprehending exactly how elements of a system fit together, and instinctively understanding the place of each component in the system sounds to me very like descriptions of the "joy" experienced by understanding the entire universe as one entity, and completely comprehending one's place in it.
Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but the two experiences certainly seem to share much in common - perhaps at opposite ends of the specrum, but the same spectrum nevertheless...
Really? I've never read up on dianetics, but always been mildly curious about it, if for no other reason than it sounds like an attempt to take a computational/systems view of consciousnes[1], which not many other philosophies/ways-of-thought do. However, the dogmatic-exclusionist-$cientology crap that comes with it always put me off actually trying to find out more about it.
Footnotes:
[1] This sentance may well betray the fact that I know sweet FA about dianetics.
Oddly enough, I went throgh a period where I found coding after a couple of drinks or joints actually helped produce better code.
It was during a period where (modesty aside) I was maturing from "someone who could program well"[1] to a "good programmer"[2]. I've always been unusually aware of my own thought processes (as I suspect many programmers/hackers/martial artists/meditators/etc are), and I've noticed that good programmers all seem to go through a stage where they stop programming with their left-brain[3] and start more right-brain-thinking[4].
During this time I discovered that, as long as I already understood the problem fully, a couple of drinks (or joints) seemed to help me internalise the "rules" of a language, and spend more time on the actual creative side of programming - solving tasks without spending the whole time thinking about syntax or grammar.
Of course, some of the code was still pretty squirrely (what a wonderful word), but I do remember on several occasions waking up in the morning, running over my code again to check for bugs, and actually being blown away by how elegant some bits were - I hadn't thought I was capable of writing code like that at that point in my education. I remember one time finding a solution to a problem in linear time that I hadn't even realised sober could be done in less than exponential time, and it quite freaked me out for a while afterwards.
Even now (several years and several languages afterwards), I find coming back to a problem after a drink or toke can sometimes help you see "alternative" ways of solving it, often wildly different to how you'd normally go about it...
Fotonotes:I'm not so sure about some of the projects in the parent - in my experience of teaching kids the best way to teach them is to engauge their enthusiasm. To do that you need high-impact, exciting projects that also demonstrate the principles behind them.
What's interesting about a rheostat? Or a battery in a beaker? Sure, I find the idea of building a battery interesting, but that's because I (A-level Chemistry) know and understand the principles behind it, and seeing them in action is what makes it fun. Anything that's fun because of an appreciation of the theory behind it is doomed, because you need to already know it before it becomes fun to learn.
I've always found the way to teach kids is to go for something that's interesting/fun/cool-looking up-front (steady-hand game, safe-with-buzzer, etc), and once they're interested, explain how they work. Try demoing one at the beginning of the class, let them play with it, then explain how it works while they're building their own.
It's very important to give a good grounding in the basics, but you can do that in a fun way, slipping in bits of theoretical knowledge while they're blinded by flashing lights and cool noises.
I suppose it depends if your priority is to teach them The Basics, or give them an interest that may extend outside the classroom... :-\
Yo, bad-asshat, step down off that high horse and think carefully about all that self-righteousness before idiot-casting it to all and sundry, eh?
Well, you know... there's the added value of not having to download the entire distro. And the added value of not having to find and burn a CD. And the added value of not having to take the time to research and worry about choosing the right linux installation to start playing with. Note that (flamebait!) all these are issues which have so far stopped me running my own Linux box, and I'm an IT-literate user on broadband who's actually quite curious about Linux. If you allow for the fact that most family & friends aren't, you get the added value of not having to learn how to download distros, not having to learn how to burn CDs, not having to go out and buy CD-Rs (you'd be amazed how many people own CD-R drives but no CD-Rs). As I said, I'm Linux-curious, but haven't had the time/energy to run my own box. If a mate handed me a pre-set-up CD that was guaranteed to work, no questions asked, I'd try it out tomorrow. No, tonight.
Christ almighty. He's sticking a free CD in a card, not anally violating them while pouring sugar in their gastank. Get some perspective, really.
Funnily enough, I find that approach more irritating, opinionated and unhelpful than simply burning me off a CD and going "here y' go... have a look if you're interested". You're basically instructing them as to how great Linux is, then instructing them to do all the learning and work themselves. He's doing all the work himself, and offering me the chance to try Linux risk-, effort- and pressure-free.
Ok, I'm going to explain something to you now. The reason people probably don't respond well to your approach? It's probably because you lecture them on the benefits of Linux, then leave them to go do all the hard work themselves. Family != nerds. Friends != geeks. Make it as easy as possible, and they'll do it. Lecture then abandon them, and don't be surprised if nobody takes a blind bit of notice.
Ok, this is just ludicrous. If he's doing it out of altruism (even "misguided"), he can't by definition be doing it "more for himself". Look up the definition of altrusim if you don't believe me:
Altruism: altruism (n.)
1. Unselfish concern for the welfare of others; selflessness.
Ah. Oh. Ah. I apologise. I was under the impression we were talking about family, and friends. I didn't realise we were talking about died-in-the-wool linux geeks. I mean, my 90-year-old granny's a Debian admi
Or why not insert tags instead? Ok, so it's not valid in later dialects of (X)HTML, but since when has slashdot's code validated as anything?
Seriously - <WBR> tags either don't render at all, or render as "\n" (if a long string needs to be broken at that point). I've never understood why slashdot uses spaces (which muck up URLs), instead of <WBR>s (which generally don't).
Anyone?
Supposedly, at least one satellite (NASA, IIRC) has already been "moved out of orbit" by hacker group cDC (Cult of the Dead Cow).
;-)
Google, Wikipedia, and the other usual suspects are a little light on corroboration though, so I suppose it depends on whether you take (self-admitted fibbers, wind-up merchants and media whores) cDc's word for it...