The point was never to stick to a certain set of freedoms as outlined in the white papers. I don't think it's reasonable to expect that anyone be able to list all of the ways that software might be made non-free, and I don't think that either license termination clauses or change disclosure clauses fall outside of the reasonable range of things one might not be willing to tolerate.
I don't agree with everything RMS says and does, but it's pretty clear in this case that he was reacting to specific objectionable restrictions, and not mearly drawing a meaningless distinction between "free software" and "open source" for political reasons. I hope you see that as well.
If the Open Source Definition is so rigid that it can't be made to protect against new restrictions in its original spirit, I don't see it as being a useful definition.
"Plain Old Text" doesn't seem to be, exactly:) Wanna fix that, Rob? You should convert > and < into &-lt; and &-gt; (without the -'s -- I can't figure out how to represent these in this bastarized sub-HTML), and so on.
I meant to suggest that Japanese sites strip the "<a href=" and ">".
Not that it really matters, given what's been said about the Japanese legal system. Speaking of which, does anyone know where I can read in English about modern law in Japan?
I've wanted for a while to devise a standard benchmark suite, distribute it to users, and let them upload their results and system configuration info to a server. Then we could have a web site which could recommend alternate configurations and small upgrades that could make a big difference, and list what the best systems for certain applications and in cerain price ranges are. Damn would that be cool. If anyone else is intersted, please email me.
Okay, I'll admit I'd be happier if a *machine* had determined that yahoo and dmoz were worth crawling for ranking information, but let's face it, that's pretty hard to do.
The fact remains that google outdoes every other search engine on the net, and returns useful links for obscure queries that would be a lost cause on other search engines.
I posted this on superspecialquestions.com, the web BBS that M. Doughty (of the band Soul Coughing) runs.
legislating the number OR i'll chew my audio, thanks.
The 5% nation has switched from offering an mp3-encoded Soul Coughing recording each month in favor of releasing a greater volume of material in the Liquid Audio format -- the catch being that these Liquid Audio files are only playable for 30 days.
The deal, as I understand it, is that more music can be released in the Liquid Audio format, since the 30-day timeout makes a future commercial release of the music more lucrative.
Let me explain why I feel this is a Bad Thing. The issue is complicated, but I'll be as breif as I can.
Liquid Audio is very different from mp3.
First, it's a "secure format". That means that (either by patent or trade secret) only Liquid Audio (the company) and its licensees can make players for these files. It also means that you can't easily convert a Liquid Audio track into another format.
Second, that 30-day time limit is more than just an inconvenience. It raises questions. Clearly I'm not supposed to be able to get around that 30-day limit. But is it a legal restriction, or just a technological one? What's the legal status of a program I might write to to convert a Liquid Audio file into a.wav or.mp3 file? Such programs exist, and they get called "cracks", and talked about as if they're seriously under the table. They're hard to find. Are they illegal? What about the simple solution -- if I get a headphone-plug-to-headphone-plug cable, put one end in the "out" jack on my sound card, put the other end in the "in" jack, and play the Liquid Audio track while I record to a regular wave file? Is that legal? Wave files are easy to encode as mp3s. Am I allowed to redistribute the resulting file?
If we don't ask questions like these, they're going to be answered the way record companies want rather than the way we (as either fans or musicians) might want. Explaining why those answers aren't likely to be the same is a little bit of a task. I'll do the best I can, and provide links. If you're interested, they'll cover the topic much more thoroughly than I'm going to here.
About Mp3: There is a political battle being fought over the mp3 format. Mp3, like many formats to come (trust me here), makes it possible to store and transfer high-quality audio recordings digitally within reasonable a size range and with reasonable transfer speed. This is becomes increasingly true as storage and network technologies allow for larger and larger files to be reasonable for storage and transfer. Suddenly, it's physically possible to receive and entire albums in digital format over the internet. No one needs to manufacture a CD. No one needs to ship CDs to stores. No one needs to run stores, and no one needs to go out to stores to get music. Record companies are terrified. That's because the business of physically distributing music media is very profitable, and in the near future, it will probably be very outdated -- unless record companies get their way and are able to create an artificial demand for the distribution of music. They've banded together as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to fight mp3. One of the most effective arguments they're using to convince people that such a system needs to be put in place deals with artist compensation and copyright protection. But before I get into that, here are some links for information on mp3 and what record companies are doing about it:
About Copyright: There was a time when Copyright made perfect sense. When printing presses were the only way to copy a publishable work, the trade-off was universally beneficial. Printing presses were expensive. Copyright made it possible for people with printing presses to profit from publishing a peice of writing, and didn't limit the rights of people who didn't have printing presses, since they had no reasonable way to copy printed works anyway. People with printing presses were happy, people without printing presses lost nothing of value, and authors could be rewarded for their efforts. When we stretch copyright to cover digital media, however, things get a lot more complicated. Anyone can copy a computer file. In fact, copying digital media is implicit in doing a lot of things that we have other metaphors for as well. To view this web page, for example, you've got to copy it from a server on the Internet. In its journey from that server to your computer, it is copyied between many other computers on the internet that you never have to pay attention to. When it arrives at your computer, it is copied around several times in RAM to get it into a format that will make sense to you, and it is probably copied from the RAM onto your disk for temporary storage to speed things up if you want to view it again in the near future. Then it's copied to a special place in the RAM, which is read by your video card, which then transforms it into the light you're seeing. Then it gets copied about in very similar ways in your eyes, your optic nerves, and in your brain. Worse, the whole web page, like any Liquid Audio track, image, or computer program, is represented within your computer as a number. What are the consequenses of legislating the rights people have over numbers and how they chose to interpret them? Copyright in the present day has become a very complicated issue. It's obviously still important to reward artists and authors for their work, but it's not at all clear how we should do it. Here are some links to pages which talk about what's wrong with the kind of Copyright that many record companies (and software companies before them) are in favor of:
Because of the mp3s released via the 5% nation, I used to count Soul Coughing amoungst the most politically progressive bands in terms of digital media policy. Such venerable (and notably non-major-record-label-affiliated) musicians as Frank Black and They Might Be Giants have released entire albums in the mp3 format. While I'm not sure it's really up to musicians to keep tabs on issues like these, it's certainly nice to see.
and this is an exerpt from a later post in the thread:
// I enjoy it when people like my music, but it's MY music. I did it. I put myself into it, and it's mine. I have a right to be compensated for it if you want to use it. The free distribution of mp3's takes away that right//
I can go out on the street right now and start selling fire. I can make the fire by banging some rocks together near some dry leaves, and I can sell it on sticks. If you've ever actually tried to start a fire by banging rocks together, you know that it's pretty difficult. So it would take a lot of hard work to make that fire. But if someone bought my fire from me, they could just turn around and start spreading it onto other sticks, and giving it away! Shouldn't I have some kind of right to profit from the fire I worked so hard to make? I don't think so. It was just a bad investment. Anyone can make fire cheap, and once fire is made, anyone can spread it cheap. What right do I have to stop them?
It comes back to the issue of how we're goinging to make music something someone can reasonably do for a living. I don't know how we should do that, but I know that a situation in which musicians get paid because people aren't allowed to do something which is essentially very easy to do will never work out. Getting controlled substances is considerably harder than copying digital media, and look how well the War on Drugs is doing. So why don't we drop that idea and start thinking very hard about what we can do instead?
I have to disagree with the first part: I don't believe that you can verify that a game is running a specific and trusted executable.
I know it's sort of out of the range of solutions you were considering, but it would be possible with various forms of redundant distributed processing (amoung player machines) to verify that each client is running the correct executable. Still doesn't help, of course, since a client could always cheat with programs that act purely on the inputs and outputs of the game.
>Security through obscurity is not security Amen.
That aphorism has always bugged me, useful as it is. All security is obscurity, in a sense. The data that will clear up the obscurity can be seen as the "key". The important thing is to isolate the obscurity (to the recognized key), and to be reasonably confident that one can't determine the key without solving a Hard Problem (finding large prime factors, obtaining data from the brain of an unwilling human, getting ahold of the disk I keep in my left breast pocket, etc).
My company (www.trilogy.com) uses Lotus Notes and Domino heavily, and I'd say it has essentially created my job (as a build guy). It sucks. Notes and Domino lock you into Lotus' proprietary solution to everything, but arn't capable enough to do what you'll inevitably want someday, and then you'll be stuck like we are. All of my big upcoming projects involve getting some Notes-based system we're using rewritten without Notes so that we can do what we need in terms of automation. I'd rather be using plain old sendmail and apache than Notes and Domino. Notes and Domino form a 'complete lossage' that you can't escape from whereas sendmail and apache's faults can be handled with other peices of software. That's the salient point. Notes and Domino do a lot of what you'll need, but when they don't do something, you're trapped. When sendmail and apache don't do something you need, you can find something else that will, or you can put together a quick hack yourself in many cases.
I agree with your principle that people who are making movies should pay more attention to what's effective in the medium than to the boring truth, but I really feel like Sneakers was much more successful as a movie than Hackers. Hackers put too much of its thrill in culture shock, and left the characters flat and the plot a mere formality. Not that I'm deaf to culture shock sci-fi -- it was an okay action thriller, a hell of a lot better than The Net, but didn't really stick with me.
Sneakers, OTOH, gave the characters a little bit of depth (if only a little bit), toyed with an interesting idea or two on the way to the Hollywood Climactic Ending, and left us with a quotable bit of humor here and there on the way.
Hackers vs. Sneakers isn't quite as pronounced as The Matrix vs. Bladerunner, but I'd say it's a comparison along the same lines.
Just don't talk to me about that "you could have anything you want and you're asking for my phone number?" drivel.
Postcyberpunk and the Death of the Movement
on
Ask Bruce Sterling
·
· Score: 1
You've said that the cyberpunk movement ended sometime in the mid-eighties, around when it got its name. Lately, one sees the word "postcyberpunk" applied to the work of Neal Stephenson and Jeff Noon, amoungst others. And when I think about it, I find that the newer work is sometimes dealing with slightly different themes, things about language and the nature of our stories that didn't show up in earlier cyberpunk, and showing more direct, conscious influence from postmodernism. So what do you think? Is this newer work deserving of its own name and catagory? Is "postcyberpunk" the right name? Or is cyberpunk still somehow alive and well and expanding its themes naturally in newer work? Or are books like _Snowcrash_ and _Vurt_ just a sort of post-movement fall-out, plumbing out the last few things that no one got around to saying?
I agree with you, but somehow they're doing it. The company I work for (http://www.trilogy.com/) is currently trying to move from ASP/COM to EJB/JSP, and they've been targetting the Really Damned High End all along. And, so far as I can tell, they've been doing okay with it. *shrug*
Tell my girlfriend (for the past three years now), who happens to live in LA, 1450ish miles from where I live in Austin, TX, that you can't flirt online. Human interaction is -different- online, but it's not cripplingly so.
I also took a few classes online from New York's New School for Social Research. They were basically held via mailing lists, which worked very well for me. I found that for writing courses, the format worked -better- than a traditional classroom setting. What better way to get people to pay attention to what others are writing than to hold the entire class in written format? I honestly didn't run in to even the smallest frustration in the course of my um courses.
I agree with you entirely that technology should assist rather than replace the teacher. Steve Jobs said in a Wired interview once something to the effect that, as someone who had given away more computers to education than anyone else probably ever has or will, he felt he was qualified to say that it doesn't matter -how- much technology you throw at education, the situation will not improve if the teachers don't understand how to use the computers to teach.
those were equally great days for me. i was in high school, using slirp to turn my (free, of course) unix shell account into a full-fledged slip account, staying up until 4am (ah, that magic hour!) hacking away on LPMOO inheritance code or whatever it was i was doing at the time. that, my friend, was the proverbial day.
i played tiberian sun last night (ah, the joys of having friends who obtain not-so-legal copies of games that haven't exactly been released yet), and it was exceedingly boring in comparison to starcraft. the ai is okay, and there are a few nice points about it, but in general it offers too much complexity and too much room to get completely screwed before you're even off the ground. it's more on the level of warcraft 2 than starcraft, only with many more units and a much less interesting matching between races. my prediction is that warcraft 3 will be much, much better.
The BSD advertising clause is obnoxious because as people add to a peice of software, the statement that must be included in every advertisment can grow to be unreasonably big. GNU/Linux isn't an unreasonably big name, and it's not growing.
Drinking salad dressing? I know you're a weird one, Shoeboy, but I didn't know you were that weird.
But I have a real question. In your letter, you mention in passing that Linux is destined to lower software sales revenue, and I guess you're commenting that someday programmers will get paid less. Do you see that as a Bad Thing, and if so, how can you come to terms with being such a greedy bastard, and if not, how are you going to buy vodka and salad dressing when the revolution comes?
That error message is a little bit cryptic. While it's technically okay for the ale to just sit in your fridge, most of the developers haven't tested under this configuration. The recommended setup involves actually -drinking- one or two of those ales before compiling. While this won't actually eliminate the error message, it will make it seem a lot less important.
While studying the emergent properties of strange attractors can be interesting, little has come of it. Most of the worthwhile work in Chaos Theory has been done in demonstrating the properties of deterministic systems that might lead to chaos (3-period behavior, etc). Although I see your point, I don't think it can be characterized as "the point of Chaos Theory". Also, Chaos Theory is all about chaos in deterministic systems. Modern interrupt-based computers are nondeterministic. The concept you're after is that of emergent properties, and isn't much related to Chaos Theory, save via a good metaphor or two. I would argue that Stephenson's reductionist viewpoint is equally valid, though I am with you regarding his poor definition of the "real job" of a computer, though for different reasons (i.e. that a computer need not be based on bit-manipulation. Bit-manipulation is just a metaphor that happens to be true to the workings of the modern computer.). Also, my plan for my essay is to use a broad definition of the purpose of a computer (what a computer is good at as a tool) to show how a lack of understanding of the basic nature of computers and what they are good at leads to (and has lead to) ineffective usage. I'm very interested in computers being good tools, but no-one is going to say that a hammer is a good tool if they're trying to use it as a saw.
Slashdot Mirror
# ftso verisign
iptables -A OUTPUT -d 64.94.110.11 -j REJECT
iptables -A FORWARD -d 64.94.110.11 -j REJECT
"The EU seems to have discovered not only the Information Society (their caps)[...]"
Wow! I have also discovered the Information Society!
"I wanna know!"
"What you're thinking!"
"Tell me what's on your mind!"
"(Pure Energy!)"
The point was never to stick to a certain set of freedoms as outlined in the white papers. I don't think it's reasonable to expect that anyone be able to list all of the ways that software might be made non-free, and I don't think that either license termination clauses or change disclosure clauses fall outside of the reasonable range of things one might not be willing to tolerate.
I don't agree with everything RMS says and does, but it's pretty clear in this case that he was reacting to specific objectionable restrictions, and not mearly drawing a meaningless distinction between "free software" and "open source" for political reasons. I hope you see that as well.
If the Open Source Definition is so rigid that it can't be made to protect against new restrictions in its original spirit, I don't see it as being a useful definition.
"Plain Old Text" doesn't seem to be, exactly :)
Wanna fix that, Rob? You should convert > and < into &-lt; and &-gt; (without the -'s -- I can't figure out how to represent these in this bastarized sub-HTML), and so on.
I meant to suggest that Japanese sites strip the "<a href=" and ">".
How about it you just strip off the ""? It's not a link, it's just text.
Not that it really matters, given what's been said about the Japanese legal system. Speaking of which, does anyone know where I can read in English about modern law in Japan?
I've wanted for a while to devise a standard benchmark suite, distribute it to users, and let them upload their results and system configuration info to a server. Then we could have a web site which could recommend alternate configurations and small upgrades that could make a big difference, and list what the best systems for certain applications and in cerain price ranges are. Damn would that be cool. If anyone else is intersted, please email me.
Actually, Manhattan is having its own problems, nightlife-wise, which with the Quality of Life Regime enforcing antiquated cabaret laws and all.
Okay, I'll admit I'd be happier if a *machine* had determined that yahoo and dmoz were worth crawling for ranking information, but let's face it, that's pretty hard to do.
The fact remains that google outdoes every other search engine on the net, and returns useful links for obscure queries that would be a lost cause on other search engines.
I posted this on superspecialquestions.com, the web BBS that M. Doughty (of the band Soul Coughing) runs.
.wav or .mp3 file? Such programs exist, and they get called "cracks", and talked about as if they're seriously under the table. They're hard to find. Are they illegal? What about the simple solution -- if I get a headphone-plug-to-headphone-plug cable, put one end in the "out" jack on my sound card, put the other end in the "in" jack, and play the Liquid Audio track while I record to a regular wave file? Is that legal? Wave files are easy to encode as mp3s. Am I allowed to redistribute the resulting file?
g ht.html
// I enjoy it when people like my music, but it's MY music. I did it. I put myself into it, and it's mine. I have a right to be compensated for it if you want to use it. The free distribution of mp3's takes away that right//
legislating the number OR i'll chew my audio, thanks.
The 5% nation has switched from offering an mp3-encoded Soul Coughing recording each month in favor of releasing a greater volume of material in the Liquid Audio format -- the catch being that these Liquid Audio files are only playable for 30 days.
The deal, as I understand it, is that more music can be released in the Liquid Audio format, since the 30-day timeout makes a future commercial release of the music more lucrative.
Let me explain why I feel this is a Bad Thing. The issue is complicated, but I'll be as breif as I can.
Liquid Audio is very different from mp3.
First, it's a "secure format". That means that (either by patent or trade secret) only Liquid Audio (the company) and its licensees can make players for these files. It also means that you can't easily convert a Liquid Audio track into another format.
Second, that 30-day time limit is more than just an inconvenience. It raises questions. Clearly I'm not supposed to be able to get around that 30-day limit. But is it a legal restriction, or just a technological one? What's the legal status of a program I might write to to convert a Liquid Audio file into a
If we don't ask questions like these, they're going to be answered the way record companies want rather than the way we (as either fans or musicians) might want. Explaining why those answers aren't likely to be the same is a little bit of a task. I'll do the best I can, and provide links. If you're interested, they'll cover the topic much more thoroughly than I'm going to here.
About Mp3:
There is a political battle being fought over the mp3 format. Mp3, like many formats to come (trust me here), makes it possible to store and transfer high-quality audio recordings digitally within reasonable a size range and with reasonable transfer speed. This is becomes increasingly true as storage and network technologies allow for larger and larger files to be reasonable for storage and transfer. Suddenly, it's physically possible to receive and entire albums in digital format over the internet. No one needs to manufacture a CD. No one needs to ship CDs to stores. No one needs to run stores, and no one needs to go out to stores to get music. Record companies are terrified. That's because the business of physically distributing music media is very profitable, and in the near future, it will probably be very outdated -- unless record companies get their way and are able to create an artificial demand for the distribution of music. They've banded together as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to fight mp3. One of the most effective arguments they're using to convince people that such a system needs to be put in place deals with artist compensation and copyright protection. But before I get into that, here are some links for information on mp3 and what record companies are doing about it:
http://www.riaa.com/
http://slashdot.org/ (search for "RIAA")
http://david.weekly.org/writings/sdmi.php3
About Copyright:
There was a time when Copyright made perfect sense. When printing presses were the only way to copy a publishable work, the trade-off was universally beneficial. Printing presses were expensive. Copyright made it possible for people with printing presses to profit from publishing a peice of writing, and didn't limit the rights of people who didn't have printing presses, since they had no reasonable way to copy printed works anyway. People with printing presses were happy, people without printing presses lost nothing of value, and authors could be rewarded for their efforts. When we stretch copyright to cover digital media, however, things get a lot more complicated. Anyone can copy a computer file. In fact, copying digital media is implicit in doing a lot of things that we have other metaphors for as well. To view this web page, for example, you've got to copy it from a server on the Internet. In its journey from that server to your computer, it is copyied between many other computers on the internet that you never have to pay attention to. When it arrives at your computer, it is copied around several times in RAM to get it into a format that will make sense to you, and it is probably copied from the RAM onto your disk for temporary storage to speed things up if you want to view it again in the near future. Then it's copied to a special place in the RAM, which is read by your video card, which then transforms it into the light you're seeing. Then it gets copied about in very similar ways in your eyes, your optic nerves, and in your brain. Worse, the whole web page, like any Liquid Audio track, image, or computer program, is represented within your computer as a number. What are the consequenses of legislating the rights people have over numbers and how they chose to interpret them? Copyright in the present day has become a very complicated issue. It's obviously still important to reward artists and authors for their work, but it's not at all clear how we should do it. Here are some links to pages which talk about what's wrong with the kind of Copyright that many record companies (and software companies before them) are in favor of:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyri
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/dat.html
http://www.public-domain.org/old.html
Because of the mp3s released via the 5% nation, I used to count Soul Coughing amoungst the most politically progressive bands in terms of digital media policy. Such venerable (and notably non-major-record-label-affiliated) musicians as Frank Black and They Might Be Giants have released entire albums in the mp3 format. While I'm not sure it's really up to musicians to keep tabs on issues like these, it's certainly nice to see.
and this is an exerpt from a later post in the thread:
I can go out on the street right now and start selling fire. I can make the fire by banging some rocks together near some dry leaves, and I can sell it on sticks. If you've ever actually tried to start a fire by banging rocks together, you know that it's pretty difficult. So it would take a lot of hard work to make that fire. But if someone bought my fire from me, they could just turn around and start spreading it onto other sticks, and giving it away! Shouldn't I have some kind of right to profit from the fire I worked so hard to make? I don't think so. It was just a bad investment. Anyone can make fire cheap, and once fire is made, anyone can spread it cheap. What right do I have to stop them?
It comes back to the issue of how we're goinging to make music something someone can reasonably do for a living. I don't know how we should do that, but I know that a situation in which musicians get paid because people aren't allowed to do something which is essentially very easy to do will never work out. Getting controlled substances is considerably harder than copying digital media, and look how well the War on Drugs is doing. So why don't we drop that idea and start thinking very hard about what we can do instead?
I know it's sort of out of the range of solutions you were considering, but it would be possible with various forms of redundant distributed processing (amoung player machines) to verify that each client is running the correct executable. Still doesn't help, of course, since a client could always cheat with programs that act purely on the inputs and outputs of the game.
>Security through obscurity is not security
Amen.
That aphorism has always bugged me, useful as it is. All security is obscurity, in a sense. The data that will clear up the obscurity can be seen as the "key". The important thing is to isolate the obscurity (to the recognized key), and to be reasonably confident that one can't determine the key without solving a Hard Problem (finding large prime factors, obtaining data from the brain of an unwilling human, getting ahold of the disk I keep in my left breast pocket, etc).
My company (www.trilogy.com) uses Lotus Notes and Domino heavily, and I'd say it has essentially created my job (as a build guy). It sucks. Notes and Domino lock you into Lotus' proprietary solution to everything, but arn't capable enough to do what you'll inevitably want someday, and then you'll be stuck like we are. All of my big upcoming projects involve getting some Notes-based system we're using rewritten without Notes so that we can do what we need in terms of automation. I'd rather be using plain old sendmail and apache than Notes and Domino. Notes and Domino form a 'complete lossage' that you can't escape from whereas sendmail and apache's faults can be handled with other peices of software. That's the salient point. Notes and Domino do a lot of what you'll need, but when they don't do something, you're trapped. When sendmail and apache don't do something you need, you can find something else that will, or you can put together a quick hack yourself in many cases.
I agree with your principle that people who are making movies should pay more attention to what's effective in the medium than to the boring truth, but I really feel like Sneakers was much more successful as a movie than Hackers. Hackers put too much of its thrill in culture shock, and left the characters flat and the plot a mere formality. Not that I'm deaf to culture shock sci-fi -- it was an okay action thriller, a hell of a lot better than The Net, but didn't really stick with me.
Sneakers, OTOH, gave the characters a little bit of depth (if only a little bit), toyed with an interesting idea or two on the way to the Hollywood Climactic Ending, and left us with a quotable bit of humor here and there on the way.
Hackers vs. Sneakers isn't quite as pronounced as The Matrix vs. Bladerunner, but I'd say it's a comparison along the same lines.
Just don't talk to me about that "you could have anything you want and you're asking for my phone number?" drivel.
You've said that the cyberpunk movement ended sometime in the mid-eighties, around when it got its name. Lately, one sees the word "postcyberpunk" applied to the work of Neal Stephenson and Jeff Noon, amoungst others. And when I think about it, I find that the newer work is sometimes dealing with slightly different themes, things about language and the nature of our stories that didn't show up in earlier cyberpunk, and showing more direct, conscious influence from postmodernism. So what do you think? Is this newer work deserving of its own name and catagory? Is "postcyberpunk" the right name? Or is cyberpunk still somehow alive and well and expanding its themes naturally in newer work? Or are books like _Snowcrash_ and _Vurt_ just a sort of post-movement fall-out, plumbing out the last few things that no one got around to saying?
I agree with you, but somehow they're doing it. The company I work for (http://www.trilogy.com/) is currently trying to move from ASP/COM to EJB/JSP, and they've been targetting the Really Damned High End all along. And, so far as I can tell, they've been doing okay with it. *shrug*
Tell my girlfriend (for the past three years now), who happens to live in LA, 1450ish miles from where I live in Austin, TX, that you can't flirt online. Human interaction is -different- online, but it's not cripplingly so.
I also took a few classes online from New York's New School for Social Research. They were basically held via mailing lists, which worked very well for me. I found that for writing courses, the format worked -better- than a traditional classroom setting. What better way to get people to pay attention to what others are writing than to hold the entire class in written format? I honestly didn't run in to even the smallest frustration in the course of my um courses.
I agree with you entirely that technology should assist rather than replace the teacher. Steve Jobs said in a Wired interview once something to the effect that, as someone who had given away more computers to education than anyone else probably ever has or will, he felt he was qualified to say that it doesn't matter -how- much technology you throw at education, the situation will not improve if the teachers don't understand how to use the computers to teach.
those were equally great days for me. i was in high school, using slirp to turn my (free, of course) unix shell account into a full-fledged slip account, staying up until 4am (ah, that magic hour!) hacking away on LPMOO inheritance code or whatever it was i was doing at the time. that, my friend, was the proverbial day.
i played tiberian sun last night (ah, the joys of having friends who obtain not-so-legal copies of games that haven't exactly been released yet), and it was exceedingly boring in comparison to starcraft. the ai is okay, and there are a few nice points about it, but in general it offers too much complexity and too much room to get completely screwed before you're even off the ground. it's more on the level of warcraft 2 than starcraft, only with many more units and a much less interesting matching between races. my prediction is that warcraft 3 will be much, much better.
The BSD advertising clause is obnoxious because as people add to a peice of software, the statement that must be included in every advertisment can grow to be unreasonably big. GNU/Linux isn't an unreasonably big name, and it's not growing.
Drinking salad dressing? I know you're a weird one, Shoeboy, but I didn't know you were that weird.
But I have a real question. In your letter, you mention in passing that Linux is destined to lower software sales revenue, and I guess you're commenting that someday programmers will get paid less. Do you see that as a Bad Thing, and if so, how can you come to terms with being such a greedy bastard, and if not, how are you going to buy vodka and salad dressing when the revolution comes?
That error message is a little bit cryptic. While it's technically okay for the ale to just sit in your fridge, most of the developers haven't tested under this configuration. The recommended setup involves actually -drinking- one or two of those ales before compiling. While this won't actually eliminate the error message, it will make it seem a lot less important.
TSIA
that was really, really boring. get the free callers. get guests. get rms and esr to have it out. or something. because that was really lame.
While studying the emergent properties of strange attractors can be interesting, little has come of it. Most of the worthwhile work in Chaos Theory has been done in demonstrating the properties of deterministic systems that might lead to chaos (3-period behavior, etc). Although I see your point, I don't think it can be characterized as "the point of Chaos Theory". Also, Chaos Theory is all about chaos in deterministic systems. Modern interrupt-based computers are nondeterministic. The concept you're after is that of emergent properties, and isn't much related to Chaos Theory, save via a good metaphor or two. I would argue that Stephenson's reductionist viewpoint is equally valid, though I am with you regarding his poor definition of the "real job" of a computer, though for different reasons (i.e. that a computer need not be based on bit-manipulation. Bit-manipulation is just a metaphor that happens to be true to the workings of the modern computer.).
Also, my plan for my essay is to use a broad definition of the purpose of a computer (what a computer is good at as a tool) to show how a lack of understanding of the basic nature of computers and what they are good at leads to (and has lead to) ineffective usage. I'm very interested in computers being good tools, but no-one is going to say that a hammer is a good tool if they're trying to use it as a saw.
CmdrTaco: More machine now than man -- twisted and evil...
yarg! "any thing Chaos Theory" indeed. hopefully my essays will be better proofread than my /. posts.