What if Slashdot applied it to your editorials? Granted, they've been much more svelte since your interview, but you must admit that "Don't like it, don't read/watch/hear it" would do you more good than "Don't like it, vote to kill it".
You're not taking the concept of Interactive far enough. Registered Slashdot readers can block your articles from displaying on the front page. Why not let Oscar viewers block acceptance speeches over three minutes individually? Instead of letting a plurality (as the word majority probably doesn't apply to entertainment preferences) ruin things for everyone else, how about letting everyone customize as he or she sees fit?
Okay, maybe I oughtn't reply to my own post, but... I've just uploaded the nVIDIA Rant Page, outlining my side of the story. I'll keep it updated and put some stuff in place to gather names and stories from other less-than-satisfied customers. Please spread it around.
I'm a little tired of hearing "We'll have something for you soon" for the better part of a year. "Soon" has come and gone.
It's funny to watch something like the Utah-GLX project make such dramatic improvements in a week or two. Granted, you might pick their best weeks, but a handful of dedicated people doing this for fun or for a hobby are working some serious magic there -- and NVidia isn't. I don't expect kung foo voodoo (pardon the pun), but I do expect that my good faith in their promises will not be abused. Unfortunately...
Personally, I'm willing to give them the rest of March and all of April.
Maybe someone should start an NVidia tracking page? Drop me a line at chromatic@snafu.wgz.org, and I'll set one up, unless someone else already has.
I bought a TNT2 card for my machine, based on NVidia's actions at the time -- they were doing the Right Thing (my opinion, anyway). Then, the obfuscated code came, and the releases slowed. Finally in January they released a newer driver. Yes, it gave me 32 bit color, but the 3d performance was atrocious, and the Utah-GLX folks couldn't make much headway with the munged code. I waited for XFree86 4.0, though, believing that NVidia would make right, releasing a decent driver that took advantage of nice things like DRI.
Now it's not completely certain that they'll ditch the standard pipeline in XFree86 4.0, but the tone of the article suggests that. I wonder if I can talk them in to buying back my card. Matrox is looking better and better all the time. Sure, maybe NVidia gets better benchmarks, but when the company cannot put out drivers that let me run Q3 and will not put out drivers that the community can improve, well, they've lost the right to have my business.
Browsing through the OSWG site, I notice that it has sections for volunteer writers and editors. Has this been successful so far, in helping volunteers find projects and vice versa? If not, what needs to happen before it takes off?
Part of the reason Microsoft started the MCSE program is marketing. That is how it can claim "There are 180,000 trained professionals currently using our products. We give them our stamp of approval." Also, by providing MCSEs, MCSDs, and all the other certified people with beta software, add-ons, and promotional materials, the company can use them to promote and to advertise upcoming software.
It's a symbiotic relationship.
For what it's worth, I actually have an MCP. That was the bare minimum requirement to keep my job here (which I'm leaving soon anyway:) -- and the reason I didn't go for anything else is that I decided MS was irrelevant to what I really wanted to do. Learning Perl, reading boatloads of books, and just experimenting with things I can actually break and fix (free software is for tinkerers) makes me many times more qualified than knowing how to click through some network configuration wizard.
People may have a right to create "junk speech", but they have no right to do it in my house or place of business. They have no right to use my resources to do it. Perhaps spammers would object if I borrowed spray paint from their garages to paint my message "UCE is Theft" on their houses, cars, and lawns?
Framing the debate in terms of "free speech" occludes the real issues -- trespassing, theft, and harassment. Bulk snail mailers have to shoulder the cost of postal rates and printing. Unsolicited commercial e-mail shifts those costs to access providers.
(I've been to that gas station in rural Idaho, by the way.)
how is spam really all that different from someone approaching you on the street and asking "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?"
Your question should be, how is spam really all that different from thousands of people blocking the entrances to your store, using your bathrooms, tracking mud all over your nice clean floors, and asking each and every one of your customers, "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?"
Sure, you may only have to hit delete three or four times a day, but how many other mail accounts does your ISP support? Do some multiplication here.
You're confusing "familiar" with "consistent and understandable". Why are there more PalmOS PDAs sold than Windows CE machines? It's a good thing more people aren't able to learn new things, or there would be millions of Palms out there. *shrug*
Other people will likely present examples of Windows being decidedly non-intuitive ("To shutdown, click Start" and "To save, click on a backwards drawing of a floppy") -- but that's not the point.
The point (as I have argued before) is that copying an existing user interface somewhere it doesn't belong is a worse idea than designing a flawed interface from scratch. Putting a Start button in Linux is like putting a crank on the front of your car.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a frontal assault on the open source ethic, both technological and social. The underlying political issue is both clear and significant: Must we depend on the creative choices and products of a handful of ferociously greedy and monopolistic corporations who have increasingly come to dominate media, culture and entertainment? Or can we define our own cultural experiences?
Before the passage of this law, the answer was yes; individuals controlled at least some of their choices.
And after the passage of this law, individuals no longer control their choices? How amazing -- the DMCA subverts free will. I no longer have the ability not to watch television, or not to listen to the radio, or not to write my own books or songs? DMCA enforcement squads will prevent me from flying halfway across the country to attend an Over the Rhine concert? I doubt it.
While your concerns may be warranted, you do your argument a disservice with this exaggeration.
One of the Net's universally shared ethics, at least among geeks, has been empowerment and choice, along with a growing open-source instinct about software and technology.
Is it universal, or is it shared among geeks? Be precise.
Previously, Net culture has tended to be freer than offline culture.
This, from someone who has decried the so-called "Digital Divide"? Aren't the barriers to participation in Net culture sufficiently higher (the cost of a PC and an Internet connection) than those of offline culture (the cost of a radio)?
If you don't like me reframing the question in those terms, be more specific on what you mean by 'freer'. (I suspect the answer lies in a latter paragraph which mentiones "free flow of ideas and opinions". I was fortunate enough to find this, among college students, before I discovered the Internet.)
Music, the spark for a surprising percentage of the Net's legal battles, has become a metaphor for the emerging political struggle over who defines and propagates culture on the Web and the rest of the Net.
Step back and look at the bigger picture. The question is, "What are the legal and ethical ramifications of trivially duplicated Intellectual Property?" That question has bounced around for decades, if not longer. (I would imagine that it came up as recording equipment became popular and practica for home use, and again as photocopying technology spread.) The current incarnations of the debate (MP3s, DVDs, TV rebroadcasting) only demonstrate that the issue has never been resolved.
The Net is, in fact, redefining what content and intellectual property are.
Some would argue that the definitions were never very good.
The law's proponents claim that the DMCA was intended to promote balance, but so far, at least, it tilts sharply towards copyright holders, not copyright challengers. It advances a principle of blind copyright protection that in no way takes into account the Net's unique nature, nor the rights and sensibilities of a generation that defines culture differently.
What is "the Net's unique nature"? Who is this mythical generation? How does it "define culture differently"? Please support your opinions with some facts. That will, at least, give your essay the semblance of commentary.
Nor does it even acknowledge the idea of any universal right to define choice, options or personal enjoyment.
Perhaps you need a law to tell you that it is okay to like something you didn't see on TV or hear on the radio, but the rest of us are doing okay without it. I am not a mindless consumer, bleating advertising jingles all day long, waiting for 5 pm when I can invade the mall with the rest of my flock, emerging bleary eyed, emblazened with the corporate logos.
This kind of pre-Net copyright protection will advance the same sort of tepid and homogeneous culture that the music and movie industries have forced on the offline world by promoting products that can generate enormous revenues, and by gobbling up independent companies and acquiring media and entertainment companies and mass-marketing (and in effect, censoring and moderating) popular culture.
Someone interested in "choice, options, or personal enjoyment" might even acknowledge that some people have made the choice, or, horrors, personally enjoy that "tepid and homogenous culture". Jack Valenti certainly did not send his good squad to force me to attend a movie or two last year.
One of the striking aspects of geek culture is that it's so far remained much freer than the mainstream.
Again, in which ways? The geeks who like Star Trek? The hardcore libertarian bunch? Cypherpunks? Script kiddies? Alt.binaries.* readers? MCSEs? Warez d00ds?
Software and hardware have enabled individuals to seek out rich, diverse and highly individualized entertainment.
As did cable television, libraries, oral tradition, and imagination before them.
The ability to personalize culture in this way is unprecedented, a unique feature of life online.
When you define culture as "a list of bookmarks in a web browser", you are correct. Unfortunately, no one else defines culture in such a short-sighted fashion.
The belief that even if laws restrict the Net, innovative software and hardware will triumph, is pervasive. The DMCA suggests that may be wishful thinking.
Whereas you suggest that the idea that I can decide not to partake of the "tepid, homogenized mass media culture" is wishful thinking.
Is there cause for concern with the DCMA? Certainly. Is it anything new? No. Is it the end of the world? Certainly not.
Grandiose exaggerations, sweeping generalizations, a limited sense of proportion and history, and vague notions about some sort of utopian geek paradise threatened by evil big business do very little but occlude the real issue.
I don't think there is any book that fully documents in detail the workings of the Linux kernel like Tanenbaum does Minix;
It doesn't get into as much detail as the Tanenbaum book, but CoriolisOpen Press put out the Linux Core Kernel Commentary recently. (It's on my stack of books to review, actually.) It's based on 2.2.5, and it owes a lot to Lions' commentary on Unix. That might be worth considering.
Hm, looks like they have a brand new book covering the networking code. (http://www.coriolis.com)
If they wouldn't have tried to get those patents then someone else (mabye B&N) would have done.
Here's my point. If someone else had done it, I would be boycotting and complaining about that company. If it is wrong for Barnes and Noble to (hypothetically) obtain a patent and then use it as the basis of legal action against Amazon, it is wrong for Amazon to do the same. Mr. Bezos' promises are nice, but they don't convince me.
If your business is so fragile that you have to bully your competitors just to keep the doors open, you're probably not going to last very long anyway.
The gist of my argument is that, if open standards and protocols benefit any one person or organization more than that person or organization contributes to everyone else (as is the case for pretty much everybody!), perhaps removing those benefits will help convince a rogue organization to stop trying to embrace, extend, deform, and extinguish those standards and protocols. It would be nice to get some suggestions and critiques and comments on it.:)
The best reason to have an IPO is so that you can afford a $300 backup solution. Or a CVS repository. Or a hard drive to go along with your ramdisk, so that if the power accidentally goes out, you don't lose all of your work.
Gosh, you'd think William Gibson wrote "Neuromancer" on a typewriter or something.
What are your thoughts on languages and the standardization process? Looking at how long it took for C (and C++) to have standards set by ANSI/ISO, and how the most popular implementations are still so very incomplete (MSVC++, even GCC in some ways), one might ask, "Why bother?" Sun might be thinking something similar with Java.
Is it worth the time and the trouble to be able to create and to point at a sort of Platonic ideal while the rest of the world is chasing a poorly realized reflection of that ideal? What are the benefits of handing over the design of a language to the standards organizations instead of pushing forward with the design yourself (see Python, or Perl, or PHP for successes of the latter)?
Funny, Udell and I had an e-mail conversation similar to this a couple of weeks ago. While I disagree with him on the appropriateness of Perl as a beginning language (after reading Elements of Programming With Perl), I think he's right on the money about Zope being Python's killer app. Real programming ought to be more about getting stuff done than arguing over whitespace.
Now the Everything engine is very flexible, and Slash lets you get a lot done, there's really nothing out there like Zope for Perl.
At the risk of a shameless plug, let me just say that that's why i started Jellybean.
But that's just it... the author wasn't talking about how long it takes to learn how to use Linux in general. He was talking about how long it takes to learn a new type of technology.
A Palm is roughly akin to an electronic notepad. Most people already know how to use notepads. No big leap there -- there are some general things you need to learn and some specific things (Graffiti being one of the latter) before you're proficient.
The same goes for word processing programs. They're all very similar -- you type and type and then hit Save and Print. There are some specific tasks peculiar to each, but most of what people I know do doesn't require anything more complicated than New Document, Open Document, Save Document, and Print Document.
Bringing "the complexity of learning how to use Linux" into the equation is a mistake. Half of the people here couldn't find the right mouse button until I stood beside them and said, "Right-click. Click the right mouse button. No, that was the left mouse button. Use the other finger. That's it." If people don't know how to use Windows and still manage to get their work done, why worry that they won't be able to learn how to use Linux, especially if it's already set up for them?
As long as they can find New Document, Open Document, Save Document, and Print Document, they'll be fine. Just watch out for incompatible file formats.
I have to disagree with a couple of points regarding end users and applications. The author states that people have invested hours and hours into learning the ins and outs of their Office Suites. Yeah, some people have. Most of the people I know sure haven't! They've spent hours and hours doing the same things over and over again because someone showed them how to do a simple task. If they moved to a different program, they'd scramble for a few weeks and call someone over to show them how to do two or simple tasks and then they'd be okay.
I'm pretty sure this is a representative group, here. They don't want to learn the ins and outs of everything. They certainly don't want to sit down with a manual and learn what options they have and might use in the future. When they try to do something new (perish the thought) they might poke around for ten seconds and then either give up or try to find someone else who might know how.
So the time spent in learning a new application is a lot smaller than the author estimates -- if the people I know are representative.
Of course, then he talks about the Palm being a revolutionary device because it did what people wanted to do, as opposed to making people adapt to a new system. Right. I'm willing to bet at least, oh, 95% of current Palm users had to learn that Graffiti language. Granted, Palm users may be more technically adept than the rest of the population, but they learned something new and it became a fantastic success.
I suspect the truth is closer to my experience than the picture the author presents.:)
Is collateral damage a concern? I mean, if a site like Yahoo! is hit with a gigabit of data per second, won't that take up a lot of the bandwidth between the DoS clients and the target?
Or are these sites so close to the Internet backbone that the additional traffic is localized?
No, by that logic if Bill Gates told me he has enough money, I'd deduce that he's staying on as Chief Innovator (his terminology) because he enjoys it and he wants Microsoft to continue as it is.
Except that I don't think it's capitalism (the desire to make money) that's keeping Hemos and Roblimo (and probably CmdrTaco, though I've not met him) running Slashdot. I've talked to them, and they've told me that they work on Slashdot because they enjoy it, not because they need the money. They don't need the stress or the additional work, but they want to make the site stay useful and interesting and as free as possible.
You're welcome to question their motives, but you're doing them a disservice to say that money is the largest (or only) factor in what they do.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean, something like:
The Festival is free and brought to you by Andover.Net / VA Linux, Addison-Wesley and SwitcHouse?
Emphasis mine.
--
Are you sure it's a great idea?
What if Slashdot applied it to your editorials? Granted, they've been much more svelte since your interview, but you must admit that "Don't like it, don't read/watch/hear it" would do you more good than "Don't like it, vote to kill it".
You're not taking the concept of Interactive far enough. Registered Slashdot readers can block your articles from displaying on the front page. Why not let Oscar viewers block acceptance speeches over three minutes individually? Instead of letting a plurality (as the word majority probably doesn't apply to entertainment preferences) ruin things for everyone else, how about letting everyone customize as he or she sees fit?
--
With an nVIDIA card? A custom one? Good luck.
I'm having enough trouble trying to get my TNT2 to work with Linux. :(
--
Okay, maybe I oughtn't reply to my own post, but... I've just uploaded the nVIDIA Rant Page, outlining my side of the story. I'll keep it updated and put some stuff in place to gather names and stories from other less-than-satisfied customers. Please spread it around.
--
I'm a little tired of hearing "We'll have something for you soon" for the better part of a year. "Soon" has come and gone.
It's funny to watch something like the Utah-GLX project make such dramatic improvements in a week or two. Granted, you might pick their best weeks, but a handful of dedicated people doing this for fun or for a hobby are working some serious magic there -- and NVidia isn't. I don't expect kung foo voodoo (pardon the pun), but I do expect that my good faith in their promises will not be abused. Unfortunately...
Personally, I'm willing to give them the rest of March and all of April.
Maybe someone should start an NVidia tracking page? Drop me a line at chromatic@snafu.wgz.org, and I'll set one up, unless someone else already has.
--
I bought a TNT2 card for my machine, based on NVidia's actions at the time -- they were doing the Right Thing (my opinion, anyway). Then, the obfuscated code came, and the releases slowed. Finally in January they released a newer driver. Yes, it gave me 32 bit color, but the 3d performance was atrocious, and the Utah-GLX folks couldn't make much headway with the munged code. I waited for XFree86 4.0, though, believing that NVidia would make right, releasing a decent driver that took advantage of nice things like DRI.
Now it's not completely certain that they'll ditch the standard pipeline in XFree86 4.0, but the tone of the article suggests that. I wonder if I can talk them in to buying back my card. Matrox is looking better and better all the time. Sure, maybe NVidia gets better benchmarks, but when the company cannot put out drivers that let me run Q3 and will not put out drivers that the community can improve, well, they've lost the right to have my business.
Anyone with me?
--
Browsing through the OSWG site, I notice that it has sections for volunteer writers and editors. Has this been successful so far, in helping volunteers find projects and vice versa? If not, what needs to happen before it takes off?
--
Part of the reason Microsoft started the MCSE program is marketing. That is how it can claim "There are 180,000 trained professionals currently using our products. We give them our stamp of approval." Also, by providing MCSEs, MCSDs, and all the other certified people with beta software, add-ons, and promotional materials, the company can use them to promote and to advertise upcoming software.
It's a symbiotic relationship.
For what it's worth, I actually have an MCP. That was the bare minimum requirement to keep my job here (which I'm leaving soon anyway :) -- and the reason I didn't go for anything else is that I decided MS was irrelevant to what I really wanted to do. Learning Perl, reading boatloads of books, and just experimenting with things I can actually break and fix (free software is for tinkerers) makes me many times more qualified than knowing how to click through some network configuration wizard.
--
People may have a right to create "junk speech", but they have no right to do it in my house or place of business. They have no right to use my resources to do it. Perhaps spammers would object if I borrowed spray paint from their garages to paint my message "UCE is Theft" on their houses, cars, and lawns?
Framing the debate in terms of "free speech" occludes the real issues -- trespassing, theft, and harassment. Bulk snail mailers have to shoulder the cost of postal rates and printing. Unsolicited commercial e-mail shifts those costs to access providers.
(I've been to that gas station in rural Idaho, by the way.)
--
how is spam really all that different from someone approaching you on the street and asking "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?"
Your question should be, how is spam really all that different from thousands of people blocking the entrances to your store, using your bathrooms, tracking mud all over your nice clean floors, and asking each and every one of your customers, "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?"
Sure, you may only have to hit delete three or four times a day, but how many other mail accounts does your ISP support? Do some multiplication here.
--
I don't see any freely downloadable books at oreilly.com
Did you look? How about Open Sources? Or Using Samba? Don't forget Learning Debian GNU/Linux. Maybe even Docbook: The Definitive Guide? (The latter is an O'Reilly book, but the downloadable version is hosted elsewhere.)
--
You're confusing "familiar" with "consistent and understandable". Why are there more PalmOS PDAs sold than Windows CE machines? It's a good thing more people aren't able to learn new things, or there would be millions of Palms out there. *shrug*
Other people will likely present examples of Windows being decidedly non-intuitive ("To shutdown, click Start" and "To save, click on a backwards drawing of a floppy") -- but that's not the point.
The point (as I have argued before) is that copying an existing user interface somewhere it doesn't belong is a worse idea than designing a flawed interface from scratch. Putting a Start button in Linux is like putting a crank on the front of your car.
--
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a frontal assault on the open source ethic, both technological and social. The underlying political issue is both clear and significant: Must we depend on the creative choices and products of a handful of ferociously greedy and monopolistic corporations who have increasingly come to dominate media, culture and entertainment? Or can we define our own cultural experiences?
Before the passage of this law, the answer was yes; individuals controlled at least some of their choices.
And after the passage of this law, individuals no longer control their choices? How amazing -- the DMCA subverts free will. I no longer have the ability not to watch television, or not to listen to the radio, or not to write my own books or songs? DMCA enforcement squads will prevent me from flying halfway across the country to attend an Over the Rhine concert? I doubt it.
While your concerns may be warranted, you do your argument a disservice with this exaggeration.
One of the Net's universally shared ethics, at least among geeks, has been empowerment and choice, along with a growing open-source instinct about software and technology.
Is it universal, or is it shared among geeks? Be precise.
Previously, Net culture has tended to be freer than offline culture.
This, from someone who has decried the so-called "Digital Divide"? Aren't the barriers to participation in Net culture sufficiently higher (the cost of a PC and an Internet connection) than those of offline culture (the cost of a radio)?
If you don't like me reframing the question in those terms, be more specific on what you mean by 'freer'. (I suspect the answer lies in a latter paragraph which mentiones "free flow of ideas and opinions". I was fortunate enough to find this, among college students, before I discovered the Internet.)
Music, the spark for a surprising percentage of the Net's legal battles, has become a metaphor for the emerging political struggle over who defines and propagates culture on the Web and the rest of the Net.
Step back and look at the bigger picture. The question is, "What are the legal and ethical ramifications of trivially duplicated Intellectual Property?" That question has bounced around for decades, if not longer. (I would imagine that it came up as recording equipment became popular and practica for home use, and again as photocopying technology spread.) The current incarnations of the debate (MP3s, DVDs, TV rebroadcasting) only demonstrate that the issue has never been resolved.
The Net is, in fact, redefining what content and intellectual property are.
Some would argue that the definitions were never very good.
The law's proponents claim that the DMCA was intended to promote balance, but so far, at least, it tilts sharply towards copyright holders, not copyright challengers. It advances a principle of blind copyright protection that in no way takes into account the Net's unique nature, nor the rights and sensibilities of a generation that defines culture differently.
What is "the Net's unique nature"? Who is this mythical generation? How does it "define culture differently"? Please support your opinions with some facts. That will, at least, give your essay the semblance of commentary.
Nor does it even acknowledge the idea of any universal right to define choice, options or personal enjoyment.
Perhaps you need a law to tell you that it is okay to like something you didn't see on TV or hear on the radio, but the rest of us are doing okay without it. I am not a mindless consumer, bleating advertising jingles all day long, waiting for 5 pm when I can invade the mall with the rest of my flock, emerging bleary eyed, emblazened with the corporate logos.
This kind of pre-Net copyright protection will advance the same sort of tepid and homogeneous culture that the music and movie industries have forced on the offline world by promoting products that can generate enormous revenues, and by gobbling up independent companies and acquiring media and entertainment companies and mass-marketing (and in effect, censoring and moderating) popular culture.
Someone interested in "choice, options, or personal enjoyment" might even acknowledge that some people have made the choice, or, horrors, personally enjoy that "tepid and homogenous culture". Jack Valenti certainly did not send his good squad to force me to attend a movie or two last year.
One of the striking aspects of geek culture is that it's so far remained much freer than the mainstream.
Again, in which ways? The geeks who like Star Trek? The hardcore libertarian bunch? Cypherpunks? Script kiddies? Alt.binaries.* readers? MCSEs? Warez d00ds?
Software and hardware have enabled individuals to seek out rich, diverse and highly individualized entertainment.
As did cable television, libraries, oral tradition, and imagination before them.
The ability to personalize culture in this way is unprecedented, a unique feature of life online.
When you define culture as "a list of bookmarks in a web browser", you are correct. Unfortunately, no one else defines culture in such a short-sighted fashion.
The belief that even if laws restrict the Net, innovative software and hardware will triumph, is pervasive. The DMCA suggests that may be wishful thinking.
Whereas you suggest that the idea that I can decide not to partake of the "tepid, homogenized mass media culture" is wishful thinking.
Is there cause for concern with the DCMA? Certainly. Is it anything new? No. Is it the end of the world? Certainly not.
Grandiose exaggerations, sweeping generalizations, a limited sense of proportion and history, and vague notions about some sort of utopian geek paradise threatened by evil big business do very little but occlude the real issue.
--
I don't think there is any book that fully documents in detail the workings of the Linux kernel like Tanenbaum does Minix;
It doesn't get into as much detail as the Tanenbaum book, but CoriolisOpen Press put out the Linux Core Kernel Commentary recently. (It's on my stack of books to review, actually.) It's based on 2.2.5, and it owes a lot to Lions' commentary on Unix. That might be worth considering.
Hm, looks like they have a brand new book covering the networking code. (http://www.coriolis.com)
--
If they wouldn't have tried to get those patents then someone else (mabye B&N) would have done.
Here's my point. If someone else had done it, I would be boycotting and complaining about that company. If it is wrong for Barnes and Noble to (hypothetically) obtain a patent and then use it as the basis of legal action against Amazon, it is wrong for Amazon to do the same. Mr. Bezos' promises are nice, but they don't convince me.
If your business is so fragile that you have to bully your competitors just to keep the doors open, you're probably not going to last very long anyway.
--
I had the same kind of questions last month. It lead to an essay called "Barbarians in the Library".
The gist of my argument is that, if open standards and protocols benefit any one person or organization more than that person or organization contributes to everyone else (as is the case for pretty much everybody!), perhaps removing those benefits will help convince a rogue organization to stop trying to embrace, extend, deform, and extinguish those standards and protocols. It would be nice to get some suggestions and critiques and comments on it. :)
--
The best reason to have an IPO is so that you can afford a $300 backup solution. Or a CVS repository. Or a hard drive to go along with your ramdisk, so that if the power accidentally goes out, you don't lose all of your work.
Gosh, you'd think William Gibson wrote "Neuromancer" on a typewriter or something.
--
As I read that, suddenly I realized the horrible truth behind my job... they're doing an experiment on me to see how to turn a human into a cat!
- comatose? Check!
- ignoring all external stimuli? Check!
- fiercely territorial? Check!
- social only before mealtimes? Check!
My goodness -- I'm the behavioral model for RoboCat! I wonder if it knows Perl?
--
What are your thoughts on languages and the standardization process? Looking at how long it took for C (and C++) to have standards set by ANSI/ISO, and how the most popular implementations are still so very incomplete (MSVC++, even GCC in some ways), one might ask, "Why bother?" Sun might be thinking something similar with Java.
Is it worth the time and the trouble to be able to create and to point at a sort of Platonic ideal while the rest of the world is chasing a poorly realized reflection of that ideal? What are the benefits of handing over the design of a language to the standards organizations instead of pushing forward with the design yourself (see Python, or Perl, or PHP for successes of the latter)?
--
Funny, Udell and I had an e-mail conversation similar to this a couple of weeks ago. While I disagree with him on the appropriateness of Perl as a beginning language (after reading Elements of Programming With Perl), I think he's right on the money about Zope being Python's killer app. Real programming ought to be more about getting stuff done than arguing over whitespace.
Now the Everything engine is very flexible, and Slash lets you get a lot done, there's really nothing out there like Zope for Perl.
At the risk of a shameless plug, let me just say that that's why i started Jellybean.
--
But that's just it... the author wasn't talking about how long it takes to learn how to use Linux in general. He was talking about how long it takes to learn a new type of technology.
A Palm is roughly akin to an electronic notepad. Most people already know how to use notepads. No big leap there -- there are some general things you need to learn and some specific things (Graffiti being one of the latter) before you're proficient.
The same goes for word processing programs. They're all very similar -- you type and type and then hit Save and Print. There are some specific tasks peculiar to each, but most of what people I know do doesn't require anything more complicated than New Document, Open Document, Save Document, and Print Document.
Bringing "the complexity of learning how to use Linux" into the equation is a mistake. Half of the people here couldn't find the right mouse button until I stood beside them and said, "Right-click. Click the right mouse button. No, that was the left mouse button. Use the other finger. That's it." If people don't know how to use Windows and still manage to get their work done, why worry that they won't be able to learn how to use Linux, especially if it's already set up for them?
As long as they can find New Document, Open Document, Save Document, and Print Document, they'll be fine. Just watch out for incompatible file formats.
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I have to disagree with a couple of points regarding end users and applications. The author states that people have invested hours and hours into learning the ins and outs of their Office Suites. Yeah, some people have. Most of the people I know sure haven't! They've spent hours and hours doing the same things over and over again because someone showed them how to do a simple task. If they moved to a different program, they'd scramble for a few weeks and call someone over to show them how to do two or simple tasks and then they'd be okay.
I'm pretty sure this is a representative group, here. They don't want to learn the ins and outs of everything. They certainly don't want to sit down with a manual and learn what options they have and might use in the future. When they try to do something new (perish the thought) they might poke around for ten seconds and then either give up or try to find someone else who might know how.
So the time spent in learning a new application is a lot smaller than the author estimates -- if the people I know are representative.
Of course, then he talks about the Palm being a revolutionary device because it did what people wanted to do, as opposed to making people adapt to a new system. Right. I'm willing to bet at least, oh, 95% of current Palm users had to learn that Graffiti language. Granted, Palm users may be more technically adept than the rest of the population, but they learned something new and it became a fantastic success.
I suspect the truth is closer to my experience than the picture the author presents. :)
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Is collateral damage a concern? I mean, if a site like Yahoo! is hit with a gigabit of data per second, won't that take up a lot of the bandwidth between the DoS clients and the target?
Or are these sites so close to the Internet backbone that the additional traffic is localized?
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No, by that logic if Bill Gates told me he has enough money, I'd deduce that he's staying on as Chief Innovator (his terminology) because he enjoys it and he wants Microsoft to continue as it is.
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Except that I don't think it's capitalism (the desire to make money) that's keeping Hemos and Roblimo (and probably CmdrTaco, though I've not met him) running Slashdot. I've talked to them, and they've told me that they work on Slashdot because they enjoy it, not because they need the money. They don't need the stress or the additional work, but they want to make the site stay useful and interesting and as free as possible.
You're welcome to question their motives, but you're doing them a disservice to say that money is the largest (or only) factor in what they do.
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