1) He's elitist and arrogant. I don't really care who called him asking for his opinion on the AOL/TW deal. My opinion of his writing will not improve even if the Queen of England herselves phones him to ask if Steve Case is really the Prince of Insufficent Light.
2) He's a lazy writer. Come on, I gave up using Dictionary Definitions to introduce an essay way back in Junior High when a Creative Writing teacher told me how lazy it is.
3) His sense of historical proportion is incredibly awful. In some of his "Look at this new thing that will save the world!" pieces, I wonder if he remembers being wrong about all the previous pieces. Or if he will ever crack open a history book and read about Oneida or the Chataqua movement.
4) He loves to generalize, and generalize poorly. Oh, geeks are libertarian atheists who love to talk about pop culture. Big businesses are all eeeevil. People who don't like me are hate-mongers who are scared of the truth. Wah, Wah.
5) He often lacks any real insight. Incite is more like it -- his articles seem designed more to generate responses than to present a cogent, tight argument. You can see this in phrases like "This may be the most important discovery ever..." or "Businesses have always sought to do this..."
6) He Just Doesn't Get It. I used to read those silly Nancy Drew mysteries, when I was seven or eight. Then I realized that there were two plots -- one for the even books and one for the odd. I never sent e-mail to the publisher, but if I had, it would read like some of Katz' fan mail. (I hope he edits it severely before he posts it.) Just because you get responses doesn't make you right.
(As for point two, I'd argue that I'm sick enough of being stereotyped anyway for being various combinations of male, celibate, mid-20s, overeducated, and rather nonsocial that any definition of "geek" you try to apply to me will not go over very well.)
Have you read Lloyd Wood's critique of your writings? He compares you to Richard Stallman (at least in terms of the reactions you both seem to cause in people) and analyzes your research and conclusions through various essays and pieces.
I guess I'm in the minority here, but I watch the show 'cuz I still have a shred of hope that Chris Carter (and Frank Spotnitz) can actually pull the main storyline together, despite evidence to the contrary.
This week we believe in aliens. Next week, they'll start invading! Ooh, a brain-eating monster, let's go chase it instead! C'mere Chompy, hee hee hee. The Super Global Mega Conspiracy who keeps killing people off can't hurt us while we're wandering off to investigate Killer Monster of the Week, no! Wait, I don't believe in aliens this week. Maybe next week!
Is it too much to ask that Chris Carter focus his attention on the X-Files long enough to give it some creative direction, instead of "Two goofy FBI agents investigate something so strange and bizarre that lovable weirdness ensues! Oh, and have the monster of the week chew on somebody by the end of the second act. Just don't have CSM stand around looking menacing. That's OUR bit."?
I hate giving books scores. The ones in the reviews seem to appear out of nowhere, hmm. The series overall is quite good, but this book really had the sort of Second Book Syndrome that's common in trilogies.
Authors must get to a point where they say, "Gosh, I had to ramp up the excitement in the first book to get people hooked, but I want to throw more plot into the mix and get into the characters without pushing too far toward the cliffhanger at the end." Williams could have got by with two less plot threads, if he'd added a little more action. He wanted to be subtle about what was going on (as he is a great fan of foreshadowing) while capturing the frustration of the travellers (in that they knew they weren't making any progress). That's my analysis.
I'll try to be better about giving scores, I promise.
The story blurb is wrong where it says "latest book", but there's a good reason about why this was posted. At least, I think it's good.
I grabbed the book right after Christmas. Since Hemos is always looking for more reviews, I offered to write one up, as no one had done it yet. (For what it's worth, the review of City of Golden Shadow got posted about the same time as this book came out in hardcover. So we're maintaining an odd sense of timing.) I'm sure he'd be glad to post a review of Mountain of Black Glass.
Now if Tad Williams wants to send me copies of his newer books as they come out....:)
Thank you for reading my site. It has come to my attention that some people have expressed interest in compensating me for the hours of hard work I have spent on running this site, whether by writing and re-writing the software that runs it, or by sifting through piles of e-mail and submissions to find interesting things to post.
I don't have to tell you how much time you have spent reloading -- truly, we would not be where we are without you.
I would also like to take this opportunity to ask your permission to sell this site to a company that is prepared to make it run faster and to enable me to spend more time making it better instead of standing in line at the soup kitchen. Consequently, we shall have a famous Slashdot poll dedicated to that very issue. The question shall be, "Should we sell Slashdot?" The answers will be "Yes", "No", "CowboyNeal", and "Why are you asking me, freak?"
Please take the time to answer, because we're obviously not qualified to make decisions about our labor of love.
Part of the ruling says that the judge doesn't believe the defendants proved that cracking CSS could help play DVDs under Linux. Why? Because you can already play DVDs under Windows, and there are a lot more Windows machines than Linux boxen.
What? That's exactly why it was necessary! Evidently no one wanted to spend the money to by into the CSS scheme to provide a player for Linux. Why? Perhaps it has something to do with the perceived size of the market?
Perhaps for his next trick, the judge could explain why PBS (public broadcasting in the US) shouldn't need to beg for money every year to stay on the air because it has less viewers (and very few commercials).
This means that one source is controlling 2/3 of all Open Source web pages!
Start your own. No one here will stop you. It's what Rob and Jeff did, it's what Scoop did, it's what Joe P. did, it's what the guys behind Themes.org did. Hey, even Bruce did it, and he had some money already.
Unless VA or Andover somehow make it so that people can't visit my site, I won't worry.
You ought to read Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. Contrary to your assertion that children in the US are taught from a young age that one view is right, they're taught not to judge, not to compare, but to accept other viewpoints as equally valid. That tends to reinforce the other idea taught by movies, music, peers, and television -- that authority is, intrinsically, something to be distrusted.
If the philosophy I can devise is just as valid as that of Spinoza or Berkeley or Anselm, why bother reading them? I might as well just go watch TV. The best way to convince an otherwise literate society not to read is to convince the people that there's no use learning anything. Mmm, intellectual laziness. That's why the most popular sites on the Internet aren't the Library of Congress or Project Gutenberg, but are sites like Yahoo! and that pornography place.
They also missed SWAT when talking about Samba configuration. Let's see... it "allows you to configure the complex smb.conf file via a web browser." It also has links to information about the options in the smb.conf file.
More information can be found by typing 'man 8 swat' at your local command prompt. (RedHat 6.0 box, Samba 2.0.3 -- they ought to have had SWAT installed!)
I interpret it as, "Since the Defendants don't have any money invested in this trade secret, it's okay to rule against them. Since the Plaintiffs say they'll lose boatloads of money, they ought to win this round."
Yes, that's a very poor reading of it, but it's what came to mind.
Another argument which seemed silly to me was the Judge's claim that posting a trade secret on the Internet oughtn't make it "public knowledge" because information spreads so quickly. Hmm, how interesting.
That sounds more like the strange case of Intel and Randal Schwartz. (Randal Schwartz is a big-time Perl hero and Intel is a large CPU manufacturer which employs at least one managers who has the strange ability to testify one week that he has examined pages of Perl and found security backdoors and then to testify two weeks later that he wouldn't recognize Perl from phonetic Swahili.)
That brings to mind an interesting question. Hypothetical situation:
A company obtains a patent on, or relating to an Open Standard, in such a way that it is prohibitively expensive or difficult to use the standard without 'infringing' on the patent.
The company allows the Open Standard to prosper, in order to gain in popularity, commercial value, and dispersion.
The company decides, at some point, to seek financial remuneration from certain uses of its patented technology.
Does this make it likely that the Open Standard will falter or fail? Pro: Alan Cox's comment above (and I think he's credible). Con: Unisys and GIF (where's my PNG support?), Microsoft and the.doc file format (okay, not really an Open Standard).
My theory: it depends on how long the company can wait in the second step up above.
How is #2 different from when misanthropes (as opposed to misogynists) pick one image of a 'technologically savvy white male' or 'Slashdot poster' to represent all Slashdot posters or Internet users? Katz may be right in that there are a handful of very hostile young, affluent, white males who like to cause trouble. Until he provides some sort of evidence for it, I'll just assume that he's picking on his favorite whipping-boy. If it's wrong to stereotype women or minorities, shouldn't it be wrong to stereotype people in general?
(ever considered why hate crimes are different from other crimes?)
Because some thoughts should be illegal? (note the bitter sarcasm)
Isn't that amazing? And yet, people still expect newbies to read the copious amounts of (free|installed by default| amazingly complete)+ documentation compiled, written, and maintained by Tom.
The software I've written as Open Source and contributed to other Open Source products has been to 'scratch a personal itch' -- whether I wanted a particular tool, thought I could do something better with a tool I'd been using, or just had an interest in the subject. That's one benefit. Another is that other people may find it useful. Yet another is that some other people have contributed code of their own that makes it even more useful to me and to others.
I fully realize that the licenses I use allow RedHat or Caldera or even Be to sell my software. So what? That's my choice. To me, giving up potential (extremely low) profits from selling my software is worth it, considering the benefits I receive. I'm sure Be has come to the same conclusion, moving to gratis non-commercial use -- if Dell installs it on some of their computers, does that make Be 'suckers'?
Jon claims that the Net has been hostile from (nearly) its start. I disagree, for various values of the word hostile.
Maybe I sound like I long for the good old days of Netiquette (before 1994-1995), but I didn't get here until shortly before that point. Still, I look at places like comp.lang.perl.misc and realize that though there are heated debates, and though even the regulars and the experts have their mistakes corrected quickly and thoroughly, it's the soi disant experts, the nouveau intelligentsia who cause the most problems.
Consider the strange case of a new poster who jumps on the first question answered in the FAQ and gives an incomplete or incorrect answer. Certainly he intended to help, but evidence through the years has shown that the common practice in clpm is the best practice. He'll be corrected for that. Some people take it well ("Thanks for the information; I'm here to learn." and others take it poorly ("Why do you hate me? Why are you arrogant? I have a right to post to this 'web sight' [sic]!").
I don't mean to say that there aren't roving gangs of troublemakers who want to get a reaction however they can, but there's also a strong pull toward correcting misinformation. Perhaps some of the 'hostility' Jon detects is simply curt and terse corrections to his errors. (Of course, there are plenty of the former as well. Plenty indicating volume, not necessarily numbers.)
You're absolutely right. We should all strive to write good, portable, clean, well-commented code even if no one will ever see it. (One of the Perl rules I picked up somewhere is "Always use -w and strict in a program over ten lines or a program you'll use more than twice.")
Still, I'm willing to give groups like SourceForge and Slashdot quite a lot of slack in the matter. They don't exist to produce high-quality code to help people build similar websites. That may come about as a result of their primary mission, but it's a mistake to put that ahead of providing a good place for Open Source projects to put their stuff or to provide an outlet for interesting news and information and public discussion about the news and information.
I'm sure they'd rather have good and useful websites with ugly code (that everyone wants to use) than boring and useless websites with beautiful code (that no one cares about using). Ideally, we shouldn't even have to make that tradeoff. Maybe someday, we won't have to.
That's the hard part about releasing custom code for a website -- it usually grows out of a side project thrown together one afternoon out of a lark, with pieces hobbled, hacked, and crufted together here and there. Now add on a database with table designs and queries evolving over the months, as well as custom hacks for speed and flexibility.
It's hard enough to keep something like that going (especially if you've coded yourself into a corner -- how many times can you take down your website for a week while you rewrite something from scratch?) let alone packaging everything up in a consistent bundle so people can install it in diverse environments on their own. You keep your web documents in/var/www? Maybe I keep mine in/usr/local/httpd/public_html. What if you're using a later version of CGI.pm than I am? Or an earlier one? How about answering a hundred questions like that every day? No thanks! Why should I hack on your code for a week just to see if I can get it to run? It's not like you're building a kernel from scratch!:)
There's a whole lot of work that goes into organizing something like this, and VA Linux deserves commendation for getting this far. (Anyone curious about my experiences ought to check out Everything Development, a system I've played with a bit. They spent months working on installation and though it's still not perfect, their hard work has really paid off. I don't take credit for anything they've done.)
Here's a US Census report showing that Idaho had the third largest percentage growth in population from 1990 through 1999. The news outlets of the Treasure Valley (which includes Boise, Meridian, Nampa, and Caldwell) continually report surveys and studies showing that the area is growing at a phenomenal rate -- but I hadn't found any links to those yet.
Don't forget, the low population density, clean air, wide open spaces, and outdoor recreation make this (and other Western states besides California) seem like paradise to disenchanted high-tech workers who have money and jobs to offer.
Slashdot Mirror
1) He's elitist and arrogant. I don't really care who called him asking for his opinion on the AOL/TW deal. My opinion of his writing will not improve even if the Queen of England herselves phones him to ask if Steve Case is really the Prince of Insufficent Light.
2) He's a lazy writer. Come on, I gave up using Dictionary Definitions to introduce an essay way back in Junior High when a Creative Writing teacher told me how lazy it is.
3) His sense of historical proportion is incredibly awful. In some of his "Look at this new thing that will save the world!" pieces, I wonder if he remembers being wrong about all the previous pieces. Or if he will ever crack open a history book and read about Oneida or the Chataqua movement.
4) He loves to generalize, and generalize poorly. Oh, geeks are libertarian atheists who love to talk about pop culture. Big businesses are all eeeevil. People who don't like me are hate-mongers who are scared of the truth. Wah, Wah.
5) He often lacks any real insight. Incite is more like it -- his articles seem designed more to generate responses than to present a cogent, tight argument. You can see this in phrases like "This may be the most important discovery ever..." or "Businesses have always sought to do this..."
6) He Just Doesn't Get It. I used to read those silly Nancy Drew mysteries, when I was seven or eight. Then I realized that there were two plots -- one for the even books and one for the odd. I never sent e-mail to the publisher, but if I had, it would read like some of Katz' fan mail. (I hope he edits it severely before he posts it.) Just because you get responses doesn't make you right.
(As for point two, I'd argue that I'm sick enough of being stereotyped anyway for being various combinations of male, celibate, mid-20s, overeducated, and rather nonsocial that any definition of "geek" you try to apply to me will not go over very well.)
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You do realize that the little link on the front page that says "Read More" is an option, and not a command, right?
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Hi, Jon.
Have you read Lloyd Wood's critique of your writings? He compares you to Richard Stallman (at least in terms of the reactions you both seem to cause in people) and analyzes your research and conclusions through various essays and pieces.
I'm curious. What is your reaction to this piece?
--
I guess I'm in the minority here, but I watch the show 'cuz I still have a shred of hope that Chris Carter (and Frank Spotnitz) can actually pull the main storyline together, despite evidence to the contrary.
This week we believe in aliens. Next week, they'll start invading! Ooh, a brain-eating monster, let's go chase it instead! C'mere Chompy, hee hee hee. The Super Global Mega Conspiracy who keeps killing people off can't hurt us while we're wandering off to investigate Killer Monster of the Week, no! Wait, I don't believe in aliens this week. Maybe next week!
Is it too much to ask that Chris Carter focus his attention on the X-Files long enough to give it some creative direction, instead of "Two goofy FBI agents investigate something so strange and bizarre that lovable weirdness ensues! Oh, and have the monster of the week chew on somebody by the end of the second act. Just don't have CSM stand around looking menacing. That's OUR bit."?
Boy, I sound bitter, don't I? Sorry.
--
I hate giving books scores. The ones in the reviews seem to appear out of nowhere, hmm. The series overall is quite good, but this book really had the sort of Second Book Syndrome that's common in trilogies.
Authors must get to a point where they say, "Gosh, I had to ramp up the excitement in the first book to get people hooked, but I want to throw more plot into the mix and get into the characters without pushing too far toward the cliffhanger at the end." Williams could have got by with two less plot threads, if he'd added a little more action. He wanted to be subtle about what was going on (as he is a great fan of foreshadowing) while capturing the frustration of the travellers (in that they knew they weren't making any progress). That's my analysis.
I'll try to be better about giving scores, I promise.
--
The story blurb is wrong where it says "latest book", but there's a good reason about why this was posted. At least, I think it's good.
I grabbed the book right after Christmas. Since Hemos is always looking for more reviews, I offered to write one up, as no one had done it yet. (For what it's worth, the review of City of Golden Shadow got posted about the same time as this book came out in hardcover. So we're maintaining an odd sense of timing.) I'm sure he'd be glad to post a review of Mountain of Black Glass.
Now if Tad Williams wants to send me copies of his newer books as they come out.... :)
--
Dear Slashdot Readers,
Thank you for reading my site. It has come to my attention that some people have expressed interest in compensating me for the hours of hard work I have spent on running this site, whether by writing and re-writing the software that runs it, or by sifting through piles of e-mail and submissions to find interesting things to post.
I don't have to tell you how much time you have spent reloading -- truly, we would not be where we are without you.
I would also like to take this opportunity to ask your permission to sell this site to a company that is prepared to make it run faster and to enable me to spend more time making it better instead of standing in line at the soup kitchen. Consequently, we shall have a famous Slashdot poll dedicated to that very issue. The question shall be, "Should we sell Slashdot?" The answers will be "Yes", "No", "CowboyNeal", and "Why are you asking me, freak?"
Please take the time to answer, because we're obviously not qualified to make decisions about our labor of love.
Your friend,
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda
--
Part of the ruling says that the judge doesn't believe the defendants proved that cracking CSS could help play DVDs under Linux. Why? Because you can already play DVDs under Windows, and there are a lot more Windows machines than Linux boxen.
What? That's exactly why it was necessary! Evidently no one wanted to spend the money to by into the CSS scheme to provide a player for Linux. Why? Perhaps it has something to do with the perceived size of the market?
Perhaps for his next trick, the judge could explain why PBS (public broadcasting in the US) shouldn't need to beg for money every year to stay on the air because it has less viewers (and very few commercials).
--
This means that one source is controlling 2/3 of all Open Source web pages!
Start your own. No one here will stop you. It's what Rob and Jeff did, it's what Scoop did, it's what Joe P. did, it's what the guys behind Themes.org did. Hey, even Bruce did it, and he had some money already.
Unless VA or Andover somehow make it so that people can't visit my site, I won't worry.
--
Rob is on the Andover Board of Directors. (See the SEC filings.) I think they call him "Mr. Malda". So don't worry too much.
--
You ought to read Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. Contrary to your assertion that children in the US are taught from a young age that one view is right, they're taught not to judge, not to compare, but to accept other viewpoints as equally valid. That tends to reinforce the other idea taught by movies, music, peers, and television -- that authority is, intrinsically, something to be distrusted.
If the philosophy I can devise is just as valid as that of Spinoza or Berkeley or Anselm, why bother reading them? I might as well just go watch TV. The best way to convince an otherwise literate society not to read is to convince the people that there's no use learning anything. Mmm, intellectual laziness. That's why the most popular sites on the Internet aren't the Library of Congress or Project Gutenberg, but are sites like Yahoo! and that pornography place.
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6. The MPAA is suing its customers for trying to watch DVDs they (the customers) purchased on equipment they (the customers) purchased.
I can think of better business plans.
--
What I find more ironic is that Mr. Kuniavsky did research on UIs at Wired of all places. Ach, my poor eyes!
(What, articles written in pink fonts spinning back and forth are easy to read?)
--
They also missed SWAT when talking about Samba configuration. Let's see... it "allows you to configure the complex smb.conf file via a web browser." It also has links to information about the options in the smb.conf file.
More information can be found by typing 'man 8 swat' at your local command prompt. (RedHat 6.0 box, Samba 2.0.3 -- they ought to have had SWAT installed!)
--
I heard it was three people.
--
I interpret it as, "Since the Defendants don't have any money invested in this trade secret, it's okay to rule against them. Since the Plaintiffs say they'll lose boatloads of money, they ought to win this round."
Yes, that's a very poor reading of it, but it's what came to mind.
Another argument which seemed silly to me was the Judge's claim that posting a trade secret on the Internet oughtn't make it "public knowledge" because information spreads so quickly. Hmm, how interesting.
--
That sounds more like the strange case of Intel and Randal Schwartz. (Randal Schwartz is a big-time Perl hero and Intel is a large CPU manufacturer which employs at least one managers who has the strange ability to testify one week that he has examined pages of Perl and found security backdoors and then to testify two weeks later that he wouldn't recognize Perl from phonetic Swahili.)
Find more details here.
--
That brings to mind an interesting question. Hypothetical situation:
- A company obtains a patent on, or relating to an Open Standard, in such a way that it is prohibitively expensive or difficult to use the standard without 'infringing' on the patent.
- The company allows the Open Standard to prosper, in order to gain in popularity, commercial value, and dispersion.
- The company decides, at some point, to seek financial remuneration from certain uses of its patented technology.
Does this make it likely that the Open Standard will falter or fail? Pro: Alan Cox's comment above (and I think he's credible). Con: Unisys and GIF (where's my PNG support?), Microsoft and theMy theory: it depends on how long the company can wait in the second step up above.
--
How is #2 different from when misanthropes (as opposed to misogynists) pick one image of a 'technologically savvy white male' or 'Slashdot poster' to represent all Slashdot posters or Internet users? Katz may be right in that there are a handful of very hostile young, affluent, white males who like to cause trouble. Until he provides some sort of evidence for it, I'll just assume that he's picking on his favorite whipping-boy. If it's wrong to stereotype women or minorities, shouldn't it be wrong to stereotype people in general?
(ever considered why hate crimes are different from other crimes?)
Because some thoughts should be illegal? (note the bitter sarcasm)
--
Isn't that amazing? And yet, people still expect newbies to read the copious amounts of (free|installed by default| amazingly complete)+ documentation compiled, written, and maintained by Tom.
--
The software I've written as Open Source and contributed to other Open Source products has been to 'scratch a personal itch' -- whether I wanted a particular tool, thought I could do something better with a tool I'd been using, or just had an interest in the subject. That's one benefit. Another is that other people may find it useful. Yet another is that some other people have contributed code of their own that makes it even more useful to me and to others.
I fully realize that the licenses I use allow RedHat or Caldera or even Be to sell my software. So what? That's my choice. To me, giving up potential (extremely low) profits from selling my software is worth it, considering the benefits I receive. I'm sure Be has come to the same conclusion, moving to gratis non-commercial use -- if Dell installs it on some of their computers, does that make Be 'suckers'?
--
Jon claims that the Net has been hostile from (nearly) its start. I disagree, for various values of the word hostile.
Maybe I sound like I long for the good old days of Netiquette (before 1994-1995), but I didn't get here until shortly before that point. Still, I look at places like comp.lang.perl.misc and realize that though there are heated debates, and though even the regulars and the experts have their mistakes corrected quickly and thoroughly, it's the soi disant experts, the nouveau intelligentsia who cause the most problems.
Consider the strange case of a new poster who jumps on the first question answered in the FAQ and gives an incomplete or incorrect answer. Certainly he intended to help, but evidence through the years has shown that the common practice in clpm is the best practice. He'll be corrected for that. Some people take it well ("Thanks for the information; I'm here to learn." and others take it poorly ("Why do you hate me? Why are you arrogant? I have a right to post to this 'web sight' [sic]!").
I don't mean to say that there aren't roving gangs of troublemakers who want to get a reaction however they can, but there's also a strong pull toward correcting misinformation. Perhaps some of the 'hostility' Jon detects is simply curt and terse corrections to his errors. (Of course, there are plenty of the former as well. Plenty indicating volume, not necessarily numbers.)
--
You're absolutely right. We should all strive to write good, portable, clean, well-commented code even if no one will ever see it. (One of the Perl rules I picked up somewhere is "Always use -w and strict in a program over ten lines or a program you'll use more than twice.")
Still, I'm willing to give groups like SourceForge and Slashdot quite a lot of slack in the matter. They don't exist to produce high-quality code to help people build similar websites. That may come about as a result of their primary mission, but it's a mistake to put that ahead of providing a good place for Open Source projects to put their stuff or to provide an outlet for interesting news and information and public discussion about the news and information.
I'm sure they'd rather have good and useful websites with ugly code (that everyone wants to use) than boring and useless websites with beautiful code (that no one cares about using). Ideally, we shouldn't even have to make that tradeoff. Maybe someday, we won't have to.
--
That's the hard part about releasing custom code for a website -- it usually grows out of a side project thrown together one afternoon out of a lark, with pieces hobbled, hacked, and crufted together here and there. Now add on a database with table designs and queries evolving over the months, as well as custom hacks for speed and flexibility.
It's hard enough to keep something like that going (especially if you've coded yourself into a corner -- how many times can you take down your website for a week while you rewrite something from scratch?) let alone packaging everything up in a consistent bundle so people can install it in diverse environments on their own. You keep your web documents in /var/www? Maybe I keep mine in /usr/local/httpd/public_html. What if you're using a later version of CGI.pm than I am? Or an earlier one? How about answering a hundred questions like that every day? No thanks! Why should I hack on your code for a week just to see if I can get it to run? It's not like you're building a kernel from scratch! :)
There's a whole lot of work that goes into organizing something like this, and VA Linux deserves commendation for getting this far. (Anyone curious about my experiences ought to check out Everything Development, a system I've played with a bit. They spent months working on installation and though it's still not perfect, their hard work has really paid off. I don't take credit for anything they've done.)
--
Here's a US Census report showing that Idaho had the third largest percentage growth in population from 1990 through 1999. The news outlets of the Treasure Valley (which includes Boise, Meridian, Nampa, and Caldwell) continually report surveys and studies showing that the area is growing at a phenomenal rate -- but I hadn't found any links to those yet.
Don't forget, the low population density, clean air, wide open spaces, and outdoor recreation make this (and other Western states besides California) seem like paradise to disenchanted high-tech workers who have money and jobs to offer.
--