The book is about those two kids Katz interviewed, huh? I grew up in Idaho, 20 miles from where those kids did. It's not exactly Silicon Valley, but there are a whole lot of technology companies there right now, like HP and Micron and Extended Systems and dozens of smaller firms, as well as the headquarters of other companies like Albertsons and Boise Cascade.
Katz got snowed by those kids, that's what happened. They fed him some line about how their lives sucked because the only things in Idaho are potato farms, that sugar beet plant, and rusty old pickups with shotguns and loud radios tuned to the country music station, and he bought it. I don't know anyone in the area who read the Wired article and took it seriously.
Now if the subtitle of the movie is "How a gullible journalist got taken in by a couple of lazy kids who can't find jobs in the 3rd fastest growing area in the U.S.", maybe it'll be worth watching as something other than a parody.
'Break the law'? 'DoS attack'? That's not how Usenet propagation works.
The large news feeds pass along messages from other sites as a courtesy. They use their own resources (time, disk space) to do so. If they choose not to pass along messages from another site due to volume of useless postings, poor Net behavior, or whatever, that is their right.
If you had guests over who made a mess in your bathroom, shaved your dog, filled up all your trash cans, started yelling obscenities and advertising slogans whenever someone tried to start a conversation, and left all of your doors and windows unlocked, would you invite them back?
Neither would the news admins participating in UDPs.
Are you looking for a clause in the GPL that says, "If you make lots of money distributing this software, you have to make it easier for people to get my software than I've already done"?
That's not likely to happen. Conversely, you might argue that that is precisely what they company is doing. Besides that, if you use the GPL, the company is obligated by the license to make the source code available to their customers. That's your source code. They're also not allowed to restrict distribution of your software (under the GPL, other licenses vary). If they do, well, then you might consider legal action.
If that doesn't answer your question, perhaps you could rephrase it -- I'm confused.
Neverwhere was adapted from the small screen to the novel. When it came out in hardcover, a local bookstore had an "authorless book signing" and showed the three-hour miniseries before giving away bookplates with Gaiman's autograph.
Just one more added to my collection. (Now to get "the Dream Hunters" from CowboyNeal).
Brazil's a tough one to explain in a short space. At the core, it reminded me of 1984 (you might have heard of it before on Slashdot) -- but it's more about modern life and trying to be an individual in an increasingly bureaucratic, cold, and cruel world. It has lots of pipes and explosions and a flying woman and the standard cool Gilliam visual effects.
Hmm, maybe you should start with Time Bandits. As I recall, the Terry Gilliam Symposium last summer had a hard time agreeing on a synopsis of Brazil.
--
The Potential To Be Wicked
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 1
So on the one hand, we have Microsoft and legal Findings of Fact which establish that the company has taken illegal actions to obtain and to maintain a monopoly within certain spheres. On the other hand, we have two large companies (AOL and Time-Warner) trying to merge, and they're more evil because you think they might do bad things in the future?
Perhaps you would not mind volunteering to go to jail on the possibility that you might commit a felony sometime? I didn't think so.
You can't legally punish someone in advance, can you?
Yes, the homogenization of 'American culture' (perhaps better written 'Post-modern Western Culture') is tragic, but many of us are willing to accept the consequences of Wal*Mart and McDonalds despite the drawbacks. Until that changes, you're going to be railing in vain. Being bland just ain't a crime.
After reading the FAQ, it appears that TNT and TNT2 support has been improved in this version. To wit, my home machine with a TNT2 only had accelerated support with 15 or 16 bit color. Apparently, this version has improved that to 32 bit color.
We'll see if my Q3 framerate gets above 24, but I'm hopeful. (I'm also glad to see that the licence for the source code is the same as the XFree86 licence!)
According to the story, the recorded message on C|Host's customer service line said something about entering domain names and IP addresses into the DNS server by hand.
I'm guessing that these are customer IP addresses, but even that smacks of technical incompetence. Pretty scary. Hint: if you're not going to make recoverable backups, at least spend an hour or two learning rudimentary shell scripting, if not Perl.
...my point is that to anyone trying to learn Perl, all perl code is obfuscated to an extent.
To anyone trying to learn Latin, all Latin is obfuscated to an extent. "Paginarium Fulvinarium" anyone? (Watch me misspell it and prove my point.) I'm not aware of any programming languages which don't have some commonly used idioms that might confuse neophytes.
...give a non-Perl programmer a copy of "Programming Perl" and see how long it takes them to figure it out...
Why would you hire a non-Perl programmer to maintain existing Perl code? Are you suggesting that one measure of the 'suckiness' of a language is the ease with which someone ignorant of the language can perform code maintenance?
I know you're both nominally involved with Blockstackers and the Everything project. My question is, to what extent? Are you funding this, or letting your more involved roommates slide on the rent, or are you actively involved in the design, testing, and coding?
Of course, it's an NT server and it's for a group of about 60 people who work standard 40 hour weeks on the weekdays. I'm more concerned about power fluctuations because our site pulls a lot of juice.
Now the Linux server I use for my websites and mail (not at work!) is staying up....
I'm heartened to read Jon Katz saying that a careful study of history shows that futurism never quite gets things right. (I hope I'm not misinterpreting him.)
Where's my flying car? Or my city on the moon? What about all the things that were promised by the year 2000 or 1990 or 1980 or whenever? The one lesson I take from all of this is, no one really knows what's going to happen in the future, and we'll probably all have just about the same concerns. Will I be able to pay my bills? Can I raise my kids right? Can I take care of my aging parents?
Maybe the real tragedy of technology is that it's not our savior, no matter how much we like to believe otherwise.
That's right. We all know that closed source projects like Diablo, Ultima Online, and IIS 4.0 are secure and uncrackable. Thank goodness for software like Windows 98 and Windows 95 which are immune to BackOrifice due to the superior protection of Security through Obscurity.
Can you *imagine* if someone like Alan Cox or Theo De Raadt had access to the source code? I mean, he might spend upwards of two hours fixing the security holes. That is plainly unacceptable.
It is a very good thing that reverse engineering and hex editing and asm disassembly are impossible and illegal, not to mention packet sniffing! Otherwise, our panacea of Ivory Tower software development might show some cracks.
Now if we can just rid the world of Computer Science classes and books, we can all hold hands and dance around. Huzzah!
Look at it this way -- if it weren't for RedHat and Mandrake and Caldera and maybe Corel, would there be as many Linux users in the world today?
I installed Linux on my own machine starting with RedHat 5.1 (having used it before on a machine belonging to someone else for quite some time). They went to the trouble of collecting, packaging, and distributing that CD so I wouldn't have to do all that work myself -- consequently, I have more time to program and to contribute free software.
Now not everyone who downloads packages or buys a CD will write software that belongs to the whole world (I kinda like that phrase), but if a hundred people try free software because of RedHat, and if only one of those people writes something that other people can use, then we're still ahead.
My astronomy teacher would have a fit. In my defense, may I excuse myself by saying that the near side is receiving sunlight right now, so it appears to be the light side?
Or let's just say that the light side of the moon is the outside, 'cuz the inside doesn't get many rays?
Don't forget, one of the manned moon missions left a mirror up there, on the light side. (If you believe that it wasn't filmed in Studio 51, that is.) I'm sure that it increases the moon's albedo by some non-integer percentage!
Of course, that assumes that a maid comes by to dust every week. Nevermind.
On the other hand, GNOME is GPL'd, and it's hard to dispute Miguel's indomitable energy. GNOME has certainly done a lot to push Linux onto desktops (as has KDE).
Personally, I agree with you, though. TeX continually amazes me.
Yes, it would be wrong to spam the spammers. Consider everyone between your internet pipe and their internet pipes -- increasing network traffic to punish someone for wasting your time by increasing your traffic is slightly misguided.
Personally, I prefer Spamcop. There's something satisfying about cancelling accounts.
Consider this: the one time I really experienced wrist pain was after an all-nighter, cranking out a 30 page term paper.
I'll second that, but it seems to be more related to stress in general. There's a lot of fluctuation (new CEO, massive reorganizations, and I'm severly bored) at work right now, and my left wrist is sore. In college, writing my own 30 page term paper, my other wrist was sore.
Excercise and stretches seem to help. Anything to stretch and to relax that spot between the shoulder blades helps.
What really hurts is Quake -- it's the hunching forward to look at the screen and the rapid finger movements on the numberpad with my left hand and my right hand on the mouse that kills me there. Ugh.
As I read it, someone can take my program and modify it and choose how he wishes to release his modifications. He can make them available under the same license. He can make them available only in binary form.
What he cannot do (under the license) is to distribute his 'non-standard version' (my program WITH his changes) in binary only form without also including my 'standard version' and the copyrights and disclaimers. It's like a mixture of the BSD (you can do anything you want with it, even make it commercial and secret) and GPL (you can do anything you want with it as long as you allow anyone else the same right with regard to your own modifications). It seems to allow commercial usage while still crediting me for my own work.
There are places where it's more appropriate than others, of course, especially for Perl middleware, where someone is likely to grab a bunch of components and modify them slightly to fit a particular task.
One also wonders why Mr. Katz is apparently unfamiliar with very similar protests raised in the earlier part of this century by such noted muckrakers as Ida Tarbell (ever heard of Standard Oil?) and Sinclair Lewis (ever read 'The Jungle'?).
Let's face it, nothing here is new. Intelligent and highly literate people have been writing about Big Business versus The Little Guy for a long time. The only difference is that Tarbell and Lewis never wrote Jon an e-mail. That's a pity -- his analysis suffers from a severe lack of perspective.
Along with Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination" and "The Demolished Man", I picked up "A Canticle for Leibowitz" after a recommendation from JMS (Babylon 5 creator). This is good stuff.
It's almost like a retelling of the dark ages of Western civilization when the monks (especially the Celts and Irish) spent centuries collecting and hiding manuscripts and preserving knowledge for future generations. (The difference, of course, is that the 20th century world becomes the new Roman Empire in Miller's retelling).
On the surface, it may not seem as relevant these days, without the Cold War looming in the background. The real meat of the story, though, is in the depiction of history and knowledge, and man's place in that tapestry. Well worth a read -- and not only to show that there's more to a dystopian post-apocalyptic future than Mad Max.
I think we agree more than disagree. Where our views start to diverge is how we both answer the question, "To what degree are geeks different from non-geeks?"
From your post, phrases like 'We are a people' and 'We need different... cultural tools' lead me to believe that your answer to that question is "To a very great degree, at a fundamental level."
While I agree that there are differences between geeks and everybody else, I don't think they're that deep. We all follow Maslow's hierarchy fairly closely. I have a desire to be needed and respected and loved just as the quarterback of my high school football team does. My social group in high school got picked on, and we picked on other people, including some of the jocks.
To follow the example you give, introversion is not limited to the geek set. I've met plenty of introverted people who had little else in common with me. Also, I think just about everybody goes 'off the rails' during adolescence -- I've met very few adolescents who didn't suffer through periods of questioning authority and one's identity. In my opinion, no one fits the Conforming Norm, and any program that fails to recognize this will have limited successes.
The thing that scares me here is the idea of a Geek Identity movement. If people sit down and start to think, "Hey, those guys are a whole lot different from everyone else," doesn't that lend validity to the whole Geek Profile thing Katz is railing about? I mean, look at what's happened to the Goths -- they're hardly suicidal Manson freaks, but that's the stereotype. That's what scares me. It's bad enough that kids feel the need to kill themselves and others, but if superficial similarities are used to alienate kids like we were even further....
You're absolutely right on the unstated premise in your last paragraph -- we're better off helping kids like ourselves. I certainly have sympathies for the little guy out there with a big stack of books, a guitar, a computer, and nothing else. Does that mean I ought to be Rob Malda's Big Brother?
Slashdot Mirror
The book is about those two kids Katz interviewed, huh? I grew up in Idaho, 20 miles from where those kids did. It's not exactly Silicon Valley, but there are a whole lot of technology companies there right now, like HP and Micron and Extended Systems and dozens of smaller firms, as well as the headquarters of other companies like Albertsons and Boise Cascade.
Katz got snowed by those kids, that's what happened. They fed him some line about how their lives sucked because the only things in Idaho are potato farms, that sugar beet plant, and rusty old pickups with shotguns and loud radios tuned to the country music station, and he bought it. I don't know anyone in the area who read the Wired article and took it seriously.
Now if the subtitle of the movie is "How a gullible journalist got taken in by a couple of lazy kids who can't find jobs in the 3rd fastest growing area in the U.S.", maybe it'll be worth watching as something other than a parody.
--
'Break the law'? 'DoS attack'? That's not how Usenet propagation works.
The large news feeds pass along messages from other sites as a courtesy. They use their own resources (time, disk space) to do so. If they choose not to pass along messages from another site due to volume of useless postings, poor Net behavior, or whatever, that is their right.
If you had guests over who made a mess in your bathroom, shaved your dog, filled up all your trash cans, started yelling obscenities and advertising slogans whenever someone tried to start a conversation, and left all of your doors and windows unlocked, would you invite them back?
Neither would the news admins participating in UDPs.
--
Are you looking for a clause in the GPL that says, "If you make lots of money distributing this software, you have to make it easier for people to get my software than I've already done"?
That's not likely to happen. Conversely, you might argue that that is precisely what they company is doing. Besides that, if you use the GPL, the company is obligated by the license to make the source code available to their customers. That's your source code. They're also not allowed to restrict distribution of your software (under the GPL, other licenses vary). If they do, well, then you might consider legal action.
If that doesn't answer your question, perhaps you could rephrase it -- I'm confused.
--
Good summary, but one correction:
Neverwhere was adapted from the small screen to the novel. When it came out in hardcover, a local bookstore had an "authorless book signing" and showed the three-hour miniseries before giving away bookplates with Gaiman's autograph.
Just one more added to my collection. (Now to get "the Dream Hunters" from CowboyNeal).
--
Brazil's a tough one to explain in a short space. At the core, it reminded me of 1984 (you might have heard of it before on Slashdot) -- but it's more about modern life and trying to be an individual in an increasingly bureaucratic, cold, and cruel world. It has lots of pipes and explosions and a flying woman and the standard cool Gilliam visual effects.
Hmm, maybe you should start with Time Bandits. As I recall, the Terry Gilliam Symposium last summer had a hard time agreeing on a synopsis of Brazil.
--
So on the one hand, we have Microsoft and legal Findings of Fact which establish that the company has taken illegal actions to obtain and to maintain a monopoly within certain spheres. On the other hand, we have two large companies (AOL and Time-Warner) trying to merge, and they're more evil because you think they might do bad things in the future?
Perhaps you would not mind volunteering to go to jail on the possibility that you might commit a felony sometime? I didn't think so.
You can't legally punish someone in advance, can you?
Yes, the homogenization of 'American culture' (perhaps better written 'Post-modern Western Culture') is tragic, but many of us are willing to accept the consequences of Wal*Mart and McDonalds despite the drawbacks. Until that changes, you're going to be railing in vain. Being bland just ain't a crime.
--
After reading the FAQ, it appears that TNT and TNT2 support has been improved in this version. To wit, my home machine with a TNT2 only had accelerated support with 15 or 16 bit color. Apparently, this version has improved that to 32 bit color.
We'll see if my Q3 framerate gets above 24, but I'm hopeful. (I'm also glad to see that the licence for the source code is the same as the XFree86 licence!)
--
According to the story, the recorded message on C|Host's customer service line said something about entering domain names and IP addresses into the DNS server by hand.
I'm guessing that these are customer IP addresses, but even that smacks of technical incompetence. Pretty scary. Hint: if you're not going to make recoverable backups, at least spend an hour or two learning rudimentary shell scripting, if not Perl.
--
To anyone trying to learn Latin, all Latin is obfuscated to an extent. "Paginarium Fulvinarium" anyone? (Watch me misspell it and prove my point.) I'm not aware of any programming languages which don't have some commonly used idioms that might confuse neophytes.
Why would you hire a non-Perl programmer to maintain existing Perl code? Are you suggesting that one measure of the 'suckiness' of a language is the ease with which someone ignorant of the language can perform code maintenance?
--
I know you're both nominally involved with Blockstackers and the Everything project. My question is, to what extent? Are you funding this, or letting your more involved roommates slide on the rent, or are you actively involved in the design, testing, and coding?
--
I meant the whole site, with hundreds of servers and somewhere over four thousand people. Luckily, I only have the one big box.
--
Of course, it's an NT server and it's for a group of about 60 people who work standard 40 hour weeks on the weekdays. I'm more concerned about power fluctuations because our site pulls a lot of juice.
Now the Linux server I use for my websites and mail (not at work!) is staying up....
--
I'm heartened to read Jon Katz saying that a careful study of history shows that futurism never quite gets things right. (I hope I'm not misinterpreting him.)
Where's my flying car? Or my city on the moon? What about all the things that were promised by the year 2000 or 1990 or 1980 or whenever? The one lesson I take from all of this is, no one really knows what's going to happen in the future, and we'll probably all have just about the same concerns. Will I be able to pay my bills? Can I raise my kids right? Can I take care of my aging parents?
Maybe the real tragedy of technology is that it's not our savior, no matter how much we like to believe otherwise.
--
That's right. We all know that closed source projects like Diablo, Ultima Online, and IIS 4.0 are secure and uncrackable. Thank goodness for software like Windows 98 and Windows 95 which are immune to BackOrifice due to the superior protection of Security through Obscurity.
Can you *imagine* if someone like Alan Cox or Theo De Raadt had access to the source code? I mean, he might spend upwards of two hours fixing the security holes. That is plainly unacceptable.
It is a very good thing that reverse engineering and hex editing and asm disassembly are impossible and illegal, not to mention packet sniffing! Otherwise, our panacea of Ivory Tower software development might show some cracks.
Now if we can just rid the world of Computer Science classes and books, we can all hold hands and dance around. Huzzah!
--
The preorder folks got just the CD in the mail (maybe the manual), and the nice tin box is coming in the mail for them.
The Real Thing for The Rest of Us will be In Stores now! That's the big deal. Now if nVIDIA will just release those silly TNT2 drivers....
--
Look at it this way -- if it weren't for RedHat and Mandrake and Caldera and maybe Corel, would there be as many Linux users in the world today?
I installed Linux on my own machine starting with RedHat 5.1 (having used it before on a machine belonging to someone else for quite some time). They went to the trouble of collecting, packaging, and distributing that CD so I wouldn't have to do all that work myself -- consequently, I have more time to program and to contribute free software.
Now not everyone who downloads packages or buys a CD will write software that belongs to the whole world (I kinda like that phrase), but if a hundred people try free software because of RedHat, and if only one of those people writes something that other people can use, then we're still ahead.
--
My astronomy teacher would have a fit. In my defense, may I excuse myself by saying that the near side is receiving sunlight right now, so it appears to be the light side?
Or let's just say that the light side of the moon is the outside, 'cuz the inside doesn't get many rays?
--
Don't forget, one of the manned moon missions left a mirror up there, on the light side. (If you believe that it wasn't filmed in Studio 51, that is.) I'm sure that it increases the moon's albedo by some non-integer percentage!
Of course, that assumes that a maid comes by to dust every week. Nevermind.
--
On the other hand, GNOME is GPL'd, and it's hard to dispute Miguel's indomitable energy. GNOME has certainly done a lot to push Linux onto desktops (as has KDE).
Personally, I agree with you, though. TeX continually amazes me.
--
Yes, it would be wrong to spam the spammers. Consider everyone between your internet pipe and their internet pipes -- increasing network traffic to punish someone for wasting your time by increasing your traffic is slightly misguided.
Personally, I prefer Spamcop. There's something satisfying about cancelling accounts.
--
Consider this: the one time I really experienced wrist pain was after an all-nighter, cranking out a 30 page term paper.
I'll second that, but it seems to be more related to stress in general. There's a lot of fluctuation (new CEO, massive reorganizations, and I'm severly bored) at work right now, and my left wrist is sore. In college, writing my own 30 page term paper, my other wrist was sore.
Excercise and stretches seem to help. Anything to stretch and to relax that spot between the shoulder blades helps.
What really hurts is Quake -- it's the hunching forward to look at the screen and the rapid finger movements on the numberpad with my left hand and my right hand on the mouse that kills me there. Ugh.
--
As I read it, someone can take my program and modify it and choose how he wishes to release his modifications. He can make them available under the same license. He can make them available only in binary form.
What he cannot do (under the license) is to distribute his 'non-standard version' (my program WITH his changes) in binary only form without also including my 'standard version' and the copyrights and disclaimers. It's like a mixture of the BSD (you can do anything you want with it, even make it commercial and secret) and GPL (you can do anything you want with it as long as you allow anyone else the same right with regard to your own modifications). It seems to allow commercial usage while still crediting me for my own work.
There are places where it's more appropriate than others, of course, especially for Perl middleware, where someone is likely to grab a bunch of components and modify them slightly to fit a particular task.
--
One also wonders why Mr. Katz is apparently unfamiliar with very similar protests raised in the earlier part of this century by such noted muckrakers as Ida Tarbell (ever heard of Standard Oil?) and Sinclair Lewis (ever read 'The Jungle'?).
Let's face it, nothing here is new. Intelligent and highly literate people have been writing about Big Business versus The Little Guy for a long time. The only difference is that Tarbell and Lewis never wrote Jon an e-mail. That's a pity -- his analysis suffers from a severe lack of perspective.
--
Along with Alfred Bester's "The Stars My Destination" and "The Demolished Man", I picked up "A Canticle for Leibowitz" after a recommendation from JMS (Babylon 5 creator). This is good stuff.
It's almost like a retelling of the dark ages of Western civilization when the monks (especially the Celts and Irish) spent centuries collecting and hiding manuscripts and preserving knowledge for future generations. (The difference, of course, is that the 20th century world becomes the new Roman Empire in Miller's retelling).
On the surface, it may not seem as relevant these days, without the Cold War looming in the background. The real meat of the story, though, is in the depiction of history and knowledge, and man's place in that tapestry. Well worth a read -- and not only to show that there's more to a dystopian post-apocalyptic future than Mad Max.
--
I think we agree more than disagree. Where our views start to diverge is how we both answer the question, "To what degree are geeks different from non-geeks?"
From your post, phrases like 'We are a people' and 'We need different... cultural tools' lead me to believe that your answer to that question is "To a very great degree, at a fundamental level."
While I agree that there are differences between geeks and everybody else, I don't think they're that deep. We all follow Maslow's hierarchy fairly closely. I have a desire to be needed and respected and loved just as the quarterback of my high school football team does. My social group in high school got picked on, and we picked on other people, including some of the jocks.
To follow the example you give, introversion is not limited to the geek set. I've met plenty of introverted people who had little else in common with me. Also, I think just about everybody goes 'off the rails' during adolescence -- I've met very few adolescents who didn't suffer through periods of questioning authority and one's identity. In my opinion, no one fits the Conforming Norm, and any program that fails to recognize this will have limited successes.
The thing that scares me here is the idea of a Geek Identity movement. If people sit down and start to think, "Hey, those guys are a whole lot different from everyone else," doesn't that lend validity to the whole Geek Profile thing Katz is railing about? I mean, look at what's happened to the Goths -- they're hardly suicidal Manson freaks, but that's the stereotype. That's what scares me. It's bad enough that kids feel the need to kill themselves and others, but if superficial similarities are used to alienate kids like we were even further....
You're absolutely right on the unstated premise in your last paragraph -- we're better off helping kids like ourselves. I certainly have sympathies for the little guy out there with a big stack of books, a guitar, a computer, and nothing else. Does that mean I ought to be Rob Malda's Big Brother?
--