You can't prove that the universe wasn't just created by a 35 meter long crayfish 5 minutes ago. (Oh, you have memories from before 5 minutes ago? Well, you were created with those memories, you never realy did/experianced anything before 5 minutes ago!).
As the high priest of the One True Church of Last-Tuesdayism I have to protest against this abdominable disgrace. Everybody in his right mind knows that the universe was created last Tuesday, 11:41 pm, by an invisible pink unicorn named Moe (and not "Mue", as some stupid heretic cretins maintain).
In other words, give in to CyberPatrol's censorship attempts by hurting an ISP who still allows freedom of speech. Great idea.
CyberPatrols definition of "adult" content is likely to contain everything from your latest holiday pictures to a commercial for deodorants. And let's not start to talk about "objectionable" or "questionable". The only resonable approach I see is to lobby the various web censors to provide a reasonably fine-grained access mechanism and to lobby the ISP's to allow easy circumvention of content filters (which really should run on the users computer, not on the ISP's).
An even better solution would be to change society in a way that makes it the norm for parents to spend enough time with their children to be able to explain things to them and to enable the kids to deal with the occasional naked breast on their own...
Well to counter your two points: First, who needs to type long command lines for linking? You write your makefile once, and are done. From then on it's only "make " (or C-c C-c for people which have hotwired emacs the one true way). Of course it takes slightly longer to write a makefile than to click a dialog box (if you know where to find it), but then you can express arbitrary dependencies in a makefile, not just some predefined resources for one particular kind of dependency.
As to interface consistency: That is admittedly a problem for UNIX. However, it has nothing to do with GUI vs. CLI - both can offer consistent or inconsistent interfaces. In UNIX it is pretty bad, because lot's of very independend-minded people have written lots of independend programs. For MacOS it's pretty good, because a single company (mostly) controls the interface.
A LISP machine might make a good example for a consistent CLI...
I agree with the points above. I was particularly baffled by Eric's suggestion to keep things out of the public view. This is not how our community works - as far as I can see, freedom of information is the most central value of the hacker culture. This includes public discussion of hot topics.
However, although I disagree with Eric on a variety of topics, I do sincerely hope that he stays with us. He is an important contributor to our community, an excellent writer and shrewd Speaker To The Press.
Somebody wrote that Eric has had to much corporate coffee in the last couple of month. Perhaps some holidays spent with emacs and source code can recharge his batteries and flush out the suit-poison;-)
This article once more shows me that RMS was right about disliking the "Open Source" term. Even within the Slashdot community, many people do not seem to be aware of the fact that "Open Source" (tm) and "Free Software" (FSF version) are supposed to be different names for the same concept. Or, to quote Eric from the Open Source web site: "Open Source is a marketing program for free software."
Just providing or publishing source code does not make an application Open Source.
The future - Let the non-coders have a voice too.
on
ESR Wants to Retire
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I do not know if we need a single spokesperson at all. If we need one, I think it will be pretty hard to find someone else who fits the bill as well as Eric. Apart from his software contributions (which are pretty impressive, if not up to RMS' level), his work on the Jargon File/New Hacker's Dictionary helped to make hackerdom aware of it's uniqueness and distinctness as a community. And he understands and believes in this community like few other people I can think of.
Anybody who wants to speak out for the hacker community (as opposed to e.g. the Linux users community) needs to be one of us. We will not respect suits, or even wannabees. I'll take one Wozniak or Cray over 10 Jobs or Gates, and I think I am not alone in this.
And the traditional way to become accepted and respected among hackers is to contribute code. If you are not a coder, you are either in larval stage (and hence not ripe for important positions) or unlikely to ever understand the hacker midset (and hence unsuited as a spokesperson for hackers).
A hack a a product. A hacker is a person. It might be possible to consider a person the product of a hack by its parents, teachers or psychologists, but that is probably rare.
As you can find in e.g. the Jargon file, it is always better to be called a hacker (by the right group) than to call oneself a hacker. A wannabe may produce badly hacked up code, but then he is not a hacker in the sense the word is used in the hacker community.
I have had extremely good experience with code done by hackers - I use programs written by hackers daily, and almost never have problems. I have limited experience with code generated under commercial condition (Netscape, Diabolo, Star Office), but these programs seem to fail all the time, and for no good reason.
Slashdot Mirror
Sheesh. The truth is so easy to see!
CyberPatrols definition of "adult" content is likely to contain everything from your latest holiday pictures to a commercial for deodorants. And let's not start to talk about "objectionable" or "questionable". The only resonable approach I see is to lobby the various web censors to provide a reasonably fine-grained access mechanism and to lobby the ISP's to allow easy circumvention of content filters (which really should run on the users computer, not on the ISP's).
An even better solution would be to change society in a way that makes it the norm for parents to spend enough time with their children to be able to explain things to them and to enable the kids to deal with the occasional naked breast on their own...
As to interface consistency: That is admittedly a problem for UNIX. However, it has nothing to do with GUI vs. CLI - both can offer consistent or inconsistent interfaces. In UNIX it is pretty bad, because lot's of very independend-minded people have written lots of independend programs. For MacOS it's pretty good, because a single company (mostly) controls the interface.
A LISP machine might make a good example for a consistent CLI...
However, although I disagree with Eric on a variety of topics, I do sincerely hope that he stays with us. He is an important contributor to our community, an excellent writer and shrewd Speaker To The Press.
Somebody wrote that Eric has had to much corporate coffee in the last couple of month. Perhaps some holidays spent with emacs and source code can recharge his batteries and flush out the suit-poison ;-)
Just providing or publishing source code does not make an application Open Source.
Anybody who wants to speak out for the hacker community (as opposed to e.g. the Linux users community) needs to be one of us. We will not respect suits, or even wannabees. I'll take one Wozniak or Cray over 10 Jobs or Gates, and I think I am not alone in this.
And the traditional way to become accepted and respected among hackers is to contribute code. If you are not a coder, you are either in larval stage (and hence not ripe for important positions) or unlikely to ever understand the hacker midset (and hence unsuited as a spokesperson for hackers).
As you can find in e.g. the Jargon file, it is always better to be called a hacker (by the right group) than to call oneself a hacker. A wannabe may produce badly hacked up code, but then he is not a hacker in the sense the word is used in the hacker community.
I have had extremely good experience with code done by hackers - I use programs written by hackers daily, and almost never have problems. I have limited experience with code generated under commercial condition (Netscape, Diabolo, Star Office), but these programs seem to fail all the time, and for no good reason.
Yes. Or rather, you write a program that does it. Wannabe hackers use Perl, real hackers use AWK, and real programmers use Fortran-58 ;-)