I found that I had to change channels or have a tape in the VCR -- the commercials were so grating when juxtaposed with the series. The audiovisual tableau of Dune was completely engrossing, and being subjected to the second or third grunting Bowflex stump or iconoclastic Santa Claus ad was too much of a tumble from sublime to everyday.
I'm normally a nitpicker, one of those awful people to watch TV/movies with, as I have ready criticism for any and everything wrong or awkward. In contrast to most of my friends, I go in assuming that the show/movie will insult my intelligence and be awful. I expected the same of this series, especially after absolutely loathing the David Lynch version, and having felt for some time now that Dune was really unfilmable. This version of Dune succeeded in creating such an ambience of Arrakis that my complaints seemed small by comparison. There were definitely glaring differences between the SciFi version and the actual text, but I think they captured the feel of the work.
This is good news for the SciFi channel, however, because they will have something with which to draw better advertising and won't have to rely on small channel mainstays like exercise machines and "revolutionary" bedding. Sequels may have better adverts.
This is excerpts/paraphrases from a draft I wrote of email guidelines & tips for a company I was working for. It has not been perused by a lawyer so it is by no means necessarily restricted enough for corporate use. I think it was helpful, though.
Email is intended to be an informal correspondence tool to assist in the employee's workday, as well as a vehicle for research and communication with clients and vendors. It is not supplied as a replacement for conventional business communications (i.e. written memos, phone conversations, meetings), but as a supplement and enhancement to them.
Personal use of email should be restricted to the following conditions:
it does not add cost to company operations
it does not interfere with the duties of the employee
it is brief, small and infrequent
it does not in any way compromise company security or profitability
Email should never be considered private, all messages are property of the company.
Unsolicited email or questionable file attachments should be reported immediately. Running executable file attachments is not allowed.
Sending the following types of messages is explicitly forbidden: chain letters and their ilk, virus warnings, messages containing sexual content, messages containing threats or abusive content, "spoofing" (impersonating another user), messages containing confidential company information.
Tips
Email can be misdirected, forwarded to someone else, and replies may go to more people than you realize. Do not put something in an email message that you would not want read by everybody.
Never, ever execute an email attachment and never run a file someone has sent to you. Save the attachment first, open it with the application that it's intended to use.
At this point in time, the most destructive viruses will appear as friendly attachments in messages from reliable sources. Be smart.
Check the file size on that attachment you're sending! Limit distribution of attachments to smaller files, or compress files before sending them. Large attachments (1MB+) may be rejected by outside mail servers.
Email takes up disk space, so delete messages you no longer need. The messaging servers are not file servers, and are not intended to be archives for your mail. Save messages to a local or network drive, or delete messages.
Email can be junk mail in the eye of the recipient. Be conscious of your audience! Be sure that your message concerns them directly. Avoid forwarding messages unnecessarily, and use distribution lists with discretion. Never send to everyone in the address list.
Avoid complicated backgrounds or non-standard fonts. Your recipients may have less powerful workstations or be on a dial-in line. Plain text is encouraged.
There are no nuances in email, no facial expressions or tone of voice, so there is a greater chance of misunderstanding. Here are some tips on bridging the digital gap:
Check that your subject line accurately represents your message.
Be polite, be brief, be funny. (it helps)
Proofread your message quickly before sending to ensure clarity for the recipient. Bad wording can misrepresent you. Don't rely on spellcheck to properly correct your words. Reply promptly, even if it's a short note telling the sender that you'll detail something later. Use autoreply if you will be away for long periods.
And it comes out later that they were away from their desk and someone else visited that site from their PC
The way I hear it, however, is that users are responsible for their own workstations' security and the integrity of their password, and anyone having access to their workstation would hence fall under their responsibility, too (not too nice if you use Win9x). This is in addition to another respondent's assertion that a company would attempt to find a trail of similar indiscretions. In an era of firewalls/logging, and with the repetitive nature of pr0n-surfing behavior, it's pretty easy to completely track down someone using company equipment for such uses.
Keep in mind, as well, that even with failsafes such as "at-will" employment[1], it can be difficult to fire someone and not worry about an expensive lawsuit. To get HR moving in many cases, you need hard evidence and a trail of it. This mostly handles the IP spoofing situation, but, yes, there might be some situations where repeated PC outages could be used as a smokescreen for this type of behavior. I think we're describing a teeny percentage of the cases, and in most instances, it's the user not paying attention to policy/consequences.
It is tough for me to understand that your average user doesn't get this, however, and that so many still do surf porn sites on company time/equipment. Bandwidth is pretty cheap/available.
1. "at-will" employment is a clause in a company's sign-on contract that states that an employee may leave for any reason, with or without notice, and a company may terminate the employee under the same conditions.
I use the Proxomitron, which is an effective Windows-based filter, but it has difficulty with secure pages. Its license requires you to listen to some music, but is otherwise free.
For any of you protecting your Exchange 5.5 server with Norton Antivirus (Symantec), there are signatures here. They aren't tested or approved, AFAIK, but they're working at my location. It won't repair the file but will quarantine bad attachments. You might want to keep the server off your network while you do this. Stop your store while you're copying the signature file to your server, then pull your ethernet cable when you want to start it again to run NAV.
That url is ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/an tivirus_definitions/norton_antivirus/spe cdef
My "net effect" and and "individual rights" are not necessarily incompatible, in fact, they are normally one in the same.
Okay, your "net effect" idea I would argue is already in place, that's what the legislative & judiciary branches are consistently determining. Laws are put into place and the net effect is retroactively assessed to determine whether the balance between individual freedom and governmental intercession on behalf of the masses is consistent with certain ideals that are laid out in US first principles.
The government is thus permitted to intrude on an individuals rights in special cases that are laid out in US code -- so free speech is not the all-encompassing right it seems to be in the discussion here. See for example, Erie v. Pap's A.M., a case recently where a nudity ban is challenged under the first amendment ("freedom of expression"); it is found to be within those "net effect" gray areas where the government is not compelled to leave the individual free. Their term is "prevention of secondary effects", or the limiting of "undesireable elements" from their society. This is normal, and par for the course, but stands as an example that free speech/expression can and will be curbed, and that the "net effect" principle can and usually does defend a certain group's predjudices.
The net effect of the commingling of our political system with this type of "possible barrier" to freedoms is that the curbs on freedoms tend to come from congressional representatives, rather than from the individuals. I think it's difficult from the senate floor to assess the "net effect" on larger society, and I'm not sure most elected officials have individual freedom in mind as much as maintenance of the status quo. There needs to be more review and assessment, a la Supreme Court, rather than political gamesmanship.
IMO, the electoral process is mingled with mass media tends to encourage those politicians who are weathy, dishonest and make promises to the majority audience, regardless of intent to carry them out. Due to their "branding" in the marketing sense, they get "electable" and hence get to choose which freedoms get curbed. Grass roots on the national political scene is practically dead. I don't feel these people accurately represent my people, but I am just one man and ill equipped to "unelect" an entire state and replace my representatives with ones whose moral fiber more suits my idea of who determines "net effects". I haven't the money, I'd be brutally honest about what I intended to do in government, and hence, would likely not get elected.
So you end up with ugly US code changes like Terry vs. Ohio, basically giving a policeman the right to initially search you if he can articulate a reason for his having a suspicion that you might be thinking about committing a crime. This, to me and many that I have talked with about it, is clearly in violation of the fourth amendment, but to the Court, seems to be within the acceptable boundary. Net effect? More victims of unreasonable searches are convicted in the short term, and perhaps a downturn in the crime rate.
However, one can fairly easily extrapolate what an unscrupulous government could do with that sort of law. But even not taking it that far, if the policeman responsible for executing the law is biased or predjudiced, then it's a larger/lesser effect on the biased/predjudiced population, and the indicted stand a lesser chance of a fair trial (fourteenth amendment, iirc) than they would were Terry not in place. Essentially, the "net effect" answer is not an answer, but an apology for the status quo.
Re:A lot of anti-FSF attitude going around
on
Giving Back
·
· Score: 2
The main problem with the FSF and why people don't donate as much as you'd like, is because the FSF is a *political* organization.
That doesn't make sense. There are thousands of political organizations with very unpopular stances on touchy issues that are rolling in donor cash. Half the problem in the FSF is absolutely no non-profit fundraising sense and an unwillingness to relinquish an unpopular and alarmist (to the layman) popular image.
The fact of the matter is, they have some of the best coding talent in the world working under perhaps the most brilliant development system in the world. They just need a PR and marketing arm that flexes a little more muscle & buffs that GNU image to a healthy golden shine.
Is it fist pumping Che-type freedom that you're fighting for, or the right to produce software in a peer-reviewed development cycle? If it's the latter, then stand for the cycle itself, rather than the right to employ it -- at least in public. Then you take your soft donor money and talk to some senators on a golf course...
That's what AOL'ers get. I'm against AOL, and I believe their users get what they deserve.
You're not considering innocent bystanders. I tried to count the hours that my service techs have spent attempting to restore normal dialup networking to users in the last week. I'm well over 40 man/hours at somewhere like $30 per -- if you add in the users' hours, AOL is costing my company serious money here.
The really big problem is that officer-level execs with laptops containing business critical information are installing AOL at home and then ranting at their IS departments when they can't get dialin access. When a VP of sales is down, you can't say "sorry, we don't support stations with AOL installed." That's how to get fired.
But you can, however, lay the blame at the right feet -- Microsoft's DUN setup is a P.O.S.(TM) hack; they designed it to allow the novice user to set up an internet connection themselves, but there's much arcane crud a user needs to know to set up the Network control panel properly. It's more complicated than the "normal" Windows user can handle.
AOL is just adding a shit addition to the brick shithouse that is Windows networking.
...and who's idea was it to install NetBEUI by default? And why does s/he still have a job?
So can I suggest that if Slashdot wants to do news, it does news, and if it wants to do discussion forums it does them too, but that it does them in different parts of the site, with different and suitable user interfaces to each part?
Can I make a suggestion? If you are going to ask that folks who are already doing a tremendous amount of work (for free), could you help out? How about coding this little suggestion of yours?
Is it too much work for your tender mouse hand to read both The Register and slashdot?
Music is a question of taste, and I, for one, don't happen to care for Waters' music. At the risk of incurring bad karma, I submit the first "who cares?"
(note that on many of the other controversial "is this really news" items, I hold slashdot's journalistic integrity in high regard.
Perhaps I'm completely starry-eyed and idealistic, but are there no lawyers who would take such a case for the publicity, or for a percentage of any settlement? It strikes me as if a case like this might be lucrative and seriously good for a law firm's business. The firm/lawyers would have an army of developers as potential clients forever, win or lose.
On another note: What makes everyone think that they're not "stealing" code now? Who's to say that they're not finding ways to optimize their copyrighted ideas by examination of GPL code?
What qualifies as a copyright infringement? If Microsoft makes EDIT.EXE more like Emacs, say with a lisp-like extension language and the same control and meta keys. They ship it in the WinNT command line, are we in sue-able territory here?
...if there is any shortage in this world there is shortage of orginality. As a commodity, your idea may not be scarce once put in tangible form, but your originality itself is scarce.
One of my favorite topics -- actually I would even go so far as to say there's a finite pool of "originality" wherever you decide to put the boundary seperating the original from the copy. There are many intellect avenues unexplored, but access to them is glutted with footprints of those past. One can get lost from them by red herring desire, and much of the really interesting original thought-tracks have been blazed by someone else. Some originality isn't terribly interesting - Charlie Manson's for instance.
The fact for me that seals the existance of a finite Noospheric pool of originality is that folks can jump in at the same time -- Newton & Leibniz, unless the apocryphal story really isn't true, unleashed the Calculus at the same time. The process of achieving that thought was inevitable, two traversed different paths to get there, and both must have had a completely transcendent experience as the original way of looking at the world emerged in their minds. One can only wonder, but can enjoy a similar experience, this Jeffersonian candle-lighting, as the Calculus is learned (actually, taught, as well) the first time.
Originality holds incredible weight & currency in our culture. Great works of art have to be original or are dismissed as low- or pop-art. But there are finite media to work in, and within those media, finite methods of harnessing the media to produce a work that excites an audience. In music, originality, or at least primacy, is entirely valued, and "copycats" are ridiculed unless their version is demonstrably better than the original...
Fascinatingly, it wasn't always this way. The aim in pre-Renaissance painting certainly didn't have originality as a component, just religious depiction with little expression. Marcantonio Raimondi later made a wealthy life by engraving copies Raphael's work in a plan to distribute throughout Europe and extend Raphael's range. Raimondi's skill at engraving is unparalleled in his time, except probably by Albrecht Durer (...but the German method is flawed by...yadda yadda yadda). Anyway, He was considered as much an artist as any of the greats in his time.
I'd never want to live in another age, but I envy the ancients with the whole cool pool of originality open to them, not a wave breaking the surface (especially after they got the noospheric reboot when the library burned at Alexandria)
Truly, try to think an original thought yourself, it's seriously difficult unless you resort to the absurd!
Being almost a die-hard command-prompt (bash, et. al.) user,
That was what my Linux experience had been as well. I think I compiled/configured XFree86 three years ago on a Debian box; I remember thinking boy, it's not really worth the effort unless you want to spend weeks tweaking it.
When I saw Gnome for the first time, I flipped my lid. In that bubbly, excited emotional state that my new discoveries Linux/FS/etc. can produce, I called my friends and swore that Windows would meet its maker in a year or less.
Though a bit enthused, I still think that de Icaza's & others' work on Gnome is a serious threat to proprietary software in general. It presents a serious, no-foolin' example of fabulous free software that even the novice user can see. It's at that point that you can gently pose the question, "and why do you think these programmers wish to let others see their source code?" You can make reg'lar folks see the beauty of the idea for a minute at least...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm normally a nitpicker, one of those awful people to watch TV/movies with, as I have ready criticism for any and everything wrong or awkward. In contrast to most of my friends, I go in assuming that the show/movie will insult my intelligence and be awful. I expected the same of this series, especially after absolutely loathing the David Lynch version, and having felt for some time now that Dune was really unfilmable. This version of Dune succeeded in creating such an ambience of Arrakis that my complaints seemed small by comparison. There were definitely glaring differences between the SciFi version and the actual text, but I think they captured the feel of the work.
This is good news for the SciFi channel, however, because they will have something with which to draw better advertising and won't have to rely on small channel mainstays like exercise machines and "revolutionary" bedding. Sequels may have better adverts.
One exception: Chicago's Soldier field during a soccer game.
Email is intended to be an informal correspondence tool to assist in the employee's workday, as well as a vehicle for research and communication with clients and vendors. It is not supplied as a replacement for conventional business communications (i.e. written memos, phone conversations, meetings), but as a supplement and enhancement to them.
Personal use of email should be restricted to the following conditions:
Email should never be considered private, all messages are property of the company.
Unsolicited email or questionable file attachments should be reported immediately. Running executable file attachments is not allowed.
Sending the following types of messages is explicitly forbidden: chain letters and their ilk, virus warnings, messages containing sexual content, messages containing threats or abusive content, "spoofing" (impersonating another user), messages containing confidential company information.
Tips
Email can be misdirected, forwarded to someone else, and replies may go to more people than you realize. Do not put something in an email message that you would not want read by everybody.
Never, ever execute an email attachment and never run a file someone has sent to you. Save the attachment first, open it with the application that it's intended to use.
At this point in time, the most destructive viruses will appear as friendly attachments in messages from reliable sources. Be smart.
Check the file size on that attachment you're sending! Limit distribution of attachments to smaller files, or compress files before sending them. Large attachments (1MB+) may be rejected by outside mail servers.
Email takes up disk space, so delete messages you no longer need. The messaging servers are not file servers, and are not intended to be archives for your mail. Save messages to a local or network drive, or delete messages.
Email can be junk mail in the eye of the recipient. Be conscious of your audience! Be sure that your message concerns them directly. Avoid forwarding messages unnecessarily, and use distribution lists with discretion. Never send to everyone in the address list.
Avoid complicated backgrounds or non-standard fonts. Your recipients may have less powerful workstations or be on a dial-in line. Plain text is encouraged.
There are no nuances in email, no facial expressions or tone of voice, so there is a greater chance of misunderstanding. Here are some tips on bridging the digital gap:
The way I hear it, however, is that users are responsible for their own workstations' security and the integrity of their password, and anyone having access to their workstation would hence fall under their responsibility, too (not too nice if you use Win9x). This is in addition to another respondent's assertion that a company would attempt to find a trail of similar indiscretions. In an era of firewalls/logging, and with the repetitive nature of pr0n-surfing behavior, it's pretty easy to completely track down someone using company equipment for such uses.
Keep in mind, as well, that even with failsafes such as "at-will" employment[1], it can be difficult to fire someone and not worry about an expensive lawsuit. To get HR moving in many cases, you need hard evidence and a trail of it. This mostly handles the IP spoofing situation, but, yes, there might be some situations where repeated PC outages could be used as a smokescreen for this type of behavior. I think we're describing a teeny percentage of the cases, and in most instances, it's the user not paying attention to policy/consequences.
It is tough for me to understand that your average user doesn't get this, however, and that so many still do surf porn sites on company time/equipment. Bandwidth is pretty cheap/available.
1. "at-will" employment is a clause in a company's sign-on contract that states that an employee may leave for any reason, with or without notice, and a company may terminate the employee under the same conditions.
I use the Proxomitron, which is an effective Windows-based filter, but it has difficulty with secure pages. Its license requires you to listen to some music, but is otherwise free.
>> And with every one you get a free Diamond Rio MP3 player, right?
> PLUS, you get a free Hungry-Like-A-Wolf (sic -- it's actually "the wolf") Cluster.
Please, please tell me now where I can get one!
Actually, John Taylor was a pretty decent bassist. I maintain that it's his basslines that made their songs so popular (Duran Duran, that is).
For any of you protecting your Exchange 5.5 server with Norton Antivirus (Symantec), there are signatures here. They aren't tested or approved, AFAIK, but they're working at my location. It won't repair the file but will quarantine bad attachments. You might want to keep the server off your network while you do this. Stop your store while you're copying the signature file to your server, then pull your ethernet cable when you want to start it again to run NAV.
n tivirus_definitions/norton_antivirus/spe cdef
That url is ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/a
Okay, your "net effect" idea I would argue is already in place, that's what the legislative & judiciary branches are consistently determining. Laws are put into place and the net effect is retroactively assessed to determine whether the balance between individual freedom and governmental intercession on behalf of the masses is consistent with certain ideals that are laid out in US first principles.
The government is thus permitted to intrude on an individuals rights in special cases that are laid out in US code -- so free speech is not the all-encompassing right it seems to be in the discussion here. See for example, Erie v. Pap's A.M., a case recently where a nudity ban is challenged under the first amendment ("freedom of expression"); it is found to be within those "net effect" gray areas where the government is not compelled to leave the individual free. Their term is "prevention of secondary effects", or the limiting of "undesireable elements" from their society. This is normal, and par for the course, but stands as an example that free speech/expression can and will be curbed, and that the "net effect" principle can and usually does defend a certain group's predjudices.
The net effect of the commingling of our political system with this type of "possible barrier" to freedoms is that the curbs on freedoms tend to come from congressional representatives, rather than from the individuals. I think it's difficult from the senate floor to assess the "net effect" on larger society, and I'm not sure most elected officials have individual freedom in mind as much as maintenance of the status quo. There needs to be more review and assessment, a la Supreme Court, rather than political gamesmanship.
IMO, the electoral process is mingled with mass media tends to encourage those politicians who are weathy, dishonest and make promises to the majority audience, regardless of intent to carry them out. Due to their "branding" in the marketing sense, they get "electable" and hence get to choose which freedoms get curbed. Grass roots on the national political scene is practically dead. I don't feel these people accurately represent my people, but I am just one man and ill equipped to "unelect" an entire state and replace my representatives with ones whose moral fiber more suits my idea of who determines "net effects". I haven't the money, I'd be brutally honest about what I intended to do in government, and hence, would likely not get elected.
So you end up with ugly US code changes like Terry vs. Ohio, basically giving a policeman the right to initially search you if he can articulate a reason for his having a suspicion that you might be thinking about committing a crime. This, to me and many that I have talked with about it, is clearly in violation of the fourth amendment, but to the Court, seems to be within the acceptable boundary. Net effect? More victims of unreasonable searches are convicted in the short term, and perhaps a downturn in the crime rate.
However, one can fairly easily extrapolate what an unscrupulous government could do with that sort of law. But even not taking it that far, if the policeman responsible for executing the law is biased or predjudiced, then it's a larger/lesser effect on the biased/predjudiced population, and the indicted stand a lesser chance of a fair trial (fourteenth amendment, iirc) than they would were Terry not in place. Essentially, the "net effect" answer is not an answer, but an apology for the status quo.
That doesn't make sense. There are thousands of political organizations with very unpopular stances on touchy issues that are rolling in donor cash. Half the problem in the FSF is absolutely no non-profit fundraising sense and an unwillingness to relinquish an unpopular and alarmist (to the layman) popular image.
The fact of the matter is, they have some of the best coding talent in the world working under perhaps the most brilliant development system in the world. They just need a PR and marketing arm that flexes a little more muscle & buffs that GNU image to a healthy golden shine.
Is it fist pumping Che-type freedom that you're fighting for, or the right to produce software in a peer-reviewed development cycle? If it's the latter, then stand for the cycle itself, rather than the right to employ it -- at least in public. Then you take your soft donor money and talk to some senators on a golf course...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/01/21/16522 24&cid=343
That's what AOL'ers get. I'm against AOL, and I believe their users get what they deserve.
...and who's idea was it to install NetBEUI by default? And why does s/he still have a job?
You're not considering innocent bystanders. I tried to count the hours that my service techs have spent attempting to restore normal dialup networking to users in the last week. I'm well over 40 man/hours at somewhere like $30 per -- if you add in the users' hours, AOL is costing my company serious money here.
The really big problem is that officer-level execs with laptops containing business critical information are installing AOL at home and then ranting at their IS departments when they can't get dialin access. When a VP of sales is down, you can't say "sorry, we don't support stations with AOL installed." That's how to get fired.
But you can, however, lay the blame at the right feet -- Microsoft's DUN setup is a P.O.S.(TM) hack; they designed it to allow the novice user to set up an internet connection themselves, but there's much arcane crud a user needs to know to set up the Network control panel properly. It's more complicated than the "normal" Windows user can handle.
AOL is just adding a shit addition to the brick shithouse that is Windows networking.
So can I suggest that if Slashdot wants to do news, it does news, and if it wants to do discussion forums it does them too, but that it does them in different parts of the site, with different and suitable user interfaces to each part?
Can I make a suggestion? If you are going to ask that folks who are already doing a tremendous amount of work (for free), could you help out? How about coding this little suggestion of yours?
Is it too much work for your tender mouse hand to read both The Register and slashdot?
Generalizing is never good, not when done...
:)
Generalizing is never good?
I can think of several specific instances where generalizing might be beneficial
Isn't it the individuals who are outside the norm that prefer specifics to generalities?
bort13
I stand corrected. Good cheer, everybody. sorry Rob!
Music is a question of taste, and I, for one, don't happen to care for Waters' music. At the risk of incurring bad karma, I submit the first "who cares?"
(note that on many of the other controversial "is this really news" items, I hold slashdot's journalistic integrity in high regard.
Perhaps I'm completely starry-eyed and idealistic, but are there no lawyers who would take such a case for the publicity, or for a percentage of any settlement? It strikes me as if a case like this might be lucrative and seriously good for a law firm's business. The firm/lawyers would have an army of developers as potential clients forever, win or lose.
On another note: What makes everyone think that they're not "stealing" code now? Who's to say that they're not finding ways to optimize their copyrighted ideas by examination of GPL code?
What qualifies as a copyright infringement? If Microsoft makes EDIT.EXE more like Emacs, say with a lisp-like extension language and the same control and meta keys. They ship it in the WinNT command line, are we in sue-able territory here?
...if there is any shortage in this world there is shortage of orginality. As a commodity, your idea may not be scarce once put in tangible form, but your originality itself is scarce.
One of my favorite topics -- actually I would even go so far as to say there's a finite pool of "originality" wherever you decide to put the boundary seperating the original from the copy. There are many intellect avenues unexplored, but access to them is glutted with footprints of those past. One can get lost from them by red herring desire, and much of the really interesting original thought-tracks have been blazed by someone else. Some originality isn't terribly interesting - Charlie Manson's for instance.
The fact for me that seals the existance of a finite Noospheric pool of originality is that folks can jump in at the same time -- Newton & Leibniz, unless the apocryphal story really isn't true, unleashed the Calculus at the same time. The process of achieving that thought was inevitable, two traversed different paths to get there, and both must have had a completely transcendent experience as the original way of looking at the world emerged in their minds. One can only wonder, but can enjoy a similar experience, this Jeffersonian candle-lighting, as the Calculus is learned (actually, taught, as well) the first time.
Originality holds incredible weight & currency in our culture. Great works of art have to be original or are dismissed as low- or pop-art. But there are finite media to work in, and within those media, finite methods of harnessing the media to produce a work that excites an audience. In music, originality, or at least primacy, is entirely valued, and "copycats" are ridiculed unless their version is demonstrably better than the original...
Fascinatingly, it wasn't always this way. The aim in pre-Renaissance painting certainly didn't have originality as a component, just religious depiction with little expression. Marcantonio Raimondi later made a wealthy life by engraving copies Raphael's work in a plan to distribute throughout Europe and extend Raphael's range. Raimondi's skill at engraving is unparalleled in his time, except probably by Albrecht Durer (...but the German method is flawed by...yadda yadda yadda). Anyway, He was considered as much an artist as any of the greats in his time.
I'd never want to live in another age, but I envy the ancients with the whole cool pool of originality open to them, not a wave breaking the surface (especially after they got the noospheric reboot when the library burned at Alexandria)
Truly, try to think an original thought yourself, it's seriously difficult unless you resort to the absurd!
this post contains 100% recycled ideas
Being almost a die-hard command-prompt (bash, et. al.) user,
That was what my Linux experience had been as well. I think I compiled/configured XFree86 three years ago on a Debian box; I remember thinking boy, it's not really worth the effort unless you want to spend weeks tweaking it.
When I saw Gnome for the first time, I flipped my lid. In that bubbly, excited emotional state that my new discoveries Linux/FS/etc. can produce, I called my friends and swore that Windows would meet its maker in a year or less.
Though a bit enthused, I still think that de Icaza's & others' work on Gnome is a serious threat to proprietary software in general. It presents a serious, no-foolin' example of fabulous free software that even the novice user can see. It's at that point that you can gently pose the question, "and why do you think these programmers wish to let others see their source code?" You can make reg'lar folks see the beauty of the idea for a minute at least...
Bravo to the FSF and de Icaza.