As the Linux Foundation’s “We’re Linux” video contest has entered the judging phase, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols lists his seven favorite entries. “I’m not a judge on the committee that will decide the winner, but I do know a little bit about both Linux and marketing. So, here are my seven favorite picks in the contest. I tried, I really did, to cut the list to five, but I couldn’t do it. It was hard enough to get to seven.“
POSIX says that many things that are not useful are fine, but doesn’t exist for the pleasure of sadistic OS implementors. POSIX exists to allow application writers to write useful applications. If you interpret POSIX in such a way that gains you some benefit but shafts a large number of application writers then people are going to be reluctant to use your code. You’re no longer a general purpose filesystem – you’re a filesystem that’s only suitable for people who write code with the expectation that their OS developers are actively trying to fuck them over. I’m sure Oracle deals with this case fine, but I also suspect that most people who work on writing Oracle on a daily basis have very, very unfulfilling lives.
With the older media, you have a place — a newsgroup, or a channel, that people went to, with a distinct culture, and that (mostly) weren’t “owned” by anyone, but rather by the community. With the new ones, we are all sole proprietors of our own streams, and we “tune in” to the subset of people we find interesting, rather than topics we invest in…Because of all the above, I have always wished that I could use Twitter from something more like my IRC client. Like, say, my IRC client.
This is what happens when hardware goes open source. Thanks Adam!
The contemporary shanzhai are rebellious, individualistic, underground, and self-empowered innovators. They are rebellious in the sense that the shanzhai are celebrated for their copycat products; they are the producers of the notorious knock-offs of the iPhone and so forth. They individualistic in the sense that they have a visceral dislike for the large companies; many of the shanzhai themselves used to be employees of large companies (both US and Asian) who departed because they were frustrated at the inefficiency of their former employers. They are underground in the sense that once a shanzhai “goes legit” and starts doing business through traditional retail channels, they are no longer considered to be in the fraternity of the shanzai. They are self-empowered in the sense that they are universally tiny operations, bootstrapped on minimal capital, and they run with the attitude of “if you can do it, then I can as well”.
Student #1, taking multivariable calculus: Don’t fuck with my logic, my logic is unfuckable!
Student #2: Don’t worry, we’ll find a hole.
Student #3: By dividing by zero!
Spent a while looking for this on their actual site. Didn’t find it. I hate when sites put different content in their RSS feeds from the rest of everything. This is from a news post posted on March 8th, 2009.
There is a new Overqualified letter up, even though it is Sunday morning.
Also, the Overqualified book comes out in a month. ECW sent me a box of them, which I have been giving away to friends like nobody’s business. They have some kind of crazy fancy inside paper because they were printed at Coach House, and the cover looks better than I’d ever hoped. The book is the perfect size for hollowing out to use as a secret cache for condoms and cocaine (or, let’s be honest, for nintendo DS games and candy.)
And that is all well and good, but do these top Katie West’s review, which begins with, “Everyone I know wants Joey Comeau to be inside of them,” and ends with, “I hate you Joey Comeau. I hate you and I hate your stupid book.”
They do not top this review. They do not come close.