This is a good example of why, although I have a Twitter account, I never use it, for the most part. It's also why I am opposed to the concept of giant, faceless corporations like Google, Facebook, and Twitter being the developers of, and having control of, the applications which the majority of people on the Internet use.

Twitter in particular is a fascist, corporate usurpation of the decentralised and non-corporate ircII protocol. As far as I am concerned, every principled Internet user should boycott both the application and the corporation into non-existence. We need to bring back IRC, so that we can again have decentralised, non-corporate control of text-based chat.

I honestly hope a Twitter employee reads this. Fuck you. Truly and sincerely, fuck you, and every other individual who works for the company as well. It is companies like yours that have destroyed the Internet as it existed before 2000.

That has not been forgiven, and it will not be forgotten.

I'm autistic. Autism has no inherent relation to lack of empathic response.

Psychopaths don't feel at all, and so don't express it. We feel, but we generally don't know how to express it in ways which are consistent with social norms, and so end up offending/upsetting people as a result.

There's a big difference.

I don't know whether or not I believe you. Why?

This guy would would be dead at my hand simple as that

You repeated this phrase twice. To me, that implies someone who still attaches some importance to the idea of killing people, and/or is trying to impress others, with how badass they supposedly are.

Psychopaths often can try and impress people, of course; the psychopathic modus operandi is all about justification for viewing yourself as superior to everyone else around you. The World of Warcraft forums taught me that.

So it's possible that you are a genuine psychopath; but it's equally possible that you're just trying to look "cool."

Okay, that's enough Linus. It's simply not funny any more. Hand it back now.

"Die! Why won't you die?!" (shooting repeatedly)

Amiga: "Behind this mask is an idea, Mr Creedy...and ideas are bullet proof."

a} OSX becoming UNIX based, caused Linux to become a solution in need of a problem. Linux is still seeing some use in the embedded space, but that's about it. The only reasons for anyone using Linux on the desktop are a} being a Stallmanite fanatic, or b} somehow being ignorant of the infinitely more desirable alternatives.

I expect the usual enraged responses to this from Ubuntards in particular; but I'd encourage you to save your energy, guys. Your distro sucks, and no amount of foaming at the mouth on your part is going to change that.

b} With the release of version 3 of the GPL, the Free Software Foundation effectively committed suicide. At the time, Linux was already on its' way to becoming less mainstream than the fandom of Battlefield Earth, and all that really did was hammer the final nail into the coffin.

As a result, we get no new Windows games ported to Linux, Ogg Vorbis is considered the domain of autistic nerds, and producing open source hardware drivers is considered more pointless and unnecessary than ever.

Way to go, FSF. I get the feeling that if you'd actually been trying to destroy FOSS' chances, you wouldn't have been able to do a better job.

One advantage of brick-and-mortar stores is that if you want something *today*, or want to look at the darn thing in person first, and *then* get it today, they have an incredible edge over online retailers. Not everyone wants to drive to a store, look at something, and then go off and find another place to get it, and then wait for it to arrive.

Honestly, I'm surprised you can't log in online to more stores, place an online reservation a product to pickup today (with a limited reservation window), and by the time you arrive the salesperson has exactly what you want, and a good idea as to what they might be able to upsell you on. They could very well be stealing business from online stores by pushing the "do you want it now?" angle. I'm not sure why they don't.

Service is dead though. Most of the staff in such stores aren't paid enough any more to give a damn beyond selling you the product with the highest commission, and it means that anyone with any sense steps inside the store already filled with skepticism. The only thing that seems to be remaining in that area (IMHO) is competing on return policies. If a place has a good return policy and you want a working product ASAP, it can be worth paying extra to get the thing you want, knowing that you won't be waiting for four weeks on an RMA if it's broken.

As someone who has spent an awful lot of time documenting *other* people's code over the last few years, I believe I can offer some insight as to how it gets that way.

IMHO, the big reasons for poor documentation tend to be either related to the self-interest of the developer, or insufficient time being allowed by management to create the documentation. On the self-interest front, we have:

- Job security: If it is apparent that replacing a developer is going to be costly due to nobody else knowing the tricks of the undocumented code, nobody is going to put their hand up to be the one doing the firing, as the resultant disaster from the replacement getting up to speed is probably going to be blamed on the one who did the firing.

- Artificial inflation of worth: If a developer knows the secrets of the code but their coworkers do not, they tend to look considerably more efficient and productive than their coworkers when working on that segment of code. This is so common that it's almost easier to list the cases where it doesn't happen, than where it does.

- Politics and currency: Knowledge of the code has value, and withholding that from others gives it value that can be used to buy favours from other people, or used to "punish" people who cross them.

- Lack of visibility: Poor commenting and inaccurate documentation is often only really noticed by people with the technical background to understand it. If the developer answers to a non-technical person, they can choose to get lazy about the things they don't strictly need themselves.

- Revenge: If the developer leaves, the next guy is going to have a lot of trouble getting up to speed. By withholding documentation, the developer can make sure the impact is greater, and is really felt.

- Hiding bodies: If the code is hideously broken, and the developer incompetent or inadequately resourced, having no documentation allows them to hide this for as long as possible whilst they look for a way to get out of the organisation, reputation intact. Let the next guy take the heat.

On the management side:

- Lack of understanding: Sometimes management doesn't understand that if documentation (and code cleanups) and forever withheld, the codebase will become an unmaintainable mess. Simple changes start to take forever, and complex changes never fully work due to the need to hack them in.

- No time: Sometimes documentation becomes a "work in the background" thing, where no time is really ever allocated for it, until some disaster strikes, and the same people cry "but where was the documentation". Writing documentation (eg. technical documents) takes time, not only from needing to refer to and test the code, but also to verify and proofread the whole thing. It never happens in magical zero-time.

- Job security: Similarly to the developer's trick, management can do this too. If they hold knowledge about how everything fits together, and it's not written anywhere, then it's going to be hard to replace the *manager*, for the same reasons.

- Artificial inflation of worth: Let's face it, the manager's manager is probably never going to really read any technical documentation- they're too far removed from it all. Who looks better: The manager who delivers work in eight months, or the one who does it in nine, with proper documentation?

- Short-term focus: If the driving factors are always the externally visible ones, and internal concerns such as code maintenance are always neglected (perhaps because the manager won't explain the necessity of this to the higher-ups), then documentation *will* be neglected. If the manager plans to move on in the medium term, they may not care if the project falls over in a heap after they leave- it's unlikely anyone will pin it on them, and it may not matter anyway.

And a last one that's in a class of its own: Inability. Not everyone can write documentation well.

Having worked on both sides of the IT support fence, I like the plumbing analogy.

If the plumbers started mandating toilet times and protocols, and required you to get management approval for each piece of toilet paper you planned to use, a month in advance, then you have a problem.

If the company employees insisted on their right to relieve themselves in their offices, and demanded to know why someone isn't there in five minutes to clean up after them, you also have a problem.

If your IT department are blissfully ignorant as to the needs of the organisation, and there is no oversight of what they do, then you have a problem.

If your IT department are forced to jump on demand, and are never given the chance to address network security, stability, or backups appropriately because they are always supporting random device X that has nothing to do with the job (until data is lost, and everyone suddenly remembers that backups *are* needed), then you have a problem.

As with many things, there is a healthy balance between the extremes that a company should be aiming for. It's all common sense, and sometimes, it's not all that common.

> A battleship that has shown its willingnes to keep firing all guns until all atoms previously making up any knife-wielding attacker is at least in earth orbit, preferably in sun orbit.

Well said.

If the size of the battleship doesn't give you pause, climbing over the charred remains of the last few knife-wielding attackers may.

You know, they might not be so rare if every do-gooder with a time machine didn't keep going back in time and picking up all of the remaining copies before they were found.

> Ever wonder why you see so few patent lawsuits from IBM relative to their portfolio?

Personally, I just assumed it was the same reason that you see very few knife attacks on the hull of a battleship.

> well they make hardware (motion capture sensors) for a niche market. So it's not terribly likely that their code being stolen will be a big issue, I think. It's a tiny market with few players. In fact, having the code open might make their hardware easier to integrate for some clients with custom solutions, or at least feel safe about it.

Hardware manufacturers can potentially be good candidates for open source software, since they can release the source, and sell the hardware. If it's a small market or the hardware is expensive, they probably won't gain much from hobbyist contributors, so the question as to whether or not a company is likely to use the source and contribute back becomes more important. Of course, the modifiable source could end up being a selling point as you suggest. :)

> If the cloner comes with a name like IBM, Google, MicroSoft or HP, they can be 3 years behind and still get the contract... nobody ever got fired for choosing ________.

If one of the big players starts intruding into your market, you've probably got a real, business-killing problem to deal with, unless you can satisfy a need that they can not or will not satisfy themselves.

But then again, sometimes they come bearing money instead, since they want the product, but don't want to develop it from scratch.

> Even if your competitors do then take that idea and steal it, it's possible to make money from the fact that your version is always months ahead in innovations. It's easier for someone who is actively inventing ideas to keep the flow of research moving forward, compared to someone that who just copied a subset of their ideas.

This is a very good point. If the product is such that you can keep improving it, and keep those improvements in the eyes of your customers, then anyone cloning the product will be seen as just playing catchup. It then becomes hard for them to compete on anything but price, which is hard to do if they're hiring double the number of developers as well. Heck, open sourcing your last version and charging for your most recent one would probably be one way to keep clone-based competitors from even *starting* to nip at your heels. I'd say there are probably lots of ways of playing it, depending on the type of product, and the potential benefits of opening some or all of the source in those circumstances.