In this comment, sethawoolley wrote:

Tip 1: Be sure to quote the parts of the comment you're replying to. Quote multiple levels to recap the discussion from the original article to Slashdot's summary through parent comments if you feel it necessary.

Tip 2: If a comment is far enough off topic, and you can't tie it back to the article somehow, put it in your journal. Then, under the original comment, reply "See my journal" without bonus so that it at least shows up in the other user's messages.pl.

so I log in to check my messages today and I have five mods, all overrated, all in a row, no other moderation. The comments are: Re:Italian Radio * Re:Cooler... * Re:Software RAID * Re:Coming to Mac OS 10.5 * Re:Amiga beat them all

It's too bad people like this feel a need to contaminate my existence. What a waste of CHON.

Recently, the OSI announced that they were planning to "crack down" on people who misuse the term "Open Source". I found this particularly intriguing because I am well aware (as are most other long-time geeks) that the term 'Open' was around long before the OSI was even a dream. Another element of that conversation that was quite interesting is that Bruce Perens claims to have invented the term 'Open Source'. Can this possibly be true?

Bruce didn't give a date anywhere in the discussion as to when he might have invented the term, but his document The Open Source Definition does provide some clues. For example, he states that "The Open Source Definition started life as a policy document of the Debian GNU/Linux Distribution." [...] "I was the leader of the Debian project, at that time, and I addressed these problems by proposing a Debian Social Contract and a Debian Free Software Guidelines in July, 1997." He also states in relation to ESR's involvement that "Raymond and I had met occassionally at the Hacker's Conference, a by-invitation-only gathering of creative and unconventional programmers. We had corresponded on various subjects via e-mail. He contacted me in February of 1997 with the idea for Open Source."

These statements would seem to put the origin of the term, therefore, between February and July of 1997 — But Eric Raymond's recollection is different. In The Origins of `Open Source' , a portion of his book Revenge of the Hackers he writes "Hence the term `open source', which the first participants in what would later become the Open Source campaign (and, eventually, the Open Source Initiative organization) invented at a meeting held in Mountain View the offices of VA Research on 3 February 1998." That's right, Perens' ostensible source for the idea of the term Open Source himself places the event in February of 1998, not 1997.

This isn't the end of the claimants to the origin of the term "Open Source", however - and to find the next one, I don't even have to talk about a different group of people. In chapter 11 ("Open Source") of the book Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software Christine Peterson, then-president (now the vice president) of the Foresight Institute, also claims to have invented the term - or at least to have a better claim to it than ESR. "Looking back, Peterson says she came up with the open source term while discussing Netscape's decision with a friend in the public relations industry. She doesn't remember where she came upon the term or if she borrowed it from another field, but she does remember her friend disliking the term." The book also quotes her as saying that she was "hesitant about suggesting it", adding "I had no standing with the group, so started using it casually, not highlighting it as a new term." The last relevant slice of the chapter claims that "Raymond says he didn't publicly use the term "open source" as a substitute for free software until a day or two after the Mozilla launch party, when O'Reilly had scheduled a meeting to talk about free software."

All of the events mentioned here happened during or after January of 1998. So it seems that ESR has the more correct interpretation of events than Perens; but in turn, Peterson's claim is shown to be the stronger.

However, none of these people has a better claim to the term "Open Source" than, of all places, Caldera - which we now know as the SCO Group. But back then, Caldera was a leader of the Open Source movement, as you can see from this mailing list archive entry which includes a press release from Caldera announcing their "Open Source" distribution of DOS, to which they had recently acquired rights. The title? CALDERA. ANNOUNCES OPEN SOURCE CODE MODEL FOR DOS The date? September tenth, 1996. That's right, over a year before the most reputable claims of invention.

To be absolutely fair, only ESR and Perens actually claim to have invented the term. Peterson says that she doesn't remember where she got the idea, which while potentially disingenuous is at the least not an outright lie, and at best is entirely true - assuming that there is any truth to the story to begin with. Believing everything you read is probably (to say the least) a mistake.

Regardless, we are left only with a mystery. Where did the term originate? Who out of these three — Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, and Christine Peterson — is telling the truth? It can only be one of them, as each of them makes contradictory claims of one nature or another.

I formerly posted a comment asking these questions of Bruce Perens, in response to the comment in which he claims to have done the inventing, but he either did not see that I made the comment (ostensibly, a slashdot message should have been sent to him notifying him of a reply) or did not feel that it was worthy of response, so I am asking this question of the larger Slashdot community. Does anyone have any better information than I've already tracked down?

While a few of the gems are missing from the crown (in the form of marked out passages) you can get the CIA's "crown jewels" documents, 701 pages of dirty tricks (although the most interesting is marked out completely, as usual) which were recently released - previously "EYES ONLY" documents. It only takes one command:

for i in `seq -w 1 701`; do wget http://www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0001451843/0001451843_0${i}.gif; done

I apologize for any misformatting courtesy slashdot. Suffice to say there are no spaces in the URL, but there are a dollar sign and a set of braces (it's a shell command, after all).

Surreal, adj. 1. Entering the Tribal casino where you work and hearing Mister Custer playing on the overhead.

Today, many web retailers (e.g. Computer Geeks) will only ship to your credit card's billing address. No one in their right mind would extend me any credit, so I typically use my debit card for making web purchases. Now granted, more and more retailers are taking paypal, but I have the problem that my bank (Washington Mutual) will not permit me to associate "temporary" addresses with my debit card - meaning that I can only have things shipped to my mailing address. This is not my real address (I don't want junk mail, so I don't use that one for anything) and this poses a problem.

Can anyone suggest a bank with offices on the left coast that is less lame than WaMu? All I want to do is to be able to spend my money, and they don't seem to be interested in providing me common banking services, in spite of ostensibly being a bank.

I got the following spam: (note: no clicky linky) "YourMom, I wanted to again invite you to try out a great new money maker for your website, AuctionAds.com AuctionAds is owned in part by TLA and the results have been outstanding. The great part about AA is that it can be run along with other ad systems like Adsense so there is no reason not to run it on your site and see how it performs.".

This is amusing to me because of the name, "YourMom", which I have occasionally used as my name on websites. Obviously someone who shouldn't be is spamming me.

I've saved the entire original message in case it's relevant.

Okay, now I know I'm going to come off as a "hey you kids get off of my lawn" old fart here, but what the hell has happened to customer service? Why is it that every time you get a phone monkey on the line they want to argue with you?

Let me just share my latest saga with you. Last names are omitted to protect the stupid.

I am attempting to evaluate a product called Crystal Reports XI Server, which is currently owned by a company called Business Objects (they will erroneously claim that they are the creators of Crystal Reports, but Crystal has belonged to more companies than just about any other software product out there. In fact, here in house we have versions 6 and 9 of Crystal, for Aristocrat OASIS and MASS-90, respectively. Neither one was from Business Objects.

So I visit their webpage and they have a download link for a server trial. I visit this page and download what appears to be the appropriate product; it turns out to actually be an ordinary Crystal Reports Designer product. So I called up a sales rep (Damon) and talked to him. He tells me I should download Crystal Reports Developer, which he claims includes the server product.

After I download it, I contact him again, and he says (in email) "My apologizes the eval Edition of Crystal Reports Developer does not come with the Server component. It will come with the Server component if you purchase the product." How useful! So I try to download again. This time I notice there's a Linux version, so I'm downloading that one too. But for some reason my Ubuntu system unexpectedly hangs to a black screen (first time) during the download. So I fire firefox and vmware back up, and use DownThemAll! to resume my Linux downloads, and use the Business Objects download manager to resume my Windows 2000 VM download.

I still don't have the Linux download (I guess DtA! is pretty slow after all) but the Windows download completes, so I try to extract it. I get some CRC errors and am eventually told that there were errors, please download a fresh copy.

At work, we have only a T1 which I have to share with some 20-odd other users. A cable modem would be faster. I have just spent some four hours downloading and do not look forward to doing it again. So I call up the sales department and tell them my story. Then they say they're going to call the sales rep. I ask if there is anyone more competent I can deal with, and the guy (Neil) actually cuts me off to tell me that Damon has worked there for two years and must therefore be competent.

Anyone who has worked anywhere for any length of time knows people who have worked there for much longer than two years and don't know dick about shit. So this is a specious argument at best. But more to the point, I'm calling the sales department and trying to get an eval (I requested a hardcopy, they do send them out according to the download page) and they're giving me a hard time! This is the department tasked with convincing people to cough up money. It is not the department that is there to give customers a hard time and scare them away so that they evaluate other products, which is what happens if there is any further headache in between me and my product evaluation.

The sheer incompetence of creating a download manager that doesn't do CRC checks during the resume of a download to avoid file corruption, of course, is just icing on this very nasty cake.

This is hardly the only company I've had this kind of experience with. Don't these people want our money any more?

Not submitting this one to the queue or anything, but why in hell is it that practically every archiver on Windows extracts to the temp folder and then copies the file to the target destination? This approach makes certain archives unusable. For example, let's say you have an archive with two archives inside it and need to extract a file from one of them; you have enough room for the archive, one of the archives inside the archive, and one file inside THAT, but you can't get it out because when the file is extracted, the copy fails, and then the original is deleted. 7-Zip is the program I most recently noticed this behavior in. Is it just an attempt to keep the user from screwing with the open file that the archiver is writing to? And if so, doesn't there have to be a far more intelligent way to handle this problem? If nothing else it would lead to unnecessary filesystem fragmentation.

Tyson Foods, one of the largest meat processors in the United States, is currently making a deal with ConocoPhillips, one of the world's major oil companies. C|Net News reports that Tyson's waste animal fat could be processed into 175 million gallons of biodiesel a year, and that ConocoPhillips plans to invest a hundred million [US] dollars on the project. A pilot program has been successfully running at a Tyson facility in Ireland.

As per the beeb, Sony launched their Playstation 3 console gaming system in Europe last night to an absolute lack of fanfare. London was essentially the only city to display high demand, and every purchaser of a Playstation 3 at the London launch was also given a forty-six inch HDTV and a cab ride home to make sure they arrived with all of their goodies. The French launch was an abject failure, with the media outnumbering players on the boat used for the launch affair, and insult was added to injury by the presence of a Microsoft and Xbox 360-labeled boat running up and down the Seine behind Sony's event. According to The Age, Australia's launch was [also] exceptionally slow in spite of Sony's claims that there were 20,000 preorders for the console. Could Sony's even-more-exorbitant pricing of the PS3 in the European market be responsible?

While I am perhaps not the best person to talk about this as I've only had one submission accepted, my recent time spent with the Firehose has demonstrated to me that most people have a hard time crafting an acceptable story submission, in spite of the numerous examples on the front page. The following is just a list of hints and tips that might help someone assemble a story submission that makes sense.

Slashdot, being a news aggregator, is about links. A submission without a link is like a hot dog with no dog. But beyond simply having a link, there is the matter of context. It is never appropriate to have a link whose text consists of "click here", as in Click here to visit Slashdot.org. Nor is it reasonable to link the URL, as in "you can visit Slashdot at http://slashdot.org". If we want to know the URL, we can mouse over the link: "You can read more at Slashdot". Besides general good etiquette, Slashdot gathers all of the links from the submitted story and places them in a sidebar block titled "Related Links". This block makes much more sense when you make descriptive links. The only kind of submission that might not need a link is an Ask Slashdot.

Use the <blockquote> tag sparingly. The entire story submission will be blockquoted anyway.

Watch your spelling and grammar. Few things are more disorienting than a missing word, or one spelled so incorrectly that it could be a different word entirely. Something like half of the story submissions to Slashdot have one or both of these problems.

Pay attention to the length of the subject field. You are only permitted a fixed number of characters for the subject of story submissions (or anything else with a subject line here on Slashdot.) If you're not paying attention, you can easily end up losing characters off of the end of your title.

Make sure you submit into the proper category. "Enlightenment", for example, is not meant in the Zen sense. We're talking about the window manager here, and the icon reflects this fact (although there's not been much news about it lately, so one can't be blamed if they've never seen the icon before.) Think carefully and read the names of all the categories if you're having a hard time deciding.

Don't just copy and paste someone's press release (or part of one) into the submission field. Explain why it's worthy of being called news!

Finally, don't use a story submission as your personal crusade. Slashdot is about discussion. If you want to engage in lengthy discussion, then wait for the story to be approved, and go post a comment. The longer your submission gets, the less likely it is to be approved.

While perusing the Firehose I came to the realization that most of those stories are going to be lost to antiquity. Oh, they'll be discussed on other websites, but slashdot actually provides us journal functionality so that they can be discussed here even if your submission doesn't make it as a story.

This is a call to all to make all of your story submissions as journal entries. Just click the radio button for "Publicize" (which is right under the format pulldown menu) and bingo! Your journal entry shows up in with the list of all the other submissions.

Can anyone see a problem with this approach? I wouldn't eliminate the idea of non-submission journal entries, but in general anything you are willing to submit as a story is something you don't mind having your name attached to...

I've never really had this thought before, but I was glancing over my user page and a comment I would have liked to track had JUST dropped off my comment history. So I look at the bottom of the page and see "Subscribers can view entire comment history for all users".

Now, I would already not pay for slashdot, because its employees don't do their jobs, but this just puts the icing on the cake. I have never paid for crippleware, and I never will.

You might argue that being able to see your entire posting history is going to result in some serious hits to the database. Yeah, that may be. But it's not as serious as googling for your comments (since slashdot's search function is worse than useless) and then making multiple page views figuring out which one is the one you wanted to be looking at. Which I've done more than once, let me tell you.

I'm not surprised - short-sightedness is the norm, not the exception. But it is rather sad. Where is the drive to excellence? News for nerds, but not by them.

Lately I've had what look like whole new masses of idiots following me around and posting cowardly (which is to say anonymous) comments under mine talking mad shit. For example under my comment I think he's absolutely right (under Raymond Knocks Fedora, Switches to Ubuntu) has a lovely comment entitled Don't reply, it's just Moronpoo the asshole. And then there's Re:Scarily familiar... in which a clueless AC challenges me when it's clear that they don't know WTF they are talking about, and asserts that my statement is "bullshit". (Many thanks to Cyberax for the save.)

But the moral of the story is that this shit has been getting stronger lately. The abusive moderation has tapered off slightly, but the attacks are growing in number. And notably, almost all of them are utterly unfounded.

So this is an open invitation to all of you cowardly little people out there. Come in from the cold, register a (or log into your) slashdot account, and join the party. But we know you won't, because the name is appropriate; you are indeed cowards. You lack the courage of your convictions, because you know deep down inside that you are only a small, scared cog in the great machine.

But thank you for making me feel relevant.

""First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi