I thought it was OK. I like his ideas taken individually, even the
anthropological "insights". But they aren't as cohesive as they
could be and so he leads the audience to conclusions that do not
necessarily follow from his arguments. For example:
1) The whole dogs/wolves/humans analogy. Wrong. All of the
aforementioned animals are SOCIAL creatures. Presumably, the
"territoriality" he mentions exists to facilitate social interaction.
And that approach, although it doesn't fit his individualist
political views, fits better with his comments on the open
source development community, rather than some dubious
explanation of how animals are "hardwired" with an intuitive
notion of property.
2) The geek "unix is the whole world" attitude is so unnecessary.
"We did Linux, now we can just focus on applications". Right.
There are professors (that ubiquitous science community we
hold in such high esteem) in every computer science department
around the country working on systems and particularly Operating
Systems. I suppose their research is pointless? Besides, the whole
fractal analogy he offered works much better if you acknowledge
that open source development can and should continue at multiple
levels (OS, Application, etc). The fractal analogy for how and
where people choose to develop would indicate that
new development could continue at multiple levels,
in parallel.
3) The N^2 bit was worked a bit too hard. Handwavy. How is a
"control" hierarchy N^2 in complexity? It would seem that
any hierarchy is logarithmic in complexity by nature... the
proper model is a tree.
-C
> I guess with the advent of preinstalled linux systems, regular
> schmoes will be running it too (since they don't have to deal with the
> nuts and bolts as much) though I don't know whether the average home
> computer user (thinking of my parents) will ever like command line stuff.
>
> Nomi
>
> > What did y'all think of that talk? I thought it was pretty interesting
> > though VERY long....
> >
> >
>
> *-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*
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> All roads lead you astray.
-- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Christopher Cantor Room 502, Dept. of Computer Science Yale University, P.O. Box 208285 New Haven, CT 06520-8285 email: cantor-christopher@cs.yale.edu phone: 203/432-0677 fax: 203/432-0593 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++