Hey, dudes: he built a bunch of cool and famous software, some of which you are using without paying a dime for, and even making money with.
He has no blog. Can't be found on Facebook. Apparently doesn't even like surfing web. But there is a wiki page about him and he gets recognized while walking down the street.
His name is Richard Stallman. What is YOUR name? What have YOU built?
Indeed! And I think Stallman comes off OK in the full referenced OpenBSD-related thread, too. He's precise and peculiar, but calm and consistent, while the people responding to him get quite pissy.
And remember, through all of this emailing-a-server-to-get-the-page-emailed-back ordeal, he doesn't use an on-line email reader either! He downloads new messages in a batch and reads them off-line. He then writes responses that get uploaded and sent off in bulk later.
At least, that was the way it worked last time I read about it.
I liken Stallman to a fanatical religious person. Although intelligent, they're completely out of touch with reality. Stallman has brainwashed himself with ridiculous beliefs.
Perhaps because he has accomplished a great deal and may have some advice for those who wish to as well? Seriously, he is out of touch with reality because he doesn't waste his time browsing the web?
There were 4 rooms for my first C++ class at uni: 3 with brand new Pentium II's and 1 with the old (and slow) 486's. No wonder, nobody wanted to be in that latter room for the exam at the end of the semester. So the teacher had to randomly dispatch people in those 4 rooms.
Funny surprise: the results from the 486's room were slightly better (than the results in other rooms). Hypotheses: people in the 486's room were thinking twice before launching the slow compilation (leading to less compilation errors), as opposed to launching it often in other rooms (with probably more compilation errors). Bottom line: increasing the focus reduces waste of time.
This phenomena is mentioned in The Mythical Man Month. An interactive debug session is three times more productive than batch submissions. However, when access to computational power becomes too easy, people fiddle aimlessly without a directed plan.
Hey, dudes: he built a bunch of cool and famous software, some of which you are using without paying a dime for, and even making money with.
He has no blog. Can't be found on Facebook. Apparently doesn't even like surfing web. But there is a wiki page about him and he gets recognized while walking down the street.
His name is Richard Stallman. What is YOUR name? What have YOU built?