A program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. 'SCIgen is a program that generates random Computer Science research papers, including graphs, figures, and citations. One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to "fake" conferences; that is, conferences with no quality standards, which exist only to make money. In fact, one of our papers was accepted to SCI 2005!' They're asking for donations so that they could actually go and, er, perform at the conference.

On prior art and the demise of O'Reilly's "anti-patent company" "As it is, patent filings are much more like the 'obfuscated C contest' than they are like anything that improves the world's ability to learn from inventions in exchange for that limited monopoly granted by the patent office." --Tim O'Reilly

On how the command line is to a Unix weenie like the keyboard to a pianist "I call this class of interface 'mastery interfaces', and they are curious because they are amazingly unusable to beginners and effortlessly usable to 'experts'. This characteristic creates something of an odd social dynamic amongst the userbase. The experts can barely (if at all) re-acquaint themselves with the frustrations that newbies face, and thus have very few (and skewed) insights on how to make the system more broadly usable."

Guy in Iraq giving out Ubuntu and Knoppix CDs (and doing lots more interesting things) "The main reason for giving away Ubuntu and Knoppix is this: People are using windows because it's what they have. They'll get to know what they have and they'll never change. If you get in on the ground floor, you can help subvert the western dominant paradigm before it's taken hold here. It helps people to recover data, it helps people to remove viruses and if they're willing to run Knoppix, Debian Gnu/Linux or Ubuntu, they're likely to not have virus problems ever again."

(Click on the link, it's too long to paste here)

"Thanks Iran, you've given me cheaper medicine than my own country ever has."

"Normal people don't like evangelists." "If one point is critical to drill in, it is that people who are unfamiliar with open source generally don't like evangelists--at all. This is particularly true for managers who may take the same disdain to evangelists that they take to salespeople and marketers."

"Corporations are not evil. That kind of anthropomorphism is inappropriate. Corporations are too stupid to be evil, only people can be that. Corporations are mechanisms."

"I've been saturated with Unix-peanut-gallery effluvia for so long that it no longer even surprises me when every question -- no matter how simple -- results in someone suggesting that you either A) patch your kernel or B) change distros. It's inevitable and inescapable, like Hitler."

jwz on closing "obsolete" bugs "This is, I think, the most common way for my bug reports to open source software projects to ever become closed. I report bugs; they go unread for a year, sometimes two; and then (surprise!) that module is rewritten from scratch -- and the new maintainer can't be bothered to check whether his new version has actually solved any of the known problems that existed in the previous version. I'm so totally impressed at this Way New Development Paradigm. Let's call it the 'Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers' model, or 'CADT' for short. It hardly seems worth even having a bug system if the frequency of from-scratch rewrites always outstrips the pace of bug fixing."