10 Jun 2000 mcelrath   » (Apprentice)

Well much to my surprise I received 6 emails about my last diary entry. Greets to Hugo, Kaushik, Sean, Chromatic, Raph, and Scotty. Seems someone agrees about my ideas for discussion forums. I've looked closer at this, kuro5hin, and technocrat.net. I think the best features of discussion forums in general are 1) the nested layout, and 2) a moderation/rating system that puts the most interesting stuff at the top. The reason nobody posts on zdnet (and other traditional news rags) is that their discussion software blows chunks. The index layout (just listing the subject and poster) is almost totally useless. I am absolutely not going to load one page for each message.

So I've written a rather lengthy piece on the "future of open source". Since babbling about OSS economics, motivations, and morals seems to be all the rage, I thought I'd jump into the game and do something different at the same time. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. Perhaps I'll submit it to kuro5hin and/or avogato and see if they'll post it. (if you run a news site and would be interested in this, contact me) Gotta finish it first. It's hard to project more than about 25 years in the future, since technological (hardware) developments will play such a crucial role. Then predictive power always decreases with the distance into the future. I hope there are a few good ideas in there that people will pick up on, and allow them to start profitable businesses. Half of prediction is in creating the future, after all.

I'm excited for Titan AE to open next week. I'm a massive scifi and anime junkie, and I really hope it doesn't suck. I didn't see Battlefield Earth (though I read the book), I'm kinda afraid too. Maybe on video.

does anyone else get sick to their stomach when they hear Metallica come on the radio...and then change the station? I wonder how many fans Metallica has/will lose over this whole napster fiasco. Such a shortsighted move on their part. #1 rule of being a celebrity: don't attack your fans. They are your livelihood.

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