3 Apr 2000 Rasputin   » (Journeyer)

I finally broke down and cleaned out my "junk box" and discovered and old HP T1000 with some tapes. Popped it into my FreeBSD 4.0 box and lo and behold, it didn't work ;/ Further investigation reveals this puppy was never supported under *BSD, although the QIC series was until 3.4 or so. So, I spent the day (when I wasn't chasing the kid around the house ;)) getting started on a Travan driver for FreeBSD. Of course I'll get the driver written only to find out the drive was in the junk box because it belonged there. Such is the life of a hacker.

I've actually given some thought to what I was thinking about yesterday, an article about the international standards process. I suspect there might be some interesting lessons in that particular process for the open source community. I'll pop it up for comments when I get to about the third revision and we'll see where it goes from there.

I was also thinking about the frequent occurence of "hot air" wars (they don't often make it to flames) over the most amazingly trivial things. I really believe not having to discuss these things face to face allows a level of aggressiveness you wouldn't normally see. Most of the hackers I know are relatively soft-spoken and articulate yet put a keyboard in front of them and hit a "Holy Issue" and the pilot light kicks in... I guess that's a feature of the on-line community that will be with us for a while. If there were a way to personalize the process a little more, this probably wouldn't be an issue.

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