I agree that people like Shannon can cause political uneasyness, but there are many in FOSS that can do the same. Heck, Shannon is an admitted Pink-Liberal-Pacifist. Politically I'm 180 from him, but he is brilliant in areas of computing. He writes his own database interfaces and drivers in hand coded assembly. The community area of BME, called IAM, has over 15,000 users and is a dynamic content creation system with actives users literally all over the world. He had it running smoothly at that level on a P3 850 running Windows and his hand coded software. He has other sites of interest including http://www.priceofhistoys.com/ http://www.undermars.com/ and his blog (linked to IAM) at http://www.zentastic.com/
Aside from political differences (many people on BME/IAM oppose some/many of his views) he is the one person I know who HAS done location and mapping work, on his own, nearly by himself, and gotten it to work. That alone is somebody who should be consulted for a project like this, regardless of his more extreme views. I forgave Linus for his fathers Communist sympathies years ago. :)
Jon.
On 11/16/06, Oren Beck orenbeck@gmail.com wrote:
On 11/16/06, Jon Pruente jdpruente@gmail.com wrote:
I know of a guy who has built his own mapping engines and put together location data from public sources. He's pretty busy, but he might at least be able to shed light on certains topics if needed. Shannon Larratt has built many location fetures into bmezine.com and it's sister sites. He's also recently gone Linux and runs Xubuntu on his laptop. He's been moving to UNIX from Windows for a while. He's done some really nifty custom work, including a worldwide location mapper, etc.
One warning- that link is potentially NSFW!
I am of mixed feelings here- while ANY expansion of OSS is good, appearances count too. Squicking the mundanes so deeply that they consider OSS to be entangled with the BM set is a risk. Then again- there is a past example. In an attempt at image manipulation Edison proposed AC for judicial executions. , To prove his DC system as "Safe" and the competing AC system as "Deadly" Edison purchased alternators and donated them to prisons for use with electric chairs. The punch line however being that AC became the preferred current distribution method- even if only for practical considerations. So much for political grandstanding and technology playing off against each other. Let's hope I am being concerned about nothing.
Oren
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