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When all software out there is Open Source, leaks will be found and closed. That would mean no more virusses.

Why, yes. Yes, it is.

Jargon File - Crippleware

If you know about the Jargon File, then you will now understand why you were wrong, and that's fine. If you don't know about it, then turn in your geek card now, go to chroot jail, go directly to chroot jail, do not pass sudo, do not collect 200 bogomips.

Fascinating to go back and read Eric Raymond's 2003 rant, which in retrospect seems quite prescient.

Actually there are two meanings -- the political jargon (which you seem to be referring to), and the nerd jargon (which *does* make sense in this context); given that this is slashdot, I would think that the nerd version is the accepted standard.

Or perhaps you're too young to remember the jargon file? :P

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/world-domination/world-domination-201.html

recursion: n. See recursion.

I don't necessarily disagree with some of your sentiment, but you're borderline flaming in that post, and probably going to get moded either troll or flaimbait. Also your post is kind of hard to read and seems to wander all over the place. You're suggestion that the school or teachers are being paid by Microsoft to push IE or ads seems unfounded. It's far more likely that their staff are clueless and just don't realize that there are non-Microsoft ways to do things. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." - F. Scott Fitzgerald

(Yes - I am aware of the irony of AC talking about first-rate intelligence.)

I call you a fool for having blind faith in reason. :-P

Start reading up on Zen philosophy.

That's not an OS issue. It's a command interface issue. Much of it is built into bash.

The user interface people writing IOS need to read Eric Raymond's document on user interface, at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html. It applies to closed source interfaces as well.

Please look at the definition of hack and how it's different from cracking

For those who hate reading: A hack is pretty much a clever trick. A crack is something that does all that security breaking stuff.

Please look at the definition of hack and how it's different from cracking

For those who hate reading: A hack is pretty much a clever trick. A crack is something that does all that security breaking stuff.

More than likely, the truth. Lately Linux has been big on exposing, and then fixing, it's faults. You see, the problem with geeks is that when we fix a bug with an ugly hack, we forget about it. An honest assessment is often welcomed, and rapidly followed by a better fix.

For example, look at the ESR rant about cups. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html Part 2 goes on to say how cups developers contacted him as well. And have you seen cups lately? It got better. So, I think the article will point out some significant faults. And I bet you won't find many of them next year...

The real fun part will be looking at this article in a year and see how many Linux faults got fixed, and how many Mac faults are still there.

Is that you, Mel?

According to the lead researcher, 'YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination.

For the hard-of-thinking out there in SlashdotLand (you don't know who you are, and if you could figure out how to use a mirror, you'd still not recognise yourself by that description), that means : the parents and or guardians who are so gullible as to base child-care decisions on TV programme snippets on youTube (edited out of context by people whose sole knowledge of the topic in question is most likely to be the whole programme they've edited), are the caregivers who are most likely to kill their charges through their stupidity. This will have the beneficial (if unintentional) side effect of raising the average intelligence of the population, through culling the bottom end of the population. This is the same effect that makes the average rabbit somewhat faster at running than the average fox.

Some might contend that this is terribly unfair on those who are too poor to afford proper health advice. To such a charge, I respond "So what?"

I have yet to see league-high letters of fire in the dawn light spelling out "the world is a fair place", or any other evidence to support an assertion that the world is a fair, or even nice, place. There were no guarantees given on conception, and the systems that run the world (quantum chromodymamics, gravity) don't necessarily cause the development of fairness. Worse - I find it hard to believe that people can afford the computing power and bandwidth to view a YouTube video, but be unable to afford some sort of access to quality health advice or education. So there is a serious problem of prioritisation of expenditures there too.

[I'm assuming that TFA was written for an American audience who expect 40% of their population to have no healthcare provision, and who expect half of bankruptcies to involve medical bills. Again, this is tough - being born in the uncivilized world, or being born poor, has always been bad for your life expectancy. So being born poor, in America, to stupid parents who value entertainment more highly than the value investing in health information, is likely to be detrimental to your health. "Film" as the saying goes, "at eleven."

(BTW, I'm not saying that it's impossible for there to be significant problems with vaccinations, or other complex medical technologies ; but there are much better places to get information about these things. If you know enough about the internet to know of YouTube, then one would hope that you'd already committed "www.cdc.gov" to memory as a starting place for health-related enquiries. It took 14 characters typing and two clicks to get to some useful information.)

TFA reads like a press release for Kroll. The whole thing is (almost) written like a short superhero story, with several paragraphs about Kroll saving the day in a small variety of mishaps which are neither very original nor particularly amusing.

These aren't disasters; all of these folks got their data back.

If this is the going rate for disaster articles these days, I might as well tell you all about the hard drive I recently rescued out of a Dell laptop after the Geek Squad had given up on it (big surprise, that). The Toshiba drive had either very bad spindle bearings or a failed head stack (or both), as when I powered it up it vibrated like crazy and made a very rapid thumping noise, but none of this was a big surprise given that it was a little over four years old.

In experimenting with it, I found a few interesting features:

Plugging it into a Windows box to try running Acronis against it immediately bluescreened the host machine.

When powered up, if the drive was slowly rotated, the nature of the thump would change, and something inside would emanate a horrible metal-on-metal grinding sound for as long as I kept rotating it (apparently due to the gyroscopic effect of the spinning platters along with the failed bearings).

The drive was totally unusable in its normal (label-side up) orientation; Linux wouldn't even read the partition table in that state.

But if I carefully propped the drive up, in a very particular, almost-vertical position resting on its connector, it worked. Not only that, but dd was able to recover every single sector of the disk, without error. I then dd'd that back to a new disk, reinstalled Windows (the theory is that Best Buy's fine Geek Squad managed to fuck up XP somehow) on it, did some shuffling of partitions in Acronis, and gave the customer back a working computer complete with their family photos and music library.

Total recovery of user data, much rejoicing, !=disaster.

Or, there was the 200GB Seagate desktop drive that was under six feet of water for about 48 hours. It worked just bloody fine after letting it dry for a week, and then removing the cover to dry out the innards a bit more. Despite the visible traces of river silt still laying on the platters, Windows Explorer was more than capable of retrieving all of the requested data.

Total recovery of user data, much rejoicing, !=disaster.

On the other hand, another (different model) Seagate drive which was also in the same flood failed miserably. Swapping controller boards did not help. Kroll's pricing for recovery was deemed too expensive, and it was therefore a total loss.

It was the hard drive from one of my boss's machines. Years worth of quotations and customer data that were stored in Outlook which he had been accustomed to referring to, all gone. This, of course, ==disaster. (But it was a minor disaster compared to the rest of the flood, which destroyed his office building, trashed the basement at his house, and ate enough of my own house that it is now condemned.)

He is still insistent on maintaining his own PCs, and has subsequently been given the standard-issue lecture about backups, which he'd already heard in the past. We'll see if it soaked in, this time.

But I seem to be digressing a lot, here. The point is, in a world stuffed full of stupid and funny computer stories, TFA doesn't seem to include any. The absence of both well-written humor and real disasters factored with the total lack of technical details equates to this article being positively inane and simply as useless as common whitewash. (Another example of this same PR tactic, not surprisingly from Kroll'

It's easier to point out that you can't use these drives to share your movies and songs. People want network storage for the same thing they use YouTube for, movies of their kids and other fun for out of town friends and family. No avi == no sale.

More devices will be like this until they are legally mandated. This is the kind of network the MAFIAA wants to build. It looks a lot like the old network that served them well. You are only invited to purchase. Government will be happy that way too. YouTube is bad enough for them. If people could simply share through their own equipment, censorship would be impossible and the terroris^H^H public good would win. Watch out for the Next DMCA type act to outlaw general purpose computing access to networks. ESR predicted stuff like this three years ago:

Expect Microsoft to ally even more closely with the RIAA and MPAA in making yet another try at hardware-based DRM restrictions and legislation making them mandatory. The rationale will be to stop piracy and spam, but the real goal will be customer control and a lockout of all unauthorized software. Two previous attempts at this have failed, but the logic of Microsoft's situation is such that they must keep trying.

I also expect a serious effort, backed by several billion dollars in bribe money (oops, excuse me, campaign contributions), to get open-source software outlawed on some kind of theory that it aids terrorists.

ESR had some good ways to fight this loss of freedom, but the easiest is to let people know that restricted devices don't do what they want to them to do.

A: No.
Q: Should I include quotations after my reply?

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/top-post.html

A: No.
Q: Should I include quotations after my reply?

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/T/top-post.html

Pursuing self-interest at the absolute expense of all other considerations is pretty much the definition of evil.

Not if you happen to be a libertarian. Enlightened self interest is the ONLY pure motivation. Not that most corporations actually ACT in their enlightened self interest of course... :(

btw, The only reason I'm not a "Ronulan" is because he is an idiotarian libertarian. (See ESR's Anti-Idiotarian Manifesto for details.)

My post has a very specific history to it, which you can read all about here if you're interested. It's nowhere near as random as it looks.

It's a nice thought, but there are compelling reasons to think that we need to make it happen NOW. 2008 needs to be the Year of the Linux Desktop. I encourage you to read World Domination 201 by Eric S. Raymond and Rob Landley.

Maybe it had a more magic switch?

No discussion of switches can be complete without a mention of a genuinely magical switch connected to a PDP-10:

A Story About 'Magic', courtesy of the venerable and surprisingly non-ubiquitous Jargon File.

That's known as a .

My favorite kind of switch is the magic kind.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

Concur. Even beyond that, there's still plenty to respect about the software as well, that many folks don't bother thinking about.

True, Dr. Berstein can be a screaming asshole at times. However, if you RTFA, you'll see that even screaming assholes can learn from their mistakes, and Dr. Berstein has learned from some of his -- even to the point of acknowledging that he was saved from one of his mistakes only by a lack of bugs.

True, his software operates in a fundamentally different way than most daemons you're used to dealing with. That doesn't make it bad or evil or stupid, merely different. On the other hand, if you can't handle things that are different, you shouldn't try to simultaneously administer Samba and Apache, since they're different from one another as well.

False, his software isn't "undocumented." There are excellent resources available on the net (and at your local bookstore) for the software. The fact that Dr. Berstein didn't write them doesn't mean they're not useful. When in doubt, consult eg thedjbway or qmail.org or LWQ (Dave Sill's excellent howto, which is actively supported on the mailing list) or LWDJBDNS.

True, the people on the mailing lists can seem to be assholes. However, it has been my experience that if I scrupulously adhere to ESR's suggestions on How To Ask Smart Questions, I get much more helpful responses than when I do not. On the occasions when I've needed to go to the mailing list for help, when I failed to be clear and intelligent, I got useless garbage back. When I ask intelligent questions, I get back answers that either tell me what the mistake I made was, or (more often) point me in the right direction so I can solve the problem myself. Sometimes, just writing the question up will reveal the problem to me. If you don't like that, it's not a flaw in the software -- it's a flaw in your thinking.

There are lots of reasons I use djb software, but the most important is this: Once it's set up, I can forget it. In seven years of running qmail, I've once had to seriously jack with it after getting it going, and on that occasion I can't say definitively the flaw was in qmail (but I can say definitively that the trigger was me and my not paying attention to the box). I've never had to update for a security hole for either qmail or djbdns. It is one less thing to have to jack with, and I have plenty of other things that need my attention.

Concur. Even beyond that, there's still plenty to respect about the software as well, that many folks don't bother thinking about.

True, Dr. Berstein can be a screaming asshole at times. However, if you RTFA, you'll see that even screaming assholes can learn from their mistakes, and Dr. Berstein has learned from some of his -- even to the point of acknowledging that he was saved from one of his mistakes only by a lack of bugs.

True, his software operates in a fundamentally different way than most daemons you're used to dealing with. That doesn't make it bad or evil or stupid, merely different. On the other hand, if you can't handle things that are different, you shouldn't try to simultaneously administer Samba and Apache, since they're different from one another as well.

False, his software isn't "undocumented." There are excellent resources available on the net (and at your local bookstore) for the software. The fact that Dr. Berstein didn't write them doesn't mean they're not useful. When in doubt, consult eg thedjbway or qmail.org or LWQ (Dave Sill's excellent howto, which is actively supported on the mailing list) or LWDJBDNS.

True, the people on the mailing lists can seem to be assholes. However, it has been my experience that if I scrupulously adhere to ESR's suggestions on How To Ask Smart Questions, I get much more helpful responses than when I do not. On the occasions when I've needed to go to the mailing list for help, when I failed to be clear and intelligent, I got useless garbage back. When I ask intelligent questions, I get back answers that either tell me what the mistake I made was, or (more often) point me in the right direction so I can solve the problem myself. Sometimes, just writing the question up will reveal the problem to me. If you don't like that, it's not a flaw in the software -- it's a flaw in your thinking.

There are lots of reasons I use djb software, but the most important is this: Once it's set up, I can forget it. In seven years of running qmail, I've once had to seriously jack with it after getting it going, and on that occasion I can't say definitively the flaw was in qmail (but I can say definitively that the trigger was me and my not paying attention to the box). I've never had to update for a security hole for either qmail or djbdns. It is one less thing to have to jack with, and I have plenty of other things that need my attention.

Say what you will about Eric S. Raymond. His writings in the cathedral and the bazaar have some strength to it, if you are to believe neo-OSS acolyte Jonathan Schwartz of Sun who often refers to this segment when defending their share price.

It is applicable it the case of RedHat vs. CentOS as well.

Well, I'm a physics student, and so use SI units all the time, but I have no problem remembering the difference between SI and computer units and I use Imperial units for some things as well (and on rare occasions the Fortnight/Furlong/Firkin system or the attoparsec), all depending on the suitable unit for the job. (Of course, I only use the latter two on rare occasions.)

Well, I'm a physics student, and so use SI units all the time, but I have no problem remembering the difference between SI and computer units and I use Imperial units for some things as well (and on rare occasions the Fortnight/Furlong/Firkin system or the attoparsec), all depending on the suitable unit for the job. (Of course, I only use the latter two on rare occasions.)

I believe the term they're thinking of is working as designed.

Of course, later there was a real Kremvax: see http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/K/kremvax.html for the story.

Having a reputation for not tolerating fools lightly also curbs the stupid and uninformed from wasting his time and the time of his collaborators. I suppose that's still motivated by insecurity, in that he needs OpenBSD to work well in order for it to pay, although it wouldn't be to prove his superiority.

It's not as if he has Don Knuth's option of simply doing away with email in order to get his work done, he needs to stay up to date. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

The guy he was replying to could have just asked "Theo, I've scoured the mailing list for your opinion on the security of virtualization, I couldn't find any, I've seen a lot of claims by virtualization vendors for increased security benefits on the basis of x, what's your opinion?"

Maybe he should have read "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way". If he had, he probably wouldn't have spouted a bunch of marketing blurb to Theo and suggest that he implement a feature based on that marketing blurb.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html

I'm running Mandriva 2008 Linux on a Dell box that came preloaded with Ubuntu. I run Windows XP under VirtualBox for a few highly specialized programs where there are not Linux equivalents. This works well for me. I have invested time learning how my system works 'under the hood.' I think this has been time well spent. The biggest challenge I faced was figuring out how to apply Dell BIOS updates. Solved it - but the details are beyond the scope of this post. The most important factor for success was a desire to learn, accompanied by a willingness to try things and to ask proper questions. This page by Eric Raymond was helpful...

The Jargon File.

"I really don't see why anyone would mention Stallman, Torvalds and whatshisface... Raymond in one sentence. Seriously, ESR is a nobody and a nutcase. Actually, if anyone actually deserved to be attacked by ninjas (AND pirates AND monkeys) it's him."

"I really don't see why anyone would mention Stallman, Torvalds and whatshisface... Raymond in one sentence. Seriously, ESR is a nobody and a nutcase. Actually, if anyone actually deserved to be attacked by ninjas (AND pirates AND monkeys) it's him."

"I really don't see why anyone would mention Stallman, Torvalds and whatshisface... Raymond in one sentence. Seriously, ESR is a nobody and a nutcase. Actually, if anyone actually deserved to be attacked by ninjas (AND pirates AND monkeys) it's him."

'A raid on ESR is likely to have look like a gameplay video from "Soldier of Fortune 2" (with the Ninjas being used for target practice).'

Nah, Ninjas have Real Ultimate Power and would cut his head off long before he could even reach for the .357 magnum under his pillow. His only effective defence would be start reading from this:

http://catb.org/~esr/writings/sextips/bedplay.html

and watch them run away with their hands over their ears, silently screaming.

Yeah, I'm thinking ESR isn't a good one to pull that on: http://www.catb.org/~esr/guns/

Oh, there's no need to worry. ESR and his friends are always ready for a ninja attack.

And a big gun nut: http://www.catb.org/~esr/geeks-with-guns/

I learned html years ago from viewing the source on ESR's homepage.* The way he has it set up made the entire process seem obvious to me. I have no skills in programming real languages, but I imagine his more substantive code is equally good.

*ESR's site is not the best place to learn graphic design from, however.