Slashdot Mirror

I linked this elsewhere, but again to make sure it gets seen: yes, purge your account of all data, but don't delete it because Yahoo reserves the right to give your old address so someone else.

Yahoo re-issues email addresses after they've been deleted. Are you absolutely 100% certain you haven't used that account as the password reset address for anything else? If so, go ahead (so long as you don't mind someone else having your username). If there's any chance at all that your old Yahoo address's new owner could reset your Facebook password, for instance, then purge your Yahoo account instead.

Yes, everything to do with Yahoo is a travesty. Why do you ask?

At the time I needed a bootable USB image (so I could use it to flash a BIOS), there wasn't one. I ended up writing up how I made one and Jim posted the end result at http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/unofficial/virtualbox/ for others to download. If you want to try FreeDOS without going through the installation process yourself - or if you don't have the facilities to do so because the $#@()! server is down and your boss is freaking out and screaming and you're out of time - then enjoy!

Anybody who flashes BIOS ought to be excited.

Along those lines, as of two months ago there was no downloadable ready-to-use USB image ready for dd'ing to your handy flash drive. I wrote up the steps I took to make one on OS X using VirtualBox. I've spoken to James Hall about making the resulting image file available for download directly from freedos.org, but it looks like he hasn't taken me up on it yet.

Do people really have personalized home pages now that Facebook came about (other than some hobbyists or professionals who run a side business)?

I have a blog (tech notes: static pages compiled with Blogofile and my own photo album plugin). If I get bored with Facebook, I can disconnect without losing any of my posts or photos - or the links to them. If I want faster web hosting than my home DSL provides, I can upload the files to a dirt cheap static host. I have virtually unlimited space with no content restrictions, upload limits, or annual fees over what I'm already paying for Internet access. I definitely fall into your hobbyist/professional category but it's more that I want more control over my web presence than any social network would give me.

I got a series of robocalls from someone claiming to be Rachel with "Card Services" wanting to help lower my credit card interest rate. I blogged about it, and 280,000 hits and 972 comments to that page later, I guess I wasn't the only one they were pestering. I removed exactly two comments from that post ever:

The first was when a poster alleged that a certain person was responsible for all the calls. I got a letter from that person's lawyer telling me to take down the site because it contained libelous statements, and attached a 20-page printout of all the comments that were attached to that post at that time. I said, "no. Tell me specifically which comments you're referring to and I'll evaluate them. Also tell your client to quit calling me." The end result is that they asked me to remove one comment with the guy's home information, and I thought that was pretty reasonable so I complied. I also got the lawyer to formally state on record that their client was not a telemarketer. I figured that if they'd pursued further legal action and it turned out that the client really was a telemarketer, it'd be handy to show a judge that they'd previously asked their lawyers to lie in writing.

The second comment was full of racial slurs. I'm a huge proponent of freedom of speech and had a hard time deciding how to handle it, but in the end decided that the poster could find their own soapbox to broadcast racism and that I wanted no part in it.

I run my own mailserver and my email address is splattered all over the place. I got a spam yesterday. Gmail does an excellent job of spam filtering, but you can do a pretty great job with your own server.

There is an old rule in business that one happy customer tells 10 people, one unhappy customer tells 100 people. With the Internet, they probably now tell 1000 or more people.

I've told 55,956 people so far. Don't underestimate the affect of high search rankings (even when it happens on accident).

It was a peculiar form of narcissism that ever led people to think anyone gave a crap about their day-to-day lives in the first place.

My blog ended up being one thing: a place for me to vent about things that annoyed me. I don't care if anyone reads my stuff; I just had to get it out of my system.

As it turns out, though, apparently a lot of people are annoyed by the same things: from Ecco shoes (6,800 hits) that fall apart (3,200 hits) to credit card interest rate scams (26,600 hits), I've been surprised to find out I'm not alone. Before blogging, I'd never have been heard by that many people, and even if I had, it would've been mostly a one-way communication. Think of it as the op-ed page in the newspaper writ large and cheap and Open Sourced.

It was a peculiar form of narcissism that ever led people to think anyone gave a crap about their day-to-day lives in the first place.

My blog ended up being one thing: a place for me to vent about things that annoyed me. I don't care if anyone reads my stuff; I just had to get it out of my system.

As it turns out, though, apparently a lot of people are annoyed by the same things: from Ecco shoes (6,800 hits) that fall apart (3,200 hits) to credit card interest rate scams (26,600 hits), I've been surprised to find out I'm not alone. Before blogging, I'd never have been heard by that many people, and even if I had, it would've been mostly a one-way communication. Think of it as the op-ed page in the newspaper writ large and cheap and Open Sourced.

It was a peculiar form of narcissism that ever led people to think anyone gave a crap about their day-to-day lives in the first place.

My blog ended up being one thing: a place for me to vent about things that annoyed me. I don't care if anyone reads my stuff; I just had to get it out of my system.

As it turns out, though, apparently a lot of people are annoyed by the same things: from Ecco shoes (6,800 hits) that fall apart (3,200 hits) to credit card interest rate scams (26,600 hits), I've been surprised to find out I'm not alone. Before blogging, I'd never have been heard by that many people, and even if I had, it would've been mostly a one-way communication. Think of it as the op-ed page in the newspaper writ large and cheap and Open Sourced.

It was a peculiar form of narcissism that ever led people to think anyone gave a crap about their day-to-day lives in the first place.

My blog ended up being one thing: a place for me to vent about things that annoyed me. I don't care if anyone reads my stuff; I just had to get it out of my system.

As it turns out, though, apparently a lot of people are annoyed by the same things: from Ecco shoes (6,800 hits) that fall apart (3,200 hits) to credit card interest rate scams (26,600 hits), I've been surprised to find out I'm not alone. Before blogging, I'd never have been heard by that many people, and even if I had, it would've been mostly a one-way communication. Think of it as the op-ed page in the newspaper writ large and cheap and Open Sourced.

Don't be so mean: SCO has an iPhone App!

I'm kind of proud that my warning against it is (at this moment) the #6 Google result for "FCmobilelife".

Hey my old 73 mustang a 351 cleveland and NOS was pretty damn fast.

I kinda like 'em, too, but it's not going to outrun a Veyron.

By driving the cost of software to zero, OSS developers have made it difficult for many people to act creatively due to the high cost of development.

"By driving the cost of $good to $smallnum, $industry have made it difficult for ..."

Oh, I give up. That's just a dumb argument, regardless of what industry you apply it to. This is a basic fact of humanity: whenever you can make a product more cheaply that other people can, you trade it for other products that you can't make as efficiently as someone else. If someone cheaper than you comes along, they get your customers until you can lower your prices. This always happens, everywhere. It's inescapable. Whether you're trading energy for computing, or rice for a haircut, there is always market pressure for things to get cheaper.

The fact that this has happened is an indicator that the economy is working. Furthermore, this is a good thing for the 99.9% of companies that develop custom software for internal use. We needed a better way to convert FoxPro tables to PostgreSQL than we could find, so I wrote one. My boss has zero interest in selling this software because that's not what we do and we're not set up to deal with support, license management, etc. By giving my work away, sure, we've undercut people who would try to sell the commercial equivalent. Can you make a legitimate argument that this is bad?

As memtest is GPL, you should be able to ask that guy for the source if you want it. I suspect he hasn't changed it significantly and is just charging for hosting, so he'd point you back to the developers' site.

That is a violation of the GPL. If you distribute GPL software that you didn't write, then you are legally obligated to provide the source.

But perhaps you can't be bothered, and would rather call people jerks who have the temerity to charge for their time/hosting costs and rail about how all software should be free.

I am utterly OK with charging for FOSS; RedHat is a great example of a good corporate citizen. However, note that RedHat gives full credit for the software they sell you and makes the source easily available without you having to ask for it.

Have you ever distributed any free software yourself?

Yeah.

I'm sure the record industry is losing sleep over the pretentious audiophile demographic ...

Like me, I guess. I was listening to the newest Dropkick Murphys CD in my car - an Oldsmobile with the factory-upgraded stereo - and it sucked. What's the point of listening to Irish punk loudly when you can only barely tell what the drummer's playing?

My ears are probably shot from a misspent youth and lots of concerts, but even I can tell when an album is horribly, almost criminally ill-mastered. It's not just the audiophiles with their $40,000 oxygen-free gold systems who are affected by this stuff.

So if you want to say some shop is dirty, bad, etc - then you better offer up some proof.

Yep. When you say you found dog poop in the halls of the Ramada Inn in Kearney, Nebraska, it's nice to have pictures to prove it. There's not a lot they can do about that.

I maintained a branch off a "dead" FOSS project for quite a while. There hasn't been a new release in over four years, but I was able to keep developing my version. You don't get those kinds of options with proprietary offerings.

Hi, Andrew! I know you're new to this and don't really understand these complicated ideas very well, but I'll try to help you.

My company has a program written in FoxPro. For reasons too long to explain, it's not going away any time soon. We needed a way to run queries against that data, and because FoxPro is too slow for interactive use, we decided to move that data into PostgreSQL. We looked and looked but there just wasn't a good program for regularly copying that data from one to the other on a scheduled basis. Eventually, I wrote one.

Now, my company isn't in the FoxPro-to-PostgreSQL conversion business. We have other, more interesting things to do all day than sell or support software. My boss, being enlightened, allowed me to release the program as Free Software so that other people could use it. It cost him absolutely nothing over what he'd already paid me to write the program. Since that first release, I've heard from users around the world who liked it and wanted new features or to make suggestions. Some of those features and suggestions turned out to be pretty good ideas for us, too, so I added them to the program.

My boss is happy because we really needed that program to conduct our business. I'm happy because I got to share a nice bit of code with the world. Random users everywhere are happy because they can spend their money on writing other cool programs and food and televisions instead of buying my program's commercial equivalent (if there was one). My boss got something nice, I got money to pay my mortgage, and everybody wins.

See, Andrew? It's not that hard! But please leave the big concepts to the adults until you get a little more practice, OK? Good boy.

That's the Green Party. No, I'm not joking.

The purpose of webapps is to provide the functionality of a native app without the need to install it on the client.

How is this different from console apps or Citrix-published apps or even mailing list software? What is new an special about the web that justifies this radical change in the scope of the GPL?

To clarify, I'm a huge fan of RMS and the FSF. I've even given memberships as birthday presents. I've released my most recent software under the GPLv3 because I think it's a fine license. I just think the FSF is totally off base this time.

To scratch an itch. My company needed a fast way to convert FoxPro files to PostgreSQL, so I wrote one. Now, we're not in the database format conversion business, so this isn't something our competitors would be waiting to pounce on. Why on Earth would we want to keep it locked up? I've already gotten bug reports and feature requests that made it work better for us, so we actually came out ahead by giving it away.

Honestly, especially for projects outside a company's direct business plan, I can't think of a single reason not to subsidize FOSS. You needed it and were going to write it anyway, right?

Exactly. I contribute patches to a couple of Open Source projects. My primary employer uses those packages but they don't relate to our line of business - they are general purpose. Improvements in those packages just allow us to build on more functionality that does relate the primary line of business. Hiding them doesn't have value, it is even bad. A project with new and better features will attract more users who will potentially contribute to the project.... and we'll probably consome those features.

Why would a business pay for software that benefits everybody else? Why not just wait for someone else to do it?

To scratch an itch. My company needed a fast way to convert FoxPro files to PostgreSQL, so I wrote one. Now, we're not in the database format conversion business, so this isn't something our competitors would be waiting to pounce on. Why on Earth would we want to keep it locked up? I've already gotten bug reports and feature requests that made it work better for us, so we actually came out ahead by giving it away.

Honestly, especially for projects outside a company's direct business plan, I can't think of a single reason not to subsidize FOSS. You needed it and were going to write it anyway, right?

I'm sure if you wrote code that walked through the steps in what you are trying to achieve, all the following would be quicker

While I agree in general principle, there are very real reasons why one-liners may be (possibly much) faster. For instance, suppose you want to execute an idempotent function, foo(), on every value in a list. The order of execution isn't important. Real world example: image manipulation where each pixel can be processed independently.

Writing it out longhand would give you something like:

for item in values: foo(item)

That's certainly clear enough! But suppose instead you do something like:

map(foo, values)

A naive implementation of map() will work similarly to the longhand version. A parallelized version of map(), though, could potentially process many values simultaneously, possibly even via a cluster of remote machines.

Another example: SQL. You don't say "loop across every row in table 'foo' and try to find a corresponding row in table 'bar'. Then, loop across that relation and give me the first and third values from 'foo' and the fourth value from 'bar'." Instead, you say "select foo.a, foo.c, bar.d from foo, bar where foo.id = bar.id". The database engine knows the best way to generate that set of tuples, so you ask it to do so and don't usually care what happens behind the scenes.

What I'm saying in a roundabout way is that sometimes there are huge wins from letting the language do as much of your work as possible. This isn't "cleverness" or "premature optimization" as much as asking the machine to do its job in the most efficient manner.

But "reality television" as it is defined today is NOT something I think any intelligent person should see as "entertainment". And I am highly suspect of anyone who claims otherwise. If anything, they are likely to be faux intellectuals who would rather put on a show of intelligence than actually make an effort to *be* intelligent.

It isn't enough that I've been working through the math textbooks my old college professor recommended to me just for the fun of it, or that I've released Free Software database conversion utilities based off a side project at work? You know, sometimes I just want to kick back and do something mindless - even stupid - to give my poor noggin a break. It could be that you're exactly wrong: some of us would rather do intelligent things than make an effort to convince others of our intelligence.

I see one big difference: the GPL is a distribution license, but the AGPL is a EULA.

No, AGPL is still purely a grant of rights that are normally reserved to the copyright holder.

The best I can say for it is that it may not be enforceable.

Very funny. Even if you somehow could get a judge to agree with that, you still haven't managed to keep your modifications to yourself.

If you really wanted to keep the source away from the users, I'd think you'd want to look into mechanisms that don't rely on making changes to the software. Something like putting it behind an apache instance with mod_rewrite to redirect the download URL to an error page, or an intelligent firewall that drops the connection when it sees the "fetch source" command, or something similar so that all of your copyright-license-required modifications very clearly follow the license.

I see one big difference: the GPL is a distribution license, but the AGPL is a EULA. The best I can say for it is that it may not be enforceable.

The AGPL is easily ignored, and frankly, its FSF-sanctioned existence pisses me off. It's one thing - a good thing! - to place Freedom-preserving restrictions on distribution. It's another thing altogether to put Freedom-removing restrictions on usage. For some reason, the FSF has endorsed the idea that hosting an application via the web is distribution, even if hosting that same application via a console session is merely usage.

Actually, I'm pretty sure the reason is that GPLed software is well entrenched, and the FSF feels they have the leverage to begin forcing users to share changes even if they're not distributing them. Want to use Free software? Here are the new rules!

That sucks. I'm a huge RMS fanboy, but I think the AGPL and the principles behind it are fundamentally broken and should be abandoned.

I am sorry fan boy, you are paying for exactly 3 things. 1) Brand 2) Style 3)Status which can really all just be called the same thing. You also get the OS that isn't Windows. Thats it.

I am sorry, you are ass-uming much about me. I'm typing this on a Model M keyboard attached to a Dell running Kubuntu. I don't mind getting my hands dirty, and I've never in my life paid for a hardware upgrade that could be done with available parts.

The fact that Apple realized that people are willing to pay extra to have this done for them means that they are better at business than you are.

We're not using it directly for the front end, at least not yet, even though we have some PyQT and PyWX code in production. We've been migrating our data to PostgreSQL, and doing more and more of our reporting-type work in Zope and now Django.

If I had my way, we'd use a web front end for almost everything where practical, and then our employee workstations could be anything that can run a browser. Want to check on something via your iPhone? Not a problem! In the mean time, we're settling for migrating more and more of our business logic to Python with the intention of gluing a new interface onto it at a later date.

Email me if you have questions. So far we're making great progress!

OK, geekoid, this is a personal message.

I believe in Global Warming, and I think I've made that pretty clear. I didn't so much as hint otherwise. I was replying only to the people who don't believe that Global Cooling was ever presented as fact, as if they admit that it was and then was later dispelled, then Global Warming must also be untrue. Well, you and I both know that's not the case.

So why the personal attack? We're not even in disagreement here, and I certainly didn't do anything to call for that. You usually have interesting things to say, and it's beneath you to act this way.

Reposted from my blog:

There are few joys in life like using something that is the perfect expression of its intent. Each trade has its representative tools, and their common trait is quality, even if it's not obvious to the casual observer, and often counterintuitive. The best tools in a category are almost always the least flashy, and rarely the ones a new practitioner would choose.

The Model M keyboard is like that: it's loud, ugly, heavy, and utterly lacking modern niceties like buttons to change your sound volume or check your email. And yet, it has that transcendent feeling that's hard to explain, that sense of rightness where you realize that you're using the best that's ever been made, that every change since then has been superfluous and cosmetic. With time, the loud clacking becomes the background music of your work, the harmony that tells you that your thoughts have become words. Its beige boxiness yields to elegant simplicity and the realization that true beauty is born of function, not appearance. The sheer weight of the thing turns to solidity and the confidence that it will stay where you put it. The dearth of features becomes the singleminded dedication to the parts that really matter and a proud disregard of unneeded distractions.

A tool attains its peak when a craftsman forgets that he's using it because it has become an extension of himself. Thus the humble Model M has become the iconic favorite of hackers everywhere, an ode to the engineers who grasped for excellence and acheived it.

I'm guessing that the Green Party is for all technology that's designed by minorities for the explicit purpose of saving endangered species, but against almost anything else. By the way, that's the same party who split one vote among two candidates in a recent county race.

I've voting Libertarian this year. McCain will almost certainly win my state anyway, so I'm trying to give a third party a good showing.

I'd been getting calls from "Card Services", representing themselves as being with my credit card company, once a day or so for a while. I whipped out a short blog entry one day just to vent, and somehow ended up with several thousands hits per month on it. Apparently I wasn't the only one they were driving crazy. It's good to see that these cretins are finally being reined in.

Thanks, and yes, that's pretty much what my company's like. My boss likes to be included in such decisions because it's ultimately his responsibility if we really screw up, but I've never once been overruled when I had solid reasons for my choice. In general, he just likes the nice toys we give him (internal Jabber server, spam-free email, PostgreSQL, etc.) and trusts us when we want to use something cool.

Fortunately for developers, the AGPL is easy enough to ignore.

My most recent stuff is at http://honeypot.net/project.

Everyone knows EULAs are a joke, and this certainly isn't the only one that's impossible to comply with. Are they legally binding anywhere?

At the highest levels, you're mostly right. At lower levels, you're definitely wrong. When an artist is applying filters in Photoshop, although they're only doing so one at a time, each filter's low-level code should be as parallelized as possible for best performance. When you open a web page, you don't want the browser to completely load one image, then completely load the next, then the next; you want quite a few coming in at the same time. Basically, each task people want done on a computer decompose to a huge number of mostly parallelizable subtasks.

I wrote a little replacement for Python's map() function one afternoon to play around with. Now, even though my implementation is unexciting, why wouldn't you want average boring code to be automatically spread across multiple processors if you can do so for free? Google did the same thing but on an entirely different level. Apparently they see quite a lot of value in the idea.

I guess what I'm saying is that even boring things like spreadsheets can be (and should be) optimized quite a lot so that ordinary people can get stuff done quicker. There are methods available to the average programmer that go a long way toward addressing these needs, and we really must start using them.

We run an hour job to copy legacy FoxPro data to PostgreSQL. It's squirreled away in its own schema, and should that schema get totally destroyed, it only takes about 20 minutes to do a full rebuild.

I would happily trade integrity for speed on that schema, and anything that gives me that option is welcome.

I'm sorry, but that's just stupid. What's magic about public schools that makes them automatically worthy of support, no matter how awful they might be? If a community has to educate 10,000 kids, and a school voucher says they will pay say $5,000 per kid, then it's going to cost $50,000,000 no matter what buildings the kids go to. I just don't get why people are perfectly happy blowing that money on crappy schools when they could spend the same amount on good ones. Note that there are many, many wonderful public schools. Those would be barely affected by vouchers. Only the lousy dropout mills are likely to be seriously harmed, and I see that as a good thing.

People would never put up with this forced allocation in other parts of their lives, but throw "think of the schools!" into the mix and everyone loses their mind.

That must be it.

Actually, my company picked Python because I kept insisting that it was better suited for us than FoxPro or VB.NET.

I learned enough Lisp to write my son's birth announcement in it a few months ago. Previous announcements were in Python, Perl, and C - pretty much following my career path. We're not having another kid, but if we did I promise you the announcement wouldn't be called "baby.4th". Dang, actually that might've been cool for the fourth kid. Rats.

Quite correct. Fortunately, it's almost trivially easy to beat the AGPL.

So, what's this all about? The SCOX page in Yahoo! Finance is the only Google result for that phrase. Is this a prankster at Yahoo!, or something more entertaining?

I also saw poorly made jeans at ShopKo, and one time I bought shampoo from Wegmans that smelled just like a famous name brand but wasn't. So what? It's not like either of those chains made those goods.

What did Wal-Mart have to do with the story other than carrying that product among tens of thousands of others? Would we be reading "Costco's Terrible Wii Knock-Offs" if the author had shopped somewhere else that day? There are lots of reasons why people don't like shopping at Wal-Mart, but this is a pretty dumb one.

I also saw poorly made jeans at ShopKo, and one time I bought shampoo from Wegmans that smelled just like a famous name brand but wasn't. So what? It's not like either of those chains made those goods.

What did Wal-Mart have to do with the story other than carrying that product among tens of thousands of others? Would we be reading "Costco's Terrible Wii Knock-Offs" if the author had shopped somewhere else that day? There are lots of reasons why people don't like shopping at Wal-Mart, but this is a pretty dumb one.

Do I want that as an option? Oh, yeah. Consider a multi-processing map() replacement that I'd been playing around with. The fork()ing version is much more complicated than a threaded version would need to be because you have to serialize return values, and is less capable because it's unable to return any values that aren't serializable (such as sockets or file handles).

Yes, all that complexity can be a nightmare, but sometimes that nightmare is actually preferable to the alternatives. As it stands today that's not a choice that I get to make.

An article on functional programming is the perfect time to introduce my new son, Nick, to Slashdot. Previous releases were in C, Perl, and Python. Since Nick's functional, this one is in Lisp.

Mod me up or my son will spit up on you.