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All malice can be explained by stupidity. Why not just say, "never ascribe to malice"?

Because that's not how the saying goes. Hanlon's Razor says "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

boxen

So it's not totally applicable to Windows machines in its original connotation/denotation. So sue me.

Obviously you weren't willing to back up your obviously superior intelligence by posting non-anonymously.

I'm not saying that is the case personally, I'm referring to users in general. Who mostly care about "the internet," word, email, and whether or not they can play a few games. For these folks, apparently one or more of the three things I listed applies.

I'd like to see you admin a server that doesn't run a GUI on a local monitor while providing everything that your users want without cracked due to incompetence. GUIs are crap for remote admin. Much faster to get work done on the command line than use VNC to click around with a bunch of GUI based tools.

Never ascribe to maliciousness that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

Hanlon's Razor actually goes like this: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Read more here. Strange, I always thought this was a quote of Oscar Wilde.

It could be that way. But if you'll allow me to play Devil's Advocate/Anti-virus Advocate (they're so similar) for a moment; it's possible that they happended to notice the modified version out there on the 'net first, then checked their most recent virus defs and determined that their software was able to detect both versions. At this part, the infomration was gleefully experssed to the marketing dept. and the "news brief" was made. Or perhaps it's all just a SNAFU. Does anybody have a copy of this AV software and the new virus version so we can verify the company's claim?

On a related subject, let me take this opportunity to mention that Vmyths exists and it's cool.

Wow. Bringing in the Nazis on the first sentence of your response. That's probably a new record. Anyway, according to Godwin's Law, you lose.

At the risk of provoking the invocation of Godwin what you have just described is a recipie for holocaust*.

I don't know what your political leanings are, but that is something that I would personally like to avoid.

-Peter

*Historical note. IMO the first "event" of the rise of the Third Reich was not the burning of the Reichstag, but the registration of firearms by the Kaiser.

... for ghod's sake get it right!

""Sure, 90% of science fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud."

I always find it ironic when people post on Slashdot that they never read weblogs. Slashdot is a weblog! Weblogs can be collective, personal and filled with bad poetry, or just recent news stories. They can have original writing or boobies. Weblogs are lots of things, and Sturgeon's Law applies.

...Look back at the inventors of the really useful devices (like the steam engine, the airplane, electricity, lightbulb, etc.), and see how many of these were invented in the "won't it be cool to do this!" spirit, and how many were in the "if I invent this, it will change the future!" spirit.

With the exception of electricity, all of the inventions you mention were created to make money, not to change the future. (Electricity, was invented to be a part of physics and it's inventor had no need of money.) The only invention that I can think of that was specifically created to change the future was the atomic bomb and we all know how well that turned out.

When I was a kid we had a reprint of a 1903 Sears catalog. The most interesting thing about it was the vast number of gadgets that had nothing to do with feeding people or changing lives.

Sturgeon's Law has been true since the dawn of time. Why should now be any different?

SCO seems to continue the tried and true tradition. See the relevant Jargon File entry.

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Teledildonics.

Forty percent? That's nothing. Sturgeon's Law states that ninety percent of everything is crap.

Urban Exploration, sometimes known on college campuses as vadding, is the activity of exploring major manmade engineering works, urban and industrial ruins, and other large-scale structures that are accessible. Sometimes this is done without permission per se and other times it's done in blatent violation of trespassing signs, but it should always be done without vandalism or theft.

Two great starting points are the Infiltration webring and Panic!'s Urban Adventure site.

Only tool? There was a time when assembly was not avaiable. I know more than on person who has manually entered the boot code into the front panel of a computer. Several of them modified that code in some way.

No abstractions? Assembly is an abstracction for the BINARY that the computer runs. I have worked with comptuers for which my assembler was buggy (There were better ones, but I couldn't afford them), so I brought out my reference manual and programed directly in binary. It was painfully beat into me at that time that a simple JMP is an abstraction for as many have 7 different binary codes, depending on exactly what is going on. You don't know if you end up with a long or short JMP in most cases. (You know about register or memory stored locations)

Speaking of memory, you don't know where each byte is in your program in assembly. You don't to a JMP to location 0xdeadbeef you do a JMP to a label which just happenes to map to that location, but the assembler figgures out that details.

At this point a link to The Story of Mel is in order.

Not only is it only about upgrading old Mac motherboards, but even the linked page says it's about building your own G4 from scratch. The only part of this that's not a simple "upgrade your old Mac to run OS X" is that it mentions using regular ATX cases. I can't see why you would want to do that unless you were doing a cool case mod.

Pardon me for yawning, but been there done that about to replace a Linux box with one. And the only reason I did it is I already had an old Power Computing Mac that was already sufficiently upgraded. I'm now debating whether it's worth upgrading my $60 thrift store Power Wave.

• That the engineers (not managers), back in the pre-dotcom days used to lounge about in hot tubs
• That the programmers used to film mock TV ads lampooning their own products
• That they inspired such love, hate and pity
• Several Jargon File entries (edited out from more recent versions of the file. ???)

Correction. That should be Sturgeon's Law, "Ninety percent of everything is crap".

I'd really like to know why private business has so much sway over government in these sorts of things.

I invoke Godwin's Law. YHL. HAND!

Since Scheme is so simple, this is surprisingly easy to do, and it's a great learning tool. It helps students understand what's really going on when they run their program.

See Abelson and Sussman's classic computer science text, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (aka The Wizard Book), for details. This book is also an excellent introduction to the basic concepts of computer science.

*Real* programmers don't use \n.

I agree with this post.

Whilst there is probably no totally unbiased media, at least if one of the major outlets (eg the BBC) did start publishing things which were clearly untrue, another organisation would pick up on it and criticise. (This is, of course, until Rupert Murdoch owns 90% of the media outlets.) On the Internet, anyone can publish anything and have it look professional and authorotative (apart from me - my HTML sucks). It is possible to troll bigtime (whoever modded the FP as troll needs to read the definition).

For all I know, the 4,000 jews who were warned not to work in the WTC on 9/11 may be true. If it isn't true, it's a fantastic troll.

To summarise, it's possible for all sorts of people to appear to be an authority for very little money. Tradiotional media does not allow this. I'm sure that there are some poor deluded saps out there who believe that Landover Baptist are a real Christian organisation, that Stephen King was really found dead aged 54, that this is an informative link.

On a puerile level, this is why trolling is fun. On a more serious level, who can you believe?

The figures you are looking for can be found here.

Hey... that's how these things start. I just hope they formalize it rather than stripping it away the way they did with terms for quarks.

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Evan

Use Kerberos for authentication. There are PAM modules out there, and it is also supported in Windows 2000 (sort of).

You also need to distribute a passwd file. We store ours in AFS and distribute it using scripts run by cron. Since doesn't contain any password, users do not really need to touch it, but we generate the global passwd file from data in a database anyway. You might want to put stuff like e-mail forwarding information in that database as well, propagate it to the mail server using some simple scripts, and let your users access the database somehow. (Perhaps through a Kerberos authenticating gateway.)

KISS

It is not inconceivable that in decade or two we will be able to provide a program with a design document written in prose and have it generate the program.

We're damn close. Programs can already be written as specifications of their output in functional languages that approximate algebraic notation. In fact, a particular programmer's boss once confused a program written in the Haskell language with a design document, asking "Where's the implementation?"

"Umm..." (runs a Haskell compiler) (runs the binary it produces) (correct answer appears)

"I've heard of programming computers in English on Pick OS, but this is something else."

alright adolf, I'll bite. first off the point if the internet is interconnectivity, borderless ungoverned freedom, and no ghestapo Government breathing down your back. The government shouldn't even be involved in the internet as far as I'm concerned. Nationality has little bearing on it. the usage of .com is for 'commercial' sites only, see how the US gov slipped into making it more of a 'default' domain, leaving even the .net and .org TLD's as second rate. Perhaps the solution is to make a new TLD governed by an administration that's more responcible about freedom, justice and liberty (wait, wasn't that supposed to be those things americas were so proud of?)

I invoke Godwin's Law. You lose.

Huh? What exactly is +1 about nyet's post? I could let "Funny" slide, maybe the moderator has a juvenile sense of humor, but "Insightful"???

• no one gets hurt if it crashes.
• oh wait. It doesn't crash.
• dead silent so it doesn't wake the neighbors.

Computers and aircraft are comparable in that they are both industrial products made of metal and plastic. That's about it.

The Jargon file entry for the word "Boxen".


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Typically I refrain from discussing politics in Taverns, it interfers with beer drinking. I usually discourage it by repeatedly changing the subject (What about them Yanks? I still say they suck.) Political discourse, as I've seen it on the internet (before there as a "The Web") rarely stayed on topic and usually drove people from discussion, requiring the invocation of Godwin's Law at some point.

IMHO the true value of the Internet and Web is for research. I can access candidates pages, League of Women voters on proposals, and visit sites (like Vote Smart) which reveal the true voting records of incumbants.


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As a fellow of conscience, though, I must attempt to dissuade you from this path. SCO may be cheap, but Linux and BSD are free and come with tons of apps (in the distros and ports, respectively). By contrast, if you want emacs (or gcc, or anything) on SCO, you're either buying a CD of precompiled GNU stuff from SCO or you're compiling it yourself. If you need a Linux/BSD CD, you can get one for under $5 from cheapbytes.com or myriad other vendors. If you absolutely must learn the quirks of a proprietary OS, do yourself a favor and pick up Solaris for Intel, which is also available for about $20 (to students, developers, and home users), without the SCO enfeeblements. Furthermore, Sun is liable to remain financially solvent for the period of time it takes you to attain proficiency with their system.

Ask yourself "Why am I doing this?" If your aim is masochistic self-gratification, then I cannot recommend a better solution than an SVR3-based proprietary Intel UNIX that "features" Open DeathTrap. However, if you want to be productive or have fun, Linux or BSD will suit you much better. (Bear in mind that most free software is developed on either Linux or BSD -- even though most stuff is portable, you're much more likely to have luck getting random stuff to run on a free unix. That's not FUD; just pragmatism.)

Perhaps you think that mad SCO skills will make you an employable, in-demand UNIX pimp. However, if you thought that, you'd be horribly wrong. A quick dice.com search revealed 578 jobs with the keyword "SCO". That might seem like a lot until you see that dice has 6,195 "Linux" positions and over 15,000 "Solaris" jobs in its database. (A quick vgrep of these results also reveals that Linux or Solaris nerds are paid a lot better than SCO Acheivers.)

There's also that little matter of the vultures circling around SCO, as any number of /. articles will attest.

In any case, good luck picking up the UNIX skills (wherever you choose to hone them). The community is great, and you're in for a fun ride!

~wog

The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.
( Read the rest of this entry )

I think it qualifies.

The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.
( Read the rest of this entry )

I think it qualifies.

Actually, there was (and still is) something similar to what you're talking about, but not on a distribuited basis. It's called "core wars". People would write programs in assembler and try to have one program kill the other one. Even though I'm not a coder, it sounds like fun.

For a little more info, check out the entry for "core wars" in the Jargon File.

To my mind, however, this is the absolute wrong way to go about it. If your child is screwed up enough that they cannot handle fringe concepts and information, then you need to put blinkers on your child...not bulldoze anything in the world that might bother you or your miscreant.

No matter what way you look at it, it's all a monument to human stupidity. Removing information about illegal activity as a means of reducing those activities strikes me as a form of Security Through Obscurity, and we all know how well that works. (I.e: Not at all.)