Slashdot Mirror

When Ubuntu Hardy was being released in April, I have posted installation instructions for it on XO. This is still probably the best way to install a "mainstream" Linux distribution on that laptop -- XO has rather unusual screen pixels layout with 1200x900 "visible" resolution, so Xubuntu desktop with a GTK theme made to accommodate XO's unusual screen behavior is better suited for it than a desktop made for plain low resolution and mostly touchscreen input that XO does not have.

I have posted videos of this version of Ubuntu in action on Youtube, and photos of the installation procedure (still with old GTK theme) on my Livejorunal.

should try reading this essay and this essay on "Nice Guys." Who are anything but nice, IMHO.

Some sites already do this, although not with RSA, but with MD5 or some other cryptographic hash, of which there exist JavaScript implementations which are plenty fast. See the LiveJournal login page. There is also HTTP digest authentication, but that requires browser support and users are used to typing their user/pass into an HTTP form, not using HTTP auth.

Comix:
Ctrl-Alt-Del http://www.cad-comic.com/
Diesel Sweeties http://dieselsweeties.com/
Questionable Content http://www.questionablecontent.net/
Penny Arcade http://www.penny-arcade.com/
xkcd http://xkcd.com/

Blogs:
Warren Ellis http://www.warrenellis.com/
Thighs Wide Shut http://thighswideshut.org/
Kids with Guns http://patrickben.livejournal.com/

Geeky Blogs/Mags:
Boing Boing http://www.boingboing.net/
Cool Hunting
365 Tomorrows
Grinding.be http://grinding.be/
io9 http://io9.com/
Lifehacker http://lifehacker.com/
Slashdot
Wired http://www.wired.com/rss/index.xml
AppleInsider http://www.appleinsider.com/
Macenstein http://macenstein.com/default
The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/
Macworld http://www.macworld.com/

Dirty Stuff:
Fleshbot http://fleshbot.com/tag/straight
FlickrBabes http://flickrbabes.com/
UseMyComputer http://usemycomputer.com/
Homocidal Insomniac http://homicidalinsomniac.blogspot.com/

News:
Salon http://www.salon.com/

Slashdot
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot

WWdN: In Exile
http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/rss.xml

Penny Arcade
http://www.penny-arcade.com/rss.xml

The Merry Corsetier
http://community.livejournal.com/corsetmakers/data/rss

T-Shirt Surgery
http://community.livejournal.com/t_shirt_surgery/data/rss

Winnipeg Bargain Barn Swap Meet and Flea Market
http://community.livejournal.com/winnipeg/data/rss

Post Secret
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

XKCD
http://xkcd.com/rss.xml

National Post
http://feeds.feedburner.com/NP_Top_Stories.rss

Astronomy Picture of the Day RSS Feed
http://www.acme.com/jef/apod/rss.xml

Dilbert Daily Strip
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip

We The Robots
http://www.wetherobots.com/feed/

Disclaimer: I have removed all of my friend's blog's feeds.

Slashdot
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot

WWdN: In Exile
http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/rss.xml

Penny Arcade
http://www.penny-arcade.com/rss.xml

The Merry Corsetier
http://community.livejournal.com/corsetmakers/data/rss

T-Shirt Surgery
http://community.livejournal.com/t_shirt_surgery/data/rss

Winnipeg Bargain Barn Swap Meet and Flea Market
http://community.livejournal.com/winnipeg/data/rss

Post Secret
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

XKCD
http://xkcd.com/rss.xml

National Post
http://feeds.feedburner.com/NP_Top_Stories.rss

Astronomy Picture of the Day RSS Feed
http://www.acme.com/jef/apod/rss.xml

Dilbert Daily Strip
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip

We The Robots
http://www.wetherobots.com/feed/

Disclaimer: I have removed all of my friend's blog's feeds.

Slashdot
http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot

WWdN: In Exile
http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/rss.xml

Penny Arcade
http://www.penny-arcade.com/rss.xml

The Merry Corsetier
http://community.livejournal.com/corsetmakers/data/rss

T-Shirt Surgery
http://community.livejournal.com/t_shirt_surgery/data/rss

Winnipeg Bargain Barn Swap Meet and Flea Market
http://community.livejournal.com/winnipeg/data/rss

Post Secret
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

XKCD
http://xkcd.com/rss.xml

National Post
http://feeds.feedburner.com/NP_Top_Stories.rss

Astronomy Picture of the Day RSS Feed
http://www.acme.com/jef/apod/rss.xml

Dilbert Daily Strip
http://feeds.feedburner.com/DilbertDailyStrip

We The Robots
http://www.wetherobots.com/feed/

Disclaimer: I have removed all of my friend's blog's feeds.

Why would anyone ebay an account that has my real name on it since the beginning on the site?

1. I thought the download was available on the 18th. Wrong, it's available at 12 noon on the 18th. *sigh* Why make a program available starting in the middle of the day?
2. The EA Download Manager isn't downloading the full version. Because I have the trial version installed already. Uninstall that.
3. Fyi, your instructions to uninstall don't work. The trial version was not listed under Start / Programs. I had to use the control panel's program manager to uninstall it.
4. Now the download manager works, but the full game install is asking for a CD code that was not part of the emails that you sent me.

Your line of argument is very similar to an article I wrote about the rules of war that Americans must impose on themselves: How America Fights. Even though I suspect we come from rather different political camps, there can be a lot of agreement on issues of principle.

One small quibble I would have with your argument, however, is that you have not fully represented the the dissenting opinion in this case. What the dissenters are most objecting to isn't about the issue of habeas corpus itself, but about the separation of powers between the courts and the other two branches of government. The supreme court is now placing itself above the other branches by requiring the military to justify it's decisions to a federal judge.

But it sounds like some of them are seemingly so well known. You've mentioned Dave Airlied and Keith Packard but what about Eric Anholt (Intel), Carl Worth (Red Hat), Daniel Stone (Nokia), Adam Jackson (Red Hat), David Reveman (Novell), Matthias Hopf (Novell), Alex Deucher (AMD), Ian Romanick (IBM), Alan Coopersmith (Sun). I believe that Tungsten Graphics also employ people who work on X (or X related infrastructure).

However do projects have to have paid devs to succeed? If there is the manpower perhaps paid people are not so key?

But it sounds like some of them are seemingly so well known. You've mentioned Dave Airlied and Keith Packard but what about Eric Anholt (Intel), Carl Worth (Red Hat), Daniel Stone (Nokia), Adam Jackson (Red Hat), David Reveman (Novell), Matthias Hopf (Novell), Alex Deucher (AMD), Ian Romanick (IBM), Alan Coopersmith (Sun). I believe that Tungsten Graphics also employ people who work on X (or X related infrastructure).

However do projects have to have paid devs to succeed? If there is the manpower perhaps paid people are not so key?

An interesting counterpoint to what you're saying is coming from Ulrich Drepper the libc guy.

KVM is nice and shows promise, but performance wise the paravirtualized approach of xen is still significantly faster (as in very-near-bare-metal, even significantly faster than vmware ESX on most loads).

VirtIO, which is in latest versions of KVM, paravirtualizes all the hardware and gives you almost all the benefit.

KVM is where things are going because as a poster said above, it avoids having to write all the drivers twice over. Xen dropped the ball by not working closely with the Linux kernel developers. Now XenSource have been bought out by a Microsoft proxy, so the future for Linux & Xen is looking even less rosy.

As you say, Red Hat offers libvirt which hides the differences between virtualization systems, so for most administrators and application programmers, which system "wins" is not going to matter. (My personal opinion is that none of them will win outright, at least not for many many years - different approaches to virtualization are suitable for different areas).

Rich.

Damn it! My LJ is titled High Tech Redneck.

My bad.

Quick development was apparently one of the reasons Apple choose KHTML over Gecko.

At least that Jamie Zawinski ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski ), heavily involved in Netscape/Mozilla during early years, seems to agree...

http://jwz.livejournal.com/132696.html
http://jwz.livejournal.com/138051.html

Quick development was apparently one of the reasons Apple choose KHTML over Gecko.

At least that Jamie Zawinski ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski ), heavily involved in Netscape/Mozilla during early years, seems to agree...

http://jwz.livejournal.com/132696.html
http://jwz.livejournal.com/138051.html

goosh disagrees...

guest@goosh.org:/web> apropos goosh
    1) MySpace.com - JACQUI - 22 - Female - California - www.myspace.com ...
http://www.myspace.com/goosh ..... I mean I loved barbrasteele, but this is just more apropos. Those beachy melodies make me long for you! ...
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=5991200

    2) Chubbypanda - The Epicurious Wanderer: Pomegranate Muffins - [Cooking]
Dec 16, 2006 ... My mother thought a pomegranate would make an apropos .... a weak point in the skin where I won't goosh the seeds when I make a breach. ...
http://www.chubbypanda.com/2006/12/pomegranate-muffins-cooking.html

    3) The Bat Cave - A Feminine Perspective  Innocent Bystanders
Feb 5, 2008 ... The half-bottle of Grey Goosh courshing through my liver .... From what Iâ(TM)ve heard of South Beach, the Batman costume would be more apropos. ...
http://michaelscomments.wordpress.com/2008/02/05/the-bat-cave-a-feminine-perspective/

    4) weird, tasty
All the vegetable goosh disappeared, as did the rice, ..... Which I guess is apropos: this salad is very pretty, very exciting, and a big ol' useless tease. ...
http://eats-the-holla.livejournal.com/

Will noone step up and defend the credibility and proud history of ISO here? They have done good work in the past. Cannot someone defend the way they've handled this?

No?

Anybody? Anybody at all?

I thought not.

Reputation. 60 years to build and 6 months to burn down.

Goodbye ISO.

Actually, as someone else has pointed out, he did update - on LiveJournal.

http://community.livejournal.com/schlocktroops/ for the right URL.

Schlock Mercenary, the popular webcomic, as well as most of the Blank Label Comics collective is down. Schlockmercenary.com now points to a holder site, and Sunday's comic is on the Livejournal community at http://schlocktroups.livejournal.com./

But what are the purposes of these images, from a social/personal/psychological perspective?

There are two main issues with such a law:

* Images that are intended to clearly be for pedophiles (e.g., they're of babies getting raped, and we know that they were drawn for that purpose).

* All sorts of images that would be caught under such a broad law, such as drawings of characters who might look 17, manga/hentai where the ages are unclear. An age limit of 18 simply doesn't make sense when with drawings, there exists no person whose age you can determine (how old is a cartoon character?) and whilst children look different from adults, a drawn 17 year old doesn't look any different to a young 20-something.

For the former, well perhaps there is no purpose for such images, but still, that is not necessarily sufficient justification for locking people up. Also one could equally argue that such images act as an outlet, rather than encouraging them - there is no conclusive evidence either way. So a ban could do harm.

For the latter, there are plenty of purposes of such images, and a law that criminalises possession of all these things is far too broad.

There is, for instance, a recognised pattern with (adult) porn that certain types of user will inevitably seek out harder and harder stuff because the less extreme stuff no longer excites to the same degree.

Is it? I've seen that claim by supporters of criminalising porn, but not seen the conclusive evidence. I've also heard the claim that people will move on from "extreme" adult porn to child porn, which makes no sense. It's the sort of stuff that Jack Chick would claim...

consider that kiddy porn

We're talking about drawings and cartoons, not kiddy porn, please don't divert the debate. Either way, I wouldn't consider them to be physically addictive drugs.

IANAL, but if you read the specifications as indicated in http://www.epatents.gov.sg/GTemp/2005038815.zip, you will see that it is about an encrypted signed image/video/logo/trademark/whatever for which you need a browser plugin and a server-side code to make the whole thing work. If you are not doing any of those things, there should not be any issue. Wasted a couple of hours reading the specs.

I have blogged about this as well at http://harishpillay.livejournal.com./ Again, IANAL.

NASA rover updates in the form of teen-girl livejournals. Opportunity's latest update is over a year ago, spiritrover's is even older, unfortunately.

http://opportunitygrrl.livejournal.com/ http://spiritrover.livejournal.com/

NASA rover updates in the form of teen-girl livejournals. Opportunity's latest update is over a year ago, spiritrover's is even older, unfortunately.

http://opportunitygrrl.livejournal.com/ http://spiritrover.livejournal.com/

I've been recommending people change flamebait to +5. Flamebait is code for "goes against herd thinking". The fact that I can change the moderation levels of tags basically means you have to accept that people do filter and want it. +5 Flamebait of course relies on herd thinking to work, so I in fact think the defaults are acceptable.

Do not know the distance we are talking about, but sounds like there won't be anything prohibitive on line of sight.

Closest neighbour who can have a fast connection, arrange with them to setup a WiFi, but not with regular uni-directional antennae, use directional, big one.

More precise you can align the antennaes, the further you can reach with better bandwidth. To avoid the bad looks, you could hook it up in a tree too.

If you are DIY type, there's lots of DIY tutorials to make one yourself on the cheap, which is just as good or better than some which costs insane high bucks. Just google "DIY WiFi Directional Antenna" :) Here's one: http://demi0urgos.livejournal.com/5924.html
Picture: http://img237.imageshack.us/my.php?image=smalllabattstilt2nr.jpg
Used: Beer can, some copper wiring, and some household items.

You actually can get quite damn good distances with this kind of setup, alternatively, you guys might want to ask if you could use signal boosters to amplify the strength of signal, but beware, there's very good reasons why by default the output is weak, but that's mostly directed towards to areas where there is other users.

Also, get the best hardware you can find on sane prices, using some cheap D-Link crap or something like that, is plain shooting yourself on the foot, they don't even work for 10 feets, nevermind 10miles no matter what kind of antenna you use.

Also, by nature WiFi is not very reliable, but setup well, it should work fine most of the time.

I have been deployed around 30 CentOS 5 boxes over the last 6 months. I used to turn SE Linux off when it was expedient. Not anymore. I educated myself about how it works and a few basic commands. This:

audit2allow -a -m local

checkmodule -M -m -o local.m

semodule_package -o local.pp -m local.mod

semodule -i ./local.pp

sequence of commands plus togglesebool has so far accomplished everything I have ever needed. I don't run any hand-written custom policy. And we have web servers, dns, mysql, web dev, and all kinds of other stuff.

It sure is easier than setting up a bunch of iptables commands although I see it as analogous. I rarely hear people talk about what a pain iptables is (and it surely is a pain). I think learning SE Linux was even easier.

I really look forward to more policy being applied to the desktop applications. That work is already well underway thanks to Dan Walsh over at RedHat who has already made a lot of progress in this area:

http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/15700.html
http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/18578.html
http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/13376.html

It is work like this that leads me to believe that Linux is not nearly so likely to become like Windows should it ever achieve a critical mass of desktop users. Security problems on the massive scale of some other operating systems are not inevitable. That is nice to know.

Also, I will be doing a presentation on SE Linux at the Kernel Panic Linux Users Group:

http://www.kernel-panic.org/meetings/general/08-07-10-general-meeting

on July 10th, 2008. If you are in San Diego please stop by. It's a fun crowd and the after-meeting meeting at Denny's is always lively.

I have been deployed around 30 CentOS 5 boxes over the last 6 months. I used to turn SE Linux off when it was expedient. Not anymore. I educated myself about how it works and a few basic commands. This:

audit2allow -a -m local

checkmodule -M -m -o local.m

semodule_package -o local.pp -m local.mod

semodule -i ./local.pp

sequence of commands plus togglesebool has so far accomplished everything I have ever needed. I don't run any hand-written custom policy. And we have web servers, dns, mysql, web dev, and all kinds of other stuff.

It sure is easier than setting up a bunch of iptables commands although I see it as analogous. I rarely hear people talk about what a pain iptables is (and it surely is a pain). I think learning SE Linux was even easier.

I really look forward to more policy being applied to the desktop applications. That work is already well underway thanks to Dan Walsh over at RedHat who has already made a lot of progress in this area:

http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/15700.html
http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/18578.html
http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/13376.html

It is work like this that leads me to believe that Linux is not nearly so likely to become like Windows should it ever achieve a critical mass of desktop users. Security problems on the massive scale of some other operating systems are not inevitable. That is nice to know.

Also, I will be doing a presentation on SE Linux at the Kernel Panic Linux Users Group:

http://www.kernel-panic.org/meetings/general/08-07-10-general-meeting

on July 10th, 2008. If you are in San Diego please stop by. It's a fun crowd and the after-meeting meeting at Denny's is always lively.

I have been deployed around 30 CentOS 5 boxes over the last 6 months. I used to turn SE Linux off when it was expedient. Not anymore. I educated myself about how it works and a few basic commands. This:

audit2allow -a -m local

checkmodule -M -m -o local.m

semodule_package -o local.pp -m local.mod

semodule -i ./local.pp

sequence of commands plus togglesebool has so far accomplished everything I have ever needed. I don't run any hand-written custom policy. And we have web servers, dns, mysql, web dev, and all kinds of other stuff.

It sure is easier than setting up a bunch of iptables commands although I see it as analogous. I rarely hear people talk about what a pain iptables is (and it surely is a pain). I think learning SE Linux was even easier.

I really look forward to more policy being applied to the desktop applications. That work is already well underway thanks to Dan Walsh over at RedHat who has already made a lot of progress in this area:

http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/15700.html
http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/18578.html
http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/13376.html

It is work like this that leads me to believe that Linux is not nearly so likely to become like Windows should it ever achieve a critical mass of desktop users. Security problems on the massive scale of some other operating systems are not inevitable. That is nice to know.

Also, I will be doing a presentation on SE Linux at the Kernel Panic Linux Users Group:

http://www.kernel-panic.org/meetings/general/08-07-10-general-meeting

on July 10th, 2008. If you are in San Diego please stop by. It's a fun crowd and the after-meeting meeting at Denny's is always lively.

Sigh. You obviously care far more passionately about this issue than I do. I don't own any products from either company. I don't run OpenSolaris /or/ OpenSuse, although I will admit to trying out Suse about 6 or 7 years ago. I'm not even sure why I'm still replying. ;)

I care because I feel that Sun is a very important company in the open source community. They have donated a lot of time and money to different open source projects. They may not contribute as much to the linux kernel but as I mentioned earlier that EU study showed they were by far the largest corporate contributor based on code in the Debian project. This did not seem to count the OpenOffice.org code which was even more than their contributions in Debian. OpenOffice.org has been the first entry for a lot of people into open source, which has led some to investigate open source and free software more. They are a patron of the FSF, as can be verified on the FSF website. Though I can't say Sun has been perfect in the open source world, events regarding OpenDS being a big disappointment from what I've seen.

I like Solaris too. While the linux kernel has made improvements, Solaris has the lead in some areas. Especially in scaling on machines with multiple processors and cores. Here's some comparisons with FreeBSD. Some applications work better when scaled vertically rather than clustered. There's a group porting OpenSolaris to IBM's Z series mainframes, apparently with IBM's assistance, and it seems that it can do a better job than Linux there since Linux seems to do better running a number of virtual instances vs one large instance.

Linux was a wakeup call to Sun so they got their asses in gear and kept innovating with Solaris and they have done a good job in terms of x86 support, performance and new features. OpenSolaris should do the same for Linux and back and forth until they can cure cancer, feed the hungry, and bring peace and harmony throughout the world. Or at least be really really good :)

Novell not only is not a patron of the FSF other than $5k they donated a few years ago, the FSF has stated that they wouldn't accept any money from Novell because of the deal they signed with Microsoft.

I still think we have to wait and see what Judge Kimball says. If he rules simply that Novell's case is invalid, then clearly the whole question is moot. This, however, is a highly unlikely outcome when you consider the entirety of the history of the case to date.

The genie's already out of the bottle and Sun has already had enough unwarranted bad press regarding the whole SCO deal. This is were groklaw really had it wrong. I mean, a Unix company, goes to the authorized licensing agent for Unix IP and purchases Unix related stuff. Yeah the timing was bad, yeah McNealy as usual said some stupid stuff. THough some of it was taken the wrong way. Just because Sun said they would indemnify it's linux customers doesn't mean they said Linux was in violation of anything. Just because they said Solaris couldn't be contested in the same way doesn't mean they were validating SCO's claims. Meanwhile HP who was probably the biggest UnixWare reseller and continued to resell UnixWare for some time after SCO started making a fuss, who also made claims that they would indemnify their RedHat and SuSE customers "if they didn't modify the source", received no such scrutiny on Groklaw.

There were a lot of things I read on groklaw that were just assumptions on top of assumptions that were used to verify their conclusions. Most of the comments were even worse. It's one thing for a lawyer to argue their case in a court with an opposing attorney there to defend against those claims with a presumption of innocence. It's another to do it on a biased blog. It just left a bad taste in my mouth. It's a good site to get the transcripts and exhibits but beyond that they really stretc

> and always it has been fastest and most effective to rely on data channels rather than horrible kludges like shared memory with mutex locks. While shared-memory tools like UPC and OpenMP are gaining ground (especially with programmers), I too feel that they are a step backwards. Message passing languages, especially Erlang, are better designed to cope with the unique challenges of computing on a large parallel computer due to their excellent fault tolerance features.

You might be interested in some work I did evaluating Erlang on a 16 core SMP machine:

http://jkndrkn.livejournal.com/205249.html

Quick summary: Erlang is slow, though using the Array module for data structure manipulation can help matters. Erlang could still be useful as a communications layer or monitoring system for processes writen in C.

I really love Orson Scott Card's work, (I also love JKR's work) but I have to say that his argument confuses two legal principles, and thus doesn't work (and yes, I am a real lawyer, not an "internet lawyer"). :) I actually was writing a post about that when I found this reference to his article (while Googling to see if he'd commented on the case before). In case anyone's interested in what is amiss with what OSC is saying, here's why it doesn't work: http://foresthouse.livejournal.com/463201.html Please note I am not saying that JKR will definitely win, here. But the lawsuit isn't frivolous, and his argument as to why she's a hypocrite is completely wrong.

I got my XO laptop.

I have ported Ubuntu Hardy on it. It easily runs Firefox and OpenOffice.org.

I am working on an easy to install version, and missing controls for screen/power/...

I went as far as making a Ubuntu-ish green gtk and icons theme to match UI colors with laptop controls.

I am going to add a way to easily switch between screens running Sugar and "mainstream" window manager.

This is pretty much the most "mainstream" laptop configuration imaginable. For any practical use on this laptop, educational or otherwise, it is already superior to anything that would involve Windows. Heck, I am POSTING FROM IT!

If the goal is anything other than spreading the disease that is Windows, they can just take this configuration -- and I am willing to help in improving it.

What's your wikipedia username? This looks an awful lot like the usual wikitroll canned response.

Of course, I'm not saying you're a wikipedian, but the evidence certainly points that way.

Of course, if you look at the history of the abuser in question's talk page (warning: he's a serial "archiver" to make it harder to trace things) you get a pretty good sense: constant pushing to have the complainer removed by POV-pushers Tiamut and Jd2718, who have a long history of pretty biased edits and who were edit-warring to try to remove Hebrew language references and Israeli culture references from food articles along with a string of nasty and abusive sockpuppets at their disposal.

AGK goes along with it, continually verbally abusing the poor person who was trying to keep the articles neutral under the barrage of anti-semitic editing and sockpuppetry attacks (which wikipedia claims to be against, except when it's to push a point of view supported by a certain admin...), and eventually bans the user entirely for exposing the sockpuppets and insisting wikipedia's procedures be followed.

Looks a heck of a lot like this typical wikipedian admin-abuse playbook, doesn't it?

I don't doubt that AGK sent the gloat email. Part of the underlying joke of wikipedia is the number of blatantly biased, aggressive, asshole-ish people who've been made admins just to POV push with authority to ban. In the Register article Slashdot links above, they now claim people were trying to be "stealth" admins to push pro-Israeli POV - and yet there have been dozens of admins coined over and over again for all sorts of POV-pushing reasons, usually because they "helped against vandals" (read: drove away newcomers and bit the newbies fast enough to prevent a consensus change) on topics that certain admins wanted to keep slanted a certain way.

What's your wikipedia username? This looks an awful lot like the usual wikitroll canned response.

Of course, I'm not saying you're a wikipedian, but the evidence certainly points that way.

Of course, if you look at the history of the abuser in question's talk page (warning: he's a serial "archiver" to make it harder to trace things) you get a pretty good sense: constant pushing to have the complainer removed by POV-pushers Tiamut and Jd2718, who have a long history of pretty biased edits and who were edit-warring to try to remove Hebrew language references and Israeli culture references from food articles along with a string of nasty and abusive sockpuppets at their disposal.

AGK goes along with it, continually verbally abusing the poor person who was trying to keep the articles neutral under the barrage of anti-semitic editing and sockpuppetry attacks (which wikipedia claims to be against, except when it's to push a point of view supported by a certain admin...), and eventually bans the user entirely for exposing the sockpuppets and insisting wikipedia's procedures be followed.

Looks a heck of a lot like this typical wikipedian admin-abuse playbook, doesn't it?

I don't doubt that AGK sent the gloat email. Part of the underlying joke of wikipedia is the number of blatantly biased, aggressive, asshole-ish people who've been made admins just to POV push with authority to ban. In the Register article Slashdot links above, they now claim people were trying to be "stealth" admins to push pro-Israeli POV - and yet there have been dozens of admins coined over and over again for all sorts of POV-pushing reasons, usually because they "helped against vandals" (read: drove away newcomers and bit the newbies fast enough to prevent a consensus change) on topics that certain admins wanted to keep slanted a certain way.

This looks like a classic case of "nobody new comes to wikipedia" corrupt behavior on the part of wikipedia's admins.

I've dealt with AGK and other admins, they're classically anti-semitic as well as usually friends with a bunch of anti-semitic people. It's no surprise any article involving Israel or the middle east has such a problem, they have people for whom the whole purpose of editing is to make "the Jews" look as evil/bad as possible.

I have no surprise this was the response parent poster got from their arbitration committee, either. Corruption on wikipedia flows from the top down, not the other way around. And the last thing they want to do is investigate malfeasance on the part of an admin, because that would set precedent to investigate their own behavior as well.

But video game companies are paragons of virtue, it's morally wrong to infringe on their vitally important intellectual property...

Yeah, sorry about that. Thunk.org is a rather ancient machine (> 5 years old) living in a colo facility, and this is how I figured out I had been slashdotted. (The two uptime commands were about two minutes apart):

    14:21:06 up 121 days, 16:47, 2 users, load average: 40.47, 12.41, 4.55
    14:23:05 up 121 days, 16:49, 2 users, load average: 81.43, 36.97, 14.52

  Fortuantely I'm still mirroring my blog onto my old Livejournal account; please read it there for now! The two articles that you want are this one: What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris and this one: Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source, if you can't get through to thunk.org.

Yeah, sorry about that. Thunk.org is a rather ancient machine (> 5 years old) living in a colo facility, and this is how I figured out I had been slashdotted. (The two uptime commands were about two minutes apart):

    14:21:06 up 121 days, 16:47, 2 users, load average: 40.47, 12.41, 4.55
    14:23:05 up 121 days, 16:49, 2 users, load average: 81.43, 36.97, 14.52

  Fortuantely I'm still mirroring my blog onto my old Livejournal account; please read it there for now! The two articles that you want are this one: What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris and this one: Organic vs. Non-organic Open Source, if you can't get through to thunk.org.

http://tytso.livejournal.com/

I am very happy that there has been another LTS release (and on my birthday)! I've been running the beta and it has been very stable other than than the firefox alpha (which seems to work fine on my debian lenny box).

I am dissapointed that abiword 2.6 didn't make the cut, though. It is a great release, however the timing of things didn't work out. You can get some context on what happened at one of the developer's blog and the bug report. Seems there was a little tension involved. Also, here are the release notes for Abiword.

Being an LTS release, I wonder if they can get it backported? I don't think that usually happens with that drastic of an upgrade - is it just security updates that get backported? However, the Abiword team will not be supporting 2.4.x for the next 3 years so I hope that something along those lines is possible.

Oh well, off to compiling it myself. :)

The argument made by the ExtJS team is that by having a web page that includes the ExtJS library constitutes a close binding, and that thus your entire web back-end must be GPL'd. This is, on the face of it, ridiculous.

Previously, they were arguing that it wasn't LGPL3ed, they were merely distributing it under the LGPL3's terms, by which they meant that they could tag on anti-commercial clauses. The terms of the LGPL3 mean you can strip those clauses and redistribute as plain LGPL3 if you wish, which somebody did, and it upset them.

Essentially, they were name-dropping the LGPL and claiming open-source status when what they really wanted was a non-open-source freeware license. Of course, if they came out and said this, they'd have a lot of upset contributors who have been duped into contributing to something they believed was open-source.

This bizarre interpretation of the GPL3 to mean that all of your website back-end needs to be open-sourced is another game in this style. They don't actually want the GPL3, because that includes commercial uses. They want a license where they can do their very best to make commercial use unappealing, while still being able to name-drop the GPL3 and tell people it is open-source without too many people calling them liars.

Programming as a job? Is fun... part of the time. Oh, there are probably even rare jobs where it is fun most of the time. If you have such a job, cling to it like a life raft, because you will understand how lucky you are when you change to your next job. (The last time I had a job like that? Well, let's just say a sock puppet had a Superbowl commercial. Those were great times to be in IT.)

At most IT jobs, the fun will be less than 40% of the job, sometimes considerably less. The parts that aren't fun? Those parts still need to get done, even though they aren't fun. This is the reason why programming and related IT work are compensated better than actual fun jobs. It's hard work to get the credentials you need to do IT work, and then the actual job is hard work. Oh, and if it isn't hard work, if it is really just fun and diversion as many of my colleagues have asserted on Slashdot over the years? Well, then the fact that you are putting in all those hours is no credit to you. Give up what I like to call "IT machismo." Since doing IT is like having an orgasm for you every minute of the day, why should we be impressed by the hours you are putting in? That's the paradox of these kinds of assertions.

Really, what we are supposed to gather from these kinds of assertions is this, "My faith in the IT gods is far greater than yours. I'm willing to take vows of silence, poverty, hardship and chastity (especially chastity!) because my love for the IT gods is so great. However, despite my love of my devotions, you should also understand that they are a hardship. My disgust with you is because of the fact that your faith is so small, that you are unwilling to take up the IT cross joyfully."

Believe it or not, other professional jobs are just as much fun as IT. For example, there's a reason why there are TV shows and video games about lawyers. It's because we all know that there are fun aspects of being a lawyer. Ever hired a lawyer? They expect to be compensated for the hours they work, and they don't work for the hours they aren't compensated for. Oh they may be dedicated, and they may live for the job, but for most of them that doesn't extend to uncompensated work.

Now, to be realistic, in the modern IT workplace, a certain amount of your time is expected to be uncompensated, mandatory unpaid overtime. This is simple reality. Also, if you grumble about this mandatory unpaid overtime, you are branded a "9 to 5er." (Which is some sort of evil beast to management and the parent, sort of like a basilisk.) The best way to look at it is that an unknown amount of mandatory unpaid overtime is part of what you are expected to do in order to get the compensation package when you get hired for an IT job. Hopefully, you have an idea of what that's going to be before you take the job. In other words, hopefully you don't sign on thinking the unpaid overtime is only going to be during crunch time, only to find out that crunch time is "every day, including weekends and holidays."

I know going into any IT job that if I don't put in some unpaid overtime, I'll probably be made to feel uncomfortable. So, I try to remember that when I have to, like this evening when I'm doing my mandatory unpaid overtime, and not grumble. I'll do the job, but what I'm doing isn't "fun." It's work... and that's why we call it work and not fun.

This is an economic problem that extends to large parts of the economy, not just IT. Ask a Wal-Mart worker. At least we are currently still making more than them, poor bastards.

XO laptop with Ubuntu ended up pretty good for a general-purpose mobile use: http://abelits.livejournal.com/37973.html

Ugh I want to punch them both

Wow. Classy.

How bout you toddle on over to CF Hardcore? I'm sure they'd love someone like you.

Too late.

Stumble your way through a few of jwz's livejounal entries. He's very serious about the things that he doesn't take seriously.