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Relax. Linux' large developer base is the reason for its mess and increasing bureaucracy. It's getting to the stage where code being too clean for the rest of the kernel is a reason to not include it in mainline (this was an argument against Reiser4).

Working on more minor projects with less random hacker interest and less pressure to keep up is the only way to result in a clean product. Rushing to compete rarely achieves anything. Not many people care about the quality of the code until it affects the quality of the product. And every Linux 'oops, my last commit broke everything, sorry' changelog entry speaks for itself.

This is why the BSDs survive despite having several orders of magnitude less developer resources. Less to manage, low pressure, good work done. FreeBSD is falling to Linux' disease of over-coding under-thinking, in particular the new complexity in 5/6 which is making it much harder to develop. They have recovered from the brutal side effects of the new SMP stack but how DragonFly's competes has yet to be seen, and the latter was done with much less mucking about, less segfaults, and much less in the way of resources.

However, Linux' incredibly large developer base means it can do just about anything (except, strangely, proper jails), and also run on just about anything too. However, not everything is done cleanly. In *one*day* (as per my reading of KernelPlanet, NOT by post time), these two posts on KernelPlanet made me break into a cold sweat:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/zaitcev/43337.htm l
http://ganesha.gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/2005/1 2/06/#20051206-libusb

The first outlines how failure to plan ahead lead to a hacky solution to what should have been a simple problem. The latter is an example of how some kernel developers just go and do something really stupid and people don't notice until it's too late.

Sure, these things happen in other systems, but they're easier to notice when there's only 20 developers, compared to 20,000. When you can afford to track every commit, you can easily notice if something stupid is happening. Add to this that Linux committers are fine with accepting small *anonymous* commits, and you have a clear path to utter failure.

So don't worry about your project. Sure few people will even know it exists, but at least you can sleep at night knowing it's as clean as you can make it.

Or use your talent to empower DragonFly BSD, which still has the potential to usurp Linux with its SMP stack, one of the most popular reasons to use Linux instead of (say) NetBSD.

My review of Aeon Flux. Spoilers are very limited.

They're going to get worse, before anything else, if people on the ground have any credibility at all.

What you need is a portible one. like this

Once you have the idea on how sucky Mozilla's history stuff is in practice, take a look at how the stuff is actually stored in history.dat. People have been rendered insane by just a single look at that stuff. Want to make sense of this format for some obscure reason? Read this and weep. This stuff is just about the most insane thing I've ever seen.

I sure hope Mozilla folks get the unified storage plans together for Firefox 2.0, and use something like sqlite to store most of the user data. MorkDB format used by Mozilla is... just not elegant.

The release of Transit was brought up to the Portland LiveJournal community with mixed responses. I know personally that it totally munged my daily commute. Some say it's not showing theirs accurately while others say it's given some good suggestions.

So ... jury is still out. Guess I've brought nothing new to the table here.

I forgot to mention that a member of the astronaut corps (hasn't earned his wings yet) came to speak at my school not too long ago. He was talking about how Shuttle operations were supposed to stop by 2009-2010. If this really happens (though I'm not sure I buy it), that's a hell of a lot less access to space that the ESA has. As it is now, they rely on us and the Russian Soyuz-TMA for their manned space transport. And since you KNOW they're not going to get the CEV ready on time... the ESA may become de facto supporters of the Kliper.

Maybe all we need is a test... ...to find people who shouldn't have children with each other.

Well given that people ask these dumb questions It's no wonder we all get the shits with everyone else.

wheras THIS is closer to it ;-)

"Open" is hardly a new buzzword - they've been using it all over the past few decades. Usually, of course, "open" meaning "you can actually buy the specification and implement it yourself if you want to". It's only in the last decade when the grassroots sense has been rising, as in "you can get the whole specification free of charge and no strings attached, too".

Plus, I think it's a silly thing to stick "open" to the project title, especially in open source projects. But that's just me.

And yes, I agree with the conversions - in the future, we'll see awfully converted Word docs and vice versa. People need to stop thinking these as typesetting languages and think of them as a format to exchange textual contents and semantic structure. Word isn't a typesetting program, neither is OO.o, and people who scream that .docx to .odt conversion isn't "perfect" are using the wrong frigging tool - they should export the document to PDF, or go download Scribus or pay some serious money for InDesign or something if they're so concerned about maintaining perfect document layout.

Good Lord, why isn't Netscape dead yet? Can't the authorities see that AOLTW is keeping them in constant pain and misery? I mean, good grief this is awful.

People whine about corporations having all rights of humans but no responsibilities; I don't want to discuss the ethics of euthanasia what comes to humans, but bloody heck, someone ought to legalize corporate euthanasia.

Good Lord, why isn't Netscape dead yet? Can't the authorities see that AOLTW is keeping them in constant pain and misery? I mean, good grief this is awful.

People whine about corporations having all rights of humans but no responsibilities; I don't want to discuss the ethics of euthanasia what comes to humans, but bloody heck, someone ought to legalize corporate euthanasia.

My impression of MySpace is basically the same as my impression of Livejournal, except I've never seen a MySpace page that wasn't visually obnoxious.

I've used LiveJournal for about four years now as a way to keep up with all my non-local friends and occasionally share stuff, and more recently as an RSS/news feed reader. I know it's not the most popular way to handle blogs, but it works for me. I have always had the tasteful default scheme, and I never visit anyone's personal LJ page. I just see their entries in a nice format.

MySpace, I suspect, is much the same. Largely idiots, but I have a number of non-idiot friends, and some of them are on MySpace. It clearly works as a way to find people, if that's what you want; I've found interesting and intelligent people on Livejournal as well.

MySpace is a community. It has a visually obnoxious format, and since it encourages socializing it attracts all manner of teens, who then characterize it. It doesn't mean you can't use MySpace for intelligent, grown-up social networking, I'm sure. It's just that people who are neither intelligent nor grown up still socialize, and it's just as good (if not better) a tool for unintelligent immature socilalization. As with LJ, that makes up the bulk.

And as for finding people -- when I want to look someone up around campus or at another school, I use Facebook. Most of my friends are college-age and on there. And, thank god, Facebook doesn't allow custom themes, colors, or formats. If it didn't exist, I'd have to look people up on MySpace. But it does, so I don't need to go there yet.

What a bunch of condescending BS. All the article says is that "Men can't develop software for women because they're not women. Therefore they should just replicate already popular software for women, for example, by placing trivia games in WoW."

Men can develop software for women, even without predecessors to replicate. These aren't games, but: Livejournal, deadjournal, and myspace were started by Brad, Frank, and Tom, yet their user-bases dramatically skew toward females.

You don't have to be a female to make software for them.

I think ADV's success has a lot to do with their relationship with their fanbase. They've been pretty receptive to suggestions, and the founders are actually fans themselves. The companies that were founded by fans are typically more attentive to details. They make a lot of trips to anime conventions and mingle with their fans. Heck, the co-founder is married to a voice actress. One of their main producers maintains a blog. All three were at a New York anime convention a few years ago and were quite obviously very passionate about their work.

He obviously knows how to keep things running
http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/

Hey Rocketship Underpant! I'm pretty sure I'm breaking some kind of slashdot rule by doing this, but I'm trying to contact you in regard to a comment you made a few months back. This one in particular: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=140022&cid=117 27383 I'm trying to get some anecdotal information from people just like you -- people with grapheme-color synethesia who speak more than one language or have learned a second language. I'm trying to see if there's any evidence for a patterns across languages with people who have grapheme-color synethesia. I describe it in a little more detail here: http://www.livejournal.com/community/synaesthesis/ 130771.html If you can take a second to tell me a little bit more about any similarities between your perception of Japanese characters, and English characters I would be very greatful. Sorry if this is out of sorts -- I looked for a "private message" feature or something like that, but couldn't find one. This is pretty much the first time I've posted anything on Slashdot. :) You can get ahold of me with the contact info on my lj, or at Craig deeot Talbert eeeatt colorado dwot edu.

It is awesome what they have did!

I have a real good computer (memory, processor and video card) but I must tell you, the game runs really fast, you dont have the feeling of running a java application with all those 3 dimensional objects flying around you. You cant tell thats a program being interpreted.

Great job folks! The Java community has only to earn with this proof of concepts works :)

I have been there

They've silently changed the EULA it seems. My information is old. The new one is much better. There was much controversy over the old EULA.

There used to be one big EULA for RHEL, and it did state that you must not have any RHEL servers installed without RHN. It didn't give you the option to run unsupported copies, period. If you bought one copy, you were bound by the EULA automatically since it came with services. If you wanted to install RHEL on another computer, the only way you could do it without violating the EULA was to buy another seat from them.

Here's some text from the old EULA:

"If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed Servers, then
Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each
additional Installed Server."

"During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter,
Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's
facilities and records from time to time in order to verify
Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement"

Link
Another Link
Yet another

You can see there was plenty of talk about this questionable EULA, I'm not making it up.

I'm glad to see they have a much better set of EULAs in place now. They are still pretty pricey for what you get.

This problem will never be fixed. If you want customer service, do not deal with a large organization. Customer service has no economies of scale, and will thus be worse the larger the organization you're dealing with.

I make a post about it in my blog.

Different Moore. Ten Commandments was Roy Moore, this is James Moore.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/gamepolitics/1263 59.html/
and
http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/11/13/moore.tencommand ments/

ACHILLES: Nothin' much [dodge, parry, stab]. Just teaching Patroclus [dodge, parry, dodge] to fight [stab].

ODYSSEUS: Lookin' good there, kid. What is he, your--

ACHILLES: Cousin. He's my cousin. Cousin. Totally my cousin. In conclusion: Cousin.

No, this isn't for every situation. Common hardware is a must (or at least a real help). But, it does neatly solve other common issues, like system builds.

A freind of mine does just this on his home system about once a month (well, and at work...as he says, we're not in the business of installing an OS by hand anymore). I'm going to take the same plunge. Pick an automated system rebuild method, test it, build new systems with it and rebuild your systems on some sort of regular basis. There are lots of caveats to the Microsoft methods (ADS/RIS... single partition systems, you need BOOTP, blah blah blah). And, the image-based methods can be tricky (Ghost? Oh come now). Other options like nLite might help, too.

It may not be what the doctor ordered, but it will simplify your life when you need to build a new workstation. And, if one gets pokey beyond the reach of the other tools mentioned, blow on a new image. Plus, if you're using XP, you can use folder redirection to keep the user files someplace else, so you don't neccesarily have to rely on draconian policies regarding where they should save files (well, you can't let them save files just anyplace, so a few policies may be in order).

Is this the ultimate insult that the best way to manage Windows workstations is to automate reinstalling them? Well, maybe, depending on your viewpoint. But, it is what it is, so we build automated methods to learn to live with the limitations.

Humbly submitted, here are some of my bookmarks on the subject:
http://www.cmu.edu/computing/andrew-windows/andrew -ris-server.html
http://ani.sourceforge.net/
http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;299441
http://www.livejournal.com/users/lotso/1863.html
http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/realmen/
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techinfo/howi tworks/management/remoteover.asp
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/risover.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windo wsserver2003/library/TechRef/3983c4a4-e6ff-4664-84 25-28ec740474b1.mspx
http://unattended.sourceforge.net/
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Art icleID=7109
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windo ws2000serv/evaluate/featfunc/intmiror.mspx

FYI, the judge in Alabama cannot disbar Thompson, because Thompson is licensed to practice law in Florida. Moore is an Alabama judge. Moore can (and has) revoke[d] Thompson's Pro Hac Vice in Alabama, which is a kind of temporary acknowledgement of another state's bar license for an individual, for the duration of a single case.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking — "Hey, dude, you missed a chance for some self promotion!"

I did stumble across this guy recently, though. Although I haven't had the time to try any of his games yet...

There's a fair amount written locally about it in Saugus. You can read the public announcement, see it discussed on the Saugus forums (in regards to the Teaching American History Grant Project) or even see the blog entry I posted about it on the Saugus blog. If you go digging through Saugus.net's search facility I'm sure you'll find more info about it in Saugus, too.

There's a fair amount written locally about it in Saugus. You can read the public announcement, see it discussed on the Saugus forums (in regards to the Teaching American History Grant Project) or even see the blog entry I posted about it on the Saugus blog. If you go digging through Saugus.net's search facility I'm sure you'll find more info about it in Saugus, too.

What part of Massachusetts? In and around Saugus it's pretty well known. Of course, Saugus switched years ago...

• Official announcment
• Saugus Blog entry
• Start of a thread about it on the Saugus Forums

AINULINDALE:

ILUVATAR: Ahem.
AINUR: Wow! Existence!
ILUVATAR: *blows pitch pipe* LA!
AINUR: LA LA LA!
ILUVATAR: LA LA!
AINUR: LA LA!
MELKOR: This sucks. BUM BUM BA DUM!
AINUR: Um. . . la?
ILUVATAR: Ahem. LA!
MELKOR: Boop bop-a-doo-bop!
ILUVATAR: LA, dammit.
MELKOR: Bwam bardle ningle boom.
AINUR: . . .
ILUVATAR: Right, you're out of the band.
MELKOR: Fine, I was leaving anyway.
AINUR: . . .
ILUVATAR: What are you waiting for?
AINUR: Oh. Right. Newly created world. Sorry. Great jam session, big guy!
ILUVATAR: Yeesh.
.
.
.

I'm interested in your 'pat factor'

How old is LiveJournal? How many of these self-hurting teens have grown up and gone for interviews at corporations only to find the ubiquitous google search on their name leads to a big flashing warning sign?

There's an option to disable seaching in your LJ blog, then you can't search it with the LJ search engine or for instance blogsearch.google.com.

Of course, you always have the option to make posts friends-only.

Wanna try out if someone on /. has an LJ? Just have a shot at http://www.livejournal.com/users/SLASHDOTUSERNAME

Dave Jones, a RedHat/Fedora kernel developer, has some interesting comments on Ubuntu and how people insist in their bug reports that "it works in Ubuntu." This blog post is certainly worth reading.

Well said. I couldn't agree with you more.

You may be interested in reading this.

For what it's worth, I got one of these messages yesterday:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ghewgill/48677.ht ml

Hopefully this will help people know what to look for.

I was recently threatened with suspension and/or expulsion from my (British A-level) College when one of the members of staff discovered that I've written less than....promotional comments about one of my physics teachers (Sure...uranium 238 is fissile...I believe you) on my livejournal, along with a draft copy of a letter I'd written to the school.

Also, one of the people in the year above got suspended for creating [schoolname]sucks.com - 'tis mad, but common.

Hence, my blog is now friends-only :).

What database requires this? Every database I've ever used has an efficient, documented method of getting the automatically generated ID.

Yeh, I was pretty surprised when I read a blog entry recently about this "feature" of Oracle. From what I could see it's basically identical to the PostgreSQL behaviour ... but you can't link to seq.next directly to the column and then select on seq.last_value.

The only reason that Linux would become a hobby is if you felt a need to update things that don't need updating continually.

Err.. or until you suddenly have problems getting two sounds to play at once, or with some other equally banal day-to-day usage scenario.

Or more simply than that, you need tools to do your work which are either not sufficiently mature or outright don't exist yet on Linux. Also known as: "It's about the apps."

He has more impact on the Hill than you do, that's what.

yes, Ronald is a scary kiddy-fiddling clown thing.

Does it let you determine offsets for open files yet? I'd really, really like to be able to run lsof -o under Linux.

Zombie Walks in Seattle - Boingboing seems to be a hotbed of articles on upcoming zombie mob activity and pointers to pictures of the events afterwards:
Vancouver Pictures San Francisco.

Looks like George and Dick beat him to it. :)

Looks like George and Dick beat him to it. :)

from down here in homestead it was quite a ride as we were in eyewall winds for quite some time and never got to experience the eye itself. see my livejournal for my play by play of the event http://cixel.livejournal.com/

at livejournal.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/opportunitygrrl/

and

http://www.livejournal.com/users/spiritrover/

at livejournal.

http://www.livejournal.com/users/opportunitygrrl/

and

http://www.livejournal.com/users/spiritrover/

See Ulrich Drepper:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/udrepper/8511.htm l

Historically, the LSB hasn't been very useful. Maybe it will in the next version. But not if the problems with the tests aren't sorted.

I was subscribed to the FHS mailing list, back in '98 or '99. I forget which version we were arguing about at the time, and can't check as the list archives don't go back that far. Part of the push to get that version out was that vendors just wanted *something*, optimal or not.

IMHO, it was that sort of thing that led to problems like multiple desktop environment binaries all being located in /usr/bin, etc. The workstation I'm writing this on has 2843 files in there, not counting X11. This is one reason why many systems are so slow to process this directory through a GUI combobox or file manager.

It's also the reason we didn't have /media much sooner, etc.

I'm not berating the list members. A lot of good came out of it, and there were many issues, such as allowing for how existing Unices used /opt, etc. But it could have been a lot better without vendor pressure.

IMHO, OpenGroup and LSB are as much about PR as anything else.

Now that MS have declared an interest in the donkey (JBOSS and MS), will they go ahead and "introduce" all the OS frameworks to MS server to try and woo away hosters from linux? Nice time to be a light-weight framework provider.