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I am presently listening to a CD on my computer at work. I shall bring it home in the morning and listen to it there on a stereo. I like the portability, so I bought the CD. The music industry should realize that music on the net is exposure, which leads to sales. The got their panties in a bunch back in the 20's when they thought radio play would damp record sales. By the 50's they had caught on, as indicated by the payola scandals.

Primus seems to make an effort to keep their music reasonably priced, and I am happy to give them a plug.

Metallica does not, and I am happy to give them a plug of another sort.

Fish on!

Can't use an OS without themes!
hehe ;-)

-Ben

1)
Someone has taken a cue from a certain User Friendly strip and created VIGOR the vi[m] editor with an added paperclip assistant!
It features helpful advice, requiring you to click on a dialog box, such as:

"You have not entered insert mode before. While you're in insert mode, remember that you need to return to command mode before entering Vigor commands!"

and:

"Are you sure you want to move left?"

Screenshots

2)
I was once shopping on a Waldensoft store and found a boxed piece of software from Microsoft which would let you create your own Office Assistants. But the EULA specifically forbade creating any kind of office assistant that appealed to the prurient interests.

NSI revoking the domain simply because you decided to go elsewhere (and had plenty of time left on your existing legitimate registration) would violate several areas of law:[several bases of illegality snipped]

First of all, your reasons that it would be illegal are wrong. If NSI's contract with you says they can delegate the name to the DNS server of NSI's choice, you have no recourse. You entered into that contract of your own free will, in a marketplace where other options were available from other providers, in many cases at better prices.

Think about this -- what would happen if NSI claimed ownership of Microsoft's or Yahoo's or Altavista's domain name?

First of all, your deliberately misleading use of the word ownership is confusing the issue. A domain name registration is a contract requiring the registrar to return IP addresses of the registrant's choosing when queried by an Internet host, for an agreed period of time, in exchange for an agreed fee. The contract typically permits the registration to be renewed in perpetuity by timely payment of renewal fees, or to be transferred if certain procedures are followed. The contract may have any other terms the regsitrar and registrant agree to, e.g., NSI's new arbitrary termination clauses. It is clear to me that domain name registration is a contract to perform service, not some sort of never-quite-defined property.

So what would happen if NSI started returning IP addresses not of Microsoft's choosing when queried with microsoft.com? What laws would Microsoft invoke? Here's my opinion: NSI's behavior is constrained by political forces enormously stronger than any court decision. For instance, Microsoft could hire private detectives to investigate every single NSI employee. With modern laws, everybody is a criminal, so it won't be very hard to dig up some blackmail material. Or MSFT could hire all of NSI's top technical experts (the recruiter could keep putting gold bars on the table until the employee jumped ship -- they can afford it).

And Microsoft is one of the good guys! They are plenty of organizations (such as the National Rifle Associtaion, or the various Nazi-inspired groups), who would be deeply offended by losing their domain name. NSI recognizes (or ought to) that some people consider munitions a reasonable response to being crapped on by a multi-billion dollar corporation.

And then there's the ultimate recourse if NSI were to offend too many Internet technical administrators: the Internet Death Penalty. In the NSI-goes-totally-insane scenario, a plurality of DNS admins could just take NSI out of their root server list, and arrange for someone else to distribute updates to the master domain database. NSI would have to screw up badly for this to happen, but it isn't impossible, and it serves as a constraint on their actions.

BTW, here's a relevant User Friendly cartoon: Network Totalitarianism - the dot commie people.

It's the dreaded day star.

kwsNI

I do not repeat do not want to play quake unless i can use iddqd!! And what happens to Stef of Userfriendly fame My skill level is about the same

Blah... at least when I get junk email it costs them between 20-30cents.. So, it really 'costs' them to anoy me. Unfortunately, with a free internet connection, it doesn't cost them any more money (which is none) to email 1,000,000 rathern than 1,000.
Our friends over at userfriendly painted the picture back in August of '99.
Here's the link. --

Blah... at least when I get junk email it costs them between 20-30cents.. So, it really 'costs' them to anoy me. Unfortunately, with a free internet connection, it doesn't cost them any more money (which is none) to email 1,000,000 rathern than 1,000.
Our friends over at userfriendly painted the picture back in August of '99.
Here's the link. --

Well, its not going to be the first time they lose big legal battles... anyone remember not so long ago their previous court appearance? Heck, they seem to be having a hay-day just embarassing themselves

their hidden secret for success is unleashed:
http://www.userfr iendly.org/cartoons/archives/99nov/19991107.html

-goon(ty)

If your going to assault Microsoft, there is advice from UserFriendly here. --Use the Snurf

i don't mind the ads, but it is the idea of tracking my movements on the Net that I hate.

So opt out of the DoubleClick tracking system by setting your DC ID# to "OPT_OUT". (You can do that from the User Friendly strip's home page.) That way, DC can still serve ads and make the web site freebeer, but DC can't track your "pr0n in one window, Pinocchio on Gutenberg in another, Precious Moments on eBay in a third" surfing habits.

According to Illiad, who draws the UserFriendly, MCSE == Minesweeper Consultant and Solitaire Expert.

This is actually ontopic. The above post addresses an important topic. Some very reputable Open Source advocates have spoken their mind on this issue here.

emmett, you missed April Fool's Day by almost a month. No one's falling for your joke.

(In case you didn't get that, take a look here)

Reminds me of thisUser Friendly strip - playing pong with the elevators!

"The romance of Silicon Valley was about money - excuse me, about changing the world, one million dollars at a time."

"That must be the Daystar. I've heard talk about it."

Also, you might run the risk of seeing a person you don't know -- someone who might not know how to recompile the Linux kernel. Then you'd have to find something ELSE to talk about. Horrors!

You could just start talking about the Linux kernel anyway. Chances are you won't have to talk very long before the other person remembers an important dental appointment and leaves.

Today's strip makes everyone here guilty. Please turn yourself in now. :(

I can't wait to have a CPU with mass storage inside the case. They didn't say whether this stuff is as fast as RAM, but I'd assume it isn't, since IIRC magnetizing something is usually a lot slower than flipping the charge on a capacitor. Read performance should be impressive, though, and in any case reads and writes should be orders of magnitude better than hard disk seek times. (HDs have decent sequential access performance, but are miserable for random access.)
#define X(x,y) x##y

just a quick note: check out sunday's userfriendly

//rdj

what about that ugly thing on UserFriendly?

I think it is about time the people shaped up and didn't just give any little thing a patent. Also if you want to see a funny comic strip about Amazon patents go here: Userfriendly.

not to mention when they start hogging your bandwith discussing their plans to "take over the world"

.sigs are dumb!

chmod 400 .netscape/cookies

It works under AIX, anyway... after doing that, I went to www.userfriendly.org and clicked on the doubleclick banner ad. After I came back here, I double-checked: no doubleclick cookies (I edited my cookies file to get rid of all the doubleclick cookies first!).

If I want to accept a cookie, I'll have to undo that temporarily, I suppose.

Nels

like this.

Of course, the last time we saw an Amiga was when Elvis brought one out of a flying saucer.... (there's a UF comic about that somewhere :)

Minesweeper Consultant, Solitaire Expert
[tip o the hat to Userfriendly.org...]

yeah right. But seriously, something needs to be done about the USPTO. Amazon's going crazy with patents (I like the User Friendly cartoon on this topic), and no one seems to care about stopping them. Other companies are doing the same, although examples seem to escape me at this moment. Maybe I'll go out and patent the 1-click Reply button (unless someone else has already done that...). While I'm at it, why not patent the 1-Click Submit button as well. Just imagine how much $ I'd get from /. alone.

But seriously again, how could the patent office be fixed? There's not too many people who's dream is to read through patent submissions all day e'er' day (as Outkast would say). They need more people, less stupid patent requests, and (better?) divisions into patent areas. Now that companies are getting onto the Net at full force, it seems they're making the Net into just another arm of the corporate labyrinth.

Eruantalon

I think userfriendly.org got this one right. http://www.userfr iendly.org/cartoons/archives/00feb/20000213.html :)

My background: I'm a 2nd-year Chemistry/Physics/Web Site Design teacher and Assistant Technical Coordinator for Hamilton High School in Hamilton, Ohio. I've been using Macs for 6 years, PCs running Dos/Win3.1/Win9x/WinNT for about 7 years (on and off), VMS for about 5 years in college and Linux for the past 3 or 4 (I've only been trying to admin Linux for the past year or so). Our high school has a mix of hundreds of computers, mostly PCs running Win9x. We have two computer labs running WinNT Workstation 4.0 sp4 (a nightmare), several NT Servers (two of which I admin - NT isn't a bad print server or FirstClass server if you get all the extra crap off of it and don't run IIS; IIS resulted in all of our crashes while our main print/proxy server also served the school web site), and 3 Linux boxen (running various versions of RedHat (2) and Mandrake (1) - I'm currently too swamped to get into any other distro's, although we played with Corel for a while).

We've been running the school's web site pretty stably on RH for the past year or so, after inheriting a Pentium-90 Netware print server and replacing a couple parts here and there. I've been interested in Linux ever since I ran a couple large-volume websites in college for some rock bands (Smashing Pumpkins (unofficial) and Foo Fighters (official), among others), and I got into CGI/Perl. When I started working here, I had a Junior in my Chemistry class who was also signed up for the Web Site Deisgn class (which is an independent study course). After I found out he was a programmer, and did HTML/Javascript, I said "Do you know Perl?", which received a blank look. I then spent every day of the next two weeks after school with him and the llama books, showing him some of my old source and giving him 'assignments'. For a while, we did our CGI/Perl on MS's IIS, but it was such a nightmare that I would install Linux on any spare machine lying around and hope that it wasn't needed back soon!

Finally we got this P-90, which we upgraded, and we could start some serious CGI/Perl work. In October of this year, I got the idea that we could "computerize" our attendance, since we passed a levy and put a computer in every classroom. So, after some very very basic coding by myself, I set Doug on the project and more or less managed/coached him while we worked with SWOCA to get all of the attendance data prepared. This was a big deal - if you screw up attendance, the state will kill you and basically ruin your funding, among other things. We finally went live with the attendance script today, and we plan on releasing it under the GPL to other local districts. Of course, we're not going to port it - they'll have to set up a Linux server for it just like we did (we snuck out a Dell P3-450 that was waiting to be set up in a computer lab, formatted NT off of it and installed RH 6.1), but it will be there for their use. Maybe we're forcing Linux on them, but who cares, they should learn how to use it.

In doing all of this, several of my students have become interested in Linux. They borrow distro's, play around with a P2-266 running Mandrake 6.0 (which netscape seems to crash regularly), play around on the web server with the accounts I've given them, talk about their troubles/successes installing it at home, and generally act like geeks. They read User Friendly every day, and some of them have even started reading /. on occasion. The trick was to get them excited about it (they sometimes teach each other HTML and Perl during and after school - how cool is that?) and give them some space to play around with it.

Our future projects include upgrading/migrating the current web server to a faster machine, and starting a school-wide Samba server so that students can access their data from anywhere. I will say this, though: Microsoft (especially Office) still rules in this school and in the minds of IT professionals I've worked with in developing an IT pathway for students at our high school. Because of that, I'm going to be teaching A+/Network+ next year, and the year after that I may teach MCP. In the meantime, I expect Linux to get better and develop more support, and I really look forward to the day when we can start replacing labs with easy-to-admin Linux workstations with a slick Office clone. As more machines are rotated out of their life-cycle, more machines can be used as Linux boxen to re-introduce students to the reason they became interested in computers in the first place - they're fun, they're challenging, and when they work correctly, they can be really really cool.

-c

http://www.userfri endly.org/cartoons/archives/99oct/uf001180.gif

Can't help but get a giggle out of this cartoon...

You forget that the Internet allows people to publish their works without having to go through a corporation to do it. MP3.com is the classic example, though the various online comics (User Friendly, Penny Arcade, etc.) should be considered as well. Not to mention the existence of MSTs of works of fan fiction that happen to be bad, IRCRPGs and their logs, and so-called "role-playing stories" such as NuRPG, all of which are unique to the Net.

I'm sure others here could name other examples of entertainment found only on the Net, including ones as obscure as the last two genres I mentioned, as well. That's the great thing about it; it allows the world to see ideas and products that corporations would never consider publishing. It has the potential to free the artist, provided the corporations don't manipulate things such that it's illegal to publish something without the possibility of a corporation making a profit from it... (Of course, if they do, it would serve them right if a "creativity drain" into countries with more favorable Net laws took place as a result...)

Your point about the purpose of copyright and patents and the corporations' desire to distort these in order to have complete control of and maximum profit from the content they sell is well-made, however. Would someone please moderate that post up to 2?

forgot the link...
Userfriendly

I think you're right, that Delphi is more or less solely owned my Borland. At least, when I was going to every geek shack in Dallas looking for Assembly compilers (don't ask! it's a long story, trust me! :), the only Delphi compilers/toolkits were Borland products, and I'm not aware of Visual Studio suportting Delphi (at least, there's no such thing as Visual Delphi++ or the like) Come to think of it, I'm really suprised it's not Visual Basic++.

I agree with all of your concerns. I'm not sure about the size of the company in question, but if it has a very large IS department, at least give all of your source code to employees. Where I work we use customized word, but the back end of the customization is as hidden as they could make VBasic scripts. Thus, when our branch calls "upstairs" on a bug problem, we can't give them a very good idea of what's actually going on, just the symptoms.

I also just want to say that as far as the theory of "Will open source work for Windows?", in theory, Heck Yeah! I think the abundance of Quake & Q2 & (in the very near future) Q3 mods proves that it's not a Linux-only phenomenon. No, I'm not saying I consider Quake an open-source project, but as far as the user community goes, the spirit is there. I think that there's a lot of us out there who don't have any choice but live in a Windows World (especially in the educational community. I have yet to go to a class where the professor said "Oh, by the way, I do have a Linux box in my office, so if you would prefer to program for Linux, I encourage it").

Besides, starting open source projects for Windows would rattle Bill's cage more than a little :)

"Come on Baby (Don't fear the Penguin) Baby grab the tools (Don't fear the Penguin) You'll be able to fly (Don't fear the penguin) Baby it's your Chance...." ~The Dust Puppy (Don't Fear the Penguin)

You're in the midst of nowhere
a droplet in a mist,
you musta typed in something weird
this URL, it don't exist.


kwsNI

You're in the midst of nowhere
a droplet in a mist,
you musta typed in something weird
this URL, it don't exist.


kwsNI

There's no way the real Tux works for MS because he never would have let this terrible slam against Sun get out!

It's possible that the MS Tux is just the dust puppy working undercover! He couldn't stop the story because he didn't want to blow his cover! He would have had complete infiltration if it hadn't been for those pesky kids, and their dog! Err, I mean all you slashdotters.

Its the Katz factor:

/. + Katz = completely off topic.

sigh

Incidently, can we get a picture of Cat Five from userfriendly to be the icon for a john katz story?

--locust

Hmm.. odd that today's UF is about Five and Dustpuppy.

Is Illiad psycho^Hic or something? (:

I think the name Script Kitty is funnier... Oh, and here's the page with an ad (help pay for User Friendly), previous and next cartoon links, etc.

They should've called it Five :-)

I do not currently subscribe to the Post up here at WVU. I get most of my news from slashdot, or other internet sites. I get a lot of it from word of mouth. Sometimes I watch the news while I do homework.

The one paper that I do read is the Daily Atheneum, which I probably spelled wrong, since only freshmen refer to it as anything other than the DA.

I read it to get campus news, and local stuff that I don't find online. Pretty often, nothing is happening. I don't really give 2 shits about who is going to be elected to student government, especially since they are pretty much powerless. A recent poll revealed that about 4% of WVU students voted in the last election, a reflection of the mighty power wielded by the pretty boy frat guys that win this popularity contest.

My point is. Unless there is real local news, there isn't really much point in reading the paper anymore. I read the DA about once a month, when I find a copy on the floor of one of my less interesting lectures.

Stuff that I care about, I can read on the net, and when it's covered in the papers, it's usually covered wrong anyways. Y2K was a great example of that one.

I'll read the comics, if I have time... Goats and Userfriendly that is.

Here

No, your toilet will run MacOS.


Make Seven

It's just an operating system.

So who cares if so-and-so has a few criticisms of it? If you're going to get angry and rant, get angry and rant about something that really matters.

A short list of suggestions includes:

• My god/political system/WWF wrestler/favourite monster truck can kick your god's/political system's/WWF wrestler's/favourite monster truck's sorry ass any day.
• Dammit, it's "tastes great," not "less filling," and I will prove it by shoving your teeth down your throat.
• Hey! I called "shotgun" first!
• The great "hot grits" versus "cream of wheat" debate
• If all men are created equal, why do some get multi-million buyouts from VA Linux while others have to line up for free cheese?
• My need to get back at those goddamned liars at "Krispy Kreme Donuts". Vengeance will be mine!
• The fact that people are still spreading falsehoods that playing the accordion won't "get you chicks".*

  * At least they told me it was a woman wearing the costume at the time...

Constant connection vs. intermittent connection.
This turned out not to be an issue. Find a real map of cellular phone coverage in the states. I've found a whole slew of coverage maps, but it's just marketing material - according to them, you can go in the middle of the ocean, and there'll be one of their cell towers nearby. In truth, it's spottier than Keanu Reave's acting abilities. You'll only be able to get digitally useful connection in urban centres. Small towns need not apply, likewise interurban highways. This is reflected on the marketing cell maps by their fine-printed disclaimer: coverage may vary depending on terrain, weather, AOL stock price, other unexplainable phenomena, etc.

Cost
This is a MAJOR issue. We were attempting to budget this trip on an absolute minimum of money. (University students... what do you expect?) Roaming on cellular phones is heinously expensive. Water and oil don't mix.

Our solution ended up being pretty simple:
We'd get an ISP with a toll-free dial-up number, and a coupler to use with payphones.

The coupler was easy enough to do, as we'd already built one for another friend's birthday. (Old-school technology. Remember when your modem consisted of putting your phone on a cradle, speaker-to-mike, mike-to-speaker? Same idea, only think duct-tape and velcro! Kinda crappy on batteries though.)

I was actually on an ISP with toll-free dial-up at the time. It's a big canadian ISP you've probably seen spoofed in UF - it's called ICan.

It would've been a great trip, but we just didn't have enough money to buy a vehicle, not to mention personal maintenance along the way. (read: food and BEvERages).

-blarg

'PC experience started with Apple II and visicalc'

That, in itself, makes him an atypical user: he has a lot of experience and began using computers quite a while ago. He owns two computers (not to mention that his 10 year old son has his own computer), he owns a scanner, CD-RW, and a zip drive. The computers are all networked. This doesn't sound hard-core techy to most slashdot readers, but it is a cut above the typical user. The fact that he installed linux himself makes him atypical: nowadays OS installation isn't hard, but it isn't something that the typical user does.

Still, it obviously means that Linux is getting to be more of a mainstream OS. Just today I saw it mentioned in Foxtrot, which, while it is nerdier than some strips, is still not User Friendly.

Of course, I'm not saying that this guy is a linux-pro, and I'm not saying that the typical computer user (which is a pretty blurry term: how do you define it? someone who uses computers? how often do they have to use them to qualify?) is a clueless newbie: often, the typical user is a newbie for a week or two, but then gets into the competent-but-not-knowledgeable category: they can drive the car expertly, but they still have no clue what goes on underneath the hood.

It seems like Linux is still testing the waters of the mainstream. But, according to me at least, that penguin still needs some swim lessons.

They point out that AOL did it to reduce competition from other ISP's (such as Prodigy) and the question 'Do you want AOL to be your default ISP?' is the setup part that causes problems.

Teaches people right not read their License Agreement.

This could be very bad precident to be set by courts, with poor documentation being grounds for a Class Action Suit.

--
Gonzo Granzeau

It doesn't compile on my system (gcc version 2.95.2, glibc2) but you might want to check Illiads entry for this contest.

Some anonymous coward dun said:

As a marketing guy it is my JOB to dictate technology. You seem to have a 'developers outlook', fair enough, but trust me we in marketing know what sells and that's the bottom line. (I'm sorry if this conflicts with your left-wing views) My corporation believes that Linux has the potential to become the next "Pokemon". However we have a real serious problem marketing it to the most lucrative segment of the marketplace, namely the upscale domestic consumer.

O_o

Erm...who in the name of Ithaqua let Stef out of User Friendly and onto Slashdot? :)

*makes mental note--remind Iliad that some parts of reality should not be bent without serious thought :) Or tell Miranda to watch the swing with the Louisville Slugger, because she has apparently knocked Stef clean out of the Ufie Universe :)*

you all did read the user friendly they had around christmas, didn't you?

go read it for a good laugh.
Sunday, 12-26-1999

The first pictures of the "new" moon were taken on December, 13th 1998... you don't believe? Look here! ;-)