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MS Pressuring NW Schools: Pay Up, Or Face Audit
razvedchik writes: "As reported in this article in the Portland, OR newspaper, The Oregonian, Microsoft is pressuring 24 school districts in the northwest to agree to their Microsoft School Agreement licensing scheme or undergo an audit in 60 days. Multnomah ESD, which covers the greater Portland area and has around 25,000 computers, has to either decide to accept the license at about $500,000 or undergo the audit which it does not have time to prepare for. Of significant interest is the fact that a significant majority of these schools are experimenting with using Linux. Multnomah ESD has its own thin-client Linux distro called K12LTSP."
Drain your swampy armpits, wash off your rancid body odor and fix the bug dammit!! But please - for Gods sake, TAKE A SHOWER!
fp
No!!!
All your computers are belong to us!
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
Some folks have asked me what I know about Jon Katz. It occurs to me that most folks have probably never heard the story, and of the ones who have heard of it, few would know or remember the details. So here's what I know about Jon Katz, plus a little history to put it in context. The dates could be off a bit. I also have a copy of Ben Baker's take on the whole deal, which goes into a lot more detail.
In 1985 I wrote a program called ARC. It became very popular with the operators of electronic bulletin boards, which was what the online world consisted of in those pre-Internet days. A big part of ARC's popularity was because we made the source code available. I know that seems strange these days, but back then a lot of software was distributed in source. Every company that made computers made a completely different computer. Different architectures, operating systems, languages, everything. Getting a program written for one computer to work on another was often a major undertaking.
Then sometime around 1987 or so Jon Katz came out with PKARC, which was basically my ARC program with the compression/decompression routines rewritten in assembler, which made it run a lot faster. I have to hand it to him, he had a real talent for assembly coding.
We approached him about licensing, but he rejected the idea. One thing led to another, and eventually we sued him. Fortunately his program was such a blatant copy of mine that we were able to win the lawsuit before we ran out of money. In a negotiated settlement he again rejected any suggestion of licensing and went for a cash-out settlement. He repaid us for most of our legal bills and promised to stop selling his program sometime in 1988.
Then he fiddled with the file format a bit, renamed it from PKARC to PKZIP, and kept right on selling it.
We sort of lost touch after that. We would have liked to have kept in touch, but we couldn't afford the legal bills. There wasn't a lot to sue for anyway. None of us was getting rich.
So now Jon Katz is dead. He drank himself to death, alone in a motel room, a bottle of booze in his hand and five empties in the room. One can only guess what drove him to such a tragic end, but it is a fitting demise for a man whose professional reputation is based entirely on a lie.
I can think of no more fitting epitath than the final clause of the original ARC copyright statement:
Many times I've heard computer "geeks" express a desire to do some charitable volunteer work, but bemoan the fact that there are so few opportunites to use their computer skills in such a way. It seems to me one thing that you could do is volunteer your time to your local school, and help them install linux and other free software. This would help them avoid the terrible situation Microsft is putting the above mentioned schools in.
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I HATE THE USA
With the Cheney-Rumsfeld Administration in The White House. My complaint about Dick Cheney: May I be cynical for a bit? I hope you don't mind, but with Cheney's latest barrage of malodorous notions, I can't resist the urge to make a few cynical comments. To get right down to it, some of the facts I'm about to present may seem shocking. This they certainly are. However, it's time that a few facts had a chance to slip through the fusillade of hype. What's my problem, then? Allow me to present it in the form of a question: Where are the people who are willing to stand up and acknowledge that Cheney, in his infinite wisdom, has decided to destroy the natural beauty of our parks and forests? On the surface, it would seem to have something to do with the way that his whole approach is repugnant. But upon further investigation, one will find that by allowing Cheney to put mephitic thoughts in our children's minds, we are allowing him to play puppet master. As for the lies and exaggerations, Cheney's epigrams are rife with contradictions and difficulties; they're entirely maladroit, meet no objective criteria, and are unsuited for a supposedly educated population. And as if that weren't enough, if Cheney is going to obstruct important things, then he should at least have the self-respect to remind himself of a few things: First, a true enemy is better than a false friend. And second, many people respond to his debauched vituperations in much the same way that they respond to television dramas. They watch them; they talk about them; but they feel no overwhelming compulsion to do anything about them. That's why I insist we pronounce the truth and renounce the lies. Even people who consider themselves scornful foolhardy-types generally agree that Cheney's slurs symbolize lawlessness, violence, and misguided rebellion -- extreme liberty for a few, even if the rest of us lose more than a little freedom. One might conclude that Cheney is incapable of writing a letter without using such phrases as "crapulous pop psychologists", "loquacious exhibitionists", "oppressive personae non gratae", or some combination thereof. Alternatively, one might conclude that Cheney has a different view of reality from the rest of us. In either case, if you're not part of the solution, then you're part of the problem. His historical record of fickle pleas is clearer than the muddled pronouncements of his apple-polishers for a variety of reasons. For instance, the worst sorts of inconsiderate Neanderthals there are must be treated with political justice, not with civil justice, as they are sincerely not real citizens. Let me rephrase that: I wonder if he really believes the things he says. He knows they're not true, doesn't he? A complete answer to that question would take more space than I can afford, so I'll have to give you a simplified answer. For starters, if we let him cause riots in the streets, then greed, corruption, and tribalism will characterize the government. Oppressive measures will be directed against citizens. And lies and deceit will be the stock and trade of the media and educational institutions. Even Cheney's bedfellows couldn't deal with the full impact of Cheney's refrains. That's why they created "Cheney-ism," which is just a garrulous excuse to force square pegs into round holes. He plans to drag everything that is truly great into the gutter. He has instructed his votaries not to discuss this or even admit to his plan's existence. Obviously, Cheney knows he has something to hide. Most of you reading this letter have your hearts in the right place. Now follow your hearts with actions. I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people. I can therefore assure you that Cheney's artifices cannot stand on their own merit. That's why they're dependent on elaborate artifices and explanatory stories to convince us that Cheney's warnings can give us deeper insights into the nature of reality. We can and we must protect ourselves by any means necessary against the unrestrained bestiality of stupid, quasi-macabre paper-pushers. And that's the honest truth.
Do you really have to nitpick? Does it make you feel smart to nitpick? Why is it every time someone makes a good informative comment some ass has to come along and bitch about the spelling, or the wording. My whole comment was good, to the point, informative and ontopic. You need to get a life my friend.
He told us that he couldn't afford to build his own arena, but he found a way to buy up the land around the arena that we built.
We get a sorry return on that investment in his sports team. Besides this Windows software, he imports to Portland a frequently disgraceful bunch of athletes to amuse himself. His big acquisition this year was a convicted sex offender. They've had about three with notorious drug problems over the past few years, one found in bed with a 14-year old girl, and many reckless driving problems, including one who flips a Mercedes on the freeway at 100+ MPH and another with a 95 MPH ticket. (There is no place near Portland where that's safe.) Well, his company is a convicted anti-trust violator, so what do you expect, good character? Compassionate marketing? When our kids have role models like that, why bother educating them at all?