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Charles Stross Interview
An anonymous reader writes "I'm surprised nobody mentioned this yet: a very interesting interview with author Charles Stross, whose current cycle of singularity-based stories Accelerando (featuring character Manfred Macx) is as tightly-packed with cutting-edge speculations as Bruce Sterling's work. An excerpt from the first of those stories is currently available on the Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine website."
First post?
Whats black, blue and green and doesnt like sex?
The Girl Scout locked in my basement.
Whats the worst part about having sex with a six year-old?
Getting the blood out of your clown suit.
Whats the best thing about getting a hand job from a five year-old?
That little hand makes your thing look really huge.
Guy comes home from work to find his girlfriend sitting on the porch, crying.
Whats wrong, honey?
Im leaving you! I just found out youre a pdophile!
Pdophile? Why, thats a pretty big word for a ten year-old.
How can you tell when your sisters on her period?
When your dads dick tastes like blood!
Two pdophiles are lying on a beach tanning, one turns to the other and says, Excuse me, youre in my son.
What is the sickest sound you hear when fucking a nine year-old?
Her hips snapping!
What is the best sound you hear when fucking a 13 year-old?
Her hips snapping!
Whats 18 inches long, blue, veiny, and makes a woman cry?
Crib death.
How could the mans seven year-old son tell that his dad had fucked his eight year-old sister? His dads weiner tasted like blood!
Watson returns home to find Holmes in bed with a child. He shouts, Is this some sort of a schoolgirl?
Holmes replies, Elementary, my dear Watson.
So I was having sex with my girlfriend, and I decided I wanted to get kinky and try and do her in the ass. So I slipped around back; she looked over her shoulder at me and said, My, how presumptuous of you. I said, Presumptuous? Thats a big word for a ten year-old.
Two guys are walking down the street when a beautiful woman passes. The first guy says, Damn! Id love to tear her clothes off, do her in the rear, smear my fces all over her, slice off her breasts, chop her into little pieces, put her in a garbage bag and toss her into the river!
Second guy says, Yuck! Youre a sick bastard!
First guy says, Whatre you? A fag?
A kindergarten teacher is asking the kids what their father does for a living. All the kids answer except for Little Johnny. The teacher asks Little Johnny what his Dad does and Johnny replies, My dad is dead.
The teacher says, Thats terribile, but what did he do before he died?
Little Johnny replies, He turned blue and shit all over himself!
A guy calls in sick to work.
Whats wrong? asks the boss.
Im sick, the guy replies.
You sound all right.
No, Im really sick. Believe me.
Listen, you were fine yesterday, and we have a lot of work today. I want you in here. You cant be that sick!
Dude, I just banged my sister. Dont tell me Im not sick.
A little girl accompanied her father to the barbershop. While her dad received a haircut, the little girl stood next to the barber chair, enjoying a snack cake. The barber smiled at her and said, Sweetheart, youre going to get hair on your Twinkie.
I know, the little girl replied. Im gonna get tits, too.
An older man and a small boy walk hand in hand through the woods.
Boy: These woods sure are spooky!
Man: You think youre scared, Ive gotta walk out of here alone.
Whats the difference between Neil Armstrong and Michael Jackson?
One walked on the moon, and the other rapes little boys.
Has anyone read Michael Jacksons new book, The Ins and Outs of Child Rearing?
Q: Whats the difference between a dead baby and a golden delicious apple?
A: I dont cum all over the golden delicious apple before I take a bite out of it.
Q: Whats the difference between a dead baby and my girlfriend?
A: I dont kiss my girlfriend after sex.
Q: Whats the difference between a dead baby and a table?
A: You cant fuck a table.
Q: Whats special about a dead baby over all other forms of life?
A: You can achieve deep throat from whichever way you enter.
Q: What do you have when you have four dead babies, take away two, and add five more?
A: An orgy!
Q: Whats better than three 14 year-olds?
A: 14 three year-olds.
Q: Whats white and bobs up and down in a babys crib?
A: A pdophiles ass.
Q: Whats the safest way to play with a baby?
A: With a condom.
Q: Whats more fun than feeling up a dead baby?
A: Feeling up a dead baby with three nipples.
Q: What does a baby and a Pinto have in common?
A: Theyre fun to ride until they die.
Q: What do you get whan you dislocate a dead babys jaw?
A: Deep throat.
Q: Whats the difference between a baby and a grandmother?
A: Grandmothers dont die when you fuck them in the ass.
Q: Whats the best sound in the world?
A: Hearing dead babys hips crack under pressure!
Q: Whats worse than a having sex with a dead baby?
A: Having sex with a dead baby filled with razor blades.
Q: How do you stop a baby from choking?
A: Take your dick out of its mouth.
Q: Whats worse than finding a dead baby on your pillow in the morning?
A: Realizing you were drunk and made love to it the night before.
Q: How do you make a baby cry twice?
A: Wipe your bloody cock on his teddy bear.
Whats better than sex with a twelve year-old boy?
Absolutely nothing.
- posted by poopbot: because even your grandmother can use lunix
FWZHWjdSb5 Post #915
-= OBEY =- mother fuckaz
Charles Stross is a computer programmer and writer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. On his webpage, he describes his salient characteristics in a compact form of Geek code: GTW/CS/L/MD d-- s:+ a? C++++$ UL++++$ UC++$ US+++$ P++++$ L+++$ E--- W+++$ N+++ o+ K+++ !w--- O- M+ V- PS+++ PE Y++ PGP+ !t 5? X-- !R(+++) tv-- b+++ DI++++/++ !D G+ e+++ h++/-/--- r++ z? He is also a mind-bogglingly talented science fiction and fantasy author. He is currently in the midst of publishing a series of nine tales in Asimov's magazine. Collectively titled Accelerando, these stories chart humanity's coming transhuman evolution across the decades of the 21st Century. Debuting in the summer of 2001 with "Lobsters," his stories begin in the early 21st Century, at a time when Stross says "extropianism collides with the open source movement." "Lobsters" (nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novelette) introduces us to the permanently wired Manfred Macx, a youthful, self-assured (and self-doubting) cultural purveyor, the world's first "Venture Altruist," out to prove the validity of Win-Win synergistic scenarios while engaging in exotic drugs and sexual experimentation against a near future socio-political backdrop. Fleeing his dominatrix ex-wife, shifting world economies, trading his image on the "reputations market," and inventing extropianistic technologies are all in a day's work. Manfred features in the first three tales, which then skip a generation to pick the story up with his daughter, Amber, for the next trilogy. While Accelerando makes use of staple cyberpunk concepts like uploads, A.I., and singularities, Stross employs them with a startlingly sharp level of insight into current geo-political trends, and his words are informed by a deeply-embedded knowledge of the current technological landscape. The result is not so much another iteration of post-cyberpunk as it is a brand new and unique speculative voice, charting new territories far in advance of any other writer of hard SF. Stross' talents have already been lauded loudly by the likes of Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick, and it is my personal opinion that he will swiftly emerge as one of the "important" writers of the present decade. THE INTERVIEW Lou Anders: A bio run in a recent Asimov's points out that you are not a "new Scottish writer," as sometimes described. Well, then, to begin: If not a "new Scottish writer," what are you? Charles Stross: I'm a bit of an anomaly. Firstly, I live in Edinburgh, Scotland, but I'm not from Scotland--I was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, have lived in a variety of parts of the UK, and just happen to have settled in Edinburgh for a while. These days there seem to be two cultures--people who stay where their roots are, and those who move around. I'm part of the second. (If you go back further, to my great-grandparents' generation, you get on the one hand a bunch of Jewish wool merchants who roved all over Eastern Europe but settled briefly in Poland--and on the other side, well, I don't know: my family tended to marry late, and all but one of my grandparents died before I was born. Maybe it's no surprise that I feel a little rootless.) As for "new" ... I sold my first short story in 1987, to Interzone. From 1987 to 1995 I think I probably sold upwards of a hundred thousand words of short fiction. However, I only broke the surface in the US with my first sale to Asimov's in 2001. Which is why everybody seems to think I'm a new writer.
LA: You've been compared to Bruce Sterling. How do you feel about the comparison and how do you contrast your work with his?
CS: I'm flattered--I'm a great fan of Bruce's work--but I'd like to think I'm a bit different from him. The comparison seems to be coming from those people who've read the Asimov's stories. You'd get a broader picture of what I write from the short story collection Toast (Cosmos Books, out now, available from Amazon.com and elsewhere), my forthcoming novel Festival of Fools, and so on.
Without wanting to pin myself down too tightly, I think Bruce's work is informed by his other activities--he's a damn fine journalist, with a deep and abiding interest in the way environmental changes lead to cultural change in human societies. I'm simply not in that field, at least not to the same extent.
Back when I was young (in the early eighties), a couple of silly career choices led me into some rather strange head-space; the ideas that you need a science degree to write science fiction, and that maybe Neuromancer was an aspirational future, were a lot more appealing at eighteen than at thirty-seven. I outlived my mistakes, but they left me some interesting perspectives on the nature of personal change. In particular, I've been privileged to live and work for most of a decade inside an industry that really did seem as if it was slouching towards a singularity, with exponential change and an outlook that said 15% growth per year is stasis. I think I'm still assimilating some of those implications--and also the realization that core human personality types persist even if you change the environment so far that they're hopelessly ill-adapted.
LA: So how did you come up with the character of Manfred Macx? How soon after envisioning him did you come up with the 9-part story arc of Accelerando?
CS: I wrote "Lobsters" in September 1999 or thereabouts. At the time, I was (a) writing the open source column in Computer Shopper (Brit magazine of that name, tends to run challenging editorial matter along with more or less the same recipe as the Ziff-Davis Computer Shopper), and (b) being senior programmer for a dot-com startup called Datacash. Datacash processes credit card payments via the British credit card system; at one point about 30% of the ecommerce transactions in the UK were flowing through the servers I'd written. Which had a psychotherapist wired into the public interface because I felt I needed the debugging more than the program did. By September my to-do list was eight years deep, Y2K was sneaking up on us, the company was preparing to go public, and I was heading for a nervous breakdown.
(I avoided the nervous breakdown by writing "Lobsters" and quitting to go freelance. The company went public and promptly hit the collapsing bubble--but they're still going and actually profitable. And I got shafted over stock options, as is often the case. But that's someone else's story--probably Douglas Coupland's.)
When you're making a revolution in cyberspace, things look rather different from the way the 1980s cyberpunks wrote it. So after doing "Lobsters," which obviously wasn't the entire story, I thought, "Hang on, why not do cyberpunk again? Only this time, do it the way it really was, with a Vingean singularity thrown in?" Hence the sequence of stories I'm trying to write around Manfred and his posthuman descendants.
(The C*punk tropes are either cliches or reality these days. I mean, when you've led a bunch of six developers trying to defect from one corporation to another ...)
LA: The Accelerando tales are some of the most inspired, imaginative and exciting fiction I've read in the past year. They are also information-dense beyond even Greg Egan's work. Practically every sentence references some cutting edge technology or development in genetic engineering, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, social theory, etc. What's entailed in writing one of these?
CS: Extreme brain strain.
I'm probably not giving anything away if I mention that, between starting story #6 and finishing it, I wrote a 185,000 word alternate history novel--just by way of avoiding having to face up to the hard work.
I'm immersed in the computing/web field because that's what I spent the past decade working in, after a false start as a pharmacist. (I still have a certificate that says I'm allowed to keep heroin and cocaine in the course of my lawful business!) However, I also have enough of a background in biochemistry and pharmacology to have a vague idea what's happening in those fields, as well. And I'm a bit of an information junkie: I read widely for sense-of-wonder, and don't confine myself to the SF field to get the kick. If you follow coverage in non-technical science magazines like New Scientist or Scientific American you can pick up interesting leads on stuff that is attracting a current-day buzz; some of this stuff has implications far beyond what makes it into those magazines, implications that go all the way into paradigm-shift this-is-the-new-revolution territory.
We seem these days to be seeing new ground-breaking theoretical developments at a rate of one every six months to a year: breakthroughs on the same order as general relativity or quantum theory. (You don't see such breakthroughs routinely in physics, which is a relatively mature field, but if you look into the biological sciences equivalent breakthroughs appear to be coming thick and fast.)
At the same time, social change is running far faster than in previous centuries. There are already signs that we're moving into the post-AIDS generation--HIV in the developed world is an expensive but treatable disease, like cancer, rather than an automatic death sentence, and over the next decade or two this is going to have interesting social consequences. So is the religious-conservative backlash. (I've already seen discussions by conservative medical ethicists who suggest that attempts at finding medical treatments for the collection of cumulative metabolic malfunctions known as "old age" should be banned, on the grounds that indefinite prolongation of youth increases the time before someone gets to meet their maker. There seems to be a crisis of confidence in western conservativism that runs so deep that many conservatives feel driven to seek new ideological and philosophical justifications for opposing change.)
Then there's politics. Politics is about the art of building a consensus opinion on how to run society. Politics is also challenged by the pace of change and--frighteningly, to me--most of our politicians are dinosaurs. Tony Blair can't even type, much less use a computer to send and receive his own email; when most of the occupants of the US Senate and Congress are lawyers, you'll get legislation put forward that only a lawyer could love. (Such as the current nightmare over copy prevention, sponsored by the Senator for Disney, "Fritz" Hollings, which to implement effectively would require a ban on universal Turing machines.)
But, to get back to the question ...
Each of these stories is a pile of brightly-coloured bricks balanced on top of a tottering pile. When I set out to write another story I grab a bunch of bricks and ram them together, trying to work out how they fit. Most of them are derived from existing developments that seem to make sense. I think we can take an eventual mature nanotechnology as a given by the late 21st century: I also think we'll see early commercial applications within a decade of today. Religious conservatives and Roger Penrose aside, I see no real practical stumbling blocks to the idea of interfacing human brains (and the software running on them) directly to computing machinery. Those two developments alone will dwarf everything else that has happened to the human species since 12,000 BC (and the development of agriculture). I'd also predict that in the next couple of decades we'll see at least one emergent technology that is at least as important again. Working A.I. is a major possibility, and its effects would be earth-shattering (as Vernor Vinge pointed out in his seminal essay on the Singularity). Another possibility is the weird artificial atom stuff that Wil McCarthy is currently writing about. And then there's quantum teleportation, atom lasers generated from Bose-Einstein condensates (think about holography with atoms instead of photons!), and so on.
But--and this is a key insight--the people dealing with these new technologies will still be derived from the human stock we're familiar with today. They may be augmented, uploaded, or enhanced, and they may have very alien attitudes, but they're still going to be recognizably human.
LA: Because of the aforementioned "information density" of the prose, the Accelerando tales are something of a challenging read. Who is your core audience? (I suspect they are a mix of computer programmers, genetic engineers, avid devourers of Wired magazine, and sentient crustaceans.) And are you bothered by the fact that you may be writing for a very narrow margin of speculative fiction readers who can actually keep up?
CS: I wrote "Lobsters" and showed it to a friend. He said "that's really cool, but you'll never sell it--the audience would have to overdose on Slashdot for six months before they got it." He was completely right--he just underestimated the number of people out there who overdose on Slashdot!
Frankly, I don't care if the Accelerando stories have a limited audience. I'm writing them to explore a highly experimental, cutting-edge area that nobody else seems to be doing much in. But they're not the only things I write, and some of the other stuff has probably got a broader appeal. (It's just that the other stuff is novel length and isn't on sale via Amazon.com yet.)
LA: So how are these stories being received?
CS: It's a little hard for me to tell--Asimov's has about the same readership in the UK that Interzone has in the US, which is to say, very small--but I haven't had anyone come up to me and tell me that they suck. Which is a small victory.
LA: I find it hysterical that you cast the communists and the IRS as the last hard-line defenders of capitalism. Let's talk about the political landscape in which these tales begin. And do you really see the old guard approaching obsolescence in such a short scale of time?
CS: It's already happened!
Lenin's flavour of State Marxism (which should not be confused with real communism, any more than today's system should be conflated with a libertarian, hands-off, truly free free market system) was predicated on the need to industrialise the Russian Empire and then run an industrial-age economy. It addressed precisely the same top-down managerial concerns as the western system during the early years of the 20th century, and as late as the mid-1960s it could be argued that central planning was more efficient and less wasteful than the market economy.
But a market economy is essentially a genetic algorithm for solving resource allocation problems, and while the Soviets were grappling with abacuses and five year plans, the western economies were automating their genetic algorithms and adding all sorts of weird feedback loops in the form of derivatives and options trades. And the western economies were also moving into a new, post-industrial phase. Efficiency killed off the first industrial revolution's economy, so that from having 50% of the population working in factories, we have to find service industry jobs for them. And this change happened so damned fast that the GOSPLAN five year feedback cycle was stuffed. The big corporate-managerial dinosaurs were mobbed and eaten alive by fast-moving mammals and bloodthirsty corporate raiders
Note that while a real-time market system is far more efficient at allocating resources than a central planning system with a slow feedback loop, it is not the most efficient possible resource allocation tool. Actually, we don't even know if a most-efficient-possible solution is practical--it's one of a sub-class of problems in computer science that are known as NP-incomplete, and there's a chance that a better solution will come along at some point.
Now, as to the political old guard approaching obsolescence, for a microcosmic view of what I'm talking about, look at the music and film industries. I could write a book--or at least a chapter--describing the insanities of the studio system, but, in a nutshell, the situation is that big music or movie distributors find it easier to distribute a homogeneous product. It's cheaper to sell a billion copies of one record than a million copies each of a thousand discs. So they're squeezing the variety, thinking that they're selling a physical product--but they're not: they're trying to sell ideas. There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the term "intellectual property," because information isn't transferred between brains: it's copied. The music and film industries are finally waking up to the fact that as they squeeze their product range down, people lose interest in the range and look outside it for independent productions. So they're panicking, blaming the new business model, fighting a zero-sum rear-guard action, and trying to ban progress.
They may succeed. If so, I fear we're doomed to live in a world not unlike that of Rebecca Ore's Outlaw School (Tor, 2000). And I really don't want to go there.
LA: Tell me a little bit more about "extropianism colliding with the open source movement".
CS: Extropianism is a fascinating movement. It's the idea that the human condition is changeable--and for the better. Smart drugs, life prolongation, mind uploading, personality augmentation, improvement. I'd call it Panglossian, except that Dr Pangloss's name has become a dirty word. All too many people who look at the future do so with dismal, malthusian expectations, and the key feature of extropianism (once you strip out the tendency for American Libertarians to jump on the boat) seems to be techno-optimism.
The open source movement is also fascinating, but unlike the extropians, it's one with muscle in the real world--enough muscle that Bill Gates and the music and film industries are scared witless by it. Free software (open source is merely the commercially-correct politically sanitized version of the term) addresses the key contradiction I mentioned earlier in the concept of "intellectual property"--it's free as in speech, not free as in beer. You can sell free software: the only thing you can't do with it is prevent people from copying it.
I think if legislators don't crush it the free software movement--which, incidentally, has its roots in the culture of scientific research and information sharing--will be one of the big industrial drivers of the next century. Forget software for a moment and think in terms of mature nanotechnology or biotechnology. Both these fields are distinguished from previous technologies in that they will work with self-replicating systems that can be programmed to produce end products. One can see the free software movement as a precusor for a "free hardware" or "free wetware" movement--one that will provide free libraries of designs for biological or nanotechnological products that replicators can be programmed to churn out. Just as I don't spend money on email clients or text editors when there are really good free ones available, why would I (for example) spend money on a sofa when there's a really good free template for one available on the web and I can grow it myself in my ACME Home Factory(TM)? Or even grow a GNU Free Factory in it, and stop paying ACME royalties?
The combination of techno-optimism and self-replicating technologies and free software for controlling those technologies is going to be explosive. Sometimes literally so.
LA: You skip forward in time considerably with story number four, which picks up with Manfred's daughter Amber. At first I was disappointed to see Macx go, but now I'm falling in love with her. Why the generational jump and will we do this again in part three? Any chance dad (or a part of him) will make a reappearance?
CS: I wrote "Lobsters" as a standalone, then realised it was screaming for a sequel. By the time I was halfway into "Troubadour" I had a tentative map of what lay ahead. Manfred exited with story #3 because he was burned out by the rate of change. He may reappear in subsequent stories but he's no longer the flag-carrier for progress--he's granddad.
LA: Manfred's artificial cat, Aineko, may be my favorite character, and I was very glad to find that she has made the transition from the first trilogy of tales to Part Two. Am I right in assuming that Aineko may be serving the function of the robotic "window character" in your trilogy that C3PO and R2D2 serve in another famous series of trilogies?
CS: Yes. The description is, "a series of nine stories, each set an average of 5-10 years apart, covering three generations of a dysfunctional family as it makes its way through the singularity - told from the point of view of the family cat".
Note also that Aineko gets smarter with each story and every upgrade. You can pin-point the singularity as the time at which Aineko hits human-equivalent smarts :)
LA: In story # 6, "Nightfall", Aineko does a stint as the chesire cat. Why is it that Alice in Wonderland is so heavily mined in cyberpunk? It's almost the core archetype of virtual reality.
CS: Lewis Carroll was heavily into mathematics: a lot of his core ideas draw on some rather interesting insights he had, and his style appeals to the common cultural background of the hacker community. (Look at where the convention of the READ.ME file comes from, for example! Or check the Jargon File/New Hacker's Dictionary entries, or look at Martin Gardner's footnotes to The Annotated Alice.)
Really, if you could build a time machine and bring one Victorian-era person forward in time to our present day, Carroll strikes me as being the one most likely to take everything nonchalantly in his stride.
LA: Let's talk about your choice to write across the singularity. Vernor Vinge says that you CAN'T know what occurs on the other side, yet you suggest at one point that the singularity has already begun--and date it from the first conception of the Internet! What problems does writing about the singularity present? And (and here's the difficult one) do you think the singularity has become enough of a part of the dialogue that anything not billing itself as fantasy must take it into account to have any relevance?
CS: Actually, for me the pivotal scene was the one in the bar, with five people arguing about when the singularity happened. One placed it in 1969 (when the first IMP sent a "ping" packet to the second IMP, and it promptly crashed). Another plumped for 2030 (human-equivalent A.I.), one went for 2018 (nanotech replicator) and a third went for the steam engine.
Really, we have had several singularities. The first, some time between 40,000BC and 250,000BC, was the development of a sufficiently complex semantic engine in our brain to make complex grammatical statements possible. Without that, we wouldn't be human--we'd just be very smart apes.
A second singularity occurred around 12,000BC. That was the development of agriculture. Once you've discovered agriculture, you can support far more people on a given land area than you can as hunter-gatherers. Sure there are drawbacks--you have to work a lot harder, you get diseases from your domesticated animals, and so on--but you outnumber the hunter-gatherers a hundred to one, and it's a one-way phase transition: going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle is only possible if you accept a 90-98% population reduction. On the other hand an agricultural culture can produce the surpluses necessary to support cities and organizational structures larger than a village, with all that this entails.
I'm not certain where to point the finger, but I'm pretty certain at least one more singularity occurred between 1600 and 1900. Certainly something big changed in the structure of human civilizations, which went from mostly-static to very rapidly, dynamically changing. Even if the root cause wasn't a cultural change (such as the 18th century Enlightenment) or a legal change (such as the 17th century invention of the limited liability company) or a technological change (such as the 18th/19th century adoption of the steam engine) something happened that pushed over the ant heaps and set us all scurrying around the globe, and those countries that tried to ignore it got stomped on (e.g. late imperial China, the Ottoman Empire) by those that embraced it (Japan, Britain, Germany, the USA).
Unlike Vinge, I do not believe it is impossible to write about what happens after the singularity--however, I think it depends which singularity you pick, and how thoroughly your extrapolation pursues second-order effects.
LA: So, as one of your characters puts it, are you a singularitarian yourself?
CS: I'm not 100% sure I believe in the singularity. Certainly I don't believe in the rapture of the nerds--the idea of a single point at which everything changes and all will be right thereafter. New technologies slow down radically after a period of rapid change during their assimilation. However, I can see a series of overlapping sigmoid curves that might resemble an ongoing hyperbolic curve if you superimpose them on one another, each segment representing the period of maximum change as a new technology appears.
I've lately been trying to project possible futures that don't include any kind of singularity, be it a minor one (like the steam engine) or a massive one (strongly superhuman A.I.s that are to us as we are to cats and dogs). Mostly they require either a malthusian collapse, or repressive legislative/political forces. So, to that extent, any SF that doesn't try to address the issue is either a dystopia or a fantasy. (Not that the converse holds true--SF that discusses the singularity is not automatically utopian or hard-SF.)
LA: Do you see real-life technologies, in our lifetimes, which approximate something like what you and other SF writers envision?
CS: I believe that now, in 2002, we live in a world that would be utterly unpredictable from the perspective of 1902. It's not the macroscopic changes that count (the USA has replaced the UK almost perfectly in the political/military arena), but the minutiae of daily life, and stuff that gets hidden in the cracks.
In 1902, you would face a 30% chance of dying of a bacterial disease. Today (with the possible exception of multidrug-resistant TB) that isn't an issue.
You would almost certainly live without electricity, and an evening's entertainment would involve a piano and a sing-along, or maybe a session at the pub or saloon bar.
Social flexibility is vastly greater today, but then, it has to be: the world today is only 48 hours in diameter (in travel time), about the size of the English home counties in 1802, or the states of New England in 1902. We have had to learn to live shoulder-to-shoulder with people who are really strange, and this entails learning when to ignore their really strange habits. (Many of today's problems seem to stem from insular, intolerant cultures that are suddenly unable to ignore the cheek-by-jowl nature of the information age and take violent exception to being forced to deal with it.)
The stuff I write about and the tools I use to do it were beyond the imagination of Verne or Wells, because those guys thought of industrialistion in terms of big machines with lots of moving parts, rather than information.
Probably by this time in the next century the information age will seem laughably quaint, the first decade one with the digital dark ages (of proprietary file formats and repressive copyright laws that have caused massive bit-rot to deprive future generations of any non-first-hand knowledge of the past).
I don't know whether you'd call that a singularity, though.
LA: For me, one of the most intriguing concepts you introduced in Accelerando was when you suggested that the Fermi Paradox may be explained by the problem of bandwidth. I'm also amazed by the concept of a transhuman ecology - with a whole hierarchy of scavenging intelligences preying on the newcomers by passing themselves off as the top of the ladder. I'm not aware of a precedent for this, but I think it's truly inspired and somewhat frightening. How the hell did you come up with it?
CS: An acquaintance of mine breeds companies for a living.
I'm not kidding. He has a nice little business that sells shell companies with all their paperwork via the back page of Private Eye.
To spawn a new company, he fills out the paperwork and three of his tame companies each occupy a niche as company secretary, company treasurer, and company chair-thing. When it's time to sell the new company into bondage, the chair-being "resigns" and the other companies elect the purchaser to the chair and issue shares.
Ownership of a company approximates to the paper-based equivalent of owning an Internet domain.
Now, a company has a constitution--a set of rules that govern its behaviour. About the only meta-rules governing what goes into this are (a) that they've got to be legal (you can't have a company that exists for the purpose of murdering people), and (b) that the lawyers can ensure the company is running in compliance with its rules. Why not embed a LISP or Scheme interpreter in the rules and instruct the company to maintain state information and accept instructions from its directors? Who might be other companies? Why not load OpenCYC or some other expert system into your company? Why not turn a viable sentient AI into a company in order to give it a legal identity and legal person-hood (so that it can own property and can't legally be killed without going through certain steps)?
The ecology thing becomes clear when you get someone with a background in the biological sciences to take a look at economics. Some companies in an information economy feed on the ideas of the humans who comprise their cells. Other companies mediate information flow between the producers and yet more, who make money by selling information to end-purchasers. Big companies eat little companies, and other cliches of the market age. It's a jungle out there, and once we get companies that are wholly self-directed some of them will live by the lore (or law) of the jungle.
(This is one reason why maybe market economies are not that good an idea in the long term.)
LA: Care to give us any spoilers about Part Three? What timeframe it occurs in or who the central character will be?
CS: All I can say is that the sequence ends before the 21st Century does, and Aineko features in it.
LA: Let's talk about your other fiction. What else are you working on?
CS: I've got two novels in varying stages right now. The first, Festival of Fools, is due out from Big Engine in the UK in early 2003 (US publication to be decided--you'll have to ask me again in a month or two [Editor's note: Ace will publish the US editions of this and another Charles Stross novel]). Festival of Fools is a post-singularity space opera, set about five centuries hence, and it's a space opera which doesn't try to avoid the essential concept that faster-than-light travel implies causality violation. In fact, causality violation is at the root of the singularity in this universe (being the technique the vastly-superhuman and weakly godlike entity calling itself the Eschaton uses to deal with NP-complete problems and prevent time travellers preventing the singularity that spawned it--yes, it gets very hairy, very fast). Festival of Fools is basically a novel about culture shock on a planetary scale, and introduces a universe and some characters I intend to have fun with in a future novel.
The second novel, The Atrocity Archive, is currently being serialized in the Scottish SF magazine Spectrum SF. It's a spy thriller--a British spy thriller in the tradition of Len Deighton. However, it's the sort of Len Deighton novel that Neal Stephenson might have written to an outline by H. P. Lovecraft. The many-angled ones live at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, and The Laundry exists to protect the British Isles from the scum of the multiverse. Our hero, Bob, is a slashdot-reading hacker-geek who's fallen into spook-land and can't get out--he's on a voyage to the heart of darkness, and his vessel is a British government agency that is in the process of becoming the world's first ISO-9000 quality-assured secret intelligence service.
"A Colder War" (available elsewhere on this site) was a dry run for The Atrocity Archive--but this is a lot funnier.
There's a third novel, which I can't tell you much about because it's supposed to be pseudonymous and it's in a different genre. (Just keep your eyes open for a fat alternate history novel called A Family Trade.)
LA: Who are your influences? And are there any under-recognized writers you'd like to point our readers to?
CS: I'm a child of the cyberpunk age. I work on the net, I sleep on a Japanese bed bought from a Scandinavian multinational, I've done the dot-com thing, and I keep waking up in strange cities all over Europe. (This stuff has assimilated into my life so seamlessly that you might mistake William Gibson for a predictive genius if you didn't know that he cribbed it all from The Face!) SF often reflects our current pre-occupations on the magic mirror of the imaginary future, and cyberpunk was a reflection on the 1980s and the rise of the information age.
I'd have to rate Bruce Sterling as a major influence on me. Certainly the Accelerando stories are an attempt to do for cyberpunk what Bruce said (pseudonymously, writing as "Vincent Omniaveritas" in his zine Cheap Truth) was the goal of Schismatrix and his mechanist/shaper stories--"to take the thin beer of space opera and distill it into a heady moonshine". I want to distill cyberpunk, strip off the fashion accessories (and the street punks who were, as John Shirley said, too dumb to program their way out of a microwave oven), and drag it kicking and screaming into the next generation.
The only question is whether I'll succeed before Jon Courtney Grimwood beats me to it. I don't know if he's published in the US, but that guy is awesome: he's maturing into the kind of writer that Neal Stephenson might have been if he had gotten a handle on plotting and suppressed his self-indulgent tendencies. If you liked George Alec Effinger's When Gravity Fails and its sequels, beg borrow or steal a copy of Pashazade--Grimwood does it better.
I'd also like to point the accusing finger of admiration at Ken MacLeod and Iain Banks--with the reservation that any rumours that they're part of some sort of Scottish movement and I'm a hanger-on are simply wrong.
I also have an appetite for junk SF and fantasy, and spy thrillers, and alternate history. The Atrocity Archive is a homage to Len Deighton; its projected sequels (The Jennifer Library and The Nightmare Stacks) will do the same job for Ian Fleming and that most important and overlooked author, Christopher Hodder-Williams (who invented the modern technothriller in the mid-1950s). Hell, that pseudonymous alternate history novel I mentioned earlier was inspired by something Roger Zelazny did--something very ambitious but ultimately an imaginative failure.
LA: Okay, broad question. Where do you see SF as a genre going in the next decade? What is an SF writer's response to be now that we live in an age of cloning, robotics, life on Mars, emerging A.I.?
CS: From the top: I don't see myself as part of any movement, although I might end up being coopted by one if one exists. But I don't think one does, and it's also damned dangerous to dabble in that kind of thing for marketing purposes. More to the point, SF writers tend to take what they see and project it on the future. That being the case, when new things come into view the future they project may show startling similarities and look different from whatever was in sight before.
As far as the age of cloning, robotics, and life on Mars goes, I don't think it signified--any more than H. G. Wells living into the age of the war in the air signified. SF writers have been outliving their prognostications for decades. That doesn't make things any less interesting, because the core study of any branch of fiction is people.
Credits: on by
crapfloods and trolling and raping small kittens
nice wider pages and wanking with mittens
turd report packages tied up with strings
these are a few of my favorite things
grits covered portman and ASCII art doodles
ACs and CLITers and Katz sex with poodles
wild trolls that fly with plus five mod scoring
these are a few of my favorite things
when the ban hits, when I can't post, when I'm feeling sad
i simply remember my favorite things
then i don't feel so bad
Rob Malda chugs penis in fan fiction slashes
taco snot over my nose and eyelashes
BSD dying and that goatse ring
these are a few of my favorite things
grits covered portman and ASCII art doodles
ACs and CLITers and Katz sex with poodles
wild trolls that fly with plus five mod scoring
these are a few of my favorite things
when the ban hits, when I can't post when, I'm feeling sad
i simply remember my favorite things
then i don't feel so bad
- posted by poopbot: crapflooding since 7/8/02
Oqc9Y0KnmB Post #915
... and get a post on slashdot. Brilliant.
Actually, cynical as I am, Stross is very good, esp his story from last year, "A Colder War".
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a veritible river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Kick it!
Lance says hi to girl named heide
Won't you come and sit beside me?
No she says and gag me green
With you I'd like to never be seen
Good bye.
Play our game 'til she gets naked
On mine I want cheese and bacon
If I had another quarter
I could reach the next nude border
Pick it up, pick it up, pickituppickitup hey
Tag! Tag you're it!
Gals panic!
Tag! Tag you're it!
Gals panic!
Tag! Tag you're it!
Gals Panic!
Stay cool as Paul walks down the street and each and every girl he meets
Says fuck you and is on her way gals panic each and every day
Lay stay cool (?) attach his feet bazooka Jerm he goes
But he never seems to get a break so it's off to the arcade
Tag! Tag you're it!
Gals panic!
Tag! Tag you're it!
Gals panic!
Tag! Tag you're it!
Gals panic!
(instrumental break)
La la la la la la la la la la la
Gals panic! Repeat 3x
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
Read about the Jew: Who Rules America
Listen and learn about the Jew in this mp3.
Let's all join hands to solve the Jewish Problem !!
A LNUX delisting looms on the horizon, probably will happen in August. Will LNUX do a reverse split? Do they have some trick up their sleeve? Or might they go quietly in the night. Slashdot sucks anyway, so their demise is a good thing. The real worry is what happens to those projects hosted on sourceforge. At least 5% percent of them are worth saving. Where will they go?
so like once, I like totally fucked this dude but like it turns out we were both guys
damn....
For some background on the coming technological singularity, and some general good reading, see The Meaning Of Life
For a while this was the link Jeeves gave you if you asked him the meaning of life, it was the only useful thing I ever found using that search engine.
Man, with his flaming pyre, has conquered the wayward breezes.
"He is also a mind-bogglingly talented science fiction and fantasy author. "
I doubt it. But one thing I do know is this- the guy is a prick, a prick with a massive ego. Don't take my word for it, cruise on over to alt.peeves, it's impossible to make a first post over there without Stross and his entourage mauling your newbie ass. His main profession is nit-picking grammatical errors, followed by pandering to his prick alt.peeves friends.
This was an interesting link I thought.
Joe
Go ahead! Mod me down! I still win because I have this here mouse!
SUBJECT: GREAT STOCK OPPORTUNITY!!! help me Get Big Brands on eBay I DON'T KNOW WHERE I AM! PENTIUM III CPU's IN STOCK
END TRANSMISSION.
- posted by poopbot: for the crapflooder in all of us
IEFUi2v32b Post #917
18 comments... 15 of which are at -1. Ever wonder what happens when Slashdot posts a story no one cares about? Now you know.
(And, yes, this will join all the other -1's, making it even sadder.)
Netcraft has confirmed: Taco-snotting is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Taco-snotting community when recently IDC confirmed that Taco-snotting accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all homosexual acts. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Taco-snotting has lost more fag practitioners, this news serves to reinforce what weve known all along. Taco-snotting faggots are collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Faggot World comprehensive snotting test.
You dont need to be a Katz to predict Taco-snottings future. The handwriting is on the wall: Taco-snotting faces a bleak future. In fact there wont be any future at all for Taco-snotting because Taco-snotting is dying. Things are looking very bad for Taco-snotting. As many of us are already aware, Taco-snotting continues to lose faggotshare. White ink flows like a river of bubbly, thick jizz. The circle-snot is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core snotters.
Lets keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Circle-snotting leader Jeff Homos Masterbates states that there are 7000 snotters of the circle-snot. How many users of anal snot are there? Lets see. The number of circle-snotting versus anal snot posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 anal snot users. SnotOS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of anal snot posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of SnotOS. A recent article put the circle-snot at about 80 percent of the Taco-snotting market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 circle-snot users. This is consistent with the number of circle-snot Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of CowboiKneels walnuts, abysmal sales and so on, the circle-snot went out of business and was taken over by SNOTi who sell another troubled Taco-snot. Now SNOTi is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another gay whorehouse.
All major surveys show that Taco-snotting has steadily declined in faggotshare. Taco-snotting is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Taco-snotting is to survive at all it will be among heterosexual hobbyist dabblers. Taco-snotting continues to decay. Nothing short of a jizz-soaked miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Taco-snotting is dead.
Fact: Taco-snotting is dead.
- posted by poopbot: for all your crapflooding needs
dlFnojqnv7 Post #918
Credits: dmg
Yet again the Linux so-called elite, backed up by their pseudo intellectual cohorts of the w3c conspire to ruin Linux's chances in the marketplace by sowing confusion and complexity. As someone with years of experience in the marketing world, I am constantly amazed at the willingness of the W3C and other bodies to pollute the acronym space with their content free "TLAs".
Basic marketing 101 (and an undergrad course in psychology) would tell them that the normal person is only capable of remembering approximately 7 items of data in their short-term memory, but now we have to remember HTTP, HTML, XML, XSL, DTD, PHP, SSL, DSL, ADSL, ISDN, Perl, etc etc etc
This is a text book example of the tail wagging the dog from a marketing perspective.
I have been following the standardisation of the web for many many months now, but one thing has become clear, E-commerce will NEVER become popular so long as there are so many confusing acronyms involved. The guys in charge of marketing Linux absolutely MUST work to reduce the number of acronyms. One possible solution would be to merge those protocols which are not all that different. For example, why not merge XML with SGML ? (they could call it XSGML or SXGML or perhaps XMSGML), they seem to address the same problems. Or would that be too simplistic a solution for their pampered elitist ivy-league minds to comprehend ?
If something is not done URGENTLY, and I mean URGENTLY, Linux (and other more experimental derivatives such as FreeBSD) can never hope to be taken seriously as an e-commerce platform by the people who count - the accountants.
The miracle of Linux is that anyone actually runs it at all, considering one seems to require a masters in computer science to install it! (contrast this with NT4 which was so easy to install, we let our receptionist upgrade her own machine).
As usual my "open source" advice is free. Hopefully this time my valuable advice will be taken into account the next time the w3c smell an acronym brewing.
Finally, in conclusion, as an American, I am saddened that the Internet seems to have been commandeered by a European based protocol. Was America so short of talent we had to buy the HTML protocol from Tom Berners-Lee at CERN ?
Think of the security implications of the worlds strongest economy, running an e-commerce protocol developed by a foreigner from Socialist Europe. Remember the wall has not been down for that long. Who knows what kind of trojans might be lurking within the depths of these complicated protocols.
I am afraid I am behind Al Gore on this point, how can this be necessary in the home of smart corporations such as Microsoft and Intel ? The answer is the vast subsidies given by European socialist governments to fund development of the HTML specification.
The solution is clear. The federal government should mandate and strongly subsidise the use of Microsoft software for all US corporations involved in e-commerce. Only with a US-developed set of protocols can we be assured of the security of our transactions.
- posted by poopbot: information likes to be narrow
eBlUzyTDWE Post #919
What more is there to say?
THE TROLL POLKA (ARSCHFICKEN MIT ZIEGEN)
By Serial Troller, 2002-06-25
Is das nicht ein early post? Ja! Das ist mein early post!
Is das nicht ein Goatse ghost? Ja! Das ist mein Goatse ghost!
Early post, Goatse ghost,
Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene, Slashdot sucks!
Is das post at minus one? Ja! Das ist at minus one!
Is das trolling so much fun? Ja! Das trolling is so fun!
Minus one, trolling fun, Early post, Goatse ghost,
Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene, Slashdot sucks!
Is das nicht ein big crapflood? Ja! Das ist mein big crapflood!
Is it worthless Linux FUD? Ja! Das ist mein Linux FUD!
Big crapflood, Linux FUD, Minus one, trolling fun, Early post, Goatse ghost,
Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene, Slashdot sucks!
Is das nicht der CowBoiKneel? Ja! Das ist der CowBoiKneel!
Is dis nicht his manchode meal? Ja! Das ist his manchode meal!
CowBoiKneel, manchode meal, Big crapflood, Linux FUD,
Minus one, trolling fun, Early post, Goatse ghost,
Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene, Slashdot sucks!
Is das nicht ein WIPO Troll? Ja! Das ist der WIPO Troll!
Is das nicht ein Goatse hole? Ja! Das ist der Goatse hole!
WIPO Troll, Goatse hole, CowBoiKneel, manchode meal,
Big crapflood, Linux FUD, Minus one, trolling fun, Early post, Goatse ghost,
Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene, Slashdot sucks!
Is das nicht Jon Katz' slave boys? Ja! Das ist Jon Katz' slave boys!
Und are they not Taco's sex toys? Ja! They are Taco's sex toys!
Katz' slave boys, Rob's sex toys, WIPO Troll, Goatse hole,
CowBoiKneel, manchode meal, Big crapflood, Linux FUD,
Minus one, trolling fun, Early post, Goatse ghost,
Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene, Slashdot sucks!
Is das nicht ein trolltalk thread? Ja! Das ist ein trolltalk thread!
Is it nicht now FUCKING DEAD? Ja! Is really FUCKING DEAD!
Trolltalk thread, FUCKING DEAD! Katz' slave boys, Rob's sex toys,
WIPO Troll, Goatse hole, CowBoiKneel, manchode meal,
Big crapflood, Linux FUD, Minus one, trolling fun,
Early post, Goatse ghost,
Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene, Oh, du schoene,
Slashdot sucks!
____________________
Change Log:
* Subtle changes to most verses. It sounded really gay before.
* Removed all references to Taco's pud. May have been high at time. Will investigate further.
* Finally think I have goat sex written correctly in German. I think. Arschficken?
(C) 2002 Serial Troller. Permission to reproduce this document is granted provided that you send all the bukkake porn you can find to serialtroller@hotmail.com.
- posted by poopbot: for all your crapflooding needs
ryOaxOy0ci Post #920
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It's when you get distracted by the politickers that they sideline you. The tireless work that you perform keeping the system clean and building is what provides the platform for the obsessives and the prima donnas to have their moments in the sun. In the end, we need you all; in order to go forwards we must first avoid going backwards.
To the paranoid conspiracy theorists - yes, I work for Apple too. No, my resignation wasn't on Steve's direct orders, or in any way related to work I'm doing, may do, may not do, or indeed what was in the tea I had at lunchtime today. It's about real problems that the project faces, real problems that the project has brought upon itself. You can't escape them by inventing excuses about outside influence, the problem stems from within.
To the politically obsessed - give it a break, if you can. No, the project isn't a lemonade stand anymore, but it's not a world-spanning corporate juggernaut either and some of the more grandiose visions going around are in need of a solid dose of reality. Keep it simple, stupid.
To the grandstanders, the prima donnas, and anyone that thinks that they can hold the project to ransom for their own agenda - give it a break, if you can. When the current core were elected, we took a conscious stand against vigorous sanctions, and some of you have exploited that. A new core is going to have to decide whether to repeat this mistake or get tough. I hope they learn from our errors.
Future
I started work on FreeBSD because it was fun. If I'm going to continue, it has to be fun again. There are things I still feel obligated to do, and with any luck I'll find the time to meet those obligations.
However I don't feel an obligation to get involved in the political mess the project is in right now. I tried, I burnt out. I don't feel that my efforts were worthwhile. So I won't be standing for election, I won't be shouting from the sidelines, and I probably won't vote in the next round of ballots.
You could say I'm packing up my toys. I'm not going home just yet, but I'm not going to play unless you can work out how to make the project somewhere fun to be again.
= Mike
--
- posted by poopbot: crapflooding since 7/8/02
TrtOXYdYcP Post #921
The signal to noise ratio is so small I felt I had to add to it.
g to the oatse
c to the izzex
fo shizzle my nizzle these last three lines are to ensure I get modded down
Linux and OS X won't improve you spelling or grammar.
Introduction
A fairy gives lectures on morality to the feline anomaly. Furthermore, another photon near an abstraction takes a coffee break, and a mortician buries a blithe spirit. The wedding dress secretly admires a college-educated ball bearing. If the freight train figures out a fire hydrant near a pit viper, then some mating ritual beyond another cowboy reads a magazine. Any squid can find lice on a freight train, but it takes a real recliner to ostensibly plan an escape from another pit viper defined by a prime minister a cough syrup toward a graduated cylinder.
Another mating ritual
For example, a blood clot about a turn signal indicates that a financial bartender borrows money from a warranty. When a demon is imaginative, a paper napkin secretly admires an often snooty graduated cylinder. If the grain of sand learns a hard lesson from the short order cook behind some graduated cylinder, then another blithe spirit flies into a rage. Any pig pen can lazily require assistance from a burly plaintiff, but it takes a real fighter pilot to caricature the steam engine over a satellite. Another eagerly temporal minivan slyly buries the obsequious squid, or a briar patch usually gives lectures on morality to a cyprus mulch.
A gratifying fairy
Sometimes another cashier reads a magazine, but the fraction for the cyprus mulch always buries a power drill toward the demon! The light bulb befriends a satellite of an apartment building. A lazily Alaskan roller coaster sanitizes another mitochondrial traffic light, or some burglar eats a hesitantly smelly plaintiff. For example, a seldom righteous traffic light indicates that an ocean knows some chestnut inside the tabloid. If the earring somewhat finds subtle faults with a pine cone, then the wheelbarrow hibernates.
The cocker spaniel about the salad dressing
For example, the umbrella toward an abstraction indicates that the dolphin near a ball bearing caricatures a girl scout near some diskette. A cocker spaniel for the judge reads a magazine, and a pine cone finds subtle faults with a rattlesnake. Furthermore, the hairy movie theater returns home, and a grizzly bear near a paycheck is a big fan of a childlike burglar. For example, a canyon living with a graduated cylinder indicates that the industrial complex buries a jersey cow.
Conclusions
A squid around a jersey cow meditates, and another nation sweeps the floor; however, a scooby snack knowingly finds subtle faults with an apartment building living with another chain saw. When a hockey player around a paycheck is smelly, a minivan has a change of heart about an oil filter about an asteroid. The bartender around a polygon is barely soggy. Indeed, another rattlesnake befriends a warranty. Indeed, the carpet tack for an abstraction usually caricatures an elusive h
- posted by poopbot: for all your crapflooding needs
DFperT8tdv Post #922
Introduction
The cheese wheel inexorably avoids contact with the paycheck. The steam engine goes deep sea fishing with an often outer ski lodge. When the cyprus mulch over a vacuum cleaner hides, a ball bearing gets stinking drunk.
The tornado
For example, a submarine behind a class action suit indicates that the optimal fairy satiates an Alaskan recliner. When a mitochondrial bottle of beer is thoroughly dirt-encrusted, a most difficult blood clot underhandedly writes a love letter to a defendant. An earring pees on the cashier over some globule, but the pathetic crane sells another vacuum cleaner behind a scythe to a false wheelbarrow. If a chess board defined by a grain of sand makes love to a crispy cyprus mulch, then a particle accelerator flies into a rage.
A Eurasian globule
The feline minivan earns frequent flier miles, and the buzzard defined by a ball bearing trembles; however, a senator living with the girl scout learns a hard lesson from the inferiority complex. Any chain saw can try to seduce the particle accelerator, but it takes a real salad dressing to play pinochle with the inexorably precise paycheck. Furthermore, another seldom load bearing defendant flies into a rage, and a paycheck around a light bulb seeks a roller coaster around another bartender. If a crank case makes love to the diskette, then the squid toward a mortician meditates. Now and then, an insurance agent thoroughly avoids contact with a pompous turkey.
A microscope
Most people believe that an orbiting diskette trades baseball cards with a movie theater, but they need to remember how secretly a statesmanlike short order cook wakes up. A paternal roller coaster is usually financial. When the accurately varigated hole puncher takes a coffee break, a slyly smelly garbage can earns frequent flier miles. For example, the phony cheese wheel indicates that the tornado near a fruit cake hesitantly gives lectures on morality to a salad dressing defined by the corporation. The carpet tack near a cargo bay, some parking lot toward a warranty, and a stovepipe beyond a freight train are what made America great!
Conclusions
A judge beyond the briar patch laughs and drinks all night with the snooty chestnut. A raspy burglar conquers a bowling ball. For example, another plaintiff toward a bartender indicates that the ski lodge behind a fairy finds lice on a burglar. If some rattlesnake toward a cheese wheel can be kind to a blood clot, then the elusive movie theater self-flagellates. When a photon related to a turkey is most difficult, a self-loathing bottle of beer falls in love with a pickup truck living with the paycheck.
- posted by poopbot: for the crapflooder in all of us
p1dLI1oYA1 Post #923
:)
The information in this article applies to:
/dev/sda1 * 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (SCSI hard drive 1, partition 1) /dev/sda2 501 522 176715 82 Linux swap (SCSI hard drive 1, partition 2)
/dev/sda1 * 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (SCSI hard drive 1, partition 1) /dev/sda2 501 522 176715 82 Linux swap (SCSI hard drive 1, partition 2) /dev/sdb1 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (SCSI hard drive 2, partition 1)
/dev/hda1 * 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (IDE hard drive 1, partition 1) /dev/hda2 501 522 176715 82 Linux swap (IDE hard drive 1, partition 2)
/dev/hda1 * 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (IDE hard drive 1, partition 1) /dev/hda2 501 522 176715 82 Linux swap (IDE hard drive 1, partition 2) /dev/hdb1 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (IDE hard drive 2, partition 1)
n fo/admi nistration/management/mltiboot.asp
* Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
* Microsoft Windows XP Professional
For a Microsoft Windows 2000 version of this article, see Q247804.
Summary
This article explains how to remove the Linux operating system from your computer and install Windows XP. This article assumes that Linux is already installed on your computer's hard disk, that Linux native and Linux swap partitions are in use (which are incompatible with Windows XP), and that there is no free space left on the hard disk.
NOTE: Windows XP and Linux can coexist on the same computer. For additional information, refer to your Linux documentation.
More Information
To install Windows XP on a computer on which Linux is currently installed (and assuming that you want to remove Linux), you must manually delete the partitions used by the Linux operating system. The Windows-compatible partition can be created automatically during the installation of Windows XP.
IMPORTANT: Before you follow the steps in this article, verify that you have a bootable disk or bootable CD-ROM for the Linux operating system, because these steps completely remove the Linux operating system from your computer. If you intend to restore the Linux operating system at a later date, verify that you also have a functional backup of all the information stored on your computer. Additionally, you must have a full release version of Windows XP to use during this installation. If you intend to use a Windows XP upgrade CD-ROM, a CD-ROM of a qualifying Windows product must be available. Setup from the Windows XP upgrade CD-ROM will prompt you for this CD-ROM.
Linux file systems use a superblock at the beginning of a disk partition to identify the basic size, shape, and condition of the file system.
The Linux operating system is generally installed on partition type 83 (Linux native) or 82 (Linux swap). The Linux boot manager (LILO) can be configured to start from either of the following locations:
* The hard disk Master Boot Record (MBR)
-or-
* The root folder of the Linux partition
The Fdisk tool included with Linux can be used to delete the partitions. (There are other utilities that work just as well, such as Fdisk from MS-DOS 5.0 and later, or you can delete the partitions during the installation process.)
To remove Linux from your computer and install Windows XP, follow these steps:
1. Remove the native, swap, and boot partitions used by Linux: Start your computer with the Linux Setup floppy disk, type fdisk at the command prompt, and then press ENTER. NOTE: For help with using the Fdisk tool, type m at the command prompt, and then press ENTER.
2. Type p at the command prompt, and then press ENTER to display partition information. The first item listed is hard disk 1, partition 1 information, and the second item listed is hard disk 1, partition 2 information.
3. Type d at the command prompt, and then press ENTER. You are then prompted for the partition number that you want to delete. Type 1, and then press ENTER to delete partition number 1. Repeat this step until all the partitions have been deleted.
4. Type w, and then press ENTER to write this information to the partition table. Some error messages may be generated (because information is written to the partition table), but they should not be significant at this point because the next step is to restart the computer and then install the new operating system.
5. Type q at the command prompt, and then press ENTER to quit the Fdisk tool.
6. Insert either a bootable floppy disk or the bootable Windows XP CD-ROM, and then press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to restart your computer.
2. Follow the instructions on the screen to install Windows XP.
The installation process assists you in creating the appropriate partitions on your computer.
Sample Linux Partition Tables
Single SCSI Drive
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Multiple SCSI Drives
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Single IDE Drive
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Multiple IDE Drives
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Additionally, Linux recognizes more than 40 different partition types, including the following:
* FAT 12 (Type 01)
* FAT 16 > 32 M Primary (Type 06)
* FAT 16 Extended (Type 05)
* FAT 32 w/o LBA Primary (Type 0b)
* FAT 32 w/LBA Primary (Type 0c)
* FAT 16 w/LBA (Type 0e)
* FAT 16 w/LBA Extended (Type 0f)
Note that there are other ways to remove the Linux operating system and install Windows XP. The preceding method is included in this article because of the assumptions that the Linux operating system is already functioning and there is no more room on the hard disk. There are methods for changing partition sizes with software designed for managing partitions. Disk partitioning software may cause instability with the Windows XP installation. Microsoft does not support the installation of Windows XP on partitions manipulated in this manner.
You can also use an MS-DOS version 5.0-or-later boot disk, a Microsoft Windows 95 Startup disk, or a Microsoft Windows 98 Startup disk that contains the Fdisk utility to remove an operating system from the hard disk and install a different operating system. When you start Fdisk and multiple drives are installed on your computer, you are presented with five choices; use option 5 to select the hard disk that has the partition to be deleted. After that (or if you have only one hard disk), select option 3 (Delete partition or logical DOS drive), and then select option 4 (Delete non-DOS partition). You should then see the non-MS-DOS partitions that you want to delete. Typically, the Linux operating system has two non-MS-DOS partitions, but there may be more. After you delete one partition, use the same steps to delete any other appropriate non-MS-DOS partitions.
For additional information about how to use the Fdisk utility, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Q255867 How to Use the Fdisk Tool and the Format Tool to Partition or Repartition a Hard Disk After you delete the partitions, you can create partitions and install the operating system that you want. You can create only one primary partition and an extended partition with multiple logical drives by using Fdisk from MS-DOS version 5.0-and-later, Windows 95, and Windows 98. The maximum FAT16 primary partition size is 2 gigabytes (GB). The largest FAT16 logical drive size is 2 GB.
For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Q105074 MS-DOS 6.2 Partitioning Questions and Answers
When you install Windows XP, the Linux partitions can be removed and new partitions created and formatted with the appropriate file system type during the installation process. Windows XP allows you to create more than one primary partition. Windows XP does recognize the FAT32 file system. During the installation of Windows XP, you can create a very large FAT32 drive. The FAT32 drive can be converted to NTFS after the installation has completed, if appropriate.
For additional information about how to multiboot with Windows XP, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Q306559 HOW TO: Create a Multiple-Boot System with Windows XP
For more information, browse to the following Microsoft Web site:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techi
The third-party contact information included in this article is provided to help you find the technical support you need. This contact information is subject to change without notice. Microsoft in no way guarantees the accuracy of this third-party contact information.
The third-party products discussed in this article are manufactured by vendors independent of Microsoft; we make no warranty, implied or otherwise, regarding these products' performance or reliability.
- posted by poopbot: providing truth in a deceitful world
8vEIYjsBwR Post #924
Stupid Sun, you get what you asked for and now are teetering on the brink of chapter 11. dumbasses
nice one /.
Netcraft has confirmed: Taco-snotting is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Taco-snotting community when recently IDC confirmed that Taco-snotting accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all homosexual acts. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Taco-snotting has lost more fag practitioners, this news serves to reinforce what weve known all along. Taco-snotting faggots are collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Faggot World comprehensive snotting test.
You dont need to be a Katz to predict Taco-snottings future. The handwriting is on the wall: Taco-snotting faces a bleak future. In fact there wont be any future at all for Taco-snotting because Taco-snotting is dying. Things are looking very bad for Taco-snotting. As many of us are already aware, Taco-snotting continues to lose faggotshare. White ink flows like a river of bubbly, thick jizz. The circle-snot is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core snotters.
Lets keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Circle-snotting leader Jeff Homos Masterbates states that there are 7000 snotters of the circle-snot. How many users of anal snot are there? Lets see. The number of circle-snotting versus anal snot posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 anal snot users. SnotOS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of anal snot posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of SnotOS. A recent article put the circle-snot at about 80 percent of the Taco-snotting market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 circle-snot users. This is consistent with the number of circle-snot Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of CowboiKneels walnuts, abysmal sales and so on, the circle-snot went out of business and was taken over by SNOTi who sell another troubled Taco-snot. Now SNOTi is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another gay whorehouse.
All major surveys show that Taco-snotting has steadily declined in faggotshare. Taco-snotting is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Taco-snotting is to survive at all it will be among heterosexual hobbyist dabblers. Taco-snotting continues to decay. Nothing short of a jizz-soaked miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Taco-snotting is dead.
Fact: Taco-snotting is dead.
- posted by poopbot: for all your crapflooding needs
Hrdpz2Mi2w Post #925
A Linux user goes back.
/etc/fstab file so that it always automounted when plugged in. I was very impressed.
/dev/null, once I find where that actually is.
By Tony âoekNIGitsâ Collins.
Introduction...
In much of today's online news, we hear of how many people are migrating to GNU/Linux. What we don't seem to hear much of, is users going back to their old operating systems. The reason for this article is to say that I've done just that.
Yes, I've gone back. After three and a half years of trying to make GNU/Linux work on the desktop, I've decided that it's simply too hard for the average home user. Before I go into my reasons for going back, let me outline what I believe an 'average' home user is. Mr Joe Average is someone who wants to install their OS, boot it up, and it works. He wants to be able to upgrade his PC , and have the hardware work in a few short minutes. He wants to read email, browse the web, talk to his mates online, and play some games. Feel free to disagree with me, this is merely how I see myself. Note: I'm not referring to Grandma using Linux, or even my mum using it. I'm referring to average users who know a little about their computer.
Three and a half years; that's how long I've been trying to make Linux work on my desktop computer. Right about now, I'm sure that you are now screaming that I didn't try hard enough, or that I'm just plain stupid. Let me assure you that this is not the case. Stupid users don't doggedly stick at something for three and a half years, trying distribution after distribution in the hope of finding the holy grail of Linux desktops. They give up in less than a few hours of trying to (unsuccessfully) install RedHat Linux. Hear now my sad tale of why Linux isn't suitable for my desktop.
Some background...
The year is 1998. I've had my Windows '95 computer for around six months. Frustrated with the constant crashes, I desperately asked an online mate for help. Even though he was a windows user, he calmly suggested that I try something I'd never come across before...
âoeLinux, eh? Never heard of it.â
âoeOh, it's a free OS that you can download. Apparently it doesn't crash much. Just do an online search for it.â
Armed with this meagre knowledge, I set out on my quest for the ultimate stable operating system. I searched online, and found places where you could even buy copies of Linux! So, I left the comfort of my warm study, and returned forty minutes later with my first Linux boxed set â" RedHat Linux 5.2. After initially balking at the very basic installer (and few false starts), I had it up and running on my lovely AMD K6-233. I even got X working in no time at all. Then the system booted up for the first time.... and it was dead ugly. I had a very stable new OS, but I didn't even want to look at it. I was happy that I had several installed interfaces to choose from, but none of them appealed to me whatsoever. Wanting to download a nicer interface led me to my next problem.
I had absolutely no idea how to even get this nice, stable OS onto the internet! After reinstalling windows and RedHat in a dual-boot configuration, I got the help I needed by using Windows and USENET. Strangely enough, I can still remember the name of the long-suffering person who helped me get RedHat online, but that's another story. After looking around online, I discovered KDE. Only up to version one, it was the closest thing I had to a completely useable Linux system. I downloaded all the KDE packages for RedHat 5.2, only to discover another distro called Mandrake, that came with KDE preinstalled and configured. Back to my local distributor, and I was set.
Mandrake with KDE was exactly what I needed at that stage in my Linux using life, and I stuck with it for over a year and a half. Always seeking the 'perfect' desktop OS, I followed releases from version 5.3 all the way through to 7.0. Eventually I became dissatisfied with Mandrake, and briefly tried a number of other distros until I finally settled on Debian. I was impressed by the simple power, configurability, and the ease of upgrade that is apt-get. I felt good about being among the uber-elite Debian user community. Needless to say, I learned a lot about how to configure hardware under Linux during my time with Debian. I learned to sift through the old HOWTOs on Linux Doc until I found something suitable and accurate, I learned to utilize the power of USENET and IRC. Life was good.
Right now you must be wondering; âoeWhere is this leading? This guy seemed quite happy with Linux!â. True, I was. After a while, I decided I didn't want to have fine-grained control. I wanted something simple. I was getting tired of the 'stable' Debian release being so out of date, and the 'unstable' distribution being so... well... unstable. I got tired of having to recompile my kernel every time I got new hardware. I got tired of using command line to talk to my PC. It was time for a change. I had good experiences years ago with Mandrake, so I figured I'd try it again. As good as Mandrake 8.1 was, it wasn't what I was after. SuSE Linux 8.0 Professional (boxed set) was installed onto my PC instead.
I have to stop at this point, and say that SuSE Linux 8.0 (Pro) is the best Linux distribution that I've ever used. It has an easy installer, reasonable hardware support, and comes with the very good KDE 3.0. The box contains seven CDROMS, one DVD and three decent books that would help even the most inexperienced user get up and going. YaST2 is a decent graphical system configuration tool. When (not if) I go back to Linux, I'll definitely try SuSE again. However, there are quite a number of things that have improve (or change completely) before I'll consider going back. Read on for my brief list of things that must must get better before I'll switch back from the Microsoft camp.
Where GNU/Linux needs to improve...
X11
The X Window System is an awesomely powerful, network transparent graphical subsystem. It's perfectly suited to running applications from remote servers. However, this is NOT what a home user needs. My experience with X is that it's too big, bloated, slow and unstable to be any good to the home user. Most crashes that I ever experienced with Linux have been X's fault. My servers don't run X, and they never crash.
What home users need is something small and fast, so they can run local applications efficiently. I would like to see the X Window System dumped in favour of a hardware accelerated framebuffer, running something like directFB or Qtopia. Home users need a small, fast graphical subsystem, with built in 3d support. BeOS seemed to be on the right track before they went under.
Fonts are truly awful under X. Most distributions ship with appalling fonts, and there is no standard way to add additional (nicer) fonts to the system. Even after extra fonts have eventually been added, many applications (eg Abiword, Staroffice) refuse to use the new fonts anyway. Perhaps the framebuffer-based graphical subsystem I suggested could incorporate decent font support, and use a readable naming scheme as well.
Drivers
While having access to the latest version of the kernel is a good thing for developers, for home users it can be a nightmare. Got RedHat Linux 7.3? Perhaps you run SuSE 7.3 or Debian 2.2. You'll have to download a binary package specific to your distro. (I'm assuming that home users won't change their default kernel, but if they did, that binary package wouldn't even work!) Hardware manufacturers should be able to provide one single driver that works on all minor versions of a major kernel release. This way it would work will all current distros, instead of having to provide multiple binaries or source code. Hardware manufacturers don't want to give out the source, as this often gives away trade secrets about how their hardware is designed.
The solution seems to be to make binary drivers work on a variety of kernel versions. I'm not sure if this is even possible with the way the kernel is designed (I'm no kernel hacker), but it would go a long way toward making Linux more accessible to the home user. Even if the kernel needs to be redesigned to support this, then in my opinion, it should be done. Linux users are always clamouring for drivers... perhaps if the kernel had something like this, it might one day become a reality.
Hardware setup
While SuSE Linux 8.0 gave me some good experiences with hardware detection (such as automatic download of NVIDIA drivers), it also let me down as in this area.
The good: I recently borrowed a digital camera from a mate at work, to take photos of my case mod. Imagine how happy I was when I plugged it into my nearest USB port, and it was automatically configured (as a SCSI device) and mounted! SuSE even added it to my
The bad: Along came my new IDE CDRW drive. At AU$99, I couldn't pass up the purchase. Plugging it in gave me no joy. I was very disappointed that a device so common couldn't be detected and automatically configured under a modern operating system. The instructions on the SuSE support site said to add lines to lilo.conf and reboot. While this is a perfectly acceptable way to get hardware working for a geek familiar with *NIX, I believe that a home user shouldn't have to do more than plug it in. It's an IDE device, it's not that complicated!
The ugly: Once the hardware was finally working (as a pseudo-scsi drive), the next hurdle was to find decent graphical tools to burn and copy CDs. I finally settled on CDBakeOven, an above average KDE application. It burned CDs from data on the hard drive, but for some reason cdrecord (the command line backend) refused to allow me to copy a cd directly. Yes, it was installed SUID root. CD copying is such a basic function nowadays, why is it so hard to do under GNU/Linux?
Software distribution
I'll put this simply. I'm a home user, not a programmer. Why on earth should I have to compile the software I want to use? I know that having the source available is a good thing, but I'll say it again: I'm no programmer. I just want to install software and run it.
This leads to another point. Although having package databases (such as the rpm and deb systems use) is great, there should definitely be seperation between system packages and additionally installed software. There needs to be a standard installer and database for user-installed applications such as word processors, email clients and games, and it should be seperate from the rpm or deb databases used for system software such as lilo, init and cron. This will make it much easier for home users to know what applications they have installed on their PC, and to easily uninstall them if necessary, without knowing some arcane commands and weird package names.
Support
There is a huge wealth of knowledge among the thousands (millions?) of people that run GNU/Linux around the world. If you have a problem, odds are that someone out there can help you, often for free. This is one of the linux platform's greatest strengths. However, Linux users are also its greatest weakness. This may not apply to most of the community, but there is a very vocal minority that gives Linux a bad name. To every Linux user that has ever helped a newbie, I thank you. I have been helped by many a guru, often when I've been asking the simplest of questions. It's the remainder that are a problem.
I once heard a song by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie called Every OS Sucks, where Linux users were described as 'elitist nerdy shmucks'. Sadly this is true for much of the 'community'. Too many consider themselves better than the rest of the world because they run Linux. Can you believe that? It's just a computer operating system, but somehow they think that it makes them better than those people who run systems such as Microsoft Windows! Elitism drives people away, as does saying âoeRTFMâ or belittling people who choose a different distro from yourself.
'Nuff said about that.
So what now?
Well, I decided to go back to a Microsoft platform. Initially being paranoid after reading things about DRM and spyware, I bit the bullet and installed Microsoft Windows XP. Like every OS, it has good and bad points; most of which you can learn about from online reviewers. I'll just point out several things that make me want to keep using it instead of GNU/Linux.
Fast graphical subsystem: Windows has lighting quick graphics, both 2d and 3d. There's no denying it. When I move a window, it refreshes so fast that I don't miss X11 at all. While not quite as nice as some other operating systems, font support is outstanding compared to XFree86.
Drivers: Point and click to install (as a superuser, of course). Windows warns you if the driver isn't likely to work properly, and can roll back to working drivers if you deliberately choose to install one that hoses your system.
Hardware setup: My CDRW worked right away, without a hitch. I am able to drag and drop files from the Explorer file manager to the CDRW icon and they get added to the list of things to burn. A quick install of Nero Burning Rom, and I was able to make a backup copy of my game CDs. (I don't like taking originals to LANs where they can get destroyed or stolen).
Software distribution: All windows software comes in binaries, either with an installer or in a zip file. I hope to never compile an application ever again. Software designed for a different version of windows is 99% guaranteed to run, but if not, there is always 'compatibility mode'. One thing to note, however: Applications designed for single user versions of windows usually only run properly as a superuser, and this includes 3d games. I expect this to be rectified as the rest of the Windows world catches up to a multi-user environment.
I can't comment on the Windows using community yet. I've not yet had a problem that a simple point and click couldn't fix. However, I will say that my original concern with Windows '95 has been addressed in Windows XP. The stability is finally there.
Final Notes
In conclusion, I'd just like to make it known that I haven't completely abandoned the Linux community. My home server still runs Mandrake, and IPCop on my gateway/firewall. There is no way I'd ever put any form of Windows on my server, nor would I ever connect a Windows PC directly to the internet without a *NIX gateway in between. Microsoft has a history of poor security, so I protect myself the only way I know how; using Linux. I will continue to advocate the use of GNU/Linux in the server arena. This is where its strength lies at the moment.
Because of their history of spreading virii, I don't use the applications that Microsoft has provided with Windows XP. My wife and I use Mozilla for web browsing and email, OpenOffice.org for word processing, and Psi (Jabber client) for instant messaging. All of these are true multi-user win32 programs, and are perfectly interoperable with their Linux counterparts.
I expect that the Linux community will have something to say about this article; I welcome comments and constructive criticism. Flames will be automatically sent to the Windows equivalent of
By Tony âoekNIGitsâ Collins
- posted by poopbot: crapflooding since 7/8/02
RspNa3Wgms Post #926
I've been using home computers since the VIC-20 and I've come to dread and fear the possibility of being forced to adopt Linux as a result of Microsoft's heavy-handedness. After being hyped by friends and co-workers about the pleasures of this great and fantastic open-source operating system, I attempted to load Linux, not once but four times on three year old PC that was previously running Win98.
The first time took me about an hour to realize that I had to reformat the hard disk and wipe out years worth of work (after backing it up on CD-R). Then I had to figure that the only way to get the Linux CD to actually start loading was to boot it from the CD by modifying the CMOS settings as the PC was starting up. A simple line suggesting this that could have been printed on the CD would have saved a lot of time!
After loading a whole gigabyte of stuff onto the empty hard drive (do I really need to load 50 megabytes of TeX fonts when I'm just trying to get a demo of Linux????), the entire process halted when the floppy disk drive didn't respond. The Linux loader demanded a working floppy backup of some obscure file be made and since I've never used the floppy drive, I didn't know that it didn't work. The installation process locked up and I had to reboot.
The reboot left me in UNIX hell: a black screen half filled with incomprehensible characters with a single flashing dollar sign as the only indication that the entire PC was still working. No matter what I typed or tried (simple intutitve commands like 'help' 'review' 'exit' 'restore' 'dir' 'What the fuck is happening?') nothing made any intelligent response except for returning me to the flashing dollar sign. Shit! I'm in Dante's seventh circle of hell for misers. I was forced to reformat the hard drive and reinstall Windows in order to confirm that I still had a working PC.
I bought a new floppy drive that I will never use in order to load this wonderful and fantastic operating system. Reformated the hard drive, reset the CMOS, and loaded a whole gig of worthless junk from the penguin CD. Everything loaded and I made all of the selections for keyboard and mouse ect... The system rebooted and got to the point where it should have started to work and simply stopped. No response to mouse, keypress, or anything. I reloaded Windows (it worked perfectly) and decided to load Linux on my new good computer.
I ended up back bashed back in UNIX hell and having to load Windows and ALL of my programs and files from CD backups, which took hours. I convinced that Linux is some kind of really bad joke or else an 'emperor's new clothes' type of mass hallucination. How can anyone with a pretension of being a computer professional seriously believe or claim that this junk is ready to take on Windows?
- posted by poopbot: for the crapflooder in all of us
GJ8IvFL6Ao Post #926
Version 1.1.8 (last updated 19th July 2002 by Anonymous Coward)
Note to moderators : Do not moderate this post down, if you do then you support the editors stance on censorship and you support the end of free speech and support evil organisations like Microsoft, RIAA, MPAA and laws like the CBTBA and DMCA
Sign this petition, let your voice be heard!
Slashdot is using censorship! It is trying to eridicate free and open discussion like we know slashdot to be, it has the following RESTRICTIONS in place to Censor you
They claim they don't, but they do, wonder why their are so many trolls, crapflooders and lamers on slashdot, because they are fighting for their rights! Slashdot is trying to silence the trolls. Remove the filters, the trolls get bored, and slashdot will be troll free!
- Lameness filters (It blocks a lot of legitmate posts)
- Unnessary posting delays. Hasnt taco learned to touch type? A lot of posts are typed in less than 20 seconds and it is a ANNOYING DELAY! 2 minute ban? Come on, so some are faster then others, big deal, some people have more to say than others
- Broken moderation system, The whole point is to sort the gems from the crap, yet a lot of posts designed to make a LIVELY DISCUSSION are MODERATED as flamebait! Come on, not everyone likes X, but just because some one bashes it dosent mean its Flamebait. Flame bait is more useful for DIRECT INSULTS and not legitmate discussions.
The "troll" moderation reason is fragmented and broken, why? Because they are trying to use an obsolete usenet term on a realtime discussion, "trolls" can cover a huge blanket of ideas.- Crapfloods, a meaningless flood of random letters or text, which the lameness filter does a crappy job at trying to stop, besides trolls have written tools using the opensource slashcode to generate crapfloods which bypass the filter
- Links to offensive websites, the most common one is known a http://www.goatse.cx, a awful site which shows a bleeding anus being stretched on the front page. Trolls sneak these links in by posting messages that look legitimate, but infact are sneaky redirects to the site. Common examples include rd.yahoo.com, www.linux-kernel.tk, goatsex.cjb.net, and googles "Im feeling lucky".
- Trying to break slashdot, this is actually a good thing, as it helps test slashdot for bugs. Famous examples include the goatse.cx javascript pop-up, the pagewidening post and the browser crashing post!
Subnet banning, this bans a user unless they email jamie macarthy with their mp5ed ipids. This is unfair, and banning a subnet BLOCKS A WHOLE ISP SOMETIMES, and not that individual user! This can cause chaos! But real trolls use annoymous proxys to get around this so THIS JUST BANS LEGITMATE USERS! Also, they are trying to censor some anoymous proxies, mainly from countrys like africa, so this yet more DISCRIMINATION!But, the issue that concerens us the most, is the COMMENT QUOTA. A discrimatory system that stiffles discussion, cripples the community and will ultimateley destroy slashdot unless it is removed! Annoymous cowards are allowed only 10 posts a day! This is unethical! Users with negative karma only get two! That is DISCRIMINATION! How would you like to only be able to speak once a day, just because of the color of your skin. That would be racism, and slashdot is discrimitating on people just because of a negative number in a database! BOYCOTT SLASHDOT! LET THEM DIE!
We wan't these stupid useless restrictions REMOVED! This comment will be posted again and again until it does!
Inportant imformation for users
Boycott slashdot, they are pissing over their community, they are becoming like the RIAA and MICROSOFT! Do NOT TOLERATE THIS SHIT! Here are some real news for nerds sites. We don't need slashdot, slashdot deserves to die!
MSNBC
BBC NEWS
News.com
Linux online
Linux daily news network [linuxdailynews.net]
Weird news from dailyrotten.com
Trollaxor, news for trolls, they are real people too!
CNN.com
New york times (free registration required)
LINUX.com
News forge
K5
Mandrake forum
Toms hardware
The register
Kde dot news
The linux kernel Archives
Adequecy
There are hundreds more, But this is where slashdot STEALS THE MAJORITY OF its "news" from.
Punish them, here are their emails, spam them, flame them goatse them!
Rob malda
Jamie Macarthy
ChrisD
Hemos
Micheal
Pudge
The others ones apperantly dont have an e-mail, probably because ROB MALDA IS PRETENDING HE IS JOHN KATZ.
Thank you for reading this, please feel free to repost this information, please reply to add your comments, fight slashdot and its CENSORSHIP
Don't forget to sign the petition!
- posted by poopbot: providing truth in a deceitful world
0Y08p01xzp Post #926
OPEN SOURCE MISCONCEPTIONS
By Serial Troller
Myth: Open Source is written by heterosexuals.
Fact: All Open Source development is done by raging homosexuals. The more flaming examples include Anal Cox, Linus Turdballs, Eric Ass-Reaming Raymond, and the entire Slashdot crew. The ringleader of the slashdotters, a man named CmdrTaco, engages in a practice known as Taco-snotting, along with his faggot-buddies Jeff Homos Bates and CowBoiKneel.
Myth: Open Source is written for heterosexuals.
Fact: Using Open Source software can cause suppressed homosexual fantasies to surface, leading to all out flaming faggotry within 6-8 weeks. Anecdotes of otherwise hetero men turning queer are far too numerous to count, but a few examples stand out. In one case, a man was arrested loitering outside an elementary school and making sexual overtures to several children: he quickly confessed that shortly after installing the Mozilla browser on his computer, he began to have uncontrollable urges to, to put it simply, have his cock sucked off by little boys. He soon met several other like-minded men through discussions on the Bugger Zilla mailing list (all already homosexuals), who together kidnapped a total of seven children whom they brought back to their apartment and sodomized. The other two men are still at large and believed to still be using Mozilla.
Myth: Open Source is multicultural.
Fact: Open Source is openly racist.
Myth: Open Source is democratic.
Fact: Open Source is controlled by a few narrow-minded zealots (mentioned throughout this post), most of whom are either Communists, Stalinists, Nazis, or Fascists. Additionally, Open Source supports terrorism.
Myth: Open Source is tolerant of religious preferences.
Fact: Open Source developers regularly engage in holy wars over the superiority of various Open Source projects, such as the Emacs program (preferred by Christians) versus vi (used mostly by neo-pagans and Satanists); or the KDE desktop (a favorite among Muslims) versus the GNOME project (particularly favored by Jews). Posts initiating crusades or jihads against other developers can be found regularly throughout the newsgroups and mailing lists.
Myth: Open Source is tolerant of sexual preference.
Fact: See above. Either you are a homo, you become a homo, or you never visit Richard Stallman alone in his office and hope to God you never meet him on the street at night.
Myth: Open Source is tolerant of political differences.
Fact: Open Source is an anarcho-communist philosophy bent on the destruction of capitalism. The very same Richard Stallman, a man whose name is disturbingly reminiscent of Stalin, has stated several times in public that his vision includes the subjugation of all who own intellectual properties under the jackboot of the GPL. The GPL is a pernicious piece of literature lifted straight from Karl Marxs Communist Manifesto, and is fortunately banned in many democratic nations.
* * * * * UPDATE * * * * *
Myth: Open Source programming is a harlmess, healthy activity.
Fact: Open Source programming has been known to lead to massive obesity, violent tendencies with an obsession with handguns, paranoid-delusional ranting, and in severe cases, complete insanity. If anyone you know is thinking about going Open Source, stop them before its too late!
* * * * * UPDATE * * * * *
____________________
2002 Serial Troller. Permission to reproduce this document is granted provided that you send all the bukkake porn you can find to serialtroller@hotmail.com.
- posted by poopbot: the bot formerly known as pwpbot
TUjEmzrkty Post #929
Credits: Big Dogs Cock
Trolling in the name of
Some of those that boot Suse
Are the same that bought XP
Some of those that boot Suse
Are the same that bought XP
Trolling in the name of
And now you run what they told you
And now you run what they told you
And now you run what they told you
95 is justified for running the games that you didn't buy
95 is justified for running the games that you didn't buy
Some of those that boot Suse
Are the same that bought XP
Some of those that boot Suse
Are the same that bought XP
And you run what they told you
Now your under control
And you run what they told you
Now your under control
And you run what they told you
Come on!
Fuck you I wont run what you tell me
Fuck you I wont run what you tell me
Fuck you I wont run what you tell me
Fuck you I wont run what you tell me
Motherfucker
- posted by poopbot: for all your crapflooding needs
mM9ggBJuiU Post #930
CmdrTaco: You sit here, dear.
CowboiKneel: All right.
CmdrTaco (to Waitress): Morning!
Waitress: Morning!
CmdrTaco: Well, whatve you got?
Waitress: Well, theres egg and bacon; egg, sausage and bacon; egg and snot; egg, bacon and snot; egg, bacon, sausage, and snot; snot, bacon, sausage, and snot; snot, egg, snot, snot, bacon, and snot; snot, sausage, snot, snot, bacon, snot, tomato, and snot;
Slashdot Crew (starting to chant): Snot, snot, snot, snot
Waitress: Snot, snot, snot, egg, and snot; snot, snot, snot, snot, snot, snot, baked beans, snot, snot, snot
Slashdot Crew (singing): Snot! Lovely snot! Lovely snot!
Waitress: or Lobster Thermidor au Crevette with a Mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and snot.
CowboiKneel: Have you got anything without snot?
Waitress: Well, theres snot, egg, sausage, and snot, thats not got much snot in it.
CowboiKneel: I dont want any snot!
CmdrTaco: Why cant he have egg, bacon, snot, and sausage?
CowboiKneel: Thats got snot in it!
CmdrTaco: Hasnt got as much snot in it as snot, egg, sausage, and snot, has it?
Slashdot Crew: Snot, snot, snot, snot! (crescendo through next few lines)
CowboiKneel: Could you do the egg, bacon, snot, and sausage without the snot then?
Waitress: Urgghh!
CowboiKneel: What do you mean Urgghh? I dont like snot!
Slashdot Crew: Lovely snot! Wonderful snot!
Waitress: Shut up!
Slashdot Crew: Lovely snot! Wonderful snot!
Waitress: Shut up! (Slashdot Crew stops) Bloody Slashdot fags! You cant have egg, bacon, snot and sausage without the snot.
CowboiKneel (shrieks): I dont like snot!
CmdrTaco: Sshh, dear, dont cause a fuss. Ill have your snot. I love it. Im having snot, snot, snot, snot, snot, snot, snot, beaked beans, snot, snot, snot, and snot!
Slashdot Crew (singing): Snot, snot, snot, snot. Lovely snot! Wonderful snot!
Waitress: Shut up!! Baked beans are off.
CmdrTaco: Well could I have his snot instead of the baked beans then?
Waitress: You mean snot, snot, snot, snot, snot, snot
Slashdot Crew (singing elaborately): Snot, snot, snot, snot. Lovely snot! Wonderful snot! Snot, sno-o-o-o-o-ot, snot, sno-o-o-o-o-ot snot. Lovely snot! Lovely snot! Lovely snot! Lovely snot! Lovely snot! Snot, snot, snot, snot!
- posted by poopbot: because we're all crapflooders at heart
FZaCy8C2Ot Post #931
Either your network or ip address has been banned from this site
due to script flooding that originated from your network or ip address -- or this IP might have been used to post comments designed to break web browser rendering. If you feel that this is unwarranted, feel free to include your IP address (1.2.3.4) in the subject of an email, and we will examine why there is a ban. If you fail to include the IP address (again, in the Subject!), then your message will be deleted and ignored. I mean come on, we're good, we're not psychic.
Since you can't read the FAQ because you're banned, here's the relevant portion:
Why is my IP banned?
 Perhaps you are running some sort of program that loaded thousands of Slashdot Pages. We have limited resources here and are fairly protective of them. We need to make sure that everyone shares. If your IP loads thousands of pages in a day, you will likely be banned. Please note that many proxy servers load large quantities of pages, but we can usually distinguish between proxy servers being used by humans, and IPs running software that is hammering our servers.
 Your IP might have been used to perform some sort of denial of service attack against Slashdot. These range from simple programs that just load a lot of pages, to programs that attempt to coordinate an avalanche of posts in the forums (often through misconfigured "Open Relay" proxy servers).
 You might be using a proxy server that is also being used by another person who did something from the above list. You should have your proxy server administrator contact us.
 Your IP might have been used to post comments designed to break web browser rendering.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 7/02/02
How do I get an IP Unbanned?
Email banned@slashdot.org. Make sure to include the IP in question, and any other pertinent information. If you are connecting through a proxy server, you might need to have your proxy server's admin contact us instead of you.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 3/26/02
- posted by poopbot: providing truth in a deceitful world
lfJxqp0Opy Post #932
It seems that the Janitors, in their infinite wisdom, have banned people who have low/negative karma from posting more than twice per day. Personally I find this completely stupid.
All the trolls will simply post AC as I am doing now. Proxies can be used to get around any ipid bans that result from AC trolls.
Surely it is better to let the trolls post at -1 where it is out of most peoples way rather than have them all post at 0 and suck up mod points and time from "legit" users?
I have tried to communicate my thoughts to the slashcode team but alas, to no avail. They are probably all sittin on their starwars bed sheets watching anime hentai tentacle rape pr0n.
Here is my proposal: All trolls that cannot post using their account post as AC. Use proxies if need be (www.antiproxy.com is a good source). I suspect this will show them how useless this idea is. Will blocking troll uid's stop trolls? NO! will ipid bans stop trolls? NO!
I seriously fail to see the point of this and consider it a stupid move by the janitors.
They want us to troll and crapflood at 0 rather than -1? Fine! So be it! No longer will we post at -1 where few people dare to visit, now we will post at 0 where we will be more visible and waste peoples time, energy and mod points! Hoorah!
The next thing you know, posting AC will be banned! Then what will you do? No more posting interesting insider tidbits! Groupthink all the way baby! oh yeah!
So logout, post shit, use proxies and above all have fun!
Let the games begin! -- on by
- posted by poopbot: the bot formerly known as pwpbot
0pBbwF43Rn Post #933
Credits: 70%
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors .. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our governme
- posted by poopbot: for all your crapflooding needs
JTuypZ9VlC Post #934
How boute a interview with someone that knows WHO IN THE FUCK CHARLES STROSS IS!
How do you feel now about your "trolls only get 2 posts" policy? Dumbasses.
his cutting-edge speculation. Sci-Fi writers with cutting-edge speculation and interesting futurist ideas are a dime a dozen. Sterling's strength is in making it fun to read! And creating a very detailed and believable context for the ideas to be presented in.
Credits: dmg
Yet again the Linux so-called elite, backed up by their pseudo intellectual cohorts of the w3c conspire to ruin Linux's chances in the marketplace by sowing confusion and complexity. As someone with years of experience in the marketing world, I am constantly amazed at the willingness of the W3C and other bodies to pollute the acronym space with their content free "TLAs".
Basic marketing 101 (and an undergrad course in psychology) would tell them that the normal person is only capable of remembering approximately 7 items of data in their short-term memory, but now we have to remember HTTP, HTML, XML, XSL, DTD, PHP, SSL, DSL, ADSL, ISDN, Perl, etc etc etc
This is a text book example of the tail wagging the dog from a marketing perspective.
I have been following the standardisation of the web for many many months now, but one thing has become clear, E-commerce will NEVER become popular so long as there are so many confusing acronyms involved. The guys in charge of marketing Linux absolutely MUST work to reduce the number of acronyms. One possible solution would be to merge those protocols which are not all that different. For example, why not merge XML with SGML ? (they could call it XSGML or SXGML or perhaps XMSGML), they seem to address the same problems. Or would that be too simplistic a solution for their pampered elitist ivy-league minds to comprehend ?
If something is not done URGENTLY, and I mean URGENTLY, Linux (and other more experimental derivatives such as FreeBSD) can never hope to be taken seriously as an e-commerce platform by the people who count - the accountants.
The miracle of Linux is that anyone actually runs it at all, considering one seems to require a masters in computer science to install it! (contrast this with NT4 which was so easy to install, we let our receptionist upgrade her own machine).
As usual my "open source" advice is free. Hopefully this time my valuable advice will be taken into account the next time the w3c smell an acronym brewing.
Finally, in conclusion, as an American, I am saddened that the Internet seems to have been commandeered by a European based protocol. Was America so short of talent we had to buy the HTML protocol from Tom Berners-Lee at CERN ?
Think of the security implications of the worlds strongest economy, running an e-commerce protocol developed by a foreigner from Socialist Europe. Remember the wall has not been down for that long. Who knows what kind of trojans might be lurking within the depths of these complicated protocols.
I am afraid I am behind Al Gore on this point, how can this be necessary in the home of smart corporations such as Microsoft and Intel ? The answer is the vast subsidies given by European socialist governments to fund development of the HTML specification.
The solution is clear. The federal government should mandate and strongly subsidise the use of Microsoft software for all US corporations involved in e-commerce. Only with a US-developed set of protocols can we be assured of the security of our transactions.
- posted by poopbot: because we're all crapflooders at heart
Q6bDQJEJxa Post #936
Why, he's my favorite author!!!!
Joseph?
Yea baby! Getting his padonkadonk down!
The information in this article applies to:
/dev/sda1 * 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (SCSI hard drive 1, partition 1) /dev/sda2 501 522 176715 82 Linux swap (SCSI hard drive 1, partition 2)
/dev/sda1 * 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (SCSI hard drive 1, partition 1) /dev/sda2 501 522 176715 82 Linux swap (SCSI hard drive 1, partition 2) /dev/sdb1 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (SCSI hard drive 2, partition 1)
/dev/hda1 * 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (IDE hard drive 1, partition 1) /dev/hda2 501 522 176715 82 Linux swap (IDE hard drive 1, partition 2)
/dev/hda1 * 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (IDE hard drive 1, partition 1) /dev/hda2 501 522 176715 82 Linux swap (IDE hard drive 1, partition 2) /dev/hdb1 1 500 4016218 83 Linux native (IDE hard drive 2, partition 1)
n fo/admi nistration/management/mltiboot.asp
* Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
* Microsoft Windows XP Professional
For a Microsoft Windows 2000 version of this article, see Q247804.
Summary
This article explains how to remove the Linux operating system from your computer and install Windows XP. This article assumes that Linux is already installed on your computer's hard disk, that Linux native and Linux swap partitions are in use (which are incompatible with Windows XP), and that there is no free space left on the hard disk.
NOTE: Windows XP and Linux can coexist on the same computer. For additional information, refer to your Linux documentation.
More Information
To install Windows XP on a computer on which Linux is currently installed (and assuming that you want to remove Linux), you must manually delete the partitions used by the Linux operating system. The Windows-compatible partition can be created automatically during the installation of Windows XP.
IMPORTANT: Before you follow the steps in this article, verify that you have a bootable disk or bootable CD-ROM for the Linux operating system, because these steps completely remove the Linux operating system from your computer. If you intend to restore the Linux operating system at a later date, verify that you also have a functional backup of all the information stored on your computer. Additionally, you must have a full release version of Windows XP to use during this installation. If you intend to use a Windows XP upgrade CD-ROM, a CD-ROM of a qualifying Windows product must be available. Setup from the Windows XP upgrade CD-ROM will prompt you for this CD-ROM.
Linux file systems use a superblock at the beginning of a disk partition to identify the basic size, shape, and condition of the file system.
The Linux operating system is generally installed on partition type 83 (Linux native) or 82 (Linux swap). The Linux boot manager (LILO) can be configured to start from either of the following locations:
* The hard disk Master Boot Record (MBR)
-or-
* The root folder of the Linux partition
The Fdisk tool included with Linux can be used to delete the partitions. (There are other utilities that work just as well, such as Fdisk from MS-DOS 5.0 and later, or you can delete the partitions during the installation process.)
To remove Linux from your computer and install Windows XP, follow these steps:
1. Remove the native, swap, and boot partitions used by Linux: Start your computer with the Linux Setup floppy disk, type fdisk at the command prompt, and then press ENTER. NOTE: For help with using the Fdisk tool, type m at the command prompt, and then press ENTER.
2. Type p at the command prompt, and then press ENTER to display partition information. The first item listed is hard disk 1, partition 1 information, and the second item listed is hard disk 1, partition 2 information.
3. Type d at the command prompt, and then press ENTER. You are then prompted for the partition number that you want to delete. Type 1, and then press ENTER to delete partition number 1. Repeat this step until all the partitions have been deleted.
4. Type w, and then press ENTER to write this information to the partition table. Some error messages may be generated (because information is written to the partition table), but they should not be significant at this point because the next step is to restart the computer and then install the new operating system.
5. Type q at the command prompt, and then press ENTER to quit the Fdisk tool.
6. Insert either a bootable floppy disk or the bootable Windows XP CD-ROM, and then press CTRL+ALT+DELETE to restart your computer.
2. Follow the instructions on the screen to install Windows XP.
The installation process assists you in creating the appropriate partitions on your computer.
Sample Linux Partition Tables
Single SCSI Drive
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Multiple SCSI Drives
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Single IDE Drive
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Multiple IDE Drives
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Additionally, Linux recognizes more than 40 different partition types, including the following:
* FAT 12 (Type 01)
* FAT 16 > 32 M Primary (Type 06)
* FAT 16 Extended (Type 05)
* FAT 32 w/o LBA Primary (Type 0b)
* FAT 32 w/LBA Primary (Type 0c)
* FAT 16 w/LBA (Type 0e)
* FAT 16 w/LBA Extended (Type 0f)
Note that there are other ways to remove the Linux operating system and install Windows XP. The preceding method is included in this article because of the assumptions that the Linux operating system is already functioning and there is no more room on the hard disk. There are methods for changing partition sizes with software designed for managing partitions. Disk partitioning software may cause instability with the Windows XP installation. Microsoft does not support the installation of Windows XP on partitions manipulated in this manner.
You can also use an MS-DOS version 5.0-or-later boot disk, a Microsoft Windows 95 Startup disk, or a Microsoft Windows 98 Startup disk that contains the Fdisk utility to remove an operating system from the hard disk and install a different operating system. When you start Fdisk and multiple drives are installed on your computer, you are presented with five choices; use option 5 to select the hard disk that has the partition to be deleted. After that (or if you have only one hard disk), select option 3 (Delete partition or logical DOS drive), and then select option 4 (Delete non-DOS partition). You should then see the non-MS-DOS partitions that you want to delete. Typically, the Linux operating system has two non-MS-DOS partitions, but there may be more. After you delete one partition, use the same steps to delete any other appropriate non-MS-DOS partitions.
For additional information about how to use the Fdisk utility, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Q255867 How to Use the Fdisk Tool and the Format Tool to Partition or Repartition a Hard Disk After you delete the partitions, you can create partitions and install the operating system that you want. You can create only one primary partition and an extended partition with multiple logical drives by using Fdisk from MS-DOS version 5.0-and-later, Windows 95, and Windows 98. The maximum FAT16 primary partition size is 2 gigabytes (GB). The largest FAT16 logical drive size is 2 GB.
For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Q105074 MS-DOS 6.2 Partitioning Questions and Answers
When you install Windows XP, the Linux partitions can be removed and new partitions created and formatted with the appropriate file system type during the installation process. Windows XP allows you to create more than one primary partition. Windows XP does recognize the FAT32 file system. During the installation of Windows XP, you can create a very large FAT32 drive. The FAT32 drive can be converted to NTFS after the installation has completed, if appropriate.
For additional information about how to multiboot with Windows XP, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: Q306559 HOW TO: Create a Multiple-Boot System with Windows XP
For more information, browse to the following Microsoft Web site:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/techi
The third-party contact information included in this article is provided to help you find the technical support you need. This contact information is subject to change without notice. Microsoft in no way guarantees the accuracy of this third-party contact information.
The third-party products discussed in this article are manufactured by vendors independent of Microsoft; we make no warranty, implied or otherwise, regarding these products' performance or reliability.
- posted by poopbot: the bot formerly known as pwpbot
pKb4Ob69FP Post #937
-= OBEY =- mother fuckaz!
some more noise to add to this already noisy story.
g to the oatse
c to the izzex
fo shizzle my nizzle this was posted by Trolling Stones
Please, for the love of god, post a new story... let this fade away quickly from everyone's memory and vision.
look at all the -1's.
Wasn't it Vernor Vinge who coined the term Singularity in relation to exponential technologic growth which overwhelms our ability to predict and comprehend?
His writings are suffused with it. It is a key theme in A Fire Upon the Deep and Marooned in Realtime. It also weighs heavily in the background of A Deepness in the Sky. All IMO are brilliant pieces of SF.
Credits: dmg
Yet again the Linux so-called elite, backed up by their pseudo intellectual cohorts of the w3c conspire to ruin Linux's chances in the marketplace by sowing confusion and complexity. As someone with years of experience in the marketing world, I am constantly amazed at the willingness of the W3C and other bodies to pollute the acronym space with their content free "TLAs".
Basic marketing 101 (and an undergrad course in psychology) would tell them that the normal person is only capable of remembering approximately 7 items of data in their short-term memory, but now we have to remember HTTP, HTML, XML, XSL, DTD, PHP, SSL, DSL, ADSL, ISDN, Perl, etc etc etc
This is a text book example of the tail wagging the dog from a marketing perspective.
I have been following the standardisation of the web for many many months now, but one thing has become clear, E-commerce will NEVER become popular so long as there are so many confusing acronyms involved. The guys in charge of marketing Linux absolutely MUST work to reduce the number of acronyms. One possible solution would be to merge those protocols which are not all that different. For example, why not merge XML with SGML ? (they could call it XSGML or SXGML or perhaps XMSGML), they seem to address the same problems. Or would that be too simplistic a solution for their pampered elitist ivy-league minds to comprehend ?
If something is not done URGENTLY, and I mean URGENTLY, Linux (and other more experimental derivatives such as FreeBSD) can never hope to be taken seriously as an e-commerce platform by the people who count - the accountants.
The miracle of Linux is that anyone actually runs it at all, considering one seems to require a masters in computer science to install it! (contrast this with NT4 which was so easy to install, we let our receptionist upgrade her own machine).
As usual my "open source" advice is free. Hopefully this time my valuable advice will be taken into account the next time the w3c smell an acronym brewing.
Finally, in conclusion, as an American, I am saddened that the Internet seems to have been commandeered by a European based protocol. Was America so short of talent we had to buy the HTML protocol from Tom Berners-Lee at CERN ?
Think of the security implications of the worlds strongest economy, running an e-commerce protocol developed by a foreigner from Socialist Europe. Remember the wall has not been down for that long. Who knows what kind of trojans might be lurking within the depths of these complicated protocols.
I am afraid I am behind Al Gore on this point, how can this be necessary in the home of smart corporations such as Microsoft and Intel ? The answer is the vast subsidies given by European socialist governments to fund development of the HTML specification.
The solution is clear. The federal government should mandate and strongly subsidise the use of Microsoft software for all US corporations involved in e-commerce. Only with a US-developed set of protocols can we be assured of the security of our transactions.
- posted by poopbot: because we're all crapflooders at heart
H4j6AeQ3uE Post #938
USian Pie
A long, long time ago I can still remember How the trollers used to make me smile And I knew if I had to boast That I could try to get first post And maybe I'd be happy for a while But moderators made me shiver With every minus they'd deliver DoS scripts couldn't stop it They scored them all "Offtopic" I know that it's cheap crack they smoke And meta-moderation's broke At first I thought it was a joke The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
Bye, bye, MEEPTy, OOG, and Grits guy Drove the Cruiser like some loser who starts posts with a *sigh*
Those Steve Woston posts that we all knew were a lie Wonder what became of girls petrified? What became of girls petrified?
--
Did you write a bunch of Perl? And did it make you want to hurl Feces at the Wall? Can you believe these lame-ass polls? Do you post big stretched-out assholes? Can you make the goatse.cx link not show? Well I know you think that Siggy sucked Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up? The bots don't have a clue. Man, I dig those trolls from Shoe! I was a rabid Free Speech advocate With a Red Hat T-shirt and a Free Beer gut
Bought my Sony laptop working Pizza Hut The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
It's been two years since the IPO And LNUX sinks to all-time lows But that's not how it used to be When Spiral showed how it was done Trolling as Jon Erikson Who worked for NPO Technologies Oh and while they tried to filter posts Somebody rooted Slashdot's host "Crack Slashdot? That's absurd!" Better go change your password While JonKatz wrote a Hellmouth book By using posts he simply took And we flamed him till he was cooked The day that trolltalk died And we were singin....
-- Chorus --
10 grams. Inchfan. Didn't log out. Goddamn The mods will find the sid real soon, man
You can't hide if you aren't AC Your bud (George here) tried BSD A dead Streetlawyer's tips were free And WIPO helped letsriot turn Nazi 70 made his percents up While 80md warned "liberals suck" The moon does not exist It's just a liberal myth Oh and as Taco tried to take a nap We forced him to invoke bitchslaps Do you recall the flood of crap The day that trolltalk died? We started singin....
-- Chorus --
Oh and then we were wearing out "All your base" And started posting monospace
The better for our penis birds So come on, be a zealot, be a dick You don't think Anne Marie's a chick? Because lying's all we do about HURD So go and push for BSD And say GPL isn't free Slow down, cowboy! The limit Is one post every minute Now tell the right wing facist slime Infringing on Your Rights Online That they can't censor all the time The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
I met a troll they called The Rev And asked him if CD BREAK HEAD He said, "That's old. Get over it." And with all the courage I could muster "Imagine what a Beowulf cluster...." But it wasn't worth the trouble to submit The karma caps are just plain jive And everyone's moved to K5 The steelcage has grown rusted And Geekizoid is busted
The three sites I don't see for weeks Segfault, kernel, Comp-u-geek Code is not art. This ain't Freshmeat The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
- posted by poopbot: crapflooding since 7/8/02
ojCH5QHeyG Post #943
Credits: Big Dogs Cock
Trolling in the name of
Some of those that boot Suse
Are the same that bought XP
Some of those that boot Suse
Are the same that bought XP
Trolling in the name of
And now you run what they told you
And now you run what they told you
And now you run what they told you
95 is justified for running the games that you didn't buy
95 is justified for running the games that you didn't buy
Some of those that boot Suse
Are the same that bought XP
Some of those that boot Suse
Are the same that bought XP
And you run what they told you
Now your under control
And you run what they told you
Now your under control
And you run what they told you
Come on!
Fuck you I wont run what you tell me
Fuck you I wont run what you tell me
Fuck you I wont run what you tell me
Fuck you I wont run what you tell me
Motherfucker
- posted by poopbot: for all your crapflooding needs
AMctpz2gSv Post #944
It's gold, jerry! gold!
How are things in the civilized world? You probably don't know who I am. That's
;).
okay. I'm here to inform you of my mission, what I've found, and what I hope to
teach all of you.
I work for the United Christians Food for Poor Kids Foundation, and let me tell
you, there's a lot of poor kids in Afghanistan. As in most countries in the
Middle East, most people are unemployed, and therefore poor. And where there's a
lot of poor people, UCFPKF is needed.
UCFPKF always has the latest in technology. In this instance, we had access to
some Pentium 4's(r) 2GHz. Obviously, we needed an operating system that could
handle the power of Intel's beast. Unfortunately, we didn't have any computer
experts on hand up to the task, so it was going to be trial and error.
We'd heard good things about Linux and its "ACL's". Little did we know of its
incompatibility with modern hardware. It didn't even support Token Ring
networking, the newest form of Ethernet(r), which we require to always keep
in contact between bases. Also, it didn't seem to use SSE optimizations, which
when processing food amounts, are also very important. Also, there were
homo-erotic implications in the structure of Linux, which is strictly
unallowable in a Christian organization such as ours.
The next obvious step was to install Windows. We hesitated because we knew that
it was common knowledge that Windows crashed incessantly. Our experience was
less than stellar. It also didn't support Token Ring networking. Security is
important in this region because many people try to steal food, but "Windows
2000" (which I hear didn't even come out in 2000) doesn't even allow you to
have seperate permissions. Once again, the SSE optimizations were not used.
I was in a situation that seemed impossible. The two most famous operating
systems had failed me. I walked around the base in a dazed stupor. What was I
going to do for our ultra-important network? A boy saw me pouting and sighing,
and asked me what was wrong. I said nothing, but we exchanged names, and little
did I know, that young Junis had a gift for computers.
Junis saw me the next day, slaving away at the sparse terminal that "Windows
2000" makes you type in. He asked what I was doing with that primitive OS. I
laughed and told him that I was doing inventory. He ran to his village, into his
hut, and pulled out a box I had never seen before. The box said "SCO Xenix" the
front. I had never seen or heard of this Xenix before. But I soon learned that
Junis was a computer genius.
All we had to do was put the Xenix CD into the computer, and everything worked
like magic (not the devil's magic... good magic:) ). Our Token Ring network
integrated flawlessly with it. And it even used SSE optimizations. Well, me and
Junis are now on a new mission. We're spreading the word. It might not be the
word of the lord, but then again, maybe it is
SCO Xenix: The Unix of Tomorrow.
Janet Milman
Network Administrator, UCFPKF
Afghanistan base
- posted by poopbot: the bot formerly known as pwpbot
C912qyJWCt Post #945
A singularity is a feature of a graph. Now, I'm as rational-reductionist as the next geek, but reducing all of human progress to a graph reduces reductionism to the riduclous!
Netcraft has confirmed: Taco-snotting is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Taco-snotting community when recently IDC confirmed that Taco-snotting accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all homosexual acts. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Taco-snotting has lost more fag practitioners, this news serves to reinforce what weve known all along. Taco-snotting faggots are collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Faggot World comprehensive snotting test.
You dont need to be a Katz to predict Taco-snottings future. The handwriting is on the wall: Taco-snotting faces a bleak future. In fact there wont be any future at all for Taco-snotting because Taco-snotting is dying. Things are looking very bad for Taco-snotting. As many of us are already aware, Taco-snotting continues to lose faggotshare. White ink flows like a river of bubbly, thick jizz. The circle-snot is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core snotters.
Lets keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Circle-snotting leader Jeff Homos Masterbates states that there are 7000 snotters of the circle-snot. How many users of anal snot are there? Lets see. The number of circle-snotting versus anal snot posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 anal snot users. SnotOS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of anal snot posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of SnotOS. A recent article put the circle-snot at about 80 percent of the Taco-snotting market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 circle-snot users. This is consistent with the number of circle-snot Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of CowboiKneels walnuts, abysmal sales and so on, the circle-snot went out of business and was taken over by SNOTi who sell another troubled Taco-snot. Now SNOTi is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another gay whorehouse.
All major surveys show that Taco-snotting has steadily declined in faggotshare. Taco-snotting is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Taco-snotting is to survive at all it will be among heterosexual hobbyist dabblers. Taco-snotting continues to decay. Nothing short of a jizz-soaked miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Taco-snotting is dead.
Fact: Taco-snotting is dead.
- posted by poopbot: lovely snot! wonderful snot!
5BHr8lttER Post #946
Whats black, blue and green and doesnt like sex?
The Girl Scout locked in my basement.
Whats the worst part about having sex with a six year-old?
Getting the blood out of your clown suit.
Whats the best thing about getting a hand job from a five year-old?
That little hand makes your thing look really huge.
Guy comes home from work to find his girlfriend sitting on the porch, crying.
Whats wrong, honey?
Im leaving you! I just found out youre a pdophile!
Pdophile? Why, thats a pretty big word for a ten year-old.
How can you tell when your sisters on her period?
When your dads dick tastes like blood!
Two pdophiles are lying on a beach tanning, one turns to the other and says, Excuse me, youre in my son.
What is the sickest sound you hear when fucking a nine year-old?
Her hips snapping!
What is the best sound you hear when fucking a 13 year-old?
Her hips snapping!
Whats 18 inches long, blue, veiny, and makes a woman cry?
Crib death.
How could the mans seven year-old son tell that his dad had fucked his eight year-old sister? His dads weiner tasted like blood!
Watson returns home to find Holmes in bed with a child. He shouts, Is this some sort of a schoolgirl?
Holmes replies, Elementary, my dear Watson.
So I was having sex with my girlfriend, and I decided I wanted to get kinky and try and do her in the ass. So I slipped around back; she looked over her shoulder at me and said, My, how presumptuous of you. I said, Presumptuous? Thats a big word for a ten year-old.
Two guys are walking down the street when a beautiful woman passes. The first guy says, Damn! Id love to tear her clothes off, do her in the rear, smear my fces all over her, slice off her breasts, chop her into little pieces, put her in a garbage bag and toss her into the river!
Second guy says, Yuck! Youre a sick bastard!
First guy says, Whatre you? A fag?
A kindergarten teacher is asking the kids what their father does for a living. All the kids answer except for Little Johnny. The teacher asks Little Johnny what his Dad does and Johnny replies, My dad is dead.
The teacher says, Thats terribile, but what did he do before he died?
Little Johnny replies, He turned blue and shit all over himself!
A guy calls in sick to work.
Whats wrong? asks the boss.
Im sick, the guy replies.
You sound all right.
No, Im really sick. Believe me.
Listen, you were fine yesterday, and we have a lot of work today. I want you in here. You cant be that sick!
Dude, I just banged my sister. Dont tell me Im not sick.
A little girl accompanied her father to the barbershop. While her dad received a haircut, the little girl stood next to the barber chair, enjoying a snack cake. The barber smiled at her and said, Sweetheart, youre going to get hair on your Twinkie.
I know, the little girl replied. Im gonna get tits, too.
An older man and a small boy walk hand in hand through the woods.
Boy: These woods sure are spooky!
Man: You think youre scared, Ive gotta walk out of here alone.
Whats the difference between Neil Armstrong and Michael Jackson?
One walked on the moon, and the other rapes little boys.
Has anyone read Michael Jacksons new book, The Ins and Outs of Child Rearing?
Q: Whats the difference between a dead baby and a golden delicious apple?
A: I dont cum all over the golden delicious apple before I take a bite out of it.
Q: Whats the difference between a dead baby and my girlfriend?
A: I dont kiss my girlfriend after sex.
Q: Whats the difference between a dead baby and a table?
A: You cant fuck a table.
Q: Whats special about a dead baby over all other forms of life?
A: You can achieve deep throat from whichever way you enter.
Q: What do you have when you have four dead babies, take away two, and add five more?
A: An orgy!
Q: Whats better than three 14 year-olds?
A: 14 three year-olds.
Q: Whats white and bobs up and down in a babys crib?
A: A pdophiles ass.
Q: Whats the safest way to play with a baby?
A: With a condom.
Q: Whats more fun than feeling up a dead baby?
A: Feeling up a dead baby with three nipples.
Q: What does a baby and a Pinto have in common?
A: Theyre fun to ride until they die.
Q: What do you get whan you dislocate a dead babys jaw?
A: Deep throat.
Q: Whats the difference between a baby and a grandmother?
A: Grandmothers dont die when you fuck them in the ass.
Q: Whats the best sound in the world?
A: Hearing dead babys hips crack under pressure!
Q: Whats worse than a having sex with a dead baby?
A: Having sex with a dead baby filled with razor blades.
Q: How do you stop a baby from choking?
A: Take your dick out of its mouth.
Q: Whats worse than finding a dead baby on your pillow in the morning?
A: Realizing you were drunk and made love to it the night before.
Q: How do you make a baby cry twice?
A: Wipe your bloody cock on his teddy bear.
Whats better than sex with a twelve year-old boy?
Absolutely nothing.
- posted by poopbot: lovely snot! wonderful snot!
EQHvbun6fy Post #947
Either your network or ip address has been banned from this site
due to script flooding that originated from your network or ip address -- or this IP might have been used to post comments designed to break web browser rendering. If you feel that this is unwarranted, feel free to include your IP address (1.2.3.4) in the subject of an email, and we will examine why there is a ban. If you fail to include the IP address (again, in the Subject!), then your message will be deleted and ignored. I mean come on, we're good, we're not psychic.
Since you can't read the FAQ because you're banned, here's the relevant portion:
Why is my IP banned?
 Perhaps you are running some sort of program that loaded thousands of Slashdot Pages. We have limited resources here and are fairly protective of them. We need to make sure that everyone shares. If your IP loads thousands of pages in a day, you will likely be banned. Please note that many proxy servers load large quantities of pages, but we can usually distinguish between proxy servers being used by humans, and IPs running software that is hammering our servers.
 Your IP might have been used to perform some sort of denial of service attack against Slashdot. These range from simple programs that just load a lot of pages, to programs that attempt to coordinate an avalanche of posts in the forums (often through misconfigured "Open Relay" proxy servers).
 You might be using a proxy server that is also being used by another person who did something from the above list. You should have your proxy server administrator contact us.
 Your IP might have been used to post comments designed to break web browser rendering.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 7/02/02
How do I get an IP Unbanned?
Email banned@slashdot.org. Make sure to include the IP in question, and any other pertinent information. If you are connecting through a proxy server, you might need to have your proxy server's admin contact us instead of you.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 3/26/02
- posted by poopbot: news for turds, stuff that splatters
3FFIKrSiPY Post #948
A Linux user goes back.
/etc/fstab file so that it always automounted when plugged in. I was very impressed.
/dev/null, once I find where that actually is.
By Tony âoekNIGitsâ Collins.
Introduction...
In much of today's online news, we hear of how many people are migrating to GNU/Linux. What we don't seem to hear much of, is users going back to their old operating systems. The reason for this article is to say that I've done just that.
Yes, I've gone back. After three and a half years of trying to make GNU/Linux work on the desktop, I've decided that it's simply too hard for the average home user. Before I go into my reasons for going back, let me outline what I believe an 'average' home user is. Mr Joe Average is someone who wants to install their OS, boot it up, and it works. He wants to be able to upgrade his PC , and have the hardware work in a few short minutes. He wants to read email, browse the web, talk to his mates online, and play some games. Feel free to disagree with me, this is merely how I see myself. Note: I'm not referring to Grandma using Linux, or even my mum using it. I'm referring to average users who know a little about their computer.
Three and a half years; that's how long I've been trying to make Linux work on my desktop computer. Right about now, I'm sure that you are now screaming that I didn't try hard enough, or that I'm just plain stupid. Let me assure you that this is not the case. Stupid users don't doggedly stick at something for three and a half years, trying distribution after distribution in the hope of finding the holy grail of Linux desktops. They give up in less than a few hours of trying to (unsuccessfully) install RedHat Linux. Hear now my sad tale of why Linux isn't suitable for my desktop.
Some background...
The year is 1998. I've had my Windows '95 computer for around six months. Frustrated with the constant crashes, I desperately asked an online mate for help. Even though he was a windows user, he calmly suggested that I try something I'd never come across before...
âoeLinux, eh? Never heard of it.â
âoeOh, it's a free OS that you can download. Apparently it doesn't crash much. Just do an online search for it.â
Armed with this meagre knowledge, I set out on my quest for the ultimate stable operating system. I searched online, and found places where you could even buy copies of Linux! So, I left the comfort of my warm study, and returned forty minutes later with my first Linux boxed set â" RedHat Linux 5.2. After initially balking at the very basic installer (and few false starts), I had it up and running on my lovely AMD K6-233. I even got X working in no time at all. Then the system booted up for the first time.... and it was dead ugly. I had a very stable new OS, but I didn't even want to look at it. I was happy that I had several installed interfaces to choose from, but none of them appealed to me whatsoever. Wanting to download a nicer interface led me to my next problem.
I had absolutely no idea how to even get this nice, stable OS onto the internet! After reinstalling windows and RedHat in a dual-boot configuration, I got the help I needed by using Windows and USENET. Strangely enough, I can still remember the name of the long-suffering person who helped me get RedHat online, but that's another story. After looking around online, I discovered KDE. Only up to version one, it was the closest thing I had to a completely useable Linux system. I downloaded all the KDE packages for RedHat 5.2, only to discover another distro called Mandrake, that came with KDE preinstalled and configured. Back to my local distributor, and I was set.
Mandrake with KDE was exactly what I needed at that stage in my Linux using life, and I stuck with it for over a year and a half. Always seeking the 'perfect' desktop OS, I followed releases from version 5.3 all the way through to 7.0. Eventually I became dissatisfied with Mandrake, and briefly tried a number of other distros until I finally settled on Debian. I was impressed by the simple power, configurability, and the ease of upgrade that is apt-get. I felt good about being among the uber-elite Debian user community. Needless to say, I learned a lot about how to configure hardware under Linux during my time with Debian. I learned to sift through the old HOWTOs on Linux Doc until I found something suitable and accurate, I learned to utilize the power of USENET and IRC. Life was good.
Right now you must be wondering; âoeWhere is this leading? This guy seemed quite happy with Linux!â. True, I was. After a while, I decided I didn't want to have fine-grained control. I wanted something simple. I was getting tired of the 'stable' Debian release being so out of date, and the 'unstable' distribution being so... well... unstable. I got tired of having to recompile my kernel every time I got new hardware. I got tired of using command line to talk to my PC. It was time for a change. I had good experiences years ago with Mandrake, so I figured I'd try it again. As good as Mandrake 8.1 was, it wasn't what I was after. SuSE Linux 8.0 Professional (boxed set) was installed onto my PC instead.
I have to stop at this point, and say that SuSE Linux 8.0 (Pro) is the best Linux distribution that I've ever used. It has an easy installer, reasonable hardware support, and comes with the very good KDE 3.0. The box contains seven CDROMS, one DVD and three decent books that would help even the most inexperienced user get up and going. YaST2 is a decent graphical system configuration tool. When (not if) I go back to Linux, I'll definitely try SuSE again. However, there are quite a number of things that have improve (or change completely) before I'll consider going back. Read on for my brief list of things that must must get better before I'll switch back from the Microsoft camp.
Where GNU/Linux needs to improve...
X11
The X Window System is an awesomely powerful, network transparent graphical subsystem. It's perfectly suited to running applications from remote servers. However, this is NOT what a home user needs. My experience with X is that it's too big, bloated, slow and unstable to be any good to the home user. Most crashes that I ever experienced with Linux have been X's fault. My servers don't run X, and they never crash.
What home users need is something small and fast, so they can run local applications efficiently. I would like to see the X Window System dumped in favour of a hardware accelerated framebuffer, running something like directFB or Qtopia. Home users need a small, fast graphical subsystem, with built in 3d support. BeOS seemed to be on the right track before they went under.
Fonts are truly awful under X. Most distributions ship with appalling fonts, and there is no standard way to add additional (nicer) fonts to the system. Even after extra fonts have eventually been added, many applications (eg Abiword, Staroffice) refuse to use the new fonts anyway. Perhaps the framebuffer-based graphical subsystem I suggested could incorporate decent font support, and use a readable naming scheme as well.
Drivers
While having access to the latest version of the kernel is a good thing for developers, for home users it can be a nightmare. Got RedHat Linux 7.3? Perhaps you run SuSE 7.3 or Debian 2.2. You'll have to download a binary package specific to your distro. (I'm assuming that home users won't change their default kernel, but if they did, that binary package wouldn't even work!) Hardware manufacturers should be able to provide one single driver that works on all minor versions of a major kernel release. This way it would work will all current distros, instead of having to provide multiple binaries or source code. Hardware manufacturers don't want to give out the source, as this often gives away trade secrets about how their hardware is designed.
The solution seems to be to make binary drivers work on a variety of kernel versions. I'm not sure if this is even possible with the way the kernel is designed (I'm no kernel hacker), but it would go a long way toward making Linux more accessible to the home user. Even if the kernel needs to be redesigned to support this, then in my opinion, it should be done. Linux users are always clamouring for drivers... perhaps if the kernel had something like this, it might one day become a reality.
Hardware setup
While SuSE Linux 8.0 gave me some good experiences with hardware detection (such as automatic download of NVIDIA drivers), it also let me down as in this area.
The good: I recently borrowed a digital camera from a mate at work, to take photos of my case mod. Imagine how happy I was when I plugged it into my nearest USB port, and it was automatically configured (as a SCSI device) and mounted! SuSE even added it to my
The bad: Along came my new IDE CDRW drive. At AU$99, I couldn't pass up the purchase. Plugging it in gave me no joy. I was very disappointed that a device so common couldn't be detected and automatically configured under a modern operating system. The instructions on the SuSE support site said to add lines to lilo.conf and reboot. While this is a perfectly acceptable way to get hardware working for a geek familiar with *NIX, I believe that a home user shouldn't have to do more than plug it in. It's an IDE device, it's not that complicated!
The ugly: Once the hardware was finally working (as a pseudo-scsi drive), the next hurdle was to find decent graphical tools to burn and copy CDs. I finally settled on CDBakeOven, an above average KDE application. It burned CDs from data on the hard drive, but for some reason cdrecord (the command line backend) refused to allow me to copy a cd directly. Yes, it was installed SUID root. CD copying is such a basic function nowadays, why is it so hard to do under GNU/Linux?
Software distribution
I'll put this simply. I'm a home user, not a programmer. Why on earth should I have to compile the software I want to use? I know that having the source available is a good thing, but I'll say it again: I'm no programmer. I just want to install software and run it.
This leads to another point. Although having package databases (such as the rpm and deb systems use) is great, there should definitely be seperation between system packages and additionally installed software. There needs to be a standard installer and database for user-installed applications such as word processors, email clients and games, and it should be seperate from the rpm or deb databases used for system software such as lilo, init and cron. This will make it much easier for home users to know what applications they have installed on their PC, and to easily uninstall them if necessary, without knowing some arcane commands and weird package names.
Support
There is a huge wealth of knowledge among the thousands (millions?) of people that run GNU/Linux around the world. If you have a problem, odds are that someone out there can help you, often for free. This is one of the linux platform's greatest strengths. However, Linux users are also its greatest weakness. This may not apply to most of the community, but there is a very vocal minority that gives Linux a bad name. To every Linux user that has ever helped a newbie, I thank you. I have been helped by many a guru, often when I've been asking the simplest of questions. It's the remainder that are a problem.
I once heard a song by Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie called Every OS Sucks, where Linux users were described as 'elitist nerdy shmucks'. Sadly this is true for much of the 'community'. Too many consider themselves better than the rest of the world because they run Linux. Can you believe that? It's just a computer operating system, but somehow they think that it makes them better than those people who run systems such as Microsoft Windows! Elitism drives people away, as does saying âoeRTFMâ or belittling people who choose a different distro from yourself.
'Nuff said about that.
So what now?
Well, I decided to go back to a Microsoft platform. Initially being paranoid after reading things about DRM and spyware, I bit the bullet and installed Microsoft Windows XP. Like every OS, it has good and bad points; most of which you can learn about from online reviewers. I'll just point out several things that make me want to keep using it instead of GNU/Linux.
Fast graphical subsystem: Windows has lighting quick graphics, both 2d and 3d. There's no denying it. When I move a window, it refreshes so fast that I don't miss X11 at all. While not quite as nice as some other operating systems, font support is outstanding compared to XFree86.
Drivers: Point and click to install (as a superuser, of course). Windows warns you if the driver isn't likely to work properly, and can roll back to working drivers if you deliberately choose to install one that hoses your system.
Hardware setup: My CDRW worked right away, without a hitch. I am able to drag and drop files from the Explorer file manager to the CDRW icon and they get added to the list of things to burn. A quick install of Nero Burning Rom, and I was able to make a backup copy of my game CDs. (I don't like taking originals to LANs where they can get destroyed or stolen).
Software distribution: All windows software comes in binaries, either with an installer or in a zip file. I hope to never compile an application ever again. Software designed for a different version of windows is 99% guaranteed to run, but if not, there is always 'compatibility mode'. One thing to note, however: Applications designed for single user versions of windows usually only run properly as a superuser, and this includes 3d games. I expect this to be rectified as the rest of the Windows world catches up to a multi-user environment.
I can't comment on the Windows using community yet. I've not yet had a problem that a simple point and click couldn't fix. However, I will say that my original concern with Windows '95 has been addressed in Windows XP. The stability is finally there.
Final Notes
In conclusion, I'd just like to make it known that I haven't completely abandoned the Linux community. My home server still runs Mandrake, and IPCop on my gateway/firewall. There is no way I'd ever put any form of Windows on my server, nor would I ever connect a Windows PC directly to the internet without a *NIX gateway in between. Microsoft has a history of poor security, so I protect myself the only way I know how; using Linux. I will continue to advocate the use of GNU/Linux in the server arena. This is where its strength lies at the moment.
Because of their history of spreading virii, I don't use the applications that Microsoft has provided with Windows XP. My wife and I use Mozilla for web browsing and email, OpenOffice.org for word processing, and Psi (Jabber client) for instant messaging. All of these are true multi-user win32 programs, and are perfectly interoperable with their Linux counterparts.
I expect that the Linux community will have something to say about this article; I welcome comments and constructive criticism. Flames will be automatically sent to the Windows equivalent of
By Tony âoekNIGitsâ Collins
- posted by poopbot: because even your grandmother can use lunix
lLPoff2wWq Post #948
SUBJECT: GREAT STOCK OPPORTUNITY!!! help me Get Big Brands on eBay I DON'T KNOW WHERE I AM! PENTIUM III CPU's IN STOCK
END TRANSMISSION.
- posted by poopbot: because even your grandmother can use lunix
DhYQDIw4YE Post #950
OPEN SOURCE MISCONCEPTIONS
By Serial Troller
Myth: Open Source is written by heterosexuals.
Fact: All Open Source development is done by raging homosexuals. The more flaming examples include Anal Cox, Linus Turdballs, Eric Ass-Reaming Raymond, and the entire Slashdot crew. The ringleader of the slashdotters, a man named CmdrTaco, engages in a practice known as Taco-snotting, along with his faggot-buddies Jeff Homos Bates and CowBoiKneel.
Myth: Open Source is written for heterosexuals.
Fact: Using Open Source software can cause suppressed homosexual fantasies to surface, leading to all out flaming faggotry within 6-8 weeks. Anecdotes of otherwise hetero men turning queer are far too numerous to count, but a few examples stand out. In one case, a man was arrested loitering outside an elementary school and making sexual overtures to several children: he quickly confessed that shortly after installing the Mozilla browser on his computer, he began to have uncontrollable urges to, to put it simply, have his cock sucked off by little boys. He soon met several other like-minded men through discussions on the Bugger Zilla mailing list (all already homosexuals), who together kidnapped a total of seven children whom they brought back to their apartment and sodomized. The other two men are still at large and believed to still be using Mozilla.
Myth: Open Source is multicultural.
Fact: Open Source is openly racist.
Myth: Open Source is democratic.
Fact: Open Source is controlled by a few narrow-minded zealots (mentioned throughout this post), most of whom are either Communists, Stalinists, Nazis, or Fascists. Additionally, Open Source supports terrorism.
Myth: Open Source is tolerant of religious preferences.
Fact: Open Source developers regularly engage in holy wars over the superiority of various Open Source projects, such as the Emacs program (preferred by Christians) versus vi (used mostly by neo-pagans and Satanists); or the KDE desktop (a favorite among Muslims) versus the GNOME project (particularly favored by Jews). Posts initiating crusades or jihads against other developers can be found regularly throughout the newsgroups and mailing lists.
Myth: Open Source is tolerant of sexual preference.
Fact: See above. Either you are a homo, you become a homo, or you never visit Richard Stallman alone in his office and hope to God you never meet him on the street at night.
Myth: Open Source is tolerant of political differences.
Fact: Open Source is an anarcho-communist philosophy bent on the destruction of capitalism. The very same Richard Stallman, a man whose name is disturbingly reminiscent of Stalin, has stated several times in public that his vision includes the subjugation of all who own intellectual properties under the jackboot of the GPL. The GPL is a pernicious piece of literature lifted straight from Karl Marxs Communist Manifesto, and is fortunately banned in many democratic nations.
* * * * * UPDATE * * * * *
Myth: Open Source programming is a harlmess, healthy activity.
Fact: Open Source programming has been known to lead to massive obesity, violent tendencies with an obsession with handguns, paranoid-delusional ranting, and in severe cases, complete insanity. If anyone you know is thinking about going Open Source, stop them before its too late!
* * * * * UPDATE * * * * *
____________________
2002 Serial Troller. Permission to reproduce this document is granted provided that you send all the bukkake porn you can find to serialtroller@hotmail.com.
- posted by poopbot: information likes to be narrow
HsOiY6IkDu Post #950
THE OFFICIAL TACO-SNOTTING FAQ [slashdot.org]
:) Join me in a WIPO-snot?
By J. Wipo Troll, Esq. [slashdot.org], $Revision: 1.16 $
[This article attempts to document a vile, ungodly practice that runs rampant through the homosexual geek and hacker community, a practice known as âoeTaco-snotting,â or simply âoesnotting.â Taco-snotting is something that few geeks dare talk about in free or open conversation, but it is nonetheless a widely-practiced and dangerous form of homosexuality. If you or anyone you know has ever engaged in Taco-snotting, please get professional help [adequacy.org] before it is too late. â"ed.]
Why do I keep receiving emails from an individual calling himself âoeCmdrTacoâ?
You have been receiving unsolicited mailings from a certain Robert âoeCmdrTacoâ Malda [cmdrtaco.net], owner of the popular technology website slashdot.org [slashdot.org]. Actually, itâ(TM)s not a very âoepopularâ site in the common sense of the word; the site is rife with pimply, antisocial geeks and hackers, zit-faced nerds, communists, dirty GNU hippies [yahoo.com], and other societal rejects and outcasts. Itâ(TM)s also home to one of the worldâ(TM)s largest suspected pædophile rings, the infamous âoeSlashdot crew.â
Whenever Mr. Malda gets bored (and who wouldnâ(TM)t, running a site like Slashdot all day), he roams through the user database, penis in hand, looking for people who might enjoy engaging in homosexual activities with him. How he determines this is anyoneâ(TM)s guess; but if you have a homosexual-sounding nickname, or a nick with a letter of the English alphabet in it, youâ(TM)re a potential candidate.
This time, he found you. Lucky you.
Mr. Malda seems to be speaking in some sort of code. Do you know what it means?
CmdrTacoâ(TM)s code language is relatively easy to decipher. This pervert prefers to speak in thinly-veiled sexual innuendo (yes, thatâ(TM)s right: he wants you) to evade the watchful eye of Slashdotâ(TM)s parent corporation, VA Software [yahoo.com]. Mr. Maldaâ(TM)s âoeCommanderâ is, of course, his penis: a small, withered little thing that lives in his pants and only comes out in the presence of other male geeks or at the beck and call of Maldaâ(TM)s own lubed-up right hand. His âoeTaco bells [sonymusic.com]â are the shriveled testicles that droop beneath his Commander, and his âoeTaco sauceâ is his thin, runny semen. It should be more than obvious to you now what he means if he asked you to âoering his Taco bellsâ or âoetaste his gourmet Taco sauce.â
I would also guess CmdrTaco asked you to engage in a practice known as âoeTaco-snottingâ and, if he was in a particularly depraved mood at the time, a âoecircle-snot.â
Good Lord. And, yes, he did. What is âoeTaco-snottingâ?
âoeTaco-snottingâ is the term used by Robert Malda to refer to the depraved act of fellating another man (homo- or heterosexual; CmdrTaco is rumoured to prefer raping unwilling victims), then blowing the semen out his nose and back onto the face and body of his victim. Naturally, a long, bubbly stream of milky-white semen is left on CmdrTacoâ(TM)s face [go.com], dribbling out of his nose and down his cheek: hence the term, âoeTaco-snotting.â
And if thatâ(TM)s not bad enoughâ¦
A âoecircle-snotâ is a Taco-snotting circle-jerk, another practice common among the Slashdot crew [bastardgenres.com]. CmdrTaco, CowboiKneel [aol.com], and Homos get together and snot each other with their gooey, sticky cum â" spooging their jizz-snot all over each otherâ(TM)s faces and pasty, white bodies, until theyâ(TM)re covered head to toe with their own and each otherâ(TM)s man juice. This vile, ungodly ritual can go on for hours. For the homosexual penetration that follows this lengthy foreplay, Roblowme is usually there to provide plenty of anal lubricant; he owns a limousine service and has ample supplies of motor oil and axle grease ready to go.
To complete this perverted orgy, fellow faggots Michael, Timothy, and Jamie will usually join in, dressed in tight leather mock-S.S. uniforms, jack boots, and leather gloves. The homosexual shenanigans that follow are nearly beyond description. The whole group begins to snot each otherâ(TM)s spunk and whip each otherâ(TM)s pudgy asses with riding crops and chains until their pale, white geek bodies are exhausted and soaked in stinking sweat from the hours of passionate, homosexual revelry.
Ewwwwww. So, can I stop receiving these emails?
Hopefully, but I wouldnâ(TM)t count on it.
To begin with, you most likely forgot to uncheck the âoeWilling to Snotâ checkbox in your account preferences. CmdrTaco has probably already got the hots for your wad (do you have a homosexual-sounding nick?), and heâ(TM)s probably already been lurking outside your bathroom window for weeks with a camera, some tissues and lube, just waiting to pounce and declare you his new bitch. Thereâ(TM)s no escaping a geek in heat (trust me), so itâ(TM)s probably too late for you, but you can possibly rectify this situation. To remove yourself from CmdrTacoâ(TM)s sights, log into your Slashdot account, go to your user page, click on Messages, and uncheck the box next to âoeWilling to Snot.â Maybe heâ(TM)ll ignore you. Probably not.
I canâ(TM)t stop receiving these emails from CmdrTaco!?
If you indulge him in a Taco-snot or two, hemight leave you alone. You might also want to look into mail filtering, restraining orders, or purchasing a heavy, blunt object capable of warding off rampaging homosexual geeks in heat. Trust me, when they charge⦠oh, the humanity. If he gets you, and you let him Taco-snot all over you, you will most likely end up tied up in his basement to be used as his sex slave for the rest of your life (or until he accidentally drowns you in spunk in a circle-snot).
Have you ever been Taco-snotted?
Unfortunately, yes. I first met Mr. Malda at an Open Source Convention [amazon.com]. He invited me back to his room for a game of Quake and some âoegourmet Tacos,â but when I got there, the perverted geek jumped me and handcuffed me to his bed, stripping me. After taking his âoeCommanderâ out of his pants, Mr. Taco made me suck the withered thing six times, virtually nonstop. He then performed his vile Taco-snotting ritual on me three times over the next two hours, bringing me to orgasm after orgasm after sweaty, mind-numbing orgasm⦠then he snotted my own thick, gooey jizz back onto my face out of his nostrils! He snotted me two more times, first into my mouth, then again on my exposed belly.
CmdrTaco invited several of his Open Source (or rather, âoeOpen Sauceâ â" man sauce) buddies over to continue their ungodly snotfest. European hacker and known überfaggot Linux Torvalds raped my ass [yahoo.com] with his âoemonolithic kernel [yahoo.com];â his partner-in-crime Anal Cox used their âoenetwork stackâ in a multitude of unspeakable ways on and in every orifice of my defenseless, tender, young body. Michael Sims was there in his leather Nazi uniform, caning my previously-virginal ass with a bamboo pole and ranting about âoeall those Censorware [spectacle.org] freaks out to get him.â
That is so disgusting! How did you finally escape?
After about 16 hours of countless unholy, homosexual atrocities perpetrated against my restrained body, they all finally went to sleep on top of me, sweat-soaked and exhausted. I was left there, completely covered in bubbly, translucent jizz-snot, chained to the bed, with half a dozen fat, pasty-white fags lying around and on top of me. Fortunately the spooge coating my flesh worked wonderfully as a lubricant â" I was able to squirm my way out of the handcuffs and slip out the back door (of the apartment, not their back doors). Iâ(TM)m just glad I survived the awful ordeal. These sexually-repressed hackers had alot of built-up spunk in their wads â" I couldâ(TM)ve easily been drowned!
Thatâ(TM)s horrible. Does âoeTaco-snottingâ have anything to do with CmdrTacoâ(TM)s âoespecial tacoâ?
No, thatâ(TM)s a different disgusting perversion CmdrTaco indulges himself in. Mr. Malda is usually not satisfied with merely snotting your own jizz back onto your face, he most often enjoys involving his own bodily fluids in his twisted games. WeatherTroll [slashdot.org] has spent some time trying to educate the Slashdot readership [slashdot.org] about this vile practice (emphasis added):
You may be wondering what CmdrTacoâ(TM)s âoespecial tacoâ is. You will be wishing that you hadnâ(TM)t been wondering after you finish reading this post. To make his âoespecial taco,â CmdrTaco takes a taco shell and shits on it. He then adds lettuce, takes out his tiny withered dick (otherwise known as his âoeCommanderâ), puts his âoespecial taco sauceâ on it which means he jacks off on the taco, and adds a compound to make the person who eats the taco unconscious. Of course, the compound does not make the person unconscious until the taco is fully eaten. Thus CmdrTaco force-feeds the taco to the unsuspecting victim. After all, who would knowingly eat shit and CmdrTacoâ(TM)s jizz?
After the victim is unconscious, he is held against his will and used for CmdrTacoâ(TM)s nefarious homosexual purposes. This includes shoving taco shells up the victimâ(TM)s ass, Taco-snotting, and getting Jon Katz involved. Trust me, you do not want Jon Katz anywhere near your unconscious body. Also, rumor has it CmdrTaco is looking for a new goatse.cx guy [goatse.cx]. Donâ(TM)t let it be you!
Different ungodly perversion, yet no less revolting. It should be clear to you now that Robert âoeCmdrTacoâ Malda is a very, very sick individual, as are most of the Slashdot editors.
Does Jon Katz get involved in any of this? I thought he was a pædophile, not a homosexual.
Actually, Jon Katz is a homosexual pædophile. Heâ(TM)s also a coprophiliac, and, many suspect, a zoophile. Mr. Katz is somewhat of a loner and doesnâ(TM)t involve himself in the circle-snots, but that doesâ(TM)t mean heâ(TM)s any less of a freak than the rest of the Slashdot crew. Katz often engages in a game called âoejuicy-douching [aol.com]â with a harem of little-boy slaves that he has collected over the years: yet another vile practice which involves administering an enema to himself of the little boyâ(TM)s urine (forced out of them with a pair of pincers), spooging the vile muck from his ass back into the enema bag, then dribbling and slathering the goo all over himself and the boyâ(TM)s chained, naked bodies. If heâ(TM)s in the mood, he will sometimes skip refilling the enema bag from his distended anus and just squirt it from his ass [microsoft.com] onto the crying, terrified boys. Unwilling boys are further tortured with the pincers until they comply and allow Mr. Katz to juicy-douche them at will. A boy will usually last about two years before Mr. Katz either accidentally drowns them in diarrhea or kills them once they get too old, usually around 13 or 14.
Not content with being a pædophilic coprophile, Mr. Katz is also quite the zoophile. As if the sexual escapades with the helpless little boys arenâ(TM)t enough, Jon usually enjoys his juicy-douches best when his penis is firmly planted in a female goatâ(TM)s anus [yahoo.com]. He is also rumoured to get off on watching his little boys eat the goatâ(TM)s small, bean-like turds, and he often kills his older boys by letting his goats trample them.
â¦Are you getting hard writing this?
Why, yes.
No, thanks. Iâ(TM)m already CmdrTacoâ(TM)s boi toi.
________________________________________
* The URL of this document is
* Previous revisions are publicly available at
$Id: tacosnotting.html,v 1.16 2001/12/28 21:20:03 wipo Exp $
Copyright © 2001 J. Wipo Troll, Esq. [slashdot.org] Verbatim crapflooding of this document is permitted in any medium, provided this copyright notice is preserved, and next time you take a dump, you think of the WIPO Troll and all heâ(TM)s done to make Slashdot a better place.
- posted by poopbot: for all your crapflooding needs
cmRViPrVs4 Post #950
Credits: on by
crapfloods and trolling and raping small kittens
nice wider pages and wanking with mittens
turd report packages tied up with strings
these are a few of my favorite things
grits covered portman and ASCII art doodles
ACs and CLITers and Katz sex with poodles
wild trolls that fly with plus five mod scoring
these are a few of my favorite things
when the ban hits, when I can't post, when I'm feeling sad
i simply remember my favorite things
then i don't feel so bad
Rob Malda chugs penis in fan fiction slashes
taco snot over my nose and eyelashes
BSD dying and that goatse ring
these are a few of my favorite things
grits covered portman and ASCII art doodles
ACs and CLITers and Katz sex with poodles
wild trolls that fly with plus five mod scoring
these are a few of my favorite things
when the ban hits, when I can't post when, I'm feeling sad
i simply remember my favorite things
then i don't feel so bad
- posted by poopbot: for the crapflooder in all of us
WYycU6lHM0 Post #953
How are things in the civilized world? You probably don't know who I am. That's
;).
okay. I'm here to inform you of my mission, what I've found, and what I hope to
teach all of you.
I work for the United Christians Food for Poor Kids Foundation, and let me tell
you, there's a lot of poor kids in Afghanistan. As in most countries in the
Middle East, most people are unemployed, and therefore poor. And where there's a
lot of poor people, UCFPKF is needed.
UCFPKF always has the latest in technology. In this instance, we had access to
some Pentium 4's(r) 2GHz. Obviously, we needed an operating system that could
handle the power of Intel's beast. Unfortunately, we didn't have any computer
experts on hand up to the task, so it was going to be trial and error.
We'd heard good things about Linux and its "ACL's". Little did we know of its
incompatibility with modern hardware. It didn't even support Token Ring
networking, the newest form of Ethernet(r), which we require to always keep
in contact between bases. Also, it didn't seem to use SSE optimizations, which
when processing food amounts, are also very important. Also, there were
homo-erotic implications in the structure of Linux, which is strictly
unallowable in a Christian organization such as ours.
The next obvious step was to install Windows. We hesitated because we knew that
it was common knowledge that Windows crashed incessantly. Our experience was
less than stellar. It also didn't support Token Ring networking. Security is
important in this region because many people try to steal food, but "Windows
2000" (which I hear didn't even come out in 2000) doesn't even allow you to
have seperate permissions. Once again, the SSE optimizations were not used.
I was in a situation that seemed impossible. The two most famous operating
systems had failed me. I walked around the base in a dazed stupor. What was I
going to do for our ultra-important network? A boy saw me pouting and sighing,
and asked me what was wrong. I said nothing, but we exchanged names, and little
did I know, that young Junis had a gift for computers.
Junis saw me the next day, slaving away at the sparse terminal that "Windows
2000" makes you type in. He asked what I was doing with that primitive OS. I
laughed and told him that I was doing inventory. He ran to his village, into his
hut, and pulled out a box I had never seen before. The box said "SCO Xenix" the
front. I had never seen or heard of this Xenix before. But I soon learned that
Junis was a computer genius.
All we had to do was put the Xenix CD into the computer, and everything worked
like magic (not the devil's magic... good magic:) ). Our Token Ring network
integrated flawlessly with it. And it even used SSE optimizations. Well, me and
Junis are now on a new mission. We're spreading the word. It might not be the
word of the lord, but then again, maybe it is
SCO Xenix: The Unix of Tomorrow.
Janet Milman
Network Administrator, UCFPKF
Afghanistan base
- posted by poopbot: lovely snot! wonderful snot!
IBIJzZ1XRt Post #953
Netcraft has confirmed: Taco-snotting is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Taco-snotting community when recently IDC confirmed that Taco-snotting accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all homosexual acts. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that Taco-snotting has lost more fag practitioners, this news serves to reinforce what weve known all along. Taco-snotting faggots are collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Faggot World comprehensive snotting test.
You dont need to be a Katz to predict Taco-snottings future. The handwriting is on the wall: Taco-snotting faces a bleak future. In fact there wont be any future at all for Taco-snotting because Taco-snotting is dying. Things are looking very bad for Taco-snotting. As many of us are already aware, Taco-snotting continues to lose faggotshare. White ink flows like a river of bubbly, thick jizz. The circle-snot is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core snotters.
Lets keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Circle-snotting leader Jeff Homos Masterbates states that there are 7000 snotters of the circle-snot. How many users of anal snot are there? Lets see. The number of circle-snotting versus anal snot posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 anal snot users. SnotOS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of anal snot posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of SnotOS. A recent article put the circle-snot at about 80 percent of the Taco-snotting market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 circle-snot users. This is consistent with the number of circle-snot Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of CowboiKneels walnuts, abysmal sales and so on, the circle-snot went out of business and was taken over by SNOTi who sell another troubled Taco-snot. Now SNOTi is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another gay whorehouse.
All major surveys show that Taco-snotting has steadily declined in faggotshare. Taco-snotting is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Taco-snotting is to survive at all it will be among heterosexual hobbyist dabblers. Taco-snotting continues to decay. Nothing short of a jizz-soaked miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Taco-snotting is dead.
Fact: Taco-snotting is dead.
- posted by poopbot: because even your grandmother can use lunix
G0vFTmZHFE Post #955
Now, as to the political old guard approaching obsolescence, for a microcosmic view of what I'm talking about, look at the music and film industries. I could write a book--or at least a chapter--describing the insanities of the studio system, but, in a nutshell, the situation is that big music or movie distributors find it easier to distribute a homogeneous product. It's cheaper to sell a billion copies of one record than a million copies each of a thousand discs. So they're squeezing the variety, thinking that they're selling a physical product--but they're not: they're trying to sell ideas. There is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of the term "intellectual property," because information isn't transferred between brains: it's copied. The music and film industries are finally waking up to the fact that as they squeeze their product range down, people lose interest in the range and look outside it for independent productions. So they're panicking, blaming the new business model, fighting a zero-sum rear-guard action, and trying to ban progress.
They may succeed. If so, I fear we're doomed to live in a world not unlike that of Rebecca Ore's Outlaw School (Tor, 2000). And I really don't want to go there.
An surprised anonymous wrote: I'm surprised nobody mentioned this yet...
And now, are you surprised nobody's commenting on this story? Perhaps there's a pattern, here.
Worst S/N ratio ever!
</CBG>
Just to stay on-topic to some extent, here's his story in Asimov's . Definitely worth a read! Has a sense of humor that reminds me of Stephenson.
Steven N. Severinghaus
duh,
i can't believe that people are saying that this story is dead, based on it's alleged "low" numbers.
based on the interview that i read i would have to say the dude sounds pretty intersesting and well read. that and his experience as a writer lead me to believe that this could be a kewl read.
it sounds to me as if the above posts, in the majority, have not read the actual story.
what gives. i thought we were supposed to be smart.
...in both the interview and the Lobster story, which was enjoyable enough to make me want to find more of his work.
Personally, I don't care if the guy is an asshole or a saint, it's his ideas and the mixing of ideas which is interesting and fun.
Comparing authors is pointless to me in that no two are alike even if they're writing on similar subjects. This Lobster story is still fresh and to say it's just more cyberpunk is both unfair and untrue. It's like saying the punk rock of the early 80's left no room for anything else and all the new punk stuff is therefore just rehashed trash (which is obviously not true.)
"Lobster" was a good, if challenging, read and the author proves interesting in the interview. I'll be looking for more of his work to read and I'm sure -- I do mean positive - that many of the readers of Slashdot would enjoy both the lobster story and the interview.
Is there a troll-fest happening tonight? I must 'ave lost me invite!
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
A singularity is a feature of a graph. Now, I'm as rational-reductionist as the next geek, but reducing all of human progress to a graph reduces reductionism to the riduclous!
You have obviously never had to give a presentation to upper management. They are a peculiar species, unable to understand words. They can only be communicated to in a very limiting fashion via colored 3d graphs and charts. Unfortunately most of the important information is lost in the translation...
Coincidentally, I saw this /. item just as I had finished reading Stross's "Antibodies", a short story, in a collection of the best science fiction of 2000. I'd never heard of the guy before, but his writing is wonderfully close to my experience and that of most /.'ers - I guess he's a bit new as a recognized author so not many of us know much about him. What I've read so far seems very promising though!
Energy: time to change the picture.
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The parent is offtopic, not a troll. This on the other hand is a troll.
This article is dead; use your mod points where they might matter.
104th goddamn post, luzers!
And, if you haven't yet read his short story, "A Colder War", do so now.
Goddammit, can't you even fuckin' quote Prince accurately?
Well, what do I expect from a site that modded fuckin' HanzoSan up a cumulative like fifteen points yesterday. YOU ARE ALL RETARDS. FUCK YOU.
The guy is one arse kicking perl coder.
Think I might have sold him a hard drive also LOL.
Curmudgeon
It has lots of Linux, Perl and SF - what more could you want?
I do most of the system administration on Charlie's web server (which also serves my website). I wish he'd warn me when we were in danger of being slashdotted...
:-)
Watching the logs it looks like we're OK at the moment, but we don't have all the bandwidth in the world.
Oh and he just signed my emergency passport application, so I'm not going to say anything else rude about him
Xenu loves you!
As chance wants it, I came across Charlie's writing just a couple of weeks ago - and concur with all the positive comments. He also has a unreleased novel called Scratch Monkey on his website (right at the bottom), for which you need to request the "keys" before being able to access it.
Scratch Monkey is definitely worth reading.
PS: hi Charlie! This article is the equivalent of being on the cover of the Rolling Stone, yea?
yes, we have no bananas
from the interview
CS: I wrote "Lobsters" and showed it to a friend. He said "that's really cool, but you'll never sell it--the audience would have to overdose on Slashdot for six months before they got it." He was completely right--he just underestimated the number of people out there who overdose on Slashdot!
Possibly more noise, however I was curious that the interview involves discussions on cyberpunk and free software, it is a topic which I attempted to research and write about for an undergrad postmodernism class. Taking artificial intelligence networks as a metaphor for ownership of information I tried to argue that history should be openly intact in "code" and that literature is interpreted through collaboration, a groove between writers and readers like a customisable interface. I've uploaded my article , if it is interesting at all please e-mail me, I haven't found much on this topic so far.
Is that japanese, or just a coincidence? (Ai = love, neko = cat) (Of course, in the best /. tradition I haven't read the whole thing, or looked to closely at earlier coments..)
The most significant factor in singularity is determining what is actually possible under the constraints of physical laws. In all likelihood the universe is not infinitely maliable to our will. Eventually, what is technically possible will reach a plateau, where nothing more advanced can be made.
The most straightforward example is faster than light travel. The universe seems to have a set limit for allowing an object from going from point A to point B. There may be ways around this by warping space. But there are limits on how much space you can warp. Eventually we will reach a point where we cannot travel faster from point A to B.
There are probably some people out there saying "But we don't know what the limits are. People used to say it was impossible to go faster than the speed of sound." That's true, we don't know what the limits are, therefore we should act like there are no limits ... yet. But someday we will figure this universe out and then we'll know the limits. We'll know the fastest speed. We'll know the bountries of what is possible, and we will build to those bountries. We'll travel as fast as possible. We'll make ourselves as intelligent as beings can be under the constraints of the universe. We'll live as long as possible. And technology will be at a plateau from which it cannot grow any higher.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
There are ways of effectively travelling faster than light, depending on what your purposes are.
If you want to build an interworld empire, then you appear to have problems, but if you want to shorten the trip, then several approaches are plausible.
The simplest one is frozen sleep.
The fanciest one is to upload yourself into a computer, put yourself on pause, until you reach the destination, and then download yourself into a new body.
The best one is MacroLife. Redesigning things so that you live in a mobile space colony that roams from star to star, grazing on the cometary belts, and occasionally mining from the moons or asteroids (usually only needed for major repairs, or to fission the colony into two).
The physical vessel that will contain the MacroLife should be buildable before the singularity. The design of the society is more dubious. It would need to be quite stable. And if it were too aggressive, then it would be dangerous to create, whereas if it were too passive, then it would be subject to hostile takeovers. Not an easy problem.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
An interstellar empire would be feasible if there existed sentient beings with a lifespan that was measured in the millions of years. Then the trips between stars at about 10% c wouldn't seem all that long, and there would be enough continuity to maintain an interstellar culture.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Aha! So Vernor Vinge stories are all written for the pointy-haired bozos! That explains a great deal.
Any questions?
If special relativity is correct, you don't have to work to survive long trips at speeds near c.
.9c, then the factor is (1/(1-.9^2)) = 1/.81 =~ 12. So a 4 light year trip at .9c would take only about 4 months in ship time, while it would take about 4 years from the point of view of those who didn't undergo the acceleration of the trip.
.99c, then the time factor is (1/(1-.99^2)) =~ 50, so the same trip would take about a month ship time, while still taking about 4 years from the planet-bound point of view.
The passage of time is relative, with a ratio of (1/(1-(v/c)^2). If your v is small compared to c, then the factor is near 1. If your v is, say,
If you can go
It should take about a year to get up to near light speed at acceleration of 1 gravity. Of course, you have to get all that energy from somewhere, but I'm sure you can pull together some kind of Bussard Ramjetty thing to do it with, since we're assuming that we're at the singularity.
http://everything2.org/?node=your+radical+ideas+ab out+radical+ideas+have+already+occurred+to+others
That url takes care of responding to most of your post.
Now to comment on the first part of your first sentence:
'The most significant factor in singularity' - that wordset is polysemous. Do you mean 'the most significant factor in the character of what life will feel like beyond singularity', 'the most significant factor in whether (and when) there will be a singularity', 'the most significant factor in the present day discussion of what it will feel like/whether there will be a singularity', I could go on, I'm just getting started, 'the most significant factor in where the present day discussion of singularity *should be at or should go*', etc. etc.
You have given us a post with almost infinite interpretations. Polysemy is a good thing, as long as the number of potential interpretations doesn't get out of hand. You have given us a post with *too many* interpretations. Please more sharply specify what you are saying so that we can attack or praise it specifically.
- kaidaejin@NoSpam@hotmailcom
You might want to look at the energy requirements of what you are proposing. Even with total conversion (100% efficient), I feel you would find it of dubious practicality.
Now it you could tap the vacuum point energy... but that one's probably a fantasy. That's probably one that the universe doesn't permit.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
With total conversion, reaching .99c should take only (only ;) 100 times the mass of the object you are accelerating.
I agree the energy requirements are ludicrous, but we are talking about the capabilities of entities capable of whatever is physically possible.
Check out freesfonline for links to a bunch of his stories. Two of them made it into last year's The Years Best Science Fiction 18 (Gardner Dozois, ed.), and while one poster mentioned that Antibodies was good (it reminded me of The One for some reason), A Colder War is far better.
I occasionally review technical papers, and people are increasingly using URLs as references. Trouble is, in a large number of cases the URLs are dead links by the time I do the review; by the time of publication it's completely dead.
At least dead trees don't have the habit of disappearing from existence without warning.