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RIP: Leonard Zubkoff
UnidentifiedCoward writes "LWN.net has a link to a blurb at KTVA, "Alaska State Troopers have recovered the bodies and released the names of two men killed late last week in a helicopter crash in Southeast. They are 38-year-old David Zampino of Fairbanks and 45-year-old Leonard Zubkoff of Crystal Bay, Nevada." Mr. Zubkoff was a linux kernel developer and the maintainer of BusLogic
and DAC960 projects." Leonard was a hell of a nice guy and will be missed.
Another of the world's many reminders of how fragile life is.
Fare thee well, poor comment. For thou hast been cast out amongst wolves.
From dandelion digital's homepage:
"Leonard is also active in the Cryonics movement, and hosts the domain for Consonance."
Not to be morbid or too sick, but does anyone see the irony of a cryonics enthusiast dying in an accident in ALASKA?
He'd obviously gotten too used to using linux, and he thought crashing was something that happened to other people.
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
As is often said when an Amiga user passes away, "The Amiga, it will outlive all of us."
It seems as if anyone who had a role in developing modern day systems are dieing. Conspiracy, I sure damn hope not.
.noitacidem deen uoy siht daer nac uoy fI
Leonard will be missed by many. He was Dandelion Digital's sole proprietor. He also has a page about his Linux acheivements, especially his SCSI drivers which are commonly used today.
http://tomgould.com/
Not to be a troll or disrepectful or anything, but that comment is hella-funny.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
It would totally suck to live a good while and be all gung ho about cryonics and then not be preserved (ala Ted Williams) after your death.
Hell, we probably need to keep him on ice as a possible Linus replacement ;)
Perhaps microsoft has a special forces division and is going after people who maintain linux.
Linux is sure up to speed with the rest of the world (by that I mean Microsoft....) think usb 2.0
You might say the business model is modern, but take a look at where Linux is now.
Not to put down this tragedy, just making a point.
sir bard
"Leonard... ...hosts the domain for Consonance."
Domain for the consonants? www.fuckvowels.com?
I had something insightful to say, but it seems silly now. I rely on his driver for all the data that matters to me. Picture of my son from birth to today and all the code I have written and kept in my years. It was his DAC960 driver and the fact that Mylex seemed to respect the driver enough to point you to his page for Linux support that made me choose Linux over Solaris a few years ago for a set of large arrays.
His contributions will truly be missed by me and I am sure many others.
Steven
Leonard was a hell of a nice guy and will be missed.
And David?
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
According to Dandelions page, Leonard was also interested in the Cryonics movement. While I don't personally think this works / is going to work, I feel sorry that he's not going to get a chance to test it out himself. Unless someone has information to the contrary?
Goodbye Leonard, you will be missed.
Bryn.
I rely on his driver for all the data that matters to me. Picture of my son from birth to today and all the code I have written and kept in my years.
I don't think you can give a better salute than that.
The parent post was funny, without being even slightly disrespectful to the memory of a valued member of our community. Humor at a death may bother some, but it can also be cathartic. There is absolutely no justification in modding the parent post as "troll" or "flamebait", and the people who wasted their mod points need some severe attitude readjustment. Please mod the parent back up before you mod me down as offtopic (I have karma to spare, and then some).
There's not much in the FAA report (see below) but it looks like weather wasn't an issue.
-----
IDENTIFICATION
Regis#: 7189T Make/Model: R44 Description: 2000 ROBINSON R-44
Date: 08/29/2002 Time:
Event Type: Accident Highest Injury: Fatal Mid Air: N Missing: N
Damage: Substantial
LOCATION
City: KETCHIKAN State: AK Country: US
DESCRIPTION
2000 ROBINSON 44 HELICOPTER CRASHED IN WINSTANLEY LAKE, LOCATED UPSIDE
DOWN, 2 POB SUFFERED FATAL INJURIES, OTHER CIRCUMSTANCES ARE UNKNOWN,
KETCHIKAN, AK
INJURY DATA Total Fatal: 2
# Crew: 1 Fat: 1 Ser: 0 Min: 0 Unk:
# Pass: 1 Fat: 1 Ser: 0 Min: 0 Unk:
# Grnd: Fat: 0 Ser: 0 Min: 0 Unk:
WEATHER: KTN METAR 08/30/02 0053 UTC 34009KT 10SM SCT040 BKN070
OTHER DATA
Activity: Pleasure Phase: Unknown Operation: General Aviation
Departed: KETCHIKAN, AK Dep Date: 08/28/2002 Dep. Time: 0349
Destination: WINSTANLEY LAKE, AK Flt Plan: NONE Wx Briefing: U
Last Radio Cont: DEPARTING KETCHIKAN
Last Clearance: NONE
FAA FSDO: JUNEAU, AK (AL05) Entry date: 08/30/2002
This is unfortunate. Was this one of those toy helicopters?
A buddy of mine was a chopper pilot in 'nam and he swears those kit copters are death traps.
Slashdot seems to run a lot of obituaries. Perhaps there should be a topic for it.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I will never forget how it felt to install Mr. Zubkoff's BusLogic drivers in a 2.0.8 kernel for the first time. Back then, the drivers hadn't yet made their way into Linus' tree. As a veteran of rolling my own kernel, having built X and gotten it up when that was still an accomplishment, and having bled on libc #defines, I settled in for major pain. But Mr. Zubkoff's driver dropped right in. Like butter. The nost seamless thing I'd ever seen. He will be missed, not only for great drivers but also for providing a model of how the Linux community could approach initially reluctant vendors for register-level APIs. Here's to you, sir!
I don't have much Karma... heck don't even know that I have any.... but please mod parent up, it's probably going to be one of the most important comments, what with everyone cracking jokes about the cryogenics thing and Alaska...
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
Oh my, it is so freakingly painful to look at the web page of a dead person that, even while you didn't know it, took part at your life...
Actually, there's no evidence that catharsis actually does anything. In fact, it often accentuates feelings, rather then getting rid of them.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Many thanks to *all* of them.
Bet they don't hear that enough...
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
Sorry, his name doesn't ring a bell, and the story doesn't mention anything about it. Just curious...
moron.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
So a guy gets killed in an accident, and so far about 75% of the posts to this story are racist, homophobic, anti-Linux trolls and comments to the effect of "He deserved it" or "I'll bet it was Microsoft." For a group of people that is supposed to be so intelligent (key word there is "supposed"), there are a lot of idiots reading Slashdot. If you don't have anything constructive to say, then either don't say it at all, or save it for the next evolution flamebait story.
.. you don't care. But I'll tell you this: One day, somebody you do care about will die, and I hope that your thoughts are preoccupied with the horrific things that you've posted to this story, and how terrible you behaved. Most /. readers are high school and college kids that wouldn't know the first thing about true loss. That will change with time.
Yeah, I know
Most people here probably know more about Leonard Zubkoff, so why don't I talk a little about David Zampino. Mr. Zampino ("Please, call me Dave") was my boss at the company I worked for during the summer between high school and college. At that time, he was working for RCN, a fairly large ISP. He taught me a great portion of what I know about TCP/IP and routing equipment. He was a great boss; on days with lots of customers calling, he would tell us techs (not just 'let' us; he would say, "Be sure to expense that,"!) to expense pizza delivery if we decided to work through lunch. His focus was always, always on having good customer service. He really wanted the company to have a reputation as being dependable and competent, even if it cost time and money. He also did not have much patience for office politics. One time, a customer called and complained that his Unreal server had suddenly become sluggish, and all the players' ping times had gone up 60 miliseconds. I investigated, found a problem in our routing, and sent an email to the appropriate internal mailing list. When the person in charge of the buggy area fired back a reply chastising my inexperience and ridiculous notions, Dave was on it like a hawk. In less than 15 minutes he, too, had investigated the problem, and wrote to the list both to back me up and to castigate the other manager (albeit in a very diplomatic way) for reflexively 'defending his turf' without even looking into the problem!
I don't know a whole lot about him before that time. Mr. Zampino was the founder of Brainstorm (1990-1991 ish), which started as a hardware company making accelerator cards for Macs. They ended up as a local, business-only ISP (long story) which was eventually bought by RCN, which is how he ended up there. While he may not have been a kernel hacker, he was certainly no slouch in Unix operation and programming, nor in hardware design. Although I have not worked for RCN since the summer of 2000, and I believe he left the company earlier this year, I am sure he is fondly remembered by all his co-workers.
Rest in peace, Dave. I am proud to have had the privilege of knowing you.
I met Leonard a few times and he took the time to listen to my questions and explain some of the intricate details of his raid drivers. He was like most of the Linux developers that I've met, which means he was happy to share what he knew and I really appreciated that quality. A simple question: Who will replace Leonard in this community? I don't have the skill, but hopefully others can fill the void.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
People, get with it!
His politeness was certainly notable; I asked him a few questions around the sundry Buslogic combos and he was always helpful and friendly, though I'm sure he'd heard the same questions many times over. A shame to have such a pleasant man pass on so young.
16 If a man has an emission of semen, he shall bathe his whole body in water, and be unclean until the evening. 17Everything made of cloth or of skin on which the semen falls shall be washed with water, and be unclean until the evening. 18If a man lies with a woman and has an emission of semen, both of them shall bathe in water, and be unclean until the evening.
19 When a woman has a discharge of blood that is her regular discharge from her body, she shall be in her impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. 20Everything upon which she lies during her impurity shall be unclean; everything also upon which she sits shall be unclean. 21Whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes, and bathe in water, and be unclean until the evening. 22Whoever touches anything upon which she sits shall wash his clothes, and bathe in water, and be unclean until the evening; 23whether it is the bed or anything upon which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening. 24If any man lies with her, and her impurity falls on him, he shall be unclean seven days; and every bed on which he lies shall be unclean.
I hope you abide by these rules just as strictly. If you hold hands with your wife or friend when she has her period, or allow her to sit on your sofa or in your car, you're going straight to hell! And don't forget, she has to make a burnt offering of turtledoves or pigeons if she has a heavy period.
Ah, there's a good god for the 21st century.
Your sig is teh suxor, d00d.
Every l33t h4x0r phil0s0pher knowz that it's an IP address, not a TCP/IP address. TCP doesn't give a fuck what your address is, IP does. Hence, IP address.
Go back to sch00l, kid.
That's NOT funny.
slashdot has different standards for obits. A linux kernel author dies and it makes the front page. But science fiction author Steven King dies at 54 and it doesn't even make it on slashdot. And *BSD is dying but everytime someone tries to warn the slashdot crowd they get modded as troll!
Mr Zubkoff had also participated in performing a cryonic suspension:
/ Pu blic-Mail/cryonics/archive/697.txt
http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/tsf
Apparently it didn't go too well in parts. Oh well, emerging field and all.
Bryn.
Too fat for what? The FBI?
Thanks Xtifr,
Funny thing, if it'd been Bill Gates who died in a copter crash, guess what kind of comment would get instant +5's?
I tried to make a joke that wasn't disrespectful, but I don't parse for taste. I figured he would've used much of his own code, so the not crashing part would link directly back to him...
Oh well.
I've used several cards using drivers by lnz@dendelion.com; I think the first 'totally built from scratch to be a Linux server' machine I ever put together used a 53c875 Symbios chip, and he helped me get it running at top speed to show off Linux's speed for a database. This would have been better than 5 years ago, at least. We'd been using Linux a lot longer than that on 'stock' machines, but needed some more 'umph' than we could get, and he was a great resource for support and friendly help. He'll be missed.
Actually, if you personally knew him, then that joke might be fine.. AMONGst FRIENDS!! though.Even waiting a few weeks after the news of his death, perhaps. But you did worse. you got one of the first posts on slashdot, a public forum.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
ok, i'll just point out that your mother's a whore.
yeah. It's not like it was steven king.
touché
Mexican Teen Pop Singer Ricardo Abarca Loses Fingers in Helicopter Accident
GUATEMALA CITY, Sept. 4
Doctors reattached three fingers to the hand of a a 16-year-old pop singer, after they were severed by a helicopter rotor as he waved to fans.
Ricardo Abarca was getting off the aircraft at a Guatemala City airport on Saturday. In raising his hand to greet fans, he put it into the still-whirling rotor.
"The index finger and middle finger were completely severed" surgeon Gustavo Lopez said Wednesday. "We still have some problems with bleeding from the area of his little finger"
Abarca, who had only recently joined the popular teen group Mageneto, was still hospitalized in Guatemala Wednesday.
[I hate spicks and beaners, so this story really made my day]
I know both of these guys were supposed to be intelligent, but flying in a lightweight, low rotor inertia helicopter is not very bright. They have a nasty habit of falling out of the sky.
Leonard was a hell of a nice guy
hell??
becareful with that, you don't want to jinx anything here..
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
Corey was his GF, moron. Look at the main page. Not that it matters if he was gay or not, tragic either way.
It means fatality. Think about it!
4B4556494E
(Not that it would matter to any decent or normal person anyway.)
THAT DOG BE BUGGIN'!!!
lameness filter bypass please disregard.
I think they'd write out the word "Fatality" if that's what they meant.
For those who don't read METAR (which includes some of us meteorologist), here is the gist:
Temp: 63F/17C
Dewp: 51F/11C
Winds: Northwest at 14mph/12kts
Pressure: 1018.7mb
Sky: mostly scattered or broken between 4000ft/1220m to 7000ft/2135m
Visibility: 10miles/16km
All in all, not a bad day, though it was a little windy. I do agree with an above post that icing COULD be a possibility, but with a surface temp as warm as it was, they would have to be flying pretty high.
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
As an undergrad at CMU, the CS terminal room was rather evenly split between DEC VT52 and Concept C100 terminals. And then there were the "special" terminals: the Concept-LNZ. These amazing little creatures were a result of Leonard's graduate work. They contained custom firmware that the locally hacked version of Unix Emacs contained special support for. It cached frequently displayed tokens in local (off screen) video memory and exchanged an encoded/compressed token stream with the editor. Working over a 2400 bps serial line was an absolute dream on these. It sped up the editing sessions to an amazing degree.
When I asked Leonard in an e-mail if he was "the" LNZ of Concept-LNZ fame, he was rather flabergasted that someone would remember this over 10 years later. He gradually took over support for the Buslogic driver as he was both a better driver writer and had local access to the Buslogic lab to do testing.
When I read this headline, my gut tied in a very tight knot that will not soon be untangled.
We'll miss you, Leonard.
An imperfect plan executed violently is far superior to a perfect plan. -- George Patton
The only reason why *BSD developers aren't dying is because there aren't any of them left!
*rimshot*
First of all my condolances to the loved ones of David and Leonard. I never knew either, but from the glowing comments I've read... I wish I had. Unfortunately shit happens. Its part of life. However even though Leonard has passed on, his legacy will be the code he has contributed to linux. From what I've understand that seems to be some extensive work on the scsi system which is no small task in its self. All of this makes me wonder, because of the freedom of his code... his work will live on through others, would this be the case in "non-OS" software? Say Company M has a programmer P who is chiefly responsible for widget W. Now say programmer P passes on and besides maybe a few people who understand the code, who works on W? But if P's work was done to be scrutinized by the masses, that work would continue on. I believe this is one important reason why information should be free. If something happens to the creator, their work can continue on if it has value to someone. It makes me wonder how many people had brilliant ideas, but closely guarded them to the point that they died with them.
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
I don't need to personally know anyone to make a joke. If you're offended, move on... I didn't write it to offend anyone, only to provide a laugh for people who understand what a joke is.
Why is it up to you to decide what's ok and what's not?
Damned self righteous "everyone should think like me" users.
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
And I have already metamoderated the Flamebait moderation as unfair.
Here are some big runon blurbs I tend to write in order to fondly remember and credit someone.
:} I'd just negotiate with him so that he didn't have to end up scrounging together an engineering team to duplicate all of IT's infrastructure. *wink to mobyone and claw*
:}
I was employee number twentysomething (IT admin) at VA Research, and I was interviewed by Larry, Rob, and Leonard. lnz always had time to randomly consult on the spot with employees in terms of engineering or general technology. Whenever he'd breeze through the office (never coming in before afternoon), ya knew he was kickin some ass. He was often seen smiling. He was one of the first people I was personally aware of to really use Linux itself to make a big dent in major industry, through his work with Buslogic and Mylex SCSI controllers. He told me when Adaptec finally stopped disavowing the existance of Linux, they came to VA and said "We're sorry. Can we play with Linux now?" and lnz said, "No. Too late." He'd already schooled them on Linux from the grassroots on up, forcing them to acknowledge an emerging market. I'm sure he was a strong mentor for that driver engineering and reverse engineering community. Man, that takes devotion and patience.
Ya couldn't mess with his workflow. He had like a mini data center and R&D lab at his house, which he relied solely on at all times, telneting home and xhosting his XEmacs display back to the office when we had public IP addresses for all workstations.
Then with the pre-IPO, he had to move his R&D out of his house into the office. This was when we were in the original garage-like Mountain View office next door to SGI North American sales on Shoreline, and our building's resources was about 3 times overcommitted by our growth rate. We had phone lines and ethernet cords draping out of the ceiling down to shared desks in order to accommodate having new employees per week, and I had to figure out how to route power all around the building using very warm and very illegal 14 gauge extension cords from each available power circuit to wherever in the building lnz's engineers needed them. Routed em like some people route ethernet cables. Such as to lnz's new 1 terabyte file server sitting next to my desk, powered by the women's restroom. That server was lnz's baby; you may have seen it at the March 1999 Linuxworld Expo. He blew that circuit that afternoon. Permanently. The women's restroom never worked again. Thanks to his rapidly growing engineering dept and to our new sales dept, the power generator in the back was hot enough to singe your body hair when you opened the door to it. The fsck alone on that event pushed the ship date back a day or more. Yeah he was shipping 1TB RAID servers with ext2.
lnz inadvertantly taught me a lot about fire and safety codes of Mountain View and Sunnyvale, and he taught me the proper use of the word "cryonics" instead of Hollywood's improper use of "cryogenics". He's one super nice guy. Hope to see ya around, lnz.
Microsoft already ate your lunch, you filthy hippies. Free software...sheesh!
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=linux.scsi.20 0203111804.g2BI4FrY013585%40dandelion.com&oe=UTF-8
not to me. take it as a suggestion of courtesy. no more or less.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
... of why slashdot should just give us permanent moderator priv's. so we don't have to have posts like these (and those above, from my point of view) to ask for moderation.
take it as a suggestion of courtesy. no more or less.
Well, fair enough, but that's not how you phrased it originally...
"User bla, please log out"
"If you knew him it might be acceptable"
The reaction's pretty ridiculous too... like I said in another post, if Bill Gates had died in the helicopter crash, noone would worry about 'tact', or 'courtesy', and they'd get modded up for it. There'd be 30 +5 funny comments saying "Ha! The copter must've been running windozzzze!"
Just because this guy wrote some code for an OS we like, he's a saint, and we must all pay respect and mourn his passing.
He wasn't the only person that died today.
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
Leonard made changes to Emacs on ITS and TOPS-10 when he was at CMU, in order to take advantage of the screen buffer controls (insert line, rather than redraw-rest-of-screen, etc.) on the Heath/Zenith H19/Z19 VT52 clone.
Although as everyone knows Leonard later became a strong contributor to free software, these updates to Emacs he placed under a restrictive license, and vigorously protected his code. RMS was quite upset by this, as were some other folks. Although Stallman's tiff with Symbolics over Lisp Machine source access is often cited as the reason he started the GNU project, I believe that his interactions with Leonard over ZEmacs were an even earlier influence.
So, in some sense, we have Leonard to thank for the Gnu project that he later contributed to.
Here is the earliest Usenet mention that Google has (we weren't all big USENET users in those days -- it was mostly UUCP modem-based systems).
Filk was around as a genre before the typo that gave it its name :-) Consonance is an annual music convention in the Bay Area.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Leonard's death was also mentioned at the Worldcon science fiction convention in San Jose. I don't think I know him, but many of the other filk singers did - as his web page says, he's been hosting the web site for the Consonance annual music conventions, and the "dandelion" in his domain name and masthead has become somewhat of an icon for the filk music genre. Lotsa folks knew and miss him.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
lol....
there's something to it...when I saw the name I knew it was someone important, but I couldn't connect the name to the accomplishment. Yeah, Leonard lives on, in my dmesg. What more can a man ask for? as I have watched so many machines boot over the years, names such as his have become so familiar.
Fare the well Leonard, in the great archive in the sky, and be assured that backups will retain your code, forever.
I was an undergrad at CMU and Leonard was a grad student (he ended up being an ABD student).
His thesis was on optimizing transmission to video displays - the work he did on the Concept-LNZ terminal was a part of the proof-of-concept.
I remember being in his office at Tartan Labs where he showed me a full screen refresh at 110 baud in under 2 seconds.
Those of you who don't remember life on a slow link don't realize how extraordinary that was but...
My wife used to clean Leonards house, and Leonard, his (now ex) wife Jan, Valorie and I became friends. The last time I saw him was at Confrancisco back in '94.
We've lost touch over the past 8 or so years, but he will be sorely missed.
Footsteps in the sand. That's a great idea. Mod it up please, or at least use it.
Good idea!
"I feel sorry that he's not going to get a chance to test it out himself."
Leonard was on the Alcor Advisory Board:
http://alcor.org/AboutAlcor/alcorStaff.htm
Since you are not permitted to be a board member unless you are signed up, it's likely he will be suspended, regardless of the situation, unless there is a requirement for an autopsy, and Alcor is unable to get a court order to have the body released.
In general, Alcor is very aggressive in ensuring that its patients get suspended as quickly as possible, and with as little concommitant damage as possible. Everyone doing the work is themselves signed up, and will treat the patient as they themselves expect to be treated.
Even in the case of serious damage, there will be a "best effort" attempt, unless the patient specifies otherwise; from the FAQ ( http://alcor.org/FAQs/ ):
--
Q: What if it is impossible to place me into suspension?
A: The Alcor Cryonic Suspension Agreement has provisions for this possibility. Options are available, including naming secondary beneficiaries to whom funds set aside for suspension can be paid. Many members want their suspension funds going towards efforts focusing on recovering any biological remains whatsoever, regardless of the degree of damage or time elapsed.
--
The person to contact for status should be the Alcor press contact; whether or not they will make information available in this depends wholly on the privacy agreements in place with the patient.
-- Terry
I have nothing but praise for Leonard. He worked diligently on the project, and was always helpful. He had some of the most kickass hardware around (a 4 processor personal box, for example).
Although I have not worked on XFree86 for a while, I'm sure he will be missed.
Andrew
Andrew van der Stock
I appreciate the thought /. but reading some of the comments here I feel sick to my stomach. Maybe /. shouldn't post obituary-style articles?
I'm incredibly open-minded esp. when it comes to humour but a lot of the posts on this article are from really sick people who should get help.
Don't give me some "It's just a web-based forum, lighten up!" crap. We're talking about people dying in a tragic accident here for godsake.
Let me please pass on my condolences to all those affected by this tragedy.
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
45-year-old Leonard Zubkoff of Crystal Bay, Nevada was found dead in his home today.
Hey, maybe the trolls are working on the broken-clock principal. Eventually, they get the announcement correct. Or perhaps we could call it the "psychic freinds" principal?
No disrespect. I just thought this thread could use a little humor.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
As much as I despise Linux "advocates" these days
Why is an advocate a bad thing? I advocate a great many technologies when I feel they are the right tool for the job. Have I done something to offend?
I wreckon Micro$oft is behind the crash...As the kernel developers fall...
How no one that dies is ever a "total asshole, Im glad he's gone"? When was the last time you heard that at a funeral?
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
I waited patiently for the Lord
He inclined and heard my cry
He brought me up out of the pit
Out of the miry clay
I will sing, sing a new song
He set my feet upon a rock
And made my footsteps firm
Many will see
Many will see and fear
I will sing, sing a new song
Bye, Leonard. You'll be missed.
You're right, after all, Stephen King died at 54 and slashdot won't post it. Plus, *BSD is dying every day....
*BSD developers are dying too; you just won't see their obits on slashdot.
On the contrary my friend. It is 5:20 AM and I think I just woke up my sleeping wife after reading that and howling in pure unadulterated glee. That comment was the funniest thing I have read in this entire thread. It is just not funny to you. No disrespect intended either, I am sure they will both be missed by friends and family. The point is, everyone's time comes. What better tribute than to have your death posted on /. and be the subject of many a heartfelt comment as well as be the focus for the troll hordes who always make me laugh?
That is why you hide your cowardice behind a bit more of anonimity.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This thread could have done with less of it...
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Even if Bill Gates died in an accident, I don't think anyone should be disrespectfull about that loss off life. Hell, I would flame people that made fun of his death. (And happily lose Modpoints if nessecary)
One can laugh with death, but most of the time it's just to cope better with the sorrow. So if you did not care about the deceased, don't say anything.
Remember: speaking is silver, silence is golden. Especially on these kind of topics.
A URL to a page describing the circumstances of his death, complete with links to the FAA report and where donations in lieu of flowers can be sent can be found at
http://www.puffin.com/puffin/lnz/Leonard.htm.
Leonard was a good friend of mine. He will be missed.
It's a good thing Leonard has done such an excellent job with the drivers - They're mature and won't need TOO much fixing. But who will update them to new kernels/etc? Hopefully someone will take up the slack.
I have a FlashPoint controller. It started acting up after upgrading to a K6-2/500 (from a 300) - It would randomly hang the system. (Timing problem in the driver)
Seems like a total of 3-4 people on the planet had a similar hw combo (A Flashpoint in a higher-speed K6/2) and problems, nonetheless, Leonard had a patch out to fix the problem within a week of the first reports of anything happening. A role model for any other software developer...
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Have I done something to offend?
Nothing specific. You are just an asshole in general.
When 2 billion live on less than a dollar a day, how you can mourn the passing of someone who got all the best breaks is beyond me.. do you merkins really have that much of a hero mentality?
Hell, I may mourn the passing of close family and friends in a slightly different way because I have had a special relationship with them, but every death is as tragic.
I guess this is the geek equivalent of the vigils for John Lennon, or the weeping housewives parading the streets of London as Diana's coffin passed by..
Slashdot. Tabloid for Nerds, News that Gets Young Men Worked Up. What next, "Taco's People"?
Worse than lack of moderation would be giving too much power to moderators. If you want, a nice techinical solution would to set it up so that most moderators can only use their points on comments with a score in the 0-2 (inclusive) range. As it is now, once you hit 3 or especially 4, you are very likely to hit 5. The rest of the moderators have to use their points in the 3-5 range.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
This guy did so much to support these cards. I hope that he rests in peace.
It would be a fitting tribute to make sure that the next v2.4 tree release had fall working DAC960 driver with a note or rememberence.
The drivers in the current tree do not work. The do_mounts file needs some defines put in and some other changes.
Was it smelly?
Smelled worse than a Linux/D&D/anime convention, if you can imagine that. It was bad enough to kill several small animals and H1B visa holders here in the NOC.
Now there's a convention that any city would be proud to host. At least we could be sure that CmdrTaco would show up!
I hope you're kidding. Of course it means "fatality."
I don't understand your joke. BSD is not dying, infact it is very alive. The FreeBSD group is about to launch FreeBSD 5.0. So, how do you conclude that BSD is dying? If you're going to troll, then at least know what you are talking about.
I've always respected Leonard, just like I've personally always respected William. Now you come to say you'd have the right to flame Leo because I'd flame Bill? Get a life! There's a lot taken away from us, Leo is just the peak.
I've liked the cooperation we've had since back in 2.0 very much. I just won't accept you nor anyone making fun of something like this.
Thunder