Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Sorveteria, Rockets, Anger
How is this sanguine? peterb writes "Slashdot has previously reported on Eve Andersson's whitewash of Ars Digita. Her screed placed responsibility for all the problems fully on the shoulders of the Venture Capitalists, while ignoring the role of those that asked the VCs for money. Ars Digita's Michael Yoon has a somewhat more sanguine and less hysterical version of the same story."
I wonder if shoulder chips can be recycled as fuel ...
All them perls don't come cheap. dogma01 writes "It's been almost a year since I submitted this story on Slashdot about the Perl Foundation Fund Drive. With a new year there has been a new round of grants. Every dime helps improve the community and bring us one step closer to Perl6. Please donate here."
The largest model is actually the one that's currently in use. joshamania writes "I knew when I saw the first post about the 'largest scale model of the solar system' I should have piped up. The second post has driven me over the edge. I call shenanigans! The Maine model is not the largest, and Peoria, IL, my hometown, has had the largest model for many years now, the Pluto model (in Kewanee, IL) being over 60 miles away from the sun model. In fact, a bicycle tour of the model is organized every summer and reoccurs in August."
Still at maximum. Danta writes "As the QNX site seems to have received an indirect slashdotting, here is a BitTorrent link to the free version of the QNX OS."
And what's in your makefile? JediTrainer writes "Community backlash begins! The author of Nmap has decided to remove all support of the SCO operating system as of version 3.28. Quoting the changelog, 'SCO operating systems are no longer supported due to their recent (and absurd) attacks against Linux and IBM. Bug reports relating to UnixWare will be ignored, or possibly even laughed at derisively. Note that I have no reason to believe anyone has ever used Nmap on SCO systems. Unixware sucks.'"
Speaking of backlash ... Ransak writes "Speak out! Space-Rockets.com has started a letter/fax campaign to sway political opinion, but needs your help! This hobby enjoyed by thousands of future scientists and astronaunts has been put in serious jeopardy by bad legislation. Senator Herb Kohl was one of the coauthors of the Safe Explosives Act, who not surprisingly, is blocking an amendment to ease restrictions on model rocketry. Wisconson geeks, take note of your Senators actions!"
... and speaking of rockets: BuR4N writes "The x-prize foundation has decided not to accept an application from a Budapest based team called GCT (Gravity Control Technologies) due to their highly questionable proposal. GCT pitched a "propellantless propulsion technology" that quote "is capable of controlling gravity for flight". Here is the full story. It would be very interesting to hear from the scientific community if this is just silliness or something that eventually could lead anywhere.."
I hope these guys don't take up making ham sandwiches. acidblood writes "Following up on yesterday's story concerning ice cream and liquid nitrogen, it appears someone was keen to try it out, and this is the result."
I can't tell from the page when exactly this was made. Whether it was truly in response to Gray's recipe or not, this site certainly provides more amusing visual aids.
The medium is the message, or something like that. LineNoiz writes "There is an interesting article over at MSNBC outlining Metallica's attempt to take advantage of the internet as a music distribution medium. It seems their newest album 'St. Anger' has a code on it which can be used to access their "Audio Vault" where users can download MP3 recordings of live concerts. The site's motto? 'Download. Burn. Share. Kick Ass.' Is this just a flagrant attempt to recapture the interest of the thousands of fans they lost in their battle with Napster, or a genuine good idea?"
Readers may recall this interview with Metallica's Lars Ulrich.
Download or not, their latest album sucks. In fact I started disliking their music since the reload album.
The torrent you provided in already slashdotted BTW.
perl 5 does just about everything I need. From everything I've read, perl 6 will have enough changes to make it almost like learning a new language. Yes, I know there will be a "backwards compatibility" mode, but why do I get the feeeling that if one has problems with the backwards compatibiltiy mode, the answer that will be offered will be "rewrite it as perl 6 code"?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
If GCT actually does it, will the X-Prize folks accept their appliation after the fact?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Metallica Tricks The Tricksters. They're planning to flood file sharing networks with Metallica "named" John Denver tunes to trick users. I hope they have Denver's estate's permission to use his works.
If you bought their last album (I got the vinyl version) - you got a card which let you go to their web page and download exclusive tracks. Personally I think it's a great idea, I mean most live concert recordings will only be bought by dedicated fans and those people won't be abandoning hte album in favour of these extras (remember the Perl Jam concert series).
I call upon all slashdotters who maintain opensource products to remove support for UNIXWARE in all future version. Explicitly disable the generation of your Makefiles for SCO machines, in protest and solidarity of SCO's actions.
I will never forgive Metallica for being such dumbasses over Napster a couple years ago. I have all their CD's
2) So that's what happened to Ars Digita. I walked by there the other day and wondered why it was now a community college. I still have warm feelings from the time I walked by, looked in the mirror and saw someone using a KDE app I'd written - first time that had happened.
3) What's with the nmap guy? He h4x0r's some kid's computer and publically posts screenshots after hitting on him over a Slashdot post (yeah, models post here all the time) but all SCO rates is a Makefile change?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
On the Metallica issue, I recall a very funny series of cartoons mocking Metallica while they were driving napster into the ground. They're still funny today, and can be found here. I mean, with this new site, could they be any more hypocritical? You can find Ulrich's testimony before congress about shutting down napster here. As I recall, he came off as whiny.
/.tted to hell but Sounds Yummy.
On SCO, this is a neat new idea. If enough major OSS developers start a divestment strategy against SCO, if nothing else they'll be ostracized and dead sure to fall when their lawsuits start going downhill. These sort of tactics could make the OSS community a force to be reconed with in buisness as well as technical circles, and maintaining the goodwill of the OSS community more important.
On ice cream and liquid nitrogen, i have no idea what to say because the site is
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
Then that would say something. Its not like UnixWare or OpenServer is really part of SCO's buisness plan for the future, but still, loosing support from the apache group would make it harder for them to pretend to care about their products.
Yesterday I was torrenting away trying to get QNX for a few hours straight, at unbelievably slow rates. But NOW you slashdot it so I can get faster. Oh, THANKS. Generally it's a good thing to download something before it gets /.'ed, but in this case it's better after... *sigh* :)
~pi
I don't think that claims that the Canopy Group is not behind this one will not hold up now.
Now my fellow "crunchies", (the insulting name M$ friendly Forbes gives us), for the million dollar question, where does this money trail lead? I'll bet it doesn't stop at the Canopy.
That this album is not in any way copy protected (at least as far as I can tell... cdparanoia had no problems ripping it). They seem to have decided to fight the file trading networks by putting out the Vault and also including a DVD of them rehearsing the songs (and the DVD's mix seems to be better quality than the CD...), for the price of a standard CD. I've talked to some people who say that they bough the CD for the DVD and the Vault.
In it's second week (first full) and has now sold approximately 800,000 copies (350,000 of which were in the second week). Hopefully the record industry gets the message that the way to survive in the post-Napster world is not by suing the bejeezus out of people but by simply offering more value than can easily be duplicated by the P2P services. I mean, St. Anger has about 7 hours of content (75 minute CD, 75 minute DVD, over 3 hours (soon to grow) of concert MP3s) for (if you bought at Target or Best Buy) $10.
Some have posted that other artists have done this, but none of them are of the stature in the industry of a band like Metallica. By demonstrating that you can do this and succeed with an album that was certified platinum before a single CD (apart from Amazon pre-orders) was sold, the RIAA has to be taking notice; Metallica has proven that if you deliver more bang for the buck, people will buy it regardless of how much free downloading there is.
The very thought of trusting Metallica seems sort of, um, crazy? in the first place. Have you taken a look at those guys lately?
As to the Model Rocketry problem, it really all boils down to the BATFE wetting their collective pants over the thought of someone building a homebrew SAM missile, which is fairly easy anyway.
The big thing as I see it is the same thing was done to Black powder, which means that making your own rocket engines, or even reloading your own ammunition, just got REAL hard AFAICT.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
While I agree with you, in the business enviroment there are still many people still running SCO. There is a damn good reason for this, cause the cost of the license is lower then that of the downtime required to go to something diffrent.
And nmap is a useful tool to test even a Unixware or Openserver box. The lack of this tool can be used by the IT department to promote something diffrent. "I'm sorry, but it's no longer possible for me to evaluate wether our SCO box is secure, the people who make the software no longer support SCO. It's reccomended that we upgrade to supported software, we don't want to risk getting hacked now do we?"
While nmap isn't in it self a reason to update, I support this person's choice in no longer supporting a platform who's politics he disagree's with. While I "could" telnet to my home box and run nmap, i'm not about to tell management that. I'm going to use this person's choice to promote my own agenda, and hope the SCO platform looses more support.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
> I call upon all slashdotters who maintain opensource products to remove support for UNIXWARE in all future version.?
For what it is worth, I thought refusing Nmap support for SCO
products might generate a firestorm of flames from angry users. In
fact, the opposite has happened! Obviously Linux/AIX users praised
the move, but even the occasional SCO users seemed pleased. The one
or two complaints were more than offset by pleasant emails like this
one that just came in (name removed for his privacy):
Date: Wed, 18 Jun 2003 17:41:07 -0700
To: <fyodor@insecure.org>
Subject: I'm the one user affected by a lack of SCO support and i'm happy
I'll be sure to report with great delight of your choice to no longer
support UnixWare to the one company I do contract work. The choice to use
SCO isn't mine, it's simply what Mas90 runs on, and in the past has been
adquate for the job. It's my hope others follow your example so I can
report to management that useful applications will no longer be supported
for this overpriced platform.
I appricate your lack of support for the SCO platform and look forward to
future unsupported products.
With great respect...
-- End email paste
Anyway, I thought this datapoint might be useful to people considering
such a move.
-Fyodor
Concerned about your network security? Try the free Nmap Security Scanner
Did anybody notice that in this article provided by a reader in a comment it mentions that the parent company that owns SCO also owns trolltech! What gives!? Qt's parent is brothers with SCO?
Presumably nmap previously had code in to support running under SCO UNIX. They've basically just removed it. They wont be supporting nmap running under SCO in future.
Of course, theres nothing to stop anybody from maintaining a patch to keep it running under SCO UNIX, but I guess they still lose some support. I suppose in a way its a form of passive resistance - kind of like the FSF boycott of Apple, where they wouldnt port anything to MacOS after their "look and feel" lawsuit..
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
Maybe the dead guy should team up with dave mustaine to create the ultimate heavy metal band..
I agree with you. I was not the author of the AC comments above, and I do not completely agree with them. However...
I was at the (excellent) YAPC::NA in St. Louis in 2002, and it was pretty clear to me then that the grant-funded work had not turned out as well as it might have. I am a long-time fan of Damian Conway's, and I was worshipfully grateful that Larry Wall signed my *old* 1st edition Camel Book. But it was at this conference that I first had the very uneasy feeling that Perl6 would never really "happen". Either it would not be released, or, if it were released, it might not be as relevant as expected. It's now a year later, and therefore even more likely that Perl6 won't "happen". I'm pretty sad about this.
I was very happy to donate money to the grant fund (not a lot of money, but more than millions of others), and I was hoping that it would become a viable model for free software development in general. Unfortunately, since the Perl grants were not viewed as a big success, I think people will be more cautious next time. That can't be the right result, however well or poorly you think the money was spent. And I do wish that the results of the grant program had done more to advance the cause of Perl6, since it might have been an interesting language. Sigh...
Babar
These guys attacked an open source newsreader project. A couple of years ago, the PAN developers incorporated an mp3 decoder into their NNTP client. For some reason, Metallica felt compelled to sue them over this. Clueless f****. The most priceless courtroom moment came when the plaintiff attorney asked "I wonder how the defendants would like it if someone was giving away their work?" The court seemed a little baffled at the laughter that ensued.
/. crowd, who wants to yell and scream about how those bastards tried to protect that last little fraction of their own creation. ("How unfair! Only giving away most of their music! We'd better boycott 'em!")
I could almost understand their attacking Napster. But a newsreader? Sorry but:
Of course, the fact that this band was already giving away 99.9% of the music they created doesn't matter to the
does not suffice to rehabilitate these bungholes. A newsreader? An f****n' newsreader? BTW, the judge was clueless too. The PAN guys had to remove the inline mp3 feature. It still downloads mp3s just fine. Idiots. Lars still needs to be soundly beaten with a clueclub.