Slashdot Mirror
Sun's President Dreams of a Linux Future
Sara Chan writes "The Economist has a story analyzing the recent Sun-Microsoft deal. What's especially interesting is the ending. Sun recently promoted Jonathan Schwartz to President and Chief Operating Officer, recognizing the need for radical change if the company is to survive. According to the story, Schwartz's dream is 'to sell deep-discount desktop computers at Wal-Mart, carrying Sun's office applications on top of a Linux operating system'!"
Whoa!
There was a time when saying you had a Sun meant you weren't just 1337, but respectable, a power user. It may seem a cool thing to be mass marketing Linux boxen from Wally World, but that's a real comedown. Saying you have a Sun would be like saying you have a microwave oven. Is this what it takes to save Sun? Honestly, Linux boxen could easily become commodity hardware. You're not much of a player anymore when you're trying to keep your head above water by selling commodity PCs.
"Hi, my name is Bob and I still felt 1337 with my Walmart-bought Sun."
"Welcome Bob, to Sun-aholics."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Wait a minute, I didn't know executives could be Slashdot Trolls.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Steve Ballmer (right), the boss of Microsoft, the Redmond-based software giant that, in the Valley's popularity polls, runs neck-and-neck with the antichrist.
they're fucked.
It looks more like a ju-jitsu demostration.
You must know by now that all you have to do is either apt-get install msttcorefonts or create a .fonts directory in your homedir and dump a bunch of TTF fonts in there. Oh, maybe you didn't know. This doesn't suck anymore.
Get a distribution that can handle these things for you, or get a Mac if you like static linking.
Wait, I'm getting the feeling that...
Yep. I've just been trolled by the Static Linking Troll. Shit.
Actually, it's "GNU/Linux", not "LINUX" or "Linux".
-RMS
5. Make it so that cubicledrone can get fonts and upgrades on RedHat 5.1 without this "upgrade" thingy.
'It is a pity that our friends lie in between,' said Gimli. 'If no land divided Microsoft and Sun, then they could fight while we watched and waited.'
'The victor would emerge stronger than either, and free from doubt,' said Gandalf.
The Unix-haters handbook!
.Xauthority file, apparently. OK, presumably we want to add an entry for boris. Do:
9. The way to set up a remote X session is clear and straightforward, and doesn't involve lots of poking at cryptic pages on google and headscratching trying to remember where you have to run Xauth or other such and whether you have forwarding enabled in your ssh_config , etc...
9a. No one ever gets the error message "Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1", for any reason, ever. That's just not descriptive as an error, and it doesn't give you any indication what to do to fix it.
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 91 15:35:46 -0800
From: David Chapman
To: UNIX-HATERS
Subject: MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1
For the first time today I tried to use X for the purpose for which it was intended, namely cross-network display. So I got a telnet window from boris, where I was logged in and running X, to akbar, where my program runs. Ran the program and it dumped core. Oh. No doubt there's some magic I have to do to turn cross-network X on. That's stupid. OK, ask the unix wizard. You say "setenv DISPLAY boris:0". Presumably this means that X is too stupid to figure out where you are coming from, or unix is too stupid to tell it. Well, that's unix for you. (Better not speculate about what the 0 is for.)
Run the program again. Now it tells me that the server is not authorized to talk to the client. Talk to the unix wizard again. Oh, yes, you have have to run xauth, to tell it that it's OK for boris to talk to akbar. This is done on a per-user basis for some reason. I give this ten seconds of thought: what sort of security violation is this going to help with? Can't come up with any model. Oh, well, just run xauth and don't worry about it. xauth has a command processor and wants to have a long talk with you. It manipulates a
xauth> help add
add dpyname protoname hexkey add entry
Well, that's not very helpful. Presumably dpy is unix for "display" and protoname must be... uh... right, protocol name. What the hell protocol am I supposed to use? Why should I have to know? Well, maybe it will default sensibly. Since we set the DISPLAY variable to "boris:0", maybe that's a dpyname.
xauth> add boris:0
xauth: (stdin):4 bad "add" command line
Great. I suppose I'll need to know what a hexkey is, too. I thought that was the tool I used for locking the strings into the Floyd Rose on my guitar. Oh, well, let's look at the man page.
I won't include the whole man page here; you might want to man xauth yourself, for a good joke. Here's the explanation of the add command:
add displayname protocolname hexkey
An authorization entry for the indicated display using the given protocol and key data is added to the authorization file. The data is specified as an even-lengthed string of hexadecimal digits, each pair representing one octet. The first digit gives the most significant 4 bits of the octet and the second digit gives the least significant 4 bits. A protocol name consisting of just a single period is treated as an abbreviation for MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1.
This is obviously totally out of control. In order to run a program across the fucking network I'm supposed to be typing in strings of hexadecimal digits which do god knows what using a program that has a special abbreviation for MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1?? And what the hell kind of a name for a network protocol is THAT? Why is it so important that it's the default protocol name?
Fuck this shit.
Obviously it is Allah's will that I throw the unix box out the window. I submit to the will of Allah.
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.