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  1. Re:OLPC vs clothes on What 2008 May Hold In Store for FOSS · · Score: 1

    Food is so interesting. There are times when it's needed. In Ruanda and Burundi they'll never be able to feed themselves because there isn't enough land.

    I visited a school in Sudan that was supposed to recieve food from the local rebel forces. The rebels would scam all their food from the world food program by setting up fake villages. One time we cut out the middle man and used the school land cruiser to steal the food directly from the airstrip where the WFP did food drops.

    In the news they always make it sound horrible that the government of Sudan wasn't even letting food aid into southern Sudan but it's obvious why they do that.

    The WFP knows that their food will support the rebels eventually. Mothers will send food to their sons who are fighting. Rebels will raid villages and steal it. On the other hand, what else can you do when people are dying of starvation?

    Also the western world unofficially supports the rebels in Sudan because they allow religious freedom.

  2. OLPC vs clothes on What 2008 May Hold In Store for FOSS · · Score: 4, Informative

    From the article: "And it is true that food and clothing may seem like more immediate priorities in many regions."

    Please do not send any more clothes. You've already killed off the local textile industry and put all the cotton farmers out of work with your free clothes. Who can compete with free crap? Please stop.

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1076411.stm

    I no longer donate clothes for exactly this reason.

  3. Re:So remember... on UN Says Tasers Are a Form of Torture · · Score: 1

    In San Jose they said tazers would reduce police shootings but it actually went up. I'm not sure why...

  4. Travel computer on Review of Asus Linux-Based Eee PC 701 · · Score: 1

    I'm thinking about buying the Nokia n810 for something to dork around with while bike touring. The advantage to the Eee is the large keyboard and possibly lower cost. It looks slightly sturdier too. The advantage with the Nokia is the built in GPS and longer battery life.

    I'm conflicted.

    Btw. It would be cool if someone sold a battery powered external usb DVD drive. Like say if I bought a DVD on the road but I didn't want to run my main battery down.

  5. Customer service is not expensive on Vonage Hit With $69.5M Judgement · · Score: 1

    Vonage customer service sucks.

    I never used the customer service until I wanted to get out of the program. The process for doing that was horrible. We ended up in a dispute over the last month's charge. They said I owed it because even though I didn't use the service, I hadn't canceled in time, I said I tried to cancel but they screwed up and I wasn't going to pay them a single penny more.

    Eventually they backed down, but I would never recommend Vonage to anyone.

    It cost them way more to fight with me than it would have to just let me go. If they had more money they'd probably just hire someone to screw with me some more...

  6. La la la on Impassable Northwest Passage Open For First Time In History · · Score: 1

    I can't hear you. La la la. Are you from some foreign country because I can't understand what you are saying.

    PS. The climate is not changing. Please go about your business people.

  7. Re:Make everything "Just Work" on How Would You Refocus Linux Development? · · Score: 1

    You get annoyed by make and I get annoyed by people who suggest that make is a valid way to install applications under linux.

    In fact if you use "make" on a production system, you're probably doing something wrong. Package management is not just a "front end" to "make." Most of it is very definitely back end.

    Packagemanagement is a complete record of what you have installed. It track library dependencies and conflicts. It allows for easy security updates. Once you start using make install to go around the back of your packagemagement you lose any kind of maitainability.

    Don't try be clever folks. Use the package management and you'll make all you co-workers' lives easier.

  8. Re:Technical Merits vs other OSS? on Linus Torvalds Speaks Out on Future of Linux · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Linux has tons drivers but windows has better hardware support for the types of hard you can buy at retail.

    Solaris has ZFS that they like to brag about. On Linux, Ext3 is a very reliable FS and something to be proud of but it's showing its age. fsck times are unbearably long for example. It tends to get fragmented. XFS is a good FS too.

    Linux is pretty weak at power management which is crucial in embeded products. The embeded guys used to complain about real time support, but I guess that's OK now.

    OpenBSD guys would say that Linux is not as secure.

    AIX people would say that Linux is not as stable. It's true that when they did away with the devel branch they also kind of dealt away with the stable branch. There are more lines of code churning in the kernel than ever before, around 9000 lines per day. It's great to be fast, but AIX type people would like a half decade of bug fixes only.

    Enterprise people feel that Linux doesn't have advanced debugging tools. The crash dump stuff is there I guess but only a very small percentage of people use it. There isn't an in kernel debugger. Actually there is but not in the stock kernel...

    Linux has really improved so far as scalability goes. People don't really complain about that anymore.

    The main thing that Linux does well is that it's general purpose. It has better hardware support than any other Unix. It can run well on big iron and cell phones. It's portable to different types of CPUs. It has tons of file systems. It can do realtime. It has decent audio. It benchmarks decently for database and webserving work. It has advanced security features like SELinux. It's hard to please everyone, but it's fun to try.

  9. Re:What about epilepsy ? on Homeland Security Commissions LED-Based Puke-Saber · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah. I completely agree.

    I've seen interview where police were talking about tazors and they said they were only dangerous in rare cases if the victim was on drugs. The official tazor policy is that it is always the drugs that kill them not the tazors. I believe that like I believe the cigarette advertising from the 50s. If you think about it, police are _most_ likely to use tazors in drugs situations.

    I read an article about a cop who killed a person accidentally with a tazor and he clearly seemed to feel bad about killing the dude. But he should have thought ahead of time. If someone is naked: A) He's not hiding a gun. B) He is probably on drugs.

  10. Re:seems premature on Apple Sued Over iPhone Non-Replaceable Batteries · · Score: 1

    He couldn't look into the battery situation before buying the phone but now he's looking a year into the future to plan his battery replacement. He's claiming to be both stupid and smart. He's partly right.

  11. Re:Blown out of proportion? on Major Security Hole In Samsung Linux Drivers · · Score: 1

    This is a dailywtf qaulity style bug. I think that's the point of the article.

  12. Re:Old-skool ergonomics of line width on Are 80 Columns Enough? · · Score: 1

    "increased code complexity"

    Perhaps you mean "increased code convolution?"

    People used to write in machine code by hand... It doesn't get any more complex than that.

  13. Re:Huh? on Bush Commutes Libby's Sentence · · Score: 1

    I believe the exact words weren't "punish" but "take care of." Clearly that has happened in this case.

  14. Kenya makes a lot of sense on Google Setting Up a Presence In Kenya · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is currently one fiber cable in Africa. It's called SAT3. It goes down the west coast to South Africa and then over to India.

    It's run by Telkom in South Africa. Telkom has close ties with the government to kill all IT development and competition in the country. As a result, SAT3 is only 5% utilities and costs more than satelite broadband. South Africa is where broad band goes to die.

    Kenya is opening up their markets and allowing competition. This year and next, they are going to be building 3 or 4 cables through Kenya. Right now the plan is for three down the coast and one through Sudan.

    Tanzania has a fiber network. Zambia is building a fiber network. Botswana has a fiber network. Uganda and Burundi are building networks. It's an exciting time for Africa.

    Every year African businesses spend $4 billion on Satelite. That money leaves the economy forever instead of paying for univesities and hospitals.

  15. time == money on RIAA Web Site Moved To Linux · · Score: 1

    They're probably losing millions of dollars in revenue per hour with this downtime.

    Or possibly they aren't and don't care about downtime and even less on Sundays...

  16. Re:lets take a point from the man himself... on Linus Warms (Slightly) to GPL3 · · Score: 1

    GPLv3 makes sense for Solaris because it's incompatible with the Linux kernel licensing. It makes sense for JAVA too because it's compatible with the apache license.

    But overall (ignoring Sun) the GPLv3 is a big waste of time and a step backwards.

  17. Re:~$ mv CommitAccess MergePrivileges on Linus on GIT and SCM · · Score: 2, Informative

    There are a couple things.

    Everyone has a complete tree so everyone can push patches between themselves. Linus doesn't have to accept it into his own tree. That cuts down on the politics. Before everyone had they're own tar ball and push patches around but you lose history and it takes more work.

    The other thing is that it's easier to delegate political questions. Lets say Linus pulls networking patches without even looking at them. The networking maintainer gets to deal with all the political issues. This is how it worked before but it was all manual and you lose all the commit comments etc.

  18. Re:Of course not! on Should Vendors Close All Security Holes? · · Score: 1

    That's normally viewed as the admin's problem for not locking the system down properly. The root user can always access passwords on a system.

  19. Re:Show it. on Microsoft Says Free Software Violates 235 Patents · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Microsoft has between 15 and 20 patents on moving the cursor around (look it up). Please remove all your cursors.

    The point about software patents is that the only way to protect yourself is to counter sue or to move to Europe.

  20. Re:Where are the perlheads? on After 9 Years, Bugzilla Moves Up to 3.0 · · Score: 1

    The guy obviously knows Perl and he's right about what's wrong with Perl.

    The python stuff is pretty bogus. You don't need a special editor to recognize indent blocks. (Hint: Look for things 4 spaces further away from the margin than the line before). That said, python is slower than perl for many things. I've written internal webpages in python but I've not seen many comercial websites done in Python. There is probably a reason for that.

    Ruby. Don't know. Joel on Software says it's slow. Otherwise, it's very popular.

    Java. He complains about mod_perl but there isn't even an apache mod_java available to complain about so far as I know. I really doubt the "fast" bit.
    They did a rewrite of sourceforge in java and it was slow and sucky.

    PHP. Don't know. Very popular. Probably a decent choice.

    The rest of the languages were not serious options.

    Rewrites are a pain. The article basically says they tried the rewrite trick for 7 years to try create the 3.0 branch and then they abandoned it. You'd think they'd learn. :P You'll always lose some existing crontributors if you switch to a new language. Still 80k is not that much so it could be done. It would be worth it if you gained more new contributers or if the remaining contributers could write faster in the new language.

    BTW. I'm the bugzilla maintainer at work and I've found the code to be pretty easy to read. It was pretty easy to upgrade my sandbox system to 3.0. It even preserved the custom fields we had added.

    PS. Please don't rewrite it in java.

  21. silly blogger... on Does Linux "Fail To Think Across Layers?" · · Score: 1

    Andrew Morton basically said, "Yeah it's great, but the API sucks." The blogger responds about Sun products are designed by ninth djinn feng shui masters.

    Woop-di-doo. And good for you.

  22. Switching OSs always fixes the problem on Qantas Ditches Linux for AIX · · Score: 4, Insightful

    At least it fixes the problem until the migration is over, then all bets are off.

    In this day and age, if your root cause analysis comes up with "Linux is unstable" then something is screwed up with your analysis. Still this doesn't affect me, so good luck with that. :) AIX is a wonderful OS from what I hear.

  23. Re:Not a doctorate? on Bill Gates to Finally Receive His Harvard Degree · · Score: 1

    Gates already has 3 honourary doctorates. It's probably funnier to give him a bachelors because that's what he was trying to get when he dropped out.

  24. Evangelism is boring... on Microsoft Segments Linux "Personas" · · Score: 1

    It doesn't matter who is doing it.

    Also this web page is a pretty much useless. The persona of the person who uses this web page:
    1) Sells Microsoft for Microsoft's sake apparently without any added value.
    2) Has a broad customer base.
    3) Didn't already know his customers are migrating from Unix.
    4) Didn't already know how much his customers spend on IT and how often they make purchases.

    Oooo... Linux is going down! I think Linus Torvalds just peed his pants from fright.

  25. Re:Stupid question... on Open Source Federal Income Tax Software · · Score: 1

    You do pay taxes as you go, but it's only an estimate based on your marital status and wages. American taxes are complicated so you don't know exactly how much you owe until the end.

    Recently, in California, the government just takes the documents from employers and mails out pre-filled forms. Most people can just sign at the bottom and wait for their refund to come back.

    John Chiang was the man behind that particular inovation. In the last election, the tax software companies spent over a million dollars fighting him. No good deed goes unpunished. Fortunately he won the election anyway.