Sure! It's great for us bracket obsessed people (Who don't want to program in lisp, that is. (Of course, we could do both.)) Also, as a 'functional' (as in mathematical functions, not as in 'I can write functions in C' functions, those are procedural languages.) language it's fun to figure out how to do stuff that would otherwise be 'step 1, step 2, step 3,...' all in one recursive burst.
Heck, in one of my programming theory classes, we had to write a scheme interpreter. Of course, the prof didn't bother telling us that, he just handed us the language spec in BNF, and said 'Write the interpreter, all in C or C++, and you're not allowed to use lex or yacc. Hand it in on Monday.' Ack, I hated writing interpreters over the weekend. Then again, I wasn't too fond of writing interpreters any time... Oh well.
Now Americans have a monopoly on honesty ? Didn't you know that? They bought up the patent last week...
Based on my exposure to Americans I can conclude they are arrogant f_cks, convinced of their own superiority. Neah, they're not all like that... unfortunately, the ones that are like that also tend to be the loudest of the bunch...
'Scuse me, I've gotta dig my way out of the Igloo now to feed the sled dogs. (I'm Canadian, we all do that. Really.:)
Neah, the real culprit is actually none other than ID Games, who're mad at Illiad for implying that losers like Stef can't play Quake - they think it might discourage the butt-kissing wannabe market from buying copies of their games. Then again, I could just be that the food I ate thismorning was a few weeks past it's best-before date, it would explain the weird colours I'm seeing, eh?
If I buy the book, follow his 12 steps religiously, and don't end up getting rich beyond my wildest dreams, who can I sue? Actually, Bill will then sue you for making him and his book look bad by not getting rich. (Not that he needs help making himself and his books look bad or anything...:)
Hey Rob, didn't you just say you were a moderator? Doesn't that mean you should revoke your own moderator status?:-) Well, he did say he'd de-moderarorized one person in the update... maybe it was himself?
I found out long ago that my site was blocked by censorware... probably because it contains information on paganism and witchcraft and such... *sigh* Then again, much like Alluvial, you may have been blocked because your domain "home.student.utwente.nl" contains the word "stud".:)
Looking at christianity in a purely physical sense, the "Creationist" theory is just as (if not more so based on factual evidence) valid as Evolution (as an example of theory/faith based concepts that are held in high regard). Next time you decide you want to argue about "Creationist Theory", go look up info about a little critter called 'Xylocaris Maculipenis' - it's an African Bed Bug. Once you've found the info, read about it's mating habits. Evolution explains them rather effectively. Creationism says "God created all of the animals the way they are because he loves them and they're all good!". Think about that while reading the description of how this critter reproduces, but make sure you've got a bucket handy to puke into. Frankly, any diety who thinks like that isn't one that I'd like to be associated with.
Not quite true. Faith certainly means that you trust in something that you don't have all evidence for, and especially if you are talking metaphysical matters, the evidence can never be fully obtained. And there's where faith interferes with enlightenment - the belief springs up that there is no evidence, so looking for it one way or another is discouraged. If something exists, then there is evidence. Otherwise that thing either does not exist, or does not interact with reality, in which case it may as well not exist. The scientific method involves looking until you find something one way or the other, and then once you've found it, you keep looking, just in case you missed something. The religious method involves being told "That's the way it is!", and never looking again.
Just lose the pretense and make it clear by the headline While that may satisfy the techies who look at the article to find info about technical stuff, (by warning them that there's none there) it will also lose some of the stereotype breaking effectiveness if they titled the article "Hey look, there's a really smart hispanic guy over here!" - that would instantly limit the article's audience to people who already wanted to know about really smart hispanic guys. Instead, they make it a 'technical' article, and insert technobable from their file (which is only 7 or 8 years old) and then they can attract a much wider audience, which serves the purpose of getting their message out to more people. Lots of corporate non-techies read tech articles like that one so they can 'keep up' with technology, and they're the ones who that article is really aimed at - it brings things into their non-tech perspective, and sneaks in the anti-stereotyping as a sideline. Plus, the article did originate in Mexico City, so it's also only natural that they'd want to highlight major contributions originating in their own country.:) Anyhow, even if it's not the most technically correct article, it's still good to see linux/gnome/free software/etc... in a positive light. More articles like that will encourage managers and educators to take a look into Linux and free software, when they ordinarily wouldn't have even thought of it otherwise. I can see some North American schools installing linux and forcing the Gym teacher to learn/teach it, just so they can stay 'ahead of the mexican schools'. (Yes, gym teacher. That's what my school did when they needed a new computer teacher. Apparently it was cheaper/easier to move an existing teacher and hire a new gym teacher than to hire someone with some technical knowlege. And no, he didn't have any experience in computers before that, it was kinda fun to watch him trying to log in after we put a password on his account other than just 'enter'.)
1) Telnet to shell 2) set DISPLAY 3) run xterm 4) type xauth +(ip of shell) 5) run program from shell
is that hard?
By accident, definitely. (I can see it now... "My fingers just slipped, and I typed a 200 character command while I wasn't looking.":) Of course, if someone told them to do it, then nope, it's not hard at all, as long as they know their IPs/system names. (And I'd give it to them with your step 4 first, then step 3 can be cut out, making the whole thing shorter and much more non-techie friendly. The last person I told those to tried to run the xterm from the shell he was telnetted to, and got upset when it wouldn't work.)
I can give you an example of corporate evil that makes Microsoft look like a saint While this is definitely a disturbing activity, they're not one of the other companies I was talking about, and it's not of much use in the open source debate. What I meant was examples about the other computer industry companies, like IBM, Lotus, ATI, Sun, etc. I realize that makes it look like I only care about computer companies, but I was asking for info that would be usefull in a computer related debate.
Do you boycott McDonalds, Monsanto, Exxon and the like? Are you even a fraction as conscientious about your other consuming habits as you are about your computing ones? Know when the last time I ate at McDonalds was? 1985. Sad thing is that one of McDonalds' major environmental offenses was caused by the environmentalists themselves complaining about styrofoam packaging - that evil CFC producer. They didn't bother realizing that it can be made without CFC problems, and that it's recyclable. Instead, they now go through tons of paper products a year to replace the evil styrofoam... Exxon (to the best of my knowlege) is mostly involved in oil/gas, and I don't buy any. (Yup, I walk everywhere that I don't take the bus. It's better for me anyhow.) As for Monsanto, I've never heard of them, what are they? Like I said, just because you only champion one cause dosen't mean you're not aware of or affected by any of the others. Even if we don't bow to every public interest group in existance, we still have a right to publicize our cause, and as much a right as any of them to expect people to listen. If you say something, at least someone is bound to hear you and be affected by it. However, if we say nothing about it, then we can guarantee that nobody will be affected.
But they are doing exactly what you are doing: "picking their battles." Do you think someone whose primary concern is the environment will really give a turd about operating systems, when the OS-warriors don't seem to give a turd about anything else? But does that stop them (the environmentalists) from telling us things like "Hey, it's stupid to dump CFCs into the air!" (just a random example) - just because someone else chose to campain in a different area dosen't mean they aren't affected. It just means that I'm not going to be jumping down people's throats about the dangers of Air polution, it's someone else's job. Similarily, the 'OS-warriors' are having an effect on the non OS-warriors. If we weren't, do you really think there would be any press coverage of Linux at all? Why are people attacking Microsoft more than the others? They're a prominent representative of the closed, proprietary software group, and they're also an easy target. Their faults and untrustworthyness is publicly known with lots of easy to see examples. Can anyone find as many examples of deliberate deception, poor quality and blatant ripoffism off the top of their head about any of those other companies as they can about Microsoft? I doubt it. (If you can, then post the list, it's always good to have more amunition.) Plus we've got the problem of MS having stated that they wanted to find a way to get rid of Open Systems, as they are a 'threat' - that makes them a declared enemy, and this is close to one of the methods they stated they would try for getting rid of OSS. In fact, it's one of the methods they tried on OS/2 as well, back when it was competition. Other companies who practice mainly closed buisness haven't stated anything like that, and some are trying to 'reform' - so we give them a chance. Netscape has Mozilla, which is open sourced, so they're not an enemy. IBM supports Apache, and is working on Linux support as well. Corel is funding Wine, which is a major open source project. So far we've got a lot of big corp's who may do bad things occasionally, but they're also slowly moving over to our side. Now if Microsoft was to announce that they were going to release source code from one of their major app's, even under some weird proprietary, sue-your-ass-off-if-you-use-this licence scheme, we'd probably be happy. (Ok, really, we'd pass out in shock. But when we recovered, if they actually did it we'd be happy.)
Only people who are so completely tunnel-visioned as to only see this one little industry as significant could possibly paint Microsoft as an ubervillian - compare the activities of... Dude, slow down. Pick your enemies, and go off to war all you want, but cripes, if you open too many fronts at once, you go splat. Sure, we know that other companies do evil things too, but we know better than to over extend ourselves. We picked our fight, and we'll get to the other ones when we're done, ok? Which would you rather do, fight against one set of bank robbers, or one set of bank robbers, Plus Cthulhu, Shub-Nigurath, and a pack of Shoggoths all at once? Personally I'll just avoid the elder menaces and handle the one that won't drain my sanity. Same with Microsoft and all the other elder Corp's. Besides, they at least maintain some illusion of product quality. MS dosen't. As for who cares - all of those buisness managers who like paying for programs will. You know them, you've probably worked for them. You know they don't always make sense, so you should be expecting it by now. And they'll buy into it, 'cause their techies have been bugging them to try Linux for a long time now, and they'll see something buggy and unstable, and say "Yup, I saw Linux, it was crap." All because they bought it and looked at it through Microsoft's narrowed proprietary view. And then all of that promotional work we've been doing is taken away tenfold.
There have been ways to port things to unix for quite some time. Only when Microsoft is thinking about it do the linux fanatics come out of the woodwork to whine about it. We're not whining about there being a way to port things to Unix, we've not only known about them for some time, we've been participating in, benefiting from, and enjoying them. Guess what? We've all heard about Wine, we all know about Corel WP, and all of those other Linux ports of other software packages. The lack of whining was because they were actual ports of said software, from people who haven't stated their goal to 'Embrace and Extend' as a way of crushing open systems. Go read the Halloween doc's at opensource.org, they lay it out nice and plain in Halloween 1. Then there's Microsoft's time-honoured practice of including hidden 'features' to invade your privacy, and degrade the performance of anyone else's products. Bet ya MS-Office for Linux will insist on installing as root only. Then there's the fact that Microsoft was the one who brought us a Word Processor that can have viruses in it's documents. Yeah, we need MS-Word for Linux, there's far too few Viruses available for our platform of choice, and this will give us so much more selection. Linux is an open system, and like all other Gnu stuff, it's used because that openness creates trust. People who get used to actually trusting their computer and the software on it will always be leary of putting something closed and secretive on it, especially when it's handed to them by someone who has demonstrated time and time again that you can not trust them. (Let's see... Stacker code stolen in DOS 6, Hard drive scan in Win95 sent to MS-Network, MAC address secretly appended to Word/Excel doc's, not releasing actual API for Win95 to developers but using it themselves to make their products faster than others, the list goes on... wonder why we don't trust them, eh?)
Random guy in crowd: "Only the Messiah would deny being the Messiah!" Brian: "Alright then, I am the Messiah!" Whole Crowd: "He IS the Messiah!" -- Monty Python's Life of Brian
Be carefull with that whole denial=proof thing. Just because Brian really was the Messiah, dosen't mean it's always true.:)
It's the only thing they make that's any good
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I dunno, it's kinda crash-prone and annoying. The last real improvement in their software that they made was the jump from MS-DOS 4 to MS-DOS 5. (DOS 4 was EEEEVVVIIILLLL... even for a spawn of MS... I liked DOS 5.) Personally I liked their implementation of MineSweeper though. It ran nice and fast, and you never get blown up on the first move.:)
At least now a badMS App won't lock the machine!
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Yup, riiiiiggghhh... They'll just insist that you install it as root, then it'll scatter a few suid'd files around your drive to make security on your box a living nightmare, trash any other program that you try to run, and produce lots of nifty system crashes that look like they're comming from other applications. Then they'll say "See? It's unstable, insecure, unreliable and slow. You should replace it with Windows 2001!" (That's what they'll be calling Win2000 by the time it's really released...)
That explains some of the crap I've had to deal with... their complaints department must be so overrun that the people in charge of reviewing.edu submissions must be busy... Pain in the neck, it is.
Interesting... they seem to have been falling steadily for over a year now... I wonder when these supposedly slanderous comments were made? (Having not seen either the actual comments themselves, I refuse to make a potentially slanderous comment myself by stating one way or another wether the comments in question were true, after all, a lawsuit-happy american company with money problems is involved.) Did these comments come before or after the decline of their stock value began? If it's before, then the AC's in question are likely to get toasted, since Wade's lawyers would be able to point to that and say "Look! See the damage these people did!" - And that would be a bad thing for us, since it would mean more clamping down on freedoms that we often take for granted. If, on the other hand, the comments were made much more recently, then the AC's lawyers (or the public Attourney, or whatever) could say that no damage was really done, since there isn't really any significant change in the trend the company's stock was taking. (Steadily down, nice and smooth...) I may not be a financial expert (Ok, I'm not even an amatuer, I have enough trouble with my own bank book, so don't take stock advice from me.) but isn't the value of stock supposed to measure how well a company is doing?
Yep, that got done (by students) to my University's main server back in 1994. It took about 15000 connections before the thing froze up, and the auto-kill daemon had it cleared up about 10 minutes later. (Probably would have been faster, but the connections were being respawned when they got killed.) Wasn't even enough to get the admins to yell at us. Anyhow, with 15000 connections to a machine being needed to shut it down, how exactly is this a huge, major scary problem? How many connections does it take to nail NT to the floor? All it means is "When you write a new/replacement daemon, don't forget to drop idle connections" - which many of them do already.
If the hostname were jimpick.ca, I'd be in awe of his financial status. You know how expensive it is to get one of those now a days? Well, Ok, it's only $75, but it's expensive to qualify. About $600+ for national incorporation, or more for some sort of national trademark on your company name. Glah. I couldn't affort it.
With physical access to your machine... True, but that's where the 'too much of a pain in the ass to be worth it' factor comes in... anyone who feels the need to sneak into my office at night, disable the alarm on the building, boot up with a rescue disk, search out which drive/partition my Linux files are on, and scan the hard drive just to see what I submitted as for a form really needs to consider seeking professional psychiatric help. (Of course, anyone going to the trouble of doing all that even for a Windows machine for the same reason also needs to visit a good psychiatrist.
Linux/Unix users - check out your/tmp (or/var/tmp) directory when you've just submitted a form. Read the new file. Decide if it hurts or not. I can't remember if this is POST format forms only, or GET too. Either way, it shouldn't leave these thing hanging around. Well, I just sent a POST, and a GET form, looked in/tmp, and/var/tmp, and/usr/tmp, and found no new files, whatsoever. Actually, except for the X-Windows lock and device files, there's nothing in any of those dir's right now, and according to the modify-times on the directories, they haven't even been used since before I started Netscape, so the files wasn't even created and removed. Netscape on Unix dosen't use/tmp, or/var/tmp, period. It uses a cache directory and an archive directory in the user's own home directory, which is only readable by the user themself. The only way that can be thrown open to the public, and accessiible is if the User (or root) opens it on purpose, and then it's not the program's fault, it's the user. Yep, the form data gets stored, that's why you can reload a form-generated page later and get asked "Repost Form Data?", but it's not kept in a public place unless you're using Windows.
Well, I like 4.08 better anyways, (marginally) less bloat, less crash, and good enough for me. I'll just wait for 5.0.1 (The bug fix for the next full release.:) Besides, from the looks of this, it only affects Windows 9x users, which I'm not.
If there are there any enterprising win9x programmers around looking for ideas on what to make next, one of you might want to come up with a cleaner that wipes unused files out of the windows temp directory. It might not be a fix for the netscape problem itself, but it'd cover for probably a lot of programs with similar bugs in them.
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you code in Scheme for *pleasure*?
Sure! It's great for us bracket obsessed people (Who don't want to program in lisp, that is. (Of course, we could do both.)) Also, as a 'functional' (as in mathematical functions, not as in 'I can write functions in C' functions, those are procedural languages.) language it's fun to figure out how to do stuff that would otherwise be 'step 1, step 2, step 3,...' all in one recursive burst.
Heck, in one of my programming theory classes, we had to write a scheme interpreter. Of course, the prof didn't bother telling us that, he just handed us the language spec in BNF, and said 'Write the interpreter, all in C or C++, and you're not allowed to use lex or yacc. Hand it in on Monday.' Ack, I hated writing interpreters over the weekend. Then again, I wasn't too fond of writing interpreters any time... Oh well.
Now Americans have a monopoly on honesty ?
:)
Didn't you know that? They bought up the patent last week...
Based on my exposure to Americans I can conclude they are arrogant f_cks, convinced of their own superiority.
Neah, they're not all like that... unfortunately, the ones that are like that also tend to be the loudest of the bunch...
'Scuse me, I've gotta dig my way out of the Igloo now to feed the sled dogs. (I'm Canadian, we all do that. Really.
Neah, the real culprit is actually none other than ID Games, who're mad at Illiad for implying that losers like Stef can't play Quake - they think it might discourage the butt-kissing wannabe market from buying copies of their games.
Then again, I could just be that the food I ate thismorning was a few weeks past it's best-before date, it would explain the weird colours I'm seeing, eh?
If I buy the book, follow his 12 steps religiously, and don't end up getting rich beyond my wildest dreams, who can I sue? :)
Actually, Bill will then sue you for making him and his book look bad by not getting rich. (Not that he needs help making himself and his books look bad or anything...
Hey Rob, didn't you just say you were a moderator? Doesn't that mean you should revoke your own moderator status? :-)
Well, he did say he'd de-moderarorized one person in the update... maybe it was himself?
Neah....
I found out long ago that my site was blocked by censorware... probably because it contains information on paganism and witchcraft and such... *sigh* :)
Then again, much like Alluvial, you may have been blocked because your domain "home.student.utwente.nl" contains the word "stud".
Looking at christianity in a purely physical sense, the "Creationist" theory is just as (if not more so based on factual evidence) valid as Evolution (as an example of theory/faith based concepts that are held in high regard).
Next time you decide you want to argue about "Creationist Theory", go look up info about a little critter called 'Xylocaris Maculipenis' - it's an African Bed Bug. Once you've found the info, read about it's mating habits. Evolution explains them rather effectively. Creationism says "God created all of the animals the way they are because he loves them and they're all good!". Think about that while reading the description of how this critter reproduces, but make sure you've got a bucket handy to puke into. Frankly, any diety who thinks like that isn't one that I'd like to be associated with.
Not quite true. Faith certainly means that you trust in something that you don't have all evidence for, and especially if you are talking metaphysical matters, the evidence can never be fully obtained.
And there's where faith interferes with enlightenment - the belief springs up that there is no evidence, so looking for it one way or another is discouraged. If something exists, then there is evidence. Otherwise that thing either does not exist, or does not interact with reality, in which case it may as well not exist. The scientific method involves looking until you find something one way or the other, and then once you've found it, you keep looking, just in case you missed something. The religious method involves being told "That's the way it is!", and never looking again.
Just lose the pretense and make it clear by the headline :)
While that may satisfy the techies who look at the article to find info about technical stuff, (by warning them that there's none there) it will also lose some of the stereotype breaking effectiveness if they titled the article "Hey look, there's a really smart hispanic guy over here!" - that would instantly limit the article's audience to people who already wanted to know about really smart hispanic guys. Instead, they make it a 'technical' article, and insert technobable from their file (which is only 7 or 8 years old) and then they can attract a much wider audience, which serves the purpose of getting their message out to more people. Lots of corporate non-techies read tech articles like that one so they can 'keep up' with technology, and they're the ones who that article is really aimed at - it brings things into their non-tech perspective, and sneaks in the anti-stereotyping as a sideline. Plus, the article did originate in Mexico City, so it's also only natural that they'd want to highlight major contributions originating in their own country.
Anyhow, even if it's not the most technically correct article, it's still good to see linux/gnome/free software/etc... in a positive light. More articles like that will encourage managers and educators to take a look into Linux and free software, when they ordinarily wouldn't have even thought of it otherwise. I can see some North American schools installing linux and forcing the Gym teacher to learn/teach it, just so they can stay 'ahead of the mexican schools'. (Yes, gym teacher. That's what my school did when they needed a new computer teacher. Apparently it was cheaper/easier to move an existing teacher and hire a new gym teacher than to hire someone with some technical knowlege. And no, he didn't have any experience in computers before that, it was kinda fun to watch him trying to log in after we put a password on his account other than just 'enter'.)
1) Telnet to shell
:) Of course, if someone told them to do it, then nope, it's not hard at all, as long as they know their IPs/system names. (And I'd give it to them with your step 4 first, then step 3 can be cut out, making the whole thing shorter and much more non-techie friendly. The last person I told those to tried to run the xterm from the shell he was telnetted to, and got upset when it wouldn't work.)
2) set DISPLAY
3) run xterm
4) type xauth +(ip of shell)
5) run program from shell
is that hard?
By accident, definitely. (I can see it now... "My fingers just slipped, and I typed a 200 character command while I wasn't looking."
I can give you an example of corporate evil that makes Microsoft look like a saint
While this is definitely a disturbing activity, they're not one of the other companies I was talking about, and it's not of much use in the open source debate. What I meant was examples about the other computer industry companies, like IBM, Lotus, ATI, Sun, etc. I realize that makes it look like I only care about computer companies, but I was asking for info that would be usefull in a computer related debate.
Do you boycott McDonalds, Monsanto, Exxon and the like? Are you even a fraction as conscientious about your other consuming habits as you are about your computing ones?
Know when the last time I ate at McDonalds was? 1985. Sad thing is that one of McDonalds' major environmental offenses was caused by the environmentalists themselves complaining about styrofoam packaging - that evil CFC producer. They didn't bother realizing that it can be made without CFC problems, and that it's recyclable. Instead, they now go through tons of paper products a year to replace the evil styrofoam... Exxon (to the best of my knowlege) is mostly involved in oil/gas, and I don't buy any. (Yup, I walk everywhere that I don't take the bus. It's better for me anyhow.) As for Monsanto, I've never heard of them, what are they? Like I said, just because you only champion one cause dosen't mean you're not aware of or affected by any of the others. Even if we don't bow to every public interest group in existance, we still have a right to publicize our cause, and as much a right as any of them to expect people to listen. If you say something, at least someone is bound to hear you and be affected by it. However, if we say nothing about it, then we can guarantee that nobody will be affected.
But they are doing exactly what you are doing: "picking their battles." Do you think someone whose primary concern is the environment will really give a turd about operating systems, when the OS-warriors don't seem to give a turd about anything else?
But does that stop them (the environmentalists) from telling us things like "Hey, it's stupid to dump CFCs into the air!" (just a random example) - just because someone else chose to campain in a different area dosen't mean they aren't affected. It just means that I'm not going to be jumping down people's throats about the dangers of Air polution, it's someone else's job. Similarily, the 'OS-warriors' are having an effect on the non OS-warriors. If we weren't, do you really think there would be any press coverage of Linux at all? Why are people attacking Microsoft more than the others? They're a prominent representative of the closed, proprietary software group, and they're also an easy target. Their faults and untrustworthyness is publicly known with lots of easy to see examples. Can anyone find as many examples of deliberate deception, poor quality and blatant ripoffism off the top of their head about any of those other companies as they can about Microsoft? I doubt it. (If you can, then post the list, it's always good to have more amunition.) Plus we've got the problem of MS having stated that they wanted to find a way to get rid of Open Systems, as they are a 'threat' - that makes them a declared enemy, and this is close to one of the methods they stated they would try for getting rid of OSS. In fact, it's one of the methods they tried on OS/2 as well, back when it was competition. Other companies who practice mainly closed buisness haven't stated anything like that, and some are trying to 'reform' - so we give them a chance. Netscape has Mozilla, which is open sourced, so they're not an enemy. IBM supports Apache, and is working on Linux support as well. Corel is funding Wine, which is a major open source project. So far we've got a lot of big corp's who may do bad things occasionally, but they're also slowly moving over to our side. Now if Microsoft was to announce that they were going to release source code from one of their major app's, even under some weird proprietary, sue-your-ass-off-if-you-use-this licence scheme, we'd probably be happy. (Ok, really, we'd pass out in shock. But when we recovered, if they actually did it we'd be happy.)
Only people who are so completely tunnel-visioned as to only see this one little industry as significant could possibly paint Microsoft as an ubervillian - compare the activities of...
Dude, slow down. Pick your enemies, and go off to war all you want, but cripes, if you open too many fronts at once, you go splat. Sure, we know that other companies do evil things too, but we know better than to over extend ourselves. We picked our fight, and we'll get to the other ones when we're done, ok? Which would you rather do, fight against one set of bank robbers, or one set of bank robbers, Plus Cthulhu, Shub-Nigurath, and a pack of Shoggoths all at once? Personally I'll just avoid the elder menaces and handle the one that won't drain my sanity. Same with Microsoft and all the other elder Corp's. Besides, they at least maintain some illusion of product quality. MS dosen't.
As for who cares - all of those buisness managers who like paying for programs will. You know them, you've probably worked for them. You know they don't always make sense, so you should be expecting it by now. And they'll buy into it, 'cause their techies have been bugging them to try Linux for a long time now, and they'll see something buggy and unstable, and say "Yup, I saw Linux, it was crap." All because they bought it and looked at it through Microsoft's narrowed proprietary view. And then all of that promotional work we've been doing is taken away tenfold.
There have been ways to port things to unix for quite some time. Only when Microsoft is thinking about it do the linux fanatics come out of the woodwork to whine about it.
We're not whining about there being a way to port things to Unix, we've not only known about them for some time, we've been participating in, benefiting from, and enjoying them. Guess what? We've all heard about Wine, we all know about Corel WP, and all of those other Linux ports of other software packages. The lack of whining was because they were actual ports of said software, from people who haven't stated their goal to 'Embrace and Extend' as a way of crushing open systems. Go read the Halloween doc's at opensource.org, they lay it out nice and plain in Halloween 1. Then there's Microsoft's time-honoured practice of including hidden 'features' to invade your privacy, and degrade the performance of anyone else's products. Bet ya MS-Office for Linux will insist on installing as root only. Then there's the fact that Microsoft was the one who brought us a Word Processor that can have viruses in it's documents. Yeah, we need MS-Word for Linux, there's far too few Viruses available for our platform of choice, and this will give us so much more selection.
Linux is an open system, and like all other Gnu stuff, it's used because that openness creates trust. People who get used to actually trusting their computer and the software on it will always be leary of putting something closed and secretive on it, especially when it's handed to them by someone who has demonstrated time and time again that you can not trust them. (Let's see... Stacker code stolen in DOS 6, Hard drive scan in Win95 sent to MS-Network, MAC address secretly appended to Word/Excel doc's, not releasing actual API for Win95 to developers but using it themselves to make their products faster than others, the list goes on... wonder why we don't trust them, eh?)
Random guy in crowd: "Only the Messiah would deny being the Messiah!"
:)
Brian: "Alright then, I am the Messiah!"
Whole Crowd: "He IS the Messiah!"
-- Monty Python's Life of Brian
Be carefull with that whole denial=proof thing. Just because Brian really was the Messiah, dosen't mean it's always true.
I dunno, it's kinda crash-prone and annoying. The last real improvement in their software that they made was the jump from MS-DOS 4 to MS-DOS 5. (DOS 4 was EEEEVVVIIILLLL... even for a spawn of MS... I liked DOS 5.) Personally I liked their implementation of MineSweeper though. It ran nice and fast, and you never get blown up on the first move. :)
Yup, riiiiiggghhh... They'll just insist that you install it as root, then it'll scatter a few suid'd files around your drive to make security on your box a living nightmare, trash any other program that you try to run, and produce lots of nifty system crashes that look like they're comming from other applications. Then they'll say "See? It's unstable, insecure, unreliable and slow. You should replace it with Windows 2001!" (That's what they'll be calling Win2000 by the time it's really released...)
That explains some of the crap I've had to deal with... their complaints department must be so overrun that the people in charge of reviewing .edu submissions must be busy... Pain in the neck, it is.
Interesting... they seem to have been falling steadily for over a year now... I wonder when these supposedly slanderous comments were made? (Having not seen either the actual comments themselves, I refuse to make a potentially slanderous comment myself by stating one way or another wether the comments in question were true, after all, a lawsuit-happy american company with money problems is involved.) Did these comments come before or after the decline of their stock value began? If it's before, then the AC's in question are likely to get toasted, since Wade's lawyers would be able to point to that and say "Look! See the damage these people did!" - And that would be a bad thing for us, since it would mean more clamping down on freedoms that we often take for granted. If, on the other hand, the comments were made much more recently, then the AC's lawyers (or the public Attourney, or whatever) could say that no damage was really done, since there isn't really any significant change in the trend the company's stock was taking. (Steadily down, nice and smooth...) I may not be a financial expert (Ok, I'm not even an amatuer, I have enough trouble with my own bank book, so don't take stock advice from me.) but isn't the value of stock supposed to measure how well a company is doing?
Yep, that got done (by students) to my University's main server back in 1994. It took about 15000 connections before the thing froze up, and the auto-kill daemon had it cleared up about 10 minutes later. (Probably would have been faster, but the connections were being respawned when they got killed.) Wasn't even enough to get the admins to yell at us. Anyhow, with 15000 connections to a machine being needed to shut it down, how exactly is this a huge, major scary problem? How many connections does it take to nail NT to the floor? All it means is "When you write a new/replacement daemon, don't forget to drop idle connections" - which many of them do already.
If the hostname were jimpick.ca, I'd be in awe of his financial status. You know how expensive it is to get one of those now a days? Well, Ok, it's only $75, but it's expensive to qualify. About $600+ for national incorporation, or more for some sort of national trademark on your company name. Glah. I couldn't affort it.
With physical access to your machine...
True, but that's where the 'too much of a pain in the ass to be worth it' factor comes in... anyone who feels the need to sneak into my office at night, disable the alarm on the building, boot up with a rescue disk, search out which drive/partition my Linux files are on, and scan the hard drive just to see what I submitted as for a form really needs to consider seeking professional psychiatric help. (Of course, anyone going to the trouble of doing all that even for a Windows machine for the same reason also needs to visit a good psychiatrist.
Linux/Unix users - check out your /tmp (or /var/tmp) directory when you've just submitted a form. Read the new file. /tmp, and /var/tmp, and /usr/tmp, and found no new files, whatsoever. Actually, except for the X-Windows lock and device files, there's nothing in any of those dir's right now, and according to the modify-times on the directories, they haven't even been used since before I started Netscape, so the files wasn't even created and removed. Netscape on Unix dosen't use /tmp, or /var/tmp, period. It uses a cache directory and an archive directory in the user's own home directory, which is only readable by the user themself. The only way that can be thrown open to the public, and accessiible is if the User (or root) opens it on purpose, and then it's not the program's fault, it's the user. Yep, the form data gets stored, that's why you can reload a form-generated page later and get asked "Repost Form Data?", but it's not kept in a public place unless you're using Windows.
Decide if it hurts or not.
I can't remember if this is POST format forms only, or GET too. Either way, it shouldn't leave these thing hanging around.
Well, I just sent a POST, and a GET form, looked in
Well, I like 4.08 better anyways, (marginally) less bloat, less crash, and good enough for me. I'll just wait for 5.0.1 (The bug fix for the next full release. :) Besides, from the looks of this, it only affects Windows 9x users, which I'm not.
If there are there any enterprising win9x programmers around looking for ideas on what to make next, one of you might want to come up with a cleaner that wipes unused files out of the windows temp directory. It might not be a fix for the netscape problem itself, but it'd cover for probably a lot of programs with similar bugs in them.