Back in my day when you had a small penis, you bought a Corvette, or collected big rifles and pistols
Nowadays, some folks fearful of modern snake oils content themselves with their SUVs de jour... and the less said about the endowment of those who drive Hummers, the better...
My solution for friends and family that ask for technical support is simply that I will help them out if they have a Macintosh. Otherwise, there is no way I have the time to troubleshoot and support Windows, Linux or other Unix operating systems.
In other words, to paraphrase "I am no longer competent to administer or help out with anything more complicated than a toaster, as I haven't worked in the field in years. But rather than admit my own shortcomings, I'm going to blame my atrophied skillset and laziness on you and make you feel guilty for having chosen to run an operating system I am no longer familiar with. Furthermore, I'm going to take that guilt and leverage it into evangelizing the One and Only Computer System(tm) according to My Doctrine(tm): Apple."
Which would be fine, except for the blaming others, guilt trips, and blind evangelism.
I too encourage anyone and everyone who will listen to use something (anything!) other than Microsoft products, and actively encourage people to switch to FreeBSD, Linux, or Apple, but I do not refuse to help friends and family out when they're in a bind, regardless of what they use, and I certainly don't mask my own incompetence in blind evangelism, and make them feel somehow inadequate for my own failings.
But I guess as Linux users aren't a particularly organised bunch the BBC feels it can get away with shoddy journalism and unsupported inuendo in this case.
I wouldn't assume the free software/Linux community is going to stay politically unorganized forever. In fact, the more our way of life is attacked (and let's face it, sharing software amongst ourselves and writing for the betterment of our world, rather than for banal motives such as simple greed, is a way of life), the more likely we are to organize.
But that is neither here nor there with respect to this kind of slander. IBM is very organized. RedHat, Novel, Oracle, HP, etc. are quite organized. The EFF and the FSF are quite organized.
The BBC is setting itself up for earning a reputation of shoddy reporting akin to that of Fox News and other Rupert Murdoch organizations. This sort of hysterical, misinformed story is the last sort of story the BBC should be running at a time when their credibility (rightly or wrongly) is already in the toilet, when they are facing govermental reorganization and funding cuts.
There are many reasons why someone would choose to attack Microsoft, but SCO? Most people haven't even heard of SCO, let alone have a reason for attacking them.
The "reason" is quite simple (even my girlfriend thought of it, and she has as little to do with computers as she can manages, doesn't use Linux, and isn't very informed on this subject at all).
It is a diversion, plain and simple.
And it worked. Even the BBC, which until its evisceration by the ever-more-right-wing British government had pretty high journalistic standards, has taken the bait.
Rather than reporting that every infected computer is divulging personal credit card and banking information to the Russian mob, potentially storing illegal child pornography and acting as a SPAM relay for said mob, and thereby warning their readers of the true intent of the virus, they are instead reporting hysterical nonsense about the "evil open source community."
Microsoft would pay a lot of money for such a story, and while I doubt they bought off a reporter (though one can never be sure), they, or their shills, are likely considered to be relatively "trusted" sources of IT information by journalists whose heads aren't in the field 24/7.
That, or one of the BBC's "trusted" sources isn't so well informed as they lead their associates to believe, and naively took the bait themselves before passing it erroneously on to the BBC.
Either way, the virus writer(s) clearly achieved their objective: diversion from the true issue at hand.
Your asinine innuendo notwithstanding, there is a veritable mountain of evidence that this virus author's only relationship to the free software community is to use it as a patsy and as cover for their misdeeds.
At a minimum, he would be arrested if he came to the states. However, if someone actually went through with the crime, I'm sure Canada would be willing to extradite him. Canada doesn't want maniacs running around free, anymore than the US does.
That assumes that beating the shit out of a SPAMmer is a "maniacal" act. I would argue that it is a perfectly rational course of action, and indeed a public service.
Canada's Finlandization by the US might compell it to hand the guy over anyway, but certainly not for fear of having maniacs run loose (unless you count our troups poised on their border to enforce US Political Correctness Bush Style abroad).:-)
[ Disclaimer required by Our Surveillence State: the preceding was a joke (c.f. humor). ]
Your rant here verges on paranoid schizophrenic babble. Under no circumstances would it be cost-effective to go out and round up everyone who tuned-in to a particular piece of content. No authoritarian dictatorship would even try something like that. There's no need to. Damage control and spin works just fine.
You assume (erroneously) that (a) surveillance is a binary option. It isn't. As Echelon and other data collection/correlation systems demonstrate, there are multiple levels of surveillance starting from casual data collection (which already affects most if not all of us), through detailed data collection and archiving, through ongoing data analysis (generally reserved for specific suspects). Then of course there is physical surveillance, which again ranges from bugging a phone or residence and recording the data for later analysis through realtime shadowing 24/7. You also erroneously assume that (b) governments have no interest in individuals (the amount of money spent surveilling Martin Luthar King Jr. and Malcome X alone should divest you of such notions).
Allowing an authoritarian government to single out a smaller subset of a population to sample (based on anything, really, but in particular passive viewing habits normally thought to be private, such as "all those who watch [insert liberal program here]") allows them to escalate the surveillence level on that particular group more rapidly and at much lower cost. Given a solid political motive for doing so, the liklihood of such serveillence goes up, as does the instrusiveness.
Spin and damange control work just fine for the majority. But it is not the majority the feds are generally concerned about, it is that small, disgruntled minority who will make trouble and potentially, in the case of an authoritarian situation, foment a rebellion.
Every revolution in history has been organized and executed by a relatively small minority of the population. Sometimes the passive majority has supported the revolt, sometimes not (and there seems to historically be little correlation between majority support and success... minority support seems to be sufficient if it is widespread enough).
It is these folks the feds would be most interested in identifying early and surveilling the most, and technologies that remove our privacy, such as cable TV and TiVo's data gathering, are excellent candidates for facilitating just that.
Which is fine if you never want a revolt. But I would be careful what you wish for there: as more than one founding father observed, sometimes revolt is the best thing for a society.
Of course, as dysfunctional as the American democracy is these days, we are very, very far from a situation that would call for a general uprising. However, current trends with respect to our civil liberties and rule of (constitutional) law being what they are, it is certainly no longer unthinkable to consider that we might, one day in the not so distant future, be there.
What I have described should be unthinkably crazy. However, the current political climate of detentions without cause, right to counsel, without trial, and in violation of the Geneva convention (often on the basis of religious or political affiliation) makes it clear that what was, four short years ago, unthinkable in this country has in fact already become our daily norm.
Exactly what kind of "illegal content" is your TiVo going to be playing? Only that which is broadcasted/streamed to your unit from giant media conglomerates.
The public service announcement some courageous, publicly minded techie slipped into the broadcast stream exposing [insert favorite president here]'s criminal participation in [insert favorite crime here], against the wishes of both his conglomerate's bosses and the ruling party.
Depending on how compelling the material, the Feds might want to know everyone who saw it, so as to begin their search for future revolutionaries and resistence leaders among a smaller subset of the general population. TiVo gives them this power to some degree already... in a few years, when virtually every household has some kind of PVR device, you'll be able to drop the "to some degree."
Seam farfetched? Then you haven't spent the last 3+ years living in the same America I have, where things that three years ago would have argued for a tinfoil hat have become mainstream headlines (with nary a voice raised in protest).
While we may not have slipped that far yet (I stress *may*, as CBS's refusal to run pro-democratic ads during the Superbowl while running pro-Republican ads tells a very different story IMHO), we are most certainly well on our way.
Privacy is important as much for what it can prevent as anything else... remove the preventative measures and the question doesn't become "will X happen" as much as "when will X happen? This year, this decade, or in fifty years." If the abuse of power is possible and, through the erosion of privacy and civil liberties, in some way facilitated, the only certainty history provide us is that said abuse most certainly will happen, likely much sooner than anyone expects.
While we may not have slipped that far yet (I stress *may*, as CBS's refusal to run pro-democratic ads during the Superbowl while running pro-Republican ads tells a very different story IMHO), we are most certainly well on our way.
Interesting. Citation, please?
Aside from several (non-CBS) newscasts, including the BBC, there is this at moveon.org.
Exactly what kind of "illegal content" is your TiVo going to be playing? Only that which is broadcasted/streamed to your unit from giant media conglomerates.
The public service announcement some courageous, publicly minded techie slipped into the broadcast stream exposing [insert favorite president here]'s criminal participation in [insert favorite crime here], against the wishes of both his conglomerate's bosses and the ruling party.
Depending on how compelling the material, the Feds might want to know everyone who saw it, so as to begin their search for future revolutionaries and resistence leaders among a smaller subset of the general population. TiVo gives them this power to some degree already... in a few years, when virtually every household has some kind of PVR device, you'll be able to drop the "to some degree."
Seam farfetched? Then you haven't spent the last 3+ years living in the same America I have, where things that three years ago would have argued for a tinfoil hat have become mainstream headlines (with nary a voice raised in protest).
While we may not have slipped that far yet (I stress *may*, as CBS's refusal to run pro-democratic ads during the Superbowl while running pro-Republican ads tells a very different story IMHO), we are most certainly well on our way.
Privacy is important as much for what it can prevent as anything else... remove the preventative measures and the question doesn't become "will X happen" as much as "when will X happen? This year, this decade, or in fifty years." If the abuse of power is possible and, through the erosion of privacy and civil liberties, in some way facilitated, the only certainty history provide us is that said abuse most certainly will happen, likely much sooner than anyone expects.
people who don't seem to have read anything by George Orwell?
"They" have almost certainly read and understood George Orwell only too well. "They're" simply counting on relatively few of the unwashed masses having read George Orwell, or to have comprehended it if they have.
Given current political events in the United States, and the persistent popularity of its president among said unwashed masses despite his appalling history in office thus far, "they" seem to be quite correct in this assumption.
What difference does it make if you and I snicker at the Orwellian names our space missions are routinely given, or the pithy propoganda that accompanies every "3...2...1...ignition" sequence (the "of [whatever] in another [whatever] for [whatever]" that always gets tagged on to the countdown these days), so long as 9 out of 10 vegitative Americans take it seriously, and more than half of America is vegatative?
To summarize: "TERRORIST TERRORIST TERRORIST, 9/11, 9/11, God Bless America"
That's a good reason for the GPL. That's the place the GPL makes sense.
But, what if your first priority is widest possible influence? For instance, you are trying to propagate a new protocol far and wide. In that case, I believe, that you would be wise to BSD the reference implementation.
Absolutely! The Ogg-Vorbis folks did this very thing.
Perhaps I didn't make it as clear as I intended. Both licenses have their place, both are good, and fragmenting the community through incompatabilities because one doesn't like the GPL would be a disservice to both the GPL and *BSD communities (as both do cross-polinate one another, with ideas and code).
Dual licensing is appropriate in some cases. BSD licensing is appropriate in some cases, and GPL is apporpriate in some cases.
What isn't appropriate is to advocate allowing folks to make free software proprietary, and with the next breath decrying folks who wish to take the same software and relicense it with vastly less draconian restrictions, but nevertheless more restrictions than it had originally (i.e. the GPL).
Choice is important, and the best way to maximize people's choices is to keep our free licenses as compatible as possible, and compatability withh the GPL, as one of the two fundamental reference licenses of the free software community (FreeBSD being the other), and as the license under which a large portion of the free software in the world is licensed under, is a very important part of that.
The FreeBSD folks, much to their credit, recognized that a long time ago. Alas, some of the more zealos folks in their ranks (along with some of the more zealous folks in the GPL ranks, and certainly the numerous agents provocateurs folks like Microsoft have seeded our ranks with), will probably never recognize (or at least never admit) as much.
All differences aside, such a stance is hypocracy
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And, frankly, I can understand why some people are a little pissed of, even if I don't share their feelings. From the point of view of a developer using a BSD-style, permissive license, GPLed code is just as impossible to integrate as proprietary code is, so there already is a schism in "the community". Cooperation between GPL and BSD (or rather, copyleft and permissive) projects is effectively a one-way street.
I, frankly, do not understand why the BSD-License zealots (which are a tiny fraction of the BSD folks) get so pissed off.
They have made a conscious choice in the working of their license to allow their code to be arbitrarilly relicensed, even with draconian, proprietary restrictions and have taken the stance that by doing so, they have maximized the freedom of the downstream (derivative) developer. Which, by definition, must also include other free software developers whose specific views a freedom differ slightly, or even a great deal, as well as those who do not believe in freedom at all (ie. proprietary developers). Then, with the next breath, the zealously anti-GPL crowd would add "but not another FREE license we happen to disagree with."
It is hypocracy in the extreme to make a claim to freedom, then with the next breath to decry those who practice freedom differently than oneself while claiming it is perfectly okay to remove that freedom completely. Thankfully, that is a form of hypocracy the vast majority of the FreeBSD folks, including the leadership, do not engage in at all (and in fact, have purposly avoided by making their license GPL compatible).
It is not a hypocracy certain BSD-License zealots have avoided at all, or those who enter the community as agent provocatuers seeking to stir up conflict where none really exists, quite probably at the behest (and paid for) by certain interests who feel threatened by free software of whatever variety.
feel I have to reply to this (particularily because part of it is being aimed at me).
I too need to reply, because rereading my post I can see how it certainly comes across as aimed at you, when in fact I was taking issue with the common thought you expressed ("why should anyone cooperate with those people!"), not you personally.
I have nothing against co-operation, nothing at all. However it often seems that "co-operation" is in fact just complying the the GPL.
Only if you incorporate GPLed code into your own. Just as, if you incorporate FreeBSD-licensed code into your own, you have to abide by the FreeBSD license (which is more liberal by some definitions, less protective of one's freedoms by others).
The most obvious method of this is that everyone always discusses being "GPL-compatable". I always considered compatability as a 2-way street.
It is a two-way street, in general. The *BSD/GPL dynamic is a little unusual, because the BSD license allows itself to be relicensed under other licenses (proprietary), which means it can also be relicensed under other free licenses (NPL, QPL, GPL, etc.) that are less liberal by those metric important to the BSD folks.
The GPL has been modified to be more flexible and cooperative with other free software projects (compare v. 2 with v. 1 sometime), but only insofar as the GPL's core aims (the protection of the 4 basic freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation) are not compromised.
The GPL v2 talks about the code being re-licensable under later versions of the GPL. It seems to me that if I wanted to not include that term (in the unlikely chance that the FSF was taken over by microsoft or some such thing), my code would then not be GPL compatable, as I would not be allowing the relicensing against anything which called itself GPL v3 (which I think could be itself incompatable with the GPL v2).
The license itself doesn't require that. What you read was the recommended way in which the GPL is licensed ("this code is licensed under the terms of the GNU Public License, version 2.0 or any later version, at your discretion" or something like that). You can chose to license your code under Version 2.0 only if you don't trust the FSF to change the terms in an ugly way down the road.
Linus torvalds did this with the Linux kernel, which is his right, and is perfectly fine... at least, until such a time as a critical bug in the terms of the GPL v. 2.0 is found and fixed in v. 3.0, at which point those projects that licensed under the "or any later version" modus will be automatically upgraded, while Linus et. al. will be hunting down every last contributer to the kernel for permission to upgrade the license as well. Just as the Povray folks how easy it is to track everyone down... they are completely rewriting their project from scratch in order to release it under the GPL, because they have found it impossible to do anything else (this is a result of their project actually predating the GPL, and their license has some signficant flaws they'd like to fix).
Under a similar vain, surely no licence can be GPL compatable, because if it was then that would mean it accepted the right of the FSF to relicence the code under any licence it saw fit.
No. First, were your characterization correct, the BSD license would still be compatible in that it is so liberal you can even make it completely proprietary, as Microsoft and Apple have done to bits of their code, a far more extreme change in licensing than a future, modified GPL would ever imply.
Second, the FSF can at most define a range of licenses the code may optionally be released under ("version 2.0 or greater of the GPL"), but it is the discretion of the user and author as to which version's terms they apply. This means, even if Bill Gates took over the FSF and made all future versions of the GPL more draconian than the standard Microsoft EULA,
Over the long term it is just as unworkable
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This isn't the case with the new XFree86 license clause 3, where it only requires acknowledgement in the documentation or the software itself. While keeping track of those acknowledgements might prove difficult at times, it has nowhere NEAR the practical problems that the original BSD license had.
You are right, it isn't as immediately bad as the original BSD clause, but it does appear nevertheless to be incompatible with the GPL, and therefor with a huge volume of free and open source software development. This in and of itself is a problem (c.f. my other post on this subject regarding fragmentation of the open source / free software community).
But, more to the point, this is a practical problem.
Consider: one of the long term unbeatable strengths of free software (and the real reason entities like Microsoft are so desperate to destroy it at any cost) is that free software can be built upon and improved indefinitely.
No need to reinvent the wheel every five, ten, fifteen, thirty, fifty, or one hundred years. Incremental evolution can and largely has replaced gutting and starting over from scratch.
Which means we could be using an unrecognizably (but incrementally improved and altered) version of GNU/Linux, XFree, or what have you a century from now. And, lest you think this is far fetched, consider that the concepts in UNIX (and Linux) date back over thirty years, and that COBOL code written even longer before that is still deployed in many legacy installations. Incremental improvement and modification is almost always preferred over revolutionary "rip out everything and start over" (indeed, the best reason for doing the latter is to get out from under the Yoke of proprietary software lockin and move toward a model -- free software -- that allows incremental, long term gradual improvement instead of triannual reinvention of the wheel a la Microsoft and, to a lesser degree, Apple).
Think of how many attributions your documentation (or your bloated code) is going to have to contain after ten years. Twenty or thirty years. Fifty.
We're talking hundreds of names at least, and by the end of half a century, probably thousands. All of that bloats the code, and, over an indefinite time frame, will probably mean a seperate volume of documentation just for the attributions!
It is, long term, as unworkable as the BSD clause. The only real difference is that scalability isn't as immediate an issue. The curve of the function is the same shape, it is merely the coeffecient that is different, and while the bloat may coming in years instead of months, it is coming nevertheless.
So You Prefer Fragmentation over Cooperation
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If the GPL is unwilling to be compatable with anyone else, why should anyone be too worried about being compatable with the GPL.
The GPL has been THE reference license since probably before you were born (tongue in cheek).
BSD and GPL are the two original free software licenses. The BSD folks have made an effort to insure that the BSD license is compatible with the GPL not because they share the GNU philosophy (they don't), but to avoid fragmenting the free software world through stupid licensing incompatibilities. FreeBSD changed their license to make it GPL compatible, and GPL v. 2 was changed likewise to be compatible with a wider range of interests (including commercial interests that are shared with the BSD community).
The GPL is the only license many enterprises will consider releasing their erstwhile proprietary code under, as it protects them from having competitors snatch up their code and incorporate it into a competing proprietary product (in their view, competing GPLed products are not an issue, as they can reincorporate the best improvement into their GPLed product). Many of us who write code will not consider a BSD style license because we do not want our code used by freeloaders who incorporate it into non-free, proprietary products.
There are enough (perhaps a majority, even) free software and open source developers who feel this way that the GPL is, if not the majority license, a sufficiently large piece of the OSS / FSS pie that being incompatible with it means losing a huge portion of the community's input and integration.
FreeBSD, as vehement as their disagreement with the GPL is, chose to deliberately modify their license to make it compatible with the GPL for exactly these reasons: because there is room in the community for both views, but no reason whatsoever to fragment the community over those views.
After all, if one licenses under a *BSD style license, and if therefor one doesn't mind having their code placed into a proprietary product, why should one mind having it incorporated into a GPLed product (unless one's goal is simply to fragment the free software world and undermine the cooperation that makes it so effective).
Which makes one wonder about the motives of someone who would post such an inane comment actively encouraging such small minded thinking ("we don't use their license, we don't like them, so why should we cooperate!")... unless you are someone who feels threatened by free software in general, or people who differ from your vision of free software in particular, and therefor prefer fragmentation over cooperation.
Someone unusually idiotic must "perminently remove themselves from the evolutionary process," to qualify and, while that usually means the award is posthumous (i.e. they died), it isn't striclty speaking a requirement.
Sterilization will do.
One nominee, for example, qualified by tying a bunch of weather balloons to his lawnchair and rocketing up to 11,000' altitude, where he sustained sufficient injuries (freezing) to lose his gonads but not his life. I believe he was edged out by someone even stupider for that year's Darwin award, but he certainly qualified, despite being very much alive.
How would it be different if he had been named Shawn Brown, instead of LaShawn Petus-Brown?
Times change. Names change. Live with it.
Easy for you to say, assuming you do not have a name that makes you a laughing stock. Many children are not so lucky, and it is they, not their asinine parents, that have to live with the consiquences day by day.
As an example, my girlfriend's daughter worked with a woman whose name was pronounced "Shith-eed." Sounds very pretty, until you saw it in writing.
It was spelled
S.H.I.T.H.E.A.D.... I kid you not. I cannot imagine the problems that name undoubtably caused her... or why she hadn't changed it long before. Though as the progeney of someone stupid, cruel, or both, perhaps it simply never occurred to her to consider what her name's spelling actually said in plain English.
It's possible, but unlikely that someone pulled this stunt to defame the community.
On the contrary, it is quite likely this was intended to defame the community. What is unlikely is that defaming the community was the primary objective.
It's likely that this shit was pulled by some dickhead who thought it would be cool - you know, the kind of dickhead who has been cheering this virus on Slashdot?
No. It is your scenerio that is possible but unlikely.
Far, far more likely MyDOOM was written by, of, and for SPAMMERs, who hate the free software community even more than SCO pretends to (SCO doesn't hate us; they view us a prey). After all, we write the best SPAM filters, deploy them widely, publicly expose the SPAMMERs themselves, and otherwise organize ourselves and our infrastructure against their predatory businesses.
The most likely scenerio by far, given that MyDOOM sets up back doors into people's computers to aid the sending of SPAM, stealing of passwords and financial information, is a massive, wide effort at fraud (at all levels), and the use of an attack against SCO as a diversionary tactic to take people's attention away from the primary objective of the code, which is to 0wn not just millions of PCs for SPAMing purposes, but to 0wn the financial data and access to credit card and bank accounts of millions, and to pilfer them accordingly.
The likelihood that whoever is doing this has any affiliation at all with the free software community is virtually nil. About the same liklihood as the author living and working at 1 Microsoft Way in Redmond, WA (which is also possible, but very unlikely).
The Reichstag fire is what I thought of immediately, as well. And please don't bother me about Godwin.
While it is certainly possible, perhaps even plausible, that Microsoft/SCO hired a trojan author to put together MyDOOM, it is far more likely that some SPAMMER subhuman filth did so.
Consider:
1) Spammers hate the free software community at least as much as SCO pretends to (remember, SCO doesn't hate us, they view us as prey. There is a difference between killing something to consume it and killing it out of hatred. Their masters in Redmond hate us, to them we are just meat.)
Why? The free software community has given them the most headaches, writing the best SPAM filters (that are being deployed by ever more people and ISPs), organizing the most effective attacks on their businesses, exposing the sub-humans themselves publicly, and so on.
2) As others have noted, this is a perfect diversion. While the free software community is getting all the heat for supposedly "attacking" SCO (and SCO is milking it for all it is worth) the SPAMMERs are quietly hijacking millions of shoddy Windows PCs (whose security is now orders of magnitude shoddier) to send out their latest penis extention and viagra ads.
I think the SPAMMERs saw a golden opportunity to kill two birds with one stone (give their nemesis a black eye and expand their powerbase of hijacked PCs), and SCO is only too glad to lend a helping hand.
It is possible that this is the burning of the Reichstag. However, I think it far more likely akin to the War in Iraq: diverting attention away from the real issues at hand (Al Q'aida, Healthcare, Eroded civil liberties, etc.). And, just like the war in Iraq, it has been very successful.
The vast majority of Slashdot readers made up their minds about Microsoft years ago.
And rightly so!:-)
Seriously, Microsoft's history of anti-competative practices, shoddy software, and stifling the growth and progress of the industry goes back at least fifteen years, so having made one's mind up about Microsoft's behavior long before now isn't at all unreasonable.
Indeed, as Microsoft displays absolutely no indication that they are changing their ways in the least, there really isn't a remote reason why one should be inclined to change one's mind, at least for the moment.
IBM changed, and technologists' attitudes toward the company changed as well. Microsoft has yet to change, so short of PR brainwashing and an intellect weak enough to succumb to it, it is unlikely that the better informed will change their negative opinions about Microsoft anytime soon. The European bureaucrats have simply, finally, begun to catch up.
In fact, the fine is capped at 10% of the undertaking's total worldwide turnover in the previous year. So, the fine could be a maximum of $3,500,000,000.
Is the cap for just one year? It would make far more sense for the fine to be capped at the illigitemate earnings over the period of the abuse. In this case, Microsoft's European earnings for the last several years (or a percentage thereof).
Of course, at the EU level the corporations write the law almost as much as the do in the United States, so 10% of one year's earnings is probably all the larger corporations would allow.
Like many posting here, I would dance around the flames if Microsoft were to crash and burn. That being said, the money that Gates has contributed to research for a malaria vaccine - probably the world's most pressing health problem, and one that is shamefully underfunded by our government - could potentially save the lives of millions.
So, if I go make my billions by say, creating a monopoly on electricity and holding the world's energy hostage, with the decline in service that a monopoly implies (and Bill Gate's monopoly has demonstrated), such as power outages induced by any script kiddie with a home built circuit, random crashes of the power grid for no apparent reason, etc., and amass my billions despite having been convicted and hand-slapped for misusing my power monopoly to gain 70% market share in television sales (by, say, randomly cutting power to my competitors factories), but I turn around and give a few hundred million of my stolen billions to malaria research, does that make my a nice guy worthy of knighthood?
Does the fact that I gave 0.01% of my stolen money away make me a good person, or worthy of the kind of fawning I see here?
In the eyes of any clear thinking person, no, it does not (regardless of how much "good" that stolen and donated money might provide, the money, along with the other billions that dwarf it, would have done much more good had it not been stolen in the first place).
In the eyes of the British Crown (or at least Tony Blair, who is likely far more behind this than a 70-year old lady), apparently yes.
This is disgusting. The man has done more to harm computing over the last 20 years than any hundred other people, he has destroyed thousands to feed his apparently bottomless avarice for money (always unethically and often illegally) and only began giving to charity after his family shamed him into it. He is an unrepentent monopolist who continues to wreck havoc upon the industry, and whos shoddy products have been a disservice, not a service, to global enterprise.
Bill Gates should be ashamed. Great Britain should be ashamed. Frankly, anyone with a knighthood should be ashamed.
As I said, a small application that shows a graphical view of the buffer stack would allow that. Scroll to the desired entry, click on the item with the left mouse button (copying it into buffer[0], pushing buffer[0] to buffer[1]), and middle-click to paste. Left+Middle to paste buffer[1].
I'm sure someone could get creative with the scroll wheel to make navigating the buffer stack even easier, sans keyboard.
Microsoft is obviously doing this just to hook the third world. Its not like they, nor Bill Gates have ever made any charitable donations before, right?
Donating cold, hard cash is charity.
Donating product is promotion, pure and simple.
Spinning it as "charity" is disningenuous, dishonest, and quite frankly an insult to our intelligence (not to mention an insult to everyone who does make real, legitimate financial donations anywhere).
Maybe one day slashdot will get rid of Michael and will slowly become a respectable news source again.
So, in other words, Michael isn't up to Microsoft Shill standards?
Microsoft is trying to "hook" the third world. As anyone with any experience with computers (who is not a Microsoft shill) will attest: once you are running on one platform, switching to another is difficult even if the playing field is level. Add to that Microsoft's long, well documented history of customer-lock-in strategies and techniques ranging from deliberate sabatoge of competitor's products through mucking with DLLs (Netscape, DR DOS, etc.) to outright strong-arm tactics ("use Netscape instead of IE and will treble the price of your licenses!"), couple all of that with Microsoft's typical monopolistic pricing, and the only rational conclusion anyone not shilling for Microsoft could reasonably reach is that they are, in fact, trying to promote their product in the third world and thereby lock in new customers, making it difficult for them to consider competing alternatives (e.g. FreeBSD, Apple, Linux).
In the Common Tongue we call that "hooking" the customer.
I'd like to see X do something like this: 1) Highlight new text with left button 2) Keep holding left button and press right button to cut to clipboard 3) Highlight text-to-be-replaced with left button 4) Keep holding left button and press middle button to copy from clipboard
What do you think? I find move-n-replace to be very handy for text editing.
That would be a handy enhancement.
I'd actually like to see something a little more general.
Cut-and-paste works as it is now, but make the buffer a stack (a little app could even display the buffer stack graphically)
Middle-click+number pulls that item from the stack.
Middle click pastes stack[0] Your #4 (left and middle button) pastes stack[1] (your second cut has pushed it up and replaced stack[0]), as does middle-click+1.
middle-click+11 pastes stack[11], middle-click+756 pastes stack[756] (if your stack is so large and you remember what you cut 756 steps ago... but again, here a handy graphical app showing the stack could be handy for such... expansive uses of the buffer).
This returns keystrokes to more complex cut-and-paste operations, but 1) keeps basic cut-and-paste, copy-and-paste simple the way they are now, and allows for much more expandability in pasting older cuts and doing other complex c by only adding a couple of keystrokes.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in my day when you had a small penis, you bought a Corvette, or collected big rifles and pistols
... and the less said about the endowment of those who drive Hummers, the better ...
Nowadays, some folks fearful of modern snake oils content themselves with their SUVs de jour
My solution for friends and family that ask for technical support is simply that I will help them out if they have a Macintosh. Otherwise, there is no way I have the time to troubleshoot and support Windows, Linux or other Unix operating systems.
In other words, to paraphrase "I am no longer competent to administer or help out with anything more complicated than a toaster, as I haven't worked in the field in years. But rather than admit my own shortcomings, I'm going to blame my atrophied skillset and laziness on you and make you feel guilty for having chosen to run an operating system I am no longer familiar with. Furthermore, I'm going to take that guilt and leverage it into evangelizing the One and Only Computer System(tm) according to My Doctrine(tm): Apple."
Which would be fine, except for the blaming others, guilt trips, and blind evangelism.
I too encourage anyone and everyone who will listen to use something (anything!) other than Microsoft products, and actively encourage people to switch to FreeBSD, Linux, or Apple, but I do not refuse to help friends and family out when they're in a bind, regardless of what they use, and I certainly don't mask my own incompetence in blind evangelism, and make them feel somehow inadequate for my own failings.
But I guess as Linux users aren't a particularly organised bunch the BBC feels it can get away with shoddy journalism and unsupported inuendo in this case.
I wouldn't assume the free software/Linux community is going to stay politically unorganized forever. In fact, the more our way of life is attacked (and let's face it, sharing software amongst ourselves and writing for the betterment of our world, rather than for banal motives such as simple greed, is a way of life), the more likely we are to organize.
But that is neither here nor there with respect to this kind of slander. IBM is very organized. RedHat, Novel, Oracle, HP, etc. are quite organized. The EFF and the FSF are quite organized.
The BBC is setting itself up for earning a reputation of shoddy reporting akin to that of Fox News and other Rupert Murdoch organizations. This sort of hysterical, misinformed story is the last sort of story the BBC should be running at a time when their credibility (rightly or wrongly) is already in the toilet, when they are facing govermental reorganization and funding cuts.
There are many reasons why someone would choose to attack Microsoft, but SCO? Most people haven't even heard of SCO, let alone have a reason for attacking them.
The "reason" is quite simple (even my girlfriend thought of it, and she has as little to do with computers as she can manages, doesn't use Linux, and isn't very informed on this subject at all).
It is a diversion, plain and simple.
And it worked. Even the BBC, which until its evisceration by the ever-more-right-wing British government had pretty high journalistic standards, has taken the bait.
Rather than reporting that every infected computer is divulging personal credit card and banking information to the Russian mob, potentially storing illegal child pornography and acting as a SPAM relay for said mob, and thereby warning their readers of the true intent of the virus, they are instead reporting hysterical nonsense about the "evil open source community."
Microsoft would pay a lot of money for such a story, and while I doubt they bought off a reporter (though one can never be sure), they, or their shills, are likely considered to be relatively "trusted" sources of IT information by journalists whose heads aren't in the field 24/7.
That, or one of the BBC's "trusted" sources isn't so well informed as they lead their associates to believe, and naively took the bait themselves before passing it erroneously on to the BBC.
Either way, the virus writer(s) clearly achieved their objective: diversion from the true issue at hand.
Your asinine innuendo notwithstanding, there is a veritable mountain of evidence that this virus author's only relationship to the free software community is to use it as a patsy and as cover for their misdeeds.
At a minimum, he would be arrested if he came to the states. However, if someone actually went through with the crime, I'm sure Canada would be willing to extradite him. Canada doesn't want maniacs running around free, anymore than the US does.
:-)
That assumes that beating the shit out of a SPAMmer is a "maniacal" act. I would argue that it is a perfectly rational course of action, and indeed a public service.
Canada's Finlandization by the US might compell it to hand the guy over anyway, but certainly not for fear of having maniacs run loose (unless you count our troups poised on their border to enforce US Political Correctness Bush Style abroad).
[ Disclaimer required by Our Surveillence State: the preceding was a joke (c.f. humor). ]
Your rant here verges on paranoid schizophrenic babble. Under no circumstances would it be cost-effective to go out and round up everyone who tuned-in to a particular piece of content. No authoritarian dictatorship would even try something like that. There's no need to. Damage control and spin works just fine.
... minority support seems to be sufficient if it is widespread enough).
You assume (erroneously) that (a) surveillance is a binary option. It isn't. As Echelon and other data collection/correlation systems demonstrate, there are multiple levels of surveillance starting from casual data collection (which already affects most if not all of us), through detailed data collection and archiving, through ongoing data analysis (generally reserved for specific suspects). Then of course there is physical surveillance, which again ranges from bugging a phone or residence and recording the data for later analysis through realtime shadowing 24/7. You also erroneously assume that (b) governments have no interest in individuals (the amount of money spent surveilling Martin Luthar King Jr. and Malcome X alone should divest you of such notions).
Allowing an authoritarian government to single out a smaller subset of a population to sample (based on anything, really, but in particular passive viewing habits normally thought to be private, such as "all those who watch [insert liberal program here]") allows them to escalate the surveillence level on that particular group more rapidly and at much lower cost. Given a solid political motive for doing so, the liklihood of such serveillence goes up, as does the instrusiveness.
Spin and damange control work just fine for the majority. But it is not the majority the feds are generally concerned about, it is that small, disgruntled minority who will make trouble and potentially, in the case of an authoritarian situation, foment a rebellion.
Every revolution in history has been organized and executed by a relatively small minority of the population. Sometimes the passive majority has supported the revolt, sometimes not (and there seems to historically be little correlation between majority support and success
It is these folks the feds would be most interested in identifying early and surveilling the most, and technologies that remove our privacy, such as cable TV and TiVo's data gathering, are excellent candidates for facilitating just that.
Which is fine if you never want a revolt. But I would be careful what you wish for there: as more than one founding father observed, sometimes revolt is the best thing for a society.
Of course, as dysfunctional as the American democracy is these days, we are very, very far from a situation that would call for a general uprising. However, current trends with respect to our civil liberties and rule of (constitutional) law being what they are, it is certainly no longer unthinkable to consider that we might, one day in the not so distant future, be there.
What I have described should be unthinkably crazy. However, the current political climate of detentions without cause, right to counsel, without trial, and in violation of the Geneva convention (often on the basis of religious or political affiliation) makes it clear that what was, four short years ago, unthinkable in this country has in fact already become our daily norm.
Exactly what kind of "illegal content" is your TiVo going to be playing? Only that which is broadcasted/streamed to your unit from giant media conglomerates.
... in a few years, when virtually every household has some kind of PVR device, you'll be able to drop the "to some degree."
... remove the preventative measures and the question doesn't become "will X happen" as much as "when will X happen? This year, this decade, or in fifty years." If the abuse of power is possible and, through the erosion of privacy and civil liberties, in some way facilitated, the only certainty history provide us is that said abuse most certainly will happen, likely much sooner than anyone expects.
The public service announcement some courageous, publicly minded techie slipped into the broadcast stream exposing [insert favorite president here]'s criminal participation in [insert favorite crime here], against the wishes of both his conglomerate's bosses and the ruling party.
Depending on how compelling the material, the Feds might want to know everyone who saw it, so as to begin their search for future revolutionaries and resistence leaders among a smaller subset of the general population. TiVo gives them this power to some degree already
Seam farfetched? Then you haven't spent the last 3+ years living in the same America I have, where things that three years ago would have argued for a tinfoil hat have become mainstream headlines (with nary a voice raised in protest).
While we may not have slipped that far yet (I stress *may*, as CBS's refusal to run pro-democratic ads during the Superbowl while running pro-Republican ads tells a very different story IMHO), we are most certainly well on our way.
Privacy is important as much for what it can prevent as anything else
While we may not have slipped that far yet (I stress *may*, as CBS's refusal to run pro-democratic ads during the Superbowl while running pro-Republican ads tells a very different story IMHO), we are most certainly well on our way.
Interesting. Citation, please?
Aside from several (non-CBS) newscasts, including the BBC, there is this at moveon.org.
Exactly what kind of "illegal content" is your TiVo going to be playing? Only that which is broadcasted/streamed to your unit from giant media conglomerates.
... in a few years, when virtually every household has some kind of PVR device, you'll be able to drop the "to some degree."
... remove the preventative measures and the question doesn't become "will X happen" as much as "when will X happen? This year, this decade, or in fifty years." If the abuse of power is possible and, through the erosion of privacy and civil liberties, in some way facilitated, the only certainty history provide us is that said abuse most certainly will happen, likely much sooner than anyone expects.
The public service announcement some courageous, publicly minded techie slipped into the broadcast stream exposing [insert favorite president here]'s criminal participation in [insert favorite crime here], against the wishes of both his conglomerate's bosses and the ruling party.
Depending on how compelling the material, the Feds might want to know everyone who saw it, so as to begin their search for future revolutionaries and resistence leaders among a smaller subset of the general population. TiVo gives them this power to some degree already
Seam farfetched? Then you haven't spent the last 3+ years living in the same America I have, where things that three years ago would have argued for a tinfoil hat have become mainstream headlines (with nary a voice raised in protest).
While we may not have slipped that far yet (I stress *may*, as CBS's refusal to run pro-democratic ads during the Superbowl while running pro-Republican ads tells a very different story IMHO), we are most certainly well on our way.
Privacy is important as much for what it can prevent as anything else
people who don't seem to have read anything by George Orwell?
"They" have almost certainly read and understood George Orwell only too well. "They're" simply counting on relatively few of the unwashed masses having read George Orwell, or to have comprehended it if they have.
Given current political events in the United States, and the persistent popularity of its president among said unwashed masses despite his appalling history in office thus far, "they" seem to be quite correct in this assumption.
What difference does it make if you and I snicker at the Orwellian names our space missions are routinely given, or the pithy propoganda that accompanies every "3...2...1...ignition" sequence (the "of [whatever] in another [whatever] for [whatever]" that always gets tagged on to the countdown these days), so long as 9 out of 10 vegitative Americans take it seriously, and more than half of America is vegatative?
To summarize: "TERRORIST TERRORIST TERRORIST, 9/11, 9/11, God Bless America"
That's a good reason for the GPL. That's the place the GPL makes sense.
But, what if your first priority is widest possible influence? For instance, you are trying to propagate a new protocol far and wide. In that case, I believe, that you would be wise to BSD the reference implementation.
Absolutely! The Ogg-Vorbis folks did this very thing.
Perhaps I didn't make it as clear as I intended. Both licenses have their place, both are good, and fragmenting the community through incompatabilities because one doesn't like the GPL would be a disservice to both the GPL and *BSD communities (as both do cross-polinate one another, with ideas and code).
Dual licensing is appropriate in some cases. BSD licensing is appropriate in some cases, and GPL is apporpriate in some cases.
What isn't appropriate is to advocate allowing folks to make free software proprietary, and with the next breath decrying folks who wish to take the same software and relicense it with vastly less draconian restrictions, but nevertheless more restrictions than it had originally (i.e. the GPL).
Choice is important, and the best way to maximize people's choices is to keep our free licenses as compatible as possible, and compatability withh the GPL, as one of the two fundamental reference licenses of the free software community (FreeBSD being the other), and as the license under which a large portion of the free software in the world is licensed under, is a very important part of that.
The FreeBSD folks, much to their credit, recognized that a long time ago. Alas, some of the more zealos folks in their ranks (along with some of the more zealous folks in the GPL ranks, and certainly the numerous agents provocateurs folks like Microsoft have seeded our ranks with), will probably never recognize (or at least never admit) as much.
And, frankly, I can understand why some people are a little pissed of, even if I don't share their feelings. From the point of view of a developer using a BSD-style, permissive license, GPLed code is just as impossible to integrate as proprietary code is, so there already is a schism in "the community". Cooperation between GPL and BSD (or rather, copyleft and permissive) projects is effectively a one-way street.
I, frankly, do not understand why the BSD-License zealots (which are a tiny fraction of the BSD folks) get so pissed off.
They have made a conscious choice in the working of their license to allow their code to be arbitrarilly relicensed, even with draconian, proprietary restrictions and have taken the stance that by doing so, they have maximized the freedom of the downstream (derivative) developer. Which, by definition, must also include other free software developers whose specific views a freedom differ slightly, or even a great deal, as well as those who do not believe in freedom at all (ie. proprietary developers). Then, with the next breath, the zealously anti-GPL crowd would add "but not another FREE license we happen to disagree with."
It is hypocracy in the extreme to make a claim to freedom, then with the next breath to decry those who practice freedom differently than oneself while claiming it is perfectly okay to remove that freedom completely. Thankfully, that is a form of hypocracy the vast majority of the FreeBSD folks, including the leadership, do not engage in at all (and in fact, have purposly avoided by making their license GPL compatible).
It is not a hypocracy certain BSD-License zealots have avoided at all, or those who enter the community as agent provocatuers seeking to stir up conflict where none really exists, quite probably at the behest (and paid for) by certain interests who feel threatened by free software of whatever variety.
feel I have to reply to this (particularily because part of it is being aimed at me).
... at least, until such a time as a critical bug in the terms of the GPL v. 2.0 is found and fixed in v. 3.0, at which point those projects that licensed under the "or any later version" modus will be automatically upgraded, while Linus et. al. will be hunting down every last contributer to the kernel for permission to upgrade the license as well. Just as the Povray folks how easy it is to track everyone down ... they are completely rewriting their project from scratch in order to release it under the GPL, because they have found it impossible to do anything else (this is a result of their project actually predating the GPL, and their license has some signficant flaws they'd like to fix).
I too need to reply, because rereading my post I can see how it certainly comes across as aimed at you, when in fact I was taking issue with the common thought you expressed ("why should anyone cooperate with those people!"), not you personally.
I have nothing against co-operation, nothing at all. However it often seems that "co-operation" is in fact just complying the the GPL.
Only if you incorporate GPLed code into your own. Just as, if you incorporate FreeBSD-licensed code into your own, you have to abide by the FreeBSD license (which is more liberal by some definitions, less protective of one's freedoms by others).
The most obvious method of this is that everyone always discusses being "GPL-compatable". I always considered compatability as a 2-way street.
It is a two-way street, in general. The *BSD/GPL dynamic is a little unusual, because the BSD license allows itself to be relicensed under other licenses (proprietary), which means it can also be relicensed under other free licenses (NPL, QPL, GPL, etc.) that are less liberal by those metric important to the BSD folks.
The GPL has been modified to be more flexible and cooperative with other free software projects (compare v. 2 with v. 1 sometime), but only insofar as the GPL's core aims (the protection of the 4 basic freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation) are not compromised.
The GPL v2 talks about the code being re-licensable under later versions of the GPL. It seems to me that if I wanted to not include that term (in the unlikely chance that the FSF was taken over by microsoft or some such thing), my code would then not be GPL compatable, as I would not be allowing the relicensing against anything which called itself GPL v3 (which I think could be itself incompatable with the GPL v2).
The license itself doesn't require that. What you read was the recommended way in which the GPL is licensed ("this code is licensed under the terms of the GNU Public License, version 2.0 or any later version, at your discretion" or something like that). You can chose to license your code under Version 2.0 only if you don't trust the FSF to change the terms in an ugly way down the road.
Linus torvalds did this with the Linux kernel, which is his right, and is perfectly fine
Under a similar vain, surely no licence can be GPL compatable, because if it was then that would mean it accepted the right of the FSF to relicence the code under any licence it saw fit.
No. First, were your characterization correct, the BSD license would still be compatible in that it is so liberal you can even make it completely proprietary, as Microsoft and Apple have done to bits of their code, a far more extreme change in licensing than a future, modified GPL would ever imply.
Second, the FSF can at most define a range of licenses the code may optionally be released under ("version 2.0 or greater of the GPL"), but it is the discretion of the user and author as to which version's terms they apply. This means, even if Bill Gates took over the FSF and made all future versions of the GPL more draconian than the standard Microsoft EULA,
This isn't the case with the new XFree86 license clause 3, where it only requires acknowledgement in the documentation or the software itself. While keeping track of those acknowledgements might prove difficult at times, it has nowhere NEAR the practical problems that the original BSD license had.
You are right, it isn't as immediately bad as the original BSD clause, but it does appear nevertheless to be incompatible with the GPL, and therefor with a huge volume of free and open source software development. This in and of itself is a problem (c.f. my other post on this subject regarding fragmentation of the open source / free software community).
But, more to the point, this is a practical problem.
Consider: one of the long term unbeatable strengths of free software (and the real reason entities like Microsoft are so desperate to destroy it at any cost) is that free software can be built upon and improved indefinitely.
No need to reinvent the wheel every five, ten, fifteen, thirty, fifty, or one hundred years. Incremental evolution can and largely has replaced gutting and starting over from scratch.
Which means we could be using an unrecognizably (but incrementally improved and altered) version of GNU/Linux, XFree, or what have you a century from now. And, lest you think this is far fetched, consider that the concepts in UNIX (and Linux) date back over thirty years, and that COBOL code written even longer before that is still deployed in many legacy installations. Incremental improvement and modification is almost always preferred over revolutionary "rip out everything and start over" (indeed, the best reason for doing the latter is to get out from under the Yoke of proprietary software lockin and move toward a model -- free software -- that allows incremental, long term gradual improvement instead of triannual reinvention of the wheel a la Microsoft and, to a lesser degree, Apple).
Think of how many attributions your documentation (or your bloated code) is going to have to contain after ten years. Twenty or thirty years. Fifty.
We're talking hundreds of names at least, and by the end of half a century, probably thousands. All of that bloats the code, and, over an indefinite time frame, will probably mean a seperate volume of documentation just for the attributions!
It is, long term, as unworkable as the BSD clause. The only real difference is that scalability isn't as immediate an issue. The curve of the function is the same shape, it is merely the coeffecient that is different, and while the bloat may coming in years instead of months, it is coming nevertheless.
If the GPL is unwilling to be compatable with anyone else, why should anyone be too worried about being compatable with the GPL.
... unless you are someone who feels threatened by free software in general, or people who differ from your vision of free software in particular, and therefor prefer fragmentation over cooperation.
The GPL has been THE reference license since probably before you were born (tongue in cheek).
BSD and GPL are the two original free software licenses. The BSD folks have made an effort to insure that the BSD license is compatible with the GPL not because they share the GNU philosophy (they don't), but to avoid fragmenting the free software world through stupid licensing incompatibilities. FreeBSD changed their license to make it GPL compatible, and GPL v. 2 was changed likewise to be compatible with a wider range of interests (including commercial interests that are shared with the BSD community).
The GPL is the only license many enterprises will consider releasing their erstwhile proprietary code under, as it protects them from having competitors snatch up their code and incorporate it into a competing proprietary product (in their view, competing GPLed products are not an issue, as they can reincorporate the best improvement into their GPLed product). Many of us who write code will not consider a BSD style license because we do not want our code used by freeloaders who incorporate it into non-free, proprietary products.
There are enough (perhaps a majority, even) free software and open source developers who feel this way that the GPL is, if not the majority license, a sufficiently large piece of the OSS / FSS pie that being incompatible with it means losing a huge portion of the community's input and integration.
FreeBSD, as vehement as their disagreement with the GPL is, chose to deliberately modify their license to make it compatible with the GPL for exactly these reasons: because there is room in the community for both views, but no reason whatsoever to fragment the community over those views.
After all, if one licenses under a *BSD style license, and if therefor one doesn't mind having their code placed into a proprietary product, why should one mind having it incorporated into a GPLed product (unless one's goal is simply to fragment the free software world and undermine the cooperation that makes it so effective).
Which makes one wonder about the motives of someone who would post such an inane comment actively encouraging such small minded thinking ("we don't use their license, we don't like them, so why should we cooperate!")
Someone has to die to recieve a darwin award,
Wrong.
Someone unusually idiotic must "perminently remove themselves from the evolutionary process," to qualify and, while that usually means the award is posthumous (i.e. they died), it isn't striclty speaking a requirement.
Sterilization will do.
One nominee, for example, qualified by tying a bunch of weather balloons to his lawnchair and rocketing up to 11,000' altitude, where he sustained sufficient injuries (freezing) to lose his gonads but not his life. I believe he was edged out by someone even stupider for that year's Darwin award, but he certainly qualified, despite being very much alive.
Insightful? Balls
... I kid you not. I cannot imagine the problems that name undoubtably caused her ... or why she hadn't changed it long before. Though as the progeney of someone stupid, cruel, or both, perhaps it simply never occurred to her to consider what her name's spelling actually said in plain English.
How would it be different if he had been named Shawn Brown, instead of LaShawn Petus-Brown?
Times change. Names change. Live with it.
Easy for you to say, assuming you do not have a name that makes you a laughing stock. Many children are not so lucky, and it is they, not their asinine parents, that have to live with the consiquences day by day.
As an example, my girlfriend's daughter worked with a woman whose name was pronounced "Shith-eed." Sounds very pretty, until you saw it in writing.
It was spelled
S.H.I.T.H.E.A.D.
Bullshit.
Bullshit back at you, a hundred fold.
It's possible, but unlikely that someone pulled this stunt to defame the community.
On the contrary, it is quite likely this was intended to defame the community. What is unlikely is that defaming the community was the primary objective.
It's likely that this shit was pulled by some dickhead who thought it would be cool - you know, the kind of dickhead who has been cheering this virus on Slashdot?
No. It is your scenerio that is possible but unlikely.
Far, far more likely MyDOOM was written by, of, and for SPAMMERs, who hate the free software community even more than SCO pretends to (SCO doesn't hate us; they view us a prey). After all, we write the best SPAM filters, deploy them widely, publicly expose the SPAMMERs themselves, and otherwise organize ourselves and our infrastructure against their predatory businesses.
The most likely scenerio by far, given that MyDOOM sets up back doors into people's computers to aid the sending of SPAM, stealing of passwords and financial information, is a massive, wide effort at fraud (at all levels), and the use of an attack against SCO as a diversionary tactic to take people's attention away from the primary objective of the code, which is to 0wn not just millions of PCs for SPAMing purposes, but to 0wn the financial data and access to credit card and bank accounts of millions, and to pilfer them accordingly.
The likelihood that whoever is doing this has any affiliation at all with the free software community is virtually nil. About the same liklihood as the author living and working at 1 Microsoft Way in Redmond, WA (which is also possible, but very unlikely).
The Reichstag fire is what I thought of immediately, as well. And please don't bother me about Godwin.
While it is certainly possible, perhaps even plausible, that Microsoft/SCO hired a trojan author to put together MyDOOM, it is far more likely that some SPAMMER subhuman filth did so.
Consider:
1) Spammers hate the free software community at least as much as SCO pretends to (remember, SCO doesn't hate us, they view us as prey. There is a difference between killing something to consume it and killing it out of hatred. Their masters in Redmond hate us, to them we are just meat.)
Why? The free software community has given them the most headaches, writing the best SPAM filters (that are being deployed by ever more people and ISPs), organizing the most effective attacks on their businesses, exposing the sub-humans themselves publicly, and so on.
2) As others have noted, this is a perfect diversion. While the free software community is getting all the heat for supposedly "attacking" SCO (and SCO is milking it for all it is worth) the SPAMMERs are quietly hijacking millions of shoddy Windows PCs (whose security is now orders of magnitude shoddier) to send out their latest penis extention and viagra ads.
I think the SPAMMERs saw a golden opportunity to kill two birds with one stone (give their nemesis a black eye and expand their powerbase of hijacked PCs), and SCO is only too glad to lend a helping hand.
It is possible that this is the burning of the Reichstag. However, I think it far more likely akin to the War in Iraq: diverting attention away from the real issues at hand (Al Q'aida, Healthcare, Eroded civil liberties, etc.). And, just like the war in Iraq, it has been very successful.
The vast majority of Slashdot readers made up their minds about Microsoft years ago.
:-)
And rightly so!
Seriously, Microsoft's history of anti-competative practices, shoddy software, and stifling the growth and progress of the industry goes back at least fifteen years, so having made one's mind up about Microsoft's behavior long before now isn't at all unreasonable.
Indeed, as Microsoft displays absolutely no indication that they are changing their ways in the least, there really isn't a remote reason why one should be inclined to change one's mind, at least for the moment.
IBM changed, and technologists' attitudes toward the company changed as well. Microsoft has yet to change, so short of PR brainwashing and an intellect weak enough to succumb to it, it is unlikely that the better informed will change their negative opinions about Microsoft anytime soon. The European bureaucrats have simply, finally, begun to catch up.
In fact, the fine is capped at 10% of the undertaking's total worldwide turnover in the previous year. So, the fine could be a maximum of $3,500,000,000.
Is the cap for just one year? It would make far more sense for the fine to be capped at the illigitemate earnings over the period of the abuse. In this case, Microsoft's European earnings for the last several years (or a percentage thereof).
Of course, at the EU level the corporations write the law almost as much as the do in the United States, so 10% of one year's earnings is probably all the larger corporations would allow.
Like many posting here, I would dance around the flames if Microsoft were to crash and burn. That being said, the money that Gates has contributed to research for a malaria vaccine - probably the world's most pressing health problem, and one that is shamefully underfunded by our government - could potentially save the lives of millions.
So, if I go make my billions by say, creating a monopoly on electricity and holding the world's energy hostage, with the decline in service that a monopoly implies (and Bill Gate's monopoly has demonstrated), such as power outages induced by any script kiddie with a home built circuit, random crashes of the power grid for no apparent reason, etc., and amass my billions despite having been convicted and hand-slapped for misusing my power monopoly to gain 70% market share in television sales (by, say, randomly cutting power to my competitors factories), but I turn around and give a few hundred million of my stolen billions to malaria research, does that make my a nice guy worthy of knighthood?
Does the fact that I gave 0.01% of my stolen money away make me a good person, or worthy of the kind of fawning I see here?
In the eyes of any clear thinking person, no, it does not (regardless of how much "good" that stolen and donated money might provide, the money, along with the other billions that dwarf it, would have done much more good had it not been stolen in the first place).
In the eyes of the British Crown (or at least Tony Blair, who is likely far more behind this than a 70-year old lady), apparently yes.
This is disgusting. The man has done more to harm computing over the last 20 years than any hundred other people, he has destroyed thousands to feed his apparently bottomless avarice for money (always unethically and often illegally) and only began giving to charity after his family shamed him into it. He is an unrepentent monopolist who continues to wreck havoc upon the industry, and whos shoddy products have been a disservice, not a service, to global enterprise.
Bill Gates should be ashamed. Great Britain should be ashamed. Frankly, anyone with a knighthood should be ashamed.
I want mouse-only access to clipboard
As I said, a small application that shows a graphical view of the buffer stack would allow that. Scroll to the desired entry, click on the item with the left mouse button (copying it into buffer[0], pushing buffer[0] to buffer[1]), and middle-click to paste. Left+Middle to paste buffer[1].
I'm sure someone could get creative with the scroll wheel to make navigating the buffer stack even easier, sans keyboard.
Microsoft is obviously doing this just to hook the third world. Its not like they, nor Bill Gates have ever made any charitable donations before, right?
Donating cold, hard cash is charity.
Donating product is promotion, pure and simple.
Spinning it as "charity" is disningenuous, dishonest, and quite frankly an insult to our intelligence (not to mention an insult to everyone who does make real, legitimate financial donations anywhere).
Maybe one day slashdot will get rid of Michael and will slowly become a respectable news source again.
So, in other words, Michael isn't up to Microsoft Shill standards?
Microsoft is trying to "hook" the third world. As anyone with any experience with computers (who is not a Microsoft shill) will attest: once you are running on one platform, switching to another is difficult even if the playing field is level. Add to that Microsoft's long, well documented history of customer-lock-in strategies and techniques ranging from deliberate sabatoge of competitor's products through mucking with DLLs (Netscape, DR DOS, etc.) to outright strong-arm tactics ("use Netscape instead of IE and will treble the price of your licenses!"), couple all of that with Microsoft's typical monopolistic pricing, and the only rational conclusion anyone not shilling for Microsoft could reasonably reach is that they are, in fact, trying to promote their product in the third world and thereby lock in new customers, making it difficult for them to consider competing alternatives (e.g. FreeBSD, Apple, Linux).
In the Common Tongue we call that "hooking" the customer.
I'd like to see X do something like this:
... but again, here a handy graphical app showing the stack could be handy for such ... expansive uses of the buffer).
1) Highlight new text with left button
2) Keep holding left button and press right button to cut to clipboard
3) Highlight text-to-be-replaced with left button
4) Keep holding left button and press middle button to copy from clipboard
What do you think? I find move-n-replace to be very handy for text editing.
That would be a handy enhancement.
I'd actually like to see something a little more general.
Cut-and-paste works as it is now, but make the buffer a stack (a little app could even display the buffer stack graphically)
Middle-click+number pulls that item from the stack.
Middle click pastes stack[0]
Your #4 (left and middle button) pastes stack[1] (your second cut has pushed it up and replaced stack[0]), as does middle-click+1.
middle-click+11 pastes stack[11],
middle-click+756 pastes stack[756] (if your stack is so large and you remember what you cut 756 steps ago
This returns keystrokes to more complex cut-and-paste operations, but 1) keeps basic cut-and-paste, copy-and-paste simple the way they are now, and allows for much more expandability in pasting older cuts and doing other complex c by only adding a couple of keystrokes.