I don't want the government to force M$oft to clean up its act.
I mean, it might work, and then we'd be stuck with this desktop monopoly for the forseeable future.
I don't think people would've built all the wonderful new OSes (and jump-started moribund BSD back to life) if the dominant OS wasn't overpriced, amorally marketed, and basically lame.
But a consent decree, that M$ will of course subvert or ignore as they have all previous such, should be a good thing.
It'll inspire more people to work towards a better alternative, and better alternatives will encourage non-techies to get off the monopoly teat.
--Charlie
PS- Be kind, I forgot my asbestos underwear today.
--C
/.
The problem with a mac is the weird keyboard (Apple Desktop Bus I think it is) and mouse interface my macs use. I can adapt the video to VGA easily with a cheap little adaptor, but the ADB to PC interface is blindingly expensive even though there are chipsets available fairly cheap.
I keep intending to build one myself from the chips, but I am way out of practice at that sort of thing:^( and have little time:^( so I just switch the video and shove the mac KB and mouse off to the side most of the time.
If anyone runs across a cheap solution to this problem PULEEZE post.
--Charlie
/.
I also use this model and am reasonably happy with it. I use a generic AT keyboard and a single 3-button logitech mouse to drive a dual-boot win98/RedHat 7 box on port one, a RedHat 6.2 box on two, a 486-based dual-boot Freesco/Smootwall router PC on 3, and the fourth port is connected to an extremely long custom cable that I use for beowulf nodes and boxes ripped apart on the workbench as necessary. I used to use a MS "Natural" keyboard on the Belkin until I spilled something nasty in it, and that worked OK too.
HERE'S THE PROBLEM: You must follow this procedure when you set this thing up, or you will get the symptoms you describe.
1) Plug all cables into Belkin.
2) Apply power to Belkin.
3) Boot machines in any order *** BUT *** do not *** EVER *** switch consoles if any machine has not finished its boot sequence!!!!
4) You may now switch freely, and you may turn machines on and off as you wish as long as you remember never to switch while any machine is booting up.
5) Go forth and prosper.
This little gotcha really bothered me because I am the type of dummy who "saves time" by booting everything at once and switching about during the boots to spot-check for clean startup message sequences. You don't want to know how much time this "time saving" habit cost me before I got around to reading the damn manual.
Gary Hein, an analyst at Burton Group, said Microsoft has never been shy to influence that evolutionary process where the consumer is concerned.
"It reminds me of the old story about how to boil a frog," he said. "If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will immediately jump out. But if you put a frog in a pot of warm water and slowly raise the temperature until the water boils, you have frog soup.
"Consumers aren't going to be thrown into a kettle of boiling water from the get-go, but rather enticed into an inviting, lukewarm bath, and then the temperature will be slowly raised over several release cycles."
This guy's had a little too much bufotenine. I suspect a frog thrown into boiling water would either be killed either immediately (if the water was hot enough) or shortly thereafter from a scalded epidermis. And I'm pretty certain frogs leave changing environments before they become deadly... most animals are fairly well evolved for that sort of thing.
On the other claw, I think this aphorism aptly demonstrates the attitude both Microsoft and these analysts have towards the computer-using public. They think we're incompetent based on their fantasies of how we behave. What a bunch of maroons.
--Charlie
PS- Who the hell would try to boil a live frog anyway?
--C
Somebody obviously ripped this off from some other site, without attribution. That's not really a problem on/., where plagarism is seen by some as a god-granted right;^), but then the copier edited the text near the end to insert a bunch of racist nonsense.
It looks like the bigot is hoping you'll clip it and copy it yourself and spread his or her lunacy under your own name. The text chosen is long and appears mostly correct to lull you into the trap.
This stuff is becoming more common on/., and it's really sad that some morons have nothing better to do with their time. Good job Mr. Moderator, thanks for reading it all the way through.
--Charlie
My spouse frequently writes to Carper, Biden and Roth. They always respond, although they usually respond in a manner that reminds me of those audio-animatronic disney puppets.
Delaware is small enough that you can call up the governor on the phone and expect to be able to talk to him if a) it's important and b) you are a Delaware resident. The methods used probably wouldn't scale very well, though.
Come to think of it, a less populated state should work even better. Move to Montana, you can be a dental floss tycoon.
--Charlie
OK, we obviously have a communication gap. When you say I'd change my opinion about the value of a fair fight once my life was threatened, I equate that to you calling me a coward. Perhaps you don't see it that way - but I do, because I think surrendering my principles out of fear would be a cowardly act.
And I have stared down the barrels of a few pistols, and my opinion is unchanged - but I can't prove that in this forum, so I haven't mentioned it until now (and I don't think you should accept my word unsupported, either).
Your implication that I think this is a game is also incorrect. I am talking about life and death, and my personal views on dealing out death to other people.
Incidentally, as far as I know, there is no creditable threat to your wife or children. Nobody has threatened mine in any way I couldn't personally deal with. So they are not germane to this discussion, really, except as an emotional red herring.
I don't buy your "Evil" and "Innocent" categories either, BTW - I don't see that the people responsible for atrocities in the name of freedom and democracy are less atrocious than the stereotypical terrorist. The Islamic fundamentalist fruitcakes that want to destroy America are trying to exact REVENGE for what they see as US-sponsored atrocities against their people - how is that different from people here who want revenge for WTC, and are willing to send death to foreign people regardless of whether there is any evidence of their involvement and regardless of how many proveably uninvolved civilians are destroyed?
The people who flew the planes into the WTC are dead. I have seen no evidence that they did not act alone, but I would suspect they had support from someone. Just like the state of Israel has support from US taxpayers. Are you responsible for the oppression of the Palestinians? You probably know that the United States Government considers sentencing half a million children to death by starvation a regrettable but perfectly legitimate act when dealing with the likes of Saddam Hussein. Are you responsible for this? You are funding it with your tax dollars.
So how is your responsibility different from the responsibility of the Taliban, who from all accounts knew nothing of the attack on WTC until after it happened?
Normally, everyone misinterprets what I'm saying when I make observations like the above. So, for the record: I am not in favor of terrorism. I am not in favor of nuclear war. I consider myself a patriotic American, in the same sense that Edward Abbey did. I am not a peace-at-all-costs dove, or a Quaker, either. I am registered with Selective Service, though unlikely to be drafted. I don't really care if somebody kills off the entire Taliban and Usama Bin Laden too, but then again I don't really care if somebody offs Jesse Helms either.
Finally, let me deal with your question:
And exactly what do you consider a "measured response"??? Let's see, a handful of terrorists killed several thousand Americans. Therefore, a "measured response" would seem to be the death of thousands of terrorists with only a handful of American casualties.
Your logic is flawed in the same sense that the following statement is flawed: "a white guy killed five people dear to me, therefore I will kill the first five white guys I meet" and also in the same sense that this statement is flawed "some people did a henious act in the name of truth and justice , therefore I must commit an act of at least equal imorality to show that their truth and justice is not the real truth and justice".
A "measured response" might be sending our army (which is composed of VOLUNTEERS who are PAID TO RISK THEIR LIVES) to go do the same highly professional job they did in Grenada. A "measured response" might involve exposing the truth behind the rhetoric of blame, and proving the existence of a culprit, rather than Rosenberging the first towel-head that blips the radar. But I didn't say I had the right answers, I just said (originally) that sending hot metal death raining down over a bunch of miseducated, half-armed zealots was not what I had in mind when I was involved in the rocket biz.
Bah. This method of communication is too cumbersome. I will send you an Email address and we can continue offline if you wish. Keep in mind, though, that I refuse to get hysterical about any of this, so I'm not interested in a flame war.
Arnold Robbins' GNU Awk reference manual, shopped by the Free Software Foundation, is quite excellent.
Gawk has a simple means of using fixed fields which is not available in other awks (there are many awks, but Gawk runs on pretty much any OS - certainly on all major OSes - and it's free).
Gawk is like perl, only more elegant, and lacking the network sockets. Gawk and netcat in combination can do most anything perl can do, though, and often faster.
--Charlie
Yeah, you like it until you're the one staring down the barrel of an AK-47.
In response to my:
I like fair fights. Or fights against overwhelming odds...
To which I in turn must reply, hey! Why are you assuming I'm a coward? You don't know me (although I'm not that hard to track down).
You may never believe it, but I have found that for me, fighting well above my weight is far more satisfying than bullying weaklings.
If you yourself are a bully, you might find out someday that I'm not the only one who thinks this way - when somebody rips that AK out of your hands and rams it up your butt. Or dies trying.
If you really believe that measured response is stupid, and overkill is the way to go, shouldn't you be advocating the nuclear option? A "protect-the-der-fatherland-right-now" and "to-hell-with-fairness" philosophy would mandate neutron bombing of Israel, Palestine, and Afghanistan immediately, wouldn't it?
I like fair fights. Or fights against overwhelming odds - those are even better from the PR point of view.
If you win against the bigger, better armed guy, you get the girls 'cause you are so studly heroic.
If you lose against the bigger, better armed guy, you get the girls because they are sympathetic to your doomed bravery - how dare that big brute pick on you!
Use Uzis and Galils against unarmored foes with Kalashnikovs and you do NOT get the girls, because you are a thug who has to cheat to win - they'll think you probably have a small penis and are overcompensating.
Now do you see why Bin Laden is a hero to Islamic adolescent girls? And why the boys want to be just like him?
He wouldn't look so great when some little guy from Brooklyn wiped the floor with him in a fair fight.
I assume you are talking about the first leader of the Ku Klux Klan, who is responsible for numerous well documented (outside the Carolinas, anyway) atrocities including the slaughter of surrendered (white) Union prisoners for associating with armed blacks?
The same Forrest who is abhorred "by freedom loving people all across America" as you put it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
--Charlie
So does pure methane, but if you ignite a juicy fart you'll find it lights up a dark room with all kinds of colors, depending of what you've been eating. (NOTE: reproducible experiments are the basis of the scientific method.)
The Hindenburg was not entirely composed of pure hydrogen, therefore it should not be expected to have burned as pure hydrogen does. This does not mean hydrogen was not burning.
The dopant used on the Hindenburg had very little in common with solid rocket fuel; it had more chemistry in common with the roll of tape on my desk, in fact.
The Hindenburg fabric was found to be made of a cotton substrate with an aluminized cellulose acetate butyrate dopant. The observations of the fire listed above, in fact, are consistent with a huge aluminum fire. (The brightness of the space shuttle's rocket boosters are an example of aluminum-based combustion.) So, it was the extreme flammability of the Hindenburg's fabric envelope which caused the disaster and not the lifting gas inside.
However, making a statement that "the Hindenberg burned because it was covered with the same chemicals that are used in rocket motors" would be a major distortion of what's been revealed here.
Aluminum is in fact used in many solid propellants; it greatly increases impulse (which is one way of measuring thrust versus weight). However, the Honda Insight has an aluminum frame, and your deodorant stick is made with powdered aluminium - yet neither will spontaneously burst into flame if exposed to a static discharge such as the one that is believed to have triggered the Hindenburg's demise.
I haven't looked it up, but I suspect an open flame of over 1000 degrees fahrenheit would be required to ignite aluminum powder. You certainly can't light off Shuttle SRM fuel with a static discharge, I can assure you of that.
Nitrocellulose and acetate dopants, however, such as were commonly used on cloth-bodied planes for much of the early history of aviation, are tremendously flammable, and easily ignited. This isn't really news to aviators, of course.
Yes, the aluminum burned when the Hindenberg went up. So did wood, magnesium, human body fat, and of course hydrogen. But it has nothing to do with rocketry, except in a "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" kind of way, and aluminum isn't some kind of "root cause" in the disaster... unless the initial static discharge that ignited the envelope cloth was in some way enabled by the conductivity of the dopant itself.
/.
When we built all these fancy weapons, I thought they'd be used in a reasonably fair fight - that is, we'd send the tomahawks against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics when they delivered their promised global revolution.
I didn't write all that code so that we could use it to kick over some mud huts in a stone-age nation bent on recreating a 16th century theocracy.
Granted, our jingoistic, bloodthirsty, home-grown perpetrators of atrocities are going after people of similar moral virtue, so at least we aren't knocking off Lapps, Tuvans or Bushmen... but I'd still like to see a fair fight. Let Bush and all his hawk buddies go fight a ground war, like the one he dodged in Viet Nam. I'll be happier about funding that, especially if we can use all-volunteer armies and ban all weapons more sophisticated than a bow and arrow.
Why can't all these warmongering bastards sate their bloodlust without bringing my nice clean superweapons into their dirty little terrorist tit-for-tat?
--Charlie
/.
Excuse me? Speaking as an ex-employee of Thiokol Chemical Corp. (was briefly Morton-Thiokol, but only until the salt boys finished stealing Thiokol's diversified holdings, bankroll, and reputation) I'm wondering exactly which chemicals you're talking about.
I've watched the Hindenburg film and it sure looks like burning hydrogen gas to me. And burning magnesium, wood, and aluminum, too - granted. But what are these "same chemicals" you are referring to?
I don't think Thiokol's produced an explosive fuel compound since the sixties.
--Charlie
Why's everything titanium these days? Because chumps are impressed. Welcome to Madison Avenue.
Things about titanium I've noticed:
The "titanium" notebooks I looked at in Best Buys had such thin casings that I could easily deform the LCD screen with finger pressure on the top of the lid. They were the least durable laptops I've seen recently.
A lot of titanium (the metal, not Tio2 the pigment) is produced under brutal, slave-like working conditions in third-world countries. Participating in the titanium trade is thus contributing to the bankrolls of The Opressors [tm] unless you are certain of provenance.
Titanium is an AWESOME thermal conductor. Some of the Thiokol guys split a titanium rocket motor case in half and made a barbecue out of it; the damn thing radiated heat so fiercely it was essentially unusable.
So you hate yourself because you believed the perp's story, and now you are (equally uncritically) believing the cop's story?
As I read the indictment, there is a lot open to interpretation. There are a lot of claims that the guy "was going to" do bad things [tm] and a very, very slim list of questionable actions that were admittedly taken.
The scientific method enshrines skepticism as a primary virtue. Faith is the domain of religion. Neither Slashdot nor your local police department require or deserve religious devotion.
--Charlie
/.
Oddly enough, I'm using a 2.2.19 kernel these days (with a planned upgrade to 2.2.20 in the works).
Can't say I did this on purpose, though, I just don't need the capabilities of 2.4 at this point. On of my co-workers has a RH 7.x box (and again, we bought the big CD set) for evaluation purposes. I'll add the resolution of all known IntProp issues to the checklist.
--Charlie
Why do you hate the BSD license? Because it is more free than the GPL, or because of some other percieved threat it imposes on the GPL?
Naw, nothing so philosophical. I just don't like the way the BSD has been used by proprietary software vendors to produce horrible travesties like the Microsoft FTP client and of course the infinitely repugnant HP-UX.
See, the BSD license, regardless of its original intent, gives a leg up to bad coders...
Example:
bash$ strings/dos8.01/WINDOWS/FTP.EXE |grep -i calif
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
...and at the same time lets them close off the source so I can't simply fix their more egregious errors.
The GPL, by forcing the source open, prevents this sort of nonsense. That's why I like the GPL!
I'm not focusing any effort on "code freedom", although I certainly prefer to use and write free code (GPL'd code that is). I am old and it takes most of my energy to work on adoption advocacy and education issues, which are more important to me.
Oh, and incidentally I don't consider myself "finux folks" although I certainly see how others would. I would prefer an open-source version of DEC's VMS that ran on commodity hardware, if only such a thing existed.
Your comment on hate is duly noted and appreciated; perhaps it would be more accurate for me to say something like "The perversion of good code that the BSD license allows leaves me sad and disgusted".
/.
If you want to securely signal someone, you start with the previously mentioned "here's a picture of my cat" in a web ghetto.
Encrypt some textual child porn into the picture. Once the thought police find that, they stop looking at the data and come looking for you.
This ensures that dopy morals enforcement cops will trigger your early warning system before the theoretically subtle and dangerous secret agent heros show up.
But, since you are smarter than a gelded water buffalo, the porn contains key words that indicate meaning based on knowledge shared by the correspondents. For example, any reference to Marsha Brady combind with the word "pigtails" would mean that you've shot a bunch of morals cops and relocated your base of operations. You get the idea.
Criminal and spy communications have been done through the personals in newspapers for a century at least. Restrictions on encryption impose no significant hardship on persons who consider themselves either above or beneath the law.
--Charlie
/.
I switched to Red Hat from Slackware eons ago because the install was less tedious. Slack has since remedied the problem (Thanks Patrick!) and Red Hat's install has gotten all GUI and bloated, but it'd be a lot of work to switch all those servers back now... so I haven't.
However, if Red Hat's programmers can't give Soren whatever recognition he is due, I will consider that to be a valid reason to switch distros to whoever is willing to do the job right.
And I always PAY for my distro CDs. Because that's how we keep the distributors in business in my opinion. Since the CDs are not machine-restricted, it's not like the cost is unreasonable anyway.
So, Red Hat, what's your take? You guys have usually done right by me. Y'all gonna fix this?
--Charlie
(who HATES the BSD license, incidentally - Go GPL!)
Of course, all the technologies you just mentioned are for the SERVER, not the desktop. Thank God sysadmins don't run the world!
OK, recap for the reading & logic impaired:
1) Free and Open Source software = Less money paid out in non-productive recurring costs = greater percentage of cash flow made available for other uses.
2) The newly available cash can be directly translated to increased profitability, or can be spent to produce additional savings, or can be returned to the workforce as bigger paychecks, or some combination of these options.
EXAMPLE: Using Free OSS server technologies, specific costs have been eliminated. The money budgeted for these costs has been reallocated to develop a free OSS desktop, which will then generate additional savings (technically, avoided costs, not really savings).
NOTE: Only an idiot would assume that the specific technologies used for servers are neccessarily the same as will be used on the desktop. However, the relevant characteristics (no recurring licensing costs) are the same and quite pertinent to the discussion.
EQUALLY OBVIOUS NOTE: If you have no cash (either income or stockpile) you go bankrupt regardless.
--Charlie
(who isn't a sysadmin by trade, incidentally)
/.
Somebody was asking about the cost of training. In most businesses today there is no end-user training for office apps. So that issue is usually a washout regardless of other factors; the few places that do train will do so on whatever software is in use.
Somebody else said "Why use an open-source clone of a M$ application? Why not use the real thing?"
Here's why: Four years ago my employer was paying over $800,000 US per year for software licensing costs. Today, that figure is less than $50,000 yearly. Linux, samba, rsync, and OpenSSH are the reasons why.
What's being done with all the money available from the avoided costs? Well, some of it is in my wallet right now. The M$-addicted IT directors out there don't control your paycheck nearly as much as the penny-pinching Smiling Men. And the accountants like to see those recurring costs dropping.....
Another thing I'm doing with that money is killing off Solaris, NT, and SCO-unix (and of course that dreaded train-wreck of a unix, HP-UX). This results in easier maintenance, and thus more time to work on the holy grail of a totally free desktop. I honestly don't care if it's linux as long as it's open source and doesn't require constant re-purchase.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want the government to force M$oft to clean up its act.
I mean, it might work, and then we'd be stuck with this desktop monopoly for the forseeable future.
I don't think people would've built all the wonderful new OSes (and jump-started moribund BSD back to life) if the dominant OS wasn't overpriced, amorally marketed, and basically lame.
But a consent decree, that M$ will of course subvert or ignore as they have all previous such, should be a good thing.
It'll inspire more people to work towards a better alternative, and better alternatives will encourage non-techies to get off the monopoly teat.
--Charlie
PS- Be kind, I forgot my asbestos underwear today.
--C
Don't think a behaviour is universal just because you have it.
--Charlie
/. :^( and have little time :^( so I just switch the video and shove the mac KB and mouse off to the side most of the time.
The problem with a mac is the weird keyboard (Apple Desktop Bus I think it is) and mouse interface my macs use. I can adapt the video to VGA easily with a cheap little adaptor, but the ADB to PC interface is blindingly expensive even though there are chipsets available fairly cheap.
I keep intending to build one myself from the chips, but I am way out of practice at that sort of thing
If anyone runs across a cheap solution to this problem PULEEZE post.
--Charlie
/.
I also use this model and am reasonably happy with it. I use a generic AT keyboard and a single 3-button logitech mouse to drive a dual-boot win98/RedHat 7 box on port one, a RedHat 6.2 box on two, a 486-based dual-boot Freesco/Smootwall router PC on 3, and the fourth port is connected to an extremely long custom cable that I use for beowulf nodes and boxes ripped apart on the workbench as necessary. I used to use a MS "Natural" keyboard on the Belkin until I spilled something nasty in it, and that worked OK too.
HERE'S THE PROBLEM: You must follow this procedure when you set this thing up, or you will get the symptoms you describe.
1) Plug all cables into Belkin.
2) Apply power to Belkin.
3) Boot machines in any order *** BUT *** do not *** EVER *** switch consoles if any machine has not finished its boot sequence!!!!
4) You may now switch freely, and you may turn machines on and off as you wish as long as you remember never to switch while any machine is booting up.
5) Go forth and prosper.
This little gotcha really bothered me because I am the type of dummy who "saves time" by booting everything at once and switching about during the boots to spot-check for clean startup message sequences. You don't want to know how much time this "time saving" habit cost me before I got around to reading the damn manual.
--Charlie
This guy's had a little too much bufotenine. I suspect a frog thrown into boiling water would either be killed either immediately (if the water was hot enough) or shortly thereafter from a scalded epidermis. And I'm pretty certain frogs leave changing environments before they become deadly... most animals are fairly well evolved for that sort of thing.
On the other claw, I think this aphorism aptly demonstrates the attitude both Microsoft and these analysts have towards the computer-using public. They think we're incompetent based on their fantasies of how we behave. What a bunch of maroons.
--Charlie
PS- Who the hell would try to boil a live frog anyway?
--C
It looks like the bigot is hoping you'll clip it and copy it yourself and spread his or her lunacy under your own name. The text chosen is long and appears mostly correct to lull you into the trap.
This stuff is becoming more common on /., and it's really sad that some morons have nothing better to do with their time. Good job Mr. Moderator, thanks for reading it all the way through.
--Charlie
My spouse frequently writes to Carper, Biden and Roth. They always respond, although they usually respond in a manner that reminds me of those audio-animatronic disney puppets.
Delaware is small enough that you can call up the governor on the phone and expect to be able to talk to him if a) it's important and b) you are a Delaware resident. The methods used probably wouldn't scale very well, though.
Come to think of it, a less populated state should work even better. Move to Montana, you can be a dental floss tycoon.
--Charlie
And I have stared down the barrels of a few pistols, and my opinion is unchanged - but I can't prove that in this forum, so I haven't mentioned it until now (and I don't think you should accept my word unsupported, either).
Your implication that I think this is a game is also incorrect. I am talking about life and death, and my personal views on dealing out death to other people.
Incidentally, as far as I know, there is no creditable threat to your wife or children. Nobody has threatened mine in any way I couldn't personally deal with. So they are not germane to this discussion, really, except as an emotional red herring.
I don't buy your "Evil" and "Innocent" categories either, BTW - I don't see that the people responsible for atrocities in the name of freedom and democracy are less atrocious than the stereotypical terrorist. The Islamic fundamentalist fruitcakes that want to destroy America are trying to exact REVENGE for what they see as US-sponsored atrocities against their people - how is that different from people here who want revenge for WTC, and are willing to send death to foreign people regardless of whether there is any evidence of their involvement and regardless of how many proveably uninvolved civilians are destroyed?
The people who flew the planes into the WTC are dead. I have seen no evidence that they did not act alone, but I would suspect they had support from someone. Just like the state of Israel has support from US taxpayers. Are you responsible for the oppression of the Palestinians? You probably know that the United States Government considers sentencing half a million children to death by starvation a regrettable but perfectly legitimate act when dealing with the likes of Saddam Hussein. Are you responsible for this? You are funding it with your tax dollars.
So how is your responsibility different from the responsibility of the Taliban, who from all accounts knew nothing of the attack on WTC until after it happened?
Normally, everyone misinterprets what I'm saying when I make observations like the above. So, for the record: I am not in favor of terrorism. I am not in favor of nuclear war. I consider myself a patriotic American, in the same sense that Edward Abbey did. I am not a peace-at-all-costs dove, or a Quaker, either. I am registered with Selective Service, though unlikely to be drafted. I don't really care if somebody kills off the entire Taliban and Usama Bin Laden too, but then again I don't really care if somebody offs Jesse Helms either.
Finally, let me deal with your question: Your logic is flawed in the same sense that the following statement is flawed: "a white guy killed five people dear to me, therefore I will kill the first five white guys I meet" and also in the same sense that this statement is flawed "some people did a henious act in the name of truth and justice , therefore I must commit an act of at least equal imorality to show that their truth and justice is not the real truth and justice".
A "measured response" might be sending our army (which is composed of VOLUNTEERS who are PAID TO RISK THEIR LIVES) to go do the same highly professional job they did in Grenada. A "measured response" might involve exposing the truth behind the rhetoric of blame, and proving the existence of a culprit, rather than Rosenberging the first towel-head that blips the radar. But I didn't say I had the right answers, I just said (originally) that sending hot metal death raining down over a bunch of miseducated, half-armed zealots was not what I had in mind when I was involved in the rocket biz.
Bah. This method of communication is too cumbersome. I will send you an Email address and we can continue offline if you wish. Keep in mind, though, that I refuse to get hysterical about any of this, so I'm not interested in a flame war.
--Charlie
Arnold Robbins' GNU Awk reference manual, shopped by the Free Software Foundation, is quite excellent.
Gawk has a simple means of using fixed fields which is not available in other awks (there are many awks, but Gawk runs on pretty much any OS - certainly on all major OSes - and it's free).
Gawk is like perl, only more elegant, and lacking the network sockets. Gawk and netcat in combination can do most anything perl can do, though, and often faster.
--Charlie
In response to my:
To which I in turn must reply, hey! Why are you assuming I'm a coward? You don't know me (although I'm not that hard to track down).
You may never believe it, but I have found that for me, fighting well above my weight is far more satisfying than bullying weaklings.
If you yourself are a bully, you might find out someday that I'm not the only one who thinks this way - when somebody rips that AK out of your hands and rams it up your butt. Or dies trying.
If you really believe that measured response is stupid, and overkill is the way to go, shouldn't you be advocating the nuclear option? A "protect-the-der-fatherland-right-now" and "to-hell-with-fairness" philosophy would mandate neutron bombing of Israel, Palestine, and Afghanistan immediately, wouldn't it?
--Charlie
I like fair fights. Or fights against overwhelming odds - those are even better from the PR point of view.
If you win against the bigger, better armed guy, you get the girls 'cause you are so studly heroic.
If you lose against the bigger, better armed guy, you get the girls because they are sympathetic to your doomed bravery - how dare that big brute pick on you!
Use Uzis and Galils against unarmored foes with Kalashnikovs and you do NOT get the girls, because you are a thug who has to cheat to win - they'll think you probably have a small penis and are overcompensating.
Now do you see why Bin Laden is a hero to Islamic adolescent girls? And why the boys want to be just like him?
He wouldn't look so great when some little guy from Brooklyn wiped the floor with him in a fair fight.
--Charlie
I assume you are talking about the first leader of the Ku Klux Klan, who is responsible for numerous well documented (outside the Carolinas, anyway) atrocities including the slaughter of surrendered (white) Union prisoners for associating with armed blacks?
The same Forrest who is abhorred "by freedom loving people all across America" as you put it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, please.
--Charlie
Pure hydrogen does indeed burn nearly invisibly.
So does pure methane, but if you ignite a juicy fart you'll find it lights up a dark room with all kinds of colors, depending of what you've been eating. (NOTE: reproducible experiments are the basis of the scientific method.)
The Hindenburg was not entirely composed of pure hydrogen, therefore it should not be expected to have burned as pure hydrogen does. This does not mean hydrogen was not burning.
The dopant used on the Hindenburg had very little in common with solid rocket fuel; it had more chemistry in common with the roll of tape on my desk, in fact.
--Charlie
Thank you for the link. It includes: However, making a statement that "the Hindenberg burned because it was covered with the same chemicals that are used in rocket motors" would be a major distortion of what's been revealed here.
Aluminum is in fact used in many solid propellants; it greatly increases impulse (which is one way of measuring thrust versus weight). However, the Honda Insight has an aluminum frame, and your deodorant stick is made with powdered aluminium - yet neither will spontaneously burst into flame if exposed to a static discharge such as the one that is believed to have triggered the Hindenburg's demise.
I haven't looked it up, but I suspect an open flame of over 1000 degrees fahrenheit would be required to ignite aluminum powder. You certainly can't light off Shuttle SRM fuel with a static discharge, I can assure you of that.
Nitrocellulose and acetate dopants, however, such as were commonly used on cloth-bodied planes for much of the early history of aviation, are tremendously flammable, and easily ignited. This isn't really news to aviators, of course.
Yes, the aluminum burned when the Hindenberg went up. So did wood, magnesium, human body fat, and of course hydrogen. But it has nothing to do with rocketry, except in a "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" kind of way, and aluminum isn't some kind of "root cause" in the disaster... unless the initial static discharge that ignited the envelope cloth was in some way enabled by the conductivity of the dopant itself.
Thanks again for the link, Jester.
--Charlie
/.
When we built all these fancy weapons, I thought they'd be used in a reasonably fair fight - that is, we'd send the tomahawks against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics when they delivered their promised global revolution.
I didn't write all that code so that we could use it to kick over some mud huts in a stone-age nation bent on recreating a 16th century theocracy.
Granted, our jingoistic, bloodthirsty, home-grown perpetrators of atrocities are going after people of similar moral virtue, so at least we aren't knocking off Lapps, Tuvans or Bushmen... but I'd still like to see a fair fight. Let Bush and all his hawk buddies go fight a ground war, like the one he dodged in Viet Nam. I'll be happier about funding that, especially if we can use all-volunteer armies and ban all weapons more sophisticated than a bow and arrow.
Why can't all these warmongering bastards sate their bloodlust without bringing my nice clean superweapons into their dirty little terrorist tit-for-tat?
--Charlie
/.
Excuse me? Speaking as an ex-employee of Thiokol Chemical Corp. (was briefly Morton-Thiokol, but only until the salt boys finished stealing Thiokol's diversified holdings, bankroll, and reputation) I'm wondering exactly which chemicals you're talking about.
I've watched the Hindenburg film and it sure looks like burning hydrogen gas to me. And burning magnesium, wood, and aluminum, too - granted. But what are these "same chemicals" you are referring to?
I don't think Thiokol's produced an explosive fuel compound since the sixties.
--Charlie
Why's everything titanium these days? Because chumps are impressed. Welcome to Madison Avenue.
Things about titanium I've noticed:
The "titanium" notebooks I looked at in Best Buys had such thin casings that I could easily deform the LCD screen with finger pressure on the top of the lid. They were the least durable laptops I've seen recently.
A lot of titanium (the metal, not Tio2 the pigment) is produced under brutal, slave-like working conditions in third-world countries. Participating in the titanium trade is thus contributing to the bankrolls of The Opressors [tm] unless you are certain of provenance.
Titanium is an AWESOME thermal conductor. Some of the Thiokol guys split a titanium rocket motor case in half and made a barbecue out of it; the damn thing radiated heat so fiercely it was essentially unusable.
--Charlie
So you hate yourself because you believed the perp's story, and now you are (equally uncritically) believing the cop's story?
As I read the indictment, there is a lot open to interpretation. There are a lot of claims that the guy "was going to" do bad things [tm] and a very, very slim list of questionable actions that were admittedly taken.
The scientific method enshrines skepticism as a primary virtue. Faith is the domain of religion. Neither Slashdot nor your local police department require or deserve religious devotion.
--Charlie
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Oddly enough, I'm using a 2.2.19 kernel these days (with a planned upgrade to 2.2.20 in the works).
Can't say I did this on purpose, though, I just don't need the capabilities of 2.4 at this point. On of my co-workers has a RH 7.x box (and again, we bought the big CD set) for evaluation purposes. I'll add the resolution of all known IntProp issues to the checklist.
--Charlie
See, the BSD license, regardless of its original intent, gives a leg up to bad coders...
Example: /dos8.01/WINDOWS/FTP.EXE |grep -i calif
bash$ strings
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
...and at the same time lets them close off the source so I can't simply fix their more egregious errors.
The GPL, by forcing the source open, prevents this sort of nonsense. That's why I like the GPL!
I'm not focusing any effort on "code freedom", although I certainly prefer to use and write free code (GPL'd code that is). I am old and it takes most of my energy to work on adoption advocacy and education issues, which are more important to me.
Oh, and incidentally I don't consider myself "finux folks" although I certainly see how others would. I would prefer an open-source version of DEC's VMS that ran on commodity hardware, if only such a thing existed.
Your comment on hate is duly noted and appreciated; perhaps it would be more accurate for me to say something like "The perversion of good code that the BSD license allows leaves me sad and disgusted".
--Charlie
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If you want to securely signal someone, you start with the previously mentioned "here's a picture of my cat" in a web ghetto.
Encrypt some textual child porn into the picture. Once the thought police find that, they stop looking at the data and come looking for you.
This ensures that dopy morals enforcement cops will trigger your early warning system before the theoretically subtle and dangerous secret agent heros show up.
But, since you are smarter than a gelded water buffalo, the porn contains key words that indicate meaning based on knowledge shared by the correspondents. For example, any reference to Marsha Brady combind with the word "pigtails" would mean that you've shot a bunch of morals cops and relocated your base of operations. You get the idea.
Criminal and spy communications have been done through the personals in newspapers for a century at least. Restrictions on encryption impose no significant hardship on persons who consider themselves either above or beneath the law.
--Charlie
/.
I switched to Red Hat from Slackware eons ago because the install was less tedious. Slack has since remedied the problem (Thanks Patrick!) and Red Hat's install has gotten all GUI and bloated, but it'd be a lot of work to switch all those servers back now... so I haven't.
However, if Red Hat's programmers can't give Soren whatever recognition he is due, I will consider that to be a valid reason to switch distros to whoever is willing to do the job right.
And I always PAY for my distro CDs. Because that's how we keep the distributors in business in my opinion. Since the CDs are not machine-restricted, it's not like the cost is unreasonable anyway.
So, Red Hat, what's your take? You guys have usually done right by me. Y'all gonna fix this?
--Charlie
(who HATES the BSD license, incidentally - Go GPL!)
OK, recap for the reading & logic impaired:
1) Free and Open Source software = Less money paid out in non-productive recurring costs = greater percentage of cash flow made available for other uses.
2) The newly available cash can be directly translated to increased profitability, or can be spent to produce additional savings, or can be returned to the workforce as bigger paychecks, or some combination of these options.
EXAMPLE: Using Free OSS server technologies, specific costs have been eliminated. The money budgeted for these costs has been reallocated to develop a free OSS desktop, which will then generate additional savings (technically, avoided costs, not really savings).
NOTE: Only an idiot would assume that the specific technologies used for servers are neccessarily the same as will be used on the desktop. However, the relevant characteristics (no recurring licensing costs) are the same and quite pertinent to the discussion.
EQUALLY OBVIOUS NOTE: If you have no cash (either income or stockpile) you go bankrupt regardless.
--Charlie
(who isn't a sysadmin by trade, incidentally)
/.
Somebody was asking about the cost of training. In most businesses today there is no end-user training for office apps. So that issue is usually a washout regardless of other factors; the few places that do train will do so on whatever software is in use.
Somebody else said "Why use an open-source clone of a M$ application? Why not use the real thing?"
Here's why: Four years ago my employer was paying over $800,000 US per year for software licensing costs. Today, that figure is less than $50,000 yearly. Linux, samba, rsync, and OpenSSH are the reasons why.
What's being done with all the money available from the avoided costs? Well, some of it is in my wallet right now. The M$-addicted IT directors out there don't control your paycheck nearly as much as the penny-pinching Smiling Men. And the accountants like to see those recurring costs dropping.....
Another thing I'm doing with that money is killing off Solaris, NT, and SCO-unix (and of course that dreaded train-wreck of a unix, HP-UX). This results in easier maintenance, and thus more time to work on the holy grail of a totally free desktop. I honestly don't care if it's linux as long as it's open source and doesn't require constant re-purchase.
--Charlie
Correct me if I'm wrong...
--Charlie