So...People should scour the judgement for ANYTHING that could remotely let them wiggle out of any part of the judgement.
Found it.
Definitions....
K. "Microsoft Middleware Product" means
1. the functionality provided by Internet Explorer, Microsoft?s Java Virtual Machine, Windows Media Player, Windows Messenger, Outlook Express and their successors in a Windows Operating System Product, and
2. for any functionality that is first licensed, distributed or sold by Microsoft after the entry of this Final Judgment and that is part of any Windows Operating System Product
a. Internet browsers, email client software, networked audio/video client software, instant messaging software or
b. functionality provided by Microsoft software that
i. is, or in the year preceding the commercial release of any new Windows Operating System Product was, distributed separately by Microsoft (or by an entity acquired by Microsoft) from a Windows Operating System Product;
ii. is similar to the functionality provided by a Non-Microsoft Middleware Product; and
iii. is Trademarked.
So they just don't trademark a given product, and voila! the whole fscking consent decree Does Not Apply.
bastards. They don't call it the Evil Empire for nothing.
Seriously. As far as I know the "findings of law" from Judge Jackson's part of this affair still hold up. That basically means that the defendant has been found guilty of criminal actions, and put on some kind of probation, but if he/she violates that probation, the probation will continue longer.
OJ may have the title for "most obvious perversion of justice by a single man", but I think MS just got it for perversion by a corporation.
And remember what they did to OJ after the criminal trial was over.... the civillians (read here, other companies, like Sun and Oracle and Netscape/AOL/TimeWarner/TheOtherEightHundredPoundG orilla)
sued the bejeezus out of him.
Which is exactly what I predict that McNeally, Case, Ellison, et alia are planning to do; they probably have lawyers with briefs all ready to go.
The cubicle next to me has been occupied by a linux-powered humanoid for the last two years.
Hell, that's nothing, my marriage has been Powered By Linux for the last three and a half years... ever since Windows ate her regsitry twice in as many weeks...
--
You know the marriage is gonna last when you finally get the house network the way you both want it.
They're migrating to W2K shortly, but I put my foot down and they allowed me to wipe my box and install RedHat on it -- the only way I managed that was the fact that it was in a nice shrinkwrap box.
First thing I did as a Linux Specialist in the middle of a mostly-Windows shop was defrag, drop my Red Hat CD in the drive, run FIPS, then reboot, setting CMOS to boot from the CD on the way... then I got the junior guy in IT to turn on the IMAP and LDAP backends on the Exchange Server (the senior dude was an NT bigot)... and when I started producing useable code, I nabbed a copy of SourceOffSite...
As a result, I had to boot Windows maybe once a week because the brass sent around some fscking Word document that AbiWord wouldn't handle at the time... cp file.doc/c; init 6... Word, File, Open, Save As, RTF, F6, ctl-ESC-arrow-RET-RET (boot) RET (you're damn straight Linux was the default LILO entry) cp/c/file.rtf.; abiword file.rtf...
And the NT bigot senior IT never caught on to the fact that I was not only running Linux 39 hours out of 40, interfacing with SourceSafe, his fileservers, printers, and getting my email with Pine or Netscape instead of Outlook, but that I had the beta rev of the team's card in one of my PCI slots and was writing the bloody Linux device driver for it on one of his stock-issue machines instead of demanding that the boss give me a crash box... hell, I probably crashed that box less times in my tenure there than if I had run Win95 the whole time, and I was fscking with the kernel!
Then I got in another strange environment in which we were eval'ing Win2k... we were serious power users, though not actually developers... do you have any idea how hard it was to get them to give me an account that did NOT have administrator privs on the local machine? (and still had appropriate privs on the network share...) I used those privs, though.... to shut down everything I could find on the box. Remote admin daemons, disk sharing, IIS, inetd (yes, Win2k has an inet daemon, with Chuck (the little Berkely daemon in tennis shoes) as the icon.... I nearly laughed my ass off!)...
But, yeah, if you get in a situation like that, where there's a lockdown but a way to work around it, by all means, do it.... or brush up your resume.
Moreover, I think this is an incentive to drive out freeware and open-source developers.
What it will really do is just drive them off the Win32 platform. Onto Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, whatever becomes of Be, QNX, or even Solaris. No more Emacs on Microsoft OS's. No more Active State Perl. Or Tcl/Tk. or Python. or Apache. (yipe.)
The only problem with this is that for those that don't jump ship before Microsoft finally cuts people off and forces them to "upgrade" to XP (they've slipped that date what, twice now?) there aren't going to be any transition tools (like Apache on Win32) to help them wean themselves from their pay software addiction; it's going to be cold turkey...
The solution for that is for people like Miguel to be writing tools in the other direction, that run on Linux (etc., I just don't want to type the whole list:) but take Microsoft-format data and configs (in Win2k or less format; XP, natch, will be verboten to us). A lot of this we already have. We already have a lot of things that grok Word and Excel files. Cold Fusion is being ported; the server engine itself is already there. There is an ASP migration tool whose name escapes me. We need to flesh out the suite; hell, maybe somebody could specialize in a distro full of migration tools (Samba enabled by default with a good user/printer migration tool, etc.).
In short, instead of bitching about yet another Microsoft screwup, we should use some business judo and make it work to our advantage. Join Larry and Scott and Steve and Lou in watering Bill's feet of clay, as it were. Soon, kids, very soon.
-- And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.
-- Shelley
Speaking as an American patriot, I think we need to get civilly disobedient about the DMCA. That's the only way we ever got anything big done around here.... from the Boston Tea Party to Rosa Parks and Martin King, breaking bad laws is a long American tradition.
What we need is an American with a non-US ssh shell account to suck down the goods from wherever Alan has them cached and host them on American soil. We need to be about giving FedGov the big fat finger on this one... it's our damn Linux, no matter where we're from, and NO ONE should be able to tell us what we can and cannot do with it. Especially not the Imperial Federal Government which tries feebly to run the US of A.
Humankind was endowed by its Creatrix with certain unalienable rights.... and when Government ceases to defend those rights, it is our solemn duty as human beings to fix the problem. The Constitution doesn't mean a damn thing if we Americans don't defend it.
I don't have a site that I own on the net, or I'd volunteer up front. We need a site.... hell, we need a bunch of sites, and someone to round-robin them.... that are well connected; each person volunteering should own his own box and line, no hosting it on Angelfire or something, that'll just get "innocent" companies involved.... but this is our software, our Linux, and we need to make it clear to all and sundry that information - and Linux - and the Internet - has a freedom of its own that knows no boundaries. It's rather like The Apple. Once the knowledge is there, God Himself couldn't stop it. Let alone the US Congress.
Frankly, I hold the opinion that Dmitry should somehow find his way back to Russia Real Soon Now... I don't believe in imposing the screwups of the American Congress on an innocent Russian. I don't intend to act on that belief myself... but I hold it, as is my Goddess-given right.... but I digress...
If you think I'm being stupid, reply, don't moderate; the crucible of ideas is all-important here.... but we've got to do something.... talk to me, people, let's strike while the iron is hot....
Re:Don't ruin my Emacs! Re:There already IS gtk...
on
GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 2
You have completely missed the point of the word "port." No one said anything about making it GTK-specific.:P
Yes, and it also already runs under generic X11 just fine. To go and add sixteen tons of widgets to something which was completely character-oriented in the first place is beyond feeping creaturism to simple redundancy.
At least the Gnome port of Nethack actually added considerable value... but what more are you going to do with a bloody text editor than is already there? If you want word processing, with all the toolbars and stuff, there is already AbiWord that works perfectly fine. Emacs already has drop-down menus and pop-up dialog boxes (after a fashion). (Matter of fact, I think it's a whole lot faster to use the little split-window completion boxes than it is to mess around with a "Save As" dialog box... there is no requirement that I use the mouse! The whole point of a text editor is that it can all be done with hands on the keyboard... although mouse support is available.)
Tell me something really useful you could do with Emacs/GTK (something along the lines of the icon support in gnomehack, where you didn't have to think "does 'f' mean fog blob or fox", you could see it was a fog blob) without going too far afield from its major role as a text editor (tacking an icon editor, for example, onto it doesn't fly....) and isn't already there, and I might think the project was a good idea.
(Actually, I just thought of something that might be feasible. Thread/stanza expansion. Click on a given thread in Gnus or a given function in C-mode to expand or collapse it. No idea if Emacs already supports this with the mouse. (a casual inspection doesn't reveal any obvious support...) This would be a truly useful addition... hmmm. )
I've got it. A GTK API from Elisp, done as a library and.elc modules. That way we could keep this thing modular and them as thought it was cool could grab it and slap it atop the regular Emacs, without introducing a lot of new bloat therein (we've got enough alreddie with all the X11 code in there)...
Okee, fine, you've convinced me it can be done. Go forth and code. Make it so it can be taken in and out of Emacs on a whim.... make it so I can add something to my.emacs file and load GTK if DISPLAY is set and -nw is not set, and leave it in text mode (with the resulting smaller, faster RSS) if I'm on a dummy terminal or equivalent. Hell, I'll even beta test it for you.
Now, get a'goin', you've got code to write.:)
Don't ruin my Emacs! Re:There already IS gtk...
on
GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 3, Informative
Let me second that emotion. Emacs runs on just about anything now, thanks to the hard work of the GNU folks.... don't spoil it! When I have to run on something that doesn't already have Emacs, I can be pretty sure right now that I can just go snarf it, or have the local god figure do so... you go make this GTK-specific, and we not only lose the Evil Empire but MacOS, VMS, AOS, and who knows what else... and the fact that while it won't run on a DECWriter II (our OTHER favorite editor does that:), it WILL run on a real vt100, or even an ADM-3A, about the dumbest terminal I ever came across... and while I remember it sucking wind at 1200 baud, it wasn't bad at 2400/V.42bis (about as low as you can go and still error-correct)...
Most of my Emacsing is done in terminal mode on xterms or remote shell sessions.... I go into graphics mode when I'm doing serious programming, but I'm a sysadm by trade, and most of the time character mode is more than good enough. Adding GTK widgets is something I'm likely never to use. Waste of time, if you ask me.
It's running right now on my Windows box at home and on my Linux box at work.
You sure you don't have that bass-ackwards? Or are you a gamer type?:)
--
I used to run Windows for werk because I had to. I run Linux at home because I want to.
(Lady willing come next week I'll run Linux at work too!:)
Oh, Finally! Re:Lilo support
on
GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 1
They've been talking about/vmemacs for years,
a decade even. They finally did it! Funny they did it for LILO and not GRUB...:):):)
Most record shops have a few albums from indie or small labels and it is that range of selection that is in danger. The aim here is quite clear... dominate the digital market place, don't allow others to sell your albums digitally and so the equivalent of the high street store that has the breadth of records is never allowed to exist as they can't exist selling _only_ indie records.
Not true.
Most music stores have a jobber that comes in and fills the racks with RIAA-produced schlock. Then there are the little mom-and-pop establishments that carry indie media... and usually trade in used RIAA produce as well. These will survive quite handily...
Furthermore, the indie bands usually have their own websites, where a selection of their stuff is available for download and where they often list the stores that carry their physical media... which, amazingly enough, indie fans generally run out and buy when they find something they like. And as has been said elsewhere in the thread, if you can't find something in your favorite indie store, google it, and find out where it is. That is, if your band's website isn't selling them on their website alreddie...
Indie music is not in any danger; matter of fact, more and more bands are figuring out that it does NOT help to get into the racket, and staying out of it. The trufans know where to go to get their fix, and are providing more than enough financial support for the bands to make ends meet...
While I think it's good that RIAA is getting its comeuppance, and think all such monopolies should, the indies are doing just fine, thank you very much.
Besides, what good does making it illegal to stop RIAA hackers do? I'll tell you what good it will do. It's a real good way to get RIAA and its members DDDOS'ed permanently.... because I guarantee you the first black hat that that discovers a RIAA hacker trying to 0wn his box is going to declare cyber-jihad...
(user checks Netcraft on a lark and discovers something horrifyingly interesting)
Oh, hell. www.riaa.com runs IIS on NT4. Now, sure, the representative sample of RIAA members run Netscapey things on Solaris.... but in the current state of affairs that organization running that webserver on that platform is the moral equivalent of
walking butt naked into a bar full of half-drunk Marines and making disparaging remarks about Uncle Sam's Misguided Children and America in general. In short, asking, nay, begging to get clobbered.
I hereby disclaim all responsibility for anything that happens to riaa.com henceforth; hell, I make it a point to not know how to do black hat kinds of things, just how to fix it so others can't do it to me. I just mentioned something that is a matter of public record.
So what, you're telling me the next law they buy, after they make it illegal to stop them from hacking my box, and I go ahead and run Linux or BSD and a hardware firewall so they can't hack my box (at least, not with their misguided intellect), will be a law that says RIAA agents can bash down my door at 4am and take my computer? Yeah, right. That's a good way to get a few dead RIAA agents. How was I supposed to know it wasn't a terrorist invasion?
Frankly, this whole RIAA b.s. is just a passive-agressive form of terrorism. I'm not saying we should tac-nuke RIAA HQ or anything... but I do firmly believe that it's time this racket (and that's what it is) was banished from American soil with the same fervor we're using on Osama. The musicians (and I know a few... I helped my favorite band schlepp their stuff Saturday night as my price of admission) don't fscking need it.
Y'know what? Let'em TRY hacking MY computer. I mean, I figure some of you guys MIGHT POSSIBLY be able to convince a hardware router to do your bidding, but then you've got to figure out which box is really mine (hint: it's not the Windows boxen, those are my housemates'), and then you've got to take into account that I do in fact keep up with all the software updates and stuff... so
there's not going to be any of this slack-ass admin hackability.....
If they really care to go to all that trouble. But I doubt it. They're going to go after easy targets.
--
Some of us are fish.... and some of us are sharks.
I work in an enterprise unix environment and getting time for outages to apply patches is incredibly tough when you are running 24x7 systems that are critical to the operation of the customer.
WHAAAT?!?!
When I worked at a certain Very Large Airplane Company, we had a very simple procedure for emergency upgrades:
Patch the backup server (you do have a backup server, don't you?)
Fail over to the backup server (you do have a failover procedure, don't you?)
Patch the main production server
Fail back to main
Sometimes several days would elapse between the patch/failover/patch and the fail back.... because we had capacity planned the failover host to be able to run the production floor at full speed, and there was no use slamming things around without necessity. Besides, it was a good test for the failover machine to run for a day or three as production just to see....
Yes, most system incursions are preventable with good patching and good firewalling. Yes, this applies across ALL OSen. Yes, Microsoft code is crappy and the number of security updates is thru the roof, but that's not the point of this argument.
The point is that if you can't get an outage to apply a critical patch whose absence may cost you a full reinstall and a weeks' downtime, you have a management problem and a design problem, not a vendor problem or a sysadm problem..... and you need to be thinking (a) what's the best way to fix this, and if that doesn't give you any good answers (b) where do I want to work next. Because sooner or later somebody's going to 0wN j00, and if your ass isn't grass you'll wish it were.
It's funny. Laugh. Humor is rarely accurate, much less P.C.
Yes, the British and Canadian contingient is recognized and appreciated. As is anyone else willing to send their money and their aircraft and their boys (and girls) to open a can of whoop-ass on all those who would destroy freedom in the world.
A cynic would note that the U.K. would likely not exist in its present form had it not been for its former colonies coming it its rescue about sixty years ago. Me, I'm not so certain, but I'm bloody sure that if it hadn't been for Tojo's insistience that Yamamoto awaken the sleeping giant, France would be speaking Russian these days... (not German; Hitler, like Napoleon before him, made the mistake of starting a land war in Asia after Easter... and the Red Army would not have stopped at the Rhine without Patton (and Monty!) there to keep them from it.)
So you Tories will excuse us Yanks a little tongue in cheek arrogance, no? After all, the RAF's next fighter aircraft will be built in either Marietta, Georgia, or (hopefully) right here in Seattle....
I will give the Brits credit, though. They have some of the bestnewsservices in the world.... unlike the crap we generatehere in the States.... (I think it's funny that perhaps America's best news network is run by an Aussie...
)
-- And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day. -- Mr. William Shakespeare, Henry V
(yes, of course we love you, John Bull, now quit being tetchy about it.)
Re:The next thing, translated
on
Bert Is Evil
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· Score: 5, Funny
I'm not even going to ask why the Feds can't piggy-back on it
I'll tell you why. Because the <censored> congresscritters can't keep their <expletive deleted> mouths shut about sensitive information. The brass hats aren't about to let'em on their network....
Love's slam of Microsoft on the patent front is somewhat unfair.
Bullshit. Your slam of Love is unfair. To-wit:
... Microsoft has not sued to prevent others using the Xerox windows GUI as apple did,
It wasn't Microsoft's to sue. It was Xerox'.
Strike one.
sued to prevent extension of an 'open' language standard as Sun did,
Exqueeze me? Microsoft replaced several key calls with proprietary API of their own... violating their license agreement to use the Java trademark. You don't like it? Go write your owndamnlanguage, but if it doesn't meet standards, you can't call it "Java". That's not dirty pool, that's just fair.
Microsoft never had to sue to prevent the bogus breaking of a language; they were the ones doing the bogus breaking. There's a difference in adding things to a language and breaking what's already there.
Strike two.
or steer standards bodies towards a technique they owned an undisclosed patent on.
Strike three called, on the outside corner. Go siddown, Casey.
They don't call it the Evil Empire for nothing.... and I don't care if you are a troll (obviously the moderators don't think so), the hoi polloi need setting straight. I don't hate Microsoft for their products. Some of them are actually decent. I hate Microsoft because they do, in fact, play dirty pool.
--
If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve the Union or to change
its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety
with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to
combat it.
-- Thomas Jefferson, Inagural Address (I)
...If I were suspicious of the American Government. But of course, I'm not. I fully support them. How could the US Government have anything but the best interests of the world at heart?
Allow me to draw an interesting parallel.
In 1937 the Navy held war games on Hawaii. The blue team was to defend Pearl Harbor; the red team was to go out to sea and attempt a carrier-borne attack. The red team struck by surprise early on a Sunday morning and totally devastated the blue defenses. Standing on a mountaintop overlooking the harbor were some American brass.... and the Japanese naval attache, a senior officer whose name with which I'm sure you're familiar. Isoroku Yamamoto was scribbling furiously on a notepad, taking down everything he saw.
We all know what happened some four years later... but the truly interesting part was what did not happen. American intel had gotten pretty good at figuring out what the Japanese were about (witness the devastation of the Japanese Navy at Midway six months later)... they knew something was coming. It's never made much mention of in the history books, but one has to wonder why all of the American carriers were out to sea on the morning of 7 December.
I think Roosevelt knew the Japanese were coming.
Fast forward sixty years. There were intel hints all over the place that Osama was planning something big. The Israelis told us as much. Just like Yamamoto, we taught Osama everything he knows.
I think Bush knew something was afoot.
But.....
In both instances America had grown complacent. Very few people wanted to help England defend herself against Hitler. Roosevelt was having major problems just giving the Brits some old, rusty, worn-out cruisers, much less any real war materiel. And heaven forfend we should send troops....
Likewise after Desert Storm (aka the Video Game War) Uncle Sam had grown fat, dumb, and happy. We figured we could open a can of whoop-ass on anybody, any time, and they couldn't touch us, because we were America, dammit, that stuff don't happen anymore. Besides, shouldn't we spend more money on old people and national parks? And all of a sudden, Bubba ain't president no more, we've got some buckaroo... and the economy's for shit and he's kinda stuck for what to do about these Arab hooligans his predecessors (on both sides of the aisle) helped create... the American people are more worried about Gary Condit than Osama bin Laden.
So the way I figure it, both Roosevelt and W. let it happen, knowing that getting our collective asses kicked was the only way rank and file Americans were going to wake up to the necessity of war. That once there were dead Americans on American soil by virtue of a sneak attack, there would be no trouble getting Congress (and the people) to back the necessary military moves to do what was... is... right, i.e. eliminate the dirty so-and-sos that are trying to impose their twisted way of life on the rest of the world.
It's a nasty way of doing business, but I'm not sure either gentleman... President.... had much of a choice. Even if there had been a public warning, it wouldn't have been taken seriously to the extent it needed to be... far better to allow a sneak attack, and get instant, wholehearted support for what must be done, than to take several years trying to coalition-build on a reluctant Congress and people and allow the jokers in question that much more time to get something truly devastating in place.
And I use the word "must" carefully. Had England fallen, all of Europe would now be speaking Russian. Not German, because no one beats Russia in a land war on her own turf (Napoleon), but Russian. And America would not now have Tony Blair to match strength for strength in the war on terror. Which brings us to the present. Since the (20/20 hindsight) premature end of Desert Storm, America has been soft on terror. It is now time to correct that mistake.
I do not accuse W. of orchestrating the attack. That's just plain evil, and I don't think anyone thinks W. is capable of that.... some would say he's not that smart; others, that he's a better man than that. Which is the truth is outside the scope of this comment. The fact remains that Osama, Saddam Hussein, and others like them needed to be dealt with..... and no amount of using the bully pulpit was going to convince Joe Average of that. Will George W. Bush, President of the United States, profit from the events of 11 September? Almost certainly. But so, in the long run, will the American people... and so will freedom. As the Ferengi say, war is good for business. And Jefferson noted that the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots alike. That tree has been parched for sixty years now. (I mean no disrespect to those who have lived and died in America's service since then, but really, we have not had a shooting war for our freedom since then. Now we do.)
Six million innocent people died during the last war for freedom. The lateness of our involvement in that war was probably a factor. If six thousand lives is anywhere close to the extent of our losses in this war for freedom, I shall count us either extremely lucky.... or extremely smart.
-- "Still, if you will not fight for the right... when your victory will be
sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to
fight with all odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival." -- (Sir) Winston Churchill
It looks like Buzz Aldrin's got some competition now.... Buzz had been going at it with the idea of adapting existing missile tech in clusters to form a cheap booster for commercial space.... but it looks to me like he was using the cathedral method of design. Big and slow.
On the other hand, it looks like the Rutan brothers are using something like Extreme Programming to build rockets... build up little by little, test daily, twice, three times a day, use existing airframes as testbeds (Dick Rutan could fly a LongEZ in his sleep, and probably has by now:).... and you know damn good and well that when they get a reliable product they're gonna release it as a kit.
(drum roll please)
Open Source Aviation!
No, I'm serious... when you buy a kitplane, you get the source (plans, etc.), and you are perfectly free to hack'em, and post your results and sell the resulting product. (Kindof a BSDish license... 1/2:) The original 2-seat pusher LongEZ became the 4-seat Velocity, the taildragger Quickie, and inspired the commercial LearStar and Beechcraft StarShip designs.
Yeah, aircraft design is kinda like doing something the size of Mozilla.. but once you've got something working (and the VariEze/LongEZ designs have been around for... well, the old VariViggen (the granddaddy of all homebuilt canards) the Museum of Flight was registered in 1972, so.... and once you've got something it's dead easy to do incremental improvement and even rapid prototyping.
They've been doing this on a shoestring budget (I know how the Rutan brothers work, that's how they built Voyager) for about two years now, and they've got a bird in the air alreddie... where the Zoche folks have been at this aerodiesel thing for six years now, and still don't have anything flying... which is a reflection of the design philosophy; Zoche is going for an FAR-23 certified engine up front, where XCOR is happy to get something off the ground in a safe manner... in much the same way as Netscape would write this huge thing ground-up and only release it when it was all done as opposed to Mozilla pumping out milestone after milestone as things gradually started working...
In short, real-world, non-code-geek example of why bazaar-style development works.
Does somebody have another source for this? Law.com is requiring cookies, and I know this sounds whiny, but I'm just a little too cagey right now to go waltzing onto a commerical site with Junkbuster disabled...
BDSM and war (was:Re:My Choice...)
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Edlin... The preferred Text Editor amongst Sado-Masochists.
No, no, no. TECO is the preferred BDSM editor.
Truth be told, I started out as a vi bigot. EMACS was Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping, and I was constantly killing hung emacs processes left by my tcsh-using sidekick... (dammit, when the shell exits, it should bloody well SIGHUP the children... but that's another holy war...) And then there was the night I spent trying to upgrade my then-boss' personal AIX box. I ran out of DASD and it marked the kernel "broken" by mistake. A little RTFM on his partner's machine, fire up emacs, fix the LPP database the hard way, and the boss gets to work to find he's able to read an email timestamped 4-something-am instead of to find a busted machine. The rest has been a ten-year gradual slide into the world of auto-fill-mode, emerge, and find-file-other-window... yes, I still use vi for the occasional "quickie" editing task, and I don't disparage those who insist on only using it to the point of narfing a Win32 binary of vim or elvis... that's their choice, they're entitled to it, and I don't think it's wrong.
I would like to say, though, that given the fact that I've become an emacs user, and that some pseudo-Muslim fanatics have dared cause mass mayhem on American soil, and that some other pseudo-Christian fanatics have dared use xenophobia as an excuse for those attacks, I'm not surprised to see the Head Slashdotter trolling on his own front page. Whether or not his comment was in jest, it says a lot more about him than it does about me... and what it says is not very nice.
What a previous poster said: One war at a time, Taco.
We now return you to something vaguely resembling Stuff That Matters.
I believe the fight to protect these rights is still a political one rather than a violent one.
For now. And I hope it remains so. But as so many pundits more well-spoken (and well-paid) than I have pointed out, now is the time, when the world is in chaos, to be more vigilant than ever... and to be willing and prepared to defend ourselves from all enemies of freedom, both foriegn and domestic.
Well-known political cartoonist Pat Oliphant said it in picture very well; for the graphics-impaired, Uncle Sam is wielding a long sword, and there's this little kid waving an American flag and wearing a t-shirt that says "Civil Liberties." Uncle Sam says, "Watch out for the backswing, kid." I think if that little kid went over and kicked Uncle Sam hard in the shins, he might just pay attention. How we do that... well, I've got a few ideas, but I admit I'm not very good at ideas. Any suggestions are welcome. ('course, we could go give him a big wet sloppy kiss, too... again, how we do that, I ain't figured out yet.)
Americans are pissed off, angry, hurting, and in some cases scared shitless, and they're not thinking straight. If we can't find the appropriate bucket of cold water...
--
Those who say we can't simultaneously prepare for war and work for peace are doomed to be caught with their pants down. -- me
You may stir up some feathers with this, but I doubt you'll help your cause. I agree that as a last resort, revolt is actually a responsibility of an american citizen. But only as a last resort, and only for the good of the country.
You sound as if we are not anywhere close to that extreme. I submit, kind sir (or madam), that, in light of the War on Drugs[sic], the war on the white male that has come of grotesque mutations on the battle for equality on the part of our melanin-enhanced bretheren, and the shameless indoctrination of our children in government institutions as an outgrowth of these and other events (like the failure of Americans to remember how to defend themselves), that we are in fact very close to the point of taking up arms to defend our freedom.
Why this is I'll leave as an exercise to the reader.
Slashdot Mirror
Definitions....
K. "Microsoft Middleware Product" means
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1. the functionality provided by Internet Explorer, Microsoft?s Java Virtual Machine, Windows Media Player, Windows Messenger, Outlook Express and their successors in a Windows Operating System Product, and
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2. for any functionality that is first licensed, distributed or sold by Microsoft after the entry of this Final Judgment and that is part of any Windows Operating System Product
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a. Internet browsers, email client software, networked audio/video client software, instant messaging software or
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b. functionality provided by Microsoft software that
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i. is, or in the year preceding the commercial release of any new Windows Operating System Product was, distributed separately by Microsoft (or by an entity acquired by Microsoft) from a Windows Operating System Product;
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ii. is similar to the functionality provided by a Non-Microsoft Middleware Product; and
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iii. is Trademarked.
So they just don't trademark a given product, and voila! the whole fscking consent decree Does Not Apply.bastards. They don't call it the Evil Empire for nothing.
Which is exactly what I predict that McNeally, Case, Ellison, et alia are planning to do; they probably have lawyers with briefs all ready to go.
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Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
--
You know the marriage is gonna last when you finally get the house network the way you both want it.
As a result, I had to boot Windows maybe once a week because the brass sent around some fscking Word document that AbiWord wouldn't handle at the time... cp file.doc /c; init 6... Word, File, Open, Save As, RTF, F6, ctl-ESC-arrow-RET-RET (boot) RET (you're damn straight Linux was the default LILO entry) cp /c/file.rtf .; abiword file.rtf...
And the NT bigot senior IT never caught on to the fact that I was not only running Linux 39 hours out of 40, interfacing with SourceSafe, his fileservers, printers, and getting my email with Pine or Netscape instead of Outlook, but that I had the beta rev of the team's card in one of my PCI slots and was writing the bloody Linux device driver for it on one of his stock-issue machines instead of demanding that the boss give me a crash box... hell, I probably crashed that box less times in my tenure there than if I had run Win95 the whole time, and I was fscking with the kernel!
Then I got in another strange environment in which we were eval'ing Win2k... we were serious power users, though not actually developers... do you have any idea how hard it was to get them to give me an account that did NOT have administrator privs on the local machine? (and still had appropriate privs on the network share...) I used those privs, though.... to shut down everything I could find on the box. Remote admin daemons, disk sharing, IIS, inetd (yes, Win2k has an inet daemon, with Chuck (the little Berkely daemon in tennis shoes) as the icon.... I nearly laughed my ass off!)...
But, yeah, if you get in a situation like that, where there's a lockdown but a way to work around it, by all means, do it.... or brush up your resume.
Once again Microsoft is trying its best to drive all but its most fanatically loyal customers away.... *sigh*
The only problem with this is that for those that don't jump ship before Microsoft finally cuts people off and forces them to "upgrade" to XP (they've slipped that date what, twice now?) there aren't going to be any transition tools (like Apache on Win32) to help them wean themselves from their pay software addiction; it's going to be cold turkey...
The solution for that is for people like Miguel to be writing tools in the other direction, that run on Linux (etc., I just don't want to type the whole list :) but take Microsoft-format data and configs (in Win2k or less format; XP, natch, will be verboten to us). A lot of this we already have. We already have a lot of things that grok Word and Excel files. Cold Fusion is being ported; the server engine itself is already there. There is an ASP migration tool whose name escapes me. We need to flesh out the suite; hell, maybe somebody could specialize in a distro full of migration tools (Samba enabled by default with a good user/printer migration tool, etc.).
In short, instead of bitching about yet another Microsoft screwup, we should use some business judo and make it work to our advantage. Join Larry and Scott and Steve and Lou in watering Bill's feet of clay, as it were. Soon, kids, very soon.
--
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains.
-- Shelley
What we need is an American with a non-US ssh shell account to suck down the goods from wherever Alan has them cached and host them on American soil. We need to be about giving FedGov the big fat finger on this one... it's our damn Linux, no matter where we're from, and NO ONE should be able to tell us what we can and cannot do with it. Especially not the Imperial Federal Government which tries feebly to run the US of A.
Humankind was endowed by its Creatrix with certain unalienable rights.... and when Government ceases to defend those rights, it is our solemn duty as human beings to fix the problem. The Constitution doesn't mean a damn thing if we Americans don't defend it.
I don't have a site that I own on the net, or I'd volunteer up front. We need a site.... hell, we need a bunch of sites, and someone to round-robin them.... that are well connected; each person volunteering should own his own box and line, no hosting it on Angelfire or something, that'll just get "innocent" companies involved.... but this is our software, our Linux, and we need to make it clear to all and sundry that information - and Linux - and the Internet - has a freedom of its own that knows no boundaries. It's rather like The Apple. Once the knowledge is there, God Himself couldn't stop it. Let alone the US Congress.
Frankly, I hold the opinion that Dmitry should somehow find his way back to Russia Real Soon Now... I don't believe in imposing the screwups of the American Congress on an innocent Russian. I don't intend to act on that belief myself... but I hold it, as is my Goddess-given right.... but I digress...
If you think I'm being stupid, reply, don't moderate; the crucible of ideas is all-important here.... but we've got to do something.... talk to me, people, let's strike while the iron is hot....
At least the Gnome port of Nethack actually added considerable value... but what more are you going to do with a bloody text editor than is already there? If you want word processing, with all the toolbars and stuff, there is already AbiWord that works perfectly fine. Emacs already has drop-down menus and pop-up dialog boxes (after a fashion). (Matter of fact, I think it's a whole lot faster to use the little split-window completion boxes than it is to mess around with a "Save As" dialog box... there is no requirement that I use the mouse! The whole point of a text editor is that it can all be done with hands on the keyboard... although mouse support is available.)
Tell me something really useful you could do with Emacs/GTK (something along the lines of the icon support in gnomehack, where you didn't have to think "does 'f' mean fog blob or fox", you could see it was a fog blob) without going too far afield from its major role as a text editor (tacking an icon editor, for example, onto it doesn't fly....) and isn't already there, and I might think the project was a good idea.
(Actually, I just thought of something that might be feasible. Thread/stanza expansion. Click on a given thread in Gnus or a given function in C-mode to expand or collapse it. No idea if Emacs already supports this with the mouse. (a casual inspection doesn't reveal any obvious support...) This would be a truly useful addition... hmmm. )
I've got it. A GTK API from Elisp, done as a library and .elc modules. That way we could keep this thing modular and them as thought it was cool could grab it and slap it atop the regular Emacs, without introducing a lot of new bloat therein (we've got enough alreddie with all the X11 code in there)...
Okee, fine, you've convinced me it can be done. Go forth and code. Make it so it can be taken in and out of Emacs on a whim.... make it so I can add something to my .emacs file and load GTK if DISPLAY is set and -nw is not set, and leave it in text mode (with the resulting smaller, faster RSS) if I'm on a dummy terminal or equivalent. Hell, I'll even beta test it for you.
Now, get a'goin', you've got code to write. :)
Most of my Emacsing is done in terminal mode on xterms or remote shell sessions.... I go into graphics mode when I'm doing serious programming, but I'm a sysadm by trade, and most of the time character mode is more than good enough. Adding GTK widgets is something I'm likely never to use. Waste of time, if you ask me.
You sure you don't have that bass-ackwards? Or are you a gamer type?-- :)
I used to run Windows for werk because I had to.
I run Linux at home because I want to.
(Lady willing come next week I'll run Linux at work too!
They've been talking about /vmemacs for years,
a decade even. They finally did it! Funny they did it for LILO and not GRUB... :) :) :)
Most music stores have a jobber that comes in and fills the racks with RIAA-produced schlock. Then there are the little mom-and-pop establishments that carry indie media... and usually trade in used RIAA produce as well. These will survive quite handily...
Furthermore, the indie bands usually have their own websites, where a selection of their stuff is available for download and where they often list the stores that carry their physical media... which, amazingly enough, indie fans generally run out and buy when they find something they like. And as has been said elsewhere in the thread, if you can't find something in your favorite indie store, google it, and find out where it is. That is, if your band's website isn't selling them on their website alreddie...
Indie music is not in any danger; matter of fact, more and more bands are figuring out that it does NOT help to get into the racket, and staying out of it. The trufans know where to go to get their fix, and are providing more than enough financial support for the bands to make ends meet...
While I think it's good that RIAA is getting its comeuppance, and think all such monopolies should, the indies are doing just fine, thank you very much.
Besides, what good does making it illegal to stop RIAA hackers do? I'll tell you what good it will do. It's a real good way to get RIAA and its members DDDOS'ed permanently.... because I guarantee you the first black hat that that discovers a RIAA hacker trying to 0wn his box is going to declare cyber-jihad...
So what, you're telling me the next law they buy, after they make it illegal to stop them from hacking my box, and I go ahead and run Linux or BSD and a hardware firewall so they can't hack my box (at least, not with their misguided intellect), will be a law that says RIAA agents can bash down my door at 4am and take my computer? Yeah, right. That's a good way to get a few dead RIAA agents. How was I supposed to know it wasn't a terrorist invasion?Frankly, this whole RIAA b.s. is just a passive-agressive form of terrorism. I'm not saying we should tac-nuke RIAA HQ or anything... but I do firmly believe that it's time this racket (and that's what it is) was banished from American soil with the same fervor we're using on Osama. The musicians (and I know a few... I helped my favorite band schlepp their stuff Saturday night as my price of admission) don't fscking need it.
If they really care to go to all that trouble. But I doubt it. They're going to go after easy targets.
--
Some of us are fish.... and some of us are sharks.
When I worked at a certain Very Large Airplane Company, we had a very simple procedure for emergency upgrades:
- Patch the backup server (you do have a backup server, don't you?)
- Fail over to the backup server (you do have a failover procedure, don't you?)
- Patch the main production server
- Fail back to main
Sometimes several days would elapse between the patch/failover/patch and the fail back.... because we had capacity planned the failover host to be able to run the production floor at full speed, and there was no use slamming things around without necessity. Besides, it was a good test for the failover machine to run for a day or three as production just to see....Yes, most system incursions are preventable with good patching and good firewalling. Yes, this applies across ALL OSen. Yes, Microsoft code is crappy and the number of security updates is thru the roof, but that's not the point of this argument.
The point is that if you can't get an outage to apply a critical patch whose absence may cost you a full reinstall and a weeks' downtime, you have a management problem and a design problem, not a vendor problem or a sysadm problem..... and you need to be thinking (a) what's the best way to fix this, and if that doesn't give you any good answers (b) where do I want to work next. Because sooner or later somebody's going to 0wN j00, and if your ass isn't grass you'll wish it were.
Yes, the British and Canadian contingient is recognized and appreciated. As is anyone else willing to send their money and their aircraft and their boys (and girls) to open a can of whoop-ass on all those who would destroy freedom in the world.
A cynic would note that the U.K. would likely not exist in its present form had it not been for its former colonies coming it its rescue about sixty years ago. Me, I'm not so certain, but I'm bloody sure that if it hadn't been for Tojo's insistience that Yamamoto awaken the sleeping giant, France would be speaking Russian these days... (not German; Hitler, like Napoleon before him, made the mistake of starting a land war in Asia after Easter... and the Red Army would not have stopped at the Rhine without Patton (and Monty!) there to keep them from it.)
So you Tories will excuse us Yanks a little tongue in cheek arrogance, no? After all, the RAF's next fighter aircraft will be built in either Marietta, Georgia, or (hopefully) right here in Seattle....
I will give the Brits credit, though. They have some of the best news services in the world.... unlike the crap we generate here in the States.... (I think it's funny that perhaps America's best news network is run by an Aussie... )
--
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
-- Mr. William Shakespeare, Henry V
(yes, of course we love you, John Bull, now quit being tetchy about it.)
Al your Qaeda are belong to U.S.
Get it right. :)
Strike one.
Exqueeze me? Microsoft replaced several key calls with proprietary API of their own... violating their license agreement to use the Java trademark. You don't like it? Go write your own damn language, but if it doesn't meet standards, you can't call it "Java". That's not dirty pool, that's just fair.Microsoft never had to sue to prevent the bogus breaking of a language; they were the ones doing the bogus breaking. There's a difference in adding things to a language and breaking what's already there.
Strike two.
Oh, yeah? Tell me Microsoft isn't behind RAND.Strike three called, on the outside corner. Go siddown, Casey.
They don't call it the Evil Empire for nothing.... and I don't care if you are a troll (obviously the moderators don't think so), the hoi polloi need setting straight. I don't hate Microsoft for their products. Some of them are actually decent. I hate Microsoft because they do, in fact, play dirty pool.
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If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve the Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
-- Thomas Jefferson, Inagural Address (I)
In 1937 the Navy held war games on Hawaii. The blue team was to defend Pearl Harbor; the red team was to go out to sea and attempt a carrier-borne attack. The red team struck by surprise early on a Sunday morning and totally devastated the blue defenses. Standing on a mountaintop overlooking the harbor were some American brass.... and the Japanese naval attache, a senior officer whose name with which I'm sure you're familiar. Isoroku Yamamoto was scribbling furiously on a notepad, taking down everything he saw.
We all know what happened some four years later... but the truly interesting part was what did not happen. American intel had gotten pretty good at figuring out what the Japanese were about (witness the devastation of the Japanese Navy at Midway six months later)... they knew something was coming. It's never made much mention of in the history books, but one has to wonder why all of the American carriers were out to sea on the morning of 7 December.
I think Roosevelt knew the Japanese were coming.
Fast forward sixty years. There were intel hints all over the place that Osama was planning something big. The Israelis told us as much. Just like Yamamoto, we taught Osama everything he knows.
I think Bush knew something was afoot.
But.....
In both instances America had grown complacent. Very few people wanted to help England defend herself against Hitler. Roosevelt was having major problems just giving the Brits some old, rusty, worn-out cruisers, much less any real war materiel. And heaven forfend we should send troops....
Likewise after Desert Storm (aka the Video Game War) Uncle Sam had grown fat, dumb, and happy. We figured we could open a can of whoop-ass on anybody, any time, and they couldn't touch us, because we were America, dammit, that stuff don't happen anymore. Besides, shouldn't we spend more money on old people and national parks? And all of a sudden, Bubba ain't president no more, we've got some buckaroo... and the economy's for shit and he's kinda stuck for what to do about these Arab hooligans his predecessors (on both sides of the aisle) helped create... the American people are more worried about Gary Condit than Osama bin Laden.
So the way I figure it, both Roosevelt and W. let it happen, knowing that getting our collective asses kicked was the only way rank and file Americans were going to wake up to the necessity of war. That once there were dead Americans on American soil by virtue of a sneak attack, there would be no trouble getting Congress (and the people) to back the necessary military moves to do what was... is... right, i.e. eliminate the dirty so-and-sos that are trying to impose their twisted way of life on the rest of the world.
It's a nasty way of doing business, but I'm not sure either gentleman... President.... had much of a choice. Even if there had been a public warning, it wouldn't have been taken seriously to the extent it needed to be... far better to allow a sneak attack, and get instant, wholehearted support for what must be done, than to take several years trying to coalition-build on a reluctant Congress and people and allow the jokers in question that much more time to get something truly devastating in place.
And I use the word "must" carefully. Had England fallen, all of Europe would now be speaking Russian. Not German, because no one beats Russia in a land war on her own turf (Napoleon), but Russian. And America would not now have Tony Blair to match strength for strength in the war on terror. Which brings us to the present. Since the (20/20 hindsight) premature end of Desert Storm, America has been soft on terror. It is now time to correct that mistake.
I do not accuse W. of orchestrating the attack. That's just plain evil, and I don't think anyone thinks W. is capable of that.... some would say he's not that smart; others, that he's a better man than that. Which is the truth is outside the scope of this comment. The fact remains that Osama, Saddam Hussein, and others like them needed to be dealt with..... and no amount of using the bully pulpit was going to convince Joe Average of that. Will George W. Bush, President of the United States, profit from the events of 11 September? Almost certainly. But so, in the long run, will the American people... and so will freedom. As the Ferengi say, war is good for business. And Jefferson noted that the tree of liberty is watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots alike. That tree has been parched for sixty years now. (I mean no disrespect to those who have lived and died in America's service since then, but really, we have not had a shooting war for our freedom since then. Now we do.)
Six million innocent people died during the last war for freedom. The lateness of our involvement in that war was probably a factor. If six thousand lives is anywhere close to the extent of our losses in this war for freedom, I shall count us either extremely lucky.... or extremely smart.
-- ... when your victory will be
sure and not too costly, you may come to the moment when you will have to
fight with all odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival."
"Still, if you will not fight for the right
-- (Sir) Winston Churchill
On the other hand, it looks like the Rutan brothers are using something like Extreme Programming to build rockets... build up little by little, test daily, twice, three times a day, use existing airframes as testbeds (Dick Rutan could fly a LongEZ in his sleep, and probably has by now :) .... and you know damn good and well that when they get a reliable product they're gonna release it as a kit.
(drum roll please)
Open Source Aviation!
No, I'm serious... when you buy a kitplane, you get the source (plans, etc.), and you are perfectly free to hack'em, and post your results and sell the resulting product. (Kindof a BSDish license... 1/2 :) The original 2-seat pusher LongEZ became the 4-seat Velocity, the taildragger Quickie, and inspired the commercial LearStar and Beechcraft StarShip designs.
Yeah, aircraft design is kinda like doing something the size of Mozilla.. but once you've got something working (and the VariEze/LongEZ designs have been around for... well, the old VariViggen (the granddaddy of all homebuilt canards) the Museum of Flight was registered in 1972, so.... and once you've got something it's dead easy to do incremental improvement and even rapid prototyping.
They've been doing this on a shoestring budget (I know how the Rutan brothers work, that's how they built Voyager) for about two years now, and they've got a bird in the air alreddie... where the Zoche folks have been at this aerodiesel thing for six years now, and still don't have anything flying... which is a reflection of the design philosophy; Zoche is going for an FAR-23 certified engine up front, where XCOR is happy to get something off the ground in a safe manner... in much the same way as Netscape would write this huge thing ground-up and only release it when it was all done as opposed to Mozilla pumping out milestone after milestone as things gradually started working...
In short, real-world, non-code-geek example of why bazaar-style development works.
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This domestic terrorism has got to stop.
Truth be told, I started out as a vi bigot. EMACS was Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping, and I was constantly killing hung emacs processes left by my tcsh-using sidekick... (dammit, when the shell exits, it should bloody well SIGHUP the children... but that's another holy war...) And then there was the night I spent trying to upgrade my then-boss' personal AIX box. I ran out of DASD and it marked the kernel "broken" by mistake. A little RTFM on his partner's machine, fire up emacs, fix the LPP database the hard way, and the boss gets to work to find he's able to read an email timestamped 4-something-am instead of to find a busted machine. The rest has been a ten-year gradual slide into the world of auto-fill-mode, emerge, and find-file-other-window... yes, I still use vi for the occasional "quickie" editing task, and I don't disparage those who insist on only using it to the point of narfing a Win32 binary of vim or elvis... that's their choice, they're entitled to it, and I don't think it's wrong.
I would like to say, though, that given the fact that I've become an emacs user, and that some pseudo-Muslim fanatics have dared cause mass mayhem on American soil, and that some other pseudo-Christian fanatics have dared use xenophobia as an excuse for those attacks, I'm not surprised to see the Head Slashdotter trolling on his own front page. Whether or not his comment was in jest, it says a lot more about him than it does about me... and what it says is not very nice.
What a previous poster said: One war at a time, Taco.
We now return you to something vaguely resembling Stuff That Matters.
Well-known political cartoonist Pat Oliphant said it in picture very well; for the graphics-impaired, Uncle Sam is wielding a long sword, and there's this little kid waving an American flag and wearing a t-shirt that says "Civil Liberties." Uncle Sam says, "Watch out for the backswing, kid." I think if that little kid went over and kicked Uncle Sam hard in the shins, he might just pay attention. How we do that... well, I've got a few ideas, but I admit I'm not very good at ideas. Any suggestions are welcome. ('course, we could go give him a big wet sloppy kiss, too... again, how we do that, I ain't figured out yet.)
Americans are pissed off, angry, hurting, and in some cases scared shitless, and they're not thinking straight. If we can't find the appropriate bucket of cold water...
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Those who say we can't simultaneously prepare for war and work for peace are doomed to be caught with their pants down. -- me
Why this is I'll leave as an exercise to the reader.