If I had no or limited funds, or the ferry operator was a real s.o.b., I'd build the bridge.... and it wouldn't take very long, either, because several of my fellow travellers just happen to have self-replicating bridges in their backpacks, which, since they are trying to improve them, they will let me use for free.
The analogy is specious. The hard parts are already done. Even on a dog-slow machine, a Linux install takes a couple of hours. Konqueror comes with, alreddie, no downloading new components across the web just to start surfing.
Besides, once the bridge is built, then everyone can walk across for free... but it's for pedestrians only. Jokers with more money than sense riding in their big Land Crushers have to take the ferry and pay the toll troll. Me, I need the exercise. Seeya....
--
Open source, open minds.
The command line is the front line
The "Digital Divide" is much more about individual priorities than economics in the US.
Tell me about it. I'm in a double minority here. Only one TV, five Real Computers plus the old crappy laptop that dual-boots WinDoze and an old version of Caldera.
But this time he's TOTALLY, 100% off base. This goes totally against everything the Net ever stood for, back before the GPL when code was Free as in Beer. If Open Source is to have a snowball's chance of beating the Cathedral types, we can't let a major cornerstone piece of software go even one iota closed source. It's totally indefensible.
Our reputation is staked on the idea that many eyeballs makes all bugs shallow, and that we can, in most cases, fix things faster than the script kiddies can exploit it. Please note that the most notable DNS problem in our short memories was on MICROSOFT servers, not Mr. Vixie's precious code. Matter of fact, MSFT went to Akamai precisely because they were running Linux and BIND - something they knew wasn't easily hacked.
Open Source is not broken, Mr. Vixie. It doesn't need to be hidden under a pile of NDA's, much less "fixed." If you go thru with this hair-brained idea, I'll be one of a very large number of people to unceremonously consign your code to/dev/null.
I may do so anyway, just to make sure the old Cabal isn't pulling stunts on me behind my back.
No, I haven't forgotten you were once a junior member of that once august organization.
Rate me down if you want to, Moderators, I've got karma to burn. But IMNSHO, this effort against the very core of Open Source must be stopped, cold, and in such a way that no one ever thinks of doing it again.
(I wonder what would happen if someone forked the code at this juncture and GPL'ed it?)
--
There is TOO a Cabal.
Where the hell is spaf when you need him?
Not that I know about. When I upgraded my Emperor BlackPerl Z (the Sony Vaio Z505 mentioned in the main article, custom-installed with Red Hat) to Kernel 2.4.0, I had to tweak around with the modules.conf and pcmcia.conf settings to get it to recognize the PCMCIA controller, but once I did that, it's been solid as a brick since it came out. It boots faster, DHCP's faster, and is generally the high quality of work we've come to expect from Linus. On the.0 version, no less. I'll get.1 in a few days.
-- See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux,
you have to be a sneaky bastard too;-)
-- Linus Torvalds
Microsoft admitted defeat a while ago, when the BSD Inet Daemon (complete with "Chuck" icon) showed up in the W2K Server control panel. They committed seppuku last week when they nearly simultaneously gave up all pretense of ever doing Java again, and admitted tacitly to the world that they needed Linux technology in order to do business in a secure fashion (i.e. hiring Akamai to do DNS for them). Only thing about seppuku is that sometimes it takes a while for the abdominal infection to set in....
Without a standards-based, crossplatform language, any hope of "taking over the Net" is so much vaporware. Such an effort is even more pitiful when you have to contract out to the competition for basic services.
The irony of the situation is that IBM, the company Bill nearly killed off in the 80's, is at the vanguard of the host of companies set to sweep the 800-pound gorilla off its feet of clay. Big Blue has spent the last 20 years turning itself into a 600-pound Rocky Balboa, a lean, mean, fighting machine.... and, at the end of it all, Tux is their mascot.
But as I said, it's not JUST IBM, not JUST Linux even.... it's BSD, and Apple, and the Alpha platform, and Sun.... and the fact that Windows STILL doesn't run on ANY 64-bit platform and at this rate may never....
Open Source has been around a lot longer than Linux. (I remember downloading "less" in 1986... and the comp.sources.* archives were pretty huge even then.) It's not going to die anytime soon. Furthermore, IBM is not stupid, not anymore. It wouldn't have put such a huge investment into this if they thought it was a short-lived technology. You don't see IBM stock losing 80% of its value, do you? In fact, IBM is outperforming the S&P, the NASDAQ, and the Dow. The Street prides itself in being able to predict future performance very accurately. (Please also note that MSFT does none of these things...) So I'm not just blowing smoke here... IBM will have its revenge - living well while a greying Bill stands off an I-405 exit ramp holding a sign, "I will code for food"...
Qwest's "connect on demand" service is PPP Over Ethernet, for which there are a number of BSD and Linux clients. It's a dirty, evil, nassssty hack, wastes bandwidth, and is generally doubleplusungood for us BSD and Linux hackers, but if you're stuck with it, it can be made to work.
Of course, if you're stuck with an actively non-Windows-hostile ISP like Roadrunner or Ma Belle (that's Bellsouth for the non-Southern among us), I feel sorry for you... and wish you the best of luck finding a new ISP.
warp eight bot
geek by nature
Free Software by choice
distro bigotry is for losers
Re:Accidents, far more than firearms
on
Clever Girl Bess
·
· Score: 2
...more kids have been killed by airbags than school shootings since airbags were made mandatory on US cars.
Once again showing the stupidity of passive safety devices as opposed to training one's young people to Do The Right Thing. Children can be taught gun safety. Many, many of my generation of people brought up in my native Dixie were raised around guns, taught to shoot by their fathers, and I never knew of anyone being killed in a firearms-related accident until I left home. My next door neighbor, however, was killed in a car accident.... he was not wearing his seat belt. My mother has been in three rather nasty accidents - two in which the car was totalled - seat belt, NO air bag, no more than minor soreness.
Do The Right Thing. Teach them firearms safety. Teach them to wear their seat belt, ALWAYS. (I really admired a friend's kid who would pitch a fit if the car started moving before he managed to get his seat belt fastened.) And don't censor them. Let their little minds roam free... they'll surprise you by how sensible they are, if you teach them to think.
And don't give the Imperial Federal Government one iota more than you can get away with. Not in bits or bucks. That goes double for the other Big Brothers in our lives. Anything you give them just gives them more power over your life.
warp eight bot
American by birth
Southern by the Grace of the Lady
Seattle by choice
Doesn't matter. Between today's Sun case and the length of time M$ will have been on its very best behavior by the time they get around to letting the case drop, the damage has already been done. The fact that it went to trial in the first place gave the little guys the intestinal fortitude they needed to Do The Right Thing, and made M$ behave long enough to let them. Now we have Linux on Dells and BSD on Compaqs and IBM doing their thing and now the Borg's pseudo-JVM has been legally 0wNeD by Mr. McNeally.... If you haven't already shorted your MSFT shares, fuggeddabowdit, go ahead and hang on to them. But if you're new to the market today, I'd reccomend AOL or YHOO before I'd go buy shares in Has Been, Inc....No, they're not done for. But you will do far better with somebody else.
Can you provide a concrete example that conclusively demonstrates the assertation that CNN is "left-leaning?"
The Clinton News Network never, to my knowledge, pointed out that the real issue with respect to the Spinmeister-in-Chief was not the fact that he did the dirty with anyone, but that he fscking lied to a Grand Jury, Congress, and the American People. It's never been the same since Ted married Jane, and conned him in to selling out to Slime Verm... err, Eh? Oh Hell Time Warner. Unlike Andover, TW never intended to allow Ted free rein...
Desert Storm was Ted's finest hour, with the likes of Christiane Amanpour and Wolf Blitzer doing (and I know this is sacrelige to some) as well as Uncle Walter ever did... complete with a little misdirection for ol' Saddam thrown in for good measure. Too bad yon 800 pound liberal weenie media guerrilla (intentional) took notice.
I think it speaks volumes that a certain
Libertariantalk show host
doesn't watch CNN and has not for several years now, and has now given up on the Big Three as well in favor of Rupert Murdoch the Aussie's Fox. The Aussies may not care for their former masters the British, but they haven't forgotten what good journalism looks like. "We Report, You Decide(tm)." Helluvalot better than "We Know What's Good For You."
I woke up late too... late for my 8am class. I pulled on some sweats, charged thru the computer center (a shortcut, and with vending machines so I could get breakfast) and made it to class on time. I think that's the only thing that went right that day.
The AE's and EE's on Georgia Tech's campus were walking around like zombies, their dreams of space shattered like so many ceramic tiles. Fifteen years, and the pic on that CNN arty still gives me the creeps. Still brings the tears, too. I don't think we cried that day, though. Too much shock... and later, anger, when we found out Mr. Feynman had told them so.
Fifteen years, and NASA is a timid shadow of its former self. So is America, for that matter. There are stupid risks, and there are ones you have to take to get anywhere. But in the P-C era, it's not PC to take risks. Except the ones you never think about, like driving on the freeway...
and so we kill thousands on thousands every year by doing stupid things with our automobiles, and no human being has cleared earth orbit since Nixon was in office.
*sigh*
But they're right, I don't remember where I was when Lennon was shot, nor Regan, nor when Elvis died... or even when Mt. St. Helen's blew. But I sure as hell remember what happened the day the space program died.
-- From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon.
And it's not a miracle, we just decided to go.
-- Jim Lovell
History will remember the inhabitants of this century as the people
who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years, only to languish
for the next 30 in low Earth orbit. At the core of the risk-free
society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve.
-- Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin
Yes, Interbase has a backdoor. But as a friend of mine said, we know where that backdoor is, and can nail 2x4's over it, and the next release will come with the 2x4's already in place. Could be worse. He coulda said M$ SQL Server 7. Or some other proprietary server.
--
If you want to end the war and stuff, you've gotta sing LOUD. --Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"
There is no reason to re-invent the wheel. The Brits (of all people) have done it for us. They wrote a program called
FREE and published it under (what else) the GPL. It's a java-based secure client server that will run on most popular OS's (W32, Linux, Mac, OS/2!) and (get this) is *already in production*.
I think we have to insist that any voting system implemented be Open Source, and specifically GPL, so no one can go and put backdoors in it without someone being able to find them. Furthermore, I think we can make it stick, to-wit: Proprietary software must be paid for, right? Which would make it an unfunded mandate, and thus unconstitutional.
Folks, get on the phone to your congresscritter, write letters, whatever, but we can, and have to, stop this right now before it spreads. I'm not going to stand for spending several million dollars of MY MONEY to develop something that has already been developed and is out there for the asking... something I will never trust unless it is open source, and neither should anyone else.
Once more into the breach, dear friends, and we can stop Gates' final attempt to take over the world, and have it for ourselves, and set it (ahem)
FREE.
-- If you want to end war and stuff, you've gotta sing LOUD.
-Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"
> They claim they are trying to make you a programmer.
Won't work. Not everyone wants to be a priest. Not everyone is brave enough to talk to the Goddess all by herself. Some people just want to linger at the edge of the Circle, or lean back in the pews, and let someone else do all the dirty work. They just want things to work without them having to think too much. As long as they can doubleclicky on the thingamabob and the spinner goes spinny and brings them the latest edition of Dilbert, everything's cool, everything's fine. They'd have no idea what to do with a hash prompt.
Now, this is not to say that a properly set up Be or *BSD or even (gasp) Linux won't do this just as well if not better than WinDoze. As long as they have someone like me to call when a power-out causes fsck to hang on boot-up.... but then how many folks actually install their own WinDoze?
Frankly, I think if any of the "new" OS's have a chance, other than the ones I mentioned above, it's Plan 9. If for no other reason than the rather serious amount of propellorhead power behind it... after all, we're talking about the same folks who dreamed up Unix in the first place, and the transistor before it. Never, ever underestimate the raw power of Ma Bell.
--
Open standards. Open source. Open minds.
The command line is the front line.
And Debian? Another distribution aimed at a particular group of users? How much has this guy had to drink?
Allow me to expand on that.
Every time I've come across a distribution problem of late, the Debian zealots come out, apt-get this, apt-get that... "and it automatically gets whatever you need..." hey, GUYS, doesn't this sound like That Other Operating System[sic]? I much prefer that RPM *tell me* what I need, and then I can go investigate getting it, and decide if I want to bloat out that many terabytes or not. This is freedom. Oh, and if the server is down, I can go hit another mirror without having to edit some configuration file somewhere and then have to remember to change it back.
Oh, and the other thing. Perhaps things are too big because folks are too fscking LAZY to sit down in custom mode and rip out everthing but what they need... I've got a fairly complete RH6.2 on this little laptop here, KDE, Mozilla AND Netscape, Emacs, and a full-out set of kernel sources and the stuff to compile them, and I'm using right on a gigabyte for system. At the other end of the spectrum, I once managed to strip down a system (using the same Red Hat 6.2) to 78mb, INCLUDING Apache, Samba, Linuxconf-http, SNMP, and raid-utils. Now, compress this down, put it on a flash-IDE chip, add a custom copy of LiLo...:)
Then of course, there's tomsrtbt, Dualix, the Linux Router Project, hal91, and all those other 2.0.3x-based systems that manage to fit on a single floppy, or maybe two or three.... or better yet the Slackware boot/root/net set, a very USEFUL Kernel 2.2 floppy-based setup... or, for a more complete system, Zipslack....
Linux as bloatware. Feh. Debian as the one true way. Humbug, I say, HUMBUG! If you see the Buddha on the road, *tac-nuke* his ass. Before it spreads.
--
Warp Eight Bot, equal opportunity abuser (wearing his OpenBSD Polo today) Being a distro bigot is so passe'...
is in the infared, ultraviolet, and radio/x-ray
detectors, which have nothing to do with the visual-spectrum pictures. All that big lens is there for is to sell the project to the taxpayers... which is, of course, why the big panic to replace that lens despite the fact it wasn't affecting any of the research projects... as one of the Mercury Seven astronauts said, "No Bucks, No Buck Rodgers." No pretty pics, no constituent letters to Congress saying "Save Hubble."
One question for Mr Browne. Can he name a single major technology invented in the last 100 years that hasn't been a direct result of government funding in science?
As a card-carrying Libertarian, I can.
The Bell System.
Plain Old Telephone Service was developed at Bell Labs, funded entirely by American Telephone and Telegraph, nary a dime of Uncle Sam's money. (The things they did develop for the government were add-ons, like encryption and wiretap devices and such.) The ubiquitous telephone, the sine qua non of business the world over, was developed by a company who then was broken up by the American government not once but twice.... IMHO the latest time, happening even as we speak, the result of the sheer weight of government regulation, forcing old "T" to break itself up along regulatory lines.
Actually, I just thought of another one... the commodity PC. It can be argued that there were various levels of involvement and interference, but the bottom line is that once the court system told the Patent Orifice to STICK IT and let the cloners reverse engineer, the market went ballistic, thus enabling Linus....
Oh, jeeze. UNIX, for Seldon's sake.
And one more, for good measure. The Internet. Yeah, it was *invented* by DARPA... but it wasn't until they killed funding for NSFNet and the various commercial network companies came to the fore that the Web made like unto a mushroom cloud....
So, there, Mr. AC, the telephone, the PC, Unix, and the Internet as we know it. All those things that are absolutely necessary for business today were either done sans government, or enabled by government getting the hell out the way.
That's why I'm voting Libertarian.
--
"See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too." -- Linus Torvalds
I've found that I rather like
Yahoo for that purpose. They've got a spam filter on inbound, so you can actually keep an address for quite a while if you're semi-careful, and a number of other nice features, including address book import/export (makes it easy when it's time to move).... Yahoo also has one of the better privacy policies in the industry, FWIW....
--
Open standards. Open source. Open minds.
The command line is the front line.
Personally, im[sic] dismayed at such a level of irresponsibility from such a distinguished company.
Me, too. So I grudgingly turned my cookies on, fired up the site, found their feedback email address, saved it off, shut down Netscape, flushed my cookie jar (changing cookies.txt's attributes so it "opens" with Win32 Emacs, then made a shortcut to it so I can do this quickly next time... but I digress), re-fired Netscape, and fired off a salvo in their general direction as to just how offensive this was and that I was dropping Lego from my shopping list and urging other parents to do likewise.
Perhaps if they get enough of these notes they'll wise up... after all, Shopping Season is close upon us.
services@lego.com is the address to bug'em yourself. Yes, I know this is liable to slashdot'em. Serves'em right, IMHO.
I'm a big fan of parental responsibility; what your kid sees and does on the net is YOUR problem. But when I can't get in to have a peek and make sure the site is legit because someone insists on shoving a cookie down my craw, it rather sticks there. Yeah, yeah, there are other ways to track, but my inside addresses are NAT'ed and my outside one is part of a huge ISP's block, so a whole lotta damn good that's going to do them... but nooooo, Lego isn't satisfied with a good generic demographic, they want it ALL...
Well, they shall get none from me.
--
"If you don' like it, you can kiss my furry little butt!" -- MiB
#3 answered as voice (or routed by the voicemail modem for processing as a primary number)
#4 should be processed likewise, only at a different priority, greater or lesser, your choice.
(funky ring signal)
Quick, Robin, it's the Batphone!
Oh, I never did say, why answer first as a modem rather than a fax? The odds of those scrooey telemarketers figuring out you're a fax and bombing it with junk (a violation of 47 USC 227, but they don't care) are a lot worse than some ev1L h@X0r d00d breaking into your properly secured (you ARE using 255-character MD5 passwords, aren't you?) Linux or OpenBSD box with the modem....
1) Microsoft Windows 2000
2):Cue:Cat by DC
3) CD's from my favorite music authors (including Metallica & Dr. Dre)
4) Internet Filtering software (ie. Net Nanny)
5) A DVD Player approved by the MPAA
Lessee, that was
1) Red Hat Linux 7.0 downloaded over my DSL connection
2):Cue:Cat free from Radio Slack
3) MP3's from MP3.com
4) Internet Junkbuster
5) WinAmp with DeCSS
Dude, ever think about who answers Gallup polls? They can only phone you from 9am til 9pm. Who's at home during those hours? or out shopping so a poll-taker can ask you f2f? People who DON'T WORK. NON-GEEKS. Stick that poll on the Internet and I guarantee a different result.
(The reasons for both cases: "everyone uses it, so there can't be something
better" and "I already know how to use this, and I don't want to learn something new.")
"Everyone" goes to McDonalds for the same reason they use Microsoft. Marketing is a very effective club. Particularly if your target audience can be someone with the Terrible Twos.
As for "I already know how to use this".... bullshit, what top-level user interface these days is NOT icon-and-mouse, point-and-click, drop-down-menu? c'mon, you can do better than this...
The second he/she gets a link to a Windows Media Player or QuickTime movie, a cute EXE attachment like a video greeting card, or
a Microsoft Office document for StarOffice to slowly beat to death, you'll have some 'splaining to do.
WMP and Orifice are part of the problem which will be solved when we split the 800 pound gorilla, leaving the apps company to go Open Standards or die. QT is an APPLE standard, exqueeze me? And that.EXE? Probably a virus. Every Unixhead out here knows you don't blindly execute a potential virus without knowing damn good and well where it came from. Jeez.
Truth is you didn't ready the Motley Fool article and discover that M$'s business model is already fscked; all the DOJ lawsuit did was enforce that they stop playing dirty pool behind the scenes for long enough for their feet of clay to crumble. Ozymandius' statue is already beginning to lean badly; those in its shadow had best get out the way. Besides, it's not the soccer moms or the third shift losers or whoever else that's home during business hours to answer the polls that actually run the world. Who does is an exercise to the reader.
Making bucks off someone else's rep
on
Typosquatting
·
· Score: 5
I don't agree, Taco. Someone else is making bucks off your good rep, for $15 worth of capital. At best, somebody owes you a cut of the proceeds for your blood, sweat, and tears spent making a site yonder doofus could exploit.
I have a feeling that if I went out on the street, put up a green sign with silver arches, and called it MacDonalds and started selling chicken sandwiches, that the company that has sold Billions and Billions would have proper recourse to land on me with a ton of lawyers. But here in cyberspace, it's *just* a typo?
I don't think so. And even if it is, when folks like the 800 pound gorilla from Redmond get into the act, it won't stay that way long, DOJ lawsuits aside. And for once, I think that's as it should be. www.whitehouse.com indeed, don't try that not-a-link unless you're 18.....
--
That Isaac Hayes, he's one baaaad mutha...(Hush yo mouth!)
I'm just talkin' 'bout Chef! (We can dig it!)
I've seen three repeatable varieties of seriously successful software engineers:
1) Traditional BSCS college grads
2) U.S. Navy (or Marine Corps) ratings
3) Tech-school (e.g. DeVry) program grads
And I notice something else: The BSCS types (including myself) had something in common with the sailors and the certificate holders: Practical experience before graduation. We either got jobs with the computer center or a department or school doing practical things with computers, or we entered the Co-Op program and did real work for real companies as interns. Whatever the route, we had real-world experience on our resumes before the school ever deigned to give us our paper and set us free.
Bottom line: Get your schooling, however you choose, but make it practical. Make sure you have something to offer that recruiter when you hand him that piece of bond that has your life's work on it.... not a lot of fluff. The theory, the philosophy, the social conditioning, this is all well and good and useful, and I recommend it for those with those for whom it fits.... but get PRACTICAL, and you'll find success.
But, if you *think* you need this device and are running Linux, maybe you should install Windows.
or if you really want a separate printserver (like if you had a cluster of workstations with just one printer handling a potload of volume) just fsckit and use smbprint.... ain't that hard....
the point of this thing is plug'n'play; if you want full flex, I agree with the original poster, get yourself a 486 and put Slack on it, shut down all but ssh and lpd, and away you go. The real issue here is whether people time or hardware has more priority in your budget.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had no or limited funds, or the ferry operator was a real s.o.b., I'd build the bridge.... and it wouldn't take very long, either, because several of my fellow travellers just happen to have self-replicating bridges in their backpacks, which, since they are trying to improve them, they will let me use for free.
The analogy is specious. The hard parts are already done. Even on a dog-slow machine, a Linux install takes a couple of hours. Konqueror comes with, alreddie, no downloading new components across the web just to start surfing.
Besides, once the bridge is built, then everyone can walk across for free... but it's for pedestrians only. Jokers with more money than sense riding in their big Land Crushers have to take the ferry and pay the toll troll. Me, I need the exercise. Seeya....
--
Open source, open minds.
The command line is the front line
--
Geek by nature.
Linux by choice
Our reputation is staked on the idea that many eyeballs makes all bugs shallow, and that we can, in most cases, fix things faster than the script kiddies can exploit it. Please note that the most notable DNS problem in our short memories was on MICROSOFT servers, not Mr. Vixie's precious code. Matter of fact, MSFT went to Akamai precisely because they were running Linux and BIND - something they knew wasn't easily hacked.
Open Source is not broken, Mr. Vixie. It doesn't need to be hidden under a pile of NDA's, much less "fixed." If you go thru with this hair-brained idea, I'll be one of a very large number of people to unceremonously consign your code to /dev/null.
I may do so anyway, just to make sure the old Cabal isn't pulling stunts on me behind my back.
No, I haven't forgotten you were once a junior member of that once august organization.
Rate me down if you want to, Moderators, I've got karma to burn. But IMNSHO, this effort against the very core of Open Source must be stopped, cold, and in such a way that no one ever thinks of doing it again.
(I wonder what would happen if someone forked the code at this juncture and GPL'ed it?)
--
There is TOO a Cabal.
Where the hell is spaf when you need him?
-- ;-)
See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too
-- Linus Torvalds
That's why you're the AC.. and I'm not.
Without a standards-based, crossplatform language, any hope of "taking over the Net" is so much vaporware. Such an effort is even more pitiful when you have to contract out to the competition for basic services.
The irony of the situation is that IBM, the company Bill nearly killed off in the 80's, is at the vanguard of the host of companies set to sweep the 800-pound gorilla off its feet of clay. Big Blue has spent the last 20 years turning itself into a 600-pound Rocky Balboa, a lean, mean, fighting machine.... and, at the end of it all, Tux is their mascot.
But as I said, it's not JUST IBM, not JUST Linux even.... it's BSD, and Apple, and the Alpha platform, and Sun.... and the fact that Windows STILL doesn't run on ANY 64-bit platform and at this rate may never....
Open Source has been around a lot longer than Linux. (I remember downloading "less" in 1986... and the comp.sources.* archives were pretty huge even then.) It's not going to die anytime soon. Furthermore, IBM is not stupid, not anymore. It wouldn't have put such a huge investment into this if they thought it was a short-lived technology. You don't see IBM stock losing 80% of its value, do you? In fact, IBM is outperforming the S&P, the NASDAQ, and the Dow. The Street prides itself in being able to predict future performance very accurately. (Please also note that MSFT does none of these things...) So I'm not just blowing smoke here... IBM will have its revenge - living well while a greying Bill stands off an I-405 exit ramp holding a sign, "I will code for food"...
Of course, if you're stuck with an actively non-Windows-hostile ISP like Roadrunner or Ma Belle (that's Bellsouth for the non-Southern among us), I feel sorry for you... and wish you the best of luck finding a new ISP.
warp eight bot
geek by nature
Free Software by choice
distro bigotry is for losers
Do The Right Thing. Teach them firearms safety. Teach them to wear their seat belt, ALWAYS. (I really admired a friend's kid who would pitch a fit if the car started moving before he managed to get his seat belt fastened.) And don't censor them. Let their little minds roam free... they'll surprise you by how sensible they are, if you teach them to think.
And don't give the Imperial Federal Government one iota more than you can get away with. Not in bits or bucks. That goes double for the other Big Brothers in our lives. Anything you give them just gives them more power over your life.
warp eight bot
American by birth
Southern by the Grace of the Lady
Seattle by choice
Doesn't matter. Between today's Sun case and the length of time M$ will have been on its very best behavior by the time they get around to letting the case drop, the damage has already been done. The fact that it went to trial in the first place gave the little guys the intestinal fortitude they needed to Do The Right Thing, and made M$ behave long enough to let them. Now we have Linux on Dells and BSD on Compaqs and IBM doing their thing and now the Borg's pseudo-JVM has been legally 0wNeD by Mr. McNeally.... If you haven't already shorted your MSFT shares, fuggeddabowdit, go ahead and hang on to them. But if you're new to the market today, I'd reccomend AOL or YHOO before I'd go buy shares in Has Been, Inc....No, they're not done for. But you will do far better with somebody else.
Desert Storm was Ted's finest hour, with the likes of Christiane Amanpour and Wolf Blitzer doing (and I know this is sacrelige to some) as well as Uncle Walter ever did... complete with a little misdirection for ol' Saddam thrown in for good measure. Too bad yon 800 pound liberal weenie media guerrilla (intentional) took notice.
I think it speaks volumes that a certain Libertarian talk show host doesn't watch CNN and has not for several years now, and has now given up on the Big Three as well in favor of Rupert Murdoch the Aussie's Fox. The Aussies may not care for their former masters the British, but they haven't forgotten what good journalism looks like. "We Report, You Decide(tm)." Helluvalot better than "We Know What's Good For You."
The AE's and EE's on Georgia Tech's campus were walking around like zombies, their dreams of space shattered like so many ceramic tiles. Fifteen years, and the pic on that CNN arty still gives me the creeps. Still brings the tears, too. I don't think we cried that day, though. Too much shock... and later, anger, when we found out Mr. Feynman had told them so.
Fifteen years, and NASA is a timid shadow of its former self. So is America, for that matter. There are stupid risks, and there are ones you have to take to get anywhere. But in the P-C era, it's not PC to take risks. Except the ones you never think about, like driving on the freeway... and so we kill thousands on thousands every year by doing stupid things with our automobiles, and no human being has cleared earth orbit since Nixon was in office.
*sigh*
But they're right, I don't remember where I was when Lennon was shot, nor Regan, nor when Elvis died... or even when Mt. St. Helen's blew. But I sure as hell remember what happened the day the space program died.
--
From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon.
And it's not a miracle, we just decided to go.
-- Jim Lovell
History will remember the inhabitants of this century as the people who went from Kitty Hawk to the moon in 66 years, only to languish for the next 30 in low Earth orbit. At the core of the risk-free society is a self-indulgent failure of nerve.
-- Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin
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If you want to end the war and stuff, you've gotta sing LOUD.
--Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"
I think we have to insist that any voting system implemented be Open Source, and specifically GPL, so no one can go and put backdoors in it without someone being able to find them. Furthermore, I think we can make it stick, to-wit: Proprietary software must be paid for, right? Which would make it an unfunded mandate, and thus unconstitutional.
Folks, get on the phone to your congresscritter, write letters, whatever, but we can, and have to, stop this right now before it spreads. I'm not going to stand for spending several million dollars of MY MONEY to develop something that has already been developed and is out there for the asking... something I will never trust unless it is open source, and neither should anyone else.
Once more into the breach, dear friends, and we can stop Gates' final attempt to take over the world, and have it for ourselves, and set it (ahem) FREE.
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If you want to end war and stuff, you've gotta sing LOUD.
-Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"
Won't work. Not everyone wants to be a priest. Not everyone is brave enough to talk to the Goddess all by herself. Some people just want to linger at the edge of the Circle, or lean back in the pews, and let someone else do all the dirty work. They just want things to work without them having to think too much. As long as they can doubleclicky on the thingamabob and the spinner goes spinny and brings them the latest edition of Dilbert, everything's cool, everything's fine. They'd have no idea what to do with a hash prompt.
Now, this is not to say that a properly set up Be or *BSD or even (gasp) Linux won't do this just as well if not better than WinDoze. As long as they have someone like me to call when a power-out causes fsck to hang on boot-up.... but then how many folks actually install their own WinDoze?
Frankly, I think if any of the "new" OS's have a chance, other than the ones I mentioned above, it's Plan 9. If for no other reason than the rather serious amount of propellorhead power behind it... after all, we're talking about the same folks who dreamed up Unix in the first place, and the transistor before it. Never, ever underestimate the raw power of Ma Bell.
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Open standards. Open source. Open minds.
The command line is the front line.
Every time I've come across a distribution problem of late, the Debian zealots come out, apt-get this, apt-get that... "and it automatically gets whatever you need..." hey, GUYS, doesn't this sound like That Other Operating System[sic]? I much prefer that RPM *tell me* what I need, and then I can go investigate getting it, and decide if I want to bloat out that many terabytes or not. This is freedom. Oh, and if the server is down, I can go hit another mirror without having to edit some configuration file somewhere and then have to remember to change it back.
Oh, and the other thing. Perhaps things are too big because folks are too fscking LAZY to sit down in custom mode and rip out everthing but what they need... I've got a fairly complete RH6.2 on this little laptop here, KDE, Mozilla AND Netscape, Emacs, and a full-out set of kernel sources and the stuff to compile them, and I'm using right on a gigabyte for system. At the other end of the spectrum, I once managed to strip down a system (using the same Red Hat 6.2) to 78mb, INCLUDING Apache, Samba, Linuxconf-http, SNMP, and raid-utils. Now, compress this down, put it on a flash-IDE chip, add a custom copy of LiLo... :)
Then of course, there's tomsrtbt, Dualix, the Linux Router Project, hal91, and all those other 2.0.3x-based systems that manage to fit on a single floppy, or maybe two or three.... or better yet the Slackware boot/root/net set, a very USEFUL Kernel 2.2 floppy-based setup... or, for a more complete system, Zipslack....
Linux as bloatware. Feh. Debian as the one true way. Humbug, I say, HUMBUG! If you see the Buddha on the road, *tac-nuke* his ass. Before it spreads.
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Warp Eight Bot, equal opportunity abuser (wearing his OpenBSD Polo today)
Being a distro bigot is so passe'...
Helluva way to sell a science project.
The Bell System.
Plain Old Telephone Service was developed at Bell Labs, funded entirely by American Telephone and Telegraph, nary a dime of Uncle Sam's money. (The things they did develop for the government were add-ons, like encryption and wiretap devices and such.) The ubiquitous telephone, the sine qua non of business the world over, was developed by a company who then was broken up by the American government not once but twice.... IMHO the latest time, happening even as we speak, the result of the sheer weight of government regulation, forcing old "T" to break itself up along regulatory lines.
Actually, I just thought of another one... the commodity PC. It can be argued that there were various levels of involvement and interference, but the bottom line is that once the court system told the Patent Orifice to STICK IT and let the cloners reverse engineer, the market went ballistic, thus enabling Linus....
Oh, jeeze. UNIX, for Seldon's sake.
And one more, for good measure. The Internet. Yeah, it was *invented* by DARPA... but it wasn't until they killed funding for NSFNet and the various commercial network companies came to the fore that the Web made like unto a mushroom cloud....
So, there, Mr. AC, the telephone, the PC, Unix, and the Internet as we know it. All those things that are absolutely necessary for business today were either done sans government, or enabled by government getting the hell out the way.
That's why I'm voting Libertarian.
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"See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too." -- Linus Torvalds
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Open standards. Open source. Open minds.
The command line is the front line.
Perhaps if they get enough of these notes they'll wise up... after all, Shopping Season is close upon us.
services@lego.com is the address to bug'em yourself. Yes, I know this is liable to slashdot'em. Serves'em right, IMHO.
I'm a big fan of parental responsibility; what your kid sees and does on the net is YOUR problem. But when I can't get in to have a peek and make sure the site is legit because someone insists on shoving a cookie down my craw, it rather sticks there. Yeah, yeah, there are other ways to track, but my inside addresses are NAT'ed and my outside one is part of a huge ISP's block, so a whole lotta damn good that's going to do them... but nooooo, Lego isn't satisfied with a good generic demographic, they want it ALL...
Well, they shall get none from me.
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"If you don' like it, you can kiss my furry little butt!" -- MiB
- #1 (listed) should be the modem
- #2 should be the fax
- #3 answered as voice (or routed by the voicemail modem for processing as a primary number)
- #4 should be processed likewise, only at a different priority, greater or lesser, your choice.
(funky ring signal)Quick, Robin, it's the Batphone!
Oh, I never did say, why answer first as a modem rather than a fax? The odds of those scrooey telemarketers figuring out you're a fax and bombing it with junk (a violation of 47 USC 227, but they don't care) are a lot worse than some ev1L h@X0r d00d breaking into your properly secured (you ARE using 255-character MD5 passwords, aren't you?) Linux or OpenBSD box with the modem....
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Geek by nature.
Linux by choice.
1) Red Hat Linux 7.0 downloaded over my DSL connection :Cue:Cat free from Radio Slack
2)
3) MP3's from MP3.com
4) Internet Junkbuster
5) WinAmp with DeCSS
Grand total: Free-nintey-free.
Isn't life grand?
As for "I already know how to use this".... bullshit, what top-level user interface these days is NOT icon-and-mouse, point-and-click, drop-down-menu? c'mon, you can do better than this...
WMP and Orifice are part of the problem which will be solved when we split the 800 pound gorilla, leaving the apps company to go Open Standards or die. QT is an APPLE standard, exqueeze me? And thatTruth is you didn't ready the Motley Fool article and discover that M$'s business model is already fscked; all the DOJ lawsuit did was enforce that they stop playing dirty pool behind the scenes for long enough for their feet of clay to crumble. Ozymandius' statue is already beginning to lean badly; those in its shadow had best get out the way. Besides, it's not the soccer moms or the third shift losers or whoever else that's home during business hours to answer the polls that actually run the world. Who does is an exercise to the reader.
I have a feeling that if I went out on the street, put up a green sign with silver arches, and called it MacDonalds and started selling chicken sandwiches, that the company that has sold Billions and Billions would have proper recourse to land on me with a ton of lawyers. But here in cyberspace, it's *just* a typo?
I don't think so. And even if it is, when folks like the 800 pound gorilla from Redmond get into the act, it won't stay that way long, DOJ lawsuits aside. And for once, I think that's as it should be. www.whitehouse.com indeed, don't try that not-a-link unless you're 18.....
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That Isaac Hayes, he's one baaaad mutha...(Hush yo mouth!)
I'm just talkin' 'bout Chef! (We can dig it!)
1) Traditional BSCS college grads
2) U.S. Navy (or Marine Corps) ratings
3) Tech-school (e.g. DeVry) program grads
And I notice something else: The BSCS types (including myself) had something in common with the sailors and the certificate holders: Practical experience before graduation. We either got jobs with the computer center or a department or school doing practical things with computers, or we entered the Co-Op program and did real work for real companies as interns. Whatever the route, we had real-world experience on our resumes before the school ever deigned to give us our paper and set us free.
Bottom line: Get your schooling, however you choose, but make it practical . Make sure you have something to offer that recruiter when you hand him that piece of bond that has your life's work on it.... not a lot of fluff. The theory, the philosophy, the social conditioning, this is all well and good and useful, and I recommend it for those with those for whom it fits.... but get PRACTICAL, and you'll find success.
warp eight bot
near-old-f@rt
the point of this thing is plug'n'play; if you want full flex, I agree with the original poster, get yourself a 486 and put Slack on it, shut down all but ssh and lpd, and away you go. The real issue here is whether people time or hardware has more priority in your budget.
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Another sneaky bastard running Linux