In reality, the Puritans were often criticized for having too much fun. They also caught flack for insisting that celibacy was not superior to sex within marriage and even went so far as to extoll the pleasurable virtues of sexuality (within the confines of marital fidelity). Such thoughts were quite scandalous to the Quakers and Catholics of the day.
Which goes to prove the point in a backward sort of way, that the Puritans wanted things THEIR way, and nobody elses. Not too warm, nor too cold, but juuu-uuust right...
Get out of my porridge, you Family Research Council puritans, you...
I don't think the GPL specifies what format they need to furnish it in.
Does too. GPL Terms and Conditions, paragraph 3, section a (and the same terms apply in (b) and (c):
Accompany [the binary] with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on
a medium customarily used for software interchange;
[emphasis mine] 8-track I don't think would qualify these days. Nine-track.... maybe.
I realize the crack about eight-track was tongue-in-cheek... but since the rest of it was at least semi-serious, I wanted to set the record straight... One should be able to beat on them and at least get a series of PKZIP'ed floppies....:) (seriously, IBM used to distribute AIX on floppies among other media... there is precedent...)
-- "We cannot legislate against all the stupid things people will do" -- Jesse Ventura
Hey, bub, I think you're way beyond six-sigma here. About 600 feet out in left field. Missing the whole order of fries out of the happy meal. That, or you didn't read the letter in the first place:
Bringing together Andover.net with VA Linux's Open Source Infrastructure Business Unit gives us a great opportunity to empower open source's most important community sites. We are also bringing their story full circle. Themes, Freshmeat, and Slashdot each started as community sites run on an all volunteer basis. We're giving them an opportunity to work together once again. More than that, we're giving them the resources to play an enduring central role. By bring Andover together with VA, we're assuring the future of these important community sites.
There's also an important subtlety here: economy of scale. It's far cheaper to cut Rob and company a paycheck each month, and put their servers on the Big LAN, than it is to write a charity check every month and have the stockholders wonder whether the investment is worth it. Besides, Slashdot's ad rates go up when you can say the ad circulates to all VA sites rather than just Slashdot or even just Andover.
Besides, Stallman foresaw all this years ago. Folks would figure out how to do Open Source as a business model, and start making money at it. Now people like you get your shorts in a twist because people are actually making money doing what it is they wanted to do all along.... This is not wrong, this is called success.
You know the geeks are serious when they deliberately book a joint that REQUIRES a noose... this is the moral equivalent of sounding General Quarters, All Hands, Man Your Battle Stations....
But seriously, dressing up and booking the best damn club in town proves a point. This is not just another Kevin Mintnick case. What MPAA wants to do is tantamount to implementing Thoughtcrime. Giving up our t-shirts and sandals and donning the monkey suits we are so well known for loathing sends a clear message: We're serious. We're in this for blood, and we don't care if it takes wearing ties to get the job done....
I think Alan sent the loudest message of all. It's not about money, you (MPAA) idiots, although it may take money in the short run to set things right. It's about freedom. It's also about being assumed to be a heinous criminal when all you want to do is have a little harmless, and what should be totally legal, fun, in the privacy of your own computer room.
The kind of legalistic bullying being spouted forth by the likes of MPAA, Amazon, etoys, and the like, has got to stop. And it will... if enough of us beat on them long enough, each in our own way. Nobody said you in particular had to don a tie and go to Boston. I'm sure as hell not. But dig out the credit card and punch up eff.org, or go down to Kinkos and print some 2600 flyers, or just make your friends aware of the situation. Do your bit... and eventually, like a Buck-Buck line, if enough of us land on top of it with both feet, it will crumble.
That will be one hell of a party.
-- "Hey, hey, HEYYYYY!" -- Fat Albert, the Baddest Buck-Buck Breaker of'em all
The fundamental difference between sucking MP3's across the net and using DeCSS to play a DVD on my Linux box, is that I *own* the steenking DVD, legit, paid for, and so long as I don't give away copies or charge people to see it, I should be able to see it on whatever hardware I so choose. Besides, I don't even want an archive copy; I don't believe in wasting that much disk. What the MPAA is doing with DeCSS is like telling a blind guy he can't use his OCR to speak a book aloud. All's he's doing is using different hardware to exploit the media.
They tried similar bovine scatology with DiVX and failed miserably. If these beauzeaux don't get a clue fast, I get the feeling that ESR and I are going to have a little party with our DVD players and some hot lead, and publicize the hell out of it. So maybe VHS isn't as durable as DVD.... that's why you make archive copies. It beats the hell out of kowtowing to those goons' ivory tower.
Feel free to flame the snot out of me, and thrash my karma to hell. That's how I feel about it, and anybody who says I can't do as I please with the bits on a disk I *own* can just stick it.
Okay, instead of siccing some hungry lawyers on them, why not call for an Internet Death Penalty?
I wish.
However, the morass of lawsuits AOL is liable to bring against those of us imposing the IDP on AOL is liable to dwarf the DOJ action against the Beast from Redmond... Remeber, these goons were big enough to buy out Time Warner, and you know how many lawyers Unca Ted and company have.... Damn shame. It would be fun to lance this boil from the butt of the Internet once and for all.
Be that as it may, the mere fact that AOL is getting sued, and the whys publicized, is karma enough for now. Besides, a quick death would be too good for them. Let'em suffer a while.
Anyonw know how good the JFS is? Should we use it?
The IBM JFS as I knew it back in 1990-4 was built like the proverbial brick outhouse. I think in four years of Atlanta summers and their persistient power flickers and outages I lost maybe one file, thanks to the journalling feature.... most of the time the system had already written to journal and didn't even know it hadn't been unmounted cleanly (including one spectacular instance where the power switch on an RS/6000-320 fell victim to a visiting toddler... the boss hadn't been doing anything on the box for a few minutes, and despite his screen being full of X sessions, when I brought it back up, everything was intact; it didn't even bother running fsck. I did, twice, just to make sure. Zero errors).
This is a Good Day for Linux. As soon as Big Blue gets things stable for i386, I <strong>will</strong> be changing file system types.
Glenn Stone, RHCE Unix professional since 1986 (gee, I'm glad I bought that extra disk now!)
(OK, I can use my +1 to post flamebait just as well as he can....)
I'm sorry, AOL knows its target audience is computer illiterate. The answer to "what exactly does saying 'ok' here" is probably undocumented, or, if it is, the docs are either online (after it's too late) or sure as hell not in the "Getting started" skinny version of the manual. If there was TFM to begin with.
In most other professional environments this practice has some dirty name or other, like "churning" or "slamming" or "psychology by the pill"; most are illegal, and the rest will get you a trip before the professional ethics board. What AOL did is not technically illegal, but it's highly unethical, and cost a lot of people a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. I think those people deserve to be richly rewarded for their trouble.... but (gods willing) a jury will be allowed to decide that question. In case anyone forgot, under British common law (which American common law is based on), the jury is allowed to judge the law as well as the facts. The AOL jury-to-be has the power to MAKE their conduct illegal-by-case-law. I hope they do.
Oh, and as for AOheLl and Slime Vermin being already merged.... according to the indications being given out, it's tantamount to a done deal. It might be interesting, however, if for some reason this case in itself held things up...
If nothing else, these so-called "clueless morons" are making a public spectacle of just how BAD yonder so-called ISP really is... and the more we have of that, IMHO the better. I think the plaintiffs should be given a medal for having the cojones to even attempt such a thing.
I know. Down with AOL'ers, down with my karma. But the previous poster noted it better than I... your chickens WILL come home to roost.
I'm an RHCE, and run Mandrake at home. I haven't bothered to mess with *BSD; when I got into throwing M$ off the desktop, Linux was what was ready to hand.
That said, I have one thing for all the daemon-bashers out there: Where would any of us be, any of us including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, et alia ad infinitum nauseumque, without BSD 4.3 networking?
If you jerked all that Berzerkeley code out of "The Internet", The Net As We Know It would cease to exist (at least until we could re-engineer all that, each vendor his own way, and we all know what THAT would entail....)
Bash M$ all you want, I don't care. Leave the daemons alone. Maybe they don't understand that free as in beer doesn't measure up to free as in speech... But without that original codebase and the original idea of giving away sofware, no enthusiasm for Unix in the university setting, no Internet as we know it, and therefore nothing for RMS to get excited or pissed off about, nor anything for Linus to base an OS on. Without the Daemons, there ARE no Penguins. And without Penguins, there would be no Slashdot. And without Slashdot... ~~*&%$# NO CARRIER
Of course "free" isn't free. Reading Dialpad's privacy statement, one discovers they use an "outside ad company" to throw their banner ads up. Which ads "may contain cookies." Cookies are required to run Dialpad. I wonder whose services Dialpad is using to throw ads? Is it Doubleclick? We all know about them....
Then, too, one wonders why a Java app requires IE4 or better on WinDoze.... what Mack-truck-sized hole are they exploiting in order to use Java to grab the sound? Perhaps one should nab the code out of their cache and analyze it.... assuming, of course, that the ELUA didn't prohibit such things.... Hey, there's always the "Platform interoperability" loophole, ne c'est pas?
Maybe for Joe Random WinDoze Jock on a semi-standalone box, this is fine.... particularly if he's only using it for surfing and doesn't have anything of value on it... but this little penguinmeister is going to give Dialpad a wide berth.
warp eight bot, RHCE Goal: No M$, no Intel, no closed source software Only Netscape and Real Player left... go Mozilla, go Shoutcast!
Any good programmer knows that sometimes there's no substitute for treeware, particularly if you don't have the monster monitor from hell on your desk. It's bloody difficult to use a highlighter on a CRT, or scribble in its margins. This goes triple for the source code you're hacking on.
Actually, a good solution (perhaps not the best) is that new CD O'Reilly is selling that has all six of their Perl books on it, that just happens to come tucked in the back of a treeware version of the Nutshell. (It also comes with a search engine, but apparently O'Reilly's R&D department is sadly WinDoze-centric...:( ) No, I don't have the bloody URL for it. Besides, I wouldn't want to be seen as advertising one bookseller over another, particularly given the current political climate concerning a certain 250-pound-and-growing-fast gorilla of an e-bookseller we have in this town... as if Boeing and Microsoft weren't gorillas enough... jeez.
But really, if you already have the proper filters in place and know good code on sight, then, no, books are often more frustrating than not. This is not this book's target audience. OpenSpace doesn't need the book... but my friend across town who's just getting the hang of the whole coding thang... might. My ten-year-old friend who is just being allowed to tinker with web publishing stuff for the first time... most certainly.
Something us olde farte geeks tend to forget is that there are, in fact, newbies out there, and that if we don't train them correctly the first time, they turn into script kiddies instead of budding hackers. Doubleplusungood. Thus the need for good treeware docs.
-- "Hey, rat!" yeah? "Where's your rat hat?" (points atop flagpole) there. "Get it."
Something subtle was missed here. LNUX is overvalued by traditional measures, sure. What Larry said was (reading between the lines here) they're not overvalued with respect to the rest of the market. Perception is everything on The Street. If Dell sneezes, Compaq and Gateway get colds. If Bob Young screws the pooch, ESR loses a few mil on paper. It's not really what's going on under the hood, it's what you can get the men in pinstripes to believe. Bob Young has them believing in Open Source as a business model. Therefore anyone who can survive the IPO gauntlet is worth five big ones with a B, simply because that's what The Street THINKS they'll be worth somewhere ages and ages hence.
Mar-ket-ing. it's that simple. Convince the suits its real, and it is. Doesn't mean I begrudge any of the beneficiaries their money. It's just the reality of the situation.
-- In 1999, the CEO of SCO called Linux second-rate hackerware. In 2000, SCO announced they were supporting Linux. Wonder if that makes SCO a bunch of second-rate hackers?
Now, what I thought I just read was "Government is ineffectual" followed by "Call your congresscritter." Ummmm, huh?
Government is not the answer to individual privacy, just as government is not the answer to individual security. Government can make it easier or more difficult to do these things, but ultimately it comes down to individual responsibility. Frankly, the best way for government to make anything easier is to get the hell out the way and let us do our thing. (Actually, the Europeans' various privacy legislation isn't such a bad attempt, but if you think the American Congress is going to pass any such thing, I have a steak dinner that says you're sadly mistaken.)
Folks, our privacy is being taken away with technology. We can use technology (or the lack of it) to fight this. Junkbuster is an excellent example. Refusing supermarket club cards, and choosing who you shop with by how they respect your privacy, is another. Joining EFF, and contributing to other worthy organizations like EPIC, is yet another.
We might be able, over time, to bludgeon the rotters in the District O'Crime into respecting us... which is why EPIC and such are worthy causes. But for the nonce, we are far more effective at protecting our privacy as individuals than as subjects of the Imperial Federal Government. IF your congresscritter will listen, talk to him. My last one would not (in fact, she was a Communist... but I digress). But in the short term, protecting privacy is simply a matter of using your head and the word "no"... and voting with your feet.
Oh, one way to keep track of issues that I haven't seen posted here before: The Privacy mailing list, which IIRC is a digest of comp.society.privacy (not posting to Usenet is a good way to keep one's email private!), which is available from privacy-request@vortex.com. Simply being aware of what's out there is one of the best ways to run a clean operation.
In The Art of War Sun Tsu says that if you know your enemy, and you know yourself, you have already won half the battle. You can use the Net, one of the very things being used to take your privacy, to learn about the enemy. You can learn what it knows about you. And once you do that, you can then figure out how to control it, make it work *for* you. I leave the rest to the reader.
but she will never succeed in changing the behavior of college kids. The University of Tennessee has for years run dorm space with no opposite sex visitation allowed (the so-called Virgin Vault:).... but that never stopped rebellious and resourceful Vol coeds (male and female) from sneaking into their opposite numbers' quarters in order to *ahem* discuss the Big Bang Theory. Nor does it prevent them from simply living off campus (or worse:) yet, in a Greek house) and thus circumventing all the restrictions altogether. (Alcohol is completely and totally prohibited on UT campus. Greek houses, however, are private property.... can you say, KEGGER?)
What goes beyond all reason, though, is the censorship of political ideas. Is it not the function of an institute of higher learning to revel in the free exchange of ideas, and by doing so to expand one's mind? College students are, mostly, of the age of majority (at least to vote), and neither need nor desire protection from so-called dangerous ideas.
The poor lady is deluded if she thinks she's going to do anything more than be a giant pain in the toosh to the good people of the State of Arizona. But I think it goes beyond that. The lady wants complete and total control of the still-malleable minds present in her state's universities, and she's like to get it if she's not stopped.
By whatever means necessary.
She thinks she has the right to impose her morals on adults. She would use the power of the state, which is the power of legal[sic] violence, in order to do so. This is doubleplusungood. She wouldn't get her way this time, as I've said, but that won't stop her from using increasingly more draconian measures in order to do so. And remember, she has the State's guns to back her up.
The Internet censorship issue is more than likely provably a First Amendment violation. But I don't think we should have to wait that long for our freedom. McGrath has been exposed. She should now be removed as a representative and steward of the peoples' rights. I leave it to the people of Arizona as to how.
-- We cannot legislate against all the stupid things people will do. -- Jesse Ventura, Governor of Minnesota
Well, in the free ISP biz, you get what you pay for...
Ummm, well, that's just the problem, isn't it? You can get your bitpipe for free, but you have to bow down before the altar of Redmond and pay them copious amounts of gold coin in order to make your computer run at all, and then you have to spend more money in the form of blood, sweat, and tears dealing with system crashes, eaten registrys, viruses, ad infinitum, nauseumque.... and that's just to get the chance to click on the stupid banner ads.
No, thankee. Me, I pay for my bits, but my operating system, and several others like and unlike it, is free, my tools are free, my security needs are met in a timely manner, my computer doesn't get viruses or eat its (non-existient) registry; and I will soon be installing a (free!) tool to make my surfing more or less banner-free. (not totally so; there are a few sites whose banners I'm deliberately going to allow thru; this one among them, because I want Taco to be able to feed himself.)
Yeah, you get what you pay for. I pay for what I want: a bitpipe, and good tech support for it (i.e. NOT the ILEC.... but don't get me started on that topic...). I don't have to pay for my OS, any of my software, or (in wasted bandwidth) ads I don't want. (As far as tech support for my OS, well, that's between my ears, mostly; I have a piece of paper with a Red Hat on it that says so.)
I, for one, like it that way. YMMV.
-- Warp Eight Bot, RHCE (but not averse to *BSD or Be either)
And just for the halibut, my favorite undeclared choice, Jesse Ventura, who, while he doesn't have a campaign website, does have a website on his current administration (http://www.jesseventura.com/), which runs (drumroll please) Apache+PHP on Linux! (My man is with it.)
Normally, I'm not a karma whore, but folks need to know about more than just the aforementioned heffalumps and woozles when they go to choose who will lead this nation into the 21st century (which starts in another 345 days!) For freedom, eh?
p.s. these are NOT THE ONLY GOOD CANDIDATES, go find your own, alreddie... and post back!
Who in Hell moderated this UP? (words chosen carefully)
I read the article. I didn't see where he bashed anything relating to religion. I haven't seen anywhere else where Katz has bashed religion, either, although I've skipped a bit of his later stuff...
I don't know where Laser Brains up there gets his delusions, but just because he doesn't post a bible verse with every article doesn't mean Katz is out for your immortal soul, nor is he deserving of this kind of b.s. Katz may be half a bubble off plumb, but he's no demon. Far from it, he's definitely in the fuzzy bunnies and sweetness and light crowd.
Actually, come to think of it, that kind of stuff needs to be moderated up... and "exposed" for what it is. I should compile a book of same, and stick it over here on the shelf with Mein Kampf and my Orwell collection. The kinds of things that make you have nightmares.
There are WAY too many people in this world who profess christianity but have no idea who Joshua ben Joseph of Nazereth was or what he stood for. I think the world would be a better place if just a few of them got on the stick and figured that out.
Being on the computer for a long time makes me more into a computer person. Good or Ill? Ill I say. Machines, tho vastly palatable and convenient, are finite. Reality, nature, people, etc... is infinite. Computers point straight into the land of dreams. Dreams are hollow.
No, dreams are what you make of them. Unfortunately, too many people, rather than using the box and the net as a tool to have more than they had before, use cyberspace as an escape.... and end up with less than what they had before.
Some folks choose to lose themselves in MUDs and chat rooms, or worse, these high-speed shoot-em-up netgames like Everquest, and end up spending not just many hours, but a goodly chunk of their income, feeding an ever-burgeoning habit. I'm a high-speed data junkie, too, but I choose to use it to tell friends about the next anime party I'm throwing where there will be real, huggable people present cooking homemade stir-fry and looking one another in the face, and to send pictures and stories of my life to my inlaws (both sets) who are 2000 miles away....
No, folks, I'm living one of my dreams... making the big dime, living in a good geek town among friends, lots of opportunity to advance career, do whatever kind of recreation I want, and I find myself less and less addicted to the square-headed girlfriend, despite the fact I just got my big feed hooked up. Using the Net to your best advantage means you end up using it LESS, not MORE.
Heck of an opportunity for an apartment developer, isn't it?
Been done. A certain well-known developer in Atlanta wired the whole joint for ISDN.... and finished the build-out about the time DSL and cable modems got started. Poor slobs.
Me, I picked my apartment by its distance from the CO... no DSL, no deal. High speed data doesn't just define college life... it drives where its graduates live and work. Once you've got that addiction going, you do not want to ever get away from it, and will pay big bucks to make sure things work right.
Tau Zero is right. Accessibility to some sort of high-speed net, be it broadband or DSL or some new sort of wireless, is going to be a Big Selling Point Real Soon Now for apartments and subdivisions in major geek towns like Atlanta, Silicon Valley, Seattle.... and the first developer or management company to figure this out and implement and market it successfully stands to make a mint. After all, us geeks make the big dime, and can afford to pay.:)
Linux has made it this far without anything as extravagent as Codewarrior.
There's still large factions that say that the CLI is superior to the GUI.
There are hundreds of free alternative to Code Warrior.
It seems understandable for a company to doubt how much impact their product will have on a hugely saturated market.
Yes, but we don't have to like it. And we don't have to just sit idly by and let Motorola, who just happens to produce one of the most butt-kicking desktop/supermini chips in the world (the PowerPC), and who should know better, do that. The more folks we have, particularly companies of that size, the better this will work.
And it's not just for Linux, either. It's for the BSD's, and for free software in general. In short, we all win. So go sign the bleeding petition alreddie.
-- "I wanna find your inner child / and kick its little ass!" -- Don Henley, "Get Over It!"
This Libertarian think there needs to be some limit on how big and evil a company can get. Microsoft is evil because it used its market position to force crappy products on vendors and ultimately a lot of end users. (see also Internet Exploder.) AOL-TW would be evil because it would (not could, would) use its market position to... well, force isn't the right word here, "foist", perhaps? crappy content directly on the end user, with no need for intervening with vendors.
There is an FCC reg which says you can't own the dominant newspaper AND a TV station AND a radio station in the same town. (Cox Communications in Atlanta notwithstanding... they paid somebody off and got a waiver.) Despite my usually laissez-faire attitude, I think this is a good idea. There is such a thing as having control over too much content, and IMHO 30% is way too close to 50%.... when you control cable plant, over half the cable content, a goodly number of print organs, and you're now going to thump in and nab a third of the Internet as well... doubleplusungood.
True, those who Know Which End Is Up will get DSL from a CLEC, get their news from Yahoo's Rueters feed (thank the gods for British media), run Linux on their desktop, and be happy well-informed people... but all that means exactly jack when it comes election time. Us penguins get squashed. (I dare you to convince me that AOL-TW and MS-NBC wouldn't conspire to put some pro-monopolist in office if they could get away with it.) I'm sorry, this doesn't fly.
Time to write your congresscritter and tell him you want this investigated. This has two benefits: It slows the process to a crawl, hopefully starving it of resources so it won't happen, and it also keeps Congress busy so it doesn't pass any more assinine laws than it already has.
Goebbels was one of the greatest marketting geniuses of history. He managed to sell genocide to the masses, he justified it and made people believe it was the right thing. He made it into something people rooted for, or at least wouldn't speak out against. Not even Microsoft has been more successful. Goebbels did his job, right or wrong is not at issue. Much like Johnny Cochran did his job defending O.J., right or wrong was not at issue.
Ummm, yeah, it was. O.J. walked, and six million Jews took a walk and didn't come back. But the universe has a habit of snapping back, wash after wash... O.J. had his stuff auctioned off and will never have a sane girlfried again. Goebbels took a dirt nap courtesy of a Nazi orderly rather than face Allied justice.
It is up to us to remember the lessons buried in those tradgedys, so that they don't happen again.
I think it would be a good thing for IBM's customers if they would open up SNA, perhaps offer source for an SNA driver for the Linux kernel. That would allow for bridges between SNA and TCP/IP systems, and would give a nice migration path for people who want to move away from SNA in a slow, well planned fashion, as well as better functionality for people who are fine with SNA and want to stay there.
Already been done, by Turbo Linux. Token Ring and Ethernet drivers, TN3270/TN5250 servers, tech support, the whole nine yards. All GPL'ed. Check it out on http://www.linux-sna.org.
Slashdot Mirror
Get out of my porridge, you Family Research Council puritans, you...
I realize the crack about eight-track was tongue-in-cheek... but since the rest of it was at least semi-serious, I wanted to set the record straight... One should be able to beat on them and at least get a series of PKZIP'ed floppies.... :) (seriously, IBM used to distribute AIX on floppies among other media... there is precedent...)
--
"We cannot legislate against all the stupid things people will do" -- Jesse Ventura
Besides, Stallman foresaw all this years ago. Folks would figure out how to do Open Source as a business model, and start making money at it. Now people like you get your shorts in a twist because people are actually making money doing what it is they wanted to do all along.... This is not wrong, this is called success.
More power to'em.
But seriously, dressing up and booking the best damn club in town proves a point. This is not just another Kevin Mintnick case. What MPAA wants to do is tantamount to implementing Thoughtcrime. Giving up our t-shirts and sandals and donning the monkey suits we are so well known for loathing sends a clear message: We're serious. We're in this for blood, and we don't care if it takes wearing ties to get the job done....
I think Alan sent the loudest message of all. It's not about money, you (MPAA) idiots, although it may take money in the short run to set things right. It's about freedom. It's also about being assumed to be a heinous criminal when all you want to do is have a little harmless, and what should be totally legal, fun, in the privacy of your own computer room.
The kind of legalistic bullying being spouted forth by the likes of MPAA, Amazon, etoys, and the like, has got to stop. And it will... if enough of us beat on them long enough, each in our own way. Nobody said you in particular had to don a tie and go to Boston. I'm sure as hell not. But dig out the credit card and punch up eff.org, or go down to Kinkos and print some 2600 flyers, or just make your friends aware of the situation. Do your bit... and eventually, like a Buck-Buck line, if enough of us land on top of it with both feet, it will crumble.
That will be one hell of a party.
--
"Hey, hey, HEYYYYY!" -- Fat Albert, the Baddest Buck-Buck Breaker of'em all
They tried similar bovine scatology with DiVX and failed miserably. If these beauzeaux don't get a clue fast, I get the feeling that ESR and I are going to have a little party with our DVD players and some hot lead, and publicize the hell out of it. So maybe VHS isn't as durable as DVD.... that's why you make archive copies. It beats the hell out of kowtowing to those goons' ivory tower.
Feel free to flame the snot out of me, and thrash my karma to hell. That's how I feel about it, and anybody who says I can't do as I please with the bits on a disk I *own* can just stick it.
However, the morass of lawsuits AOL is liable to bring against those of us imposing the IDP on AOL is liable to dwarf the DOJ action against the Beast from Redmond... Remeber, these goons were big enough to buy out Time Warner, and you know how many lawyers Unca Ted and company have.... Damn shame. It would be fun to lance this boil from the butt of the Internet once and for all.
Be that as it may, the mere fact that AOL is getting sued, and the whys publicized, is karma enough for now. Besides, a quick death would be too good for them. Let'em suffer a while.
This is a Good Day for Linux. As soon as Big Blue gets things stable for i386, I <strong>will</strong> be changing file system types.
Glenn Stone, RHCE
Unix professional since 1986
(gee, I'm glad I bought that extra disk now!)
I'm sorry, AOL knows its target audience is computer illiterate. The answer to "what exactly does saying 'ok' here" is probably undocumented, or, if it is, the docs are either online (after it's too late) or sure as hell not in the "Getting started" skinny version of the manual. If there was TFM to begin with.
In most other professional environments this practice has some dirty name or other, like "churning" or "slamming" or "psychology by the pill"; most are illegal, and the rest will get you a trip before the professional ethics board. What AOL did is not technically illegal, but it's highly unethical, and cost a lot of people a lot of blood, sweat, and tears. I think those people deserve to be richly rewarded for their trouble.... but (gods willing) a jury will be allowed to decide that question. In case anyone forgot, under British common law (which American common law is based on), the jury is allowed to judge the law as well as the facts. The AOL jury-to-be has the power to MAKE their conduct illegal-by-case-law. I hope they do.
Oh, and as for AOheLl and Slime Vermin being already merged.... according to the indications being given out, it's tantamount to a done deal. It might be interesting, however, if for some reason this case in itself held things up...
If nothing else, these so-called "clueless morons" are making a public spectacle of just how BAD yonder so-called ISP really is... and the more we have of that, IMHO the better. I think the plaintiffs should be given a medal for having the cojones to even attempt such a thing.
I know. Down with AOL'ers, down with my karma. But the previous poster noted it better than I... your chickens WILL come home to roost.
To add to what was said up there:
I'm an RHCE, and run Mandrake at home. I haven't bothered to mess with *BSD; when I got into throwing M$ off the desktop, Linux was what was ready to hand.
That said, I have one thing for all the daemon-bashers out there: Where would any of us be, any of us including IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Sun, et alia ad infinitum nauseumque, without BSD 4.3 networking?
If you jerked all that Berzerkeley code out of "The Internet", The Net As We Know It would cease to exist (at least until we could re-engineer all that, each vendor his own way, and we all know what THAT would entail....)
Bash M$ all you want, I don't care. Leave the daemons alone. Maybe they don't understand that free as in beer doesn't measure up to free as in speech... But without that original codebase and the original idea of giving away sofware, no enthusiasm for Unix in the university setting, no Internet as we know it, and therefore nothing for RMS to get excited or pissed off about, nor anything for Linus to base an OS on. Without the Daemons, there ARE no Penguins. And without Penguins, there would be no Slashdot. And without Slashdot... ~~*&%$#
NO CARRIER
:)
Of course "free" isn't free. Reading Dialpad's privacy statement, one discovers they use an "outside ad company" to throw their banner ads up. Which ads "may contain cookies." Cookies are required to run Dialpad. I wonder whose services Dialpad is using to throw ads? Is it Doubleclick? We all know about them....
Then, too, one wonders why a Java app requires IE4 or better on WinDoze.... what Mack-truck-sized hole are they exploiting in order to use Java to grab the sound? Perhaps one should nab the code out of their cache and analyze it.... assuming, of course, that the ELUA didn't prohibit such things.... Hey, there's always the "Platform interoperability" loophole, ne c'est pas?
Maybe for Joe Random WinDoze Jock on a semi-standalone box, this is fine.... particularly if he's only using it for surfing and doesn't have anything of value on it... but this little penguinmeister is going to give Dialpad a wide berth.
warp eight bot, RHCE
Goal: No M$, no Intel, no closed source software
Only Netscape and Real Player left... go Mozilla, go Shoutcast!
Any good programmer knows that sometimes there's no substitute for treeware, particularly if you don't have the monster monitor from hell on your desk. It's bloody difficult to use a highlighter on a CRT, or scribble in its margins. This goes triple for the source code you're hacking on.
:( ) No, I don't have the bloody URL for it. Besides, I wouldn't want to be seen as advertising one bookseller over another, particularly given the current political climate concerning a certain 250-pound-and-growing-fast gorilla of an e-bookseller we have in this town... as if Boeing and Microsoft weren't gorillas enough... jeez.
Actually, a good solution (perhaps not the best) is that new CD O'Reilly is selling that has all six of their Perl books on it, that just happens to come tucked in the back of a treeware version of the Nutshell. (It also comes with a search engine, but apparently O'Reilly's R&D department is sadly WinDoze-centric...
But really, if you already have the proper filters in place and know good code on sight, then, no, books are often more frustrating than not. This is not this book's target audience. OpenSpace doesn't need the book... but my friend across town who's just getting the hang of the whole coding thang... might. My ten-year-old friend who is just being allowed to tinker with web publishing stuff for the first time... most certainly.
Something us olde farte geeks tend to forget is that there are, in fact, newbies out there, and that if we don't train them correctly the first time, they turn into script kiddies instead of budding hackers. Doubleplusungood. Thus the need for good treeware docs.
--
"Hey, rat!" yeah?
"Where's your rat hat?" (points atop flagpole) there.
"Get it."
Something subtle was missed here. LNUX is overvalued by traditional measures, sure. What Larry said was (reading between the lines here) they're not overvalued with respect to the rest of the market. Perception is everything on The Street. If Dell sneezes, Compaq and Gateway get colds. If Bob Young screws the pooch, ESR loses a few mil on paper. It's not really what's going on under the hood, it's what you can get the men in pinstripes to believe. Bob Young has them believing in Open Source as a business model. Therefore anyone who can survive the IPO gauntlet is worth five big ones with a B, simply because that's what The Street THINKS they'll be worth somewhere ages and ages hence.
Mar-ket-ing. it's that simple. Convince the suits its real, and it is. Doesn't mean I begrudge any of the beneficiaries their money. It's just the reality of the situation.
--
In 1999, the CEO of SCO called Linux second-rate hackerware. In 2000, SCO announced they were supporting Linux. Wonder if that makes SCO a bunch of second-rate hackers?
Now, what I thought I just read was "Government is ineffectual" followed by "Call your congresscritter." Ummmm, huh?
Government is not the answer to individual privacy, just as government is not the answer to individual security. Government can make it easier or more difficult to do these things, but ultimately it comes down to individual responsibility. Frankly, the best way for government to make anything easier is to get the hell out the way and let us do our thing. (Actually, the Europeans' various privacy legislation isn't such a bad attempt, but if you think the American Congress is going to pass any such thing, I have a steak dinner that says you're sadly mistaken.)
Folks, our privacy is being taken away with technology. We can use technology (or the lack of it) to fight this. Junkbuster is an excellent example. Refusing supermarket club cards, and choosing who you shop with by how they respect your privacy, is another. Joining EFF, and contributing to other worthy organizations like EPIC, is yet another.
We might be able, over time, to bludgeon the rotters in the District O'Crime into respecting us... which is why EPIC and such are worthy causes. But for the nonce, we are far more effective at protecting our privacy as individuals than as subjects of the Imperial Federal Government. IF your congresscritter will listen, talk to him. My last one would not (in fact, she was a Communist... but I digress). But in the short term, protecting privacy is simply a matter of using your head and the word "no"... and voting with your feet.
Oh, one way to keep track of issues that I haven't seen posted here before: The Privacy mailing list, which IIRC is a digest of comp.society.privacy (not posting to Usenet is a good way to keep one's email private!), which is available from privacy-request@vortex.com. Simply being aware of what's out there is one of the best ways to run a clean operation.
In The Art of War Sun Tsu says that if you know your enemy, and you know yourself, you have already won half the battle. You can use the Net, one of the very things being used to take your privacy, to learn about the enemy. You can learn what it knows about you. And once you do that, you can then figure out how to control it, make it work *for* you. I leave the rest to the reader.
--
There is no spoon.
In the immortal words of Lestat the Vampire,
"Louis, Louis, Louis, stop whining!"
After all, you get exactly what you pay for.
If you don't like it, grab the tarball and go start one of your own. Whining doesn't become you. (btw, who WAS the jerk that gave him a +3??)
but she will never succeed in changing the behavior of college kids. The University of Tennessee has for years run dorm space with no opposite sex visitation allowed (the so-called Virgin Vault :) .... but that never stopped rebellious and resourceful Vol coeds (male and female) from sneaking into their opposite numbers' quarters in order to *ahem* discuss the Big Bang Theory. Nor does it prevent them from simply living off campus (or worse :) yet, in a Greek house) and thus circumventing all the restrictions altogether. (Alcohol is completely and totally prohibited on UT campus. Greek houses, however, are private property.... can you say, KEGGER?)
What goes beyond all reason, though, is the censorship of political ideas. Is it not the function of an institute of higher learning to revel in the free exchange of ideas, and by doing so to expand one's mind? College students are, mostly, of the age of majority (at least to vote), and neither need nor desire protection from so-called dangerous ideas.
The poor lady is deluded if she thinks she's going to do anything more than be a giant pain in the toosh to the good people of the State of Arizona. But I think it goes beyond that. The lady wants complete and total control of the still-malleable minds present in her state's universities, and she's like to get it if she's not stopped.
By whatever means necessary.
She thinks she has the right to impose her morals on adults. She would use the power of the state, which is the power of legal[sic] violence, in order to do so. This is doubleplusungood. She wouldn't get her way this time, as I've said, but that won't stop her from using increasingly more draconian measures in order to do so. And remember, she has the State's guns to back her up.
The Internet censorship issue is more than likely provably a First Amendment violation. But I don't think we should have to wait that long for our freedom. McGrath has been exposed. She should now be removed as a representative and steward of the peoples' rights. I leave it to the people of Arizona as to how.
--
We cannot legislate against all the stupid things people will do. -- Jesse Ventura, Governor of Minnesota
No, thankee. Me, I pay for my bits, but my operating system, and several others like and unlike it, is free, my tools are free, my security needs are met in a timely manner, my computer doesn't get viruses or eat its (non-existient) registry; and I will soon be installing a (free!) tool to make my surfing more or less banner-free. (not totally so; there are a few sites whose banners I'm deliberately going to allow thru; this one among them, because I want Taco to be able to feed himself.)
Yeah, you get what you pay for. I pay for what I want: a bitpipe, and good tech support for it (i.e. NOT the ILEC.... but don't get me started on that topic...). I don't have to pay for my OS, any of my software, or (in wasted bandwidth) ads I don't want. (As far as tech support for my OS, well, that's between my ears, mostly; I have a piece of paper with a Red Hat on it that says so.)
I, for one, like it that way. YMMV.
--
Warp Eight Bot, RHCE
(but not averse to *BSD or Be either)
[what the Dominant Paradigm candidates are running deleted for brevity]
Harry Browne (http://www.harrybrowne2000.org/) - Apache on BSD
Steve Forbes (http://www.forbes2000.com/) - Netscape Enterprise on Solaris
Alan Keys (http://www.keyes2000.org) - Apache on Solaris
And just for the halibut, my favorite undeclared choice, Jesse Ventura, who, while he doesn't have a campaign website, does have a website on his current administration (http://www.jesseventura.com/), which runs (drumroll please) Apache+PHP on Linux! (My man is with it.)
Normally, I'm not a karma whore, but folks need to know about more than just the aforementioned heffalumps and woozles when they go to choose who will lead this nation into the 21st century (which starts in another 345 days!) For freedom, eh?
p.s. these are NOT THE ONLY GOOD CANDIDATES, go find your own, alreddie... and post back!
--
Elephants and asses
are scamming the masses
Who in Hell moderated this UP? (words chosen carefully)
I read the article. I didn't see where he bashed anything relating to religion. I haven't seen anywhere else where Katz has bashed religion, either, although I've skipped a bit of his later stuff...
I don't know where Laser Brains up there gets his delusions, but just because he doesn't post a bible verse with every article doesn't mean Katz is out for your immortal soul, nor is he deserving of this kind of b.s. Katz may be half a bubble off plumb, but he's no demon. Far from it, he's definitely in the fuzzy bunnies and sweetness and light crowd.
Actually, come to think of it, that kind of stuff needs to be moderated up... and "exposed" for what it is. I should compile a book of same, and stick it over here on the shelf with Mein Kampf and my Orwell collection. The kinds of things that make you have nightmares.
There are WAY too many people in this world who profess christianity but have no idea who Joshua ben Joseph of Nazereth was or what he stood for. I think the world would be a better place if just a few of them got on the stick and figured that out.
Never Again the Burning
I also found elm(1) missing for best curses UI... shoulda been a write-in kinda thing.
Oh, well. Not like I'm getting a beanie anyway....
Some folks choose to lose themselves in MUDs and chat rooms, or worse, these high-speed shoot-em-up netgames like Everquest, and end up spending not just many hours, but a goodly chunk of their income, feeding an ever-burgeoning habit. I'm a high-speed data junkie, too, but I choose to use it to tell friends about the next anime party I'm throwing where there will be real, huggable people present cooking homemade stir-fry and looking one another in the face, and to send pictures and stories of my life to my inlaws (both sets) who are 2000 miles away....
No, folks, I'm living one of my dreams... making the big dime, living in a good geek town among friends, lots of opportunity to advance career, do whatever kind of recreation I want, and I find myself less and less addicted to the square-headed girlfriend, despite the fact I just got my big feed hooked up. Using the Net to your best advantage means you end up using it LESS, not MORE.
Own it. Make sure it doesn't own you.
Me, I picked my apartment by its distance from the CO... no DSL, no deal. High speed data doesn't just define college life... it drives where its graduates live and work. Once you've got that addiction going, you do not want to ever get away from it, and will pay big bucks to make sure things work right.
Tau Zero is right. Accessibility to some sort of high-speed net, be it broadband or DSL or some new sort of wireless, is going to be a Big Selling Point Real Soon Now for apartments and subdivisions in major geek towns like Atlanta, Silicon Valley, Seattle.... and the first developer or management company to figure this out and implement and market it successfully stands to make a mint. After all, us geeks make the big dime, and can afford to pay.
--
They've gone PLAID!
And it's not just for Linux, either. It's for the BSD's, and for free software in general. In short, we all win.
So go sign the bleeding petition alreddie.
--
"I wanna find your inner child / and kick its little ass!" -- Don Henley, "Get Over It!"
This Libertarian think there needs to be some limit on how big and evil a company can get. Microsoft is evil because it used its market position to force crappy products on vendors and ultimately a lot of end users. (see also Internet Exploder.) AOL-TW would be evil because it would (not could, would) use its market position to... well, force isn't the right word here, "foist", perhaps? crappy content directly on the end user, with no need for intervening with vendors.
There is an FCC reg which says you can't own the dominant newspaper AND a TV station AND a radio station in the same town. (Cox Communications in Atlanta notwithstanding... they paid somebody off and got a waiver.) Despite my usually laissez-faire attitude, I think this is a good idea. There is such a thing as having control over too much content, and IMHO 30% is way too close to 50%.... when you control cable plant, over half the cable content, a goodly number of print organs, and you're now going to thump in and nab a third of the Internet as well... doubleplusungood.
True, those who Know Which End Is Up will get DSL from a CLEC, get their news from Yahoo's Rueters feed (thank the gods for British media), run Linux on their desktop, and be happy well-informed people... but all that means exactly jack when it comes election time. Us penguins get squashed. (I dare you to convince me that AOL-TW and MS-NBC wouldn't conspire to put some pro-monopolist in office if they could get away with it.) I'm sorry, this doesn't fly.
Time to write your congresscritter and tell him you want this investigated. This has two benefits: It slows the process to a crawl, hopefully starving it of resources so it won't happen, and it also keeps Congress busy so it doesn't pass any more assinine laws than it already has.
Yes, I'm a proponent of constructive chaos.
--
My name.... is NEO!
It is up to us to remember the lessons buried in those tradgedys, so that they don't happen again.
--
Never Again the Burning. NO!
Cheers...