I hadn't intended this to be a "Slashdot sux " post -- I mean, I did offer what I think is a good solution, and one that's been endorsed by a Russian below.
And I agree with you about the "thirst for knowledge". I'd never heard of Togliatti, let alone known that it's a major city whose female inhabitants are eager to meet a foreign husband. (No disrespect meant to Togliatti, that was the only web page in English I could find about it.) And I agree about the worthlessness of recurring flamebait topics.
Nonetheless, the front page of Slashdot is a scarce, valuable resource and it seems to me it should have a higher threshold than "vaguely interesting tidbit of information". To me, this question has nothing to do with technology, except that the object involves happens to be a computer, is extremely specific and is much more appropriate for Usenet, IRC or a Russian discussion board. I've got to think there's something more relevant and valuable in the submission queue.
Wow, Flamebait=1, Insightful=1, Interesting=1, Informative=1, Funny=1, Overrated=1, Total=6 I haven't received moderation like that since my post in one of the "MS sues Andover" stories scored 8 of 10 categories.
I can't imagine how this qualifies as front-page News For Nerds (was it the passing mention of Linux?) but if you live near a city with a Russian immigrant neighborhood, a walk down one block should take you past multiple signs advertising shipping services for goods and money.
If you're in Kansas or something, maybe somebody living near Brighton Beach or West Hollywood could look out the window and give you a phone number to try?
Cliff, I can't find my car keys. Could you post an Ask Slashdot about it?
My favorite is the crank to power a palm if your battery dies.
Apple fans will remember when the rumor sites were claiming that the forthcoming portable (which turned out to be the iBook) was going to be powered by a hand crank. See this old As The Apple Turns article.
It's not that ludicrous -- the wind-up generator technology is better than you might think, PowerPC's are very efficient, particularly G3s, and Apple did used to make the eMate, which might have been able to get away with hand-power with its flash memory and terrific battery life. Still, it was pretty ludicrous.
I had the same thoughts when I first read that article yesterday. I get the impression, though, that RMS genuinely was trying to be friendly and conciliatory, but suffers from a total lack of social skills. Probably this new response should be interpreted as, "I apologize if people misunderstood what I wrote last week. I meant to applaud Troll Tech and to put to rest any lingering tensions between the FSF community and the Qt/KDE developers."
Anyway, enough of this stuff. KDE 2 RC1 is now tagged and coming soon -- if people have pent-up energy, they can direct it into bug reports.
The computer was named "Enterprise". On the bottom of the keyboard was a sticky with the word "Picard" on it. Yes, it was the root password. Similar stickys were to be found on the bottom of nearly every computer in the place.
I doubt if you would even need the stickies to get root on the other systems:
In this particular case, people were automatically signed up for these mailings just because they signed up for Hotmail.
I guess my view comes down to this: When they signed up for Hotmail, did they check a box saying they wanted to receive these mailings or did they fail to uncheck a box?
If it's the former, I hardly think it's "spam" to send them a mailing. If the latter, I don't recognize that as "opt-in" in the first place. Maybe I'm just giving them too much credit for the permission they did supposedly solicit.
Nonetheless, maybe there should be some middle-ground terminology for mailings that aren't as properly solicited as they ought to have been that distinguishes them from 6 identical copies of a "Make Money Fast" letter with forged headers and a misleading subject line sent through an open mailer in Chad.
by anonymous cowerd (WKiernan@concentric.net) on Saturday September 09, @02:09PM EDT (#782)
At the time you posted this, there have already been eight people explaining to me, with various degrees of rudeness and historical inaccuracy, that "X" has long been used as an abbrevaition for Christ.
Yes, I know that! I've explained that I know that 17 hours ago. Let me try this one last time before I give up on this thread.
Once more, I know that "X" is a traditional abbreviation for Christ. What did you think -- that I stand outside department stores wondering, "X-mas sale? What's that?" For that matter, how did you think I knew that "xtian" referred to Christians?
Once more, that has nothing to do with my point, which is that "xtian" is used here as a nasty reference to Christians. The people yapping at me that "Oh no, there's nothing negative about it." remind me of the racists who refer to blacks as coloreds, and defend it by saying, "Look at the NAACP! They call themselves coloreds!". If you're going to be a bigot, at least have the guts to stand behind it. Slurs exist in the social context in which they're used. I'd have to be as stupid and ignorant as people are accusing me of being if I didn't recognize hate when I see it.
Besides, you and the rest of the folks giving me a hard time already know that, don't you? For the obligatory geek cultural reference, "There's a fine line between clever and stupid."
By the way, Mencken was an unfunny, classist, cheap-shot artist prick.
Here's a novel idea. Instead of expending all this effort on hiding from the law, why don't you concentrate on creating some original work that people will want, and making it available under whatever terms you see fit? I realize it's easier and more glamorous to devise a way to redistribute other people's creations against their wishes, but wouldn't you get more satisfaction out of making your own contribution to the world?
I'm not sure what to think about this. On the one hand, I hate spam, I'm an enthusiastic SpamCop user and this lawsuit sounds more like intimidation than a valid legal case.
On the other hand, it seems to me that MAPS went overboard in claiming that the failure to use double opt-in creates the status of spam that should be blocked. Who uses double opt-in? It definitely sounds like they're applying a double standard to Harris, and acting out some grudge against the company.
I hear people say stuff like this all the time. Somehow, they always seem to have a comprehensive list of all the negative things religion has brought to the world (which is considerable) but it never occurs to them that the negative should be weighed against the positive.
But that's irrelevant to my point. The responses to my original post include several textbook examples of the "hostile to organized religion in general" mindset. Now you tell me -- do any of these guys give an impression of tolerance or respect for those whose beliefs differ from their own? Whether or not their anger and bile are justified, they're certainly not impressing me with their openmindedness.
Flame away! I'm neither religious nor a Christian.
Yes, I'm aware that X has long been used as an abbreviation for Christ. Nonetheless, if you do a web search for "xtian" you'll see that in our society it's being used exclusively as a term of derision and contempt, not out of any concern for historical accuracy. And I've only seen it used here to convey nastiness.
Could it theoretically be used in a neutral or positive way? Sure. But it's not used that way and I'm objecting to the way in which it is used.
I wasn't going to comment, because I consider this sort of "Geeks like Lego" "Hackers like guns" pigeonholing to be condescending and stupid. But what caught my eye was:
Even hackers who identify with a religious affiliation tend to be relaxed about it, hostile to organized religion in general and all forms of religious bigotry in particular. Many enjoy `parody' religions such as Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius.
To my mind, "hostile to organized religion in general" and "enjoy `parody' religions" come a lot closer to being religious bigotry than they are to being hostile to religious bigotry.
While I'm on the subject, an example that you see here frequently is the use of "xtian" and "fundie". I'm neither an xtian nor a fundie, but I find that sort of gratuitous nastiness distasteful. It only makes me think less of the person who uses it, not the person it's directed at.
Is it just my browser (IE 5.0 on MacOS) or are the rest of you also having trouble following the links to their sidebars? Whenever there's a link to an example or a result, I'm just reloading the original page.
Between the authors and Webmonkey, you'd think someone involved would know how to format a link properly!
David Lehn and Hadley Stern have on occasion been called obsessive. David is a senior information architect and interface developer in the Milan office of Razorfish. Hadley is a senior designer in Razorfish's Boston office.
OK, this is somewhat off-topic, but it's a good story and it's sort of pertinent.
I was on a Boston to New York shuttle flight that gets stuck on the runway for 3 hours with no explanation. Worse, I'm sitting in front of three idiot consultants from Razorfish who spend the whole time talking loudly and incessantly. Remarkably, not one word of it resembled any productive activity in the slightest. "So, I conducted a series of group discussion sessions to quantify how they establish their procedures." "But, Bianca, how did you formulate the framework for evaluating their paradigms?" I was thinking back to the Slashdot article where a client sued Razorfish for delivering a shoddy site and wondered whether these clowns had worked that project.
My favorite line - Bianca is irate because a client asked her for some concrete bit of information: "Can you believe that? Hello? I'm an Information Architect, not a Knowledge Engineer!"
If it makes you feel better, most of these were posted. You were just one of 10,000 people who wrote in with the stories like the Gnome Foundation. And the Stile Project thing was a hoax, anyway, wasn't it?
Now, if you want to hear some whining, check out this story. I submitted the same thing two years before and had it rejected. Then I submitted it again when a patent was awarded for the algorithm. At that point, I figured if Slashdot was rejecting a story about the patenting of a censorware algorithm (!), they must really be uninterested. Then this story appears about three months later.
Any program written in C or C++ could potentially suffer from the same problems... And that INCLUDES MacOS.
This topic is out my league, but drawing on my recollection of Mac Toolbox programming -- are you sure? It would seem to me that there's a big difference between using printf to send a string to Unix standard output and drawing a string in QuickDraw, and that it's a lot easier to do something malicious to the system with the former than the latter.
Not that gaining root on a Mac would be such a huge accomplishment anyway...
As with all Slashdot stories like this, it's never clear what the party line would consider an acceptable answer. When the government wants to pass a law, it's not the government's concern and there should be voluntary guidelines. When the software industry establishes guidelines and retailers follow them, put 'em on the wall of shame! Only parents should supervise children! Same thing when schools or libraries try to take control of what children do in their buildings.
Of course, when software companies provide the means to allow parents to determine what their children can do on a computer, Peacefire and the YRO crew start shrieking about that. And when parents simply tell their children what is expected of them, Michael is there to ridicule them for it if the parents' opinions don't match his own.
Like I keep saying here, I'd get a lot less annoyed if they would just drop the hypocracy and say what they really want -- that anyone should be able to sit down at a keyboard and do anything they please. I don't agree with that, but I'd respect it a lot more than the rhetorical bait-and-switch they keep playing.
I'm reminded of the recent Slashdot article on an HNN story about crackers complaining that their criminal record was keeping them from getting computer security jobs. Sounded to me like a bunch of worried skript kiddies who bought into the "Yeah, and even if you do get arrested, you'll get a high-paying job out of it!" myth and found that it's a lot easier to get arrested than it is to get rich. I'm envisioning Kalisto copycats winding up with more trouble than stock.
Yuck. Maybe someone could do us the service of grabbing the actual three sentences of content, wherever they are, and sticking them up on a page somewhere.
Basically, he seems to be saying that Napster should have playlists for different music formats. Anything new here? Radio has had this since, what, the 20's? And the station managers then probably would have told you it's just like having print publications that address different interests.
...and more generally, this kind of line-by-line rebuttal has become standard whenever "The Community" responds to an viewpoint. To me, it comes across as a disrespectful, snotty cheap shot. If you're going to reprint someone's words, reprint them and make your response afterward. The line-by-line format, which I guess is intended to create an impression of, "Not one single word of this makes sense!", disrupts the original statement's flow and development.
I would much prefer to read and consider what both sides have to say than to halt and restart my train of thought while CmdrTaco interrupts with irrelevancies like "Thank god. These folks worked hard to write code to use this piece of hardware, and it would be unfortunate if they were forced to take it down."
On the same note: the internal code name for Delphi 6 is "Iliad". The splash screen for field test releases (I suppose I'm technically violating non-disclosure, but what the heck) shows a bunch of sailing ships and a stirring slogan about "Delphi's Continuing Voyage....somebody obviously has the Iliad confused with the Odyssey.
Well, to me the multiple ships suggest the Iliad more than the Odyssey (Helen's beauty launching a thousand ships). Although the "Continuing Voyage" fits the Odyssey better.
You really took that quote out of context. He says that he prefers to use text tools and UNIX, but on Windows the MS development tools already know where to find all of the files, so he uses those.
Actually, I included even though in many respects they don't match the way I want do business in the text I quoted, although I realized it weakens my point, because I wanted to acknowledge the context. But the main point I wanted to make is that Brian Kernighan uses an IDE where it works for him -- and that the people who say that no worthwhile code could ever be written in anything but a console or an xterm should take note.
Slashdot Mirror
And I agree with you about the "thirst for knowledge". I'd never heard of Togliatti, let alone known that it's a major city whose female inhabitants are eager to meet a foreign husband. (No disrespect meant to Togliatti, that was the only web page in English I could find about it.) And I agree about the worthlessness of recurring flamebait topics.
Nonetheless, the front page of Slashdot is a scarce, valuable resource and it seems to me it should have a higher threshold than "vaguely interesting tidbit of information". To me, this question has nothing to do with technology, except that the object involves happens to be a computer, is extremely specific and is much more appropriate for Usenet, IRC or a Russian discussion board. I've got to think there's something more relevant and valuable in the submission queue.
Wow, Flamebait=1, Insightful=1, Interesting=1, Informative=1, Funny=1, Overrated=1, Total=6
I haven't received moderation like that since my post in one of the "MS sues Andover" stories scored 8 of 10 categories.
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If you're in Kansas or something, maybe somebody living near Brighton Beach or West Hollywood could look out the window and give you a phone number to try?
Cliff, I can't find my car keys. Could you post an Ask Slashdot about it?
---------
Apple fans will remember when the rumor sites were claiming that the forthcoming portable (which turned out to be the iBook) was going to be powered by a hand crank. See this old As The Apple Turns article.
It's not that ludicrous -- the wind-up generator technology is better than you might think, PowerPC's are very efficient, particularly G3s, and Apple did used to make the eMate, which might have been able to get away with hand-power with its flash memory and terrific battery life. Still, it was pretty ludicrous.
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Anyway, enough of this stuff. KDE 2 RC1 is now tagged and coming soon -- if people have pent-up energy, they can direct it into bug reports.
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I doubt if you would even need the stickies to get root on the other systems:
telnet voyager
login: root
password: *******
telnet ds9
login: root
password: *****
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I guess my view comes down to this: When they signed up for Hotmail, did they check a box saying they wanted to receive these mailings or did they fail to uncheck a box?
If it's the former, I hardly think it's "spam" to send them a mailing. If the latter, I don't recognize that as "opt-in" in the first place. Maybe I'm just giving them too much credit for the permission they did supposedly solicit.
Nonetheless, maybe there should be some middle-ground terminology for mailings that aren't as properly solicited as they ought to have been that distinguishes them from 6 identical copies of a "Make Money Fast" letter with forged headers and a misleading subject line sent through an open mailer in Chad.
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At the time you posted this, there have already been eight people explaining to me, with various degrees of rudeness and historical inaccuracy, that "X" has long been used as an abbrevaition for Christ.
Yes, I know that! I've explained that I know that 17 hours ago. Let me try this one last time before I give up on this thread.
By the way, Mencken was an unfunny, classist, cheap-shot artist prick.
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On the other hand, it seems to me that MAPS went overboard in claiming that the failure to use double opt-in creates the status of spam that should be blocked. Who uses double opt-in? It definitely sounds like they're applying a double standard to Harris, and acting out some grudge against the company.
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But that's irrelevant to my point. The responses to my original post include several textbook examples of the "hostile to organized religion in general" mindset. Now you tell me -- do any of these guys give an impression of tolerance or respect for those whose beliefs differ from their own? Whether or not their anger and bile are justified, they're certainly not impressing me with their openmindedness.
Flame away! I'm neither religious nor a Christian.
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Could it theoretically be used in a neutral or positive way? Sure. But it's not used that way and I'm objecting to the way in which it is used.
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Even hackers who identify with a religious affiliation tend to be relaxed about it, hostile to organized religion in general and all forms of religious bigotry in particular. Many enjoy `parody' religions such as Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius.
To my mind, "hostile to organized religion in general" and "enjoy `parody' religions" come a lot closer to being religious bigotry than they are to being hostile to religious bigotry.
While I'm on the subject, an example that you see here frequently is the use of "xtian" and "fundie". I'm neither an xtian nor a fundie, but I find that sort of gratuitous nastiness distasteful. It only makes me think less of the person who uses it, not the person it's directed at.
---------
Between the authors and Webmonkey, you'd think someone involved would know how to format a link properly!
---------
OK, this is somewhat off-topic, but it's a good story and it's sort of pertinent.
I was on a Boston to New York shuttle flight that gets stuck on the runway for 3 hours with no explanation. Worse, I'm sitting in front of three idiot consultants from Razorfish who spend the whole time talking loudly and incessantly. Remarkably, not one word of it resembled any productive activity in the slightest. "So, I conducted a series of group discussion sessions to quantify how they establish their procedures." "But, Bianca, how did you formulate the framework for evaluating their paradigms?" I was thinking back to the Slashdot article where a client sued Razorfish for delivering a shoddy site and wondered whether these clowns had worked that project.
My favorite line - Bianca is irate because a client asked her for some concrete bit of information: "Can you believe that? Hello? I'm an Information Architect, not a Knowledge Engineer!"
---------
Now, if you want to hear some whining, check out this story. I submitted the same thing two years before and had it rejected. Then I submitted it again when a patent was awarded for the algorithm. At that point, I figured if Slashdot was rejecting a story about the patenting of a censorware algorithm (!), they must really be uninterested. Then this story appears about three months later.
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And that INCLUDES MacOS.
This topic is out my league, but drawing on my recollection of Mac Toolbox programming -- are you sure? It would seem to me that there's a big difference between using printf to send a string to Unix standard output and drawing a string in QuickDraw, and that it's a lot easier to do something malicious to the system with the former than the latter.
Not that gaining root on a Mac would be such a huge accomplishment anyway...
---------
Of course, when software companies provide the means to allow parents to determine what their children can do on a computer, Peacefire and the YRO crew start shrieking about that. And when parents simply tell their children what is expected of them, Michael is there to ridicule them for it if the parents' opinions don't match his own.
Like I keep saying here, I'd get a lot less annoyed if they would just drop the hypocracy and say what they really want -- that anyone should be able to sit down at a keyboard and do anything they please. I don't agree with that, but I'd respect it a lot more than the rhetorical bait-and-switch they keep playing.
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It is and it is!
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Basically, he seems to be saying that Napster should have playlists for different music formats. Anything new here? Radio has had this since, what, the 20's? And the station managers then probably would have told you it's just like having print publications that address different interests.
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In fairness to RMS, he explicitly said he doesn't have a problem with that, at least for code written specifically to be linked to Qt.
By the way, KDE 2.0 RC1 is now due on September 14, and the final release on October 16.
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I would much prefer to read and consider what both sides have to say than to halt and restart my train of thought while CmdrTaco interrupts with irrelevancies like "Thank god. These folks worked hard to write code to use this piece of hardware, and it would be unfortunate if they were forced to take it down."
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Well, to me the multiple ships suggest the Iliad more than the Odyssey (Helen's beauty launching a thousand ships). Although the "Continuing Voyage" fits the Odyssey better.
---------
Actually, I included even though in many respects they don't match the way I want do business in the text I quoted, although I realized it weakens my point, because I wanted to acknowledge the context. But the main point I wanted to make is that Brian Kernighan uses an IDE where it works for him -- and that the people who say that no worthwhile code could ever be written in anything but a console or an xterm should take note.
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