If you were a real American, you'd be saying fuck the terrorists, period
I hope you can see the stupidity inherent in your rant - first you claim you believe in liberty and then tell me that I'm evil because I don't conform to your idea of what excercising that liberty means.
Use your brain for once for something other than keeping your skull from caving in.
You show an unfortunate propensity to insult people when they disagree with what you think is The Truth. I wonder if I'm expected to be awed or intimidated by that? Here's a bit of advice: only zealots see the world in black and white. There's a lot of grey out there. So stop being a zealot - and stop being Mr. Big Mouth. I very much doubt you'd use such colorful language if I was sitting in front of your sorry ass.
Well, the issue here is the copyright. If the copyright is owned by a corporation that no longer exists, then there's nobody to enforce it. You can't slap another license on top of it. If you release the code to the public domain (because I assume that you can't legally claim the copyright) and make absolutely no money, there's a good chance that nobody will give a rat's ass if your attempts at contacting the former officers of the former company are any indication. If you sell it or claim copyright on it, there's a damn good chance that you'll start to see the previous owners coming out of the woodwork to sue your geek butt - and this of course is also a possibility even if you don't make a dime off the code as someone will probably contest your release to the public domain because it wasn't yours to give away in the first place. People tend to be weird that way.
My advice? There's no way you can just release this without getting an OK (a legal OK) from whomever owns the copyright (this may be the company that auctioned the corp's assets for all you know). If you're the only known holder of this code, you're out of luck. You already posted to/. =) Otherwise you could have just released it to the wild without a peep using Kazaa or Freenet or something like that. Not ideal of course, but it would be better than having it sit on a CD for the next 20 years or whatever the IP laws dictate, and it would have been nearly impossible to trace it back to you, I think.
Pacify? Last I looked we were killing them wholesale.
What's the point of a society where rights are taken away under the premise of protecting them?
The history of this country is full of examples where this happened. This is nothing new, except that now we have the internet to bitch and moan about it. Things right themselves eventually, because society tends to be elastic in its acceptance of tradeoffs in its civil liberties.
I don't know about everyone else, but I'm getting a bit tired of the stupid empathy these stories generate. The poor spoiled kid that wants to overthrow the US government and provides blueprints to build small thermonuclear devices on his website. The poor thing, he got 1 year in jail. Oh my, where is this society going? How can we possibly do something like this to such a nice boy?
PC niceties are fucking killing this country. Racial profiling is evil, so let's submit 90-year old caucasian women to strip searches, just like that nice Saudi gentleman over there. All in the name of social equality.
9/11 changed the rules. The sooner everyone realizes that, the better we'll all be off. Perhaps this kid would have been just another weirdo with a badly designed website in a past life. But this is another world. Our insistence of making believe that everything is OK and should remain exactly the same is pointless and stupid. Let's get with the program. No, it's not nice to send nice youngsters to jail because of what they said in their website. OTOH, if he wants to overthrow the fucking government perhaps he'd like to move to Liberia or Burma. Those governments provide great infrastructure, defense and civil liberties.
Maybe instead of whining, you should just run back to MSFT and get your on-time, $500 software packages [...] if you want it to happen quicker, try contributing code.
Just for shits and giggles, have you ever thought that your wonderful attitude is one of the reasons 'stuff' is missing from open source software? Perhaps -just perhaps- this is the type of thing that drives people away?
Here's an idea. Instead of putting people in their place and 'telling them how it is' when they ask for these far-out things like documentation, serious release schedules and planning and decent GUIs, why not try to understand for a second how normal users think and cutting them some friggin' slack? Wow, that would be fantastic. That way you'll be doing your part to get rid of the short-tempered-elitist-dick image the OSS world unfortunately tends to exude.
considering that the target audience is a bit small and includes a disproportionate number of people that don't use Windows
Unless you provide some proof to the contrary, I'd say the people who put up that website know what their "scene" looks like better than the average/. reader.
Re:Yes, my young skywalker...
on
In-Flight Reboot?
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Most people who post crap like this base their unfunny shit on the last time they installed or use Windows - normally 1995 or 96.
But I can't fault the crackhead mods on this one - it combines Star Wars and "M$" bashing. Very shiny beads indeed - for loser geeks who like to play god on Slashbork from their parents' basement in Wisconsin.
MacOS X costs $130 retail. Compare and contrast to Windows XP
And they charge for the service packs (cunningly referring to them as "upgrades" for the "oooohhh, shiny" crowd). The hardware was expensive enough to being with - so where are my savings again?
Of course some Microsoft service packs are also cunningly referred to as "upgrades"... Win98SE would fall into that category.
What are you blathering about? I haven't had any "install nightmare" on any version of Linux since 5.X ages ago
"Blathering"? "Ages"? Let's see - the FireWire port on my Audigy card, check. My weird-ass NetGear NIC, check. My USB scanner, check. My USB mini drive. Check. My old ATI video card (or S3, I forget) Damn, I needed to turn off frame buffer for that one. Check. Misconfigured GNOME, 4 hours. Check. X not starting because I stupidly wanted to get some pretty fonts on the thing (imagine that). Check.
Oh, and this is with the boxed RH 7.3.
I'm sorry if you feel insulted. I'm not saying Linux can't be made to work with all of that. Just that it's a momumental pain in the ass to get it there. On the same box, Windows 2000 Pro detected and installed everything. Everything. Without problems.
That's what I'm "blathering" about. Hope that helps.
if you want one from one of the major manufacturers
Fair enough - vote with your hard-earned cash and buy a brand of computer that ships with Linux or install it yourself. What's the point of buying a computer from Dell and then badgering them to death because they do what 99.9% of their customers want? That's what I think is pointless. I'd be much more inclined to simpathyze with the guy if he was suing Dell for not selling PCs with Linux (though of course that would work even less).
The point is, the box makers respond to market pressures. They're not going to revise their bundling policies because 50 people take them to small claims court on these grounds. They're making $$$ from the 50,000 that like and enjoy Windows.
And if this is an attempt to save those 50,000 from themselves then I have no simpaty whatsoever.
199 is not a good deal for an operating system if it is never used.
Then buy a computer without the OS. What's so difficult about that?
It does.
That's your opinion. You're entitled to it. In my experience that's almost never the case.
WARNING FLAMEBAIT!
Let me put this as delicately as possible - fuck off and die. If you don't agree with what I say, just say so. If you think I'm posting flamebait, then get some moderator points and play god.
There are people out there - believe it or not - that think $199 is a good deal on an operating system. Myself included. If Linux worked out of the box, I'd probably attach that same monetary value to it, because once you get past the install nightmare it mostly works. Now your assesment of the value attached to the product may vary, and indeed there are people here who think paying $29 for WinZip is a rip-off, so they just pirate it. After all, all software should be "free".
But "many" as applied to the majority of the people who buy computers is stretching it a bit.
Instead of writing an article with epigrams about how you can "stick it to the man", perhaps you should have bought a computer without an OS to begin with. This is not a particularly efficient or visible way to prove that licenses are evil.
"Being Nice to Foriegners", a French government publication "How To Be A Good Sport", by Tonya Harding (feat. Mike Tyson) "How To Win The Super Bowl", by Jim Kelly "The Engineer's Guide to Fashion", a ThinkGeek Book "Easy to use Linux", by Theo de Raadt "Corect Sppeling and Gramar in,, english", by The Slashdot Crew "Business Ethics" by Ken Lay "How to Tell the Truth" by Bill Clinton "Successful Business Plans Using Linux", a Loki Games publication "How to Write Software People Would Want to Buy" by Richard Stallman "Successful Dictatorships", by Saddam Hussein
While many have roasted your opinion, I will add some more heat
Oh fear.
There were several competing DOS versions which offered general compatibilty with each other
Again, what the hell does that have to do with anything?
competition in the form of Cyrix, AMD, and WinChip
I hate to brake it to you, but there's more to a PC than the processor. And all these cheap machines - they were being bought by people running... what? OS/2? CP/M? Amiga? No, they were running Windows. Crappy Windows 3.1, but Windows nonetheless. Is that so hard to grok?
just as there will be a similar move in software over the next few years
Translation: "M$ is teh sux". Which, again, has nothing to do with my original point.
Slashdot Mirror
Next time, read the entire post. It helps.
I hope you can see the stupidity inherent in your rant - first you claim you believe in liberty and then tell me that I'm evil because I don't conform to your idea of what excercising that liberty means.
Use your brain for once for something other than keeping your skull from caving in.
You show an unfortunate propensity to insult people when they disagree with what you think is The Truth. I wonder if I'm expected to be awed or intimidated by that? Here's a bit of advice: only zealots see the world in black and white. There's a lot of grey out there. So stop being a zealot - and stop being Mr. Big Mouth. I very much doubt you'd use such colorful language if I was sitting in front of your sorry ass.
My advice? There's no way you can just release this without getting an OK (a legal OK) from whomever owns the copyright (this may be the company that auctioned the corp's assets for all you know). If you're the only known holder of this code, you're out of luck. You already posted to /. =) Otherwise you could have just released it to the wild without a peep using Kazaa or Freenet or something like that. Not ideal of course, but it would be better than having it sit on a CD for the next 20 years or whatever the IP laws dictate, and it would have been nearly impossible to trace it back to you, I think.
Tough situation, for sure.
Pacify? Last I looked we were killing them wholesale.
What's the point of a society where rights are taken away under the premise of protecting them?
The history of this country is full of examples where this happened. This is nothing new, except that now we have the internet to bitch and moan about it. Things right themselves eventually, because society tends to be elastic in its acceptance of tradeoffs in its civil liberties.
Wait - let me guess: you are one of those fucked up leftie extremists that think the constitution is a suicide pact, right?
As for your support of racial profiling, what's your response to the paper that shows that it doesn't work?
I don't understand how "it doesn't work", since it's not supposed to be happening, hmmm?
It's pseudofascist morons like you that are ruining this country, not the kid in his basement.
I'd say the problem is actually fucking liberal hippies like yourself. But that's just me.
why don't you move to a country that has a legal system more to your liking?
Actually, I like it just fine. What was your point again?
PC niceties are fucking killing this country. Racial profiling is evil, so let's submit 90-year old caucasian women to strip searches, just like that nice Saudi gentleman over there. All in the name of social equality.
9/11 changed the rules. The sooner everyone realizes that, the better we'll all be off. Perhaps this kid would have been just another weirdo with a badly designed website in a past life. But this is another world. Our insistence of making believe that everything is OK and should remain exactly the same is pointless and stupid. Let's get with the program. No, it's not nice to send nice youngsters to jail because of what they said in their website. OTOH, if he wants to overthrow the fucking government perhaps he'd like to move to Liberia or Burma. Those governments provide great infrastructure, defense and civil liberties.
Just for shits and giggles, have you ever thought that your wonderful attitude is one of the reasons 'stuff' is missing from open source software? Perhaps -just perhaps- this is the type of thing that drives people away?
Here's an idea. Instead of putting people in their place and 'telling them how it is' when they ask for these far-out things like documentation, serious release schedules and planning and decent GUIs, why not try to understand for a second how normal users think and cutting them some friggin' slack? Wow, that would be fantastic. That way you'll be doing your part to get rid of the short-tempered-elitist-dick image the OSS world unfortunately tends to exude.
Unless you provide some proof to the contrary, I'd say the people who put up that website know what their "scene" looks like better than the average /. reader.
Given the topic at hand I'd say it's a bit st00pid to engage in technical zealotry. But whatever makes you tick.
Now I realize who wrote this.
But I can't fault the crackhead mods on this one - it combines Star Wars and "M$" bashing. Very shiny beads indeed - for loser geeks who like to play god on Slashbork from their parents' basement in Wisconsin.
OK, rant over.
That should make management warm up to alternative operating systems.
You people never cease to amaze me.
And they charge for the service packs (cunningly referring to them as "upgrades" for the "oooohhh, shiny" crowd). The hardware was expensive enough to being with - so where are my savings again?
Of course some Microsoft service packs are also cunningly referred to as "upgrades"... Win98SE would fall into that category.
I must've missed them. Your "cave" thing was quite the funny quip though.
good to see a person admit they're wrong
*snort*
No, but I found a keyboard with a working CAPS LOCK key. I'll send it your way ASAP.
"Blathering"? "Ages"? Let's see - the FireWire port on my Audigy card, check. My weird-ass NetGear NIC, check. My USB scanner, check. My USB mini drive. Check. My old ATI video card (or S3, I forget) Damn, I needed to turn off frame buffer for that one. Check. Misconfigured GNOME, 4 hours. Check. X not starting because I stupidly wanted to get some pretty fonts on the thing (imagine that). Check.
Oh, and this is with the boxed RH 7.3.
I'm sorry if you feel insulted. I'm not saying Linux can't be made to work with all of that. Just that it's a momumental pain in the ass to get it there. On the same box, Windows 2000 Pro detected and installed everything. Everything. Without problems.
That's what I'm "blathering" about. Hope that helps.
if you want one from one of the major manufacturers
Vote with your money and buy something else.
The point is, the box makers respond to market pressures. They're not going to revise their bundling policies because 50 people take them to small claims court on these grounds. They're making $$$ from the 50,000 that like and enjoy Windows.
And if this is an attempt to save those 50,000 from themselves then I have no simpaty whatsoever.
Then buy a computer without the OS. What's so difficult about that?
It does.
That's your opinion. You're entitled to it. In my experience that's almost never the case.
WARNING FLAMEBAIT!
Let me put this as delicately as possible - fuck off and die. If you don't agree with what I say, just say so. If you think I'm posting flamebait, then get some moderator points and play god.
There are people out there - believe it or not - that think $199 is a good deal on an operating system. Myself included. If Linux worked out of the box, I'd probably attach that same monetary value to it, because once you get past the install nightmare it mostly works. Now your assesment of the value attached to the product may vary, and indeed there are people here who think paying $29 for WinZip is a rip-off, so they just pirate it. After all, all software should be "free".
But "many" as applied to the majority of the people who buy computers is stretching it a bit.
Instead of writing an article with epigrams about how you can "stick it to the man", perhaps you should have bought a computer without an OS to begin with. This is not a particularly efficient or visible way to prove that licenses are evil.
Some of the titles in my collection:
"Being Nice to Foriegners", a French government publication
"How To Be A Good Sport", by Tonya Harding (feat. Mike Tyson)
"How To Win The Super Bowl", by Jim Kelly
"The Engineer's Guide to Fashion", a ThinkGeek Book
"Easy to use Linux", by Theo de Raadt
"Corect Sppeling and Gramar in,, english", by The Slashdot Crew
"Business Ethics" by Ken Lay
"How to Tell the Truth" by Bill Clinton
"Successful Business Plans Using Linux", a Loki Games publication
"How to Write Software People Would Want to Buy" by Richard Stallman
"Successful Dictatorships", by Saddam Hussein
That's why it's called "Solaris 9 For Dummies"
Good for you. And I'm not american.
Thanks for sharing.
Oh fear.
There were several competing DOS versions which offered general compatibilty with each other
Again, what the hell does that have to do with anything?
competition in the form of Cyrix, AMD, and WinChip
I hate to brake it to you, but there's more to a PC than the processor. And all these cheap machines - they were being bought by people running... what? OS/2? CP/M? Amiga? No, they were running Windows. Crappy Windows 3.1, but Windows nonetheless. Is that so hard to grok?
just as there will be a similar move in software over the next few years
Translation: "M$ is teh sux". Which, again, has nothing to do with my original point.