Not to flame you or anything, but you're a fucking retard. Saying Rush is a slime and a draft-dodger says nothing about anyone else, for better or worse.
"His type"? He didn't say he thought celebs should have a get-out-of-jail-free card, but you obviously think Rush should. Why?
Why can't people accept that Dubya *is* a weasel? It's pretty much fact, he can't even come up with a consistent lie and keeps changing his story on terrorism as it justifies some new goal.
I'm pro-invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. They're better off under military occupation than with the dictators they had. That doesn't mean I have to think Dubya did it for the right reasons. I think they should shoot Osama, but I think Ashcroft is a dangerous McCarthy wanna-be...
You don't have to claim either of them are upstanding people just because they're in the same political party.
Anyways, Jeffery Dahlmer could get 40% approval, regardless of party, because most of the US voters I know support their party's president blindly. It's also traditional for the US to "stand behind" a president in wartime.
For many products like HDs, they all do get tested. They've got a built-in BIOS that handles remapping of bad sectors. Plug the HDs in, let them do a media check and remap bad sectors, it should take about 15m or so, and then plug them into a computer for a few seconds and read the number of bad sectors. This could all be done in an automated fashion like with circuit boards. It'd cost a lot to do but it'd be worth it to avoid RMAs. And it'd let them find the drives with one part (platters or board or motor) which was crap while the rest worked, then they could rip the working board off of a drive with dead platters and put it back into inventory for another drive.
My company sells thousands of pieces of hardware and every one is tested. HD companies are larger and can afford more advanced automated testing systems, I'd expect they do at least what we do.
I've seen some code from a friend's company and their Java is quite nice to look at but their Perl didn't even have warnings and strict turned on, and they used every ugly hack the language supports. They couldn't maintain a hundred lines of code. They'd all been told that Perl was ugly so much that they never even tried to do it properly.
But, I've seen really messy C++ before where all the warnings were supressed and nobody followed a consistent style. There was some hungarian notation mixed in with 'i' and 'ptr' (to what?), and some more verbose but just as useless 'loopCounter', etc. Some people used braces for every code block, other people only used them if required (ie, not for one-line blocks), some people left out semicolons on the last statement in a block.
You can still get ugnly code, Even in languages like Python with enforced syntax you still get ugly code - useless variable names, no input checking, no error handling, 500+ line functions, etc - if you don't do it well. No language can produce decent code.
It all depends on what the people you work with are like and what the bosses let you get away with. I code in perl at work for all of our web stuff and I turn out very nice perl that my co-workers have commented positively on before.
Perl also produces much shorter code than most other languages, meaning that what would be 500 lines of C, or 200 of C++, or 150 of Java, is 25-50 of Perl. That three-million line project wouldn't be that long because you'd be using a high-level language in which things like regexes are first-class functions.
Funny, I've heard almost the exact words, about hardware RAID though, from a friend of mine.
That was after the card died and it turned out that the replacement card had a newer BIOS that didn't read the array, meaning it was as good as dead.
That was the last straw. Before that it was just crappy performance, suddenly dead arrays for no reason (drives tested perfectly, no power outage,...)
He switched to software RAID under Linux, put four drives in as a RAID5 instead of the RAID0+1 (or 1+0) that he'd been using with the hardware raid (because RAID5 in hardware cost $500 for a basic 4-drive card with no cache, etc). His performance more than doubled instantly with nothing but a $100 promise 4-channel IDE controller card. He could control the RAID while the system was running instead of using a crappy little BIOS config program with text GUI that required a reboot for every change.
I've never seen a really good IDE raid5 card but Linux software RAID turns out amazing throughput numbers.
And people keep saying what you have said with far less evidence.
SCO's lawsuit (not their obviously cracked copyright claims) rests on their claim that anything IBM developed for use with UNIX being owned by SCO and thus it's insertion in Linux being a contractual violation.
Do you really think IBM would sign a contract like this? One that would assign ownership of all of their technical advancements that have been used with their UNIX property of another company? Even if they did, do you think that with all their lawyers on staff they'd miss a fairly obvious clause like that when they deliberated over contributing to Linux?
Sure, it's possible that everyone at IBM suffered collective brain failure, but they're profitable and working on technologies that people want. A useful company with customers - not desperate.
Contrast this with SCO. A company so obvious run by crack-addled simpletons that they can't keep their story straight from week to week. This could be an act, except that they're opening themselves up to lawsuits for damaging the reputation of competitors, false advertising, making false claims for manipulation of stock prices (pump and dump), etc. Considering that the execs at SCO aren't doing this through underlings to allow them to claim ignorance later, any punative damages are likely to be applied directly to the officers of the company if they're found to be breaking the law. If this apparent ignorance and these wild claims are made up they're taking an incredible risk.
It's a lot likely that things are as they seem. SCO is full of idiots who ran a company into the ground and are playing the USA game of random high-dollar lawsuits and threatening people with high legal fees until they settle out of court (the $699 invoices vs the legal threat).
The problem is that Bill's design decisions made it painful to use more than 640k, just like his sticking with a 32b OS is going to make it painful to use more than 4GB. This is especially important as other people have pointed out because mmap'ing files cuts into this space and yet is a very handy way to abstract away file access that we don't want to have to avoid using.
Oh don't be an idiot. RedHat is making money selling an OS. They aren't hamstrung by the GPL, it's what enabled them to get into business in the first place.
They couldn't have paid for the development of their own operating system so to be in the market they require a free one, the GPL provides the critical component. To say the RHat is hampered by the GPL is like saying I'm hampered by my lack of wings - while technically true, it's a pointless thing to say.
Microsoft doesn't employ idiots perhaps, but they are ruled by the marketing departmenet. They add features based on what customers want and stability isn't what most customers want. I bitched about rebooting Win9x twice a week at my last job and someone asked what the big deal was. He didn't believe a computer could stay up and running for two weeks, let alone the year or two that some machines are up, essentially zero reboots between kernel upgrades.
Linux is different in that its developers add features that they, the developers, want. Developers tend to care more about stability than users and because Linux's development is led by Linus, an developer, we'll see stability continue to be a fairly high priority.
But if MS does fairly compete, and with their office suite they are closer to this than with other products, I don't begrudge them their success. While I think some of the MS staff need to punished for lying during the anti-trust trial and faking evidence, I for the most part would simply be happy to see their monopoly power be removed.
I've heard of dirty tricks in the Win3.1 days, of using undocumented system hooks to make their apps run better than the competition's apps, but I don't know if they still do this. (Probably not, with the anti-MS climate these days I'm sure someone disassembles everything of theirs looking for calls to unknown OS entry points and it'd blow up on them.)
That's only the whole mother-fucking idea that cookies were invented to deal with. Identifying users. And why would you want to do that? Perhaps because only certain users get/want to see certain things.
It's like me patenting the idea of hauling computers in a truck, just because I'm the first to want to put that specific load into a truck doesn't mean it's revolutionary and deserving of a patent. Trucks were designed to carry loads, cookies were designed to store (possibly identifying) information on the client's computer, making the web stateful.
Patents were designed to enrich the public, for which we grant the creator a limited monopoly in return. If the idea was so obvious that a child would have thought of it, given the same situation, we (the public) don't benefit from having you tell us about it and thus we shouldn't give you a monopoly on the idea.
Sure, you can get either, but OpenOffice has recently got a lot better (to the point where it's worth considering as a replacement) and theoretically if Microsoft lost its OS monopoly, which is what I was posting about, OO and MSOffice would be competing on a somewhat equal footing.
We've seen too many examples of MS sabotaging a competitors product, everything from DRDos (even if it didn't ship in production code, it clearly shows their intent) to various NT service packs killing Lotus Notes. If MS had to compete on other OSes, they couldn't use these tactics. They'd have to compete (more) fairly.
At that point, if other programs can open MS documents and they all run without interference by the OS makers, you can actually have honest competition with Microsoft. Something that has been impossible up until now.
If you find PHP to be head and shoulders above anything, let alone Perl, you're nuts. PHPs broken Array/Hash implementation reeks and it's got a million inconsistencies where in most cases something works one way, in the other 5% it picks a random way to operate.
PHP is the driving force behind mod_perl. It's great for small to medium stuff but I'd hate to write something big in PHP. (At least, where the guts are in the PHP - if it was only for templating it would be okay.)
We'd feel sorry for Cisco if they had paid for software and found out it was compiled against an unlicensed library by ARM, or something else that put them in this position with "Traditional" software licensing, but it wouldn't excuse them from the responsibility of making it right. Why would that change with it being GPLed software?
The only reason this frightens PHBs is that they're devious little fucks by nature. It's the point of business school. They're always looking to exploit something and here they're finding that while the GPL looks like a soft and easy target because the open source community isn't doing businessy things (You know, screwing employees out of their retirement, stock manipulation scams, etc) that there are consequences to using the software and ignoring the license.
Everyone else had planned on honoring the GPL all along so they aren't crying foul when it comes due.
They actually only encourage (require?) people to assign copyrights to them for certain projects like possibly GCC, to become part of the main distribution. They don't care what you do with your own GPLed software. If you don't want to talk to the FSF they probably don't want to talk to you either.
It'll keep them from dying, but by doing so it'll mean they're dependent on a platform they aren't totally in control of. At this point they'll have to compete on performance and price, as the artificially high market share erodes.
At this point they'll have to start competing on the merits of their software. If you feel that MSOffice is $600 better than OpenOffice you'll be free to pay that, if not, you'll get the cheaper program. Microsoft won't be able to change the underlying OS to kill the performance of their competitors apps, or break them with a service pack.
Seems pretty cool to me. We'll let the MS fanboys see what happens when MS actually has to compete on quality...
Even beyond the fact that copyright law specifically says otherwise, it's just fucking retarded to consider that someone could *sell* you a product and still require unspecified actions on your part to authorize activation. If this did happen we'd all need to fight it, it'd be a terrible law.
Well, they wouldn't do this all at once. They'd release a server-side upgrade that essentially has two versions of the filesharing protocol, the old one and a new encrypted one they'd use the DMCA to keep the Samba team from reverse engineering. (Probably by claiming that breaking it would allow the unauthorized copying of copyrighted materials because the new system would have a 'copy not allowed' flag the client was relied on to support.)
Then, they'd release updates for all the OSes they felt required them (anything too many people were using to abandon) and wait a year or two until adoption was nearly complete. Then they'd declare the old antiquated protocol a security risk and release a service pack to "fix" it, essentially requiring everyone to use the other protocol.
At this point, unless the Samba team fought back against the DMCA abuse, there wouldn't be any competitors.
Re:Anyone visit honestpuck's link in the summary?
on
Even Grues Get Full
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· Score: 1
Many people who call tech support simply need the settings, or to be told to install a pop-up blocker or ad-aware. They're the easy ones and you never see them in the comics.
Other customers are complete festering morons. Unwilling to learn anything. Droolers who somehow manage to hold down a job, and comprehend that a phone needs to be plugged into a wall, but don't understand how a computer needs the same connection!?
They're gleeful about their stupidity, proudly proclaiming themselves as "not computer people", as if you need a fucking degree to plug a cable into the only plug on the back of a computer that looks anything like it'll fit. The fact that these people aren't on some sort of federal disability pension means they must be capable of round-peg, round-hole kinds of tasks. Why does that suddenly vanish when they're faced with something slightly new? (Slightly - they've supposedly been plugging in microwaves and TVs for years.)
Even if they must be this stupid, why the hell do they have to be rude about it. They call up tech support after buying an internet package and get bloody rude about not being able to use it when the power is out, I swear. (She had a laptop, but didn't understand that the cablemodem needed power - hence the power plug.) She got upset about it and wanted it fixed.
That is why there's tech support humor. Not making fun of your mom for not knowing how to compile a kernel, but making fun of jackasses who can't apply some common sense to it and get beligerant about it.
Yeah, must be the id10t virus, that's all I can think of that makes an otherwise capable person into a moron when in a slightly new situation.
"[...] Crashes, or some incapacitating system failure."
Not a bluescreen. Some system failure that means you have to reboot to get anything done. Hell, even having shell problems (losing your taskbar) is essentially the same as the OS dying for all real purposes.
I haven't seen any bluescreens in XP, or 2k for that matter. But 2k did reboot a lot for no reason, and leave a memory dump. So, they made it reboot instead of showing a BSOD. Wow, big difference.
You could be the exception to the rule, but I highly doubt it.
It's completely different that what SunnComm did to him. SC threatened him for exposing vulnerabilities in a product to the people who were paying for that product. You know, full disclosure, the truth is always acceptable and all.
He'd be suing SC for trying to use the civil courts as a form of censorship, bankrupting anyone who dares speak out against a corporation.
What you said is basically "We shouldn't jail kidnappers, we'd sink to their level." I call BS. They attack innocents, you protect innocents.
I eat dinner, Stalin ate dinner, does that mean I sink to his level every day?
Mostly. The Linux box has been upgraded fairly often actually. New versions of PHP, that SSH patch (and a few others), the latest Apache that added a feature someone was wanting.
Nothing that required any downtime, and no, we didn't use it as a games server or anything. (Though that was a suggestion - an Office Quake3 server for after-hours play, but it never happened because we don't have enough player to need a dedicated server.)
I have to agree with the other poster, nothing done to user-mode files and programs should bring down the system. If you're messing with drivers or something, that's one thing, they need access to the hardware and they're often crappily written, especially ATI's drivers. Web servers and stuff though should all be installable, fixable without any downtime and should never take out the rest of the machine.
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Not to flame you or anything, but you're a fucking retard. Saying Rush is a slime and a draft-dodger says nothing about anyone else, for better or worse.
"His type"? He didn't say he thought celebs should have a get-out-of-jail-free card, but you obviously think Rush should. Why?
Why can't people accept that Dubya *is* a weasel? It's pretty much fact, he can't even come up with a consistent lie and keeps changing his story on terrorism as it justifies some new goal.
I'm pro-invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan. They're better off under military occupation than with the dictators they had. That doesn't mean I have to think Dubya did it for the right reasons. I think they should shoot Osama, but I think Ashcroft is a dangerous McCarthy wanna-be...
You don't have to claim either of them are upstanding people just because they're in the same political party.
Anyways, Jeffery Dahlmer could get 40% approval, regardless of party, because most of the US voters I know support their party's president blindly. It's also traditional for the US to "stand behind" a president in wartime.
For many products like HDs, they all do get tested. They've got a built-in BIOS that handles remapping of bad sectors. Plug the HDs in, let them do a media check and remap bad sectors, it should take about 15m or so, and then plug them into a computer for a few seconds and read the number of bad sectors. This could all be done in an automated fashion like with circuit boards. It'd cost a lot to do but it'd be worth it to avoid RMAs. And it'd let them find the drives with one part (platters or board or motor) which was crap while the rest worked, then they could rip the working board off of a drive with dead platters and put it back into inventory for another drive.
My company sells thousands of pieces of hardware and every one is tested. HD companies are larger and can afford more advanced automated testing systems, I'd expect they do at least what we do.
Only if you're a sloppy coder.
I've seen some code from a friend's company and their Java is quite nice to look at but their Perl didn't even have warnings and strict turned on, and they used every ugly hack the language supports. They couldn't maintain a hundred lines of code. They'd all been told that Perl was ugly so much that they never even tried to do it properly.
But, I've seen really messy C++ before where all the warnings were supressed and nobody followed a consistent style. There was some hungarian notation mixed in with 'i' and 'ptr' (to what?), and some more verbose but just as useless 'loopCounter', etc. Some people used braces for every code block, other people only used them if required (ie, not for one-line blocks), some people left out semicolons on the last statement in a block.
You can still get ugnly code, Even in languages like Python with enforced syntax you still get ugly code - useless variable names, no input checking, no error handling, 500+ line functions, etc - if you don't do it well. No language can produce decent code.
It all depends on what the people you work with are like and what the bosses let you get away with. I code in perl at work for all of our web stuff and I turn out very nice perl that my co-workers have commented positively on before.
Perl also produces much shorter code than most other languages, meaning that what would be 500 lines of C, or 200 of C++, or 150 of Java, is 25-50 of Perl. That three-million line project wouldn't be that long because you'd be using a high-level language in which things like regexes are first-class functions.
Funny, I've heard almost the exact words, about hardware RAID though, from a friend of mine.
...)
That was after the card died and it turned out that the replacement card had a newer BIOS that didn't read the array, meaning it was as good as dead.
That was the last straw. Before that it was just crappy performance, suddenly dead arrays for no reason (drives tested perfectly, no power outage,
He switched to software RAID under Linux, put four drives in as a RAID5 instead of the RAID0+1 (or 1+0) that he'd been using with the hardware raid (because RAID5 in hardware cost $500 for a basic 4-drive card with no cache, etc). His performance more than doubled instantly with nothing but a $100 promise 4-channel IDE controller card. He could control the RAID while the system was running instead of using a crappy little BIOS config program with text GUI that required a reboot for every change.
I've never seen a really good IDE raid5 card but Linux software RAID turns out amazing throughput numbers.
And people keep saying what you have said with far less evidence.
SCO's lawsuit (not their obviously cracked copyright claims) rests on their claim that anything IBM developed for use with UNIX being owned by SCO and thus it's insertion in Linux being a contractual violation.
Do you really think IBM would sign a contract like this? One that would assign ownership of all of their technical advancements that have been used with their UNIX property of another company? Even if they did, do you think that with all their lawyers on staff they'd miss a fairly obvious clause like that when they deliberated over contributing to Linux?
Sure, it's possible that everyone at IBM suffered collective brain failure, but they're profitable and working on technologies that people want. A useful company with customers - not desperate.
Contrast this with SCO. A company so obvious run by crack-addled simpletons that they can't keep their story straight from week to week. This could be an act, except that they're opening themselves up to lawsuits for damaging the reputation of competitors, false advertising, making false claims for manipulation of stock prices (pump and dump), etc. Considering that the execs at SCO aren't doing this through underlings to allow them to claim ignorance later, any punative damages are likely to be applied directly to the officers of the company if they're found to be breaking the law. If this apparent ignorance and these wild claims are made up they're taking an incredible risk.
It's a lot likely that things are as they seem. SCO is full of idiots who ran a company into the ground and are playing the USA game of random high-dollar lawsuits and threatening people with high legal fees until they settle out of court (the $699 invoices vs the legal threat).
The problem is that Bill's design decisions made it painful to use more than 640k, just like his sticking with a 32b OS is going to make it painful to use more than 4GB. This is especially important as other people have pointed out because mmap'ing files cuts into this space and yet is a very handy way to abstract away file access that we don't want to have to avoid using.
Oh don't be an idiot. RedHat is making money selling an OS. They aren't hamstrung by the GPL, it's what enabled them to get into business in the first place.
They couldn't have paid for the development of their own operating system so to be in the market they require a free one, the GPL provides the critical component. To say the RHat is hampered by the GPL is like saying I'm hampered by my lack of wings - while technically true, it's a pointless thing to say.
Microsoft doesn't employ idiots perhaps, but they are ruled by the marketing departmenet. They add features based on what customers want and stability isn't what most customers want. I bitched about rebooting Win9x twice a week at my last job and someone asked what the big deal was. He didn't believe a computer could stay up and running for two weeks, let alone the year or two that some machines are up, essentially zero reboots between kernel upgrades.
Linux is different in that its developers add features that they, the developers, want. Developers tend to care more about stability than users and because Linux's development is led by Linus, an developer, we'll see stability continue to be a fairly high priority.
If the only reason something has value for you is that I don't have it, you're the jackass.
But if MS does fairly compete, and with their office suite they are closer to this than with other products, I don't begrudge them their success. While I think some of the MS staff need to punished for lying during the anti-trust trial and faking evidence, I for the most part would simply be happy to see their monopoly power be removed.
I've heard of dirty tricks in the Win3.1 days, of using undocumented system hooks to make their apps run better than the competition's apps, but I don't know if they still do this. (Probably not, with the anti-MS climate these days I'm sure someone disassembles everything of theirs looking for calls to unknown OS entry points and it'd blow up on them.)
That's only the whole mother-fucking idea that cookies were invented to deal with. Identifying users. And why would you want to do that? Perhaps because only certain users get/want to see certain things.
It's like me patenting the idea of hauling computers in a truck, just because I'm the first to want to put that specific load into a truck doesn't mean it's revolutionary and deserving of a patent. Trucks were designed to carry loads, cookies were designed to store (possibly identifying) information on the client's computer, making the web stateful.
Patents were designed to enrich the public, for which we grant the creator a limited monopoly in return. If the idea was so obvious that a child would have thought of it, given the same situation, we (the public) don't benefit from having you tell us about it and thus we shouldn't give you a monopoly on the idea.
Sure, you can get either, but OpenOffice has recently got a lot better (to the point where it's worth considering as a replacement) and theoretically if Microsoft lost its OS monopoly, which is what I was posting about, OO and MSOffice would be competing on a somewhat equal footing.
We've seen too many examples of MS sabotaging a competitors product, everything from DRDos (even if it didn't ship in production code, it clearly shows their intent) to various NT service packs killing Lotus Notes. If MS had to compete on other OSes, they couldn't use these tactics. They'd have to compete (more) fairly.
At that point, if other programs can open MS documents and they all run without interference by the OS makers, you can actually have honest competition with Microsoft. Something that has been impossible up until now.
If you find PHP to be head and shoulders above anything, let alone Perl, you're nuts. PHPs broken Array/Hash implementation reeks and it's got a million inconsistencies where in most cases something works one way, in the other 5% it picks a random way to operate.
PHP is the driving force behind mod_perl. It's great for small to medium stuff but I'd hate to write something big in PHP. (At least, where the guts are in the PHP - if it was only for templating it would be okay.)
We'd feel sorry for Cisco if they had paid for software and found out it was compiled against an unlicensed library by ARM, or something else that put them in this position with "Traditional" software licensing, but it wouldn't excuse them from the responsibility of making it right. Why would that change with it being GPLed software?
The only reason this frightens PHBs is that they're devious little fucks by nature. It's the point of business school. They're always looking to exploit something and here they're finding that while the GPL looks like a soft and easy target because the open source community isn't doing businessy things (You know, screwing employees out of their retirement, stock manipulation scams, etc) that there are consequences to using the software and ignoring the license.
Everyone else had planned on honoring the GPL all along so they aren't crying foul when it comes due.
They actually only encourage (require?) people to assign copyrights to them for certain projects like possibly GCC, to become part of the main distribution. They don't care what you do with your own GPLed software. If you don't want to talk to the FSF they probably don't want to talk to you either.
It'll keep them from dying, but by doing so it'll mean they're dependent on a platform they aren't totally in control of. At this point they'll have to compete on performance and price, as the artificially high market share erodes.
At this point they'll have to start competing on the merits of their software. If you feel that MSOffice is $600 better than OpenOffice you'll be free to pay that, if not, you'll get the cheaper program. Microsoft won't be able to change the underlying OS to kill the performance of their competitors apps, or break them with a service pack.
Seems pretty cool to me. We'll let the MS fanboys see what happens when MS actually has to compete on quality...
Even beyond the fact that copyright law specifically says otherwise, it's just fucking retarded to consider that someone could *sell* you a product and still require unspecified actions on your part to authorize activation. If this did happen we'd all need to fight it, it'd be a terrible law.
Well, they wouldn't do this all at once. They'd release a server-side upgrade that essentially has two versions of the filesharing protocol, the old one and a new encrypted one they'd use the DMCA to keep the Samba team from reverse engineering. (Probably by claiming that breaking it would allow the unauthorized copying of copyrighted materials because the new system would have a 'copy not allowed' flag the client was relied on to support.)
Then, they'd release updates for all the OSes they felt required them (anything too many people were using to abandon) and wait a year or two until adoption was nearly complete. Then they'd declare the old antiquated protocol a security risk and release a service pack to "fix" it, essentially requiring everyone to use the other protocol.
At this point, unless the Samba team fought back against the DMCA abuse, there wouldn't be any competitors.
Many people who call tech support simply need the settings, or to be told to install a pop-up blocker or ad-aware. They're the easy ones and you never see them in the comics.
Other customers are complete festering morons. Unwilling to learn anything. Droolers who somehow manage to hold down a job, and comprehend that a phone needs to be plugged into a wall, but don't understand how a computer needs the same connection!?
They're gleeful about their stupidity, proudly proclaiming themselves as "not computer people", as if you need a fucking degree to plug a cable into the only plug on the back of a computer that looks anything like it'll fit. The fact that these people aren't on some sort of federal disability pension means they must be capable of round-peg, round-hole kinds of tasks. Why does that suddenly vanish when they're faced with something slightly new? (Slightly - they've supposedly been plugging in microwaves and TVs for years.)
Even if they must be this stupid, why the hell do they have to be rude about it. They call up tech support after buying an internet package and get bloody rude about not being able to use it when the power is out, I swear. (She had a laptop, but didn't understand that the cablemodem needed power - hence the power plug.) She got upset about it and wanted it fixed.
That is why there's tech support humor. Not making fun of your mom for not knowing how to compile a kernel, but making fun of jackasses who can't apply some common sense to it and get beligerant about it.
Yeah, must be the id10t virus, that's all I can think of that makes an otherwise capable person into a moron when in a slightly new situation.
"[...] Crashes, or some incapacitating system failure."
Not a bluescreen. Some system failure that means you have to reboot to get anything done. Hell, even having shell problems (losing your taskbar) is essentially the same as the OS dying for all real purposes.
I haven't seen any bluescreens in XP, or 2k for that matter. But 2k did reboot a lot for no reason, and leave a memory dump. So, they made it reboot instead of showing a BSOD. Wow, big difference.
You could be the exception to the rule, but I highly doubt it.
I don't plan on going bankrupt fighting this, because we're fighting it before MS put DRM into Office to prevent any competition, forever.
It's completely different that what SunnComm did to him. SC threatened him for exposing vulnerabilities in a product to the people who were paying for that product. You know, full disclosure, the truth is always acceptable and all.
He'd be suing SC for trying to use the civil courts as a form of censorship, bankrupting anyone who dares speak out against a corporation.
What you said is basically "We shouldn't jail kidnappers, we'd sink to their level." I call BS. They attack innocents, you protect innocents.
I eat dinner, Stalin ate dinner, does that mean I sink to his level every day?
Mostly. The Linux box has been upgraded fairly often actually. New versions of PHP, that SSH patch (and a few others), the latest Apache that added a feature someone was wanting.
Nothing that required any downtime, and no, we didn't use it as a games server or anything. (Though that was a suggestion - an Office Quake3 server for after-hours play, but it never happened because we don't have enough player to need a dedicated server.)
I have to agree with the other poster, nothing done to user-mode files and programs should bring down the system. If you're messing with drivers or something, that's one thing, they need access to the hardware and they're often crappily written, especially ATI's drivers. Web servers and stuff though should all be installable, fixable without any downtime and should never take out the rest of the machine.