That's why I added some autotext entries on my Sidekick to convert "u" into "you", "ur" into "your", "u're" into "you're", "b4" into "before", "l8r" into "later", etc. Now I can thumb-type more quickly and not sound like a luser.
Ah, yes, but the original developers of BeOS are still great engineers, so it's newsworthy to hear about their new pursuits. As a former BeOS hacker and an intern at Be in 1997, it's great to see what's happened to the various engineers that I used to work with. Dominic Giampaolo is now at Apple where he is the chief architect behind Spotlight and other cool stuff, and several Be engineers, including myself, are now working at Danger, Inc., the company behind the Hiptop/Sidekick and Hiptop2 smart phones.
I remember Benoit as an über-hacker who wrote something like 50% of the original BeOS single-handedly. It was great to hear about his new job while I'm waiting for KDE 3.5.0 beta 2 to compile on my Gentoo box.
Are you talking about U.S. mpg or British mpg? Imperial gallons are about 20% bigger than U.S. gallons, so if you're using the British units, you're talking about maybe 42mpg in U.S. terms. Still very good, but it's easy to get the two "mpgs" confused.
My ex-roommate has a 4WD '76 Ford Bronco that he takes off-roading when going camping/caving. It gets like 12mpg, but is built like a tank. After reading, among other things, The Clock of the Long Now, about a group of people who started a non-profit foundation to build a giant clock out in the desert designed to last 1000 (!) years, I got to thinking about making my next car purchase something that could long outlast the 180,000 mile mark you mentioned. At the time, I was driving a '96 Saturn SL1, a great car, but a perfect specimen of the "disposable car" phenomenon that you point out.
I ended up buying a used '97 BMW 328i last February. Sure, it cost twice as much used (excuse me, "pre-owned", which means it came with a kick-ass 100k mile warranty) as my Saturn did new, but I think it was well worth it. Here in L.A. I regularly see 15-year old Bimmers in excellent condition on the road. Plus they go something like 9000+ miles between oil changes, and there's a little LED strip on the instrument panel that counts down from 5 bars to let you know when it's time for service, using a customized estimate based on your gas consumption. What geek couldn't appreciate that?:-)
On the downside, when you do go to change the oil, you need a special "reset tool" to reset the indicator lights. This is designed to discourage Joe Luser (or the guys at the Jiffy Lube) from doing oil changes without doing all the proper BMW-sanctioned things. You may think this is lame, but considering that I read in Consumer Reports that they found that quick-lube places have a nasty tendency to put the wrong grade of oil in about 50% of the time, I don't blame them. Brand-new, a reset tool costs $100, but I've seen them on eBay for $20.
Better quit now before I get too far off-topic, but I hope you'll agree that this is the sort of stuff that matters to a potential car buyer much more than mere mpg.
The EPA has a great site here that covers all aspects of fuel economy and includes some really handy CGI's to let you compare different 1985-2000 cars for fuel economy.
On this site, you can also find this handy chart which shows visually exactly why ICE's are so inefficient.
Having just spent 5 hours today getting just a few of the bugs worked out of my recent Mandrake 7.1 install on my Dell Inspiron 3500, I think I'll answer my own question and say that I'd personally be very happy if we all just considered the problem of speedy web serving officially solved, and moved our collective efforts to the task of making Linux (and FreeBSD and BeOS and AmigaOS and any other OS that a true geek can approve of) officially kick ass on the desktop.
Ars Technica has a new Q&A with some more info on how files are handled in DP4, as well as about other aspects of X that people have been asking about.
Where are you getting the $10 price for Solaris media? Their site says $75 for the media kit. For $10, I'd be happy to try out Solaris 8 on my PC.. for $75, forget it!
Reminds me of a Mr. Show (hilarious comedy series on HBO.. you can still catch reruns at like 2 in the morning) episode about a NASA plan to blow up the moon and all the news coverage showing Americans brainwashed into being totally happy about it and talking about throwing parties to watch the moon blow up. I still remember the lyrics to the song they played which I believe was a parody of a popular song played on American TV during the Gulf War to brainwash people about that:
Look out moon, America's goin' to get you
Gonna go ka-boom, it was nice to have met you 'cause you don't mess around... with God's America.
Heh, just the question I was thinking about asking! I'd be curious to know the answer as much as anyone, but in the end, I think it's probably irrelevant. I believe that some people need drugs (or at least drugs help tremendously) to achieve certain states (especially that state of interconnectedness where unrelated ideas glom together in one's head into a silly mess and occasionally a not-bad and genuinely creative idea.. H2G2 could easily have benefitted from this "high and giggling" state), but some people are perfectly capable of achieving those states on their own (or perhaps by procrastinating and taking lots of baths, let's say, as I've heard Douglas Adams mention in his interviews).
Another thought: does whatever Douglas Adams may or may not do to get his ideas flowing impact you in any way? If you've already tried marijuana, or 'shrooms, or whatever, and it works for you, and you're reasonably well versed on the physiological pros and cons, and believe that the benefits justify the risks, then do you really need to be able to point to a famous person to justify your habit? Many famous poets and artists of prior centuries were hooked on laudanum (alcohol mixed with morphine) or absinthe or plain old alcohol: drugs I don't personally find appealing or stimulating to the mind.
I can think of one reason to want to know: many people I talk to are completely ignorant of the real effects (good and bad) of the common illegal drugs. When everyone I know speeds on the freeway, you'd think that legality would not be a big stumbling block (esp. in California, where possession of small quantities of marijuana or other drugs is the legal equivalent of a speeding ticket, and from stories I've heard, frequently the cops just dump it out on the side of the road and let you go on your way), but there's this persistent notion in the U.S. that "they must be bad or else they wouldn't be illegal" (of course the real reason they're illegal is due to early 20th-century political grandstanding and overt racism, but most people don't know that, do they?) Being able to say that so-and-so smokes pot, and in fact credits a good deal of his creativity to it (as with the late Carl Sagan), could advance the cause, but rather than isolated examples, what we really need is to "out" the silent millions who take recreational drugs and still hold down decent jobs. If someone set up a web page petition for people to sign with their real names and email addresses and that they smoke pot, and that it should be legal, and then mailed that list to every Congressman and posted it to Slashdot and CNN and the N.Y. Times, then that'd be a powerful force. Your Congressman isn't going to send the Feds out to arrest you: and they're certainly not going to arrest a million people scattered across the country. Civil disobedience at its finest!
The other is in my large consumption of chocolate, particularly in the form of chocolate milk. I'm not sure if this is a real "addiction" or not, what I do know is that I have a hard time getting through the day with no chocolate, whether it is mixed with milk or not. I consider chocolate a food, not a drug, but some people would disagree with this.
Chocolate is mostly a food, but it does contain small quantities of drug compounds, including caffeine and THC-like chemicals. I've heard that you'd need to eat many pounds of chocolate to be equivalent to one joint, but then marijuana usage among my friends varies by probably two orders of magnitude, so perhaps some people are more sensitive than others. Also, empirical data suggests that women are much more sensitive to chocolate's mood-altering effects than men.
For more info, here are some choice links from this Google search:
"Thank you very much for taking the time to fill out our membership application. This email may serve as your receipt for your tax deductible donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
On 01/30/100 you contributed $xxx to EFF for a one year membership with the organizatiation."
I agree with your comments about the nature of BBS's vs. the Internet. A few additional thoughts: First, one interesting effect of BBS's was that the Sysop had the ability to moderate posts, as well as kicking the really obnoxious users off of the system completely. You might cry censorship, but if any Sysop was really that heavy-handed, you were free to choose any number of other local BBS's to chat on.
Another stabilizing effect were the frequent user meets that many BBS's would have. Forcing people to connect in real life broke down some of the anonymity and freedom from accountability that often gets people in trouble in their online communications. I was too young to take advantage of it in the heydey of BBS's, but I went to a few user meets for my roommate's BBS last year and they were pretty cool, despite the fact that the BBS itself, while still around, has long since ceased to be a focal point of activity for the community that it spawned.
Finally, I'd like to put in a plug for one local community that made a successful transition from the BBS world to the Internet, and is actually a great place for single geeks to meet MOTAS (Members Of The Appropriate Sex). I'm convinced that their site would never have been as cool had it started as a Web site instead of a BBS. Check out Matchmaker.com. They have local nodes for major metropolitan areas, and a very generous free 30 day trial. What sets them apart from the usual free personals services is the extensive and well balanced questionnaire (including several essay questions) that you're encouraged to fill out. By immediately eliminating prospects who aren't literate enough to write something meaningful, you can eliminate all but the most intelligent, interesting people (and as we all know, geeks crave intelligence in a mate).
From the women I've talked to on MM, it seems like there's a real lack of intelligent, friendly, single guys to talk to. If you're a lonely male without a mate, act now! Most guys seem to be either way too forward and sexually oriented in their pick-up emails, and/or just try *way* too hard. Be friendly, open, and honest, and try to meet a friend first, and a girlfriend second. Women are not as interested in photos as men, but if you have one, it can't hurt. If you don't meet at least one interesting person before your free trial runs out, well at least it didn't cost you anything!
Yet another example that MM is hip: in the Smoking category, in addition to the expected "Don't smoke", "Smoke occasionally", "Smoke like a chimney", and "Trying to quit" responses, they have entries for "I get high occasionally", "I get high daily", and "I never come down". What other site notices the reality that pot is the fourth most popular social drug (behind alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine) and allows users to query on recreational drug use (there's a separate question for alcohol) in such an unobtrusive and practical manner?
One more note about MM which reflects the sad times we live in: there's an essay question which asks "What do you look for in a BBS?" Almost all of the responses I've seen (including many from otherwise intelligent women that I've met) have said something like "What's a BBS?" Truly sad.
I ordered Relearning to See.. Excellent book! I followed the results religiously and went from -9.5 to -6.75 in just a week! I credit most of that to a two day period that I took off from work and spent walking around my apartment with no glasses and just *looking* at stuff.. finding things like circuit boards, tiny print, and posters, and looking at the tiniest details I could resolve without glasses, moving my eyes closer until I could see, then closer still and finding the even tinier details (like the little teeny numbers written on the teeny surface mounted resistors on newer circuit boards) then as far away as I could, slowly stretching my "blur point". My g/f has also improved her vision and she can now see the whiteboard at school fine with her next oldest prescription (from '93). HIGHLY recommended!
One thing to be aware of.. most optometrists are highly skeptical of this method, despite overwhelming evidence and patient testimonials, and refuse to believe that it works. I ended up going to a different optometrist from my regular one because when my prescription changed I needed new glasses right away to be able to drive to work and I didn't want to erase my progress by trying to use the old ones. The new optometrist refused to believe the old numbers I told him and I was glad that I came in without any glasses or contacts (I had my g/f drive me) because he said something about a school of thought among optometrists that even if a patient's prescription is too strong, they don't like to go back to a weaker one.. Forget that!
They've also promised source for the HotJava Browser. They must have retracted that promise because the last time I went to the HotJava page, there was no mention of SCSL...
Well, if you still have your beloved Amiga hardware, you can always install Debian, or NetBSD, or OpenBSD on it now. You can even download MINIX, which used to cost $150 or so, and is the only free UNIX clone for Amiga that I know of that doesn't require an MMU (so you can run it on an old A500 from floppies if you want!).
I'm upgrading my A3000 to potato this weekend, whoohoo! For more info on these UNIX's, check out:
In related news, Amiga OS 3.5 (the first new version of the "classic" Amiga OS in years) was released a week ago, and I just received my pre-order copy from Software Hut, along with a few other goodies I'd ordered from them. I haven't had a chance to check it out yet since I've been too busy playing with Philips FreeSpeech 2000 (*) on my laptop, but if anyone's interested, I could type up a review after I've had a chance to install it on my A3000.
(*) OT: FreeSpeech 2000 has one really cool feature not found on NaturallySpeaking or IBM ViaVoice: it supports US English, UK English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian out of the box (since I'm learning French, I figure if the PC can understand what I'm saying, I must be pronouncing it okay!), and the price was not bad ($68 from onsale.com). Unfortunately, it's not "free speech" or "free beer". However, if you're looking for voice recognition for Linux, go to www.ibm.com and search for their ViaVoice SDK for Linux which is "free beer", which I have unfortunately not had time to check out.
Come on, who could pass up a free email address at weeklyworldnews.net? Obviously not me, as you can see. Needless to say "batboy" and "sonofbatboy" were already taken.
Someone moderate that guy up! That's exactly what we need, and I was thinking about the same thing this morning in light of a similar case of our democracy at work:
From this week's DRCNet Week Online, an excellent newsletter on drug policy, the following article:
The U.S. government has moved a step closer to placing a drug popular with club goers on its list of most-hated substances along with marijuana, heroin, crack cocaine and LSD. The Hillory J. Farias Date Rape Prevention Act, a bill that would make GHB, or gamma y-hydroxybutrate, a Schedule I drug passed the House of Representatives this week by a vote of 423-1. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas was the lone dissenter.
GHB is the latest in a wave of recently demonized drugs nicknamed "date rape" drugs by politicians and the media, after reports of young women who were attacked after men put the drug into their drinks. The bill itself is named after a woman who died after visiting a nightclub in 1996. An autopsy found traces of GHB in her system.
Although GHB has become a familiar presence at nightclubs and raves in recent years, the drug has also shown promise as a treatment for narcolepsy. Federal classification of GHB as a Schedule I substance would likely hinder future research, because Schedule I drugs are deemed to have no medicinal value and cannot be prescribed by doctors under federal law.
My best friend's ex-girlfriend has narcolepsy and it's a disorder that I wouldn't wish upon my enemies. Here's a drug which is giving narcolepsy suffers their first hope in years of a treatment that might actually work well, and they're taking it away from doctors due to mass hysteria over one highly publicized incident (neglecting the fact that club-hoppers will be able to get GHB no matter what its legality is)! Note also the inflammatory name of the bill ("Date Rape Prevention Act") and the fact that only 1 Congressman was brave enough to go against the tide on this one (I guess the others figured that their opponents would claim they were "for date rape" if they didn't vote for it).
Keeping this in mind, I propose a new bill which we should try to find a representative to sponsor pronto:
The Rob Malda Just Say No To Microsoft Date Rape Prevention HIV Awareness Red Ribbon America First Drug Free CyberPromotion Internet Pornography Anti-Spam Terrorism Eradication Protect the Children Act of 1999
In an effort to protect the children from the evils of Microsoft products, recreational drug use, HIV infection, date rape, terrorism, partial birth abortions, and unsolicited email, we hereby commit to a $100 million appropriation for the establishment of a National Slashdot Fund. Slashdot is one of our nation's greatest resources, and we must protect it for our children, and our children's children, to enjoy. Amen.
Nobody would dare to vote against it, it'll be great!
I listened to my first episode last night on a whim, and it kicks ass! I remember the original announcement but didn't pay much attention to it, and now I wish I had. You guys need to promote this show more on Slashdot.
I live in LA but I spent six months in the Valley working for Be, and your show reminded me of why I sometimes miss those days. University Ave., gourmet burritos, Linux, and South Park jokes, well at least I have two of the four here in LA! Keep up the great work!
Yours is one of the few posts which IMHO has a sensible opinion about this whole thing. I'll continue your position, play devil's advocate a bit, and hope I don't get flamed too badly.:)
Yes, Sun is trying to profit off of the confusion between SCSL and a real open source license, as others have mentioned, and so we need to do some education to counteract that, pressure Sun to check their marketers a bit, and make sure people know that there are strings attached. Beyond that, I say more power to Sun! If I need to use Solaris, or Java, or StarOffice, for a project, I'd much rather have the source code than not.
As for those who say, "Sheesh, this is just a sneaky way for Sun to get us to fix their bugs for them, we better not let them," I think that if you work for a company that's going to use their products anyway, and you do find a bug, and you're a good enough debugger that you have a chance to fix it yourself rather than wait 6 months for Sun to do it, and if you can fix the bug on company time, then you're much better off fixing the bug, your company's better off, and so I'm glad that employees of companies which are already using Solaris have that option. In a sense this is no different than if you find a bug in Linux and fix it on company time, since you're getting paid either way, and either way you get the good feeling of knowing that you've helped made a critical piece of software is more reliable.
But, you might argue, "Well, if I help make Sun's software better, then they're going to make more money, and we can't have that now, can we?" You neglect the fact that Sun would've made just as much money and had just as many customers with or without your bug fix, and so the only real difference you've made is making life a little bit easier for the community of other users who are forced to deal with Solaris. And after all, that's why they call it a "community source license", because Sun really does want to make things better for their community of users, and hopefully in the end, with your bug fix, and thousands of others, they will have a slightly more reliable product and ultimately make slightly more money. And if that's a problem for you, then don't contribute! Some other Solaris user will likely find and fix the bug you would have fixed anyway.
But what if you go beyond fixing bugs and start adding new features to Solaris? Well, then, I can see some justification for being upset with the licensing terms. Suppose you add some better x86 hardware detection code to the Solaris installer and contribute it back to them. Then when Sun releases the next version of Solaris, they proudly point to their new WhizzyCoolInstall(tm) feature, and raise the price by $200. They sell a zillion copies of Solaris/x86 and cut into the Linux market a little. You're perceived as a sell-out, and nobody's happy, except Sun, and they stop being happy when everybody sees how you were treated and nobody else is foolish enough to add features to Solaris. What then?
In that case, I'd say, "don't do that then." If you have an idea for a great new feature, make it a loadable module. License it under whatever terms you want. With access to the Solaris code, you can easily make it work under Solaris, and you (or anyone else) can make it work under Linux too. If you were planning to release WhizzyCoolInstall under open source, then you weren't going to make any money off of it anyway, and this way, Sun can't turn around and use your new feature against Linux, because both OS's will have access to it. Everyone's happy, and the community of people who have to use Solaris, as well as the community of rabid Linux fan^H^H^Husers are both happy.
Honestly, I'm starting to think that/. has become physically incapable of seeing loaded issues like SCSL in their proper contexts. In the business world, most people are going to be thinking like me, so you might as well get used to it, and come up with some sort of realistic response, rather than "Sun must die." Especially since Sun's going to do it anyway, and their customers are going to be happy, and if you don't look at the issue from the POV I just gave, then you won't understand what happened.
Re:Hoax or not, there's a point here...
on
Jesux is a Bad Pun
·
· Score: 1
Exactly! Simply knowing that there are perfectly serious Christian sites as reactionary as CAP Reports (hilarious reading if you're planning to see a new movie) or as intolerant as God Hates Fags out there, the idea of a Linux for Jesus freaks isn't so outlandish, and I did have to stop and think twice before reluctantly concluding it to be a hoax. Two things finally convinced me:
The name is an obvious pun, as we've all noted. Would real Christians be that sloppy? Possibly, but unlikely. After all, if they had called it something like "Christian Linux" or "Linux for Christians", we would probably all have been fooled.
The login screen with the Lord's Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance was way over the top. It just reminded me of the kind of thing you'd see in a King of the Hill episode.
Okay, I've heard all the negative stories about Monsanto before, but here's something I'm wondering... Like ADM ("supermarket to the world"), I'm guessing Monsanto has a ton of political lobbyists in Congress. Are they one of those big companies that's supposedly keeping marijuana from being legalized due to hemp being so useful as a raw material that it'd be a lot more cost effective than growing their expensive genetically altered plastic producing plants?
Or is the whole "hemp can save the planet" agenda just a thinly veiled trick invented by stoners to legalize pot? Or (more likely), does the truth lie somewhere between the two extremes? Inquiring minds want to know!
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I added some autotext entries on my Sidekick to convert "u" into "you", "ur" into "your", "u're" into "you're", "b4" into "before", "l8r" into "later", etc. Now I can thumb-type more quickly and not sound like a luser.
Ah, yes, but the original developers of BeOS are still great engineers, so it's newsworthy to hear about their new pursuits. As a former BeOS hacker and an intern at Be in 1997, it's great to see what's happened to the various engineers that I used to work with. Dominic Giampaolo is now at Apple where he is the chief architect behind Spotlight and other cool stuff, and several Be engineers, including myself, are now working at Danger, Inc., the company behind the Hiptop/Sidekick and Hiptop2 smart phones.
I remember Benoit as an über-hacker who wrote something like 50% of the original BeOS single-handedly. It was great to hear about his new job while I'm waiting for KDE 3.5.0 beta 2 to compile on my Gentoo box.
Are you talking about U.S. mpg or British mpg? Imperial gallons are about 20% bigger than U.S. gallons, so if you're using the British units, you're talking about maybe 42mpg in U.S. terms. Still very good, but it's easy to get the two "mpgs" confused.
My ex-roommate has a 4WD '76 Ford Bronco that he takes off-roading when going camping/caving. It gets like 12mpg, but is built like a tank. After reading, among other things, The Clock of the Long Now, about a group of people who started a non-profit foundation to build a giant clock out in the desert designed to last 1000 (!) years, I got to thinking about making my next car purchase something that could long outlast the 180,000 mile mark you mentioned. At the time, I was driving a '96 Saturn SL1, a great car, but a perfect specimen of the "disposable car" phenomenon that you point out.
I ended up buying a used '97 BMW 328i last February. Sure, it cost twice as much used (excuse me, "pre-owned", which means it came with a kick-ass 100k mile warranty) as my Saturn did new, but I think it was well worth it. Here in L.A. I regularly see 15-year old Bimmers in excellent condition on the road. Plus they go something like 9000+ miles between oil changes, and there's a little LED strip on the instrument panel that counts down from 5 bars to let you know when it's time for service, using a customized estimate based on your gas consumption. What geek couldn't appreciate that? :-)
On the downside, when you do go to change the oil, you need a special "reset tool" to reset the indicator lights. This is designed to discourage Joe Luser (or the guys at the Jiffy Lube) from doing oil changes without doing all the proper BMW-sanctioned things. You may think this is lame, but considering that I read in Consumer Reports that they found that quick-lube places have a nasty tendency to put the wrong grade of oil in about 50% of the time, I don't blame them. Brand-new, a reset tool costs $100, but I've seen them on eBay for $20.
Better quit now before I get too far off-topic, but I hope you'll agree that this is the sort of stuff that matters to a potential car buyer much more than mere mpg.
On this site, you can also find this handy chart which shows visually exactly why ICE's are so inefficient.
Just say no to Win2k.. :)
Congrats to everyone who helped make this day possible but the war has not been won yet... What will the next battle be?
Ars Technica has a new Q&A with some more info on how files are handled in DP4, as well as about other aspects of X that people have been asking about.
Where are you getting the $10 price for Solaris media? Their site says $75 for the media kit. For $10, I'd be happy to try out Solaris 8 on my PC.. for $75, forget it!
Another thought: does whatever Douglas Adams may or may not do to get his ideas flowing impact you in any way? If you've already tried marijuana, or 'shrooms, or whatever, and it works for you, and you're reasonably well versed on the physiological pros and cons, and believe that the benefits justify the risks, then do you really need to be able to point to a famous person to justify your habit? Many famous poets and artists of prior centuries were hooked on laudanum (alcohol mixed with morphine) or absinthe or plain old alcohol: drugs I don't personally find appealing or stimulating to the mind.
I can think of one reason to want to know: many people I talk to are completely ignorant of the real effects (good and bad) of the common illegal drugs. When everyone I know speeds on the freeway, you'd think that legality would not be a big stumbling block (esp. in California, where possession of small quantities of marijuana or other drugs is the legal equivalent of a speeding ticket, and from stories I've heard, frequently the cops just dump it out on the side of the road and let you go on your way), but there's this persistent notion in the U.S. that "they must be bad or else they wouldn't be illegal" (of course the real reason they're illegal is due to early 20th-century political grandstanding and overt racism, but most people don't know that, do they?) Being able to say that so-and-so smokes pot, and in fact credits a good deal of his creativity to it (as with the late Carl Sagan), could advance the cause, but rather than isolated examples, what we really need is to "out" the silent millions who take recreational drugs and still hold down decent jobs. If someone set up a web page petition for people to sign with their real names and email addresses and that they smoke pot, and that it should be legal, and then mailed that list to every Congressman and posted it to Slashdot and CNN and the N.Y. Times, then that'd be a powerful force. Your Congressman isn't going to send the Feds out to arrest you: and they're certainly not going to arrest a million people scattered across the country. Civil disobedience at its finest!
Chocolate is mostly a food, but it does contain small quantities of drug compounds, including caffeine and THC-like chemicals. I've heard that you'd need to eat many pounds of chocolate to be equivalent to one joint, but then marijuana usage among my friends varies by probably two orders of magnitude, so perhaps some people are more sensitive than others. Also, empirical data suggests that women are much more sensitive to chocolate's mood-altering effects than men.
For more info, here are some choice links from this Google search:
On 01/30/100 you contributed $xxx to EFF for a one year membership with the organizatiation."
Another stabilizing effect were the frequent user meets that many BBS's would have. Forcing people to connect in real life broke down some of the anonymity and freedom from accountability that often gets people in trouble in their online communications. I was too young to take advantage of it in the heydey of BBS's, but I went to a few user meets for my roommate's BBS last year and they were pretty cool, despite the fact that the BBS itself, while still around, has long since ceased to be a focal point of activity for the community that it spawned.
Finally, I'd like to put in a plug for one local community that made a successful transition from the BBS world to the Internet, and is actually a great place for single geeks to meet MOTAS (Members Of The Appropriate Sex). I'm convinced that their site would never have been as cool had it started as a Web site instead of a BBS. Check out Matchmaker.com. They have local nodes for major metropolitan areas, and a very generous free 30 day trial. What sets them apart from the usual free personals services is the extensive and well balanced questionnaire (including several essay questions) that you're encouraged to fill out. By immediately eliminating prospects who aren't literate enough to write something meaningful, you can eliminate all but the most intelligent, interesting people (and as we all know, geeks crave intelligence in a mate).
From the women I've talked to on MM, it seems like there's a real lack of intelligent, friendly, single guys to talk to. If you're a lonely male without a mate, act now! Most guys seem to be either way too forward and sexually oriented in their pick-up emails, and/or just try *way* too hard. Be friendly, open, and honest, and try to meet a friend first, and a girlfriend second. Women are not as interested in photos as men, but if you have one, it can't hurt. If you don't meet at least one interesting person before your free trial runs out, well at least it didn't cost you anything!
Yet another example that MM is hip: in the Smoking category, in addition to the expected "Don't smoke", "Smoke occasionally", "Smoke like a chimney", and "Trying to quit" responses, they have entries for "I get high occasionally", "I get high daily", and "I never come down". What other site notices the reality that pot is the fourth most popular social drug (behind alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine) and allows users to query on recreational drug use (there's a separate question for alcohol) in such an unobtrusive and practical manner?
One more note about MM which reflects the sad times we live in: there's an essay question which asks "What do you look for in a BBS?" Almost all of the responses I've seen (including many from otherwise intelligent women that I've met) have said something like "What's a BBS?" Truly sad.
One thing to be aware of.. most optometrists are highly skeptical of this method, despite overwhelming evidence and patient testimonials, and refuse to believe that it works. I ended up going to a different optometrist from my regular one because when my prescription changed I needed new glasses right away to be able to drive to work and I didn't want to erase my progress by trying to use the old ones. The new optometrist refused to believe the old numbers I told him and I was glad that I came in without any glasses or contacts (I had my g/f drive me) because he said something about a school of thought among optometrists that even if a patient's prescription is too strong, they don't like to go back to a weaker one.. Forget that!
They've also promised source for the HotJava Browser. They must have retracted that promise because the last time I went to the HotJava page, there was no mention of SCSL...
What, the DOD is suing AOL for not writing all of their code in Ada? Oops.. sorry, I just had a flashback there. Never mind..
I'm upgrading my A3000 to potato this weekend, whoohoo! For more info on these UNIX's, check out:
(*) OT: FreeSpeech 2000 has one really cool feature not found on NaturallySpeaking or IBM ViaVoice: it supports US English, UK English, French, German, Spanish, and Italian out of the box (since I'm learning French, I figure if the PC can understand what I'm saying, I must be pronouncing it okay!), and the price was not bad ($68 from onsale.com). Unfortunately, it's not "free speech" or "free beer". However, if you're looking for voice recognition for Linux, go to www.ibm.com and search for their ViaVoice SDK for Linux which is "free beer", which I have unfortunately not had time to check out.
Come on, who could pass up a free email address at weeklyworldnews.net? Obviously not me, as you can see. Needless to say "batboy" and "sonofbatboy" were already taken.
From this week's DRCNet Week Online, an excellent newsletter on drug policy, the following article:
My best friend's ex-girlfriend has narcolepsy and it's a disorder that I wouldn't wish upon my enemies. Here's a drug which is giving narcolepsy suffers their first hope in years of a treatment that might actually work well, and they're taking it away from doctors due to mass hysteria over one highly publicized incident (neglecting the fact that club-hoppers will be able to get GHB no matter what its legality is)! Note also the inflammatory name of the bill ("Date Rape Prevention Act") and the fact that only 1 Congressman was brave enough to go against the tide on this one (I guess the others figured that their opponents would claim they were "for date rape" if they didn't vote for it).
Keeping this in mind, I propose a new bill which we should try to find a representative to sponsor pronto:
Nobody would dare to vote against it, it'll be great!
I live in LA but I spent six months in the Valley working for Be, and your show reminded me of why I sometimes miss those days. University Ave., gourmet burritos, Linux, and South Park jokes, well at least I have two of the four here in LA! Keep up the great work!
Yes, Sun is trying to profit off of the confusion between SCSL and a real open source license, as others have mentioned, and so we need to do some education to counteract that, pressure Sun to check their marketers a bit, and make sure people know that there are strings attached. Beyond that, I say more power to Sun! If I need to use Solaris, or Java, or StarOffice, for a project, I'd much rather have the source code than not.
As for those who say, "Sheesh, this is just a sneaky way for Sun to get us to fix their bugs for them, we better not let them," I think that if you work for a company that's going to use their products anyway, and you do find a bug, and you're a good enough debugger that you have a chance to fix it yourself rather than wait 6 months for Sun to do it, and if you can fix the bug on company time, then you're much better off fixing the bug, your company's better off, and so I'm glad that employees of companies which are already using Solaris have that option. In a sense this is no different than if you find a bug in Linux and fix it on company time, since you're getting paid either way, and either way you get the good feeling of knowing that you've helped made a critical piece of software is more reliable.
But, you might argue, "Well, if I help make Sun's software better, then they're going to make more money, and we can't have that now, can we?" You neglect the fact that Sun would've made just as much money and had just as many customers with or without your bug fix, and so the only real difference you've made is making life a little bit easier for the community of other users who are forced to deal with Solaris. And after all, that's why they call it a "community source license", because Sun really does want to make things better for their community of users, and hopefully in the end, with your bug fix, and thousands of others, they will have a slightly more reliable product and ultimately make slightly more money. And if that's a problem for you, then don't contribute! Some other Solaris user will likely find and fix the bug you would have fixed anyway.
But what if you go beyond fixing bugs and start adding new features to Solaris? Well, then, I can see some justification for being upset with the licensing terms. Suppose you add some better x86 hardware detection code to the Solaris installer and contribute it back to them. Then when Sun releases the next version of Solaris, they proudly point to their new WhizzyCoolInstall(tm) feature, and raise the price by $200. They sell a zillion copies of Solaris/x86 and cut into the Linux market a little. You're perceived as a sell-out, and nobody's happy, except Sun, and they stop being happy when everybody sees how you were treated and nobody else is foolish enough to add features to Solaris. What then?
In that case, I'd say, "don't do that then." If you have an idea for a great new feature, make it a loadable module. License it under whatever terms you want. With access to the Solaris code, you can easily make it work under Solaris, and you (or anyone else) can make it work under Linux too. If you were planning to release WhizzyCoolInstall under open source, then you weren't going to make any money off of it anyway, and this way, Sun can't turn around and use your new feature against Linux, because both OS's will have access to it. Everyone's happy, and the community of people who have to use Solaris, as well as the community of rabid Linux fan^H^H^Husers are both happy.
Honestly, I'm starting to think that /. has become physically incapable of seeing loaded issues like SCSL in their proper contexts. In the business world, most people are going to be thinking like me, so you might as well get used to it, and come up with some sort of realistic response, rather than "Sun must die." Especially since Sun's going to do it anyway, and their customers are going to be happy, and if you don't look at the issue from the POV I just gave, then you won't understand what happened.
- The name is an obvious pun, as we've all noted. Would real Christians be that sloppy? Possibly, but unlikely. After all, if they had called it something like "Christian Linux" or "Linux for Christians", we would probably all have been fooled.
- The login screen with the Lord's Prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance was way over the top. It just reminded me of the kind of thing you'd see in a King of the Hill episode.
Anyway, thanks for bringing up a very good point!Or is the whole "hemp can save the planet" agenda just a thinly veiled trick invented by stoners to legalize pot? Or (more likely), does the truth lie somewhere between the two extremes? Inquiring minds want to know!