What slashdot really seems to need is a "GUN NUT" category, so that I can filter articles like these from my sight just like I filtered that Katz wanker all those years ago.
Depending on the harddrive you're lugging around, your maximum bandwidth tends to max out at around 28 megabytes per second per harddrive. Not accounting for bus topology and other issues.
A NAS box attached to a gigabit LAN sounds better every day now...
How many times has the DoD/Space Command degraded GPS capabilities world-wide or in highly populated regions like Western Europe, China, Eastern Europe, Russia, SE Asia?
Never.
And that's only because the GPS system for everyone except the US military has always been degraded (i.e. not the best it could be) by default.
Yeah, right. As if a private corporation (or a set thereof), that most likely has a "will generate Value for the Shareholders, no matter What" clause in its charter no less, will be any more honest and/or efficient about this stuff. This isn't to say that humanity as a species shouldn't reach for the stars with all its might -- hey, competing over "who gets a manned base on the moon first" is better than "who develops the nastiest three-phase nuclear warhead" any day of the fucking century.
Anyway... as I was saying, I don't think it'll make any difference if your government tosses money at private corporations (who're still out for Profit, remember? how many corners can you cut in space?) or governmentally operated subsections of itself -- if the thing is run by greedy assholes (which is what your country seems to produce lots and lots of these days), you'll see the same sort of lie-telling, back-stabbing crook'ry no matter who catches the fat government contracts. Which can the US congress (etc.) assert better supervision over, a private corporation or a sub-unit of the government? And don't tell me that private corporations aren't susceptible to what is essentially the same sort of political mud-wrestling familiar from every government function that occupies more than two people.
Personally, I think that the best way to get to, well, wherever we're going once we've cleared the stratosphere, is to just simply forget about all the nationalistic goal type shit and concentrate on getting some sort of feasible solutions to many of the Hard problems posed by the unbelievably hairy business of space exploration. I mean, it's not like the US is going to get there alone all by itself with all the political, economical and ecological problems you seem to have right here on earth.
So. About a year ago, give or take a little, a NASA shuttle breaks apart and goes kaboom on re-entry. A couple of fucking big articles appear on slarshdot, it's like a national day of mourning is declared and shit. That's OK -- after all, people died and the US warmongering neo-conservative bureaucrat assholes got yet another reason to cut funding to space exploration and related technologies.
But now, a Brazilian launch vehicle explodes, on the pad no less (think Challenger, only a bit sooner) and all those 16 dead people merit are one measly link, a couple of phrases in a slashdot heading (half of which is speculation about the future of missions to space from an unbelievably US-centric viewpoint) and not much else. Like, what the fuck?
I think that McBride and Cronys really do believe in their heart of hearts that people are not capable of organizing, co-ordinating, and for that matter, producing functional code, without the direct support of some company as a mastermind.
Maybe this is in fact quite true from where they're looking -- far as I've understood, Utah is quite full of brainwashed follow-the-leader mormon sheep.
Still, the concept of "all program code is written by and for The Corporations!" is both scary and amusing at the same time; the scary bit is that most people who haven't tried it themselves entirely believe it.
Aside from this, we must remember that only part of Mac OS X is being released under the APSL. Even though the fatal flaws of the APSL were fixed, and even if the practical problems were addressed, that does no good for the other parts of Mac OS X whose source code is not being released at all. We must not judge all of a company by just part of what they do.
If they weren't already, these guys and gals would be my new heroes.
"Festival" is correct
on
Assembly '03
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
Did y'all know that an event called "assembly" has been organised yearly since 1992? And that it started out as a traditional copy party at a school building, the likes of which were quite common back then? It subsequently transformed itself into a demoscene event in the years 1992-1995, after which it has started sucking with a vengeance.
This is to say, these days it's all pimply-faced thirteen-year-old windowshead would-be-newmediawanker quake-playing consumers sitting in front of their daddy-funded PeeCees, occasionally complaining about the loud volume during the actual demo compos (the vestiges of which the organizers are pretty much obliged to maintain). As a concession to the old-school demo scene folk, they stringed off an "old school" section of the party area and charged a premium to get in. For gods' sake, last year there was a fucking 3dmark competition and I fully expect that this year there will be some other sort of competition over seeing who can metaphorically suck a corporate sponsor's dick the best!
Then again, I hear there's only one of the original assembly crew still left in the organizing group. Which completely explains their controlled slide into corporate whoredom.
Fortunately I'll only be at the shadow-event, boozembly. There's far less in the way of corporate advertising there, and more boozing, at the very least -- so it can't completely suck unlike its parent.
Have you ever tried parsing XML in order to read in one piddly little fucking config file? Even if you have something like libxml around to do the parsing for you, you'll still have to crawl around in the fucking parse tree, comparing and checking and generally getting it in the bottom from a construction that can and will feed almost any old semi-structured garbage down to the application.
Sure, you can do quick and dirty hacks, like discarding invalid structure etc, but in the end that'll work far worse than plain old comma-separated or RFCwossname ("Field: value\n" thing, you know) config files.
Of course, all this could be solved in yet another gigantic configuration file committee who would drop an equally Golgothan pile of specification out of their collective arses, the first implementation of which would be in a wanker language such as Javur or PHP that, besides being ENIAC-style unwieldy, would thus remain inaccessible to the bulk of software written for GNU/Linux and compatible systems. WHEE!
Still, all this is beside the point. Making things more idiot-proof is not, was not and will never be the answer to "how can we make GNU/Linux more attractive to complete mouth-breathing, tie-wearing wankers?". Idiots are far too ingenious to fall for that old trick.
Almost
everybody is the world would be evil, according to that argument.
Bingo!
Re:Lawyers don't sue people, people sue people
on
Sony Violating GPL?
·
· Score: 1
True -- the real problem aren't lawyers, or the fact that they exist, but the general trigger-happiness of the Average American.
Still, I'd much rather eliminate all lawyers than all people:-)
Re:Lawyers don't sue people, people sue people
on
Sony Violating GPL?
·
· Score: 1
You're forgetting that the landshark department of a megacorporation doesn't just sit there, idling, waiting for something to happen. No, in most corporations they are actively scheming, trying to find a way to sue their competition for something so that a) they can get publicity (good or bad, doesn't matter) and maybe b) they can beat their competition into submission / harass some critics / do something else to increase the perceived value of the company.
So yes, while lawyers don't actively sue people (in most cases, that is), they can still suggest to the potential plaintiff that "hey, let's use a Strategic Lawsuit to Suppress Public Participation!".
How about m$ makes a "surprise audit" on your premises, shutting you down for a full 2 weeks while the BSA investigates your computers (and trade secrets, too)?
Not buying m$ software in a world of m$-only software is probable cause. Unfortunately.
A cunning way to hurt M$ would then be to buy PCs with a m$ OS on them (or not, if you're a school, university or some such and can afford for a certain number of PCs to be unavailable for a couple of weeks) and install GNU/Linux on top of the evil m$ operating system. Then the users will grow accustomed to Linux. Which is probably what M$ fears most.
After all, they are the ones that hold all of
the cards. You are just a prospective employee, and there are plenty of them around that won't tell them they have to sign this document...
So the situation looks pretty simple: make sure that they're not the ones who hold all the cards. Don't go in pleading "please suh, could I have this job". Have an attitude. They may not hire you, but you'll leave the interview remembering that you didn't want to work there anyway.
(this strategy requires obviously that you have a couple of months' rent and food worth of money in your bank account and that you compensate for surprises.)
Slashdot Mirror
The bit about Darl being a SCOurge to humanity.
What slashdot really seems to need is a "GUN NUT" category, so that I can filter articles like these from my sight just like I filtered that Katz wanker all those years ago.
Depending on the harddrive you're lugging around, your maximum bandwidth tends to max out at around 28 megabytes per second per harddrive. Not accounting for bus topology and other issues.
A NAS box attached to a gigabit LAN sounds better every day now...
Like Finland trusted the US to not give bombs to the USSR during WW2 that they could drop on Helsinki and other civilian targets.
Fuck you.
Yeah, right. As if a private corporation (or a set thereof), that most likely has a "will generate Value for the Shareholders, no matter What" clause in its charter no less, will be any more honest and/or efficient about this stuff. This isn't to say that humanity as a species shouldn't reach for the stars with all its might -- hey, competing over "who gets a manned base on the moon first" is better than "who develops the nastiest three-phase nuclear warhead" any day of the fucking century.
Anyway... as I was saying, I don't think it'll make any difference if your government tosses money at private corporations (who're still out for Profit, remember? how many corners can you cut in space?) or governmentally operated subsections of itself -- if the thing is run by greedy assholes (which is what your country seems to produce lots and lots of these days), you'll see the same sort of lie-telling, back-stabbing crook'ry no matter who catches the fat government contracts. Which can the US congress (etc.) assert better supervision over, a private corporation or a sub-unit of the government? And don't tell me that private corporations aren't susceptible to what is essentially the same sort of political mud-wrestling familiar from every government function that occupies more than two people.
Personally, I think that the best way to get to, well, wherever we're going once we've cleared the stratosphere, is to just simply forget about all the nationalistic goal type shit and concentrate on getting some sort of feasible solutions to many of the Hard problems posed by the unbelievably hairy business of space exploration. I mean, it's not like the US is going to get there alone all by itself with all the political, economical and ecological problems you seem to have right here on earth.
That's when you start cryptographically signing all of your outgoing mail.
A little bit of public-key cryptography evangelism couldn't hurt, either.
So. About a year ago, give or take a little, a NASA shuttle breaks apart and goes kaboom on re-entry. A couple of fucking big articles appear on slarshdot, it's like a national day of mourning is declared and shit. That's OK -- after all, people died and the US warmongering neo-conservative bureaucrat assholes got yet another reason to cut funding to space exploration and related technologies.
But now, a Brazilian launch vehicle explodes, on the pad no less (think Challenger, only a bit sooner) and all those 16 dead people merit are one measly link, a couple of phrases in a slashdot heading (half of which is speculation about the future of missions to space from an unbelievably US-centric viewpoint) and not much else. Like, what the fuck?
Still, the concept of "all program code is written by and for The Corporations!" is both scary and amusing at the same time; the scary bit is that most people who haven't tried it themselves entirely believe it.
If they weren't already, these guys and gals would be my new heroes.
Did y'all know that an event called "assembly" has been organised yearly since 1992? And that it started out as a traditional copy party at a school building, the likes of which were quite common back then? It subsequently transformed itself into a demoscene event in the years 1992-1995, after which it has started sucking with a vengeance.
This is to say, these days it's all pimply-faced thirteen-year-old windowshead would-be-newmediawanker quake-playing consumers sitting in front of their daddy-funded PeeCees, occasionally complaining about the loud volume during the actual demo compos (the vestiges of which the organizers are pretty much obliged to maintain). As a concession to the old-school demo scene folk, they stringed off an "old school" section of the party area and charged a premium to get in. For gods' sake, last year there was a fucking 3dmark competition and I fully expect that this year there will be some other sort of competition over seeing who can metaphorically suck a corporate sponsor's dick the best!
Then again, I hear there's only one of the original assembly crew still left in the organizing group. Which completely explains their controlled slide into corporate whoredom.
Fortunately I'll only be at the shadow-event, boozembly. There's far less in the way of corporate advertising there, and more boozing, at the very least -- so it can't completely suck unlike its parent.
Have you ever tried parsing XML in order to read in one piddly little fucking config file? Even if you have something like libxml around to do the parsing for you, you'll still have to crawl around in the fucking parse tree, comparing and checking and generally getting it in the bottom from a construction that can and will feed almost any old semi-structured garbage down to the application.
Sure, you can do quick and dirty hacks, like discarding invalid structure etc, but in the end that'll work far worse than plain old comma-separated or RFCwossname ("Field: value\n" thing, you know) config files.
Of course, all this could be solved in yet another gigantic configuration file committee who would drop an equally Golgothan pile of specification out of their collective arses, the first implementation of which would be in a wanker language such as Javur or PHP that, besides being ENIAC-style unwieldy, would thus remain inaccessible to the bulk of software written for GNU/Linux and compatible systems. WHEE!
Still, all this is beside the point. Making things more idiot-proof is not, was not and will never be the answer to "how can we make GNU/Linux more attractive to complete mouth-breathing, tie-wearing wankers?". Idiots are far too ingenious to fall for that old trick.
Of course, the real golden rule is "He Who Has The Gold, Makes The Rules".
Bingo!
True -- the real problem aren't lawyers, or the fact that they exist, but the general trigger-happiness of the Average American.
Still, I'd much rather eliminate all lawyers than all people :-)
You're forgetting that the landshark department of a megacorporation doesn't just sit there, idling, waiting for something to happen. No, in most corporations they are actively scheming, trying to find a way to sue their competition for something so that a) they can get publicity (good or bad, doesn't matter) and maybe b) they can beat their competition into submission / harass some critics / do something else to increase the perceived value of the company.
So yes, while lawyers don't actively sue people (in most cases, that is), they can still suggest to the potential plaintiff that "hey, let's use a Strategic Lawsuit to Suppress Public Participation!".
If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
(besides, Haskell's "pure functional, yet we have the I/O monad" dualism makes my head hurt, among other things.)
You feel foolish! You haven't been paying attention. -more-
And to crack the recreation for yourself, find a way to set your system clock back to a couple of hours before key expiration. Boom!
How about m$ makes a "surprise audit" on your premises, shutting you down for a full 2 weeks while the BSA investigates your computers (and trade secrets, too)?
Not buying m$ software in a world of m$-only software is probable cause. Unfortunately.
A cunning way to hurt M$ would then be to buy PCs with a m$ OS on them (or not, if you're a school, university or some such and can afford for a certain number of PCs to be unavailable for a couple of weeks) and install GNU/Linux on top of the evil m$ operating system. Then the users will grow accustomed to Linux. Which is probably what M$ fears most.
Sturgeon's law: 90% of everything is crud.
Presumably, "people" is a subset of "everything".
That, by the way, sounds suspiciously like the iterative "code morphing" stuff in the Transmeta chips. Just caught my attention ...
Of course, you'll have to remember that ninety percent of everything is crud. That includes the people, so 90% of everyone are foolish.
So the situation looks pretty simple: make sure that they're not the ones who hold all the cards. Don't go in pleading "please suh, could I have this job". Have an attitude. They may not hire you, but you'll leave the interview remembering that you didn't want to work there anyway.
(this strategy requires obviously that you have a couple of months' rent and food worth of money in your bank account and that you compensate for surprises.)
Oh poor old would-be-capitalist. Only 22 and already he's bereft of all his precious intellectual property.
Let this be a lesson to the rest of you: GPL it and this won't happen.