We interrupt this article for an important notice:
The National Flamewar Service has issued a Distro Flamewar Watch on this article. This article has been positively identified as containing the following:
1. A technical product review from a media outlet not known for technical knowledge.
2. (Most important) Comparisons between Linux distributions.
These conditions have been found to lead to severe flamewars. Readers are advised to expect the following:
1. Fanatical defense of favorite distributions. 2. Attacks on C|Net's "idiot" reviewers. 3. Anecdotal stories about individual user experiences with various distributions. These stories may have absolutely nothing to do with anyone else's experience. 4. Long threads of arguments that amount to:
Post: Your distro sucks! Reply: Does not! YOUR distro sucks! Reply: Does not! YOUR distro sucks!
...and so on, ad infinitum.
For your own safety, we advise readers to not take comments personally. Please take deep breaths before firing off your reply. If the breathing does not help, consider pouring hot grits down your pants -- this seems to work for several Anonymous Cowards.
If you have a caffeine addiction, it would probably come out more like, "DDDDDana, yyyyou'rrre a mmmmoron. YYYou got yourssself intothissituation, iiiit's yourown ssstupid fault.... WHERE'S MY #$%@! LATTE!?"
(I know this is the second post of yours I've replied to today, but I'm not picking on you. Honest.)
I've always envied the "old-timers" who brag about running Linux since 1991. You know -- the people who wax nostalgic about downloading and compiling the 0.9 kernel.
Now, thanks to Hurd, I have a chance to get in on the ground floor. Maybe in 5 years, you'll read a post from me griping about the glibc9 to glibc10 conversion.
You could call yourself "DonkPunch", have a last name that no two people pronounce the same, combine your name with the word "Media" to name your company (even though media became uncool in 1995), name your domain after your full company name (making it 18 characters long), post pointless comments on slashdot, and include a link back to your Java-using website even though Navigator for Linux is notoriously unstable with Java.
IIRC, Microsoft is a member of the Object Management Group, as are Rational, HP, and several other companies. OMG is responsible for the official definition of UML.
Rational makes modeling tools based on UML. UML is a modeling language for object-oriented development. Rational also employs three of the biggest names in object-oriented methodology (Grady, Booch, and Rumbaugh, I believe).
(It's very convenient for a development tools company to have so much influence over development standards, isn't it?)
The XML protocol mentioned in the article is undoubtedly SOAP. From what I've seen, SOAP is pretty heavily weighted in favor of COM objects.
But the SOAP protocol is open, it is XML-based, and it should not too be hard to implement with a CORBA ORB or whatever the technology of the week is at your company.
To paint SOAP as a Java-killer, however, is misleading. It may make it unnecessary to mess with Java's Remote Method Invocation, but it won't stop people from writing JavaBeans invoked by SOAP calls. XML procedure calls will allow components to communicate, but you still need a language for writing the components.
SOAP should give Windows developers an easier way for their Visual C++ components to communicate with components on systems that have poor support for COM. Could SOAP encourage developers to use C++ instead of Java for their components? Possibly, but I already see several examples of Java making use of XML. Java developers may well embrace SOAP.
In the end, I believe developers will gravitate towards what works best, and that's the whole point.
Re:Study human factors before commenting please
on
Interface Zen
·
· Score: 2
If I had to know what I was talking about before I posted, I would probably never post.
(I hear the response of thousands -- "So, what's the downside?")
For some reason, I heard my grandmother's voice saying, "You don't know where that thumb has been.":)
More On-Topic: There seems to be a fair amount of hatred for CapsLock. I use it quite a bit for #define constants and macros in C. Do Perl programmers not use ALL_CAPS for much?
I've seen the comparative crime rates. I've heard all of the explanations for the differences ad nauseum. "Why is violent crime so low in Switzerland? Why is it so high in the U.S? Why is the suicide rate so high in Japan?"
My current feeling -- based on formal study of political science, criminal justice, and just common-sense observation -- is that these sorts of comparisons between different nations and cultures are useless. At best, they should be taken with a large grain of salt.
There is something fundamentally goofy (scholarly term:) ) in the U.S. culture that makes certain people in our country do incredibly selfish, harmful, irresponsible things. To be more specific, immaturity is perhaps too acceptable in U.S. culture.
By "immaturity", I mean selfishness, shirking responsibility, and acting out without regard to consequences. "Immaturity" is the most descriptive word I can find for this.
To a large extent, I think the U.S. glamorizes an immature mindset. Our sports heroes tend to behave like spoiled brats. Our business heroes get kudos for being ruthless. We wink at CEOs who throw telephones against their walls during temper tantrums. We like stories about music stars who commit felonies. We love catch phrases like, "Show me the money."
And, like a bunch of kids, we love to play with the things that we're not supposed to touch. Drinking makes us feel like grown-ups, so we go out and get plastered as soon as we're legal. Guns are dangerous and scary, so we make sure that our movies and television shows have lots of gunpoint standoffs, shootings, and heroes who carry Berettas in their waistbands underneath their $500 jackets.
I suspect the Swiss obligatory service laws take away a lot of the childish fascination with guns. Perhaps your culture also values maturity more than the U.S. Maybe it's time for the U.S. to take a few days off from suing and legislating each other and just GROW UP.
So the post advocating a violation of id's license terms and copyright get moderated up, but a post criticizing this idea get moderated down.
Look, I know there is no pretense of fairness or lack of bias on slashdot. Anything MS-related will get slammed -- fine. Anyone claiming a software patent is a jerk -- ok.
But upscoring posts which openly advocate copyright violations is not acceptable. If it's ok to ignore id's license, is it ok for someone else to ignore the GPL and release modified binary-only distributions of the Linux kernel?
Go ahead and "troll" me. My karma can take it. At least I'm not posting anonymously.
Don't reject Gore because of his occasionally boneheaded remarks. I think he actually has a relatively good grasp of technology issues (certainly more so than Mr. Bush).
So we should vote on presidential candidates based on their grasp of technology issues?
It's a big world. There's more to it than computers.
And I am the only person upset that it's one year before the actual election and our choices have been narrowed down to Bush and Gore (which, BTW, sounds like a pornographic slasher movie, but I digress....)
1) Sorry, we don't even know how that happened. 2) Sorry, it seemed like a good idea at first.
and
3) Doesn't count -- we didn't steal basketball. We just embraced and extended it into a circus of overpaid spoiled brats -- just like we do with most pro sports. You wouldn't want it back at this point, anyway.
A niche in the server arena is a pretty darn big niche.
I'm not against Linux as a desktop OS (or, more appropriately, a workstation OS). The problem I have is that "desktopping" an OS implies sacrificing functionality for ease-of-use. I fear this.
The main reason Linux works for me as a workstation is because it also works as a server. It greatly speeds up development when I'm able to develop and test on the same machine.
I am concerned about this trend towards "one OS does it all". I think this is a bad thing -- you end up with a lot of rarely-used baggage. To a certain extent, the "desktop" paradigm and the "server" paradigm may be mutually exclusive. Considering all of the NT criticism on slashdot, one would think there would be less desire to mimic Microsoft's desire to do everything.
KDE, GNOME, and the other GUI-oriented projects have done a lot to flatten the learning curve for Linux. I'm grateful for anything that lets me just get stuff done without digging through HOWTOs trying to figure out how to get stuff done.
But there is still room for improvement in the server niche. This is an area where Linux has started to prove itself, and I would hate to see the momentum lost here because people decided to start an open-source home-checkbook project instead of a solid application server.
(Self-contradiction ->) But, then again, Linux developers have done fine scratching their own itches so far....
Don't underestimate the importance of ketchup viscosity tests. They are essential for the advancement of condiment science. We also need to devote resources towards studying the relative tanginess of mustards. I personally make a tax-free contribution every year to the Mayo Clinic, since someone told me that this is their specialty.
These experiments are also very cost-effective. A friend and I were able to construct our own supercolliders in his driveway using Burger-King kethcup packets and bricks.
Perhaps someday, God willing, we may also clear up the whole "ketchup" vs. "catsup" controversy.
/* The funniest part of the post is knowing that somebody might to have to Meta-Moderate it without any context. They'll be saying, "What the fsck is he talking about?" */
...couldn't complete the form......too many questions......stop......please......no more questions......Why do you need to know my blood type?......Why do I have to ask to beta-test your product?......Why are you being so picky about your testers?......I just want to help you make a better product......Please......I like WordPerfect......I have a registered version......I want to try the new version......no more questions......I give up...
I've got some inside information, folks. The PRC is not only using Linux, they have already made kernel modifications. A friend of mine in China managed to slip me a few source files that were very interesting.
In particular, I found the following comments:
/* This routine replaces the inefficient original version developed by lazy capitalist pigs. */
/* This structure is dedicated to the people's resistance against decadent western culture. No more Levis! */
/* This was intended to be portable, but the capitalist running dog Torvalds f*cked it up. */
The whole "paradigm" (yech, I hate that word) of network-distributed applications falls right in the laps of Free OS's like *BSD and Linux. Here, they can offer low-cost, high-availability servers running on commodity hardware. The platforms are exceptionally well-suited to becoming application servers in much the same way they've already proven themselves as http and ftp servers.
IMHO, this is such an easy win for these systems it's not even funny. It would be a shame if a myopic infatuation with Linux on the desktop led to this opportunity being lost. By the time Linux is accepted as a "desktop OS", distributed apps may make the desktop OS an outdated concept. Why not get an early start on tomorrow's goals right now?
(This has been posted before, but I can't resist....)
From: patl@athena.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti) Subject: The True Path (long) Date: 11 Jul 91 03:17:31 GMT When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, C-h for help and "foo" File is read only. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION Ed is the standard text editor. Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED!
``Ed is the standard text editor.''
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929/bin/ed -rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970/usr/ucb/vi -rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990/usr/bin/emacs Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
``Ed is the standard text editor.''
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem> ed
? help ? ? ? quit ? exit ? bye ? hello? ? eat flaming death ? ^C ? ^C ? ^D ? Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
``Ed is the standard text editor.''
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a ``viitor.'' Not a ``emacsitor.'' Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their ``edlin'' on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can remember what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED ``VISUAL'' EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
In all seriousness, it sounds like spam was just part of how they did business. I didn't get anything from the article which would indicate that the killer(s) was a disgruntled spam-recipient.
I don't know anything about the victims, but the brief profile in the article indicated that they may have been involved in some shady business activities. A disgruntled business associate/customer/creditor sounds more likely than a hacked-off spam target. The fact that the victims were spammers is interesting to the slashdot community, but probably not to the world at large.
This line from the article made me a little tense:
Please think seriously before you create a unique license for your software product. Please use the GPL or the BSD style license if you can.
I don't want to overreact. I understand that the author is simply trying to encourage the use of established Open Source licenses. In fact, it has been my personal experience that many developers who fear the GPL don't entirely understand it ("The GPL causes me to sign over my copyright to the FSF. I can't modify my own program and sell it closed-source to someone later.")
But I want to make a simple point -- the developer has an absolute right to determine the license under which his/her product is released. If Joe Programmer releases the most killer Linux app ever, but his license agreement requires you to hop on one foot to the mailbox and mail him a check once a month, then you either start hopping or you don't use the program. You can send Joe nasty emails, you can publicly flame him on slashdot, but none of that changes Joe's right to use his General Hopping License. If you can't handle the GHL, Joe's product is useless to you.
Slashdot Mirror
We interrupt this article for an important notice:
The National Flamewar Service has issued a Distro Flamewar Watch on this article. This article has been positively identified as containing the following:
1. A technical product review from a media outlet not known for technical knowledge.
2. (Most important) Comparisons between Linux distributions.
These conditions have been found to lead to severe flamewars. Readers are advised to expect the following:
1. Fanatical defense of favorite distributions.
2. Attacks on C|Net's "idiot" reviewers.
3. Anecdotal stories about individual user experiences with various distributions. These stories may have absolutely nothing to do with anyone else's experience.
4. Long threads of arguments that amount to:
Post: Your distro sucks!
Reply: Does not! YOUR distro sucks!
Reply: Does not! YOUR distro sucks!
...and so on, ad infinitum.
For your own safety, we advise readers to not take comments personally. Please take deep breaths before firing off your reply. If the breathing does not help, consider pouring hot grits down your pants -- this seems to work for several Anonymous Cowards.
We now return you to the article.
If you have a caffeine addiction, it would probably come out more like, "DDDDDana, yyyyou'rrre a mmmmoron. YYYou got yourssself intothissituation, iiiit's yourown ssstupid fault.... WHERE'S MY #$%@! LATTE!?"
(I know this is the second post of yours I've replied to today, but I'm not picking on you. Honest.)
If you can't use your genetalia responsibly, maybe you shouldn't have them
Words to live by, if you ask me....
Since when did Sun have any credibility with the open-source movement? ;)
I've always envied the "old-timers" who brag about running Linux since 1991. You know -- the people who wax nostalgic about downloading and compiling the 0.9 kernel.
Now, thanks to Hurd, I have a chance to get in on the ground floor. Maybe in 5 years, you'll read a post from me griping about the glibc9 to glibc10 conversion.
Thanks, guys!
You could call yourself "DonkPunch", have a last name that no two people pronounce the same, combine your name with the word "Media" to name your company (even though media became uncool in 1995), name your domain after your full company name (making it 18 characters long), post pointless comments on slashdot, and include a link back to your Java-using website even though Navigator for Linux is notoriously unstable with Java.
I am using a lot of Java and XML these days.
IIRC, Microsoft is a member of the Object Management Group, as are Rational, HP, and several other companies. OMG is responsible for the official definition of UML.
Rational makes modeling tools based on UML. UML is a modeling language for object-oriented development. Rational also employs three of the biggest names in object-oriented methodology (Grady, Booch, and Rumbaugh, I believe).
(It's very convenient for a development tools company to have so much influence over development standards, isn't it?)
The XML protocol mentioned in the article is undoubtedly SOAP. From what I've seen, SOAP is pretty heavily weighted in favor of COM objects.
But the SOAP protocol is open, it is XML-based, and it should not too be hard to implement with a CORBA ORB or whatever the technology of the week is at your company.
To paint SOAP as a Java-killer, however, is misleading. It may make it unnecessary to mess with Java's Remote Method Invocation, but it won't stop people from writing JavaBeans invoked by SOAP calls. XML procedure calls will allow components to communicate, but you still need a language for writing the components.
SOAP should give Windows developers an easier way for their Visual C++ components to communicate with components on systems that have poor support for COM. Could SOAP encourage developers to use C++ instead of Java for their components? Possibly, but I already see several examples of Java making use of XML. Java developers may well embrace SOAP.
In the end, I believe developers will gravitate towards what works best, and that's the whole point.
If I had to know what I was talking about before I posted, I would probably never post.
(I hear the response of thousands -- "So, what's the downside?")
For some reason, I heard my grandmother's voice saying, "You don't know where that thumb has been." :)
More On-Topic: There seems to be a fair amount of hatred for CapsLock. I use it quite a bit for #define constants and macros in C. Do Perl programmers not use ALL_CAPS for much?
I've seen the comparative crime rates. I've heard all of the explanations for the differences ad nauseum. "Why is violent crime so low in Switzerland? Why is it so high in the U.S? Why is the suicide rate so high in Japan?"
:) ) in the U.S. culture that makes certain people in our country do incredibly selfish, harmful, irresponsible things. To be more specific, immaturity is perhaps too acceptable in U.S. culture.
My current feeling -- based on formal study of political science, criminal justice, and just common-sense observation -- is that these sorts of comparisons between different nations and cultures are useless. At best, they should be taken with a large grain of salt.
There is something fundamentally goofy (scholarly term
By "immaturity", I mean selfishness, shirking responsibility, and acting out without regard to consequences. "Immaturity" is the most descriptive word I can find for this.
To a large extent, I think the U.S. glamorizes an immature mindset. Our sports heroes tend to behave like spoiled brats. Our business heroes get kudos for being ruthless. We wink at CEOs who throw telephones against their walls during temper tantrums. We like stories about music stars who commit felonies. We love catch phrases like, "Show me the money."
And, like a bunch of kids, we love to play with the things that we're not supposed to touch. Drinking makes us feel like grown-ups, so we go out and get plastered as soon as we're legal. Guns are dangerous and scary, so we make sure that our movies and television shows have lots of gunpoint standoffs, shootings, and heroes who carry Berettas in their waistbands underneath their $500 jackets.
I suspect the Swiss obligatory service laws take away a lot of the childish fascination with guns. Perhaps your culture also values maturity more than the U.S. Maybe it's time for the U.S. to take a few days off from suing and legislating each other and just GROW UP.
(Puts away soapbox)
...and with a year of less than four of your Earth days.
:)
Of my Earth days? Are Earth days not the same everywhere or are you posting from a different planet?
So the post advocating a violation of id's license terms and copyright get moderated up, but a post criticizing this idea get moderated down.
Look, I know there is no pretense of fairness or lack of bias on slashdot. Anything MS-related will get slammed -- fine. Anyone claiming a software patent is a jerk -- ok.
But upscoring posts which openly advocate copyright violations is not acceptable. If it's ok to ignore id's license, is it ok for someone else to ignore the GPL and release modified binary-only distributions of the Linux kernel?
Go ahead and "troll" me. My karma can take it. At least I'm not posting anonymously.
Don't reject Gore because of his occasionally boneheaded remarks. I think he actually has a relatively good grasp of technology issues (certainly more so than Mr. Bush).
So we should vote on presidential candidates based on their grasp of technology issues?
It's a big world. There's more to it than computers.
And I am the only person upset that it's one year before the actual election and our choices have been narrowed down to Bush and Gore (which, BTW, sounds like a pornographic slasher movie, but I digress....)
1) Sorry, we don't even know how that happened.
2) Sorry, it seemed like a good idea at first.
and
3) Doesn't count -- we didn't steal basketball. We just embraced and extended it into a circus of overpaid spoiled brats -- just like we do with most pro sports. You wouldn't want it back at this point, anyway.
A niche in the server arena is a pretty darn big niche.
I'm not against Linux as a desktop OS (or, more appropriately, a workstation OS). The problem I have is that "desktopping" an OS implies sacrificing functionality for ease-of-use. I fear this.
The main reason Linux works for me as a workstation is because it also works as a server. It greatly speeds up development when I'm able to develop and test on the same machine.
I am concerned about this trend towards "one OS does it all". I think this is a bad thing -- you end up with a lot of rarely-used baggage. To a certain extent, the "desktop" paradigm and the "server" paradigm may be mutually exclusive. Considering all of the NT criticism on slashdot, one would think there would be less desire to mimic Microsoft's desire to do everything.
KDE, GNOME, and the other GUI-oriented projects have done a lot to flatten the learning curve for Linux. I'm grateful for anything that lets me just get stuff done without digging through HOWTOs trying to figure out how to get stuff done.
But there is still room for improvement in the server niche. This is an area where Linux has started to prove itself, and I would hate to see the momentum lost here because people decided to start an open-source home-checkbook project instead of a solid application server.
(Self-contradiction ->) But, then again, Linux developers have done fine scratching their own itches so far....
Don't underestimate the importance of ketchup viscosity tests. They are essential for the advancement of condiment science. We also need to devote resources towards studying the relative tanginess of mustards. I personally make a tax-free contribution every year to the Mayo Clinic, since someone told me that this is their specialty.
These experiments are also very cost-effective. A friend and I were able to construct our own supercolliders in his driveway using Burger-King kethcup packets and bricks.
Perhaps someday, God willing, we may also clear up the whole "ketchup" vs. "catsup" controversy.
/* The funniest part of the post is knowing that somebody might to have to Meta-Moderate it without any context. They'll be saying, "What the fsck is he talking about?" */
...couldn't complete the form... ...too many questions... ...stop... ...please... ...no more questions... ...Why do you need to know my blood type?... ...Why do I have to ask to beta-test your product?... ...Why are you being so picky about your testers?... ...I just want to help you make a better product... ...Please... ...I like WordPerfect... ...I have a registered version... ...I want to try the new version... ...no more questions... ...I give up...
That should solve the big-endian vs. little-endian debate once and for all.
I've got some inside information, folks. The PRC is not only using Linux, they have already made kernel modifications. A friend of mine in China managed to slip me a few source files that were very interesting.
In particular, I found the following comments:
/* This routine replaces the inefficient original version developed by lazy capitalist pigs. */
/* This structure is dedicated to the people's resistance against decadent western culture. No more Levis! */
/* This was intended to be portable, but the capitalist running dog Torvalds f*cked it up. */
and if you use Linux or FreeBSD, you'll only be able to get last year's model. :)
...insert joke about it being slower than a regular bike... :)
The whole "paradigm" (yech, I hate that word) of network-distributed applications falls right in the laps of Free OS's like *BSD and Linux. Here, they can offer low-cost, high-availability servers running on commodity hardware. The platforms are exceptionally well-suited to becoming application servers in much the same way they've already proven themselves as http and ftp servers.
IMHO, this is such an easy win for these systems it's not even funny. It would be a shame if a myopic infatuation with Linux on the desktop led to this opportunity being lost. By the time Linux is accepted as a "desktop OS", distributed apps may make the desktop OS an outdated concept. Why not get an early start on tomorrow's goals right now?
(This has been posted before, but I can't resist....)
/bin/ed /usr/ucb/vi /usr/bin/emacs
From: patl@athena.mit.edu (Patrick J. LoPresti)
Subject: The True Path (long)
Date: 11 Jul 91 03:17:31 GMT
When I log into my Xenix system with my 110 baud teletype, both vi and Emacs are just too damn slow. They print useless messages like, C-h for help and "foo" File is read only. So I use the editor that doesn't waste my VALUABLE time.
Ed, man! !man ed
ED(1) UNIX Programmer's Manual ED(1)
NAME
ed - text editor
SYNOPSIS
ed [ - ] [ -x ] [ name ]
DESCRIPTION
Ed is the standard text editor.
Computer Scientists love ed, not just because it comes first alphabetically, but because it's the standard. Everyone else loves ed because it's ED!
``Ed is the standard text editor.''
And ed doesn't waste space on my Timex Sinclair. Just look:
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 24 Oct 29 1929
-rwxr-xr-t 4 root 1310720 Jan 1 1970
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root 5.89824e37 Oct 22 1990
Of course, on the system I administrate, vi is symlinked to ed. Emacs has been replaced by a shell script which 1) Generates a syslog message at level LOG_EMERG; 2) reduces the user's disk quota by 100K; and 3) RUNS ED!!!!!!
``Ed is the standard text editor.''
Let's look at a typical novice's session with the mighty ed:
golem> ed
?
help
?
?
?
quit
?
exit
?
bye
?
hello?
?
eat flaming death
?
^C
?
^C
?
^D
?
Note the consistent user interface and error reportage. Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.
``Ed is the standard text editor.''
Ed, the greatest WYGIWYG editor of all.
ED IS THE TRUE PATH TO NIRVANA! ED HAS BEEN THE CHOICE OF EDUCATED AND IGNORANT ALIKE FOR CENTURIES! ED WILL NOT CORRUPT YOUR PRECIOUS BODILY FLUIDS!! ED IS THE STANDARD TEXT EDITOR! ED MAKES THE SUN SHINE AND THE BIRDS SING AND THE GRASS GREEN!!
When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a ``viitor.'' Not a ``emacsitor.'' Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!
TEXT EDITOR.
When IBM, in its ever-present omnipotence, needed to base their ``edlin'' on a UNIX standard, did they mimic vi? No. Emacs? Surely you jest. They chose the most karmic editor of all. The standard.
Ed is for those who can remember what they are working on. If you are an idiot, you should use Emacs. If you are an Emacs, you should not be vi. If you use ED, you are on THE PATH TO REDEMPTION. THE SO-CALLED ``VISUAL'' EDITORS HAVE BEEN PLACED HERE BY ED TO TEMPT THE FAITHLESS. DO NOT GIVE IN!!! THE MIGHTY ED HAS SPOKEN!!!
?
have anything to do with this?
In all seriousness, it sounds like spam was just part of how they did business. I didn't get anything from the article which would indicate that the killer(s) was a disgruntled spam-recipient.
I don't know anything about the victims, but the brief profile in the article indicated that they may have been involved in some shady business activities. A disgruntled business associate/customer/creditor sounds more likely than a hacked-off spam target. The fact that the victims were spammers is interesting to the slashdot community, but probably not to the world at large.
This line from the article made me a little tense:
Please think seriously before you create a unique license for your software product. Please use the GPL or the BSD style license if you can.
I don't want to overreact. I understand that the author is simply trying to encourage the use of established Open Source licenses. In fact, it has been my personal experience that many developers who fear the GPL don't entirely understand it ("The GPL causes me to sign over my copyright to the FSF. I can't modify my own program and sell it closed-source to someone later.")
But I want to make a simple point -- the developer has an absolute right to determine the license under which his/her product is released. If Joe Programmer releases the most killer Linux app ever, but his license agreement requires you to hop on one foot to the mailbox and mail him a check once a month, then you either start hopping or you don't use the program. You can send Joe nasty emails, you can publicly flame him on slashdot, but none of that changes Joe's right to use his General Hopping License. If you can't handle the GHL, Joe's product is useless to you.