and i fear it's tehran, here we come, and a draft, in 2005
If we do that; if we show the world that this has nothing to do with 9/11, but rather tha we're just mad enough to invade any muslim state (except Pakistan for some reason) that develops or tries to develop nukes (not that Iraq was on that list, so why did we invade again?) then you'll see a wave of terrorism that's going to make the last 20 years in Israel look like a back-yark cookout. Africa, the rest of the middle-east (including Turkey) will likely topple moderate governments in a rush to defend themselves from the US. Indonesia will fall apart and be re-built by even more agressive fundamentalists (don't "oh, it's just Indonesia" me... they have nearly as many people as we do!) Next thing you know, Spain and France are going to look questionable, and India's muslim population will be demanding blood.
Exactly how much of the world do you think you can piss off before you start to hear the words "car bomb" more often than "looks like rain" on the evening news?
Absolutely, and I'm glad someone's noticing! Congress is certainly just as much to blame here. There are even certain members who are briefed in detail so that they know as much as the president, and at the very least they should be voted out of office.
I consider it a sad, sickening turn of events that I'm left to choose between the man who lead the military into war and one of the men who failed in his solemn duty to stop him.
A few things will, I hope, change coming out of this. 1) Congress will stop rubber-stamping agression, and excersise their right and duty to review such information and declare war as appropriate. 2) Kerry should win. I hate to say it, but while most of Congress (Democrat and Republican alike) should be held to account for what they've done, in the case of Kerry and Bush you have to weigh the damage bush has done (not just in the war, but to our standing in the world visa vis our treaty compliance, the environment and human rights) against the negligence that Kerry and the rest of the Senate have been guilty of. Sadly, we can't afford it 3) The American people start leaning strongly enough AWAY from the major parties that 3rd parties get a foot-hold in Congress. We *need* to chang the way voting happens in America. Most 3rd parties support IVR, which isn't perfect, but at least puts you in a position that people can begin to vote based on issues that they care about rather than "the two-party candidate who offends me least."
It's wishing I know. Likely we'll end up with another 10-30 years of the Demopublican party running the US and in the shrot term, even more abuses from Bushiburton.
Or there might have been a *real* reason to go after Iraq, one that had to be hidden from the world.
That could be true. If it is, he should be voted out of office. Not *because of it* per se, but because that's the price you pay for acting on secret intelligence at *any* tme. You have to accept that you can't tell people why you did it, and suck up the consequences. Usually you don't want to do this, but sometimes it's so important that it's worth trashing your career and that of the head of the CIA over.
You just have to trust that the next guy who comes in will be briefed (he will) and will execute the will of the American people in view of the facts presented to him. It's a tough job, but a true patriot can no more remain passive in the face of a real threat than we can allow him to stay in office because that *might* be why it happened.
I'd like to think that that scenario is right. I'd like to think that HalliCheneyCo didn't hijack the nation's military to execute a fundraiser. I'd like to think that Bush is a patriot doing good for the nation, but when I see information about Extraoridinary Rendition (for which Clinton is just as guilty as Bush) and the abuses in Cuba and Iraq and the failure in Afghanistan.... I'm just not so sure.
So unless you consent to the possibility of giving up all rights, you should not purchase any software. You have no idea what the restrictions of the license are until after you've given them your money.
This seems like as good a time as any to point out that Linux games are getting better and better. You can download wesnoth, Neverball, and other great titles for free. Even get the source on and learn to write computer games yourself if you like.
The real breakthrough in recent years has been the massive work that has gone into the cross-platform SDL toolkit. It's really amazing, and not to discount anyone else's work, but I see a lot of great stuff coming out ever since SDL became commonplace.
Saddam was probably the best stabalizing force in Iraq we could have ever hoped for
I absolutely agree. We did, however, choose removing him as the priority, and stability in the region will likely suffer from it for the long term. There's nothing we can do about that now. Best thing to do is to step back and let someone who is slightly less repugnant organize the American flag-burning rather than staying on the political sidelines and burn Americans.
I did not mean to make it sound like I thought that was a GOOD solution or one that I would have wanted going in. I was naive. I thought Bush was smart enough to take out S.H. and his top aids, make a few grand gestures of stopping riots and looting and then present the plan for transitioning to a 1/2 Arab 1/2 UN peacekeeping force within 6 months. Needless to say, he failed to do any of the above OTHER than accomplish the military objective. Doh.
In retrospect, I was being bitter and harsh. We don't have to let anyone kill Allawi. We could just as easily make a show of shipping him out by plane and setting him up in a townhouse in NY City. The point is that we have to "take our boy out" as a prelude to publicly eating our own hat and leaving. That's the only way to make the Iraqis feel that we're really giving up on occupying them, and that they can start focusing on the state of their country.
It is, of course, a relative term, but I've always taken it to mean this: if you lost your job tomorrow, how long would it be before you were homeless, or totally dependent on a familly member / friend? How much you make is rather beside the point for almost all uses of the term.
The scale ranges:
0 minutes - Working person 1 month - Working person 6 months - starting to get grey. Working person 2 years - Still questionable. Not a working person. 5 years - you *could* argue the point. Not a working person never - Not a working person
At the 5 year mark, you have enough money to flop around for a year, think about life and then start a company out of your own pocket. That's not my definition of "a working person". It's also not "filthy rich". It's just well off.
Almost everyone living under the poverty line is in the very first catagory. Almost every CEO of a public company is in the last category. Most political rhetoric only takes those two categories into account unless we're specifically talking about "middle-america" (by which we really mean the middle class, but we don't say that because it's classist... sigh).
Absolutely! I came up against these standards in a different project: green cards. The Government QA standard for the card is that it must be able to travel in the shoe of a farm worker for two years. I really, really don't want to know how they do the unit testing on that, though;-)
The US can solve the problems in Iraq tomorrow. It would be the end of GW's presidency, and US foriegn policy would suffer for decades to come as a result, but I think it's time to cut our losses and gain the best possible outcome that we can.
1) Arrange to slack Mr. Allawi's protection just enough that he can be killed (I'm not suggesting that we do it, just that we let it happen). He knew the risks when he went in, and he will be dying for the cause he claims to advocate.
2) Have GW make an appearance on Al J the next day BEFORE he speaks to the US press (very important).
3) He says that the US mourns Allawi. Make it clear that he's one of "ours".
4) Admit that western forces cannot control Iraq's "strong spirit and determination." It's important to not be negative toward the Iraqi's. They need to feel like they have the power to make the next move or OUR next move won't work.
5) Point to the most anti-western, pro-Islam, fundamentalist we can find who has a large base of followers, but is generally not a terrorist so much as an honest freedom fighter for Iraq, the way I hope GW would be if the US were occupied by a foreign force. Someone who won't just bomb the crap out the Kurds and set up his own rape rooms, but everyone knows isn't going to be our friend.
6) Make the offer. US troops will withdraw, entirely with no conditions, in a two week period the moment he takes over the Iraqi government.
7) Walk away and never explain. If someone asks about Iraq, you have to look at your shoes and say, "it's a shame... it's just a shame."
If we do that, and do it soon, we win. Iraq will be no more anti-western than when we stared (that would be impossible). They will have no more or less love for Israel (that too would be impossible). The problems in the region will not have been solved. However, someone with the political clout to re-build Iraq without being attacked by guerilla bombings every day will be able to establish order. It will be slow and painful. There will be abuses, but it will work because he will appear to have "kicked out the Americans". In the end we will have removed the largest source of instability in the region (which we created) and accomplished our goal of removing S.H.
If our twin goals are to liberate the Iraqis and reduce the threat of terrorism world-wide, this is, IMHO, the strongest step we can make.
mindless liberal hippyisms like "peace and long life."
Heh, actually, I was tossing around several last lines there. I had orginally quoted Romeo's, "Live, and be prosperous," but was sure no one would recognize the source, and worse, many would attribute it to Spock's, "Live long and prosper," which The Great Bird lifted from The Bard.
Random thoughts. And no, I was not trying to remove myself from the observed catagorization. Again, go chechk out the 9/11 posts. They're very informative on the point.
We're quick to jump into camps here. There are the "ha ha, man fall down and die" nervous humor camp. Then there's the "don't make fun of death" camp. Still another camp comes in next to say "lighten up, people are coping in different ways"
Not many clue in to this pattern, even as they help to shape it. Go look at the stories from 9/11. Same threads, different (in some cases) posters. Slashdot is a COMMUNITY of people, not a uniform voice. I see people on all sides of every controversy here deriding the "slashdotters" or "slashbots" or whatever term they can think of. But, if you're posting here, THAT'S YOU you're talking about (hi, I'm in camp #4, good to meet you).
Some of us are flamers and trolls. Some of us are the innapropriate joke-makers. Some of us are suits with pointy hair. Some of us are late-night coders. And today, one of us is no more. If you're a regular, come in, sit down and have a drink. We'll toast the honored dead, maybe share a story or two, and the guy over in the corner will spout an embarassingly rude comment every few minutes. I just hope that when my time comes, he thinks of something really funny to say about me, and that (behind the masks of indignation), my friends smile just a little bit and remember me....
Don't knock Tk. Tk applications (as from my original post) don't scale because of Tcl, but I have to say that Ousterhout did an awesome job on Tk, and influenced, among others, the development of Qt, Gtk+ and Java's various widget sets.
The canvas widget from Tk was so good that many later widget sets borrow the code directly (the "GnomeCanvas" is a direct descendant, though it may have been re-written (at least once) by this point).
I think TCL was a great plugin-commandline tool and wonderful for a config file syntax (the OpenMarket web server used it this way to great effect).
It was only when people strarted trying to treat a string-substitution system as a general purpose programming language that it started to become the abomination that gave me nightmares (you have not seen programming hell until you've seen a 100,000 line TCL program!)
The one this post is being sent from was purchased with Linux, and is still running it. I have second desktop that was the same.
At home I have four computers (firewall, SO's desktop, my desktop, server) all of which were purchased with Windows on them. One still runs Windows full-time (SO's), one runs it every now and then (my desktop for games) and the other two have been purged of Windows and Linux is the only OS on them.
I also have a laptop for work that I use for support. It dual-boots, and I have a policy of never wiping Windows from laptops because I always end up getting some funky PCMCIA card that I need for some work thing or other and the vendor hasn't shipped a Linux driver (and no one has reverse-engineered it yet).
If you want to talk about non-desktops, I've accounted for about 1000 machines being purchased with Linux, and they've all remained Linux boxes. I've accounted for maybe 3 Windows servers in my career.
Yes you did, and posting the link is fine, but it would be courtious to not expose this guy and is company to extra liability by copying the disclaimer as well. The goal is to make sure that hosting this kind of thing in a controled way for research is not discouraged in the future.
I hope people don't just copy and paste links without reading the conversation
They will. The only thing you can do is make sure that when they look for a scape-goat, their lawyer ends up telling them that they don't have a good enough case to justify his risk because there was a disclaimer attached to the link they copied.
Yes, actually they are. More specifically, they are concerned that, having gained and then lost the slot of best-selling platform, PC games are now having to compete against a second round of games that they didn't take seriously for years (remember when we sneared as console games the same way, saying "they'll never have graphics that can compete"? Well, they kicked the PC's ass).
wesnoth is an awesome game, and I say that as someone who's not a big fan of turn-based games in general. It also looks great, which is certainly something that Linux games have lacked.
More and more as you can begin to make a name for yourself by cutting your teeth on Linux game design, and as more and more of that becomes generally applicable, you will see these games flower and grow under the care of the next generation of commercial game designers. Don't kid yourself. The folks working on wesnoth are building a resume, just like the folks working on the Linux kernel.
That all said, open source games present another problem: they are not limited by shelf-space. That means that as many games as can be cranked out by the people who want to write code can be "shipped". Sure, that means more crap, but it also means more of the cream of the crop, and when you have that many games, you get the niche effect, where statistically significant fractions of your market leaves for lesser games which fit particular niches better. This is the same effect that draws people away from big-budget movies and into film festivals to see independant films.
Every single game released last year was a clone or rip-off. Please, feel free to point to the exception; that one game that was original, and not just a "MMORPG, but with superheros" or "an FPS, but with more biological looking guns".
Nope, it's all derivative crap, and Linux is only more of the same. The good thing is that under Linux a) you get source and can fix bugs, contribute or just learn b) a single company can't decide to drop it; it only dies when it's not popular enough to survive c) it will still run on the OS you're using in 3 years.
PS: wesnoth is an amazingly good turn-based strategy game, probably the best I've seen. I'm a fan of real-time strategy, but I'll still play wesnoth under Linux over the best of the Windows real-timers.
The ACLU is not as consistant as many (myself included) would like. Ideally, they would be a politically neutral organization which fought for civil liberties in American government, but they are not. They have a distinctly liberal take on the matter, which is unfortunate.
That said, I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and that's a recent change. I'll take their shakey stance on gun control and vouchers and a few other topics because I'm willing to trade my way out of having traded my way out liberty for the sake of security. That's a terrible problem to have to fix and choice to have to make, but I find myself in that position.
Republicans are not to blame, here. Look at the voting records, and you will find that this abomination of a law call the PATRIOT Act (caps not mine) had broad (almost unanimous) bi-partisan support.
I'll a) vote anti-incumbant on every slot in this election and b) support the questionable ACLU as a result. I wish that the uniparty had not forced my hand in this way, but obviously they had other priorities.
The EFF, on the other hand is more even-handed and I am a proud member, having just renewed recently.
PS: All that said, your particular argument does not hold up (the ACLU's position on vouchers is questionable, but not in the way you suggest). In the case of abortion, we have a policy (handed down from the constitution, as interpreted by the supreme court) that says that some particular thing is protected. The fac that it violates your religeon does not mean that you don't have to pay taxes that support it.
On the other hand, we don't have a policy that says that students should be taught church doctrin, and so there is no basis for forcing tax-payers to fund this thing that they are opposed to on the grounds of their faith (or lack thereof).
The argument FOR vouchers is not that you can be forced to pay for something that violates your faith, but that you AREN'T BEING FORCED TO DO SO. You're paying taxes that are being used for vouchers in the same way that some of that money is already paying for food stamps. Food stamps can be spent on Kosher food and that wacky Christian (no offense to Christians as a whole) soap with the tracts on it just as it can be spent on more "secular" foods.
Vouchers can be used for Catholic or Jewish or Bhuddist school in the same way. No one is being forced to fund a government program of faith-based doctrin, they are being forced to pay for the education that parents feel is most fit to their children.
Please note that I'm against school vouchers in most cases, but I wanted to make the point that the ACLU is arguing that point wildly incorrectly.
For the rest of you saw fit to insult me, call me an "end user"
If you consider being called an end-user an insult, I'm sorry. It happens to be the most accurate term for someone who has a problem with downloading several packages in support of a major desktop app. You SHOULD NOT have to do that, and that's why you wait for a distro to do the integration work. If you're inclined to do that sort of thing, you're not an end-user.
I'm an evolution end-user. I *could* download pure source and go from there, as I'm quite capable of doing so, but I just don't have the time. Thus, I'm an end-user.
this is exactly the snobbish attitude that prevents anyone in the real world (i.e., holding real actual paying jobs in IT) from seriously considering Linux solutions.
I'm in the real world. I deploy and maintain hundreds of Linux systems for large companies. I was not being snobbish, but folks who are over-sensitve to being catagorized as end-users won't get very far no matter how folks like me try to help.
You really do open-source a discredit.
So be it. I'd rather discredit open source by offering constructive advice than insult those who give it to me.
I think that's beside the point. If you want to compare wikis, compare wikis. If you're platform-bound, obviously that will enter into the comparison, but if not, then you can compare them on feature-set, and one of the features of kwiki is certainly its ever-expanding feature set via modules.
I'm willing to bet that one of the schemes that the FTC is going to propose is one where it becomes illegal for "unlicensed" nodes to connect to a "licensed" MTA unless it is one with whom they have a standing agreement. In other words, you can't be an MTA without getting FTC approval, or "downstreaming" off of someone else's server.
This won't really help SPAM, but it IS something the big ISPs want in order to begin to control where their competition can come from.
Repeat after me, "SPF DOES NOT PREVENT SPAM. SPF DOES NOT ATTEMPT TO PREVENT SPAM. IF YOU EXPECT SPF TO PREVENT SPAM, YOU WILL BE DISAPOINTED."
Ok, yelling done (sorry, but this comes up so often, you'd think the "S" stood for Spam). What SPF *does* do is validate that mail was sent from a machine that was (or was not) authorized to send it by the originating domain.
It's nothing more or less than that. As a first-pass on the roots of the problem of spam, it's a great tool, but I would never suggest that anyone treat it as an actual solution for spam per se. Joe Jobs are mitigated and you can also begin to build a reputation with the sources of SPF-identified mail. Once you get spam from a machine that's listed as a valid SPF sender for that doamin, you have a great deal more information to apply ot that domain's reputation than if you recieved spam from a non-SPF sender.
It's not perfect (SPF has its warts, though I think many of your concerns are too minor to be blasting them over), but it is an excellent start, and combined with various other systems out there, helps to address many existing problems.
If you find yourself wanting to install Kwiki to look at it while they're being Slashdotted into the ground, you can start by running "cpan" as root. Just type "i/wiki/" and get your scroll-wheel ready;-)
Slashdot Mirror
and i fear it's tehran, here we come, and a draft, in 2005
If we do that; if we show the world that this has nothing to do with 9/11, but rather tha we're just mad enough to invade any muslim state (except Pakistan for some reason) that develops or tries to develop nukes (not that Iraq was on that list, so why did we invade again?) then you'll see a wave of terrorism that's going to make the last 20 years in Israel look like a back-yark cookout. Africa, the rest of the middle-east (including Turkey) will likely topple moderate governments in a rush to defend themselves from the US. Indonesia will fall apart and be re-built by even more agressive fundamentalists (don't "oh, it's just Indonesia" me... they have nearly as many people as we do!) Next thing you know, Spain and France are going to look questionable, and India's muslim population will be demanding blood.
Exactly how much of the world do you think you can piss off before you start to hear the words "car bomb" more often than "looks like rain" on the evening news?
Absolutely, and I'm glad someone's noticing! Congress is certainly just as much to blame here. There are even certain members who are briefed in detail so that they know as much as the president, and at the very least they should be voted out of office.
I consider it a sad, sickening turn of events that I'm left to choose between the man who lead the military into war and one of the men who failed in his solemn duty to stop him.
A few things will, I hope, change coming out of this. 1) Congress will stop rubber-stamping agression, and excersise their right and duty to review such information and declare war as appropriate. 2) Kerry should win. I hate to say it, but while most of Congress (Democrat and Republican alike) should be held to account for what they've done, in the case of Kerry and Bush you have to weigh the damage bush has done (not just in the war, but to our standing in the world visa vis our treaty compliance, the environment and human rights) against the negligence that Kerry and the rest of the Senate have been guilty of. Sadly, we can't afford it 3) The American people start leaning strongly enough AWAY from the major parties that 3rd parties get a foot-hold in Congress. We *need* to chang the way voting happens in America. Most 3rd parties support IVR, which isn't perfect, but at least puts you in a position that people can begin to vote based on issues that they care about rather than "the two-party candidate who offends me least."
It's wishing I know. Likely we'll end up with another 10-30 years of the Demopublican party running the US and in the shrot term, even more abuses from Bushiburton.
Or there might have been a *real* reason to go after Iraq, one that had to be hidden from the world.
That could be true. If it is, he should be voted out of office. Not *because of it* per se, but because that's the price you pay for acting on secret intelligence at *any* tme. You have to accept that you can't tell people why you did it, and suck up the consequences. Usually you don't want to do this, but sometimes it's so important that it's worth trashing your career and that of the head of the CIA over.
You just have to trust that the next guy who comes in will be briefed (he will) and will execute the will of the American people in view of the facts presented to him. It's a tough job, but a true patriot can no more remain passive in the face of a real threat than we can allow him to stay in office because that *might* be why it happened.
I'd like to think that that scenario is right. I'd like to think that HalliCheneyCo didn't hijack the nation's military to execute a fundraiser. I'd like to think that Bush is a patriot doing good for the nation, but when I see information about Extraoridinary Rendition (for which Clinton is just as guilty as Bush) and the abuses in Cuba and Iraq and the failure in Afghanistan.... I'm just not so sure.
So unless you consent to the possibility of giving up all rights, you should not purchase any software. You have no idea what the restrictions of the license are until after you've given them your money.
This seems like as good a time as any to point out that Linux games are getting better and better. You can download wesnoth, Neverball, and other great titles for free. Even get the source on and learn to write computer games yourself if you like.
The real breakthrough in recent years has been the massive work that has gone into the cross-platform SDL toolkit. It's really amazing, and not to discount anyone else's work, but I see a lot of great stuff coming out ever since SDL became commonplace.
Saddam was probably the best stabalizing force in Iraq we could have ever hoped for
I absolutely agree. We did, however, choose removing him as the priority, and stability in the region will likely suffer from it for the long term. There's nothing we can do about that now. Best thing to do is to step back and let someone who is slightly less repugnant organize the American flag-burning rather than staying on the political sidelines and burn Americans.
I did not mean to make it sound like I thought that was a GOOD solution or one that I would have wanted going in. I was naive. I thought Bush was smart enough to take out S.H. and his top aids, make a few grand gestures of stopping riots and looting and then present the plan for transitioning to a 1/2 Arab 1/2 UN peacekeeping force within 6 months. Needless to say, he failed to do any of the above OTHER than accomplish the military objective. Doh.
In retrospect, I was being bitter and harsh. We don't have to let anyone kill Allawi. We could just as easily make a show of shipping him out by plane and setting him up in a townhouse in NY City. The point is that we have to "take our boy out" as a prelude to publicly eating our own hat and leaving. That's the only way to make the Iraqis feel that we're really giving up on occupying them, and that they can start focusing on the state of their country.
What exactly are "working people?"
It is, of course, a relative term, but I've always taken it to mean this: if you lost your job tomorrow, how long would it be before you were homeless, or totally dependent on a familly member / friend? How much you make is rather beside the point for almost all uses of the term.
The scale ranges:
0 minutes - Working person
1 month - Working person
6 months - starting to get grey. Working person
2 years - Still questionable. Not a working person.
5 years - you *could* argue the point. Not a working person
never - Not a working person
At the 5 year mark, you have enough money to flop around for a year, think about life and then start a company out of your own pocket. That's not my definition of "a working person". It's also not "filthy rich". It's just well off.
Almost everyone living under the poverty line is in the very first catagory. Almost every CEO of a public company is in the last category. Most political rhetoric only takes those two categories into account unless we're specifically talking about "middle-america" (by which we really mean the middle class, but we don't say that because it's classist... sigh).
Absolutely! I came up against these standards in a different project: green cards. The Government QA standard for the card is that it must be able to travel in the shoe of a farm worker for two years. I really, really don't want to know how they do the unit testing on that, though ;-)
The US can solve the problems in Iraq tomorrow. It would be the end of GW's presidency, and US foriegn policy would suffer for decades to come as a result, but I think it's time to cut our losses and gain the best possible outcome that we can.
1) Arrange to slack Mr. Allawi's protection just enough that he can be killed (I'm not suggesting that we do it, just that we let it happen). He knew the risks when he went in, and he will be dying for the cause he claims to advocate.
2) Have GW make an appearance on Al J the next day BEFORE he speaks to the US press (very important).
3) He says that the US mourns Allawi. Make it clear that he's one of "ours".
4) Admit that western forces cannot control Iraq's "strong spirit and determination." It's important to not be negative toward the Iraqi's. They need to feel like they have the power to make the next move or OUR next move won't work.
5) Point to the most anti-western, pro-Islam, fundamentalist we can find who has a large base of followers, but is generally not a terrorist so much as an honest freedom fighter for Iraq, the way I hope GW would be if the US were occupied by a foreign force. Someone who won't just bomb the crap out the Kurds and set up his own rape rooms, but everyone knows isn't going to be our friend.
6) Make the offer. US troops will withdraw, entirely with no conditions, in a two week period the moment he takes over the Iraqi government.
7) Walk away and never explain. If someone asks about Iraq, you have to look at your shoes and say, "it's a shame... it's just a shame."
If we do that, and do it soon, we win. Iraq will be no more anti-western than when we stared (that would be impossible). They will have no more or less love for Israel (that too would be impossible). The problems in the region will not have been solved. However, someone with the political clout to re-build Iraq without being attacked by guerilla bombings every day will be able to establish order. It will be slow and painful. There will be abuses, but it will work because he will appear to have "kicked out the Americans". In the end we will have removed the largest source of instability in the region (which we created) and accomplished our goal of removing S.H.
If our twin goals are to liberate the Iraqis and reduce the threat of terrorism world-wide, this is, IMHO, the strongest step we can make.
mindless liberal hippyisms like "peace and long life."
Heh, actually, I was tossing around several last lines there. I had orginally quoted Romeo's, "Live, and be prosperous," but was sure no one would recognize the source, and worse, many would attribute it to Spock's, "Live long and prosper," which The Great Bird lifted from The Bard.
Random thoughts. And no, I was not trying to remove myself from the observed catagorization. Again, go chechk out the 9/11 posts. They're very informative on the point.
We're quick to jump into camps here. There are the "ha ha, man fall down and die" nervous humor camp. Then there's the "don't make fun of death" camp. Still another camp comes in next to say "lighten up, people are coping in different ways"
Not many clue in to this pattern, even as they help to shape it. Go look at the stories from 9/11. Same threads, different (in some cases) posters. Slashdot is a COMMUNITY of people, not a uniform voice. I see people on all sides of every controversy here deriding the "slashdotters" or "slashbots" or whatever term they can think of. But, if you're posting here, THAT'S YOU you're talking about (hi, I'm in camp #4, good to meet you).
Some of us are flamers and trolls. Some of us are the innapropriate joke-makers. Some of us are suits with pointy hair. Some of us are late-night coders. And today, one of us is no more. If you're a regular, come in, sit down and have a drink. We'll toast the honored dead, maybe share a story or two, and the guy over in the corner will spout an embarassingly rude comment every few minutes. I just hope that when my time comes, he thinks of something really funny to say about me, and that (behind the masks of indignation), my friends smile just a little bit and remember me....
Peace and long life.
Thanks for the pointer. I'll take a look.
I'll take a look. Thanks for the pointer.
Don't knock Tk. Tk applications (as from my original post) don't scale because of Tcl, but I have to say that Ousterhout did an awesome job on Tk, and influenced, among others, the development of Qt, Gtk+ and Java's various widget sets.
The canvas widget from Tk was so good that many later widget sets borrow the code directly (the "GnomeCanvas" is a direct descendant, though it may have been re-written (at least once) by this point).
I think TCL was a great plugin-commandline tool and wonderful for a config file syntax (the OpenMarket web server used it this way to great effect).
It was only when people strarted trying to treat a string-substitution system as a general purpose programming language that it started to become the abomination that gave me nightmares (you have not seen programming hell until you've seen a 100,000 line TCL program!)
The one this post is being sent from was purchased with Linux, and is still running it. I have second desktop that was the same.
At home I have four computers (firewall, SO's desktop, my desktop, server) all of which were purchased with Windows on them. One still runs Windows full-time (SO's), one runs it every now and then (my desktop for games) and the other two have been purged of Windows and Linux is the only OS on them.
I also have a laptop for work that I use for support. It dual-boots, and I have a policy of never wiping Windows from laptops because I always end up getting some funky PCMCIA card that I need for some work thing or other and the vendor hasn't shipped a Linux driver (and no one has reverse-engineered it yet).
If you want to talk about non-desktops, I've accounted for about 1000 machines being purchased with Linux, and they've all remained Linux boxes. I've accounted for maybe 3 Windows servers in my career.
You didn't cite any examples of weak dynamic typing, like Tcl. Don't forget Tcl!
I keep trying to forget TCL... the drugs are helping... aaahhh!! Vignette!! Tk applications that don't scale!! burning! death!....
Ok, I'm ok... it's ok... please don't mention that language again.... PLEASE.
Uh, except that I asked for it
Yes you did, and posting the link is fine, but it would be courtious to not expose this guy and is company to extra liability by copying the disclaimer as well. The goal is to make sure that hosting this kind of thing in a controled way for research is not discouraged in the future.
I hope people don't just copy and paste links without reading the conversation
They will. The only thing you can do is make sure that when they look for a scape-goat, their lawyer ends up telling them that they don't have a good enough case to justify his risk because there was a disclaimer attached to the link they copied.
Yes, actually they are. More specifically, they are concerned that, having gained and then lost the slot of best-selling platform, PC games are now having to compete against a second round of games that they didn't take seriously for years (remember when we sneared as console games the same way, saying "they'll never have graphics that can compete"? Well, they kicked the PC's ass).
wesnoth is an awesome game, and I say that as someone who's not a big fan of turn-based games in general. It also looks great, which is certainly something that Linux games have lacked.
More and more as you can begin to make a name for yourself by cutting your teeth on Linux game design, and as more and more of that becomes generally applicable, you will see these games flower and grow under the care of the next generation of commercial game designers. Don't kid yourself. The folks working on wesnoth are building a resume, just like the folks working on the Linux kernel.
That all said, open source games present another problem: they are not limited by shelf-space. That means that as many games as can be cranked out by the people who want to write code can be "shipped". Sure, that means more crap, but it also means more of the cream of the crop, and when you have that many games, you get the niche effect, where statistically significant fractions of your market leaves for lesser games which fit particular niches better. This is the same effect that draws people away from big-budget movies and into film festivals to see independant films.
Every single game released last year was a clone or rip-off. Please, feel free to point to the exception; that one game that was original, and not just a "MMORPG, but with superheros" or "an FPS, but with more biological looking guns".
Nope, it's all derivative crap, and Linux is only more of the same. The good thing is that under Linux a) you get source and can fix bugs, contribute or just learn b) a single company can't decide to drop it; it only dies when it's not popular enough to survive c) it will still run on the OS you're using in 3 years.
PS: wesnoth is an amazingly good turn-based strategy game, probably the best I've seen. I'm a fan of real-time strategy, but I'll still play wesnoth under Linux over the best of the Windows real-timers.
The ACLU is not as consistant as many (myself included) would like. Ideally, they would be a politically neutral organization which fought for civil liberties in American government, but they are not. They have a distinctly liberal take on the matter, which is unfortunate.
That said, I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU, and that's a recent change. I'll take their shakey stance on gun control and vouchers and a few other topics because I'm willing to trade my way out of having traded my way out liberty for the sake of security. That's a terrible problem to have to fix and choice to have to make, but I find myself in that position.
Republicans are not to blame, here. Look at the voting records, and you will find that this abomination of a law call the PATRIOT Act (caps not mine) had broad (almost unanimous) bi-partisan support.
I'll a) vote anti-incumbant on every slot in this election and b) support the questionable ACLU as a result. I wish that the uniparty had not forced my hand in this way, but obviously they had other priorities.
The EFF, on the other hand is more even-handed and I am a proud member, having just renewed recently.
PS: All that said, your particular argument does not hold up (the ACLU's position on vouchers is questionable, but not in the way you suggest). In the case of abortion, we have a policy (handed down from the constitution, as interpreted by the supreme court) that says that some particular thing is protected. The fac that it violates your religeon does not mean that you don't have to pay taxes that support it.
On the other hand, we don't have a policy that says that students should be taught church doctrin, and so there is no basis for forcing tax-payers to fund this thing that they are opposed to on the grounds of their faith (or lack thereof).
The argument FOR vouchers is not that you can be forced to pay for something that violates your faith, but that you AREN'T BEING FORCED TO DO SO. You're paying taxes that are being used for vouchers in the same way that some of that money is already paying for food stamps. Food stamps can be spent on Kosher food and that wacky Christian (no offense to Christians as a whole) soap with the tracts on it just as it can be spent on more "secular" foods.
Vouchers can be used for Catholic or Jewish or Bhuddist school in the same way. No one is being forced to fund a government program of faith-based doctrin, they are being forced to pay for the education that parents feel is most fit to their children.
Please note that I'm against school vouchers in most cases, but I wanted to make the point that the ACLU is arguing that point wildly incorrectly.
For the rest of you saw fit to insult me, call me an "end user"
If you consider being called an end-user an insult, I'm sorry. It happens to be the most accurate term for someone who has a problem with downloading several packages in support of a major desktop app. You SHOULD NOT have to do that, and that's why you wait for a distro to do the integration work. If you're inclined to do that sort of thing, you're not an end-user.
I'm an evolution end-user. I *could* download pure source and go from there, as I'm quite capable of doing so, but I just don't have the time. Thus, I'm an end-user.
this is exactly the snobbish attitude that prevents anyone in the real world (i.e., holding real actual paying jobs in IT) from seriously considering Linux solutions.
I'm in the real world. I deploy and maintain hundreds of Linux systems for large companies. I was not being snobbish, but folks who are over-sensitve to being catagorized as end-users won't get very far no matter how folks like me try to help.
You really do open-source a discredit.
So be it. I'd rather discredit open source by offering constructive advice than insult those who give it to me.
While you wait to see how major publishers will jerk you around next, games for linux keep getting better and better!
I think that's beside the point. If you want to compare wikis, compare wikis. If you're platform-bound, obviously that will enter into the comparison, but if not, then you can compare them on feature-set, and one of the features of kwiki is certainly its ever-expanding feature set via modules.
I'm willing to bet that one of the schemes that the FTC is going to propose is one where it becomes illegal for "unlicensed" nodes to connect to a "licensed" MTA unless it is one with whom they have a standing agreement. In other words, you can't be an MTA without getting FTC approval, or "downstreaming" off of someone else's server.
This won't really help SPAM, but it IS something the big ISPs want in order to begin to control where their competition can come from.
Repeat after me, "SPF DOES NOT PREVENT SPAM. SPF DOES NOT ATTEMPT TO PREVENT SPAM. IF YOU EXPECT SPF TO PREVENT SPAM, YOU WILL BE DISAPOINTED."
Ok, yelling done (sorry, but this comes up so often, you'd think the "S" stood for Spam). What SPF *does* do is validate that mail was sent from a machine that was (or was not) authorized to send it by the originating domain.
It's nothing more or less than that. As a first-pass on the roots of the problem of spam, it's a great tool, but I would never suggest that anyone treat it as an actual solution for spam per se. Joe Jobs are mitigated and you can also begin to build a reputation with the sources of SPF-identified mail. Once you get spam from a machine that's listed as a valid SPF sender for that doamin, you have a great deal more information to apply ot that domain's reputation than if you recieved spam from a non-SPF sender.
It's not perfect (SPF has its warts, though I think many of your concerns are too minor to be blasting them over), but it is an excellent start, and combined with various other systems out there, helps to address many existing problems.
If you find yourself wanting to install Kwiki to look at it while they're being Slashdotted into the ground, you can start by running "cpan" as root. Just type "i /wiki/" and get your scroll-wheel ready ;-)