I really hope that Dmitry Skylarov can go home to Russia soon.
Yes! Go home! Quick, Dmitri, go back to Russia! Your presense here is showing Americans how stupid our legal system is and our people can't possibly remain ignorant for much longer! Shoo! Shoo!
Not that I find fault with it, but Mr. Keker has just as much to gain from representing Dmitri as Dmitri himself. Keker will gain a great deal of press and attention, whether or not he wins the case. Dmitri on the otherhand, now has a fighting chance at getting off clean from this injustice.
Hopefully, this is the kind of trend we can expect. As the open source and free speech movements (funny you have to think of it in those terms these days - thought we already had that one down) become more and more publicized, we may see more and more lawyers jump into the fray on our behalf for their benefit.
Again, not a bad thing, but we don't want to be misguided into thinking that these lawyers working pro bono support our causes. They just as soon would take a $1M check from Microsoft.
It won't help clean up the.com domains. The reason is becuase most sex sites don't conflict with domain names that businesses want for their web sites. For example, does IBM in contest for hotsex4uandgoats.com? No. Do sex sites have domain names like microsoft.com? As amusing as that would be, the answer is also no..sex, while making porn smucks look a little harder for the wares they seek, wouldn't benefit the rest of us. And if it was official, it'd be something our browsers would search through if the domain we were looking for was unavailable. It'd annoy me greatly if a route to debian.org was unavailable and my browser defaulted to debian.sex and a web site containing photos of Ian's and Debra's love life.
There's already hundreds of thousands of web sites that already fall under the wrong TLD category because current TDL's are too vague. These two only make it worse. There is nothing wrong with adding TLD's, but we need them to be MORE specific to prevent ongoing domain name conflicts. Dot info and dot biz... besides the fact that they seem rather "immature" and "umprofessional" respectively, they don't help clue me in much on what I'm looking at. "What's the difference between a COMmerical site and a BIZiness site? Isn't somecompany.com also a BIZiness?" "Is this ORGinzation just about INFO?"
These domains add confusion and too much generality. At the risk of a TLD being too long, why not create a ".store" for retail fronts, or ".gr(ou)p" for non-established organizations (that one would be great for OSS developers). How about extending the concept of the.TLD. scheme to include regions? www.somecompany.com.east/west/se/etc.
I may just be blowing my horn here, but these things are just plain dumb. Some of my suggestions here may add some confusion, but won't adding to the mess also do that in a less constructive way?
...But just when are people going to realize they DO NOT have to put up with this BS? (Skip to the end for something that's not redundant.)
I love how the ZD Net article is titled: "Time to stand up to Microsoft" (and right plop in the middle of the article is an advirtisement for "Windows Solutions"). It's utterly absurd.
Linux and other free OS solutions are WITHOUT A DOUBT usable in a business setting. They are proven to be largley inexpensive, relatively easy to deploy, don't have seat/use restrictions, and show better performance records.
Duh.
I'm preaching to the choir here, but I think it's important to proliferate this message to as many people through as many channels as possible. CLEARLY, corporations who feed Microsoft are still uneducated that free software solutions aren't "low quality" just because they don't cost money.
(Original thoughts follow.)
What causes people and businesses to constantly whine about how much Windows sucks? Meanwhile, they constantly shell out the bucks to pay for new/more copies of it, all the while completely ignoring the free software alternatives. Do they think the situation is ever going to improve?
I know it sounds rash, but it is not possible for any largely used, proprietary solution to "improve". Proprietary solutions involve one controlling body. It's a tyrrany, not a democracy (as people are complaining that Microsoft "does not listen"). ONLY free software will get better because it is not driven by greed and profit alone. Greed snowballs and gets bigger and poses more influence on the product. That's the Microsoft case.
The longer they last, the more greedy they will become, the more money they will want to suck up. Unless there's no money there to consume, the beast will only get stronger and bolder.
I can understand your school's position with computers. IT IS A SMALL PRIVATE CATHOLIC COLLEGE.
We're not "small", but we are private, and what does Catholic have to do with anything?
They don't get beaucoup cash from the state for networking equipment and internet access.
Heh. I pay $28K/year to go here, which is the average tuition. From that tuition, network access is implied, whether I want it to be or not. I'm paying a bundle for it, I expect to be permitted to use it to the fullest. I want to run Internet services. Period. I know what I am doing, and I'm not going to "crash our network" by running Apache, ssh, mysqld, exim, nfs, samba, and ftp. They should have an open policy about it, since most students don't even know what a inet daemon is. Then, if someone is causing trouble, they just close that person's port, notify them, then give the student a chance to correct the problem. This is the third year I've been running a myriad of services from my dorm - all under their noses (a host.deny of their domain is all that's necessary!:) I have yet to cause any difficulties.
You also don't need a shitload of computers in your dorms.
You're not a computer geek, are you? Computer geeks/hackers/whatever tend to have multiple systems for different purposes, even if it's not for serving. You may have one box that you use full-time Linux, another for gaming, and maybe even a few older PC's or SPARC boxen. In my personal arrangment, I have a firewall, my server, my PC, my laptop, a SPARCserver5, plus an old 486 for demos. Why? Well, the firewall protects my network. Server hosts my web sites, email, ssh, and so on. My PC has Linux and Windows on it (the latter for gaming). My laptop, well, because you can't lug a midtower + 19" monitor to class. The SPARC is for learning - knew significantly less about Sun hardware before it bought it. And lastly, the 486 because I still love those old time asm graphics demos. You're silly to think that computers gurus don't have a need for more than one PC. Take away my server, and I still have a lot of boxen that I use on a frequent basis.
I suppose you didn't read the article last month about the computer department hell week. Students coming in with shit network cards that end up taking portions of the entire network down or just plain causing grief to the already overworked IT staff.
That doesn't meant that I shouldn't have to pay $100 for a 3Crap when I can buy a Linksys or Netgear that works just as well (if not better - I've had 3Com's die on me, but never a Linksys) at BestBuy for $15.00 with a $5.00 rebate. And as for our poor, overworked IT staff... don't even get me started. The employees down at our IT department (not to be confused with our audio/video CTS - those guys rock; they know what they doing) are rejects from the idiot's IT club. I'm talking about large portions of their staff not knowing anything about computers. I interacted with a guy who set up my new MAC address for "authentication" had no idea what he was doing. I waited as he searched for a proceedure to change it. One of the first steps was "click the Start Menu", the next was "click Netscape Navigator", to which he exclaimed "Ah! There's Netscape". This guy had an office. If they are overworked, it's because the majority of their department has no idea what they are doing. Especially one of the persons in charge, Karen. I won't even get into how I know she's an idiot (then they would know who's griping!:)
Complaining about trading MP3s goes back to my first point, a private school doesn't have the resources to let you max out their fucking T1 all day long.
Okay then, for bragging about being one of the nation's top ten most wired universities, you think they only have a T1? W're connected with an OC3 and we own IP addresses all the way from 165.190.10.20 up to somewhere around 169.190.230.(something). We've got HUGE funding for our IT department and Net access. Sadly, these people that don't understand anything are soaking all that up and ripping off the tuition payers.
The college I'm attending, Duquesne University, has a more draconian policy aside from disallowing net access in class. Here are a few of the features of one of the nation's "most top 10 wired universities".
* Multiuser operating systems are banned. No form of *nix can be run on our network. Reason: "Linux can be used as a hacking tool."
* No server of any kind including HTTP, Telnet, ssh, etc. can be used.
* Students are permitted to HAVE one computer per resident in dorms. If more than one computer is FOUND in a dorm, the owners access is revoked.
* Students must have a CTS certified NIC. (In otherwords, it MUST be a 3Com.)
* Students may not possess or distribute files with a ".mp3" extention. This is copyright infringement. (Napster's ports are also banned, btw.)
In actual practice, the policy is a lot worse than this. The people at our "Computer and Technology Services" are so absolutely clueless that they aren't quite sure when a policy is "broken", so they err on the side of paranoia. For example, I have known other students here using Linux, nmap'ing their own ports to check security and gotten nailed for using what CTS called an "illegal hacking tool".
These total idiots basically ban anything they don't understand and leave students reeling in the wake of it. Technology gifted students can't bring more than one PC (if you have a laptop for example, you can have it on the wireless LAN that's SLOWLY becoming available, IF you give up your PC's connection) and they cannot enjoy hosting services to the rest of the world (running internet daemons gets you called down for a warning - further violations result in suspension of access and a visit to our judiciary committee).
If your college only blocks net access in classes, consider yourself lucky. Hopefully their network policy hasn't banned free speech while I wasn't looking.
This is unacceptable. Again, open source is all about sharing code so we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel, but as was said earlier, we MUST give due credit.
As much as I love Linux and prefer it to everything else, I think 2.4.10 should be boycotted. Nobody should download, use, or install 2.4.10 until a patched version is released that gives proper credit to the BSD people for the code it used. I'd even be willing to jump immediately to a 2.4.11 release, even if it is only minor issues.
The Linux kernel version 2.4.10 violates the very ideals that it was created and lives by. Ideals that even Microsoft of all people adhered to when using code from the community. It's a black mark on the kernel's history.
Ladies and gentlemen of the House, we have yet again faced a grave terrorist threat. United States intelligence was unable to detect and then stop this obvious terrorist attack to collide material from our sun. Clearly the terrorists weren't finished with the WTC, they must now slam something into planet earth's atmosphere, and yes, even earth itself. The success of this attack is a direct result of our nation's intelligence agencies inability to crack strong crypto used by terrorists. It is obvious to demand that all cryphers hence forth have back doors for us to use to help prevent such senseless acts of wanton violence in the future.
Web sites are further more a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act since they allow intelligent people to exchange data that MIGHT lead towards the development of anticircumvention devices.
Now, besides the fact that this is one of the more useless pieces of news posted to Slashdot, it also happens to be a great strategy. By posting story links to PC manufacturers who sell PC's with Windows XP pre-loaded, we can effectively shut-down their online sales services to prevent customers from buying said systems. Great way to beat MS!:)
The practice was overwhelmed in early 80-s because of the sheer number of jeans on the street.
Exactly my point! At some point, all this will be too much for even our over-priced government to handle. When that happens, we'll see these things fall apart at the seams.
We as a community must only focus on stead-fast rebelion of the laws we find to be unjust. Sacrifices will be made... but when has freedom been earned (or recovered) without sacrifice?
How can it not? Especially when the government uses many of the technologies it hopes to alienate and regulate. Before long, there will be so much crappy legislation in place that it will be impossible to move an inch without breaking some law or another. But, that will not stop people from moving. We'll definitely find that law enforcement will be spending so much effort trying to enforce dozens of laws with millions of Americans.
This is why that the best ways we can respond are A) write a litter to your representatives, telling them to NOT pass this foolishness, and if that fails, B) everyone do everything they can to break these laws to the highest extent. What better way to stop a machine than to throw objects into its gears? In this situation where such important fundamental freedoms are in jeopardy, our only choices may be to throw ourselves in between the cogs.
How long before courts are so utterly bogged down with millions of open software and encryption users (individuals and businsess alike) that they are using up all their time? Eventually, practicallity will get in the way of these old fruits. The scale of this is analagous to making blue jeans illegal. Sure, the gov. could make it a crime to wear certain pants, but what's going to happen when every court room in the nation has a mile-long line of people waiting to be arraigned (on top of the line that's already there no less!)
Worms are definitely a problem on all platforms. But the *nix world has a bigger advantage over the Windows world. In our world, code is written with lots of thought towards quality and strong design. Windows, well, is questionable. Certainly *nix has exploits, but those that exist require a GREAT deal more skill to exploit than those that exist for Windows. Therein lies our safety net.
Most people who have the skill to code worms for more secure and robust *nix platforms are probably mature/responsible enough through their experience to not do something so utterly foolish. However, if they do decide to do so, they end up trying to do a positive thing for the community! (Anyone remember those Linux worms that FIXED the exploits they took advantage of before moving onto the next box and cleaning themselves up?) Besides, look at the very few malicious worms we have seen for *nix platforms. They didn't last long. The OSS community has a VERY quick response time to big problems and the admins are generally more skilled and knowlagable about applying patches.
I say, let's enjoy this while we can. It's kind of amusing to see MS admins scurry around, trying to stick fingers in all the leaks. It's risky to say "it serves them right", but that's for only weighing mundane factors in deciding what platform to use. And for those companies that reject OSS products, well, they get what they deserve for thinking "stuff that doesn't come from a company mustn't have any quality". Pah. Worms with the scale of NT aren't a concern for us. Let's parade this around as a reason to support and use open software.
Amusing as the infighting between the *BSD and Linux camps may be, it's hardly beneficial in our primary struggle to wrench market share away from MS. By developing projects that aid greatly in bringing these two platforms together, we can demonstrate a number of things:
Demonstrate strong interoperability but still have a choice what OS you want to run (*BSD, Linux, MacOSX, etc).
Increase availability of all kinds of software and toolkits between almost all of the anti-MS players.
Accellerate development for both platforms by encouraging developers to optimize their software for both camps.
Now this is a lot to say for such a rudimentary project (and I'm sure the list could go on), but the ideals are there. Imagine if we had increased/improved interoperability between the KDE and GNOME projects (instead of a lot of bitching about the other "sucking ass"). Say, tools that helped unify the appearance of widgets, code sharing layers, and so on.
The current model of the Internet is not something that is going to surive the rigors of foolish governments, panicky interest groups, and greedy corporations. As we've seen time after time again, having single points of failure knocked out (regulation, threats, lawsuits, etc), we lose SO much information. Thanks to recent terrorist activities, we're going to find our bastions of freedom online gradually removed by people who honestly don't know any better.
Peer2Peer, I think, is a powerful solution for us to retain the freedoms we currently enjoy on the Net. Certainly P2P helps save us from Napster-like lawsuits regarding copyrighted material. However, can we take it further? Can we deliver web page content in the P2P model, for starters? Could we move all of our Internet services to this model? Consider a world where we start using technologies that prevent any central source of information/data/etc. from being stamped out by the ignorant.
I'm basically describing a model where when a source, be it a group or an individual, publishes something, it is in the network forever. Regardless of what happens to that source, tens of thousands of other machines will always be carrying that forbidden data. It couldn't be stopped. Sure we'd gather up massive amounts of garbage and quickly antiquated material, but every piece of knowledge out there is bound to be of value to at least somebody.
P2P could bring about the global consciousness that the Internet was meant to be. Lucky for us, you can't kill a brain by trashing a few neurons.:)
Because Java still consistently sucks ass, drags ass, and is still up the ass of an almost-ran Microsoft (aka "Sun")?
Point by point here, how does Java suck? Java is a great language for all kinds of tasks. The extensive API already available for it is a big plus, and it is, for all intents and purposes, truly cross-platform.
Java is not as slow as most people claim. Like any programming language, performance is dependent largely on the programmer. A lot of programmers with poor skills use Java because they can focus on their tasks instead of building the tools to do said task. Here's an article on/. with more details about this. Also, pay attention to this article before yoiu make further claims that Java performance is bad. And of course, you could try actually coding something using the language.:P
Sun has done a lot of good for the OSS community. If you'll notice OpenOffice, and well, Java is a great piece of code for the Linux world. I'd say that Sun != Microsoft. Get a clue.
This project seems that it could fill the role of a great that that Sun wanted to accomplish with Java. The versatility of Servlets is quite extensive and it makes me wonder why, in the shadow of this project, the OSS community is spending time on dotGNU and Mono.
Tomcat has tremendous potential to deliver robust, complete apps in the same way.NET wants to. And, it's not restricted to Windows.
Is my thinking correct in that we can level this software against Microsoft's upcoming ventures? Can we make a.NET killer out of this, or am I thinking about driving a screw with a hammer?
"A revolutionary new way to bring trolls out of the wood-work!"
Slashdot launched a new service today. It's called "Systematic Unvieling of Crapy Knowledge Stream", or SUCKS for short. Slashdot SUCKS version 1.0 is intended to bore more of/. readers than any other news system before. By posting stories that have no real relevance or interest to the existing community,/. hopes to increase its already massive contigent of trolls by at least 150%.
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda states that "Slashdot SUCKS is the most obvious next step. The things that our staff can do with SUCKS technology are incredible. We can turn mature individuals to 6 year olds with boring news posts that bring out the trolls deep within. It's really quite exciting." He went on further to state how Slashdot SUCKS would help bring out art skills in/. readers by encouraging them to post ASCII artworks in the forums. "I especially like the Goatse.cx ASCII art images with my name in the anus."
When asked what the next evolution in Slashdot SUCKS would be, Rob commented briefly on Slashdot Bi-Lingual Opressive Waste Stream", or BLOWS for short. Although he would not give many details, CmdrTaco informed us that Slashdot BLOWS would deliver even more "garbage" to the whole world, by increasing/.'s support languages beyond english. "Naturally," he finished, "you must SUCK before you can BLOW."
<offtopic><rant>That guy is such a fruit cake. Probably a bigger dolt than Jimmy Swaggart and likely even more insane. How can a person who has a "doctorate" in ANY field of study feel they have to devote 20 years of their life to predicting Christ's return (which can't be done, as stated by the very reference material he uses to predict the end of the world). Not to mention said return is always "predicted" to take place 2 years after a broadcast. I suppose by the Pigeon Hole principle, he'll get it right eventually. His whole agenda is literally a FUD technique, no different from what Microsoft uses. First, scare the daylights out of anyone foolish enough to listen. Next, tell them they will be directly effected. Last, throw them a sales pitch that if you buy his books and then say a prayer with him, you're saved. Oh, and you have to buy more overpriced books and videos. Maybe he's not a fruit, just has great marketing skills.</rant></offtopic>
<ontopic>At least "Dr." Jack Van Impe succeeds in showing us that there are people in the world who are dumber, and more fanatic about their own silly dellusions than John Katz is. Congratulations to John Kats for not being a bigger goof than Dr. Impe. Knowing this gives me strength to make it through my day.</ontopic>
Titanic's Size Made It Sink More Slowly
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HP Buys Compaq
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· Score: 1, Offtopic
Doubling the size of the Titanic would only have caused it to sink twice as fast!
This is incorrect. Larger ships have more buoyancy, and as a result, it takes that much more volume of water to cause them to lose it. The Titanic took a long time to sink because there was a very large hull to fill up with water. Now, take a cooking pot, punch a hole in it, and see how fast it sinks. That's hardly anywhere near the size of the Titanic, yet it will sink almost immediately instead of over the course of a couple hours.
I highly recommend you watch the summer block buster Titanic, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo Decaprio. It's a highly educated, historically accurate portrayal of this tragic event and will even reveal to you what the upper portion of a naked woman looks like.
As far as I know all of these are lacking the single most important thing, a robust and complete set of import filters for Word, Wordperfect, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.
There's a real good reason we haven't seen this yet. It's the chicken in the egg problem. Before you can have fully capable import filters, you must first impliment the feature set of the app you're inputing from. For example, Microsoft Word has a bunch of features that do not yet appear in most other "word processors". If your word processor doesn't impliment these features, a filter that does is quite useless for your application (except in regards of ignoring things your application doesn't understand).
Unfortunately, before those features are implimented in your own application, you're going to need some more acceptance (to bring more developers on the project). Unless you can say you do what the mainstream needs/wants, you're still an obscur project. *sigh*
Off this topic, one other thing that kind of bothers me is the massive ammount of reinventing the wheel. Now while having many options is good, there are just far too many open source projects that are each trying to create their own robust, fully-featured office suite. Why is the community wasting so much time?
Some of these really should merge and share code more. Or at least, there should be one organization that is dedicated to creating a unified set of the features found in all open source office suite projects. That way, they could create a big set of libraries that do these things... so when the next guy has this reckless desire to make his own office suite... well, you get the idea.
Slashdot Mirror
I really hope that Dmitry Skylarov can go home to Russia soon.
Yes! Go home! Quick, Dmitri, go back to Russia! Your presense here is showing Americans how stupid our legal system is and our people can't possibly remain ignorant for much longer! Shoo! Shoo!
Not that I find fault with it, but Mr. Keker has just as much to gain from representing Dmitri as Dmitri himself. Keker will gain a great deal of press and attention, whether or not he wins the case. Dmitri on the otherhand, now has a fighting chance at getting off clean from this injustice.
Hopefully, this is the kind of trend we can expect. As the open source and free speech movements (funny you have to think of it in those terms these days - thought we already had that one down) become more and more publicized, we may see more and more lawyers jump into the fray on our behalf for their benefit.
Again, not a bad thing, but we don't want to be misguided into thinking that these lawyers working pro bono support our causes. They just as soon would take a $1M check from Microsoft.
It won't help clean up the .com domains. The reason is becuase most sex sites don't conflict with domain names that businesses want for their web sites. For example, does IBM in contest for hotsex4uandgoats.com? No. Do sex sites have domain names like microsoft.com? As amusing as that would be, the answer is also no. .sex, while making porn smucks look a little harder for the wares they seek, wouldn't benefit the rest of us. And if it was official, it'd be something our browsers would search through if the domain we were looking for was unavailable. It'd annoy me greatly if a route to debian.org was unavailable and my browser defaulted to debian.sex and a web site containing photos of Ian's and Debra's love life.
There's already hundreds of thousands of web sites that already fall under the wrong TLD category because current TDL's are too vague. These two only make it worse. There is nothing wrong with adding TLD's, but we need them to be MORE specific to prevent ongoing domain name conflicts. Dot info and dot biz... besides the fact that they seem rather "immature" and "umprofessional" respectively, they don't help clue me in much on what I'm looking at. "What's the difference between a COMmerical site and a BIZiness site? Isn't somecompany.com also a BIZiness?" "Is this ORGinzation just about INFO?"
.TLD. scheme to include regions? www.somecompany.com.east/west/se/etc.
These domains add confusion and too much generality. At the risk of a TLD being too long, why not create a ".store" for retail fronts, or ".gr(ou)p" for non-established organizations (that one would be great for OSS developers). How about extending the concept of the
I may just be blowing my horn here, but these things are just plain dumb. Some of my suggestions here may add some confusion, but won't adding to the mess also do that in a less constructive way?
...But just when are people going to realize they DO NOT have to put up with this BS? (Skip to the end for something that's not redundant.)
I love how the ZD Net article is titled: "Time to stand up to Microsoft" (and right plop in the middle of the article is an advirtisement for "Windows Solutions"). It's utterly absurd.
Linux and other free OS solutions are WITHOUT A DOUBT usable in a business setting. They are proven to be largley inexpensive, relatively easy to deploy, don't have seat/use restrictions, and show better performance records.
Duh.
I'm preaching to the choir here, but I think it's important to proliferate this message to as many people through as many channels as possible. CLEARLY, corporations who feed Microsoft are still uneducated that free software solutions aren't "low quality" just because they don't cost money.
(Original thoughts follow.)
What causes people and businesses to constantly whine about how much Windows sucks? Meanwhile, they constantly shell out the bucks to pay for new/more copies of it, all the while completely ignoring the free software alternatives. Do they think the situation is ever going to improve?
I know it sounds rash, but it is not possible for any largely used, proprietary solution to "improve". Proprietary solutions involve one controlling body. It's a tyrrany, not a democracy (as people are complaining that Microsoft "does not listen"). ONLY free software will get better because it is not driven by greed and profit alone. Greed snowballs and gets bigger and poses more influence on the product. That's the Microsoft case.
The longer they last, the more greedy they will become, the more money they will want to suck up. Unless there's no money there to consume, the beast will only get stronger and bolder.
I can understand your school's position with computers. IT IS A SMALL PRIVATE CATHOLIC COLLEGE.
:) I have yet to cause any difficulties.
:)
We're not "small", but we are private, and what does Catholic have to do with anything?
They don't get beaucoup cash from the state for networking equipment and internet access.
Heh. I pay $28K/year to go here, which is the average tuition. From that tuition, network access is implied, whether I want it to be or not. I'm paying a bundle for it, I expect to be permitted to use it to the fullest. I want to run Internet services. Period. I know what I am doing, and I'm not going to "crash our network" by running Apache, ssh, mysqld, exim, nfs, samba, and ftp. They should have an open policy about it, since most students don't even know what a inet daemon is. Then, if someone is causing trouble, they just close that person's port, notify them, then give the student a chance to correct the problem. This is the third year I've been running a myriad of services from my dorm - all under their noses (a host.deny of their domain is all that's necessary!
You also don't need a shitload of computers in your dorms.
You're not a computer geek, are you? Computer geeks/hackers/whatever tend to have multiple systems for different purposes, even if it's not for serving. You may have one box that you use full-time Linux, another for gaming, and maybe even a few older PC's or SPARC boxen. In my personal arrangment, I have a firewall, my server, my PC, my laptop, a SPARCserver5, plus an old 486 for demos. Why? Well, the firewall protects my network. Server hosts my web sites, email, ssh, and so on. My PC has Linux and Windows on it (the latter for gaming). My laptop, well, because you can't lug a midtower + 19" monitor to class. The SPARC is for learning - knew significantly less about Sun hardware before it bought it. And lastly, the 486 because I still love those old time asm graphics demos. You're silly to think that computers gurus don't have a need for more than one PC. Take away my server, and I still have a lot of boxen that I use on a frequent basis.
I suppose you didn't read the article last month about the computer department hell week. Students coming in with shit network cards that end up taking portions of the entire network down or just plain causing grief to the already overworked IT staff.
That doesn't meant that I shouldn't have to pay $100 for a 3Crap when I can buy a Linksys or Netgear that works just as well (if not better - I've had 3Com's die on me, but never a Linksys) at BestBuy for $15.00 with a $5.00 rebate. And as for our poor, overworked IT staff... don't even get me started. The employees down at our IT department (not to be confused with our audio/video CTS - those guys rock; they know what they doing) are rejects from the idiot's IT club. I'm talking about large portions of their staff not knowing anything about computers. I interacted with a guy who set up my new MAC address for "authentication" had no idea what he was doing. I waited as he searched for a proceedure to change it. One of the first steps was "click the Start Menu", the next was "click Netscape Navigator", to which he exclaimed "Ah! There's Netscape". This guy had an office. If they are overworked, it's because the majority of their department has no idea what they are doing. Especially one of the persons in charge, Karen. I won't even get into how I know she's an idiot (then they would know who's griping!
Complaining about trading MP3s goes back to my first point, a private school doesn't have the resources to let you max out their fucking T1 all day long.
Okay then, for bragging about being one of the nation's top ten most wired universities, you think they only have a T1? W're connected with an OC3 and we own IP addresses all the way from 165.190.10.20 up to somewhere around 169.190.230.(something). We've got HUGE funding for our IT department and Net access. Sadly, these people that don't understand anything are soaking all that up and ripping off the tuition payers.
The college I'm attending, Duquesne University, has a more draconian policy aside from disallowing net access in class. Here are a few of the features of one of the nation's "most top 10 wired universities".
* Multiuser operating systems are banned. No form of *nix can be run on our network. Reason: "Linux can be used as a hacking tool."
* No server of any kind including HTTP, Telnet, ssh, etc. can be used.
* Students are permitted to HAVE one computer per resident in dorms. If more than one computer is FOUND in a dorm, the owners access is revoked.
* Students must have a CTS certified NIC. (In otherwords, it MUST be a 3Com.)
* Students may not possess or distribute files with a ".mp3" extention. This is copyright infringement. (Napster's ports are also banned, btw.)
In actual practice, the policy is a lot worse than this. The people at our "Computer and Technology Services" are so absolutely clueless that they aren't quite sure when a policy is "broken", so they err on the side of paranoia. For example, I have known other students here using Linux, nmap'ing their own ports to check security and gotten nailed for using what CTS called an "illegal hacking tool".
These total idiots basically ban anything they don't understand and leave students reeling in the wake of it. Technology gifted students can't bring more than one PC (if you have a laptop for example, you can have it on the wireless LAN that's SLOWLY becoming available, IF you give up your PC's connection) and they cannot enjoy hosting services to the rest of the world (running internet daemons gets you called down for a warning - further violations result in suspension of access and a visit to our judiciary committee).
If your college only blocks net access in classes, consider yourself lucky. Hopefully their network policy hasn't banned free speech while I wasn't looking.
This is unacceptable. Again, open source is all about sharing code so we don't have to keep reinventing the wheel, but as was said earlier, we MUST give due credit.
As much as I love Linux and prefer it to everything else, I think 2.4.10 should be boycotted. Nobody should download, use, or install 2.4.10 until a patched version is released that gives proper credit to the BSD people for the code it used. I'd even be willing to jump immediately to a 2.4.11 release, even if it is only minor issues.
The Linux kernel version 2.4.10 violates the very ideals that it was created and lives by. Ideals that even Microsoft of all people adhered to when using code from the community. It's a black mark on the kernel's history.
Ladies and gentlemen of the House, we have yet again faced a grave terrorist threat. United States intelligence was unable to detect and then stop this obvious terrorist attack to collide material from our sun. Clearly the terrorists weren't finished with the WTC, they must now slam something into planet earth's atmosphere, and yes, even earth itself. The success of this attack is a direct result of our nation's intelligence agencies inability to crack strong crypto used by terrorists. It is obvious to demand that all cryphers hence forth have back doors for us to use to help prevent such senseless acts of wanton violence in the future.
Web sites are further more a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act since they allow intelligent people to exchange data that MIGHT lead towards the development of anticircumvention devices.
Now, besides the fact that this is one of the more useless pieces of news posted to Slashdot, it also happens to be a great strategy. By posting story links to PC manufacturers who sell PC's with Windows XP pre-loaded, we can effectively shut-down their online sales services to prevent customers from buying said systems. Great way to beat MS! :)
The practice was overwhelmed in early 80-s because of the sheer number of jeans on the street.
Exactly my point! At some point, all this will be too much for even our over-priced government to handle. When that happens, we'll see these things fall apart at the seams.
We as a community must only focus on stead-fast rebelion of the laws we find to be unjust. Sacrifices will be made... but when has freedom been earned (or recovered) without sacrifice?
And sort of hint on an idea that I mention in this post regarding P2P not too long ago.
Does Microsoft possess even a single creative/original soul in their entire organization?
Somehow I think that some of the nerds over at Microsoft's R&D have been watching Serial Experiements: Lain a bit too much. ;-)
Lain: Navi, connect to the Wired.
(scratch that...)
Joe User: PC, connect to the MS.
How can it not? Especially when the government uses many of the technologies it hopes to alienate and regulate. Before long, there will be so much crappy legislation in place that it will be impossible to move an inch without breaking some law or another. But, that will not stop people from moving. We'll definitely find that law enforcement will be spending so much effort trying to enforce dozens of laws with millions of Americans.
This is why that the best ways we can respond are A) write a litter to your representatives, telling them to NOT pass this foolishness, and if that fails, B) everyone do everything they can to break these laws to the highest extent. What better way to stop a machine than to throw objects into its gears? In this situation where such important fundamental freedoms are in jeopardy, our only choices may be to throw ourselves in between the cogs.
How long before courts are so utterly bogged down with millions of open software and encryption users (individuals and businsess alike) that they are using up all their time? Eventually, practicallity will get in the way of these old fruits. The scale of this is analagous to making blue jeans illegal. Sure, the gov. could make it a crime to wear certain pants, but what's going to happen when every court room in the nation has a mile-long line of people waiting to be arraigned (on top of the line that's already there no less!)
Worms are definitely a problem on all platforms. But the *nix world has a bigger advantage over the Windows world. In our world, code is written with lots of thought towards quality and strong design. Windows, well, is questionable. Certainly *nix has exploits, but those that exist require a GREAT deal more skill to exploit than those that exist for Windows. Therein lies our safety net.
Most people who have the skill to code worms for more secure and robust *nix platforms are probably mature/responsible enough through their experience to not do something so utterly foolish. However, if they do decide to do so, they end up trying to do a positive thing for the community! (Anyone remember those Linux worms that FIXED the exploits they took advantage of before moving onto the next box and cleaning themselves up?) Besides, look at the very few malicious worms we have seen for *nix platforms. They didn't last long. The OSS community has a VERY quick response time to big problems and the admins are generally more skilled and knowlagable about applying patches.
I say, let's enjoy this while we can. It's kind of amusing to see MS admins scurry around, trying to stick fingers in all the leaks. It's risky to say "it serves them right", but that's for only weighing mundane factors in deciding what platform to use. And for those companies that reject OSS products, well, they get what they deserve for thinking "stuff that doesn't come from a company mustn't have any quality". Pah. Worms with the scale of NT aren't a concern for us. Let's parade this around as a reason to support and use open software.
Demonstrate strong interoperability but still have a choice what OS you want to run (*BSD, Linux, MacOSX, etc).
Increase availability of all kinds of software and toolkits between almost all of the anti-MS players.
Accellerate development for both platforms by encouraging developers to optimize their software for both camps.
:)
Now this is a lot to say for such a rudimentary project (and I'm sure the list could go on), but the ideals are there. Imagine if we had increased/improved interoperability between the KDE and GNOME projects (instead of a lot of bitching about the other "sucking ass"). Say, tools that helped unify the appearance of widgets, code sharing layers, and so on.
So, wordiness aside, unity is good.
The current model of the Internet is not something that is going to surive the rigors of foolish governments, panicky interest groups, and greedy corporations. As we've seen time after time again, having single points of failure knocked out (regulation, threats, lawsuits, etc), we lose SO much information. Thanks to recent terrorist activities, we're going to find our bastions of freedom online gradually removed by people who honestly don't know any better.
:)
Peer2Peer, I think, is a powerful solution for us to retain the freedoms we currently enjoy on the Net. Certainly P2P helps save us from Napster-like lawsuits regarding copyrighted material. However, can we take it further? Can we deliver web page content in the P2P model, for starters? Could we move all of our Internet services to this model? Consider a world where we start using technologies that prevent any central source of information/data/etc. from being stamped out by the ignorant.
I'm basically describing a model where when a source, be it a group or an individual, publishes something, it is in the network forever. Regardless of what happens to that source, tens of thousands of other machines will always be carrying that forbidden data. It couldn't be stopped. Sure we'd gather up massive amounts of garbage and quickly antiquated material, but every piece of knowledge out there is bound to be of value to at least somebody.
P2P could bring about the global consciousness that the Internet was meant to be. Lucky for us, you can't kill a brain by trashing a few neurons.
Because Java still consistently sucks ass, drags ass, and is still up the ass of an almost-ran Microsoft (aka "Sun")?
/. with more details about this. Also, pay attention to this article before yoiu make further claims that Java performance is bad. And of course, you could try actually coding something using the language. :P
Point by point here, how does Java suck? Java is a great language for all kinds of tasks. The extensive API already available for it is a big plus, and it is, for all intents and purposes, truly cross-platform.
Java is not as slow as most people claim. Like any programming language, performance is dependent largely on the programmer. A lot of programmers with poor skills use Java because they can focus on their tasks instead of building the tools to do said task. Here's an article on
Sun has done a lot of good for the OSS community. If you'll notice OpenOffice, and well, Java is a great piece of code for the Linux world. I'd say that Sun != Microsoft. Get a clue.
This project seems that it could fill the role of a great that that Sun wanted to accomplish with Java. The versatility of Servlets is quite extensive and it makes me wonder why, in the shadow of this project, the OSS community is spending time on dotGNU and Mono.
.NET wants to. And, it's not restricted to Windows.
.NET killer out of this, or am I thinking about driving a screw with a hammer?
Tomcat has tremendous potential to deliver robust, complete apps in the same way
Is my thinking correct in that we can level this software against Microsoft's upcoming ventures? Can we make a
"A revolutionary new way to bring trolls out of the wood-work!"
/. readers than any other news system before. By posting stories that have no real relevance or interest to the existing community, /. hopes to increase its already massive contigent of trolls by at least 150%.
/. readers by encouraging them to post ASCII artworks in the forums. "I especially like the Goatse.cx ASCII art images with my name in the anus."
/.'s support languages beyond english. "Naturally," he finished, "you must SUCK before you can BLOW."
Slashdot launched a new service today. It's called "Systematic Unvieling of Crapy Knowledge Stream", or SUCKS for short. Slashdot SUCKS version 1.0 is intended to bore more of
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda states that "Slashdot SUCKS is the most obvious next step. The things that our staff can do with SUCKS technology are incredible. We can turn mature individuals to 6 year olds with boring news posts that bring out the trolls deep within. It's really quite exciting." He went on further to state how Slashdot SUCKS would help bring out art skills in
When asked what the next evolution in Slashdot SUCKS would be, Rob commented briefly on Slashdot Bi-Lingual Opressive Waste Stream", or BLOWS for short. Although he would not give many details, CmdrTaco informed us that Slashdot BLOWS would deliver even more "garbage" to the whole world, by increasing
Does not sound very cross-platform to me. :)
at least that's what I heard from jack van impe.
<offtopic><rant>That guy is such a fruit cake. Probably a bigger dolt than Jimmy Swaggart and likely even more insane. How can a person who has a "doctorate" in ANY field of study feel they have to devote 20 years of their life to predicting Christ's return (which can't be done, as stated by the very reference material he uses to predict the end of the world). Not to mention said return is always "predicted" to take place 2 years after a broadcast. I suppose by the Pigeon Hole principle, he'll get it right eventually. His whole agenda is literally a FUD technique, no different from what Microsoft uses. First, scare the daylights out of anyone foolish enough to listen. Next, tell them they will be directly effected. Last, throw them a sales pitch that if you buy his books and then say a prayer with him, you're saved. Oh, and you have to buy more overpriced books and videos. Maybe he's not a fruit, just has great marketing skills.</rant></offtopic>
<ontopic>At least "Dr." Jack Van Impe succeeds in showing us that there are people in the world who are dumber, and more fanatic about their own silly dellusions than John Katz is. Congratulations to John Kats for not being a bigger goof than Dr. Impe. Knowing this gives me strength to make it through my day.</ontopic>
Doubling the size of the Titanic would only have caused it to sink twice as fast!
This is incorrect. Larger ships have more buoyancy, and as a result, it takes that much more volume of water to cause them to lose it. The Titanic took a long time to sink because there was a very large hull to fill up with water. Now, take a cooking pot, punch a hole in it, and see how fast it sinks. That's hardly anywhere near the size of the Titanic, yet it will sink almost immediately instead of over the course of a couple hours.
I highly recommend you watch the summer block buster Titanic, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo Decaprio. It's a highly educated, historically accurate portrayal of this tragic event and will even reveal to you what the upper portion of a naked woman looks like.
As far as I know all of these are lacking the single most important thing, a robust and complete set of import filters for Word, Wordperfect, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.
There's a real good reason we haven't seen this yet. It's the chicken in the egg problem. Before you can have fully capable import filters, you must first impliment the feature set of the app you're inputing from. For example, Microsoft Word has a bunch of features that do not yet appear in most other "word processors". If your word processor doesn't impliment these features, a filter that does is quite useless for your application (except in regards of ignoring things your application doesn't understand).
Unfortunately, before those features are implimented in your own application, you're going to need some more acceptance (to bring more developers on the project). Unless you can say you do what the mainstream needs/wants, you're still an obscur project. *sigh*
Off this topic, one other thing that kind of bothers me is the massive ammount of reinventing the wheel. Now while having many options is good, there are just far too many open source projects that are each trying to create their own robust, fully-featured office suite. Why is the community wasting so much time?
Some of these really should merge and share code more. Or at least, there should be one organization that is dedicated to creating a unified set of the features found in all open source office suite projects. That way, they could create a big set of libraries that do these things... so when the next guy has this reckless desire to make his own office suite... well, you get the idea.