It is too bad that we can't have a DE for linux that looks exactly like XP, on down to claiming to be XP in the various dialogs and so forth.
I've considered doing such in the past myself, and calling it Girlfriend Linux (as in, the distro you install on the girlfriend's computer so she won't know that she's using it). But I'm 100% certain you'd be sued just for using the various bitmaps in the themes that you'd need.
One or two guys in an IT dept. with such though, could do covert migration...
A few aliases would cripple bash back down to cmd.exe's functionality (not that there is much worry of the intended audience using cmd.exe).
A firefox theme could make it look like IE well enough (if uglier).
Not sure which window manager to use, but certainly it wouldn't be much more than making a theme and perhaps writing a few gui wizards?
I've worked at many corporations that use windows. They aren't ever tinkering with the OS, and are forced by license to send their changes back to Microsoft.
They won't tinker with linux, and be forced to make the changes available to the world.
But assume they do, for the moment. How exactly will a tobacco company be hurt, by sending in a firefox patch that fixes a bug? How will a telephone company be hurt if the send a patch back to Linus for a kernel issue?
Most corporations don't sell software. This isn't an issue for them. Those that do, well... I doubt that helping with the maintenance of the kernel or a browser from time to time will impact their bottom line when trying to sell MovieMagic Gold Home Pro XP Edition Lite.
All the GPL does, is insist you give fixes back to others so they can use them too, should you ever manage to figure out a fix. If you write your own software, license it any way you like.
But you're also the kind of person who manages to make windows work. You've probably been working on the same install of 2k for 18 months or more, never a problem. This has more to do with your computing practices, than it does with windows. An identical installation (be it XP or 2k, or whatever) on an identical machine for Joe User, and it wouldn't last 2 days. Not even 2 hours, if on broadband.
This does not excuse windows in the least. Of course I expect even a junkbeater car to drive down the road every day with no problems, assuming the driver is a mechanic, the passenger is an auto engineer, and the 2 guys in the backseat are car technicians.
Try slackware, and forget packages. Download tarballs, and do./configure && make && make install.
Star Trek: Klingon Warriors. Set it at or just before when TNG is happening, with a ship of klingon adventurers out to kick ass and take names. And this time, they can speak real klingon again instead of the gibberish that passed for it in Enterprise. It can be filled with intrigue and espionage and so forth.
And there won't even be a human on the series until season 4!
Don't tell them, but I secretly have acquired a +50 Artifact of Withering Sales Revenue. I'm unable to use it, but on the lookout for someone with the lvl that can wield it.
Stand back. I still have my +10 Staff of "Allow us to moderate articles!" Plea. I'll nail him with it, and then you guys bury him with a few thousand -1, Redundants.
Some free insight for you: There are people that can't understand how something exists, if it isn't manufactured from the ground up to be bought and sold. Linux doesn't fit that mold, not in its entirety, and therein lies the problem, for them.
I mean, really. If we get the job done, why not act like hippies, if that's what we feel like? Does it change anything about the product? Is Hippy Linux somehow inferior to CorpDrone Linux, supposing all the underlying code is the same? It's a dangerous idea, this concept of being able to not be a serf, and still being competent to make what society needs.
Reminds me of that VMS admin they found deep in the heard of some DEC building last year. From what I understand, he still doesn't believe that Compaq bought out his company, and they're having a hell of a time tracking him own in there. Late at night he somehow evades security cameras, sneaks out and defaces HP logos.
They say you can hear his screams of "thread-level security" echo through the halls.
This will be labeled "Troll" and "Flamebait". Almost certainly a few Redundants and Overrateds too. But here goes.
They need to curl up and die. Nothing else they do earns a "thank you" from me, nor should it from you. Scientologists were praised by Jeb Bush not so long ago for doing volunteer work after one of Florida's hurricanes. Should they have been thanked? No, because it can be said with some matter of certainty that it was merely PR fodder by what is otherwise an evil organization.
Besides, for all I know they had some industrial intelligence that said some small firm could be successful selling this software, they've done it before. I mean, would we let a convicted monopolist body armor company give away bullet proof vests to drive the rest out of business?
Could it be because a female USB port is to plug devices into, and that any device plugged into such can demand up to 500ma of power from the device with the port?
Sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, you'd have Cletus trying to plug his USB 2.0 camcorder into the cell phone, and ruining either or both of the devices.
Plugging a cell phone into a USB port is ok, plugging *almost anything else* into a cell phone's USB port is a recipe for disaster.
Loss of revenue doesn't matter. They HAVE to protect their copyright.
No, they don't. They can selectively enforce copyright, unlike trademark rights.
But you do inspire what I think is a good question. Obviously, you're not an IP lawyer, so I can't be too harsh if you get a little confused... but it does make one wonder if the businessmen themselves don't get confused about this very same distinction.
"Oh shit, they're violating our copyrights, and if we don't act immediately, we'll lose them!"
Maybe this sort of thing explains why they are so fucking rabid? I dunno. Or maybe, since they figure we get confused by it, they can just keep pushing this as far as judges will allow, until they can claim they must enforce things with zero tolerance and not be laughed at. Would be nice to be a copyrightnazi and have an excuse that most believed...
Re:Reality says "hi, long time no see"
on
EZTree Shuts Down
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Thank you. I've never heard a better argument for why laws deserve zero respect. Let's have some anarchy.
Um, not that I consider Apple to be paragons of compatibility, but windows is about as low on this criteria as anything can be.
Microsoft has utter, plain contempt for open standards. They release service packs you can't block that break new releases of important apps like Photoshop.
Assuming that you meant Microsoft software when you implied you used "compatible" apps, your statement makes about as much sense as "I live on the moon because I like to breathe oxygen." And if you didn't mean Microsoft, then what is it that you think beats Apple so soundly?
Yeh, but did your fancy university classes teach you how to route appletalk with EIGRP? Huh? Huh? Did you learn how to bridge CDP across legacy switches? Did you even learn why open standards like OSPF may not be the best choice in a modern high-powered network, you savage? I think not.
Except that they do need to know the engineering behind an airbag. They need to know that it's explosive, and that if you sit with the seat too close and you're short, it can break your neck. They need to know that it inflates far faster than a human being can move. They need to know under what sorts of impacts it might deploy. They need to know not to put a carseat behind an airbag. They may not know these things, but can anyone *deny* that they need to know them, or that not knowing them may prove fatal?
Oh, and as for Billy Boy, him talking about "users just needing to know it's safe" is about like Hitler proclaiming that Germany is safe, even as Dresden is being firebombed.
The car analogy no longer holds. Sure, your little Apple II in 1980 might have been a car, but today's machines are jetliners.
And yes, I expect an airline pilot to know exactly what every damn light on the cockpit panel means. I even expect them to be able to make reasonable guesses as to what most of the diagnostic lights might mean in the engine compartment when the jet is undergoing inspection down on the ground.
This is not unreasonable.
If your Apple II has trouble, you can't play pacman anymore, just as if your car fails to start, you sit in the driveway.
If your Windows XP machine has trouble, everyone on the net pays for your stupidity, just as if your 747 crashes into a populated area.
Your ability to blind people with nakedness has nothing to do with your whiteness.
Haven't read the book..
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Firefox Hacks
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· Score: 1
But if they don't mention greasemonkey, then the only excuse I'll accept is that it's too new to appear in print. I'm using it at work to clobber that last webapp so that I no longer have to use IE...
Also, check out Favicon picker, for those last few sites that don't work properly (shame on you, www.dilbert.com). Nice too, for those embedded devices you keep bookmarks too, (print servers, etc). Even if my WAP icon looks gay (I did pretty decent freehanding on the printer icon).
PS Anyone have a decent 16x16 dilbert icon? Nothing available scales down that small...
Perhaps you're right. We'll never know though, until most people stop using the Edsel of OS's that is windows. Oh, the Edsel wasn't that bad... what was the name of that east german car, Trebant?
Slashdot Mirror
It is too bad that we can't have a DE for linux that looks exactly like XP, on down to claiming to be XP in the various dialogs and so forth.
I've considered doing such in the past myself, and calling it Girlfriend Linux (as in, the distro you install on the girlfriend's computer so she won't know that she's using it). But I'm 100% certain you'd be sued just for using the various bitmaps in the themes that you'd need.
One or two guys in an IT dept. with such though, could do covert migration...
A few aliases would cripple bash back down to cmd.exe's functionality (not that there is much worry of the intended audience using cmd.exe).
A firefox theme could make it look like IE well enough (if uglier).
Not sure which window manager to use, but certainly it wouldn't be much more than making a theme and perhaps writing a few gui wizards?
I've worked at many corporations that use windows. They aren't ever tinkering with the OS, and are forced by license to send their changes back to Microsoft.
They won't tinker with linux, and be forced to make the changes available to the world.
But assume they do, for the moment. How exactly will a tobacco company be hurt, by sending in a firefox patch that fixes a bug? How will a telephone company be hurt if the send a patch back to Linus for a kernel issue?
Most corporations don't sell software. This isn't an issue for them. Those that do, well... I doubt that helping with the maintenance of the kernel or a browser from time to time will impact their bottom line when trying to sell MovieMagic Gold Home Pro XP Edition Lite.
All the GPL does, is insist you give fixes back to others so they can use them too, should you ever manage to figure out a fix. If you write your own software, license it any way you like.
But you're also the kind of person who manages to make windows work. You've probably been working on the same install of 2k for 18 months or more, never a problem. This has more to do with your computing practices, than it does with windows. An identical installation (be it XP or 2k, or whatever) on an identical machine for Joe User, and it wouldn't last 2 days. Not even 2 hours, if on broadband.
./configure && make && make install.
This does not excuse windows in the least. Of course I expect even a junkbeater car to drive down the road every day with no problems, assuming the driver is a mechanic, the passenger is an auto engineer, and the 2 guys in the backseat are car technicians.
Try slackware, and forget packages. Download tarballs, and do
Star Trek: Klingon Warriors. Set it at or just before when TNG is happening, with a ship of klingon adventurers out to kick ass and take names. And this time, they can speak real klingon again instead of the gibberish that passed for it in Enterprise. It can be filled with intrigue and espionage and so forth.
And there won't even be a human on the series until season 4!
Too bad the universal Sony remote controls almost certainly won't support this either.
I've been looking for a year now, nothing free that will compile on a modern system, and I'm too much of an ijit to write anything like that...
Don't tell them, but I secretly have acquired a +50 Artifact of Withering Sales Revenue. I'm unable to use it, but on the lookout for someone with the lvl that can wield it.
We put up a slashdot poll for the final companies. I'm voting for Unicorp.
Stand back. I still have my +10 Staff of "Allow us to moderate articles!" Plea. I'll nail him with it, and then you guys bury him with a few thousand -1, Redundants.
Some free insight for you: There are people that can't understand how something exists, if it isn't manufactured from the ground up to be bought and sold. Linux doesn't fit that mold, not in its entirety, and therein lies the problem, for them.
I mean, really. If we get the job done, why not act like hippies, if that's what we feel like? Does it change anything about the product? Is Hippy Linux somehow inferior to CorpDrone Linux, supposing all the underlying code is the same? It's a dangerous idea, this concept of being able to not be a serf, and still being competent to make what society needs.
Reminds me of that VMS admin they found deep in the heard of some DEC building last year. From what I understand, he still doesn't believe that Compaq bought out his company, and they're having a hell of a time tracking him own in there. Late at night he somehow evades security cameras, sneaks out and defaces HP logos.
They say you can hear his screams of "thread-level security" echo through the halls.
This will be labeled "Troll" and "Flamebait". Almost certainly a few Redundants and Overrateds too. But here goes.
They need to curl up and die. Nothing else they do earns a "thank you" from me, nor should it from you. Scientologists were praised by Jeb Bush not so long ago for doing volunteer work after one of Florida's hurricanes. Should they have been thanked? No, because it can be said with some matter of certainty that it was merely PR fodder by what is otherwise an evil organization.
Besides, for all I know they had some industrial intelligence that said some small firm could be successful selling this software, they've done it before. I mean, would we let a convicted monopolist body armor company give away bullet proof vests to drive the rest out of business?
Could it be because a female USB port is to plug devices into, and that any device plugged into such can demand up to 500ma of power from the device with the port?
Sure as the sun will rise tomorrow, you'd have Cletus trying to plug his USB 2.0 camcorder into the cell phone, and ruining either or both of the devices.
Plugging a cell phone into a USB port is ok, plugging *almost anything else* into a cell phone's USB port is a recipe for disaster.
Loss of revenue doesn't matter. They HAVE to protect their copyright.
No, they don't. They can selectively enforce copyright, unlike trademark rights.
But you do inspire what I think is a good question. Obviously, you're not an IP lawyer, so I can't be too harsh if you get a little confused... but it does make one wonder if the businessmen themselves don't get confused about this very same distinction.
"Oh shit, they're violating our copyrights, and if we don't act immediately, we'll lose them!"
Maybe this sort of thing explains why they are so fucking rabid? I dunno. Or maybe, since they figure we get confused by it, they can just keep pushing this as far as judges will allow, until they can claim they must enforce things with zero tolerance and not be laughed at. Would be nice to be a copyrightnazi and have an excuse that most believed...
Thank you. I've never heard a better argument for why laws deserve zero respect. Let's have some anarchy.
Nothing is broken on my computer. But then, when I first bought it, I wiped the HD clean and installed Slackware 10.
Um, not that I consider Apple to be paragons of compatibility, but windows is about as low on this criteria as anything can be.
Microsoft has utter, plain contempt for open standards. They release service packs you can't block that break new releases of important apps like Photoshop.
Assuming that you meant Microsoft software when you implied you used "compatible" apps, your statement makes about as much sense as "I live on the moon because I like to breathe oxygen." And if you didn't mean Microsoft, then what is it that you think beats Apple so soundly?
Yeh, but did your fancy university classes teach you how to route appletalk with EIGRP? Huh? Huh? Did you learn how to bridge CDP across legacy switches? Did you even learn why open standards like OSPF may not be the best choice in a modern high-powered network, you savage? I think not.
Except that they do need to know the engineering behind an airbag. They need to know that it's explosive, and that if you sit with the seat too close and you're short, it can break your neck. They need to know that it inflates far faster than a human being can move. They need to know under what sorts of impacts it might deploy. They need to know not to put a carseat behind an airbag. They may not know these things, but can anyone *deny* that they need to know them, or that not knowing them may prove fatal?
Oh, and as for Billy Boy, him talking about "users just needing to know it's safe" is about like Hitler proclaiming that Germany is safe, even as Dresden is being firebombed.
The car analogy no longer holds. Sure, your little Apple II in 1980 might have been a car, but today's machines are jetliners.
And yes, I expect an airline pilot to know exactly what every damn light on the cockpit panel means. I even expect them to be able to make reasonable guesses as to what most of the diagnostic lights might mean in the engine compartment when the jet is undergoing inspection down on the ground.
This is not unreasonable.
If your Apple II has trouble, you can't play pacman anymore, just as if your car fails to start, you sit in the driveway.
If your Windows XP machine has trouble, everyone on the net pays for your stupidity, just as if your 747 crashes into a populated area.
Yeh, they need to start checking so they can catch all the criminals like yourself.
Your ability to blind people with nakedness has nothing to do with your whiteness.
But if they don't mention greasemonkey, then the only excuse I'll accept is that it's too new to appear in print. I'm using it at work to clobber that last webapp so that I no longer have to use IE...
Also, check out Favicon picker, for those last few sites that don't work properly (shame on you, www.dilbert.com). Nice too, for those embedded devices you keep bookmarks too, (print servers, etc). Even if my WAP icon looks gay (I did pretty decent freehanding on the printer icon).
PS Anyone have a decent 16x16 dilbert icon? Nothing available scales down that small...
Perhaps you're right. We'll never know though, until most people stop using the Edsel of OS's that is windows. Oh, the Edsel wasn't that bad... what was the name of that east german car, Trebant?
Wonder if they've released/submitted their changes to the code?
(Even if they did, still wouldn't make up for squashing bnetd, you cuntpimples).