hmm. You, Farley Mullet, are the type of guy that probably likes to go into Chaucer's Canterbury tales and point out all of the mispronunciations.
You know, I probably would, except I don't know how to find mispronunciations in a book.
Its called 'dramatic effect', and 'style'. Just because his posting doesn't follow the most straightforward syntax doesn't mean that it is 'wrong'.
I suppose that's fair, but at least part of my intent was enforcing the age-old maxim: "if you're going to call someone stupid, check your spelling first" (and to be extra pedantic, I'll point out that you want to use the word "it's" and not "its"). And dramatic effect aside, structurally, the final sentence is a total clunker, from confusing the sense of "offense" to imputing neglectfulness to my comment instead of me, to running two or three distinct thoughts together in one sentence. Style is fine, as is bending grammatical conventions, as long as sense and clarity are preserved (you'll not that in the post to which you're replying I used sentence fragments for effect). Straightforward isn't the issue. Clear is.
While we're on the topic of IQ, let's try to rewrite your post with an eye to things like verb tense, sentence structure and the spelling of words like "its":
The Original:
I look at a system with plan9 on my desk (currently turned off), I read your answer, and I remember this quote: "The IQ of a crowd is inversely proportional to it's size".
This was not meant to be an offense, Farley Mullet, but I do know a couple of people who currently try out the OS, and your comment neglected to reflect that - that was not a safe assumption, but a rather centric one.
In English:
Looking at the Plan 9 system on my desk, your comment makes me think of the quote: "The IQ of a crowd is inversely proportional to its size."
No offense intended, Farley Mullet, but I know a couple of people who currently use Plan 9, and this wasn't reflected in your comment. So your assumption wasn't safe, but reflected a certain (limited) viewpoint.
People are often struck by lightning. Sometimes even when it isn't raining. Heck, it could even happen to me tomorrow. But it's still safe to assume that it won't.
If you cut your question off at "If anyone out there is using Plan 9?", the answer would be a resounding "Nope!". From what I've read, Plan 9 seems like a good idea, but from my experience, it seems like an idea people like to talk about a lot more than they like to implement.
Lance: And, in our top story, linux guru Bruce Perens claims that linux code that SCO alleges was stolen in fact is the Berkley Packet Filter, and an old malloc() implementation.
Sherry: BPF Lance? Isn't that licensed under the GPL?
Lance: Actually, the BSD license, Sherry.
Sherry: And malloc()? Source has been available for that since the '70s for goodness sake!
Both laugh
Sherry: Next in sports: the Yankees play the royals, and Jimmy will tell you all about what it means for the playoff picture!
You, sir, are an astroturfer. Your user page shows that you have posted 6 comments on/., and eachandeveryoneofthem contains a link to either the "hiperexchange.com" domain or the "seasidesw.com" domain.
So either you're a HiPerExchange astroturfer, or you are the most devoted fan a MS Exchange utility ever had. YHL. HAND.
The actual interview is already slashdotted, but from the discussion it seems that he reserves his endorsement for the "GNU/Linex" distribution (Linex's site also seems to be down at the moment -- collateral slashdotting?), because it doesn't even provide the option of installing "non-Free" packages. This is just nuts -- it's clear to me why RMS uses the word "Free" instead of "free" at this point: because the meaning of "Free" (and I defy anyone to give a consistent definition of the way that RMS uses the term, aside from "Whatever RMS thinks it should mean at the moment") has shifted so far from what any reasonable person would expect the word "free" to mean.
RMS: Linex is more Free because it doesn't allow you to install certain programs by default!
Use:: But since it restricts my ability to do things, doesn't that make it less free?
RMS: No no no. We're talking about Free, not free here. ..
(As an aside it's funny to see people denouncing michael for describing RMS as a zealot. For goodness sake FSF-guys, michael is on your side. That kinda attitude doesn't bode well for how this comment will be moderated, I suspect.)
It's amazing how fast that download went, what with half the computers in the U.S. offline. Slashdot, on the other hand, is crawling for some reason. Could be that most of Ontario still doesn't have power, so there are fewer local links to the backbone.
C'mon guys, I can see the ad for this movie if I go to the Apple trailers site, a site dedicated to advertising. I don't need to see ads posted as news on this putatively news site. Given the size and interests of/.'s readership, I understand why studios and production companies want to start phoney "grassroots" buzz about their films here, but do the editors really have to accept the story submissions?
I suppose if you got hit with a side-effect, like the DOS that will hit the Windows Update site, that's different.
That's the sort of situation I was talking about. Or situations where company x was paralyzed because company y's network was down, but (after I actually think about it for a second) it seems to me that almost any case like that would be covered by some sort of contract, whether y was an ISP or a datacentre or whatever. However, it still seems to me that there's a certain sense in which the Internet is a commons, and we may end up with the government regulating networked computers as such. Depending on the scale of the infection, the DOS on the 16th could make the whole bloody net crawl, if too much bandwidth is consumed. Enough occasions like that might motivate the government to impose more standards on system maintenance.
But then the issue is one of resources, pure and simple. So when government agencies and public institutions (like my buddy's university) have their networks go down, this is a direct result of underfunding. And underfunding is your tax cuts at work (your jurisdictional mileage may vary).
The other issue at work here has to do with the fact that with lots of worms and trojans, an unpatched or infected box on one network can cause major headaches for all sorts of other networks. And this raises two interesting, related issues: first, can the owner or admin of some unpatched system be held civilly liable for negligence if it is infected and used by a worm or trojan that damages other networks, and secondly, will governments start regulating or setting standards for internet-connected servers, to protect the viability of the network as a whole. Regulations or standards might not be such a bad thing either, because they'd act as a shield from litigation, insofar as any company that followed the guidelines could probably claim that they'd practiced due diligence, or weren't negligent, or whatever (IANAL, can ya guess?). It seems vaguely analogous to environmental regulation, in that if you're going to put your mill by the river, it better not muck the river up for other users.
A friend of mine spent the entire afternoon patching machines in his department at the university where he works, because their IT guy is on vacation this week. And the entire finance department was sent home for the afternoon while their system was patched up.
I know that the ~3 weeks that the patch for the RPC vulnerability has been out for isn't a huge amount of time to test things, but with a vulnerability of this scale, it's really incumbent upon IT people to get networks patched quickly, and it really reflects poorly on the IT department of any organization that gets hit, if you ask me.
According to this (and since it's on the internet, it must be true, right?):
Human chimeras were first discovered with the advent of blood typing when it was found that some people had more than one blood type. Most of them proved to be "blood chimeras" -- non-identical twins who shared a blood supply in the uterus. Those who were not twins are thought to have blood cells from a twin that died early in gestation. Twin embryos often share a blood supply in the placenta, allowing blood stem cells to pass from one and settle in the bone marrow of the other.
So it looks like the answer is yes, people can have more than one blood type.
If someone malicious has access to your computer, bad things can happen. It's good to see that the FreeBSD team is tightening things up, but the bottom line is that if someone has an account on a system and they're determined, they'll find a way to do some damage.
Don't change the subject: when you say that "more than 1% of the ammunition expended in this country (which I assume is the U.S.) is fired at an animal or a target," you evade the context of the discussion on two fronts. First, and most obviously, this discussion is about handguns and not the long-bore weapons that hunters (in my experience) favor. Secondly, I question whether "bullets fired" is a useful metric for this discussion. It seems to me that if a bullet is fired at a target in preparation for a potential killing, that's a killing application, even if it isn't actually killing.
Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity.
Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling
something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time
to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable
optimisation settings."
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a
single program in my life or contributed to an open source project,
yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps
me contribute to international freedom."
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine,
but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but
the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be
for using Gentoo."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands
of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user
input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant
difference with optimisations, and RPMs and.debs can be rebuilt with
a handful of commands, my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with
the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the
third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..."
"You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be
resolved by specifying BOTH.rpms together on the command line, and
that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages
instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together
(which the system wasn't designed for)."
"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software
makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and
patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just
emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09
-fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the
near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still
eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met
on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
I think that you misunderstand the parent poster. He was bemoaning that when everything is user customizable, there are no de facto standards. De facto standards are not in principle hurdles to accessibility if they are well though out (and indeed are often crucial: think about building codes that set standards for, say, door width to accommodate wheelchairs). Cars are certainly subject to standards, and are not user customizable. If someone needs adaptive technologies to drive, they don't rig up their own lever system: occupational therapists or adaptive technologists or whatever the term that I can't remember because it's too late is make the changes for the end-user, and similarly, changes to the OS X UI can be made, it's just that you need the computer equivalent of a adaptive mechanic to make them, that is, someone who has a familiarity with programming for OS X. And why does Apple make it hard for users to change some UI settings? Because Apple adheres like crazy to the Human Interface Guidelines, to provide a standardized (and thus, in the majority of cases) more easily accessible user experience. But if you're curious about adapting OS X to make it more accessible for people with special needs, you might want to start out at Apple's developer documentation on accessibility.
Did anyone else click this link to an old coaster article in the story text, and see how michael had added a cute little "sorry buddy" note about slashdotting the guy's server, and even posted links to mirrors? Now the/. effect is positively a marketing tool; we're told that we can "beat the rush" and see the sites before the server is reduced to a smoking husk if we buy a subscription.
I think, given the limited size of PAL (only 1000 people would be allowed to register a day, so it'd take almost three years for even a million people to register), and the cost of planning and running a successful terrorist operation, it'd be very difficult, if not impossible, to make a profit blowing things up and killing people.
I think there's an analogy with buying defense industry stocks and voting republican, but I'll shut up now. . .
Slashdot Mirror
The Original: In English:People are often struck by lightning. Sometimes even when it isn't raining. Heck, it could even happen to me tomorrow. But it's still safe to assume that it won't.
Actually, his name is Lewis Black.
If you cut your question off at "If anyone out there is using Plan 9?", the answer would be a resounding "Nope!". From what I've read, Plan 9 seems like a good idea, but from my experience, it seems like an idea people like to talk about a lot more than they like to implement.
Kickin' it old school, bringing not back. Party on dude!
Yep, I can see it happening now:
SCO v. linux, coming to the evening news.You, sir, are an astroturfer. Your user page shows that you have posted 6 comments on /., and each and every one of them contains a link to either the "hiperexchange.com" domain or the "seasidesw.com" domain.
So either you're a HiPerExchange astroturfer, or you are the most devoted fan a MS Exchange utility ever had. YHL. HAND.
The actual interview is already slashdotted, but from the discussion it seems that he reserves his endorsement for the "GNU/Linex" distribution (Linex's site also seems to be down at the moment -- collateral slashdotting?), because it doesn't even provide the option of installing "non-Free" packages. This is just nuts -- it's clear to me why RMS uses the word "Free" instead of "free" at this point: because the meaning of "Free" (and I defy anyone to give a consistent definition of the way that RMS uses the term, aside from "Whatever RMS thinks it should mean at the moment") has shifted so far from what any reasonable person would expect the word "free" to mean.
(As an aside it's funny to see people denouncing michael for describing RMS as a zealot. For goodness sake FSF-guys, michael is on your side. That kinda attitude doesn't bode well for how this comment will be moderated, I suspect.)
It's amazing how fast that download went, what with half the computers in the U.S. offline. Slashdot, on the other hand, is crawling for some reason. Could be that most of Ontario still doesn't have power, so there are fewer local links to the backbone.
C'mon guys, I can see the ad for this movie if I go to the Apple trailers site, a site dedicated to advertising. I don't need to see ads posted as news on this putatively news site. Given the size and interests of /.'s readership, I understand why studios and production companies want to start phoney "grassroots" buzz about their films here, but do the editors really have to accept the story submissions?
If only they'd fitted their server enclosures with that tinfoil covering to protect from the evil SCO satellite server hacking rays.
That's the sort of situation I was talking about. Or situations where company x was paralyzed because company y's network was down, but (after I actually think about it for a second) it seems to me that almost any case like that would be covered by some sort of contract, whether y was an ISP or a datacentre or whatever. However, it still seems to me that there's a certain sense in which the Internet is a commons, and we may end up with the government regulating networked computers as such. Depending on the scale of the infection, the DOS on the 16th could make the whole bloody net crawl, if too much bandwidth is consumed. Enough occasions like that might motivate the government to impose more standards on system maintenance.
But then the issue is one of resources, pure and simple. So when government agencies and public institutions (like my buddy's university) have their networks go down, this is a direct result of underfunding. And underfunding is your tax cuts at work (your jurisdictional mileage may vary).
The other issue at work here has to do with the fact that with lots of worms and trojans, an unpatched or infected box on one network can cause major headaches for all sorts of other networks. And this raises two interesting, related issues: first, can the owner or admin of some unpatched system be held civilly liable for negligence if it is infected and used by a worm or trojan that damages other networks, and secondly, will governments start regulating or setting standards for internet-connected servers, to protect the viability of the network as a whole. Regulations or standards might not be such a bad thing either, because they'd act as a shield from litigation, insofar as any company that followed the guidelines could probably claim that they'd practiced due diligence, or weren't negligent, or whatever (IANAL, can ya guess?). It seems vaguely analogous to environmental regulation, in that if you're going to put your mill by the river, it better not muck the river up for other users.
A friend of mine spent the entire afternoon patching machines in his department at the university where he works, because their IT guy is on vacation this week. And the entire finance department was sent home for the afternoon while their system was patched up.
I know that the ~3 weeks that the patch for the RPC vulnerability has been out for isn't a huge amount of time to test things, but with a vulnerability of this scale, it's really incumbent upon IT people to get networks patched quickly, and it really reflects poorly on the IT department of any organization that gets hit, if you ask me.
The dream of a lifetime for you and me, pretty near statistically insignificant for Microsoft.
According to this (and since it's on the internet, it must be true, right?):
So it looks like the answer is yes, people can have more than one blood type.If someone malicious has access to your computer, bad things can happen. It's good to see that the FreeBSD team is tightening things up, but the bottom line is that if someone has an account on a system and they're determined, they'll find a way to do some damage.
Don't change the subject: when you say that "more than 1% of the ammunition expended in this country (which I assume is the U.S.) is fired at an animal or a target," you evade the context of the discussion on two fronts. First, and most obviously, this discussion is about handguns and not the long-bore weapons that hunters (in my experience) favor. Secondly, I question whether "bullets fired" is a useful metric for this discussion. It seems to me that if a bullet is fired at a target in preparation for a potential killing, that's a killing application, even if it isn't actually killing.
Or: Remember, if you find a bug and don't report it, it probably won't get fixed in the next release.
Official Gentoo-Linux-Zealot translator-o-matic
.debs can be rebuilt with
a handful of commands, my box MUST be faster. It's nothing to do with
the fact that I've disabled all startup services and I'm running
BlackBox instead of GNOME or KDE."
.rpms together on the command line, and
that problems hardly ever occur if one uses proper Red Hat packages
instead of mixing SuSE, Mandrake and Joe's Linux packages together
(which the system wasn't designed for)."
Gentoo Linux is an interesting new distribution with some great features. Unfortunately, it has attracted a large number of clueless wannabes who absolutely MUST advocate Gentoo at every opportunity. Let's look at the language of these zealots, and find out what it really means...
"Gentoo makes me so much more productive."
"Although I can't use the box at the moment because it's compiling something, as it will be for the next five days, it gives me more time to check out the latest USE flags and potentially unstable optimisation settings."
"Gentoo is more in the spirit of open source!"
"Apart from Hello World in Pascal at school, I've never written a single program in my life or contributed to an open source project, yet staring at endless streams of GCC output whizzing by somehow helps me contribute to international freedom."
"I use Gentoo because it's more like the BSDs."
"Last month I tried to install FreeBSD on a well-supported machine, but the text-based installer scared me off. I've never used a BSD, but the guys on Slashdot say that it's l33t though, so surely I must be for using Gentoo."
"Heh, my system is soooo much faster after installing Gentoo."
"I've spent hours recompiling Fetchmail, X-Chat, gEdit and thousands of other programs which spend 99% of their time waiting for user input. Even though only the kernel and glibc make a significant difference with optimisations, and RPMs and
"...my Gentoo Linux workstation..."
"...my overclocked AMD eMachines box from PC World, and apart from the third-grade made-to-break components and dodgy fan..." "You Red Hat guys must get sick of dependency hell..."
"I'm too stupid to understand that circular dependencies can be resolved by specifying BOTH
"All the other distros are soooo out of date."
"Constantly upgrading to the latest bleeding-edge untested software makes me more productive. Never mind the extensive testing and patching that Debian and Red Hat perform on their packages; I've just emerged the latest GNOME beta snapshot and compiled with -09 -fomit-instructions, and it only crashes once every few hours."
"Let's face it, Gentoo is the future."
"OK, so no serious business is going to even consider Gentoo in the near future, and even with proper support and QA in place, it'll still eat up far too much of a company's valuable time. But this guy I met on #animepr0n is now using it, so it must be growing!"
Yeah, but where are we going to get a plumber who speaks Norwegian, Brain?
I think that you misunderstand the parent poster. He was bemoaning that when everything is user customizable, there are no de facto standards. De facto standards are not in principle hurdles to accessibility if they are well though out (and indeed are often crucial: think about building codes that set standards for, say, door width to accommodate wheelchairs). Cars are certainly subject to standards, and are not user customizable. If someone needs adaptive technologies to drive, they don't rig up their own lever system: occupational therapists or adaptive technologists or whatever the term that I can't remember because it's too late is make the changes for the end-user, and similarly, changes to the OS X UI can be made, it's just that you need the computer equivalent of a adaptive mechanic to make them, that is, someone who has a familiarity with programming for OS X. And why does Apple make it hard for users to change some UI settings? Because Apple adheres like crazy to the Human Interface Guidelines, to provide a standardized (and thus, in the majority of cases) more easily accessible user experience. But if you're curious about adapting OS X to make it more accessible for people with special needs, you might want to start out at Apple's developer documentation on accessibility.
Did anyone else click this link to an old coaster article in the story text, and see how michael had added a cute little "sorry buddy" note about slashdotting the guy's server, and even posted links to mirrors? Now the /. effect is positively a marketing tool; we're told that we can "beat the rush" and see the sites before the server is reduced to a smoking husk if we buy a subscription.
I think, given the limited size of PAL (only 1000 people would be allowed to register a day, so it'd take almost three years for even a million people to register), and the cost of planning and running a successful terrorist operation, it'd be very difficult, if not impossible, to make a profit blowing things up and killing people.
I think there's an analogy with buying defense industry stocks and voting republican, but I'll shut up now. . .