Microsoft did just sit there once upon a time. I don't remember the details, the name of the product or company, but a year or two ago, some company sued Microsoft and won because Microsoft had appropriated their code in some manner. I think Microsoft had bought non-transferable rights to the output of the program, and this company insisted that Microsoft customers had to purchase their own licenses to use the output of the program, whereas Microsoft had resold it as if the rights transferred. Microsoft explicitly said they would not indemnify their customers, who the other company had threatened to sue.
How far things went, whether Microsoft changed their, mind, whether they simply bought up the other company, etc etc etc, I do not remember. But I do remember the big stink when it came out they weren't going to indemnify their own customers.
The Center for Public Integrity sought information about lobbying activities available under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, a 1938 law passed in response to German propaganda before World War II.
At the time (1938), for those of you too young to know, Germany was run by the Nazis.
I know there's a conspiracy in there somewhere, but I'd probably have to file a FOI request to find it.
Hieroglyphics went out thousands of years ago. I can't stand apps with zillions of little icons that I can't memorize, or menus several layers deep which have no logical organization. I can keep my hands in one place, the keyboard.
Graphics programs, sure, use a GUI. Programs which represent networks, ok. But if I can do it on the command line, I can do it faster and easier.
To expand upon your naive response...
Why, except in a few cases, would anyone want to fire up a bloated, slow to load, screen hogging app, and have to take your hands off the keyboard to push a mouse all over tarnation, to hunt among menus and wait for balloon tips to appear, then click click click, more hunting, click click click, when a couple of dozen keystrokes would do the same job? It really seems like the perfect way to waste time looking busy.
I deleted/usr/man/man1/* by mistake one day, no big deal, I got out the backup tape.
It jammed.
I finally got the tape out but destroyed the drive.
It was a real nice TEAC drive, cassette form factor but very solid robust tapesm and had been reliable for 5 years... they didn't make them any more, and no one else did either. And a usenet call for help found no responses, no one else used it either.
Well, only man1, who really cares...
Then the disk drive wouldn't spin back up.
I was about ready to drop the whole thing into the lake but I found a loose fan connection and the drive spun back up. I ended up still without man1, but everything else was ok.
My lesson was that proprietary sucks, and backup is good as long as it's to nice generic hardware that you can get replacements anywhere in a hurry.
Yes, but you have no reason to crash your own machine. This is only a problem for machines with general shell accounts, like ISPs. Most shell account users have no reason to crash their ISP's machines, but there are enough fools out there...
It is also a problem if some skiddie uses a remote exploit to get user (not root) access and uses this to crash the machine.
Tubes are electrically more robust than solid state devices.
Electrically?!? Who gives a whack about electrically "robust" when they are physically fragile?
I don't think so! One of the big restraints on early computers was the continually failing vacuum tubes; they got to a certain size and no more, because tubes burned out too fast.
How are you ever going to ruggedize tubes as well as solid state, to be shot from cannon, to take the heat and cold and vibration?
It wasn't just any old electronics. Vacuum tubes are more electronic than transistors, yet if we had stuck with them, we'd never have had tiny packages. Vacuum tubes were just a step between relays and transistors. In the future, when current packaging is going to be considered ancient quaint tech, they won't see much difference between relays and vacuum tubes. They are both size limited, very much a physically expensive to build technology compared to transistors, and certainly not very reliable.
Tobacco company executives all testified under oath before Congress that they knew of no scientific evidence of nicotine being bad. Turns out they were lying their asses off, that for decades they had been suppressing their very own studies which showed that, and intentionally adding oddball ingredients to boost addictivity.
Tobacco companies are evil and deserve more than they will get. Unfortunately, what with tobacco taxes bringing in so much revenue, governments are unlikely to give them what they deserve.
It is fscking incredible that anyone would think it reasonable to be governed by laws that you have to pay to see. It's bad enough to have that idiotic phrase floating around, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" when there are so many convoluted twisted laws added every day that you have little hope of understanding without a paying a lawyer, and even then it's a crapshoot who wins, but to add to that the idea that you have to pay even to see the law at all, that is just beyond belief.
Shall we limit freedom of speech to only book runs of at least 1 million copies?
No one is saying taxpayers have to fund poor starving students, even if that is not what you are implying. But when roadblocks to fair use only apply to those who don't spend extra money, it becomes unfair use.
The whole idea of fair use available only to those with enough money is disgusting.
Consider someone listening to a radio show and writing an article about it. That would be fair use, no? Then if that someone happens to be a radio journalist, is it not also fair use for said radio journalist to include a snippet of the original broadcast?
This happens all the time. Ever heard that famous Hindenburg broadcast? How about snippets from famous radio shows?
It's no good to say you should make your own analogue recording. That's an artificial limit to fair use. What if said journalist is a poor starving student who does everything on a home computer? Are you saying students have to buy D/A and A/D converters to become journalists?
You can't start limiting fair use, or it becomes unfair use.
Until you try an outer join or something other than trivial SELECTs. At least some of them have different syntax from others, and then there's the matter of working around MySQL's inadequacies. DBI is of very little help.
Would Microsoft have named their products Office, Word, Paint,.... Windows... if those weren't generic terms and they weren't trying to grab the common term and associate it strictly with themselves?
Wonder how well it would improve secuirty at aparrtment buildings at houses if we required users to change physical keys every 90 days... got to prevent someone from sneaking in every morning and raiding the cookie jar and kids' piggy banks.
A bit of contemplation would reveal that transportation includes trains, planes, and ships, in addition to cars, trucks, buses, and of course the ever popular SUVs.
If you won't let people build new ones, NOT EVEN FOR THE PURPOSE OF REPLACING existing ones, then you make the danger WORSE, not better.
The old plant is going to become "dangerous" regardless of whether a replacement is built. If you build a new one, eventually it becomes an old one and will be "dangerous" itself. Nuclear power plants cost as much or more to decommission as they did to build, and those costs were never factored into the economics of them. That's a good chunk of the reason it is pointless building new ones.
It's pretty clear that Ken Brown is an idiot. Here is a quote:
"It's clear to me, at least from quotes from Tanenbaum, that Linus started from Minix...He just sat down with Minix and wrote this product. By definition, that is not an invention," Brown said. "If you sit down with the Ford blueprints and build a Chrysler and don't give Ford any credit, that's not invention."
In an interview conducted for the study, Tanenbaum said Minix "was the base that Linus used to create Linux. He also took many ideas from Minix, including the file system, source tree and much more."
He is clueless and has no brain which could absorb a clue. It would require intelligence to actually claim that Linux copied other work, and he doesn't seem to have the capacity to understand the difference between "inspired by" and "copied". I suppose that is why AdTI hired him, and why SCO or Microsoft ired AdTI.
Well, not quite advocate... I can't get to the interview, it's acting...slow... for some reason.
But I had the distinct impression from other quotes about the AdTI book that IFFFF you go with the idea that everything which looks like UNIX was inspired by UNIX, THEN it is not that big a stretch to say that Linux was not invented but is just a copycat derivative, therefore Linus did not invent Linux, he merely wrote it. Like I said, I have not seen the actual book (of course) or interviews, but maybe that is the quibble they are going with, a sock puppet for SCO, who is in turn Microsoft's own sock puppet.
And for all you bozoes who think this means I believe it, well, ha ha, yolk's on you for having no imagination in your narrow little cross-eyed brain.
For instance, I know someone who rented an apartment which has no window in the bedroom for escape from fire. But it is in a very nice place at below average rent, so he puts up with it. Legally, that apartment should not have been rented at all.
I rented an apartment whose lease had an illegal clause concerning a cleaning deposit. I ignored it and signed it anyway, and when time came to leave, and they tried to enforce it, I took them to small claims court and scared them so much I got an additional several hundred dollars out of them to dismiss it in such a manner that they were not on record of having even come to court.
Illegal contarcts can not be enforced. Whether or not the iTunes contract is illegal or has illegal clauses is another matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Right Here, as another poster has listed.
Microsoft did just sit there once upon a time. I don't remember the details, the name of the product or company, but a year or two ago, some company sued Microsoft and won because Microsoft had appropriated their code in some manner. I think Microsoft had bought non-transferable rights to the output of the program, and this company insisted that Microsoft customers had to purchase their own licenses to use the output of the program, whereas Microsoft had resold it as if the rights transferred. Microsoft explicitly said they would not indemnify their customers, who the other company had threatened to sue.
How far things went, whether Microsoft changed their, mind, whether they simply bought up the other company, etc etc etc, I do not remember. But I do remember the big stink when it came out they weren't going to indemnify their own customers.
0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0000
Maybe you're a Pascal programmer? PL/SQL?
weapons of math destruction
That would be those ancient Pentiums with the FDIV bug.
From your post ...
...
Please equate Ashcroft to being a "Nazi,"
From the FA
The Center for Public Integrity sought information about lobbying activities available under the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act, a 1938 law passed in response to German propaganda before World War II.
At the time (1938), for those of you too young to know, Germany was run by the Nazis.
I know there's a conspiracy in there somewhere, but I'd probably have to file a FOI request to find it.
Hieroglyphics went out thousands of years ago. I can't stand apps with zillions of little icons that I can't memorize, or menus several layers deep which have no logical organization. I can keep my hands in one place, the keyboard.
...
Graphics programs, sure, use a GUI. Programs which represent networks, ok. But if I can do it on the command line, I can do it faster and easier.
To expand upon your naive response
Why, except in a few cases, would anyone want to fire up a bloated, slow to load, screen hogging app, and have to take your hands off the keyboard to push a mouse all over tarnation, to hunt among menus and wait for balloon tips to appear, then click click click, more hunting, click click click, when a couple of dozen keystrokes would do the same job? It really seems like the perfect way to waste time looking busy.
Conclusion
;)
Stuff = Cool
More Stuff Soon
This guy is amazing! Where does he come up with this stuff!
Probably from his refrigerator.
I deleted /usr/man/man1/* by mistake one day, no big deal, I got out the backup tape.
... they didn't make them any more, and no one else did either. And a usenet call for help found no responses, no one else used it either.
...
It jammed.
I finally got the tape out but destroyed the drive.
It was a real nice TEAC drive, cassette form factor but very solid robust tapesm and had been reliable for 5 years
Well, only man1, who really cares
Then the disk drive wouldn't spin back up.
I was about ready to drop the whole thing into the lake but I found a loose fan connection and the drive spun back up. I ended up still without man1, but everything else was ok.
My lesson was that proprietary sucks, and backup is good as long as it's to nice generic hardware that you can get replacements anywhere in a hurry.
Yes, but you have no reason to crash your own machine. This is only a problem for machines with general shell accounts, like ISPs. Most shell account users have no reason to crash their ISP's machines, but there are enough fools out there ...
It is also a problem if some skiddie uses a remote exploit to get user (not root) access and uses this to crash the machine.
I had to work on a terrible web client some years ago, and called my interface Pick and Plop ... strangely enough, management did not seem to mind.
Best humor I can manage today, nazis^Wmoderators.
Tubes are electrically more robust than solid state devices.
Electrically?!? Who gives a whack about electrically "robust" when they are physically fragile?
I don't think so! One of the big restraints on early computers was the continually failing vacuum tubes; they got to a certain size and no more, because tubes burned out too fast.
How are you ever going to ruggedize tubes as well as solid state, to be shot from cannon, to take the heat and cold and vibration?
It wasn't just any old electronics. Vacuum tubes are more electronic than transistors, yet if we had stuck with them, we'd never have had tiny packages. Vacuum tubes were just a step between relays and transistors. In the future, when current packaging is going to be considered ancient quaint tech, they won't see much difference between relays and vacuum tubes. They are both size limited, very much a physically expensive to build technology compared to transistors, and certainly not very reliable.
Tobacco company executives all testified under oath before Congress that they knew of no scientific evidence of nicotine being bad. Turns out they were lying their asses off, that for decades they had been suppressing their very own studies which showed that, and intentionally adding oddball ingredients to boost addictivity.
Tobacco companies are evil and deserve more than they will get. Unfortunately, what with tobacco taxes bringing in so much revenue, governments are unlikely to give them what they deserve.
It is fscking incredible that anyone would think it reasonable to be governed by laws that you have to pay to see. It's bad enough to have that idiotic phrase floating around, "Ignorance of the law is no excuse" when there are so many convoluted twisted laws added every day that you have little hope of understanding without a paying a lawyer, and even then it's a crapshoot who wins, but to add to that the idea that you have to pay even to see the law at all, that is just beyond belief.
Shall we limit freedom of speech to only book runs of at least 1 million copies?
No one is saying taxpayers have to fund poor starving students, even if that is not what you are implying. But when roadblocks to fair use only apply to those who don't spend extra money, it becomes unfair use.
The whole idea of fair use available only to those with enough money is disgusting.
Consider someone listening to a radio show and writing an article about it. That would be fair use, no? Then if that someone happens to be a radio journalist, is it not also fair use for said radio journalist to include a snippet of the original broadcast?
This happens all the time. Ever heard that famous Hindenburg broadcast? How about snippets from famous radio shows?
It's no good to say you should make your own analogue recording. That's an artificial limit to fair use. What if said journalist is a poor starving student who does everything on a home computer? Are you saying students have to buy D/A and A/D converters to become journalists?
You can't start limiting fair use, or it becomes unfair use.
Until you try an outer join or something other than trivial SELECTs. At least some of them have different syntax from others, and then there's the matter of working around MySQL's inadequacies. DBI is of very little help.
Would Microsoft have named their products Office, Word, Paint, .... Windows ... if those weren't generic terms and they weren't trying to grab the common term and associate it strictly with themselves?
Wonder how well it would improve secuirty at aparrtment buildings at houses if we required users to change physical keys every 90 days ... got to prevent someone from sneaking in every morning and raiding the cookie jar and kids' piggy banks.
Or maybe a hemerhoid.
A bit of contemplation would reveal that transportation includes trains, planes, and ships, in addition to cars, trucks, buses, and of course the ever popular SUVs.
If you won't let people build new ones, NOT EVEN FOR THE PURPOSE OF REPLACING existing ones, then you make the danger WORSE, not better.
The old plant is going to become "dangerous" regardless of whether a replacement is built. If you build a new one, eventually it becomes an old one and will be "dangerous" itself. Nuclear power plants cost as much or more to decommission as they did to build, and those costs were never factored into the economics of them. That's a good chunk of the reason it is pointless building new ones.
It's pretty clear that Ken Brown is an idiot. Here is a quote:
"It's clear to me, at least from quotes from Tanenbaum, that Linus started from Minix...He just sat down with Minix and wrote this product. By definition, that is not an invention," Brown said. "If you sit down with the Ford blueprints and build a Chrysler and don't give Ford any credit, that's not invention."
In an interview conducted for the study, Tanenbaum said Minix "was the base that Linus used to create Linux. He also took many ideas from Minix, including the file system, source tree and much more."
He is clueless and has no brain which could absorb a clue. It would require intelligence to actually claim that Linux copied other work, and he doesn't seem to have the capacity to understand the difference between "inspired by" and "copied". I suppose that is why AdTI hired him, and why SCO or Microsoft ired AdTI.
Well, not quite advocate ... I can't get to the interview, it's acting ...slow ... for some reason.
But I had the distinct impression from other quotes about the AdTI book that IFFFF you go with the idea that everything which looks like UNIX was inspired by UNIX, THEN it is not that big a stretch to say that Linux was not invented but is just a copycat derivative, therefore Linus did not invent Linux, he merely wrote it. Like I said, I have not seen the actual book (of course) or interviews, but maybe that is the quibble they are going with, a sock puppet for SCO, who is in turn Microsoft's own sock puppet.
And for all you bozoes who think this means I believe it, well, ha ha, yolk's on you for having no imagination in your narrow little cross-eyed brain.
For instance, I know someone who rented an apartment which has no window in the bedroom for escape from fire. But it is in a very nice place at below average rent, so he puts up with it. Legally, that apartment should not have been rented at all.
I rented an apartment whose lease had an illegal clause concerning a cleaning deposit. I ignored it and signed it anyway, and when time came to leave, and they tried to enforce it, I took them to small claims court and scared them so much I got an additional several hundred dollars out of them to dismiss it in such a manner that they were not on record of having even come to court.
Illegal contarcts can not be enforced. Whether or not the iTunes contract is illegal or has illegal clauses is another matter.