Maybe you're right. Just in case, I had the courtesy to actually email the MSN.com search staff and let them know about the problem. Their incredibly informative response:
Hello rcgspam,
Thank you for writing to MSN Search regarding your search for "XFree86".
We are currently investigating your issue and will respond with a resolution or suggestion on how to resolve this matter.
If you have any additional information you can provide to us or if there is anything else we can assist you with, please feel free to write us back.
Sincerely,
Beth MSN Search Customer Support
Well, make of it what you will. Is it incompetence or malice? It's pretty clear that _somebody_ did something maliciously, but that hardly indicates an organizational conspiracy. The real question is what will they do after hearing lots of bitching and whining from us about it - quietly remove the XFree86->porn mapping in their list, leave it, or decide it was such a good idea they should do the same for other "double-plus ungood" search terms.
Yeah, unlike all those portable video players that do fit in your blue jeans pockets. I mean, if you just want a solid-state MP3 player to fit in your pocket, you can get that. This does more, and it doesn't really cost any more. It may not be useful to you, and that's fine, but don't knock the device itself (admittedly, I know the industrial designers and engineers who worked on this product so I'm biased - but they are an excellent team). If you are into the idea of a handheld portable video player that is "pocket-change" affordable, then this is the device that fits the bill. Not that I really get who wants that other than teens for cool factor, or for, uh, porto-porn that you can bring into the stall with you at work or something (I'm a sick bastard!).
As for the quality of the proprietary memory cards themselves, I cannot speak - those are made by a different company. You may just have had a bad batch.
I assume what you mean is "how can any literalist, fundamentalist religion survive that revelation". You do realize there are a lot of people who identify themselves as being of some religion who don't believe in the literal truth of creation myths and so forth. In fact, some religions don't really require belief or faith at all in the Christian sense.
And honestly, fundamentalist Christians have been busily rejecting the heaps and reams of evidence available to refute their beliefs here on Earth. Why do you think they'd change their minds just because evidence exists on Mars?
It's not "OK". That million dollars goes directly to fueling SCO's flagrantly factually and morally wrong hostile legal campaign. It's like buying "blood diamonds" from rebel-controlled areas of African nations - you are directly financing things you really don't want to be associated with.
The more you beat your chest about it, the more you make yourself look like a troll. Maybe there's a RICO case, maybe there isn't - at least some people think there is a legitimate RICO case against the RIAA. Around here, we value discussion and argument. Frankly, as silly as it sounds and as much as we may self-efface regularly on Slashdot, knock the sliding standards of this community, the trolling, the karma-whoring and so on, many ideas that have been proposed or supported on Slashdot over the years have turned out to have legs. Some have turned into successful products and Open Source projects. And certainly successful memes and social phenomena have sprung out of individuals on Slashdot.
So I figure, if somebody wants to throw out the idea that there is a RICO violation involved in using misleading contracts and false legal claims and press statements as part of a systematic attempt to threaten and bully money out of admittedly naive companies, then dammit, either explain why he's wrong and give him a thwack upside the head or constructively contribute to the discussion. DON'T spew out sentences in all caps reiterating your argument without any evidence of your own to back up your point, you'll just get yourself ripped a new asshole.
It's somewhere between "fink", "fank" and "funk". I'll leave it up to you to decide the exact attribution of vowels to my deeply meaningful Slashdot username.
Unfortunately, we are often stuck with these usernames we selected without a care on some alcohol inebriated night back in college, many years ago. Especially since Slashdot has seen fit to make usernames non-modifiable (which doesn't make any sense really - everything should be keyed on UID).
I'm not reading any more SCO stories. Really. I mean it. This is the last comment you will see from the fnkmaster in a SCO story. No more. Nada.
Aaaaaah, fuck it, who am I kidding.
It's like shoveling jelly beans into your mouth at the candy store - sure, it rots your teeth out and you end up with diabetes, but it tastes so damned good you can't help yourself.
I think you're right. Even if nobody buys Viagra from a spam email, the first place anybody thinks of to get Viagra is online - why bother going to see a doctor, you can just Google for Viagra and buy online! It's interesting, the real benefit from a lot of spam would seem to be for the manufacturer who benefits from the brand-building and the awareness of an online market created (thus also benefitting those who rank high in Google results).
In fact, it would seem possible that some of the egregious violators may just be setting up phantom shops to spamvertize, which can be easily shut down, renamed, etc. while they keep a separate "clean" operation for harvesting search hits.
Or maybe spam just works and people really are buying from spammers.
Documented spam support? It seems pretty clear that they have a rather extreme anti-spam policy, and all the domains people have referenced have been axed by them. I think they are just understaffed and overworked and all these whiny anti-spam crusaders expect instant response to their complaints or they run around trashing people as being spam-friendly.
Obviously I'm not defending ev1server's deal-making with SCO - that's plenty of reason not to ever do business with them right there (I have never hosted with them, but I have registered a bunch of domains with them when they were doing 5 dollar registrations). But I've seen some of these ridiculous spam-crusaders come down absurdly hard on people who don't deserve it many times before, and I refuse to believe any such claims without extremely clear evidence of an intentional pattern of hosting/doing business with spammers.
Can we use words that describe the situation instead of words that invoke powerful yet completely unrelated images?
How about plain old-fashioned criminal? The terrorism label has become incredibly overloaded and overused. Osama bin Laden is a terrorist in the classical sense of the word, as for everyone else who perpetrates acts of violence, property damage and so on, I prefer to use the simple apellation of criminal. If they are breaking laws and codes of basic human conduct, endangering public safety, taking control of other people's property, then they are criminals.
Unfortunately, even though it's RFC-compliant, I've found probably half the sites I have to give my email address to won't grok the username+filtername@mydomain.com syntax. It's convenient when it works, but it doesn't work enough to rely on. No, throw-away spam-bait email addresses that you use for 6 months at a time for all online ordering and the like, then eventually trash when they get too spam-ridden are the best solution I know of.
Interesting, I should mention that is new in the last three weeks, as is the MSFU compile process. Previously the only option was Cygwin (not a real option for most of us, you can't exactly roll that out to a team of Windows developers). I never tried cross-compiling, spent a while hacking on the build process and source to get a native Windows MingW32 compile to work, I don't remember what the outcome was, but something critical was missing that b0rked the whole build process.
My evaluation of Arch took place about two months ago and everything I said was true at that time.
I am pretty certain that most terrorists, mobsters and other criminals that get caught with computers are probably running Windows on their computers. Nobody ever says "Windows - it's the OS of criminals!".
Re:How is this news? GNU Arch 1.1 already does mor
on
Subversion 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Arch doesn't compile under Mingw, even with hacking. I tried it two or three months ago. Apparently it does now compile with Microsoft Services for Unix, but this is new in the last 3 weeks. Cygwin has somewhat worked with Arch for some time, but that is not a viable solution for Windows-based development. Cygwin is nice if you want to run real Unix apps on Windows and have no other options. Getting an entire development team set up with Cygwin just so they can use Arch... that's not gonna fly anywhere I've ever worked.
Anyway, barely compiling for the last three weeks isn't exactly stable Windows support that I would feel comfortable rolling out into a corporate environment for professional software development work. Like I said before, Arch is a great concept, and I'd love to see more done with it, especially in terms of getting it to work out-of-the-box with Windows (i.e. I can roll it out to a development team with a single installer) so it was useful for cross-platform and Windows development. Until then, it's great for Open Source projects that themselves have a more distributed model of development which is nicely matched by Arch's capabilities.
Re:How is this news? GNU Arch 1.1 already does mor
on
Subversion 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Yeeeah, you realize that a lot of people use CVS and now Subversion for Windows development? A nice *nix server running an Svn or CVS server can support a medium sized team of developers just fine. How the heck are you supposed to do this using Arch? Oh, you mean it really is designed to work primarily, if not only, with Unix-like operating systems?
Don't get me wrong, Arch is a very nice concept and it has some merits, but don't pretend there aren't advantages to Subversion's architecture. And the Subversion way of doing things is much more natural for a lot of existing professional software development teams. Arch is great for more distributed projects, but it's a bit less intuitive with respect to usage in a more traditional software development environment, and outright useless for cross-platform or non-Unix projects.
Wow, BAT files and Javascript viruses! Man, that is K-RAD! Reminds me of going to a computer store and editing autoexec.bat to do an ECHO "THIS COMPUTER SUCKS" loop when I was 10 years old. Would really confuse the people who worked there.
Anyway, anybody who thinks this qualifies as elite virus writing needs their head examined. There is really nothing elite about a script file. Not to mention that it should be apparent in this day and age that trashing other people's computers is not only very uncool but incredibly likely to get you thrown in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
That's all nice, but I refuse to actually run a desktop with such horrendously mismatched aesthetics. I HATE having to choose all-or-nothing between Qt and Gtk apps, but the alternative causes my soul to hurt. Your attitude is what has driven a lot of geeks over to Mac OS X, where you can run Unix AND have an aesthetically appealing, consistent desktop.
Unified theming is great, as long as you don't touch any configuration options ever, seeing as how everything from fonts to colors to widget shapes and menus have to be set not once but twice. So yes, it looks decent in the exact default configuration. This is worse than Windows, where you can at least configure look and feel and have it applied universally. The closest thing to a solution (though it's a hack) that I've seen was the guy who implemented a Gtk engine that rendered using Qt (or was it the other way around?). At least then things will generally work.
But it's little things like Gtk2 reversing Cancel and OK buttons - mix apps, and all of a sudden half your apps have Cancel on the left and half have Cancel on the right. Great usability there. Yes, I realize you can probably configure all these things and tweak it all to actually be consistent and correct, but the process can take ages and lots of fudging with text files or finding utilities to change theme configuration (anybody else ever notice how impossible it is to change Gtk settings when you are running KDE? Maybe this is just a Mandrake thing, but it never works).
As for Windows - you are right, some of these apps do render custom widgets. But font rendering is always 100% consistent because it's not done separately at the toolkit level (and to me this is probably the most important visual issue for consistency - ever notice that even when Gtk and Qt should be rendering fonts the same there always seem to be minor differences?), and most apps still respect basic color schemes and menu choices (new Office-style menus aside). And at least the choices are generally aesthetically appealing and consistent with color schemes and so on - I can tolerate the Office-style menus, even if I don't love them.
Sorry if this came out as a rant, but I don't think I could disagree more about it not mattering. This Y project is making the right architectural decisions (or at least some of them, I dunno yet about the rest). Implement an X server for compatibility as an extension on top of the new system, and you can still run all the zillions of X apps out there until they've been properly replaced with Y apps, and you could get to the dogfood stage much sooner. I've known plenty of geeks who like Linux but don't use it as their day-to-day desktop OS in part because of the aesthetic issues I've mentioned above - and in part for other reasons, stability and performance of basic 2D rendering still sucking compared to Windows (at least when you use Gtk/Qt etc. - I realize that Xlib/Xaw/Motif and similar widget sets are extremely fast, but modern apps don't use them).
This is an evolution of the graphical subsystem on *nix... It frees itself from the limitations of the architecture and mindset of X to take advantage of new hardware and ideas for graphical interfaces.
People do not need 64-bit computing for standard desktop computing applications - of course not. But the point here is a further shift down in price point of the workstation and server markets - lots of applications where you did need 64 bit memory addressing or where 64 bit calculation helped a lot are now cheaply implemented on commodity hardware. And if you don't need it, the AMD 64 bit hardware still runs your old 32 bit apps better.
Your derisive tone clearly does quite a disservice to your employer (whether it's Intel, Microsoft or related) - makes you guys look like a bunch of whiny shits. Athlon64 and the other 64 bit Athlon processors are doing well because they perform well with both legacy apps and OSes as well as 64-bit apps and OSes. They are good products, and yes, the 64 bit "higher numbers are better" marketing factor is part of it. Assuming you work for Intel (or are an Intel "fanboi" of some sort to use your own gay little derogatory term), you should be very familiar with making higher-is-better a key part of your marketing strategy, since Intel has been doing it with MHz for years now, pipelining until the cows come home to crank the MHz rating higher and higher to generate sales of new processors, whether or not their "goodness" is actually directly related to the operating frequency of the processor or not.
Okay, every time we talk about fixing it and proposing ideas, we get flamed out of existance. Keith Packard has been working on implementing those exact ideas, and some of us have been supporting his work for years (I have written HOWTOs and guides for using XRender/Xft and Fontconfig, and hacked on some FreeType rendering code over the years).
It definitely doesn't help when every conversation about how to improve X and fix its major flaws devolves into a bunch of zealots proclaiming how perfect it is and that they see no performance issues that might VASTLY hinder adoption of X as a desktop windowing system. Not saying that you are such a zealot, but you could at least admit the flaws and stop taking it as some sort of personal affront against your honor.
I'll throw in a quick plug for MEPIS. MEPIS is actually a rather fast growing distro, hovering around number 10 on the distrowatch list. In many ways it's similar to Knoppix, which I will disclaim that I don't have any real experience with. MEPIS comes in bootable CD format, and makes a fabulous rescue disk. But it's not presented or pitched as _primarily_ for bootable CD use, whereas Knoppix is as least shown around that way. It's remarkably easy to take MEPIS, get it running from the bootable CD, and then run the Installer to install to your hard drive.
Once you get it running (which is remarkably easy), it's very much like Debian on the inside. KDE comes nicely preconfigured, desktop setup I find to be excellent (FAR superior to recent Mandrake releases on utterly basic issues like default font readability). MEPIS also works well as an easy-setup, no-fuss personal server box. I wanted a Debian-based server for my Asterisk system, but didn't feel like dealing with a time-consuming install, and wanted something I could test for hardware compatibility right away with a bootable CD. Most critically, I wanted something that came with out-of-the-box support for NVidia motherboards to avoid the hassle of having to separately download and burn to CD all the NForce (and NVidia graphics) drivers so you can compile and install them to get your NForce2 motherboard working properly (no ethernet until you install them, makes it hard to get online to fetch the drivers, and pain-in-the-butt ensues). MEPIS worked out of the box, Mandrake took a couple of hours of compiling and installing different versions of the NVidia drivers to get things working perfectly.
The only thing I don't particularly like about MEPIS is that it lack the sheer volume of documentation that other distros have. Luckily, you can almost always do things the standard Debian way - but trying to figure out if there's some lovely preinstalled KDE tool for package/configuration management or whatever to handle some particular issue is just not as thoroughly addressed as it is with Mandrake, for example (which is still the king of a good GUI tool package out of the box, and there's TONS of info on distro-specific HOWTO stuff). It took me half an hour to figure out how to make sure the SSH daemon was getting started at startup before I figured out the Debian way to do it is dpkg-reconfigure ssh (I am a RedHat guy by background, and a Mandrake user in recent years, so this stuff is not obvious to me, as the Debian init system is completely different). Oh yeah, and MEPIS is a shitty name. I think they'd be growing even faster with a less lame sounding name - something you could be proud to show to your friends. Knoppix - that sounds cool. So does Red Hat... Debian is alright... MEPIS is just terrible.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello rcgspam,
Thank you for writing to MSN Search regarding your search for "XFree86".
We are currently investigating your issue and will respond with a resolution or suggestion on how to resolve this matter.
If you have any additional information you can provide to us or if there is anything else we can assist you with, please feel free to write us back.
Sincerely,
Beth
MSN Search Customer Support
Well, make of it what you will. Is it incompetence or malice? It's pretty clear that _somebody_ did something maliciously, but that hardly indicates an organizational conspiracy. The real question is what will they do after hearing lots of bitching and whining from us about it - quietly remove the XFree86->porn mapping in their list, leave it, or decide it was such a good idea they should do the same for other "double-plus ungood" search terms.
As for the quality of the proprietary memory cards themselves, I cannot speak - those are made by a different company. You may just have had a bad batch.
And honestly, fundamentalist Christians have been busily rejecting the heaps and reams of evidence available to refute their beliefs here on Earth. Why do you think they'd change their minds just because evidence exists on Mars?
It's not "OK". That million dollars goes directly to fueling SCO's flagrantly factually and morally wrong hostile legal campaign. It's like buying "blood diamonds" from rebel-controlled areas of African nations - you are directly financing things you really don't want to be associated with.
Yes, RedHat has already sued for declaratory judgement. The wheels of justice are turning, they just don't work on "internet time".
So I figure, if somebody wants to throw out the idea that there is a RICO violation involved in using misleading contracts and false legal claims and press statements as part of a systematic attempt to threaten and bully money out of admittedly naive companies, then dammit, either explain why he's wrong and give him a thwack upside the head or constructively contribute to the discussion. DON'T spew out sentences in all caps reiterating your argument without any evidence of your own to back up your point, you'll just get yourself ripped a new asshole.
Unfortunately, we are often stuck with these usernames we selected without a care on some alcohol inebriated night back in college, many years ago. Especially since Slashdot has seen fit to make usernames non-modifiable (which doesn't make any sense really - everything should be keyed on UID).
Aaaaaah, fuck it, who am I kidding.
It's like shoveling jelly beans into your mouth at the candy store - sure, it rots your teeth out and you end up with diabetes, but it tastes so damned good you can't help yourself.
Support from a guy with a two-digit Slashdot User ID... what more could you ask for?
The only thing worse than stupid people buying from spam is stupid people with small dicks buying from spam.
In fact, it would seem possible that some of the egregious violators may just be setting up phantom shops to spamvertize, which can be easily shut down, renamed, etc. while they keep a separate "clean" operation for harvesting search hits.
Or maybe spam just works and people really are buying from spammers.
Obviously I'm not defending ev1server's deal-making with SCO - that's plenty of reason not to ever do business with them right there (I have never hosted with them, but I have registered a bunch of domains with them when they were doing 5 dollar registrations). But I've seen some of these ridiculous spam-crusaders come down absurdly hard on people who don't deserve it many times before, and I refuse to believe any such claims without extremely clear evidence of an intentional pattern of hosting/doing business with spammers.
How about plain old-fashioned criminal? The terrorism label has become incredibly overloaded and overused. Osama bin Laden is a terrorist in the classical sense of the word, as for everyone else who perpetrates acts of violence, property damage and so on, I prefer to use the simple apellation of criminal. If they are breaking laws and codes of basic human conduct, endangering public safety, taking control of other people's property, then they are criminals.
Unfortunately, even though it's RFC-compliant, I've found probably half the sites I have to give my email address to won't grok the username+filtername@mydomain.com syntax. It's convenient when it works, but it doesn't work enough to rely on. No, throw-away spam-bait email addresses that you use for 6 months at a time for all online ordering and the like, then eventually trash when they get too spam-ridden are the best solution I know of.
You mean you've never noticed this before? Idiots are some of the happiest people I know.
My evaluation of Arch took place about two months ago and everything I said was true at that time.
I am pretty certain that most terrorists, mobsters and other criminals that get caught with computers are probably running Windows on their computers. Nobody ever says "Windows - it's the OS of criminals!".
Anyway, barely compiling for the last three weeks isn't exactly stable Windows support that I would feel comfortable rolling out into a corporate environment for professional software development work. Like I said before, Arch is a great concept, and I'd love to see more done with it, especially in terms of getting it to work out-of-the-box with Windows (i.e. I can roll it out to a development team with a single installer) so it was useful for cross-platform and Windows development. Until then, it's great for Open Source projects that themselves have a more distributed model of development which is nicely matched by Arch's capabilities.
Don't get me wrong, Arch is a very nice concept and it has some merits, but don't pretend there aren't advantages to Subversion's architecture. And the Subversion way of doing things is much more natural for a lot of existing professional software development teams. Arch is great for more distributed projects, but it's a bit less intuitive with respect to usage in a more traditional software development environment, and outright useless for cross-platform or non-Unix projects.
Anyway, anybody who thinks this qualifies as elite virus writing needs their head examined. There is really nothing elite about a script file. Not to mention that it should be apparent in this day and age that trashing other people's computers is not only very uncool but incredibly likely to get you thrown in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Unified theming is great, as long as you don't touch any configuration options ever, seeing as how everything from fonts to colors to widget shapes and menus have to be set not once but twice. So yes, it looks decent in the exact default configuration. This is worse than Windows, where you can at least configure look and feel and have it applied universally. The closest thing to a solution (though it's a hack) that I've seen was the guy who implemented a Gtk engine that rendered using Qt (or was it the other way around?). At least then things will generally work.
But it's little things like Gtk2 reversing Cancel and OK buttons - mix apps, and all of a sudden half your apps have Cancel on the left and half have Cancel on the right. Great usability there. Yes, I realize you can probably configure all these things and tweak it all to actually be consistent and correct, but the process can take ages and lots of fudging with text files or finding utilities to change theme configuration (anybody else ever notice how impossible it is to change Gtk settings when you are running KDE? Maybe this is just a Mandrake thing, but it never works).
As for Windows - you are right, some of these apps do render custom widgets. But font rendering is always 100% consistent because it's not done separately at the toolkit level (and to me this is probably the most important visual issue for consistency - ever notice that even when Gtk and Qt should be rendering fonts the same there always seem to be minor differences?), and most apps still respect basic color schemes and menu choices (new Office-style menus aside). And at least the choices are generally aesthetically appealing and consistent with color schemes and so on - I can tolerate the Office-style menus, even if I don't love them.
Sorry if this came out as a rant, but I don't think I could disagree more about it not mattering. This Y project is making the right architectural decisions (or at least some of them, I dunno yet about the rest). Implement an X server for compatibility as an extension on top of the new system, and you can still run all the zillions of X apps out there until they've been properly replaced with Y apps, and you could get to the dogfood stage much sooner. I've known plenty of geeks who like Linux but don't use it as their day-to-day desktop OS in part because of the aesthetic issues I've mentioned above - and in part for other reasons, stability and performance of basic 2D rendering still sucking compared to Windows (at least when you use Gtk/Qt etc. - I realize that Xlib/Xaw/Motif and similar widget sets are extremely fast, but modern apps don't use them).
Oh, you mean kinda like a replacement?
Your derisive tone clearly does quite a disservice to your employer (whether it's Intel, Microsoft or related) - makes you guys look like a bunch of whiny shits. Athlon64 and the other 64 bit Athlon processors are doing well because they perform well with both legacy apps and OSes as well as 64-bit apps and OSes. They are good products, and yes, the 64 bit "higher numbers are better" marketing factor is part of it. Assuming you work for Intel (or are an Intel "fanboi" of some sort to use your own gay little derogatory term), you should be very familiar with making higher-is-better a key part of your marketing strategy, since Intel has been doing it with MHz for years now, pipelining until the cows come home to crank the MHz rating higher and higher to generate sales of new processors, whether or not their "goodness" is actually directly related to the operating frequency of the processor or not.
It definitely doesn't help when every conversation about how to improve X and fix its major flaws devolves into a bunch of zealots proclaiming how perfect it is and that they see no performance issues that might VASTLY hinder adoption of X as a desktop windowing system. Not saying that you are such a zealot, but you could at least admit the flaws and stop taking it as some sort of personal affront against your honor.
Once you get it running (which is remarkably easy), it's very much like Debian on the inside. KDE comes nicely preconfigured, desktop setup I find to be excellent (FAR superior to recent Mandrake releases on utterly basic issues like default font readability). MEPIS also works well as an easy-setup, no-fuss personal server box. I wanted a Debian-based server for my Asterisk system, but didn't feel like dealing with a time-consuming install, and wanted something I could test for hardware compatibility right away with a bootable CD. Most critically, I wanted something that came with out-of-the-box support for NVidia motherboards to avoid the hassle of having to separately download and burn to CD all the NForce (and NVidia graphics) drivers so you can compile and install them to get your NForce2 motherboard working properly (no ethernet until you install them, makes it hard to get online to fetch the drivers, and pain-in-the-butt ensues). MEPIS worked out of the box, Mandrake took a couple of hours of compiling and installing different versions of the NVidia drivers to get things working perfectly.
The only thing I don't particularly like about MEPIS is that it lack the sheer volume of documentation that other distros have. Luckily, you can almost always do things the standard Debian way - but trying to figure out if there's some lovely preinstalled KDE tool for package/configuration management or whatever to handle some particular issue is just not as thoroughly addressed as it is with Mandrake, for example (which is still the king of a good GUI tool package out of the box, and there's TONS of info on distro-specific HOWTO stuff). It took me half an hour to figure out how to make sure the SSH daemon was getting started at startup before I figured out the Debian way to do it is dpkg-reconfigure ssh (I am a RedHat guy by background, and a Mandrake user in recent years, so this stuff is not obvious to me, as the Debian init system is completely different). Oh yeah, and MEPIS is a shitty name. I think they'd be growing even faster with a less lame sounding name - something you could be proud to show to your friends. Knoppix - that sounds cool. So does Red Hat... Debian is alright... MEPIS is just terrible.