First, you took seriously a post that was clearly at least partially tongue-in-cheek. Second, you made me a Foe because I don't have the same preference in programming/scripting languages as you. Third, you are resorting to ad hominem attacks and suggesting that I'm a bad programmer without a thimbleful of knowledge about ME.
Either you are trolling, or you are a reactionary idiot. And by the way, I've built several pretty large, complicated AOLserver/Tcl apps, back in the day when this was considered one of the best ways to build a database-backed web application. My experience with it was that I could write perfectly fine Tcl code by myself. Trying to work collaboratively on an application with others was nearly impossible when they kept "upvar"ing all over the place. I'm not going to get into a flame war about Tcl, because it would be a rehash of flamewars that have already been had, and I can't prove or disprove that Tcl is or is not readable - just tell you my qualitative observations about its use in group development projects.
Oh yeah, and I've had this debate with some of the early Ars Digita employees and other old-school hardcore Tcl community members, and even most of them are forced to agree that for most projects, there are better tools for the job. Hell, Ars Digita's entire VERY SUCCESSFUL business model was built around building dynamic web pages using a language that resulted in code nobody else could decipher, so they could lock their customers into expensive support contracts. Once they tried transitioning over to Java (the post Phil Greenspun era) the company tanked - because nobody will pay MIT students and recent grads 100 dollars an hour to write JSPs when they can get somebody in India to do it for 10.
Geez, some people really take things too literally. If they looked at Perl and said "we can make something worse than this", they are some sick, sick fucks.
Perl IS the "worse is better" language.
Tcl goes so far to the "worse" end, it comes back around the circle at "utterly fucking miserable".
Nobody is going to appeal a small claims court decision. Small claims courts don't make binding precent, so there's no real reason to (500 dollars is approximately the cost of one lawyer-hour of time, thus it would be a very, very stupid business decision to do such a thing). Sometimes companies will appeal because the precedent of the decision is very damaging to their business - I don't think small claims courts have any real ability to form precedent, or to be cited as precedent anywhere else (maybe by the same small claims court judge). So why bother?
Sorry, I like Python too for small to medium-sized projects, and while it's undoubtedly a highly readable language, this does not mean that it is more maintainable. A weakly typed language like Python is hard to manage in large projects for a very simple reason - it becomes incredibly hard to remember what object type you have where and to "black-box" function/method calls by the objects you are passing into them. I've heard Python developers and gurus suggest that the IDE should perform this job by "guessing" or interpolating the object type from context - and this is reasonable for a project being worked on by one person, but the concept of code libraries and black-boxing that we use to manage large (even medium sized, depending on what kind of projects you are talking about here) don't work very well in weakly typed languages.
Frankly these methods don't work terribly well with a statically, implicitly typed language like OCAML either, which I think is part of the reason they haven't caught on broadly in industry use.
When I open up a JavaDoc, I like to know that Interface Foo has a method called Bar and I need to pass it two ints and a Baz object, be able to click on the Baz object and see its JavaDoc information too. Python with optional type declarations or "boundary" declarations for surrounding your libraries with a well-defined interface contract might solve this problem, but until that exists, Python projects over 50k-100k lines of code are just too confusing to be manageable.
I for one hope that Ogg/MP3 combo mini-CD players make it onto the market soon. One of the best devices out there is the Memorex MPD8081 mini-CD player. Yes, yes, it only plays small form-factor miniCDs and not full size CDs. But consider it as an alternative to relatively expensive solid state MP3 players - battery life on this unit is fabulous, far better than most CD players (because it spins up, reads 120 seconds of a song into memory then spins down, saving lots of battery life, though it's still not quite as long-lasting as a good solid state player). It displays the full MP3 info on screen, has simple, very easy to use controls, you can arrange your MP3s into directories before you burn them, the miniCD-Rs cost roughly 25 cents a pop (compare to a 256 meg compact flash card or memory stick... ugh), and it uses 2 AA batteries. Sound quality is pretty damned good. Size and weight - circular, a few centimeters less diameter than a full-sized CD, but much less bulky and lighter than most CD players (this was key - I wanted something that I could fit in my jacket pocket for skiing). And 200 megs is a lot of space - and you can bring several miniCDs of MP3s with you, they are so damned small. The only thing lacking from this unit is a backlight for the display, which can be modestly annoying. The upside, however, is the cost - I paid 56 dollars for it, new (from buy.com or Amazon, I think). Oh yeah, and these units DON'T skip - even when walking, jogging, rowing or skiing (I've used it for all these activities without any skips - sometimes it can do a 1-2 second "lag" between songs though).
I think these units are the most underrated out there - I mean, if you really want to put your entire music collection in a portable box, the hard drive units are your only choice. If you don't mind that every 3+ hours of listening you'll have to swap out mini-CDs (i.e. you don't miss the 600+ megs of a full sized CD), you want somewhat more portability for working out or sports use, you don't want to spend a lot of money on a solid state player with several hundred megs of storage, and prefer the convenience of throwing a mini-CDR into your CD burner instead of plugging in a cable and syncing up MP3s to your solid state player, and 55 dollars sounds like a good price, you should definitely consider one of these units.
And if it played OGGs too, and had a radio-broadcast feature for use in the car, that would be the bomb.
Yup, and it looks like the nice friendly AOL folks just nuked everything in Mr. Eeyore's home directory there. I'm sure he'll have some nice friendly men in black suits showing up at his door in a few hours, and then he'll have some explainin' to do to his mommy and daddy.
And Joe Average matters why? If Joe Average is a product of the educational system in this country, he's most likely a fucking idiot, and doesn't have a right to an opinion. Let him watch Fox News, but for god's sake, don't let him vote. Democracy only works with an educated public. The American public is far from educated. Thus demagoguery wins every time. Fox News is the modern equivalent of the tyrants and demagogues of ancient Greece. Just because Joe Average likes hearing his own biased vitriol spewed back at him, reaffirming his beliefs about the world, doesn't make them right.
In any case, I'm not defending Salon as the source for unbiased news - there are more than enough biased loonies to go around on both sides. But the right wing supports their mouthpieces with CASH money, and the left wing... were are they?
This advice should be modded up. I mean, sure, we'd all tell ourselves to buy and hold the duration of the boom of the late 90s so we could get a head start on that 10 million bucks we wanna retire with. But realistic advice like yours is key. I realized the first one in college, when I decided to set out and start a company, when the opportunity was there. I will never regret this decision - if I'd waited 2 or 3 years, taken a great paying job for a while first, it would have been much harder in the real down economy to do it. I went with the opportunity as it presented itself to me, and I refuse to look back and second guess the risks that I take, as long as they were well thought out and well reasoned risks - inaction is the fast path to mediocrity, and to an unfulfilling life.
And the physical fitness thing (which I have pimped before on/.) would improve alot of geeky people's lives. Increased productivity is only one benefit - a longer life span, a healthier, higher quality lifestyle (i.e. less illness, happier, less depression), better physical appearance which makes you more attractive to members of the opposite sex (and yes, getting laid also leads to a happier, more fulfilling life).
I think we often tend to avoid doing things like physical activity because we aren't as good as them as we are at intellectual activities (the/. readership). You don't have to be involved in team sports (though there are some benefits to those as well), you can get into physical activities that are self-directed and reward personal effort and intiative. Don't get discouraged just because you are "bad" at something at first - make it a competition against yourself and your own personal best, endurance, etc. Stick with it for a month or two and you'll be hooked.
And even more importantly, NEVER EVER go to Rotten.com. No matter how curious you may be. Don't do it. There are things in the world that you just don't want to see.
We did this 4-5 years ago, only we called them IP-address restricted FTP servers. Had one in my college dorm room (it was my roommates). He had about 20 gigs of MP3s on it that we leeched from Napster, and we let people upload to the box too. It was IP address restricted so that we didn't have people outside the university community using it (and forwarding it around to friends) so that we didn't have to sit up late at night worrying about somebody (RIAA) making a stink about it (one student had already gotten expelled for distributing copyrighted material).
You are on target with your description of "geeks" and their precise use of language. My point is simple: when you are supposed to be speaking for a community, you need to understand how to use the language that your audience will comprehend. When I'm talking to a broad, general but educated audience, having conversations with students in good colleges, or talking to executives from software and other technology companies, and other generally bright but non-"geek" people, I use the speech and mannerisms expected in our culture to communicate ideas effectively. Precision is sometimes important, but an effective communicator who doesn't want to anger those he or she is communicating with knows when to insist on precision (sometimes, but not constantly) and when to let a point slide because it's not germane to the topic at hand, or because the ideas can be communcated well enough without worrying about it.
In RMS's world, precise use of "Free" vs. "Open" may be important all the time for philisophical reasons, but it's not the most important point to a generally educated, non-geek audience - or rather, it's a point you can bring up once in a talk, but to harp on your audience for every slip of the tongue is disrespectful and annoying. He doesn't understand this distinction. Ergo he should not be considered a mouthpiece for the Free Software community or any other community.
A sufficiently bright person should be able to tune their communications to an appropriate level for the audience. I don't think I qualify as a "lesser geek" just because I don't ALWAYS consider the distinction between Free Software and Open Source software to be relevant to every conversation that touches on the topic.
That is possibly the most inane argument I've ever heard. I can turn that argument around the other way to refer to anybody's use of language it makes equally little sense:
Face it, RMS is insulting me by using derogatory terms. Turn it around and look at it from my point of view, and maybe, just maybe, you will see that he needs a bit of sensitivity in his language. Has he ever stopped to think that the way he uses language might be insulting to some people? I am a human being too, and I don't deserve to be insulted. It is so arrogant of RMS to assume that I should adapt my terms to his standards and accept his insulting language.
In other words, your argument is content-free. My language pisses him off. His practice of correcting other people's language pisses me off. I was simply arguing that if you don't understand how to correct people in a way that doesn't offend 80% of people in the room, you are going to be an ineffective communicator. We have societal norms for interpersonal interactions. If a person has no intention of conforming to cultural norms, fine, but don't expect people in that culture to just smile and say "well, he's the most annoying fuck in the world, but let's see things from his perspective, he has the right to be an annoying, anal fuck, he's a human being too, maybe he is insulted by our use of language contrary to the rules he has drafted in his own isolated universe".
I realize that many geeks are like that. I'm just trying to explain that that's not a good way to be popular, well liked, or a charismatic leader. I am a nerd, perhaps even a geek, but I'm a social person. I understand how to interact with people in a business or professional environment, how to interact with people in an academic environment, how to be persuasive, when it's desireable or appropriate to be aggressive and so on. My actual views are often quite strongly held, though I consider myself a rational person open to logical persuasion on issues where it's appropriate. I just don't think people like RMS understand how to interact with normal folks well enough to be representing a community. Witness how many Slashdotters, geeks by trade or hobby, who are annoyed by the guy.
And yes I have talked to him in person before, several years back at a talk he gave at Harvard. Maybe asshole was too strong a word, I understand it's just "the way he is", I'm just pointing out it could rub a lot of people the wrong way.
Do you understand how annoying it is to talk to RMS in person? You have to consciously keep telling yourself not to use the word Open Source. Despite your assertion that he only gets mad when people "misuse" a word, and that the Open Source people are equally fanatical about the words people use (they aren't), he is a nut. If you ask him for his thoughts on something like Linux, he'll correct you and say, "Well, I can't tell you that, but I'll tell you about my thoughts on GNU/Linux...".
It's not that HE chooses to refer to Linux as GNU/Linux or that HE chooses to speak exclusively for the Free Software movement, but the obnoxious and geekily obsessive-compulsive way he corrects other people's language all the time that pisses everybody off.
It's like if somebody asks you about those "hackers" that broke into some web site. If you start out by saying "I can't tell you about 'hackers', because I only know about 'crackers' and that's the only terminology that I will use..." - well it doesn't matter if you are technically correct, you are an asshole and people will hate you. I appreciate the fact that it can be frustrating to hear people abuse language in discussing topics close to your heart, but subtlety is a virtue if you don't want to inspire enmity in everybody you meet.
Wow. As another replier said, it's amazing there are this many pussies in this country. I mean, there are business deals where you win and business deals where you lose. But as an entrepreneur, if somebody did that to my company, well, they'd find themselves on the unwelcome end of a.357 magnum. Of course, I'd have an unassailable alibi. And it might not happen for 6 months, or even a year. Revenge can take its time. But really, it seems like you would have to be a fucking crackhead to try to screw over entrepreneurs in this way. I mean, you screw over a bunch of investors for a few grand each, nobody is gonna be mad enough to kill you (beat you to a modest pulp maybe). But screw over an entrepreneur with years of his life invested in a company, his own money and time, his faith and credit on the line with his investors? That is a foolish force to fuck with indeed. He just might have you wacked. Then you are a dead scumbag broker. And nobody is likely to cry about it.
Remember Castle Software from the GPL violation articles on/.? You know, the guys who (supposedly) ripped off GPLed kernel code for RISC OS. Yup, they were www.castle.uk.co. Not anymore. The vengeful spirit of RMS is seeking revenge on these bastards by knocking out the whole uk.co faux-domain.
Custom compiling a Linux kernel? Ya know, I've installed Linux Mandrake 8.1, 8.2, and 9.0 several times on desktop and laptop systems in the last few years, and haven't had to do a kernel recompile since I-don't-remember-when. Sure, back in the old days (97,98 when I started using Linux fairly seriously) it was kernel recompiles galore. I guess on particularly weird hardware you might need to do a kernel recompile, but I've found at least with Dell laptops, that a stock Mandrake installation works like a charm. Thank god people have finally realized the wonders of the module system. In any case, paying 100-150 bucks extra would be reasonable for tech support availability and shipping the laptop imaged with a preconfigured Linux distro. 500-600 dollars is ridiculous however.
Incidentally, I graduated from Harvard '00. Back when I was an undergrad, we had a shitty network, shitty computers, shitty support, AND WE LIKED IT. Okay, just kidding. We used to joke that Harvard was a $30,000 a year bandwidth pipe (and social club). And damn did we use it - my suitemate senior year had a 20 gig MP3 stash shared on his FTP server, open to any Harvard IP addresses.
Actually, you are paying a hell of a lot more. For example, check this out: Ibex. This is a Sony Vaio VX-89 with Linux pre-installed. EmperorLinux charges $2050 for it. Here on the other hand, we have the same product available for $1399. That's right, it's $650 cheaper.
If that's not a fuck job, I don't know what is. I mean, the evidence here clearly supports that A) when you buy an EmperorLinux laptop, you are clearly still paying the Microsoft tax - they are just wiping Windows XP off of it (or you can still get it dual boot if you want it as such). And B) you are paying a shit price. The worst retail price online I found for the VX-89 was around 1700 dollars. So why not just suck it up and accept that the MS tax is unavoidable for laptops, and buy a decent laptop you like?
I understand the idea of voting with your dollars, but it doesn't get through to the shitheads at Sony corporate since they are still shipping a Vaio with Windows license to some schlocky overpriced "Linux" reseller. Or find a source of laptops that truly doesn't include the MS tax (they do exist, but I don't know of any super lightweight ones).
Wireless ISPs... limited viability
on
Joltage Powers Down
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
It just doesn't make sense. Most areas are too sparsely populated for limited range broadcast 802.11b hardware to get to enough people. Sure, sometimes neighbors or groups will spontaneously set something up like this, as a bandwidth collective. But building something as grass roots as that into a sustainable, growable business? No way. 802.11b (and a/g now) is great for what it's meant for. And if you live somewhere like NYC or Boston, when your asshole DSL/cable modem provider spews chunks on your connection and it goes haywire, it's nice to be able to hang your wireless access point out the window, run an SSID scanner, and find a good, open 802.11b network running on Joe Schmoe's Linksys box the next building over and tap into his bandwidth for a while (yes, I did this with a friend in his building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan when his RCA cable modem service borked up). Or if your nextdoor neighbor is kind enough to have an open 802.11b network, just bring your laptop into the living room and surf away (this was what I did my first two weeks in my new apartment in Boston before AT&T Broadband got me set up).
But commercializing collective bandwidth sharing using fundamentally short-range, modest latency "hotspots"? Especially when it violates TOSes of most residential broadband providers? I just think people got caught up with the wireless hype and didn't think too much about the economics of it.
Dude, take a lesson in economics. They realize there are free riders like yourselves, and that hobbiests are really rather likely to pirate their software at its now-ludicrous prices. Clearly they have decided their primary target market is companies that use VMWare as a development tool, and they don't want any loopholes with "educational" pricing or "hobbiest" licenses. They want to make sure every company using VMWare pays an outrageous 300 dollars per seat license - if Joe Linuxhacker pirates their software, so what? Generic Software Development Corp. will pay market rates for top-notch development tools that provide their developers a lot of value. If VMWare can sell 50,000 licenses at 300 dollars and can sell 100,000 licenses at 60 dollars, what would you do as their CEO? And they should have pretty good information about their demand curve, given their various pricing tiers and special pricing programs they've used over time.
I would just like to point out that there is clearly a work-around, since VMWare manages to get these 3 instructions (IRET and the two others that don't come to mind right now) right. I realize there is a design flaw in x86, and I'm not an ISA guru or processor architecture/kernel/ring 0 guru to have the foggiest idea of what the workaround is, but it clearly isn't impossible. Doesn't VMWare have a patent or some such thing that actually describes their mechanism? If it's clear enough, perhaps its described in their patent (of course, that means it's probably illegal to do it their way without licensing it from them). Or perhaps you can figure it out with a little bit of reverse engineering magic, screw around with decompiling their code and figure out how they handle these three instructions.
Anyway, this may be one of these issues that seems like it's small but is really huge (i.e. requires a redesign rather than modification to plex86), but don't imply that the design flaw is impossible to work around, or that a "really innovative" workaround doesn't already exist.
Seems to me that the way to implement this that provides the capability for valid mass email would be to allow the receiver to provide tickets for mailing lists and other opt-in information services that they want. In other words, certain white-listed sources would be able to be marked (in some way) as pay-on-receipt (like COD or Cash On Delivery). Obviously, that's not a technical proposal since it provides no meaningful details, but I think that general kind of approach might be a good starting point. If I really want to receive mass emails from certain folks, then I should not have a problem with spending 5 seconds of my own CPU time to generate a ticket for that email. Of course, I would only want certain people to be able to send me COD messages - everyone else can take a hike, or pay themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Either you are trolling, or you are a reactionary idiot. And by the way, I've built several pretty large, complicated AOLserver/Tcl apps, back in the day when this was considered one of the best ways to build a database-backed web application. My experience with it was that I could write perfectly fine Tcl code by myself. Trying to work collaboratively on an application with others was nearly impossible when they kept "upvar"ing all over the place. I'm not going to get into a flame war about Tcl, because it would be a rehash of flamewars that have already been had, and I can't prove or disprove that Tcl is or is not readable - just tell you my qualitative observations about its use in group development projects.
Oh yeah, and I've had this debate with some of the early Ars Digita employees and other old-school hardcore Tcl community members, and even most of them are forced to agree that for most projects, there are better tools for the job. Hell, Ars Digita's entire VERY SUCCESSFUL business model was built around building dynamic web pages using a language that resulted in code nobody else could decipher, so they could lock their customers into expensive support contracts. Once they tried transitioning over to Java (the post Phil Greenspun era) the company tanked - because nobody will pay MIT students and recent grads 100 dollars an hour to write JSPs when they can get somebody in India to do it for 10.
Perl IS the "worse is better" language.
Tcl goes so far to the "worse" end, it comes back around the circle at "utterly fucking miserable".
Nobody is going to appeal a small claims court decision. Small claims courts don't make binding precent, so there's no real reason to (500 dollars is approximately the cost of one lawyer-hour of time, thus it would be a very, very stupid business decision to do such a thing). Sometimes companies will appeal because the precedent of the decision is very damaging to their business - I don't think small claims courts have any real ability to form precedent, or to be cited as precedent anywhere else (maybe by the same small claims court judge). So why bother?
Frankly these methods don't work terribly well with a statically, implicitly typed language like OCAML either, which I think is part of the reason they haven't caught on broadly in industry use.
When I open up a JavaDoc, I like to know that Interface Foo has a method called Bar and I need to pass it two ints and a Baz object, be able to click on the Baz object and see its JavaDoc information too. Python with optional type declarations or "boundary" declarations for surrounding your libraries with a well-defined interface contract might solve this problem, but until that exists, Python projects over 50k-100k lines of code are just too confusing to be manageable.
I think these units are the most underrated out there - I mean, if you really want to put your entire music collection in a portable box, the hard drive units are your only choice. If you don't mind that every 3+ hours of listening you'll have to swap out mini-CDs (i.e. you don't miss the 600+ megs of a full sized CD), you want somewhat more portability for working out or sports use, you don't want to spend a lot of money on a solid state player with several hundred megs of storage, and prefer the convenience of throwing a mini-CDR into your CD burner instead of plugging in a cable and syncing up MP3s to your solid state player, and 55 dollars sounds like a good price, you should definitely consider one of these units.
And if it played OGGs too, and had a radio-broadcast feature for use in the car, that would be the bomb.
Yup, and it looks like the nice friendly AOL folks just nuked everything in Mr. Eeyore's home directory there. I'm sure he'll have some nice friendly men in black suits showing up at his door in a few hours, and then he'll have some explainin' to do to his mommy and daddy.
In any case, I'm not defending Salon as the source for unbiased news - there are more than enough biased loonies to go around on both sides. But the right wing supports their mouthpieces with CASH money, and the left wing... were are they?
And the physical fitness thing (which I have pimped before on
I think we often tend to avoid doing things like physical activity because we aren't as good as them as we are at intellectual activities (the
I likewise wish I had known this at 12 or 13.
And even more importantly, NEVER EVER go to Rotten.com. No matter how curious you may be. Don't do it. There are things in the world that you just don't want to see.
There's strength in numbers - and the lawyers finally realized that geeks are the only people as universally unpopular as they are.
We did this 4-5 years ago, only we called them IP-address restricted FTP servers. Had one in my college dorm room (it was my roommates). He had about 20 gigs of MP3s on it that we leeched from Napster, and we let people upload to the box too. It was IP address restricted so that we didn't have people outside the university community using it (and forwarding it around to friends) so that we didn't have to sit up late at night worrying about somebody (RIAA) making a stink about it (one student had already gotten expelled for distributing copyrighted material).
In RMS's world, precise use of "Free" vs. "Open" may be important all the time for philisophical reasons, but it's not the most important point to a generally educated, non-geek audience - or rather, it's a point you can bring up once in a talk, but to harp on your audience for every slip of the tongue is disrespectful and annoying. He doesn't understand this distinction. Ergo he should not be considered a mouthpiece for the Free Software community or any other community.
A sufficiently bright person should be able to tune their communications to an appropriate level for the audience. I don't think I qualify as a "lesser geek" just because I don't ALWAYS consider the distinction between Free Software and Open Source software to be relevant to every conversation that touches on the topic.
Face it, RMS is insulting me by using derogatory terms. Turn it around and look at it from my point of view, and maybe, just maybe, you will see that he needs a bit of sensitivity in his language. Has he ever stopped to think that the way he uses language might be insulting to some people? I am a human being too, and I don't deserve to be insulted. It is so arrogant of RMS to assume that I should adapt my terms to his standards and accept his insulting language.
In other words, your argument is content-free. My language pisses him off. His practice of correcting other people's language pisses me off. I was simply arguing that if you don't understand how to correct people in a way that doesn't offend 80% of people in the room, you are going to be an ineffective communicator. We have societal norms for interpersonal interactions. If a person has no intention of conforming to cultural norms, fine, but don't expect people in that culture to just smile and say "well, he's the most annoying fuck in the world, but let's see things from his perspective, he has the right to be an annoying, anal fuck, he's a human being too, maybe he is insulted by our use of language contrary to the rules he has drafted in his own isolated universe".
And yes I have talked to him in person before, several years back at a talk he gave at Harvard. Maybe asshole was too strong a word, I understand it's just "the way he is", I'm just pointing out it could rub a lot of people the wrong way.
It's not that HE chooses to refer to Linux as GNU/Linux or that HE chooses to speak exclusively for the Free Software movement, but the obnoxious and geekily obsessive-compulsive way he corrects other people's language all the time that pisses everybody off.
It's like if somebody asks you about those "hackers" that broke into some web site. If you start out by saying "I can't tell you about 'hackers', because I only know about 'crackers' and that's the only terminology that I will use..." - well it doesn't matter if you are technically correct, you are an asshole and people will hate you. I appreciate the fact that it can be frustrating to hear people abuse language in discussing topics close to your heart, but subtlety is a virtue if you don't want to inspire enmity in everybody you meet.
Wow. As another replier said, it's amazing there are this many pussies in this country. I mean, there are business deals where you win and business deals where you lose. But as an entrepreneur, if somebody did that to my company, well, they'd find themselves on the unwelcome end of a .357 magnum. Of course, I'd have an unassailable alibi. And it might not happen for 6 months, or even a year. Revenge can take its time. But really, it seems like you would have to be a fucking crackhead to try to screw over entrepreneurs in this way. I mean, you screw over a bunch of investors for a few grand each, nobody is gonna be mad enough to kill you (beat you to a modest pulp maybe). But screw over an entrepreneur with years of his life invested in a company, his own money and time, his faith and credit on the line with his investors? That is a foolish force to fuck with indeed. He just might have you wacked. Then you are a dead scumbag broker. And nobody is likely to cry about it.
No.
Remember Castle Software from the GPL violation articles on /.? You know, the guys who (supposedly) ripped off GPLed kernel code for RISC OS. Yup, they were www.castle.uk.co. Not anymore. The vengeful spirit of RMS is seeking revenge on these bastards by knocking out the whole uk.co faux-domain.
Incidentally, I graduated from Harvard '00. Back when I was an undergrad, we had a shitty network, shitty computers, shitty support, AND WE LIKED IT. Okay, just kidding. We used to joke that Harvard was a $30,000 a year bandwidth pipe (and social club). And damn did we use it - my suitemate senior year had a 20 gig MP3 stash shared on his FTP server, open to any Harvard IP addresses.
If that's not a fuck job, I don't know what is. I mean, the evidence here clearly supports that A) when you buy an EmperorLinux laptop, you are clearly still paying the Microsoft tax - they are just wiping Windows XP off of it (or you can still get it dual boot if you want it as such). And B) you are paying a shit price. The worst retail price online I found for the VX-89 was around 1700 dollars. So why not just suck it up and accept that the MS tax is unavoidable for laptops, and buy a decent laptop you like?
I understand the idea of voting with your dollars, but it doesn't get through to the shitheads at Sony corporate since they are still shipping a Vaio with Windows license to some schlocky overpriced "Linux" reseller. Or find a source of laptops that truly doesn't include the MS tax (they do exist, but I don't know of any super lightweight ones).
But commercializing collective bandwidth sharing using fundamentally short-range, modest latency "hotspots"? Especially when it violates TOSes of most residential broadband providers? I just think people got caught up with the wireless hype and didn't think too much about the economics of it.
Hmmm, are you quite sure you're talking about your keyboard here?
Dude, take a lesson in economics. They realize there are free riders like yourselves, and that hobbiests are really rather likely to pirate their software at its now-ludicrous prices. Clearly they have decided their primary target market is companies that use VMWare as a development tool, and they don't want any loopholes with "educational" pricing or "hobbiest" licenses. They want to make sure every company using VMWare pays an outrageous 300 dollars per seat license - if Joe Linuxhacker pirates their software, so what? Generic Software Development Corp. will pay market rates for top-notch development tools that provide their developers a lot of value. If VMWare can sell 50,000 licenses at 300 dollars and can sell 100,000 licenses at 60 dollars, what would you do as their CEO? And they should have pretty good information about their demand curve, given their various pricing tiers and special pricing programs they've used over time.
Anyway, this may be one of these issues that seems like it's small but is really huge (i.e. requires a redesign rather than modification to plex86), but don't imply that the design flaw is impossible to work around, or that a "really innovative" workaround doesn't already exist.
Seems to me that the way to implement this that provides the capability for valid mass email would be to allow the receiver to provide tickets for mailing lists and other opt-in information services that they want. In other words, certain white-listed sources would be able to be marked (in some way) as pay-on-receipt (like COD or Cash On Delivery). Obviously, that's not a technical proposal since it provides no meaningful details, but I think that general kind of approach might be a good starting point. If I really want to receive mass emails from certain folks, then I should not have a problem with spending 5 seconds of my own CPU time to generate a ticket for that email. Of course, I would only want certain people to be able to send me COD messages - everyone else can take a hike, or pay themselves.