> However Unix is not at all suitable for general > introductory courses. If you have highly motivated and intelligent kids they could probably learn on anything, including JCL. > But most kids are not in that category (just as well or else our skills would not be in the same demand).
At first glance, you might have a point. But last Saturday I heard from a schoolteacher in the Portland Public School District who clearly stated the opposite: the kids actually prefer the computers runing Linux because they are more stable. And she likes them because fixing problems in a Unix-like environment is far easier than tracking down the cause of another hex dump crash in Windows.
The problem isn't with the kids learning: they do quite fine at that. It's the adults who know nothing better than pointing & clicking -- or have to unlearn the three R's of troubleshooting MS Windows: reboot, reinstall, reformat.
I read Duin's article this morning, & one item that he emphasized -- & hasn't gotten any attention -- was that MS pulled this same tactic with other school systems across the US. As a direct result Randy Baker, the tech coordinator for 16 school districts (& 12,000 end users) in central Iowa, ``completely dumped Microsoft last summer and migrated everything to Linux."
We're seeing one of the vicious political campaigns in our state election history. (The television ads the candidates for the Republican nomination for governor are broadcasting would embarass a six-year-old.) I'd say 80-90% of the telemarketers who call my house are little more than automated phone messages for one candidate or another.
Last night's news broadcast just revealed that while you can tell both commerical & charity callers to put you on their ``Do Not Call List", these politicians gave themselves immunity to this restriction. And to observing the ornocall database.
I expect there will be an initiative to close this loop hole in the September election.
Just before the changeover in recording the statistics, no one thought much of Nirvana or other Grunge bands. They produced music that only scuzzy, drug-abusing 15-year-olds listened to who were destined for Juvenile Detention. So the clerks would often forget to mark down the sales, or would ``adjust" the sales totals at the end of the day.
When automated recording was adopted, the PTB learned that Nirvana had an audience that extended far beyond the stereotype. Grunge immediately became The Next Big Thing (tm), & all of the media types jumped on the flannel-wearing, angst-ridden bandwagon.
Which amused me because where I live (Portland, OR), you could see lots of people who dressed like this riding the bus (because they could only afford to shop at Goodwill), & who were more likely listening to Country & Western, or Christian music.
Years ago, the PTB reformed the process that music sales were recorded & how albums would thereby be certified as ``Gold" or ``Platinum."
One week, the best-selling record was some forgettable group created by the music industry & heavily hyped on MTV. (ISTR it was a group called ``Poison.") The next week . . . Nirvana was king. And Seattle suffered for it.
> Anyway, more power to the music sharing people. I think it's about time someone ran an honest, non-biased study about > this, and I'm glad to see these results. They just prove to me what I've known all along.
Yes, but when asked to comment on this report, the suits in the record industry claimed that ``people lie" & we shouldn't believe it.
Sigh. Those people are deep into denial, & if it were a river, Fritz Hollings & his ilk would be buying first class riverboat tickets. They won't be happy until they have control of the contents of every last hard drive -- even that ancient 20MB drive you've used as a door stop for the last 5 years.
> What would you like to see improve about tech support?
> How about some training and a fair wage for the poor bastards that work in the call centers?
Heh. I could rant for several thousand words about the 18 months I did at Stream. (It started out as a fairly humane place to work at, & slowly degenerated into a sweatshop.)
But since we're supposed to talk about suggestions for improving things, here's mine: I'd like to submit a list of management-types from Stream who should die a long, painful death. Mebbe that won't improve tech support, but those of us who had to work for these morons at least would believe that there is a God & some justice in the world.
> And if you ARE one of his constituents, he simply ignores you. See how many South Carolinians here have received > responses. I know I haven't, and many others have not as well. And I wrote a personalized letter via postal mail.
Based on my own experience, & a friend who frequently writes letters on environmental issues, congresscriters respond to 1 in 5 to 7 letters.
On the other hand, if Hollings routinely ignores letters from his consituents, then this fact ought to be widely published. Keep him in SC, if he won't hear you in Washington.
> Furthermore, his argument is that if Microsoft had started its FUD campaign back in 1998, no one would > have bought into Linux. This is similar to charging Microsoft with failure to have a crystal ball. Back in 1998, Linux was > barely a blip on anyone's radar.
Actually, Linux was on a number of radars. A lot of ISPs (predominantly mom-&-pop shops with little spare cash) were using Linux (& *BSD) for their servers because they couldn't afford Win NT.
And knowledge of some of this usage must have filtered back to Redmond. Remember, the infamous Halloween Papers (which were published in 1998) were written in August of 1998 after careful study of how Linux & Apache are written.
What is more cripling for Eric Raymond's argument that MS could have FUDed Linux to death is that these memos clearly state that FUD will NOT work against Open Source Software. I don't understand is why Raymond didn't remember this assertion: after all, he published the original documents.
Geoff
Re:I *TRIED* to buy shareware.. this is the proble
on
More On Policing Shareware
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> In fact, I tried on 3 instances to buy/register shareware.. and this is what happened.. I think this is part of the problem...
Shareware for Palm OS devices have a nice solution for this: they have agreements with various online sites to take payment for them, & apparently have ways to accept foreign currencies. (For an example of this see http://www.tealpoint.com/register.htm.)
Is there an equivalent service for Windows & Mac customers?
I did a little googling on Philip Beck, the attorney who is in charge of the DOJ team, expecting to find a colorless hack who rode his connections to his current position (like another person in the current administration), only to find he has some positive creds -- at least at first glance. See
http://www.nlj.com/staging/special/1224loy-beck. sh tml
and
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168507.html
Frankly, I don't what to make of these two bits of information. Did someone talk Beck into taking a dive over this case, is he someone different from these two stories, or is he correct about the case?
I still believe though, if this were a just universe, Bill Gates would be sentenced to live his life inside a bubble where all the life support functions ran on an NT box.
> This is clearly an example of some hyper-patriot using buzzwords and buzzconcepts to expand his country's control over > scant international resources (intelligence analyses) without really understanding the international environment, or indeed > without really understanding the terms he's using. Open source? Not likely. Open (to him) intelligence sources, closed (to > everyone else) information.
Aha. That explains why the author went off into jargonland in the following passage:
> the events of 9-11 demonstrated our > inability to detect and prevent bold asymmetric attacks > that used our own airliners as precision missiles.
In case you don't follow, ask yourself WTF ``asymmetric attacks" is supposed to mean. ``Unexpected attacks"? ``Attacks without a counterpart"? If that is so, then why didn't he just use plain English & say so?
Or would killing several thousand Moslems in the Middle East somehow justify a similar attack on the US?
(Okay, that last sentence was off the wall, but if he is going to use weird language, then why can't I?)
> The date says the article was written yesterday but I remember being in this loop 6 months ago and getting 600 messages or > so one night.
Looking back in the mess that is my mail archives, I see this happened towards the end of the week of Saturday 30 November 2001. When a search thru NANAE did not turn up anything about savoixmagazine, I decided this was just another weirdness of the Innernet, & forgot about it.
> The funny thing was that I'm not on any Suse email list or on savoixmagazine.
One theory a couple of the folks caught up in it suggested was that somehow somebody at savoixmagazine got ahold of the Linux Counter Project mailing list & added this to the mail list in question.
FWIW, after experiencing this mess, I have a little more sympathy for the bewildered user who sends off an email ``Take me off this list." I inadvertently added to the spew before I saw the email from the folks at SuSe -- which was buried in dozens of emails with the subject lines of ``Urgent", ``You have been subscribed toSuSe-security", ``You have been unsubscribed from SuSe-security". You have to get your fingers burned at least once in order to remember to sit no them before trying to solve a problem.
> That's just it: We don't know. We've reached a point where the > media are so owned by the large corporations and they live in this > tight loop where practically all they can convey is what is already > believed.
While I believe corporations have more power in US life more than the Federal & local governments (the later are too easily compromised by the former), Barlow is overstating the influence of corporations on the Internet.
A quick google on the topics ``white power" brought up over 3 million hits; one on ``us labor party" brought up over a million -- & none on the first page mentioned Lyndon Larouche's fringe group.
Anyone can put up a web site, or contribute to Usenet - that's a freedom that I haven't heard has been compromised, although there have been a few cases. (And Barlow should have mentioned these cases & why they may pose a dangerous precedent.) The problem is getting people to read these websites with divergent points of view.
Google helps to bring visibility to these websites, & the commnities associated with them. But a better tool would be for more people to cease relying on Microsoft or Time-Warner to advertise these communities, & for them to talk to each other, to create their own links amongst themselves.
> You can hate Microsoft all you want but this analogy is just plain silly.
I don't know. For an analogy that I came up with on the spur of the moment, & accidentally submitted (I coulda sworn I clicked on the ``preview" button), it has a certain appeal. Your assertion -- that politicians can refuse to listen to corporations that give them money -- puts the burden of responsibility upon the other party -- like the rape victim in my example. It puts all of the blame on the other party, & leaving blameless the party who is spending monetary influence.
But if you'd like a better analogy, what about the crime of prostituion? If you were driving down a known stroll, & offered a person standing on a street corner $60 to ``be nice to you", I doubt either of you would assume you were talking about your recieivng directions to the nearest church. Unless your idea of worship involves an orgasm.
In other words, your argument would mean that the john is not breaking the law. And not contributing to moral delinquincy.
It doesn't matter if the person on the street corner is a prostitute or not. By offering the cash, YOU knew what you wanted. So did the other party. The only proper repsonse is to say no.
(And to take the money, say thanks & run only invites trouble. In either this example -- or for the politician you think can still be objective after accepting money.)
Besides, the people at Microsoft allegedly aren't the dullest knives in the box. They'd figure out real quick that if they gave money to a certain congresscriter, & said congresscriter was ``too busy" to either listen or vote in a friendly way, they'd stop their contributions very quickly.
> Microsoft is NOT doing anything illegal when it spends money on political contributions. It is the politicians that are doing
> something illegal if they let that money sway their votes.
Hmm. And do you also argue that it's not rape if a woman wears a tight sweater & a short skirt? (After all, if she was dressed that way, she *must* have been asking for it.)
Only someone truly arrogant & so monomoniacally focussed on success at any cost would accept this argument in defense of an unethical action.
> they say the metro area here has the one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation
The unemployment rate is 7.5%, second only to Miami. This is the worst I've seen it here in Oregon since the early 1980's.
> I lost a job in
> march, gained one in june, lost it in september, got an offer in january, and said no to the offer. unemployment has run out,
> subsisting on emergency fund.
Except for a couple of odd jobs, I haven't been able to find any work. My phone interview with Intel in December was the first interview I had with a hiring manager since I let go in May.
If it wasn't for my wife having a fulltime job, I would be scared. (There always seems to be a demand for accountants.)
I haven't been proud: I applied for a mail-handling job for the Xmas rush, & it didn't come thru. (Probably something about all of my high-tech employers -- they wanted a list of all of my employers for the last 10 years. Of my last 8 employers, 2 have gone bankrupt & at least one has vanished in a merger.)
And from talking to folks at the Linux Users' Group meetings, & to former co-workers, the competition is tough. Employers are now demanding degrees in either CS or engineering, & unbelievable amounts of specialized experience. Folks with 12, 15 or more years of practical experience are being passed over.
My strategy? Use my time to learn more about computing, & to network more. This downturn has to end eventually.
> One is that Microsoft sucks for doing this... I think most people can agree to that.
>
> Two is that people are stupid if they don't read those agreements. They are so used to clicking next that anyone who
> has agreed to this deserves to give thier info to M$
As I read this, I noticed at the bottom of the page was this ``quote of the moment" from the folks at/.:
Grasshopper, there is a careful difference between a commodity bastard, & a true BOFH. A small-b bastard is an idiot who makes everyone's lives miserable with little or no thought; a true BOFH shows great cunning & care in inflicting misery on her/his victims.
(There is a school of thought that a BOFH inflicts misery only on lusers. Debate about this point is endless. However, a BOFH will only inflict misery on another BOFH for a very brief time for obvious reasons.)
So if someone has passed to you much pain, & you can identify them well enough to return the present, then see this as a call to find your BOFH nature.
> I get the last laugh, however. Without my money they looses their job as COX goes belly up. No one really wants to
> spend loads of money to trade the TV that spews trash they hate to have their PC spew much of the same.
> Prediction, bankruptsy in two years. Bye Bye BOFH, better learn to write a more flexible and friendlier shell
> script. [cox.net]
Grasshopper, grasshopper. One disgruntled customer deciding to stop buying will not put an end to a business. Sieze your BOFH nature, & find a useful way to deal with this problem.
> So how exactly does this work? If you're a business in that area, do they send you a "card", and demand you reply with
> a statement saying that you're 100% compliant or they'll sue the pants off of you?
Last summer, I got one of these threatening letters to my home address. Shortly afterwards, I also got a letter from a certain company in Redmond, urging me to take advantage of the BSA softare truce. They suggest that I sign up for a ``free consultation" from a company called Zones, who will sell me MS software at 20% off.
The last piece of MS software I ever bought was a copy of DOS 6.0. (I may have registered it -- I don't have the box at hand.) I once subscribed to PC Magazine, but let the subscription run out in either 1994 or 95. Other than that, I have NO idea how they got my name, or thought I was running a business out of my house.
I ignored the mail. (I wanted to send a copy of the GNU & BSD licenses to them, since this covers almost all of the software I used, but my wife wouldn't let me.) I'm not sure if they caught any pirates in my area -- at least there's no report on their website.
> Amazing! I wonder if the original author was embelishing to make a point or if he was just misinformed.
He wrote his piece in 1833, in the early years of the last Enclosure Movement in England. Obviously his analysis was colored, but he had a valid point.
> Now then as for your example of BLM lands. That example has some flaws too. When the Feds lease land to a rancher
> they actually require that he graze a certain number of cattle upon the land. The rancher cannot reduce the size of his
> herd, or he will be removed from the program and his leases auctioned to somebody else who'll "use the land".
>
> This policy also means that you & I can't buy the lease and use the land for recreation or as a nature preserve.
>
> BTW: My information is dated (>15 yrs). Are policies more enlightened now?
The BLM is a like any beauracracy: if the head manager states what policy is, everyone under him must follow it. 15 years ago (circa 1986), the BLM was still very pro-rancher in many regards, & would undoubtedly use this tactic to foil attempts by the Sierra Club, et alia, to lease the land in order to allow it to recover.
Since then, the BLM has acknowledged environmental concerns for these millions of acres they manage. Whether this means that these lands be wisely managed . . . well, we are talking about beauracrats, who are most comfortable with following the letter -- not the spirit -- of their policy statements.
> Here's a related link [dieoff.org] that may say it better than I can.
So that's where the story came from: a monograph by an amateur mathematician in 1833. A convincing example of social dynamics . . . but without basis in actual historical fact.
One of my hobbies is studying English History on the social/peasant level. And reading several Enclosure Records, I was struck by the fact many times acerage was held by a number of farmers or tenant ``in common". And reading the secondary history on village history, I never found a mention of Village Commons -- unless you want to include the small bit of ground in front of the church, or the village square.
This is because resources -- like land -- were rare in medieval times, & rights to them jealously protected. Nobles are recorded in the Domesday Book (for example) as having owned churches, & received a cut of the tithes paid by the congregation. Just because some pasture was held ``in common" by some or all of a village did not mean everyone or anyone could use it.
Think of it this way: you have two siblings, one of whom shares with you ownership of a vacation house. The other sibling constantly wants to be able to use this vacation house at anytime -- although she/he does not pay for upkeep -- because ``we're family". Would you be inclined to say ``no" often?
The medieval peasant with shares in a field held ``in common" felt the same way. A better example whould be people who lease land from the US Federal government (e.g. cattlemen who have degraded BLM lands with overgrazing & constant complaints over increased fees to cover costs).
> Oroborus for the window manager. It's default theme is beautiful and it is amazingly quick. Uses only xlib for drawing.
> www.kensden.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Oroborus/ [blueyonder.co.uk]
I just took a look at the home page, & read that the developer discontinued his work on this project on 9 September.
A few other software projects on this list appear to either have vanished or be in stasis. I guess interest is fading in writing small, tight code.
Slashdot Mirror
> However Unix is not at all suitable for general
> introductory courses. If you have highly motivated and intelligent kids they could probably learn on anything, including JCL.
> But most kids are not in that category (just as well or else our skills would not be in the same demand).
At first glance, you might have a point. But last Saturday I heard from a schoolteacher in the Portland Public School District who clearly stated the opposite: the kids actually prefer the computers runing Linux because they are more stable. And she likes them because fixing problems in a Unix-like environment is far easier than tracking down the cause of another hex dump crash in Windows.
The problem isn't with the kids learning: they do quite fine at that. It's the adults who know nothing better than pointing & clicking -- or have to unlearn the three R's of troubleshooting MS Windows: reboot, reinstall, reformat.
Geoff
I read Duin's article this morning, & one item that he emphasized -- & hasn't gotten any attention -- was that MS pulled this same tactic with other school systems across the US. As a direct result Randy Baker, the tech coordinator for 16 school districts (& 12,000 end users) in central Iowa, ``completely dumped Microsoft last summer and migrated everything to Linux."
Anybody have more details about this migration?
Geoff
We're seeing one of the vicious political campaigns in our state election history. (The television ads the candidates for the Republican nomination for governor are broadcasting would embarass a six-year-old.) I'd say 80-90% of the telemarketers who call my house are little more than automated phone messages for one candidate or another.
Last night's news broadcast just revealed that while you can tell both commerical & charity callers to put you on their ``Do Not Call List", these politicians gave themselves immunity to this restriction. And to observing the ornocall database.
I expect there will be an initiative to close this loop hole in the September election.
Geoff
> Elaborate a bit
Okay.
Just before the changeover in recording the statistics, no one thought much of Nirvana or other Grunge bands. They produced music that only scuzzy, drug-abusing 15-year-olds listened to who were destined for Juvenile Detention. So the clerks would often forget to mark down the sales, or would ``adjust" the sales totals at the end of the day.
When automated recording was adopted, the PTB learned that Nirvana had an audience that extended far beyond the stereotype. Grunge immediately became The Next Big Thing (tm), & all of the media types jumped on the flannel-wearing, angst-ridden bandwagon.
Which amused me because where I live (Portland, OR), you could see lots of people who dressed like this riding the bus (because they could only afford to shop at Goodwill), & who were more likely listening to Country & Western, or Christian music.
Geoff
Years ago, the PTB reformed the process that music sales were recorded & how albums would thereby be certified as ``Gold" or ``Platinum."
One week, the best-selling record was some forgettable group created by the music industry & heavily hyped on MTV. (ISTR it was a group called ``Poison.") The next week . . . Nirvana was king. And Seattle suffered for it.
Just remembering a bit of history.
Geoff
> Anyway, more power to the music sharing people. I think it's about time someone ran an honest, non-biased study about
> this, and I'm glad to see these results. They just prove to me what I've known all along.
Yes, but when asked to comment on this report, the suits in the record industry claimed that ``people lie" & we shouldn't believe it.
Sigh. Those people are deep into denial, & if it were a river, Fritz Hollings & his ilk would be buying first class riverboat tickets. They won't be happy until they have control of the contents of every last hard drive -- even that ancient 20MB drive you've used as a door stop for the last 5 years.
Geoff
> What would you like to see improve about tech support?
> How about some training and a fair wage for the poor bastards that work in the call centers?
Heh. I could rant for several thousand words about the 18 months I did at Stream. (It started out as a fairly humane place to work at, & slowly degenerated into a sweatshop.)
But since we're supposed to talk about suggestions for improving things, here's mine: I'd like to submit a list of management-types from Stream who should die a long, painful death. Mebbe that won't improve tech support, but those of us who had to work for these morons at least would believe that there is a God & some justice in the world.
Geoff
> And if you ARE one of his constituents, he simply ignores you. See how many South Carolinians here have received
> responses. I know I haven't, and many others have not as well. And I wrote a personalized letter via postal mail.
Based on my own experience, & a friend who frequently writes letters on environmental issues, congresscriters respond to 1 in 5 to 7 letters.
On the other hand, if Hollings routinely ignores letters from his consituents, then this fact ought to be widely published. Keep him in SC, if he won't hear you in Washington.
Geoff
He received numerous phone calls, emails & letters from informed computer users & professionals stating in careful detail why this was a bad bill.
And how did the esteemed senator respond? ``You're not one of my constituents, so I won't listen to you."
BTW, why would someone moderate the parent comment ``Flamebait"? Sheesh!
Geoff
> Furthermore, his argument is that if Microsoft had started its FUD campaign back in 1998, no one would
> have bought into Linux. This is similar to charging Microsoft with failure to have a crystal ball. Back in 1998, Linux was
> barely a blip on anyone's radar.
Actually, Linux was on a number of radars. A lot of ISPs (predominantly mom-&-pop shops with little spare cash) were using Linux (& *BSD) for their servers because they couldn't afford Win NT.
And knowledge of some of this usage must have filtered back to Redmond. Remember, the infamous Halloween Papers (which were published in 1998) were written in August of 1998 after careful study of how Linux & Apache are written.
What is more cripling for Eric Raymond's argument that MS could have FUDed Linux to death is that these memos clearly state that FUD will NOT work against Open Source Software. I don't understand is why Raymond didn't remember this assertion: after all, he published the original documents.
Geoff
> In fact, I tried on 3 instances to buy/register shareware.. and this is what happened.. I think this is part of the problem...
Shareware for Palm OS devices have a nice solution for this: they have agreements with various online sites to take payment for them, & apparently have ways to accept foreign currencies. (For an example of this see http://www.tealpoint.com/register.htm.)
Is there an equivalent service for Windows & Mac customers?
Geoff
> None of this is that surprising.
. sh tml
Actually, there is a weird twist or two here.
I did a little googling on Philip Beck, the attorney who is in charge of the DOJ team, expecting to find a colorless hack who rode his connections to his current position (like another person in the current administration), only to find he has some positive creds -- at least at first glance. See
http://www.nlj.com/staging/special/1224loy-beck
and
http://www.newsbytes.com/news/01/168507.html
Frankly, I don't what to make of these two bits of information. Did someone talk Beck into taking a dive over this case, is he someone different from these two stories, or is he correct about the case?
I still believe though, if this were a just universe, Bill Gates would be sentenced to live his life inside a bubble where all the life support functions ran on an NT box.
Geoff
> This is clearly an example of some hyper-patriot using buzzwords and buzzconcepts to expand his country's control over
> scant international resources (intelligence analyses) without really understanding the international environment, or indeed
> without really understanding the terms he's using. Open source? Not likely. Open (to him) intelligence sources, closed (to
> everyone else) information.
Aha. That explains why the author went off into jargonland in the following passage:
> the events of 9-11 demonstrated our
> inability to detect and prevent bold asymmetric attacks
> that used our own airliners as precision missiles.
In case you don't follow, ask yourself WTF ``asymmetric attacks" is supposed to mean. ``Unexpected attacks"? ``Attacks without a counterpart"? If that is so, then why didn't he just use plain English & say so?
Or would killing several thousand Moslems in the Middle East somehow justify a similar attack on the US?
(Okay, that last sentence was off the wall, but if he is going to use weird language, then why can't I?)
Geoff
> The date says the article was written yesterday but I remember being in this loop 6 months ago and getting 600 messages or
> so one night.
Looking back in the mess that is my mail archives, I see this happened towards the end of the week of Saturday 30 November 2001. When a search thru NANAE did not turn up anything about savoixmagazine, I decided this was just another weirdness of the Innernet, & forgot about it.
> The funny thing was that I'm not on any Suse email list or on savoixmagazine.
One theory a couple of the folks caught up in it suggested was that somehow somebody at savoixmagazine got ahold of the Linux Counter Project mailing list & added this to the mail list in question.
FWIW, after experiencing this mess, I have a little more sympathy for the bewildered user who sends off an email ``Take me off this list." I inadvertently added to the spew before I saw the email from the folks at SuSe -- which was buried in dozens of emails with the subject lines of ``Urgent", ``You have been subscribed toSuSe-security", ``You have been unsubscribed from SuSe-security". You have to get your fingers burned at least once in order to remember to sit no them before trying to solve a problem.
Geoff
You forgot Barlow's answer:
> That's just it: We don't know. We've reached a point where the
> media are so owned by the large corporations and they live in this
> tight loop where practically all they can convey is what is already
> believed.
While I believe corporations have more power in US life more than the Federal & local governments (the later are too easily compromised by the former), Barlow is overstating the influence of corporations on the Internet.
A quick google on the topics ``white power" brought up over 3 million hits; one on ``us labor party" brought up over a million -- & none on the first page mentioned Lyndon Larouche's fringe group.
Anyone can put up a web site, or contribute to Usenet - that's a freedom that I haven't heard has been compromised, although there have been a few cases. (And Barlow should have mentioned these cases & why they may pose a dangerous precedent.) The problem is getting people to read these websites with divergent points of view.
Google helps to bring visibility to these websites, & the commnities associated with them. But a better tool would be for more people to cease relying on Microsoft or Time-Warner to advertise these communities, & for them to talk to each other, to create their own links amongst themselves.
Geoff
> You can hate Microsoft all you want but this analogy is just plain silly.
I don't know. For an analogy that I came up with on the spur of the moment, & accidentally submitted (I coulda sworn I clicked on the ``preview" button), it has a certain appeal. Your assertion -- that politicians can refuse to listen to corporations that give them money -- puts the burden of responsibility upon the other party -- like the rape victim in my example. It puts all of the blame on the other party, & leaving blameless the party who is spending monetary influence.
But if you'd like a better analogy, what about the crime of prostituion? If you were driving down a known stroll, & offered a person standing on a street corner $60 to ``be nice to you", I doubt either of you would assume you were talking about your recieivng directions to the nearest church. Unless your idea of worship involves an orgasm.
In other words, your argument would mean that the john is not breaking the law. And not contributing to moral delinquincy.
It doesn't matter if the person on the street corner is a prostitute or not. By offering the cash, YOU knew what you wanted. So did the other party. The only proper repsonse is to say no.
(And to take the money, say thanks & run only invites trouble. In either this example -- or for the politician you think can still be objective after accepting money.)
Besides, the people at Microsoft allegedly aren't the dullest knives in the box. They'd figure out real quick that if they gave money to a certain congresscriter, & said congresscriter was ``too busy" to either listen or vote in a friendly way, they'd stop their contributions very quickly.
Geoff
> Microsoft is NOT doing anything illegal when it spends money on political contributions. It is the politicians that are doing
> something illegal if they let that money sway their votes.
Hmm. And do you also argue that it's not rape if a woman wears a tight sweater & a short skirt? (After all, if she was dressed that way, she *must* have been asking for it.)
Only someone truly arrogant & so monomoniacally focussed on success at any cost would accept this argument in defense of an unethical action.
Geoff
> they say the metro area here has the one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation
The unemployment rate is 7.5%, second only to Miami. This is the worst I've seen it here in Oregon since the early 1980's.
> I lost a job in
> march, gained one in june, lost it in september, got an offer in january, and said no to the offer. unemployment has run out,
> subsisting on emergency fund.
Except for a couple of odd jobs, I haven't been able to find any work. My phone interview with Intel in December was the first interview I had with a hiring manager since I let go in May.
If it wasn't for my wife having a fulltime job, I would be scared. (There always seems to be a demand for accountants.)
I haven't been proud: I applied for a mail-handling job for the Xmas rush, & it didn't come thru. (Probably something about all of my high-tech employers -- they wanted a list of all of my employers for the last 10 years. Of my last 8 employers, 2 have gone bankrupt & at least one has vanished in a merger.)
And from talking to folks at the Linux Users' Group meetings, & to former co-workers, the competition is tough. Employers are now demanding degrees in either CS or engineering, & unbelievable amounts of specialized experience. Folks with 12, 15 or more years of practical experience are being passed over.
My strategy? Use my time to learn more about computing, & to network more. This downturn has to end eventually.
Geoff
> One is that Microsoft sucks for doing this... I think most people can agree to that.
/.:
>
> Two is that people are stupid if they don't read those agreements. They are so used to clicking next that anyone who
> has agreed to this deserves to give thier info to M$
As I read this, I noticed at the bottom of the page was this ``quote of the moment" from the folks at
> If you had any brains, you'd be dangerous.
Geoff
> And I hate their guts.
[lines of badly formatted HTML snipped]
Grasshopper, there is a careful difference between a commodity bastard, & a true BOFH. A small-b bastard is an idiot who makes everyone's lives miserable with little or no thought; a true BOFH shows great cunning & care in inflicting misery on her/his victims.
(There is a school of thought that a BOFH inflicts misery only on lusers. Debate about this point is endless. However, a BOFH will only inflict misery on another BOFH for a very brief time for obvious reasons.)
So if someone has passed to you much pain, & you can identify them well enough to return the present, then see this as a call to find your BOFH nature.
> I get the last laugh, however. Without my money they looses their job as COX goes belly up. No one really wants to
> spend loads of money to trade the TV that spews trash they hate to have their PC spew much of the same.
> Prediction, bankruptsy in two years. Bye Bye BOFH, better learn to write a more flexible and friendlier shell
> script. [cox.net]
Grasshopper, grasshopper. One disgruntled customer deciding to stop buying will not put an end to a business. Sieze your BOFH nature, & find a useful way to deal with this problem.
And remember, a true BOFH is never caught.
Geoff
> Naming their new OS 'Longhorn' is an affront to all UT [utexas.edu] grads everywhere!
>
> Can't they call it 'Aggie' or something?
I can't imagine how this would be considered ``Flamebait". But then, I'm not from Texas, so I have no passion invested in this historic rivalry.
Geoff
> So how exactly does this work? If you're a business in that area, do they send you a "card", and demand you reply with
> a statement saying that you're 100% compliant or they'll sue the pants off of you?
Last summer, I got one of these threatening letters to my home address. Shortly afterwards, I also got a letter from a certain company in Redmond, urging me to take advantage of the BSA softare truce. They suggest that I sign up for a ``free consultation" from a company called Zones, who will sell me MS software at 20% off.
The last piece of MS software I ever bought was a copy of DOS 6.0. (I may have registered it -- I don't have the box at hand.) I once subscribed to PC Magazine, but let the subscription run out in either 1994 or 95. Other than that, I have NO idea how they got my name, or thought I was running a business out of my house.
I ignored the mail. (I wanted to send a copy of the GNU & BSD licenses to them, since this covers almost all of the software I used, but my wife wouldn't let me.) I'm not sure if they caught any pirates in my area -- at least there's no report on their website.
Geoff
> Amazing! I wonder if the original author was embelishing to make a point or if he was just misinformed.
He wrote his piece in 1833, in the early years of the last Enclosure Movement in England. Obviously his analysis was colored, but he had a valid point.
> Now then as for your example of BLM lands. That example has some flaws too. When the Feds lease land to a rancher
> they actually require that he graze a certain number of cattle upon the land. The rancher cannot reduce the size of his
> herd, or he will be removed from the program and his leases auctioned to somebody else who'll "use the land".
>
> This policy also means that you & I can't buy the lease and use the land for recreation or as a nature preserve.
>
> BTW: My information is dated (>15 yrs). Are policies more enlightened now?
The BLM is a like any beauracracy: if the head manager states what policy is, everyone under him must follow it. 15 years ago (circa 1986), the BLM was still very pro-rancher in many regards, & would undoubtedly use this tactic to foil attempts by the Sierra Club, et alia, to lease the land in order to allow it to recover.
Since then, the BLM has acknowledged environmental concerns for these millions of acres they manage. Whether this means that these lands be wisely managed . . . well, we are talking about beauracrats, who are most comfortable with following the letter -- not the spirit -- of their policy statements.
Geoff
> Here's a related link [dieoff.org] that may say it better than I can.
So that's where the story came from: a monograph by an amateur mathematician in 1833. A convincing example of social dynamics . . . but without basis in actual historical fact.
One of my hobbies is studying English History on the social/peasant level. And reading several Enclosure Records, I was struck by the fact many times acerage was held by a number of farmers or tenant ``in common". And reading the secondary history on village history, I never found a mention of Village Commons -- unless you want to include the small bit of ground in front of the church, or the village square.
This is because resources -- like land -- were rare in medieval times, & rights to them jealously protected. Nobles are recorded in the Domesday Book (for example) as having owned churches, & received a cut of the tithes paid by the congregation. Just because some pasture was held ``in common" by some or all of a village did not mean everyone or anyone could use it.
Think of it this way: you have two siblings, one of whom shares with you ownership of a vacation house. The other sibling constantly wants to be able to use this vacation house at anytime -- although she/he does not pay for upkeep -- because ``we're family". Would you be inclined to say ``no" often?
The medieval peasant with shares in a field held ``in common" felt the same way. A better example whould be people who lease land from the US Federal government (e.g. cattlemen who have degraded BLM lands with overgrazing & constant complaints over increased fees to cover costs).
Geoff
> Oroborus for the window manager. It's default theme is beautiful and it is amazingly quick. Uses only xlib for drawing.
> www.kensden.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/Oroborus/ [blueyonder.co.uk]
I just took a look at the home page, & read that the developer discontinued his work on this project on 9 September.
A few other software projects on this list appear to either have vanished or be in stasis. I guess interest is fading in writing small, tight code.
Geoff