> I have a question for people using AfterStep or WM nowdays - how do you stay compatable with KDE and Gnome based
> software?
As another poster remarked, the Qt & Gtk libraries run just fine under AfterStep, so at most all I have to do is type something like ``gcalc &" to run a given application. (The only Gtk app I still use is Electric Eyes, which I configured to launch from Wharf.)
As for using some of the benefits Gnome offers behind the scenes, AS has a ``Gnome" module that handles all of that.
> Heinlein wasn't even an officer.
>
> He was accepted to the Naval Academy, but was discharged (in his sophmore year iirc)for medical reasons (a blown out
> knee), while Haldeman was an infantryman in Viet Nam.
>
> Heinlein tried to sign up during WWII, but was refused, again, on medical grounds.
In response to my earlier statement, I've read one person who stated he was not an officer, one who stated he was, & one who stated he was a ``sapper", a rank not usually found in the US military. To settle this difference in opion, I pulled out my copy of L. Sprague de Camp's _Science Fiction Handbook_, which I have found to be an invaluable reference for this genre in the late 1930's & 1940's period, when he was a participant & knew almost all fo the major figures.
de Camp wrote:
``Robert Anston Heinlein was born in Missouri in 1907, was reared in Kansas City, Mo., and graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1929. He served with the fleet but was retired for physical disability in 1934. He tried silver-mining in Colorado, professional politics in California, and finally writing. When he sold ``Life Line" to _Astounding_ in 1939 his thought (like that of many other beginning writers misled by initial success) was, why hasn't somebody told me about this? It beats working! During the war he worked as a civilian engineer in the U. S. Navy, along with Asimov and me [de Camp], but returned to writing afterwards."
So my comments about his being an officer were correct. (Amazing, considering my memory.) And this provided him a different viewpoint from Haldeman, whose attitudes about war are very clear in his numerous novels.
Open Source or not, I have to admit to wasting more time on this game than any single one since Warcraft.
And what I find nice about FreeCiv is that I can play it in one Virtual Window, go to another VW to do stuff, then return to where I left off in FreeCiv. It nicely works with the multi-tasking environment of Linux, unlike the Loki ports I have tried.
Geoff
Re:One of My Favorites...Well, OK, BUT.....
on
The Forever War
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> Also, any comparison to Starship Troopers (the book), is merely superficial resemblance.
>
> Johnny Rico, in ST, is the device Heinlein uses to show us the effects of a "limitless war" upon both people and societies, when
> confronted with an enemy so inhuman that they are merely "Bugs" (a device Scott Card has also used and improved upon in
> his "Enders" series).....
> However, in FW, William Mandela IS the story. His POV dominates the entire book (as was Haldeman's intention).
I think you miss an important point here that makes the contrast between the two books both deep & insightful: Heinlein was an officer, & Haldeman was a grunt.
My grandfather served in the First World War in the American Expeditionary Force, where he was injured by mustard gas. According to my mother, afterwards he read a book or two, & complained that these books DIDN'T describe the war he was in. I'm sure at some point Haldeman read Heinlein's book, & not only came to the same conclusion, but found the inspiration to write his own book.
Geoff
P.S. Does anyone else remember the board game ``Warp Wars" from the late 1970's? The creator admitted he was inspired in his time-dilation mechanics by Haldeman's novel.
> However that and the "Tain Bo Cuailnge" (Oxford press) as translated by Thomas Kinsella are the only Celtic books I own. I
> tend to read more of the Mediveal English Texts.
I've read Kinsella's translation. It is very readable.
If you want to read a little deepr into this, may I recommend K.H. Jackson, _The Oldest Irish Tradion: A Window on the Iron Age_ (Cambridge, 1964, no ISBN #)? Jackson discusses the historical background of the Tain Bo Cuailnge, & how it can be used to understand the world of the Irish Iron Age.
> Thank you for the info
You're welcome.
OT: Why is it today my cat appears at my side, loudly meowing, every time I try to write a post to/.?
> I have never found a good verse translation of the original Welsh tales (Mabinogion et al). that also inspired the Tolkien mythos,
> so if anyone has a suggetion
Could it be because the Mabinogion & related stories *weren't* written in verse but prose?
Helpful information follows:
I have two translations of the Mabinogion in my library: one by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones in the Everyman's Library series, & a more recent translation by Patrick K. Ford. Of the two, Ford's is done in contemporary American English, & I remember finding it slightly more readable. Both contain a translation of the related tale ``Culhwlch and Olwen", which contains the earlier Welsh description of Arthur before the late Medieval poets recast him as the ideal monarch.
Speaking of Arthur, there are translations of Aneiryn's ``Gododdin", the earliest Welsh poem which mentions Arthur in the middle of describing an unsuccessful North Country battle against the Saissons, aka Anglo-Saxons. K.H. Jackson's translation is useful for the extensive notes.
And if you want to get truly serious about Welsh traditions, hunt down a copy of Rachel Bromwich, _Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Welsh Triads_ (2nd, ed., University of Wales, 1978), ISBN 0-7083-0690-X. Bromwich's edition is a treasure trove of information, aswell as including an index of most of the personages of Welsh legendry.
> This interview certainly doesn't
> instill confidence in his ability to maintain the tree.
Remember that English is NOT Marcelo's first language, so perhaps he is far more chatty in Portuguese. (This is a hint to the Brazilian readers of/.: if you know of any.br interviews with Marcelo, please share them.)
But as another follow-up post mentioned, this was a stupid question. David Weinehall has been maintaining the 2.0.x tree for a few months now, & might become ``The Man" due to seniority. (And there's a few other developers who have been involved for close to a decade, & they might want first grab.)
In short, there's a pretty deep bench of talent available to take over Linux kernel development should the proverbial bus flatten Linus & Alan.
This has been an issue that has puzzled me for the longest time: if your company has a program that runs on -- say -- DOS 5.0, & you can't afford to pay someone to port it to Win98/Win2000/Linux/BSD/whatever, why not leave the aging 486 running this ancient program alone?
Either you have an idiot in charge of IT who wants every computer at the same iteration of hardware & OS for ``simplicity" reasons, or you have a bunch of lazy users who don't want to leave their cube to walk over to the old computer to run this legacy application, then move the data to a shared directory from whence they can work on it at their cube.
And if a case can be made that it has to run on several current-generation computers, then it's justification to be rewritten & migrated to the office standard.
Something just doesn't compute here. Unless this is MS's way of hiding the fact they have to leave a butt-load of legacy function calls because no one in Redmond is sure they aren't being called in some dusty corner of Word or Excell that no one still working there understands.
>> Hire someone from a company known for its inability to make secure software, and put him in charge of what his company
>> always did poorly.
>
> Or, even better, people could check what in the hell they are talking about! But then again, this is Slashdot, no fact checking
> [go2vanguard.com] required:
[posts resume]
Yet for many seasoned sysadmins concerned for security, having Microsoft on your resume is what a character in ``Dilbert" once called an indelible stain on your resume: it is going to work against you, rather than for you. And you better be able to do some persuasive talking to explain why under your tenure MS failed implement its own software in a secure manner.
In my home town, several million dollars got flushed down the toilet on a lousy implimentation for a new enterprise software package for the city water bureau. (And much of that loss could have been avoided if the old system had been running in parallel with the new one.)
If it was just due to a garden variety daisy-chain, then there's little to learn from what happened at Ameritrade. (Except maybe get as much money up front when one accepts a consulting job with bad juju associated with it.;-) But if this was just a garden variety daisy-chain, it would be useful to know this before the MS fan-boys started pointing to this case as a reason ``Linux doesn't work."
> I didn't see one thing in that memo which was a big deal.
I did: Ameritrade tried to migrate to Linux servers & failed. And once the CIO left (obviously due to the failed migration), MS marketroids swept in & convinced them to go with Win2000.
I'd like to know a little more about this failure. We need to learn from the mistakes made here, in order to improve Linux. (And when those Win 2000 servers start breaking, for the next person to come up with a better Linux/BSD implementation.)
> I don't know if it's "normal business practice", but I have never seen such artistic dancing around the questions.
Naw, this is just middling. Not that I have any love for billg, but I have seen worse:
In spring of 2000, the company I worked for declared chapter 11 bankrupcy. The next day there was an all-hands meeting with the CEO. It took three different people asking ever more pointedly the question ``Is the stock we own in this corporation now worthless?" before he would provide a yes or no answer. And he said it with a look on his face as if he had just been forced to admit he, indeed had sexual relations with the family dog.
And I'm sure there are even more horrific stories out there about the obsfucation TPHBTB[1] practice on their minions.
(Ugh. I deserve a -1 for that title. Maybe someone will be nice enough to give me +2 for being Informative.)
Calvino is not, per se, an SF writer, but if you like Lem or Dick, his philosophical & folklorish style of writing will lend himself to you.
The three titles I own of his are:
Invisible Cities (an allegory based on a fictional dialogue between Marco Polo & Kublai Khan)
The Castle of Crossed Destinies (the telling of several stories based on cards from a Tarot deck)
If on a Winter's Night a Travel (selections from several imaginary books . . . well, you have to read it for yourself to understand)
And if Calvino has sated your weird literature taste, then there is Milorad Pavic. His _Dictionary of the Khazars_ evokes HPL's own creation of the _Necronomicon_.
Geoff
Re:MS doesn't actually turn a profit.
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 2
Hmm. Point by point:
> --How so? Well, look at their taxes. They don't pay any tax on profit because they report no profit.--
> Well, checking their financial reports for the last 3 years shows they paid more than 30% of their Revenue as tax. Check the
> audited financial statements.
armb, in another article in this thread, mentioned the URL http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/4526.html , where the author states that all taxable income was sheltered from taxes due to providing employee stock options.
> -- How? They claim the value of stock options used to pay employees as expense. Between that and cash outlays, they are
> losing money, and have been for years.--
> Actually, what is claimed as a liability is the money reserved for income tax payments on exercised options. Options are
> considered compensation, but the amount of the compensation cannot be determined until they are exercised, therefore
> Microsoft has to hold money in a long term liability account to cover the expense of the exercising of options as they occur.
Smoke & mirrors. If MS is not writing checks or sending cash to Uncle Sam, then they aren't paying taxes. No matter what the justification is.
> --The stock market is not a source of investment for them, but primary revenue.--
> Actually, they lost money on investments this year but still have a positive Net Revenue (i.e. Profit).
True. So it has been reported.
> -- They are being supported by the wishful thinking of their employees, who still think the stock will resume its growth, and so
> are willing to accept stock options as pay.--
> Microsoft pays salaries on par with the leaders in the industry, and gives employee great benefits as well. The fact that they
> grant options in addition to that is even better.
It's been a well-known fact that MS pays lower salaries than other software companies; they can get away with this because (1) they can play the ``Don't you want to work at Microsoft?" card; & (2) the above-mentioned stock options. Again, one of armb's URLs metnions this:
``A significant portion of the wages Microsoft pays to its employees comes in the form of stock options rather
than in cash. Compared to the rest of the industry, the amount of cash Microsoft pays its programmers is at
best mediocre. It attracts and retains employees via stock options."
You wouldn't happen to work for Microsoft, now would you? Maybe in their FUB^WPublic Relations unit? In any case, it's noteworthy that this is your first posting.
Geoff
Re:Interesting use of statistics here..
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 2
> The point the article made was that, in order to justify it's high stock price, Microsoft needs large yearly increases in revenue.
And the investment industry needs MS to declare large yearly increases in revenue, too. At least this is what I concluded when I heard CNBC's analysis of MS's last quarter earnings report. (Which was approximately, ``MS declared earnings of 23 cents per share, but since they took a write-off due to loses on investment, they actually made 43 cents per share last quarter, which wasn't far from the expected earnings.")
It's bad enough when a company fudges its earnings report; it really is bad when the analysts -- who are responsible for making these reports clear to understand -- do the same thing.
> If it is good enough for "Big Blue" it is good enough for you.
>
> Just show your manager IBM's Linux sites. For most I doubt that they will need more convincing that Linux is ready for prime
> time in the desktop market.
The URL you posted actually lists IBM *server* implementations, not desktop ones. And from a presentation I heard 20 September at the Oregon Graduate Institute given by Gerrit Huizenga &
Larry Kessler, from IBM's Linux Technology Center to the Oregon IEEE/Computer Society meeting, IBM will be focussing on the server side, NOT the desktop. (Huizenga actually said during his presentation that Linux on the desktop was dead.)
You can find the pdf of the slides used at this presentation at http://ieee.or.com/pastprograms.html, first entry at the top.
> Oh no, they're more worried about trying to create a good show than trying to be PC to pander to all the whiny wacko liberals
> who think it's their right to force their views down everyone's throat.
Yeah, right. And why is it every Libertarian/Cnservative/Right wing nut I talk to says this kind of thing right before THEY shove their opinion down *my* throat?
> Ok, mod me down, I'm not PC
About the only ``politically correct" people who exist are the guys who take pride in being called ``Dittoheads." And laugh about being told that their views are offensive; because they believe it is politically correct to be offensive & insulting.
> These people are resistant to "counter-brainwashing"... as crude a term as it is.
Not what I meant.
If we have to go into Afghanistan to get bin Laden & his cronies, I feel the wisest course would be (1) after we have proven to the Islamic world that, yes he is responsible & we have the right under Islamic law to exact justice or revenge, & (2) that we are going to target for him as narrowly as possible.
The first is an important point because no society wants to bear the burden of sheltering criminals; Freedom-fighters or heros yes. And if the US can win this struggle of defining whom bin Laden is -- or at least begin to compete for listeners & the minds & hearts with bin Laden -- the rest of the Islamic world (many of whom have no love for this murderous fanatic) would begin to move away from him. His organization receives one to two million dollars in alms collected at various mosques in the Arab world; some kind of dialogue or address to these donors could begin to reduce this income.
And the second needs to be kept in mind. No one wants to get involved in another's war, & if the Afghani & other peoples who are neighbors to these terrorist organizations understand they won't be the victims of indiscriminate strikes, they may contribute with intelligence as to where these bases & camps are, & allow the US to strike hard at them.
None of this is easy. But to send several hundred cruise missles into Afghanistan & declare this act a victory won't win the war either. It will only set in motion another round of terrorism & reprisals. We need to act on several fronts -- both militarily & in the realm of public opinion -- in the relevant areas to isolate, wear down & destroy these peoples. Not just one.
> I would really like to think that some of the so-called "leaders" have an awareness of what went wrong in Vietnam. But I
> think I have a different idea of exactly what that was.
I think you have put your finger exactly on why the US response won't work. But I disagree that we cannot win this war.
IIRC, Mao Tse tung (or another successful guerrilla leader) once remarked, ``Our troops are like fish in the sea." What the US needs to do is to find a way to drain that sea of support. One way to do this is to wage a war of words to convince the neighbors, friends & families of these terrorists that they are criminals, which will at the least improve our means of information-gathering, & at best put peer pressure on the terrorists to desist from their activities.
And US culture -- noteably Madison Avenue & Hollywood -- has conquered the world. (With only a few exceptions like a cult following in Japanese anime.) If the US cannot win this kind of war, then there is something truely wrong with my country.
And as the original link -- & ``The Man" -- has pointed out, the US will not win this war thru military superiority. Even if Afghanistan is turned into a sea of radioactive glass with the nuclear option[1], there are enough other breeding grounds for terrorism & hate to swarm out of like malarial mosquitos, & will prolong Bush's war for generations.
And that will result with a world like the one Joe Haldeman describes at the beginning of _Forever Peace_ -- with the affluent First World of the US, Europe & their allies fighting a destructive & high-tech war against teh other 70% of humanity.
Geoff
[1] Or was I the only person, when I kept hearing the phrase ``a day that wil live in infamy" on 11 Sept., recalled the first time this phrase was spoken began a process that ended with Hiroshima & Nagasaki?
> Hint, XP isn't going to be the tonic to get the tech sector back on its feet. MS isn't the be all and end all of the stock market.
> And even if a sushi chef of a judge diced MS into a ton of Baby Bills you wouldn't get a recession.
Pundits keep saying that the tech sector will recover once Windows XP is released . . . only that ain't gonna happen.
Why? There isn't anything in XP that will make a user happy with either Windows NT or Win 2000 want to upgrade. Yes, there's a few bug fixes, but most of the stuff that has changed either (a) locks the user into depending more on MS; or (b) encroaches on her/his fair use rights to the software. And this has been pointed out not only in the computer press, but in such media outlets like CNBC.
And I suspect the Shrub knows this. This is why his underlings are trying to walk away from this suit as fast as they can. Otherwise, another rich buddy of the Shrub may suffer some financial hurt -- which he doesn't want to see.
I bought this book about a year ago, & also read it cover-to-cover. It is good in explaining the hardware issues with SCSI, but it hads a major oversight.
When it talked about Operating Systems, & SCSI programming, it was extremely Wintel centric.
The point of my criticism is not that Fields, et alia, devoted room to getting SCSI to work with Windows 95, NT & 2000, but that they kept in a number of pages from the first edition that talked about SCSI & DOS. (Who is going to lay out several hundred dollars in hardware then run an antiquated OS with it?) This wouldn't be so irritating if it weren't for how little some space they devoted to UNIX-like systems -- less than five pages in total, which amounted to saying ``there are issues, & learn what they are by talking to your OS vendor."
The authors devoted an entire chapter to writing SCSI drivers under Windows using one vendor's SDK, but failed to even mention that one could study how to code for UNIX by looking at *BSD or Linux code -- that was available for study to all.
And as pathetic as the UNIX coverage was, Mac SCSI users received only a pair of by-the-way mentions in the text. And the hardware discussions focussed on common, Intel-based systems; for instance, there is no mention of the Mac 25-pin SCSI cable. Perhaps a beginning SysAdmin could use Appendix A to troubleshoot her/his Sparc, PowerPC, or Alpha systems, but I would recommend Evi Nemeth, et alia _Unix System Administration Handbook_ as the first reference to turn to. Nemeth's book discusses much of the same hardware issues in less space, & in a far more hardware-agnostic manner.
And the material on the CD, although Linux-oreinted, is out of date -- as a simple ``ls -l" will show.
There are strengths in this book, but the weaknesses in it bothered me far more. I hope in the next edition much of the DOS-related stuff is flushed out, & far more useful UNIX-related information is included. And that would make it a definite buy for any computer nerd's library, instead of a strong maybe.
You read a copy? Is the following author's allegation true?
> The CSS License
> Is only available under NDA, or so it seems. The DVD CCA website makes a few.pdf files available with procedures, but not the
> license itself. There are a number of references to NDAs on the DVD FLLC website (FLLC is the Format Logo Licensing
> Corporation, which apparently licenses the DVD logo you see on every player and DVD disc).
> In a presentation, John Hoy, president of DVD CCA, mentions that the CSS license consists of "218 carefully crafted pages",
> and until someone violates the NDA and leaks the actual document (both Lemuria.org and Cryptome would surely be
> happy to publish it) . . .
It's hard to obey the rules when there are barriers to learn what they are.
> I have to say - SO WHAT. Every one is entitled to their opinion whether others agree with it or not. If he wants to vent at the
> opposition then let him. I bet half the people on Slashdot have done the same at one time or another. I know I have.
The difference in atmosphere between/. & LT was the fact that the editors posted under their own names. And Reichard knew this -- I remember reading several posts he made in the talk-backs under his own name.
(And why is it there are 124 posts in the LT talk-back forum, most of which are critical of Reichard, & a few promising to boycott LT, but Reichard has not responded to a single one of them under his own name?)
But was even more pernicious was the fact that LT appeared to have a number of trolls with a pro-Microsoft bent, a la Steve Bartko on the Compuserve forums from years past. A large number of LT readers honestly thought that this was part of a FUD attack encouraged either by Microsoft or people outside of MS who felt their livelihood depended on that company. And now it is clear that a hack journalist eager for more clicks was stirring up trouble . . . & the folks at MS have been watching this & smiling at the confusion on the other side.
Reichard has proven he is no friend of Linux. If Internet.com were wise, they'd let him go.
> Marketing people are slime, they should all be forced to spend large amounts of time with John Tesh.
But they'd LOVE to hear Tesh -- just ask Steff. You need to submit them to something that will give them pain. I really pissed one marektroid off with a Sex Pistols tape, so that should give you a clue.
I owned a Jesus & Mary Chain tape around that time. Maybe I should have played that next . . .
Slashdot Mirror
> I have a question for people using AfterStep or WM nowdays - how do you stay compatable with KDE and Gnome based
> software?
As another poster remarked, the Qt & Gtk libraries run just fine under AfterStep, so at most all I have to do is type something like ``gcalc &" to run a given application. (The only Gtk app I still use is Electric Eyes, which I configured to launch from Wharf.)
As for using some of the benefits Gnome offers behind the scenes, AS has a ``Gnome" module that handles all of that.
Geoff
> Heinlein wasn't even an officer.
>
> He was accepted to the Naval Academy, but was discharged (in his sophmore year iirc)for medical reasons (a blown out
> knee), while Haldeman was an infantryman in Viet Nam.
>
> Heinlein tried to sign up during WWII, but was refused, again, on medical grounds.
In response to my earlier statement, I've read one person who stated he was not an officer, one who stated he was, & one who stated he was a ``sapper", a rank not usually found in the US military. To settle this difference in opion, I pulled out my copy of L. Sprague de Camp's _Science Fiction Handbook_, which I have found to be an invaluable reference for this genre in the late 1930's & 1940's period, when he was a participant & knew almost all fo the major figures.
de Camp wrote:
``Robert Anston Heinlein was born in Missouri in 1907, was reared in Kansas City, Mo., and graduated from the US Naval Academy in 1929. He served with the fleet but was retired for physical disability in 1934. He tried silver-mining in Colorado, professional politics in California, and finally writing. When he sold ``Life Line" to _Astounding_ in 1939 his thought (like that of many other beginning writers misled by initial success) was, why hasn't somebody told me about this? It beats working! During the war he worked as a civilian engineer in the U. S. Navy, along with Asimov and me [de Camp], but returned to writing afterwards."
So my comments about his being an officer were correct. (Amazing, considering my memory.) And this provided him a different viewpoint from Haldeman, whose attitudes about war are very clear in his numerous novels.
Geoff
Open Source or not, I have to admit to wasting more time on this game than any single one since Warcraft.
And what I find nice about FreeCiv is that I can play it in one Virtual Window, go to another VW to do stuff, then return to where I left off in FreeCiv. It nicely works with the multi-tasking environment of Linux, unlike the Loki ports I have tried.
Geoff
> Also, any comparison to Starship Troopers (the book), is merely superficial resemblance.
>
> Johnny Rico, in ST, is the device Heinlein uses to show us the effects of a "limitless war" upon both people and societies, when
> confronted with an enemy so inhuman that they are merely "Bugs" (a device Scott Card has also used and improved upon in
> his "Enders" series).....
> However, in FW, William Mandela IS the story. His POV dominates the entire book (as was Haldeman's intention).
I think you miss an important point here that makes the contrast between the two books both deep & insightful: Heinlein was an officer, & Haldeman was a grunt.
My grandfather served in the First World War in the American Expeditionary Force, where he was injured by mustard gas. According to my mother, afterwards he read a book or two, & complained that these books DIDN'T describe the war he was in. I'm sure at some point Haldeman read Heinlein's book, & not only came to the same conclusion, but found the inspiration to write his own book.
Geoff
P.S. Does anyone else remember the board game ``Warp Wars" from the late 1970's? The creator admitted he was inspired in his time-dilation mechanics by Haldeman's novel.
> However that and the "Tain Bo Cuailnge" (Oxford press) as translated by Thomas Kinsella are the only Celtic books I own. I
/.?
> tend to read more of the Mediveal English Texts.
I've read Kinsella's translation. It is very readable.
If you want to read a little deepr into this, may I recommend K.H. Jackson, _The Oldest Irish Tradion: A Window on the Iron Age_ (Cambridge, 1964, no ISBN #)? Jackson discusses the historical background of the Tain Bo Cuailnge, & how it can be used to understand the world of the Irish Iron Age.
> Thank you for the info
You're welcome.
OT: Why is it today my cat appears at my side, loudly meowing, every time I try to write a post to
Geoff
> I have never found a good verse translation of the original Welsh tales (Mabinogion et al). that also inspired the Tolkien mythos,
> so if anyone has a suggetion
Could it be because the Mabinogion & related stories *weren't* written in verse but prose?
Helpful information follows:
I have two translations of the Mabinogion in my library: one by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones in the Everyman's Library series, & a more recent translation by Patrick K. Ford. Of the two, Ford's is done in contemporary American English, & I remember finding it slightly more readable. Both contain a translation of the related tale ``Culhwlch and Olwen", which contains the earlier Welsh description of Arthur before the late Medieval poets recast him as the ideal monarch.
Speaking of Arthur, there are translations of Aneiryn's ``Gododdin", the earliest Welsh poem which mentions Arthur in the middle of describing an unsuccessful North Country battle against the Saissons, aka Anglo-Saxons. K.H. Jackson's translation is useful for the extensive notes.
And if you want to get truly serious about Welsh traditions, hunt down a copy of Rachel Bromwich, _Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Welsh Triads_ (2nd, ed., University of Wales, 1978), ISBN 0-7083-0690-X. Bromwich's edition is a treasure trove of information, aswell as including an index of most of the personages of Welsh legendry.
Geoff
> This interview certainly doesn't
/.: if you know of any .br interviews with Marcelo, please share them.)
> instill confidence in his ability to maintain the tree.
Remember that English is NOT Marcelo's first language, so perhaps he is far more chatty in Portuguese. (This is a hint to the Brazilian readers of
But as another follow-up post mentioned, this was a stupid question. David Weinehall has been maintaining the 2.0.x tree for a few months now, & might become ``The Man" due to seniority. (And there's a few other developers who have been involved for close to a decade, & they might want first grab.)
In short, there's a pretty deep bench of talent available to take over Linux kernel development should the proverbial bus flatten Linus & Alan.
Geoff
This has been an issue that has puzzled me for the longest time: if your company has a program that runs on -- say -- DOS 5.0, & you can't afford to pay someone to port it to Win98/Win2000/Linux/BSD/whatever, why not leave the aging 486 running this ancient program alone?
Either you have an idiot in charge of IT who wants every computer at the same iteration of hardware & OS for ``simplicity" reasons, or you have a bunch of lazy users who don't want to leave their cube to walk over to the old computer to run this legacy application, then move the data to a shared directory from whence they can work on it at their cube.
And if a case can be made that it has to run on several current-generation computers, then it's justification to be rewritten & migrated to the office standard.
Something just doesn't compute here. Unless this is MS's way of hiding the fact they have to leave a butt-load of legacy function calls because no one in Redmond is sure they aren't being called in some dusty corner of Word or Excell that no one still working there understands.
Geoff
>> Hire someone from a company known for its inability to make secure software, and put him in charge of what his company
>> always did poorly.
>
> Or, even better, people could check what in the hell they are talking about! But then again, this is Slashdot, no fact checking
> [go2vanguard.com] required:
[posts resume]
Yet for many seasoned sysadmins concerned for security, having Microsoft on your resume is what a character in ``Dilbert" once called an indelible stain on your resume: it is going to work against you, rather than for you. And you better be able to do some persuasive talking to explain why under your tenure MS failed implement its own software in a secure manner.
Geoff
Gaudior, you speak truth.
;-) But if this was just a garden variety daisy-chain, it would be useful to know this before the MS fan-boys started pointing to this case as a reason ``Linux doesn't work."
In my home town, several million dollars got flushed down the toilet on a lousy implimentation for a new enterprise software package for the city water bureau. (And much of that loss could have been avoided if the old system had been running in parallel with the new one.)
If it was just due to a garden variety daisy-chain, then there's little to learn from what happened at Ameritrade. (Except maybe get as much money up front when one accepts a consulting job with bad juju associated with it.
Geoff
> I didn't see one thing in that memo which was a big deal.
I did: Ameritrade tried to migrate to Linux servers & failed. And once the CIO left (obviously due to the failed migration), MS marketroids swept in & convinced them to go with Win2000.
I'd like to know a little more about this failure. We need to learn from the mistakes made here, in order to improve Linux. (And when those Win 2000 servers start breaking, for the next person to come up with a better Linux/BSD implementation.)
Geoff
> I don't know if it's "normal business practice", but I have never seen such artistic dancing around the questions.
Naw, this is just middling. Not that I have any love for billg, but I have seen worse:
In spring of 2000, the company I worked for declared chapter 11 bankrupcy. The next day there was an all-hands meeting with the CEO. It took three different people asking ever more pointedly the question ``Is the stock we own in this corporation now worthless?" before he would provide a yes or no answer. And he said it with a look on his face as if he had just been forced to admit he, indeed had sexual relations with the family dog.
And I'm sure there are even more horrific stories out there about the obsfucation TPHBTB[1] practice on their minions.
Geoff
[1]TPHBTB == The Pointed Haired Powers That Be
(Ugh. I deserve a -1 for that title. Maybe someone will be nice enough to give me +2 for being Informative.)
Calvino is not, per se, an SF writer, but if you like Lem or Dick, his philosophical & folklorish style of writing will lend himself to you.
The three titles I own of his are:
Invisible Cities (an allegory based on a fictional dialogue between Marco Polo & Kublai Khan)
The Castle of Crossed Destinies (the telling of several stories based on cards from a Tarot deck)
If on a Winter's Night a Travel (selections from several imaginary books . . . well, you have to read it for yourself to understand)
And if Calvino has sated your weird literature taste, then there is Milorad Pavic. His _Dictionary of the Khazars_ evokes HPL's own creation of the _Necronomicon_.
Geoff
Hmm. Point by point:
l , where the author states that all taxable income was sheltered from taxes due to providing employee stock options.
> --How so? Well, look at their taxes. They don't pay any tax on profit because they report no profit.--
> Well, checking their financial reports for the last 3 years shows they paid more than 30% of their Revenue as tax. Check the
> audited financial statements.
armb, in another article in this thread, mentioned the URL http://www.ecommercetimes.com/perl/story/4526.htm
> -- How? They claim the value of stock options used to pay employees as expense. Between that and cash outlays, they are
> losing money, and have been for years.--
> Actually, what is claimed as a liability is the money reserved for income tax payments on exercised options. Options are
> considered compensation, but the amount of the compensation cannot be determined until they are exercised, therefore
> Microsoft has to hold money in a long term liability account to cover the expense of the exercising of options as they occur.
Smoke & mirrors. If MS is not writing checks or sending cash to Uncle Sam, then they aren't paying taxes. No matter what the justification is.
> --The stock market is not a source of investment for them, but primary revenue.--
> Actually, they lost money on investments this year but still have a positive Net Revenue (i.e. Profit).
True. So it has been reported.
> -- They are being supported by the wishful thinking of their employees, who still think the stock will resume its growth, and so
> are willing to accept stock options as pay.--
> Microsoft pays salaries on par with the leaders in the industry, and gives employee great benefits as well. The fact that they
> grant options in addition to that is even better.
It's been a well-known fact that MS pays lower salaries than other software companies; they can get away with this because (1) they can play the ``Don't you want to work at Microsoft?" card; & (2) the above-mentioned stock options. Again, one of armb's URLs metnions this:
``A significant portion of the wages Microsoft pays to its employees comes in the form of stock options rather
than in cash. Compared to the rest of the industry, the amount of cash Microsoft pays its programmers is at
best mediocre. It attracts and retains employees via stock options."
You wouldn't happen to work for Microsoft, now would you? Maybe in their FUB^WPublic Relations unit? In any case, it's noteworthy that this is your first posting.
Geoff
> The point the article made was that, in order to justify it's high stock price, Microsoft needs large yearly increases in revenue.
And the investment industry needs MS to declare large yearly increases in revenue, too. At least this is what I concluded when I heard CNBC's analysis of MS's last quarter earnings report. (Which was approximately, ``MS declared earnings of 23 cents per share, but since they took a write-off due to loses on investment, they actually made 43 cents per share last quarter, which wasn't far from the expected earnings.")
It's bad enough when a company fudges its earnings report; it really is bad when the analysts -- who are responsible for making these reports clear to understand -- do the same thing.
Geoff
> If it is good enough for "Big Blue" it is good enough for you.
>
> Just show your manager IBM's Linux sites. For most I doubt that they will need more convincing that Linux is ready for prime
> time in the desktop market.
The URL you posted actually lists IBM *server* implementations, not desktop ones. And from a presentation I heard 20 September at the Oregon Graduate Institute given by Gerrit Huizenga &
Larry Kessler, from IBM's Linux Technology Center to the Oregon IEEE/Computer Society meeting, IBM will be focussing on the server side, NOT the desktop. (Huizenga actually said during his presentation that Linux on the desktop was dead.)
You can find the pdf of the slides used at this presentation at http://ieee.or.com/pastprograms.html, first entry at the top.
Geoff
> Oh no, they're more worried about trying to create a good show than trying to be PC to pander to all the whiny wacko liberals
> who think it's their right to force their views down everyone's throat.
Yeah, right. And why is it every Libertarian/Cnservative/Right wing nut I talk to says this kind of thing right before THEY shove their opinion down *my* throat?
> Ok, mod me down, I'm not PC
About the only ``politically correct" people who exist are the guys who take pride in being called ``Dittoheads." And laugh about being told that their views are offensive; because they believe it is politically correct to be offensive & insulting.
Geoff
> These people are resistant to "counter-brainwashing"... as crude a term as it is.
Not what I meant.
If we have to go into Afghanistan to get bin Laden & his cronies, I feel the wisest course would be (1) after we have proven to the Islamic world that, yes he is responsible & we have the right under Islamic law to exact justice or revenge, & (2) that we are going to target for him as narrowly as possible.
The first is an important point because no society wants to bear the burden of sheltering criminals; Freedom-fighters or heros yes. And if the US can win this struggle of defining whom bin Laden is -- or at least begin to compete for listeners & the minds & hearts with bin Laden -- the rest of the Islamic world (many of whom have no love for this murderous fanatic) would begin to move away from him. His organization receives one to two million dollars in alms collected at various mosques in the Arab world; some kind of dialogue or address to these donors could begin to reduce this income.
And the second needs to be kept in mind. No one wants to get involved in another's war, & if the Afghani & other peoples who are neighbors to these terrorist organizations understand they won't be the victims of indiscriminate strikes, they may contribute with intelligence as to where these bases & camps are, & allow the US to strike hard at them.
None of this is easy. But to send several hundred cruise missles into Afghanistan & declare this act a victory won't win the war either. It will only set in motion another round of terrorism & reprisals. We need to act on several fronts -- both militarily & in the realm of public opinion -- in the relevant areas to isolate, wear down & destroy these peoples. Not just one.
Geoff
> I would really like to think that some of the so-called "leaders" have an awareness of what went wrong in Vietnam. But I
> think I have a different idea of exactly what that was.
I think you have put your finger exactly on why the US response won't work. But I disagree that we cannot win this war.
IIRC, Mao Tse tung (or another successful guerrilla leader) once remarked, ``Our troops are like fish in the sea." What the US needs to do is to find a way to drain that sea of support. One way to do this is to wage a war of words to convince the neighbors, friends & families of these terrorists that they are criminals, which will at the least improve our means of information-gathering, & at best put peer pressure on the terrorists to desist from their activities.
And US culture -- noteably Madison Avenue & Hollywood -- has conquered the world. (With only a few exceptions like a cult following in Japanese anime.) If the US cannot win this kind of war, then there is something truely wrong with my country.
And as the original link -- & ``The Man" -- has pointed out, the US will not win this war thru military superiority. Even if Afghanistan is turned into a sea of radioactive glass with the nuclear option[1], there are enough other breeding grounds for terrorism & hate to swarm out of like malarial mosquitos, & will prolong Bush's war for generations.
And that will result with a world like the one Joe Haldeman describes at the beginning of _Forever Peace_ -- with the affluent First World of the US, Europe & their allies fighting a destructive & high-tech war against teh other 70% of humanity.
Geoff
[1] Or was I the only person, when I kept hearing the phrase ``a day that wil live in infamy" on 11 Sept., recalled the first time this phrase was spoken began a process that ended with Hiroshima & Nagasaki?
> Hint, XP isn't going to be the tonic to get the tech sector back on its feet. MS isn't the be all and end all of the stock market.
> And even if a sushi chef of a judge diced MS into a ton of Baby Bills you wouldn't get a recession.
Pundits keep saying that the tech sector will recover once Windows XP is released . . . only that ain't gonna happen.
Why? There isn't anything in XP that will make a user happy with either Windows NT or Win 2000 want to upgrade. Yes, there's a few bug fixes, but most of the stuff that has changed either (a) locks the user into depending more on MS; or (b) encroaches on her/his fair use rights to the software. And this has been pointed out not only in the computer press, but in such media outlets like CNBC.
And I suspect the Shrub knows this. This is why his underlings are trying to walk away from this suit as fast as they can. Otherwise, another rich buddy of the Shrub may suffer some financial hurt -- which he doesn't want to see.
Geoff
I bought this book about a year ago, & also read it cover-to-cover. It is good in explaining the hardware issues with SCSI, but it hads a major oversight.
When it talked about Operating Systems, & SCSI programming, it was extremely Wintel centric.
The point of my criticism is not that Fields, et alia, devoted room to getting SCSI to work with Windows 95, NT & 2000, but that they kept in a number of pages from the first edition that talked about SCSI & DOS. (Who is going to lay out several hundred dollars in hardware then run an antiquated OS with it?) This wouldn't be so irritating if it weren't for how little some space they devoted to UNIX-like systems -- less than five pages in total, which amounted to saying ``there are issues, & learn what they are by talking to your OS vendor."
The authors devoted an entire chapter to writing SCSI drivers under Windows using one vendor's SDK, but failed to even mention that one could study how to code for UNIX by looking at *BSD or Linux code -- that was available for study to all.
And as pathetic as the UNIX coverage was, Mac SCSI users received only a pair of by-the-way mentions in the text. And the hardware discussions focussed on common, Intel-based systems; for instance, there is no mention of the Mac 25-pin SCSI cable. Perhaps a beginning SysAdmin could use Appendix A to troubleshoot her/his Sparc, PowerPC, or Alpha systems, but I would recommend Evi Nemeth, et alia _Unix System Administration Handbook_ as the first reference to turn to. Nemeth's book discusses much of the same hardware issues in less space, & in a far more hardware-agnostic manner.
And the material on the CD, although Linux-oreinted, is out of date -- as a simple ``ls -l" will show.
There are strengths in this book, but the weaknesses in it bothered me far more. I hope in the next edition much of the DOS-related stuff is flushed out, & far more useful UNIX-related information is included. And that would make it a definite buy for any computer nerd's library, instead of a strong maybe.
Geoff
> "At regular intervals I take stuff from the -ac tree and feed it to Linus."
> Take that out of context and think about it.
Just because Alan Cox is east of the US doesn't mean he is a snake.
And why are all of you handing me my coat?
Geoff
> Upon reading of the 100+ page license for CSS
.pdf files available with procedures, but not the
You read a copy? Is the following author's allegation true?
> The CSS License
> Is only available under NDA, or so it seems. The DVD CCA website makes a few
> license itself. There are a number of references to NDAs on the DVD FLLC website (FLLC is the Format Logo Licensing
> Corporation, which apparently licenses the DVD logo you see on every player and DVD disc).
> In a presentation, John Hoy, president of DVD CCA, mentions that the CSS license consists of "218 carefully crafted pages",
> and until someone violates the NDA and leaks the actual document (both Lemuria.org and Cryptome would surely be
> happy to publish it) . . .
It's hard to obey the rules when there are barriers to learn what they are.
Geoff
> I have to say - SO WHAT. Every one is entitled to their opinion whether others agree with it or not. If he wants to vent at the
/. & LT was the fact that the editors posted under their own names. And Reichard knew this -- I remember reading several posts he made in the talk-backs under his own name.
> opposition then let him. I bet half the people on Slashdot have done the same at one time or another. I know I have.
The difference in atmosphere between
(And why is it there are 124 posts in the LT talk-back forum, most of which are critical of Reichard, & a few promising to boycott LT, but Reichard has not responded to a single one of them under his own name?)
But was even more pernicious was the fact that LT appeared to have a number of trolls with a pro-Microsoft bent, a la Steve Bartko on the Compuserve forums from years past. A large number of LT readers honestly thought that this was part of a FUD attack encouraged either by Microsoft or people outside of MS who felt their livelihood depended on that company. And now it is clear that a hack journalist eager for more clicks was stirring up trouble . . . & the folks at MS have been watching this & smiling at the confusion on the other side.
Reichard has proven he is no friend of Linux. If Internet.com were wise, they'd let him go.
Geoff
> Marketing people are slime, they should all be forced to spend large amounts of time with John Tesh.
But they'd LOVE to hear Tesh -- just ask Steff. You need to submit them to something that will give them pain. I really pissed one marektroid off with a Sex Pistols tape, so that should give you a clue.
I owned a Jesus & Mary Chain tape around that time. Maybe I should have played that next . . .
Geoff