Too Much Firefox in the News

Again, the Open-Source world is trying so very hard to compete with itself and, in some cases, its own backers.

No-one with half a brain really thinks that all this programming time is free, as we all need day jobs from which to shirk off in order to work on OSS projects -- unless our company is throwing its good-will tax write-off money into that fickle wind of funding Open Source Development, of course, in which case you may need to plan for the eventual drying-up of said funding or the moment when the mob grows weary/bored/whatever (the Caldera effect -- except this mob will not be upset if you ignore them back).

Given the precarious, and in some cases oblivious, attitude that OSS as a mob has toward the business that indirectly feeds it in our obscenely capitalist society, it's remarkable that business doesn't lay its golden foot down more and make its wishes even more known. After all, business isn't particularly overtly concerned with much beyond its bottom line; we've selectively bred out anything less focused.

Maybe I'm just not as tolerant as the average business, but it sould surprise me when considering the goal of business..

I'm getting increasingly sick of the mozilla people - all hail them for the kind and benvolent gods they must truly be, etc - for shooting themselves in the left foot to promote their right foot. What kind of growing business actively works to cut itself out of the picture? It's mind-numblingly stupid, especially so for people who're so otherwise gifted.

Doubly so disappointing is the fact that the bloated piece of software that is Mozilla may soon finally ship with all the features of its older brother Netscape, and may finally be a bona fide Upgrade to the older software (for it can only be an upgrade if it has new stuff and omits no non-buggy stuff).

Apparently having a project nearing a point where it's indistinguishable from 'working' (for some definitions of 'working') is not an interesting goal for the Chrome-and-Theming mozilla crowd. They want to now cut the one bloated app into two - no, three bloated apps, maybe more - and have you grab all of these seprately to install.

Do they understand that we've worked with the Open Source Community before, and really don't trust any open source product for compatibility unless every part of that product is released from the same build process?

It almost seems that Compatibility is considered Gauche in the Open Source world, although Open Source people aren't as bad as Free Software People - thus the term "this week's X" in the sense of "unless you grab this week's GNUN X package, don't expect it to be compatible with Y" - and we're largely becoming less and less willing to try this stuff without some assurance that it's not going to be a waste of time. That's what we get in Mozilla that we don't get in Firefox and Thunderbird (aka Dog and Pony): all but guaranteed compatibility. It's the same app, released the same moment, and it can't not have the same APIs.

Yes, it's free-as-in-beer, and the code is free-as-in-speech, and I therefore have no right to freely (as in speech, ha!) criticise it for anything less than the perfectly formed piece of lovingly crafted bug-free software it can only be (unless I in the same breath deliver my fixes in diff-u format), but may I suggest that even free-as-in-beer software indeed isn't free? The time we take to purse up the prerequisites to install in lock-step with each week's revision of the software sure is worthy of consideration, although I'm sure I'm a heathen for suggesting so. Yes, Open Source projects only compete Good-Naturedly, but when an engineer is too busy futzing with a re-working of his bug for the other browser or mailer instead of having time to get to the next one, or when a testor runs out of lunch break at IBM, or when the long-hair crunchies are buying up ads for a minority component instead of the product, you must suspect that the effort being put forth is less than optimal.

It's the generally incompatible nature of open software - or should I say general lack of anything resembling testing and the nature of open-source projects to naturally drift away from each other in terms of compatibility - that is surely shooting this and other projects in the foot. Try not to disagree until you've tried upgrading GAIM while leaving GTK at 2.0 so you can use a particular app for its feature which was dropped subsequently (like Roaming on Netscape). We must upgrade everything at once to ensure compatibility. While I itch to use glorious free software and show it off as the champion for everything good that it surely is, I'm continually defeated by very difficult, intermittent bugs that have been known about for years but still not fixed simply because the engineers in question were too busy working on some new theming support, some new gimmick, or working to support yet another pluggable extension module rather than fixing some crash. Meanwhile, I have 4 JS [alerts] whenever I block a pop-up.

So, I ask you: When I hear the Mozilla Foundation touting their experimental, younger, probably buggier pair of bloated software fanboy apps over the integrated, better tested, more respected piece of bloated software, why should I agree? Why should tell my friends to go download Thunderbird 0.9999b2rc5.3 and Phoenix Firebird FireFox 1.0.1.20050201.1859a when even they just want one download, one install, one integrated app that does most of their net communications needs and will most likely work with itself? What's the added value in splitting that into two apps which are independently released and developed, adn therefore not 100% guaranteed to not have an incompatibility problem beyond today's non-functioning maito: link?

I hate it when people make stupid decisions. I hate to see them advertising yet another stupid decision. I tire of them and their fanboys trumpeting lunacy from the heavens as if they don't realize it's their own eardrums and business they're splitting. And if I can see a problem, me, then these guys are seriously messing up.

Wired News: Improvised Bombs Baffle Army

Wired News: Improvised Bombs Baffle Army:

"The signal 'cannot make contact, therefore when it can't make contact it doesn't detonate,' he added. '(It's like) the cell phone never gets through, but (enemy forces) think it goes through.'"

Army official

Two questions: Since you have to essentially overload all potential frequencies, do you think this is gonna help with the radio comms in the vehicles themselves? You figure some radio with a 2 mile expected range isn't gonna be so sensitive as to be also completely incercepted and rendered useless by a unit dumping out so muhc power as to overload an entire spectrum to the point where a garage door's steady tone can't be transmitted 3o metres?

Secondly: If we're so freaked about the potential radiation from a cel phone, what do you think the potential damage will be to a brain or prostate subjected to 8-24 hours a day of prolonged exposure to a unit less than 30 feet away that is, as I said, required to essentially overload the entire spectrum? Of course, if you believe the stories that the military accidentally on purpose injected experimental substances during its vaccination effort through either negligence or as a huge scret test program and which may have also bombarded several countries, so far, with 'lightly radioactive' slugs from its larger cannon, then you quite probably will believe that the military will either accidentally or knowingly subject its own members or the populace of the countries it's invading to the huge potential for cellular damage from a 'defensive item' like this one.

Were they to subject a civilian population to this kind of radio-frequency bath, it'd be an even great contravention of the Hague than the use of 'Depleted' Uranium slugs.

Not only is it beginning to appear that ANY money spent in ANY effort other than this brutal and belligerent invasion of a second-world nation would be money better spent - and lives not lost - but it would almost appear, to some, that the nation that spends so much money trying to accidentally inflict so much casualties on a civilian population through intent or blind negligence is entirely too arrogant or stupid to be given the full measure of our sympathy.

Round 2

So I went to the doc again.

You see, the first time was to see this other guy, since my doc was busy and I rather dropped in. This guy listens to me breathe, concludes it's a lingering cough and prescribes me fucking steroids. In an Inhaler! Holy crap.

Anyway, 3 days, $70 worth of useless meds later and I'm still coughing, so I go in to see my doc.

He thumps, listens, thumps, listens ot the front, decides he's done playing around. Prednisone and Codeine tablets. Woo hoo!

Stay tuned. 'Just a cold' my ass.

Skins and Theming, a New Opinion

linux video:

"Whenever a programmer thinks, 'Hey, skins, what a cool idea', their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls."

Makali

Jamie Zawinski is generally cool. I love his writing about life in Mosaic and how it changed under AOL, and I love the things he finds in his travels (or which fall into his Inbox). I also like someone who's not afraid to let loose with a 'Fuck' every now and then.

Finally, I like that we agree on this fucking waste of user-time that is theming and skins. You people all suck.

No, really, SCO is ignoring you

Dear Linux and/or Free Software Crunchy,

SCO is ignoring you. Sorry to say, but your latest placard-waving little collective outside their office is largely being ignored or laughed at. This isn't a surprise to anyone but you. You see, SCO is a business, and it sells things to other businesses. Businesses don't care so much about what some screaming child wants them to do so much as it cares about Return on Investment.

SCO charges a lot for its stuff, a reflection on the amount of time that goes into each one of its releases. I'm sure it'd love to charge less, but it has decided that the Return on the Investment of a Loss-Leader plan is not enough to ensure its survival, so that plan is out.

Similarly, it's not going to try and be your friend for a while. It tried that: it opened the source on a number of things, including installers, profilers and performance software. You sneered at it because of some plan it had to be paid for each computer using its software, a plan suggested by its business partner and one that's currently in use by one of your favourite OS Vendors right now.

For some reason, the only variable in this equation is SCO. Let's work this out:

• SCO opens source on things it can afford to open. You sneer, jeer and show nothing but contempt. SCO stops trying to appease you


• SuSE coaches SCO to call their Support Contracts 'Seat Licenses', kicking off a hate-storm to end all hate-storms. SCO cannot defuse the situation with so many ranting freaks, and essentially leaves the room so it at least doesn't have to listen to the hate.
• Redhat and SuSE now use Seat Licenses, called Support Contracts
• You don't hate them.
  


• SCO says IBM screwed them over by opening up sections of code that SCO owned. You believe the massively-funded Toquevillian PR campaign and hate SCO more. SCO continues with the litigation proceedings against the most litigous company in history. You support Goliath.
• IBM enters into litigation with many companies
• you used to hate IBM, but they've won you over in 2 years with spraypaint and giveaways. See above, on SCO not vandalising but still being hated.
  

The only factor common in all this is SCO; other companies in the same circumstances win your rabid support. Your hate for SCO is based upon your hate for SCO: you hate them because of the way you perceived something they did while you were hating them. There's not a single thing they can do to appease whatever you think you're entitled to through all your personal indignation and hate.

What plan of action would you have them do, if you were their CEO? You have no idea, no plan, and you would probably just tell them to fold the company, because you don't have the ability to see the conflict from any point of view but your own. You think their products are dead and useless, you believe Groklaw - it said Grok, so it must be cool - and while you can't suggest a solution for the situation you caused, you also can't stop hating them for being in this corner you've pushed them into.

Businesses work on Investment and Return, so as to grow the value of the company and the paycheques of the people who work there. That's why those people work there: they get something out of it, be it money, pride, accomplishment, a sense of belonging or a free company car. Businesses provide those as investments, and reap the Return in terms of employee loyalty and more diligent work. Good, evil, left, right, white, black, French, none of that matters to the bottom line, unless it matters to the bottom line.

You just don't get it. You, ergo, suck. You dream up reasons to hate SCO, and hate them. Have a great time, but don't be so arrogant as to suggest that any company with a brain is going to give your mindless and baseless ranting a moment's thought.

That's why SCO isn't listening.

Magic City Morning Star: Will Blizzard Destroy the Future of Videogames?

Magic City Morning Star: Will Blizzard Destroy the Future of Videogames?:

"If it stands, the lower court's decision would make it unlawful in most cases to reverse-engineer any commercial software program, thus making it impossible to create new programs that interoperate with older ones. This squeezes consumer choice out of the marketplace by essentially allowing companies to outlaw competitors' products that interact with their own."

Um, yeah, of course they will destroy the future of video games, but that's not the main goal.

The main goal of Vivendi Universal is to make money. In our capitalist society, mostly everything else is secondary. Blizzard makes good games in order to get paid; that's why Vivendi owns them. Blizzard/Vivendi sue the developers of bNetd because they can, not because they're evil. Suing the bnetd developers is easier than the alternatives:

• Coding the networking protocol to better exclude third-party servers
• working with the community to improve the game

AOL and MSN have obviously followed the former idea with their messenger applications, and most of us view it as an annoyance and a waste of time, so that's not a really good return on the investment of labour. We've seen, so many times, companies that try and work with their gamer community, but don't end up getting it and eventually get sour or ignore the community already (sorry guys, but SCO is mostly ignoring you, because you just insulted its efforts to work with you after SuSE got Ransom to say 'Seat License').

Larger companies can no longer understand how to be a small company, and successful small companies are the only ones who can adequately work with the cacophany of egoes currently comprising the Linux and/or Free Software community -- labeling Mr Stallman as their leader is never true, but sometimes apt.

Larger companies, though, have this third option: Blizzard sells so many decent software titles that it's not like we can effectively boycott them for being rat bastards, so they weild the DMCA like the big-business anti-competitive club it is. They have sued, and will continue to sue to stop any effort that can potentially damage them at all, as long as the effort to sue requires less resources than any other option.

That's just the way business works. It's not evil, good, happy, sad or French; it's all Investment and Returns, and the sooner we wake up to this soulless capitalism nightmare, the better we all will be.

Now go read about how the American Military has destroyed artefacts older than civilisation (which, it can be suggested, they represent the death of anyway).

Guardian | Months of war that ruined centuries of history

Guardian | Months of war that ruined centuries of history:

"Babylon, capital of the Babylonian empire, site of the Tower of Babel and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, was rediscovered by archaeologists in the 19th century, but has inspired legends for thousands of years. It was the capital of two of the most famous kings of all time, Hammurabi, who ruled from 1792 to 1750BC, and introduced the world's first code of law, and Nebuchadnezzar, ruler from 604 to 562BC, who rebuilt and doubled the size of the city and built the hanging gardens."

Good job, guys. Keep up the war effort. You'll find those WMDs free the iraqis win the war on terror revive the American Economy yet!

Telegraph | News | US deserters flee to Canada to avoid service in Iraq

Telegraph | News | US deserters flee to Canada to avoid service in Iraq

Apparently about 5,000 former soldiers and US Citizens have decided the 8th amendment is bogus.

That's 3 to 5 times the number of Americans who have unfortunately been killed as a result of this criminal war.

Where I come from, that's an organized, coordinated effort to break a law. Some big ol' boys should be up for Conspiracy (and, dare we say, RICO?) charges.

Thankfully, the average soldier is 3 times more likely to have already deserted than likely to be killed in Iraq so far.

The Poor Man: Compare and Contrast of RatherGate vs IraqGate

The Poor Man: Compare and Contrast is beautiful.

The worst thing that Dan Rather or Bill Clinton did involved some questionable facts. No one got killed as a result. No matter how much some small-brained people feel the need to focus on what matters most to them, I feel the desire to bring out widows and children of dead people to see which matters most to them.

Lost a loved one as a result of badly-checked but still not refuted news stories? No? Sit the hell down, you sniveling piece of shit.

CVS is cool

.. except when it bites me. Committing new changes shoudl really be done in the middle of the night when ya make them, and damn me for my laziness in not branching immediately and committing right away. I know better. I always fuck up the catch-up, and today I vowed to learn how to un-fuck it. I actually ripped out the entire branch, and now I can re-merge everything, and I'll learn to suck it up and do the branching immediately so that I can commit as I go.

I vow to be less of an idiot in the future.

Red Hat tries again

Nice Article: Red Hat tries again with Linux enthusiasts | CNET News.com:

"'One of the mistakes we made early on when we made the split between RHEL and Fedora was we told everybody that Fedora was public, come help us out,' said Greg Dekoenigsberg, Red Hat's community relations manager. 'We got lots of people responding,' but Red Hat couldn't accept much beyond simple bug reports.

'There just wasn't much they were able to do,' he said. '(This time) we want to make sure we have systems and processes to make sure these people can contribute.'"

Well, at least they know why the FC program really started to suck: the "yes, please help us but you don't have input" problem is something close to what they're solving. Maybe they'll get another chance to examine it when they realize that their solution only partially fits the problem.

Good start, good direction, and good luck.

US gives up search for Iraq WMD

BBC NEWS | Americas | US gives up search for Iraq WMD

So, um, why is it that you gun-freaks invaded a 3rd-world nation?

• Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction
  
• Saddam Hussein evicted UN weapons inspectors
  
• To remove a regime
  
• Saddam Hussein is 'Evil'
  
• It would improve relations with the Middle East
  
• Setting an Example for Other Nations
  
• Saddam Hussein hates the US so America needs to stop him before he does harm.
  
• To liberate Iraqis and make them free like Americans
  
• Iraq had not complied with UN resolutions
  
• Revenge for the earlier Attempt on JHWB's life.
  
• Iraq posed a threat to the region and should be 'handled'
  
• Because the Iraqi military is weaker than Iran or N Korea
  
• Unfinished Business from the first invasion
  
• War for Oil
  
• America had a Historical Obligation
  
• Disarm the warlike Iraqis
  
• Safety of the World
  
• Protect the Children of the US from Iraq
  
• Imminent Threat
  
• Preserve Peace
  
• Threat to Freedom
  
• Link to Al Qaeda
  
• Iraq Unique
  
• Relevance of the UN
  
• International Law
  
• Stimulate the Economy
  

Go read the paper. Then tell me how 'stimulation of the economy' or 'because it will be easy' is a reasonable justification for killing 100,000 Iraqis or - what may concern you more - 1000 American soldiers.

I'm going straight to hell..

I can't even mask my enjoyment for this video under the noble guise of the freedom of sexual preference. I just think these women are absolutely gorgeous. I think that's what the advert was going for, though.

Yeah, it's potentially sexist. Yeah, it's sophomoric. Yeah, it's loosely definable as art. That makes me an art connoisseur! yay!

Armchair Arcade: Article / Hackers, Slackers, and Shackles

Armchair Arcade: Article / Hackers, Slackers, and Shackles

The start of a decent article on the open source movement. Too bad I had to stop reading:

• Mr Barton refers to GNU/Linux -- and reveals himself to be a PR Flack of Stallman, who has definite ideas that are way too narrow for me.
  
• there is no comment function so I shouldn't have even started. If an article doesn't allow feedback, then it's nothing but dictation: FOX News.
  

Articles with such obvious problems aren't worth the time.

Bug #4627 - jabberd2 - JabberStudioOh god, I hate RedHat today

A long, long time ago, RedHat decided they didn't need to actually make their system work. Maybe they were smoking dope, maybe not, but, suddenly, everything that used openssl failed to build. See here:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=82369

So, unless you use that piece of shit hack from hell, pkgconfig, you can't build anything with Redhat's fucking broken openssl/krb mix.

My fucking christ, what the fuck is wrong with a company that thinks they can fucking break compatibility like that? They think they're SuSE with their heavy hands and decrees like that?

No wonder RH has lost a whack of followers. There's no 'underfunding' excuse for adamantly refusing to follow convention, no matter how shiny the nifty-keen alternative is.

Richard Gere speaks for the world, or so he thought.

Richard Gere's election appeal perplexes Palestinians, and he gets a funny rebuttal:

"We don't need the Americans' intervention. We know who to elect. Not like them - they elected a moron."

-- Manar an Najar

ha ha ha. Mr Gere dressed down by a mere Soap Factory Worker, indeed.

Ask me why I don't want to go to the cinema any longer

so, we have

• overpriced seat tickets
• grossly overpriced snacks
• annoying people with
  
  • crying babies
    
  • problems shutting the hell up
    
  • cell phones
    
  • inflated senses of entitlement
    
  • pick any 2
• now, stabbing, for that added-value feeling.

Holy crap, am I never going to the movies again or what? What kind of pathetic dreck can follywood toss out that will coerce me to pay a fucking wad to trundle out to their crowded, annoying and now unsafe theatres to see?

BBC NEWS | Africa | Nigerians sacked over oil tanker

BBC NEWS | Africa | Nigerians sacked over oil tanker:

"Two Nigerian admirals have been sacked for oil smuggling after they were found guilty of being involved in the disappearance of an oil tanker."

Well, that ends that handy joke. It was always good for a laugh, imagining perhaps an 8x11 stapled to a lamp-post reading "lost: one tanker. really hard to miss. contact Nigerian authorities" or so.

Well, does this mean they found it? I guess they must've had a witness or something, that somehow managed to spot a freakin' oil tanker parked where it shouldn't be. I mean, it's not like one of the guys coulda hidden it in his garage or so, right?

I love Nigeria.

It's the Crimes against Humanity, stupid!

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish:

"Run that by me again. The point is not 'an anti-Bush political issue.' It's about whether the United States condones torture of prisoners (many of whom have turned out to be innocent) in its care. Since president Bush shifted U.S. policy to one which allows what any sane person would call torture, any criticism of the policy, by its very nature, has to be 'anti-Bush.' And when the president responds to his egregious error - which has undermined the war - by rewarding those who helped him make it, like Gonzales and Bybee, are we all supposed to roll over? Is all legitimate criticism of the administration now reducible to this kind of inane partisanship? Glenn's deeper point is that if you ask for torture to be stopped, the majority of Americans will respond by saying: ramp it up. But that amounts to complete capitulation to something no civilized person should tolerate, and no grown-up military officer would approve. Glenn cannot pretend to be anti-torture, while eschewing any serious attempts to stop it through the political process.If you won't stand up to the Bush administration on torture, is there anything you won't acquiesce to? And it's not 'hype.' Read the reports. "

Exactly. Since when was rational and critical thought merely bashing Mr Bush? It's only accidental that most of our justifiable criticism happens to cast a few people in a nagative light.

Apparently, though, to some, one must blindly follow one's leaders to be a devout follower .. I mean patriot.

News Channel 10 - Consumer Unit - Cox Takes Blame For Causing Fire In Customer's Home

News Channel 10 - Consumer Unit - Cox Takes Blame For Causing Fire In Customer's Home

At least we have to stick around while their 'somewhere between 8 and 4' slackers actually do the work. I think it's a law here, although I'm not so sure it would have prevented the accident described.

I miss my cat

Olestra seen to help Leakage of Other Crap too

The Cincinnati Post has an article about an odd finding: Olestra has been known for helping the body eliminate PCBs and Dioxins stored in fat cells. Considering our governments can't seemto fucking stop polluting, it's almost comical that our most embarrassing vanity-launched food additive invention seems to accidentally help us clean ourselves up. Olestra could soon be a recommended dietary supplement.

It's Anal Leakage for all!

Mr Bush chooses to screw his people after all

Sun-Sentinel: "President Bush, who swore that he would never cut Social Security benefits and promised a magic plan to fix everything, presents his magic plan: cutting benefits"

Yay!