Jeremiah Cornelius's Journal: Matt Welsh

Why is that damned quote stuck for over a week in the slashdot footer- without fortune rolling a new one?

Because they switched commercial software?

[tomhudson]

The quote in question, for posterity:

Are Linux users lemmings collectively jumping off of the cliff of reliable, well-engineered commercial software? -- Matt Welsh

Who knows the real reason. Most likely they pick the quote up from a static text snippet that's supposed to be changed every few minutes by a cron job that writes a new fortune to the snippet, and the snippet is set to rw-r--r--.

Re:

[mcgrew]

I think you're probably right, or at least close. The quote used to change with every page refresh. I've seen my own sig used in it before.

I had to google Matt Welsh, and considering his Linux credentials, he must have meant it as a joke. Most commercial software I've seen is poorly engineered and unreliable.

I wish I could find the quote in context.

Re:

[tomhudson]

I've done it a few times when logged in as root to fix something by creating a new file, and I've seen it happen a LOT when people use Filezilla on Windows to upload files (for example, images) to a linux box and all of a sudden they're not writeable, so they can't be deleted by (again, for example) the cms when they want to change an image to another one via the web interface.

It's easy enough to check. Someone probably ran a script to "fix" file permissions globally and made a booboo on a temp file.