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GNU is Not Unix

Introducing RMS-Lint 170

Posted by michael from the gnu/rms-lint dept.
Shlomi Fish writes "There's a new tool called RMS-Lint that aims to check and correct documents for their compliance with correspondence rules from Richard Stallman. If you plan on sending RMS an E-mail, you may actually need it."
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Introducing RMS-Lint More

Introducing RMS-Lint

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  • sigh (Score:5, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Thursday April 01, 2004 @11:53AM (#8737856) Homepage Journal

    GNU/is GNU/this GNU/another GNU/April GNU/Fool's GNU/joke?

    • Re:sigh (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 01, 2004 @12:00PM (#8737923)
      I GNU this would come out... But I wouldn't put something GNU like this past him.

    • Re:sigh (Score:2)

      by ajs ( 35943 )
      You insensitive clod! That's:
      BSD/Is MIT/this CMU/another IBM/April SCO/Fools GNU/joke?
      Please give credit where credit is due!

    • Re:sigh (Score:5, Funny)

      by falzer ( 224563 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @01:00PM (#8738736)
      You have to ask? You must be GNU here.
    • Well, I just have to say I think it's a bit cruel and insensitive to have this kind of a joke at RMS's expense, as if to make out that he's some kind of a pedant.

      Maybe it just shows how very young the young can be :) Far better, though, to try and communicate across the generation gap ...

      -wb- (feeling humor-impaired after what must surely be the biggest spate of April-1 non-jokes ever)

      • Re:sigh (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Uh, he IS a pedant. Unapologetically so.

  • Where is the lint from? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ajiva ( 156759 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @11:53AM (#8737857)
    Now is this navel lint or dryer lint? Because you know it does make a difference!

  • Enough enough! (Score:5, Funny)

    by davek99999 ( 749198 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @11:54AM (#8737863)
    Stop making fun of RMS. [kickinthehead.org]

  • Hmmmm (Score:2, Insightful)

    by IdleTime ( 561841 )
    Let me see RMS-Lint and 04/01..... Ok... ummm... yes... I see what they are trying to accomplish here...
    • The vrms program [debian.org] will analyze the set of currently-installed packages on a Debian GNU/Linux system, and report all of the packages from the non-free tree which are currently installed.

      Future versions of vrms will include an option to also display text from the public writings of RMS and others that explain why use of each of the installed non-free packages might cause moral issues for some in the Free Software community. This functionality is not yet included.

  • the tool hangs (Score:5, Funny)

    by gtrubetskoy ( 734033 ) * on Thursday April 01, 2004 @11:55AM (#8737874)
    I tried it, but it seems to hang in an infinite loop when processing the word GNU.
    • I took a peek at the source code, and I have completely re-written it from scratch (without the use of emacs-lisp, imagine that!):

      #! /bin/sh

      sed 's/\([A-Za-z][A-Za-z0-9_-]*\)/GNU\/\1/g'

  • You forgot the GNU! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Pranjal ( 624521 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @11:55AM (#8737875)
    It should have been GNU/RMS Lint. So we know it's a fake. Nice try sucker!

  • Think that's bad? (Score:5, Funny)

    by ajs ( 35943 ) <{moc.sja} {ta} {sja}> on Thursday April 01, 2004 @11:56AM (#8737881) Homepage Journal
    Just wait for SCO-IPLint... *shudder*
    • SCO is the reason we should be allowed to take someone out back and beat them over the head with a shovel.

      • Re:Think that's bad? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by ajs ( 35943 ) <{moc.sja} {ta} {sja}> on Thursday April 01, 2004 @12:02PM (#8737938) Homepage Journal
        SCO is the very best mirror in which to look if you wish to know what the open source community will look like at its worst. The flaming, hatred and threats are all characteristics that we're not too proud of, but SCO makes us face our demons and admit that we too are no angels.

        The number of ways in which the SCO situation is actually good for the open source community are kind of scary.
        • I remember when I was in college, there was this kid in one of my physics classes who thought he was smarter than the professor. He always tried to point things out, and every time, I (the TA) had the wonderful priviledge of making him look like an ass. This is what I wish on SCO, if you know what I mean.
        • SCO is the very best mirror in which to look if you wish to know what the open source community will look like at its worst. The flaming, hatred and threats are all characteristics that we're not too proud of, but SCO makes us face our demons and admit that we too are no angels. ... The number of ways in which the SCO situation is actually good for the open source community are kind of scary.

          Ugh, so then they become enshrined in our psyche as a cartoonish form of Ultimate Evil. Now we are going to have to

          • How exactly did I compare anyting to SCO as a negative? I've simply pointed out OUR reaction to SCO, and said nothing about THEM.

            I think you were a bit to trigger-happy with a comment you'd been waiting to post or you just mis-read my statement.
    • Or Bill-lint, if many published reports of his inadequate personal hygiene are true.

      Of course a Bill-lint would check to ensure that you have a sufficient number of unckecked buffers, dangling pointers etc to guarantee access by hackers, and at least one BSOD every day. It would also check to ensure that the critical error handler code itself contained a critical error, that no attempt was being made to write-protect executable code, that no attempt was made to make a calloc() routine that actually returned

  • Full List of April Fools Web Sites (Score:5, Informative)

    by Urgo ( 28400 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @11:56AM (#8737883) Homepage
    For a full updated list of sites pulling april fools jokes see here [urgo.org]

    Some of the latest enteries:
    livejournal.com [livejournal.com] - on userinfo pages, "Friend"/"Friend Of" -> "Stalking"/"Stalked By"
    www.gpf-comics.com [gpf-comics.com] - Comic mirrored.
    smh.com.au [smh.com.au] - Yum-cha trolleys with "L" plates
    www.clutchfans.com [clutchfans.com] - Patrick Ewing returning to NBA
    www.freeciv.org [freeciv.org] - Freeciv ANSI client
    www.rav4world.com [rav4world.com] - Closed? Should have announced that TOMORROW!
    www.retrocrush.com [retrocrush.com] - Nude pics of Jaclyn Smith
    westcoaster.net [westcoaster.net] - Roller coaster site turned into teen girl site
    www.meowpawjects.com [meowpawjects.com] - Sock people forced webmaster to take website down.
    miceage.com [miceage.com] - Disney merges with Walmart
    www.badgerbadgerbadger.com [badgerbadgerbadger.com] - Badgers replaces with zombies
    skepdic.com [skepdic.com] - Skeptic's Dictionary closing
    fool.com [fool.com] - Buffett buys Krispy Cream
    launch.com [launch.com] - Britney Spears & Jason Alexander To Renew Wedding Vows
    MetaFilter.com [metafilter.com] - Turned in to a Wiki for the day
    www.ddrkc.com [ddrkc.com] - owner sold site to a user that is unpopular
    brownpau.com [brownpau.com] - March for Web Standards
    www.beyondunreal.com [beyondunreal.com] - ut2k4 production suspended
    globetechnology.com [globetechnology.com] - Microsoft Solitaire
    www.modernwiccan.com [modernwiccan.com] - Randomized Color Scheme
    bbs.fuckedcompany.com [fuckedcompany.com] - Site shutting down
    www.diary-x.com [diary-x.com] - looks like diaryland!
    theprp.com [theprp.com] - Music site to "Previously Ridden Ponies"
    mpx200.org [mpx200.org] - Pocket PC with 2Gb system memory/Smart Drunk Pocket PC application
    www.macosxhints.com [macosxhints.com] - triple G5 Powermacs
    www.slyfx.com [slyfx.com] - AOL buys slyfx
    palminfocenter.com [palminfocenter.com] - Palms for toddlers.
    www.carniola.org [carniola.org] - fake news story
    eikenes.alvestrand.no [alvestrand.no] - Considering porn spam to be in a separate dialect to everything else
    defunctgames.com [defunctgames.com] - Pimps At Sea fox xbox
  • Wouldn't the opposite of this be more in line typical *lint programs or scripts? That way it would remove the unneeded extra GNU/ prefixes resulting in more efficient use of resources.
  • Hhhmmm... "Lint" introduced by a guy named "Fish". Something tells me that even though it's 04/01, I'm still staying as far away as possible. ;)

  • Damn... I was hoping... (Score:3, Funny)

    by FroMan ( 111520 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @11:58AM (#8737904) Homepage Journal
    I was hoping this would be a new product at thinkgeek!

    GNU/RMS-Belly-Button-Lint

  • fuck off (Score:4, Interesting)

    by larry bagina ( 561269 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @11:58AM (#8737905) Journal
    christ slashdot sucks on april fools day.

    How about doing something original, like weirdo moderation ("insightful" becomes "no shit", interesting becomes "word up", etc). or announce that slashdot will now be requiring all posters to subscribe in order to post comments, or "Kathleen Fent, please divorce rob and marry me!" posted by Hemos.

    • Re:fuck off (Score:1, Flamebait)

      by iso ( 87585 )

      Agreed. I hate this place when the geeks think they're being funny. Slashdot became much more readable when I started assigning a -3 moderation to anything moderated as "Funny" (check the prefs -- great feature). Unfortunately the same trick doesn't work for the front page.

      In the meantime, here are some other good tech/news sites to check out while Slashdot is useless:

      Enjoy!

      • +1 Insightful on that mod rating. It's easy to forget that a lot of posters on this site are the science club nerds that you took great pleasure in pounding on in school.
    • Agreed. 1 or 2 April Fool stories is enough, but I imagine the editors enjoy beating a dead horse all day long.

    • hm (Score:2)

      by sulli ( 195030 ) *
      one year they did ban anonymous posting for april fool's. that was fun.

      you're right, though, oddly enough slashdot isn't nearly weird enough on april fool's. the stories can't be the whole picture.

    • And while we're at it, an 'April 1st karma whore' story or poll, where everyone can post their gripes about April 1st stories. I don't know which is more annoying, the lame stories, or those who feel the need to point out that it's {April 1st|Slashdot Sucks on April 1st|$poster Sucks on April 1st}in _every_ damn story.

      It happens every damn year : so either get used to it or don't bother visiting today. Let them have their fun, let those who want to play along have their fun and if you have ideas, why not s

    • To be fair, it's mostly just michael. The guy's as diligent as a Worldcomm accountant, and about as funny as a tumour on your whanger. If he gets paid more than beer money for his "contributions" here, then I think we've found our next sacrifice to the Indian outsourcing machine.

    • Excellent ideas!

      How about Unlimited mod points (reset later) like they did while testing the new server? Now that was Evil(TM) and a helluva lot of fun for a day or so...

      I'll agree about the sucks part - there's a lot of funny stuff being posted today, but it sure as hell isn't the stories, not so far...the day is only half over, however muahahahahaha

      SB

    • Re:fuck off (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Jim Hall ( 2985 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @01:02PM (#8738770) Homepage

      christ slashdot sucks on april fools day. How about doing something original, like weirdo moderation ("insightful" becomes "no shit", interesting becomes "word up", etc).

      Actually, that's a very good idea. MOD PARENT UP. Slashdot is hella lame on April 1st. Ever since this morning, I've been avoiding slashdot (it's lunchtime now, so I'm slacking off.)

      Sorry guys, I read slashdot for the news. When you don't post real news, you've become something like BBSpot or Fark, and I don't read them every day.

      Just do something simple (I like the idea from the parent poster) and let that be it.

    • I was hoping that slashdot had outgrown the adolescent idea that every single story must be a lame April fools joke.

      Those are really great ideas. This just shows that there are ways to run April fools jokes on the site without compromising the usefulness of the site for those of us who just want to come here for our usual Microsoft and SCO bashing.

      Oh well, I can always follow the advice of the subject line to this message.
  • Since it is April Fools Day, why don't we have any SCO stories?
  • what are the next stories going to be about "Netcraft confirms it, BSD is dying!" or "Stephen King dead at 54", come on people this is getting a little out of hand

  • Only RMS? (Score:4, Funny)

    by MrIrwin ( 761231 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @12:02PM (#8737941) Journal
    I would like to see lint options for average values as well as RMS.....not to mention Peak Music Power.
  • So I'm just curious to see what would happen if I sent a flame mail to RMS using GNU/RMS-Lint. Could it possibly cause a spontaneous combustion reaction?

  • Reality distortion field.... this must be said (Score:3, Funny)

    by DJDaveET ( 129429 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @12:03PM (#8737956) Homepage
    I feel this must be said -- we already have rules of correspondence. They are called grammar, spelling, and etiquette.

    I find we have reached a bit of a level of absurdity when an individual has created their own rules by which they can be corresponded with.

    I would hope that if you can assemble a correct sentence, put your thoughts in writing well, be polite, and spell things correctly, you could always expect a response from anyone via e-mail.

  • HA HA. Site slashdotted! You can't click the link! April Fools.
  • the site has just been slashdotted. It looks like slashdotters are somewhat playful today.
  • I send them to postmaster@gnu.org. He gets those by default anyways!!!
  • Only funs allowed.

    Serious discussion strictly forbidden!
  • "If you plan on sending RMS an E-mail, you may actually need it."
    Nobody wants to send RMS and email. Well mabey to flame.

    • Re:Proof of AF (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sepluv ( 641107 ) <blakesley@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Thursday April 01, 2004 @01:00PM (#8738741)
      I sent RMS an email recently about sthg and he sent a nice reply quite quickly--I'm not sure why everyone thinks RMS is that funny actually (for a geek anyway).

      Although, in his reply, he did say that I should attach webpages instead of giving him the URI's so that he doesn't have to wait for his next batch of mail to receive the webpages (by emailing the URI's) (i.e.: he dsoesn't have WWW access ort doesn't use it) which I thought was a bit sad.
  • At least the Canadian legal file sharing story was a good read, though coming a day early I'd call it cheating. Is that going to be the only good joke this year?

    Amy

  • April Fools? (Score:4, Funny)

    by joeytsai ( 49613 ) on Thursday April 01, 2004 @12:19PM (#8738122) Homepage
    Actually, there is a strangely similar package [debian.org] in Debian.
  • next unless /check enclosed/i or /goats\.ex/i ;

  • Yay (Score:5, Funny)

    by broothal ( 186066 ) <christian@fabel.dk> on Thursday April 01, 2004 @12:23PM (#8738168) Homepage Journal
    Darn - for a minute there I thought it read PMS limit . I'd sure like such a tool. Especially in...(counting)... 8 days.

  • What Have We Learned (Score:3, Funny)

    by pete-classic ( 75983 ) <hutnick@gmail.com> on Thursday April 01, 2004 @12:26PM (#8738194) Homepage Journal
    What have we learned today kids? If you are going to make some lame April Fool's Day joke on your website and submit it to Slashdot USE A FUCKING STATIC PAGE.

    -Peter

  • I don't get it (Score:3, Informative)

    by geekoid ( 135745 ) <dadinportland@y[ ]o.com ['aho' in gap]> on Thursday April 01, 2004 @12:46PM (#8738513) Homepage Journal
    why do the people who dislike the April Fools /. bother to post? Jeez, do they think this is their personal site designed to cater to them?

    I mean, go away.
  • In the split second before I realized it was AFD, I thought "Holy carp! He's going to compete with us [gimpel.com]!"

    Then I thought, "Waitaminute...remember Emacs?" Then I relaxed... :-)

    /me waits to be modded into oblivion.
  • it's been GNU/.ed
  • There is another program called SCO/Lint. It checks your entire network for any installations of any non-Microsoft operating system, and, if found, your bank account is debited $1399 for each installation. The best part? This program is run by a cron job every hour, which does not check if you've already paid for the computers it finds. So every hour, your bank account is charged these outrageous fees.

    Finally, new government legislation makes it a federal felony, punishable by a minimum of 50 years in priso

  • april's (?) fool (Score:3, Interesting)

    by molnarcs ( 675885 ) <csabamolnar AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday April 01, 2004 @02:09PM (#8739709) Homepage Journal
    Do you know why GNU su doesn't support the wheel group (well, I think it does now, but it didn't for a time). Because RMS opined that it creates a divide between those with power and those without. (Actually I found this jewel in this this thread, so credit isn't mine... [freebsdforums.org]
    manpage is from SUSE 6.1...
    Why GNU su does not support the wheel group (by Richard Stallman)
    Sometimes a few of the users try to hold total power over all the rest. For example, in 1984, a few users at the MIT AI lab decided to seize power by changing the operator password on the Twenex system and keeping it secret from everyone else. (I was able to thwart this coup and give power back to the users by patching the kernel, but I wouldn't know how to do that in Unix.)

    However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.

    I'm on the side of the masses, not that of the rulers. If you are used to supporting the bosses and sysadmins in whatever they do, you might find this idea strange at first.
    Actually I respect the guy: he is a man with strong principles, and I admire him for that. Given the historical context (1984) this isn't as silly as it sounds now. Without the internet this wasn't as much a security threat as it is today. But there is no excuse for linux distributions (second half of 90's) to follow that policy (or did they just take su for what it is - e.g. no wheel support - without looking at the outdated and by now somewhat silly reasons?).

    April's fool day on ./ featuring RMS ... when I saw it, I thought I'd share this cute (I'd say funny) piece of history, but again, no disrespect intended. Although being somewhat cynical is en vogue in nerd circles (unfortunately and boringly), when I say I respect RMS for what he is and for what he represents, I mean it.

    • Isn't RMS the fellow who refused to password his account for a while, because it showed a terrible lack of trust in one's fellow man, but later recanted when (gasp) his account got terribly abused?

  • Man I'd love to be able to require a lint-type program to be run on emails sent to me. Besides the obvious implications for spam, I think I'd need pretty much one rule on mine:

    NO FUCKING HTML!

    Who's with me?

  • Text of the Article (Score:2, Informative)

    by Shlomi Fish ( 3362 )

    Here's the text of the article to relieve the stress from the site. Slashdot operators: please link to it from the feature.

    Introducing the RMS-Lint

    Introduction

    A new tool aims to revolutionize the way people communicate with the famous free software evangelist Richard M. Stallman, (also known by his initials - "RMS"). Its project leader Shlomi Fish has more to say of it:

    "RMS-Lint is called RMS-Lint because like most lints it warns on many things that are obviously not errors, because there's

  • For those who don't know about RMS... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 01, 2004 @08:22PM (#8743116)

    RMS was born in Modesto, California and attended Berkeley University [berkeley.edu]. This shouldn't surprise anyone, since Berkeley is the Liberal Hive [russia.ru] of America and RMS is an admitted [stallman.org] communist [www.jkl.fi]. RMS began his bizarre lifestyle while attending Berkeley, where he occupied the attic of a clock tower. This eccentricity continues today and RMS will not travel without a grandfather clock and a spitoon [warmann.org].

    RMS' penchant for thievery was evident from the very beginning. His attic "apartment" was filled with equipment stolen from the Berkeley computer labs. This was quite an achievement in the early '70s, when any computer equipment was the size of a refrigerator.

    RMS and his hacker friends cut class regularly, opting to spend their time and parent's money constructing illegal electronics devices designed to covertly access phone lines. The group of pirates would hack into the phone company, and charge enormous phone bills to unsuspecting Republican professors.

    It was during this period that Stallman met Steve Jobs. RMS' technical savvy was far exceeded by that of Jobs and, never one to like being second-best, this caused him to pursue software hacking. RMS' hacking ability was innate and he and Jobs formed an alliance which would later result in the birth of Apple Computer.

    Jobs' technical accumen was matched only by his ability to sell. He designed the internal electronics and outer package design of the first Apple, which was financed by Nolan Bushnell. He set RMS on to the task of developing the computer's "operating system" - a sequence of low-level MS-DOS commands which tell the computer how to decode program codes.

    Though a gifted "coder", Stallman was quite lazy and didn't fare so well with the new operating system. His sloppy design and bloated codes were barely useable on the first microcomputer. Jobs dumped Stallman and hired John Wozniack to rewrite the internal operating system codes for the Apple I.

    This situation didn't sit too well with RMS. Though he effectively dropped out of college, through non-attendance, he remained in the clock tower, unbeknownst to the faculty and administration of Berekely. His bizarre reclusiveness and tendency to "hack" only in the night kept him invisible to everyone, though rumors did circulate around campus about the "haunted clock-tower" and the deformed ghost that would occasionally appear, transluscent white, on top of the tower playing a magical flute [stallman.org].

    Stallman grew sullen and withdrew into his own world in the clock tower. He watched as the joint Apple/Microsoft empire grew to become the computer industry and he vowed to topple it by undermining the livelyhood of his arch-rival Steve Jobs (and, by extension, Bill Gates) with his illegal offerings.

    Stallman conspired with Linux Torvaledse, another Berkeley student, to create a hacker operating system which could be used to leverage the internet and wreak havoc on corporations everywhere. RMS even went so far as to use Microsoft's innovative GUI (Graphical User Implementation) which he had stolen from Microsoft's mainframe computer and given the hacker alias "X-Windows". Unfortunately, RMS was not able to acquire the latest Microsoft GUI codes and was thus forced to settle for an inferior version.

    RMS' continued interest in communism provided him some insight as to how to spread his hacker tool across the internet. By stressing the free nature of the software, he would appeal to the welfare nature of the public.

    This marketing scheme worked spectacularly. RMS' hacker tool is now installed on countless computers, hidden away in the dark bedrooms of LSD-using hacker teens [etext.org].

    B

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