I've been thinking hard about a lot of issues recently. There's the risk of civil war in Iraq. On the home front, Amazon.com and Toys R Us have been engaged in lawsuits. Apple has released a "Mac mini" that's inferior to the machine it replaced. The Bush administration has been caught exaggerating the degree to which tragedies like New Orleans were unforeseeable.

At first, all these things appear unrelated. But in a kind of way, they're not. They all involve people. People doing what they believe is right, and getting it wrong. There's no doubt in my mind that nobody wants a civil war in Iraq or New Orleans to flood again, but basic human nature means that, despite our best efforts, we end up going headlong into tragedy and suffering whenever we try to fix things beforehand. I'm sure Amazon and TRU didn't intend to hurt one another, but in the end, we saw a beach of contract. Someone somewhere mislead someone else, probably for all innocent reasons. And, well, I think I speak for everyone when I say I'm not going to pay $100 for some leather speakers, even if they can be hacked to run Windows.

We can do something about this, but it involves being willing to adopt democracy, a forceful power that, through thick and thin, has yet to fail us when we've been willing to give it a try. When we're worried about issues like the above, we can always just write to our senators and congressmen. They're good people. Sure, some do bad things, but that's the nature of the game, our senators and congressmen are just like us really, a mixture of good and bad, some liking chocolate, others cheese, but always walking together, forward, in the same direction, ploughing on towards the light, out of the darkness, away from the suffering.

We must do that too.

Guess all I've been trying to say all along, sometimes in rather trollish terms, is that the real world isn't made of good-vs-evil, black-vs-white. My world has no pure immaculate white, and no pure light-sucking black.

Both extremes are just that: extremes. They're something to be feared, rather than something to seek. (If nothing else, seeked as something to reduce everything to.) And most people do fear them.

The real world is nothing like "Microsoft=EVIL vs SUN=GOOD", nor viceversa. It's not like "Windows=EVIL vs Linux=GOOD" either. Nor viceversa. And it's not like "Government=EVIL vs Pure Anarchy=GOOD". Same thing about corporations.

The real world is a lot more complicated, and a lot less comfortable than those simplifications.

There are plenty of good sides to choosing Solaris or Linux for your desktop or server, but then there also are plenty of damn good reasons to choose Windows. Either choice won't be 100% perfect, but rather a compromise. Either choice won't be 100% universal either: what worked for you, may not work at all for someone else. Etc.

Same about the corporations themselves. If you look at the history of computing, whoever was losing always wanted open standards. Whoever was winning, always wanted proprietary and preferrably patented stuff to lock the customers in.

Sun, IBM, Novell, etc, were all once in the same position where Microsoft is now: trying to lock the customers into one single vendor for upgrades, and into fundamentally incompatible formats and interfaces. That's how the Unix fragmentation happened, if you didn't know that already. (And that's what paved the way for Microsoft to win, incidentally.)

There are no villains and heroes. Just a bunch of greedy people trying to make a buck. Your buck.

Right now, pumping resources into Linux and promoting open standards is their best weapon. But if either of them got back on top, they'd do the same thing all over again.

Either way, remember if you still just feel a need to be a zealot for a multi-billion dolar corporation's interests, at least do yourself and it a service: don't sound like an extremist. Try to at least _look_ aware that the real world is made of shades of grey.

And try to at least look like you care about someone's actual problem, not like a rebel on a holy jihad. Your bosses might listen to a business plan where Linux will save them this much money. They will _not_ however listen to foaming at the mouth about how MS is pure evil and needs to be uninstalled from all computers, at all costs.

Try also to at least look like you've actually taken everything into account. Blowing one single problem out of proportion ("but Windows has viruses!"), and obviously avoiding all else (e.g., the cost to retrain everyone to use Linux), you've lost their attention. Or mine.

Again: a real solution is always the best compromise, among a bunch of crappy compromises. If yours is a clear cut case of 100% good vs 100% evil, you've just told everyone that you didn't do a real analysis. You might as well wear a "I'm not giving you a solution to your problem, I'm giving you a dogma" sign, because that's what everyone will understand.

For a while now, I've been recommending that when people contact their elected representatives to argue the case for some IT issue, they also bring up the issue of the lack of SMP in OpenBSD, and the consequences this has for the effective deployment of OpenBSD on workstations and servers.

Well, it looks like all the lobbying has finally paid off. The next version of OpenBSD will support SMP which is a remarkable achievement. While many will, rightly, want to congratulate the programmers behind the OpenBSD project for this major improvement, I also think some credit has to go to the Slashdotters who put time and effort into lobbying their Senators and Congressmen and women to do something about this. I know many of you have been writing letters since 2002, but a year and a half isn't a long time to wait for something this extraordinary. Would it have happened without the lobbying? We will never know, but somehow I doubt it would have happened in such small a space of time.

This is proof, as if any were needed, that democracy can work, that we can all make a difference, that even if we can't code or market open source products, we can - simply by leveraging our collective elective strength - lobby the people who can make a difference to ensure the time and resources can be devoted.

Well done everyone.

The more I read Slashdot and other IT sites (e.g., www.theregister.co.uk), the more I'm starting to doubt that it's got anything to do with either technology or journalism. It's pretty much a case where you can predict that any article will be just an excuse to rehash one or more of the following fashionable black-vs-white prejudices. Just because it's fashionable to do so.

1. Microsoft = EVIL, IBM = GOOD, Intel = EVIL, Sun = GOOD, Apple = GOOD, etc. Clear cut cases of super-heroes vs super-villains. (It doesn't matter what MS does. Even if we're talking about offering a compiler for free, it's inherently evil just because it's MS, and it's fashionable to be Anti-MS. Conversely it doesn't really matter what Sun does, and how it never offered more than hot air to support its occasional "We love F/OSS" fits. It's good just because it's foaming at the mouth against MS and Intel.)

2. Any corporation is inherently an incarnation of the Supreme Evil (TM). Unless, of course, it happens to be fighting against MS or Intel, in which case the exact same behaviour now counts as Lawful Good.

3. Anyone who dares question the Good Anti-MS corporations in any way (e.g., a stock analyst daring to say that Sun's cancelling every single CPU it was supposed to release in the next 3 years doesn't exactly inspire confidence to buy Sun stock) is automatically
(A) A loonie,
(B) a retarded drooling user running pirated MS software,
(C) a MS fanboy,
(D) paid by MS to spread FUD, or, of course,
(E) all the above.

4. Your bugs suck, while ours smell sweet and never cause any harm. That the Opera browser I'm writing this in crashes by itself every couple of hours, is of course benign, and shouldn't keep anyone from thinking that it's a great browser. But if IE has some obscure bug in all that pile of code, it's time to gather a proper medieval angry mob, with pitchforks and torches. And call every IE user an idiot, while we're at it.

Corolary: having to update our favourite non-MS programs (e.g., Mozilla or Opera) every 2 weeks against bugs, is just normal and benign, and only idiots don't have the latest version already anyway. Having to download an update to IE 4.5 (or God forbid actually upgrade to IE 6) is an outrage, and someone should kill MS for that.

5. Noone should be allowed to keep me from stealing their work. It doesn't matter if it's music or algorithms. (See the endless foaming at the mouth about algorithm patents.) The fashionable IT whore should never have to pay for anything ever. If you worked to produce something, I should be legally allowed and encouraged to just come over and help myself.

6. Nothing should change, ever. Doubly so if, God forbid, it requires one to learn new skills. Not only we should all still be using a command line, but we should probably still all be programming in COBOL on punched cards.

Corolary: everyone who did learn new skills is to be ridiculed and called names.

Etc.

Wake up people. Reality isn't as simple and clear cut as Superman comics or Star Wars movies. There are no super-heroes or Paladins in shiny armour, and there are no super-villains cackling manically over death-ray blueprints.

If you've read my posts, you may have noticed I'm not quite anti-Microsoft. Let me explain.

I think the computer is a tool. Its worth is no more, and no less, than what programs you run on it and what data you have on it.

Linux has come a long way since I have first used it. It came on a stack of 5" floppies back then. No doubt there. I even installed it on my workstation at work nowadays.

It's not even the only non-MS operating system I've used. Before my rabid Linux zealot days (yeah, hard to believe, but I was one, roughly between 1999 and 2001), I used to be a rabid IBM OS/2 zealot. That wasn't my first non-MS OS either. I've used GEM, CP/M, and a few others before that.

But for what I use my computer at home, and especially for games, I find MS Windows to be a better choice at the moment. Or an easier choice. It's easier to just run something in Windows, especially since I do have a license for it anyway, than to try to make it run in Wine or Wine/X.

Also from my experience it's _far_ easier to tell Joe Average how to run something in Windows, than to educate him in the finer points of Unix administration. You also don't end up explaining stuff like "why isn't my new card supported" or "why can't I play this little VBscript web-based game in Mozilla" or whatever.

Basically that's all I'm saying. It's simply a pragmatic choice. No particular love for either camp.

I've decided to judge everybody on /. and make a list using the friends/foes features.

No, this is not the Troll Blacklist, or any other type of fan whoring.

I used to post a lot, but I've become a lurker lately, posting nothing but one-liners. I feel like Crumb's older brother. Once a sane, talented person now reduced to paranoia and meaningless ramblings in what was once an art form--posting to /.

So now I'm just going to read at -1, nested, and judge you all, friend or foe.

For the AC's:

RPN guy -- I hate you and hope you die a slow death.

Gay erotica search and replace trolls -- you should also be killed.

I love the rest of you AC's , unless, of course, you suck. :P

This is a screengrab of an actual advertisement in Yahoo! movies.

Coincidence?

Fluke?

I did replace my zip code with 'KGB's Soviet Russia,' but that is the only thing I altered.

Slashdot has over half a million registered users.

Think about that for a moment. Half a million. That's to say, with 250 million people in the US, every 500th person you meet has a Slashdot account. That's a remarkable number. And, of course, Slashdot has thousands more readers who have never registered.

But consider also what that means. Half a million people have considered Slashdot important enough to them to enter extremely private and personal information, such as their email address and a "nick name" they believe reflects the kind of person they are, on to Slashdot, together with a password that, in all probability, is the same one they use to access their Hotmail account, their eBay account, their PayPal account, and login to their work PC.

Half a million! Crikey!

Which would be great, if that half million could be mobilised to do something positive. If you're willing to put the effort into typing these details into a website, and then logging in and all that stuff, then it stands to reason you'll be more than willing to do other stuff where you believe it will benefit you. Maybe you'll change your long distance provider from AT&T to MCI, or from MCI to Sprint. Or maybe back to AT&T again when they send you checks, two times in as many months, first for $50 then for $80, as a blatent bribe to have you switch back to them.

The point I'm trying to make, is that there are half a million people here who are willing to get off their rears and do something. And while that half million may often disagree - is it GNU/Linux or just "Linux"? Is Linux ready for the desktop? Is BSD? Would we better off using Macs and if so, how what about that one mouse button, eh? - there are things we can agree on. Things we can sit down, and maybe not all of us, but, say, 400,000 of us, can say "Hey. Look, I may disagree with you about, say, GNOME being a big bloated pile of crap, but when it comes to the DMCA, I say, 'Oi! Bush! Nooooooo! You may be the Supreme Court's choice to be President of the US, and I admire your version of "Fool me once", but you do not enforce laws that prevent me from watching my own DVDs!' and give people like that a slap."

(And you'd be well in order to.)

So, I guess, what I'm trying to say is this: when someone says "I think blah and whatever and so-there and hel-lo! Get out! I am soooo there! And what I think is we should write to our reps and senators, and tell them this", you ought to listen to them. If you agree with what they're saying, well, go ahead! Do it!

Because if everyone thinks like that, that's 400,000 Slashdotters writing intelligent, well formed, gramatical and impresife emails and letters to influential people who can do something to help make things better.

Half a million! Wow.

Sealab is beginning its second season, but the fan art just hasn't quite arrived yet, not like it has for Space Ghost and Aqua Teen Hunger Force. I'm doing what I can, though, and I'm sure there are others out there.

If you do not know anything about the programs I just mentioned I highly reccomend taking a look in your favorite search engine or cable TV listings. Sealab is all I watch.

Okay, college has been in session for quite some time now, and the programs that intest me are beginning to begin meeting. Apart from the Quiz Bowl team and the Math Club, which I fully understand, are the Young Democrats. This is a very important election year in my adopted home. Three major positions are being contested, Senator, Govenor, and Leutenant Govenor. The US Senator is the position most important to me, as the senate has such an even distribution of Democrats and Republicans. I want to be involved with politics, and I am generally liberal, but before I volunteer my time and energy on assisting with the campaign I need to know about isues that are every important to me, but not clearly defined along party lines. At the meeting, I asked another student the position of the senate candidate in regards to the DMCA and the Hollings Bill. He didn't know, but he referred me to an Email address, saying he or someone else could find out later. Again, I care a lot about My Rights Online, so I ask you, what are considerations I need to take into account when writing this question. What have you found to be the best way to ask candidates about their stance in relation to electronic freedom?