Are /. editors actually bots?

Sometimes, you have to wonder about things like this. It seems to be /. Dupe-A-Mania week. Either that, or the /. editors really are bots and we humans are, well, duped.

Whatever the answer, one more question comes to my mind. Does this make /. look stupid because the geeks in charge can't even write a simple Perl script to search for duplicate subject material in the text of their archives or does it merely add to the charm? I guess we'll have to work on a new overused catchphrase for this phenomenon to join the "in Soviet Russia", "I for one welcome our new (insert subject here) overlords" and "1, 2, ,3 ,4, 5. Profit" staples.

On we march towards Ghost in the Shell...

(One of the more lucid and insightful things I've managed to spit out even if it is simply IMHO and possibly at odds with yours, this was written in response to this article on Slashdot:
UK to lnstall Wireless Mics on London Streets

Posted by timothy on Sunday May 08, @05:47AM

from the no-sir-that's-not-at-all-disturbing-no-sir dept.

johnthorensen writes "Looks like parts of London may be seeing wireless microphones on the street sometime soon. At this point, they're looking to use them to monitor noise ordinance violations - if you call about a repeated disturbance, they'll mount one by your place to monitor noise levels for the next several days. The article also notes that they intend to locate them more permanently outside bars and nightclubs. The microphones apparently communicate via wireless Internet connection, although no real details are given as to the nature of said connection. Are London residents getting the boiled frog treatment?")

It seems like over time, we are getting more and more wound up in an us vs. them (whoever we or they actually are at the moment) battle every day. The biggest ongoing one is the one of the people at large vs. the government which is inextricably tied to the people at large by blood and friendship, neighborhood and planet.

Government is in all cases mob rule. Whether the mob is leashed by a king in a monarchy or stumbling like a mass of drunken sailors on shore leave in a democracy. Mobs don't think well. It's a testament to our perseverance and dedication to what's best in and for ourselves that the democratic republics we in the west live under work as well as they do. So I have to take that as a bright note of hope for the future.

Nevertheless, not thinking well, government fears o'ermuch as they once said, and overreacts. So we ratchet up the infringements as much as the courts will let them get away with and the people fight a subversive war both against the unnecessary intrusions of the government and their misbehaving brethren whom the government is overreacting about in the first place. It can get so bad we wonder if the cure isn't worth the disease and the law enforcement worse than the criminals.

That being said, we still make it work somehow so I am not worried about incrementalism taking us to the world of 1984. We're not given to simple jingoistic rhetoric and propaganda, being increasingly disaffected, estranged, and cynical by turns. And we the people at large are somewhat given to superstitious overreaction and propaganda amongst ourselves as well. Our governments are in the end reflection of our own natures. Given that we continuously put into power a succession of people that cold logic and experience tells us flatly will be not the best and brightest, we easily override our intellect and vote with our emotions, largely those based on the idea of "what have you done for me lately?".

And so it goes...

I would just add that acoustic scramblers have been used for point to point phone communications for years by businesses and governments long before the digital age. So will we fear so much as to fit such things into face-masks and be only intelligible to those with proper headsets we choose to give the codes to? I wonder how the governments we put in power will overreact to our overreaction...

Java on Fedora made quicker than figuring it out yourself...

Beginner Linux user? Problems getting Java to work with Firefox on Fedora? Of course. I feel your pain. My drive is littered with RPMs and tarballs in testament to the frustration. Fear not, for there is a solution.

Pay no attention to the results of Google and your own intuition about changing about:config and so forth. No need to curse Fedora when Sun's idiotically packaged *.rpm.bin download causes it to refuse to work because it wants a file name change. Sure, you could open a terminal and just sh *.rpm.bin but why tear your nails out trying to make Firefox look at the Java that was just installed?

Dag Wieers, the one and only stop you need to make Java work right.

Choose the big j2re package you need and install as root. Then install the matching "mozilla" package right after. Suddenly, I can get VNC to work inside Firefox again.

Brings back the old manual plugin configuration days when Netscape 3 wasn't even a gleam in anyone's eye. Of course back then, the raw visceral promise of the web made it worth your while to struggle with it until the coders were finally leashed in by the more reasonable people of the world and made to write proper intelligent installer applications. Not so now when Windows XP apps install with a couple clicks and they either do what Microsoft says should be done or they don't work at all. One standard to rule them all and in the darkness of closed source bind them.

Okay, so maybe you don't need open source because you really don't want to know all about the gory details of C and don't plan on trying to con some hapless coder friend into doing something with the source to make you happy. It's just nice for those of us who do. However, I suspect we probably wouldn't care a whole lot, at least not as much as we do, if the installers in Linux land worked as well as a modern Installshield installer does.

Scratch that. I know we wouldn't. We will just have to wait until the sensible and reasonable people whip and leash the technologists into making sense with Linux that way they did with Windows. After all, we only waited almost ten years out from Windows 3.11 to reach Windows XP. We can wait as long, right?

Do I hear crickets?

I therefore once again suggest we call the next great Linux installer initiative the WTF? installer in honor of the reaction of all the poor befuddled beginners convinced by geek friends to use it by conning them into looking at Windows XP as if it was DOS. Nothing could be further from the truth, but as long as FUD rules the day and the Linux camp does nothing to make it easy to use at all times from installation to de-installation and everything in between, they will be shooting themselves in the crotch and doing the platform and their credulous friends a grave disservice.

Sort of like massively hyping a band that could have been good but sucked and once you blow first impressions, you're fighting an uphill battle in a hurricane to get back the momentum you idiotically squandered.

Linux is doing that right now.

Editor's Note: The following recommendations were made by the blogger.com spellchecker. I leave the detection of irony to you.

Actual Suggested
RPMs --> raping
tarballs --> travails
Google --> googol
hyping --> hoping

Personally, in my mind, make install ---> make yourself insane...

Musings...

Should we just get it over with, kill CSS, and release CFS 1.0? Cascade Failure Sheets would be more honest naming...

For that matter, maybe releasing CRS would be a good idea as well. It's not as though so many coders can remember anything. Wasn't that one of the points of high level interpreted languages in the first place?

Could the explosion of hacker theme books at your local Borders have any connection with the explosion of script kiddies and increase in the percentage of same who are getting better? Nah, of course not...

Does the fact that Linux distributions costing $70+, boxed with CDs and manuals are selling when they could be downloaded for free on the Internet illustrate the continuing lack of "getting it" on the part of a good portion of the Internet using public?

Was the leaving of the letter M out of BSD an accident or purposeful because it was felt to be implied?

Is someone trying to tell me something when rather than being advised to use a Linux based utility, I am directed to buy Partition Magic instead?

It would seem to me that there are certain requirements for every job and that one very important unwritten one in IT book design is skill with unintentional humor in choosing titles. It isn't just the Dummies and Complete Idiot books that have this tendency, either.

Unix-Hater's Handbook

It occurred to me that I might mention this, however irrelevant the mention.

By checking out Daniel Weise's old site of which only pieces remain since he left Microsoft, you can still download a copy of his work with Simson Garfinkel and Steve Strassmann which pretty clearly lays out a buttload of reasons to not just hate or loathe Unix, but the people who continue to purvey it as well.

More to the point, it is an excellent bit of bait to the blind zealots of Unix who in almost every review of this book, come back with rejoinders and dismissals so clearly illustrative of everything the book lays out. A book which takes Unix to task for its tool-set (bag of hammers) mentality (among other things) cannot be countered obviously with the glib jibe that such has been fixed with some other tool. The biggest tools in Unix seem to be many of its own users.

Myself, not being a Unix zealot but rather a realist, I most certainly do hate Unix and the people who continue standing in the way of the two inevitable choices of outcome: death or resurrection anew. No, Linux is not resurrection anew for all the fluff and eye candy of the latest Mepis disc. BSD even less so. In fact, the entirety of Unix might as well be referred to as OS/BDSM. If your critical systems run Unix you are in Bondage. You're forced to a Discipline of whimsical masters and mistresses not much more sane than those who sired Freddy Krueger. Sadism and Masochism are self explanatory for the love-hate relationship you share with a viral organic morass born of thousands of arrogant nobodies and a few supremely arrogant somebodies who all pretend to follow some standard while at the same time rewriting it as they think it really should be.

Death is the easy to understand first alternative and the easiest to give when emotions run high. Of course, when you realize the alternative is Microsoft Windows with its myriad bugs and total lack of interest in not shipping them in the first place or nothing, you have to consider something else.

Resurrection is the other solution and I mean the classical reforging into a new body, pure and unbroken; the current course in Linux of combining vampiric resurrection with your mother-in-law's sister's application of make-up by spackling trowel is obviously a faux solution.

A simple to understand picture would be to compare Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows XP Professional. The former is what Unix still is under the fluff and eye candy of your favorite Linux distro and The latter is what Unix should be and we all very well know it.

Knowing it and actually achieving it through conscious effort are two different things as we can see from the path of progression from WfW3.11 to WinXPPro. However, Microsoft was obviously more about making that effort than simply wandering there haphazardly as the Unix crowd is presently doing.

If I had to offer an analogy, I'd say the state of Unix is presently right about the level of DOS and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 prior to Windows 95 being more than a brain fart: underlying OS and GUI are still totally separate and kludged, neither one is being improved upon by the exact same people and those who are working don't seem to talk to each other, and they don't work right out of the box the way you want except in a very small number of cases and require far more effort to make them work than you want to expend.

"Why can't it just work?"

What work means is of course variable in meaning but when it comes to end-users of software, it means the way they expect. If you can't produce something that even makes a farcical attempt at it, you shouldn't be even in software programming. If you do make a farcical attempt and stop there thinking it is "good enough" then you aren't any better than the majority of abandonware writers and pop musicians. A vast undertaking with half-vast ideas is fine at the start when you can be forgiven for not knowing in advance for certain what a folly you were pursuing (Edsel), fanaticism to refuse to acknowledge it and buy your own horseshit (Linux), minor idiocy to avoid acknowledging it openly but only in private (Microsoft, Bill Clinton), and maturity for working seriously to make good with a real and true rationale even if you are ultimately wrong (no one in IT that I am aware of which tells you something about maturity in IT). Silent slinking away from the disaster doesn't count.

As I said, the post is probably apocryphal in the minds of anyone firmly embedded in the anti-Microsoft world of Unix. This all just came to mind reading up on some ideas of the book in the Linux camp and reinforces my belief that they just don't get it in the way that comedian Jeff Dunham's Peanut would show with his trademark hand over the head swipe with the sound of a passing race car. Mmrrrrrrrroooooowwwww...

So I'm this, huh?

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

Well this is news. I thought I was a 2.5d3.141592653... How disappointing.

The Doctor Lives (the American radio one, not the British time travelling one)

This just in, the place to refresh your cherished memories of Doctor Demento. Welcome to tape trading in the Internet Age. Now if only we can archive every MST3K episode...

Why do this?

Well, for starters... uh... because everyone else was?

Okay, I know. It's probably not the best of reasons. No need to drag out that tired mother-voice impression in screeching tones and answer with, "if everyone was jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, would you do it?"

"Uh, only if I had a bungee cord. Er... No, probably not even then."

"Go to your room."

I would, but it is in another city.

Stay tuned for anything that crosses my mind or catches my attention and... oooooh! Shiny!

Well, this will teach me...

...to rtfm. Or maybe rtfwarnings. Seems blogger.com has had a bad kernel and is being worked on. Lovely.

In the meantime, welcome to the start of my blogging experience.