Monday, May 19, 2008

Stallman hunting sharks


World-class adventure sports fanatic Richard M. Stallman now has turned his attention from other dangerous activities like kite-boarding and high-wire walking and rocking the half-pipe into a new passion — hunting sharks. The photo above was taken in Australia a few days ago. This unlucky shark bastard violated the GPL and got what he had coming — a spear through the neck from RMS, who was aided in his shark-hunt by Harald Welte and Eben Moglen. Rock on, RMS, you demented soldier in the war for freedom. Much love to Jason for the photo.


Wednesday, May 14, 2008

A stunning look inside the OLPC fiasco


Ivan Krstic used to be the head of security development for OLPC but he quit recently as the entire place began to fall into chaos. Turns out the mess is far, far worse than anyone on the outside could ever have imagined. Check out this long essay in which Krstic lays it all bare. It’s amazing stuff, and in case you don’t want to read the whole thing let me boil down the essential bits:

* OLPC was never really about learning; it was about freetards promoting free software. Now it’s not even about that. It’s just about selling laptops.

* Walter Bender: “I quit because I can’t continue to work on a lie.”

* Richard Stallman is a total fuckwit who thinks OLPC is evil for shipping Windows on the XO machine.

* Krstic recently got fed up with Linux (after 12 years) and bought a Mac — only to discover that OS X eats Linux for lunch. (Welcome back to the real world, freetard.)

* OLPC never had any plan for deploying laptops. Out in the field, in Peru and Uruguay, it’s a total mess.

Great stuff, right? So do you think Lesley Stahl will do an update for 60 Minutes and ask Saint Nicholas to explain what went wrong? Will anyone hold this idiot’s feet to the fire?

Coming up next on 60 Minutes — The big lie: How a band of arrogant, ignorant, academic blowhards squandered millions of dollars and conned the world — until it all came crashing down around them.

Now that would be a show worth watching.


Friday, May 2, 2008

Freetard convicted of murdering wife; other freetards say it must be a conspiracy

Read the comments here. Classic freetard paranoia.


Thursday, April 17, 2008

Red Hat throws in towel on Linux desktop

Great news, Mac fans! Red Hat is getting out of the desktop OS business, which will make life so much easier for us. No more having to sell against Red Hat. Yay! Red Hat’s basic argument is that not enough people want Linux on the desktop — I know, shocking, right? — and so they can’t make money doing it and because they’re a publicly traded company they can’t do things that don’t make money. See their pathetic statement here. CNET covers it here. As far as we can tell Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has not yet copied the statement into an article of his own. More as this develops.


Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Rare video of eWeek copycat Steven J. Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste


Spotted in the wild! It’s former eWeek copycat hack Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (aka the King of All Freetard Hacks, aka the founder and self-appointed president of the Internet Press Guild) reporting live from a Linux trade show right before he got axed in a recent round of Ziff-Davis layoffs. You think Ricky Gervais created some excruciating moments in the British version of “The Office”? You ain’t seen nothing. Watch this poor frigtard really struggle when he’s caught live on camera and isn’t allowed to copy from a Red Hat press release. Though you have to admit, the camera really loves him. Note the really professional zoom-in-zoom-out technique of fellow freetard hack (and Slashdot boss and former limo driver) Robin “Roblimo” Miller. To see the original go here.


Wednesday, April 9, 2008

Red Hat hates patents. Sort of.

Classic freetard maneuver today. Red Hat, king of all freetard software makers, put out a statement saying patents are bad and are stifling innovation. (Reprint by Steven J. Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste is here.) Red Hat also filed an amicus brief in some court case where someone is trying to patent a business method.

Says Red Hat:

“Today the patent system is, if anything, a hindrance to open source. Developers face the risk that the original code they have written in good faith could be deemed to infringe an existing software patent.”

Except that:

“Despite the hindrances of the patent system, open source continues to expand at an exponential rate.”

And, um:

“Given the litigation risk, some open source companies, including Red Hat, acquire patents for the sole purpose of asserting them defensively in the event they are faced with a future lawsuit.”

To see a list of Red Hat patents and patent applications, go here and here.

FWIW, note how many of these filings contain the phrase “methods and systems” in the title. Ahem.


Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Unbreakable Linux?

That’s Larry’s slogan but maybe you’ve heard of the huge security breach at this supermarket chain called Hannaford. Millions of customer records compromised. Guess which OS they switched to a few years ago, garnering huge amounts of praise from the freetard hackery?


For example, see this article, called “Grocer rings up savings with Linux cash registers,” which features a photo of the company’s brave pioneering CIO, Bill Homa (right). Wanna guess how long this risk-taking tech exec will have his job? Or see this triumphant press release from IBM announcing that Hannaford had just installed a gorgeous new IBM mainframe running Linux as part of a “multi-year IT transformation” at the company. Money quote: “Now all Hannaford’s partner and supplier data, inventory controls, and payment and order processing run simultaneously on 23 separate and secure [shurely shome mishtake, ed.] partitions on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 and z/OS on the single System z9.”

But wait. I thought Linux had magical powers and couldn’t be hacked. I asked Larry about it. His response? “No comment.”

Strangely, there’s also been no mention of the Hannaford situation from freetard hack Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of Linux-Watch. I mean, one of the biggest and best-known early adopters of Linux suffers a massive security breach, and it’s not worth a mention? Funny that.


Monday, March 31, 2008

News flash: Linux developer has sex, doesn’t have to pay.


The freetard community is in a tizzy over this one. I suppose it was going to happen sooner or later as Linux became more mainstream. See the full story here. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols is already cutting and pasting this story into something that will appear under his own byline.


Wednesday, March 12, 2008

Wal-Mart yanks Linux PC, cites lack of childlike wonder


See this story in InformationWeek (the #1 source for tech news of all kinds) saying that even the cheap dumb fucks who buy computers at Wal-Mart have enough of a clue to avoid the gPC machine from Everex. Naturally the freetard writing the article says he can’t understand why this has happened, though he concedes that (a) the gPC runs gOS which won’t run Windows apps and Wal-Tards might get the thing home and find that out and be a bit disappointed and return it; and (b) the gPC machine shipped without a monitor, which apparently confuses Wal-Tards who get home and turn it on and then call tech support asking why can’t they see anything; and (c) the gPC machine mostly shipped with Web apps, but those require a high-speed Internet connection and, um, the cheapskate n00bs and Wal-Tards who are drawn to a $200 computer don’t generally spend $50 a month on cable modem or DSL service and they generally haven’t heard of “cloud computing” and the “Google-centric computing experience.” Guess nobody thought of that.

Nonetheless freetard hack boy says, “I don’t think this is the end of the road for retail Linux PCs — not by a long shot,” though he concedes that “selling Linux to the masses is going to require more than just a low price tag — since, when you get down to it, Linux already has that.”

Um, yeah. Put it this way. When you’re giving something away free, and people still don’t want it, and in fact would rather spend money on something else, you’ve got a problem.

Nonetheless, I expect that soon the extreme freetards at Groklaw will suggest a Microsoft conspiracy. Like, um, after doing some heavy-duty investigative work it turns out that some mid-level executive who joined Wal-Mart last month is the same guy who back in the 1980s worked at an investment bank that managed money for a prince from Saudi Arabia and strangely enough records show that in 2003 Bill Gates visited Saudi Arabia and met with a cousin of that very same prince and they talked about creating a company to bring more tech to the Middle East. Pretty easy to connect the dots, right? Soon, Steven J. Vaughan-Cut-and-Paste of eWeek will pick up the meme and after repeating it once or twice will shorten it to “the well-known close ties between Microsoft and Wal-Mart, which led to Wal-Mart removing all Linux machines from its stores.”

Or maybe the Wal-Tards just didn’t want to buy them. Nah. Couldn’t be.


Sunday, February 24, 2008

Linux dudes love Macs. Who knew?

See here. Money quote: “Conventional wisdom — suggesting that open source advocates are cheap geeks who don’t want to pay for technology — is just plain wrong. On the contrary, it seems as if the open source movement is more about quality than price. And Apple’s commitment to quality, it seems, is enough for open source folks to overlook Steve Jobs’ penchant for building closed, proprietary systems.”

I love you too, open source dudes. I just feel bad for poor old Dell. They totally fell for that petition thing and started making pre-loaded Linux machines. Then you guys all keep buying MacBooks. Hilarious!