Cox Crow

One of these initiatives will include discontinuing the snacks and refreshments historically provided by [company]. I know you all understand that drastic times calls for drastic measures and will support this initiative.

That had better not include coffee.

5:16:01 PM #
categories: Coffee, System Administration

31337

(6) the term ‘copyright owner’ means a legal or beneficial owner of an exclusive right under section 106 and any party authorized to act on the owner’s behalf.
— "A BILL To amend title 17, United States Code, to limit the liability of copyright owners for protecting their works on peer-to-peer networks."

Now where did I put that license to kill....

5:04:35 PM # Google It!
categories: Law, Media

The drug caused the men to lose their will-power?

2:39:31 PM #

Repeating Myself

Dear Microsoft,

Suppose someone opens a message in your mail client. They stop reading it for a bit, and go about their business. When they come back, they double-click on the message in the index of their inbox. What should you do?

Open the message in a new window? Yeah, I thought you'd say that. Go talk to the people writing your other mail client, but don't listen to everything they have to say, because they don't know how to sort.

2:35:01 PM # Google It!
categories: Dear Microsoft

Big Enough for China

How many uids are available? Or, to put it another way, just how big is a 32-bit integer?

4,294,967,296

So we can have uid 0 (reserved) to uid 4294967295. There's plenty of room there so that, as we carve it up, most namespaces won't overlap. We shouldn't need to use a 64-bit system until we need to assign user IDs to everyone in China and India. :-)

This is, BTW, the same problem that IPv4 has that IPv6 attempts to solve: the shortness of the namespace.

12:38:06 PM # Google It!
categories: System Administration

Money makes the World go round

Money is a consensual illusion. We agree that it has value. And so we accept it in return for things.

In the coal fields of West Virginia, the coal companies issued their own scrip. The workers were paid in scrip. The company store accepted the scrip. And the company took rent for the company houses in scrip. Outside the company town, the scrip was worthless.

Until Sean Gallagher pointed out Ithaca and Baltimore Hours, I was unaware that communities smaller than national governments were issuing currency. Shows how much I care about money.

11:47:52 AM # Google It!