Consider the past year. Now consider UserFriendly.org's blatant MS bashing of past. And then take a look at the following cartoon.
In the past the Orbital Mind Control Ray could only have been an obvious reference to MSFT (as seen on slashdot). But today, we're making fun of Google - is the attitude towards GOOG changing as the company grows bigger and starts eating small companies for breakfast, lunch and dinner ? Which reminds of this conversation between Bart and Fat Tony from Simpsons 8F03.
Bart: Are you guys crooks?
Fat Tony: Bart.. uhm. Is it it wrong to steal a loaf of bread to feed
your starving family?
Bart: No..
Fat Tony: Well suppose you got a large starving family. Is it wrong to
steal a truckload of bread to feed them?
Bart: Nuh-uh
Fat Tony: And what if your family don't like bread. They like.. cigarettes.
Bart: I guess that's okay.
Fat Tony: Now, what if instead of giving them away.. you sold them at a
price that was practically giving them away. Would that be a
crime, Bart?
Bart: Hell no!
As someone else pointed out, when Microsoft came out, they were the hungry rebels who were freeing the public from the iron fisted data processing overlords, without the cutsey "Ribbons and Ponies" approach that Apple was taking. The big blue of old, which has now become a savior and hero for Linux, was the evil monopoly ?
How often does sides get switched, old rebels become new masters and acquire new allies from old enemies ?
--No permanent friends or allies, only permanent interests.
-- Lord Palmerston
I suppose it is my own damn fault for not participating. But unlike last year, the hackfest was during daytime, which severly limits my coding abilities. Like so many other people who started hacking during college, my peak hours of coding lie between 7 PM and 11 PM, with the extended version running upto 3 AM - and the muse of coding cannot just turn on & off, on demand. Not to mention my laptop was showing more bad sectors than a minefield in Cambodia.
But what *really* saddens me is the first question titled jail break. I'd discovered this design flaw in chroot() quite a while back and broken out of a real production chroot. On the other hand, I'd have never really made it with the image processing example.
Maybe there was a point - but Hindsight is always 20/20.
--Given the choice between accomplishing something and just lying around, I'd rather lie around.
-- Eric Clapton
posted at: 10:53 | path: /conferences | permalink |