Where's Rusty?

There's been a lot of talk on Kuro5hin recently regarding Emperor Rusty and several nagging issues with the site and the fact that he got paid in excess of $35,000 to run the site, by its users, who haven't seen more than a handful of pissant bug fixes since then. A lot of real work needs done.

On the other hand, we have heard of a lot about other activities Der Foster has been involved in lately. It's time we looked at how Rusty has been budgeting his time and think about how our money is being spent.

Things Rusty has been up to:

• calculating the efficiency of trees as storage devices for heat energy captured from the sun
• peacefully boating around his little island in a kayak that he made all by himself
• kindling fires and meditating, shrinking his skin with sun-tree heat
• pricing anvils at the local community bulletin board
• making bread from scratch (the entire process takes an entire year and yields one loaf)
• flying to DC and San Francisco to meet men for "drinks" in bars
• modifying user accounts that publicly voice dissenting opinion
• designing hypocritical, sycophantic scenester t-shirts without giving due to the real underground heros
• being a big meanie to Vladinator
• playing with Linus^Hx

Are the needs of the site and its users being met? With $35,000 of cold hard cash in hand and the above goals realized, Rusty has yet to take care of the following issues that Kuro5hin users have been vocal about for some time. Here's where the real cost/benefit ratio analysis needs to come in.

Pending tasks at Kuro5hin.org:

• actually releasing a real whole-number version of Scoop
• making Scoop work with Apache 2, which has been released for over a year!
• purchasing a dedicated database server, alleviating Kuro5hin's nagging speed problems
• posting site news, so people know where all of their hard-earned BLING-BLING is going to
• fixing searches-- how can I run vanity searches on Kuro5hin when they always time out?
• documentation: it's been, what, four years and we still don't have any?
• PLP/PWP: why have these annoying bugs been given to the users-- paying users-- to deal with!?

Kuro5hin users, together we can bring this issue to a head and collect the information regarding our monies and Rusty's whereabouts. There are a few simple actions we can all take that, en masse, will achieve our shared goals. I urge you to take the following steps this very minute!!!

1. email Rusty with your complaints!
2. threaten not to renew or purchase a subscription to Kuro5hin, ever!
3. flail and wave your arms everywhere while shouting!
4. use lots of text decoration tags and styles!

Just a thought.

Thank you.

Why Run Linux on a Mac?

I don't understand why anyone would bother running Linux on a Mac. For $99 you can purchase Mac OS X and get real live tech support for problems that (probably won't) pop up. There's a lot of technical reasons you should run Mac OS instead of Linux.

Here are some of them.

A Leap Ahead for Apple

Never before in the history of computing has the consumer had so much power and convenience available to him. What only ten years ago was viewed as a super-computing application is now freely offered to anyone with the hardware to support it — genetic sequencing, video editing, 3D graphics, explosion reproduction. It is in this climate that we must ask ourselves what the next step will be, and where we will allow it to take us.

In 1996, SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics, Inc.) swapped out their home-grown operating system and processor — IRIX and MIPS, respectively — for commodity components Linux and IA32. Today, SGI is in the doghouse and fares little better than any other PC vendor. Into the gap left by SGI came Apple, who in 1996 themselves purchased what is arguably the most advanced UNIX in existance: OPENSTEP, aka Mac OS X.

Now with QuickTime 6.1 and Quartz Extreme, is there anything that can stop Apple's juggernaut-like race to be king of the high-end server market? Only lack of hardware to run their crown jewels on. The Mac is so good at what it does, Apple is pressing Motorola and IBM for PowerPC chips that can meet the exhaustive demands of new high-end customers. The best of both breeds, Apple offers scalable, high-end UNIX to the Fortune 500 clientele as well as ease of use and simplicity to its private consumers. With things going so well, Apple seems to be on an unstoppable rise.

Trading Megahurtz For Megahertz

For the last few years Motorola has been the sole supplier of Apple's high-end chips, all from the G4 family. And for the last few years, Mac fans and industry pundits alike have expressed grief over the speed — or lack thereof — Motorola has reached with these processors. While Intel and AMD reach speeds nearing 3 GHz, or 3,000 MHz, the Motorola/Apple camp have slowly crawled to 1.25 GHz.

A cacophony of possible solutions to the Megahurtz problem have been heard from within the Mac community, and finally an end is in sight. The light at the end of the PowerPC tunnel is shining, Mac faithful, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief.

Well, not quite yet.

Drug Use & Mac OS X

After months of painstaking research on prerelease versions of Mac OS 10.3, AKA Panther, I have proven my theory that Mac OS is really just a suite of drug tools. Steve Jobs and Apple promote drug use! After following the simple steps below, you'll see how Steve Jobs and company are promoting illegal drug abuse through Panther, the most popular Mac OS ever!

1. insert your Mac OS X Install Disc 1 CD (optionally, for you elite #macfilez pirates, mount the image of it)
2. navigate to /Mac OS X Install Disc 1/System/Installation/Packages/
3. control- or right-click on the OSInstall.mpkg file you'll find in the above path, and choose the Show Package Contents option
4. double-click on the folder called Contents, and again on the Resources folder that appears next
5. see firsthand the terrible drug propaganda: the file called Pusher!!!

Another stinging clue are the dozens — if not hundreds — of files that end in .plist, which are found scattered all over a Mac OS hard drive. Obviously they are some sort of informational resources regarding replacing pee, or urine, a common technique criminals employ to pass drug tests! This is clear proof that Mac OS X is some sort of twisted junkie tool created to assist in selling drugs and subverting justice!

Let's take a look at some other aspects of Mac OS X that are clearly drug-related.

• Address Book: No drug dealer's bag of tricks is complete without an address book, filled with the names and numbers of other dealers, steady customers, and his suppliers.
• Backup (a .Mac application): If the deal ain't up to what they feel they hit the steel an' instead of gettin' jacked up, they get they backup.
• Preview: Everyone knows that drug dealers hook prospective customers by giving out "samples," otherwise known as Previews. Obviously this app was designed to make doing so easier for the dealer.
• Grab: When things get hot and shit goes down, any dealer worth his weight in marijauna won't hesitate to grab what's due to him.
• Terminal: What quicker way to make it across the city for that sweet drug deal than using the terminal? And what better way to keep track of the routes and schedules than with a Mac OS X application?

Linux vs. OpenBSD

I received the email first thing in the morning from the IT department. Our network would be undergoing a major overhaul to correct the ad hoc growth it had experienced in the last year, and starting next week Internet access would be sporadic. There would also be a new firewall and security measures, replacing the old OpenBSD system I'd managed to get installed last Spring. Happy for the heads-up, I went to work right away to make sure Linux had no place on our network. This was not the first time that I had faced this threat.