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Quoth the Raven, "Welcome!"
Personal blog · linuxmafia.comprogrammingculturewriting
Quoth the Raven, "Welcome!" is a personal blog at linuxmafia.com about programming, culture and writing. Since 2008, 49 different Hacker News readers have linked it 58 times, most often “Kudzu and the Marriage Amendment”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
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58mentions?
49HN people?
2008–2026first – last linked?
Most-linked posts?
- Kudzu and the Marriage Amendment8 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2010-05-09
- /faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.html7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2013-07-23
- What's the Plural of 'Virus'?5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2009-04-29
- Why being able to fork is still A Good Thing(1999)3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-04-21
- Public Domain3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2011-08-30
- /faq/Essays/smart-questions.html2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-02-11
- /~rick/afw/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-05-30
- /faq/Kernel/linus-im-a-bastard-speech.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-12-05
- /~karsten/Rants/piracy.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-10-26
What Hacker News says?
FVWM95 was, certainly. Plain FVWM was very much not - it had a very distinctive look of its own. E.g. [1] is more typical of FVWM. [1] http://linuxmafia.com/~n6tadam/fvwm/screenshot.png
Comment linking /~n6tadam/fvwm/screenshot.png
on “I quit my job to focus on SerenityOS full time”Submitted Why being able to fork is still A Good Thing(1999) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOK, define "male". Is it chromosomal, such that XY makes you male? Wrong. People with total androgen insensitivity are XY but look and act and feel female, because the androgens they produce never took effect. Their bodies and minds feminized, so they're female in every respect except their karyotype. There's a ton of other conditions which make the definition of sex complex. Read this essay, which lists a lot more…
Comment linking /kb/Essays/marriage.html
on “Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo”Submitted Kudzu and the Marriage Amendment as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYup. http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html
Comment linking /faq/Essays/marriage.html
on “Ask a Female Engineer: Thoughts on the Google Memo”Submitted What's the Plural of 'Virus'? as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> won't work on such a processor; Eh, I think SSH clients for OS8 existed. http://www.heilancoo.net/MacCVSClient/MacCVSClientDoc/ssh-cl... http://linuxmafia.com/ssh/macos.html
Comment linking /ssh/macos.html
on “1991 Macintosh Quadra with Mac OS 8.1 as an Electron App”Submitted Dave Barry's Read This First as a story · 2 points
HN discussion- nl · 2011-07-08
The linked essay[1] is worth reading. I had no idea that sex testing was so complicated - it explained to me a lot about why sex-testing for (usually) women's sport isn't as simple as I'd assumed. [1] http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html
Comment linking /faq/Essays/marriage.html
on “XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public” Submitted What's the Plural of 'Virus'? (1999) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis reminds me of the old concept of "tab damage"[1] on usenet/mailing lists. People used to leave little "devices" in their signatures that based on this that would point to the number of times a message had been forwarded or quoted, because client software would typically indent the quoted message. [1] http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/afw/#tabdamage
Comment linking /~rick/afw/
on “Show HN: Super Mail Forward, an HTML email that evolves as you forward it”Submitted Kudzu and the California Marriage Amendment as a story · 1 points
HN discussionFunny, I've had a similar experience, and stopped contributing because of it. My case was even more egregious as autosubmit _was_ enabled on StreetComplete, but unbeknownst to me at the time such submissions are batched, so if you edit local places that you're visiting (vacation) and places far away that you're intimately familiar with (home), it can still end up in one big changeset that spans an enormous geographi…
Comment linking /~rick/faq/crybaby.html
on “OpenStreepMap 2012 vs. 2022”Submitted Public Domain as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAbandoning your copyright to a work does not place it in the public domain. It just makes it abandoned property, which then becomes owned by the first person to take ownership of it (barring further complications in the applicable jurisdictions abandoned property laws, or pre-existing claims by others such as the former owner's heirs or assigns). http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.ht...
Comment linking /faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.html
on “Eyeo wins German copyright decision, sets legal precedent for who ‘owns’ HTML”Submitted All Operating Systems Suck (1996, classic humor) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThis used to be called "Who is not on LiveJournal[1]" http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/winolj.html Notes: 1. An interesting story itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveJournal
Comment linking /faq/Essays/winolj.html
on “Dear "Landlord"”Submitted Fear of Forking essay as a story · 1 points
HN discussionHere's a much better link.. someone collected various emails from Linus on loadable modules: http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules....
Comment linking /faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.html
on “OpenZFS launch”http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.... Linus said it was okay long ago; that's as close to official as one can get. Later his views became more nuanced, but still largely authorize binary-only drivers. It may still be legally problematic (as there are many contributors who may be able to make a claim); but 28 years of policy precedent make such an attempt at enforcement difficult. There's al…
Comment linking /faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.html
on “AMD's 22 year old GPUs are still getting updates”Obligatory nitpick regarding the plural of "virus": http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html
Comment linking /~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html
on “1980s computer controls Grand Rapids Public School heat and AC”http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/g63.html What is the plural of virus? Viruses. It is not viri, or (worse) virii. True, the word comes directly from Latin, but not all Latin words ending in -us have -i as their plural. http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html The plural of virus is neither viri nor virii, nor even vira nor virora. It is quite simply viruses, irrespective of context.
Comment linking /~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html
on “Man-made super flu could kill half of humanity”In the case of Linux, Linus has a public position [1] that: * A kernel module is run by the kernel, not incorporated in it, * A kernel module only uses LGPL interfaces, so full GPL compliance shouldn't be necessary, * Binary modules should be legal (though he doesn't like them), and * Projects (like filesystems developed for other platforms) with their own life outside of Linux shouldn't be required to re-license if…
Comment linking /faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.html
on “GPL Violations Related to Combining ZFS and Linux”> So I've not been able to find any easy way to create an Ubuntu 8.04 container on modern Ubuntu Interesting. I posted a comment here a few months ago where I went through this process so that I could run Amarok 1.4. I used 8.10. Here's is a rough howto... Step 1: Find an Ubuntu 8.10 ISO and mount it: curl http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/8.04.0/ubuntu-8.04.4... sudo mount -o loop ubuntu-8.04-desktop-amd64.is…
Comment linking /pub/linux/apps/
on “You can legally get and run WordPerfect for free”egcs and gcc "merged" in that the modern gcc is the descendant of the egcs codebase. Rick Moen wrote a good essay titled "Fear of Forking" http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/forking.html It's a defense of forking, but it contains a few capsule histories of important forks of the past (from the perspective of when it was written) which are interesting.
Comment linking /faq/Licensing_and_Law/forking.html
on “FreeNAS and TrueNAS Are Unifying”I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, the issue is not 'countries that don't recognise the public domain', but rather 'countries that do not allow authors to donate their works to the public domain', which includes the USA (since 1978): http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.ht...
Comment linking /faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.html
on “Why no Steam, Notch?”IANAL, but: I don't know of any countries that do not recognise public domain as a concept, but there are many countries (including the USA) whose copyright laws have no provision for an author 'giving up' their copyright. Just saying "I release this into the public domain" does not necessarily do that, any more than walking away from a house you own means you no longer own it. That means that if somebody says "I re…
Comment linking /faq/Licensing_and_Law/public-domain.html
on “Why no Steam, Notch?”The Linux kernel has explicit rules for the cases where it allows it: An explicit license exception for the syscall interface, stating that calling it from userspace is freely allowed: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin... And modules, e.g. drivers, have various statements from Linus on how they're not necessarily considered derived works of the kernel/linked to the kernel, e.g. http://linu…
Comment linking /faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.html
on “Xapiand: A fast, simple, modern search and storage engine”> The kernel developers and the FSF have always claimed that loadable modules (like the exFat driver) are "derived works"... Not true [1]. 1. See e.g. http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.... .
Comment linking /faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.html
on “Leaked Samsung exFat driver relicensed as GPL”Depend which you want to listen to. If you want to listen to what lawyers think (fsf), then there is a GPL violation( https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NonfreeDriverKerne... ). If you want to listen to kernel hackers, (such as Linus Torvalds), then he doesn't say if it is, or isn't a violation. Rather, he says that developers has a right to write non-free drivers to the kernel using modules ( http://linuxmaf…
Comment linking /faq/Kernel/proprietary-kernel-modules.html
on “Leaked Samsung exFat driver relicensed as GPL”
