Sinabro

Something from the talk page on GNU/Linux naming controversy:

...Second, since the FSF owns the copyright on most of the GNU code, it
could freely change the license tomorrow to require any operating system
distributed with GNU code to be called "GNU/something".

That’s an interesting possibility to consider. Of course, the probability of that happening is almost as small as Windows ever being released under GPL 3, but if we suppose it happened, will the free software community fork all GNU projects?

That did happen with X and the fork of Xorg, but this is GNU (and, in connection, FSF) we are talking about here, not X consortium. It would be almost like comparing possibility of a coup in the U.S. against the possibility of a coup in Serbia.

I feel slightly safer.

I just changed my Google Account password (along with another important account). This is the password that I used to treat as “secure” for quite a while, and well, it might have been. At least I know for sure that it has never been transmitted in cleartext (I only type that into Google Accounts and trusted resellers, who all use SSL for such connections), but frankly, it has been “shared” with too many entities. I have been assuming that they all encrypt user passwords and take good care of them … but what if they haven’t?

So, I changed my important passwords. I will continue to change my passwords until none of them are identical.

Of course, I have no hope of remembering so many passwords by myself … but I will manage.

From a mailing list I am on (redacted for obivous reasons):

Regrettably I don't know enough about BSD internals to look for the solution
in the previous OS X where it is running OK. What I will do is un-install
Xxxxxxx, download a new distribution, and install it again. If that doesn't
effect a cure, I will have no idea what to do.

Ugh. That’s what we get when the shameless propaganda such as “Mac OS X == BSD” is allowed to spread. Yes, Mac OS X is “based on BSD”, in the sense that it uses tho same Mach kernel, but a lot of things are different, even under the hood.

Here’s the most obvious one: where’s the home directory under Mac OS X? /home? Unless Tiger or Leopard changed this, it’s under /Users or some non POSIX b.s.

People should know that “knowing BSD” != “knowing Mac OS X”, and vice versa.