GIFT WRAPPING TIPS FOR MEN
==============================
This is the time of year when we think back to the very first Christmas,

when the Three Wise Men; Gaspar, Balthazar and Herb, went to see the baby Jesus and, according to the Book of Matthew, "presented unto Him gifts; gold, frankincense, and myrrh."

These are simple words, but if we analyze them carefully, we discover an important, yet often overlooked, theological fact: There is no mention of wrapping paper.

If there had been wrapping paper, Matthew would have said so: "And lo, the gifts were inside 600 square cubits of paper. And the paper was festooned with pictures of Frosty the Snowman. And Joseph was going to throweth it
away, but Mary saideth unto him, she saideth, 'Holdeth it! That is nice paper! Saveth it for next year!' And Joseph did rolleth his eyeballs. And the baby Jesus was more interested in the paper than the frankincense."

But these words do not appear in the Bible, which means that the very first Christmas gifts were NOT wrapped. This is because the people giving those gifts had two important characteristics: 1. They were wise. 2. They were men.

Men are not big gift wrappers. Men do not understand the point of putting paper on a gift just so somebody else can tear it off. This is not just my opinion: This is a scientific fact based on a statistical survey of two guys I know. One is Rob, who said the only time he ever wraps a gift is "if it's such a poor gift that I don't want to be there when the person opens it."

The other is Gene, who told me he does wrap gifts, but as a matter of principle never takes more than 15 seconds per gift. "No one ever had to wonder which presents daddy wrapped at Christmas," Gene said. "They were the ones that looked like enormous spitballs."

I also wrap gifts, but because of some defect in my motor skills, I can never completely wrap them. I can take a gift the size of a deck of cards and put it the exact center of a piece of wrapping paper the size of a regulation volleyball court, but when I am done folding and taping, you can still see a sector of the gift peeking out. (Sometimes I camouflage this sector with a marking pen.)

If I had been an ancient Egyptian in the field of mummies, the lower half of the Pharaoh's body would be covered only by Scotch tape.

On the other hand, if you give my wife a 12-inch square of wrapping paper, she can wrap a C-130 cargo plane. My wife, like many women, actually likes wrapping things. If she gives you a gift that requires batteries, she wraps
the batteries separately, which to me is very close to being a symptom of mental illness. If it were possible, my wife would wrap each individual volt.

My point is that gift-wrapping is one of those skills like having babies that come more naturally to women than to men. That is why today I am presenting:

GIFT-WRAPPING TIPS FOR MEN:
* Whenever possible, buy gifts that are already wrapped. If, when the recipient opens the gift, neither one of you recognizes it, you can claim that it's myrrh.

* If you're giving a hard-to-wrap gift, skip the wrapping paper! Just put it inside a bag and stick one of those little adhesive bows on it. This creates a festive visual effect that is sure to delight the lucky recipient on Christmas morning:
YOUR WIFE: Why is there a Hefty trash bag under the tree?
YOU: It's a gift! See? It has a bow!
YOUR WIFE (peering into the ...bag and being somwhat unimpressed... "Do you want a divorce?"
YOU: I also got you some myrrh.

In conclusion, remember that the important thing is not what you give, or how you wrap it. The important thing, during this very special time of year, is that you save the receipt.

~Male Author Unknown~
- posted by Richard @ 10:41 AM

 
Creator of Linux Defends Its Originality
By STEVE LOHR
NY Times
Published: December 23, 2003

Linus Torvalds, creator of the popular Linux computer operating system, defended his work yesterday as not always lovely but original - and certainly not copied, as a Utah company has contended.

The Utah company, the SCO Group, has begun sending out a round of warning letters to large corporate users of Linux, which is distributed free. The letters, dated Friday, assert that Linux, a variant of the Unix operating system, violates an SCO license and copyright. SCO, based in Lindon, Utah, (says it.ed. ) owns the rights to the Unix operating system. SCO has for months made the broad claim that Linux included large chunks of copied Unix code. But the letters being sent out - urging companies to stop using Linux or to pay SCO license fees - listed for the first time more than 65 software files that "have been copied verbatim from our copyrighted Unix code and contributed to Linux."

Mr. Torvalds began looking at these files, and their history, yesterday. As a student in Finland, he wrote the original kernel of the Linux operating system in 1991. Mr. Torvalds, who now lives in Silicon Valley, has since continued to oversee the growth of the Linux project, which relies on contributions from a worldwide network of programmers.

"Some of these files were written by me directly," Mr. Torvalds said in an e-mail exchange, and so were not contributed to the Linux project by third parties, including I.B.M., which is being sued by SCO.

The files listed in SCO's letter are written in the C programming language. Citing two files, "include/linux/ctype.h" and "lib/ctype.h," Mr. Torvalds said "some trivial digging shows that those files are actually there in the original 0.01 distribution of Linux" in September 1991.

"I wrote them," Mr. Torvalds noted, "and looking at the original ones I'm a bit ashamed."

He observed that some of the macros, or programming shortcuts, are "so horribly ugly that I wouldn't admit to writing them if it wasn't because somebody else claimed to have done so ;)" - ending his comment with the e-mail symbol for winking and smiling.

Mr. Torvalds's talent as a communicator, including his self-deprecating humor, is one reason for the remarkable progress of the Linux project.

But Mr. Torvalds is also clearly angered by SCO's accusation that much of Linux was merely copied. "In short," Mr. Torvalds said, "for the files where I personally checked the history, I can definitely say that those files were trivially written by me personally, with no copying from any Unix code, ever.

"I can show, and SCO should have been able to see, that the list they show clearly shows original work, not copied."

Darl C. McBride, the chief executive of SCO, said he stood by the company's assertions. He said that a Linux expert who will testify in the SCO suit against I.B.M., which was filed last March, went over the code closely. "As a social revolutionary, Linus Torvalds is a genius," Mr. McBride said. "But at the speed the Linux project has gone forward something gets lost along the way in terms of care with intellectual property."

The dispute over the Unix and Linux heritage became even more tangled yesterday when Novell, a software company, announced it had filed with the United States Patent and Trademark Office for copyright on some of the same Unix code for which SCO claims the rights.

Note: SCO generates less than 20 million dollars in annual sales, and has lost money constantly for the past few years. Since they seem incapable of adding anything posiive to the IT mix circa 2004, it appears they are simply trying to force their hand into other companies pockets with false claims of ownership over the base Unix code, which had been previously been owned by AT&T, and Novell, and is only tangentially related to Linux source code.

Microsoft and the RSA started this threatening letter bullshit a few years ago, and one hopes McBride and his SCO cronies suffer the same backlash as these other critters received for their dastardly deeds.

- posted by Richard @ 10:03 PM