Slashdot Mirror

These are the idiot trollers who have been spamming Slashdot with trolls and garbage for the past several years. Maybe it's time they get some payback.

Burdge, Jonathan - jlb@io.com
Casillas, Luis - casillas@stanford.edu
Corrigan, Barry - barry@bjcorrigan.fsnet.co.uk
Haberberger, George - ghaberbe@frontiernet.net
Johnson, Peter - shoeboy@adequacy.org
Lockwood, Scott - wsl3@attbi.com
Linwood, Rob - rcl@cs.csoft.net
Osborne, Michaell - osborm@yahoo.com
Sassaman, Esther - esther@antioch.edu
Stanton, Matt - matt@madeforchina.com
Stauffer, Marc - marc@ksac.com

Let these people know that abusing Slashdot isn't cool.

These are the people who have been fucking up Slashdot for years. Maybe it's time we give them a taste of their own medicine!

Burdge, Jonathan - jlb@io.com
Casillas, Luis - casillas@stanford.edu
Corrigan, Barry - barry@bjcorrigan.fsnet.co.uk
Haberberger, George - ghaberbe@frontiernet.net
Johnson, Peter - shoeboy@adequacy.org
Lockwood, Scott - wsl3@attbi.com
Linwood, Rob - rcl@cs.csoft.net
Osborne, Michaell - osborm@yahoo.com
Sassaman, Esther - esther@antioch.edu
Stanton, Matt - matt@madeforchina.com
Stauffer, Marc - marc@ksac.com

These are the people who have been fucking up Slashdot for years. Maybe it's time we give them a taste of their own medicine.

Burdge, Jonathan - jlb@io.com
Casillas, Luis - casillas@stanford.edu
Corrigan, Barry - barry@bjcorrigan.fsnet.co.uk
Haberberger, George - ghaberbe@frontiernet.net
Johnson, Peter - shoeboy@adequacy.org
Lockwood, Scott - wsl3@attbi.com
Linwood, Rob - rcl@cs.csoft.net
Osborne, Michaell - osborm@yahoo.com
Sassaman, Esther - esther@antioch.edu
Stanton, Matt - matt@madeforchina.com
Stauffer, Marc - marc@ksac.com

Linkin Park apparent got on appropriate IRC and other IM/Chat channels where music was being discussed, and pretended they weren't in the band and told people to go check them out. See this article, taken from Time Magazine Jan 28 2002.

Get some of your music on a p2p service. Some people think it helps.

Get yourself a Soundscan barcode, and start tracking sales with it religiously. Labels notice if your soundscan numbers jump.

Finally, ask yourself what's really important to you. Labels will try to make you famous if they think it's a good investment that fits with their concept. They'll take your art and most of the money from the resulting fame, though. If your desire is to be huge, go the label route. If your desire is simply to make music and make a living, re-read the article I linked to above. That artist is making a living in Utah, a place with nearly no real local music venues or radio support. Several others are too. They had something in them that appealed to a large enough audience, and word got out. That's the real trick.

Put this in your pipe and smoke it.

OK, for those too lazy to click on the link:

"Peer-to-peer technology is sortof like the high tech version of students playing their CDs in their cars. It has the potential to do what word of mouth did for me... You give something to your audience, and it always seems to come back somehow."

--Peter Breinholt

He's one of several local Utah artists who have eschewed label deals -- not because they couldn't get them, but because they knew they'd likely get ripped off. Each of those bands make money when they play a show, and sell lots of CDs. Why sign with the label if you will suddenly make no money off of CD sales until you go platinum?

Prince may have been not particularly articulate, but he's right. Artists are realizing the system doesn't do much for them, and standing outside. They lose the possibility of making it huge overnight, but they keep control of their art and careers, and the good ones -- funny thing -- succeed anyway.

And P2P, as it turns out, can help. Again, funny thing.

For a moment, I thought the article was going to focus on the law that states that things of a non-urgent nature must be delivered by USPS, and things like that. Interesting to find out they were looking into official electronic mail in the 70s, and interesting that the solution that finally popped up was distributed and came out of defense research.

By the way, if anyone has any information about the history of letter delivery, and especially things like the Ed Baker Memorial Postal Conspiracy or other postal conspiracies, I'd be interested in hearing from you. Unusually, lots of information is not readily available from a Google search.

For a moment, I thought the article was going to focus on the law that states that things of a non-urgent nature must be delivered by USPS, and things like that. Interesting to find out they were looking into official electronic mail in the 70s, and interesting that the solution that finally popped up was distributed and came out of defense research.

By the way, if anyone has any information about the history of letter delivery, and especially things like the Ed Baker Memorial Postal Conspiracy or other postal conspiracies, I'd be interested in hearing from you. Unusually, lots of information is not readily available from a Google search.

"So far," stated Breinholt, "my music has been a cottage industry. I paid for CDs to be made, found people to distribute them, designed covers, booked concert halls, took out ads in the paper... So I've stayed independant. That's not to say I'm anti-label...there's a lot a label could do to make my music available to more people. And if a fair deal came along, I might do it. I've just never seen a deal that would be fair to both parties." He spent some time delving into math of record deals, comparing his self-produced work (which makes $7-9 per CD sold) with that of a friend who went the label route (and makes $1 per CD sold, after all the record label's costs are covered, and doesn't own the rights to the CD anymore).

"It's a lot of work, but I like doing it. Not only that, but I think I understand my audience, and I get to be protective of them. I like being able to decide ticket prices for shows, who is goign to open for us, what the next CD will sound like, or how aggressively I'm willing to advertise," Breinholt said.

http://csoft.net/

What I've come to realize is that for the majority of artists, this so-called piracy may have actually been working in their favor," testified alternative rock star Alanis Morissette. RAC also says artists who want to put their music on free sites like Napster should have that right -- something they don't now have.

That's from a Business Week article referenced from the Artist's Coalition site -- which, curiously enough, has the domain name "artistsagainstpiracy.com". Either they're missing something, or they've correctly realized that music sharing is not the biggest "piracy" going on here.

Anyway, as another artist put it in a senate field hearing:

"You give something to your audience, and it always seems to come back somehow."

Of course, the difference between the record industry and the artist is that the artist receives the goodwill and interest. So the record industry has to secure their return by other means...

Good advice. Here's a few specific recommendations I've heard: csoft.net for good and inexpensive web/email/ftp hosting, and register.com (if you want to switch registrars for your domains or make new ones) as they provide free primary and secondary DNS. The ZoneEdit place sounds cool too if have pre-extant domains through NSI.

You need apache, php, and mysql. Many, many hosting providers will have accounts set up around this configuration, allowing you to "just have a website up without all this bull" as you put it. They worry about server admin and security (on the host and network level anyway), all you have to do is write code and pay the bills.

As an example of a place that has the feature set you're looking for with very generous disk allocations for reasonable prices, see csoft.net. (I've never used them but I've heard good things about them, and when I emailed them some techie questions about their service they responed quickly and very professionally.) For example, the $25/mo. plan gives you unlimited disk. All plans include 1Gb/day of traffic ($6/Gb per Gb over 30 per month). Anyone here actually, directly used these guys that would like to comment?

...if you count Senator Hatch's little "re-elect me" special hearing in Provo last October. Shawn Fanning came, and several other P2P companies based in Utah. They all recited their little scripts and went home.

A friend of mine did the write up, but alas, slashdot didn't pick it up.



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So, while it's not the typical lot of a sysadmin or programmer, it is possible :)

I don't drink, but I voted for Howell. :)

When it comes to copyright law, I really do think Hatch has good intentions. It's just that he can't really see past the "what's good for corporations is good for individuals" and "there is no God but market" stuff. And I think he thinks he "gets it" just because he's a semi-professional lyricist who's collaborated with a few Utah/local big names (though really, it's likely that his privileged position and semi-celebrity status has given him a distorted view of things).

There was a Senate field hearing held at BYU a couple months back. You might want to read my take on the event.. I think it gives some idea that Hatch:

1) really was fishing for corporate support. I can't figure out why else all those corporations were there and allowed to read their press releases in the middle of the hearing

2) really is listening to people at Napster and to independant artists

3) really wants to do something, even if it might not be the greatest... ("let's look to the legislation that killed DAT as our possible solution")


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I think that part of Hatch's motivation may come from what you're talking about, but I don't think he's quite as interested in completely regulating it as you might think.

The other part of his motivation is that he fancies himself a lyricist, and has sortof fallen in with the independent artist crowd. His level of privilege/celebrity in society probably gives him a distorted view of what it's like to make it in the world as an artist on your merits, but I think in some ways he's honestly trying.

I think he's misguided in some ways, but probably honestly trying.

You may want to read some of my comments on his DCMA and Peer-To-Peer hearing.

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no dialup (afaik), but for hosting of email, webspace, dns, you can't go far wrong imho.

they aren't as small as they used to be, but they still have a great touch. you used to be able to "write root" for immediate tech support ;) still possible now, but as they have a better email handling system, response from them is great. i'll give you an example.

i am writing an app that's pretty DB intensive (mySQL), so i wrote to them asking for suggestions on how they'd recommend writing it to minimise the load on their servers. within 2 hours i had 2 responses from admins (the reply and a followup) covering different aspects of it. however that wasn't the best part. a *week* later, i get an email from an admin again, saying that as they've recompiled it and done some extra tweaks, what i would be doing shouldn't be a drain on resources anyway. now THAT's what i call service.

it's "web hosting for geeks". there wont be much help to "my internet is broken", you're left pretty much alone with a shell (but isn't that a dream come true?), but for any genuine problems, they're right on the ball. they've even written their own app for managing pop3 accounts, aliases, virtual domains, mysql databases and such.

ssh and telnet access, unlimited bandwidth, up to unlimited storage space, all linux or bsd servers... many more features, i'm not going to go on anymore, just go look at their website :)

http://www.csoft.net

Fross
- a satisfied customer :)

They primarily do web hosting, but the features you are looking for are all still there.

csoft.net

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A friend of mine submitted this to slashdot weeks, ago, but it got rejected. It's some comments by an unsigned but locally very succesful artist on the benefits of Napster. It's fairly pro-napster -- and, interestingly enough, was made during a Senate field hearing.

Lets see, $15 a month gets you 300MB, extra domains and all that jazz. They say unlimited bandwidth within reason, maybe you can talk to them about how reasonable they'll be. They run Linux / BSD and offer tons of tools and goodies on the servers. The performance is pretty good, when I tested from various locations using tracert.com they seemed to have great connectivity.

The only downside is support. Email and IRC only, unless you want to get brave and hunt up a number via WHOIS on their domain and try calling it. Plus, they died on me for about 6 hours once that I noticed. On the other hand, they freely admitted the problem.

Compare that to Hurricane Electric who have ridiculously low disk space limits and reasonable bandwidth limits but have great performance and great connectivity and decent pricing. I had to call them one evening because MySQL was dead and they not only had a live person who knew what was going on but he called me back at home within an hour to let me know it was fixed. The few other times I've called with dumb questions they've been quite helpful. And aside from that MySQL problem, I've never seen them have any problems.

There was a "field hearing" in Utah about two weeks ago on Napster, held by Senator Hatch. Shawn Fanning (wrote the beast) was there, and a few others. A friend of mine wrote the piece above, and submitted it to slashdot, but to no avail. Give it a read; it's interesting. Among other things, it indicates Hatch supports Napster, but wants seems to want to see ASCAP like royalty schemes (which really isn't too unreasonable -- my only concern is once you get the big boys involved, it'll turn into a payola oriented media...)

According to their webpage, csoft.net offers colocation for $30/mo. I am not running something extremely mission critical, but high uptime is nice. Does anyone know if this is for real, and if it's any good? They don't seem to respond to emails.

The "graph" of primes does NOT make a pattern! If it even remotely resembled a pattern, we wouldn't have all of this hub-bub about finding primes.... Here is a graph of the first 15

Now get to work

Also, I do have to give a shout-out to some friends of mine at Meticulous.com, who do bangup jobs of running database-driven sites using open-source technology, such as Nancies.org, the fan-based Dave Matthews Band site, and Viber.net, the Agents of Good Roots' fan-site. Good peeps. Ask for Bobo/John or Waldo.

how will it be before such draconian views extend to any powerful computing technology

You mean "powerful computing technology" such as the Playstation 2? If the U.S. govt can restrict it in any way, they probably will.

Not that it is likely to make much of a difference by now. Just as anyone who wants DeCSS can get it, anyone who wants Beowulf would probably be able to get it. There are no border checks on the Internet.

~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd

[ot] I need a company that would host my domain on a unix box with a useable c++ compiler, about 20 megs, for under $20 a month.. i'm tired of looking at all the hosting companies, its all the same generic deals and when I sign up, something is always wrong with their compiler. any help?

I suggest http://www.csoft.net/ as a hosting company. They charge like $15/mo for the best setup you could possibly want.

If you go to http://www.findahost.com/, you can get an easy way to find a web site hosting service based on certain criteria (price, OS type, ftp/shell access, CGI, etc). Granted, it doesn't cover every hosting service, but it is pretty good.

From my research with FindAHost, I ended up choosing CubeSoft Networks (http://csoft.net/). For $10US, you get upto 5 accounts, with email, shell, and ftp access. They use Linux and BSD on their servers, so shell access should present no problem. You get unlimited email aliases, CGI, PHP, MySQL, Java suport, Perl, Python, C, etc. Unlimited space for text and html files, 50 megs for binaries. Not bad. And cheap.

~~~~~~~~~
auntfloyd

Has anyone here heard of csoft.net? They look clueful, but they are hard to get in touch with.

http://www.csoft.net/~djf/docs/findfact .pdf

(I know, I know, PDF. But I got the PDF because it appeared the HTML on the gpo.gov site was multi-page browseable HTML rather than one big file. Given the instantaneous overload when the docs were released I wanted to just grab one file and let TCP do its thing.)

CubeSoft charges $10/mo for a virtual host and that includes a domain name, a shell account on the Linux box that's hosting your site, PHP3, Perl, etc....

Artists like Phish, Dave Matthews Band, and of course, the Grateful Dead, took the example of early bluegrass artists and allowed folks to bring in their own recording equipment and record concerts for their own archives. People like me would take these recordings and trade them at no profit for either other recordings or blanks and postage to our friends or others who request them. It's a concept I've been involved in for several years, and what initially attracted me to Open Source.

At any rate, Sony fights all taping, and generally throws in language in artists' contracts forbidding even recording themselves for their own archival and study[never hurts for a band to be able to bone up on old material or see how they sounded x years ago.] We can only hope that other labels like RCA [ granted, they're a BMG label, but they have a clue on taping, with artists like Bruce Hornsby, DMB, Agents of Good Roots and Vertical Horizon, which are all pro-taping and have it in writing in their contacts from what I understand!] have some effect on the industry as a whole and discourage Sony from more restrictive ideas like no taping, SCMS [ bleah! ], or SDMI, not to mention the opposition of artists to control their own destinies with regard to their operations on the net.

"Who are you?What do you want?Why are you here?Where are you going?"-JMS

Then I worked at another company doing support and maintenance of their lousy code. Often times it was screaming at me to fix it, but if it wasn't on the list of bugs we were supposed to fix, I couldn't. Some of it was so ugly and I just wanted to improve it, but it was considered too much of a risk.

At Rice I had so much fun because even though I was coding something I was asked to do, I had considerable freedom in the coding itself and could actually talk to other people about what I was doing. Now I spend so much of my time wishing that I could work on this or that dream program of mine. Usually I want to write it to illustrate some kind of principle I have devised. I would get a big kick out of writing detailed documents explaining exactly what my theory is. That's exactly what research is.

I have begun a new job teaching CS at a local community college. Tomorrow is my first day teaching. The salary cut doesn't bother me, despite what some have said above. I have to be doing what I enjoy. If the teaching works out, I think that's a sure sign I need to go back to school. As for GRE scores, I recently trained with the Princeton Review to teach their GRE course. Not a problem. The only thing I'm concerned about is finding faculty recommendations. I might need to take a couple of classes to get to know some more professors.

CSoft networks has packages starting at US$5. They've been slashdot advertisers for a while too.

Not really, it's much lower level than X... Look at this URL for an idea of how low-level. There's an X-server (and other userspace graphics libraries) that runs on top of the framebuffer though.

It's not even for special situations; you'd use it if you want the Linux logo at boot time or find it useful to boot up in 1024x768.