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I wrote the following letter to the editor of time.com
I appreciated Josh Quittner's Linux article [http://cgi.pathfinder.com/time/personal/19990524/ tech.html]. I have been Unix systems adminstrator for three years and a Linux user for a little under a year. His installation criticisms were valid, but it is worth noting that installing Windows 98 onto a computer with an unformatted hard-drive or one that has non-windows OS on it is a truly daunting proposition which took me a couple of hours to figure out. The formatting and partitioning tools are not a part of the standard installation procedure as they are with any Linux distribution, therefore it is necessary to boot off a diskette and use the command line format and fdisk utilities.

The perception of easy Windows installations is largely due to the fact that the vast majority of PC's come with Windows pre-installed. Most users are unlikely to ever do more than upgrade their Windows which is a relatively painless proposition. Upgrading a Red Hat system is just as easy. In my estimation, installing a Red Hat system is easier than installing Windows in any case except when the computer has Windows pre-installed and has no unpartioned disk space.

Overall the article was very informative and made the virtues of Linux clear, including it's open source code, stability and low cost. Your readers may also benefit from knowing that Gnome, while developed with help from Red Hat, is also open source software and is available from www.gnome.com, and that a very viable alternative to Gnome called KDE is available from www.kde.com and is also open source and included in Red Hat 6.0 as well as Caldera, SuSe and other distribution. Finally, it might be noted that an alternative to downloading a distribution or buying a boxed set is to pay a couple of dollars and get the distribution from www.cheapbytes.com which redistributes all of the major distributions sans book documentation and support. I would still recommend that the average user buy a boxed set.

I hope to see further linux coverage in the future.

Sincerely,
Michael Cope
--

There's a couple of quotes from the guys who are auctioning themselves at timedigital.com.


Specifically,
http://cgi.pathfi nder.com/time/digital/daily/0,2822,23744,00.html

After reading the cover of the latest Time, The Monsters Next Door, I thought "oh no, more persecution". Imagine my surprise to see a balanced look at the issues:

• The Curse of Cliques
• Page 2 of the cover story goes over the daily treatment received(bottles/rocks thrown at them from moving cars, persecution from jocks and teachers, etc.)
• Coverage of the Goth scene in We're Goths Not Monsters
• Flash: movies don't kill people from Bang, You're Dead
• The computer age may be giving kids a new outlet for their dark fantasies, but that hardly means it is turning them into killers. from Digital Dungeons, an article covering software.

After reading the cover of the latest Time, The Monsters Next Door, I thought "oh no, more persecution". Imagine my surprise to see a balanced look at the issues:

• The Curse of Cliques
• Page 2 of the cover story goes over the daily treatment received(bottles/rocks thrown at them from moving cars, persecution from jocks and teachers, etc.)
• Coverage of the Goth scene in We're Goths Not Monsters
• Flash: movies don't kill people from Bang, You're Dead
• The computer age may be giving kids a new outlet for their dark fantasies, but that hardly means it is turning them into killers. from Digital Dungeons, an article covering software.

After reading the cover of the latest Time, The Monsters Next Door, I thought "oh no, more persecution". Imagine my surprise to see a balanced look at the issues:

• The Curse of Cliques
• Page 2 of the cover story goes over the daily treatment received(bottles/rocks thrown at them from moving cars, persecution from jocks and teachers, etc.)
• Coverage of the Goth scene in We're Goths Not Monsters
• Flash: movies don't kill people from Bang, You're Dead
• The computer age may be giving kids a new outlet for their dark fantasies, but that hardly means it is turning them into killers. from Digital Dungeons, an article covering software.

After reading the cover of the latest Time, The Monsters Next Door, I thought "oh no, more persecution". Imagine my surprise to see a balanced look at the issues:

• The Curse of Cliques
• Page 2 of the cover story goes over the daily treatment received(bottles/rocks thrown at them from moving cars, persecution from jocks and teachers, etc.)
• Coverage of the Goth scene in We're Goths Not Monsters
• Flash: movies don't kill people from Bang, You're Dead
• The computer age may be giving kids a new outlet for their dark fantasies, but that hardly means it is turning them into killers. from Digital Dungeons, an article covering software.

After reading the cover of the latest Time, The Monsters Next Door, I thought "oh no, more persecution". Imagine my surprise to see a balanced look at the issues:

• The Curse of Cliques
• Page 2 of the cover story goes over the daily treatment received(bottles/rocks thrown at them from moving cars, persecution from jocks and teachers, etc.)
• Coverage of the Goth scene in We're Goths Not Monsters
• Flash: movies don't kill people from Bang, You're Dead
• The computer age may be giving kids a new outlet for their dark fantasies, but that hardly means it is turning them into killers. from Digital Dungeons, an article covering software.

After reading the cover of the latest Time, The Monsters Next Door, I thought "oh no, more persecution". Imagine my surprise to see a balanced look at the issues:

• The Curse of Cliques
• Page 2 of the cover story goes over the daily treatment received(bottles/rocks thrown at them from moving cars, persecution from jocks and teachers, etc.)
• Coverage of the Goth scene in We're Goths Not Monsters
• Flash: movies don't kill people from Bang, You're Dead
• The computer age may be giving kids a new outlet for their dark fantasies, but that hardly means it is turning them into killers. from Digital Dungeons, an article covering software.

This article talks about the announcement of Windows Media Technologies 4.0.

Interesting to notice how little industry support Microsoft has on this one. Also, how strong Real is.

Also, WMT does MP3, too.

I largely agree with your article ( http://cgi.pathfinder .com/fortune/technology/alsop/index.html) proposing the elimination of intellectual property. I have a few things to add:

• it needs to be done slowly, over a period of five years or so, to avoid scaring the investors off and risking a backlash.
• trademark is not intended to grant monopolies as patent and copyright are; it is only intended to allow consumers to reliably identify the folks with which they are doing business. Accordingly, I see no reason to eliminate trademark. (Indeed, most of your arguments pertain only to copyright.)
• eliminating copyright for books would more effectively promote the copying of books than eliminating copyright for software would promote copying of software. Since the distributed versions of software often don't include source code (books always include ``source code'') some method is needed to promote its publication. I suggest the method that was used for books: copyright, but with a term of 18 months, so it doesn't unduly inhibit copying. Copyright protection would only be granted to those works of software for which source code was on deposit at the Library of Congress; when the copyright expired, the source code would be released to the public.
• you neglected to detail the harmful effects of current copyright and patent law. Perhaps you didn't have enough space; here are a few:
  • the inevitable creation of harmful monopolies like Microsoft (see http://www.tao.ca/wind/rre/0579.html for more, search for my name); you did mention this briefly, but a reasonable person might conclude, after reading your article, that Microsoft was simply an aberration.
  • the necessity to crack down on freedom of the press in order to maintain copyright. (What's a press? It's a machine for copying speech. How do you maintain copyright in this Brave New World of digital technology? Restrict access to devices for copying speech. Several proposals have already been put forth that do just this, and one of them (the Audio Home Recording Act) has been passed into law in the US.)
  • the ultimate necessity to outlaw private computer-mediated communication in order to detect violations of copyright
  • the high costs to each individual to make sure they aren't violating the law. (In a couple of years, you'll need a J.D. and a couple of paralegals to write a novel computer program without violating any patents.)
  • the chilling effect it has on innovation. (The other way you can avoid violating patents is to not use any techniques that weren't published ten years ago. This won't keep you from getting sued, given the incompetence of the patent office, but it will probably keep you from losing the case. Needless to say, if you can't afford to be sued, you need to find another business to be in. Washing windows is probably a good choice.) This will get worse and worse as more and more patents are granted.

Some of these evils may be excusable if they produce a greater social good -- like encouraging people to innovate and create by offering them financial rewards -- but the evidence is that they actually do the opposite. (Witness the Internet and Linux.)

--
< kragen@pobox.com> Kragen Sitaker < http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your Web browser is Ronald Reagan.
-- Neal Stephenson, at http://www.cryptonomicon.com/begi nning_print.html

... that says basically the same things (I know, I wrote it):

http://cgi.pathfi nder.com/time/digital/daily/0,2822,22429,00.html

Is There A Chapter Missing, Bill? BY CHRIS TAYLOR

At the end of the article, there's a reference to a column in fortune. Anyway, I was reading it and there were a few lines worth remembering when I realized that the article is dated November 17!

that fortune column had some specific quotes from the Judge and other players. I really didn't read anything specific about the recent press conference except that Gates only answered three questions. Does anyone know anymore?

http://pathfinder .com/time/digital/reports/starwars/starwars.html

Time Digital has yet another article about the protest -- http://cgi.pathfi nder.com/time/digital/daily/0,2822,19986,00.html

It was pretty wack...