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• vents a little
• holding steady
• passing out
• hau led off as garret watches

Not quite as much fun, but then not trickery from Photoshop either -- I took them at a Man or Astroman show last year... :)

• vents a little
• holding steady
• passing out
• hau led off as garret watches

Not quite as much fun, but then not trickery from Photoshop either -- I took them at a Man or Astroman show last year... :)

• vents a little
• holding steady
• passing out
• hau led off as garret watches

Not quite as much fun, but then not trickery from Photoshop either -- I took them at a Man or Astroman show last year... :)

• vents a little
• holding steady
• passing out
• hau led off as garret watches

Not quite as much fun, but then not trickery from Photoshop either -- I took them at a Man or Astroman show last year... :)

• vents a little
• holding steady
• passing out
• hau led off as garret watches

Not quite as much fun, but then not trickery from Photoshop either -- I took them at a Man or Astroman show last year... :)

But you overlook one little thing:

That Other System is run by about 95% of the rest of the world.

I don't much like Windows either, guys -- I agree that there are much better desktop operating systems. But the sheer size of Windows is a card it can play against all others. If someone managed to come up with a decent clone of it, and one that was reasonably stable and fast, then as an aside -- with no work on their part -- they'd also get a universe of applications to run on it, and hundreds of millions of users that already know how to use it.

Would it be sub-optimal? Sure. Would hardcore geeks like us prefer it to Linux? Doubtful -- maybe as a games platform or as something to make the Gnu/Linux weenies happy ;) -- but it's something those hundreds of millions of others might appreciate way more than Linux.

Further, I thought one of the better possible outcomes of the anti-trust trial would be an open API and possible clones. Hey presto, looks like people have gotten started already. Why do you have a problem with that? Even if it can't make a perfect & enhanced & stabilized version of Windows -- which, I admit, is a long shot -- it would have a possibly much greater side effect: it would be competition for Microsoft . Isn't that supposed to be a good thing? What are you all complaining about, anyway?

US Code Title 47, Sec.227(b)(1)(C):

"It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States to use any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine"

A "telephone facsimile machine" is defined in Sec.227(a)(2)(B) as:

"equipment which has the capacity to transcribe text or images (or both) from an electronic signal received over a regular telephone line onto paper."

Sounds close enough to me. Can we have this shot down before it gets out of control? IANAL of course, but I think we can defend against this...

"what about promotions, tours, music videos, movie soundtracks, and everything else that makes the music industry hum while sating consumer appetites?"

I think there's a whole lot of bloat in the current music promotion business, and we certainly don't need the RIAA's help to push things along. Take a look at this article by Steve Albini, in which he describes the crap that the labels make a typical band go through to get to "the top." Note especially the itemized accounting at the bottom, showing how all the label fees end up ultimately *costing the band money*, rather than making them rich as they origianlly hoped.

Then consider a band like Fugazi, which has managed to do extremely well without this label crap for going on 15 years. They print their own albums, organize their own tours, etc -- and I suspect they're doing a hell of a lot better than some of their major label collegues. And I sure as hell have a lot more respect for them than most major label bands.

The comparison to the movies isn't exactly accurate. Any bum with three chords and an attitude can put out a decent rock album (hey, just look at anyone from the Ramones to Green Day). More money mainly translates into fancier equipment, more beer, and 18" models of Stonehenge on stage -- none of which necessarily does anything to increase the quality of the show. Especially the Stonehenge thing. Look at the Fugazis, the Ani DiFrancos, etc that are recording their own music and doing their own tours on less than a shoestring budget, yet are making a decent living in the process. Then consider how rare this is in movies, even in the indie/arthouse friendly climate today. "Blair Witch Project" was a huge anomaly: most movies are extremely expensive to produce, market, and distribute. It's out of reach for most people, but any high school kid can start up a band.

And to come back to the matter of copyright, I don't think it's the major issue with the Fugazi's and Ani DiFranco's of the world. They make their living by touring, mainly, and while their albums sell at very respectable rates, it is the live performances that are bringing them recognition and financial reward. I'm certainly not the first to point out that in a "post copyright" world, it will be the act of creation, and not the product of it, that will bring one rewards. It's an old tradition, going back through the Grateful Dead and their bootleggers and even, say, Shakespeare and his plays -- he didn't make his fortune off the scripts, but the performances. Everything old is new again...

"Geez this guy is sick, 39 minutes on one picture"

Actually, this doesn't tell you much of anything at all. Examples:

• Browsing in two windows. Load picture in window #1. Open Slashdot in window #2. Spend half an hour wishing Katz would shut the hell up, wanting not to hear any more about grits or trousers or Portman. Close window #2, remember that window #1 has been open with that picture all this time, and close it too after following a link or two and deciding that you aren't interested in this site.
• Load page. Get invited to lunch. Turn off monitor and leave. Come back, rememmber that you left Netscape on, and reload the page, then think better of it and decide you'll take a look after work.

Those are just obvious examples. More than that, I don't think the HTTP protocol really allows you to gather the sort of information you're talking about. All these people could find out was that you loaded their image once at, say, 10:00, and then you loaded another at 10:39. What you did between those two clicks is a complete mystery to them. You could have, for example, hopped over to Google, searched for whatever for a while, then came back to what you were doing previously. This example is only different in that it doesn't mean you weren't paying attention to the browser & the tagged page -- you were.

This isn't to say that there aren't frightening Big Brother aspects of this all. Certainly, I'm sure it's possible to make some more or less accurate guesses about what people are doing. But because of the basically stateless nature of HTTP (neverminding cookies for a minute), the most these peopel can get is an imperfect view of your travels, and everything else is just statistics, probabilty, and educated guesswork.

Privacy is, of course, very important, and it's important to know what information you are giving away whenever you use the web. But it's also important to know what you aren't giving away, at least with current technology, and to use that as a starting point in trying to defend your privacy.

Did anyone else want to just let Lucas have it? I sure did... hahaha

Did anyone else want to just let Lucas have it? I sure did... hahaha

Plus, and this can't be understated, Star Wars didn't have Keanu Reeves. Big edge there :)

It's possible to have a movie that balances special effects against a good story. Forrest Gump, for example -- I didn't like it all that much, but it's the sort of thing I'm talking about. City of Lost Children is a great example though -- one of the "characters" is a flea assassin, shown in closeup several times. You need special effects to get a flea-eyed view of a flea. You don't need them to show Keanu beating up the guy from The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.

Frankly, I'm sick & tired of movies like that, and I can't fathom why they're so popular. It wouldn't be so incomprehensible if they weren't so universally homogenous and boring, but they are and I just don't get it.

Personally, I have high hopes for the next Star Wars movie, even if the last one did royally suck. A friend of mine and I were... um, that is, some people that I was reading about but have never met before and certainly wouldn't want anything to do with... were suggesting holding Lucas' children hostage for the duration of the next two movies -- if the next one is good, he can have one back; if the next one sucks the kid dies and he better try real hard if he ever wants to see the other again. But of course this would be terribly mean and overreactive and treating a movie way outside of reality and I'm certainly not condoning any harm come down on the dear Lucas children. Not at all. I just think ol' Georgie better do it right this time, that's all ;)

You might be interested to know that Man or Astroman? are using the same trick on their new album, in a track called -- fittingly, A Simple Text File. Supposedly there's an mp3 of it laying around, but I haven't heard it yet.

Friends of mine are all into this kind of music. I remember hearing about one that did more or less the same as this dot matrix stuff, only with a room full of hard drives and very precisely accessed text files & a bit of perl magic. If you find this sort of thing interesting, you might want to listen to (void).mp3 by Alex MacLean, which was 100% generated with a perl script and the logs of a mailing list, and generative.net, where people that are in to this sort of stuff congregate and exchange ideas about what art really is. All very fascinating stuff...

You might be interested to know that Man or Astroman? are using the same trick on their new album, in a track called -- fittingly, A Simple Text File. Supposedly there's an mp3 of it laying around, but I haven't heard it yet.

Friends of mine are all into this kind of music. I remember hearing about one that did more or less the same as this dot matrix stuff, only with a room full of hard drives and very precisely accessed text files & a bit of perl magic. If you find this sort of thing interesting, you might want to listen to (void).mp3 by Alex MacLean, which was 100% generated with a perl script and the logs of a mailing list, and generative.net, where people that are in to this sort of stuff congregate and exchange ideas about what art really is. All very fascinating stuff...

I've got several questions about this new language of theirs, and I'd like to hear what the Slashdot audience might ahve to say about them. Any takers?

I've got several questions about this new language of theirs, and I'd like to hear what the Slashdot audience might ahve to say about them. Any takers?

But, I think that this one is much more fun, in a clever little funny on IE funny on Lynx kinda way....

But, I think that this one is much more fun, in a clever little funny on IE funny on Lynx kinda way....

Everyone (incl me) seems to be posting favorite haikus (what is this, an excuse or something? :), but I'll post a *picture* of one of my favorites instead! hahaha

If you can prove that [innovation was stifled] I will shut up forever.
Unfortunately, this is not a provable statement so I'm not really going to debate it. Yes, you're right, there has been much progress. But one of the best engines of progress seems to be market competition, and that has been absent here for years. What would we have today if that competition had existed? No one can say, and there isn't a lot of point debating it. I'm a little bit more interested in the question of MS's supposed innovations -- what have they offered that hasn't been a refinement of something stolen from another source? Nothing leaps to mind. They make decent software, for the most part, but it's all derivitive stuff and seldom if ever any better than the original material. I can't think of a single truly new & innovative thing that MS has offered in any area where it had crushed the competition, and welcome examples to prove otherwise.

You think that win95 is worse than 3.1? Than Dos 3? 9x is so-so.[....]What do you want?
Each new generation is, I'll admit, marginally better than the one that came before it. But they're better in the wrong ways. It's more quantity, not more quality. More crap, more complexity, but for all the new hardware we have to buy to make the new versions work (256 mb of ram for W2k? you've gotta be kidding me!), it doesn't seem as if the machines are actually doing more for all this. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect software not to crash or corrupt data. I do think it's unreasonable to give "reinstall the system" as a legitimate solution to average problems. I do think it's reasonable to hold software to high standards of reliability, and Windows has never met even a low standard on this front. What's the joke about Gates debating the head of GM? If you notice, all the computer advances Gates cites are hardware based & thus had nothing to do with MS, while all the criticisms raised by the GM guy are valid criticisms of MS software which have not been met to date.

Sorry but I need something better than that.
Sorry, but apparently I'm not the person to give it to you. You seem to want to hear precise reasons to justify touching MS. Fair enough. But I'm at the other end of things, and want to hear a good justification for them to exist in the first place. I see no benefit to society in allowing a company like this to continue to exist, and don't think that any kind of breakup is enough to restore the state of things as they should be.

So, rather than let things get ugly (as they oh so often do around here ;), I'll just agree to disagree with you on this one...

Of course, indie has always been the way to go... :)

I've got a couple of ways to deal with spam. The first and most effective is to keep more than one email address. My main address is only available to friends, colleagues, and a mailing list or two. Another one is the "public" address, which gets used for site registrations and that sort of thing. I don't really care as much if that address gets spammed, because it's easier to ignore and filter it there. My other strategy for dealing with spam is to have a boilerplate ready for incoming junk mail. It's nice & lawyerly, and while I can no longer remember where I got it or whether it's actually accurate anymore (can't be bothered to check the US code), it's sufficiently intimidating that I assume it keeps at least some of the marketers away.

It has been pointed out to me that such a strategy might be flawed, however. for one thing, spammers can easily fake the address, so the boilerplate might go to a nonexistent or innocent party. Maybe so. More importantly, marketers might see any address that sends bck a reply -- even an 'unsubscribe' request -- as being live and worth spamming more in the future. Good point. These friends tell me that it's more effective to pass along the offending message to the kind folks at nospam.org (?- i think) instead.

Even still, sending out that boilerplate makes me feel a lot better, even if it isn't having the biggest impact. Short of carrying out my real wish (that is, to have marketing declared as a capital offense, punishable by anyone within range of the offender whether or not they are an appointed agent of the law), sending it back makes me feel a whole lot better, and I fully encourage you all to share, distribute, and use it as well...

This is absolutely unacceptable.

The ability to distribute information through the population is critical to the maintainence and control of society, and allowing it to come into the hands of those whose stated purpose is making shareholders (i.e. not regular people, workers, the environment, etc) happy can only be dangerous.

Implicitly, if that one party gets control over things, the rest of us tend to get screwed over -- after all, they are looking after their interests, not yours and mine. Why would they bother to do anything that helps the other 90% of the American and 99% of the global population, unless maybe it happens to be as a side effect of an activity that is otherwise purely profitable to themselves.

The mass media are already too homogenous. It's bread & circuses all over again: we get fed a steady diet of nothing worth watching, and not enough people are complaining about it. And while, yes, the digital new media are somewhat immune to the influence of the old media, still the danger is present.

We really can't ignore this or allow it to go unchecked. Read up. Read Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent". Listen to Disposeable Heroes of Hiphoprisy's Drug of a Nation. Watch C-Span rather than Jerry Springer; Adbusters rather (or in additon to ;-) Slashdot; wave signs, write letters, make web pages, consider civil disobedience and acts of anarchy a la "Fight Club" -- but whatever you do, fight back and make a difference.

We need it, badly. We're on the wrong track these days...

I'd write more, and more cogently, but I'm too tired right now...

Posted by Foochre:

Interesting article, of course programming is an artform, and art becomes more meaningful if more people see it.

There's a good mailing list that a good friend of mine started up called (void), which is about the philosophy of programming and unix; we chat about this sort of thing there. Here are some inspirational quotes from the list blurb:

"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make our world."
- Buddha

"If we can dispel the delusion that learning about computers should be an activity of fiddling with array indexes and worrying whether X is an integer or a real number, we can begin to focus on programming as a source of ideas."
- Harold Abelson

"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley:
LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
- Jeremy S. Anderson

If you want to join, mail majordomo@slab.org with 'subscribe void' in the message body, or see http://slab.org/void.html for more info.

Ta