Slashdot Mirror
Playboy And...Linux?
The article's been up for only a little bit, but a huge number people have e-mailed that Playboy's Gillan has done a column on Linux. It's a typical media piece, explaining Linux but being featured in Playboy, I think, means that we've conquered the media. And I have, of course, no comment on what the sheer number of submissions must mean about our readers. *grin*
What article? Playboy has articles???
Finally, I can honestly say I read the articles!
---- "A programmer is a person who solves a problem you didn't know you had in a way you don't understand."
So you guys do read something other than tech manuals...8)
all persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental. - Kurt Vonnegut
So I'm sitting here at work, and I reload Slashdot. Ooh! New article! Playboy article on Linux! I temporarily forget where I am and click through: BLOCKED BY SURFWATCH. I wonder if my supervisor's going to believe me when I say I was just trying to look at an article. :P
1999-12-07 13:36:22 Opensource article in playboy (articles,humor) (rejected)
Sigh. I wish people would let me know why they reject things.
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--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
So now we just need some penguins in the centerfold, pictured in some skimpy little... hey wait, they're already naked =D
Perhaps Miss January can cuddle with tux for 'warmth'
I personally would like to see the slashdot crew add the playboy bunny icon to the list of news icons, so slashdot readers can be informed more quickly of linux-related playboy news as it breaks.
Man lookit the size of that laptop Torvalds is holding...
What, you mean there's naked wimmin in here too?
Finding God in a Dog
Hmmmm....Beowulf 6 or 7 Playmates together and.....
Once you get into publications that have nothing to do with computers, one must admit that linux is in the mainstream now. We already knew that it was the darling buzzword in finance and of many techies (and related publications), but playboy? This is a surprise, although not a huge one. Linux has been growing a lot in the past year, so I guess it was to be expected... still... playboy? ;)
What's nice is the author saying how easy to install the two distros he tried (Red Hat and Corel) were. I still remember installing Slackware 2.0 a few years ago, distributions have improved greatly in that regard. The two he tried are indeed very easy install-wise. Now, readers of this magazine know a bit more about Linux, which is a good thing.
De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum
I knew Linux was sexy... I just didn't know it was that sexy! :)
I was quite surprised to see your article posted here. Having never read Playboy (yes, honestly!) I thought it was all pictures and no words. I was even pleasantly surprised to discover that the article was well researched and well written. (I'll leave out my personal bias towards Debian).
;-)
What did get me thinking is why a magazine full of tits'n'ass would want to waste valuable picture space on a nerdy topic like Linux (I maintain it's "Lie-nucks" though - ask Linus;-)). Then I realised it's all tied in with the telecommuting revolution. Many years ago, no self-respecting programmer would contemplate coding before growing an uneven beard, and donning a cardigan and sandals before mumbling incoherently should any annoying coworkers interrupt. As Time has advanced, we have started working from home. As very few people actually code in COBOL anymore, the requirement for uneven beards and sandals has disappeared, but also this has drawn us towards Playboy.
Coding from home isn't like work anymore, all you need is a cold cup of coffee and sit down at your workstation and get on with it. Usually it's not until the first time the doorbell goes that I realise I'm actually sat naked at my desk - by the time I pull some pants on and answer the door the caller has gone. (This is the telecommuting equivilant of all those annoying co-workers) Obviously someone at Playboy has made the perfectly reasonable assumption that there are an army of naked men sitting naked at their desks doing work nobody seems to understand. After further research, Playboy discovered that the vast majority of these naked men were chanting about some kind of god called "Torvalds" Undeterred by the god-like status of our idol, the enterprising magazine decided to book Linus as their centrefold. Imagine the editors horror when a Scandinavian male software engineer turns up for the shoot. Realising that the average reader of Playboy might be somewhat shocked at the site of a full frontal Linus Torvals on the centre pages, they hastily changed their plan and asked the great Open Source Master what alternative article they could possible post.
That, my friends, is the honest truth on how Playboy come to be writing articles on Linux
When a felon's not engaged in his employment, or maturing his felonious little plans, his capacity for innocent enjoyment is just the same as any honest mans - Gilbert and Sullivan
Philosopher (n) - a wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity
This is what I get when I try to access the article:
IBM's internal systems must be used only for conducting IBM's business, or for purposes authorized by IBM management. Use is subject to audit at any time by IBM management.
YOU HAVE JUST ATTEMPTED TO ACCESS A WEBSITE THAT CONTAINS SEXUALLY EXPLICIT MATERIAL. THIS IS A DIRECT VIOLATION OF IBM's INTERNET USE GUIDELINES AND IBM's BUSINESS CONDUCT GUIDELINES.
CONTINUED DISREGARD OF IBM's GUIDELINES WILL RESULT IN DISCIPLINARY ACTION UP TO AND INCLUDING SEPARATION.
IBM has the right to monitor its employees' and others' use of IBM's systems and assets including use on the Internet.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
What a story to bring out the trolls!
Let's get them out of the way before they get out of hand:
1. Naked and petrified
2. Above-mentioned actress open-source, copyrighted and undistributable.
3. Any combination of obscenities, ALL-CAPS, and repeated 50 times, repeated 50 times, repeated 50 times...
4. MEEPT
5. Llamas (where is that guy?)
6. Karma whore!!
7. FIRST POST, PLAYBOY STYLE!
I hope I did not forget any.
thank you.
________________________________
I'm a little less sure than Gillian about the future of Linux on the desktop, but we'll see. I don't think that will happen until Linux has better game support and a better GUI.
As for the impact of the article, now that women with appellations like "Miss April, 1996" are starting to get on the Linux bandwagon, it's bound to get more popular :) I bet Red Hat's stock goes up some more as well.
Who reads playboy? Well.. middle aged males i.e. The Bosses! The people with power! And what are they reading now?* M$-bashing! And combined with naked women. The advertisers dream!
*I assume that they read the articles.
FRA: STFU GTFO
Ok, i get alot of emails about this:
The quote is from a former mtv skit show, "the state". It was a skit with two guys named barry and levan, and their two hundred and forty dollars, worth of pudding. the state was the best skit show ever, in it's short running it captivated my interest every time it was on. I'm changing the "foty" to "forty", because I can no longer remember why I left out the "r".
now we have a few million more 13 year old kids who are aware about linux. Get ready, #LinuxHelp.
David
I can't believe I put pants on for this.
--Homer Simpson
While I see everyone is having a field day with the obvious "reading it for the articles" jokes, I do have a serious comment/question.
"Corel touts its product as a version for the end user and plans to package it with many of its other products, such as PageMaker,CorelDRAW, QuattroPro and Paradox."
I assume this is a mistake, since pagemaker isn't available for Linux, and Corel doesn't distribute it anyways. But what was she talking about? Did she mean FrameMaker? even that isn't out yet (AFAIK) and it still wouldn't be a Corel product.
I don't have a Corel CD, so what's the deal? Is corel going to be distributing FrameMaker/LINUX for/with Adobe, or is this confused or am I confused?...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
--
The shareholder is always right.
[Make your own joke about Linux in Playboy]
"I know we all go on about only reading the articles, but did you see that [insert unattractive Linux celeb here] centerfold!? Oh my god, check out the [disk array/mouse pad/beowulf cluster] on that one!"
There ya go, now you don't need to read the rest of the posts.
Hotnutz.com
Taken from a chat with gillian ...
t /transcripts/1999-10-20-A.html)
....
(http://cyber.playboy.com/members/viplounge/cha
guest22: What are your favorite websites?
gillianbonner: I really like shockwave.com. It's a very cool site. I also like slashdot.org. It is computer-based. Another site that I really like is called astroabby.com because I am an astrology junkie!
And yes, I only read it for the articles
couldn't resist :)
This is the first article that I've read which actually touches on the subject that I don't think I ever heard anyone mention before:
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[ Talking about the Windows OS ]
Worse, nobody dares change it. Nobody dares to fix bugs because it's such a mess that fixing one bug might just break a hundred programs that depend on that bug. ... Whoa, that's some serious dissing. But I have to agree; as I work, I can just sense the inefficiency of the Windows OS.
[ Talking about trying out the Linux OS ]
I could just feel the power under the hood of this slick and efficient interface.
---------------------------------------------
Literally, when I use Win 98 or NT, I can really sense the inefficient, bloated, puddles of fat rippling behind the monitor screen. And I'm not running on ancient hardware - I've got a dual PII with 256 MB RAM and UW SCSI. Still, that's not enough to cover up all that bloated waste of code.
Running Linux "feels" different, and I'm not really talking just about the immediate responsiveness. Right from the beginning, you begin with a fresh start. When you boot Win98, when the splash screen disappears and the initially blank wallpaper pops up, and you sit there waiting for all the icons to show up, as the disk grinds an grinds away, you can't help but wonder what in ghods earth is going on down there. You sit there, cross your fingers, and hope that whatever crap its trying to load will work right, and not BSOD on me. Time and time again I swap some bit of hardware in the system, then boot into Windoze, and be greeted with some unwholly DLL upchucking all over the place, and then leaving me with a mess to clean up.
Cycle the machine, and after LILO load the kernel, I just don't get the same feeling that there's a voodoo ritual going inside the gray box. Everything comes up, nice, lean, and mean. You know exactly what's going on. Everything is highly modular, well organized, and in its place.
--
So I set it up on an older but clean 200mhz Pentium, with a 1GB hard drive and 32MB of RAM. Seamless install, and boatloads of fun to muck around in.
:)
200MHz? 32MB RAM? Shit, even Windows 3.1 will run on that . If you're gonna test it, TEST IT. Load linux onto your power drill or something.
I only read the article, honest (although that cleavage on the left was a little distracting).
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Once in a while you get shown the light,
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Once in a while you get shown the light,
In the strangest of places, when you look at it right -
I keep hearing that from everyone who doesn't actually use (GNU/)Linux... blablabla but it lacks software blablabla
If I type in my shell, I get this question: "There are 1852 possibilities. Do you really wish to see them all? (y or n)" That's the number of single _programs_, or ``pieces of software'' that I have installed on a fairly standard desk-top developer machine.
I recently started porting some software to NT, it's been four years since I used that OS last... After installing IE4 (required for VC), Visual C++ 6.0, MS Win32 SDK, (and in order not to lose my mind completely: Cygwin too), I fired up this huge IDE GUI development environment. Especially VC++ is something that Win developers claim Linux lacks. I simply cannot imagine why. Hang on:
In order to do development on NT I depend on the IDE. If the IDE does not offer the combination of commands I wish to apply to my work, I'm shit out of luck. There's just no way to get boring repetitive work done easily, if it happens to not fit exactly into the provided dialog box. The IDE may be very nice, but it is _inherently_ limited because it has no way of executing scripts. It lacks a shell.
On GNU/Linux, I run Emacs. For editing. Then I run bash for CLI. Then I run make to build. I use X with KDE to *integrate* these xterms and editors into one large IDE. In short: NT *has* an IDE, GNU/Linux with the standard tools *IS* an IDE.
X+Emacs+GCC+Make+xterm+bash+... is quite a large program, if you look at all the parts as one. Anyone claiming that GNU/Linux is lacking software is someone who can't see the forest for trees.
Granted, there may be a lack of integrated office suites. They should be just around the corner though. A lot of people won't need them though. Again, they limit you somehow. As an example: Work four people on a report using either Word or LaTeX+CVS. Assuming you actually _know_ a little word or a little LaTeX. LaTeX has no support for workgroups, CVS has no support for typesetting, but they both keep things simple and work on files, there you have your workgroup-aware typesetting tool.
If you have to complain, say something clever. Like lack of huge but clumsy, limited, and hard-to-make-do-repetitive-work-for-you GUI applications.
"If I type in my shell"
That should - of course - have read:
"If I type TAB TAB in my shell"
But Slashdot ate my < and >s because they weren't - eh.
Oh pipe down and set your threshold at +5 if you can't take a little humor!
________________________________
Anyway, I would have NEVER in a million years guessed that his picture would be in Playboy... ever!
I just think that's funny.
I couldn't quite figure out if this article on "online only" or his picture will actually be in the print version. That would be WAY cool :)
RP
It is a free anonymous encrypted proxy with the option of URL encryption.
I had to use it to read the playboy article because JANET ( the sort of academic internet backbone of UK ) even soft porn is illegal.
Anyway, considering that Linux was around for some 9 years, I think the author is a tad over excited about this "new" OS.
that geeks don't think about sex, and hence won't reproduce at sufficient numbers to sustain the geek population?
I say slashdot needs to add porn, to remind geeks that they are, in fact men, encouraging them to do something besides waste their time on slashdot! heh
I'm only kidding...sorta. =)
TO BE RELEASED IMMEDIATELY
HOLLAND, MI - Slashdot (www.slashdot.org), a popular web site focusing on IT-related news, has announced it was awarded a patent on "One-click porn" by the United States Patent Office. The technology, which allows world wide web surfers to access porn with a single mouse click was invented by Slashdot founder Rob Malda. Malda said the innovation was inspired by Amazon's one-click shopping technology. "When I saw how easy it was to patent an obvious technique that everyone uses, and then start suing everyone left and right, I couldn't resist," said Malda. "I am going to start by suing every site that links to porn. Soon I will be the king of the porn industry," he said, "I already rule the nerds, the intellect of the world, so this was the next logical step in my quest for World Domination(tm)."
He continued, "And besides, what better way could there be to make SHITLOADS of money than having banner ads for porn sites on a site that millions of horny, teenaged, sex-starved nerds visit EVERY DAY!" Asked if the pro-open-source Slashdot community would accept the idea of Slashdot owning patents, Malda responded "You don't think I've thought of that already? What people really don't know is that RMS is a recovering porn addict. I will soon own him and then I can tell him to tell everyone patents are good. Everyone will listen to RMS. I also plan to form a porn division within Slashdot called 'GNU/pr0n' which RMS will head. That should keep him happy and ensure I have control over him. I'm no fool."
Officials from Andover.net (Nasdaq: ANDN), which recently acquired Slashdot were mum about the technology. When asked how one-click porn fit into their future plans, the company released a statement only saying "our patented one-click porn technology is Linux-based, and as you can tell from the success Linux has had in the past year, it is clearly the Next Big Thing(tm). Therefore, you should all invest in lots and lots of Andover stock."
Slashdot also has patents pending on the technology in 18 other countries.
Oh, man... does that ever take me back! I remember accessing the site (it must've been just about the only porn site on the net then -- how things have changed!) with the w3c's browser... I seem to recall it (the browser) simply being called "www."
But it was text-only, so to get to the good stuff, I had to instruct it to download the actual images to the AIX (college) shell account I was doing all this through.
Then, after I was finished browsing, I could zmodem all the images back to my home computer (which took for ever and ever and ever and ever...) and finally view them through a third-party image viewer (Paintbrush didn't do JPegs). I can't for the life of me remember what it was called, although I still remember zooming in and in and in, and the nipple just getting grainier and grainier and blockier and blockier...
Hmm, my first brush with Unix, I believe.
Ahh... nostalgia. Thanks for the memories!
--
- Sean
It's a fine line between trolling and karma-whoring... and I think I just crossed it.
- Sean
This is a great article, I mean, is getting mentioned in Playboy our generation's version of getting mentioned in time? Will this bring about a new crop of playboy models that are right at home with an xterm, vi, and routing tables? (well, I can hope, (that my gf doesn't read this :).
Did anyone actually read the article though? There is nothing new here, and it has some FUD. Not enough software? Are you kidding me? There's so much software for linux that I've actually been out of the warez scene so long I don't have any contacts anymore! :) Staroffice, Abi, not to mention the tomes at Freshmeat and Gnome.org. Maybe they meant lack of commmercial software.
I don't know what to critque, mainly because I don't know how technical playboy is supposed to be.. The models aren't really photographed in detail enough to be an anatomy lesson, either :).
Excellent publicity. Too bad about that last paragraph though. No mention of the gaming support for linux coming about, and there was no mention of the current achilles heel of linux - getting cutting edge hardware suppored. (USB devices, sound cards, 3D cards, etc.)
All in time though. How about some models in copyleft shirts? :)
kudos!
..don't panic
Well, at least with Playboy on the Linux side there won't be any bloatware on display :)
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
You know you've made it when you're in the 'sticky pages.'
Why do I get the feeling its sandwiched between an ad for penis enlargement and '101 ways to pick up chicks fast!'
Whats the big deal, this isn't the first time something with Linux on it is soon gonna have some jizz all over it.
OT: I love this new brand of moderation. Its like Billy Graham at the controls - anything dirty, explicit, or god forgive us: a dissenting opinion, or a criticism about geek culture automaticaly gets knocked down at least one.
Slashdot: where no-thought fundies rule.
saying in a meeting "I read that article about Linux in Playboy" ...
Perhaps we could add a kernel level JPEG decompression system to go with our kernel http. So now we can serve and view porn faster than everyone else.
Sigh. I wish people would let me know why they reject things.
To put it bluntly: Get over it.
You submitted a suggestion for a story. The idea is to send ideas to the Slashdot crew, not to boost your ego by putting your email address in a mailto: link on Slashdot's homepage. It isn't like you didn't get your pay check or someone stole your hard drive.
As for why: Maybe Rob saw it and didn't like it, but Jeff did. Maybe there were too many stories that week. Maybe the reviewer was just tired. Of all the things in the world to get worked up over, this has got to be one of the silliest.
As an aside: This gets "+1 Insightful"?
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I am currently researching the Linux operating system and other open source software. I'm sure it will play an important role in the future of your company as well as our other clients. Please unblock www.playboy.com so I may continue to provide my best efforts in supporting your company.
Thanks in advance,
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...if that doesn't work, well, there's always the shiva client
(posting this about 5 hours to late to be seen but anyway) I'd recently downloaded an MP3 file (a 1944 new years "swing around the clock" - perfectly legal) and thought that it would be cool to put onto an audio CD for my dad - so how to convert MP3 to the proper wav format for the cd burner? Researching 'doze solutions turns up a $30 module for a popular 'doze program that requires the 'pro' version, which is $400. Yikes!!! So did a little google research on Linux solutions and found a neat simple script to pipe the output of mpg123 to sox and accomplish the job perfectly. Of course it doesn't proactively jump in your face with "What format would you like to convert to?" help wiz's, but the software was all there, mission accomplished. There's a LOT of hidden talent in most Linux distro's, more than most newbies & reviewers realize.
Boojum
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I only read Playboy for the source code listings.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com