Slashdot Mirror
The Failure of Tech Journalism
Belzebutt writes: "This is a great article that talks about something we already knew, but haven't paid that much attention to: most tech journalists are a bunch of corporate whores. It even mentions Slashdot, although not very favorably." Eh, we'll get over it. It's a good rant, something to consider as news sites fold left and right.
To read Slashdot, only the lack of intellectual fervor is standing between you and the nirvana of Linux. The fact that you need a million work arounds and training sessions to get it to function on the desktop is always downplayed. Mention this and you're a "luser who uses Windoze". Which is a mature, intelligent way to settle an argument among adults. Raise an objection: get flamed.
Did this guy cut & paste this from trolltalk? Wrong headline: tech journalists are a bunch of ripoff artists. That's our material!
Seriously though, I think he meant to say:
"raise an objection: get moderated as Flamebait"
a fp.
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**SUBMIT**
Never meaning no harm.
Beats all you never saw, been in trouble with the law
Since the day they was born.
yes. what's new ?
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The Old Northwest, A Chronicle Of The Ohio Valley And Beyond
By Frederic Austin Ogg
New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.91
London: Humphrey Milford
Oxford University Press
1919
CONTENTS
I. PONTIAC'S CONSPIRACY
II. "A LAIR OF WILD BEASTS"
III. THE REVOLUTION BEGINS
IV. THE CONQUEST COMPLETED
V. WAYNE, THE SCOURGE OF THE INDIANS
VI. THE GREAT MIGRATION
VII. PIONEER DAYS AND WAYS
VIII. TECUMSEH
IX. THE WAR OF 1812 AND THE NEW WEST
X. SECTIONAL CROSS CURRENTS
XI. THE UPPER MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The Old Northwest
Chapter I. Pontiac's Conspiracy
The fall of Montreal, on September 8, 1760, while the plains
about the city were still dotted with the white tents of the
victorious English and colonial troops, was indeed an event of
the deepest consequence to America and to the world. By the
articles of capitulation which were signed by the Marquis de
Vaudreuil, Governor of New France, Canada and all its
dependencies westward to the Mississippi passed to the British
Crown. Virtually ended was the long struggle for the dominion of
the New World. Open now for English occupation and settlement was
that vast country lying south of the Great Lakes between the Ohio
and the Mississippi--which we know as the Old Northwest--today
the seat of five great commonwealths of the United States.
With an ingenuity born of necessity, the French pathfinders and
colonizers of the Old Northwest had chosen for their settlements
sites which would serve at once the purposes of the priest, the
trader, and the soldier; and with scarcely an exception these
sites are as important today as when they were first selected.
Four regions, chiefly, were still occupied by the French at the
time of the capitulation of Montreal. The most important, as well
as the most distant, of these regions was on the east bank of the
Mississippi, opposite and below the present city of St. Louis,
where a cluster of missions, forts, and trading-posts held the
center of the tenuous line extending from Canada to Louisiana. A
second was the Illinois country, centering about the citadel of
St. Louis which La Salle had erected in 1682 on the summit of
"Starved Rock," near the modern town of Ottawa in Illinois. A
third was the valley of the Wabash, where in the early years of
the eighteenth century Vincennes had become the seat of a colony
commanding both the Wabash and the lower Ohio. And the fourth was
the western end of Lake Erie, where Detroit, founded by the
doughty Cadillac in 1701, had assumed such strength that for
fifty years it had discouraged the ambitions of the English to
make the Northwest theirs.
Sir Jeffrey Amherst, to whom Vaudreuil surrendered in 1760,
forthwith dispatched to the western country a military force to
take possession of the posts still remaining in the hands of the
French. The mission was entrusted to a stalwart New Hampshire
Scotch-Irishman, Major Robert Rogers, who as leader of a band of
intrepid "rangers" had made himself the hero of the northern
frontier. Two hundred men were chosen for the undertaking, and on
the 13th of September the party, in fifteen whaleboats, started
up the St. Lawrence for Detroit.
At the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, near the site of the present
city of Cleveland, the travelers were halted by a band of Indian
chiefs and warriors who, in the name of their great ruler
Pontiac, demanded to know the object of their journeying. Parleys
followed, in which Pontiac himself took part, and it was
explained that the French had surrendered Canada to the English
and that the English merely proposed to assume control of the
western posts, with a view to friendly relations between the red
men and the white men. The rivers, it was promised, would flow
with rum, and presents from the great King would be forthcoming
in endless profusion. The explanation seemed to satisfy the
savages, and, after smoking the calumet with due ceremony, the
chieftain and his followers withdrew.
Late in November, Rogers and his men in their whaleboats appeared
before the little palisaded town of Detroit. They found the
French commander, Beletre, in surly humor and seeking to stir up
the neighboring Wyandots and Potawatomi against them. But the
attempt failed, and there was nothing for Beletre to do but
yield. The French soldiery marched out of the fort, laid down
their arms, and were sent off as prisoners down the river. The
fleur-de-lis, which for more than half a century had floated over
the village, was hauled down, and, to the accompaniment of
cheers, the British ensign was run up. The red men looked on with
amazement at this display of English authority and marveled how
the conquerors forbore to slay their vanquished enemies on the
spot.
Detroit in 1760 was a picturesque, lively, and rapidly growing
frontier town. The central portions of the settlement, lying
within the bounds of the present city, contained ninety or a
hundred small houses, chiefly of wood and roofed with bark or
thatch. A well-built range of barracks afforded quarters for the
soldiery, and there were two public buildings--a council house
and a little church. The whole was surrounded by a square
palisade twenty-five feet high, with a wooden bastion at each
corner and a blockhouse over each gateway. A broad passageway,
the chemin du ronde, lay next to the palisade, and on little
narrow streets at the center the houses were grouped closely
together.
Above and below the fort the banks of the river were lined on
both sides, for a distance of eight or nine miles, with little
rectangular farms, so laid out as to give each a water-landing.
On each farm was a cottage, with a garden and orchard, surrounded
by a fence of rounded pickets; and the countryside rang with the
shouts and laughter of a prosperous and happy peasantry. Within
the limits of the settlement were villages of Ottawas,
Potawatomi, and Wyandots, with whose inhabitants the French lived
on free and easy terms. "The joyous sparkling of the bright blue
water," writes Parkman; "the green luxuriance of the woods; the
white dwellings, looking out from the foliage; and in the
distance the Indian wigwams curling their smoke against the
sky--all were mingled in one broad scene of wild and rural
beauty."
At the coming of the English the French residents were given an
opportunity to withdraw. Few, however, did so, and from the
gossipy correspondence of the pleasure-loving Colonel Campbell,
who for some months was left in command of the fort, it appears
that the life of the place lost none of its gayety by the change
of masters. Sunday card parties at the quarters of the commandant
were festive affairs; and at a ball held in celebration of the
King's birthday the ladies presented an appearance so splendid as
to call forth from the impressionable officer the most
extravagant praises. A visit in the summer of 1761 from Sir
William Johnson, general supervisor of Indian affairs on the
frontier, became the greatest social event in the history of the
settlement, if not of the entire West. Colonel Campbell gave a
ball at which the guests danced nine hours. Sir William
reciprocated with one at which they danced eleven hours. A round
of dinners and calls gave opportunity for much display of
frontier magnificence, as well as for the consumption of
astonishing quantities of wines and cordials. Hundreds of Indians
were interested spectators, and the gifts with which they were
generously showered were received with evidences of deep
satisfaction.
No amount of fiddling and dancing, however, could quite drown
apprehension concerning the safety of the post and the security
of the English hold upon the great region over which this fort
and its distant neighbors stood sentinel. Thousands of square
miles of territory were committed to the keeping of not more than
six hundred soldiers. From the French there was little danger.
But from the Indians anything might be expected. Apart from the
Iroquois, the red men had been bound to the French by many ties
of friendship and common interest, and in the late war they had
scalped and slaughtered and burned unhesitatingly at the French
command. Hardly, indeed, had the transfer of territorial
sovereignty been made before murmurs of discontent began to be
heard.
Notwithstanding outward expressions of assent to the new order of
things, a deep-rooted dislike on the part of the Indians for the
English grew after 1760 with great rapidity. They sorely missed
the gifts and supplies lavishly provided by the French, and they
warmly resented the rapacity and arrogance of the British
traders. The open contempt of the soldiery at the posts galled
the Indians, and the confiscation of their lands drove them to
desperation. In their hearts hope never died that the French
would regain their lost dominion; and again and again rumors were
set afloat that this was about to happen. The belief in such a
reconquest was adroitly encouraged, too, by the surviving French
settlers and traders. In 1761 the tension among the Indians was
increased by the appearance of a "prophet" among the Delawares,
calling on all his race to purge itself of foreign influences and
to unite to drive the white man from the land.
Protests against English encroachments were frequent and, though
respectful, none the less emphatic. At a conference in
Philadelphia in 1761, an Iroquois sachem declared, "We, your
Brethren, of the several Nations, are penned up like Hoggs. There
are Forts all around us, and therefore we are apprehensive that
Death is coming upon us." "We are now left in Peace," ran a
petition of some Christian Oneidas addressed to Sir William
Johnson, "and have nothing to do but to plant our Corn, Hunt the
wild Beasts, smoke our Pipes, and mind Religion. But as these
Forts, which are built among us, disturb our Peace, and are a
great hurt to Religion, because some of our Warriors are foolish,
and some of our Brother Soldiers don't fear God, we therefore
desire that these Forts may be pull'd down, and kick'd out of the
way."
The leadership of the great revolt that was impending fell
naturally upon Pontiac, who, since the coming of the English, had
established himself with his squaws and children on a wooded
island in Lake St. Clair, barely out of view of the
fortifications of Detroit. In all Indian annals no name is more
illustrious than Pontiac's; no figure more forcefully displays
the good and bad qualities of his race. Principal chief of the
Ottawa tribe, he was also by 1763 the head of a powerful
confederation of Ottawas, Ojibwas, and Potawatomi, and a leader
known and respected among Algonquin peoples from the sources of
the Ohio to the Mississippi. While capable of acts of
magnanimity, he had an ambition of Napoleonic proportions, and to
attain his ends he was prepared to use any means. More clearly
than most of his forest contemporaries, he perceived that in the
life of the Indian people a crisis had come. He saw that, unless
the tide of English invasion was rolled back at once, all would
be lost. The colonial farmers would push in after the soldiers;
the forests would be cut away; the hunting-grounds would be
destroyed; the native population would be driven away or
enslaved. In the silence of his wigwam he thought out a plan of
action, and by the closing weeks of 1762 he was ready. Never was
plot more shrewdly devised and more artfully carried out.
During the winter of 1762-63 his messengers passed stealthily
from nation to nation throughout the whole western country,
bearing the pictured wampum belts and the reddened tomahawks
which symbolized war; and in April, 1763, the Lake tribes were
summoned to a great council on the banks of the Ecorces, below
Detroit, where Pontiac in person proclaimed the will of the
Master of Life as revealed to the Delaware prophet, and then
announced the details of his plan. Everywhere the appeal met with
approval; and not only the scores of Algonquin peoples, but also
the Seneca branch of the Iroquois confederacy and a number of
tribes on the lower Mississippi, pledged themselves with all
solemnity to fulfill their prophet's injunction "to drive the
dogs which wear red clothing into the sea." While keen-eyed
warriors sought to keep up appearances by lounging about the
forts and begging in their customary manner for tobacco, whiskey,
and gunpowder, every wigwam and forest hamlet from Niagara to the
Mississippi was astir. Dusky maidens chanted the tribal
war-songs, and in the blaze of a hundred camp-fires chiefs and
warriors performed the savage pantomime of battle.
A simultaneous attack, timed by a change of the moon, was to be
made on the English forts and settlements throughout all the
western country. Every tribe was to fall upon the settlement
nearest at hand, and afterwards all were to combine--with French
aid, it was confidently believed--in an assault on the seats of
English power farther east. The honor of destroying the most
important of the English strongholds, Detroit, was reserved for
Pontiac himself.
The date fixed for the rising was the 7th of May. Six days in
advance Pontiac with forty of his warriors appeared at the fort,
protested undying friendship for the Great Father across the
water, and insisted on performing the calumet dance before the
new commandant, Major Gladwyn. This aroused no suspicion. But
four days later a French settler reported that his wife, when
visiting the Ottawa village to buy venison, had observed the men
busily filing off the ends of their gunbarrels; and the
blacksmith at the post recalled the fact that the Indians had
lately sought to borrow files and saws without being able to give
a plausible explanation of the use they intended to make of the
implements.
God out marijuana on this earth for all to use. Don't let some silly laws stop you from the blissful experience of smoking Gods marijuana!!!
:)
I've seen the same boring cut-n-paste "BSD is dying!" trolls for years now too, so don't dismiss what I have to say as another one of those. I researched many compartive points about all the various flavours of *BSD after my comptroller asked me to deploy an OpenBSD firewall.
/maybe/ by 2004 FreeBSD will be a contender in the low-end server market.
Granted 4.2BSD was a very fine OS, but that was in 1983. 4.4BSD, and its brother 4.4BSBD-Lite, were abymsmal performers at best during their heydey in 1993-4. Both Solaris and HP-UX had networking stacks that supported "long fat pipes," multicasting, and TCP header header prediction years before 4.4BSD did.
I don't know why 4.4BSD-Lite became so popular. Perhaps because it was released as OpenSource in 1994? But even then there were much better TCP/IP stacks and VM schemes in use (Solaris, AIX) so availability of source code was an insignificant win at best. All OpenSource does is allow poor quality code to be re-circulated and reused again and again in new systems, while high quality and RFC compliant code is relagated to the pay environment.
Regardless, the codebase of 4.4BSD-Lite became the stepping stone for all the *BSDs that are still around now. The main three *BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD) all use at least 85% of 4.4BSD-Lite's source code, with the rest being mostly new userland code, TCP/IP updates, and multiprocessor support.
The commerical offering, BSDI, is even more appaling - a source code diff shows roughly 94% code reuse. Paying for an archaic and outdated OS...that would explain why BSDI has less than 2% of the server market.
FreeBSD has very close ties with BSDI. I'm not one to preach doom by association, but I'm afraid FreeBSD has doomed itself by the move. If that isn't enough, FreeBSD's C2 security certification is horrible. Even NT can do better than it!
FreeBSD has a reputation of being the "fastest" BSD on x86 hardware. Actual memory bandwidth performance is a fraction of all of Sun's offerings, and the multiprocessor support is a joke since it has a poorly implemented semaphore locking mechanism. I hear a total re-write is planned, and perhaps even a security audit too, so
NetBSD, I'm afraid, is dead before it got off the ground. The goal of running on as many platforms at once is a noble and idealistic one, but in the real world its useless. At best NetBSD is a mediocre hobbyist OS that runs on outdated computers. A match made in hell it would seem, since ancient source code has been hacked to run on ancient computer. Its ports to systems such as the Dreamcast are total folly, offering no more real world use than GUI systems on headless servers. And I think the installed user base of less than 10,000 speaks for itself.
I was hopeful OpenBSD would be better as its reputation for security is interesting. Sadly, its another strikeout. OpenBSD's filesystem is extremely slow, and hardware support is nearly nonexistant. There are also numerous political issues surrouding its development team that are eating away the last bit of hope. Perhaps the reason it is secure is because no one bothers to hack it since the "prize" is mostly worthless.
*BSD users too are dooming thier own OS. As a group, they are a very vocal and rowdy bunch. No real help is given to new users and such an elitest attitude is suicide.
I chose to not deploy an OpenBSD based upon these reasons. It is my humble opinion that either NT or Solaris be used for any significant work, and *BSDs be left to the hobbyists.
see, it's comments like yours that beg for ascii art!
Calm down, Bill.
lameness filter off
Elect Republicans, everyone except the rich get screwed.
I no longer vote for anybody, just against somebody else.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.