Most of you seem confused about why the content industries are so desperate to get rid of fair use. Let me explain. First of all, it is/not/ about backup copies. Right now, you are legally able to distribute clips -- on the net and anywhere else -- of "The Fellowship of the Ring", "Star Wars", "Minority Report" and every other pompous piece of Hollywood flotsam _provided you do so to aid in your critical discussion of the work_. Notice how scary this is for Hollywood.
1) You can put pristine segments their precious garbage on the net legally. 2) You can make fun of it and point out how stupid and crappy it is.
Once your ability to actually capture clips legally (hello DMCA, DVD and Macrovision) has been destroyed what are you going to do? Draw stick figures? Go ahead! All of the fawning coverage people will see on Entertainment Tonight will have glorious, full motion, full color clips of the film and you, the guy shouting that the Emperor has no clothes, will have no way to illustrate your point.
That is what is really at stake with this threat to fair use.
The biggest customer of Mickeysoft products in the world is Lockheed-Martin. They and other defense companies have had it with the hassle and unreliability of windows (expense doesn't really factor into it) and are looking hard at Linux.
If Mickeysoft's government market dries up the company will basically implode. Microsoft is laying the groundwork for a law to deny gov't purchasing agents the option of using GPL'd software.
Sure. All I'm saying is that while you're feeling happy your little car is being "protected" from the "bad guys", the guys looking to pillage your pension, social security and 401k funds have got pals in the White House helping them out.
You'll realize who the real crooks were when you're a toothless street beggar forty years from now. Just don't get any ideas about stealing a loaf of bread - those will have their own GPS tracking in place by then.
Fine, Jose is going to jail but remember that no "important" white guy from Enron will ever see the inside of a prison cell, no matter how many lives he wrecked with his corruption. Also remember that you have been, and will be, the victim of more white-collar crime in your life than any other form. Personally, I'm more worried when my government gets hijacked than when my car gets ripped off.
"Steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and they make you king." - Dylan
Ignoring the underlying causes of terror and trying to bomb a billion desperate, disenfranchised people into submission will ultimately destroy our sorry, panicked asses.
That simple enough?
BTW: What's going on is not about fear. It's about the will to exploit fear to consolidate power.
- Night
Lots of Fun 'til It's Used on You
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Sometime around 2008-2016 the machinations of supra-national trade organizations will have finally hammer-locked the bulk of humanity into a cycle of miserable economic and cultural servitiude as well as political impotence. At that point we'll experience protest like those of Seattle and Genoa but played out on an enormous, international scale.
That is the moment you and/or your children will find out first-hand what it feels like to be attacked by space-based weaponry.
All of this stuff is ultimately meant to exert power over/you/ - American, Canadian, French, Pakistani -- it doesn't matter. This is a jackboot in your face and the joke is you're paying for all of it and Bruce Sterling thinks it's cute. Have a nice day!
Night
Explanation for SETI Failure?
on
Time Travel
·
· Score: 1
Carl Sagan once stated that, "the most likely explanation (for eventually finding nothing but radio silence in the universe) is that advanced intelligences routinely destroy themselves".
Imagine instead that the reason for the silence is that advcanced intelligences learn time travel and their citizenry empty out of this universe into other, parallel time lines where they can be free to happily manipulate the past/future to their own liking?
This is an inefficient way to deliver nutrition to those very short of space and resources. Slabs of dead fish muscle fed in nutrient baths are not going to give you anywhere close to 100% efficiency in conversion. This is the same thing as generating a pound of beef from 30 pounds of grain fed to a cow. It's wasteful and stupid.
Yeah, beef tastes better than grain, hahaha. Enjoy your colon cancer.
We Have No Government Without CFR!
on
SSSCA Hearing
·
· Score: 1
Campaign Finance Reform. Fritz Hollings is just another corrupt pol shaking down monied groups for cash to use to keep his personal power and prestige intact. De-fund Fritz and every other corrupt pol. Back public funding of political campaigns or continue to watch your rights and country sold out by pimps and whores.
I'm just wondering what Slashdotters think the reason is that the music and movie industries - with a combined revenue of 22 billion dollars/anum -- are allowed to get away with throwing a three trillion dollar economy into a tailspin. Further, why do you think they are allowed to bully around the consumer electronics, computer and software industries at will? Further, why do you think are they are allowed to threaten the rights of 300 million Americans?
I'm just curious. It's got to be more than lobbyists, everyone has those. Why are these guys able to push everybody around so easily? Anyone have any ideas?
Night
Called 'New Kind of War' to Protect Insurance Comp
on
A New Kind of War
·
· Score: 1
There has been a rush by the Bush Administration to call it a 'new kind of war' for a nunber of reasons, but a primary one is to bail out those heavy campaign donors known as the insurance industry. These companies are going to get hammered in this instance unless the events of Sept 11 can be legally termed "war". The fact that this is plainly a terrorist act is problematic for the insurance lobby. Examine just about every insurance policy you've got and you'll notice your insurer gets a free ride if you're fucked over by "force maejure" (act of God - pretty tough for the Bushies to call it that), insurrection (in which case the government isn't necessarily in their pocket and can't invent a reason for them not to pay) or war (bingo). More here
The whole idea of having to learn software engineering in school is a scam. If you take a look at anything you're genuinely any good at you'll realize that you largely taught yourself. If you really, really want to learn to program you'll read about it, try your hand at writing a little something, read some more, try something more difficult and so on until you're hooked.
A programmer to me is someone who loves to code. All the rest are better off becoming cops or cab drivers or construction workers and such.
Play is Learning
School is Time Taken Away from Learning
The problem with this strategy is that all "control" and "financial benefit" are permanently ceded to media monopolies! DOH! These guys will come for you and your pathetic Freenet development with new laws as soon as they've polished off any commercial alternatives to their eternal dominance (witness crackdown on OpenNap if you want proof).
Hollywood cannot be trusted with the kind of power Judge Patel has given them. We all need to do what we can to immediately stop feeding it our money. We're funding the construction of our own chains and cages.
CONSUMER REVOLT
Starve
Hollywood
Starve
Hollywood
Starve
The US, EU and Australia should drop any last pretense of acting in the interests of ordinary citizens and finally create the "People and Families That Matter Act" (PTMA).
Excerpt:
"The PTMA shall guarantee uninterrupted wealth, power and social dominance for the privileged elite of the early 21st century until, and if at all possible beyond, the heat death of the universe.
Any unauthorized discussion of the PTMA by persons not explicitly covered by this Act shall be considered terrorism."
Night
---
(C) Copyright Forever and Ever and Ever
ME ME ME All Rights Reserved and Defended By the Full Weight of the US Military
MINE MINE MINE (C) Copyright Copyright Copyright Copyright ALL MINE This Post Not Authorized for Use By Anyone Who Has Not Paid Me In Full ANY UNAUTHORIZED MEMORY OF THIS POST IS A VIOLATION OF MY COPYRIGHT AND SHALL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW
Post-Napster-decision I think we can all feel a new dynamic afoot. Everybody on the planet that doesn't own a Hollywood studio, Microsft, or a Big 5 record company (or get paid whoring for one) is plainly getting screwed up the ass. Corporate America is feeling newly emboldened to attack the foundations of openness and the very idea of individuals controlling key parts of their communications environment. At the same time, a huge groundswell of anger and energy by the disenfranchised, meaning pathetic saps like Slashdot readers, enraged at being trampled by these clumsy corporate Brontos, is producing a hundred new squash-resistant P2P ideas a minute.
We're all getting a sense of the enormity of what is about to go down. It is going to be ugly. Personally, I think of the huge corporate interests built on American intellectual property laws as the Titanic and the innate human desire for unrestricted communication (in words, songs, movies, stories, pictures, books etc) as the iceberg. While both sides represent enormously powerful forces, the Titanic is going to lose this battle and sink. There is simply no bottom to the iceberg.
Always remember that all of this pain and idiocy proceeds from corporate denial of one simple fact: bits are not atoms. Hollywood, Redmond: Go fuck yourselves, we ain't goin' back. Even if it takes a thousand years to engineer you out of existence you are going down.
Night GeekGoddess
---
"I'm too slippery for time to grip, get me Sundog?" - Bruce Sterling 'Schismatrix'
While the RIAA/MPAA lobby for more draconian content protection laws daily, the reality is that more and more people continue to opt out of mainstream content consumption. Most of my friends are into underground music, favor independent or foreign films, watch little to no television, read independent news media sources and ignore radio outside of college, pirate or public stations. Further, more and more of us are becoming our own audio/video/radio/print content producers.
Perhaps we should let Hollwood spend all of their money running concertina wire and digging trenches around copyright. They are less and less the ones making content anybody gives a shit about. Sure, the've got some promotional/synergistic inertia left from the glory days of Big Media, but that advantage is eroding fast. Who really cares anymore if you own a TV network, radio stations and a chain of newspapers? I can do all that and more in my basement for $2,500.
Disney got skewered on the internet because they couldn't monopolize an infinitely expandable virtual space where it was all too easy for people to route around their banal corporate pap.
Go RIAA! Go MPAA! Spend yourselves into the ground protecting the music and movies we'll all be making and watching without you!
I've been a NeXT developer for over ten years. I've seen it/all/ -- the (for the time) mind-blowing hardware, the bad business decisions, the wrong turns and the beautiful, beautiful devleopment environment and OO frameworks. What a ride!
While some of the spirit of NeXT - an elitist, snobby, extremely weird and secretive company for rock star coders and Jobs cultists - lives on to a degree today at Apple, most of the really central people have either retired or scattered to the wind (Bud Tribble, William Parkhurst, Keith Ohlfs). Avie is still around, of course, but he and guys like Bertrand Serlet are really the last of the old guard. NeXT always had top-shelf engineers, though.
In truth, what really killed NeXT was Java. Although the Java 2 class libraries available today that have comparable peers in the NeXT Foundation/WebObjects/Enterprise Objects and AppKit frameworks are almost universally inferior to what Apple is going to ship as the "Cocoa" development environment on Mac OSX, Apple has largely squandered the promise of Cocoa already because it has sat on this rich legacy from NeXT while Java slowly took over the world of enterprise software development. Today, the few people who can be arsed to learn Objective-C don't even bother to put it on a resume. Very sad, but Apple's marketing team just never had the balls to fight Sun. As far as writing Cocoa apps in Java - why bother? Might as well write pure Java apps. Therein dies the last of NeXT.
All that said, I really miss the company. NeXT made some of the most exciting computer products ever released. That it was a dysfunctional organization and a money-losing operation is ultimately beside the point. I find it very sad that companies that made truly amazing machines, and tried to do extraordinary things (ie NeXT, SGI) were severely punished for it and gray box makers without a single idea in their heads (Dell, Microsoft) thrived. Oh well, that's the "genius of the market" for you.
In the end, I like to think of the company as a success anyway. NeXT computers will be in glass cases in museums a hundred years from now and people will still ooh and ahh at them. And if someone turns one on, bet your last nickel that the little matte black magnesium monolith will find some way to boot and run.
Say what you will about Steve Jobs and NeXT, but you won't see their like again in your lifetime.
I made the move to Cupertino from Boston a little
over two years ago. Here are my thoughts
on Silicon Valley living:
This place is an environmental
disaster. The air always smells like it
is on fire; 365 days a year. Your lung
capacity will drop precipitously as you
hoover up buckets of PM10 and diesel
exhaust while stuck in traffic on 280,
880 and 101.
The corporate culture, particularly
the management culture, is far more
relaxed and easy-going than on the East
Coast. If you are a tech worker you had
better know your shit, though, because
your aptitude will be tested to the nth
degree by the best tech minds
around.
There is almost no real culture at
all. San Jose is a dull, drab city. The
Valley is basically a big strip mall
sprinkled with office parks. Palo Alto
(University Ave. near Stanford) is about
the only decent place to spend an
evening out.
You can't afford to buy a house here,
and if you could, you would be a fucking
idiot to pay these prices to live in a
toxic strip mall.
There are huge amounts of money
floating around. If you have half an
idea and know a blow-dried marketing guy
with some kind of pedigree you can get
funded -- dot bomb or no dot bomb.
The weather is temperate and it sunny almost all the time, so
you'll have a nice tan to go with your
hacking cough.
My advice to anyone making the move is to
carefully save whatever you can after paying your
ridiculous rent, nurture your stock options with
TLC and get the fuck outta dodge before
you get cancer.
If Silicon Valley represents the future of
America, not to mention the world, then we
are all pretty much screwed.
The networks had it right about Florida -- exit polls indicated that people _THOUGHT_ they had voted for Gore. In fact, many had been tricked into voting for Buchanan. This is fraud.
THIS ELECTION IS FRAUDULENT. THE BUSH FAMILY AND REPUBLICANS ARE TRYING TO STEAL AN AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION ON BEHALF OF OIL, TOBACCO, AEROSPACE, HMO, PHARMACEUTICAL AND MILITARY INTERESTS.
It looks like at least three thousand Florida votes that should have gone to Gore went to Buchanan instead because of the confusing ballots issued in Palm Beach:
"One supervisor of elections decided to do their ballot a little bit differently than others," Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth told NBC's "Today" show.
Butterworth said that if Buchanan won a disproportionate percentage of votes in Palm Beach County, "that may be a problem." In fact, Buchanan appears to have done better in Palm Beach, which is heavily Democratic, than in comparable areas. He won 3,407 votes there, but got only 789 in Broward County, which lies immediately to the south, and 108 in Martin County, which is immediately to the north of Palm Beach. Hillsborough County, which tends to be conseravtive, gave Buchanan 800.
All of these corporate attacks on your liberty, all of these draconian restrictions are being paid for by the money YOU spend on corporate-sponsored books, DVDs, CDs, VHS tapes and trips to the multiplex. If you want it to stop you need to re-orient your priorities and better target your entertainment dollar.
If you like movies, go to Atomfilms or head down to the local art-house cinema that shows truly independent work instead of the mega-mall. If you like music, go to mp3.com or use services like Napster and pay artists you like directly via Fairtunes or Paypal. If you are an artist, release your work to the public under the terms of the OPL and let the public know about your account at Paypal.
Don't spend dime one on anything for sale at Amazon.com. Use your local library instead. If you simply must have some piece of corporate media, buy it used.
The only power these pimps have is the power YOU give them. For the DMCA and everything else the RIAA and MPAA have done to your rights, and plan to do to them in the future, you must choke off their access to the cash they expect to have available to fund their ongoing attacks against you, your family and your children. Hollywood has had a terrible year, box office receipts are way off. Keep it up! Make the first decade of the 21st century a finacial Waterloo for them!
Every one of these abuses flows from the ability of corporate money to pervert your democracy, your birthright. Support alternatives to the corrupt two-party system. One week from today vote Nader or Harry Browne.
Say whatever you like. In all likelihood if you successfully make the mind-numbingly obvious point -- that the RIAA are a corrupt business cartel and Hilary Rosen is a corporate lobbyist attacking the freedoms of individuals to help maximize their profits -- your message will not be printed by ZDNet.
Slashdotters should know better than to beg for the favor of corporate media.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of you seem confused about why the content industries are so desperate to get rid of fair use. Let me explain. First of all, it is /not/ about backup copies. Right now, you are legally able to distribute clips -- on the net and anywhere else -- of "The Fellowship of the Ring", "Star Wars", "Minority Report" and every other pompous piece of Hollywood flotsam _provided you do so to aid in your critical discussion of the work_. Notice how scary this is for Hollywood.
1) You can put pristine segments their precious garbage on the net legally.
2) You can make fun of it and point out how stupid and crappy it is.
Once your ability to actually capture clips legally (hello DMCA, DVD and Macrovision) has been destroyed what are you going to do? Draw stick figures? Go ahead! All of the fawning coverage people will see on Entertainment Tonight will have glorious, full motion, full color clips of the film and you, the guy shouting that the Emperor has no clothes, will have no way to illustrate your point.
That is what is really at stake with this threat to fair use.
- Night
The biggest customer of Mickeysoft products in the world is Lockheed-Martin. They and other defense companies have had it with the hassle and unreliability of windows (expense doesn't really factor into it) and are looking hard at Linux.
If Mickeysoft's government market dries up the company will basically implode. Microsoft is laying the groundwork for a law to deny gov't purchasing agents the option of using GPL'd software.
- Night
Sure. All I'm saying is that while you're feeling happy your little car is being "protected" from the "bad guys", the guys looking to pillage your pension, social security and 401k funds have got pals in the White House helping them out.
You'll realize who the real crooks were when you're a toothless street beggar forty years from now. Just don't get any ideas about stealing a loaf of bread - those will have their own GPS tracking in place by then.
- Night
Fine, Jose is going to jail but remember that no "important" white guy from Enron will ever see the inside of a prison cell, no matter how many lives he wrecked with his corruption. Also remember that you have been, and will be, the victim of more white-collar crime in your life than any other form. Personally, I'm more worried when my government gets hijacked than when my car gets ripped off.
"Steal a little and they throw you in jail. Steal a lot and they make you king." - Dylan
Okay. How about this:
Ignoring the underlying causes of terror and trying to bomb a billion desperate, disenfranchised people into submission will ultimately destroy our sorry, panicked asses.
That simple enough?
BTW: What's going on is not about fear. It's about the will to exploit fear to consolidate power.
- Night
Sometime around 2008-2016 the machinations of supra-national trade organizations will have finally hammer-locked the bulk of humanity into a cycle of miserable economic and cultural servitiude as well as political impotence. At that point we'll experience protest like those of Seattle and Genoa but played out on an enormous, international scale.
/you/ - American, Canadian, French, Pakistani -- it doesn't matter. This is a jackboot in your face and the joke is you're paying for all of it and Bruce Sterling thinks it's cute. Have a nice day!
That is the moment you and/or your children will find out first-hand what it feels like to be attacked by space-based weaponry.
All of this stuff is ultimately meant to exert power over
Night
Carl Sagan once stated that, "the most likely explanation (for eventually finding nothing but radio silence in the universe) is that advanced intelligences routinely destroy themselves".
Imagine instead that the reason for the silence is that advcanced intelligences learn time travel and their citizenry empty out of this universe into other, parallel time lines where they can be free to happily manipulate the past/future to their own liking?
- Night
This is an inefficient way to deliver nutrition to those very short of space and resources. Slabs of dead fish muscle fed in nutrient baths are not going to give you anywhere close to 100% efficiency in conversion. This is the same thing as generating a pound of beef from 30 pounds of grain fed to a cow. It's wasteful and stupid.
Yeah, beef tastes better than grain, hahaha. Enjoy your colon cancer.
Night
Your Base too! Plus Okinawa!
- Chen
Campaign Finance Reform. Fritz Hollings is just another corrupt pol shaking down monied groups for cash to use to keep his personal power and prestige intact. De-fund Fritz and every other corrupt pol. Back public funding of political campaigns or continue to watch your rights and country sold out by pimps and whores.
Night
They want Linux dead as much or more than the MPAA does. You all should feel like a sheep in a Congressional committee full of wolves.
Night
I'm just wondering what Slashdotters think the reason is that the music and movie industries - with a combined revenue of 22 billion dollars/anum -- are allowed to get away with throwing a three trillion dollar economy into a tailspin. Further, why do you think they are allowed to bully around the consumer electronics, computer and software industries at will? Further, why do you think are they are allowed to threaten the rights of 300 million Americans?
I'm just curious. It's got to be more than lobbyists, everyone has those. Why are these guys able to push everybody around so easily? Anyone have any ideas?
Night
There has been a rush by the Bush Administration to call it a 'new kind of war' for a nunber of reasons, but a primary one is to bail out those heavy campaign donors known as the insurance industry. These companies are going to get hammered in this instance unless the events of Sept 11 can be legally termed "war". The fact that this is plainly a terrorist act is problematic for the insurance lobby. Examine just about every insurance policy you've got and you'll notice your insurer gets a free ride if you're fucked over by "force maejure" (act of God - pretty tough for the Bushies to call it that), insurrection (in which case the government isn't necessarily in their pocket and can't invent a reason for them not to pay) or war (bingo). More here
Night
The whole idea of having to learn software engineering in school is a scam. If you take a look at anything you're genuinely any good at you'll realize that you largely taught yourself. If you really, really want to learn to program you'll read about it, try your hand at writing a little something, read some more, try something more difficult and so on until you're hooked.
A programmer to me is someone who loves to code. All the rest are better off becoming cops or cab drivers or construction workers and such.
Play is Learning
School is Time Taken Away from Learning
Night
The problem with this strategy is that all "control" and "financial benefit" are permanently ceded to media monopolies! DOH! These guys will come for you and your pathetic Freenet development with new laws as soon as they've polished off any commercial alternatives to their eternal dominance (witness crackdown on OpenNap if you want proof).
Hollywood cannot be trusted with the kind of power Judge Patel has given them. We all need to do what we can to immediately stop feeding it our money. We're funding the construction of our own chains and cages.
CONSUMER REVOLT
Starve
Hollywood
Starve
Hollywood
Starve
Night
GeekGoddess
The US, EU and Australia should drop any last pretense of acting in the interests of ordinary citizens and finally create the "People and Families That Matter Act" (PTMA).
Excerpt:
"The PTMA shall guarantee uninterrupted wealth, power and social dominance for the privileged elite of the early 21st century until, and if at all possible beyond, the heat death of the universe.
Any unauthorized discussion of the PTMA by persons not explicitly covered by this Act shall be considered terrorism."
Night
---
(C) Copyright Forever and Ever and Ever
ME ME ME All Rights Reserved and Defended By the Full Weight of the US Military
MINE MINE MINE (C) Copyright Copyright Copyright Copyright ALL MINE This Post Not Authorized for Use By Anyone Who Has Not Paid Me In Full ANY UNAUTHORIZED MEMORY OF THIS POST IS A VIOLATION OF MY COPYRIGHT AND SHALL BE PROSECUTED TO THE FULL EXTENT OF THE LAW
Post-Napster-decision I think we can all feel a new dynamic afoot. Everybody on the planet that doesn't own a Hollywood studio, Microsft, or a Big 5 record company (or get paid whoring for one) is plainly getting screwed up the ass. Corporate America is feeling newly emboldened to attack the foundations of openness and the very idea of individuals controlling key parts of their communications environment. At the same time, a huge groundswell of anger and energy by the disenfranchised, meaning pathetic saps like Slashdot readers, enraged at being trampled by these clumsy corporate Brontos, is producing a hundred new squash-resistant P2P ideas a minute.
We're all getting a sense of the enormity of what is about to go down. It is going to be ugly. Personally, I think of the huge corporate interests built on American intellectual property laws as the Titanic and the innate human desire for unrestricted communication (in words, songs, movies, stories, pictures, books etc) as the iceberg. While both sides represent enormously powerful forces, the Titanic is going to lose this battle and sink. There is simply no bottom to the iceberg.
Always remember that all of this pain and idiocy proceeds from corporate denial of one simple fact: bits are not atoms. Hollywood, Redmond: Go fuck yourselves, we ain't goin' back. Even if it takes a thousand years to engineer you out of existence you are going down.
Night
GeekGoddess
--- "I'm too slippery for time to grip, get me Sundog?" - Bruce Sterling 'Schismatrix'
While the RIAA/MPAA lobby for more draconian content protection laws daily, the reality is that more and more people continue to opt out of mainstream content consumption. Most of my friends are into underground music, favor independent or foreign films, watch little to no television, read independent news media sources and ignore radio outside of college, pirate or public stations. Further, more and more of us are becoming our own audio/video/radio/print content producers.
Perhaps we should let Hollwood spend all of their money running concertina wire and digging trenches around copyright. They are less and less the ones making content anybody gives a shit about. Sure, the've got some promotional/synergistic inertia left from the glory days of Big Media, but that advantage is eroding fast. Who really cares anymore if you own a TV network, radio stations and a chain of newspapers? I can do all that and more in my basement for $2,500.
Disney got skewered on the internet because they couldn't monopolize an infinitely expandable virtual space where it was all too easy for people to route around their banal corporate pap.
Go RIAA! Go MPAA! Spend yourselves into the ground protecting the music and movies we'll all be making and watching without you!
Night
I've been a NeXT developer for over ten years. I've seen it /all/ -- the (for the time) mind-blowing hardware, the bad business decisions, the wrong turns and the beautiful, beautiful devleopment environment and OO frameworks. What a ride!
While some of the spirit of NeXT - an elitist, snobby, extremely weird and secretive company for rock star coders and Jobs cultists - lives on to a degree today at Apple, most of the really central people have either retired or scattered to the wind (Bud Tribble, William Parkhurst, Keith Ohlfs). Avie is still around, of course, but he and guys like Bertrand Serlet are really the last of the old guard. NeXT always had top-shelf engineers, though.
In truth, what really killed NeXT was Java. Although the Java 2 class libraries available today that have comparable peers in the NeXT Foundation/WebObjects/Enterprise Objects and AppKit frameworks are almost universally inferior to what Apple is going to ship as the "Cocoa" development environment on Mac OSX, Apple has largely squandered the promise of Cocoa already because it has sat on this rich legacy from NeXT while Java slowly took over the world of enterprise software development. Today, the few people who can be arsed to learn Objective-C don't even bother to put it on a resume. Very sad, but Apple's marketing team just never had the balls to fight Sun. As far as writing Cocoa apps in Java - why bother? Might as well write pure Java apps. Therein dies the last of NeXT.
All that said, I really miss the company. NeXT made some of the most exciting computer products ever released. That it was a dysfunctional organization and a money-losing operation is ultimately beside the point. I find it very sad that companies that made truly amazing machines, and tried to do extraordinary things (ie NeXT, SGI) were severely punished for it and gray box makers without a single idea in their heads (Dell, Microsoft) thrived. Oh well, that's the "genius of the market" for you.
In the end, I like to think of the company as a success anyway. NeXT computers will be in glass cases in museums a hundred years from now and people will still ooh and ahh at them. And if someone turns one on, bet your last nickel that the little matte black magnesium monolith will find some way to boot and run.
Say what you will about Steve Jobs and NeXT, but you won't see their like again in your lifetime.
Nightspore
- This place is an environmental
disaster. The air always smells like it
is on fire; 365 days a year. Your lung
capacity will drop precipitously as you
hoover up buckets of PM10 and diesel
exhaust while stuck in traffic on 280,
880 and 101.
- The corporate culture, particularly
the management culture, is far more
relaxed and easy-going than on the East
Coast. If you are a tech worker you had
better know your shit, though, because
your aptitude will be tested to the nth
degree by the best tech minds
around.
- There is almost no real culture at
all. San Jose is a dull, drab city. The
Valley is basically a big strip mall
sprinkled with office parks. Palo Alto
(University Ave. near Stanford) is about
the only decent place to spend an
evening out.
- You can't afford to buy a house here,
and if you could, you would be a fucking
idiot to pay these prices to live in a
toxic strip mall.
- There are huge amounts of money
floating around. If you have half an
idea and know a blow-dried marketing guy
with some kind of pedigree you can get
funded -- dot bomb or no dot bomb.
- The weather is temperate and it sunny almost all the time, so
you'll have a nice tan to go with your
hacking cough.
My advice to anyone making the move is to carefully save whatever you can after paying your ridiculous rent, nurture your stock options with TLC and get the fuck outta dodge before you get cancer.If Silicon Valley represents the future of America, not to mention the world, then we are all pretty much screwed.
Night
I may be a stupid liberal, but at least I wasn't smoking any "cigerettes" when I cast my "ballet".
The networks had it right about Florida -- exit polls indicated that people _THOUGHT_ they had voted for Gore. In fact, many had been tricked into voting for Buchanan. This is fraud.
THIS ELECTION IS FRAUDULENT. THE BUSH FAMILY AND REPUBLICANS ARE TRYING TO STEAL AN AMERICAN PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION ON BEHALF OF OIL, TOBACCO, AEROSPACE, HMO, PHARMACEUTICAL AND MILITARY INTERESTS.
It looks like at least three thousand Florida votes that should have gone to Gore went to Buchanan instead because of the confusing ballots issued in Palm Beach:
"One supervisor of elections decided to do their ballot a little bit differently than others," Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth told NBC's "Today" show.
Butterworth said that if Buchanan won a disproportionate percentage of votes in Palm Beach County, "that may be a problem." In fact, Buchanan appears to have done better in Palm Beach, which is heavily Democratic, than in comparable areas. He won 3,407 votes there, but got only 789 in Broward County, which lies immediately to the south, and 108 in Martin County, which is immediately to the north of Palm Beach. Hillsborough County, which tends to be conseravtive, gave Buchanan 800.
The above from The Washington Post.
All of these corporate attacks on your liberty, all of these draconian restrictions are being paid for by the money YOU spend on corporate-sponsored books, DVDs, CDs, VHS tapes and trips to the multiplex. If you want it to stop you need to re-orient your priorities and better target your entertainment dollar.
If you like movies, go to Atomfilms or head down to the local art-house cinema that shows truly independent work instead of the mega-mall. If you like music, go to mp3.com or use services like Napster and pay artists you like directly via Fairtunes or Paypal. If you are an artist, release your work to the public under the terms of the OPL and let the public know about your account at Paypal.
Don't spend dime one on anything for sale at Amazon.com. Use your local library instead. If you simply must have some piece of corporate media, buy it used.
The only power these pimps have is the power YOU give them. For the DMCA and everything else the RIAA and MPAA have done to your rights, and plan to do to them in the future, you must choke off their access to the cash they expect to have available to fund their ongoing attacks against you, your family and your children. Hollywood has had a terrible year, box office receipts are way off. Keep it up! Make the first decade of the 21st century a finacial Waterloo for them!
Every one of these abuses flows from the ability of corporate money to pervert your democracy, your birthright. Support alternatives to the corrupt two-party system. One week from today vote Nader or Harry Browne.
Night
Geek Goddess
Say whatever you like. In all likelihood if you successfully make the mind-numbingly obvious point -- that the RIAA are a corrupt business cartel and Hilary Rosen is a corporate lobbyist attacking the freedoms of individuals to help maximize their profits -- your message will not be printed by ZDNet.
Slashdotters should know better than to beg for the favor of corporate media.
Night