They called ACORN a fraud and a threat to democracy, with the implication that their next stop is Gitmo -- so naturally the acorns went into hiding until next year when a more acorn-friendly administration is in office. You geeks just over-analyze everything.
Of course you should, you're an artist. Mind you, I'm no artist and even less am I a geek, but I work with both and know them well. Especially in the corporate world, you have to do something to celebrate your uniqueness, because the company won't. I recently finished writing a large and intensely detailed user manual for a content management app, and couldn't even put my own name on it (I'm a consultant, so a full-time employee's sig had to be on the title page).
So here's my general rule: always err on the side of autonomy.
Someone invented a stationary bike with a platform that you can put a laptop on -- you pedal and program at the same time. Now isn't that a typical corporate solution -- the boss saying, "stay healthy, geek, but don't stop writing the damned code!"
Read Ballmer's message to the troops -- his selected targets are Apple and Google, not FOSS. That is a calculated strategy, not an awakening. The man is very deluded, but he ain't stupid -- he knows that he can't take on the world, but he can aim at a couple of big bears that have started to take over his forest.
This is what I mean when I write (repeatedly) of "death by a thousand charges." It has driven me away from Apple, and now I've passed that aversion to the next generation (my daughter's graduation present was an EeePC, and now she actually like Xandros).
Apple is going to be really sorry they took this line with their customers. Anyone who isn't mega-wealthy and has seen Ubuntu 8.04 in action will have to seriously question the payoff of buying Apple or Vista-powered hardware. I can run Ubuntu on a 7 year old P4 machine and get 90% of the functionality of a new iMac, and be permanently free of the infinite loop of charges; or spend $500 on a new Dell with Ubuntu and watch it fly -- could it be that Steve J. plans on being retired by the time this chicken comes home to roost on his company?
Robert Bly (he's a poet, geeks) called television "the thalidomide of the '90's." Flash will be it for the early decades of this millennium. We will, as I mention here be peeing into our Depends while we Twitter toward death:
In another 20 years, we will be reading about the Youtube-drunk oldsters fading away before the VR chipset-in-the-brain prime dogs.
I've been in every flavor of Ubuntu since Hoary Hedgehog, and have played with Suse, Mandriva, Fedora, and MEPIS; but I had never used Xandros at all until my daughter asked for an ASUS eePC for her graduation present (a colored one, of course). It's pretty neat, both the machine and the OS, but I'll keep Texstar's amazing distro (PCLOS).
The icons of our age are walking ads for the blitzed life - Rush Limbaugh, Mel Gibson, Beerhouse or whatever her name is - the story and the short list would be famous people who are sober.
Did anyone else see that comment from the guy who's actually criticizing the Chinese approach to this --
"The way in which you recognize an evildoer, somebody who wants to throw a bomb, somebody who wants to unfurl a Tibet flag is not on the basis of their identity,"
Ugh, those flag-furlers are scary, ain't they? I guess it's like Dubya would say: either you're with us...or you're with the flag-wavers.
Yep, this guy's making a similar point that I raised in this post last month:
Plagiarism? Hardly. No plot, character, setting, or language is being stolen, re-worked, or represented as an original creation. In fact, the author and publishers are clear in their intent: to offer a fun and thorough compendium of Potter-related information drawn from a study of the novels. Barry Bonds might as well be suing the authors of The Baseball Encyclopedia for plagiarizing his name and lifetime statistics.
If Rowling wins this suit, literary reference works and literary criticism overall will be endangered. Authors of compendia and criticism on the works of Tolkien, galactic hitchhiker Douglas Adams, Simpsons author Matt Groening, and many more, will be facing disastrous litigation. But those authors know that such reference works generate interest â" they actually draw people to buy the original stuff.
That's the ticket. I'd also encourage you to remember that tech is not the demon in this hell. It's something I was writing about today, in fact:
Technology is no more to be blamed for the quotidian failures of our corporate world than is Nature for the death and decline of America's post-Katrina Gulf Coast; or scientists for the unwelcome truth on the endangerment of our planet. The fact is that corporate America has taken technology, an indisputable blessing to humankind, and infected it with its own insipid and careless superficiality...
This is a problem I've noted before (for example, here). I have an equivalent Google page rank with sites with hundreds of times more traffic. In short, I've yet to see the metrics or analytics tool that is truly reliable.
I just checked on of my own books (published through Lulu.com POD) and found that the Buy button was still enabled. So apparently Amazon hasn't executed this very thoroughly. But unless they back off and quit this nonsense, I'm cancelling my affiliate account with them, wiping their ads off my site, and telling them why.
Disagree completely -- I see more garbage in B&N stores, published by the giants of Rock Center, than I do from my colleagues at Lulu.com. If you're going to look down your nose at talented people who take the only avenue open to them, just because they're not famous (or infamous, which is far more likely to get you a six-figure deal these days), then you might as well say let's shut down the entire open source software movement because some crappy stuff gets into our apt-get repositories every so often. Amazon's behavior is disgraceful, and frankly self-destructive.
What language does this guy speak? "...the partnership on top delivers real value..." What does the missionary position have to do with competing with Linux?
No doubt MS Office is good, but on the Mac, until last month it loaded no faster than OO or Neo (and of course you have to shell out again to get the UB that they should have provided for free a year ago). I agree that GIMP's a monster with a steep training curve and no lightweight version a la Image Well or Seashore or PS Elements on the mac platform. But I've been around PCs since the 80's, where we all started out on the command line with DOS 3 or whatever; and Linux is a reminder that things can be done safely and simply, while also teaching me that most of the hyper-tech stuff that's shilled to me by Redmond and Cupertino is stuff I don't really need after all. What most folks need from an office suite can be easily done online now, and if you're a professional who needs a top-flight image editor you're going to wind up on the Mac anyway. But for Joe Windowsuser, I think PCLinuxOS (amazing product), MEPIS 7, or any flavor of Ubuntu is a no-brainer: they all do at least 90% of what you'd expect a PC to do for essentials, is far safer, and doesn't cost a dime. In the context of that article's point, folks are going to have to get used to the fact that they've been sold on a largely manufactured set of needs these past 20 years, and also realize that there are larger issues at stake here, such as the future of the planet and our benighted species. Do I need a new $3K Air with a solid state HD when I can run YDL on an old iBook with nary a complaint? Do I need a new Dellienware monster when I run PCLOS on a seven-year old Gateway that groans even under the weight of XP Home? I don't remember Mr. Moore saying in his famous law that you need to buy a new box every 18 mos., but that's been the spin put on it by the corporations. Linux offers an alternative to this cult of waste and destruction; not to mention a more productive model of capitalism than we've had from the monsters of the west coast. Mozilla, Canonical, Red Hat, and plenty of other open source businesses are doing just fine without having to build a cult of hegemony around themselves. As the current recession deepens, I predict that people will realize that FOSS is pretty much exactly the sort of thing they need amid increasingly straitened economies. Linux is the first wave of a tide that will define business in the 21st century: companies will have to sell service rather than products; modestly-priced support for what's here now rather than megabucks gouging for the next-big-thing.
Nah, that'd be Exxon. They've got $40 billion in profit from 2007 jingling in their pockets. So maybe it's not quite enough to buy Yahoo, but maybe build a space tanker? Ain't no Valdez out there, no insurgency, no Congress...Oil fallin' down from the sky, just like in that John Wayne movie...betcha that's where God lives...
I don't truly rate as a geek, so I typically have more down time than everyone else (you can't be writing requirements and testing all the time, but if you can do it, someone always needs something fixed). So I work on my geek blog for non-geeks, where I try to make ordinary people think about trying out some arctic men's formal wear.
How does Corel get spun as a "rival" to M$? Far as I know, WordPerfect had its day in the DOS era, when 5.1 was the best word processor alive, but now? I might as well claim that Mike Gravel is a rival to Barack Obama as say that Corel threatens M$. Can Quattro Pro be said to "rival" Excel? Yeah right, so can Apple's Numbers.
Universal health care, true high speed broadband, an enlightened prison system, a beautiful nation, and now this -- is there anything wrong with Norway??? I sure would like to find out if there is -- that's why I wrote an open petition to their PM.
My point was that the agents were all for seeing the book published, and actively marketed it to pubs. Now the one guy worked for William Morris and had just landed a $600K advance for the client before me. He's a member of AAR, and a very highly regarded man in his industry. If he was ignorant of copyright law, then he's got plenty of company. Bottom line is: when you do a spinoff piece, are you stealing the original author's IP? In my case, you might as well say I've stolen the IP of Plato, Lao Tzu, Kierkegaard, Jon Kabat Zinn, C.G. Jung, and many others, because the book contains scores of quotes and over a hundred footnotes. If my work is plagiarism, then so is everything in the literature of literary criticism, and that's hundreds of thousands of books, partner.
Fact is you haven't looked at my book, because Lulu hasn't registered a sale of it in weeks! So I'll give you a fair shake: here's a link to a pdf copy of the text. Read a piece of it, look at the endnotes, and then make up your mind. In future, I would avoid making baseless charges without consulting all the evidence. Maybe you're not a writer and couldn't understand: but there's no harder slap to the face you can give an author than to call him a plagiarist or an IP thief. For professional writers, that's career-ending shit right there.
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They called ACORN a fraud and a threat to democracy, with the implication that their next stop is Gitmo -- so naturally the acorns went into hiding until next year when a more acorn-friendly administration is in office. You geeks just over-analyze everything.
Of course you should, you're an artist. Mind you, I'm no artist and even less am I a geek, but I work with both and know them well. Especially in the corporate world, you have to do something to celebrate your uniqueness, because the company won't. I recently finished writing a large and intensely detailed user manual for a content management app, and couldn't even put my own name on it (I'm a consultant, so a full-time employee's sig had to be on the title page). So here's my general rule: always err on the side of autonomy.
The only model that endures with me is the TnA
Someone invented a stationary bike with a platform that you can put a laptop on -- you pedal and program at the same time. Now isn't that a typical corporate solution -- the boss saying, "stay healthy, geek, but don't stop writing the damned code!"
Read Ballmer's message to the troops -- his selected targets are Apple and Google, not FOSS. That is a calculated strategy, not an awakening. The man is very deluded, but he ain't stupid -- he knows that he can't take on the world, but he can aim at a couple of big bears that have started to take over his forest.
This is what I mean when I write (repeatedly) of "death by a thousand charges." It has driven me away from Apple, and now I've passed that aversion to the next generation (my daughter's graduation present was an EeePC, and now she actually like Xandros).
Apple is going to be really sorry they took this line with their customers. Anyone who isn't mega-wealthy and has seen Ubuntu 8.04 in action will have to seriously question the payoff of buying Apple or Vista-powered hardware. I can run Ubuntu on a 7 year old P4 machine and get 90% of the functionality of a new iMac, and be permanently free of the infinite loop of charges; or spend $500 on a new Dell with Ubuntu and watch it fly -- could it be that Steve J. plans on being retired by the time this chicken comes home to roost on his company?
I've been in every flavor of Ubuntu since Hoary Hedgehog, and have played with Suse, Mandriva, Fedora, and MEPIS; but I had never used Xandros at all until my daughter asked for an ASUS eePC for her graduation present (a colored one, of course). It's pretty neat, both the machine and the OS, but I'll keep Texstar's amazing distro (PCLOS).
I've been beating the drum for John from AZ for a while -- does this count? (don't forget to watch the video too!)
The icons of our age are walking ads for the blitzed life - Rush Limbaugh, Mel Gibson, Beerhouse or whatever her name is - the story and the short list would be famous people who are sober.
Ugh, those flag-furlers are scary, ain't they? I guess it's like Dubya would say: either you're with us...or you're with the flag-wavers.
This is a problem I've noted before (for example, here). I have an equivalent Google page rank with sites with hundreds of times more traffic. In short, I've yet to see the metrics or analytics tool that is truly reliable.
I just checked on of my own books (published through Lulu.com POD) and found that the Buy button was still enabled. So apparently Amazon hasn't executed this very thoroughly. But unless they back off and quit this nonsense, I'm cancelling my affiliate account with them, wiping their ads off my site, and telling them why.
Disagree completely -- I see more garbage in B&N stores, published by the giants of Rock Center, than I do from my colleagues at Lulu.com. If you're going to look down your nose at talented people who take the only avenue open to them, just because they're not famous (or infamous, which is far more likely to get you a six-figure deal these days), then you might as well say let's shut down the entire open source software movement because some crappy stuff gets into our apt-get repositories every so often. Amazon's behavior is disgraceful, and frankly self-destructive.
What language does this guy speak? "...the partnership on top delivers real value..." What does the missionary position have to do with competing with Linux?
Is there anything in the universe, I wonder, that we cannot abide without throwing bombs and guns into it?
The setup won't finish here -- craps out during download of MS device components.
No doubt MS Office is good, but on the Mac, until last month it loaded no faster than OO or Neo (and of course you have to shell out again to get the UB that they should have provided for free a year ago). I agree that GIMP's a monster with a steep training curve and no lightweight version a la Image Well or Seashore or PS Elements on the mac platform. But I've been around PCs since the 80's, where we all started out on the command line with DOS 3 or whatever; and Linux is a reminder that things can be done safely and simply, while also teaching me that most of the hyper-tech stuff that's shilled to me by Redmond and Cupertino is stuff I don't really need after all. What most folks need from an office suite can be easily done online now, and if you're a professional who needs a top-flight image editor you're going to wind up on the Mac anyway. But for Joe Windowsuser, I think PCLinuxOS (amazing product), MEPIS 7, or any flavor of Ubuntu is a no-brainer: they all do at least 90% of what you'd expect a PC to do for essentials, is far safer, and doesn't cost a dime. In the context of that article's point, folks are going to have to get used to the fact that they've been sold on a largely manufactured set of needs these past 20 years, and also realize that there are larger issues at stake here, such as the future of the planet and our benighted species. Do I need a new $3K Air with a solid state HD when I can run YDL on an old iBook with nary a complaint? Do I need a new Dellienware monster when I run PCLOS on a seven-year old Gateway that groans even under the weight of XP Home? I don't remember Mr. Moore saying in his famous law that you need to buy a new box every 18 mos., but that's been the spin put on it by the corporations. Linux offers an alternative to this cult of waste and destruction; not to mention a more productive model of capitalism than we've had from the monsters of the west coast. Mozilla, Canonical, Red Hat, and plenty of other open source businesses are doing just fine without having to build a cult of hegemony around themselves. As the current recession deepens, I predict that people will realize that FOSS is pretty much exactly the sort of thing they need amid increasingly straitened economies. Linux is the first wave of a tide that will define business in the 21st century: companies will have to sell service rather than products; modestly-priced support for what's here now rather than megabucks gouging for the next-big-thing.
Nah, that'd be Exxon. They've got $40 billion in profit from 2007 jingling in their pockets. So maybe it's not quite enough to buy Yahoo, but maybe build a space tanker? Ain't no Valdez out there, no insurgency, no Congress...Oil fallin' down from the sky, just like in that John Wayne movie...betcha that's where God lives...
I don't truly rate as a geek, so I typically have more down time than everyone else (you can't be writing requirements and testing all the time, but if you can do it, someone always needs something fixed). So I work on my geek blog for non-geeks, where I try to make ordinary people think about trying out some arctic men's formal wear.
How does Corel get spun as a "rival" to M$? Far as I know, WordPerfect had its day in the DOS era, when 5.1 was the best word processor alive, but now? I might as well claim that Mike Gravel is a rival to Barack Obama as say that Corel threatens M$. Can Quattro Pro be said to "rival" Excel? Yeah right, so can Apple's Numbers.
Universal health care, true high speed broadband, an enlightened prison system, a beautiful nation, and now this -- is there anything wrong with Norway??? I sure would like to find out if there is -- that's why I wrote an open petition to their PM.
Fact is you haven't looked at my book, because Lulu hasn't registered a sale of it in weeks! So I'll give you a fair shake: here's a link to a pdf copy of the text. Read a piece of it, look at the endnotes, and then make up your mind. In future, I would avoid making baseless charges without consulting all the evidence. Maybe you're not a writer and couldn't understand: but there's no harder slap to the face you can give an author than to call him a plagiarist or an IP thief. For professional writers, that's career-ending shit right there.