Whenever you start talking about a boycott,
there's always some defeatists who crawls out of
the wood work claiming that it won't work, that
there's no point, that there's something better
you should be doing. They often have fairly
legal or economic arguments as to why it won't
work.
The trouble is that they're wrong. Boycotts are
indeed effective, at least sometimes. The fancy
arguments about why you shouldn't bother can even
be technically correct, and still be irrelevant,
because all of these huge, formidible looking
organizations are much like the proverbial
school yard bully that acts tough but is really
very insecure. These guys are always looking over
their shoulder at public opinion, and even if
your boycott is making a miniscule, barely detectable,
dent in their bottom line, they're going to be
really worried that you're going to do better
next time, that the boycott may get even bigger.
Even if there *is* no dent in their bottom line,
they may get nervous that there's a sizeable
group of people *talking* about a boycott.
Here's something I said here a while back about
the Amazon boycott. Try doing an s/amazon/RIAA/ig on it:
The idea that Amazon is too big to be shot down by the
slashdot crowd is similarly nutty. If you believe this,
you've got an exagerated idea about how big Amazon is, and
how small slashdot is, and you have no clue about how much
leverage a small dedicated group of people have in running a
boycott. It wasn't that long ago that the Nike corporation
was forced to backpeddle on it's overseas hiring practices
because of pressure started by Global Exchange (a small
non-profit with a few dozen employees). Recently they've
turned their sites (sights?) on the Gap Corporation for
using what amounts to indentured servitude in a US
territory, and the Gap's sales are now flat. The same
people helped organize the protests of the WTO in Seattle
(heard about this one, yes? Mass action organized by the
internet... ha, what a silly idea, eh?).
If you're looking for record labels, my first stop is
usually:
http://www.arancidamoeba.com/labels/.
This is a pretty comprehensive listing of labels with web
sites (with searches by genre, etc). This includes indie
and non-indie, though... you've got to use your head to tell
which is which. If you care about these things, it becomes
something of an instinct, even when a major tries to
disguise itself as a minor (as they sometimes do). Hint: if
the label has an address in New York or LA the odds are it's
not indie.
(I see that http://www.musicisland.com/ claims to be "the
home of Independant Music on the Web" but their web site is
a mess of pop-up add windows, unreadable fonts, and critical
links that are busted.)
I took a look at the Napster "Buycott" (http://www.napster.com/buycott.html)
and it looks okay, though they've only got about fifty or so
artists (not labels) in the list. In any case, I would
definitely recommend DJ Spooky: he's an incredibly
prolific, really creative ambient sample artist.
As a place to find cool new stuff, I'd recommend:
http://www.aquariusrecordsSF.com/.
This is a record store that does mail orders. They
essentially refuse to stock anything they don't really
love. Subscribe to their email newsletter: it's full of
really chatty, detailed reviews of nearly every good
new release in the last month.
Heard in the Suck board room: will actually click through and read the "Page views were down 50% last month what are we going to do?" article that's under discussion? "We need slashdotted, that will keep us alive"
"How? What can we write about that will get our article on/. CmdrTaco Seems a little far-fetched. hates everything we submit." "How about we kill Mozilla." "Perfect!"
But doesn't this assume that slashdot readers will actually click-through to look at the article under discussion?
I'm currently running RedHat 6.1, but there are two things that have always struck me as attractive about Debian:
(1) There's an apt-get mechanism that you can set up to do automated updates (think, security patches) of your system software. Redhat is working on this, too, but Debian has been there for a long time.
(2) They don't ship alpha quality software! I sincerely hope that RedHat has bought some QA with their IPO money, because despite having a reputation for being easy to install, RedHat upgrades always strike me as a severe nightmare.
(Hey, maybe I'll try a *beta* release of a "x.0" version of RedHat! That sounds so exciting! Uh, on second thought....)
In fact, my first thought on this is that while it's pretty neat that Bruce Peren's is capable of admitting that he was wrong, it is not at all cool that he yanked something that he published. Even if what he said was wrong, it's now part of the public discourse. The fact that we can take something down off of the web after it's been published is a bug, not a feature (I keep hoping that someday the WWW will mutate into something more like Xanadu...).
Try this hypothetical: what if, instead of doing public speeches, polticians took to publishing their opinions in articles on the web? That way, if anything they say produces a bad reaction, they can just edit it away, and no one will be able to figure out what the complaints were about. Very convienient, eh?
My take: If you publish an article, and then later recant, the thing to do is to add a link at the top pointing to your later thoughts on the subject.
Okay, that's it. You guys aren't real nerds. Time to change your slogan.
And the Department of Energy now reports that work on a power source replacement for the traditional plutonium-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) called the Advanced Radiological Power Source (ARPS) has not been productive, yielding lower than predicted output.
Somehow I suspect that this Plutonium "shortage" has more to do with fear of another political flap, like the one surrounding the launch of the Cassini probe (oh my god, they're launching *Plutonium*... on a rocket!).
Go to www.borland.com, and take a look at the announcement. See the slogan? "The OPEN Source Database". Okay, you can argue that MySQL has only just gone GPL, and isn't really much of a database program. But what happened to postgresql? This kind of, uh, "marketing" does not inspire confidence.
Someday I hope the open source world will progress to the point where it will stop getting excited every time some corporation tosses a failing product over the wall.
Incidentally, from eavesdropping on the postgresql developer list, I gather that their take on interbase is that postgresql will be as good or better by around 7.1 or 7.2 (the current release is 7.0). I believe the only key feature postgresql is missing at the moment is outer joins.
(Warning, blatant religious evangelism follows.) Postgresql is BSD liscensed, and has a really good team of open source developers actively working on it, including Tom Lane and Bruce Momjian... (unlike Inprise, which is now in the position of trying to drum up community support using an MPL-style license).
Postgresql has been making rapid improvements over the last year or so (though it still has the worst name of any software project, ever...). Bruce Momjian has a book coming out about postgresql and the full text is available online. Commercial support for postgresql is available from places such as Great Bridge.
(And whatever you do, don't mention Perl in this thread, or you'll have the Python fanatics in here too.)
Or how about this...the GUI is the text. Multiple windows of text ala an Xterm, clicking on the word disk0 or some such thing would open up another window showing you the contents of the disk0 object.
Every piece of text is a mouse clickable object. If you type in disk0 it becomes a mouse clickable object which links to the contents of disk0.
If I understand your point, I think you might be interested in Oberon. This is an OS designed by Niklaus Wirth back in the early 90s. I quote:
The system is completely modular and all parts of it are dynamically loaded on-demand. Persistent object and rich text support is built into the kernel. Clickable commands embedded in "tool" texts are used as a transparent, modeless, highly customizable and low-overhead user interface, which minimizes non-visible state information. Mouse "interclicks" enable fast text editing. An efficient multitasking model is supported in a single-process by using short-running commands and cooperative background task handlers. The basic system is small - it fits on one 1.44Mb installation diskette, including the compiler and TCP/IP networking. It is freely downloadable (with source code) for non-commercial use.
They've got a version up for Linux, as well as a "Native PC" one. Doesn't require a hell of a lot of hardware (e.g. a 486DX is okay).
I'm going to stop reading reviews. Personally, I don't care if the X-Men represent any group (Gay, Black, Jew, etc.) Whatever happened to just sitting down in a theatre, getting involved in the story line?
If you'd really been paying attention while reading the X-Men, you'd know that this kind of aspect has pretty much already been there, certainly since Chris Claremont started writing it. Myself, I'm glad that the people making this movie played up the "oppressed mutant struggle" jazz a bit, rather than just doing another action flick.
Character, plot and action are only parts of the storyline.
ya, you know at MS they don't even use VSS for there major projects.
Win2k, Office, etc... no VSS. they don't use CVS either. it's something else, i forget.
I don't *think* I'm violating any confidentiality agreements by saying this (but don't tell anyone, huh?):
Microsoft at least used to use an internally developed tool called "SLM" ("shared library management", maybe?). It was command-line oriented, and as I remember it, it did file locking by default (when you have a file "checked out", no one else can until you do a "check in").
Anyway, Source Safe didn't exist when they started using SLM, and I wouldn't be suprised if the developers just never felt like switching version control software just to be dogfood-compliant.
(A better question might be, if SLM is so useful, why didn't they ever ship it as a product? My experience with it was that it was kind of balky to use, but I later realized that all source control systems are -- certainly including CVS.)
But then my only experience with using Source Safe was that the guy administering it couldn't figure out how to give someone permission to check something out. It was a little *too* safe... things would go in, but never come out again. (We went back to using CVS.)
Whoa, lost a whole two points of Karma on that one. That was a suprise eh? Fortunately I've got more to burn.
And you know what: That posting did *not* deserve to be pounded down. I said two things of substance, which I'd be glad to defend if discussions on slashdot were capable of lasting longer than two rounds: (1) Time magazine's characterization of "Snow Crash" as "prescient" is ridiculous... maybe it'll turn out that way, but writing about computer networks before everyone got into Netscape doesn't count as "prescient" (2) The book itself doesn't say much about the net that wasn't said by Gibson.
I would also be willing to defend the point that the book is slanted at the slash-baby crowd. Where Gibson borrowed riffs from noir-fiction, Stephenson worked from video games and comic books.
I make the further point that slashdot moderators are *awful*: moderators are *not* supposed to pound something down just because they disagree with it.
This Village Voice story isn't "the" story, it's talking about a completely different study:
"We estimate that a worst-case scenario would be 16 percent of all U.S. music sales in 2002 being lost to Web piracy, representing a $985 million loss in U.S. music profitability," reads the analysis, issued last month by the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Investment Research Group.
And the Voice may indeed be a better publication on some level, but you couldn't prove it from this story, which for example, uncritically accepts the idea that encrypted music is going to prevent people from pirating it (when in fact all it would do is force pirates to rip the analog signal rather than working directly with the digital).
Also, the entire slant of this story is from the point of view of the poor-beleagured, multi-million dollar music industry. Nothing at all about the new freedom of people to listen to what they like, even if it's not on a major label... Once upon a time, the Village Voice was a "counterculture" publication, but those days are long gone.
It's very sketchy (it's only two pages!). They don't give you enough information to duplicate their work, even if you *did* have access to SoundScan data (which none of us do). Some points:
They present data for three regions: the total US national sales, the sales for areas within five miles of a college, and the sales for areas near "selected colleges" that "anecdotal evidence suggests a high degree of Napster usage". They don't even tell us which colleges are in this "selected" group. In other words, they were free to select any colleges that showed a downturn, and toss them into the "selected" group on the basis of "anecdotes" which they've chosen not to repeat.
They work only with first quarter sales, comparing them to other years. This is fairly common in the retail business, but you can't just ignore the year long sales picture... (Note: it is at least possible that college students tend to give gifts of CDs, and that the year-long average contradicts the story told by Q1 data alone. Remember that Christmas sales are huge compared to Q1 sales... a lot of retail businesses make all of their money at the end of the year.)
In general I wonder how significant a drop of a percent or two is. More data might give us a better feel for how much jitter there is in the data. If the noise is around, say, 5%, the figures they cite become much less impressive.
I've always liked the *idea* of linuxcare. The trouble with relying on a company like RedHat for support is that they're experts in only one linux distribution. If the correct solution to a problem is "Switch to Debian", you're not going to hear that from RedHat.
And while their revenue was drowning in their loses, at least they *had* revenue (unlike many a dot com startup). Firing the insane suits that were throwing money away is pretty much all they've got to do to become profitable, and that's what they did.
Too bad they're not publically traded already, or I'd say "buy".
Here's a vauge thought: the world is pretty much divided into people who understand the importance of free speech, and people who understand the importance of economic freedom.
So if you decide to try running some sort of off-shore "data haven", I recommend making sure that it's also a bank.
Yes, by all means write your congresspersonoid, but especially write if they happen to be on this list of members of the Small Business Committee: http://www.house.gov/smbiz/about/membe rs.htm
I think a general area you might want to look at is auto-moderation. Currently a site like slashdot works (barely) because lots of volunteers are willing to work over the data and manually vote on it or rank it's quality.
Consider the way that Google can identify valuable (or at least popular) websites without any such clumsy user input. Is there a way you could identify a valuable slashdot posting by looking at user reading patterns? There's a lot of different kinds of data you have to work with: How many people read the thread, how much time people spend before moving on, numbers of responses, clickthroughs on posted links, and so on... perhaps all weighted by karma?
You could also try and evaluate a posting based on certain heuristics, though I suspect that would rely a lot on obscurity.... e.g. if people knew that a posting with three URLs was always given credit for being informative, you'd see a lot more suck.com style linking.
On the other hand, you might be able to do about as well as a lot of slashdot moderators.
"We?" I didn't see your name on the developer list! (-:
I was using the editorial "we", speaking in my in my capacity as the sole developer of my proposed fork of the Postgresql code. I don't believe I'm required by the license to even give the Postgresql developers any credit.
(So it goes with the BSD style licenses... Some of the people on the Postgresql hackers list were saying that they'd like to take a look at the Interbase code when it's really opened up, if only to check and see how much of they're code they lifted from earlier versions of postgres...)
Anyway, I like the name Greased Piglet. In fact, that was another idea I had kicking around, to try and get everyone to use the nickname 'gres, pronounced "grease". Postgresql jocks are then "greasers".
Interbase is available, but it's not open source yet. The source code isn't out there, and more importantly it hasn't attracted a community of open source developers, bug reporters, etc.
If you look at their web site, here's what they've got to say:
InterBase Software is scheduled to release InterBase 6.0 for Linux, Windows and Solaris in open source format this summer.
BTW, I've been eavesdropping on the postgresql hackers mailing list, and their estimate is that Interbase is slightly better than postgresql, but they expect that postgresql will be as good or better in the near future, e.g. around release 7.1. I think that "outer joins" is the key feature that needs to be added.
But then, how *can* MySql be "fast"?
on
Why Not MySQL?
·
· Score: 2
* MySQL only has table-level locking. Only one user can write to a table at the same time. For web usage, that falls under the category of "pathetic."
Can someone spell out for me exactly how a site like Slashdot gets away with using MySql then? Why doesn't it crumble under the heavy load that it receives?
Linux-based OSes have the leading market share of Web servers powering the Internet's public Web sites, with 31 percent of all sites, according to a Netcraft study.
Am I the only one who finds the phrase "Linux-based OSes" to be a little disturbing? Why wouldn't you just say "the Linux OS"? Is he trying to imply that "RedHat" is an OS of it's own, which is merely based on a certain kernel?
(Or is this some sort of nod to the "Call it GNU/Linux" campaign?)
Slashdot Mirror
The trouble is that they're wrong. Boycotts are indeed effective, at least sometimes. The fancy arguments about why you shouldn't bother can even be technically correct, and still be irrelevant, because all of these huge, formidible looking organizations are much like the proverbial school yard bully that acts tough but is really very insecure. These guys are always looking over their shoulder at public opinion, and even if your boycott is making a miniscule, barely detectable, dent in their bottom line, they're going to be really worried that you're going to do better next time, that the boycott may get even bigger. Even if there *is* no dent in their bottom line, they may get nervous that there's a sizeable group of people *talking* about a boycott.
Here's something I said here a while back about the Amazon boycott. Try doing an s/amazon/RIAA/ig on it:
(I see that http://www.musicisland.com/ claims to be "the home of Independant Music on the Web" but their web site is a mess of pop-up add windows, unreadable fonts, and critical links that are busted.)
I took a look at the Napster "Buycott" (http://www.napster.com/buycott.html) and it looks okay, though they've only got about fifty or so artists (not labels) in the list. In any case, I would definitely recommend DJ Spooky: he's an incredibly prolific, really creative ambient sample artist.
As a place to find cool new stuff, I'd recommend: http://www.aquariusrecordsSF.com/. This is a record store that does mail orders. They essentially refuse to stock anything they don't really love. Subscribe to their email newsletter: it's full of really chatty, detailed reviews of nearly every good new release in the last month.
Seems a little far-fetched.
(1) There's an apt-get mechanism that you can set up to do automated updates (think, security patches) of your system software. Redhat is working on this, too, but Debian has been there for a long time.
(2) They don't ship alpha quality software! I sincerely hope that RedHat has bought some QA with their IPO money, because despite having a reputation for being easy to install, RedHat upgrades always strike me as a severe nightmare.
(Hey, maybe I'll try a *beta* release of a "x.0" version of RedHat! That sounds so exciting! Uh, on second thought....)
Try this hypothetical: what if, instead of doing public speeches, polticians took to publishing their opinions in articles on the web? That way, if anything they say produces a bad reaction, they can just edit it away, and no one will be able to figure out what the complaints were about. Very convienient, eh?
My take: If you publish an article, and then later recant, the thing to do is to add a link at the top pointing to your later thoughts on the subject.
Okay, that's it. You guys aren't real nerds. Time to change your slogan.
Somehow I suspect that this Plutonium "shortage" has more to do with fear of another political flap, like the one surrounding the launch of the Cassini probe (oh my god, they're launching *Plutonium*... on a rocket!).Someday I hope the open source world will progress to the point where it will stop getting excited every time some corporation tosses a failing product over the wall.
Incidentally, from eavesdropping on the postgresql developer list, I gather that their take on interbase is that postgresql will be as good or better by around 7.1 or 7.2 (the current release is 7.0). I believe the only key feature postgresql is missing at the moment is outer joins.
(Warning, blatant religious evangelism follows.) Postgresql is BSD liscensed, and has a really good team of open source developers actively working on it, including Tom Lane and Bruce Momjian... (unlike Inprise, which is now in the position of trying to drum up community support using an MPL-style license).
Postgresql has been making rapid improvements over the last year or so (though it still has the worst name of any software project, ever...). Bruce Momjian has a book coming out about postgresql and the full text is available online. Commercial support for postgresql is available from places such as Great Bridge.
(And whatever you do, don't mention Perl in this thread, or you'll have the Python fanatics in here too.)
Is there any reason I should trust the
opinions about "user interfaces" of people
who don't use paragraph breaks?
If you'd really been paying attention while
reading the X-Men, you'd know that this kind of
aspect has pretty much already been there,
certainly since Chris Claremont started
writing it. Myself, I'm glad that the people
making this movie played up the "oppressed
mutant struggle" jazz a bit, rather than just
doing another action flick.
Character, plot and action are only parts of
the storyline.
Microsoft at least used to use an internally developed tool called "SLM" ("shared library management", maybe?). It was command-line oriented, and as I remember it, it did file locking by default (when you have a file "checked out", no one else can until you do a "check in").
Anyway, Source Safe didn't exist when they started using SLM, and I wouldn't be suprised if the developers just never felt like switching version control software just to be dogfood-compliant.
(A better question might be, if SLM is so useful, why didn't they ever ship it as a product? My experience with it was that it was kind of balky to use, but I later realized that all source control systems are -- certainly including CVS.)
But then my only experience with using Source Safe was that the guy administering it couldn't figure out how to give someone permission to check something out. It was a little *too* safe... things would go in, but never come out again. (We went back to using CVS.)
And you know what: That posting did *not* deserve to be pounded down. I said two things of substance, which I'd be glad to defend if discussions on slashdot were capable of lasting longer than two rounds: (1) Time magazine's characterization of "Snow Crash" as "prescient" is ridiculous... maybe it'll turn out that way, but writing about computer networks before everyone got into Netscape doesn't count as "prescient" (2) The book itself doesn't say much about the net that wasn't said by Gibson.
I would also be willing to defend the point that the book is slanted at the slash-baby crowd. Where Gibson borrowed riffs from noir-fiction, Stephenson worked from video games and comic books.
I make the further point that slashdot moderators are *awful*: moderators are *not* supposed to pound something down just because they disagree with it.
And the Voice may indeed be a better publication on some level, but you couldn't prove it from this story, which for example, uncritically accepts the idea that encrypted music is going to prevent people from pirating it (when in fact all it would do is force pirates to rip the analog signal rather than working directly with the digital).
Also, the entire slant of this story is from the point of view of the poor-beleagured, multi-million dollar music industry. Nothing at all about the new freedom of people to listen to what they like, even if it's not on a major label... Once upon a time, the Village Voice was a "counterculture" publication, but those days are long gone.
It's very sketchy (it's only two pages!). They don't give you enough information to duplicate their work, even if you *did* have access to SoundScan data (which none of us do). Some points:
I mean, to save the world.
I've always liked the *idea* of linuxcare.
The trouble with relying on a company like
RedHat for support is that they're
experts in only one linux distribution.
If the correct solution to a problem is
"Switch to Debian", you're not going to
hear that from RedHat.
And while their revenue was drowning in their
loses, at least they *had* revenue (unlike many
a dot com startup). Firing the insane suits
that were throwing money away is pretty much
all they've got to do to become profitable,
and that's what they did.
Too bad they're not publically traded already, or
I'd say "buy".
Here's a vauge thought: the world is pretty
much divided into people who understand the
importance of free speech, and people who
understand the importance of economic freedom.
So if you decide to try running some sort of
off-shore "data haven", I recommend making sure
that it's also a bank.
You also might like to look at the main web page for the Small Business Committee: http://www.house.gov/smbiz/about/members.htm
(Go ahead, call me a karma whore, I don't mind.)
Consider the way that Google can identify valuable (or at least popular) websites without any such clumsy user input. Is there a way you could identify a valuable slashdot posting by looking at user reading patterns? There's a lot of different kinds of data you have to work with: How many people read the thread, how much time people spend before moving on, numbers of responses, clickthroughs on posted links, and so on... perhaps all weighted by karma?
You could also try and evaluate a posting based on certain heuristics, though I suspect that would rely a lot on obscurity.... e.g. if people knew that a posting with three URLs was always given credit for being informative, you'd see a lot more suck.com style linking.
On the other hand, you might be able to do about as well as a lot of slashdot moderators.
I was using the editorial "we", speaking in my in my capacity as the sole developer of my proposed fork of the Postgresql code. I don't believe I'm required by the license to even give the Postgresql developers any credit.
(So it goes with the BSD style licenses... Some of the people on the Postgresql hackers list were saying that they'd like to take a look at the Interbase code when it's really opened up, if only to check and see how much of they're code they lifted from earlier versions of postgres...)
Anyway, I like the name Greased Piglet. In fact, that was another idea I had kicking around, to try and get everyone to use the nickname 'gres, pronounced "grease". Postgresql jocks are then "greasers".
Yeah, I agree that this is a problem. A name like
"PostgreSQL" is practically anti-marketing.
I was considering doing a nominalogical fork,
and release a new product based on postgresql
which is completely identical except for the
name.
We can call it something nice and corporate like:
If you look at their web site, here's what they've got to say:
That's from this page: InterBase: the OPEN source database. (Note the title: "the OPEN source database", and count the lies).BTW, I've been eavesdropping on the postgresql hackers mailing list, and their estimate is that Interbase is slightly better than postgresql, but they expect that postgresql will be as good or better in the near future, e.g. around release 7.1. I think that "outer joins" is the key feature that needs to be added.