Re:Bullshit press != News For Nerds. Sorry, Mikey.
on
Silicon Hell
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· Score: 1
As of the time of this writing, I have a Karma of 46. That means I can tag anything I write as +2 right out of the gate if I choose. How? I earned it. If you would do some decent writing, you'de have a big enough Karma too.
Bowie J. Poag
Bullshit press != News For Nerds. Sorry, Mikey.
on
Silicon Hell
·
· Score: 1
This "article" is published by the SFBG, aka The San Francisco Bay Guardian. This highly reputable and serious news organization's headline for today is:
"Cross-Dress For Less! Charles Anders hits Union Square in search of the perfect tranny wardrobe"
Thanks, but no thanks. Transvestites, and bullshit hippie news articles are both things I try to avoid. I'll stick to ZDNet. I just hope that some earthquake or bizzare boating accident kills off these new bozo Timothy/Mikey-likes-it Slashdot authors so we can get back to the Slashdot we all remember.
2) No way of enforcing NDA's (read: too poor to afford a lawyer, and too poor to afford the defense of that NDA)
3) Prevents rumormongering.
4) Allows people to concentrate on development versus concentrating on public relations crap.
5) If the idea turns out to be bad, great, nobody will know you were doing something stupid. If your idea turns out to already exist, great, you wont be sued for patent infringement. No one will even know you existed or did the work in the first place...
I could go on, but you get the point. Silence means security.
I did.;) I covered some of your points in a response I just penned, #8 I think. Anyway, to address the rest of yours specifically:
1) I've got a co-lo already, but its not powerful enough to do what need to do. While I do have a little nest egg over at MetaLab/UNC, I wouldn't dare move everybody and their uncle over there to work on something. They've already been extraordinarrily generous to me already.
2) In short: idea security, not project security. Im sure VA keeps a tidy ship when it comes to their community-inhabited boxes.
3) I wasn't trying to poke fun them by pointing out something they can't exactly offer.
4) Being out of the public eye also means being out from under the gaze of companies like VA, Andover, or any other business offering hosting space.
5) XNot seems a good candidate, but I need to hear more.
My concern rests mainly with the need to have a large array of resources available to developers, while still preserving some degree of "radio silence" while the development process occurs. Some things (even some projects) obviously benefit from having a worldwide audience that can propose solutions or correct problems. However, there are some things, ideas mainly, which need a degree of secrecy in order to grow to maturity.
While SourceForge does offer the resource end of the equation, having your project on SourceForge is admittedly anything but low-profile. For some of us, this is a problem. This is also what I meant by "security concerns", by the way. I'm sure VA does a good job of handling machine security (they did while I was working with them at least), but thats not what I'm referring to here. I'm talking about security within an individual project, hosted by a larger entity.
If we want to dig up System 12 as an example, consider this: We had something on the order of 15,000 people sniffing around and speculating on what we were doing before we even had anything tangible to share. We watched the logs daily, and parsed them for unusual referrals..Some of them pointing directly back to people within large orginazations we had no dealings with at all. We thought it was amusing at the time, but personally, I didn't like the idea that we were being periodically watched by different companies.
(Admittedly, we did place some little pieces of eye-candy out for public view, but I'll take the blame for that mistake. If I could go back and do it all differently, I would have kept the lid on that project air-tight.. Only myself, and the people working on it would know, until we were ready.)
Anyway, nuff about S12. Onto the problem at hand:
By saying "We don't wany anyone to know or hear about what we're doing until its done" isn't illegal, nor is it morally wrong or at odds with the spirit of the GPL. So long as in the end, when the final product is complete and the source for it has been made available to the public, everything's fine.
Im just wondering if such a place exists. A tall order, sure, a big box with a wide pipe, and total secrecy for a dozen people for a finite period of time. But thats why I wrote Ask Slashdot in the first place.:) Does such a place exist?
(PS.. Yes, I dont like VA. Thats obvious. However, im not going to edge my bias into the discussion lets keep the conversation constructive here.)
You're right, and I usually dont. However, I know who the prick is who posted it. And it makes allll the difference. He's lucky I haven't decided to out him yet.
Does anyone have a pirated MP3 of Lars Ulrich's press conference they'd like to share?:)
Explanation of above joke: All a millionaire like Lars Ulrich accomplishes by bitching and whining about people sharing his music, is that more people are likely to rip him off more than ever before. He'd be smart to shut his mouth instead of trying to protect the record industry.
joke_mode(off); I'll stop using Napster when the music industry stops charging me $18 for a 35 minutes of music just so they can make another $14,000,000.00 fish-eye-lens / helicopter / humvee / shiny space suit Puffy Combs video.
Shouldn't you be working? Business must be slow at VA if you've got the time to sit around and troll on Slashdot. I hope for your sake its your coffee break.
Considering VA Linux's whopping 5% marketshare among Linux hardware vendors, according to IDC, I can't say im really surprised. Way to go, by the way. You guys edged past tough big-name Linux vendors like "Fujitsu Siemens" with 3%, and uhh...oh wait, you guys arent doing better than any of the others.. Oh well.
Hey, byte me. I had a C64 too, AND watched Pee-Wee's Playhouse. It was about the only thing on TV I watched, outside of Computer Chronicles with Stuart Chiffet. Heh
Oh come on--Pee Wee's Playhouse was a saturday morning ritual! If you were a kid in the 80's, you know how bad saturday morning cartoons got around 1986.. They were just sad and lame. Pee-Wee's Playhouse was the only original thing on TV at the time, and kicked ass. Unless you consider "The Adventures Of O.G. Readmore" crap to be awesome television. I thought it was for slow kids who couldnt handle normal TV.
Cost of a 486 with a cheap NIC, SoundBlaster 16, some RCA cables and a 50 foot Cat 5: $80.00
One requires a proprietary driver and takes orders from Winblows 2K.
The other peacefully coexists with other machines on your network, is accessable from a variety of platforms instead of just one, can be upgraded, repaired if necessary, and replaced easilly. Did I mention it runs Linux, can perform more functions than simply an MP3 server, and can download new MP3's while you sleep?
When playing the C64 version of Super Mario Bros (well, ok, Great Giana Sisters) hold down all 5 keys simultaneously to automatically warp to the next level with a hefty time bonus: M A N F R
I had the exact same experience with ATI--Sure, their hardware is nice, but as a company they suck donkey balls. I wrote them at least twice over the course of a year, politely asking them to release drivers for their Rage/Rage II chipsets. All I got was A) Spam, and B) Bullshit from their spokesman.
I'd Switch to 3DFx..They do a great job of not sucking. They keep linux.3dfx.com updated religiously.
Guess what, kids -- It is the responsibility of the original author to enforce the conditions laid out in the GPL. Not Slashdot, not the FSF, and not the GNU Project. Lets suppose Evil Company X steals your code...do you have the resources in place to defend the GPL yourself? There will probably be a day in the not-too-distant future when a company simply decides to muscle its way past the GPL and reap the harvest of yours, and everyone else's work for their own benefit.
"The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized to take action to enforce the License."
Read: No income, no money. No money, no lawyer. No layer, no lawsuit. No lawsuit, no safety. No safety, no Linux. Be careful what you release, folks..You may not be able to prevent someone from making money off your work.
A) Sorry, chum. VA and Andover arent "merging". VA bought Andover out because they wanted control of their holdings, ala Slashdot and Freshmeat. Believe me, they didnt buy Andover because they're big fans of Canadian publishers. They wanted control of important fixtures of the Linux community. Andover was aquired . Dont try and sugar-coat it, Chris.
B) You guys "rescued a site that was liked by a bunch of people with no strings attached"? Bullshit. If VA was interested in philanthropy, they would have donated money to Rob & Hemos, and done the same for Patrick over at Freshmeat. Guess what. They didn't. They paid millions of dollars for the right to own it all lock, stock and barrel. Infact, if the rumors are true, VA was one of the original bidders for Slashdot, from what I hear. They were turned away because of details they insisted on including in their offer. They didn't get it. So, they did the next best thing they could. The instant they had the money to do so, they aquired the company that DID get them. Somehow, I dont think "love" was Larry's main motivation here. Of course, you're welcome to have your own opinion, Chris. Then again, you'de probably be canned if you said anything even remotely damaging your company.
C) Thats right. VA owns and controls the things it owns. Andover.net, and everything beneath it, are now corporate holdings. This includes Sourceforge. See, thats why they purchased Andover.net. In other words, they payed money to obtain ownership of it all. I know, wacky concept, isn't it. Paying money means you own things. The reality of it is, VA Linux Systems, at any time, can pull the plug thousands of community projects at its own discretion. They own the boxes, they lease the pipe, they employ the admins. All it takes is a call to one employee to walk over to Above.net and yank the plug out of the wall. With Sourceforge, they now own a little ant-farm called where they can watch bright-eyed kids come up with amazing things that might be of use to the company. If one of ideas is important enough to VA, they'll put people to work on the task full time, under the auspices of "community involvement".. This is precisely what happened with System 12, in my opinion. We were forced off the map the instant we started talking about being a fixture in the Linux community. They couldnt own the idea, so they gave the order to their own full-time employees to replicate it and slap their name on it first before we could even get off the ground. Why else would they have put several of its employees on the task full-time? I'll bet you ten bucks to a goddamn donut the same thing is happening on Sourceforge right now. Someone there , right now, has an idea that could give VA an advantage over their competition down the road. Right now, VA doesnt have to worry about a thing. VA has no competition--They now own their competitors. And when the bright-eyed kids begin making waves about what they're shooting for, they'll get screwed so hard they wont be able to walk straight for months.
The premise that VA purchased Andover.net, Freshmeat, Slashdot, and countless other sites out of the kindness of their own hearts sounds about as laughable as hearing Bill Gates whine about how Microsoft is being denied their "freedom to innovate."
Snap out of it. I'm so tired of your spin and bullshit I could squat.
I think I share your sentiments. Regardless of the effort Rob has taken to make sure things dont change, they have, and irreversibly so. I'm also nearing the point where i'm looking for places other than Slashdot to get my news. These days, most of the stuff I see on here I would classify as irrelevant crap. Pointless lawsuit posts, for example.. its like, who cares.
Nowadays, the people in charge of posting articles to Slashdot are more clueless than the average reader, it feels like. It goes beyond repeat posts, rampant trolling, and the like.. Instead of having a page where we're all equals, Slashdot has eroded into a boys club of have's and have-not's. A handful of questionable people dole out the news to the masses instead of the other way around, like it used to be.
Nobody knows who Timothy, Jamie, Emmet, Roblimo, and others are. No offense, but all we know is that theyre all very obviously poor substitutes for Rob and Hemos. I look at a list of 7 news items on Slashdot's front page right now, and 2 out of those 7 pages are posts I've seen before, even *years* ago.
I keep asking myself, how did these new guys get into the position of being able to post articles? If this is supposed to be a community page, who appointed them? Who are they? VA goons? Andover people? Whatever the case..Slashdot has taken a very obvious nose-dive in recent months, largely due to crap posts and the resulting trolls they inspire. Garbage in, garbage out. I hate to admit it as well, but i'm looking for somewhere else to get my daily news.
I don't think i'm alone in feeling fed up with the VA media monopoly..Strong words, sure, but stop and think about it now. Your news, your software, your project -- All of it is owned and controlled by one singular company with questionable intentions. If I had to choose between this "new" Linux community and the old one, i'd take the old one in a heartbeat.
The whole mindset of ownership, and class division is a complete 180' from the ideals which formed the Linux community to begin with.
Go ahead and moderate me down if you want. Just sharing my $0.02. You dont have to agree with me.
Wait until GPS is available on a PCMCIA card.:) Peel the sticker off it and have your laptop quietly email you its location every 10 minutes.
While you wait for that, try something a little more practical. Like keeping your car locked, and never letting your laptop out of your sight. Dont advertise the fact you have one, either. Its like carrying a camera bag with a big logo on the side--you're helping a theif do his shopping. But, if you want to go truly geek, have your laptop ping a known address you have access to, like your home box.
For me, I have a very discrete black shoulderbag for my Thinkpad. Then again, i'm 6'5" 250, so, if anyone tried to yank it off my arm and run with it, I would rip their spine and beat them to death with it. Us Thinkpad owners are a bit protective of our notebooks.:)
I have a box here at the apartment that I picked up from the University of Arizona Surplus auction.. Its a big honkin' patchcord synthesizer from the late 60's or early 70's, originally designed as a hearing tester.
It has a 100-step programmable sequencer, 4 VCO's, 3 bypass filters, AGC control and a few other oddities. The name on the front is "Starkey Hearing Sciences Laboratory".
If anyone has any information about this box, or this company, please contact me. I've figured out how to play it and all, but im more interested in its history than anything else. Any ex-Starkey Labs employees out there?
While Bob Moog was important (and does rule), there's also another guy whom Moog worked with in the late 60's and early 70's who is probably the biggest unsung hero in the history of electronic music.
Hop over to RaymondScott.com and have a look. This guy built a goddamn self-programmable synthesizer out of thousands of pieces of discarded telephone switching equiptment in his basement before the era of MIDI. A 6 foot tall, 30-foot long array of telephone switching relays, tone circuits and oscillators to be exact.
Scott is also the person credited with inventing the sequencer, and ambient electronic music in the early 1960's..A double-album set of pure electronic music designed for babies to listen to, believe it or not.
For those of you who want to hear what the giant array of telephone relays sounds like, go here. Decompress the file and cat it to >/dev/audio...its crude, but its all I can do on short notice.:) Its terrible quality, but, thats what buying CD's are for. I basically pointed my laptop at my stereo and recorded it straight off a console prompt. Hehehe..
"(...) 5. To mass-mail unrequested identical or nearly-identical email messages, particularly those containing advertising. Especially used when the mail addresses have been culled from network traffic or databases without the consent of the recipients."
If its email, and its trying to sell me something I didnt ask for, its spam..Regardless of its IBM or Habib's House Of Rice sending it. The phrase "legitimate spam" falls into the same category of "military intelligence" and "NT security".
Well, I wouldn't consider alcoholism a death-sentence. Its not like its some incurable disease you have no control over. I'd imagine its very difficult to get a handle on it, but its certainly seems possible to do so.
There are drugs on the market which will cause you to become violently ill if you attempt to drink anything with alcohol in it. Of course, you have to take the drug religiously..but in any case, that usually solves the physical side of the addition. Going into therapy to correct the psychological part of the addition is likely the next step, i'd assume.
Slashdot Mirror
As of the time of this writing, I have a Karma of 46. That means I can tag anything I write as +2 right out of the gate if I choose. How? I earned it. If you would do some decent writing, you'de have a big enough Karma too.
Bowie J. Poag
This "article" is published by the SFBG, aka The San Francisco Bay Guardian. This highly reputable and serious news organization's headline for today is:
"Cross-Dress For Less! Charles Anders hits Union Square in search of the perfect tranny wardrobe"
Thanks, but no thanks. Transvestites, and bullshit hippie news articles are both things I try to avoid. I'll stick to ZDNet. I just hope that some earthquake or bizzare boating accident kills off these new bozo Timothy/Mikey-likes-it Slashdot authors so we can get back to the Slashdot we all remember.
Bowie J. Poag
Here's a few reasons:
1) Being first to market.
2) No way of enforcing NDA's (read: too poor to afford a lawyer, and too poor to afford the defense of that NDA)
3) Prevents rumormongering.
4) Allows people to concentrate on development versus concentrating on public relations crap.
5) If the idea turns out to be bad, great, nobody will know you were doing something stupid. If your idea turns out to already exist, great, you wont be sued for patent infringement. No one will even know you existed or did the work in the first place...
I could go on, but you get the point. Silence means security.
Bowie J. Poag
I did.
1) I've got a co-lo already, but its not powerful enough to do what need to do. While I do have a little nest egg over at MetaLab/UNC, I wouldn't dare move everybody and their uncle over there to work on something. They've already been extraordinarrily generous to me already.
2) In short: idea security, not project security.
Im sure VA keeps a tidy ship when it comes to their community-inhabited boxes.
3) I wasn't trying to poke fun them by pointing out something they can't exactly offer.
4) Being out of the public eye also means being out from under the gaze of companies like VA, Andover, or any other business offering hosting space.
5) XNot seems a good candidate, but I need to hear more.
Bowie J. Poag
Hi folks..time to address a few questions.
:) Does such a place exist?
My concern rests mainly with the need to have a large array of resources available to developers, while still preserving some degree of "radio silence" while the development process occurs. Some things (even some projects) obviously benefit from having a worldwide audience that can propose solutions or correct problems. However, there are some things, ideas mainly, which need a degree of secrecy in order to grow to maturity.
While SourceForge does offer the resource end of the equation, having your project on SourceForge is admittedly anything but low-profile. For some of us, this is a problem. This is also what I meant by "security concerns", by the way. I'm sure VA does a good job of handling machine security (they did while I was working with them at least), but thats not what I'm referring to here. I'm talking about security within an individual project, hosted by a larger entity.
If we want to dig up System 12 as an example, consider this: We had something on the order of 15,000 people sniffing around and speculating on what we were doing before we even had anything tangible to share. We watched the logs daily, and parsed them for unusual referrals..Some of them pointing directly back to people within large orginazations we had no dealings with at all. We thought it was amusing at the time, but personally, I didn't like the idea that we were being periodically watched by different companies.
(Admittedly, we did place some little pieces of eye-candy out for public view, but I'll take the blame for that mistake. If I could go back and do it all differently, I would have kept the lid on that project air-tight.. Only myself, and the people working on it would know, until we were ready.)
Anyway, nuff about S12. Onto the problem at hand:
By saying "We don't wany anyone to know or hear about what we're doing until its done" isn't illegal, nor is it morally wrong or at odds with the spirit of the GPL. So long as in the end, when the final product is complete and the source for it has been made available to the public, everything's fine.
Im just wondering if such a place exists. A tall order, sure, a big box with a wide pipe, and total secrecy for a dozen people for a finite period of time. But thats why I wrote Ask Slashdot in the first place.
(PS.. Yes, I dont like VA. Thats obvious. However, im not going to edge my bias into the discussion lets keep the conversation constructive here.)
Bowie J. Poag
You're right, and I usually dont. However, I know who the prick is who posted it. And it makes allll the difference. He's lucky I haven't decided to out him yet.
Yours in science,
Bowie J. Poag
joke_mode(on);
flame(on);
Does anyone have a pirated MP3 of Lars Ulrich's press conference they'd like to share?
Explanation of above joke: All a millionaire like Lars Ulrich accomplishes by bitching and whining about people sharing his music, is that more people are likely to rip him off more than ever before. He'd be smart to shut his mouth instead of trying to protect the record industry.
joke_mode(off);
I'll stop using Napster when the music industry stops charging me $18 for a 35 minutes of music just so they can make another $14,000,000.00 fish-eye-lens / helicopter / humvee / shiny space suit Puffy Combs video.
flame(off);
Bowie J. Poag
Shouldn't you be working? Business must be slow at VA if you've got the time to sit around and troll on Slashdot. I hope for your sake its your coffee break.
Considering VA Linux's whopping 5% marketshare among Linux hardware vendors, according to IDC, I can't say im really surprised. Way to go, by the way. You guys edged past tough big-name Linux vendors like "Fujitsu Siemens" with 3%, and uhh...oh wait, you guys arent doing better than any of the others.. Oh well.
Truth hurts, doesn't it.
Bowie J. Poag
Hey, byte me. I had a C64 too, AND watched Pee-Wee's Playhouse. It was about the only thing on TV I watched, outside of Computer Chronicles with Stuart Chiffet. Heh
sys64738,
Bowie J. Poag
Oh come on--Pee Wee's Playhouse was a saturday morning ritual! If you were a kid in the 80's, you know how bad saturday morning cartoons got around 1986.. They were just sad and lame. Pee-Wee's Playhouse was the only original thing on TV at the time, and kicked ass. Unless you consider "The Adventures Of O.G. Readmore" crap to be awesome television. I thought it was for slow kids who couldnt handle normal TV.
Bowie J. Poag
Konqi 2000 R-R-R-Ready To Ass-s-s-s-st You, Pee-Wee!
:)
Bowie J. Poag
Shhhh...we're trying to get Timmy fired! Pass it on! ;)
(thanks for the compliment, btw!)
Bowie J. Poag
Cost of one Audiotron: $499.00
Cost of a 486 with a cheap NIC, SoundBlaster 16, some RCA cables and a 50 foot Cat 5: $80.00
One requires a proprietary driver and takes orders from Winblows 2K.
The other peacefully coexists with other machines on your network, is accessable from a variety of platforms instead of just one, can be upgraded, repaired if necessary, and replaced easilly. Did I mention it runs Linux, can perform more functions than simply an MP3 server, and can download new MP3's while you sleep?
Bowie J. Poag
When playing the C64 version of Super Mario Bros (well, ok, Great Giana Sisters) hold down all 5 keys simultaneously to automatically warp to the next level with a hefty time bonus: M A N F R
:)
Bowie J. Poag
I had the exact same experience with ATI--Sure, their hardware is nice, but as a company they suck donkey balls. I wrote them at least twice over the course of a year, politely asking them to release drivers for their Rage/Rage II chipsets. All I got was A) Spam, and B) Bullshit from their spokesman.
I'd Switch to 3DFx..They do a great job of not sucking. They keep linux.3dfx.com updated religiously.
Bowie J. Poag
Guess what, kids -- It is the responsibility of the original author to enforce the conditions laid out in the GPL. Not Slashdot, not the FSF, and not the GNU Project. Lets suppose Evil Company X steals your code...do you have the resources in place to defend the GPL yourself? There will probably be a day in the not-too-distant future when a company simply decides to muscle its way past the GPL and reap the harvest of yours, and everyone else's work for their own benefit.
Quoting from the GNU Project's own document on how to deal with possible GPL violations:
"The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized to take action to enforce the License."
Read: No income, no money. No money, no lawyer. No layer, no lawsuit. No lawsuit, no safety. No safety, no Linux. Be careful what you release, folks..You may not be able to prevent someone from making money off your work.
Bowie J. Poag
A) Sorry, chum. VA and Andover arent "merging". VA bought Andover out because they wanted control of their holdings, ala Slashdot and Freshmeat. Believe me, they didnt buy Andover because they're big fans of Canadian publishers. They wanted control of important fixtures of the Linux community. Andover was aquired . Dont try and sugar-coat it, Chris.
B) You guys "rescued a site that was liked by a bunch of people with no strings attached"? Bullshit. If VA was interested in philanthropy, they would have donated money to Rob & Hemos, and done the same for Patrick over at Freshmeat. Guess what. They didn't. They paid millions of dollars for the right to own it all lock, stock and barrel. Infact, if the rumors are true, VA was one of the original bidders for Slashdot, from what I hear. They were turned away because of details they insisted on including in their offer. They didn't get it. So, they did the next best thing they could. The instant they had the money to do so, they aquired the company that DID get them. Somehow, I dont think "love" was Larry's main motivation here. Of course, you're welcome to have your own opinion, Chris. Then again, you'de probably be canned if you said anything even remotely damaging your company.
C) Thats right. VA owns and controls the things it owns. Andover.net, and everything beneath it, are now corporate holdings. This includes Sourceforge. See, thats why they purchased Andover.net. In other words, they payed money to obtain ownership of it all. I know, wacky concept, isn't it. Paying money means you own things. The reality of it is, VA Linux Systems, at any time, can pull the plug thousands of community projects at its own discretion. They own the boxes, they lease the pipe, they employ the admins. All it takes is a call to one employee to walk over to Above.net and yank the plug out of the wall. With Sourceforge, they now own a little ant-farm called where they can watch bright-eyed kids come up with amazing things that might be of use to the company. If one of ideas is important enough to VA, they'll put people to work on the task full time, under the auspices of "community involvement".. This is precisely what happened with System 12, in my opinion. We were forced off the map the instant we started talking about being a fixture in the Linux community. They couldnt own the idea, so they gave the order to their own full-time employees to replicate it and slap their name on it first before we could even get off the ground. Why else would they have put several of its employees on the task full-time? I'll bet you ten bucks to a goddamn donut the same thing is happening on Sourceforge right now. Someone there , right now, has an idea that could give VA an advantage over their competition down the road. Right now, VA doesnt have to worry about a thing. VA has no competition--They now own their competitors. And when the bright-eyed kids begin making waves about what they're shooting for, they'll get screwed so hard they wont be able to walk straight for months.
The premise that VA purchased Andover.net, Freshmeat, Slashdot, and countless other sites out of the kindness of their own hearts sounds about as laughable as hearing Bill Gates whine about how Microsoft is being denied their "freedom to innovate."
Snap out of it. I'm so tired of your spin and bullshit I could squat.
Bowie J. Poag
I think I share your sentiments. Regardless of the effort Rob has taken to make sure things dont change, they have, and irreversibly so. I'm also nearing the point where i'm looking for places other than Slashdot to get my news. These days, most of the stuff I see on here I would classify as irrelevant crap. Pointless lawsuit posts, for example.. its like, who cares.
Nowadays, the people in charge of posting articles to Slashdot are more clueless than the average reader, it feels like. It goes beyond repeat posts, rampant trolling, and the like.. Instead of having a page where we're all equals, Slashdot has eroded into a boys club of have's and have-not's. A handful of questionable people dole out the news to the masses instead of the other way around, like it used to be.
Nobody knows who Timothy, Jamie, Emmet, Roblimo, and others are. No offense, but all we know is that theyre all very obviously poor substitutes for Rob and Hemos. I look at a list of 7 news items on Slashdot's front page right now, and 2 out of those 7 pages are posts I've seen before, even *years* ago.
I keep asking myself, how did these new guys get into the position of being able to post articles? If this is supposed to be a community page, who appointed them? Who are they? VA goons? Andover people? Whatever the case..Slashdot has taken a very obvious nose-dive in recent months, largely due to crap posts and the resulting trolls they inspire. Garbage in, garbage out. I hate to admit it as well, but i'm looking for somewhere else to get my daily news.
I don't think i'm alone in feeling fed up with the VA media monopoly..Strong words, sure, but stop and think about it now. Your news, your software, your project -- All of it is owned and controlled by one singular company with questionable intentions. If I had to choose between this "new" Linux community and the old one, i'd take the old one in a heartbeat.
The whole mindset of ownership, and class division is a complete 180' from the ideals which formed the Linux community to begin with.
Go ahead and moderate me down if you want. Just sharing my $0.02. You dont have to agree with me.
Bowie J. Poag
Wait until GPS is available on a PCMCIA card. :) Peel the sticker off it and have your laptop quietly email you its location every 10 minutes.
:)
While you wait for that, try something a little more practical. Like keeping your car locked, and never letting your laptop out of your sight. Dont advertise the fact you have one, either. Its like carrying a camera bag with a big logo on the side--you're helping a theif do his shopping. But, if you want to go truly geek, have your laptop ping a known address you have access to, like your home box.
For me, I have a very discrete black shoulderbag for my Thinkpad. Then again, i'm 6'5" 250, so, if anyone tried to yank it off my arm and run with it, I would rip their spine and beat them to death with it. Us Thinkpad owners are a bit protective of our notebooks.
Bowie J. Poag
It wasn't meant as a troll, honestly. Just a bit of humor.
:)
Apparently, my sense of humor (or lack thereof) doesn't translate well over 56K.
Bowie J. Poag
By the way..
I have a box here at the apartment that I picked up from the University of Arizona Surplus auction.. Its a big honkin' patchcord synthesizer from the late 60's or early 70's, originally designed as a hearing tester.
It has a 100-step programmable sequencer, 4 VCO's, 3 bypass filters, AGC control and a few other oddities. The name on the front is "Starkey Hearing Sciences Laboratory".
If anyone has any information about this box, or this company, please contact me. I've figured out how to play it and all, but im more interested in its history than anything else. Any ex-Starkey Labs employees out there?
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
While Bob Moog was important (and does rule), there's also another guy whom Moog worked with in the late 60's and early 70's who is probably the biggest unsung hero in the history of electronic music.
Hop over to RaymondScott.com and have a look. This guy built a goddamn self-programmable synthesizer out of thousands of pieces of discarded telephone switching equiptment in his basement before the era of MIDI. A 6 foot tall, 30-foot long array of telephone switching relays, tone circuits and oscillators to be exact.
Scott is also the person credited with inventing the sequencer, and ambient electronic music in the early 1960's..A double-album set of pure electronic music designed for babies to listen to, believe it or not.
For those of you who want to hear what the giant array of telephone relays sounds like, go here. Decompress the file and cat it to >/dev/audio
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Its called a joke. Look that one up.
And yes, i'm sure there are many secure NT servers out there. The problem is, people keep plugging them back into the wall.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Quoting from the Hacker's Lexicon:
"(...) 5. To mass-mail unrequested identical or nearly-identical email messages, particularly those containing advertising. Especially used when the mail addresses have been culled from network traffic or databases without the consent of the recipients."
If its email, and its trying to sell me something I didnt ask for, its spam
Oxymorons.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Well, I wouldn't consider alcoholism a death-sentence. Its not like its some incurable disease you have no control over. I'd imagine its very difficult to get a handle on it, but its certainly seems possible to do so.
There are drugs on the market which will cause you to become violently ill if you attempt to drink anything with alcohol in it. Of course, you have to take the drug religiously..but in any case, that usually solves the physical side of the addition. Going into therapy to correct the psychological part of the addition is likely the next step, i'd assume.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)