Lydon doesn't like disengenuine people. The instant you open your mouth and start asking him the same old and retarded questions about the Sex Pistols, like everyone else, he will grow bored with you immediately. From the sound of the post, that looks like the first turd that will fall out of your mouth. You know how the saying goes..Dont be "that guy".
If you want to get on his good side, thank him for being himself.:)
The important part is not that they comply with the GPL, but that they use the GPL voluntarily. All of the software they write and distribute (that's not subject to other people's licenses, like the RSA stuff), even when it contains no patches from people outside of Redhat, is under the GPL. They don't have to do that, and it is a positive contribution to the community.
True, Red Hat has given alot to the Linux community. But the vast majority of that _stuff_ was done while they were still a privately-held company. I dont think anyone at all had a problem with the old Red Hat. Its the new one people think smells funny.
Bleh, what do I care, i'm moving out of my apartment tomorrow. Wheeeeeee:)
I came back from vacation and discovered that I didnt recieve one of these letters, nor did about two dozen other people I felt should have deserved one but didn't recieve it. I emailed you and asked not for an invitation, but >why I wasn't sent one. You sent me one. I rejected it.
Sorry to rain on your flame, but I never accepted any money, or any hardware from VA, or anyone at VA. Trae tried to give me a computer once "to be nice", but I had a long talk with my folks about that "gift" at that time..Ultimately, I decided that such a gift would have only obligated me to do similar work for him for free, so I rejected it.
The server that was provided for System 12 was only given to me so that I would have somewhere other than themes.org to house my project. It wasn't a "gift". Want some email for proof?
I should note, however, I did once change my mind; When System 12 rolled around in June of 99, I felt that the year or so's worth of work I would be putting into the project justified such a gift. I finally agreed to let him send me a computer.
Since you wrote your response as an Anonymous Coward, I cant address you directly, so..
Sorry you feel that way.. You might want to read VA's own press release announcing ColdStorage from Aug '99. I posted the link to it a few messages ago. It sounds absolutely nothing like SourceForge. While you're at it, you can go have a look at the interview I did for Linux.Com back in November, which _does_ sound alot like what later became SourceForge. I have a feeling VA canned ColdStorage when it became clear that they were going to buy Andover. It would have been stupid for them to continue with building ColdStorage in that case. Why ColdStorage never saw the light of day has never been established. Ask yourself why.
As for Trae, sorry, I dont talk to liars, nor do I keep them as friends. That rule applies both to my personal life and professional life. The scene is rife with people who by virtue of working with him, hold the same opinion of him as I have. You'de be surprised at the volume of email I've recieved from people who've had similar run-ins with him. I can't say I was too surprised at his effort at damage control, tho. Its typical of his style.
Him and Tony (the ColdStorage/SourceForge guy)are best friends in real life, I later found out. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that what I told Trae idea-wise for weeks on end last year may have ended up on Tony's desk as work orders.
So, you can go ahead and hate me for having an opinion. It doesn't really change the facts, unfortunately. Sometimes I wish it did.
I had a paper published in Linux Journal a few years ago, when InSight blew up. Our head coder (Hi Ben) had absolutely nothing to show for 6 months of work between late 97 and early 98.. I ended up donating my end of the workload to Gnome and Red Hat. A measly thousand icons, some music and a few icons. Anyway--back to the article in LJ.. I didnt have the money to afford a patent-filing fee, so, I let that idea (and others) go for free. Someone later built it, and added it to the Gnome CVS tree. A nice thing.
Then theres TFUG, my local Linux users group here in Tucson. I've given more than a few talks there over the yeas, and have spent virtually every other Sunday of my life since 1996 there helping people enjoy Linux, both new and old.
Then there was the little matter of the Gnome Style Guide in summer of 98. 3 or 4 months of my spare time went into that until it dissolved into a convoluted mess of bickering and flame. It got people thinking about the UI, at least. Oh well, can't win em all.;)
Oh, then theres that little thing with VA called Themes.org where I busted my ass as a volunteer for nearly two years. Was on staff at t.o for a while, and was even asked by Trae McCombs at one point to be site manager of the whole damn thing. (I declined it. I was too busy with school, running Propaganda, and working simultaneously.)
Then theres Propaganda. a year and a half worth of work, all of it in your lap, and everyone elses lap, for free. Now you and about 2-3 million other people have a pretty desktop. You're welcome.
Then there's System 12.
Nowadays, theres MetaLab/UNC, Spindletop and other little things i'm quietly up to. Sure, plenty of people have done more than me. Written drivers, applications and whatnot..But an awful lot more have done less than me, too.
Call up Red Hat. Tell them you're trying to get a job, and ask them if you may list someone within their company as a job reference, since your work is included in their distrib. They wont even know who you are.
Lets suppose you did some work for VA instead. Call em up and ask if you may list someone within their company as a job reference on your resume'. The answer will be an equally flat "No." because they dont know who the hell you are either.
They dont know who you and I are. They don't know who you and I are because they dont care who you and I are. They dont care who you and I are because they dont have to care. They dont make any money by caring. See how it works yet?
If you go back and read my response carefully, you'll see that I didnt say "Anyone who makes money off Linux is evil."
I said, anyone who makes money off Linux -at the expense- of the community, is evil. Theres nothing at all wrong with making money off Linux. Good examples of this care Copyleft, Cheapbytes, LinuxMall and others.
Try to read what I write a little more carefully next time. Its all too easy to fly off the handle with an opposing point of view.
1) Red Hat isn't a good company because they comply with the GPL. If they didn't comply with the GPL, their company would be sacked, and their employees burnt at the stake. Not to mention, their company would be sitting beneath 6 miles of lawsuits from the x-number of thousands of people who give them a product to sell. Myself included. I may not have any mission critical code in Red Hat's distrib, but my contribution to the distribution itself is fairly large -- 11 MB.
2) Slashdot was doing fine (some would argue, better) without support from Andover, or VA. They arent necessary to Slashdot's existance, and never were.
3) Before VA got smart and decided to purchase Andover, they were planning on building a Freshmeat clone, to compete with it for community mindshare, and ultimately push Patrick and his project out of existance by sheer force. Rather than allow or encourage Freshmeat to prosper, they wanted it to destroy it and replace it with something they had direct control over. Don't believe me? Read this press release from August '99. Don't be surprised if its gone by the time you read this. By August '99, Freshmeat was already the established watering hole for new software in the Linux community. What reason, other than greed, would VA want to reproduce what already existed?
ColdStorage never saw the light of day. Think about it---why pay your employees to build a site from scratch and spend alot of time and effort trying to compete when you can just buy your competition outright? Sound familliar?
4) Making money in the Linux community does make you evil, if you have to answer to anyone but the community. VA answers to a board of directors, now. Not the community. Same story with Red Hat. Their job is to turn a profit however they can--and thats their only job. Thats the only thing they need to care about, and consequently, that is the only thing they care about.
It is a fundemental betrayl of the very principles which made Linux even possible in the first place. Cooperation, mutual respect, and community effort. Not competition, hidden motivations, and monopolization of utilities. When one company owns what you read, what you download, and what you use, its time to ask questions. If you dont, you are doing a grave disservice to yourself. If VA truly is a good-natured company, they will stand the test of time.
There's one good thing about all this..Theres a growing awareness among the real Linux community that we are in the middle of a pool of sharks--People who care less about the people involved than they do about turning a goddamn profit. Now you're seeing what happens to these people. They begin to fail, because their intentions are anything but pure and innocent.
We didn't need them before to be happy and successful, and we sure as hell don't need them now. Companies like Red Hat, VA, and LinuxCare have only made the game more interesting..The total sum of what they've done for us is negative, not positive. Whatever they have "provided" for us, was not made by them. It was was made by us. For free, without hidden motivations.
Re: Too far south? Maybe not!
on
G3 Solar Storm
·
· Score: 2
Actually, I remember seeing the Aurora (albeit very, very faintly) outside of Chicago in 1989 or so, during a similar storm. My folks and I had to drive about 8 miles out of town to a forest preserve to get far enough away from the city lights to see it, but, it was there.
Last night, I hauled ass down to Sabino Canyon and found a good place in the hills where light pollution was very low, layed down on the hood of my car and gave my eyes a good 20 minutes to adjust. No Aurora.:)
Will Boy X be predisposed to solving his problems with guns?
The answer is neither Yes, or No. It all depends on how Boy X was raised. If Boy X was raised with a strong sense of civic responsibility, and a healthy respect for guns, then Boy X will not be predisposed to solving his problems with guns.
However, if Boy X is raised in a home without a stable set of parents, where there are guns lying around all over the place, and he's parked infront of a damn television all day, then I'd say yes, Boy X _will_ be predisposed to solving his problems with guns.
Well, no one's arguing wether or not children imitate the things they are exposed to. Theyre pre-programmed from birth to do just that. However, its wrong to conclude that _exposure_ always leads immediately to a _change_ in the child. It can, but not always.
Growing up outside of Chicago, I knew the phone number for Empire Carpet before I knew my own. If I were exposed to strongly negative things, often enough, I would have undoubtedly been changed by it.
Case in point -- I remember when I was in High School, I watched Reginald Denny get dragged out of an 18-wheeler and nearly beaten to death by a mob of black people on live television. 90 seconds. It nearly made me puke at the time I saw it, it still makes me ill to some degree. 90 seconds was all it took. I cant even imagine how I would have felt if instead of being 16, I was say, 9 or 10.
When I was a kid in the late 70's/early 80's, we had a games we all knew about in the neighborhood. Ahh yes, back in the pre-PC age of analog, we had to come up with games instead of buying them, believe it or not. We had three neighborhood favorites. "Ghost In The Graveyard", "Smear The Queer", and "Guns".
In "Ghost In The Graveyard", we played it only at night. One person was selected to go somewhere in the neighborhood and hide. The rest of us would split up and search for the ghost. The fun came when you had the crap scared out of you when you came across the person hiding, or heard a scream of terror somewhere in the neighborhood. I liked Ghost In The Graveyard, and played it alot. However, it didn't make me worship satan and bite the heads off of chickens later in life. It was a game.
At the risk of sounding patronizing, or incredibly insensitive towards gays, i'll tell you about the next game. "Smear The Queer" was a variant of rugby. Before the days of political correctness, it was a sure-fire way of humilitating and physically punishing your friends as a group. The person with the football ran around and had to avoid relinquishing posession of it, even after being tackled and beaten into submission. I liked playing Smear The Queer, and played it alot. However, it didn't make me a gay-bashing redneck later in life. It was a game.
Similarly, "Guns" was alot of fun. Any object in the household that even vaguely resembled a firearm was used in an imaginary war of attrition with a line drawn between houses. In my case, I managed to get a discarded power-drill from my dad which looked vastly more impressive than the simple garden-hose sprayers and silicone caulking guns the other kids had. We chased eachother around the neighborhood, the 6 of us, for hours on end, jumping over cars and diving over bushes, hiding under stairwells and such, our imaginations running wild with the thought of gunning down our friends in a real-life Quake arena, if you will. However, it didnt make me a homocidal mainiac with an unquenchable thirst for human suffering. It was a game.
So, here I am, 20 years later. I have no interest in the occult. I have no urge to physically assault gay people, and I have no bizzare fixation with firearms. Infact, it would scare me to even know someone involved in any of those activities, let alone be a participant in any of those activities myself.
When the line between fantasy and reality is blurred in the mind of a child, you can often times look directly at that kid's parents and point out very, very severe problems in how they handled the task of raising their child. Dylan Klebold left his house every morning wearing a black trenchcoat with a swastika armband on, leaving a sawed-off shotgun ontop of the dresser in his bedroom. His parents did nothing about it, unfortunately. And by the time they understood the gravity of their own neglect of their child, a dozen or more kids lay dead in a school.
Your upbringing wont cause you to become a psychopath later in life. The _lack_ of an upbringing, however, will. Thats not to say that companies like Id are immune from scrutiny but the fault most often lies with internal causes rather than external ones, like TV, music, or entertainment in general, IMHO.
Flame away. Thats how I see it, and i'm-a stickin' to it.
At the time I submitted this post to Slashdot, Propaganda was still up and running. That was around 11:30 PM last night. I went to bed shortly after that.
On the splash page, I put a little graphic which did a wonderful job of explaining how I felt about things.. Specifically, about what VA did to the people I worked with, myself, and those of you who actually supported the site. The lyrics from an old song by the Police, called "Murder By Numbers".
Clicking on the graphic then displayed a series of emails I had recieved from someone at VA Linux Systems from between April and May of 1999. A few of you know who I'm talking about, and thats fine. The bottom line is, that person knows who he is, and he has to live with himself. Thats all that matters.
Apparently, VA didn't like the fact that I had this sort of thing on public display, so, my site was basically destroyed by VA sometime between midnight and 9:00 AM when I woke up.
I don't have login access to the site anymore, nor do I want access. In addition to losing my login, all the materials that were once there are now gone. Artwork included. All of it. Gone.
If this doesn't underscore what i've been saying all along, I really don't know what more I can do to show you people. VA is a company willing to destroy a year and a half's worth of my work to prevent you from seeing a handful of emails which show you what kind of company they are on the inside.
The Linux community isn't the same anymore because of companies like VA, and what they're doing to us. It makes me sick. So sick, I refuse to even be associated with it. They can rot as far as I'm concerned. I'm out.
My sincerest thanks to all of you guys who were honestly thankful for all the work that went into the project, and took the time to write me tonight. or tossed a reply here.
(ignore the signature, btw. havent gotten around to changing it quite yet)
Well, you did your homework he right way..But you made one false assumption--You assumed that Slashdot, and Freshmeat were accurately valued at the time they were sold.:)
During Propaganda's peak of popularity (summer '99), I considered putting it up on the auction block just to see what I could get for it..At peak, we were doing a little over half a million pageviews and 1.0-1.2 million hits per month. For a few weeks (and over several dinners with friends of mine) I asked them what they felt Propaganda was worth--These being IS/MIS professionals themselves, I figured I would get a good solid figure. Between 7 or so people, I heard values ranging from $50K to $450K.
Pricing a webpage is fairly difficult to do accurately. There are so many ways to think of a page's current value versus potential value that you're best off settling on an average. In the case of Propaganda, there are pluses and minuses to think about. Propaganda is currently included in every major Linux distribution in the world. A good thing. Propaganda is comparably high-exposure but low-traffic. A bad thing. See what I mean?
Content versus potential growth. I could easilly turn Propaganda into a cottage industry if I really wanted to..You may want to take that route instead.
One thing you might want to do is email Trae McCombs at VA..He sold themes.org to VA about a year ago. He was doing about half a million pageviews a day at the point where he sold it, but you'll have to ask him how much VA shelled out for it. I dont know that figure.
Truncated Irish, actually. One of my ancestors about 200 years ago dropped the "ue" off the end of the name "Pogue" and threw an A to prevent him from being tagged as a Frenchman. The story goes, that he settled in a largely Irish-dominated community in the Carolinas, and couldn't find work with a French-sounding name. So he changed it.
Sorry to disappoint you, but, I was not named after a bisexual transvestite pop star. My first name, Bowie, was chosen out of a book, according to my mom. She adds that David Bowie only became popular a few months after I was born, and had she known that, she wouldn't have picked "Bowie" as a name--She would have chosen "Beowulf" instead.
According to mom, there were too many parents naming their kids "Mike" and "Dave" and common-sounding names, so, she gave me something unique.
Dad didn't like the name "Bowie", but wen't along with it after mom insisted on it.
Since I was still in-utero in late '73 and the first 6 months of '74, I wasn't able to voice my opinion. I did kick alot, tho.
..How about we spend less fucking time worrying about lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit and go back to having fun?
None of these lawsuits affect us. The RIAA doesnt affect me. The UCITA doesnt affect me. A lawsuit against Yahoo doesn't affect me. A lawsuit against MP3.com doesn't affect me. None of this shit affects me, because I, and we, will all be able to get our hands on what we want for free, anyway. Laws do not and cannot prevent piracy of any media. Laws -encourage- piracy. Half of you people fail to realize there are piracy groups in existance that are older than you are!
I've said it before, and i'll say it again. The damn cat is already out of the bag. No amount of lawsuits will put the damn cat back in it.
For crying out loud, quit worrying, people. If I see another damn RIAA/UCITA/Napster/MP3 lawsuit story on Slashdot i'm going to puke.
You know..I used to think that I was falling behind the times when acronyms and buzzwords like RIAA and B2B were popping up. But with this, i'm absolutely sure that nobody knows what the hell an "AviTec enabled" application is, or cares.
Slashdot Mirror
Lydon doesn't like disengenuine people. The instant you open your mouth and start asking him the same old and retarded questions about the Sex Pistols, like everyone else, he will grow bored with you immediately. From the sound of the post, that looks like the first turd that will fall out of your mouth. You know how the saying goes..Dont be "that guy".
If you want to get on his good side, thank him for being himself.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
The important part is not that they comply with the GPL, but that they use the GPL voluntarily. All of the software they write and distribute (that's not subject to other people's licenses, like the RSA stuff), even when it contains no patches from people outside of Redhat, is under the GPL. They don't have to do that, and it is a positive contribution to the community.
:)
True, Red Hat has given alot to the Linux community. But the vast majority of that _stuff_ was done while they were still a privately-held company. I dont think anyone at all had a problem with the old Red Hat. Its the new one people think smells funny.
Bleh, what do I care, i'm moving out of my apartment tomorrow. Wheeeeeee
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
I came back from vacation and discovered that I didnt recieve one of these letters, nor did about two dozen other people I felt should have deserved one but didn't recieve it. I emailed you and asked not for an invitation, but >why I wasn't sent one. You sent me one. I rejected it.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Sorry to rain on your flame, but I never accepted any money, or any hardware from VA, or anyone at VA. Trae tried to give me a computer once "to be nice", but I had a long talk with my folks about that "gift" at that time..Ultimately, I decided that such a gift would have only obligated me to do similar work for him for free, so I rejected it.
The server that was provided for System 12 was only given to me so that I would have somewhere other than themes.org to house my project. It wasn't a "gift". Want some email for proof?
I should note, however, I did once change my mind; When System 12 rolled around in June of 99, I felt that the year or so's worth of work I would be putting into the project justified such a gift. I finally agreed to let him send me a computer.
No computer ever arrived.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Since you wrote your response as an Anonymous Coward, I cant address you directly, so..
Sorry you feel that way.. You might want to read VA's own press release announcing ColdStorage from Aug '99. I posted the link to it a few messages ago. It sounds absolutely nothing like SourceForge. While you're at it, you can go have a look at the interview I did for Linux.Com back in November, which _does_ sound alot like what later became SourceForge. I have a feeling VA canned ColdStorage when it became clear that they were going to buy Andover. It would have been stupid for them to continue with building ColdStorage in that case. Why ColdStorage never saw the light of day has never been established. Ask yourself why.
As for Trae, sorry, I dont talk to liars, nor do I keep them as friends. That rule applies both to my personal life and professional life. The scene is rife with people who by virtue of working with him, hold the same opinion of him as I have. You'de be surprised at the volume of email I've recieved from people who've had similar run-ins with him. I can't say I was too surprised at his effort at damage control, tho. Its typical of his style.
Him and Tony (the ColdStorage/SourceForge guy)are best friends in real life, I later found out. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that what I told Trae idea-wise for weeks on end last year may have ended up on Tony's desk as work orders.
So, you can go ahead and hate me for having an opinion. It doesn't really change the facts, unfortunately. Sometimes I wish it did.
Ciao,
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Well, lets see...What have I done for Linux.
;)
I had a paper published in Linux Journal a few years ago, when InSight blew up. Our head coder (Hi Ben) had absolutely nothing to show for 6 months of work between late 97 and early 98.. I ended up donating my end of the workload to Gnome and Red Hat. A measly thousand icons, some music and a few icons. Anyway--back to the article in LJ.. I didnt have the money to afford a patent-filing fee, so, I let that idea (and others) go for free. Someone later built it, and added it to the Gnome CVS tree. A nice thing.
Then theres TFUG, my local Linux users group here in Tucson. I've given more than a few talks there over the yeas, and have spent virtually every other Sunday of my life since 1996 there helping people enjoy Linux, both new and old.
Then there was the little matter of the Gnome Style Guide in summer of 98. 3 or 4 months of my spare time went into that until it dissolved into a convoluted mess of bickering and flame. It got people thinking about the UI, at least. Oh well, can't win em all.
Oh, then theres that little thing with VA called Themes.org where I busted my ass as a volunteer for nearly two years. Was on staff at t.o for a while, and was even asked by Trae McCombs at one point to be site manager of the whole damn thing. (I declined it. I was too busy with school, running Propaganda, and working simultaneously.)
Then theres Propaganda. a year and a half worth of work, all of it in your lap, and everyone elses lap, for free. Now you and about 2-3 million other people have a pretty desktop. You're welcome.
Then there's System 12.
Nowadays, theres MetaLab/UNC, Spindletop and other little things i'm quietly up to. Sure, plenty of people have done more than me. Written drivers, applications and whatnot..But an awful lot more have done less than me, too.
So..What have you done lately?
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Call up Red Hat. Tell them you're trying to get a job, and ask them if you may list someone within their company as a job reference, since your work is included in their distrib. They wont even know who you are.
Lets suppose you did some work for VA instead. Call em up and ask if you may list someone within their company as a job reference on your resume'. The answer will be an equally flat "No." because they dont know who the hell you are either.
They dont know who you and I are. They don't know who you and I are because they dont care who you and I are. They dont care who you and I are because they dont have to care. They dont make any money by caring. See how it works yet?
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
If you go back and read my response carefully, you'll see that I didnt say "Anyone who makes money off Linux is evil."
I said, anyone who makes money off Linux -at the expense- of the community, is evil. Theres nothing at all wrong with making money off Linux. Good examples of this care Copyleft, Cheapbytes, LinuxMall and others.
Try to read what I write a little more carefully next time. Its all too easy to fly off the handle with an opposing point of view.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
1) Red Hat isn't a good company because they comply with the GPL. If they didn't comply with the GPL, their company would be sacked, and their employees burnt at the stake. Not to mention, their company would be sitting beneath 6 miles of lawsuits from the x-number of thousands of people who give them a product to sell. Myself included. I may not have any mission critical code in Red Hat's distrib, but my contribution to the distribution itself is fairly large -- 11 MB.
2) Slashdot was doing fine (some would argue, better) without support from Andover, or VA. They arent necessary to Slashdot's existance, and never were.
3) Before VA got smart and decided to purchase Andover, they were planning on building a Freshmeat clone, to compete with it for community mindshare, and ultimately push Patrick and his project out of existance by sheer force. Rather than allow or encourage Freshmeat to prosper, they wanted it to destroy it and replace it with something they had direct control over. Don't believe me? Read this press release from August '99. Don't be surprised if its gone by the time you read this. By August '99, Freshmeat was already the established watering hole for new software in the Linux community. What reason, other than greed, would VA want to reproduce what already existed?
ColdStorage never saw the light of day. Think about it---why pay your employees to build a site from scratch and spend alot of time and effort trying to compete when you can just buy your competition outright? Sound familliar?
4) Making money in the Linux community does make you evil, if you have to answer to anyone but the community. VA answers to a board of directors, now. Not the community. Same story with Red Hat. Their job is to turn a profit however they can--and thats their only job. Thats the only thing they need to care about, and consequently, that is the only thing they care about.
It is a fundemental betrayl of the very principles which made Linux even possible in the first place. Cooperation, mutual respect, and community effort. Not competition, hidden motivations, and monopolization of utilities. When one company owns what you read, what you download, and what you use, its time to ask questions. If you dont, you are doing a grave disservice to yourself. If VA truly is a good-natured company, they will stand the test of time.
I don't see that as being the case, here.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
There's one good thing about all this..Theres a growing awareness among the real Linux community that we are in the middle of a pool of sharks--People who care less about the people involved than they do about turning a goddamn profit. Now you're seeing what happens to these people. They begin to fail, because their intentions are anything but pure and innocent.
We didn't need them before to be happy and successful, and we sure as hell don't need them now. Companies like Red Hat, VA, and LinuxCare have only made the game more interesting..The total sum of what they've done for us is negative, not positive. Whatever they have "provided" for us, was not made by them. It was was made by us. For free, without hidden motivations.
We don't need them.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Actually, I remember seeing the Aurora (albeit very, very faintly) outside of Chicago in 1989 or so, during a similar storm. My folks and I had to drive about 8 miles out of town to a forest preserve to get far enough away from the city lights to see it, but, it was there.
:)
Last night, I hauled ass down to Sabino Canyon and found a good place in the hills where light pollution was very low, layed down on the hood of my car and gave my eyes a good 20 minutes to adjust. No Aurora.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Well, think about this..Its a simple example:
Boy X grows up in house with guns.
Will Boy X be predisposed to solving his problems with guns?
The answer is neither Yes, or No. It all depends on how Boy X was raised. If Boy X was raised with a strong sense of civic responsibility, and a healthy respect for guns, then Boy X will not be predisposed to solving his problems with guns.
However, if Boy X is raised in a home without a stable set of parents, where there are guns lying around all over the place, and he's parked infront of a damn television all day, then I'd say yes, Boy X _will_ be predisposed to solving his problems with guns.
Make sense?
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Nothing in the skies above Tucson, as of midnight.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
Well, no one's arguing wether or not children imitate the things they are exposed to. Theyre pre-programmed from birth to do just that. However, its wrong to conclude that _exposure_ always leads immediately to a _change_ in the child. It can, but not always.
Growing up outside of Chicago, I knew the phone number for Empire Carpet before I knew my own. If I were exposed to strongly negative things, often enough, I would have undoubtedly been changed by it.
Case in point -- I remember when I was in High School, I watched Reginald Denny get dragged out of an 18-wheeler and nearly beaten to death by a mob of black people on live television. 90 seconds. It nearly made me puke at the time I saw it, it still makes me ill to some degree. 90 seconds was all it took. I cant even imagine how I would have felt if instead of being 16, I was say, 9 or 10.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
When I was a kid in the late 70's/early 80's, we had a games we all knew about in the neighborhood. Ahh yes, back in the pre-PC age of analog, we had to come up with games instead of buying them, believe it or not. We had three neighborhood favorites. "Ghost In The Graveyard", "Smear The Queer", and "Guns".
In "Ghost In The Graveyard", we played it only at night. One person was selected to go somewhere in the neighborhood and hide. The rest of us would split up and search for the ghost. The fun came when you had the crap scared out of you when you came across the person hiding, or heard a scream of terror somewhere in the neighborhood. I liked Ghost In The Graveyard, and played it alot. However, it didn't make me worship satan and bite the heads off of chickens later in life. It was a game.
At the risk of sounding patronizing, or incredibly insensitive towards gays, i'll tell you about the next game. "Smear The Queer" was a variant of rugby. Before the days of political correctness, it was a sure-fire way of humilitating and physically punishing your friends as a group. The person with the football ran around and had to avoid relinquishing posession of it, even after being tackled and beaten into submission. I liked playing Smear The Queer, and played it alot. However, it didn't make me a gay-bashing redneck later in life. It was a game.
Similarly, "Guns" was alot of fun. Any object in the household that even vaguely resembled a firearm was used in an imaginary war of attrition with a line drawn between houses. In my case, I managed to get a discarded power-drill from my dad which looked vastly more impressive than the simple garden-hose sprayers and silicone caulking guns the other kids had. We chased eachother around the neighborhood, the 6 of us, for hours on end, jumping over cars and diving over bushes, hiding under stairwells and such, our imaginations running wild with the thought of gunning down our friends in a real-life Quake arena, if you will.
However, it didnt make me a homocidal mainiac with an unquenchable thirst for human suffering. It was a game.
So, here I am, 20 years later. I have no interest in the occult. I have no urge to physically assault gay people, and I have no bizzare fixation with firearms. Infact, it would scare me to even know someone involved in any of those activities, let alone be a participant in any of those activities myself.
When the line between fantasy and reality is blurred in the mind of a child, you can often times look directly at that kid's parents and point out very, very severe problems in how they handled the task of raising their child. Dylan Klebold left his house every morning wearing a black trenchcoat with a swastika armband on, leaving a sawed-off shotgun ontop of the dresser in his bedroom. His parents did nothing about it, unfortunately. And by the time they understood the gravity of their own neglect of their child, a dozen or more kids lay dead in a school.
Your upbringing wont cause you to become a psychopath later in life. The _lack_ of an upbringing, however, will. Thats not to say that companies like Id are immune from scrutiny but the fault most often lies with internal causes rather than external ones, like TV, music, or entertainment in general, IMHO.
Flame away. Thats how I see it, and i'm-a stickin' to it.
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
>5 other people have yet to be sequenced, not 4. I should know. I'm one of em.
(chuckle)
Bowie J. Poag
Project Founder, PROPAGANDA For Linux (http://metalab.unc.edu/propaganda)
At the time I submitted this post to Slashdot, Propaganda was still up and running. That was around 11:30 PM last night. I went to bed shortly after that.
On the splash page, I put a little graphic which did a wonderful job of explaining how I felt about things.. Specifically, about what VA did to the people I worked with, myself, and those of you who actually supported the site. The lyrics from an old song by the Police, called "Murder By Numbers".
Clicking on the graphic then displayed a series of emails I had recieved from someone at VA Linux Systems from between April and May of 1999. A few of you know who I'm talking about, and thats fine. The bottom line is, that person knows who he is, and he has to live with himself. Thats all that matters.
Apparently, VA didn't like the fact that I had this sort of thing on public display, so, my site was basically destroyed by VA sometime between midnight and 9:00 AM when I woke up.
I don't have login access to the site anymore, nor do I want access. In addition to losing my login, all the materials that were once there are now gone. Artwork included. All of it. Gone.
If this doesn't underscore what i've been saying all along, I really don't know what more I can do to show you people. VA is a company willing to destroy a year and a half's worth of my work to prevent you from seeing a handful of emails which show you what kind of company they are on the inside.
The Linux community isn't the same anymore because of companies like VA, and what they're doing to us. It makes me sick. So sick, I refuse to even be associated with it. They can rot as far as I'm concerned. I'm out.
My sincerest thanks to all of you guys who were honestly thankful for all the work that went into the project, and took the time to write me tonight. or tossed a reply here.
(ignore the signature, btw. havent gotten around to changing it quite yet)
Bowie J. Poag
Well, you did your homework he right way..But you made one false assumption--You assumed that Slashdot, and Freshmeat were accurately valued at the time they were sold.
During Propaganda's peak of popularity (summer '99), I considered putting it up on the auction block just to see what I could get for it..At peak, we were doing a little over half a million pageviews and 1.0-1.2 million hits per month. For a few weeks (and over several dinners with friends of mine) I asked them what they felt Propaganda was worth--These being IS/MIS professionals themselves, I figured I would get a good solid figure. Between 7 or so people, I heard values ranging from $50K to $450K.
Pricing a webpage is fairly difficult to do accurately. There are so many ways to think of a page's current value versus potential value that you're best off settling on an average. In the case of Propaganda, there are pluses and minuses to think about. Propaganda is currently included in every major Linux distribution in the world. A good thing. Propaganda is comparably high-exposure but low-traffic. A bad thing. See what I mean?
Content versus potential growth. I could easilly turn Propaganda into a cottage industry if I really wanted to..You may want to take that route instead.
One thing you might want to do is email Trae McCombs at VA..He sold themes.org to VA about a year ago. He was doing about half a million pageviews a day at the point where he sold it, but you'll have to ask him how much VA shelled out for it. I dont know that figure.
Good luck,
Bowie J. Poag
Truncated Irish, actually. One of my ancestors about 200 years ago dropped the "ue" off the end of the name "Pogue" and threw an A to prevent him from being tagged as a Frenchman. The story goes, that he settled in a largely Irish-dominated community in the Carolinas, and couldn't find work with a French-sounding name. So he changed it.
Sorry to disappoint you, but, I was not named after a bisexual transvestite pop star. My first name, Bowie, was chosen out of a book, according to my mom. She adds that David Bowie only became popular a few months after I was born, and had she known that, she wouldn't have picked "Bowie" as a name--She would have chosen "Beowulf" instead.
According to mom, there were too many parents naming their kids "Mike" and "Dave" and common-sounding names, so, she gave me something unique.
Dad didn't like the name "Bowie", but wen't along with it after mom insisted on it.
Since I was still in-utero in late '73 and the first 6 months of '74, I wasn't able to voice my opinion. I did kick alot, tho.
Bowie J. Poag
..How about we spend less fucking time worrying about lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit and go back to having fun?
None of these lawsuits affect us. The RIAA doesnt affect me. The UCITA doesnt affect me. A lawsuit against Yahoo doesn't affect me. A lawsuit against MP3.com doesn't affect me. None of this shit affects me, because I, and we, will all be able to get our hands on what we want for free, anyway. Laws do not and cannot prevent piracy of any media. Laws -encourage- piracy. Half of you people fail to realize there are piracy groups in existance that are older than you are!
I've said it before, and i'll say it again. The damn cat is already out of the bag. No amount of lawsuits will put the damn cat back in it.
For crying out loud, quit worrying, people. If I see another damn RIAA/UCITA/Napster/MP3 lawsuit story on Slashdot i'm going to puke.
Bowie J. Poag
All NASA needs is to fire their PR department.
Bowie J. Poag
Welcome to the (tm)(c)(R) Open Source Movement. A select few make unbelievable amounts of money off other people's free work.
Honor will wont pay your rent.
Bowie J. Poag
On your left, we see a gathering of trolls, who have sunk to the level of pointing out verbal faux-pas.
Although, i'll conceed one thing -- the "Summer grits, make me feel fine!" made me laugh.
Bowie J. Poag
Agreed.
Bowie J. Poag
You know..I used to think that I was falling behind the times when acronyms and buzzwords like RIAA and B2B were popping up. But with this, i'm absolutely sure that nobody knows what the hell an "AviTec enabled" application is, or cares.
I feel better.
Bowie J. Poag