I am officially a total nerd for ripping off a Monty Python bit in an online forum.
I would like to apologize to America, and also to my family, who has bravely stood by me through this trying time. I look forward to the chance to move on with my life and put this whole ugly incident behind me.
I found it particularilly amusing that he wrote a coulumn about young people taking over the new media, and the only web link in his entire article was to Brill's Content, a media watchdog magazine put out by the producer of CourtTV.
For Katz to imply that old media is doomed (in spite of the wild success of printed magazines targeting every imaginable niche market), and that sites like Teen Movie Critic are the future is so silly that I can't even take it seriously enough to thoughtfully point out how horribly, horribly wrong so much of his column is... so I will just fire off a couple of smart-assed questions.
Does the term "Open Media" imply that we are welcome to take his rough drafts, make a few changes, and sell them as our own under the GPL?
If there is such a thing as "Old Fartism", what exactly does an Old Fartist believe?
Is there also a New Fartism? Or perhaps a Reformed Fartism?
Katz, does it bother you that your whole column is dripping with the same sappy sentiment as the opening lines of "The Greatest Love of All" by Whitney Houston?
Does the term "Open Media" imply that we are welcome to take his rough drafts, make a few changes, and sell them as our own under the GPL?
If there is such a thing as "Old Fartism", what exactly does an Old Fartist believe?
Is there also a New Fartism? Or perhaps a Reformed Fartism?
Katz, does it bother you that your whole column is dripping with the same sappy sentiment as the opening lines of "The Greatest Love of All" by Whitney Houston?
Funny, but I must have missed that press statement, and you don't link to one here, nor does the opinion column that you linked to.
and that provides an interesting chance to speculate again about the future of a company that had some good technologies, but couldn't respond successfully to challenges from Linux and Windows... (Cough) FUD (Cough)
Whoever acquires the rights to OpenServer and UnixWare needs to appreciate this fact and admit publicly that there will be no further work, besides bug fixes and sales of the existing versions, on these platforms. Instead, the focus will have to be on an immediate migration path to the next platform, almost definitely Linux. With this admission, the new vendor will certainly cannibalize short-term licensing revenue, but the longer-term benefits of acquiring a chunk of the SCO customer/reseller base will outweigh that (pretty damn small) opportunity loss.
That has got to be one of the dumbest things I have ever read. Everybody here is a little dumber for having read it.
There is one reason, and one reason only, that anybody would want to buy SCO, and that is for their products... specifically, SVR4, UNIXWare, and Tarantella.
Nobody who wants to be YALD (Yet Another Linux Distributer) would have any reason to buy a non-Linux company. A friendly take-over of one of the smaller players (read: not Red Hat) would make a hell of a lot more sense.
As for the loopy idea of buying SCO's customer base... If, as you imply, the Linux and NT vendors are stealing these customers away so easilly that SCO is on its death-bed, how much could those relationships possibly be worth?
osOpinion has an extremely thought provoking editorial piece which expands upon this issue in detail.
No they don't. They have an extremely speculative rant that reminds me of the "Apple is dead" stories that ZDNet used to run every other week a couple years ago.
Linux is very cool, but we gotta tone this kind of zealotry down a little. One bad quarter != a dead company.
Drink when "Open-" is used as a prefix to anything that is not related to software code. Drink each time he re-uses a word or phrase that he coined in an earlier column. Drink for each "revolution" or "paradigm shift". Drink every time young people are "making themselves heard".
This whole thread reminds me of that scene in Chasing Amy, where Banky is told that Archie never settled on either Betty or Veronica because he is a "friend of Dorothy".
This is a clear example of what a hypocrite Hatch is.
Actually, it is a very murky example, because I don't see where the "hypocracy" is in this case.
Does he somehow fail to live up to his "fair use" standards in his daily life? Did he recently sue somebody for distributing his IP without permission?
I'm not trying to flame you, I would just like to know what you mean by calling this an example of Hatch being a hypocrite?
There are plenty of reasons for a lot of people to disagree with Hatch, but there is no denying that he can kick serious ass when you get him mad.
I remember his presence as a "talking head" on a lot of the news shows in the early days of the Clinton scandal. He was calmly repeating, over and over, "this is not so bad... a sincere apology would be more than enough for me". After Clinton's famous non-apology on the night of his Grand Jury testimony, you could count the veins behind Hatch's eyes. He was using words like "disapointed" and "inadequate", but you could tell what he really wanted to do was jump up and down shouting "BULLSH?T" at the top of his lungs.
It was also very entertaining when he was in the GOP primary debates. Al Gore would do well to study the video tapes of the verbal flogging that Hatch dispatched against Bush.
I really hate the way he has voted on a few issues (cough DMCA cough), but it's hard not to like his "damn the torpedos" aproach to politics.
...or maybe just so far to the left that Lennin would qualify as right wing.
She freely admitted that she had been called "so far to the left that she had lost radio contact with the lunatic fringe". I disagreed with her about everything, and had a great time in her class. I respect people that are smart enough to know their own bias.
Many of their stances are quite left of center, others quite far right.
That was the whole point of her joke. The LP is so dogmatic about scaling back governmetn, that they end up champions of a lot of causes that people normally associate with left-wingers, but they are completely inspired by thinkers like Burke, Voltaire, Toqueville, and other guys with french names that are hard to spell. Adam Smith is their Budda.
As for me, I have never been a member of their party, but confronted with a frat-boy Republican that is basically a dumber version of Bill Clinton, a Green schmuck who has made a career out of annoying punditry, a Reform guy who plays on racial fears to court the trailer trash vote, and a Democrat who thinks my pickup truck is more dangerous than an atom bomb and considers himself key to the evolution of the Internet, I may very well vote Libertarian this year.
I saw Harry Browne on PBS the other day, and he struck me as one of the few voices of reason in the entire election, and the only one with a Social Security plan that actually shows where all the money is coming from (sale of Federal assets to cover short term obligations while privatizing the system). He is not so delusional as to think he can win (unlike a certain wing-nut from the Green Party), but knows that he can advance his party's ideals a lot if he can muster up a slightly larger minority than he did 4 years ago.
I did read it. Every last paragraph. To me, it seemed obvious that he was really reaching and stretching a lot in order to cram the X-Men's square peg into the round hole of an agenda that he had in mind.
It is not a particularilly well-kept secret that the outcast status of the X-Men has been used by the writers at Marvel to pontificate on a lot of issues, but at its core the X-Men is a deliberately vague and general story about the impact of intollerence. One can easilly find a much more obvious tale of gay-bashing in the classic Alan Moore comic "V for Vendetta".
Fringe groups that usurp popular culture icons annoy me. Remember that missionary group that was trying to use Star Wars to teach fundamentalism in the early 70's? Same thing.
I realize that you live in a communist nation, so anything less than total state control of the entire economy looks like a radical right-wing agenda to you.
Here in the US, the extremists on the right are the Libertarian Party, and the Constitution Party. Extremists on the left include the Green Party, and visiting Canadians.
Most of the Democrats and Republicans are very mainstream, middle-of-the-road types, who only express rhetoric from one side or the other to rally support away from the minor parties.
(Canadians: Most of you are smart enough to tell that my negative comments about Canada are just jokes. I like Canada. As third-world nations go, it is one of my favorites. To those of you who can't seem to tell when I'm only kidding around: shut up, go back to your igloo, and keep lying to yourself about how much better the beer is up there.)
Leave it to a Salon writer to take a wonderfully vague story about teen outcasts and adopt it to his own favorite agenda (in this case, gay rights).
I think it is a safe bet that sometime next week Jon Katz will be writing another "Hellmouth" type story where he tells us that the X-Men mutants are really computer geeks.
Ah, but there we see the problem. If the Republicans had accepted this "compromise", we would be cutting taxes while ramping up spending. Isn't that the sort of economic policy that Clinton campaigned against for most of his political career?
The goal of every conservatice should be to reduce spending. Some Republicans feel the best way to do it is to "starve the beast", by which I mean cut taxes so far that government is then forced to make some hard choices... there's not much pressure to reduce waste when the budget is running surplusses. What you need to keep in mind about modern conservatives (by which I mean fiscal conservatives) is that their agenda is not just less money taken out of your paycheck (although that is part of it), but also to reduce the size of the federal government, which has wrested too much power from the states, cities, and people.
Democrats, on the other hand, are no so much anti-tax cut as they are pro-spending. The honest ones, like Walter Mondale, were willing to admit that all of those nifty federal programs cost money, and that high taxes are needed for them.
For most of his two terms, Bill Clinton has been very moderate and very honest about the books. He has raised taxes a little (we are still way below the pre-Reagan socialistic days), and has introduced a few targeted spending hikes, but he has also signed more Republican budget bills into law than Reagan and Bush combined.
The fact that there is a political scrum over the current budget proposal comes as no suprise. Clinton probably proposed it while knowing it would be rejected, specifically to resurrect the "do nothing congress" label that has worked so well for Clinton/Gore in the past.
Re:The Failing of Democracy, Capitalism as Governm
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The Perils Of E-Voting
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· Score: 2
That reminds me of a very funny recent column by P.J. O'Rourke, where he suggests that we should make people really free to do what they like with their vote, including the freedom to sell it to somebody else. Since politicians are pretty much buying elections anyway, let's cut out the middle man and let them buy votes directly from the people.
The only people who would vote would be those who care enough about their sufferage to not sell.
Unfortunately, I'm not as good of a writer as O'Rourke, so I doubt that any explanation of mine could do justice to how funny the column was.:/
Currently, politicians get into office by NOT playing the middle.
Clinton and Gore are both moderate liberals.
Their opponents in '92 and '96 were Bush the Elder and Bob Dole, both moderate conservatives.
The strongest third-party showing, by a w--i--d--e margin, was Ross Perot, a dead-center moderate who campaigned to reduce the debt in 92 and repeal NAFTA in 96.
The extremes on both sides (Jackson, Forbes, Brown, Buchannan, Quayle, etc.) all got spanked by those who could stand more towards the center.
The result has been meaningless elections between nearly identical candidates full of moderately bad proposals. Playing the center has been the winning strategy since 1988. No presidential candidate has been able to build a nantional coalition of radicals and win since Reagan... and even he needed the "Reagan Democrats" to get elected.
It was a hotel where some Nixon supporters broke into a Democratic Party campaign office.
(A relatively minor crime in the great scheme of things, which Nixon was not involved with. The major scandal was that Nixon tried to cover it up, which surely would have resulted in impeachment had he not resigned.)
It will be interesting to see which side of the debate Michael Robertson speaks up for, since MP3.com has now entered a license-based relationship with the big record companies (as part of the my.mp3.com settlement).
You've got it backwards (at least as far as enterprise level IT is concerned). Check the ads, or talk to a headhunter, and you will hear that there are lots of openings for a UNIX admin with 3-4 years experience, but very few junior positions.
The M$ track is far easier for a newbie to break into. Land a job on a help desk, take the MCSE tests, and you might eventually get to be an admin or maybe an Exchange Server support guy.
That does not change the fact that an old guru can hit the ground running, doing twice the work of a kid right out of school. The youngsters are generally not trusted to lord over mission-critical systems, and you usually need to invest time and money into getting them up to speed.
A paper MCSE or even *n?x CS grad with no experience will take a couple months to figure out your system, and will get a much higher offer from somebody else within a year or two.
Old-school gurus are already getting near the top range of their salary, so they will stay put until they are ready to be a consultant or retire, as long as you keep them happy. They won't leave a good job for just another couple grand a year. Also, they will have seen it all before and will be able to take control of the project right away.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps this means we can expect a Merchant/Ivory film next year that stars Emma Thompson as a strong-willed mechanical engineer in the 19th Century.
I would like to apologize to America, and also to my family, who has bravely stood by me through this trying time. I look forward to the chance to move on with my life and put this whole ugly incident behind me.
Heh heh. Thanks. Now I don't feel so bad for neglecting the preview button.
I found it particularilly amusing that he wrote a coulumn about young people taking over the new media, and the only web link in his entire article was to Brill's Content, a media watchdog magazine put out by the producer of CourtTV.
For Katz to imply that old media is doomed (in spite of the wild success of printed magazines targeting every imaginable niche market), and that sites like Teen Movie Critic are the future is so silly that I can't even take it seriously enough to thoughtfully point out how horribly, horribly wrong so much of his column is... so I will just fire off a couple of smart-assed questions.
Does the term "Open Media" imply that we are welcome to take his rough drafts, make a few changes, and sell them as our own under the GPL?
If there is such a thing as "Old Fartism", what exactly does an Old Fartist believe?
Is there also a New Fartism? Or perhaps a Reformed Fartism?
Katz, does it bother you that your whole column is dripping with the same sappy sentiment as the opening lines of "The Greatest Love of All" by Whitney Houston?
Does the term "Open Media" imply that we are welcome to take his rough drafts, make a few changes, and sell them as our own under the GPL?
If there is such a thing as "Old Fartism", what exactly does an Old Fartist believe?
Is there also a New Fartism? Or perhaps a Reformed Fartism?
Katz, does it bother you that your whole column is dripping with the same sappy sentiment as the opening lines of "The Greatest Love of All" by Whitney Houston?
Funny, but I must have missed that press statement, and you don't link to one here, nor does the opinion column that you linked to.
and that provides an interesting chance to speculate again about the future of a company that had some good technologies, but couldn't respond successfully to challenges from Linux and Windows...
(Cough) FUD (Cough)
Whoever acquires the rights to OpenServer and UnixWare needs to appreciate this fact and admit publicly that there will be no further work, besides bug fixes and sales of the existing versions, on these platforms. Instead, the focus will have to be on an immediate migration path to the next platform, almost definitely Linux. With this admission, the new vendor will certainly cannibalize short-term licensing revenue, but the longer-term benefits of acquiring a chunk of the SCO customer/reseller base will outweigh that (pretty damn small) opportunity loss.
That has got to be one of the dumbest things I have ever read. Everybody here is a little dumber for having read it.
There is one reason, and one reason only, that anybody would want to buy SCO, and that is for their products... specifically, SVR4, UNIXWare, and Tarantella.
Nobody who wants to be YALD (Yet Another Linux Distributer) would have any reason to buy a non-Linux company. A friendly take-over of one of the smaller players (read: not Red Hat) would make a hell of a lot more sense.
As for the loopy idea of buying SCO's customer base... If, as you imply, the Linux and NT vendors are stealing these customers away so easilly that SCO is on its death-bed, how much could those relationships possibly be worth?
osOpinion has an extremely thought provoking editorial piece which expands upon this issue in detail.
No they don't. They have an extremely speculative rant that reminds me of the "Apple is dead" stories that ZDNet used to run every other week a couple years ago.
Linux is very cool, but we gotta tone this kind of zealotry down a little. One bad quarter != a dead company.
Drink when "Open-" is used as a prefix to anything that is not related to software code.
Drink each time he re-uses a word or phrase that he coined in an earlier column.
Drink for each "revolution" or "paradigm shift".
Drink every time young people are "making themselves heard".
That oughta get you tanked.
This whole thread reminds me of that scene in Chasing Amy, where Banky is told that Archie never settled on either Betty or Veronica because he is a "friend of Dorothy".
Actually, it is a very murky example, because I don't see where the "hypocracy" is in this case.
Does he somehow fail to live up to his "fair use" standards in his daily life? Did he recently sue somebody for distributing his IP without permission?
I'm not trying to flame you, I would just like to know what you mean by calling this an example of Hatch being a hypocrite?
I remember his presence as a "talking head" on a lot of the news shows in the early days of the Clinton scandal. He was calmly repeating, over and over, "this is not so bad... a sincere apology would be more than enough for me". After Clinton's famous non-apology on the night of his Grand Jury testimony, you could count the veins behind Hatch's eyes. He was using words like "disapointed" and "inadequate", but you could tell what he really wanted to do was jump up and down shouting "BULLSH?T" at the top of his lungs.
It was also very entertaining when he was in the GOP primary debates. Al Gore would do well to study the video tapes of the verbal flogging that Hatch dispatched against Bush.
I really hate the way he has voted on a few issues (cough DMCA cough), but it's hard not to like his "damn the torpedos" aproach to politics.
She freely admitted that she had been called "so far to the left that she had lost radio contact with the lunatic fringe". I disagreed with her about everything, and had a great time in her class. I respect people that are smart enough to know their own bias.
Many of their stances are quite left of center, others quite far right.
That was the whole point of her joke. The LP is so dogmatic about scaling back governmetn, that they end up champions of a lot of causes that people normally associate with left-wingers, but they are completely inspired by thinkers like Burke, Voltaire, Toqueville, and other guys with french names that are hard to spell. Adam Smith is their Budda.
As for me, I have never been a member of their party, but confronted with a frat-boy Republican that is basically a dumber version of Bill Clinton, a Green schmuck who has made a career out of annoying punditry, a Reform guy who plays on racial fears to court the trailer trash vote, and a Democrat who thinks my pickup truck is more dangerous than an atom bomb and considers himself key to the evolution of the Internet, I may very well vote Libertarian this year.
I saw Harry Browne on PBS the other day, and he struck me as one of the few voices of reason in the entire election, and the only one with a Social Security plan that actually shows where all the money is coming from (sale of Federal assets to cover short term obligations while privatizing the system). He is not so delusional as to think he can win (unlike a certain wing-nut from the Green Party), but knows that he can advance his party's ideals a lot if he can muster up a slightly larger minority than he did 4 years ago.
In college, my hippie Poli Sci prof used to call the Libertarians, "the party so far to the right that they came back around to the left again."
It has been said before, and it still holds: The lottery is a tax on stupidity.
Might as well beat the nit-pickers to it. Oops.
It is not a particularilly well-kept secret that the outcast status of the X-Men has been used by the writers at Marvel to pontificate on a lot of issues, but at its core the X-Men is a deliberately vague and general story about the impact of intollerence. One can easilly find a much more obvious tale of gay-bashing in the classic Alan Moore comic "V for Vendetta".
Fringe groups that usurp popular culture icons annoy me. Remember that missionary group that was trying to use Star Wars to teach fundamentalism in the early 70's? Same thing.
Here in the US, the extremists on the right are the Libertarian Party, and the Constitution Party. Extremists on the left include the Green Party, and visiting Canadians.
Most of the Democrats and Republicans are very mainstream, middle-of-the-road types, who only express rhetoric from one side or the other to rally support away from the minor parties.
(Canadians: Most of you are smart enough to tell that my negative comments about Canada are just jokes. I like Canada. As third-world nations go, it is one of my favorites. To those of you who can't seem to tell when I'm only kidding around: shut up, go back to your igloo, and keep lying to yourself about how much better the beer is up there.)
I think it is a safe bet that sometime next week Jon Katz will be writing another "Hellmouth" type story where he tells us that the X-Men mutants are really computer geeks.
The goal of every conservatice should be to reduce spending. Some Republicans feel the best way to do it is to "starve the beast", by which I mean cut taxes so far that government is then forced to make some hard choices... there's not much pressure to reduce waste when the budget is running surplusses. What you need to keep in mind about modern conservatives (by which I mean fiscal conservatives) is that their agenda is not just less money taken out of your paycheck (although that is part of it), but also to reduce the size of the federal government, which has wrested too much power from the states, cities, and people.
Democrats, on the other hand, are no so much anti-tax cut as they are pro-spending. The honest ones, like Walter Mondale, were willing to admit that all of those nifty federal programs cost money, and that high taxes are needed for them.
For most of his two terms, Bill Clinton has been very moderate and very honest about the books. He has raised taxes a little (we are still way below the pre-Reagan socialistic days), and has introduced a few targeted spending hikes, but he has also signed more Republican budget bills into law than Reagan and Bush combined.
The fact that there is a political scrum over the current budget proposal comes as no suprise. Clinton probably proposed it while knowing it would be rejected, specifically to resurrect the "do nothing congress" label that has worked so well for Clinton/Gore in the past.
The only people who would vote would be those who care enough about their sufferage to not sell.
Unfortunately, I'm not as good of a writer as O'Rourke, so I doubt that any explanation of mine could do justice to how funny the column was. :/
Clinton and Gore are both moderate liberals.
Their opponents in '92 and '96 were Bush the Elder and Bob Dole, both moderate conservatives.
The strongest third-party showing, by a w--i--d--e margin, was Ross Perot, a dead-center moderate who campaigned to reduce the debt in 92 and repeal NAFTA in 96.
The extremes on both sides (Jackson, Forbes, Brown, Buchannan, Quayle, etc.) all got spanked by those who could stand more towards the center.
The result has been meaningless elections between nearly identical candidates full of moderately bad proposals. Playing the center has been the winning strategy since 1988. No presidential candidate has been able to build a nantional coalition of radicals and win since Reagan... and even he needed the "Reagan Democrats" to get elected.
It was a hotel where some Nixon supporters broke into a Democratic Party campaign office.
(A relatively minor crime in the great scheme of things, which Nixon was not involved with. The major scandal was that Nixon tried to cover it up, which surely would have resulted in impeachment had he not resigned.)
It will be interesting to see which side of the debate Michael Robertson speaks up for, since MP3.com has now entered a license-based relationship with the big record companies (as part of the my.mp3.com settlement).
The M$ track is far easier for a newbie to break into. Land a job on a help desk, take the MCSE tests, and you might eventually get to be an admin or maybe an Exchange Server support guy.
That does not change the fact that an old guru can hit the ground running, doing twice the work of a kid right out of school. The youngsters are generally not trusted to lord over mission-critical systems, and you usually need to invest time and money into getting them up to speed.
A paper MCSE or even *n?x CS grad with no experience will take a couple months to figure out your system, and will get a much higher offer from somebody else within a year or two.
Old-school gurus are already getting near the top range of their salary, so they will stay put until they are ready to be a consultant or retire, as long as you keep them happy. They won't leave a good job for just another couple grand a year. Also, they will have seen it all before and will be able to take control of the project right away.