It is all about the applications
on
Gnome 2.0 RC1
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· Score: 1
It is all about the applications. Give me choice. I rate the chances of survival of an open source program that only provides binaries for an awkward Gnome configuration very very low indeed (some users are lazy like me, others have neither the time nor ability to figure how to use new software let alone a whole new operating system or having to compile and/or install their own software). Cross platform closed source proprietary program with a reasonabley sized userbase has more market share giving it potential to adapt and survive.
If developers really value market share they will develop applications that are either use a portable toolkit (pure gtk/qt) or program in cross platform way. You may not like Windows and certainly it may not be your choice of operating systems but what is your primary motivation, do you want people to use your application or your operating system? Dont underestimate the importance of being able to try out software like the Gimp, StarOffice, Mozilla, Abiword, without the need to install a whole new operating system.
Many Gtk projects understand this and provide a basic solid working gtk only version with easy to install statically compiled binaries for a variety of common systems that let the user get the job done. And the projects that really want to promote Gnome also provide a lovely Gnome or Gnome 2 version with lots of nice addons and extra polish to give users as many incentives as possible to use the Gnome Desktop.
I guess the core arguement i am making that - irrespective of whether the source code is available or not - a larger more diverse developer/stakeholder/userbase/ecosystem the better a projects chance of not just surviving but flourishing.
i can see the resemblance but the problem is the mac does have a toolbar and menus (just not in the main window)
and "once you get the hang of it" does not mean it is even easy to use or remotely likely to meet the reasonable expectations of an ordinary desktop user.
emacs is easy to use "once you get the hang of it":)
the full story for those who dont want to register
David Bowie, 21st-Century Entrepreneur By JON PARELES
IN a Manhattan rehearsal studio, Gerry Leonard seemed to be noodling on his guitar as the rest of David Bowie's band waited. He played some sustained notes and a bit of minor-key arpeggio; he worked his effects pedals, adding echoes. A digital stutter entered the pattern, and suddenly the music gelled into "Sunday," the song that opens Mr. Bowie's new album, "Heathen," which will be released on Tuesday.
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Chords from a phantom chorus wafted from a keyboard, and Mr. Bowie intoned: "It's the beginning of an end, and nothing has changed. Everything has changed."
Mr. Bowie sang somberly about searching for signs of life, about fear and hope. At the end of the song, he shivered like someone coming out of a trance. "Ahhh," he said and grinned. "Good morning!" It was just after 11 a.m. and Mr. Bowie, 55, had already worked out at the gym and given an extended interview before starting the day's rehearsal for his summer tour.
Lean and affable, he was wearing a skintight gray T-shirt and stylishly understated gray pants. His gaze, with different-colored eyes because of a childhood accident that paralyzed his left pupil, has grown less disconcerting; he laughs easily. When asked what he considered the central point of his work, he said, "I write about misery" and chuckled.
Visions of cataclysm and professional aplomb: that's Mr. Bowie's life in his fourth decade as a rock star. One of rock's most astute conceptualists since the 1960's, he has toyed with the possibilities of his star persona, turned concerts into theater and fashion spectacles, and periodically recharged his songs with punk, electronics and dance rhythms. Now he has emerged as one of rock's smartest entrepreneurs.
"Heathen" is the first album from Mr. Bowie's own recording company, Iso, which has major-label distribution through Sony. In 1997, he sold $55 million of Bowie Bonds backed by his song royalties; the next year, he founded the technology company Ultrastar and his own Internet service provider-cum-fan club, Bowienet (davidbowie.com). In a nod to his art-school background, his bowieart.com sells promising students' work without the high commissions of terrestrial galleries.
His deal with Sony is a short-term one while he gets his label started and watches the Internet's effect on careers. "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way," he said. "The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."
"Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity," he added. "So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen."
With his wife, Iman, he has a 22-month-old daughter, Alexandria, for whom he's keeping to a minimum his time away from home in Manhattan. When Mr. Bowie signed on as a headliner for Moby's Area:Two tour this summer, he made sure the schedule allowed him to return home between each of the six East Coast dates. He is also organizing, and performing at, Meltdown, a contemporary music, film and visual arts festival in London. (One songwriter he booked is Norman Carl Odam, known as the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, from whom he took Ziggy Stardust's last name in the 1970's; on "Heathen," he sings the Cowboy's "Gemini Spacecraft," about an astronaut obsessed with a girl he left behind.)
Mr. Bowie no longer expects to compete with performers in their 20's. "I'm well past the age where I'm acceptable," he said. "You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you're not going to get played on radio and you're not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth."
HIS fans among musicians, including Moby and Nine Inch Nails, have toured with Mr. Bowie, introducing him to a younger generation.
Back in 1990, Mr. Bowie tried to jettison his past. He billed an arena tour as the last time he would play his old hits. "I really did think I meant that," he said. "I got quite a way into the 90's before I started thinking, `Well, if you want an audience, David, you may want to consider putting some songs into your sets that they've actually heard.' Yes, I know, I went back on my word completely and absolutely."
He's now more comfortable riffling through his huge body of work. This week, the Museum of Television and Radio, in New York and Los Angeles, opened "Sound + Vision," a retrospective of Mr. Bowie on video that continues through Sept. 15. A restored version of "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars," the D. A. Pennebaker documentary of the 1972 tour that defined glam-rock, will be released on July 10.
"Heathen" was produced by Tony Visconti, who last collaborated with Mr. Bowie on his 1980 album, "Scary Monsters." He worked on most of Mr. Bowie's 1970's albums, including the celebrated Berlin trilogy of "Low," " `
On "Heathen," Mr. Bowie knowingly hints at his past. He echoes the song " `Heroes' " in "Slow Burn," which wonders, "Who are we in times such as these?" He revives analog keyboard sounds like that of the Stylophone, a miniature electric organ played with a stylus that was heard on "Space Oddity" in 1969 and reappears in the new "Slip Away." When Mr. Bowie starts his tour with a show for fan-club members at Roseland on Tuesday, he plans to play all 12 songs on "Heathen," followed by all of "Low." Hearing the music 25 years later "makes the hairs on my arm stand up," he said.
To make "Low," Mr. Bowie recalled: "I had brought the idea of having fundamentally an R & B rhythm section working against this new zeitgeist of electronic ambience that was happening in Germany. It was terribly exciting to know that one had stumbled across something which was truly innovative.
"At that time, I was vacillating badly between euphoria and incredible depression. Berlin was at that time not the most beautiful city of the world, and my mental condition certainly matched it. I was abusing myself so badly. My subtext to the whole thing is that I'm so desperately unhappy, but I've got to pull through because I can't keep living like this. There's actually a real optimism about the music. In its poignancy there is, shining through under there somewhere, the feeling that it will be all right."
Drug problems are long behind him, Mr. Bowie said. He now hesitates to take even an Advil because. "I have such an addictive personality," he said.
Making "Heathen," he and Mr. Visconti were leery of nostalgia. "One thing we haven't tried to be is cutting edge," Mr. Bowie said. "The other thing we've tried not to do is to delve too far into the past and rely on our known strengths, our known previous work. We do know, between us, how to landscape a song and give it a real place, an identity and a character. I guess that's the vestiges of the more theatrical things."
The album starts with "Sunday" and ends with its title song, both hushed and haunted by mortality. In "Heathen," Mr. Bowie sings, "Still on the skyline, sky made of glass/ Made for a real world, all things must pass." The album was written before Sept. 11, however, and the songs join a long line of Mr. Bowie's apocalyptic scenarios.
"I hope that a writer does have these antennae that pick up on low-level anxiety and all those Don DeLillo resonances within our culture," he said. "But I don't want to say that it was in any way trying to suggest that it was going to happen. It's not like it's something new to me. These are all personal crises, I'm sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It's as simple as that."
Between his own ruminations, he borrows "Gemini Spacecraft," the Pixies' "Cactus" and Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting for You"; in songs like "Afraid" and "I Would Be Your Slave," he sings about love, insecurity and transience.
"I tried to make a checklist of what exactly the album is about and abandonment was in there, isolation," he said. "And I thought, well, nothing's changed much. At 55, I don't really think it's going to change very much. As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I've got left?
"When it's taken that nakedly, these are my subjects. And it's like, well, how many times can you do this? And I tell myself, actually, over and over again. The problem would be if I was too self-confident and actually came up with resolutions for these questions. But I think they're such huge unanswerable questions that it's just me posing them, again and again."
it was not too difficult to work out that HA stood for High Availability in the context of clusters with a little help from Google but really should the reader have to figure it out? it is really dissapointing that Cliff did not expand the acronym or add any relevant links. If it is news, "News for Nerds" then why dont they at least try and do some journalism.
What i found most interesting about the article was this comment:
"Sun also has its own word processing and office suite, called Star Office, which it has begun selling, instead of it giving away, in a sign of maturity for the Microsoft Office rival."
For those who still doubt, this is why charging for Star Office is such a good idea (just so long as we still have OpenOffice.org for free that is). It is amazing that the journalist has this attitude that it is better purely because they are now charging for it, but it goes to show what you can expect from the Pointy Haired Bosses.
Bit for bit copying. Most "copy protection" systems particularly DeCSS have no effect on bit for bit copying. These systems are not about preventing large scale piracy, they are about making it too inconvenient for the casual user to make a copy for his friends and in the process it prevents me from making backup copies or a spare copy for the car.
Copyright law, and actually getting local government and law enforcement to enforce it are what is needed to prevent industrial scale copying.
Region locking of DVDs is just shameless price gouging, it is an artificial restriction of supply to maximise profits, plain and simple.
I dont have a problem with creator making use of Copyright, what i have a problem with is that 70 years after the creator is dead and buried Disney that has borrowed so much from the public domain refuses to let anything out.
You seem to think market forces are all that keeps up the price of CDs, but market forces are restricted. Buy CDs at the price the record industry Cartel has set or not at all. The record industry prefers to make a big profit on its sales than take the chance that selling cheaper will give them greater sails and a bigger overall profit.
Music is given away for free on the radio! it actually serves as advertising for concerts and album sales. If i like a few songs from a band i will often buy the album and rip it to mp3 to listen to from my computer.
Progress. the world changes, businesses need to change with it and find new ways to earn money. no one cares about the buggy whip manufacturers who were put out of business by the automobile.
To bring this back on topic. programmers could paid to write the code and release it freely under the GPL then they have to go off and try and find new problems to solve, more code to write, or improve existing code. Similarly the entertainment industry should the opportunity to get paid for their work for a limited time and then have to go off and come up with something new.
ive made my points, im not going to argue every last minute detail. :wq
Im reffering to misguided attempts to maximise profits and gouge the public by inflicting copy prevention technology. Im talking about attempts to use and abuse legislation to enforce riduculously long copyright terms. Im talking about the over inflated price of CDs, the abject failure of the mainstream music industry to adapt to MP3s and the internet.
The entertainment industry needs to overhaul its business model, i dont believe the middle men of the entertainment industry deserve to take the lions share of the profit rather than the artists/creators. Expecting to continue to make the kind of profit margins for distributing music is what im saying is unrealistic and invalid.
And if the MPAA and RIAA were not so overbearing and restrictive in their exploitation of the entertainemnt industry they would be forced to find a new source of revenue. A job is not for life, invalid business models (unlike social services) have no right to protection. You have to keep learning, training and adapting. Some businesses fail (Enron) it is harsh but that's life.
If it is the entertainment industry it is not something most slashdotters would seem to have a problem with but when applied to the Technology industry suddenly people can relate.
RMS cares about propping up what he sees as the invalid software as property business model as much as most slashdotters care about propping up the entertainment industry.
Zhenlei Cai, for his project, Discovery and Grouping of Semantic Concepts from Web Pages with Applications. This effort processed a corpus of documents and found words and phrases that tend to co-occur within the same document, producing a list of pairs of terms that seem to be closely related (such as "federal law" and "supreme court", or "Bay Area" and "San Francisco").
Use copyright to maintain name recognition
on
Debian And WineX
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· Score: 1
MPlayer is now apperently legit, GPL compliant.
The way i see it Transgaming should simple use their copyright on the name WineX and insist that the CVS version be packaged as something else under a different name.
The beauty of the GPL is that you can use the software as much as you like and the license does not matter. If you dont want to agree to the GPL then you are still given all your standard entitlements under normal Copyright.
Only when you want to distribute the software or its source does the GPL come into play.
I admire Richard Stallmans idealism. I amdire Linus pragmatism, the right tool for the right job.
US box office takings dont mean much, Spider-Man opened on more screens than Star Wars did because of Lucas going all digital and only allowing approved cinemas to show Attack of the Clones. Star Wars opened worldwide at about the same time, Spider-man opens about 2 months later in Europe. If you are going to be crass and look at the money earned as an indication of a good movie then at least give it a few weeks.
Spider-Man but it is just as much an hyped Hollywood blockbuster as Star Wars, and people going to see Star Wars does not preclude them from also seeing Spider-Man. This is not a revolution, it moving forward in the same direction.
All star wars fans know the dialog Lucas writes is total ass, and the stories are hokey and cheesy but enjoyable at best and annoying and cringe inducing (Yippee! Jar Jar, etc). Attack just does not really have the same mythical quality the original star wars.
Spider-Man is not a sequal its new and fresh. lets see if they can manage not to bastardise the franchise like Joel Schumaker did to Batman. Spider-Man has Kirsten Dunst in it. Spider-Man is a movie you might actually be able to convince a non geek girlfriend to go to.
As a comparison between SpiderMan and Attack of the clones this might have been an interesting article if Katz had not felt the need to make a grandiose bulshit statement in the first paragraph.
I am quite surprised that neither mozillazine nor mozillanews have done a story on mb (mozilla/browser) yet, i saw in one the developers blogs (cannot remeber which maybe mpt). There is not much information to be found about it yet, it does not help that google returned mozilla-browser even when i used the advanced search to specify exact phrase *sigh*.
for those who dont know Mozilla/Browser aka mb is the new browser only Mozilla project with a slightly differnt interface (i dont know the details i have not actually used it myself)
Here is a relevant link from Blogzilla, a blog about Mozilla: http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/archives/mozill ab rowser_download.html#comments
Re:Something interesting about Moz on Windows XP
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
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· Score: 3, Informative
> I love Mozilla to no end... I'd just like a native version. (See Internet Explorer, OmniWeb, Lynx, etc
I read that sentence it is a bit misleading, if you want a "native mozilla" rather than just a native browser check out the following gecko based browsers (gecko, the mozilla rendering engine).
For windows Try K-meleon k-meleon.sf.net windows look and feel, gecko rendering engine
For Mac see Fizilla: or, for the boring, "Mozilla for MacOS X" http://www.mozilla.org/ports/fizzilla/
This page is quite informative http://www.mozilla.org/projects/distr os.html http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding /examples / ndex.html
You really should report this to bugzilla http://bugzila.mozilla.org
Some sites have made their pop up/under advertisements even more evil and force you to click on a combination link so that to get the page you want you are forced to display both pages. Other sites use timer mechanisms and other tricks to display the page.
Be under no illusion this is an arms race. Advertisers and unscrupulous page designers will conitinue to abuse browser functionality and ram every nasty dirty trick down your thoat and Mozilla
will continue to adapt (and some days you just really gotta appreciate lynx).
I posted the wise words of Gord too (just before you did i think). I dont have 50 Karma. I could really do without being marked down as redundant and having my meagre karma further decimated.
Here is a website debunking the notion that console makers have been selling below cost for years.
Acts of Gord - Legend Vs the myths http://www.actsofgord.com/Proclamations/cha pter02. html
What is particularly intersting to me was that as a Hardware manufacturer Sony can effectively write off the chip developement costs as work they were going to have to do anyway, and it is a great way for them to sell CD players too.
Get them used to the software and then the Operating System is less of an issue. Definately get StarOffice (or OpenOffice.org if it is appropriate for your needs) and Mozilla/Netscape or possibly Opera. The Gimp is also available for windows. If you have any users who actually use command line applications Cygwin is a great program and allows you to familiarise yourself with a unix enviroment without having to learn the whole system at once.
This slashdot article may be helpful Using Windows w/ 100% Open-Source Software? http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/0 7/07/194227 &mode=nested
This is why i love cross platform software.
Samba and Apache are a good way to save costs and reliable software, if your office has need for Network filestorage and a good webserver (you could run them of your Sun machine perhaps).
When you do install Linux make sure to install an up to date version of Wine and set up a few links so that they can run still run Minesweeper/Solitare and even MS Office in the unlikely event that StarOffice has a problem.
Moderators, this post is not Redundant, it is just reemphasizing a really good point.
Slashdot Mirror
It is all about the applications. Give me choice. I rate the chances of survival of an open source program that only provides binaries for an awkward Gnome configuration very very low indeed (some users are lazy like me, others have neither the time nor ability to figure how to use new software let alone a whole new operating system or having to compile and/or install their own software). Cross platform closed source proprietary program with a reasonabley sized userbase has more market share giving it potential to adapt and survive.
If developers really value market share they will develop applications that are either use a portable toolkit (pure gtk/qt) or program in cross platform way. You may not like Windows and certainly it may not be your choice of operating systems but what is your primary motivation, do you want people to use your application or your operating system?
Dont underestimate the importance of being able to try out software like the Gimp, StarOffice, Mozilla, Abiword, without the need to install a whole new operating system.
Many Gtk projects understand this and provide a basic solid working gtk only version with easy to install statically compiled binaries for a variety of common systems that let the user get the job done. And the projects that really want to promote Gnome also provide a lovely Gnome or Gnome 2 version with lots of nice addons and extra polish to give users as many incentives as possible to use the Gnome Desktop.
I guess the core arguement i am making that - irrespective of whether the source code is available or not - a larger more diverse developer/stakeholder/userbase/ecosystem the better a projects chance of not just surviving but flourishing.
i can see the resemblance but the problem is the mac does have a toolbar and menus (just not in the main window)
:)
and "once you get the hang of it" does not mean it is even easy to use or remotely likely to meet the reasonable expectations of an ordinary desktop user.
emacs is easy to use "once you get the hang of it"
> Hope they ditch the horrid GUI though
r ap hics/composite.jpg
The GUI is written in QT so it is quite possible that he is just using a very dark unflattering theme.
They could probably benefit from a more convential interface and include Menus and keyboard shortcuts (i cannot see any from the screenshots).
iFrames on the website cramped layout, no Menus in the program. Definately a project that would benefit from a some usuabilty analyis.
http://jahshakafx.sourceforge.net/screenshots/g
the full story for those who dont want to register
David Bowie, 21st-Century Entrepreneur
By JON PARELES
IN a Manhattan rehearsal studio, Gerry Leonard seemed to be noodling on his guitar as the rest of David Bowie's band waited. He played some sustained notes and a bit of minor-key arpeggio; he worked his effects pedals, adding echoes. A digital stutter entered the pattern, and suddenly the music gelled into "Sunday," the song that opens Mr. Bowie's new album, "Heathen," which will be released on Tuesday.
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Chords from a phantom chorus wafted from a keyboard, and Mr. Bowie intoned: "It's the beginning of an end, and nothing has changed. Everything has changed."
Mr. Bowie sang somberly about searching for signs of life, about fear and hope. At the end of the song, he shivered like someone coming out of a trance. "Ahhh," he said and grinned. "Good morning!" It was just after 11 a.m. and Mr. Bowie, 55, had already worked out at the gym and given an extended interview before starting the day's rehearsal for his summer tour.
Lean and affable, he was wearing a skintight gray T-shirt and stylishly understated gray pants. His gaze, with different-colored eyes because of a childhood accident that paralyzed his left pupil, has grown less disconcerting; he laughs easily. When asked what he considered the central point of his work, he said, "I write about misery" and chuckled.
Visions of cataclysm and professional aplomb: that's Mr. Bowie's life in his fourth decade as a rock star. One of rock's most astute conceptualists since the 1960's, he has toyed with the possibilities of his star persona, turned concerts into theater and fashion spectacles, and periodically recharged his songs with punk, electronics and dance rhythms. Now he has emerged as one of rock's smartest entrepreneurs.
"Heathen" is the first album from Mr. Bowie's own recording company, Iso, which has major-label distribution through Sony. In 1997, he sold $55 million of Bowie Bonds backed by his song royalties; the next year, he founded the technology company Ultrastar and his own Internet service provider-cum-fan club, Bowienet (davidbowie.com). In a nod to his art-school background, his bowieart.com sells promising students' work without the high commissions of terrestrial galleries.
His deal with Sony is a short-term one while he gets his label started and watches the Internet's effect on careers. "I don't even know why I would want to be on a label in a few years, because I don't think it's going to work by labels and by distribution systems in the same way," he said. "The absolute transformation of everything that we ever thought about music will take place within 10 years, and nothing is going to be able to stop it. I see absolutely no point in pretending that it's not going to happen. I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing."
"Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity," he added. "So it's like, just take advantage of these last few years because none of this is ever going to happen again. You'd better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that's really the only unique situation that's going to be left. It's terribly exciting. But on the other hand it doesn't matter if you think it's exciting or not; it's what's going to happen."
With his wife, Iman, he has a 22-month-old daughter, Alexandria, for whom he's keeping to a minimum his time away from home in Manhattan. When Mr. Bowie signed on as a headliner for Moby's Area:Two tour this summer, he made sure the schedule allowed him to return home between each of the six East Coast dates. He is also organizing, and performing at, Meltdown, a contemporary music, film and visual arts festival in London. (One songwriter he booked is Norman Carl Odam, known as the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, from whom he took Ziggy Stardust's last name in the 1970's; on "Heathen," he sings the Cowboy's "Gemini Spacecraft," about an astronaut obsessed with a girl he left behind.)
Mr. Bowie no longer expects to compete with performers in their 20's. "I'm well past the age where I'm acceptable," he said. "You get to a certain age and you are forbidden access. You're not going to get the kind of coverage that you would like in music magazines, you're not going to get played on radio and you're not going to get played on television. I have to survive on word of mouth."
HIS fans among musicians, including Moby and Nine Inch Nails, have toured with Mr. Bowie, introducing him to a younger generation.
Back in 1990, Mr. Bowie tried to jettison his past. He billed an arena tour as the last time he would play his old hits. "I really did think I meant that," he said. "I got quite a way into the 90's before I started thinking, `Well, if you want an audience, David, you may want to consider putting some songs into your sets that they've actually heard.' Yes, I know, I went back on my word completely and absolutely."
He's now more comfortable riffling through his huge body of work. This week, the Museum of Television and Radio, in New York and Los Angeles, opened "Sound + Vision," a retrospective of Mr. Bowie on video that continues through Sept. 15. A restored version of "Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars," the D. A. Pennebaker documentary of the 1972 tour that defined glam-rock, will be released on July 10.
"Heathen" was produced by Tony Visconti, who last collaborated with Mr. Bowie on his 1980 album, "Scary Monsters." He worked on most of Mr. Bowie's 1970's albums, including the celebrated Berlin trilogy of "Low," " `
On "Heathen," Mr. Bowie knowingly hints at his past. He echoes the song " `Heroes' " in "Slow Burn," which wonders, "Who are we in times such as these?" He revives analog keyboard sounds like that of the Stylophone, a miniature electric organ played with a stylus that was heard on "Space Oddity" in 1969 and reappears in the new "Slip Away." When Mr. Bowie starts his tour with a show for fan-club members at Roseland on Tuesday, he plans to play all 12 songs on "Heathen," followed by all of "Low." Hearing the music 25 years later "makes the hairs on my arm stand up," he said.
To make "Low," Mr. Bowie recalled: "I had brought the idea of having fundamentally an R & B rhythm section working against this new zeitgeist of electronic ambience that was happening in Germany. It was terribly exciting to know that one had stumbled across something which was truly innovative.
"At that time, I was vacillating badly between euphoria and incredible depression. Berlin was at that time not the most beautiful city of the world, and my mental condition certainly matched it. I was abusing myself so badly. My subtext to the whole thing is that I'm so desperately unhappy, but I've got to pull through because I can't keep living like this. There's actually a real optimism about the music. In its poignancy there is, shining through under there somewhere, the feeling that it will be all right."
Drug problems are long behind him, Mr. Bowie said. He now hesitates to take even an Advil because. "I have such an addictive personality," he said.
Making "Heathen," he and Mr. Visconti were leery of nostalgia. "One thing we haven't tried to be is cutting edge," Mr. Bowie said. "The other thing we've tried not to do is to delve too far into the past and rely on our known strengths, our known previous work. We do know, between us, how to landscape a song and give it a real place, an identity and a character. I guess that's the vestiges of the more theatrical things."
The album starts with "Sunday" and ends with its title song, both hushed and haunted by mortality. In "Heathen," Mr. Bowie sings, "Still on the skyline, sky made of glass/ Made for a real world, all things must pass." The album was written before Sept. 11, however, and the songs join a long line of Mr. Bowie's apocalyptic scenarios.
"I hope that a writer does have these antennae that pick up on low-level anxiety and all those Don DeLillo resonances within our culture," he said. "But I don't want to say that it was in any way trying to suggest that it was going to happen. It's not like it's something new to me. These are all personal crises, I'm sure, that I manifest in a song format and project into physical situations. You make little stories up about how you feel. It's as simple as that."
Between his own ruminations, he borrows "Gemini Spacecraft," the Pixies' "Cactus" and Neil Young's "I've Been Waiting for You"; in songs like "Afraid" and "I Would Be Your Slave," he sings about love, insecurity and transience.
"I tried to make a checklist of what exactly the album is about and abandonment was in there, isolation," he said. "And I thought, well, nothing's changed much. At 55, I don't really think it's going to change very much. As you get older, the questions come down to about two or three. How long? And what do I do with the time I've got left?
"When it's taken that nakedly, these are my subjects. And it's like, well, how many times can you do this? And I tell myself, actually, over and over again. The problem would be if I was too self-confident and actually came up with resolutions for these questions. But I think they're such huge unanswerable questions that it's just me posing them, again and again."
Registering sucks
thanks
thank you for the explanation
it was not too difficult to work out that HA stood for High Availability in the context of clusters with a little help from Google but really should the reader have to figure it out? it is really dissapointing that Cliff did not expand the acronym or add any relevant links.
If it is news, "News for Nerds" then why dont they at least try and do some journalism.
Karma be damned, not using AC this time.
What i found most interesting about the article was this comment:
"Sun also has its own word processing and office suite, called Star Office, which it has begun selling, instead of it giving away, in a sign of maturity for the Microsoft Office rival."
For those who still doubt, this is why charging for Star Office is such a good idea (just so long as we still have OpenOffice.org for free that is).
It is amazing that the journalist has this attitude that it is better purely because they are now charging for it, but it goes to show what you can expect from the Pointy Haired Bosses.
Bit for bit copying.
Most "copy protection" systems particularly DeCSS have no effect on bit for bit copying. These systems are not about preventing large scale piracy, they are about making it too inconvenient for the casual user to make a copy for his friends and in the process it prevents me from making backup copies or a spare copy for the car.
Copyright law, and actually getting local government and law enforcement to enforce it are
what is needed to prevent industrial scale copying.
Region locking of DVDs is just shameless price gouging, it is an artificial restriction of supply to maximise profits, plain and simple.
I dont have a problem with creator making use of Copyright, what i have a problem with is that 70 years after the creator is dead and buried Disney that has borrowed so much from the public domain refuses to let anything out.
You seem to think market forces are all that keeps up the price of CDs, but market forces are restricted. Buy CDs at the price the record industry Cartel has set or not at all. The record industry prefers to make a big profit on its sales than take the chance that selling cheaper will give them greater sails and a bigger overall profit.
Music is given away for free on the radio! it actually serves as advertising for concerts and album sales.
If i like a few songs from a band i will often buy the album and rip it to mp3 to listen to from my computer.
Progress. the world changes, businesses need to change with it and find new ways to earn money. no one cares about the buggy whip manufacturers who were put out of business by the automobile.
To bring this back on topic. programmers could paid to write the code and release it freely under the GPL then they have to go off and try and find new problems to solve, more code to write, or improve existing code.
Similarly the entertainment industry should the opportunity to get paid for their work for a limited time and then have to go off and come up with something new.
ive made my points, im not going to argue every last minute detail.
:wq
Im reffering to misguided attempts to maximise profits and gouge the public by inflicting copy prevention technology.
Im talking about attempts to use and abuse legislation to enforce riduculously long copyright terms.
Im talking about the over inflated price of CDs, the abject failure of the mainstream music industry to adapt to MP3s and the internet.
The entertainment industry needs to overhaul its business model, i dont believe the middle men of the entertainment industry deserve to take the lions share of the profit rather than the artists/creators. Expecting to continue to make the kind of profit margins for distributing music is what im saying is unrealistic and invalid.
And if the MPAA and RIAA were not so overbearing and restrictive in their exploitation of the entertainemnt industry they would be forced to find a new source of revenue. A job is not for life, invalid business models (unlike social services) have no right to protection. You have to keep learning, training and adapting. Some businesses fail (Enron) it is harsh but that's life.
If it is the entertainment industry it is not something most slashdotters would seem to have a problem with but when applied to the Technology industry suddenly people can relate.
RMS cares about propping up what he sees as the invalid software as property business model as much as most slashdotters care about propping up the entertainment industry.
sounds a lot like Google sets
Robust Hyperlinks has to be my favourite.
MPlayer is now apperently legit, GPL compliant.
The way i see it Transgaming should simple use their copyright on the name WineX and insist that the CVS version be packaged as something else under a different name.
How about "VinegarX"
:P
The beauty of the GPL is that you can use the software as much as you like and the license does not matter. If you dont want to agree to the GPL then you are still given all your standard entitlements under normal Copyright.
Only when you want to distribute the software or its source does the GPL come into play.
I admire Richard Stallmans idealism.
I amdire Linus pragmatism, the right tool for the right job.
US box office takings dont mean much, Spider-Man opened on more screens than Star Wars did because of Lucas going all digital and only allowing approved cinemas to show Attack of the Clones. Star Wars opened worldwide at about the same time, Spider-man opens about 2 months later in Europe. If you are going to be crass and look at the money earned as an indication of a good movie then at least give it a few weeks.
Spider-Man but it is just as much an hyped Hollywood blockbuster as Star Wars, and people going to see Star Wars does not preclude them from also seeing Spider-Man. This is not a revolution, it moving forward in the same direction.
All star wars fans know the dialog Lucas writes is total ass, and the stories are hokey and cheesy but enjoyable at best and annoying and cringe inducing (Yippee! Jar Jar, etc). Attack just does not really have the same mythical quality the original star wars.
Spider-Man is not a sequal its new and fresh. lets see if they can manage not to bastardise the franchise like Joel Schumaker did to Batman. Spider-Man has Kirsten Dunst in it. Spider-Man is a movie you might actually be able to convince a non geek girlfriend to go to.
As a comparison between SpiderMan and Attack of the clones this might have been an interesting article if Katz had not felt the need to make a grandiose bulshit statement in the first paragraph.
I am quite surprised that neither mozillazine nor mozillanews have done a story on mb (mozilla/browser) yet, i saw in one the developers blogs (cannot remeber which maybe mpt). There is not much information to be found about it yet, it does not help that google returned mozilla-browser even when i used the advanced search to specify exact phrase *sigh*.
l ab rowser_download.html#comments
for those who dont know Mozilla/Browser aka mb
is the new browser only Mozilla project with a slightly differnt interface (i dont know the details i have not actually used it myself)
Here is a relevant link from Blogzilla, a blog about Mozilla:
http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/archives/mozil
> I love Mozilla to no end... I'd just like a native version. (See Internet Explorer, OmniWeb, Lynx, etc
r os.htmlg /examples / ndex.html
I read that sentence it is a bit misleading, if you want a "native mozilla" rather than just a native browser check out the following gecko based browsers (gecko, the mozilla rendering engine).
For windows Try K-meleon
k-meleon.sf.net
windows look and feel, gecko rendering engine
For Mac see Fizilla: or, for the boring, "Mozilla for MacOS X"
http://www.mozilla.org/ports/fizzilla/
This page is quite informative
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/dist
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embeddin
You really should report this to bugzilla
http://bugzila.mozilla.org
Some sites have made their pop up/under advertisements even more evil and force you to click on a combination link so that to get the page you want you are forced to display both pages.
Other sites use timer mechanisms and other tricks to display the page.
Be under no illusion this is an arms race. Advertisers and unscrupulous page designers will conitinue to abuse browser functionality and ram every nasty dirty trick down your thoat and Mozilla
will continue to adapt (and some days you just really gotta appreciate lynx).
I posted the wise words of Gord too (just before you did i think).
5 51 274
I dont have 50 Karma.
I could really do without being marked down as redundant and having my meagre karma further decimated.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=32900&cid=3
Here is a website debunking the notion that console makers have been selling below cost for years.
a pter02. html
Acts of Gord - Legend Vs the myths
http://www.actsofgord.com/Proclamations/ch
What is particularly intersting to me was that as a Hardware manufacturer Sony can effectively write off the chip developement costs as work they were going to have to do anyway, and it is a great way for them to sell CD players too.
> Next week may involve repotting plants I think, and trying to work out why one of my spiderplants is dying.
...
I wonder if he has any ulterior motives for having spider plants
:)
(RMS allegedly has a phobia of spider plants
http://www.geocities.com/stallmanus/ )
When a coporation fakes public support it is its called Astro turfing.
I love that expression.
Get them used to the software and then the Operating System is less of an issue. Definately get StarOffice (or OpenOffice.org if it is appropriate for your needs) and Mozilla/Netscape or possibly Opera. The Gimp is also available for windows.
0 7/07/194227 &mode=nested
If you have any users who actually use command line applications Cygwin is a great program and allows you to familiarise yourself with a unix enviroment without having to learn the whole system at once.
This slashdot article may be helpful
Using Windows w/ 100% Open-Source Software?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/
This is why i love cross platform software.
Samba and Apache are a good way to save costs and reliable software, if your office has need for Network filestorage and a good webserver (you could run them of your Sun machine perhaps).
When you do install Linux make sure to install an up to date version of Wine and set up a few links so that they can run still run Minesweeper/Solitare and even MS Office in the unlikely event that StarOffice has a problem.
Moderators, this post is not Redundant, it is just reemphasizing a really good point.
> Hong Kong of the Star Wars universe.
Chinese takeaway anyone?
Hong Kong is not free by a long shot. (British rule only became less restrictive when they knew they were going to lose Hong Kong).
> Palpatine is a dictator--but a relatively benign one, like Pinochet.
Satire or gross stupidity are the only things in my mind that can explain this statement
A search for Pinochet in google and topping the list is a site critical of Pinochet, debunking myths of his supporters.
http://www.lakota.clara.net/
A site about Pinochets crimes
http://www.trentu.ca/~mneumann/pinochet.h
A benovelent dictator is a very rare thing.
> "Practical OO Programming In Binary"
intersting book title, but it would get called POOP for short