You might want to take on the book banners,
the 'the freedom of speech is for anyone who agrees with MY point of view' types within the liberal community and the 'I don't care what it says about the people, ban inanimate objects' types.
Alot of this freedom of speech stuff tends to vanish when you get folks outside the cultural norm of the group in question. Doesn't matter what the cultural norm is, and it tends to be amplified by folks with lack of experience as a cultural minority.
Living overseas, even just for a summer, in a place where you just cannot get your MTV and your Dew or Jolt, and you have to make do with what the locals do is educational, if you can get over being an ugly american.
That being said, there are times when you do not blow off the conditions you see because "that's how they do things there". But you got to REALLY understand what the folks are about.
It is one thing to go after MS because of shoddy coding technique, and quite another to go after them as a personality cult.
I can recall arguments that I had with folks where the other person destroyed every objection I made and proved convincingly that I was wrong in every respect, and therefore I had to believe what he said and agree with him. And all it did was leave me completely unconvinced and alienated from him. It took me weeks to spot the flaws in the argument. And it never made a friend or convinced me in any way.
The Big Stick method of debate is maybe a way to grab power, but ultimately it only makes more enemies. Which is not convenient when you can't kill them off utterly. Unfortunately, many in politics like to practice some version of the big stick method. Changing individual minds is much more difficult.
It is better done through other techniques, such as artisitic expression, because this forces people to think. A two edged sword if there ever was one.
There was a show on Pbs a few years back about the research of an Australian Music Professor who developed an interesting theory on the function of basic melodic shapes vs emotion. He tested the theory by verififying the curves with Aboriginies. Without the name of the professor or the school in advance, I have never been able to find it online.
NetSlaves has something similar called the Geek Dating Manifesto, which is less in the for of a classic how-to, and more of the form of a chat with someone who has been there. One point is that it hits on the typical reasonable sounding illogic that geeks often bring to dating.
However, it doesn't have the pedigree of the Raymond peice. A quick sample:
This is the logic of "geekboy dating":
+ Want someone
+ Can't get them immediately (at all)
+ Declare that you don't want them after all
+ Repeat
If that reads like shampoo instructions, you're getting the picture. If you think that's normal or healthy, you're missing the point.
The Langley Research Center announced this week an agreement to use one of the computers, known as HAL (Hyper Algorithmic Logic)-15. Other customers that will use HAL-15 machines include the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the Department of Defense and Hollywood film companies.
"But Dave, I don't like Hollywood.......Dave? Aren't they just asking for trouble here?
I don't know about you, but I sure as heck hope that this bit is someone's April Fool's joke that launched a little early.
Let me look at this. The idea of regulating ISPs etc presents the possibilities for certain legal precedants
Question: under the.NET program, would Microsoft be an ISP and/or similar service provider?
If MS becomes wildly successful with the.NET initive, and if it is a monopoly as ruled in court, does this legal action open the door to the government takeover of Microsoft down the road, in the Public interest, since they are a monopoly, since they will have made themselves essential to the welfare of America?
[Insert Fantasy sequence] And further, under such a take over, could they regulate the quality of code? such as making it some sort of criminal offense to write code with an excessive number of bugs. - think of it - microsoft code being reviewed and managed like they do it for the Space Shuttle. (see original story here.)
Just maybe. As reported here and here on slash, and later Updated here at the register, Sony has signed with BE for the BEIA for the eVilla
[Side Note: check out the Register for their April Fools edition of the website. It's a good poke in the eye with a sharp stick to some of our favorite people]
In any case, with that inflow of $$ from Sony, I do not think that the company is going to go under all that quickly, unless it is bleeding green really bad. The news story might not be be giving all of the details, unless it is one of those things of "well everyone is being careful with their money".
Sort of like saying to a man in the water "well rope is scarce, and we got to be careful on who we hand it out to"
I think that the practical barrier is likely the install program, which I did not find particularly hard when I first fired it up. In fact for someone technically savvy, it is pretty easy.
But that is the problem. You need to be technically savvy.
If you have someone that is clueless on this stuff, then the answer is "Start X? how the hell am I supposed to know that?"
The latest Redhat has a nice pretty gui type install. But if you have odd ball hardware setup, it is a problem.
I have one guy teaching himself how to do work with Unix by installing Redhat. He has a nice desktop with gnome fired up. By default it installs with Dialup (not Ethernet), even though he choose a server config. The computer doesn't have a modem, but it does lan card. He is going to figure this out on his own, but hasn't yet.
Redhat has the prettier program, and sets up the dial up for you. FreeBSD is "Uglier" (I think it is better) but you have to know more. But in both cases you still have to be fairly knowledgable.
The bottom line is that I still think that Unix is still not for beginners. This is a practical problem for widespread adoption. I happen to prefer FreeBSD.
Alot of impressions are highly dependant of the Distribution, which deals with items like installation, ease of changing components, changing setups, installing programs, etc. Not the underlying soundness of the system, the drivers, etc.
But that (your fav distro) is a different flamewar indeed. (I need a cup of coffee, my mind is too fuzzy for this, this early in the morning)
The old Adage is that life on the Net is like living life in Dog Years.
Univac = 50 years old. 50 x 7 = 350 dog years.
Y'know, the Univac is not doing bad for something invented in the internet equivalent of 1650.
;-)
[For those not USian, the folk adage is that one year in a dogs life is equivalent to 7 years in the life of a human. Thus the term "Dog Years". Internet development time, etc has been seen as being very similar to this]
How about a hair dryer, an espresso machine, an electric razor, a TV (phlat panel and CRT types), a nearby PC running a benchmark, a washing machine and/or dryer? Gotta give it that lived in environmental background noise.:)
I recall one office that was over a metal shop, where alot of the RFI came from the Arc Welders.
Very nasty stuff, messed with the desktops big time, even though they were on separate power systems.
In a weird way, I can see this from a geek view point.
It is sort of similar to the Problem of the US Navy submarine submarine hitting the tourist boat, because of the civilians on board.
but in a more ordinary context, the sysadmins can relate to this. Under what conditions would you allow a user into the server/router closet to twiddle with the knobs and watch the flashing lights? Even if it was a paying customer of the company, and the system also doubled as a kick ass gaming lan.
How long before things like this are treated only as somebodies toy to ride? I grant some PR value, but...
For those of us not so enlightened as to use netscape or mozilla, this means another trip to the microsoft website.
Special note of warning, the website has been more messed up than usual over the past few days, especially in trying to download the 5.01 sp2. I'm still trying to find the full package in one compressed file so that some folks can save the bandwidth.
My opinion: reports and pr to the contrary, the bit and piece auto install over the net is not more convenient. Especially when you have poeple mobbing sites for an update.
But if you are here reading this, you probably know this already.
Maybe this is not supposed to be related to the common phrase "my heart/feelings go out to them"
Maybe this means the thoughts go out, like "the lights go out", or like sending email out.
I got it. With the service shut down, his connections to the outside world are shutting down, and his thoughts are literally going out(that is, shutting down), sort of like HAL singing Daisy in 2001. His connection is so sssllloowww. Loosing touch with the digital world
Collect together a million nodes supplied by a bunch of young adolescent boys. Compare this collection to a similar collection by the wizened moderators of Usenet (not the alt hierarchy). While each will have deficiencies, which will probably be more useful? For fun, repeat the experiment comparing different areas of the planet.
The old saw is that 90% of everything is junk. While it might not be a self fullfilling prophecy, it is interesting to speculate just how true it is, in this case.
Why we used these back in the boiler room, a hundred years ago, and they were old-hat then, too!
Seems like alot of what we have seen over the past few weeks is re-cycled one way or another.
For Example, the Latest from Microsoft: The Tablet PC. (formerly know back in Win 3.1 days as Pen Computing)
but pen computing isn't old hat (to read the article at my link) - I wonder what is available in Linux? it would be amusing to steal his thunder there as well.
While, ILM will certainly keep going with the low end cluster technology, you can bet that Lucas will want one or two of the high end product just to be able to render the high end special effects that he is so fond off. If the US Navy is going to buy one at 5.2 million us dollars, then you can be sure that this would be a worthy investment for some one like Lucas.
I can see the programmers and designers drooling now.
I don't know, but it seems to me that people who were part of the Bully culture growing up would tend to have a natural blind spot when it comes to this kind of stuff.
Now years later, when they are grown up, and go to work, say, in politics, what kind of solutions will they looks at? They sure as heck will not be inclined to blame the bullies, because for them, it was not a problem. After all they were on top, even if they were not the top bully. To do otherwise means they would have toi admit they were wrong.
It is interesting to speculate on their management style, although that crawls off into another topic.
In Any Case, because of the blind spot, they will tend to protect their own blindness.
Yes, shootings happened. But the root cause in the dangerous enviroment that the kids find themselve in. I do not blame them for wanting to strike back. In that enviroment, it is quite easy to go numb, to shut down the emotions that make you feel bad about different things. Toss in the psych drugs that make you feel like everything is alright, and it is just icing on the cake.
boom.
But the bullies will only blame the shooters, and never see how they caused it themselves. and so endangered innocent lives.
Here is the link to Lariat.org. Their main claim to fame is that they set themselves up as their own ISP, with rates one third of the national average. They want to help other small communities to do the same.
Get enough folks together, and you could have a sweet setup.
well, DslReports.com has a nice mix of feed back on user reports on the quality of service, although I do not know about actual speed reports. The site itself is pretty good.
Be careful on the typos, though. Switching a couple of letters around will get you something else indeed.
Reports from WinHec (such as this story from the Register) speculate on Blade as being the up and coming Linux killer from MS. Blade servers are intended to be cheap, slam-in-and-go boxes that Web hosting operations can just peel off the roll (almost) and shove in whenever they need more server capacity. Web Servers are a core market for Linux. What can you say as far as the long term MS corporate strategy in this regard (i.e. regarding Linux)?
Sounds like in the background they know they are loosing the PR war. After all, all of these people are getting into the habit of not doing what the RIAA wants.
Of course, you could always create a bunch of junk with the new and approved "legal" names. There are so many ways for this to go wrong.
but the RIAA is training people wonderfully well to treat the RIAA like the "Plague of the Month Club."
Try installing something from Intuit, Apple, or MSFT... these things always show you a series of ads while running the installer. (Usually "Please! Register!! Please... register!!! )
I sometimes wonder if there should be a generic slashdot user profile that could be used by mobs of people as a registration tool.
Would sort of put the whammy on the whole purpose of the user profile in the firstplace.
I can see it now: 50,000 copies of Windows XP registered in the name of John Katz
Slashdot Mirror
Alot of this freedom of speech stuff tends to vanish when you get folks outside the cultural norm of the group in question. Doesn't matter what the cultural norm is, and it tends to be amplified by folks with lack of experience as a cultural minority.
Living overseas, even just for a summer, in a place where you just cannot get your MTV and your Dew or Jolt, and you have to make do with what the locals do is educational, if you can get over being an ugly american.
That being said, there are times when you do not blow off the conditions you see because "that's how they do things there". But you got to REALLY understand what the folks are about.
It is one thing to go after MS because of shoddy coding technique, and quite another to go after them as a personality cult.
I can recall arguments that I had with folks where the other person destroyed every objection I made and proved convincingly that I was wrong in every respect, and therefore I had to believe what he said and agree with him. And all it did was leave me completely unconvinced and alienated from him. It took me weeks to spot the flaws in the argument. And it never made a friend or convinced me in any way.
The Big Stick method of debate is maybe a way to grab power, but ultimately it only makes more enemies. Which is not convenient when you can't kill them off utterly. Unfortunately, many in politics like to practice some version of the big stick method. Changing individual minds is much more difficult.
It is better done through other techniques, such as artisitic expression, because this forces people to think. A two edged sword if there ever was one.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
However, it doesn't have the pedigree of the Raymond peice. A quick sample:
This is the logic of "geekboy dating":
+ Want someone
+ Can't get them immediately (at all)
+ Declare that you don't want them after all
+ Repeat
If that reads like shampoo instructions, you're getting the picture. If you think that's normal or healthy, you're missing the point.
Definitely worth a read
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
I know there has to be a really dumb joke about MS in there someplace.
really.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"But Dave, I don't like Hollywood.......Dave? Aren't they just asking for trouble here?
I don't know about you, but I sure as heck hope that this bit is someone's April Fool's joke that launched a little early.
really
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
1 = "You had data"
0 = "Now you don't"
very efficient under some situations :P
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Question: under the .NET program, would Microsoft be an ISP and/or similar service provider?
If MS becomes wildly successful with the .NET initive, and if it is a monopoly as ruled in court, does this legal action open the door to the government takeover of Microsoft down the road, in the Public interest, since they are a monopoly, since they will have made themselves essential to the welfare of America?
[Insert Fantasy sequence] And further, under such a take over, could they regulate the quality of code? such as making it some sort of criminal offense to write code with an excessive number of bugs. - think of it - microsoft code being reviewed and managed like they do it for the Space Shuttle. (see original story here.)
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
[Side Note: check out the Register for their April Fools edition of the website. It's a good poke in the eye with a sharp stick to some of our favorite people]
In any case, with that inflow of $$ from Sony, I do not think that the company is going to go under all that quickly, unless it is bleeding green really bad. The news story might not be be giving all of the details, unless it is one of those things of "well everyone is being careful with their money".
Sort of like saying to a man in the water "well rope is scarce, and we got to be careful on who we hand it out to"
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
But that is the problem. You need to be technically savvy.
If you have someone that is clueless on this stuff, then the answer is "Start X? how the hell am I supposed to know that?"
The latest Redhat has a nice pretty gui type install. But if you have odd ball hardware setup, it is a problem.
I have one guy teaching himself how to do work with Unix by installing Redhat. He has a nice desktop with gnome fired up. By default it installs with Dialup (not Ethernet), even though he choose a server config. The computer doesn't have a modem, but it does lan card. He is going to figure this out on his own, but hasn't yet.
Redhat has the prettier program, and sets up the dial up for you. FreeBSD is "Uglier" (I think it is better) but you have to know more. But in both cases you still have to be fairly knowledgable.
The bottom line is that I still think that Unix is still not for beginners. This is a practical problem for widespread adoption. I happen to prefer FreeBSD.
Alot of impressions are highly dependant of the Distribution, which deals with items like installation, ease of changing components, changing setups, installing programs, etc. Not the underlying soundness of the system, the drivers, etc.
But that (your fav distro) is a different flamewar indeed. (I need a cup of coffee, my mind is too fuzzy for this, this early in the morning)
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Univac = 50 years old. 50 x 7 = 350 dog years.
Y'know, the Univac is not doing bad for something invented in the internet equivalent of 1650.
;-)
[For those not USian, the folk adage is that one year in a dogs life is equivalent to 7 years in the life of a human. Thus the term "Dog Years". Internet development time, etc has been seen as being very similar to this]
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
I recall one office that was over a metal shop, where alot of the RFI came from the Arc Welders.
Very nasty stuff, messed with the desktops big time, even though they were on separate power systems.
Being located directly over the stop didn't help.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
It is sort of similar to the Problem of the US Navy submarine submarine hitting the tourist boat, because of the civilians on board.
but in a more ordinary context, the sysadmins can relate to this. Under what conditions would you allow a user into the server/router closet to twiddle with the knobs and watch the flashing lights? Even if it was a paying customer of the company, and the system also doubled as a kick ass gaming lan.
How long before things like this are treated only as somebodies toy to ride? I grant some PR value, but ...
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Special note of warning, the website has been more messed up than usual over the past few days, especially in trying to download the 5.01 sp2. I'm still trying to find the full package in one compressed file so that some folks can save the bandwidth.
My opinion: reports and pr to the contrary, the bit and piece auto install over the net is not more convenient. Especially when you have poeple mobbing sites for an update.
But if you are here reading this, you probably know this already.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Maybe this is not supposed to be related to the common phrase "my heart/feelings go out to them"
Maybe this means the thoughts go out, like "the lights go out", or like sending email out.
I got it. With the service shut down, his connections to the outside world are shutting down, and his thoughts are literally going out(that is, shutting down), sort of like HAL singing Daisy in 2001. His connection is so sssllloowww. Loosing touch with the digital world
What a horrible fate!
Watch out people. This could happen to you.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Collect together a million nodes supplied by a bunch of young adolescent boys. Compare this collection to a similar collection by the wizened moderators of Usenet (not the alt hierarchy). While each will have deficiencies, which will probably be more useful? For fun, repeat the experiment comparing different areas of the planet.
The old saw is that 90% of everything is junk. While it might not be a self fullfilling prophecy, it is interesting to speculate just how true it is, in this case.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Seems like alot of what we have seen over the past few weeks is re-cycled one way or another.
For Example, the Latest from Microsoft: The Tablet PC. (formerly know back in Win 3.1 days as Pen Computing)
but pen computing isn't old hat (to read the article at my link) - I wonder what is available in Linux? it would be amusing to steal his thunder there as well.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
And change the allowed length of the sig to match. What's forty more characters?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
I can see the programmers and designers drooling now.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Now years later, when they are grown up, and go to work, say, in politics, what kind of solutions will they looks at? They sure as heck will not be inclined to blame the bullies, because for them, it was not a problem. After all they were on top, even if they were not the top bully. To do otherwise means they would have toi admit they were wrong.
It is interesting to speculate on their management style, although that crawls off into another topic.
In Any Case, because of the blind spot, they will tend to protect their own blindness.
Yes, shootings happened. But the root cause in the dangerous enviroment that the kids find themselve in. I do not blame them for wanting to strike back. In that enviroment, it is quite easy to go numb, to shut down the emotions that make you feel bad about different things. Toss in the psych drugs that make you feel like everything is alright, and it is just icing on the cake.
boom.
But the bullies will only blame the shooters, and never see how they caused it themselves. and so endangered innocent lives.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
The direct link to the site is here. It is called the Sky Mirror. They got photos and everything.
Get enough folks together, and you could have a sweet setup.
Be careful on the typos, though. Switching a couple of letters around will get you something else indeed.
Reports from WinHec (such as this story from the Register) speculate on Blade as being the up and coming Linux killer from MS. Blade servers are intended to be cheap, slam-in-and-go boxes that Web hosting operations can just peel off the roll (almost) and shove in whenever they need more server capacity. Web Servers are a core market for Linux. What can you say as far as the long term MS corporate strategy in this regard (i.e. regarding Linux)?
Of course, you could always create a bunch of junk with the new and approved "legal" names. There are so many ways for this to go wrong.
but the RIAA is training people wonderfully well to treat the RIAA like the "Plague of the Month Club."
this must thrill them no end.
I sometimes wonder if there should be a generic slashdot user profile that could be used by mobs of people as a registration tool.
Would sort of put the whammy on the whole purpose of the user profile in the firstplace.
I can see it now: 50,000 copies of Windows XP registered in the name of John Katz
;-)