I do consulting, I replace alot of computers and their parts in the course of the year. I stockpile these goodies until you can get a machine together. I donated a T-1 line to my res. and made my first student the root user. Then I kept taking in parts and books. (Even the old 3$ learn Java 1.1 in 21 days work.) Linux being free helped immensly. The res runs Suse, and by being a Lug is always getting more and more free software. (If you run a LUG you know what I mean.)
Eventually we had a bunch of people working with P90's and down hosting very basic e-commerce sites, everything from "Native Art" to seminars, tours, t-shirts, etc... The usual stuff. The first e-sites dealt with more reservation specific goods, but by making a link exchange type system for the res, we were able to bring a higher profile to other sites and branch out into mainstream business models. The servers were upgraded, redundancy was built in, etc...
We now sell everything from hemp clothing and other goods to CD's, furniture, software and hardware. We run tech info sites with thousands of views per day. The spirit of cooperation among the people has led to more and more as server space, bandwidth, skills and the like have been freely traded and expanded on. I really have very little left to mentor as many of my one time students are now better C++ coders than myself.
The reason that so many "heavily-funded" e-commerce sites fail is that they want to spend the money and be fancy and have a nice office and hire the best people... you get the point. When you can start a.com with your own sweat on a 486 on the kitchen table, your start-up costs are nil, and every sale is 20 dollars you did not have before. The disparity between the cost of living on the res. and NYC makes for more fun. My great Grandparents pay 25$ a month for their house. 20$ more makes a world of difference to them.
Noone on the res. needs to make a fortune, $20,000 a year is more than they could have ever imagined. Our most successful site now grosses about $200,000 a year and employs 5 people. The "owner" of the site makes about $25,000 a year take home. This is not alot by most peoples standards, but it is a fortune compared to starvation.
Also, reservations can use their "nation" status to set up sites that a U.S. citizen would be hesitant to. Marajuana cultivation information, supplies, etc... Anonymous re-mailers that can stay anonymous, even online gambling (although we don't).
The most important thing is to give the skills. Once they have the skills, any man's imagination is limitless.
Fiscal Overview: Startup costs:
~1,000 in consulting fees lost in trade in on old computers. (This is debatable, because some customers were so thrilled to get their new computer set up for free, (exchange of old computer) that they increased business with reccommendations).
2,000 getting T-1 run with a $250 dollar monthly fee. (Paid for one year) (now the res pays it themselves.) Access donated by Univ. of Kentucky.
Linux: Free Apache: Free Perl: Free G++: Free
Grand total: $6,000 over 2 years
And to be honest, the reccommendations and customers gained from them will probably net me another 10-15 thousand this year. (To be donated to Crazy Horse monument).
If the sell what they have, are good at, and can produce themselves, small scale e-commerce is no different from setting up a roadside stand. (It's just a big freakin' road.)
They are sending 6 people to africa in a few months. While I find GeekCorps a fine endeavor, we have enough people here who need help. For those in the SW, why not contact your local Reservation and offer to mentor. With a mean 75% unemployment rate you could be helping a new generation move forward as a society. The Hopi average 85% unemployment, with only 25% of working adults making over $7,000 per year.
Sorry, I just realized that if you have a job, you probably live nowhere near a reservation...
(For those of you who do, please help.)
I have been working with my own reservation for only 2 years, and have watched the unemployment rate drop to 25% with the mean income raised by $15,000 a year for adults. Much of this has come from setting up el cheapo.coms and e-commerce. (Yea Linux...) As an Amerind I can tell you that we'd prefer not to be casino employess and the like. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, the Casinos generally benefit the money men from outside the Res. and do only harm to the residents. (The Pequots being the noted exception and therefore the ones you'll see on 60 minutes.) They are a wasteland of broken promises and corrupt swindlers. (Not that I would mention Kevin Costner by name.)
There are people starving next door. Let's stop giving them fish and start teaching them how to fish.
Yeah, O.K., Kauffmann is being childish about this. In keeping with the "Tending of the Geek Flame", who cares who gets credit?? But, a Slashdot man that replies by opening a new thread?? For shame.
Again, we must assume that this was done so that it would be noticed in the way down the page instead of being ignored as an attachement to his post. But this is akin to karma whoring and totally unacceptible.
This mesage is being posted with the +1 bonus off, and all I ask of the moderators is that they leave it alone. (I could have just posted as an AC) Thank You.
Linux, where you get more Geek Chic for finding the bug than exploiting it.
Viruses are on the way, and will most likely be even more attractive for Linux than WinXX. By writing a WinXX virus, I have to fool a virus checker, and even then I can generally only affect the clients of an organization. And if you have the "." in your path?? You're a great target. Plus, I can just start taking out your linux machines, your print servers, your databases, have a trojan report back keystrokes and network stats until it blows up?? Doable. And the virus will most likely not be open source.
Plus, what about companies like Norton?? I have this sneaking suspicion that they actually create some of these viruses, both to increase the value of their own product, and to devalue the product of a competitor. (You'd be surprised at the viruses I've seen that only one virus checker can find when they all have updated defs.) I know that this delves into the realm of conspiracy theory, but if theres a Dr. Solomon's for linux, there will have to be a virus for it to find. And if linux gets a good mindshare....
P.S. I wrote quite a bit of Unix virii back in the day, and it ain't that difficult.
Uninformed opinions like this are the reason that our company has stopped hiring Linuxers...
Solaris a second-rate OS?? What is First rate again??
Linux was modeled after Unix why again?? And Sun being the largest Unix distributor means??
Your obvious bias would be offensive if it were not so laughable. Linux lags quite a bit behind in the technosphere, and though it is making massive inroads, it still does not compare to Solaris for mission critical applications.
My guess is that you have been running Linux for less than a year and have seen Solaris from a distance once or twice. Or you ordered the free ver. 7 and could never get it set up so you decide to trash it.
Please either educate yourself, or keep your mouth shut.
Jason Maggard "Better to be thought an idiot that open your mouth and remove all doubt."
With the testing and stability that their OS demands, I would assume that open-sourcing would be too much.
Also, they have an x86 *nix, why support another one??? IBM had AIX, but no x86 port that I'm aware of, and HP etc... And these companies went tromping off to Linux just as easily as they did to NT. This means that they will have an even easier time tromping off towards the "next big thing". Even at that most of these companies have made the CYA commitment to linux like, "Well, we'll offer one of our models with linux, but not for home machines, and we'll charge you more than NT to install it.
Wait for M$'es marketing department to start the FUD about Win NT costing less to purchase and that this is indicitave of the difficulty installing Linux.
My mother gave me some good advice that I will now pass along to Linux, "Be careful who you sleep with, you never know where they've been"....
Solaris has for a long time been a great OS, and I have sun boxes here dating back to INP's. (4 MB of Ram, Motorola processor.) The problem that I have always had is that running it at home is a pain. (Arcane PPP, etc...) But this looks like a good new list of features compared with 7. (Or 2.7, whatever) And for free, you can't beat it.
I'll toss in my very pleasurable experiences into the mix...
1: Landsend.com Placed an order on the 10th for myself. Went home and let the wife pick out a god-awful amount of clothing. Called and asked if I could combine shipping on the two orders since they were placed in the same day. They said no, but gave me free shipping on my wife's order. Saved me 10 bucks, and both orders were there by the 20th. (This is with hemming)
2: Think Geek Placed an order on the 10th, there on the 14th. But we are both in VA...
3: CD Now Mom has already gotten 2 of her CD's and the 3rd is a back order. Acceptable, but not much else.
4: Big Star WOW! Mom's movie arrived in 2 days. A movie I ordered for myself on Tuesday Night was there on Thursday. I didn't even expect that movie until after X-mas. This was with the normal shipping options. (2 day priority)
5: B&N All gifts arrived on time.
6: QVC Ordered late, but the delay other companies are complaining about gives me an excuse for it being late. Talk about your blessings!
The bottom line here is this: I use the online shopping so that I can drop ship to my relatives who live elsewhere. Even the delayed items are no big deal, and the ones that I ordered late will get there on the 28th or 29th, and I can blame the company instead of saying that I forgot until I got your X-mas card....
Loved the online shopping experience this year, will do it next year...
There have been some comments made about the "High Quality" (HQ) vs. "Low Quality" (LQ) recording. the LQ recording is fine for most things, and you do indeed get 14 hours. A few small visual defects, but for watching "Meet the Press" or "Babylon 5" it's fine. HQ is great for recording something you plan to "port" to VCR. You get about 4 hours with this mode. There is also an in-between quality that would be good for movies you don't want to move to VCR, but you still want fairly sharp. This comes in at about 8 hours. The Matrix comes to mind.
Naturally, double these for the 30 hour version.
There are still alot of desirable features that are not included in the Tivo, so if you are cautious, I'd wait. They'll have bigger drives to work with in a year, cheaper, and competition will drive them to include more features.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks to such a thing would be the lack of the Tivo service. The station listings and keyword database. The most impressive feature of the Tivo service is the "record what you might like" scenario, and you would need up to date station listings and a cross referenced database that would know the shows by type.
The recording and playback of video is not new, and could still be done even without the GPL additions of Phillips. It is the service that is exciting and original. Perhaps some entrepenuer out there will offer the service with some basic hardware options and distribute it as a downloadable prog.
And to reply to some of the later posts after this, the 2 hard drive solution would not be as practical as a good cacheing scheme. Of course you will want the box SCSI, not IDE, and there should be no problem streaming out and in with video. And yes, compression tech would be a pain to implement. (Gee, you mean we're actually paying Phillips for having a decent product??)
Yes, they probably are using an old devel tree. In set-top boxes you don't worry about upgrading to the latest greatest, you make sure it works. With the amount of time that the Tivo has been out, it would seem that they were very early adopters of 2.1. Matter of fact, they probably started R&D with the devel model 2.0.
BTW, the 2.1 devel tree would be a prerelease of 2.2 anyway and the 2.4 is not yet stable.
Analog works best for an analog medium. We all know this. Something is always lost in the translation of light moving through colored celluloid to a string of 1's and 0's. This has bben the case with CD-Rom's The good thing about CD's is that a cheap CD player is better than a cheap record player. The media is more convenient, more durable, and can be more reliably mass produced. These qualities make it perfect for home electronics.
The theatre business however will always tend towards whatever delivers the best picture quality, and that will continue to be film. With some of the higher end projectors that are coming out, one of which is mentioned in Ebert's article, will, as promised, maintain the preeminence of film as the distribution media. 10 years ago they were talking about Beta taking the place of film even in the theatres. It was not to be.
Beyond the technical hurdles, there is the romanticism still inherent in hollywood that demands that film be used. This will not die. Film has an inexplicable quality of tone in every image. Certain films for certain scenes will be a mainstay of directors who know the look of film.
Call their service # and cancel your order. Then go to Find it now and get yourself some coupons for B&N. If you need, a 10$ coupon for B&N is to be had by typing COSHARE in the coupon field when you order.
I cannot help but feel that I have somehow insulted you with this post, and I assure you that this was not my intention. Indeed I have simply tried to perform some basic lampoonery of the style of the C-net reviews. You, being a high profile name within the "Geek Community" (as Jon Katz would refer to us) seemed a likely target for this.
Allow me to euclidiate by going through the context of my "review"/post and illustrate my apparently feeble attempt at comedy more completely.
The Cambrian Explosion reference would most likely be lost on newbies or anyone who has not spent hours in the company of Larry Wall. His post was to loaded down with big words that make his post difficult to install. Also, his use of plain text for the message format makes the installer none too pretty to look at.
In this instance, I was poking fun of C-net's apparent bias towards install ease being an overall indication of distribution strength. After reading their reviews, one could be led to believe that they felt that any installer that actually asked you what software you wanted on your new system was too difficult to install. Or for that matter, any installation that gave you a choice as to how the disk is partitioned. I certainly feel that any computer user who could not make these simple (and it would seem intuitative?) choices would no doubt have some trouble with "Cambrian Explosion".
The final sentence makes reference to the fact that they depreciated Slackware's installer for not being a GUI installer. This obvious GUI bias seems to me to be as stupid as saying someone's post was plaintext, and therefore not as informative as another. Again, my dear sir, this was intended in humor. If a plaintext post will suffice, why should I need to type html tags??
However, for the power user, he makes over 5 points throughout the article while keeping the post lean and stable. But at a price of $8.75 for all of the 25 cent words in his post, this brings him in as one of the more expensive posters in our roundup.
The next line in all of the C-net reviews was usually about why a business, power user, app freak, or otherwise would appreciate the distro considering the "Difficult Install". Indeed, "lean and stable" merely echos their comments about slackware. As far as the price comment, which semms to have drawn your ire more than anything else I wrote, I neither counted words, nor figured out how many quarters would make up $8.75. For that matter, I did not check to see that you had made 5 points in your article either. Humor need not be overly intellectual. The phrase "25 cent words" is quite popular in the american vernacular, and provided me, as the humorist, a way to attach an imaginary dollar value to your post. Seeing that Red Hat was depreciated for costing $20 more, I felt that this line was needed to stay in the style of the C-net article.
(May I also add that in the real world, newspapers are written on a 5th grade reading level. My Grandmother, who uses the phrase "25 cent words" incessantly around me would have told you to shut up and eat your mashed potatoes long beforethe conclusion of your post. I do not feel that the Slashdot community needs their commentary in the form of pablum, but I do feel that the average person does not use the words orthogonal and speciation much in a sentence. While this may indeed herald the death of the English language, many people consider it a literary feat to use expletives as nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and anything else they please. As for Ozymandias, I urge you to take a gander at the best seller lists.)
The Bottom Line: For the truly knowledgeable, this post offers the most bang for the buck, but if you prefer the skript kiddie approach to/., you might want to consider reading further down for the "Micro$oft Sucks!" posts.
As this (oddly enough) seemed to escape the blade of your finely honed rebuttal, it shall be allowed to be an entity of itself, bereft of commentary.
Tom gets a rating of 5.
Well, in Slashdot terms this is high praise indeed. I do believe that the actual post did indeed recieve a 5. Of course by the C-net ratings (1-10) this would be average. Either way, there is no negative connotation to be had here. (Unless, of course, you find a rating equal to that recieved by Mandrake to have negative connotations.)
As far as the end of my post, I was referring to the Slashdot community's attitude that anyone running an "easy to install" version of Linux, or a distro geared towards newbies, is to be reviled. I will not debate this any further, as it is an impression that I have recieved more than a scientific analysis. You will agree or disagree, but I don't feel like writing a Perl script to find out. =|:>)
Now, a Corel user might decide to move to a more powerful Distro, (Happens all the time at our LUG...) with more tools available. (If you found Blender to be indespensable, would you just download it each time? Or you might switch to SUSE, a new version of all of your software every 3 months for $29.95) Many people are quite happy writing "Perl baby-talk", why would they get into declaring "my" variables? I happen to use the "$_" variable quite often, but have seen it depreciated by you quite often. But it works, and I see no reason to switch. I simply bear in mind the possible problems that it can cause. It would seem that both statements evaluate to false for the same reason.
My other point is this, I have seen users reviled for not knowing the proper names for various linux related hooziewhatzits, and seen small flame wars start up because someone typed "My http demon isn't running". We know it's daemon, but this does not make valid the searing criticism that some of these people recieve.
In closing, my post recieved one point for being interesting, and one for being funny. Perhaps this means that someone out there understood that this was intended in the spirit of humor. I hope that you understand as well, that it was the post's intention to be funny, and hardly deserving of what I took to be a curt and derogatory response. I have an abundance of laziness and impatience, perhaps to can refer me to a good source of hubris, or loan me some of yours, you seem to have an excessive supply.
Actually, written documentation is a very important part of a Distro for me. And for the unwashed masses, who wants to fiddle with the XF config and the CTRL+ALT+F2 to switch to a virtual term to read docs, back to 1 to proceed, etc... Plus, with most folks, they aren't comfortable enough with the OS to do all of that anyway. The most common questions from newbies?? "How the H377 do I get to my CD-ROM??" "I need support for my modem, and I can't get on line!" The Docs are in HTML, and I can't use them because I can't get X (actually they call it "windows"... They're so cute at that age!") running."
Now, when they need to use vi or emacs, to edit a file.... Goodness!!
IMHO, every Distro should come with: VI quick ref and brief tutorial. Brief command ref. Info for setting up hardware. Info for stting up X. Basic WM setup. Overview of the "concept" behind the system. Overview of the FS. ENOUGH INFO TO GET YOU TO THE DOCUMENTATION ON THE CDS!!
~Jason Maggard "Never underestimate the power of a dead tree."
The Cambrian Explosion reference would most likely be lost on newbies or anyone who has not spent hours in the company of Larry Wall. His post was to loaded down with big words that make his post difficult to install. Also, his use of plain text for the message format makes the installer none too pretty to look at.
However, for the power user, he makes over 5 points throughout the article while keeping the post lean and stable. But at a price of $8.75 for all of the 25 cent words in his post, this brings him in as one of the more expensive posters in our roundup.
The Bottom Line: For the truly knowledgeable, this post offers the most bang for the buck, but if you prefer the skript kiddie approach to/., you might want to consider reading further down for the "Micro$oft Sucks!" posts.
~Jason "Karma Whore" Maggard "You can learn Perl "small end first". You can program in Perl baby-talk and we promise not to laugh." ~The Camel Book
P.S. We can also let people learn Linux small end first, you can start with Corel and wind up with Debian. It is really part of the natural evolution of the user. It is most important that we nurture the newbies like children speaking Linux Baby-Talk, that is how we will grow mature Linux adults.
I don't know how many people are familiar with current devices to do this, but they are all unseemly and often painful. This looks to be a more focused way of stimulating just the muscles you need.
But on the radio note, think about the Dallas hospital that had all of their heart monitors go off line due to interference from an HDTV signal. That's the scary part...
As a musician who has worked both on his own website and on some high profile mp3 sites, here's my take.
The mp3 sites have a very low noise to signal ratio for the indie artists. Most of their indie selections are a) Poorly recorded (and I don't mean in the charming sense) b) Poor songs (Yes, this is a value judgement, but if you can't play the local clubs, why do I need your mp3?) c) crap. (Hey, what is this "Voyetra Jam Box" program I got with my Packard Smell??) This would create a problem for me if I were running a site like mp3.com for the following reasons.
Do I really want/need to cater to the bedroom rockers etc. out there? If all of my submitters are good quality bands with good tunes, sure, I want to give them all the bells and whistles to maqke sure they come back and to help them along the path to stardom. It's just good business. If one big band got their start on friggin-mp3.com (TM), I'd be set. But do I want to deal with the added overhead of catering to "DJ Whimpleteats" and his GW2K Mixmaster? No. So you scale back service to the lowest common denominator.
Consider this like/., if only the best and brightest were to post, Hemos and Taco would probably have an 800 number that you could call if something went wrong while you were trying to post. But as it stands, if your Microsoft Ruulz post gets eaten in the ethernet, too bad. And by the same token, if your Thinking beyond the desktop paradigm post gets munched, too bad.
Now the flipside of the coin reveals this: Who am I to make the decision that what you are sending is crap? Ever had a post moderated down when you didn't think it needed to be?? So how can you challenge the status quo of the recording industry yet turn people away right and left because content is not up to snuff?? (Besides the fact that you would actually have to listen to all of it to make the valuation.) Plus you now get into bruised egos, and a possible/. flame. (Hey my song, "Bill G. ain't so peachy" got turned down because of the the reapeated use of "fsck"...")
This really isn't the recording industry. Any artist who thinks that they are going to make big money would also believe that the moon is made of cheese. The name of the game is exposure, and that is the best you can hope for with these sites.
Running you own website is a good proposition, but you cannot generate the traffic that these large sites do, and the large sites are also a good way to drive traffic to your individual site.
The mp3 sites have their place, but the indies will need to find a new way to get better and cleaner exposure. Look at/., it's basically structured usenet... Streaming mp3's of latest submissions with a voting tab?? Now each file can be tagged with a quality rating. The list goes on. The tech is always in it's infancy...
~Jason Maggard "America is the home of the hypocrite The American Dream is only a dream" ~The Violent Femmes
Well, this is all very droll. We cn see the new direction that open source is taking, but the real question is "Will it survive??"
Back in the old DOS days I released some high memory drivers for the 286 (Still needed at the time so that you could access a full Meg of memory) for free to the internet and BBS'es. Alot of people used these things. Then AOL started listing them for download. Now I spent too much time responding to user mail, and on into the 486 era, I would get the occasional rude paniced phone call asking me why my program didn't work.
Those of you who run LUG's know what I'm talking about. We gave out LUG info to get noticed, and now our home phone #'s are splattered across the Red Hat pages, Linux.com, etc... Now I get phone calls at 9:00 A.M. and I work nights. Needless to say I am none too cordial when woken up. (BTW, attempts to get this info off various pages does not work. If the offending site takes it down, some other site has picked it up before then and the cycle perpetuates.)
With a market share equal to that of Microsoft would the community crumble or flourish??
The future of Open Source is much more likely going to be a corporate/individual shared effort.
For Linux to survive, the Open Source movement will need to evolve to encompass corporate culture as well. Look at Rasterman and Red Hat.
Ok, that's a falsehood, I have used it, once. About 2 years ago I downloaded Notes From The Underground. It lingered on my hard drive with some Mark Twain that I had also downloaded at the time. I don't believe that I ever read them, because it's too darn uncomfortable to read a full novel on a computer.
Eventually I picked up Notes from the Underground As a Dover Thrift Edtiton. It cost me all of $1.00. I couldn't print it myself for that much. Also I picked up Faust, The Theory Of The Leisure Class, The Devil's Dictionary, The Queen of Spades, Oedipus Rex... and the list goes on. These were brand new. None of them were more than $2.00. And that was suggested retail. Used books fall into much the same category, as they are usually $2.00 for a paperback.
In this era we publish more books than ever before but fewer authors than 30 years ago. Why not use E-texts to promote some authors who cannot get published by the big boys like Bantam, Del, Tor, etc... Why not have a more user friendly site? Why not invite reviews? Reccommendations? Etc...
Why not make it so that PG is accessible to the masses. Let people have their stake in PG, make them a part of something. That is what draws people to participate in these projects. Slashdot is not the best news site out there for news, but it is the best community out there for news.
When I first found PG it seemed like one of those great ideas. I bookmarked it. I stopped back, nothing had changed, A year later I stopped back, still didn't see anything that really caught my eye.
In short, I appreciate what PG is trying to accomplish, but I cannot find where it has any real relevancy to me. Not when the price of the information on a user-friendly, portable media that never needs winding or batteries is available for so little. To truly draw attention and keep it, you need to fight our pitifully short attention spans, and our desparate need for convenience. Why not encourage people to write for PG, not copy. Why not encourage the stockpiling of information, not fiction. What about an app that facilitates the finding and reading of e-texts, something more than "more"...
PG has been around long enough to have garnered the recognition it deserves. If it is concerned that it is not busy enough, then it should be wondering why. It has always seemed to me that PG tries to lure it's readership with the mantra that "This is for the greater good..." Help us... Instead of playing on our consciences, fufill a need. As of this writing there are ~50 responses from people who have all heard of PG. Some use it, some don't. But they all know about it.
PG, give me the slightest reason to come and keep coming, and I will. Until then, I can get Vonnegut for $0.25 at the library and PK Dick for $2.00 at Novel Futures. And god knows that our independent booksellers are struggling too. (Tangent: Don't buy from book behemoths, as smaller booksellers die out our culture moves further into the realm of vanilla pop garbage!)
~Jason Maggard "Give me convenience or give me death." ~Jello
Well, the Chineese have already been doing the dumb stuff. There is some meditation technique that they don't like, and they have been defacing the websites DoS'ing the servers that host the content, etc... both here and in Canada. Sorry if I'm fuzzy on the details, but I really don't feel like looking them up.
Can't really blame them. The Russians were brought down by Pepsi-Cola, cheap blue jeans, fast food, and rock-and-roll. If I was running a totalitarian government, I'd keep such a tight lock on information that I'd make sure that only my brain-washed cronies could speak any language other than ubby-dubby. As is stated in "Children of the Revolution", "McDonald's in Red Square! It's the Communist Apocalypse!"
Information warfare is a part of every government plan, and will be as long as there are people and governments and information. And I'm all for it. My theory is this: It's war. You want to kill me and mine, and I want to stop you. I will do whatever it takes.
~Jason Maggard "When I remain formless, I force my opponent to defend an attack that he cannot understand." ~Sun Tzu
With Mandrake coming into the Distro market a little on the late side and Corel et. al. stealing their thunder as the "easy" Linux install, it would seem to me that this is just a matter of trying to get their company some street cred among the debian/slackware people out there. Plus, Jean's gotta eat too....
It is a known fact that whatever distro the alpha geek uses will eventually be adopted by the others. Around here it's Suse. Why?? They kept shipping me free versions. By the time they stopped, I was so used to their distro that I didn't feel like changing. So when my co-workers ask me how to set up any of the Red-Hat tools, I have to tell them I don't know. Result? Around here, Suse = Support.
It's just a wild guess that ESR wasn't available, or was too expensive...
~Jason Maggard "You are using Pharlap on 172.16.63.81 Dig this stone cold funky groove baby!" ~MOTD
Here is a perfect example of what happens when people from California try to use words from Mississippi...
"The showcase of nations - a collection of distinctly-designed pavilions that sell the food and gew-gaws of various encircle around a man-made lagoon"
First, they would be "Geegaws" according to Webster's unabridged. Also to be noted in the Mose Allison album Geegaws and Gimcracks. Secondly, is there a word missing from the sentence above?? "of various encircle" sounds like an REM album. Do they pay you for these stories??
And finally, Walt was a facist. Well, most "Utopian" societies actually were. The ones that weren't made the assumption that eventually we'd get over this whole "agression" thing. Read Dostoyevsky's "The Devils". THat might also give you an opportunity to read an author who really could predict the future. (once)
I forgot to see if I won that spankin' new linux server they were giving away. The drawing was on the 12th.
But seriously, this gives me a great chance to laugh at my boss. I hope that this means new and better graphics tools for Linux like 3D studio Max and the like. Also, with SGI on board we might start seeing linux support for some of the high end rendering tools, and this will help greatly with linux multimedia development. I am just soooo friggin' happy! I won't have to reboot between tracings of my 3D models now like I do if I use an NT workststion....
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the method I used works like this...
.com with your own sweat on a 486 on the kitchen table, your start-up costs are nil, and every sale is 20 dollars you did not have before. The disparity between the cost of living on the res. and NYC makes for more fun. My great Grandparents pay 25$ a month for their house. 20$ more makes a world of difference to them.
I do consulting, I replace alot of computers and their parts in the course of the year. I stockpile these goodies until you can get a machine together. I donated a T-1 line to my res. and made my first student the root user. Then I kept taking in parts and books. (Even the old 3$ learn Java 1.1 in 21 days work.) Linux being free helped immensly. The res runs Suse, and by being a Lug is always getting more and more free software. (If you run a LUG you know what I mean.)
Eventually we had a bunch of people working with P90's and down hosting very basic e-commerce sites, everything from "Native Art" to seminars, tours, t-shirts, etc... The usual stuff. The first e-sites dealt with more reservation specific goods, but by making a link exchange type system for the res, we were able to bring a higher profile to other sites and branch out into mainstream business models. The servers were upgraded, redundancy was built in, etc...
We now sell everything from hemp clothing and other goods to CD's, furniture, software and hardware. We run tech info sites with thousands of views per day. The spirit of cooperation among the people has led to more and more as server space, bandwidth, skills and the like have been freely traded and expanded on. I really have very little left to mentor as many of my one time students are now better C++ coders than myself.
The reason that so many "heavily-funded" e-commerce sites fail is that they want to spend the money and be fancy and have a nice office and hire the best people... you get the point. When you can start a
Noone on the res. needs to make a fortune, $20,000 a year is more than they could have ever imagined. Our most successful site now grosses about $200,000 a year and employs 5 people. The "owner" of the site makes about $25,000 a year take home. This is not alot by most peoples standards, but it is a fortune compared to starvation.
Also, reservations can use their "nation" status to set up sites that a U.S. citizen would be hesitant to. Marajuana cultivation information, supplies, etc... Anonymous re-mailers that can stay anonymous, even online gambling (although we don't).
The most important thing is to give the skills. Once they have the skills, any man's imagination is limitless.
Fiscal Overview:
Startup costs:
~1,000 in consulting fees lost in trade in on old computers. (This is debatable, because some customers were so thrilled to get their new computer set up for free, (exchange of old computer) that they increased business with reccommendations).
2,000 getting T-1 run with a $250 dollar monthly fee. (Paid for one year) (now the res pays it themselves.) Access donated by Univ. of Kentucky.
Linux: Free
Apache: Free
Perl: Free
G++: Free
Grand total: $6,000 over 2 years
And to be honest, the reccommendations and customers gained from them will probably net me another 10-15 thousand this year. (To be donated to Crazy Horse monument).
If the sell what they have, are good at, and can produce themselves, small scale e-commerce is no different from setting up a roadside stand. (It's just a big freakin' road.)
They are sending 6 people to africa in a few months. While I find GeekCorps a fine endeavor, we have enough people here who need help. For those in the SW, why not contact your local Reservation and offer to mentor. With a mean 75% unemployment rate you could be helping a new generation move forward as a society. The Hopi average 85% unemployment, with only 25% of working adults making over $7,000 per year.
Sorry, I just realized that if you have a job, you probably live nowhere near a reservation...
(For those of you who do, please help.)
I have been working with my own reservation for only 2 years, and have watched the unemployment rate drop to 25% with the mean income raised by $15,000 a year for adults. Much of this has come from setting up el cheapo .coms and e-commerce. (Yea Linux...) As an Amerind I can tell you that we'd prefer not to be casino employess and the like. Furthermore, contrary to popular belief, the Casinos generally benefit the money men from outside the Res. and do only harm to the residents. (The Pequots being the noted exception and therefore the ones you'll see on 60 minutes.) They are a wasteland of broken promises and corrupt swindlers. (Not that I would mention Kevin Costner by name.)
There are people starving next door. Let's stop giving them fish and start teaching them how to fish.
Yeah, O.K., Kauffmann is being childish about this. In keeping with the "Tending of the Geek Flame", who cares who gets credit?? But, a Slashdot man that replies by opening a new thread?? For shame.
Again, we must assume that this was done so that it would be noticed in the way down the page instead of being ignored as an attachement to his post. But this is akin to karma whoring and totally unacceptible.
This mesage is being posted with the +1 bonus off, and all I ask of the moderators is that they leave it alone. (I could have just posted as an AC) Thank You.
Linux, where you get more Geek Chic for finding the bug than exploiting it.
Viruses are on the way, and will most likely be even more attractive for Linux than WinXX. By writing a WinXX virus, I have to fool a virus checker, and even then I can generally only affect the clients of an organization. And if you have the "." in your path?? You're a great target. Plus, I can just start taking out your linux machines, your print servers, your databases, have a trojan report back keystrokes and network stats until it blows up?? Doable. And the virus will most likely not be open source.
Plus, what about companies like Norton?? I have this sneaking suspicion that they actually create some of these viruses, both to increase the value of their own product, and to devalue the product of a competitor. (You'd be surprised at the viruses I've seen that only one virus checker can find when they all have updated defs.) I know that this delves into the realm of conspiracy theory, but if theres a Dr. Solomon's for linux, there will have to be a virus for it to find. And if linux gets a good mindshare....
P.S. I wrote quite a bit of Unix virii back in the day, and it ain't that difficult.
Just My 0.02
Jason
Uninformed opinions like this are the reason that our company has stopped hiring Linuxers...
Solaris a second-rate OS?? What is First rate again??
Linux was modeled after Unix why again?? And Sun being the largest Unix distributor means??
Your obvious bias would be offensive if it were not so laughable. Linux lags quite a bit behind in the technosphere, and though it is making massive inroads, it still does not compare to Solaris for mission critical applications.
My guess is that you have been running Linux for less than a year and have seen Solaris from a distance once or twice. Or you ordered the free ver. 7 and could never get it set up so you decide to trash it.
Please either educate yourself, or keep your mouth shut.
Jason Maggard
"Better to be thought an idiot that open your mouth and remove all doubt."
Control is very important....
With the testing and stability that their OS demands, I would assume that open-sourcing would be too much.
Also, they have an x86 *nix, why support another one??? IBM had AIX, but no x86 port that I'm aware of, and HP etc... And these companies went tromping off to Linux just as easily as they did to NT. This means that they will have an even easier time tromping off towards the "next big thing". Even at that most of these companies have made the CYA commitment to linux like, "Well, we'll offer one of our models with linux, but not for home machines, and we'll charge you more than NT to install it.
Wait for M$'es marketing department to start the FUD about Win NT costing less to purchase and that this is indicitave of the difficulty installing Linux.
My mother gave me some good advice that I will now pass along to Linux, "Be careful who you sleep with, you never know where they've been"....
Jason Maggard
Gee, that's all??
Solaris has for a long time been a great OS, and I have sun boxes here dating back to INP's. (4 MB of Ram, Motorola processor.) The problem that I have always had is that running it at home is a pain. (Arcane PPP, etc...) But this looks like a good new list of features compared with 7. (Or 2.7, whatever) And for free, you can't beat it.
I'll toss in my very pleasurable experiences into the mix...
1: Landsend.com Placed an order on the 10th for myself. Went home and let the wife pick out a god-awful amount of clothing. Called and asked if I could combine shipping on the two orders since they were placed in the same day. They said no, but gave me free shipping on my wife's order. Saved me 10 bucks, and both orders were there by the 20th. (This is with hemming)
2: Think Geek Placed an order on the 10th, there on the 14th. But we are both in VA...
3: CD Now Mom has already gotten 2 of her CD's and the 3rd is a back order. Acceptable, but not much else.
4: Big Star WOW! Mom's movie arrived in 2 days. A movie I ordered for myself on Tuesday Night was there on Thursday. I didn't even expect that movie until after X-mas. This was with the normal shipping options. (2 day priority)
5: B&N All gifts arrived on time.
6: QVC Ordered late, but the delay other companies are complaining about gives me an excuse for it being late. Talk about your blessings!
The bottom line here is this: I use the online shopping so that I can drop ship to my relatives who live elsewhere. Even the delayed items are no big deal, and the ones that I ordered late will get there on the 28th or 29th, and I can blame the company instead of saying that I forgot until I got your X-mas card....
Loved the online shopping experience this year, will do it next year...
Jason Maggard
There have been some comments made about the "High Quality" (HQ) vs. "Low Quality" (LQ) recording. the LQ recording is fine for most things, and you do indeed get 14 hours. A few small visual defects, but for watching "Meet the Press" or "Babylon 5" it's fine. HQ is great for recording something you plan to "port" to VCR. You get about 4 hours with this mode. There is also an in-between quality that would be good for movies you don't want to move to VCR, but you still want fairly sharp. This comes in at about 8 hours. The Matrix comes to mind.
Naturally, double these for the 30 hour version.
There are still alot of desirable features that are not included in the Tivo, so if you are cautious, I'd wait. They'll have bigger drives to work with in a year, cheaper, and competition will drive them to include more features.
~Jason
One of the biggest stumbling blocks to such a thing would be the lack of the Tivo service. The station listings and keyword database. The most impressive feature of the Tivo service is the "record what you might like" scenario, and you would need up to date station listings and a cross referenced database that would know the shows by type.
The recording and playback of video is not new, and could still be done even without the GPL additions of Phillips. It is the service that is exciting and original. Perhaps some entrepenuer out there will offer the service with some basic hardware options and distribute it as a downloadable prog.
And to reply to some of the later posts after this, the 2 hard drive solution would not be as practical as a good cacheing scheme. Of course you will want the box SCSI, not IDE, and there should be no problem streaming out and in with video. And yes, compression tech would be a pain to implement. (Gee, you mean we're actually paying Phillips for having a decent product??)
~Jason
Yes, they probably are using an old devel tree. In set-top boxes you don't worry about upgrading to the latest greatest, you make sure it works. With the amount of time that the Tivo has been out, it would seem that they were very early adopters of 2.1. Matter of fact, they probably started R&D with the devel model 2.0.
BTW, the 2.1 devel tree would be a prerelease of 2.2 anyway and the 2.4 is not yet stable.
~Jason
Analog works best for an analog medium. We all know this. Something is always lost in the translation of light moving through colored celluloid to a string of 1's and 0's. This has bben the case with CD-Rom's The good thing about CD's is that a cheap CD player is better than a cheap record player. The media is more convenient, more durable, and can be more reliably mass produced. These qualities make it perfect for home electronics.
The theatre business however will always tend towards whatever delivers the best picture quality, and that will continue to be film. With some of the higher end projectors that are coming out, one of which is mentioned in Ebert's article, will, as promised, maintain the preeminence of film as the distribution media. 10 years ago they were talking about Beta taking the place of film even in the theatres. It was not to be.
Beyond the technical hurdles, there is the romanticism still inherent in hollywood that demands that film be used. This will not die. Film has an inexplicable quality of tone in every image. Certain films for certain scenes will be a mainstay of directors who know the look of film.
~Jason Maggard
Seriously.
Call their service # and cancel your order. Then go to Find it now and get yourself some coupons for B&N. If you need, a 10$ coupon for B&N is to be had by typing COSHARE in the coupon field when you order.
Tom,
I cannot help but feel that I have somehow insulted you with this post, and I assure you that this was not my intention. Indeed I have simply tried to perform some basic lampoonery of the style of the C-net reviews. You, being a high profile name within the "Geek Community" (as Jon Katz would refer to us) seemed a likely target for this.
Allow me to euclidiate by going through the context of my "review"/post and illustrate my apparently feeble attempt at comedy more completely.
The Cambrian Explosion reference would most likely be lost on newbies or anyone who has not spent hours in the company of Larry Wall. His post was to loaded down with big words that make his post difficult to install. Also, his use of plain text for the message format makes the installer none too pretty to look at.
In this instance, I was poking fun of C-net's apparent bias towards install ease being an overall indication of distribution strength. After reading their reviews, one could be led to believe that they felt that any installer that actually asked you what software you wanted on your new system was too difficult to install. Or for that matter, any installation that gave you a choice as to how the disk is partitioned. I certainly feel that any computer user who could not make these simple (and it would seem intuitative?) choices would no doubt have some trouble with "Cambrian Explosion".
The final sentence makes reference to the fact that they depreciated Slackware's installer for not being a GUI installer. This obvious GUI bias seems to me to be as stupid as saying someone's post was plaintext, and therefore not as informative as another. Again, my dear sir, this was intended in humor. If a plaintext post will suffice, why should I need to type html tags??
However, for the power user, he makes over 5 points throughout the article while keeping the post lean and stable. But at a price of $8.75 for all of the 25 cent words in his post, this brings him in as one of the more expensive posters in our roundup.
The next line in all of the C-net reviews was usually about why a business, power user, app freak, or otherwise would appreciate the distro considering the "Difficult Install". Indeed, "lean and stable" merely echos their comments about slackware. As far as the price comment, which semms to have drawn your ire more than anything else I wrote, I neither counted words, nor figured out how many quarters would make up $8.75. For that matter, I did not check to see that you had made 5 points in your article either. Humor need not be overly intellectual. The phrase "25 cent words" is quite popular in the american vernacular, and provided me, as the humorist, a way to attach an imaginary dollar value to your post. Seeing that Red Hat was depreciated for costing $20 more, I felt that this line was needed to stay in the style of the C-net article.
(May I also add that in the real world, newspapers are written on a 5th grade reading level. My Grandmother, who uses the phrase "25 cent words" incessantly around me would have told you to shut up and eat your mashed potatoes long beforethe conclusion of your post. I do not feel that the Slashdot community needs their commentary in the form of pablum, but I do feel that the average person does not use the words orthogonal and speciation much in a sentence. While this may indeed herald the death of the English language, many people consider it a literary feat to use expletives as nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions, and anything else they please. As for Ozymandias, I urge you to take a gander at the best seller lists.)
The Bottom Line: For the truly knowledgeable, this post offers the most bang for the buck, but if you prefer the skript kiddie approach to /., you might want to consider reading further down for the "Micro$oft Sucks!" posts.
As this (oddly enough) seemed to escape the blade of your finely honed rebuttal, it shall be allowed to be an entity of itself, bereft of commentary.
Tom gets a rating of 5.
Well, in Slashdot terms this is high praise indeed. I do believe that the actual post did indeed recieve a 5. Of course by the C-net ratings (1-10) this would be average. Either way, there is no negative connotation to be had here. (Unless, of course, you find a rating equal to that recieved by Mandrake to have negative connotations.)
As far as the end of my post, I was referring to the Slashdot community's attitude that anyone running an "easy to install" version of Linux, or a distro geared towards newbies, is to be reviled. I will not debate this any further, as it is an impression that I have recieved more than a scientific analysis. You will agree or disagree, but I don't feel like writing a Perl script to find out. =|:>)
Now, a Corel user might decide to move to a more powerful Distro, (Happens all the time at our LUG...) with more tools available. (If you found Blender to be indespensable, would you just download it each time? Or you might switch to SUSE, a new version of all of your software every 3 months for $29.95) Many people are quite happy writing "Perl baby-talk", why would they get into declaring "my" variables? I happen to use the "$_" variable quite often, but have seen it depreciated by you quite often. But it works, and I see no reason to switch. I simply bear in mind the possible problems that it can cause. It would seem that both statements evaluate to false for the same reason.
My other point is this, I have seen users reviled for not knowing the proper names for various linux related hooziewhatzits, and seen small flame wars start up because someone typed "My http demon isn't running". We know it's daemon, but this does not make valid the searing criticism that some of these people recieve.
In closing, my post recieved one point for being interesting, and one for being funny. Perhaps this means that someone out there understood that this was intended in the spirit of humor. I hope that you understand as well, that it was the post's intention to be funny, and hardly deserving of what I took to be a curt and derogatory response. I have an abundance of laziness and impatience, perhaps to can refer me to a good source of hubris, or loan me some of yours, you seem to have an excessive supply.
~Jason Maggard
jmaggard@mindspring.com
Actually, written documentation is a very important part of a Distro for me. And for the unwashed masses, who wants to fiddle with the XF config and the CTRL+ALT+F2 to switch to a virtual term to read docs, back to 1 to proceed, etc... Plus, with most folks, they aren't comfortable enough with the OS to do all of that anyway. The most common questions from newbies?? "How the H377 do I get to my CD-ROM??" "I need support for my modem, and I can't get on line!" The Docs are in HTML, and I can't use them because I can't get X (actually they call it "windows"... They're so cute at that age!") running."
Now, when they need to use vi or emacs, to edit a file.... Goodness!!
IMHO, every Distro should come with:
VI quick ref and brief tutorial.
Brief command ref.
Info for setting up hardware.
Info for stting up X.
Basic WM setup.
Overview of the "concept" behind the system.
Overview of the FS.
ENOUGH INFO TO GET YOU TO THE DOCUMENTATION ON THE CDS!!
~Jason Maggard
"Never underestimate the power of a dead tree."
Tom gets a rating of 5.
/., you might want to consider reading further down for the "Micro$oft Sucks!" posts.
The Cambrian Explosion reference would most likely be lost on newbies or anyone who has not spent hours in the company of Larry Wall. His post was to loaded down with big words that make his post difficult to install. Also, his use of plain text for the message format makes the installer none too pretty to look at.
However, for the power user, he makes over 5 points throughout the article while keeping the post lean and stable. But at a price of $8.75 for all of the 25 cent words in his post, this brings him in as one of the more expensive posters in our roundup.
The Bottom Line: For the truly knowledgeable, this post offers the most bang for the buck, but if you prefer the skript kiddie approach to
~Jason "Karma Whore" Maggard
"You can learn Perl "small end first". You can program in Perl baby-talk and we promise not to laugh."
~The Camel Book
P.S. We can also let people learn Linux small end first, you can start with Corel and wind up with Debian. It is really part of the natural evolution of the user. It is most important that we nurture the newbies like children speaking Linux Baby-Talk, that is how we will grow mature Linux adults.
I don't know how many people are familiar with current devices to do this, but they are all unseemly and often painful. This looks to be a more focused way of stimulating just the muscles you need.
But on the radio note, think about the Dallas hospital that had all of their heart monitors go off line due to interference from an HDTV signal. That's the scary part...
~Jason
As a musician who has worked both on his own website and on some high profile mp3 sites, here's my take.
/., if only the best and brightest were to post, Hemos and Taco would probably have an 800 number that you could call if something went wrong while you were trying to post. But as it stands, if your Microsoft Ruulz post gets eaten in the ethernet, too bad. And by the same token, if your Thinking beyond the desktop paradigm post gets munched, too bad.
/. flame. (Hey my song, "Bill G. ain't so peachy" got turned down because of the the reapeated use of "fsck"...")
/., it's basically structured usenet... Streaming mp3's of latest submissions with a voting tab?? Now each file can be tagged with a quality rating. The list goes on. The tech is always in it's infancy...
The mp3 sites have a very low noise to signal ratio for the indie artists. Most of their indie selections are a) Poorly recorded (and I don't mean in the charming sense) b) Poor songs (Yes, this is a value judgement, but if you can't play the local clubs, why do I need your mp3?) c) crap. (Hey, what is this "Voyetra Jam Box" program I got with my Packard Smell??) This would create a problem for me if I were running a site like mp3.com for the following reasons.
Do I really want/need to cater to the bedroom rockers etc. out there? If all of my submitters are good quality bands with good tunes, sure, I want to give them all the bells and whistles to maqke sure they come back and to help them along the path to stardom. It's just good business. If one big band got their start on friggin-mp3.com (TM), I'd be set. But do I want to deal with the added overhead of catering to "DJ Whimpleteats" and his GW2K Mixmaster? No. So you scale back service to the lowest common denominator.
Consider this like
Now the flipside of the coin reveals this: Who am I to make the decision that what you are sending is crap? Ever had a post moderated down when you didn't think it needed to be?? So how can you challenge the status quo of the recording industry yet turn people away right and left because content is not up to snuff?? (Besides the fact that you would actually have to listen to all of it to make the valuation.) Plus you now get into bruised egos, and a possible
This really isn't the recording industry. Any artist who thinks that they are going to make big money would also believe that the moon is made of cheese. The name of the game is exposure, and that is the best you can hope for with these sites.
Running you own website is a good proposition, but you cannot generate the traffic that these large sites do, and the large sites are also a good way to drive traffic to your individual site.
The mp3 sites have their place, but the indies will need to find a new way to get better and cleaner exposure. Look at
~Jason Maggard
"America is the home of the hypocrite
The American Dream is only a dream"
~The Violent Femmes
Well, this is all very droll. We cn see the new direction that open source is taking, but the real question is "Will it survive??"
Back in the old DOS days I released some high memory drivers for the 286 (Still needed at the time so that you could access a full Meg of memory) for free to the internet and BBS'es. Alot of people used these things. Then AOL started listing them for download. Now I spent too much time responding to user mail, and on into the 486 era, I would get the occasional rude paniced phone call asking me why my program didn't work.
Those of you who run LUG's know what I'm talking about. We gave out LUG info to get noticed, and now our home phone #'s are splattered across the Red Hat pages, Linux.com, etc... Now I get phone calls at 9:00 A.M. and I work nights. Needless to say I am none too cordial when woken up. (BTW, attempts to get this info off various pages does not work. If the offending site takes it down, some other site has picked it up before then and the cycle perpetuates.)
With a market share equal to that of Microsoft would the community crumble or flourish??
The future of Open Source is much more likely going to be a corporate/individual shared effort.
For Linux to survive, the Open Source movement will need to evolve to encompass corporate culture as well. Look at Rasterman and Red Hat.
Bleach and boobaroo!
Jason Maggard
Ok, that's a falsehood, I have used it, once. About 2 years ago I downloaded Notes From The Underground. It lingered on my hard drive with some Mark Twain that I had also downloaded at the time. I don't believe that I ever read them, because it's too darn uncomfortable to read a full novel on a computer.
Eventually I picked up Notes from the Underground As a Dover Thrift Edtiton. It cost me all of $1.00. I couldn't print it myself for that much. Also I picked up Faust, The Theory Of The Leisure Class, The Devil's Dictionary, The Queen of Spades, Oedipus Rex... and the list goes on. These were brand new. None of them were more than $2.00. And that was suggested retail. Used books fall into much the same category, as they are usually $2.00 for a paperback.
In this era we publish more books than ever before but fewer authors than 30 years ago. Why not use E-texts to promote some authors who cannot get published by the big boys like Bantam, Del, Tor, etc... Why not have a more user friendly site? Why not invite reviews? Reccommendations? Etc...
Why not make it so that PG is accessible to the masses. Let people have their stake in PG, make them a part of something. That is what draws people to participate in these projects. Slashdot is not the best news site out there for news, but it is the best community out there for news.
When I first found PG it seemed like one of those great ideas. I bookmarked it. I stopped back, nothing had changed, A year later I stopped back, still didn't see anything that really caught my eye.
In short, I appreciate what PG is trying to accomplish, but I cannot find where it has any real relevancy to me. Not when the price of the information on a user-friendly, portable media that never needs winding or batteries is available for so little. To truly draw attention and keep it, you need to fight our pitifully short attention spans, and our desparate need for convenience. Why not encourage people to write for PG, not copy. Why not encourage the stockpiling of information, not fiction. What about an app that facilitates the finding and reading of e-texts, something more than "more"...
PG has been around long enough to have garnered the recognition it deserves. If it is concerned that it is not busy enough, then it should be wondering why. It has always seemed to me that PG tries to lure it's readership with the mantra that "This is for the greater good..." Help us... Instead of playing on our consciences, fufill a need. As of this writing there are ~50 responses from people who have all heard of PG. Some use it, some don't. But they all know about it.
PG, give me the slightest reason to come and keep coming, and I will. Until then, I can get Vonnegut for $0.25 at the library and PK Dick for $2.00 at Novel Futures. And god knows that our independent booksellers are struggling too. (Tangent: Don't buy from book behemoths, as smaller booksellers die out our culture moves further into the realm of vanilla pop garbage!)
~Jason Maggard
"Give me convenience or give me death." ~Jello
Reasons they made the show??
Thank God! We finally found something that can run Win2000, Office 2000, and IE 6!
What is the command to launch the missiles again??
Gates to Balmer: "Keep an eye on that british super-spy Bond. He interferes with my plans..."
Finally demonstrating the clustering technology mentioned on the "Linux Myths" page...
With that mich hardware, how can they blame the software?? Ship it!!!
Bill Gates just saw Freejack and thinks the technology is possible...
Looking for companies to buy/crush/steal from. Hah! We are innovative!
Current downloadable pr0n filez look grainy and pixellated on Bill's home PC.
Looking to build an android Judge Jackson and quietly make the switch.
last but not least, "I'm where???"
~Jason Maggard
Well, the Chineese have already been doing the dumb stuff. There is some meditation technique that they don't like, and they have been defacing the websites DoS'ing the servers that host the content, etc... both here and in Canada. Sorry if I'm fuzzy on the details, but I really don't feel like looking them up.
Can't really blame them. The Russians were brought down by Pepsi-Cola, cheap blue jeans, fast food, and rock-and-roll. If I was running a totalitarian government, I'd keep such a tight lock on information that I'd make sure that only my brain-washed cronies could speak any language other than ubby-dubby. As is stated in "Children of the Revolution", "McDonald's in Red Square! It's the Communist Apocalypse!"
Information warfare is a part of every government plan, and will be as long as there are people and governments and information. And I'm all for it. My theory is this: It's war. You want to kill me and mine, and I want to stop you. I will do whatever it takes.
~Jason Maggard
"When I remain formless, I force my opponent to defend an attack that he cannot understand."
~Sun Tzu
With Mandrake coming into the Distro market a little on the late side and Corel et. al. stealing their thunder as the "easy" Linux install, it would seem to me that this is just a matter of trying to get their company some street cred among the debian/slackware people out there. Plus, Jean's gotta eat too....
It is a known fact that whatever distro the alpha geek uses will eventually be adopted by the others. Around here it's Suse. Why?? They kept shipping me free versions. By the time they stopped, I was so used to their distro that I didn't feel like changing. So when my co-workers ask me how to set up any of the Red-Hat tools, I have to tell them I don't know. Result? Around here, Suse = Support.
It's just a wild guess that ESR wasn't available, or was too expensive...
~Jason Maggard
"You are using Pharlap on 172.16.63.81
Dig this stone cold funky groove baby!"
~MOTD
Here is a perfect example of what happens when people from California try to use words from Mississippi...
"The showcase of nations - a collection of distinctly-designed pavilions that sell the food and gew-gaws of various encircle around a man-made lagoon"
First, they would be "Geegaws" according to Webster's unabridged. Also to be noted in the Mose Allison album Geegaws and Gimcracks. Secondly, is there a word missing from the sentence above?? "of various encircle" sounds like an REM album. Do they pay you for these stories??
And finally, Walt was a facist. Well, most "Utopian" societies actually were. The ones that weren't made the assumption that eventually we'd get over this whole "agression" thing. Read Dostoyevsky's "The Devils". THat might also give you an opportunity to read an author who really could predict the future. (once)
~Jason Maggard
I forgot to see if I won that spankin' new linux server they were giving away. The drawing was on the 12th.
But seriously, this gives me a great chance to laugh at my boss. I hope that this means new and better graphics tools for Linux like 3D studio Max and the like. Also, with SGI on board we might start seeing linux support for some of the high end rendering tools, and this will help greatly with linux multimedia development. I am just soooo friggin' happy! I won't have to reboot between tracings of my 3D models now like I do if I use an NT workststion....
~Jason Maggard