I think that the biggest problem in this case appears to be that the trailers etc from the Universal site are being presented as content on the MovieList site. There was almost a groundbreaking case regarding this in the UK, where two newspapers in the Shetland Isles were duking it out over the fact that one paper's website was using links to the other's pages within it's own frameset, making it look like their own content. The papers settled out of court eventually, so there is still no precedent.
Careful linking (such as us practised by/. who link out from their pages to other people's pages) is unlikely to land anyone in trouble.
What really burns me about all this is that at the end of the day, both parties could settle this reasonably - there must be a middle ground that could be taken to allow links to the content, while still presenting Universal's advertising content. Alternatively, a financial arrangement could be reached.
Personally, I always advise my clients to link to a new window if they wish to provide deep-links on their pages, or alternatively, to make an arrangement with the owner of the pages.
Sure mods beat rockers - who can't? But punks beat mods any day!
When I were but a young lad growing up in SW England, there were always rivalries between the Exeter punks and the Exmouth mods. It was all no contest really. Mods never stood a chance! (Having said which, I do remember being chased through the shopping centre by a gang of 6 mods one time!)
We all listened to pretty much the same music though! It was a confusing time.
In the UK, Southpark (which hasn't had it's release yet) will almost certainly be rated 18 (and quite possibly be cut to pieces as well, making a mockery of the title no doubt). 18 means EXACTLY what it says - no kids at all, even people who are old enough to reproduce and marry will be barred from seeing the film.
(Disclaimer - I'm no longer in the UK, so I'm not sure what the actual rating will be - but my guess would be 18)
To hear that US kids can get to see a film like SP or Eyes Wide Shut even WITH an adult sounds like a pretty good deal to me. If I were a kid in the UK, I can imagine I would find it pretty hard to get to see this until the video release.
If we actually persuade journos to use the How-To, then it would be pretty straightforward to write a spider to crawl the web, catalogue all the journalists who have written anti-Linux articles so that when MS is no more and Linux rules the world, they can be first up against the wall!
(Or at least a clause could be written into the GPL that Linux is not to be distributed to people who have said nasty things about it).
For me, web based calendars are the way to go. I came from a company that built their own internal scheduling and address-book intranet application and miss it terribly in my new company.
So I'm building a new one right now from scratch. I've taken a look at WebCal and it's nice, but it doesn't have everything I need - specifically it has no integration with an address organiser.
Sadly the new calendar I'm building is being written using ASP's and I very much doubt we are likely to release it for external use, but who knows, I may one day get a chance to build a third one in a nice open-source environment:-)
I'm surprised that not one person has commented on the use of the Amish as a subject of the immature jokes on Hashsnot. Calling it racist might be going one step too far, but picking on a religious minority because they hold different beliefs is a step on the slippery path towards such behaviour.
OK, so this sounds pretty intolerant and I'm perhaps taking things too seriously, but ask yourself - if it is acceptable to make jokes about the Amish, then where does it become unacceptable to make jokes about the jews, or racial groups?
Just because people hold a different point of view to yourself doesn't mean they deserve to become the butt of your jokes.
Funny this should come up today - I was watching a Nat. Geog. documentary on Plagues last night (in Sweden) and one of the subjects covered was "syndromes" that sweep areas, but which are thought to be largely mentally caused.
The documentary showed that RSI swept through Australia several years before it became a well-known problem in the States. The Australian medical system spent a long time working on surgery and other techniques to treat the symptoms. Eventually the medical system realised that the classification of RSI was too broad and there were actually several different causes - some physical, but many of them stress related.
Then the Los Angeles Times (I think!) were covered. They were also swept with cases of RSI. However they also after some time decided to analyse each case separately. Again it was found that though there definitely were some cases with medical causes (overextended tendons etc), a large proportion were stress related. The cause here was often found to be that a small, natural pain associated with overruse would be magnified in the brain to be the first signs of RSI. People then would begin to use their wrists unnaturally, which in time magnified the effects.
There was a great scene with a manager who discussed posters that had been on the office walls at the time with pictures of wrists overlaid with lightning flashes! As he said, it's no wonder so many people were developing these symptoms, every time they had the slightest twinge of pain, they thought it was the beginning of the end of their working life! It was actually fear that was helping RSI to spread.
According to the documentary, RSI is now much less common in Australia, where a system of education, combined with more openminded diagnoses has helped differentiate between natural fatigues and the beginnings of physical problems.
This is not to say that the effects of RSI are not very real. I have also been feeling wrist pains from mouse use, but am taking steps to alter my work environment and my working practises in order to eradicate the pain before it becomes a serious problem. So far it is working and the documentary I saw last night has also helped me realise that awareness of one's body, proper diagnosis and a sensible approach to the problem means that I don't need to add it to the list of things I worry too much about:-)
(Disclaimer: Everything here is from memory, I'm not claiming to have all the details 100% accurate! My memory is another source of worry <grin)
Could one build a form of "Braille" into pages using such a device? BHTML could allow bind users to use a tactile feedback device to read pages.
Of course, the majority of pages would never catch up with such technology - even today, the careful use of ALT tags can make a page more readable for speaking browsers, but almost never actually do so!
There's plenty of people out there still using Perl. In the US, where leased line prices are comparitively cheap, the majority of companies who want to take their web presence seriously will have their own server. In the UK (and much of Europe) it costs an arm and a leg to host a server, so small-medium businesses and even the occasional large company host their sites with ISP's.
Unfortunately, many ISP's don't provide much more than the usual cgi access for functionality, so a lot of people are writing some very interesting and often quite complex systems in Perl.
Of course, this isn't an ideal state of affairs and I for one would much rather be using PHP style solutions, but often the choice just isn't there.
I remember some years ago when AOL installed a filtering system across their entire system. I recall reading an article at the time which descibed an occasion when a chap in the North of England had tried to register a free account using a cover-mount CD.
He found that the registration form kept refusing his account information. Eventually, he rang to AOL support and after some thinking it was noticed that part of his address was Scunthorpe (the town).
It apparently took them some time to reprogram the system to not notice such anomalies - during which time the user was encouraged to log in with Sconthorpe as his town name.
Ever since then I have thought of AOL as the people who put the "cunt" in Scunthorpe!
I have read on Alcatel's site that ADSL is being trialled by Telia, but does anyone know where I can find some definite information on availability / locations of service in Sweden - especially the Göteborg area.
Also, are there any pressure groups / user campaigns to try and push telco's for better access in Sweden?
Below is a comment I have sent to Village Voice. It says pretty much how I feel about the article.
--------------------------------------------- That's an interesting critique of the "Voices from the Hellmouth" postings over on Slashdot. However, I feel that there is something essentially wrong at the heart of it - a point that seems to have been missed along the way.
For the most part, the "geek kids" who have raised this issue are white and middle class - however, they are an excluded section of the white middle class school population. Cast your mind back to your school - who were the white kids that had no friends, the ones who were quiet, serious, nerdy perhaps. Maybe the kids with the thick glasses, maybe someone who was overweight, possibly someone who looked just like you, but never seemed to fit in.
I don't know about where you went to school, but at my school, those kids went through hell. Part of no clique, mostly friendless, certainly unable to defend themselves easily from attack. And those attacks came. It was certainly easier to be coloured at my school than to be a nerd, or a goth, or just different.
Grouping these kids in with the rest of the school - especially saying "The idea that this group could move into the slot of the oppressed, as well as occupying the traditional role of the oppressor, " is laughable. These are kids we are talking about. They have no personal history of being the oppressor. And here we move to the crunch of this argument.
Your article was based on a political view of what is essentially a sociological problem. So what if these kids are from white middle class families. That isn't the point. The point is that there is a lot of suffering and persecution going on out there that is not being recognised. What is worse is that a lot of it is coming from the people who *should* know better - parents, educators, the people who are meant to protect children.
I am appalled that such a well respected organ as the Village Voice would run an editorial piece that basically says "Someone is being persecuted and we don't care". Not so long ago, people said that about gays, blacks and all the other minority groups that you wouldn't dare say such a thing about. What is the difference here? At the end of the day, the Hellmouth respondents are children.
Mmm- yes. I've got a ZX Spectrum you see. It's just as well that this isn't actual competition isn't it? Cos loads of people would be in the wrong then.
Do you see a sign that says "please confine your comments to the rules of the competition'. Some people actually like nostalgia.
Did I mention that I've got a ZX Spectrum at home - and even worse, I've got an Atari2600 which isn't even a computer - but it's old.
I sense the groundroots of a campaign here. It would be nice also if the ISP's could realise what thsi means to them and call for a one day net strike (hell, even 1 hour would be bad enough).
Actually, I wonder. What effect would a one day net strike have with our increased reliance on the internet? Anyway, I digress - some of you Aussie folks need to get a campaign to have as many sites submitted to the Film Board as possible. Creative protest has always been the most effective way of ridding dumb laws like this.
I've found that logging on from the many different machines I use, I can't always be bothered to log in each time I post a comment.
Also, your cookie information will get lost between www.slashdot.org and slashdot.org - a jump that I have found occurs sometimes between different areas of the site. This is another reason why I will sometimes post A/C.
Not this time though;-)
East Coast / West Coast - who gives a damn!
on
Palm VII Debut 05/24
·
· Score: 1
"Palm Computing will introduce its eagerly anticipated Palm VII handheld computer next Monday in trial markets starting on the East Coast. "
It is so frustrating to have such fine trinkets dangled in your face, but to be completely unable to use them. Does anyone know when we are likely to see this device in Europe? Especially Sweden?
Still, at least we got the Nokia 9000 before you yanks did:-)
Cheezers - so people aren't allowed to discover things later than you ol' grandaddies who've seen it all and done it all eh? Commercialism sucks of course, but now it's here, it ain't ever gonna go away.
Get used to the hype daddy-o. You can maybe set up a #linux-grandads channel to reminisce about the old days, or maybe one of those modern web-based BBS thingies.
What the hell does it matter that other people are making money from Linux? You guys work in the computer field maybe? Use you *nix skills at all to earn a penny? Different strokes for different folks. If you choose not to contribute further to Free Software, so what - there's plenty folks who will. Just don't come over the martyr about your contribution, or get off your backside and do your own self promoting.
I used to think the way you guys do about music. My favourite small bands were always getting big and then becoming commercialised - but then I realised, hey - this probably means that I've got pretty good taste and at least those guys can afford to eat now.
Anyway, that's my rant out of my system. Just my 2SEK worth.
If you're really lucky, you might even find the big bad Badtz wallets at a REAL low price at a local car-boot fair in London. Heh! Along with a real neat little tin of mini-stickers which adorn so many of my things it's not funny.
There's only one thing though - coming from the UK and living now in Sweden, I've never seen a Badtz Maru 'toon or anything APART from my wallet and stickers.
Come off it, of course Phantom Menace is surrounded by hype. That's what happens with films these days. I seem to remember that it was the Star Wars movies that basically founded movie hype (along with maybe Grease and Saturday Night Fever).
I dislike the circus that goes along with anything like this these days too - but hey - wake up! It's the world we live in. Moaning about it is like wanting to go back to a world without computers.
We talk about the New Economy on the one hand as an amazing change in our lives, but don't forget that a big part of the New Economy is cross-promotion and making your bucks from sources other than product/ticket sales.
Finally, Lucas may be big - godlike in many eyes - but stuff like this is just out of his hands.
In the meantime, why don't you try ignoring the hype, or at least disassociating it from the movie, and just concentrate on getting into that cinema, sitting back in that seat and enjoying the ride.
(And afterwards, you can eat your *EmpireBurger tm* and wear your "I saw the first episode" beany hat with pride)
In principle I agree with you, but then there's also a question of legitimate usage of multiple domains linking to one site. I can see a genuine requirement for having foo.com, foo.net, foobar.com, foobar.net linking to one page.
I guess that if there were a more flexible system of top-domains, or a completely new naming system like RealNames, then there would be less incentive to squat every available combination. It's feasible whene there's just.com,.net,.org and appropriate countries, but if there were unlimited top domains, then it would be impossible to protect every combination.
Don't see a solution happening for some time yet though;-)
Anyone got any idea when CTP might show up in shops in Sweden? Of course I could order over the net, but I had to cut up my credit card last week:-(
(I'm nit talking about a Swedish version - just the English language, Linux version will do me fine).
Katz's experimenting is over
on
Why Kids Kill
·
· Score: 1
Im not often a 'me too'-er, but in this case I've got to say that my first reaction to seeing this piece was "I wonder if Katz can shed any more insight or ideas on this subject than those expressed yesterday". Having read his piece, I really don't think that he has added anything to the already very large response received on Slashdot.
Was this article really any better written, or making any better points than many of the pieces posted yesterday? Personally I think that this piece would have been better posted as a Slashdot user comment.
Great response. Knee jerk defences just don't have a place in dicussions of events like this.
It is interesting that you bring up the goth element. In my younger years I certainly considered myself a goth and although aged almost 30 now, I still hang out in 'goth' clubs. There is a strong thread linking most people who are into the goth thing and you would be surprised at how many parallels there are to the video / fantasy / wargaming community.
My experience of the goth scene is that ther are many people who are attracted to it through their day to day troubles and in finding people who share a slightly 'bleaker' outlook on life. When I was 16, I was surprised at how many of my friends were people who were victimised at school.
However (and here's the kicker!) we were also all pretty well adjusted kids overall. Sure, there was a predisposal to listen to dark music, wear dark clothes, play Dungeons and Dragons and read 2000AD - but that was pretty much it. Personally, I do much the same today, except you can swap D&D for 'fiddle with Linux' and reading 2000AD for reading Slashdot.
So, is there a point I'm making? Yup, I guess there is. Those kids grew up in a society bounded by community values on the one side and surrounded by death and criminal behaviour on the other. There have been maladjusted people at almost every point in our history as far as I can work out, nowadays though, the maladjusted have an extreme range of different views of the world they can choose from, plus access to some startling amounts of firepower. To put the blame on any one aspect of our society is useless. I could blame those kid's parents, or the jocks who bullied them in school, or the laws of America which made guns available to them, or their teachers for not noticing how marginalised these kids were. But I'm not a journalist:-)
I would say that all these aspects, pushed the kids to rebel. Once you begin to rebel against your parents, teachers etc, then you tend to gravitate towards certain things - I'm sure that I would be playing Quake a hell of a lot if I were that age right now. What is missed though is that these kids took their rebelliousness to an extreme new level - but one that has precedents. When I was a kid in the 70's I remember the girl who when asked why she had come into school with a shotgun and gunned down her class replied "I don't like Mondays", inspiring The Boomtown Rats song. I bet you anything that she too felt ostracised, was bullied and felt like the world was not somewhere she belonged.
OK, I'm gonna wrap this up, as typing something so long into a little textarea box is making me lose the thread of my argument.
Basically I feel that Goth music, dark clothing, a predisposition towards guns and violence, extreme political viewpoints, obsessively playing Quake - these things are symptoms of deeper problems. In our society, we are all looking for a panacea, a quick explanation for the irrational. Unfortunately, there just isn't one. These kids were complicated machines and somewhere along the line, they got their programming mixed up.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the biggest problem in this case appears to be that the trailers etc from the Universal site are being presented as content on the MovieList site. There was almost a groundbreaking case regarding this in the UK, where two newspapers in the Shetland Isles were duking it out over the fact that one paper's website was using links to the other's pages within it's own frameset, making it look like their own content. The papers settled out of court eventually, so there is still no precedent.
/. who link out from their pages to other people's pages) is unlikely to land anyone in trouble.
Careful linking (such as us practised by
What really burns me about all this is that at the end of the day, both parties could settle this reasonably - there must be a middle ground that could be taken to allow links to the content, while still presenting Universal's advertising content. Alternatively, a financial arrangement could be reached.
Personally, I always advise my clients to link to a new window if they wish to provide deep-links on their pages, or alternatively, to make an arrangement with the owner of the pages.
Sure mods beat rockers - who can't? But punks beat mods any day!
When I were but a young lad growing up in SW England, there were always rivalries between the Exeter punks and the Exmouth mods. It was all no contest really. Mods never stood a chance! (Having said which, I do remember being chased through the shopping centre by a gang of 6 mods one time!)
We all listened to pretty much the same music though! It was a confusing time.
Fly the flag - Hang a mod!
In the UK, Southpark (which hasn't had it's release yet) will almost certainly be rated 18 (and quite possibly be cut to pieces as well, making a mockery of the title no doubt). 18 means EXACTLY what it says - no kids at all, even people who are old enough to reproduce and marry will be barred from seeing the film.
(Disclaimer - I'm no longer in the UK, so I'm not sure what the actual rating will be - but my guess would be 18)
To hear that US kids can get to see a film like SP or Eyes Wide Shut even WITH an adult sounds like a pretty good deal to me. If I were a kid in the UK, I can imagine I would find it pretty hard to get to see this until the video release.
If we actually persuade journos to use the How-To, then it would be pretty straightforward to write a spider to crawl the web, catalogue all the journalists who have written anti-Linux articles so that when MS is no more and Linux rules the world, they can be first up against the wall!
(Or at least a clause could be written into the GPL that Linux is not to be distributed to people who have said nasty things about it).
:-)
For me, web based calendars are the way to go. I came from a company that built their own internal scheduling and address-book intranet application and miss it terribly in my new company.
:-)
So I'm building a new one right now from scratch. I've taken a look at WebCal and it's nice, but it doesn't have everything I need - specifically it has no integration with an address organiser.
Sadly the new calendar I'm building is being written using ASP's and I very much doubt we are likely to release it for external use, but who knows, I may one day get a chance to build a third one in a nice open-source environment
I'm surprised that not one person has commented on the use of the Amish as a subject of the immature jokes on Hashsnot. Calling it racist might be going one step too far, but picking on a religious minority because they hold different beliefs is a step on the slippery path towards such behaviour.
OK, so this sounds pretty intolerant and I'm perhaps taking things too seriously, but ask yourself - if it is acceptable to make jokes about the Amish, then where does it become unacceptable to make jokes about the jews, or racial groups?
Just because people hold a different point of view to yourself doesn't mean they deserve to become the butt of your jokes.
</rant>
Funny this should come up today - I was watching a Nat. Geog. documentary on Plagues last night (in Sweden) and one of the subjects covered was "syndromes" that sweep areas, but which are thought to be largely mentally caused.
:-)
The documentary showed that RSI swept through Australia several years before it became a well-known problem in the States. The Australian medical system spent a long time working on surgery and other techniques to treat the symptoms. Eventually the medical system realised that the classification of RSI was too broad and there were actually several different causes - some physical, but many of them stress related.
Then the Los Angeles Times (I think!) were covered. They were also swept with cases of RSI. However they also after some time decided to analyse each case separately. Again it was found that though there definitely were some cases with medical causes (overextended tendons etc), a large proportion were stress related. The cause here was often found to be that a small, natural pain associated with overruse would be magnified in the brain to be the first signs of RSI. People then would begin to use their wrists unnaturally, which in time magnified the effects.
There was a great scene with a manager who discussed posters that had been on the office walls at the time with pictures of wrists overlaid with lightning flashes! As he said, it's no wonder so many people were developing these symptoms, every time they had the slightest twinge of pain, they thought it was the beginning of the end of their working life! It was actually fear that was helping RSI to spread.
According to the documentary, RSI is now much less common in Australia, where a system of education, combined with more openminded diagnoses has helped differentiate between natural fatigues and the beginnings of physical problems.
This is not to say that the effects of RSI are not very real. I have also been feeling wrist pains from mouse use, but am taking steps to alter my work environment and my working practises in order to eradicate the pain before it becomes a serious problem. So far it is working and the documentary I saw last night has also helped me realise that awareness of one's body, proper diagnosis and a sensible approach to the problem means that I don't need to add it to the list of things I worry too much about
(Disclaimer: Everything here is from memory, I'm not claiming to have all the details 100% accurate! My memory is another source of worry <grin)
Could one build a form of "Braille" into pages using such a device? BHTML could allow bind users to use a tactile feedback device to read pages.
Of course, the majority of pages would never catch up with such technology - even today, the careful use of ALT tags can make a page more readable for speaking browsers, but almost never actually do so!
There's plenty of people out there still using Perl. In the US, where leased line prices are comparitively cheap, the majority of companies who want to take their web presence seriously will have their own server. In the UK (and much of Europe) it costs an arm and a leg to host a server, so small-medium businesses and even the occasional large company host their sites with ISP's.
Unfortunately, many ISP's don't provide much more than the usual cgi access for functionality, so a lot of people are writing some very interesting and often quite complex systems in Perl.
Of course, this isn't an ideal state of affairs and I for one would much rather be using PHP style solutions, but often the choice just isn't there.
Try www.allmusic.com - I have no idea what the song is, so I can't look it up, but you can search by artist, album, song or style there :-)
Hope this helps.
Afterburner is strictly freeware - so it won't cost you a penny to try anyway (or a krone, dollar or currency unit of your choice).
.. unless your Pilot starts to smoke that is :-)
Ermmm
I remember some years ago when AOL installed a filtering system across their entire system. I recall reading an article at the time which descibed an occasion when a chap in the North of England had tried to register a free account using a cover-mount CD.
He found that the registration form kept refusing his account information. Eventually, he rang to AOL support and after some thinking it was noticed that part of his address was Scunthorpe (the town).
It apparently took them some time to reprogram the system to not notice such anomalies - during which time the user was encouraged to log in with Sconthorpe as his town name.
Ever since then I have thought of AOL as the people who put the "cunt" in Scunthorpe!
I have read on Alcatel's site that ADSL is being trialled by Telia, but does anyone know where I can find some definite information on availability / locations of service in Sweden - especially the Göteborg area.
Also, are there any pressure groups / user campaigns to try and push telco's for better access in Sweden?
Below is a comment I have sent to Village Voice. It says pretty much how I feel about the article.
---------------------------------------------
That's an interesting critique of the "Voices from the Hellmouth" postings over on Slashdot. However, I feel that there is something essentially wrong at the heart of it - a point that seems to have been missed along the way.
For the most part, the "geek kids" who have raised this issue are white and middle class - however, they are an excluded section of the white middle class school population. Cast your mind back to your school - who were the white kids that had no friends, the ones who were quiet, serious, nerdy perhaps. Maybe the kids with the thick glasses, maybe someone who was overweight, possibly someone who looked just like you, but never seemed to fit in.
I don't know about where you went to school, but at my school, those kids went through hell. Part of no clique, mostly friendless, certainly unable to defend themselves easily from attack. And those attacks came. It was certainly easier to be coloured at my school than to be a nerd, or a goth, or just different.
Grouping these kids in with the rest of the school - especially saying "The idea that this group could move into the slot of the oppressed, as well as occupying the traditional role of the oppressor, " is laughable. These are kids we are talking about. They have no personal history of being the oppressor. And here we move to the crunch of this argument.
Your article was based on a political view of what is essentially a sociological problem. So what if these kids are from white middle class families. That isn't the point. The point is that there is a lot of suffering and persecution going on out there that is not being recognised. What is worse is that a lot of it is coming from the people who *should* know better - parents, educators, the people who are meant to protect children.
I am appalled that such a well respected organ as the Village Voice would run an editorial piece that basically says "Someone is being persecuted and we don't care". Not so long ago, people said that about gays, blacks and all the other minority groups that you wouldn't dare say such a thing about. What is the difference here? At the end of the day, the Hellmouth respondents are children.
Children who are suffering.
Mmm- yes. I've got a ZX Spectrum you see. It's just as well that this isn't actual competition isn't it? Cos loads of people would be in the wrong then.
Do you see a sign that says "please confine your comments to the rules of the competition'. Some people actually like nostalgia.
Did I mention that I've got a ZX Spectrum at home - and even worse, I've got an Atari2600 which isn't even a computer - but it's old.
Lighten up - you'll get an ulcer.
Hmmm, indeedy. There is no way they could cope.
I sense the groundroots of a campaign here. It would be nice also if the ISP's could realise what thsi means to them and call for a one day net strike (hell, even 1 hour would be bad enough).
Actually, I wonder. What effect would a one day net strike have with our increased reliance on the internet? Anyway, I digress - some of you Aussie folks need to get a campaign to have as many sites submitted to the Film Board as possible. Creative protest has always been the most effective way of ridding dumb laws like this.
I've found that logging on from the many different machines I use, I can't always be bothered to log in each time I post a comment.
;-)
Also, your cookie information will get lost between www.slashdot.org and slashdot.org - a jump that I have found occurs sometimes between different areas of the site. This is another reason why I will sometimes post A/C.
Not this time though
"Palm Computing will introduce its eagerly anticipated Palm VII handheld computer next Monday in trial markets starting on the East Coast. "
:-)
It is so frustrating to have such fine trinkets dangled in your face, but to be completely unable to use them. Does anyone know when we are likely to see this device in Europe? Especially Sweden?
Still, at least we got the Nokia 9000 before you yanks did
Cheezers - so people aren't allowed to discover things later than you ol' grandaddies who've seen it all and done it all eh? Commercialism sucks of course, but now it's here, it ain't ever gonna go away.
Get used to the hype daddy-o. You can maybe set up a #linux-grandads channel to reminisce about the old days, or maybe one of those modern web-based BBS thingies.
What the hell does it matter that other people are making money from Linux? You guys work in the computer field maybe? Use you *nix skills at all to earn a penny? Different strokes for different folks. If you choose not to contribute further to Free Software, so what - there's plenty folks who will. Just don't come over the martyr about your contribution, or get off your backside and do your own self promoting.
I used to think the way you guys do about music. My favourite small bands were always getting big and then becoming commercialised - but then I realised, hey - this probably means that I've got pretty good taste and at least those guys can afford to eat now.
Anyway, that's my rant out of my system. Just my 2SEK worth.
If you're really lucky, you might even find the big bad Badtz wallets at a REAL low price at a local car-boot fair in London. Heh! Along with a real neat little tin of mini-stickers which adorn so many of my things it's not funny.
There's only one thing though - coming from the UK and living now in Sweden, I've never seen a Badtz Maru 'toon or anything APART from my wallet and stickers.
Come off it, of course Phantom Menace is surrounded by hype. That's what happens with films these days. I seem to remember that it was the Star Wars movies that basically founded movie hype (along with maybe Grease and Saturday Night Fever).
I dislike the circus that goes along with anything like this these days too - but hey - wake up! It's the world we live in. Moaning about it is like wanting to go back to a world without computers.
We talk about the New Economy on the one hand as an amazing change in our lives, but don't forget that a big part of the New Economy is cross-promotion and making your bucks from sources other than product/ticket sales.
Finally, Lucas may be big - godlike in many eyes - but stuff like this is just out of his hands.
In the meantime, why don't you try ignoring the hype, or at least disassociating it from the movie, and just concentrate on getting into that cinema, sitting back in that seat and enjoying the ride.
(And afterwards, you can eat your *EmpireBurger tm* and wear your "I saw the first episode" beany hat with pride)
In principle I agree with you, but then there's also a question of legitimate usage of multiple domains linking to one site. I can see a genuine requirement for having foo.com, foo.net, foobar.com, foobar.net linking to one page.
.com, .net, .org and appropriate countries, but if there were unlimited top domains, then it would be impossible to protect every combination.
;-)
I guess that if there were a more flexible system of top-domains, or a completely new naming system like RealNames, then there would be less incentive to squat every available combination. It's feasible whene there's just
Don't see a solution happening for some time yet though
Anyone got any idea when CTP might show up in shops in Sweden? Of course I could order over the net, but I had to cut up my credit card last week :-(
(I'm nit talking about a Swedish version - just the English language, Linux version will do me fine).
Im not often a 'me too'-er, but in this case I've got to say that my first reaction to seeing this piece was "I wonder if Katz can shed any more insight or ideas on this subject than those expressed yesterday". Having read his piece, I really don't think that he has added anything to the already very large response received on Slashdot.
Was this article really any better written, or making any better points than many of the pieces posted yesterday? Personally I think that this piece would have been better posted as a Slashdot user comment.
Great response. Knee jerk defences just don't have a place in dicussions of events like this.
:-)
It is interesting that you bring up the goth element. In my younger years I certainly considered myself a goth and although aged almost 30 now, I still hang out in 'goth' clubs. There is a strong thread linking most people who are into the goth thing and you would be surprised at how many parallels there are to the video / fantasy / wargaming community.
My experience of the goth scene is that ther are many people who are attracted to it through their day to day troubles and in finding people who share a slightly 'bleaker' outlook on life. When I was 16, I was surprised at how many of my friends were people who were victimised at school.
However (and here's the kicker!) we were also all pretty well adjusted kids overall. Sure, there was a predisposal to listen to dark music, wear dark clothes, play Dungeons and Dragons and read 2000AD - but that was pretty much it. Personally, I do much the same today, except you can swap D&D for 'fiddle with Linux' and reading 2000AD for reading Slashdot.
So, is there a point I'm making? Yup, I guess there is. Those kids grew up in a society bounded by community values on the one side and surrounded by death and criminal behaviour on the other. There have been maladjusted people at almost every point in our history as far as I can work out, nowadays though, the maladjusted have an extreme range of different views of the world they can choose from, plus access to some startling amounts of firepower. To put the blame on any one aspect of our society is useless. I could blame those kid's parents, or the jocks who bullied them in school, or the laws of America which made guns available to them, or their teachers for not noticing how marginalised these kids were. But I'm not a journalist
I would say that all these aspects, pushed the kids to rebel. Once you begin to rebel against your parents, teachers etc, then you tend to gravitate towards certain things - I'm sure that I would be playing Quake a hell of a lot if I were that age right now. What is missed though is that these kids took their rebelliousness to an extreme new level - but one that has precedents. When I was a kid in the 70's I remember the girl who when asked why she had come into school with a shotgun and gunned down her class replied "I don't like Mondays", inspiring The Boomtown Rats song. I bet you anything that she too felt ostracised, was bullied and felt like the world was not somewhere she belonged.
OK, I'm gonna wrap this up, as typing something so long into a little textarea box is making me lose the thread of my argument.
Basically I feel that Goth music, dark clothing, a predisposition towards guns and violence, extreme political viewpoints, obsessively playing Quake - these things are symptoms of deeper problems. In our society, we are all looking for a panacea, a quick explanation for the irrational. Unfortunately, there just isn't one. These kids were complicated machines and somewhere along the line, they got their programming mixed up.