Yes, people in L.A. are that dumb. For a more complete analysis of just how widespread it is, pick up the book "If Chins Could Kill" by Bruce Campbell (literally, pick it up - buy it later if you want) and browse to the section where he and the Raimi brothers are in L.A. trying to get distribution for Evil Dead I. It's baaaaaaaddd...
I can't believe anyone modded the parent insightful. I didn't see a bunch of Clowns galavanting through here recently...
First, why are you downloading it off of P2P when a taped- or digital-recording is *much* better quality since it's direct from the source?
Also, your personally recorded version is ready as soon as you wake up, there's no P2P Download-Time Penalty, and if you want to convert from tape- or DV-recording, it's going to be much better quality doing a direct dump from the source than getting some lossy 'net-friendly-size format.
Maybe I'm missing something, but given that you have direct access to the original show, why in God's name would you P2P anything??
Kelkoo is the Latin word for a species that's notable for being too fat, too lazy and too stupid to work at finding a decent domain name after discovering that Europrice.com was already registered.
This isn't politics, this is Our Great Commander coming up with a brilliantly daring strike to lasso-up broadband for the benefit of all Americans.
I wouldn't be surprised if his experiences with AOL Top Speed led him to this inspired proposal to free all of us from the agony of slow access. If this doesn't just put a cherry on top of all the ways he's thought about the little feller, I don't know what does.;-D
Thanks for reposting this, it's encouraging to see the tech community reposting some of the horror stories that Indies normally suffer through without much public knowledge.
BTW, Jody's a guy and his music is pretty good: http://www.jodywhitesides.com
I really like this, hadn't know it existed. Now that I'm running FireBush, my entire browsing experience has become faster, leaner and a whole lot less intrusive.
Here's to hoping that the Mozilla hackers keep up the technical and political innovations.:-)
What I don't like is the push to outlaw anything that isn't a Win/Mac clone because the proverbial average user will be confused. All I care about is that I have the choice to use whatever I like precisely because everybody's tastes are different.
Absolutely. While I'm a Linux newbie who's only run Xandros 2 (and liked it), I think it would be a terrible mistake to mandate that everything be as user-friendly as X2. IMO, and knowing that I know jack-shit about OSource development, I think it might be a good idea if there was some directory or index that said "Hey!, Macish-Windowish newbie-friendly programs here" since Freshmeat and distro CDs have all the high-end or unstable software an experienced user might want (I assume).
*Is* there an index of newbie-friendly Linux programs, a la download, double-click and install? I don't recall seeing one outside of Xandros Networks.
The ultimate goal of Linux desktops should be the ability to set it up to work exactly the way you want it to, not to imitate the Mac.
I don't give a shit about the average home user.
Call me silly, but you just contradicted yourself. If the average home user wants to it to imitate a Mac or W2K or Fisher-Price Speak and Spell, I agree that Linux shoud let them.
I don't think the goal of Linux desktops should be to take away all the things I like about them.
Problem is, ask 1,000 people what they like about the Linux desktop and you'll get little agreement. Besides, an experienced hacker will have a lot fewer problems re-configuring their desktop from a basic setup than the average user will trying to configure their desktop from a hacker setup.
the average home user can use a stripped-down KDE set to emulate Windows or Mac if he/she wants to.
This is a really good idea. I'd *love* to see a vanilla Linux standard that all programmers could program to without worrying about which of 97 flavors of Linux were installed on the PC. The CLI Commandos and UberL33ts could keep their CLIs and RTFM MAN pages while the general public benefited from having an inexpensive, realistic escape path from MS.
I have nothing to do with the player or its company, but in checking out *a lot* of hard-drive mp3 players to replace my Neuros 20gb model, this one looks like the best IMO.
I've been checking out DVD burners for a couple or three years now but haven't made the dive. As you noted for yourself, a cheap firewire external hard drive fits my situation better. It costs roughly the same as a good DVD burner, I don't need to worry about player compatibility, and its lifespan is roughly the same as burned DVD media (~2-3 years).
When they come out with one standard, I'll check it out again.
Hey Fred, I'll disagree with you. Remember the 56K modem standards fight from ?10? years ago? Once they agreed on a unified standard, there were still tons of manufacturers out there making their own model that abided by the standard. I think the same principle applies to hard drives and other devices.
"Or, they could * see it as a cash cow and milk it for more than you're paying now, sinking the money into higher salaries for town officials * farm out the maintenance to the lowest bidder, who has 20 hours of downtime/week * outsource support to india * decide that 500kbps is fast enough for everyone * mandate Windows usage if you want to get on the net * any number of other stupid things"
You mean just like the private companies who do it now, charge more for their service, and provide less in return? Holy Crock-O'-Shit, Batman, I don't want to compete with that!
"I'd rather see towns mandate multiple cable/DSL providers and let the market drive the prices down."
Uh, one small but eternally permanent problem with that - towns, small municipalities, and other cities can't tell X Internet companies to "get your ass in here and compete, or else we'll do nothing."
Or were you referring to offering incentives to attract Internet-access companies? If so, thanks, but no thanks to corporate welfare.
"They promised to only provide backhaul services to begin with, now they are competing with local ISPs"
Wow, I can't believe the people of Memphis haven't rose up and smited the local government for providing a service that the people seem to want. Unbelievable.
"How can a company compete when the playing field is not level?"
Bribe the representatives and get the legislation you want passed? Seems to work for many other businesses in the U.S. See "Eldred" for an example.
I've been looking for something along these lines since early 2001 and they're just now *sort of* starting to appear. There are portable DVD players which support mp3 playback from a DVD, but their lifespan is ~3 hours before needing new batteries or a recharge.
There are still no large-format audio-only players with "in the field" playtimes of 9 or more hours, support for DVD-RWs, or hard-drive sizes of 100gb or more. My Neuros is pretty good, but I'd rather have a DVD-RW or 100gb+ audio player instead. It's not here today, but maybe within 5 years.
It seems to me that the only thing they did wrong was to not say "thank you" or "sorry for the inconvenience." I'm not trolling here, but everything else they did, there is a good reason for it.
Did it really take them 30 minutes? That's pretty bad. In Cincinnati, I got flagged for a pat-down and re-screen and the entire thing from "step over here" after the metal detector to departing for my gate took about 5-8 minutes. That included a field-check of my Neuros MP3 player to see if it was really an audio player.
You know, for a moment there, you got me thinking that UW was this amazing school that teaches its CS people not only how to be competent techies, but also amazing writers. Alas, at least you cited your source, but it was a bit of a letdown. Hope school's going well for you!
Firefox? Firefox? What, did they put 10 trademark-eligible names in a hat and pull this one out? It's nifty that they have a trademarked name, too bad they trademarked a name that sucks.
Thank God when I support the project by buying their merchandise here: http://snipurl.com/4drd, I'm not stuck buying something that says or displays a frigging Firefox. Is there some reason they couldn't compound their names like nearly any other business in the world? Mozilla Phoenix or Mozilla Firebird would have been a much better solution than this. Heck, cannibalizing Mozilla once the Suite is discontinued would have been better, soooo, once the suite hit 1.8 and then ceased, they could have come out with Mozilla 1.9 the browser and Mozilla Mail 1.9.
Yes, in the big picture, it's not the end of the world - no product name is, even if they'd decided to call this the Edsel. Still, if anyone asks me what I recommend for mail and browsing, I'll be forwarding them to Mozilla.
There's another way to skin this cat, which is to take a page from P2P and distribute the costs out to the area that's AOLing Linux discs in their area. That way, there's no need for a central distributor to pick up the tab - the cost is distributed out to each area according to its own need.
For example, if you've got some of us in Cincinnati, we take care of replicating the discs off our own PCs and getting them into local AOLish freebie channels. Where help can come down from on-high is for each LUG area to share best-of advice, experiences and troubleshooting tips.
One other sidenote, for which I'll be glad to be wrong. Outside of IBM's push for Linux, the Linux community is a lot like the Indie music community in that it's generally competing with more-widely financed, promoted and reviewed products. Perhaps there are a lot of guerilla or shoe-string promo techniques we could take from the Indie music scene and apply towards growing our base?
Yo K, thank you, and true. I have no idea how often I've heard people preaching nonviolent resistance when it was clear that they had a mental image of Buddhist passivity in their mind.
I'm working on not ranting down on Slashdot posts that I perceive to be stupid, soooo...
"As soon as Linux is ready for the desktop, Microsoft is going to hell."
Fortunately for Microsoft, that's a minimum of 5 years, millions upon millions of users, and real driver and software support away.
"Nobody is going to want to pay for software let alone software which is strictly limited in variety."
So you're saying that there is more variety of software for Linux than Windows? In what?
"If Microsoft was smart, they would stop trying to suck every penny out of every company"
They've been sucking companies dry since at least 1988 and haven't had to change a thing. Why change now?
"and start producing software which doesnt limit a users choice."
I'm not a fan of Microsoft at all, but how are they limiting a user's choice? I can buy or download any software for Windows that I want and install it on my system. Where exactly are they limiting my choice?
"And with DRM in Longhorn, there is going to be even more incentive to migrate to Linux.
Speaking as a PC owner who's looking down the road to 64-bit computing (when it becomes mainstream in 2005, 2006 or 2007), I know that all Linux users will have to deal with Palladium too. Moving from Windows to Linux won't matter - the hardware and content/software manufacturers will still have the final word via Palladium. The only mainstream system without it will be Apple.
You know, I really do hope Linux eventually kicks Microsoft's ass on the desktop because then I get the best of both worlds - a stable, reliable, consistent operating system that runs on cheap non-Apple hardware. Until Palladium bites the dust for Linux and companies like Adobe, Macromedia and most major games are released for Linux, my future's Mac.
I have to agree. Terrible Terry Tate, "Triple T," and "The Pain Train" all rolled into one fantastic ad. When I first saw it, it really surprised me and my friends, and is easily a better ad than some of the others on the Top 10 list.
Too bad Reebok is every bit the corporate sweatshop scum that Nike is.
OK, I'm big enough to admit I made a mistake - your documentable history indicates you do know what you're talking about.
Going back to what you said:
"If you want to drag people away from the abomination that is windows, you have to offer something better instead of just copying the crap blindly"
It pissed me off because I run Xandros 1.1 in dual boot with Win2K. When my mother came down, I showed her Xandros and she immediately felt comfortable with it. As a personal experiment, I left the PC in 1.1 all weekend while getting help doing the wallpaper. She checked her web sites and e-mail through Mozilla, and did some word processing with OpenOffice. She never once asked to be let out of 1.1 for the three days she was down. To me, that's remarkable because even Windows normally takes a little training.
To be blunt, I think Xandros has done a remarkable job of making a Linux-newbie-friendly OS out of the box, which is critical if Microsoft is ever going to be marginalized. I apologize for attacking more of you instead of your points.
Your post is interesting, so replies in reverse order.
The GPL states nothing of the sort that you claim. If you use GPLed code or libraries (Note: most libraries are LGPL, not GPL), such as readline, you need to be GPL.
The GPL allows Manufacturer X to make software or drivers that are proprietary and not open-source for inclusion in a distro if said works don't include any GPL code? I'll take your word for it for now but will go back and re-read the salient sections of the GPL. I thought that was both legally and ethically forbidden.
If you choose *not* to use TCPA, then you will be in the same boat as Mac OS X users -- if a publisher refuses to produce DRM-less content, then you will simply have to go without that content
I understood that too, but the "Law of Unforseen Circumstances" has a nasty way of jacknifing that reality. To be blunt, there are *a lot* of ways to make Palladium as proposed work for the content creators past its normal shelf-life, and a lot of consumers who don't read Slashdot to figure out how to preserve their traditional consumer rights (which are admittedly none). Besides, by example alone, I don't support giving $ to people who feel the need to control interaction with my PC. Egads...
Slashdot Mirror
Off-topic, but...
Yes, people in L.A. are that dumb. For a more complete analysis of just how widespread it is, pick up the book "If Chins Could Kill" by Bruce Campbell (literally, pick it up - buy it later if you want) and browse to the section where he and the Raimi brothers are in L.A. trying to get distribution for Evil Dead I. It's baaaaaaaddd...
I can't believe anyone modded the parent insightful. I didn't see a bunch of Clowns galavanting through here recently...
First, why are you downloading it off of P2P when a taped- or digital-recording is *much* better quality since it's direct from the source?
Also, your personally recorded version is ready as soon as you wake up, there's no P2P Download-Time Penalty, and if you want to convert from tape- or DV-recording, it's going to be much better quality doing a direct dump from the source than getting some lossy 'net-friendly-size format.
Maybe I'm missing something, but given that you have direct access to the original show, why in God's name would you P2P anything??
Kelkoo is the Latin word for a species that's notable for being too fat, too lazy and too stupid to work at finding a decent domain name after discovering that Europrice.com was already registered.
:-)
You can see a Kelkoo here.
Hey Ace,
;-D
This isn't politics, this is Our Great Commander coming up with a brilliantly daring strike to lasso-up broadband for the benefit of all Americans.
I wouldn't be surprised if his experiences with AOL Top Speed led him to this inspired proposal to free all of us from the agony of slow access. If this doesn't just put a cherry on top of all the ways he's thought about the little feller, I don't know what does.
Hey Mic,
Thanks for reposting this, it's encouraging to see the tech community reposting some of the horror stories that Indies normally suffer through without much public knowledge.
BTW, Jody's a guy and his music is pretty good:
http://www.jodywhitesides.com
I really like this, hadn't know it existed. Now that I'm running FireBush, my entire browsing experience has become faster, leaner and a whole lot less intrusive.
:-)
Here's to hoping that the Mozilla hackers keep up the technical and political innovations.
You're right, unless your Scrabble opponent is too girly to challenge it.
STOP IT, that's not an iPod...
What I don't like is the push to outlaw anything that isn't a Win/Mac clone because the proverbial average user will be confused. All I care about is that I have the choice to use whatever I like precisely because everybody's tastes are different.
Absolutely. While I'm a Linux newbie who's only run Xandros 2 (and liked it), I think it would be a terrible mistake to mandate that everything be as user-friendly as X2. IMO, and knowing that I know jack-shit about OSource development, I think it might be a good idea if there was some directory or index that said "Hey!, Macish-Windowish newbie-friendly programs here" since Freshmeat and distro CDs have all the high-end or unstable software an experienced user might want (I assume).
*Is* there an index of newbie-friendly Linux programs, a la download, double-click and install? I don't recall seeing one outside of Xandros Networks.
The ultimate goal of Linux desktops should be the ability to set it up to work exactly the way you want it to, not to imitate the Mac.
I don't give a shit about the average home user.
Call me silly, but you just contradicted yourself. If the average home user wants to it to imitate a Mac or W2K or Fisher-Price Speak and Spell, I agree that Linux shoud let them.
I don't think the goal of Linux desktops should be to take away all the things I like about them.
Problem is, ask 1,000 people what they like about the Linux desktop and you'll get little agreement. Besides, an experienced hacker will have a lot fewer problems re-configuring their desktop from a basic setup than the average user will trying to configure their desktop from a hacker setup.
the average home user can use a stripped-down KDE set to emulate Windows or Mac if he/she wants to.
This is a really good idea. I'd *love* to see a vanilla Linux standard that all programmers could program to without worrying about which of 97 flavors of Linux were installed on the PC. The CLI Commandos and UberL33ts could keep their CLIs and RTFM MAN pages while the general public benefited from having an inexpensive, realistic escape path from MS.
Hey, you might want to consider checking out this mp3 player since it has been rated pretty highly by its buyers:
iRiver iHP 120 - 20gb
iRiver iHP 140 - 40gb
I have nothing to do with the player or its company, but in checking out *a lot* of hard-drive mp3 players to replace my Neuros 20gb model, this one looks like the best IMO.
I've been checking out DVD burners for a couple or three years now but haven't made the dive. As you noted for yourself, a cheap firewire external hard drive fits my situation better. It costs roughly the same as a good DVD burner, I don't need to worry about player compatibility, and its lifespan is roughly the same as burned DVD media (~2-3 years).
When they come out with one standard, I'll check it out again.
Hey Fred, I'll disagree with you. Remember the 56K modem standards fight from ?10? years ago? Once they agreed on a unified standard, there were still tons of manufacturers out there making their own model that abided by the standard. I think the same principle applies to hard drives and other devices.
Nice troll, really nice troll...
"Or, they could
* see it as a cash cow and milk it for more than you're paying now, sinking the money into higher salaries for town officials
* farm out the maintenance to the lowest bidder, who has 20 hours of downtime/week
* outsource support to india
* decide that 500kbps is fast enough for everyone
* mandate Windows usage if you want to get on the net
* any number of other stupid things"
You mean just like the private companies who do it now, charge more for their service, and provide less in return? Holy Crock-O'-Shit, Batman, I don't want to compete with that!
"I'd rather see towns mandate multiple cable/DSL providers and let the market drive the prices down."
Uh, one small but eternally permanent problem with that - towns, small municipalities, and other cities can't tell X Internet companies to "get your ass in here and compete, or else we'll do nothing."
Or were you referring to offering incentives to attract Internet-access companies? If so, thanks, but no thanks to corporate welfare.
"They promised to only provide backhaul services to begin with, now they are competing with local ISPs"
Wow, I can't believe the people of Memphis haven't rose up and smited the local government for providing a service that the people seem to want. Unbelievable.
"How can a company compete when the playing field is not level?"
Bribe the representatives and get the legislation you want passed? Seems to work for many other businesses in the U.S. See "Eldred" for an example.
I've been looking for something along these lines since early 2001 and they're just now *sort of* starting to appear. There are portable DVD players which support mp3 playback from a DVD, but their lifespan is ~3 hours before needing new batteries or a recharge.
There are still no large-format audio-only players with "in the field" playtimes of 9 or more hours, support for DVD-RWs, or hard-drive sizes of 100gb or more. My Neuros is pretty good, but I'd rather have a DVD-RW or 100gb+ audio player instead. It's not here today, but maybe within 5 years.
It seems to me that the only thing they did wrong was to not say "thank you" or "sorry for the inconvenience." I'm not trolling here, but everything else they did, there is a good reason for it.
Did it really take them 30 minutes? That's pretty bad. In Cincinnati, I got flagged for a pat-down and re-screen and the entire thing from "step over here" after the metal detector to departing for my gate took about 5-8 minutes. That included a field-check of my Neuros MP3 player to see if it was really an audio player.
Oh well, at least it wasn't Greyhound.
You know, for a moment there, you got me thinking that UW was this amazing school that teaches its CS people not only how to be competent techies, but also amazing writers. Alas, at least you cited your source, but it was a bit of a letdown. Hope school's going well for you!
Firefox? Firefox? What, did they put 10 trademark-eligible names in a hat and pull this one out? It's nifty that they have a trademarked name, too bad they trademarked a name that sucks.
Thank God when I support the project by buying their merchandise here: http://snipurl.com/4drd , I'm not stuck buying something that says or displays a frigging Firefox. Is there some reason they couldn't compound their names like nearly any other business in the world? Mozilla Phoenix or Mozilla Firebird would have been a much better solution than this. Heck, cannibalizing Mozilla once the Suite is discontinued would have been better, soooo, once the suite hit 1.8 and then ceased, they could have come out with Mozilla 1.9 the browser and Mozilla Mail 1.9.
Yes, in the big picture, it's not the end of the world - no product name is, even if they'd decided to call this the Edsel. Still, if anyone asks me what I recommend for mail and browsing, I'll be forwarding them to Mozilla.
Peace,
Chuck
There's another way to skin this cat, which is to take a page from P2P and distribute the costs out to the area that's AOLing Linux discs in their area. That way, there's no need for a central distributor to pick up the tab - the cost is distributed out to each area according to its own need.
For example, if you've got some of us in Cincinnati, we take care of replicating the discs off our own PCs and getting them into local AOLish freebie channels. Where help can come down from on-high is for each LUG area to share best-of advice, experiences and troubleshooting tips.
One other sidenote, for which I'll be glad to be wrong. Outside of IBM's push for Linux, the Linux community is a lot like the Indie music community in that it's generally competing with more-widely financed, promoted and reviewed products. Perhaps there are a lot of guerilla or shoe-string promo techniques we could take from the Indie music scene and apply towards growing our base?
Peace,
Chuck
Yo K, thank you, and true. I have no idea how often I've heard people preaching nonviolent resistance when it was clear that they had a mental image of Buddhist passivity in their mind.
I'm working on not ranting down on Slashdot posts that I perceive to be stupid, soooo...
"As soon as Linux is ready for the desktop, Microsoft is going to hell."
Fortunately for Microsoft, that's a minimum of 5 years, millions upon millions of users, and real driver and software support away.
"Nobody is going to want to pay for software let alone software which is strictly limited in variety."
So you're saying that there is more variety of software for Linux than Windows? In what?
"If Microsoft was smart, they would stop trying to suck every penny out of every company"
They've been sucking companies dry since at least 1988 and haven't had to change a thing. Why change now?
"and start producing software which doesnt limit a users choice."
I'm not a fan of Microsoft at all, but how are they limiting a user's choice? I can buy or download any software for Windows that I want and install it on my system. Where exactly are they limiting my choice?
"And with DRM in Longhorn, there is going to be even more incentive to migrate to Linux.
Speaking as a PC owner who's looking down the road to 64-bit computing (when it becomes mainstream in 2005, 2006 or 2007), I know that all Linux users will have to deal with Palladium too. Moving from Windows to Linux won't matter - the hardware and content/software manufacturers will still have the final word via Palladium. The only mainstream system without it will be Apple.
You know, I really do hope Linux eventually kicks Microsoft's ass on the desktop because then I get the best of both worlds - a stable, reliable, consistent operating system that runs on cheap non-Apple hardware. Until Palladium bites the dust for Linux and companies like Adobe, Macromedia and most major games are released for Linux, my future's Mac.
Peace.
I have to agree. Terrible Terry Tate, "Triple T," and "The Pain Train" all rolled into one fantastic ad. When I first saw it, it really surprised me and my friends, and is easily a better ad than some of the others on the Top 10 list.
Too bad Reebok is every bit the corporate sweatshop scum that Nike is.
Peace,
Chuck
OK, I'm big enough to admit I made a mistake - your documentable history indicates you do know what you're talking about.
Going back to what you said:
"If you want to drag people away from the abomination that is windows, you have to offer something better instead of just copying the crap blindly"
It pissed me off because I run Xandros 1.1 in dual boot with Win2K. When my mother came down, I showed her Xandros and she immediately felt comfortable with it. As a personal experiment, I left the PC in 1.1 all weekend while getting help doing the wallpaper. She checked her web sites and e-mail through Mozilla, and did some word processing with OpenOffice. She never once asked to be let out of 1.1 for the three days she was down. To me, that's remarkable because even Windows normally takes a little training.
To be blunt, I think Xandros has done a remarkable job of making a Linux-newbie-friendly OS out of the box, which is critical if Microsoft is ever going to be marginalized. I apologize for attacking more of you instead of your points.
Peace,
Chuck
Your post is interesting, so replies in reverse order.
The GPL states nothing of the sort that you claim. If you use GPLed code or libraries (Note: most libraries are LGPL, not GPL), such as readline, you need to be GPL.
The GPL allows Manufacturer X to make software or drivers that are proprietary and not open-source for inclusion in a distro if said works don't include any GPL code? I'll take your word for it for now but will go back and re-read the salient sections of the GPL. I thought that was both legally and ethically forbidden.
If you choose *not* to use TCPA, then you will be in the same boat as Mac OS X users -- if a publisher refuses to produce DRM-less content, then you will simply have to go without that content
I understood that too, but the "Law of Unforseen Circumstances" has a nasty way of jacknifing that reality. To be blunt, there are *a lot* of ways to make Palladium as proposed work for the content creators past its normal shelf-life, and a lot of consumers who don't read Slashdot to figure out how to preserve their traditional consumer rights (which are admittedly none). Besides, by example alone, I don't support giving $ to people who feel the need to control interaction with my PC. Egads...
Peace,
Chuck