While one has to agree with your point about Katz not realizing the irony of his declaring someone else to be such, I also agree this should come as no surprise.
Take France's hit Loft Story, basically a French version of Big Brother, but way more interesting. They had two versions - an edited, sans les corps nus bien sur, version on standard TV and a pay per view version 24/7. Naturally, when some naughty bits popped up on the cable side, which many think was scripted, traffic on the cable side increased and revenues went through. The French minister for TV broadcasts slammed the company for offering two versions of the product - it was not that it had been edited, which was offensive to most French who aren't quite as hung up about such things as Americans, it was that the cable channel saved the most commercially viable parts for cable only.
Naturally, many people recorded it and saved the video off to MPEG and similar formats, which are now freely available.
Censorship, as most of us realize, doesn't really work, it just makes it worse.
Given that Microsoft has been spitting out FUD in large quantities about the viral quality of GPL and Open Source, this result actually proves them wrong, in the way that everyone always said it would:
All any developer need do, to use Open Source software, is invoke it as a separate program from the commercial program. All a company need do is keep all the stuff not part of its main line of business (the "crown jewels") in a commercial separate program and keep as GPL all the stuff that it doesn't need to control.
As an example, let's say the City of Seattle was reselling a computer program for electricity bill subrogation (a real example). They could have the really nifty stuff in a commercial program and leave most of it as GPL. The advantage is it's easier to resell - anyone who wants to can custom-code most of it, so long as it's not in the commercial section, which helps sell it, while letting the seller keep control of the proprietary code they sweated blood and research time to develop. Coders at the buyer are happy, cause they can fix bugs more often, and the seller is happy, cause more people buy their software.
Cox Cable overbuilds their network and uses premium circuits, with a faster maintenance rebuild schedule than most. I found that dial-up was also better (GTE circuit) down there in Santa Barbara too - could get 40K consistent in Santa Barbara and 24K in most places in Seattle.
As I understand it, Cox has fewer oversubscribes, and part of the problems that other people talk about are due to oversubscribed cable segments using oversubscribed fat pipes. Apparently Cox doesn't do that.
I live in Fremont, Center of the Universe, which is one of the core neighborhoods of Seattle. We get very spotty cell coverage, because we're in a valley between Queen Anne hill and Phinney Ridge.
Similar areas have similar problems.
Basic result is this:
1. some areas won't want more towers - many neighborhoods have successfully stopped them.
2. some areas will have spotty service - because we're a city of hills and valleys.
3. some areas will have intermittent problems - think about where I live, next to Adobe - now imagine all those mobile high-speed users decide to hang out at the cafes within a two-block radius, broadcasting one of our funparades that this city loves so well - they all try to broadcast it on their portable laptops with their software (and a lot of us do this, trust me) - there goes reception and packet availability...
4. What about solar flares?
Well, we're still plugging along and maybe we'll have commercial and/or military fusion power by 2020, but so far it sounds like the problems with using it remain the same:
1. Eventually the shell becomes radioactive. Not as much as in fission reactors, but it does happen. We still do not have proper disposal procedures for nuclear reactor shells - technically, we should lift them up, barge them down a river, put them in a plastic bag (or some kind of skin), and sink them down to the induction zone of the continental plates.
2. Power distribution still suffers from the main problem - a lot of energy in one place. You lose a lot more energy when you pump it out onto the grid.
3. They still make great sites for international terrrorists to play with society - if a plant produces 10 percent of the grid and you cause it to fail at peak load, you can get some nifty cascade blackouts in the grid; the same goes for pushing it to higher generation. This is why it's good to have multiple grids and multiple power sources in multiple places.
4. For all we know, there are star guppies that like to hop and play around the sun, causing nifty splashes (solar flares) in their frolics. Some adventurous ones might see the shiny pebbles on earth and decide to go for a jump - oops, there goes life on earth... my point is, we only think we know what goes on inside the sun, by inference, and our perceptions - no promises that other things we have no idea of couldn't happen, like nifty white holes or other cool side effects.
5. Heat. Using this creates heat, liberates it. Are you sure you want to make the planet warmer? More heat in system means I get beachfront property sooner than 2100. Nothing's free.
It all comes down to this - all power sources have unanticipated side effects and environmental costs, we always get suckered by the bright side and ignore the dark side of the equation until after we start using them on massive scales in long-term production.
My only observation is that many of the statistics are still based on pre-installed, paid dollar charge amounts. This means that, if 80 percent of all servers were GNU/Linux and 20 percent were Windows 2000, and the GNU/Linux cost $50 and the Windows 2000 cost $1000, then you could legitimately say that Windows 2000 has 80 percent of market share, since they got $20,000 per hundred units and GNU/Linux got $4,000.
So market price based measures will always distort so that the most expensive price dominates the percantage of dollars spent.
In reality, this would mean that there are 80 percent of the servers that probably have more desire and need to buy software, whereas the 20 percent of servers that would be MSFT have a lesser need, since they installed BackOffice or something like that.
I know you mentioned this indirectly, but it's not stressed at all.
It's not the ends, it's the middle
on
Internet2 Update
·
· Score: 1
You don't need Interenet2 for that. I've gotten speeds of over 350 kB/s (that's 2800 kb/s, or 2.73 Mb/s) on my cable modem.
The problem's not at the ends, either server or receiver, it's the middle, where most people live in areas where we all go through a 300 kb/s max speed pipe. Until we get good relays and fat pipes, which is what Internet2 is all about, the real difference between the next-to-lowest speed of DSL and the highest speed is virtually nil, unless it's locally cached or served, cause it has to get there first.
And this is where the priority bits in IPv6 become useful - we can have high, mid, and low priority - and I'm hoping spam gets 0 priority, so I can buy a service where only 1 or higher priority packets arrive at my destination...
But:
The constitution doesnt guarantee anonymous speech. In Talley v California (1960), three of the justices said "I stand second to none in supporting Talley's right of free speech -- but not his freedom of anonymity. The Constitution says nothing about freedom of anonymous speech."
Um, last time I checked, three dissenting votes out of nine is called a minority opinion. Or, in clear English, kvetching because they lost.
So, it seems that we do in fact have a right to post anonymous handbills in the public square of discourse which the Net is for the 21st Century.
What is more worrisome, I now have the right, according to our Attorney General, to march anonymously and fully armed, defending my first and second amendment rights. Maybe I'll do it wearing a hood...
Seriously, Scott, if they can use OLE2 (ActiveX) then Wine could be fortified and noone would use that cheap hooch we call Windows to play games on or run other software.
And then what would Bill G do with all his plans for world domination?
Seriously, just because the techie prima donnas might think it's fine to type misspelled words and phrases, as a manager, you need to make sure they can understand you.
OK, all you purists out there, you can skip this post. But for the rest of us who want to run The Sims (especially House Party) and Black & White on their boxen, this is extremely good news!
Don't you get it? This is the death knell of Bill G's hold on the desktop! No more must I go buy a new box to play the latest game - now I can just use WINE and DirectX and run it on my Linux box. Once I'm done playing The Sims or Black & White, I can shut it down, drop DirectX and go back to being secure.
It ain't pretty, it ain't pure, but it rocks my world!
was the spam. They promised to give you free DSL for life - well, you still have DSL, it's just not functional, there's that nice NIC in your PC now, just use it for an extra LAN connection for your internal house network.
Coming soon, free pr0n for life. OK, so it's pictures from a retirement home, but what were you expecting?
As you should have known, it's Canada. So suing everyone, while a nifty American idea, is unlikely to go over well, especially if the Crown decides it doesn't want to be sued.
Yes, that is what I said. Many times I see Yanks make the mistake that the whole world works like the USA. It doesn't. Get over it, already.
What might happen is someone might establish a commission to investigate it, which, years later, will end up having done nothing at all.
So, once again - Canada Post == Crown == no lawsuit unless some silly twit forgot to do his job and toss it into the circular file.
I'm a lumberjack and I'm ok, I work all night, and I get DSL...
If you'd been watching the telecast, they showed it at http://www.scifi.com/secret/ for a short time.
While it's true that SciFi is making this with a low budget, and it does show, I still find that their adaptation has certain elements I find far more believable than the one Frank Herbert was so deeply involved with, even though that one had far better character actors for the most part.
The SCI FI version seems to get the feel of the culture better, and what the events in the book may have been like, than one found in the original movie, even if it's not as well-crafted.
Plus, the actress who plays Chani is way hotter, and more believable, than Sean was in the same role.
All my fridge magnets are offline and out of date.
Sidewalk.com, Webvan, and all the dot coms that used to give them away.
If I were a blues singer, I'd write a song:
Since my dot com left me,
I'm feeling all so blue,
Can't order food online nomore,
Or turn my horse to glue.
I got the blues...
Got them dot com blues...
From my head down to my shoes
Yes, I got them dot com blues
Can't use my DSL,
My ISPs gone cold,
Can't even order pizza,
It's all just turned to mold
I got the blues...
Got them dot com blues...
From my head down to my shoes
Yes, I got them dot com blues
Exactly, Jack of Shadows is a better work
on
Lord of Light
·
· Score: 4
I used to collect Zelanzy and Vance, back in my SMOF days.
While Lord of Light was a refreshing retelling of many Indian themes, and a masterwork of its time, it probably affected far fewer people than Jack of Shadows did.
Jack of Shadows gave a lot of young people a path that they could really follow, one connected more closely with the change in Western society from mythic fantasy and our belief in supernatural beings to the scientific, rules-based approach. Due to its influence, many of the gaming engines of both RPG and Computer games were created, and I've noticed most authors who came to prominence in the decade following invariably listed it amongst their favorite works.
It may have been juvenile in its characterization, never one of Zelazny's strong parts, but it was earth shattering in its impact on a number of writers, similar to the influence of the new breed that Moorcock belonged to.
However, in recent years we've seen a number of Western authors get in tune with Veddic writings and their own personal search for meaning has led them to rediscover Lord of Light. It's more of a reflection of their changing religious beliefs than the strength of the actual work, and thus a modern redefinition says that Lord of Light was the masterwork, when in actual impact any serious author of the time would have claimed Jack of Shadows as the true masterwork.
While I'd normally just slam Jon for missing the point, this time let's actually listen to what he's trying to tell us. Yes, excess verbiage aside, he's trying to say that future media for future people will be more broadband, more chatter, more Me Too! kind of stuff.
This is a false choice. Take cell phones. In the old days we had postal deliveries four or five times a day and noone had a phone or telegraph. Then the telegraph was invented and someone gave one to the Royal Palace and soon all businesses had telegraphs and stock tickers. Then the phone came along and soon we all had phones.
At first, with normal phones, we always answered each and every call. Then we got receptionists to screen out the unwanted calls and voice mail to help with that. Now we don't even answer when our phone rings if someone's in our office or cube, just let the machine/person get it.
The same will happen with cell phones. At first we shout into the things, talk in our cars, answer each ring, take it with us on vacations and to movies. Soon we'll have a Busy button on them - when you go to the beach you press the busy button and it won't even ring or vibrate, just pops it into voice mail. Soon we won't let them interrupt us when we're eating or we have a friend over - life's not designed to be hectic, and being more broadband, more scattered is something that humans are not wired for. The phone may even talk to our car, and if we're stuck in traffic it may ring, but if we're near an exit we need to take, it won't.
The same will keep happening with email, web ads, PDAs, etc. We'll find ways to make them fade into the background and not bug us when we're not in the mood to be interrupted. Our web surf glasses will shrink the stock ticker into a teeny icon on the extreme left, make it pulse if our stocks are under major motion, make it get bigger if the market's taking a 200 point dive or one of our stock's is under a plus or minus five percent correction.
And, when we're on vacation, our cell phone wristwatch will only ring when it's mom, and never when you're eating. When we go to bed with that cute girl from Pasadena, ain't none of our electro toys gonna bug us - the CEO of your work could try to contact you and won't get through.
That's what's already happening in Europe - technology is becoming civilized. The future is not Hong Kong, not Japan, not the US - tech won't take over our lives, it will blend in with our lives and get out of the way when it needs to be gone.
Recent actions in the European Union (EU) show that the regulators there are increasingly willing to take the proper role of government in dealing with monopolies and merger mania, which leads one to ask when the other shoe will fall?
In other words, MSFT may ban the use of GPL here in the USA, but maybe the EU will override such actions in all of Europe, which makes it pretty much a moot point.
Can't happen? Just ask GE's Jack Welch - you can buy all the US Congressmembers and Senators you want, and get the White House behind you, but it don't count for squat overseas.
This is also based on some conversations I overheard last week in Paris and Carcassonne.
He was part of the original garage crew, and did some Lisa work and other hybrids. Not bad for a Dead Head...
I've still got an Apple II+ with dual floppies and a 172K RAM card (so you can do a RAM disk and speed up your programs to about 1000 times faster than floppy R/W will allow) in my garage, as well as an old Mac SE (with dual floppies and one of the first external 20MB hard drives), which I took to Burning Man last year. One of these days I'll gut them and use them for some art project, but haven't got around to it yet.
And somewhere I've got my old floppies with AppleWriter II and French and English version of Microsoft Word for the Mac.
According to a recent appeal that was upheld in federal court (previously on slashdot), we have the legal right to insist that any UCE/spam have:
valid From: and To: addresses, a non-misleading subject line, and that a working email reply address that will actually remove us from your databases, email lists, and all other files.
And, if you don't like it, we can sue you in small claims court, as can any ISPs resident in Washington State which declare that on their root web page.
I can see it now, Washington state residents taking a US Senator from Oregon to court for damages!
This just in: it is now legal to spam any pro-spam senator. When he opts out, just go get a new hotmail address.
Yes, but you forgot to tell them how.
First, in each spam, make sure you include a name, street address, city, state and zip code from their state. Otherwise, their spam filters will reject it.
Also, give a misleading subject: No, not Make Money Now!, but something like My neighbor said you could help with this legislation. That will get it past the subject filters and not put in a folder and then ignored.
Now for the text. Write a script for this and push it out, you need to show them you mean business.
OK, let's get creative:
Dear Senator Wyden (or other name),
Glad to meet you at when you [visited/flew in/dropped by] to talk about [guns/email/spam/cereal/mining law tort reform].
You said I should [email/write] your office about the fact that I get [spam/unsolicited email/garbage] sent to me with [opt-out that doesn't work/misleading headers].
So, I told a few [friends/neighbors] and they said they'd write you too.
[Basically/Actually], we'd like you to [sponsor legislation/write a law/pass a bill] to outlaw any commercial email that has misleading headers or subjects and doesn't include [ADV/ADV:] in the subject line and doesn't have an active working email account to remove all persons who reply to the email saying they wish to be removed.
I've enclosed a [document/petition/letter] with further info on this:
[attachment - something varying between 0K and 2 GB in size]
As the concept that Freenet could beat playing chess by post is undoubtably incorrect, I should point out that some of us have played Diplomacy by post, and in fact used to develop role-playing-games (RPGs) that could be played by post.
IMHO Freenet is worse than post. It doesn't let you send secret decoder rings in the envelope, you can't include photos of your cat balancing on a high tension wire, and it's not possible to put a whole mess of glitter inside Freenet as you can with a well-designed postal envelope.
Some of us used to give away nifty badges, fake coinage, and various artifacts via post, so Freenet is definitely not even close in the end-user experience as a good snail-mail based game.
Given that someone working for Microsoft (hereafter referred to as "God") has undoubtably used Open Source code written with the General Purpose License (hereafter referred to either as GPL or "That Nasty Stuff That Threatens Our Ability To Absorb Other Corporations And Person's Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks"), Microsoft denies that any Microsoft software is in fact null and void of any licensing, since under UCITA we can be sued for violation of the GPL.
Not that we did that, no, you can't prove it, and really, it's not true. Please ignore the Penguin behind the Curtain Of Legality.
Slashdot Mirror
While one has to agree with your point about Katz not realizing the irony of his declaring someone else to be such, I also agree this should come as no surprise.
Take France's hit Loft Story, basically a French version of Big Brother, but way more interesting. They had two versions - an edited, sans les corps nus bien sur, version on standard TV and a pay per view version 24/7. Naturally, when some naughty bits popped up on the cable side, which many think was scripted, traffic on the cable side increased and revenues went through. The French minister for TV broadcasts slammed the company for offering two versions of the product - it was not that it had been edited, which was offensive to most French who aren't quite as hung up about such things as Americans, it was that the cable channel saved the most commercially viable parts for cable only.
Naturally, many people recorded it and saved the video off to MPEG and similar formats, which are now freely available.
Censorship, as most of us realize, doesn't really work, it just makes it worse.
Given that Microsoft has been spitting out FUD in large quantities about the viral quality of GPL and Open Source, this result actually proves them wrong, in the way that everyone always said it would:
All any developer need do, to use Open Source software, is invoke it as a separate program from the commercial program. All a company need do is keep all the stuff not part of its main line of business (the "crown jewels") in a commercial separate program and keep as GPL all the stuff that it doesn't need to control.
As an example, let's say the City of Seattle was reselling a computer program for electricity bill subrogation (a real example). They could have the really nifty stuff in a commercial program and leave most of it as GPL. The advantage is it's easier to resell - anyone who wants to can custom-code most of it, so long as it's not in the commercial section, which helps sell it, while letting the seller keep control of the proprietary code they sweated blood and research time to develop. Coders at the buyer are happy, cause they can fix bugs more often, and the seller is happy, cause more people buy their software.
End result is: GPL means more market!
Cox Cable overbuilds their network and uses premium circuits, with a faster maintenance rebuild schedule than most. I found that dial-up was also better (GTE circuit) down there in Santa Barbara too - could get 40K consistent in Santa Barbara and 24K in most places in Seattle.
As I understand it, Cox has fewer oversubscribes, and part of the problems that other people talk about are due to oversubscribed cable segments using oversubscribed fat pipes. Apparently Cox doesn't do that.
I live in Fremont, Center of the Universe, which is one of the core neighborhoods of Seattle. We get very spotty cell coverage, because we're in a valley between Queen Anne hill and Phinney Ridge.
...
Similar areas have similar problems.
Basic result is this:
1. some areas won't want more towers - many neighborhoods have successfully stopped them.
2. some areas will have spotty service - because we're a city of hills and valleys.
3. some areas will have intermittent problems - think about where I live, next to Adobe - now imagine all those mobile high-speed users decide to hang out at the cafes within a two-block radius, broadcasting one of our fun parades that this city loves so well - they all try to broadcast it on their portable laptops with their software (and a lot of us do this, trust me) - there goes reception and packet availability
4. What about solar flares?
Well, we're still plugging along and maybe we'll have commercial and/or military fusion power by 2020, but so far it sounds like the problems with using it remain the same:
... my point is, we only think we know what goes on inside the sun, by inference, and our perceptions - no promises that other things we have no idea of couldn't happen, like nifty white holes or other cool side effects.
1. Eventually the shell becomes radioactive. Not as much as in fission reactors, but it does happen. We still do not have proper disposal procedures for nuclear reactor shells - technically, we should lift them up, barge them down a river, put them in a plastic bag (or some kind of skin), and sink them down to the induction zone of the continental plates.
2. Power distribution still suffers from the main problem - a lot of energy in one place. You lose a lot more energy when you pump it out onto the grid.
3. They still make great sites for international terrrorists to play with society - if a plant produces 10 percent of the grid and you cause it to fail at peak load, you can get some nifty cascade blackouts in the grid; the same goes for pushing it to higher generation. This is why it's good to have multiple grids and multiple power sources in multiple places.
4. For all we know, there are star guppies that like to hop and play around the sun, causing nifty splashes (solar flares) in their frolics. Some adventurous ones might see the shiny pebbles on earth and decide to go for a jump - oops, there goes life on earth
5. Heat. Using this creates heat, liberates it. Are you sure you want to make the planet warmer? More heat in system means I get beachfront property sooner than 2100. Nothing's free.
It all comes down to this - all power sources have unanticipated side effects and environmental costs, we always get suckered by the bright side and ignore the dark side of the equation until after we start using them on massive scales in long-term production.
If it's a bug and you've all got Thinkpads, couldn't you try to contrib code to at least have lm_sensors behave differently on them?
...
I mean, it is open source
My only observation is that many of the statistics are still based on pre-installed, paid dollar charge amounts. This means that, if 80 percent of all servers were GNU/Linux and 20 percent were Windows 2000, and the GNU/Linux cost $50 and the Windows 2000 cost $1000, then you could legitimately say that Windows 2000 has 80 percent of market share, since they got $20,000 per hundred units and GNU/Linux got $4,000.
So market price based measures will always distort so that the most expensive price dominates the percantage of dollars spent.
In reality, this would mean that there are 80 percent of the servers that probably have more desire and need to buy software, whereas the 20 percent of servers that would be MSFT have a lesser need, since they installed BackOffice or something like that.
I know you mentioned this indirectly, but it's not stressed at all.
You don't need Interenet2 for that. I've gotten speeds of over 350 kB/s (that's 2800 kb/s, or 2.73 Mb/s) on my cable modem.
...
The problem's not at the ends, either server or receiver, it's the middle, where most people live in areas where we all go through a 300 kb/s max speed pipe. Until we get good relays and fat pipes, which is what Internet2 is all about, the real difference between the next-to-lowest speed of DSL and the highest speed is virtually nil, unless it's locally cached or served, cause it has to get there first.
And this is where the priority bits in IPv6 become useful - we can have high, mid, and low priority - and I'm hoping spam gets 0 priority, so I can buy a service where only 1 or higher priority packets arrive at my destination
But:
...
The constitution doesnt guarantee anonymous speech. In Talley v California (1960), three of the justices said "I stand second to none in supporting Talley's right of free speech -- but not his freedom of anonymity. The Constitution says nothing about freedom of anonymous speech."
Um, last time I checked, three dissenting votes out of nine is called a minority opinion. Or, in clear English, kvetching because they lost.
So, it seems that we do in fact have a right to post anonymous handbills in the public square of discourse which the Net is for the 21st Century.
What is more worrisome, I now have the right, according to our Attorney General, to march anonymously and fully armed, defending my first and second amendment rights. Maybe I'll do it wearing a hood
Seriously, Scott, if they can use OLE2 (ActiveX) then Wine could be fortified and noone would use that cheap hooch we call Windows to play games on or run other software.
And then what would Bill G do with all his plans for world domination?
is to spell asbestos correctly.
Seriously, just because the techie prima donnas might think it's fine to type misspelled words and phrases, as a manager, you need to make sure they can understand you.
OK, all you purists out there, you can skip this post. But for the rest of us who want to run The Sims (especially House Party) and Black & White on their boxen, this is extremely good news!
Don't you get it? This is the death knell of Bill G's hold on the desktop! No more must I go buy a new box to play the latest game - now I can just use WINE and DirectX and run it on my Linux box. Once I'm done playing The Sims or Black & White, I can shut it down, drop DirectX and go back to being secure.
It ain't pretty, it ain't pure, but it rocks my world!
was the spam. They promised to give you free DSL for life - well, you still have DSL, it's just not functional, there's that nice NIC in your PC now, just use it for an extra LAN connection for your internal house network.
Coming soon, free pr0n for life. OK, so it's pictures from a retirement home, but what were you expecting?
As you should have known, it's Canada. So suing everyone, while a nifty American idea, is unlikely to go over well, especially if the Crown decides it doesn't want to be sued.
...
Yes, that is what I said. Many times I see Yanks make the mistake that the whole world works like the USA. It doesn't. Get over it, already.
What might happen is someone might establish a commission to investigate it, which, years later, will end up having done nothing at all.
So, once again - Canada Post == Crown == no lawsuit unless some silly twit forgot to do his job and toss it into the circular file.
I'm a lumberjack and I'm ok, I work all night, and I get DSL
If you'd been watching the telecast, they showed it at http://www.scifi.com/secret/ for a short time.
While it's true that SciFi is making this with a low budget, and it does show, I still find that their adaptation has certain elements I find far more believable than the one Frank Herbert was so deeply involved with, even though that one had far better character actors for the most part.
The SCI FI version seems to get the feel of the culture better, and what the events in the book may have been like, than one found in the original movie, even if it's not as well-crafted.
Plus, the actress who plays Chani is way hotter, and more believable, than Sean was in the same role.
All my fridge magnets are offline and out of date.
...
...
...
...
Sidewalk.com, Webvan, and all the dot coms that used to give them away.
If I were a blues singer, I'd write a song:
Since my dot com left me,
I'm feeling all so blue,
Can't order food online nomore,
Or turn my horse to glue.
I got the blues
Got them dot com blues
From my head down to my shoes
Yes, I got them dot com blues
Can't use my DSL,
My ISPs gone cold,
Can't even order pizza,
It's all just turned to mold
I got the blues
Got them dot com blues
From my head down to my shoes
Yes, I got them dot com blues
I used to collect Zelanzy and Vance, back in my SMOF days.
While Lord of Light was a refreshing retelling of many Indian themes, and a masterwork of its time, it probably affected far fewer people than Jack of Shadows did.
Jack of Shadows gave a lot of young people a path that they could really follow, one connected more closely with the change in Western society from mythic fantasy and our belief in supernatural beings to the scientific, rules-based approach. Due to its influence, many of the gaming engines of both RPG and Computer games were created, and I've noticed most authors who came to prominence in the decade following invariably listed it amongst their favorite works.
It may have been juvenile in its characterization, never one of Zelazny's strong parts, but it was earth shattering in its impact on a number of writers, similar to the influence of the new breed that Moorcock belonged to.
However, in recent years we've seen a number of Western authors get in tune with Veddic writings and their own personal search for meaning has led them to rediscover Lord of Light. It's more of a reflection of their changing religious beliefs than the strength of the actual work, and thus a modern redefinition says that Lord of Light was the masterwork, when in actual impact any serious author of the time would have claimed Jack of Shadows as the true masterwork.
While I'd normally just slam Jon for missing the point, this time let's actually listen to what he's trying to tell us. Yes, excess verbiage aside, he's trying to say that future media for future people will be more broadband, more chatter, more Me Too! kind of stuff.
This is a false choice. Take cell phones. In the old days we had postal deliveries four or five times a day and noone had a phone or telegraph. Then the telegraph was invented and someone gave one to the Royal Palace and soon all businesses had telegraphs and stock tickers. Then the phone came along and soon we all had phones.
At first, with normal phones, we always answered each and every call. Then we got receptionists to screen out the unwanted calls and voice mail to help with that. Now we don't even answer when our phone rings if someone's in our office or cube, just let the machine/person get it.
The same will happen with cell phones. At first we shout into the things, talk in our cars, answer each ring, take it with us on vacations and to movies. Soon we'll have a Busy button on them - when you go to the beach you press the busy button and it won't even ring or vibrate, just pops it into voice mail. Soon we won't let them interrupt us when we're eating or we have a friend over - life's not designed to be hectic, and being more broadband, more scattered is something that humans are not wired for. The phone may even talk to our car, and if we're stuck in traffic it may ring, but if we're near an exit we need to take, it won't.
The same will keep happening with email, web ads, PDAs, etc. We'll find ways to make them fade into the background and not bug us when we're not in the mood to be interrupted. Our web surf glasses will shrink the stock ticker into a teeny icon on the extreme left, make it pulse if our stocks are under major motion, make it get bigger if the market's taking a 200 point dive or one of our stock's is under a plus or minus five percent correction.
And, when we're on vacation, our cell phone wristwatch will only ring when it's mom, and never when you're eating. When we go to bed with that cute girl from Pasadena, ain't none of our electro toys gonna bug us - the CEO of your work could try to contact you and won't get through.
That's what's already happening in Europe - technology is becoming civilized. The future is not Hong Kong, not Japan, not the US - tech won't take over our lives, it will blend in with our lives and get out of the way when it needs to be gone.
Recent actions in the European Union (EU) show that the regulators there are increasingly willing to take the proper role of government in dealing with monopolies and merger mania, which leads one to ask when the other shoe will fall?
In other words, MSFT may ban the use of GPL here in the USA, but maybe the EU will override such actions in all of Europe, which makes it pretty much a moot point.
Can't happen? Just ask GE's Jack Welch - you can buy all the US Congressmembers and Senators you want, and get the White House behind you, but it don't count for squat overseas.
This is also based on some conversations I overheard last week in Paris and Carcassonne.
The person who stole the first Cappuccino PC is the same person who stole that very large screen that was at Comdex.
...
That's right - he's going to watch his espresso being made, in full living color, on a really big screen.
Ah, now that's a good cup of coffee
He was part of the original garage crew, and did some Lisa work and other hybrids. Not bad for a Dead Head ...
I've still got an Apple II+ with dual floppies and a 172K RAM card (so you can do a RAM disk and speed up your programs to about 1000 times faster than floppy R/W will allow) in my garage, as well as an old Mac SE (with dual floppies and one of the first external 20MB hard drives), which I took to Burning Man last year. One of these days I'll gut them and use them for some art project, but haven't got around to it yet.
And somewhere I've got my old floppies with AppleWriter II and French and English version of Microsoft Word for the Mac.
According to a recent appeal that was upheld in federal court (previously on slashdot), we have the legal right to insist that any UCE/spam have:
valid From: and To: addresses, a non-misleading subject line, and that a working email reply address that will actually remove us from your databases, email lists, and all other files.
And, if you don't like it, we can sue you in small claims court, as can any ISPs resident in Washington State which declare that on their root web page.
I can see it now, Washington state residents taking a US Senator from Oregon to court for damages!
This just in: it is now legal to spam any pro-spam senator. When he opts out, just go get a new hotmail address.
Yes, but you forgot to tell them how.
First, in each spam, make sure you include a name, street address, city, state and zip code from their state. Otherwise, their spam filters will reject it.
Also, give a misleading subject: No, not Make Money Now!, but something like My neighbor said you could help with this legislation. That will get it past the subject filters and not put in a folder and then ignored.
Now for the text. Write a script for this and push it out, you need to show them you mean business.
OK, let's get creative:
Dear Senator Wyden (or other name),
Glad to meet you at when you [visited/flew in/dropped by] to talk about [guns/email/spam/cereal/mining law tort reform].
You said I should [email/write] your office about the fact that I get [spam/unsolicited email/garbage] sent to me with [opt-out that doesn't work/misleading headers].
So, I told a few [friends/neighbors] and they said they'd write you too.
[Basically/Actually], we'd like you to [sponsor legislation/write a law/pass a bill] to outlaw any commercial email that has misleading headers or subjects and doesn't include [ADV/ADV:] in the subject line and doesn't have an active working email account to remove all persons who reply to the email saying they wish to be removed.
I've enclosed a [document/petition/letter] with further info on this:
[attachment - something varying between 0K and 2 GB in size]
Sincerely,
[name]
[city]
Have fun, script kiddies!
As the concept that Freenet could beat playing chess by post is undoubtably incorrect, I should point out that some of us have played Diplomacy by post, and in fact used to develop role-playing-games (RPGs) that could be played by post.
IMHO Freenet is worse than post. It doesn't let you send secret decoder rings in the envelope, you can't include photos of your cat balancing on a high tension wire, and it's not possible to put a whole mess of glitter inside Freenet as you can with a well-designed postal envelope.
Some of us used to give away nifty badges, fake coinage, and various artifacts via post, so Freenet is definitely not even close in the end-user experience as a good snail-mail based game.
Even if it is used for chess.
Given that someone working for Microsoft (hereafter referred to as "God") has undoubtably used Open Source code written with the General Purpose License (hereafter referred to either as GPL or "That Nasty Stuff That Threatens Our Ability To Absorb Other Corporations And Person's Copyrights, Patents, and Trademarks"), Microsoft denies that any Microsoft software is in fact null and void of any licensing, since under UCITA we can be sued for violation of the GPL.
Not that we did that, no, you can't prove it, and really, it's not true. Please ignore the Penguin behind the Curtain Of Legality.