I have often thought U.S. schools don't focus enough on computers. I remember there was one computer lab in the school I taught at briefly in Opelika, Alabama. Students were allowed time there to work on class projects and what not. These were old IBM PS/2 boxen that were so out of date it was pathetic. Not to mention the fact that programs like "Carmen San Diego" and "Oregon Trail" were long considered excellent ways of incorporating computers in the classroom. How wrong could taht be? All that does is use new technology to teach the same thing a book or movie can. Pretty much in the same fashon too!
If school systems are honest about teaching computer use in schoool, teach students how to use tools such as search engines and newsgroups to find information for reports. Use programs like powerpoint (or Star Office/KOffice/whatever Gonme's calling it's office app today) to add multimedia to their reports. Better yet, partner with someone like Macromedia and/or Adobe to use flash annimations on web pages designed through GoLive or Dreamweaver (after learning HTML programming by hand of course). Get copies of "Learning Perl" or some of Laura Lemay's "21 Days" series. Teach kids how computers are used in the world. Teach them why they're useful and how they work. Teaching the standard Microsoft line will not allow students to see how applications work in anything beyond a superficial standpoint (a diagram in a book). It will also more than likely produce more people who expect an AOL-ized or M$-ized version of computing -- simplicity to the point of absurdity. Don't get me wrong, computing for Joe User should be pain free, but wouldn't things be great if Joe User could remember something from high school computer class like, "if your password's not working, check the CAPS Lock key!"?
Microsoft is not necessarily needed for all of this. For programming-based classes (which should be limited to basic web programming (HTML, with intro to JavaScript, DHTML, and possibly XML), Perl and C to cover the basics). Anything from Linux to one fo the BSDs would work fine. Schools could arrange a deal with local vendors to sponsor computer purchases through fund matching programs and what not. Imagine how far universities could go with CS programs if most incoming freshmen already knew all this information.
I know more and more students are learning this stuff on their own these days, but why can't schools look to expand their computer learning beyond learning Office apps and playing outdated and useless geography and history games with little to no interactivity. I realize most people qualified to teach this stuff can make lots more money than a school system can offer, but when you think about it, lots of teachers could make more money doing something else too! It's not about money so much as it's about how passionate someone is about his cause. In this case, I'm asking how passionate people are about teaching school kids about computers and programming rather than how to use one OS and a handful of marginally useful applications.
Re:Doolittle's Raid More Important Than Many Think
on
Review: Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 1
I agree Doolittle's raid was incredibly important to the war in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor gave the country its proverbial Alamo, Doolittle gave people hope and belief in the war effort.
I am pretty happy they put it in there. A while north of this thread, I saw someone idolizing Doolittle. I agree, the guy was very smart, but he was also headstrong, bold and brash which is why it was no suprise he carried out the raid. He was the perfect man for the job.
To clarify, at the time of Pearl, three carriers were strangely out on maneuvers. This is one of the things conspiracy theorists point to when charging that FDR or someone in power wanted the war to happen. However, there were 4 carriers I know of in the pacific theater by the time of Coral Sea: Yorktown, Hornet, Lexington & Enterprise. By the time Midway was over we were down to Hornet and Enterprise. Fortunately, the Japanese navy was down to one, or possibly none. I can't remember if we sank the 4th carrier or just left it to crawl home burning. I know we screwed it up pretty good.
I have to agree, this is a pretty interesting article. However, there is also nothing new in the article. It is a well-written history piece on large corporations' knee-jerk fear of innovation and advancements in tech.
One other thing, the Motley Fool, while certainly being well-respected, does not speak for the financial community. I only saw one reference in the article (to the NYT) to another respected financial stalwart. This particular article, however well-written, reflects the opinion of a single representative of one major financial institution. If CNN came out on its own with an opinion like this would that represent the popular media industry as a whole?
I know it's nit-picking but having worked in the news industry, I can tell how you say it is just as important as what you say.
Who anywhere would not argue that anyone selling burned CD's with pirated ANYTHING on them should not go to jail. That is piracy in its simplest form.
As for millions of people using Napster for public domain music, you're right. Napster would fail, but not for the reasons you cite. It would fail because it's prime competition would be mp3.com who's been at it longer, has more money and a more marketable name.
A reporter does not and should not reveal annonymous sources. Yeah, that's an easy thing to say, but there's other considerations. Sure, this guy could just go into court and say, "Yes, what I wrote is true." When asked to identify the people he is talking about, he could simply refuse on the grounds that he would be revealing a source. One problem arrises. A big problem. These two crackers broke the law. Once that's an issue, all bets are off. Journalistic integrity doesn't extend to protecting people who've broken the law, and by refusing to name these two crackers, I would think Mr. Journalism here is opening himself up to a charge of contempt. Of course, I'm not a lawyer.
---------- Anyone else think it's funny how a comment with a zero score looks like this:0
I hear a lot about "putting MS in a worse light than they're already in", but honestly, the only people seeing M$ in that light tend not to use MS products unless we have to (for work reasons or whatever). The rest of the PC-using world (roughly the other 90% I would guess) doesn't care, nor do they know any better. The average PC user is little more than a sheep doing what he/she is told is a Good Thing. Sorry if I offend some people with that statement, but what's the biggest complaint against Linux? The learning curve is too steep. Why is that? Because people want point and click, they don't like using a keyboard.
M$ gives them a rough approximation of what they want. Because of the dummy-friendly windows interface, people don't care whether IE follows standards, or whether windows has more security loopholes than a child's Hot Wheels race track and more bugs than week old deer carcass.
I think things would change if the W3C was actually given some teeth. So many other languages/professions/protocols have set standards that everyone follows, why should the web be any different? How to give the W3C teeth is not something I have an answer to, but I know as long as they can only make suggestions, M$ won't feel the need to listen to them.
I wholeheartedly agree. I applied for a job with a certain Linux-oriented company (which will remain nameless) awhile back. A job for which I felt I was seriously capable of excelling at. Sent in my resume and cover letter after some slight modifications in Star Office. What was my reply? "We have no need of people who use Microsoft software. We are an open source publisher". Where did the email come from? Netscape Communicator. I never really saw Netscape as a great bastion of open source despite the Mozilla project. Nevermind the fact that I was not given a fair shot at the job, this person reflected everythig that makes me embarrassed of the Linux and Open Source communities.
Zealotry never accomplished anything good. If NT beats Linux, we pick apart every little detail of the test and find flaw everywhere. If the results are reversed, we cheer and sing the praises of happy penguins.
Open source is probably the best thing to hit software development. I believe it produces a much higher quality product. Also, let's have a look at a little OS history here. How long has NT been around? Unless I am mistaken, NT has taken longer to be 'competitive' with an OS as relatively young as Linux. For me, that speaks volumes as to the benefits of open source.
I would love to see NT take on Linux (or better yet, one of the BSD's) in a truely impartial, real world test. Personally, for a server, I would prefer FreeBSD. On that note, why have I not seen any big benchmarks tests comparing NT to it? Why is it always Linux? I could have sworn the last numbers I saw showed BSD on more servers than Linux. Perhaps we need a Road & Track-style head to head comparrison of the top 5 server OS's.
I would set up each machine as comparably as possible (on identical machines where possible) and advertise on the tech sites with the highest traffic numbers to hit the site as hard a possible. Hell, to keep all the OS communities content, let each vendor spec out their own server. I understand the need for consistency here, but consider that the vendors are picking what their product will run best on. Basically forcing everyone to put their product where their mouth is. Have some static pages for a day or two, add some graphics intensive pages, then to dynamic pages, and on the last week, mix it up. Anything goes, write scripts to hit the site, ping it, anything you can think of to beat the server ragged. After that round, move to the next OS. After this is done, hell, set up the 5 servers as ftp mirrors for something like Metalab for a year, something with tons of traffic (imagine an NT server mirroring Slashdot as part of the tests;-). See what the uptime and load averages look like. See how the OS's handle upgrades, patches, hardware swap-outs, etc. To make things interesting, don't put them behind a firewall. See if any of them get busted into.
I agree Windows has its place. Personally, I would hate to see Linux on everyone's desktop. Can you imagine how dumbed down it would have to become for that to happen? It's frightening.
Anyone else getting a screenshot of this? I mean, I've seen the same story posted twice numerous times, hell they ARE only humans running this site, but not one right after the other an hour apart! Copnsidering that UF wasn't terribly funny this morning (when the hell are AJ and Miranda going to hop on the good foot and do teh bad thing?), it's good to know I can still rely on/. for a nice chuckle to get things started right.
Oh, and to folks who post crap like "this should be moderated down", or "Malda, you f*cking idiot"... get a sense of humor... it's Good Thing.
I have nothing against paying for *good* software. Nor do I have anything against free (as in speech or beer, I don't care) software. The now defunct PC Accelerator had a great piece on the price of software wherein Mike Saloman (sp?) said he felt game prices were way too high, but when one considers how many pirated copies of each game there are out there, the prices may seem justified. Software companies don't want to make less money but still make a profit on new releases; when they work to produce a better product than the previous version, they expect more profit. That's the nature of the beast.
The important thing to remember here is that I am talking about *good* software. I don't generally consider Windows to be good software. Anything that I imediately have to patch after installing is not good software. Anything that is constantly plagued by security holes, trojans, bugs, etc. is not good software.
On the pay side, I think companies that produce good software deserve the right to choose whether that software will be free, open sourced or not. If they can't do that, then where's the freedom? Adobe makes some good software. I wish they would port some of it to Linux (more than just Acrobat reader), but again, that's their choice.
People may bitch and moan about stupid M$ moves like this one, but less than a third will ever do anything about it, and insinuating that it's close to a third of the people bitching is probably a l. They either expect the government to fix it *cough-mistake-cough*, expect other people to protest, or simply make do as one more right slides away. Personally, I think if people have a problem with the still-developing UI in Linux, they should go to a Mac. Certainly a more stable OS.
I couldn't agree more. While I see and understand the reasoning for 'no exceptions' types of rules, I do not agree with them. In the case of fighting, if I did as the school rules insisted, couldn't run, and basically got the crap kicked out of me, could I not sue the school system for payment of any medical bills?
I hated just about every second of high school. So much in fact, that when I was offered the chance to go to community college in leu of my senior year, I may have actually left vapor trials running out the councellor's door!
Having read the article and Katz's fairly non-commital piece above, the main thing that stuck out was "why". Why did the Columbine shooters do what they did? Why did this guy do what he did? Why is this becoming such a problem?
Did anyone stop to answer these questions by talking to the kids? People said Karos and Kliebold were sort of outsiders like this guy, did anyone bother to find out if anything was bothering them? Not by asking "Why can't you get along with other students?", but rather by asking, "Is there something bothering you?" People generally want to talk about what's bothering them, but they won't talk unless they know you give a shit. I never got the impression that the folks at my HS had any interest in my education/problems beyond making sure I didn't break any rules/laws. Therefore, I basically decided that my HS blew goats, and dreaded going there every day.
Funny thing about high schools. Here is where students really begin learning that not only do they have rights, but what those rights are, how they work, and how they relate to the rights of others. Yet, with all this flag-waiving classroom rhetoric abotu the USA being such a great and free place, we have mentioned in just the above message, supression of free press and supression of free speech. Why? 'Well, we can't offend anybody.'
Has anyone stopped to think that if people were a little more thick-skinned, and able to cope with the fact that HS life is not a John Hughes' movie; things like this wouldn't happen? We all go through our teen-angst-related BS, but I don't remember kids getting shot in school when I was there, and that was about 7 years ago. The Columbine kids said nobody understood them, and they had no friends. Not to rip from Chris Rock, but there WERE about 8 folks in this group they were in. At least 6 other people sort of understood them! That's more than I could say.
I don't agree with the way the Lake boy chose to handle his problems, but I have serious issues with the school systems knee-jerk method of handling it: "Nevermind your problems, the Columbine folks did what you did, therefore you might be planning a school shooting spree, so regardless of what caused the problem, you and your website will be designated as "the problem" and cast aside pending possible legal action. No exceptions."
I don't mean to sound like the average butthead slamming/. for not being as good as it used to be. Personally, the site has been a daily/hourly ritual of mine for awhile. One thing that is getting a bit old, though, is seeing all these articles from NYT, CNN, ZDNet, etc. that are basically fluff pieces about Linux and Open Source. Honestly, articles like these tend to be a dime a dozen.
Plus, when I see: "Among their somewhat-obvious insights is the somewhat-obvious comment..." and then the all-too-familiar moderator's comment: "it is interesting to see outside sources commenting on the growth of the free software/open source movement." While I think it's great that outside sources are taking notice, I would be much happier to see a more in depth piece from some of these bastions of information rather than what has become the standard form letter used by Window-jockey reporters who read a few websites about linux (more than likely linux.com, being that it's the obvious place). Until such time, what's the point with wasting space on/. with fluff pieces like this.
As far as the Open Source movement is concerned, I am a big believer in being able to effectively argue against one's own position. That being the case, DevShed had a great little article last February called Open Source - On Why Not. Stephen Den Beste makes some truely interesting, if somewhat elementary points about some valid shortcomings in the movement. What's interesting about the article is that he refrains from arguing which is better code (open or closed source), but rather which makes more business sense from an investor's standpoint. Like the man said, "no bucks, no Buck Rogers."
I know, I know, RedHat and others are riding high right now, but eventually, people are going to stop throwing money at them and want to see the company turn a profit. Lots of things change, but one obvious constant in business is a company needs to be profitable if it hopes to stick around. Companies like VALinux will probably keep gaining in value simply because they have a tangible product that people must buy if they want to get it... get it legally, that is.
Anyway, my point in writing this was not to flame anyone on Slashdot, this a great site. I just don't see why we need to have the bi-monthly "it's good to see the big media guys taking notice of what we're doing here" story. Sort of pointless stories in the first place if you ask me. So moderate me down... you know you want to;-)
I have always thought of Lucas as thus: A wonderful sci-fi storyteller, a good director, but a piss-poor public figure.
Here he has the most technologically advanced movie of its time and he is content on releasing it on the worst available format?
Someone else pointed out that Lucas goes where the money is. I got a joke email awhile back written by a friend of a friend in which Jar Jar started out as a well-spoken and intelligent character. After 2 lines Lucas realizes The movie will make tons of money, but needs kid appeal to really rake it in, like Ewoks, so Jar Jar instantly becomes annoying, stupid, and a chore for older fans to stomach.
Another interesting point about Lucas is the appearance that he holds this saga so close to his own heart and doesn't want anyone or thing to spoil or tarnish it. You see where I'm going with this? I went to Taco Bell today, and they STILL have those damn Anakin pod racer cups! There should be some kind of award for him to win for the most marketed movie in history. All the fast food crap, convenience store crap, drug store crap, re-releasing the original toys, the list goes on longer than for any movie I can think of. I am mildly suprised I haven't seen the Star Wars hour on Home Shopping Network pedaling even more Star Wars-related sh*t!
I see tons of people in this discussion saying, "the REAL reason is [this or that]", but you know what? Lucas as a person has always struck me as someone who's just not quite on the same page as everyone else. I don't mean this as a bad thing, but I personally think Lucas did this because he could. No other reason. Lucas works in control. He would not have made TPM without total control of all aspects, which he got. Call it childish, call it flexing muscles, but I don't think there was any political-, business-, or profit-motivated reason for this move. If he was going to re-release it as DVD, then release it once along with the VHS and make a ton of money, then release the "Collector's Edition tm" wherein the great His Holiness, along with the cast of the movie, will make a little documentary about the making of, what Star Wars means, what Lucas is trying to do with it, etc., etc., etc... He'll make a lot more money on that as well. And after all that, a long long time from now in a place far far away, he can re-re-release all the boxed sets he wants and make even more money.
But, he won't do that because he's George Lucas, and Star Wars is his his his... all his.
I have always thought of Lucas as thus: A wonderful sci-fi storyteller, a good director, but a piss-poor public figure.
Here he has the most technologically advanced movie of its time and he is content on releasing it on the worst available format?
Someone else pointed out that Lucas goes where the money is. I got a joke email awhile back written by a friend of a friend in which Jar Jar started out as a well-spoken and intelligent character. After 2 lines Lucas realizes The movie will make tons of money, but needs kid appeal to really rake it in, like Ewoks, so Jar Jar instantly becomes annoying, stupid, and a chore for fans to stomach.
Another interesting point about Lucas is the appearance that he holds this saga so close to his own heart and doesn't want anyone or thing to spoil or tarnish it. You see where I'm going with this? I went to Taco Bell today, and they STILL have those damn Anakin pod racer cups! There should be some kind of award for him to win for the most marketed movie in history. All the fast food crap, convenience store crap, drug store crap, re-releasing the original toys, the list goes on longer than for any movie I can think of. I am mildly suprised I haven't seen the Star Wars hour on Home Shopping Network.
I see tons of people in this discussion saying, "the REAL reason is [this or that]", but you know what? Lucas as a person has always struck me as someone who's just not quite on the same page as everyone else. I don't mean this as a bad thing, but I personally think Lucas did this because he could. No other reason. Lucas works in control. He would not have made TPM without total control of all aspects, which he got. Call it childish, call it flexing muscles, but I don't think there wasn't any political-, business-, or profit-motivated reason for this move. If he was going to re-release it as DVD, then release it once along with the VHS and make a ton of money, then release the "Collector's Edition tm" wherein the great chinless wonder along with the cast of the movie will make a little documentary about the making of, what Star Wars means, what Lucas is trying to do with it, etc., etc., etc... He'll make a lot more money on that as well. And aftewr all that, a long long time from now in a place far far away, he can release all the boxed sets he wants and make even more money.
But, he won't do that because he's George Lucas, and Star Wars is his his his... all his.
Things are getting more and more touchy feely every day and it makes me sick. If we are to take into consideration every type of person's feelings in everything we do, we may as well just drop humor from society. Make it illegal or something.
I don't know about the other comic having never read it, but as a former tech, User Friendly really makes me laugh. Illiad and crew generally tend to make fun of tech life more than the ISP's users. Oh sure, every now and then, we see Miranda or the tech guy (Scott is it?) dealing with a clueless customer, but that is the nature of the biz and what makes UF funny to its audience of, guess what, current and former techs.
Every time I hear someone say that this makes these people feel bad, and that makes those look bad, it really gets my undies in a bunch. Take a friggin' sociology class some time. That's the basis of humor. Humor is based on either slap stick (Three Stooges, Buster Keaton, Chaplin, Jerry Lewis, the New Orleans Saints, etc.) or taking a real and plausible situation and showing how it could be humorous in either extreme or situational settings. While these aren't the only foundations of humor, this is most of it. BTW, I didn't mean to offend the New Orleans Saints Organization or any Saints fans in implying their football team sucks so bad, it's funny.
What are we supposed to do? Cut all humor back to Peanuts and For Better or Worse? Sorry dude, but that's just not going to happen. I'll kill without my daily dose of Dilbert and Doonsberry. What about folks like Deniss's Miller & Leary? Are they just mean and bad people? No, they're funny people. They have a talent of seeing the funny aspects of people and life and bringing it to light. What about Gallagher or George Carlin who makes fun of the entire USA (the "We'll bomb the hell out of you" bit)?
Most of the time, people who don't know dick about a computer ("What mouse? Where!?") laugh about their shortcomings and see the humor for themselves. I actually had a guy ask me if I would rather talk to his 7 yr. old since she knew a lot more about the computer than he did. He thought that was hilarious. When I see UF joke about clueless customers, I think of the moronic a**holes who brightened my day by yelling at me because I couldn't get their damn Laptop WinModem connecting at 56K. Folks who know they don't know squat, but rather than graciously ask for and accept help, thay get defensive and assume that all techs think they're dumb simply because they call in. Fact of the matter is, most techs realize, if everyone knew as much as they did, they wouldn't have jobs. In my opinion, most of these supposedly mean spirited comics poke fun at groups of people who deserve a little ribbing. If you can't laugh at yourself, you really have no healthy sense of humor.
Actually, there's a little more to it than that. You are mixing up your deffinitions a little bit. They are all search engines in some way, shape, or form in that they all perform searches on databases of URL's. The difference between Altavista and Yahoo is that Yahoo is a directory. It does not spider sites like Altavista does. It also, as you mentioned, presents its data in a taxonomic organization - much like a directory!
I work in the online newspaper industry and before taking a cushy, stress-free job in a small civil war town in Virginia, I supported most of the Knight Ridder-owned newspaper sites as well as a number of sites owned by Gannett and Landmark Communications (Detroit Free Press, San Jose Mercury, Washington Times, Miami Herald, Virginian Pilot, etc.). Knight-Ridder got big on portals about 2 years ago and began building this which you will see, looks a lot like the other portals.
A portal is just what it says. It is a window to all the news, websites, etc available on the internet that is of interest to the user. Remember MyExcite? The way you can tell it what weather, news, links, etc. you wanted to see?
The goal of a portal is to make a better homepage than a simple link to your bookmarks (like I do). The goal of a search engine is nothing more than finding information, whereas a good portal provides the information you want on your homepage and has a search function should you need something else.
This raises an interesting point that was not really covered in the original piece. I am sure it is covered in one of the comments, but damn if I am going to read that many. Here's the point:
DON'T WAIT
If you see a lady you want to talk to, talk to her. If you want to do something with her, talk to her, get to know her a bit, and ask her. If you hang around thinking she'll never like you and never date you, guess what, you're right, she never will. Geek or not, if you don't go after anything, chances are, it won't fall into your lap. Did you just one day know how to compile a kernel? No way. You probably f'ed up something the first time you tried.
Don't worry about feeling awkward. We all do when we talk to someone we don't know. Look in her eyes. She is probably a bit apprehensive too. If you can't look in her eyes (shyness or whatever) at least look at her face. Whatever you do, don't look at the floor or god-forbid one of the no-no-places (you know where they are). People in general respond better to someone who looks them in the eye and appears to have self-confidence.
Finally, don't buy into that BS peddaled by movies like Powder and Lucas. The quiet, pastey, awkward, and plain old wierd geek doesn't get the great girl. EVER. Nobody, least of all people looking for any kind of relationship, is going fall in love with a person out of pitty. And, if they do, run like hell, you're better off dating the silicon crack whore.
The only thing you can do here is grow a pair, grit your teeth, and talk to her. You have been watching her it seems. You know some things she likes. Look into them. Find something you can at least talk about. It doesn't have to interest you, so long as it's something you can talk about and listen to without losing interest. You got a 50/50 chance, she will either like you or not. Either way, you will know.
Not really on topic, but Matsushita and Toshiba are one in the same. The former owns the latter. It is kind of like saying Pioneer and Kenwood announced that they will have working portable Dolby Digital DVD players/viewers by the end of the year. Same labs, different names.
Also, to my knowlwedge, Matsushita doesn't market anything with that name emblazoned on it, do they? Or do they do it in other countries (ie. not the US of A)? I thought they were pretty much a zaibatsu that pulled the stings and reaped the profits of a number of companies.
One other thing. How do you all pronounce that word? I always said Mat-su-SHIT-a but a friend who works there says it is Mat-su-shit-a. uh huh huh I said sh*t..... twice.
I agree. About the only thing I use my windows partition for anymore is gaming, Dreamweaver/Fireworks/Flash, and ripping my Cd's. after that I simply make a symlink in my home dir to/98/mp3z so's I can get to them quick in the Linux partition, and all's well. I used MusicMatch when I got my Rio and it was alright, but RealJukebox free version offers so much more, it's free, it records faster than most other things mentioned, and is more configurable than MusicMatch. Only problem I have with it is that it's processor intensive. Of course, that could be because I am trudging away on a P200!
Anyone in the Washington DC area: If you have not been to the American History museum lately, they have a wing set up showing off all sorts of really old machines. There are a number of ENIAC pieces there as well as MANIAC, the good old TRaSh80, C-64 (my first one), a pretty old DEC, and all sorts of cool stuff. Well worth a look. They have it set up so you're basically walking down through the years of geek memory lane. I spent a good hour in there!
They also have a pretty cool exhibit in the main hall on materials used to make things. Basically, they have a bunch of cool 'things' and they tell you what they're made of on the little cards. One of the cool 'things' is the actual "60 Minutes" stopwatch.
I totally agree here. Every time something that goes against 100% free and unaccountable speech or flow of goods/information on the internet, all the tech-heads (for lack of a better word) get up in a bunch about howe their "freedoms are being taken away", and "this could be the beginnings of an internet witch hunt", and "it's corporate america trying to [hold 'us' back]".
Sorry folks. If these 'annonymous' posters were, in fact, guilty of making false statements at the expense of a company, they should be prosecuted. There are two terms for this depending on the situation: Slander and Libel; and both are well-documented in legal history. Both also have very good reasons for being illegal. Things like this make it possible for me to be held accountable for saying money given to slashdot is merely funding a diabolical plot, devised by criminally insane mastermind Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda and gang, to kill all lovers of beanie babies in this world. I have accused our host of a criminal, albeit comic book-ish, plan for which he could be investigated and possibly brought up on charges of misdoings. All because of one little white lie on one little newsgroup from one little asshole... Me. Needless to say, this is pretty far-fetched, so let's tone it down a bit:
I am a VP for Matsushita, parent company of Panasonic and a number of others, and I am betting my career on this new-fangled mp3 player I have gotten approved by the company for production in competition to the ever-popular Rio. Some pinhead decides he is pissed off because he bought a faulty Panasonic phone and did not get his ass kissed by the Sears return desk, so he blames Panasonic when they do nothing about it. Our evil friend decides to post some mean comments about Panasonic and Matsushita in general. Lets say one of these comments is concerns Matsushita having 7-year-olds in sweat shops putting together the plastic casings for their new mp3 players. Is it true? Who really cares. As long as someone gives a hint of agreeing with it, it could blow up and Matsushita could lose enormous amounts of money for something they probably didn't even do.
The simple fact that these Annonymous posters are being prosecuted is not admission of guilt in any way. People, especially those who wrap themselves in the freedoms of the internet, have a tendency to see most corporate-started lawsuits as a bad thing. While I agree on a lot of those ocasions, I do not here. This is simply a company protecting whatever reputation it has, and nothing more. People need to realize that just because we have the most powerful means of sharing information at our fingertips does not mean there is no responsibility for what we say. Words can be as strong as, if not stronger than, actions sometimes.
The point about the "Perfect Sound Forever" campaign is an interesting one. When CD's came out, it was the new thing. Digital music on easy-to-use media. Cool! Fortunately for me, my music collection was an extension to my dad's of about 4 albums and 10 cassettes so the cost of switching wasn't that bad.
The music industry has pulled the wool over consumers' eyes more than most realize. CD's generally come in two formats available to the consumer. AAD and DDD. I can't remember what all the letters stand for (something like the first letter is recording, the second: remixing, and the third being the process by which it was applied to the media. How close did I get someone who knows?) The vast majority (read: about 99%) of music CD's are AAD which means recording and remixing was all analog while it was placed on CD digitally. Keep in mind ALL CD's have their media placed on them digitally - it is the nature of the CD! DDD, which is what they were advertising with that BS campaign is 100% digital from the time the musician strums or beats or sings it to the time it hits the CD's surface. This is where the CD quality we heard, and continue to be lied to about.
AAD CD's are an improvement over cassettes, albums, and 8-tracks, but not nearly as much of an improvement as DDD. To offer an example, I bought a CD of Beethoven's 9th by the London Philharmonic that was DDD (and $9!!!) and it was so clear I could actually hear people in the audience coughing during the more quiet parts of the movements. How's that for clarity!?
Until the music industry spends the money to offer me the quality and clarity found on DDD CD's, I do not pitty them one bit. I pitty the artists who spend the time to make the music and please us fans. They are the ones who ultimately get screwed by the industry in that their work (art, if you will) is not marketed in the high quality that CD's are capable of. Until I see DDD media churned out at a fair price like about $9 max, I say screw 'em all.
The interesting thing here is that generally these people have no clue how to implement what they talk about. Like Liz Dole talking about filtering the Internet: Her thinking is basically "porn=bad; you can access it in public places; other than a convenience store, on the web; It is possible to rate sites and have browsers not show sites with certain ratings." What she diesn't know is that most sites do not have these ratings and without those ratings, they will be blocked by default if any security method is checked. So what comes next?
Same thing with the music industry only they're more slippery. Their thinking is, "People don't know the difference between AAD and DDD, they will buy it even if it's only available on cassette, mp3s can be obtained free, that means less money for artists, which equals less money for us, gotta do something fast!" So they do something that will piss off a bunch of fans and say it is "protecting the artists' rights" when it is really only forcing people to do one of three things; protest inflated prices, find something new and improved (mp4?), or open up and hope they have an appetite for steaming dung because that's all they'll get. Maybe not even steaming dung. If the people will deal with it cold, why spend the time to warm it up!?
I'll say this and then shut up on the matter. It all comes down to a lack of customer service. Executives, corporations, etc. could, for the most part, care less what would make the average consumer truly happy. All they are interested in are three simple questions: "Will they buy it?", "Will we make money off it?", and "How much can we make off it?"
Perhaps it's just my being a lazy-ass and not thoroughly researching this topic from the artists being "protected", or it could just be that I really don't give a care about wasting my time to do the above, but it seems that I do not hear the actual ARTISTS complaining too much about mp3's and free music in general. Public Enemy embraces the technology, the Beastie Boys released a mix of a pretty good tune (the mix sucked IMHO) that wans't mp3, but was free. They plan to release more songs in the future last I heard.
I understand RIAA wanting to protect mp3s from reproduction, but then again, where were these great guardians of artists' frail rights when people were dubbing to cassette tapes oh so long ago!? I mean, high speed dubbing was a pretty standard feature on tape decks, and still is! I really don't think they made those so we could make copies of college lectures and recorded interviews. It was made so I could quickly copy my buddy's Bon Jovi "Slippery When Wet" tape in less than an hour.
Funny how when RIAA got pissed off at the Lyrics Database, I never read about a lot of artists getting in on the procedings. Look at that site now. I hate to say it, but it sucks. I used to love that site, but don't go there any longer simply due to the fact that the International Lyrics Server serves up the lyrics to absolutely no songs I have ever heard of. Thanks a lot corporate world, I appreciate that.
I think the RIAA thinks it has a good purpose, sort of like how most political extremists think they are right and everyone else is wrong. It would seem to me that artists would not mind mp3s. The more people who listen to their music, the more people will want to see them in concert. They make their living either way. I would really like to see some tool like Pinfeld or some other MTV VJ ask a question like "How do you feel about people ripping your music to mp3s and giving them out to their friends?" instead of "So, how cool was that last tour?" next time he had a really big super star to ask questions and kiss up to. At least then we would know how the artists (remember? the ones being "exploited" by mp3s?) feel about this whole matter.
One last thing, RIAA does all of this to jump on mp3s and yet I never hear their response to peoples' gripes over incrediblly bloated CD prices. If people could actually get a fair price on a CD, perhaps mp3s would not be quite as popular. The main reason I got into these things is because I could get them for free off ftp sites and did not have to pay Blockbuster their outrageous prices for something like "Poison's Greatest Hits" which probably contains all of about 6 songs, 3 of which I never heard of. When an EP costs $13 or so, we all ought to just bring our own KY when going to Blockbuster or Sam Goody or any of the other commercial rapists out there (not their fault, it's the music industry. But, they are the tools by which the rape is perpetrated).
Remember when Pearl Jam got so pissed at Ticketmaster? They blabbed about it wherever they could and rightfully so. But, I have not heard ol' Eddy Vedder whailing about how more people probably own a ripped version of "Vitalogy" than have actually bought the damn CD.
I really dug the movie, both of them. Where I used to work my co-workers and I would quote the movie quite often ("there really is nothing like a freshly shorn scrotum...") and I have always thought it was hillarious. I even dug Axe Murderer (Nancy Travis.... mmmmmm - Myers gets all the good babes!). I got tired of WW2 thanks to HBO as is always the case but WW is hillarious to this day.
I really liked the opening sequence and was glad that the rehashed choreographed scenes from the first movie were kept to a minimum, plus I really liked what they did with it this time around with the tent scene. I think I was crying there for a bit it was so funny. I agree with Rob in that Mini-Me was great as was Scott Evil. Dr. Evil was pretty good as well although not quite as funny as the first time 'round. I won't even go into Heather Graham... but I agree with everyone else! Even though Liz Hurly is the better choice IMHO.
The scene with Mustafa was classic Mike Myers, and Fat Bastard was a riot. All of this and the word plays, penis synonym sequences, and just the saying, "I am a sexy bitch!" really made this movie a blast to watch. I may have to see this one again before it leaves the theater.
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I have often thought U.S. schools don't focus enough on computers. I remember there was one computer lab in the school I taught at briefly in Opelika, Alabama. Students were allowed time there to work on class projects and what not. These were old IBM PS/2 boxen that were so out of date it was pathetic. Not to mention the fact that programs like "Carmen San Diego" and "Oregon Trail" were long considered excellent ways of incorporating computers in the classroom. How wrong could taht be? All that does is use new technology to teach the same thing a book or movie can. Pretty much in the same fashon too!
If school systems are honest about teaching computer use in schoool, teach students how to use tools such as search engines and newsgroups to find information for reports. Use programs like powerpoint (or Star Office/KOffice/whatever Gonme's calling it's office app today) to add multimedia to their reports. Better yet, partner with someone like Macromedia and/or Adobe to use flash annimations on web pages designed through GoLive or Dreamweaver (after learning HTML programming by hand of course). Get copies of "Learning Perl" or some of Laura Lemay's "21 Days" series. Teach kids how computers are used in the world. Teach them why they're useful and how they work. Teaching the standard Microsoft line will not allow students to see how applications work in anything beyond a superficial standpoint (a diagram in a book). It will also more than likely produce more people who expect an AOL-ized or M$-ized version of computing -- simplicity to the point of absurdity. Don't get me wrong, computing for Joe User should be pain free, but wouldn't things be great if Joe User could remember something from high school computer class like, "if your password's not working, check the CAPS Lock key!"?
Microsoft is not necessarily needed for all of this. For programming-based classes (which should be limited to basic web programming (HTML, with intro to JavaScript, DHTML, and possibly XML), Perl and C to cover the basics). Anything from Linux to one fo the BSDs would work fine. Schools could arrange a deal with local vendors to sponsor computer purchases through fund matching programs and what not. Imagine how far universities could go with CS programs if most incoming freshmen already knew all this information.
I know more and more students are learning this stuff on their own these days, but why can't schools look to expand their computer learning beyond learning Office apps and playing outdated and useless geography and history games with little to no interactivity. I realize most people qualified to teach this stuff can make lots more money than a school system can offer, but when you think about it, lots of teachers could make more money doing something else too! It's not about money so much as it's about how passionate someone is about his cause. In this case, I'm asking how passionate people are about teaching school kids about computers and programming rather than how to use one OS and a handful of marginally useful applications.
I agree Doolittle's raid was incredibly important to the war in the Pacific. Pearl Harbor gave the country its proverbial Alamo, Doolittle gave people hope and belief in the war effort.
I am pretty happy they put it in there. A while north of this thread, I saw someone idolizing Doolittle. I agree, the guy was very smart, but he was also headstrong, bold and brash which is why it was no suprise he carried out the raid. He was the perfect man for the job.
To clarify, at the time of Pearl, three carriers were strangely out on maneuvers. This is one of the things conspiracy theorists point to when charging that FDR or someone in power wanted the war to happen. However, there were 4 carriers I know of in the pacific theater by the time of Coral Sea: Yorktown, Hornet, Lexington & Enterprise. By the time Midway was over we were down to Hornet and Enterprise. Fortunately, the Japanese navy was down to one, or possibly none. I can't remember if we sank the 4th carrier or just left it to crawl home burning. I know we screwed it up pretty good.
I have to agree, this is a pretty interesting article. However, there is also nothing new in the article. It is a well-written history piece on large corporations' knee-jerk fear of innovation and advancements in tech. One other thing, the Motley Fool, while certainly being well-respected, does not speak for the financial community. I only saw one reference in the article (to the NYT) to another respected financial stalwart. This particular article, however well-written, reflects the opinion of a single representative of one major financial institution. If CNN came out on its own with an opinion like this would that represent the popular media industry as a whole? I know it's nit-picking but having worked in the news industry, I can tell how you say it is just as important as what you say.
Who anywhere would not argue that anyone selling burned CD's with pirated ANYTHING on them should not go to jail. That is piracy in its simplest form.
As for millions of people using Napster for public domain music, you're right. Napster would fail, but not for the reasons you cite. It would fail because it's prime competition would be mp3.com who's been at it longer, has more money and a more marketable name.
Here is a list of RIAA Members.
A reporter does not and should not reveal annonymous sources. Yeah, that's an easy thing to say, but there's other considerations. Sure, this guy could just go into court and say, "Yes, what I wrote is true." When asked to identify the people he is talking about, he could simply refuse on the grounds that he would be revealing a source. One problem arrises. A big problem. These two crackers broke the law. Once that's an issue, all bets are off. Journalistic integrity doesn't extend to protecting people who've broken the law, and by refusing to name these two crackers, I would think Mr. Journalism here is opening himself up to a charge of contempt. Of course, I'm not a lawyer.
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Anyone else think it's funny how a comment with a zero score looks like this
I hear a lot about "putting MS in a worse light than they're already in", but honestly, the only people seeing M$ in that light tend not to use MS products unless we have to (for work reasons or whatever). The rest of the PC-using world (roughly the other 90% I would guess) doesn't care, nor do they know any better. The average PC user is little more than a sheep doing what he/she is told is a Good Thing. Sorry if I offend some people with that statement, but what's the biggest complaint against Linux? The learning curve is too steep. Why is that? Because people want point and click, they don't like using a keyboard.
M$ gives them a rough approximation of what they want. Because of the dummy-friendly windows interface, people don't care whether IE follows standards, or whether windows has more security loopholes than a child's Hot Wheels race track and more bugs than week old deer carcass.
I think things would change if the W3C was actually given some teeth. So many other languages/professions/protocols have set standards that everyone follows, why should the web be any different? How to give the W3C teeth is not something I have an answer to, but I know as long as they can only make suggestions, M$ won't feel the need to listen to them.
I wholeheartedly agree. I applied for a job with a certain Linux-oriented company (which will remain nameless) awhile back. A job for which I felt I was seriously capable of excelling at. Sent in my resume and cover letter after some slight modifications in Star Office. What was my reply? "We have no need of people who use Microsoft software. We are an open source publisher". Where did the email come from? Netscape Communicator. I never really saw Netscape as a great bastion of open source despite the Mozilla project. Nevermind the fact that I was not given a fair shot at the job, this person reflected everythig that makes me embarrassed of the Linux and Open Source communities.
;-). See what the uptime and load averages look like. See how the OS's handle upgrades, patches, hardware swap-outs, etc. To make things interesting, don't put them behind a firewall. See if any of them get busted into.
Zealotry never accomplished anything good. If NT beats Linux, we pick apart every little detail of the test and find flaw everywhere. If the results are reversed, we cheer and sing the praises of happy penguins.
Open source is probably the best thing to hit software development. I believe it produces a much higher quality product. Also, let's have a look at a little OS history here. How long has NT been around? Unless I am mistaken, NT has taken longer to be 'competitive' with an OS as relatively young as Linux. For me, that speaks volumes as to the benefits of open source.
I would love to see NT take on Linux (or better yet, one of the BSD's) in a truely impartial, real world test. Personally, for a server, I would prefer FreeBSD. On that note, why have I not seen any big benchmarks tests comparing NT to it? Why is it always Linux? I could have sworn the last numbers I saw showed BSD on more servers than Linux. Perhaps we need a Road & Track-style head to head comparrison of the top 5 server OS's.
I would set up each machine as comparably as possible (on identical machines where possible) and advertise on the tech sites with the highest traffic numbers to hit the site as hard a possible. Hell, to keep all the OS communities content, let each vendor spec out their own server. I understand the need for consistency here, but consider that the vendors are picking what their product will run best on. Basically forcing everyone to put their product where their mouth is. Have some static pages for a day or two, add some graphics intensive pages, then to dynamic pages, and on the last week, mix it up. Anything goes, write scripts to hit the site, ping it, anything you can think of to beat the server ragged. After that round, move to the next OS. After this is done, hell, set up the 5 servers as ftp mirrors for something like Metalab for a year, something with tons of traffic (imagine an NT server mirroring Slashdot as part of the tests
I agree Windows has its place. Personally, I would hate to see Linux on everyone's desktop. Can you imagine how dumbed down it would have to become for that to happen? It's frightening.
Anyone else getting a screenshot of this? I mean, I've seen the same story posted twice numerous times, hell they ARE only humans running this site, but not one right after the other an hour apart! Copnsidering that UF wasn't terribly funny this morning (when the hell are AJ and Miranda going to hop on the good foot and do teh bad thing?), it's good to know I can still rely on /. for a nice chuckle to get things started right.
Oh, and to folks who post crap like "this should be moderated down", or "Malda, you f*cking idiot"... get a sense of humor... it's Good Thing.
I have nothing against paying for *good* software. Nor do I have anything against free (as in speech or beer, I don't care) software. The now defunct PC Accelerator had a great piece on the price of software wherein Mike Saloman (sp?) said he felt game prices were way too high, but when one considers how many pirated copies of each game there are out there, the prices may seem justified. Software companies don't want to make less money but still make a profit on new releases; when they work to produce a better product than the previous version, they expect more profit. That's the nature of the beast.
The important thing to remember here is that I am talking about *good* software. I don't generally consider Windows to be good software. Anything that I imediately have to patch after installing is not good software. Anything that is constantly plagued by security holes, trojans, bugs, etc. is not good software.
On the pay side, I think companies that produce good software deserve the right to choose whether that software will be free, open sourced or not. If they can't do that, then where's the freedom? Adobe makes some good software. I wish they would port some of it to Linux (more than just Acrobat reader), but again, that's their choice.
People may bitch and moan about stupid M$ moves like this one, but less than a third will ever do anything about it, and insinuating that it's close to a third of the people bitching is probably a l. They either expect the government to fix it *cough-mistake-cough*, expect other people to protest, or simply make do as one more right slides away. Personally, I think if people have a problem with the still-developing UI in Linux, they should go to a Mac. Certainly a more stable OS.
I couldn't agree more. While I see and understand the reasoning for 'no exceptions' types of rules, I do not agree with them. In the case of fighting, if I did as the school rules insisted, couldn't run, and basically got the crap kicked out of me, could I not sue the school system for payment of any medical bills?
I hated just about every second of high school. So much in fact, that when I was offered the chance to go to community college in leu of my senior year, I may have actually left vapor trials running out the councellor's door!
Having read the article and Katz's fairly non-commital piece above, the main thing that stuck out was "why". Why did the Columbine shooters do what they did? Why did this guy do what he did? Why is this becoming such a problem?
Did anyone stop to answer these questions by talking to the kids? People said Karos and Kliebold were sort of outsiders like this guy, did anyone bother to find out if anything was bothering them? Not by asking "Why can't you get along with other students?", but rather by asking, "Is there something bothering you?" People generally want to talk about what's bothering them, but they won't talk unless they know you give a shit. I never got the impression that the folks at my HS had any interest in my education/problems beyond making sure I didn't break any rules/laws. Therefore, I basically decided that my HS blew goats, and dreaded going there every day.
Funny thing about high schools. Here is where students really begin learning that not only do they have rights, but what those rights are, how they work, and how they relate to the rights of others. Yet, with all this flag-waiving classroom rhetoric abotu the USA being such a great and free place, we have mentioned in just the above message, supression of free press and supression of free speech. Why? 'Well, we can't offend anybody.'
Has anyone stopped to think that if people were a little more thick-skinned, and able to cope with the fact that HS life is not a John Hughes' movie; things like this wouldn't happen? We all go through our teen-angst-related BS, but I don't remember kids getting shot in school when I was there, and that was about 7 years ago. The Columbine kids said nobody understood them, and they had no friends. Not to rip from Chris Rock, but there WERE about 8 folks in this group they were in. At least 6 other people sort of understood them! That's more than I could say.
I don't agree with the way the Lake boy chose to handle his problems, but I have serious issues with the school systems knee-jerk method of handling it: "Nevermind your problems, the Columbine folks did what you did, therefore you might be planning a school shooting spree, so regardless of what caused the problem, you and your website will be designated as "the problem" and cast aside pending possible legal action. No exceptions."
oops.... didn't submit that in HTML... Here's the link to that story for anyone interested: Open Source - On Why Not Sorry `bout that.
I don't mean to sound like the average butthead slamming /. for not being as good as it used to be. Personally, the site has been a daily/hourly ritual of mine for awhile. One thing that is getting a bit old, though, is seeing all these articles from NYT, CNN, ZDNet, etc. that are basically fluff pieces about Linux and Open Source. Honestly, articles like these tend to be a dime a dozen.
/. with fluff pieces like this.
;-)
Plus, when I see: "Among their somewhat-obvious insights is the somewhat-obvious comment..." and then the all-too-familiar moderator's comment: "it is interesting to see outside sources commenting on the growth of the free software/open source movement." While I think it's great that outside sources are taking notice, I would be much happier to see a more in depth piece from some of these bastions of information rather than what has become the standard form letter used by Window-jockey reporters who read a few websites about linux (more than likely linux.com, being that it's the obvious place). Until such time, what's the point with wasting space on
As far as the Open Source movement is concerned, I am a big believer in being able to effectively argue against one's own position. That being the case, DevShed had a great little article last February called Open Source - On Why Not. Stephen Den Beste makes some truely interesting, if somewhat elementary points about some valid shortcomings in the movement. What's interesting about the article is that he refrains from arguing which is better code (open or closed source), but rather which makes more business sense from an investor's standpoint. Like the man said, "no bucks, no Buck Rogers."
I know, I know, RedHat and others are riding high right now, but eventually, people are going to stop throwing money at them and want to see the company turn a profit. Lots of things change, but one obvious constant in business is a company needs to be profitable if it hopes to stick around. Companies like VALinux will probably keep gaining in value simply because they have a tangible product that people must buy if they want to get it... get it legally, that is.
Anyway, my point in writing this was not to flame anyone on Slashdot, this a great site. I just don't see why we need to have the bi-monthly "it's good to see the big media guys taking notice of what we're doing here" story. Sort of pointless stories in the first place if you ask me. So moderate me down... you know you want to
so that's my $.02. I be broke now.
Here he has the most technologically advanced movie of its time and he is content on releasing it on the worst available format?
Someone else pointed out that Lucas goes where the money is. I got a joke email awhile back written by a friend of a friend in which Jar Jar started out as a well-spoken and intelligent character. After 2 lines Lucas realizes The movie will make tons of money, but needs kid appeal to really rake it in, like Ewoks, so Jar Jar instantly becomes annoying, stupid, and a chore for older fans to stomach.
Another interesting point about Lucas is the appearance that he holds this saga so close to his own heart and doesn't want anyone or thing to spoil or tarnish it. You see where I'm going with this? I went to Taco Bell today, and they STILL have those damn Anakin pod racer cups! There should be some kind of award for him to win for the most marketed movie in history. All the fast food crap, convenience store crap, drug store crap, re-releasing the original toys, the list goes on longer than for any movie I can think of. I am mildly suprised I haven't seen the Star Wars hour on Home Shopping Network pedaling even more Star Wars-related sh*t!
I see tons of people in this discussion saying, "the REAL reason is [this or that]", but you know what? Lucas as a person has always struck me as someone who's just not quite on the same page as everyone else. I don't mean this as a bad thing, but I personally think Lucas did this because he could. No other reason. Lucas works in control. He would not have made TPM without total control of all aspects, which he got. Call it childish, call it flexing muscles, but I don't think there was any political-, business-, or profit-motivated reason for this move. If he was going to re-release it as DVD, then release it once along with the VHS and make a ton of money, then release the "Collector's Edition tm" wherein the great His Holiness, along with the cast of the movie, will make a little documentary about the making of, what Star Wars means, what Lucas is trying to do with it, etc., etc., etc... He'll make a lot more money on that as well. And after all that, a long long time from now in a place far far away, he can re-re-release all the boxed sets he wants and make even more money.
But, he won't do that because he's George Lucas, and Star Wars is his his his... all his.
I have always thought of Lucas as thus: A wonderful sci-fi storyteller, a good director, but a piss-poor public figure.
Here he has the most technologically advanced movie of its time and he is content on releasing it on the worst available format?
Someone else pointed out that Lucas goes where the money is. I got a joke email awhile back written by a friend of a friend in which Jar Jar started out as a well-spoken and intelligent character. After 2 lines Lucas realizes The movie will make tons of money, but needs kid appeal to really rake it in, like Ewoks, so Jar Jar instantly becomes annoying, stupid, and a chore for fans to stomach.
Another interesting point about Lucas is the appearance that he holds this saga so close to his own heart and doesn't want anyone or thing to spoil or tarnish it. You see where I'm going with this? I went to Taco Bell today, and they STILL have those damn Anakin pod racer cups! There should be some kind of award for him to win for the most marketed movie in history. All the fast food crap, convenience store crap, drug store crap, re-releasing the original toys, the list goes on longer than for any movie I can think of. I am mildly suprised I haven't seen the Star Wars hour on Home Shopping Network.
I see tons of people in this discussion saying, "the REAL reason is [this or that]", but you know what? Lucas as a person has always struck me as someone who's just not quite on the same page as everyone else. I don't mean this as a bad thing, but I personally think Lucas did this because he could. No other reason. Lucas works in control. He would not have made TPM without total control of all aspects, which he got. Call it childish, call it flexing muscles, but I don't think there wasn't any political-, business-, or profit-motivated reason for this move. If he was going to re-release it as DVD, then release it once along with the VHS and make a ton of money, then release the "Collector's Edition tm" wherein the great chinless wonder along with the cast of the movie will make a little documentary about the making of, what Star Wars means, what Lucas is trying to do with it, etc., etc., etc... He'll make a lot more money on that as well. And aftewr all that, a long long time from now in a place far far away, he can release all the boxed sets he wants and make even more money.
But, he won't do that because he's George Lucas, and Star Wars is his his his... all his.
Things are getting more and more touchy feely every day and it makes me sick. If we are to take into consideration every type of person's feelings in everything we do, we may as well just drop humor from society. Make it illegal or something.
I don't know about the other comic having never read it, but as a former tech, User Friendly really makes me laugh. Illiad and crew generally tend to make fun of tech life more than the ISP's users. Oh sure, every now and then, we see Miranda or the tech guy (Scott is it?) dealing with a clueless customer, but that is the nature of the biz and what makes UF funny to its audience of, guess what, current and former techs.
Every time I hear someone say that this makes these people feel bad, and that makes those look bad, it really gets my undies in a bunch. Take a friggin' sociology class some time. That's the basis of humor. Humor is based on either slap stick (Three Stooges, Buster Keaton, Chaplin, Jerry Lewis, the New Orleans Saints, etc.) or taking a real and plausible situation and showing how it could be humorous in either extreme or situational settings. While these aren't the only foundations of humor, this is most of it. BTW, I didn't mean to offend the New Orleans Saints Organization or any Saints fans in implying their football team sucks so bad, it's funny.
What are we supposed to do? Cut all humor back to Peanuts and For Better or Worse? Sorry dude, but that's just not going to happen. I'll kill without my daily dose of Dilbert and Doonsberry. What about folks like Deniss's Miller & Leary? Are they just mean and bad people? No, they're funny people. They have a talent of seeing the funny aspects of people and life and bringing it to light. What about Gallagher or George Carlin who makes fun of the entire USA (the "We'll bomb the hell out of you" bit)?
Most of the time, people who don't know dick about a computer ("What mouse? Where!?") laugh about their shortcomings and see the humor for themselves. I actually had a guy ask me if I would rather talk to his 7 yr. old since she knew a lot more about the computer than he did. He thought that was hilarious. When I see UF joke about clueless customers, I think of the moronic a**holes who brightened my day by yelling at me because I couldn't get their damn Laptop WinModem connecting at 56K. Folks who know they don't know squat, but rather than graciously ask for and accept help, thay get defensive and assume that all techs think they're dumb simply because they call in. Fact of the matter is, most techs realize, if everyone knew as much as they did, they wouldn't have jobs. In my opinion, most of these supposedly mean spirited comics poke fun at groups of people who deserve a little ribbing. If you can't laugh at yourself, you really have no healthy sense of humor.
I work in the online newspaper industry and before taking a cushy, stress-free job in a small civil war town in Virginia, I supported most of the Knight Ridder-owned newspaper sites as well as a number of sites owned by Gannett and Landmark Communications (Detroit Free Press, San Jose Mercury, Washington Times, Miami Herald, Virginian Pilot, etc.). Knight-Ridder got big on portals about 2 years ago and began building this which you will see, looks a lot like the other portals.
A portal is just what it says. It is a window to all the news, websites, etc available on the internet that is of interest to the user. Remember MyExcite? The way you can tell it what weather, news, links, etc. you wanted to see?
The goal of a portal is to make a better homepage than a simple link to your bookmarks (like I do). The goal of a search engine is nothing more than finding information, whereas a good portal provides the information you want on your homepage and has a search function should you need something else.
This raises an interesting point that was not really covered in the original piece. I am sure it is covered in one of the comments, but damn if I am going to read that many. Here's the point:
DON'T WAIT
If you see a lady you want to talk to, talk to her. If you want to do something with her, talk to her, get to know her a bit, and ask her. If you hang around thinking she'll never like you and never date you, guess what, you're right, she never will. Geek or not, if you don't go after anything, chances are, it won't fall into your lap. Did you just one day know how to compile a kernel? No way. You probably f'ed up something the first time you tried.
Don't worry about feeling awkward. We all do when we talk to someone we don't know. Look in her eyes. She is probably a bit apprehensive too. If you can't look in her eyes (shyness or whatever) at least look at her face. Whatever you do, don't look at the floor or god-forbid one of the no-no-places (you know where they are). People in general respond better to someone who looks them in the eye and appears to have self-confidence.
Finally, don't buy into that BS peddaled by movies like Powder and Lucas. The quiet, pastey, awkward, and plain old wierd geek doesn't get the great girl. EVER. Nobody, least of all people looking for any kind of relationship, is going fall in love with a person out of pitty. And, if they do, run like hell, you're better off dating the silicon crack whore.
The only thing you can do here is grow a pair, grit your teeth, and talk to her. You have been watching her it seems. You know some things she likes. Look into them. Find something you can at least talk about. It doesn't have to interest you, so long as it's something you can talk about and listen to without losing interest. You got a 50/50 chance, she will either like you or not. Either way, you will know.
Not really on topic, but Matsushita and Toshiba are one in the same. The former owns the latter. It is kind of like saying Pioneer and Kenwood announced that they will have working portable Dolby Digital DVD players/viewers by the end of the year. Same labs, different names.
Also, to my knowlwedge, Matsushita doesn't market anything with that name emblazoned on it, do they? Or do they do it in other countries (ie. not the US of A)? I thought they were pretty much a zaibatsu that pulled the stings and reaped the profits of a number of companies.
One other thing. How do you all pronounce that word? I always said Mat-su-SHIT-a but a friend who works there says it is Mat-su-shit-a.
uh huh huh I said sh*t..... twice.
I agree. About the only thing I use my windows partition for anymore is gaming, Dreamweaver/Fireworks/Flash, and ripping my Cd's. after that I simply make a symlink in my home dir to /98/mp3z so's I can get to them quick in the Linux partition, and all's well. I used MusicMatch when I got my Rio and it was alright, but RealJukebox free version offers so much more, it's free, it records faster than most other things mentioned, and is more configurable than MusicMatch. Only problem I have with it is that it's processor intensive. Of course, that could be because I am trudging away on a P200!
Anyone in the Washington DC area: If you have not been to the American History museum lately, they have a wing set up showing off all sorts of really old machines. There are a number of ENIAC pieces there as well as MANIAC, the good old TRaSh80, C-64 (my first one), a pretty old DEC, and all sorts of cool stuff. Well worth a look. They have it set up so you're basically walking down through the years of geek memory lane. I spent a good hour in there!
They also have a pretty cool exhibit in the main hall on materials used to make things. Basically, they have a bunch of cool 'things' and they tell you what they're made of on the little cards. One of the cool 'things' is the actual "60 Minutes" stopwatch.
I totally agree here. Every time something that goes against 100% free and unaccountable speech or flow of goods/information on the internet, all the tech-heads (for lack of a better word) get up in a bunch about howe their "freedoms are being taken away", and "this could be the beginnings of an internet witch hunt", and "it's corporate america trying to [hold 'us' back]".
Sorry folks. If these 'annonymous' posters were, in fact, guilty of making false statements at the expense of a company, they should be prosecuted. There are two terms for this depending on the situation: Slander and Libel; and both are well-documented in legal history. Both also have very good reasons for being illegal. Things like this make it possible for me to be held accountable for saying money given to slashdot is merely funding a diabolical plot, devised by criminally insane mastermind Rob 'CmdrTaco' Malda and gang, to kill all lovers of beanie babies in this world. I have accused our host of a criminal, albeit comic book-ish, plan for which he could be investigated and possibly brought up on charges of misdoings. All because of one little white lie on one little newsgroup from one little asshole... Me. Needless to say, this is pretty far-fetched, so let's tone it down a bit:
I am a VP for Matsushita, parent company of Panasonic and a number of others, and I am betting my career on this new-fangled mp3 player I have gotten approved by the company for production in competition to the ever-popular Rio. Some pinhead decides he is pissed off because he bought a faulty Panasonic phone and did not get his ass kissed by the Sears return desk, so he blames Panasonic when they do nothing about it. Our evil friend decides to post some mean comments about Panasonic and Matsushita in general. Lets say one of these comments is concerns Matsushita having 7-year-olds in sweat shops putting together the plastic casings for their new mp3 players. Is it true? Who really cares. As long as someone gives a hint of agreeing with it, it could blow up and Matsushita could lose enormous amounts of money for something they probably didn't even do.
The simple fact that these Annonymous posters are being prosecuted is not admission of guilt in any way. People, especially those who wrap themselves in the freedoms of the internet, have a tendency to see most corporate-started lawsuits as a bad thing. While I agree on a lot of those ocasions, I do not here. This is simply a company protecting whatever reputation it has, and nothing more. People need to realize that just because we have the most powerful means of sharing information at our fingertips does not mean there is no responsibility for what we say. Words can be as strong as, if not stronger than, actions sometimes.
The point about the "Perfect Sound Forever" campaign is an interesting one. When CD's came out, it was the new thing. Digital music on easy-to-use media. Cool! Fortunately for me, my music collection was an extension to my dad's of about 4 albums and 10 cassettes so the cost of switching wasn't that bad.
The music industry has pulled the wool over consumers' eyes more than most realize. CD's generally come in two formats available to the consumer. AAD and DDD. I can't remember what all the letters stand for (something like the first letter is recording, the second: remixing, and the third being the process by which it was applied to the media. How close did I get someone who knows?) The vast majority (read: about 99%) of music CD's are AAD which means recording and remixing was all analog while it was placed on CD digitally. Keep in mind ALL CD's have their media placed on them digitally - it is the nature of the CD! DDD, which is what they were advertising with that BS campaign is 100% digital from the time the musician strums or beats or sings it to the time it hits the CD's surface. This is where the CD quality we heard, and continue to be lied to about.
AAD CD's are an improvement over cassettes, albums, and 8-tracks, but not nearly as much of an improvement as DDD. To offer an example, I bought a CD of Beethoven's 9th by the London Philharmonic that was DDD (and $9!!!) and it was so clear I could actually hear people in the audience coughing during the more quiet parts of the movements. How's that for clarity!?
Until the music industry spends the money to offer me the quality and clarity found on DDD CD's, I do not pitty them one bit. I pitty the artists who spend the time to make the music and please us fans. They are the ones who ultimately get screwed by the industry in that their work (art, if you will) is not marketed in the high quality that CD's are capable of. Until I see DDD media churned out at a fair price like about $9 max, I say screw 'em all.
The interesting thing here is that generally these people have no clue how to implement what they talk about. Like Liz Dole talking about filtering the Internet: Her thinking is basically "porn=bad; you can access it in public places; other than a convenience store, on the web; It is possible to rate sites and have browsers not show sites with certain ratings." What she diesn't know is that most sites do not have these ratings and without those ratings, they will be blocked by default if any security method is checked. So what comes next?
Same thing with the music industry only they're more slippery. Their thinking is, "People don't know the difference between AAD and DDD, they will buy it even if it's only available on cassette, mp3s can be obtained free, that means less money for artists, which equals less money for us, gotta do something fast!" So they do something that will piss off a bunch of fans and say it is "protecting the artists' rights" when it is really only forcing people to do one of three things; protest inflated prices, find something new and improved (mp4?), or open up and hope they have an appetite for steaming dung because that's all they'll get. Maybe not even steaming dung. If the people will deal with it cold, why spend the time to warm it up!?
I'll say this and then shut up on the matter. It all comes down to a lack of customer service. Executives, corporations, etc. could, for the most part, care less what would make the average consumer truly happy. All they are interested in are three simple questions: "Will they buy it?", "Will we make money off it?", and "How much can we make off it?"
Perhaps it's just my being a lazy-ass and not thoroughly researching this topic from the artists being "protected", or it could just be that I really don't give a care about wasting my time to do the above, but it seems that I do not hear the actual ARTISTS complaining too much about mp3's and free music in general. Public Enemy embraces the technology, the Beastie Boys released a mix of a pretty good tune (the mix sucked IMHO) that wans't mp3, but was free. They plan to release more songs in the future last I heard.
I understand RIAA wanting to protect mp3s from reproduction, but then again, where were these great guardians of artists' frail rights when people were dubbing to cassette tapes oh so long ago!? I mean, high speed dubbing was a pretty standard feature on tape decks, and still is! I really don't think they made those so we could make copies of college lectures and recorded interviews. It was made so I could quickly copy my buddy's Bon Jovi "Slippery When Wet" tape in less than an hour.
Funny how when RIAA got pissed off at the Lyrics Database, I never read about a lot of artists getting in on the procedings. Look at that site now. I hate to say it, but it sucks. I used to love that site, but don't go there any longer simply due to the fact that the International Lyrics Server serves up the lyrics to absolutely no songs I have ever heard of. Thanks a lot corporate world, I appreciate that.
I think the RIAA thinks it has a good purpose, sort of like how most political extremists think they are right and everyone else is wrong. It would seem to me that artists would not mind mp3s. The more people who listen to their music, the more people will want to see them in concert. They make their living either way. I would really like to see some tool like Pinfeld or some other MTV VJ ask a question like "How do you feel about people ripping your music to mp3s and giving them out to their friends?" instead of "So, how cool was that last tour?" next time he had a really big super star to ask questions and kiss up to. At least then we would know how the artists (remember? the ones being "exploited" by mp3s?) feel about this whole matter.
One last thing, RIAA does all of this to jump on mp3s and yet I never hear their response to peoples' gripes over incrediblly bloated CD prices. If people could actually get a fair price on a CD, perhaps mp3s would not be quite as popular. The main reason I got into these things is because I could get them for free off ftp sites and did not have to pay Blockbuster their outrageous prices for something like "Poison's Greatest Hits" which probably contains all of about 6 songs, 3 of which I never heard of. When an EP costs $13 or so, we all ought to just bring our own KY when going to Blockbuster or Sam Goody or any of the other commercial rapists out there (not their fault, it's the music industry. But, they are the tools by which the rape is perpetrated).
Remember when Pearl Jam got so pissed at Ticketmaster? They blabbed about it wherever they could and rightfully so. But, I have not heard ol' Eddy Vedder whailing about how more people probably own a ripped version of "Vitalogy" than have actually bought the damn CD.
Just my opinion... etc.
I really dug the movie, both of them. Where I used to work my co-workers and I would quote the movie quite often ("there really is nothing like a freshly shorn scrotum...") and I have always thought it was hillarious. I even dug Axe Murderer (Nancy Travis.... mmmmmm - Myers gets all the good babes!). I got tired of WW2 thanks to HBO as is always the case but WW is hillarious to this day.
I really liked the opening sequence and was glad that the rehashed choreographed scenes from the first movie were kept to a minimum, plus I really liked what they did with it this time around with the tent scene. I think I was crying there for a bit it was so funny. I agree with Rob in that Mini-Me was great as was Scott Evil. Dr. Evil was pretty good as well although not quite as funny as the first time 'round. I won't even go into Heather Graham... but I agree with everyone else! Even though Liz Hurly is the better choice IMHO.
The scene with Mustafa was classic Mike Myers, and Fat Bastard was a riot. All of this and the word plays, penis synonym sequences, and just the saying, "I am a sexy bitch!" really made this movie a blast to watch. I may have to see this one again before it leaves the theater.