10 years ago eh?... And you never taught the difference between a Mainframe (IBM System/360 or IBM zSeries), Minicomputer(IBM AS/400/iSeries), and a Microcomputer(IBM PC)???
What school did you go to??? I see this as a serious problem when folks enter "the industry" can can't tell you what the hell a mainframe is.
If I were to press up 10K copies of a CD with artwork and all that, it'll run me $.74 per CD buying from Discmakers. I will then turn around and sell that CD to indie distributors and one-stop's for about $5 or $6 per unit, but I have to accept all returns (gotta take a risk somewhere). The distributor will mark it up to about $8 or $9 per CD and sell it to the retailers, who will then sell it to you for $16.
A major label own's it's own distribution channel, so you cut out the middle-man immediately. They also press CD's for FAR cheaper than my $.74 per unit (somewhere around 25 cents per unit, even with artwork overhead, for a 100K+ run). Even after they pay everyone, you're still looking at only a couple of dollars per unit. The label is going to sell to a retailer like Wal-Mart for cheap, so about $5 or $6 per unit is what Wallyworld is really paying. Mark that up by 80-100% and you're at their 9.99 price point and still profitable when you take into account their own overhead.
They're not losing on those CD's. Not by a longshot.
I'm usually the latest adopter of my circle. My PC is usually a generation or two behind everyone else's (Athlon XP 2500+ barton core, just built back in December), my video cards can be even further behind (I just "upgraded" to a Geforce 6200 from a Geforce 2MX, but still have a TNT2 and Matrox G450 in service). I bought my first MP3 player back in June and it's a cheapie Sansa model. It took me years to stop using Mandrake 7.2 because it just worked and each new distro had issues I didn't want to deal with and and didn't have to deal with with the old trusty one. The only reason I use WinXP is because of a single application I need: Digidesign's ProTools. If if wasn't for that, I'd still be running Windows 2000 and Cubase 5.1 to compose music (I finally upgraded to Cubase SX3 earlier this year). I still use FL Studio 6 even though FL8 is on the verge of release and it took me quite a while to even upgrade from FL5.
If it works, why change??? In the case of upgrading my PC, I was able to do my work and play the games I liked, so there was no need to upgrade. I only upgrade when it's absolutely necessary, as was the case of a new plugin I got for Cubase (NI's FM8). Back in 2005, that forced me to finally get off of the P3-850 I had been using for years and upgrade to a 1.3GHz Athlon Thunderbird.
In most cases, there's no REAL reason to upgrade. There's people out there right now still using Win98SE, Office 97 or 2000, and IE6 on a P2-333 and they're quite happy with that setup. To be 100% honest, I would believe that the majority of the PC using public would be just fine on such a machine (I happen to have one such machine at home, it's the one with the Matrox G450 in it). We're told we NEED the latest, greatest whatever but in reality don't need it. If you're a gamer, yeah I see a need to upgrade constantly. Hell, I just downloaded the Crysis demo and, while it does run on my PC, I know it's not running well, it's got me considering a video card upgrade. But how many people still use a PC for small tasks like email, IM, occasional web surfing, word processing, and their taxes? Quite a few. Do you really need a Quad core pc with 4GB of RAM and Vista64 to do these things??? Nope. Just about any old pc can do it just fine.
The reason many companies and people do not buy Macs or switch to distros is because the software they rely on simply doesn't exist anywhere else.
I'm one of those people. I've tried Linux "equivalents", but they simply doesn't work the way I need.
Until I can switch ALL of my software needs to Linux, I simply cannot go over 100%. I keep Linux installed on my PC (Fedora 8 has an entire 160GB drive dedicated to it), but still have to switch back over to XP for the bulk of what I do.
A mac would be better for me, however, there's still the issue of software. Granted, MOST of what I use has a Mac version (ProTools, Cubase SX3, Reason being a few of them), but the rest do not (FL Studio and quite a few VST plugins).
Now... I'm just one person. Imagine a corporation that relies on software without a Mac or Linux port and no viable alternative (from a corporate standpoint anyways). What alternative do they have?
We all remember "Joanie Loves Chachi", "Enos", "The Ropers", "Flo" (I may be the only human that remembers this pile), "After M*A*S*H", and that wretched Jeffersons spinoff "Checking In" (seriously, this sucks more than anything that has ever sucked before), and we all know how badly 99.999999999999999999999% of all spinoffs suck. So why, then, does Fox wish to taint the excellence that is Family Guy with a spinoff? And of Cleveland???!!! I'da figured Quagmire, but not mr "Hhhhheeeeeeeellooo Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeetaaaaah" Cleveland!
Sony and other big name companies don't want people to find out that they really never needed that $3000 laptop with the 18432940THz Quad Quantum processor, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of drive space just to read email, surf the web, and do a bit of word processing.
These cheap laptops sound underpowered to some, but I'm willing to bet that the majority of computer user out there will be quite happy with one.
I, too, do music production on an old machine. Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton) to be exact (2GB RAM/256MB Geforce 6200/Audiophile192). I see no reason to upgrade to Vista thanks to software incompatibilities and that it would be far slower than XP.
The average user can honestly get by on an old P2 or P3 (my wife hs a P3-850 slot 1 machine I built 2 years ago and it's fine for her), 512MB of RAM, and XP SP2. My kids have a P2-450, P3-550, P3-700, and my eldest has just taken over my Athlon Thunderbird 1.3GHz box. None of them complain. They're all fine for their homework and leisure activities (email, IM, flash-based web games, Quake3 and UT '99).
Do you compose music as a hobby or for a living? Need Pro Tools because the big studio you record at runs it and you need to be able to open the session you recorded at home in said studio? Then you need a machine running Windows or OSX because that's the ONLY way you're going to be able to do this.
Are you a graphic designer or illustrator? Want to take your work home to fiddle with it a bit? Got a client that wants soem work done for you, but wants the source files in case their in-house guys need to touch it up a bit? Chances are extremely high that you're running Illustrator and Photoshop (and possibly Fireworks). You need a machine running Windows or OSX because that's the ONLY way you're going to be able to do this.
Do you DJ at all? Got your own portable rig and all but hate carrying around crates of records and CD's? Wouldn't you love to take a laptop around and have every mp3 and ogg file you have instantly available at your fingertips where you can mix them like vinyl or CD using your turntables and/or DJ CD decks? Guess what? You need a machine running Windows or OSX because that's the ONLY way you're going to be able to do this.
I could keep going on and on with this, but I won't. I personally use both WinXP and Fedora 8 with a virtual machine under XP running FreeBSD and Solaris 10. I'm back to using Linux on my primary machine since my audio card was wretchedly supported under previous distros (M-Audio Audiophile 192, tried under FC7, mandriva 2006 and 2007. Each distro the sound was full-on distortion at full blast. Almost destroyed my studio monitors the first time around). Fedora 8 is better, thankfully, and I'm using it with Ardour and Soundgarden to give music under Linux another go. Unfortunately, there's no real VST plugin support under Linux, so my primary means of composition is out of the question.
going along with the premise of the article, there was a huge flaw in this approach:
They all included EVERYTHING.
For $29-$49, a person could get a reasonably well rounded Linux distro from Best Buy, or for $79-$99 you could get one loaded to the gills with all types of apps, desktops, emulators, servers, etc.
Windows, for $189+ (install disc, not an upgrade), gives you the OS, a few M$ games, media player, IE, and not much more than that.
You have to buy an office suite. That'll be $99 for MS Works, or $300+ for Office. You have to buy a photo editor. That's $29-$59 for some cheapie crapola to $600+ for Photoshop (these days) If you want to run a decent server, you have to buy a whole new Windows OS. If you want to anything else, you have to buy the apps to do it.
With a typical Linux distro, it's all there, which devalues it even more so following the logic of this article.
Think of it this way: You could buy a Corvette Z06 for around $50K which will blow the doors off most cars on the road today OR you could buy a Ferrari F430, which barely beats the Z06 out on 0-60 (3.5 secs vs 3.6 for the Vette). The public perception, however, is that the Ferrari is much faster and better because it costs 4 times as much as a Vette. In reality, the Vette is as good, sometimes better, than far more expensive offerings.
The Motorola Dyna TAC 8000 series phones - Many tales of these things being indestructible. Dropped down flights of stairs, off of scaffoldings many stories in the air, dropped in toilets, swimming pools, and sewers, and successfully being used as a projectile weapon against machine (car windows usually) and human alike. It seemed nothing short of hurling them into the sun could break them (a regular "fire" wouldn't do. I've seen partially melted units come into my old shop that were still fully functional).
Suncom Slik Stick - I had a pair of these Atari/Commodore compatible joysticks for my Atari 2600 in the mid 80s, then moved them to my Atari ST's and Amiga. When I got rid of them in 1997, they were still in full working order; amazing considering the sheer number of hours I put on them. These things were regularly hurled against walls, entertainment centers, floors, and people during heated gaming... especially when "the computer cheated!!!"
I got sent to a school for gifted kids starting in the 5th grade (http://www.spsd.net/Handley/index.htm) and in a little room across the hall from the math classroom, was a pair of Apple ][+ machines. First time I had ever seen a REAL computer in person. There was a crowd of guys (all 6th graders) huddled around one machine playing a game called "Pulsar". It was similar to "Star Castle", except your ship moved strictly in a circular motion around the shielded ship in the center. On the second machine was a kid typing up his own little app with a book on Basic next to him. From that moment forward, I spent all of my free time (or as much of it as they allowed me to) in the computer room. A week after I saw the Apples, I took home every manual we had that came with those machines and studied them cover to cover. These were EXCELLENT reference material with code examples in basic and ML.
One month to the day I wrote my first little program. Then another, and another, then I bought graphing paper and started making images on the screens, which eneded up as shape tables, which by the end of the year turned into moving objects.
After that, I was obsessed with writing my own games, with was only magnified when my mother bought an Atari 800XL for me for christmas a couple of years later. By high school, I had written games in not only basic, but in 6502 ML thanks to books by Compute! publishing.
To this day I still have thoughts of taking one of my old games and reworking it to something modern. I may do it too.
C'mon Andy... Give it up, you're not going to sway someone with your arguments, no more than you swayed the public to run "free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5". A lot of the stuff Andy stated in the "Tanenbaum-Torvalds" debate turned out to be just plain wrong.
- He asserted that x86 architechture was doomed to extinction. Yet the majority of the -planet- uses an x86 machine of some sort as of 2008.
- He alluded to the Linux kernel being hard to port because of it's ties to x86 architechture, citing how Minix was ported to x86, 680x0, and SPARC. Yet there's hardly a piece of silicon worthy of driving a terminal that Linux hasn't been ported to
- oh... and the whole "Linux is obsolete" thing was a complete pile of rubbish.
I'd be willing to put money on the bulk of "piracy" being downloads of long out-of-print music and not just on the current offerings from the record labels.
I hear all the time about people finding rare songs or whole albums online and how great it was that SOMEONE out there encoded it and shared it. The labels refuse to do it, so how else is anyone going to get it? If it's not being offered in the stores or online for purchase, the only alternative is to scour Ebay or second hand shops for that music. The RIAA doesn't see a dime of second hand purchases, so why should it care if someone d/l'ed that song or album that they're not selling anyways? There's lots of old hip hop, funk, and soul that are out of print that I'd love to hear again, but according to the RIAA, I'd be engaging in a criminal act if I seek it out and download it from some p2p network. In some cases it's the only way to hear that music, so what am I supposed to do?
I wonder if IE7 will go the way of WinME. In a few years time, will M$ answer the question "What about IE7?" with a resounding "IE7??? There was never an IE7. IE7 is a figment of your imagination. FORGET!!!!... FOOOORGET..."
Slashdot Mirror
10 years ago eh? ... And you never taught the difference between a Mainframe (IBM System/360 or IBM zSeries), Minicomputer(IBM AS/400/iSeries), and a Microcomputer(IBM PC)???
What school did you go to??? I see this as a serious problem when folks enter "the industry" can can't tell you what the hell a mainframe is.
There's no way Wal-Mart is taking a loss on CD's.
If I were to press up 10K copies of a CD with artwork and all that, it'll run me $.74 per CD buying from Discmakers. I will then turn around and sell that CD to indie distributors and one-stop's for about $5 or $6 per unit, but I have to accept all returns (gotta take a risk somewhere). The distributor will mark it up to about $8 or $9 per CD and sell it to the retailers, who will then sell it to you for $16.
A major label own's it's own distribution channel, so you cut out the middle-man immediately. They also press CD's for FAR cheaper than my $.74 per unit (somewhere around 25 cents per unit, even with artwork overhead, for a 100K+ run). Even after they pay everyone, you're still looking at only a couple of dollars per unit. The label is going to sell to a retailer like Wal-Mart for cheap, so about $5 or $6 per unit is what Wallyworld is really paying. Mark that up by 80-100% and you're at their 9.99 price point and still profitable when you take into account their own overhead.
They're not losing on those CD's. Not by a longshot.
I'm usually the latest adopter of my circle. My PC is usually a generation or two behind everyone else's (Athlon XP 2500+ barton core, just built back in December), my video cards can be even further behind (I just "upgraded" to a Geforce 6200 from a Geforce 2MX, but still have a TNT2 and Matrox G450 in service). I bought my first MP3 player back in June and it's a cheapie Sansa model. It took me years to stop using Mandrake 7.2 because it just worked and each new distro had issues I didn't want to deal with and and didn't have to deal with with the old trusty one. The only reason I use WinXP is because of a single application I need: Digidesign's ProTools. If if wasn't for that, I'd still be running Windows 2000 and Cubase 5.1 to compose music (I finally upgraded to Cubase SX3 earlier this year). I still use FL Studio 6 even though FL8 is on the verge of release and it took me quite a while to even upgrade from FL5.
If it works, why change??? In the case of upgrading my PC, I was able to do my work and play the games I liked, so there was no need to upgrade. I only upgrade when it's absolutely necessary, as was the case of a new plugin I got for Cubase (NI's FM8). Back in 2005, that forced me to finally get off of the P3-850 I had been using for years and upgrade to a 1.3GHz Athlon Thunderbird.
In most cases, there's no REAL reason to upgrade. There's people out there right now still using Win98SE, Office 97 or 2000, and IE6 on a P2-333 and they're quite happy with that setup. To be 100% honest, I would believe that the majority of the PC using public would be just fine on such a machine (I happen to have one such machine at home, it's the one with the Matrox G450 in it). We're told we NEED the latest, greatest whatever but in reality don't need it. If you're a gamer, yeah I see a need to upgrade constantly. Hell, I just downloaded the Crysis demo and, while it does run on my PC, I know it's not running well, it's got me considering a video card upgrade. But how many people still use a PC for small tasks like email, IM, occasional web surfing, word processing, and their taxes? Quite a few. Do you really need a Quad core pc with 4GB of RAM and Vista64 to do these things??? Nope. Just about any old pc can do it just fine.
The reason many companies and people do not buy Macs or switch to distros is because the software they rely on simply doesn't exist anywhere else.
I'm one of those people. I've tried Linux "equivalents", but they simply doesn't work the way I need.
Until I can switch ALL of my software needs to Linux, I simply cannot go over 100%. I keep Linux installed on my PC (Fedora 8 has an entire 160GB drive dedicated to it), but still have to switch back over to XP for the bulk of what I do.
A mac would be better for me, however, there's still the issue of software. Granted, MOST of what I use has a Mac version (ProTools, Cubase SX3, Reason being a few of them), but the rest do not (FL Studio and quite a few VST plugins).
Now... I'm just one person. Imagine a corporation that relies on software without a Mac or Linux port and no viable alternative (from a corporate standpoint anyways). What alternative do they have?
I quite vaguely remember this show. VERY vaguely... As in, I watched Barney Miller as a kid, but seem to remember something about "Fish"...
A quick trip to Wikipedia brought a bit of it back, but not enough.
yeah Braniac, we all know The Jeffersons was a spinoff, just like Maude and Good Times.
No one was talking about the GOOD ones, I'm talking about the BAD ones.
so... Fuck YOU.
Yeah... not seeing how this is gonna work.
We all remember "Joanie Loves Chachi", "Enos", "The Ropers", "Flo" (I may be the only human that remembers this pile), "After M*A*S*H", and that wretched Jeffersons spinoff "Checking In" (seriously, this sucks more than anything that has ever sucked before), and we all know how badly 99.999999999999999999999% of all spinoffs suck. So why, then, does Fox wish to taint the excellence that is Family Guy with a spinoff? And of Cleveland???!!! I'da figured Quagmire, but not mr "Hhhhheeeeeeeellooo Peeeeeeeeeeeeeeetaaaaah" Cleveland!
Sony and other big name companies don't want people to find out that they really never needed that $3000 laptop with the 18432940THz Quad Quantum processor, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of drive space just to read email, surf the web, and do a bit of word processing.
These cheap laptops sound underpowered to some, but I'm willing to bet that the majority of computer user out there will be quite happy with one.
I, too, do music production on an old machine. Athlon XP 2500+ (Barton) to be exact (2GB RAM/256MB Geforce 6200/Audiophile192). I see no reason to upgrade to Vista thanks to software incompatibilities and that it would be far slower than XP.
The average user can honestly get by on an old P2 or P3 (my wife hs a P3-850 slot 1 machine I built 2 years ago and it's fine for her), 512MB of RAM, and XP SP2. My kids have a P2-450, P3-550, P3-700, and my eldest has just taken over my Athlon Thunderbird 1.3GHz box. None of them complain. They're all fine for their homework and leisure activities (email, IM, flash-based web games, Quake3 and UT '99).
It's in that same universe where everyone uses "... free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5".
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum-Torvalds_debate#Erroneous_predictions)
Add to that:
Do you compose music as a hobby or for a living? Need Pro Tools because the big studio you record at runs it and you need to be able to open the session you recorded at home in said studio? Then you need a machine running Windows or OSX because that's the ONLY way you're going to be able to do this.
Are you a graphic designer or illustrator? Want to take your work home to fiddle with it a bit? Got a client that wants soem work done for you, but wants the source files in case their in-house guys need to touch it up a bit? Chances are extremely high that you're running Illustrator and Photoshop (and possibly Fireworks). You need a machine running Windows or OSX because that's the ONLY way you're going to be able to do this.
Do you DJ at all? Got your own portable rig and all but hate carrying around crates of records and CD's? Wouldn't you love to take a laptop around and have every mp3 and ogg file you have instantly available at your fingertips where you can mix them like vinyl or CD using your turntables and/or DJ CD decks? Guess what? You need a machine running Windows or OSX because that's the ONLY way you're going to be able to do this.
I could keep going on and on with this, but I won't. I personally use both WinXP and Fedora 8 with a virtual machine under XP running FreeBSD and Solaris 10. I'm back to using Linux on my primary machine since my audio card was wretchedly supported under previous distros (M-Audio Audiophile 192, tried under FC7, mandriva 2006 and 2007. Each distro the sound was full-on distortion at full blast. Almost destroyed my studio monitors the first time around). Fedora 8 is better, thankfully, and I'm using it with Ardour and Soundgarden to give music under Linux another go. Unfortunately, there's no real VST plugin support under Linux, so my primary means of composition is out of the question.
going along with the premise of the article, there was a huge flaw in this approach:
They all included EVERYTHING.
For $29-$49, a person could get a reasonably well rounded Linux distro from Best Buy, or for $79-$99 you could get one loaded to the gills with all types of apps, desktops, emulators, servers, etc.
Windows, for $189+ (install disc, not an upgrade), gives you the OS, a few M$ games, media player, IE, and not much more than that.
You have to buy an office suite. That'll be $99 for MS Works, or $300+ for Office.
You have to buy a photo editor. That's $29-$59 for some cheapie crapola to $600+ for Photoshop (these days)
If you want to run a decent server, you have to buy a whole new Windows OS.
If you want to anything else, you have to buy the apps to do it.
With a typical Linux distro, it's all there, which devalues it even more so following the logic of this article.
Think of it this way: You could buy a Corvette Z06 for around $50K which will blow the doors off most cars on the road today OR you could buy a Ferrari F430, which barely beats the Z06 out on 0-60 (3.5 secs vs 3.6 for the Vette). The public perception, however, is that the Ferrari is much faster and better because it costs 4 times as much as a Vette. In reality, the Vette is as good, sometimes better, than far more expensive offerings.
Tooting my own horn here, but:
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=93340&threshold=0&commentsort=1&mode=thread&cid=8018882
That was 4 years ago. I said a lot of the same things, and 4 years later I still feel EXACTLY the same way.
... damn lies... and DNF release dates.
I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, I will continue to feed my flying pigs.
The Motorola Dyna TAC 8000 series phones - Many tales of these things being indestructible. Dropped down flights of stairs, off of scaffoldings many stories in the air, dropped in toilets, swimming pools, and sewers, and successfully being used as a projectile weapon against machine (car windows usually) and human alike. It seemed nothing short of hurling them into the sun could break them (a regular "fire" wouldn't do. I've seen partially melted units come into my old shop that were still fully functional).
Suncom Slik Stick - I had a pair of these Atari/Commodore compatible joysticks for my Atari 2600 in the mid 80s, then moved them to my Atari ST's and Amiga. When I got rid of them in 1997, they were still in full working order; amazing considering the sheer number of hours I put on them.
These things were regularly hurled against walls, entertainment centers, floors, and people during heated gaming... especially when "the computer cheated!!!"
I got sent to a school for gifted kids starting in the 5th grade (http://www.spsd.net/Handley/index.htm) and in a little room across the hall from the math classroom, was a pair of Apple ][+ machines. First time I had ever seen a REAL computer in person. There was a crowd of guys (all 6th graders) huddled around one machine playing a game called "Pulsar". It was similar to "Star Castle", except your ship moved strictly in a circular motion around the shielded ship in the center. On the second machine was a kid typing up his own little app with a book on Basic next to him. From that moment forward, I spent all of my free time (or as much of it as they allowed me to) in the computer room. A week after I saw the Apples, I took home every manual we had that came with those machines and studied them cover to cover. These were EXCELLENT reference material with code examples in basic and ML.
One month to the day I wrote my first little program. Then another, and another, then I bought graphing paper and started making images on the screens, which eneded up as shape tables, which by the end of the year turned into moving objects.
After that, I was obsessed with writing my own games, with was only magnified when my mother bought an Atari 800XL for me for christmas a couple of years later. By high school, I had written games in not only basic, but in 6502 ML thanks to books by Compute! publishing.
To this day I still have thoughts of taking one of my old games and reworking it to something modern. I may do it too.
C'mon Andy... Give it up, you're not going to sway someone with your arguments, no more than you swayed the public to run "free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5". A lot of the stuff Andy stated in the "Tanenbaum-Torvalds" debate turned out to be just plain wrong.
- He asserted that x86 architechture was doomed to extinction. Yet the majority of the -planet- uses an x86 machine of some sort as of 2008.
- He alluded to the Linux kernel being hard to port because of it's ties to x86 architechture, citing how Minix was ported to x86, 680x0, and SPARC. Yet there's hardly a piece of silicon worthy of driving a terminal that Linux hasn't been ported to
- oh... and the whole "Linux is obsolete" thing was a complete pile of rubbish.
Can we assume your first gaming experience was "Oregon Trail" on the Apple ][?
2 inch tape beats it hands down.
Manipulate Google today, doing drive-bys and selling crack tomorrow...
It's just like caffeine is a gateway drug for meth addiction.
I expect a whole new government agency and "War on " campaign soon.
I'd be willing to put money on the bulk of "piracy" being downloads of long out-of-print music and not just on the current offerings from the record labels.
I hear all the time about people finding rare songs or whole albums online and how great it was that SOMEONE out there encoded it and shared it. The labels refuse to do it, so how else is anyone going to get it? If it's not being offered in the stores or online for purchase, the only alternative is to scour Ebay or second hand shops for that music. The RIAA doesn't see a dime of second hand purchases, so why should it care if someone d/l'ed that song or album that they're not selling anyways? There's lots of old hip hop, funk, and soul that are out of print that I'd love to hear again, but according to the RIAA, I'd be engaging in a criminal act if I seek it out and download it from some p2p network. In some cases it's the only way to hear that music, so what am I supposed to do?
I wonder if IE7 will go the way of WinME. In a few years time, will M$ answer the question "What about IE7?" with a resounding "IE7??? There was never an IE7. IE7 is a figment of your imagination. FORGET!!!!... FOOOORGET..."
I wonder if it'll run on my Indrema L600 console, modded with a Glaze3D video card.
"Assuming the user has at least a bit of a common sense and logical thinking"
You assume entirely too much.
Doof - adj, Short for "Doofus" - a colloquial term for an inept or stupid person.
Stupid people, generally, are "out of the loop", therefore this name would be most befitting of Dvorak.