I didn't see *anything* on that page except this notice: "Don't see a video? Macromedia Flash Player 7 or higher is required to view the media."
Funny - I have Flash 7. The notice failed to state... "and run an operating system we like instead of that commie African Ubuntu GNU/Linux crap you seem to have on your PC."
I guess that spot was made by the same tier one cableco tech support people who want you to click "My Computer" and otherwise pretend you have Windows before they let you report a line outage.
More amusing: I had no trouble viewing any of the videos at the other link, savetheinternet.com.
I even saw this one with no problem -- which is especially nice, since I made it.:)
It depends on the flourescent. I have some Commercial Electric 23 W spirals (bought at Home Depot) in my offce that are slightly yellower than standard incandescent bulbs. I have GE flourescents that are slightly bluer. The difference really shows up in white balance tests with my old Sony TRV900 Camcorder.
My house is all CFL except for 3 Halogen video spots I use (maybe) a few hours a month, two small outdoor fixtures with dawn/dusk sensors, and one small fixture in the kitchen for which I haven't yet found a small enough CFL bulb.
I live in Florida, where the state income tax is 0%.
I live neither in the boonies nor in a big city.
I live in Bradenton, pop. 60,000, a 1-mile walk from downtown, a 3-mile bike or car ride from a mall, 30 feet from the nearest art/crafts gallery (my wife's), and 25 feet from my office.
Nearest launch ramp for my little sailboat: 1.5 miles
Nearest salt water launch ramp: 7.3 miles
Nearest award-winning little theater: 1 mile
Nearest bar:.4 miles
Nearest live music coffeehouse:.1 miles
Nearest more-or-less major museum: 1 mile
Nearest major art museum: 6 miles
Nearest hard-core slum: 16 miles
Nearest area full of too-rich idiots: 9 miles... and so on.
I've lived in big cities (born in L.A., spent early adult years in SF), medium-sized cities (mostly Baltimore), and now Bradenton. It's nice here.
Humid? For sure -- on hot,humid days you go to the beach or the fishing pier or out on your boat.
Hurricanes? More notice than you get for eartchquakes!
I think real estate is high here -- and it is, compared to a few years back, but you can still find old houses in our neighborhood (where it's legal - even encouraged - to open arts-oriented home businesses) for well under $220K. I know one for $115K - need lots of work, but hey!
So even if houses are high here compared to - say - rural Georgia, it's cheap compared to most big cities.
Jobs? Lots of low-wage ones. And a fair number in the $30K - $60K range. I won't say it's tech mecca, but all the guys I know in the local LUG seem to be earning a decent living.
It all depends on what you want. We enjoy having urban amenities (although on a small scale) while living someplace where you might run into the police chief or mayor in a restaurant and you know your city council being personally. (Sadly, mine's an idiot -- but then, some friends and I have a fair chance of putting up our own candidate and replacing him with someone better on a budget of maybe $1000 or $2000.)
And that driving thing... 95% of the time there's no need for us to go more than 10 or 15 miles unless we're going to the Tampa airport, and that's mostly me, for job-related travel.
According to the filing, the party whose bogus patent is allegedly being infringed is incorporated in Delaware and has its primary office in Washington D.C., while the alleged infringer is a Canadian company.
But the suit itself is being filed in Texas, and the suit names statutes that give the court jurisdiction.
Does this mean they chose this court because it's run by Bushies who instinctively love monoplizers and hate entrepreneurs? Or is there another reason for this choice of venue?
In a logical world, you'd expect the lawsuit to be filed where one or the other of the companies has its HQ.
I know, it's not a logical world. The USPTO proves that. But this geographical silliness is another example of the general legal ludicrosities we USians now deal with instead of having sensible laws and courts.
No, a great article or idea wouldn't get the attention it deserves.
And with all the damn "major" media and book publishers being public companies now, no one is going to take a chance on writing that's unclassifiable. If you write for a living you might as well hunker down, bland down, and save your real talent and wit for private work.
I have a collection of ideas (and some finished stories) that I keep private. They're too... strange... for today's insipid publishers and the instant-knock Web audience. Most of them are about tech in one way or another. Or about people who *create* the tech...
Drugs were never HST's main point unless he was writing about drug experiences. His strength was a warped viewpoint. He saw and focused your attention on details you otherwise might not have noticed. Now we're all expected to write on moron level. Expositive title. Simple lede graf that search engines will pick up. Conform to style guides or get rejected.
Maybe after I'm dead you'll see my best work. You sure aren't seeing it now.
I'm a professional writer. Besides thousands of articles, I've written three books for Prentice Hall and I'm getting ready to do a fourth.
But there are books I'd like to write that might only sell a few hundred copies per year. No mass-market publisher can make money on a title that doesn't sell thousands of copies, and they're rightfully reluctant to ship copies of ultra-niche books to bookstores that can return them for full credit if they don't sell.
So PoD, here I come!
This doesn't mean my PoD books will be badly-designed or unedited, just that they aren't economically feasible for big publishers to handle.
Back before the WWW and email, when I was getting going as a writer, my Kinkos graveyard shift friend (Hey, Damen! Long time no see!) let me make free copies of all my clips from local pubs and of my article proposals, which meant I could send good-looking packages to national magazines for the cost of a stamp and an envelope. I sent out lots of them, and enough editors bit that I did rather well freelancing.
Of course, since 1996 or so, I don't think I've dealt with a publication that didn't accept emailed proposals and finished articles.
Funny: I had to send a paper ms. to Financial Times Prentice Hall for a book in 2002. I'd already FTPed all the copy, illustrations, and such and they were already editing the thing, but their contract called for a copy on CD and a paper copy before they'd send me the final advance check. I essentially did 260 pages of inkjet printing and a CD burn & spent $30 on Fedex for no real reason besides, "We've always done it that way."
I've written two more books for Prentice Hall since, and now I'm gearing up for another. No more paper required, thank Glub.
And Kinkos has gotten so crazy-tight about copyrights that they give you shit if you want to copy an article out of a newspaper or magazine even if your own byline's on it and you have matching ID. Good thing I don't need many copies made these days, eh?
- Robin
PS - You can still copy just about anything you want with Office Depot/Staples/Office Max self-serve copiers...
...for NewsForge, but we don't have staff to waste on regurgitating press releases. We tend to wait until we can either review a product ourselves or until we can find some actual companies using the product and talk to them about their experience with it.
Well... "Telco spokesthing says telco plan is Good For America" isn't much of a story. Add a voice from the other side and it gets more interesting.
BTW, I'm not worrying about Google or Yahoo. As far as I'm concerned, New Neutrality is all about me [flash video] and other small-timers moving into Internet video delivery, not a fight between big companies.
1) A Pakistani developer starts an interesting FOSS project.
2) I test a copy and like it. He then calls me or I call him for a phone interview.
3) My next step is to call a bunch of sources in the U.S. and elsewhere, ask what they think of the software.
So with no family or friends in Pakistan, I am suddenly a potential terrorist threat by NSA standards. Uh huh.
It doesn't need to be a story about software, either. One about anti-terrorism activities could generate a similar call pattern.
On the other hand, I suppose that by current U.S. government standards, any journalist who makes a lot of calls to verify a story, instead of being a Good Little Boy and sticking to "official sources," is nearly as dangerous as a terrorist, anyway.
It seems to me that two weeks ago I was in Mexico at DebConf, which if you look at the official page, was preceded by a weeklong "DebCamp" that could just as easily been called a "hackathon," not to mention that probably 60% or more of the average attendee's time during the "main" DebConf week was spent in collaborative hacking. And DebConf had around 250 people there...
I'm not knocking OpenBSD's hackathon, just pointing out that it's hardly unique. Many other FOSS projects have similar gatherings.
"Truth is though, some kids throw temper tantrums because they work, and it's the parent's fault they throw them."
This is true. Start teaching them early (like at 6 months) that crying for no reason gets them no attention, and they won't have tantrums later. It takes great emotional strength to let the poor little tyke cry himself or herself to sleep once you've checked that the back end is dry, and that both food and liquids have been inserted into the other end recently, but after 3 - 5 nights of hardheartedness you will find that "I want attention! Now!" crying fits stop.
Once you win the "sleep through the night" battle, don't stop. Withdraw attention (put them in the corner or whatever) when they act nasty, play with them and praise them when they're nice. Be totally consistent. And when you threaten a punishment in response to "X" behavior, always deliver on the threat. (So make your threats realistic; don't say "I'm going to kill you." Say "If you don't stop crying right now I'll take you out of here and put you against the wall" -- and do exactly that if the crying doesn't stop.)
Little children are not Full Humans. It is a parent's job to make them into socialized humans, not to be their best buddies.
I have three children, three stepchildren, and seven grandchildren. I am giving you Wisdom That Works (tm) straight out of any sanely-written behavioral psych text -- which is exactly the same advice I got from plenty of older people with little or no formal education who raised children into well-behaved, successful adults.
None of this means you should stifle curiosity. Teach your children (well). Answer questions. Show them how to find answers to questions to which you do not have the answers. And ask them questions, too. We *all* like to have someone display interest in what we know, children included.
These same tactics work with dogs. My dog is not super-trained, but she is a civilized fur-person who knows her job (guard the property!) and her limits, and is happy within the bounds we have set for her.
We can take our grandchildren (and dog) almost anywhere without any of them breaking out into tantrums. This makes an afternoon at the beach (or, to stay on topic, at the computer store) much more pleasant for all of us than it would be if the kids and dog constantly misbehaved.
I had a revelation one evening at a Walgreens Drug Store in Bradenton, which I suppose is as good a place to have a revelation as any. It was about Jesus, Passover, and Easter. In a flash, I suddenly realized why Christianity is popular and Judaism is not.
If I had seen the link to NewsForge instead of Linux.com before the article was posted, I would have corrected it. Sadly, I have many other duties and can't watchdog our sites every minute. This was a mistake, period. And I'm sure you later noticed that the connection between Slashdot and NewsForge was mentioned in the Slashdot stub -- and that Slashdot's connection with other OSTG sites is mentioned on the top of every single Slashdot page unless a user logs in and specifically chooses not to view that navbar.
I'm sure you also noticed later that Mr. Brockmeier mentioned the BSDs toward the end of the article -- and FreeDOS too.
But all that aside, thank you for your comments. We always enjoy hearing from intelligent, well-informed readers.
This poor man can't handle friend/family tech support the (easy) way I do: Install Linux, put their favorite apps as icons on the bottom (KDE) panel, then leave things alone.
Slashdot Mirror
Questions and moderations after this post don't count - I'm now selecting the 10 questions to forward.
- Robin
I didn't see *anything* on that page except this notice: "Don't see a video? Macromedia Flash Player 7 or higher is required to view the media."
:)
Funny - I have Flash 7. The notice failed to state... "and run an operating system we like instead of that commie African Ubuntu GNU/Linux crap you seem to have on your PC."
I guess that spot was made by the same tier one cableco tech support people who want you to click "My Computer" and otherwise pretend you have Windows before they let you report a line outage.
More amusing: I had no trouble viewing any of the videos at the other link, savetheinternet.com.
I even saw this one with no problem -- which is especially nice, since I made it.
- Robin
It depends on the flourescent. I have some Commercial Electric 23 W spirals (bought at Home Depot) in my offce that are slightly yellower than standard incandescent bulbs. I have GE flourescents that are slightly bluer. The difference really shows up in white balance tests with my old Sony TRV900 Camcorder.
My house is all CFL except for 3 Halogen video spots I use (maybe) a few hours a month, two small outdoor fixtures with dawn/dusk sensors, and one small fixture in the kitchen for which I haven't yet found a small enough CFL bulb.
The things are great. Period.
- Robin
No one goes there for the food. They either go to ogle and flirt with the waitresses or for bike night.
I shudder at the thought of an automated Hooters. The non-automated ones we have today are bad enough...
- Robin
I live in Florida, where the state income tax is 0%.
.4 miles
.1 miles
... and so on.
I live neither in the boonies nor in a big city.
I live in Bradenton, pop. 60,000, a 1-mile walk from
downtown, a 3-mile bike or car ride from a mall, 30
feet from the nearest art/crafts gallery (my wife's),
and 25 feet from my office.
Nearest launch ramp for my little sailboat: 1.5 miles
Nearest salt water launch ramp: 7.3 miles
Nearest award-winning little theater: 1 mile
Nearest bar:
Nearest live music coffeehouse:
Nearest more-or-less major museum: 1 mile
Nearest major art museum: 6 miles
Nearest hard-core slum: 16 miles
Nearest area full of too-rich idiots: 9 miles
I've lived in big cities (born in L.A., spent early
adult years in SF), medium-sized cities (mostly
Baltimore), and now Bradenton. It's nice here.
Humid? For sure -- on hot,humid days you go to the
beach or the fishing pier or out on your boat.
Hurricanes? More notice than you get for eartchquakes!
I think real estate is high here -- and it is, compared
to a few years back, but you can still find old houses
in our neighborhood (where it's legal - even encouraged -
to open arts-oriented home businesses) for well under
$220K. I know one for $115K - need lots of work, but hey!
So even if houses are high here compared to - say -
rural Georgia, it's cheap compared to most big cities.
Jobs? Lots of low-wage ones. And a fair number in the
$30K - $60K range. I won't say it's tech mecca, but all
the guys I know in the local LUG seem to be earning a
decent living.
It all depends on what you want. We enjoy having urban
amenities (although on a small scale) while living
someplace where you might run into the police chief or
mayor in a restaurant and you know your city council
being personally. (Sadly, mine's an idiot -- but then,
some friends and I have a fair chance of putting up our
own candidate and replacing him with someone better
on a budget of maybe $1000 or $2000.)
And that driving thing... 95% of the time there's no
need for us to go more than 10 or 15 miles unless
we're going to the Tampa airport, and that's mostly
me, for job-related travel.
- Robin
According to the filing, the party whose bogus patent is allegedly being infringed is incorporated in Delaware and has its primary office in Washington D.C., while the alleged infringer is a Canadian company.
But the suit itself is being filed in Texas, and the suit names statutes that give the court jurisdiction.
Does this mean they chose this court because it's run by Bushies who instinctively love monoplizers and hate entrepreneurs? Or is there another reason for this choice of venue?
In a logical world, you'd expect the lawsuit to be filed where one or the other of the companies has its HQ.
I know, it's not a logical world. The USPTO proves that. But this geographical silliness is another example of the general legal ludicrosities we USians now deal with instead of having sensible laws and courts.
Fah!
- Robin
No, a great article or idea wouldn't get the attention it deserves.
And with all the damn "major" media and book publishers being public companies now, no one is going to take a chance on writing that's unclassifiable. If you write for a living you might as well hunker down, bland down, and save your real talent and wit for private work.
I have a collection of ideas (and some finished stories) that I keep private. They're too... strange... for today's insipid publishers and the instant-knock Web audience. Most of them are about tech in one way or another. Or about people who *create* the tech...
Drugs were never HST's main point unless he was writing about drug experiences. His strength was a warped viewpoint. He saw and focused your attention on details you otherwise might not have noticed. Now we're all expected to write on moron level. Expositive title. Simple lede graf that search engines will pick up. Conform to style guides or get rejected.
Maybe after I'm dead you'll see my best work. You sure aren't seeing it now.
- Robin
Advice for Microsoft in future speech recognition demos: Use a high-quality USB headset with a noise-canceling mic.
In fact, this is good advice for *anyone* messing with speech recognition software...
- Robin
I'm a professional writer. Besides thousands of articles, I've written three books for Prentice Hall and I'm getting ready to do a fourth.
But there are books I'd like to write that might only sell a few hundred copies per year. No mass-market publisher can make money on a title that doesn't sell thousands of copies, and they're rightfully reluctant to ship copies of ultra-niche books to bookstores that can return them for full credit if they don't sell.
So PoD, here I come!
This doesn't mean my PoD books will be badly-designed or unedited, just that they aren't economically feasible for big publishers to handle.
- Robin
Back before the WWW and email, when I was getting going as a writer, my Kinkos graveyard shift friend (Hey, Damen! Long time no see!) let me make free copies of all my clips from local pubs and of my article proposals, which meant I could send good-looking packages to national magazines for the cost of a stamp and an envelope. I sent out lots of them, and enough editors bit that I did rather well freelancing.
Of course, since 1996 or so, I don't think I've dealt with a publication that didn't accept emailed proposals and finished articles.
Funny: I had to send a paper ms. to Financial Times Prentice Hall for a book in 2002. I'd already FTPed all the copy, illustrations, and such and they were already editing the thing, but their contract called for a copy on CD and a paper copy before they'd send me the final advance check. I essentially did 260 pages of inkjet printing and a CD burn & spent $30 on Fedex for no real reason besides, "We've always done it that way."
I've written two more books for Prentice Hall since, and now I'm gearing up for another. No more paper required, thank Glub.
And Kinkos has gotten so crazy-tight about copyrights that they give you shit if you want to copy an article out of a newspaper or magazine even if your own byline's on it and you have matching ID. Good thing I don't need many copies made these days, eh?
- Robin
PS - You can still copy just about anything you want with Office Depot/Staples/Office Max self-serve copiers...
Slashdot has moderation. The Senate doesn't. On Slashdot, Sen. Stevens would be moderated "-1 Troll" in about 10 seconds.
- Robin
Oy! You're right. Corrected now. Back to the hot tub...
- Robin
Works fine fore me - Flash Player 7, Ubuntuthreefour Gnuf/Lunix, FarFox 1.5.0.4.14159265 or whatever the heck it is.
- Robin
...for NewsForge, but we don't have staff to waste on regurgitating press releases. We tend to wait until we can either review a product ourselves or until we can find some actual companies using the product and talk to them about their experience with it.
But that's just us...
- Robin
Well... "Telco spokesthing says telco plan is Good For America" isn't much of a story. Add a voice from the other side and it gets more interesting.
BTW, I'm not worrying about Google or Yahoo. As far as I'm concerned, New Neutrality is all about me [flash video] and other small-timers moving into Internet video delivery, not a fight between big companies.
- Robin
A not-unlikely scenario:
1) A Pakistani developer starts an interesting FOSS project.
2) I test a copy and like it. He then calls me or I call him for a phone interview.
3) My next step is to call a bunch of sources in the U.S. and elsewhere, ask what they think of the software.
So with no family or friends in Pakistan, I am suddenly a potential terrorist threat by NSA standards. Uh huh.
It doesn't need to be a story about software, either. One about anti-terrorism activities could generate a similar call pattern.
On the other hand, I suppose that by current U.S. government standards, any journalist who makes a lot of calls to verify a story, instead of being a Good Little Boy and sticking to "official sources," is nearly as dangerous as a terrorist, anyway.
(sigh)
It seems to me that two weeks ago I was in Mexico at DebConf, which if you look at the official page, was preceded by a weeklong "DebCamp" that could just as easily been called a "hackathon," not to mention that probably 60% or more of the average attendee's time during the "main" DebConf week was spent in collaborative hacking. And DebConf had around 250 people there...
I'm not knocking OpenBSD's hackathon, just pointing out that it's hardly unique. Many other FOSS projects have similar gatherings.
"Truth is though, some kids throw temper tantrums because they work, and it's the parent's fault they throw them."
This is true. Start teaching them early (like at 6 months) that crying for no reason gets them no attention, and they won't have tantrums later. It takes great emotional strength to let the poor little tyke cry himself or herself to sleep once you've checked that the back end is dry, and that both food and liquids have been inserted into the other end recently, but after 3 - 5 nights of hardheartedness you will find that "I want attention! Now!" crying fits stop.
Once you win the "sleep through the night" battle, don't stop. Withdraw attention (put them in the corner or whatever) when they act nasty, play with them and praise them when they're nice. Be totally consistent. And when you threaten a punishment in response to "X" behavior, always deliver on the threat. (So make your threats realistic; don't say "I'm going to kill you." Say "If you don't stop crying right now I'll take you out of here and put you against the wall" -- and do exactly that if the crying doesn't stop.)
Little children are not Full Humans. It is a parent's job to make them into socialized humans, not to be their best buddies.
I have three children, three stepchildren, and seven grandchildren. I am giving you Wisdom That Works (tm) straight out of any sanely-written behavioral psych text -- which is exactly the same advice I got from plenty of older people with little or no formal education who raised children into well-behaved, successful adults.
None of this means you should stifle curiosity. Teach your children (well). Answer questions. Show them how to find answers to questions to which you do not have the answers. And ask them questions, too. We *all* like to have someone display interest in what we know, children included.
These same tactics work with dogs. My dog is not super-trained, but she is a civilized fur-person who knows her job (guard the property!) and her limits, and is happy within the bounds we have set for her.
We can take our grandchildren (and dog) almost anywhere without any of them breaking out into tantrums. This makes an afternoon at the beach (or, to stay on topic, at the computer store) much more pleasant for all of us than it would be if the kids and dog constantly misbehaved.
- Robin
It begins...
Hmmm? The VA hospitals and clinics near me are pretty good... ...but then, I'm speaking from personal experience, not quoting someone else's opinion.
I agree with eldavojohn. That's why 'Killer' is enclosed by quotation marks even though they weren't in the headline as it was originally submitted.
:)
I also agree about GIMP 2.0. It's my primary graphics program. I work almost entirely on the WWW, so it does everything I need.
My wife is a low-level Trekkie; a fan of the series, especially the original, but not one who goes to conventions or wears Trek-based costumes.
We met before the Internet was open to the public -- the old-fashioned way, in a coffee shop where we were sitting near each other.
I wasn't aware of her Trekkie tendencies for several months. Finding out about them changed nothing. We (obviously) ended up married anyway.
If I had seen the link to NewsForge instead of Linux.com before the article was posted, I would have corrected it. Sadly, I have many other duties and can't watchdog our sites every minute. This was a mistake, period. And I'm sure you later noticed that the connection between Slashdot and NewsForge was mentioned in the Slashdot stub -- and that Slashdot's connection with other OSTG sites is mentioned on the top of every single Slashdot page unless a user logs in and specifically chooses not to view that navbar.
I'm sure you also noticed later that Mr. Brockmeier mentioned the BSDs toward the end of the article -- and FreeDOS too.
But all that aside, thank you for your comments. We always enjoy hearing from intelligent, well-informed readers.
Robin 'Roblimo' Miller
Editor in Chief, OSTG
Or what if you work in a store that sells fur coats and one day, after work, you join a PETA anti-fur demonstration out front?
:)
Time to find a new job.
Be nice!
This poor man can't handle friend/family tech support the (easy) way I do: Install Linux, put their favorite apps as icons on the bottom (KDE) panel, then leave things alone.
- Robin