Well, Bruce, for *literate* hackers, the title "Hole in GNU GPL?" with a question mark at the end (which is how it ran) indicated that it was a question, rather than a statement of fact. But be that as it may. I know that you're human, and like most humans you feel that "responsible reporting" and "unbiased journalism" are phrases that only apply to stories which you totally agree - and that any story that doesn't adhere strictly to the Official Bruce Perens Party Line is wrong, sensationalist, biased, and (no doubt) irresponsible.
;-)
But we all have our flaws; I have mine, you have yours, and since we're both trying to achieve many of the same long-term goals, I have nothing against you and wish you well in every way. Why, I even read TECHNOCRAT.NET at least two or three times every week -- and enjoy it! (Free plug!)
And so, since I'm a "don't sweat the small stuff" person and know it's scary getting ready to be a father for the first time, I'll overlook your poor fact-checking on the taxi front. A tiny bit of research would have told you that Royal Cab in Baltimore, for which I both drove and dispatched, has red taxis, not yellow ones.
I hope I have time to drop in on your chat tonight. You're an interesting guy and decent person (with a few tiny flaws) and I think this is going to be a fine and worthy event.
Take care,
-- Robin "roblimo" Miller Baltimore Cab License #6714 Maryland Limo Permit #1273
Hey, moderators! You might want to bump this one a few points. I had *exactly* the same thought while I was listening to the original interview tape last night! *grin*
NewDeal is a separate company that bought the old GEOS GUI in, I believe, 1995 or 1996, and made marvelous changes to it. I wrote about it several times in my "Cheap Computing" column on andovernews.com and before that on Time Warner's Netly News, which is where I wrote (online) before Andover.
I still have NewDeal running in DRDOS 6.something on an old monochrome 386 laptop with a 20MB HD. Works fine. Nice little "full featured" office program. Its only flaw IMO is the WWW browser, which simply doesn't cut it on "modern" websites with frames, tables, etc.
DOS, NewDeal and a throwaway PC make a great training tool for small children. There are a lot of old DOS games around that are still new to a 4-year-old.
"Bottom line, their biases are showing. Painfully."
Perhaps their biases are showing because I asked all these people to give their *personal opinions" on possible effects of the AOL/TW merger - from their *personal* perspectives.
The AOLWatch guy (surprise!) talks about how AOL censors content. The Amiga.org guy (another big surprise, eh?) talks from the perspective of an Amiga advocate. Alice Hill @ C|Net (gasp!) speaks from the perspective of an editorial honcho for a mainstream online/cable TV news source that already has close ties to AOL. Local TV news guy Marty Bass (I'm going to faint...) discusses how AOL+TW might/might not affect local TV news. And Jon Katz speaks from the viewpoint of (hard to believe)... Jon Katz. As usual. And Brock Meeks is enough of an old-line reporter and general hard case to speak his own mind even when his opinions might not be shared by his bosses at MSNBC. Or by MS or NBC.
I hate bad journalism myself. But I also remember that in most people's eyes, "good" journalism is journalism that agrees with their personal biases 100%. And Glub forbid a journalist should have an opinion of his or her own and share it freely with Slashdot readers without getting it cleared and blanded down by a corporate PR department!
These are puzzling comments. We had the first announcement of the AOL/TW merger up within an hour after the first press release was issued Monday.
Katz did an excellent piece titled "AOL Nation" that ran Tuesday.
This one is the third one we've done on the subject, generated in part by Katz and in part by all the people from other media who have called CmdrTaco, Hemos, Katz, and me to get our take on the merger.
The "I submitted this but it didn't get posted" complaint is slightly silly in this case. When I stopped counting Monday morning, the merger story had been submitted by over 200 people, half of whom submitted it *after* we posted it. Another 100+ submitted it Tuesday through Thursday, and I'll bet at least a few more submit it today (Friday).
As far as spacing out stories to maximize ad banner views, my comment is, "Huh?" Sometimes we'll (manually) set non-time-sensitive stories (especially book reviews and opinion features) to appear a few hours or a day or three in advance, but breaking news generally goes up as soon as it gets submitted and one of us sees it in the submission queue.
"Employ known figures indeed. Sounds like some of the famous traders in the old bazaar don't want too many newcomers setting up stalls unless they pay their dues."
What's wrong with that? In the "pure" Open Source business model, for-profit companies are living on the backs of the community. They need to give a little back in order to have any cred.
Even on the journalistic side, everybody at Slashdot (including me) did a lot of FREE writing and reporting before making any money at it, and Andover.net quietly ran the freecode.com site long before most of the other Open Source code indexes and repositories came along.
As far as employing "known figures," I doubt that Bruce is thinking "known" in the "heavily quoted" sense. I can think of many excellent developers and project organizers who get little or no public attention but are respected by kernel maintainers and other free software developers. I'm sure Bruce would consider these unsung ones to be valid hires for a company that wanted to make a splash in the Linux or Open Source world.
If you came up with a better package management system, you would be a "known" developer as soon as three other people tried it and liked it, whether they found out about your product through an RPM mailing list or through a company you set up to distribute your work. The point is that you would have *done something* instead of purely riding on others' backs.
And VA Linux? They actually *do* somthing. They have Linux-based hardware products you can order and have delivered, and they "give back" to the community in many ways both visible and invisible without directly asking for anything in return.
It's a fine edge, isn't it?
But then, I'm an old-fashioned person who believes it's better to earn your money by working hard than by selling chaff as wheat, so maybe I'm not the best person to listen to on this subject; my attitude is obviously not in tune with current financial and stock market thinking.
Or I might just throw a link to the story out there so that all you mighty brains can pick it to pieces. I know as well as any other half-bright middle-aged American what a stock split does and doesn't mean, and I know that gaming products represent only a fraction of Sony's product line, but a news source that is read as near-gospel by many gamers reported Sony's stock split as a risky move, and took it as a vote of confidence in a game product.
Enjoy the irony! And please note that many Slashdot readers have debunked that hype for those who *don't* know that a stock split is a ho-hum financial maneuver for companies whose share prices have put round lots (100 shares) out of reach of the very small-time investors who are most susceptible to hype.
More and more, before posting a story like the one above, instead of adding my own words to it I find myself thinking, "Fifty others will say exactly what I would anyway, so why not let them?"
Slashdot has some amazingly bright readers. The debunking always gets done, one way or another, whether by me or by you.
- Robin
PS - remember the Jesux "Christian Linux" hoax that took in ZDNet and Wired a while back, but got exposed here? I had a pleasant IRC conversation with Pudge, the perpetrator, earlier today. Real nice guy.
(I'm often on #slashdot at irc.slashnet.org if you want to continue this discussion, BTW.)
Off-topic "guide to Slashdot" post: if you see a whole bunch of words in italics and/or enclosed in quotation marks in the posts, they are the words of the person who sent in the story, not of the Slashdot author who posted the story.
In this case, um... Lucas has me especially baffled. I didn't see any mention of intellectual property above, just of a technical standard that would allow packing more data into a given amount of bandwidth or storage capacity.
I would think the biggest market for such a thing, if applied to motion pictures, would be the manufacture of lower-cost video players, not movie piracy. The ability to pack a movie onto a CD would allow movie distributors to bring prices on their product down to the point where piracy simply wouldn't be worthwhile.
If you're going to extrapolate effects of this technology, I'd say it would be better to look at what it could (potentially) do to the video rental business, not how it could be used to steal intellectual property. I mean, if you could *buy* a movie CD for $7 or $8, who'd rent one?
Corrinne, I believe Mr. Wozniak reads Slashdot now and then. For all you know, he's already read your opinion of him.
And besides, you *never know* what kind of questions might get moderated up and sent to him. No law says they all have to be techie stuff.
We often get some excellent personal question in these interview. *I* sure don't discourage them!
- Robin
Re:Look at the submission date on this article
on
When Does Y2K Begin?
·
· Score: 2
I'm glad somebody noticed the posting time. I couldn't resist...
But since "Komedy" sounds like part of K-Office or something else that's going to be included in KDE-2, and this thread is about Y2K, not KDE, I hereby declare your post off-topic.
Unless, of course, the KDE crowd secretly plans to release something called Y2KDE Saturday, in which case your post is the only one here that is ON-topic, and I owe you a most abject apology.;-)
The RIAA was set up to make sure musicians got royalties from jukebox companies whose big sales pitch to bars was that they could fire their live players and still have music -- and make money every time a "nickel song" was played on the juke.
The MPIA was formed to keep theaters (and other businesses) from showing illegally copied movies. Movie piracy was once as rampant as software copying is today.
Intellectual property disputes are not new. I bet prehistoric storytellers fought over who the rights to tell which sagas.;-)
Please don't blame Hiawatha Bray for his column's crummy title. Newspaper headlines are usually written by copy editors, not by the people who actually write the stories. (Hiawatha Bray is one of my personal favorite "mainstream" tech columnists in the whole world.)
I use Yahoo web-based e-mail whenever I'm on the road; it's easier than setting up POP stuff through "borrowed" network connections. I've never had a problem with it.
They send you a little spam, but you can run it into a separate "bulk mail" mailbox and delete it all with a single click without ever even looking at it.
True - nothing is nicer than watching the little ones rip through a pile of presents.;-) You don't need to adhere to any particular religious belief (or any at all) to enjoy giving things to children.
On that note, I'm off to pick up a carless stepdaughter and her small children. Our living room will soon be a storm of small bodies, discarded wrapping paper, and food, food, food.
(My wife is a chronic holiday cook who always makes 10 times as much as we can actually eat...)
So Merry (your holiday here). Hope yours is as warm and joyful as ours.
Sorry; I had never met Jim Willard before I interviewed him, and I haven't seen him since. It was a case of a story submission coming in and figuring that since its subject lived near enough to me to make an f2f interview practical, why not do one?
If he'd been near Holland, Michigan, Rob or Jeff might have done the interview.
It was simply an interesing little article that turned out to have more human quality than I expected, so that's the side that came through most clearly.
The car came into the story because it was a tangible symbol of how Jim Willard's obsession with his invention has ruined his life. This is what writers call a "metaphor."
But IANALET (I Am Not A Licensed English teacher), so for specific information about metaphors, similes, allusions, punctuation, capitalization, and other writing basics, I suggest seeking help from a qualified local professional.
Meanwhile, "don't panic," as my fellow metaphor-user Douglas Adams has said more than a few times. Whenever a Slashdot author writes about a personal friend, we'll let you know.;-)
Looks like we were among the first to pick up on this one, so no links. I mean, we do actually *break* a story now and then. Not often, but it happens.;-)
The Leonardo Journal and the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology have been around for a good long time. I read their stuff from time to time, even though I find some of it a little stuffier than it needs to be.
This is not an MIT prank. I blew up when I saw the submission because I have always *liked* Leonardo and ISAST - and because the idea of suing over search engine placement is a new low.
I'm sorry that so many Slashdot readers took this as an opportunity to knock the French. Leonardo was founded in France, and ISAST is as international as, well, Linux. One dumb company and a few over-reaching French cops don't reflect on the whole country any more than some of the obnoxious moves made by U.S. Government agencies and U.S. companies reflect on all U.S. citizens.
I'm going to spend the rest of the night shaking my head and asking myself, "What is this world coming to?"
Note "the world." All of it, not any particular country.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Trust me, it was a *relief* to have something submitted that wasn't about patents or lawsuits.
- Robin
But we all have our flaws; I have mine, you have yours, and since we're both trying to achieve many of the same long-term goals, I have nothing against you and wish you well in every way. Why, I even read TECHNOCRAT.NET at least two or three times every week -- and enjoy it! (Free plug!)
And so, since I'm a "don't sweat the small stuff" person and know it's scary getting ready to be a father for the first time, I'll overlook your poor fact-checking on the taxi front. A tiny bit of research would have told you that Royal Cab in Baltimore, for which I both drove and dispatched, has red taxis, not yellow ones.
I hope I have time to drop in on your chat tonight. You're an interesting guy and decent person (with a few tiny flaws) and I think this is going to be a fine and worthy event.
Take care,
-- Robin "roblimo" Miller
Baltimore Cab License #6714
Maryland Limo Permit #1273
Hey, moderators! You might want to bump this one a few points. I had *exactly* the same thought while I was listening to the original interview tape last night! *grin*
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
Can't hurt to try. ;-) I'll write to Kevin's grandmother - who seems to be his point of contact with the outside world - and ask.
Thanks for the idea.
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
NewDeal is a separate company that bought the old GEOS GUI in, I believe, 1995 or 1996, and made marvelous changes to it. I wrote about it several times in my "Cheap Computing" column on andovernews.com and before that on Time Warner's Netly News, which is where I wrote (online) before Andover.
I still have NewDeal running in DRDOS 6.something on an old monochrome 386 laptop with a 20MB HD. Works fine. Nice little "full featured" office program. Its only flaw IMO is the WWW browser, which simply doesn't cut it on "modern" websites with frames, tables, etc.
DOS, NewDeal and a throwaway PC make a great training tool for small children. There are a lot of old DOS games around that are still new to a 4-year-old.
- Robin "roblimo" Miller
"Bottom line, their biases are showing. Painfully."
... Jon Katz. As usual. And Brock Meeks is enough of an old-line reporter and general hard case to speak his own mind even when his opinions might not be shared by his bosses at MSNBC. Or by MS or NBC.
;-)
Perhaps their biases are showing because I asked all these people to give their *personal opinions" on possible effects of the AOL/TW merger - from their *personal* perspectives.
The AOLWatch guy (surprise!) talks about how AOL censors content. The Amiga.org guy (another big surprise, eh?) talks from the perspective of an Amiga advocate. Alice Hill @ C|Net (gasp!) speaks from the perspective of an editorial honcho for a mainstream online/cable TV news source that already has close ties to AOL. Local TV news guy Marty Bass (I'm going to faint...) discusses how AOL+TW might/might not affect local TV news. And Jon Katz speaks from the viewpoint of (hard to believe)
I hate bad journalism myself. But I also remember that in most people's eyes, "good" journalism is journalism that agrees with their personal biases 100%. And Glub forbid a journalist should have an opinion of his or her own and share it freely with Slashdot readers without getting it cleared and blanded down by a corporate PR department!
Do I sound biased here? Damn right!!!
And proud of it.
- Robin
These are puzzling comments. We had the first announcement of the AOL/TW merger up within an hour after the first press release was issued Monday.
Katz did an excellent piece titled "AOL Nation" that ran Tuesday.
This one is the third one we've done on the subject, generated in part by Katz and in part by all the people from other media who have called CmdrTaco, Hemos, Katz, and me to get our take on the merger.
The "I submitted this but it didn't get posted" complaint is slightly silly in this case. When I stopped counting Monday morning, the merger story had been submitted by over 200 people, half of whom submitted it *after* we posted it. Another 100+ submitted it Tuesday through Thursday, and I'll bet at least a few more submit it today (Friday).
As far as spacing out stories to maximize ad banner views, my comment is, "Huh?" Sometimes we'll (manually) set non-time-sensitive stories (especially book reviews and opinion features) to appear a few hours or a day or three in advance, but breaking news generally goes up as soon as it gets submitted and one of us sees it in the submission queue.
- Robin
irc.slashnet.org
#slashdot
I'm on it right now.
- Robin
What's wrong with that? In the "pure" Open Source business model, for-profit companies are living on the backs of the community. They need to give a little back in order to have any cred.
Even on the journalistic side, everybody at Slashdot (including me) did a lot of FREE writing and reporting before making any money at it, and Andover.net quietly ran the freecode.com site long before most of the other Open Source code indexes and repositories came along.
As far as employing "known figures," I doubt that Bruce is thinking "known" in the "heavily quoted" sense. I can think of many excellent developers and project organizers who get little or no public attention but are respected by kernel maintainers and other free software developers. I'm sure Bruce would consider these unsung ones to be valid hires for a company that wanted to make a splash in the Linux or Open Source world.
If you came up with a better package management system, you would be a "known" developer as soon as three other people tried it and liked it, whether they found out about your product through an RPM mailing list or through a company you set up to distribute your work. The point is that you would have *done something* instead of purely riding on others' backs.
And VA Linux? They actually *do* somthing. They have Linux-based hardware products you can order and have delivered, and they "give back" to the community in many ways both visible and invisible without directly asking for anything in return.
It's a fine edge, isn't it?
But then, I'm an old-fashioned person who believes it's better to earn your money by working hard than by selling chaff as wheat, so maybe I'm not the best person to listen to on this subject; my attitude is obviously not in tune with current financial and stock market thinking.
- Robin
Enjoy the irony! And please note that many Slashdot readers have debunked that hype for those who *don't* know that a stock split is a ho-hum financial maneuver for companies whose share prices have put round lots (100 shares) out of reach of the very small-time investors who are most susceptible to hype.
More and more, before posting a story like the one above, instead of adding my own words to it I find myself thinking, "Fifty others will say exactly what I would anyway, so why not let them?"
Slashdot has some amazingly bright readers. The debunking always gets done, one way or another, whether by me or by you.
- Robin
PS - remember the Jesux "Christian Linux" hoax that took in ZDNet and Wired a while back, but got exposed here? I had a pleasant IRC conversation with Pudge, the perpetrator, earlier today. Real nice guy.
(I'm often on #slashdot at irc.slashnet.org if you want to continue this discussion, BTW.)
I must have missed something... ;-)
- Robin
A lot of Internet economics are still pretty muddy. At least people are experimenting.
- Robin
In this case, um... Lucas has me especially baffled. I didn't see any mention of intellectual property above, just of a technical standard that would allow packing more data into a given amount of bandwidth or storage capacity.
I would think the biggest market for such a thing, if applied to motion pictures, would be the manufacture of lower-cost video players, not movie piracy. The ability to pack a movie onto a CD would allow movie distributors to bring prices on their product down to the point where piracy simply wouldn't be worthwhile.
If you're going to extrapolate effects of this technology, I'd say it would be better to look at what it could (potentially) do to the video rental business, not how it could be used to steal intellectual property. I mean, if you could *buy* a movie CD for $7 or $8, who'd rent one?
- Robin
And besides, you *never know* what kind of questions might get moderated up and sent to him. No law says they all have to be techie stuff.
We often get some excellent personal question in these interview. *I* sure don't discourage them!
- Robin
But since "Komedy" sounds like part of K-Office or something else that's going to be included in KDE-2, and this thread is about Y2K, not KDE, I hereby declare your post off-topic.
Unless, of course, the KDE crowd secretly plans to release something called Y2KDE Saturday, in which case your post is the only one here that is ON-topic, and I owe you a most abject apology. ;-)
- Robin
The MPIA was formed to keep theaters (and other businesses) from showing illegally copied movies. Movie piracy was once as rampant as software copying is today.
Intellectual property disputes are not new. I bet prehistoric storytellers fought over who the rights to tell which sagas. ;-)
- Robin
- Robin
- Robin
They send you a little spam, but you can run it into a separate "bulk mail" mailbox and delete it all with a single click without ever even looking at it.
- Robin
On that note, I'm off to pick up a carless stepdaughter and her small children. Our living room will soon be a storm of small bodies, discarded wrapping paper, and food, food, food.
(My wife is a chronic holiday cook who always makes 10 times as much as we can actually eat...)
So Merry (your holiday here). Hope yours is as warm and joyful as ours.
- Robin
If he'd been near Holland, Michigan, Rob or Jeff might have done the interview.
It was simply an interesing little article that turned out to have more human quality than I expected, so that's the side that came through most clearly.
The car came into the story because it was a tangible symbol of how Jim Willard's obsession with his invention has ruined his life. This is what writers call a "metaphor."
But IANALET (I Am Not A Licensed English teacher), so for specific information about metaphors, similes, allusions, punctuation, capitalization, and other writing basics, I suggest seeking help from a qualified local professional.
Meanwhile, "don't panic," as my fellow metaphor-user Douglas Adams has said more than a few times. Whenever a Slashdot author writes about a personal friend, we'll let you know. ;-)
- Robin
- Robin
This is not an MIT prank. I blew up when I saw the submission because I have always *liked* Leonardo and ISAST - and because the idea of suing over search engine placement is a new low.
I'm sorry that so many Slashdot readers took this as an opportunity to knock the French. Leonardo was founded in France, and ISAST is as international as, well, Linux. One dumb company and a few over-reaching French cops don't reflect on the whole country any more than some of the obnoxious moves made by U.S. Government agencies and U.S. companies reflect on all U.S. citizens.
I'm going to spend the rest of the night shaking my head and asking myself, "What is this world coming to?"
Note "the world." All of it, not any particular country. ;-)
- Robin
- Robin
- Robin