I went to see it, and I liked it so much I've made plans to go again. Sure it isn't high art and the story isn't a sweeping saga that will echo through the vaults of history -- but so what. It was meant to be mind candy, and I found it entertaining.
My biggest "complaint" is that the bad guys seemed to mirror the Beast aliens from Mainframe Entertainment's Shadow Wars (I believe you Americans know it as War Planets). I would sure like to see the list of colaborators on both projects and see where the intersection is! --
I wish. Monitor moves are routine. System moves are less routine, but that's compensation for the extra weight that is involved. This weekend I lifted an 60 pound drive array off of a table, carried it across a room, and placed it on the floor.
2. Indoor work, air conditioned.
True. Especially through the winter. Up here in Ottawa, the only thing colder than the weather outside is the weather inside.
3. No hazmat contact.
Also true. That smoke that comes out of toasted drive electronics isn't a known carcenogen.
4. No serious risk of disease.
Tell that to the chickenpox re-infection I got last year -- parents with school aged kids are the number one infection vector.
5. Equity/profit participation, on top of good pay.
For there to be profits, there first must be sales. For there to be sales, the salesforce must sell the product. For the salesforce to sell the product, the salesforce must know about the product. And the only thing our stock is good for is the entertainment value of watching it tank. Better than a themepark ride -- down 20% today! Down more than 50% since March! Name That Symbol!
6. Unparalleled tolerance of all matters of race, creed, more holes than God intended your body to have, etc.
The reason for the lack of racism is because the immigrants are usually overwhelmed with the amount of money offered -- they don't realize that $35K just really isn't that much money. Also, most of them don't want to take the risk of asking for more. Supply and demand -- the immigrants charge less than the white man, they get hired in disproportionally higher numbers. Oddly enough, most of the smartest guys in the company (yeah, few gals, so much for equality) are the lowest paid...
7. Workers in very short supply, and can call the tune.
Right. That's why I get paid the big bucks. They must be big, there are so damn few of them.
8. No corrupt union taking a cut of your pay to conduct political activities you don't agree with.
Fortunately, we have a government to do that for the non-existant union. --
But is this really fair? If the user can't pry apart the Tivo front end from the Linux kernel, are the programs intertwined enough to become the same program? If so, shouldn't Tivo be releasing the source code to the front end as well?
In my opinion, this is a strawman argument. Security (design/implementation/whatever) permitting, users cannot access the guts of a remote web server. It could be apache on linux, it could be IIS on Win2K, it could be Netscape on Solaris. To the average idiot on the web, the server is an abstract, sealed, information providing appliance. The point is that suitably empowered people can access the internals of the remote web server (in the case of open source systems, right down to the code level). In the case of the TiVo, I am sure that there are ways that suitably empowered/educated people can access the low levels of the system.
If TiVo were to release the source code for everything, it would be useless without a way for the interested parties to make changes and then use them even if only on their own systems. Would you hold the TiVo company responsible for providing source, compilers, and object code conduits? I think not.
I think that devices which are not intended to be generically programmable do not fit in to the GPL world. --
Is the list of alleged offenders published somewhere?
Is there evidence of copyright violations available -- or is Metallica just serving reams and reams of names?
If I have a file listed as "Enter-Sandman.mp3", did Metallica's agents download it to ensure that this is, in fact, a copyright violation and not a mislabelled 'Billy and the Boingers' track? (Would such a download by a private individual constitute a copyright violation -- ie, can Metallica suspend copyright in regards to their own agents? What would their publisher think! Are their agents listed in the list of violators?)
How does Metallica's agents intend to prove that the MP3 listed at one moment in time was an intentional action, and not an accidental sharing of a private MP3?
What is the appeal process if Metallica's agents have erroniously included your username as an offender?
Is the mere act of offering for copy a piece of music a copyright violation -- or is the act of violation the copying? When someone sneaks a video camera into the movie theater, it is the person making the copy who is guilty, not the theater for advertising and displaying the movie!
Stefik, a principal scientist and manager of the Human Document Interactions Area at the Xerox
Palo Alto Research Center and the author of Internet Dreams (MIT Press, l996), is one of the
smartest thinkers and writers about the Net and the electric communities forming online.
In other words, Stefik has the credibility and the reputation as an established and respectable "internet" author that Katz covets.
But seriously:
This concept of an "edge", a fronteer in history that is constantly getting pushed back beyond the grasp of those involved is really nothing new. All through the 20th century there was a mad rush to improve technology, fight wars, and think up new ideas. Before that it was the rush to expand into the 'new world' and colony holdings -- fronteers and resources that were previously unimaginable were being discovered and reported on. Even back to the tenth century, the fronteer was religious -- wars and crusades and trying to decide what was permissible thought.
You could make a case that the main difference with today's "Edge" is the rate at which the expantion is happening -- but I believe that a careful study of history would show that this is merely the natural accelleration of events through history itself.
No, the only thing even remotely significant is the fact that any talking head can profess themselves an expert on the subject and write extensively, and meaninglessly, about it. --
Actually, the circumstances vary from company to company -- it all depends on your agreement (usually called something unimaginative like Terms Of Employment).
Point. When I was hired, the company agreement said that it had rights to any software I wrote. Naturally, this could be broadly interpreted as them owning rights to stuff I did on my own time on my own equiptment in areas not related to any that the company had business interests in. So I wrote nothing on my own time.
This company got absorbed by a larger one (well actually it is more complex than that but lets simplify) and the new agreement said that if I
used their time
used their equiptment
used their knowledge and/or techniques
explored into areas they had business interests in
If I did any one of those things then they had exclusive rights to what I created. But anything else was not. So naturally I'm a lot more productive now!
(Interesting sidebar -- the company I work for is Canadian, and the new American owner is much less concerned about what it has rights to -- the new agreement is much more focused on limiting any potential claims I may have against them.)
This is an important issue to discuss with potential employers. I make it a point to mention it during the interview before any offer is made, and make sure they understand that it is a dealbreaker after the offer is made.
I presume that adopting another user's cookie ID without their consent would be illegal. But what if everyone here decided to use the same cookie? I mean, what if someone says "this is my cookie, you have my permission to use it"? A cookie equivilent to the 'cypherpunks' accounts that are here and there.
Everyone wins: doubleclick sells the eyeballs, sites get advertising money, and we get access to the content without a 'profile' being developed! --
The cornerstone of my point is that those who degenerate into name calling and spewing fire and venom detract from the credibility of the forum. At the very least, it lowers the probability of first-time posters having their opinions read.
Consider: would you rather debate a point with someone who considers your points, discusses them, and forwards alternate ideas -- or someone who starts to jump up and down screaming that you are merely an asshole? Personally, I would pick the former, and I would be embarrassed to be associated with someone who defended a viewpoint I agreed with by hurling abuse. Even this exchange is a point in favor -- had I filled my first reply to you with nothing but fuck you asshole blah blah blah, I think you would have written me off as a harmless loser with nothing usefull to contribute and ignored me completely.
This isn't about "censorship". It is merely about deciding what is appropriate conduct for a particular form.
Remember, the 1st ammendment only limits congress. In private forums, speach is a privalige, not a right.
Eventually, this type of forum is going to gain credibility in matters that matter. By filling the low end with fire and venom, you detract from the other average non-participant who may have something intelligent to say. If this was a direct line to congress, and due to witty posts such as your own decision makers read at +5, are you going to start screaming that your opinions are not being read? And would you be surprised to learn that dear old granny next door refuses to participate because she has to wade through waste deep crap such as your own?
You do your own disservice.
Oh, and in keeping with the spirit of your post...asshole. Let the degenerate name-calling begin. --
You have hit the nail on the head. I don't read all the comments that are attached to all the slashdot articles -- I have enough stuff to deal with in meatspace without wading through 400 "1st Post", "Natalie Portman", "Katz Sux", "Where's The/. Source", or other useless posts.
One poster indicates that hostility is just as previlent in real life as it is in cyberspace. While this may be true, it ignores the fact that meatspace has a veil of civility over that hostility. I may wail on for lines and lines in cyberspace about how so and so is such a anal loser, but if I was in a room of people (including so and so) then I would probably be more diplomatic.
I think that those who claim their right to add their two cents should feel it more of an obligation to be inteligent, coherent, and interesting. You should add to a conversation, and me too is not an addition. (I would, however, count a well said type comment as an addition.)
Slashdot, like usenet and BBSing before it, is a victim of its own success. The lesson we learned with massive BBS networks, re-proved with usnet, and are well on the way to proving with Slashdot, is that direct participatory democracy doesn't scale.
Although I post occasionally, I count myself as a lurker. And this lurker reads far more articles with no comments added than with comments. When I do read, it's with the filter set to 3 or higher. Do I miss the gems of wisdom put into the lower rated posts? Of course. But I also miss the bucketfuls of ranting and abuse and general stupidity that is the hallmark of far too many cyberspace "conversations".
Personally, I agree with the call for accountability. If you can't put your name next to it, then you shouldn't say it. There are exceptions, of course -- but completely open forums like this are the best argument against themselves.
Perhaps the wisdom to be gained from these experiments in community (for that is what they really are) is that a community is only as authoritative as its loudest, crassest members. Something to think about as we barrel into the 21st century.
Oh gosh, just shoot me for using "the 21st century" in that way... --
My $2e-2: The reason why these pinheads keep saying abandon your project, no one needs it, work on something that's already there and make it better for me, you're wasting your time blah blah blah is very simply that these people have their own favorite [project] that comes up short in some way -- and they do not have the interest themselves to rectify it.
I believe their theory is that if enough people join a project, someone will have to do the boring bits.
But they are wrong. People do what they want to do. If that means making their own WM, so be it. If that means working on an existing WM, so be it. In either case, the cause celebre, OpenSource or Free Software, is enriched. --
Bruce said (at one point) that the call to legal action was to stimulate discussion in the community. Is anyone else finding it funny that it appears he is now sorry he got it?
Roblimo refered to the lack of intimacy in the current web based online community, where you knew who 'Vanity Flair' or 'Azeem Fizban' were (to name-drop two from my history -- Hi Yuko!) because you went out periodically and had a beer with them. When you had your own community, it was a safe haven where you could say (potentially) inflammatory things to stimulate discussion, and everyone knew that was all you were doing.
Of course, none of us were discussing things that affected large financial investments.
The whole thing smacks of media hypocracy (and I am not for one second implying that Slashdot is being malicious about this). The media claims that a person (in this case, Bruce) should be aware that there is this ultracoverage of his every word because he is a public figure -- while studiously ignoring the fact that he is a public figure because the media made it so!
So if we can't trust advertiser-financed media, who is going to pay for the media we want?
The internet shows through the failure of subscriber-based content sites that the average internet punter is of the opinion that all this information should be free. The information may be free, but the effort needed to collect, colate, analyse and present the information isn't, and we should be compensating those who do the actual work.
The number-one ranked comment as I write this is about how we should be pressuring wealthy people to fund these media services. The great american way -- get someone else to pay for it.
Even our beloved/. was grubbing for donations, and eventually ended up here with Andover.
Consider: would you pay $10 or $20 per year to use/.? Would you put your money where your mouth is? I'm honest -- I'm a cheap bastard so I'll cheerfully say that I wouldn't.
Most of those who would claim they would pay are liars.
I, on the other hand, accept the advertising as a cost of the "free" content. If a site wants me to look at a banner ad which tries to interest me in widgets or wonkies or Linux Servers, fine. I'll read the ads. (Banner ads are a lousy idea, but that's beside the point.)
Magasines may grow on trees, but it costs money to turn them from trees into Dvorak columns. That's going to come from somewhere. And if you won't put your money up for it, you have to chose between advertising and not having it.
With all due respect to learned member, the idea is entirely without merit.
The quick, off-the hip response to this suggestion is that what you propose is merely a cut down Outer Limits which uses Star Trek backgrounds. Outer Limits works (occasionally) due to the strength of the writing. It cannot survive on characters becase there are no consistant characters from week to week.
The second response is one based on the tail of the first -- that the setting is irrelevant to the success or failure of a TV show (or movie). If you read the Salon article, you see that the author of the piece gets it: writing is what drives a TV show, and character is what keeps the audience coming back week after week.
Character is driven by the actors, yes, but it is also driven by the writers. The writers have to get inside the heads of the characters, become them, know them better than they know themselves. This is why the first episode/half-season of a series always, always sucks. The first part of a series is to sell you on the premise. After that, after we've stopped gawking at all the pretty lights and toys and started accepting them as reasonable, we start to get more concerned with the characters and the story.
Would B5 have been the same had Sheridan not been written so strongly? Or the stories?
Having guest writers means there is no continuity, the writers are not around long enough to know the characters. There isn't a master plan, and things don't go anywhere. And if B5 did anything, they raised the bar in that long term series now should go somewhere. Just lurking about in space trading witty dialogue with the alien du jour just doesn't cut it any more. Audiences get bored, they need to want to know what happens next -- next scene, next segment, next week.
Asside: was I the only one that noticed that ST:DSN started to have an arc (the Dominion) that drove the story almost immediately after it became aparrent that B5 had one?
Without interesting or developing characters, there is simply no point unless the stories are strong enough to stand on their own. And Outer Limits has shown a few stinkers in their time.
I'd like to apologize for the tone of this post, I didn't mean for it to come out this harshly. I just don't think this is such a great idea. --
Speaking as a geek myself, I'd have to say that I didn't want a geek as a partner. When I've had a long day fighting with compilers and smitty and HP-UX and stupid users, the last thing I want is to have my partner at home griping about the same damn thing. I want her griping about something completely separate from what I do. It makes it easier for me to leave the office at the office.
So what can we do? Hassle them! Hassle them to death! Make sure that every Euro politician knows that he'll have to face election as "The guy who's trying to censor the Internet".
Of course, you realize that to many of the bible-thumping "won't someone think of the children!" proto-Mrs. Flanders types -- such a label would be a positive thing, not a negative thing. Most of these people are used to the church dictating what to think, what to read, what to say, what to believe, the whole nine yards. So if the minister gets up at the front and says that so-and-so is going to tame those lawless infidels out there on the internet, Mrs. Flanders will trip over herself to vote for them -- not against.
(Of course, I'll be the first to admit that this is a grossly unfair sweeping generalization.) --
This is a good article, but I think that it represents a throwback to the 'bad old days' when operating systems competed head to head (amiga vs mac vs Win vs OS/2 vs...). The users of one OS looked at another and said, "we like parts of that, but we'd really rather other parts of it look like this." In this case, Windows users crave both the standardization of Windows with the stability of Linux. The proposed solution? Try to shame the Linux developers into making a 'standard' Linux.
This will hopefully never happen. 'Linux For EveryUser' would not be a linux I would use. Say what you want about them, but CLI commands are usually smaller, lighter, faster, more flexible, can be more easilly run in batch (when you need to do the same thing or similar things on large groups of input) and can be more easilly run remotely (through telnet) than virtually _any_ GUI app.
I also reject the argument that multiple distributions are inheirantly bad. Multiple distributions means that if I have different needs, I can select a different distro that meets those needs better. Microsoft has brilliantly demonstrated that the "good enough for most users" solution isn't "best" for virtually anything.
Similarly, the multiple UI argument is both bogus and already satisfied. Firstly, I want to be able to select my own interface. (I'm a sick puppy, I _like_ olvwm -- I don't like all the bells and whistles of E or afterStep, and CDE -er- KDE leaves me cold.) But that is my choice. Locking me into an interface that 'you' have decided is 'standard' (which usually means, it meets _your_ needs adequately) does nothing for my support of the system and little for my productivity.
Secondly, linux already has a standard user interface that is common across all distributions: the dreaded CLI. I can sit on a RedHat or Slackware or SuSE installation, type 'ls' or 'cd' or 'vi', 'find' or 'awk' or 'perl', 'ps' or 'kill' or 'cat', and get the expected result every single time. More to the point, I can use 90% of those same commands on virtually any Sun, HP-UX, OSF (er sorry Tru64), AIX, Irix, or BSD machine and get the expected results! And best of all, I can do it through telnet (or rsh in closed shops) from the comfort of the other side of the office/building/planet! Try running even gmc across an internet VPN.
The point is that choice is good. You can select the right tool for the job. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail. I guess you could similarly say "when all you have is Microsoft Windows, every problem tends to look like either a labour-intensive impossibility or a GPF waiting to happen."
:)
Some things are not simple. Nor can they be made simple. Sometimes you need clever people to do difficult things. --
Hey, some of us poor, misguided souls actually like olvwm. Of course, most of us work on suns, and only have CDE as an alternative...
Having olvwm at home gives me a consistant interface no matter where I am.
The big reason I like olvwm is that it doesn't do any of these fancy things that kwm, enlightenment or whatever do. It stays out of my face until I ask it for something. --
Slashdot Mirror
Having said that, most of my browsing is done in Netscape since that's what I use at home and I am a terrible creature of habit.
--
My biggest "complaint" is that the bad guys seemed to mirror the Beast aliens from Mainframe Entertainment's Shadow Wars (I believe you Americans know it as War Planets). I would sure like to see the list of colaborators on both projects and see where the intersection is!
--
I wish. Monitor moves are routine. System moves are less routine, but that's compensation for the extra weight that is involved. This weekend I lifted an 60 pound drive array off of a table, carried it across a room, and placed it on the floor.
True. Especially through the winter. Up here in Ottawa, the only thing colder than the weather outside is the weather inside.
Also true. That smoke that comes out of toasted drive electronics isn't a known carcenogen.
Tell that to the chickenpox re-infection I got last year -- parents with school aged kids are the number one infection vector.
For there to be profits, there first must be sales. For there to be sales, the salesforce must sell the product. For the salesforce to sell the product, the salesforce must know about the product. And the only thing our stock is good for is the entertainment value of watching it tank. Better than a themepark ride -- down 20% today! Down more than 50% since March! Name That Symbol!
The reason for the lack of racism is because the immigrants are usually overwhelmed with the amount of money offered -- they don't realize that $35K just really isn't that much money. Also, most of them don't want to take the risk of asking for more. Supply and demand -- the immigrants charge less than the white man, they get hired in disproportionally higher numbers. Oddly enough, most of the smartest guys in the company (yeah, few gals, so much for equality) are the lowest paid...
Right. That's why I get paid the big bucks. They must be big, there are so damn few of them.
Fortunately, we have a government to do that for the non-existant union.
--
In my opinion, this is a strawman argument. Security (design/implementation/whatever) permitting, users cannot access the guts of a remote web server. It could be apache on linux, it could be IIS on Win2K, it could be Netscape on Solaris. To the average idiot on the web, the server is an abstract, sealed, information providing appliance. The point is that suitably empowered people can access the internals of the remote web server (in the case of open source systems, right down to the code level). In the case of the TiVo, I am sure that there are ways that suitably empowered/educated people can access the low levels of the system.
If TiVo were to release the source code for everything, it would be useless without a way for the interested parties to make changes and then use them even if only on their own systems. Would you hold the TiVo company responsible for providing source, compilers, and object code conduits? I think not.
I think that devices which are not intended to be generically programmable do not fit in to the GPL world.
--
A while back I wrote a comment on another site about Corel. Interested parties can find it here.
--
Just asking.
--
In other words, Stefik has the credibility and the reputation as an established and respectable "internet" author that Katz covets.
But seriously:
This concept of an "edge", a fronteer in history that is constantly getting pushed back beyond the grasp of those involved is really nothing new. All through the 20th century there was a mad rush to improve technology, fight wars, and think up new ideas. Before that it was the rush to expand into the 'new world' and colony holdings -- fronteers and resources that were previously unimaginable were being discovered and reported on. Even back to the tenth century, the fronteer was religious -- wars and crusades and trying to decide what was permissible thought.
You could make a case that the main difference with today's "Edge" is the rate at which the expantion is happening -- but I believe that a careful study of history would show that this is merely the natural accelleration of events through history itself.
No, the only thing even remotely significant is the fact that any talking head can profess themselves an expert on the subject and write extensively, and meaninglessly, about it.
--
...and "intelligent slashdot discussion".
--
Of course, the defence that "this affects real people" is no defence at all. What you mean is that it now has the possibility of affecting you.
Heh... who needs the comedy of politicians when you can watch the slashdot community choking on their own credibility.
--
Point. When I was hired, the company agreement said that it had rights to any software I wrote. Naturally, this could be broadly interpreted as them owning rights to stuff I did on my own time on my own equiptment in areas not related to any that the company had business interests in. So I wrote nothing on my own time.
This company got absorbed by a larger one (well actually it is more complex than that but lets simplify) and the new agreement said that if I
- used their time
- used their equiptment
- used their knowledge and/or techniques
- explored into areas they had business interests in
If I did any one of those things then they had exclusive rights to what I created. But anything else was not. So naturally I'm a lot more productive now!(Interesting sidebar -- the company I work for is Canadian, and the new American owner is much less concerned about what it has rights to -- the new agreement is much more focused on limiting any potential claims I may have against them.)
This is an important issue to discuss with potential employers. I make it a point to mention it during the interview before any offer is made, and make sure they understand that it is a dealbreaker after the offer is made.
Read those agreements, people!
--
Everyone wins: doubleclick sells the eyeballs, sites get advertising money, and we get access to the content without a 'profile' being developed!
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Consider: would you rather debate a point with someone who considers your points, discusses them, and forwards alternate ideas -- or someone who starts to jump up and down screaming that you are merely an asshole? Personally, I would pick the former, and I would be embarrassed to be associated with someone who defended a viewpoint I agreed with by hurling abuse. Even this exchange is a point in favor -- had I filled my first reply to you with nothing but fuck you asshole blah blah blah, I think you would have written me off as a harmless loser with nothing usefull to contribute and ignored me completely.
This isn't about "censorship". It is merely about deciding what is appropriate conduct for a particular form.
Remember, the 1st ammendment only limits congress. In private forums, speach is a privalige, not a right.
--
Eventually, this type of forum is going to gain credibility in matters that matter. By filling the low end with fire and venom, you detract from the other average non-participant who may have something intelligent to say. If this was a direct line to congress, and due to witty posts such as your own decision makers read at +5, are you going to start screaming that your opinions are not being read? And would you be surprised to learn that dear old granny next door refuses to participate because she has to wade through waste deep crap such as your own?
You do your own disservice.
Oh, and in keeping with the spirit of your post...asshole. Let the degenerate name-calling begin.
--
You have hit the nail on the head. I don't read all the comments that are attached to all the slashdot articles -- I have enough stuff to deal with in meatspace without wading through 400 "1st Post", "Natalie Portman", "Katz Sux", "Where's The /. Source", or other useless posts.
One poster indicates that hostility is just as previlent in real life as it is in cyberspace. While this may be true, it ignores the fact that meatspace has a veil of civility over that hostility. I may wail on for lines and lines in cyberspace about how so and so is such a anal loser, but if I was in a room of people (including so and so) then I would probably be more diplomatic.
I think that those who claim their right to add their two cents should feel it more of an obligation to be inteligent, coherent, and interesting. You should add to a conversation, and me too is not an addition. (I would, however, count a well said type comment as an addition.)
Slashdot, like usenet and BBSing before it, is a victim of its own success. The lesson we learned with massive BBS networks, re-proved with usnet, and are well on the way to proving with Slashdot, is that direct participatory democracy doesn't scale.
Although I post occasionally, I count myself as a lurker. And this lurker reads far more articles with no comments added than with comments. When I do read, it's with the filter set to 3 or higher. Do I miss the gems of wisdom put into the lower rated posts? Of course. But I also miss the bucketfuls of ranting and abuse and general stupidity that is the hallmark of far too many cyberspace "conversations".
Personally, I agree with the call for accountability. If you can't put your name next to it, then you shouldn't say it. There are exceptions, of course -- but completely open forums like this are the best argument against themselves.
Perhaps the wisdom to be gained from these experiments in community (for that is what they really are) is that a community is only as authoritative as its loudest, crassest members. Something to think about as we barrel into the 21st century.
Oh gosh, just shoot me for using "the 21st century" in that way...
--
I believe their theory is that if enough people join a project, someone will have to do the boring bits.
But they are wrong. People do what they want to do. If that means making their own WM, so be it. If that means working on an existing WM, so be it. In either case, the cause celebre, OpenSource or Free Software, is enriched.
--
And of course, these lawyers riding to the rescue of our Opressed Open Source Bretheren would be powered by the best kind of money: Someone Else's.
Exits left, laughing hysterically
--
Roblimo refered to the lack of intimacy in the current web based online community, where you knew who 'Vanity Flair' or 'Azeem Fizban' were (to name-drop two from my history -- Hi Yuko!) because you went out periodically and had a beer with them. When you had your own community, it was a safe haven where you could say (potentially) inflammatory things to stimulate discussion, and everyone knew that was all you were doing.
Of course, none of us were discussing things that affected large financial investments.
The whole thing smacks of media hypocracy (and I am not for one second implying that Slashdot is being malicious about this). The media claims that a person (in this case, Bruce) should be aware that there is this ultracoverage of his every word because he is a public figure -- while studiously ignoring the fact that he is a public figure because the media made it so!
Just something to think about.
--
The internet shows through the failure of subscriber-based content sites that the average internet punter is of the opinion that all this information should be free. The information may be free, but the effort needed to collect, colate, analyse and present the information isn't, and we should be compensating those who do the actual work.
The number-one ranked comment as I write this is about how we should be pressuring wealthy people to fund these media services. The great american way -- get someone else to pay for it.
Even our beloved /. was grubbing for donations, and eventually ended up here with Andover.
Consider: would you pay $10 or $20 per year to use /.? Would you put your money where your mouth is? I'm honest -- I'm a cheap bastard so I'll cheerfully say that I wouldn't.
Most of those who would claim they would pay are liars.
I, on the other hand, accept the advertising as a cost of the "free" content. If a site wants me to look at a banner ad which tries to interest me in widgets or wonkies or Linux Servers, fine. I'll read the ads. (Banner ads are a lousy idea, but that's beside the point.)
Magasines may grow on trees, but it costs money to turn them from trees into Dvorak columns. That's going to come from somewhere. And if you won't put your money up for it, you have to chose between advertising and not having it.
So which is it going to be?
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The quick, off-the hip response to this suggestion is that what you propose is merely a cut down Outer Limits which uses Star Trek backgrounds. Outer Limits works (occasionally) due to the strength of the writing. It cannot survive on characters becase there are no consistant characters from week to week.
The second response is one based on the tail of the first -- that the setting is irrelevant to the success or failure of a TV show (or movie). If you read the Salon article, you see that the author of the piece gets it: writing is what drives a TV show, and character is what keeps the audience coming back week after week.
Character is driven by the actors, yes, but it is also driven by the writers. The writers have to get inside the heads of the characters, become them, know them better than they know themselves. This is why the first episode/half-season of a series always, always sucks. The first part of a series is to sell you on the premise. After that, after we've stopped gawking at all the pretty lights and toys and started accepting them as reasonable, we start to get more concerned with the characters and the story.
Would B5 have been the same had Sheridan not been written so strongly? Or the stories?
Having guest writers means there is no continuity, the writers are not around long enough to know the characters. There isn't a master plan, and things don't go anywhere. And if B5 did anything, they raised the bar in that long term series now should go somewhere. Just lurking about in space trading witty dialogue with the alien du jour just doesn't cut it any more. Audiences get bored, they need to want to know what happens next -- next scene, next segment, next week.
Asside: was I the only one that noticed that ST:DSN started to have an arc (the Dominion) that drove the story almost immediately after it became aparrent that B5 had one?
Without interesting or developing characters, there is simply no point unless the stories are strong enough to stand on their own. And Outer Limits has shown a few stinkers in their time.
I'd like to apologize for the tone of this post, I didn't mean for it to come out this harshly. I just don't think this is such a great idea.
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Speaking as a geek myself, I'd have to say that I didn't want a geek as a partner. When I've had a long day fighting with compilers and smitty and HP-UX and stupid users, the last thing I want is to have my partner at home griping about the same damn thing. I want her griping about something completely separate from what I do. It makes it easier for me to leave the office at the office.
Vive la difference.
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Of course, you realize that to many of the bible-thumping "won't someone think of the children!" proto-Mrs. Flanders types -- such a label would be a positive thing, not a negative thing. Most of these people are used to the church dictating what to think, what to read, what to say, what to believe, the whole nine yards. So if the minister gets up at the front and says that so-and-so is going to tame those lawless infidels out there on the internet, Mrs. Flanders will trip over herself to vote for them -- not against.
(Of course, I'll be the first to admit that this is a grossly unfair sweeping generalization.)
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(...well, not literally, you know what I mean)
This is a good article, but I think that it represents a throwback to the 'bad old days' when operating systems competed head to head (amiga vs mac vs Win vs OS/2 vs...). The users of one OS looked at another and said, "we like parts of that, but we'd really rather other parts of it look like this." In this case, Windows users crave both the standardization of Windows with the stability of Linux. The proposed solution? Try to shame the Linux developers into making a 'standard' Linux.
This will hopefully never happen. 'Linux For EveryUser' would not be a linux I would use. Say what you want about them, but CLI commands are usually smaller, lighter, faster, more flexible, can be more easilly run in batch (when you need to do the same thing or similar things on large groups of input) and can be more easilly run remotely (through telnet) than virtually _any_ GUI app.
I also reject the argument that multiple distributions are inheirantly bad. Multiple distributions means that if I have different needs, I can select a different distro that meets those needs better. Microsoft has brilliantly demonstrated that the "good enough for most users" solution isn't "best" for virtually anything.
Similarly, the multiple UI argument is both bogus and already satisfied. Firstly, I want to be able to select my own interface. (I'm a sick puppy, I _like_ olvwm -- I don't like all the bells and whistles of E or afterStep, and CDE -er- KDE leaves me cold.) But that is my choice. Locking me into an interface that 'you' have decided is 'standard' (which usually means, it meets _your_ needs adequately) does nothing for my support of the system and little for my productivity.
Secondly, linux already has a standard user interface that is common across all distributions: the dreaded CLI. I can sit on a RedHat or Slackware or SuSE installation, type 'ls' or 'cd' or 'vi', 'find' or 'awk' or 'perl', 'ps' or 'kill' or 'cat', and get the expected result every single time. More to the point, I can use 90% of those same commands on virtually any Sun, HP-UX, OSF (er sorry Tru64), AIX, Irix, or BSD machine and get the expected results! And best of all, I can do it through telnet (or rsh in closed shops) from the comfort of the other side of the office/building/planet! Try running even gmc across an internet VPN.
The point is that choice is good. You can select the right tool for the job. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem tends to look like a nail. I guess you could similarly say "when all you have is Microsoft Windows, every problem tends to look like either a labour-intensive impossibility or a GPF waiting to happen."
:)
Some things are not simple. Nor can they be made simple. Sometimes you need clever people to do difficult things.
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Hey, some of us poor, misguided souls actually like olvwm. Of course, most of us work on suns, and only have CDE as an alternative...
Having olvwm at home gives me a consistant interface no matter where I am.
The big reason I like olvwm is that it doesn't do any of these fancy things that kwm, enlightenment or whatever do. It stays out of my face until I ask it for something.
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