I have seen a few posts where people continue to insist that downloading a MP3 is stealing. Let's look at this from the proper perspective, shall we?
First of all, you're not stealing anything. When you download an MP3, you're transfering electrons from one source to another (and they are eventually recycled). Electrons. Bits. A CD is a thing that you can hold, touch, whatever. It costs money to produce copies of a work on CD, but nothing to send it over the Net (except bandwidth costs). If anyone is losing money, it's the RIAA and ONLY the RIAA consortium. You do not hurt the artists. In fact, you can *really* help the artists out with online donation. Every time you download an MP3, give the arist 100% of the profits instead of the 0.01% that the RIAA gives them. This is the best way to weaken the RIAA because it shows artists they they do not need a big record label to get their music sold. All they need is a cheap computer and an Internet connection.
What the RIAA is pissed off about is that this technique which some call "stealing" gives power back to the artists. Several artists have attempted to distribute music via MP3, but the RIAA has smacked them down for doing so. The RIAA is pissed because they hate these so-called "theives" because their business model is becoming outdated. To combat that, they want to make the government freeze-frame innovation.
Wake up. This greedy group of companies are the real theives. They seize ownership of the work of artists, and then pay them shit for it. Let's fight those bastards by downloading MP3's like crazy, and then giving the artists the money directly. Simple! It's cheaper for you, and more profitable for the musicians! What more do you want?
You're not stealing anything. When you download an MP3, you're transfering electrons from one source to another (and they are eventually recycled). Electrons. Bits. A CD is a thing that you can hold, touch, whatever. It costs money to produce copies of a work on CD, but nothing to send it over the Net (except bandwidth costs). If anyone is losing money, it's the RIAA and ONLY the RIAA consortium. You do not hurt the artists. In fact, you can *really* help the artists out with online donation. Every time you download an MP3, give the arist 100% of the profits instead of the 0.01% that the RIAA gives them.
What the RIAA is pissed off about is that this technique which you call "stealing" gives power back to the artists. Several artists have attempted to distribute music via MP3, but the RIAA has smacked them down for doing so. The RIAA is pissed because they hate these so-called "theives", they're pissed because their business model is becoming outdated. To combat that, they want to make the government freeze-frame innovation.
Wake up. This greedy group of companies are the real theives. They seize ownership of the work of artists, and then pay them shit for it. Let's fight those bastards by downloading MP3's like crazy, and then giving the artists the money directly. Simple! It's cheaper for you, and more profitable for the musicians! What more do you want?
...but did there happen to be anyone testifying in the interests of The People to provide a counterpoint to Rosen? Was Shawn Fanning asked to speak? Felton? I would like to know why is it that they always get to address Congress, but not anyone from the other side.
I particularly like the comment near the end from Valenti. "If you can't protect what you own, you don't own anything." Sounds like he's taking a hit on US Government with their "failure" to protect us from terrorists. Little statements like that will no doubt be massively effective to a particularly sensitive legislature.
Microsoft seems to think that they can treat the Xbox like a piece of software. "This version didn't work out so great. Luckily, we have mandatory upgrades in the EULA, so people will have to buy the next version." No. They fail to realize that companies like Sony and Nintendo have successful consoles because they are *extremely* well refined for doing one thing only and that one thing well: playing games. (Duh.) Case in point: the SNES. Weak ass machine, 128/16kb sys/vid RAM, 3.5/2.6/1.7MHz CPU. Effectively less powerful than any given PC 5 years before its time. Yet, it's tight, well designed hardware was able to deliver astonishing audio and video effects for the time.
So, Microsoft decides to jump on the boat and they offer a console that is really nothing more than a repackaged desktop PC. Stock *everything* except for their pretty case. Microsoft sees Windows as "successful", and surely thought that if they do to the Xbox as with Windows, it too will be successful. That is to make it has huge and feature rich as they possibly can. Totally the wrong idea. It needs to fail so that game companies see quite clearly that this is no way to offer a console. I would venture that if the Xbox were a success, we'd see more slapped together consoles like this cropping up from Nintendo, Sony, or whoever else. Now they know they really have to engineer hardware instead of use the current market hardware like a Lego-kit to build a game platform.
No that's fine. I am not at all ashamed of questions asking who my daddy is and what he does.
Clearly, it's a good George Lucas movie plot...
on
Spyware Fights Back
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I can see it now... "Spy Warez: The Phantom Manuscript", featuring the lovable character Kaz Zaz! Coming to theaters near you!
Repost of the Katz article...
on
Dog Bites Website
·
· Score: -1, Redundant
Since every time JohnKatz posts an article, people flame him - most without ever reading what he wrote in the first place. This is a reflect reaction to Katz that I suggest we fight with this new method. In a new trend, I suggest we repost any Katz article in the discussion forum of any such article. That way, we can reflect upon it in such a way that if Katz didn't post it, we can consider it before flaming.
from the can-open-marketing-online-save-writers? dept. I'm not much of a salesman, in comfort or skill, but I'm willing to hype my books, especially given the realities of 21st Century publishing, when you do it yourself or nobody does it. Some people think if you get a book published, you're a big deal and a rich one. If you're Grisham or King, that's true. The reality: Few books sell well, and even fewer (mine, for example) make money. Can content like books be successfully "open-marketed" on the Net? I say yes.
In early March my eleventh book A Dog Year; Twelve Months, Four Dogs and Me was published by Random House/Villard. For several months I've been working on a bottom-up, Net-based marketing program that permits me to push my own book in my own way, rather than rely on big publishing or big media. That led me to the banner ad on this site a lot of you have seen and e-mailed me about. So why am I buying a banner ad, on Slashdot of all places, to tout my new book about a year with four dogs? It's a chance for me to tick off the yowling hordes, which is always fun. Some will shriek that a dog saga has little to do with open source, technology or selling things on the Net. But it does, and I'm happy -- eager, even -- to explain why.
I do most of my hyping for A Dog Year in the expected places -- in media interviews and on various dog-related sites, mailing lists and forums.
My reason for advertising here, too, is that I believe the Net offers the best place for individual entrepreneurs of all kinds -- writers, game creators, artists, musicians, software designers -- to skirt conventional costs, limitations and marketing practices and find their own audiences. To me, that's a big part of the "open" in open source. Younger people raised on the Net don't pay nearly as much attention to mainstream media as their elders, so we have to reach them where they are. The good news is that we can.
In fact, Net communications themselves have become increasingly segmented and targeted. Much has become subterranean, centered on mailing lists, IM and other limited-entry venues. In the weeks before my book's publication, I concentrated on these grass-roots venues, contacting websites, subscribing to mailing lists, e-mailing excerpts of my book to people who were interested. People on special interests lists and chat rooms don't mind being pitched on subjects they're interested in. They don't consider it spam. What they hate is being bombarded with messages for things they don't care about, which is what traditional media does. Besides which, I can't afford to take an ad out in Time magazine or on the ABC Evening News.
Elsewhere, individual entrepreneurs and creators find it more and more difficult to survive. The megacorporations who've taken over much of culture and media are primarily interested in best-selling mega-products -- Britney Spears, John Grisham -- not idiosyncratic ones like mine.
They have a point, too. My last book found its own audience, or rather its audience found it. It did all right, but didn't sell much beyond it's core audience. To successfully market a book like Running To The Mountain or A Dog Year (at least in the conventional way) could cost more money than my publisher expects to earn. And interesting, I believe the Running To The Mountain excerpt that ran on Slashdot sold more books than a subsequent appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show.
The Net, at least in theory, can bypass that stalemate and create radical new opportunities for artists of all kinds. So I don't mind paying for my own ad. I think it has worked.
Individuals are under attack all across our culture, from the likes of Microsoft and Wal-Mart and Sony to publishing conglomerates. The Net can be a way out for people like me (us), whether we're telling the story of our
dogs or coming up with new software. What's why I bought a banner on Slashdot. If it works, it could sell some books, sure. I have no apologies to make for that. But it could also help demonstrate to writers and other people struggling to survive in a mass-market world that the Open Source idea is only fractionally about software. It's about individualism, free expression, and a culture open to us all.
...plotting on your little web page to overthrow politicians of our grand, glorious, and noble government. You should all be ashamed of yourself for adopting such anti-authority views and attacking such core institutions like Disney. They are a good, reputable company and if they need a little help from the government to keep entertaining our youngsters, I say give it to them!"
...that this group of Americans struggles so endlessly to preserve core American values... by destroying core American values. When will they wake up and realize that this country was founded in the name of freedom for people of all backgrounds. It was only in recent history that they were be persecuted in similar ways.
Is it really so hard to understand that an attack on "linking" is an attack on the very fabric of the Web? The very thing that made it popular to begin with? If you discourage linking, then the Web is NOTHING. There's a reason it's analgous to a spider web. If you remove the strands that connect to form the web, well, you don't have one anymore. I cannot believe that such intelligent people fail to understand something so trivial.
Doesn't this constitute some form of entrapment? And what if I were to place a valuable item out on the streets with the intention of having it stolen? Is the person who takes it guilty of theft?
how the fuck is this post a troll? it's actually pretty funny... if you've ever heard that old.au file that came with lots of linux distros for testing that your sound card worked (hello, my name is Linus Torvalds and i pronounce linux as linux)
note to moderators.. if you are too stupid to get the fucking joke, don't mod someone down
It appears that this programmer has created an Open Sourced Unix Desktop, KDE, written in C++. I found this posted in response to an article on C++ Monks asking if C++ was obsessed with entry level programming courses? Apparently not. Check it out, it looks pretty interesting. I wonder how fast it runs?
Anyone who thinks that episodes 25 & 26 sucked largely misses the point of the whole series. In brief, what NERV was attempting to do was improve humanity. In the case of the series ending, they were successful. In the case of the movies however, Gianax wanted to show what happened if NERV fucked up. Shinji represented, for intents and purposes, the whole human race in BOTH versions of the ending. Both are equally valid and make sense from this context. Personally, I find episodes 25 & 26 to be more meaningful than just watching the entire human race die.
Keyboard no longer stops working for no apparent reason
Check your system. Sounds like you have a problem. I've used KDE 2.x.x for, well, as long as it's been around. Very appropriately, the "bug free*" wallpaper is almost correct.
CD handling no longer breaks the automounter
Again, *you* have a configuration problem. Check the mailing lists.
Runs well on modest hardware
Uh, it's always done that since version 1. If you want to run KDE on a low-end hardware, use lightweight themes. Same goes for ANY desktop environment or window manager.
Default wallpaper no longer ripped off from OSX
That's an original artwork. And if you're going to bitch like this, why not say "concept of object oriented desktop no longer ripped off of Mac OS."
KMail no longer corrupts its mail files
I have this complaint about mailers other than KMail.
Default browser handling works all the time
Try elaborating.
K* apps effort united with other projects trying to do the same thing
Oh, this is a problem unique to the KDE project, eh? Go out and blame the GTK people if you REALLY want to throw stones like these.
Go get a clue and stop you bitching. If you don't like it, go use something else. The rest of us will greatly enjoy our KDE 3 experience.
Cyan, when writing the novels, went into a ton of detail of the history of the D'ni and their great, vast civilization. I *really* like to "see" this. The books gave a strong impression of the richness of this culture and that really helped give a good idea of exactly who and what Ghen was. Really boosted the story!
I remember from the interview on the original Myst CD with our friends at Cyan. One of the artists (a really geeky, engineering type) mentioned "we had to fully realize this 3D world". Luckily, Cyan went far beyind just visuals in developing this world. I'd love to see it on the screen with that level of detail and devotion.:)
(Incidently, the best order is read "Book of Atrus", play Myst, read "Book of Ti'ana", play Riven, read "Book of D'ni". You'll really have a strong feel for the characters and their causes in this case. It's particularly chilling to read Atrus' journal entry about losing his Myst book into the star fissure and then hear him recite it at the beginning of the game. It suddenly makes so much sense after that.:)
I'm serious. They shouldn't have a policy on it at all. Their only policy should be to continue doing their business and if they see they're losing market space to open source software, they should improve their products to compete. End of story. Microsoft, by their very nature, can do nothing but hurt open source, and vice versa. To save everyone a lot of effort, they should just each do their own thing and have zero interaction. As for the interaction of software, well, that's inevitable, but nonethless, it's not political.
I am sure Microsoft can compete and keep its market share without even uttering the words of our ideals. If they can't, why do they deserve to make a buck?
While Taco was busy snotting all of us with stupid April Fools crap, K5 was busy posting intelligent stories. They ran this story yesterday with a very interesting article attached and already some very good commentary. I highly recommend everyone read this one comment that sums up, I'd say, a lot of our thoughts.
CmdrTaco, you idiot, you're missing the point!
on
April Fools Wrap Up
·
· Score: 1, Troll
The point of an "April Fools joke" is to make someone look like a fool for the purpose of humor. This is accomplished by presenting something that is clever such that it looks believable but is fake under closer examination. Today's Slashdot fiasco only succeeded in making you and your editors look like a bunch of morons, without the joyful side effect of creating laughs. Nothing clever. Nothing believable except to complete idiots.
If you are presented with X pieces of information and you know for a fact that out of those X pieces, ALL of them are fake... well, you won't be fooled. Now if maybe one or two believable stories were injected into today's article, there might have been comedic value.
You're getting tons of flames and pissed off users because IT JUST ISN'T FUNNY. Once or twice, maybe, but not every single story! If I spent my entire day doing nothing but pulling April Fools jokes on my girlfriend, I'd have my balls kicked by now. Do that to half a million Slashdot readers, and you WILL get flamed!
Maybe next year you'll get it... probably not. But this bullshit probably resulted in a lot of good story submissions getting tossed out. What a waste.
Slashdot Mirror
I have seen a few posts where people continue to insist that downloading a MP3 is stealing. Let's look at this from the proper perspective, shall we?
First of all, you're not stealing anything. When you download an MP3, you're transfering electrons from one source to another (and they are eventually recycled). Electrons. Bits. A CD is a thing that you can hold, touch, whatever. It costs money to produce copies of a work on CD, but nothing to send it over the Net (except bandwidth costs). If anyone is losing money, it's the RIAA and ONLY the RIAA consortium. You do not hurt the artists. In fact, you can *really* help the artists out with online donation. Every time you download an MP3, give the arist 100% of the profits instead of the 0.01% that the RIAA gives them. This is the best way to weaken the RIAA because it shows artists they they do not need a big record label to get their music sold. All they need is a cheap computer and an Internet connection.
What the RIAA is pissed off about is that this technique which some call "stealing" gives power back to the artists. Several artists have attempted to distribute music via MP3, but the RIAA has smacked them down for doing so. The RIAA is pissed because they hate these so-called "theives" because their business model is becoming outdated. To combat that, they want to make the government freeze-frame innovation.
Wake up. This greedy group of companies are the real theives. They seize ownership of the work of artists, and then pay them shit for it. Let's fight those bastards by downloading MP3's like crazy, and then giving the artists the money directly. Simple! It's cheaper for you, and more profitable for the musicians! What more do you want?
You're not stealing anything. When you download an MP3, you're transfering electrons from one source to another (and they are eventually recycled). Electrons. Bits. A CD is a thing that you can hold, touch, whatever. It costs money to produce copies of a work on CD, but nothing to send it over the Net (except bandwidth costs). If anyone is losing money, it's the RIAA and ONLY the RIAA consortium. You do not hurt the artists. In fact, you can *really* help the artists out with online donation. Every time you download an MP3, give the arist 100% of the profits instead of the 0.01% that the RIAA gives them.
What the RIAA is pissed off about is that this technique which you call "stealing" gives power back to the artists. Several artists have attempted to distribute music via MP3, but the RIAA has smacked them down for doing so. The RIAA is pissed because they hate these so-called "theives", they're pissed because their business model is becoming outdated. To combat that, they want to make the government freeze-frame innovation.
Wake up. This greedy group of companies are the real theives. They seize ownership of the work of artists, and then pay them shit for it. Let's fight those bastards by downloading MP3's like crazy, and then giving the artists the money directly. Simple! It's cheaper for you, and more profitable for the musicians! What more do you want?
...but did there happen to be anyone testifying in the interests of The People to provide a counterpoint to Rosen? Was Shawn Fanning asked to speak? Felton? I would like to know why is it that they always get to address Congress, but not anyone from the other side.
I particularly like the comment near the end from Valenti. "If you can't protect what you own, you don't own anything." Sounds like he's taking a hit on US Government with their "failure" to protect us from terrorists. Little statements like that will no doubt be massively effective to a particularly sensitive legislature.
Microsoft seems to think that they can treat the Xbox like a piece of software. "This version didn't work out so great. Luckily, we have mandatory upgrades in the EULA, so people will have to buy the next version." No. They fail to realize that companies like Sony and Nintendo have successful consoles because they are *extremely* well refined for doing one thing only and that one thing well: playing games. (Duh.) Case in point: the SNES. Weak ass machine, 128/16kb sys/vid RAM, 3.5/2.6/1.7MHz CPU. Effectively less powerful than any given PC 5 years before its time. Yet, it's tight, well designed hardware was able to deliver astonishing audio and video effects for the time.
So, Microsoft decides to jump on the boat and they offer a console that is really nothing more than a repackaged desktop PC. Stock *everything* except for their pretty case. Microsoft sees Windows as "successful", and surely thought that if they do to the Xbox as with Windows, it too will be successful. That is to make it has huge and feature rich as they possibly can. Totally the wrong idea. It needs to fail so that game companies see quite clearly that this is no way to offer a console. I would venture that if the Xbox were a success, we'd see more slapped together consoles like this cropping up from Nintendo, Sony, or whoever else. Now they know they really have to engineer hardware instead of use the current market hardware like a Lego-kit to build a game platform.
It's not even a hiccup. Lots of people are posting.
You can reach me at tofuchute@hotmail.com. Please submit your question there.
You can reach me at tofuchute@hotmail.com. Please submit your question there.
No that's fine. I am not at all ashamed of questions asking who my daddy is and what he does.
I can see it now... "Spy Warez: The Phantom Manuscript", featuring the lovable character Kaz Zaz! Coming to theaters near you!
from the can-open-marketing-online-save-writers? dept.
I'm not much of a salesman, in comfort or skill, but I'm willing to hype my books, especially given the realities of 21st Century publishing, when you do it yourself or nobody does it. Some people think if you get a book published, you're a big deal and a rich one. If you're Grisham or King, that's true. The reality: Few books sell well, and even fewer (mine, for example) make money. Can content like books be successfully "open-marketed" on the Net? I say yes.
In early March my eleventh book A Dog Year; Twelve Months, Four Dogs and Me was published by Random House/Villard. For several months I've been working on a bottom-up, Net-based marketing program that permits me to push my own book in my own way, rather than rely on big publishing or big media. That led me to the banner ad on this site a lot of you have seen and e-mailed me about. So why am I buying a banner ad, on Slashdot of all places, to tout my new book about a year with four dogs? It's a chance for me to tick off the yowling hordes, which is always fun. Some will shriek that a dog saga has little to do with open source, technology or selling things on the Net. But it does, and I'm happy -- eager, even -- to explain why.
I do most of my hyping for A Dog Year in the expected places -- in media interviews and on various dog-related sites, mailing lists and forums.
My reason for advertising here, too, is that I believe the Net offers the best place for individual entrepreneurs of all kinds -- writers, game creators, artists, musicians, software designers -- to skirt conventional costs, limitations and marketing practices and find their own audiences. To me, that's a big part of the "open" in open source. Younger people raised on the Net don't pay nearly as much attention to mainstream media as their elders, so we have to reach them where they are. The good news is that we can.
In fact, Net communications themselves have become increasingly segmented and targeted. Much has become subterranean, centered on mailing lists, IM and other limited-entry venues. In the weeks before my book's publication, I concentrated on these grass-roots venues, contacting websites, subscribing to mailing lists, e-mailing excerpts of my book to people who were interested. People on special interests lists and chat rooms don't mind being pitched on subjects they're interested in. They don't consider it spam. What they hate is being bombarded with messages for things they don't care about, which is what traditional media does. Besides which, I can't afford to take an ad out in Time magazine or on the ABC Evening News.
Elsewhere, individual entrepreneurs and creators find it more and more difficult to survive. The megacorporations who've taken over much of culture and media are primarily interested in best-selling mega-products -- Britney Spears, John Grisham -- not idiosyncratic ones like mine. They have a point, too. My last book found its own audience, or rather its audience found it. It did all right, but didn't sell much beyond it's core audience. To successfully market a book like Running To The Mountain or A Dog Year (at least in the conventional way) could cost more money than my publisher expects to earn. And interesting, I believe the Running To The Mountain excerpt that ran on Slashdot sold more books than a subsequent appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show.
The Net, at least in theory, can bypass that stalemate and create radical new opportunities for artists of all kinds. So I don't mind paying for my own ad. I think it has worked.
Individuals are under attack all across our culture, from the likes of Microsoft and Wal-Mart and Sony to publishing conglomerates. The Net can be a way out for people like me (us), whether we're telling the story of our dogs or coming up with new software. What's why I bought a banner on Slashdot. If it works, it could sell some books, sure. I have no apologies to make for that. But it could also help demonstrate to writers and other people struggling to survive in a mass-market world that the Open Source idea is only fractionally about software. It's about individualism, free expression, and a culture open to us all.
It's OKay, you can ask me here.
...plotting on your little web page to overthrow politicians of our grand, glorious, and noble government. You should all be ashamed of yourself for adopting such anti-authority views and attacking such core institutions like Disney. They are a good, reputable company and if they need a little help from the government to keep entertaining our youngsters, I say give it to them!"
Draw your own conclusions.
...that this group of Americans struggles so endlessly to preserve core American values... by destroying core American values. When will they wake up and realize that this country was founded in the name of freedom for people of all backgrounds. It was only in recent history that they were be persecuted in similar ways.
Is it really so hard to understand that an attack on "linking" is an attack on the very fabric of the Web? The very thing that made it popular to begin with? If you discourage linking, then the Web is NOTHING. There's a reason it's analgous to a spider web. If you remove the strands that connect to form the web, well, you don't have one anymore. I cannot believe that such intelligent people fail to understand something so trivial.
Doesn't this constitute some form of entrapment? And what if I were to place a valuable item out on the streets with the intention of having it stolen? Is the person who takes it guilty of theft?
how the fuck is this post a troll? it's actually pretty funny... if you've ever heard that old .au file that came with lots of linux distros for testing that your sound card worked (hello, my name is Linus Torvalds and i pronounce linux as linux)
note to moderators.. if you are too stupid to get the fucking joke, don't mod someone down
...this is Barksdale Garbee and I pronounce 'Bdale' as 'Bee-Dale'."
It appears that this programmer has created an Open Sourced Unix Desktop, KDE, written in C++. I found this posted in response to an article on C++ Monks asking if C++ was obsessed with entry level programming courses? Apparently not. Check it out, it looks pretty interesting. I wonder how fast it runs?
Anyone who thinks that episodes 25 & 26 sucked largely misses the point of the whole series. In brief, what NERV was attempting to do was improve humanity. In the case of the series ending, they were successful. In the case of the movies however, Gianax wanted to show what happened if NERV fucked up. Shinji represented, for intents and purposes, the whole human race in BOTH versions of the ending. Both are equally valid and make sense from this context. Personally, I find episodes 25 & 26 to be more meaningful than just watching the entire human race die.
Keyboard no longer stops working for no apparent reason
Check your system. Sounds like you have a problem. I've used KDE 2.x.x for, well, as long as it's been around. Very appropriately, the "bug free*" wallpaper is almost correct.
CD handling no longer breaks the automounter
Again, *you* have a configuration problem. Check the mailing lists.
Runs well on modest hardware
Uh, it's always done that since version 1. If you want to run KDE on a low-end hardware, use lightweight themes. Same goes for ANY desktop environment or window manager.
Default wallpaper no longer ripped off from OSX
That's an original artwork. And if you're going to bitch like this, why not say "concept of object oriented desktop no longer ripped off of Mac OS."
KMail no longer corrupts its mail files
I have this complaint about mailers other than KMail.
Default browser handling works all the time
Try elaborating.
K* apps effort united with other projects trying to do the same thing
Oh, this is a problem unique to the KDE project, eh? Go out and blame the GTK people if you REALLY want to throw stones like these.
Go get a clue and stop you bitching. If you don't like it, go use something else. The rest of us will greatly enjoy our KDE 3 experience.
Cyan, when writing the novels, went into a ton of detail of the history of the D'ni and their great, vast civilization. I *really* like to "see" this. The books gave a strong impression of the richness of this culture and that really helped give a good idea of exactly who and what Ghen was. Really boosted the story!
:)
:)
I remember from the interview on the original Myst CD with our friends at Cyan. One of the artists (a really geeky, engineering type) mentioned "we had to fully realize this 3D world". Luckily, Cyan went far beyind just visuals in developing this world. I'd love to see it on the screen with that level of detail and devotion.
(Incidently, the best order is read "Book of Atrus", play Myst, read "Book of Ti'ana", play Riven, read "Book of D'ni". You'll really have a strong feel for the characters and their causes in this case. It's particularly chilling to read Atrus' journal entry about losing his Myst book into the star fissure and then hear him recite it at the beginning of the game. It suddenly makes so much sense after that.
I'm serious. They shouldn't have a policy on it at all. Their only policy should be to continue doing their business and if they see they're losing market space to open source software, they should improve their products to compete. End of story. Microsoft, by their very nature, can do nothing but hurt open source, and vice versa. To save everyone a lot of effort, they should just each do their own thing and have zero interaction. As for the interaction of software, well, that's inevitable, but nonethless, it's not political.
I am sure Microsoft can compete and keep its market share without even uttering the words of our ideals. If they can't, why do they deserve to make a buck?
While Taco was busy snotting all of us with stupid April Fools crap, K5 was busy posting intelligent stories. They ran this story yesterday with a very interesting article attached and already some very good commentary. I highly recommend everyone read this one comment that sums up, I'd say, a lot of our thoughts.
The point of an "April Fools joke" is to make someone look like a fool for the purpose of humor. This is accomplished by presenting something that is clever such that it looks believable but is fake under closer examination. Today's Slashdot fiasco only succeeded in making you and your editors look like a bunch of morons, without the joyful side effect of creating laughs. Nothing clever. Nothing believable except to complete idiots.
If you are presented with X pieces of information and you know for a fact that out of those X pieces, ALL of them are fake... well, you won't be fooled. Now if maybe one or two believable stories were injected into today's article, there might have been comedic value.
You're getting tons of flames and pissed off users because IT JUST ISN'T FUNNY. Once or twice, maybe, but not every single story! If I spent my entire day doing nothing but pulling April Fools jokes on my girlfriend, I'd have my balls kicked by now. Do that to half a million Slashdot readers, and you WILL get flamed!
Maybe next year you'll get it... probably not. But this bullshit probably resulted in a lot of good story submissions getting tossed out. What a waste.
I could have sworn that Linus was not just retiring, but also changing direction. I guess the editors didn't see it that way. :(
* 2002-04-01 18:39:37 Linus Announces Devotion To GNU/HURD (articles,linux) (rejected)