For those that ask "who is this guy and why should we care about this?":
He may be hoping that someone at Microsoft will remember who he is and what he did... and their brains will kick in and they'll listen to him speak in a pleasant, calm, rational, grits-free, petrification-free tone of voice.
And if it works, great. There has to be someone rational inside Microsoft....
Considering the somewhat lacking support for the features in the current specification of the W3C in both of the large-scale browsers (and some of the smaller ones), what do you feel is the best way to motivate them to become as compliant as possible? If it was as simple as users urging them, it would probably be done now. But Microsoft and Netscape still seek their own forms of 'embrace and extend' on their browsers. Any ideas as to how to try and get them to pay more attention to the standards? ----
If an inconspicuous and tiny graphic bothers you that much, by all means, block it.
To be totally honest, something that flashes, in multiple colors, repeatedly, at POKEMON CLASS EPILEPSY INDUCING SPEEDS, the word 'Winner' or something that is a Java applet...
THESE ARE NOT INCONSPICUOUS OR TINY. These are good solid reasons that I have, in my IE preferences, doubleclick and a few other banner-ad providers in the 'Custom' zone, with 'No Java', 'no images' and 'no cookies' kicked in.
If I could find a place that didn't use irritating banner ads (I want to punch the maker of 'Punch the Monkey'), tracking via cookies, and just gave ads that people could click through or not, I'd be rather happier and willing to put a banner ad on my site. ----
All of these read like a marketing guy putting out "Oh, Linux, how cute...". Talking about how there's stuff that they don't want to compete with (I'd love to see lex, personally). And the line about "We believe that proprietary software will continue to thrive and interact with the Open Source Movement." sounded very much like getting added on "Especially if we can stick in stuff that we can charge megabucks for." Note their commentary about hot-plug PCI, and journaling filesystems.
The bit about 'What is Linux to SCO'... jd, that was a brilliant question. He danced around that pretty well. "Well, it's something we can sell, and something we can sell stuff with, and something we can sell stuff with later."
I'm seeing way more Marketroidisms in here than I'd hope to see. Too bad we couldn't ask an admin at SCO. ----
Take a hypothetical case, he said: If a major newspaper that operated an online news site wrote an article saying that somebody had broken the DVD encryption code, and it linked to a site that had the code on it, "I think they'd have absolutely every right to do that."
And now they did it. Go NY Times! They took that very hypothetical case and made it completely real. I think the MPAA will have to think very, very hard about this one.... ----
And if that doesn't work, I'll just throw the book at them. Nothing like bouncing a 400-page book off of your client's forehead. Too bad it's not hardback.:)
Are you nuts? I wouldn't throw this book at a client's forehead. I'd use that now-useless MCSE training book I keep around to look things up in. (One of the 'nice' things is that it does have a good index.) It's hardcover, 700 pages, and a built-in stupidity sink, just sucks the stuff in. ----
I hemmed and hawwed about getting it,but finally did. And I'm glad I did. I'm now working on a top-down ripapart and recreate of just about all my pages. I sat my mother down and she couldn't quite get what was what. That's when I realized that my site had gotten a little too 'yippie!'. I'd recommend, along with this, 'Hotwired Style' which talks about the first five iterations of the Hotwired site, what they learned and what they did. It's a good look at an evolution of a web site. I also recommend Scott McCloud's 'Understanding Comics'. I know, it probably confuses people, but really. A large chunk of the book discusses the visual interpretation of information, going into the concepts behind icons.... which, if you think about it, really, is part of what's going on. You look at an icon and it brings up something. (A seated penguin with big eyes: Linux. There's probably concept icons you recognize implicitly that you can't even describe in words, but they have the associations.) Anyway, my pair of ducats. I'm still trying to find a copy of Brenda Laurel's 'The Art Of Human-Computer Interface Design' to read through to see if it's worth the hype. ----
I see someone forgot their Prozac(TM) again today. But really, Bill, couldn't you make it less obvious who it is posting? And shouldn't you get back to your tremendously important sleeping, I mean job as Chief Software Architect?
(I talked about this in the Ask Slashdot about the 'Death of the Net As We Know It, and I'm rehashing now.)
What we need to do is set up a briefing packet for Congress. All of them. Discussions of the flaws in the DMCA, of UCITA, of the attacks on DeCSS and on anti-filtering. Logical, reasoned arguments against what's there already. Maybe sponsored by the EFF. Or a made-up think-tank with a grandiose title. (Sure, let's USE the ideas that work! We'll Open Source some political tricks!)
Any interest? I'd work on it, but I'm not sure I want to do it all by myself. I'd need some fact checkers, and some editors.
Someone pointed out that one of the big problems here is that the politicos just don't understand anything except what they're spoon-fed by lobbyists. What we need to do is design our own spoon. (Take the Matrix 'there is no spoon' jokes elsewhere, kids.)
A lot of these groups create, effectively, a 'brief' on their points of view on the situation, with their research and information, and their spin on the issues. Politicians pay attention to these. We need to look into the possibility - no, the need to make up one of these briefs ourselves. Sure, we don't want to think about The Way Things Have Always Worked In Washington, but until there's an upsurge in net.awareness there as something other than a piracy and pr0n haven, that's not feasable.
What should we put into a brief like this? Certainly we need to put some of the exceptional discussions people have placed up about the DCMA, UCITA, filtering software, and the Bono act, summarized. We'd also need to start working on getting this together in a readable, hot-grits-free form. Sponsorship of it by, say, the EFF, for their political clout (I honestly don't know how much of it there is, but they've spoken before Congressional committees, so there has to be something) would also help.
Would anyone want to work with me on this? It's something we can do in our sidebar times. And it has the possibility to put another point of view into the process. And it can be the place where we start to mold things so that the Net doesn't become more than a place to sell stuff, but we keep Usenet, and Slashdot, and places like that.
ObBookOnThis: 'Trouble and her Friends', Melissa Scott.
Yet somehow, amusingly, people are STILL trying to pull something together. Whereas, if Microsoft pulled out of a major Windows expo, it would sink into the dark tarn with barely a ripple. No one would want to try to create it from scratch just to have a get-together.
That's the difference, bunky. So Red Hat decided not to sponsor... some people will do it themselves. (I, unfortunately, live near New York City and getting to it to help org is a pain in the neck. Which is why I may subscribe to the list, but don't expect to be deep into it.)
('we' being 'the citizens of the United States of America' for all the foreign slashdotters.)
That's the question that needs to be looked at here. What can we, as a group, as a rising political force do to stop this? They ('they' being 'the forces of big business who want to control our minds in a way that Orwell may have not imagined at all') have managed to run this through the Congress using tremendous amounts of money that your average geek doesn't have. (The only one that DOES would be Gates, and we can be pretty sure he doesn't care either.)
Some ideas:
It may be time for a geek-out. Every techie in America calls in protesting, and we get together in state capitols to protest. Set up booths to actually sign petitions to present to the state legislatures and to our Congressmen.
Let's take it one step further, maybe. A Million Geek March. A firm show of what we are willing to do, to say to these people, "Not just this far and no further, but you have gone TOO FAR and we want you to step back!".
Remember that spamming Washington is NOT a good idea - it says nothing to them. We need to seize the moral high ground and KEEP it. Maybe it's crazy, but if we can present our side of things to Congress AND the public, AND we can keep ourselves from looking like maniacs, we can take that high ground. This means, unfortunately, we may not want to let some of our more vocal friends out of the box. This is going to take a skill that many in the Open Source community do not have: Tact.
Anyone else have ideas as to how we can turn things around within the system? I'd prefer to start inside than try to break it from outside.
No, really. We should, as a group, put our collective money where our collective mouth is and go somewhere else. Fatbrain, maybe. How about some recommendations?
Re:This is getting a lot of attention.
on
Victory in Holland
·
· Score: 1
All I can say is... WTF does full internet access have to do with a girl getting raped in the same building? How the hell is an internet filter supposed to stop that?
Dude, don't you know that, like, the Web causes your brains to do bad things? Like rape girls, and read news that the AFA doesn't like, and think for yourself? Don't you know ANYTHING?
THIS POST HAS BEEN RATED 'S' FOR SARCASTIC BY THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PEOPLE THAT USE THEIR HEADS FOR MORE THAN A HATRACK.
It's popped up at MSNBC and The Register so far that I know of. But we still have to remember the old quote: "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." They didn't mean just from OUTSIDE, people...
Check the summary for the definition of 'last'.
on
Red Hat Finishes Last
·
· Score: 3
Look at the report summary:
If you want a good, general purpose NOS that can deliver enterprise-class services with all the bells and whistles imaginable, then Windows 2000 is the strongest contender. However, for high performance, enterprise file and print services, our tests show that Novell leads the pack. If you're willing to pay a higher price for scalability and reliability, SCO UnixWare would be a safe bet. But if you need an inexpensive alternative that will give you bare-bones network services with decent performance, Red Hat Linux can certainly fit the bill.
So, if you're looking to drop a bunch of cash on bells and whistles, get Win2K. I don't think we can really hate Novell, and SCO UnixWare is sort of a cousin.
What this review points out is, once again, what the Mindcraft Review pointed out: Linux is not 100% read for high-power, high-speed, prime-time major network server use. It IS getting there - look at the stuff that's popped up since then! - but more work is needed.
The bright side is: how many people are going to look at this, grr, and get to work on fixing it? That's the good side of FUD reports - gets people off their butts and trying to make better.
In the late 1970s, the first RPGs appeared in Japan. They let you play... well, characters from various series. That was it. You got the pregenerated characters and there were no character generation rules. Then D&D showed up. They went nuts.
One GM ran a campaign that went through two generations of heroes. He kept copious notes, and turned those notes in to the 12 novels of the Records of the Wars of Lodoss. Which became the anime series...
And then they released the Record of Lodoss Wars RPG. Thus bringing things 100% full circle. TSR wouldn't let them license the AD&D system for Lodoss, so they had to do their own.
Yes, there are a lot of techs like that. I personally try to learn things, find ways around problems other than the obvious, and work to make sure that if I have to support something, I can support it damn near every which way I can. And then, when the weird question comes, I know the answer. I also, when working for an ISP, used to mail things to the other techs so they would have that information too. Because, dammit, we were supposedly a 'team' and working together.
A large number of the problems tend to come from the new people on the phones. I've seen a lot of companies just slaughter their training budgets, then toss people who don't know better on the phones to sink or swim. (They usually sink.) I had the luck to have two good jobs in support early on which gave me good solid training that I could use to get a new job.
Clueless Support tends to be the result of either support people who don't want to learn, or of people above them who don't want them to learn enough to get a better job elsewhere. It just makes people evil and bitter.
Ah, yes, Stream... I remember those days. I was there for a few months in late 95 - early 96, just about the time 2.0 came out. I remember the joys of figuring out how to set up Win95's DUN; supporting the Netcom logins; all sorts of stuff.
It was insane; it was crazy; it was amazing. I remember when the agency told me I had the position, but they couldn't tell me what I was supporting. Then we got there and we weren't supposed to tell anyone what we were supporting. Netscape didn't want anyone to know what was going on. (One Sunday there was a hellish ice storm, I showed up along with about 4 others, and we just took messages 'cause we didn't have the people for it, and had some interesting questions about WHY we weren't fully staffed...)
Would I do it again? No. Would I change having done it? No. A few months later I got a job for an ISP based on my experience at Netscape. And it's been pretty much uphill since then.
Someone did steal a book from me while I was there, which annoys me... but it was years ago and the book's way outdated now. So.
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. (I know someone who work there, and visited him a few times. Apparently, they do tours from time to time.)
In a backlash, more than 250 members of Congress have signed on as co-sponsors to legislation that would prohibit mandating such back-door devices on computers.
After all, the Congresscritters have stuff to hide, too. More than some people here. They don't want the FBI and the Ethics Committee going and sneaking around into their work and home PCs either...
>Sure the trailers belong to them, but can they >copyright the URL? I wouldn't think so, but who >knows.
Of course they can. I actually heard someone here in New York, at last year's Fall Internet World, say, "We're golden as far as these trademarks are concerned! I mean, come on. Why do you think it's called HTML?"
Some of these people really need a hobby or a brain.
Slashdot Mirror
For those that ask "who is this guy and why should we care about this?":
He may be hoping that someone at Microsoft will remember who he is and what he did... and their brains will kick in and they'll listen to him speak in a pleasant, calm, rational, grits-free, petrification-free tone of voice.
And if it works, great. There has to be someone rational inside Microsoft....
....right?
----
Sir:
Considering the somewhat lacking support for the features in the current specification of the W3C in both of the large-scale browsers (and some of the smaller ones), what do you feel is the best way to motivate them to become as compliant as possible? If it was as simple as users urging them, it would probably be done now. But Microsoft and Netscape still seek their own forms of 'embrace and extend' on their browsers. Any ideas as to how to try and get them to pay more attention to the standards?
----
If an inconspicuous and tiny graphic bothers you that much, by all means, block it.
To be totally honest, something that flashes, in multiple colors, repeatedly, at POKEMON CLASS EPILEPSY INDUCING SPEEDS, the word 'Winner' or something that is a Java applet...
THESE ARE NOT INCONSPICUOUS OR TINY. These are good solid reasons that I have, in my IE preferences, doubleclick and a few other banner-ad providers in the 'Custom' zone, with 'No Java', 'no images' and 'no cookies' kicked in.
If I could find a place that didn't use irritating banner ads (I want to punch the maker of 'Punch the Monkey'), tracking via cookies, and just gave ads that people could click through or not, I'd be rather happier and willing to put a banner ad on my site.
----
(Apologies for catchphrase theft.)
All of these read like a marketing guy putting out "Oh, Linux, how cute...". Talking about how there's stuff that they don't want to compete with (I'd love to see lex, personally). And the line about "We believe that proprietary software will continue to thrive and interact with the Open Source Movement." sounded very much like getting added on "Especially if we can stick in stuff that we can charge megabucks for." Note their commentary about hot-plug PCI, and journaling filesystems.
The bit about 'What is Linux to SCO'... jd, that was a brilliant question. He danced around that pretty well. "Well, it's something we can sell, and something we can sell stuff with, and something we can sell stuff with later."
I'm seeing way more Marketroidisms in here than I'd hope to see. Too bad we couldn't ask an admin at SCO.
----
Take a hypothetical case, he said: If a major newspaper that operated an online news site wrote an article saying that somebody had broken the DVD encryption code, and it linked to a site that had the code on it, "I think they'd have absolutely every right to do that."
And now they did it. Go NY Times! They took that very hypothetical case and made it completely real. I think the MPAA will have to think very, very hard about this one....
----
And if that doesn't work, I'll just throw the book at them. Nothing like bouncing a 400-page book off of your client's forehead. Too bad it's not hardback. :)
Are you nuts? I wouldn't throw this book at a client's forehead. I'd use that now-useless MCSE training book I keep around to look things up in. (One of the 'nice' things is that it does have a good index.) It's hardcover, 700 pages, and a built-in stupidity sink, just sucks the stuff in.
----
I hemmed and hawwed about getting it,but finally did. And I'm glad I did. I'm now working on a top-down ripapart and recreate of just about all my pages. I sat my mother down and she couldn't quite get what was what. That's when I realized that my site had gotten a little too 'yippie!'. I'd recommend, along with this, 'Hotwired Style' which talks about the first five iterations of the Hotwired site, what they learned and what they did. It's a good look at an evolution of a web site. I also recommend Scott McCloud's 'Understanding Comics'. I know, it probably confuses people, but really. A large chunk of the book discusses the visual interpretation of information, going into the concepts behind icons.... which, if you think about it, really, is part of what's going on. You look at an icon and it brings up something. (A seated penguin with big eyes: Linux. There's probably concept icons you recognize implicitly that you can't even describe in words, but they have the associations.) Anyway, my pair of ducats. I'm still trying to find a copy of Brenda Laurel's 'The Art Of Human-Computer Interface Design' to read through to see if it's worth the hype.
----
> News of its cancellation have been greatly exaggerated... again.
How very like Babylon 5 itself, then...
Faith Manages.
I see someone forgot their Prozac(TM) again today. But really, Bill, couldn't you make it less obvious who it is posting? And shouldn't you get back to your tremendously important sleeping, I mean job as Chief Software Architect?
(I talked about this in the Ask Slashdot about the 'Death of the Net As We Know It, and I'm rehashing now.)
What we need to do is set up a briefing packet for Congress. All of them. Discussions of the flaws in the DMCA, of UCITA, of the attacks on DeCSS and on anti-filtering. Logical, reasoned arguments against what's there already. Maybe sponsored by the EFF. Or a made-up think-tank with a grandiose title. (Sure, let's USE the ideas that work! We'll Open Source some political tricks!)
Any interest? I'd work on it, but I'm not sure I want to do it all by myself. I'd need some fact checkers, and some editors.
No, seriously.
Someone pointed out that one of the big problems here is that the politicos just don't understand anything except what they're spoon-fed by lobbyists. What we need to do is design our own spoon. (Take the Matrix 'there is no spoon' jokes elsewhere, kids.)
A lot of these groups create, effectively, a 'brief' on their points of view on the situation, with their research and information, and their spin on the issues. Politicians pay attention to these. We need to look into the possibility - no, the need to make up one of these briefs ourselves. Sure, we don't want to think about The Way Things Have Always Worked In Washington, but until there's an upsurge in net.awareness there as something other than a piracy and pr0n haven, that's not feasable.
What should we put into a brief like this? Certainly we need to put some of the exceptional discussions people have placed up about the DCMA, UCITA, filtering software, and the Bono act, summarized. We'd also need to start working on getting this together in a readable, hot-grits-free form. Sponsorship of it by, say, the EFF, for their political clout (I honestly don't know how much of it there is, but they've spoken before Congressional committees, so there has to be something) would also help.
Would anyone want to work with me on this? It's something we can do in our sidebar times. And it has the possibility to put another point of view into the process. And it can be the place where we start to mold things so that the Net doesn't become more than a place to sell stuff, but we keep Usenet, and Slashdot, and places like that.
ObBookOnThis: 'Trouble and her Friends', Melissa Scott.
Yet somehow, amusingly, people are STILL trying to pull something together. Whereas, if Microsoft pulled out of a major Windows expo, it would sink into the dark tarn with barely a ripple. No one would want to try to create it from scratch just to have a get-together.
That's the difference, bunky. So Red Hat decided not to sponsor... some people will do it themselves. (I, unfortunately, live near New York City and getting to it to help org is a pain in the neck. Which is why I may subscribe to the list, but don't expect to be deep into it.)
('we' being 'the citizens of the United States of America' for all the foreign slashdotters.)
That's the question that needs to be looked at here. What can we, as a group, as a rising political force do to stop this? They ('they' being 'the forces of big business who want to control our minds in a way that Orwell may have not imagined at all') have managed to run this through the Congress using tremendous amounts of money that your average geek doesn't have. (The only one that DOES would be Gates, and we can be pretty sure he doesn't care either.)
Some ideas:
Anyone else have ideas as to how we can turn things around within the system? I'd prefer to start inside than try to break it from outside.
No, really. We should, as a group, put our collective money where our collective mouth is and go somewhere else. Fatbrain, maybe. How about some recommendations?
All I can say is... WTF does full internet access have to do with a girl getting raped in the same building? How the hell is an internet filter supposed to stop that?
Dude, don't you know that, like, the Web causes your brains to do bad things? Like rape girls, and read news that the AFA doesn't like, and think for yourself? Don't you know ANYTHING?
THIS POST HAS BEEN RATED 'S' FOR SARCASTIC BY THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PEOPLE THAT USE THEIR HEADS FOR MORE THAN A HATRACK.
It's popped up at MSNBC and The Register so far that I know of. But we still have to remember the old quote: "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." They didn't mean just from OUTSIDE, people...
Look at the report summary:
If you want a good, general purpose NOS that can deliver enterprise-class services with all the bells and whistles imaginable, then Windows 2000 is the strongest contender. However, for high performance, enterprise file and print services, our tests show that Novell leads the pack. If you're willing to pay a higher price for scalability and reliability, SCO UnixWare would be a safe bet. But if you need an inexpensive alternative that will give you bare-bones network services with decent performance, Red Hat Linux can certainly fit the bill.
So, if you're looking to drop a bunch of cash on bells and whistles, get Win2K. I don't think we can really hate Novell, and SCO UnixWare is sort of a cousin.
What this review points out is, once again, what the Mindcraft Review pointed out: Linux is not 100% read for high-power, high-speed, prime-time major network server use. It IS getting there - look at the stuff that's popped up since then! - but more work is needed.
The bright side is: how many people are going to look at this, grr, and get to work on fixing it? That's the good side of FUD reports - gets people off their butts and trying to make better.
But I may be wrong.
You may have just mispelled Kick The Punk Ass To Hell And Back Again.
Have a nice day!
Okay, history lesson here...
In the late 1970s, the first RPGs appeared in Japan. They let you play... well, characters from various series. That was it. You got the pregenerated characters and there were no character generation rules. Then D&D showed up. They went nuts.
One GM ran a campaign that went through two generations of heroes. He kept copious notes, and turned those notes in to the 12 novels of the Records of the Wars of Lodoss. Which became the anime series...
And then they released the Record of Lodoss Wars RPG. Thus bringing things 100% full circle. TSR wouldn't let them license the AD&D system for Lodoss, so they had to do their own.
And now you know the REST of the story...
Yes, there are a lot of techs like that. I personally try to learn things, find ways around problems other than the obvious, and work to make sure that if I have to support something, I can support it damn near every which way I can. And then, when the weird question comes, I know the answer. I also, when working for an ISP, used to mail things to the other techs so they would have that information too. Because, dammit, we were supposedly a 'team' and working together.
A large number of the problems tend to come from the new people on the phones. I've seen a lot of companies just slaughter their training budgets, then toss people who don't know better on the phones to sink or swim. (They usually sink.) I had the luck to have two good jobs in support early on which gave me good solid training that I could use to get a new job.
Clueless Support tends to be the result of either support people who don't want to learn, or of people above them who don't want them to learn enough to get a better job elsewhere. It just makes people evil and bitter.
And then we become sysadmins.
Ah, yes, Stream... I remember those days. I was there for a few months in late 95 - early 96, just about the time 2.0 came out. I remember the joys of figuring out how to set up Win95's DUN; supporting the Netcom logins; all sorts of stuff.
It was insane; it was crazy; it was amazing. I remember when the agency told me I had the position, but they couldn't tell me what I was supporting. Then we got there and we weren't supposed to tell anyone what we were supporting. Netscape didn't want anyone to know what was going on. (One Sunday there was a hellish ice storm, I showed up along with about 4 others, and we just took messages 'cause we didn't have the people for it, and had some interesting questions about WHY we weren't fully staffed...)
Would I do it again? No. Would I change having done it? No. A few months later I got a job for an ISP based on my experience at Netscape. And it's been pretty much uphill since then.
Someone did steal a book from me while I was there, which annoys me... but it was years ago and the book's way outdated now. So.
It's the streaming protocol for RealPlayer stuff. I'm pretty sure that there's nothing that even pretends to be a RealPlayer for ANY form of *NIX.
And no plans for one, either.
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. (I know someone who work there, and visited him a few times. Apparently, they do tours from time to time.)
You can look at the stuff about it at The Birth Of The Information Age exhibit. For something deeeeeply funky, I suggest looking through the programming manual. You can, in fact write PROGRAMS for ENIAC, even today.
I find this highly amusing.
In a backlash, more than 250 members of Congress have signed on as co-sponsors to legislation that would prohibit mandating such back-door devices on computers.
After all, the Congresscritters have stuff to hide, too. More than some people here. They don't want the FBI and the Ethics Committee going and sneaking around into their work and home PCs either...
>Sure the trailers belong to them, but can they
>copyright the URL? I wouldn't think so, but who
>knows.
Of course they can. I actually heard someone here in New York, at last year's Fall Internet World, say, "We're golden as far as these trademarks are concerned! I mean, come on. Why do you think it's called H TM L?"
Some of these people really need a hobby or a brain.