Think about it. Now that will throw people for a loop.
Makes me wonder who they cast for The Fugitive tv series that's filming in Seattle right now - wouldn't a cameo by Scully just throw everyone for a loop?
One wonders what people who live in the Olympics mountain range in Washington State might think about this. Or those people who do business in Olympia, our state capitol.
Kind of hard to trademark a place name, if you get my drift.
www.olympicshardware.com for example (not a real URL, probably) or www.olynews.com for a weekly newspaper.
Even though most people disagree with him, the Karma scores, and the number of reples tell that he is one of the most poplular writers on slashdot. It's so nice to have someone to talk about.
Now, hold on. The number of replies are inflated, due to the fact that at least a third of them are people commenting: a. How bad a writer Jon is b. How he thinks everything is about Geekdom being close to Godhood c. How he's distorting reality to match his thesis d. How he should get a real job and stop writing this carp.
So, why does/. allow him to continue to waste electrons, and get paid doing it?
Jesse Berst figured this out some time ago, and now it's spreading through the rest of the ZD editorial department. Publish something especially absurd or scandalous about free software, and the odds are good that the article will get Slashdotted and a few hundred thousand geeks will make life easy for the ZD marketing department.
It's especially amusing, considering they're one of the slowest loading sites out there.
I wonder if that's why they show up in the top 5 news stories on my.yahoo.com - do they pay for the placement? Because every time I click on a Linux story link from ZD, it's a thinly disguised attack on Linux, not an objective review. And, as a survivor of the Apple/MSFT and MSFT/IBM wars, I find this all quite laughable.
25% of the youth in Africa have aids and are dying. They can't get access to a computer, they aren't on the Net, and they probably won't live till they're 30.
Face it, it's an American UberGeekdom that Jon promotes as "taking control". One that has no wars to fight, one that is tired with the cynicism of the X-Gens (they're the Y-Gens). One that wants people to do something and stop talking about doing something.
I strongly dislike and do not enjoy the articles written by Jon Katz, they are like a regular article, minus the relevant information, minus the interesting information, injected with buzzwords and "geek propaganda."
I strongly agree with you. So, why not a poll?
Look, if we really believe in the UberGeekdom that Jon promotes, we geeks should have the right, nay, the duty, to vote him down.
And, if we just think that we're not in favor of his writing, perhaps because it reminds us of the worst excesses of the Bulwer-Lytton contest "It was a dark and stormy night...", we should still get our say.
That said, I don't think casting aspersions on the man due to any perceived gender attraction is proper. For all I know, I'd like the guy if I met him in person, it's the writing and the twisting of the truth that I object to.
I mean, what with Gnutella and other open source projects, the cat's out of the bag. They can try to attack Napster all the want - the Net will heal itself after each try.
It's not such a far stretch, given that Hatch actually has CDs out of some of his music. I don't listen to them, but I hear he's quite good, and some wish he'd never gone into politics due to his talent.
I know it's a sleazy thought, but the reason why Red Hat is the most popular distro has more to do with marketing and deals than the code itself.
So my question is this - how will TUX market itself and what kind of deals are you looking at making so that it becomes more widely adopted?
I don't think we need specifics, just some of the general methods you plan to use for marketing and some probable categories of companies you are looking at making deals with.
[yeah, I know, free bheer - but it's a good question]
I've been reading a lot of posts from people saying things along the lines of "use PGP".
While I think it's cool to do things like that, you should know that you're not safe.
Face it, all they need to do is monitor the emissions from your computer and monitor. This is why the govt requires TEMPEST machines - anything else is never secure.
I know, I used to code on them back when I was in the Canadian Armed Forces.
The ugly truth about encryption and security is this:
There is no such thing as a totally secure system.
Which also reminds me of this:
The easiest way to defeat any security method is to use physical access methods through inside personnnel.
So, stop worrying - Big Brother already knows all about your dirty linen - he just doesn't care about it.
The price is for a year's support, if I recall the blurb in the Annual Report.
Remember, Red Hat's business model is to charge for support and packaging, but to make it fully Open Source.
And, given that they pubbed the 0.01 kernel in the Annual Report, they are wicked cool. Did you notice the cool charts of Linux growth in server shipments? You may not like the distro, but it is the most popular one that people pay to have pre-installed, so obviously corporate America (and the world) is buying it.
Now who's this Hahn guy they want us shareholders to vote for? Thumbs up or thumbs down? Does he have any GPL code he's contribbed or is he just one of those investors? [Yes, I own 300 shares of RHAT, but I also own 200 shares of MSFT, so take your OS wars elsewhere]
As the article says, if a corporation used this aggressively, this could create a/. effect of negative publicity. It is free speech, and censorship just creates a stronger backlash.
That said, since I own stocks in a number of corporations, how would one suggest wording a shareholder proposal to stop the corporation from using this in an extra-legal or aggressive manner?
Why is it that people who say stupid things often can't spell a single complete sentence correctly?
Probably for the same reason that they eschew the proper use of grammer, use run-on sentences, and forget to divide their posts into paragraphs.
Wasn't there some famous comment along the lines of: "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend your right to mumble it with a Canadian accent while a freight train passes overhead."
I like the system Canada is using. If you are publishing a personal web page, your address is www.[whatever].city.province.ca.
Actually, it's also in use in the US, but just for municipal governments, e.g. www.ci.seattle.wa.us , which is the main web page for the City of Seattle.
OK, so I've got my G4 enterprise server running Mac-on-Linux with the RealPC emu and the lilo Win/Linux running Wine on VMWare in the Linux partition, in which I'm running VGS.
But wouldn't this be more useful as a Beowulf cluster?
I've got a number of the Windows Resource Kit books. I mean, I live in Seattle, it's hard to avoid them. If you ever want to ace your MCP or MCSE tests, just memorize them. Don't try to do it right, though, just parrot what the big monkey tells you, or you lose points on the tests.
The problem is with the approach to the security model. It's both inconsistent and MSFT allows it's own groups to ignore the rules they apply to everyone else. If they'd just live by their own rules, start the default configs at fewer rights, establish some standard levels, and not let people code around the security model, it might actually work. But they ignore all that, and the result is that any trained monkey can slice through their security with a minimum of training and luck.
That comes back to the positional vs. geurilla theory. MS has a massive positional advantage in the desktop arena that gives them a huge advantage. This advantage (ie, fud, safety-in-numbers etc.) easily offsets technological weaknesses. They're the VHS of the world. We're the 3/4 inch (Apple gets to be Betamax). Honestly, VHS is not a great tech... but who the hell is going to buy a 3/4" deck if there are only 3 releases available to rent and you have to drive to another province to get them? I'm enough of an idealist that I believe that if Endusers were given an unfettered opportunity to make an informed choice they would choose Linux more than Winders. We can't get to that position by following the MS formula, though. We need to move into the niches as branch from there. The server niche goes nicely so far and embedded is shaping up, but neither of those are consumer niches. Apple has desktop publishing and soon amateur video. What do we have?
We have heart. And I'd say we're the CD/RW and they're the VHS and Divx distaff. We win out, not because we're popular, but because it works. Never forget that - MSFT glitches are our friends.
And my standard disclaimer... war sucks.
You'll get no argument from me on that one. We need to be shiny, happy techie guerillas, who spend most of their time doing fun stuff and ignoring the MSFT enemy, because the MSFT values don't matter to us. We need good parties, Net connections that MSFT can't grok, stuff that's cool by it's nature, not stuff the corporate mindset wants to shove at us.
I mean, I've heard Bill Gibson and Stan Robinson come up with more plausible story lines at the Boreal SF convention, and that was in French!
Look, it's real simple - most people will misuse the technology to make babies who are:
1. male (hey, it's stupid, but that's what they'll do) 2. their society's distorted ideal (long necks, ears the size of elephants, it's all in the eyes of the beholder) 3. fewer genetic disease tendencies (this will actually be useful for some populations, until the next plague that makes HIV look a piker wipes out most of these perfect immune systems, since they won't have the glitches that let you survive wierd microbes (like sickle cell anemia which allows survival for most carriers against lethal diseases))
But, at least these designer kids will not write like Jon - that will be bred out of the human species as a survival mechanism.
News Flash: In 2050, the status symbol will be having Natural Kids, which only the rich can afford.
Well, as someone who's actually served (I was a Sargeant in the Canadian Army), I'd say this is definitely not a war.
Except:
In a war, you win by imposing chaos on your enemy and allowing your units to function. Since we are organized chaos, it's hard for them to impose further chaos on us, and easy for us to impose chaos upon them.
Some simple things to keep in mind:
Don't let the enemy impose the rules. Impose your own rules, define your own battlefield, determine your own objectives. Maybe we don't want to do GUI stuff for p0rn users. Maybe we don't want to seemless integration in one box. Maybe we don't want to make security easy so we're easy to hack.
Don't worry about the bucks. Let the corporate greedheads worry about the bucks. You want to change the world. Money is just a method to measure how much control one has of resources. MSFT has lots of that. But if we undermine control and reestablish the valuation system, we devalue his currency. Just like the British Secret Service counterfeited money to win the Falklands War - don't fight conventionally when you can win a different way.
Ain't nothing wrong with fighting on the Server Front. Who cares if it doesn't have fancy graphics - what do we use those for, anyway? Slide show presentations? Now, if you can crank out MP3 files and PNG faster, that I might care about.
And, as the original poster said, remember that the pie is growing - and we keep getting larger fractions. This is good, and MSFT knows it. They may talk about selling 3 million W2K licenses, but how many of those had some guy install Linux on top of it? A heck of a lot, that's for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
But, even under Massive Attack, inquiring minds want to know:
Is the Tao Neutrino Open Source?
Is it GPL?
Can we build a Beowulf Cluster out of Tao Neutrinos?
[had to do it - surface tension breaker]
Think about it. Now that will throw people for a loop.
Makes me wonder who they cast for The Fugitive tv series that's filming in Seattle right now - wouldn't a cameo by Scully just throw everyone for a loop?
One wonders what people who live in the Olympics mountain range in Washington State might think about this. Or those people who do business in Olympia, our state capitol.
Kind of hard to trademark a place name, if you get my drift.
www.olympicshardware.com for example (not a real URL, probably) or www.olynews.com for a weekly newspaper.
Even though most people disagree with him, the Karma scores, and the number of reples tell that he is one of the most poplular writers on slashdot. It's so nice to have someone to talk about.
/. allow him to continue to waste electrons, and get paid doing it?
Now, hold on. The number of replies are inflated, due to the fact that at least a third of them are people commenting:
a. How bad a writer Jon is
b. How he thinks everything is about Geekdom being close to Godhood
c. How he's distorting reality to match his thesis
d. How he should get a real job and stop writing this carp.
So, why does
Jesse Berst figured this out some time ago, and now it's spreading through the rest of the ZD editorial department. Publish something especially absurd or scandalous about free software, and the odds are good that the article will get Slashdotted and a few hundred thousand geeks will make life easy for the ZD marketing department.
It's especially amusing, considering they're one of the slowest loading sites out there.
I wonder if that's why they show up in the top 5 news stories on my.yahoo.com - do they pay for the placement? Because every time I click on a Linux story link from ZD, it's a thinly disguised attack on Linux, not an objective review. And, as a survivor of the Apple/MSFT and MSFT/IBM wars, I find this all quite laughable.
What Jon fails to mention is this:
25% of the youth in Africa have aids and are dying. They can't get access to a computer, they aren't on the Net, and they probably won't live till they're 30.
Face it, it's an American UberGeekdom that Jon promotes as "taking control". One that has no wars to fight, one that is tired with the cynicism of the X-Gens (they're the Y-Gens). One that wants people to do something and stop talking about doing something.
At least, those are the ones I see around here.
I strongly dislike and do not enjoy the articles written by Jon Katz, they are like a regular article, minus the relevant information, minus the interesting information, injected with buzzwords and "geek propaganda."
...]
I strongly agree with you. So, why not a poll?
Look, if we really believe in the UberGeekdom that Jon promotes, we geeks should have the right, nay, the duty, to vote him down.
And, if we just think that we're not in favor of his writing, perhaps because it reminds us of the worst excesses of the Bulwer-Lytton contest "It was a dark and stormy night...", we should still get our say.
That said, I don't think casting aspersions on the man due to any perceived gender attraction is proper. For all I know, I'd like the guy if I met him in person, it's the writing and the twisting of the truth that I object to.
[sigh, here goes another 20 mod points
I mean, what with Gnutella and other open source projects, the cat's out of the bag. They can try to attack Napster all the want - the Net will heal itself after each try.
Information just wants to buy free bheer.
It's not such a far stretch, given that Hatch actually has CDs out of some of his music. I don't listen to them, but I hear he's quite good, and some wish he'd never gone into politics due to his talent.
I know it's a sleazy thought, but the reason why Red Hat is the most popular distro has more to do with marketing and deals than the code itself.
So my question is this - how will TUX market itself and what kind of deals are you looking at making so that it becomes more widely adopted?
I don't think we need specifics, just some of the general methods you plan to use for marketing and some probable categories of companies you are looking at making deals with.
[yeah, I know, free bheer - but it's a good question]
I've been reading a lot of posts from people saying things along the lines of "use PGP".
While I think it's cool to do things like that, you should know that you're not safe.
Face it, all they need to do is monitor the emissions from your computer and monitor. This is why the govt requires TEMPEST machines - anything else is never secure.
I know, I used to code on them back when I was in the Canadian Armed Forces.
The ugly truth about encryption and security is this:
There is no such thing as a totally secure system.
Which also reminds me of this:
The easiest way to defeat any security method is to use physical access methods through inside personnnel.
So, stop worrying - Big Brother already knows all about your dirty linen - he just doesn't care about it.
The price is for a year's support, if I recall the blurb in the Annual Report.
Remember, Red Hat's business model is to charge for support and packaging, but to make it fully Open Source.
And, given that they pubbed the 0.01 kernel in the Annual Report, they are wicked cool. Did you notice the cool charts of Linux growth in server shipments? You may not like the distro, but it is the most popular one that people pay to have pre-installed, so obviously corporate America (and the world) is buying it.
Now who's this Hahn guy they want us shareholders to vote for? Thumbs up or thumbs down? Does he have any GPL code he's contribbed or is he just one of those investors? [Yes, I own 300 shares of RHAT, but I also own 200 shares of MSFT, so take your OS wars elsewhere]
As the article says, if a corporation used this aggressively, this could create a /. effect of negative publicity. It is free speech, and censorship just creates a stronger backlash.
That said, since I own stocks in a number of corporations, how would one suggest wording a shareholder proposal to stop the corporation from using this in an extra-legal or aggressive manner?
Ideas?
Why is it that people who say stupid things often can't spell a single complete sentence correctly?
Probably for the same reason that they eschew the proper use of grammer, use run-on sentences, and forget to divide their posts into paragraphs.
Wasn't there some famous comment along the lines of: "I disagree with what you say, but I will defend your right to mumble it with a Canadian accent while a freight train passes overhead."
If not, there should be.
I mean, really, ABM is so 20th Century it makes me want to slip into Austin Powers mode ...
...
What's next, nuclear umbrellas? The Beijing Wall (like the Berlin Wall but near Hong Kong)? Ecstasy\\\\\\\\Acid?
Hmmm, then again
But, one point - if Red Star Linux is Linux, it must be GPL, right? So, when do we get the code?
I like the system Canada is using. If you are publishing a personal web page, your address is www.[whatever].city.province.ca.
Actually, it's also in use in the US, but just for municipal governments, e.g. www.ci.seattle.wa.us , which is the main web page for the City of Seattle.
I mean, why not do a true 6-way shootout and let the chips fall where they may ...
OK, so I've got my G4 enterprise server running Mac-on-Linux with the RealPC emu and the lilo Win/Linux running Wine on VMWare in the Linux partition, in which I'm running VGS.
But wouldn't this be more useful as a Beowulf cluster?
Heck, you just shoot yourself in the foot by slowing down game cartridge sales.
Economics 101 - you lose money on the game box, you make it on the game cartridges. Anything that sells more game cartridges is good.
[disclosure - my son and I own lots of shares of Nintendo]
Seriously. Of course, we'd probably disappear for a bit to go to Powell's book store, but hey, we've got priorities.
I've got a number of the Windows Resource Kit books. I mean, I live in Seattle, it's hard to avoid them. If you ever want to ace your MCP or MCSE tests, just memorize them. Don't try to do it right, though, just parrot what the big monkey tells you, or you lose points on the tests.
The problem is with the approach to the security model. It's both inconsistent and MSFT allows it's own groups to ignore the rules they apply to everyone else. If they'd just live by their own rules, start the default configs at fewer rights, establish some standard levels, and not let people code around the security model, it might actually work. But they ignore all that, and the result is that any trained monkey can slice through their security with a minimum of training and luck.
I mean, was it, only cool people use Linux?
Or was it more of a We Are Linux, We Will Absorb You?
This is marketing - did people hear that Linux can do everything W2K can do and better or did they hear you need to be a technogeek to use this stuff?
That comes back to the positional vs. geurilla theory. MS has a massive positional advantage in the desktop arena that gives them a huge advantage. This advantage (ie, fud, safety-in-numbers etc.) easily offsets technological weaknesses. They're the VHS of the world. We're the 3/4 inch (Apple gets to be Betamax). Honestly, VHS is not a great tech... but who the hell is going to buy a 3/4" deck if there are only 3 releases available to rent and you have to drive to another province to get them? I'm enough of an idealist that I believe that if Endusers were given an unfettered opportunity to make an informed choice they would choose Linux more than Winders. We can't get to that position by following the MS formula, though. We need to move into the niches as branch from there. The server niche goes nicely so far and embedded is shaping up, but neither of those are consumer niches. Apple has desktop publishing and soon amateur video. What do we have?
We have heart. And I'd say we're the CD/RW and they're the VHS and Divx distaff. We win out, not because we're popular, but because it works. Never forget that - MSFT glitches are our friends.
And my standard disclaimer... war sucks.
You'll get no argument from me on that one. We need to be shiny, happy techie guerillas, who spend most of their time doing fun stuff and ignoring the MSFT enemy, because the MSFT values don't matter to us. We need good parties, Net connections that MSFT can't grok, stuff that's cool by it's nature, not stuff the corporate mindset wants to shove at us.
Party on, dudes!
I mean, I've heard Bill Gibson and Stan Robinson come up with more plausible story lines at the Boreal SF convention, and that was in French!
Look, it's real simple - most people will misuse the technology to make babies who are:
1. male (hey, it's stupid, but that's what they'll do)
2. their society's distorted ideal (long necks, ears the size of elephants, it's all in the eyes of the beholder)
3. fewer genetic disease tendencies (this will actually be useful for some populations, until the next plague that makes HIV look a piker wipes out most of these perfect immune systems, since they won't have the glitches that let you survive wierd microbes (like sickle cell anemia which allows survival for most carriers against lethal diseases))
But, at least these designer kids will not write like Jon - that will be bred out of the human species as a survival mechanism.
News Flash: In 2050, the status symbol will be having Natural Kids, which only the rich can afford.
Well, as someone who's actually served (I was a Sargeant in the Canadian Army), I'd say this is definitely not a war.
Except:
In a war, you win by imposing chaos on your enemy and allowing your units to function. Since we are organized chaos, it's hard for them to impose further chaos on us, and easy for us to impose chaos upon them.
Some simple things to keep in mind:
Don't let the enemy impose the rules. Impose your own rules, define your own battlefield, determine your own objectives. Maybe we don't want to do GUI stuff for p0rn users. Maybe we don't want to seemless integration in one box. Maybe we don't want to make security easy so we're easy to hack.
Don't worry about the bucks. Let the corporate greedheads worry about the bucks. You want to change the world. Money is just a method to measure how much control one has of resources. MSFT has lots of that. But if we undermine control and reestablish the valuation system, we devalue his currency. Just like the British Secret Service counterfeited money to win the Falklands War - don't fight conventionally when you can win a different way.
Ain't nothing wrong with fighting on the Server Front. Who cares if it doesn't have fancy graphics - what do we use those for, anyway? Slide show presentations? Now, if you can crank out MP3 files and PNG faster, that I might care about.
And, as the original poster said, remember that the pie is growing - and we keep getting larger fractions. This is good, and MSFT knows it. They may talk about selling 3 million W2K licenses, but how many of those had some guy install Linux on top of it? A heck of a lot, that's for sure.