Careful study of Microsofts previous tactics in the information warfare department reveal that they do indeed use directives such as this to kick off FUD campaigns.
Maybe you don't have much of a concept of exactly *how* damaging a message from Microsoft such as "this computer is running a non-MS version of DOS, and Windows may not work" type message can be to the average end user in terms of making an informed and intelligent decision, but articles like this on Slashdot are intended to make you *learn* from lessons lost by previous computer people.
The fact is, this little gem of 'support information' about Linux, and how Linux is so cryptic and 'not compatible with Windows', carefully propagated around the computer user community can be very effective in terms of market control. This 'support information' isn't really support - it's a clever way of indicating that you might be helped by removing Linux from your system, and here's how to do it so that you can install Win2k...
If you're in the computer industry and intend to survive in it, you'd be wise to at least stop being so naive a little bit, and start looking behind the curtain. Even if just a little bit.
Was that large computer company Microsoft, by any chance? I can't think of any other company that would get so many calls from users trying to install NT...
I've been in the same boat, different waters. I've had tons of people ask me to come and fix their NT networks and get them properly connected to the Internet, figure out why their network printer isn't working for all stations, and give them better access to truly compliant email standards.
The solution: blow away NT on their server, install Linux. Set up proper networking using open standards. Give everyone good shares on the Linux box (Samba alone replaces 95% of the need for NT in all of my client base here in Los Angeles), and set up a good logfile analyzer to predict problems before they happen and mail me about them in advance.
Can't do that with NT, at least not out of the box...
My first Linux distribution CD, in 1994 (ish) was from a company called Yggdrasil. It shipped on a single CD and a boot floppy - just pop the floppy in your PC (booting from CD wasn't even thought of in PC-land back then), stick the CD in your drive, and wait a few minutes - you instantly had a fulling working Linux machine running so you could evaluate it before you installed anything on your disk. That was actually an *awesome* way of showing Linux off to my fellow co-workers - it didn't destroy anything, yet it showed you what you got... and if you wanted, you could move over to your hard disk and thus have a writable filesystem to work on. But it seems that those days are over - I wonder if they'll ever come back? It'd be awesome, given the speed and power (and RAM capabilities - maybe we'd get a small ramdisk for/home or something) of todays PC's, to have a demo CD that booted Linux in read only mode (except for the ramdisk, maybe), didn't change anything, and gave you a glimpse of the OS without any liability whatsoever... If RedHat/Mandrake/SUSE/Debian/etc. could pull this off, demo's of Linux' capabilities would be so much slicker... Anyone know of any distro's that can do that today, like the good old days of Yggdrasil?
Ever stop to think how much money is to be made in the pharmaceutical industry? I mean, the sheer profits to be gained are amazing, compared to any other industry.
In fact, it could be said that the pharmaceutical industry has one of the highest profit margins of any industry.
That's why we're all nuts - there's money to be made. Just like Jordache Jeans, we all want a piece of the fashion pie... and smart pharmaceutical marketing types are doing their damnedest to add some 'authority' to their plans by getting some dupe to write a report about the decline of American mental health.
Of course, the media helps to propagate the myth that Americans are insane too - after all, those Paxil commercials are worth a pretty penny, you know. Oh, and the odd nut case reacting badly to a mental health drug and killing a few of his coworkers is usually a nice windfall for the CNN/CBS/ABC/TW crowd too, so yeah, what the heck, lets promote drug use... it's worth it!
(But oh, lets not give away the secret. Nobody reports on the drugs that these people were taking just prior to rampage, lest the big-P's get beset by lawsuits from disgruntled family members.)
Don't buy the hype.
In 100 years time "Mental Health can be cured by drugs" will be one of those nice little facts filed in the same section as "The Earth is Flat" and "The Sun revolves Around Earth" theories...
There are *far* better ways to deal with stress than to pop a pill. Turn the TV off for a few weeks, for starters, stop reading the news and taking in all the FUD of society being propagated by profiteers of doom.
Take more walks, learn to play a musical instrument, go to the library for a few hours a day and study some distant culture. Make a drastic change in your lifestyle somehow - the thing causing your depression is most likely *not* the most obvious thing in your life...
Consider a change in career. *Live*.
But whatever you do, don't try to live life through a haze of drugs - I don't care what some 'authority' says, it aint worth the loss you *will* suffer as a result of letting drugs dominate your life.
No doubt, some pro anti-depressant user may come along and attept to refute my perspective in this thread, maybe some psych student will have some smart rebuttal, that doesn't matter. A little public flaming never really hurt, and I don't suffer from any DSM-documented "social disorders" that are likely to be triggered by a bit of controversy on Slashdot.
The average brainwashed American drug user doesn't scare me.
I am fairly confident that they know, deep down inside, under all that fog, that they're really not getting their moneys worth with Prozac or Paxil, and that no, it's not really working the way it was supposed to work, is it? If you don't notice it now, you will soon... but don't worry, the Big-P's will have a nice 'alternative' drug ready for you to use once you stop reaping 'rewards' from whatever it is you're on now.
Feeling cheated by Prozac? Not getting the life improvement you thought you'd get from Paxil?
That's coz it's a lie. Drugs don't make any difference.
... I am consistently disgusted by news of the state of the Internet industry in my homeland.
Oh sure, we can whore our coastlines out to any American movie company we want to (those portions of it that we haven't already allowed to be annexed by the Japanese, that is), and we will gladly divert taxpayer money into developing such amazingly destructive industries as tourism so that irresponsible Yanks can get their Dundee fixes any time they want to.
Give the film industry nice big fat government sanctioned kickbacks so that we can make trashy TV shows and B-level movies and be proud of it, no problem.
But when it comes to propagation of the Internet, which is guaranteed to be one of the big industry motivators for the new millenium, oh no, we have to resort to old-school big-business tactics and draconian censorship laws.
I'm ashamed.
My plans for moving back to Australia have just been extended another 5 years... which sucks, because I miss the beaches - oh wait, those are for Japanese tourist families only, now... (sarcasm)
... it was more of a commentary on the fact that our space program has become a "Galactic Trash Program" more than a "Woohoo, Vacation on the Moon" program...
Growing up as a kid in the 70's, I have an eager fascination with space exploration. (Heck, I'm just getting over the fact that it's 1999 and we *still* don't have a moon base...)
About the only reason I log on to the various mainstream newssites these days is to catch the space news - who launched what, what blew up on the launch pad, who has the latest mass-market space stuff in experimental stages, etc.
And I love hearing about the exploration of Mars, and the moon, etc.
But one thing that keeps bugging me is that we're littering all this Earth trash all over these external bodies - there's a Hasselblad sitting on a Lunar Rover on the moon, pointed at the stars... there are 2 dead robots sitting close to each other on Mars... there are strange devices hurtling towards the stars... whoa, lyrics!
Anyway, the point is, we've got all this debris out there. It bugs me.
What if we come to an early demise as a species, and in a few millenia the 'roaches or whatever evolve a Space-faring Caste and they start making their way out to distant rocks, and they find all this crap - and some half-wit 'roach from the Religious Caste holds it up as evidence proving that life once existed on these foreign planets!
Well, damnit. I guess I am a 70's Sci-Fi Cild after all, but c'mon - does anyone else feel the sentiment that NASA should be cleaning up after itself?
:)
OT: Euro vs. US web sites... interesting.
on
redhat.com Redone
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Never quite put my finger on it before, but you've definitely got a point - there are fundamental differences between Euro sites and US ones...
Sort of the same as the automobile industry - US designs cheesy godawful cars and EU designs cars that yuppies all over the US are cashing in their stock options to buy on a yearly basis.
Interesting. I'm going to continue to observe this effect as I browse the web, looking for cultural barriers like this. Lifes simple ironies (cultural/design ethos on an International medium) are interesting, at times...
When you become an 'adult', you'll find that there are plenty of laws that have been enacted because of 'the few' to protect/limit the actions of 'the many'.
This is nothing new, and has nothing to do with age. It's a consequence of the way our legal system works.
By the same argument, you could be saying "how dare our government enact a law making it illegal for adults to have sex with underaged teenagers - do they think that *all* of us adults wants to have sex with underage teenagers? This is *OUTRAGEOUS*!"...
So you'd better get used to it, kiddo. It's a permanent thing.
As I read this article, I had an interesting thought come to mind... what if we do discover a distant planet, and what if we do observe parameters indicating some form of life on that Planet?
In 10 years time, we'll supposedly have the technology to start taking pictures of distant planets - what if we eventually take a picture of a planet that definitively indicates that life exists on that planet (hey, are those *cities*?)?
What do we, as a species, do next?
We know we have distant neighbours. They're definitely some sorta life form, say. It'll take us 10,000 years to get there, at least using modern technology - what do we do about it?
I personally don't have a hard time envisioning a massive shift in cultural focus were this to happen - mankind may in fact become more unified around the goal of reaching out to our neighbours and establishing trade with them, or some sort of Unification of species (cultural, trade, religious, sexual, etc).
The ramifications are interesting - do we as a species make it a goal to contact this distant civilization in some fashion, or do we just leave it at that and go on pretending they don't exist, since for all intents and purposes, the existing Earth generation will never have contact with them? Well, I can imagine our own species undergoing massive shifts too - perhaps Earth wars will be fought over whether to contact our neighbours or not, who knows?
I'm sure there have to be some pretty good speculative fiction pieces on this sort of subject - do any Slashdotters know of authors that have treated this subject in any particular degree of quality or style? I'm inclining towards writing a short story myself, based on this subject... but surely there have to be some fairly decent authors out there who have already approached this same issue from a "what effect does it have on mankind *now* as we know it?" stance.
I read ATP, and it was worth every penny (though the local bookstore has an *autographed* copy that might be worth a few more pennies)...
And I would just like to say one thing: Chapter 68 of ATP was probably one of the most unique, fun, scientific and enthralling chapters I've ever read. If you haven't read ATP, just wait until you get to Chapter 68... all one and a half pages of it. Pure Gibson pleasure!
Back in the good old days of DOS (and thus, 80x25 page size), I had a programmer in my team who followed the "all functions must fit on one page" rule...
Man, the number of times I wanted to kill that guy. We called him Anti-Whitespace.
Scarey though, how that page gave guidelines that I myself have been guilty of following too many times in the past. Is there a counter-page to that one, that gives guidelines (general purpose) that make it easier to work with other programmers?
We've done a few PHP sites here at TekLab, and live by it as a platform for building smart web applications.
One of the best examples I can think of is my Totally Free Sample Library, which can be accessed here:
http://www.samplelibrary.net/
We developed this site using totally free tools, and it's a shining example of the power and flexibility of the PHP/Apache combo.
The most difficulty I have with Apache/PHP though is explaining to my clients that yes, in fact, this amazingly powerful platform that I want to use for their projects *is* free, and it is fundamentally a better choice than IIS/ASP for all of their work. They just can't believe it.
Then I show them what we've done with SLN, and it's pretty much a done deal...
One thing that is definitely not really made clear in this FoF/MS/Linux broo-haha is the fact that Linux is cutting into MS' *SERVER* market, not its desktop market.
And this lawsuit is really about MS' desktop operating system - Windows 95/98.
So on that basis, what Jackson has said is that Linux can't compete with Windows 95/98, and its true - right now, Linux is not a desktop operating system that Ma Apple Pie is gonna install.
But on the backside of this, when you are comparing *SERVER* products, Linux is a match for NT, for sure...
First of all, I don't care about being moderated down to "Troll", even though I was *not* trolling.
The fact that I was moderated *up* to +4 shortly after posting this article, and then subsequently back down to 1 (Troll) is just evidence that some moderator likes Bowie's music, and got offended that I might counter the party view that this Bowie interview is anything other than utterly boring. Big deal, the moderator system is what it is.
But the fact remains, this interview was utterly boring, and I fail to see the significance to the average Slashdot reader.
Is it not clearly obvious that Bowie is just Al-Gore'ing MP3, that he's Al-Gore'ing "geekiness", that he's just jumping on the bandwagon and getting some nice press to scare up a few more subscriptions to his IPO'd ISP?
To me, he's coming off as a tired old musician, who is attempting to cash in a few of his pop-culture chips. Sure, I appreciate his music (his earlier stuff, certainly), but I'm tired of hearing how he's responsible for all this wonderful new social change, when in fact he's had nothing to do with it.
This interview had *very little* to do with Bowie's artwork, his music. It had everything to do with Bowie getting up there on a bandwagon and Al-Gore'ing everyone about how wonderfully technologically inclined he is, how he predicted the future in the 60's, and how he was tragically 'with it' enough to have been part of the MP3 scene.
This whole interview gave me flashbacks to when Billy Idol was trying to come off as The Original Cyberpunk in the early 90's. How utterly droll.
Since Slashdot is often a host platform for incisive social discussion, I fail to see how this Bowie article was anything other than an opportunity for a few Slashdotters to get out there and get some warm fuzzies about their favourite musician - that's fine, but I find it humorous to say the least that there are a few moderators who can't recognize Bowie's grandstanding for what it is, and chose to Troll me down just because I don't buy Bowie's party line.
Is it just me, or did anyone else get incredibly bored with the constant "I did that first, that was me, I was there before anyone else" line that just kept coming up during that interview?
That whole article just felt so AlGore'ish to me. I mean, sure, yeah, the man did some interesting and new and innovative things, but come on... he had a Rio last year, and that makes him feel like he was in on the MP3 scene before anyone else?
The man is clueless. Yay for his previous success, but just get over yourself, Bowie.
As much as I'm happy that this is finally out there, and I feel that this is a major step in bringing Microsoft into line with the rest of the computer industry, I want to make sure that people realize that this is BY NO MEANS A GUILTY VERDICT.
It's just a "Finding of Fact" from the Judge - he's selected all the facts presented to him, and determined what he finds to be true, and supported by the arguments presented.
I am not a lawyer, but I know enough to realize that this is not a final verdict, and that this trial could still go anywhere from this point on.
It's a significant step, but before we get all slashdot-a-riffic about how Microsoft sucks, just realize that this is a formal step in what is still going to be a very long legal battle against Microsoft.
If anything, however, this will effect a lot of peoples attitudes towards Microsoft, regardless of their understanding of the legal system and exactly what this FoF means... so we should probably be happy about that.
People generally are no longer going to be viewing Microsoft as the warm fuzzy company that it is in the minds of many ignorant Americans, as a result of this Finding of Fact.
And that's a good thing, because it was our (computer industry in generaly) complacency towards businesses like Microsoft, doing the things they've done, that led to this problem in the first place...
I pride myself on being relatively hip to most of the articles that are posted to Slashdot. Heck, I even often read 'em on memepool before they make it over here. And its not like I'm not hep to some of the other more obscure programming languages out there - I've played with Haskell, and I even know a few Clean tricks. (Okay, so I abhor Perl, but is that so bad? At least I can make awk do its thing, and I'm a C programmer by trade.)
But in this particular case, I have *no* idea what the hell is the big deal. Sure, I know TEX is that monster publishing engine, and yeah, I've rotely clicked the install a few times during a Linux-install-a-thon, with perfectly good intentions to check it and its source tarball out one of these days.
But what is the big deal about a calendar?
Please, oh guru's of text-language fantasia, please enlighten me. What's the big deal here, folks? I just don't get it.
Umm... wait a minute. I just realized that I could just click the link and find out for myself.
But you know what? Okay, okay, I'll admit it. To be totally honest here, TEX scares me. I mean, it *scares* me. I don't wanna have to learn it to do fancy BOFH-style user manuals. Since when does typing 'make' to make a correction to a document feel right?
The idea of entering equation-like scripts just to get a few well-formatted chars up on the screen in the right typeface ready for printing just feels lame to me. And I'm afraid of it because hey, its still around, hey, there are people using it still, and hey, it just got a fancy new article about it on Slashdot. It's hurting my inner leet hacker persona *not* to know about TeX, and that just makes me even more scared of it.
So I haven't checked it out yet.
Someone, please, either flame me so expertly that I dare not defile your TeXiness in the future, or explain it to me in hacker bean-value terms.
I wholeheartedly agree with Gold on the issue that peer review is a stifling factor in modern scientific research, one that I have often thought to put economic viability before scientific worth.
After all, what better way to get an edge on your competitor than to pre-qualify their products before they are released for general acceptance in the scientific 'marketplace'.
Imagine this same system being used by such scientific innovators as Microsoft and Sun, and you see why this is really not the best way for scientific validity to be obtained.
The fact is, such things as 'competitive interest' and 'peer acceptance' have no place in scientific research - they are simply forms of maintaining status quo amongst the players involved (i.e. what everyone thinks and accepts, as opposed to what 'individuals discover'), rather than means by which scientific progress can flourish and prosper.
I think we find a lot of this anti-establishment view in the Slashdot/open source community as well - certainly its evident in the OS arena. If we all agreed to only use that which had been peer approved, we'd be subject to the rules of marketing and economics, and thus we wouldn't be using such alternative OS's as BeOS/FreeBSD/Linux, etc. By this stance, Microsoft NT would be the only valid operating system - and in fact, in some realms of the computer industry, this is the case.
Now, I don't think 'peer review' of code is the same thing here, though... in an open source environment, we're more prone to a 'peer cooperative' effort than 'peer review' - i.e. if you find bugs in someone elses software, fix it and let 'em have the fix - thus progress is made.
I for one look forward to reading his memoirs when they are published - and I monitor with continued interest the Slashdot view on 'scientific methods'.
Slashdot Mirror
... should stop being so naive.
...
Careful study of Microsofts previous tactics in the information warfare department reveal that they do indeed use directives such as this to kick off FUD campaigns.
Maybe you don't have much of a concept of exactly *how* damaging a message from Microsoft such as "this computer is running a non-MS version of DOS, and Windows may not work" type message can be to the average end user in terms of making an informed and intelligent decision, but articles like this on Slashdot are intended to make you *learn* from lessons lost by previous computer people.
The fact is, this little gem of 'support information' about Linux, and how Linux is so cryptic and 'not compatible with Windows', carefully propagated around the computer user community can be very effective in terms of market control. This 'support information' isn't really support - it's a clever way of indicating that you might be helped by removing Linux from your system, and here's how to do it so that you can install Win2k
If you're in the computer industry and intend to survive in it, you'd be wise to at least stop being so naive a little bit, and start looking behind the curtain. Even if just a little bit.
Was that large computer company Microsoft, by any chance? I can't think of any other company that would get so many calls from users trying to install NT...
I've been in the same boat, different waters. I've had tons of people ask me to come and fix their NT networks and get them properly connected to the Internet, figure out why their network printer isn't working for all stations, and give them better access to truly compliant email standards.
The solution: blow away NT on their server, install Linux. Set up proper networking using open standards. Give everyone good shares on the Linux box (Samba alone replaces 95% of the need for NT in all of my client base here in Los Angeles), and set up a good logfile analyzer to predict problems before they happen and mail me about them in advance.
Can't do that with NT, at least not out of the box...
My first Linux distribution CD, in 1994 (ish) was from a company called Yggdrasil. It shipped on a single CD and a boot floppy - just pop the floppy in your PC (booting from CD wasn't even thought of in PC-land back then), stick the CD in your drive, and wait a few minutes - you instantly had a fulling working Linux machine running so you could evaluate it before you installed anything on your disk. That was actually an *awesome* way of showing Linux off to my fellow co-workers - it didn't destroy anything, yet it showed you what you got... and if you wanted, you could move over to your hard disk and thus have a writable filesystem to work on. But it seems that those days are over - I wonder if they'll ever come back? It'd be awesome, given the speed and power (and RAM capabilities - maybe we'd get a small ramdisk for /home or something) of todays PC's, to have a demo CD that booted Linux in read only mode (except for the ramdisk, maybe), didn't change anything, and gave you a glimpse of the OS without any liability whatsoever... If RedHat/Mandrake/SUSE/Debian/etc. could pull this off, demo's of Linux' capabilities would be so much slicker... Anyone know of any distro's that can do that today, like the good old days of Yggdrasil?
Ever stop to think how much money is to be made in the pharmaceutical industry? I mean, the sheer profits to be gained are amazing, compared to any other industry.
In fact, it could be said that the pharmaceutical industry has one of the highest profit margins of any industry.
That's why we're all nuts - there's money to be made. Just like Jordache Jeans, we all want a piece of the fashion pie... and smart pharmaceutical marketing types are doing their damnedest to add some 'authority' to their plans by getting some dupe to write a report about the decline of American mental health.
Of course, the media helps to propagate the myth that Americans are insane too - after all, those Paxil commercials are worth a pretty penny, you know. Oh, and the odd nut case reacting badly to a mental health drug and killing a few of his coworkers is usually a nice windfall for the CNN/CBS/ABC/TW crowd too, so yeah, what the heck, lets promote drug use... it's worth it!
(But oh, lets not give away the secret. Nobody reports on the drugs that these people were taking just prior to rampage, lest the big-P's get beset by lawsuits from disgruntled family members.)
Don't buy the hype.
In 100 years time "Mental Health can be cured by drugs" will be one of those nice little facts filed in the same section as "The Earth is Flat" and "The Sun revolves Around Earth" theories...
There are *far* better ways to deal with stress than to pop a pill. Turn the TV off for a few weeks, for starters, stop reading the news and taking in all the FUD of society being propagated by profiteers of doom.
Take more walks, learn to play a musical instrument, go to the library for a few hours a day and study some distant culture. Make a drastic change in your lifestyle somehow - the thing causing your depression is most likely *not* the most obvious thing in your life...
Consider a change in career. *Live*.
But whatever you do, don't try to live life through a haze of drugs - I don't care what some 'authority' says, it aint worth the loss you *will* suffer as a result of letting drugs dominate your life.
No doubt, some pro anti-depressant user may come along and attept to refute my perspective in this thread, maybe some psych student will have some smart rebuttal, that doesn't matter. A little public flaming never really hurt, and I don't suffer from any DSM-documented "social disorders" that are likely to be triggered by a bit of controversy on Slashdot.
The average brainwashed American drug user doesn't scare me.
I am fairly confident that they know, deep down inside, under all that fog, that they're really not getting their moneys worth with Prozac or Paxil, and that no, it's not really working the way it was supposed to work, is it? If you don't notice it now, you will soon... but don't worry, the Big-P's will have a nice 'alternative' drug ready for you to use once you stop reaping 'rewards' from whatever it is you're on now.
Feeling cheated by Prozac? Not getting the life improvement you thought you'd get from Paxil?
That's coz it's a lie. Drugs don't make any difference.
Ummm... have you *been* to the California beaches here? Fine by me if someone wants to own 'em.
Cottesloe and City Beach is a different story... at least in the US they're not *pretending* to be an advanced civilization.
... I am consistently disgusted by news of the state of the Internet industry in my homeland.
Oh sure, we can whore our coastlines out to any American movie company we want to (those portions of it that we haven't already allowed to be annexed by the Japanese, that is), and we will gladly divert taxpayer money into developing such amazingly destructive industries as tourism so that irresponsible Yanks can get their Dundee fixes any time they want to.
Give the film industry nice big fat government sanctioned kickbacks so that we can make trashy TV shows and B-level movies and be proud of it, no problem.
But when it comes to propagation of the Internet, which is guaranteed to be one of the big industry motivators for the new millenium, oh no, we have to resort to old-school big-business tactics and draconian censorship laws.
I'm ashamed.
My plans for moving back to Australia have just been extended another 5 years... which sucks, because I miss the beaches - oh wait, those are for Japanese tourist families only, now... (sarcasm)
Erck.
... it was more of a commentary on the fact that our space program has become a "Galactic Trash Program" more than a "Woohoo, Vacation on the Moon" program...
Guess that was missed a bit.
Growing up as a kid in the 70's, I have an eager fascination with space exploration. (Heck, I'm just getting over the fact that it's 1999 and we *still* don't have a moon base...)
... there are 2 dead robots sitting close to each other on Mars ... there are strange devices hurtling towards the stars ... whoa, lyrics!
About the only reason I log on to the various mainstream newssites these days is to catch the space news - who launched what, what blew up on the launch pad, who has the latest mass-market space stuff in experimental stages, etc.
And I love hearing about the exploration of Mars, and the moon, etc.
But one thing that keeps bugging me is that we're littering all this Earth trash all over these external bodies - there's a Hasselblad sitting on a Lunar Rover on the moon, pointed at the stars
Anyway, the point is, we've got all this debris out there. It bugs me.
What if we come to an early demise as a species, and in a few millenia the 'roaches or whatever evolve a Space-faring Caste and they start making their way out to distant rocks, and they find all this crap - and some half-wit 'roach from the Religious Caste holds it up as evidence proving that life once existed on these foreign planets!
Well, damnit. I guess I am a 70's Sci-Fi Cild after all, but c'mon - does anyone else feel the sentiment that NASA should be cleaning up after itself?
:)
Never quite put my finger on it before, but you've definitely got a point - there are fundamental differences between Euro sites and US ones...
Sort of the same as the automobile industry - US designs cheesy godawful cars and EU designs cars that yuppies all over the US are cashing in their stock options to buy on a yearly basis.
Interesting. I'm going to continue to observe this effect as I browse the web, looking for cultural barriers like this. Lifes simple ironies (cultural/design ethos on an International medium) are interesting, at times...
When you become an 'adult', you'll find that there are plenty of laws that have been enacted because of 'the few' to protect/limit the actions of 'the many'.
...
This is nothing new, and has nothing to do with age. It's a consequence of the way our legal system works.
By the same argument, you could be saying "how dare our government enact a law making it illegal for adults to have sex with underaged teenagers - do they think that *all* of us adults wants to have sex with underage teenagers? This is *OUTRAGEOUS*!"
So you'd better get used to it, kiddo. It's a permanent thing.
As I read this article, I had an interesting thought come to mind... what if we do discover a distant planet, and what if we do observe parameters indicating some form of life on that Planet?
In 10 years time, we'll supposedly have the technology to start taking pictures of distant planets - what if we eventually take a picture of a planet that definitively indicates that life exists on that planet (hey, are those *cities*?)?
What do we, as a species, do next?
We know we have distant neighbours. They're definitely some sorta life form, say. It'll take us 10,000 years to get there, at least using modern technology - what do we do about it?
I personally don't have a hard time envisioning a massive shift in cultural focus were this to happen - mankind may in fact become more unified around the goal of reaching out to our neighbours and establishing trade with them, or some sort of Unification of species (cultural, trade, religious, sexual, etc).
The ramifications are interesting - do we as a species make it a goal to contact this distant civilization in some fashion, or do we just leave it at that and go on pretending they don't exist, since for all intents and purposes, the existing Earth generation will never have contact with them? Well, I can imagine our own species undergoing massive shifts too - perhaps Earth wars will be fought over whether to contact our neighbours or not, who knows?
I'm sure there have to be some pretty good speculative fiction pieces on this sort of subject - do any Slashdotters know of authors that have treated this subject in any particular degree of quality or style? I'm inclining towards writing a short story myself, based on this subject... but surely there have to be some fairly decent authors out there who have already approached this same issue from a "what effect does it have on mankind *now* as we know it?" stance.
I read ATP, and it was worth every penny (though the local bookstore has an *autographed* copy that might be worth a few more pennies)...
And I would just like to say one thing: Chapter 68 of ATP was probably one of the most unique, fun, scientific and enthralling chapters I've ever read. If you haven't read ATP, just wait until you get to Chapter 68... all one and a half pages of it. Pure Gibson pleasure!
Back in the good old days of DOS (and thus, 80x25 page size), I had a programmer in my team who followed the "all functions must fit on one page" rule...
Man, the number of times I wanted to kill that guy. We called him Anti-Whitespace.
Scarey though, how that page gave guidelines that I myself have been guilty of following too many times in the past. Is there a counter-page to that one, that gives guidelines (general purpose) that make it easier to work with other programmers?
Yeah, I dig it... functionality first, then we'll make it pretty...
We've done a few PHP sites here at TekLab, and live by it as a platform for building smart web applications.
One of the best examples I can think of is my Totally Free Sample Library, which can be accessed here:
http://www.samplelibrary.net/
We developed this site using totally free tools, and it's a shining example of the power and flexibility of the PHP/Apache combo.
The most difficulty I have with Apache/PHP though is explaining to my clients that yes, in fact, this amazingly powerful platform that I want to use for their projects *is* free, and it is fundamentally a better choice than IIS/ASP for all of their work. They just can't believe it.
Then I show them what we've done with SLN, and it's pretty much a done deal...
You couldn't more elegantly summarize the concept of distant, non-attached, portable computing than with the image of footprints in the sand.
A dream for many geeks.
So not only do they have very good programmers working for them, (Linux et al), they also have semi-decent marketing types too.
Cool.
One thing that is definitely not really made clear in this FoF/MS/Linux broo-haha is the fact that Linux is cutting into MS' *SERVER* market, not its desktop market.
And this lawsuit is really about MS' desktop operating system - Windows 95/98.
So on that basis, what Jackson has said is that Linux can't compete with Windows 95/98, and its true - right now, Linux is not a desktop operating system that Ma Apple Pie is gonna install.
But on the backside of this, when you are comparing *SERVER* products, Linux is a match for NT, for sure...
First of all, I don't care about being moderated down to "Troll", even though I was *not* trolling.
The fact that I was moderated *up* to +4 shortly after posting this article, and then subsequently back down to 1 (Troll) is just evidence that some moderator likes Bowie's music, and got offended that I might counter the party view that this Bowie interview is anything other than utterly boring. Big deal, the moderator system is what it is.
But the fact remains, this interview was utterly boring, and I fail to see the significance to the average Slashdot reader.
Is it not clearly obvious that Bowie is just Al-Gore'ing MP3, that he's Al-Gore'ing "geekiness", that he's just jumping on the bandwagon and getting some nice press to scare up a few more subscriptions to his IPO'd ISP?
To me, he's coming off as a tired old musician, who is attempting to cash in a few of his pop-culture chips. Sure, I appreciate his music (his earlier stuff, certainly), but I'm tired of hearing how he's responsible for all this wonderful new social change, when in fact he's had nothing to do with it.
This interview had *very little* to do with Bowie's artwork, his music. It had everything to do with Bowie getting up there on a bandwagon and Al-Gore'ing everyone about how wonderfully technologically inclined he is, how he predicted the future in the 60's, and how he was tragically 'with it' enough to have been part of the MP3 scene.
This whole interview gave me flashbacks to when Billy Idol was trying to come off as The Original Cyberpunk in the early 90's. How utterly droll.
Since Slashdot is often a host platform for incisive social discussion, I fail to see how this Bowie article was anything other than an opportunity for a few Slashdotters to get out there and get some warm fuzzies about their favourite musician - that's fine, but I find it humorous to say the least that there are a few moderators who can't recognize Bowie's grandstanding for what it is, and chose to Troll me down just because I don't buy Bowie's party line.
Bowie Al-Gore'd me to death. Bowie is boring.
Is this really a Troll?
The man is the original pop chameleon.
Geek is cool, these days.
Is it just me, or did anyone else get incredibly bored with the constant "I did that first, that was me, I was there before anyone else" line that just kept coming up during that interview?
That whole article just felt so AlGore'ish to me. I mean, sure, yeah, the man did some interesting and new and innovative things, but come on... he had a Rio last year, and that makes him feel like he was in on the MP3 scene before anyone else?
The man is clueless. Yay for his previous success, but just get over yourself, Bowie.
Your Pop Industry Schmuck Game Is Over.
As much as I'm happy that this is finally out there, and I feel that this is a major step in bringing Microsoft into line with the rest of the computer industry, I want to make sure that people realize that this is BY NO MEANS A GUILTY VERDICT.
It's just a "Finding of Fact" from the Judge - he's selected all the facts presented to him, and determined what he finds to be true, and supported by the arguments presented.
I am not a lawyer, but I know enough to realize that this is not a final verdict, and that this trial could still go anywhere from this point on.
It's a significant step, but before we get all slashdot-a-riffic about how Microsoft sucks, just realize that this is a formal step in what is still going to be a very long legal battle against Microsoft.
If anything, however, this will effect a lot of peoples attitudes towards Microsoft, regardless of their understanding of the legal system and exactly what this FoF means... so we should probably be happy about that.
People generally are no longer going to be viewing Microsoft as the warm fuzzy company that it is in the minds of many ignorant Americans, as a result of this Finding of Fact.
And that's a good thing, because it was our (computer industry in generaly) complacency towards businesses like Microsoft, doing the things they've done, that led to this problem in the first place...
Would it be fair to say that it's mostly math nerds that enjoy a bit of TeX now and then, given it's propensity for equation-layouts?
Because that would probably explain my being scared of it - I'm just not mathematically inclined, even though I have been a programmer for years.
Is TeX good for something other than math stuff, or is that it's primary sticking point... heck, maybe I'll go read a FAQ or two.
I pride myself on being relatively hip to most of the articles that are posted to Slashdot. Heck, I even often read 'em on memepool before they make it over here. And its not like I'm not hep to some of the other more obscure programming languages out there - I've played with Haskell, and I even know a few Clean tricks. (Okay, so I abhor Perl, but is that so bad? At least I can make awk do its thing, and I'm a C programmer by trade.)
But in this particular case, I have *no* idea what the hell is the big deal. Sure, I know TEX is that monster publishing engine, and yeah, I've rotely clicked the install a few times during a Linux-install-a-thon, with perfectly good intentions to check it and its source tarball out one of these days.
But what is the big deal about a calendar?
Please, oh guru's of text-language fantasia, please enlighten me. What's the big deal here, folks? I just don't get it.
Umm... wait a minute. I just realized that I could just click the link and find out for myself.
But you know what? Okay, okay, I'll admit it. To be totally honest here, TEX scares me. I mean, it *scares* me. I don't wanna have to learn it to do fancy BOFH-style user manuals. Since when does typing 'make' to make a correction to a document feel right?
The idea of entering equation-like scripts just to get a few well-formatted chars up on the screen in the right typeface ready for printing just feels lame to me. And I'm afraid of it because hey, its still around, hey, there are people using it still, and hey, it just got a fancy new article about it on Slashdot. It's hurting my inner leet hacker persona *not* to know about TeX, and that just makes me even more scared of it.
So I haven't checked it out yet.
Someone, please, either flame me so expertly that I dare not defile your TeXiness in the future, or explain it to me in hacker bean-value terms.
What is the big deal with TeX?
... I posted my views earlier, I guess we have a case of article collision.
I wholeheartedly agree with Gold on the issue that peer review is a stifling factor in modern scientific research, one that I have often thought to put economic viability before scientific worth.
After all, what better way to get an edge on your competitor than to pre-qualify their products before they are released for general acceptance in the scientific 'marketplace'.
Imagine this same system being used by such scientific innovators as Microsoft and Sun, and you see why this is really not the best way for scientific validity to be obtained.
The fact is, such things as 'competitive interest' and 'peer acceptance' have no place in scientific research - they are simply forms of maintaining status quo amongst the players involved (i.e. what everyone thinks and accepts, as opposed to what 'individuals discover'), rather than means by which scientific progress can flourish and prosper.
I think we find a lot of this anti-establishment view in the Slashdot/open source community as well - certainly its evident in the OS arena. If we all agreed to only use that which had been peer approved, we'd be subject to the rules of marketing and economics, and thus we wouldn't be using such alternative OS's as BeOS/FreeBSD/Linux, etc. By this stance, Microsoft NT would be the only valid operating system - and in fact, in some realms of the computer industry, this is the case.
Now, I don't think 'peer review' of code is the same thing here, though... in an open source environment, we're more prone to a 'peer cooperative' effort than 'peer review' - i.e. if you find bugs in someone elses software, fix it and let 'em have the fix - thus progress is made.
I for one look forward to reading his memoirs when they are published - and I monitor with continued interest the Slashdot view on 'scientific methods'.