I work in a large CD store on the East Coast (Which one? I'll give you a hint, we've been financially fucked ever since the late 1990s, only partially due to P2P, more due to some really stupid decisions made out in California [that's another hint]). This gives me a unique opportunity to get a mildly decent idea of what people are buying - there's an almost representative sample of college kids, ten year olds, minivan moms, old fogies, hippie burnouts, and Dr. Joe Average in his SUV.
Granted, classical music is not the largest seller in this store. But the people who buy classical music buy in BULK. It's not uncommon for one customer to slap down three Benjamins (that's $300 for those of you not 'hip' to my street slang) at a time for his latest classical bonaza. And several "artists" (Charlotte Church, Bocelli, Sarah Vaughn, Diana Krall) have reguarly placed in the top 25 sellers for the store - during weeks when Dave Matthews, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and other mainstream artists came out with new releases. Granted, I'm not a fan of any of these artists (and Ms. Krall is slightly more in the jazz/vocals realm) - but what's important is that these people are selling in big numbers, which means SOMEONE out there is buying the stuff.
To say that "people don't like classical music nowadays" is a rather ignorant statement to make. One of the reasons why classical doesn't often make it to the charts is that, let's take an example... Beethoven's 9th symphony. Would you like the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Ensemb-- do you understand my point? There's a wealth of different versions to choose from, and so the already merely-moderate consumer base is spread even thinner.
Granted, classical isn't usually that popular with the under-30 crowd (generalization). But it's been constantly popular with the elderly for the past three or four generations - and those aren't the same elderly, because OLD PEOPLE DIE. However, new ones are always cropping up to take their place. You can usually tell them by the Oldsmobiles with the stuffed animals in the back.
I think this comes, on one level, as no surprise to a great many people. You cannot continue to step on the toes of the little person without working up some "bad karma" (as a student of eastern religion, not a/. geek, might say), and sooner or later it's going to catch up with you. The only factors are time and luck.
And... it's about god damned time Jesse Helms did something useful.:)
This does seem like a pretty big blow to GPL in general - but I figured if anyone would know of good alternatives to Netware, it'd be the dudes at/. - so, honestly - is this the beginning of the end for GPL, or will Novell "correct" their "mistake" (both in quotations, as I don't think I know enough about the behind-the-scenes detail to make a subjective decision like that) with a future update?
Your score of "0" speaks volumes about your abilities to construct an insightful comment. But just for the sake of disproving your moronic babblings...
Hypothetical situation - I see a problem with black people. They turn nice neighborhoods into ghettos by forcing whites out and decreasing the property values, they have a higher rate of crime and a lower average life span, which must mean they carry disease of some sort. This, naturally raises a furor in the educated crowd, jumping on my poorly thought out hypothesis and point out the Chevy-sized holes in my "logic". Your response? "Don't listen to those well educated people trying to play this down! If my man Nugneant sees a problem, IT MUST BE SO!". And congratulations, fuckwit! We have the new KKK!
And to all the well meaning idiot liberals who are about to pounce on the "reply" link - HYPOTHETICAL. I repeat: hypothetical. Now for god's sake, give me a break.
But global warming has been shown to be a bit of an exaggeration... studies are now finding that humans aren't contributing as much to it as we'd like to think... Ken Wilbur mentions this, I believe, in "Boomeritis", and it's covered in other texts as well... these things come and go in cycles, and we're in the middle of a warming cycle... that's not to say that I don't think that dumping ten tons of refridgerant-12 is a good idea... but global warming is largely another media exaggeration, like the dangers of travelling abroad (discussed in this/. thread - first post in thread is a bit of a troll, but there's some insightful commentary further down), or the CIA / FBI's monthly warnings of "yes sir, there's a-gonna be another o' dem terry-rist attacks soon, y'all best be prepared, jus' in case!".
My opinions may be a bit strong... but I'm open to people with insightful commentaries both for and against my viewpoints on this... I don't profess to be an ecologist... but the commentaries I've read that attribute this to a healthy, natural Earth cycle have, thus far, been far more convincing.
Something tells me this plan will fall through without anything being done...
Not to mention, okay, collect AOL discs, send them back to AOL... hmm now, AOL now has 1 million discs which didn't reach new users. Hmmm... LET'S SEND THOSE PONIES RIGHT BACK UP! THANK YOU GENTS FOR THE SURPLUS!
The entire thing just seems a bit pointless at best, counter productive at worst.
Oh yeah, that'll really get him out and seeing the world. Because India, Thailand, Belgium, they really want Linux! In fact, the situation in Iraq isn't over oil and Islam - Osama is just jealous of our open source solutions! And don't believe what you hear about Russia - rather than pirating all their Microsoft products, the government really is interested in hiring a bunch of foreigners to come in and breath Cheetoh breath all over the place while setting up RedHat!
I'm hoping you were being sarcastic, and just failed to make your sarcasm clear, because if you're serious, you really need to go back to school and brush up on your reading comprehension.
Are you religious? Most faiths have organized means to send you to do mission work (where you could even use your skills).
Talk about travelling all over the world to destroy it. I think if I was the "owner" of a country, I would much rather see a group of marines off the coast than a group of missionaries. The marines, at worst, will kill my warriors and take my women as their wives. The missionaries will turn my warriors into cloudy eyed Jesus freaks, and my women into chaste, humorless, passionless droids.
Sooner or later, the computers will have to occupy inverse space in order to keep up with progress. And then how can the geeks build them in stuffed animals and desks and corpses and stuff? Since, obviously, stuffed animals, desks, human bodies, et al., are inferior technology and not able to be easily miniaturized.
In response to people who have been raising concerns as to whether or not anyone wants to travel to Boston -
Perhaps MacWorld is actually trying for some newbie walk-ins. Think about it. Who, stereotypically, uses Macs? Rich college kids who like to think they're "cool" and "hip". Where are there a lot of elitist colleges whose student base is pretty financially well-off? Boston!! What do you do if you're a rich trendy kid and you want to skip class, but Dave Matthews isn't going on tour? HANG OUT AT MACWORLD!!
DISCLAIMER: I am in no way a fan, supporter, or advocate of Apple, MacWorld, or Dave Matthews, and my views are not to be taken as such.
There are advertisements running in several trade magazines that say something to the effect of, "I got tired of requiring an office full of people to help me keep my PC stable - so I bought a Mac" or "At home, I don't have a tech support department to keep my PC running. So I bought a Mac". Just who the hell is Apple trying to target with this ridiculous advertising? The coveted "60 year old" crowd? Somehow I doubt Grandpa will enjoy all the cutesy worthless shareware as much the Mac's current audience - 20-24 year olds desperate to look "cool" and "edgy" and "eXtreme" in between trips to the local coffeehouse, and 14-18 year old caucasian girls who squeal "kawaii" at anything Japanese - do.
Granted. But what about robotic understanding? And I'm not making any cheesy PAK CHOOIE UNF references, I'm almost serious. Who's to say that a robot cannot be programmed to exist in multiple dimensions? Bleah, it's late at night and I'm making no sense, I give up.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's annoying when people use blanket statements... of course, it's equally annoying to qualify everything. But they're scientists, dammit, so they should be forced to put up with such annoyances.
A minor tangent
on
Life on Pluto?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I've always been amazed at the arrogance of the human race, the arrogant logic that dictates that because "we" need liquid formed from two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, that automatically this is a pre-requisite for life. When it comes down to it, who are we to dictate which planets contain life and which do not? We can only percieve things along three, possibly four dimensions. I'm no mathematician, nor can I spell the word properly, but seems to me there's a lot more than just three, maybe four numbers in the numeric alphabet (contradiction intended). Just because we cannot percieve a dimension, does that mean life cannot occupy it?
And anyone who makes a "tree falling in a forest" reference in this thread is an annoying idiot.
I hear that NBC is hopping mad over this blatant attempt by public television to cut off a slice of the network pie. So they're going to have a show next season that's exactly the same, only each scientist has a pet monkey with him, and each pet monkey has a typewriter.
The scientist CAN use the pet monkey in his experiments, either as a test subject or just for parts and labor, but can also gain bonus points (which can be traded for tools, water, Cheetos, etc) if the pet monkey is allowed to play at the typewriter long enough to type out Hamlet, Finnegan's Wake, or any short story by Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut.
However, if the monkey accidently produces a copy of any poem by Elizabeth Barring Brown or a Jane Austen novel, the monkey is shot between the eyes and dragged off to be made into soup.
It's a "fast paced game of cat and mouse!", according to the network insiders!
One con you forgot to mention is the fact that, since it's sloppily coded in Java, it tends to drag your system resources down into the crapper. It's very hard to let something this laggy and slow run in the background while life goes on around you - you need to check USENET, there are some.rar files that look pretty interesting,.rar files need to be expanded, 650MB movie files need to be, ahem, "studied", CDs need to be burned... err... all the while you have fat, bloated, Sister Susan in the background, happily wheezing away as she downloads some 500MB.shn concert from an anonymous source.
Don't get me wrong, I love what Furthernet attempts to do... I just think it needs an interface overhaul. And Frank Zappa concerts, I cannot fucking believe they neglect the true maestro himself in favor of all this Dave Matthews Band soundalike shit.
...taking on a man who doesn't have legal fees because he is a lawyer...
Honestly, where do people always come up with this stupid idea? Haven't you ever heard the saying, "A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client"?
And I seriously doubt lawyers give the same "hook-ups" that you do to all your friends at Starbucks. It's time and money. They may offer a "mate's rate", but freebies in the legal system are hard to come by.
Even though the death of Napster is long, drawn out, and killing off what little dignity it has left (we're dead! no we're bankrupt! no now we're sold! we'll be back! whoops we're dead again), I cannot deny that there were many, many good times to be had on the network.
Thanks, Napster, for 18 months of bliss, happiness, and new music.
Flash back to 1998, before the Y2k bug ended civilization and killed us all and all that stuff... VRML was going to be the "next big thing, honestly, trust us on this".
Imagine what knocking good fun Biff would have with this 3D hoo-hah.
Candles are basically wax and coloring. Just like the outside stuff on a lump of Gouda cheese. When I went to elementary school, it was a mark of coolness to eat the wax with your cheese. Wax is pretty non toxic. Disgusting as fuck, but non toxic.
Now, the string might pose a choking hazard.
Slashdot Mirror
I work in a large CD store on the East Coast (Which one? I'll give you a hint, we've been financially fucked ever since the late 1990s, only partially due to P2P, more due to some really stupid decisions made out in California [that's another hint]). This gives me a unique opportunity to get a mildly decent idea of what people are buying - there's an almost representative sample of college kids, ten year olds, minivan moms, old fogies, hippie burnouts, and Dr. Joe Average in his SUV. Granted, classical music is not the largest seller in this store. But the people who buy classical music buy in BULK. It's not uncommon for one customer to slap down three Benjamins (that's $300 for those of you not 'hip' to my street slang) at a time for his latest classical bonaza. And several "artists" (Charlotte Church, Bocelli, Sarah Vaughn, Diana Krall) have reguarly placed in the top 25 sellers for the store - during weeks when Dave Matthews, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and other mainstream artists came out with new releases. Granted, I'm not a fan of any of these artists (and Ms. Krall is slightly more in the jazz/vocals realm) - but what's important is that these people are selling in big numbers, which means SOMEONE out there is buying the stuff. To say that "people don't like classical music nowadays" is a rather ignorant statement to make. One of the reasons why classical doesn't often make it to the charts is that, let's take an example... Beethoven's 9th symphony. Would you like the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, the Ensemb-- do you understand my point? There's a wealth of different versions to choose from, and so the already merely-moderate consumer base is spread even thinner.
Granted, classical isn't usually that popular with the under-30 crowd (generalization). But it's been constantly popular with the elderly for the past three or four generations - and those aren't the same elderly, because OLD PEOPLE DIE. However, new ones are always cropping up to take their place. You can usually tell them by the Oldsmobiles with the stuffed animals in the back.
I think this comes, on one level, as no surprise to a great many people. You cannot continue to step on the toes of the little person without working up some "bad karma" (as a student of eastern religion, not a /. geek, might say), and sooner or later it's going to catch up with you. The only factors are time and luck.
:)
And... it's about god damned time Jesse Helms did something useful.
This does seem like a pretty big blow to GPL in general - but I figured if anyone would know of good alternatives to Netware, it'd be the dudes at /. - so, honestly - is this the beginning of the end for GPL, or will Novell "correct" their "mistake" (both in quotations, as I don't think I know enough about the behind-the-scenes detail to make a subjective decision like that) with a future update?
Your score of "0" speaks volumes about your abilities to construct an insightful comment. But just for the sake of disproving your moronic babblings...
Hypothetical situation - I see a problem with black people. They turn nice neighborhoods into ghettos by forcing whites out and decreasing the property values, they have a higher rate of crime and a lower average life span, which must mean they carry disease of some sort. This, naturally raises a furor in the educated crowd, jumping on my poorly thought out hypothesis and point out the Chevy-sized holes in my "logic". Your response? "Don't listen to those well educated people trying to play this down! If my man Nugneant sees a problem, IT MUST BE SO!". And congratulations, fuckwit! We have the new KKK!
And to all the well meaning idiot liberals who are about to pounce on the "reply" link - HYPOTHETICAL. I repeat: hypothetical. Now for god's sake, give me a break.
But global warming has been shown to be a bit of an exaggeration... studies are now finding that humans aren't contributing as much to it as we'd like to think... Ken Wilbur mentions this, I believe, in "Boomeritis", and it's covered in other texts as well... these things come and go in cycles, and we're in the middle of a warming cycle... that's not to say that I don't think that dumping ten tons of refridgerant-12 is a good idea... but global warming is largely another media exaggeration, like the dangers of travelling abroad (discussed in this /. thread - first post in thread is a bit of a troll, but there's some insightful commentary further down), or the CIA / FBI's monthly warnings of "yes sir, there's a-gonna be another o' dem terry-rist attacks soon, y'all best be prepared, jus' in case!".
My opinions may be a bit strong... but I'm open to people with insightful commentaries both for and against my viewpoints on this... I don't profess to be an ecologist... but the commentaries I've read that attribute this to a healthy, natural Earth cycle have, thus far, been far more convincing.
Do you think AOL would really care?
It'd just acquaint new users even quicker to the famous AOL quality control standards!
Something tells me this plan will fall through without anything being done...
Not to mention, okay, collect AOL discs, send them back to AOL... hmm now, AOL now has 1 million discs which didn't reach new users. Hmmm... LET'S SEND THOSE PONIES RIGHT BACK UP! THANK YOU GENTS FOR THE SURPLUS!
The entire thing just seems a bit pointless at best, counter productive at worst.
Just my $0.02
Oh yeah, that'll really get him out and seeing the world. Because India, Thailand, Belgium, they really want Linux! In fact, the situation in Iraq isn't over oil and Islam - Osama is just jealous of our open source solutions! And don't believe what you hear about Russia - rather than pirating all their Microsoft products, the government really is interested in hiring a bunch of foreigners to come in and breath Cheetoh breath all over the place while setting up RedHat!
I'm hoping you were being sarcastic, and just failed to make your sarcasm clear, because if you're serious, you really need to go back to school and brush up on your reading comprehension.
Are you religious? Most faiths have organized means to send you to do mission work (where you could even use your skills).
Talk about travelling all over the world to destroy it. I think if I was the "owner" of a country, I would much rather see a group of marines off the coast than a group of missionaries. The marines, at worst, will kill my warriors and take my women as their wives. The missionaries will turn my warriors into cloudy eyed Jesus freaks, and my women into chaste, humorless, passionless droids.
Sooner or later, the computers will have to occupy inverse space in order to keep up with progress. And then how can the geeks build them in stuffed animals and desks and corpses and stuff? Since, obviously, stuffed animals, desks, human bodies, et al., are inferior technology and not able to be easily miniaturized.
In response to people who have been raising concerns as to whether or not anyone wants to travel to Boston -
Perhaps MacWorld is actually trying for some newbie walk-ins. Think about it. Who, stereotypically, uses Macs? Rich college kids who like to think they're "cool" and "hip". Where are there a lot of elitist colleges whose student base is pretty financially well-off? Boston!! What do you do if you're a rich trendy kid and you want to skip class, but Dave Matthews isn't going on tour? HANG OUT AT MACWORLD!!
DISCLAIMER: I am in no way a fan, supporter, or advocate of Apple, MacWorld, or Dave Matthews, and my views are not to be taken as such.
There are advertisements running in several trade magazines that say something to the effect of, "I got tired of requiring an office full of people to help me keep my PC stable - so I bought a Mac" or "At home, I don't have a tech support department to keep my PC running. So I bought a Mac". Just who the hell is Apple trying to target with this ridiculous advertising? The coveted "60 year old" crowd? Somehow I doubt Grandpa will enjoy all the cutesy worthless shareware as much the Mac's current audience - 20-24 year olds desperate to look "cool" and "edgy" and "eXtreme" in between trips to the local coffeehouse, and 14-18 year old caucasian girls who squeal "kawaii" at anything Japanese - do.
Granted. But what about robotic understanding? And I'm not making any cheesy PAK CHOOIE UNF references, I'm almost serious. Who's to say that a robot cannot be programmed to exist in multiple dimensions? Bleah, it's late at night and I'm making no sense, I give up.
I guess what I'm saying is that it's annoying when people use blanket statements... of course, it's equally annoying to qualify everything. But they're scientists, dammit, so they should be forced to put up with such annoyances.
I've always been amazed at the arrogance of the human race, the arrogant logic that dictates that because "we" need liquid formed from two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, that automatically this is a pre-requisite for life. When it comes down to it, who are we to dictate which planets contain life and which do not? We can only percieve things along three, possibly four dimensions. I'm no mathematician, nor can I spell the word properly, but seems to me there's a lot more than just three, maybe four numbers in the numeric alphabet (contradiction intended). Just because we cannot percieve a dimension, does that mean life cannot occupy it?
And anyone who makes a "tree falling in a forest" reference in this thread is an annoying idiot.
Hopefully this isn't designed by the guy who designed those damn Shover robots.
DOCTOR: "Robot nurse, scalpel-- WARRRRRGH" *lands face first in entrails*
ROBOT NURSE: "PAK CHOOIE UNF. DATA - TO PUSH. TARGET = DOCTOR>>..."
But SERIOUSLY, folks...
I hear that NBC is hopping mad over this blatant attempt by public television to cut off a slice of the network pie. So they're going to have a show next season that's exactly the same, only each scientist has a pet monkey with him, and each pet monkey has a typewriter.
The scientist CAN use the pet monkey in his experiments, either as a test subject or just for parts and labor, but can also gain bonus points (which can be traded for tools, water, Cheetos, etc) if the pet monkey is allowed to play at the typewriter long enough to type out Hamlet, Finnegan's Wake, or any short story by Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut.
However, if the monkey accidently produces a copy of any poem by Elizabeth Barring Brown or a Jane Austen novel, the monkey is shot between the eyes and dragged off to be made into soup.
It's a "fast paced game of cat and mouse!", according to the network insiders!
One con you forgot to mention is the fact that, since it's sloppily coded in Java, it tends to drag your system resources down into the crapper. It's very hard to let something this laggy and slow run in the background while life goes on around you - you need to check USENET, there are some .rar files that look pretty interesting, .rar files need to be expanded, 650MB movie files need to be, ahem, "studied", CDs need to be burned... err... all the while you have fat, bloated, Sister Susan in the background, happily wheezing away as she downloads some 500MB .shn concert from an anonymous source.
Don't get me wrong, I love what Furthernet attempts to do... I just think it needs an interface overhaul. And Frank Zappa concerts, I cannot fucking believe they neglect the true maestro himself in favor of all this Dave Matthews Band soundalike shit.
...taking on a man who doesn't have legal fees because he is a lawyer... Honestly, where do people always come up with this stupid idea? Haven't you ever heard the saying, "A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client"? And I seriously doubt lawyers give the same "hook-ups" that you do to all your friends at Starbucks. It's time and money. They may offer a "mate's rate", but freebies in the legal system are hard to come by.
Cite your sources. Can you name a case, just one case, in which this precedent was set?
Even though the death of Napster is long, drawn out, and killing off what little dignity it has left (we're dead! no we're bankrupt! no now we're sold! we'll be back! whoops we're dead again), I cannot deny that there were many, many good times to be had on the network. Thanks, Napster, for 18 months of bliss, happiness, and new music.
Flash back to 1998, before the Y2k bug ended civilization and killed us all and all that stuff... VRML was going to be the "next big thing, honestly, trust us on this".
Imagine what knocking good fun Biff would have with this 3D hoo-hah.
Or JeffK, for that matter.
OFFTOPIC!??!?!?!?
Zark != Zork
MacOSX != a PC or anything worthwhile
This article (not the post, but the article to which it linked) != interesting.
Moderators != Clued-in people.
Candles are basically wax and coloring. Just like the outside stuff on a lump of Gouda cheese. When I went to elementary school, it was a mark of coolness to eat the wax with your cheese. Wax is pretty non toxic. Disgusting as fuck, but non toxic. Now, the string might pose a choking hazard.
I hope for your boyfriend's sake that you know more about how to cook a good dinner than you do about the future of the internet.
Not quite Zork... not quite a PC... not quite interesting.