Well, my brother has played on a variety of Sony and MoJazz albums, and his ska band just turned down a Sony contract because they wouldn't see any money from the disks until they sold approx. 75,000.
I know a lot of musicians, particularly, jazz ones, who lost money selling 50,000 CDs.
Not sure if that falls under "proof", but that's where my numbers/info come from.
I can't think of anything sold today which enjoys a higher profit margin than a music CD... except perhaps for software...
The sad thing is that, of the seven or eight bucks made by the music companies, only a dollar or so usually goes to the artist, and even that only after they pay their promotion fees et al. And then the poor artists are expected to turn around and serve as mouthpieces for the anti-MP3 folks!
You have chosen the true path, my friend. Only those who type in the entire program, like those of us Antic subscribers who did not own an Atari tape drive and therefore had to type in everything we wanted to run, can appreciate what a program truly does.
May I suggest that you use EMACS rather than vi? That way, you can compile in a second window and watch for faults. On the other hand, you could always go the true 1337 route and use ed!
It's patently obvious that the "bloat" which is symptomatic of every M$ product since MS-DOS 6.22 is not a good fit with the "palmtop" concept.
Palmtops should be going lighter and faster, not bigger and slower. There's no reason for the little boxes to be any bigger than their own screens... just my two cents.
We, the "Linux Community", Demand that...
on
AskJeeves Interview
·
· Score: 3
Taco and Hemos share the Katzbot(tm) technology with the Ask Jeeves people.
Question: What is the title of Stephen Hawking's latest book?
Answer: Columbine geek nerd chickclickers Pinkerton my newest book is called Geeks.
You see how much more useful the K-bot would be as a condescending search engine, rather than as a condescending feature writer?
Do it now, guys, before somebody writes it in Python and calls it the Squishbot!
You may claim that "the market" is not a story, but it fact it has been a story in the past. There is no difference between posting about an IPO and posting about the Linux stock tumble - they are both of interest to certain Slashdotters.
I would suggest that, given that Linux's credibility in the business world is a direct function of RHAT and LNUX prices (which I don't agree with, but there you go), we need to be discussing this. This is more on-topic than any of Jon Katz's ramblings.
I'm sorry if you lost money. A lot of us lost money. That doesn't make Linux any less viable, it doesn't affect the GPL, but it is worthy of discussion.
primarily because a well-designed nanomachine could perform all sorts of atomic-level rendering of pollutants into safe materials.
This would force Al Gore et al to either just come out and admit that their environmentalist hysterics are simply an attempt to force everyone in America to have the same dismal life as a Beltway insider, or to "roll with it" and remove a hundred years of ineffective Federal law.
Oh yeah... I bet we'd have a better handle on eugenics as well, and that would lead to the genetic perfection of the human race. I can't wait!
Last night I had the "opportunity" to use a PC running xenix. My G-d! What a pain to work with and on! Let's all take a moment to be grateful for the GNU folks and for Linus... because trust me, GNU/Linux is way easier and more rewarding to use than Xenix, or AIX, or any of the so-called "real" Unices.
Unfortunately, obtaining the Genome is only part of the puzzle---we still need commodity-priced machinery to manipulate the gene and do inexpensive creche-style tissue creation. How I look forward to the day when I can create my own hardworking homunculii(sp?) to do my bidding.
Another neat thing to do would be to create the Sandkings. You know, the small distributed-mind creatures...
Many religions, including my wife's, feel that writing the Creator's name is blasphemy, particularly in discourse not directly related to religion. "G-d" is a common workaround and solves the problem nicely. I don't see what the problem is.
So, when I call you a G-ddammed idiot, I'm doing the right thing for two reasons: a) it's true, and b) it's not strictly blasphemous.
How wonderful that the government decides, for once in its existence, that no new laws are needed. Given that existing federal law permits the FBI to drive a tank through the side wall of your home and CS gas you until you suffocate and die, I would hate to see what the "new" laws would provide. Perhaps the freedom to cook up a little "Crystal Night" of your own...
I still maintain that the government should leave the Net alone. If there are no laws to let lax security administrators have the post-coital satisfaction of having skr1pt k1ddy5 hanged, at least we don't have to, say, have equal racial representation in every photo posted in a corporate website. Government intervention, like stuffing a hamster up your own ass, seems like a good idea intially, and can even feel good for a moment, but when the beast goes crazy it's a world of pain and sadness...
I haven't been too fond of the Mozilla that comes with Debian slink, but this new one seems nice, if a touch pokey. I'll use it now, even if there are some minor bug issues.
I'd help fix the bugs, if only they'd rewrite it in Perl...
Just as the achievement of Chuck Yeager signaled the beginning of a new era in aviation, the 1GHz processor ushers in a new era of information technology. AMD plans to lead in the gigahertz era.
I don't know... certainly the x86 tech that permitted AMD to enter the "gigahertz era" won't take it much farther. I'd compare this to a 10Mhz 6502 - extremely interesting for its time, but less a presaging of things to come than a logical endpoint to an old tech.
There's no harm in being a "Lucasite"
on
Review: "Scream 3"
·
· Score: 1
There is nothing wrong with being a "Star Wars" fan, at any level of fanaticism. Nearly everyone's hobby is ridiculous to someone else.
Although I don't do the dress-up thing, I *do* enjoy the movies, and I respect people who do, especially those who correct me on minor points of Star Wars stuff. And as a convicted violent felon, I'm not always everyone's idea of a Star Wars fan. The moral - Lighten up. Surely there are worse things in this world than people who take joy from that movie - such, as for instance, the evil Katzbot...
Dammit, Somebody's Made a Fork Call to the Katzbot
on
Review: "Scream 3"
·
· Score: 2
My fellow Slashdotters,
Some days ago I made you all aware of the danger of the Katzbot, a middling-length Python program with enough power to destroy an entire Slashdot topic. That danger still exists, but another, more horrible danger has arisen.
A fork call has been made to the Katzbot, and now it is simultaneously free-associating and reviewing movies that have been in the theater for weeks.
I'm afraid now that we will need two squadrons of "snub" fighters - one to place a proton torpedo in the "logic hole" vulnerability of the original Katzbot, and a second to fly into the enormous, empty meta-brain of the second one and blow up the power station's cooling tower.
But it won't be that tough. I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my T-38 back home. They're not much bigger than two meters...
Katzbot, The Free Associator
on
Middle Media
·
· Score: 3
It's time we all realize we've been hilariously duped. There is no Jon Katz. What there is, rather, is the Katzbot, a middling-length Python program that, given two phrases, constructs a meaningless story. Luckily I have my own copy, and here's some output:
Given "Shetland ponies" and "acupunture", I got "Demystifying the Man-Animal Holistic Connection."
Given "hot grits" and "Natalie Portman", I got "Cyberfood and E-Love in the Naboo System.",
Given "school shootings" and "confused by Linux", I got "Greetings from the Hellmouth 5: When The Lack of Man Pages Causes the Info-Ignorant to go on a Geek Goth Gun Nerd Columbine Rampage."
Clearly, this is a program whose time has come. Hey, Rob, open the Katzbot source!
What's this? Somebody's launching a DOS attack? For the sake of children, somebody had better make sure it's a DR-DOS attack, not that bug-riddled, CP/M-code-laden Microsoft stuff.
It must be a heavy burden to have been chosen to speak out for the Net's righteous dignity. I recommend getting a little more fiber in your diet, and seeing a therapist to remove the identity confusion you seem to have with your Everquest character, Sir Sucks-A-Lot...
This is truly a shame.. for the folks who mistook the Web for a corpoplayground as thoroughly and revoltingly controlled as the mass media.
What if we could DoS NBC every time they knowingly aired a false, misleading story?
What if we could DoS USA Today every time they printed more anti-gun propaganda disguised as news?
The Web is not yet completely controlled. Good. I'll put up with no eBay for a couple of hours simply to preserve the last vestiges of the Net as we knew it once upon a time.
May I remind you, nobody ever DoSes metalab, or gnu.org, or any of those places which are true cornerstones of the Internet. Yahoo? eBay? Amazon?
What could I, personally, pay you to leave Andover.net? Name a figure. I'm not made of money, but I'd take a night job at Blockbuster and send you my check from it, so long as you stop writing for Slashdot.
Would you feel some hack-nerd-geek empathy were you to impose Mitnick's sentence on yourself, i.e. no computers for a very long time? Do you have the courage to do that? Do you have the callousness not to?
Oh, yes, and one more... Aren't you ashamed of yourself?
I'm in the business. I use Debian on the best x86 and PPC platforms I can find, I offer shell access and emacs, and I donate boxes with Debian on them to young developers.
On the other hand, I don't take porn sites, and I'm kind of picky regarding content (warez, etc). Anyway, if you want to host with someone who is interested in furthering GNU/Linux, check us out at synecdoche.net, blah blah blah.
This has inspired me to offer my local schools Debian CDs and a little bit of help. Once they take that, it's a short hop to posters of RMS in the cafeteria.
Seriously, though, if every geek offered to donate a couple of hours a week helping the local schools, particularly with Debian since it's noncommercial, I think that would accomplish more than a public handout of CDs and manuals.
Is there anyone left who believes that Katz is, or ever was, part of the GNU/Linux community?
We've been used. Katz used his faux-fame to become a favored child of Slashdot, pretended to "get it", and will now profit by stereotypically profiling, from a sophisticated distance, the very people he has supposedly befriended.
Do you ever watch TV news and wonder exactly how they get those trailer-trash people to make themselves look so hilariously bad on-screen? Now you know. Only this time, we'll be the target of this old-media derision. It makes me sick.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, my brother has played on a variety of Sony and MoJazz albums, and his ska band just turned down a Sony contract because they wouldn't see any money from the disks until they sold approx. 75,000.
I know a lot of musicians, particularly, jazz ones, who lost money selling 50,000 CDs.
Not sure if that falls under "proof", but that's where my numbers/info come from.
which enjoys a higher profit margin than a music CD... except perhaps for software...
The sad thing is that, of the seven or eight bucks made by the music companies, only a dollar or so usually goes to the artist, and even that only after they pay their promotion fees et al. And then the poor artists are expected to turn around and serve as mouthpieces for the anti-MP3 folks!
You have chosen the true path, my friend. Only those who type in the entire program, like those of us Antic subscribers who did not own an Atari tape drive and therefore had to type in everything we wanted to run, can appreciate what a program truly does.
May I suggest that you use EMACS rather than vi? That way, you can compile in a second window and watch for faults. On the other hand, you could always go the true 1337 route and use ed!
Palmtops should be going lighter and faster, not bigger and slower. There's no reason for the little boxes to be any bigger than their own screens... just my two cents.
Question: What is the title of Stephen Hawking's latest book?
Answer: Columbine geek nerd chickclickers Pinkerton my newest book is called Geeks.
You see how much more useful the K-bot would be as a condescending search engine, rather than as a condescending feature writer?
Do it now, guys, before somebody writes it in Python and calls it the Squishbot!
I would suggest that, given that Linux's credibility in the business world is a direct function of RHAT and LNUX prices (which I don't agree with, but there you go), we need to be discussing this. This is more on-topic than any of Jon Katz's ramblings.
I'm sorry if you lost money. A lot of us lost money. That doesn't make Linux any less viable, it doesn't affect the GPL, but it is worthy of discussion.
This would force Al Gore et al to either just come out and admit that their environmentalist hysterics are simply an attempt to force everyone in America to have the same dismal life as a Beltway insider, or to "roll with it" and remove a hundred years of ineffective Federal law.
Oh yeah... I bet we'd have a better handle on eugenics as well, and that would lead to the genetic perfection of the human race. I can't wait!
Sorry to babble...
Another neat thing to do would be to create the Sandkings. You know, the small distributed-mind creatures...
So, when I call you a G-ddammed idiot, I'm doing the right thing for two reasons: a) it's true, and b) it's not strictly blasphemous.
Hope that helps!
I still maintain that the government should leave the Net alone. If there are no laws to let lax security administrators have the post-coital satisfaction of having skr1pt k1ddy5 hanged, at least we don't have to, say, have equal racial representation in every photo posted in a corporate website. Government intervention, like stuffing a hamster up your own ass, seems like a good idea intially, and can even feel good for a moment, but when the beast goes crazy it's a world of pain and sadness...
I'd help fix the bugs, if only they'd rewrite it in Perl...
1GHz processor ushers in a new era of information technology. AMD plans to lead in the gigahertz era.
I don't know... certainly the x86 tech that permitted AMD to enter the "gigahertz era" won't take it much farther. I'd compare this to a 10Mhz 6502 - extremely interesting for its time, but less a presaging of things to come than a logical endpoint to an old tech.
Although I don't do the dress-up thing, I *do* enjoy the movies, and I respect people who do, especially those who correct me on minor points of Star Wars stuff. And as a convicted violent felon, I'm not always everyone's idea of a Star Wars fan. The moral - Lighten up. Surely there are worse things in this world than people who take joy from that movie - such, as for instance, the evil Katzbot...
Some days ago I made you all aware of the danger of the Katzbot, a middling-length Python program with enough power to destroy an entire Slashdot topic. That danger still exists, but another, more horrible danger has arisen.
A fork call has been made to the Katzbot, and now it is simultaneously free-associating and reviewing movies that have been in the theater for weeks.
I'm afraid now that we will need two squadrons of "snub" fighters - one to place a proton torpedo in the "logic hole" vulnerability of the original Katzbot, and a second to fly into the enormous, empty meta-brain of the second one and blow up the power station's cooling tower.
But it won't be that tough. I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my T-38 back home. They're not much bigger than two meters...
Given "Shetland ponies" and "acupunture", I got "Demystifying the Man-Animal Holistic Connection."
Given "hot grits" and "Natalie Portman", I got "Cyberfood and E-Love in the Naboo System.",
Given "school shootings" and "confused by Linux", I got "Greetings from the Hellmouth 5: When The Lack of Man Pages Causes the Info-Ignorant to go on a Geek Goth Gun Nerd Columbine Rampage."
Clearly, this is a program whose time has come. Hey, Rob, open the Katzbot source!
Heck, Honda hit 17,000 on their NSR500 a while ago. So, why can't hard drives spin faster than a 200-lb motorcycle engine?
Just food for thought. What's the design bottleneck?
What's this? Somebody's launching a DOS attack? For the sake of children, somebody had better make sure it's a DR-DOS attack, not that bug-riddled, CP/M-code-laden Microsoft stuff.
It must be a heavy burden to have been chosen to speak out for the Net's righteous dignity. I recommend getting a little more fiber in your diet, and seeing a therapist to remove the identity confusion you seem to have with your Everquest character, Sir Sucks-A-Lot...
CNN-Clinton News Network
Between this and being DoS-bitchslapped, they must be wondering why they ever decided to make the Faustian venture onto the Internet...
What if we could DoS NBC every time they knowingly aired a false, misleading story?
What if we could DoS USA Today every time they printed more anti-gun propaganda disguised as news?
The Web is not yet completely controlled. Good. I'll put up with no eBay for a couple of hours simply to preserve the last vestiges of the Net as we knew it once upon a time.
May I remind you, nobody ever DoSes metalab, or gnu.org, or any of those places which are true cornerstones of the Internet. Yahoo? eBay? Amazon?
Fuck 'em.
What could I, personally, pay you to leave Andover.net? Name a figure. I'm not made of money, but I'd take a night job at Blockbuster and send you my check from it, so long as you stop writing for Slashdot.
Would you feel some hack-nerd-geek empathy were you to impose Mitnick's sentence on yourself, i.e. no computers for a very long time? Do you have the courage to do that? Do you have the callousness not to?
Oh, yes, and one more... Aren't you ashamed of yourself?
That's not my Internet, and I doubt it's yours, either. After a while I had to walk away from the television.
Let's all pitch in five bucks so next year Stallman can be on thirty seconds during the Super Bowl, talking about free (as in speech) software.
In the meantime, f*ck those "dot-coms" and their banal advertising.
P.S. As a BMX racer and mountain biker, I was bemused by the Mountain Dew ad...
On the other hand, I don't take porn sites, and I'm kind of picky regarding content (warez, etc). Anyway, if you want to host with someone who is interested in furthering GNU/Linux, check us out at synecdoche.net, blah blah blah.
Seriously, though, if every geek offered to donate a couple of hours a week helping the local schools, particularly with Debian since it's noncommercial, I think that would accomplish more than a public handout of CDs and manuals.
We've been used. Katz used his faux-fame to become a favored child of Slashdot, pretended to "get it", and will now profit by stereotypically profiling, from a sophisticated distance, the very people he has supposedly befriended.
Do you ever watch TV news and wonder exactly how they get those trailer-trash people to make themselves look so hilariously bad on-screen? Now you know. Only this time, we'll be the target of this old-media derision. It makes me sick.