The other day I pointed out the Propaganda site to somebody and had to explain to them that while not everybody thinks correctly tiled backgrounds are "cool", some people do.
I'm a fan of the Propaganda site and am using backgrounds from there as I write this but I have to say on a scale of "coolness", anime has a lot more going for it than swirly jpegs.
I know that Slashdot does have rare problems (I've been visiting every day for a long time so I've seen them) but the author of this article makes it seem like every time you come here something breaks. That's not the case as far as I've ever seen. Am I just lucky in that this site runs like a champ every time I come here or do others see lots of database related problems popping up? Slashdot's use of mod_perl, apache, and mysql for the setup is one of the best examples I've seen of why the combo works so well.
The NYTimes is reporting that the two companies have withdrawn the merger papers. They say they might refile at some point but the conditions imposed by the European Union and this intent to block by the DoJ didn't make it worthwhile.
There was a good story in the NYTimes earlier this week about the conditions and possible sell-offs that would have had to result had this gone through, the slicing and dicing of the combined company would have been pretty brutal.
The Patent Office has been surprisingly intelligent about patents on genes. Most involved think just as you do (and most of us probably) that the PTO will just grant patents willy-nilly to genes like they seem to do for computers but they've been raising the bar much higher than usual for this stuff. Pretty much everybody is scared of some company patenting hundreds of genes just because they have the data on them so even folks like Celera (whose whole business plan is based on gene patents) are petitioning the PTO to make you present evidence that you know what you're doing and have a valid reason for the patent.
This of course doesn't address many people's idea that genes shouldn't be patented at all but that's unlikely to be the way things go down.
This whole week PBS interviewer Charlie Rose has been doing programs on this, interviewing the important people involved. After watching these interviews I know a bit about the subject so I hope I can clear up some of the questions.
The reason that they are both announcing is mostly political/ideological. The HGP is known as the "public" project, which is funded by taxes and will be releasing the data to the public. Celera is doing their research in order to sell the data they create to scientists/students/etc. Celera's plan is to make the raw genome data more usable for people, like Bloomberg takes raw financial data and sifts through it, analyzes it, and sells the resulting information to it's customers. Also, the two projects use different methods of sequencing the genome and the HGP people don't seem to care for Celera's "shotgun" approach as opposed to their more standard approach. (I'm not familiar with the details of either approach, I just know they're different). Celera also plans on patenting it's work to sell to drug companies and the HGP people (including Watson of Watson & Crick, the guys who discovered the whole deal in the first place) aren't too thrilled with the idea of patents on genes.
One researcher interviewed on Charlie Rose compared this announcment to reaching the North Pole, nothing is really acomplished by it, we just get to say it's been done. Finishing one person's genome is a pretty big deal but it's just the raw data, it's going to take years to sift and look through what you have there to make it useful.
This is only the first step, the next couple of thousand are the exciting ones.
What if I register one of these domains at another domain registrar? Shouldn't I be able to get it? Does this mean that NSI in effect owns all the domains registered with them since they can hold them from being registered by somebody else? This opens up a whole sack of interesting/important questions about domain names.
You can get a computer and internet access for less than the cost of a TV and cable and I know many, many people who are supposedly living from paycheck to paycheck who have cable and a TV (and quite a few of them play Bingo every week too). It's a falacy to think anymore that if you want a computer, you can't get one. There are too many free deals around or cheapo computer with free net access. The problem is educating people to that fact and getting them to give up something like cable or $20 a week in lottery tickets (a _very_ common occurence).
From now on can we have a 'Katz Bashing Thread' in all of John's posts so I don't have to read through 100 posts of meaningless off-topic dribble to find somebody saying something about the damn article? The number of anti-Katz posts in the this story outnumber the ones about the content of the article by at least 5 to 1. If you don't like Katz, filter him out or don't read the freakin article! It's not that difficult. I for one like to hear many different opinions and don't want to have to wade through 10 pages of 'Katz sucks' or 'Katz is a hypocrite' or 'Another Katz article too long for me to read so I'll just complain about it being too long' blah blah blah blah. From now on, just stick your Katz bashing in one thread that those of us who want to read and post interesting stuff can ignore it more easily. Or better yet, if you don't like him personally, don't read his stuff!
And fellow moderators, please use the Offtopic setting like it's supposed to be used and get rid of stuff that isn't relevant to the article.
I was reading a magazine article recently about an artist who took pictures of various streets and cities then colored over all the advertising content in the picture with orange. It made for some very interesting images, hardly any space in America is free of some sort of advertising. It's so common that we almost don't even see it anymore.
I really wish I could remember the artist or article I saw that in. If somebody knows what I'm talking about I would really appreciate any pointers to that stuff, it was very interesting.
Making the internet backbone fabric better helps everybody. If you're on a 56k connect and you're hitting a site with 1 million other 56k users, all of you are going to be slower than your max because the pipes probably won't handle the load.
Plus, it's better to make the backbones bigger than needed now so as more and more people do get broadband home connections it doesn't kill the net.
But you are correct, we need people to work on home broadband connections in addition to all the backbone work.
ComputerWorld has a story about how some fixed wireless companies are saying that various at-sea internet connections are threats to public safety and should be outlawed. Might be On Topic for your question.
Check out today's UF about the Metallica/Napster fiasco for a stupendous example of what is wrong with User Friendly. Illiad has absolutely no idea what comedy is about.
"Oh look, the guy smashed the computer and he works for Metallica's PR dept. um, ha?"
I have yet to see a UF that even made me smile. He comes from the school that thinks anytime you bash an unpopular subject (Microsoft, stupid users, Metallica, etc. ad nauseum) it's funny. Not true. It's sad that a strip with such little comedic value is seen as representative of the Linux/geek community's humor.
The only thing I've seen Illiad do that I liked was to put a TradeWars game up on the UFie BBS. Thanks for that.
Nobody ever said Jon Katz has all the plans. One of the main points of this whole Open Source thing is that the mass of people have more ideas and plans than one company or person and that's a good model to use. If you have a personal political itch, scratch it. Don't wait for somebody else to tell you what their itch is. If you see something that bothers you, rally your own troops, take care of it.
China has 1 billion potential consumers. Cuba does not.
Seriously, the theory is that the more capitalism spreads in China, the more people will want freedom and democracy. Most Cubans already have access to western goods so this theory doesn't really apply in most people's eyes.
Once in high school where our teacher gave it to us as an example of how an author can start with a wonderful idea and situation and then proceed to completely ruin it.
As soon as a teacher gives a student this idea, it does ruin the book for most of the students. I'm not saying you wouldn't have held this opinion if the teacher hadn't said it, but as soon as a teacher starts imparting opinions like this onto students it starts the student out with the idea that the book is crap instead of starting out with no idea and forming their own opinion about it. This IMO, is wrong and the teacher was absolutely wrong to start out a lesson like this.
I only bother to post this because I had too many teachers in high school start classes out with 'I know you hate poetry' or 'Shakespeare is hard' instead of just going ahead with the material and it gets to me. People (especially students) tend to take on the first opinions given to them about a new subject and when teachers start out lessons with negative opinions it takes away from the students.
We've been thinking a bit about this very question in the New Mexico LUG (www.nmlug.org). One thing that we do is we have a repository of blank CDRs available for people to get different distros burned onto to try for free. The CDRs are donated by LUG members and since a few of the LUG members work at ISPs around Albuquerque we keep the CDs at our various places of employment for people to come get without having to wait for LUG meetings. This allows people to play with different Linux (also *BSD) distros without having to shell out for the box versions and it spreads good will about the LUG at the same time. We've also been working on labels telling where the discs come from and encouraging people to hand the CDs over to others when they're done.
Maybe somebody at one of the big linux.(com|org) sites might be willing to compile a page from the various suggestions/comments on this topic?
From my non-economist chair I've always seen the stock market as seperate from the "reality" of businesses. I think what this "irrational exhuberance" and the rocketing of the market upward despite little or no earnings has blown the schism between the market and reality open to the point where people see the differences. Really, the market has never reflected earnings or anything of the sort, it's only reflected people's desire to own a stock and most of the people owning the stock cared about the P/E ratios and all that. Now that the masses are investing, the market has been opened to people who don't know a Price to Earnings ratio from a box of Rice Chex. This means that the "reality" of earnings and profit _really_ doesn't matter because it doesn't even figure into the calculations of thousands of investors. Most institutional investors see this as terrible but I wonder if it really is? Just because The Market is way out of whack with Reality instead of tenuously connected like it was before, does this mean anything?
The important thing I think is that people realize the schism between The Reality and The Market and invest that way. If you know that your stock's price isn't related to the business's performance you can invest differently. You can begin to invest based on what you think others will do, rather than what you think the business will do.
I hate to fall into the trap of applying the Open Source model to everything but I'm going to anyway. The old investors, the guy in the Datek commercial pleading "You don't see the quotes as the market is moving," are like the Closed Source software vendors seeing the new Open Source guys coming up. To them, the Open Source way is the death of software, the death of security, a new way that will never work. To the institutional investor, these New Investors with their Internet stocks and zero/negative profits are going to wreck havoc on the world but I don't think it will. I think the new investors are changing the ways things happen but if people see the change it doesn't have to cause anybody any sleepless nights or recessions.
If any economists read this, I'm not one of you and I might not know what I'm talking about. But I don't think I'm the only one thinking this. I'm also trying to coalate my thoughts on this so if this was a bit rambling it's only because I haven't solidified my ideas yet. I welcome all discussion.
Don't go blaming this guy's ignorance on slashdot, there's nothing special about this forum that gave this guy any standing in the world of technical competence. If he were one of the slashdot crew (Taco, Hemos, etc) then you'd be right but he's just a guy like you and me. The value of this place is that everybody can have a voice. If he's wrong, I expect people to shoot him down just as happened. Not everybody instantly believes something just because somebody on slashdot said it, this is a meritocracy and you have to prove yourself.
After reading some of the Talkbacks below Bob's article I don't know whether to laugh at or feel very sad for some of those people. While quite a few people commented on how well the response was written, the usual ZDNet crowd of MS apologists and seemingly brainwashed MCSE-types were out in force, displaying not only a stunning lack of knowledge in their Open Source competition, an almost childlike devotion to Bill Gates and everything MS, and most of all a very pitiable lack of manners. A lot of the posts resorted to useless namecalling, knocking Redhat's falling stock price (as if MSs stock has been riding high in recent days?), and left a very juvinile impression overall. Anyone who knocks the Linux community needs to see some of the hardcore Microsofties try to defend their position, they make even the most loudmouth adolescents in our community seem like William F. Buckley.
While I don't know about 'a substantial core' of Linux being BSD licenced (not that it isn't, I'm just not familiar enough with a list of the core programs and what licences each is under) you bring up a good point. Calling the system GNU/Linux dismisses the other licences that make the system a useful whole. Calling it Linux, which is a made-up and license agnostic name referring to the system's general heritage as a UNIX derivant and the brainchild of Linus, takes the discussion of licenses out of it. If I were to take Mr. Stallman's way of doing things my system at home would have to not only be called GNU/Linux, it would have to be called GNU/BSD/X/Apache/Artistic/MySQL/other/Linux, which is more than I want to say when I'm asked what OS I run.
I like seeing different sides to people and while this interview was typical Stallman for the most part, the thing that stuck out for me was when he said:
I also like sharing tenderness with someone I adore...
Jeez, I'm a pretty romantic guy but I don't think I would have thought to put something this sappy on an interview for a site like Slashdot. Just shows me that Stallman isn't afraid to tell what he thinks, even when it doesn't involve Free Software. Keep up the good work Mr. Stallman.
Slashdot Mirror
The other day I pointed out the Propaganda site to somebody and had to explain to them that while not everybody thinks correctly tiled backgrounds are "cool", some people do.
I'm a fan of the Propaganda site and am using backgrounds from there as I write this but I have to say on a scale of "coolness", anime has a lot more going for it than swirly jpegs.
I know that Slashdot does have rare problems (I've been visiting every day for a long time so I've seen them) but the author of this article makes it seem like every time you come here something breaks. That's not the case as far as I've ever seen. Am I just lucky in that this site runs like a champ every time I come here or do others see lots of database related problems popping up? Slashdot's use of mod_perl, apache, and mysql for the setup is one of the best examples I've seen of why the combo works so well.
The NYTimes is reporting that the two companies have withdrawn the merger papers. They say they might refile at some point but the conditions imposed by the European Union and this intent to block by the DoJ didn't make it worthwhile.
There was a good story in the NYTimes earlier this week about the conditions and possible sell-offs that would have had to result had this gone through, the slicing and dicing of the combined company would have been pretty brutal.
The Patent Office has been surprisingly intelligent about patents on genes. Most involved think just as you do (and most of us probably) that the PTO will just grant patents willy-nilly to genes like they seem to do for computers but they've been raising the bar much higher than usual for this stuff. Pretty much everybody is scared of some company patenting hundreds of genes just because they have the data on them so even folks like Celera (whose whole business plan is based on gene patents) are petitioning the PTO to make you present evidence that you know what you're doing and have a valid reason for the patent.
This of course doesn't address many people's idea that genes shouldn't be patented at all but that's unlikely to be the way things go down.
This whole week PBS interviewer Charlie Rose has been doing programs on this, interviewing the important people involved. After watching these interviews I know a bit about the subject so I hope I can clear up some of the questions.
The reason that they are both announcing is mostly political/ideological. The HGP is known as the "public" project, which is funded by taxes and will be releasing the data to the public. Celera is doing their research in order to sell the data they create to scientists/students/etc. Celera's plan is to make the raw genome data more usable for people, like Bloomberg takes raw financial data and sifts through it, analyzes it, and sells the resulting information to it's customers. Also, the two projects use different methods of sequencing the genome and the HGP people don't seem to care for Celera's "shotgun" approach as opposed to their more standard approach. (I'm not familiar with the details of either approach, I just know they're different). Celera also plans on patenting it's work to sell to drug companies and the HGP people (including Watson of Watson & Crick, the guys who discovered the whole deal in the first place) aren't too thrilled with the idea of patents on genes.
One researcher interviewed on Charlie Rose compared this announcment to reaching the North Pole, nothing is really acomplished by it, we just get to say it's been done. Finishing one person's genome is a pretty big deal but it's just the raw data, it's going to take years to sift and look through what you have there to make it useful.
This is only the first step, the next couple of thousand are the exciting ones.
What if I register one of these domains at another domain registrar? Shouldn't I be able to get it? Does this mean that NSI in effect owns all the domains registered with them since they can hold them from being registered by somebody else? This opens up a whole sack of interesting/important questions about domain names.
You can get a computer and internet access for less than the cost of a TV and cable and I know many, many people who are supposedly living from paycheck to paycheck who have cable and a TV (and quite a few of them play Bingo every week too). It's a falacy to think anymore that if you want a computer, you can't get one. There are too many free deals around or cheapo computer with free net access. The problem is educating people to that fact and getting them to give up something like cable or $20 a week in lottery tickets (a _very_ common occurence).
From now on can we have a 'Katz Bashing Thread' in all of John's posts so I don't have to read through 100 posts of meaningless off-topic dribble to find somebody saying something about the damn article? The number of anti-Katz posts in the this story outnumber the ones about the content of the article by at least 5 to 1. If you don't like Katz, filter him out or don't read the freakin article! It's not that difficult. I for one like to hear many different opinions and don't want to have to wade through 10 pages of 'Katz sucks' or 'Katz is a hypocrite' or 'Another Katz article too long for me to read so I'll just complain about it being too long' blah blah blah blah. From now on, just stick your Katz bashing in one thread that those of us who want to read and post interesting stuff can ignore it more easily. Or better yet, if you don't like him personally, don't read his stuff!
And fellow moderators, please use the Offtopic setting like it's supposed to be used and get rid of stuff that isn't relevant to the article.
Why go through the hassle of doing this rather than just sign up with fake info once and let their cookies log you in each time?
Or just use the various cypherpunk/cypherpunk or slashdot/slashdot names that are appearing all over?
I think you're refering to 'Hari' Seldon, the main character of Issac Asimov's Foundation Series.
Good reference though.
I was reading a magazine article recently about an artist who took pictures of various streets and cities then colored over all the advertising content in the picture with orange. It made for some very interesting images, hardly any space in America is free of some sort of advertising. It's so common that we almost don't even see it anymore.
I really wish I could remember the artist or article I saw that in. If somebody knows what I'm talking about I would really appreciate any pointers to that stuff, it was very interesting.
Making the internet backbone fabric better helps everybody. If you're on a 56k connect and you're hitting a site with 1 million other 56k users, all of you are going to be slower than your max because the pipes probably won't handle the load.
Plus, it's better to make the backbones bigger than needed now so as more and more people do get broadband home connections it doesn't kill the net.
But you are correct, we need people to work on home broadband connections in addition to all the backbone work.
ComputerWorld has a story about how some fixed wireless companies are saying that various at-sea internet connections are threats to public safety and should be outlawed. Might be On Topic for your question.
Check out today's UF about the Metallica/Napster fiasco for a stupendous example of what is wrong with User Friendly. Illiad has absolutely no idea what comedy is about.
"Oh look, the guy smashed the computer and he works for Metallica's PR dept. um, ha?"
I have yet to see a UF that even made me smile. He comes from the school that thinks anytime you bash an unpopular subject (Microsoft, stupid users, Metallica, etc. ad nauseum) it's funny. Not true. It's sad that a strip with such little comedic value is seen as representative of the Linux/geek community's humor.
The only thing I've seen Illiad do that I liked was to put a TradeWars game up on the UFie BBS. Thanks for that.
Nobody ever said Jon Katz has all the plans. One of the main points of this whole Open Source thing is that the mass of people have more ideas and plans than one company or person and that's a good model to use. If you have a personal political itch, scratch it. Don't wait for somebody else to tell you what their itch is. If you see something that bothers you, rally your own troops, take care of it.
China has 1 billion potential consumers.
Cuba does not.
Seriously, the theory is that the more capitalism spreads in China, the more people will want freedom and democracy. Most Cubans already have access to western goods so this theory doesn't really apply in most people's eyes.
Once in high school where our teacher gave it to us as an example of how an author can start with a wonderful idea and situation and then proceed to completely ruin it.
As soon as a teacher gives a student this idea, it does ruin the book for most of the students. I'm not saying you wouldn't have held this opinion if the teacher hadn't said it, but as soon as a teacher starts imparting opinions like this onto students it starts the student out with the idea that the book is crap instead of starting out with no idea and forming their own opinion about it. This IMO, is wrong and the teacher was absolutely wrong to start out a lesson like this.
I only bother to post this because I had too many teachers in high school start classes out with 'I know you hate poetry' or 'Shakespeare is hard' instead of just going ahead with the material and it gets to me. People (especially students) tend to take on the first opinions given to them about a new subject and when teachers start out lessons with negative opinions it takes away from the students.
We've been thinking a bit about this very question in the New Mexico LUG (www.nmlug.org). One thing that we do is we have a repository of blank CDRs available for people to get different distros burned onto to try for free. The CDRs are donated by LUG members and since a few of the LUG members work at ISPs around Albuquerque we keep the CDs at our various places of employment for people to come get without having to wait for LUG meetings. This allows people to play with different Linux (also *BSD) distros without having to shell out for the box versions and it spreads good will about the LUG at the same time. We've also been working on labels telling where the discs come from and encouraging people to hand the CDs over to others when they're done.
Maybe somebody at one of the big linux.(com|org) sites might be willing to compile a page from the various suggestions/comments on this topic?
From my non-economist chair I've always seen the stock market as seperate from the "reality" of businesses. I think what this "irrational exhuberance" and the rocketing of the market upward despite little or no earnings has blown the schism between the market and reality open to the point where people see the differences. Really, the market has never reflected earnings or anything of the sort, it's only reflected people's desire to own a stock and most of the people owning the stock cared about the P/E ratios and all that. Now that the masses are investing, the market has been opened to people who don't know a Price to Earnings ratio from a box of Rice Chex. This means that the "reality" of earnings and profit _really_ doesn't matter because it doesn't even figure into the calculations of thousands of investors. Most institutional investors see this as terrible but I wonder if it really is? Just because The Market is way out of whack with Reality instead of tenuously connected like it was before, does this mean anything?
The important thing I think is that people realize the schism between The Reality and The Market and invest that way. If you know that your stock's price isn't related to the business's performance you can invest differently. You can begin to invest based on what you think others will do, rather than what you think the business will do.
I hate to fall into the trap of applying the Open Source model to everything but I'm going to anyway. The old investors, the guy in the Datek commercial pleading "You don't see the quotes as the market is moving," are like the Closed Source software vendors seeing the new Open Source guys coming up. To them, the Open Source way is the death of software, the death of security, a new way that will never work. To the institutional investor, these New Investors with their Internet stocks and zero/negative profits are going to wreck havoc on the world but I don't think it will. I think the new investors are changing the ways things happen but if people see the change it doesn't have to cause anybody any sleepless nights or recessions.
If any economists read this, I'm not one of you and I might not know what I'm talking about. But I don't think I'm the only one thinking this. I'm also trying to coalate my thoughts on this so if this was a bit rambling it's only because I haven't solidified my ideas yet. I welcome all discussion.
My point was that nobody speaks for slashdot except the crew in charge.
Don't go blaming this guy's ignorance on slashdot, there's nothing special about this forum that gave this guy any standing in the world of technical competence. If he were one of the slashdot crew (Taco, Hemos, etc) then you'd be right but he's just a guy like you and me. The value of this place is that everybody can have a voice. If he's wrong, I expect people to shoot him down just as happened. Not everybody instantly believes something just because somebody on slashdot said it, this is a meritocracy and you have to prove yourself.
After reading some of the Talkbacks below Bob's article I don't know whether to laugh at or feel very sad for some of those people. While quite a few people commented on how well the response was written, the usual ZDNet crowd of MS apologists and seemingly brainwashed MCSE-types were out in force, displaying not only a stunning lack of knowledge in their Open Source competition, an almost childlike devotion to Bill Gates and everything MS, and most of all a very pitiable lack of manners. A lot of the posts resorted to useless namecalling, knocking Redhat's falling stock price (as if MSs stock has been riding high in recent days?), and left a very juvinile impression overall. Anyone who knocks the Linux community needs to see some of the hardcore Microsofties try to defend their position, they make even the most loudmouth adolescents in our community seem like William F. Buckley.
While I don't know about 'a substantial core' of Linux being BSD licenced (not that it isn't, I'm just not familiar enough with a list of the core programs and what licences each is under) you bring up a good point. Calling the system GNU/Linux dismisses the other licences that make the system a useful whole. Calling it Linux, which is a made-up and license agnostic name referring to the system's general heritage as a UNIX derivant and the brainchild of Linus, takes the discussion of licenses out of it. If I were to take Mr. Stallman's way of doing things my system at home would have to not only be called GNU/Linux, it would have to be called GNU/BSD/X/Apache/Artistic/MySQL/other/Linux, which is more than I want to say when I'm asked what OS I run.
I like seeing different sides to people and while this interview was typical Stallman for the most part, the thing that stuck out for me was when he said:
I also like sharing tenderness with someone I adore...
Jeez, I'm a pretty romantic guy but I don't think I would have thought to put something this sappy on an interview for a site like Slashdot. Just shows me that Stallman isn't afraid to tell what he thinks, even when it doesn't involve Free Software. Keep up the good work Mr. Stallman.
Finally I can upgrade to XFree86 4. I hope these will make Q3 playable under Linux so I can show off Linux at LAN parties. :)
Also, for all fellow Redhat users out there, the nVidia FAQ indicates that there are now RPMs at the Redhat mirror sites.