More accurately, it is the technical elite that keep the computers working for the masses, rather like janitors (says Chris, putting off heading to work for more keep-computers-working duties and longing for a linux internet kiosk- hell, I'm gonna do an essay just about that, explore how it could be done) If the geeks say something is a technical disaster, know what that means? If they quit working like dogs to keep it running, it'll just fscking fall apart. Well, that's Windows (and to some extent the PC). And everybody knows it. But everybody assumes _WE!_ are just going to keep propping it up forever... Look, people, if Windows loses the huge masses of geeks out there patiently reinstalling it for people and wrestling with demented wizards, it will _die_ because it will _choke_ on its own technical problems. It relies on people being willing to pick up after it. I'm losing patience with this- and with the assumption that of course the technical elite is best used as janitors to clean up messes made by Microsoft, served to uneducated customers, and arrogantly dumped all over the place in big piles of steaming lossage. We will never do ourselves out of jobs, because there is _always_ a place for people who put extra effort into thinking, designing, coding. Most people don't do that, they pay others to think. So we might as well think in terms of: how can we build plug-in and go Emailboxes and the like, WebTV only from linux, for all the people who can't or won't be technically competent? I always say these people are Microsoft's rightful property- but if that assumes that _I_ will always be available for tech support duties, I am strongly tempted to quit that job which I never agreed to take on! And that goes double for the more seriously PC-supporting techs at the shop I work at: they're awful tired of dealing with the crap. Think about it. What would happen if Microsoft _did_ have to deal with cleaning up their own messes? If only MCSEs were willing to reinstall Windows all the time, or deal with issues? If all the overworked technical elite low-status geeks just quit dealing with Windows? A disaster area, that's what- Microsoft do not _educate_ their people to repair Windows effectively, but to advocate and sell it effectively, even if that means becoming certified by parroting marketingnuggets that actually do not work in practice, but sound good! (see the O'Reilly book, or genuine NT experts with hands-on experience). Let's move in the direction of cutting them loose to fend for themselves, shall we? HOW MANY of you put in paid or unpaid time to _support_ Microsoft products because your own friends, family or workplace uses them? You are irreplaceable support for Microsoft when you do this. Stop doing it >;)
I'm a Mac tech, and I am going in to work today to upgrade a machine for a client. This woman has given us so much grief it's absurd- she is aggressively dumb- brings in computer without modem to have its Email setup looked at. Then brings in just the modem without the very weird cable it uses, or the power adapter- all the time getting madder and madder at _US_. This woman cannot set up a Mac. Will not even try. That is why I would like to be able to give her a Linux box so totally transformed into a kiosk that it can only check Email. Done properly, she'd never return with a problem! (well, one can dream). Who says linux is only for techies? It might just be the idea platform for setting up luser-kiosks so people with no clue can still check their email without ever dealing with computer issues. Such a kiosk would have to be inflexible, preconfigured on controlled hardware, and cheap. I could see Netwinders finding an extra market just as this sort of kiosk, once you got rid of all the configurability. Set it up so unless you hold down magic keys, like you do to get into Open Firmware, it always boots to the handholding, no-options mode. The special key combo gets you to bash or something, so the admin can do the one-time setup. Hell, you could have it boot specially off a CD so the important stuff would be read-only! It could have just a CD-Rom and a floppy to hold the prefs, no HD! (that might also make it very quiet and nice to live with). I want one of _those_ for my customer from hell. Not a Mac (too flexible!) not Linux proper (bwahahaha) not Windows (also bwahahaha, but more of a pain). But what I want could and would be _based_ on Linux.
...at selling OSS to hippies. This is good, as I said. Personally, I didn't find this article very inspiring, because it seemed too vague and breathless for my taste, but looking at it as a work targeted to a very different audience, I think it's _damn_ effective, just about perfect for that task. Go Katz! There are guys in boardrooms and positions of power who used to care about what you talk about, went for money in midlife, and are now wondering if they can have their self-validation back. Get 'em frothing about open source! It'd really shake things up and might improve the world in little ways. At least it would get more ideas happening, and more lines of communication open- that's where the action really is.
...or for that matter Window Maker, nicely kitted out, with transparent aterms... then close the transparent one (hee, only good for showing off when you have a vivid desktop) and run the afterstep xlock -inroot hacks... for star travel or laser shows or 'swarm' (everybody falls in love with swarm!) as _animated_ desktops. *grin* damn straight it can be the most visually pleasant, and this is a dude here who knows _all_ the tricks for making a _MacOS_ desktop visually pleasant (and there are a lot- basically the equivalent of E for macs, complete with outlandish window regions). You can set up a workstation in linux that's not only beautiful, but deeply functional- I can't get over the elegance of running them little old unix apps from tiles with elaborate lashings of flags and all sorts of customizations on the window specifications... Yes, the visual prettiness is enticing, but you know you're a serious linux fancier when you get off on your ability to totally rewrite the menu and invent applications out of very basic parts (process manager, called BOFHCenter, run as top in an inverse aterm with the minimize button and resize border removed! Oh, and shift-keypad - and + will make all aterm-based apps shrink and expand as the font size changes- sort of 3D effect there, try _that_ anywhere else) Maybe this is only for geeks. But, by God, is it ever for geeks! It's fun to do demos and wow neophytes- it's _amazing_ to set up a workspace where you could do demos that would floor _other_ _geeks_...
I keep reading these comments and considering one peculiar interpretation that comes to mind. Supposing this is _for_ charging really large interstate ISPs? It is unfortunately fantasy, but supposing I call up my local ISP, SoVerNet, which is a 7 digit dialup, and still within that area they tie into the net? Now, suppose I call up a local AOL node, which calls another, which calls another one God knows where, and then ties into the net from a totally different state? Wouldn't it be interesting if this sort of thing was used to squeeze money out of the hugest ISPs? One thing you can say is, they _have_ the money. We don't- we'll just be forced into silence if we get hit with such charges. Supposing the AOLs of the world have become rich by using these loopholes? It would be very interesting if this development actually _aided_ local ISPs as a phenomenon, and mostly sucked the blood of the overarching, huge ISPs that are so brutal for local operations to compete with. On the one hand, yes yes, evil wicked government is going to lick the hand of the rich corporations and put the hurt on us poor regular folks. On the other hand- who, exactly, has the money in this equation? The rich corporations- and these days it's the Microsofts, the AOLs, etc., and they make it damned tough to maintain a normal capitalism with many players anymore. Wouldn't it be interesting if the government, purely out of self-interest, decided that since these corporations have all the money now, _they_ should be the focus for 'creative fundraising and taxation'? Just a thought. I'd looooove to see my local ISP untouched, and AOL and MSN etc brutally taxed >:) I wonder what the real truth will be.
Indeed... and if the present curves are extrapolated, you'll be seeing a ROCKING SEVEN PERCENT improvement over the 500mhz ones, woohoo:P Haven't you _noticed_ that the performance of x86 is no longer scaling linearly with mhz? It's hitting a wall.
Hey: that perfectly describes the JPEG software I have. Mind you, not _all_ jpeg will do that- I'm talking Boxtop Software 'ProJPEG'. It takes noticably longer than generic JPEG to run, because it's doing things like (if I remember correctly) optimizing huffman coding of whatever the hell it's doing... *boggle* at any rate, the 'curve' of this is striking. It's not that much greater than, say, Photoshop's version, for super high quality that's supposed to look lossless. Still looks like a jpeg, maybe a bit smaller. However, when you start getting ruthless, look out! I think my limit was nearer to 400:1. This looks ugly and it's more usable to go with between 30:1 and 90:1...
Examples? Easy: my art pages (which also include a bunch of linux tiles and titlebars in XPM) have background pictures that are JPEG. They are all 1024x768 and are around 100K in size. They are here. (And I should give my mac/linux dualboot box up and start doing everything in Windows for what, exactly, mister proprietary compression vendor sir? Feh)
Gates and Co. are a _lot_ more like Nixon and Co. than Clinton is. Clinton seems to be some kind of fool. Both the Nixon Cabinet, and the Gates Cabinet, were and are incredibly arrogant and dangerous criminals with the morals of scorpions.
Open Rant/Letter It's disturbing to see Slashdot used as a publicity vehicle for, as I most unkindly said the last article, an aging hippie writer. "This site has become my spiritual and literal Web home". How many people can, without embarrassment, make statements about their spiritual web homes? One thing for damn sure- this is part of the reason why Katz doesn't get along with genX. I have to confess to a little personal anger and frustration, though, and this tends to make me harsher than I might otherwise be. I am a writer, too. In fact, in a previous Katz thread, a couple people were saying 'ditch Katz and hire the Chris!' *hehe* That's not going to happen, as near as I can tell. One thing that is happening is that I'm trying to help out the Golgotha project's story team- this is almost the writer equivalent of open source. It's not going to pay me anything, but it might be a foot in the door of something somewhere, if Golgotha can be made to be not embarrassingly dim:) Also, while Jon Katz is getting tremendous support for a non-Linux related book that he's selling at Amazon, I've never seen any publicity for my novels- of which, one ("Kings of Rainmoor") is actually finished. For personal reasons I ended up putting all this work on the web so it could be enjoyed by people, because I felt that the business was so locked up by people like Jon Katz that I had no hope of breaking in. I gave up a lot to do this, to 'free' this work (it is still copyright Chris Johnson, mind you, but I'm not charging to read it). I gave up hope, to give this to people. It makes it hard to justify writing more of it, since it can't buy me food or shelter, since it displaces other activity that might help me survive. Now here comes Katz, making big bucks off Slashdot publicity. That stings. I hope, I seriously hope, that Katz's exploits here will change the way internet publication is viewed. All this time I've been quite certain that my own open publishing of my work has completely scuttled any hope of ever actually _selling_ it. I would be delighted to be proved wrong- and I have always secretly hoped someone would read my site and go, at best, 'Hey, can we have paperback rights? Lot of people without Web access you know', or more plausibly, 'Do you have anything like that which is _not_ all up on the web? We can use this web one as a publicity angle'. I'd willingly do that- though I'm not being given the opportunity at the moment. The situation of the internet artist is a dicey one. It would be terrific to see this change. However, from the perspective of someone who's actually made the choice to give something to the largely distracted community- I don't see Katz's experience as a blow for freedom. I see it as an aging hippie unthinkingly using a community as his soapbox, for personal gain. I don't think this is his primary intention, but he isn't doing anything that the typical slashdot reader would have as an option. Again: Katz angers me with this. I'm offended that he can so easily cash in on slashdot and be praised for it, and all I seem to have available is to put up work I've sweated blood over, and watch mostly nothing happen. I am _not_ a writer luser. However, I'm out of the loop. If Katz's 'self-discovery through publishing contracts' makes it easier for people to find and understand _me_ (hey, even if I still can't make a fscking cent from the art I love and have slaved over!) then it is, in some way, a good thing. If it makes it more likely that somehow, in some way, I or someone like me can actually get some bread money from writing 'customers' (readers, publishers...) then this is a very good thing. If this never goes beyond one person's ability to use an unrelated community for personal gain, then it's not a good omen. In the meantime, you can be damn sure I'm going to add the link to my novels again. That's something I can do, and it's even somewhat relevant. I am very aware, right now, when trying to slashdot myself, that I haven't set up for personal gain from this publication at all. If you want to, and can get to a Mac, you could register one of my GPLed shareware programs- they are set up through Kagi Shareware. I worked hard on those too, and made them available to all, including source up on the web and in the downloads. Some people have greatly admired this, and thought it was just great. Nobody has ever registered even one program through Kagi. I am going now to put computer-repair paycheck money into the back and pay a fee from one of my checks bouncing- this will reduce the amount of groceries I can afford for the rest of the month. Katz, I can't buy your book. I'm having trouble buying food. I've been sharing a lot, over the years. I don't know if I can do this dance much longer. But then, you're not doing it at all, are you? Do _you_ think there is value in giving to the community? What is the direction you're actually going in- what is the message you have for publishers? For fellow artists? Please think about this. If my views disturb you, they should- I've been harsh. It's easy to be harsh when you're out of the loop, and it's easy to not mind it when you have it made- but it seems that you do have vulnerabilities, after all, and one thing that truly hurts you is being attacked on your sincerity. Please decide where you really stand. Are you with us, or are you not? If you are, then you're suddenly in a hell of a position to help us. You, not CmdrTaco, not I, are the one who might be doing talk shows, plugging this book, working the angle about how suddenly Internet publicity made it take off. You are the one who can choose between basking in the attention, or evangelizing like Eric Raymond that there are _people_ out there, who care and work hard and are getting nothing but some random links on other people's web pages. Tell them about us, about Golgotha, about me. Tell them it's a gold mine, that one could trawl the web like a Hollywood director trolling for starlets, and grab up fully realized talents that were rotting in the digital equivalent of Paducah. Tell them that it's true, that people with no inside track can take their case to the people on the Web, and that you can package it and sell it without removing it from the freedom of the Web- you can have virtual and paperback both, they don't have to be mutually exclusive. It can hardly be more of a crapshoot than publishing already is, and you can get vital publicity through Web grassroots. Sell them the dream... and in so doing, you'll finally find a role far beyond linux dilettante and cheerleader, a role that perhaps you're meant for, a role that's come to you if you have the guts to take it. Please, Jon, give it a try. For us.
Now Katz makes perfect sense. He is an aging hippie who's found a new cause. We need those guys. Know why we need those guys? They're the ones running things these days- _they_ are The Establishment. Bigtime. However much Katz wants to disclaim it, he _is_ Establishment. This is why he is so totally confident that no flames touch him- he knows he's getting all the breaks, and he can humor all the poverty stricken under-30s who will never touch the hem of his Birkenstocks or the fender of his Beemer. He can spend a year or more playing writer- if it doesn't work out, he can go right back to being Big Boss Man with little fuss. This is why his adopting Linux as a pet annoys. He is an aging hippie and believes he is legitimizing it. Guess what? We need those guys- not because they are useful, for they are not- but because if they're against us, they will be an absolute bastard of an obstacle. We gotta reach those aging hippies running things, and get them pumped up about Linux and operating system choice. If we don't, it's Windows forever baby! They are much inclined to blindly accept what they are fed- as Frank Zappa observed way back in the 60s- and we need them blindly accepting Linux, otherwise they will blindly swallow Windows until they choke, meanwhile setting MS up for seriously alarming power and control over the entire world's information. WE NEED THE OLD HIPPIES. I don't care how annoying they are, or what bankrupt ideological baggage they carry along with 'em. Some of that can be used to break down the monopoly... the point is, these guys ARE the establishment now, and if we can get them, it blows a major hole in Microsoft's, or anybody's, plans of manipulation and control. These guys are running boardrooms all over the country, beemers and birkenstocks and they still figure they are the spiritually elect. Fine- now let's persuade them that Linux, and open source, and the free software/free information concepts, are important! We gotta get these guys away from MS, who have them pretty well nailed down, except that hippies are fickle and don't have much of an attention span or much loyalty to anything tangible. Win 'em, capture their attentions, get 'em to write big grandiose essays to each other about how linux is really a philosophical journey! The practical results that will come from this are IMPORTANT.
"Macintoshes sell well into that market because they're nearly idiot-proof and most people can sit down and figure out how to use them fairly easily. But even more so than Windows, you better hope they don't break on you because so much of the OS is hidden from you, you'll like have to reinstall to fix the problem."
Come again? This is flat nonsense. _Every_ _single_ _point_ you make is right on, except the instant you mention Macintoshes, you descend into gibberish. Might I suggest just not mentioning Macintoshes at all, if you can't talk sense about them? It's jarring to see such foolishness alongside such thoughtful, insightful points. There is _no_ CLI/DOS level 'hidden from you' in MacOS: it's all right there. Moving a thing out of the system folder or out of Extensions or something is not an _abstraction_ for some other behavior somewhere, it's right there- it's all at the GUI level, there _is_ no hiding going on. It's _designed_ to be that way, and it's damn easy to maintain, in fact: Linux could benefit from similar predictability of GUI 'object' behavior. With Linux, of course, the idea _is_ 'hiding', or at least transparently mapping things like file operations into a GUI metaphor while concealing the exact 'filesystem calls' (shell programs) doing it. But with the Mac there is no hiding at all- it's totally accessible. If you hack, you can get ResEdit at no cost and it's even more totally accessible. I also don't see how 'ending the domination of any company' jibes with KDE/Gnome 'one of the two will have to go'. Come again? I think we will have to do better than _that_. I think we have to be ready to protect the interests of the minority KDE people assuming everybody mostly abandons it- we have to look out for the smaller factions. There's historical precedent to suggest that this is an important lesson to learn... I guess what I'm saying is, I wish you would think these things through a little more.
If you can order ten thousand hard drives, you can get Compaq prices too. Otherwise, forget it. You're crazy if you think you can buy in single digits and get within 30 percent of the bulk rate. That's business: you seem not to be aware of it. Have you bought any electronic part in quantities over a hundred, even? I have- your wonderful retailer might be THREE TIMES the bulk price depending on the exact part. Sorry: DIY costs significantly more.
The trouble with Wright is this: he was so close to 'fine art' that his works were not optimal homes. Architecture is weird, and it has some parallels with software- on one hand you can have striking visual design and aesthetic considerations, and on the other you also have constraints relating to the fact that houses are people's 'dens' for living in, and overly stark and artsy dens do not feel reassuring to animals, including the human animal. My favorite architects are Roger and Martyn Dean (see the coffeetable books Views and Magnetic Storm for examples). They have actually built at least the model houses for wild organic cavelike rounded homes of many levels. The design is _wild_, but at the same time, people loved it! When demonstrated at a home exhibition, people shoved past the ropes and things to constrain spectators, and roamed all over the designs, making themselves at home and happy as clams. The Deans tapped into a set of values for architecture which to my knowledge _still_ have not been fully explored. Of course, these homes they made have absolutely horrifyingly nightmarishly bad acoustics... see how complicated design is? Next stage, making softly organic comforting hobbit-hole homes _and_ keeping the acoustics good;) hmmmmmmm;) where'd I put that gunnite?;)
Apple's kinda cool- they oscillate between sucking horribly and being totally cool. Did you hear that now Sys7.5 is available on the web for download at no cost, same with sys6 and sys7.1? That you can download the rather unixish MPW development environment, with the same compilers as used to compile MacOS itself, also at no cost? That Apple is supporting OpenGL and aiming to make _that_ available to developers and users at no cost also? (note avoidance of 'free'!;) ) Any half competent Linux hacker can make a version of MacOS 8, 8.1, 8.5 sit up and do tricks. You only have to do a bit of research, and make sure MS doesn't have a place on your box for anything. There's an active software ecology with lots of developers (hell, even game developers!) getting by writing Mac software. You don't hear about them any more than you hear about Linux developers in the Doze mags, but they are out there, lots of them. There are even GPLed Mac software programs- I know this for a fact 'cos _I_ write 'em;) There's a rapid IDE Basic out there just in the last two years or so called REALbasic, written by an Australian who's moved to Texas. REALbasic is absolutely phenomenal, and though it's vaguely syntax compatible with VB, the vendors (six people in Texas! Not counting the coder's newborn baby daughter:) yay!) have explicitly said they will not blindly copy the bits of VB that suck, even if they are begged to by suits and VB weenies;) And, of course, there's LinuxPPC. I think this may be the most approachable path to Linux you can get short of buying a prebuilt x86 box with Linux on;) it dualboots with a terrific little control panel app that's super convenient (or open firmware if you insist on not dualbooting MacOS), and the hardware is more predictable so it's easier to set up and maintain. I can't say enough good things about LinuxPPC- I just love it, and my first experiences with Linux have been linuxish, sometimes frustrating (unixgeekery novice here), but in the end rewarding- it did not defeat me, in fact I got to where I understood and loved it. Isn't that what all this is about, in the end? SUPPORT PPC AND LINUXPPC;) and hey, Apple's not so bad either! Dualboot to it for games, or when you want to just passively webbrowse. MacOS Navigator 4.06 is dead stable...
Because PPC, which is made by Motorola and IBM and, at one point, Exponential, already has areas in which it is faster than x86, and already is significantly more energy-efficient than x86. Therefore, although Pentiums need these speed and efficiency improvements far more, they can't have them because IBM makes PPCs (and lots of other things besides), and therefore we want to 'replace' x86 by having really solid competition come up and basically obliterate x86 in performance. The fact that this will give people three main options- MacOS, LinuxPPC and Be- is icing on the cake. Support for x86 == support for Intel, and Microsoft. Support for PPC is far more likely to drive Linux, simply because not everybody wants to use MacOS:) Screw ATX mobos, it's time for a PPC based Netwinder >;) that sets out from the start to tap into the cost savings of aiming for Linux from the beginning. _That_ would be the future.
I've seen Conix OpenGL for the Mac, and its software rendering. It's seriously impressive for software rendering. One would almost think it was raycasting from the speed of some demos! This is the product Apple bought and will be making available to MacOS folk at no cost, the concession that got John Carmack on a stage acerbically plugging Macintoshes. Maybe PPC is particularly suited to software OpenGL rendering? If so it'd be every bit as capable in linuxppc...
Brin is right- you can't control this. What you need to do is be able to get at that supervisor. Where does _he_ go... and what makes you different from the zillions of other people who sometimes go places some people would have a problem with? What will have to happen is this: the place you work _cannot_ simply say 'you went here, clean out your desk'. Ideally everybody would/will be in the same boat- hell, man, you think you're the only person with vulnerabilities? You'd be way down on the list. Brin is right- you can't stop these people from steadily getting more and more information. The only recourse is to get information on them- and start getting used to the idea that 'everybody is guilty'. You're not unique, you're not a victim- you have choices you make. If some of them are too deeply shameful that you cannot live with them being exposed, maybe you need to make different choices?
Mind you, this is still 604-based and Apple is just about at G4 by now. It's quite possible that this dual-processor CHRP board is a dog compared to Apple's hardware.
I don't use Gnome at all, as near as I can tell. If I wanted a desktop I'd boot into MacOS... but the times I have used KDE, my personal experience has not been of functionality, work and working software. My experience was of a thing that tried really hard to be just like Windows, had lots of little behaviors like what you'd get with Windows, but was horribly beset with minor glitches everywhere. Programs would launch a couple times and then be unlaunchable. Windows would freeze up- and KDE actually took pains to make sure I couldn't use PPP config information in nonKDE tools like wmppp, by literally making the important config info (in resolv.conf) _temporary_ and deleting it after use so no other program can use it unless it goes through kppp. I didn't buy a whole other disk and set up a working, live, genuine Linux installation to put up with crap like that. Again- I don't use Gnome and have had no real interest in trying to nail a desktop onto the side of X. But, I have used KDE, and in fact have hunted down some of the things it does, and my experience with it has been quite negative in every way. Most notably, I contest the implication that KDE is functionality, good design and working software. There is a lot to it and some of that works, but mostly all it is is Windows design principles hauled up by the roots and replanted in Linux. That's fine, but don't even call it superior design, or working software, or functionality incarnate. It's not, and there is no reason to seriously believe it will ever _fully_ live up to that sort of hype. It doesn't need to- somebody has to take care of the Microsofties come to Linux and looking for their taskbar and shortcuts. But put a cork in the KDE-uber-alles ranting, OK? You're flat wrong, precisely as wrong as Microsoft itself is when it makes THOSE SAME EXACT ARGUMENTS. And Windows, too, works- sort of. But I don't want to use it, either, and I don't.
It almost sounds reasonable that Linux would have been started in "Visual C" or "Masm" only if you're a complete uneducated fool- which is why so many of us responded along the lines of "LOL ROFL stop! stop! it hurts! ROFL!" It _is_ worth noting, however, that people without a clue might be conned by this sort of thing, and so it's good to note formally that the very suggestion is beyond ludicrous and in fact impossible. VC++ is not necessarily a more reliable tool- even if it were, which is debatable, it is absolutely certain that Linus used no such thing. Unix C compilers have been around for ages, since before X even... I daresay you could even look up what Linus had back then, it's not at all subject to doubt.
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More accurately, it is the technical elite that keep the computers working for the masses, rather like janitors (says Chris, putting off heading to work for more keep-computers-working duties and longing for a linux internet kiosk- hell, I'm gonna do an essay just about that, explore how it could be done)
If the geeks say something is a technical disaster, know what that means? If they quit working like dogs to keep it running, it'll just fscking fall apart. Well, that's Windows (and to some extent the PC). And everybody knows it. But everybody assumes _WE!_ are just going to keep propping it up forever...
Look, people, if Windows loses the huge masses of geeks out there patiently reinstalling it for people and wrestling with demented wizards, it will _die_ because it will _choke_ on its own technical problems. It relies on people being willing to pick up after it. I'm losing patience with this- and with the assumption that of course the technical elite is best used as janitors to clean up messes made by Microsoft, served to uneducated customers, and arrogantly dumped all over the place in big piles of steaming lossage.
We will never do ourselves out of jobs, because there is _always_ a place for people who put extra effort into thinking, designing, coding. Most people don't do that, they pay others to think.
So we might as well think in terms of: how can we build plug-in and go Emailboxes and the like, WebTV only from linux, for all the people who can't or won't be technically competent? I always say these people are Microsoft's rightful property- but if that assumes that _I_ will always be available for tech support duties, I am strongly tempted to quit that job which I never agreed to take on! And that goes double for the more seriously PC-supporting techs at the shop I work at: they're awful tired of dealing with the crap.
Think about it. What would happen if Microsoft _did_ have to deal with cleaning up their own messes? If only MCSEs were willing to reinstall Windows all the time, or deal with issues? If all the overworked technical elite low-status geeks just quit dealing with Windows? A disaster area, that's what- Microsoft do not _educate_ their people to repair Windows effectively, but to advocate and sell it effectively, even if that means becoming certified by parroting marketingnuggets that actually do not work in practice, but sound good! (see the O'Reilly book, or genuine NT experts with hands-on experience).
Let's move in the direction of cutting them loose to fend for themselves, shall we? HOW MANY of you put in paid or unpaid time to _support_ Microsoft products because your own friends, family or workplace uses them? You are irreplaceable support for Microsoft when you do this. Stop doing it >;)
I'm a Mac tech, and I am going in to work today to upgrade a machine for a client. This woman has given us so much grief it's absurd- she is aggressively dumb- brings in computer without modem to have its Email setup looked at. Then brings in just the modem without the very weird cable it uses, or the power adapter- all the time getting madder and madder at _US_.
This woman cannot set up a Mac. Will not even try. That is why I would like to be able to give her a Linux box so totally transformed into a kiosk that it can only check Email. Done properly, she'd never return with a problem! (well, one can dream). Who says linux is only for techies? It might just be the idea platform for setting up luser-kiosks so people with no clue can still check their email without ever dealing with computer issues. Such a kiosk would have to be inflexible, preconfigured on controlled hardware, and cheap. I could see Netwinders finding an extra market just as this sort of kiosk, once you got rid of all the configurability. Set it up so unless you hold down magic keys, like you do to get into Open Firmware, it always boots to the handholding, no-options mode. The special key combo gets you to bash or something, so the admin can do the one-time setup. Hell, you could have it boot specially off a CD so the important stuff would be read-only! It could have just a CD-Rom and a floppy to hold the prefs, no HD! (that might also make it very quiet and nice to live with).
I want one of _those_ for my customer from hell. Not a Mac (too flexible!) not Linux proper (bwahahaha) not Windows (also bwahahaha, but more of a pain). But what I want could and would be _based_ on Linux.
...at selling OSS to hippies.
This is good, as I said. Personally, I didn't find this article very inspiring, because it seemed too vague and breathless for my taste, but looking at it as a work targeted to a very different audience, I think it's _damn_ effective, just about perfect for that task.
Go Katz! There are guys in boardrooms and positions of power who used to care about what you talk about, went for money in midlife, and are now wondering if they can have their self-validation back. Get 'em frothing about open source! It'd really shake things up and might improve the world in little ways. At least it would get more ideas happening, and more lines of communication open- that's where the action really is.
...or for that matter Window Maker, nicely kitted out, with transparent aterms... then close the transparent one (hee, only good for showing off when you have a vivid desktop) and run the afterstep xlock -inroot hacks... for star travel or laser shows or 'swarm' (everybody falls in love with swarm!) as _animated_ desktops.
*grin* damn straight it can be the most visually pleasant, and this is a dude here who knows _all_ the tricks for making a _MacOS_ desktop visually pleasant (and there are a lot- basically the equivalent of E for macs, complete with outlandish window regions). You can set up a workstation in linux that's not only beautiful, but deeply functional- I can't get over the elegance of running them little old unix apps from tiles with elaborate lashings of flags and all sorts of customizations on the window specifications...
Yes, the visual prettiness is enticing, but you know you're a serious linux fancier when you get off on your ability to totally rewrite the menu and invent applications out of very basic parts (process manager, called BOFHCenter, run as top in an inverse aterm with the minimize button and resize border removed! Oh, and shift-keypad - and + will make all aterm-based apps shrink and expand as the font size changes- sort of 3D effect there, try _that_ anywhere else)
Maybe this is only for geeks. But, by God, is it ever for geeks! It's fun to do demos and wow neophytes- it's _amazing_ to set up a workspace where you could do demos that would floor _other_ _geeks_...
I keep reading these comments and considering one peculiar interpretation that comes to mind. Supposing this is _for_ charging really large interstate ISPs? It is unfortunately fantasy, but supposing I call up my local ISP, SoVerNet, which is a 7 digit dialup, and still within that area they tie into the net? Now, suppose I call up a local AOL node, which calls another, which calls another one God knows where, and then ties into the net from a totally different state?
Wouldn't it be interesting if this sort of thing was used to squeeze money out of the hugest ISPs? One thing you can say is, they _have_ the money. We don't- we'll just be forced into silence if we get hit with such charges. Supposing the AOLs of the world have become rich by using these loopholes? It would be very interesting if this development actually _aided_ local ISPs as a phenomenon, and mostly sucked the blood of the overarching, huge ISPs that are so brutal for local operations to compete with. On the one hand, yes yes, evil wicked government is going to lick the hand of the rich corporations and put the hurt on us poor regular folks. On the other hand- who, exactly, has the money in this equation? The rich corporations- and these days it's the Microsofts, the AOLs, etc., and they make it damned tough to maintain a normal capitalism with many players anymore. Wouldn't it be interesting if the government, purely out of self-interest, decided that since these corporations have all the money now, _they_ should be the focus for 'creative fundraising and taxation'?
Just a thought. I'd looooove to see my local ISP untouched, and AOL and MSN etc brutally taxed >:)
I wonder what the real truth will be.
Indeed... and if the present curves are extrapolated, you'll be seeing a ROCKING SEVEN PERCENT improvement over the 500mhz ones, woohoo :P
Haven't you _noticed_ that the performance of x86 is no longer scaling linearly with mhz? It's hitting a wall.
Hey: that perfectly describes the JPEG software I have. Mind you, not _all_ jpeg will do that- I'm talking Boxtop Software 'ProJPEG'. It takes noticably longer than generic JPEG to run, because it's doing things like (if I remember correctly) optimizing huffman coding of whatever the hell it's doing... *boggle* at any rate, the 'curve' of this is striking. It's not that much greater than, say, Photoshop's version, for super high quality that's supposed to look lossless. Still looks like a jpeg, maybe a bit smaller. However, when you start getting ruthless, look out! I think my limit was nearer to 400:1. This looks ugly and it's more usable to go with between 30:1 and 90:1...
Examples? Easy: my art pages (which also include a bunch of linux tiles and titlebars in XPM) have background pictures that are JPEG. They are all 1024x768 and are around 100K in size. They are here. (And I should give my mac/linux dualboot box up and start doing everything in Windows for what, exactly, mister proprietary compression vendor sir? Feh)
*broken pipe*
;)
*broken pipe*
*broken pipe*
*broken pipe*
They slashdotted Ebay!
You bastards!
...like the truth ;)
Gates and Co. are a _lot_ more like Nixon and Co. than Clinton is. Clinton seems to be some kind of fool. Both the Nixon Cabinet, and the Gates Cabinet, were and are incredibly arrogant and dangerous criminals with the morals of scorpions.
Open Rant/Letter :)
It's disturbing to see Slashdot used as a publicity vehicle for, as I most unkindly said the last article, an aging hippie writer. "This site has become my spiritual and literal Web home". How many people can, without embarrassment, make statements about their spiritual web homes? One thing for damn sure- this is part of the reason why Katz doesn't get along with genX.
I have to confess to a little personal anger and frustration, though, and this tends to make me harsher than I might otherwise be. I am a writer, too. In fact, in a previous Katz thread, a couple people were saying 'ditch Katz and hire the Chris!' *hehe*
That's not going to happen, as near as I can tell. One thing that is happening is that I'm trying to help out the Golgotha project's story team- this is almost the writer equivalent of open source. It's not going to pay me anything, but it might be a foot in the door of something somewhere, if Golgotha can be made to be not embarrassingly dim
Also, while Jon Katz is getting tremendous support for a non-Linux related book that he's selling at Amazon, I've never seen any publicity for my novels- of which, one ("Kings of Rainmoor") is actually finished. For personal reasons I ended up putting all this work on the web so it could be enjoyed by people, because I felt that the business was so locked up by people like Jon Katz that I had no hope of breaking in. I gave up a lot to do this, to 'free' this work (it is still copyright Chris Johnson, mind you, but I'm not charging to read it). I gave up hope, to give this to people. It makes it hard to justify writing more of it, since it can't buy me food or shelter, since it displaces other activity that might help me survive.
Now here comes Katz, making big bucks off Slashdot publicity. That stings.
I hope, I seriously hope, that Katz's exploits here will change the way internet publication is viewed. All this time I've been quite certain that my own open publishing of my work has completely scuttled any hope of ever actually _selling_ it. I would be delighted to be proved wrong- and I have always secretly hoped someone would read my site and go, at best, 'Hey, can we have paperback rights? Lot of people without Web access you know', or more plausibly, 'Do you have anything like that which is _not_ all up on the web? We can use this web one as a publicity angle'. I'd willingly do that- though I'm not being given the opportunity at the moment.
The situation of the internet artist is a dicey one. It would be terrific to see this change. However, from the perspective of someone who's actually made the choice to give something to the largely distracted community- I don't see Katz's experience as a blow for freedom. I see it as an aging hippie unthinkingly using a community as his soapbox, for personal gain. I don't think this is his primary intention, but he isn't doing anything that the typical slashdot reader would have as an option.
Again: Katz angers me with this. I'm offended that he can so easily cash in on slashdot and be praised for it, and all I seem to have available is to put up work I've sweated blood over, and watch mostly nothing happen. I am _not_ a writer luser. However, I'm out of the loop.
If Katz's 'self-discovery through publishing contracts' makes it easier for people to find and understand _me_ (hey, even if I still can't make a fscking cent from the art I love and have slaved over!) then it is, in some way, a good thing. If it makes it more likely that somehow, in some way, I or someone like me can actually get some bread money from writing 'customers' (readers, publishers...) then this is a very good thing. If this never goes beyond one person's ability to use an unrelated community for personal gain, then it's not a good omen.
In the meantime, you can be damn sure I'm going to add the link to my novels again. That's something I can do, and it's even somewhat relevant. I am very aware, right now, when trying to slashdot myself, that I haven't set up for personal gain from this publication at all. If you want to, and can get to a Mac, you could register one of my GPLed shareware programs- they are set up through Kagi Shareware. I worked hard on those too, and made them available to all, including source up on the web and in the downloads. Some people have greatly admired this, and thought it was just great. Nobody has ever registered even one program through Kagi. I am going now to put computer-repair paycheck money into the back and pay a fee from one of my checks bouncing- this will reduce the amount of groceries I can afford for the rest of the month.
Katz, I can't buy your book. I'm having trouble buying food. I've been sharing a lot, over the years. I don't know if I can do this dance much longer. But then, you're not doing it at all, are you? Do _you_ think there is value in giving to the community? What is the direction you're actually going in- what is the message you have for publishers? For fellow artists? Please think about this. If my views disturb you, they should- I've been harsh. It's easy to be harsh when you're out of the loop, and it's easy to not mind it when you have it made- but it seems that you do have vulnerabilities, after all, and one thing that truly hurts you is being attacked on your sincerity.
Please decide where you really stand. Are you with us, or are you not? If you are, then you're suddenly in a hell of a position to help us. You, not CmdrTaco, not I, are the one who might be doing talk shows, plugging this book, working the angle about how suddenly Internet publicity made it take off. You are the one who can choose between basking in the attention, or evangelizing like Eric Raymond that there are _people_ out there, who care and work hard and are getting nothing but some random links on other people's web pages. Tell them about us, about Golgotha, about me. Tell them it's a gold mine, that one could trawl the web like a Hollywood director trolling for starlets, and grab up fully realized talents that were rotting in the digital equivalent of Paducah. Tell them that it's true, that people with no inside track can take their case to the people on the Web, and that you can package it and sell it without removing it from the freedom of the Web- you can have virtual and paperback both, they don't have to be mutually exclusive. It can hardly be more of a crapshoot than publishing already is, and you can get vital publicity through Web grassroots. Sell them the dream... and in so doing, you'll finally find a role far beyond linux dilettante and cheerleader, a role that perhaps you're meant for, a role that's come to you if you have the guts to take it.
Please, Jon, give it a try. For us.
Now Katz makes perfect sense. He is an aging hippie who's found a new cause.
We need those guys. Know why we need those guys?
They're the ones running things these days- _they_ are The Establishment. Bigtime. However much Katz wants to disclaim it, he _is_ Establishment. This is why he is so totally confident that no flames touch him- he knows he's getting all the breaks, and he can humor all the poverty stricken under-30s who will never touch the hem of his Birkenstocks or the fender of his Beemer.
He can spend a year or more playing writer- if it doesn't work out, he can go right back to being Big Boss Man with little fuss.
This is why his adopting Linux as a pet annoys. He is an aging hippie and believes he is legitimizing it.
Guess what? We need those guys- not because they are useful, for they are not- but because if they're against us, they will be an absolute bastard of an obstacle. We gotta reach those aging hippies running things, and get them pumped up about Linux and operating system choice. If we don't, it's Windows forever baby! They are much inclined to blindly accept what they are fed- as Frank Zappa observed way back in the 60s- and we need them blindly accepting Linux, otherwise they will blindly swallow Windows until they choke, meanwhile setting MS up for seriously alarming power and control over the entire world's information.
WE NEED THE OLD HIPPIES. I don't care how annoying they are, or what bankrupt ideological baggage they carry along with 'em. Some of that can be used to break down the monopoly... the point is, these guys ARE the establishment now, and if we can get them, it blows a major hole in Microsoft's, or anybody's, plans of manipulation and control. These guys are running boardrooms all over the country, beemers and birkenstocks and they still figure they are the spiritually elect. Fine- now let's persuade them that Linux, and open source, and the free software/free information concepts, are important! We gotta get these guys away from MS, who have them pretty well nailed down, except that hippies are fickle and don't have much of an attention span or much loyalty to anything tangible. Win 'em, capture their attentions, get 'em to write big grandiose essays to each other about how linux is really a philosophical journey! The practical results that will come from this are IMPORTANT.
"Macintoshes sell well into that market because they're nearly idiot-proof and most people can sit down and figure out how to use them fairly easily. But even more so than Windows, you better hope they don't break on you because so much of the OS is hidden from you, you'll like have to reinstall to fix the problem."
Come again? This is flat nonsense. _Every_ _single_ _point_ you make is right on, except the instant you mention Macintoshes, you descend into gibberish. Might I suggest just not mentioning Macintoshes at all, if you can't talk sense about them? It's jarring to see such foolishness alongside such thoughtful, insightful points.
There is _no_ CLI/DOS level 'hidden from you' in MacOS: it's all right there. Moving a thing out of the system folder or out of Extensions or something is not an _abstraction_ for some other behavior somewhere, it's right there- it's all at the GUI level, there _is_ no hiding going on. It's _designed_ to be that way, and it's damn easy to maintain, in fact: Linux could benefit from similar predictability of GUI 'object' behavior.
With Linux, of course, the idea _is_ 'hiding', or at least transparently mapping things like file operations into a GUI metaphor while concealing the exact 'filesystem calls' (shell programs) doing it. But with the Mac there is no hiding at all- it's totally accessible. If you hack, you can get ResEdit at no cost and it's even more totally accessible.
I also don't see how 'ending the domination of any company' jibes with KDE/Gnome 'one of the two will have to go'. Come again? I think we will have to do better than _that_. I think we have to be ready to protect the interests of the minority KDE people assuming everybody mostly abandons it- we have to look out for the smaller factions. There's historical precedent to suggest that this is an important lesson to learn...
I guess what I'm saying is, I wish you would think these things through a little more.
If you can order ten thousand hard drives, you can get Compaq prices too.
Otherwise, forget it. You're crazy if you think you can buy in single digits and get within 30 percent of the bulk rate.
That's business: you seem not to be aware of it. Have you bought any electronic part in quantities over a hundred, even? I have- your wonderful retailer might be THREE TIMES the bulk price depending on the exact part.
Sorry: DIY costs significantly more.
The trouble with Wright is this: he was so close to 'fine art' that his works were not optimal homes. Architecture is weird, and it has some parallels with software- on one hand you can have striking visual design and aesthetic considerations, and on the other you also have constraints relating to the fact that houses are people's 'dens' for living in, and overly stark and artsy dens do not feel reassuring to animals, including the human animal. ;) hmmmmmmm ;) where'd I put that gunnite? ;)
My favorite architects are Roger and Martyn Dean (see the coffeetable books Views and Magnetic Storm for examples). They have actually built at least the model houses for wild organic cavelike rounded homes of many levels. The design is _wild_, but at the same time, people loved it! When demonstrated at a home exhibition, people shoved past the ropes and things to constrain spectators, and roamed all over the designs, making themselves at home and happy as clams. The Deans tapped into a set of values for architecture which to my knowledge _still_ have not been fully explored.
Of course, these homes they made have absolutely horrifyingly nightmarishly bad acoustics... see how complicated design is? Next stage, making softly organic comforting hobbit-hole homes _and_ keeping the acoustics good
Apple's kinda cool- they oscillate between sucking horribly and being totally cool. Did you hear that now Sys7.5 is available on the web for download at no cost, same with sys6 and sys7.1? That you can download the rather unixish MPW development environment, with the same compilers as used to compile MacOS itself, also at no cost? That Apple is supporting OpenGL and aiming to make _that_ available to developers and users at no cost also? (note avoidance of 'free'! ;) ) ;) :) yay!) have explicitly said they will not blindly copy the bits of VB that suck, even if they are begged to by suits and VB weenies ;) ;) it dualboots with a terrific little control panel app that's super convenient (or open firmware if you insist on not dualbooting MacOS), and the hardware is more predictable so it's easier to set up and maintain. I can't say enough good things about LinuxPPC- I just love it, and my first experiences with Linux have been linuxish, sometimes frustrating (unixgeekery novice here), but in the end rewarding- it did not defeat me, in fact I got to where I understood and loved it. ;) and hey, Apple's not so bad either! Dualboot to it for games, or when you want to just passively webbrowse. MacOS Navigator 4.06 is dead stable...
Any half competent Linux hacker can make a version of MacOS 8, 8.1, 8.5 sit up and do tricks. You only have to do a bit of research, and make sure MS doesn't have a place on your box for anything. There's an active software ecology with lots of developers (hell, even game developers!) getting by writing Mac software. You don't hear about them any more than you hear about Linux developers in the Doze mags, but they are out there, lots of them.
There are even GPLed Mac software programs- I know this for a fact 'cos _I_ write 'em
There's a rapid IDE Basic out there just in the last two years or so called REALbasic, written by an Australian who's moved to Texas. REALbasic is absolutely phenomenal, and though it's vaguely syntax compatible with VB, the vendors (six people in Texas! Not counting the coder's newborn baby daughter
And, of course, there's LinuxPPC. I think this may be the most approachable path to Linux you can get short of buying a prebuilt x86 box with Linux on
Isn't that what all this is about, in the end?
SUPPORT PPC AND LINUXPPC
Because PPC, which is made by Motorola and IBM and, at one point, Exponential, already has areas in which it is faster than x86, and already is significantly more energy-efficient than x86. :)
Therefore, although Pentiums need these speed and efficiency improvements far more, they can't have them because IBM makes PPCs (and lots of other things besides), and therefore we want to 'replace' x86 by having really solid competition come up and basically obliterate x86 in performance.
The fact that this will give people three main options- MacOS, LinuxPPC and Be- is icing on the cake. Support for x86 == support for Intel, and Microsoft. Support for PPC is far more likely to drive Linux, simply because not everybody wants to use MacOS
Screw ATX mobos, it's time for a PPC based Netwinder >;) that sets out from the start to tap into the cost savings of aiming for Linux from the beginning. _That_ would be the future.
I've seen Conix OpenGL for the Mac, and its software rendering. It's seriously impressive for software rendering. One would almost think it was raycasting from the speed of some demos! This is the product Apple bought and will be making available to MacOS folk at no cost, the concession that got John Carmack on a stage acerbically plugging Macintoshes. Maybe PPC is particularly suited to software OpenGL rendering? If so it'd be every bit as capable in linuxppc...
Brin is right- you can't control this. What you need to do is be able to get at that supervisor. Where does _he_ go... and what makes you different from the zillions of other people who sometimes go places some people would have a problem with?
What will have to happen is this: the place you work _cannot_ simply say 'you went here, clean out your desk'. Ideally everybody would/will be in the same boat- hell, man, you think you're the only person with vulnerabilities? You'd be way down on the list.
Brin is right- you can't stop these people from steadily getting more and more information. The only recourse is to get information on them- and start getting used to the idea that 'everybody is guilty'. You're not unique, you're not a victim- you have choices you make. If some of them are too deeply shameful that you cannot live with them being exposed, maybe you need to make different choices?
s/benefit/amusement
:)
Mind you, this is still 604-based and Apple is just about at G4 by now. It's quite possible that this dual-processor CHRP board is a dog compared to Apple's hardware.
I don't use Gnome at all, as near as I can tell. If I wanted a desktop I'd boot into MacOS... but the times I have used KDE, my personal experience has not been of functionality, work and working software.
My experience was of a thing that tried really hard to be just like Windows, had lots of little behaviors like what you'd get with Windows, but was horribly beset with minor glitches everywhere. Programs would launch a couple times and then be unlaunchable. Windows would freeze up- and KDE actually took pains to make sure I couldn't use PPP config information in nonKDE tools like wmppp, by literally making the important config info (in resolv.conf) _temporary_ and deleting it after use so no other program can use it unless it goes through kppp.
I didn't buy a whole other disk and set up a working, live, genuine Linux installation to put up with crap like that.
Again- I don't use Gnome and have had no real interest in trying to nail a desktop onto the side of X. But, I have used KDE, and in fact have hunted down some of the things it does, and my experience with it has been quite negative in every way. Most notably, I contest the implication that KDE is functionality, good design and working software. There is a lot to it and some of that works, but mostly all it is is Windows design principles hauled up by the roots and replanted in Linux. That's fine, but don't even call it superior design, or working software, or functionality incarnate. It's not, and there is no reason to seriously believe it will ever _fully_ live up to that sort of hype.
It doesn't need to- somebody has to take care of the Microsofties come to Linux and looking for their taskbar and shortcuts. But put a cork in the KDE-uber-alles ranting, OK? You're flat wrong, precisely as wrong as Microsoft itself is when it makes THOSE SAME EXACT ARGUMENTS. And Windows, too, works- sort of. But I don't want to use it, either, and I don't.
It almost sounds reasonable that Linux would have been started in "Visual C" or "Masm" only if you're a complete uneducated fool- which is why so many of us responded along the lines of "LOL ROFL stop! stop! it hurts! ROFL!"
It _is_ worth noting, however, that people without a clue might be conned by this sort of thing, and so it's good to note formally that the very suggestion is beyond ludicrous and in fact impossible. VC++ is not necessarily a more reliable tool- even if it were, which is debatable, it is absolutely certain that Linus used no such thing. Unix C compilers have been around for ages, since before X even... I daresay you could even look up what Linus had back then, it's not at all subject to doubt.
...he's Linus! :) )
(just kidding
No kidding ;) don't ask me, I spend my time playing with a Window Maker desktop ;)