I don't know about this Dell product specifically, but I'd love a product that acts as a front-end MP3 player and plugs into a 100baseT network. I'd throw some whopping hard drives into an old box, stick in the basement and have it do nothing but serve up the MP3s. That way there's a central music repository that can be accessed by not only any PC in the house, but a non-PC stereo component.
The MP3 player component would be great - just walk up, hit the power switch and browse for music. Better than having to wait for a noisy PC to boot up, and it could be nice and easy to use. And there are places where it'd be nicer to have a simple little component rather than a full-blown PC setup.
No, there's not much point to it if you're a solitary geek. But if you're a geek living with other people and you already have a home network, hey, for 250 bones it could be a cool little deal.
Maybe someday there will be enough decent games to have these kinds of discussions and to have a "Rolling Stone" of games, but for now there's only www.oldmanmurray.com.
If the future means respectability for games, then Old Man Murray's "crate test" will be a seminal piece of work, and Seanbaby will be a pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing, undergraduate-diddling professor.
That's actually the kind of future I'd look forward to.
Fight Club. Just out on DVD, for those that aren't boycotting, and it is one HELL of a package. And who can forget the comparable Trainspotting.
The Resistance starts here. It is a battle for mindshare, a cultural revolution in the truest sense. Popular film is the thermonuclear device of this war, but there are many alternatives for the rest of us... websites, Flash, short films, pamphlets, email, music, comics, software, even just talking with your friends and family... whatever you can do, you can do it subversively. And you can have a positive effect.
I recommend reading "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" by Eric Hoffer, very much not politically-correct and over-the-top, but Hoffer brings some interesting concepts to the table in short order. How can we teach people to distrust the corporate order? You'll find some ideas here.
I recommend Jack T. Chick, the sick bastard. www.chick.com - order the complete set of Chick Tracts for $10. It's cheap education... these things have been around for a long time for a reason. How could someone use the Chick concept in a positive way? Hmmmm...
Yeah, you and Rasvar and right... I tend to be optimistic when it comes to time predictions. I think in a couple of years non-PCs will be a definite trend, but it'll probably be ten years before they get as cool as I'm expecting they will.
I don't know SHIT about ANYTHING. PCs is merely one minor area of expertise in which I am totally devoid of knowledge. It's pretty sad, really... sometimes I can conjure up enough buzzwords to convince the average schmuck I know something about a given subject, but it's really just a cheap, hollow sham, one which is easily discerned by men of refinement. You, for example, have seen through my pathetic little ruse.
Maybe someday I'll learn something about something. Maybe you'll be the one to enlighten me...
Yeah, absolutely the PC is going to be around for awhile. You and me and probably everyone else who reads Slashdot is going to have them, but like the Explorer, it'll be a niche market.
Somebody else posted a link to this site - http://www.indrema.com - which is more in line with what I see coming. Rather than an unnecessarily dumbed-down console or web pad, it'll have all the power of a PC but made easy to use and, probably with a Linux variant underneath, damn near crash-proof.
But I don't see any technical reason why a "web pad" couldn't be able to play MP3s, update codecs, write papers (especially if voice recognition kicks in), play games, and all those things you mentioned. I don't think processing power or interfaces will be an issue... I think it's more a matter of perceptions. We have this notion that a console couldn't possibly be any good for Photoshop work, for example, but then again, slap a bigass solid-state RAM drive, a drawing tablet and a keyboard into a Playstation 3, and presto, it works just fine. I'm sure even the PS2 CPU itself would be a jim-dandy number-cruncher for Photoshop. You might scoff now, but I bet by the time the Playstation 4 rolls around it could be used as a serious design platform... and a great game console. Hey, what's not to like?
I was explaining to a friend of mine why I wasn't interested in becoming a freelance PC consultant. It might be fun for awhile, but long-term prospects aren't good... and here's my reasoning:
PCs will always be around. In 5-7 years, I think they'll be mostly for geeks. In 10-15 years, they'll be mostly for uber-geeks, like the amateur radio guys - a real niche.
What's going to kill PCs for the masses? Two things:
1) Static RAM hard drives, or whatever you want to call them... flash card hard drives, whatever. As soon as we ditch mechanical hard drives, we kiss a lot of problems goodbye.
2) Combine the above with the i-Opener of three years from now and a broadband connection. The thing won't ever need service from a hardware standpoint (and if it does, it's a factory kind of thing), and all software updates can be done over the wire. The processor will be, what, 3 to 5 ghz or something, which should be plenty for speech recognition and photorealistic 3D graphics, so the "obsolete" thing should not be a big deal for all but the most hardcore gamers, and even so, since it only costs $100 or $200 or something it's not a huge investment anyway.
If it's not the i-Opener per se, then the PS2 or the Palm 2005 or who knows what... the point is, Joe Consumer is going to honest-to-god truly plug and play this thing and he's not going to be calling us geeks to come fix it because his hard drive puked or Windows is fubar'd.
And sometime around then someone will make a business version that connects to a network (but is NOT an NC, notice), and the PHBs are going to be all over it.
I compare computers and cars a lot, and the way I figure it, we're at about 1933 in car years. Cars are mass-produced and reliable enough not to require daily maintenance and futzing around, but they still require some degree of training and knowledge to operate... and the roads are mostly in place, but there's no superhighways yet. I think, allegorically speaking, the leap from the cars of 1933 to the cars of 2000 is going to happen in the next 5-10 years for computers.
And I don't know if all y'all have noticed, but people generally hate monkeyin' around with their PCs. They hate how unreliable and confusing they are, and I don't blame them. Us geeks will always enjoy it and probably always have the option, but I gar-awn-tee everyone else is going to be more than happy to kiss their PCs goodbye. In fact, they'll be goddamn THRILLED.
The death-of-the-PC meme may be especially trendy right now, and I agree it's a little too soon to be trumpeting it, but be aware... it's actually going to happen. Maybe sooner, maybe later, but count on it - 10 years from now our mothers aren't to be e-nagging us from a PC!
Well, I don't have a 31 inch TV on my desk at work.
But I have a nice 21" monitor. And a SBLive full with the Desktop Theatre 5.1 speakers. And a Toshiba DVD drive I picked up for $70. And seeing as how TVs suck, I'd say I have a better home (office) theatre setup than anyone I know.
No, no, I'm staying late at the office WORKING. Honest.
Someone pointed out here that we're not talking about the old Marxist concept of workers controlling the means of industrial production... what we're talking about is who controls our culture and who sets the political agendas. We should be optimistic.
Politically, Americans are waiting for a real alternative... the most amazing thing about the McCain near-nomination was that it came from the right. If there was a candidate with John McCain's apparent integrity running in the left's place against an obvious shithead like the Shrub, the coming election would be an easy call. But for a pack of Establishment types to break ranks and embrace McCain... that's impressive. David Foster Wallace's recent article on McCain in Rolling Stone laid it out surprisingly well - Americans under 40 really don't believe the hype any more. "Bulworth", for its flaws as a film and even just a premise, was a prophecy. The anti-corporate, no-bullshit candidate is coming. It'll take a few more years for this generation to percolate through the system, but they'll come.
These candidates will be in demand because of the culture, and here there are some definite signs of hope. The most remarkable, all neatly in a row, all at the right time in the right place for the right market: "Fight Club", "Three Kings" and "American Beauty". Three outstanding films, three wide audiences, one underlying message: the old rules no longer apply.
Not as obviously subversive yet examples of a deepening trend - "Pleasantville", "Truman Show", "Drop Dead Gorgeous", "Election", even the geek-trendy "Matrix". These aren't little art house flicks or obscure straight-to-video. It's no longer just one well-worn copy of "Heathers" at the video store - our viewpoint is becoming the mainstream. Fast.
The daily paper falls prey to the free alterna-weekly and online news. The record store and bland corporate rock falls to MP3 and local artists. TV gives way to the net. Barnes & Noble loses to Amazon on the net and to plucky or niche real stores. Local TV news is relegated to the laughingstock status it's always deserved. Proprietary standards languish, open standards flourish. "Organic" is equivalent to "superior" in the supermarket and restaurant. Michael Moore just keeps going. "The Simpsons", ten years of stickin' it to The Man and counting. WTO/IMF protests. Adbusters. RTMark. Cluetrain. The Onion. Utne. The New Urbanism and the Geography of Nowhere. Strawbale and other ecofriendly building solutions. Home Power magazine. And yeah, Linux and the GPL.
This isn't a fad marketing niche and it isn't a revolutionary fight for survival - it's a righteous memetic bandwagon, and it's gathering momentum. The signs are all clear as hell and pointing in the same direction. I don't know where the signs point to or how all these chips will finally fall, but it couldn't be more obvious: if you're not heading that way - you're heading the wrong way.
You should read it sometime. It's perfect for you... you won't learn anything factual or even insightful about the world, and it'll help keep those lurking self-doubts at bay. Just keep repeating to yourself: You know the Way Things Are. You know the Way Things Are. You know the Way Things Are.
First, if you're building a machine just to burn discs you're going to want to make sure you're using 100baseT, and even then realize it'll take a few minutes to transfer 650mb of data between machines. On one hand, it's great to have a separate machine, but on the other it can be a bit of a drag. Anyway, if you use a 486, make sure you've got a 100 card that'll work with it... out of my pile of 486s only a few have PCI, and I haven't seen many great deals on 100 ISA cards.
IDE v. SCSI -- well, the snobs will berate you if you go with IDE. Now, SCSI is great, and I love my SCSI Plextors. I do all sorts of things on my SCSI NT box at my office while burning discs, and seriously, I can't remember the last time I got a coaster. The newish IDE Plextor drives look real cool, though, and you can get 'em for about $230 last time I checked... if it's a dedicated burning machine, IDE will probably work just fine for you. Get yourself a bigass IDE hard drive for stockpiling stuff until it's time to burn. And you won't go wrong with Plextor, whether it's IDE or SCSI.
So if I was you, I'd get a Pentium-class machine with a decent 10/100 card and 32mb of RAM, 64 if you have it laying around. Throw Win95 OSR2 on it with Adaptec CD Creator 3.5b (but not that DirectCD stuff) if it supports your drive; if not, be sure to grab the most recent CD Creator patch, as the 4.0 series seems to have issues (I've happily stuck with 3.5b, so I don't know the details). IDE or SCSI, you should have a decent burning box. For trickier burns, check out CDRWin and Nero, and Sonic Foundry's CD Architect program is brilliant for making audio CDs.
I'd love it if there's software for Linux comparable to CD Creator, CDRWin and CD Architect... these three programs are, besides games, of course, the best reasons I can think of for keeping an MS operating system around.
And use good quality blanks - your mileage WILL vary, so sample and test a bunch of brands with your hardware before settling on one. Personally, I'm partial to Mitsui, but I've used Verbatim blues quite a bit as well.
Earthstation1 is the only site I've seen so far that's along the lines of a cultural audio repository. It's, uh, not the greatest web design I've ever seen, and in the past few years they've really saturated the site with bad advertising... but ya gotta give the guy props for makin' the effort. It's more than I've done.
http://www.earthstation1.com/ And hey, where else are you going to find Shooby Taylor.wavs?
Wow, this is just spooky. I'd be tempted to doubt the sincerity of this post if I didn't actually know people like this. Let me guess, you do all your research through "The Limbaugh Letter"...
For the most part, I agree with this. To be honest, I haven't read enough about XML to get excited about it. From what I've picked up here and there, I understand two things about XML:
1) It's the Next Big Hot Cool Thing That Everyone's Doing So You Should Too 2) It's just swell stuff if you want to read web pages on your cell phone.
So, in a nutshell, it's kinda like "push" technology, only slightly more useful because SUV drivers who talk on their cell phone will start browsing on their phone while driving and eliminate themselves from the gene pool.
HTML certainly has its limits, but with a good GUI editor, for most people, I don't understand why HTML wouldn't work just fine. Would someone post a link or something explaining in hypeless terms just exactly why XML is da bomb?
I don't know anything about this HomePNA stuff, and I doubt you'll find a great many hardware options specifically for it. But here's what I did for my company.
We got DSL in late summer '98. We have a main office and a branch office, and I wanted a VPN so that we could share files and printers and whatever else came up.
I picked up a couple of SonicWalls for about $400 each. With the VPN option, we paid about $1200 for the setup. My Linux pals thought I was a sissy, but it was clearly the right decision for the business.
Now, with over a year and a half of experience with these things, these SonicWalls have been nearly PERFECT for us. I recommend them without reservation. The only reason I qualify that with "nearly" is because of a few minor bugs early on... these days, it IS perfect.
The SonicWall has a really sweet web interface, extremely simple and easy to understand. I trust the firewall at least as much as I trust anything. Decent logging capabilities -- my SonicWalls email me logfiles every day full of dropped connections and portscans. You can even set it to send emergency emails when it detects spoofs or specific attacks.
Opening a port and forwarding it to a specific computer is trivial. Flashing the BIOS is trivial. It's about the size of a videotape and makes no noise - no fans or hard drives. It never crashes and never needs maintenance beyond the occasional BIOS flash. It's got a nice-looking DHCP server built-in, but I don't use it. Supposedly it'll even do NetMeeting through the firewall, but I've never tried it. It also has a data logging option - you can count web site hits or track bandwidth in mb by user or service. Kinda nice.
The models I have only have a 10baseT connection, but they have newer models available with 100.
I keep hearing good things about the Linksys router, but I'd definitely look into the SonicWall. It's more expensive and it might very well not be any better than the Linksys, but I can tell you that I'm 100% satisfied with my SonicWall. It's just an excellent product that's never failed me and always done what I wanted it to do.
Re:Stephenson continues to impress.
on
CFP 2000 Wrapup
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· Score: 2
Oppression hasn't moved from minorities to workers. They're not related that way. One, minorities are still slowly moving out from under mainstream oppression (here in America, anyway). It's an organic process. It's slow. But it's happening because people want it bad enough.
Two, employers have always kept workers from becoming too powerful. That's kind of the nature of the whole employer/employee paradigm. But again, if people want it bad enough, it doesn't have to be that way. Especially now. We live in a fine time to be an oppressed employee, at least relative to, say, 1880, 1920 or 1955.
The domination system can work in our favor. It's a better, more hopeful model for us than the old. We have opportunities, mostly thanks to the internet, that are practically limitless. Ain't no power like the power of the people, baby... yeah, it's trite. But like the Cluetrain, it doesn't necessarily make it not so.
And I don't necessarily even mean that "we" have the power collectively. Sometimes it works out that way, more often it doesn't. What's more important to me is that this paradigm gives us some remarkable opportunities as individuals. Have your wits about you and you can play one circle of domination against the other... you can be a conspiracy of one. Oh, man, I better stop now before I start rambling off along some rather obtuse tangents... but just use your imagination, and remember that human nature - whatever that means - stays pretty constant, and so far, domination systems require human oversight to function.
But what more can we expect from the Pinkerton agency? The largest private operator of prisons in America. Legendary guardians of Area 51. Strongarm bullies for oppressive industrialists for over 100 years.
Founded by drunken Irish cops. What are some of the prizes you get for turning in kids? A fifth of Wild Irish Rose? Your very own billyclub? And if you turn in kids on St. Patrick's Day, you get a bonus switchblade!
I can think of no more appropriate and Genuine American institution to operate such a program. Good call, Pinkerton! Nice to see that some things don't change!
The question I'd like to sincerely ask these people is - what are they trying to accomplish?
I'd like to look them in the eyes and ask if they really, truly, honestly believe that encouraging and offering prizes for students to actively single out, ostracize and label other students is going to be a benefit to the school atmosphere... or are they just looking for a way to make a cheap buck?
I'd also ask if they would approve if their own child was "turned in" under this system. Or what they would have done if they had been turned in themselves when they were in school.
This whole project is so obviously and ludicrously wrong-headed, in fact, that I think there ought to be a place where we can turn in the people responsible for thinking it up. Isn't there anyone out there who'll give me a free hat for pointing out that these Pinkerton executives are clearly imbalanced, subversive and probably in need of more than a little counseling? Anyone? It doesn't even have to be a nice hat... I don't ask for much in return for my willing cooperation with the authorities...
If I had moderator points, I'd moderate this post up.
The only thing I question above, though, is the long-term fiscal viability of MS' applications. This insane registration process for Office 2000 SR-1 (and the future) is only going to lead to grief for that franchise. I predict that in two years, dissatisfaction with this system will be running very high and Star Office and other competitors will be pulling their act together. Joe Consumer will be forced to spend at least $200 for his buggy, bloated, annoying copy of Office 2002... or he can get a free set of office applications that work just fine from the net. Or in a broadband area, maybe he'll just use a free ASP. Or his Playstation 2. Any way it goes, O2K is going to become the least attractive option.
Much more important than Joe Consumer, though - the day is coming (at about the same pace, and for the same reasons) when business will realize that they don't want or need MS Office. As soon as that happens, MS' whole house of cards will start to fold.
MS better have good dev tools to sell in 2005. That or whatever else they can come up with for a couple billion in cash, 'cause the Windows/Office gravy train is headed square off the tracks. Whatever the DOJ does will just help it along slightly.
Of course, if a schmuck like me can see this coming, then I'm sure MS' billions of dollars have bought them a clue from somewhere and they'll come through all of this with those smug grins on their faces and a couple trillion in the bank. But maybe not. Anyway, if I was a gambling man (re: stock trader), I'd have ditched all my MS shares last summer... I think Microsoft's history will record the summer of '99 as the peak of its power.
I signed O'Reilly's petition, and now I wish I could take it back.
The problem isn't with Amazon, the problem is with the patent office. Until such time as the patent office gets its poop in a group (dunno where the hell that phrase just came from), Bezos is doing the right thing.
And like it or not, the Netscape analogy isn't inappropriate. Yeah, Amazon hasn't always been perfect, but relatively speaking, they're not so bad. B&N ranks among the most evil corporations on the planet, and if Amazon hadn't drawn their patents, B&N (or Microsoft? or IBM?) could've... and you can bet B&N wouldn't be as polite to the little guy. And remember, the guy who runs the internet division of B&N is clumsy, stupid and malevolent, like Darth Vader as played by Homer Simpson, and we definitely wouldn't want these patents in his hands.
It's not an ideal world, folks, and sometimes you gotta pick the lesser of two evils. The proper place to vent your disgust with this stuff is with your friendly neighborhood legislators, and try to convince them to throw some heat on the patent office. That's where the problem lies. Unless Bezos is abusing people with his patents, which I don't see happening, then I say he's just doing what he's gotta do.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about this Dell product specifically, but I'd love a product that acts as a front-end MP3 player and plugs into a 100baseT network. I'd throw some whopping hard drives into an old box, stick in the basement and have it do nothing but serve up the MP3s. That way there's a central music repository that can be accessed by not only any PC in the house, but a non-PC stereo component.
The MP3 player component would be great - just walk up, hit the power switch and browse for music. Better than having to wait for a noisy PC to boot up, and it could be nice and easy to use. And there are places where it'd be nicer to have a simple little component rather than a full-blown PC setup.
No, there's not much point to it if you're a solitary geek. But if you're a geek living with other people and you already have a home network, hey, for 250 bones it could be a cool little deal.
Maybe someday there will be enough decent games to have these kinds of discussions and to have a "Rolling Stone" of games, but for now there's only www.oldmanmurray.com.
If the future means respectability for games, then Old Man Murray's "crate test" will be a seminal piece of work, and Seanbaby will be a pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing, undergraduate-diddling professor.
That's actually the kind of future I'd look forward to.
But it's too damn cold there!
Fight Club. American Beauty. Three Kings.
Fight Club. Just out on DVD, for those that aren't boycotting, and it is one HELL of a package. And who can forget the comparable Trainspotting.
The Resistance starts here. It is a battle for mindshare, a cultural revolution in the truest sense. Popular film is the thermonuclear device of this war, but there are many alternatives for the rest of us... websites, Flash, short films, pamphlets, email, music, comics, software, even just talking with your friends and family... whatever you can do, you can do it subversively. And you can have a positive effect.
I recommend reading "The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements" by Eric Hoffer, very much not politically-correct and over-the-top, but Hoffer brings some interesting concepts to the table in short order. How can we teach people to distrust the corporate order? You'll find some ideas here.
I recommend Jack T. Chick, the sick bastard. www.chick.com - order the complete set of Chick Tracts for $10. It's cheap education... these things have been around for a long time for a reason. How could someone use the Chick concept in a positive way? Hmmmm...
www.adbusters.org
www.rtmark.com
Where's your head? Do something!
Yeah, you and Rasvar and right... I tend to be optimistic when it comes to time predictions. I think in a couple of years non-PCs will be a definite trend, but it'll probably be ten years before they get as cool as I'm expecting they will.
Well, you're partially correct there...
I don't know SHIT about ANYTHING. PCs is merely one minor area of expertise in which I am totally devoid of knowledge. It's pretty sad, really... sometimes I can conjure up enough buzzwords to convince the average schmuck I know something about a given subject, but it's really just a cheap, hollow sham, one which is easily discerned by men of refinement. You, for example, have seen through my pathetic little ruse.
Maybe someday I'll learn something about something. Maybe you'll be the one to enlighten me...
Yeah, absolutely the PC is going to be around for awhile. You and me and probably everyone else who reads Slashdot is going to have them, but like the Explorer, it'll be a niche market.
Somebody else posted a link to this site - http://www.indrema.com - which is more in line with what I see coming. Rather than an unnecessarily dumbed-down console or web pad, it'll have all the power of a PC but made easy to use and, probably with a Linux variant underneath, damn near crash-proof.
But I don't see any technical reason why a "web pad" couldn't be able to play MP3s, update codecs, write papers (especially if voice recognition kicks in), play games, and all those things you mentioned. I don't think processing power or interfaces will be an issue... I think it's more a matter of perceptions. We have this notion that a console couldn't possibly be any good for Photoshop work, for example, but then again, slap a bigass solid-state RAM drive, a drawing tablet and a keyboard into a Playstation 3, and presto, it works just fine. I'm sure even the PS2 CPU itself would be a jim-dandy number-cruncher for Photoshop. You might scoff now, but I bet by the time the Playstation 4 rolls around it could be used as a serious design platform... and a great game console. Hey, what's not to like?
I was explaining to a friend of mine why I wasn't interested in becoming a freelance PC consultant. It might be fun for awhile, but long-term prospects aren't good... and here's my reasoning:
PCs will always be around. In 5-7 years, I think they'll be mostly for geeks. In 10-15 years, they'll be mostly for uber-geeks, like the amateur radio guys - a real niche.
What's going to kill PCs for the masses? Two things:
1) Static RAM hard drives, or whatever you want to call them... flash card hard drives, whatever. As soon as we ditch mechanical hard drives, we kiss a lot of problems goodbye.
2) Combine the above with the i-Opener of three years from now and a broadband connection. The thing won't ever need service from a hardware standpoint (and if it does, it's a factory kind of thing), and all software updates can be done over the wire. The processor will be, what, 3 to 5 ghz or something, which should be plenty for speech recognition and photorealistic 3D graphics, so the "obsolete" thing should not be a big deal for all but the most hardcore gamers, and even so, since it only costs $100 or $200 or something it's not a huge investment anyway.
If it's not the i-Opener per se, then the PS2 or the Palm 2005 or who knows what... the point is, Joe Consumer is going to honest-to-god truly plug and play this thing and he's not going to be calling us geeks to come fix it because his hard drive puked or Windows is fubar'd.
And sometime around then someone will make a business version that connects to a network (but is NOT an NC, notice), and the PHBs are going to be all over it.
I compare computers and cars a lot, and the way I figure it, we're at about 1933 in car years. Cars are mass-produced and reliable enough not to require daily maintenance and futzing around, but they still require some degree of training and knowledge to operate... and the roads are mostly in place, but there's no superhighways yet. I think, allegorically speaking, the leap from the cars of 1933 to the cars of 2000 is going to happen in the next 5-10 years for computers.
And I don't know if all y'all have noticed, but people generally hate monkeyin' around with their PCs. They hate how unreliable and confusing they are, and I don't blame them. Us geeks will always enjoy it and probably always have the option, but I gar-awn-tee everyone else is going to be more than happy to kiss their PCs goodbye. In fact, they'll be goddamn THRILLED.
The death-of-the-PC meme may be especially trendy right now, and I agree it's a little too soon to be trumpeting it, but be aware... it's actually going to happen. Maybe sooner, maybe later, but count on it - 10 years from now our mothers aren't to be e-nagging us from a PC!
Just wanted to point that out.
Hey, it's a small town, and I'm easily amused. Give me a break.
Well, I don't have a 31 inch TV on my desk at work.
But I have a nice 21" monitor. And a SBLive full with the Desktop Theatre 5.1 speakers. And a Toshiba DVD drive I picked up for $70. And seeing as how TVs suck, I'd say I have a better home (office) theatre setup than anyone I know.
No, no, I'm staying late at the office WORKING. Honest.
Someone pointed out here that we're not talking about the old Marxist concept of workers controlling the means of industrial production... what we're talking about is who controls our culture and who sets the political agendas. We should be optimistic.
Politically, Americans are waiting for a real alternative... the most amazing thing about the McCain near-nomination was that it came from the right. If there was a candidate with John McCain's apparent integrity running in the left's place against an obvious shithead like the Shrub, the coming election would be an easy call. But for a pack of Establishment types to break ranks and embrace McCain... that's impressive. David Foster Wallace's recent article on McCain in Rolling Stone laid it out surprisingly well - Americans under 40 really don't believe the hype any more. "Bulworth", for its flaws as a film and even just a premise, was a prophecy. The anti-corporate, no-bullshit candidate is coming. It'll take a few more years for this generation to percolate through the system, but they'll come.
These candidates will be in demand because of the culture, and here there are some definite signs of hope. The most remarkable, all neatly in a row, all at the right time in the right place for the right market: "Fight Club", "Three Kings" and "American Beauty". Three outstanding films, three wide audiences, one underlying message: the old rules no longer apply.
Not as obviously subversive yet examples of a deepening trend - "Pleasantville", "Truman Show", "Drop Dead Gorgeous", "Election", even the geek-trendy "Matrix". These aren't little art house flicks or obscure straight-to-video. It's no longer just one well-worn copy of "Heathers" at the video store - our viewpoint is becoming the mainstream. Fast.
The daily paper falls prey to the free alterna-weekly and online news. The record store and bland corporate rock falls to MP3 and local artists. TV gives way to the net. Barnes & Noble loses to Amazon on the net and to plucky or niche real stores. Local TV news is relegated to the laughingstock status it's always deserved. Proprietary standards languish, open standards flourish. "Organic" is equivalent to "superior" in the supermarket and restaurant. Michael Moore just keeps going. "The Simpsons", ten years of stickin' it to The Man and counting. WTO/IMF protests. Adbusters. RTMark. Cluetrain. The Onion. Utne. The New Urbanism and the Geography of Nowhere. Strawbale and other ecofriendly building solutions. Home Power magazine. And yeah, Linux and the GPL.
This isn't a fad marketing niche and it isn't a revolutionary fight for survival - it's a righteous memetic bandwagon, and it's gathering momentum. The signs are all clear as hell and pointing in the same direction. I don't know where the signs point to or how all these chips will finally fall, but it couldn't be more obvious: if you're not heading that way - you're heading the wrong way.
Please, folks - give this a shot. It only take a few minutes to copy-n-paste these letters, and if enough of them get sent, they will get noticed.
It doesn't cost anything, it isn't inconvenient, and it just may have some kind of effect. What more could you ask for?
You should read it sometime. It's perfect for you... you won't learn anything factual or even insightful about the world, and it'll help keep those lurking self-doubts at bay. Just keep repeating to yourself: You know the Way Things Are. You know the Way Things Are. You know the Way Things Are.
First, if you're building a machine just to burn discs you're going to want to make sure you're using 100baseT, and even then realize it'll take a few minutes to transfer 650mb of data between machines. On one hand, it's great to have a separate machine, but on the other it can be a bit of a drag. Anyway, if you use a 486, make sure you've got a 100 card that'll work with it... out of my pile of 486s only a few have PCI, and I haven't seen many great deals on 100 ISA cards.
IDE v. SCSI -- well, the snobs will berate you if you go with IDE. Now, SCSI is great, and I love my SCSI Plextors. I do all sorts of things on my SCSI NT box at my office while burning discs, and seriously, I can't remember the last time I got a coaster. The newish IDE Plextor drives look real cool, though, and you can get 'em for about $230 last time I checked... if it's a dedicated burning machine, IDE will probably work just fine for you. Get yourself a bigass IDE hard drive for stockpiling stuff until it's time to burn. And you won't go wrong with Plextor, whether it's IDE or SCSI.
So if I was you, I'd get a Pentium-class machine with a decent 10/100 card and 32mb of RAM, 64 if you have it laying around. Throw Win95 OSR2 on it with Adaptec CD Creator 3.5b (but not that DirectCD stuff) if it supports your drive; if not, be sure to grab the most recent CD Creator patch, as the 4.0 series seems to have issues (I've happily stuck with 3.5b, so I don't know the details). IDE or SCSI, you should have a decent burning box. For trickier burns, check out CDRWin and Nero, and Sonic Foundry's CD Architect program is brilliant for making audio CDs.
I'd love it if there's software for Linux comparable to CD Creator, CDRWin and CD Architect... these three programs are, besides games, of course, the best reasons I can think of for keeping an MS operating system around.
And use good quality blanks - your mileage WILL vary, so sample and test a bunch of brands with your hardware before settling on one. Personally, I'm partial to Mitsui, but I've used Verbatim blues quite a bit as well.
Good luck!
Earthstation1 is the only site I've seen so far that's along the lines of a cultural audio repository. It's, uh, not the greatest web design I've ever seen, and in the past few years they've really saturated the site with bad advertising... but ya gotta give the guy props for makin' the effort. It's more than I've done.
.wavs?
http://www.earthstation1.com/
And hey, where else are you going to find Shooby Taylor
The ACLU is one of the most destructive organizations out there. It's goal is to break down every single difference in society.
Ewww... I think I just stepped in some Randroid.
Wow, this is just spooky. I'd be tempted to doubt the sincerity of this post if I didn't actually know people like this. Let me guess, you do all your research through "The Limbaugh Letter"...
For the most part, I agree with this. To be honest, I haven't read enough about XML to get excited about it. From what I've picked up here and there, I understand two things about XML:
1) It's the Next Big Hot Cool Thing That Everyone's Doing So You Should Too
2) It's just swell stuff if you want to read web pages on your cell phone.
So, in a nutshell, it's kinda like "push" technology, only slightly more useful because SUV drivers who talk on their cell phone will start browsing on their phone while driving and eliminate themselves from the gene pool.
HTML certainly has its limits, but with a good GUI editor, for most people, I don't understand why HTML wouldn't work just fine. Would someone post a link or something explaining in hypeless terms just exactly why XML is da bomb?
I don't know anything about this HomePNA stuff, and I doubt you'll find a great many hardware options specifically for it. But here's what I did for my company.
We got DSL in late summer '98. We have a main office and a branch office, and I wanted a VPN so that we could share files and printers and whatever else came up.
I picked up a couple of SonicWalls for about $400 each. With the VPN option, we paid about $1200 for the setup. My Linux pals thought I was a sissy, but it was clearly the right decision for the business.
Now, with over a year and a half of experience with these things, these SonicWalls have been nearly PERFECT for us. I recommend them without reservation. The only reason I qualify that with "nearly" is because of a few minor bugs early on... these days, it IS perfect.
The SonicWall has a really sweet web interface, extremely simple and easy to understand. I trust the firewall at least as much as I trust anything. Decent logging capabilities -- my SonicWalls email me logfiles every day full of dropped connections and portscans. You can even set it to send emergency emails when it detects spoofs or specific attacks.
Opening a port and forwarding it to a specific computer is trivial. Flashing the BIOS is trivial. It's about the size of a videotape and makes no noise - no fans or hard drives. It never crashes and never needs maintenance beyond the occasional BIOS flash. It's got a nice-looking DHCP server built-in, but I don't use it. Supposedly it'll even do NetMeeting through the firewall, but I've never tried it. It also has a data logging option - you can count web site hits or track bandwidth in mb by user or service. Kinda nice.
The models I have only have a 10baseT connection, but they have newer models available with 100.
I keep hearing good things about the Linksys router, but I'd definitely look into the SonicWall. It's more expensive and it might very well not be any better than the Linksys, but I can tell you that I'm 100% satisfied with my SonicWall. It's just an excellent product that's never failed me and always done what I wanted it to do.
Oppression hasn't moved from minorities to workers. They're not related that way. One, minorities are still slowly moving out from under mainstream oppression (here in America, anyway). It's an organic process. It's slow. But it's happening because people want it bad enough.
Two, employers have always kept workers from becoming too powerful. That's kind of the nature of the whole employer/employee paradigm. But again, if people want it bad enough, it doesn't have to be that way. Especially now. We live in a fine time to be an oppressed employee, at least relative to, say, 1880, 1920 or 1955.
The domination system can work in our favor. It's a better, more hopeful model for us than the old. We have opportunities, mostly thanks to the internet, that are practically limitless. Ain't no power like the power of the people, baby... yeah, it's trite. But like the Cluetrain, it doesn't necessarily make it not so.
And I don't necessarily even mean that "we" have the power collectively. Sometimes it works out that way, more often it doesn't. What's more important to me is that this paradigm gives us some remarkable opportunities as individuals. Have your wits about you and you can play one circle of domination against the other... you can be a conspiracy of one. Oh, man, I better stop now before I start rambling off along some rather obtuse tangents... but just use your imagination, and remember that human nature - whatever that means - stays pretty constant, and so far, domination systems require human oversight to function.
Good idea. We should just directly sell the schools to the Pinkerton corp. They know how to handle troublemakers.
Fsckin' brilliant.
But what more can we expect from the Pinkerton agency? The largest private operator of prisons in America. Legendary guardians of Area 51. Strongarm bullies for oppressive industrialists for over 100 years.
Founded by drunken Irish cops. What are some of the prizes you get for turning in kids? A fifth of Wild Irish Rose? Your very own billyclub? And if you turn in kids on St. Patrick's Day, you get a bonus switchblade!
I can think of no more appropriate and Genuine American institution to operate such a program. Good call, Pinkerton! Nice to see that some things don't change!
The question I'd like to sincerely ask these people is - what are they trying to accomplish?
I'd like to look them in the eyes and ask if they really, truly, honestly believe that encouraging and offering prizes for students to actively single out, ostracize and label other students is going to be a benefit to the school atmosphere... or are they just looking for a way to make a cheap buck?
I'd also ask if they would approve if their own child was "turned in" under this system. Or what they would have done if they had been turned in themselves when they were in school.
This whole project is so obviously and ludicrously wrong-headed, in fact, that I think there ought to be a place where we can turn in the people responsible for thinking it up. Isn't there anyone out there who'll give me a free hat for pointing out that these Pinkerton executives are clearly imbalanced, subversive and probably in need of more than a little counseling? Anyone? It doesn't even have to be a nice hat... I don't ask for much in return for my willing cooperation with the authorities...
Christopher Kirk
Olympia, WA
If I had moderator points, I'd moderate this post up.
The only thing I question above, though, is the long-term fiscal viability of MS' applications. This insane registration process for Office 2000 SR-1 (and the future) is only going to lead to grief for that franchise. I predict that in two years, dissatisfaction with this system will be running very high and Star Office and other competitors will be pulling their act together. Joe Consumer will be forced to spend at least $200 for his buggy, bloated, annoying copy of Office 2002... or he can get a free set of office applications that work just fine from the net. Or in a broadband area, maybe he'll just use a free ASP. Or his Playstation 2. Any way it goes, O2K is going to become the least attractive option.
Much more important than Joe Consumer, though - the day is coming (at about the same pace, and for the same reasons) when business will realize that they don't want or need MS Office. As soon as that happens, MS' whole house of cards will start to fold.
MS better have good dev tools to sell in 2005. That or whatever else they can come up with for a couple billion in cash, 'cause the Windows/Office gravy train is headed square off the tracks. Whatever the DOJ does will just help it along slightly.
Of course, if a schmuck like me can see this coming, then I'm sure MS' billions of dollars have bought them a clue from somewhere and they'll come through all of this with those smug grins on their faces and a couple trillion in the bank. But maybe not. Anyway, if I was a gambling man (re: stock trader), I'd have ditched all my MS shares last summer... I think Microsoft's history will record the summer of '99 as the peak of its power.
I signed O'Reilly's petition, and now I wish I could take it back.
The problem isn't with Amazon, the problem is with the patent office. Until such time as the patent office gets its poop in a group (dunno where the hell that phrase just came from), Bezos is doing the right thing.
And like it or not, the Netscape analogy isn't inappropriate. Yeah, Amazon hasn't always been perfect, but relatively speaking, they're not so bad. B&N ranks among the most evil corporations on the planet, and if Amazon hadn't drawn their patents, B&N (or Microsoft? or IBM?) could've... and you can bet B&N wouldn't be as polite to the little guy. And remember, the guy who runs the internet division of B&N is clumsy, stupid and malevolent, like Darth Vader as played by Homer Simpson, and we definitely wouldn't want these patents in his hands.
It's not an ideal world, folks, and sometimes you gotta pick the lesser of two evils. The proper place to vent your disgust with this stuff is with your friendly neighborhood legislators, and try to convince them to throw some heat on the patent office. That's where the problem lies. Unless Bezos is abusing people with his patents, which I don't see happening, then I say he's just doing what he's gotta do.