...for being the self-sacrificial, benevolent, unbiased and wholeheartedly concerned neighbor who clearly stands to gain nothing significant from this deal... After US leaves Iraq, I'm sure the goodness of their hearts will compell them to step in and aid in "political restoration." Turkey, the Iraqi's friend...
Are you being sarcastic or what? IMHO, there is a good possibility that the Turks kept the U.S. troops out because they are more concerned with keeping the Kurds down in their own country, and discouraging any uprising to unite with Iraqi Kurds.
The Kurds are a substantial minority in Turkey, and have long been oppressed there. Kurds are discouraged/prevented from speaking their own language and expressing their own culture, for fear that they might get the notion of breaking away from Turkey to form their own country. Therefore, there's a strong motivation on the part of the Turks to be able to protect their border and prevent any Kurdish uprising. They might even make an incursion into northern Iraq to assure there's no "trouble". I am sure they didn't want the Americans around kludging things up.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like us being at war with Iraq. But I think the motivations of a lot of countries to be part of the "coalition of the one, er, willing", is self-interest, and not the enlightened kind either.
Actually, if they didn't have the apparatus to rig the election in Florida, and his brother Jebuzon had lost the gubernatorial election, he would have made him Emperor of Iraq. Instead, there will be a U.S. military goverment there-- for who knows how long.
Talk about ironic, the banner ad on my page as I type this offers a link to "Research Ronald Reagan at the world's largest online library". Fitting with the story...
Anyhoo, I think it would be cool to have a 20 Questions with Berke sometime soon, to catch up on what he's doing, and press him as to WHY, OH WHY AREN'T YOU STILL A (COMIC) STRIPPER? Even if it isn't a reprise of Bloom County, I would love to see some new work aside from children's books. I think he's one of the most talented cartoonists to ever put pen to paper. It was a big part of the lives of many of us making our way into the world in the '80s.
As for the offer of mycomicspage, I'll pass-- I have Classics of Western Literature and Bloom County Babylon, which I think have the best of his work.
I think what Petreley says about developers programming for the server might be close to being correct-- Linux is taking market share from Microsoft, and I think it could extend to Windows server installations as well as Unix. I don't think that Linux is really having an impact on the desktop yet. The other thing he doesn't mention is whether this developer survey is just the USA or whether it's international-- it seems quite probable that Linux has more mind/market share in Europe in particular, than it does in the USA.
My question is, why would someone go to Circuit City or Best Buy to purchase a machine that has Windows pre-installed, then take it home and install Linux? Yes, yes, you can create a dual boot system (not easily), but it would seem to be easier to buy a "naked" PC from an online builder and save yourself the Microsoft "tax", then install Linux. I realize that MS is trying to clamp down on OEMs, but naked machines are still available out there. I bought one just to assure that I could reinstall Windows 2000 (which I got elsewhere) if I had to.
Petreley has a reputation as cheerleading for Java, too. I am surprised he didn't tell us how many of those Linux developers are using Java. I think there's a trend toward Linux, but it is developing less dramatically than Petreley would have us believe.
John Malcolm, a Justice Department official who oversees the computer crime division, warned the panel about the connections between copyright piracy and terrorism.
"Organized crime syndicates are frequently engaged in many types of illicit enterprises, including supporting terrorist activities," Malcolm said. "All components of the Justice Department...will do everything within their power to make sure that intellectual property piracy does not become a vehicle for financing or supporting acts of terror."
At least, this is what Herr Himmler, er, Attorney General Ashcroft would like us to believe.
You nailed it. I get the feeling a new McCarthyism is creeping into American society, and if it is allowed to continue, people will be ostracized for not believing anything the Nazional Republikan regime in Washington wants them to. There is a hidden agenda among these people to destroy freedom, to co-opt individual rights in favor of the corporation, and to create what amounts to an American empire in the world. It is this arrogant, corrupting agenda that the rest of the world opposes, and this proclamation by MS and the MPAA is another example of the absurd lengths they will go to get their way on what matters most to them-- the almighty dollar. In their eyes:
GPL == Communism
BSD == Pinko Socialism
Mac User == Liberal Extremist
MS Windows Toadie == Good Republican
Speaking out against War in Iraq
== Anti-American
France == Enemy (Just because they disagree with us!)
What you may not understand is that Christian rightists live in a different world from you and I. For them, it's not 2003, it's 1692 or sometime in the Victorian era. If you saw The Salem Witch Trials, that's the kind of world they want, so watching over another's shoulder is acceptable conduct.
If you are aware that the Christian rightists are the biggest boosters of GW Bush and Ashcroft, it explains a lot of things.
BTW...Kirstie Alley as Goodie Putnam is totally ludicrous.
Cluetrain Reprise
on
World of Ends
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
This site is a reprise of some of the themes that were in their book from a few years ago, The Cluetrain Manifesto. It is still available online. I think of the internet as a kind of infrastructure that nobody owns, like a highway. The potential perils are of a takeover of large companies that want to make you carry p(Assports) or "pay tolls" to cross into certain parts of it. They are the ones who, in the words of the book, believe in "engorging people with material goods so as to make them poop out dollars". The internet has another potential that is not so crassly commercial: for self-expression, for the acquisition of knowledge, to be able to connect with others wherever concerning almost anything. People have the ability to turn away from the crassly commercial, if they choose to see something else of value besides what the popular culture puts before them.
You can look at Python as being a lot like Java: it's compiled when you import a module with the interpreter, and a compiled Python "bytecode" file is created (.pyc). But it is still interpreted by the Python runtime. Whether you want to call it a "script" or a "program" is up to you. Maybe it depends upon what you're using it for: for systems programming or CGI, it could be a "script"; for a Tkinter GUI or some other purpose, it could be called a "program". What sets Python apart from traditional scripting languages, in my opinion, is that it can be object-oriented-- you can create classes and utilize inheritance and polymorphism (which works a lot better with Python than with strongly-typed languages). Usually, scripts aren't compiled, but with Python, you can call the.pyc files as a prorgram too-- the interpreter doesn't care. I don't know that the performance is any faster, but they are compiled files. I think the prejudice from scripting is from the tendency of interpreted prgrams to run more slowly than lower-level apps.
Maybe this is where Linux isn't a perfect comparison to the music biz. A lot of open source projects arise from the need/desire for tools that people use in their "day" jobs. Developers may not be expecting to get paid, except maybe in the realm of prestige from having worked on a project. My point is that musicians need to be in charge of their presence on the Internet, and have an opportunity to profit from that presence-- especially those acts that are unsigned, lesser known or unknown. It's this prospect that really scares the big recording labels-- that they could be cut out of the picture altogether.
That "mythical album" is the one that the recording biz wants you to pay $16 at Virgin Megastore. Squeeze the fatkat rekkid producers and the retail stores out of the chain, and it leaves a lot more for the artist and their patrons.
Chances are, if you're starting out, it's your own money, being spent at a recording studio in your town. It's like any other business: "You pays your money and you takes your chances." Nobody starts at the top.
You're right about the costs, but I think the bands would still come out ahead. Remember that the cost in bandwidth for a download is a variable cost per unit, if you're pricing per each: no download == no bandwidth cost. So the economics make sense for the bands, and they would make sense for their patrons, too-- you get the music you want.
You're making the case of the RIAA and the bands that have been set up as straw people for the RIAA:
This assumes that everyone would prefer to freeload instead of supporting the artist in some way. It's because the recording industry and the artists who have made it to the very top of the heap are more interested in an economic security plan, that people have turned away from buying the music and instead trade it via P2P. How do a lot of bands become well-known? I am sure that file-sharing helps, and will become more important in the years to come. But a lot of people would pay to support the artists, and if they're good, they could still end up making more money than they could through a recording contract.
is who really has the most to lose and who has the most to gain where it comes to online record sales. One of these days a band is going to catch on to the fact that it might be worth their effort to try reaching people online, and sell their music direct for so much a cut or album. Let's do some math:
1 song @ $.70 x 500000 downloads= $350,000
1 album @ $7.00 x 500000 downloads = $3,500,000
Amount given to the sharks at the record companies = $0
Number of downloads to reach the "hypothetical" band's earnings: about 231,000 singles or 23,100 albums
The satisfaction gained from knowing you didn't get screwed by the recording industry: priceless
I think these figures are pretty conservative as to the amount of money that bands can make from online sales. I would much rather do business in this way than to do it the RIAA's way. And yes, this does nothing to touch the piracy issue, but we all know that whole Linux distros are freely available for download on the Internet; and this hasn't ruined Linux, has it?
Mandrake 8.0 was the first Linux distro I put on my computer; this was over a year ago. If I didn't need/want OpenOffice as much as I do, I would have stuck with them because of the ease of use and configuration. I appreciate the different applets they have available to make the experience easier, such as configuring internet connection sharing in one step. For a first distro, I lucked into a good choice.
Now, I have Red Hat 8.0, which is a nice distro, and I feel more comfortable with Linux now than I used to. I really would prefer to have the "unconverged" versions of GNOME and KDE instead of Bluecurve. Maybe next time I will go back to Mandrake or choose another distro. It seems to me that Mandrake's niche is for first-timers to Linux or home or small office users who don't have time to fiddle with everything on the system. Their real competition is Lindows and other distros that are geared to reach the same crowd. As for paying for boxed distros instead of download, it's what I do, too. I don't have a broadband connection yet, and I prefer to have a full distro of packages on CD, instead of having to hunt for them on the 'net.
Re:FUD FUD FUD and more FUD.
on
The Linux Uprising
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As Linus said (as told by John "Mad Dog" Hall): "I don't care what you call it as long as you use it."
The implication in the Register story is that if you have Office 2000, where some editions with Access have an MSDE component included, you may be liable. However, you would have had to use MSDE to develop a data warehouse or data mart, which is the center of the patent lawsuit. Anybody who's going to go to the step of setting up a production data warehouse or data mart will be using the full version of SQL Server, not MSDE. I seriously doubt they will come after individuals or small businesses who are just using it for development purposes unrelated to those patents. Timeline will probably want to go after the big fish anyway-- that's where the money is.
have heard from employees that upgrades to the network have been held off because they didn't want to offer it to the competitors but they are forced to by law
This is like standing in front of a lifeboat on the Titanic as the ship goes down: everybody will perish. If they don't want to offer better service to their customers just because they don't want their competitors to have the same service capabilities, doesn't this illustrate how unwilling the RBOCs are to change their way of doing business? The only people who are really suffering are customers.
In my area, SBC (I think it stands for Sum-Bitchin' Communications) is running commercials on TV that decry other companies being able to offer local phone service, on their wire. *clears throat* They seem to forget that they otherwise would be a MONOPOLY in local phone service in our area. This is why states have public utility commissions: to keep their eyes on what these regulated monopolies are up to, and to assure that they provide service to everyone in their area who wants it.
I appreciate having an alternative to the local phone monopoly-- I have had another company for almost three years, with my local phone, long distance, and Internet service all with the same provider. It has worked out well for me. My problems would begin if I decided to change this around, such as subscribing to broadband.
In a more serious vein, you wonder if this address harvesting isn't the result of exploiting a known or unknown vulnerability in IIS or Exchange. Campers, what's your experience been with this?
MSN was recently noted as serving up different (read broken) content to non-IE browsers. Now you won't be able to decrypt or access MSN... without Internet Exploder.
There's also a way to break into RH 8 from GRUB and run root privileges... I forget the details now, but it's useful if you ever forget your password. The problem is, it makes a system vulnerable if everyone knows about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you being sarcastic or what? IMHO, there is a good possibility that the Turks kept the U.S. troops out because they are more concerned with keeping the Kurds down in their own country, and discouraging any uprising to unite with Iraqi Kurds.
The Kurds are a substantial minority in Turkey, and have long been oppressed there. Kurds are discouraged/prevented from speaking their own language and expressing their own culture, for fear that they might get the notion of breaking away from Turkey to form their own country. Therefore, there's a strong motivation on the part of the Turks to be able to protect their border and prevent any Kurdish uprising. They might even make an incursion into northern Iraq to assure there's no "trouble". I am sure they didn't want the Americans around kludging things up.
Don't get me wrong, I don't like us being at war with Iraq. But I think the motivations of a lot of countries to be part of the "coalition of the one, er, willing", is self-interest, and not the enlightened kind either.
Actually, if they didn't have the apparatus to rig the election in Florida, and his brother Jebuzon had lost the gubernatorial election, he would have made him Emperor of Iraq. Instead, there will be a U.S. military goverment there-- for who knows how long.
We'd have to figure out what to do with the (BU)ll(SH)it.
Thanks for the link... I'll check it out.
Talk about ironic, the banner ad on my page as I type this offers a link to "Research Ronald Reagan at the world's largest online library". Fitting with the story...
Anyhoo, I think it would be cool to have a 20 Questions with Berke sometime soon, to catch up on what he's doing, and press him as to WHY, OH WHY AREN'T YOU STILL A (COMIC) STRIPPER? Even if it isn't a reprise of Bloom County, I would love to see some new work aside from children's books. I think he's one of the most talented cartoonists to ever put pen to paper. It was a big part of the lives of many of us making our way into the world in the '80s.
As for the offer of mycomicspage, I'll pass-- I have Classics of Western Literature and Bloom County Babylon, which I think have the best of his work.
I think what Petreley says about developers programming for the server might be close to being correct-- Linux is taking market share from Microsoft, and I think it could extend to Windows server installations as well as Unix. I don't think that Linux is really having an impact on the desktop yet. The other thing he doesn't mention is whether this developer survey is just the USA or whether it's international-- it seems quite probable that Linux has more mind/market share in Europe in particular, than it does in the USA.
My question is, why would someone go to Circuit City or Best Buy to purchase a machine that has Windows pre-installed, then take it home and install Linux? Yes, yes, you can create a dual boot system (not easily), but it would seem to be easier to buy a "naked" PC from an online builder and save yourself the Microsoft "tax", then install Linux. I realize that MS is trying to clamp down on OEMs, but naked machines are still available out there. I bought one just to assure that I could reinstall Windows 2000 (which I got elsewhere) if I had to.
Petreley has a reputation as cheerleading for Java, too. I am surprised he didn't tell us how many of those Linux developers are using Java. I think there's a trend toward Linux, but it is developing less dramatically than Petreley would have us believe.
Doesn't matter... L'il Hitler still has negative karma. Must rub off from the people who surround him.
From the ZDNet article:
John Malcolm, a Justice Department official who oversees the computer crime division, warned the panel about the connections between copyright piracy and terrorism. "Organized crime syndicates are frequently engaged in many types of illicit enterprises, including supporting terrorist activities," Malcolm said. "All components of the Justice Department...will do everything within their power to make sure that intellectual property piracy does not become a vehicle for financing or supporting acts of terror."
At least, this is what Herr Himmler, er, Attorney General Ashcroft would like us to believe.
You nailed it. I get the feeling a new McCarthyism is creeping into American society, and if it is allowed to continue, people will be ostracized for not believing anything the Nazional Republikan regime in Washington wants them to. There is a hidden agenda among these people to destroy freedom, to co-opt individual rights in favor of the corporation, and to create what amounts to an American empire in the world. It is this arrogant, corrupting agenda that the rest of the world opposes, and this proclamation by MS and the MPAA is another example of the absurd lengths they will go to get their way on what matters most to them-- the almighty dollar. In their eyes:
When will it end?
What you may not understand is that Christian rightists live in a different world from you and I. For them, it's not 2003, it's 1692 or sometime in the Victorian era. If you saw The Salem Witch Trials, that's the kind of world they want, so watching over another's shoulder is acceptable conduct.
If you are aware that the Christian rightists are the biggest boosters of GW Bush and Ashcroft, it explains a lot of things.
BTW...Kirstie Alley as Goodie Putnam is totally ludicrous.
This site is a reprise of some of the themes that were in their book from a few years ago, The Cluetrain Manifesto. It is still available online. I think of the internet as a kind of infrastructure that nobody owns, like a highway. The potential perils are of a takeover of large companies that want to make you carry p(Assports) or "pay tolls" to cross into certain parts of it. They are the ones who, in the words of the book, believe in "engorging people with material goods so as to make them poop out dollars". The internet has another potential that is not so crassly commercial: for self-expression, for the acquisition of knowledge, to be able to connect with others wherever concerning almost anything. People have the ability to turn away from the crassly commercial, if they choose to see something else of value besides what the popular culture puts before them.
You can look at Python as being a lot like Java: it's compiled when you import a module with the interpreter, and a compiled Python "bytecode" file is created (.pyc). But it is still interpreted by the Python runtime. Whether you want to call it a "script" or a "program" is up to you. Maybe it depends upon what you're using it for: for systems programming or CGI, it could be a "script"; for a Tkinter GUI or some other purpose, it could be called a "program". What sets Python apart from traditional scripting languages, in my opinion, is that it can be object-oriented-- you can create classes and utilize inheritance and polymorphism (which works a lot better with Python than with strongly-typed languages). Usually, scripts aren't compiled, but with Python, you can call the .pyc files as a prorgram too-- the interpreter doesn't care. I don't know that the performance is any faster, but they are compiled files. I think the prejudice from scripting is from the tendency of interpreted prgrams to run more slowly than lower-level apps.
Maybe this is where Linux isn't a perfect comparison to the music biz. A lot of open source projects arise from the need/desire for tools that people use in their "day" jobs. Developers may not be expecting to get paid, except maybe in the realm of prestige from having worked on a project. My point is that musicians need to be in charge of their presence on the Internet, and have an opportunity to profit from that presence-- especially those acts that are unsigned, lesser known or unknown. It's this prospect that really scares the big recording labels-- that they could be cut out of the picture altogether.
That "mythical album" is the one that the recording biz wants you to pay $16 at Virgin Megastore. Squeeze the fatkat rekkid producers and the retail stores out of the chain, and it leaves a lot more for the artist and their patrons.
Chances are, if you're starting out, it's your own money, being spent at a recording studio in your town. It's like any other business: "You pays your money and you takes your chances." Nobody starts at the top.
You're right about the costs, but I think the bands would still come out ahead. Remember that the cost in bandwidth for a download is a variable cost per unit, if you're pricing per each: no download == no bandwidth cost. So the economics make sense for the bands, and they would make sense for their patrons, too-- you get the music you want.
You're making the case of the RIAA and the bands that have been set up as straw people for the RIAA: This assumes that everyone would prefer to freeload instead of supporting the artist in some way. It's because the recording industry and the artists who have made it to the very top of the heap are more interested in an economic security plan, that people have turned away from buying the music and instead trade it via P2P. How do a lot of bands become well-known? I am sure that file-sharing helps, and will become more important in the years to come. But a lot of people would pay to support the artists, and if they're good, they could still end up making more money than they could through a recording contract.
I think these figures are pretty conservative as to the amount of money that bands can make from online sales. I would much rather do business in this way than to do it the RIAA's way. And yes, this does nothing to touch the piracy issue, but we all know that whole Linux distros are freely available for download on the Internet; and this hasn't ruined Linux, has it?
Mandrake 8.0 was the first Linux distro I put on my computer; this was over a year ago. If I didn't need/want OpenOffice as much as I do, I would have stuck with them because of the ease of use and configuration. I appreciate the different applets they have available to make the experience easier, such as configuring internet connection sharing in one step. For a first distro, I lucked into a good choice.
Now, I have Red Hat 8.0, which is a nice distro, and I feel more comfortable with Linux now than I used to. I really would prefer to have the "unconverged" versions of GNOME and KDE instead of Bluecurve. Maybe next time I will go back to Mandrake or choose another distro. It seems to me that Mandrake's niche is for first-timers to Linux or home or small office users who don't have time to fiddle with everything on the system. Their real competition is Lindows and other distros that are geared to reach the same crowd. As for paying for boxed distros instead of download, it's what I do, too. I don't have a broadband connection yet, and I prefer to have a full distro of packages on CD, instead of having to hunt for them on the 'net.
As Linus said (as told by John "Mad Dog" Hall): "I don't care what you call it as long as you use it."
The implication in the Register story is that if you have Office 2000, where some editions with Access have an MSDE component included, you may be liable. However, you would have had to use MSDE to develop a data warehouse or data mart, which is the center of the patent lawsuit. Anybody who's going to go to the step of setting up a production data warehouse or data mart will be using the full version of SQL Server, not MSDE. I seriously doubt they will come after individuals or small businesses who are just using it for development purposes unrelated to those patents. Timeline will probably want to go after the big fish anyway-- that's where the money is.
have heard from employees that upgrades to the network have been held off because they didn't want to offer it to the competitors but they are forced to by law
This is like standing in front of a lifeboat on the Titanic as the ship goes down: everybody will perish. If they don't want to offer better service to their customers just because they don't want their competitors to have the same service capabilities, doesn't this illustrate how unwilling the RBOCs are to change their way of doing business? The only people who are really suffering are customers.
In my area, SBC (I think it stands for Sum-Bitchin' Communications) is running commercials on TV that decry other companies being able to offer local phone service, on their wire. *clears throat* They seem to forget that they otherwise would be a MONOPOLY in local phone service in our area. This is why states have public utility commissions: to keep their eyes on what these regulated monopolies are up to, and to assure that they provide service to everyone in their area who wants it.
I appreciate having an alternative to the local phone monopoly-- I have had another company for almost three years, with my local phone, long distance, and Internet service all with the same provider. It has worked out well for me. My problems would begin if I decided to change this around, such as subscribing to broadband.
In a more serious vein, you wonder if this address harvesting isn't the result of exploiting a known or unknown vulnerability in IIS or Exchange. Campers, what's your experience been with this?
MSN was recently noted as serving up different (read broken) content to non-IE browsers. Now you won't be able to decrypt or access MSN ... without Internet Exploder.
Surely, you don't consider this to be a loss?
There's also a way to break into RH 8 from GRUB and run root privileges... I forget the details now, but it's useful if you ever forget your password. The problem is, it makes a system vulnerable if everyone knows about it.