Two years ago, at my previous employer, I sat across the conference-room table from Mr. Andreessen while several of Loudcloud's salesmen and "sales engineers" literally shouted at me and the other developers and admins on the tech staff that our reliance on "shareware schemes" (the lead salesman's term for FOSS) was going to be our company's downfall and that we were fools not to let them save us. Six months later Loudcloud morphed into Opsware and got out of the enterprise hosting business. We hadn't signed their contract, either.
Maybe he was thinking counter to his salesforce even then, though that is giving him the benefit of some large doubt. I don't think he was actually thinking about anything in particular related to that meeting, since he spent most of his time checking information on his Blackberry and filling out a Federal security clearance application, and didn't participate in the meeting other than to sit there and look famous.
In any case, this story makes me laugh, only half-ruefully.
Also, since when is desire for control over one's computing systems 'anti-American sentiment' (point 5).
Holy Matt Frewer, I'd forgotten about that. Spookiest thing I'd ever seen. I didn't see it live, but did see it on tape.
The British version of the original Max Headroom movie was released in the US. I recall renting it and getting a friend who could dub tapes to make a copy of it. There's a copy of it available on Amazon for $45.
In the same way that people research CDDB and IMDB to see who has recorded what and who has directed what and who starred in what, people also want to see full author bibliographies, checklists for book series, edition lists (there are people who collect multiple editions and sometimes even printings of the same book). Then the hunt begins. There are more uses of catalogs and libraries than just adding metadata to your own collection. There's also research.
>If enough people stop purchasing crippled music, wouldn't their voices become more relevant?
They can become more relevant to the artists whose music *does* get purchased instead of the crippled release. That's the important corrollary to MrZaius' assertions. He's right -- the corporate oligarchy is not going to give a whit about the individual who opts out of their game. And that's fine by me, since I don't give a whit about them or their products, either. I don't like my culture under their terms.
Corporate culture product is not the only game in town, though. For every person, artist or audience, who chooses to support culture outside the closed system the SSSCA is endemic of, the cultural artifacts in that system lose a little value. It's a small value, but it's still a loss. It may take ages for this loss to be noticed by the corporations. They may never notice it at all. But just because you've opted out of their system does not mean you have to lose anything. And you may have a whole other world to gain.
But if you buy their wares *and* complain, I don't know how seriously their going to take that, either, unless you show them that you're not making idle threats. You'll need to show them conclusively that a big piece of their audience/revenue is actually going to carry through with a boycott. That kind of boycott requires a lot of energy that you're going to throw into their game, when you could throw that same energy into a separate game, and let them hang.
>Remember that the SSSCA would cripple all sorts of computing devices even when they're not being used to rip and burn.
From the SSSCA:
(b) Exception -- Subsection (a) does not apply to the offer for sale or provision of, or other trafficking in, any previously-owned interactive digital device, if such device was legally manufactured or imported, and sold, prior to the effective date of regulations adopted under section 104 and not subsequently modified in violation of subsection (a) or 103(a).
IANAL, but this appears to say that any existing device, meaning the PC on your desk now and any device sold prior to the SSSCA becoming law (and it has not even been brought to committee yet) is exempt from the strictures. If that is the case, then I wonder if the SSSCA will not simply create an increase in the secondary markets for old computer hardware and unofficial support for old software.
Also, I am still looking for evidence that adoption of the protections offered by the SSSCA is going to be mandatory for the claim and defense of copyright.
If it isn't, then there's still the option to simply not play the corporate culture oligarchy's game. You can show independant publishers and artists that you're a willing and grateful audience for/participant in their work. You can vote with your attention and your money. You don't have to let the corporations define your culture for you.
>If the record companies don't want my money anymore then Fcuk'em.
Amen. Corporate culture-product is not the only game in town. Not in music. Not in books. Not in comics. Not in news. Not in anything.
The alternatives may not be pretty and clean and comfortable, but they are out there. Disney and Microsoft and McDonalds are *not* *our* *culture*. They are abberations. And if they want to lock up all their precious wares and treat the "market" (human beings who are more than simply economic creatures) as something to be bled dry and kept weak, fine. There's still no gun at my head forcing me to participate in their "culture." When there is, then we have something to fight over.
Should that actually be the case, then thankfully paper will still work just fine as a publication medium. And unless the oligarchy intends to send someone to my house and yours and to every other existing PC installation to force an upgrade of hardware and software, there will still be systems in the world that do not play the corporate oligarchy's game. Or am I reading 101.b incorrectly in the text of the proposed SSSCA?
I'm still looking for a citation pointing to evidence that there is any sort of proposal for adoption of a given technology standard by publishers and creators in order to claim and defend copyright. Reading the text of the SSSCA I see a lot of definition of the capability of the devices and their responsibilities towards content that is protected under those devices. I do not, however, see a mandate that all creators adopt the protection of those devices.
If the Big 7 (or 6, or whatever it is this month) want to lock up their wares with this stuff, grand. I think it would be a horrible mistake, but I don't give a flying damn for what they do with their assets. They don't define my culture and I personally have no problem opting out of their petty little game.
>The problem is, if the law passes *EVERYONE* will have to use the copy protection to keep legal.
Citation? I'm still looking for evidence that any proposed legislation forces all copyright holders to play the oligarchy's game. Is SCCCA compliance going to be the necessary to prove claim of copyright?
In other words, if I publish my electronic book in an unprotected, freely-distributable form, would I then be breaking some proposed law?
Having sat across the table from Mr. Andreessen in a couple of meetings, I have to say that the man is less than impressive. He comes off as an empty-headed suit, a trophy for his sales staff to parade in front of clients.
(Background: LoudCloud was attempting to take over my former employer's web operations; not just make a pitch for services, but actively -- and with much hostility on the part of their sales team -- denigrate the infrastructure we had built in our own data center and convince upper management that we were being negligent in our work. We ended up fighting them off by showing that they would have had to lose money on us for several years in order to provide us equivalent services for less cost. They pressed on for months, fueled by our CEO's irrational desire to have Andreessen as a personal friend. The highlight of my career there was the day we canceled our letter of intention with LoudCloud.)
At a meeting in which his local and regional salesmen were in a shouting match with us (my favorite comment from their regional sales director: "You'll never be able to keep up with your little shareware schemes!" -- this was in response to our use of Apache/mod_perl), Mr. Andreessen sat there, first looking at us all as if we were speaking in a language he didn't understand. When talk turned to leasing schedules and other evidence against LoudCloud's value proposition, he became bored and began checking email on his RIM. Eventually he went and made a phone call at the other end of the room, and then sat down away from us so he could fill out his forms for a Federal security clearance (after the meeting I had to show him where our FAX machine was so he could get it in under deadline).
That's how he behaves in meetings with potential clients -- clients that his staff spend insane amounts of money and energy to woo, and bring him in to impress the savages. When we finally ceased talks with LoudCloud, he was very petulant and sent our CEO a near-illiterate email message about how disappointed he was that we had chosen not to contract their services. I understand the CEO still tries to woo him on occasion, despite.
He may very well be the richest (or luckiest) media darling I've ever shaken hands with. I am pretty certain he's also the most shallow.
Whoo-hoo-hoo! I hadn't thought about the NHS in years. One of my finest moments as an outcast in high school. At that time, good grades only got you halfway towards getting into NHS. The other part was getting two teachers to sponsor your application. For the first couple of years no teacher would sponsor me because of my "bad attitude" (telling a biology teacher that he's wrong when he said a bee's stinger is in its head apparently qualified as bad behavior one year). My senior year I got invited in. I can still see the shock on the advisor's face when I handed back the application blank and said I wasn't interested. She and a couple other teachers hounded me for a couple of days, trying to convince me that I'd never get into the college of my choice without some kind of extracurricular activities to show. By that point, I had already been accepted into two schools and a third showed up later that week.
These days I only get the satisfaction of shocking people like that when I tell a consultant company or recruiter that we don't use Microsoft products in my workplace.
>>wasted time you spent on the last crappy King
>>novel when you could be reading
>>something great from a nobody you currently
>>have no access hearing about.
> You can. It's called Fanfiction
Or, "the small press." There are literally thousands of small publishers out there supporting unknown writers and publishing some damn good work. The distribution of books and magazines is in just as bad a shape as it is for music and movies.
As with everything, Sturgeon's Law applies and no matter what channel is used to distribute the goods, 90% of everything is indeed crap. Of course, any overlap between my 90% and your 90% is coincidental.
The people who would want to do this are distributed streaming networks like InterVU (part of Akamai now), RBN, and any of the other "deliver to the edge" networks who have already bitten the bullet and paid Real for the licenses, have the hardware and software in place,and can now stream QT as well as Real from the same boxes without additional resources.
The Darwin server is a fine bit of software, but none of the large distributed streaming networks have it deployed, except for possibly Akamai. Most of the networks have *nix "boxes" (InterVU, for example, has single-board Linux computers in rackmounts at their POPs) deployed for Real delivery, and NT boxes alongside for WMP. They are of the mindset (right or wrong) that these boxes should be single-purpose to keep QOS high and maintenance simple, so they won't want to install another piece of server software on something already dedicated. With this announcement, they can plan to upgrade to Real 8 (which they have already invested in, so it isn't as easy as dumping one for the other -- you can probably imagine the piles of money that get thrown about in the high-end streaming game; it scares me sometimes) and deliver two formats from the same server. It's actually a good deal for Apple's distribution and a nice selling point for Real and its larger customers.
I've just finished up a couple months' surveying the field of distributed streaming networks for my employer, but since they are only interested in who's deployed RealServer (they flirted with WMP but MS wouldn't come around on the business/marketing side of things), I didn't ask about QT much until the end of discussions, and most of the firms said "Oh yes, we have plans to deploy it in the [near] future."
Of course, had I asked if they were planning on deploying streaming string cheese to keep the viewers fed, they'd have said yes if they thought that's what I wanted to hear.
Thousands. Literally. Bookstores and reasonably stocked libraries carry the Directory of Small Publishers and Magazines from Dustbooks (http://www.dustbooks.com/) which is quite a compendium of small and mid-sized presses. There are several other small press directories.
I think the original poster meant most respected mainstream publishers of short fiction. I'd still take issue. Alice K. Turner is a fine editor and she still manages to get some decent fiction published in Playboy, but there are still other magazines closer to the mainstream that publish more fiction (The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly).
As someone who publishes a small magazine of fiction, I can vouch that there is no shortage of outlets for short fiction writers to get published (on paper) in the US. Get published and *paid* or published to a mass audience, that's a different story.
ObOnTopic: I'm sure that some stories submitted to Playboy two decades ago were composed on a PET.
Actually, now *you're* mistaken. Playboy features Playmates. The Playboy Bunnies were the hostesses at the old Playboy Clubs. There were occasional pictorials of Bunnies in the magazine, but the monthly centerfold model is the Playmate of the Month.
> There is nothing out there that has all the functionality of MS Money 99, that also runs on Linux.
Amen.
I've found a replacement for everything I use under Windows that does what I need under Linux, save for the Money "Small Business" edition.
I'm no accountant and don't much feel like using any of the professional accounting solutions available for Linux (and there are some quite robust ones out there), and none of the GnuCash/MoneyDance/etc. programs do what MS Money does for me. At least not yet -- I have high hopes. I also considered a home-grown spreadsheet-based system, but I'd rather spend my development energy on Mason (http://www.masonhq.com/) projects.
It is a bit irksome, but I'll live with it. I wasn't doing anything fun on the old Windows box anyway.
YMMV.
ObOnTopic: So how is this different from the secure server package RH was selling previously?
Here I thought I was going overboard since I had registered 13 domain names (all of which have projects attached, though I really considered keeping them under one umbrella domain and probably could have if I'd not fallen into the vanity trap). Two of those I'm going to retire and let their registrations expire and I really doubt anyone will snap them up.
The only one I'd ever even consider selling would be cashregister.net, but only if I fail to make a go of it myself.
In a few years, domain names will be of secondary importance when searching the web, I suspect. Host/domain names are great for naming machines, but seem somewhat limited, ultimately, in naming an online presence.
Slashdot Mirror
Two years ago, at my previous employer, I sat across the conference-room table from Mr. Andreessen while several of Loudcloud's salesmen and "sales engineers" literally shouted at me and the other developers and admins on the tech staff that our reliance on "shareware schemes" (the lead salesman's term for FOSS) was going to be our company's downfall and that we were fools not to let them save us. Six months later Loudcloud morphed into Opsware and got out of the enterprise hosting business. We hadn't signed their contract, either.
Maybe he was thinking counter to his salesforce even then, though that is giving him the benefit of some large doubt. I don't think he was actually thinking about anything in particular related to that meeting, since he spent most of his time checking information on his Blackberry and filling out a Federal security clearance application, and didn't participate in the meeting other than to sit there and look famous.
In any case, this story makes me laugh, only half-ruefully.
Also, since when is desire for control over one's computing systems 'anti-American sentiment' (point 5).
> When are consumers going to realize ...
When they stop thinking of themselves merely as consumers.
Holy Matt Frewer, I'd forgotten about that. Spookiest thing I'd ever seen. I didn't see it live, but did see it on tape.
The British version of the original Max Headroom movie was released in the US. I recall renting it and getting a friend who could dub tapes to make a copy of it. There's a copy of it available on Amazon for $45.
In the same way that people research CDDB and IMDB to see who has recorded what and who has directed what and who starred in what, people also want to see full author bibliographies, checklists for book series, edition lists (there are people who collect multiple editions and sometimes even printings of the same book). Then the hunt begins. There are more uses of catalogs and libraries than just adding metadata to your own collection. There's also research.
Take a look at the SFDB for an example.
>If enough people stop purchasing crippled music, wouldn't their voices become more relevant?
They can become more relevant to the artists whose music *does* get purchased instead of the crippled release. That's the important corrollary to MrZaius' assertions. He's right -- the corporate oligarchy is not going to give a whit about the individual who opts out of their game. And that's fine by me, since I don't give a whit about them or their products, either. I don't like my culture under their terms.
Corporate culture product is not the only game in town, though. For every person, artist or audience, who chooses to support culture outside the closed system the SSSCA is endemic of, the cultural artifacts in that system lose a little value. It's a small value, but it's still a loss. It may take ages for this loss to be noticed by the corporations. They may never notice it at all. But just because you've opted out of their system does not mean you have to lose anything. And you may have a whole other world to gain.
But if you buy their wares *and* complain, I don't know how seriously their going to take that, either, unless you show them that you're not making idle threats. You'll need to show them conclusively that a big piece of their audience/revenue is actually going to carry through with a boycott. That kind of boycott requires a lot of energy that you're going to throw into their game, when you could throw that same energy into a separate game, and let them hang.
>If the record companies don't want my money anymore then Fcuk'em.
Amen. Corporate culture-product is not the only game in town. Not in music. Not in books. Not in comics. Not in news. Not in anything.
The alternatives may not be pretty and clean and comfortable, but they are out there. Disney and Microsoft and McDonalds are *not* *our* *culture*. They are abberations. And if they want to lock up all their precious wares and treat the "market" (human beings who are more than simply economic creatures) as something to be bled dry and kept weak, fine. There's still no gun at my head forcing me to participate in their "culture." When there is, then we have something to fight over.
As for now, I say we go elsewhere.
Should that actually be the case, then thankfully paper will still work just fine as a publication medium. And unless the oligarchy intends to send someone to my house and yours and to every other existing PC installation to force an upgrade of hardware and software, there will still be systems in the world that do not play the corporate oligarchy's game. Or am I reading 101.b incorrectly in the text of the proposed SSSCA?
I'm still looking for a citation pointing to evidence that there is any sort of proposal for adoption of a given technology standard by publishers and creators in order to claim and defend copyright. Reading the text of the SSSCA I see a lot of definition of the capability of the devices and their responsibilities towards content that is protected under those devices. I do not, however, see a mandate that all creators adopt the protection of those devices.
If the Big 7 (or 6, or whatever it is this month) want to lock up their wares with this stuff, grand. I think it would be a horrible mistake, but I don't give a flying damn for what they do with their assets. They don't define my culture and I personally have no problem opting out of their petty little game.
>The problem is, if the law passes *EVERYONE* will have to use the copy protection to keep legal.
Citation? I'm still looking for evidence that any proposed legislation forces all copyright holders to play the oligarchy's game. Is SCCCA compliance going to be the necessary to prove claim of copyright?
In other words, if I publish my electronic book in an unprotected, freely-distributable form, would I then be breaking some proposed law?
Having sat across the table from Mr. Andreessen in a couple of meetings, I have to say that the man is less than impressive. He comes off as an empty-headed suit, a trophy for his sales staff to parade in front of clients.
(Background: LoudCloud was attempting to take over my former employer's web operations; not just make a pitch for services, but actively -- and with much hostility on the part of their sales team -- denigrate the infrastructure we had built in our own data center and convince upper management that we were being negligent in our work. We ended up fighting them off by showing that they would have had to lose money on us for several years in order to provide us equivalent services for less cost. They pressed on for months, fueled by our CEO's irrational desire to have Andreessen as a personal friend. The highlight of my career there was the day we canceled our letter of intention with LoudCloud.)
At a meeting in which his local and regional salesmen were in a shouting match with us (my favorite comment from their regional sales director: "You'll never be able to keep up with your little shareware schemes!" -- this was in response to our use of Apache/mod_perl), Mr. Andreessen sat there, first looking at us all as if we were speaking in a language he didn't understand. When talk turned to leasing schedules and other evidence against LoudCloud's value proposition, he became bored and began checking email on his RIM. Eventually he went and made a phone call at the other end of the room, and then sat down away from us so he could fill out his forms for a Federal security clearance (after the meeting I had to show him where our FAX machine was so he could get it in under deadline).
That's how he behaves in meetings with potential clients -- clients that his staff spend insane amounts of money and energy to woo, and bring him in to impress the savages. When we finally ceased talks with LoudCloud, he was very petulant and sent our CEO a near-illiterate email message about how disappointed he was that we had chosen not to contract their services. I understand the CEO still tries to woo him on occasion, despite.
He may very well be the richest (or luckiest) media darling I've ever shaken hands with. I am pretty certain he's also the most shallow.
>Dr. Seuss's alter ego?
Lawrence Lessig
Theodore Geisel
I suppose one could get the names confused. If you were squinting. While reading in the dark. And you'd been drinking.
>National Honor Society
Whoo-hoo-hoo! I hadn't thought about the NHS in years. One of my finest moments as an outcast in high school. At that time, good grades only got you halfway towards getting into NHS. The other part was getting two teachers to sponsor your application. For the first couple of years no teacher would sponsor me because of my "bad attitude" (telling a biology teacher that he's wrong when he said a bee's stinger is in its head apparently qualified as bad behavior one year). My senior year I got invited in. I can still see the shock on the advisor's face when I handed back the application blank and said I wasn't interested. She and a couple other teachers hounded me for a couple of days, trying to convince me that I'd never get into the college of my choice without some kind of extracurricular activities to show. By that point, I had already been accepted into two schools and a third showed up later that week.
These days I only get the satisfaction of shocking people like that when I tell a consultant company or recruiter that we don't use Microsoft products in my workplace.
>>wasted time you spent on the last crappy King
>>novel when you could be reading
>>something great from a nobody you currently
>>have no access hearing about.
> You can. It's called Fanfiction
Or, "the small press." There are literally thousands of small publishers out there supporting unknown writers and publishing some damn good work. The distribution of books and magazines is in just as bad a shape as it is for music and movies.
As with everything, Sturgeon's Law applies and no matter what channel is used to distribute the goods, 90% of everything is indeed crap. Of course, any overlap between my 90% and your 90% is coincidental.
> that and we only have one baseball team here :)
So does Chicago. The Cubs only approximate a Major League team, for wide tolerances of such.
The people who would want to do this are distributed streaming networks like InterVU (part of Akamai now), RBN, and any of the other "deliver to the edge" networks who have already bitten the bullet and paid Real for the licenses, have the hardware and software in place,and can now stream QT as well as Real from the same boxes without additional resources.
The Darwin server is a fine bit of software, but none of the large distributed streaming networks have it deployed, except for possibly Akamai. Most of the networks have *nix "boxes" (InterVU, for example, has single-board Linux computers in rackmounts at their POPs) deployed for Real delivery, and NT boxes alongside for WMP. They are of the mindset (right or wrong) that these boxes should be single-purpose to keep QOS high and maintenance simple, so they won't want to install another piece of server software on something already dedicated. With this announcement, they can plan to upgrade to Real 8 (which they have already invested in, so it isn't as easy as dumping one for the other -- you can probably imagine the piles of money that get thrown about in the high-end streaming game; it scares me sometimes) and deliver two formats from the same server. It's actually a good deal for Apple's distribution and a nice selling point for Real and its larger customers.
I've just finished up a couple months' surveying the field of distributed streaming networks for my employer, but since they are only interested in who's deployed RealServer (they flirted with WMP but MS wouldn't come around on the business/marketing side of things), I didn't ask about QT much until the end of discussions, and most of the firms said "Oh yes, we have plans to deploy it in the [near] future."
Of course, had I asked if they were planning on deploying streaming string cheese to keep the viewers fed, they'd have said yes if they thought that's what I wanted to hear.
YMMV.
MSM
Thousands. Literally. Bookstores and reasonably stocked libraries carry the Directory of Small Publishers and Magazines from Dustbooks (http://www.dustbooks.com/) which is quite a compendium of small and mid-sized presses. There are several other small press directories.
I think the original poster meant most respected mainstream publishers of short fiction. I'd still take issue. Alice K. Turner is a fine editor and she still manages to get some decent fiction published in Playboy, but there are still other magazines closer to the mainstream that publish more fiction (The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly).
As someone who publishes a small magazine of fiction, I can vouch that there is no shortage of outlets for short fiction writers to get published (on paper) in the US. Get published and *paid* or published to a mass audience, that's a different story.
ObOnTopic: I'm sure that some stories submitted to Playboy two decades ago were composed on a PET.
Actually, now *you're* mistaken. Playboy features Playmates. The Playboy Bunnies were the hostesses at the old Playboy Clubs. There were occasional pictorials of Bunnies in the magazine, but the monthly centerfold model is the Playmate of the Month.
> There is nothing out there that has all the functionality of MS Money 99, that also runs on Linux.
Amen.
I've found a replacement for everything I use under Windows that does what I need under Linux, save for the Money "Small Business" edition.
I'm no accountant and don't much feel like using any of the professional accounting solutions available for Linux (and there are some quite robust ones out there), and none of the GnuCash/MoneyDance/etc. programs do what MS Money does for me. At least not yet -- I have high hopes. I also considered a home-grown spreadsheet-based system, but I'd rather spend my development energy on Mason (http://www.masonhq.com/) projects.
It is a bit irksome, but I'll live with it. I wasn't doing anything fun on the old Windows box anyway.
YMMV.
ObOnTopic: So how is this different from the secure server package RH was selling previously?
Here I thought I was going overboard since I had registered 13 domain names (all of which have projects attached, though I really considered keeping them under one umbrella domain and probably could have if I'd not fallen into the vanity trap). Two of those I'm going to retire and let their registrations expire and I really doubt anyone will snap them up.
The only one I'd ever even consider selling would be cashregister.net, but only if I fail to make a go of it myself.
In a few years, domain names will be of secondary importance when searching the web, I suspect. Host/domain names are great for naming machines, but seem somewhat limited, ultimately, in naming an online presence.