Yeah, not to mention the fact that when they said this was Bernstein's NFS, the first thing I thought was, "Okay, what has the author of qmail gotten his fingers into this time?"
The point is, everyone should have access to the airwaves. It should not be based on how much money you have. No one has any right to claim they own the air or the airwaves, just as no one has the right to claim they own their air: that's bullshit.
This is sort of like saying "Forget traffic laws, let anyone who wants to get a vehicle and drive it any way they want." Sounds great until someone drives a tank across your front lawn. There might be laws against trespass, but the damage has already been done by the time the tank tread prints are in the grass.
Spectrum regulation isn't some cheesy artifact the government dreamed up to make your life miserable. Among other things, it means you can make radios that tune between 530 and 1700 kHz instead of having to guess where the broadcast band might be. It keeps people from plopping down TV operations right in the middle of a band used for medical telemetry.
I'm not saying the currect system is perfect or anything, but there are valid reasons why some of it (especially the lower areas where broadcasters can be heard across the country or around the globe) still needs to be.
after all, if I were making something like this, I'd be reeeeeeeeeeeeeeal tempted to have it translate "How do I find the nearest bathroom?" to "I have three testicles!" or "I think you're cute, wanna go to my place?" to "I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverine."
is a standalone executable so it doesn't touch your registry
I beg to differ. It saves its information in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SimonTatham\PuTTY (at least it does on my Win2000 Pro box).
And yes, PuTTY does rock. At any given time I have about half a dozen PuTTY sessions open on my desktop, with various connections to my development servers and home box. Not quite as good as having a Linux box to work on, unfortunately, but about as close as you can reasonably get. Like the man says, it's called PuTTY because it makes Windows usable.
They'll do it the same way they do now, by chopping out several minutes of "extraneous" action to make room for spots. So what if you don't see the vision the writer, director, actors, sound men, special effects people and dozens of others worked so hard to produce? You get to see that dork Steve bleat "Dude, you're getting a HOSEJOB" again!
It's been done before. A lot. In radio's heyday the principals of a show would often go into a commercial, with little or no break in the action of the show proper, then pick up the action without missing a beat (except perhaps for a musical bridge, similar to any other scene change). Harlow Wilcox, the announcer on the Fibber McGee and Molly Show, did his Johnson's Wax commercials just like any other skit involving Mayor LaTrivia or Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve or any of the other members of the cast. The practice carried over into the early days of television as well.
Basically advertisers need to make their commercials more interesting and clever, so people will actually want to watch them.
but definitely, this is just a lull in the skirmish. Time to reload and keep the pressure on for equitable royalties (equitable to the performers and to the webcasters).
Just consider: the GNU Project starts developing an operating system, and years later Linus Torvalds adds one important piece.
Which, ten years later, the FSF has yet to include in its own version.
The GNU Project says, "Please give our project equal mention," but Linus says, "Don't give them a share of the credit; call the whole thing after my name alone!" Now envision the mindset of a person who can look at these events and accuse the GNU Project of egotism. It takes strong prejudice to misjudge so drastically.
I think it takes a strong imagination to spin events this way. To my knowledge Linus never stood up and said to create the entire operating system built around his kernel Linux. He gave that name to the kernel itself, and popular usage associated the name of the kernel with the kernel/utilities combination that sprang up around it.
If RMS thinks it's unfair that someone used his utilities and then didn't name the operating system after them, that's his perogative, but it doesn't mean it's going to stick any more than years of protests from our entire community have redefined the term "hacker" in the public eye. And, as others have pointed out, the GNU utilities are an important part of every Linux distribution, but these days it's no more important than XFree86 or Gnome or KDE or the kernel itself, without which the utilities would have no application. (Perhaps we could have avoided the whole thing by calling the combination Freenix or something, but it's a bit late for that now.) As I indicated in the post title, the beast we call Linux is more than the sum of its parts, let alone more than one of its parts.
Or to put it into an American popular culture context, no matter how good or important to the team Shaq O'Neill and Kobe Bryant are, we call the team the Los Angeles Lakers, not the Los Angeles O'Neill/Bryant/Lakers.
If you decide to put on a play covered by a publisher like Samuel French or Dramatists Play Service, your royalties will vary depending on whether your group is professional or amateur. Usually the amateur rate is fixed and fairly nominal -- $50 per performance is what I'm remembering -- and the professional rate most likely depends on the size of the theater and the intended run of the play. (You have to get a rate quote from the publisher for professional performances, something I've never done.)
So, why not base Internet royalties on the size of the audience, or perhaps the number of simultaneous streams a broadcaster can handle?
This would allow the larger broadcasters to pay the larger royalties and hopefully allow the hobbyists to pursue their hobby without it bankrupting them.
Surely the RIAA must realize that they can make more money from small payments from a lot of source than from big payments from two or three sources. Unless this is all about power, which is entirely possible, in which case nothing short of shutting down everyone who isn't buddy-buddy with them will make them happy.
My personal inclination would be to take the job and supplement it with community-college courses, at least to start. Then, if you decide you really want an IT degree, go for it after you have some background under your belt.
There are going to be many things you learn about being a system administrator, by being a system administrator, that college will never be able to teach you.
I remember those ads, and while they didn't exactly draw me in, I thought the idea was pretty clever.
Television is going to have to change to keep up with technology. I'm not sure how to do it, but if I were doing a TV show I'd find a way to work the sponsorship into the content of the show. It's been done often enough before. On radio's Fibber McGee and Molly show, for instance, the ads for Johnson Wax were written into the show's dialogue, with pitchman Harlow Wilcox taking part in each show and there being no continuity break between the ads and the dialogue. More recently, Elizabeth Taylor was on some show or another pitching one of her products.
The idea is not without its flaws but it wouldn't surprise me to see something like this become more common as time goes on.
The best linux can do is to copy them, steal their ideas.
"Stealing their ideas" is such an ugly word. I prefer to call it "standing upon the shoulders of giants," or perhaps "building upon the prior work that Microsoft has so generously provided funding for."
Or, in the words of the Immortal Bard, "Plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize but please to always be calling it 'research.'"
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. A competitive upgrade from Windows makes a great deal of sense.
You see, right now I think the retail version of RH 7.3 is selling for $60, give or take. So you offer a $10 competitive upgrade for anyone who brings in ANY evidence that they've used Windows. A CD, a case with a sticker, a printed screen shot, doesn't matter.
Sure Red Hat is giving up $10 a box if they do this. But, assuming they can still make money on every box they ship at $50, this gets them a ton of publicity that whatever they pay out in rebates could never buy otherwise.
Magazines would cover it -- and I'm not talking about the usual ZD rags, I'm talking about Time and Newsweek. It's a natural for thirty seconds of coverage in the business section of every local TV news show in America. If whoever does Red Hat's publicity is smart, they'd be making or fielding calls from talk shows and newspaper reporters.
I wouldn't expect they would sell all that many more copies of Red Hat with the Windows competitive rebate, but in the end it doesn't matter. One of the big obstacles to Linux right now is the public's complete lack of awareness that it exists, or if they know about it, it's some high end computer smart guy thing they see on those IBM commercials.
I don't know how much this could help, but I can't see how it could possibly hurt.
Would everyone who wishes to point out that Stuart Madnick is a business professor, and not a computer science professor, please check in at the desk, take a number, and wait in line over there along the far wall?
I guess we'll have to wait and see if it is enough to buy a government.
The first picture that came to mind when I read that was Victor von Doom sitting in his castle in Latveria. heh heh
This really needs to be two efforts
on
GeekPAC
·
· Score: 2
First, there needs to be an effort to educate the public about technological issues and how those issues relate to them. If the average person understands why laws like the DCMA and the CBDTPA are bad, they are more likely to influence their legislators to Do The Right Thing.
Second, there needs to be the continuous Washington presence that educates the lawmakers on these issues (i.e., lobbies like mad).
This is going to require two kinds of people in the organization (in addition to those of us who merely contribute, and those who encourage us to do so, i.e. fundraisers). The first will be those who can explain complex technical issues to the masses without sounding like a man page. Someone who looks and sounds good on Oprah. Yes, I said Oprah -- if you want to educate people you have to go someplace where they're listening, and getting the gatekeepers of public opinion on our side would be an Incredibly Good Thing. The second will be those who know how to play the Inside The Beltway game and know how to explain complex technical issues to Congresscritters, preferably in terms of how their support of tech-friendly legislation is going to get them re-elected.
Basically, the people setting this up need to take notes on how organizations like The Sierra Club and The National Rifle Organization achieve their successes in Washington. We don't have to like them, share their views or have their money in order to learn from them.
Re:They MUST change the name
on
GeekPAC
·
· Score: 2
Done properly no one in Congress needs to know that we refer to this organization among ourselves as "GeekPAC". In fact, considering the bad press that political action committees have gotten, maybe staying away from the acronym "PAC" is as important as staying away from the label "geek".
Personally I think "American Open Technology Consortium" will work just fine unless we come up with something better.
A writer can't publish a book without a publishing company to edit, revise, print, promote and distribute the book.
You're kidding, right? People do indeed publish their own books all the time, either because the intended audience is too small, the subject matter is too controversial, or because they have a burning desire to publish something that the media cartels won't touch for whatever reason.
Thoreau published some of his own works. So did Robert Ringer of "Winning Through Intimidation" fame and Henry Martyn Robert of "Robert's Rules of Order". So did Mark Twain, Zane Grey, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Gray, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alexander Pope, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edward Fitzgerald, Leo Tolstoy, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Hardy, James M. Barrie, Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, Francois Mauriac, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Richard Bolles, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Rudyard Kipling, A.E. Houseman, Marcel Proust, and Rod McKuen, among other names you would and wouldn't have heard of.
It is indeed possible to break through the cartel wall and be recognized if you have an audience waiting, although it isn't easy. For every name above there are 500 people who printed a thousand copies of "Aunt Wilma McGillicuddy, A Nebraska Life" and sold four. The Internet is probably the best facilitator for self-publishing and letting talent be discovered there's ever been, which is why it's so important the media moguls not be allowed to cut off its air supply.
Trouble is, few people would recognize McNealy or Linus. The best way around that, though, would be to add meaningful subtitles to the talking heads:
- Ferd Berfel CTO, SomeBigFortune500Company
- Scott McNeally CEO, Sun Microsystems
- Steve Jobs CEO, Apple Computer
- John Lassiter Director, "Toy Story"
- James Cameron Director, "Titanic"
- Jim Someguy System Administrator, ABigCompany Has administered 750 Unix workstations for 8 years without a single crash
- Larry Ellison CEO, Oracle Corporation
- International Business Machines (would be a crowd shot proclaiming "WE BELIEVE IN UNIX")
- Steve Case Chairman of the Board, AOL Time Warner
- Cathy Stillwater Mrs. Perlman's class, Hayes Elementary, Des Moines, Iowa (show her with a screen shot of a GNOME or KDE background surfing the web)
- Anonymous, Microsoft Corporation (silhouette of some guy, maybe even looking like Bill Gates, saying "I believe in Unix -- but unfortunately I can't tell anybody.")
Obviously I made up some names and situations and didn't check job titles or anything, but a campaign like this should be fairly easy for someone like IBM to put together. Assuming you could trust IBM's marketing group to not shoot itself in the foot like it did with OS/2.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, not to mention the fact that when they said this was Bernstein's NFS, the first thing I thought was, "Okay, what has the author of qmail gotten his fingers into this time?"
The point is, everyone should have access to the airwaves. It should not be based on how much money you have. No one has any right to claim they own the air or the airwaves, just as no one has the right to claim they own their air: that's bullshit.
This is sort of like saying "Forget traffic laws, let anyone who wants to get a vehicle and drive it any way they want." Sounds great until someone drives a tank across your front lawn. There might be laws against trespass, but the damage has already been done by the time the tank tread prints are in the grass.
Spectrum regulation isn't some cheesy artifact the government dreamed up to make your life miserable. Among other things, it means you can make radios that tune between 530 and 1700 kHz instead of having to guess where the broadcast band might be. It keeps people from plopping down TV operations right in the middle of a band used for medical telemetry.
I'm not saying the currect system is perfect or anything, but there are valid reasons why some of it (especially the lower areas where broadcasters can be heard across the country or around the globe) still needs to be.
after all, if I were making something like this, I'd be reeeeeeeeeeeeeeal tempted to have it translate "How do I find the nearest bathroom?" to "I have three testicles!" or "I think you're cute, wanna go to my place?" to "I would like to feed your fingertips to the wolverine."
Maybe it's just me, I dunno.
Now we can look forward to a Y82,136,525,314,815,442,306,154,117K problem.
is a standalone executable so it doesn't touch your registry
I beg to differ. It saves its information in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SimonTatham\PuTTY (at least it does on my Win2000 Pro box).
And yes, PuTTY does rock. At any given time I have about half a dozen PuTTY sessions open on my desktop, with various connections to my development servers and home box. Not quite as good as having a Linux box to work on, unfortunately, but about as close as you can reasonably get. Like the man says, it's called PuTTY because it makes Windows usable.
They'll do it the same way they do now, by chopping out several minutes of "extraneous" action to make room for spots. So what if you don't see the vision the writer, director, actors, sound men, special effects people and dozens of others worked so hard to produce? You get to see that dork Steve bleat "Dude, you're getting a HOSEJOB" again!
It's been done before. A lot. In radio's heyday the principals of a show would often go into a commercial, with little or no break in the action of the show proper, then pick up the action without missing a beat (except perhaps for a musical bridge, similar to any other scene change). Harlow Wilcox, the announcer on the Fibber McGee and Molly Show, did his Johnson's Wax commercials just like any other skit involving Mayor LaTrivia or Throckmorton P. Gildersleeve or any of the other members of the cast. The practice carried over into the early days of television as well.
Basically advertisers need to make their commercials more interesting and clever, so people will actually want to watch them.
but definitely, this is just a lull in the skirmish. Time to reload and keep the pressure on for equitable royalties (equitable to the performers and to the webcasters).
Just consider: the GNU Project starts developing an operating system, and years later Linus Torvalds adds one important piece.
Which, ten years later, the FSF has yet to include in its own version.
The GNU Project says, "Please give our project equal mention," but Linus says, "Don't give them a share of the credit; call the whole thing after my name alone!" Now envision the mindset of a person who can look at these events and accuse the GNU Project of egotism. It takes strong prejudice to misjudge so drastically.
I think it takes a strong imagination to spin events this way. To my knowledge Linus never stood up and said to create the entire operating system built around his kernel Linux. He gave that name to the kernel itself, and popular usage associated the name of the kernel with the kernel/utilities combination that sprang up around it.
If RMS thinks it's unfair that someone used his utilities and then didn't name the operating system after them, that's his perogative, but it doesn't mean it's going to stick any more than years of protests from our entire community have redefined the term "hacker" in the public eye. And, as others have pointed out, the GNU utilities are an important part of every Linux distribution, but these days it's no more important than XFree86 or Gnome or KDE or the kernel itself, without which the utilities would have no application. (Perhaps we could have avoided the whole thing by calling the combination Freenix or something, but it's a bit late for that now.) As I indicated in the post title, the beast we call Linux is more than the sum of its parts, let alone more than one of its parts.
Or to put it into an American popular culture context, no matter how good or important to the team Shaq O'Neill and Kobe Bryant are, we call the team the Los Angeles Lakers, not the Los Angeles O'Neill/Bryant/Lakers.
that the tablet I just looked at had the DeCSS code enscribed on it.
If you decide to put on a play covered by a publisher like Samuel French or Dramatists Play Service, your royalties will vary depending on whether your group is professional or amateur. Usually the amateur rate is fixed and fairly nominal -- $50 per performance is what I'm remembering -- and the professional rate most likely depends on the size of the theater and the intended run of the play. (You have to get a rate quote from the publisher for professional performances, something I've never done.)
So, why not base Internet royalties on the size of the audience, or perhaps the number of simultaneous streams a broadcaster can handle?
This would allow the larger broadcasters to pay the larger royalties and hopefully allow the hobbyists to pursue their hobby without it bankrupting them.
Surely the RIAA must realize that they can make more money from small payments from a lot of source than from big payments from two or three sources. Unless this is all about power, which is entirely possible, in which case nothing short of shutting down everyone who isn't buddy-buddy with them will make them happy.
My personal inclination would be to take the job and supplement it with community-college courses, at least to start. Then, if you decide you really want an IT degree, go for it after you have some background under your belt.
There are going to be many things you learn about being a system administrator, by being a system administrator, that college will never be able to teach you.
Oh yeah . . . and of course, you have to read the definitive work on the subject.
I remember those ads, and while they didn't exactly draw me in, I thought the idea was pretty clever.
Television is going to have to change to keep up with technology. I'm not sure how to do it, but if I were doing a TV show I'd find a way to work the sponsorship into the content of the show. It's been done often enough before. On radio's Fibber McGee and Molly show, for instance, the ads for Johnson Wax were written into the show's dialogue, with pitchman Harlow Wilcox taking part in each show and there being no continuity break between the ads and the dialogue. More recently, Elizabeth Taylor was on some show or another pitching one of her products.
The idea is not without its flaws but it wouldn't surprise me to see something like this become more common as time goes on.
The best linux can do is to copy them, steal their ideas.
"Stealing their ideas" is such an ugly word. I prefer to call it "standing upon the shoulders of giants," or perhaps "building upon the prior work that Microsoft has so generously provided funding for."
Or, in the words of the Immortal Bard, "Plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize but please to always be calling it 'research.'"
No, no, no, no, no, no, no. A competitive upgrade from Windows makes a great deal of sense.
You see, right now I think the retail version of RH 7.3 is selling for $60, give or take. So you offer a $10 competitive upgrade for anyone who brings in ANY evidence that they've used Windows. A CD, a case with a sticker, a printed screen shot, doesn't matter.
Sure Red Hat is giving up $10 a box if they do this. But, assuming they can still make money on every box they ship at $50, this gets them a ton of publicity that whatever they pay out in rebates could never buy otherwise.
Magazines would cover it -- and I'm not talking about the usual ZD rags, I'm talking about Time and Newsweek. It's a natural for thirty seconds of coverage in the business section of every local TV news show in America. If whoever does Red Hat's publicity is smart, they'd be making or fielding calls from talk shows and newspaper reporters.
I wouldn't expect they would sell all that many more copies of Red Hat with the Windows competitive rebate, but in the end it doesn't matter. One of the big obstacles to Linux right now is the public's complete lack of awareness that it exists, or if they know about it, it's some high end computer smart guy thing they see on those IBM commercials.
I don't know how much this could help, but I can't see how it could possibly hurt.
I mean, I've spent the greater part of my adult life trying to keep my balls out of the fire.
Would everyone who wishes to point out that Stuart Madnick is a business professor, and not a computer science professor, please check in at the desk, take a number, and wait in line over there along the far wall?
Thank you.
Well, what I thought you meant was that Assistant Anything goes before everybody else. :)
I guess we'll have to wait and see if it is enough to buy a government.
The first picture that came to mind when I read that was Victor von Doom sitting in his castle in Latveria. heh heh
First, there needs to be an effort to educate the public about technological issues and how those issues relate to them. If the average person understands why laws like the DCMA and the CBDTPA are bad, they are more likely to influence their legislators to Do The Right Thing.
Second, there needs to be the continuous Washington presence that educates the lawmakers on these issues (i.e., lobbies like mad).
This is going to require two kinds of people in the organization (in addition to those of us who merely contribute, and those who encourage us to do so, i.e. fundraisers). The first will be those who can explain complex technical issues to the masses without sounding like a man page. Someone who looks and sounds good on Oprah. Yes, I said Oprah -- if you want to educate people you have to go someplace where they're listening, and getting the gatekeepers of public opinion on our side would be an Incredibly Good Thing. The second will be those who know how to play the Inside The Beltway game and know how to explain complex technical issues to Congresscritters, preferably in terms of how their support of tech-friendly legislation is going to get them re-elected.
Basically, the people setting this up need to take notes on how organizations like The Sierra Club and The National Rifle Organization achieve their successes in Washington. We don't have to like them, share their views or have their money in order to learn from them.
Done properly no one in Congress needs to know that we refer to this organization among ourselves as "GeekPAC". In fact, considering the bad press that political action committees have gotten, maybe staying away from the acronym "PAC" is as important as staying away from the label "geek".
Personally I think "American Open Technology Consortium" will work just fine unless we come up with something better.
A writer can't publish a book without a publishing company to edit, revise, print, promote and distribute the book.
You're kidding, right? People do indeed publish their own books all the time, either because the intended audience is too small, the subject matter is too controversial, or because they have a burning desire to publish something that the media cartels won't touch for whatever reason.
Thoreau published some of his own works. So did Robert Ringer of "Winning Through Intimidation" fame and Henry Martyn Robert of "Robert's Rules of Order". So did Mark Twain, Zane Grey, Upton Sinclair, Carl Sandburg, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Bernard Shaw, Thomas Gray, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alexander Pope, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Edward Fitzgerald, Leo Tolstoy, Stephen Crane, Willa Cather, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Hardy, James M. Barrie, Walt Whitman, Vachel Lindsay, Francois Mauriac, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Richard Bolles, Joseph Smith, Mary Baker Eddy, Rudyard Kipling, A.E. Houseman, Marcel Proust, and Rod McKuen, among other names you would and wouldn't have heard of.
It is indeed possible to break through the cartel wall and be recognized if you have an audience waiting, although it isn't easy. For every name above there are 500 people who printed a thousand copies of "Aunt Wilma McGillicuddy, A Nebraska Life" and sold four. The Internet is probably the best facilitator for self-publishing and letting talent be discovered there's ever been, which is why it's so important the media moguls not be allowed to cut off its air supply.
seeing as how I have moderator points today, can I moderate this
mod minus one
for you this time --
no sense of rhythm
and no sense of rhyme
Oh wait, I just posted to this thread, never mind.
Trouble is, few people would recognize McNealy or Linus. The best way around that, though, would be to add meaningful subtitles to the talking heads:
- Ferd Berfel
CTO, SomeBigFortune500Company
- Scott McNeally
CEO, Sun Microsystems
- Steve Jobs
CEO, Apple Computer
- John Lassiter
Director, "Toy Story"
- James Cameron
Director, "Titanic"
- Jim Someguy
System Administrator, ABigCompany
Has administered 750 Unix workstations for 8 years without a single crash
- Larry Ellison
CEO, Oracle Corporation
- International Business Machines
(would be a crowd shot proclaiming "WE BELIEVE IN UNIX")
- Steve Case
Chairman of the Board, AOL Time Warner
- Cathy Stillwater
Mrs. Perlman's class, Hayes Elementary, Des Moines, Iowa
(show her with a screen shot of a GNOME or KDE background surfing the web)
- Anonymous, Microsoft Corporation
(silhouette of some guy, maybe even looking like Bill Gates, saying "I believe in Unix -- but unfortunately I can't tell anybody.")
Obviously I made up some names and situations and didn't check job titles or anything, but a campaign like this should be fairly easy for someone like IBM to put together. Assuming you could trust IBM's marketing group to not shoot itself in the foot like it did with OS/2.
In the long run, we're all dead. -- John Maynard Keynes
Unless we're an evil corporation. Then we live on, but everyone wishes we were dead.