Ever read 1984? Or Animal Farm? In each of these books (basically cautionary tales against totalitarianism) the ruling class trots out the spectre of a common enemy to unite the masses. In 1984 it's (the probably nonexistent) Goldstein; in Animal Farm it's first Farmer Jones, then Snowball. Let's face it, people seem to have more of a reaction toward "we have to defeat this common enemy" than "we have to work toward this common good."
Around here, the common enemy is Microsoft, which is trotted out as the cause behind all software evil (just for kicks, do a Google search for the phrase more evil than Satan himself and see what the first entry is). There's a problem with that, though, even if it's true (which I don't personally believe, though I will say that they have done a few uncharitable things, in much the same way a wolverine occasionally gets mildly ticked off). If Microsoft is gone as the enemy, what then? If they ever decide to embrace open source (I agree, this isn't likely to happen, and a recent company-wide memo from Bill Neukom tends to bear that out), and do it wholeheartedly for the right reasons, do you continue to hate them because Bill Gates still has more money than all but about 50 countries? Do you turn on someone else, someone from the community perhaps who isn't living up to perceived standards of OS correctness? Do you have to have hate as your motivating force? We have words for people like that, and they're not very nice words.
I really wish we could all agree on working toward the goal of World Domination Through Software That Doesn't Suck rather than Mow Down Microsoft (and I agree with the previous post, eventually MS will fall by the wayside just like every other empire). I think we, and the world, would be better in the long run. --
Silly, you can't use the round corkscrew for that. You need a square corkscrew for an Ethernet port. Now a keyboard connector (the old style, bigger and more painful than the wimpy PS/2-style ones) -- now there's where a corkscrew could be useful. --
I think that if universal electronic democracy were ever to come about, two things would happen:
1. People would tend to specialize in their own areas of interest. I would, for instance, probably be most interested in areas like transportation and technology that either touch my life on a daily basis, or I have some experience with and can (at least partially) understand the issues involved. I would be a lot less likely to be worried about issues like agriculture and the military because, while I know they affect me in some way, I don't know enough about them to make intelligent decisions and only have a certain amount of time to spend on civic duties (although if some of these predictions come true, that amount of time may steadily increase).
2. A new group of professional politicians will arise who will be more than glad to do your thinking for you in certain areas. Something like lobbyists, perhaps, but not (necessarily) funded by corporations or PACs. They would do the research on their areas of interest and report back to the public.
One way this might work was outlined in L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach. In it he envisions an alternate-America democracy in which anyone who wants to can show up for Congress. However, most people don't care to make the trek to the Capitol (intentionally parked on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, as I recall) so they delegate proxies to vote for them. If you like the way a potential proxy thinks, you can register to have him or her cast votes on your behalf. If they tick you off sufficiently, you unregister. I can easily see advances in digital democracy leading to citizens being allowed to delegate different proxies for different issues.
Granted, this is not a perfect system, but neither is the one we have now. That's why we're talking about the possibility that it might change, right? --
First they ignore you. We're long past that. So is this the part where they laugh at you, Or is this the part where they fight you? I honestly can't tell.
But I do know what comes after they fight you.
"Then you win."
(Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, I did not have a hand in writing this. Probably just as well, too. I don't think I could have come up with anything intentionally that would be as good at making the company look silly as this does by accident.) --
Well, perhaps we can agree to disagree all the way around. I don't see that being musicals is a downcheck, especially since the music is IMHO pretty good. And as for butchering the stories... that's a matter of opinion, I'm afraid. Folk stories come in hundreds of versions (including tales like The Little Mermaid that have made their way into folklore from definitive versions) and Disney has just added one more to the mix. (Just don't ask me about Pocahontas.;-)
Or maybe the fact that those are three of my toddler granddaughter's favorite movies and we watch them three times a day on the weekends has me brainwashed. (grin again)
As for Clash of the Titans, I haven't seen the whole thing through since it was in theaters the first time around, but my memory of it is that the animation was dated and the acting was pretty wooden. You're partially right about explaining characters, but not entirely -- you just have to do it in a slightly different fashion, preferably with set design, dialog, mannerisms, interaction with the other characters, etc. Just as an example, in the book The Princess Bride (an example of a great fantasy I forgot to include in my previous post!), William Goldman takes IIRC about ten pages to set up the character of Inigo Montoya. In the movie he doesn't have the luxury of showing Inigo's entire back story, so he uses about a minute of dialog ("My father was a great swordmaker . . . ") combined with the way he interacts with the other characters ("You were so slobbering drunk you couldn't buy brandy!" and playing the rhyming game with Fezzik), and reinforces these characteristics later in the movie (the scene in the Thieves' Forest and the "Father, please guide my hands" scene). I agree about the believable characters and a good plot -- but the sort of thing I outlined above is the way you make characters believable.
I'm afraid the breadth and depth of the D&D canon won't save it from getting the coveted Golden Turkey award. It will probably (hopefully) have killer special effects, and I will be quite happy to be shown to be wrong about the script. I'm just setting my expectations at a suitably low level. --
It's not impossible to do good fantasy in film -- just very, very difficult. The better Disney animated pictures come immediately to mind -- I'm thinking of Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, the Little Mermaid here -- as does "Ladyhawke" of a number of years ago. These two, however, are quite unusual. Ladyhawke didn't rely on huge, impressive special effects -- just a few camera tricks to suggest the human-to-hawk and human-to-wolf transformations. And of course animation is a genre well suited to fantasy, because if you can imagine it and draw it, you can put it into a movie.
I also think it's difficult to do science fiction well in film, or at least it historically has been. Most of the reason is that producers and studios tend to equate "science fiction" with zap guns and flying saucers -- the kind of science fiction real SF fans deride as "sci-fi." In the best SF and fantasy movies, as in all movies (and indeed, all literature) the characters come first. That doesn't mean a movie with cardboard characters, predictable plots and dumbed-down dialogue can't be fun to watch -- it just means it isn't good SF.
This is the first I've heard of a D&D movie, but if I were to guess I would say it will probably rank right up there with "Masters of the Universe" and "Mortal Kombat", evoking Dorothy Parker's immortal phrase, "it fills a much-needed void in the genre." --
Let's face it, 99% of the people using any ISP are going to think a subnet mask is something one of Batman's enemies wears. You can tell them their default gateway setting but unless you can tell them how to implement it, it does them no good. Therefore they have to support individual OSs, and it would please me no end if each ISP had an entry in their support database on how to set the TCP/IP settings in every OS from Windows 3.1 to FreeBSD to AmigaOS.
Where you're correct is that at the very least, the second-tier support personnel at an ISP should know enough about TCP/IP to be able to troubleshoot a connection. Most first-tier support personnel have been trained to read off a troubleshooting chart, but not what to do when there are problems that are off the list. It would be great if all support personnel were trained in these arts, but as much as I would have liked to see it back when I was doing Windows 95 support, it just isn't cost effective. Training is time is money, and most support companies are reluctant to spend any money they don't feel like they have to. Unfortunately they haven't figured out yet that they really have to. --
No proxy client yet, and not likely to be one. Macs, and probably anybody else but Windows boxen have the same problem.
You can, however, use the telnet and ftp gateways on the internal network to do your, um, well, telnetting and ftp'ing. I've occasionally gotten the web proxy to work with ftp as well, but don't remember the details. (If you don't know where these various gateways are, do a search on the internal web or find the page for new interns, which has a pile of basic information. They'll pop up.) Unfortunately, the various gateways don't let things like realaudio through, so you can't get that on anything but Windows-with-Remote-Winsock.
Once you know where these gateways are you can use them pretty seamlessly if you know how. For instance, if you set the ftp_proxy and http_proxy variables you can use lynx with no problem, and mc's ftpfs (which lets you mount ftp shares to look like local hard drives) with a minor change to its configuration.
And, if you get stuck, there's an internal Linux mailing list. Just check the address book under "linux." --
That's very odd. I'm still on Illuminati Online and I still have my shell account. It could be bacause I have one of their telnet-only accounts, which would be much less useful without a shell. --
One day I was in our building's cafeteria sometime between breakfast and lunch, and the servicemen were there working on the teller machine. I stopped to watch for just a moment, and was rather surprised to see an OS/2 boot screen come up!
I must have had quite an interesting look on my face because the repairman put his left hand over the screen, put his right index finger over his mouth and gave me an elaborate "Ssssssssh!"
It was just nice to see that OS/2 had worked itself back onto campus.:-) I had to smile -- I ran OS/2 several years ago and still remember it fondly. In fact I keep thinking I ought to pull out the old CD and reinstall it onto one of the spare, older machines I have laying around, but then I think of what my wife would do to me if another computer invaded the computer lab, er, living room. --
I don't know a whole lot about music industry contracts, but I know something of publishing contracts, and I expect they're similar.
In an ideal world, the artist sits down with his/her/its/their agent, goes over the contract line by line, and approves or disapproves of each clause, making changes to the contract as necessary. Then it goes back to the publisher (or, presumably, record label), which can accept or reject the proposed changes. The back-and-forth continues until both sides accept the contract and everybody starts making money. Nobody has to accept any clause in the contract if they don't like it or don't want to.
The article did in effect note, though, that a lot of artists (especially first-timers) are naive in the ways of the music business and have no idea what the things they're signing away, like T-shirt licensing deals and URL control, are really worth -- and the standard contract is designed precisely to give the publisher/record company/whoever as much control of the product (read, band and music, or writer and books) as possible. It's much like a negotiation where one side names its wildest pie-in-the-sky offer, expecting to be haggled down to something sensible. When Big Mama Sony is dangling a six-figure check and a contract in front of The Garage Fish, whose biggest gig to date has been the American Legion hall, as the article says, it's hard to say no, and often they sign, giving Sony control over their entire artistic lives. (This is not to pick on Sony. It's the same with Warner Brothers, or Columbia, or anybody else. YMMV)
It's also possible that if Sony wants control over an artist's web presence badly enough, they can say, "Well, sorry, if you don't include this clause we won't sign you."
Personally I think the artist should keep as much control over his/her/their product as possible. You never know when it's going to mean a few (or a lot of) extra dollars. Just as an example, an obscure newspaperwoman and novelist named Irene Kampen made sure the contract for her first book, "Life Without George," gave her the television rights instead of the publisher. At the time the book was published television was still in its infancy, so the publisher probably didn't even notice -- but until her death last year she was collecting residuals for a TV show based on her book. You might have heard of it. It was called "The Lucy Show." It ran in prime time for 12 years and is probably still running somewhere at this very moment.
Artists, think twice before you sign away those satellite, holodeck and telepathy rights! --
Tim suggests reading technical books to find out what you like about them so you can incorporate it into your own writing. I also suggest you do your best to read bad technical books, or at least note the portions of the books you read that irritate you, and make a note not to do that sort of thing in your own writing. My pet peeve is sloppy writing and editing -- misspelled words, using it's instead of its (or vice versa), badly contructed sentences, and the like that in the past would have been caught by a careful editor, but now go sailing through in the rush to publish. (I also have to say that, although it's not entirely absent, I see a lot less of that in O'Reilly books than I do in those from other publishers. Take your editors out to lunch, Tim!) --
The Seattle Mariners have had a web site for years. I think they were the first baseball team to do so, but since then quite a few have followed suit. Anyone who watches baseball sees URLs popping up all over the place. --
it's based solely on a date system that revolves around some bloke supposedly born 2000 years ago that pagans don't believe in...
Actually, it's based solely on a date system that revolves around when the mother of some Roman emperor or another thought some bloke supposedly born 2000 years ago that pagans don't believe in was born.
I don't think I've ever heard your voice. I have no doubt it's a fine voice. You are, after all, a professional actor, someone who makes his living in part from his voice. But I'm afraid that whatever else Lucas may have gotten wrong, he was dead on with this one. I simply can't imagine anyone but James Earl Jones doing Darth Vader's voice. --
What would be required for Linux to fail? First, there has to be some definition of what would be required for it to succeed. Now, the question becomes, who defines how it could succeed? The answer is, no one and everyone. Everybody from Bill Gates to Anonymous Bloody Slashdot Coward has his/her own idea of what it would take for Linux to succeed. Yet, there is no single, monolithic "they" that defines whether Linux will succeed because a certain thing has happened.
If you ask me, Linux has already succeeded. It provides my little home Windows network with disk space, printer sharing and Internet connectivity, gives me a forum to learn more about underlying computer technologies like TCP/IP and have a blast doing it, and gives me a place to use no-longer-hip-for-Windows hardware. It does all the things I want from it and more. That's succees. Do I care about world domination for Linux? Not really. I don't think it's a realistic goal. Do I think Linux would be the be-all and end-all for everyone? Not in this lifetime. Do I think it's a great server OS and has the capability of being a great desktop OS, and incidentally a thorn in Microsoft's side? You betcha. It does what I want, when I want it to. It succeeds. Your mileage may vary, especially if you think it's going to reduce Bill Gates to begging for quarters.
I have long maintained that Microsoft is 100% irrelevant for any success Linux may have. Linux will succeed on its own terms, and whether it captures 90% or 9% or any number in between of any market, if it does its job and does it well, it has succeeded. Giving Microsoft a good kick in the shins or worse is just a pleasant side benefit. --
I was once told that when Microsoft was first connected to the Internet, the guys in Network Ops watched with amusement as the caches began filling up with hits from porn sites. Fortunately they didn't particularly care, and apparently still don't. I mean c'mon, if they were paying attention they might notice I was posting to Slashdot, and then how would I report in?
There are several different types of addictions. I for one have a serious oxygen jones, but that's neither here nor there.
I agree that there is such a thing as "too much Internet." There was a sound byte this morning on the radio about some kid whose father came home every night, went upstairs, and chatted with his friends online until all hours of the morning. That particular marriage is headed for divorce. That's certainly destructive behavior, but the odds are good that if the Internet didn't exist, people with a tendency toward that kind of addiction would end up being addicted to something else -- gambling, TV, tent revivals, whatever.
There can be a good side to this sort of addiction. I joked earlier about my oxygen addiction. Take my O2 away and I get agitated. I had a friend back in my AOL days who regularly ran up $1000+ AOL bills because of the time she stayed online. I think it was silly, but it apparently gave her something she wasn't getting in real life. Her doctors agreed -- she'd been on a number of antidepressants over the years, none of which did much for her, and her depression went into remission when she was online. This particular addiction, much like mine, was keeping her alive.
Many writers are addicted to writing. Robert Heinlein described a time when he quit writing and felt vaguely sick through the entire three week period. John Campbell sent him a manuscript to revise, Heinlein sat down to the typewriter and the malaise went away. Isaac Asimov wouldn't travel unless he could write (and never on a plane, of course).
The point I'm making is that addictions can serve a physiologically, psychologically or socially useful purpose. Rather than an arbitrary number of hours a day, I would base a determination of whether an addiction was "bad" on what its results and consequences were. If you're on the net 12 hours a day hanging out in #linuxhelp while you're monitoring servers for an ISP, that's one thing. If you steal a credit card so you can pay your ISP bill, that's something quite different. --
Heh . . . OK, I can agree with that. It's important to separate the code from the people writing it. Otherwise half of us would never use anything that called itself GNU (because we don't like RMS), half of us would never use anything called Open Source (because we don't like ESR), but we'd all use Linux because we all like Linus. (grin) --
Actually I'm going to create a Tom Christiansen-free distribution as a reaction. And that's much easier than a GNU-free distribution.
Only by comparison, and I'm afraid there are a lot of people who would never use your distribution. Why? You touched on this yourself -- you would not be able to include a single line of Perl code. Ton's fingerprints are all over core Perl. That also means you wouldn't be able to include any utility written in Perl.
I think Tom is a top-notch coder. I also think he needs serious work on his people skills. The two often go together, sad to say.
I don't advocate censorship, and I think a public library is an essential part of a community. I do, however, have a problem with the way the web is handled at the moment. Not long ago here in the Seattle area there was a flap about some guy surfing porn sites at a local library in public view of a child waiting to use the computer.
I think a much better solution would be to keep Internet connections available "behind the counter." Better yet, have public cubicles available but filtered, and a second set of private, unfiltered cubicles that can be used by dirty old men, Future Anarchists of America members, teenage girls looking for information on birth control, traveling salesmen checking Hotmail, or people who just don't want someone looking over their shoulder. This is no different from keeping copies of The Joy Of Sex behind the counter.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll probably have something to say about this when the article comes up . . . in an hour or two.
Ow.
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Ever read 1984? Or Animal Farm? In each of these books (basically cautionary tales against totalitarianism) the ruling class trots out the spectre of a common enemy to unite the masses. In 1984 it's (the probably nonexistent) Goldstein; in Animal Farm it's first Farmer Jones, then Snowball. Let's face it, people seem to have more of a reaction toward "we have to defeat this common enemy" than "we have to work toward this common good."
Around here, the common enemy is Microsoft, which is trotted out as the cause behind all software evil (just for kicks, do a Google search for the phrase more evil than Satan himself and see what the first entry is). There's a problem with that, though, even if it's true (which I don't personally believe, though I will say that they have done a few uncharitable things, in much the same way a wolverine occasionally gets mildly ticked off). If Microsoft is gone as the enemy, what then? If they ever decide to embrace open source (I agree, this isn't likely to happen, and a recent company-wide memo from Bill Neukom tends to bear that out), and do it wholeheartedly for the right reasons, do you continue to hate them because Bill Gates still has more money than all but about 50 countries? Do you turn on someone else, someone from the community perhaps who isn't living up to perceived standards of OS correctness? Do you have to have hate as your motivating force? We have words for people like that, and they're not very nice words.
I really wish we could all agree on working toward the goal of World Domination Through Software That Doesn't Suck rather than Mow Down Microsoft (and I agree with the previous post, eventually MS will fall by the wayside just like every other empire). I think we, and the world, would be better in the long run.
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Silly, you can't use the round corkscrew for that. You need a square corkscrew for an Ethernet port. Now a keyboard connector (the old style, bigger and more painful than the wimpy PS/2-style ones) -- now there's where a corkscrew could be useful.
--
does it have an Ethernet port?
I'd settle for RS-232 even.
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I think that if universal electronic democracy were ever to come about, two things would happen:
1. People would tend to specialize in their own areas of interest. I would, for instance, probably be most interested in areas like transportation and technology that either touch my life on a daily basis, or I have some experience with and can (at least partially) understand the issues involved. I would be a lot less likely to be worried about issues like agriculture and the military because, while I know they affect me in some way, I don't know enough about them to make intelligent decisions and only have a certain amount of time to spend on civic duties (although if some of these predictions come true, that amount of time may steadily increase).
2. A new group of professional politicians will arise who will be more than glad to do your thinking for you in certain areas. Something like lobbyists, perhaps, but not (necessarily) funded by corporations or PACs. They would do the research on their areas of interest and report back to the public.
One way this might work was outlined in L. Neil Smith's The Probability Broach. In it he envisions an alternate-America democracy in which anyone who wants to can show up for Congress. However, most people don't care to make the trek to the Capitol (intentionally parked on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, as I recall) so they delegate proxies to vote for them. If you like the way a potential proxy thinks, you can register to have him or her cast votes on your behalf. If they tick you off sufficiently, you unregister. I can easily see advances in digital democracy leading to citizens being allowed to delegate different proxies for different issues.
Granted, this is not a perfect system, but neither is the one we have now. That's why we're talking about the possibility that it might change, right?
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You know . . .
First they ignore you. We're long past that.
So is this the part where they laugh at you,
Or is this the part where they fight you?
I honestly can't tell.
But I do know what comes after they fight you.
"Then you win."
(Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, I did not have a hand in writing this. Probably just as well, too. I don't think I could have come up with anything intentionally that would be as good at making the company look silly as this does by accident.)
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Well, perhaps we can agree to disagree all the way around. I don't see that being musicals is a downcheck, especially since the music is IMHO pretty good. And as for butchering the stories... that's a matter of opinion, I'm afraid. Folk stories come in hundreds of versions (including tales like The Little Mermaid that have made their way into folklore from definitive versions) and Disney has just added one more to the mix. (Just don't ask me about Pocahontas. ;-)
Or maybe the fact that those are three of my toddler granddaughter's favorite movies and we watch them three times a day on the weekends has me brainwashed. (grin again)
As for Clash of the Titans, I haven't seen the whole thing through since it was in theaters the first time around, but my memory of it is that the animation was dated and the acting was pretty wooden. You're partially right about explaining characters, but not entirely -- you just have to do it in a slightly different fashion, preferably with set design, dialog, mannerisms, interaction with the other characters, etc. Just as an example, in the book The Princess Bride (an example of a great fantasy I forgot to include in my previous post!), William Goldman takes IIRC about ten pages to set up the character of Inigo Montoya. In the movie he doesn't have the luxury of showing Inigo's entire back story, so he uses about a minute of dialog ("My father was a great swordmaker . . . ") combined with the way he interacts with the other characters ("You were so slobbering drunk you couldn't buy brandy!" and playing the rhyming game with Fezzik), and reinforces these characteristics later in the movie (the scene in the Thieves' Forest and the "Father, please guide my hands" scene). I agree about the believable characters and a good plot -- but the sort of thing I outlined above is the way you make characters believable.
I'm afraid the breadth and depth of the D&D canon won't save it from getting the coveted Golden Turkey award. It will probably (hopefully) have killer special effects, and I will be quite happy to be shown to be wrong about the script. I'm just setting my expectations at a suitably low level.
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It's not impossible to do good fantasy in film -- just very, very difficult. The better Disney animated pictures come immediately to mind -- I'm thinking of Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, the Little Mermaid here -- as does "Ladyhawke" of a number of years ago. These two, however, are quite unusual. Ladyhawke didn't rely on huge, impressive special effects -- just a few camera tricks to suggest the human-to-hawk and human-to-wolf transformations. And of course animation is a genre well suited to fantasy, because if you can imagine it and draw it, you can put it into a movie.
I also think it's difficult to do science fiction well in film, or at least it historically has been. Most of the reason is that producers and studios tend to equate "science fiction" with zap guns and flying saucers -- the kind of science fiction real SF fans deride as "sci-fi." In the best SF and fantasy movies, as in all movies (and indeed, all literature) the characters come first. That doesn't mean a movie with cardboard characters, predictable plots and dumbed-down dialogue can't be fun to watch -- it just means it isn't good SF.
This is the first I've heard of a D&D movie, but if I were to guess I would say it will probably rank right up there with "Masters of the Universe" and "Mortal Kombat", evoking Dorothy Parker's immortal phrase, "it fills a much-needed void in the genre."
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Let's face it, 99% of the people using any ISP are going to think a subnet mask is something one of Batman's enemies wears. You can tell them their default gateway setting but unless you can tell them how to implement it, it does them no good. Therefore they have to support individual OSs, and it would please me no end if each ISP had an entry in their support database on how to set the TCP/IP settings in every OS from Windows 3.1 to FreeBSD to AmigaOS.
Where you're correct is that at the very least, the second-tier support personnel at an ISP should know enough about TCP/IP to be able to troubleshoot a connection. Most first-tier support personnel have been trained to read off a troubleshooting chart, but not what to do when there are problems that are off the list. It would be great if all support personnel were trained in these arts, but as much as I would have liked to see it back when I was doing Windows 95 support, it just isn't cost effective. Training is time is money, and most support companies are reluctant to spend any money they don't feel like they have to. Unfortunately they haven't figured out yet that they really have to.
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No proxy client yet, and not likely to be one. Macs, and probably anybody else but Windows boxen have the same problem.
You can, however, use the telnet and ftp gateways on the internal network to do your, um, well, telnetting and ftp'ing. I've occasionally gotten the web proxy to work with ftp as well, but don't remember the details. (If you don't know where these various gateways are, do a search on the internal web or find the page for new interns, which has a pile of basic information. They'll pop up.) Unfortunately, the various gateways don't let things like realaudio through, so you can't get that on anything but Windows-with-Remote-Winsock.
Once you know where these gateways are you can use them pretty seamlessly if you know how. For instance, if you set the ftp_proxy and http_proxy variables you can use lynx with no problem, and mc's ftpfs (which lets you mount ftp shares to look like local hard drives) with a minor change to its configuration.
And, if you get stuck, there's an internal Linux mailing list. Just check the address book under "linux."
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That's very odd. I'm still on Illuminati Online and I still have my shell account. It could be bacause I have one of their telnet-only accounts, which would be much less useful without a shell.
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Naaaah. In real world terms, maybe, but it makes them way too powerful for game balance. Maybe one or more of these:
Power 2 or 3 (maybe some transferrable), income fairly high -- maybe 4. Three arrows.
The Network gets +2 on any attack if they control M$
Any player gets a +1 to any attack by a Corporate group if they also control M$.
Any player controlling Slashdot has a +3 to attack M$.
(Those of you who are old Illuminati players may recognize my sig.)
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One day I was in our building's cafeteria sometime between breakfast and lunch, and the servicemen were there working on the teller machine. I stopped to watch for just a moment, and was rather surprised to see an OS/2 boot screen come up!
:-) I had to smile -- I ran OS/2 several years ago and still remember it fondly. In fact I keep thinking I ought to pull out the old CD and reinstall it onto one of the spare, older machines I have laying around, but then I think of what my wife would do to me if another computer invaded the computer lab, er, living room.
I must have had quite an interesting look on my face because the repairman put his left hand over the screen, put his right index finger over his mouth and gave me an elaborate "Ssssssssh!"
It was just nice to see that OS/2 had worked itself back onto campus.
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I don't know a whole lot about music industry contracts, but I know something of publishing contracts, and I expect they're similar.
In an ideal world, the artist sits down with his/her/its/their agent, goes over the contract line by line, and approves or disapproves of each clause, making changes to the contract as necessary. Then it goes back to the publisher (or, presumably, record label), which can accept or reject the proposed changes. The back-and-forth continues until both sides accept the contract and everybody starts making money. Nobody has to accept any clause in the contract if they don't like it or don't want to.
The article did in effect note, though, that a lot of artists (especially first-timers) are naive in the ways of the music business and have no idea what the things they're signing away, like T-shirt licensing deals and URL control, are really worth -- and the standard contract is designed precisely to give the publisher/record company/whoever as much control of the product (read, band and music, or writer and books) as possible. It's much like a negotiation where one side names its wildest pie-in-the-sky offer, expecting to be haggled down to something sensible. When Big Mama Sony is dangling a six-figure check and a contract in front of The Garage Fish, whose biggest gig to date has been the American Legion hall, as the article says, it's hard to say no, and often they sign, giving Sony control over their entire artistic lives. (This is not to pick on Sony. It's the same with Warner Brothers, or Columbia, or anybody else. YMMV)
It's also possible that if Sony wants control over an artist's web presence badly enough, they can say, "Well, sorry, if you don't include this clause we won't sign you."
Personally I think the artist should keep as much control over his/her/their product as possible. You never know when it's going to mean a few (or a lot of) extra dollars. Just as an example, an obscure newspaperwoman and novelist named Irene Kampen made sure the contract for her first book, "Life Without George," gave her the television rights instead of the publisher. At the time the book was published television was still in its infancy, so the publisher probably didn't even notice -- but until her death last year she was collecting residuals for a TV show based on her book. You might have heard of it. It was called "The Lucy Show." It ran in prime time for 12 years and is probably still running somewhere at this very moment.
Artists, think twice before you sign away those satellite, holodeck and telepathy rights!
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Sounds to me like "trademark squatting" would be a good term, if a better term doesn't already exist.
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Tim suggests reading technical books to find out what you like about them so you can incorporate it into your own writing. I also suggest you do your best to read bad technical books, or at least note the portions of the books you read that irritate you, and make a note not to do that sort of thing in your own writing. My pet peeve is sloppy writing and editing -- misspelled words, using it's instead of its (or vice versa), badly contructed sentences, and the like that in the past would have been caught by a careful editor, but now go sailing through in the rush to publish. (I also have to say that, although it's not entirely absent, I see a lot less of that in O'Reilly books than I do in those from other publishers. Take your editors out to lunch, Tim!)
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The Seattle Mariners have had a web site for years. I think they were the first baseball team to do so, but since then quite a few have followed suit. Anyone who watches baseball sees URLs popping up all over the place.
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it's based solely on a date system that revolves around some bloke supposedly born 2000 years ago that pagans don't believe in...
Actually, it's based solely on a date system that revolves around when the mother of some Roman emperor or another thought some bloke supposedly born 2000 years ago that pagans don't believe in was born.
Whew.
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I don't think I've ever heard your voice. I have no doubt it's a fine voice. You are, after all, a professional actor, someone who makes his living in part from his voice. But I'm afraid that whatever else Lucas may have gotten wrong, he was dead on with this one. I simply can't imagine anyone but James Earl Jones doing Darth Vader's voice.
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What would be required for Linux to fail? First, there has to be some definition of what would be required for it to succeed. Now, the question becomes, who defines how it could succeed? The answer is, no one and everyone. Everybody from Bill Gates to Anonymous Bloody Slashdot Coward has his/her own idea of what it would take for Linux to succeed. Yet, there is no single, monolithic "they" that defines whether Linux will succeed because a certain thing has happened.
If you ask me, Linux has already succeeded. It provides my little home Windows network with disk space, printer sharing and Internet connectivity, gives me a forum to learn more about underlying computer technologies like TCP/IP and have a blast doing it, and gives me a place to use no-longer-hip-for-Windows hardware. It does all the things I want from it and more. That's succees. Do I care about world domination for Linux? Not really. I don't think it's a realistic goal. Do I think Linux would be the be-all and end-all for everyone? Not in this lifetime. Do I think it's a great server OS and has the capability of being a great desktop OS, and incidentally a thorn in Microsoft's side? You betcha. It does what I want, when I want it to. It succeeds. Your mileage may vary, especially if you think it's going to reduce Bill Gates to begging for quarters.
I have long maintained that Microsoft is 100% irrelevant for any success Linux may have. Linux will succeed on its own terms, and whether it captures 90% or 9% or any number in between of any market, if it does its job and does it well, it has succeeded. Giving Microsoft a good kick in the shins or worse is just a pleasant side benefit.
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I was once told that when Microsoft was first connected to the Internet, the guys in Network Ops watched with amusement as the caches began filling up with hits from porn sites. Fortunately they didn't particularly care, and apparently still don't. I mean c'mon, if they were paying attention they might notice I was posting to Slashdot, and then how would I report in?
Excuse me, there's somebody at my office door.
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There are several different types of addictions. I for one have a serious oxygen jones, but that's neither here nor there.
I agree that there is such a thing as "too much Internet." There was a sound byte this morning on the radio about some kid whose father came home every night, went upstairs, and chatted with his friends online until all hours of the morning. That particular marriage is headed for divorce. That's certainly destructive behavior, but the odds are good that if the Internet didn't exist, people with a tendency toward that kind of addiction would end up being addicted to something else -- gambling, TV, tent revivals, whatever.
There can be a good side to this sort of addiction. I joked earlier about my oxygen addiction. Take my O2 away and I get agitated. I had a friend back in my AOL days who regularly ran up $1000+ AOL bills because of the time she stayed online. I think it was silly, but it apparently gave her something she wasn't getting in real life. Her doctors agreed -- she'd been on a number of antidepressants over the years, none of which did much for her, and her depression went into remission when she was online. This particular addiction, much like mine, was keeping her alive.
Many writers are addicted to writing. Robert Heinlein described a time when he quit writing and felt vaguely sick through the entire three week period. John Campbell sent him a manuscript to revise, Heinlein sat down to the typewriter and the malaise went away. Isaac Asimov wouldn't travel unless he could write (and never on a plane, of course).
The point I'm making is that addictions can serve a physiologically, psychologically or socially useful purpose. Rather than an arbitrary number of hours a day, I would base a determination of whether an addiction was "bad" on what its results and consequences were. If you're on the net 12 hours a day hanging out in #linuxhelp while you're monitoring servers for an ISP, that's one thing. If you steal a credit card so you can pay your ISP bill, that's something quite different.
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Heh . . . OK, I can agree with that. It's important to separate the code from the people writing it. Otherwise half of us would never use anything that called itself GNU (because we don't like RMS), half of us would never use anything called Open Source (because we don't like ESR), but we'd all use Linux because we all like Linus. (grin)
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Actually I'm going to create a Tom Christiansen-free distribution as a reaction. And that's much easier than a GNU-free distribution.
Only by comparison, and I'm afraid there are a lot of people who would never use your distribution. Why? You touched on this yourself -- you would not be able to include a single line of Perl code. Ton's fingerprints are all over core Perl. That also means you wouldn't be able to include any utility written in Perl.
I think Tom is a top-notch coder. I also think he needs serious work on his people skills. The two often go together, sad to say.
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I don't advocate censorship, and I think a public library is an essential part of a community. I do, however, have a problem with the way the web is handled at the moment. Not long ago here in the Seattle area there was a flap about some guy surfing porn sites at a local library in public view of a child waiting to use the computer.
I think a much better solution would be to keep Internet connections available "behind the counter." Better yet, have public cubicles available but filtered, and a second set of private, unfiltered cubicles that can be used by dirty old men, Future Anarchists of America members, teenage girls looking for information on birth control, traveling salesmen checking Hotmail, or people who just don't want someone looking over their shoulder. This is no different from keeping copies of The Joy Of Sex behind the counter.
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