...and my jaw literally dropped when I realized it was more AOL buying TW than the other way around. That was when I realized the dot-com boom was very, very real and that things were not the way they were. Time Warner is beyond huge, so to have AOL swoop them up was incredible. I had older relatives who had been in the media business, mostly on the news side, and they were stunned too for they knew how big TW was but had little idea of this new AOL "thing."
Of course it turned out all to be a stock thing. AOL stock, at the time, was high-flying, and TW stock was looked down upon as this underperforming, boring old line stock. AOL would give TW a facelift for the 21st-century, and both sides would benefit from that 90s buzzword "synergy."
Ha! From trying to force TW staffers to switch internal mail systems to the laughable AOL mail system, to conflicts on the board level, to a failure to find true value out of the synergy, and then the stock market collapse, followed by the fleeing of subscribers from AOL, it was not to be. Now AOL/Time-Warner is back to being Time-Warner, the old line guys are getting revenge on the dot-com upstarts, and the whole thing seems like a bad idea gone wrong from the start.
I meant amoral, as in without morals. That is, they make their marketing decisions without taking into consideration various moral factors, merely financial ones.
You know what? You're right. My statement was too dogmatic. There are mentions of companies that can be done in a non-offensive way, and then there is the offensive way. My anger is against pop-up ads in particular.
But thanks for pointing out the hypocrisy of my statement. It's a valid point.
Well, I guess if you disagree with my POV you can think I was flaming, but I wasn't. I happen to think very strongly about this issue (see the About page on my web site), so I wrote in very strong terms.
A coward will try to make my argument disappear. A man will express his opposing view to my face.
Is there any other industry that tries to force itself upon a public that is explicity making it clear it wants no part of it? This is not a case of putting an ad in front of an audience composed of people who may or may not look favorably upon that ad, and who may or may not want the product. Instead they are trying to put an ad in front of the eyes of someone who has said, "I don't want to see this ad, I hate this form of advertising, and I look down on any company that employs this form of advertising, and I refuse to use their products."
Yet they do it anyway! Remarkably obtuse people. Of course, I know the reason for it. It's all about eyeballs and the more they can prove they are shoving their stuff in front of more eyeballs, the more money they get. That's why this is so amoral: They don't care how anyone reacts, or that that are despised, or that it causes business problems for the advertisers. They just want mo' money, and that's the end of their thought process.
Buh bye, new technology. It won't work. I will defeat it. I will refuse to view ads on the Web. Don't yammer at me with the tired old whine, "But how else are I gonna pay for my web siiiiiiite?" I dunno, Sparky, figure something else out. I will never allow advertising on my web site. It doesn't belong on the Web.
The Web is about people to people communiciation. Just because a bunch of greedheads decided to use it to make money doesn't subvert the purpose of the Web. As for the endless war against pop-ups: They lose. Every time.
Huh? What FUD? For the better part of a year she has noticed Sun making statements and going in directions that are anti-GPL and anti-FOSS. Now she found some new and recent quotes that continue that theme, and uses the example of one of their products to illustrate what she means.
This is not hypocrisy, for it has nothing to do with not liking a company and therefore not liking their product. She is worried about what direction Sun may go, is gathering evidence of this concern, sharing it with the community, getting slammed every time she dares criticize holy Sun, but keeps doing it since anything that threatens the GPL is worth paying attention to. I'm sorry people seem so put out any time Sun comes up, but isn't that the flip side of your complaint? Praising a product based on how you feel about a company?
As far as I'm concerned, Sun bears watching. Any company that will sign a cooperation deal with Microsoft has either sold out or doesn't know Microsoft history. Sun certainly knows Microsoft history, so my guess is that Sun is at a desperate state and is grasping around for a lifeline. They picked the wrong one.
"PJ does really seem to hate Sun though. I'm not sure why."
Yeah, I'm seeing lots of comments about the/. submission about what PJ wrote, and very little about what PJ actually said. If you have read Groklaw for a while, you'll know that she distrusts Sun because of some very anti-FOSS statements that spokespersons there have made in the last year. Since she is in favor of FOSS, this worries her. But since Sun makes lots of schizo statements back and forth on the subject, sometimes they sound friendly to FOSS. That makes/. readers think Sun is cool, not to mention they make neat hardware.
But if they are going to turn against FOSS, it's better to know sooner rather than later. That's what PJ is warning about, and answering/.-type critics who keep telling her to shut up about Sun. But she won't, and time may even prove her correct. We'll see. But it isn't about hatred, it's about warning people of a potential threat to FOSS. Since their recent deal with Microsoft, a lot more warning bells should be going off around here.
Hey, that's this crowd. When I was a teen, I collected brochures of HP and TI calculators whose prices were too high for me to readily buy. So I would leaf through the brochures and imagine how cool it would be to have one of them.
Then personal computers came out and my technolust transfered to other inamimate objects, but there is something about hearing of the release of a new HP calculator that makes my heart jump. That's why it's on/. Now enough explanation; time to go drool over hardware...
That's like saying "I guarantee there is no danger of flooding here. But I would be happy to sell you flood insurance."
No, the correct analogy would be more like this:
"I guarantee there is no natural danger of flooding here, but there are rustlers out there going around causing floods and if you want to protect yourself, try this."
OK, for all those who won't bother reading the story, keep these points in mind:
1. This is voluntary insurance. Don't want it? Don't get it.
2. This isn't targeted at users, who are not at risk in any case, so 95% of us can move on, nothing to see here.
3. This has nothing to do with the risks of Linux, for there is nothing wrong with Linux. Instead, it's about the fact that, as SCO showed, there are bad people who want to make trouble for FOSS and will use nuisance suits in order to do that. Sad but true, but let's at least look at the world realistically. We now have another tool to fight these losers.
4. If you are a kernel developer, or a big-pocketed Linux corporate user, and you think you could become a target of one of these nuisance suits, you now have a chance to get insurance against such. Voluntary. Don't want it? Don't get it.
5. Does this make you sad? Blame the bad people who want to cause trouble for FOSS, not the people who are stepping up to try to help.
This latest addition to Groklaw's site contents reduces its credibility as an objective information consolidator regarding Linux and FOSS legal issues. Why on earth is its owner turning it into a Linux fansite?
Did you actually read the articles? The point is that this won't be on Groklaw, but on a new site. It is a separate project designed to further the growth of FOSS. Ain't nothing wrong with that, and it won't affect Groklaw since it will be the community that does this project. PJ merely proposed it. She won't be the one doing it. She'll just be one of thousands of people who offer input.
Reading the article, PJ is talking about helping the Grandma types who want to switch to Linux. With all the publicity about Microsoft worms and virii, even the computer newbies are beginning to wonder if there is a way to use computers without the headaches of Windows. And as Linux distros get increasingly user-friendly, it enables even the total newbie to point-and-click their way to a Linux install. And that's where a need exists.
The easy, cool, experienced thing to say in response is "RTFM" or "read the man pages and leave me alone." That works for the experienced switcher, or those who have some experience with computers. Most grandma-types (and I'm using that as a stereotype, so all you computer-whiz grandmas need not send me mail, k?) are not going to know how to even find the FM, let alone be able to RTFM. "Man pages? What's that, honey? I'm a female. Aren't there pages for me?"
One of the good things about Microsoft is they spend the money to do usability studies so that grandma types can figure out how to send email. This grokdoc project is going to apply the many eyes principles of the community to replicate the usability principles that Microsoft can just throw money at. We can't throw money at this, but we can throw eyeballs. (go ahead, make your joke, I'll wait.)
This is a new site, not on Groklaw itself, and it is a community project, not just PJ. So don't worry, Groklaw is not going anywhere, and PJ will still have time to tear into those legal papers. And yes, we know, there are other Linux doc projects, and those are wonderful, but they are not yet grandma-friendly enough, and so now the community will attempt to add to the existing docs something new, targeted at a new audience. An audience we actually do want to see using Linux if we are ever to see widespread adoption of the software. Remember, the/. crowd is atypical. The vast majority of computer users lack of knowledge of the machines would make our hair stand on end if we focused too much on their ignorance. So we can either crack jokes about them, or we can pause a moment and give them a helping hand. The grokdoc project is an attempt to give a helping hand to a new type of Linux user.
Read the article: They don't really deny it
on
A New Ice Age?
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· Score: 1
You know, after reading the/. comments first, I thought the article would totally trash the movie and DOD report's premise. Yet when I finally did read the article, I was surprised to see that the scientists didn't really trash the premise at all, merely the timing and severity being suggested. From the article:
"The DoD's doomsday scenario, which is very similar to that in the film, was drawn up by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of the San Francisco-based Global Business Network. Neither is a climate scientist.
The scenario suggests that as global warming melts Arctic ice packs, the North Atlantic will become less salty. This would shut down a global ocean circulation system that is driven by dense, salty water falling to the bottom of the north Atlantic and that ultimately produces the Gulf Stream.
This much is respectable scientific theory, and some researchers believe it could happen for real in 100 years or so. But the film-makers and DoD authors go further."
The article goes on quote scientists who say 'yeah, this could happen, but not so quickly' or 'yeah, this could happen, but not as severly.' So let's not jump to the conclusion that the movie is just making stuff up. Nobody really knows, and even the expert climate scientists are suggesting that this sort of thing may actually happen, but perhaps not for 100 years, and maybe not at all if actions are taken now. But it's not nonsense, and it is a potential threat, at least at some point in the future.
Nice goal. It would be great to have computers responding intuitively to my wants, but this is easier said than done. Sounds to me as if the ultimate goal is Star Trek. You know the scenes: Landing party checks out an abandoned alien ship. Some crisis occurs requiring them to access the alien computer. Captain tells Spock (or Data, or O'Brien/Dax, or Seven, or T'Pol depending on which Trek you want to use as an example) to access the alien's computer. Said person punches a few buttons (or touch screens) and voila! Access.
It's almost as easy in the Trek universe as starting up an alien ship's engines, or navigating it through an asteroid belt. One thing you gotta say about those aliens: They followed the CMI 'Pervasive Computing' initiative slavishly, and we can be so thankful they did or Spock (or Data, or O'Brien/Dax, or Seven, or T'Pol) would have looked like incompetent idiots.
Oh well, given how badly the SCO case has been going for them, and how confident IBM seems, and how many cases are looming against SCO, and how none of the evidence seems to point in SCO's favor, this is an empty threat in the long term. In the short term, however, as SCO goes through its death throes, I suppose it's possible some Aussie contractor gets hit with legal claims. If that happens, ask your lawyer for advice before you do anything (good advice any time you get embroiled in legal affairs), but don't worry. Chances are very good you won't have to pay a dime, but play things the smart way by making sure you don't do anything foolish.
And soon this will all blow over as SCO is turned into a caldera by IBM.
Exactly! You make my point perfectly. It is precisely because it was an elliptical construction that I could pick on the inherent ambiguity of the sentence. Yes, you and I could infer the meaning, but anytime you rely on reader inference you introduce potential ambiguity. Thanks.
Sorry, anonymous dude, but you're wrong. It was written in an ambiguous way, a way that although the actual meaning could be figured out, if read literally would give a nonsensical meaning. But hey, you don't care. You're just trolling and will deny anything anyone says just to troll. Be gone, little troll.
ROFL! Just read the original post to understand the grammatical ambiguity of the statement that I was making fun of. Then maybe you won't be so quick to insult people the next time you misunderstand something. I was two steps ahead of you, but I guess I'll have to speak more slowly next time.
"BuyMusic.com initially expected to sell one million songs per day or 200 to 300 in the first year according to estimates by founder and CEO Scott Blum"
Well there's your problem right there. Let's see, either one million songs per day -OR- 200 to 300 in the first year. Yessir, typically fuzzy CEO math led to the downfall, I'd say. On the other hand, while that first target was quite high, the second target was easy to exceed. Why I bet I could sell 200 to 300 songs in a year by standing on the street corner.
Hmm...let me see....here's a FUD point....there's a FUD point...now where is the DRM section? What? No bullet points for Microsoft's plans for DRM for all of its products in the future? Oh well, that's one massive advantage for not locking into MS Office.
Hmm...funny, when I check that box, Microsoft loses every time!
I am not old enough to remember the 50s, but I can remember catching all the familiar 60s sitcoms and that was the time when they were making the transition to color. Early Gilligan's Island episodes and I Dream of Jeannie episodes were in B&W, as you can verify on Nick at Nite. Yup, it sure was different seeing Jeannie's costume in black & white. And I had no idea Gilligan wore a red shirt in the early episodes.
Anyway, like all new technology, first they trumpt the technology itself. I remember NBC shows beginning with the colorful peacock logo and the voiceover saying, "The following program is brought to you in living color," a sentiment that today makes you think, "Duh!" but back then meant something new about the tech. That's the typical arc for technology. First they talk about the tech, and then the tech just melts into the background and nobody thinks about how it happens, they just enjoy that it happens.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course it turned out all to be a stock thing. AOL stock, at the time, was high-flying, and TW stock was looked down upon as this underperforming, boring old line stock. AOL would give TW a facelift for the 21st-century, and both sides would benefit from that 90s buzzword "synergy."
Ha! From trying to force TW staffers to switch internal mail systems to the laughable AOL mail system, to conflicts on the board level, to a failure to find true value out of the synergy, and then the stock market collapse, followed by the fleeing of subscribers from AOL, it was not to be. Now AOL/Time-Warner is back to being Time-Warner, the old line guys are getting revenge on the dot-com upstarts, and the whole thing seems like a bad idea gone wrong from the start.
Which it was.
I meant amoral, as in without morals. That is, they make their marketing decisions without taking into consideration various moral factors, merely financial ones.
How's this? :)
But thanks for pointing out the hypocrisy of my statement. It's a valid point.
A coward will try to make my argument disappear. A man will express his opposing view to my face.
Yet they do it anyway! Remarkably obtuse people. Of course, I know the reason for it. It's all about eyeballs and the more they can prove they are shoving their stuff in front of more eyeballs, the more money they get. That's why this is so amoral: They don't care how anyone reacts, or that that are despised, or that it causes business problems for the advertisers. They just want mo' money, and that's the end of their thought process.
Buh bye, new technology. It won't work. I will defeat it. I will refuse to view ads on the Web. Don't yammer at me with the tired old whine, "But how else are I gonna pay for my web siiiiiiite?" I dunno, Sparky, figure something else out. I will never allow advertising on my web site. It doesn't belong on the Web.
The Web is about people to people communiciation. Just because a bunch of greedheads decided to use it to make money doesn't subvert the purpose of the Web. As for the endless war against pop-ups: They lose. Every time.
This is not hypocrisy, for it has nothing to do with not liking a company and therefore not liking their product. She is worried about what direction Sun may go, is gathering evidence of this concern, sharing it with the community, getting slammed every time she dares criticize holy Sun, but keeps doing it since anything that threatens the GPL is worth paying attention to. I'm sorry people seem so put out any time Sun comes up, but isn't that the flip side of your complaint? Praising a product based on how you feel about a company?
As far as I'm concerned, Sun bears watching. Any company that will sign a cooperation deal with Microsoft has either sold out or doesn't know Microsoft history. Sun certainly knows Microsoft history, so my guess is that Sun is at a desperate state and is grasping around for a lifeline. They picked the wrong one.
Yeah, I'm seeing lots of comments about the /. submission about what PJ wrote, and very little about what PJ actually said. If you have read Groklaw for a while, you'll know that she distrusts Sun because of some very anti-FOSS statements that spokespersons there have made in the last year. Since she is in favor of FOSS, this worries her. But since Sun makes lots of schizo statements back and forth on the subject, sometimes they sound friendly to FOSS. That makes /. readers think Sun is cool, not to mention they make neat hardware.
But if they are going to turn against FOSS, it's better to know sooner rather than later. That's what PJ is warning about, and answering /.-type critics who keep telling her to shut up about Sun. But she won't, and time may even prove her correct. We'll see. But it isn't about hatred, it's about warning people of a potential threat to FOSS. Since their recent deal with Microsoft, a lot more warning bells should be going off around here.
Then personal computers came out and my technolust transfered to other inamimate objects, but there is something about hearing of the release of a new HP calculator that makes my heart jump. That's why it's on /. Now enough explanation; time to go drool over hardware...
That's what OSRM is doing, and they hired her to do some research for them. Big difference.
No, the correct analogy would be more like this:
"I guarantee there is no natural danger of flooding here, but there are rustlers out there going around causing floods and if you want to protect yourself, try this."
1. This is voluntary insurance. Don't want it? Don't get it.
2. This isn't targeted at users, who are not at risk in any case, so 95% of us can move on, nothing to see here.
3. This has nothing to do with the risks of Linux, for there is nothing wrong with Linux. Instead, it's about the fact that, as SCO showed, there are bad people who want to make trouble for FOSS and will use nuisance suits in order to do that. Sad but true, but let's at least look at the world realistically. We now have another tool to fight these losers.
4. If you are a kernel developer, or a big-pocketed Linux corporate user, and you think you could become a target of one of these nuisance suits, you now have a chance to get insurance against such. Voluntary. Don't want it? Don't get it.
5. Does this make you sad? Blame the bad people who want to cause trouble for FOSS, not the people who are stepping up to try to help.
Did you actually read the articles? The point is that this won't be on Groklaw, but on a new site. It is a separate project designed to further the growth of FOSS. Ain't nothing wrong with that, and it won't affect Groklaw since it will be the community that does this project. PJ merely proposed it. She won't be the one doing it. She'll just be one of thousands of people who offer input.
The easy, cool, experienced thing to say in response is "RTFM" or "read the man pages and leave me alone." That works for the experienced switcher, or those who have some experience with computers. Most grandma-types (and I'm using that as a stereotype, so all you computer-whiz grandmas need not send me mail, k?) are not going to know how to even find the FM, let alone be able to RTFM. "Man pages? What's that, honey? I'm a female. Aren't there pages for me?"
One of the good things about Microsoft is they spend the money to do usability studies so that grandma types can figure out how to send email. This grokdoc project is going to apply the many eyes principles of the community to replicate the usability principles that Microsoft can just throw money at. We can't throw money at this, but we can throw eyeballs. (go ahead, make your joke, I'll wait.)
This is a new site, not on Groklaw itself, and it is a community project, not just PJ. So don't worry, Groklaw is not going anywhere, and PJ will still have time to tear into those legal papers. And yes, we know, there are other Linux doc projects, and those are wonderful, but they are not yet grandma-friendly enough, and so now the community will attempt to add to the existing docs something new, targeted at a new audience. An audience we actually do want to see using Linux if we are ever to see widespread adoption of the software. Remember, the /. crowd is atypical. The vast majority of computer users lack of knowledge of the machines would make our hair stand on end if we focused too much on their ignorance. So we can either crack jokes about them, or we can pause a moment and give them a helping hand. The grokdoc project is an attempt to give a helping hand to a new type of Linux user.
"The DoD's doomsday scenario, which is very similar to that in the film, was drawn up by Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall of the San Francisco-based Global Business Network. Neither is a climate scientist.
The scenario suggests that as global warming melts Arctic ice packs, the North Atlantic will become less salty. This would shut down a global ocean circulation system that is driven by dense, salty water falling to the bottom of the north Atlantic and that ultimately produces the Gulf Stream.
This much is respectable scientific theory, and some researchers believe it could happen for real in 100 years or so. But the film-makers and DoD authors go further."
The article goes on quote scientists who say 'yeah, this could happen, but not so quickly' or 'yeah, this could happen, but not as severly.' So let's not jump to the conclusion that the movie is just making stuff up. Nobody really knows, and even the expert climate scientists are suggesting that this sort of thing may actually happen, but perhaps not for 100 years, and maybe not at all if actions are taken now. But it's not nonsense, and it is a potential threat, at least at some point in the future.
It's almost as easy in the Trek universe as starting up an alien ship's engines, or navigating it through an asteroid belt. One thing you gotta say about those aliens: They followed the CMI 'Pervasive Computing' initiative slavishly, and we can be so thankful they did or Spock (or Data, or O'Brien/Dax, or Seven, or T'Pol) would have looked like incompetent idiots.
And soon this will all blow over as SCO is turned into a caldera by IBM.
Can I be on that test team? Just goes to show, there's QA testing and then there's QA testing. "Debug code? Bah! I wanna drop things!"
What part of New York City are you not from?
Exactly! You make my point perfectly. It is precisely because it was an elliptical construction that I could pick on the inherent ambiguity of the sentence. Yes, you and I could infer the meaning, but anytime you rely on reader inference you introduce potential ambiguity. Thanks.
Well there's your problem right there. Let's see, either one million songs per day -OR- 200 to 300 in the first year. Yessir, typically fuzzy CEO math led to the downfall, I'd say. On the other hand, while that first target was quite high, the second target was easy to exceed. Why I bet I could sell 200 to 300 songs in a year by standing on the street corner.
Hmm...funny, when I check that box, Microsoft loses every time!
Anyway, like all new technology, first they trumpt the technology itself. I remember NBC shows beginning with the colorful peacock logo and the voiceover saying, "The following program is brought to you in living color," a sentiment that today makes you think, "Duh!" but back then meant something new about the tech. That's the typical arc for technology. First they talk about the tech, and then the tech just melts into the background and nobody thinks about how it happens, they just enjoy that it happens.