Excuse me but here in Seattle there was NOT "a huge amount of damage done to property"...a few downtown store windows were broken (notably a Starbucks) and the same footage was shown over and over ad nauseam. The police tactics were far, far worse...No disrespect to your Dad - just a fact. There was a definite suspension of civil liberties, bad/illegal treatment of "detainees" and plenty of random assaults in residential neighborhoods.
If you doubt it, call up the Seattle Public Access Network TV sector and ask for a copy of the three public "town hall" hearings that allowed citizens to publically question police and city hall tactics. You'll be suprised; they stopped at three but people were PLENTY MAD - including "ordinary folk", & including some police.
Recently the same Seattle cops SHOT DOWN A MENTALLY ILL BLACK MAN w/o visible provocation WHILE LOCAL NEWS VIDEOTAPED IT. In the series of hearings that followed, it transpired that the same cop did the same thing 12 years ago - he got off then, too. A few tears on the stand and, despite ocular proof the man was nowhere near a gun or the phalanx of cops surrounding him, the perpetrator got off.
A week later he was named "Cop of the Month". So don't represent Seattle's finest as maligned because of huge damage during WTO.
"Sloppy reporting" describes part one of your post better than the "new media"./. carried some admirable WTO accounts...They also pointed people towards on the site, truth-telling bodies such as www.indymedia.org. You ought to order the five-part WTO series they made and wise up.
Even this book is an old topic
on
Selfish Society
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· Score: 1
Hey, dude, discussion about this book ended around the time the author's tour finished. (Ditto the bad reviews)
So we're apolitical and incapable of dealing with politicians? How come the M$-Boies duel was the most hotly-followed, skillfully lawyered, endlessly-discussed case of the last/new century?
Face it, you don't know any of us. You don't know whether we vote, give money, donate time, work at activism, steal secrets, practice santeria, wear forbidden codes on T-shirts or even read your pompous rants all the way to the end.
Hmmmm. Seems like M$ also finally picked a fight with "people more equipped than it". No way should Napster or anyone else imitate M$...they should stick to the fact that (a) they're not selling anything and (b) settle whether sharing something will be considered illegal - or not.
Admire M$ just because the "got away with" something and took "less heat"? No thanks.
A cranky judge doesn't like Napster. We've yet to see what David Boise will do. Fair or not, it's somewhat traditional to ask perceived offenders to desist until their case can be heard. And, of course: 20 MILLION PEOPLE ARE INTERESTED? Well, SOMEONE in the "Establishment" is gonna be looking, if only at those numbers.
Why rabbit on at such length until more happens? This is just pontification for the sake of it.
Yes, everyone who writes books needs an editor. Or another pair of eyes. Or time. Or experience. But: even if you DO have great editors, you can still have crap PR and distribution or a designer can irritate someone "in-house" and screw yr project, etc, etc, etc. I mean from BIG publishing houses...the bigger the house, the more they focus on their biggest names.
Let's face it, Stephen King is hardly yr average technical writer. Nor is the scheme he endorses the only Web alternative. The Web is already a FANTASTIC plus for authors. Especially anyone who writes _because_ they know a good idea is good without "market research".
The more aggressive e-publishers, such as iuniverse.com and Bertelsmann Arvato, are setting up now to absolutely cream offset publishing. Plus, at only $200 for a starting fee (as long as you know enough about digital design and PR), most authors can already benefit. You just have to have the energy. If you still leave it to agents, publishers, editors, etc - well, they deserve your money!
Someone like iuniverse (like all the big-name publishers who just don't say so), uses Lightning Print, Ingram Books' pioneer plant in Tennessee. Lightning has very interesting IBM-provided technology which can print and bind a book in 30 to 60 seconds...changing titles one by one, if that's what's needed.
The books look just as good as anyone else's but they don't incur the costs of shipping and sitting unsold in warehouses. Instead, you can order a book every time someone wants it.
This beats the download-by-parts or pay-as-you-go schemes, plus actual booksellers like it. (Barnes & Noble own 49% of iuniverse and they stock various iuniverse titles on the shelf.) It also means the independent, non-chain, booksellers can now afford to launch imprints of their own.
Currently, the only drawback is: you can only print novels or academic books. Because, with half-tones or anything like that, the technology isn't cost-effective. No-one is doing color plates at all...not YET.
So it's still great for Steven Kings or technical writers. But anyone doing a book on Web graphics or art must wait.
Meanwhile, that agent who takes 10%-15% of the work you did (and the same off yr royalties, as well as delaying your check) is losing his or her valued prestige and power. Your publisher has to re-evaualate how he or she treats authors. And the in-house imprint staff are scrambling to become REALLY literate. For anyone who writes, this is hardly bad news.
There may be companies comprised of "ordinary folks" out there. But Microsoft isn't one of them. Plus, rarely do those ordinary bods "just trying to get through a day" set company policies.
If/. was really part of the mainstream media, or if you'd ever had to deal with interviewing Gates or his personnel, you wouldn't be so blithe. The MS press department may not be some kind of conspiracy. But it certainly tries to exert the maximum of control. Their brand of control goes way beyond that of Rolling Stone or the most notorious Hollywood PR firm like PMK.
They even make sure even your interviewee is fully intimidated. At "private interviews" an MS press person sits alongside whoever interviews, taking down everything said by everyone in shorthand. If you do a radio interview, they stick you in their own sound studio. Then, they record you recording - very solemnly. If it's Gates, he will call sudden, arbitrary halts. Everyone present then has to pause until he speaks again.
Yes, it's hilarious - to any professional press person. But, as MS has evolved, the press has mostly knuckled under. What English-language paper reported the scandal of their Spanish-language thesaurus? (The one that turned out to be filled with strange Ayran synonyms). Who has gone on to monitor their plan to finance "grassroots" letters-to-the-editor throughout the country? (That one was exposed by the LA Times) Who's ripped the lid off FIN...the "Freedom to Innovate Network"?
Certainly not the people you'd expect to be doing it. Microsoft coverage stinks in both Seattle papers. Each religiously fawns over Gates' house, his riches and charity. But even here the story runs a little deeper. Actual journalists know (thanks to the San Jose Mercury News) that the bigger paper's chief "software critic" also wrote Bill's biography. It was the News who finally made that writer admit publically that he spent seven hours taking deletions and changes from Bill.
Yet, as those royalties continue to roll in, he is the one assigned to big critiques of MS products. Nor does his paper publish any kind of disclaimer.
/. writers don't answer to editors and publishers. So please: don't fall into the trap they (and MS) have set for you. It's very easy for the media to go soft on anyone - as long as they keep readers believing "companies are really just folks."
Anyone who's actually reported on Microsoft knows that's a crock. They aren't "just folks" by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, despite the home-y Bill and Ballmer ads on TV, they reserve a special contempt for anyone who buys that line.
And before you decide where there's no "editorial agenda", better try working UNDER actual editors, owners and publishers./. has many pluses, but independence is one of the biggest. You just don't realize how rare that really is in the media.
Actually Woz is _plenty_ rich enough - as he notes - to never work again. Although, if he hadn't been in the plane crash, whether he would have taken the course he has certainly seems debatable.
One crucial difference is that he, unlike so many software celebs, does have an ability to disconnect when he wants to. ALWAYS MORE MONEY is not the only driving force in his life.
Does it really take Woz coming out of retirement to point out - shock - that M$ has been buying favorable press??? I mean, read the Failure piece/s closely and check the credentials. Michael Malone, for instance, runs Forbes. What kind of an accident is it that he wrote the most one-sided rant of an Apple "book" ever? Yet he is giving them "authoritative" quotes on Woz, Jobs and Apple's engineering.
Why? Not because he "grew up with" Woz and Jobs. This is only true geographically. The only actual Apple personnel he interviewed for his book were all aggrieved in some kind of way. His "insights" about Jobs & Woz & most of the central players are guess-work.
Just because Apple looked like it was going down and a book about THAT looked like it would make a LOT of money. Hence his book deal, hence his book. If you haven't read it, it's kind of mind-boggling. Most reliable journalists, of which there are still a few, would be knocked sideways by the singleminded hatred & envy exuded by it. That comes from the editorial voice - the author.
It's entertaining but....this guy runs Forbes? Hmmm. No wonder all that matters to him re M$'s monopoly is whether or not Gates was smart enough to "get out of trouble".
Whereas it matters to Woz that M$ ARE a monopoly capable of getting _him_ censored.
Failure should have emphasized the NYT's attempt to change an independently commissioned Op-Ed piece. Most people reading this - unless they work at a paper - have little idea HOW rigged all Op-Ed pages are. And let's not even talk about their software reviews!!!
Hear hear. There's more diversity in programming than in plenty of other fields: say, high school teaching ("source" of ideas like these) or newspaper journalism (where these reports get written and published!)
Don't recall meeting too many women high-up in either....although it's true every company wants a killer babe in marketing
Amen to this. The real problems happen once a female attempts to have any leverage in a company...from my gf's experience at corps and startups it varies not by the size of the place. (Yep, the grrrls DO get sent off to "Web design!!!)
But don't blame it all on the "money guys"...at all those places she's been they used to be "the programmers"
Yep, it's a really good deal for these developers and those stockholders and blah and blah. Except what has the "network" actually done for the "American people"?
Number One, forever corrupted use of the term "innovate" or "innovation".
Number Two, created a huge number of companies run by ex-Microsofties. I just left one because, frankly, the management was (without their monopoly) totally clueless about (a) basic business, (b) truly innovative technology (c) people (d) any kind of actual creativity.
What's sad but also scary about the Redmond factor is that its loyal troops are subliminally programmed to trust only other rich guys - and to trust only other people who worked at M$. They seem like it's not that way, but in any situation where decision-making is called-for, you'll find even the 3rd-rater M$-ex ranks higher than anyone from elsewhere.
It's truly sad, unwittingly hilarious - and pervasive all around the Puget Sound.
Of course, in many companies around Redmond and Seattle, this leads inexorably to diminishing returns.
"Innovation"? The loyalists I worked with couldn't even spell it. When their company began falling apart, too, all the ex-M$ programmers headed back to - a quote - "the ready arms of Uncle Bill".
PS People at several national news orgs have for months refered gleefully to the FIN as "Microsoft Pravda".
Hey: hold your horses!!! There _are_ ethical journos out here and half the work they do is sparing the public those endless "and...uh" or "as I said last time, uh...yeah" and so on...whilst preserving the voice they heard, the views someone is striving to articulate and the sense that the reader/viewer is meeting the same person that they did.
Nothing pisses good reporters off more than the idea that it's either one or the other: either an interview one presents has to be bumbling and full off repetitive noises to be "authentic" OR it's ipso facto a prettified - to use Roblimo's term - re-written press release (or similar corporate diktat).
Good journalists are not so numerous - they never have been. The Net has made their arduous task a lot tougher simply because - not to do a Lars on ya, but it's true !!! - the proliferation of news, magazine, "entertainment" and "media" sites has led to a near-desperation scramble for "content". This, in turn, has spawned a plague of virtual plagiarism. (Not to mention miles of boilerplate bad writing and "reporting").
Any reputable scribe (plenty of them write for the Web) will tell you this. Doing good journalistic work has never been easy and it doesn't help to have a cranky/. staffer, of all people, implying such work is worthless.
Commendations to/. for persevering in getting Lars to answer their ?s. That, too, ain't quite so easy.
Slashdot Mirror
Capitalism does indeed have a lot of "less than attractive traits"...they are normally known as capitalists.
No, they have to be standing in their apartment vestibule, reaching for I-D in their wallet. Then they get shot...41 times.
If more people DID look at what there is of a rceord for Bush in Texas, more would be voting for Gore. Not Daddy's son or the Execution King.
It's clear you've never worked in television, especially local news.
Excuse me but here in Seattle there was NOT "a huge amount of damage done to property"...a few downtown store windows were broken (notably a Starbucks) and the same footage was shown over and over ad nauseam. The police tactics were far, far worse...No disrespect to your Dad - just a fact. There was a definite suspension of civil liberties, bad/illegal treatment of "detainees" and plenty of random assaults in residential neighborhoods.
/. carried some admirable WTO accounts...They also pointed people towards on the site, truth-telling bodies such as www.indymedia.org. You ought to order the five-part WTO series they made and wise up.
If you doubt it, call up the Seattle Public Access Network TV sector and ask for a copy of the three public "town hall" hearings that allowed citizens to publically question police and city hall tactics. You'll be suprised; they stopped at three but people were PLENTY MAD - including "ordinary folk", & including some police.
Recently the same Seattle cops SHOT DOWN A MENTALLY ILL BLACK MAN w/o visible provocation WHILE LOCAL NEWS VIDEOTAPED IT. In the series of hearings that followed, it transpired that the same cop did the same thing 12 years ago - he got off then, too. A few tears on the stand and, despite ocular proof the man was nowhere near a gun or the phalanx of cops surrounding him, the perpetrator got off.
A week later he was named "Cop of the Month". So don't represent Seattle's finest as maligned because of huge damage during WTO.
"Sloppy reporting" describes part one of your post better than the "new media".
Six figures?????? New Line wuz had!
Hey, dude, discussion about this book ended around the time the author's tour finished. (Ditto the bad reviews)
So we're apolitical and incapable of dealing with politicians? How come the M$-Boies duel was the most hotly-followed, skillfully lawyered, endlessly-discussed case of the last/new century?
Face it, you don't know any of us. You don't know whether we vote, give money, donate time, work at activism, steal secrets, practice santeria, wear forbidden codes on T-shirts or even read your pompous rants all the way to the end.
Hmmmm. Seems like M$ also finally picked a fight with "people more equipped than it". No way should Napster or anyone else imitate M$...they should stick to the fact that (a) they're not selling anything and (b) settle whether sharing something will be considered illegal - or not.
Admire M$ just because the "got away with" something and took "less heat"? No thanks.
If the pizza was shared, the Mafia wouldn't have been so interested.
M$ would certainly sell anything for a buck. Everyone I know with a hotmail acount gets three times the spam I w/o one.
A cranky judge doesn't like Napster. We've yet to see what David Boise will do. Fair or not, it's somewhat traditional to ask perceived offenders to desist until their case can be heard. And, of course: 20 MILLION PEOPLE ARE INTERESTED? Well, SOMEONE in the "Establishment" is gonna be looking, if only at those numbers.
Why rabbit on at such length until more happens? This is just pontification for the sake of it.
Ah well one person's Jefferson is another person's Tesla. Seems to me /. folk get shirty about too many "what about tesla" inclusions too.
However I would vote for Katz Getting To The Point myself,
Yes, everyone who writes books needs an editor. Or another pair of eyes. Or time. Or experience. But: even if you DO have great editors, you can still have crap PR and distribution or a designer can irritate someone "in-house" and screw yr project, etc, etc, etc. I mean from BIG publishing houses...the bigger the house, the more they focus on their biggest names.
Let's face it, Stephen King is hardly yr average technical writer. Nor is the scheme he endorses the only Web alternative. The Web is already a FANTASTIC plus for authors. Especially anyone who writes _because_ they know a good idea is good without "market research".
The more aggressive e-publishers, such as iuniverse.com and Bertelsmann Arvato, are setting up now to absolutely cream offset publishing. Plus, at only $200 for a starting fee (as long as you know enough about digital design and PR), most authors can already benefit. You just have to have the energy. If you still leave it to agents, publishers, editors, etc - well, they deserve your money!
Someone like iuniverse (like all the big-name publishers who just don't say so), uses Lightning Print, Ingram Books' pioneer plant in Tennessee. Lightning has very interesting IBM-provided technology which can print and bind a book in 30 to 60 seconds...changing titles one by one, if that's what's needed.
The books look just as good as anyone else's but they don't incur the costs of shipping and sitting unsold in warehouses. Instead, you can order a book every time someone wants it.
This beats the download-by-parts or pay-as-you-go schemes, plus actual booksellers like it. (Barnes & Noble own 49% of iuniverse and they stock various iuniverse titles on the shelf.) It also means the independent, non-chain, booksellers can now afford to launch imprints of their own.
Currently, the only drawback is: you can only print novels or academic books. Because, with half-tones or anything like that, the technology isn't cost-effective. No-one is doing color plates at all...not YET.
So it's still great for Steven Kings or technical writers. But anyone doing a book on Web graphics or art must wait.
Meanwhile, that agent who takes 10%-15% of the work you did (and the same off yr royalties, as well as delaying your check) is losing his or her valued prestige and power. Your publisher has to re-evaualate how he or she treats authors. And the in-house imprint staff are scrambling to become REALLY literate. For anyone who writes, this is hardly bad news.
There may be companies comprised of "ordinary folks" out there. But Microsoft isn't one of them. Plus, rarely do those ordinary bods "just trying to get through a day" set company policies.
/. was really part of the mainstream media, or if you'd ever had to deal with interviewing Gates or his personnel, you wouldn't be so blithe. The MS press department may not be some kind of conspiracy. But it certainly tries to exert the maximum of control. Their brand of control goes way beyond that of Rolling Stone or the most notorious Hollywood PR firm like PMK.
/. has many pluses, but independence is one of the biggest. You just don't realize how rare that really is in the media.
If
They even make sure even your interviewee is fully intimidated. At "private interviews" an MS press person sits alongside whoever interviews, taking down everything said by everyone in shorthand. If you do a radio interview, they stick you in their own sound studio. Then, they record you recording - very solemnly. If it's Gates, he will call sudden, arbitrary halts. Everyone present then has to pause until he speaks again.
Yes, it's hilarious - to any professional press person. But, as MS has evolved, the press has mostly knuckled under. What English-language paper reported the scandal of their Spanish-language thesaurus? (The one that turned out to be filled with strange Ayran synonyms). Who has gone on to monitor their plan to finance "grassroots" letters-to-the-editor throughout the country? (That one was exposed by the LA Times) Who's ripped the lid off FIN...the "Freedom to Innovate Network"?
Certainly not the people you'd expect to be doing it. Microsoft coverage stinks in both Seattle papers. Each religiously fawns over Gates' house, his riches and charity. But even here the story runs a little deeper. Actual journalists know (thanks to the San Jose Mercury News) that the bigger paper's chief "software critic" also wrote Bill's biography. It was the News who finally made that writer admit publically that he spent seven hours taking deletions and changes from Bill.
Yet, as those royalties continue to roll in, he is the one assigned to big critiques of MS products. Nor does his paper publish any kind of disclaimer.
/. writers don't answer to editors and publishers. So please: don't fall into the trap they (and MS) have set for you. It's very easy for the media to go soft on anyone - as long as they keep readers believing "companies are really just folks."
Anyone who's actually reported on Microsoft knows that's a crock. They aren't "just folks" by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, despite the home-y Bill and Ballmer ads on TV, they reserve a special contempt for anyone who buys that line.
And before you decide where there's no "editorial agenda", better try working UNDER actual editors, owners and publishers.
"Women's brains are smaller than men's and...". You can _bet_ he doesn't have a PhD in semi-conductor physics!!!
Actually Woz is _plenty_ rich enough - as he notes - to never work again. Although, if he hadn't been in the plane crash, whether he would have taken the course he has certainly seems debatable.
One crucial difference is that he, unlike so many software celebs, does have an ability to disconnect when he wants to. ALWAYS MORE MONEY is not the only driving force in his life.
Hey, didn't you catch the part about *Microsoft's* pals getting Woz's opinion censored? After it was asked for?
Does it really take Woz coming out of retirement to point out - shock - that M$ has been buying favorable press??? I mean, read the Failure piece/s closely and check the credentials. Michael Malone, for instance, runs Forbes. What kind of an accident is it that he wrote the most one-sided rant of an Apple "book" ever? Yet he is giving them "authoritative" quotes on Woz, Jobs and Apple's engineering.
Why? Not because he "grew up with" Woz and Jobs. This is only true geographically. The only actual Apple personnel he interviewed for his book were all aggrieved in some kind of way. His "insights" about Jobs & Woz & most of the central players are guess-work.
Just because Apple looked like it was going down and a book about THAT looked like it would make a LOT of money. Hence his book deal, hence his book. If you haven't read it, it's kind of mind-boggling. Most reliable journalists, of which there are still a few, would be knocked sideways by the singleminded hatred & envy exuded by it. That comes from the editorial voice - the author.
It's entertaining but....this guy runs Forbes? Hmmm. No wonder all that matters to him re M$'s monopoly is whether or not Gates was smart enough to "get out of trouble".
Whereas it matters to Woz that M$ ARE a monopoly capable of getting _him_ censored.
Failure should have emphasized the NYT's attempt to change an independently commissioned Op-Ed piece. Most people reading this - unless they work at a paper - have little idea HOW rigged all Op-Ed pages are. And let's not even talk about their software reviews!!!
Hear hear. There's more diversity in programming than in plenty of other fields: say, high school teaching ("source" of ideas like these) or newspaper journalism (where these reports get written and published!)
Don't recall meeting too many women high-up in either....although it's true every company wants a killer babe in marketing
Amen to this. The real problems happen once a female attempts to have any leverage in a company...from my gf's experience at corps and startups it varies not by the size of the place. (Yep, the grrrls DO get sent off to "Web design!!!)
But don't blame it all on the "money guys"...at all those places she's been they used to be "the programmers"
Seems to be that the problem is...a GUY thing.
Yep, it's a really good deal for these developers and those stockholders and blah and blah. Except what has the "network" actually done for the "American people"?
Number One, forever corrupted use of the term "innovate" or "innovation".
Number Two, created a huge number of companies run by ex-Microsofties. I just left one because, frankly, the management was (without their monopoly) totally clueless about (a) basic business, (b) truly innovative technology (c) people (d) any kind of actual creativity.
What's sad but also scary about the Redmond factor is that its loyal troops are subliminally programmed to trust only other rich guys - and to trust only other people who worked at M$. They seem like it's not that way, but in any situation where decision-making is called-for, you'll find even the 3rd-rater M$-ex ranks higher than anyone from elsewhere.
It's truly sad, unwittingly hilarious - and pervasive all around the Puget Sound.
Of course, in many companies around Redmond and Seattle, this leads inexorably to diminishing returns.
"Innovation"? The loyalists I worked with couldn't even spell it. When their company began falling apart, too, all the ex-M$ programmers headed back to - a quote - "the ready arms of Uncle Bill".
PS People at several national news orgs have for months refered gleefully to the FIN as "Microsoft Pravda".
Yep. Hold the presses!!!
You like Microsoft and you love freedom? Did you actually follow this case AT ALL?
PS M$ HAS performed criminal acts; that's the whole point.....or are you just part of the Microsoft "grassroots" letter-writing strategy
well said, sir!
Nothing pisses good reporters off more than the idea that it's either one or the other: either an interview one presents has to be bumbling and full off repetitive noises to be "authentic" OR it's ipso facto a prettified - to use Roblimo's term - re-written press release (or similar corporate diktat).
Good journalists are not so numerous - they never have been. The Net has made their arduous task a lot tougher simply because - not to do a Lars on ya, but it's true !!! - the proliferation of news, magazine, "entertainment" and "media" sites has led to a near-desperation scramble for "content". This, in turn, has spawned a plague of virtual plagiarism. (Not to mention miles of boilerplate bad writing and "reporting").
Any reputable scribe (plenty of them write for the Web) will tell you this. Doing good journalistic work has never been easy and it doesn't help to have a cranky /. staffer, of all people, implying such work is worthless.
Commendations to /. for persevering in getting Lars to answer their ?s. That, too, ain't quite so easy.