As noted elsewhere in this thread, Darwin is BSD running on the Mach microkernel. Apple did at least a modicum of work that they're releasing; whether anyone else is going to have a reason to use it is another question.
That's part of the reason why less than half of all silent films are still in existance. (Studios also had no idea that one day video would exist and make their film libraries profitable again, so they didn't want to pay the money necessary to store nitrate film properly. There are stories about studios using silent films as fuel when they needed bonfires for movies they were filming in the '30s...)
There's a whole host of silent films that I'd love to see that just don't exist anymore; virtually all of Theda Bara's work is lost, for instance, and she was a huge star (as well as a cutie). Silent film is certainly one of the more spectacular media deaths of the 20th century, given how amazingly popular it was...
Ignoring the fact that the RIAA assumes that copying music "hurts the bands I love" more than the viciously-weighted contracts major labels give some of those self-same bands, I'm puzzled by an element of this. The courts have found that we have the right to tape television shows off the air, right? "Time-shifting"?
How, then, do they presume to say that making an MP3 off a legally-purchased CD for use, say, at work, is different? Has this law ever been tested in Federal court? It can't be so simple as an analog-vs-digital distinction, can it?
(And I just love this little gem: "record companies don't recoup their investments, and that makes it more difficult for them to invest in new artists and new music." God bless the fabulous innovation brought to us by the likes of Universal.)
More than that, there are labels that manage to put out multiple albums every year, pay the artists higher royalties, and still make a buck. Touch & Go's royalty rate is around 50%; I believe that of DeSoto and Dischord sits at around 40%. The entire feast-famine business model of the major labels is essentially flawed; a band on an independent label--or making professional-quality music themselves, a la the Poster Children--and touring frequently (but without putting out a video or sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into studio time) can make a living where most bands playing the majors' game can't. It's that simple. Steve Albini broke down the numbers in an essay for The Baffler, and for all his personality issues, I'm inclined to trust his numbers. --
If you read a biography of Tesla, it rapidly becomes apparent that he was both a genius and badly, badly cracked. (His phobia of human hair and his obsessive need to calculate the volume of the food he ate are just two of the ways his madness manifested himself.) That's one of the reasons Edison won the PR battle--Tesla's difficulties in focusing on mundane factors like, say, money or meetings with his backers (Westinghouse and Morgan) led to the failure of a number of his business ventures. (Although Mark Twain seemed rather taken with Tesla when they met.)
If Edison is Gates, I'll leave it to the reader to fill in their favorite Free Software figure as the brilliant-but-insane Tesla. I'd say the problem is more that Tesla was an intuitive scientist--along the lines of a Ramanujan, say--and others who couldn't make his leaps could neither duplicate many of his successes nor understand what he was trying to do with his (many) failures. His notes are also difficult to follow; I've got a book somewhere on Tesla's inventions, and they published excerpts.
Still, the man had a unit of measure named after him. Can Edison say the same? --
12:01 PM- Plot planetary takeover, dismantle the heteropatriarchy, pass laws banning sexual orientation discrimination, remake the meaning of the word "majority" into what the majority actually is (i.e. female)...
You only had to spend a minute to plot a planetary takeover? Man, you feminazis have good organizational skills. --
Word. If I weren't suffering from email address inertia--the very same thing that keeps people on AOL--I'd drop Clarknet like a rock; the drop in quality since Verio bought them is remarkable.
Actually, under MacOS 8.5, there already exist virtual monitor/virtual desktop type programs. For instance, there's a free one called Virtual Desktop. Not going to blow away anyone using X, but hey.
On the other hand, why assume that the skill sets overlap? Vi is an impressive tool. I use it. I like it. (You can substitute emacs, if you're of that religious sect.) And it's a great piece of code. But can you honestly say that it has a great--or even a good--user interface? Compared to, say, BBEdit, a Macintosh text editor that I also use? If I'm in a similar situation and not using CVS or something, I'll use BBEdit almost every time.
And that's because being able to make vi do all the fabulous things that it does isn't the same as being able to write an intuitive user interface. Being able to throw a 95-mph fastball doesn't make you also able to throw a decent curve.
Now, the arguments that vi isn't intended for the average PC user (probably true) or that vi is fairly easy to use once you get used to it (definitely true in my case) or have validity, but if the argument is UI elegance, I just think that you're wrong. The key of the MacOS, as far as I'm concerned, is predictability--I can sit down with an unfamiliar program and, if it's well designed, be doing things with it inside five minutes. That's just not true with any of the X programs I've used. The Gimp is really and truly a beautiful piece of work, but it doesn't compare to the Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign/GoLive suite because there aren't any other programs that use an identical interface.
You're thinking of one of the essays in Richard Hofstader's The Paranoid Style in American Politics (not, as I initially remember, Politics and the Paranoid Style).
What he's doing in that essay is not only contrasting Goldwater with previous conservatives but also examining how Goldwater and his efforts to rip the heart out of northeastern "moderate" Republicanism could be understood as "conservative" in the original meaning of the word (Thus the term "pseudo-conservative").
Don't buy it at Amazon--support your local bookstore.)
I haven't read your cited sources. If I get a chance over the next few weeks, I will, and I'll let you know what I think. However, let me just jump on a couple of these:
The LAPD Sexually Exploited Child Unit examined the relationship between extrafamilial (outside the family) child sexual abuse and pornography in their cases over a ten-year period from 1980-89. Pornography was directoy involved in 62% of the cases and actually recovered in 55% of the total cases. As the study's author concludes "Clearly, pornography, wehther it be adult or child pornography is an insidious tool in the hands of pedophilic population...
We're talking about pedophiles. For God's sake, Jello is an insidious tool in the hands of pedophiles. Sick people do sick things with nigh anything; I remain unconvinced that pornography is a genetive cause of that sickness.
...there are some sexually oriented businesses that have private booths with "glory holes" in them through which patrons can enjoy anonymous sexual acts with each other. A study conducted in New York (I don't have the material in front of me, so I can't cite the author) shows that such booths are plastered with bodily fluids. Talk about a health risk!
And anonymous sexual acts certainly sound like a factor in STD transmission, but here, too, we're not talking about pornography as a causal factor. You can find cruising in public parks or department store bathrooms. Does that mean that parks and department stores are factors in transmission STDs?
And finally, one of your citations is about commercials, which I personally feel have much more of an effect on the populace than mere porno.
1.The way it facilitates child molestation 2.Its relationship to rape and sexual violence 3.Its compulsive or "addictive" nature for many men (and to a lesser extent, women) 4.Its direct role in the transmission and encouragement of sexually transmitted diseases by promoting promiscuous sex 5.The way it shapes attitudes and values
This is straight out of an Andrea Dworkin book. Can you provide hard data for any of it? Ed Meese couldn't, and he spent years trying. If you can show me how pornography plays a "direct role" in the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, I'll give you a dollar.
The average child molester has "nearly always" been "influenced" by pornography? Fine, I'll let that stand. But I'd say that the average person in the United States has been "influenced" by pornography--what percentage of the population hasn't seen a Playboy or a stag film?
I'm actually all for blocking software, although not installing it in libraries; parents can't always be by their kids, and if they've got a strong objection to letting their children see naked people and don't trust them to do the right thing, filterware is a legit solution. But when you start blocking out things in a public library--including, inevitably, innocent sites (and, in the case of some of the filterware, sites like Peacefire that have political stances antithetical to those of NetNanny and the like)--I want a better rationale than a bunch of presuppositions about what porn does to society. Until then, I'm sticking with the consensus of research. [See, as a brief Google search tells me, Padgett et al's "Pornography, erotica, and attitudes toward women: The effects of repeated exposure" (Journal of Sex Research, Nov 1989) and Langevin et al's "Pornography and sexual offences" (Annals of Sex Research, 1988), for just two examples.]
I'd say that violence, specifically sexualized violence, in the general media is much more of a factor, but no library in the world is going to (or should) take "The Collector" or "Rising Sun" off their shelves.
Swing by Matthew Sachs' Slash-help list. Personally, I'm planning on finishing up my dynamic front-page code, slapping it on Matt's CVS server or something, and never thinking about it again. There's no reason Rob couldn't do the same, but we'll get it done (eventually) without him.
By then, I'm sure everyone interested will have migrated to Squishdot or PHPSlash, but c'est la vie.
Well, "libertarian" originally referred to the religious doctrine of free will, and then was, I believe, adopted by certain leftist movements (I'm specifically thinking of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists). "Right-wing libertarian" would thus be necessary, just as "decaf coffee" is--to distinguish it from the original.
But more to the point, we're talking about a group whose ideology boils down to the supremacy of property rights. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but I don't think you can call it "left." --
>As I recall Sterling and Gibson both have these >really dark views of the future where technology >and corporatism have transformed the world in to >a vile place filled with cyborgs and mercenaries, >while this makes for a fun read; it may have >nothing to do with the future which we are >creating.
I have some objections to Sterling's latest manifesto, but to say that he's some dystopian gloompuppy is patently false. Go read Islands in the Net or any of Sterling's novels which follow it--I view, say, Holy Fire as a manifestly optimistic work.
So you don't see anything potentially offensive--or even rhetorically inaccurate--about comparing the legal machinations of greedy corporations with a regime that killed over ten million people?
Wow. I don't think that you're a Nazi, but you definitely need to get your priorities straight.
Oh, for moderation points right now. I'll make what is probably a drastic error, dust off my undergraduate degree in mathematics, and respond in due seriousness to this little piece of trollbait.
Real-world relevance of higher math:
Number theory is what makes modern cryptosystems go. (As someone has noted elsewhere in the responses to this article, cryptosystems have been devised based on elliptical curves.)
Scheduling problems (as seen in, say, multitasking processors) require a surprising amount of deep math for optimized solutions.
To the best of my knowledge, both real and complex analysis are required for several branches of upper-level physics. Someone with a degree in physics may wish to correct me in this.
And you know, I'd hold "furthering the bounds of human knowledge" to be an good thing unto itself, regardless of any real-world applications for, say, generalized statements about Ramsey theory and the Party Problem (to choose something which I've been doing a bit of amateur reading on lately that might well lead to real-world applications).
I personally feel that the quality of writing in Sandman dropped of precipitously after "Brief Lives" and that Gaiman's best work in the field was Signal to Noise. Your mileage may vary.
But, oh man, Acme Novelty Library. I can't take a concentrated dose of Ware's worldview, he's mastery of the craft of illustration is incredible.
And hell, I'll add Richard Sala's Evil Eye to the list of comics what should be read by folks. And Moore & Campbell's From Hell is, imho, possibly the best work ever done in the medium.
I know that this is one of the reasons for It's a Wonderful Life's popularity--someone allowed the copyright to lapse, it entered the public domain, and a thousand television stations decided they'd run it for free at Christmastime. IIRC, a few years ago the movie studio made an end-run around this by declaring that while the film was in the public domain, the soundtrack, including the dialogue, remained under copyright. So letting a copyright lapse--at least for works like television and movies--doesn't seem to actually mean a thing.
Ahhh, NTRU. I remember Jeff Hoffstein talking about that when I took a course with him at Brown.
Does anyone know if the Hoffstein (and Kalin, I believe) have their paper on NTRU up on the web?
Pinkwater and Zen Dada Ducks
on
5 Novels
·
· Score: 1
I've read Young Adults. As I recall, "The Wild Dada Ducks Go to College" has a brilliant parody of the Beats (they become "The Wild Zen Dada Ducks") and some of J.D. Salinger's more irritating tropes. (I'd also recommend Fish Whistle, a collection of Pinkwater essays. The Afterlife Diet, his "adult" book about where fat people go when they die, is not nearly as successful as the best of his Y.A. and children's books.)
I once interacted with Pinkwater. He found my drooling fan email somewhat frightening. I asked if I could send him a copy of my zine, which had, among other things, a review of children's books in which I called him the greatest living children's writer.
If memory serves me correctly, I got his email address from one of the children's books newsgroups... If people want to harass the poor man, they can do a DejaNews search.
This guy's report seems a lot less reality-based if you consulting Edgar, the SEC's online database. The link to Microsoft's most recent annual report is her e.
Warning: I Am Not An Accountant. (Or a lawyer, for that matter. Please don't sue me.) But if you scroll way, way down, you'll find:
An alternative method of accounting for stock options is SFAS 123, Accounting
for Stock-Based Compensation. Under SFAS 123, employee stock options are valued at grant date using the Black-Scholes valuation model, and compensation cost is recognized ratably over the vesting period. Had compensation cost for the Company's stock option and employee stock purchase plans been determined based on the Black-Scholes value at the grant dates for awards, pro forma income statements...would have been as follows:
And then they cite pro forma numbers last year of $1.29 vs. $1.42. Which is a significant difference, but not (I suspect) going to send investors fleeing for the hills. Can one of you dandy accountants--looking at these lawyer-ese, my respect for you guys just increased drastically--explain the Black-Scholes valuation model? --
The problem is that when the trademark is diluted, anyone can call their "facial tissue" Kleenex. You'll note that Bayer is no longer the only company selling "Aspirin". I'd site the original maker of the "Trampoline", but I have no idea who that was--Acme Trampoline Co.? They're probably out of business now.
It's also worth noting that ajs quoted the article incorrectly. The actual quote is "of The Sandman and other literary undertakings". The author wasn't calling it "non-literary". (Flamebait about the horribleness of the last two years of the book's run has been self-censored.)
(I'm being Jiji for Halloween. My girlfriend is being Kiki. Miyazaki is good stuff!)
Did you read the article? I felt it was anything but "all washed up" FUD.
As I'm basically solely a user of SunOS and MacOS, I'm not qualified to discuss potential Balkanization of Linux, but the article seemed pretty even-handed. It didn't say that Linux was doomed. It said that given past issues with commercial Unix flavors (like, uh, SunOS) and the recent flurry of interest in Linux, fragmentation was a danger to be watched out for.
I personally don't think the KDE vs. Gnome issue is a big one, but the article mentioned that. And it brought up the counterargument, citing Linus and the Linux System Base. I think it was about as good as coverage of a basically technical issue will get in the mainstream press.
Slashdot Mirror
As noted elsewhere in this thread, Darwin is BSD running on the Mach microkernel. Apple did at least a modicum of work that they're releasing; whether anyone else is going to have a reason to use it is another question.
That's part of the reason why less than half of all silent films are still in existance. (Studios also had no idea that one day video would exist and make their film libraries profitable again, so they didn't want to pay the money necessary to store nitrate film properly. There are stories about studios using silent films as fuel when they needed bonfires for movies they were filming in the '30s...)
There's a whole host of silent films that I'd love to see that just don't exist anymore; virtually all of Theda Bara's work is lost, for instance, and she was a huge star (as well as a cutie). Silent film is certainly one of the more spectacular media deaths of the 20th century, given how amazingly popular it was...
--Ignoring the fact that the RIAA assumes that copying music "hurts the bands I love" more than the viciously-weighted contracts major labels give some of those self-same bands, I'm puzzled by an element of this. The courts have found that we have the right to tape television shows off the air, right? "Time-shifting"?
How, then, do they presume to say that making an MP3 off a legally-purchased CD for use, say, at work, is different? Has this law ever been tested in Federal court? It can't be so simple as an analog-vs-digital distinction, can it?
(And I just love this little gem: "record companies don't recoup their investments, and that makes it more difficult for them to invest in new artists and new music." God bless the fabulous innovation brought to us by the likes of Universal.)
More than that, there are labels that manage to put out multiple albums every year, pay the artists higher royalties, and still make a buck. Touch & Go's royalty rate is around 50%; I believe that of DeSoto and Dischord sits at around 40%. The entire feast-famine business model of the major labels is essentially flawed; a band on an independent label--or making professional-quality music themselves, a la the Poster Children--and touring frequently (but without putting out a video or sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into studio time) can make a living where most bands playing the majors' game can't. It's that simple. Steve Albini broke down the numbers in an essay for The Baffler, and for all his personality issues, I'm inclined to trust his numbers.
--
If you read a biography of Tesla, it rapidly becomes apparent that he was both a genius and badly, badly cracked. (His phobia of human hair and his obsessive need to calculate the volume of the food he ate are just two of the ways his madness manifested himself.) That's one of the reasons Edison won the PR battle--Tesla's difficulties in focusing on mundane factors like, say, money or meetings with his backers (Westinghouse and Morgan) led to the failure of a number of his business ventures. (Although Mark Twain seemed rather taken with Tesla when they met.)
If Edison is Gates, I'll leave it to the reader to fill in their favorite Free Software figure as the brilliant-but-insane Tesla. I'd say the problem is more that Tesla was an intuitive scientist--along the lines of a Ramanujan, say--and others who couldn't make his leaps could neither duplicate many of his successes nor understand what he was trying to do with his (many) failures. His notes are also difficult to follow; I've got a book somewhere on Tesla's inventions, and they published excerpts.
Still, the man had a unit of measure named after him. Can Edison say the same?
--
12:01 PM- Plot planetary takeover, dismantle the heteropatriarchy, pass laws banning sexual orientation discrimination, remake the meaning of the word "majority" into what the majority actually is (i.e. female)...
You only had to spend a minute to plot a planetary takeover? Man, you feminazis have good organizational skills.
--
Word. If I weren't suffering from email address inertia--the very same thing that keeps people on AOL--I'd drop Clarknet like a rock; the drop in quality since Verio bought them is remarkable.
Actually, under MacOS 8.5, there already exist virtual monitor/virtual desktop type programs. For instance, there's a free one called Virtual Desktop. Not going to blow away anyone using X, but hey.
On the other hand, why assume that the skill sets overlap? Vi is an impressive tool. I use it. I like it. (You can substitute emacs, if you're of that religious sect.) And it's a great piece of code. But can you honestly say that it has a great--or even a good--user interface? Compared to, say, BBEdit, a Macintosh text editor that I also use? If I'm in a similar situation and not using CVS or something, I'll use BBEdit almost every time.
And that's because being able to make vi do all the fabulous things that it does isn't the same as being able to write an intuitive user interface. Being able to throw a 95-mph fastball doesn't make you also able to throw a decent curve.
Now, the arguments that vi isn't intended for the average PC user (probably true) or that vi is fairly easy to use once you get used to it (definitely true in my case) or have validity, but if the argument is UI elegance, I just think that you're wrong. The key of the MacOS, as far as I'm concerned, is predictability--I can sit down with an unfamiliar program and, if it's well designed, be doing things with it inside five minutes. That's just not true with any of the X programs I've used. The Gimp is really and truly a beautiful piece of work, but it doesn't compare to the Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign/GoLive suite because there aren't any other programs that use an identical interface.
My two cents.
--
You're thinking of one of the essays in Richard Hofstader's The Paranoid Style in American Politics (not, as I initially remember, Politics and the Paranoid Style).
What he's doing in that essay is not only contrasting Goldwater with previous conservatives but also examining how Goldwater and his efforts to rip the heart out of northeastern "moderate" Republicanism could be understood as "conservative" in the original meaning of the word (Thus the term "pseudo-conservative").
Don't buy it at Amazon--support your local bookstore.)
We're talking about pedophiles. For God's sake, Jello is an insidious tool in the hands of pedophiles. Sick people do sick things with nigh anything; I remain unconvinced that pornography is a genetive cause of that sickness.
And anonymous sexual acts certainly sound like a factor in STD transmission, but here, too, we're not talking about pornography as a causal factor. You can find cruising in public parks or department store bathrooms. Does that mean that parks and department stores are factors in transmission STDs?
And finally, one of your citations is about commercials, which I personally feel have much more of an effect on the populace than mere porno.
--
This is straight out of an Andrea Dworkin book. Can you provide hard data for any of it? Ed Meese couldn't, and he spent years trying. If you can show me how pornography plays a "direct role" in the spread of sexually transmitted diseases, I'll give you a dollar.
The average child molester has "nearly always" been "influenced" by pornography? Fine, I'll let that stand. But I'd say that the average person in the United States has been "influenced" by pornography--what percentage of the population hasn't seen a Playboy or a stag film?
I'm actually all for blocking software, although not installing it in libraries; parents can't always be by their kids, and if they've got a strong objection to letting their children see naked people and don't trust them to do the right thing, filterware is a legit solution. But when you start blocking out things in a public library--including, inevitably, innocent sites (and, in the case of some of the filterware, sites like Peacefire that have political stances antithetical to those of NetNanny and the like)--I want a better rationale than a bunch of presuppositions about what porn does to society. Until then, I'm sticking with the consensus of research. [See, as a brief Google search tells me, Padgett et al's "Pornography, erotica, and attitudes toward women: The effects of repeated exposure" (Journal of Sex Research, Nov 1989) and Langevin et al's "Pornography and sexual offences" (Annals of Sex Research, 1988), for just two examples.]
I'd say that violence, specifically sexualized violence, in the general media is much more of a factor, but no library in the world is going to (or should) take "The Collector" or "Rising Sun" off their shelves.
--
Swing by Matthew Sachs' Slash-help list. Personally, I'm planning on finishing up my dynamic front-page code, slapping it on Matt's CVS server or something, and never thinking about it again. There's no reason Rob couldn't do the same, but we'll get it done (eventually) without him.
By then, I'm sure everyone interested will have migrated to Squishdot or PHPSlash, but c'est la vie.
Well, "libertarian" originally referred to the religious doctrine of free will, and then was, I believe, adopted by certain leftist movements (I'm specifically thinking of the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists). "Right-wing libertarian" would thus be necessary, just as "decaf coffee" is--to distinguish it from the original.
But more to the point, we're talking about a group whose ideology boils down to the supremacy of property rights. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but I don't think you can call it "left."
--
>As I recall Sterling and Gibson both have these
>really dark views of the future where technology
>and corporatism have transformed the world in to
>a vile place filled with cyborgs and mercenaries,
>while this makes for a fun read; it may have
>nothing to do with the future which we are
>creating.
I have some objections to Sterling's latest manifesto, but to say that he's some dystopian gloompuppy is patently false. Go read Islands in the Net or any of Sterling's novels which follow it--I view, say, Holy Fire as a manifestly optimistic work.
--
So you don't see anything potentially offensive--or even rhetorically inaccurate--about comparing the legal machinations of greedy corporations with a regime that killed over ten million people?
Wow. I don't think that you're a Nazi, but you definitely need to get your priorities straight.
And, as per Godwin's Law, this thread is done.
--
Real-world relevance of higher math:
And you know, I'd hold "furthering the bounds of human knowledge" to be an good thing unto itself, regardless of any real-world applications for, say, generalized statements about Ramsey theory and the Party Problem (to choose something which I've been doing a bit of amateur reading on lately that might well lead to real-world applications).
I personally feel that the quality of writing in Sandman dropped of precipitously after "Brief Lives" and that Gaiman's best work in the field was Signal to Noise. Your mileage may vary.
But, oh man, Acme Novelty Library. I can't take a concentrated dose of Ware's worldview, he's mastery of the craft of illustration is incredible.
And hell, I'll add Richard Sala's Evil Eye to the list of comics what should be read by folks. And Moore & Campbell's From Hell is, imho, possibly the best work ever done in the medium.
I know that this is one of the reasons for It's a Wonderful Life's popularity--someone allowed the copyright to lapse, it entered the public domain, and a thousand television stations decided they'd run it for free at Christmastime. IIRC, a few years ago the movie studio made an end-run around this by declaring that while the film was in the public domain, the soundtrack, including the dialogue, remained under copyright. So letting a copyright lapse--at least for works like television and movies--doesn't seem to actually mean a thing.
Anyone know further details?
Ahhh, NTRU. I remember Jeff Hoffstein talking about that when I took a course with him at Brown.
Does anyone know if the Hoffstein (and Kalin, I believe) have their paper on NTRU up on the web?
I've read Young Adults. As I recall, "The Wild Dada Ducks Go to College" has a brilliant parody of the Beats (they become "The Wild Zen Dada Ducks") and some of J.D. Salinger's more irritating tropes. (I'd also recommend Fish Whistle, a collection of Pinkwater essays. The Afterlife Diet, his "adult" book about where fat people go when they die, is not nearly as successful as the best of his Y.A. and children's books.)
I once interacted with Pinkwater. He found my drooling fan email somewhat frightening. I asked if I could send him a copy of my zine, which had, among other things, a review of children's books in which I called him the greatest living children's writer.
If memory serves me correctly, I got his email address from one of the children's books newsgroups... If people want to harass the poor man, they can do a DejaNews search.
Warning: I Am Not An Accountant. (Or a lawyer, for that matter. Please don't sue me.) But if you scroll way, way down, you'll find:
And then they cite pro forma numbers last year of $1.29 vs. $1.42. Which is a significant difference, but not (I suspect) going to send investors fleeing for the hills. Can one of you dandy accountants--looking at these lawyer-ese, my respect for you guys just increased drastically--explain the Black-Scholes valuation model?
--
The problem is that when the trademark is diluted, anyone can call their "facial tissue" Kleenex. You'll note that Bayer is no longer the only company selling "Aspirin". I'd site the original maker of the "Trampoline", but I have no idea who that was--Acme Trampoline Co.? They're probably out of business now.
It's also worth noting that ajs quoted the article incorrectly. The actual quote is "of The Sandman and other literary undertakings". The author wasn't calling it "non-literary". (Flamebait about the horribleness of the last two years of the book's run has been self-censored.)
(I'm being Jiji for Halloween. My girlfriend is being Kiki. Miyazaki is good stuff!)
Did you read the article? I felt it was anything but "all washed up" FUD.
As I'm basically solely a user of SunOS and MacOS, I'm not qualified to discuss potential Balkanization of Linux, but the article seemed pretty even-handed. It didn't say that Linux was doomed. It said that given past issues with commercial Unix flavors (like, uh, SunOS) and the recent flurry of interest in Linux, fragmentation was a danger to be watched out for.
I personally don't think the KDE vs. Gnome issue is a big one, but the article mentioned that. And it brought up the counterargument, citing Linus and the Linux System Base. I think it was about as good as coverage of a basically technical issue will get in the mainstream press.