Microsoft has Linux in its target sights. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Above all else, remember that Microsoft is not addressing you. They're addressing your boss, who by definition is almost certainly not capable of completely understanding the complexity of the situation and by default doesn't even want to try thinking about it.
Microsoft can and will convince the people who make the decisions to avoid Linux like the plague.
The only chance there is to avoid this assured outcome is to gain control of the bosses' minds.
You must couch your persuasive arguments in simple terms, as soundbite-compatible as possible. You need to implant memes that paint Microsoft with a tarry, black brush; and make Linux look like a glowing angel.
"Linux is a cancer" is the perfect meme. It's memorable, and it's nasty.
You much create countermemes -- and you must be able to get them publicised to the same extent that Microsoft can. And that, I suspect, is impossible. It may be impossible to win the war, simply because Microsoft owns the territory, the media, and the minds of your bosses.
It's been suggested that "Microsoft is afraid of Linux" may be one of the better counter-memes to spread to your bosses.
I should think we can come up with others, too.
[this message has been brought to you by the emergency rebroadcast system]
Siesta isn't lazy hours, it's sanity. Your body's natural rhythm is to slow down at around 2PM.
And just *imagine* how much nicer your life would be if you could knock off for a little nap in the midafternoon. Hell, give it a try for a month -- I'll bet you'd *never* want to go back.
One of the problems with the American headspace is that "live to work" is the meme, instead of "work to live."
Even more so, if companies can patent and protect genomes/genes that are specific to a particular community -- ie. the Icelandic fiasco -- then why shouldn't a people be able to trademark and protect their culture?
I'm fairly sure the Slashdot crowd would be brothers-in-arms if the Maori were fighting Pfizer for ownership of their genes. What's the difference between that and fighting for their culture?
Microsoft has Linux in its target sights. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Above all else, remember that Microsoft is not addressing you. They're addressing your boss, who by definition is almost certainly not capable of completely understanding the complexity of the situation and by default doesn't even want to try thinking about it.
Microsoft can and will convince the people who make the decisions to avoid Linux like the plague.
The only chance there is to avoid this assured outcome is to gain control of the bosses' minds.
You must couch your persuasive arguments in simple terms, as soundbite-compatible as possible. You need to implant memes that paint Microsoft with a tarry, black brush; and make Linux look like a glowing angel.
"Linux is a cancer" is the perfect meme. It's memorable, and it's nasty.
You much create countermemes -- and you must be able to get them publicised to the same extent that Microsoft can. And that, I suspect, is impossible. It may be impossible to win the war, simply because Microsoft owns the territory, the media, and the minds of your bosses.
So steal the music and send a sawback to the band, directly. Cut out the RIAA, and help the band make more money from private sales than they do from their crappy contracts with those ticks.
ICANN is just like a third-world, third-rate countries with tinpot despots screwing their fellow citizens for their own financial and power gains.
And like those despots, the only way things are going to change is for the people to revolt. If you want change, ICANN must be overthrown.
But a revolution requires mass public support. Despots don't typically get dethroned by a single person, nor even by a few hundred rabid guerillas.
And if there's one thing there ain't on the Internet, is a mass public that's informed enough to understand why it's necessary to overthrow ICANN.
Heck, there ain't even a mass DNS-controlling population that's got enough of a clue to understand that they can get root name serving from an alternative source.
Which basically means y'all are fscked. No revolution is going to happen until all the domain controller guys are educated as to why they should abandon ICANN name resolution, and go with someone else (OpenNIC).
And given that most people don't ever want to have to think, I think educating them stands a snowball's chance.
Actually, if you live in British Columbia, the telco is *extremely* interested in delivering everything _plus_ voice.
They already deliver video to some apartments. They've run fiber to all new homes. And they're biding their time... watching while the "competition" falls apart.
It's fairly amusing, actually. For a while, it looked like the telco was going to get caught with its pants down: the cableco's were getting into broadband and wireless, and the telco seemed to be doing nothing.
Then all of a sudden everyone and his dog can get DSL for dirt cheap, the cell phone competitors are going bankrupt, the long-distance alternative providers are going bankrupt, and the telco is supplying video to a few people. Goodness, what an about-face!
Anyway, all that to say that there's at least one telco that does a heckuva lot more than voice.
Two bucks for a Big Mac, Fries and Coke? I don't believe it.
'round here (BC, Canada), I'm pretty sure you'd be looking more at six bucks. I'm guessing, because I haven't actually eaten McDonald's hamburgers since I got past the kiddy stage of life.
Anyway, six bucks seems to be the going rate for a Wendy's chicken thing with fries and soft drink.
Which means I could also:
* get a couple slices of Uncle Dave's pizza. Real cheese, real meat, real dough. Good stuff.
* get a pasta meal at a pub, beer would be extra.
* get a good sushi meal.
* buy a TV dinner that's surely better than fast food. (I don't think I've ever eaten a TV dinner!)
* buy a salad-in-a-bag, some roasted chicken, and a bottle of water at the local Safeway.
All of which are better than McDonalds, by a very long shot...
Oh, hell, no. This is British Columbia we're talking about. Home to continuous political scandal!
We just elected in a "Liberal" government that's actually pretty damn right-wing, to the tune of 76 of 79 seats. In other words, we have *NO* effective opposition to this government.
One of their political platforms: they're gonna look into privatizing BC Hydro.
This would be a company that's charging BCers a whopping $0.0577/kWH. We're not exactly being screwed over by them...
I suspect most of us Canucks would hand you the knife, too. That guy is an asshole to no end.
Care to kill the people that keep making it possible for him to make movies? Surely some SOB in Hollywood should be taken 'round back and shot for letting Tom have a movie...
"We have seen the effects of this already. Frequent posters who relied on deja.com were suddenly silenced."
And thank god for that! The signal-to-noise ratio on usenet *immediately* skyrocketed.
There would be nothing better than to get rid of web interfaces to Usenet. It allows dumb people to get access. There was a time, oh so very long ago, when Usenet was a high-quality information exchange media: there were interesting, informative discussions where most everyone knew what s/he was talking about. These days, it's about as intelligent as a Lowtax ICQ prank...
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that the government should be involved; I can see how my message could easily be interpreted as such.
What I meant was "lean on your friends and family to not be knobs when they choose their next vehicle"...
Would you believe that in BC, where we have a single-source insurance scheme that's tightly regulated by the government, there's now talk of privatizing the whole shebang?
It's utterly stupid. Here we have a system that *works*: there's no age bias. There's no bias against make or model. There hasn't been a rate increase in ages, and our rates are, for most drivers, lower than in other provinces. The insurance company is involved with redesigning high-incident intersections and roads, further reducing accidents. And the *only* people who get punished are those people who *prove* they can't drive, by getting into accidents.
You can be an 18-year old male driving a Camaro and you will pay *exactly* as much insurance as a forty-year old driving a Honda Accord. *ONLY* if you fuck it up, will you pay through the nose.
It's a *fair* system... but because the government is involved, there's been call to dismantle it.
At which point, many of us will be fucked right over, because we'll end up with plenty o' age/sex/vehicle discrimination. That stupid fucker of a soccer mom running red lights in her SUV will pay bugger all for insurance, but I'll be feckin' broke to pay for my motorcycle insurance... even though I've had less accidents than that bitch.
If you *really* want to see automobile pollution and gas consumption dramatically reduced, call for an end to the SUV trend.
Alas, despite the soaring price of gas and of new vehicles, all too many stupid North Americans are purchasing pickup trucks and SUVs -- not because they *need* those sorts of vehicles, but for the status symbol.
Unfortunately, they're killing us when they make those choices.
Or just as good as STOP BUYING CDs is to start buying them second-hand. Yah, sure, RIAA is still getting their cut on the original sale, but every sale after that fucks 'em over.
If you want to do it ethically, send the artists a buck. Hell, that's more than twice what RIAA would give 'em...
Give 'em Python. Great programming language, easy to learn.
Although that doesn't resolve the big problem: there are no *small* problems left. When I was a kid, I was hacking on TRS-80 Model I in the school's office after hours.
I'm not entirely sure what they used it for: no one did word processing back in those days. Perhaps they were handling accounting on it.
Anyway, point is that this was the first year of the TRS-80, which means it was also pretty much the first year of publicly-sold computers, not counting Apple mail-order.
Which, in turn, means that there was bugger all out there for software. A couple cheezy games, a couple business programs, and that's about all she wrote.
So it was pretty damn easy to write up some cheezy-ass program and feel like a hero.
These days, anything that's easy is already done. There's no point in writing the program: someone's already done it.
Which rather takes away the desire to program. What's the point? It ain't gonna impress anyone.
(actually, it's exactly what I meant to say. (a) it was funnier; (b) it may have had use to dodge flak; (c) if I were truly poorly misinformed, I'd have figured it destroyed crippled lesbian libertarian spotted owls...)
Slashdot Mirror
Nice layman's explanation, Michael!
--
Other useful link:
d .h t ml
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/techstds/standard/standar
It's the Online Approved DOE Technical Standards -- including
* Licensed Reactor Nuclear Safety Criteria Applicable to DOE Reactors,
* DOE Fundamentals Handbook, Nuclear Physics and Reactor Theory,
and
* Criteria for Packaging and Storing Uranium-233-Bearing Materials
Wonderful stuff!
--
Microsoft has Linux in its target sights. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Above all else, remember that Microsoft is not addressing you. They're addressing your boss, who by definition is almost certainly not capable of completely understanding the complexity of the situation and by default doesn't even want to try thinking about it.
Microsoft can and will convince the people who make the decisions to avoid Linux like the plague.
The only chance there is to avoid this assured outcome is to gain control of the bosses' minds.
You must couch your persuasive arguments in simple terms, as soundbite-compatible as possible. You need to implant memes that paint Microsoft with a tarry, black brush; and make Linux look like a glowing angel.
"Linux is a cancer" is the perfect meme. It's memorable, and it's nasty.
You much create countermemes -- and you must be able to get them publicised to the same extent that Microsoft can. And that, I suspect, is impossible. It may be impossible to win the war, simply because Microsoft owns the territory, the media, and the minds of your bosses.
It's been suggested that "Microsoft is afraid of Linux" may be one of the better counter-memes to spread to your bosses.
I should think we can come up with others, too.
[this message has been brought to you by the emergency rebroadcast system]
--
Siesta isn't lazy hours, it's sanity. Your body's natural rhythm is to slow down at around 2PM.
And just *imagine* how much nicer your life would be if you could knock off for a little nap in the midafternoon. Hell, give it a try for a month -- I'll bet you'd *never* want to go back.
One of the problems with the American headspace is that "live to work" is the meme, instead of "work to live."
--
Even more so, if companies can patent and protect genomes/genes that are specific to a particular community -- ie. the Icelandic fiasco -- then why shouldn't a people be able to trademark and protect their culture?
I'm fairly sure the Slashdot crowd would be brothers-in-arms if the Maori were fighting Pfizer for ownership of their genes. What's the difference between that and fighting for their culture?
--
Microsoft has Linux in its target sights. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Above all else, remember that Microsoft is not addressing you. They're addressing your boss, who by definition is almost certainly not capable of completely understanding the complexity of the situation and by default doesn't even want to try thinking about it.
Microsoft can and will convince the people who make the decisions to avoid Linux like the plague.
The only chance there is to avoid this assured outcome is to gain control of the bosses' minds.
You must couch your persuasive arguments in simple terms, as soundbite-compatible as possible. You need to implant memes that paint Microsoft with a tarry, black brush; and make Linux look like a glowing angel.
"Linux is a cancer" is the perfect meme. It's memorable, and it's nasty.
You much create countermemes -- and you must be able to get them publicised to the same extent that Microsoft can. And that, I suspect, is impossible. It may be impossible to win the war, simply because Microsoft owns the territory, the media, and the minds of your bosses.
--
So steal the music and send a sawback to the band, directly. Cut out the RIAA, and help the band make more money from private sales than they do from their crappy contracts with those ticks.
--
ICANN is just like a third-world, third-rate countries with tinpot despots screwing their fellow citizens for their own financial and power gains.
And like those despots, the only way things are going to change is for the people to revolt. If you want change, ICANN must be overthrown.
But a revolution requires mass public support. Despots don't typically get dethroned by a single person, nor even by a few hundred rabid guerillas.
And if there's one thing there ain't on the Internet, is a mass public that's informed enough to understand why it's necessary to overthrow ICANN.
Heck, there ain't even a mass DNS-controlling population that's got enough of a clue to understand that they can get root name serving from an alternative source.
Which basically means y'all are fscked. No revolution is going to happen until all the domain controller guys are educated as to why they should abandon ICANN name resolution, and go with someone else (OpenNIC).
And given that most people don't ever want to have to think, I think educating them stands a snowball's chance.
--
Actually, if you live in British Columbia, the telco is *extremely* interested in delivering everything _plus_ voice.
They already deliver video to some apartments. They've run fiber to all new homes. And they're biding their time... watching while the "competition" falls apart.
It's fairly amusing, actually. For a while, it looked like the telco was going to get caught with its pants down: the cableco's were getting into broadband and wireless, and the telco seemed to be doing nothing.
Then all of a sudden everyone and his dog can get DSL for dirt cheap, the cell phone competitors are going bankrupt, the long-distance alternative providers are going bankrupt, and the telco is supplying video to a few people. Goodness, what an about-face!
Anyway, all that to say that there's at least one telco that does a heckuva lot more than voice.
--
Two bucks for a Big Mac, Fries and Coke? I don't believe it.
'round here (BC, Canada), I'm pretty sure you'd be looking more at six bucks. I'm guessing, because I haven't actually eaten McDonald's hamburgers since I got past the kiddy stage of life.
Anyway, six bucks seems to be the going rate for a Wendy's chicken thing with fries and soft drink.
Which means I could also:
* get a couple slices of Uncle Dave's pizza. Real cheese, real meat, real dough. Good stuff.
* get a pasta meal at a pub, beer would be extra.
* get a good sushi meal.
* buy a TV dinner that's surely better than fast food. (I don't think I've ever eaten a TV dinner!)
* buy a salad-in-a-bag, some roasted chicken, and a bottle of water at the local Safeway.
All of which are better than McDonalds, by a very long shot...
--
Oh, hell, no. This is British Columbia we're talking about. Home to continuous political scandal!
We just elected in a "Liberal" government that's actually pretty damn right-wing, to the tune of 76 of 79 seats. In other words, we have *NO* effective opposition to this government.
One of their political platforms: they're gonna look into privatizing BC Hydro.
This would be a company that's charging BCers a whopping $0.0577/kWH. We're not exactly being screwed over by them...
Yup. BC. Always interesting.
--
I think that because I perceive someone as being dumb, it's a *PERFECT* reason to kick them off the Net, the Web, *AND* Usenet.
Yes, that's elitist. Tough.
--
Betcha it's not Tom Green...
...it'll be Stockwell Day, and the whole project will be financed by disillusioned Alliance Party members!
--
I suspect most of us Canucks would hand you the knife, too. That guy is an asshole to no end.
Care to kill the people that keep making it possible for him to make movies? Surely some SOB in Hollywood should be taken 'round back and shot for letting Tom have a movie...
--
"We have seen the effects of this already. Frequent posters who relied on deja.com were suddenly silenced."
And thank god for that! The signal-to-noise ratio on usenet *immediately* skyrocketed.
There would be nothing better than to get rid of web interfaces to Usenet. It allows dumb people to get access. There was a time, oh so very long ago, when Usenet was a high-quality information exchange media: there were interesting, informative discussions where most everyone knew what s/he was talking about. These days, it's about as intelligent as a Lowtax ICQ prank...
--
Sorry, didn't mean to imply that the government should be involved; I can see how my message could easily be interpreted as such.
What I meant was "lean on your friends and family to not be knobs when they choose their next vehicle"...
Would you believe that in BC, where we have a single-source insurance scheme that's tightly regulated by the government, there's now talk of privatizing the whole shebang?
It's utterly stupid. Here we have a system that *works*: there's no age bias. There's no bias against make or model. There hasn't been a rate increase in ages, and our rates are, for most drivers, lower than in other provinces. The insurance company is involved with redesigning high-incident intersections and roads, further reducing accidents. And the *only* people who get punished are those people who *prove* they can't drive, by getting into accidents.
You can be an 18-year old male driving a Camaro and you will pay *exactly* as much insurance as a forty-year old driving a Honda Accord. *ONLY* if you fuck it up, will you pay through the nose.
It's a *fair* system... but because the government is involved, there's been call to dismantle it.
At which point, many of us will be fucked right over, because we'll end up with plenty o' age/sex/vehicle discrimination. That stupid fucker of a soccer mom running red lights in her SUV will pay bugger all for insurance, but I'll be feckin' broke to pay for my motorcycle insurance... even though I've had less accidents than that bitch.
oooooh, I'm gonn aget sooooo bitter...
--
No, I don't have it the wrong way. Please go hit the 'net and figure it out. Shouldn't take you more than a few seconds, bub.
--
QUIT MAKING SUVS/
If you *really* want to see automobile pollution and gas consumption dramatically reduced, call for an end to the SUV trend.
Alas, despite the soaring price of gas and of new vehicles, all too many stupid North Americans are purchasing pickup trucks and SUVs -- not because they *need* those sorts of vehicles, but for the status symbol.
Unfortunately, they're killing us when they make those choices.
--
How amusing. Europeans spend more, to get gas that contains less bang! The higher the octane, the less "power" it provides...
--
Except for those of us who use Opera. Except for a bunch of proprietory MSIE extensions that I wouldn't allow to run in any case, Opera kicks ass.
For one thing, it's got a helluva great UI. Saves a lotta time in browsing. Makes me more efficient.
--
Or just as good as STOP BUYING CDs is to start buying them second-hand. Yah, sure, RIAA is still getting their cut on the original sale, but every sale after that fucks 'em over.
If you want to do it ethically, send the artists a buck. Hell, that's more than twice what RIAA would give 'em...
--
Start a trust-based community for CD swapping.
Ain't nothing illegal about sharing a CD with a friend, right?
--
...compares Williams' lawsuit to "a smoker suing a tobacco company."
Ne pas?
--
Give 'em Python. Great programming language, easy to learn.
Although that doesn't resolve the big problem: there are no *small* problems left. When I was a kid, I was hacking on TRS-80 Model I in the school's office after hours.
I'm not entirely sure what they used it for: no one did word processing back in those days. Perhaps they were handling accounting on it.
Anyway, point is that this was the first year of the TRS-80, which means it was also pretty much the first year of publicly-sold computers, not counting Apple mail-order.
Which, in turn, means that there was bugger all out there for software. A couple cheezy games, a couple business programs, and that's about all she wrote.
So it was pretty damn easy to write up some cheezy-ass program and feel like a hero.
These days, anything that's easy is already done. There's no point in writing the program: someone's already done it.
Which rather takes away the desire to program. What's the point? It ain't gonna impress anyone.
--
(actually, it's exactly what I meant to say. (a) it was funnier; (b) it may have had use to dodge flak; (c) if I were truly poorly misinformed, I'd have figured it destroyed crippled lesbian libertarian spotted owls...)
--