THey came along, took a week internet tool (the search) and did it better than anyone else. It's the fact that they did it better than everyone else and got the press for that which caused them to be the big name.
I don't know about you, but 40-60% of the reason I started using Google ~1999 is that I had gotten burned by other "web portals" with all of their popup ads, JavaScript malware, and other shit.
If you think this is something that only us Ivory-Tower geeks care about, you are incorrect. My parents recently threw away an entire computer because it was so ridden with spyware and popups.
Google's business is all about trust. If users think they can't depend on it - because the search results suck or because of popups - they can set their homepage elsewhere with a quickness and never come back. There is a reason that the first of Google's top three questions is about popups. Users get pissed off about it, and if they blame Google, it cuts into the bottom line.
A few years ago, there were an whole lot of innovative, more-or-less independent titles produced for the PC: like Sacrifice, Giants Citizen Kabuto, Black & White, Startopia, etc.
A lot of them didn't do so hot. Most of those development groups have folded. Assy Black & White is the only one of the above franchises that's still alive and it's moving more into conventional MMORPG/RTS territory.
Sega Dreamcast probably had the most innovative titles of any system (a monkey with fucking maracas! brilliant!) and it's dead.
What companies "learned" from this is that innovation doesn't sell. What they're starting to learn is that derivative suckfests don't sell either.
The bottom has already fallen out of PC gaming. I don't think it'll be long before it hits the consoles as well.
AFAIK, in the only legal case regarding BSD, the judge ruled that he thought it would be extremely unlikely that AT&T would be able to prove that they still owned the source code, after scientists had gone through and improved/rewritten much of it.
At the end of the case, there were like 2 or 3 BSD files that had to be rewritten. At the end (rumor has it), the case was settled in a hurry because the judge pointed out that there was more (unattributed) Berkeley-infringing code in AT&T Unix than AT&T-infringing code in Berkeley.
ANAL, but is this legal? Don't they have to somehow prove that the documents they're asking for have some relevance to their argument?
It's pretty common for requests like this to be super-broad. Plaintiff: give us everything. Subpoenee: we give you nothing. Plaintiff: okay, how bout half? Subpoenee: leave us alone and we'll give you 40%.
So to a certain extent, it's standard lawyerly practice. However, it's the kind of thing judges tire of quickly if taken too far: "fishing expedition" is what it's called.
Furthermore, what exactly is their argument? Is it still that Linux contains SCO code? How would documents about "enforcement of the GPL" prove existence of SCO code?
SCO must prove not only that their IP was infringed, but also that the infringement was malicious: i.e. harmful and intentional. What they'd like to get out of these documents is a picture of IBM plotting in dark rooms with dirty GNU hippies to destroy SCO's proprietary Unix business by stealing source code and selectively litigating with the GPL.
(but IANAL either)
I really have to figure out how to do this scam.
Get money from big corporations
They started off taking money fromtheSwiss. The process seems to go something like this:
1. Get some hack-journalist experience (overfunded and obscure policy journals publish damn near anything; ditto for the Washington Times, as long as it purports to be conservative).
2. Get to know rich people
--a. get cushy internships in college
--b. marry a lawyer at a Big Firm
3. Convince the rich people you know to pay you for hack journalism.
4. Use hack journalism to push dubious foreign-investment schemes
5. PROFIT!!!
The key is that business, academia, law, journalism and government don't really know how to function with one another. They want to, for both good and bad reasons, so a lot of the time they're willing to throw big money conferences, fellowships, publications and "research institutions" that are supposed to grease the wheels.
Added to this, washed-up bigwigs usually want some place to go, and their former friends often set up make-work jobs for them. Lose an election? Why don't you give a lecture once a month at my public policy school. Get shitcanned from your CEO job? Why don't you sit on my government advisory committee. Newspaper column dried up? How bout you be a fellow at my think-tank. And of course, all of these people need gophers, personal assistants, research aides, etc. - a whole industry of suckups scurrying around washups.
The pay is peanuts for the honorees, sometimes even nonexistent. But they like the honorary titles. In exchange, the institution that hands out the titles gets more prestige from having Big Names attached to it. Look at the name-dropping on AdTI website: Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich (Republicans), John Norquist (Democrat). In turn, the aura of Big Names clustered around an institution makes it easier to sucker donors.
That's basically the scam: laundering prestige for money. All you have to do is Know People(tm).
He also says that Brown, the person who interviewed him, was completely clueless and obviously pushing an agenda.
I was semi-surprised at how retarded Brown came off in the article. I mean, everything that's come out of his "institution" would lead one to expect that, but somehow I thought maybe it was just an act for the punters. Turns out he really is that dumb. Weird.
I don't think Tanenbaum is bitter. He just wants to point this out.
Since I don't think anyone here has RTFA'd (/. effect and all) it's not worth judging right now. I think it's pretty classy of Tanenbaum to step up and offer some perspective on the AdTI FUD. If he does that as someone who still doesn't buy into Linux, that makes it all the more credible. Do we really want every response to this to be written by a Linux fanboy?
Treating the micro v. monolithic debate as a solved problem ("microkernels win!") is as idiotic as suggesting that object orientation is the ideal solution to all programming problems.
Apparently, the really trendy kids have decided that microkernels themselves are obsolete, and moved on to something called exokernels. I can't pretend to understand the distinctions involved.
There are some people in Hollywood that realize that movies are about to go the way of Vaudeville in the next twenty years
Vaudeville didn't die. It just passed off the stage and onto movies and television. Especially in comedy, early movie guys like WC Fields, the Marx brothers, and the Three Stooges were all straight off Vaudeville. Early TV guys like Sid Caesar, Uncle Miltie and Jerry Lewis were all right off the Catskills circuit.
Peoples' basic desire for short, funny, dramatic situations never changed. All that changed was the way they were delivered and some of the stylistics involved. Stage sketch -> movie short -> TV variety show -> modern sitcom.
Similarly, TV didn't kill off movies; it changed how they were distributed.
What you are talking about is a shift in the kind of entertainment, rather than the medium. I can't say whether it will or won't happen (I don't think it will; didn't work out for Phillps CDi) but "interactive" stories will never replace fully-scripted ones, ever.
Ah, okay. That was exactly the thing that RMS was unhappy about the Plan 9 license. It would also kills any chance of it being used by most US universities, since nearly all state universities require litigation to happen in the state itself, and many private ones do the same.
The code part of tax software is fairly trivial. The problem is the data part: your code has to be working with good information about tax laws federally and in all fifty states.
So even if you could code in C or C++, it wouldn't matter. You need tax lawyers and CPAs for this project rather than just coders. And they don't work for free.
The problem with AdTI isn't that they're conservatives, or even Neocons. It's that they're goldbrickers. Their intellectual heritage may be fine and dandy, but their financial and organizational connections are shady, their "research" shoddy. Similar situations exist on the Left as well. (BTW: I voted for Bush, and plan to again.)
Thank you for your follow-up. For the record, I don't think AdTI is all about Neocon-ism: I think it's about whoring connections into cash in return for slipshod "reports." The whores just happen to mostly be neocons.
Now that I look back on the information in light of your response, it seems that Norquist is a case in point (rather than one of the culprits).
He's a "co-chairman of the advisory board". In other words, he has nothing to do with them, they have nothing to do with him - most people don't bother to check up before accepting no-work honorary titles; some bestowers of honorary titles don't even wait for a response. He gets a stack of shiny reports and a new title, they get a veneer of credibility for their front-group.
Half of the links from the AdTI front page are broken. The other half send you to repositories of op-eds and recorded radio shows.
This is not a research institute. Not even a bad research institute. This is a demi-journalistic hack shop where goldbricking bottomfeeders of right-wing policy studies and editorial-writing filch cash from gullible corporations in return for hastily-written hokum.
Please do not post any more from these con artists. I'm sure they get paid by the hit.
Linux is better mostly because it's free. It does not fix some of the imperfections in the core design (for good reasons; that would break Posix compatibility).
According the Inferno Design Principles, Inferno takes Unix ideas and applies them more consistently. For instance: everything is a file. In Inferno, what you're typing in a text editor window can be queried in something like/gui/window/...etc. Also, the network protocol is entirely file-based. Your desktop system (or smartphone, or brower plugin) sees the server or another client as part of the same filesystem that its own resources sit in.
Read some of Stallman's rants about the Plan9 license(s). Vita Nuova's license has the same problems.
Plan 9 had a license where you couldn't sue Lucent on an unrelated matter if you used it. They've now changed that (as of June 2003), and Stallman now considers it a "free software license incompatible with the GPL". From the GNU site:
This is a free software license, incompatible with the GNU GPL. We recommend that you not use this license for new software that you write, but it is ok to use and improve Plan 9 under this license.
Inferno's license seems to be the same as the new plan 9 one. (But I haven't looked in depth).
To judgefrom their sample scenarios they're building a doohickey that tells you whether you a) have seen people before or else b) feel socially awkward in a given situation - but only if everyone else is wearing the same doohickey.
As in Ghostbusters (except at the end) this is a classic case of don't cross the beams. French-style social theory and American-style sociology do make a tasty pie together. And throwing McLuhan into it makes things even worse. They could've got the same results by hiring a bunch of popular tech journalists from ~15 years ago
It will be awful
on
NextFest
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
First of all, the site has a Flash intro that's more epilepsy-inducing than the latest Japanese cartoon craze.
Second of all, it's sponsored by Wired. I remember picking up one of the early issues and there was all this stuff about VR. If this were the early 90's, VR would be all over NextFest or whatever it's called.
Anyways, it sounded like a cool idea and all until the inventor dude talked about the actual applications. He had had a party the last night, and everyone had to pretend they were lobsters. They wore the low-res headsets and had to use the special gloves to make pincer movements with their hands.
It was then that I concluded that VR wasn't what it promised to be. Also that Wired was basically a newer Omni, but without the virtue of being published by a pr0n baron.
That's what comsymp pedants like you called it. But most people whose minds weren't completely addled by Leftism just called it "Russia". Hence, in this great man's act, it was always "in Russia".
Anyhow, he was an unfunny dude, so fighting over the semantics of a lame joke about a lame comic by a lame/. posters is, well, lame.
This is probably a good thing. In fact, as it presently stands Darl could teach a thing or two about not running your mouth off unnecessarily to a certainotherproprietaryUnixcompany.
Like X, Flash can be extremely suckass, but it doesn't have to be. In both cases, this comes from separating policy from mechanism. Since Flash unlike HTML gives you a completely free-form palette on which to paint, it's easy to make it do things that would be more appropriate in a structured medium. And also the opportunity to do useless, self-indulgent intros. To choose a random example: here.
But there are times when Flash is good: when you are dealing with data that does not easily lend itself to html-ish structure (e.g. animated graphics) and when you need to preserve state in a more complex way than forward-back: e.g. Flash games.
That's a trivial example, I know. But recently, my company had to develop a kiosk system for a client: shininess was at a premium, and the underlying dataset (maps of the facility) lent itself to a highly visual interface.
The "free as in beer" distinction is what killed the term "Free Software" as a potential part of the non-Asperger's lexicon. Whenever a FOSS advocate uses it, it sounds like they're slagging off beer. Who wants to be associated with a movement like that?
Try "free as in refills" or "free as in puppies" or "handjobs" or something. But don't make yourself sound like a beer-despising communist. That's just bad for America.
Slashdot Mirror
THey came along, took a week internet tool (the search) and did it better than anyone else. It's the fact that they did it better than everyone else and got the press for that which caused them to be the big name.
I don't know about you, but 40-60% of the reason I started using Google ~1999 is that I had gotten burned by other "web portals" with all of their popup ads, JavaScript malware, and other shit.
If you think this is something that only us Ivory-Tower geeks care about, you are incorrect. My parents recently threw away an entire computer because it was so ridden with spyware and popups.
Google's business is all about trust. If users think they can't depend on it - because the search results suck or because of popups - they can set their homepage elsewhere with a quickness and never come back. There is a reason that the first of Google's top three questions is about popups. Users get pissed off about it, and if they blame Google, it cuts into the bottom line.
A few years ago, there were an whole lot of innovative, more-or-less independent titles produced for the PC: like Sacrifice, Giants Citizen Kabuto, Black & White, Startopia, etc.
A lot of them didn't do so hot. Most of those development groups have folded. Assy Black & White is the only one of the above franchises that's still alive and it's moving more into conventional MMORPG/RTS territory.
Sega Dreamcast probably had the most innovative titles of any system (a monkey with fucking maracas! brilliant!) and it's dead.
What companies "learned" from this is that innovation doesn't sell. What they're starting to learn is that derivative suckfests don't sell either.
The bottom has already fallen out of PC gaming. I don't think it'll be long before it hits the consoles as well.
AFAIK, in the only legal case regarding BSD, the judge ruled that he thought it would be extremely unlikely that AT&T would be able to prove that they still owned the source code, after scientists had gone through and improved/rewritten much of it.
At the end of the case, there were like 2 or 3 BSD files that had to be rewritten. At the end (rumor has it), the case was settled in a hurry because the judge pointed out that there was more (unattributed) Berkeley-infringing code in AT&T Unix than AT&T-infringing code in Berkeley.
ANAL, but is this legal? Don't they have to somehow prove that the documents they're asking for have some relevance to their argument?
It's pretty common for requests like this to be super-broad. Plaintiff: give us everything. Subpoenee: we give you nothing. Plaintiff: okay, how bout half? Subpoenee: leave us alone and we'll give you 40%.
So to a certain extent, it's standard lawyerly practice. However, it's the kind of thing judges tire of quickly if taken too far: "fishing expedition" is what it's called.
Furthermore, what exactly is their argument? Is it still that Linux contains SCO code? How would documents about "enforcement of the GPL" prove existence of SCO code?
SCO must prove not only that their IP was infringed, but also that the infringement was malicious: i.e. harmful and intentional. What they'd like to get out of these documents is a picture of IBM plotting in dark rooms with dirty GNU hippies to destroy SCO's proprietary Unix business by stealing source code and selectively litigating with the GPL. (but IANAL either)
I really have to figure out how to do this scam. Get money from big corporations
They started off taking money from the Swiss. The process seems to go something like this:
1. Get some hack-journalist experience (overfunded and obscure policy journals publish damn near anything; ditto for the Washington Times, as long as it purports to be conservative).
2. Get to know rich people
--a. get cushy internships in college
--b. marry a lawyer at a Big Firm
3. Convince the rich people you know to pay you for hack journalism.
4. Use hack journalism to push dubious foreign-investment schemes
5. PROFIT!!!
The key is that business, academia, law, journalism and government don't really know how to function with one another. They want to, for both good and bad reasons, so a lot of the time they're willing to throw big money conferences, fellowships, publications and "research institutions" that are supposed to grease the wheels.
Added to this, washed-up bigwigs usually want some place to go, and their former friends often set up make-work jobs for them. Lose an election? Why don't you give a lecture once a month at my public policy school. Get shitcanned from your CEO job? Why don't you sit on my government advisory committee. Newspaper column dried up? How bout you be a fellow at my think-tank. And of course, all of these people need gophers, personal assistants, research aides, etc. - a whole industry of suckups scurrying around washups.
The pay is peanuts for the honorees, sometimes even nonexistent. But they like the honorary titles. In exchange, the institution that hands out the titles gets more prestige from having Big Names attached to it. Look at the name-dropping on AdTI website: Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich (Republicans), John Norquist (Democrat). In turn, the aura of Big Names clustered around an institution makes it easier to sucker donors.
That's basically the scam: laundering prestige for money. All you have to do is Know People(tm).
He also says that Brown, the person who interviewed him, was completely clueless and obviously pushing an agenda.
I was semi-surprised at how retarded Brown came off in the article. I mean, everything that's come out of his "institution" would lead one to expect that, but somehow I thought maybe it was just an act for the punters. Turns out he really is that dumb. Weird.
I don't think Tanenbaum is bitter. He just wants to point this out.
Since I don't think anyone here has RTFA'd (/. effect and all) it's not worth judging right now. I think it's pretty classy of Tanenbaum to step up and offer some perspective on the AdTI FUD. If he does that as someone who still doesn't buy into Linux, that makes it all the more credible. Do we really want every response to this to be written by a Linux fanboy?
Treating the micro v. monolithic debate as a solved problem ("microkernels win!") is as idiotic as suggesting that object orientation is the ideal solution to all programming problems.
Apparently, the really trendy kids have decided that microkernels themselves are obsolete, and moved on to something called exokernels. I can't pretend to understand the distinctions involved.
There are some people in Hollywood that realize that movies are about to go the way of Vaudeville in the next twenty years
Vaudeville didn't die. It just passed off the stage and onto movies and television. Especially in comedy, early movie guys like WC Fields, the Marx brothers, and the Three Stooges were all straight off Vaudeville. Early TV guys like Sid Caesar, Uncle Miltie and Jerry Lewis were all right off the Catskills circuit.
Peoples' basic desire for short, funny, dramatic situations never changed. All that changed was the way they were delivered and some of the stylistics involved. Stage sketch -> movie short -> TV variety show -> modern sitcom.
Similarly, TV didn't kill off movies; it changed how they were distributed.
What you are talking about is a shift in the kind of entertainment, rather than the medium. I can't say whether it will or won't happen (I don't think it will; didn't work out for Phillps CDi) but "interactive" stories will never replace fully-scripted ones, ever.
Ah, okay. That was exactly the thing that RMS was unhappy about the Plan 9 license. It would also kills any chance of it being used by most US universities, since nearly all state universities require litigation to happen in the state itself, and many private ones do the same.
The code part of tax software is fairly trivial. The problem is the data part: your code has to be working with good information about tax laws federally and in all fifty states.
So even if you could code in C or C++, it wouldn't matter. You need tax lawyers and CPAs for this project rather than just coders. And they don't work for free.
The problem with AdTI isn't that they're conservatives, or even Neocons. It's that they're goldbrickers. Their intellectual heritage may be fine and dandy, but their financial and organizational connections are shady, their "research" shoddy. Similar situations exist on the Left as well. (BTW: I voted for Bush, and plan to again.)
[John Norquist == fmr. mayor of Milwaukee]
Thank you for your follow-up. For the record, I don't think AdTI is all about Neocon-ism: I think it's about whoring connections into cash in return for slipshod "reports." The whores just happen to mostly be neocons.
Now that I look back on the information in light of your response, it seems that Norquist is a case in point (rather than one of the culprits).
He's a "co-chairman of the advisory board". In other words, he has nothing to do with them, they have nothing to do with him - most people don't bother to check up before accepting no-work honorary titles; some bestowers of honorary titles don't even wait for a response. He gets a stack of shiny reports and a new title, they get a veneer of credibility for their front-group.
Fact: AdTI employs James Kilpatrick as a senior fellow. Kilpatrick made a career defending segregation and apartheid.
Fact: AdTI employs John Norquist, the not-so-big-time younger brother of big-time conservative activist Grover Norquist.
Fact: AdTI president Ken Brown's sole research qualification is a BA in English from George Mason. He has built a career out of milking shady publications, agent-of-foreign-power lobby groups, and dubious business-academica-government incest groups.
Half of the links from the AdTI front page are broken. The other half send you to repositories of op-eds and recorded radio shows.
This is not a research institute. Not even a bad research institute. This is a demi-journalistic hack shop where goldbricking bottomfeeders of right-wing policy studies and editorial-writing filch cash from gullible corporations in return for hastily-written hokum.
Please do not post any more from these con artists. I'm sure they get paid by the hit.
I thought a better unix was linux!
/gui/window/...etc. Also, the network protocol is entirely file-based. Your desktop system (or smartphone, or brower plugin) sees the server or another client as part of the same filesystem that its own resources sit in.
Linux is better mostly because it's free. It does not fix some of the imperfections in the core design (for good reasons; that would break Posix compatibility). According the Inferno Design Principles, Inferno takes Unix ideas and applies them more consistently. For instance: everything is a file. In Inferno, what you're typing in a text editor window can be queried in something like
Plan 9 had a license where you couldn't sue Lucent on an unrelated matter if you used it. They've now changed that (as of June 2003), and Stallman now considers it a "free software license incompatible with the GPL". From the GNU site:
Inferno's license seems to be the same as the new plan 9 one. (But I haven't looked in depth).
To judge from their sample scenarios they're building a doohickey that tells you whether you a) have seen people before or else b) feel socially awkward in a given situation - but only if everyone else is wearing the same doohickey.
Intel must have a lot of cash to burn. They're paying these people to reinvent what the human brain already does better than anything else in order to solve the first problem. For the second problem, the fancy social type events they're hoping to hock this to have already had a well-functioning solution in place for some time now.
As in Ghostbusters (except at the end) this is a classic case of don't cross the beams. French-style social theory and American-style sociology do make a tasty pie together. And throwing McLuhan into it makes things even worse. They could've got the same results by hiring a bunch of popular tech journalists from ~15 years ago
First of all, the site has a Flash intro that's more epilepsy-inducing than the latest Japanese cartoon craze.
Second of all, it's sponsored by Wired. I remember picking up one of the early issues and there was all this stuff about VR. If this were the early 90's, VR would be all over NextFest or whatever it's called.
Anyways, it sounded like a cool idea and all until the inventor dude talked about the actual applications. He had had a party the last night, and everyone had to pretend they were lobsters. They wore the low-res headsets and had to use the special gloves to make pincer movements with their hands.
It was then that I concluded that VR wasn't what it promised to be. Also that Wired was basically a newer Omni, but without the virtue of being published by a pr0n baron.
When he was "popular" it was "Soviet Union."
/. posters is, well, lame.
That's what comsymp pedants like you called it. But most people whose minds weren't completely addled by Leftism just called it "Russia". Hence, in this great man's act, it was always "in Russia".
Anyhow, he was an unfunny dude, so fighting over the semantics of a lame joke about a lame comic by a lame
Stop any time you want.
McBride is at a Loss for Words
Maybe he shouldn't have used them all up before.
This is probably a good thing. In fact, as it presently stands Darl could teach a thing or two about not running your mouth off unnecessarily to a certain other proprietary Unix company.
Like X, Flash can be extremely suckass, but it doesn't have to be. In both cases, this comes from separating policy from mechanism. Since Flash unlike HTML gives you a completely free-form palette on which to paint, it's easy to make it do things that would be more appropriate in a structured medium. And also the opportunity to do useless, self-indulgent intros. To choose a random example: here.
But there are times when Flash is good: when you are dealing with data that does not easily lend itself to html-ish structure (e.g. animated graphics) and when you need to preserve state in a more complex way than forward-back: e.g. Flash games.
That's a trivial example, I know. But recently, my company had to develop a kiosk system for a client: shininess was at a premium, and the underlying dataset (maps of the facility) lent itself to a highly visual interface.
If used in its proper place, Flash is just fine.
The "free as in beer" distinction is what killed the term "Free Software" as a potential part of the non-Asperger's lexicon. Whenever a FOSS advocate uses it, it sounds like they're slagging off beer. Who wants to be associated with a movement like that?
Try "free as in refills" or "free as in puppies" or "handjobs" or something. But don't make yourself sound like a beer-despising communist. That's just bad for America.
Quicktime sux0rz, but you can see all the clips on Flash at the Disney site.
Seems to be a takeoff on the old Captain Marvel (I guess there's no shame in ripping off the world's most generic superhero franchise).
Shazam!
But-wait-there's-more!
She plays Elastigirl!
And Holly Hunter too. Grrrowll... Okay so she's a little old, but her voice is the best part and that's all their using! w00t!