I was at The Next Hope over the summer, where they had Adrian Lamo on a panel along with Emmanuel Goldstein, Kevin Mitnick, BernieS, and Phiber Optik, discussing the ethical issues of becoming an informant. It was obviously a pretty tense panel; Julian Assange was originally supposed to be the keynote speaker the day prior, though obviously he couldn't because by that point he was a wanted man. A lot of people had really, really harsh words for Lamo, and you had to give the guy credit for knowing that and still being willing to show up.
Anyway, at one point during the panel I recall someone asking him how he came to know Manning; his response was that Manning found him after reading a little about him online, and then proceeded share a lot of "personal things" with him. The insinuation seemed to be that it wasn't anything as simple as moral opposition to the war or his role in it; the fact that Lamo left it so open and wouldn't go into details seemed to me that Manning may be gay, and was struggling to deal with being a closeted member of the military under DADT policy. If you check Lamo's Wikipedia page, it classified him as being an "LGBT person from the United States". Maybe Manning spoke at length to Lamo about being a closested homosexual, and the frustrations that came with it, especially being in the military?
I could be way off here, but maybe the reason they don't want to release the logs is more to protect Bradley Manning's right not to be outed, or to have other potentially "embarrassing" things revealed about his private life that are irrelevant to the rest of the case.
Fight the power and the power will fight back!
You're only as good as the system you hack;
If you become a problem you will be replaced--
banned, shut down, erased!
The world has capsized, gone erratic
Constitutional rights have dissolved into static
The truth is based on misinformation--
reality is only a hallucination!
In what way will having a painting in your house enhance your existence. In what way will any artistic expression or personal expression do so?
Difference; I can take down that art. I can't easily remove a tattoo from my skin. I know this is subtle, but it's important.
I've heard many variants of this argument but never really bought the idea. Yeah when you're old and wrinkly they won't look good. Neither will your skin. Seriously, if you find "Reagan's neck" to be dignified i any way you are more twisted than I. The ravages of old age aren't sexy or cool or dignified, but just the opposite. At that point, tattoos are the least of your problems.
Just because your skin will be wrinkled doesn't mean it's a good idea to go for broke and make it wrinkled AND hideous. Some of us want to maintain a modicum of good looks, if possible. Tattoos aren't helpful in this area.
Yes. Well, assuming I had grandkids, I'd absolutely like to tell them why I chose specific and important mathematical equations and discuss with them the scientific importance, cultural relevance, and history of those equations. That would probably be a hundred times more significant and interesting of a conversation than is the norm.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that kids 30-50 years from now are going to be much like kids today in that they would not find that stuff interesting in the least, and use your rambling lectures on the importance of some math equation as further proof that you're off your rocker. Not saying that they're right, but that's probably how they would take it.
Note, I don't have any tattoos right now, but I'm not opposed to them. I used to think getting one required a lot of thought, but they're pretty removable these days so maybe instead of lecturing someone about the details of a tattoo they're planning on getting, why not just make suggestions about what would be the most awesomely geeky equation and stop being so patronizing.
I'm not opposed to tattoos either; I'm just opposed to shallow decision-making. No matter how you slice it, this guy's presentation of the question just reeks of it; and sadly, it's demonstrative of a trend I've noticed over the last decade or so of considering tattoos more or less temporary. It still costs a lot of money to get them removed; it's not exactly something you just walk into a clinic and get done in an hour. I have enough friends with tattoo regret to be aware of the details. It's just not pretty.
Even beyond the "professional" consequences, it's a remarkably stupid thing to do. A lot of people are dishonest about their interests in getting a tattoo - it's all about fulfilling some vain ideal of what you want others to think of you, and does little to enhance any actual substance on your part. All it says is that you care so little about yourself and your body that you'll gladly deface it to for some kitschy image. This will make for a great novelty at a party or con, sure, but nobody will care after the first time they see it. After that, you have to live with knowing that you thought so little of yourself that you actually prostituted your flesh to some kitschy idea.
Like an idea, or symbol, or picture a lot? Get a fucking t-shirt of it. This has the advantage of getting the cheap laugh at the party, but you can also walk home with your dignity relatively intact. It takes a remarkably low level of self-respect to devalue yourself by attaching the whole of your existence to a few cheap symbols.
In what way will having these tattoos enhance your existence? Do you really foresee finding it "cool" ten years from now? Or twenty? If you have to ask what it is you want tattooed, that should be sign enough that it isn't something you want permanently engraved into your skin.
Think of how dignified those tattoos will look when you age and your whole body looks like Reagan's neck. Do you really want to explain to your grandkids why you thought a math equation or Mighty Mouse or a kanji character that means "desk" was something that held enough meaning that it required you to permanently scar your body with it?
This applies to everyone who resolves to get a tattoo before deciding what it is of, btw.
In some cases, your work is your social network. I work as a sysadmin for an insurance agency, and probably the most important day-to-day function for the insurance agents here is keeping in touch with clients. The ones that are "hip" enough to know about Facebook et al can see the value these things could have in doing business, but nobody has any delusions of being able to use one in any useful fashion because of regulatory compliance.
First, the only social networking site you're allowed to have a profile on is LinkedIn, which is fitting because it's designed from the ground up to do nothing but exchange business information in the most factual and boring way possible. Access to Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter is blocked in the office by our corporate-run firewall, and if you get caught discussing business with clients on a personal profile with one of these sites, you're subject to being written up.
Second, every change, even correcting a typo, requires submitting paperwork and waiting a matter of weeks to hear a "yea" or "nay" from corporate; given that timeliness is a key factor in most social networking sites, this fact alone renders them completely useless.
Most end up passing on making a profile at all, since it ends up being a huge hassle for little benefit compared to just calling people and meeting in person the old-fashioned way. I find it hard to believe there isn't some better middle-ground that corporate entities can find which would leverage communication technologies with adequate record-keeping.
Because public schools aren't an invitation for indoctrination? What you're saying is, you don't want them being indoctrinated with things you don't like. In other words, you're just another control freak.
Hardly.
The difference between public schools and home schooling in this case is that there is much more scrutiny in a public school. Though indoctrination most certainly happens in schools, it can at least be identified and handled, either through the media or in the courts - often both.
If you can identify a mechanism in homeschooling which prevents Mr. Smith from telling his child that evolution is a lie from the devil and that the world is 6000 years old, I'd be glad to entertain the idea in a more serious light. But until then, public school is the lesser of two evils.
The existence and history of the homeschooling movement indicates very much to the contrary. What is a homeschooling household, but a grassroots school sprouted up around a single family? A properly designed voucher system would encourage groups of parents, when they feel they have no better alternative, to homeschool their kids together. That's a school! The vouchers would help with the cost of educational materials, and what more is needed?
I would not trust such a system like homeschooling to objectively and effectively educate most children. Relying on parents is an invitation for indoctrination and intellectual inbreeding. Forget teaching kids about skills that aren't already developed in adults, much less the ability to cope with different environments and alternative viewpoints.
You seem to have absorbed the idea that education is something that comes only from large institutions. The truth is, education is a thoroughly individual activity that requires nothing but access to information and to people who already understand that information. In this Internet age, those things are more readily available than ever.
No, I've absorbed the idea that people who have achieved a modicum of qualification are better suited to instruct our youth than parents who have a vested interest in protecting children from the scary world outside their home.
This doesn't make any sense. There's no limit on the number of schools that can be created. Vouchers make it easier for parents to remove their children from failing schools and put them in better ones. Poorly run schools will quickly lose all their students and shut down. It's the current system that keeps failing schools in operation, not a voucher system!
Schools do not just appear. They take a great deal of financing and legal paperwork. Your dream of grassroots school systems sprouting up is fantastically misguided.
Yes, vouchers help some parents place their students into better schools. Undoubtedly. But what you are breezing over is the effect this has on the other students who aren't quite so lucky. When considering educational models, you need to give attention to all students - not just the bright ones. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and all that. That is where vouchers fail.
I've never understood why the left, which has supported the idea of a single-payer health care system, can't get its head around vouchers, which amount to a single-payer education system. No, a voucher system isn't perfect; yes, there will be abuses. But look at the ongoing train wreck of a system we have now!
In a voucher system, Jaime Escalante would have been massively successful, probably at the top of an organization teaching thousands of students. So what if some fundamentalists use their vouchers to send their kids to religious schools? Vouchers would finally give us a way to end the culture of mediocrity that has such a death grip on our schools now.
Chiefly because exposing school systems to a competitive market implicitly accepts that some schools will fall into even worse decay that they currently are. Poor schools become poorer, with little funding to hire better teachers or acquire better books.
As schools are not objects which can house an infinite number of students, some students will be forced to attend those schools caught in that downward spiral - schools that are not only sub-par, but lacking funding and interaction with a diverse body of students, since all the brightest have made it into the "nice" schools.
When you consider that some students are going to be shafted big time by this arrangement, you may see why some (not just on the left) don't like the voucher system. Education after 18 is no longer compulsory, so good luck compensating for those all-important developmental years of education.
...I see this article which says Google is attempting a sort of compromise.
Google Inc. will shift its search engine for China off the mainland but won't shut it down altogether, and it will maintain other operations in the country. It's an attempt to balance its stance against censorship with its desire to profit from an explosively growing Internet market.
On Monday afternoon, visitors to Google.cn were being redirected to Google's Chinese-language service based in Hong Kong. The page said, according to a Google translation, "Welcome to Google Search in China's new home."
Google's attempt at a compromise could resolve a 2 1/2-month impasse pitting the world's most powerful Internet company against the government of the world's most populous country.
Gates is as fearful as he is feared, and these days he worries most about the Internet, Usenet and the World Wide Web, which threaten his software monopoly by shifting the nexus of control from stand-alone computers to the network that connects them. The Internet, by design, has no central operating system that Microsoft or anybody else can patent and license. And its libertarian culture is devoted to open--that is to say, nonproprietary--standards, none of which were set by Microsoft.
Gates moved quickly this year to embrace the Net, although it sometimes seemed he was trying to wrap Microsoft's long arms around it.
I remember reading Gates' book "The Road Ahead" something like seven years ago and being surprised at how wrong he was in his estimation of the impact that mainstream Internet connectivity would have. I wish I could get the exact quotes, but there were a few telling sentences where he comes off pretty clearly as dismissive that net connectivity would become anything more than a cute PC accessory. I'm still not sure if that was his genuine line of reasoning, or of it was just wishful thinking, but I think the point was clear that Microsoft was stacking their chips against net-based services, insisting that locally-run software was going to be the way of the future.
Now they are investing in what Google has already been doing and doing well for years, following their trend of copying other business' models instead of innovating on their own. I'm sure this will work out well for them.
Videos like this are why I go to Digg, not Slashdot. I come to Slashdot for tech news, There are already quite enough sites with this kind of crap on them, and I don't see why/. should be yet another.....crap, and this site doesn't even have a "bury" button!
It does; there should be a "minus" sign next to the title that you can click on to "demote" the story. You can then tag it appropriately (binspam, dupe, notthebest, stale, stupid, slownesday, offtopic).
David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) did a fantastic article for Wired a few years ago about this. He discusses (with details!) how the music industry works, some of the "models" of releasing music, and the economics/incentives to each one. Great read.
On a semi-related note, it's also worth looking at Steve Albini's now classic essay "The Problem With Music", which showcases how horrible the modern music industry is to musicians. It was written before the whole "digital revolution", but it helps remind me why I don't feel sympathy for suits in the music business.
Q: Didn't you sell MySQL to Sun? Do you want to have the cake and eat it too?
First a little background:
I started to work on a code that would later become MySQL in 1982. MySQL was released in 1995 under a dual licensing scheme that allowed David Axmark and me to very quickly work full time on developing MySQL.
I lost the rights to the MySQL copyright in 2001 when MySQL AB was created and we allowed investors to come in. We needed to bring in investors to be able to create a full-scale working company to satisfy big customers and to be able to hire more developers and take MySQL to the next stage. To ensure that MySQL would continue to be free, David and I stated in the shareholder agreement that MySQL AB would have to keep MySQL under an open source license. The problem with a shareholder agreement is that it is terminated when the company is sold. This is just how things works.
David and I however thought that this would not be a problem, as we would help ensure that MySQL would be bought by a good owner.
I continued to lead the MySQL project and have been one of the leaders and top contributors for the project since then.
When the sales process to Sun started, I was at the time not anymore in the MySQL Board (just a MySQL shareholder). I was just informed about the deal, after it was agreed to. I did get money for my shares, that is true, but it did not change in any way my dedication or involvement in the MySQL project.
Imagine a mechanic telling his brother-in-law "pay me for parts and labor, or just take it to the dealership". I can't imagine this. At the very best, I can imagine the mechanic saying "XYZ is probably wrong, I don't have the time to fix it, take it to RST and tell them ABC. They should be able to fix it for $HIJ"
It doesn't have to be a moral hazard. Chances are, you will charge your family less than what they would pay at a shop. You probably also have better availability, and more liability (since I'm assuming if you do a bad job, you'll suffer a lot more than a stranger at a shop would).
I know many people would argue that its immoral to charge family for tech services, given that they've probably helped you, y'know, grow up safely and possibly even helped you develop those skills. But these are intangible things that shouldn't be measured or compared in the first place.
What seems evident about the original poster is that his family doesn't seem to value the work he does, since they proceed right ahead into undoing it immediately after he fixes it. If I were a mechanic who fixed cars for my family members at a discounted rate, I would probably be within my moral rights to threaten ceasing the discounts if it became apparent that they were abusing the car I was fixing and then bringing it right back to me. Clearly, they aren't being considerate of my time and skills, and asking them to consider compensating me financially can be a polite way of enlightening them on this matter.
Stop doing it for free. Either charge them for your time, or tell them to get it repaired at the store. I think you might be amazed how interested they become in browsing the net safely and taking care of their PC when they have a financial motivation to do so.
I know a lot of people have a hard time mustering up the courage to tell their folks to pay up, but take my advise - you're doing them a favor in the end (not to mention giving them a lesson the value of what you do).
Say what you want about aesthetics, but Geocities gave a lot of young people (myself included) their first taste of web design. Long before cookie-cutter social networking sites made web coding languages trivial, services like Geocities and Angelfire were giving people all the tools to build a personal web site with. Sure, they weren't all winners (by a long shot), but there were enough diamonds in the rough that I still have a soft spot for the days when a lot of young kids actually bothered to learn HTML and CSS so they could make their page look a little nicer.
We often overlook the idea of using web sites as a form of expression, but that's exactly what a lot of the self-made websites were back then. And I remember seeing a lot of really amazing layouts being made by people who otherwise had no interest in anything techy, a little after CSS hit the mainstream.
Say what you will, but Geocities got a lot of young people - myself included - to get their hands dirty with web design. I, for one, will miss it.
That's precisely how many consulting companies make their daily bread. Hell, nothing wrong with that. But you have to admit, it seems a bit misleading to claim that something like a server can be setup "without the assistance of someone who actually knows what they are doing."
That is a recipe for disaster waiting to happen. I've been in the unfortunate spot of representing a consulting company called in to configure a Mac OSX Server purchased by less-than-knowledgeable employees. It was a small business, about 5-10 people, that did contract-based graphic design/marketing. They loved Apple stuff, and were suckered into a completely unnecessary Xserve system, complete with overpriced external rack-mount tape backup drive. Being young and mildly tech-conscious, they overestimated their ability to manage this thing, doubtlessly egged on by some "whiz" at a Genius Bar waxing their balls about how well they'd be able to run it on their own.
Wrong. Granted, it's not hard to someone like me who does this sort of thing for a living, but managing backups was way out of their league. The backups weren't even running, though they remained blissfully unaware of this fact, and setting up network shares/user permissions was beyond their capability. This ended up costing them way more than ever needed to spend to get what amounted to a file server up and running, and I blame this on bad marketing.
Oh, we tried to convince them to sell their ridiculously overpowered server equipment before it depreciated in value, but they were insistent on using it, because it's Apple.
Misleading marketing like this is exactly what drives the borderline masochistic relationship Apple nuts have with Apple. All I can do is shake my head.
"The almost completely guided setup process means that people can set up relatively sophisticated services without the assistance of someone who actually knows what they are doing."
Slashdot Mirror
Could be fun for educational projects...
Anyway, at one point during the panel I recall someone asking him how he came to know Manning; his response was that Manning found him after reading a little about him online, and then proceeded share a lot of "personal things" with him. The insinuation seemed to be that it wasn't anything as simple as moral opposition to the war or his role in it; the fact that Lamo left it so open and wouldn't go into details seemed to me that Manning may be gay, and was struggling to deal with being a closeted member of the military under DADT policy. If you check Lamo's Wikipedia page, it classified him as being an "LGBT person from the United States". Maybe Manning spoke at length to Lamo about being a closested homosexual, and the frustrations that came with it, especially being in the military?
I could be way off here, but maybe the reason they don't want to release the logs is more to protect Bradley Manning's right not to be outed, or to have other potentially "embarrassing" things revealed about his private life that are irrelevant to the rest of the case.
Fight the power and the power will fight back!
You're only as good as the system you hack;
If you become a problem you will be replaced--
banned, shut down, erased!
The world has capsized, gone erratic
Constitutional rights have dissolved into static
The truth is based on misinformation--
reality is only a hallucination!
-MDFMK, ©ontrol
that we've clearly got out budget priorities straight in this country.
In what way will having a painting in your house enhance your existence. In what way will any artistic expression or personal expression do so?
Difference; I can take down that art. I can't easily remove a tattoo from my skin. I know this is subtle, but it's important.
I've heard many variants of this argument but never really bought the idea. Yeah when you're old and wrinkly they won't look good. Neither will your skin. Seriously, if you find "Reagan's neck" to be dignified i any way you are more twisted than I. The ravages of old age aren't sexy or cool or dignified, but just the opposite. At that point, tattoos are the least of your problems.
Just because your skin will be wrinkled doesn't mean it's a good idea to go for broke and make it wrinkled AND hideous. Some of us want to maintain a modicum of good looks, if possible. Tattoos aren't helpful in this area.
Yes. Well, assuming I had grandkids, I'd absolutely like to tell them why I chose specific and important mathematical equations and discuss with them the scientific importance, cultural relevance, and history of those equations. That would probably be a hundred times more significant and interesting of a conversation than is the norm.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that kids 30-50 years from now are going to be much like kids today in that they would not find that stuff interesting in the least, and use your rambling lectures on the importance of some math equation as further proof that you're off your rocker. Not saying that they're right, but that's probably how they would take it.
Note, I don't have any tattoos right now, but I'm not opposed to them. I used to think getting one required a lot of thought, but they're pretty removable these days so maybe instead of lecturing someone about the details of a tattoo they're planning on getting, why not just make suggestions about what would be the most awesomely geeky equation and stop being so patronizing.
I'm not opposed to tattoos either; I'm just opposed to shallow decision-making. No matter how you slice it, this guy's presentation of the question just reeks of it; and sadly, it's demonstrative of a trend I've noticed over the last decade or so of considering tattoos more or less temporary. It still costs a lot of money to get them removed; it's not exactly something you just walk into a clinic and get done in an hour. I have enough friends with tattoo regret to be aware of the details. It's just not pretty.
Like an idea, or symbol, or picture a lot? Get a fucking t-shirt of it. This has the advantage of getting the cheap laugh at the party, but you can also walk home with your dignity relatively intact. It takes a remarkably low level of self-respect to devalue yourself by attaching the whole of your existence to a few cheap symbols.
Think of how dignified those tattoos will look when you age and your whole body looks like Reagan's neck. Do you really want to explain to your grandkids why you thought a math equation or Mighty Mouse or a kanji character that means "desk" was something that held enough meaning that it required you to permanently scar your body with it?
This applies to everyone who resolves to get a tattoo before deciding what it is of, btw.
Again - no idea whether this is true or just hype, but thought it was worth mentioning.
First, the only social networking site you're allowed to have a profile on is LinkedIn, which is fitting because it's designed from the ground up to do nothing but exchange business information in the most factual and boring way possible. Access to Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter is blocked in the office by our corporate-run firewall, and if you get caught discussing business with clients on a personal profile with one of these sites, you're subject to being written up.
Second, every change, even correcting a typo, requires submitting paperwork and waiting a matter of weeks to hear a "yea" or "nay" from corporate; given that timeliness is a key factor in most social networking sites, this fact alone renders them completely useless.
Most end up passing on making a profile at all, since it ends up being a huge hassle for little benefit compared to just calling people and meeting in person the old-fashioned way. I find it hard to believe there isn't some better middle-ground that corporate entities can find which would leverage communication technologies with adequate record-keeping.
Because public schools aren't an invitation for indoctrination? What you're saying is, you don't want them being indoctrinated with things you don't like. In other words, you're just another control freak.
Hardly.
The difference between public schools and home schooling in this case is that there is much more scrutiny in a public school. Though indoctrination most certainly happens in schools, it can at least be identified and handled, either through the media or in the courts - often both.
If you can identify a mechanism in homeschooling which prevents Mr. Smith from telling his child that evolution is a lie from the devil and that the world is 6000 years old, I'd be glad to entertain the idea in a more serious light. But until then, public school is the lesser of two evils.
The existence and history of the homeschooling movement indicates very much to the contrary. What is a homeschooling household, but a grassroots school sprouted up around a single family? A properly designed voucher system would encourage groups of parents, when they feel they have no better alternative, to homeschool their kids together. That's a school! The vouchers would help with the cost of educational materials, and what more is needed?
I would not trust such a system like homeschooling to objectively and effectively educate most children. Relying on parents is an invitation for indoctrination and intellectual inbreeding. Forget teaching kids about skills that aren't already developed in adults, much less the ability to cope with different environments and alternative viewpoints.
You seem to have absorbed the idea that education is something that comes only from large institutions. The truth is, education is a thoroughly individual activity that requires nothing but access to information and to people who already understand that information. In this Internet age, those things are more readily available than ever.
No, I've absorbed the idea that people who have achieved a modicum of qualification are better suited to instruct our youth than parents who have a vested interest in protecting children from the scary world outside their home.
Schools do not just appear. They take a great deal of financing and legal paperwork. Your dream of grassroots school systems sprouting up is fantastically misguided.
Yes, vouchers help some parents place their students into better schools. Undoubtedly. But what you are breezing over is the effect this has on the other students who aren't quite so lucky. When considering educational models, you need to give attention to all students - not just the bright ones. The squeaky wheel gets the grease, and all that. That is where vouchers fail.
I've never understood why the left, which has supported the idea of a single-payer health care system, can't get its head around vouchers, which amount to a single-payer education system. No, a voucher system isn't perfect; yes, there will be abuses. But look at the ongoing train wreck of a system we have now!
In a voucher system, Jaime Escalante would have been massively successful, probably at the top of an organization teaching thousands of students. So what if some fundamentalists use their vouchers to send their kids to religious schools? Vouchers would finally give us a way to end the culture of mediocrity that has such a death grip on our schools now.
Chiefly because exposing school systems to a competitive market implicitly accepts that some schools will fall into even worse decay that they currently are. Poor schools become poorer, with little funding to hire better teachers or acquire better books.
As schools are not objects which can house an infinite number of students, some students will be forced to attend those schools caught in that downward spiral - schools that are not only sub-par, but lacking funding and interaction with a diverse body of students, since all the brightest have made it into the "nice" schools.
When you consider that some students are going to be shafted big time by this arrangement, you may see why some (not just on the left) don't like the voucher system. Education after 18 is no longer compulsory, so good luck compensating for those all-important developmental years of education.
...I see this article which says Google is attempting a sort of compromise.
Google Inc. will shift its search engine for China off the mainland but won't shut it down altogether, and it will maintain other operations in the country. It's an attempt to balance its stance against censorship with its desire to profit from an explosively growing Internet market.
On Monday afternoon, visitors to Google.cn were being redirected to Google's Chinese-language service based in Hong Kong. The page said, according to a Google translation, "Welcome to Google Search in China's new home."
Google's attempt at a compromise could resolve a 2 1/2-month impasse pitting the world's most powerful Internet company against the government of the world's most populous country.
Gates is as fearful as he is feared, and these days he worries most about the Internet, Usenet and the World Wide Web, which threaten his software monopoly by shifting the nexus of control from stand-alone computers to the network that connects them. The Internet, by design, has no central operating system that Microsoft or anybody else can patent and license. And its libertarian culture is devoted to open--that is to say, nonproprietary--standards, none of which were set by Microsoft.
Gates moved quickly this year to embrace the Net, although it sometimes seemed he was trying to wrap Microsoft's long arms around it.
I remember reading Gates' book "The Road Ahead" something like seven years ago and being surprised at how wrong he was in his estimation of the impact that mainstream Internet connectivity would have. I wish I could get the exact quotes, but there were a few telling sentences where he comes off pretty clearly as dismissive that net connectivity would become anything more than a cute PC accessory. I'm still not sure if that was his genuine line of reasoning, or of it was just wishful thinking, but I think the point was clear that Microsoft was stacking their chips against net-based services, insisting that locally-run software was going to be the way of the future.
Now they are investing in what Google has already been doing and doing well for years, following their trend of copying other business' models instead of innovating on their own. I'm sure this will work out well for them.
Videos like this are why I go to Digg, not Slashdot. I come to Slashdot for tech news, There are already quite enough sites with this kind of crap on them, and I don't see why /. should be yet another.....crap, and this site doesn't even have a "bury" button!
It does; there should be a "minus" sign next to the title that you can click on to "demote" the story. You can then tag it appropriately (binspam, dupe, notthebest, stale, stupid, slownesday, offtopic).
The best part of this post:
50% Informative
30% Underrated
20% Funny
God bless the /. crowd :)
David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame) did a fantastic article for Wired a few years ago about this. He discusses (with details!) how the music industry works, some of the "models" of releasing music, and the economics/incentives to each one. Great read.
On a semi-related note, it's also worth looking at Steve Albini's now classic essay "The Problem With Music", which showcases how horrible the modern music industry is to musicians. It was written before the whole "digital revolution", but it helps remind me why I don't feel sympathy for suits in the music business.
FTA:
Q: Didn't you sell MySQL to Sun? Do you want to have the cake and eat it too?
First a little background:
I started to work on a code that would later become MySQL in 1982. MySQL was released in 1995 under a dual licensing scheme that allowed David Axmark and me to very quickly work full time on developing MySQL.
I lost the rights to the MySQL copyright in 2001 when MySQL AB was created and we allowed investors to come in. We needed to bring in investors to be able to create a full-scale working company to satisfy big customers and to be able to hire more developers and take MySQL to the next stage. To ensure that MySQL would continue to be free, David and I stated in the shareholder agreement that MySQL AB would have to keep MySQL under an open source license. The problem with a shareholder agreement is that it is terminated when the company is sold. This is just how things works.
David and I however thought that this would not be a problem, as we would help ensure that MySQL would be bought by a good owner.
I continued to lead the MySQL project and have been one of the leaders and top contributors for the project since then.
When the sales process to Sun started, I was at the time not anymore in the MySQL Board (just a MySQL shareholder). I was just informed about the deal, after it was agreed to. I did get money for my shares, that is true, but it did not change in any way my dedication or involvement in the MySQL project.
StarWarsHolidaySpecial.com
Fan site about the special...worth checking out for more details on the subject.
Imagine a mechanic telling his brother-in-law "pay me for parts and labor, or just take it to the dealership". I can't imagine this. At the very best, I can imagine the mechanic saying "XYZ is probably wrong, I don't have the time to fix it, take it to RST and tell them ABC. They should be able to fix it for $HIJ"
It doesn't have to be a moral hazard. Chances are, you will charge your family less than what they would pay at a shop. You probably also have better availability, and more liability (since I'm assuming if you do a bad job, you'll suffer a lot more than a stranger at a shop would).
I know many people would argue that its immoral to charge family for tech services, given that they've probably helped you, y'know, grow up safely and possibly even helped you develop those skills. But these are intangible things that shouldn't be measured or compared in the first place.
What seems evident about the original poster is that his family doesn't seem to value the work he does, since they proceed right ahead into undoing it immediately after he fixes it. If I were a mechanic who fixed cars for my family members at a discounted rate, I would probably be within my moral rights to threaten ceasing the discounts if it became apparent that they were abusing the car I was fixing and then bringing it right back to me. Clearly, they aren't being considerate of my time and skills, and asking them to consider compensating me financially can be a polite way of enlightening them on this matter.
I know a lot of people have a hard time mustering up the courage to tell their folks to pay up, but take my advise - you're doing them a favor in the end (not to mention giving them a lesson the value of what you do).
We often overlook the idea of using web sites as a form of expression, but that's exactly what a lot of the self-made websites were back then. And I remember seeing a lot of really amazing layouts being made by people who otherwise had no interest in anything techy, a little after CSS hit the mainstream.
Say what you will, but Geocities got a lot of young people - myself included - to get their hands dirty with web design. I, for one, will miss it.
That is a recipe for disaster waiting to happen. I've been in the unfortunate spot of representing a consulting company called in to configure a Mac OSX Server purchased by less-than-knowledgeable employees. It was a small business, about 5-10 people, that did contract-based graphic design/marketing. They loved Apple stuff, and were suckered into a completely unnecessary Xserve system, complete with overpriced external rack-mount tape backup drive. Being young and mildly tech-conscious, they overestimated their ability to manage this thing, doubtlessly egged on by some "whiz" at a Genius Bar waxing their balls about how well they'd be able to run it on their own.
Wrong. Granted, it's not hard to someone like me who does this sort of thing for a living, but managing backups was way out of their league. The backups weren't even running, though they remained blissfully unaware of this fact, and setting up network shares/user permissions was beyond their capability. This ended up costing them way more than ever needed to spend to get what amounted to a file server up and running, and I blame this on bad marketing.
Oh, we tried to convince them to sell their ridiculously overpowered server equipment before it depreciated in value, but they were insistent on using it, because it's Apple.
Misleading marketing like this is exactly what drives the borderline masochistic relationship Apple nuts have with Apple. All I can do is shake my head.
...call me skeptical on that one.