Has anyone else noticed how MSNBC gets to Microsoft stories first?
I first noticed the story via my CNNfn Slashbox (the MS-phobic can, at least temporarily, peruse CNN's 12:10 Redmond-time take here -- there's no time stamp on the MSNBC.com story, but surely they had no "world exclusive"). While I'd love to put MSNBC in the conspiracy-theory in-box, I'm pretty sure this story (actually a Waggener Edstrom press release) reached every organization at roughly the same time.
Dammit, Real- just give us the ability to zoom video!
There's that magnifying-glass icon. It activates a small menu, and you can double the image size. For some reason I associated it with "search" all this time. On Windows, I just right-clicked to bring up the menu, blissfully ignorant of the magnifying glass. I was lost when right-clicking didn't work in Linux.
I'll eat my previous words. It even streams MP3s, including those without the.mp3 suffix. But you still can't zoom video. Maybe in a year or two there will be a beta; this thing's still flaky.
And do they plan on delivering anything more than this barely-OK alpha? I'm beginning to doubt it. And there's still no non-x86-Linux support. I'll stop whining now; if you've tried the "first" alpha, you probably have an idea of what sucks about it.
Of course, this is still better than MS, who promised a new NetSho^H^H^H^H^H^HMedia Play^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HWindows Media Player client for Linux for over a year, then switched to the "What's a Linux?" routine.
The whole point of the Katz articles was never wether they were a sad bunch of outcasts or not! It was allways about hte reaction that people had to it. The fact that everyone assumed that they were Goths, satanists, gay, etc. and then proceeded to step all over the rights of anyone even remotly 'diferent'. IMHO Katz's article now has even *more* relevancy since all those reactions have been shown to based on untruths.
It has more relevancy because the reactions here were equally based on untruths. See further down, subjects: "Interesting Slashdot prejudices" and "The Mirror of Columbine". The bottom line for me was: American violence-as-usual at Columbine, and a bit of hypocrisy here at/., amongst other places. YMMV. The dead remain dead, no matter how much gasbagging we do.
If there is one thing that this whole business is good for, its exposing mainstream prejudices which run deeper than colour or sex! If the gunmen had been jocks or 'popular' types and had gone after nerds and geeks the same way, probably very little would have been said in the mainstream media about the motives of the gunmen, and it would have been put down as another 'shooting without apparent motive'.
But look at the attention that we gave it here, just because the "outsiders" involved were perceived as "geeks". American history, past and present, is rife with outsiders, from Indians and slaves to immigrants, hippies, communists, and geeks. To have gone singularly overboard about Columbine (and geekdom) on/. was just as prejudiced as the mainstream's biases. There was all this rampant sympathy over the slights suffered by "us", while the slights suffered by other us-es probably don't even register on our respective radars.
An outsider killed a bunch of folks in Fort Worth last week. Was he really any different from Harris and Klebold, other than being a generation older? I don't think so.
We made much ado about this stuff, missing out on the sheer cussedness of the assailants. They weren't firing the first salvos of some Geek Revolution; it wasn't some White Power Trip; it wasn't fill-in-the-blank with your own little pet advocacy topic. Even Pat Robertson tried to hype Cassie Bernall into Great Christian Martyr status. We all overreacted: me, you, the media, school administrators, my cat, and even Linus and Elvis.
Harris and Klebold were simply illustrating a truism uttered by H. Rap Brown back in the 1960s: "Violence is as American as Cherry Pie." (Katz, you're old enough to remember that one). Violence (literal, threatened, or figurative) is the all-purpose "solution" to problems, whether a non-compliant kid, a non-compliant foreign country, a non-compliant workforce, or whatever.
If it takes a village to raise a child, then Americans (and I myself am occasionally one) are the village idiots who helped raise Harris and Klebold.
By the time Unisys finds me (somewhere on the outskirts of the fine capital of Name of Small Island Nation Withheld), their little shakedown stunt will be history. Right?
Right?
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Re: What makes other news service more accurate??
on
Wired on Slashdot
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· Score: 1
On one hand it says "Slashdot is not journalism but rather just a list of links to other people's articles", then on the other hand it questions the accuracy of Slashdot's journalism -- how can Slashdot be innaccurate if all it has is links to other people's articles, such as Wired and ZDNN???
There's also, on occasion, links to rumors and PR, or inaccurate info in the submittor's summary. It's not simply a bare link to an article at a news site.
Personally I think Slashdot is/more/ accurate because of the moderation system. Eventually the truth shines through as comments get scored upward.A great example is yesterday's post of a guy who claimed he solved the IPv4 addressing shortage.
[...]
But here on Slashdot there are many techies who know better and clued the rest of us in that the guy is a nut -- that's the kind of insight you get here on Slashdot.
Fine, if the matter is a straightforward technical or historical issue. But the moderation system -- in general -- is only as good as the subject matter and the moderators./. provides the means for a poster to be more accurate than the journalist in the linked article. But often it's all just a matter of opinion. The moderation itself doesn't always do the trick -- it can, and will at times, devolve into fruitless Mob Rule. I keep my threshold at -1, because the moderators often miss out on good comments; conversely, it means I get to see all the worst pack-mentality or adolescent-preening posts. Sometimes it isn't worth it for me to wade through the muck to find one of the "good" posts.
The only cure for bad journalism is good journalism. It doesn't matter what sort of "new paradigm" (or old one) produces it. Sometimes getting a useful nugget from/. is like an evening of root canal.
Oh, you mean, like the Grateful Dead? This was their modus operandi for a long time. Sure, they sold albums, but they also encouraged fans to record and trade recordings of their live shows.
Everybody brings up The Dead. What percentage of bands since 1965 have succeeded by using that business model? How many people have bought, for example, Honor Role (great late-80's Richmond punkish band) t-shirts? Or 3 Teens Kill 4 (mid-80's NYC crappy artsy-fartsy band) posters? They "gave away" their music, in the form of promo disques sent to (college and community) radio stations; they sold LPs at rock-bottom prices at gigs. They probably wouldn't have minded the trading of tapes. Could they have lived on that revenue, plus their cut of $5 cover charges or $10 tickets? The fact of their non-existence and obscurity may be an indicator that they couldn't. You can't hang an argument on one San Francisco band's freak success story (one that, I might add, was aided and abetted by those Evil Dudes at Warner Brothers - had they not signed with a Big Label, one that worked to get them airplay in the then-burgeoning medium of FM rock radio, would the Free Thing have worked? I doubt it).
Try talking with some musicians, or indie producers, or people who hold seminars to teach you how to actually break even. Your mind might snap, but better that than to get eviscerated by your own naivete.
I may have dealt with these issues and entities (indie labels, minor majors, college radio, booking agencies, tours from hell, etc; we didn't have seminars back then, or self-appointed "experts") back when you were in diapers, lad, so take a hike.
My points were: a) the marketing muscle comes via the Label-Broadcaster Complex, regardless of who foots the bill - this, in many cases, is what enables the Large Revenue Streams. b) I doubt that many musicians buy into the absolutist "information wants to be free" shtick - everybody wants to (eventually) Get Paid. c) we're straying far from the point of my original post, which was b).
Don't have a cow, a chicken, or a llama. OK? Sorry for the delay.
I don't think it will be too long before a Linux [Media Player] client pops up...
I admire your optimism. I've never seen a link to a Linux beta (you gotta link? share it!:), as has been mentioned. I've seen almost a year's worth of "Unix client coming soon" messages at the NetShow/WMP site. I suspect a beta will come out around the same time as the IE and Office Linux betas:)
actualy, I was readin in the latest issue of roling stone that most *artists* arn't aganst MP3s. when was the last time you hear an *artist* come out against MP3? i don't think I ever have. Its beacuse the record companys gett all the $$$, for the artiest *most* of the money comes from ticket sales, not records.
infact its the exact reverce of what you are describing, only the largest bands make money off records. next time get your facts straight before posting.
As someone else pointed out, if they're in Rolling Stone, they're one of the brand names to which I referred -- they have a vested interest in the humongous revenue streams that a big label provides them, via promotion, even if the royalty deal could be better. If they're for MP3, fine, but I don't think they're in favor of the business model the previous poster outlined (go take a look). They're no doubt in favor of the free-MP3-as-promotional-single angle; they're no doubt in favor of the MP3-as-free-publicity angle, especially if their career has stalled. But they still expect their royalties, whether from Big Brother or from a New Deal, whether from CD, DVD, MP*, or whatever.
So what about VQF? Didn't VQF have better sound quality, compress faster, and smaller file sizes (so I heard)? Sure, you had to pay for a VQF player, but you're probably going to have to pay for an SDMI player too.
Actually, you can go over to VQF.com and download a client binary for free (encoders as well). Good quality, smaller file sizes, good for modem-rate streaming too. The problem with its widespread adoption seems to be Yamaha's lack of haste in finishing and promoting it (they seem to be blissfully ignorant of the concept of "internet time"). And, of course, they still have the ever-popular "What's a Linux?" attitude, when last I checked.
Rather than fight a losing fight the RIAA needs to change their approach. Give away the music, but sell the T-shirst, the concerts, the theme parks, etc.
It's usually the absolute worst of music that achieves the sort of brand-name status that makes that kind of business model even halfway viable. There's thousands of bands that would starve if they had to live on the gate and the tchotchkes (have you seen gas prices lately?). It's as if you're asking McDonald's or M*cr*s*ft to just give away everything and make their loot off of some damn fine t-shirts. Yes, things will have to change vis-à-vis distribution, but hell no, most labels (and musicians) won't want to go your "let them eat cake" route.
Power Computing. It was competition. So it was removed.
Didn't the clonemakers overstep the bounds of the licensing agreements?
Quicktime. It once was just a nice free client. Now it's got a 'Pro' edition. Plus the fact that Apple is gripping the codecs like they're made of pure gold.
Does Apple own all the codecs, or are other companies also guilty of hoarding them? My guess is that Apple's hands are, to some extent, tied.
Whatever. I, too, am pissed at the lack of a client and at the miniscule possibility of running BeOS on some fancy (hypothetical for now) quad-G4 box. I can't do a thing about the latter, but what can we, The Big Bad Linux Community, do about the former? Wasn't there a petition a while back about getting a QuickTime client?
With all due respect to Katz, Rushkoff's essay is a much better -- and more succinct -- explanation of Wired's sux-ness (and rools-ness) than Katz's "backstage at the revolution" eulogy. Thanks for the link.
A Geek Mega-Union? Do something on a smaller scale, like organizing at the workplace level before you set your hubris on bigger fish. And Katz will have to show me some evidence that Merkin politicians' Ten Commandments Mania is some sort of anti-geek (or anti-Geek) measure.
...and 100 million more eyeballs wouldn't hurt. I'm starting to feel more and more goose-pimply and subversive with every arg on my command line. Maybe I should dust off my childhood copy of The Fat Dead Guy's Little Red Book.
Slashdot Mirror
See JXTA.
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Roger? Roger who? Which one's Pink?
My allegiance remains to Poor Old Syd anyway.
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I first noticed the story via my CNNfn Slashbox (the MS-phobic can, at least temporarily, peruse CNN's 12:10 Redmond-time take here -- there's no time stamp on the MSNBC.com story, but surely they had no "world exclusive"). While I'd love to put MSNBC in the conspiracy-theory in-box, I'm pretty sure this story (actually a Waggener Edstrom press release) reached every organization at roughly the same time.
--
There's that magnifying-glass icon. It activates a small menu, and you can double the image size. For some reason I associated it with "search" all this time. On Windows, I just right-clicked to bring up the menu, blissfully ignorant of the magnifying glass. I was lost when right-clicking didn't work in Linux.
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And do they plan on delivering anything more than this barely-OK alpha? I'm beginning to doubt it. And there's still no non-x86-Linux support. I'll stop whining now; if you've tried the "first" alpha, you probably have an idea of what sucks about it.
Of course, this is still better than MS, who promised a new NetSho^H^H^H^H^H^HMedia Play^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HWindows Media Player client for Linux for over a year, then switched to the "What's a Linux?" routine.
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It has more relevancy because the reactions here were equally based on untruths. See further down, subjects: "Interesting Slashdot prejudices" and "The Mirror of Columbine". The bottom line for me was: American violence-as-usual at Columbine, and a bit of hypocrisy here at /., amongst other places. YMMV. The dead remain dead, no matter how much gasbagging we do.
--
But look at the attention that we gave it here, just because the "outsiders" involved were perceived as "geeks". American history, past and present, is rife with outsiders, from Indians and slaves to immigrants, hippies, communists, and geeks. To have gone singularly overboard about Columbine (and geekdom) on /. was just as prejudiced as the mainstream's biases. There was all this rampant sympathy over the slights suffered by "us", while the slights suffered by other us-es probably don't even register on our respective radars.
An outsider killed a bunch of folks in Fort Worth last week. Was he really any different from Harris and Klebold, other than being a generation older? I don't think so.
outsider != geek
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Harris and Klebold were simply illustrating a truism uttered by H. Rap Brown back in the 1960s: "Violence is as American as Cherry Pie." (Katz, you're old enough to remember that one). Violence (literal, threatened, or figurative) is the all-purpose "solution" to problems, whether a non-compliant kid, a non-compliant foreign country, a non-compliant workforce, or whatever.
If it takes a village to raise a child, then Americans (and I myself am occasionally one) are the village idiots who helped raise Harris and Klebold.
Have a nice day.
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Right?
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There's also, on occasion, links to rumors and PR, or inaccurate info in the submittor's summary. It's not simply a bare link to an article at a news site.
Personally I think Slashdot is /more/ accurate because of the moderation system. Eventually the truth shines through as comments get scored upward.A great example is yesterday's post of a guy who claimed he solved the IPv4 addressing shortage.
[...]
But here on Slashdot there are many techies who know better and clued the rest of us in that the guy is a nut -- that's the kind of insight you get here on Slashdot.
Fine, if the matter is a straightforward technical or historical issue. But the moderation system -- in general -- is only as good as the subject matter and the moderators. /. provides the means for a poster to be more accurate than the journalist in the linked article. But often it's all just a matter of opinion. The moderation itself doesn't always do the trick -- it can, and will at times, devolve into fruitless Mob Rule. I keep my threshold at -1, because the moderators often miss out on good comments; conversely, it means I get to see all the worst pack-mentality or adolescent-preening posts. Sometimes it isn't worth it for me to wade through the muck to find one of the "good" posts.
The only cure for bad journalism is good journalism. It doesn't matter what sort of "new paradigm" (or old one) produces it. Sometimes getting a useful nugget from /. is like an evening of root canal.
--
Everybody brings up The Dead. What percentage of bands since 1965 have succeeded by using that business model? How many people have bought, for example, Honor Role (great late-80's Richmond punkish band) t-shirts? Or 3 Teens Kill 4 (mid-80's NYC crappy artsy-fartsy band) posters? They "gave away" their music, in the form of promo disques sent to (college and community) radio stations; they sold LPs at rock-bottom prices at gigs. They probably wouldn't have minded the trading of tapes. Could they have lived on that revenue, plus their cut of $5 cover charges or $10 tickets? The fact of their non-existence and obscurity may be an indicator that they couldn't. You can't hang an argument on one San Francisco band's freak success story (one that, I might add, was aided and abetted by those Evil Dudes at Warner Brothers - had they not signed with a Big Label, one that worked to get them airplay in the then-burgeoning medium of FM rock radio, would the Free Thing have worked? I doubt it).
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I may have dealt with these issues and entities (indie labels, minor majors, college radio, booking agencies, tours from hell, etc; we didn't have seminars back then, or self-appointed "experts") back when you were in diapers, lad, so take a hike.
My points were: a) the marketing muscle comes via the Label-Broadcaster Complex, regardless of who foots the bill - this, in many cases, is what enables the Large Revenue Streams. b) I doubt that many musicians buy into the absolutist "information wants to be free" shtick - everybody wants to (eventually) Get Paid. c) we're straying far from the point of my original post, which was b).
Don't have a cow, a chicken, or a llama. OK? Sorry for the delay.
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I admire your optimism. I've never seen a link to a Linux beta (you gotta link? share it! :), as has been mentioned. I've seen almost a year's worth of "Unix client coming soon" messages at the NetShow/WMP site. I suspect a beta will come out around the same time as the IE and Office Linux betas :)
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infact its the exact reverce of what you are describing, only the largest bands make money off records. next time get your facts straight before posting.
As someone else pointed out, if they're in Rolling Stone, they're one of the brand names to which I referred -- they have a vested interest in the humongous revenue streams that a big label provides them, via promotion, even if the royalty deal could be better. If they're for MP3, fine, but I don't think they're in favor of the business model the previous poster outlined (go take a look). They're no doubt in favor of the free-MP3-as-promotional-single angle; they're no doubt in favor of the MP3-as-free-publicity angle, especially if their career has stalled. But they still expect their royalties, whether from Big Brother or from a New Deal, whether from CD, DVD, MP*, or whatever.
But I wasn't really referring to them, anyway.
OK?
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Actually, you can go over to VQF.com and download a client binary for free (encoders as well). Good quality, smaller file sizes, good for modem-rate streaming too. The problem with its widespread adoption seems to be Yamaha's lack of haste in finishing and promoting it (they seem to be blissfully ignorant of the concept of "internet time"). And, of course, they still have the ever-popular "What's a Linux?" attitude, when last I checked.
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It's usually the absolute worst of music that achieves the sort of brand-name status that makes that kind of business model even halfway viable. There's thousands of bands that would starve if they had to live on the gate and the tchotchkes (have you seen gas prices lately?). It's as if you're asking McDonald's or M*cr*s*ft to just give away everything and make their loot off of some damn fine t-shirts. Yes, things will have to change vis-à-vis distribution, but hell no, most labels (and musicians) won't want to go your "let them eat cake" route.
--
Power Computing. It was competition. So it was removed.
Didn't the clonemakers overstep the bounds of the licensing agreements?
Quicktime. It once was just a nice free client. Now it's got a 'Pro' edition. Plus the fact that Apple is gripping the codecs like they're made of pure gold.
Does Apple own all the codecs, or are other companies also guilty of hoarding them? My guess is that Apple's hands are, to some extent, tied.
Whatever. I, too, am pissed at the lack of a client and at the miniscule possibility of running BeOS on some fancy (hypothetical for now) quad-G4 box. I can't do a thing about the latter, but what can we, The Big Bad Linux Community, do about the former? Wasn't there a petition a while back about getting a QuickTime client?
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Yes. Then maybe we'll be embarrassed enough to stop behaving like a bunch of immature 11-year-olds.
Disclaimer: I don't speak for Rob, of course.
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Dear Mr AC (no, not you Natedog!):
It's a long paper, so just skip all that boring file system stuff, and go here.
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