Oh, Janeane - what happened to the brainy cranky girl I fell in love with so many years ago? Why do you have to spout action-movie cliches through the whole film? Oh, it hurts...
All in all, I thought it was a pretty tight, well-done sci-fi romp. When the kid got out of the Dredge cell, I chalked that up to them letting him escape to see where he leads them.
But... It dated itself with the music. Using toothless rock music for scene filler is always a big big mistake. Don't they remember the _Transformers Movie_? (You got the touch... you got the POW-AHH!) They could have used some low-key techo to complement the action quite nicely. Whgenever I heard Ned's Atomic Dustbin or whatever they used starting up a song, it made me cringe the same way as when I hear some REALLY bad girl-pop in an otherwise awesome anime flick.
Below is an Article that Steve Albini wrote a few years ago about how working for a major label is a huge sucker bet. It was published in The Baffer and Maximum Rock 'n' Roll under the title "Some of Your Friends are Already this Fucked"
We don't have to "play the game" of Shadowrun. Or anything else we don't choose. Don't like the megacorps? Do something. Rewrite the rulebook.
Ever read Tom Frank's _Commodify Your Dissent_? It's about how ad companies and media corps have gotten filthy rich by telling us that we're all rebels, we're all breaking the rules. By buying their product. It's kind of insidious when you think about it. Post-modernism has created an atmosphere where anyone can define themselves as a rebel, including some yahoo stockbroker who drives an SUV and is "extreme".
There's nothing like a little sardonic humor to bring a little realism to the discourse. You've definately got some good points. Folks on the left get real tired in their rhetoric (and sometimes I'm no exception) sometimes and I'd never accuse the left of having better critical thinkers.
But come on, SOMEBODY's gotta try and be critical of what's going on around us, tired protest chants notwithstanding. And if I ever have to look at another goddamn Mumia puppet parading through the streets I'm gonna varf.
It's like this - Monsanso has to expand their markets. Monsanto (as well as ADM and others) make their money off of western farming practices. They sell fertilizers, they sell pesticides, they sell seeds.
So what to they do? They push industrial farming practices (which work just fine in places like Western Europe or the North American Midwest) on Third World countries where for starters the soil simply can't support that kind of agriculture for more than a couple of years. After that, the soil's tapped out, the farmer moves on, and desertification expands.
Here's an example of business practices surrounding genetically modified foods - Ag industry producers like to create crops that are resistant to their own brand of herbicides and thrive on their own brand of fertilizer. I would liken it to being roughly as effective as selling "Integrated Solutions" such as MS BackOffice. Overpriced, exploitative, and unneeded.
Now that the Invisibles has finished its run, I'm still not finished digesting all the concepts that Grant Morrison threw in there. It seems like he got a little panicked about setting up his cosmology towards the last five issues and just started throwing stuff in there willy-nilly. I don't feel like all the disparate threads were tied up clearly enough. I felt like the flash-forward to 2012 stuff was more than a little slapdash. And the StraightEdge high school kid that got introduced in like issue two - what the hell was with those ruffled shirts? I felt like having someone X'ed up was just subculture tokenism on Morrison's part. People are so put off by the no smoking/no drinking/no drugs thing and assume that all StraightEdge kids are hardline fanatics. I think Morrison's getting old and losing touch with the kids.
So: What the fuck was Barbelith all about, anyhow?
We're not living in a dystopian future - our social order is essentially the same as it has been since the 1880's.
Multinational corporations essentially control governments - Once we had Standard Oil and United Fruit (United Fruit liked to send marines to Latin American republics when they got uppity), now we have Monsanto (destroying the agricultural viability of small farms in africa by trying to westernize their methods and force genetically engineered crops on people) or Shell (who don't flinch when governments exterminate indigenous peoples like the Ogoni of Nigeria to make room for their pipelines).
There have always been people on the fringes of society outside of easy control, be they the Hobo radicals of the IWW back in the day speading sarcastic activism or haX0rs today making things tough for AT&T or Earth First!ers utterly humiliating the IMF and World Bank when they assume they have everyone's tacit approval in industrialized nations because they're "creating markets".
Again, things have changed precious little in the past one hundred years - the technology has just changed. Instead of a dull, meanial job in front of a factory machine, we're given a dull, meanial job in a cubicle in a call center.
Just because the foot at your neck is clad in a penny loafer instead of a boot doesn't mean that it's not holding you down.
That's my theory. There's a strange mix of truth/technical vagueness that makes some of the hacking implausible but the reality of the company irrefutable. Now - do these folks actually spam? Who knows. But the phone numbers are certainly valid. Most of the names are probably real, so who knows?
So I'm gonna say that this is some ex-employee who pulled a bunch of stuff off of his co-workers' drives before bailing. All in all, a pretty admirable example of workplace sabotage. Bob Black would be proud.
Moderating the worm-generated post down reduces the possibility that other folks will subsequently click on the link. Just like real Karma, slashdot Karma sometimes has nothing to do with good intentions... -carl
If it would mean living in Vancouver, I'd sign up with Microsoft in a heartbeat. There's so many things about Canadia that just plain kick ass, and BC is gorgeous.
Anybody who thinks that M$ moving to Canada would mean a Cost of Living increase obviously hasn't tried to find a place to stay in Seattle lately.
I'm really antsy to hear some resolution to the question of how much BSD userland will find its way into the final release of OSX.
There have been conflicting reports as to whether there will be an option to install a BSD "layer" under Aqua accessible by the user. Everybody's in agreement on the kernel, but nobody seems to know how many BSD commands will be available to the user.
I'm just wondering. Who, if not Alan Cox whould maintain the ac (Alan Cox) patch-series? 8-)
I believe Alan has specified that this duty would fall to the seminal grindcore band Anal Cunt. Not many folks are aware of the fact that the "grind" in grindcore refers to Code Grinding.
-carl
It's the business model, stupid!
on
Boo No More
·
· Score: 2
Nobody has made money doing clothing retail on the web. It just doesn't work. Maybe once we've got total immersion five-senses buzzword-compliant VR dongles it'll work, but for now nobody wants to buy a potentially poor-fitting ugly-in-real-life article of clothing. Even Levi's, with a relatively standardized product array, ended up pulling the plug on its eCommerce site last year.
Sure, the internet bubble will burst, but this won't be the incident that issues the clarion call. Right now what we're seeing is a bunch of people throwing money at untried and often nonsensical business plans just necause it involves the net. We've got to wait for some heavy hitters to run our of capital before we see a collapse.
That's Slashdot's reaction to everything, isn't it? "MIRROR IT QUICK!" -- Hello? This information isn't exactly top secret.
Time for me to nibble on some crow. I hadn't realized when first reading this article that the data was available from MS's TechNet. Once I read an article on The Standard's site I saw that it was pretty easily obtainable document. It does seem like the inforation could be put to use by the Samba team for talking to Win2000, though.
Of course, the fact that it's not so secret makes one wonder why MS has their panties all in a bunch. I guess they believe in absolute enforcement.
Folks need to start volunteering to mirror that info ASAP. While Andover.net has clout, the position they're in is legally tenuous given the insanity of the DMCA.
Would Freenet be a good place to put the disputed info? If the spec were distributed widely enough, the genie would be out of the bottle and MS would have nothing to gain from further legal action against Andover/Slashdot.
The fact of the matter is that CD's produced my major labels will always be incredibly overpriced. It's intrinsic in the business model of multinational media corporations.
A CD costs around a dollar to produce, including mastering, production, and printing/packaging. This price goes down farther when you start manufacturing in volumes like a Sony or BMG produces.
Corporate labels gouge customers and the product they offer often ranges from lackluster to poor. Why bother when you can get a better product from an independant label for less? I would liken it to open source software. Why buy crap from BMG/Microsoft when you can obtain a better, cheaper product from a Touch & Go/Red Hat?
And you can't argue that good independant music is hard to find. Look in a locally owned music store instead of a Coconuts or Tower. And the Southern Records consortium distros lots of great indie labels.
Basically, there's no reason to settle for crappy, overpriced CDs. </RANT>
So I just tried to send a message through hotmail, and I got a 404-ish error. So I logged back in to Hotmail and later got a message while refreshing saying that the server holding my account was temporarily unavailable. Sounds like they're taking the machines offline to throw in a patch.
I'm hella pissed, though, because the mail I was sending was to a headhunter I've been talking with about a sweet Linux job and I don't know if it went through or not.
It's enough to make a person switch over to PEmail. Old habits die hard, though. I've been using Hotmail since before M$ bought them.
My memory has failed me but was there not a book upon which a movie was based where Robert Redford was reading books for either ideas or communications between spies?
Uhm... _Three Days of the Condor_? I think it was based on a novel called _Five Days of the Condor_.
This is exaclty the sort of temptation I DON'T need making me want to get a Palm. I have no legitimate need for one, my Powerbook 180 takes care of all my mobile needs.
>>Eventually there will be no more money for the herds to throw at the stock market. Then we're in for it. And the CEOs and higher-ups who make out on the IPOs will be laughing all the way to the bank.
We should be so lucky! There's legislation before the House of Representatives RIGHT NOW to start pumping money from the Social Security system into the stock market, probably via mutual funds.
This would ensure that there was always new capital coming into the market perpetually. One of the reasons the "Long Boom" has happened is that so many people throw money into the markey via 401(k) plans. This would be the same thing, only on a much larger scale.
I see two big risks from this. First, there is obviously a risk that when the possibly inevitable crash comes, the Social Security System will get burned big time. The second problem is that I'm extremely uncomfortable with this much mixing between federal and corporate funds. I'm distrustful of both groups, and it just gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Unfortunately, it's almost inevitable that some portion of the Social Security fund's money will go into the market, given how scared everybody is that Social Security will go insolvent. There's too many congressfolks talking about it for it to not go ahead. I'm pretty sure George Dubya supports putting large amounts of the fund into the market.
It's also possible that this won't be the economic train wreck I'm worried about. After all, the last time the US federal government pumped massive amounts of cash into the private sector (WWII to pre-'Nam Cold War) ended up jumpstarting the economy in a big way.
Some South American nation or another (El Salvador? Chile)enacted a similar plan with okay results. It seems like most of the sites talking about this (www.socialsecurity.org, socialsecurityreform.org) are fronts for right-wing think-tanks.
From the stills I've seen, it doesn't look like they're being too faithful to the novel in terms of details and production design. The stillsuits don't look like they process the body's entire moisture (and let's face it, one of the best things about Lynch's version was the production design and its faithfulness combined with weird stylizationg - take the fetish-looking stillsuits for example). Fremen with no water discipline? Come on...
It's possible that this miniseries will be more of an interpretation (It looks like it's way more D&D than Sci-Fi. Everybody looks like an extra from _Jabberwocky_). This could be the project's saving grace - Lynch fell flat because he tried to capture the entire scope of the novel and ALMOST caught it. I'm not gonna hold my breath, though. None of the Sci-Fi network's productions have really impressed me.
Holy Wars are almost always pointless, but this one takes irrelevance to an extreme. If the primary factor in using a mac is the product design, then the OS must be irrelevant. It's not - the Mac is the MacOS, not the hardware.
Here's what I wrote to the author of a MacCentral article on the topic last week:
Regarding the FishPC - While this does show resemblance to the original iMac's Blue & White color scheme, this is no eOne. The photo in your article shows that the guts of the machine are all contained in a seperate CPU tower, a tower which looks nothing like apple's G3 Blue & White CPU. At most, the monitor's translucent plastic looks very similar to Apple's B&W 17" monitor scheme.
While the FishPC may not be breaking much in the way of new ground in industrial design, I don't think this is as blatant a case of copyright infringement as we've seen in the past. In fact, I may even be rooting for FishPC's success in the inevitable lawsuit. After all, just because you can't afford a G4 doesn't mean you should be doomed to a lifetime of ugly computer cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Janeane Garofalo as a giant kangaroo?
Oh, Janeane - what happened to the brainy cranky girl I fell in love with so many years ago? Why do you have to spout action-movie cliches through the whole film? Oh, it hurts...
-carl
All in all, I thought it was a pretty tight, well-done sci-fi romp. When the kid got out of the Dredge cell, I chalked that up to them letting him escape to see where he leads them.
But... It dated itself with the music. Using toothless rock music for scene filler is always a big big mistake. Don't they remember the _Transformers Movie_? (You got the touch... you got the POW-AHH!) They could have used some low-key techo to complement the action quite nicely. Whgenever I heard Ned's Atomic Dustbin or whatever they used starting up a song, it made me cringe the same way as when I hear some REALLY bad girl-pop in an otherwise awesome anime flick.
-carl
Below is an Article that Steve Albini wrote a few years ago about how working for a major label is a huge sucker bet. It was published in The Baffer and Maximum Rock 'n' Roll under the title "Some of Your Friends are Already this Fucked"
This is an archived article off of Google
Ever read Tom Frank's _Commodify Your Dissent_? It's about how ad companies and media corps have gotten filthy rich by telling us that we're all rebels, we're all breaking the rules. By buying their product. It's kind of insidious when you think about it. Post-modernism has created an atmosphere where anyone can define themselves as a rebel, including some yahoo stockbroker who drives an SUV and is "extreme".
-carlThere's nothing like a little sardonic humor to bring a little realism to the discourse.
You've definately got some good points. Folks on the left get real tired in their rhetoric (and sometimes I'm no exception) sometimes and I'd never accuse the left of having better critical thinkers.
But come on, SOMEBODY's gotta try and be critical of what's going on around us, tired protest chants notwithstanding. And if I ever have to look at another goddamn Mumia puppet parading through the streets I'm gonna varf.
-carl
It's like this -
Monsanso has to expand their markets. Monsanto (as well as ADM and others) make their money off of western farming practices. They sell fertilizers, they sell pesticides, they sell seeds.
So what to they do? They push industrial farming practices (which work just fine in places like Western Europe or the North American Midwest) on Third World countries where for starters the soil simply can't support that kind of agriculture for more than a couple of years. After that, the soil's tapped out, the farmer moves on, and desertification expands.
Here's an example of business practices surrounding genetically modified foods - Ag industry producers like to create crops that are resistant to their own brand of herbicides and thrive on their own brand of fertilizer. I would liken it to being roughly as effective as selling "Integrated Solutions" such as MS BackOffice. Overpriced, exploitative, and unneeded.
-carl
Now that the Invisibles has finished its run, I'm still not finished digesting all the concepts that Grant Morrison threw in there. It seems like he got a little panicked about setting up his cosmology towards the last five issues and just started throwing stuff in there willy-nilly. I don't feel like all the disparate threads were tied up clearly enough. I felt like the flash-forward to 2012 stuff was more than a little slapdash. And the StraightEdge high school kid that got introduced in like issue two - what the hell was with those ruffled shirts? I felt like having someone X'ed up was just subculture tokenism on Morrison's part. People are so put off by the no smoking/no drinking/no drugs thing and assume that all StraightEdge kids are hardline fanatics. I think Morrison's getting old and losing touch with the kids.
So: What the fuck was Barbelith all about, anyhow?
-carl
We're not living in a dystopian future - our social order is essentially the same as it has been since the 1880's.
Multinational corporations essentially control governments - Once we had Standard Oil and United Fruit (United Fruit liked to send marines to Latin American republics when they got uppity), now we have Monsanto (destroying the agricultural viability of small farms in africa by trying to westernize their methods and force genetically engineered crops on people) or Shell (who don't flinch when governments exterminate indigenous peoples like the Ogoni of Nigeria to make room for their pipelines).
There have always been people on the fringes of society outside of easy control, be they the Hobo radicals of the IWW back in the day speading sarcastic activism or haX0rs today making things tough for AT&T or Earth First!ers utterly humiliating the IMF and World Bank when they assume they have everyone's tacit approval in industrialized nations because they're "creating markets".
Again, things have changed precious little in the past one hundred years - the technology has just changed. Instead of a dull, meanial job in front of a factory machine, we're given a dull, meanial job in a cubicle in a call center.
Just because the foot at your neck is clad in a penny loafer instead of a boot doesn't mean that it's not holding you down.
-carl
That's my theory. There's a strange mix of truth/technical vagueness that makes some of the hacking implausible but the reality of the company irrefutable. Now - do these folks actually spam? Who knows. But the phone numbers are certainly valid. Most of the names are probably real, so who knows?
So I'm gonna say that this is some ex-employee who pulled a bunch of stuff off of his co-workers' drives before bailing. All in all, a pretty admirable example of workplace sabotage. Bob Black would be proud.
-carl
Does this mean I have to remove the "Kitchen Stadium" sign from my stove?
-carl
Moderating the worm-generated post down reduces the possibility that other folks will subsequently click on the link. Just like real Karma, slashdot Karma sometimes has nothing to do with good intentions... -carl
If it would mean living in Vancouver, I'd sign up with Microsoft in a heartbeat. There's so many things about Canadia that just plain kick ass, and BC is gorgeous.
Anybody who thinks that M$ moving to Canada would mean a Cost of Living increase obviously hasn't tried to find a place to stay in Seattle lately.
-carl
I'm really antsy to hear some resolution to the question of how much BSD userland will find its way into the final release of OSX.
There have been conflicting reports as to whether there will be an option to install a BSD "layer" under Aqua accessible by the user. Everybody's in agreement on the kernel, but nobody seems to know how many BSD commands will be available to the user.
Anybody have thoughts?
-carl
I believe Alan has specified that this duty would fall to the seminal grindcore band Anal Cunt. Not many folks are aware of the fact that the "grind" in grindcore refers to Code Grinding.
-carlNobody has made money doing clothing retail on the web. It just doesn't work. Maybe once we've got total immersion five-senses buzzword-compliant VR dongles it'll work, but for now nobody wants to buy a potentially poor-fitting ugly-in-real-life article of clothing. Even Levi's, with a relatively standardized product array, ended up pulling the plug on its eCommerce site last year.
Sure, the internet bubble will burst, but this won't be the incident that issues the clarion call. Right now what we're seeing is a bunch of people throwing money at untried and often nonsensical business plans just necause it involves the net. We've got to wait for some heavy hitters to run our of capital before we see a collapse.
butidontneedmytoothpasedelivered.com
-carl
Time for me to nibble on some crow. I hadn't realized when first reading this article that the data was available from MS's TechNet. Once I read an article on The Standard's site I saw that it was pretty easily obtainable document. It does seem like the inforation could be put to use by the Samba team for talking to Win2000, though.
Of course, the fact that it's not so secret makes one wonder why MS has their panties all in a bunch. I guess they believe in absolute enforcement.
-carlFolks need to start volunteering to mirror that info ASAP. While Andover.net has clout, the position they're in is legally tenuous given the insanity of the DMCA.
Would Freenet be a good place to put the disputed info? If the spec were distributed widely enough, the genie would be out of the bottle and MS would have nothing to gain from further legal action against Andover/Slashdot.
Information wants to be free.
-carl
The fact of the matter is that CD's produced my major labels will always be incredibly overpriced. It's intrinsic in the business model of multinational media corporations.
A CD costs around a dollar to produce, including mastering, production, and printing/packaging. This price goes down farther when you start manufacturing in volumes like a Sony or BMG produces.
Corporate labels gouge customers and the product they offer often ranges from lackluster to poor. Why bother when you can get a better product from an independant label for less? I would liken it to open source software. Why buy crap from BMG/Microsoft when you can obtain a better, cheaper product from a Touch & Go/Red Hat?
And you can't argue that good independant music is hard to find. Look in a locally owned music store instead of a Coconuts or Tower. And the Southern Records consortium distros lots of great indie labels.
Basically, there's no reason to settle for crappy, overpriced CDs.
</RANT>
So I just tried to send a message through hotmail, and I got a 404-ish error. So I logged back in to Hotmail and later got a message while refreshing saying that the server holding my account was temporarily unavailable. Sounds like they're taking the machines offline to throw in a patch.
I'm hella pissed, though, because the mail I was sending was to a headhunter I've been talking with about a sweet Linux job and I don't know if it went through or not.
It's enough to make a person switch over to PEmail. Old habits die hard, though. I've been using Hotmail since before M$ bought them.
-carl
Uhm... _Three Days of the Condor_? I think it was based on a novel called _Five Days of the Condor_.
-carl
This is exaclty the sort of temptation I DON'T need making me want to get a Palm. I have no legitimate need for one, my Powerbook 180 takes care of all my mobile needs.
But damnit, I want one anyway!
Gadget lust strikes again...
-carl
>>Eventually there will be no more money for the herds to throw at the stock market. Then we're in for it. And the CEOs and higher-ups who make out on the IPOs will be laughing all the way to the bank.
We should be so lucky! There's legislation before the House of Representatives RIGHT NOW to start pumping money from the Social Security system into the stock market, probably via mutual funds.
This would ensure that there was always new capital coming into the market perpetually. One of the reasons the "Long Boom" has happened is that so many people throw money into the markey via 401(k) plans. This would be the same thing, only on a much larger scale.
I see two big risks from this. First, there is obviously a risk that when the possibly inevitable crash comes, the Social Security System will get burned big time. The second problem is that I'm extremely uncomfortable with this much mixing between federal and corporate funds. I'm distrustful of both groups, and it just gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Unfortunately, it's almost inevitable that some portion of the Social Security fund's money will go into the market, given how scared everybody is that Social Security will go insolvent. There's too many congressfolks talking about it for it to not go ahead. I'm pretty sure George Dubya supports putting large amounts of the fund into the market.
It's also possible that this won't be the economic train wreck I'm worried about. After all, the last time the US federal government pumped massive amounts of cash into the private sector (WWII to pre-'Nam Cold War) ended up jumpstarting the economy in a big way.
Some South American nation or another (El Salvador? Chile)enacted a similar plan with okay results. It seems like most of the sites talking about this (www.socialsecurity.org, socialsecurityreform.org) are fronts for right-wing think-tanks.
-carl
From the stills I've seen, it doesn't look like they're being too faithful to the novel in terms of details and production design. The stillsuits don't look like they process the body's entire moisture (and let's face it, one of the best things about Lynch's version was the production design and its faithfulness combined with weird stylizationg - take the fetish-looking stillsuits for example). Fremen with no water discipline? Come on...
It's possible that this miniseries will be more of an interpretation (It looks like it's way more D&D than Sci-Fi. Everybody looks like an extra from _Jabberwocky_). This could be the project's saving grace - Lynch fell flat because he tried to capture the entire scope of the novel and ALMOST caught it. I'm not gonna hold my breath, though. None of the Sci-Fi network's productions have really impressed me.
-carl
>Since when was apple ever number 1?
:)
Oh, around 1980.
-carl
Holy Wars are almost always pointless, but this one takes irrelevance to an extreme. If the primary factor in using a mac is the product design, then the OS must be irrelevant. It's not - the Mac is the MacOS, not the hardware.
Here's what I wrote to the author of a MacCentral article on the topic last week:
Regarding the FishPC -
While this does show resemblance to the original iMac's Blue & White color scheme, this is no eOne. The photo in your article shows that the guts of the machine are all contained in a seperate CPU tower, a tower which looks nothing like apple's G3 Blue & White CPU. At most, the monitor's translucent plastic looks very similar to Apple's B&W 17" monitor scheme.
While the FishPC may not be breaking much in the way of new ground in industrial design, I don't think this is as blatant a case of copyright infringement as we've seen in the past. In fact, I may even be rooting for FishPC's success in the inevitable lawsuit. After all, just because you can't afford a G4 doesn't mean you should be doomed to a lifetime of ugly computer cases.
-carl hirsch