Would someone in 50 years time be willing to wade through the dross for the good stuff?
Sure they would - they do it with plenty of writers. Dickens, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Asimov all wrote a whole heap of pants, too. But when they were good...
Before you all say it...yeah, yeah, he's not *real* fantasy, whatever.
But the Discworld books are actually quite sharp, and ideas based: Small Gods and Jingo, for example.
And, more importantly, they are very very funny. The sort of books you keep to read to your children one day, in the hope they'll want to read on their own. I guess like Douglas Adams did for me when I was 11.
yes, but who says Big Money has to be American? I'm sure the Pro-Globalisation Corporations in Japan, China, South Africa, France, Korea, Italy whereever, they'd quite like to export their culture to you.
As for John Woo, he might be working for American studios, making American Movies for American Audiences right now, but that's only because the Hong Kong film industry globalised itself. He was making great films for 20 years before the US had ever heard of him.
Don't think Globalisation = Americanisation...
Where's the biggest film industry? India. Who's the biggest film star? Chow Yun Fat - in Chinese films. What's the most eaten restaurant meal in the UK? Chicken Tikka Masala.
Ok, oblig disclaimer - I'm white, privately educated, English, live in Kensington, London, and once worked for Rupert Murdoch. Hence, on paper at least, I'm unusually evil.
Having said that...
Globalisation can only, in the end, work out as a force for good. I say In The End, so bear with me a second...
Klein's NoLogo theories (nicely offset by having her name in massive print, and her picture on the back, *sigh*) are nice, but forget the fact that Globalisation works on all levels: education included. As corporations spread across the world, so does the rest of the world come badck to the corporations. Sept11 is an extreme example of this, but so is the Globalisation'd media reporting on Nike sweatshops in Vietnam, or human rights abuses in China. Anything - anything at all - that forces connections between different cultures can only add to increased understanding.
Whether that understanding is developed in the first instance as a tool to exploit is somewhat irrelevent, because the same globalisation process is used by those who want to help.
You really only need look at the change in mindset that has been brought round by globalisation. Take a generation or two back - little knowledge of the rest of the world compared with today (well, at least in Europe).
A silly example: food. Look at food from 30 years ago: Spaghetti Bolognaise was an exotic dish in the UK. Now I can get Sushi at the corner shop. 30 years ago it was John Wayne, now it's John Woo.
Taco's hobby is obscure Japanese animation, my wife loves African guitar music. THAT is just as much globalisation as the spectre of nasty corporations.
It's a publicity stunt, but it's also slightly wrong:
at least on XP RC2, you can easily get to the command line.
I use it for Perl stuff sometimes, and ping and things. It might not be full DOS (oh, the loss of that extreme power will be sorely felt), but it is a command line.
of course there are flagship titles - Luigi's Mansion, Zelda, and Pikmin are all flagship titles. The next Pokemon will be too.
It's just that the Gamecube's flagships are aimed at the Gamecube's audience - kids who play Pokemon. MGS2 and Halo are very nice, but not Nintendo's style at all...it's not a lack of a flagship, but rather a whole different gaming ethos to the 20-30 year old FPS fan demographic that MS and Sony would like to have.
Pikmin, for example, imho will be huuuuuuge. But huge in a Nintendo way - cartoon spinoffs, mechandising, the whole Pokemon lot...and with in this will be massively more succesful than MGS2. Whether as a game it sells more is irrelevent.
Ok, so it's a minor plug, but as my sig says, I run Gbloogle from an old machine under my desk. It's a weblog search engine that updates its index every three hours.
Now, apart from the plug (and this being slashdot, and me paying for the bandwidth, gawd knows why I did that), I point this out because even Google only updates every four weeks or so.
For some subjects (and the memes and odd sites you find via blogs are good examples) the specialist search engines are going to become very useful. Things like Distributed Searching, JXTA and so on are the way forward when the web is double the size it is today, and then double again.
Question for the masses:
Doesn't the quality of the speakers, the noise on the wires, the interference from the monitor and the size of the bass cabinet etc etc etc have a more pertinent effect on sound quality when you get above a certain sample rate.
128 is better than 64, sure, but above that isn;t the difference between monitor mounted speakers and a dolby 5.1 creative surround sound system, say, the most important one?
It's actually just a formalised version of the same philosophy that most open-source projects go by.
It could be also rewritten as
"Although we like coding for the sake of it as much as the next guy, we do have better things to do than do something that has no support at all. If, after all our hard work, no one gives us anything back we're going to do something else more appreciated. Now, some people like appreciation in the form of praise, we prefer cash."
It is really human nature, and is entirely fair enough. I hope it works too: the community does need a half way point between doing open source for the fun of it, and writing closed source for money.
Thats why companies that try to make money off of selling GPL'ed software are an inherently Bad Thing (tm) for the Linux community. It destroys the very incentive that caused us all to start coding in the first place.
Does that include distros? Wouldn't the Linux community be so so tiny without them that no one would start such big projects in the first place?
I get the idea about not working on something when someone else is being paid mucho cash, but would you still bother if were asked to write a windowmanager for some other OS? One nowhere near as popular as Linux?
1) Nobody is willing to work on something, pouring hours upon hours of work into it, only to have someone working in Company X take their code, and make a living off of tweaking it. Suppose you're writing a windowmanager for Linux. In order for your windowmanager to succeed, it probably has to be GPL in order for it to really catch on. And if its GPL, surprise-surprise, there are employees of parasitic companies like VA Linux Systems who make a nice living playing with your code. No one in their right mind is going to do something for free, working side by side next to someone who is getting paid to do the same. By simple virtue of the fact that parasitic GPL companies exist, you're effectively letting someone else make the money off your work by making it GPL. This is why companies who capitalize on Linux software development are a (tm) Bad Thing, because they assert a choking influence over the entire community. It stops becoming an exercise in fun, and rapidly becomes an exercise in profiteering.
Why do they start in the first place, then?
If a developer of a GPL project stops working on it, because a co-developer is in the lucky position of being paid to work on it, or because a company takes their great code and incorporates it into the product they need to sell to stay in business, then why did they start working in Open Source to begin with?
I'm not being stroppy, I just don't understand the psychology.
>How can 90% of the world's heroin come from >Afghanistan when the Taliban officially >declared growing opium poppies sinful a year >ago, and their cultivation was stopped dead in >its tracks?
You're not going to like this. The Taliban declared opium growing sinful for two reasons. Firstly, the price of opium was going down, and they needed to fix the market.
Secondly, the ban was a condition of $43million of aid given by the US, in a war-on-drugs initiative.
Sadly, there is the little-mentioned fact that the War-on-Drugs, in some small way, helped fund what resulted in a War-on-Terrorism.
oh, and if you want to see a picture of an Afghan drugdealer with a kilo of hash he was about to try to sell me, have a look at picture number 8 here
Cultural note, people. British universities are effectively free - government funded - with comparitively tiny student fees, if any at all. Their alumni associations are small, and don't raise anything like the amounts their US counterparts do.
So...
They need the money, advertisers think it's a good idea, and students won't notice it after a week or two (even if they had cash to spend, which most don't).
Sounds like, Win/Win/Win to me, especially if the money goes on more books, computers or teaching staff.
It pains me say this, but you're right. I've been using XP betas for the past few months, and it does, as you say, rock.
Sure, I wouldn't use it for serving anything, and I rely on my linux machines for perl and the like, but for a desktop system, with an x-term and ssh, XP is the business. I'm on about a week uptime right now, and that's only because I added a second graphics card (dual monitor support is also v.v.g by the way) and it is as solid as any linux gui desktop. perhaps more so. It's full of very neat things, that only appear after you use it for a bit, that you soon learn to love.
Seanbaby is one of the reasons the Web's still-vibrant climate of individualistic expression needs to be preserved as Microsoft and AOL/Time-Warner gather their forces like two giant and rapacious dinosaurs to plot out the future of the desktop. (Believe me, if either or both win, Seanbaby.com won't be there.) Seanbaby.com is the voice of the other Web, the "real" web, if you prefer. It understands that comics, The Simpsons, and Nintendo aren't just "entertainment" -- they're the basis of whole sub-cultures affecting and shaping people's lives.
oh, as they say, purleeese.
Not withstanding the fact that the Simpsons is a product of one of the biggest Media conglomerates in the world. And that Nintendo is the maker of whole realms of entirely closed, utterly ubiquitous, copyrighted morass of sweatshop made kiddie crack (TM), or that Comics are more than likely to be licensing themselves to AOLTimeWarner or Fox or whoever to pay the bills...
Not withstanding all of that, can we please get of this Microsoft and ATW will destroy the internet thing?
It will not happen. Apart from the fact that the internet is designed to route around this sort of damage, the fact remains that it is Against their commerical interests to introduce anything that might jeopardise the richness of the internet experience for their customers. Why did AOL allow access to the web in the first place? (remember when it didn't?) Because the multiplicity of content is the key selling point.
They, you see, understand that Seanbaby is not the voice of the "real" web. It's just a voice within it. Without Seanbaby, the web would be a poorer place, sure, but frankly, so would the web be poorer if we lost all the crocheting sites, or the fly-fishing portals, or the china-doll collecters' webrings.
Linux will be just as bad...discuss....
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Code Red bunging up my apache logs has made me think:
Posit: once Linux reaches a certain saturation, it will suffer the same security issues as Microsoft does.
Bear with me on this...
Take Code Red.The problem is not that Microsoft products are insecure. Code Red exploits a flaw for which the patch was available a month ago.
Neither is it that Microsoft sysadmins are incompetent. Most major systems were indeed patched well in advance. Those that weren't at the time, soon did as Code Red struck: even the least-subscribed admin reads the papers and watches TV news.
No. The problem that should be making the Linux community a little less smug is rather more insideous.
After talking to quite a few infected companies, it seems that the majority of uninfected machines were those that were admin-less.
The sort of server you buy, plug in, have someone load up with whatever and leave in a cupboard to happily serve away...and that is **Precisely** the sort of system Linux is going to be used for.
Once Linux systems are consumer devices (like my lovely Cobalt Qube) - and there is every good reason for them to become so - then no amount of open source hacking, patches, multiple eyeballs and bugtraqery will stop these systems from being compromised once a hole is found and made public.
This is not because they will be run by bad sysadmins, but because they will - as with many MS systems running Code Red right now - not be administered by anyone at all.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the very security of Linux is something to do with the average level of savvy among current Linux users.
Would a bigger userbase keep the same level of security and system awareness? Will the guy in 2020 buying the plug-in-and-leave Linux box for his small business's network know when and where to go for the next patch to Sendmail/Apache/Bind?
Probably not.
And that's the problem Microsoft have. and the one we're going to get.
Slashdot Mirror
Would someone in 50 years time be willing to wade through the dross for the good stuff?
Sure they would - they do it with plenty of writers. Dickens, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Asimov all wrote a whole heap of pants, too. But when they were good...
and the same it is with anyone
Before you all say it...yeah, yeah, he's not *real* fantasy, whatever.
But the Discworld books are actually quite sharp, and ideas based: Small Gods and Jingo, for example.
And, more importantly, they are very very funny. The sort of books you keep to read to your children one day, in the hope they'll want to read on their own. I guess like Douglas Adams did for me when I was 11.
yes, but who says Big Money has to be American? I'm sure the Pro-Globalisation Corporations in Japan, China, South Africa, France, Korea, Italy whereever, they'd quite like to export their culture to you.
As for John Woo, he might be working for American studios, making American Movies for American Audiences right now, but that's only because the Hong Kong film industry globalised itself. He was making great films for 20 years before the US had ever heard of him.
Don't think Globalisation = Americanisation...
Where's the biggest film industry? India. Who's the biggest film star? Chow Yun Fat - in Chinese films. What's the most eaten restaurant meal in the UK? Chicken Tikka Masala.
Ok, oblig disclaimer - I'm white, privately educated, English, live in Kensington, London, and once worked for Rupert Murdoch. Hence, on paper at least, I'm unusually evil.
Having said that...
Globalisation can only, in the end, work out as a force for good. I say In The End, so bear with me a second...
Klein's NoLogo theories (nicely offset by having her name in massive print, and her picture on the back, *sigh*) are nice, but forget the fact that Globalisation works on all levels: education included. As corporations spread across the world, so does the rest of the world come badck to the corporations. Sept11 is an extreme example of this, but so is the Globalisation'd media reporting on Nike sweatshops in Vietnam, or human rights abuses in China. Anything - anything at all - that forces connections between different cultures can only add to increased understanding.
Whether that understanding is developed in the first instance as a tool to exploit is somewhat irrelevent, because the same globalisation process is used by those who want to help.
You really only need look at the change in mindset that has been brought round by globalisation. Take a generation or two back - little knowledge of the rest of the world compared with today (well, at least in Europe).
A silly example: food. Look at food from 30 years ago: Spaghetti Bolognaise was an exotic dish in the UK. Now I can get Sushi at the corner shop. 30 years ago it was John Wayne, now it's John Woo.
Taco's hobby is obscure Japanese animation, my wife loves African guitar music. THAT is just as much globalisation as the spectre of nasty corporations.
Sure they could - provided all of the users of XP were the sort of people who don't mind downloading and recompiling a new kernel every two weeks.
They're not. So Microsoft put these changes in point releases instead.
It's a publicity stunt, but it's also slightly wrong:
at least on XP RC2, you can easily get to the command line.
I use it for Perl stuff sometimes, and ping and things. It might not be full DOS (oh, the loss of that extreme power will be sorely felt), but it is a command line.
ah, I see. That makes it a lot more clear. Actually, it's rather clever. I've now bought the book.
Damn that one-click ordering.
thanks for the new ideas...
Colour me brown, for I contain multitudes, and will speak with all.
Saying that people are one colour or another and no shade in between is like believing your horoscope. Comforting, perhaps, but utter bollocks.
of course there are flagship titles - Luigi's Mansion, Zelda, and Pikmin are all flagship titles. The next Pokemon will be too.
It's just that the Gamecube's flagships are aimed at the Gamecube's audience - kids who play Pokemon. MGS2 and Halo are very nice, but not Nintendo's style at all...it's not a lack of a flagship, but rather a whole different gaming ethos to the 20-30 year old FPS fan demographic that MS and Sony would like to have.
Pikmin, for example, imho will be huuuuuuge. But huge in a Nintendo way - cartoon spinoffs, mechandising, the whole Pokemon lot...and with in this will be massively more succesful than MGS2. Whether as a game it sells more is irrelevent.
Well.
It's back up now. But crikey...my poor little server...
Ok, so it's a minor plug, but as my sig says, I run Gbloogle from an old machine under my desk. It's a weblog search engine that updates its index every three hours.
Now, apart from the plug (and this being slashdot, and me paying for the bandwidth, gawd knows why I did that), I point this out because even Google only updates every four weeks or so.
For some subjects (and the memes and odd sites you find via blogs are good examples) the specialist search engines are going to become very useful. Things like Distributed Searching, JXTA and so on are the way forward when the web is double the size it is today, and then double again.
la la la la
the lameness filter will not catch me
la la la la
Question for the masses:
Doesn't the quality of the speakers, the noise on the wires, the interference from the monitor and the size of the bass cabinet etc etc etc have a more pertinent effect on sound quality when you get above a certain sample rate.
128 is better than 64, sure, but above that isn;t the difference between monitor mounted speakers and a dolby 5.1 creative surround sound system, say, the most important one?
I dont know - I'm asking you...
It's actually just a formalised version of the same philosophy that most open-source projects go by.
It could be also rewritten as
It is really human nature, and is entirely fair enough. I hope it works too: the community does need a half way point between doing open source for the fun of it, and writing closed source for money.
Does that include distros? Wouldn't the Linux community be so so tiny without them that no one would start such big projects in the first place?
I get the idea about not working on something when someone else is being paid mucho cash, but would you still bother if were asked to write a windowmanager for some other OS? One nowhere near as popular as Linux?
good point. damn. sorry.
>How can 90% of the world's heroin come from
>Afghanistan when the Taliban officially >declared growing opium poppies sinful a year
>ago, and their cultivation was stopped dead in
>its tracks?
You're not going to like this. The Taliban declared opium growing sinful for two reasons. Firstly, the price of opium was going down, and they needed to fix the market. Secondly, the ban was a condition of $43million of aid given by the US, in a war-on-drugs initiative. Sadly, there is the little-mentioned fact that the War-on-Drugs, in some small way, helped fund what resulted in a War-on-Terrorism. oh, and if you want to see a picture of an Afghan drugdealer with a kilo of hash he was about to try to sell me, have a look at picture number 8 here
Cultural note, people. British universities are effectively free - government funded - with comparitively tiny student fees, if any at all. Their alumni associations are small, and don't raise anything like the amounts their US counterparts do.
So...
They need the money, advertisers think it's a good idea, and students won't notice it after a week or two (even if they had cash to spend, which most don't).
Sounds like, Win/Win/Win to me, especially if the money goes on more books, computers or teaching staff.
oh *No* We've broken the internet.
search Morpheus for "fellowshipoftherings_fs.mov"
it's the full screen version, and *hell*yes*it*rocks*
I've throttled the max uploads to save myself, if you get it, spread it around...
It pains me say this, but you're right. I've been using XP betas for the past few months, and it does, as you say, rock.
Sure, I wouldn't use it for serving anything, and I rely on my linux machines for perl and the like, but for a desktop system, with an x-term and ssh, XP is the business. I'm on about a week uptime right now, and that's only because I added a second graphics card (dual monitor support is also v.v.g by the way) and it is as solid as any linux gui desktop. perhaps more so. It's full of very neat things, that only appear after you use it for a bit, that you soon learn to love.
Annoying, but true.
I may now have to go and wash my mouth out.
Against their commerical interests to introduce anything that might jeopardise the richness of the internet experience for their customers. Why did AOL allow access to the web in the first place? (remember when it didn't?) Because the multiplicity of content is the key selling point.
They, you see, understand that Seanbaby is not the voice of the "real" web. It's just a voice within it. Without Seanbaby, the web would be a poorer place, sure, but frankly, so would the web be poorer if we lost all the crocheting sites, or the fly-fishing portals, or the china-doll collecters' webrings.
Code Red bunging up my apache logs has made me think:
Posit: once Linux reaches a certain saturation, it will suffer the same security issues as Microsoft does.
Bear with me on this...
Take Code Red.The problem is not that Microsoft products are insecure. Code Red exploits a flaw for which the patch was available a month ago.
Neither is it that Microsoft sysadmins are incompetent. Most major systems were indeed patched well in advance. Those that weren't at the time, soon did as Code Red struck: even the least-subscribed admin reads the papers and watches TV news.
No. The problem that should be making the Linux community a little less smug is rather more insideous.
After talking to quite a few infected companies, it seems that the majority of uninfected machines were those that were admin-less.
The sort of server you buy, plug in, have someone load up with whatever and leave in a cupboard to happily serve away...and that is **Precisely** the sort of system Linux is going to be used for.
Once Linux systems are consumer devices (like my lovely Cobalt Qube) - and there is every good reason for them to become so - then no amount of open source hacking, patches, multiple eyeballs and bugtraqery will stop these systems from being compromised once a hole is found and made public.
This is not because they will be run by bad sysadmins, but because they will - as with many MS systems running Code Red right now - not be administered by anyone at all.
Perhaps, just perhaps, the very security of Linux is something to do with the average level of savvy among current Linux users.
Would a bigger userbase keep the same level of security and system awareness? Will the guy in 2020 buying the plug-in-and-leave Linux box for his small business's network know when and where to go for the next patch to Sendmail/Apache/Bind?
Probably not.
And that's the problem Microsoft have. and the one we're going to get.