Having read some of what Eben Moglen wrote, I'm inclined to agree. Software is covered under copyright, and copyright grants your work protection by default. We don't need a shrinkwrap on a book to note that copying it is illegal; the same should remain true of software.
Haha, excellent! I knew I was botching it a bit, but it is quite hilarious. So, I hear this all went down at a convention, and that the story was circulating like ~15 years ago, so when did it actually happen, and at what con? And since you're referring to Ed, is that greenwood? I really have to have this all down for posterity;)
/me falls over. I wish my mod points hadn't just expired.
DM: "You enter a clearing, and near the center, you see a gazebo." Incredibly Ignorant Paladin Player: "Has the gazebo seen me?" DM: "Um, no." IIPP: "I approach the gazebo." DM: "Ok." IIPP: "It still hasn't moved?" DM: "No." IIPP: "I attack the gazebo!" DM: "Ok, you swing at the gazebo. Pieces of it are flying off." IIPP: "Is it attacking me back?"
The good news is, roleplaying will improve IIPP's vocabulary.
I hope the judge who first allowed a software patent is proud of the monster he created, because this has turned software development into a minefield. The greatest creations of our generation are public and open, and at every turn, pathetically obvious 'innovations' seal off every avenue of advancement with patents.
We're not talking about a motivation for writing. We're talking about an already-written book, with the assumption in the question being that it is excellent. The issue is not: who will publish it? The issue is: who will support it so it doesn't become a 5000 copy print run lost in the annals of history? The question is: which publisher has the clout, enthusiasm, and experience working with a motivated writer who is willing to work on promotion, to help maximize the breadth of the book sales?
I read them. In fact, I re-read the first one a lot of times, but I read them all at least once. I noticed on his site he's e-publishing them now. Neat.
Personally, myself and most of those I've talked to who are widely read believe that his best work was the first trilogy of the Split Infinity series -- Split Infinity, Blue Adept, and Juxtaposition, and some of the earlier Incarnations books. I did enjoy Bio when I was younger, but it is a bit pulpy now.
How eager are publishers to get your work electronically when you submit it? Do you believe they'd feel the same about work from first-time authors? And do they try to insist on getting proprietary formats, or are they ready to handle formats like StarOffice?
If you were giving advice to a first-time author who wanted to shop around a fantasy manuscript -- and it was vibrant, original, compelling, and entertaining -- what publishers would you recommend? Assume the goal of this author is to be as widely read as possible, and the author is willing to do their part. (Grueling signing tour, visit tons of cons, etc) What publishers would be best at polishing the work and promoting it well?
I must have read at least 20 of your books between 11 and 17, but over time, they seemed to lose their luster. A lot of people I know had a similar fascination, and a similar segue into other reading. Do you believe that your work in fantasy is targetted at the juvenile market? Is that intentional or accidental? Have you had pressure from publishers over the years to try to be 'more mainstream' or perhaps specifically write to the young adult market?
No, you're not thinking of the good ol' days. You're thinking of the fucked up new days, when people stopped manipulating the irc protocol itself and started unleashing 400Mbps DOS attacks on servers because, "That bastard IRCop shouldn't have killed me". There's a far cry from producing nickname collisions because the irc protocol is weak to using thousands of compromised machines to generate hundreds of megs in smurf traffic.
Ah, yes. But the best was just colliding people, pre-TS. I wrote a script that made connection(s) to remote servers, usually far from you and your intended victim. If they changed nicks (which people often did to avoid being collided by a split off server rejoining their nick), the script would order the remote client to change nicks. Since the direct connection would propagate faster than the serverserverserver links (usually you'd pick a server 5+ hops away), by the time the nick change propagated there, it would cause a collision. Combine that with a traditional collide from a split server, and it was unavoidable. I remember taking #jews back from a bunch of nazis using that script.
This reminds me of the good old days, when people distributed like 20 different scripts for the irc2 client, all of which had some backdoor or another. Most of them listened for ctcp commands and would pass them directly to shell. CTCP GROK JUPE CMD ORD -- bonus points to anyone who can name all 4 scripts that had those backdoor commands. Then there were amusing tidbits like scripts that would flood anyone using the authors nick without the right hostmask. Then there was the 'Folder's Crystals' script -- it set your display to off, so you saw nothing even while you joined a channel and were saying, "I've just had all my files secretly replaced by folgers_crystals... let's see what happens!" (meanwhile, the script was executing rm -rf ~).
Of course, back then, you could blame people for running something they didn't understand, since it was on the order of getting a whack-a-bill game by email and just running it, whereas tainted downloads aren't quite as shameful, but ah, it does bring back the memories of the Wild Days of irc...
I wasn't saying an all-windows shop would not use it, only that a shop that is not all-windows will almost certainly be using it. I had a colleague port the original ssh 1.2.x source to cygwin back before openssh existed (at least, before I heard of it, but I think it was before the project had a stable release). Certainly, it could be a great thing for windows, but most corporate types seem to prefer PCAnywhere or something that lets them play with their GUIs.
OpenSSH is far more widely used than any commercial variant. You'd be hard pressed to find a fortune 500 company that isn't using it somewhere. Almost any provider of IT services or network services uses it, unless they have no *nix boxes at all and provide no services on anything other than a windows platform. Try a quick survey of network security companies and ask how they do remote access/filetransfer -- no matter how big, scp/ssh will be the answer, and it will be openssh for a majority of them.
Ok, so 'PC' may generally refer to a desktop. But by 2008, I see a lot of computing done elsewhere. Tablets, wearables, handhelds, phone-based...maybe even certain types of implants. Will those count? Will thin computers count? They may have failed once, but if we get LCD "paper" technology, a computer you unroll and use wherever starts to seem like a great idea. Will that count?
Who's going to use buckeye cable after it is known they have their customers arrested? Who's to say they didn't make the mistake? Someone complains of high ping, tech tampers with modem, and a few months later, the customer goes to jail? There's service with a smile. Thanks, but if I heard that, I'd certainly be looking at my DSL providers.
linux and the slow advance
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Part of the reason linux is moving slowly is that almost everyone has used windows. While those of us experienced with more reliable and open OS's may find this a reason to avoid windows in the future, it nonetheless makes managers comfortable. There are also umpteen trillion "certified" MCSE types out there, who are ostensibly capable of managing the microsoft systems. Linux certs are fairly rare -- which is unsurprising, because demand for them remains relatively low. It's a classic case of Microsoft having a 'Mindshare'.
That said, things are improving. The support of IBM and others and their initiatives is coating linux with the candy coating of acceptability. If large groups begin to adopt linux on the desktop with open office, we are then on the verge of a true potential transition. Desktop use will translate into server comfort.
Finally, it hasn't helped that the last milestone release, 2.4, was a colossal mess. My 2.0.x and 2.2.x boxes were totally, utterly rock solid as servers. I upgraded one to 2.4 -- and it is now an unreliable piece of crap. It fails with kernel panics at any time (albeit infrequently), and almost always dies ~45 days into uptime. Every box I ever tried to use ext3 on died a horrible death, and that didn't make me particularly happy. FreeBSD and I are now getting well acquainted.
Despite all this, Linux has continued to make inroads. And of course it has hype -- it has become, and remains, the primary alternative in the minds of IT people everywhere to the monopolists from Redmond. Since they are a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company, and are tied into every aspect of the industry, saying something might challenge them is a bit like suggesting something might shift the Earth off its orbit -- it will cause ubiquitous change. And Linux is hardly down and out. The sad thing is that venture capital is so dead. NOW is the time of opportunity for fresh linux companies to step up and replace microsoft in places that really want to keep their budgets down. A return to the boom days just means that hundreds of dollars of windows upgrades and office software and such is no longer a big deal...again. Get in there while the gettin's good, I say.
Just be sure, when you fill out your registration card, to note you bought the game for your linux box. Honestly, if BG2 had been linux compatible, I might not have bought a windows box to game on. I played q3 for a long time on linux, and I think it is great that Bioware is putting out a client. In a way, I think it epitomizes that they're a hip company. Their linux players who WOULD NOT otherwise play on a windows box probably comprise, at most, 0.1% of their playerbase. But they're doing it anyhow-- quite possibly because they wisely know that game clients aside, a LOT of people (myself included) plan to run servers only on linux. I know very few people who colo windows boxes who have the freedom to install a game server. Those of us who DO have that freedom already use Linux (or BSD -- I hope the linux compat layer lets me run the linux server on FBSD).
It looks and sounds great, but I'm not too fond of Free Software that only builds under a Microsoft compiler. Let's hope that linux port comes before 1.0.
He's so far beyond smart, that even if you're smart, you're supposed to be alienated. And as he is, he is paying the ultimate price (his early death) for it. Now, you may sympathize -- since everyone different typically pays some sort of price, extracted by some peer group at some point -- but you cannot know him. Bean is also an asshole. He's out to accomplish his goals, and he's only really capable of non-manipulative human contact if he has nothing left to accomplish. If he's trying to do something, then look out -- he'll play everyone around him as he feels will best achieve his goal. Ender was unlike bean; Ender was a Carnegie sort of leader. He rallied people around him because he lifted them up and up, until they followed him out of love and admiration. That's why Ender was loved, and Bean does not inspire the same. But Ender grew up with 5 years of loving parents; Bean hid in a toilet to escape being killed as a baby, and spent his first few years staying alive on the streets.
Slashdot Mirror
Having read some of what Eben Moglen wrote, I'm inclined to agree. Software is covered under copyright, and copyright grants your work protection by default. We don't need a shrinkwrap on a book to note that copying it is illegal; the same should remain true of software.
Haha, excellent! I knew I was botching it a bit, but it is quite hilarious. So, I hear this all went down at a convention, and that the story was circulating like ~15 years ago, so when did it actually happen, and at what con? And since you're referring to Ed, is that greenwood? I really have to have this all down for posterity ;)
/me falls over. I wish my mod points hadn't just expired.
DM: "You enter a clearing, and near the center, you see a gazebo."
Incredibly Ignorant Paladin Player: "Has the gazebo seen me?"
DM: "Um, no."
IIPP: "I approach the gazebo."
DM: "Ok."
IIPP: "It still hasn't moved?"
DM: "No."
IIPP: "I attack the gazebo!"
DM: "Ok, you swing at the gazebo. Pieces of it are flying off."
IIPP: "Is it attacking me back?"
The good news is, roleplaying will improve IIPP's vocabulary.
I hope the judge who first allowed a software patent is proud of the monster he created, because this has turned software development into a minefield. The greatest creations of our generation are public and open, and at every turn, pathetically obvious 'innovations' seal off every avenue of advancement with patents.
Lame.
We're not talking about a motivation for writing. We're talking about an already-written book, with the assumption in the question being that it is excellent. The issue is not: who will publish it? The issue is: who will support it so it doesn't become a 5000 copy print run lost in the annals of history? The question is: which publisher has the clout, enthusiasm, and experience working with a motivated writer who is willing to work on promotion, to help maximize the breadth of the book sales?
Piers Anthony actually used CP/M before switching to DOS many years ago. I recall him recounting it in an authors note.
I read them. In fact, I re-read the first one a lot of times, but I read them all at least once. I noticed on his site he's e-publishing them now. Neat.
Personally, myself and most of those I've talked to who are widely read believe that his best work was the first trilogy of the Split Infinity series -- Split Infinity, Blue Adept, and Juxtaposition, and some of the earlier Incarnations books. I did enjoy Bio when I was younger, but it is a bit pulpy now.
How eager are publishers to get your work electronically when you submit it? Do you believe they'd feel the same about work from first-time authors? And do they try to insist on getting proprietary formats, or are they ready to handle formats like StarOffice?
If you were giving advice to a first-time author who wanted to shop around a fantasy manuscript -- and it was vibrant, original, compelling, and entertaining -- what publishers would you recommend? Assume the goal of this author is to be as widely read as possible, and the author is willing to do their part. (Grueling signing tour, visit tons of cons, etc) What publishers would be best at polishing the work and promoting it well?
I must have read at least 20 of your books between 11 and 17, but over time, they seemed to lose their luster. A lot of people I know had a similar fascination, and a similar segue into other reading. Do you believe that your work in fantasy is targetted at the juvenile market? Is that intentional or accidental? Have you had pressure from publishers over the years to try to be 'more mainstream' or perhaps specifically write to the young adult market?
No, you're not thinking of the good ol' days. You're thinking of the fucked up new days, when people stopped manipulating the irc protocol itself and started unleashing 400Mbps DOS attacks on servers because, "That bastard IRCop shouldn't have killed me". There's a far cry from producing nickname collisions because the irc protocol is weak to using thousands of compromised machines to generate hundreds of megs in smurf traffic.
Ah, yes. But the best was just colliding people, pre-TS. I wrote a script that made connection(s) to remote servers, usually far from you and your intended victim. If they changed nicks (which people often did to avoid being collided by a split off server rejoining their nick), the script would order the remote client to change nicks. Since the direct connection would propagate faster than the serverserverserver links (usually you'd pick a server 5+ hops away), by the time the nick change propagated there, it would cause a collision. Combine that with a traditional collide from a split server, and it was unavoidable. I remember taking #jews back from a bunch of nazis using that script.
This reminds me of the good old days, when people distributed like 20 different scripts for the irc2 client, all of which had some backdoor or another. Most of them listened for ctcp commands and would pass them directly to shell. CTCP GROK JUPE CMD ORD -- bonus points to anyone who can name all 4 scripts that had those backdoor commands. Then there were amusing tidbits like scripts that would flood anyone using the authors nick without the right hostmask. Then there was the 'Folder's Crystals' script -- it set your display to off, so you saw nothing even while you joined a channel and were saying, "I've just had all my files secretly replaced by folgers_crystals... let's see what happens!" (meanwhile, the script was executing rm -rf ~).
Of course, back then, you could blame people for running something they didn't understand, since it was on the order of getting a whack-a-bill game by email and just running it, whereas tainted downloads aren't quite as shameful, but ah, it does bring back the memories of the Wild Days of irc...
I wasn't saying an all-windows shop would not use it, only that a shop that is not all-windows will almost certainly be using it. I had a colleague port the original ssh 1.2.x source to cygwin back before openssh existed (at least, before I heard of it, but I think it was before the project had a stable release). Certainly, it could be a great thing for windows, but most corporate types seem to prefer PCAnywhere or something that lets them play with their GUIs.
OpenSSH is far more widely used than any commercial variant. You'd be hard pressed to find a fortune 500 company that isn't using it somewhere. Almost any provider of IT services or network services uses it, unless they have no *nix boxes at all and provide no services on anything other than a windows platform. Try a quick survey of network security companies and ask how they do remote access/filetransfer -- no matter how big, scp/ssh will be the answer, and it will be openssh for a majority of them.
Ok, so 'PC' may generally refer to a desktop. But by 2008, I see a lot of computing done elsewhere. Tablets, wearables, handhelds, phone-based...maybe even certain types of implants. Will those count? Will thin computers count? They may have failed once, but if we get LCD "paper" technology, a computer you unroll and use wherever starts to seem like a great idea. Will that count?
It's mildly amusing that this comment is getting modded down at the same time as it is being proven utterly accurate.
Who's going to use buckeye cable after it is known they have their customers arrested? Who's to say they didn't make the mistake? Someone complains of high ping, tech tampers with modem, and a few months later, the customer goes to jail? There's service with a smile. Thanks, but if I heard that, I'd certainly be looking at my DSL providers.
Part of the reason linux is moving slowly is that almost everyone has used windows. While those of us experienced with more reliable and open OS's may find this a reason to avoid windows in the future, it nonetheless makes managers comfortable. There are also umpteen trillion "certified" MCSE types out there, who are ostensibly capable of managing the microsoft systems. Linux certs are fairly rare -- which is unsurprising, because demand for them remains relatively low. It's a classic case of Microsoft having a 'Mindshare'.
That said, things are improving. The support of IBM and others and their initiatives is coating linux with the candy coating of acceptability. If large groups begin to adopt linux on the desktop with open office, we are then on the verge of a true potential transition. Desktop use will translate into server comfort.
Finally, it hasn't helped that the last milestone release, 2.4, was a colossal mess. My 2.0.x and 2.2.x boxes were totally, utterly rock solid as servers. I upgraded one to 2.4 -- and it is now an unreliable piece of crap. It fails with kernel panics at any time (albeit infrequently), and almost always dies ~45 days into uptime. Every box I ever tried to use ext3 on died a horrible death, and that didn't make me particularly happy. FreeBSD and I are now getting well acquainted.
Despite all this, Linux has continued to make inroads. And of course it has hype -- it has become, and remains, the primary alternative in the minds of IT people everywhere to the monopolists from Redmond. Since they are a multi-hundred-billion-dollar company, and are tied into every aspect of the industry, saying something might challenge them is a bit like suggesting something might shift the Earth off its orbit -- it will cause ubiquitous change. And Linux is hardly down and out. The sad thing is that venture capital is so dead. NOW is the time of opportunity for fresh linux companies to step up and replace microsoft in places that really want to keep their budgets down. A return to the boom days just means that hundreds of dollars of windows upgrades and office software and such is no longer a big deal...again. Get in there while the gettin's good, I say.
Except that google is not linked TO from every page, but yes, any link to google is going to cut any trip very, very short.
I would have sworn a while back that some study showed that there was less than 6 degrees of separation in 99% of all pages.
Just be sure, when you fill out your registration card, to note you bought the game for your linux box. Honestly, if BG2 had been linux compatible, I might not have bought a windows box to game on. I played q3 for a long time on linux, and I think it is great that Bioware is putting out a client. In a way, I think it epitomizes that they're a hip company. Their linux players who WOULD NOT otherwise play on a windows box probably comprise, at most, 0.1% of their playerbase. But they're doing it anyhow-- quite possibly because they wisely know that game clients aside, a LOT of people (myself included) plan to run servers only on linux. I know very few people who colo windows boxes who have the freedom to install a game server. Those of us who DO have that freedom already use Linux (or BSD -- I hope the linux compat layer lets me run the linux server on FBSD).
Except that it wasn't necessary to get a physical CD if you had the capability of downloading 900M.
It looks and sounds great, but I'm not too fond of Free Software that only builds under a Microsoft compiler. Let's hope that linux port comes before 1.0.
He's so far beyond smart, that even if you're smart, you're supposed to be alienated. And as he is, he is paying the ultimate price (his early death) for it. Now, you may sympathize -- since everyone different typically pays some sort of price, extracted by some peer group at some point -- but you cannot know him. Bean is also an asshole. He's out to accomplish his goals, and he's only really capable of non-manipulative human contact if he has nothing left to accomplish. If he's trying to do something, then look out -- he'll play everyone around him as he feels will best achieve his goal. Ender was unlike bean; Ender was a Carnegie sort of leader. He rallied people around him because he lifted them up and up, until they followed him out of love and admiration. That's why Ender was loved, and Bean does not inspire the same. But Ender grew up with 5 years of loving parents; Bean hid in a toilet to escape being killed as a baby, and spent his first few years staying alive on the streets.