Yes, I am aware of that. Like many, I was reading all about his life in response to the recent news. The story with his daughter is just part of the long narrative of brutality and mistrust that has characterized Saddam's life. But make no mistake, he is no longer a figure to be feared but to be pitied--so much power and promise wasted on such cruel and self-serving aims. His life and fate, regardless of whether he is put to death or not, serves as a cautionary tale. That's why killing him is pointless. The lesson about corruptive power and human rights abuses has been taught, the dictator has fallen. To put him to death now serves no purpose outside of vengeance. Vengeance diminishes us and it cheapens our legal system. By killing him, we sink to his level.
I had a long rebuttal typed up addressing your careless use of rhetorical devices, but decided against it about halfway through and deleted it. Frankly, posts such as yours are not insightful, interesting, funny, or informative. They're just semantic and boring.
Great point. Are we supposed to believe that (just to make up typical asshat DJ names here) "DJ Walrus Gordon and the Wildman: Gordon in the Mornin'" are too dignified, too principled to shill for a product, in this case, a certain band's CD? Celebrities do it, so why do button-pushing banter monkeys object to it?
Well put. Keep in mind that those labels used to try to sign bands based on the idea of exposure. The angle was always that they "knew the music business" and could arrange shows, provide space on store shelves for their records/tapes/CD's, and in general make the band more money. But what we're seeing now is a situation in which those labels are less and less capable of trapping new talent, because the bands themselves realize how little added value the old channels offer over self-promotion. Who wants space on a store shelf when traditional music stores are dying all around us? Just ask the latest victim, Tower Records. Hell, ask the record store owner I knew in indie rock hotbed, Chapel Hill, who one day confided in me that if he didn't run an eBay store on the side, he would be out of business.
Depending on the band's budget, direct-to-consumer marketing can be as simple as a band web page with PayPal buttons on it for downloading DRM-free mp3s, or it can consist of television or radio advertising, or anything else you can imagine. If you're a new, unproven band, and you have a good idea of what you're trying to accomplish coupled with the discipline to keep your overhead low, then you really don't need the "help" of a Sony BMG, an Atlantic or a Warner.
Few people know the music industry better than Peter Jenner. Pink Floyd's first manager, who subsequently managed Syd Barrett's solo career, Jenner has also looked after T.Rex, The Clash, Ian Dury, Disposable Heroes and Billy Bragg - who he manages today. He's also secretary general of the International Music Managers Forum.
That's great! He sounds like a really fascinating, well-weathered guy who has had a hand in promoting and advertising musicians. I'm sure he has a lot of really cool stories to tell about his experiences as a manager. But has that experience working in a music culture so dramatically different from the present day one given him the ability to intuit anything about DRM, about evolving content delivery systems, about much of anything outside of managing bands? Of course it hasn't. I'd rather hear the opinion of someone who is actually involved in the online music distribution business, someone like...hell, Steve Jobs, as opposed to an aging, disgruntled outsider who has been commissioned to tell us what we want to hear.
Perhaps that's why the only thing he gives us in the interview is sloganeering, platitudes, and empty insights that most of us who have been paying attention are already wise to. DRM is already dying. You don't need to drag out the old Pink Floyd manager and have him give a curse word-laced statement to that effect.
It almost conjures up the old saying "Linux is only free if your time is worthless" doesn't it?
It's funny because there seems to be this commonly-held notion that Linux and other open source projects are perfect tools for any situation and are therefore immune to any criticism. And of course, that's not always the case. Sometimes commercial solutions are far more viable because a company has already paid people for the man hours it takes to do whatever it is you are trying to do.
When I'm not out of my gourd and posting things like this, I tend to be a fairly advanced Linux user and I have yet to find anything that I just simply cannot do under Linux. But there is a threshold at which the more important consideration is time and not the freeness of the solution. It's just not worth my time to spend 6 hours diagnosing a particularly ugly and complex problem, and poring over the questionable online resources you described. I'm not going to pay anybody in my company to do it either, they have other things to do.
But maybe, just maybe, it's worth it for a company with whom I have a support contract to pay somebody else for 6 hours of their time to do the same. In the case of Red Hat, Oracle, and Novell (what has become the holy trinity of corporate Linux solutions), the market has turned into a battleground where the better-financed of the three has not been afraid to throw its weight around. It's arguably the same level of support for the same product. In that case, who wins? It's the company that has far more capital to dump into any project of its choosing. It's the company that can afford to charge literally half as much as the competition. And unfortunately, that just ain't trusted and true Red Hat.
I won't bother to explain my circumstances in great detail, but they involve coming back from a lousy Irish pub Saturday and then fooling around on my computer for an hour or two with all the useful effects of alcohol in place, such as loss of memory and impaired judgment. Beer goggled, I got busy with an ugly girl who talks too much last night, and that girl was Slashdot and its myriad posters too cowardly to support their statements with an actual login.
That's all you really need to know. Actually, that's more than you need to know. I've told you this because there seems to be a void in your mind representing the puzzlement and incredulity correspondent with the lack of understanding of my circumstances. Speaking of "lack": You lack any power in this situation, so keep in mind that I'm explaining this to you out of courtesy, and not because you, who lack even the respect to identify yourself, matter in the least.
As far as reading my comment history goes, I welcome it. I stand by everything I've ever written:) Obviously you can't make the same claim, or you would have posted using your login name. Later, coward.
...is also the most impractical. What you do is just never network the Windows box in the first place. No internet, no intranet--nothing. If you use Windows exclusively, then this isn't really an option. You're going to want to get online eventually. But if you're double booting and running Windows for rendering applications, non-multiplayer games, office suites or whatever else that doesn't require connectivity, then you'll be fine.
Said the anonymous coward who thinks that he knows my hardware setup without my even telling him. I like how you just psychically KNOW that I must not know what I'm talking about based on your meager, barely interesting little experience with your own crappy card.
I have a GeForce4 Ti 4200 overclocked almost to 4600 speeds. I've had it for a long time. I've been able to run most games at 1024 x 768 resolution with medium graphics settings for years and years now. So what's the problem? The version of hardware pixel shaders that it supports. If you think I'm somehow mistaken (which I doubt, since you're just the type to blurt out things that make no damn sense without any care as to facts), then why don't you waste time researching the card yourself? Or better yet, just trust me when I tell you that I installed the latest Vista beta and the card would not work with Aero. And yes, I spent lot of time on google determining why and if there is a workaround. I even looked into ways of flashing the rom on the card to trick it into supporting a higher version of shaders. I'm so far ahead of you on this, and on probably every other single aspect of life, that it's not even funny. Moe-ron.
...and jobs may be refused to applicants who are seen as a health risk.
I don't know if I'm helping to dismantle the vapid Orwellian scare tactics that the article has adopted or if I'm just adding to them by pointing this out. The work climate and employment laws in the U.K. may differ from those of the U.S., but in the United States, this already happens.
The Americans With Disabilities Act proscribes discrimination against disabled Americans and imposes a burden upon employers to make reasonable accommodations for the disabled. Now let's say I'm a very pragmatic employer, and I know that under workers' compensation schemes, if I hire an-already disabled worker and that person injures themselves further and gets even more disabled, then I'm really, really paying serious money because of it. For example, let's say I run a factory that presses steel girders, and I chance hiring Joe, who only has one eye. Well, Joe isn't a lucky guy. Three months down the line, he has an accident at my factory that costs him the only eye he has left. It's an injury to one eye--if I had hired someone who had two good eyes to start with, I'd be paying much, much less in workers compensation to that person than I would to Joe, who is now completely blind. So what I do is, despite the ADA, I just find every legal excuse in the world to not hire Joe.
That's just how we Yanks play the game. The U.K. was the home to the Industrial Revolution and probably has a far richer history of workers' compensation than the U.S. The rules of the hiring game and how it's played are undoubtedly the same. Don't want to burst anybody's fortune-telling bubble, but we already do most of what the article has predicted.
No, that was my point. I don't know what kind of world people think we live in, where offering only marginally better support services for the same product can somehow compete with veritable truckloads of cash. It ain't the real one, though, I can assure you of that. Thanks, but my dollars are going into shares of the monopoly with questionable but effective business practices, instead of the bright-eyed darling of the Linux community that can barely break even and has been trending down, down down even in their estimation ever since the Fedora fork.
I only wish I still had that kind of youthful idealism and naivete. Red Hat thinks it has some sort of advantage over Novell, over Oracle, over everybody else? Let them prove it. Show us you really have a better product and really offer better support for it, and that those advantages are more significant than the proven track records of bigger corporations who can buy and sell your ass. Because all I see is this ridiculous "interview" that reads like a Red Hat press release. I don't see numbers, I don't see results--I damn sure don't see a company that is even in the same league as a Novell or an Oracle. When I read the "Oracle to Buy Red Hat" press release in 18 months, I promise not to be a bandwagon poster, chiming in with the "I told you so's." I'll simply be unsurprised and leave it at that.
I'm getting tired of seeing all these bullshit, tomshardware-like Apple stories. Does anybody have an idea about what I can do to get Appledot stories all up out of my grill when I go to the main page? I've thought about going to, for example, politics.slashdot.org, games.slashdot.org, etc. individually, but I don't want to miss a story of value that is not in any one individual category. Any ideas? Anyone? Bueller?
You know, mods, comments that attract the attention of only a few trolls are not trolls per se. Mine was simply the first post in the discussion by a registered user, and by someone who has always had no less than excellent karma. You sure have an odd way of penalizing people who contribute to the overall discussion of an article, and to the quality of discussion on this forum in general. And by "odd" I think I really mean petty, clueless, and incompetent. You know, that kind of odd.
I've been running various incarnations of Linux and other open source projects since before apparently half of Slashdot readers even started elementary school. Using this, my third Slashdot account, I have offered my opinions on various topics as both a licensed, practicing attorney and as just another fellow geek. Open source and open source companies such as Red Hat have few better advocates than old diehards like me. But in all that time, I've never seen such ridiculous, toe-the-line open source jihadism. To mod anything even marginally critical of an open source-based company appears to be great heresy in the court of Slashdot. The petty abuse meted to anyone playing devil's advocate or presenting opposing viewpoints is distasteful. If you think, in your infinite wisdom, that all people want to read are a bunch of "Me too!" and "You got THAT right!" posts that correlate with a Slashdot hive mind mentality, then why even have an open forum to begin with?
My little fee-wings are a tad hurt, you sad, sad little assholes. Please, use the full extent of your petty power to drive the sensible posters away who come from other walks of life, leaving just the maniacal, drum-beating and chest-thumping zealots. That will work out great for you. Promise.
I got a chuckle out of this. Incidentally, I am someone who is "lucky" enough to own a last- generation card new enough to run the latest games at acceptable framerates, and yet somehow too dumpy to run Vista in its fully tricked out form.
"I thought this iPod I bought would make it seem like I was part of some music revolution--that I was so plugged into the music scene, so knee-deep in a technological, counter-cultural uprising that I have to have my music with me at all times. Make no mistake, I am only mildly nearsighted, but the glasses I nevertheless wear are as big and black as the people I secretly fear when they walk past my car at stoplights. When I'm not discussing the origins of coffee brewing with a clearly disinterested Starbucks worker, I can be found rarely making eye contact with others and attempting to mail my gigantic pieces of shitty art at the media mail rate at my local post office.
You know, it used to be my music player for playing my music. Owning it used to mean I was cool, but now everybody on the subway has one. What do I do now? Please, please, direct me to the Next Big Thing for me to purchase so that I can continue to identify myself as someone who is young and wise to the latest trends."
If Microsoft really wants that market, it need only convince them that they are ordinary, well-adjusted people if they don't own a Zune.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I am aware of that. Like many, I was reading all about his life in response to the recent news. The story with his daughter is just part of the long narrative of brutality and mistrust that has characterized Saddam's life. But make no mistake, he is no longer a figure to be feared but to be pitied--so much power and promise wasted on such cruel and self-serving aims. His life and fate, regardless of whether he is put to death or not, serves as a cautionary tale. That's why killing him is pointless. The lesson about corruptive power and human rights abuses has been taught, the dictator has fallen. To put him to death now serves no purpose outside of vengeance. Vengeance diminishes us and it cheapens our legal system. By killing him, we sink to his level.
That sword in Kill Bill that is so sharp that it can cut God might be a good start. I'm saying we need that thing.
I had a long rebuttal typed up addressing your careless use of rhetorical devices, but decided against it about halfway through and deleted it. Frankly, posts such as yours are not insightful, interesting, funny, or informative. They're just semantic and boring.
You stole my insightful comment. Please expect to hear from my lawyer.
Mercy is the best form of vengeance.
Several minutes ago, I saw this picture of him over on Wikipedia, and I just felt really, really sorry for him.
The man has already been stripped of his wealth and power, and imprisoned. Will killing him bring back the 148 dead Shiites?
What is the worst case of voter disenfranchisement you have ever seen as a result of electronic voting?
Great point. Are we supposed to believe that (just to make up typical asshat DJ names here) "DJ Walrus Gordon and the Wildman: Gordon in the Mornin'" are too dignified, too principled to shill for a product, in this case, a certain band's CD? Celebrities do it, so why do button-pushing banter monkeys object to it?
Well put. Keep in mind that those labels used to try to sign bands based on the idea of exposure. The angle was always that they "knew the music business" and could arrange shows, provide space on store shelves for their records/tapes/CD's, and in general make the band more money. But what we're seeing now is a situation in which those labels are less and less capable of trapping new talent, because the bands themselves realize how little added value the old channels offer over self-promotion. Who wants space on a store shelf when traditional music stores are dying all around us? Just ask the latest victim, Tower Records. Hell, ask the record store owner I knew in indie rock hotbed, Chapel Hill, who one day confided in me that if he didn't run an eBay store on the side, he would be out of business.
Depending on the band's budget, direct-to-consumer marketing can be as simple as a band web page with PayPal buttons on it for downloading DRM-free mp3s, or it can consist of television or radio advertising, or anything else you can imagine. If you're a new, unproven band, and you have a good idea of what you're trying to accomplish coupled with the discipline to keep your overhead low, then you really don't need the "help" of a Sony BMG, an Atlantic or a Warner.
I enjoyed that pun, thanks :)
That's great! He sounds like a really fascinating, well-weathered guy who has had a hand in promoting and advertising musicians. I'm sure he has a lot of really cool stories to tell about his experiences as a manager. But has that experience working in a music culture so dramatically different from the present day one given him the ability to intuit anything about DRM, about evolving content delivery systems, about much of anything outside of managing bands? Of course it hasn't. I'd rather hear the opinion of someone who is actually involved in the online music distribution business, someone like...hell, Steve Jobs, as opposed to an aging, disgruntled outsider who has been commissioned to tell us what we want to hear.
Perhaps that's why the only thing he gives us in the interview is sloganeering, platitudes, and empty insights that most of us who have been paying attention are already wise to. DRM is already dying. You don't need to drag out the old Pink Floyd manager and have him give a curse word-laced statement to that effect.
It almost conjures up the old saying "Linux is only free if your time is worthless" doesn't it?
It's funny because there seems to be this commonly-held notion that Linux and other open source projects are perfect tools for any situation and are therefore immune to any criticism. And of course, that's not always the case. Sometimes commercial solutions are far more viable because a company has already paid people for the man hours it takes to do whatever it is you are trying to do.
When I'm not out of my gourd and posting things like this, I tend to be a fairly advanced Linux user and I have yet to find anything that I just simply cannot do under Linux. But there is a threshold at which the more important consideration is time and not the freeness of the solution. It's just not worth my time to spend 6 hours diagnosing a particularly ugly and complex problem, and poring over the questionable online resources you described. I'm not going to pay anybody in my company to do it either, they have other things to do.
But maybe, just maybe, it's worth it for a company with whom I have a support contract to pay somebody else for 6 hours of their time to do the same. In the case of Red Hat, Oracle, and Novell (what has become the holy trinity of corporate Linux solutions), the market has turned into a battleground where the better-financed of the three has not been afraid to throw its weight around. It's arguably the same level of support for the same product. In that case, who wins? It's the company that has far more capital to dump into any project of its choosing. It's the company that can afford to charge literally half as much as the competition. And unfortunately, that just ain't trusted and true Red Hat.
I won't bother to explain my circumstances in great detail, but they involve coming back from a lousy Irish pub Saturday and then fooling around on my computer for an hour or two with all the useful effects of alcohol in place, such as loss of memory and impaired judgment. Beer goggled, I got busy with an ugly girl who talks too much last night, and that girl was Slashdot and its myriad posters too cowardly to support their statements with an actual login.
:) Obviously you can't make the same claim, or you would have posted using your login name. Later, coward.
That's all you really need to know. Actually, that's more than you need to know. I've told you this because there seems to be a void in your mind representing the puzzlement and incredulity correspondent with the lack of understanding of my circumstances. Speaking of "lack": You lack any power in this situation, so keep in mind that I'm explaining this to you out of courtesy, and not because you, who lack even the respect to identify yourself, matter in the least.
As far as reading my comment history goes, I welcome it. I stand by everything I've ever written
Nonsense--I'm a progressive, 1490's man. You're allowed to choose between the two.
...is also the most impractical. What you do is just never network the Windows box in the first place. No internet, no intranet--nothing. If you use Windows exclusively, then this isn't really an option. You're going to want to get online eventually. But if you're double booting and running Windows for rendering applications, non-multiplayer games, office suites or whatever else that doesn't require connectivity, then you'll be fine.
Said the anonymous coward who thinks that he knows my hardware setup without my even telling him. I like how you just psychically KNOW that I must not know what I'm talking about based on your meager, barely interesting little experience with your own crappy card.
I have a GeForce4 Ti 4200 overclocked almost to 4600 speeds. I've had it for a long time. I've been able to run most games at 1024 x 768 resolution with medium graphics settings for years and years now. So what's the problem? The version of hardware pixel shaders that it supports. If you think I'm somehow mistaken (which I doubt, since you're just the type to blurt out things that make no damn sense without any care as to facts), then why don't you waste time researching the card yourself? Or better yet, just trust me when I tell you that I installed the latest Vista beta and the card would not work with Aero. And yes, I spent lot of time on google determining why and if there is a workaround. I even looked into ways of flashing the rom on the card to trick it into supporting a higher version of shaders. I'm so far ahead of you on this, and on probably every other single aspect of life, that it's not even funny. Moe-ron.
I don't know if I'm helping to dismantle the vapid Orwellian scare tactics that the article has adopted or if I'm just adding to them by pointing this out. The work climate and employment laws in the U.K. may differ from those of the U.S., but in the United States, this already happens.
The Americans With Disabilities Act proscribes discrimination against disabled Americans and imposes a burden upon employers to make reasonable accommodations for the disabled. Now let's say I'm a very pragmatic employer, and I know that under workers' compensation schemes, if I hire an-already disabled worker and that person injures themselves further and gets even more disabled, then I'm really, really paying serious money because of it. For example, let's say I run a factory that presses steel girders, and I chance hiring Joe, who only has one eye. Well, Joe isn't a lucky guy. Three months down the line, he has an accident at my factory that costs him the only eye he has left. It's an injury to one eye--if I had hired someone who had two good eyes to start with, I'd be paying much, much less in workers compensation to that person than I would to Joe, who is now completely blind. So what I do is, despite the ADA, I just find every legal excuse in the world to not hire Joe.
That's just how we Yanks play the game. The U.K. was the home to the Industrial Revolution and probably has a far richer history of workers' compensation than the U.S. The rules of the hiring game and how it's played are undoubtedly the same. Don't want to burst anybody's fortune-telling bubble, but we already do most of what the article has predicted.
No, that was my point. I don't know what kind of world people think we live in, where offering only marginally better support services for the same product can somehow compete with veritable truckloads of cash. It ain't the real one, though, I can assure you of that. Thanks, but my dollars are going into shares of the monopoly with questionable but effective business practices, instead of the bright-eyed darling of the Linux community that can barely break even and has been trending down, down down even in their estimation ever since the Fedora fork.
I only wish I still had that kind of youthful idealism and naivete. Red Hat thinks it has some sort of advantage over Novell, over Oracle, over everybody else? Let them prove it. Show us you really have a better product and really offer better support for it, and that those advantages are more significant than the proven track records of bigger corporations who can buy and sell your ass. Because all I see is this ridiculous "interview" that reads like a Red Hat press release. I don't see numbers, I don't see results--I damn sure don't see a company that is even in the same league as a Novell or an Oracle. When I read the "Oracle to Buy Red Hat" press release in 18 months, I promise not to be a bandwagon poster, chiming in with the "I told you so's." I'll simply be unsurprised and leave it at that.
I'm getting tired of seeing all these bullshit, tomshardware-like Apple stories. Does anybody have an idea about what I can do to get Appledot stories all up out of my grill when I go to the main page? I've thought about going to, for example, politics.slashdot.org, games.slashdot.org, etc. individually, but I don't want to miss a story of value that is not in any one individual category. Any ideas? Anyone? Bueller?
Does this mean you didn't like the scratch-offs I sent? Tell the world, why don't you.
- BeeBeard "Beeloney" Beekowski
You know, mods, comments that attract the attention of only a few trolls are not trolls per se. Mine was simply the first post in the discussion by a registered user, and by someone who has always had no less than excellent karma. You sure have an odd way of penalizing people who contribute to the overall discussion of an article, and to the quality of discussion on this forum in general. And by "odd" I think I really mean petty, clueless, and incompetent. You know, that kind of odd.
I've been running various incarnations of Linux and other open source projects since before apparently half of Slashdot readers even started elementary school. Using this, my third Slashdot account, I have offered my opinions on various topics as both a licensed, practicing attorney and as just another fellow geek. Open source and open source companies such as Red Hat have few better advocates than old diehards like me. But in all that time, I've never seen such ridiculous, toe-the-line open source jihadism. To mod anything even marginally critical of an open source-based company appears to be great heresy in the court of Slashdot. The petty abuse meted to anyone playing devil's advocate or presenting opposing viewpoints is distasteful. If you think, in your infinite wisdom, that all people want to read are a bunch of "Me too!" and "You got THAT right!" posts that correlate with a Slashdot hive mind mentality, then why even have an open forum to begin with?
My little fee-wings are a tad hurt, you sad, sad little assholes. Please, use the full extent of your petty power to drive the sensible posters away who come from other walks of life, leaving just the maniacal, drum-beating and chest-thumping zealots. That will work out great for you. Promise.
...for 15 years, I am judging each and every one of you damn fish-eaters! ;)
In one year's time, it's quite possible that Red Hat will have already lost the battle of even just supporting their own product.
I got a chuckle out of this. Incidentally, I am someone who is "lucky" enough to own a last- generation card new enough to run the latest games at acceptable framerates, and yet somehow too dumpy to run Vista in its fully tricked out form.
"I thought this iPod I bought would make it seem like I was part of some music revolution--that I was so plugged into the music scene, so knee-deep in a technological, counter-cultural uprising that I have to have my music with me at all times. Make no mistake, I am only mildly nearsighted, but the glasses I nevertheless wear are as big and black as the people I secretly fear when they walk past my car at stoplights. When I'm not discussing the origins of coffee brewing with a clearly disinterested Starbucks worker, I can be found rarely making eye contact with others and attempting to mail my gigantic pieces of shitty art at the media mail rate at my local post office.
You know, it used to be my music player for playing my music. Owning it used to mean I was cool, but now everybody on the subway has one. What do I do now? Please, please, direct me to the Next Big Thing for me to purchase so that I can continue to identify myself as someone who is young and wise to the latest trends."
If Microsoft really wants that market, it need only convince them that they are ordinary, well-adjusted people if they don't own a Zune.