Michel Verdier
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Van's Response to the "Halloween Document"
Wake up Bill Gates
My 2¢
on this Idiotic Ploy
I'm a songwriter, and have
been, since I was 12 years old. I've fought the music industry on it's
turf for over 20 years trying to do what I love to do most: write
songs. Until 5 years ago, it looked pretty
futile. Over the years, I've learned how to network
everything from drum machines and MIDI synthesizers to NT/Netware/Unix
computers together in the interests of someday getting my songs out to
the masses. It currently, looks like my prospects are pretty
good.
For several years, I used
Cakewalk Professional 2.0 to write and compose almost a hundred
songs. I remember one Christmas while I was in the Navy that
I didn't have a lot of money, and my ship was on it's way toward another
deployment, and, I wanted to give my Mom and little Sister a memorable
Christmas gift. I went to the San Diego library and checked
out a bunch of music books and went to work on my Commodore 128 with Dr.
T's Music Sequencing software to create a 12 song tape that was my Mom
and Sister's Christmas
gift. Tangent? Perhaps......
I've come quite a distance
from those adolescent days of just writing songs for my Mom and
Sister. Now, I run many Internet servers on Linux boxen,
using Apache, Sendmail, PHP, MySQL, FrontPage extensions for Linux/UNIX
that serve better than a thousand hits a day on better days for me, my
clients, and my employer; because I spent countless hours learning
Internet protocols, server configurations, communications
infrastructures, etc. to propagate my music. Let's get back to
that...
I used Cakewalk for a while on
my Windows 3.1 x386, and loved it, and accomplished a great deal, but,
Bill has pushed the technology forward. I ran Windows 95 for
a while trying to write songs, but after reinstalling it countless times
and suffering through massive ordeals at times when the creative spirit
was high, I eventually pitched it due to it's flaws. I
eventually built an expendable machine on my home network (yeah, the
irony, huh? I have 7 networked machines in my home; 8
more on the Internet at large; and, I'm really just a musician who wants
to play the piano), to work the Win3.1 version of Cakewalk that served
me so well over the years, and allowed my creative side to
excel.
Windows NT never did allow my
MPU-401 card to communicate with my synthesizers and drum machines, and,
that was tragic, {perhaps Win2000 natively supports it now, but,
Micro$oft has lost me for good; I don't have the time, at this point}
but, when, I dropped $550 on a CD-R (Ricoh) and it blue-screened me
every time I tried to burn a CD of my songs, I decided there had to be
something better, I started doing the Tri-boot WinNT/95/Linux
thing over 5 years ago, and, then, Win95 became too much of a pain in
the ass, so, I dual-booted WinNT/Linux for a few months, until that
fated-night when NT blue-screened me for the last time, while trying to
cut my songs to a CD in the interests of promoting my own creations
using my own hard-won hardware via CD-media.
Now, I run Linux, exclusively;
with the exception of those 2 hours a week my clients force me to use
this inferior, virus-ridden, buggy, inept software. Sure, I
had to do a lot of tap-dancing to get my documents into a format that
Windoze could read, via saving to RTF in StarOffice 4.0, or Excel 95,
using the same in the beginning, but, now, I'm 10 times as productive,
and, better, yet; though it took long-hours to learn how to make Linux
2.0.34 work well with my CD-R and Advansys SCSI card, I can begin
burning a CD from a customer site in Detroit, while my little Internet
server is out there attached to the Internet, at large, by a mere
2-cable Diva ISDN modem, using a second phone line in my home in Grand
Rapids; and, when I get home, the CD is there, and it works when, I play
it in my stereo. Now, several of the servers, including Tempe, on
which you read this, live on T-1s, and, I can leave them alone for
months at a time to serve you my music. I'm actually starting to
attain to that musical ideal.
Enough, on the soap-box
thingy, but, while I write this as of the date, you'll see at the
bottom, my Dad's in a trailer park 40 miles to the West working on his
own web-page development, using the same machine that used to live on a
frail little 2-lead copper phone line in my apartment, and, when I make
the time again (hopefully soon) I'll build another P200 for the other
room and run Win3.1 and Cakewalk 2.0 on it to let me write another song
in the manic manner in which I used to write.
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But, while, my Apache 1.3.6 / MySQL / PHP3 / Sendmail / PPP /
Slackware Linux7.0 / StarOffice5.1 / SoundStudio / Festival / elm /
pine /
ad nauseum hasn't
cost me one red cent, it has cost me much more.
Time................ Time, I could have written something better
than Living in a
Cartoon , or, Dreamer, or,
my ex-girlfriend's waiting favorite, Stow Away, which I haven't finished because I work until 2 a.m. every
morning, then, go to client sites at 8 am to solve their Microsoft
problems. The girl is gone, but, that's my own fault.
But, perhaps, if I'd spent more time playing the boards, or writing her
song than hacking, that might not have come to be. Another
tangent, sure, but, hopefully, you'll see the parallels in how our
technology demeans our pursuit of our life's quests.
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There will be no more troubleshooting Win95
machines that can't find their mouse, or, their, sound card, or, nic, or
server, or whatever. OSS is free and, will solve these
problems. Sure, I might have wasted a lot of time where it
would have been better spent, and, also cost myself some human value,
but, those souls drift regardless of these tangential issues.
Trust me, I've been through too many "friends" to believe
otherwise. True friends stay
true. But, if you consider time to be a commodity of
any value, at all, you'll ask yourself how many songs I've suppressed in
trying to get a technology environment that fosters my musique reliably,
so those inspired moments don't get crushed by a
mouse-deludedly-turned-joystick.
My point: The "
Halloween Documents" may be a
hoax, or, a disgruntled employee's/contractor's slant on the Microsoft
vs. Open Software community, or an initiation of war between the
2. I don't care. I'm just trying to write music,
and, Bill's stuff couldn't make that happen for me. OSS did,
and that's why 500+ people a day have the opportunity to hear Ded Serius
music over these little copper wires using (more often than not)
Win95/98/NT machines. If that gets altered by the way
Microsoft wants to run the protocols on your Microsoft machine, it will,
truly be a tragedy. Not because my songs are that good; but,
because my music server represents only one of the 81%, or so, Internet servers not
governed by Microsoft. This machine complies with the
standards the Internet set forth in the days of the Arpanet, and, I
check the RFC's constantly to ensure it complies with the standards
of the Internet today, so, you can hear RealAudio, MP3, MIDI, or see my
lyrics and such via HTTP, from your Windows 95/98/NT
machine. If the standard changes on your machine at Bill
Gate's invocation, you'll no longer have access to this machine, or
Yahoo, or IRC, or Mirabilis, or Altavista, or any other machine that was
built for an enterprise audience. This will be the Internet's
dead-end, if it comes to be.
I'm not asking Bill to give me
a machine that can continue to let me write music, because, to this end,
he's consistently failed; including that Win2000 piece of
crap. I'm merely asking that Bill not exclude access from my
machine to you. I hope you agree that this would be bad. Not
that my music is that good. But, somebody else's might
be.
Regards,
Van
Links Below: {Will open in new window}
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I updated this page on Wednesday December 31, 1969 5:00:00 PM
Van
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