Ded Serius

 

Ded Serius: My Take on The Halloween Documents Ded Serius
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.

  • 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.

  • 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


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I updated this page on Wednesday December 31, 1969 5:00:00 PM Van

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