Dr. Andy's Poetry and Technology Hour
Hosted by Andy Jones
KDVS 90.3FM
Davis, California

Show date: 2002.Jan.23
Transcribed by: Bill Kendrick

And this is Dr. Andy of Dr. Andy's Poetry & Technology Hour,
coming to you at 5 o'clock on the 23rd of January from KDVS 90.3FM Davis.
I'm very pleased to have you as a listener this afternoon, and want to make
sure to tell you to stay tuned ... [ Aggie basketball plug ]

Anyway, back to poetry.  Back to technology.  In this short version of
Dr. Andy's Poetry & Technology Hour, we will enjoy a conversation with the
president of the Linux Users' Group of Davis, Peter J. Salzman.  He and I
will talk about AOL and what's up with Red Hat.  You probably don't know
what Red Hat is, perhaps you don't care, but after my conversation with
Peter J. Salzman, you'll care.

We'll also talk about W. B. Yates, and perhaps a couple other poets in this
hour, and remind you ... [ poetry reading plug ]

We will talk about that, and so much more, on this afternoon's
shorter edition of Dr. Andy's Poetry & Technology Hour.

[ musical interlude ]

Those have been the soulful tunes of one Mr. Ray Charles.  And he plays
for us on his keyboard every Wednesday afternoon at this time "What I Say."
You can hear that and many more of Ray Charles' greatest tunes on his
Rhino Records recording "The Very Best of Ray Charles."

Well I wanted to start with today's listener mail.  [ mail readings ]

[ poetry ]

[ psas ]

I hope you will heed those important messages about your mucus membranes.

At the very top of the hour, I promised that we'd talk a little bit about
AOL.  They've been very busy this week, they're in the news.  When I say
AOL, of course I refer to America Online.  Here're the sort of things
that AOL's engaged in this week.  They announced this week, and I'm
reading this from memory - most of the news that I get about the technology
world, I get from a site that you can find linked-to on the website for
this show - that's www.CultureLover.com - I noticed that last week, a good
20 people signed on to CultureLover.com the day after this program, and
I think they did that because they wanted to play this show from their
office at their leisure, and you can do that as well, any day of the week,
within a week after a particular show - this show, or any other show on
KDVS - you can go to KDVS.org, go right to the winter schedule, and then
download the relevant hour or hours of programming to listen to from your
office or home.  Amazing.

Anyway, AOL this week has decided that they are going to raise the rate
that they charge people who go to AOL for content only, who use a secondary
ISP, because many people are not very satisfied with the sort of Internet
service provider function that AOL offers.  They feel that they're always
getting disconnected, that they are finding busy signals.  That if they
go through a local ISP, such as Mother.com here in Davis, then they can
have access to that AOL content without having to wait or be disconnected
by AOL itself.  Well, AOL has raised its rates from $9.95 to $14.95 for
people who just want their content on a monthly basis.

Also AOL this week has announced that they are going to sue Microsoft -
get in line, I say! - but they're going to sue Microsoft because of the
way that Microsoft's practices has made Internet Explorer the predominant
web browser rather than Netscape, which, of course, has been bought out by
AOL as of a couple of years ago.  It's a long a complicated suit, I won't
get into it now.  But that's another one of AOL's important activities.

And then, just a couple of days ago it was announced that there is a movement
afoot for AOL to purchase none other than Red Hat.  Red Hat - many of you
are wondering what that is, and I don't blame you.  Well, to shed some light,
to answer that particular question, I have on the live line here, one
Mr. Peter J. Salzman, president of LUGOD, which is the Linux Users' Group
of Davis.  He's going to explain to us a little bit what Red Hat is, and
why we should care that AOL might be buying them out.

Peter J. Salzman, are you there?

P: Hi Andy.

A: Welcome to Dr. Andy's Poetry & Technology Hour.

P: Thank you.

A: Now, tell us what is the deal with Red Hat, and why would we care that
AOL may be purchasing this particular outfit.

P: OK, well, first of all, Red Hat is company that sells Linux.  Linux itself
is not a company.  It's not developed by a company or anything.  Linux is
actually developed by a bunch of people who have really no commercial
affiliation.  They make the software available freely.  And what other
companies do is take this software written by these private developers,
they package it onto a CD, and then they sell their CD as an operating
system.

A: So Linux itself can't be bought, but only you can buy, say a version
of it, an interpretation of Linux by Red Hat or some other company, is
that right?

P: That's correct.  Nobody will ever be able to buy Linux.  Linux is freely
available.  You can do with it whatever you want to, but you will never be
able to buy Linux itself.

A: Interesting.  So, what sort of value does Red Hat offer?  I mean, why not
pick up a copy of Linux for free, rather than, say, paying money for it
by going through this Red Hat company.

P: Well, there are lots of reasons for that.  The number one reason would
be support.  Red Hat offers support for people who buy their operating system.
Linux doesn't necessary have the best reputation for being user friendly.
If you're not really a geek-head, then installing it could be a problem
on particularly new hardware.  Red Hat offers support to help you get up
to speed with your Linux installation.

A: I see, interesting.  And what would AOL be doing buying Red Hat.
What would that do for them in the computing world, and are you, as
a Linux user worried that one of the primary presenters of Linux might be
owned by AOL/Time-Warner, one of the maybe half-dozen companies that seems
to chomping into every aspect of the media, and really controlling,
therefore, so much of the content available to us as consumers.

P: Well, actually, to answer your first question.  I'm not sure what AOL is
doing.  AOL has always been sort of this weird company - they do very
strange things like buying the Netscape browser and then not using Netscape
with their own software.  Very strange company.  So I have no clue,
but if you look at the timing at which the rumor of the Red Hat buying
takes place, ie, a few days before AOL announces that they want to sue
Microsoft, that's sort of interesting, and it seems to suggest something.
AOL is aiming for something.  I don't know what.

To answer your second question, I'm not particularly worried about whether
AOL buys Red Hat or not.  I actually use another version of Linux called
Debian, so whether Red Hat gets bought out or not - it would be sad to
see them bought by AOL, no one's particularly impressed by AOL's quality
assuredness, but it wouldn't affect me.

A: It wouldn't affect you personally, but still, you are, aren't you an
advocate for Linux.  You'd like to see more people using Linux, and wouldn't
you therefore be worried that many of these potential users might be put off
not only by the lack of customer service that AOL might be known for,
according to some, but also that this would really further corporatize
something, Linux, that has really blossomed because of people's willingness
to volunteer their time to create something without these sort of
fiduciary interests, as a primary reason for really promoting and using
the product.

P: Perhaps.  But, actually there are always two sides of the coin.
You could turn around and say, well, right now Linux is in the domain
of the geeks and the tech-heads, what's a better way to introduce
even just the word Linux to the world, than having AOL shove it down
their customer's throat, like they do with just about everything else they
have.

A: Oh, that's good!  So in the same way that, say, there's an AOL 6 or 9,
or whatever they're up to, disc in everyone's mailbox and in every grocery
store, that they've run rampant, we see them on TV with commercial slogans
like "It's so easy, no wonder everyone's using it," kind of bandwagon
mentality.  Obviously you should be using it too.  Many of people have no
idea what Linux is, and so if AOL buys it, they'll see that in the news,
they'll wonder about it, and maybe they'll even contact LUGOD, and see what
you guys are up to.

P: Absolutely.

A: Well let's then quickly change subjects and jump over to the Linux
Users' Group of Davis.  If you're interesting in finding out more about
LUGOD you can go right to their website, LUGOD.org.  You can also visit
CultureLover.com and find a link to LUGOD.

What sort of activities have you recently completed, or do you have
coming up, Peter J. Salzman, that some of our listeners would be interested
in?

P: Well, we just had our three-year anniversary meeting.  It's hard to
believe that we've been around for 3 years.  The years just seem to fly by.
We just had an Installfest, in fact, and as far as future events goes,
we have a meeting on February 5th and February 18th, and we're also having
another Installfest on February 17th, and basically all you need to do is
bring your computer system to our Installfest, and we can install Linux for
you, not only on the whole system, but if you like, we can make it so that
you can boot both Windows and Linux on your computer.

A: So that one can go back and forth.  And tell us just for a minute,
why one would want to install Linux at one of these free and no doubt
popular Installfests.  What would be in it for the average or
better-than-average computer user.

P: It's a very powerful operating system.  If you're into gaming for
instance, when you install drivers on your Windows machine, you basically
get whatever the manufacturer gives to you.  A lot of manufacturers
cripple their hardware because not everyone can use the particular settings
that their drivers use.  With Linux, you can seriously micromanage your
hardware, IF that's your thing, so that if you have a particular video card
or sound card, you can tweak it so that it gives you the maximum performance.
That's one of the reasons I use Linux.  Other than that, free software:
just about everything you can do on Microsoft, you can do on Linux, not only
better, but also for free.  Two powerful reasons to use Linux.

A: That's excellent, alright.  Well good, do you want to tell us the date
and time of your next meeting, if there are listeners out there who would
like to show up to the next LUGOD meeting?

P: Absolutely.  The next meeting will be February 5th, I believe that's
the first Tuesday of February.  The meetings are between 6:30 and usually
we wrap up around 9/9:30.

A: And am I reading this correctly, that this coming February 5th
Rich Morin will be speaking on DOSSIER and the Meta Project.

P: Yes.  Basically, what he's doing is taking documentation for various
programs, which is available freely, and formatting them into a nice book
format.  He's worrying about the small details of presenting the information
in a beautiful and nicely formatted way.  Usually when you get documentation,
they're usually text files that you can print out on your printer, but
he's sort of aiming to extend that by making them into published books.

A: Excellent. Well, Peter J. Salzman of LUGOD, I want to thank you very
much for appearing on Dr. Andy's Poetry & Technology Hour this week.

P: It was fun!

A: And we'll contact you again when we have more questions about Open Source
computing, about Linux, and make sure to let us know when you've got more
big events coming up.

P: Feel free to call whenever you want.

A: Will-do, thanks very much.

P: Sure, Andy.

A: Bye-bye.

P: Bye.

A: That was Peter J. Salzman of the Linux Users' Group of Davis.
Well what do we have up for you now?  Another important public service
announcement.

...