Well, it sounds like a joke. The great thing about Helios is that he dresses up his own self-importance with what I can only call megalomania.
And yes, I’m all for charities that help out poor kids in Austin (or anywhere else, but if you live in Austin, then that’s a fine and good place to start).
And yes, even puffed-up nobodies with whacko ideals can help in this regard. I am not against them, per se.
On the other hand:
We will set up a dedicated fund to provide our HeliOS kids with Internet service. Now, the point I want to make clear is this. This is an Austin problem and I am going to seek an Austin solution. We’ll update our website soon to announce the presence of the program and to make people aware of it.
I’m going door-knocking. I will approach businesses within the community to let them know what we are doing and what they can do to help.
And don’t read the link before you consider, first, what you would do.
Me? I’d print up a bunch of flyers and hand them out to the Mom’n'Pop stores in the neighborhood. These people are easy. Some of them are even sentimental (“I built this li’l thang up frahm nuthin’, I tell yah…”). And, equally to the point, they’ve probably all been ripped off by kids who they’d rather see at home on the Internet, strumming away on their guitars.
Jeez, isn’t this the sort of business plan that community charities are supposed to come up with? (1)
OK, let’s aim higher. Let’s go for the successful start-up tech companies in Austin. (I assume there’s a good few handfuls.) You owe us, guys. You owe the community. Plus which, we have ripe young intelligent interns just waiting round the corner … (2)
Or you could do what Helios did:
To this point, and with few exceptions, we’ve been fairly well ignored. Many Austin businesses and companies have been asked to help us when we needed it, and the results were poor. Time-Warner, Clear and Cricket have been contacted about this problem and we were either ignored or our in-office appointments were canceled by them and never re-scheduled.
Regardless of how often we tried to reschedule.
In 2008, I was granted an appointment with an executive within Time-Warner’s Corporate Responsibility Department. After a 40 minute wait, I was asked by the receptionist what my appointment was for. I explained that I needed to discuss Internet connections for the disadvantaged. An hour and 15 minutes after that, I was informed that the executive was called away unexpectedly and she would not return for the day. She would contact me and reschedule the appointment.
The call never came and my subsequent calls were never returned.
How nice.
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What a total plank.
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(1) It’s also tax-deductible at this level.
(2) It’s probably also tax-deductible at this level. Is it tax-deductible at the level of Time-Warner, Clear and Cricket? These people already have a big ole pot called “Community Awareness,” and they’ve already done the tax-deductability thing on that pot. You kinda sorta have to offer something more.
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Incidentally, best of luck to Albert and Anthony Gilbert. They look like good folk.
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Edit, 13th March:
Two companies that are quite big in Austin are Microsoft and, er, Dell. Somehow, and for reasons that I am sure are nothing to do with That Other Charitable Foundation, Helios appears to have overlooked both of them in his ceaseless quest to better the technological lives of the poor.
What a total plank.
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Edit, 14th March:
I actually feel bad about bashing somebody who spends his time, in his own way, trying to help people in his neighborhood. The very idea is admirable.
And I don’t do any of that. I am ashamed of myself.
When I get around to it (and I promise you, I will), it will be no holds barred. I will shame. I will defame. I will gouge and strut and wank and I will be the bestest ever gosh-durn snake-oil salesman for the poor that you have ever seen, or I can ever be.
What I won’t do … what I won’t do … is to chain myself up with a set of preconceived notions about freedom. That might work for me. I have my own “freedom,” although not quite as much as I’d like.
But I’m not gonna be charitable to me. That’s not quite how caritas works.
Comments
I never understood why freetards are so bitter towards Dell. There guys offered the first mass market ubuntu laptop. It was Canonical’s fault for not making sure the updates work in that model (because they didn’t). They should have tested the update process against that particular laptop, and insert model-specific hacks if needed. And they shouldn’t have bundled pulse audio for sure.
Freetards dream of a world were companies like Dell run behind distro maintainers and contribute patches to ensure compatibility with their laptops, forgetting that ThatOtherOS is already compatible and ready to deploy, and available to these companies for a handfull of bucks.
Keep dreaming freetards!
@KURKOSDR
Building a Linux distro is a battle on two fronts – the kernel and the user spaces. In the kernel space, you have a vast set of broken drivers developed by people too dabbled in pointless ideologies and too stuck up to admit their own incompetence. In the user space, you have a virtually infinite set of third-party software that you need to shoe-horn into your distro to make the whole damned thing worth. This is not to say that you are always doomed to dealing with such problems when building your distro – it’s just that you will need both time and money on your side in order to eliminate them once and for all. Commercial non-Linux OS vendors all have well-designed platforms to separate responsibility between themselves and third-party, and you rarely see them worry about patching drivers or apps because, quite frankly, they know well they don’t have the ability to, and, more importantly, they don’t need to.
Canonical is not a non-Linux OS vendor, or even strictly qualifies as a proper, sustaiable commercial establishment, and that means, in all likelihood, they simply don’t have any of the commercial platform goodness to separate third-party resposibilities from their own developments. In other words, when Shuttleworth is not busily dreaming up his next farcical vision of desktop Linux, his resources are mostly spent on packaging and patching software that his crew have most certainly next to no knowledge of (since, after all, they weren’t even the ones who made them in the first place). Testing, if possible at all, is bound to be rudimentary at best. Thus, in all seriousness, do you think that a product like this that is bound to either be badly broken on the get-go or badly break somewhere along the line is going to succeed?
Laugh at Shuttleworth for his own failings if you will, but at the end of the day, he is just following the same rotten model of Linux distribution that everyone else is following.
ItsUpstreamsFault™ summarizes all this nicely.
But what puzzles me is why some German or Japanese corporation hasn’t yet come in and produced a proprietary BSD-based OS that will give Microsoft a run for their money, in the same way that, in the second half of the 20th century, German and Japanese carmakers came to the US, and gave Detroit a run for its money. Instead, the Japanese are making TVs and DVD players, running the race to the bottom with the Chinese, and the Germans fool around with linux. In other words, they have given Microsoft clear ground towards world domination. I must confess I expected more from Japan and Germany during the 90s.
“But what puzzles me is why some German or Japanese corporation hasn’t yet come in and produced a proprietary BSD-based OS that will give Microsoft a run for their money”
Like Larry Ellison said, the computer industry is like women’s fashion. Back in the 90s, Linux was the fashion, and there were start-ups selling “Linux” solution all over the streets. Some of them would even have the galls to tell you that their stuff would work or sell simply because “it’s Linux”. Of course, the idea there was not to deliver a sustainable product, but to simply wait for that fat buy-out check from a venture capitalist or a large IT corp. This was basically how the computer market worked back in the days, and quite frankly, how it would still work even 10 years later.
Nowadays, you still have dubious start-ups trying to sell even more dubious products and trends. What’s more, you have computer magazines serving as the IT equivalents of Vogue shilling for these products and trends both on paper and online without much of any repurcussion at all. Honest business simply isn’t – and wasn’t – the norm in this industry, and if you think pointless hypes like “open-source” or the “cloud” are bad enough already, then just wait until someone comes around and combine them with some good ol’ used-car salesmanship. A good show is always in order, I tell ya.
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