Slashdot Mirror

Some keenspot comics use PNGs. In particular, I remember Superosity and Ubersoft both announcing when they switched. Both mentioned a space saving of about 30% on images after the switch.

The Trib picked a few strips as a survey of the field. No such list would get everything good. The links I added were meta-sites and mega-sites, not individual strips.

Having said that, here are some more that might appeal to fellow Slashers:

o Goats: nominally a couple of Web developers, mostly about ... oh, never mind, just read it. PG-13; your mom might not like it.

o Freefall: A captain of a starship (that's only flown once in the history of the strip), his robot sidekick, and his furry engineer. SF meets Dilbert in a kindler, gentler way.

o GPF: life at a software development company with an unfortunate name.

o Help Desk: life at the tech support desk of a software megacompany named Ubersoft (with products such as Nifty Doorways and Tactile Basic).

(The last two recently had a crossover, a pretty common occurence in online strips.)

o Acid Reflux (previously here): vaguely-D&D-ish strip about a young god trying to restore the universe her sister abandoned.

o Mega Tokyo: a couple of American gamers stranded in Japan.

o Real Life: a couple of American gamers who know they're comic strip characters.

o Schlock Mercenary: light SF strip.

All have complete archives back to the first strip, so you can catch up at your leisure. Enjoy!

That's how I feel today about all these news reports - the Feds teaming up against alt2600 in the DCCS case, Napster all but gone, and now these proposals to prevent our own information from being traded about.

Yes, I understand the need for copy protection - I hate it when folks sell pirated copies of games because I know that's money that should have gone to a hard working developer. But it seems that corporate interests have gone out on such an insane bend to make certain that the people who might rip them off don't - even at the expense of the privacy and freedoms of law abiding citizens.

Probably the worst part is the possibility of what might follow. There was a joke made that the RIAA will sue people who sing copyrighted songs in the showers. On Ubersoft they have a joke about a gigantic company's word processing software preventing the federal government from prosecuting them for illegal actions by detecting what words are typed and changing them.

And that's what makes me so depressed about these articles. It always starts off for "the good" reasons - copy protection good, so copy protection technology has to be good too. The problem is that we all know we can't trust other people to make our own decisions for us, and the second that the power is taken out of our hands, the possibility for corruption is there. What happens when the "copy protection" technology is modified to not allowed "unsupported" or "illegal" software (ie: "dangerous" GPL software that doesn't make the corporations any money).

That's the problem with the copy control schemes. I don't fear people taking my words and claiming them for their own. I fear the people who might prevent my words from being seen at all in the name of "the good of the business" interests.

John "Dark Paladin" Hummel

The situation reminds me of bullies at a playground. It used to be that all the kids would play there, but now the bullies want it for themselves. It elvolves into things like gangs, and the regular folks go away.

Unfortunately, I can't think of anything to make that seem funny

All these lawsuits remind me children fighting over something screaming "mine!", "mine!", "mine!". At it never was theirs in the first place. And they will all cry and blame the other guy when they break it.

Ubersoft seems less of a satire, and this sequence (about ten strips) in Sinfest seems strangely appropriate.

On this subject, the thread in the cartoon strip Help Desk about integrating spam into the desktop is very funny. Start here to read it.

On this subject, the thread in the cartoon strip Help Desk about integrating spam into the desktop is very funny. Start here to read it.

Exactly! They've done it before. And yes, I do mean low level protocol stuff here, not just Kerberos, Java, or any upper level application stuff.

They've done it with DHCP. With the release of Win98se, they tried to make all network admins switch to NT and an MS DHCP server. How? By doing exactly what augustz said: adding a few flags.

Win98se machines refused all DHCP offers (following the RFC) from servers if it didn't have one non-functional, previously non-existent flag set. When asked why DHCP seemed broken on the 98se machines, they said "Oh, that's because you're not using a Microsoft certified DHCP server." But the problem was, of course, that there were no MS certified DHCP servers, save their own.

So in order to make a Win98se machine accept DHCP offers from DHCP servers, admins had to switch to MS for their server, rewrite part of their server to use the appropriate flag, or replace the sys file responsible for DHCP on each client machine!

But not everybody got 98se right away, so admins had a decent amount of time to come up with a fix before too many users ended up needing to use their 98se machines. I'm sure MS got a number of converts out of that, taking away some of the nix share of the server market.

But you don't think they'll do that for IPv6? I don't know what they'll do, but I think they could get away with it. Keep in mind how much upgrading it will take to phase out IPv4. Best case scenario, all core networking equipment could have IPv6 functionality added to it within a year and a half, probably more like two years, at least. And that's just the core of the internet, it'll take many years longer to filter down to every JoeBloe's ISP.

That gives MS plenty of time to woo over the admins in a jam, and though I'm sure it won't get MS everything they want, I know they could get a lot out of it.

• Mr. Bunny, the hoppy computer guy

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• Mr. Bunny, the hoppy computer guy

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It's located under ...

http://www.ubersoft.net/ and it's name is 'Can't Win for losing' in case you come in later and the scripts have moved the URL.

Just FYI. Greetings

I tried to convince Gav (supreme leader of Keenspot and artist of Nukees) to make a Keenspot slashbox, but he wasn't interested.

In other news, it seems when this article first got posted, Keenspot (and quite a few of its member sites, like College Roomies from Hell, got Slashdotted.

And check out Help Desk. It's awesome (done entirely on OS/2 too).
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Zardoz has spoken!

before you start making those accusations. It's only fair.

After all, companies that license UF characters need to know what they're getting into. It's not like Illiad keeps his opinions to himself, or anything.

Here's another example: I do a comic strip on my own (not to plug my own strip, but hey, the opportunities there) called Help Desk. Help Desk is a member of Keenspot, a (consortium? collective?) group of online comics that sort of pool our resources (and audiences). We now use banner advertising, and we've recently switched over to Sonar/Doubleclick ads (I protested. I was overruled. That's life.)

I'll be doing a Doubleclick parody in a month or so. I'm planning on making it reasonably vicious. Doubleclick might not like it. Tough.

The only way not to be endanger of compromise is to not try and make any money at all off anything you do. As soon as you try and make any kind of living off your work, you compromise. It's unavoidable. I didn't used to display banner ads, but I do now. That's certainly a compromise. I don't quite think it's selling out.

Illiad is successful enough that he'd have leverage when it comes to licensing. I doubt very much a sotware company is going to try and bring out the heavies on him -- he's got enough of an audience so that if he parodied them on it, they'd be pretty embarrassed.

So again, I feel the need to say, don't prejudge the guy.

Why do people resent the fact that Illiad is successful? I love it -- I enjoy User Friendly as a comic strip, and it's great to see an online comic artist actually supporting himself (and supporting himself well) on his work. It gives the rest of us hope, let me tell you...

The thing I've never understood about this kind of hate mail is that if you really dislike the strip, all you have to do is NOT GO TO USERFRIENDLY.ORG. It's not like Illiad spams the net with his strip or anything like that.

Perhaps you're just unable to allow other people to appreciate what you don't? Only explanation that makes sense to me...

I do my own comic strip. It's called Help Desk. Illiad is a success story that has encouraged a lot of us... even some of the online comic strip artists who don't like Illiad are still spurred by his success. More power to him!

As you can see here.

Binky the Talking Paper Clip is Immortal!

I realized why when I analyzed my own behaviour.

In the good old days, when I asked for assistance on any Microsoft(tm) product, the help system was startlingly inept at providing same. So what would I do? Why, curse Microsoft and try and figure it out on my own, of course.

Now we have a modern, sleek, polished system, complete with a glorious cartoon character who's going to offer friendly assistance and tell us what to do.

A big improvement, of course! So, when I ask for help and get answers that are even worse than under the old system, what do I do?

Why, curse that (bleep) paper clip, of course! Microsoft is an Innocent Creator of Brilliant Software, it's Binky the talking paper clip I blame.

It's a neat emotional transformation, but I'm willing to bet it's worth millions to Microsoft.

Oh, by the way, I'd like to endorse the following link on Binky:

Binky on the Witness Stand

D
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Yet Another Slashdot Parody, but it's damn funny. You might not like it though; it does not contain grits.

If you think this is bad, check out ApostropheColon.

Allow me to mention the best parody of /. that I know of out there.

It may make more sense if you read the associated cartoon. Even if you don't like the parody, read a few cartoons anyways...they are good. :-)

Cheers,
Ben

PS I know several people who submitted this to /., and it got rejected every time...which is why I am posting like this.

Allow me to mention the best parody of /. that I know of out there.

It may make more sense if you read the associated cartoon. Even if you don't like the parody, read a few cartoons anyways...they are good. :-)

Cheers,
Ben

PS I know several people who submitted this to /., and it got rejected every time...which is why I am posting like this.

I have done two years of phone tech support for a hard drive manufacturer. I have done 3 years of e-mail tech support for a small linux distribution. I've done tech support.

I find User Friendly hillarious.

Now, I read his article, and I can see what he is trying to say. We should be nice to clueless people. And to some extent, we should. But there are people out there... it's amazing that they can even turn the damn things on! And what is worse, they are trying to do something that is way beyond their skill level (like installing a hard drive - not hard by any means, but for those that are scared to look in the recycle bin...) which is usually the direct result of a sales person at BigComputerStore (who is equally clueless, or he still works on commission...) telling them it's easier than baking a pie.

Now, should we laugh at people who really have no clue? Why not? Why is tech support any different from plumbers talking about stupid homeowners who tried to do something like replace a floater ball in their toilet and destroyed the entire mechanisim? You can't tell me that plumbers don't talk about that kind of thing. They just don't happen to have large numbers or comic strips. It still happens when they eat lunch together.

The reason we enjoy jokes reagarding tech support, is that as a whole, we techies & geeks are fairly computer literate, know about much of this stuff, and are good at getting around the web. Which means it's subject matter that we understand, and as many have noticed in various parts of the Internet, many of our `cliques` are at some times zealtous in their knoledge and beliefs. (Pick a flame war, any flame war...)

So what happens when we have a comic strip that we (Don't know anyone [even my wife!] who doesn't enjoy User Friendly) all find funny, timely, and uses it's comedic license very well with current events - someone is bound to hate it. Apparently there is now one person who hates User Friendly. First one I ever heard of. (And I don't pretend to know Scott.) Now, this person is also a techie, and has a web site. Bingo! That's what the net is all about.

Another thing about the Internet that goes with stating your opinion - others will have the same opinion as you. Multitudes more will not. And they are the ones to speak up. Welcome to the Internet Scott. I hope you don't have too much E-mail to read.

One other quick thing I would like to leave you with. Scott says he thinks comic strips more like Help Desk are funny because they don't poke fun at the customers calling. Well, he should read just a few more strips past his own example: http://www.ubersoft.net/helpdesk/015.html

To me, it seems that this strip is poking fun at the customer for being stupid. Didn't Scott say that was bad? Now, there is a word that comes to mind, but I'll just let it lie.

...On this one, I can't agree with him. Come on, good humor is an art form, and just like you wouldn't hear one artist (publicly) criticizing another's work, if he was a professional, you shouldn't hear this sort of crap.

I have worked two sales jobs, tech support, and systems administration at a small ISP that I set up from scratch, and currently, at a medium-sized ISP that hired me back (used to do tech support there). This has led me to deal with people on many levels, and it isn't really the cluelessness of the people that is funny. It is the NATURE of people that is funny, and that is what the real root of the joke is in User Friendly, or any other site that pokes fun of the tech's situation. Help Desk Funnies come to mind.

I'd also like to point out that the strip "Help Desk" linked to by Kurtz as an example of what's really funny is not above exploiting this type of humor as well. See this link for an example.

I was really disappointed to see an artist so publicly berating another, arguably more successful (Kurtz has a comic book deal, but Illiad has a book published by O'Reilly!) artist like this. Perhaps Scott should send e-mail to all the nice people in the biz who seem to disagree with him.

I thought it was him, but I wasn't sure.

So I made sure I didn't make it sound like it was original.

BTW another unoriginal quote I like...

"If you can't laugh at yourself, eventually other people will."

Showed up in a discussion on why a spoof of slashdot keeps on getting rejected when people submit it...

Cheers,
Ben

The result is Apostrophecolon . Hope you enjoy it.

After you view that, take a look at my comic strip on the rest of the Ubersoft.net website.

The result is Apostrophecolon . Hope you enjoy it.

After you view that, take a look at my comic strip on the rest of the Ubersoft.net website.