Slashdot Mirror
Beijing Snubs Microsoft For Municipal PCs' Software
jsse points to this Gartner article which says "that on 28 December 2001, the Beijing municipal government selected among seven vendors to provide operating system (OS), office automation (OA) and antivirus software for government PCs. Beijing selected six bidders, including Red Flag, but rejected the seventh bidder, Microsoft -- the only one that was not selected. Gartner listed several reasons why Microsoft lost the bid, but missed out the famous rumor that Microsoft has built a bad relationship with China since the first Chinese Windows 95, which was written by Taiwan programmers, contains Easter eggs carrying anti-communist messages."
I work with a bunch of geeks. And that's okay. They do their thing and I do mine. Most of the time I'm happy for them, that they get joy and happiness out of playing with electronics. Admittedly I disagree with a lot of their thoughts about life. People used to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe, then it was the sun, but now we all know that the computer is the focal point of the universe, projecting its cathode ray goodness on our souls. You can't eat, sleep, breathe, live or run a business without one, or so we're told.
But if there's one thing I have no tolerance for, it's the geek phenomenon known as slashdot.org, the sorriest case for content on the web I've ever seen pawned off and gleefully accepted by the masses.
When I look at magazines, newspapers, or any other source of information, I judge them on three items: usefulness/uniqueness of content, quality of that content, and the depth of coverage regarding that content.
Slashdot has none of these things. And yet people try to convince me that the people who run that website are working hard at it.
Say what?
That's right - when Andover.net filed its IPO, making the editors of Slashdot instant wannabe millionaires, someone in the office said "Those guys put in a lot of hard work, and they deserve the success."
Now, I write code for a living, and I work hard at it, so I have a good idea of how slashdot operates. I guarantee you that the entire website is little more than leftover code from college projects and other unrelated work. At the very best, it is ill-conceived and poorly developed, which explains in part why the interface is so miserably awful, and the site is unbelievably slow.
Let's theorize what goes on in the average day of the slashdot editors:
10:42 AM - get out of bed.
10:45 AM - first Dr Pepper of the day.
10:46 AM - unglue keyboard from desk, check stock market.
10:56 AM - find a few interesting tech stories on the web. This is easy, since users send them to us all the time.
11:04 AM - post said stories to slashdot, disregarding spelling and journalistic impartiality.
11:08 AM - start playing Quake 3 (or whatever the game of the moment is).
3:15 AM - go to sleep.
If I'm wrong about anything, it's that they get up even later than that. And I couldn't figure out what time that order the pizza for dinner. But they have pepperoni on them.
Content - The content of slashdot is, admittedly, targeted towards geeks. But apparently not very smart ones. Regardless of the target audience, the content is never challenging - it never pushes the reader to think. Have we become a society where the last place you really exercise your brain is in grammar school? The average news article on slashdot is little more than a snippet from some tech rag about a new product that everyone loves, usually with an editorial comment tossed in telling everyone how they should feel about it.
I can get that same crap anywhere else. The TV tells me what to think, newspapers and magazines back them up, and slashdot does the same exact thing and is somehow worshipped as a haven for free thinking.
Quality - Why not try out that spellchecker? One word for you slashdot folks: dictionary. Try one on for size. Work on your spelling and grammar, and once those improve I'll attack the quality of your writing.
Consider this - Jon Katz is the best writer on slashdot. If you're familiar with his work, then you might appreciate that, or you might realize how lousy the writing must be if that's the case.
Katz has written some decent articles for slashdot (In particular, his Hellmouth series). But he's too wrapped up in the medium to see what he writes about. He's too busy dropping buzzwords that define his writing more than his actual content.
But the truly amazing thing about him is - almost everyone who reads slashdot hates Katz. They loathe him. The self-proclaimed geeks who read slashdot don't want to be challenged by his writing. There are people who attack every article he writes, regardless of the content.
Depth - unless its the updated release schedule for the new linux kernel or a new game, you're not going to get much repeat coverage on slashdot. And you're not likely to extract much from an article unless you already knew a certain amount of information about the topic. Once again, the exception might be Katz, who writes multi-part articles, but mostly that's because he's a hopeless wheezebag.
The thing that really scares me is that all sorts of little slashdots are popping up all over the web, popular sources of sludge pawned off on the accepting readers, and we readily accept is all as verse. Is this what 200 years of the Industrial Revolution primed us for? 50 years of television? Or was it something else? In my short lifetime I've watched the quality of information sources decline to a point where coverage is simplistic enough that it could be fictionalized and no one would notice the difference. While people ignore the WTO or slaughters in Burundi, Angola, Cambodia, anywhere else to devote coverage to wonder drugs, the newest Internet craze, the Hollywood minute, or any other sort of "News you can use."
And now, in a time when information should be even more readily available, so much of it is crap that finding the gems is rarely worth the shit you need to shovel. The sort of crap you find at slashdot instead of insightful knowledge about this increasingly impersonal, computerized world that we all blithely accept and even embrace.
And that is why slashdot sucks. That website isn't encouraging any free thought, any independent thinking, and certainly not any dissenting viewpoints on the information age. And we all accept it, even 'credible' websites like Wired frequently link to slashdot as their source of expert information and news updates.
If you're not directly connected to the information you want, you're not likely to find anything of depth nowadays. And if you have that sort of connection, then why do you need the web in the first place?
As if cars, skyscrapers, television, mini malls, supermarkets, drugs, war, and McRainForest (brought to you by the Big Mac!) weren't enough, now we have to venture out on the web with millions of other people, and not once challenge out horizons or open our minds.
Willow John
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=6, Troll=1, Insightful=4, Interesting=3, Overrated=1, Underrated=5, Total=20.
I work with a bunch of geeks. And that's okay. They do their thing and I do mine. Most of the time I'm happy for them, that they get joy and happiness out of playing with electronics. Admittedly I disagree with a lot of their thoughts about life. People used to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe, then it was the sun, but now we all know that the computer is the focal point of the universe, projecting its cathode ray goodness on our souls. You can't eat, sleep, breathe, live or run a business without one, or so we're told.
But if there's one thing I have no tolerance for, it's the geek phenomenon known as slashdot.org, the sorriest case for content on the web I've ever seen pawned off and gleefully accepted by the masses.
When I look at magazines, newspapers, or any other source of information, I judge them on three items: usefulness/uniqueness of content, quality of that content, and the depth of coverage regarding that content.
Slashdot has none of these things. And yet people try to convince me that the people who run that website are working hard at it.
Say what?
That's right - when Andover.net filed its IPO, making the editors of Slashdot instant wannabe millionaires, someone in the office said "Those guys put in a lot of hard work, and they deserve the success."
Now, I write code for a living, and I work hard at it, so I have a good idea of how slashdot operates. I guarantee you that the entire website is little more than leftover code from college projects and other unrelated work. At the very best, it is ill-conceived and poorly developed, which explains in part why the interface is so miserably awful, and the site is unbelievably slow.
Let's theorize what goes on in the average day of the slashdot editors:
10:42 AM - get out of bed.
10:45 AM - first Dr Pepper of the day.
10:46 AM - unglue keyboard from desk, check stock market.
10:56 AM - find a few interesting tech stories on the web. This is easy, since users send them to us all the time.
11:04 AM - post said stories to slashdot, disregarding spelling and journalistic impartiality.
11:08 AM - start playing Quake 3 (or whatever the game of the moment is).
3:15 AM - go to sleep.
If I'm wrong about anything, it's that they get up even later than that. And I couldn't figure out what time that order the pizza for dinner. But they have pepperoni on them.
Content - The content of slashdot is, admittedly, targeted towards geeks. But apparently not very smart ones. Regardless of the target audience, the content is never challenging - it never pushes the reader to think. Have we become a society where the last place you really exercise your brain is in grammar school? The average news article on slashdot is little more than a snippet from some tech rag about a new product that everyone loves, usually with an editorial comment tossed in telling everyone how they should feel about it.
I can get that same crap anywhere else. The TV tells me what to think, newspapers and magazines back them up, and slashdot does the same exact thing and is somehow worshipped as a haven for free thinking.
Quality - Why not try out that spellchecker? One word for you slashdot folks: dictionary. Try one on for size. Work on your spelling and grammar, and once those improve I'll attack the quality of your writing.
Consider this - Jon Katz is the best writer on slashdot. If you're familiar with his work, then you might appreciate that, or you might realize how lousy the writing must be if that's the case.
Katz has written some decent articles for slashdot (In particular, his Hellmouth series). But he's too wrapped up in the medium to see what he writes about. He's too busy dropping buzzwords that define his writing more than his actual content.
But the truly amazing thing about him is - almost everyone who reads slashdot hates Katz. They loathe him. The self-proclaimed geeks who read slashdot don't want to be challenged by his writing. There are people who attack every article he writes, regardless of the content.
Depth - unless its the updated release schedule for the new linux kernel or a new game, you're not going to get much repeat coverage on slashdot. And you're not likely to extract much from an article unless you already knew a certain amount of information about the topic. Once again, the exception might be Katz, who writes multi-part articles, but mostly that's because he's a hopeless wheezebag.
The thing that really scares me is that all sorts of little slashdots are popping up all over the web, popular sources of sludge pawned off on the accepting readers, and we readily accept is all as verse. Is this what 200 years of the Industrial Revolution primed us for? 50 years of television? Or was it something else? In my short lifetime I've watched the quality of information sources decline to a point where coverage is simplistic enough that it could be fictionalized and no one would notice the difference. While people ignore the WTO or slaughters in Burundi, Angola, Cambodia, anywhere else to devote coverage to wonder drugs, the newest Internet craze, the Hollywood minute, or any other sort of "News you can use."
And now, in a time when information should be even more readily available, so much of it is crap that finding the gems is rarely worth the shit you need to shovel. The sort of crap you find at slashdot instead of insightful knowledge about this increasingly impersonal, computerized world that we all blithely accept and even embrace.
And that is why slashdot sucks. That website isn't encouraging any free thought, any independent thinking, and certainly not any dissenting viewpoints on the information age. And we all accept it, even 'credible' websites like Wired frequently link to slashdot as their source of expert information and news updates.
If you're not directly connected to the information you want, you're not likely to find anything of depth nowadays. And if you have that sort of connection, then why do you need the web in the first place?
As if cars, skyscrapers, television, mini malls, supermarkets, drugs, war, and McRainForest (brought to you by the Big Mac!) weren't enough, now we have to venture out on the web with millions of other people, and not once challenge out horizons or open our minds.
Willow John
I thought this was sheer brilliance. Great reviews too:
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=6, Troll=1, Insightful=4, Interesting=3, Overrated=1, Underrated=5, Total=20.
I work as a consultant for several fortune 500 companies, and I think I can shed a little light on the climate of the open source community at the moment. I believe that part of the reason that open source based startups are failing left and right is not an issue of marketing as it's commonly believed but more of an issue of the underlying technology.
I know that that's a strong statement to make, but I have evidence to back it up! At one of the major corps(5000+ employees) that I consult for, we wanted to integrate Linux into our server pool. The allure of not having to pay any restrictive licensing fees was too great to ignore. I reccomended the installation of several boxes running the new 2.4.9 kernel, and my hopes were high that it would perform up to snuff with the Windows 2k boxes which were(and still are!) doing an AMAZING job at their respective tasks of serving HTTP requests, DNS, and fileserving.
I consider myself to be very technically inclined having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming. I don't believe in C programming because contrary to popular belief, VB can go just as low level as C and the newest VB compiler generates code that's every bit as fast. I took it upon myself to configure the system from scratch and even used an optimised version of gcc 3.1 to increase the execution speed of the binaries. I integrated the 3 machines I had configured into the server pool, and I'd have to say the results were less than impressive... We all know that linux isn't even close to being ready for the desktop, but I had heard that it was supposed to perform decently as a "server" based operating system. The 3 machines all went into swap immediately, and it was obvious that they weren't going to be able to handle the load in this "enterprise" environment. After running for less than 24 hours, 2 of them had experienced kernel panics caused by Bind and Apache crashing! Granted, Apache is a volunteer based project written by weekend hackers in their spare time while Microsft's IIS has an actual professional full fledged development team devoted to it. Not to mention the fact that the Linux kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem, memory protection, SMP support, etc, but I thought that since Linux is based on such "old" technology that it would run with some level of stability. After several days of this type of behaviour, we decided to reinstall windows 2k on the boxes to make sure it wasn't a hardware problem that was causing things to go wrong. The machines instantly shaped up and were seamlessly reintegrated into the server pool with just one Win2K machine doing more work than all 3 of the Linux boxes.
Needless to say, I won't be reccomending Linux/FSF to anymore of my clients. I'm dissappointed that they won't be able to leverege the free cost of Linux to their advantage, but in this case I suppose the old adage stands true that, "you get what you pay for." I would have also liked to have access to the source code of the applications that we're running on our mission critical systems; however, from the looks of it, the Microsoft "shared source" program seems to offer all of the same freedoms as the GPL.
As things stand now, I can understand using Linux in academia to compile simple "Hello World" style programs and learn C programming, but I'm afraid that for anything more than a hobby OS, Windows 98/NT/2K are your only choices.
thank you.
I don't understand why they're rejecting Microsoft software. I mean it's cheap enough...they just have to head down to their local flea market or to Wing's Software Emporium and they can buy Microsoft's complete product line for 50 bucks!
You're using her as bait, Master!
Isn't the fact that communists are the ones liking linux saying something?
Nice definitions. What dictionary are they from? Or did you just pull them out of your ass?