Slashdot Mirror
New Year's Eve Wrap-Up of Wrap-Ups
SkeeterMac writes "CNN ran an article today listing the top dubious achievements in personal computing for the year... raising again the point that PC speed can not be measured only in megahertz! Too bad the author doesn't think so, because they slam Apple for pricing the iMac around $1,500 for "chugging along at 700 Mhz"..."
cwill1004 writes "Mary Jo Foley has written up a set of predictions for Microsoft in 2003. She suggests that the tablet PC will be a bust, MSN gaining on AOL, and Microsoft getting more flak for its DRM (digital rights management) offerings, much like it did for the Windows Product Activation. It's on Microsoft Watch."
angkor links to Shift's "stupid web moments of 2002."
And the good news -- sulli writes "Just in time for New Year's, the New York Times (register now, use a workaround, or forever hold your peace) discusses at length the health benefits of alcohol. Prevent heart attacks, not with drugs or diet, but with a good California Zinfandel! Avoid strokes with a Perfect Gin Martini! Just don't overdo it, and you'll be fine - too much alcohol, like too much caffeine, has well-known effects. But in moderation, bottoms up!"
Update: 01/01 01:07 GMT by T : Here's another. An anonymous reader submits: "The BBC News has an amusing article titled the 'E-cyclopedia's glossary of 2002'. One wonders what future generations will make of our 'Bollotics' and 'Euronating'... Even Slashdotting gets a mention."
Now to see it in every timezone, does one dabble with the wee beverages, or just go on an all out binge for 25 or so hours?
Who will be celebrating New Year's Eve live on Cartoon Network with an Adult Swim Marathon! Hopefully the Mooninites make an appearance!
She suggests that the tablet PC will be a bust
Isn't it already??
I hadn't thought of that.
:)
*eyes the pack of Mike's Hard Cranberry Lemonade*
Well, I'm late, I'm sure, but... why not? So... happy new year to the European folks out there, and to everyone else when it gets to them.
Saying that a 700MHz Mac is tolerable these days is to say like the 1-2+GHz Microsoft boxes are wasting somewhere along the lines of 25-40% of their processor time? Has MS Bloatware gotten that bad?
It's new years eve! Do you people really not have anything more exciting to be doing than reading Slashdot? You'd never catch me posting on a geek news site on the party night of the year. Ever.
Its 01:07 GMT NOW! Since GMT is the offical timezone for the world, YOU FAIL IT!
YES, its only 20:07 over at BRAK, but YOU STILL FAIL IT!
...of potential local time live webcasts from around the world.
/.ed first.
/. you better beleive I'm raising my glass every 2 mins.
What the hell does that mean? Oh, wait, you mean if it doesn't get
May be helpful for those who want to raise a glass to the New Year every hour on the hour.
I don't need a reason to raise my glass every hour. Its New Years Eve and I'm ranting on
I won't be online at midnight, GMT-9, so I'll just say it now: HAPPY NEW YEAR!
May we survive this one, too.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I noticed that there were 1991 bytes in the full article. Could the /. editors raise that to 2003 bytes by adding a few spaces, spelling errors, etc.? It'd be a small touch that the whole community would appreciate.
You zap the moderators with a wand of humor! The moderators resist!
*eyes the pack of Mike's Hard Cranberry Lemonade*
Dude you'll be sick before you get drunk.
Just a thought :)
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
Ahh... good ole mikes: A womans drink, through and through: Sweet, rediculously expensive, cannot be downed in large quantities (all the sugar = stomach ache), and inferior in every way to a nice, cold beer.
I hope you have your Fosters Oil Can and a Funnel!
For the new year, take a hint from our President! If you get pulled over, pass your alcohol poisoned self off as 'recovering from choking on a pretzel!' Watch the chucklefest begin!
(Drink safely, and don't drive wasted! What would I do without -1 Overrated and -1 Troll mods? I'd be unstoppable! So take care, you drunk bitches!)
The Imac looks really cool, but damn it is overpriced. With PC prices dropping like a stone, and even clever integrated PCs starting at $1000 (eg, Gateway's) and barebone PC chassis like the shuttle Cubes & motherboard for $300, the Jellybean is just not cost-effective unless you Gotta Have A Mac.
Test your net with Netalyzr
It's 12:09pm 1/1/2003 here. This story is about 15 hours overdue.
Who celebrates at 12:01? I know I celebrate at 11:59:59 become 12:00:00.
It's 12:01 at the exact same time everywhere in my timezone at least
You saw in the start of 2003 by sitting on your own in front of a computer, posting on Slashdot. Have a nice twelve months.
I've never used the words, or even heard either used, ever. I figure they're British English terms, and not American English. If so, I'll just be waiting for Spike or Giles to use them.
The really sobering news in that article was that they knew in 1972 that alcohol could help people at risk for cardiovascular disease but the government forbid publication of the study.
In other words, they suppressed information that would have reduced the number of people who died from this disease.
Nearly one million people died in 1999 from cardiovascular disease.
That's one in every 2.5 deaths.
Fucking unbelievable.
This goes well with the news that the government suppressed research into the marijuana's effectiveness in treating cancer. Since the 1973 study talked about in the linked story, there have been three separate studies demonstrating that THC holds promise in reducing or eradicating tumors, but still the government virtually prohibits the research.
The total number of dead worldwide may be in the hundreds of millions.
I'm glad to see the slashdot editors consider this news, even if they didn't bother giving it its own berth. Good thing nobody introduced a new MP3 player today.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
People have been pointing to cost as Apple's Achilles heel for decades now.
Apple knows their machines are more expensive. They always have been, and probably always will be.
People buy them anyway.
People who are buying Macs are willing to pay more because they believe they're getting their money's worth.
Why is this so hard to understand?
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
Slashdot are a little late on this then. I'm in Sydney and we have been in 2003 for the last 12 hours.
Learn to Improvise
Of course this article's out of date for 96% of the world but that's because of a little thing we call TIME ZONES. Get used to it.
Mary Jo Foley's article is worth a read, and free too! (You don't to know how much the Microsoft Watch Newsletter will cost you, trust me, it'll make your eyes water). And the predictions look to be spot-on too.
The E-cyclopedia is worth a read too, although some of the words probably won't make sense if you don't live in the UK (eg. 'archery' refers to Jeffrey Archer, sent down last year for perjury).
PS. 2003 in da house! (UK)
-MT.
People should treasure this shit.
Not quite, there are a finite number of timezones, which the time is split, otherwise your house and someone else's house (to the east or west) would be several minutes apart...but that's just not how it works.....
Let the vast right-wing conspiracy begin! ;)
Hey, with GPS we could all live in individual sub-second timezones... The GPS units in clocks/watches could update the time as you move. Think of the fun.
"Meet me at the movies at noon."
"Noon at the movies? Or noon where you are now? Or noon where I am?"
From the NYT article on the beneficial health effects of moderate alcohol consumption:
Moderate drinking can help prevent strokes, amputated limbs and dementia.
I'm sorry, for a second there I thought that said... AMPUTATED LIMBS?!? I'd think the correlation between alcohol consumption and severed limbs would run the other direction. I mean, I grew up in white-trash East Texas and an informal study of most of my classmates seemed to indicate that those who had the highest alcohol consumption also tended to accidentally lose or damage appendages. Whereas I, who drank virtually none, still have... um... "all the parts God gave me."
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
My favorite year-in-review so far is the one put up by news parody site Ridiculopathy-Dot-Com.
Blah blah blah, they're not The Onion. Blah Blah blah, mentioned in the Wall Street Journal. Blah blah blah, shut up and read it.
you'd be chugging a can of [insert caffeinated beverage here] every two minutes. Real geeks don't have time for glasses.
/me swallows two tins of penguin mints. Match this caffeine high!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Metric Time will herald a new dawn of productivity and quick figuring of time sheets.
Janet from Allentown says, "I've been waiting for metric time for 25.35 Decamonths! TeeHee!"
Let the celebration begin! (At exactly 0.01 days!) Metric Time is here!
I'm afraid the government has been lying to you again my child, and you've bought it, hook, line and sinker. Well, it'll make you a happy little timeclock puncher so I guess I should just leave you alone.
x,y,z,t. Not just a good idea. It's the law.
KFG
I think they must mean the use of alcohol after you get into a situation requiring the amputation of limbs. Maybe pouring/injecting alcohol into the site of a wound lowers the chance you need to amputate.
Then again, I could just be talking out of my hat.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
and just use UTC everywhere.
which show that having just *one* drink actually improves the driving of most people.
I doubt you've seen that trumpeted about the newspapers today though.
Go figure.
KFG
It's not the alcohol that has health benefits. It's the polyphenols and bioflavonoids that provide the benefits. These occur in red wines, among other things, which is why the studies cite the consumption of red wine and not white wine, vodka or beer. The alcohol part is still bad for you. It's why you get that buzz, depriving those brain cells of oxygen. But hey, most of us weren't using those brain cells anyway.
It's not even 9:00 p.m. here in Toronto, I have friends here and broadband, where can I find some REALLY cool cams this fine evening?
let's keep each other posted.. I know I'm not the only geek with a keyboard within reach from my seat at the couch.
Happy New Year everyone, I'll be here all night, haha
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. it's the only thing that ever has.
It's because of a little thing called physics, with a hint of cosmology thrown in for good measure.
Time zones are just a logical construct with no real basis in reality whose only function is to give the illusion that trains run on time.
If they DID there might even be a point to them. Why on earth do they print train schedules with times like "1:37" on them when we all know it's really "Half past one to two somthing or other, depending on the phase of the moon and whether the crick rose any during the night"?
KFG
The crap that the BBC's producing, thanks to the TV licence monopoly it has, its the only Broadcasting Company who can afford to publish crap like this!
As for Microsoft I dont really care, thanks to Mplayer 0.9rc2 thats justs just been released, I can play all my wmvs and wmas in Linux. I havent rebooted for days! All it really lacks is asx support. asx is just an xml wrapper, and when I grep the url out the asx, it plays steaming win media!
Ten years ago, most of us paid well over $1500 for machines that do a hell of a lot less than they do now. The machines are worth a lot more than we pay for them. As for Apple...
Apple has trained people to trust their Macs, and they've done a great job of it too. It's like speaking a different language. If they can maintain the illusion that "learning the PC language" is tough and unrewarding, they will continue winning the minds of people who will then pay an arbitrarily high price to keep speaking Mac-ese.
What's your computer worth to you? How much would you pay for it if there was no other way to get one?
Rank comments and posts against each other at We-Rank.com
It turned 5763 nearly four months ago. Is this some sort of new thing that someone forgot to tell me about?
Sheesh, I just can't keep up with the rate of social change these days.
KFG
thanks again.. home QT cams are better!
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. it's the only thing that ever has.
oh that's a real drink?? I thought he was making a thinly-veiled sexual reference.
macs chug along at 700 mhz?? that's like saying, compared to an athlon 1600, a P4 2000 chugs along
oh wait
His palms are sweaty and keys weak
There's telnet on his session already
SSH's not ready
He's dateless, but on his posts he's all elite and hacking
To drop pings
but he keeps on repeating' what they mod down
He types all his words but the spelling dont come right
He's posted, everybody knows he's boasting now
The mod's run out, times up over blah.
Err
Sorry.
His palms are sweaty and keys weak ..but he keeps on repeating' what they mod down
.. what this is new year's Wrap up .. not rap up?
There's telnet on his session already
SSH's not ready
He's dateless, but on his posts he's all elite and hacking
To drop pings
He types all his words but the spelling dont come right
He's posted, everybody knows he's boasting now
The mod's run out, times up over blah.
Err
Sorry.
8 Line
..but he keeps on repeating' what they mod down
.. what this is new year's Wrap up .. not rap up?
------
His palms are sweaty and keys weak
There's telnet on his session already
SSH's not ready
He's dateless, but on his posts he's all elite and hacking
To drop pings
He types all his words but the spelling dont come right
He's posted, everybody knows he's boasting now
The mod's run out, times up over blah.
Err
Sorry.`
How can you post that without a link to some such studies?
Rank comments and posts against each other at We-Rank.com
I don't know why you would need help. I just drink every time its *:00.
Okay.. I'm lying.
*:*
http://use.perl.org
Who else remembers wehavethewayout.com? The anti-Unix site that was hosted on Unix?
It's Not 2002, it's really the year 6007, since, as we all (should) know, the Earth, the universe, and everything else was created in 4004 B.C.
tee hee, tee hee.
LongTail SSH Brute Force analysis tool is here!
How about some slashdot hangover remedies for those of us that will need them tomorrow. The tried and true remedy is to sleep until January 3rd, but what about for those of us that have to get up tomorrow?
Actually. Just hit submit. . . and there you go.
KFG
Beer can also be good for you. I'm sure you can find a better link if you are interested but if you look
Here and Here you will see that there are in fact several health benefits from drinking beer.
Don't be a wine snob, have a beer and live longer.
The DLAPAPA (Designed Like A Picasso And Priced Accordingly) award goes to Apple Computer for the design of its latest iMac, the one that looks like half a round melon impaled with a bent easel. You have to shell out $1,499 to get one with a CD-RW drive, chugging along on a 700-megahertz processor.
Oh yeah, this iMac is a total rip off at $1,499.00... Wait, you mean the 700 MHz model is actually only $1,199.00 including CD-RW? Way to go, CNN.
I like my women like my coffee... pale and bitter.
Like any real geek, I'm coding on new years eve and day you insensitive clod!
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
LAID GETS YOU!
a clear distinction between the reality and the *model.* A clock may be analog or digital. A clock, or a time zone, is just a model of time. In fact, analog *means* model. *Time* is neither analog nor digital. It's reality. Time existed long before clocks. Plants can tell time. There is no such thing as a time "zone." x,y,z,t is literally true. Take one step to the left in space and you also "travel" in time.
For that matter, clocks don't even really measure what time it *is,* they really just measure the passage of time as a dynamic entity.
If you *really* want to know what "time" it *is* the best you can do is look up.
KFG
What's so special about new years day over any other day? It's not even a RELIGIOUS holiday (which I wouldn't celebrate anyway).
It's just an excuse to get off work and drink like an idiot. FUcking morons.
That's NZST, dontchya know.
dominionrd.blogspot.com - Restaurants on
a few mates and i went up to albert park for the new years eve festivities, alcohol en masse. we were there for just about the entire evening until just after 12am, when the cops finally found us and reminded us there was a public alcohol ban, and requested us to tip our drinks on the ground. yea, we had it coming, but we were still a little annoyed, and protested quietly. what came next was most probably the highlight of any new years eve ive ever celebrated.
:P
"hmm, oohh, alright. SCULL SCULL SCULL!!"
we were stunned. they actually told us to scull our drinks, or we would be arrested.
they did still search our bags, and found my 1/4 full flask of vodka that id forgotten about, but i let them have that. foul, nasty stuff. i wouldnt be suprised if they took it home and celebrated the new year with all the alcohol they had confiscated!
the rest of the night was primo, but god that gave us the roffles
Dont ask me...Im just the bass player.
Props to H1B's and Indian Programmers
Ya ya, sieg heil.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
OK, this is incredibly geeky, but.. At 11:59:59, I said "Foo." When people asked why, I told them I wanted to be the last person to say "Foo" in 2002.
In my time zone, at least.
Doesn't seem nearly as profound now that my buzz has worn off.
Justin
"Why would God give us a waist if we wasn't supposed to rest our pants on it?" - Rev. Roy McDaniels
Prevent heart attacks, not with drugs or diet, but with a good California Zinfandel! Do my eyes betray me or did that actually imply taht there's a such thing as a good Californian wine, and then go further to suppose that a Zinfandel, whatever its origin, could be included in the list of "good" wines? My eyes bleed to see such horrific lies. ;)
404 Error:
Ugh...shouldn't have had those last two shots of tequila...
On the hour? Feh...
Could we please keep the original conspiracy that alcohol is bad for you? This article blows my whole excuse that I use for not drinking. Do I give a rat's fuzzy posterior about my health? Not really - but saying I don't drink for reasons of my health WAS an excuse that was hard to refute. Sheesh, now I'll have to go through the long process of explaining how I don't like the taste of alcohol. Sure, there's acquired tastes, and then there's camping stove fuel.
As I've learned from experience, the "I don't like the taste of alcohol." excuse is usually met with "Well, neither do I, but I love how it makes me feel.". Well, guess what - it makes me feel light-headed and nauseous. Kudos to you if you enjoy that feeling - I don't.
As you can imagine, I'm not much for social gatherings where drinking is the primary activity. I honestly wish more people were mature enough to find better social common grounds than the vile substances they're putting into their bodies. Pop culture says otherwise.
You smoke, I smoke, I drink, me too, well good
Cause we gon get high tonight - Cam'ron "Hey Ma"
Screw pop culture. I'm a geek.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
I know that several countries have timezones on the half-hour relative to GMT, such as Iran, so you should be able to get at least 26 celebrations in!
Consuming alcohol means that you can't carry on with the drone like jobs you have been assigned by 'The Man'.
If you rebel and drink all day, every day, your posts on weblogs like this start to make more sense.
polyphenols and bioflavonoids
Yes, and these can be quite harmful at higher doses too, while like most things there are also some negative effects from consumption levels that help with heart disease.
It becomes a question of whether you're prone to the ailments they can help prevent or the ones they can help cause.
And the next time you consider complaining that running Lucid Emacs
19.05 via NFS from a remote Linux machine in Paraguay doesn't seem to
get the background colors right, you'll know who to thank.
-- Matt Welsh
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...
The ark lands after The Flood. Noah lets all the animals out. Says he, "Go
and multiply." Several months pass. Noah decides to check up on the animals.
All are doing fine except a pair of snakes. "What's the problem?" says Noah.
"Cut down some trees and let us live there", say the snakes. Noah follows
their advice. Several more weeks pass. Noah checks on the snakes again.
Lots of little snakes, everybody is happy. Noah asks, "Want to tell me how
the trees helped?" "Certainly", say the snakes. "We're adders, and we need
logs to multiply."
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...