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Hitachi's Terabyte DVD Recorder
lposeidon writes "Hitachi has a terabyte DVD recorder. Looks like its an oversized TIVO box with 2 500GB harddrives, all for the low, low price of $1180" It's also fully high def capable.
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gee - I bet those are "deathstars" drives they're using - I'd rather wait for a WD or a Maxtor with a 5 yr warranty.... /sarcasm
Hey, look at that! The duped article headline is just as misleading as the original. What a surprise!
... and so on. Each and every one of these captures a concept, for which practical and theoretical considerations made the terms a necessity. Often there are synonyms for them because of historical developments, but never "jargons for jargon's sake" because mathematicians hate bloats and irrelevance.
So, I interupt this dupe to bring you your scheduled trolling.
People in the computing field like to spur the use of spurious jargons. The less educated they are, the more they like extraneous jargons, such as in the Unix & Perl community. Unlike mathematicians, where in mathematics there are no fewer jargons but each and every one are absolutely necessary. For example, polytope, manifold, injection/bijection/surjection, group/ring/field.., homological, projective, pencil, bundle, lattice, affine, topology, isomorphism, isometry, homeomorphism, aleph-0, fractal, supremum/infimum, simplex, matrix, quaternions, derivative/integral,
The jargon-soaked stupidity in computing field can be grouped into classes. First of all, there are jargons for marketing purposes. Thus you have Mac OS "X", Windows "XP", Sun OS to Solaris and the versioning confusion of 4.x to 7 to 8 and also the so called "Platform" instead of OS. One flagrant example is Sun Microsystem's Java stuff. Oak, Java, JDK, JSDK, J2EE, J2SE enterprise edition or no, from java 1.x to 1.2 == Java 2 now 1.3, JavaOne, JFC, Jini, JavaBeans, entity Beans, Awk, Swing... fucking stupid Java and fuck Sun Microsystems. This is just one example of Jargon hodgepodge of one single commercial entity. Marketing jargons cannot be avoided in modern society. They abound outside computing field too. The Jargons of marketing came from business practice, and they can be excusable because they are kinda a necessity or can be considered as a naturally evolved strategy for attracting attention in a laissez-faire economy system.
The other class of jargon stupidity is from computing practitioners, of which the Unix/Perl community is exemplary. For example, the name Unix & Perl themselves are good examples of buzzing jargons. Unix is supposed to be opposed of Multics and hints on the offensive and tasteless term eunuchs. PERL is cooked up to be "Practical Extraction & Reporting Language" and for the precise marketing drama of being also "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister". These types of jargons exude juvenile humor. Cheesiness and low-taste is their hall-mark. If you are familiar with unixism and perl programing, you'll find tons and tons of such jargons embraced and verbalized by unix & perl lovers. e.g. grep, glob, shell, pipe, man, regex, more, less, tarball, shebang, Schwartzian Transform, croak, bless, interpolation, TIMTOWTDI, DWIM, RFC, RTFM, I-ANAL, YMMV and so on.
There is another class of jargon moronicity, which i find them most damaging to society, are jargons or spurious and vague terms used and brandished about by programers that we see and hear daily among design meetings, online tech group postings, or even in lots of computing textbooks or tutorials. I think the reason for these, is that these massive body of average programers usually don't have much knowledge of significant mathematics, yet they are capable of technical thinking that is not too abstract, thus you ends up with these people defining or hatching terms a-dime-a-dozen that's vague, context dependent, vacuous, and their commonality is often a result of sopho-morons trying to sound big.
Here are some examples of the terms in question:
anonymous functions or lambda or lamba function
closure
exceptions (as in Java)
list, array, vector, aggregate
hash (or hash table) ? fantastically stupid
rehash (as in csh or tcsh)
regular expression (as in regex, grep, egrep, fgrep)
name space (as in Scheme v
As if companies paying slashdot to post their product ads wasn't bad enough, now they are actually paying to get them duped too!
Anyone who has been visiting /. frequently knows that no-one reads the articles.
Now we can dispense with readng the summary.
And knowing the title to be misleading and innaccurate, we can dispense with tat, too.
Soon we will have a page full of nicely formatted filler text and a forum of flamewars regarding how the filler text supports/unfairly dismisses thier favourite OS/application/background colour.
Or, in Bizaarro World, the editors might do thier job. Submitters may read their own articles/submissions.
Not that we care. We don't read them anyway.
My OS can beaet up your OS.
My OS was in the army.
b3 4phr41d 0f my 4bov3-4v3r4g3 c0mpu73r kn0wI3dg3!
MadDwarf
Hey Slashd00dz...
How about adding a dupe checker to Slashcode and allow users to 'turn off' duplicate stories. Dupes frustrate me to a point (dupe complaints are more frustrating), but their utility (for non-frequent readers) has been touted by some. It should be easy to check each storie's URL against previous post URL's in the same topic area, right?
Why don't the editors have a "Check" button, just like us have a "Preview", that performs a search in the database looking for the keywords, or the title, or even if the same urls has been mentioned earlier?
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They don't care. They have contempt for their readers and apparently for their subscribers.
It's not that hard to search for a few keywords from an article.
It also wouldn't be that hard to do a quick grammar & spell check of a submission that was otherwise acceptable.
And, hey, here's a crazy idea - how about knowing a little about what you're submitting so that you don't post articles with obvious errors, omissions or lies?
The Slashdot editors merely mash "ACCEPT" on articles, apparently arbitrarily. They don't check to make sure the links work. They don't change obviously misleading or flamebaiting titles to something less inflamatory. They do zero spell checking.
This is the definition of "contempt for readers".
Is this a dupe? I'm not sure... anyone?
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