Slashdot Mirror
Roland Piquepaille Dies
overheardinpdx writes "I'm sad to report that longtime HPC technology pundit Roland Piquepaille (rpiquepa) died this past Tuesday. Many of you may know of him through his blog, his submissions to Slashdot, and his many years of software visualization work at SGI and Cray Research. I worked with Roland 20 years ago at Cray, where we both wrote tech stories for the company newsletter. With his focus on how new technologies modify our way of life, Roland was really doing Slashdot-type reporting before there was a World Wide Web. Rest in peace, Roland. You will be missed." The notice of Roland's passing was posted on the Cray Research alumni group on Linked-In by Matthias Fouquet-Lapar. There will be a ceremony on Monday Jan. 12, at 10:30 am Paris time, at Père Lachaise.
While I often found his stories and comments to be far reaching, overstated, overly optimistic & sometimes bordered on religious zealotry, I will miss his contributions and wish his family and friends well. I hope they know that Roland was a man committed to the proliferation of technology and advancements has done great things for both our community & society.
It is also comforting to see a soul survive and prosper in a technological field and end up where they want to live blogging peacefully. I hope my own retirement and passing are similar instead of some of the mindless inane existences I know my ancestors have lived out in nursing homes and/or in front of a TV.
My work here is dung.
I have read some interesting stories from Roland here. Most of them were tagged "ohnoitsroland", the meaning of which I still don't fully understand.
http://slashdot.org/tags/ohnoitsroland
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
...his blog? Or for that matter, his email account?
Roland was really doing Slashdot-type reporting before there was a World Wide Web.
Now, Now... there's no need to insult the guy at this point.
More
Well you know what they say... you never know how much you miss something until it's gone. For me, I find that is definitely the case here - I will truly miss the use of ohnoitsroland, boycottroland, and dierolanddie tags!
... than all the slashdotcynicalwhining that pervades the board.
He'll definitely be missed by some of us.
I piss off bigots.
You know, over the years I've read Slashdot, I got the impression Roland was one of those stereotypical "needs a life" /. posters from all the people complaining about him. Then this happens and I find out that, well, he had a life, and worked at some interesting companies back in the day.
Best wishes to all Roland's people, and at the same time I'm glad that complaining about him from the other basement dwellers is going to stop before too long.
i'll miss his blog. biotech, computers, physics ... it was slashdot^2 ... to bad he had to close down comments a few years ago due to abuse.
he was thinking ahead of his time. i would like to be that anticipating at that age.
Apparently its not just his blog links that resulted in a DEAD END.
Too soon?
While it is important to speak when you have something useful to say, it is as important to Shut The Fuck Up when you haven't.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Articles about him have been deleted over and over again most recently in 2007.
Is he really just "A french blogger known for frequently posting articles to the technical website Slashdot that primarily linked back to his own technica" or "a fellow who makes a lot of money on ads by getting his crappy stories linked constantly on Slashdot" [link] or is he notable enough outside of the blogger/Slashdot community to make an article?
I know it's tempting, but please don't go making an article about him before you read Wikipedia's notability requirements for people.
Sincerely,
Anonymous Coward Wikipedian
I liked his whit, and charming methods of describing things to the readers of this website. He truly embodied what can best be described one of the pioneers of the Slashdot effect. Some people trolled him pretty hard, but he was and will always be remembered as interesting, insightful, funny and underrated.
Roland, may the god(s) of whatever religion you believed in, forever mod you up.
RIP, bro.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
You certainly don't speak for me, Anonymous Coward.
R.I.P. Roland.
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!
Is there a named cognitive bias (or something similar) for suddenly liking and missing someone who was universally considered a git prior to his passing? Because that's what happening to Slashdot right now, including me a bit.
You just got troll'd!
Kdawson made the phone calls to confirm this before posting it.
Somebody mod parent troll. I didn't always agree with Roland's editorial habits, but I enjoyed many of his stories. The man was quite an accomplished individual, as many would realize if they took the time to learn a bit about his life. There's more to the Web than Slashdot.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Oh, no, Roland is no more...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1138
It is with great sadness to tell you that our Emerging Technologies blogger Roland Piquepaille has passed away suddenly. His wife Suzanne just confirmed his passing.
Roland, 62, was one of our most passionate bloggers and his ability to explain complex science well was something to behold. Roland spent most of his career in software, mainly for high performance computing and visualization companies, working for example for Cray Research and Silicon Graphics. He left the corporate world in 2001 after 33 years and jumped into blogging.
Roland passed away Monday in Paris. He was hit with a digestive virus that lead to a high fever and health complications beyond that. Suzanne said that the doctors are still trying to quantify how Roland got the virus and the exact details. We spent the last few hours confirming Roland's passing as word began to spread. It has been a rough year for the ZDNet family.
There will be a ceremony held on Monday. Rest in peace Roland, we'll miss you. Suzanne said that Roland had a few posts in the pipeline and wanted them published. If she is able to pull them from Roland's PC we'll put them on his blog to complete his record.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Is breathing a sigh of relief that he escaped Slashdot alive.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Actually I will. His reporting improved significantly from his early blogging days, so much so that I often did not notice that the story submitted here on Slashdot was from Roland unless the "oh no its Roland" tag appeared. I think this became more of a good natured ribbing rather than slighting him personally. I also subscribed to the nascent "oh yeah it's Roland" tag movement a couple of months back. Now that he is gone, I really do miss him. Rest in peace, friend.
Here is more details about his death, which appears to be a fast moving gastrointestinal virus.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
All the advertising I usually see on a /. story is coming up with a "404 - Not Found".
RIP, Roland.
R.I.P, Roland. You will be missed, even if I didn't agree with you on everything.
You're expecting me to believe that not only did the /. editors start editing, but that it started with kdawson?
Sorry to disappoint you, but -- inb4 "He Bought it on Ebay."
I first visited Slashdot when UIDs were in the low 1000's, so I have a lot of time invested in this website. I've read plenty of Rolly's posts and while I didn't agree with all of them, I always enjoyed his perspective.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
On the contrary, he very rarely seemed to understand what he was reporting about, making overly optimistic and far reaching speculations about trivial matters.
I was surprised just now to learn that he was actually so technically inclined.
Bot Assisted Blogging
Ok now THAT makes me doubt this is real.
A digestive virus, plus complications.
But pretty much everyone here hated his linkjacking ass, even threatening to boycott the site. I can remember threads calling him the worst of the worst, and for a time, he was. To steal others content and pass it off as your own is real intellectual property theft. Especially when you make advertising money from it!! To see everyone get all two faced and misty eyed now that he has died is pretty unreal. Its like everyone feels guilty somewhat. He linkjacked all his content, and everybody dies. I really dont see what saying RIP does for anyone except the person that says it. My guess is that people are trying to say "im sorry".
Whats next, jon katz found dead and we build him a monument?
Hopefully I dont get bitchslapped for insulting a slashdot "celebrity", but someone has to tell it like it was
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
There were submissions from Roland that I thought pointless and absurd, but he also submitted some fascinating stuff.
It occurs to me now that Roland was "in love" ( in a manner of speaking) with science. And this is probably why he behaved as he did. He wanted to share that which he loved with the rest of us.
Whether the guy is dead or not, it's hard to hold someone's essentially harmless passion against them. If anything, the world would be a better place if there were more curious and passionate people.
Finally, I remain utterly amazed that he could manage to assimilate and pass on so much information, and if he really did do it all by himself ( I used to suspect he had a few interns or something ) then he must have been quite a guy.
He'll be missed.
But honestly, his death should have been reported via a link to his blog that would THEN link to the page discussing his death.
Only a fitting tribute.
-Styopa
by lowering reader's estimation of how much Slashdot editors can be trusted.
Story submitters can't do that. It is the editors' jobs to separate the wheat from the chaff. Failure to do so is what reflects badly on the editors.
Just one word.
Fetch the holy water and call an exorcist! This time, he's going to stay dead.
Kdawson made the phone calls to confirm this before posting it.
What is netcrafts phone number?
I don't have them, and I'm not looking at this story again, because I'm grossed out by some of the folks here.
Bruce Perens.
I checked to see who submitted and it wasn't Roland. I would think that this being Slashdot he would have set up a dead-man-switch to make that submission himself.
It would be only fitting.
RIP Roland.
Perhaps that was right, but Roland has earned a place in the slashdot community.
I had a good time tagging all of Roland's articles as "ohnoitsroland". It made my days more bearable, and everytime I saw his stories tagged already, I chuckled.
Roland was a traditional part of Slashdot (for good or bad), and even if only in the form of a meme, I will miss him.
Roland might have been short on netiquette when he first started submitting stories to /., but once the community started to speak out against his copy-and-paste blog entries and use of other people's content to earn ad revenue, he stopped doing all that. all of his submissions of late have linked directly to the source article.
if anything, Roland has contributed greatly to the /. community by submitting a ton of excellent stories--even after he stopped earning ad revenue from submissions--and starting many interesting discussions. so he clearly cared more about /. as a thriving community with a rich online culture than just another business to be monetized. and if you're more worried about Slashdot's value as a business than its usefulness to its users (which is primarily from the discussions that follow each submission), then you clearly don't understand /. as well as Roland did.
your blatant hyperboles and baseless accusations are more dishonest than Roland has ever been. and i doubt you will ever make as great of a contribution to the /. community as he has.
Funny, you write the basic truth while his corpse is still warm and are modded Troll.
Wait a few weeks after they plant him and you'd be modded Insightful
Trolling is a art,
"Oe-Noe-itz-roe-land"
Trolling is a art,
The old guy in your local bar. You'd be in there regularly, and there he'd be, holding forth at anybody who'd give him the time of day. You'd make for the other side of the bar, grateful that he'd collared some wet-behind-the-ears Johnny-come-lately rather than yourself, because you'd been there enough times before. He'd be chuntering on in the background and you'd pay him little heed.
And then one day you come into the bar and he isn't there, and you hear he'd passed away, and you realise that you'd miss the old bastard. Because people like that add colour to the world, and what is this life without characters to enrich it, whether you actually like them or not?
That was Roland for me - I'd come here and I'd see an article submitted by him and there'd be some generally good-natured muttering about his modus operandi. Some people clearly didn't like him, but the truth is I couldn't tell you who any of those people are. But if you asked me to name five people who post on Slashdot, he'd be one of them.
So by that measure alone, I for one will miss him, and I think Slashdot will be the poorer for his passing.
Here's to Roland, and to making a difference in any way you can.
"Its slashdot for God's sake. If you can't laugh at someone's death here where can you?"
I wonder if your mourners would mind if I laugh all the way through your eulogy?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Roland was a well intentioned soul and will be sorely missed. I found most who mocked him did so in a jovial spirit, he sparked vigorous debate even from detractors and he encouraged a focus on fringe topics that keep this site unique and interesting. We all have our quirks, and his were more entertaining than frustrating. He will live on in all our hearts as more than just a meme, but as a kindred spirit, as one of us.
I always wondered about the following question:
Why is it we only show up for peoples' weddings and funerals? Do they have to hook up psuedo-permanently with a gal/guy or be in a casket before we'll take the time out of our busy lives to see them?
So, for all those who miss him in requiem - treat the living, give them as much charity, forgive their trespasses, and appreciate their good qualities while they are still around to hear it.
R.I.P. anyway.
Because there is something called "respect"... nobody will force you to speak beauty of a man you didn't like, but it'd be "respectful" not to throw shit in a post dedicated to his death... Peace. Drx
-- Counting backwards since 1984!