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Is the 4th Yellow Pixel of Sharp Quattron Hype?
Nom du Keyboard writes "Sharp Aquos brand televisions are making a big deal about their Quattron technology of adding a 4th yellow pixel to their RGB sets. While you can read a glowing review of it here, the engineer in me is skeptical because of how all the source material for this set is produced in 3-color RGB. I also know how just making a picture brighter and saturating the colors a bit can make it more appealing to many viewers over a more accurate rendition – so much for side-by-side comparisons. And I laugh at how you are supposed to see the advantages of 4-color technology in ads on your 3-color sets at home as you watch their commercials. It sounds more like hype to extract a higher profit margin than the next great advance in home television. So is it real?"
I'm sure you're curious as to why Slashdot, OSDN, and the rest of VA Linux's network wasn't available the weekend of Friday, June 22, 2001. I was. Then I found out. In this exposé, I will inform the reader on the why and the how of Slashdot's worst outage yet, its narrow escape from death, its darkest day in history.
INNOCENT BEGINNINGS
Picture this: you're young, you're gay, and you own a successful web log. But you want more. Enter buyouts by a company called VA Linux, headed by the ruddy fag ESR and his band of Open Source homosexuals, hand picked by Larry Augustin himself and charged with taking over the Linux world. Got it so far? Good.
Short of having kidnapped Linux Torvalds, VA Linux virtually was Linux. You had hit the big time. You were the loud mouth of the biggest, baddest mother of a faggot Linux Empire ever assembled.
(Important note: VA Linux had, indeed, tried to hire Linux Torvalds away, but Linus had refused, so as not to favor any single company or distribution. VA Linux, in turn, had kidnapped Torvalds and had Rob Malda and ESR rape his mouth unil he couldn't feel his jaw. Linus also needed his stomach pumped. However, good ol' Linus, the stout Finn that he is, never gave in and so was returned to Helsinki soon thereafter.)
THE IPO
December, 1999:
Stock: $253 Volume: 8,000,000
IPO time, and you were riding high. You had become a millionaire and didn't know it. ESR had been surpised by wealth. And scores of other investors and Linux nuts found themselves with swollen bank accounts. Even though the stock fell sharply soon after, you figure it was just a burp in the market, and you headed out to celebrate by sucking some cock and buying your sports cars, boy-servants, horses, bathhouses and mansions. Still with me? OK. Now fast forward a few months.
THE UGLY TRUTH
June, 2001:
Stock: $2.53 Volume: 1,000
You have Linux companies that have lost large parts of their market valuations, Linux distros merging, IPO's cancelled: Linux was dying. If you wished to portray the worst of the present state of the Linux market, you could not do so without factoring in how the GPL works to un-employ programmers. You didn't have to be a Kreskin to see what was happening; the handwriting was on the wall: Linux faced a bleak future. Even RMS commented on the current position of his Free Software Foundation due to Linux's misfortunes, which, indeed, represented the boat everyone was in with Linux:
I am goat-fucked!
WHO ARE YOU?
If you can sit there and read this expose and nod your head in affirmation of the events I have thus far documented, you can be only one person: Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda of Slashdot.
All of the events here led up to Slashdot's Black Friday, where Rob Malda almost lost everything he had left (after the VA Linux stock plummet, that is). The only thing left really was Slashdot itself, and the homosexual orgies the Slashdot staff held every Friday night. Alan Cox had since abandoned sucking the Slashdot staffs' cocks, and had returned to civillian life, disillusioned with Linux. Banner ad hits came only by means of the Slashdot staff themselves, and ESR, drunker and drunker with every stock plummet, would call and ream out Rob Malda over the phone every day, holed up in his cabin of 386s running Linux.
As an engineer who works with this technology, and a holder of Ph.D.s in Optics and Electrical Engineering, I find everyones' armchair analysis here to be both amusing and horribly wrong.