Let's see, I can pay Microsoft several hundred dollars a seat for supoort and/or upgrades...
...or I can pick up a new Mac Mini for $499, and be completely secure from all Windows virsues, plus 99.99% of trojans, spyware, etc. And given how long ago NT 4.0 came preloaded on anything, I'll probably get a faster machine in the bargain.
Hopefully, everyone who buys used books as well as new ones should know about Bookfinder, which searches tens of thousands of dealers on various listings sites (including, if you want, Amazon and Barnes & Noble). When you buy a used book through Amazon, what you're usually buying a book that's already listed through one the multiple listing sites that Amazon adds their own percetange (usually 100%) on top of.
How can we get our Iranian friends back in the Web?
Hey Dan, Michael, let me give you a little hint: You can't. Or, as Stalin once said of the Pope, "How many divisions does Slashdot have?"
The Islamofascist Mmullahs ruling Iran have made it quite clear they're immune to such chimeras as "international pressure." What are you going to do, impose sanction? Yeah, that worked so well with Saddam.
There are only two things which might actually allow Iranians to get back their Internet freedoms:
1. A full-scale liberation invasion by U.S./coalition troops, a very difficult and probably quite bloody task, or
2. A "decapitation" strike that takes out the Islamist religious leadership, possibly some high level military assets, and probably as much of their illegal nuclear weapons infrastructure as we can locate.
The chances of either being undertaken right now are slim, and the chances of the majority of Slashdot digirati support such a move are close to zero.
The heightened popularity of blogs can in large measure be attributed to two big stories this year: Dan Rather's use of the clumsily forged documents on President Bush's National Guard Service, and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
In RatherGate, it was blogs like Little Green Footballs and Powerline which actually broke the story, quickly determining that the RatherGate documents where not only frauds, but poor, obvious frauds at that. And it wasn't TV news "experts" who made the determination, but real experts out on the Internet chipping in their particular bits of knowledge about computer typographer, Air Force National Guard procedures, etc. Tens years ago, CBS probably would have gotten away with it. Now they can't.
In the case of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, here was a story the MSM didn't want to touch with a ten-foot poll because it went against the narrative the had already decided on ("John Kerry, War Hero Turned Protestor"). (Just imagine if there had been an organization with some 80-odd National Guard vets swearing that they witnessed Bush shirking his duty; there would have been an hour-long prime time special...) Since no media outlet was covering their ads, it was the blogsphere that carried information about the group. It's ironic that the Swift Boat Vets spent about 1/100th what Moveon.org did, and was still 100 times more effective.
Don't forget that Time singled out the mighty Powerline as blog of the year. As you may remember, Powerline played a major part in exposing the Rathergate forged documents scandal, and their commentary is consistantly insightful and well-written.
Congratulations to Hindrocket, The Big Trunk, and Deacon for producing such an excellent blog.
And It Will Be Built By Flying Monkeys!
on
The Super Superhighway
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
All this rhetoric sounds fairly familiar. That's because about ten years ago Texas formed a "High Speed Rail Commission" to study THAT proposal. The end result was that a lot of bureaucrats got very fat salaries to study the proposal while it withered on the vine. This is an even more grandiose boondoggle, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the same special interests behind it. (Note that this is from a.com address, not a.gov address.) The funding and interest from the public at large simply aren't there. Right now there's a semi-revolt brewing over plans to turn highways previously constructed and paid for with bond money into toll roads. (I'm all for making new highways toll roads to pay for their construction, but screw double taxation.)
The real chances of this getting built are pretty close to zero.
Benchmarking Tuning: Just as bad as Karma Whoring
on
Truth in Advertising?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The sort of people who would tune their software for a specific benchmark are the same sort of people who would karma whore here on Slashdot by throwing off-topic lines with guaranteed Slashdot appeal.
And you know who else hates that type of benchmarking whoring? Linus Torvalds, that's who! Linus would never stoop to such a thing, because Linus is a great guy!
And you know who else would never do it? Apple Computer, the people who make the greatest computers in the world! They would never stoop to rigging benchmarks!
To my mind, the best web page on the reality of an everyday working stiff's life in Antarctica is Big Dead Place. It casts a rather cynical eye on the dubious glories of "working for science" there.
And there's that great review of John Carpenter's The Thing: "The most noteworthy deviation from actual USAP practices is that in the film everyone has a flamethrower...In the actual USAP, employees are forbidden flamethrowers."
Remember the glorious days of manual switchboards? Roughly 98% of those jobs disappared. Oddly enough, however, the telephone industry didn't reduce its overall workforce by 98%. As technology elimiates old jobs, new ones are created for new technologies. By 2024, major jobs for Slashdot readers might include immersive holographic engineer and "wranglers" for self-evolving computer code.
And as for the Gartner Group predicting the future of IT two decades from now, who died and made them Hari Seldon? Predicting 2004 in 1984 probably sounded a whole lot like "IBM and AT&T dominate the personal computer market, PCs have reached almost 30% of people's homes, most PCs come with a 500 MHz RISC chip or higher, with over a megabyte of memory and a blazing fast 16K modem! The sales of software giants Borland, Ashton-Tate and Lotus exceed $2 billion annually." Etc. You just can't predict the future of technology with anything remotely like accuracy that far out.
Dear Citizens of China,
Since your communist government is blocking access to Google, and assuming that you can read Slashdot, here are a few web pages that your government would probably prefer you not read:
Finally, here's a page discussing the practice of Falun Gong. Now I'm personally not a believer in Falun Gong, but since I live in a nation blessed with freedom of religion, and since your government would rather execute people rather than let them practice it, perhaps you should find out for yourself what it is they so desperately don't want you to hear.
Rorshach: Johnny Depp Dr. Manhatten: George Clooney (alt: Hugh Jackman) The Comedian: Tom Sellack Ozymandius: Ralph Feinnes Nite Owl: Stephen Root (alt: Tom Hanks) Silk Spectre 1: Lucy Lawless Silk Spectre 2: Natalie Portman? Too young. Probably need someone more muscular, true brunette, can actually act. Michelle Forbes is probably a little too old. Maybe Maggie Gyllenhaal. Psychiatristic: James Earl Jones
What does it tell you about the state of NASA when it takes Burt Rutan 4 days to get his ship back into orbit, while it takes NASA two years? Granted, the Shuttles goes into a much higher orbit, and carries a lot more payload, but the difference is still ridiculous.
Despite the fact that there are many extremely smart and talented people at NASA, it, like every bureaucracy, has become an entrenched special interest, more concerned with preserving its budget than in actually moving the cause of space flight forward. The Space Shuttle, no matter how many times it has been retrofitted, is still 1970s technology. It's hideously expensive to launch and requires a vast support army to operate. But that vast support army is precisely why it exists. The space shuttle exists to serve the International Space Station. The International Space Station exists to be serviced by the space shuttle. Both provide lots of aerospace industry jobs and this is, in fact, their primary function. Turf and caution have become the watchwords at the highest echelons of NASA, who are more concerned with protecting their bureaucratic empire than moving the exploration and colonization of space forward. The shuttle monopoly has strangled the development of alternative launch vehicles, something the X Prize has only partially offset. A lot of people had predicted we'd not only have launched a manned mission to Mars by now, but set up a colony. See any sign of that?
Until there's a serious shakeup among the upper echelons of NASA bureaucrats, expect for the U.S. manned space program to creep along rather than soaring.
This is rather emblamatic of the differences between the way Apple and Microsoft approach any technical problem.
Apple asks: "How can we make the best product possible for the customer and still make money at it?"
Microsoft asks: "How can we use this to reinforce our monopoly and still get end-users to swallow it?"
All Microsoft's DRM and Codec schemes have seemed to design to "embrace and extend" to further their Windows monopoly. Apple's have been designed to be the best they possibly can, with just enough DRM to satisfy their media partners. It's a big difference, and it shows up in everything they do.
Actually. Linus had to move to Portland in order to get closer to Redmond. Only in the place it was forged can he destroy the One OS, and liberate the free peoples from the shadow of the Dark Lord...
I'm assuming they have the same towering intellects that managed to break graphic upload functionality for all non-IE browsers no less than THREE TIMES working on Paypal now. That was very frustrating for Mac and Linux users. Even worse was the fact that they didn't announce any of these changes in advance, didn't have a fallback when they didn't work, and didn't bother to make an announcement as to what was wrong even after they knew there was a problem, leading to hundreds of frustrated forum posts, and probably hundreds of thousands of hacked off users.
eBay doesn't seem to have learned anything from these debacles, and continues to roll out unnecessary updates with inadequate testing, resulting in previously solid functionality breaking down. Whoever is in charge of update testing over there should be sacked.
No, THIS is his low-point, William Shatner's Spplat Attack, a DVD of a Star Trek-themed day of paintball. A friend bought this and brought it over one night.
It was painful.
Very painful.
How painful was it? There was actually a moment when I wished I was watching Star Trek V instead.
Watching Liberal Brains Asplode
on
Inside Wal-Mart IT
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Axiom 1: "Wal-Mart is Evil!"
Axiom 2: "Outsourcing is Evil!"
Fact: "Wal-Mart is against outsourcing."
Result: Liberals heads asplode! (Much like the guys in Scanners, or the computer in that really stupid episode of The Prisoner.)
This is too easy to win, assuming you have broadband.
Step 1: Rip all three Star Wars and the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings Movies (yeah yeah, the third isn't out yet) to your HD.
Step 2: Mail copies to 25 of your friends with GMail accounts as attachments.
Step 3: Have your friends change each of the file names and mail them back.
Bingo! Instant excession of 100 GB.
Alternately, you could just post your e-mail address here and say something like "You wussy, panty-wasted Linux hackers couldn't spam-bomb my account even if you wanted to! Your hacking skills are pathetic and lame! Besides, everyone knows that REAL MEN use Windows!"
I figured that's good for getting mailed 500 full distros within an hour. That should do the trick.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Which would you choose?
And I know, because I sell science fiction first editions in my spare time.
Hey Dan, Michael, let me give you a little hint: You can't. Or, as Stalin once said of the Pope, "How many divisions does Slashdot have?"
The Islamofascist Mmullahs ruling Iran have made it quite clear they're immune to such chimeras as "international pressure." What are you going to do, impose sanction? Yeah, that worked so well with Saddam.
Given a regime where critics of the regime have to flee for their lives, and where they executed retarded rape victims for the "crime" of having sex, what makes you think any actions short of armed revolution will get their Internet access back? Who are they going to listen to? Kofi Annan? Get real.
There are only two things which might actually allow Iranians to get back their Internet freedoms:
1. A full-scale liberation invasion by U.S./coalition troops, a very difficult and probably quite bloody task, or
2. A "decapitation" strike that takes out the Islamist religious leadership, possibly some high level military assets, and probably as much of their illegal nuclear weapons infrastructure as we can locate.
The chances of either being undertaken right now are slim, and the chances of the majority of Slashdot digirati support such a move are close to zero.
In RatherGate, it was blogs like Little Green Footballs and Powerline which actually broke the story, quickly determining that the RatherGate documents where not only frauds, but poor, obvious frauds at that. And it wasn't TV news "experts" who made the determination, but real experts out on the Internet chipping in their particular bits of knowledge about computer typographer, Air Force National Guard procedures, etc. Tens years ago, CBS probably would have gotten away with it. Now they can't.
In the case of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, here was a story the MSM didn't want to touch with a ten-foot poll because it went against the narrative the had already decided on ("John Kerry, War Hero Turned Protestor"). (Just imagine if there had been an organization with some 80-odd National Guard vets swearing that they witnessed Bush shirking his duty; there would have been an hour-long prime time special...) Since no media outlet was covering their ads, it was the blogsphere that carried information about the group. It's ironic that the Swift Boat Vets spent about 1/100th what Moveon.org did, and was still 100 times more effective.
Congratulations to Hindrocket, The Big Trunk, and Deacon for producing such an excellent blog.
The real chances of this getting built are pretty close to zero.
All I have are my pathetic attempts to draw a distinction between private and public - that is, Howard Stern saying those oh-so-naughty! words on the public airwaves vs. Stern saying what he wants on subscription radio, or Hustler Honey sex-shows in the Superbowl half-time vs. private rentals from the satellite hot-mama feeds. I suppose it comes down to this: you should have to seek these things out instead of having them come to you. Otherwise the coarsening of the public arena continues unabated, and the good & decent fathers who fought hard for Howard Stern's right to say shit - literally - find themselves without an argument when the billboard across from their kid's elementary school uses the same words. Today's crusading moderate is tomorrow's prude.
For those unfamiler with the A.W.E.S.O.M.-O 4000, a picture of it undergoing stress testing by the U.S. military can be found here.
And you know who else hates that type of benchmarking whoring? Linus Torvalds, that's who! Linus would never stoop to such a thing, because Linus is a great guy!
And you know who else would never do it? Apple Computer, the people who make the greatest computers in the world! They would never stoop to rigging benchmarks!
Or karma whoring.
And there's that great review of John Carpenter's The Thing : "The most noteworthy deviation from actual USAP practices is that in the film everyone has a flamethrower...In the actual USAP, employees are forbidden flamethrowers."
And as for the Gartner Group predicting the future of IT two decades from now, who died and made them Hari Seldon? Predicting 2004 in 1984 probably sounded a whole lot like "IBM and AT&T dominate the personal computer market, PCs have reached almost 30% of people's homes, most PCs come with a 500 MHz RISC chip or higher, with over a megabyte of memory and a blazing fast 16K modem! The sales of software giants Borland, Ashton-Tate and Lotus exceed $2 billion annually." Etc. You just can't predict the future of technology with anything remotely like accuracy that far out.
Freedom starts with you.
I also sell science fiction, fantasy, and horror books (mostly first editions, small press, etc.) on the side as Lame Excuse Books. This is also a way to feed my own science fiction first edition book-buying, just like junkies who are forced to become pushers to support their drug habit...
Rorshach: Johnny Depp
Dr. Manhatten: George Clooney (alt: Hugh Jackman)
The Comedian: Tom Sellack
Ozymandius: Ralph Feinnes
Nite Owl: Stephen Root (alt: Tom Hanks)
Silk Spectre 1: Lucy Lawless
Silk Spectre 2: Natalie Portman? Too young. Probably need someone more muscular, true brunette, can actually act. Michelle Forbes is probably a little too old. Maybe Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Psychiatristic: James Earl Jones
Despite the fact that there are many extremely smart and talented people at NASA, it, like every bureaucracy, has become an entrenched special interest, more concerned with preserving its budget than in actually moving the cause of space flight forward. The Space Shuttle, no matter how many times it has been retrofitted, is still 1970s technology. It's hideously expensive to launch and requires a vast support army to operate. But that vast support army is precisely why it exists. The space shuttle exists to serve the International Space Station. The International Space Station exists to be serviced by the space shuttle. Both provide lots of aerospace industry jobs and this is, in fact, their primary function. Turf and caution have become the watchwords at the highest echelons of NASA, who are more concerned with protecting their bureaucratic empire than moving the exploration and colonization of space forward. The shuttle monopoly has strangled the development of alternative launch vehicles, something the X Prize has only partially offset. A lot of people had predicted we'd not only have launched a manned mission to Mars by now, but set up a colony. See any sign of that?
Until there's a serious shakeup among the upper echelons of NASA bureaucrats, expect for the U.S. manned space program to creep along rather than soaring.
Sorry, had to be said. ;-p
However, I do wondering how you can label the ones you burn yourself...
I feel so dirty now...
Apple asks: "How can we make the best product possible for the customer and still make money at it?"
Microsoft asks: "How can we use this to reinforce our monopoly and still get end-users to swallow it?"
All Microsoft's DRM and Codec schemes have seemed to design to "embrace and extend" to further their Windows monopoly. Apple's have been designed to be the best they possibly can, with just enough DRM to satisfy their media partners. It's a big difference, and it shows up in everything they do.
eBay doesn't seem to have learned anything from these debacles, and continues to roll out unnecessary updates with inadequate testing, resulting in previously solid functionality breaking down. Whoever is in charge of update testing over there should be sacked.
Sarge Shots The Monster
Sarge Runs
Sarge Shots The Monster
Sarge Picks Up More Ammo
Sarge Runs
Monster Shoots Sarge Just Before He Shots The Monster
Sarge: Ouch!
Sarge Runs
Sarge Opens A Secret Door
Sarge Applies A Medkit
Sarge Runs
Sarge Shots The Monster
Sarge Finds A Bigger Gun
____________________________
Academy Award, here we come!
(Note: I couldn't put directions in all caps like a real script due to Lameness Filter...)
No, THIS is his low-point, William Shatner's Spplat Attack, a DVD of a Star Trek-themed day of paintball. A friend bought this and brought it over one night.
It was painful.
Very painful.
How painful was it? There was actually a moment when I wished I was watching Star Trek V instead.
Axiom 2: "Outsourcing is Evil!"
Fact: "Wal-Mart is against outsourcing."
Result: Liberals heads asplode! (Much like the guys in Scanners, or the computer in that really stupid episode of The Prisoner.)
Step 1: Rip all three Star Wars and the extended editions of The Lord of the Rings Movies (yeah yeah, the third isn't out yet) to your HD.
Step 2: Mail copies to 25 of your friends with GMail accounts as attachments.
Step 3: Have your friends change each of the file names and mail them back.
Bingo! Instant excession of 100 GB.
Alternately, you could just post your e-mail address here and say something like "You wussy, panty-wasted Linux hackers couldn't spam-bomb my account even if you wanted to! Your hacking skills are pathetic and lame! Besides, everyone knows that REAL MEN use Windows!"
I figured that's good for getting mailed 500 full distros within an hour. That should do the trick. ;-)