I understand the purists who are fussing but they just need to go to their local video store or anime shop and snag the real thing.
My first exposure to anime was Speed Racer courtesy of Uncle Ted Turner at TBS. I saw G-Force (also known as Battle of the Planets) next. Then years later I saw Akira and I realized what good animation could be as opposed to the sterile formula driven crap dished out as American animation.
Stephen King (media whore at large) said,
"TV is the magic medium that turns everything it touches into shit."
He was right. If it gets on TV it will not be as good as the originals. It is a fact of life. It ain't going to change. Get the fsck over it already.
The coward who replied to this almost had it right. Cowboy Bebop is not kid's stuff and most people who saw it had to drag others to see it because of the damn name. However, a good deal of the kiddie sounding anime is kiddie stuff.
Bubblegum Crisis is moronic at best. Gundam is fun but it is like watching Batman on Saturday morning it is just adults indulging themselves by watching a kid's cartoon.
Ninja Scroll is not kid's stuff.
Akira is not kid's stuff.
Neon Genesis Evangelion is great.
Serial Experiment Lain is deep as hell.
The grown up stuff is out there. It is marred by the porn (BTW, if it looks like a horror flick there will be a disturbing rape scene don't bother with the crap). It is mixing in with the kid's stuff. Rourin Kenshin is a one man A-team running around with a sword never killing anyone. Its kid's stuff. There is a new series dealing with his younger life as an assasin that is violent, a bit deep and disturbing. Not kid's stuff.
Sometimes, it is tough to tell the difference. I thought Rourin Kenshin would be great from the reviews and it is worshipped by many but I thought it was formulastic and smacked of kid's stuff. Cute, but nothing special.
Listen, I ran a desk a little more humane than this. However, I have to say this is a very important article because it reflects how help desk's are run. I have had the speech on call boundaries and such. I hated it and that is why I got out.
Anyway, everyone should read and realize the reality of this article.
Techs are paid crap money so if your real lucky you will get the guy who loves computers but never took a computer science class so he is using this job as a stepping stone into IT. Otherwise you are dealing with a customer service person that knows what an OS is and is savvy enough to run the ping command. This is an entry-level position in every organization in the world.
One bit of advice. If they don't know what to do right away just let them off the phone because they are useless. If they don't know right away they might send you to second-level support who all think they are tech gods because they can make a macro in Excel and relish the opportunity to make the end luser feel like an idiot and piss on the first level guys for not knowing the answer. Yes, the bar for most 2nd level folks are that small and promotion is by survival unless the supervisor hates you.
If you are on a help desk for more than a year and have not made it to second-level support, quit. The supervisor or manager hates you and you will never get promoted.
BTW, even if your problem is about connectivity and has nothing to do with the OS never mention you are using Linux or you will not get anything out of these people. They don't support the *nixes and this is a favorite call boundary used to get rid of users quickly.
NDS alone could be the savior of Novell
on
Is Novell Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
Listen, the one thing most (notice I say most so don't bother with the exceptions) computer companies do wrong is branch out in too many different directions instead of concentrating on what it does best.
Netware is dead but maybe not Novell. They nearly died by screwing around and branching off into groupware and office suites for awhile while Mickeysoft sucked the core of their business from them. However, the NDS product really does rock.
If Novell can concentrate on networking products that do not necessarily depend exclusively on one OS or another then they have a chance. There are two keys. Neither one Novell is usually very good at. They need to market themselves like mad to the right markets and they need to figure out how to make profits with NDS in a big way until they can bring more quality products to the forefront.
My company uses NDS and I have to say that it honestly rocks.
From some of the earlier posts, I would say the neatest use would be to take all the old pieces of Boosters laying around Huntsville. Then you fit a couple of them together and put the Russian capsule on top like the crowning cherry on a perfect nerdesque sundae.
It is just a thought. I wonder what the insides of one of those things look like? Is it all old tech switches and primitve computers strapped together or does it have a cool look that reminds one of all those small kid wonder ideas of what it would be like to be an astronaut?
Personally, I think we should have an ICBM dealer on every block. They need to recycle them somehow and all the money is in the US. I bet Bill Gates would pay a pretty penny to be a nuclear power. He could finally tell the Feds to screw off in a big way. Oooops that would be bad! Well, Larry Ellison would have to have one if Gates has one so at least there would a semblance of detente. Hahahahaha!!
They are already spying on each other like autonomous governments I say let the monopolies go to war. Give AOL a couple of migs and.... wait I digress...
If you think that is funny do a search on whitehouse or intern. Personally, I think everyone who works in the whitehouse or is an intern or is japanese must be a porn star or peddler of pornographic material.
I just think that now that networks are starting to pick up anime that hopefully it will reach a larger audience. I just hope the genre does not get pigeonholed in the US the way the regular animation market has. If it does, there will always be the fansubs.
In the fifties they nearly banned comic books for attributing to juvenile deliquency.
In the sixties it was the hippies and the drugs that caused all the violence. Yes, BTW, I know the stereotype of the peace loving hippy but then again every radical politico in the sixties were
referred to as a hippy.
In the seventies it was the drugs still (everyone really liked drugs around this time;->).
In the eighties it was those satanic role playing games.
Today, they complain about video games.
Scapegoats are always going to be needed because people in America right now just cannot accept that some people are freaks and mad dogs that will simply go off.
They have to have a reason so we can prevent it. It is bull. Famous people cannot die without a conspiracy behind their death, John Kennedy, MLK or even freakin' Princess Di. Nothing random can happen and nothing can happen that is totally unpreventable. There are people that actually think that we can actually prevent a warped kid from shooting up a school or some weirdo from attacking kids or terroists from bombing our ships, etc..etc.. ad nausem.
We are not in control. Expectation is just a way of thinking you know what is coming next AND YOU DON'T. Get over it.
The horror, the drama, the boredom
on
Nobel Prizes
·
· Score: 1
They could not make it any more boring than NBC did the coverage in Sydney.
Cyclists striking manly poses as they describe the life story and the Cancer drama one more time before you find out the guy came in like 16th.
Then we get to see 14 year old children sitting back in contemplative sexy poutty poses as the NBC strains his voice trying to sound excited about a bunch of eurotrash children chunking their medals off when they only get silver. Gawd, it sucked!!
The times they could have honestly profited off some drama like all the nonsense with the horse thing being put too low they did not (yeah my wife likes gymnastics so sue me).
I can see the coverage in my head now. Rock video lighting on the lab coated scientist squaring off against the lab on the other side of the world. One is from a rich western country making an advance against the backdrop of high tech toys while in the other corner some dedicated schmuck in the third world come through with some success in his field with nothing but a test tube and McGuiver like sense of resourcefullness. Who will win? Will anyone outside of their own fields give a shit?
This is the kind of numbnut robber baron tactics you would expect from AT&T.
However, I thought these sort of tactics were prohibited by some of the previous ant-monopoly rulings against this company. They can do it.
Yet, is it legal?
I thought this was the sort of things that the feds were screaming about with other cable companies and such.
Re:It is nice to get back to "grass roots"
on
Think Unix
·
· Score: 1
Like in most arguements, there is a mid point and see both points. I think the *nixes in general could be easier to learn. Could someone please re-write my damn man pages please? I understand they all sound like they were written by pissed off programmers venting their hatred for the end-user as they pretended to explain the functionality. Man pages are good for simple commands but try figuring out how to do something complex with awk and sed from the man page. No way! That is why O'Reilly has a whole book on awk and sed.
Anyway, I can also see the other side of the point though. Once you know one *nix you really are able to adjust quickly. Honestly, I kind of like working from my Sparc Ultra 5. Solaris is damn stable and helixcode runs really smooth on it. The terminology is a little different and really the only thing else that would freak newbie out about my Sparc is the placement of directories. The different *nixes are not that different. People seem to be very frightened about moving between them. I think that is rather odd.
The whole NTFS Microsoft battle should be viewed from the simple viewpoint of whether or not reverse engineering a product is a copyright violation.
If they argue this point they are saying in essence the whole basis of their monolopy (cheap intel hardware for their products to run on) is illegal. They are as one reader put it shooting themselves in the foot. If they don't want to steal ideas from the companies, they don't need to go down this route.
The funny thing is they will not scare linux developers the same way they would frighten a small corporation. Sic Stallman and Mr. Maddog Hall on them at the same time.
First place I ever worked as tech developed their app in Delphi of all things. It was not bad(the app that is). Borland had a rep back in the day of making decent products so I hope this works out for them.
My question is simple though, has anyone tried out Codewarrior for Linux? Is it worth the time?
A couple of people have bemoaned the lack of good IDEs for Linux and other have all responded with the typical KDevelop replies. I don't like it that much but then again I only do C,C++ coding on small utility style projects so I am not the big project oriented style programmer that this thing was made for.
I just want a nice, easy to use editor with sensible color coding and easy compiling and debugging tools. I don't need the revision and project tools at all. Is CodeWarrior worth the time? I know a couple of Mac hacks and people stuck programming Windoze stuff that love the thing.
Listen, corporations, people and groups of any kind do things usually for their own benefit or their group's benefit. No actions are purely altruistic. Corporations are no different than any other group or institution in society. They have a purpose (to make money) and they want to survive otherwise money is not made and people do not continue to have a jobs.
Governments, clubs, and even idealistic environmental groups all have purposes and a will to survive. You may not like the mandate to exist for the sole purpose of amassing cash but at the same time you use or own the products of these corporations and continue the cycle. Live a year without purchasing anything produced by a corporation in any industrialized non-communist nation.
As one person put it the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
As long as they don't keep my name, address and social security number somewhere to sell off to companies to fill my email and snail mail boxes full of crap, I don't care more power to them.
As one poster already said, at least I don't have to sit through maxi-pad commercials. What about people that surf around the commercials? Will it completely confuse the system?
Ok, I was there in the Quake II days. I had played Doom and Wolfenstein 3-D. I played a little quake on the side. I had even went head to head over a lan playing Doom. However, I got into playing Quake II over the net and loved it.
What I don't hear people talking about are the llamas and the a**holes who try to ruin it for everyone else. I got out and stopped playing when it was impossible to play a game without a few players making the opportunity to bitch and whine at each other through the whole match. I did not get on to play against real people to get verbally asaulted or watch endless messages from people cursing at each other. It got to the point where it was not that fun.
Plus, I was on a 33.6 connection and all the lpbs were eating my lunch anyway and bitching all the time because I was using grenades or rocket launchers. Annoying.
Anime articles have as much of a place on slashdot as Sci-Fi movie articles. A lot of my friends like anime and I would have not known about this interview without the kind folks at slashdot.
Listen don't read the damn aritcle if you don't like the subject matter.
I think that including articles about subjects that do not strictly meet computer interests is a helpful and interesting diversion. I don't get into Star Trek even when the whole TNG thing was in full swing. I do like Star Wars however. I am not into the physics/hard science articles but a lot of folks are. The idea that anime should not be included is in my opinion silly.
If some people are embarrased by stereotypes of anime fans fine, don't read the article but whining all over the boards about it is silly.
I think the NYT guys and the Salon guys are sitting in a room with the CNET and the ZDNET guys. Sure, I can see it now.
It is the only freaking way so many different sources can all write the same damn article over and over again. Not only have we all read this same article from different sources but it has been done better. They would serve better by providing a link to one of those articles done by a more technically adept writer.
Two years ago, it was exciting to see this kind of article and it is still neat to hear Sun or someone say they are using a open source project desktop environment (GNOME of course).
Still can't the mainstream press stop spewing the same message over and over again. God, there is enough stuff going on that we don't have to recycle the same messages endlessly. You would think they never read each other's stuff, and I know they do.
This kind of stuff is very interesting to me. One day when we are sitting back looking around at the virtual world we created or in my case maintained and hacked on we will care about the founding days. I am glad someone had the vision to save this even though 99.9% of it like any other medium will be seen as crap.
As someone who was not a Computer Science major but took their hobbyist skill and starting making money at it (history teachers are not paid well and dumped on every day as in you have to be truly dedicated or truly a masochist), I find the idea of taking all the Usenet posts and discussions from other sources and making a true social study of people who work on the backbone of the IT industry. I think this would be far more enlightening that most "geek" culture articles currently being peddled around.
I always though Neal Stephenson was more a Sci-Fi writer hack like Gibson till I read his
In the beginning was the Command Line
That was done very well and progressed my appreciation of Stephenson as a writer and some one knowledgable about the history of computers.
It was more about explaining the progression of the UI but studies like this focusing on the people who created the interfaces we know take for granted could be very interesting, a scholarily version of the PBS Revenge of the Nerds show. What do you guys think?
I think this is great. It shows that a division of Time/Warner that proposes itself as a news organization can stand up and show the news without getting squashed by the corporate office.
Just because one part of an organization has taken the wrong stance on an issue does not mean that every other part of the organization is necessarily tainted to the point of not being able to report this accurately. It certainly does not mean that everyone working there has to agree with the corporate position is that wasn't totally obvious.
People talk as if Napster is the only way to get mp3s. It was just the first folks to design a for-profit company around the idea. If all the easy to scam utils go down the toilet, people are still going to turn around and trade mp3s the way the did cassette tapes back in the day and post them on Anonymous FTP.
These people cannot stop the trade of copyrighted material. They can only make it more annoying for newbies. Go ahead and firewall Napsters and the three dozen clone sites out there providing the same service will suddenly get all the hits. If they block those, I will hit my fave ten or site FTP sites and get them that way. The corporations can't keep up with technology. They can only make sure all the obvious targets are sued. The other ten guys working from the shadows will always be there behind one url or ftp:// ready to serve. As long as diskspace is cheap the music industry is screwed to the wall.
The latest batch of Dell notebooks look pretty good and have me thinking about them as a real option. However, I wonder how much support this will really translate into. Any *NIX variant demands a good deal of expertise to troubleshoot when something goes wrong. It demands a higher level of Technical Support knowledge than I usually see from most big manufacturing houses.
Will Dell just give you the option and not help you if the OS and the hardware don't play nice or will they back up the kind words with corporate action?
Slashdot Mirror
I understand the purists who are fussing but they just need to go to their local video store or anime shop and snag the real thing.
My first exposure to anime was Speed Racer courtesy of Uncle Ted Turner at TBS. I saw G-Force (also known as Battle of the Planets) next. Then years later I saw Akira and I realized what good animation could be as opposed to the sterile formula driven crap dished out as American animation.
Stephen King (media whore at large) said,
"TV is the magic medium that turns everything it touches into shit."
He was right. If it gets on TV it will not be as good as the originals. It is a fact of life. It ain't going to change. Get the fsck over it already.
The coward who replied to this almost had it right. Cowboy Bebop is not kid's stuff and most people who saw it had to drag others to see it because of the damn name. However, a good deal of the kiddie sounding anime is kiddie stuff.
Bubblegum Crisis is moronic at best. Gundam is fun but it is like watching Batman on Saturday morning it is just adults indulging themselves by watching a kid's cartoon.
Ninja Scroll is not kid's stuff.
Akira is not kid's stuff.
Neon Genesis Evangelion is great.
Serial Experiment Lain is deep as hell.
The grown up stuff is out there. It is marred by the porn (BTW, if it looks like a horror flick there will be a disturbing rape scene don't bother with the crap). It is mixing in with the kid's stuff. Rourin Kenshin is a one man A-team running around with a sword never killing anyone. Its kid's stuff. There is a new series dealing with his younger life as an assasin that is violent, a bit deep and disturbing. Not kid's stuff.
Sometimes, it is tough to tell the difference. I thought Rourin Kenshin would be great from the reviews and it is worshipped by many but I thought it was formulastic and smacked of kid's stuff. Cute, but nothing special.
I read his sig line twice and my head exploded. Do you know how hard it was to type this with no head?!?
Listen, I ran a desk a little more humane than this. However, I have to say this is a very important article because it reflects how help desk's are run. I have had the speech on call boundaries and such. I hated it and that is why I got out.
Anyway, everyone should read and realize the reality of this article.
Techs are paid crap money so if your real lucky you will get the guy who loves computers but never took a computer science class so he is using this job as a stepping stone into IT. Otherwise you are dealing with a customer service person that knows what an OS is and is savvy enough to run the ping command. This is an entry-level position in every organization in the world.
One bit of advice. If they don't know what to do right away just let them off the phone because they are useless. If they don't know right away they might send you to second-level support who all think they are tech gods because they can make a macro in Excel and relish the opportunity to make the end luser feel like an idiot and piss on the first level guys for not knowing the answer. Yes, the bar for most 2nd level folks are that small and promotion is by survival unless the supervisor hates you.
If you are on a help desk for more than a year and have not made it to second-level support, quit. The supervisor or manager hates you and you will never get promoted.
BTW, even if your problem is about connectivity and has nothing to do with the OS never mention you are using Linux or you will not get anything out of these people. They don't support the *nixes and this is a favorite call boundary used to get rid of users quickly.
Listen, the one thing most (notice I say most so don't bother with the exceptions) computer companies do wrong is branch out in too many different directions instead of concentrating on what it does best.
Netware is dead but maybe not Novell. They nearly died by screwing around and branching off into groupware and office suites for awhile while Mickeysoft sucked the core of their business from them. However, the NDS product really does rock.
If Novell can concentrate on networking products that do not necessarily depend exclusively on one OS or another then they have a chance. There are two keys. Neither one Novell is usually very good at. They need to market themselves like mad to the right markets and they need to figure out how to make profits with NDS in a big way until they can bring more quality products to the forefront.
My company uses NDS and I have to say that it honestly rocks.
From some of the earlier posts, I would say the neatest use would be to take all the old pieces of Boosters laying around Huntsville. Then you fit a couple of them together and put the Russian capsule on top like the crowning cherry on a perfect nerdesque sundae.
.... wait I digress...
It is just a thought. I wonder what the insides of one of those things look like? Is it all old tech switches and primitve computers strapped together or does it have a cool look that reminds one of all those small kid wonder ideas of what it would be like to be an astronaut?
Personally, I think we should have an ICBM dealer on every block. They need to recycle them somehow and all the money is in the US. I bet Bill Gates would pay a pretty penny to be a nuclear power. He could finally tell the Feds to screw off in a big way. Oooops that would be bad! Well, Larry Ellison would have to have one if Gates has one so at least there would a semblance of detente. Hahahahaha!!
They are already spying on each other like autonomous governments I say let the monopolies go to war. Give AOL a couple of migs and
If you think that is funny do a search on whitehouse or intern. Personally, I think everyone who works in the whitehouse or is an intern or is japanese must be a porn star or peddler of pornographic material.
I just think that now that networks are starting to pick up anime that hopefully it will reach a larger audience. I just hope the genre does not get pigeonholed in the US the way the regular animation market has. If it does, there will always be the fansubs.
In the fifties they nearly banned comic books for attributing to juvenile deliquency.
;->).
In the sixties it was the hippies and the drugs that caused all the violence. Yes, BTW, I know the stereotype of the peace loving hippy but then again every radical politico in the sixties were
referred to as a hippy.
In the seventies it was the drugs still (everyone really liked drugs around this time
In the eighties it was those satanic role playing games.
Today, they complain about video games.
Scapegoats are always going to be needed because people in America right now just cannot accept that some people are freaks and mad dogs that will simply go off.
They have to have a reason so we can prevent it. It is bull. Famous people cannot die without a conspiracy behind their death, John Kennedy, MLK or even freakin' Princess Di. Nothing random can happen and nothing can happen that is totally unpreventable. There are people that actually think that we can actually prevent a warped kid from shooting up a school or some weirdo from attacking kids or terroists from bombing our ships, etc..etc.. ad nausem.
We are not in control. Expectation is just a way of thinking you know what is coming next AND YOU DON'T. Get over it.
They could not make it any more boring than NBC did the coverage in Sydney.
Cyclists striking manly poses as they describe the life story and the Cancer drama one more time before you find out the guy came in like 16th.
Then we get to see 14 year old children sitting back in contemplative sexy poutty poses as the NBC strains his voice trying to sound excited about a bunch of eurotrash children chunking their medals off when they only get silver. Gawd, it sucked!!
The times they could have honestly profited off some drama like all the nonsense with the horse thing being put too low they did not (yeah my wife likes gymnastics so sue me).
I can see the coverage in my head now. Rock video lighting on the lab coated scientist squaring off against the lab on the other side of the world. One is from a rich western country making an advance against the backdrop of high tech toys while in the other corner some dedicated schmuck in the third world come through with some success in his field with nothing but a test tube and McGuiver like sense of resourcefullness. Who will win? Will anyone outside of their own fields give a shit?
This is the kind of numbnut robber baron tactics you would expect from AT&T.
However, I thought these sort of tactics were prohibited by some of the previous ant-monopoly rulings against this company. They can do it.
Yet, is it legal?
I thought this was the sort of things that the feds were screaming about with other cable companies and such.
Like in most arguements, there is a mid point and see both points. I think the *nixes in general could be easier to learn. Could someone please re-write my damn man pages please? I understand they all sound like they were written by pissed off programmers venting their hatred for the end-user as they pretended to explain the functionality. Man pages are good for simple commands but try figuring out how to do something complex with awk and sed from the man page. No way! That is why O'Reilly has a whole book on awk and sed.
Anyway, I can also see the other side of the point though. Once you know one *nix you really are able to adjust quickly. Honestly, I kind of like working from my Sparc Ultra 5. Solaris is damn stable and helixcode runs really smooth on it. The terminology is a little different and really the only thing else that would freak newbie out about my Sparc is the placement of directories. The different *nixes are not that different. People seem to be very frightened about moving between them. I think that is rather odd.
The whole NTFS Microsoft battle should be viewed from the simple viewpoint of whether or not reverse engineering a product is a copyright violation.
If they argue this point they are saying in essence the whole basis of their monolopy (cheap intel hardware for their products to run on) is illegal. They are as one reader put it shooting themselves in the foot. If they don't want to steal ideas from the companies, they don't need to go down this route.
The funny thing is they will not scare linux developers the same way they would frighten a small corporation. Sic Stallman and Mr. Maddog Hall on them at the same time.
First place I ever worked as tech developed their app in Delphi of all things. It was not bad(the app that is). Borland had a rep back in the day of making decent products so I hope this works out for them.
My question is simple though, has anyone tried out Codewarrior for Linux? Is it worth the time?
A couple of people have bemoaned the lack of good IDEs for Linux and other have all responded with the typical KDevelop replies. I don't like it that much but then again I only do C,C++ coding on small utility style projects so I am not the big project oriented style programmer that this thing was made for.
I just want a nice, easy to use editor with sensible color coding and easy compiling and debugging tools. I don't need the revision and project tools at all. Is CodeWarrior worth the time? I know a couple of Mac hacks and people stuck programming Windoze stuff that love the thing.
The sad thing is that this freakin' thing is faster and has no space than my current computer at home. :-
Listen, corporations, people and groups of any kind do things usually for their own benefit or their group's benefit. No actions are purely altruistic. Corporations are no different than any other group or institution in society. They have a purpose (to make money) and they want to survive otherwise money is not made and people do not continue to have a jobs.
Governments, clubs, and even idealistic environmental groups all have purposes and a will to survive. You may not like the mandate to exist for the sole purpose of amassing cash but at the same time you use or own the products of these corporations and continue the cycle. Live a year without purchasing anything produced by a corporation in any industrialized non-communist nation.
As one person put it the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Leave the silly politics at home.
As long as they don't keep my name, address and social security number somewhere to sell off to companies to fill my email and snail mail boxes full of crap, I don't care more power to them.
As one poster already said, at least I don't have to sit through maxi-pad commercials. What about people that surf around the commercials? Will it completely confuse the system?
Ok, I was there in the Quake II days. I had played Doom and Wolfenstein 3-D. I played a little quake on the side. I had even went head to head over a lan playing Doom. However, I got into playing Quake II over the net and loved it.
What I don't hear people talking about are the llamas and the a**holes who try to ruin it for everyone else. I got out and stopped playing when it was impossible to play a game without a few players making the opportunity to bitch and whine at each other through the whole match. I did not get on to play against real people to get verbally asaulted or watch endless messages from people cursing at each other. It got to the point where it was not that fun.
Plus, I was on a 33.6 connection and all the lpbs were eating my lunch anyway and bitching all the time because I was using grenades or rocket launchers. Annoying.
Anime articles have as much of a place on slashdot as Sci-Fi movie articles. A lot of my friends like anime and I would have not known about this interview without the kind folks at slashdot.
Listen don't read the damn aritcle if you don't like the subject matter.
I think that including articles about subjects that do not strictly meet computer interests is a helpful and interesting diversion. I don't get into Star Trek even when the whole TNG thing was in full swing. I do like Star Wars however. I am not into the physics/hard science articles but a lot of folks are. The idea that anime should not be included is in my opinion silly.
If some people are embarrased by stereotypes of anime fans fine, don't read the article but whining all over the boards about it is silly.
I think the NYT guys and the Salon guys are sitting in a room with the CNET and the ZDNET guys. Sure, I can see it now.
It is the only freaking way so many different sources can all write the same damn article over and over again. Not only have we all read this same article from different sources but it has been done better. They would serve better by providing a link to one of those articles done by a more technically adept writer.
Two years ago, it was exciting to see this kind of article and it is still neat to hear Sun or someone say they are using a open source project desktop environment (GNOME of course).
Still can't the mainstream press stop spewing the same message over and over again. God, there is enough stuff going on that we don't have to recycle the same messages endlessly. You would think they never read each other's stuff, and I know they do.
This kind of stuff is very interesting to me. One day when we are sitting back looking around at the virtual world we created or in my case maintained and hacked on we will care about the founding days. I am glad someone had the vision to save this even though 99.9% of it like any other medium will be seen as crap.
As someone who was not a Computer Science major but took their hobbyist skill and starting making money at it (history teachers are not paid well and dumped on every day as in you have to be truly dedicated or truly a masochist), I find the idea of taking all the Usenet posts and discussions from other sources and making a true social study of people who work on the backbone of the IT industry. I think this would be far more enlightening that most "geek" culture articles currently being peddled around.
I always though Neal Stephenson was more a Sci-Fi writer hack like Gibson till I read his
In the beginning was the Command Line
That was done very well and progressed my appreciation of Stephenson as a writer and some one knowledgable about the history of computers.
It was more about explaining the progression of the UI but studies like this focusing on the people who created the interfaces we know take for granted could be very interesting, a scholarily version of the PBS Revenge of the Nerds show. What do you guys think?
I think this is great. It shows that a division of Time/Warner that proposes itself as a news organization can stand up and show the news without getting squashed by the corporate office.
Just because one part of an organization has taken the wrong stance on an issue does not mean that every other part of the organization is necessarily tainted to the point of not being able to report this accurately. It certainly does not mean that everyone working there has to agree with the corporate position is that wasn't totally obvious.
People talk as if Napster is the only way to get mp3s. It was just the first folks to design a for-profit company around the idea. If all the easy to scam utils go down the toilet, people are still going to turn around and trade mp3s the way the did cassette tapes back in the day and post them on Anonymous FTP.
These people cannot stop the trade of copyrighted material. They can only make it more annoying for newbies. Go ahead and firewall Napsters and the three dozen clone sites out there providing the same service will suddenly get all the hits. If they block those, I will hit my fave ten or site FTP sites and get them that way. The corporations can't keep up with technology. They can only make sure all the obvious targets are sued. The other ten guys working from the shadows will always be there behind one url or ftp:// ready to serve. As long as diskspace is cheap the music industry is screwed to the wall.
The only truly secure box is the one that is turned off. If you want a secure linux box, then pull the plug out of the back of the damn wall.
BSD is better or should I say it is easier to install the OS so that all the obviously compromising crap is turned off or not installed.
What I want to know is whether or not the more expensive Redhat secure server could stand up next to a properly configured standard issue BSD box?
The latest batch of Dell notebooks look pretty good and have me thinking about them as a real option. However, I wonder how much support this will really translate into. Any *NIX variant demands a good deal of expertise to troubleshoot when something goes wrong. It demands a higher level of Technical Support knowledge than I usually see from most big manufacturing houses.
Will Dell just give you the option and not help you if the OS and the hardware don't play nice or will they back up the kind words with corporate action?