If my memory serves (having read the whole prospectus earlier this afternoon), the contract states that if Andover "fires" Rob et al for reasons other than criminal activity, the following is triggered:
(1) They get paid their salary for a year; (2) Amounts owed within the contract for the purchase of Slashdot are still owed; (3) They are released from any non-compete agreements.
So yes, they can legally restart Slashdot under those conditions, with a nice infusion of capital over the next few years.
Obviously, this isn't going to happen. And it looks like Andover is adhering to their end of the deal. I've noticed only two changes in Slashdot since the takeover: Rob has spent lots more time tinkering with the system, to mainly good results, and the overall quality (i.e. ability to pay bills) of sponsors has gone up. So far, so good.
It was good enough to get me on the Internet in 1994, but I switched to a Sun workstation as soon as I could afford it. Linux was fine, but the PC hardware I was running wasn't particularly stable. Then to SGI, and now to a mixed Linux/SGI environment.
I remember hearing that something like 1 of every 4 Commodore 64s were dead on arrival. That sure coloured my attitude about the Amiga when it came out.
It doesn't make sense to find geekesses unless they want to be found. I think that if you did a survey, you'd find the overwhelming majority of female Slashdot readers already have significant others and aren't keen on changing them. Even if one happened to be single and available, there's the matter of geography - every woman I've found interesting on the net has lived circa 3,000 miles away, and the woman I found most interesting lived in another country entirely.
That being said, I think User Friendly [http://www.userfriendly.org] has a matchmaking section someplace that might prove useful.
Hmmm, only problem is a ring lasts forever, while a notebook computer lasts about as long as a mayfly - six months later, she'll throw away your expensive token of love and buy another.
Much as I love computers, I think I'd stick with the ring - the computer symbolism just doesn't work.
Sadly, I can't stand flowers - what's the romance in giving someone something that's already dead? I'll never get that one...
As of approximately Irix 6.2 (maybe even 6.0), header files are included with the base OS, so GCC can work without the IDO.
I don't think most people are so superficial as to reject a company's products just because of the logo change. I wonder if my Indigo2 (with the old logo) will become a collector's item someday?
Even Atlas Shrugged conceded the need for government at some level or another. You will note that the companies moving to Colorado still had one - it ran law courts and a police department.
So sure, we should have a government, and we probably need an army. Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with current targets of Internet regulation. So far, I have yet to be convinced that any of it is in the best interest of Internet users.
People who create nice art tend to like machines whose user interfaces look good. I use a Mac in a lot of my computing for exactly this reason - It looks slick.
Windows is pretty darn ugly and clunky, SGI has overpriced software, Unix still has The Fonts from the Bottom of the Wastebasket, so where can she go?
(I'd suggest she look into BeOS, but I'd bet she uses commercial illustration software that's not available there).
I wonder how you define "on the Internet"? I would certainly count email time as "Internet time", and in that case he probably spends the majority of his day writing emails to his underlings. If you read any of 'Business @ the speed of thought", that seems pretty central to his style.
Disclaimer: I couldn't get through it, but I didn't buy it either - I checked it out in the bookstore. Oh those ugly chapter titles... corporatese at its worst:-(.
The pro-censorship governments of China and Singapore are already using these ratings to determine what people should not be allowed to see.
The problem with mandatory ratings is that it makes their jobs easier, and it also puts the censorship weapon in the hands of whatever governments want to use it. Ours, for example - consider the number of Internet censorship proposals that have appeared in Congress.
The European Community plans to allow each government to create a "template" for censorship - Germany's, for instance, will forbid "Hate Speech".
It's a bad proposal, and while I'm not sure if it would work (who the heck would call what they write "Hate Speech"?), I'm inclined to nip it in the bud.
I don't think there's anything in these rating systems that would prevent sites from continuing to use spurious keywords as you describe.
Here's an interesting experiment: Search for the same keywords with AltaVista's "Family Filter" on and see what happens. If the filter works like other filters, it will censor some of the "good" material you're trying to find, and let through much of the "bad" material, too. I don't think any form of ratings are going to change that.
It was taken down - ironically enough, not by the government, but by the Church of Scientology. But the fact that it was taken down is disturbing to anyone who wants to form or count on a similar service.
Well, porn sites have at least a theoretical obligation to keep out minors or at least warn them that they're going to see something Very Bad. In practice, most porn sites shill for Net Nanny, Cyber Patrol, etc, as a way to get parents off their backs. If I ever get around to running a porn site, I'll be sure it has some anti-censorware information in the opening.:-)
But certainly there's no way in the world Stormfront or kkk.com is going to accurately rate itself for hate speech. They will say that hate speech is a subjective classification, and I daresay they'll be right. Self-rating totally falls apart when you're desperate to get your message through.
The real weak link in the chain is ISPs as enforcers. How many ISPs do you know who'd relish that role? They're not going to do anything until forced, and in that case we're back to centralized government enforcement again. I don't think it will work - but it will be horribly politicised.
If this system actually does wind up working, I see a lot of people moving to Anguillia to express their opinions. The more the mainstream world cracks down on stuff like this, the more of a market there will be for a "free for all". Anguilla and other Carribean countries might be safe havens for free speech, in the same way they are safe havens for money today.
I suspect their apathy over this issue has to do with the question of trust - would they have any reason to trust us to not fire our own nukes, and tell them they were a false alarm?
I know that doesn't seem too sensible, since we have no particular reason to destroy the Russians at this point. But Russian paranoia runs deep.
Style sheets in Word and similar programs let you design your formatting in ways remarkably similar to the old TeX/Scribe/Runoff/etc programs. My favourite formatter was Scribe, which worked a lot like style sheets - you could define your styles in a file, and use that file for every document you created. This made it easy to define @section(xxx) and so on. So the actual document with markup was very easy to read.
I'd like to still use a solution like that today, but TeX is too complex, and as far as I know Scribe is gone (although I think LaTeX is similar in some ways).
To tell the truth, the main reason this is a dead issue for me is that I write all my documents in HTML, and I print less than 1% of what I write. If I was still producing long, complex documents, I'd definitely be looking for something less crash-prone then Word. TeX might even be the answer, be it ever so complex.
But, in all seriousness, check out style sheets before discarding what you see might be what you get software.
People who want to express themselves, and know how to do it, will always get websites.
Those who don't care to do so, well, won't.
The real limit is on the number of people willing to be creative.
I don't think it has anything to do with "cool" technologies - whether I have JavaScript rollovers on my site or not doesn't affect the quality of the content itself.
Unfortunately, the same technology that enables people to waste time is what they need to do real work. You can surf random sites on the web, or you can learn stuff you really need to know for your work. The same mechanism does both.
In other words, if you can't use one of these devices to surf the web and waste time, they are profoundly useless. Somehow I have a feeling you can - no problem.
D
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Re:The Viability of Be and Linux
on
Be on the G4
·
· Score: 2
I'm not sure who the BeOS core group is - it seems to more or less be developers right now. But it's certain that they are designing software more or less for the mainstream, and in my view (as a programmer), that's a Good Thing. At some point, I'd like to honestly tell someone, "Here's this great alternative to Windows, it's easy to set up and use, and you can do your mainstream stuff on it." Right now, I recommend MacOS to mainstream people; I'd like to recommend something for people who need the low cost of an X86 system.
I think the reason that multitasking feels better on BeOS is that every window is a separate thread. I don't understand why Netscape for Unix wasn't written that way, but it wasn't, and the net effect is that during DNS lookups you can't use multiple browser windows. That problem never comes up on BeOS.
I must admit to thinking of Mozilla as "The next version of Netscape". Me bad, I suppose.
Slashdot Mirror
If my memory serves (having read the whole prospectus earlier this afternoon), the contract states that if Andover "fires" Rob et al for reasons other than criminal activity, the following is triggered:
(1) They get paid their salary for a year;
(2) Amounts owed within the contract for the purchase of Slashdot are still owed;
(3) They are released from any non-compete agreements.
So yes, they can legally restart Slashdot under those conditions, with a nice infusion of capital over the next few years.
Obviously, this isn't going to happen. And it looks like Andover is adhering to their end of the deal. I've noticed only two changes in Slashdot since the takeover: Rob has spent lots more time tinkering with the system, to mainly good results, and the overall quality (i.e. ability to pay bills) of sponsors has gone up. So far, so good.
D
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Wow, someone mentions my First Distribution!
It was good enough to get me on the Internet in 1994, but I switched to a Sun workstation as soon as I could afford it. Linux was fine, but the PC hardware I was running wasn't particularly stable. Then to SGI, and now to a mixed Linux/SGI environment.
D
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How about just wretched product quality?
I remember hearing that something like 1 of every 4 Commodore 64s were dead on arrival. That sure coloured my attitude about the Amiga when it came out.
D
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It doesn't make sense to find geekesses unless they want to be found. I think that if you did a survey, you'd find the overwhelming majority of female Slashdot readers already have significant others and aren't keen on changing them. Even if one happened to be single and available, there's the matter of geography - every woman I've found interesting on the net has lived circa 3,000 miles away, and the woman I found most interesting lived in another country entirely.
That being said, I think User Friendly [http://www.userfriendly.org] has a matchmaking section someplace that might prove useful.
D
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Hmmm, only problem is a ring lasts forever, while a notebook computer lasts about as long as a mayfly - six months later, she'll throw away your expensive token of love and buy another.
...
Much as I love computers, I think I'd stick with the ring - the computer symbolism just doesn't work.
Sadly, I can't stand flowers - what's the romance in giving someone something that's already dead? I'll never get that one
D
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Safety isn't everything.
- pacifico/
Just tell me you really wouldn't want to live here:
http://www.amazing.com/david/dream-house/rambla
Yes, someone bought it -- and for more than the asking price, I reckon.
D
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which pretty much means one here in Los Angeles.
:-(.
I hate to admit it, but I'm really cheap when it comes to travel
D
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Not found on this server!
No more I can't spell the name any better than when I first heard it.com?
D
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As of approximately Irix 6.2 (maybe even 6.0), header files are included with the base OS, so GCC can work without the IDO.
I don't think most people are so superficial as to reject a company's products just because of the logo change. I wonder if my Indigo2 (with the old logo) will become a collector's item someday?
D
----
Even Atlas Shrugged conceded the need for government at some level or another. You will note that the companies moving to Colorado still had one - it ran law courts and a police department.
So sure, we should have a government, and we probably need an army. Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with current targets of Internet regulation. So far, I have yet to be convinced that any of it is in the best interest of Internet users.
D
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The wise words of this very experienced fellow are always worth reading, especially if you're facing the sailboat owner's predicament:
9 .htm
http://www.yachtsurvey.com/hurricane_season_199
D
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Graphics, my friend, graphics.
People who create nice art tend to like machines whose user interfaces look good. I use a Mac in a lot of my computing for exactly this reason - It looks slick.
Windows is pretty darn ugly and clunky, SGI has overpriced software, Unix still has The Fonts from the Bottom of the Wastebasket, so where can she go?
(I'd suggest she look into BeOS, but I'd bet she uses commercial illustration software that's not available there).
D
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Well, one of your visions seems to have found life:
http://www.friendlymachines.com/
D
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I must admit to being profoundly puzzled by your name. It sounds like it should mean something really odd ... am I right?
D
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I wonder how you define "on the Internet"? I would certainly count email time as "Internet time", and in that case he probably spends the majority of his day writing emails to his underlings. If you read any of 'Business @ the speed of thought", that seems pretty central to his style.
... corporatese at its worst :-(.
Disclaimer: I couldn't get through it, but I didn't buy it either - I checked it out in the bookstore. Oh those ugly chapter titles
D
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The pro-censorship governments of China and Singapore are already using these ratings to determine what people should not be allowed to see.
The problem with mandatory ratings is that it makes their jobs easier, and it also puts the censorship weapon in the hands of whatever governments want to use it. Ours, for example - consider the number of Internet censorship proposals that have appeared in Congress.
The European Community plans to allow each government to create a "template" for censorship - Germany's, for instance, will forbid "Hate Speech".
It's a bad proposal, and while I'm not sure if it would work (who the heck would call what they write "Hate Speech"?), I'm inclined to nip it in the bud.
D
----
I don't think there's anything in these rating systems that would prevent sites from continuing to use spurious keywords as you describe.
Here's an interesting experiment: Search for the same keywords with AltaVista's "Family Filter" on and see what happens. If the filter works like other filters, it will censor some of the "good" material you're trying to find, and let through much of the "bad" material, too. I don't think any form of ratings are going to change that.
D
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Yes, you probably should remember anon.penet.fi.
It was taken down - ironically enough, not by the government, but by the Church of Scientology. But the fact that it was taken down is disturbing to anyone who wants to form or count on a similar service.
D
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Well, porn sites have at least a theoretical obligation to keep out minors or at least warn them that they're going to see something Very Bad. In practice, most porn sites shill for Net Nanny, Cyber Patrol, etc, as a way to get parents off their backs. If I ever get around to running a porn site, I'll be sure it has some anti-censorware information in the opening. :-)
But certainly there's no way in the world Stormfront or kkk.com is going to accurately rate itself for hate speech. They will say that hate speech is a subjective classification, and I daresay they'll be right. Self-rating totally falls apart when you're desperate to get your message through.
The real weak link in the chain is ISPs as enforcers. How many ISPs do you know who'd relish that role? They're not going to do anything until forced, and in that case we're back to centralized government enforcement again. I don't think it will work - but it will be horribly politicised.
If this system actually does wind up working, I see a lot of people moving to Anguillia to express their opinions. The more the mainstream world cracks down on stuff like this, the more of a market there will be for a "free for all". Anguilla and other Carribean countries might be safe havens for free speech, in the same way they are safe havens for money today.
D
----
I suspect their apathy over this issue has to do with the question of trust - would they have any reason to trust us to not fire our own nukes, and tell them they were a false alarm?
I know that doesn't seem too sensible, since we have no particular reason to destroy the Russians at this point. But Russian paranoia runs deep.
D
----
Style sheets in Word and similar programs let you design your formatting in ways remarkably similar to the old TeX/Scribe/Runoff/etc programs. My favourite formatter was Scribe, which worked a lot like style sheets - you could define your styles in a file, and use that file for every document you created. This made it easy to define @section(xxx) and so on. So the actual document with markup was very easy to read.
I'd like to still use a solution like that today, but TeX is too complex, and as far as I know Scribe is gone (although I think LaTeX is similar in some ways).
To tell the truth, the main reason this is a dead issue for me is that I write all my documents in HTML, and I print less than 1% of what I write. If I was still producing long, complex documents, I'd definitely be looking for something less crash-prone then Word. TeX might even be the answer, be it ever so complex.
But, in all seriousness, check out style sheets before discarding what you see might be what you get software.
D
----
People who want to express themselves, and know how to do it, will always get websites.
Those who don't care to do so, well, won't.
The real limit is on the number of people willing to be creative.
I don't think it has anything to do with "cool" technologies - whether I have JavaScript rollovers on my site or not doesn't affect the quality of the content itself.
D
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My Karma has gone down alarmingly, from 36 to 25.
It makes me wonder what I've done wrong. Ouch!
D
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Unfortunately, the same technology that enables people to waste time is what they need to do real work. You can surf random sites on the web, or you can learn stuff you really need to know for your work. The same mechanism does both.
In other words, if you can't use one of these devices to surf the web and waste time, they are profoundly useless. Somehow I have a feeling you can - no problem.
D
----
I'm not sure who the BeOS core group is - it seems to more or less be developers right now. But it's certain that they are designing software more or less for the mainstream, and in my view (as a programmer), that's a Good Thing. At some point, I'd like to honestly tell someone, "Here's this great alternative to Windows, it's easy to set up and use, and you can do your mainstream stuff on it." Right now, I recommend MacOS to mainstream people; I'd like to recommend something for people who need the low cost of an X86 system.
I think the reason that multitasking feels better on BeOS is that every window is a separate thread. I don't understand why Netscape for Unix wasn't written that way, but it wasn't, and the net effect is that during DNS lookups you can't use multiple browser windows. That problem never comes up on BeOS.
I must admit to thinking of Mozilla as "The next version of Netscape". Me bad, I suppose.
D
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