All the TV magazine and blog articles I've read have agreed that that Dollhouse is on Friday night because that's a graveyard shift. NO show attracts blockbuster numbers on a Friday night, so the network wants something a little more high-end than reality programming (to lure better advertisers) that will attract a devoted core. In other words, they know that Joss Whedon's fanbase will watch anything... and is mostly sitting an home on Friday night anyway. If Dollhouse were on any other night of the week, it would have been pulled after the first two episodes.
While I'm at it, I'm as big a Joss Whedon mark as anyone but I'm going to go ahead and say it... Dollhouse simply SUCKS for me so far. With the possible exception of Echo's "handler", all the other characters simply do not interest me. They are one-dimensional stock characters (e.g. the arrogant nerd who tries to be funny, the gruff security guard who always wants to use the violent option, the obsessed FBI agent chasing chasing after Kaiser Soze, etc). Other than Eliza Dusku and her handler, the acting is pretty poor and the premise itself pretty retarded. Nothing has really "hooked" me yet.
Worst of all, the scripts are virtually devoid of wit and humor. WTF?!? That's the whole POINT of a Joss Whedon show... characters that pull you in and make you care about them, and intelligent dialog that catches you off-guard with laughs. Take that out of the equation, and you're just left with goofy sci-fi/fantasy ridiculousness and some mushy political/feminist messages.
I don't really understand the business problem that this "invention" is intended to solve. If a manager doesn't want people using their laptops during his meeting... he should, well, tell the guy sitting ten feet directly in front of him to kindly close his laptop.
This is a technical version of your old college roommate leaving you angry notes to clean up or change your habits... because the person was too weak and passive to simply have an adult conversation to your face. A manager who has to "communicate" with subordinates in such a manner should not be a manager in the first place.
I don't really care to wade into the abortion-debate muck, particularly as abortion has nothing to do with the stem cells we're talking about. Those are obtained from fertility clinics, and created by people who are SO "pro-life" that they leave plenty of discarded excess life behind in the freezer.
However, what frustrates me to a greater degree is this myth that stem cell research has been "restricted". 90+ percent of people on the street (and probably even a majority of Slashdot posters here) mistakenly believe that the evil Bush administration "banned" or "outlawed" stem cell research. That's simply not true. The last administration refused to SUBSIDIZE it, and that's all. Researchers have been under no restriction whatsoever to do any of this research, as long as they're not sucking off the taxpayer teat for their funds.
This opens up an entirely separate debate on private sources of medical research funds, and why pharmaceutical companies now pay more in marketing than they do in R&D. I'll leave that debate to others. However, are we REALLY so drunk on "stimulus" spending for everything under the sun these days, that refusing to subsidize a particular item means that item is actively "restricted"?
... can a guy intentionally making homemade explosives that killed people, who had a role in major riots, who detonated bombs in public parks, and who never really apologized for any of it get cast as the GOOD GUY against Bill Gates!
Yeah, I voted against GOP last year too, in part because this was 40 years ago and and it was cheap for the Republicans to wait so late to bring it up. However, the fact that Ayers was criticized by some lousy political candidates doesn't that he deserves no criticism. This guy is a symptom of why the Left is a minority philosophy in the U.S., and can't win a Presidency without a major recession or impeachment just before the election.
"MySpace" instead of "Facebook" shows cluelessness
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Bear in mind that within just five years, members of the MySpace generation are going to be entering the workforce, bringing their collaborative tools with them.
Umm... just because a young guy enjoys blabbing to quasi-strangers about how trashed he was last night, and/or how totally "hawt" your new profile photo is, doesn't mean they're chomping at the bit to crank out documentation for you. Social networking sites are something people do for fun to AVOID work. Putting documentation on the Wiki is very much "work", and is not fun in the slightest. Most of the time, in-house wiki's are just a matter of managers being too lazy to come up with a real knowledge management strategy.
Whenever a manager tells me to "throw something on the Wiki", I groan. I know it will be a chore to write, that no one will actually read it (they'll just email or call my cell in the middle of the night as always), and the information will be out of date within a month because it's never updated. Corporate wiki's are not the same as Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, articles about obscure butterfly species are constantly updated because people WANT to do it. For corporate wiki's, they are seldom updated because people HAVE to do it. New tools do not change old realities about human nature and motivation.
I'm also not so sure about the notion of social networking tools for business DISCUSION. Sure, if you work in one of those environments where email threads get CC:'ed to half the company, you might think it would be cleaner just to throw that on a message board or something. The problem is that people pay less attention to every thread on a message board then they do to every email that is sent to their Inbox (and the latter doesn't always get any attention already). So I think you'd still need some system for "flagging" messages and sending "No, really... you REALLY need to read this one!" alerts to individuals.
As you move up the scale from routine communication to planning and business decisions (i.e. brainstorming), you run into even more issues. For one thing, brainstorming sessions need to be isolated to a limited audience... which often doesn't correspond to the normal hierarchy. Obviously managers don't want subordinates reading their discussions, because they're often about layoffs and otherwise making their jobs worse. However, those managers don't want PEERS from other groups/teams reading discussions, because they often involve turf-war issues. Those managers would even need to protect discussions from SUPERIORS, because the point of many meetings is to figure out how to sell an idea up the chain (or do damage control for something bad)... and you don't want that visible before it's fully-baked.
For business communication above the routine low-level stuff, most people wouldn't be comfortable an open to putting their thoughts in writing. Also, there's the issue that most decisions in a business meeting are already made PRIOR to the meeting... I don't think social networking tools would replace people doing end-runs and going behind backs to build consensus.
So in a nutshell: "MySpace generation" workers are not going to make your stale in-house Wiki any fresher, and discussion tools could only potentially be helpful for low-level routine operational communication.
This doesn't sound like a case study in union corruption, or a sign of some disturbing trend with Linux in education. It sounds like a random funny example of how public school can attract teachers who aren't all that bright, and how IT can attract people who lack social skills. While "Retard vs. Asshole" does have some Godzilla and Mothra entertainment value to it, I'm not sold on any "big picture" beyond that.
I think all the people crying about "censorship" by Nintendo are overlooking one key point. If it were not for his employment with Nintendo, no one on the planet would CARE what his hobbies were. Half the people on this thread are running personal blogs where they talk about their hobby of collecting Star Wars figurines or studying Esperanto. However, no one's reading... and no one cares (sorry!).
It's only due to his employment situation, and penchant for turning new hobbies into games, that any of that information has interest in the first place. If you were a biochemical engineer for Pfizer back in the 90's, it would have been pretty reasonable for them to say, "Hey, can you please not blog about your obsession with impotence until we get this new Viagra thing through the FDA approval process?" Besides, if Miyamoto wants to write about his fascination with Firefly under the posting handle "SummerGlauRULEZZ"... no one will know (or care... or read).
There's an Ask Slashdot for you. Is there something out there that can replace this magic bit of software? Is anyone interested in writing an Open-Source equivalent?
Legal types have been posting feature requests for years, and can't even get OpenOffice to implement the Microsoft Word "Table of Authorities" feature necessary to write a basic case brief. The notion that someone's willing to write a law office specific case management system is just not plausible. See Slashdot's recent thread about industry-specific apps in Linux.
This is an interesting new kind of FUD about free software: that there are legal requirements for 'using it'. The GPL is quite explicit: running the program is not restricted; unless you are modifying or distributing the software, you can do absolutely what you like. Every other free software licence is the same. This message needs to be spread more widely.
Sigh... where are mod points when you need them? This comment should be at the absolute top of any thread that deals with licensing.
It should probably be pointed out that formally registering a copyright with the U.S. government costs a whopping $35, and can be done online in a matter of minutes. That is maybe one Happy Meal more expensive than paying a notary public to roll your own legal creation.
Can I instead just spend the day reading Slashdot from my cube rather than working? If I get credit for that, then I've already been on strike for about 12 months now... you dirty SCABS!
Much like everything else thrown under the "Web 2.0" umbrella, this story is more 1990's rehash... where someone applies new marketing gloss and pretends it's a new idea.
Pretty much any technology leads to both open implementations and proprietary implementations. The central question is whether the STANDARDS for interacting with those implementations are open or proprietary. Maybe you deploy Java to a proprietary WebLogic server, or an open JBoss server... but you're dropping basically the same EAR or JAR file in either case. THAT'S one of the key factors determining whether a technology will catch on.
Before you can start developing the proprietary or open implementations, you have to develop the standards. Before you can develop the standards, you have to figure out what it is your developing in the first place. That is, can anyone actually define what this nonsense sales-and-managerspeak "cloud" buzzword even means? It seems like whenever Gartner and Gang tries to shill a new technology that doesn't widely catch on, they just wait a few years and try again with a different buzzword. Ten years ago this was called a "cluster", and few people cared. Five years ago this was called a "grid", and few people cared. Today it's called a "cloud", and I... well, you know.
You sit at home you little PUSSY. The rest of real MEN (including some pretty awesome Women too) will be outside risking our lives, liberty, and property to make sure little fuckers like you have some freedoms left.
Uhh... while I pretty much agree and all... come on. You're not marching through Tibet and staring down Chinese tanks or something. You're hacking a video game console, not exactly "risking your life". Yes, yes, I know... mod me down because I don't understand that it's THE EXACT SAME THING IN PRINCIPLE and all. Hyperbole, much?
Exactly... "assuming you are logged in as root". In Vista, right-click on a shortcut to "cmd.exe", select "Run as Administrator", and do a similar delete from "C:\". Running at user-vs-administrator level on Vista is no different from running user-vs-root on a Ubuntu box.
I do understand that the Mars Lander has nothing to do with Vista on its face. I don't even like Vista. It just struck me as another example of a design choice being hailed as brilliant, when the same design choice is deemed retarded coming from Redmond. Yeah, replacement parts are harder to come by on Mars, but the idea's still the same... does the machine get the final say, or does the user ultimately make the choice? I assume that NASA can override the Mars Lander if they choose, and if not then that's poor design.
Oh good lord, Slashdot... let me see if I follow: (1) Vista prompts me to click a button if I want to do something potentially stupid. Slashdotters regard this as ridiculously unnecessary user annoyance.
(2) If I want to do something stupid in Ubuntu, it prompts me to enter a password for sudo AND click a button. This may or may not be a good idea, we just prefer not to bring it up. (3) In this story we have a device that not only prompts you when you're doing something potentially stupid, but takes the initiative to completely ignore you even when you click the prompt. OMG! This is the most brilliant design ever!!!
Yeah, yeah... I get that Microsoft OS's are poorly designed and shouldn't have so many vulnerabilities to protect in the first place. Even still... HUH?
RMS pointed out that the bulk of the Gates Foundation's money is parked in investments (so the philanthropy can live off the interest). This is a true statement. However, it's a bit silly to imply that a philanthropy is disingenuous for not spending its entire balance sheet in a single year... because if philanthropies did that, they mostly wouldn't be around longer than a year. Pretty much EVERY philanthropy keeps most of its money in investments, and does it philanthropic work with the annual proceeds.
Stallman's second criticism is that some of the particular investments the Foundation keeps its money in are not socially-conscious companies. I don't know the details of the Gates Foundation's portfolio, but that's a fair criticism of a philanthropy in general. If you donate money to a gun control policy foundation, you expect that they won't invest it in gun manufacturers, etc. A foundation that works with disease and living conditions in third-world countries probably shouldn't invest in companies with poor track records of worker and environmental exploitation in third-world countries. Indeed, applying pressure through the use of its investment decisions might be the most effective power that a foundation of that size could wield.
In sum, the quote was probably a bit less than fair in that it has nothing to do with software, and was thrown in just to be spiteful. Still, the quote was just ONE SENTENCE... buried in an article that dealt exclusively with software otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
All the TV magazine and blog articles I've read have agreed that that Dollhouse is on Friday night because that's a graveyard shift. NO show attracts blockbuster numbers on a Friday night, so the network wants something a little more high-end than reality programming (to lure better advertisers) that will attract a devoted core. In other words, they know that Joss Whedon's fanbase will watch anything... and is mostly sitting an home on Friday night anyway. If Dollhouse were on any other night of the week, it would have been pulled after the first two episodes.
While I'm at it, I'm as big a Joss Whedon mark as anyone but I'm going to go ahead and say it... Dollhouse simply SUCKS for me so far. With the possible exception of Echo's "handler", all the other characters simply do not interest me. They are one-dimensional stock characters (e.g. the arrogant nerd who tries to be funny, the gruff security guard who always wants to use the violent option, the obsessed FBI agent chasing chasing after Kaiser Soze, etc). Other than Eliza Dusku and her handler, the acting is pretty poor and the premise itself pretty retarded. Nothing has really "hooked" me yet.
Worst of all, the scripts are virtually devoid of wit and humor. WTF?!? That's the whole POINT of a Joss Whedon show... characters that pull you in and make you care about them, and intelligent dialog that catches you off-guard with laughs. Take that out of the equation, and you're just left with goofy sci-fi/fantasy ridiculousness and some mushy political/feminist messages.
Sorry... but if this goes, I won't miss it.
I don't really understand the business problem that this "invention" is intended to solve. If a manager doesn't want people using their laptops during his meeting... he should, well, tell the guy sitting ten feet directly in front of him to kindly close his laptop.
This is a technical version of your old college roommate leaving you angry notes to clean up or change your habits... because the person was too weak and passive to simply have an adult conversation to your face. A manager who has to "communicate" with subordinates in such a manner should not be a manager in the first place.
I don't really care to wade into the abortion-debate muck, particularly as abortion has nothing to do with the stem cells we're talking about. Those are obtained from fertility clinics, and created by people who are SO "pro-life" that they leave plenty of discarded excess life behind in the freezer.
However, what frustrates me to a greater degree is this myth that stem cell research has been "restricted". 90+ percent of people on the street (and probably even a majority of Slashdot posters here) mistakenly believe that the evil Bush administration "banned" or "outlawed" stem cell research. That's simply not true. The last administration refused to SUBSIDIZE it, and that's all. Researchers have been under no restriction whatsoever to do any of this research, as long as they're not sucking off the taxpayer teat for their funds.
This opens up an entirely separate debate on private sources of medical research funds, and why pharmaceutical companies now pay more in marketing than they do in R&D. I'll leave that debate to others. However, are we REALLY so drunk on "stimulus" spending for everything under the sun these days, that refusing to subsidize a particular item means that item is actively "restricted"?
Britney kicks off her latest world tour on March 3... post an article about that while you're at it.
... can a guy intentionally making homemade explosives that killed people, who had a role in major riots, who detonated bombs in public parks, and who never really apologized for any of it get cast as the GOOD GUY against Bill Gates!
Yeah, I voted against GOP last year too, in part because this was 40 years ago and and it was cheap for the Republicans to wait so late to bring it up. However, the fact that Ayers was criticized by some lousy political candidates doesn't that he deserves no criticism. This guy is a symptom of why the Left is a minority philosophy in the U.S., and can't win a Presidency without a major recession or impeachment just before the election.
Umm... just because a young guy enjoys blabbing to quasi-strangers about how trashed he was last night, and/or how totally "hawt" your new profile photo is, doesn't mean they're chomping at the bit to crank out documentation for you. Social networking sites are something people do for fun to AVOID work. Putting documentation on the Wiki is very much "work", and is not fun in the slightest. Most of the time, in-house wiki's are just a matter of managers being too lazy to come up with a real knowledge management strategy.
Whenever a manager tells me to "throw something on the Wiki", I groan. I know it will be a chore to write, that no one will actually read it (they'll just email or call my cell in the middle of the night as always), and the information will be out of date within a month because it's never updated. Corporate wiki's are not the same as Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, articles about obscure butterfly species are constantly updated because people WANT to do it. For corporate wiki's, they are seldom updated because people HAVE to do it. New tools do not change old realities about human nature and motivation.
I'm also not so sure about the notion of social networking tools for business DISCUSION. Sure, if you work in one of those environments where email threads get CC:'ed to half the company, you might think it would be cleaner just to throw that on a message board or something. The problem is that people pay less attention to every thread on a message board then they do to every email that is sent to their Inbox (and the latter doesn't always get any attention already). So I think you'd still need some system for "flagging" messages and sending "No, really... you REALLY need to read this one!" alerts to individuals.
As you move up the scale from routine communication to planning and business decisions (i.e. brainstorming), you run into even more issues. For one thing, brainstorming sessions need to be isolated to a limited audience... which often doesn't correspond to the normal hierarchy. Obviously managers don't want subordinates reading their discussions, because they're often about layoffs and otherwise making their jobs worse. However, those managers don't want PEERS from other groups/teams reading discussions, because they often involve turf-war issues. Those managers would even need to protect discussions from SUPERIORS, because the point of many meetings is to figure out how to sell an idea up the chain (or do damage control for something bad)... and you don't want that visible before it's fully-baked.
For business communication above the routine low-level stuff, most people wouldn't be comfortable an open to putting their thoughts in writing. Also, there's the issue that most decisions in a business meeting are already made PRIOR to the meeting... I don't think social networking tools would replace people doing end-runs and going behind backs to build consensus.
So in a nutshell: "MySpace generation" workers are not going to make your stale in-house Wiki any fresher, and discussion tools could only potentially be helpful for low-level routine operational communication.
This doesn't sound like a case study in union corruption, or a sign of some disturbing trend with Linux in education. It sounds like a random funny example of how public school can attract teachers who aren't all that bright, and how IT can attract people who lack social skills. While "Retard vs. Asshole" does have some Godzilla and Mothra entertainment value to it, I'm not sold on any "big picture" beyond that.
I think all the people crying about "censorship" by Nintendo are overlooking one key point. If it were not for his employment with Nintendo, no one on the planet would CARE what his hobbies were. Half the people on this thread are running personal blogs where they talk about their hobby of collecting Star Wars figurines or studying Esperanto. However, no one's reading... and no one cares (sorry!).
It's only due to his employment situation, and penchant for turning new hobbies into games, that any of that information has interest in the first place. If you were a biochemical engineer for Pfizer back in the 90's, it would have been pretty reasonable for them to say, "Hey, can you please not blog about your obsession with impotence until we get this new Viagra thing through the FDA approval process?" Besides, if Miyamoto wants to write about his fascination with Firefly under the posting handle "SummerGlauRULEZZ"... no one will know (or care... or read).
There's an Ask Slashdot for you. Is there something out there that can replace this magic bit of software? Is anyone interested in writing an Open-Source equivalent?
Legal types have been posting feature requests for years, and can't even get OpenOffice to implement the Microsoft Word "Table of Authorities" feature necessary to write a basic case brief. The notion that someone's willing to write a law office specific case management system is just not plausible. See Slashdot's recent thread about industry-specific apps in Linux.
This is an interesting new kind of FUD about free software: that there are legal requirements for 'using it'. The GPL is quite explicit: running the program is not restricted; unless you are modifying or distributing the software, you can do absolutely what you like. Every other free software licence is the same. This message needs to be spread more widely.
Sigh... where are mod points when you need them? This comment should be at the absolute top of any thread that deals with licensing.
It should probably be pointed out that formally registering a copyright with the U.S. government costs a whopping $35, and can be done online in a matter of minutes. That is maybe one Happy Meal more expensive than paying a notary public to roll your own legal creation.
Can I instead just spend the day reading Slashdot from my cube rather than working? If I get credit for that, then I've already been on strike for about 12 months now... you dirty SCABS!
The fact that somebody actually got modded +5 for questioning the occurrence of World War I has certainly given ME faith in miracles.
Yuk-yuk, I'm here all week... try the veal!
A "404 Not Found" page? Dummies... you should link to a DESCRIPTION of the bugs, not link to the actual bugs themselves!
Oops, the page is just Slashdotted. Nevermind.
Much like everything else thrown under the "Web 2.0" umbrella, this story is more 1990's rehash... where someone applies new marketing gloss and pretends it's a new idea.
Pretty much any technology leads to both open implementations and proprietary implementations. The central question is whether the STANDARDS for interacting with those implementations are open or proprietary. Maybe you deploy Java to a proprietary WebLogic server, or an open JBoss server... but you're dropping basically the same EAR or JAR file in either case. THAT'S one of the key factors determining whether a technology will catch on.
Before you can start developing the proprietary or open implementations, you have to develop the standards. Before you can develop the standards, you have to figure out what it is your developing in the first place. That is, can anyone actually define what this nonsense sales-and-managerspeak "cloud" buzzword even means? It seems like whenever Gartner and Gang tries to shill a new technology that doesn't widely catch on, they just wait a few years and try again with a different buzzword. Ten years ago this was called a "cluster", and few people cared. Five years ago this was called a "grid", and few people cared. Today it's called a "cloud", and I... well, you know.
Uhh... while I pretty much agree and all... come on. You're not marching through Tibet and staring down Chinese tanks or something. You're hacking a video game console, not exactly "risking your life". Yes, yes, I know... mod me down because I don't understand that it's THE EXACT SAME THING IN PRINCIPLE and all. Hyperbole, much?
Exactly... "assuming you are logged in as root". In Vista, right-click on a shortcut to "cmd.exe", select "Run as Administrator", and do a similar delete from "C:\". Running at user-vs-administrator level on Vista is no different from running user-vs-root on a Ubuntu box.
I do understand that the Mars Lander has nothing to do with Vista on its face. I don't even like Vista. It just struck me as another example of a design choice being hailed as brilliant, when the same design choice is deemed retarded coming from Redmond. Yeah, replacement parts are harder to come by on Mars, but the idea's still the same... does the machine get the final say, or does the user ultimately make the choice? I assume that NASA can override the Mars Lander if they choose, and if not then that's poor design.
Oh good lord, Slashdot... let me see if I follow: (1) Vista prompts me to click a button if I want to do something potentially stupid. Slashdotters regard this as ridiculously unnecessary user annoyance. (2) If I want to do something stupid in Ubuntu, it prompts me to enter a password for sudo AND click a button. This may or may not be a good idea, we just prefer not to bring it up. (3) In this story we have a device that not only prompts you when you're doing something potentially stupid, but takes the initiative to completely ignore you even when you click the prompt. OMG! This is the most brilliant design ever!!!
Yeah, yeah... I get that Microsoft OS's are poorly designed and shouldn't have so many vulnerabilities to protect in the first place. Even still... HUH ?
Your typical MySpace/Facebook user has ears that can handle 2-4 KHz too. Doesn't necessarily correlate to speaking ability.
How about a scientific study on human speech since the dawn of Eternal September?
Not until Slashdot gives me a killfile!
I'm going to hell for laughing at this.
RMS pointed out that the bulk of the Gates Foundation's money is parked in investments (so the philanthropy can live off the interest). This is a true statement. However, it's a bit silly to imply that a philanthropy is disingenuous for not spending its entire balance sheet in a single year... because if philanthropies did that, they mostly wouldn't be around longer than a year. Pretty much EVERY philanthropy keeps most of its money in investments, and does it philanthropic work with the annual proceeds.
Stallman's second criticism is that some of the particular investments the Foundation keeps its money in are not socially-conscious companies. I don't know the details of the Gates Foundation's portfolio, but that's a fair criticism of a philanthropy in general. If you donate money to a gun control policy foundation, you expect that they won't invest it in gun manufacturers, etc. A foundation that works with disease and living conditions in third-world countries probably shouldn't invest in companies with poor track records of worker and environmental exploitation in third-world countries. Indeed, applying pressure through the use of its investment decisions might be the most effective power that a foundation of that size could wield.
In sum, the quote was probably a bit less than fair in that it has nothing to do with software, and was thrown in just to be spiteful. Still, the quote was just ONE SENTENCE... buried in an article that dealt exclusively with software otherwise.
Something cracks me up about modding a post "5, Insightful" when the title clearly states, "I have nothing insightful to add".