My favorite bit of the interview:
on
Explaining SETI
·
· Score: 3
oreilly.com: What could we learn from another civilization?
McConnell: One of the things I discuss in my book is how it is easier to undress and petrify hot young actresses than most people imagine. All that is required is a scientifically proven magical petrification ray and a giant aibo. But what we cannot do is undress and petrify hot young daughters of famous open source programmers. If there is another technological civilization nearby, it will be possible to communicate using equations, images, and algorithms. And one of the things we'd like them to communicate is a method for creating a naked and petrified Heidi Wall. I discuss this at length in my book.
I don't know about any of you, but that's a book I'm going to have to purchase. Also, I'm going to start donating my cycles to SETI today.
--Shoeboy
A simple request for Jon
on
Review: Blow
·
· Score: 3
Jon,
I don't see movies for the plot. I don't see them for the rich acting. I don't see them for the skillful handling of complex issues.
I see films because they're a cheap date that doesn't require advance planning.
But your reviews do not take this into consideration. Your reviews do not tell me whether this is a movie I should take Heidi Wall to. You seem to be under the impression that I go to movies for my own pleasure. Let me correct that impression - unless the film is playing at the "Lusty Lady Theatre", I probably won't find it terribly interesting.
I propose a simple remedy - put in a date scale. Something like this:
Bad date flick. Title contains the words "Terror", "Justice" and/or a roman numeral greater than III.
Average date flick. She won't talk smack about your taste in films, but won't be impressed either.
Above average date flick. This is perfect for a non-Heidi female, but not quite good enough for the sweet divine perfection of a woman that is Heidi Wall.
Good flick. Heidi will want to talk about this film afterwards, giving you a great excuse to go get a cup of coffee together instead of having to drive her home.
Superior flick. Heidi will lash you furiously with a riding crop and then make you unlace her shoes with your teeth.
So Jon, can we get this scale added to your reviews? Cause once this weakness is ironed out, you will stand as the greatest film critic since Siskel.
I wish I had the money right now to go out and buy an Intel product to counteract your zealous boycott. I did so last summer in a similar case when I bought a set-top DVD player in protest of the deCSS shrillness on here.
What a coincidence, so did most of the slashdotters responsible for that self same shrillness. You didn't think they'd actually back up their political beliefs with action, did you?
--Shoeboy
So I know some members of the perl 5 porters list will be reading this, and I'd like you to relay this question to Larry:
Larry,
How do you feel about having me as a son in law? I know that having a troll in the family can be a bit traumatic, and I'd like to know upfront if this will cause any problems. I'd like to work through them before the wedding, so that everything can go smoothly.
I know that you're a little disturbed by Heidi's recent spate of trolling here on/., but that was none of my doing. It wasn't until after she began trolling that we met.
You are probably also thinking that maybe your daughter can do better than a shiftless layabout who got fired from AtomFilms.com for sexual harassment, but c'mon. Think about it. Look at my flowing, golden mane, my high cheekbones, my chiseled jaw and my piercing eyes. Could any young woman possibly do any better? If you're still not convinced, you can look at my broad shoulders, barrel chest, washboard stomach and manly bearing. Now you can go have a cold shower, you probably need it.
Free Software is a luxury good. The recent explosion in free software is due to the fact that a) free software companies could get enough venture capital to fund developers and b) tech workers have been in such high demand that programmers and sysadmins have been able to work on free software on company time without getting fired.
This will not be the case in the future. Unless they drift into health care or government work, open source developers will find themselves faced with a choice of "contribute to the company's bottom line" or "get fired." Either way, they will be unable to be as productive. The simple fact is that the PC is a luxury good. It is far from being a necessity. The idea of free accessories for a luxury good is laughable.
Free software will not dissappear, but as the developers find it harder and harder to make time to code voluntarily, they'll code less.
--Shoeboy
I've been looking for a language with which to petrify Heidi Wall. Now I know that giant Aibo's with scientifically proven magical petrification rays are the preferred method of petrification, but there are a couple of snags.
First off, scientifically proven magical petrification rays only work on hot young actresses. While Ms. Wall is both hot and young, she has 0 stage or film credits to her name.
Secondly, Ms. Wall insists that only Perl be used to petrify her. This is out of a (misguided) sense of loyalty to her father and his life work.
Unfortuanately, Perl's bolted on OOP support is unsuitable for the kind of enterprise-ready, scalable and cross-platform petrification script I have in mind. A perl/python hybrid would be perfect. That way I could get the excellent OOP structure of python while not making Heidi feel like she has betrayed her family.
This rocks!
Now all that remains is to test the script out and then get Heidi naked. I'm currently working on a testing harness, and, quite frankly, there's no way that Heidi will be able to resist my charm and manly beauty.
I should be able to report my results shortly.
--Shoeboy
What I've been wondering is which current hardware would most be best to integrate with unknown alien technology? Which operating system would be most easily adaptable to be made compatible with alien systems?
Am I the only one that saw Independence Day? MacOS is the clear winner here. All you need is a powerbook and you can wipe out an entire alien race.
It's also worth noting that the aliens were running tcp/ip. Perhaps they read/.
HAHAHAHAHAH!!!!
ROTFLMAOWTIME!!!
Wow, it's great to meet another userfriendly fan! There just aren't enough of us on/.!
Did you see the one where all the unix geeks were talking about how much window sucks? That was the greatest! It's so funny because it's true!
Or how about the one where they're camping and Mike holds up a pine cone and says "pine cone"! Get it, it's a reference to the pine email app. I nearly wet myself with laughter.
That Iliad, he's a rocket straight out of the internet's collective unconscious!
When I find one, I cannot resist the urge to start licking the screen. I've tried, but I just cannot do it.
The problem is that with 6 or 7 licks, I wind up getting more moisture on my monitor than the little monitor cleaning pads are capable of dealing with.
So my idea is a method whereby I only display the pic for only a fraction of a second. That way, I can only lick the screen once.
So my question is can I patent this, or does the Amazon patent cover one lick techniques?
Refusing to patent software and buisness methods isn't all they do differently.
Did you know they spell differently too?
It's true.
In England:
Color is spelled colour
Meter is spelled metre
Program is spelled programme
And fag is spelled fagge
Aren't they zany?
--Shoeboy
Hey, that arguments remind me of some of the greats faults in cryptography. Your argument is basicaly the same as security through obscurity.
deCSS has clearly shown that this principle doesn't work. Blowfish, AES, TEA, RSA,... and are all completly documented cryptos that remain unbroken. (At least with an good key length)
Kindly pull your head out of your ass.
There's a world of difference between enabling secure communications with an open source program and preventing cheating in multiplayer games.
In cryptograpy <oversimplification> the goal is to enable Alfred and Betty to communicate without letting Chris listen in. </oversimplification> This assumes that Alfred and Betty can trust each other not to phone up Chris and tell him what the other person said. In short, you can trust the client - it's third parties you can't trust.
In gaming, this assumption does not hold. I can not trust Betty not to hack her client and frag my ass by shooting through walls. There are only 3 ways that I can deal with this.
1) I can just accept that Betty might be cheating and try to avoid the servers that she plays on.
2) I can try to ensure that Betty will have a very difficult time cheating by hiding the source code from her. This is security through obscurity, but I will make it impossible for *most* gamers to create cheating clients. If Debbie does build a cheating client and share it with Betty, I can release a patch that will break it and make make go back to the drawing board and release a new one. Since Betty, Beatrice, Bill and Bob aren't all that bright, they will have to play fair, at least until Debbie builds a new cheating client. This is security through obscurity, but it's workable.
3) I can move all the crucial logic from the client to the server. Since Frank runs the server and is trustworthy, I don't have to worry about hiding the source from Betty or Debbie. This is the most effective method of dealing with cheaters, but it also will increase bandwidth requirements and cpu overhead on the server. Either Frank or myself will have to spend serious cash on servers and tell the modem users to fuck off, or we'll have to live with shitty performance.
Those are my options. If I am a for-profit development house, option 2 is the most attractive one for me. I don't want to spend lots of money on servers or tell modem users to fuck themselves so option 3 is right out. Option 1 is also right out, as widespread cheating will piss off my user base and hurt sales.
Sure it's security through obscurity, but as long as you can keep the userbase *relatively* free of cheaters, that's *good enough*. The users will complain about campers and low ping bastards instead, and since they do that with *every* game, it won't hurt sales.
Security through obscurity is only a bad thing if a single exploit can fuck you over. If someone hacks your credit card database, or the government reads your emails about your pot smuggling operation, that's a disaster. If 1 or 2 people figure out how to cheat at counterstrike, that's only a *very* minor annoyance. Security through obscurity does work to restrict the number of people who can find holes. As long as your system can tolerate a small number of cheaters, you do not need bulletproof security.
Offtopic: Everytime an American brings up Tianamen square, someone should remind them of Kent state, and how the US reacted to student protesters) Dumbass.
There's a critical difference between Tianamen and Kent State. The National Guardsmen at Kent State were not acting under orders when they opened fire. They were simply a bunch of nervous kids who reacted poorly in a situation they were not adequately trained to handle. One of them started shooting, and the others got spooked and did the same. I'll admit that Kent State was a tradgedy, but no one ordered those deaths. It was tragic and avoidable, but not malicious.
Tianamen is another matter entirely.
--Shoeboy
Are you insane?
Sure encryption with ROT13 is fast, but decryption is a bitch.
Go ahead if you've got a quad xeon box, but on anything else, forget about it.
While encryption is an linear, decryption is an N^2 operation. Even with a processor capable of performing 10^12 operations/second you'd requre months to decrypt a gigabyte of text.
Admittedly, there's some academic research that indicates an N lg N solution for ROT13 decryption is possible, but nobody has built a working prototype.
And don't even get me started on the amount of CPU time a ROT26 algorithm requires. It's been proven to be an NP complete problem. Can you say "computationally unfeasable"?
I knew you could.
--Shoeboy
What I want are the 2600 adult games on my cell phone.
You know, like Knight on the town and beat 'em and eat 'em.
The only problem is that with 1 hand playing the game and the other handling my joystick, I'd have to steer with my feet.
Thank god for cruise control.
If you want to learn more about the truly fucked up games that came out for the 2600, go here.
That's some freaky shit.
--Shoeboy
I wouldn't say SQL on NT will out-perform MySQL is just about every way. I personally was using SQL 7.0 on dual xeon 2g rdram and it got its ass kicked by mysql on the same system.
Like the people who compain about NT crashing every 3 days, you are only demonstrating your incompetence.
If you don't have the slightest idea how to tune MS-SQL, don't advertise the fact. Just keep your mouth shut and maybe learn about the system that you're using.
Cheers,
--Shoeboy
Hi Paul,
You're a real moron.
Just because you're an obsessive/. reader who obsesses over whether or not a user might be a troll doesn't mean everyone else is.
Most users on this site don't recognize user names other than cmdrtaco, hemos and signal 11.
They don't even see the qpt at the top and, if they do, it means nothing to them.
They certainly don't wast time stalking suspected trolls and posting worthless responses that are actually more damaging to the quality of discussions on/. than the trolls themselves.
But don't let that stop you. Keep on doing what you're doing. Every response after a trollspotter appears is worth double.
--Shoeboy
Java is awful for gui applications. That's why things like "Corel Office for Java" were given the mercy killing they so desperately needed.
What the Linux desktop really needs is something like Visual Basic.
Wait - hear me out.
I'm not saying that you should code in Visual Basic. I don't do it myself - that's one of the perks of being a systems programmer. All I'm saying is that there should be a language for the non-programmer to quickly design graphical applications that use pre-fabbed components and a minimum of glue code.
Java is object oriented. This makes it a mistake for a general purpose gui language. What you need is something that is object based like Visual Basic.
Any idiot should be able to create usable graphical apps for Linux. Unfortunately, currently even gifted C++ hackers can't make usable gui's for Linux - witness freeciv. Whether you like the language or not, you've got to admit that a language designed primarily for component reuse would be a good thing for linux - espescially for the corporate environment where rapid development is a must.
--Shoeboy
OlympicSponsor,
The fact that you are being attacked anonymously sickens me. I cannot allow this to continue without doing my part to help rectify the situation.
You are a jackass.
There, now you've got at least one person expressing his opinion of you while logged in.
Here's a few scenerios, ideas I've been pitching around:
Comment forums for each ad banner:
Great idea! The best part is that you've already tested it here on slashdot. Nearly ever article posted during the "Slashdot Cruiser" campaign contained at least 3 comments about what a horrible idea that was. Clearly you can leverage your existing expertise in this area.
Turning off annoying ads:
I've got a better idea, how about we see hot horny women and get fired? I think this could be a great experience for us to share together.
Choice of ad topics and categories:
Will hardware manufacturers that don't suck be an option? Cause while I'll probably never pay 10% more than the standard price for a "server" that has an asus desktop motherboard and a VA Linux case badge, I do like computer hardware ads. I just like them from real companies like Dell and Compaq that don't charge extra for printing "Linux Powered" on the outside of the box the computer ships in.
What about ad system karma?
Would that work like the slashdot karma system? Cause the idea of ad system bitchslapping is scary. I can handle a default posting score of -1, but I'd hate to have 20 popups on slashdot just because Taco got pissed at me.
1 point for every time you load a paid ad
0 points for clicking on an ad
50 points for loading bigger ads
100 points for loading a pop-up ad
500 points for filling out an advertiser's survey
100 points for loading a Flash ad
300 points for posting a meaningful critique on an ad
200 points for alerting us if an ad is broken
500 points for helping us test an ad before it goes live
The look on Larry Augustin's face when OSDN starts turning a profit: priceless.
There are some things that ad karma can't buy. For everything else there's mastercard.
I understand that you're brainstorming here, but your ideas are pretty silly.
Slashdot Mirror
oreilly.com: What could we learn from another civilization?
McConnell: One of the things I discuss in my book is how it is easier to undress and petrify hot young actresses than most people imagine. All that is required is a scientifically proven magical petrification ray and a giant aibo. But what we cannot do is undress and petrify hot young daughters of famous open source programmers. If there is another technological civilization nearby, it will be possible to communicate using equations, images, and algorithms. And one of the things we'd like them to communicate is a method for creating a naked and petrified Heidi Wall. I discuss this at length in my book.
I don't know about any of you, but that's a book I'm going to have to purchase. Also, I'm going to start donating my cycles to SETI today.
--Shoeboy
I don't see movies for the plot. I don't see them for the rich acting. I don't see them for the skillful handling of complex issues.
I see films because they're a cheap date that doesn't require advance planning.
But your reviews do not take this into consideration. Your reviews do not tell me whether this is a movie I should take Heidi Wall to. You seem to be under the impression that I go to movies for my own pleasure. Let me correct that impression - unless the film is playing at the "Lusty Lady Theatre", I probably won't find it terribly interesting.
I propose a simple remedy - put in a date scale. Something like this:
So Jon, can we get this scale added to your reviews? Cause once this weakness is ironed out, you will stand as the greatest film critic since Siskel.
--Shoeboy
I wish I had the money right now to go out and buy an Intel product to counteract your zealous boycott. I did so last summer in a similar case when I bought a set-top DVD player in protest of the deCSS shrillness on here.
What a coincidence, so did most of the slashdotters responsible for that self same shrillness. You didn't think they'd actually back up their political beliefs with action, did you?
--Shoeboy
I think you're an asshole for bringing people like Heidi and her dad into it.
For the record, I have contacted Heidi, and she doesn't object to my actions on slashdot. So piss off.
--Shoeboy
But the perpetrator just gave it back to me (THANK YOU). Ignore the few articles
that have references to Heidi Wall, but the rest are mine.
Uh, you aren't going to press criminal charges against me, are you?
--Shoeboy
So I know some members of the perl 5 porters list will be reading this, and I'd like you to relay this question to Larry:
/., but that was none of my doing. It wasn't until after she began trolling that we met.
Larry,
How do you feel about having me as a son in law? I know that having a troll in the family can be a bit traumatic, and I'd like to know upfront if this will cause any problems. I'd like to work through them before the wedding, so that everything can go smoothly.
I know that you're a little disturbed by Heidi's recent spate of trolling here on
You are probably also thinking that maybe your daughter can do better than a shiftless layabout who got fired from AtomFilms.com for sexual harassment, but c'mon. Think about it. Look at my flowing, golden mane, my high cheekbones, my chiseled jaw and my piercing eyes. Could any young woman possibly do any better? If you're still not convinced, you can look at my broad shoulders, barrel chest, washboard stomach and manly bearing. Now you can go have a cold shower, you probably need it.
Later,
--Shoeboy
Free Software is a luxury good. The recent explosion in free software is due to the fact that a) free software companies could get enough venture capital to fund developers and b) tech workers have been in such high demand that programmers and sysadmins have been able to work on free software on company time without getting fired.
This will not be the case in the future. Unless they drift into health care or government work, open source developers will find themselves faced with a choice of "contribute to the company's bottom line" or "get fired." Either way, they will be unable to be as productive. The simple fact is that the PC is a luxury good. It is far from being a necessity. The idea of free accessories for a luxury good is laughable.
Free software will not dissappear, but as the developers find it harder and harder to make time to code voluntarily, they'll code less.
--Shoeboy
I've been looking for a language with which to petrify Heidi Wall. Now I know that giant Aibo's with scientifically proven magical petrification rays are the preferred method of petrification, but there are a couple of snags.
First off, scientifically proven magical petrification rays only work on hot young actresses. While Ms. Wall is both hot and young, she has 0 stage or film credits to her name.
Secondly, Ms. Wall insists that only Perl be used to petrify her. This is out of a (misguided) sense of loyalty to her father and his life work.
Unfortuanately, Perl's bolted on OOP support is unsuitable for the kind of enterprise-ready, scalable and cross-platform petrification script I have in mind. A perl/python hybrid would be perfect. That way I could get the excellent OOP structure of python while not making Heidi feel like she has betrayed her family.
This rocks!
Now all that remains is to test the script out and then get Heidi naked. I'm currently working on a testing harness, and, quite frankly, there's no way that Heidi will be able to resist my charm and manly beauty.
I should be able to report my results shortly.
--Shoeboy
What I've been wondering is which current hardware would most be best to integrate with unknown alien technology? Which operating system would be most easily adaptable to be made compatible with alien systems?
/.
Am I the only one that saw Independence Day? MacOS is the clear winner here. All you need is a powerbook and you can wipe out an entire alien race.
It's also worth noting that the aliens were running tcp/ip. Perhaps they read
--Shoeboy
If slashdot ever starts covering socially significant topics, they'll have to change their slogan to "Stuff that matters, nerds that don't."
--Shoeboy
HAHAHAHAHAH!!!! /.!
ROTFLMAOWTIME!!!
Wow, it's great to meet another userfriendly fan! There just aren't enough of us on
Did you see the one where all the unix geeks were talking about how much window sucks? That was the greatest! It's so funny because it's true!
Or how about the one where they're camping and Mike holds up a pine cone and says "pine cone"! Get it, it's a reference to the pine email app. I nearly wet myself with laughter.
That Iliad, he's a rocket straight out of the internet's collective unconscious!
Later,
--Shoeboy
I regularly find myself browsing the web for Heidi Wall pictures.
When I find one, I cannot resist the urge to start licking the screen. I've tried, but I just cannot do it.
The problem is that with 6 or 7 licks, I wind up getting more moisture on my monitor than the little monitor cleaning pads are capable of dealing with.
So my idea is a method whereby I only display the pic for only a fraction of a second. That way, I can only lick the screen once.
So my question is can I patent this, or does the Amazon patent cover one lick techniques?
--Shoeboy
Refusing to patent software and buisness methods isn't all they do differently.
Did you know they spell differently too?
It's true.
In England:
Color is spelled colour
Meter is spelled metre
Program is spelled programme
And fag is spelled fagge
Aren't they zany?
--Shoeboy
Hey, that arguments remind me of some of the greats faults in cryptography. Your argument is basicaly the same as security through obscurity. ... and are all completly documented cryptos that remain unbroken. (At least with an good key length)
deCSS has clearly shown that this principle doesn't work. Blowfish, AES, TEA, RSA,
Kindly pull your head out of your ass.
There's a world of difference between enabling secure communications with an open source program and preventing cheating in multiplayer games.
In cryptograpy <oversimplification> the goal is to enable Alfred and Betty to communicate without letting Chris listen in. </oversimplification> This assumes that Alfred and Betty can trust each other not to phone up Chris and tell him what the other person said. In short, you can trust the client - it's third parties you can't trust.
In gaming, this assumption does not hold. I can not trust Betty not to hack her client and frag my ass by shooting through walls. There are only 3 ways that I can deal with this.
1) I can just accept that Betty might be cheating and try to avoid the servers that she plays on.
2) I can try to ensure that Betty will have a very difficult time cheating by hiding the source code from her. This is security through obscurity, but I will make it impossible for *most* gamers to create cheating clients. If Debbie does build a cheating client and share it with Betty, I can release a patch that will break it and make make go back to the drawing board and release a new one. Since Betty, Beatrice, Bill and Bob aren't all that bright, they will have to play fair, at least until Debbie builds a new cheating client. This is security through obscurity, but it's workable.
3) I can move all the crucial logic from the client to the server. Since Frank runs the server and is trustworthy, I don't have to worry about hiding the source from Betty or Debbie. This is the most effective method of dealing with cheaters, but it also will increase bandwidth requirements and cpu overhead on the server. Either Frank or myself will have to spend serious cash on servers and tell the modem users to fuck off, or we'll have to live with shitty performance.
Those are my options. If I am a for-profit development house, option 2 is the most attractive one for me. I don't want to spend lots of money on servers or tell modem users to fuck themselves so option 3 is right out. Option 1 is also right out, as widespread cheating will piss off my user base and hurt sales.
Sure it's security through obscurity, but as long as you can keep the userbase *relatively* free of cheaters, that's *good enough*. The users will complain about campers and low ping bastards instead, and since they do that with *every* game, it won't hurt sales.
Security through obscurity is only a bad thing if a single exploit can fuck you over. If someone hacks your credit card database, or the government reads your emails about your pot smuggling operation, that's a disaster. If 1 or 2 people figure out how to cheat at counterstrike, that's only a *very* minor annoyance. Security through obscurity does work to restrict the number of people who can find holes. As long as your system can tolerate a small number of cheaters, you do not need bulletproof security.
Understand?
--Shoeboy
Offtopic: Everytime an American brings up Tianamen square, someone should remind them of Kent state, and how the US reacted to student protesters)
Dumbass.
There's a critical difference between Tianamen and Kent State. The National Guardsmen at Kent State were not acting under orders when they opened fire. They were simply a bunch of nervous kids who reacted poorly in a situation they were not adequately trained to handle. One of them started shooting, and the others got spooked and did the same. I'll admit that Kent State was a tradgedy, but no one ordered those deaths. It was tragic and avoidable, but not malicious.
Tianamen is another matter entirely.
--Shoeboy
Are you insane?
Sure encryption with ROT13 is fast, but decryption is a bitch.
Go ahead if you've got a quad xeon box, but on anything else, forget about it.
While encryption is an linear, decryption is an N^2 operation. Even with a processor capable of performing 10^12 operations/second you'd requre months to decrypt a gigabyte of text.
Admittedly, there's some academic research that indicates an N lg N solution for ROT13 decryption is possible, but nobody has built a working prototype.
And don't even get me started on the amount of CPU time a ROT26 algorithm requires. It's been proven to be an NP complete problem. Can you say "computationally unfeasable"?
I knew you could.
--Shoeboy
Right here.
I'd paste it, but there's this lameness filter thing.
And yes, it will compile and run on any system.
--Shoeboy
What I want are the 2600 adult games on my cell phone.
You know, like Knight on the town and beat 'em and eat 'em.
The only problem is that with 1 hand playing the game and the other handling my joystick, I'd have to steer with my feet.
Thank god for cruise control.
If you want to learn more about the truly fucked up games that came out for the 2600, go here.
That's some freaky shit.
--Shoeboy
I wouldn't say SQL on NT will out-perform MySQL is just about every way. I personally was using SQL 7.0 on dual xeon 2g rdram and it got its ass kicked by mysql on the same system.
Like the people who compain about NT crashing every 3 days, you are only demonstrating your incompetence.
If you don't have the slightest idea how to tune MS-SQL, don't advertise the fact. Just keep your mouth shut and maybe learn about the system that you're using.
Cheers,
--Shoeboy
Hi Paul, /. reader who obsesses over whether or not a user might be a troll doesn't mean everyone else is.
/. than the trolls themselves.
You're a real moron.
Just because you're an obsessive
Most users on this site don't recognize user names other than cmdrtaco, hemos and signal 11.
They don't even see the qpt at the top and, if they do, it means nothing to them.
They certainly don't wast time stalking suspected trolls and posting worthless responses that are actually more damaging to the quality of discussions on
But don't let that stop you. Keep on doing what you're doing. Every response after a trollspotter appears is worth double.
--Shoeboy
Java is awful for gui applications. That's why things like "Corel Office for Java" were given the mercy killing they so desperately needed.
What the Linux desktop really needs is something like Visual Basic.
Wait - hear me out.
I'm not saying that you should code in Visual Basic. I don't do it myself - that's one of the perks of being a systems programmer. All I'm saying is that there should be a language for the non-programmer to quickly design graphical applications that use pre-fabbed components and a minimum of glue code.
Java is object oriented. This makes it a mistake for a general purpose gui language. What you need is something that is object based like Visual Basic.
Any idiot should be able to create usable graphical apps for Linux. Unfortunately, currently even gifted C++ hackers can't make usable gui's for Linux - witness freeciv. Whether you like the language or not, you've got to admit that a language designed primarily for component reuse would be a good thing for linux - espescially for the corporate environment where rapid development is a must.
--Shoeboy
How many hops away from slashdot am I?
C:\>tracert slashdot.org
Tracing route to slashdot.org [127.0.0.1]
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 <10 ms <10 ms <10 ms slashdot.org [127.0.0.1]
Trace complete.
Hrm, that looks pretty good. So why do the pages take so long to load?
--Shoeboy
OlympicSponsor,
The fact that you are being attacked anonymously sickens me. I cannot allow this to continue without doing my part to help rectify the situation.
You are a jackass.
There, now you've got at least one person expressing his opinion of you while logged in.
HTH
--Shoeboy
Here's a few scenerios, ideas I've been pitching around:
Comment forums for each ad banner:
Great idea! The best part is that you've already tested it here on slashdot. Nearly ever article posted during the "Slashdot Cruiser" campaign contained at least 3 comments about what a horrible idea that was. Clearly you can leverage your existing expertise in this area.
Turning off annoying ads:
I've got a better idea, how about we see hot horny women and get fired? I think this could be a great experience for us to share together.
Choice of ad topics and categories:
Will hardware manufacturers that don't suck be an option? Cause while I'll probably never pay 10% more than the standard price for a "server" that has an asus desktop motherboard and a VA Linux case badge, I do like computer hardware ads. I just like them from real companies like Dell and Compaq that don't charge extra for printing "Linux Powered" on the outside of the box the computer ships in.
What about ad system karma?
Would that work like the slashdot karma system? Cause the idea of ad system bitchslapping is scary. I can handle a default posting score of -1, but I'd hate to have 20 popups on slashdot just because Taco got pissed at me.
1 point for every time you load a paid ad
0 points for clicking on an ad
50 points for loading bigger ads
100 points for loading a pop-up ad
500 points for filling out an advertiser's survey
100 points for loading a Flash ad
300 points for posting a meaningful critique on an ad
200 points for alerting us if an ad is broken
500 points for helping us test an ad before it goes live
The look on Larry Augustin's face when OSDN starts turning a profit: priceless.
There are some things that ad karma can't buy. For everything else there's mastercard.
I understand that you're brainstorming here, but your ideas are pretty silly.
--Shoeboy
If you're looking for a good introduction to the whole CRPM issue, check out this FAQ from TheRegister.
Best part:
Q: So why is Microsoft against this, if it prevents wholesale "piracy" of its software in developing nations?
A: Um, can you ask us another...?
--Shoeboy