Hey, he can post anon if he wants.
Although I've been out of the closet IRL for a couple of years, I've maintained a straight persona on/. just because of the advesarial nature of the site.
I even went so far as to invent stories.
Sad, I know, but I'll not cast stones at AC's.
That's what anonymous posting is for, right?
--Shoeboy
Hmm...
There are statistics that contradict each other.
First off homosexual men tend to be less skilled at the sorts of mathematics and abstract reasoning that computer science requires.
Secondly, gay men are more likely to be left handed.
Thirdly, left handers tend to be more skilled at the sorts of mathematics and abstract reasoning that computer science requires.
So it may be that like Alan Turing and myself, Eric and Kirk are left handed.
Most likely though, it's that statistics measure means and modes, when it comes to people these means and modes aren't very strong ones.
No matter what the statistics say, ~ half the people measured are greater than the mean. By definition. So there's room for excellence for all types of people, just not all people.
--Shoeboy
From Eric Allman:
I got a counselor who said "as long as you hang out with straight men, you'll be falling in love with straight men -- go to the Berkeley Gay Mens' Raps. This does NOT mean that gay men with straight friends will fall in love with them. I know it reads that way on first glance, but I'm sure that's not what Eric meant. Rather, it means that if you are exclusively surrounding yourself with straight men, you'll fall in love with one because you won't have any other emotional outlet.
As a practicing homosexual, I can assure you that I don't get attatched to straight boys - in fact, I'm more often attracted to somewhat butch lesbians than I am to straight boys.
Other than that, it was a great article, and I'm delighted to see two such impressive gay role models in a front page/. story.
--Shoeboy
No offense lad, but
a) the html is a bit too garish for my tastes and
b) it's truly sad that this is the #1 ranked guy on your site.
It's possible that your site just isn't a good test case for this idea. Satirewire on the other hand...
--Shoeboy
From the satirewire tipbox:
"Shoeboy, you CAN save a dotcom. This is one." That's truly annoying. Any time I see my nick, I look. Even my parents call me shoeboy. It's more recognizable to me than my real name.
If this thing takes off, I'm going to have to delete my amazon cookies. The last thing I want is to have my attention drawn to advertisements.
God, imagine if they applied this tech to banner adds.
--Shoeboy
Ha ha,
Nothing's as funny as an offensive stereotype.
Do you have any idea what it's like to be a homosexual in middle America?
Violence, intimidation, ridicule, discrimination...
It's not funny at all.
You make me ill.
--Shoeboy
As a straight, heterosexual male, I have been mistaken in the past for being gay, as a result of these idiotic sterotypes. If you were mistaken for being gay by actual homosexuals, you might want to do some introspection.
As a practicing homosexual, I can assure you that what is laughably called "gaydar" is damn near infallible.
I have never once mistakenly hit on a heterosexual man - not once. Sure, sometimes I hit on latent homosexuals who were still in denial, but they've all been at the point in their lives where they were willing to expiriment.
Of course if it's women or straight men that think you're gay, you've got nothing to worry about - they can't tell worth beens.
Most of my hetero male friends think I'm straight.
--Shoeboy
But I'd like to get 8 PDAs and install linux on them.
Then I'd configure them in a wireless beowulf cluster.
It wouldn't be useful for anything, but can you imagine the bragging rights?
Most of my friends would look at me with newfound respect.
Which says more about my friends than it does about beowulf clusters of PDA's, but hey, what can you do?
This idea really appeals to me.
Maybe I should seek professional help.
--Shoeboy
So you want something like this:
At shoeboy.com, we take the elementary precaution of changing the default password on our database servers! Your data is completely safe!
Not going to happen. Companies can tell you that they "employ a security team" or that they "have been audited by a third party" or that the software the run has had "no remote exploits in 3 years."
It means nothing. How can a company prove that it didn't misconfigure anything?
How can they be sure that their in house developed project has any security at all.
How can they verify that the well camoflaged back door the sysadmin put in to make his job easier won't get found? How do they even know it's there?
How do get the CTO and Director of IT (both of whom threatened to fire you if you didn't give them domain admin permissions) to lock their workstations?
Sure auditing is an answer, but what happens when the auditing team leaves? Security goes to pot again, that's what happens.
There's always in house auditing, but do you trust a team that reports directly to the half witted manager who designed the network? You shouldn't.
If nothing else, how do you know that the system is as secure as the company says it is? You don't.
The final answer is that there is no good way to trust an online merchant if you can't inspect their setup yourself.
And since you can't do that, you can't trust them at all.
Anyone who buys anything online is a fucking moron. If your credit card gets stolen, tough - you deserved what you got.
You modded yourself up. Be a man and admit it. If you knew anything about how this site works, you'd know that it's impossible to moderate in a thread once you've posted in it.
That means you can't moderate yourself up.
==Shoeboy
Ok, first off you're going to need some sand. Lots of sand.
Next get some bauxite ore and some copper ore. We're going to use aluminum interconnects, so the copper will only be used for the motherboard.
First off, take the sand and use it to form a silicon wafer 12 inches in diameter. (Note, previous versions of this howto specified 8 inch wafers - these will work, but your cost/chip will be much higher.
Next, purify the bauxite ore to create an ingot of pure alluminum.
Ok, now we're ready to create the general purpose microprocessor at the heart of our set top box. Using the alluminum, the wafer, a magnifying glass and a laser pointer, create a 6 issue wide superscalar 64 bit microprocessor with at least 256 KB of l2 cache. For best results, try to keep the feature size at.18 microns or below. You may have to try a few times to get this right.
Be sure to have a very clean environment for this as microprocessor cores are very succeptible to dust. Your garage is not suitable unless you give it a thorough cleaning first.
Now that you have the microprocessor, the next step is to package it. It is important to use a pin grid array rather than a ball grid array as you may wish to upgrade the processor later.
I'm a fan (and occasional practicioner) of the noble art of trolling, and this one is amazing.
The second paragraph is the best:
These are three key Linux trends to watch for in 2001: a static growth rate, lessening mainstream interest in the open source operating system, and a sharp decline in Linux-based companies' stock value, said Doug Miller, Microsoft's group product manager for competitive strategies. This is beautiful. It's irrefutable.
Obviously linux growth will slow, you can only grow at an exponential rate for so long before you run out of servers and people to run them.
Similarly with "reduced mainstream press." At linux ceases to be a novelty, the mainstream press will start giving it normal coverage.
Finally, the bankruptcy of linux companies will be a side effect of the venture capital spending spree having caused some linux companies to get funding without a solid buisness plan. With the bursting of the internet bubble, they'll have trouble making that second round of financing.
All three trends are clearly in evidence and obvious.
The clever thing is to use them as proof that linux is doomed.
Doug Miller, I salute you. You have a gift for inciteful comments that appear logically sound at first glance.
If you ever want to start trolling slashdot, let me know. We can hook you up with a low user id account with plenty of karma.
--Shoeboy
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9810/09/nt5.idg/ I'm not sure if it meets your definition of a "fucking" source, but here's an article from CNN in 1998 that discusses in passing how NT 5 was supposed to ship in 1997.
--Shoeboy
I'm sorry, but you just don't have a clue.
But if it's so vague, why would anybody pay thousands of dollars for it? Quick question for you Jon,
If you were an advertiser, what information would you find more valuable:
a) Suzy Radcliffe age 9 likes to read Kuro5hin and keep abreast of the latest benchmarks on tpc.org.
b) Children who use altavista rather than yahoo also prefer pepsi to coke.
Well?
I think it's obvious that general information is more valuable than specific information.
--Shoeboy
Right right right,
and professional houses ship things late all the time too, NT 5 was supposed to ship in '97.
But I think some criticism of the slowness of kernel updates is self inflicted.
Don't you recall the heady days of 1998 when all the linux advocates were boasting about the speed of releases and proclaiming open source as a magic bullet that would lead to instant release and completely bug free code?
I think that the linux community is now suffering from a backlash brough on by having had too many advocates who were assholes, see Nick Petreley for a good example.
If you don't want to face heavy bitter criticism, don't make outrageous claims.
And for the love of God, read the linux-advocacy-howto.
--Shoeboy
This is the last straw.
I'm never getting in an automobile ever again.
Jesus.
I though drivers were dangerous when they were talking on the phone, but this is ridiculous.
Anyone know where I can buy a tank or APC?
--Shoeboy
A new identity for geeks in the post columbine era
on
Shadow Of The Vampire
·
· Score: 5
Murnau's monster is the ultimate renegade and outsider, only nobody would dare to dismiss or taunt him.
Fuck, that's what I did wrong in high school. I joined the debate team instead of drinking the blood of the innocent.
I never really thought of Vampires as being geeks before.
a bitter, loathesome plague, a repulsive creature who's not superhuman but a half-dead thing you couldn't stand to be anywhere near, let alone have feast on you in the dead of night. Once powerful and rich, he's reduced to the occasional rodent and vial of delivered blood. His hunting days are over. He has pallid skin, talon-like fingernails, and a dessicated face. There is nothing erotic or charismatic about him.
Wow, this really does sound like the average geek. Especially after the dotcom collapse left so many unemployed and desperate.
After you
s/dessicated/bloated/;
and
s/blood/pizza/;
it becomes a perfect description.
Thank you Jon Katz, I never would have discovered the parallels between geeks and vampires without your help.
As leader of the sad world of open-source fandom, the weblog buck stops at CmdrTaco's keyboard.
The 24-year-old CmdrTaco, a leisure-class hero to lazy developers who prefer web surfing to work, is the inventor and guardian of a technology website that reports unsubstantiated rumors about a $2 billion industry, one whose rapid rise is unnerving executives at Microsoft Corp. (stock: MSFT).
Yet some solution providers, vendors, and industry observers are beginning to question how long one man can steer the evolution of slashdot, and whether CmdrTaco's sole oversight of the site, now at version 1.0.9, is slowing its corporate adoption.
While he's not driven by aesthetic motives, CmdrTaco has significant power over the look of the website./. however, is a registered trademark of Andover.net.
Kuro5hin, in contrast, is the trademark of Rusty Foster.
They note CmdrTaco lacks both color vision and good taste for web design, and as an inept but persistent amateur guitarist, has considerable professional obligations outside his slashdot activities.
What's more, industry titans such as IBM Corp. (stock: IBM); Compaq Computer Corp. (stock: CPQ); Intel Corp. (stock: INTC); Hewlett-Packard Corp. (stock: HWP); and Oracle Corp. (stock: ORCL) are losing billions of dollars in developer time as their employees spend the entire day reading the site and those developers to exert more influence on the development of a less garish color scheme, not based on a bad acid trip.
"We need a designer that understands why the BSD section shouldn't be a combination of teal and fire engine red. Employees at IBM, Compaq, and Dell and the [Linux] distributors have taken to wearing welding masks while viewing some portions of the site," said Hal Davison, owner and president of Davison Consulting, Sarasota, Fla.
Some overweight, bearded, slovenly Linux users view the unpleasant site design as proof that CmdrTaco isn't gay, Davison said.
"Linux wookies reluctant to see the site change because they have channeled their sexual frustrations into homophobia. They don't want to see a Maurice or Antoine saying, 'Pastels would be nice,'" he said.
Torvalds opposes the notion of aesthetic principles controlling the look and feel of the slashdot website.
However, experts say he'll face pressure from big OEM VA Linux which is attempting to bankroll the transformation of the inaccurate technology reporting into a lucrative industry.
The slashdot user base stands to double this year to 600,000 accounts, according to Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown, a Wall Street investment firm. Users are hopeful but leery about Taco's casual indifference to usability and readability.
Shoeboy's recent pledge to spend $1 to advance slashdot usability in 2001 comes with a no-strings-attached promise today, but observers say that won't last if Taco doesn't pick up steam in the form of making the site less shitty.
For example, at the LinuxWorld conference in New York, a passing marketer cried out in horror after viewning the apache section. She is currently in therapy working to resolve her new found aversion to the color purple.
"In the early stages of slashdot, it was more of an amateur affair and developers didn't have high expectations," said George Weiss, an analyst at Gartner. "But CmdrTaco has acheived financial success, and they think he should maybe fix the fucking site already."
Publicly, blue-chip posters recognize Taco as the lead slashdot user, but note that they aren't beholden to his final nod to carry out their posting plans, as they are with other websites.
Still, insiders say Taco's casual e-mail flip-offs of the user base carry tremendous weight in the user community - down the food chain from Karma Whores to Trolls, slashbots, and first posters.
For instance, when Taco declared Microsofts web outage unimportant several days ago, many posters opted to call him a "fucking shithead."
"[Taco's] decisions are ones he quickly pulls out his ass," said Signal 11, senior director of database marketing at Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif., who contributed to the decline of slashdot.
"After he's had a few too many, that's when he's ready to check the submission queue. He flames users, reposts old stories and then vomits. He makes CowboyNeal lap it up," Signal 11 said. "Having a little bit of alcohol is a good thing, but Taco takes it to far."
Despite Taco's technical reign over slashdot, Timothy and Michael have quickly become the sites de facto editors, and tensions over the sites direction will heighten as they continue to post pointless articles, experts say.
"I don't believe open submission queus work well for commercial sites because they can't control submissions," said Michael Cusumano, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management who sits on the board of solution provider NetNumina Solutions. "This leaves them open to accidentally posting links to the Amsterdam hooters and shit."
About 2 hours ago, I learned that you should never chew on a cigarette lighter.
Normal people wouldn't have to learn this lesson the hard way, but I'm not normal. Among other neuroses, I'm orally fixated and always have to be chewing on something. It's not my fault though - it's because I was never properly weaned.
Anyway, I was writing some code and idly chewing on a disposable cigarette lighter when I spotted a bug. A stupid bug. A "=" instead of "==" bug. This annoyed me a little bit, and caused me to clench my teeth.
Big mistake.
For those of you majoring in English or Journalism - butane (the fluid inside a cigarette lighter) is a gas at room temperature. It stays in liquid form inside the lighter because it is under pressure. By cracking the case of the lighter, I cause the contents to evaporate almost instantly. Since vaporization is endothermic, this dropped the temperature of one of my teeth somewhere close to 32 degrees farenheit. This, in turn dropped me to the floor where I began whimpering in pain.
But that's not all. I also got a lungful of the stuff. Not good. To quote from the MSDS for butane: "Inhalation causes headaches, dizziness, drowsiness, and nausea, and may lead to unconsciousness. Liquid can cause burns similar to frostbite." That's no lie. I've vomited twice and am feeling quite faint.
So let this be a lesson to those of you wishing to colonize mars: don't chew cigarette lighters on the trip over.
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that Card chooses to name his villian "Achilles."
Most would consider Achilles to be a hero's name, but not Card.
Card is mormon and, like all mormons, homophobic.
As anyone who read the Illiad in high school knows, Achilles was homosexual.
Apparently in Card's eyes, this is enough to make him a villian.
Mormons worry me.
Espescially considering that 1 in 50 americans is a member of that church.
--Shoeboy
For starters, H cards are damn near indestructible. I've seen one go through a washing machine and still function.
Secondly, even there would be no need to add the offending code bit by bit, you could just send 1 update. The only reason to send it bit by bit is to save bandwidth and this isn't a concern. Sounds mildly improbable eh?
Thirdly the destruction of the cards would force Hughes to replace them. Not a cheap move. They'd be opening themselves to a lawsuit from everyone who was willing to say "I hadn't modified my card, honest" otherwise.
Finally, the site Michael linked to requests financial support by clicking a paypal link. Sounds like an elaborate setup to fleece the/. community.
I refused to sign my contract for ~3 months when I was temping at MS.
They nagged but I still got paid.
Eventually I found a better job.
Never did sign the new contract.
It asked me to waive all rights to take legal action against MS.
--Shoeboy
Ok, it's as simple as this:
These people voluntarily signed a no-compete agreement with Microsoft. That makes Crossgrain's actions theft.
You shouldn't be allowed to steal employees from a competitor. What Crossgrain did was as wrong as stealing hardware from Microsoft. In the information age, the contents of a person's mind are assets and a company has a right to protect its assets. Employees have a duty to their employers just as employers have a duty to their employees. As long as you sign a no-compete clause you shouldn't be allowed to learn your trade at one company and then practice it at a competitors.
--Shoeboy
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, he can post anon if he wants. /. just because of the advesarial nature of the site.
Although I've been out of the closet IRL for a couple of years, I've maintained a straight persona on
I even went so far as to invent stories.
Sad, I know, but I'll not cast stones at AC's.
That's what anonymous posting is for, right?
--Shoeboy
Hmm...
There are statistics that contradict each other.
First off homosexual men tend to be less skilled at the sorts of mathematics and abstract reasoning that computer science requires.
Secondly, gay men are more likely to be left handed.
Thirdly, left handers tend to be more skilled at the sorts of mathematics and abstract reasoning that computer science requires.
So it may be that like Alan Turing and myself, Eric and Kirk are left handed.
Most likely though, it's that statistics measure means and modes, when it comes to people these means and modes aren't very strong ones.
No matter what the statistics say, ~ half the people measured are greater than the mean. By definition. So there's room for excellence for all types of people, just not all people.
--Shoeboy
From Eric Allman: /. story.
I got a counselor who said "as long as you hang out with straight men, you'll be falling in love with straight men -- go to the Berkeley Gay Mens' Raps.
This does NOT mean that gay men with straight friends will fall in love with them. I know it reads that way on first glance, but I'm sure that's not what Eric meant. Rather, it means that if you are exclusively surrounding yourself with straight men, you'll fall in love with one because you won't have any other emotional outlet.
As a practicing homosexual, I can assure you that I don't get attatched to straight boys - in fact, I'm more often attracted to somewhat butch lesbians than I am to straight boys.
Other than that, it was a great article, and I'm delighted to see two such impressive gay role models in a front page
--Shoeboy
No offense lad, but
a) the html is a bit too garish for my tastes and
b) it's truly sad that this is the #1 ranked guy on your site.
It's possible that your site just isn't a good test case for this idea. Satirewire on the other hand...
--Shoeboy
From the satirewire tipbox:
"Shoeboy, you CAN save a dotcom. This is one."
That's truly annoying. Any time I see my nick, I look. Even my parents call me shoeboy. It's more recognizable to me than my real name.
If this thing takes off, I'm going to have to delete my amazon cookies. The last thing I want is to have my attention drawn to advertisements.
God, imagine if they applied this tech to banner adds.
--Shoeboy
Ha ha,
Nothing's as funny as an offensive stereotype.
Do you have any idea what it's like to be a homosexual in middle America?
Violence, intimidation, ridicule, discrimination...
It's not funny at all.
You make me ill.
--Shoeboy
As a straight, heterosexual male, I have been mistaken in the past for being gay, as a result of these idiotic sterotypes.
If you were mistaken for being gay by actual homosexuals, you might want to do some introspection.
As a practicing homosexual, I can assure you that what is laughably called "gaydar" is damn near infallible.
I have never once mistakenly hit on a heterosexual man - not once. Sure, sometimes I hit on latent homosexuals who were still in denial, but they've all been at the point in their lives where they were willing to expiriment.
Of course if it's women or straight men that think you're gay, you've got nothing to worry about - they can't tell worth beens.
Most of my hetero male friends think I'm straight.
--Shoeboy
But I'd like to get 8 PDAs and install linux on them.
Then I'd configure them in a wireless beowulf cluster.
It wouldn't be useful for anything, but can you imagine the bragging rights?
Most of my friends would look at me with newfound respect.
Which says more about my friends than it does about beowulf clusters of PDA's, but hey, what can you do?
This idea really appeals to me.
Maybe I should seek professional help.
--Shoeboy
So you want something like this:
At shoeboy.com, we take the elementary precaution of changing the default password on our database servers! Your data is completely safe!
Not going to happen. Companies can tell you that they "employ a security team" or that they "have been audited by a third party" or that the software the run has had "no remote exploits in 3 years."
It means nothing. How can a company prove that it didn't misconfigure anything?
How can they be sure that their in house developed project has any security at all.
How can they verify that the well camoflaged back door the sysadmin put in to make his job easier won't get found? How do they even know it's there?
How do get the CTO and Director of IT (both of whom threatened to fire you if you didn't give them domain admin permissions) to lock their workstations?
Sure auditing is an answer, but what happens when the auditing team leaves? Security goes to pot again, that's what happens.
There's always in house auditing, but do you trust a team that reports directly to the half witted manager who designed the network? You shouldn't.
If nothing else, how do you know that the system is as secure as the company says it is? You don't.
The final answer is that there is no good way to trust an online merchant if you can't inspect their setup yourself.
And since you can't do that, you can't trust them at all.
Anyone who buys anything online is a fucking moron. If your credit card gets stolen, tough - you deserved what you got.
--Shoeboy
You modded yourself up. Be a man and admit it.
If you knew anything about how this site works, you'd know that it's impossible to moderate in a thread once you've posted in it.
That means you can't moderate yourself up.
==Shoeboy
Ok, first off you're going to need some sand. Lots of sand. .18 microns or below. You may have to try a few times to get this right.
Next get some bauxite ore and some copper ore. We're going to use aluminum interconnects, so the copper will only be used for the motherboard.
First off, take the sand and use it to form a silicon wafer 12 inches in diameter. (Note, previous versions of this howto specified 8 inch wafers - these will work, but your cost/chip will be much higher.
Next, purify the bauxite ore to create an ingot of pure alluminum.
Ok, now we're ready to create the general purpose microprocessor at the heart of our set top box. Using the alluminum, the wafer, a magnifying glass and a laser pointer, create a 6 issue wide superscalar 64 bit microprocessor with at least 256 KB of l2 cache. For best results, try to keep the feature size at
Be sure to have a very clean environment for this as microprocessor cores are very succeptible to dust. Your garage is not suitable unless you give it a thorough cleaning first.
Now that you have the microprocessor, the next step is to package it. It is important to use a pin grid array rather than a ball grid array as you may wish to upgrade the processor later.
*rest of guide clipped for space reasons, but you can get the latest version from the linux documentation project.*
--Shoeboy
I'm a fan (and occasional practicioner) of the noble art of trolling, and this one is amazing.
The second paragraph is the best:
These are three key Linux trends to watch for in 2001: a static growth rate, lessening mainstream interest in the open source operating system, and a sharp decline in Linux-based companies' stock value, said Doug Miller, Microsoft's group product manager for competitive strategies.
This is beautiful. It's irrefutable.
Obviously linux growth will slow, you can only grow at an exponential rate for so long before you run out of servers and people to run them.
Similarly with "reduced mainstream press." At linux ceases to be a novelty, the mainstream press will start giving it normal coverage.
Finally, the bankruptcy of linux companies will be a side effect of the venture capital spending spree having caused some linux companies to get funding without a solid buisness plan. With the bursting of the internet bubble, they'll have trouble making that second round of financing.
All three trends are clearly in evidence and obvious.
The clever thing is to use them as proof that linux is doomed.
Doug Miller, I salute you. You have a gift for inciteful comments that appear logically sound at first glance.
If you ever want to start trolling slashdot, let me know. We can hook you up with a low user id account with plenty of karma.
--Shoeboy
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9810/09/nt5.idg/
I'm not sure if it meets your definition of a "fucking" source, but here's an article from CNN in 1998 that discusses in passing how NT 5 was supposed to ship in 1997.
--Shoeboy
I'm sorry, but you just don't have a clue.
But if it's so vague, why would anybody pay thousands of dollars for it?
Quick question for you Jon,
If you were an advertiser, what information would you find more valuable:
a) Suzy Radcliffe age 9 likes to read Kuro5hin and keep abreast of the latest benchmarks on tpc.org.
b) Children who use altavista rather than yahoo also prefer pepsi to coke.
Well?
I think it's obvious that general information is more valuable than specific information.
--Shoeboy
Right right right,
and professional houses ship things late all the time too, NT 5 was supposed to ship in '97.
But I think some criticism of the slowness of kernel updates is self inflicted.
Don't you recall the heady days of 1998 when all the linux advocates were boasting about the speed of releases and proclaiming open source as a magic bullet that would lead to instant release and completely bug free code?
I think that the linux community is now suffering from a backlash brough on by having had too many advocates who were assholes, see Nick Petreley for a good example.
If you don't want to face heavy bitter criticism, don't make outrageous claims.
And for the love of God, read the linux-advocacy-howto.
--Shoeboy
This is the last straw.
I'm never getting in an automobile ever again.
Jesus.
I though drivers were dangerous when they were talking on the phone, but this is ridiculous.
Anyone know where I can buy a tank or APC?
--Shoeboy
Murnau's monster is the ultimate renegade and outsider, only nobody would dare to dismiss or taunt him.
Fuck, that's what I did wrong in high school. I joined the debate team instead of drinking the blood of the innocent.
I never really thought of Vampires as being geeks before.
a bitter, loathesome plague, a repulsive creature who's not superhuman but a half-dead thing you couldn't stand to be anywhere near, let alone have feast on you in the dead of night. Once powerful and rich, he's reduced to the occasional rodent and vial of delivered blood. His hunting days are over. He has pallid skin, talon-like fingernails, and a dessicated face. There is nothing erotic or charismatic about him.
Wow, this really does sound like the average geek. Especially after the dotcom collapse left so many unemployed and desperate.
After you
s/dessicated/bloated/;
and
s/blood/pizza/;
it becomes a perfect description.
Thank you Jon Katz, I never would have discovered the parallels between geeks and vampires without your help.
--Shoeboy
As leader of the sad world of open-source fandom, the weblog buck stops at CmdrTaco's keyboard.
/. however, is a registered trademark of Andover.net.
The 24-year-old CmdrTaco, a leisure-class hero to lazy developers who prefer web surfing to work, is the inventor and guardian of a technology website that reports unsubstantiated rumors about a $2 billion industry, one whose rapid rise is unnerving executives at Microsoft Corp. (stock: MSFT).
Yet some solution providers, vendors, and industry observers are beginning to question how long one man can steer the evolution of slashdot, and whether CmdrTaco's sole oversight of the site, now at version 1.0.9, is slowing its corporate adoption.
While he's not driven by aesthetic motives, CmdrTaco has significant power over the look of the website.
Kuro5hin, in contrast, is the trademark of Rusty Foster.
They note CmdrTaco lacks both color vision and good taste for web design, and as an inept but persistent amateur guitarist, has considerable professional obligations outside his slashdot activities.
What's more, industry titans such as IBM Corp. (stock: IBM); Compaq Computer Corp. (stock: CPQ); Intel Corp. (stock: INTC); Hewlett-Packard Corp. (stock: HWP); and Oracle Corp. (stock: ORCL) are losing billions of dollars in developer time as their employees spend the entire day reading the site and those developers to exert more influence on the development of a less garish color scheme, not based on a bad acid trip.
"We need a designer that understands why the BSD section shouldn't be a combination of teal and fire engine red. Employees at IBM, Compaq, and Dell and the [Linux] distributors have taken to wearing welding masks while viewing some portions of the site," said Hal Davison, owner and president of Davison Consulting, Sarasota, Fla.
Some overweight, bearded, slovenly Linux users view the unpleasant site design as proof that CmdrTaco isn't gay, Davison said.
"Linux wookies reluctant to see the site change because they have channeled their sexual frustrations into homophobia. They don't want to see a Maurice or Antoine saying, 'Pastels would be nice,'" he said.
Torvalds opposes the notion of aesthetic principles controlling the look and feel of the slashdot website.
However, experts say he'll face pressure from big OEM VA Linux which is attempting to bankroll the transformation of the inaccurate technology reporting into a lucrative industry.
The slashdot user base stands to double this year to 600,000 accounts, according to Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown, a Wall Street investment firm. Users are hopeful but leery about Taco's casual indifference to usability and readability.
Shoeboy's recent pledge to spend $1 to advance slashdot usability in 2001 comes with a no-strings-attached promise today, but observers say that won't last if Taco doesn't pick up steam in the form of making the site less shitty.
For example, at the LinuxWorld conference in New York, a passing marketer cried out in horror after viewning the apache section. She is currently in therapy working to resolve her new found aversion to the color purple.
"In the early stages of slashdot, it was more of an amateur affair and developers didn't have high expectations," said George Weiss, an analyst at Gartner. "But CmdrTaco has acheived financial success, and they think he should maybe fix the fucking site already."
Publicly, blue-chip posters recognize Taco as the lead slashdot user, but note that they aren't beholden to his final nod to carry out their posting plans, as they are with other websites.
Still, insiders say Taco's casual e-mail flip-offs of the user base carry tremendous weight in the user community - down the food chain from Karma Whores to Trolls, slashbots, and first posters.
For instance, when Taco declared Microsofts web outage unimportant several days ago, many posters opted to call him a "fucking shithead."
"[Taco's] decisions are ones he quickly pulls out his ass," said Signal 11, senior director of database marketing at Oracle, Redwood Shores, Calif., who contributed to the decline of slashdot.
"After he's had a few too many, that's when he's ready to check the submission queue. He flames users, reposts old stories and then vomits. He makes CowboyNeal lap it up," Signal 11 said. "Having a little bit of alcohol is a good thing, but Taco takes it to far."
Despite Taco's technical reign over slashdot, Timothy and Michael have quickly become the sites de facto editors, and tensions over the sites direction will heighten as they continue to post pointless articles, experts say.
"I don't believe open submission queus work well for commercial sites because they can't control submissions," said Michael Cusumano, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management who sits on the board of solution provider NetNumina Solutions. "This leaves them open to accidentally posting links to the Amsterdam hooters and shit."
From the second link: (the "introducing microbes" one)
Above: In many desert environments, Chroococcidiopsis grows on the undersides of transparent rocks, just below the surface.
I've driven through desert areas several times, and I haven't seen any "transparent rocks."
Oh...
Wait...
Never mind.
--Shoeboy
About 2 hours ago, I learned that you should never chew on a cigarette lighter.
Normal people wouldn't have to learn this lesson the hard way, but I'm not normal. Among other neuroses, I'm orally fixated and always have to be chewing on something. It's not my fault though - it's because I was never properly weaned.
Anyway, I was writing some code and idly chewing on a disposable cigarette lighter when I spotted a bug. A stupid bug. A "=" instead of "==" bug. This annoyed me a little bit, and caused me to clench my teeth.
Big mistake.
For those of you majoring in English or Journalism - butane (the fluid inside a cigarette lighter) is a gas at room temperature. It stays in liquid form inside the lighter because it is under pressure. By cracking the case of the lighter, I cause the contents to evaporate almost instantly. Since vaporization is endothermic, this dropped the temperature of one of my teeth somewhere close to 32 degrees farenheit. This, in turn dropped me to the floor where I began whimpering in pain.
But that's not all. I also got a lungful of the stuff. Not good. To quote from the MSDS for butane: "Inhalation causes headaches, dizziness, drowsiness, and nausea, and may lead to unconsciousness. Liquid can cause burns similar to frostbite." That's no lie. I've vomited twice and am feeling quite faint.
So let this be a lesson to those of you wishing to colonize mars: don't chew cigarette lighters on the trip over.
--Shoeboy
Is anyone else bothered by the fact that Card chooses to name his villian "Achilles."
Most would consider Achilles to be a hero's name, but not Card.
Card is mormon and, like all mormons, homophobic.
As anyone who read the Illiad in high school knows, Achilles was homosexual.
Apparently in Card's eyes, this is enough to make him a villian.
Mormons worry me.
Espescially considering that 1 in 50 americans is a member of that church.
--Shoeboy
Don't believe everything you read.
/. community.
For starters, H cards are damn near indestructible. I've seen one go through a washing machine and still function.
Secondly, even there would be no need to add the offending code bit by bit, you could just send 1 update. The only reason to send it bit by bit is to save bandwidth and this isn't a concern. Sounds mildly improbable eh?
Thirdly the destruction of the cards would force Hughes to replace them. Not a cheap move. They'd be opening themselves to a lawsuit from everyone who was willing to say "I hadn't modified my card, honest" otherwise.
Finally, the site Michael linked to requests financial support by clicking a paypal link. Sounds like an elaborate setup to fleece the
Way to go Michael.
--Shoeboy
Visit your local library.
--Shoeboy
I refused to sign my contract for ~3 months when I was temping at MS.
They nagged but I still got paid.
Eventually I found a better job.
Never did sign the new contract.
It asked me to waive all rights to take legal action against MS.
--Shoeboy
Ok, it's as simple as this:
These people voluntarily signed a no-compete agreement with Microsoft. That makes Crossgrain's actions theft.
You shouldn't be allowed to steal employees from a competitor. What Crossgrain did was as wrong as stealing hardware from Microsoft. In the information age, the contents of a person's mind are assets and a company has a right to protect its assets. Employees have a duty to their employers just as employers have a duty to their employees. As long as you sign a no-compete clause you shouldn't be allowed to learn your trade at one company and then practice it at a competitors.
--Shoeboy