Actually, I think one of the humor sites(maybe segfault.org) has already created a random slashdot story generator that creates stories just like these.
I suspect that the actual explanation is much simpler. There is a phenonmenon observed by those in the paranormal field whose name escapes me. Basically, people remember the "hits" and forget the "misses". Therefore, they see patterns which don't exist because they don't notice the data that contradicts their theory. If you assume that a certain portion of our population is gay, and that a certain portion of our population works in IT, it would follow that a certain portion works in IT and is gay. However, it's still somewhat unusual for public figures to be openly gay, so you tend to remember it. I suspect that you've just listed every single gay computer innovator that you could think of. Not so many, is it? A study of homosexuality in the IT industry would probably yield numbers consistent with other fields in that socio/economic stratum.
they plan to pay the artists. I assume they want to pay per download, but for that to happen, they have to know who the artist is. Using the file names would be unreliable, since everyone has their own way of naming music files. Which means they'll have to use ID3 tag for identification. Which means they'll have to require that songs traded on the service have their ID3 tags filled out properly! Thank god! That alone is worth the price of the service (assuming its not more than $15 a month).
I you want to see the trailer, get yourself a computer that will let you watch it. I'm sure you can afford it, and we're all tired of hearing you whine about quicktime trailers. If you're worried about the Slashdot readers thinking less of you, consider two points:
1. After years of being assulted by your poor spelling, grammer, and the general flaimbait nature of your posts, we couldn't possibly think any less of you.
2. Who cares what slashdot readers think of you, anyway?
Have you read any of the old Image comics? They were terrible and never came out on time. Very few people have the ability to write, draw, edit, and manage the publishing end all by themselves. There's a reason for everything, and in this case that's the reason that creators don't self publish very often.
Hi. I don't understand the American legal system when it comes to suing people and companies. It seems like you can sue for any amount of money that you like!
Hi. I'm a person from a non-US country desperate to get karma by exploiting the 'I'm from a different country/you americans are so wacky' meme!
Why, here 5 employees are suing for $5 Billion - Isn't this completely over the top? $50,000 each would be more like it. Doesn't it mean that big companies are in total fear of the very slightest slip up, and are unlikely to take risks and innovate when it could mean that they are likely to lose Billions if it even goes slightly wrong.
I have no understanding of your legal system, and thus don't know that absurdly large settlements are almost never upheld and that asking for them is the only way to be assured an eventual resonable settlement in appeal. Also, I don't realize that punitive damages must actually hurt the company to be punitive.
Also, I really really find it hard to believe that a company in this day and age would be racist. They are driven by money, and finding the best employee for the job is the absolute bottom line in any company these days.
Companies aren't racist. People are racist. Although market pressures and the employement crunch have forced some companies with institutionalized bigotry to hire minorities, this doesn't change the fact that individual employees can and often are insensitive and hostile to minorities.
That being said, it is still the companies' responsibility to monitor and prevent the harrassment of and by their employees.
No, the killer app everyone's been waiting for is a really great, free, but hard to operate, UNIX clone. Why, just the other day my grandmother was asking me for that. You'd think she'd want a computer that could translate commands like "send email" and "open Word", but apparently everyone wants to waste their time typing commands into a shell or picking out skins for their GUI. What does all this have to do with transistor thickness? Absolutely nothing!
I'm sure there's some old foggies out there that might remember the details, but back in the fifties, pinball was seen as a source of juvenile delinquincy, along with comic books (led to homosexuality don't you know). Police would actually go on raids where they would bust up machines! Crazy!!!
The answer to your underlining question as I understand it is one of economics. It's easier, in terms of developement and marketing, to make money perfecting an existing process than to develop an entirely new one. Economies of scale have a lot to do with it as well. It's still frustrating though. All these legacy technologies lying around for years past their usefullness just so some corp can make a buck.
It's true, no league of any kind would be complete without the token ring bearer, but which GL would join the KDE League? Hal Jordan may be the one true Green Lantern, but Kyle knows more about computers. Of course he works on a Mac, so that's not really useful either. Hmmm.
I keep hearing reports of shortages of LCD's that are keeping the prices of laptop and PDA's up and keeping supply low. Would 18,000 new laptop users every year be enough to exacerbate this situation>
First of all, let me start off by saying that the tone of the article is speculative and doesn't seem to properly back up any of its conclusions. It reads like a Behind the Music for the dot-com industry. Second of all, I don't consider most of the people this article seems to be talking about to be "techies". They're business people and almost indestinguishable from the yuppies they're being compared to. The true techies, i.e. coders, sys admins, etc. do not go to these coctail parties with the peolpe we despised in high school. He stay home and hack, and game, and chill with each other.
Second of all, I've noticed a rise in coke and meth use in young people in general. I hang out at a coffee house that turns into a(illegal) after-hours at 2am, and you should see the shit these people cram into their bodies. Why, because they're stupid and desperate to do anything to distract themselves from their day-to-day lives.
The people I hang with, hackers and gamers and geeks (oh my!) do massive amounts of caffeine to get the project done, and we smoke some weed to relax while we're watching Iron Chef afterward.
In conclusion, slashdotters, this article isn't about us.
Ok, I just went to the Intervideo site and checked their press releases. The LinDVD anouncement is still there. I guess this makes me look like a bit of a prick. Still, it makes the entire article rather irrelevant. all we have here is late software.
So if it is a stunt, which seems likely with the vanishing press release, what can we do about this. Here we have a company trying to make $$$ off open source and Linux without giving anything back. This is going to sound vindictive, but is there anything LEGAL we can do to hurt Intervideo, teach them a little lesson maybe?
Of course, maybe they just didn't have the skills to make the player, and are too embarrassed to admit it.
I really feel for Jon. He's trying to teach to a group of people who are really just waiting for their chance to talk. Its getting so I can predict exactly what people are going to say in their posts after reading of of his article. Are they going to:
a) pointlessly debate some small detail while ignoring his overall point. b) rush to point out some trivial inacurracy and use it to prove their own self-worth and Jon's lack of same. c) make some comment about Jon's general views and how pompous he always is, while ignoring whatever the subject of the particular article is.
Or some combination thereof.
I'm tired of this. I often agree with a lot of what you say Jon, but find somewhere else to editorialize from. Slashdot isn't that place anymore. Maybe it never was.
I seemed to remember that Disney pulled something similar on Aladin Systems a while back. They apparently wrested the aladin.com domain name from Aladin Systems on the basis that someone typing in aladin.com would be expecting to see their version of a classic public domain character.
Slashdot Mirror
we'll be able to set the "bugs =" statement to 0 and have a stable copy of win2k?
Actually, I think one of the humor sites(maybe segfault.org) has already created a random slashdot story generator that creates stories just like these.
You get them for free from other people!
I suspect that the actual explanation is much simpler. There is a phenonmenon observed by those in the paranormal field whose name escapes me. Basically, people remember the "hits" and forget the "misses". Therefore, they see patterns which don't exist because they don't notice the data that contradicts their theory. If you assume that a certain portion of our population is gay, and that a certain portion of our population works in IT, it would follow that a certain portion works in IT and is gay. However, it's still somewhat unusual for public figures to be openly gay, so you tend to remember it. I suspect that you've just listed every single gay computer innovator that you could think of. Not so many, is it? A study of homosexuality in the IT industry would probably yield numbers consistent with other fields in that socio/economic stratum.
they plan to pay the artists. I assume they want to pay per download, but for that to happen, they have to know who the artist is. Using the file names would be unreliable, since everyone has their own way of naming music files. Which means they'll have to use ID3 tag for identification. Which means they'll have to require that songs traded on the service have their ID3 tags filled out properly! Thank god! That alone is worth the price of the service (assuming its not more than $15 a month).
I you want to see the trailer, get yourself a computer that will let you watch it. I'm sure you can afford it, and we're all tired of hearing you whine about quicktime trailers. If you're worried about the Slashdot readers thinking less of you, consider two points:
1. After years of being assulted by your poor spelling, grammer, and the general flaimbait nature of your posts, we couldn't possibly think any less of you.
2. Who cares what slashdot readers think of you, anyway?
is that it was accidentally created in an experiment to create a real world product.
Have you read any of the old Image comics? They were terrible and never came out on time. Very few people have the ability to write, draw, edit, and manage the publishing end all by themselves. There's a reason for everything, and in this case that's the reason that creators don't self publish very often.
Hi. I don't understand the American legal system when it comes to suing people and companies. It seems like you can sue for any amount of money that you like!
Hi. I'm a person from a non-US country desperate to get karma by exploiting the 'I'm from a different country/you americans are so wacky' meme!
Why, here 5 employees are suing for $5 Billion - Isn't this completely over the top? $50,000 each would be more like it. Doesn't it mean that big companies are in total fear of the very slightest slip up, and are unlikely to take risks and innovate when it could mean that they are likely to lose Billions if it even goes slightly wrong.
I have no understanding of your legal system, and thus don't know that absurdly large settlements are almost never upheld and that asking for them is the only way to be assured an eventual resonable settlement in appeal. Also, I don't realize that punitive damages must actually hurt the company to be punitive.
Also, I really really find it hard to believe that a company in this day and age would be racist. They are driven by money, and finding the best employee for the job is the absolute bottom line in any company these days.
Companies aren't racist. People are racist. Although market pressures and the employement crunch have forced some companies with institutionalized bigotry to hire minorities, this doesn't change the fact that individual employees can and often are insensitive and hostile to minorities.
That being said, it is still the companies' responsibility to monitor and prevent the harrassment of and by their employees.
No, the killer app everyone's been waiting for is a really great, free, but hard to operate, UNIX clone. Why, just the other day my grandmother was asking me for that. You'd think she'd want a computer that could translate commands like "send email" and "open Word", but apparently everyone wants to waste their time typing commands into a shell or picking out skins for their GUI. What does all this have to do with transistor thickness? Absolutely nothing!
I'm sure there's some old foggies out there that might remember the details, but back in the fifties, pinball was seen as a source of juvenile delinquincy, along with comic books (led to homosexuality don't you know). Police would actually go on raids where they would bust up machines! Crazy!!!
The answer to your underlining question as I understand it is one of economics. It's easier, in terms of developement and marketing, to make money perfecting an existing process than to develop an entirely new one. Economies of scale have a lot to do with it as well. It's still frustrating though. All these legacy technologies lying around for years past their usefullness just so some corp can make a buck.
It's impossible to control copywrited material in the way they envision. Who is advising these people?
netscape needs the $?
It's true, no league of any kind would be complete without the token ring bearer, but which GL would join the KDE League? Hal Jordan may be the one true Green Lantern, but Kyle knows more about computers. Of course he works on a Mac, so that's not really useful either. Hmmm.
That's Vogon Destructor Fleet, I beleive.
I keep hearing reports of shortages of LCD's that are keeping the prices of laptop and PDA's up and keeping supply low. Would 18,000 new laptop users every year be enough to exacerbate this situation>
Hmm. I wonder what religion this guy is? You'd never catch one one God's Chosen PeopleTM saying something like that. :)
First of all, let me start off by saying that the tone of the article is speculative and doesn't seem to properly back up any of its conclusions. It reads like a Behind the Music for the dot-com industry. Second of all, I don't consider most of the people this article seems to be talking about to be "techies". They're business people and almost indestinguishable from the yuppies they're being compared to. The true techies, i.e. coders, sys admins, etc. do not go to these coctail parties with the peolpe we despised in high school. He stay home and hack, and game, and chill with each other. Second of all, I've noticed a rise in coke and meth use in young people in general. I hang out at a coffee house that turns into a(illegal) after-hours at 2am, and you should see the shit these people cram into their bodies. Why, because they're stupid and desperate to do anything to distract themselves from their day-to-day lives. The people I hang with, hackers and gamers and geeks (oh my!) do massive amounts of caffeine to get the project done, and we smoke some weed to relax while we're watching Iron Chef afterward. In conclusion, slashdotters, this article isn't about us.
Ok, I just went to the Intervideo site and checked their press releases. The LinDVD anouncement is still there. I guess this makes me look like a bit of a prick. Still, it makes the entire article rather irrelevant. all we have here is late software.
So if it is a stunt, which seems likely with the vanishing press release, what can we do about this. Here we have a company trying to make $$$ off open source and Linux without giving anything back. This is going to sound vindictive, but is there anything LEGAL we can do to hurt Intervideo, teach them a little lesson maybe?
Of course, maybe they just didn't have the skills to make the player, and are too embarrassed to admit it.
Microsoft: We're going to fuck you up the ass, and then you're going to pay us for it. Twice!
Company: Oh boy! Does that include the service packs?
God, I wish I was M$!
Oooo, a Nietzsche quote! And he picked such an underused one, too!
I really feel for Jon. He's trying to teach to a group of people who are really just waiting for their chance to talk. Its getting so I can predict exactly what people are going to say in their posts after reading of of his article. Are they going to:
a) pointlessly debate some small detail while ignoring his overall point.
b) rush to point out some trivial inacurracy and use it to prove their own self-worth and Jon's lack of same.
c) make some comment about Jon's general views and how pompous he always is, while ignoring whatever the subject of the particular article is.
Or some combination thereof.
I'm tired of this. I often agree with a lot of what you say Jon, but find somewhere else to editorialize from. Slashdot isn't that place anymore. Maybe it never was.
Spyrral
I seemed to remember that Disney pulled something similar on Aladin Systems a while back. They apparently wrested the aladin.com domain name from Aladin Systems on the basis that someone typing in aladin.com would be expecting to see their version of a classic public domain character.