I run linux on one of my Macs, but I do it for testing and building when I'm writing code for a customer with PowerPC processors in their embedded devices. Apple is the cheapest source for portable PowerPC machines, so I bought one, and I run linux on it.
OSX wouldn't run so well on my 333 Mhz lombard anyway, and linux is way better than OS 9.
Oh, BTW, I run Debian. I don't see any reason for these specialized PPC only Distros, and I don't know why they make news. Why would I want a distribution for one architecture that's different from the distro on all the other architectures I run? Also, why would I want to wait the rediculous periods between yellow dog releases when I can just use debian unstable and have the latest and greatest daily?
The general trend in the industry goes to non-intelligent interconnections (Gigabit card used to have a processor (Alteon), they don't anymore (see latest intels)). I2O never took off because you don't really need to relieve a computer from computation when your computation power is pletoric.
General purpose CPU power is still more expensive than specialized processing for compute heavy tasks. High level gzip compression still eats CPU on multi-ghz machines.
Besides, that's not the trend at all. The trend is typically to have a special purpose chip that can do things the CPU can't, then when CPUs get faster to offload the task, and finally, when the task becomes ubiquitous, it is included in the interface hardware. This is true for video, audio, networking....
The initial alteon boards had general purpose processing on them, while the newer cards use chips designed specifically for gigabit ethernet, and either way, it doesn't change the interconnect, just the interface. The newer cards are way more intelligent than the old ones though; many are starting to compute checksums on the card, and you can get cards with encryption processors.
On a Xeon 2.8GHz, I just got 71 MB/s for gzip.
That's great, so you can dedicate most of an expensive Xeon to gzipping, or you can plug one of these things in and free you Xeon up to, say, generate 64MB/s of data... You're Xeon can't be raytracing if it's gzipping.
You, sir, are a $10 an hour programmer, and not a computer scientist. You know syntax like a ditch digger knows his shovel. You say "syntax is vital to becoming proficient -- and employable". That's only true if you want to be a keyboard monkey, and even then, how fast you can type is just as important as the syntax. If you know the concepts, you can pick up the syntax of any modern programming language in a few days. If you don't know the concepts, you're only employable until your language of choice goes out of style, and then you can flip burgers. There are concepts you can't learn with C#.NET that are easy to teach with lisp or prolog. You may never use lisp in your job, but in 5 years, you may never write another line of C# either.
What good is your education if it teaches you short lived information? Pay to learn the concepts. If you want to learn syntax, go buy a book.
and government research is highly efficient and has been responsible for most of the real innovations over the last 50 years.
What a wonderful alternate world you must live in. I know that ignorance must be bliss, but since you probably vote perhaps I should try to burst your bubble.
I just finished a $445,000 government research project. The contract and grant negotiations took 6 months. We had finished the project by the time the papers were signed. Then, before the work was put into use and made official, we went through 22 months of red tape to get the outcome approved. Our private sector clients pay us less and accept and use our results much more quickly. Needless to say this is a single representative example.
Government research is only ever on the leading edge when they are researching weapons, and then because nobody else is doing that kind of research. Don't depend on the government for services or information unless you've got some time to kill and have low expectations for the results. If it runs through the public sector, the outcome will always be delayed, and will always be a comprimise.
Admittedly, I haven't installed debian from scratch since before potato, since I've just been upgrading. The older distributions are still availble though, and I've definatly run debian on a 80MB hard drive before. It didn't seem like that long ago until I just thought about it... Where has all the time since 1996 gone?
You'll be hard pressed to do anything with less than 40-50MB, but if you've got more than that, just install debian. You should be able to install using PPP over the serial port.
If you're really low on disk space though, 2.5" 1GB IDE drives can be had for around $20. Less if you're willing to snipe on ebay. If you want to spend $35, you can have a whopping 6GB!
I'm getting married in less than a year. My fiancee was very specific about not wanting a diamond. Her mother also did not want a diamond in her engagement ring when she got married. I think the problem is that people don't ask what the woman wants before they buy a ring, they just take a multi-thousand dollar chance and listen to the DeBeers commercials. Ask her to marry you before you buy the ring. You'll get to have fun ring shopping together, and you might be surprised what she'll pick.
BTW, we bought unset stones and had a setting made. I spent WAY less than I was planning on spending. She's happier with it than she could have possibly been had I chosen the ring without her, and I spent the money I saved on power tools and computer equipment:)
A few years back, my roommate was addicted to neopets. It's basically a website where you play silly little games, some strategic and some mindless, to earn points that you can spend on your "pet". The better your pet was they better your chances of beating up other people's pets. I knew nothing about it at the time, but saw him playing around with it a lot, so I thought it must be fun and I'd give it a try. It was boring after 5 minutes. Instead of playing more, I spent a week writing some perl scripts to play the games for me and max out my points. By the time the scripts were done, I only ran them for one day when I realized that the fun was in writing the scripts, not in using them, so I stuck them in an archve directory and never did anything neopets related again.
My point? To some people, mindless games are no fun by themselves, but it is fun to try and describe the activity of playing the game in code, since it requires you to consiously describe the actions that make the game playable without consious thought. It also adds some chalange to a game that has none. For example, not only did my neopets scripts have to perfect game interaction for the optimal outcome, but they also had to convince the server that there was a real person with a real browser at the other end (they tried to figure that out). Trying to out-wit the server admins was the most chalanging part. Writing the scripts is fun. Of course, the people who download and use such scripts simply to be at the top of the high-scores chart have problems, but that's another story entirely.
BTW, I never distributed my neopets scripts, so don't go blaming me for people "cheating".
Someday men and women will probably drive cars running on "fuel-cell" motors that have no pistons, consume hydrogen, and emit no pollutants, including no greenhouse gases. Between the zero-pollutants advantages of hydrogen and the fact that its supply is in principle inexhaustible, the world's petroleum-based economy will probably eventually yield to a hydrogen-based economy--to everyone's benefit. Republicans relentlessly mocked Al Gore for saying the internal combustion engine should be replaced by something better, and now George W. Bush is saying exactly the same thing.
From listening to Al Gore you can get the impression that he believes saying things makes them happen. Planning to legislate the replacement of internal combustion engines without having ideas for alternatives doesn't make you a visionary, it makes you an idiot. There's a big difference between saying we should do something and actually having a plan on how to do it.
Also, the only viable methods for generating hydrogen in quantities sufficient to replace fossil fuels in cars and homes are through fossil fuel or nuclear based power plants. Sure, it may be possible someday to generate enough power using solar, but we don't know how to do it right now, and we don't know how long progress will take. That means in order to replace the internal combustion engine in our vehicles, and the oil furnaces in our basements, we need nuclear power. Guess what Al Gore's position on nuclear is. Great plan, huh?
It may be intended for just inventory purposes - but unless the rfid tags are disabled or removed on sale, it IS possible to abuse the benign benefit of inventory control to track a person's movement in close quarters (say... embed sensors in the floor of an airport).
Message from reality: After you buy the clothes you can remove the tag yourself. This is a non-issue. There is no privacy conspiracy. Do you want to know the real motivation here? It takes 2-4 people 10-15 hours to inventory a smallish clothing store. That's an immence labor cost when compared to having an employee walk around the room with a wand for 10 minutes before closing every night. Plus you'll get more frequent checks. Considering the fact that alot of clothing isn't purchased by the wearer, so any tracking database they tried to make would simply contain noise, can we drop this paranoid delusional roadblock to progress please?
Seriously, "research" like the parent comment is the result of BILLIONS of electrons streaming towards the front of quakeslut's CRT in a frantic search for unsubstantiated opinions. Anybody who tells you that paper and plastic recycling processes involve the use of toxic chemicals is lying, just like those republican assholes who say that glass recycling takes almost as much energy (generated with fossil fuels, or worse, with that evil nuclear stuff) as making new glass, without even counting the costs of collecting and sorting bottles.
Even it sombody comes up with an idea that's good for the environment but contrasts ideas presented as environmentalist, we should resist those ideas, as they reduce the momentum of the movement and undermine environmentalism as a political force. Clearly that power is more important for saving the environment than anything these meddling scientists can think up.
Believe me when I say that entrapment of that kind is not going to look good to companies considering contributing code to Linux
When did the word "redistribute" come to mean "contribute"? If you contribute a small amount of code, you're only on the hook for the patents implemented by that small amount of code. Taking all of Linux and packaging it up with your name on it and giving it out to people is another thing entirely. Also, software consumers hardy ever hold software patents, so even if Microsoft (or somebody else) tried to make the argument you mentioned, it would only be compelling for software developers who hold patents. Those people are a very small portion of the global software market.
That's a little bit like saying that all a company needs to do is release one of their software products under the GPL and magically, any other party can then put that company's code into a GPL product and it's legal.
It's not at all like saying that. It's saying that if you hold a software patent, and release an implementation of that patent under the GPL, everybody who uses the GPL can use your patent. If they have patents that cover Linux, and they ship linux under the GPL, they've given free license to their patents, but if they have other patents that aren't implemented in linux, then other companies/people still have to arrange for licensing.
Unless SCO/Caldera put the code in question into the Linux software base themselves, that sorts of claims are groundless.
They didn't have to put them there, they just had to ship them. By redistributing them they agreed to the terms of the GPL implicitly.
If you've got alot of money you earn interest. Let's say you want to spend $1k/day, and you make a single $365k cash withdrawal once a year from an account that earns 10% compounded anually for simplicity. To do this for 30 years, you'd only need $3,736,535. That's way less than $11 million. If you wanted to spend $365k/year indefinatly, you'd need only to wait a year, or start with an extra $365k. Of course this disregards taxes on interest, but still, not too bad a life having only a couple of million, huh?
As long as the PS3 can read the media, they should be able to implement PS1 compatibility in software. Right now they have essentially a single chip PS1 in each PS2. For the PS3 they could potentially have a single chip PS2, and some PS1 software. If Nintendo's GameBoy is any sign, it appears that backward compatibility is the key to continuing dominance, especially considering how many worthy or superior competetors it has crushed.
Sure, they're free to do anything they like and I'm also free to go away, but if you think that people will now pay for something that they previously got without charge, I think you're mistaken.
Slashdot has to pay the bills. I'd rather they loose some users than close up shop. Either way, you don't have to pay. You can just wait 20 minutes and get what you're looking for for free. It's likely that people who disagree with this new policy will just continue to read slashdot without paying (or even really noticing a change), and some people will pay. Very few frequent readers will go away, no matter how offended they are. You're a perfect example. You wouldn't be seeing these replies had you stoped reading slashdot because of this.
The problem is all in principal, I'll be the first to admit. I realize the Slashdot always has been, and always will be a meta-news service, but it still should have an obligation to get things out to its users in a timely fashion.
Slashdot has as much obligation to it's users as it's users have to slashdot. None. Slashdot could close up shop and go away for ever if they so felt like it, and similarly they can wait a week before posting stories if they wanted. Sure, if what they do sucks then the users will go away, but there's no obligation to do anything on either side.
If this is a mater of principal to you, you have to ask yourself what your principal is? Shouldn't slashdot be free to do whatever they want with their publication? Clearly you're free to not sign up, or to no longer visit this site, just as Grease Monkey is free to implement the pricing policy you described. Sure, they may loose customers (and slashdot may loose readers), but then again, maybe they won't.
Another way to think about it: There are people (I just finished talking to sombody I know who feels this way) who dislike the principal of paying to remove ads, but have now signed up because they feel they're actually getting something for their money. After all, why pay slashdot not to send you a few extra bytes of hypertext when you're already not loading the image?
Calm down, man. What difference does it make if it takes you an extra 20 minutes to see a Slashdot story about an article from last year.:)
Seriously though, since Slashdot is only a meta-news source (they post stories about news stories, and not the actual news stories themselves) if you want the news sooner and/or for free, just go get it from the horses mouth.
I think the real benifit to slashdot from this will be that all those "First Post" trolls will have to shell out the bucks to get the first post now.
Discussions have structure. If they didn't you might as well scramble a dictionary, because you'll never make sense of it. There's a difference between a useful tool for following a discussion (I won't use the word reply if you don't want me to. Just because Joel says they're not replies doesn't change the meaning of the word, though) and a jumble of statements. Words and statements only mean things when arranged correctly. The order of statements in a discussion can convey as much meaning as the words themselves. Taking the structure away is like reading every other page of a book. At best, with his layout, you'll have to waste time figuring out the order in which things were to appear in order to understand the correct meaning. In the worst case, something somebody said will mean the wrong thing or will be meaningless because of the order in which it appears.
Of course I'm just as much of a self proclaimed expert on the subject as he is (you did notice that, like me, he's just a guy with a big mouth and lots of opinions, and not anybody particularly special, right?), so I guess I should shut up.
Man, am I the only person who still lives near an arcade where the games are $0.25? There's got to be other people here that live near Worcester, MA. If you're in the area, check out Playoff Entertainment. $5 minimum, but all games are two tokens and you get 8 tokens for $1.
Slashdot Mirror
I run linux on one of my Macs, but I do it for testing and building when I'm writing code for a customer with PowerPC processors in their embedded devices. Apple is the cheapest source for portable PowerPC machines, so I bought one, and I run linux on it.
OSX wouldn't run so well on my 333 Mhz lombard anyway, and linux is way better than OS 9.
Oh, BTW, I run Debian. I don't see any reason for these specialized PPC only Distros, and I don't know why they make news. Why would I want a distribution for one architecture that's different from the distro on all the other architectures I run? Also, why would I want to wait the rediculous periods between yellow dog releases when I can just use debian unstable and have the latest and greatest daily?
The general trend in the industry goes to non-intelligent interconnections (Gigabit card used to have a processor (Alteon), they don't anymore (see latest intels)). I2O never took off because you don't really need to relieve a computer from computation when your computation power is pletoric.
General purpose CPU power is still more expensive than specialized processing for compute heavy tasks. High level gzip compression still eats CPU on multi-ghz machines.
Besides, that's not the trend at all. The trend is typically to have a special purpose chip that can do things the CPU can't, then when CPUs get faster to offload the task, and finally, when the task becomes ubiquitous, it is included in the interface hardware. This is true for video, audio, networking....
The initial alteon boards had general purpose processing on them, while the newer cards use chips designed specifically for gigabit ethernet, and either way, it doesn't change the interconnect, just the interface. The newer cards are way more intelligent than the old ones though; many are starting to compute checksums on the card, and you can get cards with encryption processors.
On a Xeon 2.8GHz, I just got 71 MB/s for gzip.
That's great, so you can dedicate most of an expensive Xeon to gzipping, or you can plug one of these things in and free you Xeon up to, say, generate 64MB/s of data... You're Xeon can't be raytracing if it's gzipping.
You, sir, are a $10 an hour programmer, and not a computer scientist. You know syntax like a ditch digger knows his shovel. You say "syntax is vital to becoming proficient -- and employable". That's only true if you want to be a keyboard monkey, and even then, how fast you can type is just as important as the syntax. If you know the concepts, you can pick up the syntax of any modern programming language in a few days. If you don't know the concepts, you're only employable until your language of choice goes out of style, and then you can flip burgers. There are concepts you can't learn with C#.NET that are easy to teach with lisp or prolog. You may never use lisp in your job, but in 5 years, you may never write another line of C# either.
What good is your education if it teaches you short lived information? Pay to learn the concepts. If you want to learn syntax, go buy a book.
and government research is highly efficient and has been responsible for most of the real innovations over the last 50 years.
What a wonderful alternate world you must live in. I know that ignorance must be bliss, but since you probably vote perhaps I should try to burst your bubble.
I just finished a $445,000 government research project. The contract and grant negotiations took 6 months. We had finished the project by the time the papers were signed. Then, before the work was put into use and made official, we went through 22 months of red tape to get the outcome approved. Our private sector clients pay us less and accept and use our results much more quickly. Needless to say this is a single representative example.
Government research is only ever on the leading edge when they are researching weapons, and then because nobody else is doing that kind of research. Don't depend on the government for services or information unless you've got some time to kill and have low expectations for the results. If it runs through the public sector, the outcome will always be delayed, and will always be a comprimise.
Done any performance tests with your 2100?
There's a reason why those cards that were $800 originally are only $40 now.
The 2200s and 2300s are still expensive for a reason too.
Admittedly, I haven't installed debian from scratch since before potato, since I've just been upgrading. The older distributions are still availble though, and I've definatly run debian on a 80MB hard drive before. It didn't seem like that long ago until I just thought about it... Where has all the time since 1996 gone?
You'll be hard pressed to do anything with less than 40-50MB, but if you've got more than that, just install debian. You should be able to install using PPP over the serial port.
If you're really low on disk space though, 2.5" 1GB IDE drives can be had for around $20. Less if you're willing to snipe on ebay. If you want to spend $35, you can have a whopping 6GB!
I'm getting married in less than a year. My fiancee was very specific about not wanting a diamond. Her mother also did not want a diamond in her engagement ring when she got married. I think the problem is that people don't ask what the woman wants before they buy a ring, they just take a multi-thousand dollar chance and listen to the DeBeers commercials. Ask her to marry you before you buy the ring. You'll get to have fun ring shopping together, and you might be surprised what she'll pick.
:)
BTW, we bought unset stones and had a setting made. I spent WAY less than I was planning on spending. She's happier with it than she could have possibly been had I chosen the ring without her, and I spent the money I saved on power tools and computer equipment
I think my pets have starved to death by now
I just logged back in for the first time in 600 days to see. Apparently pets NEVER starve to death...
My Dice-A-Roo script still works, too! There's no more jackpot though.
A few years back, my roommate was addicted to neopets. It's basically a website where you play silly little games, some strategic and some mindless, to earn points that you can spend on your "pet". The better your pet was they better your chances of beating up other people's pets. I knew nothing about it at the time, but saw him playing around with it a lot, so I thought it must be fun and I'd give it a try. It was boring after 5 minutes. Instead of playing more, I spent a week writing some perl scripts to play the games for me and max out my points. By the time the scripts were done, I only ran them for one day when I realized that the fun was in writing the scripts, not in using them, so I stuck them in an archve directory and never did anything neopets related again.
My point? To some people, mindless games are no fun by themselves, but it is fun to try and describe the activity of playing the game in code, since it requires you to consiously describe the actions that make the game playable without consious thought. It also adds some chalange to a game that has none. For example, not only did my neopets scripts have to perfect game interaction for the optimal outcome, but they also had to convince the server that there was a real person with a real browser at the other end (they tried to figure that out). Trying to out-wit the server admins was the most chalanging part. Writing the scripts is fun. Of course, the people who download and use such scripts simply to be at the top of the high-scores chart have problems, but that's another story entirely.
BTW, I never distributed my neopets scripts, so don't go blaming me for people "cheating".
Someday men and women will probably drive cars running on "fuel-cell"
motors that have no pistons, consume hydrogen, and emit no pollutants,
including no greenhouse gases. Between the zero-pollutants advantages of
hydrogen and the fact that its supply is in principle inexhaustible, the
world's petroleum-based economy will probably eventually yield to a
hydrogen-based economy--to everyone's benefit. Republicans relentlessly mocked
Al Gore for saying the internal combustion engine should be replaced by
something better, and now George W. Bush is saying exactly the same thing.
From listening to Al Gore you can get the impression that he believes saying things makes them happen. Planning to legislate the replacement of internal combustion engines without having ideas for alternatives doesn't make you a visionary, it makes you an idiot. There's a big difference between saying we should do something and actually having a plan on how to do it.
Also, the only viable methods for generating hydrogen in quantities sufficient to replace fossil fuels in cars and homes are through fossil fuel or nuclear based power plants. Sure, it may be possible someday to generate enough power using solar, but we don't know how to do it right now, and we don't know how long progress will take. That means in order to replace the internal combustion engine in our vehicles, and the oil furnaces in our basements, we need nuclear power. Guess what Al Gore's position on nuclear is. Great plan, huh?
It may be intended for just inventory purposes - but unless the rfid tags are disabled or removed on sale, it IS possible to abuse the benign benefit of inventory control to track a person's movement in close quarters (say... embed sensors in the floor of an airport).
Message from reality: After you buy the clothes you can remove the tag yourself. This is a non-issue. There is no privacy conspiracy. Do you want to know the real motivation here? It takes 2-4 people 10-15 hours to inventory a smallish clothing store. That's an immence labor cost when compared to having an employee walk around the room with a wand for 10 minutes before closing every night. Plus you'll get more frequent checks. Considering the fact that alot of clothing isn't purchased by the wearer, so any tracking database they tried to make would simply contain noise, can we drop this paranoid delusional roadblock to progress please?
Actually, the entire post was completely sarcastic, which should have been absolutely clear from the first line in the second paragraph.
Why am I explaining that?
MOD PARENT UP!
Seriously, "research" like the parent comment is the result of BILLIONS of electrons streaming towards the front of quakeslut's CRT in a frantic search for unsubstantiated opinions. Anybody who tells you that paper and plastic recycling processes involve the use of toxic chemicals is lying, just like those republican assholes who say that glass recycling takes almost as much energy (generated with fossil fuels, or worse, with that evil nuclear stuff) as making new glass, without even counting the costs of collecting and sorting bottles.
Even it sombody comes up with an idea that's good for the environment but contrasts ideas presented as environmentalist, we should resist those ideas, as they reduce the momentum of the movement and undermine environmentalism as a political force. Clearly that power is more important for saving the environment than anything these meddling scientists can think up.
Believe me when I say that entrapment of that kind is not going to look good to companies considering contributing code to Linux
When did the word "redistribute" come to mean "contribute"? If you contribute a small amount of code, you're only on the hook for the patents implemented by that small amount of code. Taking all of Linux and packaging it up with your name on it and giving it out to people is another thing entirely. Also, software consumers hardy ever hold software patents, so even if Microsoft (or somebody else) tried to make the argument you mentioned, it would only be compelling for software developers who hold patents. Those people are a very small portion of the global software market.
That's a little bit like saying that all a company needs to do is release one of their software products under the GPL and magically, any other party can then put that company's code into a GPL product and it's legal.
It's not at all like saying that. It's saying that if you hold a software patent, and release an implementation of that patent under the GPL, everybody who uses the GPL can use your patent. If they have patents that cover Linux, and they ship linux under the GPL, they've given free license to their patents, but if they have other patents that aren't implemented in linux, then other companies/people still have to arrange for licensing.
Unless SCO/Caldera put the code in question into the Linux software base themselves, that sorts of claims are groundless.
They didn't have to put them there, they just had to ship them. By redistributing them they agreed to the terms of the GPL implicitly.
If you've got alot of money you earn interest. Let's say you want to spend $1k/day, and you make a single $365k cash withdrawal once a year from an account that earns 10% compounded anually for simplicity. To do this for 30 years, you'd only need $3,736,535. That's way less than $11 million. If you wanted to spend $365k/year indefinatly, you'd need only to wait a year, or start with an extra $365k. Of course this disregards taxes on interest, but still, not too bad a life having only a couple of million, huh?
I still agree about the dirty old man part...
As long as the PS3 can read the media, they should be able to implement PS1 compatibility in software. Right now they have essentially a single chip PS1 in each PS2. For the PS3 they could potentially have a single chip PS2, and some PS1 software. If Nintendo's GameBoy is any sign, it appears that backward compatibility is the key to continuing dominance, especially considering how many worthy or superior competetors it has crushed.
Sure, they're free to do anything they like and I'm also free to go away, but if you think that people will now pay for something that they previously got without charge, I think you're mistaken.
Slashdot has to pay the bills. I'd rather they loose some users than close up shop. Either way, you don't have to pay. You can just wait 20 minutes and get what you're looking for for free. It's likely that people who disagree with this new policy will just continue to read slashdot without paying (or even really noticing a change), and some people will pay. Very few frequent readers will go away, no matter how offended they are. You're a perfect example. You wouldn't be seeing these replies had you stoped reading slashdot because of this.
If you read this, I guess I wasn't mistaken.
The problem is all in principal, I'll be the first to admit. I realize the Slashdot always has been, and always will be a meta-news service, but it still should have an obligation to get things out to its users in a timely fashion.
Slashdot has as much obligation to it's users as it's users have to slashdot. None. Slashdot could close up shop and go away for ever if they so felt like it, and similarly they can wait a week before posting stories if they wanted. Sure, if what they do sucks then the users will go away, but there's no obligation to do anything on either side.
If this is a mater of principal to you, you have to ask yourself what your principal is? Shouldn't slashdot be free to do whatever they want with their publication? Clearly you're free to not sign up, or to no longer visit this site, just as Grease Monkey is free to implement the pricing policy you described. Sure, they may loose customers (and slashdot may loose readers), but then again, maybe they won't.
Another way to think about it: There are people (I just finished talking to sombody I know who feels this way) who dislike the principal of paying to remove ads, but have now signed up because they feel they're actually getting something for their money. After all, why pay slashdot not to send you a few extra bytes of hypertext when you're already not loading the image?
Calm down, man. What difference does it make if it takes you an extra 20 minutes to see a Slashdot story about an article from last year. :)
Seriously though, since Slashdot is only a meta-news source (they post stories about news stories, and not the actual news stories themselves) if you want the news sooner and/or for free, just go get it from the horses mouth.
I think the real benifit to slashdot from this will be that all those "First Post" trolls will have to shell out the bucks to get the first post now.
Discussions have structure. If they didn't you might as well scramble a dictionary, because you'll never make sense of it. There's a difference between a useful tool for following a discussion (I won't use the word reply if you don't want me to. Just because Joel says they're not replies doesn't change the meaning of the word, though) and a jumble of statements. Words and statements only mean things when arranged correctly. The order of statements in a discussion can convey as much meaning as the words themselves. Taking the structure away is like reading every other page of a book. At best, with his layout, you'll have to waste time figuring out the order in which things were to appear in order to understand the correct meaning. In the worst case, something somebody said will mean the wrong thing or will be meaningless because of the order in which it appears.
Of course I'm just as much of a self proclaimed expert on the subject as he is (you did notice that, like me, he's just a guy with a big mouth and lots of opinions, and not anybody particularly special, right?), so I guess I should shut up.
Man, am I the only person who still lives near an arcade where the games are $0.25? There's got to be other people here that live near Worcester, MA. If you're in the area, check out Playoff Entertainment. $5 minimum, but all games are two tokens and you get 8 tokens for $1.
But the idea that the concept of the "Album as album" rather than "album as collection" has been dead for 50 years is utterly wrong.
If I had said that then I would disagree with me too. I didn't say it has been dead, I said it has been slowly dying.
In a non-branching/flat forum like Joel's your reply will be 50 or so messages below the original.
So he allows branching, just displays the messages in a non-obvois form. Wonderful.