But WordPerfect for Windows crashed non-stop. I was in the IT department at a college at the time and my previous roommate was the head PC lab tech. When the college told us we had to switch to WP for Windows officially, our jaws dropped, because everyone knew it was a buggy piece of crap.
Yes. Yes it was. WP4Win was, in fact, a crashing bug generator rather than a word processor. That was quite annoying, IIRC.
Novell owned the network File/Print market and pioneered the e-Directory (NDS) environment. Microsoft was playing catch-up the whole way.
The biggest problem with Novell was that you couldn't develop applications on the Netware platform. Microsoft offered ISVs the ability to develop software on the platform (Windows) on which it would run. When Novell purchased Unix, I thought that they would fully integrate NCP (Netware Core Protocol) into Unix. This would allow ISVs to develop software on the same platform on which their software would run. Had they done so, Microsoft would have lost the server wars and been relegated to the desktop.
But Novell didn't do the necessary integration, and the rest is history.
As I recall, Word Perfect was better than Microsoft Word in almost every respect. In fact, Word Perfect 5.0 is probably better in many ways than the current incarnation of Word. Sigh.
tl;dr version: Novell killed themselves and Microsoft moved into the vacuum created when Novell imploded. The resolution of this lawsuit just puts the cherry on top of the whole mess.
That's quite a trick! Seeing as Ronald Reagan has been dead for ten years, was a Ouija board involved?
Apparently, Ronald Reagan did endorse this idea in 1985. I stand...errr...sit corrected. Please ignore my initial comment. That is all.
From the 1985 speech:
The number of taxpayers who need to itemize would be reduced to 1 in 4. We envision a system where more than half of us would not even have to fill out a return. We call it the return-free system, and it would be totally voluntary. If you decided to participate, you would automatically receive your refund or a letter explaining any additional tax you owe. Should you disagree with this figure, you would be free to fill out your taxes using the regular form. We believe most Americans would go from the long form or the short form to no form.
I agree that leaks are worrying, but in this case I'd argue that donations to political campaigns should be public. If someone without money to spare wants to endorse or promote a cause they have to speak, revealing their position. Just because you can afford to give up $1000 shouldn't excuse you from that responsibility. Yes, you are free to say what you want, but you are never free from the consequences.
I don't think I agree, but I admit I may be wrong. I'm very sure that it would be very bad to have to disclose how you vote. But with regards to monetary contributions to a Proposition ballot advocacy group, I'll have to think about it more. I do think it's proper to disclose contributions to nominees running for office, but I feel that way because it represents influence the donor has on the candidate, not because the candidate then spent money on advertising. And if PAC contributions weren't disclosed, that would just be a glaring loophole for candidate contributions through a middle-man.
But a $1000 donation to a Proposition group? I don't know. I agree there's a problem if someone wealthy can donate $1 Million, but a small monetary contribution feels more like a donate-to-your-cause type thing than try-to-influence-others type thing. On the other hand, you're right that ultimately it's spent on trying to influence other people, and that should not be done with secret backers. So maybe you're right and I'm wrong.
(I'm the AC you responded to)
Ballots are supposed to be secret, yes. However, campaign contributions are highly regulated (both federally via the Federal Elections Commission and in most states.
In California, campaign contributions (including donor names) are reported to the California Secretary of State. This link will take you directly to the reporting for Prop 8.
You raise an interesting point too. He was fired over information that should never have been released. That just makes it that much worse.
It makes the topic difficult, and it annoys the crap out of me that the info was revealed, and it annoys me that no one seems to care that this type of information should never be revealed. Democracy depends on it not being revealed. But... since it has been revealed, it's not like it can just be ignored.
Wrong. Your vote is supposed to be secret, not your political contributions. The FEC (and the laws of the various states) requires that candidates, political parties, PACs and certain other political organizations report the source and amount of each donation received. That information is then published and is publicly available.
Democracy depends on free discourse, a vigorous and *free* press, free and fair elections and a host of other things. It does not depend on secret campaign donations.. When we don't know who is paying for all those TV ads and rallies, etc. that can give undue influence to players we don't even know exist.
In fact, the law should be changed to force such reporting from 501(c)3's and similar organizations that currently do not need to file such reports, IMHO
Given the enormous amounts of money thrown into political campaigns, we should know where that money is coming from -- giving us more information about the supporters of issues and candidates.
And it's a very bad thing that his contributions to Prop 8 were known, because those types of things are supposed to be kept private and we should all want them to be kept private. But since they were revealed, there's no way in hell he should have been offered the role of CEO of Mozilla. Once you learn someone is an A-hole, you have the right to decide if he/she/it should be the leader of a volunteer-based organization.
BZZT! Wrong. All political contributions should be publicly available for all to see. As a society, we should be able to know who voted with their wallets and to what purpose. We have that to a certain extent, but 501(c)3s and their ilk (as well as any other players attempting to affect elections) should be forced to publicly disclose all of their donors and the amounts contributed, just as candidates do.
Blowing my mod points on this thread because you need schooling, friend.
Gentrification to me means turning poor neighborhoods into unaffordable ones for rich white people. Which displaces people who have few resources.. I haven't heard any reasonable argument that I am not a racist scumbag trying to justify my small-mindedness.
I'm approaching 50, and I'll let you in on a little secret, we're not as tough as we act at this age. I had better senses, attention span, cognitive speed, reflexes, learning speed, joint mobility, stamina and a host of other useful, animal skills when I was 25 to 35 years old. Of course, I'm still "better with age" but that's basically experience at work, and 99% of what makes me better today than I was 20 years ago can be replaced by a team of experts at the other end of a radio link.
If I were the mission planner and I could have a ground crew of 200, but only 12 on the mission, I'd keep the grey hair down with their families, let 'em work ordinary 8 hour shifts and take normal vacations - you get better people that way, and you want the best people you can get. If you take the brightest, most talented and experienced person and caffeine fuel them for 18 hour shifts, you're still not getting better performance than you would from a team of 3 people who have figured out what's important to them in life and also happen to be experts in their field.
So, I'm saying, put the wunder-kind on the mission vehicle, support them with experienced ground crew. When the pioneers have established a reliable shirt-sleeve living and working environment that doesn't demand too much of the residents, then think about sending the old folks - they'll be able to contribute in great ways; but for pioneers you're better off working with people that don't have heavy family ties, arthritis, kidney stones and the occasional cancer that needs treatment.
I am also just a couple years short of the half-century mark. You are correct, I am not the man I was fifteen or twenty years ago.
But I think you miss my point. What good are fast reflexes and the exuberance of youth on a ten year mission to explore the Jupiter system? Most of the time would be spent waiting to arrive, and then manning consoles to run experiments. Nothing that requires super fast reflexes or the ability to stay awake for days at a time. It's also a good bet that radiation exposure would probably kill anyone attempting such a mission. Even if we make it clear that this would be a one-way trip, you'd have people lining up to make the journey. Again, I ask you -- "why waste all that potential?"
Construction, management and operation of a moon base would be another mission that would be ideally suited to older folks. Most of their time would be spent planning and managing, with power equipment doing all the heavy construction. No wunderkind required.
If we want to, say, explore Mars with a team of ten or so, or set up a colony, that would be the time for the youngsters, IMHO.
Then, when they expire, you could strap 'em to the hull for radiation shielding....
Seriously, there are plenty of healthy people - more likely to accomplish the mission objectives and also willing to go.
This isn't John Glenn's joyride on the shuttle, we're talking about actual pioneering - requiring, you know, pioneers....
There most certainly are plenty of healthy people who could go. However, I disagree that younger people could perform better than older people. Okay, the terminally ill would be a poor choice.
In a low (1/6G on the moon, for example), older folks would be just as capable as younger ones to perform low G construction, scientific testing, spaceport management, all kinds of stuff. In fact, many of the jobs necessary in low gravity/free fall would be just fine for those in their late fifties and sixties.
In fact, they would be a wonderful resource for long-term missions to the outer planets as well as helping to engineer space habitats, moon facilities and even martian exploration.
As long as the worker is healthy enough to survive the trip to LEO, they should be perfectly able to perform tasks for which they are trained (how many engineers, scientists and the myriad of other specialties required for space exploration, development and colonization are in that age range? A whole lot). Unless, of course, you think that somehow being older makes you less intellectually capable. The average lifespan of an American is somewhere around 75 years. I ask again, why waste a valuable resource?
What is more, this would obviate many of the evolutionary and ethical issues seen with younger participants.
Surely, given the activity level of many seniors, they could take on the really dangerous missions. Same goes for terminally ill people. If they're more concerned with science and discovery than with coming home, we'd all be better off. I'd guess that there are many seniors/terminally ill folks who be willing to take on a dangerous mission with little or no chance of returning. I'm not either of those and I would jump at such a chance. Why should we waste all that human potential?
Seems to me, OKCupid trying to drive traffic to their site by using this non-story as a hook for folks to see if this is true, potentially creating new customers. Nothing to see here, just another corporation attempting to hitch its wagon to a cause to drive business.
Well, those few needed tweaks never stop piling up. On top of that, UX research and (more importantly) user expectations continue to evolve.
To keep up with that, websites either need to constantly change in small increments, or to do it in big chunks. We'd been doing the former for a while, but the decision was made to start fresh. I totally understand how jarring it is to see such a huge amount of change all at once, but we also have to look at what the website will look like a few years down the road.
The classic design in 2014? Not too bad. The classic design in 2018? Probably not going to cut it.
An old boss of mine used to say (and he said it at least six times a day -- it was very annoying) that "when the pain to change is less than the pain to stay the same, people change."
Let's review. The pain caused by a redesigned site with less functionality and more broken functionality is much greater than the pain to use the existing site. So don't wonder why you're seeing so much pushback.
I strongly recommend that the dev team re-label Slasdot Beta as Slashdot Alpha rev 0.3 or something similar. Don't call it beta until the important features are complete. In case you're wondering what those features might be, they are smooth and complete support for comments and moderation. Usability is key and based on the testing that's been going on, clearly that's an issue with the new design.
Please take the hint. I like/. and would like to continue using it. But if you make the pain to change greater than finding somewhere else to go, I'm outa here.
As an aside, many of your users could do a much better job in less time than the folks you've got working on this. That should scare you. Something about altslashdot.org, I think.
Hey, how about posting an article with some statistical analysis of the feedback you've been getting? If it shows up on the front page, maybe you might get the right idea. Because AFAICT, management isn't getting it.
I guess a lot of Americans hate smart people, don't they? I'd have thought it would have been far more entertaining to watch someone do something different, interesting and successful, but what do I know. I'm sure the Idiocracy version will be along any time now.
As a smart (and very modest) person, the anti-intellectual bent of the average American is pretty obvious. They're not bad people, they've just been poorly educated and feel threatened. It's rather sad, really.
He's getting booed because he's taking all the fun out of the game for the viewers
What Mr. Chu did did not take the fun out of the viewers who can keep up. On the contrary, those who could keep up with Mr. Chu's strategic moves find the whole thing very stimulating and refreshing.
It is those Joe Sixpacks who are so perplexed by the unconventional moves deployed by Mr. Chu who are doing all the booing.
Thank you. The guy is fairly smart and seems to have a broad base of trivia knowledge. Were I to be a contestant, I'd use a similar strategy.
It's Sony/Jeopardy's goal to make money entertaining the masses. Mr. Chu's goal is to win games. Seems reasonable to me.
Those "pre-approved offer" are just a marketing scheme. They don't do any credit checks before sending them out.
The credit check occurs when you reply to the offer. Then, they may refuse you or say; "After review, we can provide you with a limit of $5,000 or $10,000.
This is correct. The way the CC companies operate these is to get average credit scores for specific areas (zip codes, generally) or for people in specific groups. Fairly sophisticated statistical analyses (based on demographic profiles) are used to determine what offers are appropriate.
Just to clarify, the crime Vickerman was prosecuted for is Conspiracy to Defraud, purely for running SurfTheChannel, a streaming links site.
This is quite a different law from Fraud, it's vaguer and much more prone to abuse - it seems to be FACT's go-to law whenever they realise a suspect they've spent time and money investigating isn't breaking any actual laws.
Without it, Vickerman would probably never have been prosecuted for anything, although civil action would have been likely, IMO.
If some defendant somewhere ever gets an appeal up to the ECJ, I think it quite possible they'll shoot the law down in flames, just for being so badly written.
More information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_to_defraudhttp://torrentfreak.com/surfthechannel-owner-sentenced-to-four-years-in-jail-120814/
An excellent point. Thank you for correcting me. Civil action is appropriate in these situations. Unfortunately, content owners have co-opted our system to benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of us -- hence the criminalization of copyright infringement
No, the crime is copyright infringement. THAT is what infringement is, not someone downloading an episode of Downton Abbey because they missed it the other day.
I don't recognize copyright infringement as a crime. At best it is a tort, IMHO. Yes, I am aware that various governments have criminalized "copyright infringement." That doesn't mean I have to agree, or incorporate it into my worldview.
Changes in the business models made every one of their excuses invalid and as much as companies bent over backwards to get these people to be honest customers the trend just continued.
He's my MP, but I'm afraid I can't report on his file-sharing habits.
And to lend some context to his words, from TFA:
“The discrepancy I mentioned is a source of great frustration. For example, the private prosecution by the Federation Against Copyright Theft of Anton Vickerman, who was making £50,000 a month from running a website [SurfTheChannel] that facilitated mass-scale copyright infringement, saw him convicted of conspiracy to defraud and sentenced to four years in prison,” Leech explained.
“This level of sentence would not have been possible if he had been prosecuted under copyright law, but FACT was able to prove conspiracy in his actions. Without proof of conspiracy, a serious criminal could have been left subject to a disproportionately low maximum penalty.”
In a way, I do agree with his point; those making that sort of money from infringement do need to be punished properly. However, it'll be all too easy to abuse this sort of measure, and end up with the disproportion going the other way.
The crime here was fraud. The guy sold something he did not have the rights to sell. Kind of like someone selling your house without your knowledge. IANAL, but as I understand it, we have laws (as was seen in this case) that address these issues. Sending someone to prison for ten years (or at all) for downloading the latest episode of some crap TV show or movie for their personal use is ridiculous. That is and should be a civil matter, IMHO.
jumping from POSIX shell to bash, i.e. implicitly assuming i was a linux zealot, gibbering about how much easier language A is than language B, arguing with portability where POSIX is all about portability, and portable scripts run on any POSIX compliant system, further demonstrates how little you know. Perhaps take a bit of your own advice and learn the shell command language, the quality of your straw-men would probably double.
Also, your assumptions are plain wrong. Yes, i'm a coder, but yes, then again, i'm a sys- and network admin of a mid-sized network (~200 hosts, not counting the VLANs for guest, wifi, isolation, etc) We do nearly everything in posix shell, even the damn server configuration automation. - the prime reason being that the scripts will not bother whether they run on our BSD servers or the linux boxen. But why don't you tell me some more about how vastly superior some-language-you-know-better-than-sh-is
Oh Technology god, I am but a toad at the feet of your incredibly knowledge and power! Please don't vaporize me with your incredible wisdom and power. Everything you say is absolute truth and I am just a retarded splotch who should have been aborted.
You are right about everything and I am wrong. Always and ever wrong. Compared to you, I don't deserve to live. Please come and take my possessions, my wife, my children so I can relieve this world of a brainless, worthless loser.
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But WordPerfect for Windows crashed non-stop. I was in the IT department at a college at the time and my previous roommate was the head PC lab tech. When the college told us we had to switch to WP for Windows officially, our jaws dropped, because everyone knew it was a buggy piece of crap.
Yes. Yes it was. WP4Win was, in fact, a crashing bug generator rather than a word processor. That was quite annoying, IIRC.
A long time ago.
Novell owned the network File/Print market and pioneered the e-Directory (NDS) environment. Microsoft was playing catch-up the whole way.
The biggest problem with Novell was that you couldn't develop applications on the Netware platform. Microsoft offered ISVs the ability to develop software on the platform (Windows) on which it would run. When Novell purchased Unix, I thought that they would fully integrate NCP (Netware Core Protocol) into Unix. This would allow ISVs to develop software on the same platform on which their software would run. Had they done so, Microsoft would have lost the server wars and been relegated to the desktop.
But Novell didn't do the necessary integration, and the rest is history.
As I recall, Word Perfect was better than Microsoft Word in almost every respect. In fact, Word Perfect 5.0 is probably better in many ways than the current incarnation of Word. Sigh.
tl;dr version: Novell killed themselves and Microsoft moved into the vacuum created when Novell imploded. The resolution of this lawsuit just puts the cherry on top of the whole mess.
That's quite a trick! Seeing as Ronald Reagan has been dead for ten years, was a Ouija board involved?
Apparently, Ronald Reagan did endorse this idea in 1985. I stand...errr...sit corrected. Please ignore my initial comment. That is all.
From the 1985 speech:
That's quite a trick! Seeing as Ronald Reagan has been dead for ten years, was a Ouija board involved?
I agree that leaks are worrying, but in this case I'd argue that donations to political campaigns should be public. If someone without money to spare wants to endorse or promote a cause they have to speak, revealing their position. Just because you can afford to give up $1000 shouldn't excuse you from that responsibility. Yes, you are free to say what you want, but you are never free from the consequences.
Leaks? You mean leaked from the publicly available, state mandated, campaign donation reporting database? Which, we both agree is a good thing.
I don't think I agree, but I admit I may be wrong. I'm very sure that it would be very bad to have to disclose how you vote. But with regards to monetary contributions to a Proposition ballot advocacy group, I'll have to think about it more. I do think it's proper to disclose contributions to nominees running for office, but I feel that way because it represents influence the donor has on the candidate, not because the candidate then spent money on advertising. And if PAC contributions weren't disclosed, that would just be a glaring loophole for candidate contributions through a middle-man.
But a $1000 donation to a Proposition group? I don't know. I agree there's a problem if someone wealthy can donate $1 Million, but a small monetary contribution feels more like a donate-to-your-cause type thing than try-to-influence-others type thing. On the other hand, you're right that ultimately it's spent on trying to influence other people, and that should not be done with secret backers. So maybe you're right and I'm wrong.
(I'm the AC you responded to)
Ballots are supposed to be secret, yes. However, campaign contributions are highly regulated (both federally via the Federal Elections Commission and in most states.
In California, campaign contributions (including donor names) are reported to the California Secretary of State. This link will take you directly to the reporting for Prop 8.
You raise an interesting point too. He was fired over information that should never have been released. That just makes it that much worse.
It makes the topic difficult, and it annoys the crap out of me that the info was revealed, and it annoys me that no one seems to care that this type of information should never be revealed. Democracy depends on it not being revealed. But... since it has been revealed, it's not like it can just be ignored.
Wrong. Your vote is supposed to be secret, not your political contributions. The FEC (and the laws of the various states) requires that candidates, political parties, PACs and certain other political organizations report the source and amount of each donation received. That information is then published and is publicly available.
Democracy depends on free discourse, a vigorous and *free* press, free and fair elections and a host of other things. It does not depend on secret campaign donations.. When we don't know who is paying for all those TV ads and rallies, etc. that can give undue influence to players we don't even know exist.
In fact, the law should be changed to force such reporting from 501(c)3's and similar organizations that currently do not need to file such reports, IMHO
Given the enormous amounts of money thrown into political campaigns, we should know where that money is coming from -- giving us more information about the supporters of issues and candidates.
And it's a very bad thing that his contributions to Prop 8 were known, because those types of things are supposed to be kept private and we should all want them to be kept private. But since they were revealed, there's no way in hell he should have been offered the role of CEO of Mozilla. Once you learn someone is an A-hole, you have the right to decide if he/she/it should be the leader of a volunteer-based organization.
BZZT! Wrong. All political contributions should be publicly available for all to see. As a society, we should be able to know who voted with their wallets and to what purpose. We have that to a certain extent, but 501(c)3s and their ilk (as well as any other players attempting to affect elections) should be forced to publicly disclose all of their donors and the amounts contributed, just as candidates do.
Blowing my mod points on this thread because you need schooling, friend.
Gentrification to me means turning poor neighborhoods into unaffordable ones for rich white people. Which displaces people who have few resources.. I haven't heard any reasonable argument that I am not a racist scumbag trying to justify my small-mindedness.
There. FTFY. And you're welcome.
I'm approaching 50, and I'll let you in on a little secret, we're not as tough as we act at this age. I had better senses, attention span, cognitive speed, reflexes, learning speed, joint mobility, stamina and a host of other useful, animal skills when I was 25 to 35 years old. Of course, I'm still "better with age" but that's basically experience at work, and 99% of what makes me better today than I was 20 years ago can be replaced by a team of experts at the other end of a radio link.
If I were the mission planner and I could have a ground crew of 200, but only 12 on the mission, I'd keep the grey hair down with their families, let 'em work ordinary 8 hour shifts and take normal vacations - you get better people that way, and you want the best people you can get. If you take the brightest, most talented and experienced person and caffeine fuel them for 18 hour shifts, you're still not getting better performance than you would from a team of 3 people who have figured out what's important to them in life and also happen to be experts in their field.
So, I'm saying, put the wunder-kind on the mission vehicle, support them with experienced ground crew. When the pioneers have established a reliable shirt-sleeve living and working environment that doesn't demand too much of the residents, then think about sending the old folks - they'll be able to contribute in great ways; but for pioneers you're better off working with people that don't have heavy family ties, arthritis, kidney stones and the occasional cancer that needs treatment.
I am also just a couple years short of the half-century mark. You are correct, I am not the man I was fifteen or twenty years ago.
But I think you miss my point. What good are fast reflexes and the exuberance of youth on a ten year mission to explore the Jupiter system? Most of the time would be spent waiting to arrive, and then manning consoles to run experiments. Nothing that requires super fast reflexes or the ability to stay awake for days at a time. It's also a good bet that radiation exposure would probably kill anyone attempting such a mission. Even if we make it clear that this would be a one-way trip, you'd have people lining up to make the journey. Again, I ask you -- "why waste all that potential?"
Construction, management and operation of a moon base would be another mission that would be ideally suited to older folks. Most of their time would be spent planning and managing, with power equipment doing all the heavy construction. No wunderkind required.
If we want to, say, explore Mars with a team of ten or so, or set up a colony, that would be the time for the youngsters, IMHO.
Then, when they expire, you could strap 'em to the hull for radiation shielding....
Seriously, there are plenty of healthy people - more likely to accomplish the mission objectives and also willing to go.
This isn't John Glenn's joyride on the shuttle, we're talking about actual pioneering - requiring, you know, pioneers....
There most certainly are plenty of healthy people who could go. However, I disagree that younger people could perform better than older people. Okay, the terminally ill would be a poor choice.
In a low (1/6G on the moon, for example), older folks would be just as capable as younger ones to perform low G construction, scientific testing, spaceport management, all kinds of stuff. In fact, many of the jobs necessary in low gravity/free fall would be just fine for those in their late fifties and sixties.
In fact, they would be a wonderful resource for long-term missions to the outer planets as well as helping to engineer space habitats, moon facilities and even martian exploration.
As long as the worker is healthy enough to survive the trip to LEO, they should be perfectly able to perform tasks for which they are trained (how many engineers, scientists and the myriad of other specialties required for space exploration, development and colonization are in that age range? A whole lot). Unless, of course, you think that somehow being older makes you less intellectually capable. The average lifespan of an American is somewhere around 75 years. I ask again, why waste a valuable resource?
What is more, this would obviate many of the evolutionary and ethical issues seen with younger participants.
Surely, given the activity level of many seniors, they could take on the really dangerous missions. Same goes for terminally ill people. If they're more concerned with science and discovery than with coming home, we'd all be better off. I'd guess that there are many seniors/terminally ill folks who be willing to take on a dangerous mission with little or no chance of returning. I'm not either of those and I would jump at such a chance. Why should we waste all that human potential?
Just sayin'.
Seems to me, OKCupid trying to drive traffic to their site by using this non-story as a hook for folks to see if this is true, potentially creating new customers. Nothing to see here, just another corporation attempting to hitch its wagon to a cause to drive business.
There. FTFY.
Either way AT&T/Verizon/TWC and maybe Comcast will win and beat Google in the crony capitalism environment we have Silicon Valley type CEO's will win
There. FTFY.
As this clearly shows. Sad, but true.
Well, those few needed tweaks never stop piling up. On top of that, UX research and (more importantly) user expectations continue to evolve.
To keep up with that, websites either need to constantly change in small increments, or to do it in big chunks. We'd been doing the former for a while, but the decision was made to start fresh. I totally understand how jarring it is to see such a huge amount of change all at once, but we also have to look at what the website will look like a few years down the road.
The classic design in 2014? Not too bad. The classic design in 2018? Probably not going to cut it.
An old boss of mine used to say (and he said it at least six times a day -- it was very annoying) that "when the pain to change is less than the pain to stay the same, people change."
Let's review. The pain caused by a redesigned site with less functionality and more broken functionality is much greater than the pain to use the existing site. So don't wonder why you're seeing so much pushback.
I strongly recommend that the dev team re-label Slasdot Beta as Slashdot Alpha rev 0.3 or something similar. Don't call it beta until the important features are complete. In case you're wondering what those features might be, they are smooth and complete support for comments and moderation. Usability is key and based on the testing that's been going on, clearly that's an issue with the new design.
Please take the hint. I like /. and would like to continue using it. But if you make the pain to change greater than finding somewhere else to go, I'm outa here.
As an aside, many of your users could do a much better job in less time than the folks you've got working on this. That should scare you. Something about altslashdot.org, I think.
Hey, how about posting an article with some statistical analysis of the feedback you've been getting? If it shows up on the front page, maybe you might get the right idea. Because AFAICT, management isn't getting it.
Don Pardo is in Jeopardy !!
No. Johnny Gilbert is in Jeopardy. Don Pardo is in "The Illinois Enema Bandit."
And you're welcome.
I guess a lot of Americans hate smart people, don't they? I'd have thought it would have been far more entertaining to watch someone do something different, interesting and successful, but what do I know. I'm sure the Idiocracy version will be along any time now.
As a smart (and very modest) person, the anti-intellectual bent of the average American is pretty obvious. They're not bad people, they've just been poorly educated and feel threatened. It's rather sad, really.
He's getting booed because he's taking all the fun out of the game for the viewers
What Mr. Chu did did not take the fun out of the viewers who can keep up. On the contrary, those who could keep up with Mr. Chu's strategic moves find the whole thing very stimulating and refreshing.
It is those Joe Sixpacks who are so perplexed by the unconventional moves deployed by Mr. Chu who are doing all the booing.
Thank you. The guy is fairly smart and seems to have a broad base of trivia knowledge. Were I to be a contestant, I'd use a similar strategy.
It's Sony/Jeopardy's goal to make money entertaining the masses. Mr. Chu's goal is to win games. Seems reasonable to me.
Those "pre-approved offer" are just a marketing scheme. They don't do any credit checks before sending them out.
The credit check occurs when you reply to the offer. Then, they may refuse you or say; "After review, we can provide you with a limit of $5,000 or $10,000.
This is correct. The way the CC companies operate these is to get average credit scores for specific areas (zip codes, generally) or for people in specific groups. Fairly sophisticated statistical analyses (based on demographic profiles) are used to determine what offers are appropriate.
Just to clarify, the crime Vickerman was prosecuted for is Conspiracy to Defraud, purely for running SurfTheChannel, a streaming links site. This is quite a different law from Fraud, it's vaguer and much more prone to abuse - it seems to be FACT's go-to law whenever they realise a suspect they've spent time and money investigating isn't breaking any actual laws. Without it, Vickerman would probably never have been prosecuted for anything, although civil action would have been likely, IMO. If some defendant somewhere ever gets an appeal up to the ECJ, I think it quite possible they'll shoot the law down in flames, just for being so badly written. More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_to_defraud http://torrentfreak.com/surfthechannel-owner-sentenced-to-four-years-in-jail-120814/
An excellent point. Thank you for correcting me. Civil action is appropriate in these situations. Unfortunately, content owners have co-opted our system to benefit themselves at the expense of the rest of us -- hence the criminalization of copyright infringement
No, the crime is copyright infringement. THAT is what infringement is, not someone downloading an episode of Downton Abbey because they missed it the other day.
I don't recognize copyright infringement as a crime. At best it is a tort, IMHO. Yes, I am aware that various governments have criminalized "copyright infringement." That doesn't mean I have to agree, or incorporate it into my worldview.
Changes in the business models made every one of their excuses invalid and as much as companies bent over backwards to get these people to be honest customers the trend just continued.
Chris Dodd, Is that you?
He's my MP, but I'm afraid I can't report on his file-sharing habits.
And to lend some context to his words, from TFA:
In a way, I do agree with his point; those making that sort of money from infringement do need to be punished properly. However, it'll be all too easy to abuse this sort of measure, and end up with the disproportion going the other way.
The crime here was fraud. The guy sold something he did not have the rights to sell. Kind of like someone selling your house without your knowledge. IANAL, but as I understand it, we have laws (as was seen in this case) that address these issues. Sending someone to prison for ten years (or at all) for downloading the latest episode of some crap TV show or movie for their personal use is ridiculous. That is and should be a civil matter, IMHO.
jumping from POSIX shell to bash, i.e. implicitly assuming i was a linux zealot, gibbering about how much easier language A is than language B, arguing with portability where POSIX is all about portability, and portable scripts run on any POSIX compliant system, further demonstrates how little you know. Perhaps take a bit of your own advice and learn the shell command language, the quality of your straw-men would probably double. Also, your assumptions are plain wrong. Yes, i'm a coder, but yes, then again, i'm a sys- and network admin of a mid-sized network (~200 hosts, not counting the VLANs for guest, wifi, isolation, etc) We do nearly everything in posix shell, even the damn server configuration automation. - the prime reason being that the scripts will not bother whether they run on our BSD servers or the linux boxen. But why don't you tell me some more about how vastly superior some-language-you-know-better-than-sh-is
Oh Technology god, I am but a toad at the feet of your incredibly knowledge and power! Please don't vaporize me with your incredible wisdom and power. Everything you say is absolute truth and I am just a retarded splotch who should have been aborted.
You are right about everything and I am wrong. Always and ever wrong. Compared to you, I don't deserve to live. Please come and take my possessions, my wife, my children so I can relieve this world of a brainless, worthless loser.
You win. Happy now? Jackass.