Like I've stated before, I'm happy in a way to see an online comic artist be successful, I'm dismayed to see it at the total sell-out of his strip, characters, and personalities.
And yes, I could not go to userfriendly.org. I hadn't gone for several months actually, I quit reading it. But I'm still allowed to express my opinion on it, just as well as you're allowed to tell me to go to hell.
And by the way.. I actually like Help Desk quite a bit, I have one of your comics printed out and posted on my cubicle wall. Good luck to you and your strip.
Thanks for the backup, though the moderation has been pretty fair so far.. at least, more than I expected.
From that Watterson article, here's an excellent quote/point:
Beyond all this, however, lies a deeper issue: the corruption of a strip's integrity. All strips are supposed to be entertaining, but some strips have a point of view and a serious purpose behind the jokes. When the cartoonist is trying to talk honestly and seriously about life, then I believe he has a responsibility to think beyond satisfying the market's every whim and desire. Cartoonists who think they can be taken seriously as artists while using the strip's protagonists to sell boxer shorts are deluding themselves.
The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize or will admit. Believable characters are hard to develop and easy to destroy. When a cartoonist licenses his characters, his voice is co-opted by the business concerns of toy makers, television producers, and advertisers. The cartoonist's job is no longer to be an original thinker; his job is to keep his characters profitable. The characters become "celebrities", endorsing companies and products, avoiding controversy, and saying whatever someone will pay the to say. At that point, the strip has no soul. With its integrity gone, a strip loses its deeper significance.
Thanks for posting that link.. moderators, please moderate that original post with the link up, it contains a lot of excellent points.
That says it far better than I ever could. Bill Watterson is the man.. it was a sad day when the last C&H strip ran.:( Comics haven't been the same since, but at least The Boondocks is entertaining.. aside from that, Dilbert, and Liberty Meadows.. there's not that much.:(
Fans: wow, you should make some t-shirts, I'd buy them! Artist: cool, will do!
or even
Artist: I made some t-shirts for those who want to support this, click here
but Artist: Hey corporations, pay us $$$ to use our badly drawn and poorly developed one dimensional characters to market your corporate image.
It wouldn't really bother me so much if UF sold out to some corporation that came to them and wanted to buy them.. but when you peddle your warez on the street and make a website dedicated to selling out to corporations, that's where it begins to bother me a little bit.
Hell, as much as I dislike UF, I kinda want them to survive just for the well-being of online comics in general.
Call me idealistic, but I thought one of the purposes of doing a comic online was to gain some independence from the newspaper syndicates.
Is there something wrong with making money off your work? Of course not! But my main problem is with UFMedia now, he is building a product designed to sell. Whatever WAS funny with UF has been lost in the process.
My point is that the quality of the strip has deteriorated into zippy, because he is drawing the strip/developing the characters in a way that he's trying to pimp to companies.
Tell you what. You go watch this, and afterwards, tell me if you don't feel robbed of 10 minutes of your life.
User Friendly has been around for years.. in most online comic strips you can see changes, whether they be artistic (as in, quality of art improving), or development (character development). It is awfully difficult to put together a case for UF showing either.
And I actually used to LIKE UF at one point, so I'm not some random UF-basher-slashdot-troll. I just find it sad that he is pimping his work like this.. ohwell.. hope he enjoys the $ that gets raked in, and when a company starts doing sitcoms based off of UF characters, I'll be busy turning in my grave.
UF used to be somewhat amusing for a little while, then I realized "Hey, they did this strip already.. 2000 times."
Not to mention the UFMedia crap.. has anyone taken a look at that? The way he just pimps out his work.. I mean, it's one thing if someone comes to you with an interest in mind, but when you start creating your media to target companies and get the almighty $, you lose a little something.
Oh yeah, don't forget to mod me down since disliking UF isn't allowed on Slashdot.:| Loved how the review didn't have a "You won't like.." section to it like some normally do.
I use Adcycle (http://www.adcycle.com) with my existing Slash installation (1.0.2) at http://www.e-league.com with no problems.. I'd try that if you need an ad rotator.
And I dunno, the article seemed pretty fair, considering quotes like this:
Even today's data can be interpreted in several ways, and it's not clear that online piracy is the culprit.
The drop in college music store sales was more pronounced in 1998 than in 1999--a year before Napster was written, released and began spreading quickly across college campuses.
In addition, students say other competition, such as online music stores and rewritable CD copies of store-bought CDs, may be responsible for the drop in sales.
"The majority of my friends buy their CDs online," said Jon Barsook, a student at the University of Southern California. "If the study says the music stores near the colleges have seen a drop in sales, that doesn't mean that college students are not buying records."
There's a difference between me deep linking to your public site, and me deep linking to a URL intended for paying customers that I found. While it's possibly legal since they aren't taking much of a stance to protect it (being that it's easy to avoid the login by using the partners link), that doesn't make it any less right if their intent is for people to pay for this service.
did Slashdot make an arrangement with the NYT to link directly to partner articles? If not, I'd hate to see them basically stealing this service, I assume this is something NYT charges companies for (assumed due to the partners URL).. nothing is free, either choke up your user data (real or fake), or Slashdot should pay for it.. stealing information is wrong, regardless of what the 'information wants to be free' people on Slashdot say. It's their information, and they should be able to restrict it and charge what they want for it.
We had to register some domains for a client, I decided to save the $ by doing it through Joker. No problems at all, saved a lot of $, boss appeared happy.
Then a few days ago my boss lets me know he registered a bunch more domain names. I ask what registrar he used. He tells me NSI.
Me: "WHY? They charge $70!" Boss: "But they are an AMERICAN company! I trust them! Not some silly kid web site in Europe.. "
*sigh*
Any ideas on what I can do? Persuading him to let me transfer a bunch of domains isn't going to be an easy task, especially from grand ol' american NSI.:\
My apologies John.. I had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction I guess. It just infuriates me to see some of the inaccurate reporting in the Post (not from you, from other reporters).. and how key issues are missed or just glossed over. I have 2 friends who work in the tech section at the post, and they basically say you are one of the two columnists with a clue there.. so props to you, and my apologies again.
The site is, in no small part, an online clubhouse for Microsoft haters; news items about the firm are accompanied by a small picture of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as a Borg, one of the human-machine chimeras from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" who say, "Resistance is futile -- you will be assimilated."
The Washington Post makes me sick with their pro-MS slant to everything, and their tech writers in their business section are -horrible-. Fast forward is *occasionally* worth reading, but that's it. Thank god they really only run tech stuff once a week..
That got me to thinking this morning as I bought my paper.. wouldn't it be cool to have a print version of what's going on/what had happened in the web the previous day? I would certainly plunk down a quarter to get some slashdot headlines, the register headlines, some article blurbs, security stuff, recent security holes, penny-arcade, sluggy, and friend bear on the comics page, some 20 page editorials by Jon Katz:)..
I find print format a lot more friendly to read for longer periods, and it's nice to have something to read on the metro (not all of us have laptops, and even if I did, the paper is a more efficent way of reading all this I think.)
Just what I want to wake up to the morning, is coming downstairs, walking into my living room, and see a ream of paper all over my living room floor because some hax0r hacked into my TV set and printed '3y3 0wN3d j00r 14m3 hP pR1n43r' in banner size font 1000 times.
after further re-reading, does this really matter?
Installing and updating a software program module component. A determination is made whether the current date is on or after a date stored in a registry key on a computer.
Last I checked, there's no registry keys on Linux (sorry, GNU/Linux:) ).. depends how technical they want to get with it, I suppose.
MS isn't stupid though.. they have to want to patent this for a reason.. even though it appears prior use by linux would make this null and void if they attempt to go after them.
you'd think this would have no chance.. but with the state of the patent office today....
Imagine the uproar if Microsoft tried to enforce this patent on Debian and other distributions.. oh my..
God, I have a sinking feeling this will actually get through too. What a shame.:(
Hmm.. how does PHP work with Postgres?
on
Why Not MySQL?
·
· Score: 1
Might be a dumb question, but I seriously don't know.. I've just gotten into using PHP w/ MySQL, but am curious as to how PHP interfaces with PostGres.. a search on google proved unhelpful, as nearly everything I turned up was in a foreign language.
Does anyone out there know of any websites that cover this topic better? A search for postgres on php.net turns up nothing.
That looks like a code from Mike Tyson's Punch Out!..
I didn't remember where it took you exactly, I cheated on that using Google (apparently it takes you to Super Macho Man).. but I DID remember it was from punch out.:)
it would probably be a lot harder to hide my time slacking off visiting CNN, Washington Post, etc, if I'm holding up this big newspaper in front of my monitor.:(
What I believe you want is this, the Kernel HOW-TO.
And yes, Commander Taco is a malevolent dictator.. refused to post a submission of mine on the DMCA rally that happened 2 days ago.
Of course, since sites like Slashdot apparently don't find this worthy of the front page, many people had NO idea it happened, or if it even happened at all, including myself. Remember last time when there was a DMCA protest, Slashdot gave like 2 days notice? I sent this in -weeks- in advance, and Slashdot posts nothing. What's up with that?
You care about something you have no control over, and is pointless to moan about. ZDNet isn't going to stop posting FUD and unresearched stories, slashdot effect or not. They get plenty of banner views from other sources than slashdot, I'm sure.
And so what if they drive up hits and revenue? Is this directly harming you? Why does this bother you so much to the point where you waste time posting about it on Slashdot?
I just don't see why people get in such a fit when they realize companies exist to make money. You know full-well they are going to do things to drive up hits and ad revenue. This should not be such a shock to people here.
I don't see it really as an issue of right or wrong. They are entitled to post whatever they want, and whether it's right or wrong will be determined by how many eyeballs they get on their banners. And you know what? So far, they're right.
Slashdot Mirror
Like I've stated before, I'm happy in a way to see an online comic artist be successful, I'm dismayed to see it at the total sell-out of his strip, characters, and personalities.
And yes, I could not go to userfriendly.org. I hadn't gone for several months actually, I quit reading it. But I'm still allowed to express my opinion on it, just as well as you're allowed to tell me to go to hell.
And by the way.. I actually like Help Desk quite a bit, I have one of your comics printed out and posted on my cubicle wall. Good luck to you and your strip.
Thanks for the backup, though the moderation has been pretty fair so far.. at least, more than I expected.
From that Watterson article, here's an excellent quote/point:
Beyond all this, however, lies a deeper issue: the corruption of a strip's integrity. All strips are supposed to be entertaining, but some strips have a point of view and a serious purpose behind the jokes. When the cartoonist is trying to talk honestly and seriously about life, then I believe he has a responsibility to think beyond satisfying the market's every whim and desire. Cartoonists who think they can be taken seriously as artists while using the strip's protagonists to sell boxer shorts are deluding themselves.
The world of a comic strip is much more fragile than most people realize or will admit. Believable characters are hard to develop and easy to destroy. When a cartoonist licenses his characters, his voice is co-opted by the business concerns of toy makers, television producers, and advertisers. The cartoonist's job is no longer to be an original thinker; his job is to keep his characters profitable. The characters become "celebrities", endorsing companies and products, avoiding controversy, and saying whatever someone will pay the to say. At that point, the strip has no soul. With its integrity gone, a strip loses its deeper significance.
Thanks for posting that link.. moderators, please moderate that original post with the link up, it contains a lot of excellent points.
That says it far better than I ever could. Bill Watterson is the man.. it was a sad day when the last C&H strip ran. :( Comics haven't been the same since, but at least The Boondocks is entertaining.. aside from that, Dilbert, and Liberty Meadows.. there's not that much. :(
I'm not sure you got my point either.
There is a difference between:
Fans: wow, you should make some t-shirts, I'd buy them!
Artist: cool, will do!
or even
Artist: I made some t-shirts for those who want to support this, click here
but
Artist: Hey corporations, pay us $$$ to use our badly drawn and poorly developed one dimensional characters to market your corporate image.
It wouldn't really bother me so much if UF sold out to some corporation that came to them and wanted to buy them.. but when you peddle your warez on the street and make a website dedicated to selling out to corporations, that's where it begins to bother me a little bit.
Hell, as much as I dislike UF, I kinda want them to survive just for the well-being of online comics in general.
Call me idealistic, but I thought one of the purposes of doing a comic online was to gain some independence from the newspaper syndicates.
Is there something wrong with making money off your work? Of course not! But my main problem is with UFMedia now, he is building a product designed to sell. Whatever WAS funny with UF has been lost in the process.
Apparently, you missed my point.
My point is that the quality of the strip has deteriorated into zippy, because he is drawing the strip/developing the characters in a way that he's trying to pimp to companies.
Tell you what. You go watch this, and afterwards, tell me if you don't feel robbed of 10 minutes of your life.
User Friendly has been around for years.. in most online comic strips you can see changes, whether they be artistic (as in, quality of art improving), or development (character development). It is awfully difficult to put together a case for UF showing either.
And I actually used to LIKE UF at one point, so I'm not some random UF-basher-slashdot-troll. I just find it sad that he is pimping his work like this.. ohwell.. hope he enjoys the $ that gets raked in, and when a company starts doing sitcoms based off of UF characters, I'll be busy turning in my grave.
UF used to be somewhat amusing for a little while, then I realized "Hey, they did this strip already.. 2000 times."
Not to mention the UFMedia crap.. has anyone taken a look at that? The way he just pimps out his work.. I mean, it's one thing if someone comes to you with an interest in mind, but when you start creating your media to target companies and get the almighty $, you lose a little something.
At least there's always Penny Arcade.
Oh yeah, don't forget to mod me down since disliking UF isn't allowed on Slashdot. :| Loved how the review didn't have a "You won't like.." section to it like some normally do.
I use Adcycle (http://www.adcycle.com) with my existing Slash installation (1.0.2) at http://www.e-league.com with no problems.. I'd try that if you need an ad rotator.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/000525-000013.html
:) Amusing that the BBC got taken along that far, not to mention 80% of slashdot..
Heh.
Couldn't seem to find that info anywhere..
And I dunno, the article seemed pretty fair, considering quotes like this:
Even today's data can be interpreted in several ways, and it's not clear that online piracy is the culprit.
The drop in college music store sales was more pronounced in 1998 than in 1999--a year before Napster was
written, released and began spreading quickly across college campuses.
In addition, students say other competition, such as online music stores and rewritable CD copies of
store-bought CDs, may be responsible for the drop in sales.
"The majority of my friends buy their CDs online," said Jon Barsook, a student at the University of Southern
California. "If the study says the music stores near the colleges have seen a drop in sales, that doesn't mean
that college students are not buying records."
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of TI-85's!
:)
There's a difference between me deep linking to your public site, and me deep linking to a URL intended for paying customers that I found. While it's possibly legal since they aren't taking much of a stance to protect it (being that it's easy to avoid the login by using the partners link), that doesn't make it any less right if their intent is for people to pay for this service.
did Slashdot make an arrangement with the NYT to link directly to partner articles? If not, I'd hate to see them basically stealing this service, I assume this is something NYT charges companies for (assumed due to the partners URL).. nothing is free, either choke up your user data (real or fake), or Slashdot should pay for it.. stealing information is wrong, regardless of what the 'information wants to be free' people on Slashdot say. It's their information, and they should be able to restrict it and charge what they want for it.
-1 flamebait.
We had to register some domains for a client, I decided to save the $ by doing it through Joker. No problems at all, saved a lot of $, boss appeared happy.
.. "
:\
Then a few days ago my boss lets me know he registered a bunch more domain names. I ask what registrar he used. He tells me NSI.
Me: "WHY? They charge $70!"
Boss: "But they are an AMERICAN company! I trust them! Not some silly kid web site in Europe
*sigh*
Any ideas on what I can do? Persuading him to let me transfer a bunch of domains isn't going to be an easy task, especially from grand ol' american NSI.
especially if I read it on Slashdot!
You'd think if it were true, other papers would be running this as well, because it IS a good/interesting story. hrm.
Yeah, damn the Teutons and that cheap TC rush technique they use..
:)
My apologies John.. I had a bit of a knee-jerk reaction I guess. It just infuriates me to see some of the inaccurate reporting in the Post (not from you, from other reporters).. and how key issues are missed or just glossed over. I have 2 friends who work in the tech section at the post, and they basically say you are one of the two columnists with a clue there.. so props to you, and my apologies again.
Washington Post:
The site is, in no small part, an online clubhouse for Microsoft haters; news items about the firm are accompanied by a small picture of Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates as a Borg, one of the human-machine chimeras from "Star Trek: The Next Generation" who say, "Resistance is futile -- you will be assimilated."
The Washington Post makes me sick with their pro-MS slant to everything, and their tech writers in their business section are -horrible-. Fast forward is *occasionally* worth reading, but that's it. Thank god they really only run tech stuff once a week..
That got me to thinking this morning as I bought my paper.. wouldn't it be cool to have a print version of what's going on/what had happened in the web the previous day? I would certainly plunk down a quarter to get some slashdot headlines, the register headlines, some article blurbs, security stuff, recent security holes, penny-arcade, sluggy, and friend bear on the comics page, some 20 page editorials by Jon Katz :)..
I find print format a lot more friendly to read for longer periods, and it's nice to have something to read on the metro (not all of us have laptops, and even if I did, the paper is a more efficent way of reading all this I think.)
Just what I want to wake up to the morning, is coming downstairs, walking into my living room, and see a ream of paper all over my living room floor because some hax0r hacked into my TV set and printed '3y3 0wN3d j00r 14m3 hP pR1n43r' in banner size font 1000 times.
Installing and updating a software program module component. A determination is made whether the current date is on or after a date stored in a registry key on a computer.
Last I checked, there's no registry keys on Linux (sorry, GNU/Linux :) ) .. depends how technical they want to get with it, I suppose.
MS isn't stupid though.. they have to want to patent this for a reason.. even though it appears prior use by linux would make this null and void if they attempt to go after them.
you'd think this would have no chance.. but with the state of the patent office today.. ..
:(
Imagine the uproar if Microsoft tried to enforce this patent on Debian and other distributions.. oh my..
God, I have a sinking feeling this will actually get through too. What a shame.
Might be a dumb question, but I seriously don't know.. I've just gotten into using PHP w/ MySQL, but am curious as to how PHP interfaces with PostGres.. a search on google proved unhelpful, as nearly everything I turned up was in a foreign language.
Does anyone out there know of any websites that cover this topic better? A search for postgres on php.net turns up nothing.
That looks like a code from Mike Tyson's Punch Out!..
:)
I didn't remember where it took you exactly, I cheated on that using Google (apparently it takes you to Super Macho Man).. but I DID remember it was from punch out.
Hhahahah.. Doc riding that bike... HAHAHAHAH
it would probably be a lot harder to hide my time slacking off visiting CNN, Washington Post, etc, if I'm holding up this big newspaper in front of my monitor. :(
What I believe you want is this, the Kernel HOW-TO.
And yes, Commander Taco is a malevolent dictator.. refused to post a submission of mine on the DMCA rally that happened 2 days ago.
Of course, since sites like Slashdot apparently don't find this worthy of the front page, many people had NO idea it happened, or if it even happened at all, including myself. Remember last time when there was a DMCA protest, Slashdot gave like 2 days notice? I sent this in -weeks- in advance, and Slashdot posts nothing. What's up with that?
Anyway, off my soapbox, and happy kernel'ing.
You care about something you have no control over, and is pointless to moan about. ZDNet isn't going to stop posting FUD and unresearched stories, slashdot effect or not. They get plenty of banner views from other sources than slashdot, I'm sure.
And so what if they drive up hits and revenue? Is this directly harming you? Why does this bother you so much to the point where you waste time posting about it on Slashdot?
I just don't see why people get in such a fit when they realize companies exist to make money. You know full-well they are going to do things to drive up hits and ad revenue. This should not be such a shock to people here.
I don't see it really as an issue of right or wrong. They are entitled to post whatever they want, and whether it's right or wrong will be determined by how many eyeballs they get on their banners. And you know what? So far, they're right.