Just because the guy posted to the Yahoo message board before posting to Slashdot doesn't mean he's a PR flack, or that this is astroturfing.
Correct: it means he's a day-trader trying to get a one-day bounce on the stock by hyping one of the company's press releases on a widely read "news" site with notoriously lax editorial standards.
Blatant astroturfing: this article is hyping a completely unproven treatment, and was written by an employee of the company. This is news? Every biotech company has a "promising" anti-cancer treatment in development.
I'm not generally one for conspiracy theories, but it's not unreasonable to conclude at this point that Disney licensed the Miyazaki corpus not to bring it to the American public, but to ensure that most of the American public is never exposed to it.
Ah, now we enter the bizarro universe, wherein Disney doing theatrical releases of Ghibli films (and not incidentally, spending MILLIONS OF DOLLARS on re-dubbing, striking new prints and putting together DVDs) is, somehow, a conspiracy to prevent people from seeing the films.
Meanwhile, back on planet earth, the number of companies releasing Ghibli films into any theaters in the USA (other than speciality engagements specifically for fans) other than Disney and prior to Disney is...what? Could it be? ZERO! Oddly enough, that is also the exact same number of companies that did excellent and legitimate DVD releases of the Ghibli back-catalogue prior to the Disney deal. And last I checked, any positive integer was axiomatically greater than zero.
Fox held the American distribution rights to Totoro for the better part of a decade, and all we got out of it was a crappy VHS dub and a feature-free DVD shovelware release. But Disney is conspiring to hide Ghibli's films from the American public. Sure.
Damn near every set of eyes that saw Mononoke and Spirited Away in their Disney release is one that would not have seen those movies if Disney hadn't released them here. Yeah, it sucks that they weren't put into general release, but Disney is a business, not a charity. There's a long history of foreign films not making any money in this country, and they had every reason to be leery of the project. They did it anyway: bully for them. They made money on it; hopefully well see the next one on more screens as a result.
1. The cd/dvd drive in any mac ever is a bog-standard one. (Usually a Sony SCSI CD-ROM prior to about 1996; usually a Pioneer IDE DVD-R drive these days.) There's an eject pin just like on any other drive. The little cosmetic door on the G4 cases covers it, but that is designed to manually fold down in case of a stuck disk emergency.
2. Holding down the mouse button during boot ejects any removable media in a Mac. This has been true since, I'm pretty sure, the Mac Plus, circa 1985.
Last I checked, every last line of code in RHEL 3.0 was GPLed, and the SRPMs are downloadable from redhat.com.
Don't want to pay RedHat's support prices? Download the SRPMs, compile them, roll your own distro. (CheapBytes or someone like them will inevitably do this for you, for a nominal cost.) Or hell, just borrow the ISO from someone with a RHEL license and make a copy: it's quite legal.
If you really are running a webhosting business, stop bitching and start calling your redhat salesrep. There's these things called "volume discounts" that have been all the vogue since, ah, the industrial revolution.
Bernstein is a loon. No one can use the software he writes because of his license, which specifies you can't change it and have to keep the binaries in/var.
In addition to being an anonymous coward, you're a fucking idiot who apparently can't read.
Bernstein's "license" (it's actually an explicit disavowal of a "license" and a statement of your existing rights under copyright law, but whatever) lets you do any damn thing you want with his software under your own auspices: you can install it in/usr/local/shut/the/hell/up/ac/idiots, you can rewrite components in C# and Visual Basic.
What you can't do is redistribute a version of it with your changes pre-built in. This is annoying, but far from the end of the world: if your changes are actually useful, publish the patch. Hundreds of people do.
And did you read that link in your post ? The guy has no idea how to do what he wants.
It's a proposal. Criticising a proposal for not being an implementation is rather missing the point.
The lack of a working SMS client is not a problem with the Treo 600 itslef. The problem is with the Sprint PCS Vision network, and this is merely the latest chapter in a long, sordid history of Sprint doing their damndest to prevent their customers from interoperating with the rest of the world.
The GSM (TMobile, AT&T, Cingular) version of the Treo 600 will have working SMS out of the box, much as the GSM Treo 270 did.
While god knows I'm the first to agree with the general sentiment that the slashdot editors are sucking the glass dick (see my sig, etc), are you seriously maintaining that the release of a white paper (ie: "We plan for our next generation of computers to be EVEN FASTER, woo!") detailing a series of products with no ship dates attached is much more important than a product that has actually shipped?
The Efficeon (god, what an awful name) and the new Eden are both real products that I can now order in batches of 1 or more. The press release you cite is just Sun saying -- again -- that this time, really for sure uh huh they've whipped the UltraSparc's performance issues...in the next version...real soon now.
... and you seriously believe they can pull this off twice?
Short form: yes.
These sorts of propaganda initiatives are not aimed at geeks. They're aimed at prima-donna C*Os who want to believe that they're buying into a company with a brilliant Vision Of The Future. As long as the people who sign the checks believe that not committing wholeheartedly to the Microsoft Way involves an unacceptably high risk of being locked out of The Future, they'll keep demanding that their IT drones implement it.
What ever happened to Copland? Or Rhapsody? Or object-oriented computing like OpenDoc?
Copland sucked down several dozens of millions of dollars and several years worth of development time at Apple, only to produce one completely unusable developer preview release at WWDC. Shortly afterward, Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock took over Apple, and pretty much their first official act was to kill Copland development and go searching for a replacement. Most people figured at the time that it was gonna be BeOS, but Steve Jobs came a-knockin, and the rest is history.
OpenDoc lingered on a bit past that point; I believe it wasn't until Steve Jobs assumed his position as iCEO that it was officially killed. Interesting technology, but too hard to explain to the punters, and nobody outside Apple was really interested in it. Oh well.
Rhapsody was the code-name for the first Apple-branded release of a NeXT-based OS. It shipped as "MacOS X Server 1.0", and had at least...four or five happy customers. During Rhapsody's development and testing cycle, folks at Apple realized that just slapping a MacOS-style graphical theme on top of NeXTStep wasn't going to make anyone happy, so they returned to the drawing board and MacOS X as we know it was born.
I'm certain that Microsoft does keep skunkworks projects like.NET-on-linux going just as backup plans, but way way way too much of their market value is derived from their soup-to-nuts control of the entire PC operating environment. I can't see them giving that up except at gunpoint.
Everything old is new again. Remember a few years back, when OS/2 was still considered a semi-legitimate contender, Apple's market share was greater than a single digit, and most IT hands were pretty unconvinced that migrating from Netware to NT was worth the time, money or aggravation? Against what should have been an overwhelming competitive landscape, and armed only with what was in retrospect a dismal product (NT4), MS managed to convince IT managers everywhere that they were the Future of Computing as We Know It. Why? Well, there was this thing called "Cairo", and it was gonna ship Real Soon Now, and it was going to be an all-object-oriented thingamabob that would shine your shoes and make your teeth whiter. The industry bought it, hook line and sinker, and after NT4 had trounced OS/2 and Netware soundly, Cairo evaporated into the same neverland that Apple's Copland project did.
Flash forward to now: Apple is regaining a bit of strength on the desktop, Linux is seriously eating into their server revenue, and while Windows Server 2003 is itself a solid (if unexciting) product, the greater gestalt of the Windows Infrastructure is looking more and more like a bug-ridden, unmaintainable mess. But wait, we've got this really cool technology just around the corner, it's called Longhorn and it'll get your whites whiter, you're gonna love it!
Not really. Apple bought out PowerComputing in order to take a competitor with multiple superior products and shut them down.
Palm bought out Handspring in order to take a competitor with one single, shining superior product, and make that product theirs, and then sell lots and lots and lots of them.:)
Cruise over to your favorite auction site, and buy a used HP LaserJet 5 or earlier, usually for less than a hundred dollars. Then, if necessary, buy a $30 self-repair kit to replace the paper pick-up rollers, which have probably rotted away at this point. Buy a new toner cartridge at Staples for $40, and you will never even have to THINK about your printer again.
The old HPs are built like tanks: given occasional replacement of the very few degradable bits, and as long as someone keeps making toner carts for them, I'm expecting my LJ IIIp to last well into the next decade.
The above post was not "flamebait." It was, depending on your point of view, either "funny" or "offtopic." Please step AWAY from the crack pipe. Thank you.
-Remember Jesus loves you, everyone else thinks your an idiot-
Normally I try to avoid pointing out spelling/usage errors, but in the context of the above signature, it's a little ironic that you used "your" when you should have used "you're".
Slashdot Mirror
Nice catch!
Just because the guy posted to the Yahoo message board before posting to Slashdot doesn't mean he's a PR flack, or that this is astroturfing.
Correct: it means he's a day-trader trying to get a one-day bounce on the stock by hyping one of the company's press releases on a widely read "news" site with notoriously lax editorial standards.
Which is, um, worse.
Blatant astroturfing: this article is hyping a completely unproven treatment, and was written by an employee of the company. This is news? Every biotech company has a "promising" anti-cancer treatment in development.
I'm not generally one for conspiracy theories, but it's not unreasonable to conclude at this point that Disney licensed the Miyazaki corpus not to bring it to the American public, but to ensure that most of the American public is never exposed to it.
Ah, now we enter the bizarro universe, wherein Disney doing theatrical releases of Ghibli films (and not incidentally, spending MILLIONS OF DOLLARS on re-dubbing, striking new prints and putting together DVDs) is, somehow, a conspiracy to prevent people from seeing the films.
Meanwhile, back on planet earth, the number of companies releasing Ghibli films into any theaters in the USA (other than speciality engagements specifically for fans) other than Disney and prior to Disney is...what? Could it be? ZERO! Oddly enough, that is also the exact same number of companies that did excellent and legitimate DVD releases of the Ghibli back-catalogue prior to the Disney deal. And last I checked, any positive integer was axiomatically greater than zero.
Fox held the American distribution rights to Totoro for the better part of a decade, and all we got out of it was a crappy VHS dub and a feature-free DVD shovelware release. But Disney is conspiring to hide Ghibli's films from the American public. Sure.
Damn near every set of eyes that saw Mononoke and Spirited Away in their Disney release is one that would not have seen those movies if Disney hadn't released them here. Yeah, it sucks that they weren't put into general release, but Disney is a business, not a charity. There's a long history of foreign films not making any money in this country, and they had every reason to be leery of the project. They did it anyway: bully for them. They made money on it; hopefully well see the next one on more screens as a result.
Some people really can't take yes for an answer.
I wonder if I'm the only person on the planet who liked Alien Resurrection.
Yes. And based on that claim, I'm not sure you actually exist. It's axiomatic that no one liked Alien Resurrection.
Wrong and wrong.
1. The cd/dvd drive in any mac ever is a bog-standard one. (Usually a Sony SCSI CD-ROM prior to about 1996; usually a Pioneer IDE DVD-R drive these days.) There's an eject pin just like on any other drive. The little cosmetic door on the G4 cases covers it, but that is designed to manually fold down in case of a stuck disk emergency.
2. Holding down the mouse button during boot ejects any removable media in a Mac. This has been true since, I'm pretty sure, the Mac Plus, circa 1985.
Last I checked, every last line of code in RHEL 3.0 was GPLed, and the SRPMs are downloadable from redhat.com.
Don't want to pay RedHat's support prices? Download the SRPMs, compile them, roll your own distro. (CheapBytes or someone like them will inevitably do this for you, for a nominal cost.) Or hell, just borrow the ISO from someone with a RHEL license and make a copy: it's quite legal.
If you really are running a webhosting business, stop bitching and start calling your redhat salesrep. There's these things called "volume discounts" that have been all the vogue since, ah, the industrial revolution.
Also AAC > OGG.
Wrong.
(Link is to an english summary; original german article is here.
Bernstein is a loon. No one can use the software he writes because of his license, which specifies you can't change it and have to keep the binaries in /var.
/usr/local/shut/the/hell/up/ac/idiots, you can rewrite components in C# and Visual Basic.
In addition to being an anonymous coward, you're a fucking idiot who apparently can't read.
Bernstein's "license" (it's actually an explicit disavowal of a "license" and a statement of your existing rights under copyright law, but whatever) lets you do any damn thing you want with his software under your own auspices: you can install it in
What you can't do is redistribute a version of it with your changes pre-built in. This is annoying, but far from the end of the world: if your changes are actually useful, publish the patch. Hundreds of people do.
And did you read that link in your post ? The guy has no idea how to do what he wants.
It's a proposal. Criticising a proposal for not being an implementation is rather missing the point.
SMTP email was nice while it lasted.
Semaphore, anyone? Smoke signals?
The lack of a working SMS client is not a problem with the Treo 600 itslef. The problem is with the Sprint PCS Vision network, and this is merely the latest chapter in a long, sordid history of Sprint doing their damndest to prevent their customers from interoperating with the rest of the world.
The GSM (TMobile, AT&T, Cingular) version of the Treo 600 will have working SMS out of the box, much as the GSM Treo 270 did.
While god knows I'm the first to agree with the general sentiment that the slashdot editors are sucking the glass dick (see my sig, etc), are you seriously maintaining that the release of a white paper (ie: "We plan for our next generation of computers to be EVEN FASTER, woo!") detailing a series of products with no ship dates attached is much more important than a product that has actually shipped?
The Efficeon (god, what an awful name) and the new Eden are both real products that I can now order in batches of 1 or more. The press release you cite is just Sun saying -- again -- that this time, really for sure uh huh they've whipped the UltraSparc's performance issues...in the next version...real soon now.
... and you seriously believe they can pull this off twice?
Short form: yes.
These sorts of propaganda initiatives are not aimed at geeks. They're aimed at prima-donna C*Os who want to believe that they're buying into a company with a brilliant Vision Of The Future. As long as the people who sign the checks believe that not committing wholeheartedly to the Microsoft Way involves an unacceptably high risk of being locked out of The Future, they'll keep demanding that their IT drones implement it.
What ever happened to Copland? Or Rhapsody? Or object-oriented computing like OpenDoc?
.NET-on-linux going just as backup plans, but way way way too much of their market value is derived from their soup-to-nuts control of the entire PC operating environment. I can't see them giving that up except at gunpoint.
Copland sucked down several dozens of millions of dollars and several years worth of development time at Apple, only to produce one completely unusable developer preview release at WWDC. Shortly afterward, Gil Amelio and Ellen Hancock took over Apple, and pretty much their first official act was to kill Copland development and go searching for a replacement. Most people figured at the time that it was gonna be BeOS, but Steve Jobs came a-knockin, and the rest is history.
OpenDoc lingered on a bit past that point; I believe it wasn't until Steve Jobs assumed his position as iCEO that it was officially killed. Interesting technology, but too hard to explain to the punters, and nobody outside Apple was really interested in it. Oh well.
Rhapsody was the code-name for the first Apple-branded release of a NeXT-based OS. It shipped as "MacOS X Server 1.0", and had at least...four or five happy customers. During Rhapsody's development and testing cycle, folks at Apple realized that just slapping a MacOS-style graphical theme on top of NeXTStep wasn't going to make anyone happy, so they returned to the drawing board and MacOS X as we know it was born.
I'm certain that Microsoft does keep skunkworks projects like
Everything old is new again. Remember a few years back, when OS/2 was still considered a semi-legitimate contender, Apple's market share was greater than a single digit, and most IT hands were pretty unconvinced that migrating from Netware to NT was worth the time, money or aggravation? Against what should have been an overwhelming competitive landscape, and armed only with what was in retrospect a dismal product (NT4), MS managed to convince IT managers everywhere that they were the Future of Computing as We Know It. Why? Well, there was this thing called "Cairo", and it was gonna ship Real Soon Now, and it was going to be an all-object-oriented thingamabob that would shine your shoes and make your teeth whiter. The industry bought it, hook line and sinker, and after NT4 had trounced OS/2 and Netware soundly, Cairo evaporated into the same neverland that Apple's Copland project did.
Flash forward to now: Apple is regaining a bit of strength on the desktop, Linux is seriously eating into their server revenue, and while Windows Server 2003 is itself a solid (if unexciting) product, the greater gestalt of the Windows Infrastructure is looking more and more like a bug-ridden, unmaintainable mess. But wait, we've got this really cool technology just around the corner, it's called Longhorn and it'll get your whites whiter, you're gonna love it!
The more things change...
Not really. Apple bought out PowerComputing in order to take a competitor with multiple superior products and shut them down.
:)
Palm bought out Handspring in order to take a competitor with one single, shining superior product, and make that product theirs, and then sell lots and lots and lots of them.
Cruise over to your favorite auction site, and buy a used HP LaserJet 5 or earlier, usually for less than a hundred dollars. Then, if necessary, buy a $30 self-repair kit to replace the paper pick-up rollers, which have probably rotted away at this point. Buy a new toner cartridge at Staples for $40, and you will never even have to THINK about your printer again.
The old HPs are built like tanks: given occasional replacement of the very few degradable bits, and as long as someone keeps making toner carts for them, I'm expecting my LJ IIIp to last well into the next decade.
Hence we weren't subjected to a whole lot more than mere rhetoric from the end of Valenti's digestive system incapable of facial expression.
Yeah, but I wonder: what does his ass have to say about it?
Seriously, that man is shellaced.
The above post was not "flamebait." It was, depending on your point of view, either "funny" or "offtopic." Please step AWAY from the crack pipe. Thank you.
-Remember Jesus loves you, everyone else thinks your an idiot-
Normally I try to avoid pointing out spelling/usage errors, but in the context of the above signature, it's a little ironic that you used "your" when you should have used "you're".
It's an old, classic New Yorker magazine cartoon, by Sidney Harris. You can see it here.
...powered by SURGE!
I so needed some 19-year-old, unemployed slashdotter telling me that good business decisions come from the heart.
Oh wait, no, I didn't.
I liked this troll better when it was called "BSD is dying."
Moderators: this is auto-posted crap that gets appended to EVERY gnome article. Search and destroy.
I was the person being indirectly slammed in that post, and I thought that it was funny. Lighten up, eh?