It's great to see a big, AOL subsidiary, that as far as I know has never shown a big interest in producing GPLed software now jumping in and producing something like this.
But! The concern I have is that the analysis I've seen of the Napster protocol shows that it's a very poorly designed protocol. I wonder if there's any chance gnutella will be able to either support different protocols -- the old Napster protocol and a new better designed one, or help redesign the current protocol.
Anybody know a good alternative protocol that could be used instead? Anybody care to design one? Does someone want to let these guys know this is a priority?
For gods sake here, all it is is a couple of naked bodies having sex, who cares! Kids can undress and look at themselves too ya know. These puritan mores in our society sicken me.
I'm no fan of the US puritan society, and think that most censorship goes way too far. However not all web pages are "a couple of naked bodies having sex". These days on the Internet you can find s&m, necrophelia, pedophelia, beastiality, rape, etc. "Playboy" might not scar a kid for life, but there are sites out there that I would guess aren't healthy for young minds.
I was on the point of buying one of these, but while I was thinking about it and taking a shower I came up with a progression in mind...
Some geek buys one of these devices
That geek hacks the hardware and figures out how to install Linux on the machine
The geek shares his knowledge of how to do it with others over the internet
Someone submits the site to Slashdot's editors and it gets posted on the main page
Slashdot readers see the story and see that they can get a cool Linux box for $99
Slashdot users int the thousands go out and buy this device
The company sells thousands of these devices at a loss
The company assumes they will recover this loss when these thousands of people start paying for their internet service
These users don't sign up for the internet service and the company doesn't make their money back
The company goes belly-up, blaming malicious Linux hackers for destroying their business (ironically using the right term)
Now unless you're violating a license agreement by not using their internet service you aren't doing anything illegal by turning this machine into a Linux box. Sure, it seems very stupid to me that the company would sell these machines at what can only be a loss assuming they would make up their loss with the internet service -- but that's not the point here.
Whether or not the people buying this machine are doing anything wrong, think of the bad publicity this thing could cause, not to mention the potential moral guilt of destroying a dumb company. It would be different if this company were selling millions of units and only a small handfull of people hacked it and installed Linux, but Slashdot is a big site now, and our "Slashdot Effect" can do more than just take down a small web server.
I wholeheartedly agree. I'm a very technical user, but installing things in Linux, even when using RPMs is still harder than installing DOS or Windows programs.
DOS was easy because all you had to do is put the files on your hard drive in some random folder and they worked. Windows generally had some kind of install program that did the work for you. Unfortunately windows made removing software you installed a real pain sometimes, but at least you could get it there.
With its logical hierarchical filesystem, and a standard way (actually a few different "standard" ways) of organizing things, Linux should be an easy platform to install/remove software for.
But it's not. Certain packages require other packages. They require certain libraries. They are distributed in different ways: tarballs, RPM,.deb, whatever. Then, once they're installed, there's the problem of configuration.
When a typical Windows app is installed, if it needs to be configured it will force the user to configure it either as part of the installation process or as something run the first time the program is started. With Linux software, often you have to get out your fave text editor and mess around with a config file, often written in some obscure way, until the program is configured however you like.
While this method does often ensure much more customizability than you get in a Windows app, the fact things don't work "out of the box" gets pretty annoying.
I know Netscape wasn't the first company to release buggy software and then to release a patch for it. What I'm saying is that Netscape was the first major company to distribute the majority of its product over the Internet, and because of that the first to let some really buggy stuff out the door because they knew they could just put tomorrow's build up on the FTP server.
Someone else may have started the process but Netscape did the whole Embrace and Extend thing.
It's always great to hear that something you *really* want but can't have (yet) is really not that good anyhow!
I wonder if they missed this in their beta testing, and if so how... and if not, why they decided to ship anyhow? Normally the console market has been able to avoid the "release buggy stuff and patch it" mentality that Netscape started. Oh well, I just hope they fix all the bugs in time for the North American launch.
As the other poster who replied said, you're making assumptions: "The Net is nothing but the Web, and the Web is nothing but companies."
A proper URN system will do this properly. Maybe for US people typing in "McDonalds" alone will find the fast food chain, but maybe in the UK it will prompt so you can choose the family group (clan?) instead. A proper system will have to avoid simply creating another monopoly space where only big businesses show up.
DNS names were never meant to be seen by the general public. They were never really meant to be seen by anyone, but the process of creating a URL system over a URL system took too long and so people advertise domain names.
What we need to do is simple:
Settle on a URN system. Sure, most of the current proposals are imperfect but they're hella-better than what we have now
Incorporate using this new URN system into the new generation of web browsers, FTP clients, etc.
Hide true URLs and domain names so they only show up in logs, debugging info, etc.
Currently the "location" field in a web browser is only vaguely useful. It's a good place to type in the web site URL when you know it, and it's a quick way to verify what domain/file you're on. But what about when it's what it is in mine right now:
I, a trained geek who likes to know these obscure things don't need to see that, and the average joe definitely doesn't need to see it. What if that were replaced by a set of fields that gave me my location in some kind of logical hierarchy? "Language: English, Site Type: Online Forum, Site Name: Slashdot, Site Section: Article Comment Posting"
That (from what I understand) is that they're trying to allow with URNs.
That would also mean that when you're trying to reach McDonalds Clothing you fill in McDonalds in one box, Clothing in another, and then you're done. No accidental exposure to grease-filled nutrition free "sandwiches".
If that were done it wouldn't matter who owns mcdonalds.com or ford.com. It wouldn't matter that slashdot has a.org domain and that openssh.org isn't the main OpenSSH web site.
Am I dreaming? I don't think so... All we need is a push to get rid of browsers displaying URLs and we're halfway there.
I don't know about this plugin specifically -- but the problem I've found with most automated RPM tools is that they make no provision for Proxies. I have to use one and so dealing with RPMs is a big problem for me.
I don't know how this relates, but I recently heard that somewhere in the world recently a judge ruled that you can't agree to get injured.
I'm sketchy on the details but it went something like this: Two guys in a bar agreed to go outside and fight. One guy got pretty badly injured in the fight. A case resulted, went to court, and the judge said that although they agreed to fight, and that the nature of a fight is for people to hurt eachother, you can't agree to get injured.
I don't really see the point of 5GB in a portable player. If I can get a few hours of music in a player I'm happy. To me, 5GB in an MP3 player is like having a car that can do 400 miles per hour. I'll never really get to use that speed so why pay extra for it?
My wishlist for an MP3 player is:
64MB upgradable to maybe 128 with a SmartMedia or similar card
No SDMI handcuffs
The ability to upload/download files, so I can not only use this to listen to music but to move files around too.
USB connection. Not so much for the speed but for the convenience.
Decent battery life, maybe even something that can be recharged by the USB cable.
Decent "portable audio device" features. Good sound, small form factor, easy to use buttons, but a way to disable them so when I'm working out I don't hit them accidentally, random play, some equalizer type control, etc.
Did I miss anything? What are you guys looking for in an MP3 player? Does such a device exist? I'm eager to ditch my clunky portable CD player. It's a great CD player but has crummy battery life and is really bulky.
My contacts at Microsoft knew that through the 1990s I'd written warnings about the company's growing monopoly power. So why did I want to work there? Because Microsoft had eliminated the competition. If you want to affect the program people use for writing, you have to deal with Word.
To me that's just a huge cop-out. Maybe you can't expect the guy to know about the Open Source community and how to get involved here. But he must have heard of WordPerfect. If he truly felt strongly that Microsoft was a monopoly and he didn't like them, why did he decide to go work for them?
He makes it seem that the only way he can help people us a better tool for writing is to become a Microsoft contractor. Huh?? Obviously if he's just trying to make the world a better place for writers he would have just told everyone all the features he'd like to see in a word processor. That way Corel could put them in WordPerfect, Microsoft could put them in Word, and Open Source developers could put them in anything they chose.
So I guess it's clear he didn't just want to improve word processors but that he wanted to make money. He figured making his own word processor to compete against Microsoft wasn't an option. The next money-making alternative was to try to sell his ideas. I guess he then decided that Microsoft had deeper pockets than Corel, so he tried to sell his idea to them.
I don't blame him for wanting to make money off his ideas. I don't even blame him for selling his ideas to Microsoft to get that money. I do, however, blame him for pretending that he went with Microsoft because he had no other options.
I think Corel is really committed to Linux and this isn't just a publicity thing. They really hate MS over there, as would anyone who has tried to compete with MS on a core product. They might be pretty clueless when it comes to the GPL, but give them a chance.
If they become a good member of the Linux community think of what they have to offer. Graphics knowledge from Corel PhotoPaint and Corel Draw. A very good word processing program (I maintain anything with "reveal codes" has to be superior to Word). Good IDEs from Inprise/Borland. They even have some really good hardware knowledge. Remember they're the ones originally behind the Netwinder
I know this is somewhat offtopic, but as an Ottawa resident I'm just hoping that a local company can inspire a little fear in Microsoft and hope we can help them do it instead of just flaming them for their errors.
nick collide impersonation trick... How fun. Too bad he didn't ride a net split and take ops on the channel. *Grin*
The sad thing is that this might scare CNN away from using something standard and open like IRC and into using some messed up AOL chat program. Oh well... Any ideas how we can help them prevent this from happening again?
I know why they'd have credit cards online. How do you reconcile these three requirements:
The site must be easy to use, and you want people to come back, so you want them to have their profiles stored and not require them to enter their credit cards each time.
The web server (or applications server as the case may be) needs to know their credit card number so it can arrange payment for the order.
The site must be secure so that nobody can get at people's personal info, esp. credit cards.
I was recently hit with this problem... and didn't find a solution that was secure enough, so we're ditching 2 and doing that seperately.
Actually, the best real analogy I've found to watching a DVD in linux is buying a Slim Jim to get into your own car because you locked your keys inside.
You're using a tool that is legal for a legal purpose -- the only thing is that the tool also makes it much easier for people to illegally break into cars. Thus the tool is seen as an instrument for criminals and part of that rubs off on you.
Overall this is an incredibly feeble attempt at spreading FUD. I'd like to challenge Microsoft to make their FUD a little more believable.
Their "proof" that Windows offers higher reliability is:
Sun servers fave failed.
Um... ok. Sun never claimed their servers never fail, just that they're more reliable than Windows machines.
Some analysts recommend against Sun in environments that require high availability.
Well yeah, mainframes are often more appropriate than Unix servers. How often do objective analysts recommend Windows systems over Sun systems?
EBay's back-end Sun servers both failed once, but it's windows front-end didn't.
This is equivalent to saying "my brother crashed his Ford truck one day, but his wife's Honda didn't have an accident that day, so Hondas are more reliable."
Vendors offer windows availability guarantees.
This is only meaningful if nobody is willing to offer availability guarantees for Sun platforms. I have trouble believing that is the case.
The second claim is actually a decent FUD job. If Sun is actually claiming that they're the leading provider of Internet technology (a very obscure claim) obviously there are areas where they don't dominate.
I expect more from the people who brought us the Mindcraft fiasco! I mean, c'mon, that one involved specially picking specific areas where Linux was lacking, fine tuning Windows and not Linux, etc. This is pathetic compared to that work of art. This one is about as sophisticated as a knock-knock joke. C'mon Microsoft, you can do better, I know it!
(Oh, and if you can't live up to your own hype, at least live up to your promise to update the site. It says "come back tomorrow" but the last update was 3 days ago. Don't make me wait for my daily dose of FUD!)
Sure, that's fair, and I'm glad to see this post is being moderated up. On the other hand:
More than 27,000 "BugBug" comments. These are usually notes to developers to make something work better or more efficiently. According to Microsoft, they tend to represent "unfinished work" or "long-forgotten problems."
As a coder, I'm not going to go liberally sprinkling my code with "BugBug" comments. That's reserved for something somewhat serious and important. Maybe Microsoft policy is different however. Still, 27,000 things Microsoft's coders think is important enough to mark as a bug, yet Microsoft feels the product is ready for release?? Wow!
"The public message boards of Slashdot tend to be populated by teenagers who resent the fact that I'm not a computer geek. But I think it is healthy for me to be challenged. This is what keeps you from being a
New York Times op-ed page gasbag."
That sure seems to be condescending way to look at the community that is nice enough to provide you with a forum to post your articles. Not to mention a condescending way to look at the New York Times.
I think the problem most people have is with "the frequency with which [you serve] as spokesman for the growing number of people who work and live online". In particular, the frequency with which you claim to represent and understand geeks, while being about as far from a real geek as possible. As you should know, being one who uses the term so frequently, being a geek is about more than just what you know about computers. Being a geek is about interest in technology, wanting to know how things work. Being able to see the beauty in a technical fix... But not only are you not technically sophisticated, you don't seem interested in these things. How can you claim to represent or understand geeks?
And btw, I don't resent you (although you at turns bore, annoy me and occasionally interest me), and I'm certainly no longer a teenager.
Programmers are an especially tough audience, as precision means a lot to them, and they aren (
superscript 1) t forgiving of sloppiness or mistakes
Yep, including mistakes using non-ASCII editors to post ASCII text.
As far as I know editors do three different types of things for writers:
They check the technical details (formatting, punctuation, spelling)
They edit to keep the content the same but make it more clear and more succinct
They talk over the content with the writer to suggest alternatives, to provide feedback so the writer can change the content if he/she wants
Given that you've published real books, I think your editor deserves a hearty thanks. While you often do have interesting things to say, I get the impression your editor does a lot of work before your books hit the presses.
Now you mention that Rob Jeff and Robin are great editors -- I dunno -- I haven't seen too much editing on their part, especially of the first type. They don't seem to catch the non ASCII characters, the run-on sentences, or any of the other mistakes. But then again, they're not really editors... nobody who spels az bad az rob kan be a reel editur.
You say Slashdot is hiring real editors? GREAT! I might actually read everything you write instead of skimming it if someone does a good job of editing it first.
And btw, using as a crutch that you "barely got through high school and didn't finish college" won't cut it. If you're going to call yourself a professional writer, you should expect to be treated as a professional writer. As a professional coder, any code I put out for public consumption will be decent code, even if I'm doing it for free. I'm not going to write uncommented spaghetti code that won't compile and then make the excuse that "I did it for free!"
This is sounding a bit like a flame, but that's not how I mean it. I find the subjects you choose for your articles interesting, and they do tend to promote discussion on Slashdot. But I tend to find them a pain to read, mainly because the writing style seems almost like a "stream of conciousness". I can't bring myself to read it all the way through. If you made sure that they were edited before they would posted I think they would be much better received.
I think his films might lack a bit of variety in the race of the actors, but I think people went a bit far with the "silly voices" being linked to a certain race/ethnicity. I don't think that's a reason to believe that the studio would announce "we won't cast asians". C'mon, that was taking it a little far.
C'mon, don't be dumb. It means what it says, that they have no specific roles with those characters.
It sounds like the people creating that false story are trying to make it sound like the new Star Wars is going to be filled with stereotypes. This was as much an announcement that those rumours were untrue as it was an attempt to say "we don't have stereotypical characters". That was a concern with the first movie of course. The last thing LucasFilm is going to do in the wake of that is to refuse to cast people of a certain race.
I'm guessing you're just a troll looking for some attention. Go back and hide under the bridge.
Now formally called "Itanium" (like "titanium, but not quite -- perhaps for their next processor Intel will be inspired by "iron" and call it "Ron")
What's with the really bad names? "Itanium"? "Merced"? "Willamette"? I don't even really like "Althon", it's too easy to confuse with "Athalon", "Athlon", etc. I thought Pentium was a pretty good name, but since then Intel has come up with a good name (let alone a decent product).
On the other hand, there are some good processor names. "Alpha" (though it has some bad connotations), "StrongArm", "Sledgehammer"... I'm still undecided about "Crusoe". It's easy to remember but it's not much of a processor name...
Slashdot Mirror
It's great to see a big, AOL subsidiary, that as far as I know has never shown a big interest in producing GPLed software now jumping in and producing something like this.
But! The concern I have is that the analysis I've seen of the Napster protocol shows that it's a very poorly designed protocol. I wonder if there's any chance gnutella will be able to either support different protocols -- the old Napster protocol and a new better designed one, or help redesign the current protocol.
Anybody know a good alternative protocol that could be used instead? Anybody care to design one? Does someone want to let these guys know this is a priority?
I'm no fan of the US puritan society, and think that most censorship goes way too far. However not all web pages are "a couple of naked bodies having sex". These days on the Internet you can find s&m, necrophelia, pedophelia, beastiality, rape, etc. "Playboy" might not scar a kid for life, but there are sites out there that I would guess aren't healthy for young minds.
I was on the point of buying one of these, but while I was thinking about it and taking a shower I came up with a progression in mind...
Now unless you're violating a license agreement by not using their internet service you aren't doing anything illegal by turning this machine into a Linux box. Sure, it seems very stupid to me that the company would sell these machines at what can only be a loss assuming they would make up their loss with the internet service -- but that's not the point here.
Whether or not the people buying this machine are doing anything wrong, think of the bad publicity this thing could cause, not to mention the potential moral guilt of destroying a dumb company. It would be different if this company were selling millions of units and only a small handfull of people hacked it and installed Linux, but Slashdot is a big site now, and our "Slashdot Effect" can do more than just take down a small web server.
Something to think about anyhow...
I wholeheartedly agree. I'm a very technical user, but installing things in Linux, even when using RPMs is still harder than installing DOS or Windows programs.
DOS was easy because all you had to do is put the files on your hard drive in some random folder and they worked. Windows generally had some kind of install program that did the work for you. Unfortunately windows made removing software you installed a real pain sometimes, but at least you could get it there.
With its logical hierarchical filesystem, and a standard way (actually a few different "standard" ways) of organizing things, Linux should be an easy platform to install/remove software for.
But it's not. Certain packages require other packages. They require certain libraries. They are distributed in different ways: tarballs, RPM, .deb, whatever. Then, once they're installed, there's the problem of configuration.
When a typical Windows app is installed, if it needs to be configured it will force the user to configure it either as part of the installation process or as something run the first time the program is started. With Linux software, often you have to get out your fave text editor and mess around with a config file, often written in some obscure way, until the program is configured however you like.
While this method does often ensure much more customizability than you get in a Windows app, the fact things don't work "out of the box" gets pretty annoying.
Ok, ok, ok...
I know Netscape wasn't the first company to release buggy software and then to release a patch for it. What I'm saying is that Netscape was the first major company to distribute the majority of its product over the Internet, and because of that the first to let some really buggy stuff out the door because they knew they could just put tomorrow's build up on the FTP server.
Someone else may have started the process but Netscape did the whole Embrace and Extend thing.
It's always great to hear that something you *really* want but can't have (yet) is really not that good anyhow!
I wonder if they missed this in their beta testing, and if so how... and if not, why they decided to ship anyhow? Normally the console market has been able to avoid the "release buggy stuff and patch it" mentality that Netscape started. Oh well, I just hope they fix all the bugs in time for the North American launch.
As the other poster who replied said, you're making assumptions: "The Net is nothing but the Web, and the Web is nothing but companies."
A proper URN system will do this properly. Maybe for US people typing in "McDonalds" alone will find the fast food chain, but maybe in the UK it will prompt so you can choose the family group (clan?) instead. A proper system will have to avoid simply creating another monopoly space where only big businesses show up.
By the way, the IETF URN Working Group might help explain some of the issues.
And I'll say it again...
DNS names were never meant to be seen by the general public. They were never really meant to be seen by anyone, but the process of creating a URL system over a URL system took too long and so people advertise domain names.
What we need to do is simple:
Currently the "location" field in a web browser is only vaguely useful. It's a good place to type in the web site URL when you know it, and it's a quick way to verify what domain/file you're on. But what about when it's what it is in mine right now:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00%2F03%2F07%I, a trained geek who likes to know these obscure things don't need to see that, and the average joe definitely doesn't need to see it. What if that were replaced by a set of fields that gave me my location in some kind of logical hierarchy? "Language: English, Site Type: Online Forum, Site Name: Slashdot, Site Section: Article Comment Posting"
That (from what I understand) is that they're trying to allow with URNs.
That would also mean that when you're trying to reach McDonalds Clothing you fill in McDonalds in one box, Clothing in another, and then you're done. No accidental exposure to grease-filled nutrition free "sandwiches".
If that were done it wouldn't matter who owns mcdonalds.com or ford.com. It wouldn't matter that slashdot has a .org domain and that openssh.org isn't the main OpenSSH web site.
Am I dreaming? I don't think so... All we need is a push to get rid of browsers displaying URLs and we're halfway there.
I don't know about this plugin specifically -- but the problem I've found with most automated RPM tools is that they make no provision for Proxies. I have to use one and so dealing with RPMs is a big problem for me.
I don't know how this relates, but I recently heard that somewhere in the world recently a judge ruled that you can't agree to get injured.
I'm sketchy on the details but it went something like this: Two guys in a bar agreed to go outside and fight. One guy got pretty badly injured in the fight. A case resulted, went to court, and the judge said that although they agreed to fight, and that the nature of a fight is for people to hurt eachother, you can't agree to get injured.
Anyhow, I thought it was interesting.
I don't really see the point of 5GB in a portable player. If I can get a few hours of music in a player I'm happy. To me, 5GB in an MP3 player is like having a car that can do 400 miles per hour. I'll never really get to use that speed so why pay extra for it?
My wishlist for an MP3 player is:
Did I miss anything? What are you guys looking for in an MP3 player? Does such a device exist? I'm eager to ditch my clunky portable CD player. It's a great CD player but has crummy battery life and is really bulky.
To me that's just a huge cop-out. Maybe you can't expect the guy to know about the Open Source community and how to get involved here. But he must have heard of WordPerfect. If he truly felt strongly that Microsoft was a monopoly and he didn't like them, why did he decide to go work for them?
He makes it seem that the only way he can help people us a better tool for writing is to become a Microsoft contractor. Huh?? Obviously if he's just trying to make the world a better place for writers he would have just told everyone all the features he'd like to see in a word processor. That way Corel could put them in WordPerfect, Microsoft could put them in Word, and Open Source developers could put them in anything they chose.
So I guess it's clear he didn't just want to improve word processors but that he wanted to make money. He figured making his own word processor to compete against Microsoft wasn't an option. The next money-making alternative was to try to sell his ideas. I guess he then decided that Microsoft had deeper pockets than Corel, so he tried to sell his idea to them.
I don't blame him for wanting to make money off his ideas. I don't even blame him for selling his ideas to Microsoft to get that money. I do, however, blame him for pretending that he went with Microsoft because he had no other options.
Have you looked at AOL subscription numbers lately? Unfortunately most net users tend to be fairly unclueful... *sigh*
Corel just bought Inprise/Borland, and according to the recent interview with Slashdot Corel really seems to be going all-out for Linux.
I think Corel is really committed to Linux and this isn't just a publicity thing. They really hate MS over there, as would anyone who has tried to compete with MS on a core product. They might be pretty clueless when it comes to the GPL, but give them a chance.
If they become a good member of the Linux community think of what they have to offer. Graphics knowledge from Corel PhotoPaint and Corel Draw. A very good word processing program (I maintain anything with "reveal codes" has to be superior to Word). Good IDEs from Inprise/Borland. They even have some really good hardware knowledge. Remember they're the ones originally behind the Netwinder
I know this is somewhat offtopic, but as an Ottawa resident I'm just hoping that a local company can inspire a little fear in Microsoft and hope we can help them do it instead of just flaming them for their errors.
nick collide impersonation trick... How fun. Too bad he didn't ride a net split and take ops on the channel. *Grin*
The sad thing is that this might scare CNN away from using something standard and open like IRC and into using some messed up AOL chat program. Oh well... Any ideas how we can help them prevent this from happening again?
I know why they'd have credit cards online. How do you reconcile these three requirements:
I was recently hit with this problem... and didn't find a solution that was secure enough, so we're ditching 2 and doing that seperately.
Actually, the best real analogy I've found to watching a DVD in linux is buying a Slim Jim to get into your own car because you locked your keys inside.
You're using a tool that is legal for a legal purpose -- the only thing is that the tool also makes it much easier for people to illegally break into cars. Thus the tool is seen as an instrument for criminals and part of that rubs off on you.
Overall this is an incredibly feeble attempt at spreading FUD. I'd like to challenge Microsoft to make their FUD a little more believable.
Their "proof" that Windows offers higher reliability is:
Sun servers fave failed.
Um... ok. Sun never claimed their servers never fail, just that they're more reliable than Windows machines.
Some analysts recommend against Sun in environments that require high availability.
Well yeah, mainframes are often more appropriate than Unix servers. How often do objective analysts recommend Windows systems over Sun systems?
EBay's back-end Sun servers both failed once, but it's windows front-end didn't.
This is equivalent to saying "my brother crashed his Ford truck one day, but his wife's Honda didn't have an accident that day, so Hondas are more reliable."
Vendors offer windows availability guarantees.
This is only meaningful if nobody is willing to offer availability guarantees for Sun platforms. I have trouble believing that is the case.
The second claim is actually a decent FUD job. If Sun is actually claiming that they're the leading provider of Internet technology (a very obscure claim) obviously there are areas where they don't dominate.
I expect more from the people who brought us the Mindcraft fiasco! I mean, c'mon, that one involved specially picking specific areas where Linux was lacking, fine tuning Windows and not Linux, etc. This is pathetic compared to that work of art. This one is about as sophisticated as a knock-knock joke. C'mon Microsoft, you can do better, I know it!
(Oh, and if you can't live up to your own hype, at least live up to your promise to update the site. It says "come back tomorrow" but the last update was 3 days ago. Don't make me wait for my daily dose of FUD!)
Sure, that's fair, and I'm glad to see this post is being moderated up. On the other hand:
As a coder, I'm not going to go liberally sprinkling my code with "BugBug" comments. That's reserved for something somewhat serious and important. Maybe Microsoft policy is different however. Still, 27,000 things Microsoft's coders think is important enough to mark as a bug, yet Microsoft feels the product is ready for release?? Wow!
The playboy article has a quote from you:
That sure seems to be condescending way to look at the community that is nice enough to provide you with a forum to post your articles. Not to mention a condescending way to look at the New York Times.
I think the problem most people have is with "the frequency with which [you serve] as spokesman for the growing number of people who work and live online". In particular, the frequency with which you claim to represent and understand geeks, while being about as far from a real geek as possible. As you should know, being one who uses the term so frequently, being a geek is about more than just what you know about computers. Being a geek is about interest in technology, wanting to know how things work. Being able to see the beauty in a technical fix... But not only are you not technically sophisticated, you don't seem interested in these things. How can you claim to represent or understand geeks?
And btw, I don't resent you (although you at turns bore, annoy me and occasionally interest me), and I'm certainly no longer a teenager.
Yep, including mistakes using non-ASCII editors to post ASCII text.
As far as I know editors do three different types of things for writers:
Given that you've published real books, I think your editor deserves a hearty thanks. While you often do have interesting things to say, I get the impression your editor does a lot of work before your books hit the presses.
Now you mention that Rob Jeff and Robin are great editors -- I dunno -- I haven't seen too much editing on their part, especially of the first type. They don't seem to catch the non ASCII characters, the run-on sentences, or any of the other mistakes. But then again, they're not really editors... nobody who spels az bad az rob kan be a reel editur.
You say Slashdot is hiring real editors? GREAT! I might actually read everything you write instead of skimming it if someone does a good job of editing it first.
And btw, using as a crutch that you "barely got through high school and didn't finish college" won't cut it. If you're going to call yourself a professional writer, you should expect to be treated as a professional writer. As a professional coder, any code I put out for public consumption will be decent code, even if I'm doing it for free. I'm not going to write uncommented spaghetti code that won't compile and then make the excuse that "I did it for free!"
This is sounding a bit like a flame, but that's not how I mean it. I find the subjects you choose for your articles interesting, and they do tend to promote discussion on Slashdot. But I tend to find them a pain to read, mainly because the writing style seems almost like a "stream of conciousness". I can't bring myself to read it all the way through. If you made sure that they were edited before they would posted I think they would be much better received.
I think his films might lack a bit of variety in the race of the actors, but I think people went a bit far with the "silly voices" being linked to a certain race/ethnicity. I don't think that's a reason to believe that the studio would announce "we won't cast asians". C'mon, that was taking it a little far.
C'mon, don't be dumb. It means what it says, that they have no specific roles with those characters.
It sounds like the people creating that false story are trying to make it sound like the new Star Wars is going to be filled with stereotypes. This was as much an announcement that those rumours were untrue as it was an attempt to say "we don't have stereotypical characters". That was a concern with the first movie of course. The last thing LucasFilm is going to do in the wake of that is to refuse to cast people of a certain race.
I'm guessing you're just a troll looking for some attention. Go back and hide under the bridge.
Ok, you guys really should quit assigning your replies to eachother a score of '2'. There's a reason why there a "No Score +1 Bonus" checkbox.
What's with the really bad names? "Itanium"? "Merced"? "Willamette"? I don't even really like "Althon", it's too easy to confuse with "Athalon", "Athlon", etc. I thought Pentium was a pretty good name, but since then Intel has come up with a good name (let alone a decent product).
On the other hand, there are some good processor names. "Alpha" (though it has some bad connotations), "StrongArm", "Sledgehammer"... I'm still undecided about "Crusoe". It's easy to remember but it's not much of a processor name...