Salon has already made it clear that they intend to slowly move content behind the subscription only wall. This is one way to entice people to subscribe... the carrot if you will (though since it was once freely available content, it has a stick aspect as well).
Increasing the amount, variety, and annoyance level of the ads is the true stick in their strategy. If you're not sufficiently motivated by the subscription-only content (of which you get a tantalized 2 paragraph preview if you aren't subscribed), then perhaps you'll be sufficiently annoyed by the advertising that you'll buy the o|4/\/\N3o| subscription.
Given their financial situation and the relatively low revenue that advertising generates nowadays, they really don't even want non-paying viewers. So they slowly advance the border between free and paid content and increase the advertising until they have everyone they can get.
I really like Salon's coverage and there have been several times I'd really liked to have read one of their subscription-only articles, but I'm just not motivated enough to pay. Too short an attention span. I hope one of these days they snag me, because I'd love to see them survive.
I always thought that the Deep Space series was for labeling probes testing experimental technology. The Deep Space 2 probes on Mars Polar Lander were part of that because they were designed to survive impact after being just DROPPED from MPL during descent, penetrate the surface, take samples, and beam back data. MPL itself was not really part of the Deep Space series.
The whole concept that MPL and the other Mars probes (and maybe... probably... the deep space probes) fall under has generally been refered to (at least in the press) as "better, cheaper, faster". Prevailing wisdom seems to suggest the first two parts of that are mutually exclusive given the Mars failures. But there are some big successes there too, and perhaps even a 50% casualty rate is better than quadrupling the cost. Hopefully they'll build in more redundancy;).
It may not be too difficult to figure out how events played out. The cockpit voice records in each of these planes should be VERY telling as to how these planes were taken over, who was doing it, and potentially why! Suicidal terrorists need to bring attention to their agenda in order to advance that agenda. I would expect them to be at least somewhat talkative as they were going down, especially since the presence of cockpit voice recorders is quite well known.
How else do you expect them to track the missile during the test? A guy sitting on the ground with a telescope and a sextant or something?
Oh I don't know... maybe... radar? How do you think NORAD tracks missles? How do AEGIS cruisers track missles (the Iraqi airliner incident notwithstanding)?
I swear, the next person that names a high-tech electronic device P S 2 with any combination of.,/, - is going to have to deal with me! I have to read half the article to figure out what the heck system someone came up with a hard drive for!
So let me get this straight. Microsoft puts out C# to kill Java and.NET to kill JINI and the Linux community is going to jump on board?
I can understand jumping on board for SOAP, which is a fairly basic element of.NET, developed alongside IBM and others. But I'm not sure embracing C# is the best way to "stick it to Microsoft"...
-StaticLimit
Re:Stupidity is Self Curing
on
Eco-Terrorism
·
· Score: 2
At a minimum, it's going to take irrefutable proof of anthropogenic contributions to global warming and undeniable evidence of consequential harm. We don't have that right now, and we won't for a long time, if ever. Will it be too late then? Maybe.
You know, I'm not entirely sure if nuclear fallout could cause a "nuclear winter". Perhaps a "large test" is needed to validate this.
And I've HEARD that complete deforestation of the Amazon could impact the oxygen supply significantly. Perhaps a "large test" would help prove this false as well?
My point is, when we don't know how this will "affect sea life", a "large test" is probably the LAST thing we should be trying.
I honestly don't see what creationism has to do with particle physics. Even IF God created all that is in its current form (no big bang, no evolution, and potentially... and some (but not all) creationists actually believe this... no dinosaurs (they were planted by God to test the faith of "scientists")). Even IF we presuppose all of this as absolute truth, that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not neutrinos have mass. The whole point is that we THOUGHT neutrinos had no mass, and now we've OBSERVED that they MUST have mass. I'm Christian but scoff at almost all creationist logic, and it really runs the gamut... but we're talking about objective observations of the rules of God's universe, with which, if we recall Einstein, God does not play dice with. God did not intend the Bible to be a crutch to be used to ignore science, or batter it into submission.
How dare you invoke Douglas Adams and compare him to this guy. We could power California by strapping magnets onto Douglas's corpse and generating electicity from him spinning in his grave.
To think that Douglas Adams inspired satire and gift for clever humor are comparable to Alex's writing is beyond just being a stretch...
I certainly agree that this is an example of how one can advance his ideas through the internet, and I definitely agree that Alex must have very think skin (but not as think as his skull if he actually believes any of the stuff he's saying).
I frequently enjoy reading online about such silly concepts as "eternal life rings" written by people who think a "testimonial" from Joe in Montana who's been wearing the rings for 6 months and gosh he isn't dead yet are a substitute for actual science. But I think that this is not so much an example as it is a warning. There are a lot of gullible people out there who are willing to believe "reason" issued forth from people who are capable of ignoring science and logic. And while Alex and his "Eternal Life" rings are harmless and perhaps even fun, there are people pushing much nastier philosophies on the web and the power that they and their adherents are able to project using the web are rather frightening. I think that we need, as a community, to actively debunk any serious attempt to propogate such fallacies...
Actually, I thought this one summed it up even better:
We gather scientific evidence (testimonials) in order to base our assumptions.
If "testimonials" count as "science" and are a valid substitute for double-blind clinical trials, there's really no point in trying to apply reason to this guy.
No matter how insultingly patronizing you are in your (quite correct) explaination of the science behind it (and your subsequent replies I might add)...
It's still freaking hilarious to read about people shooting high powered lasers at volatile, combustable petro-chemicals!
You're right... cutting through rock with a big piece of hot metal that (probably) generates sparks is probably just as risky as a laser... but it's not NEARLY as funny!
I believe ASP.NET (which Microsoft was refering to at VBITS Orlando as ASP+) is designed to speed up ASP by compiling the code on the server the first time it is requested (this was the part that was still giving them fits at the time). In addition, it helps facilitate n-tier programming for the Web by separating out the HTML code and the VB (or C# or C++, etc, etc, etc) code, essentially creating an environment where HTML form controls act as objects which raise events, and making an event driven model work in the HTML world is the Web server's problem. A series of objects they've bundled with Visual Studio.NET will take care of some of the dirty work of determining whether to validate controls client-side or server-side by detecting what the requesting browser supports and sending appropriate code.
The real bonus that I see is that with their "Web-Forms" package for Visual Studio.NET, they're able to pull the ASP coding into their, frankly, superior IDE and integrate it more tightly with the whole.NET thing. Visual Basic Script will go away, replaced by Visual Basic (or C# or C++, etc, etc, etc) code attached to the ASP+ files.
It remains to be seen whether the cross-platform capabilities they've been touting will come to pass, and I'm quite skeptical about whether or not it will be possible to code pages that use a decent amount of DHTML inside of the Visual Studio environment. But it nothing else, it's going to be a wonderful upgrade to Visual Studio which is a very power IDE for rapid application development, and here's the kicker... if they can port the.NET common language runtime to Linux and allow people to develop apps in Visual Studio that run well on Linux, we'll see an explosion of enterprise (by Microsoft's definition) applications that run on Linux.
Everything you had to say in your column is... speculation
Speculation perhaps, but hardly guesswork. We're talking about people with decades of public record behind them (except for Bush of course). Along with the party platform and reams of rhetoric (and who has the time to read all that... oh right, journalists... it's their job) I think it's pretty easy to draw some VERY educated guesses about what direction this administration will go.
I thought it was almost completely skipped. I saw the Lynch movie, but didn't read the book and assumed the "weirding way" was related to "the voice". I was not able to determine anyplace in the miniseries where they explained that this was a fighting style.
Similarly, when the bomb blew up the section of mountains, I had no idea where it came from and could only assume that it had something to do with the changed water of life and the pre-spice mass. I was confused about that until the end...
Right on man. Rogue on the Tandy 1000 EX was my first gaming addiction, and every year or so I get disillusioned with the slick cinematic sequences and linear plots and wander back to nethack!
Nethack should be the official game of Slashdot. Open source, runs on Linux, and it's a great game! The complexity and scope of nethack match anything out there today, to say nothing of it's replayability...
And the roguelike games are still influencing new games (ever play Chocobo's Dungeon?) and still innovating and improving (go download the latest version of nethack!)
I have a Linksys BEFSR41 - EtherFast 4-Port Cable/DSL Router. I just put it in to replace a Linux box that I want to take off of firewall/router/ipmasq duties and turn into a development web server (which I'll be able to reboot without causing my wife to storm in asking why the network is down). Up and running my network in 5 minutes.
Runs about $180 and has a 4 port 10/100 switch (not a hub, a switch). For a small home network, it's really an excellent solution.
The other posts are right that this card thing would be far more useful as a small stand-alone box.
Perhaps they could reconfigure it to be an ethernet card with 1 port out to the DSL/Cablemodem and firewalling sitting in between. Now that would be reasonably useful to single user non-geeks.
I am grateful to a certain extent. Netscape really created the market only to have Microsoft leverage their OS dominance to take away Netscape's market. It's too bad, but frankly, I think that IE deserved to win.
The other thing I applaud Netscape for is taking the necessary step of scrapping the old code-base and starting anew. If the point releases past 4.5 are any indication, the current code base is beyond help. It's too bad the damage is done. Thousands of people using Netscape's current (rather shody) browser makes my job more difficult. I still relish in finding out why Netscape is crashing and successfully kludging around it... but I'd prefer to amuse myself with clever new ways to deploy applications over the web.
I know that Netscape Navigator is closed-source and the company sold out to AOL
Just as an aside, open source is of course not a substitute for quality, it's just a method to make quality more attainable.
I'm always surprised when people suggest that IE is not a better browser than Netscape.
Perhaps you'll indulge me while I go on a long rant... yesterday was not a fun day to write code for the Netscape browser...
Netscape 6 is definitely a big huge step in the right direction, but 4.7 is (in my opinion and experience) the absolute worst piece of software in any product category, ever.
In developing web applications, I find that I can reliably count on my code to horribly crash or lock Netscape to the point that I have to kill the process at least 3 times a week. And every one of those problems takes a couple hours and dozens of repeat crashes to track down! Invariably, it's a minor syntax error that IE handles more elegantly, or a straight out massive bug in Netscape.
Yesterday, it was a cut-and-paste error with the include statement for a stylesheet. It wasn't at the path I indicated and it locked up the whole netscape process.
I'll probably have several people reply to tell me I should just use straight HTML, no Javascript, no CSS, nothing dealing with the DOM... and I could do that, but I must ask: What is the point in including horribly bugged, non-standards-compliant, "support" for these things in the first place. IF IT'S WORTH DOING... IT'S WORTH DOING RIGHT. I wrote boring HTML for Netscape 3, and the whole web universe has moved on since then...
IE is by far the most stable, standards-compliant browser with any reasonable amount of market share, and when developing web pages, you don't get to choose what browser they'll run in. The people get to choose. And I can only hope and pray nightly that they choose to ditch Netscape 4.7 in favor of IE 5 as soon as possible, and maybe switch over to Netscape 6 or Mozilla when they are truly ready for the masses (masses means my grandmother, not just me and my programmer friends).
Slashdot once again defends Linux when someone claims there is a bug by shouting loudly that it's not a bug, but something that should be addressed by proper system administration...
Then turns around and blasts Microsoft for an identical issue (which of course is now a major bug!). And to top it off, the media gets blamed for bias... talk about your pot and your fscking kettle.
It's true... every remotely competant sysadmin has already changed the sa password and it's been common knowledge for years. It's a stupid vulnerablitiy that M$ should fix by prompting for an sa password as part of install. Its almost exactly like the RedHat non-bug, and as a result, is a non-bug now too. It IS a design flaw and it SHOULD be corrected.
NDS may rule, but it's got to be hard to run a software company with one product... especially a software company the size of Novell.
Netware has been losing market share for years and it's pretty clear that regardless of it's power as a file/print server I think that more memory/more servers are probably a better investment than Novell training.
If IBM buys, it'd be for NDS and maybe for the programmers.
Katz takes some journalistic license, but hits an interesting point about the corporatization of America. And it's not that it's a sudden thing. The shift has been occuring for some time in academia, politics, etc... The more sudden shift is in the mindset of people in these institutions. It's no longer just admitted grudgingly that research at Universities needs to make money. It's become acceptable to openly admit it.
Katz's assertion that our institutions are falling one by one to the Corporate Republic is true, but his list of institutions is certainly laughable. Business, small-town restaurants, real estate, agriculture. These are ALL businesses that have been profit driven by nature from the start. These aren't institutions falling to the Corporate Republic... they are in fact the very foundation of it.
As this shift to naked, unapologetic, capitalism becomes the accepted norm (as one would expect in a booming economy... the inherent unfairnesses of capitalism are certainly less obvious during boom times) it's interesting to look at movies where the post-apocalyptic vision of the future was a world ruled by corporations. Seems just a bit closer now than it did... say... 5 years ago.
- StaticLimit
Geek as a political movement
on
Selfish Society
·
· Score: 3
Two words: It's Not
Why don't geeks seem to be able to influence politics? Because politics is not tech-centric. Geeks are defined primarily by their views on technology and are often anti-social. Politics in it's current state is defined largely by candidates views on social issues. And as George W. (and to an only slightly lesser extent Al Gore) demonstrate, election politics is a shallow popularity contest between two liars who know the right buzzwords and scare tactics to turn on the single-issue voters. (despite my cynicism, I DO have strong opinions on social issues as well as tech issues, and will not be voting for GWBasi^H^H^Hush)
Geeks have a variety of views on social issues. I'm a very liberal Democrat, but I know a lot of Republican geeks. And while geeking away at our programming jobs, there's no conflict because the issues that separate the candidates are not technology issues. Sure, plenty of tech bosses have strong opinions on the direction of national economic policy (really, they're interested in avoiding taxes on their loot), but the masses of geeks will never form a useful political block with the current state of politics in America.
Ah yes. The thing I didn't like about the movie. The Physics. For some reason, whenever people get hit and go flying across the room... it looks totally, completely fake. I think I know why...
They always go in a straight line. And go far too slowly to be moving in a straight line. I want one of two things:
Either they fly across the room in a notable arc (first up, then down) or...
They fly in a straight line REALLY REALLY FAST. I want to see almost instanteneous. If they're not losing altitude, and they fly all the way across the FREAKING ROOM FROM ONE PUNCH!?! than I expect them to be moving really really fast. When Cyclops' eye-beam hits someone and knocks them through... say for example... the Statue of Liberty, I want to see the beam hit them, hear a crash, and see them 40 feet out finally arcing down into the sea. I do NOT want to see them moving towards the inner wall of the statue, breaking through the wall, and travelling 40 feet out. Same goes for Wolverine getting whacked across the room by... oh... everyone.
Exception is Magneto. He controls magnetic fields and can throw Wolvie anywhere he damned well pleases in any direction at any speed.
Slashdot Mirror
This is obviously part of a two-phase approach.
Salon has already made it clear that they intend to slowly move content behind the subscription only wall. This is one way to entice people to subscribe... the carrot if you will (though since it was once freely available content, it has a stick aspect as well).
Increasing the amount, variety, and annoyance level of the ads is the true stick in their strategy. If you're not sufficiently motivated by the subscription-only content (of which you get a tantalized 2 paragraph preview if you aren't subscribed), then perhaps you'll be sufficiently annoyed by the advertising that you'll buy the o|4/\/\N3o| subscription.
Given their financial situation and the relatively low revenue that advertising generates nowadays, they really don't even want non-paying viewers. So they slowly advance the border between free and paid content and increase the advertising until they have everyone they can get.
I really like Salon's coverage and there have been several times I'd really liked to have read one of their subscription-only articles, but I'm just not motivated enough to pay. Too short an attention span. I hope one of these days they snag me, because I'd love to see them survive.
-StaticLimit
I always thought that the Deep Space series was for labeling probes testing experimental technology. The Deep Space 2 probes on Mars Polar Lander were part of that because they were designed to survive impact after being just DROPPED from MPL during descent, penetrate the surface, take samples, and beam back data. MPL itself was not really part of the Deep Space series.
;).
The whole concept that MPL and the other Mars probes (and maybe... probably... the deep space probes) fall under has generally been refered to (at least in the press) as "better, cheaper, faster". Prevailing wisdom seems to suggest the first two parts of that are mutually exclusive given the Mars failures. But there are some big successes there too, and perhaps even a 50% casualty rate is better than quadrupling the cost. Hopefully they'll build in more redundancy
Regardless, I'm just parsing semantics...
- StaticLimit
It may not be too difficult to figure out how events played out. The cockpit voice records in each of these planes should be VERY telling as to how these planes were taken over, who was doing it, and potentially why! Suicidal terrorists need to bring attention to their agenda in order to advance that agenda. I would expect them to be at least somewhat talkative as they were going down, especially since the presence of cockpit voice recorders is quite well known.
- StaticLimit
How else do you expect them to track the missile during the test? A guy sitting on the ground with a telescope and a sextant or something?
Oh I don't know... maybe... radar? How do you think NORAD tracks missles? How do AEGIS cruisers track missles (the Iraqi airliner incident notwithstanding)?
-StaticLimit
I swear, the next person that names a high-tech electronic device P S 2 with any combination of ., /, - is going to have to deal with me! I have to read half the article to figure out what the heck system someone came up with a hard drive for!
And they do. This is just the best shot from Earth or near-Earth.
:)
I'd imagine the best shots we have are composite images from probes. So I suppose the most amazing this about this is...
Hubble rulez! Hubble rulez! Go Go Gadget Hubble-Space-Telescope! Woo-Hoo
I wonder if this image meets Taco's requirement of being a good desktop background image?
-StaticLimit
So let me get this straight. Microsoft puts out C# to kill Java and .NET to kill JINI and the Linux community is going to jump on board?
.NET, developed alongside IBM and others. But I'm not sure embracing C# is the best way to "stick it to Microsoft"...
I can understand jumping on board for SOAP, which is a fairly basic element of
-StaticLimit
At a minimum, it's going to take irrefutable proof of anthropogenic contributions to global warming and undeniable evidence of consequential harm. We don't have that right now, and we won't for a long time, if ever. Will it be too late then? Maybe.
See subject line.
Too bad THIS cure would apply to all of us...
-StaticLimit
You know, I'm not entirely sure if nuclear fallout could cause a "nuclear winter". Perhaps a "large test" is needed to validate this.
And I've HEARD that complete deforestation of the Amazon could impact the oxygen supply significantly. Perhaps a "large test" would help prove this false as well?
My point is, when we don't know how this will "affect sea life", a "large test" is probably the LAST thing we should be trying.
- StaticLimit
I honestly don't see what creationism has to do with particle physics. Even IF God created all that is in its current form (no big bang, no evolution, and potentially... and some (but not all) creationists actually believe this... no dinosaurs (they were planted by God to test the faith of "scientists")). Even IF we presuppose all of this as absolute truth, that has no bearing whatsoever on whether or not neutrinos have mass. The whole point is that we THOUGHT neutrinos had no mass, and now we've OBSERVED that they MUST have mass. I'm Christian but scoff at almost all creationist logic, and it really runs the gamut... but we're talking about objective observations of the rules of God's universe, with which, if we recall Einstein, God does not play dice with. God did not intend the Bible to be a crutch to be used to ignore science, or batter it into submission.
- StaticLimit
How dare you invoke Douglas Adams and compare him to this guy. We could power California by strapping magnets onto Douglas's corpse and generating electicity from him spinning in his grave.
To think that Douglas Adams inspired satire and gift for clever humor are comparable to Alex's writing is beyond just being a stretch...
I certainly agree that this is an example of how one can advance his ideas through the internet, and I definitely agree that Alex must have very think skin (but not as think as his skull if he actually believes any of the stuff he's saying).
I frequently enjoy reading online about such silly concepts as "eternal life rings" written by people who think a "testimonial" from Joe in Montana who's been wearing the rings for 6 months and gosh he isn't dead yet are a substitute for actual science. But I think that this is not so much an example as it is a warning. There are a lot of gullible people out there who are willing to believe "reason" issued forth from people who are capable of ignoring science and logic. And while Alex and his "Eternal Life" rings are harmless and perhaps even fun, there are people pushing much nastier philosophies on the web and the power that they and their adherents are able to project using the web are rather frightening. I think that we need, as a community, to actively debunk any serious attempt to propogate such fallacies...
- StaticLimit
Actually, I thought this one summed it up even better:
We gather scientific evidence (testimonials) in order to base our assumptions.
If "testimonials" count as "science" and are a valid substitute for double-blind clinical trials, there's really no point in trying to apply reason to this guy.
- StaticLimit
No matter how insultingly patronizing you are in your (quite correct) explaination of the science behind it (and your subsequent replies I might add)...
It's still freaking hilarious to read about people shooting high powered lasers at volatile, combustable petro-chemicals!
You're right... cutting through rock with a big piece of hot metal that (probably) generates sparks is probably just as risky as a laser... but it's not NEARLY as funny!
- StaticLimit
I believe ASP.NET (which Microsoft was refering to at VBITS Orlando as ASP+) is designed to speed up ASP by compiling the code on the server the first time it is requested (this was the part that was still giving them fits at the time). In addition, it helps facilitate n-tier programming for the Web by separating out the HTML code and the VB (or C# or C++, etc, etc, etc) code, essentially creating an environment where HTML form controls act as objects which raise events, and making an event driven model work in the HTML world is the Web server's problem. A series of objects they've bundled with Visual Studio .NET will take care of some of the dirty work of determining whether to validate controls client-side or server-side by detecting what the requesting browser supports and sending appropriate code.
.NET, they're able to pull the ASP coding into their, frankly, superior IDE and integrate it more tightly with the whole .NET thing. Visual Basic Script will go away, replaced by Visual Basic (or C# or C++, etc, etc, etc) code attached to the ASP+ files.
.NET common language runtime to Linux and allow people to develop apps in Visual Studio that run well on Linux, we'll see an explosion of enterprise (by Microsoft's definition) applications that run on Linux.
The real bonus that I see is that with their "Web-Forms" package for Visual Studio
It remains to be seen whether the cross-platform capabilities they've been touting will come to pass, and I'm quite skeptical about whether or not it will be possible to code pages that use a decent amount of DHTML inside of the Visual Studio environment. But it nothing else, it's going to be a wonderful upgrade to Visual Studio which is a very power IDE for rapid application development, and here's the kicker... if they can port the
- StaticLimit
Everything you had to say in your column is ... speculation
Speculation perhaps, but hardly guesswork. We're talking about people with decades of public record behind them (except for Bush of course). Along with the party platform and reams of rhetoric (and who has the time to read all that... oh right, journalists... it's their job) I think it's pretty easy to draw some VERY educated guesses about what direction this administration will go.
- StaticLimit
I thought it was almost completely skipped. I saw the Lynch movie, but didn't read the book and assumed the "weirding way" was related to "the voice". I was not able to determine anyplace in the miniseries where they explained that this was a fighting style.
Similarly, when the bomb blew up the section of mountains, I had no idea where it came from and could only assume that it had something to do with the changed water of life and the pre-spice mass. I was confused about that until the end...
- StaticLimit
Right on man. Rogue on the Tandy 1000 EX was my first gaming addiction, and every year or so I get disillusioned with the slick cinematic sequences and linear plots and wander back to nethack!
Nethack should be the official game of Slashdot. Open source, runs on Linux, and it's a great game! The complexity and scope of nethack match anything out there today, to say nothing of it's replayability...
And the roguelike games are still influencing new games (ever play Chocobo's Dungeon?) and still innovating and improving (go download the latest version of nethack!)
- StaticLimit
I have a Linksys BEFSR41 - EtherFast 4-Port Cable/DSL Router. I just put it in to replace a Linux box that I want to take off of firewall/router/ipmasq duties and turn into a development web server (which I'll be able to reboot without causing my wife to storm in asking why the network is down). Up and running my network in 5 minutes.
Runs about $180 and has a 4 port 10/100 switch (not a hub, a switch). For a small home network, it's really an excellent solution.
The other posts are right that this card thing would be far more useful as a small stand-alone box.
Perhaps they could reconfigure it to be an ethernet card with 1 port out to the DSL/Cablemodem and firewalling sitting in between. Now that would be reasonably useful to single user non-geeks.
- StaticLimit
I am grateful to a certain extent. Netscape really created the market only to have Microsoft leverage their OS dominance to take away Netscape's market. It's too bad, but frankly, I think that IE deserved to win.
The other thing I applaud Netscape for is taking the necessary step of scrapping the old code-base and starting anew. If the point releases past 4.5 are any indication, the current code base is beyond help. It's too bad the damage is done. Thousands of people using Netscape's current (rather shody) browser makes my job more difficult. I still relish in finding out why Netscape is crashing and successfully kludging around it... but I'd prefer to amuse myself with clever new ways to deploy applications over the web.
I know that Netscape Navigator is closed-source and the company sold out to AOL
Just as an aside, open source is of course not a substitute for quality, it's just a method to make quality more attainable.
- StaticLimit
I'm always surprised when people suggest that IE is not a better browser than Netscape.
Perhaps you'll indulge me while I go on a long rant... yesterday was not a fun day to write code for the Netscape browser...
Netscape 6 is definitely a big huge step in the right direction, but 4.7 is (in my opinion and experience) the absolute worst piece of software in any product category, ever.
In developing web applications, I find that I can reliably count on my code to horribly crash or lock Netscape to the point that I have to kill the process at least 3 times a week. And every one of those problems takes a couple hours and dozens of repeat crashes to track down! Invariably, it's a minor syntax error that IE handles more elegantly, or a straight out massive bug in Netscape.
Yesterday, it was a cut-and-paste error with the include statement for a stylesheet. It wasn't at the path I indicated and it locked up the whole netscape process.
I'll probably have several people reply to tell me I should just use straight HTML, no Javascript, no CSS, nothing dealing with the DOM... and I could do that, but I must ask: What is the point in including horribly bugged, non-standards-compliant, "support" for these things in the first place. IF IT'S WORTH DOING... IT'S WORTH DOING RIGHT. I wrote boring HTML for Netscape 3, and the whole web universe has moved on since then...
IE is by far the most stable, standards-compliant browser with any reasonable amount of market share, and when developing web pages, you don't get to choose what browser they'll run in. The people get to choose. And I can only hope and pray nightly that they choose to ditch Netscape 4.7 in favor of IE 5 as soon as possible, and maybe switch over to Netscape 6 or Mozilla when they are truly ready for the masses (masses means my grandmother, not just me and my programmer friends).
- StaticLimit
Slashdot once again defends Linux when someone claims there is a bug by shouting loudly that it's not a bug, but something that should be addressed by proper system administration...
Then turns around and blasts Microsoft for an identical issue (which of course is now a major bug!). And to top it off, the media gets blamed for bias... talk about your pot and your fscking kettle.
It's true... every remotely competant sysadmin has already changed the sa password and it's been common knowledge for years. It's a stupid vulnerablitiy that M$ should fix by prompting for an sa password as part of install. Its almost exactly like the RedHat non-bug, and as a result, is a non-bug now too. It IS a design flaw and it SHOULD be corrected.
- StaticLimit
NDS may rule, but it's got to be hard to run a software company with one product... especially a software company the size of Novell.
Netware has been losing market share for years and it's pretty clear that regardless of it's power as a file/print server I think that more memory/more servers are probably a better investment than Novell training.
If IBM buys, it'd be for NDS and maybe for the programmers.
- StaticLimit
Katz takes some journalistic license, but hits an interesting point about the corporatization of America. And it's not that it's a sudden thing. The shift has been occuring for some time in academia, politics, etc... The more sudden shift is in the mindset of people in these institutions. It's no longer just admitted grudgingly that research at Universities needs to make money. It's become acceptable to openly admit it.
Katz's assertion that our institutions are falling one by one to the Corporate Republic is true, but his list of institutions is certainly laughable. Business, small-town restaurants, real estate, agriculture. These are ALL businesses that have been profit driven by nature from the start. These aren't institutions falling to the Corporate Republic... they are in fact the very foundation of it.
As this shift to naked, unapologetic, capitalism becomes the accepted norm (as one would expect in a booming economy... the inherent unfairnesses of capitalism are certainly less obvious during boom times) it's interesting to look at movies where the post-apocalyptic vision of the future was a world ruled by corporations. Seems just a bit closer now than it did... say... 5 years ago.
- StaticLimit
Two words:
It's Not
Why don't geeks seem to be able to influence politics? Because politics is not tech-centric. Geeks are defined primarily by their views on technology and are often anti-social. Politics in it's current state is defined largely by candidates views on social issues. And as George W. (and to an only slightly lesser extent Al Gore) demonstrate, election politics is a shallow popularity contest between two liars who know the right buzzwords and scare tactics to turn on the single-issue voters. (despite my cynicism, I DO have strong opinions on social issues as well as tech issues, and will not be voting for GWBasi^H^H^Hush)
Geeks have a variety of views on social issues. I'm a very liberal Democrat, but I know a lot of Republican geeks. And while geeking away at our programming jobs, there's no conflict because the issues that separate the candidates are not technology issues. Sure, plenty of tech bosses have strong opinions on the direction of national economic policy (really, they're interested in avoiding taxes on their loot), but the masses of geeks will never form a useful political block with the current state of politics in America.
- StaticLimit
Ah yes. The thing I didn't like about the movie. The Physics. For some reason, whenever people get hit and go flying across the room... it looks totally, completely fake. I think I know why...
They always go in a straight line. And go far too slowly to be moving in a straight line. I want one of two things:
Either they fly across the room in a notable arc (first up, then down) or...
They fly in a straight line REALLY REALLY FAST. I want to see almost instanteneous. If they're not losing altitude, and they fly all the way across the FREAKING ROOM FROM ONE PUNCH!?! than I expect them to be moving really really fast. When Cyclops' eye-beam hits someone and knocks them through... say for example... the Statue of Liberty, I want to see the beam hit them, hear a crash, and see them 40 feet out finally arcing down into the sea. I do NOT want to see them moving towards the inner wall of the statue, breaking through the wall, and travelling 40 feet out. Same goes for Wolverine getting whacked across the room by... oh... everyone.
Exception is Magneto. He controls magnetic fields and can throw Wolvie anywhere he damned well pleases in any direction at any speed.
Thank you for your support
- StaticLimit