I think it's great that Wikipedia exists and asks one to be a critical reader. But I wonder if that requirement keeps it from being a true 'encyclopedia.'
Most people think of encyclopedia as being one of the most authoritative references around. Your point, I think, is that Wikipedia is unabashedly not authoritative. So, sure, Wikipedia is a collection of articles on a wide variety of topics, but does that really make it an encyclopedia? Couldn't it avoid a lot of confusion simply by calling itself something else?
I think it's interesting that you seem to lament/.'s moderation systems tendency toward choir-preaching, yet embrace your ability to enforce your own biases in metamoderation. Don't take this as a criticism: I do it too, and I actually think it contributes value to the system.
Sometimes posters like to talk about how much better and smarter slashdot contributitors are, since they're self-described nerds. Let me go out on a limb and say that nerds also frequently hold very strong opinions because they're smart and used to being correct. At (meta)moderation time, they're more likely to consider their moderation decisions objectively correct than a reflection of their own flawed biases, and 'while acting within the rules... [they'll] act accordingly when [they] see posts modded inappropriately.'
Let them so act. Given a large and varied enough sample, this will produce a much more accurate reflection of both the status quo and the range of opinions surrounding it than a bunch of users trying to constrain themselves within political correctness (or whatever standard of value is adopted). The willingness to moderate based on individual definitions of appropriateness is part of what makes the system work. Inevitably, majority standards of value (and a choir along with them) will arise as a result, but the strength of opinion that allows this majority to form is the same strength that continues to nip at its heels.
So there is some money to be made in "learning" search engines that tailor themselves to the user
Am I the only one who sees privacy issues here? One concept of the next gen search engine that the article addresses is just this: one that tracks my every click, learns about me, and tailors searches in terms of that knowledge. I wonder just how clear a picture this data could paint of a person? How much of myself do I want represented in someone elses database, without a clear sense of how they'll use it or what it says about me? In what ways beside enhanced search and advertisements might this data be (ab)used? Could outside access to this kind of data cost someone their job, or a political campaign, or much worse, just because of a link they once clicked?
Satelite providers are a poor choice for gaming because although they are often high speed (which results in quick downloads) they are also high latency (which results in high pings). The latency is actually high enough (~350-450ms) that it makes it worse than dial-up for most FPS games.
Haha I can see it now. Female-Only servers, based of course on the honor system because of lack of a better option. Someone shows up and starts beating everyone else, and a few minutes later "are u a guy??? you dick!" followed by "i swear i'm a girl, briney spears rules!" or "h4h4 g1rlz sux0r"
thats worse than regular flaimbait because you were being egocentric and condescending in a high school 90210 "i'm better than you" sort of way. you actually meant what you said, most people are just out for kicks.
Have you looked into QNX at all? It's a real time OS and they're demo disk is pretty impressive. A GUI with TCP/IP support and a Web Browser, all on a 1.44 MB disk. If you can get it to work on the hardware, it would be a much better solution than *nix/bsd. The Cyrix WebPad that was announced quite a while back was supposed to use it, but I'm not sure if that's still in production or not.
Good Luck..
Solitaire actually served somewhat of a purpose at first: teach the MSDOS users how to use that thing that the Macs have been using (umm, I mean the mouse).
My guess is that most computer buyers will continue to compare only clock speeds, however.
It may seem obvious to some, but thats exactly the point. Who cares if it's shoddily produced and a poor performer, it's got two very important things going for it.
1. It's got the fastest clock speeds out there.
2. It's got the Intel (tm) brand name.
The average computer user doesn't have a clue that it performs slower than a slower clocked AMD chip. They see the higher number, and assume that means it's better. Who's AMD? They don't have all those nice commercials with Blue Man Group and all, and the nice logo. Selling chips isn't really about technology as much as it is about marketing. For example, Cyrixs PR266/PR300/etc - they didn't actually run at 300mhz but they said that they performed equal to around a 300mhz processor, so they sold them as "300"'s, figuring consumers would assume that means 300mhz. That was all bs - Cyrix just couldn't keep their clockspeeds rising at the same rate as Intel, and realized that they could take advantage of the average consumers ignorance. Intel seems to be banking on that same ignorance today; I think this line sums it all up the best:
What it boils down to is this - just like at Microsoft and just like at Apple, the marketing scumbags at Intel have prevailed and pushed sound engineering aside.
We can't allow Intel to charge a premium for poorly performing chips, nor can we allow them to lie about their ability. The only solution is to boycott the P4 and all Intel products. Buy AMD, you'll be happy you did (I am).
Super C (contra part 2) uses a modified version of the code... Right Left Down Up A B Start.
I also remember Mortal Kombat 1 for the Sega had a blood code (I believe it was A B A C A B B) and Aladin for the sega had a code that let you go to the next level (pause, then A B B A A B B A).
Fun.
A while ago I came across a page describing someones attempts to register the domain fuck.com. The information may be a little dated, since it all took place during InterNICs monopoly over registration, but it is useful (and somewhat entertaining) nonetheless. The url is http://www.links.net/webpub/fuck.com.htm l.
Well, if you had read the article, you would see that the contract was was not for free computers, no conditions. I quote:
"We never gave the computers to the schools" outright, Mr. Mortensen said. And William R. Connon, a Hartford lawyer who represents the Plainfield Township schools, said the ZapMe contract gives the company the right to charge for its services or to take them back.
This means the contract probably said at one point that they can take back the computers or charge for them at anytime they wish. Unfortunately, for a small school with a limited budget that is a risk they might have been willing to take because they have so few options. It is more likely, however, that they just were not aware that the contract said anything like that. They probably just jumped at the chance for the computers.
This isn't neccisarily the companies fault. They tried to do something good and make a profit at the same time, and unfortunately they failed. However, if the school had the resources in the first place they wouldn't have had to get locked into a contract that they didn't understand. Once again proving that the educational system in the country is flawed.
We're way off topic and you don't have to bother replying to this post because I'm done with the conversation. Your obviously missing the point here, heroine is not marijuana. Bottom line. Any comparisons between the two are stupid. It's like comparing tylenol to pcp. It takes a weak human to fall victim to drugs like heroin, and it's by their own decision. This is even if your story about "the dead kid" as you so eloquently put it is true.
Your entire response is irrelivant. My "dealer" is also a good friend of mine, who just would never do something stupid like that to me. You imagine anyone selling or doing drugs as an evil person, and that just isn't correct. There are a large number of drug users/dealers who are violent and stupid in nature, and could probably be classified as evil people. Just because the government propaganda says that drug users are all bad people doesn't mean it's true. Not every drug user is a drug abuser. How confident are you that your best friend wouldn't betray you. That's how confident I am that I would never get laced weed from my dealer. That's all beside the obvious point that you are basically side-stepping my true accusation here. "The dealer may not make much money taking you and your parents to the cleaners, but who said crime really paid? " People take the risk of selling drugs for the profit involved, they wouldn't take that risk if they didn't think it'd be repaid. 'Crime doesn't pay' is a weak (and in this pay incorrect) argument.
In a recent survey at the public high school in my city, over 40% of the students said they'd tried smoking weed, and almost 20% said they smoke weed on a weekly basis. And those are just the ones who admitted to it. Don't believe me?
Go read some independant studies about weed, and some truthful information. There'd be better information out there if the government would permit independent or even government studies involving marijuana, but they have been reluctant to do so.
I work 40 hours a week and bought my own car, paid for my own insurance, pay for most of my own food and all of my own gas, and pretty much any other expenses of mine: I'm hardly taking my parents to the cleaners. And if going to catholic school means I live in a comfortable little suburban world, than how come yours has a heroine epidemic? I don't like hard drugs, have never tried them, and don't even smoke cigarettes. I don't smoke cigarettes or do hard drugs because I know they're bad for me. I am confident enough that weed is not that I will smoke some on occasion, and I am not a stupid person so don't even suggest it.
Bull shit. Complete and utter bullshit. I don't know if your doing this on purpose just to piss people off, or if you're really this ignorant. If you'd ever seen weed in your life maybe you'd realize that heroine and weed look just a little bit different. If you'd ever read anything about weed (or even other drugs) that wasn't force-fed to you by the government through D.A.R.E (as it was to me) you'd know weed is not the problem.
I'm a senior at a Catholic High School in New Hampshire, a Catholic School for Gods sake, and just about every single person in my class has tried smoking weed, I guarentee it. I would guess somewhere around the 99% mark. I can't think of anyone in my school who's tried anything harder than weed than maybe 2 or 3 people. Most people at least know doing hard drugs is taking a risk that they're probably not willing to take.
The story is not the same when it has to do with hard drugs. You do hard drugs knowing the risk involved. If you don't know the risk involved than it's your own damn fault for being too ignorant to check the facts before you do something potentialy harmful. The government putting weed in the same list as heroine is part of the problem. If information was at least made more readily available (as it is becoming now with the Internet, although it's hard to discern fact from fiction) than people could make their own informed decisions.
What works for one dealer works for all and they all cary the cheapest crap they can make the most money on.
Then how come there is an abundance of high quality marijuana at this time, especially in Canada. There was an article in Time Magazine about BC Buds not too long ago. Maybe in the projects they sell the cheapest shit they can get their hands on...
They have great morals and would never knowingly buy or sell anything harmful, but they don't really know either. They are weak as are their cutomers. What are you going to do if you get burnt?
Once again, if you had done your homework and actually knew the first thing about weed, you can tell weed from anything fake. Easily. And as for 'laced' weed and whatnot, it simply is not cost effective to do so without telling the customer. It costs more money to add more expensive drugs to probably already expensive weed. I've never even seen laced weed in my life.
How old are your kids? When they get through high school and college, if they havn't already, they'll have tried weed - I'm sure of it. Who's the looser now?
Yeah everybodys free. What do you care if weed is legalized to use/grow in your own house or on your own property. There's a bill being voted on in Alaska very soon that will make that legal. People aren't gonna walk down the street and blow it in your face. If you think of the stereotypical stoner they aren't pushers, they just want to have the peace to do what they want privately. What I do to my own body is is my own business.
Is this really worth it? I have a Mediaone (err, I mean roadrunner, I mean AT&T, I mean Verizon) cable modem and my downloads max at around 200kbyte/s. However, I hardly ever sustain 200k/s downloads, most of the time I'm around a quarter of that or less. At some point doesn't the bottleneck stop being your connection and start being the Internet as a whole? Isn't there a better solution?
My great grandmother came over with no money in her pocket in the 20's as one of the new immigrants. Now we're comfortably middle class and both my uncles and my aunt all own their own businesses and are pretty wealthy. Through hard work. You don't think anyone gets rich by hard work than your sadly mistaken.
A friend of mine claimed his father had an adult game when he was a kid. I thought he said atari but it may have actually been Apple ][ now that I think about it. Heh he said it was two (highly pixelated) people in bed and you could lift up the covers and make them do stuff... What fun eh?
I believe your the one who read the article wrong. While it's true that AMD chips are now about as overclockable as Intel chips, you confused the method they used to do so. You said they've "re-locked the front-side bus multiplier". Hwoever, the Front Side Bus is different from the multipliers. A multiplier is what you multiply the front side bus speed by to get the Total CPU speed (ie 100 FSB 5.0 Multiplier == 500Mhz CPU). The front side bus is the speed at which your RAM and CPU communicate.
Also you said they re-locked it. However I don't recall AMD ever having any chips that had either front side bus or multipliers locked...
This interview is pretty lame I admit, but if you were going to interview someone about "hacking AOL" you could at least get someone who did something other than happen to type a period at the end of an url. At one point there were some people who really did some cool stuff on AOL...
Starting 7 years ago up until about 4 or 5 years ago I spent a lot of my time on AOL. I was rather young at the time, and didn't really know too much about computers except that I thought hackers were cool. Somehow I ended up in private room hack, I don't know how or why, but there was a whole culture of people in there. Keep in mind this was a long time ago, this was when compuserv and prodigy were viable alternatives, when AOL sucked because of the "me too"s first and foremost. When AOL didn't have a web browser.
So to skip all the boring shit I found myself going to the "elite" room with various other kids who had somehow proved their eliteness. Anyway, these were the people who really fscked around with AOL, not this parental control bs. This was before parental controls even existed. These were the people who figured out how to upload and download and chat at the same time (back when you couldn't do that). Figured out how to download in a free area (back when you had 5 hours a month on a 2400bps modem), and other usefull things. And no they weren't all harmless, we got overhead accounts (sort of below a guide and above a regular user) that could go to guide areas and had other special features. Some people knew guides that could TOS or delete someones account, etc etc. We also figured out how to kick people offline, intercept instant messages(!), and other cool but usually malicious things. Of course this usually involved pirating software and even credit card theft and all that bad stuff that seems to follow behind, but at the very center of it all there was really just a bunch of people exploring AOL.
At some point Visual Basic got thrown into the mix (probably as a result of the widespread software priacy), and AOHell was made - which automated a lot of these tasks we did manually. Then came the huge amounts of "AOHacks" or "AOProggies" or whatever people would call them. This led to drones of people being able to do the tricks that were previously restricted to only the people who were cool enough to be told. Some of the folks who thought themselves better than this created "AOTurkey" around thanksgiving one year as a sort of joke, making fun of AOL's version of script kiddies. Even though we may have thought ourselves superior, we didn't nothing to stop the flame. I myself spent a decent chunk of time writing a still incomplete VB 3.0 program (and I still have the source code in case I ever come back to it:) ) that could do all sorts of stupid shit like make accounts with fake credit card numbers, automatically send messages to people asking them for hteir credit card numbers, and other random crap. A few decent programmers did some pretty incredible things with Visual Basic back then. No one had really done this stuff before - that is trying to interface directly with AOLs client. If you could write a program that would "get the chatroom text" (ie - being able to detect when someone says a trigger that would add them to a mailing list (of pirated softare)) you were elite. Of course the original people started to grow up and realize they really weren't as hot shit as they thought they were, and that some of the more illegal stuff they were doing was really not worth the risk at the least. I left and never went back, though I still keep in touch with a few of those people through EFNet and emails etc etc. I was actually a bit surprised when I didn't see a comment like this one already posted, since the people who lead the way always think they kick ass:).
So I guess what I'm saying is hacking AOL isn't neccisarily something to immediatly scoff at, I just wouldn't have picked Mr. Sklut to be the representative...
Woz is being credited as one of the greatest inventors of all time. Maybe Touring was one of the greatest Computer Scientists ever, but that's fairly irrelivant when we're talking about inventors.
Another case of the slashdot didn't read the article sydrome?
This isn't a flame saying that "blah Windows sucks"...I'll step off my Blizzard bashing soapbox, but this opionion of "WIndows sucks, but it's ok when Diabalo 2 comes out, and I don't care if it only runs on Windows" is so hypocritical, it's not funny. That very idea is why you don't see more games in linux.
That's rediculous. You said yourself that saying "blah windows sucks" would be a flame, and then you say it. Who is the hypocrite here again?
These gaming companys are out for profit, just like every other business out there. If there was a GOOD profit to be made selling Linux ports than you can bet your ass that every single game would have a linux port. John Carmack is trying to do a good thing from our perspective, but the two copies of Quake 3 for Linux that my local EB got are still sitting there on the shelf. Don't give yourself the illusion that it's because everyone dual boots that games aren't ported to linux; because thats just what it is, an illusion.
Despite all that, you may have a good point with the windows gaming icon. However, backing up your arguments with fallacies is not going to get you very far, especialy not here on slashdot...
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's great that Wikipedia exists and asks one to be a critical reader. But I wonder if that requirement keeps it from being a true 'encyclopedia.'
Most people think of encyclopedia as being one of the most authoritative references around. Your point, I think, is that Wikipedia is unabashedly not authoritative. So, sure, Wikipedia is a collection of articles on a wide variety of topics, but does that really make it an encyclopedia? Couldn't it avoid a lot of confusion simply by calling itself something else?
I think it's interesting that you seem to lament /.'s moderation systems tendency toward choir-preaching, yet embrace your ability to enforce your own biases in metamoderation. Don't take this as a criticism: I do it too, and I actually think it contributes value to the system.
Sometimes posters like to talk about how much better and smarter slashdot contributitors are, since they're self-described nerds. Let me go out on a limb and say that nerds also frequently hold very strong opinions because they're smart and used to being correct. At (meta)moderation time, they're more likely to consider their moderation decisions objectively correct than a reflection of their own flawed biases, and 'while acting within the rules... [they'll] act accordingly when [they] see posts modded inappropriately.'
Let them so act. Given a large and varied enough sample, this will produce a much more accurate reflection of both the status quo and the range of opinions surrounding it than a bunch of users trying to constrain themselves within political correctness (or whatever standard of value is adopted). The willingness to moderate based on individual definitions of appropriateness is part of what makes the system work. Inevitably, majority standards of value (and a choir along with them) will arise as a result, but the strength of opinion that allows this majority to form is the same strength that continues to nip at its heels.
Am I the only one who sees privacy issues here? One concept of the next gen search engine that the article addresses is just this: one that tracks my every click, learns about me, and tailors searches in terms of that knowledge. I wonder just how clear a picture this data could paint of a person? How much of myself do I want represented in someone elses database, without a clear sense of how they'll use it or what it says about me? In what ways beside enhanced search and advertisements might this data be (ab)used? Could outside access to this kind of data cost someone their job, or a political campaign, or much worse, just because of a link they once clicked?
your the pathetic one, fagot
1010
Quake was a dos game, I doubt it used any Win32 APIs.
Good Luck..
Agreed.
this worries me
Solitaire actually served somewhat of a purpose at first: teach the MSDOS users how to use that thing that the Macs have been using (umm, I mean the mouse).
It may seem obvious to some, but thats exactly the point. Who cares if it's shoddily produced and a poor performer, it's got two very important things going for it.
1. It's got the fastest clock speeds out there.
2. It's got the Intel (tm) brand name.
The average computer user doesn't have a clue that it performs slower than a slower clocked AMD chip. They see the higher number, and assume that means it's better. Who's AMD? They don't have all those nice commercials with Blue Man Group and all, and the nice logo. Selling chips isn't really about technology as much as it is about marketing. For example, Cyrixs PR266/PR300/etc - they didn't actually run at 300mhz but they said that they performed equal to around a 300mhz processor, so they sold them as "300"'s, figuring consumers would assume that means 300mhz. That was all bs - Cyrix just couldn't keep their clockspeeds rising at the same rate as Intel, and realized that they could take advantage of the average consumers ignorance. Intel seems to be banking on that same ignorance today; I think this line sums it all up the best:
What it boils down to is this - just like at Microsoft and just like at Apple, the marketing scumbags at Intel have prevailed and pushed sound engineering aside.
We can't allow Intel to charge a premium for poorly performing chips, nor can we allow them to lie about their ability. The only solution is to boycott the P4 and all Intel products. Buy AMD, you'll be happy you did (I am).
Super C (contra part 2) uses a modified version of the code... Right Left Down Up A B Start. I also remember Mortal Kombat 1 for the Sega had a blood code (I believe it was A B A C A B B) and Aladin for the sega had a code that let you go to the next level (pause, then A B B A A B B A). Fun.
A while ago I came across a page describing someones attempts to register the domain fuck.com. The information may be a little dated, since it all took place during InterNICs monopoly over registration, but it is useful (and somewhat entertaining) nonetheless. The url is http://www.links.net/webpub/fuck.com.htm l.
"We never gave the computers to the schools" outright, Mr. Mortensen said. And William R. Connon, a Hartford lawyer who represents the Plainfield Township schools, said the ZapMe contract gives the company the right to charge for its services or to take them back.
This means the contract probably said at one point that they can take back the computers or charge for them at anytime they wish. Unfortunately, for a small school with a limited budget that is a risk they might have been willing to take because they have so few options. It is more likely, however, that they just were not aware that the contract said anything like that. They probably just jumped at the chance for the computers.
This isn't neccisarily the companies fault. They tried to do something good and make a profit at the same time, and unfortunately they failed. However, if the school had the resources in the first place they wouldn't have had to get locked into a contract that they didn't understand. Once again proving that the educational system in the country is flawed.
In a recent survey at the public high school in my city, over 40% of the students said they'd tried smoking weed, and almost 20% said they smoke weed on a weekly basis. And those are just the ones who admitted to it. Don't believe me?
Go read some independant studies about weed, and some truthful information. There'd be better information out there if the government would permit independent or even government studies involving marijuana, but they have been reluctant to do so.
I work 40 hours a week and bought my own car, paid for my own insurance, pay for most of my own food and all of my own gas, and pretty much any other expenses of mine: I'm hardly taking my parents to the cleaners. And if going to catholic school means I live in a comfortable little suburban world, than how come yours has a heroine epidemic? I don't like hard drugs, have never tried them, and don't even smoke cigarettes. I don't smoke cigarettes or do hard drugs because I know they're bad for me. I am confident enough that weed is not that I will smoke some on occasion, and I am not a stupid person so don't even suggest it.
I'm a senior at a Catholic High School in New Hampshire, a Catholic School for Gods sake, and just about every single person in my class has tried smoking weed, I guarentee it. I would guess somewhere around the 99% mark. I can't think of anyone in my school who's tried anything harder than weed than maybe 2 or 3 people. Most people at least know doing hard drugs is taking a risk that they're probably not willing to take.
The story is not the same when it has to do with hard drugs. You do hard drugs knowing the risk involved. If you don't know the risk involved than it's your own damn fault for being too ignorant to check the facts before you do something potentialy harmful. The government putting weed in the same list as heroine is part of the problem. If information was at least made more readily available (as it is becoming now with the Internet, although it's hard to discern fact from fiction) than people could make their own informed decisions.
What works for one dealer works for all and they all cary the cheapest crap they can make the most money on.
Then how come there is an abundance of high quality marijuana at this time, especially in Canada. There was an article in Time Magazine about BC Buds not too long ago. Maybe in the projects they sell the cheapest shit they can get their hands on...
They have great morals and would never knowingly buy or sell anything harmful, but they don't really know either. They are weak as are their cutomers. What are you going to do if you get burnt?
Once again, if you had done your homework and actually knew the first thing about weed, you can tell weed from anything fake. Easily. And as for 'laced' weed and whatnot, it simply is not cost effective to do so without telling the customer. It costs more money to add more expensive drugs to probably already expensive weed. I've never even seen laced weed in my life.
How old are your kids? When they get through high school and college, if they havn't already, they'll have tried weed - I'm sure of it. Who's the looser now?
Yeah everybodys free. What do you care if weed is legalized to use/grow in your own house or on your own property. There's a bill being voted on in Alaska very soon that will make that legal. People aren't gonna walk down the street and blow it in your face. If you think of the stereotypical stoner they aren't pushers, they just want to have the peace to do what they want privately. What I do to my own body is is my own business.
Is this really worth it? I have a Mediaone (err, I mean roadrunner, I mean AT&T, I mean Verizon) cable modem and my downloads max at around 200kbyte/s. However, I hardly ever sustain 200k/s downloads, most of the time I'm around a quarter of that or less. At some point doesn't the bottleneck stop being your connection and start being the Internet as a whole? Isn't there a better solution?
My great grandmother came over with no money in her pocket in the 20's as one of the new immigrants. Now we're comfortably middle class and both my uncles and my aunt all own their own businesses and are pretty wealthy. Through hard work. You don't think anyone gets rich by hard work than your sadly mistaken.
A friend of mine claimed his father had an adult game when he was a kid. I thought he said atari but it may have actually been Apple ][ now that I think about it. Heh he said it was two (highly pixelated) people in bed and you could lift up the covers and make them do stuff... What fun eh?
Also you said they re-locked it. However I don't recall AMD ever having any chips that had either front side bus or multipliers locked...
Starting 7 years ago up until about 4 or 5 years ago I spent a lot of my time on AOL. I was rather young at the time, and didn't really know too much about computers except that I thought hackers were cool. Somehow I ended up in private room hack, I don't know how or why, but there was a whole culture of people in there. Keep in mind this was a long time ago, this was when compuserv and prodigy were viable alternatives, when AOL sucked because of the "me too"s first and foremost. When AOL didn't have a web browser.
So to skip all the boring shit I found myself going to the "elite" room with various other kids who had somehow proved their eliteness. Anyway, these were the people who really fscked around with AOL, not this parental control bs. This was before parental controls even existed. These were the people who figured out how to upload and download and chat at the same time (back when you couldn't do that). Figured out how to download in a free area (back when you had 5 hours a month on a 2400bps modem), and other usefull things. And no they weren't all harmless, we got overhead accounts (sort of below a guide and above a regular user) that could go to guide areas and had other special features. Some people knew guides that could TOS or delete someones account, etc etc. We also figured out how to kick people offline, intercept instant messages(!), and other cool but usually malicious things. Of course this usually involved pirating software and even credit card theft and all that bad stuff that seems to follow behind, but at the very center of it all there was really just a bunch of people exploring AOL.
At some point Visual Basic got thrown into the mix (probably as a result of the widespread software priacy), and AOHell was made - which automated a lot of these tasks we did manually. Then came the huge amounts of "AOHacks" or "AOProggies" or whatever people would call them. This led to drones of people being able to do the tricks that were previously restricted to only the people who were cool enough to be told. Some of the folks who thought themselves better than this created "AOTurkey" around thanksgiving one year as a sort of joke, making fun of AOL's version of script kiddies. Even though we may have thought ourselves superior, we didn't nothing to stop the flame. I myself spent a decent chunk of time writing a still incomplete VB 3.0 program (and I still have the source code in case I ever come back to it :) ) that could do all sorts of stupid shit like make accounts with fake credit card numbers, automatically send messages to people asking them for hteir credit card numbers, and other random crap. A few decent programmers did some pretty incredible things with Visual Basic back then. No one had really done this stuff before - that is trying to interface directly with AOLs client. If you could write a program that would "get the chatroom text" (ie - being able to detect when someone says a trigger that would add them to a mailing list (of pirated softare)) you were elite. Of course the original people started to grow up and realize they really weren't as hot shit as they thought they were, and that some of the more illegal stuff they were doing was really not worth the risk at the least. I left and never went back, though I still keep in touch with a few of those people through EFNet and emails etc etc. I was actually a bit surprised when I didn't see a comment like this one already posted, since the people who lead the way always think they kick ass :).
So I guess what I'm saying is hacking AOL isn't neccisarily something to immediatly scoff at, I just wouldn't have picked Mr. Sklut to be the representative...
Another case of the slashdot didn't read the article sydrome?
That's rediculous. You said yourself that saying "blah windows sucks" would be a flame, and then you say it. Who is the hypocrite here again?
These gaming companys are out for profit, just like every other business out there. If there was a GOOD profit to be made selling Linux ports than you can bet your ass that every single game would have a linux port. John Carmack is trying to do a good thing from our perspective, but the two copies of Quake 3 for Linux that my local EB got are still sitting there on the shelf. Don't give yourself the illusion that it's because everyone dual boots that games aren't ported to linux; because thats just what it is, an illusion.
Despite all that, you may have a good point with the windows gaming icon. However, backing up your arguments with fallacies is not going to get you very far, especialy not here on slashdot...