A few years ago I was renewing my car tabs on the WA state's site and they had a box for 'donations to DOT' or somesuch. For kicks I tried putting in a negative value, and sure enough it reflected the total for my tabs as less. I went ahead and submitted things with a dollar taken off the value, just to see if it would actually go through. Sure enough, a week later I received my tabs, and the mathematically correct but embarrassing negative donation on my receipt.
I ended up calling them and letting them know about the bug. They were nice about it, and the next year at least it was fixed.
This is almost REALLY cool, but is missing a few big things.
1) video inputs and outputs are analog.. lame, this isn't next gen, this is last gen. 2) no display. Even a one line LCD would go a long way... I don't always want my TV on to play music for example.
I love the business model though, and allowing the community to build things is great. Much like the Squeezebox.
I started a project to have a rich client for Google Maps that blows this away:
http://gmap.trileet.com/
You get a full scrollable map, way better view of the search results and a map that's actually 240x160 and you can scroll for infinity.
Most full maps take less than 5 seconds to come down and you get full integration with your addressbook etc..
You'll need a developer key and unlocked device to get it for now, but as I said, this blows away any other mapping software I've seen on any other phone.
This is funny to say on the other side, but don't believe the MhZ myth!:)
The PM 2.0Ghz boxes are equivelant to a P4 3.6Ghz or so, which is much more than even twice as fast as the current 1.5Ghz powerbooks.
My G4 800 certainly HAS aged well, no complaints, it has done it's job for three years. (though it really is falling apart now, damn titanium paint and flakey battery connection!) I would have bought another if the processor had kept pace, but they haven't. The 1.5Ghz G4 powerbooks are maybe, MAYBE, twice as fast as my old 800, but various benchmarks on the web seem to indicate it's actually pretty close.
When was it? Apple's schtick isn't having cutting-edge hardware, it's having software that just works.
I would argue that back when I bought my powerbook it WAS cutting edge. Few if any notebooks had the combination of being extremely thin, being widescreen, having firewire, DVI etc.. They truly were cutting edge when it came to laptops.
The x86 clones have caught up though and more than a few manufacturers (HP, Sony, IBM) now offer laptops that offer the same sleek form factors (often much better, whee, two mice buttons!) for less money.
When it comes to the desktop, the G5's are now pretty darn nice, but I hate working at a desk so laptops are still my main system.
-Nic
I've come full circle...
on
Return of the Mac
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Three years ago I bought a Powerbook, my main environment before then was Debian on a desktop (running KDE). Although I certainly enjoyed my mac, and it did get the job done, in the end the incredible lag in hardware (in portable systems) has led me back to Linux.
The sad thing is that three years later, my powerbook (G4 800) isn't really all that much slower than the top of the line powerbooks today. On the other hand, for half the price I bought a new laptop that is as thin, runs a resolution that blows away my old mac and is at least 3-5 times faster. (HP NC8230)
Linux on the desktop has come a long way since I left, and I must admit I'm thoroughly enjoying Gnome, especially hacking away on the new, very excellent Mono apps now coming out. (F-Spot even at it's young age beats iPhoto in my book)
I'm really flabbergasted at just how good the desktop now is on Linux. One huge contributing factor to that is Firefox, three years ago all we had was an aging Netscape that was horrid. Thunderbird also fills the roll for a great e-mail client. Good old emacs is my editor of choice (with a dab of Eclipse running at warp speed compared to my powerbook) and having the source for my photo viewer makes life so much better.
In short, my predicting is that the pendulum is going to swing the other way again, Mac portable hardware is no longer cutting edge by any regard, and the Linux desktop is now fantastic.
I can honestly say I'm not missing Mac OS X one bit.
Well the other option is that he's not entirely wrong.
I just installed Ubuntu Warty and Gnome Panel crashes on me regularly (is there any quick and easy way to kill this thing and restart it apart from killing all of X with a CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE?)
Almost driving me to go back to my confortable KDE, but I'll give Fedora 3 a try with 2.10 first.
I mean they are horrible. I know this is the latest trend, podcasting and all, but it's freaking useless.
I don't care what Nate sounds like, I just want the content, and I want it in txt so I can index it, search against it, quote it easily etc..
Not only are these shows just incredibly badly done (wtf is the first 3 minutes of this thing?) but the format itself is just asinine. mp3's are great for music, they are not great for interviews.
For the love of god, at least give us a transcript!
-Nic
All well and good, but misses the interesting part
on
Mapping Google Maps
·
· Score: 1
This misses the really interesting part, where (and how) is the conversion done from lattitude and longitude to the Google scale of x and y?
That's what is preventing me from doing neato stuff using maps.google and I know it's got to be done in the browser somewhere, but apparently I'm too dumb to figure it out.
Has anybody figured this out yet? It's completely glossed over here, and I don't think it's because it's obvious..
a) This is not a ban, it's control for a certain age group, it's not censorship either. If the government was banning violent games outright then ya, I could understand, but this is just a little effort to help kids off some of the more mature titles out there.
b) The idea that you as a parent can control everything is all well and nice, but ultimately unrealistic. The media, corporations etc, are what you should be worrying more about, rather than the government. We are on a race towards the bottom right now, driven purely by profit, profit that is coming from corporation appealing to the basest instincts. Want no control, no legislation, nothing? Let me paint a picture of what that would look like. Basically 24/7 pr0n, intersperced with some violence and then some more pr0n, maybe a bit of football here and there with hardcore girl on girl on goat halftime shows. That will sell, therefore that's what will be on the airwaves with absolutely no control.
The point is that we as a society need to make some effort to let parents MAKE that decision for their children until they can make that decision themselves. If all content, pr0n, mature video games etc, are available to anyone at any age, then parents really don't have much of a change to instill those values.
As for saying that's the parent's job. Consider that kid's spend hours upon hours a day either watching TV (in school no less!), playing video games, or otherwise being exposed to marketers and the corporation's messages. How many hours a day do most parents get to really sit down and talk values with their kids? It's not a fair fight, so having some reasonably sane laws to hedge things in the parent's favor is absolutely sound.
If you can't trust your children to not go purchase a game you told them not to buy, then I think you need to deal with your parenting problems, rather than the government "taking care" of your children.
Oh whatever, this is so naive as to be laughable.
Take a step back for a bit. Ok, take a deep breath. Now try, I know it's hard, but just try to get your one sided mind to look at the other side for a bit.
What are the downsides to this law? Really, I'm waiting.
The video game manufacturers themselves have already said that these games are NOT appropriate for children, that children should NOT be playing them. This is setting up a law (and therefore enforcement by retailers) to help enforce that belief. Is it perfect? No, but considering how many games are rented without parents having any clue it's a step in the right direction.
Who is getting hurt? If you feel your child is mature enough for some content (game or otherwise) then by all means go buy it for them. But our society as a whole can (and should) make some reasonable attempt to keep inappropriate content away. Yes that clashes with the naive, I'm still in college,/. liberatarian view, but just as free markets are not the solution to all problems, neither is absolute transparency.
I'm still waiting for WHY this is a bad move apart from a knee jerk reaction. Who will this hurt? Don't give me some slippery slope bullshit argument either, cause that's just not being able to think for yourself.
Hello, how is this different than R-rated movies today? Mature games are intended for a mature audience and you better believe we shouldn't have 8 year olds playing GTA3 unless their parents approve of it and buy it for them.
What's the crazy backlash to this? It's absolutely sound to set up laws prohibiting sales of these games to minors (just as it prohibits sales of pr0n to minors).
If parents choose that their kids are mature enough for said games then they'll go and buy it for their kids. If not, then kids won't be playing games that they likely aren't ready for.
Both you and the original poster seem to have been out of the loop for a while, these things have been addressed.
The current playstation has two ports for little 'flash' cards to save games onto, you can save dozens of games on a single one, bring your games to a friend's house etc..
As for demo's, you can buy playstation magazines which come with demo cd's which contain a dozen demo's for games, so that's pretty well covered as well.
The PS2 certainly is going to open up alot of interesting opportunities as it seems to blend the computer/console line very well. It seems to offer expandability (using industry standards) and has the horsepower to really dish out some graphics.
As for those who say that console games don't have the depth of PC games, again this is a pretty dated concept. Take a look at FF7, which is one of the better RPG's I've ever played on any platform.
I don't know, but I agree it is somewhat worrisome.
In my opinion the biggest problem with Mozilla is that it hasn't yet reached a point where alot of people are using it, due to it not being feature complete. I think it's hard for the Open Source model to build something that big totally from scratch, but once there is something that works, the itterative process can really get rolling and improve on the product and fix bugs quickly.
I hope they leave it open, and just tough out this first release, as I think after that you'll see alot more involvement with the project.
I can't see Sun's process fitting in here very well, Java and Mozilla are very different in that respect. I see the reason to enforce control over what goes into Java (for compatibility reasons), but I see Mozilla as being something which should be able to offshoot and grow, and needs to in order to be successful.
Although I agree with your points and think YOU're dead on, I still think ESR is off.
He says:
All of these trends raised the payoff from opening the source. At some point the payoff curves crossed over and it became economically rational for id to open up the Doom source and shift to making money in secondary markets such as game-scenario anthologies. And sometime after this point, it actually happened. The full source for Doom was released in late 1997.
id never changed their strategy as to how to make money, they kept making close sourced games that had better (proprietary) engines than anybody else at the time.
Your point, which I agree with, is that eventually, it became more of a headache for id to keep supporting Doom than it was worth, especially since they were actively working on something new.
This is a very different thing than embracing open source, or using open source as your model. Instead it's basically giving something away which is no longer cutting edge and isn't bringing in much revenue anymore (with the advent of other games like Duke Nuken etc..) and is in fact more of a headache than it's worth due to people wanting ports and support issues.
I agree Carmack is the man for having released the source and educating tons of people out there on writing high quality portable games, but using id as an example of a company which shifted it's model to an open source one is completely off base. If anything, id proves the point that if you're doing something that's really cutting edge, it pays to keep it closed source and make a mint off of it, at least if you're good enough to do it with high quality. (granted very very few are as good as JC)
Anyways, I still think ESR is way off base on the whole thing and is confusing the matter more than anything.
Isn't ESR just totally off base on the whole Doom analogy?
If I remember correctly Doom source was only released after Quake was out (or at the very least after Quake was well into production). And I'm pretty sure there's very little shared code between Quake and Doom, considering the engines are drastically different, as is the networking.
ESR seems to imply that id switched to an open source model, while really, I think Carmack just decided to be cool and release Doom source because he thought it would be a nice way for people interested in 3D engines to cut their teeth. Releasing Doom source was no threat whatsoever on Quake, as it was significantly more primitive. To this day, Quake and Quake 2 (and Quake 3) are still closed source, because Carmack is still pushing the envelope and doing things better than anybody else.
id released source because they wanted to give people something to learn from, not because they wanted to increase their quality. To this day they depend on closed source software and traditional testing to make their (high quality) games.
So where does ESR get off making them an example? Didn't he do his homework, or am I just mistaken?
Check out http://www.newsmaps.com/ (preferebly from a T1) and you'll see an interface to data which I suspect is alot easier to use than the IBM system. It branched off of a government lab, and we first also had a 3D jazzy interface like IBM has, and although it looks cool, it's not the best way to display things. The map paradigm that we've adopted is easier for people to understand and provides the same information, again, organizing the content automatically into areas of similar content.
The basic premise is that you map documents onto a 2 dimensional plane, where proximity of documents relates to how related they are. (ie, if you have two documents right next to each other, there's a high likelyhood that they will be related) A landscape is added onto this to add a 3rd dimension which represents the density of the information. Labels are added to the mountains and peaks to give you some idea of where things are layed out and you can fully interact with the map to view documents in areas.
This is cool stuff, and although I'll admit I'm plugging my own company, I think it's worth a look to get an idea of where information visualization is heading.
I agree, man you guys are over the top with this privacy stuff.. See 'The Transparent Society' article.. Whether you like it or not, you WILL lose your privacy, your only choice is going to be whether you will have the same access to that information as others. With the advent of smaller cameras, X-Ray devices like this, and increasing dependence of computers, facts WILL be accumulated about you. Any other opinion is sticking your head in the sand and pretending it's not true.
I for one, DON'T have anything hide, and actually sort of look forward to a society where there is no privacy.. When everybody knows everything about everybody else we all become more tolerant and our society becomes a hell of alot better.
As for those bitching about us not caring about our privacy.. Those in the US live in a democracy, if you voice your opinion strongly enough and are in the majority you should be able to change the direction we're headed in this manner (though I doubt it). Otherwise, if you don't like it, you have the choice to move somewhere else that suits you better, you always have a choice, so stop bitching and moaning.
Slashdot Mirror
A few years ago I was renewing my car tabs on the WA state's site and they had a box for 'donations to DOT' or somesuch. For kicks I tried putting in a negative value, and sure enough it reflected the total for my tabs as less. I went ahead and submitted things with a dollar taken off the value, just to see if it would actually go through. Sure enough, a week later I received my tabs, and the mathematically correct but embarrassing negative donation on my receipt.
I ended up calling them and letting them know about the bug. They were nice about it, and the next year at least it was fixed.
-Nic
Oh and no-wifi. Duh.
This is almost REALLY cool, but is missing a few big things.
1) video inputs and outputs are analog.. lame, this isn't next gen, this is last gen.
2) no display. Even a one line LCD would go a long way... I don't always want my TV on to play music for example.
I love the business model though, and allowing the community to build things is great. Much like the Squeezebox.
I started a project to have a rich client for Google Maps that blows this away:
http://gmap.trileet.com/
You get a full scrollable map, way better view of the search results and a map that's actually 240x160 and you can scroll for infinity.
Most full maps take less than 5 seconds to come down and you get full integration with your addressbook etc..
You'll need a developer key and unlocked device to get it for now, but as I said, this blows away any other mapping software I've seen on any other phone.
Nic
This is funny to say on the other side, but don't believe the MhZ myth!
The PM 2.0Ghz boxes are equivelant to a P4 3.6Ghz or so, which is much more than even twice as fast as the current 1.5Ghz powerbooks.
My G4 800 certainly HAS aged well, no complaints, it has done it's job for three years. (though it really is falling apart now, damn titanium paint and flakey battery connection!) I would have bought another if the processor had kept pace, but they haven't. The 1.5Ghz G4 powerbooks are maybe, MAYBE, twice as fast as my old 800, but various benchmarks on the web seem to indicate it's actually pretty close.
A 2.0 Ghz PM is easily 3 times faster.
-Nic
When was it? Apple's schtick isn't having cutting-edge hardware, it's having software that just works.
I would argue that back when I bought my powerbook it WAS cutting edge. Few if any notebooks had the combination of being extremely thin, being widescreen, having firewire, DVI etc.. They truly were cutting edge when it came to laptops.
The x86 clones have caught up though and more than a few manufacturers (HP, Sony, IBM) now offer laptops that offer the same sleek form factors (often much better, whee, two mice buttons!) for less money.
When it comes to the desktop, the G5's are now pretty darn nice, but I hate working at a desk so laptops are still my main system.
-Nic
Three years ago I bought a Powerbook, my main environment before then was Debian on a desktop (running KDE). Although I certainly enjoyed my mac, and it did get the job done, in the end the incredible lag in hardware (in portable systems) has led me back to Linux.
The sad thing is that three years later, my powerbook (G4 800) isn't really all that much slower than the top of the line powerbooks today. On the other hand, for half the price I bought a new laptop that is as thin, runs a resolution that blows away my old mac and is at least 3-5 times faster. (HP NC8230)
Linux on the desktop has come a long way since I left, and I must admit I'm thoroughly enjoying Gnome, especially hacking away on the new, very excellent Mono apps now coming out. (F-Spot even at it's young age beats iPhoto in my book)
I'm really flabbergasted at just how good the desktop now is on Linux. One huge contributing factor to that is Firefox, three years ago all we had was an aging Netscape that was horrid. Thunderbird also fills the roll for a great e-mail client. Good old emacs is my editor of choice (with a dab of Eclipse running at warp speed compared to my powerbook) and having the source for my photo viewer makes life so much better.
In short, my predicting is that the pendulum is going to swing the other way again, Mac portable hardware is no longer cutting edge by any regard, and the Linux desktop is now fantastic.
I can honestly say I'm not missing Mac OS X one bit.
-Nic
Well the other option is that he's not entirely wrong.
I just installed Ubuntu Warty and Gnome Panel crashes on me regularly (is there any quick and easy way to kill this thing and restart it apart from killing all of X with a CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE?)
Almost driving me to go back to my confortable KDE, but I'll give Fedora 3 a try with 2.10 first.
-Nic
I mean they are horrible. I know this is the latest trend, podcasting and all, but it's freaking useless.
I don't care what Nate sounds like, I just want the content, and I want it in txt so I can index it, search against it, quote it easily etc..
Not only are these shows just incredibly badly done (wtf is the first 3 minutes of this thing?) but the format itself is just asinine. mp3's are great for music, they are not great for interviews.
For the love of god, at least give us a transcript!
-Nic
This misses the really interesting part, where (and how) is the conversion done from lattitude and longitude to the Google scale of x and y?
That's what is preventing me from doing neato stuff using maps.google and I know it's got to be done in the browser somewhere, but apparently I'm too dumb to figure it out.
Has anybody figured this out yet? It's completely glossed over here, and I don't think it's because it's obvious..
-Nic
Please go look up censorship.
a) This is not a ban, it's control for a certain age group, it's not censorship either. If the government was banning violent games outright then ya, I could understand, but this is just a little effort to help kids off some of the more mature titles out there.
b) The idea that you as a parent can control everything is all well and nice, but ultimately unrealistic. The media, corporations etc, are what you should be worrying more about, rather than the government. We are on a race towards the bottom right now, driven purely by profit, profit that is coming from corporation appealing to the basest instincts. Want no control, no legislation, nothing? Let me paint a picture of what that would look like. Basically 24/7 pr0n, intersperced with some violence and then some more pr0n, maybe a bit of football here and there with hardcore girl on girl on goat halftime shows. That will sell, therefore that's what will be on the airwaves with absolutely no control.
The point is that we as a society need to make some effort to let parents MAKE that decision for their children until they can make that decision themselves. If all content, pr0n, mature video games etc, are available to anyone at any age, then parents really don't have much of a change to instill those values.
As for saying that's the parent's job. Consider that kid's spend hours upon hours a day either watching TV (in school no less!), playing video games, or otherwise being exposed to marketers and the corporation's messages. How many hours a day do most parents get to really sit down and talk values with their kids? It's not a fair fight, so having some reasonably sane laws to hedge things in the parent's favor is absolutely sound.
-Nic
If you can't trust your children to not go purchase a game you told them not to buy, then I think you need to deal with your parenting problems, rather than the government "taking care" of your children.
/. liberatarian view, but just as free markets are not the solution to all problems, neither is absolute transparency.
Oh whatever, this is so naive as to be laughable.
Take a step back for a bit. Ok, take a deep breath. Now try, I know it's hard, but just try to get your one sided mind to look at the other side for a bit.
What are the downsides to this law? Really, I'm waiting.
The video game manufacturers themselves have already said that these games are NOT appropriate for children, that children should NOT be playing them. This is setting up a law (and therefore enforcement by retailers) to help enforce that belief. Is it perfect? No, but considering how many games are rented without parents having any clue it's a step in the right direction.
Who is getting hurt? If you feel your child is mature enough for some content (game or otherwise) then by all means go buy it for them. But our society as a whole can (and should) make some reasonable attempt to keep inappropriate content away. Yes that clashes with the naive, I'm still in college,
I'm still waiting for WHY this is a bad move apart from a knee jerk reaction. Who will this hurt? Don't give me some slippery slope bullshit argument either, cause that's just not being able to think for yourself.
-Nic
The /. one that is. Ban? What?
Hello, how is this different than R-rated movies today? Mature games are intended for a mature audience and you better believe we shouldn't have 8 year olds playing GTA3 unless their parents approve of it and buy it for them.
What's the crazy backlash to this? It's absolutely sound to set up laws prohibiting sales of these games to minors (just as it prohibits sales of pr0n to minors).
If parents choose that their kids are mature enough for said games then they'll go and buy it for their kids. If not, then kids won't be playing games that they likely aren't ready for.
-Nic
Both you and the original poster seem to have been out of the loop for a while, these things have been addressed.
The current playstation has two ports for little 'flash' cards to save games onto, you can save dozens of games on a single one, bring your games to a friend's house etc..
As for demo's, you can buy playstation magazines which come with demo cd's which contain a dozen demo's for games, so that's pretty well covered as well.
The PS2 certainly is going to open up alot of interesting opportunities as it seems to blend the computer/console line very well. It seems to offer expandability (using industry standards) and has the horsepower to really dish out some graphics.
As for those who say that console games don't have the depth of PC games, again this is a pretty dated concept. Take a look at FF7, which is one of the better RPG's I've ever played on any platform.
-Nic
Well maybe the dual processors are, though even that is a little much for most.
Certainly, having 3 21" monitors is pretty rare, no matter where you work though.
-Nic
Seems like it's
Anybody have mirrors of the screenshots up?
-Nic
I don't know, but I agree it is somewhat worrisome.
In my opinion the biggest problem with Mozilla is that it hasn't yet reached a point where alot of people are using it, due to it not being feature complete. I think it's hard for the Open Source model to build something that big totally from scratch, but once there is something that works, the itterative process can really get rolling and improve on the product and fix bugs quickly.
I hope they leave it open, and just tough out this first release, as I think after that you'll see alot more involvement with the project.
I can't see Sun's process fitting in here very well, Java and Mozilla are very different in that respect. I see the reason to enforce control over what goes into Java (for compatibility reasons), but I see Mozilla as being something which should be able to offshoot and grow, and needs to in order to be successful.
-Nic
He says:
All of these trends raised the payoff from opening the source. At some point the payoff curves crossed over and it became economically rational for
id to open up the Doom source and shift to making money in secondary markets such as game-scenario anthologies. And sometime after this point, it
actually happened. The full source for Doom was released in late 1997.
id never changed their strategy as to how to make money, they kept making close sourced games that had better (proprietary) engines than anybody else at the time.
Your point, which I agree with, is that eventually, it became more of a headache for id to keep supporting Doom than it was worth, especially since they were actively working on something new.
This is a very different thing than embracing open source, or using open source as your model. Instead it's basically giving something away which is no longer cutting edge and isn't bringing in much revenue anymore (with the advent of other games like Duke Nuken etc..) and is in fact more of a headache than it's worth due to people wanting ports and support issues.
I agree Carmack is the man for having released the source and educating tons of people out there on writing high quality portable games, but using id as an example of a company which shifted it's model to an open source one is completely off base. If anything, id proves the point that if you're doing something that's really cutting edge, it pays to keep it closed source and make a mint off of it, at least if you're good enough to do it with high quality. (granted very very few are as good as JC)
Anyways, I still think ESR is way off base on the whole thing and is confusing the matter more than anything.
-Nic
Isn't ESR just totally off base on the whole Doom analogy?
If I remember correctly Doom source was only released after Quake was out (or at the very least after Quake was well into production). And I'm pretty sure there's very little shared code between Quake and Doom, considering the engines are drastically different, as is the networking.
ESR seems to imply that id switched to an open source model, while really, I think Carmack just decided to be cool and release Doom source because he thought it would be a nice way for people interested in 3D engines to cut their teeth. Releasing Doom source was no threat whatsoever on Quake, as it was significantly more primitive. To this day, Quake and Quake 2 (and Quake 3) are still closed source, because Carmack is still pushing the envelope and doing things better than anybody else.
id released source because they wanted to give people something to learn from, not because they wanted to increase their quality. To this day they depend on closed source software and traditional testing to make their (high quality) games.
So where does ESR get off making them an example? Didn't he do his homework, or am I just mistaken?
-Nic
The basic premise is that you map documents onto a 2 dimensional plane, where proximity of documents relates to how related they are. (ie, if you have two documents right next to each other, there's a high likelyhood that they will be related) A landscape is added onto this to add a 3rd dimension which represents the density of the information. Labels are added to the mountains and peaks to give you some idea of where things are layed out and you can fully interact with the map to view documents in areas.
This is cool stuff, and although I'll admit I'm plugging my own company, I think it's worth a look to get an idea of where information visualization is heading.
-Nic
I agree, man you guys are over the top with this privacy stuff.. See 'The Transparent Society' article.. Whether you like it or not, you WILL lose your privacy, your only choice is going to be whether you will have the same access to that information as others. With the advent of smaller cameras, X-Ray devices like this, and increasing dependence of computers, facts WILL be accumulated about you. Any other opinion is sticking your head in the sand and pretending it's not true.
I for one, DON'T have anything hide, and actually sort of look forward to a society where there is no privacy.. When everybody knows everything about everybody else we all become more tolerant and our society becomes a hell of alot better.
As for those bitching about us not caring about our privacy.. Those in the US live in a democracy, if you voice your opinion strongly enough and are in the majority you should be able to change the direction we're headed in this manner (though I doubt it). Otherwise, if you don't like it, you have the choice to move somewhere else that suits you better, you always have a choice, so stop bitching and moaning.
Anybody want to put up a mirror with the file on it? I'm too lazy to track down 47 parts of a uuencoded message from a newsgroup I never frequent.