Nothing. When they call IBM for support, the support guy laughs for five minutes, dries his eyes, and then says, "thank you, I needed that." He then hangs up and mails them a free raspberry pi that runs a punch card machine emulator.
When I first learned about bytes I was in elementary school and my only frame of reference was the movie Tron (the original).
Kevin Flynn: Hey! Hold it right there! Bit: Yes. Kevin Flynn: What do you mean, "yes"? Bit: Yes. Kevin Flynn: Is that all you can say? Bit: No. Kevin Flynn: Know anything else? Bit: Yes. Kevin Flynn: Positive and negative, huh. You're a bit, aren't you? Bit: Yes. Kevin Flynn: Well, where's your program? Isn't he going to miss you? Bit: No. Kevin Flynn: I'M your program? Bit: Yes. Kevin Flynn: Pretty good driving, huh?
[CRASH] Bit: No.
Bits are very direct. I figured a byte was a bit that knew 8 different ways of saying yes or no, but I was confused about how bits and bytes would communicate, because the bit wouldn't understand all the nuanced shades of yes or no. It seemed like a very fuzzy kind of logic. I made a mental note to study it further in junior high school, as a primer for studying other... curiosities... that know hundreds of ways of saying yes or no.
I just send all my broken storage media to the Nixon Presidential Library, labelled "18 1/2 minutes" in a box with a return address for "Flasback Data Recovery Specialists: We Recover Anything, Confidentiality Guaranteed. Austin, TX." They replace all the 1s and 0s with pure silence. Nothing beats that.
The cost per lumen of LEDs has held the technology back as a viable replacement for incandescent bulbs for all-purpose commercial and residential lighting.
450 lumens for $9.97 is 0.0222 per lumen. It's rated to last 22.8 years. That's $0.0010 per lumen per year of use.
Let's compare that to an "equivalent" (the cree is a 40-watt equivalent bulb) incandescent bulb. $8.77 for a pack of 6 is $1.46 per bulb.
300 lumens for $1.46 is $0.0049 per lumen. But it's only rated to last 0.9 years. That's $0.0544 per lumen per year of use. It's more than 54 times more expensive than the CREE. That's before you look at the electricity you'll be saving (6 watts to get more light than you would out of a 40 watt incandescent).
Home Depot is also selling CREE's 60-watt equivalent:
800 lumens for $12.97 is 0.0162 per lumen.It's rated to last 22.8 years. That's $0.0007 per lumen per year of use. The incandescent is 77 times more expensive.
As much as I love CREE LEDs in general, I prefer Philips 10.5-watt bulb. The bulb itself it more aesthetically pleasing (in my opinion) and it diffuses the light better (the CREE focuses all the bulbs in one area and its very apparent from the very bright spot in the middle). I own six of them. Home Depot sells them for $27.97 for a two pack.
800 lumens for $13.99 is $0.0175 per lumen. Rated to last 18.3 years. That's $0.0010 per lumen per year of use. If I'm going to spent the next two decades with a bulb, I'll spend the extra three hundredths of a cent per lumen on something I really like. Still less than one fiftieth the cost of an incandescent per lumen.
The only things I see holding back LED bulbs are misinformation and lack of availability (Home Depot is the only major brick and mortar store I've found that carries them). That, and some freaky designs that don't look like light bulbs... I bought one of these out of curiosity, and its appearance, on or off, just irritates me for some reason... if I was redesigning my living room to look like Quark's, I'd go with these all the way, but since I'm not "that guy" it's in a lamp that I almost never use. Which means it will probably outlive me. It may even survive to the 24th century and end up in Quark's.
...you can't predict when the asshole in the left lane is going to swerve right three lanes...
I think this text should be printed on every license plate above the plate number as a reminder. Forget the "sesquicentennial" or "first in flight" or "STATE is for lovers" stuff... we don't need people daydreaming on the road, we need people jolted to a state of alertness. Screw the censors who would say you can't put "asshole" on a license plate... it needs to be shocking. In fact, it should be followed by this in smaller print: "If you can read this from your car you are about to die when I hit my brakes. 5... 4... 2..."
"What the hell is a GW?!" Looks around, confused. "What?! I thought "jigawatt" was abbreviated JW? Isn't it easier to say 'almost fifty pre-Fukushima Fukushimas?'"
Does a spy camera on the side of the road really justify comparisons to 1984??
Novel
No, it would have to be in your living room. 1984-esque technology in a public place would consist of a video screen at which you hurl things and scream.
Year
Even in 1985, Dr. Emmett Brown, who was sufficiently advanced to build a time machine out of a DeLorean, had to hire some slacker kid to shoulder his ginormous video camera. If he didn't have the technology to build a self-supporting camera in 1985, it certainly wouldn't have been available in 1984.
Till last week, I had never heard of Kobo. Now there is a story everyday about Kobo.
They've been around for a few years, but since their main revenue driver seems to be their bookstore they don't get as much attention as the more flashy iTunes or Amazon. I've only bought one book from them because I don't like the idea that their content is not in a standard epub format (I don't buy the argument that standard epubs without DRM aren't a valid business model... O'Reilly uses them... JK Rowling's "Pottermore" store uses them...). They've had licensing arrangements to be the bookstore that is tied to some dirt-cheap ebook readers you've never heard of, but they first came to my attention when Target gave them the boot last year in favor of a closer relationship with Barnes and Noble.
Target was carrying two models of their e-ink e-readers (the WiFi and the Touch), and suddenly put them on clearance for 30% off, then 50% off. At that point I didn't have an e-ink e-reader so I figured I'd try it for 50% off.I can only read books on my iPad for so long before the weight and the backlit screen get to me. The "pearl" e-ink screen Kobo was using made all the difference. I was spending less time watching TV and more time reading books. Then they went down to 70% off as Target tried to clear the last units from their supply chain, and I spent an afternoon driving around to different locations buying them up to give to friends and co-workers as gifts. A friend of mine who is over 65 and an avid book reader (but definitely not a gadget guy... he still doesn't even own a cell phone) has been devouring books on the Kobo WiFi I gave him. His employees tell me he's sitting in his car reading it before work, and sitting in his office reading it while he eats lunch. A friend in her 20s who is a physical book "purist" has taken to the one I gave her in a similar fashion, despite the fact that she told me she'd never read e-books. I'm sure they'd get the same enjoyment out of a Kindle (until Amazon remotely deleted their books one day), but it was cheap enough and usable enough that it turned some pretty staunch anti-e-book people into devotees.
Beyond that, their software is open source. The devices run a stripped down Linux distro and there is a community dedicated to rooting and hacking the device... and as far as I can tell they're not fighting it. It was pretty simple to SSH into the device and play around in the shell. A little Googling turns up instructions on how to do it, and videos of people running Python games on the Kobos. This alone should make Kobos a more attractive choice for the Slashdot crowd.
But their offerings weren't really all that different from the Nook and Kindle until Kobo announced earlier this week that it was selling the "limited edition" Kobo Aura with the high-resolution screen. At 256ppi, it's pretty close to the resolution of the current generation "retina screen" iPad, which is listed as 264ppi. Plus the interface looks more usable than the Kobo I'm already spending a few hours a day reading. Totally worth it to me, but YMMV.
It's also tax day. A couple years ago I went to a downtown BofA branch and was stopped by an armed guard in combat boots who said I had to use the entrance on the other side of the building. There was another armed guard at the other entrance who was watching me, the street, etc. Once I got inside I asked one of the bank employees what was going on, and he said "it's April 15th and the IRS has offices upstairs." They were back last year on 4/15 too. Probably guarding the building again today.
That was not a troll. By "never," I meant that Slashdot doesn't produce journalism, it aggregates it. I was pointing out that this story's submitter, Nerval's Lobster, is not a user, but a shill that exists solely to submit Slashdot-produced content (slashdot.org/topic/) to Slashdot and is nearly always posted by the editors. See a brief sampling of Nerval's Lobster's very recent history below. Note that he/she never makes any comments in discussions, but submits about 10 stories a week and nearly all of them are posted. How many real users have a success rate like that?
HP Hopes Its 'Moonshot' Project Will Kick Off a Big Shift
Submitted by Nerval's Lobster, Not posted, but Unknown Lamer posted a story submitted by "new submitter" linatux (who has never submitted anything else, and has never posted any comments) that linked to the same slashdot-paid-content
Links to http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/hp-hopes-moonshot-servers-will-kick-off-big-shift/
Since when did Slashdot start doing real journalism?
Never. The submitter, Nerval's Lobster, is a frequently-accepted shill that submits stories for Slashdot's "business intelligence" and "cloud" channels, which are usually paid advertisements disguised as journalism.
The submitter's name is a pun in reference to 19th-century French surrealist poet Gérard de Nerval, who had a pet lobster he would take for walks in the Palais Royal gardens in Paris on the end of a blue silk ribbon. He was quoted as having said, "Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog?...or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark, and they don't gnaw upon one's monadic privacy like dogs do."
Dice sees paid content writers as pets on a ribbon it takes for walks in the Slashdot gardens. When people comment that it is absurd to masquerade these paid content writers as journalists, Dice asks why a paid content writer should be any more ridiculous than a journalist. Or a cat, or a gazelle, or a troll, or other animal. It likes paid content writers. They are peaceful, serious creatures that keep secrets, don't bark and don't gnaw upon one's privacy like journalists do.
The only thing funny about the pun is that it's fairly obvious and we haven't noticed.
No need for nukes with North Korea, anyway. They will easily be flattened by conventional missles. They are effectively defenceless and have a tiny infrastructure.
Speaking of their infrastructure, most countries would be returned to the stone age by nukes. North Korea might actually be brought forward into the stone age by nukes.
(On the second attempt, Timothy calls again using a blatantly falsetto voice)
Timothy: Hi, this is Dawn Kawamoto from Dice. I'd like to speak to...
Russian: Did you just call five minutes ago pretendingto be from Slashdot?
Timothy: Maybe... it's hard to keep track these days.
Russian: *click*
In Soviet Russia, Slashdot editor pretend to be Dice news editor
How is Blink one of the most popular HTML layout engines?
I think what they meant is that people who have no concept of HTML layout have a tendency to overcompensate for this shortcoming by using the BLINK tag as a replacement for all other more-subtle and more-refined embellishments (B, I, U, P, BR, etc.), and they use it with such gusto that use of the tag indicates a subscription to the Blink "School" of layout theory ("more blink equals more better" and so forth) which is treated as a layout engine unto itself, however crude it may be. Many adherents of the Blink School evolved to the Flash school during the AOLic period, but as Blink is so much simpler to implement, it serves as a common denominator and suggests that these simplest developers outnumber all other developers combined. This makes their "layout engine" the most popular, in much the same way that people who do not know how to drive set the popular rules of the road through their ignorance of the actual rules simply by outnumbering everyone else.
I feel there has been a great disturbance in the Blink School, as though millions of dancing animated hamsters suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly stationary but not silenced.
Why can't they pass that information on without people assuming ulterior motives? What is wrong with "We heard something related to our business; you might want to know too".
It's called full disclosure. If a reporter or columnist at The New York Times or The Washington Post owns stock in a company they mention, the article will make a point of noting that connection. If The Post runs a story about Kaplan Test Prep, or The Times runs a story about The Boston Globe, they make a point of noting that they are owned by the same parent. Likewise, if Slashdot is going to promote its parent company's content as news, the connection should be noted in the summary. Slashdot used to note its connection with Sourceforge in the summary when an article mentioned it.
Also, this is Kawamoto's second accepted submission. Her first was two days ago.
MSN didn't write an article, they posted a Reuters wire story on their site (lots of sites automatically post the entire feed for services like Reuters, AP, etc.). The Reuters story had all the key facts that the Dice story did, but Dice owns Slashdot so its two stories went on top. See the pattern yet?
The author of the Dice "news story" and the "business intelligence story" is also the submitter. Dawn Kawamoto is a Dice employee who has had two story "submissions" accepted in the last three days. Her other one was the H-1B visa cap story, which notes her as "First time accepted submitter Dawn Kawamoto." She's not an accepted submitter, she's a shill for your corporate overlords, Timothy. Again, a story about people looking for jobs and how tough the market is.
Bottom line: if you see Kawamoto's name listed as the submitter, you know it's a Dice ad right away.
Dice: You bought slashdot. Fine. But if you're going to try to pass your content off as news, instead of sponsored content, people will leave and you will have wasted your money. If you want to post an ad, call it what it is. Deception will get you nowhere on this site. You said you weren't going to interfere with Slashdot's editorial independence. Honor your commitment.
For anyone who was wondering what Dice's real interest in Slashdot was, this seems to be it.
The first link goes to a "Dice News" story.
The second link goes to a Slashdot "Business Intelligence" story (remember, Business Intelligence is code for "someone paid us to put this up") that is a "Dice News" story by the same author as the first link.
Obviously Dice pushed the Slashdot editors to post this as a news item. So much for editorial independence from the parent company. The disappearance of LucasArts may be Slashdot-worthy news, but when Slashdot's parent company, Dice, is writing the story it looks like they just want lots of techies to think "techies are losing their jobs, it could happen to me, I should look and see what's out there."
After being saddled with a half-billion dollars in loans from the U.S. Department of Energy...
From the OED:
saddle v. 1. Put a saddle on a horse 2. (Saddle someone with) give someone an unpleasant responsibility or task.
1. If you somehow meant this car company was reducing fossil fuel consumption by strapping saddles to horses and calling them cars, they should have been out of business a long time ago.
2. If you somehow meant that the DOE forced a half billion dollar loan guarantee on them, and they were unhappy about this... I think you misunderstand the function of the DOE, and possibly the function of a loan guarantee.... And possible the function of a half billion dollars. Are you, perchance, a Fisker executive? They seem to have this same difficulty in understanding the functions of these things.
DOE should take control of the company, oust its top executives and either turn it around or sell off its useful assets to other companies who will use them to achieve the goals of the loan and recoup the taxpayers' costs. Otherwise Fisker will probably sell its assets off for less than they are worth and the executives will get kickbacks or positions at those companies in exchange for doing so.
That's the opposite of "you get what you paid for." It's called "Marketing."
I think you misunderstood. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 190a: "When you don't get what you think you paid for, then you paid for marketing, and you got what paid for." It's a sub-rule of Rule 190: "Hear all, trust nothing."
No word on whether the Indian firm is mostly a thin shell of management and a few field engineers who exist to look over the shoulders of the Chinese sub-subcontractors to keep them from swapping in cheaper parts when nobody is looking...
At $35 for a 7" touchscreen tablet, how much cheaper can you get on parts? A Fisher-Price "tablet" (no touch screen, no shift key, has a "10" key instead of a "0," but it does have a light-up LCD screen that changes color) costs $25, and even then consumers in the two-to-five-year-old bracket are refusing to use it because they keys are too cheaply made. What "cheaper parts" could the sub-subcontractors possibly swap in? Horse meat? Melamine?
I can see the reviews now: "Bought these for my kids, but they leak some kind of liquid. Kids won't touch them, but the cat loved it. The cat's dead now, vet said his kidneys failed, so at least I'm saving money on cat food."
VMware COO Carl Eschenbach jumped on the Amazon theme, saying, "I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books
Amazon is as much about selling books as Pepsi is about selling sugared water.
An engineer at Orbital Sciences created a 1/48th scale paper model of the landsat satellite that you can print, build and hang above your cubicle for nerd cred.
These ppl need to meet each other and learn to trust the other guy.
In fact, 3 nights a week, these ppl should be required to dine with each other.
It is the insane attitudes towards each other that is causing them to not compromise.
Interesting idea. We could make sessions of congress like summer camp. They could hang out in a secluded, mountain location (say, Camp David), living in bunks of 6-8 people, with no lobbyists, cell-phones or Internet-connected devices. They would participate in supervised group activities, playing wheelchair basketball, swimming in the lake and shooting skeet with Obama by day. They'd eat three FDA-approved meals together in the mess hall and make their own beds every morning. Half-way through the session, constituents could bring them care packages and tell them all about what's going on at home. After a few weeks, color war breaks out, and the red and blue teams spend the last couple weeks in competition, playing tug of war over proposed legislation, dodgeball with hot-button issues, and archery using each other's backs as targets. When it's all over, both sides take a field trip to the capitol where they share pizza and cake while piecing the resulting legislation together into law. Once the law is complete, they go home with commemorative T-shirts.
This could be fun for the members and more productive than the current system while being strangely similar to what goes on now (tug of war, dodgeball, shooting each other in the back, etc.). It's so crazy it just might work.
Slashdot Mirror
How much is the IBM support contract for this?
Nothing. When they call IBM for support, the support guy laughs for five minutes, dries his eyes, and then says, "thank you, I needed that." He then hangs up and mails them a free raspberry pi that runs a punch card machine emulator.
Kevin Flynn: Hey! Hold it right there!
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: What do you mean, "yes"?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Is that all you can say?
Bit: No.
Kevin Flynn: Know anything else?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Positive and negative, huh. You're a bit, aren't you?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Well, where's your program? Isn't he going to miss you?
Bit: No.
Kevin Flynn: I'M your program?
Bit: Yes.
Kevin Flynn: Pretty good driving, huh?
[CRASH]
Bit: No.
Bits are very direct. I figured a byte was a bit that knew 8 different ways of saying yes or no, but I was confused about how bits and bytes would communicate, because the bit wouldn't understand all the nuanced shades of yes or no. It seemed like a very fuzzy kind of logic. I made a mental note to study it further in junior high school, as a primer for studying other... curiosities... that know hundreds of ways of saying yes or no.
Do one overwrite with zeros for magnetic media.
I just send all my broken storage media to the Nixon Presidential Library, labelled "18 1/2 minutes" in a box with a return address for "Flasback Data Recovery Specialists: We Recover Anything, Confidentiality Guaranteed. Austin, TX." They replace all the 1s and 0s with pure silence. Nothing beats that.
The cost per lumen of LEDs has held the technology back as a viable replacement for incandescent bulbs for all-purpose commercial and residential lighting.
Really? CREE started distributing LED bulbs a month or two ago through Home Depot for less than $10 each. I own two of them.
450 lumens for $9.97 is 0.0222 per lumen. It's rated to last 22.8 years. That's $0.0010 per lumen per year of use.
Let's compare that to an "equivalent" (the cree is a 40-watt equivalent bulb) incandescent bulb. $8.77 for a pack of 6 is $1.46 per bulb.
300 lumens for $1.46 is $0.0049 per lumen. But it's only rated to last 0.9 years. That's $0.0544 per lumen per year of use. It's more than 54 times more expensive than the CREE. That's before you look at the electricity you'll be saving (6 watts to get more light than you would out of a 40 watt incandescent).
Home Depot is also selling CREE's 60-watt equivalent:
800 lumens for $12.97 is 0.0162 per lumen.It's rated to last 22.8 years. That's $0.0007 per lumen per year of use. The incandescent is 77 times more expensive.
As much as I love CREE LEDs in general, I prefer Philips 10.5-watt bulb. The bulb itself it more aesthetically pleasing (in my opinion) and it diffuses the light better (the CREE focuses all the bulbs in one area and its very apparent from the very bright spot in the middle). I own six of them. Home Depot sells them for $27.97 for a two pack.
800 lumens for $13.99 is $0.0175 per lumen. Rated to last 18.3 years. That's $0.0010 per lumen per year of use. If I'm going to spent the next two decades with a bulb, I'll spend the extra three hundredths of a cent per lumen on something I really like. Still less than one fiftieth the cost of an incandescent per lumen.
The only things I see holding back LED bulbs are misinformation and lack of availability (Home Depot is the only major brick and mortar store I've found that carries them). That, and some freaky designs that don't look like light bulbs... I bought one of these out of curiosity, and its appearance, on or off, just irritates me for some reason... if I was redesigning my living room to look like Quark's, I'd go with these all the way, but since I'm not "that guy" it's in a lamp that I almost never use. Which means it will probably outlive me. It may even survive to the 24th century and end up in Quark's.
...you can't predict when the asshole in the left lane is going to swerve right three lanes...
I think this text should be printed on every license plate above the plate number as a reminder. Forget the "sesquicentennial" or "first in flight" or "STATE is for lovers" stuff... we don't need people daydreaming on the road, we need people jolted to a state of alertness. Screw the censors who would say you can't put "asshole" on a license plate... it needs to be shocking. In fact, it should be followed by this in smaller print: "If you can read this from your car you are about to die when I hit my brakes. 5... 4... 2..."
>the total output of fifty 1 GW power plants
Soooo... 50 GW?
"What the hell is a GW?!" Looks around, confused. "What?! I thought "jigawatt" was abbreviated JW? Isn't it easier to say 'almost fifty pre-Fukushima Fukushimas?'"
The Hague is the seat of the Dutch intelligence services...
More importantly, The Hague is the location of the International Court of Justice, the judicial arm of the United Nations, as well as a number of other international courts. Definitely a city of international importance.
Does a spy camera on the side of the road really justify comparisons to 1984??
Novel
No, it would have to be in your living room. 1984-esque technology in a public place would consist of a video screen at which you hurl things and scream.
Year
Even in 1985, Dr. Emmett Brown, who was sufficiently advanced to build a time machine out of a DeLorean, had to hire some slacker kid to shoulder his ginormous video camera. If he didn't have the technology to build a self-supporting camera in 1985, it certainly wouldn't have been available in 1984.
So no on both counts.
Till last week, I had never heard of Kobo. Now there is a story everyday about Kobo.
They've been around for a few years, but since their main revenue driver seems to be their bookstore they don't get as much attention as the more flashy iTunes or Amazon. I've only bought one book from them because I don't like the idea that their content is not in a standard epub format (I don't buy the argument that standard epubs without DRM aren't a valid business model... O'Reilly uses them... JK Rowling's "Pottermore" store uses them...). They've had licensing arrangements to be the bookstore that is tied to some dirt-cheap ebook readers you've never heard of, but they first came to my attention when Target gave them the boot last year in favor of a closer relationship with Barnes and Noble.
Target was carrying two models of their e-ink e-readers (the WiFi and the Touch), and suddenly put them on clearance for 30% off, then 50% off. At that point I didn't have an e-ink e-reader so I figured I'd try it for 50% off.I can only read books on my iPad for so long before the weight and the backlit screen get to me. The "pearl" e-ink screen Kobo was using made all the difference. I was spending less time watching TV and more time reading books. Then they went down to 70% off as Target tried to clear the last units from their supply chain, and I spent an afternoon driving around to different locations buying them up to give to friends and co-workers as gifts. A friend of mine who is over 65 and an avid book reader (but definitely not a gadget guy... he still doesn't even own a cell phone) has been devouring books on the Kobo WiFi I gave him. His employees tell me he's sitting in his car reading it before work, and sitting in his office reading it while he eats lunch. A friend in her 20s who is a physical book "purist" has taken to the one I gave her in a similar fashion, despite the fact that she told me she'd never read e-books. I'm sure they'd get the same enjoyment out of a Kindle (until Amazon remotely deleted their books one day), but it was cheap enough and usable enough that it turned some pretty staunch anti-e-book people into devotees.
Beyond that, their software is open source. The devices run a stripped down Linux distro and there is a community dedicated to rooting and hacking the device... and as far as I can tell they're not fighting it. It was pretty simple to SSH into the device and play around in the shell. A little Googling turns up instructions on how to do it, and videos of people running Python games on the Kobos. This alone should make Kobos a more attractive choice for the Slashdot crowd.
But their offerings weren't really all that different from the Nook and Kindle until Kobo announced earlier this week that it was selling the "limited edition" Kobo Aura with the high-resolution screen. At 256ppi, it's pretty close to the resolution of the current generation "retina screen" iPad, which is listed as 264ppi. Plus the interface looks more usable than the Kobo I'm already spending a few hours a day reading. Totally worth it to me, but YMMV.
It's also tax day. A couple years ago I went to a downtown BofA branch and was stopped by an armed guard in combat boots who said I had to use the entrance on the other side of the building. There was another armed guard at the other entrance who was watching me, the street, etc. Once I got inside I asked one of the bank employees what was going on, and he said "it's April 15th and the IRS has offices upstairs." They were back last year on 4/15 too. Probably guarding the building again today.
That was not a troll. By "never," I meant that Slashdot doesn't produce journalism, it aggregates it. I was pointing out that this story's submitter, Nerval's Lobster, is not a user, but a shill that exists solely to submit Slashdot-produced content (slashdot.org/topic/) to Slashdot and is nearly always posted by the editors. See a brief sampling of Nerval's Lobster's very recent history below. Note that he/she never makes any comments in discussions, but submits about 10 stories a week and nearly all of them are posted. How many real users have a success rate like that?
4/11
"Winnti" Attacks on Online Gaming Servers Dissected
Submitted by Nerval's Lobster, (NOT POSTED)
Links to http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/winnti-attacks-on-online-gaming-servers-dissected/
U.S. Government Blocks Sales to Russian Supercomputer Maker
Submitted by Nerval's Lobster, Posted by Timothy
Links to http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/u-s-govt-blocks-sales-to-russian-supercomputer-maker/
4/10
How Google Fiber Could Do Some National Good, or At Least Scare the Carriers
Submitted by Nerval's Lobster, Posted by Soulskill
http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/how-google-fiber-could-do-some-national-good/
If Apple and Yahoo Got Together, What Would the Baby Look Like?
Submitted by Nerval's Lobster, (NOT POSTED)
Links to http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/if-apple-and-yahoo-got-together-what-would-the-baby-look-like/
4/8
Should California Have Banned Checking Smartphone Maps While Driving?
Submitted by Nerval's Lobster, Posted by Samzenpus
Links to http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/checking-a-smartphone-map-while-driving-banned-in-california/
HP Hopes Its 'Moonshot' Project Will Kick Off a Big Shift
Submitted by Nerval's Lobster, Not posted, but Unknown Lamer posted a story submitted by "new submitter" linatux (who has never submitted anything else, and has never posted any comments) that linked to the same slashdot-paid-content
Links to http://slashdot.org/topic/datacenter/hp-hopes-moonshot-servers-will-kick-off-big-shift/
4/5 Ask Slashdot: Is Making Government More Open and Connected a Good Idea?
Submitted by Nerval's Lobster, Posted by soulskill
Links to http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/is-government-2-0-a-bad-concept/
4/4
Facebook Launches "Home" for Android
Submitted by Nerval's Lobster, Posted by Timothy
Links to http://slashdot.org/topic/cloud/facebook-launches-home-less-than-an-os-more-than-an-app/
Since when did Slashdot start doing real journalism?
Never. The submitter, Nerval's Lobster, is a frequently-accepted shill that submits stories for Slashdot's "business intelligence" and "cloud" channels, which are usually paid advertisements disguised as journalism.
...or a cat, or a gazelle, or a lion, or any other animal that one chooses to take for a walk? I have a liking for lobsters. They are peaceful, serious creatures. They know the secrets of the sea, they don't bark, and they don't gnaw upon one's monadic privacy like dogs do."
The submitter's name is a pun in reference to 19th-century French surrealist poet Gérard de Nerval, who had a pet lobster he would take for walks in the Palais Royal gardens in Paris on the end of a blue silk ribbon. He was quoted as having said, "Why should a lobster be any more ridiculous than a dog?
Dice sees paid content writers as pets on a ribbon it takes for walks in the Slashdot gardens. When people comment that it is absurd to masquerade these paid content writers as journalists, Dice asks why a paid content writer should be any more ridiculous than a journalist. Or a cat, or a gazelle, or a troll, or other animal. It likes paid content writers. They are peaceful, serious creatures that keep secrets, don't bark and don't gnaw upon one's privacy like journalists do.
The only thing funny about the pun is that it's fairly obvious and we haven't noticed.
North Korea: China's autistic little brother.
I'd call that an insult to autistic brothers. Seriously.
No need for nukes with North Korea, anyway. They will easily be flattened by conventional missles. They are effectively defenceless and have a tiny infrastructure.
Speaking of their infrastructure, most countries would be returned to the stone age by nukes. North Korea might actually be brought forward into the stone age by nukes.
(On the second attempt, Timothy calls again using a blatantly falsetto voice)
Timothy: Hi, this is Dawn Kawamoto from Dice. I'd like to speak to...
Russian: Did you just call five minutes ago pretending to be from Slashdot?
Timothy: Maybe... it's hard to keep track these days.
Russian: *click*
In Soviet Russia, Slashdot editor pretend to be Dice news editor
How is Blink one of the most popular HTML layout engines?
I think what they meant is that people who have no concept of HTML layout have a tendency to overcompensate for this shortcoming by using the BLINK tag as a replacement for all other more-subtle and more-refined embellishments (B, I, U, P, BR, etc.), and they use it with such gusto that use of the tag indicates a subscription to the Blink "School" of layout theory ("more blink equals more better" and so forth) which is treated as a layout engine unto itself, however crude it may be. Many adherents of the Blink School evolved to the Flash school during the AOLic period, but as Blink is so much simpler to implement, it serves as a common denominator and suggests that these simplest developers outnumber all other developers combined. This makes their "layout engine" the most popular, in much the same way that people who do not know how to drive set the popular rules of the road through their ignorance of the actual rules simply by outnumbering everyone else.
I feel there has been a great disturbance in the Blink School, as though millions of dancing animated hamsters suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly stationary but not silenced.
Why can't they pass that information on without people assuming ulterior motives? What is wrong with "We heard something related to our business; you might want to know too".
It's called full disclosure. If a reporter or columnist at The New York Times or The Washington Post owns stock in a company they mention, the article will make a point of noting that connection. If The Post runs a story about Kaplan Test Prep, or The Times runs a story about The Boston Globe, they make a point of noting that they are owned by the same parent. Likewise, if Slashdot is going to promote its parent company's content as news, the connection should be noted in the summary. Slashdot used to note its connection with Sourceforge in the summary when an article mentioned it.
Also, this is Kawamoto's second accepted submission. Her first was two days ago.
MSN didn't write an article, they posted a Reuters wire story on their site (lots of sites automatically post the entire feed for services like Reuters, AP, etc.). The Reuters story had all the key facts that the Dice story did, but Dice owns Slashdot so its two stories went on top. See the pattern yet?
The author of the Dice "news story" and the "business intelligence story" is also the submitter. Dawn Kawamoto is a Dice employee who has had two story "submissions" accepted in the last three days. Her other one was the H-1B visa cap story, which notes her as "First time accepted submitter Dawn Kawamoto." She's not an accepted submitter, she's a shill for your corporate overlords, Timothy. Again, a story about people looking for jobs and how tough the market is.
Bottom line: if you see Kawamoto's name listed as the submitter, you know it's a Dice ad right away.
Dice: You bought slashdot. Fine. But if you're going to try to pass your content off as news, instead of sponsored content, people will leave and you will have wasted your money. If you want to post an ad, call it what it is. Deception will get you nowhere on this site. You said you weren't going to interfere with Slashdot's editorial independence. Honor your commitment.
For anyone who was wondering what Dice's real interest in Slashdot was, this seems to be it.
The first link goes to a "Dice News" story.
The second link goes to a Slashdot "Business Intelligence" story (remember, Business Intelligence is code for "someone paid us to put this up") that is a "Dice News" story by the same author as the first link.
Obviously Dice pushed the Slashdot editors to post this as a news item. So much for editorial independence from the parent company. The disappearance of LucasArts may be Slashdot-worthy news, but when Slashdot's parent company, Dice, is writing the story it looks like they just want lots of techies to think "techies are losing their jobs, it could happen to me, I should look and see what's out there."
After being saddled with a half-billion dollars in loans from the U.S. Department of Energy...
From the OED:
saddle
v.
1. Put a saddle on a horse
2. (Saddle someone with) give someone an unpleasant responsibility or task.
1. If you somehow meant this car company was reducing fossil fuel consumption by strapping saddles to horses and calling them cars, they should have been out of business a long time ago.
2. If you somehow meant that the DOE forced a half billion dollar loan guarantee on them, and they were unhappy about this... I think you misunderstand the function of the DOE, and possibly the function of a loan guarantee.... And possible the function of a half billion dollars. Are you, perchance, a Fisker executive? They seem to have this same difficulty in understanding the functions of these things.
DOE should take control of the company, oust its top executives and either turn it around or sell off its useful assets to other companies who will use them to achieve the goals of the loan and recoup the taxpayers' costs. Otherwise Fisker will probably sell its assets off for less than they are worth and the executives will get kickbacks or positions at those companies in exchange for doing so.
That's the opposite of "you get what you paid for." It's called "Marketing."
I think you misunderstood. Ferengi Rule of Acquisition 190a: "When you don't get what you think you paid for, then you paid for marketing, and you got what paid for." It's a sub-rule of Rule 190: "Hear all, trust nothing."
No word on whether the Indian firm is mostly a thin shell of management and a few field engineers who exist to look over the shoulders of the Chinese sub-subcontractors to keep them from swapping in cheaper parts when nobody is looking...
At $35 for a 7" touchscreen tablet, how much cheaper can you get on parts? A Fisher-Price "tablet" (no touch screen, no shift key, has a "10" key instead of a "0," but it does have a light-up LCD screen that changes color) costs $25, and even then consumers in the two-to-five-year-old bracket are refusing to use it because they keys are too cheaply made. What "cheaper parts" could the sub-subcontractors possibly swap in? Horse meat? Melamine?
I can see the reviews now: "Bought these for my kids, but they leak some kind of liquid. Kids won't touch them, but the cat loved it. The cat's dead now, vet said his kidneys failed, so at least I'm saving money on cat food."
VMware COO Carl Eschenbach jumped on the Amazon theme, saying, "I look at this audience, and I look at VMware and the brand reputation we have in the enterprise, and I find it really hard to believe that we cannot collectively beat a company that sells books
Amazon is as much about selling books as Pepsi is about selling sugared water.
An engineer at Orbital Sciences created a 1/48th scale paper model of the landsat satellite that you can print, build and hang above your cubicle for nerd cred.
Printable model here.
Assembly Instructions here.
It actually looks pretty cool... not that I'll be spending two hours building it myself.
These ppl need to meet each other and learn to trust the other guy.
In fact, 3 nights a week, these ppl should be required to dine with each other.
It is the insane attitudes towards each other that is causing them to not compromise.
Interesting idea. We could make sessions of congress like summer camp. They could hang out in a secluded, mountain location (say, Camp David), living in bunks of 6-8 people, with no lobbyists, cell-phones or Internet-connected devices. They would participate in supervised group activities, playing wheelchair basketball, swimming in the lake and shooting skeet with Obama by day. They'd eat three FDA-approved meals together in the mess hall and make their own beds every morning. Half-way through the session, constituents could bring them care packages and tell them all about what's going on at home. After a few weeks, color war breaks out, and the red and blue teams spend the last couple weeks in competition, playing tug of war over proposed legislation, dodgeball with hot-button issues, and archery using each other's backs as targets. When it's all over, both sides take a field trip to the capitol where they share pizza and cake while piecing the resulting legislation together into law. Once the law is complete, they go home with commemorative T-shirts.
This could be fun for the members and more productive than the current system while being strangely similar to what goes on now (tug of war, dodgeball, shooting each other in the back, etc.). It's so crazy it just might work.