Expanding on what someone else said, this is demonstrably untrue -- gmail messages can certainly have multiple tags, and indeed, you can search your gmail based on combinations of tags, which I find insanely useful. One search on "label:work label:todo" and, well, you can figure out what I get.
This isn't to say that the labels mechanism (and the search mechanism!) in gmail couldn't use some improvement, but I think they "get" it pretty well -- it's one of the few features that dragged me back to using gmail for everything.
A few notes: TinyMUD never needed a rewrite for passing 65536 objects, and I doubt Islandia was the first to do so (TinyMUD was, more likely). It used a 32-bit integer for dbrefs (this came up when there was mild, if odd, panic over 32768). Page gained the ability to do messages partway through Islandia's run, it's true (whichever version Fuzzy and I split the work on). Chaos went down not long after Islandia's closing day (in point of fact, Chaos only existed for about 4 months. Apparently months were longer in those days).
Islandia's @recycle was different from later schemes; in point of fact, all it did was change objects to a special ownership, which were then periodically extracted out of the database (which changed the dbrefs of everything remaining).
None of this matters, but I felt obliged to say more than "I remember Random and Moira, too."
While I don't doubt the ability of mass media to oversimplify any bad situation, I have noticed that many groups who feel they have been mentioned -- at least in passing -- after this tragedy are taking it as if they're the targets of some kind of blamefest.
Example: Just last night I was mystified by someone very wound up about this subject. It turned out that, to my amazement, he felt that as a gay man who wears a trenchcoat a lot (bear with me here, this is a real example), the world was accusing him and his social group of this crime.
Frankly, I haven't noticed any particular pattern to media descriptions except that they're flailing about trying to get a handle on these guys. Matt Drudge, of all people, had an article where he pointed out some dozen or so different attempts to categorize them (Marilyn Manson fans, Hitler enthusiasts, vampire game players, fingernail polish wearers, the works) and made a little light of the actual journalistic depth of these attempts. If internet chatheads (and I'm one, believe me) are one of these categorizations, I guess it's natural for us to jump a little when our turn comes up on the big random attempt-to-explain-it-all wheel, but my point is that being loudly offended and raising a new stink isn't going to help, and I hope we think twice before going down that road.
In short (too late), no, I don't think that the Internet made these guys do this. Neither do you, I expect. Anyone who sits and thinks about it will realize that the major players here are someone who didn't bother or didn't succeed to instill a sense of morality -- or at least respect for life -- in these guys, and ultimately, beyond even that, responsibility falls on the shooters themselves. We all know it. I hope we all realize it. I suspect strongly that, like usual, after a couple of weeks we'll all get past the attempts to find some element of their lifestyles onto which to shift the blame.
Slashdot Mirror
Expanding on what someone else said, this is demonstrably untrue -- gmail messages can certainly have multiple tags, and indeed, you can search your gmail based on combinations of tags, which I find insanely useful. One search on "label:work label:todo" and, well, you can figure out what I get.
This isn't to say that the labels mechanism (and the search mechanism!) in gmail couldn't use some improvement, but I think they "get" it pretty well -- it's one of the few features that dragged me back to using gmail for everything.
-R
I remember Random and Moira, too.
A few notes: TinyMUD never needed a rewrite for passing 65536 objects, and I doubt Islandia was the first to do so (TinyMUD was, more likely). It used a 32-bit integer for dbrefs (this came up when there was mild, if odd, panic over 32768). Page gained the ability to do messages partway through Islandia's run, it's true (whichever version Fuzzy and I split the work on). Chaos went down not long after Islandia's closing day (in point of fact, Chaos only existed for about 4 months. Apparently months were longer in those days).
Islandia's @recycle was different from later schemes; in point of fact, all it did was change objects to a special ownership, which were then periodically extracted out of the database (which changed the dbrefs of everything remaining).
None of this matters, but I felt obliged to say more than "I remember Random and Moira, too."
-Random
While I don't doubt the ability of mass media to oversimplify any bad situation, I have noticed that many groups who feel they have been mentioned -- at least in passing -- after this tragedy are taking it as if they're the targets of some kind of blamefest.
Example: Just last night I was mystified by someone very wound up about this subject. It turned out that, to my amazement, he felt that as a gay man who wears a trenchcoat a lot (bear with me here, this is a real example), the world was accusing him and his social group of this crime.
Frankly, I haven't noticed any particular pattern to media descriptions except that they're flailing about trying to get a handle on these guys. Matt Drudge, of all people, had an article where he pointed out some dozen or so different attempts to categorize them (Marilyn Manson fans, Hitler enthusiasts, vampire game players, fingernail polish wearers, the works) and made a little light of the actual journalistic depth of these attempts. If internet chatheads (and I'm one, believe me) are one of these categorizations, I guess it's natural for us to jump a little when our turn comes up on the big random attempt-to-explain-it-all wheel, but my point is that being loudly offended and raising a new stink isn't going to help, and I hope we think twice before going down that road.
In short (too late), no, I don't think that the Internet made these guys do this. Neither do you, I expect. Anyone who sits and thinks about it will realize that the major players here are someone who didn't bother or didn't succeed to instill a sense of morality -- or at least respect for life -- in these guys, and ultimately, beyond even that, responsibility falls on the shooters themselves. We all know it. I hope we all realize it. I suspect strongly that, like usual, after a couple of weeks we'll all get past the attempts to find some element of their lifestyles onto which to shift the blame.