Slashdot may be run by Taco, but for a multitude of reasons I've already stated, it's not his personal blog by any stretch of the imagination. I call BS on it if someone tries to make out that it is. We'll just have to disagree on this point.
This is not my first UID, I've been coming to Slashdot close to daily since 1998, so I'm not oblivious to the culture here. I've even been responsible for some of that culture on another UID. I realize the professionality has improved over time, but that doesn't make the remaining issues any less annoying. "It's always been this way" and "Other editorials suck" are no excuse for letting easily fixable things go. I like the irreverence, it's one of the reasons I come here, but this pity sponge of an rant felt like a step backward to a time when there was even less thought before editors posted content. You can be irreverent, quirky, a bit iconoclastic and professional all at the same time, and most of the time Slashdot pulls it off well enough. Just not this time, and I'll call it out.
It came across as a whine because it's over a game. There's different standards in different contexts, and games come way after practical services like phone and email. I'm sorry to break it to you and Taco, but having your name changed in WoW shouldn't really effect your life significantly, and if it does you probably have a game addition problem. I've played a lot of MMORPGs so I know I'd be pissed if this happened to me, but I wouldn't feel I had to abuse my position as an editor and subject hundreds of thousands of people to my crying. It just came across as petty.
If ANY of us had submitted the same story it would have been rejected in a heartbeat, but since it happened to him he automatically assumed it was newsworthy. All I'd like is a little integrity.
Firstly, it's rarely cool to shout whole sentences unless you're trying to make yourself look like a tool. Maybe that was your intention, if so I apologize.
I knew it was an editorial. I don't think it's too much to ask for an editorial to come across as professional if I'm paying a subscription to a news site. A real story would be "Identity in Virtual Worlds" and would have included some meat other than a lamenting on single anecdote for paragraphs on end without eventually making a point. The story he subjected us to was "Blizzard Made Me Change My Name", and you're right I should have stopped as soon as I read the gripe-laden title. But I trusted that a Slashdot story would actually have a bit more substance than a "poor me" whine with a paragraph tacked on at the end about the nature of identity to justify its existence.
At that point I was irritated, but not enough to actually say anything. I come here for news, I expect the occasional editorial and I had wrote this off as being at the fringe of editorial content. No big deal, whatever.
Then Taco made out that Slashdot, a news site I pay for and which is owned by a publicly traded company, is still his own personal blog. Once he'd claimed that the site was about him and not the news, I got irritated enough to comment. This isn't the CmdrTaco show, that's not why I come here. It's very revealing to how things are run if he honestly thinks of this place as his own personal LiveJournal.
Since when has Slashdot been devoid of bitching? YMBNH.
I come to Slashdot because most of the time the content is stuff I like. I pay money for a subscription and I don't care for errors and dupes, so I have every right to complain in this public forum even if it attracts IDIOTS WHO HAVE TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS WITH BOLD.
Front-page Slashdot posts are generally informative stories. News for nerds. Stuff that matters. You know, what it says in the banner of the page. I read this particular story because I had the expectation that he was going to make a cogent point, not just whine about how unfair life can be. That's several minutes of my life lost because Taco decided out of nowhere to use this site for one of his own personal gripes. When Taco was called out on it, someone else defended him with a false assertion that Slashdot is Rob's personal blog. Taco had the arrogance to agree with the guy making a patently false claim geared directly at stroking his ego instead of correcting him or leaving well enough alone.
So yeah, I'm a little irritated that a person running a news site I've tended to put some faith in thinks of it as no more than his own LiveJournal, using it to cry about the unfairness of a GM in a MMORPG. What, was the journal system Rob built into Slashdot not good enough for him? Doesn't he have enough visitors on cmdrtaco.net? No, he wanted the sympathy and sycophantic adoration of droves of geeks, so he put his whiney rant on the front page of Slashdot instead.
Most of Slashdot's content is my sort of thing regardless of the rampant amnesia and dyslexia in the staff. But if you'll re-read my post, my like or dislike of Slashdot is irrelevant to the point. Claiming that this site is Rob's personal blog is patently false. Sycophantic stroking of the editors is only going to promote more pointless position abuse like this story, as opposed to the other content I come here for. If I wanted to hear about how terrible CmdrTaco's day is, I'd look for it on cmdrtaco.net or his Slashdot journal, not the Slashdot front page. What's next, are we going to have different colored smilies next to stories to indicate what mood Rob is in?
Slashdot used to be Rob's blog. Slashdot is currently run by OSTG which is wholly owned by VA which is publicly traded on NASDAQ, which means it's owned by a lot more people than Rob. That said... at no point has it ever been a personal blog consisting primarily of stories relating only to Taco's personal life. Thank goodness, if it were we'd be subjected to stories like this all the time. Now he's sold the site, works for the new owners, and posts only a handful of stories. There is nothing about the site that makes it a personal blog, except maybe the distinct lack of professionalism and the overinflated sense of importance of the people running it.
I pay money to Slashdot so I can have the plums, and OSTG gets tons of money from ads. You post a few times a week, or perhaps a bunch of times in a day if you're particularly prolific. You're posting a very small percentage of the stories that appear on Slashdot. None of your posts in my recollection except this rant and a certain matrimonial proposal were directly personal either. You don't own it, you hardly post to it, and it's practically never anything of a personal nature. I can't see how anyone, the least of which you, can claim this this is your personal blog anymore. It doesn't seem the appropriate place for a personal lament about the unfairness of a MMORPG naming system.
Here's a good litmus test to see if something personal is appropriate for a "News for Nerds" site... would you have taken a story written in this manner by a non-editor and posted it to the site?
On another note.... my other UID is 5-digit, but I post under this one nowadays. I'd still have my low UID on my main account if name changes were allowed, but I digress.:)
A UPS only outputs power to the protected connections, the only person getting shocked would be the OP if he forgot to turn off the UPS before doing electrical work in the single room he was planning on giving backup power to.
Well, it help could at low RPMs where energy output for fuel consumed is quite poor (which is why I think they made the statement that it would help with city driving but I didn't see any claims WRT highway).
They have a digital distribution service that is quite appealing as well, you can still get your music into pay-for-download services for a cut of the profits, but you don't have to negotiate deals with a bunch of places yourself.
One supposes the artificial meat would have to be rather better than that, before people would give up the real stuff.
I'd say all it would need to get widespread adoption would be reasonably close parity taste-wise, and half the price. If I had a steak that I knew I could cook exactly 7 minutes every time to get it medium, it tasted more or less like a regular hoof-based steak, and it cost a bit cheaper, you'd have to make a pretty good argument for me NOT to buy it.
Indeed. You have the choice of someone else's idea of what features and work-flow you need, or your own. Writing wrapper classes for output, databases, etc. isn't that hard, and you can get a solution 100% tailored to you needs.
The only argument I could imagine for using someone else's framework is to reduce the overhead to bring in new programmers since they'll already know much of the ropes. But in the case of PHP there really isn't a clear winning system with a large pool of available programmers...
Indeed, and not everyone chooses based on raw number-crunching performance, lots of us have a need for a processor that runs cooler. My SSH sessions, email and web use look pretty much the same on a low GHz quiet intel-based machine as they do on a high end AMD gaming rig. In my case, Half-Life 2 runs just fine on my newish middle-to-low-end Intel machine too, not everyone needs a 100 FPS twitch-click hardcore flush-your-money-down-the-toilet experience to get their game on.:)
You can see the same pattern of building a setup, making a play, and then having a reprieve and a bit of satisfaction in another popular game: Tetris (at least if you play it for score instead of for length of time). Instead of sitting back and watching the game play itself like breakout though, it's more that you some get a bit more time to think about the placement of future pieces, but it immediately starts that slow ramp back up to a frenetic pace again. The entire game feels like cascading exponential builds to the end, and it's arguably the most popular game ever made.
So let me get this straight, you want to charge more to the people who don't give up their personal information for tracking... thereby paying the people *not* in the program 30-50% MORE for their returns. Brilliant!
Your plan will only act as a deterrent to people who would make valid returns. For the fraudsters, who cares how cheap something is if you're planning on getting it for free and/or sell it in the end. It gives the wholesale shoplift-and-return people a BONUS for the same amount of effort.
You'd get a much better result by simply tracking returns by receipt and correlating them by name, credit card, club card or whatever, and then charging a steep restocking penalty if the return is done without a receipt. You could still flag a potentially bad customer by the correlation (anyone doing more than 10 returns a month is a likely to be up to something and can be flagged to be additionally scrutinized). Or even better, refuse to do returns without a receipt, you can even prevent all sorts of mayhem that way.
Nah, hex editing is too much effort. While on the main map, disk swap from the Britania disk to one of the castle disks and move to a different map sector... usually there'll be a bunch of chests because the disk format was the same, but a byte in the castle disk that meant "wall" or "chair" or somesuch meant "chest full of gold" on Britania. Any time you're strapped for cash, there ya go!
A helicopter with a pilot and a single passenger was flying around above Seattle when a malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's navigation and communications equipment. Due to the darkness and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position and course to get back to the airport.
The pilot saw a tall building with lights on and flew toward it, the pilot had the passenger draw a handwritten sign reading "WHERE AM I?" and hold it up for the building's occupants to see.
People in the building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign said "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER."
The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely.
After they were on the ground, the passenger asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position.
The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the Microsoft support building, they gave me a technically correct but entirely useless answer."
I currently have the Qcast player sold by GameShark (not bad for $8, I think the shipping was free even). Unfortunately the PS2 does not have enough juice to decode HDTV files ganked from the net, but it does support DivX.
However XBMC looks promising, since it's OSS it's extensible and supports a lot of stuff. I may have to spring for a used x-box so I can play Dr. Who on my TV and not have it be choppy.
Well, one of the reasons I suspect the Sidekick has less battery life is the fact that it syncs its information with central servers near-realtime so you never have to back up your data, so there's a lot of transmitting it's doing that other phones wouldn't. I could shoot my sidekick and be up in minutes after stopping by a T-Mo store. To me standby times are not all that relevant, if a phone goes a month without use it's sitting in a drawer somewhere. So some phones can go a couple extra days in a high-use scenario, it's just not worth the trade for battery life against a pocketable, full network-sync'd PDA with QWERTY if you have a need like the OP, writing long docs while on the go.
I want something that is easy to set up, secure, easily tunnelable, cross platform, and allows my users to easily map network drives on windows. Editing files directly is important to me, it takes a whole layer off the support onion (and just seems to be the right thing to do).
WebDav
Drive-mountable in windows through certain versions of web folders... still haven't located how to do that mapping in WindowsXP Home. Set up under Apache is a pain in the butt. I just want to set up home directories for users using standard filesystem permissions and let it go. Plus, under Apache you have to either run the server as root OR have users open r/w permissions to the web server user for all files. Is there a rock-secure, easily set up WebDav implementation for Linux/Unix out there that I just haven't managed to find yet?
FTP/SFTP
There are drive mounting tools for FTP, but since FTP isn't block oriented it doesn't map well. I haven't seen one FTP drive mounting proggy for windows that does SFTP or FTP/S without some sort of problem. The protocol is so inconsistently implemented it's a wonder that FTP clients and servers can talk at all.
Samba/SMB
Not easily tunnelable (at least for windows boxen). I can't give simple instructions to a user on how to make a secure connection to a remote SMB share from windows.
NFS
Shares most of the same problems with Samba, with the disadvantage of most windows clients for it being costly.
iFolder, Chungles, etc.
Looks promising, but apps like these invariably lack drive mounting.
Is it too much to ask for a great file sharing protocol that windows users can edit files directly on, that can be securely routed through firewalls without too much trouble?
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ibq2IwznCgc
Like, say... putting it on a dog.
Slashdot may be run by Taco, but for a multitude of reasons I've already stated, it's not his personal blog by any stretch of the imagination. I call BS on it if someone tries to make out that it is. We'll just have to disagree on this point.
This is not my first UID, I've been coming to Slashdot close to daily since 1998, so I'm not oblivious to the culture here. I've even been responsible for some of that culture on another UID. I realize the professionality has improved over time, but that doesn't make the remaining issues any less annoying. "It's always been this way" and "Other editorials suck" are no excuse for letting easily fixable things go. I like the irreverence, it's one of the reasons I come here, but this pity sponge of an rant felt like a step backward to a time when there was even less thought before editors posted content. You can be irreverent, quirky, a bit iconoclastic and professional all at the same time, and most of the time Slashdot pulls it off well enough. Just not this time, and I'll call it out.
It came across as a whine because it's over a game. There's different standards in different contexts, and games come way after practical services like phone and email. I'm sorry to break it to you and Taco, but having your name changed in WoW shouldn't really effect your life significantly, and if it does you probably have a game addition problem. I've played a lot of MMORPGs so I know I'd be pissed if this happened to me, but I wouldn't feel I had to abuse my position as an editor and subject hundreds of thousands of people to my crying. It just came across as petty.
If ANY of us had submitted the same story it would have been rejected in a heartbeat, but since it happened to him he automatically assumed it was newsworthy. All I'd like is a little integrity.
Firstly, it's rarely cool to shout whole sentences unless you're trying to make yourself look like a tool. Maybe that was your intention, if so I apologize.
I knew it was an editorial. I don't think it's too much to ask for an editorial to come across as professional if I'm paying a subscription to a news site. A real story would be "Identity in Virtual Worlds" and would have included some meat other than a lamenting on single anecdote for paragraphs on end without eventually making a point. The story he subjected us to was "Blizzard Made Me Change My Name", and you're right I should have stopped as soon as I read the gripe-laden title. But I trusted that a Slashdot story would actually have a bit more substance than a "poor me" whine with a paragraph tacked on at the end about the nature of identity to justify its existence.
At that point I was irritated, but not enough to actually say anything. I come here for news, I expect the occasional editorial and I had wrote this off as being at the fringe of editorial content. No big deal, whatever.
Then Taco made out that Slashdot, a news site I pay for and which is owned by a publicly traded company, is still his own personal blog. Once he'd claimed that the site was about him and not the news, I got irritated enough to comment. This isn't the CmdrTaco show, that's not why I come here. It's very revealing to how things are run if he honestly thinks of this place as his own personal LiveJournal.
Since when has Slashdot been devoid of bitching? YMBNH.
I come to Slashdot because most of the time the content is stuff I like. I pay money for a subscription and I don't care for errors and dupes, so I have every right to complain in this public forum even if it attracts IDIOTS WHO HAVE TO TYPE IN ALL CAPS WITH BOLD.
Front-page Slashdot posts are generally informative stories. News for nerds. Stuff that matters. You know, what it says in the banner of the page. I read this particular story because I had the expectation that he was going to make a cogent point, not just whine about how unfair life can be. That's several minutes of my life lost because Taco decided out of nowhere to use this site for one of his own personal gripes. When Taco was called out on it, someone else defended him with a false assertion that Slashdot is Rob's personal blog. Taco had the arrogance to agree with the guy making a patently false claim geared directly at stroking his ego instead of correcting him or leaving well enough alone.
So yeah, I'm a little irritated that a person running a news site I've tended to put some faith in thinks of it as no more than his own LiveJournal, using it to cry about the unfairness of a GM in a MMORPG. What, was the journal system Rob built into Slashdot not good enough for him? Doesn't he have enough visitors on cmdrtaco.net? No, he wanted the sympathy and sycophantic adoration of droves of geeks, so he put his whiney rant on the front page of Slashdot instead.
Most of Slashdot's content is my sort of thing regardless of the rampant amnesia and dyslexia in the staff. But if you'll re-read my post, my like or dislike of Slashdot is irrelevant to the point. Claiming that this site is Rob's personal blog is patently false. Sycophantic stroking of the editors is only going to promote more pointless position abuse like this story, as opposed to the other content I come here for. If I wanted to hear about how terrible CmdrTaco's day is, I'd look for it on cmdrtaco.net or his Slashdot journal, not the Slashdot front page. What's next, are we going to have different colored smilies next to stories to indicate what mood Rob is in?
Slashdot used to be Rob's blog. Slashdot is currently run by OSTG which is wholly owned by VA which is publicly traded on NASDAQ, which means it's owned by a lot more people than Rob. That said... at no point has it ever been a personal blog consisting primarily of stories relating only to Taco's personal life. Thank goodness, if it were we'd be subjected to stories like this all the time. Now he's sold the site, works for the new owners, and posts only a handful of stories. There is nothing about the site that makes it a personal blog, except maybe the distinct lack of professionalism and the overinflated sense of importance of the people running it.
I pay money to Slashdot so I can have the plums, and OSTG gets tons of money from ads. You post a few times a week, or perhaps a bunch of times in a day if you're particularly prolific. You're posting a very small percentage of the stories that appear on Slashdot. None of your posts in my recollection except this rant and a certain matrimonial proposal were directly personal either. You don't own it, you hardly post to it, and it's practically never anything of a personal nature. I can't see how anyone, the least of which you, can claim this this is your personal blog anymore. It doesn't seem the appropriate place for a personal lament about the unfairness of a MMORPG naming system.
Here's a good litmus test to see if something personal is appropriate for a "News for Nerds" site... would you have taken a story written in this manner by a non-editor and posted it to the site?
On another note.... my other UID is 5-digit, but I post under this one nowadays. I'd still have my low UID on my main account if name changes were allowed, but I digress. :)
A UPS only outputs power to the protected connections, the only person getting shocked would be the OP if he forgot to turn off the UPS before doing electrical work in the single room he was planning on giving backup power to.
Well, it help could at low RPMs where energy output for fuel consumed is quite poor (which is why I think they made the statement that it would help with city driving but I didn't see any claims WRT highway).
They have a digital distribution service that is quite appealing as well, you can still get your music into pay-for-download services for a cut of the profits, but you don't have to negotiate deals with a bunch of places yourself.
I'd say all it would need to get widespread adoption would be reasonably close parity taste-wise, and half the price. If I had a steak that I knew I could cook exactly 7 minutes every time to get it medium, it tasted more or less like a regular hoof-based steak, and it cost a bit cheaper, you'd have to make a pretty good argument for me NOT to buy it.
Indeed. You have the choice of someone else's idea of what features and work-flow you need, or your own. Writing wrapper classes for output, databases, etc. isn't that hard, and you can get a solution 100% tailored to you needs.
The only argument I could imagine for using someone else's framework is to reduce the overhead to bring in new programmers since they'll already know much of the ropes. But in the case of PHP there really isn't a clear winning system with a large pool of available programmers...
HEY!!!
How'd you get into my house?
Indeed, and not everyone chooses based on raw number-crunching performance, lots of us have a need for a processor that runs cooler. My SSH sessions, email and web use look pretty much the same on a low GHz quiet intel-based machine as they do on a high end AMD gaming rig. In my case, Half-Life 2 runs just fine on my newish middle-to-low-end Intel machine too, not everyone needs a 100 FPS twitch-click hardcore flush-your-money-down-the-toilet experience to get their game on. :)
You can see the same pattern of building a setup, making a play, and then having a reprieve and a bit of satisfaction in another popular game: Tetris (at least if you play it for score instead of for length of time). Instead of sitting back and watching the game play itself like breakout though, it's more that you some get a bit more time to think about the placement of future pieces, but it immediately starts that slow ramp back up to a frenetic pace again. The entire game feels like cascading exponential builds to the end, and it's arguably the most popular game ever made.
So let me get this straight, you want to charge more to the people who don't give up their personal information for tracking... thereby paying the people *not* in the program 30-50% MORE for their returns. Brilliant!
Your plan will only act as a deterrent to people who would make valid returns. For the fraudsters, who cares how cheap something is if you're planning on getting it for free and/or sell it in the end. It gives the wholesale shoplift-and-return people a BONUS for the same amount of effort.
You'd get a much better result by simply tracking returns by receipt and correlating them by name, credit card, club card or whatever, and then charging a steep restocking penalty if the return is done without a receipt. You could still flag a potentially bad customer by the correlation (anyone doing more than 10 returns a month is a likely to be up to something and can be flagged to be additionally scrutinized). Or even better, refuse to do returns without a receipt, you can even prevent all sorts of mayhem that way.
Ummmmm... they did that with x-Box and sold the hardware at a LOSS, and are already going for x-Box 2.
Nah, hex editing is too much effort. While on the main map, disk swap from the Britania disk to one of the castle disks and move to a different map sector... usually there'll be a bunch of chests because the disk format was the same, but a byte in the castle disk that meant "wall" or "chair" or somesuch meant "chest full of gold" on Britania. Any time you're strapped for cash, there ya go!
A helicopter with a pilot and a single passenger was flying around above Seattle when a malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's navigation and communications equipment. Due to the darkness and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter's position and course to get back to the airport.
The pilot saw a tall building with lights on and flew toward it, the pilot had the passenger draw a handwritten sign reading "WHERE AM I?" and hold it up for the building's occupants to see.
People in the building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign said "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER."
The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely.
After they were on the ground, the passenger asked the pilot how the "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position.
The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the Microsoft support building, they gave me a technically correct but entirely useless answer."
Based on its widespread adoption, it must be user friendly too!;1
Cringely worked for Apple, employee #12. He got fired by Jobs. 3 times. He's a bit more aware of his Jobs' control freakishness than most.
I currently have the Qcast player sold by GameShark (not bad for $8, I think the shipping was free even). Unfortunately the PS2 does not have enough juice to decode HDTV files ganked from the net, but it does support DivX.
However XBMC looks promising, since it's OSS it's extensible and supports a lot of stuff. I may have to spring for a used x-box so I can play Dr. Who on my TV and not have it be choppy.
Well, one of the reasons I suspect the Sidekick has less battery life is the fact that it syncs its information with central servers near-realtime so you never have to back up your data, so there's a lot of transmitting it's doing that other phones wouldn't. I could shoot my sidekick and be up in minutes after stopping by a T-Mo store. To me standby times are not all that relevant, if a phone goes a month without use it's sitting in a drawer somewhere. So some phones can go a couple extra days in a high-use scenario, it's just not worth the trade for battery life against a pocketable, full network-sync'd PDA with QWERTY if you have a need like the OP, writing long docs while on the go.
I want something that is easy to set up, secure, easily tunnelable, cross platform, and allows my users to easily map network drives on windows. Editing files directly is important to me, it takes a whole layer off the support onion (and just seems to be the right thing to do).
WebDav Drive-mountable in windows through certain versions of web folders... still haven't located how to do that mapping in WindowsXP Home. Set up under Apache is a pain in the butt. I just want to set up home directories for users using standard filesystem permissions and let it go. Plus, under Apache you have to either run the server as root OR have users open r/w permissions to the web server user for all files. Is there a rock-secure, easily set up WebDav implementation for Linux/Unix out there that I just haven't managed to find yet? FTP/SFTP There are drive mounting tools for FTP, but since FTP isn't block oriented it doesn't map well. I haven't seen one FTP drive mounting proggy for windows that does SFTP or FTP/S without some sort of problem. The protocol is so inconsistently implemented it's a wonder that FTP clients and servers can talk at all. Samba/SMB Not easily tunnelable (at least for windows boxen). I can't give simple instructions to a user on how to make a secure connection to a remote SMB share from windows. NFS Shares most of the same problems with Samba, with the disadvantage of most windows clients for it being costly. iFolder, Chungles, etc. Looks promising, but apps like these invariably lack drive mounting.Is it too much to ask for a great file sharing protocol that windows users can edit files directly on, that can be securely routed through firewalls without too much trouble?