"Genuinely informative, insightful, and interesting posts are lucky to get one positive mod point. Much more commonly, something that deserves at most one positive mod point, and likely deserves a "-1 completly misguided," will instead get a pile-on that would send it to +10 if there weren't a +5 limit."
Ok, look - I'm really not trying to troll or be super argumentative about this, but if posts that you would consider to be good are lucky to get one mod point and every shmuck that does get modded up is uninteresting, a troll, or saying the same old thing, why do you bother coming here? What's the point? Obviously you're a part of a very small minority (not saying that that's a bad thing). Is it really worth it to stick around for the gems? Or is it for the same reason I still watch The Simpsons - it's crappy now, but I don't know what else to watch that half hour every week.
I read Slashdot to be entertained and if there's one thing that it is, it's entertaining. I've never expected real serious insightful conversation, but maybe I showed up to the party too late (I started reading and posting anonymously about 1.5 years ago). If you honestly consider the average Slashdot reader to be stupid (and boy, I'd hate to hear what you think of the non-geek/technical/scientific folk in the world, although I agree about the 'typical geek confidence - yeesh), then what keeps you coming back?
And you clearly are very considerate in keeping the noise down by using your +1 bonus on this thread. *sigh*
How is browsing at +3 not a solution? What do you see at that level that ruins your browsing experience? Or even at +2? Honestly curious - I want my fucking stupidity remedied.
Browse at +3 and shut the hell up. That's the advantage of the wonderous moderation system. It doesn't make sense to bitch about something that can be so easily remedied. I browse at -1 and find nothing to be ruined anyways, so maybe I just don't get it.
And for the record, irc.goatse.cx troll has written some really interesting stuff on here - don't assume that because his/her name contains the word 'troll' that he/she was talking about him/herself.
"Cat-burglar better than the common thieves and muggers"... geez. Get a grip, man.
But it is probably worth boycotting BMG anyways, if their record sales completely erode, maybe they'll consider different policies.
Yup, because then they'll say, "Our sales our down, so piracy must be up! Better call R&D and have them get to work on stronger copy protection." I wish you could check some sort of box when you boycott something that says:
I am not purchasing your company's product because of your shoddy business practices.
What plugins do we still use these days? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Flash, and I could live without that. ActiveX controls? So what? Applets? That's a pretty broad term, but is there much outside of Java that this might include? What else is there that makes this a big deal if it should apply to all browsers (except the stupid patent bit - I want to know about tangible losses (not "freedom"))?
I need more information before I start caring one way or the other.
Re:When did politics become vital for geeks?
on
Indecision 2002
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· Score: 1
I'll be the first to admit that I've been relatively apathetic until the past couple years. Recently I've felt compelled to follow politics when I can and even take the time to write paper letters to my Congressfolks when something really rubs me right or wrong (and have been surprised to actually receive responses, although not always with the opinions I would prefer).
"PS- Why do you hate using the term "geek"?"
Not entirely sure, except that maybe it strikes me as becoming an overused term not unlike the word "extreme" (as in mountain climbing, surfing, sports etc.). *shrug* There's certainly worse things in the world.
When did politics become vital for geeks?
on
Indecision 2002
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· Score: 2, Interesting
(One quick clarification: I hate using the term geek.)
Call it flamebait/offtopic/troll/whatever if you want, but it's an honest question:
When was the last time having a good working knowledge of senators and politicians was necessary for the average geek? Is this the first time period in American history where politics play a vital role in our daily lives insofar as the comingling of our PCs and freedoms? DRM? Napster? RIAA invasions into our home PCs? The Patriot Act? Before recent years, can you think of the geek community despising someone for the same reasons as a great deal of/.-eers hates Senator Hollings? Do you find yourself actually paying more attention to politics now than you did even 3 or 4 years ago?
It's not really an issue of the technically-literate (is that better? Yeesh) being socially responsible citizens, but I'll bet that at the past 2 or 3 elections, geek turnout has been higher than normal at least in part because issues that directly affect us have been in the spotlight. Perhaps we feel that it's our responsiblity to at least sort of steer things in what we believe to be the proper direction? I dunno. I'm stuck at work until 3am, I'm bored and I thought I'd see if anyone would bite.
This release includes an encryption feature for the Cordless Freedom(TM) Optical and Cordless Freedom(TM) iTouch(TM) keyboards only.
You can snag 'em here. No Linux, and there appears to be only an encryption free version for OSX. Looks like the above are the only types of keyboards that support it.
Now, will someone please explain to me how updating drivers for a 3 year old wireless keyboard will encrypt the path from the keyboard to the receiver? I'm honestly asking, because I don't get it. Or does it only work for recent revisions of these keyboards? I don't think this wasn't a part of the drivers when I bought it a couple years ago. I tried to ask LISA, their magical online support, but all I got was: "LISA I found no items pertaining to 'encryption'."
"2. Attention to Multiplay. Developers out there are, and I can't quite understand this because its so BLOODY OBVIOUS, are continuing to develop games in single player, when it can be easily seen there should be a multi player aspect. Need for Speed hot Pursuit 2 on the Playstation 2 recently released, won't support online play, but the PC version does. If you want a game to succeed, MAKE IT MULTIPLAYER, at least then you can play humans."
This is the only one I disagree with. Games that have *really* stood the test of time (i.e. Pac Man, Galaga, etc.) focused on the single player competing only against scores. They were addictive and fun. Same with pinball, and that's been around and popular for ages. Other than that, I agree. Especially about the prices. Yikes.
I see it like this: I hate them all equally and should the opportunity arise, I'd tell them all where they can go. I still buy their products because they entertain me. That said, when it was just "Microsoft vs. Company-That-Provides-Us-With-Wonderful-Modchips," it was the big baddie mailciously taking something we love. Now that the others are involved, there's no point in singling out Microsoft, because it's now "The Videogame Industry (who mean business when they unite) vs. Company-That-blah-blah." It seems more fair now because they all took action.
A lot of/. loves to bash Microsoft. So do a lot of people who don't visit here but have to deal with Microsoft's licensing schemes. It's fun, and usually not totally unfounded. I don't see anyone denying it. Big fucking deal. Thanks for pointing out the blaring 'truth' that we all apparently missed, though. That is really interesting.
This feeds the likely possiblility that this PR person just took the fall for something that was probably just a composite PR release. It's funny that she got tracked down by a submission form (a Microsoft info form no less) which should've been completely and totally unrelated to the 'Switch' ad - they never claim that the 'Switcher' wrote the form for you to submit. I imagine she just jumped the gun after someone checked the.doc info and said, "Yep, I did it" to cover their asses.
Besides, at the bottom of both the Encarta FUD paper and the Switch ad, it says, "Do you have an idea for a story?" which is all these are; stories, not testimonials. No testimonial in the world will you give you step-by-step directions on how to set up dial-up networking. I failed to see anything that claims that these are real testimonials from real people (unless someone wants to correct me).
Not that I don't think this is real real funny, I'm just sayin'...
Please show me the $199 PC that has a DVD drive, onboard NIC, decent video and sound that I can run into my TV and, while on, is pretty much noiseless that also plays Xbox games. Provide links, if possible, and I'll go buy one instead of the Xbox I was planning on buying (refurb on sale for $159.99 at Electronics Boutique!) today. If you could, please hurry as the sale ends this weekend.
I'm not being entirely sarcastic (if there really is a place that sells comparable $200 PCs, I would buy one), but I am tired of this whole "you can get PCs for the price of an Xbox" argument. My motherboard cost almost that much by itself. My video card cost more than that. Just because I can get a crappy Microtel or whatever at Wal-Mart for $200 bucks doesn't mean it's just as good.
Anyways, all of this hacking stuff is over my head, but I would assume that the challenge is kind of interesting and being part of the group that is a watchdog to the predecessor to Palladium must be at least part of the intrigue. But what do I know. *shrug*
If netboot or installing from another distro won't help either (yipes), there's plenty of info in the forums and in the docs on how to bootstrap/compile on one PC for another.
Maybe Slashdot needs a general, day to day message board type thing where people can start their own topics? They could have different sections, like General Discussion, Site Problems, Suggestions, etc.
That already exists (although it's totally fscked right now because of whatever's going on here). It's just not well advertised.
I will say that at one point, the Gentoo forum community was the nicest, most useful place I had ever seen in all of my years of computer use. I joined up in April after I felt comfortable with Gentoo but realized that I just didn't have the time or experience to be able to help people. Once post frequency got up to ridiculous levels (a lot of redundancy and (I think) well over 500 new posts *per day*) it went down in quality, with people not searching and cross posting being the big pet peeves of the mods.
For the record, I have no idea why your RealTek 8139 wouldn't work (I think I found your posts). Some people have had no problems getting it to work (other than a supposed kernel issue which was resolved in 2.4.19 final - don't know what it was, though), some people have similar inexplicable problems to yours. The reason people didn't respond is most likely because they didn't have the answer or the question just got crowded down the list and ignored. Sorry.
I believe that Lik-Sang did sell pre-modded Xboxes (as they did sell premodded everything else (PS2, PSX, pimped out Gamecubes, you name it)) with DivX players, Mame with a full compliment of games, and basically an entire non-MS setup (not Linux either - just a browser to run things off the HDD written by OpenXbox or whoever) all preinstalled. I know everyone is defending the consumers rights to mod the hell out of everything they own and I agree with that completely, but I think it might be a little fuzzier if a business premods and sells. Honestly, I'm not sure.
For the record, I ordered a PS2 modchip from Lik-Sang about 4 or 5 weeks ago. They sent me an empty box. Now they have a hoard of money for which they haven't sent products (as the mini-interviews in the article state) and won't respond to any emails. I say fuck 'em if they keep all the money they stole from people before they went under.
I have a feeling this program isn't exactly marketed towards the blind (or towards people who can't stand run on sentences)...
"When you see the SpeakIt! picture on a Web Page you know that there is a special presentation waiting for you there and all you need to do is right-click in your browser window and choose SpeakIt! to play it and if your Web Page Visitors Don't have SpeakIt! all they need to do is Click on the SpeakIt! picture and now they will not only be able to hear and see your presentation but also hear ANY web page on the Internet! as well as your special SpeakIt! presentations"
It also tries to use characters from Office (i.e. Merlin, Clippy, etc.) to represent the voice. Weird. And it installs Microsoft Agent automatically. Good thing, my computer really needed some... er.... agenting.
I totally agree. I use gentoo now (bizarrely enough) because it's simple to maintain and not terribly hard to install in the first place if you have a weekend to kill, especially in comparison to lfs. There's a massive difference from installing KDE from source and typing 'emerge kde.' As others have said, lfs is great for getting your hands dirty and learning some stuff. Gentoo is for after your hands are dirty and you want to clean them up while still getting that feel-good speed from compiling every package for your system from source. Yeah yeah yeah, you have to hand edit all of the X/ftp/ssh/profile/etc config files and that's a big pain. Deal with it. You should be doing that anyways.
Why is that everytime someone mentions lfs, someone has to say, "Why not just use gentoo?" It makes us (the users) look like the next generation zealots. I have a better idea - learn what distros do what things and at what difficulty and then choose for yourself. Suit your own needs, dammit.
Of course like I said you can turn all the options down, but who wants to play games at 800x600 on a 19" monitor?
If there were any PC games that were actually fun, I wouldn't mind playing them at 320x240 with no fancy-shmancy T&L using a 2 button controller. Oh wait, that was Nintendo.
The main thing that I find valuable about the need-to-have-the-latest-greatest-video-card-for-$4 00 early adopters is that it pushes the video card manufacturers forward and makes life cheaper for us losers who don't mind being a generation behind on the hardware. So keep on buying 'em new every 6 or 12 months. You're probably saving me about 50 bucks.
Slashdot Mirror
"Genuinely informative, insightful, and interesting posts are lucky to get one positive mod point. Much more commonly, something that deserves at most one positive mod point, and likely deserves a "-1 completly misguided," will instead get a pile-on that would send it to +10 if there weren't a +5 limit."
Ok, look - I'm really not trying to troll or be super argumentative about this, but if posts that you would consider to be good are lucky to get one mod point and every shmuck that does get modded up is uninteresting, a troll, or saying the same old thing, why do you bother coming here? What's the point? Obviously you're a part of a very small minority (not saying that that's a bad thing). Is it really worth it to stick around for the gems? Or is it for the same reason I still watch The Simpsons - it's crappy now, but I don't know what else to watch that half hour every week.
I read Slashdot to be entertained and if there's one thing that it is, it's entertaining. I've never expected real serious insightful conversation, but maybe I showed up to the party too late (I started reading and posting anonymously about 1.5 years ago). If you honestly consider the average Slashdot reader to be stupid (and boy, I'd hate to hear what you think of the non-geek/technical/scientific folk in the world, although I agree about the 'typical geek confidence - yeesh), then what keeps you coming back?
Thanks for that. It made my night at work. If anything I just wanted to respond to bookmark this comment for future review.
And you clearly are very considerate in keeping the noise down by using your +1 bonus on this thread. *sigh*
How is browsing at +3 not a solution? What do you see at that level that ruins your browsing experience? Or even at +2? Honestly curious - I want my fucking stupidity remedied.
Browse at +3 and shut the hell up. That's the advantage of the wonderous moderation system. It doesn't make sense to bitch about something that can be so easily remedied. I browse at -1 and find nothing to be ruined anyways, so maybe I just don't get it.
And for the record, irc.goatse.cx troll has written some really interesting stuff on here - don't assume that because his/her name contains the word 'troll' that he/she was talking about him/herself.
"Cat-burglar better than the common thieves and muggers"... geez. Get a grip, man.
Yup, because then they'll say, "Our sales our down, so piracy must be up! Better call R&D and have them get to work on stronger copy protection." I wish you could check some sort of box when you boycott something that says:
I am not purchasing your company's product because of your shoddy business practices.
What plugins do we still use these days? The only one I can think of off the top of my head is Flash, and I could live without that. ActiveX controls? So what? Applets? That's a pretty broad term, but is there much outside of Java that this might include? What else is there that makes this a big deal if it should apply to all browsers (except the stupid patent bit - I want to know about tangible losses (not "freedom"))?
I need more information before I start caring one way or the other.
I'll be the first to admit that I've been relatively apathetic until the past couple years. Recently I've felt compelled to follow politics when I can and even take the time to write paper letters to my Congressfolks when something really rubs me right or wrong (and have been surprised to actually receive responses, although not always with the opinions I would prefer).
"PS- Why do you hate using the term "geek"?"
Not entirely sure, except that maybe it strikes me as becoming an overused term not unlike the word "extreme" (as in mountain climbing, surfing, sports etc.). *shrug* There's certainly worse things in the world.
(One quick clarification: I hate using the term geek.)
/.-eers hates Senator Hollings? Do you find yourself actually paying more attention to politics now than you did even 3 or 4 years ago?
Call it flamebait/offtopic/troll/whatever if you want, but it's an honest question:
When was the last time having a good working knowledge of senators and politicians was necessary for the average geek? Is this the first time period in American history where politics play a vital role in our daily lives insofar as the comingling of our PCs and freedoms? DRM? Napster? RIAA invasions into our home PCs? The Patriot Act? Before recent years, can you think of the geek community despising someone for the same reasons as a great deal of
It's not really an issue of the technically-literate (is that better? Yeesh) being socially responsible citizens, but I'll bet that at the past 2 or 3 elections, geek turnout has been higher than normal at least in part because issues that directly affect us have been in the spotlight. Perhaps we feel that it's our responsiblity to at least sort of steer things in what we believe to be the proper direction? I dunno. I'm stuck at work until 3am, I'm bored and I thought I'd see if anyone would bite.
I predict that in the future the Plus! pack will contain kernel32.dll and cost $149.99 retail.
They didn't have Windows on the ship because sailors kept opening them and getting all their stuff wet. Ta da!
(So long, karma.)
Now, will someone please explain to me how updating drivers for a 3 year old wireless keyboard will encrypt the path from the keyboard to the receiver? I'm honestly asking, because I don't get it. Or does it only work for recent revisions of these keyboards? I don't think this wasn't a part of the drivers when I bought it a couple years ago. I tried to ask LISA, their magical online support, but all I got was:
"LISA I found no items pertaining to 'encryption'."
"2. Attention to Multiplay. Developers out there are, and I can't quite understand this because its so BLOODY OBVIOUS, are continuing to develop games in single player, when it can be easily seen there should be a multi player aspect. Need for Speed hot Pursuit 2 on the Playstation 2 recently released, won't support online play, but the PC version does. If you want a game to succeed, MAKE IT MULTIPLAYER, at least then you can play humans."
This is the only one I disagree with. Games that have *really* stood the test of time (i.e. Pac Man, Galaga, etc.) focused on the single player competing only against scores. They were addictive and fun. Same with pinball, and that's been around and popular for ages. Other than that, I agree. Especially about the prices. Yikes.
(Ditto on the place marker)
I wonder if they'll ask him to return his 4 points of Karma (i.e. the profit) he earned from reposting their material...
I see it like this: I hate them all equally and should the opportunity arise, I'd tell them all where they can go. I still buy their products because they entertain me. That said, when it was just "Microsoft vs. Company-That-Provides-Us-With-Wonderful-Modchips," it was the big baddie mailciously taking something we love. Now that the others are involved, there's no point in singling out Microsoft, because it's now "The Videogame Industry (who mean business when they unite) vs. Company-That-blah-blah." It seems more fair now because they all took action.
/. loves to bash Microsoft. So do a lot of people who don't visit here but have to deal with Microsoft's licensing schemes. It's fun, and usually not totally unfounded. I don't see anyone denying it. Big fucking deal. Thanks for pointing out the blaring 'truth' that we all apparently missed, though. That is really interesting.
A lot of
This feeds the likely possiblility that this PR person just took the fall for something that was probably just a composite PR release. It's funny that she got tracked down by a submission form (a Microsoft info form no less) which should've been completely and totally unrelated to the 'Switch' ad - they never claim that the 'Switcher' wrote the form for you to submit. I imagine she just jumped the gun after someone checked the .doc info and said, "Yep, I did it" to cover their asses.
Besides, at the bottom of both the Encarta FUD paper and the Switch ad, it says, "Do you have an idea for a story?" which is all these are; stories, not testimonials. No testimonial in the world will you give you step-by-step directions on how to set up dial-up networking. I failed to see anything that claims that these are real testimonials from real people (unless someone wants to correct me).
Not that I don't think this is real real funny, I'm just sayin'...
Please show me the $199 PC that has a DVD drive, onboard NIC, decent video and sound that I can run into my TV and, while on, is pretty much noiseless that also plays Xbox games. Provide links, if possible, and I'll go buy one instead of the Xbox I was planning on buying (refurb on sale for $159.99 at Electronics Boutique!) today. If you could, please hurry as the sale ends this weekend.
I'm not being entirely sarcastic (if there really is a place that sells comparable $200 PCs, I would buy one), but I am tired of this whole "you can get PCs for the price of an Xbox" argument. My motherboard cost almost that much by itself. My video card cost more than that. Just because I can get a crappy Microtel or whatever at Wal-Mart for $200 bucks doesn't mean it's just as good.
Anyways, all of this hacking stuff is over my head, but I would assume that the challenge is kind of interesting and being part of the group that is a watchdog to the predecessor to Palladium must be at least part of the intrigue. But what do I know. *shrug*
The Gentoo Linux alternative installation method HOWTO
If netboot or installing from another distro won't help either (yipes), there's plenty of info in the forums and in the docs on how to bootstrap/compile on one PC for another.
Maybe Slashdot needs a general, day to day message board type thing where people can start their own topics? They could have different sections, like General Discussion, Site Problems, Suggestions, etc.
That already exists (although it's totally fscked right now because of whatever's going on here). It's just not well advertised.
I will say that at one point, the Gentoo forum community was the nicest, most useful place I had ever seen in all of my years of computer use. I joined up in April after I felt comfortable with Gentoo but realized that I just didn't have the time or experience to be able to help people. Once post frequency got up to ridiculous levels (a lot of redundancy and (I think) well over 500 new posts *per day*) it went down in quality, with people not searching and cross posting being the big pet peeves of the mods.
For the record, I have no idea why your RealTek 8139 wouldn't work (I think I found your posts). Some people have had no problems getting it to work (other than a supposed kernel issue which was resolved in 2.4.19 final - don't know what it was, though), some people have similar inexplicable problems to yours. The reason people didn't respond is most likely because they didn't have the answer or the question just got crowded down the list and ignored. Sorry.
One quick point -
I believe that Lik-Sang did sell pre-modded Xboxes (as they did sell premodded everything else (PS2, PSX, pimped out Gamecubes, you name it)) with DivX players, Mame with a full compliment of games, and basically an entire non-MS setup (not Linux either - just a browser to run things off the HDD written by OpenXbox or whoever) all preinstalled. I know everyone is defending the consumers rights to mod the hell out of everything they own and I agree with that completely, but I think it might be a little fuzzier if a business premods and sells. Honestly, I'm not sure.
For the record, I ordered a PS2 modchip from Lik-Sang about 4 or 5 weeks ago. They sent me an empty box. Now they have a hoard of money for which they haven't sent products (as the mini-interviews in the article state) and won't respond to any emails. I say fuck 'em if they keep all the money they stole from people before they went under.
I have a feeling this program isn't exactly marketed towards the blind (or towards people who can't stand run on sentences)...
"When you see the SpeakIt! picture on a Web Page you know that there is a special presentation waiting for you there and all you need to do is right-click in your browser window and choose SpeakIt! to play it and if your Web Page Visitors Don't have SpeakIt! all they need to do is Click on the SpeakIt! picture and now they will not only be able to hear and see your presentation but also hear ANY web page on the Internet! as well as your special SpeakIt! presentations"
It also tries to use characters from Office (i.e. Merlin, Clippy, etc.) to represent the voice. Weird. And it installs Microsoft Agent automatically. Good thing, my computer really needed some... er.... agenting.
I totally agree. I use gentoo now (bizarrely enough) because it's simple to maintain and not terribly hard to install in the first place if you have a weekend to kill, especially in comparison to lfs. There's a massive difference from installing KDE from source and typing 'emerge kde.' As others have said, lfs is great for getting your hands dirty and learning some stuff. Gentoo is for after your hands are dirty and you want to clean them up while still getting that feel-good speed from compiling every package for your system from source. Yeah yeah yeah, you have to hand edit all of the X/ftp/ssh/profile/etc config files and that's a big pain. Deal with it. You should be doing that anyways.
Why is that everytime someone mentions lfs, someone has to say, "Why not just use gentoo?" It makes us (the users) look like the next generation zealots. I have a better idea - learn what distros do what things and at what difficulty and then choose for yourself. Suit your own needs, dammit.
Of course like I said you can turn all the options down, but who wants to play games at 800x600 on a 19" monitor?
4 00 early adopters is that it pushes the video card manufacturers forward and makes life cheaper for us losers who don't mind being a generation behind on the hardware. So keep on buying 'em new every 6 or 12 months. You're probably saving me about 50 bucks.
If there were any PC games that were actually fun, I wouldn't mind playing them at 320x240 with no fancy-shmancy T&L using a 2 button controller. Oh wait, that was Nintendo.
The main thing that I find valuable about the need-to-have-the-latest-greatest-video-card-for-$
ArrrrMS says information *wants* to be free!
And so did I. I thought that seemed funny. Whoops.