The only possible explanation for this is that the web site was created as a hoax by JonKatz in order to give himself more material about which to write long-winded ego-stroking redunant editorials. This couldn't possibly be for real....
.... as corporations get more power over everything in the USA. At my university, we're unable to get any beverages not made by Coca-Cola on campus. Big deal, right? Well, then they put up signs all over campus saying "Always Rutgers, Always Coca-Cola!" Hey, I'll deal with it if it's bringing in money towards educational improvements. Then they sold the campus bookstore to Follett. And decided that when they built new stores, only Follett would be able to bid on rights to control them. (Which kind of voids the purpose of a bid.) Fortunately, our Comp Sci department hasn't been taken over, and the people in power are pretty friendly towards standards etc., so I haven't been hurt that way.
My mother, on the other hand, worked at another university with a well-known Comp Sci program. Not a technological person, she became a big fan of the Mac in her office, until the school cut a deal with Microshaft, and she was forced to switch to Windows. And all their email had to go through Exchange servers.
Google doesn't match phrases the way Altavista does, I think. For instance, say there's a page called "Nifty Cartoons by Spike and Lee". I can't remember the URL. So I tell Google to search for +"Spike and Lee". It says "Oh, you don't need to have the word AND in your searches. We do that automatically." So it gives me a billion pages about film director Spike Lee. So this time I search for +"Spike and Lee" -"Spike Lee", which should eliminate pages containing the phrase "Spike Lee". Nope. As far as Google is concerned, the two strings are identical.
Still you can add me to the list of people who migrated from altavista to google in the last 2 weeks.
If angry geeks are able to ha>0r killer robots and use them to shoot up their high schools instead of doing the killing themselves, JonKatz will be unemployed.
I had to use MainSoft Visual Source Safe on Solaris at work last summer, and although I don't know, I'm guessing that it uses the aforementioned Win32 API emulator for *NIX. Ugh. It made Windows apps running on Windows look like a souped-up Apache server. I have never seen such bloated software in my life.
Microsoft, if you're listening, DROP MAINSOFT. I'm sure there are graphics libraries out there licensed compatibly with you. The amount of cash it will cost to pay programmers to port into those libraries is under Bill Gates's couch. And they'll run 5 times faster - no exaggeration there.
Or you could put some cash into WINE development and then have nothing to do but push your apps on Linux users....
Calm down people, it's called satire.
on
Voteauction.com
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· Score: 1
If you read the tone of the writing on the site, it's pretty obvious IMHO that these people are doing this as a comical protest of the way money influences elections and the actions of the government today. It's not a very professional site - for example, the dropdown list of states has NY twice and misses NJ. It also requires you to check a box that says "I have read and agree to the voter agreement." When you click on "voter agreement" it takes you to a page that says "The voter agreement isn't up yet. It will be emailed to you when it's finished."
It's a good idea, though. I just feel bad about all the flames they're going to get from people who don't understand satire....
Wouldn't it be easier to have a little perl script (or executable for mac and win users) to run at startup of the OS or browser that would just delete or scramble the doubleclick cookie? What do you gain by exchanging?
Republicans are only libertarian when it comes to the destructive shortsighted behavior of huge corporations. We wouldn't want the jackbooted Big Government thugs oppressing oil companies by making them treat their workers with dignity, or stop destroying our environment.
I am not a conservative, but I respect conservatism as a philosophy. To me, conservatism means letting the economy run itself without government intervention and upholding a strong respect for morals and the law. Not my cup of tea, but worth listening to.
But Republicanism != conservatism. Republicanism means using conservatism as an EXCUSE to give breaks to anyone who will contribute to our campaign warchests and lavish convention parties. Conservatives have no choice but to vote Republican, the same way liberals have no choice but to vote Democrat, when neither party represents either's views at the federal level. That's why John McCain, a true conservative, allied himself with Democrats to try to clean up campaign financing. The Republicans, of course, killed McCain-Feingold because they knew it would stop their sponsors from buying elections every year.
It seems to me as a long-time Slashdot reader that the two main political trains of thought here are represented by the Greens and by the Libertarians. Nearly all of us are firmly against censorship and harsh law enforcement (i.e. "Geek Profiling"). I suppose many of us were hurt earlier in our lives by "conservative" social attitudes. It's on economic issues where we seem to differ. A lot of us, probably more so for those outside the USA, favor policies that encourage a fair distribution of wealth and social services for all citizens. But there's also a big Libertarian contingent, who feel that if the government keeps its hands out of the economy, prosperity is the result, and that if I earn something, no government should be able to force me to share it with anyone else.
I'm more in the Green camp ideologically (not yet decided between Gore and Nader, but that's another post), but I have nothing but respect for the US Libertarian Party due to their honesty and smart campaigning. The Democrats and Republicans do everything they can to keep everyone else out of debates, so that they can set the debates' parameters, and the Libertarians have done the best possible job of getting their voices heard in spite of having the deck stacked against them. The televised debates NEED to include Ralph Nader and Harry Browne(And probably one of those Reformers, but they can't seem to get their act together), if any substantive issues are going to be discussed.
There are a lot of comments about arcade-style games which you can now get on MAME, and NES games, but are there any fans out there besides me of Sierra's games from the late 80's to mid 90's? They came out of the Infocom text-adventures, but the best ones (read: Quest for Glory series, which never got as much hype due to not being written by Roberta Williams) were based on gradual character development. The backgrounds tended to be taken from hand-painted pictures. And the games were funny, too. (Innumerable Monty Python references.) The Police Quest series did similar things with a more serious subject matter. Am I alone?
I volunteered at a summer camp a few years ago. It was a computer class for inner-city kids in Philadelphia. We're talking schools that border on hopelessness. Several admitted on the first day that they had never touched a computer before. We started all the way at the beginning. As in "it's a mouse, not a microphone."
By the end, they all had hotmail accounts that they could use as easily as I used mine. They could all write resumes in a word processor. The more artistically inclined ones were scanning in their work and posting it on web pages.
Now, what about their classmates who didn't get into this program? Are they "meritless"? Nope. They just weren't offered the opportunity.
Shhhh! Don't mention OO Basic near my university's Comp Sci department... they'll do anything to inconvenience students!
In all seriousness, however, how DO you write OO Basic? I am a big fan of the OO paradigm, but I owe the creators of BASIC for instilling a love of coding in me at a young age. Has this actually been done?
People are talking about sources of new non-RIAA music, and that's cool. But there's a lot of good RIAA music I and others would like to own on CD. May I recommend Ebay for used CDs. I've found a good number of hard-to-find CDs by mainstream bands, and I've yet to pay less than $10. Of course, one fear that I've almost been afraid to articulate is that used CD sales will be the next target. The good folks in Redmond have nearly managed to illegalize the sale of used M$ software. How long will it be before we start hearing "You don't buy the music, you buy a license to use the music the way we say." Could there ever be a UCITA for music?
Napster asked the RIAA to provide a list of acts the RIAA didn't want distributed on Napster. That way, any artist could opt out of Napster but the artists who liked the idea could stay. The RIAA said they were "unable" to do so.
How hard is it to open up your database of artists you own and hit Print?!
I know very little about the alternate Napsters. I have used GNapster on Linux, which got search results in half the time the Win32 client took, but I don't know whether it connected to Napster servers or alternate ones. My worry is this: what made Napster great was the sheer quantity of people using it simultaneously. If everyone goes off to whatever server they heard was best, that won't happen. And the non-technical users won't be bothered to enter a new server name. They'll just shrug and say "it was fun while it lasted." GNUtella? I have the bandwidth to get 400k/s downloads off Napster, but I've rarely gotten anything faster than 3k/s off GNUtella.
Is there a little false optimism here?
Uh, what about all the open-source clones?
on
Two-Faced Napster?
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· Score: 1
More significantly, the company repeatedly has tried to stymie independent developers working on Napster-compatible software and Web sites. Is that true? http://freshmeat.net/search.php3?que ry=napster The only napster clone I've used is Gnapster, which (mmmmm.... Aqua GTK theme) works IMHO faster and more efficiently than the Windows client. I haven't heard anything about Napster trying to shut these people down. I'm sure they could easily tweak their protocol a la AOL to make it incompatible with the reverse-engineered stuff. I don't see what they've done that's selfish at all, except try to stop people from SELLING merchandise pertaining to them without permission.
All the research done by the posters on this story seem to indicate that there is no way between the eastern and western hemispheres without going through the USA. The US isn't the center of the universe, but if you're trying to exchange data with someone in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, etc, the US is pretty damn necessary, and a serious disruption of routers there would cut you off from all those countries. Stating hard facts about network topology != cultural imperialism.
I can still make music on my own, and expect to be able to regardless of what Time-Warner does. Oh really? I'd like to agree with you. But the point of your art to express yourself, no? And that means expressing yourself TO OTHERS. The RIAA and the MPAA (if you were a smalltime moviemaker) don't want you to be able to get your material out to fans without going through them. That means giving them a huge cut of the money you'd make, and retooling your work to what they think they can sell. The Internet is a practically cost-free means of distributing information. Napster helps a lot. The DeCSS and RIAA debates are about who gets to control the distribution of YOUR art.
I really liked Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, even though it's an easy part to play. (Just growl and act tough.) There are so many questions surrounding his origin that my hope is that the next sequel is all about him. It can take place in the same universe as this one, so maybe Rogue can come along or the Professor can have a little cameo, but I think his character alone could make a high quality flick. I think a solo movie for any character would be better than a film that tries to do too much in too little time.
Slashdot Mirror
The only possible explanation for this is that the web site was created as a hoax by JonKatz in order to give himself more material about which to write long-winded ego-stroking redunant editorials. This couldn't possibly be for real....
.... as corporations get more power over everything in the USA. At my university, we're unable to get any beverages not made by Coca-Cola on campus. Big deal, right? Well, then they put up signs all over campus saying "Always Rutgers, Always Coca-Cola!" Hey, I'll deal with it if it's bringing in money towards educational improvements. Then they sold the campus bookstore to Follett. And decided that when they built new stores, only Follett would be able to bid on rights to control them. (Which kind of voids the purpose of a bid.) Fortunately, our Comp Sci department hasn't been taken over, and the people in power are pretty friendly towards standards etc., so I haven't been hurt that way.
My mother, on the other hand, worked at another university with a well-known Comp Sci program. Not a technological person, she became a big fan of the Mac in her office, until the school cut a deal with Microshaft, and she was forced to switch to Windows. And all their email had to go through Exchange servers.
Why does this textbook story not surprise me?
True, but then again, I know some web sites whose designers would die on my 400mhz P-II, in my dorm where I can get up to 900k/s downloads....
Google doesn't match phrases the way Altavista does, I think. For instance, say there's a page called "Nifty Cartoons by Spike and Lee". I can't remember the URL. So I tell Google to search for +"Spike and Lee". It says "Oh, you don't need to have the word AND in your searches. We do that automatically." So it gives me a billion pages about film director Spike Lee. So this time I search for +"Spike and Lee" -"Spike Lee", which should eliminate pages containing the phrase "Spike Lee". Nope. As far as Google is concerned, the two strings are identical.
Still you can add me to the list of people who migrated from altavista to google in the last 2 weeks.
This has been an excellent thread. Rarely do I laugh out loud while surfing the web at work. And a lot of very interesting points have been raised.
So, JonKatz, that means you don't need to write a piece on this ruling that says all the same ideas in three times as many words.
Please?
http://ter.air0day.com/archives.html
I found this site from a slashdot Quickie a year ago. It rules. It just completely rules.
If angry geeks are able to ha>0r killer robots and use them to shoot up their high schools instead of doing the killing themselves, JonKatz will be unemployed.
I had to use MainSoft Visual Source Safe on Solaris at work last summer, and although I don't know, I'm guessing that it uses the aforementioned Win32 API emulator for *NIX. Ugh. It made Windows apps running on Windows look like a souped-up Apache server. I have never seen such bloated software in my life.
Microsoft, if you're listening, DROP MAINSOFT. I'm sure there are graphics libraries out there licensed compatibly with you. The amount of cash it will cost to pay programmers to port into those libraries is under Bill Gates's couch. And they'll run 5 times faster - no exaggeration there.
Or you could put some cash into WINE development and then have nothing to do but push your apps on Linux users....
If you read the tone of the writing on the site, it's pretty obvious IMHO that these people are doing this as a comical protest of the way money influences elections and the actions of the government today. It's not a very professional site - for example, the dropdown list of states has NY twice and misses NJ. It also requires you to check a box that says "I have read and agree to the voter agreement." When you click on "voter agreement" it takes you to a page that says "The voter agreement isn't up yet. It will be emailed to you when it's finished."
It's a good idea, though. I just feel bad about all the flames they're going to get from people who don't understand satire....
Wouldn't it be easier to have a little perl script (or executable for mac and win users) to run at startup of the OS or browser that would just delete or scramble the doubleclick cookie? What do you gain by exchanging?
Republicans are only libertarian when it comes to the destructive shortsighted behavior of huge corporations. We wouldn't want the jackbooted Big Government thugs oppressing oil companies by making them treat their workers with dignity, or stop destroying our environment.
I am not a conservative, but I respect conservatism as a philosophy. To me, conservatism means letting the economy run itself without government intervention and upholding a strong respect for morals and the law. Not my cup of tea, but worth listening to.
But Republicanism != conservatism. Republicanism means using conservatism as an EXCUSE to give breaks to anyone who will contribute to our campaign warchests and lavish convention parties. Conservatives have no choice but to vote Republican, the same way liberals have no choice but to vote Democrat, when neither party represents either's views at the federal level. That's why John McCain, a true conservative, allied himself with Democrats to try to clean up campaign financing. The Republicans, of course, killed McCain-Feingold because they knew it would stop their sponsors from buying elections every year.
It seems to me as a long-time Slashdot reader that the two main political trains of thought here are represented by the Greens and by the Libertarians. Nearly all of us are firmly against censorship and harsh law enforcement (i.e. "Geek Profiling"). I suppose many of us were hurt earlier in our lives by "conservative" social attitudes.
It's on economic issues where we seem to differ. A lot of us, probably more so for those outside the USA, favor policies that encourage a fair distribution of wealth and social services for all citizens. But there's also a big Libertarian contingent, who feel that if the government keeps its hands out of the economy, prosperity is the result, and that if I earn something, no government should be able to force me to share it with anyone else.
I'm more in the Green camp ideologically (not yet decided between Gore and Nader, but that's another post), but I have nothing but respect for the US Libertarian Party due to their honesty and smart campaigning. The Democrats and Republicans do everything they can to keep everyone else out of debates, so that they can set the debates' parameters, and the Libertarians have done the best possible job of getting their voices heard in spite of having the deck stacked against them. The televised debates NEED to include Ralph Nader and Harry Browne(And probably one of those Reformers, but they can't seem to get their act together), if any substantive issues are going to be discussed.
There are a lot of comments about arcade-style games which you can now get on MAME, and NES games, but are there any fans out there besides me of Sierra's games from the late 80's to mid 90's? They came out of the Infocom text-adventures, but the best ones (read: Quest for Glory series, which never got as much hype due to not being written by Roberta Williams) were based on gradual character development. The backgrounds tended to be taken from hand-painted pictures. And the games were funny, too. (Innumerable Monty Python references.) The Police Quest series did similar things with a more serious subject matter. Am I alone?
I volunteered at a summer camp a few years ago. It was a computer class for inner-city kids in Philadelphia. We're talking schools that border on hopelessness. Several admitted on the first day that they had never touched a computer before. We started all the way at the beginning. As in "it's a mouse, not a microphone."
By the end, they all had hotmail accounts that they could use as easily as I used mine. They could all write resumes in a word processor. The more artistically inclined ones were scanning in their work and posting it on web pages.
Now, what about their classmates who didn't get into this program? Are they "meritless"? Nope. They just weren't offered the opportunity.
His name is Michael Smerconish. And he is a dick. I only ever hear him because he's on before and after Phillies games. But don't take it from me:
http://www.brainsoap.com/news_v iews/blotter_2.shtml
Shhhh! Don't mention OO Basic near my university's Comp Sci department... they'll do anything to inconvenience students!
In all seriousness, however, how DO you write OO Basic? I am a big fan of the OO paradigm, but I owe the creators of BASIC for instilling a love of coding in me at a young age. Has this actually been done?
People are talking about sources of new non-RIAA music, and that's cool. But there's a lot of good RIAA music I and others would like to own on CD. May I recommend Ebay for used CDs. I've found a good number of hard-to-find CDs by mainstream bands, and I've yet to pay less than $10.
Of course, one fear that I've almost been afraid to articulate is that used CD sales will be the next target. The good folks in Redmond have nearly managed to illegalize the sale of used M$ software. How long will it be before we start hearing "You don't buy the music, you buy a license to use the music the way we say."
Could there ever be a UCITA for music?
Napster asked the RIAA to provide a list of acts the RIAA didn't want distributed on Napster. That way, any artist could opt out of Napster but the artists who liked the idea could stay. The RIAA said they were "unable" to do so.
How hard is it to open up your database of artists you own and hit Print?!
This ain't about piracy.
I know very little about the alternate Napsters. I have used GNapster on Linux, which got search results in half the time the Win32 client took, but I don't know whether it connected to Napster servers or alternate ones. My worry is this: what made Napster great was the sheer quantity of people using it simultaneously. If everyone goes off to whatever server they heard was best, that won't happen. And the non-technical users won't be bothered to enter a new server name. They'll just shrug and say "it was fun while it lasted." GNUtella? I have the bandwidth to get 400k/s downloads off Napster, but I've rarely gotten anything faster than 3k/s off GNUtella.
Is there a little false optimism here?
More significantly, the company repeatedly has tried to stymie independent developers working on Napster-compatible software and Web sites.
Is that true?
http://freshmeat.net/search.php3?que ry=napster
The only napster clone I've used is Gnapster, which (mmmmm.... Aqua GTK theme) works IMHO faster and more efficiently than the Windows client. I haven't heard anything about Napster trying to shut these people down. I'm sure they could easily tweak their protocol a la AOL to make it incompatible with the reverse-engineered stuff. I don't see what they've done that's selfish at all, except try to stop people from SELLING merchandise pertaining to them without permission.
....is because of "Crouch End", from Nightmares and Dreamscapes.
God DAMN I love Stephen King.
All the research done by the posters on this story seem to indicate that there is no way between the eastern and western hemispheres without going through the USA. The US isn't the center of the universe, but if you're trying to exchange data with someone in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, etc, the US is pretty damn necessary, and a serious disruption of routers there would cut you off from all those countries.
Stating hard facts about network topology != cultural imperialism.
I can still make music on my own, and expect to be able to regardless of what Time-Warner does.
Oh really? I'd like to agree with you. But the point of your art to express yourself, no? And that means expressing yourself TO OTHERS. The RIAA and the MPAA (if you were a smalltime moviemaker) don't want you to be able to get your material out to fans without going through them. That means giving them a huge cut of the money you'd make, and retooling your work to what they think they can sell. The Internet is a practically cost-free means of distributing information. Napster helps a lot. The DeCSS and RIAA debates are about who gets to control the distribution of YOUR art.
I know one slashdotter quotes Tom Tomorrow 's cartoon This Modern Worldin his sig, but I've often been surprised at how they've never made it into Quickies or Humor. Here's a brilliant piece he did on the subject of media bias:
http://www.freespeech.o rg/tomorrow/pages/rar/rar_bBrill.htm
I really liked Hugh Jackman's Wolverine, even though it's an easy part to play. (Just growl and act tough.) There are so many questions surrounding his origin that my hope is that the next sequel is all about him. It can take place in the same universe as this one, so maybe Rogue can come along or the Professor can have a little cameo, but I think his character alone could make a high quality flick. I think a solo movie for any character would be better than a film that tries to do too much in too little time.