Come on. AmigaOS, OS-9, and QNX all had amazingly modern features, back in the 1980s, running on, in some cases, 8 bit hardware. In fact, it turns out that RIM bought QNX Software Systems, according to Wikipedia. There's no reason for the OS to be special purpose or cut-down. The problem is with loading up the hardware with extraneous features, such as the ability to play DVDs or streaming media, while keeping the energy consumption minimal. The real innovation is that today's integrated hardware can easily play DVDs, while giving a useful life to embedded devices, thanks to both improved battery technology and energy consumption. It's not that the operating systems can finally have breathing space.
Seriously. Take a look at what the Amiga could do with a 7 MHz 68K CPU and 256KB RAM. Then, once your mind is blown by that, try out OS-9 on a 6809 CPU, dating back to the late 1970s. Both have features that only appeared in the 2000s, in more mainstream operating systems. QNX can even boot up a GUI environment, with a web browser and networking stack, on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Linux, Windows, and MacOS X can only dream about that (not that they are bad operating systems or anything -- it's just something they can't do).
It's a matter of priorities, really. Do you want to have your operating system coded in hand-optimized assembly language, with all the maintainability problems that brings? Or do you want an easy to maintain, C++-based operating system, that caches everything in the (presumably available) gigabytes of RAM of a modern PC? You can have features, performance, and low system requirements, but it takes a lot more effort than if you simply emphasize features. It also takes a lot more training.
Yeah, for a true apk post, it needs to be ten paragraphs of rambling, stream-of-consciousness ranting. Don't forget the attacks on Drinkypoo, Countertrolling, and gmhowell. Also, it never hurts to have some kind of bizarre, self-congratulatory "I WIN, BECAUSE YOU FAIL LOL ROFL" series of statements at the end, proclaiming victory and the ritual pwning of noobs. On the whole, it was a good first attempt, but the real apk is near irreplaceable. He may be an arrogant, pseudo-intellectual kook, but he's our arrogant, pseudo-intellectual kook.
Is there some reason why Hugh Pickens submits every single news article that he finds? Is he really that obsessive-compulsive? Is he trying to become an unofficial Slashdot editor?
Back in those days, Trip Hawkins was the CEO. He left in the early 90s, to found 3DO (which wasn't nearly as successful, to put it lightly). Unfortunately, after Trip Hawkins left, the company became quite a bit less creative, efficiently pumping out sequels to highly derivative games and buying smaller studios (and usually ruining them). I'll always remember the great EA games of the 80s fondly, but it's difficult to see how they're even remotely related to that company today. Hopefully, PopCap will fair better than Origin and Maxis, but I kind of doubt it. Actually, since I intensely dislike most social/casual games, I don't care, but it'd be nice to see someone actually flourish under the EA banner, for once. It's a shame that Trip Hawkins left the company, but it's hard to argue with their bottom line: EA is huge and highly profitable, despite their poor reputation among many gamers.
Interesting bit of trivia: Trip Hawkins was actually an early Apple employee.
I get this hilarious picture in my head, of someone protesting, "These tapes are real! I need them to restore my grandfather!", as he's carted away by the men in white.
Are you kidding? I'm tempted to believe that you are joking, but you seem serious. The problem is not with the concept; the problem is in the enforcement. I'll give you a success story for regulation: I walked into a pharmacy and bought a bottle of medicine that more-or-less truthfully lists its ingredients, claimed benefits, and usage on the side of the container. Maybe you're not familiar with a period of history in the USA where so-called snake oil was sold, but this is quite a revolution in terms of customer rights. Without the FDA and FTC, we'd have a return to this system, wherein companies could claim whatever they wanted, with no repercussions, except for a possible boycott by the most informed consumers.
When enforcement -- by pro-business, Libertarian types -- becomes a joke, yes, the system does look pointless and worthless. But that's the whole point, isn't it? By appointing such people to head regulatory agencies, the agency is made lame, so that Libertarians can say, "See? Regulation doesn't work. It's just a waste of time and money."
Yes, one is usually not destroyed by one's boss, no matter how much of an asshole he is. However, the competition was destroyed, and, as I'm sure you're aware, that's to what I was referring... though it was a good troll. I rate it 4/5. Would be trolled again. An asset to Slashdot! A++++++++
Ballmer offers incentives. Gates dictated. I'll take Ballmer over Gates any day, because you can at least turn down Ballmer's incentives. If you stood up to Gates, you were destroyed.
I would contrast Sculley and Jobs in a similar manner, though not nearly so strong.
Wow. I sure how that there are games better than that. The graphics are total shit, and the gameplay consists of clicking on shitting icons, then sitting there, waiting for something to happen. Exciting.
I wouldn't even pay a single dollar for that game.
If I had known it was some shitty flash game, I probably wouldn't have even clicked on the link, so fair warning to anyone else who has an actual gaming PC...
Such vitriol. Are you unable to look at a) the software and b) the incident dispassionately?
I've been diagnosed as bipolar, so I'd probably say that I'm psychologically incapable of looking at things dispassionately. On the positive side, it makes life much more interesting for those around me, as long as they're at a sufficiently safe distance.
As for the reviews: Mozilla was right to delete them. Reviews are supposed to review the add-on, not be used to publicly raise a stink. It's fair to let the latter happen when there's a problem, but after that, it's good that Mozilla's cleaning up again, too.
I understand what you're saying, and I generally agree; but shouldn't the feedback system be for everyone, rather than just the satisfied customers/users? For example, when Spore was released, its Amazon rating was vote-bombed by angry gamers, because it had restrictive DRM. It greatly annoyed me that these "single issue voters" were ignoring everything but the DRM, leaving people to wonder if it was truly a good game or not, because the vote-bomb completely pushed everything else out of the discussion. One way that Amazon could have solved this issue is to have indicated two categories for voting: quality and satisfaction. A high quality item that had odious restrictions -- such as a fun game with restrictive DRM -- could then be properly rated, instead of the current system, where one has to indicate both quality and satisfaction with the same vote. The same problem exists on Newegg, too, though Newegg reviews do tend to be a bit more verbose and technical.
There's always "ce", as in "c'est la vie". Ce is usually used for "this" or "that", but can also be translated as "it". Much like English, there's a real problem with specifying unknown or indeterminate gender. For some reason, Anglophones really hate using "it" to refer to people, thus you end up with "he/she needs to eat his/her food", instead of "it needs to eat its food". At least, in English, when gender is inapplicable (a situation that English recognizes), you can use "it".
There's a difference between being cheap (trying to minimize costs), having an entitlement complex (believing that you deserve everything for free), and wanting the source code available (software freedom). I'm not saying that they don't intersect, but there are differences. It's easy to confuse people who call for software freedom with the people who pirate software, because they're both using the word "free", but in different contexts, and they both have an aversion to paying for commercial software, whereas the cheap user might be virtually immune to spending their money on luxury brands, like Apple or Sony, that offer little real return for the extra money spent.
But, in the end, you're just trolling, and I'm simply bored; so I'm responding to your troll. I'm sure someone else will mention the Humble Indie Bundle, because it's turning into an annoyingly cliched (though true) counter-example to this common troll.
I am, to this day, surprised at how many people still advocate that malware piece of shit, NoScript. It should have been kicked off Mozilla's Addon website and Maone banned for life. Oh well.
But I'm sure you're right; the reviews will be removed and the votes discounted. This also happened when EA's Spore was vote bombed on Amazon, because of the heavy DRM. In the end, retailers (like Apple's App Store, Amazon, and Newegg) have no real incentive for actually allowing negative reviews to stand, and it surprises me whenever they don't censor the one star reviews. Mozilla, on the other hand, I had higher hopes for, and it saddens me to see that they acted like apologetics; but they, too, have more incentive to be permissive and soft, since they are dependent on people uploading add-ons, in order to stay relevant. If they ban people for minor infractions, the add-on authors will simply set up their own competing site, with more permissive rules.
In the grand scheme of things, it's not all that important whether a few loud mouths are censored or not, because every controversy eventually blows over, and the loud mouths can always complain elsewhere. What bothers me is the illusion of free speech that such sites maintain, by allowing some negative reviews to be posted. If you see 96% of 1000 people voted a product 4/5 or 5/5, you're much more likely to trust that rating, versus a rather suspicious 100% positive feedback rating. One rating indicates heavy censorship of negative feedback, while the other leaves some doubt as to whether censorship is occurring or not.
I don't support vote-bombing products on Amazon or Newegg, because a) it's stupid, b) it's usually done by rabid fanboys, and c) it doesn't give an actual, unbiased picture of how satisfied the owners are with their purchase, but the censorious reactions are somewhat annoying. It just goes to prove that you should never trust anyone who's got something to gain by lying to you -- what would seem to be common sense, but is usually treated as paranoid cynicism by most people.
I agree, but what else is Slashdot going to report on? Most stories get complaints that they don't belong on the main page. If we listened to those people complaining loudest and hardest, banned all Facebook, Twitter, iterative product releases, generic rants and blogs, flamebait and troll articles, and reviews, what would be left? One story per day, which half the people on Slashdot didn't even understand, because it was too technical?
I agree that there's too much boring, extraneous crap being posted to Slashdot, but this is the way it's always been. There was no glorious, crapless time when everything was relevant, interesting, and geeky. Half the fun of Slashdot has always been trolling the stupid articles, while you wait for a good one to be posted.
And, let's face it, for every article that you consider relevant and interesting, there's someone out there, thinking, "Why the fuck was this posted?" Windows users don't give a shit about Linux 3.0, Libertarians don't give a shit about some Marxist interpretation of The Matrix, graphics designers don't care about the latest I.T. management fad, and teenagers don't understand why anyone would want to talk about the banking industry.
Normally, I'd agree with you. However, as a New Yorker, I can tell you that these phrases are used (or at least known) in the coastal Northeast (NY, NJ, PA, MD). I can't say one way or the other how a New Englander might react, because I've never been out that way (except for a brief foray into Boston once). It's not something that we commonly use, but we understand the idiom. Whether that's from linguistic evolution or global telecommunications, I don't know. I didn't have any trouble understanding the summary, but I find the guy's ire a bit perplexing. He got mad because someone made a misleading visualization? He's going to have a heart attack at 40.
Yeah. Online NWN was very heavily influenced by MUD/MUSH culture. I tried a few NWN persistent worlds, but I found that they were usually a bit too social or too combat-oriented for my taste, so I ended up playing the single-player modules more than anything else. There were a few servers that had a decent mix of both action and RP, but they were often a bit underpopulated, as people gravitated toward the more extreme servers. While I'm generally more a fan of the action side, I like a compelling story and some light RP thrown in, as well. The social servers seemed to generally be run by elitist control-freaks who believed that having fun was a sign that you were a powergamer, while the action servers were so generic and based on instant gratification, it was a bit of a turn-off. The best part of NWN was being able to find the perfect module and play through it, without having to make major compromises on aspects of gameplay you enjoyed. I tried to get some of my friends involved, but they weren't really into it as much as I was, so it was generally a single-player game for me, with the occasional attempts at trying out new persistent worlds.
Roleplaying a gimp in a low magic world can be a decent change of pace from the more action-oriented servers, but it's definitely not something that I want to return to every time I start up the game. From a gameplay perspective, it's boring as fuck, even if it's creatively engrossing.
I'm not convinced that he'd be the right person at this time, though. He was visionary enough to see that a software company was a good idea; he saw the good idea of other people and either plagiarized or bought them; he was a ruthless businessman who resorted to unethical methods to claw his way up from the bottom, reach the top, and stay at the top. When you think about it, are those the qualities that Microsoft needs today? Post-investigation, Microsoft needs a softer, gentler hand. Ironically, Ballmer is that softer, gentler hand, that makes overtures to the industry, rather than dictating ultimatums to it.
Gates and Jobs are similar in many respects, while Ballmer and Sculley share an equal number of opposing qualities. Gates and Jobs are both dictatorial, with clear visions of what they want, how they want it implemented, and what they're going to do to keep the users locked in and dependent on them. Ballmer and Sculley, however, are less visionary and approach most issues from a traditional business perspective. Remember how Sculley opened up the Mac platform, allowing clones? Jobs would never have done that. Nor would Gates. Ballmer, on the other hand, I think might have. While it didn't work out too well for Apple, at the time, there was potential there for licensing and making the brand more popular. Maybe if Sculley had been more aggressive in his licensing of the Macintosh brand -- going to HP, Compaq, and IBM with enticing offers -- he'd have been on to something, rather than just diluting his own marketshare, by allowing his partners and allies to undercut him. Ballmer and Sculley aren't nearly as bad as people make them out to be, but their lack of vision does hurt them. What hurts them even more, however, is their lack of viciousness. Ballmer is unfairly characterized as a psychopath, whereas I think he's probably much more bipolar than anything else. He doesn't have the ruthless, take-no-prisoners attitude that being a high powered CEO demands, and when he's compared to Gates, people often uncharitably use this against him. I hate to defend the guy, because I don't really like him, but he's just not that bad. He's the second coming of Sculley, who was also vilified and detested by analysts, for not being a good enough judge of what to plagiarize and who to destroy. Given a choice, I'll take Sculley and Ballmer over Jobs and Gates. While Jobs and Gates brought their corporations to dizzying heights, Ballmer and Sculley are the better choice for consumers, competitors, and underlings. Jobs is nothing more than a more charismatic version of Gates -- which goes a long way to making him preferable to Gates, in my mind -- but Jobs is still a dictatorial asshole who can't stand competition. Ballmer, as excitable and unvisionary as he may be, is preferable to Gates, unless you're looking for a ruthless asshole with very little empathy. Analysts love that shit. I don't.
To be fair, a lot of MUDs were highly repetitive, boring grindfests. After MUDs and their tropes had been firmly established (with Diku and Circle MUD), one MUD was pretty much the same as any other MUD, with the exact same, boring gameplay and areas. In fact, I remember playing on some MUDs where you were handed a bag full of the best low-level loot, so that you could get to the drudgery right away, without having to expend any creative thought. Sure, there were exceptions -- I remember one custom MUD that hid all your statistics from you, so that you never truly knew what your strength or intelligence were, and was composed entirely of unique areas; and there were RP MUDs where social interaction was more important than killing random mobs -- but even these MUDs eventually bored me to tears, as I realized that the gameplay was never going to amount to more than "west; west; north; kill orc; ; get treasure". If you weren't imprisoned within an interactive story as a passive participant, you were mindlessly executing the same commands to kill the same mobs, over and over again, to slowly replace each piece of equipment with marginally better equipment.
The alternative was arguably even worse -- stories that were more interactive and interesting, yet full of people who wanted to RP every breath they took, with no actual game involved. You want to actually kill a monster? You want to gain a level?! Powergamer! Ban him!
You can dress it up as much as you want, but MUDs were not much different than the current crop of social games, where you're on a never-ending treadmill of repetitive gameplay.
A few probably are, but many people simply get called trolls or shills because they dare to cross the groupthink. Try it some day. You'll see. It seems to be a bit of a Slashdot stereotype that one's most well-intentioned, tactful posts get modded as troll, while the actual troll posts get modded insightful. It's a bit of a mindfuck the first time it happens to you.
Yeah, you make good points. Like anything else in life, it's a series of trade-offs. For some things, a rolling release system really doesn't work as well as traditional, monolithic release cycles. For a browser, which is supposed to be stable and dependable, I can totally see how you'd want to stick to a known good version, while holding off on the (possibly unstable) feature-rich versions. Arguably, browsers (and technology in general!) have been relentlessly moving forward, forcing new ways of doing things and new, confusing technologies on users. Browser plugins, for example, are widely considered a pain in the ass by users, despite the added functionality they bring.
OK, so how does that tie into browsers, Firefox, rolling releases, and enterprise support? Here's what I'd do, if I were Mozilla CEO:
1) Apologize for all the zany shit that's gone on since 4.0. Can't hurt. Might help. At least, in the short term, it would mollify those who've recently complained that the Mozilla devs are uncaring, egotistical bastards. 2) Set up a new project, called Firecheetah or something, where development happens at breakneck speed, UI is in flux, and new technologies are readily adopted. It would have a rolling release, possibly automatically updated. This would be recommended for power users, enthusiasts, and web developers. There would be two or three channels: alpha, beta, and standard. Alpha would be like nightlies, where new code is tested first. These might crash a lot. Since the whole project is beta quality work, I'm not convinced that a beta channel even makes all that much sense, but, hey, why not. If it turns out to be redundant, it can be removed. Beta code is supposed to work as intended, but will probably need some testing to validate this. And, finally, we have the standard channel, where users are constantly inundated with new code from the beta channel, once it seems stable. If it turns out to not be stable, then they'll deal with it, since this project is more about rapid development than stability... and the next bugfix will be delivered shortly, anyway. This project is for the people who hate stagnation. It might be codenamed "Ritalin". Heh. 3) Retain the Firefox project, but as a more enterprise-friendly, stable version. Major versions would be heavily beta-tested before release. This would be the version that "normal" users and enterprises are encouraged to use. This version would be supported for a long time, with promises that the API will not change between minor revisions. Major revisions would be kept to a minimal amount each year, preferably with a leisurely development rate. Features from Firecheetah (ugh, I hate that name, but I'm not very good at branding) would be backported, after they've been sufficiently tested. My vision is for Firefox to be very conservative about changing the UI, adding superfluous features, or having crazy API changes that exist merely because someone got bored. This would be the browser that you use when you want a Firefox 2.0 oe 3.0 style experience: lean, mean, and stable. Architectural changes would be readily accepted, as long as they don't cause bloat or change the API. This project is for the people who hate change for the sake of change.
Add-on compatibility between the two projects would have to be decided, but I don't think it would really be reasonable to expect that an add-on would be cross-project. A compatibility layer could be written into Firecheetah. One might be able to enable or disable this feature, so that it doesn't bloat the browser too much. Plug-ins, such as Flash or Java, would be compatible. The Javascript engine would also be compatible, though the Firecheetah engine might be a bit faster and streamlined, at the cost of decreased stability.
I'm sure there's stuff that I'm overlooking, and I might be overestimating the ability of computer users to handle having two browser projects coming from Mozilla, but I think this is actually pretty workable.
I love the idea of rolling releases. There isn't even a "but" involved here.
However, when Firefox does this half-assed version, which ends up just inflating the version number (which remains quite prominent and significant), they are simply making life difficult. The way they should have done this is: Firefox 3, Firefox 4 (an interim release, where they retain the version number), and then just plain old Firefox. No version number. At the very least, they should have removed the significance of the version number, so that assigning random numbers to it didn't cause users' add-ons to stop working. What the hell is that about? Why should the users be so inconvenienced? If the version number truly doesn't matter, then stop making it matter!
Mozilla doesn't know what it wants and it's going about implementing things in a half-assed way that annoys people. This can only end in tears.
Ah, but the role of the asshole in society is actually quite misunderstood and underappreciated. Without overly critical, judgemental assholes to shame and berate people for their odious behavior, where would we be? We'd live in a society full of care bears, where everyone's opinions were equally valid, every POV was respected, and, yes, stupid shit was said and time was wasted. Without the assholes of the world, berating people for their foolishness, we'd descend into a hellish dystopia, where AOL-ish cries of "me too!" and generic, emotional outbursts replace intelligent discourse. Truly, the asshole is one of society's greatest assets, for without him, we turn into bland, boring, and ultimately useless people, contributing nothing to society. Is he a destructive, hateful force for evil? Far from it! No, he is the crusader of all that is good and of high quality!
Slashdot Mirror
Come on. AmigaOS, OS-9, and QNX all had amazingly modern features, back in the 1980s, running on, in some cases, 8 bit hardware. In fact, it turns out that RIM bought QNX Software Systems, according to Wikipedia. There's no reason for the OS to be special purpose or cut-down. The problem is with loading up the hardware with extraneous features, such as the ability to play DVDs or streaming media, while keeping the energy consumption minimal. The real innovation is that today's integrated hardware can easily play DVDs, while giving a useful life to embedded devices, thanks to both improved battery technology and energy consumption. It's not that the operating systems can finally have breathing space.
Seriously. Take a look at what the Amiga could do with a 7 MHz 68K CPU and 256KB RAM. Then, once your mind is blown by that, try out OS-9 on a 6809 CPU, dating back to the late 1970s. Both have features that only appeared in the 2000s, in more mainstream operating systems. QNX can even boot up a GUI environment, with a web browser and networking stack, on a 1.44MB floppy disk. Linux, Windows, and MacOS X can only dream about that (not that they are bad operating systems or anything -- it's just something they can't do).
It's a matter of priorities, really. Do you want to have your operating system coded in hand-optimized assembly language, with all the maintainability problems that brings? Or do you want an easy to maintain, C++-based operating system, that caches everything in the (presumably available) gigabytes of RAM of a modern PC? You can have features, performance, and low system requirements, but it takes a lot more effort than if you simply emphasize features. It also takes a lot more training.
Yeah, for a true apk post, it needs to be ten paragraphs of rambling, stream-of-consciousness ranting. Don't forget the attacks on Drinkypoo, Countertrolling, and gmhowell. Also, it never hurts to have some kind of bizarre, self-congratulatory "I WIN, BECAUSE YOU FAIL LOL ROFL" series of statements at the end, proclaiming victory and the ritual pwning of noobs. On the whole, it was a good first attempt, but the real apk is near irreplaceable. He may be an arrogant, pseudo-intellectual kook, but he's our arrogant, pseudo-intellectual kook.
Is there some reason why Hugh Pickens submits every single news article that he finds? Is he really that obsessive-compulsive? Is he trying to become an unofficial Slashdot editor?
And, seriously, "Hugh Pickens writes writes"?
Back in those days, Trip Hawkins was the CEO. He left in the early 90s, to found 3DO (which wasn't nearly as successful, to put it lightly). Unfortunately, after Trip Hawkins left, the company became quite a bit less creative, efficiently pumping out sequels to highly derivative games and buying smaller studios (and usually ruining them). I'll always remember the great EA games of the 80s fondly, but it's difficult to see how they're even remotely related to that company today. Hopefully, PopCap will fair better than Origin and Maxis, but I kind of doubt it. Actually, since I intensely dislike most social/casual games, I don't care, but it'd be nice to see someone actually flourish under the EA banner, for once. It's a shame that Trip Hawkins left the company, but it's hard to argue with their bottom line: EA is huge and highly profitable, despite their poor reputation among many gamers.
Interesting bit of trivia: Trip Hawkins was actually an early Apple employee.
Yeah. Because there are so many non-transportation uses for cars.
I get this hilarious picture in my head, of someone protesting, "These tapes are real! I need them to restore my grandfather!", as he's carted away by the men in white.
Are you kidding? I'm tempted to believe that you are joking, but you seem serious. The problem is not with the concept; the problem is in the enforcement. I'll give you a success story for regulation: I walked into a pharmacy and bought a bottle of medicine that more-or-less truthfully lists its ingredients, claimed benefits, and usage on the side of the container. Maybe you're not familiar with a period of history in the USA where so-called snake oil was sold, but this is quite a revolution in terms of customer rights. Without the FDA and FTC, we'd have a return to this system, wherein companies could claim whatever they wanted, with no repercussions, except for a possible boycott by the most informed consumers.
When enforcement -- by pro-business, Libertarian types -- becomes a joke, yes, the system does look pointless and worthless. But that's the whole point, isn't it? By appointing such people to head regulatory agencies, the agency is made lame, so that Libertarians can say, "See? Regulation doesn't work. It's just a waste of time and money."
Yes, one is usually not destroyed by one's boss, no matter how much of an asshole he is. However, the competition was destroyed, and, as I'm sure you're aware, that's to what I was referring... though it was a good troll. I rate it 4/5. Would be trolled again. An asset to Slashdot! A++++++++
Ballmer offers incentives. Gates dictated. I'll take Ballmer over Gates any day, because you can at least turn down Ballmer's incentives. If you stood up to Gates, you were destroyed.
I would contrast Sculley and Jobs in a similar manner, though not nearly so strong.
You don't get irony, do you?
Man, there are so many typos in that post, I must need to get some slepe pretty bad.
Wow. I sure how that there are games better than that. The graphics are total shit, and the gameplay consists of clicking on shitting icons, then sitting there, waiting for something to happen. Exciting.
I wouldn't even pay a single dollar for that game.
If I had known it was some shitty flash game, I probably wouldn't have even clicked on the link, so fair warning to anyone else who has an actual gaming PC...
I've been diagnosed as bipolar, so I'd probably say that I'm psychologically incapable of looking at things dispassionately. On the positive side, it makes life much more interesting for those around me, as long as they're at a sufficiently safe distance.
I understand what you're saying, and I generally agree; but shouldn't the feedback system be for everyone, rather than just the satisfied customers/users? For example, when Spore was released, its Amazon rating was vote-bombed by angry gamers, because it had restrictive DRM. It greatly annoyed me that these "single issue voters" were ignoring everything but the DRM, leaving people to wonder if it was truly a good game or not, because the vote-bomb completely pushed everything else out of the discussion. One way that Amazon could have solved this issue is to have indicated two categories for voting: quality and satisfaction. A high quality item that had odious restrictions -- such as a fun game with restrictive DRM -- could then be properly rated, instead of the current system, where one has to indicate both quality and satisfaction with the same vote. The same problem exists on Newegg, too, though Newegg reviews do tend to be a bit more verbose and technical.
There's always "ce", as in "c'est la vie". Ce is usually used for "this" or "that", but can also be translated as "it". Much like English, there's a real problem with specifying unknown or indeterminate gender. For some reason, Anglophones really hate using "it" to refer to people, thus you end up with "he/she needs to eat his/her food", instead of "it needs to eat its food". At least, in English, when gender is inapplicable (a situation that English recognizes), you can use "it".
There's a difference between being cheap (trying to minimize costs), having an entitlement complex (believing that you deserve everything for free), and wanting the source code available (software freedom). I'm not saying that they don't intersect, but there are differences. It's easy to confuse people who call for software freedom with the people who pirate software, because they're both using the word "free", but in different contexts, and they both have an aversion to paying for commercial software, whereas the cheap user might be virtually immune to spending their money on luxury brands, like Apple or Sony, that offer little real return for the extra money spent.
But, in the end, you're just trolling, and I'm simply bored; so I'm responding to your troll. I'm sure someone else will mention the Humble Indie Bundle, because it's turning into an annoyingly cliched (though true) counter-example to this common troll.
I am, to this day, surprised at how many people still advocate that malware piece of shit, NoScript. It should have been kicked off Mozilla's Addon website and Maone banned for life. Oh well.
But I'm sure you're right; the reviews will be removed and the votes discounted. This also happened when EA's Spore was vote bombed on Amazon, because of the heavy DRM. In the end, retailers (like Apple's App Store, Amazon, and Newegg) have no real incentive for actually allowing negative reviews to stand, and it surprises me whenever they don't censor the one star reviews. Mozilla, on the other hand, I had higher hopes for, and it saddens me to see that they acted like apologetics; but they, too, have more incentive to be permissive and soft, since they are dependent on people uploading add-ons, in order to stay relevant. If they ban people for minor infractions, the add-on authors will simply set up their own competing site, with more permissive rules.
In the grand scheme of things, it's not all that important whether a few loud mouths are censored or not, because every controversy eventually blows over, and the loud mouths can always complain elsewhere. What bothers me is the illusion of free speech that such sites maintain, by allowing some negative reviews to be posted. If you see 96% of 1000 people voted a product 4/5 or 5/5, you're much more likely to trust that rating, versus a rather suspicious 100% positive feedback rating. One rating indicates heavy censorship of negative feedback, while the other leaves some doubt as to whether censorship is occurring or not.
I don't support vote-bombing products on Amazon or Newegg, because a) it's stupid, b) it's usually done by rabid fanboys, and c) it doesn't give an actual, unbiased picture of how satisfied the owners are with their purchase, but the censorious reactions are somewhat annoying. It just goes to prove that you should never trust anyone who's got something to gain by lying to you -- what would seem to be common sense, but is usually treated as paranoid cynicism by most people.
I agree, but what else is Slashdot going to report on? Most stories get complaints that they don't belong on the main page. If we listened to those people complaining loudest and hardest, banned all Facebook, Twitter, iterative product releases, generic rants and blogs, flamebait and troll articles, and reviews, what would be left? One story per day, which half the people on Slashdot didn't even understand, because it was too technical?
I agree that there's too much boring, extraneous crap being posted to Slashdot, but this is the way it's always been. There was no glorious, crapless time when everything was relevant, interesting, and geeky. Half the fun of Slashdot has always been trolling the stupid articles, while you wait for a good one to be posted.
And, let's face it, for every article that you consider relevant and interesting, there's someone out there, thinking, "Why the fuck was this posted?" Windows users don't give a shit about Linux 3.0, Libertarians don't give a shit about some Marxist interpretation of The Matrix, graphics designers don't care about the latest I.T. management fad, and teenagers don't understand why anyone would want to talk about the banking industry.
Normally, I'd agree with you. However, as a New Yorker, I can tell you that these phrases are used (or at least known) in the coastal Northeast (NY, NJ, PA, MD). I can't say one way or the other how a New Englander might react, because I've never been out that way (except for a brief foray into Boston once). It's not something that we commonly use, but we understand the idiom. Whether that's from linguistic evolution or global telecommunications, I don't know. I didn't have any trouble understanding the summary, but I find the guy's ire a bit perplexing. He got mad because someone made a misleading visualization? He's going to have a heart attack at 40.
Yeah. Online NWN was very heavily influenced by MUD/MUSH culture. I tried a few NWN persistent worlds, but I found that they were usually a bit too social or too combat-oriented for my taste, so I ended up playing the single-player modules more than anything else. There were a few servers that had a decent mix of both action and RP, but they were often a bit underpopulated, as people gravitated toward the more extreme servers. While I'm generally more a fan of the action side, I like a compelling story and some light RP thrown in, as well. The social servers seemed to generally be run by elitist control-freaks who believed that having fun was a sign that you were a powergamer, while the action servers were so generic and based on instant gratification, it was a bit of a turn-off. The best part of NWN was being able to find the perfect module and play through it, without having to make major compromises on aspects of gameplay you enjoyed. I tried to get some of my friends involved, but they weren't really into it as much as I was, so it was generally a single-player game for me, with the occasional attempts at trying out new persistent worlds.
Roleplaying a gimp in a low magic world can be a decent change of pace from the more action-oriented servers, but it's definitely not something that I want to return to every time I start up the game. From a gameplay perspective, it's boring as fuck, even if it's creatively engrossing.
I'm not convinced that he'd be the right person at this time, though. He was visionary enough to see that a software company was a good idea; he saw the good idea of other people and either plagiarized or bought them; he was a ruthless businessman who resorted to unethical methods to claw his way up from the bottom, reach the top, and stay at the top. When you think about it, are those the qualities that Microsoft needs today? Post-investigation, Microsoft needs a softer, gentler hand. Ironically, Ballmer is that softer, gentler hand, that makes overtures to the industry, rather than dictating ultimatums to it.
Gates and Jobs are similar in many respects, while Ballmer and Sculley share an equal number of opposing qualities. Gates and Jobs are both dictatorial, with clear visions of what they want, how they want it implemented, and what they're going to do to keep the users locked in and dependent on them. Ballmer and Sculley, however, are less visionary and approach most issues from a traditional business perspective. Remember how Sculley opened up the Mac platform, allowing clones? Jobs would never have done that. Nor would Gates. Ballmer, on the other hand, I think might have. While it didn't work out too well for Apple, at the time, there was potential there for licensing and making the brand more popular. Maybe if Sculley had been more aggressive in his licensing of the Macintosh brand -- going to HP, Compaq, and IBM with enticing offers -- he'd have been on to something, rather than just diluting his own marketshare, by allowing his partners and allies to undercut him. Ballmer and Sculley aren't nearly as bad as people make them out to be, but their lack of vision does hurt them. What hurts them even more, however, is their lack of viciousness. Ballmer is unfairly characterized as a psychopath, whereas I think he's probably much more bipolar than anything else. He doesn't have the ruthless, take-no-prisoners attitude that being a high powered CEO demands, and when he's compared to Gates, people often uncharitably use this against him. I hate to defend the guy, because I don't really like him, but he's just not that bad. He's the second coming of Sculley, who was also vilified and detested by analysts, for not being a good enough judge of what to plagiarize and who to destroy. Given a choice, I'll take Sculley and Ballmer over Jobs and Gates. While Jobs and Gates brought their corporations to dizzying heights, Ballmer and Sculley are the better choice for consumers, competitors, and underlings. Jobs is nothing more than a more charismatic version of Gates -- which goes a long way to making him preferable to Gates, in my mind -- but Jobs is still a dictatorial asshole who can't stand competition. Ballmer, as excitable and unvisionary as he may be, is preferable to Gates, unless you're looking for a ruthless asshole with very little empathy. Analysts love that shit. I don't.
To be fair, a lot of MUDs were highly repetitive, boring grindfests. After MUDs and their tropes had been firmly established (with Diku and Circle MUD), one MUD was pretty much the same as any other MUD, with the exact same, boring gameplay and areas. In fact, I remember playing on some MUDs where you were handed a bag full of the best low-level loot, so that you could get to the drudgery right away, without having to expend any creative thought. Sure, there were exceptions -- I remember one custom MUD that hid all your statistics from you, so that you never truly knew what your strength or intelligence were, and was composed entirely of unique areas; and there were RP MUDs where social interaction was more important than killing random mobs -- but even these MUDs eventually bored me to tears, as I realized that the gameplay was never going to amount to more than "west; west; north; kill orc; ; get treasure". If you weren't imprisoned within an interactive story as a passive participant, you were mindlessly executing the same commands to kill the same mobs, over and over again, to slowly replace each piece of equipment with marginally better equipment.
The alternative was arguably even worse -- stories that were more interactive and interesting, yet full of people who wanted to RP every breath they took, with no actual game involved. You want to actually kill a monster? You want to gain a level?! Powergamer! Ban him!
You can dress it up as much as you want, but MUDs were not much different than the current crop of social games, where you're on a never-ending treadmill of repetitive gameplay.
A few probably are, but many people simply get called trolls or shills because they dare to cross the groupthink. Try it some day. You'll see. It seems to be a bit of a Slashdot stereotype that one's most well-intentioned, tactful posts get modded as troll, while the actual troll posts get modded insightful. It's a bit of a mindfuck the first time it happens to you.
Yeah, you make good points. Like anything else in life, it's a series of trade-offs. For some things, a rolling release system really doesn't work as well as traditional, monolithic release cycles. For a browser, which is supposed to be stable and dependable, I can totally see how you'd want to stick to a known good version, while holding off on the (possibly unstable) feature-rich versions. Arguably, browsers (and technology in general!) have been relentlessly moving forward, forcing new ways of doing things and new, confusing technologies on users. Browser plugins, for example, are widely considered a pain in the ass by users, despite the added functionality they bring.
OK, so how does that tie into browsers, Firefox, rolling releases, and enterprise support? Here's what I'd do, if I were Mozilla CEO:
1) Apologize for all the zany shit that's gone on since 4.0. Can't hurt. Might help. At least, in the short term, it would mollify those who've recently complained that the Mozilla devs are uncaring, egotistical bastards.
2) Set up a new project, called Firecheetah or something, where development happens at breakneck speed, UI is in flux, and new technologies are readily adopted. It would have a rolling release, possibly automatically updated. This would be recommended for power users, enthusiasts, and web developers. There would be two or three channels: alpha, beta, and standard. Alpha would be like nightlies, where new code is tested first. These might crash a lot. Since the whole project is beta quality work, I'm not convinced that a beta channel even makes all that much sense, but, hey, why not. If it turns out to be redundant, it can be removed. Beta code is supposed to work as intended, but will probably need some testing to validate this. And, finally, we have the standard channel, where users are constantly inundated with new code from the beta channel, once it seems stable. If it turns out to not be stable, then they'll deal with it, since this project is more about rapid development than stability... and the next bugfix will be delivered shortly, anyway. This project is for the people who hate stagnation. It might be codenamed "Ritalin". Heh.
3) Retain the Firefox project, but as a more enterprise-friendly, stable version. Major versions would be heavily beta-tested before release. This would be the version that "normal" users and enterprises are encouraged to use. This version would be supported for a long time, with promises that the API will not change between minor revisions. Major revisions would be kept to a minimal amount each year, preferably with a leisurely development rate. Features from Firecheetah (ugh, I hate that name, but I'm not very good at branding) would be backported, after they've been sufficiently tested. My vision is for Firefox to be very conservative about changing the UI, adding superfluous features, or having crazy API changes that exist merely because someone got bored. This would be the browser that you use when you want a Firefox 2.0 oe 3.0 style experience: lean, mean, and stable. Architectural changes would be readily accepted, as long as they don't cause bloat or change the API. This project is for the people who hate change for the sake of change.
Add-on compatibility between the two projects would have to be decided, but I don't think it would really be reasonable to expect that an add-on would be cross-project. A compatibility layer could be written into Firecheetah. One might be able to enable or disable this feature, so that it doesn't bloat the browser too much. Plug-ins, such as Flash or Java, would be compatible. The Javascript engine would also be compatible, though the Firecheetah engine might be a bit faster and streamlined, at the cost of decreased stability.
I'm sure there's stuff that I'm overlooking, and I might be overestimating the ability of computer users to handle having two browser projects coming from Mozilla, but I think this is actually pretty workable.
I love the idea of rolling releases. There isn't even a "but" involved here.
However, when Firefox does this half-assed version, which ends up just inflating the version number (which remains quite prominent and significant), they are simply making life difficult. The way they should have done this is: Firefox 3, Firefox 4 (an interim release, where they retain the version number), and then just plain old Firefox. No version number. At the very least, they should have removed the significance of the version number, so that assigning random numbers to it didn't cause users' add-ons to stop working. What the hell is that about? Why should the users be so inconvenienced? If the version number truly doesn't matter, then stop making it matter!
Mozilla doesn't know what it wants and it's going about implementing things in a half-assed way that annoys people. This can only end in tears.
Ah, but the role of the asshole in society is actually quite misunderstood and underappreciated. Without overly critical, judgemental assholes to shame and berate people for their odious behavior, where would we be? We'd live in a society full of care bears, where everyone's opinions were equally valid, every POV was respected, and, yes, stupid shit was said and time was wasted. Without the assholes of the world, berating people for their foolishness, we'd descend into a hellish dystopia, where AOL-ish cries of "me too!" and generic, emotional outbursts replace intelligent discourse. Truly, the asshole is one of society's greatest assets, for without him, we turn into bland, boring, and ultimately useless people, contributing nothing to society. Is he a destructive, hateful force for evil? Far from it! No, he is the crusader of all that is good and of high quality!
Or maybe assholes just like being mean. Who knows.