It's not hard. The editors can simply collect every URL that they've ever linked in a table I call 'used_urls.' When they attempt to approve a story, the URLs are checked against the 'used_urls' table. If any are duplicates, further confirmation is requested before the story can be posted.
For my regular contract rate of $275 per hour plus expenses, I'd be happy to code this up for Slashdot.
So if a game was originally made for the Amiga, its creators are obligated to release future versions for the Amiga in order to pacify a group of whiny zealots.
Face it, pudge; you overspend by thousands of dollars for specialized hardware to grouse about the lack of games. You have a tcsh shell prompt. Congratufuckinglations. Go play moon-buggy on your glorified DEC terminal.
What Apple needs to do is drop the cost of their giant cheese graters by $1,000 and allow other companies to make Mac OS X-compatible hardware. Then, and only then, will that bastard child of a platform gain more than 2% market share.
I bet you were shouting "Fuck you" the second Microsoft bought Bungie, and you realized that it would take 15 more years before you could play Marathon Aleph Infinity Plus One G Turbo X on your Mac. You still think that Microsoft will release Halo for Mac.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some games to play on my real computer. Enjoy your candycoated toybox. I hear that puzzle game with the Apple logo is really fun!
Oh yeah, keep swearing at Microsoft. Call them "Micro$oft" and use the 'f' word a lot. That makes 'em really mad, pudge.
Nobody cares about Macs any more. There's not much money to be had selling games to such a tiny segment of the market. It's like saying "Let's develop a game for Dell computers."
There's already a standard for computers, and that standard is Windows. The users have spoken.
By the way, pudge, congratulations. You have risen to the level of 0.5 microSimses of indignation and antagonism. That's the highest level of any Slashdot editor besides Michael Sims himself. If you steal sethf.com, you'll jump way out into the lead!
This new ERS-7 will usher in a new era of robotics wonders. Why, it seems like just yesterday that I got my very first AIBO. It wasn't cheap, either -- it cost over $2,600!
The addition of Wireless Fidelity (or "Wi-Fi") will only improve robot dog technology. I look forward to the day that these robots run Linux.
No, it isn't. It contains no advertising (except for its own premium product) and does not include any spyware.
If not, doesn't it lock up after a couple dozen encodes, forcing users to upgrade to the "Plus" version?
Nope.
I haven't used MusicMatch Jukebox, so I'm just making shit up off the top of my head. And why does the documentation call 128 kbps "CD quality"?
128 kbps is "CD quality" in marketing-speak. If you're going to play the numbers game, you and I both know that an MP3 will never be CD quality (or vinyl quality, to mix flamewars) no matter what bitrate at which it's encoded.
MP3 is useful only for one purpose: transcoding higher-bitrate.ogg files down to a lower bitrate for use on pocket MP3 players. (Transcoding down doesn't introduce nearly as many extra artifacts as transcoding to similar bitrates.)
No, you should never convert from one lossy format to another. I encode.ogg files from my CDs, and I encode.mp3 files from my CDs. Never the twain shall meet.
Apple is thinking "We have a loyal customer base. Let's not aggravate them with DRM."
Microsoft is thinking "Stupid PHBs buy our software no matter what. Let's load it up with DRM so the entertainment industry will stop using the technologically-superior Mac platform."
Our company over here bought an Apple for testing purposes (an eMac). It has an Apple button-mouse (useless frelling mouse), Apple monitor (at least it has a big Apple on the front of it), Apple keyboard, Apple OSX (actually BSD's OSX, but whatever), etc. And yes, it's frelling expensive.
Please name the company you work for. I never want to buy any of its products.
You bought an eMac, a low-end model designed for education, and you want to judge the entire Mac platform based on it. That's like me judging Linux based on some kiddie's half-assed low-end Compaq box with Red Hat on it.
You are completely unfamiliar with how USB mice work; rather than plugging in a mouse you like, you grouse about the one you were issued because you were too stupid to order a different one.
You fail to understand that because Apple makes both the hardware and software, they can guarantee quality in their product line. If, say, Compaq were to start making Apple-compatible hardware, it would be of very poor quality. People would judge Mac OS X to be poor-quality software because of the poor-quality hardware on which it runs.
But I'm feeding an obvious troll already. Please go away.
Any laptop part will cost you an arm and a leg. My friend Joe had to replace a part in his IBM "ThinkPad," and they wanted him to pay $70 for a simple 3-inch ribbon cable. That's excluding shipping, Fred.
Tower cases, like the famous Macintosh G5, are much easier to service with industry standard parts.
Apple has never forced DRM on its users. If you use MP3s that you ripped from your own CDs or acquired by means of fair use, then you will be fine. Contrast this with Windows Media Player 9, which tags every MP3 with a unique identifier (UUID) and sends the UUID back to Microsoft.
There's also Linux, I suppose, but there are even fewer games for Linux than for Mac.
What about my freedom to use my own hardware, instead of being forcing to use Apple's mouse,
What, you mean like the Microsoft IntelliMouse that Apple sold me at the time of purchase?
Apple's memory,
Nobody buys Apple's memory. You go to Crucial.com and buy what you need.
Apple's monitor (with boat anchor attachment on the top),
Apple hasn't sold CRTs in over a year. Their LCDs are the best in the industry. If you disagree, you have the freedom to buy your system with no monitor and purchase one of your choice.
Apple's video card, etc.?
Apple doesn't make video cards. They certainly didn't make the NVidia card that shipped inside my computer.
Also, how can you say that Apple is a company that "respects your freedom" when the music you get off the ITMS is DRMed?
Because nobody's forcing you to get music from the iTunes Music Store.
iTunes lets you rip your music to MP3, the most common format there is. Additional plugins, also free, let you use Ogg Vorbis. Compare this to Windows Media Player, which charges additional fees to rip to MP3. Millions of Windows users have inadvertently ripped their files to DRM-laden "Windows Media Audio" simply because it was the default. The second they try to back up or legally and non-commercially share their music (i.e. with friends, not using KaZaA) they will be denied. That's not very Free to me.
...Apple becomes the only computer maker with its hands clean.
Think about it: most PC enthusiasts around here build their own computers. However, now they will be faced with DRM at the motherboard layer. No matter of software liberation, from Linux to FreeBSD, will be able to cleanse motherboards of this impurity. Apple, on the other hand, has never incorporated any form of DRM into their basic system. Sure, there's iTunes music store, but its DRM is limited to the application level. I boycott iTunes because I care about the Right of First Sale, for example.
I know that it hurts to pay an additional $2,000 for the convenience of a computer company that respects your Freedom, but trust me: once you go Mac, you don't go black, Jack!
The title of the section is horrifically incorrect. It should be "Music By Which to Code." Everyone knows that you can't end a sentence or a title with a preposition.
Re:Looks too much like XP
on
Aethera 1.0
·
· Score: 1
You obviously have no idea what the hell Exchange is and what it is designed to do.
I know enough about Exchange to know why it sucks, and why open source solutions are better.
Also, I find it ridiculous you make fun of the NAME of "Outlook" while juxtaposing it to "Mozilla". Please... I mean, I have never heard of anyone resorting to namecalling a piece of software in order to win an argument... It takes all kinds, I guess...
I prefer to use names of my own design when referring to inferior products.
Please give me your IP addy. Check this out: one, two, three. I can go on if you want...
Tell me the last time Mozilla was responsible for massive worm propagation.
So spake the wise Seth. Why? Please grace us with your obviously paramount knowledge of everything software related.
Access is a "relational database" in the barest sense of the word. It supports absolutely nothing beyond the basic SELECT, UPDATE, and INSERT statements. Everything else is done using inferior GUI tools.
And what, pray tell, is the Open Source alternative? Text files indexed through a bunch of perl scripts outputting LaTEX? Sure.
Have you ever heard of mySQL?
It appears to me that, frankly, you have no clue what Word is since you insist on comparing it to Latex.
Micro$oft Word is a tool for creating documents. LaTeX (not "Latex," you pervert) is a superior open source tool for creating documents.
Finally, please grow up and stop writing "Micro$oft". It is idiotic. Trust me on that.
I reserve the right to misspell any name I want to misspell.
Re:Looks too much like XP
on
Aethera 1.0
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Microsoft Outlook is the BEST mailer there is in a corporate environment. You might think that Mozilla mail or whatever is the Linux equivalent-of-the-day to Outlook is as good, but it is not.
Having worked with Micro$oft Outhouse for 10 years, I can safely say that it is ugly, bloated, stupid, overpriced, and wholly unnecessary. Mozilla with an LDAP server runs rings about Micro$oft's closed-source ass.
People are not stupid, they use Outlook because it does what it says on the box.
Oh really? Outlook looks out? Onto what does it look out? A lake?
Hey Micro$oft! Onto which lake does Outlook?
You might have a bone to pick with Exchange but, frankly, the last versions are much more stable and integrate PERFECTLY with Active Directory.
There's a big surprise. A Micro$oft technology works only with other Micro$oft technologies. What happened to open source technologies like LDAP? Oh, sorry, you can use non-Micro$oft clients with those, so they don't count. Nice try, shill.
Outlook has been the main application that is receiving enhancements in the past two versions of Office (2k and XP), and it shows.
Bug fixes and patches are not "enhancements." I don't recall ever having to install "CRITICAL SECURITY UPDATES" for Mozilla because of some worm going around.
Having beta-tested the new Outlook 2k3 I am certain Outlook will remain the mailer of choice.....your choice, which is inferior, that is.
You can open ANY Office document, no matter when it was made, or what version of the software it was made with, now. The only incompatibility is with Access. That's it.
Access sucks. And no, you can't. One of my idiot co-workers made a document in Micro$oft Word 97. When I tried to load it on a liberated version of Micro$oft Word 2002, Micro$oft Word crashed. Guess you don't get what you pay for.
Which brings me to this: what are you talking about "breaking backward compatibility"? I am still using a DOS app (written in COBOL about fifteen years ago) every day at work on my Windows XP desktop. I have never seen Microsoft breaking anything on a large scale. When Windows 95 came out something like 95% of the apps still worked, and the rest 5% that did not were using undocumented API calls. As a matter of fact, I can install a copy of Word 6 on Windows XP and it will work, even though it's a 16-bit app written for Windows 3.11.
Blah, blah, blah, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. On my Linux boxen I can take ANY application written for ANY POSIX-compliant operating system and recompile it. I'm not even restricted to one architecture, like Micro$oft Word is. Honestly, LaTeX has been superior to that piece of closed-source crapware for 15 years.
DOS and COBOL? Please.
Re:Looks too much like XP
on
Aethera 1.0
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That's a very naive assessment of the Open Source community. The goal of Open Source has always been to create high-quality software and distribute it for Free As In Speech. Compare this to closed-source crapware like Micro$oft Outhouse, which is driven by marketing alone. Micro$oft creates new versions of their closed-source crapware every year, expects people to pay $300 to upgrade, and forces the upgrade by breaking backward compatibility.
Open-source file formats, on the other hand, never change. I can take a LaTeX file from 1989 and create a beautiful PostScript file using Free As In Speech software. Try doing that with Micro$oft "software."
Slashdot Mirror
It's not hard. The editors can simply collect every URL that they've ever linked in a table I call 'used_urls.' When they attempt to approve a story, the URLs are checked against the 'used_urls' table. If any are duplicates, further confirmation is requested before the story can be posted.
For my regular contract rate of $275 per hour plus expenses, I'd be happy to code this up for Slashdot.
I e-mailed him about this. Here's his reply.
Not only does Malda deny responsibility for his own behavior, he also top posted! It's behavior like this that makes me boycott Slashdot every day.
No. I just have a remarkably similar name, and I hate Michael Sims.
This article looks familiar. Perhaps it's because Slashdot linked to it 4 1/2 years ago.
Nice work, "editors."
So if a game was originally made for the Amiga, its creators are obligated to release future versions for the Amiga in order to pacify a group of whiny zealots.
Face it, pudge; you overspend by thousands of dollars for specialized hardware to grouse about the lack of games. You have a tcsh shell prompt. Congratufuckinglations. Go play moon-buggy on your glorified DEC terminal.
What Apple needs to do is drop the cost of their giant cheese graters by $1,000 and allow other companies to make Mac OS X-compatible hardware. Then, and only then, will that bastard child of a platform gain more than 2% market share.
I am not "famous."
I bet you were shouting "Fuck you" the second Microsoft bought Bungie, and you realized that it would take 15 more years before you could play Marathon Aleph Infinity Plus One G Turbo X on your Mac. You still think that Microsoft will release Halo for Mac.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some games to play on my real computer. Enjoy your candycoated toybox. I hear that puzzle game with the Apple logo is really fun!
Oh yeah, keep swearing at Microsoft. Call them "Micro$oft" and use the 'f' word a lot. That makes 'em really mad, pudge.
Dear pudge: fuck you.
Nobody cares about Macs any more. There's not much money to be had selling games to such a tiny segment of the market. It's like saying "Let's develop a game for Dell computers."
There's already a standard for computers, and that standard is Windows. The users have spoken.
By the way, pudge, congratulations. You have risen to the level of 0.5 microSimses of indignation and antagonism. That's the highest level of any Slashdot editor besides Michael Sims himself. If you steal sethf.com, you'll jump way out into the lead!
This new ERS-7 will usher in a new era of robotics wonders. Why, it seems like just yesterday that I got my very first AIBO. It wasn't cheap, either -- it cost over $2,600!
The addition of Wireless Fidelity (or "Wi-Fi") will only improve robot dog technology. I look forward to the day that these robots run Linux.
Macs don't have a "bios." They have Open Firmware. Because it's Open Firmware, I know for a fact that there's no DRM. Ipso fatso.
You're my hero.
If every computer user were like you, the world would be a better place.
Isn't that adware?
.ogg files down to a lower bitrate for use on pocket MP3 players. (Transcoding down doesn't introduce nearly as many extra artifacts as transcoding to similar bitrates.)
.ogg files from my CDs, and I encode .mp3 files from my CDs. Never the twain shall meet.
No, it isn't. It contains no advertising (except for its own premium product) and does not include any spyware.
If not, doesn't it lock up after a couple dozen encodes, forcing users to upgrade to the "Plus" version?
Nope.
I haven't used MusicMatch Jukebox, so I'm just making shit up off the top of my head. And why does the documentation call 128 kbps "CD quality"?
128 kbps is "CD quality" in marketing-speak. If you're going to play the numbers game, you and I both know that an MP3 will never be CD quality (or vinyl quality, to mix flamewars) no matter what bitrate at which it's encoded.
MP3 is useful only for one purpose: transcoding higher-bitrate
No, you should never convert from one lossy format to another. I encode
I can download MusicMatch Jukebox for free, and it encodes to MP3.
Mac users get iTunes for free, and it encodes to MP3.
There is no reason for Windows Media Player, which is also free, not to encode to MP3.
Then OpenOffice.org will become the de facto replacement for Microsoft Office, and the GIMP will become the de facto replacement for Photoshop.
Funny how companies are open source's greatest ally, no matter how much they try to say otherwise.
Apple is thinking "We have a loyal customer base. Let's not aggravate them with DRM."
Microsoft is thinking "Stupid PHBs buy our software no matter what. Let's load it up with DRM so the entertainment industry will stop using the technologically-superior Mac platform."
From whom would you buy?
Our company over here bought an Apple for testing purposes (an eMac). It has an Apple button-mouse (useless frelling mouse), Apple monitor (at least it has a big Apple on the front of it), Apple keyboard, Apple OSX (actually BSD's OSX, but whatever), etc. And yes, it's frelling expensive.
Please name the company you work for. I never want to buy any of its products.
You bought an eMac, a low-end model designed for education, and you want to judge the entire Mac platform based on it. That's like me judging Linux based on some kiddie's half-assed low-end Compaq box with Red Hat on it.
You are completely unfamiliar with how USB mice work; rather than plugging in a mouse you like, you grouse about the one you were issued because you were too stupid to order a different one.
You fail to understand that because Apple makes both the hardware and software, they can guarantee quality in their product line. If, say, Compaq were to start making Apple-compatible hardware, it would be of very poor quality. People would judge Mac OS X to be poor-quality software because of the poor-quality hardware on which it runs.
But I'm feeding an obvious troll already. Please go away.
Any laptop part will cost you an arm and a leg. My friend Joe had to replace a part in his IBM "ThinkPad," and they wanted him to pay $70 for a simple 3-inch ribbon cable. That's excluding shipping, Fred.
Tower cases, like the famous Macintosh G5, are much easier to service with industry standard parts.
So don't use iTunes.
Apple has never forced DRM on its users. If you use MP3s that you ripped from your own CDs or acquired by means of fair use, then you will be fine. Contrast this with Windows Media Player 9, which tags every MP3 with a unique identifier (UUID) and sends the UUID back to Microsoft.
There's also Linux, I suppose, but there are even fewer games for Linux than for Mac.
What about my freedom to write my own applications without requiring Apple to approve it?
Perhaps you've never heard of VersionTracker.
What about my freedom to use my own hardware, instead of being forcing to use Apple's mouse,
What, you mean like the Microsoft IntelliMouse that Apple sold me at the time of purchase?
Apple's memory,
Nobody buys Apple's memory. You go to Crucial.com and buy what you need.
Apple's monitor (with boat anchor attachment on the top),
Apple hasn't sold CRTs in over a year. Their LCDs are the best in the industry. If you disagree, you have the freedom to buy your system with no monitor and purchase one of your choice.
Apple's video card, etc.?
Apple doesn't make video cards. They certainly didn't make the NVidia card that shipped inside my computer.
Also, how can you say that Apple is a company that "respects your freedom" when the music you get off the ITMS is DRMed?
Because nobody's forcing you to get music from the iTunes Music Store.
iTunes lets you rip your music to MP3, the most common format there is. Additional plugins, also free, let you use Ogg Vorbis. Compare this to Windows Media Player, which charges additional fees to rip to MP3. Millions of Windows users have inadvertently ripped their files to DRM-laden "Windows Media Audio" simply because it was the default. The second they try to back up or legally and non-commercially share their music (i.e. with friends, not using KaZaA) they will be denied. That's not very Free to me.
...Apple becomes the only computer maker with its hands clean.
Think about it: most PC enthusiasts around here build their own computers. However, now they will be faced with DRM at the motherboard layer. No matter of software liberation, from Linux to FreeBSD, will be able to cleanse motherboards of this impurity. Apple, on the other hand, has never incorporated any form of DRM into their basic system. Sure, there's iTunes music store, but its DRM is limited to the application level. I boycott iTunes because I care about the Right of First Sale, for example.
I know that it hurts to pay an additional $2,000 for the convenience of a computer company that respects your Freedom, but trust me: once you go Mac, you don't go black, Jack!
The title of the section is horrifically incorrect. It should be "Music By Which to Code." Everyone knows that you can't end a sentence or a title with a preposition.
You obviously have no idea what the hell Exchange is and what it is designed to do.
I know enough about Exchange to know why it sucks, and why open source solutions are better.
Also, I find it ridiculous you make fun of the NAME of "Outlook" while juxtaposing it to "Mozilla". Please... I mean, I have never heard of anyone resorting to namecalling a piece of software in order to win an argument... It takes all kinds, I guess...
I prefer to use names of my own design when referring to inferior products.
Please give me your IP addy. Check this out: one, two, three. I can go on if you want...
Tell me the last time Mozilla was responsible for massive worm propagation.
So spake the wise Seth. Why? Please grace us with your obviously paramount knowledge of everything software related.
Access is a "relational database" in the barest sense of the word. It supports absolutely nothing beyond the basic SELECT, UPDATE, and INSERT statements. Everything else is done using inferior GUI tools.
And what, pray tell, is the Open Source alternative? Text files indexed through a bunch of perl scripts outputting LaTEX? Sure.
Have you ever heard of mySQL?
It appears to me that, frankly, you have no clue what Word is since you insist on comparing it to Latex.
Micro$oft Word is a tool for creating documents. LaTeX (not "Latex," you pervert) is a superior open source tool for creating documents.
Finally, please grow up and stop writing "Micro$oft". It is idiotic. Trust me on that.
I reserve the right to misspell any name I want to misspell.
Microsoft Outlook is the BEST mailer there is in a corporate environment. You might think that Mozilla mail or whatever is the Linux equivalent-of-the-day to Outlook is as good, but it is not.
...your choice, which is inferior, that is.
Having worked with Micro$oft Outhouse for 10 years, I can safely say that it is ugly, bloated, stupid, overpriced, and wholly unnecessary. Mozilla with an LDAP server runs rings about Micro$oft's closed-source ass.
People are not stupid, they use Outlook because it does what it says on the box.
Oh really? Outlook looks out? Onto what does it look out? A lake?
Hey Micro$oft! Onto which lake does Outlook?
You might have a bone to pick with Exchange but, frankly, the last versions are much more stable and integrate PERFECTLY with Active Directory.
There's a big surprise. A Micro$oft technology works only with other Micro$oft technologies. What happened to open source technologies like LDAP? Oh, sorry, you can use non-Micro$oft clients with those, so they don't count. Nice try, shill.
Outlook has been the main application that is receiving enhancements in the past two versions of Office (2k and XP), and it shows.
Bug fixes and patches are not "enhancements." I don't recall ever having to install "CRITICAL SECURITY UPDATES" for Mozilla because of some worm going around.
Having beta-tested the new Outlook 2k3 I am certain Outlook will remain the mailer of choice..
You can open ANY Office document, no matter when it was made, or what version of the software it was made with, now. The only incompatibility is with Access. That's it.
Access sucks. And no, you can't. One of my idiot co-workers made a document in Micro$oft Word 97. When I tried to load it on a liberated version of Micro$oft Word 2002, Micro$oft Word crashed. Guess you don't get what you pay for.
Which brings me to this: what are you talking about "breaking backward compatibility"? I am still using a DOS app (written in COBOL about fifteen years ago) every day at work on my Windows XP desktop. I have never seen Microsoft breaking anything on a large scale. When Windows 95 came out something like 95% of the apps still worked, and the rest 5% that did not were using undocumented API calls. As a matter of fact, I can install a copy of Word 6 on Windows XP and it will work, even though it's a 16-bit app written for Windows 3.11.
Blah, blah, blah, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. On my Linux boxen I can take ANY application written for ANY POSIX-compliant operating system and recompile it. I'm not even restricted to one architecture, like Micro$oft Word is. Honestly, LaTeX has been superior to that piece of closed-source crapware for 15 years.
DOS and COBOL? Please.
That's a very naive assessment of the Open Source community. The goal of Open Source has always been to create high-quality software and distribute it for Free As In Speech. Compare this to closed-source crapware like Micro$oft Outhouse, which is driven by marketing alone. Micro$oft creates new versions of their closed-source crapware every year, expects people to pay $300 to upgrade, and forces the upgrade by breaking backward compatibility.
Open-source file formats, on the other hand, never change. I can take a LaTeX file from 1989 and create a beautiful PostScript file using Free As In Speech software. Try doing that with Micro$oft "software."