Ummm... define "failed". I didn't write the article; personally I'd call it "Why Digg sucks":-)
But Digg certainly was hyped as some sort of "Slashdot: The Next Generation", fixing its flaws and demonstrating the power of the hive mind/community efforts/blah blah....
And it's all bollocks. The article basically explains the reality of the situation which you can contrast with the shining vision above; hence when we compare it against the hype, of what Digg was supposed to be, it's failed.
I don't know if Digg was *ever* as good as it was hyped up to be; it wasn't that great when I started using it around a year ago, and it seemed to have gone further down the tubes when I stopped towards the end of 2006.
The ugly reality of Digg today is a groupthinking, self-centered and navel-gazing, novelty-seeking, hype-promoting, popularity contest, dissent-attacking, random-noisish mishmash. The moderation is totally useless for its intended purpose (you think that Slashdotters are bad for modding down things they disagree with, you haven't seen Digg). The majority of the comments are not remotely insightful.
I could go on about it (and I did anyway!), but the article does a better job of explaining the problems than I would, and there's no point in my paraphrasing it.
The above goes for the same with: construction, accountants, lawyers, Indian chiefs, etc...
How about motorcycle cops and sailors? Very funny, but was there ever an accountant or a lawyer in the Village People though?;-)
Speaking as someone who grew annoyed with Slashdot's flaws and stopped using it for quite a while, Digg made me appreciate it a whole lot more. The amount of "noise" in the stories (i.e. what GP is complaining about here) is orders of magnitudes higher than on Slashdot, the groupthink is an order of magnitude worse, the comments an order of magnitude more vapid, and... oh, sod it, just read this.
How old is your "old" computer? I tried booting Ubuntu on my old P1-233 and it didn't work. Turned out you need at least a Pentium II to run it; which, to be fair, is still a pretty ancient machine by today's standards.
It's an artificial distinction IMHO. The question is where you draw the line, but it's all interconnected, unless by "their environment" you mean just their surroundings, which is not what Tickletaint was discussing.
Oh, and the "hippie" stereotyping isn't useful here; it never was. "Hippies" are just as likely to want to practice free love and smoke pot all day, and conversely not all people concerned about "the" environment are "hippies".
Let's not forget The Pirate Bay, people. They've had this up since 03:00 UTC. I told The Pirate Bay that there was no piracy involved, it was perfectly legal to copy Ubuntu discs and pass them around.
They got all stroppy and took it down immediately.
I'm pointing out that you don't have to be a hippie to regret the social costs of automobile use over more "sustainable" modes of transportation. I didn't say you weren't. But you try to have your cake and eat it by starting off with
Fuck the environment So you don't give a toss about the environment? But then you go on to say...
I just want livable streets, a shorter commute, and to breathe clean air instead of carcinogenic particulate matter. Oh, hang on, you do. You're just so damn paranoid about being labelled a hippie that you have to pretend that you don't. What are you, twelve years old or something?!
You miserable little shitstain. Dude, it's too late. We know you're only talking like a punk to cover up the fact that you're a hippie. Come out of the kaftan closet now, maaaaan....:-P
You guys might take the piss out of Bill Gates, but MS's reputation as the #1 Big Spender gets him respect from the ladies.
The minute he walks in the joint, they can see he is a man of distinction, a *real* big spender. Some even claim that he's so good looking(!) and so refined that they'd like to let him know what's going on in their mind.
And let me tell you, these girls are fussy; they don't pop their cork for every guy they see.
Latex, the writer offer(s|ed) cash for bugs found Latex is neither a word processor, nor a text editor; it's software that typesets files you've already created (presumably using another text editor).
Re:How about the route to Canada and Continental U
on
The World's Longest Tunnel
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Nah, I'm no hippie. Fuck the environment; I just want livable streets, a shorter commute, and to breathe clean air instead of carcinogenic particulate matter So in other words, you do care about the environment, you're just too gutless to stand up and admit it for fear of being labelled a "hippie". Either that or you just missed the irony altogether.
Most pointless article ever. Why the fuck do I care about people inflating their web traffic?
If you don't give stores your phone number, they may inflate their customer count. Give it a break; you had a valid point first time round, second time is excusable, third similar post from the same person (AC or not, it obviously is) just smacks of trying to get attention.
I knew that their customer support sucked when they put me on hold and I got a Sex Pistols tune:-
"Lie lie lie lie liar you lie lie lie lie lie
Tell me why tell me why why d'you have to lie
Should've realised that you should've
Told the truth should've realised you know what
I'll do
You're in suspension...
You're a liar!"
I mean, WTF, I've only been peripherally involved with audio work, but that's just common sense. But sometimes, if you listen to audiophiles, you'll hear totally retarded things like how some brand of CD-Rs will provide clearer-sounding recordings. Audiophiles are admittedly full of pseudo-scientific crap on occasion. However, there *are* issues with making copies of audio CDs. (Disclaimer: I am not an expert on this stuff). These include the fact that due to the low-level nature of error-checking and inaccessibility of audio data at the lowest level on most CD drives (IIRC), it's not normally possible to make a literal, exact bit-for-bit copy of an audio CD. AFAIK, the player may even transparently "correct" (i.e. interpolate) errors at a lower level than the computer ever gets to see the data at.
This isn't an issue with most computer data (ISO 9660) CDs, as we're normally only concerned with bit-for-bit copies of the files, not the low-level structure of the CD itself.
Also, I've heard that in CDs written at high speed (e.g. 48x... remember that's 48 times faster than ordinary audio CDs are read), the edges of the pits and lands are less clearly defined because the laser is effectively having to turn on/off much faster. Apparently, this results in some players having more trouble reading them and (presumably) "fixing" the errors, degrading the audio quality. I remember reading about this somewhere, but the person writing it wasn't (IIRC) an audiophile, and it was in a computer magazine, where the person's friend noticed that the audio quality on the copied CD just wasn't as good.
This says nothing about the story about the good/poor quality CD-Rs per se; that might be bollocks. But be aware that audio CDs have issues that mean you can't just imply "it's digital, it either works or it doesn't".
Ah, if you RTFA, you should know this: "Late last week, some bee-keepers claimed that the phenomenon - which started in the US, then spread to continental Europe - was beginning to hit Britain as well."
Sorta blows your theory out of the water, I think. No it doesn't. Mobile phones have been popular in Britain for a long time; if it really was just down to mobile phones in general, this wouldn't explain the sudden jump in numbers.
It might be suggested that more recent adoption of 3G technologies had something to do with this. However, AFAIK 3G penetration is greater in the UK than in the US, so if that were the cause we'd more likely be "ahead" of you with the bee problem, not behind.
That's right! Despite the fact that people in the Western world are living longer and healthier lives than ever before, those "bastard" mobiles are still perceived as a threat.
I'd think bees have killed far more people than mobile phones ever have. That as may be, it's only in the past ten or so years that mobile phones achieved real mass-market popularity; if the effects are long-term as expected, they're not likely to have shown up in significant numbers yet.
"In the real world, bosses are known to suffer from a long list of social pathologies: naked aggression, credit hogging, micromanaging, bullying, you name it. " Ballmer didn't really throw those chairs himself, he just took the credit for it.
No. Life's fundamental purposes is to spread everywhere and self-perpetuate. Procreation and evolution are merely tactics to achieve that. No. In the absence of evidence that life as we know it is the creation of a higher power (for whatever reason), life itself has no inherent "purpose" outside the inherently biased viewpoint that some people impose upon it. Period.
It just so happens that objects that are good at reproducing and enjoy reproducing are more likely to produce objects that survive and enjoy reproducing, and so on.... you can't talk about "purpose" unless something outside the system set the whole thing in motion. And we are very much a *part* of the system.
When this thought occurred to me, I *was* thinking of foreign governments; particularly during the cold war era. Not to mention the fact that some of the probes out there were launched quite a long time ago and won't have modern standards of "security".
Absolutely - Commodore, Atari and the like really needed to keep building new stuff instead of marginally improving on what came before. To be fair, the 68000-based original Amiga technology (with minor enhancements) was still way ahead of the competition for a long time, until the late 80s at least. That says more about the strength of the original tech than it does about Commodore's investment. To retain that position, they should have had the true "next generation" machines out the door far earlier than they did. Ah well, who cares, it's all long past anyway...
The re-use of the same case from the STFM just made it painfully obvious. Actually, I kind of liked the "grey-keyed, rebadged ST" case of the Falcon; but then I always preferred the appearance of the ST to the Amiga. Whether this was a good move from the point-of-view of public perception is debatable, but I really doubt it would have succeeded either way.
They brought additional engineers into the projects By contrast, on buying Atari, Tramiel supposedly fired all the engineers. I read elsewhere that they had a SID-beating sound chip lined up for the 8-bit computers... it was shelved because the people who knew how it worked were all gone. Sad...
(Would've been better than the ST's off-the-shelf sound chip as well).
Commodore did actually have a fab that could make the chips for the Amiga. Atari always seems under-resourced to me. They abandoned the Falcon shortly after it came out to concentrate on the Jaguar, and the Lynx never got the breaks it deserved. It didn't help that they seemed to spread themselves to thin and lack focus (a habit going back to the Warner days). So you may be right that it's fortunate they didn't get their hands on the Amiga.
And in fact, the Amiga did ok under Commodore for awhile. Yep; particularly in Europe. Even the ST did well here for a while, until the Amigas came down in price. The ST was also very popular with musicians well into the 90s.
in fact, there was a project in 1993 indended to deliver a PCI-based successor to the Amiga graphics chips... it even had a real GPU (actually based on the PA-RISC processor ISA) and 3D engine. This was at least potentially something that would have sold in the PC market as well as being sold in Amiga computers. It's interesting to speculate on where this would have taken Commodore and the Amiga itself, had they survived. Would it have given it new life or would it have eventually steered the Amiga technology towards the amorphous PC black hole? Who knows...
Slashdot Mirror
But Digg certainly was hyped as some sort of "Slashdot: The Next Generation", fixing its flaws and demonstrating the power of the hive mind/community efforts/blah blah....
And it's all bollocks. The article basically explains the reality of the situation which you can contrast with the shining vision above; hence when we compare it against the hype, of what Digg was supposed to be, it's failed.
I don't know if Digg was *ever* as good as it was hyped up to be; it wasn't that great when I started using it around a year ago, and it seemed to have gone further down the tubes when I stopped towards the end of 2006.
The ugly reality of Digg today is a groupthinking, self-centered and navel-gazing, novelty-seeking, hype-promoting, popularity contest, dissent-attacking, random-noisish mishmash. The moderation is totally useless for its intended purpose (you think that Slashdotters are bad for modding down things they disagree with, you haven't seen Digg). The majority of the comments are not remotely insightful.
I could go on about it (and I did anyway!), but the article does a better job of explaining the problems than I would, and there's no point in my paraphrasing it.
Yeah; I should have read the GGP more closely, sorry.
You weren't being serious, were you?
Speaking as someone who grew annoyed with Slashdot's flaws and stopped using it for quite a while, Digg made me appreciate it a whole lot more. The amount of "noise" in the stories (i.e. what GP is complaining about here) is orders of magnitudes higher than on Slashdot, the groupthink is an order of magnitude worse, the comments an order of magnitude more vapid, and... oh, sod it, just read this.
How old is your "old" computer? I tried booting Ubuntu on my old P1-233 and it didn't work. Turned out you need at least a Pentium II to run it; which, to be fair, is still a pretty ancient machine by today's standards.
It's an artificial distinction IMHO. The question is where you draw the line, but it's all interconnected, unless by "their environment" you mean just their surroundings, which is not what Tickletaint was discussing.
Oh, and the "hippie" stereotyping isn't useful here; it never was. "Hippies" are just as likely to want to practice free love and smoke pot all day, and conversely not all people concerned about "the" environment are "hippies".
They got all stroppy and took it down immediately.
You guys might take the piss out of Bill Gates, but MS's reputation as the #1 Big Spender gets him respect from the ladies.
The minute he walks in the joint, they can see he is a man of distinction, a *real* big spender. Some even claim that he's so good looking(!) and so refined that they'd like to let him know what's going on in their mind.
And let me tell you, these girls are fussy; they don't pop their cork for every guy they see.
I knew that their customer support sucked when they put me on hold and I got a Sex Pistols tune:-
"Lie lie lie lie liar you lie lie lie lie lie
Tell me why tell me why why d'you have to lie
Should've realised that you should've
Told the truth should've realised you know what
I'll do
You're in suspension...
You're a liar!"
This isn't an issue with most computer data (ISO 9660) CDs, as we're normally only concerned with bit-for-bit copies of the files, not the low-level structure of the CD itself.
Also, I've heard that in CDs written at high speed (e.g. 48x... remember that's 48 times faster than ordinary audio CDs are read), the edges of the pits and lands are less clearly defined because the laser is effectively having to turn on/off much faster. Apparently, this results in some players having more trouble reading them and (presumably) "fixing" the errors, degrading the audio quality. I remember reading about this somewhere, but the person writing it wasn't (IIRC) an audiophile, and it was in a computer magazine, where the person's friend noticed that the audio quality on the copied CD just wasn't as good.
This says nothing about the story about the good/poor quality CD-Rs per se; that might be bollocks. But be aware that audio CDs have issues that mean you can't just imply "it's digital, it either works or it doesn't".
Jesus... you are aware that you come across like an angry, bedroom-dwelling, wish-fulfilment fantasising nerd, right?
It might be suggested that more recent adoption of 3G technologies had something to do with this. However, AFAIK 3G penetration is greater in the UK than in the US, so if that were the cause we'd more likely be "ahead" of you with the bee problem, not behind.
It just so happens that objects that are good at reproducing and enjoy reproducing are more likely to produce objects that survive and enjoy reproducing, and so on.... you can't talk about "purpose" unless something outside the system set the whole thing in motion. And we are very much a *part* of the system.
When this thought occurred to me, I *was* thinking of foreign governments; particularly during the cold war era. Not to mention the fact that some of the probes out there were launched quite a long time ago and won't have modern standards of "security".
...the whole class being kept behind at school until they found the culprit.
Yes, you were joking; but I've said this before. What's to stop hostile parties from hacking, DOSsing or simply hijacking your average space probe?
(Would've been better than the ST's off-the-shelf sound chip as well). Commodore did actually have a fab that could make the chips for the Amiga. Atari always seems under-resourced to me. They abandoned the Falcon shortly after it came out to concentrate on the Jaguar, and the Lynx never got the breaks it deserved. It didn't help that they seemed to spread themselves to thin and lack focus (a habit going back to the Warner days). So you may be right that it's fortunate they didn't get their hands on the Amiga. And in fact, the Amiga did ok under Commodore for awhile. Yep; particularly in Europe. Even the ST did well here for a while, until the Amigas came down in price. The ST was also very popular with musicians well into the 90s. in fact, there was a project in 1993 indended to deliver a PCI-based successor to the Amiga graphics chips... it even had a real GPU (actually based on the PA-RISC processor ISA) and 3D engine. This was at least potentially something that would have sold in the PC market as well as being sold in Amiga computers. It's interesting to speculate on where this would have taken Commodore and the Amiga itself, had they survived. Would it have given it new life or would it have eventually steered the Amiga technology towards the amorphous PC black hole? Who knows...