But I suppose that if you don't find the whole notion of a guy coming to a "News for Nerds" Website and asking questions about what kind of wedding jewelry to buy absolutely over-the-top bizarre/hysterical, I guess there's little hope of you finding humor in subtler matters.
I assume by this comment that your WTB places a high value on the rings she gets out of the deal. If she is truly the right woman for you...she wouldn't care how good the ring was...because it's just a thing...it's not important...the commitment to each other is the important thing.
There were even a few "end of the world" type programs that connected the Internet to general decadence. God, according to Christian media, didn't approve of internet pr0n.
I missed this. Can you be more specific? What shows? And where do you live that the media is Christian? Are you a Canadian? Or are you referring to local shows/media?
I know some people who get upset if you call a book Sci-Fi.
Advise them -- lovingly, gently, nurturingly -- to get out more.
People live in SF; it's a common abbreviation for a major city in California. As somone has already pointed out, there is also a trade industry designation in publishing for "SF" which covers a range far wider than science fiction.
People read, write, and watch Sci-Fi. Some people even watch it on the "Sci-Fi Channel," go figure!
While we're at it, a "hacker" is a no-goodnick who does horrible things to the Internet and other computer networks, and a "cracker" is both a derogatory term for a White American Southerner or a thin salty biscuit commonly topped with cheese.
I realize that many here might wish that the above terms meant something different, but, happily, language is shaped by common usage, and not by oligarchical edict. Ain't that peachy?
A good percentage of the people who come to my site are on *some* revision of safari.
Hey, now *there's* a bellwether for you! Who needs Gallup Polls and sophisticated statistical sampling when an AC will share abstracts from his homepage's usage log with us, eh?
A point which is often forgotten as those knees jerk up so high they slam into the side of heads.
The XBOX is a great console, come into the game late, catching up on the number two machine in bits and rips, but so far in the dust of Number One console maker (and Evil Sith Master) Sony even a fan occasionally worries it won't go all DreamCast on us.
Nothing has so energized the staid console market -- and by extension, the whole gaming industry -- than the introduction of the XBOX and its deep-pocketed if often distracted Daddy.
So the deserving Carmack makes a bundle, Sony gets slapped around a bit, XBOX gets another Halo, the console industry rocks and rolls some more, and the PC faithful still get their shooter.
Dude, what is the problem here? If you don't like it, don't read it. Same goes for the stories on anime, Buffy, the War, Star Wars, Macs, some particularly exotic Linux distro, Windows, Music, and a dozen other topics. They're ALL done better other places, but I don't necessarily want to GO other places for this marginalia, I come HERE.I have a finite amount of hours in my day, and, unlike you I guess, don't feel obliged to read every single article that scrolls across the front page of SlashDot.
Now, I don't know a crankcase from a sparkplug, but I checked out the link, skimmed the article, and find myself slightly more informed about a topic that is meaningful to a LOT of like-minded people. I recommend you either do the same, or skip along to the next story. Your blood pressure will thank you, and so will everyone here who is trying to learn or contribute something.
Well, of course it does! The only thing peculiar here is that a weepy coming-of-age story about it makes it to the front page of SlashDot!
The bar is so much lower for Game reviews, as opposed to other consumer products, because the reviewers for the most part are poorly-paid and impressionable kids with even less experience (if this is possible) than music reviewers. Does anyone read the reviews of game software, especially those on Websites, and believe for a heartbeat there is some kind of Wisdom of The Ages being levied there? Can you imagine how they must have read before the adult edited them? Yipes!
These junkets, freebies, tsotchkes, payolas, etc etc yadda yadda all comprise the grease for the wheels for a whole caste of underpaid newbie journalists looking for real writing jobs. Consumers all know this... don't they?
Obiwan, if you really felt so emotionally scarred by the whole episode, what you should have done was stuck it out and become a Trusted and Uncorruptible Force for Game Reviewing Goodness.
Fourth, you will find that the more education a group of people are, the more likely they are to have tendebcy towards liberal views, this is true of many moderate republicans like myself. So in a profession that requires a college degree.
D00d, you want to provide a translation of that for the less-educated conservatives trying to follow along?
Oh, stop! Puh-leeze...! You can't really believe that? Not sure if we're going to be able to have a meaningful exchange here if that's your premise, but let's give it a go...
I think that what Limbaugh, Hannity, and the rest of the Know-Nothings really are about is hate . They fan it, they bathe in it
You, sir, illustrate the reason why there will never be a strong liberal counter to the Limbaugh and O'Reilly shows. You take the whole experience far, far too seriously. It's show biz, theatre, lipstick and mirrors! The hosts know it, and play it with the appropriate winks and nudges, and it's those very same winks and nudges which seem to upset their overly sensitive foils.
At the end of the day, the conservative talk show celebrities who are trying to influence public opinion are much more intellectually honest about what they are doing than the actor and musician celebrities (or NPR Assignment Editors) who attempt the same thing. But my opinion of the guy who votes some way because O'Reilly told him to is on par with my opinion of the guy who votes some way because his favorite actress or rock star told him to.
Doubt me? Listen to him sometime I just turned him - Limbaugh -- on. He was going on about his bad self being "A Way of Life" and how he was doing the show with half his brain tied behind his back to make it fair. It made me chuckle. Which part was I supposed to take seriously?
If you don't get the joke, I guess you're the butt of it....
Wow! Those are very interesting stats! I had absolutely no idea so few Americans favored unconditional freedom of choice when it came to abortion!! Only 39 percent? Jeepers...
...which makes the first stat, about how many people call themselves "conservative," quite consistent and logical.
I question the relevance of the last stat. "Equal Rights for Women?" Dude, it's 2004! Might as well use a question like "how many favor powdered wigs?" as a socio-political litmus test.
The majority Americans are socially liberal and economically moderate when polled. Just because the conservative echo chamber seems loud dosen't mean that it is.
"Socially liberal and economically moderate" would not put them out of lock-step with the "conservative" talk show hosts/entertainers who are in the front of the new media bus. (But I'd still like to see your source of that stat...)
My point here is that TV News is Show Business, and that Fox -- with whatever political party label you classify it -- is being more entertaining than their competitors by delivering the events of the day in a fashion that the majority of the people who are watching cable news want to see it presented.
It's all relative. The US is a nation of -- what?? -- 250 million? And the cable news numbers are in the under 10 million ballpark, so it is possible that the majority of people in the country are rabid Proust-reading liberals all getting their news downloaded into their Linux-powered Seikos as beamed directly from newsrooms in Paris and Zurich, but I don't think so...
Except for CNN and MSNBC mysteriously vanishing in favor of fox news
MSNBC is accomplishing that quite nicely on its own, thank you very much. And although the war has driven viewership of all three cable newsers up, the real losers have been the Old School "News By Appointment" telecasts on the broadcast nets. Check the ratings for the past three weeks. I mean, really, who wants to wait until the "Friends" re-runs are over to find out what is happening in Iraq?
News on TV -- Now, Today -- must be two things: Immediate, and Entertaining. If I want deep analyses and differing perspectives (and I do), I get them on the 'net. Twenty years ago I read the NY Post, Times, Daily News and my local Gannett paper every day. Now I read twice as much news from papers around the world, and I don't have to wash the newsprint off my hands afterwards. The broadcast outlets fail at providing those two criteria. Fox succeeds in spades, and their numbers are reflecting this.
The Fox News "phenomenon" is better understood not as a "right wing conspiracy" but a failure of one by the left wing that has been percolating for 30 years. It is, rather, the "mainstreaming" of the news. People "enjoy" seeing the news delivered by preenters who clearly share their perspective on the events they are reporting. This may not be good journalism, but it is turning out to be good television. Golly, who knew...?
They may not float your particular boats, but it does seem that a not insignificant majority of people in the US share views closer to those of O'Reilly and Hannity than of your average Ivy League University Latino Studies Profeessor. And Murdoch would be insane to ignore that fact. The broadcast news outlets have had their collective heads in the sand on this topic for years, and are now imperiled.
To all you nay-sayers out there: I want you to name one application out there that does not have a full-featured alternative in Linux
MS Outlook.
...and for many offices, that's the deal-breaker right there. Sure, Evolution approximates it's look, and offers some of the features, but a clone it ain't.
This does not mean that individuals cannot get by with less (I was an Outlook user for years before I made the switch to Linux), but make no mistake that it is less.
Look, there is an ancient Engineering statement that many of you must have heard:
"Inexpensive, Fast, Good -- You May Choose Two."
With OSS, the first is a condition, at its most extreme scale (Free!). It follows then, that the vast majority of the offerings will either be, err, incomplete, or evolving strongly over time (e.g., OO, KDE, Gnome).
I found the tone of the article arrogant to the extreme. People contribute code to the movement because they are enthusiasts; if someone wants to write "yet another MP3 player," who's to say he can't? You want him to "focus on" an application about which he has less enthusiasm? Fine; we call that "work," so toss him some coin.
My favorite line from the article: "fifteen minutes of fame on 'Freshmeat.'" Whoaa! Now there's an incentive, huh?
(as an aside, do you find those "naysayers" whom you chide take you MORE or LESS seriously when you substitute those dollar signs for 'esses' everywhere? just curious...)
There are a number of billing services (e.g., CableData) in the US who routinely prepare various flavors of program schedule downloads and attendant metadata for the purpose of populating cable TV on-screen displays, billing systems, etc. The DBS providers (DirecTV et.al.) do their own collation. I gotta think this is a great opportunity for one of these shops to expand subscriber base substantially without adding much work.
These companies have already whipped the toughest part -- establishing a regular system wherein the networks provide you with the info in a form you can manipulate -- so the rest should be gravy.
Ohhh, because it's dreadful! There's no comparison!!
Outlook and MS Money had been the only programs that made me boot up into my Windows partition, and I finally kicked Outlook recently through sheer force of will and fusing my PDA to my fingers. (Evolution, like GNUcash, _looks_ like its MS counterpart, but the resemblance ends at surface level.)
If this puppy can help me kick out of MS Money, I'm a real happy camper.
Nah. Now, The Sega Channel -- THAT was Early!
on
Games on Demand
·
· Score: 1
Anyone else remember The Sega Channel? Satellite delivered games to the cable headend, and then on-demand through the coax to the home. Circa 8-9 years ago. Never got very far (obviously).
...and as for the average schmoe needing that jewelcase before he plinks down his bling for a game, it should be noted that Sony is having mad success with its EQ download-only expansion. Of course, that's EQ, so the normal rules of games, marketing, economics, space, and time may not necessarily apply...
I resent having demographic information pryed from me, personal information demanded of me, my email address handed out to lord knows who, having to remember yet another password and cope with yet another web designers maddening form verification script, all in exchange for the rare priviledge of reading the news.
Then why don't you drop some change at the news stand and buy yourself a dead-tree copy, Privacy-Boy?
Do you not think that the NYT deserves some form of compensation for publishing a story that drives so much discussion (and pageviews) on this site and elsewhere?
What do you do for a living, by the way? Or is it just that you're sixteen years old, and your perception of the world is that it revolves around you? (If so, my apologies; real life will straighten you out better than I ever could soon enough...)
Slashdot Mirror
People Are Stupid
So, um, B3ryllium, is that how come you have, like, a Number in your name, because you're not human?
What's the weather like on Alpha Centauri, B-3?
(BTW, I'm betting you ARE human, but the people you work with aren't so sure...)
Spare us your humor-impaired attitude, AC!
But I suppose that if you don't find the whole notion of a guy coming to a "News for Nerds" Website and asking questions about what kind of wedding jewelry to buy absolutely over-the-top bizarre/hysterical, I guess there's little hope of you finding humor in subtler matters.
I assume by this comment that your WTB places a high value on the rings she gets out of the deal. If she is truly the right woman for you...she wouldn't care how good the ring was...because it's just a thing...it's not important...the commitment to each other is the important thing.
Alternatively, she could be a real Babe...
Actually, why the hell would you even bring a chicken on your honeymoon???
Hey, don't knock it, City-Boy!
There were even a few "end of the world" type programs that connected the Internet to general decadence. God, according to Christian media, didn't approve of internet pr0n.
I missed this. Can you be more specific? What shows? And where do you live that the media is Christian? Are you a Canadian? Or are you referring to local shows/media?
I know some people who get upset if you call a book Sci-Fi.
Advise them -- lovingly, gently, nurturingly -- to get out more.
People live in SF; it's a common abbreviation for a major city in California. As somone has already pointed out, there is also a trade industry designation in publishing for "SF" which covers a range far wider than science fiction.
People read, write, and watch Sci-Fi. Some people even watch it on the "Sci-Fi Channel," go figure!
While we're at it, a "hacker" is a no-goodnick who does horrible things to the Internet and other computer networks, and a "cracker" is both a derogatory term for a White American Southerner or a thin salty biscuit commonly topped with cheese.
I realize that many here might wish that the above terms meant something different, but, happily, language is shaped by common usage, and not by oligarchical edict. Ain't that peachy?
Artists will have to make a living by doing performing (which is hard work, but hey, look at what the rest of us are doing).
So you won't buy my book, but you'll pay to come over here and watch me *write* it?
Dude, you ARE a strange one. But hey, a living's a living, right?
Show starts at 3AM Eastern. See ya then! (Bring your own popcorn.)
A good percentage of the people who come to my site are on *some* revision of safari.
Hey, now *there's* a bellwether for you! Who needs Gallup Polls and sophisticated statistical sampling when an AC will share abstracts from his homepage's usage log with us, eh?
A point which is often forgotten as those knees jerk up so high they slam into the side of heads.
The XBOX is a great console, come into the game late, catching up on the number two machine in bits and rips, but so far in the dust of Number One console maker (and Evil Sith Master) Sony even a fan occasionally worries it won't go all DreamCast on us.
Nothing has so energized the staid console market -- and by extension, the whole gaming industry -- than the introduction of the XBOX and its deep-pocketed if often distracted Daddy.
So the deserving Carmack makes a bundle, Sony gets slapped around a bit, XBOX gets another Halo, the console industry rocks and rolls some more, and the PC faithful still get their shooter.
What's not to like?
Go someplace else if you want to talk about cars.
No. Make me.
Dude, what is the problem here? If you don't like it, don't read it. Same goes for the stories on anime, Buffy, the War, Star Wars, Macs, some particularly exotic Linux distro, Windows, Music, and a dozen other topics. They're ALL done better other places, but I don't necessarily want to GO other places for this marginalia, I come HERE.I have a finite amount of hours in my day, and, unlike you I guess, don't feel obliged to read every single article that scrolls across the front page of SlashDot.
Now, I don't know a crankcase from a sparkplug, but I checked out the link, skimmed the article, and find myself slightly more informed about a topic that is meaningful to a LOT of like-minded people. I recommend you either do the same, or skip along to the next story. Your blood pressure will thank you, and so will everyone here who is trying to learn or contribute something.
This thing happens all the time
Well, of course it does! The only thing peculiar here is that a weepy coming-of-age story about it makes it to the front page of SlashDot!
The bar is so much lower for Game reviews, as opposed to other consumer products, because the reviewers for the most part are poorly-paid and impressionable kids with even less experience (if this is possible) than music reviewers. Does anyone read the reviews of game software, especially those on Websites, and believe for a heartbeat there is some kind of Wisdom of The Ages being levied there? Can you imagine how they must have read before the adult edited them? Yipes!
These junkets, freebies, tsotchkes, payolas, etc etc yadda yadda all comprise the grease for the wheels for a whole caste of underpaid newbie journalists looking for real writing jobs. Consumers all know this... don't they?
Obiwan, if you really felt so emotionally scarred by the whole episode, what you should have done was stuck it out and become a Trusted and Uncorruptible Force for Game Reviewing Goodness.
You've gone and let the Dark Side win, Bunky!
Fourth, you will find that the more education a group of people are, the more likely they are to have tendebcy towards liberal views, this is true of many moderate republicans like myself. So in a profession that requires a college degree.
D00d, you want to provide a translation of that for the less-educated conservatives trying to follow along?
Oh, stop! Puh-leeze...! You can't really believe that? Not sure if we're going to be able to have a meaningful exchange here if that's your premise, but let's give it a go...
I think that what Limbaugh, Hannity, and the rest of the Know-Nothings really are about is hate . They fan it, they bathe in it
You, sir, illustrate the reason why there will never be a strong liberal counter to the Limbaugh and O'Reilly shows. You take the whole experience far, far too seriously. It's show biz, theatre, lipstick and mirrors! The hosts know it, and play it with the appropriate winks and nudges, and it's those very same winks and nudges which seem to upset their overly sensitive foils.
At the end of the day, the conservative talk show celebrities who are trying to influence public opinion are much more intellectually honest about what they are doing than the actor and musician celebrities (or NPR Assignment Editors) who attempt the same thing. But my opinion of the guy who votes some way because O'Reilly told him to is on par with my opinion of the guy who votes some way because his favorite actress or rock star told him to.
Doubt me? Listen to him sometime
I just turned him - Limbaugh -- on. He was going on about his bad self being "A Way of Life" and how he was doing the show with half his brain tied behind his back to make it fair. It made me chuckle. Which part was I supposed to take seriously?
If you don't get the joke, I guess you're the butt of it....
I question the relevance of the last stat. "Equal Rights for Women?" Dude, it's 2004! Might as well use a question like "how many favor powdered wigs?" as a socio-political litmus test.
O'Reilly... Sponge Bob
I always get these two mixed up... who is the one who is always crying out "I HAVE ISSUES...?"
The majority Americans are socially liberal and economically moderate when polled. Just because the conservative echo chamber seems loud dosen't mean that it is.
"Socially liberal and economically moderate" would not put them out of lock-step with the "conservative" talk show hosts/entertainers who are in the front of the new media bus. (But I'd still like to see your source of that stat...)
My point here is that TV News is Show Business, and that Fox -- with whatever political party label you classify it -- is being more entertaining than their competitors by delivering the events of the day in a fashion that the majority of the people who are watching cable news want to see it presented.
It's all relative. The US is a nation of -- what?? -- 250 million? And the cable news numbers are in the under 10 million ballpark, so it is possible that the majority of people in the country are rabid Proust-reading liberals all getting their news downloaded into their Linux-powered Seikos as beamed directly from newsrooms in Paris and Zurich, but I don't think so...
Except for CNN and MSNBC mysteriously vanishing in favor of fox news
MSNBC is accomplishing that quite nicely on its own, thank you very much. And although the war has driven viewership of all three cable newsers up, the real losers have been the Old School "News By Appointment" telecasts on the broadcast nets. Check the ratings for the past three weeks. I mean, really, who wants to wait until the "Friends" re-runs are over to find out what is happening in Iraq?
News on TV -- Now, Today -- must be two things: Immediate, and Entertaining. If I want deep analyses and differing perspectives (and I do), I get them on the 'net. Twenty years ago I read the NY Post, Times, Daily News and my local Gannett paper every day. Now I read twice as much news from papers around the world, and I don't have to wash the newsprint off my hands afterwards. The broadcast outlets fail at providing those two criteria. Fox succeeds in spades, and their numbers are reflecting this.
The Fox News "phenomenon" is better understood not as a "right wing conspiracy" but a failure of one by the left wing that has been percolating for 30 years. It is, rather, the "mainstreaming" of the news. People "enjoy" seeing the news delivered by preenters who clearly share their perspective on the events they are reporting. This may not be good journalism, but it is turning out to be good television. Golly, who knew...?
They may not float your particular boats, but it does seem that a not insignificant majority of people in the US share views closer to those of O'Reilly and Hannity than of your average Ivy League University Latino Studies Profeessor. And Murdoch would be insane to ignore that fact. The broadcast news outlets have had their collective heads in the sand on this topic for years, and are now imperiled.
Huh?
Mail Client?
Is that all you think MS Outlook is? Sure you're not confusing it with Outlook Express??
The Mail Client is the least among Outlook's features.
Do some more research and get back to us, okay?
MS Outlook.
...and for many offices, that's the deal-breaker right there. Sure, Evolution approximates it's look, and offers some of the features, but a clone it ain't.
This does not mean that individuals cannot get by with less (I was an Outlook user for years before I made the switch to Linux), but make no mistake that it is less.
Look, there is an ancient Engineering statement that many of you must have heard:
With OSS, the first is a condition, at its most extreme scale (Free!). It follows then, that the vast majority of the offerings will either be, err, incomplete, or evolving strongly over time (e.g., OO, KDE, Gnome).
I found the tone of the article arrogant to the extreme. People contribute code to the movement because they are enthusiasts; if someone wants to write "yet another MP3 player," who's to say he can't? You want him to "focus on" an application about which he has less enthusiasm? Fine; we call that "work," so toss him some coin.
My favorite line from the article: "fifteen minutes of fame on 'Freshmeat.'" Whoaa! Now there's an incentive, huh?
(as an aside, do you find those "naysayers" whom you chide take you MORE or LESS seriously when you substitute those dollar signs for 'esses' everywhere? just curious...)
There are a number of billing services (e.g., CableData) in the US who routinely prepare various flavors of program schedule downloads and attendant metadata for the purpose of populating cable TV on-screen displays, billing systems, etc. The DBS providers (DirecTV et.al.) do their own collation. I gotta think this is a great opportunity for one of these shops to expand subscriber base substantially without adding much work.
These companies have already whipped the toughest part -- establishing a regular system wherein the networks provide you with the info in a form you can manipulate -- so the rest should be gravy.
Ohhh, because it's dreadful! There's no comparison!!
Outlook and MS Money had been the only programs that made me boot up into my Windows partition, and I finally kicked Outlook recently through sheer force of will and fusing my PDA to my fingers. (Evolution, like GNUcash, _looks_ like its MS counterpart, but the resemblance ends at surface level.)
If this puppy can help me kick out of MS Money, I'm a real happy camper.
Cut the Cowboy some slack. He ain't used to the dayshift.
I resent having demographic information pryed from me, personal information demanded of me, my email address handed out to lord knows who, having to remember yet another password and cope with yet another web designers maddening form verification script, all in exchange for the rare priviledge of reading the news.
Then why don't you drop some change at the news stand and buy yourself a dead-tree copy, Privacy-Boy?
Do you not think that the NYT deserves some form of compensation for publishing a story that drives so much discussion (and pageviews) on this site and elsewhere?
What do you do for a living, by the way? Or is it just that you're sixteen years old, and your perception of the world is that it revolves around you? (If so, my apologies; real life will straighten you out better than I ever could soon enough...)
C'mon! Remember Dick Tracy? The ORIGINAL wristwatch (vid)phones?? Magnetic Hovercars?? Sam Ketcham?
...
NO?!?
How 'bout the later-model Beatty/Pacino/Madonna movie, does THAT ring any bells?
ZD even led with a Tracy reference when it reported this same story
Jeez, yet another reason for SlashDot to institute age filters; I guess it would be pointless for me to make a joke about "Opening Channel 'D'"