If Vista required a DX10 vid card for the new UI, I'd be looking at the Vista Basic theme instead of Aero Glass right now, since the GeForce Go 7400 in this Vaio is only a DX9 part. Even Vista beta 2 ran the new UI well on relatively low-end hardware; the first machine I installed it on was a Sempron 2800 w/512Mb and a Radeon 9700.
I realize that for many users a Sempron 2800 is a powerful machine compared to the PIII they've got, but, look... hardware ages. Apple is likely to drop support for G3 machines in Leopard, just as they've dropped the PPC601 and the M68k before it. Does that make Apple suck, because they require newer kit to run the latest features? Hardly. I really think arguing the hardware requirements of Vista is a null point.
I do think it's a load of shit that you have to shell out $500 just to get the OS to run your "certified" driver. I also think Microsoft should start following Apples example as far as opening source code is concerned, though even Apple isn't sharing everything; nor will they, since one of the big selling points of Apple hardware is the ability to run OS X.
Ubuntu installs very few of those by default. You have to use Synaptic to install most development tools, which is about as difficult as installing Cygwin to get the same tools.
I've been using the "Pre-RC1" build since the invites went out last week. I'm typing this post on a Vaio VGN-SZ220/B which is running Vista. The build is immensely improved since beta 2; performance and compatibility are leaps ahead of B2, the taskbar actually works, bundled drivers and DX10 are usable out of the box for playing WoW and HL2. So... nicer looking than XP, better out of box compatibility, significant UI improvements, even a better (flatter) filesystem layout. Web browser, mail, media, simple word processing, simple games, calendaring, etc. etc. are included. Except for the office applications, Vista (as shipped in sort-of-almost-RC1) does everything that Ubuntu does with the default install, and is coming closer to OS X. Why is it that if Microsoft ships anything but a bare OS, they're ridiculed for shipping bloatware, while Apple and every Linux distro on the planet can get away with bundling out the wazoo?
I'm far from a MS fanboy, as the mini and Slackware boxes on my desk attest to, but if they make a significant improvement to their OS, I think the last thing they deserve is ridicule and derision. I also think statements like "I for one don't plan on giving Microsoft more money for their software until they release an OS that is totally useful and original." are just a reflection of the blind anti-MS zealotry that's too common here. You've just asked for a software panacea, and one that uses none of the metaphors and conventions that make desktop operating systems accessible to average users. Why not just ask them to prove the existence of God while you're at it? Sorry about the rant, but, Jesus, sometimes this place is like Michael Moore making a film about Bill Gates.
Did you read the descriptions of their "new" technology?
MaxFPS(TM) Technology offloads network processing to Killer which frees your CPU to focus on what you need it to - THE GAME!!! Killer's superior performance allows you to experience more Frames Per Second even on max'd out PCs with top of line graphics cards and other peripherals.
So... they must have invented TCP offload around the same time Al Gore was inventing the Intarweb?
That's why I said 'perceived'. The MPAA is still intent on pushing DRM on us, though, so to them any new technology which offers yet another avenue of restriction will seem useful.
The good part is that their stance doesn't appear to be tenable in the long term; the bad part is that for the short term they can afford to buy all the legislation they need to hang on as long as possible.
...and this sort of thing isn't nearly as commonplace as you seem to imply. Though I was an infantryman in Iraq, my best friend was an interrogator for our battalions S-2 (intelligence) section. Whenever we took prisoners in to S-2, I'd stand in with him during the interrogation; the implied threat of physical violence from me (one of the guys who'd taken the prisoner in the first place, which means he'd already been manhandled, and none too gently, by us) usually enhanced the subjects willingness to talk. The implied threat. I only saw one instance of a prisoner being struck by an American, and that was a piece of shit who had killed three of our men in an IED attack. I'll admit I punched the fucker, too.
If you want to see prisoner abuse, take a look at the Iraqi governments prisoners. They routinely have prisoners who "commit suicide" or were killed "trying to escape". The Iraqi police are particularly bad - I have some pictures of a group of prisoners that were tortured by the IPs. Not interrogated, just tortured. No question asking, just rubber hoses and AK-47s. Compared to a back laid open beatings and AK rounds through the meat of the legs, a few gut punches and a black eye looks pretty damn good. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the world isn't a black-and-white moral landscape. It's all shades of gray, and sometimes being the lesser of two evils is what makes you the good guy. This "not as bad as Hussein" angle is not just that; it's the plain truth. I envy the apparent strength of your moral convictions, but I pity you for the way you've allowed them to blind you.
You are correct, there are relatively few companies who can afford to drop $40k per CPU on Oracle licenses. Of course, if you're buying Oracle Enterprise you'll also most likely be running the database on some pretty powerful, clustered, SMP machines, which just drives the costs up even higher. And you'd be retarded to buy that many Oracle licenses with no support contract, and the Gold contract is the minimum for getting any useful support from Oracle (last time I bought licenses, anyway). So you're looking at a real cost of somewhere close to $45k per license with hardware and support, assuming you're buying some fairly generic hardware. Bump that up to around $50k per license if you decide you have to run on a Sun T1 or something equally exotic.
Of course, once you've spent this money, you never have to spend it again. Because at $40k/license you are buying perpetual EE licenses. If you plan to run on Oracle for a long time, that's not really a tough pill to swallow. Oracle also sells 2- and 4-year licenses if you don't want to make such a big commitment and they'll even give you some pretty steep discounts to get your initial business. But that recurring cost hurts, and makes it harder to be able to afford to upgrade to a perpetual license.
I think the perpetual licenses are priced so high because Oracle doesn't want you to buy them. They make a lot more money over time on recurring license sales than they do just selling you something once. I'm sure Oracle would *love* to sell only subscription-style licenses because of the disincentive to switch to another RDBMS, but they need to offer perpetual licenses to huge clients like financial institutions and governments. These are the guys that can afford them, and for those enormous clients Oracle is willing to sacrifice the steady flow of income from the DB software for the steady flow of income from support, especially since it's not too hard to get into extra-charge territory with Oracle support.
Anyway, now that I've gone completely away from my original point, here it is: Oracle Standard supports just about all of the most commonly needed functionality from a database, and it's $15k per processor for a perpetual license. That's for a DB that will support up to 1000 users, 500GB of data, clustering, and all the fancy RDBMS acrobatics you'd need for a small-to-medium sized business. And the Oracle salespeople have pretty broad authority to discount even those licenses. So, let's not assume that the cost of Oracle is constant at $40k/CPU, because the vast majority of Oracle's biggest potential growth market is already well targeted with the much less expensive Standard Edition.
I'm not surprised by the slow growth in Oracle's DB business, either. For years our sales rep was consistently focused on getting us to buy more DB licences - if you listened to the sales reps you'd think you need a dedicated machine running Oracle for every app you develop or use. Recently, though, they've been telling us we should consolidate our database needs into a small cluster and start addressing our business needs. With Oracle software, of course. *Expensive* Oracle software.
One more thing - on review, the tone of this post seems decidedly pro-Oracle. I'm not. I'm in the middle of migrating our databases from Oracle to PgSQL. If anyone else is doing this too, and just in the first phases, drop me a Slashdot message; I've got a small PHP program which reads Oracle schemas, including triggers, functions, and procedures, and emits PgSQL DML to replicate your schema on a PgSQL 8.x+ DB.
From what I've obvserved, there are 3 kinds of people that have purchased the PSP.
Four kinds. Believe it or not, there are people who are actually *happy* with the PSP. I have about twenty games for it right now. The PSP has its fair share of crap games (Ghost in the Shell, or Generation of Chaos, which is perhaps the most terrible game ever made) but it also has plenty of titles which are a lot of fun, like SSX, Legend of Heroes, Ys, Rengoku, Tokobot, and a few others.
That said, my wife has a DS, and haven't (yet) played a game on it that I haven't really enjoyed - way to go, Nintendo. Here's the thing, though - as much as I usually dislike the idea of "convergence" gadgets (do one thing, and do it well, please - like the DS, or GBA) it's sometimes really, really nice to have all the extra abilities. It's a hassle to put MP3s and movies onto Memory Sticks sometimes, but the extra complexity of the device is compensated for by my not having to carry multiple devices when travelling or suffering through family affairs at my mom's place.
I think Sony's problem is that they just don't know how to market the PSP. They have definitely undersold the gaming capabilities of the device in favor of pushing UMDs (which I agree are a big "f-you" to consumers from Sony) on us.
Just my $0.02, but I'm a 360 fanboy, so my opinion isn't worth much here on/.
I wonder how Linux idealists feel about their cute little OS being deployed in machinery of war?"
Isn't that the point? Free as in speech, not as in beer means that sometimes someone might do something with your creation that you don't like or agree with. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
Fair enough. Also from the Wikipedia entry on Islamism: "However, it is important to keep in mind that this distinction or boundary between "Islam" and "Islamism" is not as sharp, clear or distinct for many followers of Islam as it has in recent years become for many English-speaking non-Muslims or western academics. For example, most followers of Islam would consider themselves "Fundamentalists", insofar as believing in Islam means believing in its Fundamentals. Similarly, traditional Islam also promotes a vision of society influenced by the tenets of the religion, in much the same way that Christianity, Buddhism and other religions advocate not just personal but also social changes."
I'd say this is a pretty accurate assessment. "Islamism" and "Islamist" are fundamentally Western categorizations of a certain type of Muslim. Even those Muslims who don't condone the actions extremists like the Taliban and Al Qaeda take generally have the same goal as these groups: the unification of the various Arab/Islamic states. Most Muslims are just willing to take a more moderate path.
Umm... did your Poli Sci prof actually ever *spend* any time in a predominately Islamic nation? What you're repeating is a gross misrepresentation of the way things really are. Muslims (not "Islamists") are required to be true and to act in good faith in dealings with other Muslims. That doesn't mean they don't believe lying to a non-Muslim is not lying; it means that lying to a non-Muslim is not an affront to Allah. They still know they're lying.
I'm sure you have a lot of faith in your prof, who is an authority figure and has worked with and around important people, but I spent last year in Baghdad, so these things are a bit fresher in my mind.
Oh, and if *anyone* believes that Muslims aren't as fundamentally dishonest and untruthful (even with other Muslims) as all the rest of us, I have a nice bridge to sell you.
You are a troll. A troll preying on the fact that most of the moderators here have no idea about computer science, and have not taken a wiff of a real operatings systems class.
I think you are generalizing a bit too much here. I've taken years of computer science courses, and I still don't have a clue.
Well... no. My point being that I *purchased* these books, all of which are freely available online. In the case of TAoUP and PCL, after I read the online copies.
There's no better way to kill a book than to make it available for anyone to read for free.
My copies of Free as in Freedom, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Art of Unix Programming, and Practical Common Lisp beg to differ strongly on this point.
Basic government security levels:
1.) For Official Use Only (not important, really)
2.) Classified (usually sensitive technical data)
3.) Secret (much more sensitive technical or operational data)
4.) Top Secret (stuff like nuclear weapons handling procedures, etc.)
5.) Top Secret Compartmented, and up (who *did* kill Kennedy? These guys know.) Not that it's really important, but to avoid sounding like a n00b, "classified" is different from "secret".
Also, if you want to know more about what the DoD considers a trusted computer system, look here.
If you can manage to stay awake through the entire document you win a prize.
I have never met anyone in the Army who had any trouble falling asleep any time, anywhere. My experience is limited to cavalry and infantry, though, so maybe that's just something about combat arms troops. Over the course of a year in Baghdad, I was able to fall asleep in some surprising situations.
Of course, when going on extended missions, we also had the option of asking the platoon medics for stimulants. I don't remember what the name of the drug was, but one little white pill kept you up and alert for about two days. You did crash pretty hard after that. Anyway, while there may be some interest in the military for this drug, its use won't be anywhere near as prevalent as you seem to think. The Army likes its combat units to be operationally ready all the time, but also keeps mission durations and objectives as tight as possible to minimize battle fatigue and risk of combat losses. Sometimes you can't avoid a mission that lasts for a week, and in those (relatively rare - I only remember doing maybe a dozen of those two-day-plus missions over a year) situations, a drug to mitigate sleep-dep would be a godsend.
A crucial difference here is that Slashdot's moderation is essentially a reputation system which has nothing to do with censorship. Post intelligent, insightful remarks and you are rewarded with a higher reputation, meaning people are more likely to see your posts in the future.
But, it's an optional reputation system. Anyone can browse Slashdot at -1, and see *everything* that's been posted to an article, AC trolls, flamewars, and all. It's moderation, not censorship, and that censorship is why what some retailers do with product reviews is simply unconscionable.
Slashdot Mirror
If Vista required a DX10 vid card for the new UI, I'd be looking at the Vista Basic theme instead of Aero Glass right now, since the GeForce Go 7400 in this Vaio is only a DX9 part. Even Vista beta 2 ran the new UI well on relatively low-end hardware; the first machine I installed it on was a Sempron 2800 w/512Mb and a Radeon 9700.
I realize that for many users a Sempron 2800 is a powerful machine compared to the PIII they've got, but, look... hardware ages. Apple is likely to drop support for G3 machines in Leopard, just as they've dropped the PPC601 and the M68k before it. Does that make Apple suck, because they require newer kit to run the latest features? Hardly. I really think arguing the hardware requirements of Vista is a null point.
I do think it's a load of shit that you have to shell out $500 just to get the OS to run your "certified" driver. I also think Microsoft should start following Apples example as far as opening source code is concerned, though even Apple isn't sharing everything; nor will they, since one of the big selling points of Apple hardware is the ability to run OS X.
Ubuntu installs very few of those by default. You have to use Synaptic to install most development tools, which is about as difficult as installing Cygwin to get the same tools.
I've been using the "Pre-RC1" build since the invites went out last week. I'm typing this post on a Vaio VGN-SZ220/B which is running Vista. The build is immensely improved since beta 2; performance and compatibility are leaps ahead of B2, the taskbar actually works, bundled drivers and DX10 are usable out of the box for playing WoW and HL2. So... nicer looking than XP, better out of box compatibility, significant UI improvements, even a better (flatter) filesystem layout. Web browser, mail, media, simple word processing, simple games, calendaring, etc. etc. are included. Except for the office applications, Vista (as shipped in sort-of-almost-RC1) does everything that Ubuntu does with the default install, and is coming closer to OS X. Why is it that if Microsoft ships anything but a bare OS, they're ridiculed for shipping bloatware, while Apple and every Linux distro on the planet can get away with bundling out the wazoo?
I'm far from a MS fanboy, as the mini and Slackware boxes on my desk attest to, but if they make a significant improvement to their OS, I think the last thing they deserve is ridicule and derision. I also think statements like "I for one don't plan on giving Microsoft more money for their software until they release an OS that is totally useful and original." are just a reflection of the blind anti-MS zealotry that's too common here. You've just asked for a software panacea, and one that uses none of the metaphors and conventions that make desktop operating systems accessible to average users. Why not just ask them to prove the existence of God while you're at it? Sorry about the rant, but, Jesus, sometimes this place is like Michael Moore making a film about Bill Gates.
So... they must have invented TCP offload around the same time Al Gore was inventing the Intarweb?
(well, just about - I don't think you can use the top-of-screen menu bar in Swing apps)
:)
System.setProperty("apple.laf.useScreenMenuBar", "true");
Without looking at the documentation, I am not sure if this works with J2SE 5, but for 1.4.x Swing apps it works nicely.
That's why I said 'perceived'. The MPAA is still intent on pushing DRM on us, though, so to them any new technology which offers yet another avenue of restriction will seem useful.
The good part is that their stance doesn't appear to be tenable in the long term; the bad part is that for the short term they can afford to buy all the legislation they need to hang on as long as possible.
If you're the MPAA, the ability to watermark content in non-visible wavelengths may be perceived as *very* useful.
At the same time I am both very proud, and very, very depressed that I understood every single word of that.
The Havok physics engine used by Oblivion runs in its own thread.
...and this sort of thing isn't nearly as commonplace as you seem to imply. Though I was an infantryman in Iraq, my best friend was an interrogator for our battalions S-2 (intelligence) section. Whenever we took prisoners in to S-2, I'd stand in with him during the interrogation; the implied threat of physical violence from me (one of the guys who'd taken the prisoner in the first place, which means he'd already been manhandled, and none too gently, by us) usually enhanced the subjects willingness to talk. The implied threat. I only saw one instance of a prisoner being struck by an American, and that was a piece of shit who had killed three of our men in an IED attack. I'll admit I punched the fucker, too.
If you want to see prisoner abuse, take a look at the Iraqi governments prisoners. They routinely have prisoners who "commit suicide" or were killed "trying to escape". The Iraqi police are particularly bad - I have some pictures of a group of prisoners that were tortured by the IPs. Not interrogated, just tortured. No question asking, just rubber hoses and AK-47s. Compared to a back laid open beatings and AK rounds through the meat of the legs, a few gut punches and a black eye looks pretty damn good. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but the world isn't a black-and-white moral landscape. It's all shades of gray, and sometimes being the lesser of two evils is what makes you the good guy. This "not as bad as Hussein" angle is not just that; it's the plain truth. I envy the apparent strength of your moral convictions, but I pity you for the way you've allowed them to blind you.
You are correct, there are relatively few companies who can afford to drop $40k per CPU on Oracle licenses. Of course, if you're buying Oracle Enterprise you'll also most likely be running the database on some pretty powerful, clustered, SMP machines, which just drives the costs up even higher. And you'd be retarded to buy that many Oracle licenses with no support contract, and the Gold contract is the minimum for getting any useful support from Oracle (last time I bought licenses, anyway). So you're looking at a real cost of somewhere close to $45k per license with hardware and support, assuming you're buying some fairly generic hardware. Bump that up to around $50k per license if you decide you have to run on a Sun T1 or something equally exotic.
Of course, once you've spent this money, you never have to spend it again. Because at $40k/license you are buying perpetual EE licenses. If you plan to run on Oracle for a long time, that's not really a tough pill to swallow. Oracle also sells 2- and 4-year licenses if you don't want to make such a big commitment and they'll even give you some pretty steep discounts to get your initial business. But that recurring cost hurts, and makes it harder to be able to afford to upgrade to a perpetual license.
I think the perpetual licenses are priced so high because Oracle doesn't want you to buy them. They make a lot more money over time on recurring license sales than they do just selling you something once. I'm sure Oracle would *love* to sell only subscription-style licenses because of the disincentive to switch to another RDBMS, but they need to offer perpetual licenses to huge clients like financial institutions and governments. These are the guys that can afford them, and for those enormous clients Oracle is willing to sacrifice the steady flow of income from the DB software for the steady flow of income from support, especially since it's not too hard to get into extra-charge territory with Oracle support.
Anyway, now that I've gone completely away from my original point, here it is: Oracle Standard supports just about all of the most commonly needed functionality from a database, and it's $15k per processor for a perpetual license. That's for a DB that will support up to 1000 users, 500GB of data, clustering, and all the fancy RDBMS acrobatics you'd need for a small-to-medium sized business. And the Oracle salespeople have pretty broad authority to discount even those licenses. So, let's not assume that the cost of Oracle is constant at $40k/CPU, because the vast majority of Oracle's biggest potential growth market is already well targeted with the much less expensive Standard Edition.
I'm not surprised by the slow growth in Oracle's DB business, either. For years our sales rep was consistently focused on getting us to buy more DB licences - if you listened to the sales reps you'd think you need a dedicated machine running Oracle for every app you develop or use. Recently, though, they've been telling us we should consolidate our database needs into a small cluster and start addressing our business needs. With Oracle software, of course. *Expensive* Oracle software.
One more thing - on review, the tone of this post seems decidedly pro-Oracle. I'm not. I'm in the middle of migrating our databases from Oracle to PgSQL. If anyone else is doing this too, and just in the first phases, drop me a Slashdot message; I've got a small PHP program which reads Oracle schemas, including triggers, functions, and procedures, and emits PgSQL DML to replicate your schema on a PgSQL 8.x+ DB.
From what I've obvserved, there are 3 kinds of people that have purchased the PSP.
/.
Four kinds. Believe it or not, there are people who are actually *happy* with the PSP. I have about twenty games for it right now. The PSP has its fair share of crap games (Ghost in the Shell, or Generation of Chaos, which is perhaps the most terrible game ever made) but it also has plenty of titles which are a lot of fun, like SSX, Legend of Heroes, Ys, Rengoku, Tokobot, and a few others.
That said, my wife has a DS, and haven't (yet) played a game on it that I haven't really enjoyed - way to go, Nintendo. Here's the thing, though - as much as I usually dislike the idea of "convergence" gadgets (do one thing, and do it well, please - like the DS, or GBA) it's sometimes really, really nice to have all the extra abilities. It's a hassle to put MP3s and movies onto Memory Sticks sometimes, but the extra complexity of the device is compensated for by my not having to carry multiple devices when travelling or suffering through family affairs at my mom's place.
I think Sony's problem is that they just don't know how to market the PSP. They have definitely undersold the gaming capabilities of the device in favor of pushing UMDs (which I agree are a big "f-you" to consumers from Sony) on us.
Just my $0.02, but I'm a 360 fanboy, so my opinion isn't worth much here on
I wonder how Linux idealists feel about their cute little OS being deployed in machinery of war?"
Isn't that the point? Free as in speech, not as in beer means that sometimes someone might do something with your creation that you don't like or agree with. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
... would be to mix some Lisp in there. Perlth?
Fair enough. Also from the Wikipedia entry on Islamism: "However, it is important to keep in mind that this distinction or boundary between "Islam" and "Islamism" is not as sharp, clear or distinct for many followers of Islam as it has in recent years become for many English-speaking non-Muslims or western academics. For example, most followers of Islam would consider themselves "Fundamentalists", insofar as believing in Islam means believing in its Fundamentals. Similarly, traditional Islam also promotes a vision of society influenced by the tenets of the religion, in much the same way that Christianity, Buddhism and other religions advocate not just personal but also social changes."
I'd say this is a pretty accurate assessment. "Islamism" and "Islamist" are fundamentally Western categorizations of a certain type of Muslim. Even those Muslims who don't condone the actions extremists like the Taliban and Al Qaeda take generally have the same goal as these groups: the unification of the various Arab/Islamic states. Most Muslims are just willing to take a more moderate path.
Umm... did your Poli Sci prof actually ever *spend* any time in a predominately Islamic nation? What you're repeating is a gross misrepresentation of the way things really are. Muslims (not "Islamists") are required to be true and to act in good faith in dealings with other Muslims. That doesn't mean they don't believe lying to a non-Muslim is not lying; it means that lying to a non-Muslim is not an affront to Allah. They still know they're lying.
I'm sure you have a lot of faith in your prof, who is an authority figure and has worked with and around important people, but I spent last year in Baghdad, so these things are a bit fresher in my mind.
Oh, and if *anyone* believes that Muslims aren't as fundamentally dishonest and untruthful (even with other Muslims) as all the rest of us, I have a nice bridge to sell you.
You are a troll. A troll preying on the fact that most of the moderators here have no idea about computer science, and have not taken a wiff of a real operatings systems class.
I think you are generalizing a bit too much here. I've taken years of computer science courses, and I still don't have a clue.
In fact, forget the blackjack! And the competetive model!
Ancient Greece?
Well... no. My point being that I *purchased* these books, all of which are freely available online. In the case of TAoUP and PCL, after I read the online copies.
There's no better way to kill a book than to make it available for anyone to read for free.
My copies of Free as in Freedom, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Art of Unix Programming, and Practical Common Lisp beg to differ strongly on this point.
Only when I don't want my wife to know I'm looking at porn.
Basic government security levels:
1.) For Official Use Only (not important, really)
2.) Classified (usually sensitive technical data)
3.) Secret (much more sensitive technical or operational data)
4.) Top Secret (stuff like nuclear weapons handling procedures, etc.)
5.) Top Secret Compartmented, and up (who *did* kill Kennedy? These guys know.)
Not that it's really important, but to avoid sounding like a n00b, "classified" is different from "secret".
Also, if you want to know more about what the DoD considers a trusted computer system, look here. If you can manage to stay awake through the entire document you win a prize.
I have never met anyone in the Army who had any trouble falling asleep any time, anywhere. My experience is limited to cavalry and infantry, though, so maybe that's just something about combat arms troops. Over the course of a year in Baghdad, I was able to fall asleep in some surprising situations.
Of course, when going on extended missions, we also had the option of asking the platoon medics for stimulants. I don't remember what the name of the drug was, but one little white pill kept you up and alert for about two days. You did crash pretty hard after that. Anyway, while there may be some interest in the military for this drug, its use won't be anywhere near as prevalent as you seem to think. The Army likes its combat units to be operationally ready all the time, but also keeps mission durations and objectives as tight as possible to minimize battle fatigue and risk of combat losses. Sometimes you can't avoid a mission that lasts for a week, and in those (relatively rare - I only remember doing maybe a dozen of those two-day-plus missions over a year) situations, a drug to mitigate sleep-dep would be a godsend.
A crucial difference here is that Slashdot's moderation is essentially a reputation system which has nothing to do with censorship. Post intelligent, insightful remarks and you are rewarded with a higher reputation, meaning people are more likely to see your posts in the future.
But, it's an optional reputation system. Anyone can browse Slashdot at -1, and see *everything* that's been posted to an article, AC trolls, flamewars, and all. It's moderation, not censorship, and that censorship is why what some retailers do with product reviews is simply unconscionable.