PHP's flakiness is well known, and it has contradictory function naming and behavior. As for MySQL, it's infamous for its silent behavior when truncating values or setting things to NULL. Even accepting dates that could never exist. Those are the kinds of bugs and bad habits that have received criticism for years from critics of PHP and MySQL.
It's so hilarious, I stabbed my eyes out to make sure no lesser joke would sully my eyes by being not as hilarious as Dvorak's take on modern technology!
Predictably, Microsoft expresses no outward concern about the Google service, but you have to believe that the company's engineers are working overtime to assess the threat. "There's nothing new here [with Google Spreadsheets] really," Microsoft General Manager Alan Yates said. "It's like watching a time machine from 10 years ago."
Heh, a time machine from 10 years ago is actually how I feel when using Windows, but that's beside the point. This arrogant attitude is going to bite them later, especially since it's a guarantee Microsoft is now furiously working to finish their own online Excel to yet again follow a Google service.
I don't like being told what I can't do or that I need to re-enter my password, as in OS X.
This feature is so vitally important that Vista is stealing it. If you don't like it, tough. If you want everything to run in full admin privileges without prompting, it's only an inevitability that you will be compromised. It's especially unsettling that, as an admin, you're so bothered when entering a password. On OS X, it only happens during system updates, installing an application, or some other system-wide change.
So you're saying regular users of Windows should give up when their system gets compromised, and just reinstall everything? That says a lot about the quality of Windows that you can't restore it to a pristine point, and it's also asking far too much from people. They shouldn't have to reinstall their entire operating system just because something buried itself in the registry.
Having two monopolies (one heavy native and one light web based) isn't much better than having one.
Slashdotters have become so obsessed with "monopolies" all the time that every single company is threatened to become a monopoly, and the discussions are all about how "evil" it will become once a given company becomes one. Can we please go back to the days when a company was allowed to be successful without "monopoly" becoming the favored buzzword?
Look at what you wrote: Google is evil for making revenue. That seems to be the running theme around here. Guess what, Google wouldn't be around to make all these technologies if they didn't include making revenue as part of their business plan. Capitalism has driven modern technology, including the computer you typed your post on. You might be shocked to know your computer manufacturer has evil plans to generate revenue by selling these machines to people.
To be fair, a few of the example political cartoons leaned toward the other side of the debate. I particularly enjoyed the one with the guy watching Al Gore talking about how if we don't do something, the climate will "be out of our control," and the guy thinks to himself, "When has the climate ever been in our control?"
So, after all that reactionary vitriol, do you have any actual counterarguments against hispoint that environmentalism has become an urban religion? Or are you just hating on someone who disagrees with you? You sound like the same reactionary loons who attacked the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, because he dared speak out against the hegemony of thinking going on in the environmentalist movement.
Frankly, Crichton makes a lot of very valid points, particularly about man's ingrained rush to craft a religious viewpoint around the idea that there was once a pristine world marred by man's sins, and only through ritual can he be saved 'lest he befall to an impending armageddon. Environmentalists behave just like religious nuts when you are critical of their beliefs.
Global warming went up the most during the time Gore was in power, according to Gore's own charts. He also flies around the country in a jet to give his lectures, polluting more air than most people do driving a car for a year.
The most damning contradiction is that the global temperature record shows that worldwide average temperatures have not risen since 1998.
By the way, please do not use your recycling bin. It is more damaging to the environment to recycle paper in those dirty refineries then it is to just plant more trees and make new paper. Whenever you buy paper, what you're doing is ordering new trees to be planted by logging companies. Trees are a renewable resource. Most people have been taught all their lives to recycle paper because evil loggers are taking down all our forests to the point of extinction, which was never true. Greenpeace even inadvertently admitted its alarmism in a recent gaffe.
Environmentalism today is really a lot of college freshman getting together and holding marches against "globalism" and "corporatism." It's not about the environment anymore; that's just a ruse. The most amusing part is that they organize these anti-globalism movements using cell phones and the Internet, the most global technologies of all.
It explains how he accomplished it in the first link. The CIRA pulls sites that are registered with anonymous info.
UPDATE (supplemtary info): There's more information to the story. The deletion of the domain name was in full compliance of rules of the CIRA (just because it's a rule, doesn't make it right). Supposedly, if one registers a.ca domain name with anonymous details, the domain name can be removed under the CIRA's rules. However, one first needs to point it out (as Joe Volpe's campaign did).
It's not a free speech issue. Of course, Slashdot will blare it as such in a headline declaring that they "pulled the plug on free speech," but that just illustrates Slashdot's rampantly inaccurate reporting.
Which leads me to believe that maybe the "Macs have better graphics" line has always been a bunch of hooey
Others have already pointed out that game development is different from professional graphics, but I'd like to clarify. Macs did have better graphics up until 1995, because it was the first to sport a full GUI while PCs were languishing in black-and-white command prompt land. Windows 3.1 was a joke.
Even after Windows 95, MacOS continued to have many things over Windows, including that on-screen graphics and typography more accurately matched what would be printed on paper. Windows loves to change the text wrapping and other weird quirks. Apple also had ColorSync, which is a part of OS X today.
When OS X came out, it improved things even better, because Quartz correlates to PDF's object graph, so the printing instructions sent to the printer match the drawing instructions sent to Quartz. What you see on screen is exactly what you will get.
Basically, you come off as somewhat ignorant with your statements.
Despite your "funny" criticisms, the clickwheel remains the best interface out there to scroll through a hundred-album list on a music player. I've never had any of the problems you describe, and I doubt the majority of users have either considering the iPod's huge popularity.
"Two of my friends recently purchased iPods specifically because they saw others on campus using them--nothing to do with UI and how stylish the hardware is. IMO, most people buying iPods these days are buying it to feel a belonging to a "movement"/culture or because it is some kind of new fad going on."
I don't think anybody has any proof of this. People buy iPods because they LIKE them. If they saw others using them on campus and decided to pick one up, then obviously they DID see how easy the UI was and how stylish the hardware is, because as you just wrote, they saw someone else using it.
You know, just because you're all technical geeks posting on Slashdot doesn't mean everyone else is a "sheep" or following a "movement" when they adopt something that is popular. The iPod really is a great product.
Everything about this article seems kind of strange. Better security is mostly a good thing, especially for an OS as traditionally as insecure as Windows, isn't it?
You need to read the article, Beta 2 is becoming infamous for its insanely annoying security dialog prompts. It takes seven prompts to delete a desktop shortcut. Somehow, I think if a user has a shortcut installed on their desktop, they should have permission over their own desktop to delete it.
Yes, the point is just to change it, and get rid of the retina-burning, head-straining layout of today. You actually LIKE this 1998-era Times New Roman-infested layout? I've never seen a post that defended Slashdot's look. Nearly all commentary on the matter has centered around how badly it needs to change. It was a miracle from God that it went CSS, and now we have this.
Of course, the shitty moderation system (still a -1 to +5 system in 2006) and poor editing won't go away, but at least it looks a little better than it did when compared to the excellent Digg.
Your main fallacy is to the tired cliche of doing some Google searches and coming up with a list of fallacies instead of addressing my point.
Ignore my sig if you'd like.
I don't paint 100% of Slashdotters with one brush, but I do go by the majority of upmodded comments.
The GPL double standard argument isn't wrong just because you think it's "repeatedly-trotted-out." If piracy isn't theft, as is often repeated in the comments, then people need to stop referring to GPL violations as stolen GPL code.
According to Slashdot, you can pirate GPL software. Not only that, it is "stolen code" and constitutes "theft" which should be sued over by the EFF. However, it's supposedly wrong for any other copyright holders to sue and protect their materials.
No shit, sherlock. The point TechDirt is making is that it's still better that they run warez than nothing at all.
Nobody can explain exactly why that's "still better." If you don't have the money to pay for stuff, you find investors or take out loans like everyone else.
And their productivity is a lot more important than your indignation or the potential profit of the software industry.
What a self-centered mindset. How is one person's productivity more important than someone else's (through paying them for their work)? One company is more important than another's, just because one of them doesn't want to pay for software? What a lame, pseudo-socialist mindset (the struggling company is somehow entitled to something it doesn't want to pay for).
I'm desperately trying to figure out when Slashdot became pro-piracy. It's really become quite a pro-piracy haven these last few years. People think it's perfectly all right to steal software and not pay the author for it. They actually believe it's okay to download, for instance, Doom 3, and not pay John Carmack, even though he spent five years of hard work to release it. Even more hypocritically, you'll often hear that piracy isn't theft, but when a GPL violation is reported, it is referred to as "stolen code." Also, people act as though it's wrong for the RIAA or the MPAA to go after individual infringers (never mind that this is exactly what Slashdotters were calling for during the Napster lawsuit), but when there's a GPL violation, the EFF should get involved and sue the infringers. I just don't understand the disconnect. I have a feeling it really just boils down to money--people want to preserve the means to get stuff for free without having to pay for it. It has nothing to do with morality or ideals at all.
I also don't get TechDirt's hostile opinion towards the idea that--gasp--piracy is wrong and shouldn't be happening, and that it costs people money. Of course it does. The idea that some section of the economy is magically enhanced because they got to use pirated software ignores the section of the economy hurting from lost sales. And none of it matters anyway, because you don't magically have the right to pirate software just because it would enhance your company. What a selfish and amateurish opinion to have. My company would do better if we could hack into competitors' computers and copy their valuable trade secrets for ourselves, but we don't have the right to do that just because it would enhance our business.
Finally, I don't get why so many pro-piracy opinions exist in Slashdot comments, invariably with some mention of the "MPAA/RIAA," as though scapegoating some lobby group somehow justifies making sure some musician or filmmaker or software engineer doesn't get paid for something they worked hard on to release and make a living from. I think rooting for piracy is a weak, lazy mindset. It's the easy route to take, and illustrates that one has not thought through it at all. They likely are high school or college students who haven't had to go out into "the real world" and perform work in exchange for income. They're used to running Kazaa and eMule all day long, downloading everything they can find, and they get so used to such convenience that they get bitter and defensive when the free ride is taken away.
But, I don't expect the amateur opinions around here to change. People will continue to scapegoat the RIAA and MPAA as a lame justification--"The RIAA made me download System of a Down's latest album!" "The MPAA made me download a camrip of X-Men 3!" Slashdot will continue to post vaguely pro-piracy articles such as this one, while ignoring its own Slashdot heroes like John Carmack (id Software was estimated to have lost millions of dollars when Doom 3 was leaked the weekend before its release date). Outside of the green and white bubble of this website, the rest of the world will continue to run on capitalism, the least bad economic system on Earth, and the antithesis to the pseudo-socialist worldview of "share everything and worry about the consequences later" that permeates the discussions.
Slashdot Mirror
PHP's flakiness is well known, and it has contradictory function naming and behavior. As for MySQL, it's infamous for its silent behavior when truncating values or setting things to NULL. Even accepting dates that could never exist. Those are the kinds of bugs and bad habits that have received criticism for years from critics of PHP and MySQL.
That's what Dvorak's wife said last night.
Zing!
It's so hilarious, I stabbed my eyes out to make sure no lesser joke would sully my eyes by being not as hilarious as Dvorak's take on modern technology!
Heh, a time machine from 10 years ago is actually how I feel when using Windows, but that's beside the point. This arrogant attitude is going to bite them later, especially since it's a guarantee Microsoft is now furiously working to finish their own online Excel to yet again follow a Google service.
This feature is so vitally important that Vista is stealing it. If you don't like it, tough. If you want everything to run in full admin privileges without prompting, it's only an inevitability that you will be compromised. It's especially unsettling that, as an admin, you're so bothered when entering a password. On OS X, it only happens during system updates, installing an application, or some other system-wide change.
So you're saying regular users of Windows should give up when their system gets compromised, and just reinstall everything? That says a lot about the quality of Windows that you can't restore it to a pristine point, and it's also asking far too much from people. They shouldn't have to reinstall their entire operating system just because something buried itself in the registry.
And I get all your financial information through the microchip I implanted in your tinfoil hat! Mwuahaha!
Slashdotters have become so obsessed with "monopolies" all the time that every single company is threatened to become a monopoly, and the discussions are all about how "evil" it will become once a given company becomes one. Can we please go back to the days when a company was allowed to be successful without "monopoly" becoming the favored buzzword?
Look at what you wrote: Google is evil for making revenue. That seems to be the running theme around here. Guess what, Google wouldn't be around to make all these technologies if they didn't include making revenue as part of their business plan. Capitalism has driven modern technology, including the computer you typed your post on. You might be shocked to know your computer manufacturer has evil plans to generate revenue by selling these machines to people.
To be fair, a few of the example political cartoons leaned toward the other side of the debate. I particularly enjoyed the one with the guy watching Al Gore talking about how if we don't do something, the climate will "be out of our control," and the guy thinks to himself, "When has the climate ever been in our control?"
So, after all that reactionary vitriol, do you have any actual counterarguments against hispoint that environmentalism has become an urban religion? Or are you just hating on someone who disagrees with you? You sound like the same reactionary loons who attacked the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, because he dared speak out against the hegemony of thinking going on in the environmentalist movement.
Frankly, Crichton makes a lot of very valid points, particularly about man's ingrained rush to craft a religious viewpoint around the idea that there was once a pristine world marred by man's sins, and only through ritual can he be saved 'lest he befall to an impending armageddon. Environmentalists behave just like religious nuts when you are critical of their beliefs.
Global warming went up the most during the time Gore was in power, according to Gore's own charts. He also flies around the country in a jet to give his lectures, polluting more air than most people do driving a car for a year.
The most damning contradiction is that the global temperature record shows that worldwide average temperatures have not risen since 1998.
By the way, please do not use your recycling bin. It is more damaging to the environment to recycle paper in those dirty refineries then it is to just plant more trees and make new paper. Whenever you buy paper, what you're doing is ordering new trees to be planted by logging companies. Trees are a renewable resource. Most people have been taught all their lives to recycle paper because evil loggers are taking down all our forests to the point of extinction, which was never true. Greenpeace even inadvertently admitted its alarmism in a recent gaffe.
Environmentalism today is really a lot of college freshman getting together and holding marches against "globalism" and "corporatism." It's not about the environment anymore; that's just a ruse. The most amusing part is that they organize these anti-globalism movements using cell phones and the Internet, the most global technologies of all.
It's not a free speech issue. Of course, Slashdot will blare it as such in a headline declaring that they "pulled the plug on free speech," but that just illustrates Slashdot's rampantly inaccurate reporting.
Others have already pointed out that game development is different from professional graphics, but I'd like to clarify. Macs did have better graphics up until 1995, because it was the first to sport a full GUI while PCs were languishing in black-and-white command prompt land. Windows 3.1 was a joke.
Even after Windows 95, MacOS continued to have many things over Windows, including that on-screen graphics and typography more accurately matched what would be printed on paper. Windows loves to change the text wrapping and other weird quirks. Apple also had ColorSync, which is a part of OS X today.
When OS X came out, it improved things even better, because Quartz correlates to PDF's object graph, so the printing instructions sent to the printer match the drawing instructions sent to Quartz. What you see on screen is exactly what you will get.
Basically, you come off as somewhat ignorant with your statements.
Somewhere in Cupertino, Steve Jobs read the the memo on this, laughed, farted, then went to have lunch with Yo-Yo Ma.
Good luck, SanDisk.
Despite your "funny" criticisms, the clickwheel remains the best interface out there to scroll through a hundred-album list on a music player. I've never had any of the problems you describe, and I doubt the majority of users have either considering the iPod's huge popularity.
"Two of my friends recently purchased iPods specifically because they saw others on campus using them--nothing to do with UI and how stylish the hardware is. IMO, most people buying iPods these days are buying it to feel a belonging to a "movement"/culture or because it is some kind of new fad going on."
I don't think anybody has any proof of this. People buy iPods because they LIKE them. If they saw others using them on campus and decided to pick one up, then obviously they DID see how easy the UI was and how stylish the hardware is, because as you just wrote, they saw someone else using it.
You know, just because you're all technical geeks posting on Slashdot doesn't mean everyone else is a "sheep" or following a "movement" when they adopt something that is popular. The iPod really is a great product.
Everything about this article seems kind of strange. Better security is mostly a good thing, especially for an OS as traditionally as insecure as Windows, isn't it?
You need to read the article, Beta 2 is becoming infamous for its insanely annoying security dialog prompts. It takes seven prompts to delete a desktop shortcut. Somehow, I think if a user has a shortcut installed on their desktop, they should have permission over their own desktop to delete it.
CSS3 has corner radius values. Apple's latest version of WebKit supports them.
No offense to the design winner, but too often CSS styles websites just end up a bunch of gradient filled rounded corner boxes
Welcome to "Web 2.0." Gradients and rounded boxes. Some random JavaScript to make it client-side dynamic.
Yes, the point is just to change it, and get rid of the retina-burning, head-straining layout of today. You actually LIKE this 1998-era Times New Roman-infested layout? I've never seen a post that defended Slashdot's look. Nearly all commentary on the matter has centered around how badly it needs to change. It was a miracle from God that it went CSS, and now we have this.
Of course, the shitty moderation system (still a -1 to +5 system in 2006) and poor editing won't go away, but at least it looks a little better than it did when compared to the excellent Digg.
because doing so requires a CSS crack.
It requires a CSS license, but nobody wants to pay for one or release a binary-only player (which would go against the community's philosophies).
According to Slashdot, you can pirate GPL software. Not only that, it is "stolen code" and constitutes "theft" which should be sued over by the EFF. However, it's supposedly wrong for any other copyright holders to sue and protect their materials.
No shit, sherlock. The point TechDirt is making is that it's still better that they run warez than nothing at all.
Nobody can explain exactly why that's "still better." If you don't have the money to pay for stuff, you find investors or take out loans like everyone else.
And their productivity is a lot more important than your indignation or the potential profit of the software industry.
What a self-centered mindset. How is one person's productivity more important than someone else's (through paying them for their work)? One company is more important than another's, just because one of them doesn't want to pay for software? What a lame, pseudo-socialist mindset (the struggling company is somehow entitled to something it doesn't want to pay for).
I'm desperately trying to figure out when Slashdot became pro-piracy. It's really become quite a pro-piracy haven these last few years. People think it's perfectly all right to steal software and not pay the author for it. They actually believe it's okay to download, for instance, Doom 3, and not pay John Carmack, even though he spent five years of hard work to release it. Even more hypocritically, you'll often hear that piracy isn't theft, but when a GPL violation is reported, it is referred to as "stolen code." Also, people act as though it's wrong for the RIAA or the MPAA to go after individual infringers (never mind that this is exactly what Slashdotters were calling for during the Napster lawsuit), but when there's a GPL violation, the EFF should get involved and sue the infringers. I just don't understand the disconnect. I have a feeling it really just boils down to money--people want to preserve the means to get stuff for free without having to pay for it. It has nothing to do with morality or ideals at all.
I also don't get TechDirt's hostile opinion towards the idea that--gasp--piracy is wrong and shouldn't be happening, and that it costs people money. Of course it does. The idea that some section of the economy is magically enhanced because they got to use pirated software ignores the section of the economy hurting from lost sales. And none of it matters anyway, because you don't magically have the right to pirate software just because it would enhance your company. What a selfish and amateurish opinion to have. My company would do better if we could hack into competitors' computers and copy their valuable trade secrets for ourselves, but we don't have the right to do that just because it would enhance our business.
Finally, I don't get why so many pro-piracy opinions exist in Slashdot comments, invariably with some mention of the "MPAA/RIAA," as though scapegoating some lobby group somehow justifies making sure some musician or filmmaker or software engineer doesn't get paid for something they worked hard on to release and make a living from. I think rooting for piracy is a weak, lazy mindset. It's the easy route to take, and illustrates that one has not thought through it at all. They likely are high school or college students who haven't had to go out into "the real world" and perform work in exchange for income. They're used to running Kazaa and eMule all day long, downloading everything they can find, and they get so used to such convenience that they get bitter and defensive when the free ride is taken away.
But, I don't expect the amateur opinions around here to change. People will continue to scapegoat the RIAA and MPAA as a lame justification--"The RIAA made me download System of a Down's latest album!" "The MPAA made me download a camrip of X-Men 3!" Slashdot will continue to post vaguely pro-piracy articles such as this one, while ignoring its own Slashdot heroes like John Carmack (id Software was estimated to have lost millions of dollars when Doom 3 was leaked the weekend before its release date). Outside of the green and white bubble of this website, the rest of the world will continue to run on capitalism, the least bad economic system on Earth, and the antithesis to the pseudo-socialist worldview of "share everything and worry about the consequences later" that permeates the discussions.
Just my two cents.