Okay, we've seen this enough. -Compression won't do any good on the biggest bandwidth hogs: image, video, and zip files. -Most dial-up ISPs already run caching software. Most browsers already cache images, etc. And the American reason... -If there was really a way to accelerate dial-up speeds by 5x without interfering with the downloaded content, some greedy businessman would already have figured it out and be charging a lot more than $10. And I mean besides blocking flash, Java, and animated gif advertisements at the server side. That's too easy and much too effective.
It's pretty bothersome to read comments that play out like the following: -- BEGIN SUMMARY -- FreeNet can give anyone great anonymity. FreeNet can give anyone a safe public forum. FreeNet can help groups dodge oppressive governments/corporations. Wow! FreeNet is great! Oh wait. Did you say it might have child pornography? BAN/REGULATE/CENSOR IT. -- END SUMMARY -- I can't believe people will use child pornography as a measuring stick for free speech. Does the magnitude of the problem even register here?
Pros: allows individuals, groups, and (god help us & china) even nations to retain their pursuit of knowledge without allowing iron-fisted governments to control their opinions and votes through censorship, misinformation, and isolation. Cons: Allows a few deviants to propagate photo documentation of child abuse that hardly any normal person is interested in anyway.
Do these even compare? Does anyone here really want to overthrow this network because a small minority of established pedophiles have a new, very slow, and somewhat complicated way to get their jollies? Speculation that it will be used to distribute nuclear bomb blueprints, etc, is just speculation. There's no evidence that this has been done on freenet, nor is there any good reason to believe these things couldn't be printed, put in a briefcase and walked over to the interested party. As long as information flow becomes more automated and regulated through computers, and as long as this software does what it claims to do, the need for freenet will rise. Don't even think this should be thrown away to pretend we're sticking it to child pornographers.
Re:Can we get past the holier-than-thou dude?
on
Linus Interview
·
· Score: 1
Hey, I'm totally the same way. I have nothing to contribute when people are talking about 'current events' because I don't even know what the hell is going on in the world (except when it's tech related).
It bothers me that I'm even *less* knowledgable than the average American when it comes to this (how sick is that?), but a great site to brush up on your political issues is www.govote.com. I'm not a shill for this place, but it's great cuz it tells you exactly what politicians stand for and can match you to a candidate based on your interests. Straightforward stuff. Really educational if, like me, you're politically inept.
I in no way stated that "'Geek culture'" is about love. I said that picking on Katz, being a bully, will not make people love you.
My point was that this audience values new ideas more than love. Bashing Katz may not win friends, but FascDot presented a new idea, however cynical, and *that's* what is valuable. Don't discourage it. Slashdot is a bad medium for personal relations. IRC is good for that. On a community board like this, posts are made and seen by thousands of people, many anonymous, and a relavent post with fresh ideas is something everyone is looking for. I certainly hope slashdot doesn't turn into offtopic 1-1 discussions littered with smiley's and inside jokes, like many of my favorite newsgroups. People come here (i think) for informative articles and informative discussion. No other place I've seen offers it like slashdot. FascDot's post may be harsh, but it's informative, which is what's most important to this audience. That's why it's not about love, and why even a rude post can be valuable.
your statement that "Most programmers and people on/. just don't care," is patently untrue.
Well, I guess this is just opinion against opinion, unless one of us has statistics to back it up. Notice there are many fewer CmdrTaco and Hemos bashers, even though there is much more opportunity to slam them. Katz must be doing something different: people aren't bashing just to bash people, or they'd incessantly flame other targets, such as Hemos or Stallman. My opinion is that progammers know what their lives are like better than Katz. Hearing him write long essays about this subject is like trying to listen to dial-up tech support tell you something you already knew, but taking a half-hour to do it. Many readers here don't care for that.
Usually I just ignore people with bad attitudes. Really, I don't feel it's my place...
Thanks for telling us about yourself before diving into the real meat of your writing. You must idolize Katz.
[Katz] has done more to help geeks and the "geek cause" than anyone I've ever heard of.
What has Katz done to help the 'geek cause' (journalist buzzword)? Why don't you give examples? Is this really more than, say, Linus' contribution to 'geeks', or haven't you heard of him?
[Your] posts... are... problems with the moderation system.
Spend a whole paragraph on a personal attack against FascDot and his karma? What a waste of time.
Now I've had another glimpse into the dark side of the geek....
You *are* Jon Katz! Admit it! This is the whole reason Katz is rejected here. No programmers I know of run around yapping about 'geek culture'. I never even hear the word 'geek', except out of that lamo NT-hugging couldn't-write-Hello-World-in-BASIC-without-a-wiza rd guy down the street. Katz likes geek culture, and you like geek culture. Most programmers and people on/. just don't care.
I think you'll find killing Piggy doesn't make people love you.
Who cares? Are you totally out of touch? Take your romantics somewhere else. 'Geek culture' (journalist buzzword) isn't about love at all, it's more about information and problem solving. Bill Gates isn't operating out of love. Linux wasn't open sourced because of love. Windows Rebate day wasn't done out of love. FascDot isn't posting to become 'loved'. He certainly doesn't care to please everyone, as evidenced by the 'goodbye 70 karma'. He's posting to present new opinions (however brash) and generate discussion. You, on the other hand, are posting to: talk about yourself, give an unsupported claim of Katz's benevolence, and veer offtopic only to personally slam FascDot. I hope you feel love.
Sex is absolutely necessary for the propogation of the species. Where do you propose to draw the line? Sex that *you* deem is okay?
Sex violates. Sex hurts. Sex demeans. Sex insults.
People enjoy sex. Period. Do you really think it would be popular if _everyone_ was hurt, violated, and insulted by it?
I consider sex to be the most disgusting thing in the world.
Sex is a natural genetic instinct inherent to every species. Some animals give their lives simply to mate and pass on their genes. From an evolutionary standpoint, every creature's action is either to contribute to survival, or to increase the success of mating. Humans are the only exception to this. In their continued pursuit of 'higher meaning' some completely reject anything that looks silly (eg sex) and is unusally gratifying. A few scant individuals, such as you Mr. Coward, go so far as to say they don't enjoy sex at all. This is denial and repression of natural desires, and probably frustrates you more than you care to admit. If you *genuinely* don't enjoy sex and are not just denying it for the sake of appearing 'holy', then you have a medical condition and should see your doctor.
Oh shoot, there i go again: being just as off-topic as the AC before me.
In a previous interview (alas, I can't remember which one), Carmack said that after q3 he wanted to work on a 3D persistant online environment, along with whatever project 'id Software' is working on. So it wouldn't be like all those silly VRML filesystems, or whatever. Perhaps a much more advanced FPS in a global, persistant world.
Woah, wait just a minute! Who said anything about being a "religious" person, or accepting the Bible as 100% truth?
sorry dude, i didn't mean 'you' when i said 'you'. er... i didn't mean you in particular. i meant, if *anyone* accepts the bible 100% etc...
You need to widen your scope of thinking a little and forget about a polar separation of bible literalists vs. staunch athiests.
the argument only applies to bible literalists. "...you may accept the Bible as 100% truth..." if you aren't a bible literalist (again, not *you* grappler, i mean anybody) then the post doesn't apply to anything in your world.
i don't know where i introduced staunch atheism. if you mean the 'Bible is false' part, it was to indicate that, according to the reasoning, either god doesn't exist or the bible is fallible.
the post only intended to show a theoretical way to disprove the existance of god, and it exists because i think it's a 'cute' concept, not a serious one.
My argument is hypothetical (note the "If one exists..." after the 'truckloads' sentence). Bible debates are disgusting and messy and I'd prefer to avoid one. I just wanted to show a (somewhat clever) way to try and disprove the existance of God. It's not a bulletproof argument, it's hardly even logical. I'd be more comfortable defending the 'burden of proof' argument mentioned elsewhere.
You will certainly find people that will tell you about supposed contradictions of the Bible. Whether you believe these passages are human error, misinterpreted, real contradictions, or unexplainable is your business, not mine. Here are a few examples if you're curious: http://www.truthbeknown.com/biblecontradictions. htm http://members.tripod.com/~cygnus6/pageCon.html http://www.ffrf.org/lfif/contra.html
And science most definately cannot disprove the existance of a god. You can't prove He doesn't exist! How would you go about it? It's entirely a matter of personal beliefs in which science offers no insight one way or the other.
It *is* possible to prove something doesn't exist. Anybody familiar with the prove that sqrt(2) cannot exist as a rational number? I'll reproduce it here (cuz it's cool...)
//note: A and B are integers
A/B == sqrt(2);//assume A/B is a reduced fraction. if it's not, reduce it A^2/B^2 == 2; A^2 == 2B^2; //therefore, A^2 is an even number, and so must be A //we can then express A as... A == 2M;//M is an integer A^2 == 4M^2; 4M^2 == 2B^2; 2M^2 == B^2;//therefore, B^2 is even, and so is B //We've now shown that A and B are both even, and so A/B is not a reduced fraction. //This contradicts our original assumption, so sqrt(2) cannot be expressed as a rational number (A/B).
Cool proof? (did i get it right?) The principle behind it is that, if you have a consistent system, then to prove something cannot exist you just show 2 observations that can't both be true (in this case A/B is both reduced and not reduced). Normally, this only works well in mathematics. We can't be truly certain of everything science tells us (we can be pretty sure, but not 100%). However, if you are a religious person, you may accept the Bible as 100% truth. If so, to disprove the existance of God, you only need to find two statements about him in the Bible that cannot both be true. I know there are truckloads of contradictions in the Bible, but I don't know if any deal with the nature of God. If one exists, the only reasonable conclusions are that either God doesn't exist, the Bible is false, or the rules of logic no longer apply. If God doesn't exist, that's what we were seeking to show all along. If the Bible is false, that takes a big chunk out of the basis for God's existance anyway. The last conclusion I've heard from several slippery fundamentalists regarding God's essence. If it's true, then we're all screwed.
Simple bug fix: disable java-script. Really! Every time this incredibly irritating bug has popped up for me has been due to Javascript errors. Going into Edit->Preferences->Advanced, turning off Javascript and reloading has fixed it every time.
Nowadays i just surf with Java and Javascript off. It helps with a lot of the bugs and most java(script) on the net is crap anyway:(
It is pretty obvious that all you guys are poised at your swivel chairs, in anticipation of seeing MS lose the trial so you can say 'I told you so'.
'All you guys'? Heh, no. *Some*. Please don't stereotype the entire/. audience. There's a lot of diversity here.
(1)This whole thing is totally ridiculous. Would you ask Coca Cola to include a pepsi in every sixpack? And then sue them for stomping all over your business if they refuse? Really thats basically whats going on here!
No it's not going on here. You must be thinking of some other forum. I haven't seen anyone on/. advocate forcing non-MS products into windows, and even if someone did, nobody would take them seriously.
(2)More importantly; why the heck does this affect you guys? Face it, youre just wasting revenge! Whats the bet that most of you use *nix, or other OS's, and not windows? Am I right or am I right?
There is a big world outside of my computer. NT servers running IIS, incompatible pages made using Frontpage, and even the computer lab where I print my school papers has nothing in the realm of UNIX machines. Lots of people hit these issues on a daily basis and it *does* affect everyone.
Also, if MS stifles competition as this case seems to indicate, that doesn't just affect the PC market. It trickles down through the industry. Companies that have been stunted or ruined by MS now obviously haven't the resources to apply their efforts to program development for a less-popular operating system like Linux. This is a side-effect MS enjoys.
if MS do lose out in the end, what will you personally gain?
Hmm... perhaps open standards and compatibilty with the most popular desktop operating system and office suite in the world? Yeah, i guess you're right: that won't affect anyone here.
you know that is obviously false. i think his point was that microsoft is often associated with having fabulous amounts of money, perhaps more than people should be giving them. (oh god, i'm just setting myself up for an anti-trust debate, aren't i?)
>>Micros~1 - Hello... I've used win95/98/nt and I've *never* had to type in an 8.3 file name.
if you use any of your older 16-bit apps in windows, you will encounter these silly abbreviations (eg pictur~1.jpg) all the time. however, i usually run into these things in DOS, which turns long filenames into a nightmare, not a blessing.
>>I think linux geeks are just bitter about MS's dominance.
the complaints about ~1 filenames have nothing to do with MS's dominance. just because you've never had to struggle against its ugly side does not mean it's not a bad system. people complain because it sucks.
>> Macrostupid - Surely the people who were fooled into running these macros are to blame.
the people that passed on that virus are mostly newbies, and don't know how to wield the power of macros anyway! unfortunately, there are millions of newbies out there, and microsoft pushes their products into their hands more feverishly than any other demographic. if you don't believe me, i'm sure the talking paperclip can convince you otherwise.
>>I get 15+ days uptime all the time on my machine.
well cool, as long as we're sharing our experiences i might as well give mine! i've got win98 on a top of the line dell machine that i'm using right now. this whole summer it has not had an uptime of more than 5 days. hell, i don't even push this machine! i use it to browse slashdot and chat mostly. what causes it to crash after 5 days for no good reason? beats me. buggy coding i guess. oh sure, it made it to 8 days *once* but who wants to use a computer that has 194 meg of allocated memory with no apps running? and this is windows *98*, supposedly fixing those truckloads of bugs. when i had win95 on a diff computer (that i sold, hehe) i couldn't even make it through the *day* without it crashing. usually crashed 3 times a day. are you telling me this is 'acceptable'?
oh honestly, what kind of reason is that? 'he is contributing something, unlike most of the critics'??? according to that logic, if rob posted some flaming piece of garbage on slashdot and people hated it you'd *still* defend the flaming piece of garbage simply because 'it's a contribution.'
saying 'katz sucks' is fine. dammit, a news site needs to know what the people want. how else would rob know if people want to hear more of katz's essays unless people *comment* on katz's essays? should he have a poll "Does Katz suck? Yes/No/Robsucks"?
oh... and for the record i also think katz articles are not worth reading. mostly because: -he's always trying to make a big important issue out of something that's not (then again, this is why i don't like most journalists) -he's not a linux user, and he's writing on a linux oriented web-site (that in itself isn't so bad, but katz seems to steer around anything too technical, even if his audience would appreciate it) -those stupid apostrophe's that turn into question marks in netscape. did he write that in frontpage or something? doesn't that alienate his mostly-anti-ms audience? doesn't he realize this?
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, we've seen this enough.
-Compression won't do any good on the biggest bandwidth hogs: image, video, and zip files.
-Most dial-up ISPs already run caching software. Most browsers already cache images, etc.
And the American reason...
-If there was really a way to accelerate dial-up speeds by 5x without interfering with the downloaded content, some greedy businessman would already have figured it out and be charging a lot more than $10. And I mean besides blocking flash, Java, and animated gif advertisements at the server side. That's too easy and much too effective.
It's pretty bothersome to read comments that play out like the following:
-- BEGIN SUMMARY --
FreeNet can give anyone great anonymity.
FreeNet can give anyone a safe public forum.
FreeNet can help groups dodge oppressive governments/corporations.
Wow! FreeNet is great!
Oh wait. Did you say it might have child pornography? BAN/REGULATE/CENSOR IT.
-- END SUMMARY --
I can't believe people will use child pornography as a measuring stick for free speech. Does the magnitude of the problem even register here?
Pros: allows individuals, groups, and (god help us & china) even nations to retain their pursuit of knowledge without allowing iron-fisted governments to control their opinions and votes through censorship, misinformation, and isolation.
Cons: Allows a few deviants to propagate photo documentation of child abuse that hardly any normal person is interested in anyway.
Do these even compare? Does anyone here really want to overthrow this network because a small minority of established pedophiles have a new, very slow, and somewhat complicated way to get their jollies?
Speculation that it will be used to distribute nuclear bomb blueprints, etc, is just speculation. There's no evidence that this has been done on freenet, nor is there any good reason to believe these things couldn't be printed, put in a briefcase and walked over to the interested party.
As long as information flow becomes more automated and regulated through computers, and as long as this software does what it claims to do, the need for freenet will rise. Don't even think this should be thrown away to pretend we're sticking it to child pornographers.
Hey, I'm totally the same way. I have nothing to contribute when people are talking about 'current events' because I don't even know what the hell is going on in the world (except when it's tech related).
It bothers me that I'm even *less* knowledgable than the average American when it comes to this (how sick is that?), but a great site to brush up on your political issues is www.govote.com. I'm not a shill for this place, but it's great cuz it tells you exactly what politicians stand for and can match you to a candidate based on your interests. Straightforward stuff. Really educational if, like me, you're politically inept.
I in no way stated that "'Geek culture'" is about love. I said that picking on Katz, being a bully, will not make people love you.
/. just don't care," is patently untrue.
My point was that this audience values new ideas more than love. Bashing Katz may not win friends, but FascDot presented a new idea, however cynical, and *that's* what is valuable. Don't discourage it.
Slashdot is a bad medium for personal relations. IRC is good for that. On a community board like this, posts are made and seen by thousands of people, many anonymous, and a relavent post with fresh ideas is something everyone is looking for. I certainly hope slashdot doesn't turn into offtopic 1-1 discussions littered with smiley's and inside jokes, like many of my favorite newsgroups. People come here (i think) for informative articles and informative discussion. No other place I've seen offers it like slashdot.
FascDot's post may be harsh, but it's informative, which is what's most important to this audience. That's why it's not about love, and why even a rude post can be valuable.
your statement that "Most programmers and people on
Well, I guess this is just opinion against opinion, unless one of us has statistics to back it up.
Notice there are many fewer CmdrTaco and Hemos bashers, even though there is much more opportunity to slam them. Katz must be doing something different: people aren't bashing just to bash people, or they'd incessantly flame other targets, such as Hemos or Stallman.
My opinion is that progammers know what their lives are like better than Katz. Hearing him write long essays about this subject is like trying to listen to dial-up tech support tell you something you already knew, but taking a half-hour to do it. Many readers here don't care for that.
Usually I just ignore people with bad attitudes. Really, I don't feel it's my place...
a rd guy down the street. /. just don't care.
Thanks for telling us about yourself before diving into the real meat of your writing. You must idolize Katz.
[Katz] has done more to help geeks and the "geek cause" than anyone I've ever heard of.
What has Katz done to help the 'geek cause' (journalist buzzword)? Why don't you give examples? Is this really more than, say, Linus' contribution to 'geeks', or haven't you heard of him?
[Your] posts... are... problems with the moderation system.
Spend a whole paragraph on a personal attack against FascDot and his karma? What a waste of time.
Now I've had another glimpse into the dark side of the geek....
You *are* Jon Katz! Admit it!
This is the whole reason Katz is rejected here. No programmers I know of run around yapping about 'geek culture'. I never even hear the word 'geek', except out of that lamo NT-hugging couldn't-write-Hello-World-in-BASIC-without-a-wiz
Katz likes geek culture, and you like geek culture. Most programmers and people on
I think you'll find killing Piggy doesn't make people love you.
Who cares? Are you totally out of touch? Take your romantics somewhere else. 'Geek culture' (journalist buzzword) isn't about love at all, it's more about information and problem solving. Bill Gates isn't operating out of love. Linux wasn't open sourced because of love. Windows Rebate day wasn't done out of love. FascDot isn't posting to become 'loved'. He certainly doesn't care to please everyone, as evidenced by the 'goodbye 70 karma'. He's posting to present new opinions (however brash) and generate discussion. You, on the other hand, are posting to: talk about yourself, give an unsupported claim of Katz's benevolence, and veer offtopic only to personally slam FascDot. I hope you feel love.
SEX IS KILLING OUR WORLD!!!
Sex is absolutely necessary for the propogation of the species. Where do you propose to draw the line? Sex that *you* deem is okay?
Sex violates. Sex hurts. Sex demeans. Sex insults.
People enjoy sex. Period. Do you really think it would be popular if _everyone_ was hurt, violated, and insulted by it?
I consider sex to be the most disgusting thing in the world.
Sex is a natural genetic instinct inherent to every species. Some animals give their lives simply to mate and pass on their genes. From an evolutionary standpoint, every creature's action is either to contribute to survival, or to increase the success of mating.
Humans are the only exception to this. In their continued pursuit of 'higher meaning' some completely reject anything that looks silly (eg sex) and is unusally gratifying. A few scant individuals, such as you Mr. Coward, go so far as to say they don't enjoy sex at all. This is denial and repression of natural desires, and probably frustrates you more than you care to admit. If you *genuinely* don't enjoy sex and are not just denying it for the sake of appearing 'holy', then you have a medical condition and should see your doctor.
Oh shoot, there i go again: being just as off-topic as the AC before me.
In a previous interview (alas, I can't remember which one), Carmack said that after q3 he wanted to work on a 3D persistant online environment, along with whatever project 'id Software' is working on.
So it wouldn't be like all those silly VRML filesystems, or whatever. Perhaps a much more advanced FPS in a global, persistant world.
Woah, wait just a minute! Who said anything about being a "religious" person, or accepting the Bible as 100% truth?
sorry dude, i didn't mean 'you' when i said 'you'. er... i didn't mean you in particular. i meant, if *anyone* accepts the bible 100% etc...
You need to widen your scope of thinking a little and forget about a polar separation of bible literalists vs. staunch athiests.
the argument only applies to bible literalists. "...you may accept the Bible as 100% truth..." if you aren't a bible literalist (again, not *you* grappler, i mean anybody) then the post doesn't apply to anything in your world.
i don't know where i introduced staunch atheism. if you mean the 'Bible is false' part, it was to indicate that, according to the reasoning, either god doesn't exist or the bible is fallible.
the post only intended to show a theoretical way to disprove the existance of god, and it exists because i think it's a 'cute' concept, not a serious one.
My argument is hypothetical (note the "If one exists..." after the 'truckloads' sentence). Bible debates are disgusting and messy and I'd prefer to avoid one. I just wanted to show a (somewhat clever) way to try and disprove the existance of God. It's not a bulletproof argument, it's hardly even logical. I'd be more comfortable defending the 'burden of proof' argument mentioned elsewhere.
. htm
You will certainly find people that will tell you about supposed contradictions of the Bible. Whether you believe these passages are human error, misinterpreted, real contradictions, or unexplainable is your business, not mine. Here are a few examples if you're curious:
http://www.truthbeknown.com/biblecontradictions
http://members.tripod.com/~cygnus6/pageCon.html
http://www.ffrf.org/lfif/contra.html
It *is* possible to prove something doesn't exist. Anybody familiar with the prove that sqrt(2) cannot exist as a rational number? I'll reproduce it here (cuz it's cool...)
Cool proof? (did i get it right?)
The principle behind it is that, if you have a consistent system, then to prove something cannot exist you just show 2 observations that can't both be true (in this case A/B is both reduced and not reduced).
Normally, this only works well in mathematics. We can't be truly certain of everything science tells us (we can be pretty sure, but not 100%).
However, if you are a religious person, you may accept the Bible as 100% truth. If so, to disprove the existance of God, you only need to find two statements about him in the Bible that cannot both be true.
I know there are truckloads of contradictions in the Bible, but I don't know if any deal with the nature of God. If one exists, the only reasonable conclusions are that either God doesn't exist, the Bible is false, or the rules of logic no longer apply.
If God doesn't exist, that's what we were seeking to show all along.
If the Bible is false, that takes a big chunk out of the basis for God's existance anyway.
The last conclusion I've heard from several slippery fundamentalists regarding God's essence. If it's true, then we're all screwed.
Simple bug fix: disable java-script. Really!
:(
Every time this incredibly irritating bug has popped up for me has been due to Javascript errors. Going into Edit->Preferences->Advanced, turning off Javascript and reloading has fixed it every time.
Nowadays i just surf with Java and Javascript off. It helps with a lot of the bugs and most java(script) on the net is crap anyway
It is pretty obvious that all you guys are poised at your swivel chairs, in anticipation of seeing MS lose the trial so you can say 'I told you so'.
/. audience. There's a lot of diversity here.
/. advocate forcing non-MS products into windows, and even if someone did, nobody would take them seriously.
'All you guys'? Heh, no. *Some*. Please don't stereotype the entire
(1)This whole thing is totally ridiculous. Would you ask Coca Cola to include a pepsi in every sixpack? And then sue them for stomping all over your business if they refuse? Really thats basically whats going on here!
No it's not going on here. You must be thinking of some other forum. I haven't seen anyone on
(2)More importantly; why the heck does this affect you guys? Face it, youre just wasting revenge! Whats the bet that most of you use *nix, or other OS's, and not windows? Am I right or am I right?
There is a big world outside of my computer. NT servers running IIS, incompatible pages made using Frontpage, and even the computer lab where I print my school papers has nothing in the realm of UNIX machines. Lots of people hit these issues on a daily basis and it *does* affect everyone.
Also, if MS stifles competition as this case seems to indicate, that doesn't just affect the PC market. It trickles down through the industry. Companies that have been stunted or ruined by MS now obviously haven't the resources to apply their efforts to program development for a less-popular operating system like Linux. This is a side-effect MS enjoys.
if MS do lose out in the end, what will you personally gain?
Hmm... perhaps open standards and compatibilty with the most popular desktop operating system and office suite in the world?
Yeah, i guess you're right: that won't affect anyone here.
other quick karma boosters:
:)
1.) include hyperlinks to supplementary articles, even if they're mentioned in the main article
2.) include a dictionary definition
3.) say what the slashdot community *should* be doing
4.) act intelligent, and say why "jonkatz/microsoft/some popularly opposed group" really is beneficial to us
i'd include all these things in *this* post, but i don't want to abuse the system
>>Are unix people all anti-capitalists?
you know that is obviously false. i think his point was that microsoft is often associated with having fabulous amounts of money, perhaps more than people should be giving them. (oh god, i'm just setting myself up for an anti-trust debate, aren't i?)
>>Micros~1 - Hello... I've used win95/98/nt and I've *never* had to type in an 8.3 file name.
if you use any of your older 16-bit apps in windows, you will encounter these silly abbreviations (eg pictur~1.jpg) all the time. however, i usually run into these things in DOS, which turns long filenames into a nightmare, not a blessing.
>>I think linux geeks are just bitter about MS's dominance.
the complaints about ~1 filenames have nothing to do with MS's dominance. just because you've never had to struggle against its ugly side does not mean it's not a bad system. people complain because it sucks.
>> Macrostupid - Surely the people who were fooled into running these macros are to blame.
the people that passed on that virus are mostly newbies, and don't know how to wield the power of macros anyway! unfortunately, there are millions of newbies out there, and microsoft pushes their products into their hands more feverishly than any other demographic. if you don't believe me, i'm sure the talking paperclip can convince you otherwise.
>>I get 15+ days uptime all the time on my machine.
well cool, as long as we're sharing our experiences i might as well give mine! i've got win98 on a top of the line dell machine that i'm using right now. this whole summer it has not had an uptime of more than 5 days. hell, i don't even push this machine! i use it to browse slashdot and chat mostly. what causes it to crash after 5 days for no good reason? beats me. buggy coding i guess. oh sure, it made it to 8 days *once* but who wants to use a computer that has 194 meg of allocated memory with no apps running?
and this is windows *98*, supposedly fixing those truckloads of bugs. when i had win95 on a diff computer (that i sold, hehe) i couldn't even make it through the *day* without it crashing. usually crashed 3 times a day. are you telling me this is 'acceptable'?
oh honestly, what kind of reason is that? 'he is contributing something, unlike most of the critics'???
according to that logic, if rob posted some flaming piece of garbage on slashdot and people hated it you'd *still* defend the flaming piece of garbage simply because 'it's a contribution.'
saying 'katz sucks' is fine. dammit, a news site needs to know what the people want. how else would rob know if people want to hear more of katz's essays unless people *comment* on katz's essays? should he have a poll "Does Katz suck? Yes/No/Robsucks"?
oh... and for the record i also think katz articles are not worth reading. mostly because:
-he's always trying to make a big important issue out of something that's not (then again, this is why i don't like most journalists)
-he's not a linux user, and he's writing on a linux oriented web-site (that in itself isn't so bad, but katz seems to steer around anything too technical, even if his audience would appreciate it)
-those stupid apostrophe's that turn into question marks in netscape. did he write that in frontpage or something? doesn't that alienate his mostly-anti-ms audience? doesn't he realize this?
i keep reading katz articles hoping someday he'll write something i'll genuinely enjoy reading.