OK, i don't like Firetruck at all, and even so i agreed almost completely with your post. Except this part:
Go develop a decent browser first and call me when you do.
Have we all graduated from fifth grade by now or what? The fact that i have not done better does not mean that you have not done something wrong. Making your own successful browser is not a prerequisite for bashing another one -- otherwise i'd hope that you wouldn't be calling Internet Explorer 'inferior'.
The big problem with that is that the spammers also used forged addresses, so not only CIS had to deal with tons of e-mails per day but also had to avoid bounces at all costs, since that would mean throttling over some other ISPs as well.
Yeah, that was the problem they'd told me about early on, but i figured they fixed it after a while since i didn't hear about it anymore.
I think the spammer got a really clear confusion confusing CIS with "Compuserve Internet Services" which was the full name of Compuserve
Like it said in the article, he thinks that they meant to try some other ISP, but they just... mistyped it or something, i don't know. As for what the e-mails were, i think that a lot of them were just like a@cis, b@cis, c@cis, so forth, and then they'd start over at aa@cis, ab@cis, ac@cis.... Don't know how far they went with that scheme. And then i think there were some completely ridiculous ones involving... you know, sexual activities and certain body parts, just addresses that no legitimate person would ever have.:/
As far as whether or not i think that the judgement is fair, i don't know. Not really, i guess. $10 per spam is a little steep, and i don't really understand the point of tripling the judgement because of the racketeering law... but whatever. They were warned multiple times, and even THEN they failed to show up to defend themselves. So i don't really feel too sorry for them.
Also, he didn't sue them for a billion dollars. The punative damages were miniscule compared to the damages that he received om accprdance with state and federal law.
OK, the guy who owns the ISP is my dad (i actually live in an ISP), so i think i know a little bit about this.
(a) My dad doesn't need to be given a job. He runs his own ISP, remember?
(b) It wasn't just four companies spamming him. There are hundreds of people spamming us. There were millions and millions of CIS addresses sold on CDs to hundreds of spammers around the world. My dad has 5000 customers. It doesn't take a TON of computing power to do e-mail for 5000 customers in Iowa. HOWEVER, at one point at least (i don't know if it's still the case, but i was told that it was) we were getting more e-mail than America Online. You can't just throw a Perl script at something like that, sorry.
(c) Obviously i'm not an expert on this, but spammers use lots of tricks to send e-mail to people. They forge their reply addresses so that they return Yahoo! and Hotmail and things like that. When you've got millions and millions of e-mails being shoved into your mail server and they're all going to fake addresses your server wants to send messages back to Yahoo! saying that the addresses don't exist, but of course the Yahoo! addresses are forged too, so what ends up happening at first, before anyone can even do anything, is Yahoo! blocks you because you're flooding their servers with messages about undeliverable mail, et cetera....
(d) Even with all your rad Perl scripts, it does take processing power to run those on millions and millions of e-mails a day.
(e) In any case, spam is a relatively new thing -- you can hardly expect someone who's never had to deal with it to be an expert at blocking it. You'll notice in the article that he now says he's a 'spam professional' or whatever, and as far as i know he's got it set up better now so that this isn't such a huge problem. But he wasn't always an expert on it and it took a lot of time and new mail servers and help from people who knew more about it and big sites like Yahoo! blocking him and so forth before it was finally kind of under control.
(f) I don't really see where you get off blaming anybody but the spammers. If i shot and killed somebody would you say it was their own fault for not wearing a bullet-proof vest?
Except for this post i was pretty impressed with the responses on Slashdot. A lot of you actually seem to know a little bit what you're talking about, unlike the people on Neowin and Fark and stuff. (Not that they were really discussing the story, of course. On Fark it was mostly joking about Mac users and on Neowin it was just 'hay can u give me sum money lol???'.)
Very mature. If you lose an argument, just call names. I love it! Nothing like an immature baby trying to make a _poor_ point on/. and then calling names!
OK, um....
(a) If you're newfangled enough to figure out the bold tags, you should be able to figure out the italic ones too. <i> isn't so much harder to do than <b>.
I think you're giving them too much credit by saying that they don't think it's useful or desired. It's not that they just hate tabbed browsing, it's that they don't have to add it. When you have 90% of the browser market, you're not really worried about paying people to add lots of rad features to your browser.
Microsoft will add things one at a time, as the need arises. (Meaning that if their market share continues to be important to them and if they think it's slipping, they'll add just enough to get them by.)
If you don't need any of the extra features, what's the problem with... um, anything? IE sounds like it does exactly what you want it to, if you understand how to use it. There's no such thing as a 'haven for malware' -- the only havens for malware are the warez and porn sites you have to visit to get diallers installed on your computer. I used Internet Explorer for a good, what, 7 or 8 years, and i never got any 'malware', because i browsed responsibly. IE doesn't crash for me, either (no more than any other program, anyway).
Firetruck i'm not a fan of at all, but the only thing that i see wrong with it in your list is that it doesn't render 'identical to how IE renders pages'. The number of pages that actually are broken in Firetruck is very very small. I guess you could try the new AOL browser (which is Firetruck + IE for compatibility)... but i heard that you can't disable tabs in that, so i don't know if you'd like that either.
Opera you can make EXTREMELY minimal if you want, and it's usually closer to how IE renders than Firetruck is. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, themes, and so forth can all be disabled if you want.
These are descriptions of a group of people, OK. It is an undeniable fact that there is a group of people who listen to 50 Cent and wear Abercrombie and Fitch clothing. It's irrefutable. This group of people exists. There's nothing you or i can do about it. What i said in my post was that this group of people (which irrefutably exists) tends to use Y!IM in my area. What trouble are you having with this statement? Where is the stone-throwing in this?
It's like if i said that the people who like emacs and donate to the FSF (a group of people which i'm sure you'll agree irrefutably exists) tend to use Linux. The only reason that you wouldn't call that 'stone-throwing' is the fact that i haven't expressed any distate for emacs or the FSF. My distaste for top-40 radio and Abercrombie and Fitch doesn't make what i said any less true.
The great majority of kids at school here who listen to top-40 radio and wear Abercrombie and Fitch use Y!IM. Based on all the evidence i've seen, it's a fact. A 'trend' or a 'statistic' if you want a better-feeling word for it, but it's the same thing. Sorry that the group of people that's involved in that fact was portrayed as undesirable, but that doesn't make it less of a fact. Most of the people around here who pay for Internet service have a computer, but i guess i wouldn't want to stereotype anyone.
You imply that i said 'everyone who uses x is y', when what i actually said was 'everyone who is y uses x'. The first is a stereotype. The second is a generalisation based on factual observations. 'All Americans are red-necks' and 'All red-necks live in America' are two different things.
Around here (Iowa), we (and by that i mean my generation -- i'm 18 years old) started out on MSN Messenger. This was in, i don't know, maybe grade five for us 'early adopters' and then six or seven for everybody else. MSN was the thing in my area for all of my friends to use. I don't know why exactly we all started using it (because i'm pretty sure back then MSN wasn't bundled with Windows yet), but we did.
One of my friends went off and found some on-line friends, probably computer-game buddies or something, and because of those friends he started using AIM. After that, he slowly started converting everybody else he (and the rest of us) knew to AIM, and after that everybody pretty much used both.
In secondary school, all of us nerdy types started using Trillian, which pretty much made specific protocols meaningless. Today, most of my friends (both on-line and off-line) have both, whether they use Trillian/Miranda/whatever or not. Probably 3/4 of the ones who don't have AIM only. The other fourth have MSN only.
Currently, MSN is becoming really really popular with the people i'm friends with for some reason, probably because of all the fancy doo-dads they're including now like themes and custom emoticons and big avatars (and i suppose the latter two are actually kind of neat, from a having-fun perspective).
I don't know if this is the norm for my area, but (to generalise) it seems like the more intelligent people are starting to flock to MSN. Whereas a few years ago your typical MSN screen name would be (8)(8)(8)(8)ju$+in CRAWLING IN MY SKIN THESE WOUNDS THEY WILL NOT HEAL FEAR IS HOW I FALL CONFUSING WHAT IS REAL sandy i luv u(8)(8)(8)(8), people are actually starting to be, you know, not retarded about it. e.g., they'll just use their name or their handle instead of putting an entire song in it. I don't know, maybe that's just a sign of increased maturity. It applies to younger kids (still in high school) that i know, too, though, so who knows.
ON THE OTHER HAND, the trendy girls and all the boys who try to hit on them, the kind of people i'd call 'preps', who listen exclusively to top-40 radio and wear Abercrombie and Fitch, stick with Yahoo!'s messenger. I don't really know why -- Y!IM is hideous and bloated, but OK. My little brothers and sisters use Y!IM, and they have, you know, 9084058940809345 different buddies and every single one of them has a screen name like the ridiculous one i described above, except of course it's Nelly lyrics or something. These are the kids who can't spell 'you'.
I suppose maybe one factor that contributed to the adoption of Y!IM by the middle-schoolers and freshmen in my area was the fact that Y!IM has a built-in radio thing, which means they can sit there and listen to 50 Cent while they're chatting about LOL SHUTUP SUK MY KOK GURL.
Just thought you'd be interested in hearing about the social break-down in relation to instant messengers in my area!
Listen, you're trying to argue against the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent being. This being supposedly CREATED THE UNIVERSE. He is ALL-POWERFUL. To accept that a being like that could possibly exist is to accept that a being like that created any 'evidence' you have against his existence.
I mean, i don't believe in God either, but you can't pretend to be more enlightened than someone else when you have no evidence that an all-powerful God doesn't exist. In order to use anything in the universe as evidence of God's non-existence, you have to prove that God isn't all-powerful. Which is a pretty big task.
Essays carelessly written will be carelessly edited. Problems never fix themselves.
Ah. So much for the benefits of open-source software.
Big whoop. You are telling me you can answer a triva question by clicking on Google.
Right, and? Everybody knows different things. If you know about Churchill's personal beliefs and i know about his biographical statistics, we have a (more) complete article. An encyclopaedia is a source of information, not entertainment. You're not writing it for the prestige or the honour or the chance to show off how much you know. You're writing it to compile a comprehensive description of a topic. How many people it takes to get that description written and how ungenuine (or whatever adjective you might want to apply to someone whose knowledge is gained by 'clicking on Google') the knowledge of those people is are completely irrelevant when you have your completed description.
You allow yourself an excuse to be lazy. That is by definition second-rate.
Whatever. Why does it matter whether two second-rate guys or one first-rate guy wrote the article?:/
I'm not like a big Wikipedia zealot, and there are a couple things i think are retarded about it, but i don't know, i just think you're being way too harsh on it.
Why should you have to be first-rate to contribute something? Obviously most (not all, mind you) of the people on Wikipedia aren't really, um, 'qualified' (formally trained or educated) to contribute, but that doesn't change anything. If it was just one person writing each article, then maybe you'd have a legitimate complaint, but the fact that it's a collaborative thing means that most of the problems presented by 'the second-rate' fix themselves.
I don't have to be a professional biographer to write a paragraph on where and when Winston Churchill was born, for example, and with the resources of the Internet at my disposal that's even more the case. Maybe it's not as prestigious or serious as being a Marconi or Einstein, but it gets the job done. And supposing i do get it wrong, well, there's a good chance that there is some expert on Winston Churchill on Wikipedia that will fix it.
Not to mention, you don't necessarily have to contribute substance. Usually when i see something on Wikipedia that i can contribute, it comes in the form of grammar or organisation corrections (like maybe a misplaced comma or a repeated word or an out-of-order sentence or something). Certainly doesn't make me the most valuable person there, but every bit helps.
Well... although not doing research or source comparisons is certainly questionable, i don't see why you'd have to be an expert on anything to contribute to an encyclopaedia. I'm not an expert on anything in particular (not that i know of, anyway), but that doesn't mean that there aren't certain things that i know a lot (or even a little) about. The fact that i'm not some kind of IT professional or a trained linguist or whatever doesn't mean that there aren't things that i can contribute to the topics of IT and language, and, um, with the addition of some Googling and stuff that's even more true.
Hellooo Internet everywhere. Can't find a good AP for your cheap WiFi card? Plug in your cell phone and surf the net at ~56k speeds for only $10+whatever you're paying your cellphone provider.
I'm pretty sure you've been able to do that for a long time. My dad used to have a thing where he could somehow plug his mobile phone into his lap-top and use it to get on the Internet (very slowly, of course). And this was a few years BEFORE everyone and their dog had a mobile.
Do you really think they host all those ads themselves? *.doubleclick.net is in my hosts file, and I don't see many ads on that site.
I'm not talking about the ads, i'm talking about the images they use all over in the page design. For example, there are like twenty unique images on the front page that could just as well be got rid of. That doesn't sound like much since they're probably all like 5k GIF files, but with a site as popular as SuprNova that just seems to me like it's got to affect the speed a little.
Try here if you have trouble finding things.
I know how to use the search function. Sometimes i just like to browse, though, and if i'm looking for (for example) general metal stuff, i don't want to have to think to myself, 'gee, maybe the idiots put it in alternative or pop or indie or blues'.:/
I mean it's not like SuprNova is OMG UNUSEABLE, but it does annoy me lots.
I never said i deserved anything. The fact that something fucking sucks doesn't mean that i think i deserve better. It just means that it fucking sucks.
Also, i'm disappointed. I had figured that, you know, by the time people reached Slashdot age they would have realised that 'ID LIEK TO C YOU DO BETER' isn't a valid arguement against criticism.
I personally couldn't care less about any of the benefits 'Exeem' has to offer except for the fact that it means the death of SuprNova. SuprNova is absolutely the WORST site i have ever seen. It's slow, it's ugly, and it doesn't work half the time (and by that i mean that because they use some retarded JavaScript i have to go back to the front page and retrace my steps every time i want to look at a new sub-category because the JavaScript doesn't update the page properly in my browser).
You'd think a site with such ridiculous bandwidth usage would consider doing something to, you know, limit the size of each page, but of course not with SuprNova. They load every single one with as much JavaScript and images and redundant garbage as they can.
Not to mention that the people who upload the Torrents seem to be a little stupid. I know we could spend all day arguing musical genres, but i hardly consider Metallica 'indie', and i can't fathom why anyone would think to look there for it.
So, um, yeah. If it gets rid of SuprNova i'm all for it. <_<
Slashdot Mirror
OK, i don't like Firetruck at all, and even so i agreed almost completely with your post. Except this part:
Go develop a decent browser first and call me when you do.
Have we all graduated from fifth grade by now or what? The fact that i have not done better does not mean that you have not done something wrong. Making your own successful browser is not a prerequisite for bashing another one -- otherwise i'd hope that you wouldn't be calling Internet Explorer 'inferior'.
hay~
The big problem with that is that the spammers also used forged addresses, so not only CIS had to deal with tons of e-mails per day but also had to avoid bounces at all costs, since that would mean throttling over some other ISPs as well.
Yeah, that was the problem they'd told me about early on, but i figured they fixed it after a while since i didn't hear about it anymore.
I think the spammer got a really clear confusion confusing CIS with "Compuserve Internet Services" which was the full name of Compuserve
o rly
Like it said in the article, he thinks that they meant to try some other ISP, but they just... mistyped it or something, i don't know. As for what the e-mails were, i think that a lot of them were just like a@cis, b@cis, c@cis, so forth, and then they'd start over at aa@cis, ab@cis, ac@cis.... Don't know how far they went with that scheme. And then i think there were some completely ridiculous ones involving... you know, sexual activities and certain body parts, just addresses that no legitimate person would ever have. :/
As far as whether or not i think that the judgement is fair, i don't know. Not really, i guess. $10 per spam is a little steep, and i don't really understand the point of tripling the judgement because of the racketeering law... but whatever. They were warned multiple times, and even THEN they failed to show up to defend themselves. So i don't really feel too sorry for them.
In accordance*, shit. :/
Also, he didn't sue them for a billion dollars. The punative damages were miniscule compared to the damages that he received om accprdance with state and federal law.
OK, the guy who owns the ISP is my dad (i actually live in an ISP), so i think i know a little bit about this.
(a) My dad doesn't need to be given a job. He runs his own ISP, remember?
(b) It wasn't just four companies spamming him. There are hundreds of people spamming us. There were millions and millions of CIS addresses sold on CDs to hundreds of spammers around the world. My dad has 5000 customers. It doesn't take a TON of computing power to do e-mail for 5000 customers in Iowa. HOWEVER, at one point at least (i don't know if it's still the case, but i was told that it was) we were getting more e-mail than America Online. You can't just throw a Perl script at something like that, sorry.
(c) Obviously i'm not an expert on this, but spammers use lots of tricks to send e-mail to people. They forge their reply addresses so that they return Yahoo! and Hotmail and things like that. When you've got millions and millions of e-mails being shoved into your mail server and they're all going to fake addresses your server wants to send messages back to Yahoo! saying that the addresses don't exist, but of course the Yahoo! addresses are forged too, so what ends up happening at first, before anyone can even do anything, is Yahoo! blocks you because you're flooding their servers with messages about undeliverable mail, et cetera....
(d) Even with all your rad Perl scripts, it does take processing power to run those on millions and millions of e-mails a day.
(e) In any case, spam is a relatively new thing -- you can hardly expect someone who's never had to deal with it to be an expert at blocking it. You'll notice in the article that he now says he's a 'spam professional' or whatever, and as far as i know he's got it set up better now so that this isn't such a huge problem. But he wasn't always an expert on it and it took a lot of time and new mail servers and help from people who knew more about it and big sites like Yahoo! blocking him and so forth before it was finally kind of under control.
(f) I don't really see where you get off blaming anybody but the spammers. If i shot and killed somebody would you say it was their own fault for not wearing a bullet-proof vest?
Except for this post i was pretty impressed with the responses on Slashdot. A lot of you actually seem to know a little bit what you're talking about, unlike the people on Neowin and Fark and stuff. (Not that they were really discussing the story, of course. On Fark it was mostly joking about Mac users and on Neowin it was just 'hay can u give me sum money lol???'.)
Very mature. If you lose an argument, just call names. I love it! Nothing like an immature baby trying to make a _poor_ point on /. and then calling names!
OK, um....
(a) If you're newfangled enough to figure out the bold tags, you should be able to figure out the italic ones too. <i> isn't so much harder to do than <b>.
(b) You called him an idiot first, what the Hell.
I think you're giving them too much credit by saying that they don't think it's useful or desired. It's not that they just hate tabbed browsing, it's that they don't have to add it. When you have 90% of the browser market, you're not really worried about paying people to add lots of rad features to your browser.
Microsoft will add things one at a time, as the need arises. (Meaning that if their market share continues to be important to them and if they think it's slipping, they'll add just enough to get them by.)
If you don't need any of the extra features, what's the problem with... um, anything? IE sounds like it does exactly what you want it to, if you understand how to use it. There's no such thing as a 'haven for malware' -- the only havens for malware are the warez and porn sites you have to visit to get diallers installed on your computer. I used Internet Explorer for a good, what, 7 or 8 years, and i never got any 'malware', because i browsed responsibly. IE doesn't crash for me, either (no more than any other program, anyway).
Firetruck i'm not a fan of at all, but the only thing that i see wrong with it in your list is that it doesn't render 'identical to how IE renders pages'. The number of pages that actually are broken in Firetruck is very very small. I guess you could try the new AOL browser (which is Firetruck + IE for compatibility)... but i heard that you can't disable tabs in that, so i don't know if you'd like that either.
Opera you can make EXTREMELY minimal if you want, and it's usually closer to how IE renders than Firetruck is. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, themes, and so forth can all be disabled if you want.
These are descriptions of a group of people, OK. It is an undeniable fact that there is a group of people who listen to 50 Cent and wear Abercrombie and Fitch clothing. It's irrefutable. This group of people exists. There's nothing you or i can do about it. What i said in my post was that this group of people (which irrefutably exists) tends to use Y!IM in my area. What trouble are you having with this statement? Where is the stone-throwing in this?
It's like if i said that the people who like emacs and donate to the FSF (a group of people which i'm sure you'll agree irrefutably exists) tend to use Linux. The only reason that you wouldn't call that 'stone-throwing' is the fact that i haven't expressed any distate for emacs or the FSF. My distaste for top-40 radio and Abercrombie and Fitch doesn't make what i said any less true.
No, it doesn't in that case, but it does in mine.
The great majority of kids at school here who listen to top-40 radio and wear Abercrombie and Fitch use Y!IM. Based on all the evidence i've seen, it's a fact. A 'trend' or a 'statistic' if you want a better-feeling word for it, but it's the same thing. Sorry that the group of people that's involved in that fact was portrayed as undesirable, but that doesn't make it less of a fact. Most of the people around here who pay for Internet service have a computer, but i guess i wouldn't want to stereotype anyone.
You imply that i said 'everyone who uses x is y', when what i actually said was 'everyone who is y uses x'. The first is a stereotype. The second is a generalisation based on factual observations. 'All Americans are red-necks' and 'All red-necks live in America' are two different things.
Around here (Iowa), we (and by that i mean my generation -- i'm 18 years old) started out on MSN Messenger. This was in, i don't know, maybe grade five for us 'early adopters' and then six or seven for everybody else. MSN was the thing in my area for all of my friends to use. I don't know why exactly we all started using it (because i'm pretty sure back then MSN wasn't bundled with Windows yet), but we did.
One of my friends went off and found some on-line friends, probably computer-game buddies or something, and because of those friends he started using AIM. After that, he slowly started converting everybody else he (and the rest of us) knew to AIM, and after that everybody pretty much used both.
In secondary school, all of us nerdy types started using Trillian, which pretty much made specific protocols meaningless. Today, most of my friends (both on-line and off-line) have both, whether they use Trillian/Miranda/whatever or not. Probably 3/4 of the ones who don't have AIM only. The other fourth have MSN only.
Currently, MSN is becoming really really popular with the people i'm friends with for some reason, probably because of all the fancy doo-dads they're including now like themes and custom emoticons and big avatars (and i suppose the latter two are actually kind of neat, from a having-fun perspective).
I don't know if this is the norm for my area, but (to generalise) it seems like the more intelligent people are starting to flock to MSN. Whereas a few years ago your typical MSN screen name would be (8)(8)(8)(8)ju$+in CRAWLING IN MY SKIN THESE WOUNDS THEY WILL NOT HEAL FEAR IS HOW I FALL CONFUSING WHAT IS REAL sandy i luv u(8)(8)(8)(8), people are actually starting to be, you know, not retarded about it. e.g., they'll just use their name or their handle instead of putting an entire song in it. I don't know, maybe that's just a sign of increased maturity. It applies to younger kids (still in high school) that i know, too, though, so who knows.
ON THE OTHER HAND, the trendy girls and all the boys who try to hit on them, the kind of people i'd call 'preps', who listen exclusively to top-40 radio and wear Abercrombie and Fitch, stick with Yahoo!'s messenger. I don't really know why -- Y!IM is hideous and bloated, but OK. My little brothers and sisters use Y!IM, and they have, you know, 9084058940809345 different buddies and every single one of them has a screen name like the ridiculous one i described above, except of course it's Nelly lyrics or something. These are the kids who can't spell 'you'.
I suppose maybe one factor that contributed to the adoption of Y!IM by the middle-schoolers and freshmen in my area was the fact that Y!IM has a built-in radio thing, which means they can sit there and listen to 50 Cent while they're chatting about LOL SHUTUP SUK MY KOK GURL.
Just thought you'd be interested in hearing about the social break-down in relation to instant messengers in my area!
He appreciates that that's a bad example, though, before anyone starts jumping up and down.
... Right? Are you trying to prove me wrong or what. :/
Who is the fool?
Listen, you're trying to argue against the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent being. This being supposedly CREATED THE UNIVERSE. He is ALL-POWERFUL. To accept that a being like that could possibly exist is to accept that a being like that created any 'evidence' you have against his existence.
I mean, i don't believe in God either, but you can't pretend to be more enlightened than someone else when you have no evidence that an all-powerful God doesn't exist. In order to use anything in the universe as evidence of God's non-existence, you have to prove that God isn't all-powerful. Which is a pretty big task.
lol ya i aggree w/ him ^
Essays carelessly written will be carelessly edited. Problems never fix themselves.
Ah. So much for the benefits of open-source software.
Big whoop. You are telling me you can answer a triva question by clicking on Google.
Right, and? Everybody knows different things. If you know about Churchill's personal beliefs and i know about his biographical statistics, we have a (more) complete article. An encyclopaedia is a source of information, not entertainment. You're not writing it for the prestige or the honour or the chance to show off how much you know. You're writing it to compile a comprehensive description of a topic. How many people it takes to get that description written and how ungenuine (or whatever adjective you might want to apply to someone whose knowledge is gained by 'clicking on Google') the knowledge of those people is are completely irrelevant when you have your completed description.
You allow yourself an excuse to be lazy. That is by definition second-rate.
Whatever. Why does it matter whether two second-rate guys or one first-rate guy wrote the article? :/
I'm not like a big Wikipedia zealot, and there are a couple things i think are retarded about it, but i don't know, i just think you're being way too harsh on it.
Why should you have to be first-rate to contribute something? Obviously most (not all, mind you) of the people on Wikipedia aren't really, um, 'qualified' (formally trained or educated) to contribute, but that doesn't change anything. If it was just one person writing each article, then maybe you'd have a legitimate complaint, but the fact that it's a collaborative thing means that most of the problems presented by 'the second-rate' fix themselves.
I don't have to be a professional biographer to write a paragraph on where and when Winston Churchill was born, for example, and with the resources of the Internet at my disposal that's even more the case. Maybe it's not as prestigious or serious as being a Marconi or Einstein, but it gets the job done. And supposing i do get it wrong, well, there's a good chance that there is some expert on Winston Churchill on Wikipedia that will fix it.
Not to mention, you don't necessarily have to contribute substance. Usually when i see something on Wikipedia that i can contribute, it comes in the form of grammar or organisation corrections (like maybe a misplaced comma or a repeated word or an out-of-order sentence or something). Certainly doesn't make me the most valuable person there, but every bit helps.
Well... although not doing research or source comparisons is certainly questionable, i don't see why you'd have to be an expert on anything to contribute to an encyclopaedia. I'm not an expert on anything in particular (not that i know of, anyway), but that doesn't mean that there aren't certain things that i know a lot (or even a little) about. The fact that i'm not some kind of IT professional or a trained linguist or whatever doesn't mean that there aren't things that i can contribute to the topics of IT and language, and, um, with the addition of some Googling and stuff that's even more true.
Hellooo Internet everywhere. Can't find a good AP for your cheap WiFi card? Plug in your cell phone and surf the net at ~56k speeds for only $10+whatever you're paying your cellphone provider.
I'm pretty sure you've been able to do that for a long time. My dad used to have a thing where he could somehow plug his mobile phone into his lap-top and use it to get on the Internet (very slowly, of course). And this was a few years BEFORE everyone and their dog had a mobile.
You know, uh, Internet Explorer has a very similar feature. And i'm pretty sure it's had it for, like, almost the last decade.
INTERNET EXPLORER FOR PRESIDENT
Do you really think they host all those ads themselves? *.doubleclick.net is in my hosts file, and I don't see many ads on that site.
I'm not talking about the ads, i'm talking about the images they use all over in the page design. For example, there are like twenty unique images on the front page that could just as well be got rid of. That doesn't sound like much since they're probably all like 5k GIF files, but with a site as popular as SuprNova that just seems to me like it's got to affect the speed a little.
Try here if you have trouble finding things.
I know how to use the search function. Sometimes i just like to browse, though, and if i'm looking for (for example) general metal stuff, i don't want to have to think to myself, 'gee, maybe the idiots put it in alternative or pop or indie or blues'. :/
I mean it's not like SuprNova is OMG UNUSEABLE, but it does annoy me lots.
I never said i deserved anything. The fact that something fucking sucks doesn't mean that i think i deserve better. It just means that it fucking sucks.
Also, i'm disappointed. I had figured that, you know, by the time people reached Slashdot age they would have realised that 'ID LIEK TO C YOU DO BETER' isn't a valid arguement against criticism.
I personally couldn't care less about any of the benefits 'Exeem' has to offer except for the fact that it means the death of SuprNova. SuprNova is absolutely the WORST site i have ever seen. It's slow, it's ugly, and it doesn't work half the time (and by that i mean that because they use some retarded JavaScript i have to go back to the front page and retrace my steps every time i want to look at a new sub-category because the JavaScript doesn't update the page properly in my browser).
You'd think a site with such ridiculous bandwidth usage would consider doing something to, you know, limit the size of each page, but of course not with SuprNova. They load every single one with as much JavaScript and images and redundant garbage as they can.
Not to mention that the people who upload the Torrents seem to be a little stupid. I know we could spend all day arguing musical genres, but i hardly consider Metallica 'indie', and i can't fathom why anyone would think to look there for it.
So, um, yeah. If it gets rid of SuprNova i'm all for it. <_<