Apparently, Didier Benchimol, VP of Netscape Europe is part of this outfit. I attempted to confirm that Didier Benchimol really is VP of NS Euro, but, alas, it was too late when I tried to call the California offices of Netscape. Perhaps a few calls/emails to Benchimol's Netscape offices (and his superiors at NS) might be beneficial. EUROPEAN HEADQUARTERS Netscape Communications SA CNIT, B.P. 370 2 Place de La Défense 92053 Paris-La-Défense France +33 1/41.97.55.55 +33 1/41.97.55.00 Fax
We've known for decades that life can develop in some of the most hostile environments known to man. From the hottest, driest desert, to the deepest depths of the ocean, and even in sulfur-laden and extremely "toxic" areas by undersea lava vents, there is life. And not just the odd creature or two. Every environment on earth (with perhaps the exception of the interior of active volcanos) is TEAMING with life. Fifty years ago, suggesting life existed in some of these places made you a crackpot. Now that we've found life in almost every imaginable environement on earth, why does thinking that equally complex and sophisticated ecosystems have developed in not just a few places in the Universe besides Earth still make you an extremist? I think it's time for the establishment to encourage a little more free-thinking among the scientific research community. There is NO environment on Earth that is truly lifeless. Why would any other planet be much different?
Seriously, then a great deal of the effort that went into the Linux kernel would have gone into either BSD and/or HURD. The way I see it, the time has come for OSS. If it hadn't been Linux, it would have been SOMETHING... It was inevitable.
I am always amazed how/. folks overreact to such obvious stupidity. ZDnet was a total joke before this, and this level of "journalism" is nothing new for them. Lay off the Christians, too. Believe it or not, most of them aren't wacko fundamentalists. I'd be in deep shit and get labeled anti-semitic if I railed against Jews the way some of you guys do Christians. People are WAY too quick to overreact nowadays. And as for the BSD T-shirt story, not everyone from Alabama or Texas is not an intolerant bigotted redneck. <SARCASM>Of course, everyone who reads slashdot is a pimply virgin teenage script-kiddy, right<
Lucas is to movies as Gates is to software
on
More Star Wars Hype
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· Score: 4
It seems to me that a community as intelligent and perceptive as the/. folks would see that Lucas has us all by the short and curlies, same as Gates has most of the non-technical lusers in the world. We are being manipulated and milked for our time and money, and we're letting it happen. How could the movie ever possibly live up to all the expectations that've been built up by all the hype? It can't. Why are we going to spend 5 and 6 dollars at a time for plastic toys worth less than a dollar? Why are we going to rush to the theatres, wait days and days in line, and spend 8 or 12 dollars a ticket, when in 3 months we can get in without waiting at all? To say "We were there when IT first showed"?? Big fuckin' deal. Theatres will probably run the damned thing until November, so what's the rush? And screw the whole merchandising monstrosity. Who thought I'd want to see lame-ass Darth Maul on my Mountain Dew bottle? He looks more like an ugly, angry circus clown with that ridiculous make up than he does a "ph33rs0m3 \/1ll41n". Vader was 10 times the villain this painted joke could ever be.
All I was really saying was that if they came up to someone who had treated them with a single iota of decency, I don't think they'd have shot them. Yes, these boys had other problems, and their apparently racist behavior was a way of channeling the hate they felt in general towards a specific target. I did not and cannot condone violence as an answer to what these boys were feeling. I'm sure that the racism is something they learned from some influential adult figure. Kids do NOT automatically hate. It's learned. Either by heaping derision upon them, and making them hate, or by example. Where did these kids learn it? At the hand of the bullying "in crowd," under the wing of a parent or other adult, or both? My money says both.
Maybe this will make the "ins" realize the "outs" are human beings, and have breaking points. I'm sure these boys did what they did because they were sick and tired of being treated like shit. It's sad and terrible and tragic that peoples' sons and daughters are dead. But how many of them that died ever bothered for one second to treat the boys that did this like real human beings? I'd bet none. So be warned. If you don't treat your fellow human beings as equal, it could happen to you. And if you treat others like shit, whose to say you didn't deserve it? Maybe the jocks SHOULD be the ones afraid of the geeks, instead of the way it is now. Food for thought. If you don't like my opinion, get your own.
There was a link of the day at userfriendly to a Mr. T vs. Half-Life page a while back, but this was an absolute goldmine of cheap, "Helluva-Funny" laughs! I love Rob's Quickies (wink, wink)!
Lots of people who don't code (or, like me, don't code well enough to matter) wonder what they can do. Documentation is definitely a HUGE help, and a laborious task for those more involved in actually improving and enhancing the stuff we work with every day.
You are, on some points, right. We have to do things in the here-and-now to avoid such a bleak future. Again, I must stress that what I found totally unfunny about these pranks was that it could very well happen. And in the future, it may not be because of big money lawyers threatening litigation. It may be the "authorities," and they may do far worse and shut down a web site. The line between what the joke was about, and the dark and terrible future that may yet exist is an infinitessimally small one. What I could (and should) have said in far fewer words is "Let's be thankful it was just a harmless, if ill-conceived, prank."
But there are still some things too important to make jokes about. At the least, they are too important to make jokes about in such a public forum. Whether you agree with me or not on that point, I do not care. It is my opinion, and you are entitled to your own. You may also purchase a copy of my opinion for the low, low price of either a BeOS or Open BSD CD for my next box.
Do I detect a hint of sarcasm?
on
Slashdot:Mark 2
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· Score: 1
You have a valid point. There may come a day, however, when we _CAN'T_ make jokes about freedom of speech/press because there won't be any. You know where I'll be then? Me and ESR and Jesse Ventura will be in a bunker with food, guns, and our families. And it may come to that sooner than we can imagine. That's what makes today's jokes a lot less funny. As far as your list of things we shouldn't joke about, making a list like that comes way too close to censorship for me. Self-imposed common sense about what is and isn't funny ought to work a lot better for what should be a fairly intelligent community like ours.
I just don't think it's funny
on
Slashdot:Mark 2
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· Score: 1
As I said, free speech protects all jokes, even really bad ones. All I meant was that this was an elaborate and _UN_funny joke about a matter that we might not be able to make jokes about someday. Chill, I can manage. Enjoy? It would have to be funny first. BTW, now that UF is back up, today's strip is a riot.
If these shutdowns are a 4/1 joke....
on
Slashdot:Mark 2
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· Score: 3
If all these site "shutdowns" are an April Fool's Day joke, it's in poor taste. I've got as much of a sense of humor as the next guy, but, come on! Some people don't take matters like freedom of speech as a joking matter. I'm all for freedom of speech on the internet as well as our day-to-day lives. But this kind of thing is _almost_ like the radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds." I nearly freaked when I hit my Daily Static bookmark, and there was nothing there but a legal statement. I was angry as hell. A good practical joke does not make people angry or scared about their own freedom! Granted, free speech allows really bad practical jokes, but if this is what Illiad and the other webmasters find funny.... Well, I'd be very disappointed. And/. is now a portal/news/communtiy/HUMOR site? heheh Methinks not. Rob's idea of funny is "Duckpins."
I have hounded them for Linux ports for ages, it seems like. The blanket response has always been the "Thank you for your interest. If sufficient market demands make it feasible, we will consider porting to your platform. But until that happens, there are no plans at this time." That's paraphrased, but you get the idea. A polite brush-off. If all the musicians I knew would get on their case, maybe we could persuade them to give it serious consideration. It'd be great for them to get on the BeOS bandwagon, but it would still mean another OS for me. Not that I'm not inclined to get Be in addition to my beloved Caldera OpenLinux, but it'd be nice to be able to sequence something in whatever OS I'm on when the mood strikes me without a reboot into something else, which is what I have to do now if I'm in Linux.
The point I was trying to make in my original post was that it's kind of pointless to "codename" an OS or other project in development. If it's going to be Mac OS 10, then call it that from the get-go. Just like codenaming Chicago or Memphis. If you're writing something, and you know what it will ultimately be, then call it what it is: WhateverOS v. #X, alpha version, beta version, pre-final version, or what ever is appropriate. To borrow from the wisdom of Eddie Murphy, "His momma call him Cassius Clay, I'll call him Cassius Clay." Obviously noone caught the intended humor, so it must not have been funny to anyone but me.
One of the few reasons I keep a dos partition is to run Cakewalk, Sound Forge, and, to a lesser extent, Sonic Foundry's (the SoundForge people) ACID. It'd be great to get equal or better apps on an OS whose uptime can be measured on a calendar rather than a stopwatch. Looks like maybe that day is near! I've been dying for a reason to get Be, and now it's here. I'm a happy geek!
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, Didier Benchimol, VP of Netscape Europe is part of this outfit. I attempted to confirm that Didier Benchimol really is VP of NS Euro, but, alas, it was too late when I tried to call the California offices of Netscape. Perhaps a few calls/emails to Benchimol's Netscape offices (and his superiors at NS) might be beneficial. EUROPEAN HEADQUARTERS Netscape Communications SA CNIT, B.P. 370 2 Place de La Défense 92053 Paris-La-Défense France +33 1/41.97.55.55 +33 1/41.97.55.00 Fax
We've known for decades that life can develop in some of the most hostile environments known to man. From the hottest, driest desert, to the deepest depths of the ocean, and even in sulfur-laden and extremely "toxic" areas by undersea lava vents, there is life. And not just the odd creature or two. Every environment on earth (with perhaps the exception of the interior of active volcanos) is TEAMING with life. Fifty years ago, suggesting life existed in some of these places made you a crackpot. Now that we've found life in almost every imaginable environement on earth, why does thinking that equally complex and sophisticated ecosystems have developed in not just a few places in the Universe besides Earth still make you an extremist? I think it's time for the establishment to encourage a little more free-thinking among the scientific research community. There is NO environment on Earth that is truly lifeless. Why would any other planet be much different?
See obvious FLAMEBAIT above, please...
... Instead of Tux ones :)
Seriously, then a great deal of the effort that went into the Linux kernel would have gone into either BSD and/or HURD. The way I see it, the time has come for OSS. If it hadn't been Linux, it would have been SOMETHING... It was inevitable.
I'd love to participate in that. :)
I am always amazed how /. folks overreact to such obvious stupidity. ZDnet was a total joke before this, and this level of "journalism" is nothing new for them. Lay off the Christians, too. Believe it or not, most of them aren't wacko fundamentalists. I'd be in deep shit and get labeled anti-semitic if I railed against Jews the way some of you guys do Christians. People are WAY too quick to overreact nowadays. And as for the BSD T-shirt story, not everyone from Alabama or Texas is not an intolerant bigotted redneck. <SARCASM>Of course, everyone who reads slashdot is a pimply virgin teenage script-kiddy, right<
It seems to me that a community as intelligent and perceptive as the /. folks would see that Lucas has us all by the short and curlies, same as Gates has most of the non-technical lusers in the world. We are being manipulated and milked for our time and money, and we're letting it happen. How could the movie ever possibly live up to all the expectations that've been built up by all the hype? It can't. Why are we going to spend 5 and 6 dollars at a time for plastic toys worth less than a dollar? Why are we going to rush to the theatres, wait days and days in line, and spend 8 or 12 dollars a ticket, when in 3 months we can get in without waiting at all? To say "We were there when IT first showed"?? Big fuckin' deal. Theatres will probably run the damned thing until November, so what's the rush? And screw the whole merchandising monstrosity. Who thought I'd want to see lame-ass Darth Maul on my Mountain Dew bottle? He looks more like an ugly, angry circus clown with that ridiculous make up than he does a "ph33rs0m3 \/1ll41n". Vader was 10 times the villain this painted joke could ever be.
/rant
Thanks for validating the clarification I made a little earlier.
All I was really saying was that if they came up to someone who had treated them with a single iota of decency, I don't think they'd have shot them. Yes, these boys had other problems, and their apparently racist behavior was a way of channeling the hate they felt in general towards a specific target. I did not and cannot condone violence as an answer to what these boys were feeling. I'm sure that the racism is something they learned from some influential adult figure. Kids do NOT automatically hate. It's learned. Either by heaping derision upon them, and making them hate, or by example. Where did these kids learn it? At the hand of the bullying "in crowd," under the wing of a parent or other adult, or both? My money says both.
Maybe this will make the "ins" realize the "outs" are human beings, and have breaking points. I'm sure these boys did what they did because they were sick and tired of being treated like shit. It's sad and terrible and tragic that peoples' sons and daughters are dead. But how many of them that died ever bothered for one second to treat the boys that did this like real human beings? I'd bet none. So be warned. If you don't treat your fellow human beings as equal, it could happen to you. And if you treat others like shit, whose to say you didn't deserve it? Maybe the jocks SHOULD be the ones afraid of the geeks, instead of the way it is now. Food for thought. If you don't like my opinion, get your own.
There was a link of the day at userfriendly to a Mr. T vs. Half-Life page a while back, but this was an absolute goldmine of cheap, "Helluva-Funny" laughs! I love Rob's Quickies (wink, wink)!
Lots of people who don't code (or, like me, don't code well enough to matter) wonder what they can do. Documentation is definitely a HUGE help, and a laborious task for those more involved in actually improving and enhancing the stuff we work with every day.
But there are still some things too important to make jokes about. At the least, they are too important to make jokes about in such a public forum. Whether you agree with me or not on that point, I do not care. It is my opinion, and you are entitled to your own. You may also purchase a copy of my opinion for the low, low price of either a BeOS or Open BSD CD for my next box.
You have a valid point. There may come a day, however, when we _CAN'T_ make jokes about freedom of speech/press because there won't be any. You know where I'll be then? Me and ESR and Jesse Ventura will be in a bunker with food, guns, and our families. And it may come to that sooner than we can imagine. That's what makes today's jokes a lot less funny. As far as your list of things we shouldn't joke about, making a list like that comes way too close to censorship for me. Self-imposed common sense about what is and isn't funny ought to work a lot better for what should be a fairly intelligent community like ours.
As I said, free speech protects all jokes, even really bad ones. All I meant was that this was an elaborate and _UN_funny joke about a matter that we might not be able to make jokes about someday. Chill, I can manage. Enjoy? It would have to be funny first. BTW, now that UF is back up, today's strip is a riot.
If all these site "shutdowns" are an April Fool's Day joke, it's in poor taste. I've got as much of a sense of humor as the next guy, but, come on! Some people don't take matters like freedom of speech as a joking matter. I'm all for freedom of speech on the internet as well as our day-to-day lives. But this kind of thing is _almost_ like the radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds." I nearly freaked when I hit my Daily Static bookmark, and there was nothing there but a legal statement. I was angry as hell. A good practical joke does not make people angry or scared about their own freedom! Granted, free speech allows really bad practical jokes, but if this is what Illiad and the other webmasters find funny.... Well, I'd be very disappointed. And /. is now a portal/news/communtiy/HUMOR site? heheh Methinks not. Rob's idea of funny is "Duckpins."
I have hounded them for Linux ports for ages, it seems like. The blanket response has always been the "Thank you for your interest. If sufficient market demands make it feasible, we will consider porting to your platform. But until that happens, there are no plans at this time." That's paraphrased, but you get the idea. A polite brush-off. If all the musicians I knew would get on their case, maybe we could persuade them to give it serious consideration. It'd be great for them to get on the BeOS bandwagon, but it would still mean another OS for me. Not that I'm not inclined to get Be in addition to my beloved Caldera OpenLinux, but it'd be nice to be able to sequence something in whatever OS I'm on when the mood strikes me without a reboot into something else, which is what I have to do now if I'm in Linux.
The point I was trying to make in my original post was that it's kind of pointless to "codename" an OS or other project in development. If it's going to be Mac OS 10, then call it that from the get-go. Just like codenaming Chicago or Memphis. If you're writing something, and you know what it will ultimately be, then call it what it is: WhateverOS v. #X, alpha version, beta version, pre-final version, or what ever is appropriate. To borrow from the wisdom of Eddie Murphy, "His momma call him Cassius Clay, I'll call him Cassius Clay." Obviously noone caught the intended humor, so it must not have been funny to anyone but me.
One of the few reasons I keep a dos partition is to run Cakewalk, Sound Forge, and, to a lesser extent, Sonic Foundry's (the SoundForge people) ACID. It'd be great to get equal or better apps on an OS whose uptime can be measured on a calendar rather than a stopwatch. Looks like maybe that day is near! I've been dying for a reason to get Be, and now it's here. I'm a happy geek!
Perhaps an appropriate poll would be something like this:
Which has undergone more name changes?
John Cougar Mellencamp []
Rhapsody []
As usual, there'd probably be some bitching about lack of choices, but we're used to that around here from all the whiners.