... do you hear that sound? That screeching sound? That's the sound of the fingernails of Yahoo executives trying desperately to cling onto the edge of the abyss.
No flame wars about Hawking? What are you talking about? The flame war was already begun with that completely inappropriate comment about Wheeler being the last great physicist still standing. That was out of line, mister submitter.
Yes, absolutely! Why submit an article about the sad death of a great man and then completely trivialize it with a cheap shot at Hawking. Knowing full well that all you'll do is make the comments about Hawking. Cheap and disrespectful. Let's try and make this about Wheeler and be more dignified than the submitter please.
Yep, that's exactly right. It's easy to sell Firefox because that's a name that sounds exciting. People want to know what Firefox is just based on the name. Shallow, sure -- but welcome to Earth.
A product named GIMP ain't going nowhere -- face it. Not even if it were a good substitute for its competition, which it still very much is not. While changing the name won't improve the utility of the product, at least it will encourage more people to use it -- and thus maybe develop for it too.
Absolutely! Wikiality is exactly like newspapers in many ways -- and this is its primary flaw, and the point of this article. Newspapers have a powerful lobby and an agenda behind every news story. One that subtly uses semiotics and wordplay to manipulate emotion and how facts are perceived.
Wikipedians do exactly the same things. For all the talk of NPOV on every discussion page, it's little more than talk. Almost every music related page is essentially fan site, and spam too -- music is a commercial product, from an evil industry. For some bizarre reason people don't equate music promotion with spam. And there's music spam on most other pages too - e.g. "xyz" wrote a song about "Cyprus" or whatever.
And then there's the much noted cabals. Political pages, religion pages, controversial authors, you name it - there's groups working every hour of every day to ensure the facts are as they see them.
And then theres the Wikipedia admins... the real problem with the site. Some of them have been proven to be frauds, to have criminal convictions -- and yet they manipulate facts, they have their own little agendas, they block entire countries IP addresses, or the addresses of individuals they dislike (or who are protesting the nature of an article). "Vandalism" isn't necessary vandalism -- they've never actually defined that word. It's like "terrorism" is to a newspaper - a license to do what you like in the name of "truthiness". Would Galileo be a vandal, would Rosa Parks? Is Stephen Colbert?
What's non-notable and who has the right to decide, why even decide, what the problem if it's not very notable but not spam? This is just like the way news editors manipulate facts and decide who's flavor of the month.
And then there's Jimbo... good old Jimbo. His relationship with Wikiality, his "misunderstanding" of non-profit and commercial, and "expenses". And his much documented, and much flawed history. Not to mention his autocracy and views on Ayn Rand.
How is Jimbo different from Rupert Murdoch? I see very little difference. Well... other than Jimbo has so far managed to mislead people into thinking that Wikipedia is "open" and somehow "open source" -- when the reality is far, far from that.
Languages still have rules, even if they are informal.
However, the beauty of English over many other languages is that it is still possible to massacre grammar and spelling and still be perfectly understandable. This article is wholly understandable. There's really no need for any issue. Instead of funny or insightful comments relating to this very interesting article, we've got a dozen pointless, pedantic posts by grammar nazis. Be off with you all, return to wikipedia along with others who enjoy rules for rules sake.
All nazis must die, and grammar nazis are not excluded from this.
He's gone from Google -- not evil (as far as we know, pretty much)...
...to EMI - yes, marginally less evil than Sony BMG, but still as evil as an evil thing on a black day in a bad mood -- one of the Four Horsemen of Evil in fact.
If the banks were the ones losing money through ID theft they'd do it in an heartbeat. For sure. However, you lose your ID, you lose the money. Your bank's just fine thank you very much.
It's not happening... it should, yes. But it's not.
Slashdot could join in by reviving the OMG Ponies theme. Pink is close enough to magenta, right?
T-Mobile calls that color "magenta" but any normal person sees it as pink. It's pink. Clearly. Also, it's an horrific shade of pink, you'd be completely crazy to use it in a brand - unless you are indeed making toy ponies. The OMG Ponies theme burned our eyes, so just think what hell it must be to work for Deutsche Telekom (the pink thing just the tip of the iceberg there too).
One firm being that stupid is surprising, two is stupefying.
One quick and easy way to make the web a safer place would be for ActiveX to be shunned by everyone. If you are a web developer, simply refuse to use it.
I'm old enough to remember the Jet Set era. Air travel was so glamorous then. But now...
Phones. The latest in a series of moves designed to make traveling on a plane as excruciating as possible. Were I wearing a tinfoil hat I might even think it were a deliberate policy to discourage people from taking planes, in the name of terrorism or whatever this week's Reichstag fire is.
First there's the awful journey in a car and the cost of parking in the long-term carpark (slightly cheaper than buying your own plane). Or a similar fee in any taxi, should you decide to leave your car at home.
Next up is the confusing maze of finding your check-in point in a plastic ugly 60s monstrosity designed by the same blind architect who also does all the world's supermarket carparks.
Then you wait in line to check-in. Usually behind a Mongolian rugby team, who all have visa issues, and who all want to ask very, very detailed questions about their seats.
Then there's the security check. The hours of waiting, then the removing of shoes, belts, rings, laptops, false teeth, and god knows whatever else. This despite the fact that it's pretty easy to throttle a steward using the shoulder strap on your carry-on.
Then you have to hang around for hours in the departure lounge (you arrived 3 hours early to beat the lines at security). You fill the time by buying bad coffee which costs about the same as 100 gallons of avation fuel. Tastes like it too.
Then you get on the plane....
And now some fucker's gonna sit and phone for hours?
Screw planes, I'm going by boat. It's probably quicker.
Would you mind as much if this was only used for text messages and data plans for in-flight communications using a laptop? What if phones were forced into vibrate mode when they detected the picocell on the plane?
The vibration mode thing seems like an essential thing (in ALL public places actually). The sound made by incoming texts is just as annoying as some retard talking on the plane into their phone. It's Pavlovian. The sound of incoming message alert is designed to attract the attention of the recipient -- unfortunately this also means everyone else within 40 feet.
As an aside, I'm sure there must be a way of mathematically proving that the altitude of a phone call is inversely proportional to importance of the call.
But by the context of the summary, it seems I am getting exactly the opposite of it.
Although I consider myself quite good at English, it is not my main language.
Can someone clear this up for me?
Pendant! You know perfectly well what these sentences mean. That's the beauty of English, it's flexible and yet understandable. One would have hoped Grammar Nazis (all Nazis actually) would have been long dead by 2008. Sadly, such vermin needlessly still pollute the planet.
I guess the Chinese may also have figured that there's no point in blocking a site from a more restricted country than them. The UK or China -- which one has the 5 million security cameras again?
Totally correct. People forget that the BBC is, and always has been, a propaganda tool for the UK Government -- probably an espionage tool too.
My first thought on seeing this article was that the most likely reason was a deal done by the BBC / UK Government and China -- i.e. not that China was becoming more liberal, but that the BBC had agreed on certain censorships.
Maybe it's just me, but Google seems to be this huge juggernaut of mediocrity and rehashed advertising. That's not to say they were always that way. They were all about great search engines, mapping software, and other web stuff. But now they are all about advertising channels.
I guess I would have put it less bluntly, but no, it's not just you. It's now 11 years since Google was established and in that time they have done the usual corporate consolidation and synergy technologies thing. Their core business is still search. Has search improved in those 11 years? No, it has not. In fact, as people have become more skilled at gaming Google, and Google is the only show of note in town, search has actually got worse.
Google seriously needs competition. We all need this to happen. It's good for them, good for everyone else.
Re:for those of us old enough to remmeber...
on
The Death of Windows XP
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I'm old enough to remember...
Here's what you're missing... Win95 did have a number of significant improvements over 3.11. Vista does not have significant improvements over XP. It's a few security fixes, lots of eye candy, and lots of DRM or similar protectionist practices that mean you have to contact MS every time you switch your hard drive.
There is no benefit whatsoever in switching to Vista. There are, however, consequences in terms of performance and in the freedom to change hardware etc. It might have been a different story if they'd delivered the Vista they initially promised -- the one with the new file system etc. The Vista they eventually delivered had none of that -- no significant improvements, no "must have" features whatsoever.
American Evangelicals don't go suicide bombing anyone that disagrees with their point of view. They also don't call for the execution of cartoonists that portray Jesus disrespectfully...
Why is this modded insightful? It's actually mostly incorrect. So, it's is strictly speaking correct that evangelicals don't go suicide bombing, but try asking someone who is pro-choice or works in an abortion clinic if their life has been put in danger by evangelicals. You'll find they have been threatened or even harmed. Some have been killed.
Consider also that the KKK is essentially an evangelical organization.
Similarly the vast majority of Muslims have never even thought of bombing as a suicide technique.
The idiots find religion as an excuse -- all, and any, religion -- it's not that any one religion is bad or responsible for the ills of the World. All religions have their zealots, and their lunatics.
Slashdot Mirror
... do you hear that sound? That screeching sound? That's the sound of the fingernails of Yahoo executives trying desperately to cling onto the edge of the abyss.
easy, flying sharks!
Yep, that's exactly right. It's easy to sell Firefox because that's a name that sounds exciting. People want to know what Firefox is just based on the name. Shallow, sure -- but welcome to Earth.
A product named GIMP ain't going nowhere -- face it. Not even if it were a good substitute for its competition, which it still very much is not. While changing the name won't improve the utility of the product, at least it will encourage more people to use it -- and thus maybe develop for it too.
Wikipedians do exactly the same things. For all the talk of NPOV on every discussion page, it's little more than talk. Almost every music related page is essentially fan site, and spam too -- music is a commercial product, from an evil industry. For some bizarre reason people don't equate music promotion with spam. And there's music spam on most other pages too - e.g. "xyz" wrote a song about "Cyprus" or whatever.
And then there's the much noted cabals. Political pages, religion pages, controversial authors, you name it - there's groups working every hour of every day to ensure the facts are as they see them.
And then theres the Wikipedia admins... the real problem with the site. Some of them have been proven to be frauds, to have criminal convictions -- and yet they manipulate facts, they have their own little agendas, they block entire countries IP addresses, or the addresses of individuals they dislike (or who are protesting the nature of an article). "Vandalism" isn't necessary vandalism -- they've never actually defined that word. It's like "terrorism" is to a newspaper - a license to do what you like in the name of "truthiness". Would Galileo be a vandal, would Rosa Parks? Is Stephen Colbert?
What's non-notable and who has the right to decide, why even decide, what the problem if it's not very notable but not spam? This is just like the way news editors manipulate facts and decide who's flavor of the month.
And then there's Jimbo... good old Jimbo. His relationship with Wikiality, his "misunderstanding" of non-profit and commercial, and "expenses". And his much documented, and much flawed history. Not to mention his autocracy and views on Ayn Rand.
How is Jimbo different from Rupert Murdoch? I see very little difference. Well... other than Jimbo has so far managed to mislead people into thinking that Wikipedia is "open" and somehow "open source" -- when the reality is far, far from that.
All nazis must die, and grammar nazis are not excluded from this.
The poor man...
...to EMI - yes, marginally less evil than Sony BMG, but still as evil as an evil thing on a black day in a bad mood -- one of the Four Horsemen of Evil in fact.
He's gone from Google -- not evil (as far as we know, pretty much)...
What's his name, this CIO? Faust?
It's not happening... it should, yes. But it's not.
One firm being that stupid is surprising, two is stupefying.
who ya gonna call?
Geistbusters!
One quick and easy way to make the web a safer place would be for ActiveX to be shunned by everyone. If you are a web developer, simply refuse to use it.
Phones. The latest in a series of moves designed to make traveling on a plane as excruciating as possible. Were I wearing a tinfoil hat I might even think it were a deliberate policy to discourage people from taking planes, in the name of terrorism or whatever this week's Reichstag fire is.
- First there's the awful journey in a car and the cost of parking in the long-term carpark (slightly cheaper than buying your own plane). Or a similar fee in any taxi, should you decide to leave your car at home.
- Next up is the confusing maze of finding your check-in point in a plastic ugly 60s monstrosity designed by the same blind architect who also does all the world's supermarket carparks.
- Then you wait in line to check-in. Usually behind a Mongolian rugby team, who all have visa issues, and who all want to ask very, very detailed questions about their seats.
- Then there's the security check. The hours of waiting, then the removing of shoes, belts, rings, laptops, false teeth, and god knows whatever else. This despite the fact that it's pretty easy to throttle a steward using the shoulder strap on your carry-on.
- Then you have to hang around for hours in the departure lounge (you arrived 3 hours early to beat the lines at security). You fill the time by buying bad coffee which costs about the same as 100 gallons of avation fuel. Tastes like it too.
- Then you get on the plane....
And now some fucker's gonna sit and phone for hours?Screw planes, I'm going by boat. It's probably quicker.
so very true.
As an aside, I'm sure there must be a way of mathematically proving that the altitude of a phone call is inversely proportional to importance of the call.
I guess the Chinese may also have figured that there's no point in blocking a site from a more restricted country than them. The UK or China -- which one has the 5 million security cameras again?
Mod parent Insightful.
Totally correct. People forget that the BBC is, and always has been, a propaganda tool for the UK Government -- probably an espionage tool too.
My first thought on seeing this article was that the most likely reason was a deal done by the BBC / UK Government and China -- i.e. not that China was becoming more liberal, but that the BBC had agreed on certain censorships.
Google seriously needs competition. We all need this to happen. It's good for them, good for everyone else.
I'm old enough to remember...
Here's what you're missing... Win95 did have a number of significant improvements over 3.11. Vista does not have significant improvements over XP. It's a few security fixes, lots of eye candy, and lots of DRM or similar protectionist practices that mean you have to contact MS every time you switch your hard drive.
There is no benefit whatsoever in switching to Vista. There are, however, consequences in terms of performance and in the freedom to change hardware etc. It might have been a different story if they'd delivered the Vista they initially promised -- the one with the new file system etc. The Vista they eventually delivered had none of that -- no significant improvements, no "must have" features whatsoever.
And all of them (apparently) live stream your personal data to every advertiser on the planet.
Graphene Gulch is kinda cool though. It's much more Chuck Norris than Silicon Valley.
Consider also that the KKK is essentially an evangelical organization.
Similarly the vast majority of Muslims have never even thought of bombing as a suicide technique.
The idiots find religion as an excuse -- all, and any, religion -- it's not that any one religion is bad or responsible for the ills of the World. All religions have their zealots, and their lunatics.
Mod parent overrated.
The IT staff is malicious AND highly incompetent.