Oh, come on. I run it on my BBS and people play that sack of doo-doo even less than they play poker.
LoRD was fun and simple, TW2002 0wns, Usurper's keen, OO][ rocked the casbah... but LoRD2? Jinkies.
Nice revisionist history you're writing there, partner. As someone who was bitten on the ass by that multiple times, I can tell you the solution to my problem: flashing my VIA's BIOS to a more recent rev. You can either do that or you can disable ACPI. Microsoft never released a fix for it because they never had a bug of their own to begin with; it was VIA's fault through and through.
FWIW, after one of these corruptions (hasn't happened since the BIOS flash) I rolled back my registry and Office 2K didn't complain one bit about it. Go figure.
Do they have DeCSS source code on their front page or something? They should embed some of it in their metatags; then if the pesky other parties refuse to cease and desist their nefarious linking ways, they can just have law enforcement step in and take care of business.
My heart goes out to anyone who actually has to apply ACLs to a machine operating in a multiuser environment. This is something that *nux has long since, uh. You mean you have to set things up there too?
See also: multiple users.
Here's a starting point for you to consider: "The Orange Book C2 specification is for standalone, nondistributed computing environments and non-networked devices." There's no security without physical security and a floppy/CD attached to a computer giving you a workaround from the single pathflow of username/password login to an ACL-controlled environment fails the C2 spec by default. No one brags about Orange Book certifications because no one enforces it because it's freaking useless in every conceivable work environment. No network + no disk drives == no sneakernet == why bother?
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, but if you were to ask the average Slashdotter how they feel about someone using "their" resources without registration (think Anonymous Cowards here), one would instead getsthe impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica, The Register and memepool (topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective sites), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
The using() operator. As long as a given class you're looking to use implements IDispose functionality, you can use it and completely control its scope, instantiation and collection. It's keen!
And, uh. What exactly is wrong with the MSXML parser? As long as you use the version that you can get from Microsoft (the MSXML 4.0 parser's shipping and if not, the MSXML 3.0 parser's been shipping for 6+ months) and not the version that was shipped with IE (IE was released before XSLT was a ratified W3C spec) then it certainly does adhere to the spec, minus the kludgy MS interpretation of XSLT in the IE-bundled version.
If only it weren't for the fact that golden boy de Icaza and his Ximian clan were developing an open-source implementation, you'd actually have a point.
Also, being able to separate C# the language from.Net the runtime platform (something Java has yet to do, no?) would be a nice step forward.
I can't help but think of things like universal IDs and the like, and cookies harvested without our knowledge to be fed into our corporate masters' databanks. Add to this the unlimited potential for mischief when hackers break the websites down and, uh.
What does a website give us that the tried-and-true paper forms and human interaction doesn't?
I've got a sneaking suspicion that the folks in Congress have slightly more important things to work out than how taxes should work for Internet sites as opposed to mail-order purchases... especially so in a recession.
Not a flame, but more "modern" languages such as Java and C# have constructs explicitly built to avoid the buffer overflow/pointer gone insane problems.
For the rest of the world, secure C programing is far from a secret.
If you're using SOAP, make sure you have a validation schema that you run all incoming messages through and drop anything that doesn't pass it. If you're running anything else, I dunno. Re-examine your code and make sure you don't have any obvious buffer overflows waiting to happen.
As with most of the Ask Slashdot questions, I'll beg the question: was a Google search and a little common sense really so scary that you needed the hand-holding and warm fuzzies that a few nodding heads who may not have any idea what you're talking about will provide you?
On a vaguely unrelated note, go out and rent "Wu Tang Champ Vs. Champ" for a truly sublime kung-fu experience. It stars Dragon Lee, also known as (here's where i keep from being completely off-topic!) Bruce Lei. Not to be mistaken for Bruce Le or Bruce Li, Dragon does Bruce Lee almost as well as Bruce Lee does Bruce Lee.
Or rather, has ASCAP demanded the publishing and the RIAA the distribution rights yet?
If not, give it a few days. They'll make your heartbeat the next Britney Spears...
Salon's not exactly "objective".
on
XBox Released
·
· Score: 1
Maybe once upon a time I'd have given them credit for being so, albeit obviously liberal-leaning, but as times have moved on and VC has dried up, the quality and quantity of writing that they put out has dropped, and a fair number of their staff writers have adopted the Linux/open-source-pandering inflammatory article "writing" that another high-profile site who shall remain nameless is so well-known for doing.
Let's not forget that Salon.com is the site that less than a week ago broke the SHOCKING news that there's rampant drug use at LAN parties!, an article so obviously rife with unsubstantiated anecdotes and biased information that a high school paper's editor would have to laughingly decline it.
Not saying they're wrong, saying take it with a pinch of salt.
...as is the case with register.com (and possibly other registrars), there will always be backdoors into their systems so long as people write code, seeing as how people still make mistakes. See also: putting a $100K firewall in front of a system that you never bother applying ACLs to. It'd be apples and oranges if this all didn't repeat itself so often.
...then malicious intruders will just go after the core routers, saturate lines, do things of that nature. Not that locking down DNS is a bad thing, but you can't defend everything all the time.
"Christ. Le me just shove it in already."
"No. You have to say it first."
"But..."
"No. Say it. You know I love it when you do."
"*sigh* Mikey likes it."
"C'mon! Say it like you mean it! The Astroglide's drying up over here. Just do it, huh?"
"Mikey likes it!"
"Mmm. Now!"
And with that, michael rammed his turgid member into Hemos' well-travelled dongpath. Watching over all this were CmdrTaco, working on pulverizing the liver lining his VA Li^H^H Software-branded PVC pipe with his diminuitive schlong and Timothy. Saliently missing from the orgy was Jon Katz, who had excused himself from the afternoon's activities to go watch a elementary school boys' soccer game, and fon... err, interview some of the tawny young lads for inspiration for his next groundbreaking article.
As they watched the unnatural union between Hemos and Michael, CmdrTaco noticed tears welling up in Timothy's eyes. Without missing a beat as he continued to sodomize his liverpipe, he began to address him.
"What's wrong, Timothy?"
"*sniff* Nothing. I'm just allergic to something."
"Oh, come on. Don't be so hard like that. It's about VA's stock, isn't it? Listen. We ditched the Linux thing and went with Software instead. Now that people won't associate us with Linux and the whole money pit of open-source software, I'm sure that we'll turn a profit sometime soon. Probably..."
CmdrTaco's monologue was abruptly interrupted by a scream of pain from Hemos.
"Asshole. Don't ream my asshole so hard! Christ. Have you gotten bigger or something?"
CmdrTaco whispered, "Heh. Once we turn a profit, I'll stop watering down their Astroglide, too."
"Geez, Rob. It's not that. The profitability thing."
"Dude. Call me CmdrTaco. No one here can know my name."
Timothy rolled his eyes and continued, "It's just... I don't think Hemos likes me anymore. Is it the trolls taking over my Your Rights Online posts? Because I'll ban more of them. Really I will!"
CmdrTaco patted Timothy on the shoulder, leaving some liver juice residue on his shirt, and said, "Timmy, I think you know what you need to do to get back in his heart."
"You mean..."
"Shh. Just do it."
Timothy skipped out of the room and for a while, nothing was heard but the wet sounds of dongs slapping in and out of liver and dingus. Slowly, a whirring sound came closer and closer. With a grimace on his face, Hemos turned his head in time to see Timothy with a bandage on his head, rolling into the room in a wheelchair.
"TIMMY!"
"Ha ha! Timmy! I knew you'd come back! Roll on over here, baby!"
"TIM-TIM-TIM-AY!"
Timothy rolled over to Hemos and Michael and stopped. In a fluid, well-practiced motion, Hemos hopped up on the arm-rests of the wheelchair, and thrusted his dong into Timothy's slobbering mouth as Michael began to give Timothy a reach-around. Within minutes, each member (no pun intended) of the grotesque orgy hand finished and collapsed on the ground.
Covered in sweat, CmdrTaco was the first to speak up.
"So what'll we do this afternoon?"
"Oh, I don't know. Boot into Windows 98 and play some Diablo II?", Hemos replied.
"Yeah. Sounds good to me," said Timothy.
Michael chimed in, "Hey. After that, I could, uh. Post something about Microsoft? Think of the pageviews!"
"Yeah. That'd be sweet," Timothy replied.
"Ha ha! Just like on South Park! You crazy nut!"
"Speaking of crazy," CmdrTaco added, "I've got a crazy idea..."
Pulling the pearly mistake-covered liver out of the PVC pipe, he continued, "...what about tacos tonight?"
The four shared a hearty laugh.
Hemos blurted "And we can give Katz the tacos without CmdrTaco's special sauce on them!!!"
At this, the four burst out laughing and kept on laughing... all the way to the bank!
They install adware to help offset the costs of bandwidth so what do you do but drive 10,000 lemmings to their site to jack the prices of bandwidth up even higher. Wonderful.
Not that including spyware (if it is) in their product is much more salubrious, but still.
Sad? No. It was simply inevitable.
on
SourceForge Drifting
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, but if you were to ask the average Slashdotter how they feel about someone using "their" resources without registration (think Anonymous Cowards here), one would instead getsthe impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica, The Register and memepool (topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective sites), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
...I dunno. I thought the controls for the game were pretty painful, but then again I have yet to play a console-based FPS whose controls I find as intuitive as keyboard+mouse.
Granted, I didn't get to take the XBox home and hook it up to my Wega, but graphics didn't even come close to blowing me away.
MS is supposed to be spending half a billion promoting the XBox, right? Ads and demo machines are pretty sparsely dropped, so I guess we know where that money earmarked for advertising found its way to, hmm? Not saying that there's payola going on here, but "better single-player than Half-Life" has more than a tinge of that bought-and-paid-for hyperbole.
If software becomes a patentable, er... commodity, what implications will this have for free software? Will the length of legal disclaimers attached to code eventually be greater than the code itself?
And everyone fighting against encryption... it's a losing battle. "Criminals" don't exactly pay attention to "the law", and if they're not completely braindead and know that a given piece of encryption software is crippled by the fact that the government has the keys to the backdoor, don't you think that they'll either use something else or maybe just not incriminate themselves via any digital media? Law-abiding citizens are the only ones that lose here, unless you like the idea of every Jane Government sticking their nose in your business whether you've done anything wrong or not.
On the bright side, if software becomes patentable, maybe this will strengthen the notion of Code As Speech in the US courts? I sure hope that the US legislators in charge of ratifying this bill (are there any? what body would be in charge of this?) runs this by the RIAA and MPAA before they sign it.
What about total power?
on
RLX Gets Denser
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Nifty that Transmeta's finally (belatedly?) living up to its hype by showing that they can stack mo' CPUs into a smaller space as they run so much cooler... but how much computing power (bus bandwidth and everything) does a Transmeta have when compared to an Intel/Sun/whoever solution? Does it stack (no pun intended) up?
While everyone knows that Mexicans are at least marginally less than human, it's considered bad form to refer to other biped species as simians in mixed company.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, come on. I run it on my BBS and people play that sack of doo-doo even less than they play poker.
LoRD was fun and simple, TW2002 0wns, Usurper's keen, OO][ rocked the casbah... but LoRD2? Jinkies.
> Weezer also had troubles with Geffen to a point where last year they were shopping demos around trying to find a new label, IIRC.
Sho 'nuff. Fred Durst (he's, inexplicably enough, a VP, you know) didn't want to let them back into the studio. After hearing the Green Album, maybe he was on to something.
Nice revisionist history you're writing there, partner. As someone who was bitten on the ass by that multiple times, I can tell you the solution to my problem: flashing my VIA's BIOS to a more recent rev. You can either do that or you can disable ACPI. Microsoft never released a fix for it because they never had a bug of their own to begin with; it was VIA's fault through and through.
FWIW, after one of these corruptions (hasn't happened since the BIOS flash) I rolled back my registry and Office 2K didn't complain one bit about it. Go figure.
Do they have DeCSS source code on their front page or something? They should embed some of it in their metatags; then if the pesky other parties refuse to cease and desist their nefarious linking ways, they can just have law enforcement step in and take care of business.
My heart goes out to anyone who actually has to apply ACLs to a machine operating in a multiuser environment. This is something that *nux has long since, uh. You mean you have to set things up there too?
See also: multiple users.
Here's a starting point for you to consider: "The Orange Book C2 specification is for standalone, nondistributed computing environments and non-networked devices."
There's no security without physical security and a floppy/CD attached to a computer giving you a workaround from the single pathflow of username/password login to an ACL-controlled environment fails the C2 spec by default. No one brags about Orange Book certifications because no one enforces it because it's freaking useless in every conceivable work environment. No network + no disk drives == no sneakernet == why bother?
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, but if you were to ask the average Slashdotter how they feel about someone using "their" resources without registration (think Anonymous Cowards here), one would instead getsthe impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica, The Register and memepool (topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective sites), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
The using() operator. As long as a given class you're looking to use implements IDispose functionality, you can use it and completely control its scope, instantiation and collection. It's keen!
And, uh. What exactly is wrong with the MSXML parser? As long as you use the version that you can get from Microsoft (the MSXML 4.0 parser's shipping and if not, the MSXML 3.0 parser's been shipping for 6+ months) and not the version that was shipped with IE (IE was released before XSLT was a ratified W3C spec) then it certainly does adhere to the spec, minus the kludgy MS interpretation of XSLT in the IE-bundled version.
If only it weren't for the fact that golden boy de Icaza and his Ximian clan were developing an open-source implementation, you'd actually have a point. .Net the runtime platform (something Java has yet to do, no?) would be a nice step forward.
Also, being able to separate C# the language from
I can't help but think of things like universal IDs and the like, and cookies harvested without our knowledge to be fed into our corporate masters' databanks. Add to this the unlimited potential for mischief when hackers break the websites down and, uh.
What does a website give us that the tried-and-true paper forms and human interaction doesn't?
I've got a sneaking suspicion that the folks in Congress have slightly more important things to work out than how taxes should work for Internet sites as opposed to mail-order purchases... especially so in a recession.
Not a flame, but more "modern" languages such as Java and C# have constructs explicitly built to avoid the buffer overflow/pointer gone insane problems.
For the rest of the world, secure C programing is far from a secret.
If you're using SOAP, make sure you have a validation schema that you run all incoming messages through and drop anything that doesn't pass it. If you're running anything else, I dunno. Re-examine your code and make sure you don't have any obvious buffer overflows waiting to happen.
As with most of the Ask Slashdot questions, I'll beg the question: was a Google search and a little common sense really so scary that you needed the hand-holding and warm fuzzies that a few nodding heads who may not have any idea what you're talking about will provide you?
On a vaguely unrelated note, go out and rent "Wu Tang Champ Vs. Champ" for a truly sublime kung-fu experience. It stars Dragon Lee, also known as (here's where i keep from being completely off-topic!) Bruce Lei. Not to be mistaken for Bruce Le or Bruce Li, Dragon does Bruce Lee almost as well as Bruce Lee does Bruce Lee.
Or rather, has ASCAP demanded the publishing and the RIAA the distribution rights yet?
If not, give it a few days. They'll make your heartbeat the next Britney Spears...
Maybe once upon a time I'd have given them credit for being so, albeit obviously liberal-leaning, but as times have moved on and VC has dried up, the quality and quantity of writing that they put out has dropped, and a fair number of their staff writers have adopted the Linux/open-source-pandering inflammatory article "writing" that another high-profile site who shall remain nameless is so well-known for doing.
Let's not forget that Salon.com is the site that less than a week ago broke the SHOCKING news that there's rampant drug use at LAN parties!, an article so obviously rife with unsubstantiated anecdotes and biased information that a high school paper's editor would have to laughingly decline it.
Not saying they're wrong, saying take it with a pinch of salt.
...as is the case with register.com (and possibly other registrars), there will always be backdoors into their systems so long as people write code, seeing as how people still make mistakes. See also: putting a $100K firewall in front of a system that you never bother applying ACLs to. It'd be apples and oranges if this all didn't repeat itself so often.
...then malicious intruders will just go after the core routers, saturate lines, do things of that nature. Not that locking down DNS is a bad thing, but you can't defend everything all the time.
"Christ. Le me just shove it in already."
"No. You have to say it first."
"But..."
"No. Say it. You know I love it when you do."
"*sigh* Mikey likes it."
"C'mon! Say it like you mean it! The Astroglide's drying up over here. Just do it, huh?"
"Mikey likes it!"
"Mmm. Now!"
And with that, michael rammed his turgid member into Hemos' well-travelled dongpath. Watching over all this were CmdrTaco, working on pulverizing the liver lining his VA Li^H^H Software-branded PVC pipe with his diminuitive schlong and Timothy. Saliently missing from the orgy was Jon Katz, who had excused himself from the afternoon's activities to go watch a elementary school boys' soccer game, and fon... err, interview some of the tawny young lads for inspiration for his next groundbreaking article.
As they watched the unnatural union between Hemos and Michael, CmdrTaco noticed tears welling up in Timothy's eyes. Without missing a beat as he continued to sodomize his liverpipe, he began to address him.
"What's wrong, Timothy?"
"*sniff* Nothing. I'm just allergic to something."
"Oh, come on. Don't be so hard like that. It's about VA's stock, isn't it? Listen. We ditched the Linux thing and went with Software instead. Now that people won't associate us with Linux and the whole money pit of open-source software, I'm sure that we'll turn a profit sometime soon. Probably..."
CmdrTaco's monologue was abruptly interrupted by a scream of pain from Hemos.
"Asshole. Don't ream my asshole so hard! Christ. Have you gotten bigger or something?"
CmdrTaco whispered, "Heh. Once we turn a profit, I'll stop watering down their Astroglide, too."
"Geez, Rob. It's not that. The profitability thing."
"Dude. Call me CmdrTaco. No one here can know my name."
Timothy rolled his eyes and continued, "It's just... I don't think Hemos likes me anymore. Is it the trolls taking over my Your Rights Online posts? Because I'll ban more of them. Really I will!"
CmdrTaco patted Timothy on the shoulder, leaving some liver juice residue on his shirt, and said, "Timmy, I think you know what you need to do to get back in his heart."
"You mean..."
"Shh. Just do it."
Timothy skipped out of the room and for a while, nothing was heard but the wet sounds of dongs slapping in and out of liver and dingus. Slowly, a whirring sound came closer and closer. With a grimace on his face, Hemos turned his head in time to see Timothy with a bandage on his head, rolling into the room in a wheelchair.
"TIMMY!"
"Ha ha! Timmy! I knew you'd come back! Roll on over here, baby!"
"TIM-TIM-TIM-AY!"
Timothy rolled over to Hemos and Michael and stopped. In a fluid, well-practiced motion, Hemos hopped up on the arm-rests of the wheelchair, and thrusted his dong into Timothy's slobbering mouth as Michael began to give Timothy a reach-around. Within minutes, each member (no pun intended) of the grotesque orgy hand finished and collapsed on the ground.
Covered in sweat, CmdrTaco was the first to speak up.
"So what'll we do this afternoon?"
"Oh, I don't know. Boot into Windows 98 and play some Diablo II?", Hemos replied.
"Yeah. Sounds good to me," said Timothy.
Michael chimed in, "Hey. After that, I could, uh. Post something about Microsoft? Think of the pageviews!"
"Yeah. That'd be sweet," Timothy replied.
"Ha ha! Just like on South Park! You crazy nut!"
"Speaking of crazy," CmdrTaco added, "I've got a crazy idea..."
Pulling the pearly mistake-covered liver out of the PVC pipe, he continued, "...what about tacos tonight?"
The four shared a hearty laugh.
Hemos blurted "And we can give Katz the tacos without CmdrTaco's special sauce on them!!!"
At this, the four burst out laughing and kept on laughing... all the way to the bank!
They install adware to help offset the costs of bandwidth so what do you do but drive 10,000 lemmings to their site to jack the prices of bandwidth up even higher. Wonderful.
Not that including spyware (if it is) in their product is much more salubrious, but still.
Yes, open source as a hobbyist development model can and will persist long into the future, and I'm sure that there will be fun and exciting products as a result of it.
That said, now that the heady, greedy days of the dot com boom are long behind us, it's high time to re-evaluate the position. Money isn't growing on trees and being plucked from the asses of VCs star-struck by that beautiful three-letter phrase (IPO, IPO, IPO!) so much that they can overlook that little thing called "a business plan."
Internet advertising is the redheaded stepchild of the marketing family. Old media ads have no need to justify themselves with inanities like "click-through"; they know their demographic and their real estate is mindshare, that precious commodity which they assume that they're purchasing with their ad dollars, regardless of whether or not this purchase translates into a product purchase immediately or down the road. The internet is a fickle bastard: people gravitate towards the warez model of "buy none, get one free" and so there's the propensity towards stealing everything we can. To wit: the inevitable linking to archives.nytimes.com anytime they've got an article up because registration is such a chore, but if you were to ask the average Slashdotter how they feel about someone using "their" resources without registration (think Anonymous Cowards here), one would instead getsthe impression that merely providing a name and e-mail address is as simple as could be. Hmm. To wit: proxies, ad-killing bots and specialized hosts files that insure that our precious bandwidth isn't eaten up by ancillary ads that might keep the sites afloat, but then again if we don't click on them and buy something might not even if we do see them. Hmm.
Ah, open source. Communism reborn, and who can hate that? Not the watered down Leninism that the Soviet Union ran through in short order, but honest-to-goodness communism. Take what you need, give what you have. Beautiful. A touching sentiment.
Also impossible to be a commercially viable entity when human nature comes into play. If we can get our content ad-free we will, even though it means economic hardship and possibly the closing of the sites we visit and love (or love to hate, as the case may be) and if we can get our software cost-free, without the dirty stigma of clicking through porno banners to find the 3rd word of the 4th paragraph to get entry to L33t b0b'5 h0u53 0f w4r3z, all the better. I whip up a weekend project that is derivative but I'm proud of and off to Freshmeat with you! Maybe even Sourceforge! Take it! Share it!
I'll pour a few hundred hours of blood, sweat and tears into it! Shiny new! Everyone wants it! It's hot!
But how do I parlay it into a commercial venture when everyone can get it for free and fix it up as they want? Hmm.
Open source is a lovely idea with lofty goals, and as long as talented, motivated, intelligent programmers buy into it, it will generate impressive results. Unfortunately, there's a very finite number of talented, motivated, intelligent, ascetic programmers out there who will buy into it.
OSDN's changing business strategies faster than you can say "we're a B2B play now!" (read: brushed up that resume yet?). If bigger ads or a subscription service to a website who doesn't give a whit about the quality of its journalism and doesn't know the meaning of the word "editing", relying on constantly inflammatory agitprop to woo its readership are the order of the day, then I'll just stick with Ars Technica, The Register and memepool (topical, informative, and normally journalistically objective sites), thanks. Slashdot's been a fun little ride, and like many other things, peer moderation was a sexy little idea, just unfortunate in that it pretty much disintegrated into ugly mob rule groupthink. Scene, not herd.
...I dunno. I thought the controls for the game were pretty painful, but then again I have yet to play a console-based FPS whose controls I find as intuitive as keyboard+mouse.
Granted, I didn't get to take the XBox home and hook it up to my Wega, but graphics didn't even come close to blowing me away.
MS is supposed to be spending half a billion promoting the XBox, right? Ads and demo machines are pretty sparsely dropped, so I guess we know where that money earmarked for advertising found its way to, hmm? Not saying that there's payola going on here, but "better single-player than Half-Life" has more than a tinge of that bought-and-paid-for hyperbole.
If software becomes a patentable, er... commodity, what implications will this have for free software? Will the length of legal disclaimers attached to code eventually be greater than the code itself?
And everyone fighting against encryption... it's a losing battle. "Criminals" don't exactly pay attention to "the law", and if they're not completely braindead and know that a given piece of encryption software is crippled by the fact that the government has the keys to the backdoor, don't you think that they'll either use something else or maybe just not incriminate themselves via any digital media? Law-abiding citizens are the only ones that lose here, unless you like the idea of every Jane Government sticking their nose in your business whether you've done anything wrong or not.
On the bright side, if software becomes patentable, maybe this will strengthen the notion of Code As Speech in the US courts? I sure hope that the US legislators in charge of ratifying this bill (are there any? what body would be in charge of this?) runs this by the RIAA and MPAA before they sign it.
Nifty that Transmeta's finally (belatedly?) living up to its hype by showing that they can stack mo' CPUs into a smaller space as they run so much cooler... but how much computing power (bus bandwidth and everything) does a Transmeta have when compared to an Intel/Sun/whoever solution? Does it stack (no pun intended) up?
While everyone knows that Mexicans are at least marginally less than human, it's considered bad form to refer to other biped species as simians in mixed company.