No. Everytime I refer to that sucky piece of crap from Redmond, I don't have to call it Microsoft Windows 98. I call it windows. I don't have to call my mother by her full name either. I call her mom. I call my dishwasher a dishwasher, not Maytag Dishwasher model XEr74. Do you see my point here?
This is getting to be like the situation with hyphenated Americans, for crying out loud. No! He's not an Italian, or an American, he's an Italian-American! If you call him an American you are dishonoring his heritage and the contribution Italy made to his genetic makeup!
The fact that RMS thinks I need to call it GNU/Linux to pay homage to GNU and the FSF, that's just ridiculous. I have a great amount of respect for the GNU project. It's done more for computing than Microsoft ever has or will do. But I'm not going to call Linux GNU/Linux. First of all it's a mouthfull. Second of all, it sounds like a disease. Thirdly, there's no reason for me to do this. This is the computer equivalent of political correctness. Every second he devotes to this little diatribe is a second he could be using to do something more worthwile. Even if he succeeded in getting people to start calling it GNU/Linux, what would be the point? It wouldn't accomplish anything. This is all a huge waste of time.
>"Make the bastards chase you. They will follow." -hst-
Some quotes cannot exist in a vacuum. I'll quote(as close as possible) the movie, as it is fresher in my mind than the book and is almost the same.
"Few people understand the psychology of a highway cop. Your normal speeder will panic and pull over. This is wrong. It incites contempt in the cop heart. Make the bastard chase you. He will follow...But he won't know what to make of your right-hand blinker, signaling that you're turning off for an appropriate place to talk. He'll have a few seconds to realize that he's about to make a 180 degree turn at high-speed.
I know I massacared it, but I couldn't just let it sit there out of context.
I thought the "revolution mounted on my D:/ drive" line was good. It's the Village Voice, what did you expect? The fact that linux is in there at all is rather astonoshing.
Y'see, y'see it's because these kids todayyayyyy. They have the Brain Damage
Because CNN is competing with MTV for viewers. Yo! Wolf Blitzer Raps!
In all seriousness, trying to explain source code to non-techie people is going to go over about as well as trying to explain the finer points of microeconomics. Nobody will understand, and even if they did they wouldn't care.
Stuff like this makes slashdot better. To pretend that technology has no social context is foolish. In many ways this is just as much "News for nerds." as is an article about Star Wars or RMS' latest wanderings. The influence of Slashdot is expanding, and with that expanding influence comes a greater responsibility to keep people informed. Articles like this make you step back and look at technology from a different perspective. That can never be a bad thing.
Anyway, since author filtering is now a/. option, where's the harm? If you don't want to read it you can just ignore posts from that author and let those who are interested (of which there are many) take a look.
In 100 years I'll be gone too and I won't care how my pictures look, but in the meantime I'll use film. I've taken pictures with a wide variety of digital cameras and real cameras. Digital just can't come close to film in terms of quality. This is not to say that years from now digital won't be just as good. I'm sure digital will catch up eventually, but we're talking about right now.
It depends on the projector. Lousy digital projector = lousy picture, regardless of what's being displayed. How many theaters are going to want to put up the cash to get these hugely expensive projectors when they get no economic benefit in return?
As with most things, this has an upside and a downside. Like MP3, digital film *might* make it easier for more indie films to make it into theaters. This is a big maybe. It could also solidify the hold the major movie factories have on American cinema right now. Either way, the only way digital will be good is if it can maintain either the same level of quality as film, or improve it. I was once forced to watch a movie on one of those hideous digital screens (looked to be about HDTV in terms of quality) and it just isn't the same. You simply don't need digital to make or show a good film. Kubrick never used digital. Hell, he never even used stereo! Yet the experience of seeing a film like that in the theater is amazing. Right now the whole digital film(oxymoron) thing is mostly aimed at easing distribution for major movie studios. I think this is a bad thing because the major movie studios pump mostly crap into cinemas. In this case it dosen't matter how good it looks. Crap is still crap.
Agreed. I would say trolling would be defined as *intentionally* starting a flame war. What he's referring to is dissenting from the slashdot canon of belief. It's like the difference between having a political protest against some stupid thing the government is doing, and having a protest where you burn Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in effigy. One is meant as an intelligent thought-provoking measure, the other is just to cause trouble. I hope I don't inadvertently start a flame war about whether or not you should be allowed to burn the flag.:)
A company I recently worked at was looking at commercial spaces in that vicinity. And I thought the residential real estate was expensive! Geez. In two years it's going to be up there with Sand Hill Road as far as overpriced real estate goes. If only Mtn. View and the other valley towns would change their zoning to allow for higher-density commercial development (read tall buildings) they wouldn't be in this mess. Increase density, make the VTA not suck, and then maybe things would be reasonable. Until that time comes, why not live in San Francisco? You can take the train to work, provided you're near it. A small loft in Potrero beats a pad in San Jose on any day of the week, except the day that you have to pay rent:)
No. Everytime I refer to that sucky piece of crap from Redmond, I don't have to call it Microsoft Windows 98. I call it windows. I don't have to call my mother by her full name either. I call her mom. I call my dishwasher a dishwasher, not Maytag Dishwasher model XEr74. Do you see my point here?
This is getting to be like the situation with hyphenated Americans, for crying out loud. No! He's not an Italian, or an American, he's an Italian-American! If you call him an American you are dishonoring his heritage and the contribution Italy made to his genetic makeup!
The fact that RMS thinks I need to call it GNU/Linux to pay homage to GNU and the FSF, that's just ridiculous. I have a great amount of respect for the GNU project. It's done more for computing than Microsoft ever has or will do. But I'm not going to call Linux GNU/Linux. First of all it's a mouthfull. Second of all, it sounds like a disease. Thirdly, there's no reason for me to do this. This is the computer equivalent of political correctness.
Every second he devotes to this little diatribe is a second he could be using to do something more worthwile. Even if he succeeded in getting people to start calling it GNU/Linux, what would be the point? It wouldn't accomplish anything.
This is all a huge waste of time.
Maybe 200+ /.'ers tried to look at it at once. :)
I think it falls into relatively the same space as UC Santa Cruz's mascot - the Banana Slug.
>"Make the bastards chase you. They will follow." -hst-
Some quotes cannot exist in a vacuum. I'll quote(as close as possible) the movie, as it is fresher in my mind than the book and is almost the same.
"Few people understand the psychology of a highway cop. Your normal speeder will panic and pull over. This is wrong. It incites contempt in the cop heart. Make the bastard chase you. He will follow...But he won't know what to make of your right-hand blinker, signaling that you're turning off for an appropriate place to talk. He'll have a few seconds to realize that he's about to make a 180 degree turn at high-speed.
I know I massacared it, but I couldn't just let it sit there out of context.
This is very similar to an old adage about MIT:
Welcome to MIT!
Friends
Work
Sleep
Choose two
I thought the "revolution mounted on my D:/ drive" line was good.
It's the Village Voice, what did you expect? The fact that linux is in there at all is rather astonoshing.
Umm..you need a login for their Open Source site?
Anyone else see the irony here?
Y'see, y'see it's because these kids todayyayyyy. They have the
Brain
Damage
Because CNN is competing with MTV for viewers. Yo! Wolf Blitzer Raps!
In all seriousness, trying to explain source code to non-techie people is going to go over about as well as trying to explain the finer points of microeconomics. Nobody will understand, and even if they did they wouldn't care.
>Everything that can be invented, has been invented."
If I recall, wasn't this quote in reference to why they wanted to close the patent office (not kidding)
Stuff like this makes slashdot better. To pretend that technology has no social context is foolish. In many ways this is just as much "News for nerds." as is an article about Star Wars or RMS' latest wanderings.
/. option, where's the harm? If you don't want to read it you can just ignore posts from that author and let those who are interested (of which there are many) take a look.
The influence of Slashdot is expanding, and with that expanding influence comes a greater responsibility to keep people informed. Articles like this make you step back and look at technology from a different perspective. That can never be a bad thing.
Anyway, since author filtering is now a
You want to know who to blame for all of this? Blame MTV. Ever since The Real World started, all visual forms of entertainment have gotten screwed up.
In 100 years I'll be gone too and I won't care how my pictures look, but in the meantime I'll use film. I've taken pictures with a wide variety of digital cameras and real cameras. Digital just can't come close to film in terms of quality. This is not to say that years from now digital won't be just as good. I'm sure digital will catch up eventually, but we're talking about right now.
It depends on the projector. Lousy digital projector = lousy picture, regardless of what's being displayed. How many theaters are going to want to put up the cash to get these hugely expensive projectors when they get no economic benefit in return?
As with most things, this has an upside and a downside. Like MP3, digital film *might* make it easier for more indie films to make it into theaters. This is a big maybe. It could also solidify the hold the major movie factories have on American cinema right now.
Either way, the only way digital will be good is if it can maintain either the same level of quality as film, or improve it. I was once forced to watch a movie on one of those hideous digital screens (looked to be about HDTV in terms of quality) and it just isn't the same. You simply don't need digital to make or show a good film.
Kubrick never used digital. Hell, he never even used stereo! Yet the experience of seeing a film like that in the theater is amazing.
Right now the whole digital film(oxymoron) thing is mostly aimed at easing distribution for major movie studios. I think this is a bad thing because the major movie studios pump mostly crap into cinemas. In this case it dosen't matter how good it looks. Crap is still crap.
Hehh hehh. That page with the e-mails from the Springer freaks...I haven't laughed that hard in a long time.
Agreed. I would say trolling would be defined as *intentionally* starting a flame war. What he's referring to is dissenting from the slashdot canon of belief. It's like the difference between having a political protest against some stupid thing the government is doing, and having a protest where you burn Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich in effigy. One is meant as an intelligent thought-provoking measure, the other is just to cause trouble. I hope I don't inadvertently start a flame war about whether or not you should be allowed to burn the flag. :)
A company I recently worked at was looking at commercial spaces in that vicinity. And I thought the residential real estate was expensive! Geez. In two years it's going to be up there with Sand Hill Road as far as overpriced real estate goes. If only Mtn. View and the other valley towns would change their zoning to allow for higher-density commercial development (read tall buildings) they wouldn't be in this mess. Increase density, make the VTA not suck, and then maybe things would be reasonable. Until that time comes, why not live in San Francisco? You can take the train to work, provided you're near it. A small loft in Potrero beats a pad in San Jose on any day of the week, except the day that you have to pay rent :)