Simple solution to that problem: web of trust. A replaced key would have to replace the entire web of trust. Trusting a key that is not itself signed is like not using signatures at all.
You are only required by the GPL to release any changes you make to the engine itself
You are thinking of the LGPL. Anything that touches the GPL becomes GPL'd. e.g. using the header files, or linking.
I'm pretty sure that the art wouldn't get covered though, it should be pretty simple to give away the game and charge for the art, music, voiceovers, maps, writing... anything that isn't source code, basically. Games might be one of the better venues for the GPL, if they're games that depend more on production quality than technical pizazz.
You are way the hell off-base calling the poster a troll.
In some cases, I think graphics actually detracts from game play; for example, I like Nethack a lot better than the graphics-based equivalents
You and about the rest of the 0.0001% of gamers that feel this way. Not suggesting you should follow the herd, but this argument has gotten really tired. Most avid nethack fans play the game with sepia-tinted glasses of nostalgia, and frankly that's not a great way to approach something new.
I would actually argue that many, perhaps most, great game designs originated in open source or the public domain. Those designs were then picked up by commercial gaming companies, branded, trademarked, and augmented with lots of graphics.
Your point would itself be augmented with lots of examples.
In what way is Tcl's runtime 'brain damaged' ? (I don't want a flamewar - just an example to back up that remark)
One must go through ghastly syntactic contortions to write object-oriented tcl, for one.
Another is the way it deals with events in tk: not only does it use its own printf-like "little language" for events -- weird, but otherwise not bad by itself -- it executes all events in global scope. You can't get any information on what was happening at the time the event (like a button press) was invoked unless you stuff it into a global variable. And since you can't pass any extra information except for what's hardwired into the little event sublanguage, you can't, for example, pass the position of a slider in when you press a button that does something related to that value.
In short, tcl makes you do everything with globals. Hope you never wanted to use tcl in a multithreaded environment -- not that the language itself has any support for it.
Perhaps bind has since been improved in tcl to take a function expression that evaluates in the definer's (static) or caller's (dynamic) scope. Perhaps there's threading, perhaps there's either a less painful OO, or enough borrowed from lisp to reduce the pain of writing real OO code. If so, then congratulations, but too late for this hacker. Maybe if scriptics spent more time developing an otherwise beautiful *looking* language and less writing claptrap about "leveraging your synergies with scripting in b2b enterprises" like it invented the concept of scripting and was handing it down like mana from heaven, then the developers wouldn't have abandoned it and scriptics wouldn't have gone under. At least ActiveState took it under its wing, so there might be hope yet.
A good language can introduce new features without changing the basics. This is why PHP got so popular so fast.
Does PHP have inheritance yet? Or let's start simpler: has it stopped dumping every new function into a global namespace? This bugs me in elisp, and it bugs me in php. Actually, it's the fact that PHP passes objects by value (and that they removed the declaration syntax for byref and saddled you with the ugly syntax at call time) that caused me to stop using PHP.
That and PHP perpetuates the perlism nonsense of:
$foo->bar(baz,mumble);
As opposed to a much more sensible:
foo.bar(baz, mumble)
Or, when you think long and hard about about it, by using the logical start of the line as a statement beginner, the end of the line as a terminator, and that most args don't have whitespace in them or have other good logical delimiters if they do:
foo bar baz mumble
Only Tcl does anything like this, though lisp comes close (but I shouldn't need the top level of parens if I have other delimiters). It's just a shame that Tcl's runtime is so brain damaged, and that it's become irrelevant as a language these days.
Re:Perl's had it's day - It's become like COBOL
on
Apocalypse 5 Released
·
· Score: 2
perl is the practical extraction and reporting language. that's what it was originally designed for
Arguably that's what it was designed for, but that's a "backronym" (hey, how do i create e2 links in slashcode?). perl was "pearl" in larry wall's mind, but through some weird quirk of the library filing system, he only had four letters, so he called it PERL (all uppercase then, I think). Which was helpful since there was another language at the time called "pearl" (which never took off anyway).
Just get the damn thing written, make it flexible enough for us to rewrite perl in perl, and kick this lazy-ass camel out the door before my grandchildren ask me when perl6 is coming out!
I don't want more powerful regular expressions. I want a more powerful pattern-matching syntax, one I can compile down to an opaque object with a bit of syntactic sugar, then use in place of a regex. I want a parser sub-language like SML or parsing primitives like haskell. Regular expressions are now turing complete thanks to perl... great, so move on already, regexes are not the final word in pattern matching.
And what's more -- all this you're doing Larry, it's anti-hacker. It's top-down, it's engineered, it's ivory-tower theory that might sound neat and no matter how zany your presentation is, you are living in the rareified atmosphere of a language designer, and now you are starting to think that way, dispensing wisdom on The Right Way To Do Things from on high. Yes, inventing Just The Right Way to give people 1E+255 ways to do things is still looking for the perfect that's the enemy of the good, because once we have the foundations to improve on perl6, we will do it, but only if we have something to work with. It doesn't all need to be done up front.
Your extended regexes can be done as a library solution. Stop ending the world and start living in it.
dude... you're lecturing an AV programmer on the proper terminology.
Anyway, here's the distinction: viruses, the real kind, require host cells to replicate. Worms are full-blown self-contained organisms. Worms burrow into systems, breed, and push into other systems. Viruses infect files, typically the execution path of an executable, or the data stream (e.g. exploiting a buffer overflow in a mp3 codec).
Arguably, the fact that the worm is now embedded in the email, and taking advantage of the email program to self-replicate just makes the point of the original poster that much stronger -- that viruses and worms are getting pretty well interchangeable these days.
I'll tell you a story about why Sun will go broke in the next 10-20 years, and irrelevant in 2-5 years [snip]
You work in securities, and you base your analysis off a single bad salesdork? Now I know what goes into the average stock pick. "I liked the guy. Buy."
I don't think they wanted you anyway. P.S. I was never hotelled at Sun, it's only at places where the price of the real estate is sky high where they do have "flex" offices.
I think his problem was server performance, not network bandwidth (not counting remote network resources). If he didn't allocate enough bandwidth for the sunrays, then he'd be getting tearing effects on the screens, not slow application performance. I'm guessing he had runaway processes that were never killed off, that SRM was never being run, and that no one even bothered to run ps to diagnose the problem, let alone pkill. And under no circumstance was weakness ever admitted by doing the unforgivable, and calling support...
16 cpu'S, 20 users, and slow... dude, call support and get it fixed. That's way sub-optimal performance, and way way out of spec. The initial roll-out of these things (when they were called Coronas), we ran a hundred users on an eight way box, and I actually jumped in on it because it ran circles around my ultra 10 (which i'll admit is not the zippiest workstation) even under full load. 700 users on one server is easy, though I've never seen them claim that it'll do all 700 at a time (after 200, it really started to bog)
... Or does it make you feel superior to stand up and testify like it gives you some inside knowledge the way it supposedly works in the rest of the world? Wouldn't be the first...
Anyway, coronas aren't for everyone (developers who run a lot of compiles, bad), but zero-admin makes them *amazingly* cheap for places like schools, where PC's are abused like hell and they cost more to admin than buy.
How about, "The web was designed for interoperable standards
The web was designed in order for CERN to make papers available on demand. To this end, a hack on SGML was created that wasn't compliant with any SGML "standard", and a whole new protocol was invented (HTTP/0.9), one that could be implemented in literally minutes.
There might be standards now, and they're good ones [1]. The web most certainly was not "engineered"
with such standards in mind. It's a pull model for arbitrary MIME docs. Get used to the fact that it's not all text/html.
Oh, and "bloody clueless and lazy" might get your fire and brimstone rocks off, but it pretty much shuts off rational discourse. Not that it appears you wanted that...
[1] ones that Opera, I might add, has one of the worst available implementations of (read: DOM. It's read-only for crissakes).
Well said. Well enough said that I think you should post it to slashdot as an article, titled "An Open Letter to Richard Stallman", and cc it to rms@stallman.org
Got that address from his home page, and after reading it, I must say, I do have new respect for him... his ravings about the GNU/Linux thing are still scary in a "watch someone you care about go nuts" sort of way, but that page has *lots* of news and articles written by him about various socio-political issues, most of which don't even have to do with technology. Definitely not the work of a monomaniac.
I frankly don't see the big deal about Mira's technology.
The technology, no. The fact that it's actually being done instead of theorized over and cobbled together out of a script here, a customization there, 125E+238 config edits there, such that the average home user will never experience such a thing... Microsoft is getting it out the door. Apple probably could have done it first with Airport, and the new iMac was supposed to be a hub like that, except oops, they killed the Newton. Having the hub and no peripherals isn't too useful... reminds me of when they shipped Macs without keyboards.
Go and listen to an hour of their brain-wa^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmarketing drivel about.NET development and they'll give you a free copy of XP Professional, key and all. That's where I got mine.
Awesome. Where do I sign up for one of these marketing things? Using win2k now, but I could really use the multiple logins thing for letting my SO check her mail (no, I'm not switching this box to Linux until I get a new machine)
Swapping? Perhaps you haven't checked memory prices [pricewatch.com] lately.
Price it for a Vaio laptop. Just got a little more expensive, not to mention the bother of having to order it, since it's not something I can just walk down to Best Buy and get. I'm sick to death of people excusing waste and saying "RAM is cheap". Fact is, IE does better with RAM, so I don't have to care about price point.
1. It is the *one* browser that is nearly 100% standards compliant.
Hell yes, though I wonder when it'll start supporting COLGROUP in tables (it's HTML 4.01).
2.If you use Quick Launch with Mozilla, it loads part of itself into memory and then starts up about as fast as IE does.
Until it swaps out. Takes 30-60 seconds for it to swap back in and respond to anything at all, whereas IE is ready for use in about 10 seconds.
I still have lots of minor annoyances with Mozilla, but they're little interface behavior bugs (like why is it always warning me on submits even when I tell it to not show me the damn alert again?). Stability's about equal now. It's not like IE doesn't have its own annoyances (like ignoring the fact that I have.java files sent as text/plain from my webserver, but IE always wants to download them anyway).
Really, the only major complaint I have is how god-awful huge it is in memory so that it's slower than hell to swap in. This is quite an improvement from just a year ago.
Re:Something interesting about Moz on Windows XP
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
XUL is merely a nifty declarative way to construct GUIs. There's java implementations of it as well, and there's really no reason XUL couldn't be used to build native GUIs. The fact that Mozilla's XUL currently only targets the gecko engine is simply a consequence of the implementation -- it should be quite possible to make it render into native widgets and have them control mozilla "from the outside" through some sort of COM/XPCOM adaptor. But they really have no reason to -- end users are getting used to applications like mp3 players and the like that look and feel nothing at all close to "standard" -- witness RealPlayer, or even MS's latest windows media player on non-XP systems, for example.
Cool, thanks. Wasn't really flaming the product, actually, I just figured it was par for the course. Anyway, I just discovered caret browsing in Mozilla... I'm in keyboard user heaven. I wonder (seriously) if it'd be possible to get IE to run as a plug-in, get it to run in a mozilla tab for when I really need IE for a site. Hmmm...
I don't think I coined the term "penguinista", I've just used it a good deal more than average. In fact, I think it was a self-applied label, used in some sort of positive sense the first time I saw it. I took it as exactly how twisted the evangelism had gotten. I personally think that usage was a good deal more disturbing than the pejorative connotation I put on it. How about "penguinite"? (aside from sounding like a chemical substance).
What does amaze me about this post, however, is the implicit assumption that any news critical of MS is inherently biased and non-factual. I'm not sure this conclusion can be drawn.
Whoah there. No, it's just that slashdot has shown a long and increasingly obvious pattern of what goes way worse than bias when it comes to Microsoft. I don't even have a word for it, suffice to say that it impugns the first word of slashdot's slogan: "News".
Those of us who mistrust Microsoft are backed up by Federal District Court and a Circuit Court of Appeals. I'm not sure what backs up MS's advocates.
I'll do my best to shelve my clever rejoinders if you put away yours. Appeal to authority, and not even one universally respected. Besides, I haven't seen the words "great satan" anywhere in the court decisions:^) (ok, I promise, last one)
As for the fact that a community tends to be self-congratulatory, well, I grant you that. Of course, I cannot immediately think of a single counter-example in human history..
Self-congratulatory is one thing, I get used to minor kernel release announcements and "linux used to power 3 vacuum cleaners at company XYZ" (ok, -1 troll). What I refuse to accept is the daily Two Minute Hate against Microsoft that slashdot seems more and more to represent, which is destroying the credibility of the community it is associated with. Slashdot is becoming synonymous with sloppy spite-filled evangelism, which (and I bet is in the FAQ) is worse than none at all.
I dumped the google toolbar for one reason: no keyboard shortcut. See, I have a broken trackpad, no mouse (often no surface for it), so I use these mousekeys, which can take me 10 seconds to click on something. Plus, even when I have a working mouse, I hate to take my hands off the keyboard and aim for something on the screen. It's easier for me to just hit Ctrl-o, type 'g' (I have it aliased in my hosts file), hit return, then start typing my search. I also have a MS natural keyboard, and I hit the little blue "search" button, and have it set to a custom page that includes google, as well as a DICE search for my area. Still much faster than that shortcutless toolbar.
Hopefully, this is a sea change for/. and it's front page stories
I dunno. The story had to go to great lengths to explain how RealNames did itself in while MS had nothihg to do with it. In fact, the title of this article points out the novelty of Microsoft not being the bad guy. The story could have been posted as "Microsoft lets RealNames twist in the wind" and there would have been legions of rabid penguinistas jumping on them, not the least of which would probably have been the submitter, and the editors who take anything that slams MS without an iota of fact checking. And it's that last part that's the clincher -- the submitter spared the editors from having to do the fact checking. I suspect the next 10 stories about Microsoft will be of the form "New attack out for vulnerability [not mentioned: patched >6months ago]" or another piece of minutae in whatever legal imbroglio they're in to invite half-baked legal opinions about how Bill Gates should be forcibly given a sex-change or something.
In short, while the culture of slashdot might not be composed entirely of said rabid penguinistas, the editors certainly do their best to make it look that way. This one instance doesn't really assuage me at all.
Slashdot Mirror
would it have been too difficult to have credited the portion of FAQ you copied and pasted verbatim?
Simple solution to that problem: web of trust. A replaced key would have to replace the entire web of trust. Trusting a key that is not itself signed is like not using signatures at all.
You are only required by the GPL to release any changes you make to the engine itself
... anything that isn't source code, basically. Games might be one of the better venues for the GPL, if they're games that depend more on production quality than technical pizazz.
You are thinking of the LGPL. Anything that touches the GPL becomes GPL'd. e.g. using the header files, or linking.
I'm pretty sure that the art wouldn't get covered though, it should be pretty simple to give away the game and charge for the art, music, voiceovers, maps, writing
You are way the hell off-base calling the poster a troll.
In some cases, I think graphics actually detracts from game play; for example, I like Nethack a lot better than the graphics-based equivalents
You and about the rest of the 0.0001% of gamers that feel this way. Not suggesting you should follow the herd, but this argument has gotten really tired. Most avid nethack fans play the game with sepia-tinted glasses of nostalgia, and frankly that's not a great way to approach something new.
I would actually argue that many, perhaps most, great game designs originated in open source or the public domain. Those designs were then picked up by commercial gaming companies, branded, trademarked, and augmented with lots of graphics.
Your point would itself be augmented with lots of examples.
In what way is Tcl's runtime 'brain damaged' ? (I don't want a flamewar - just an example to back up that remark)
One must go through ghastly syntactic contortions to write object-oriented tcl, for one.
Another is the way it deals with events in tk: not only does it use its own printf-like "little language" for events -- weird, but otherwise not bad by itself -- it executes all events in global scope. You can't get any information on what was happening at the time the event (like a button press) was invoked unless you stuff it into a global variable. And since you can't pass any extra information except for what's hardwired into the little event sublanguage, you can't, for example, pass the position of a slider in when you press a button that does something related to that value.
In short, tcl makes you do everything with globals. Hope you never wanted to use tcl in a multithreaded environment -- not that the language itself has any support for it.
Perhaps bind has since been improved in tcl to take a function expression that evaluates in the definer's (static) or caller's (dynamic) scope. Perhaps there's threading, perhaps there's either a less painful OO, or enough borrowed from lisp to reduce the pain of writing real OO code. If so, then congratulations, but too late for this hacker. Maybe if scriptics spent more time developing an otherwise beautiful *looking* language and less writing claptrap about "leveraging your synergies with scripting in b2b enterprises" like it invented the concept of scripting and was handing it down like mana from heaven, then the developers wouldn't have abandoned it and scriptics wouldn't have gone under. At least ActiveState took it under its wing, so there might be hope yet.
</rant>
We weren't going to run this, but there were a lot of submissions, so ...
... being the media whores we are, got in as many trolling jabs as we could when we posted it.
Why subscribe indeed?
A good language can introduce new features without changing the basics. This is why PHP got so popular so fast.
Does PHP have inheritance yet? Or let's start simpler: has it stopped dumping every new function into a global namespace? This bugs me in elisp, and it bugs me in php. Actually, it's the fact that PHP passes objects by value (and that they removed the declaration syntax for byref and saddled you with the ugly syntax at call time) that caused me to stop using PHP.
That and PHP perpetuates the perlism nonsense of:
$foo->bar(baz,mumble);
As opposed to a much more sensible:
foo.bar(baz, mumble)
Or, when you think long and hard about about it, by using the logical start of the line as a statement beginner, the end of the line as a terminator, and that most args don't have whitespace in them or have other good logical delimiters if they do:
foo bar baz mumble
Only Tcl does anything like this, though lisp comes close (but I shouldn't need the top level of parens if I have other delimiters). It's just a shame that Tcl's runtime is so brain damaged, and that it's become irrelevant as a language these days.
perl is the practical extraction and reporting language. that's what it was originally designed for
Arguably that's what it was designed for, but that's a "backronym" (hey, how do i create e2 links in slashcode?). perl was "pearl" in larry wall's mind, but through some weird quirk of the library filing system, he only had four letters, so he called it PERL (all uppercase then, I think). Which was helpful since there was another language at the time called "pearl" (which never took off anyway).
Just get the damn thing written, make it flexible enough for us to rewrite perl in perl, and kick this lazy-ass camel out the door before my grandchildren ask me when perl6 is coming out!
... great, so move on already, regexes are not the final word in pattern matching.
I don't want more powerful regular expressions. I want a more powerful pattern-matching syntax, one I can compile down to an opaque object with a bit of syntactic sugar, then use in place of a regex. I want a parser sub-language like SML or parsing primitives like haskell. Regular expressions are now turing complete thanks to perl
And what's more -- all this you're doing Larry, it's anti-hacker. It's top-down, it's engineered, it's ivory-tower theory that might sound neat and no matter how zany your presentation is, you are living in the rareified atmosphere of a language designer, and now you are starting to think that way, dispensing wisdom on The Right Way To Do Things from on high. Yes, inventing Just The Right Way to give people 1E+255 ways to do things is still looking for the perfect that's the enemy of the good, because once we have the foundations to improve on perl6, we will do it, but only if we have something to work with. It doesn't all need to be done up front.
Your extended regexes can be done as a library solution. Stop ending the world and start living in it.
dude... you're lecturing an AV programmer on the proper terminology.
Anyway, here's the distinction: viruses, the real kind, require host cells to replicate. Worms are full-blown self-contained organisms. Worms burrow into systems, breed, and push into other systems. Viruses infect files, typically the execution path of an executable, or the data stream (e.g. exploiting a buffer overflow in a mp3 codec).
Arguably, the fact that the worm is now embedded in the email, and taking advantage of the email program to self-replicate just makes the point of the original poster that much stronger -- that viruses and worms are getting pretty well interchangeable these days.
I'll tell you a story about why Sun will go broke in the next 10-20 years, and irrelevant in 2-5 years [snip]
You work in securities, and you base your analysis off a single bad salesdork? Now I know what goes into the average stock pick. "I liked the guy. Buy."
I don't think they wanted you anyway. P.S. I was never hotelled at Sun, it's only at places where the price of the real estate is sky high where they do have "flex" offices.
I think his problem was server performance, not network bandwidth (not counting remote network resources). If he didn't allocate enough bandwidth for the sunrays, then he'd be getting tearing effects on the screens, not slow application performance. I'm guessing he had runaway processes that were never killed off, that SRM was never being run, and that no one even bothered to run ps to diagnose the problem, let alone pkill. And under no circumstance was weakness ever admitted by doing the unforgivable, and calling support...
16 cpu'S, 20 users, and slow ... dude, call support and get it fixed. That's way sub-optimal performance, and way way out of spec. The initial roll-out of these things (when they were called Coronas), we ran a hundred users on an eight way box, and I actually jumped in on it because it ran circles around my ultra 10 (which i'll admit is not the zippiest workstation) even under full load.
...
700 users on one server is easy, though I've never seen them claim that it'll do all 700 at a time (after 200, it really started to bog)
... Or does it make you feel superior to stand up and testify like it gives you some inside knowledge the way it supposedly works in the rest of the world? Wouldn't be the first
Anyway, coronas aren't for everyone (developers who run a lot of compiles, bad), but zero-admin makes them *amazingly* cheap for places like schools, where PC's are abused like hell and they cost more to admin than buy.
How about, "The web was designed for interoperable standards
The web was designed in order for CERN to make papers available on demand. To this end, a hack on SGML was created that wasn't compliant with any SGML "standard", and a whole new protocol was invented (HTTP/0.9), one that could be implemented in literally minutes.
There might be standards now, and they're good ones [1]. The web most certainly was not "engineered"
with such standards in mind. It's a pull model for arbitrary MIME docs. Get used to the fact that it's not all text/html.
Oh, and "bloody clueless and lazy" might get your fire and brimstone rocks off, but it pretty much shuts off rational discourse. Not that it appears you wanted that...
[1] ones that Opera, I might add, has one of the worst available implementations of (read: DOM. It's read-only for crissakes).
Well said. Well enough said that I think you should post it to slashdot as an article, titled "An Open Letter to Richard Stallman", and cc it to rms@stallman.org
... his ravings about the GNU/Linux thing are still scary in a "watch someone you care about go nuts" sort of way, but that page has *lots* of news and articles written by him about various socio-political issues, most of which don't even have to do with technology. Definitely not the work of a monomaniac.
Got that address from his home page, and after reading it, I must say, I do have new respect for him
I frankly don't see the big deal about Mira's technology.
... Microsoft is getting it out the door. Apple probably could have done it first with Airport, and the new iMac was supposed to be a hub like that, except oops, they killed the Newton. Having the hub and no peripherals isn't too useful ... reminds me of when they shipped Macs without keyboards.
The technology, no. The fact that it's actually being done instead of theorized over and cobbled together out of a script here, a customization there, 125E+238 config edits there, such that the average home user will never experience such a thing
Go and listen to an hour of their brain-wa^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmarketing drivel about .NET development and they'll give you a free copy of XP Professional, key and all. That's where I got mine.
Awesome. Where do I sign up for one of these marketing things? Using win2k now, but I could really use the multiple logins thing for letting my SO check her mail (no, I'm not switching this box to Linux until I get a new machine)
Swapping? Perhaps you haven't checked memory prices [pricewatch.com] lately.
Price it for a Vaio laptop. Just got a little more expensive, not to mention the bother of having to order it, since it's not something I can just walk down to Best Buy and get. I'm sick to death of people excusing waste and saying "RAM is cheap". Fact is, IE does better with RAM, so I don't have to care about price point.
1. It is the *one* browser that is nearly 100% standards compliant.
.java files sent as text/plain from my webserver, but IE always wants to download them anyway).
Hell yes, though I wonder when it'll start supporting COLGROUP in tables (it's HTML 4.01).
2.If you use Quick Launch with Mozilla, it loads part of itself into memory and then starts up about as fast as IE does.
Until it swaps out. Takes 30-60 seconds for it to swap back in and respond to anything at all, whereas IE is ready for use in about 10 seconds.
I still have lots of minor annoyances with Mozilla, but they're little interface behavior bugs (like why is it always warning me on submits even when I tell it to not show me the damn alert again?). Stability's about equal now. It's not like IE doesn't have its own annoyances (like ignoring the fact that I have
Really, the only major complaint I have is how god-awful huge it is in memory so that it's slower than hell to swap in. This is quite an improvement from just a year ago.
XUL is merely a nifty declarative way to construct GUIs. There's java implementations of it as well, and there's really no reason XUL couldn't be used to build native GUIs. The fact that Mozilla's XUL currently only targets the gecko engine is simply a consequence of the implementation -- it should be quite possible to make it render into native widgets and have them control mozilla "from the outside" through some sort of COM/XPCOM adaptor. But they really have no reason to -- end users are getting used to applications like mp3 players and the like that look and feel nothing at all close to "standard" -- witness RealPlayer, or even MS's latest windows media player on non-XP systems, for example.
Cool, thanks. Wasn't really flaming the product, actually, I just figured it was par for the course. Anyway, I just discovered caret browsing in Mozilla ... I'm in keyboard user heaven. I wonder (seriously) if it'd be possible to get IE to run as a plug-in, get it to run in a mozilla tab for when I really need IE for a site. Hmmm...
I don't think I coined the term "penguinista", I've just used it a good deal more than average. In fact, I think it was a self-applied label, used in some sort of positive sense the first time I saw it. I took it as exactly how twisted the evangelism had gotten. I personally think that usage was a good deal more disturbing than the pejorative connotation I put on it. How about "penguinite"? (aside from sounding like a chemical substance).
:^) (ok, I promise, last one)
What does amaze me about this post, however, is the implicit assumption that any news critical of MS is inherently biased and non-factual. I'm not sure this conclusion can be drawn.
Whoah there. No, it's just that slashdot has shown a long and increasingly obvious pattern of what goes way worse than bias when it comes to Microsoft. I don't even have a word for it, suffice to say that it impugns the first word of slashdot's slogan: "News".
Those of us who mistrust Microsoft are backed up by Federal District Court and a Circuit Court of Appeals. I'm not sure what backs up MS's advocates.
I'll do my best to shelve my clever rejoinders if you put away yours. Appeal to authority, and not even one universally respected. Besides, I haven't seen the words "great satan" anywhere in the court decisions
As for the fact that a community tends to be self-congratulatory, well, I grant you that. Of course, I cannot immediately think of a single counter-example in human history..
Self-congratulatory is one thing, I get used to minor kernel release announcements and "linux used to power 3 vacuum cleaners at company XYZ" (ok, -1 troll). What I refuse to accept is the daily Two Minute Hate against Microsoft that slashdot seems more and more to represent, which is destroying the
credibility of the community it is associated with. Slashdot is becoming synonymous with sloppy spite-filled evangelism, which (and I bet is in the FAQ) is worse than none at all.
I dumped the google toolbar for one reason: no keyboard shortcut. See, I have a broken trackpad, no mouse (often no surface for it), so I use these mousekeys, which can take me 10 seconds to click on something. Plus, even when I have a working mouse, I hate to take my hands off the keyboard and aim for something on the screen. It's easier for me to just hit Ctrl-o, type 'g' (I have it aliased in my hosts file), hit return, then start typing my search. I also have a MS natural keyboard, and I hit the little blue "search" button, and have it set to a custom page that includes google, as well as a DICE search for my area. Still much faster than that shortcutless toolbar.
Hopefully, this is a sea change for /. and it's front page stories
I dunno. The story had to go to great lengths to explain how RealNames did itself in while MS had nothihg to do with it. In fact, the title of this article points out the novelty of Microsoft not being the bad guy. The story could have been posted as "Microsoft lets RealNames twist in the wind" and there would have been legions of rabid penguinistas jumping on them, not the least of which would probably have been the submitter, and the editors who take anything that slams MS without an iota of fact checking. And it's that last part that's the clincher -- the submitter spared the editors from having to do the fact checking. I suspect the next 10 stories about Microsoft will be of the form "New attack out for vulnerability [not mentioned: patched >6months ago]" or another piece of minutae in whatever legal imbroglio they're in to invite half-baked legal opinions about how Bill Gates should be forcibly given a sex-change or something.
In short, while the culture of slashdot might not be composed entirely of said rabid penguinistas, the editors certainly do their best to make it look that way. This one instance doesn't really assuage me at all.