You guys sit in your holes and have a touchy-feely staff meeting. We'll take Kirk and go on ahead.:P
Informative???? A tread-head talking trash about guys who engage the enemy at close range with rifles, rather than from inside the protective confines of a steel box?
Sadly enough, I've gotten into loud arguments about whether Picard or Kirk was the better captain.
I'm with you on that one. Back when I was a young infantry officer in the Army, the three other lieutenants in my company and I used to get together at our CO's house to watch the latest Next Generation episode.
We would get into blistering arguments about the leadership styles of Picard and Kirk. Two of the guys came down in favor of Kirk, and three of us (including our boss, the CO), though Picard was a better leader. We actually had extensive discussions about it, comparing their actions on various episodes to examples from the Army's leadership manuals, books we'd read about leadership, and our own real-world examples.
A few months after these regular Trek sessions started, we were deployed to a rather remote part of Somalia. The CO asked his wife to record and send episodes, even though being a light infantry company we deployed with no real luxury items. Sure enough, several weeks after arriving in Somalia, we received a tape with two episodes. By then a heavy engineer unit had colocated with us, and we were able to phinagle a couple of hours on their TV late one night between patrols.
Strange though it may sound, that night spent watching Trek with a generator humming loudly outside in the hot Somali air was one of the best cinematic experiences of my life.
By all accounts I've read, KHTML had a smaller code base which better lent it to modification and expansion, and had a faster rendering engine. Apple's big push with Safari was to beat IE on speed. This was before Firefox had made its appearance, and Mozilla 7 was not making any real inroads with average users.
This highlights a problem with the tech press
on
Firefox Growth Slowing?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So Firefox's adaption rate is (supposedly) slowing. BFD. It is still taking marketshare away from IE, after only a few short months. The tech press is so interested (like most of the media) in being hypervigilant about the latest "news" that they miss the big picture.
The big picture is that people are realizing there are viable alternatives to Microsoft products, and they are using those alternatives. For a long time it was essentially IE reigning supreme, and now there are a variety of alternatives, with Firefox leading the pack and picking up new users by the millions.
Right, and were we here in (ex-) East Bloc better off with a TV that lied 24/7, or would we have been better off with no TV at all?
Wrong question.
Maybe TV is the wrong analogy. What about the radios that brought in information from the outside world, despite the best efforts of governments to prevent it from happening? It seems to me that even comparing Google to radio transmissions is a limited analogy at best, given that the Web is by its nature more interactive and fungible by the average user.
Will Google's presence in China hasten the free flow of information, or end up encouraging the Chinese government to reactively restrict even more?
Something tells me it won't be a simple matter of either/or. There will probably be ways for resourceful Chinese citizens to use Google in a manner the authorities don't want, and there will be some areas where Google will have to go along with the government.
A larger question might be this: Is the Chinese public better off with, or without Google?
Our own coporate-government now places economic restrictions and burdens on us that aren't on the Chinese.
What sort of restrictions? Environmental policies? Too much regulatory oversight, like the kind that might have prevented the Tyco and Enron scandals from happening? Not enough tax breaks, like the ones that allow many of the biggest American businesses to get away with paying essentialy no tax? Not enough subsidies and protections?
We have a two-party monolithic government concerned only with power and maintaining the status-quo.
We had that during WW I, WW II, and the Cold War. What has changed in our political system that has made America suddenly weak compared to the Chinese?
We have our own fundamentalists that are not interested in personal freedoms.
Agreed, but the Chinese don't have many of the personal freedoms that are enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, yet they're moving rapidly forward economically.
What the Chinese and Indians and many other people have that we don't have is drive and determination. We have let our society atrophy. The state of Kansas is debating whether "Intelligent Design" should have an equal place in the education system with evolution. We have invaded two countries and are engaged in a global war, but we want our guns and our butter too - look at the number of PCVs (Penis Compensation Vehicles) on the road in America. We think quarter to quarter, always searching for the fast buck. We want quick, easy, painless solutions, and we have succumbed to the belief that individualism equals Americanism.
We Americans have our heads in the sand. We're living on past glories, allowing our democratic institutions to wither away due to lack of interest, and we continue to put forth leaders who represent the most mediocre aspects of our society.
In the wake of scandals at the NYT, USN&WR, et. al., and now Wired, is the profession of journalism going to get its act together? I think these scandals are a good thing, in that they are forcing journalists to realize that they've not been doing a good enough job of policing their profession.
Things seem bleak for traditional journalism right now, but the threat of distributed reporting from blogs, the demise of local newspapers, and this series of scandals could be just the thing to force the profession to rebuild itself in a better image.
She's pushing Microsoft WMA10 format. Simple as that.
That's my take on it as well. The subtle message is that Microsoft used to be closed but is now open, while Apple is still closed.
Let's not forget that Microsoft WMA10 came out into a market where the iPod was king. They're not interested in compatibility, they're interested in owning the market by owning the format and controlling the devices and stores themselves that way.
Exactly. Hillary's assessment is particularly absurd given that you can save non-DRMed WMP files as AAC files. This is really all about which DRM format is going to win. Apple came to market with AAC/FairPlay and people liked it. They recognized that it was a compromise, but it was a reasonable one.
My feeling is that Apple should be doing everything it can to bring more players into the AAC/FairPlay camp, rather than just letting Microsoft draw everyone into the WMA 10 fold. But Microsoft doesn't give a gnat's ass about making things easier on consumers.
They're all for the "music as a subscription" model, because it's a perfect extension of their goal of divesting control from hardware manufacturers. Plus, if you never own the music you listen to, it's easy to keep charging you for it over, and over, and over. Any guess why a music industry flak likes the Microsoft approach better than the Apple approach?
You're the CEO of the most powerful OEM in the business, and right now you're reliant on Microsoft to keep bringing customers to your door. If you're Michael Dell, it seems you'd want to make sure that if Microsoft falls down on the job, you're in good with the most prominent Linux vendor.
Dell is also sending a message to Microsoft: Just because we haven't embraced Linux at this juncture doesn't mean we won't in the future. It's a good way of letting MS know that he's not in their pocket.
I don't think there needs to be a law for everything, but to me this is a case where hunters are saying that they don't want hunting to become inundated with people who are not hunters.
Hunting isn't just about taking out your high-powered rifle and wasting an animal. You have to be out in the environment. You have to be where the animal is in order to kill it. While the technology for finding and killing animals has become more advanced, there is a connection between the hunter and the prey . I'm not a hunter, but every hunter I've ever talked to takes this seriously.
It seems to me that one of the primary reasons people go out early in the morning and spend long hours in the woods looking for animals to kill, then doing the dirty work of dispatching the animals and hauling their dead bodies is that they want to be closer to the life and death struggle of nature. They want to feel less removed from it, not more removed from it.
In that sense, a ban on Internet hunting is a way of saying that they want to preserve this aspect of hunting, so that it is not overwhelmed by people who have no sense of what hunting is all about, and think of it as merely a video game featuring live animals. While I don't hunt because I don't see the need to kill animals in order to feel closer to nature, or in order to prove my dominance over other creatures, I can understand why hunters would want to keep hunting from becoming an exercise that requires no interaction with the natural world.
As a side note, California does have to focus on balancing the budget, but I hardly think it's a question of balancing the budget or passing a law banning Internet hunting.
I'll even grant that because it was commisioned by MS a little extra scrutiny is certainly due; but summarily discarding the study simply for this reason is the intellectual equivalent of sticking our fingers in our ears and screaming "lalalalalala" at the top of our lungs.
Actually, it's learned behavior. We've seen so many fact-warping MS-sponsored studies, astroturfing campaigns, dissembling regarding the nature of their monopoly, and other aggressive PR that it's no wonder people are more than a little skeptical.
This reminds me of something someone told me about graphic card benchmarks. He is a 3d graphics professional, and he was called in by a rather large chip company to help them in a test against another large chip maker's video card. The arrangement was that he would work with the representative from the other company to come up with a "fair" set tests to which both sides could agree.
As the more experienced guy, he was able to get his counterpart to agree to tests that worked squarely in favor of his company's card. This is in a scenario where it is supposed to be evenhanded, since both companies agreed to the test methodology.
So it's bad enough already. Compare a situation like that to one in which Microsoft is commissioning a study, and you can imagine why people react with such profound skepticism.
I'm not saying that Microsoft can't be a formidable oppponent when they want to, due to their resources and distribution system, not because of their innovation.
I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment. But the thing about Microsoft is that they wait for their opponents to make mistakes, and they aggressively capitalize on them. Because Microsoft has such deep pockets, they can afford to think on a longer timeline than most of their competitors, and they can afford to make more mistakes.
They have succeeded remarkably well in spite of their lack of innovation. They don't have to innovate. They just have to be second or third or fourth to market, then bury the innovator with "close enough" products that leverage their Windows and Office monopolies.
I'm not saying that Google is going to loose a head-on battle with Microsoft, but I am saying that just because you have a better product doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be able to beat Microsoft. Those who forget this fact will eventually get clobbered.
Apple - It took Microsoft forever to get to Windows 3.1, but in the mean time Apple failed to take the threat seriously.
Sun - Their recent deal with Microsoft is tacit acknowledgement that back when they had a huge edge in the enterprise, they were not taking Microsoft seriously. Say what you want, but their glory days are long gone.
Netscape - Not for the reason you mentioned. I started using IE because in spite of a built-in distrust of everything Microsoft, it was hands-down better than Navigator. I'm not alone in this assessment.
Borland - This is a local company, and I know a slew of people who worked there. Borland screwed themselves out of market leadership because they didn't have the basic smarts to realize that Microsoft could and would leverage their position to create a better compiler, which they did.
Lotus - SmartSuite was knocked off by MS Office for a variety of reasons, but it was the tight OS/application bundling that really did the trick for MS. This is the sort of MS behavior I'm talking about.
While you're focusing on innovation, innovation *per se* doesn't matter. What matters is that through innovation, marketing, or other business maneuvering, you box in your competitors and beat them in the market. That often sucks for you and me, but that's the way it is, and Microsoft's understanding of this reality is embedded deep in its DNA.
To get an idea of the approach Microsoft will take with search, look at the long-term strategy they're applying with respect to console games. The XBox is now locked in a battle with the PlayStation. They were initially the number three player when they entered the market. Now they're number two. They may never get to number one, but if Sony screws up and rests on their laurels, Microsoft certainly will come out on top.
As long as there are advertizers that can pay the bills, there will be innovation from Google.
Right. And if Microsoft can leverage its OS dominance through "good enough" IE built-in MSN Search capabilities, they could conceivably stop Google dead in their tracks. No eyeballs looking at Google, no Google Ads, no Google.
Google is complacent and getting too full of themselves because... they aren't continually coming out with new products and software and innovations/evolutions?
I love Google. Love the company, love their products. Just went to the Cinco de Mayo open house this evening. They are rolling out all kinds of groovy new technology. The people there are smart as hell, and they are definitely technology-driven.
That's what I worry about. In my experience, really smart people with the best technology don't always win when pitted against well-entrenched players who have the marketing and business strategy to displace them.
I'm just being paranoid.;-)
Microsoft is relentless
on
Gates on Google
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Never write off or underestimate what lies in Redmond.
That saying should be tatooed in reverse on the forehead of every CEO of every company that competes against Microsoft, so that every morning they look in the mirror and see that message in bold black ink.
The aggressiveness and will to succeed that you find in the CEOs of so many technology companies tends to go hand in hand with the sort of hubris that becomes an iron anchor. They succeed temporarily against Microsoft, get happy about it and crow to whomever will listen, and a few years later they get solidly trounced by the Beast of Redmond.
It has been proven over and over again that Microsoft succeeds against opponents who become complacent. Those that don't (Intuit is a good example) can fend off Microsoft's attacks. But I'm seeing signs that Google is already getting too full of themselves. If they're not paranoid of Microsoft, they're screwed.
It is a restless day in which somebody is not blown to smithereens in Iraq yet I am supposed to feel outraged that the new Star Wars movie earned a pg-13 rating?
Don't worry, the only people are dying are those soldiers and marines who volunteered to serve their country, plus of course the Iraqi civilians and resistance fighters. It's not like anyone really has to care, since there's no draft. If your ass isn't in danger, why concern yourself with the plight of people in Iraq?
It works out pretty well. We can all loudly proclaim that America is sacrificing for the greater good, while safely spending our summer watching Darth Vader carve people up into little chunks.
The pattern is always the same: their early work rocks, but as their egos inflate, they stop listening to their editors. Their early work is tight, it's only their best work, and anything not meeting the highest standards is edited out. Then in later work, they go on and on in mind-numbing histories that fail to move the story forward or create any new dramatic tension.
I'm so with you there. That's why it's so funny to see Card bashing on Trek, for having outlived its usefulness. "Ender: The Infant Years" anyone?
Anti-Slash is an open community of people that constantly make fun of other people on slashdot.
So in an attempt to show how rediculous the unpaid advertising is on Slashdot, you put up your own advertisement for a site that essentially functions as a leech. It could not live without Slashdot, yet its purpose is to bash on Slashdot. That's constructive, AC.
I fucking hate how people think science and "technology" is just a business and call it a "market".
Actually my point was not that business dictates all things, but that those who lead in the technology business tend to be the ones who get all of the press. Like it or not, economics exists, and it is a huge force in all our lives. Technology isn't just formed in a bubble outside of market forces.
Another reason to shut all Americans' mouths with superglue.
It might be handier to superglue our fingers together, so we can't type.
I'm interested in the first two, but not the last two. That's the nature of Slashdot, I suppose. The popular stuff makes the page, and the unpopular stuff doesn't show up as often. But for my part I'll keep my eyes peeled for Linux and Gnome stories (and not just Linux stories about Linus either) to submit.
Google is one of the few market-changing forces in computer tech these days. There's a reason you read a lot about Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, AMD, Intel, etc. on Slashdot. It's because these are the companies that are changing the way other companies do business, and in turn how we all work and play.
Because you didn't include any sort of solution to what you see as an overabundance of stories about Google, I'm curious: What specific types of stories would you like to see?
Slashdot Mirror
Informative???? A tread-head talking trash about guys who engage the enemy at close range with rifles, rather than from inside the protective confines of a steel box?
Beh, I say! Beh!
I'm with you on that one. Back when I was a young infantry officer in the Army, the three other lieutenants in my company and I used to get together at our CO's house to watch the latest Next Generation episode.
We would get into blistering arguments about the leadership styles of Picard and Kirk. Two of the guys came down in favor of Kirk, and three of us (including our boss, the CO), though Picard was a better leader. We actually had extensive discussions about it, comparing their actions on various episodes to examples from the Army's leadership manuals, books we'd read about leadership, and our own real-world examples.
A few months after these regular Trek sessions started, we were deployed to a rather remote part of Somalia. The CO asked his wife to record and send episodes, even though being a light infantry company we deployed with no real luxury items. Sure enough, several weeks after arriving in Somalia, we received a tape with two episodes. By then a heavy engineer unit had colocated with us, and we were able to phinagle a couple of hours on their TV late one night between patrols.
Strange though it may sound, that night spent watching Trek with a generator humming loudly outside in the hot Somali air was one of the best cinematic experiences of my life.
By all accounts I've read, KHTML had a smaller code base which better lent it to modification and expansion, and had a faster rendering engine. Apple's big push with Safari was to beat IE on speed. This was before Firefox had made its appearance, and Mozilla 7 was not making any real inroads with average users.
Check out the KDE reaction to the new Safari browser back in Janary, 2003.
The big picture is that people are realizing there are viable alternatives to Microsoft products, and they are using those alternatives. For a long time it was essentially IE reigning supreme, and now there are a variety of alternatives, with Firefox leading the pack and picking up new users by the millions.
Wrong question.
Maybe TV is the wrong analogy. What about the radios that brought in information from the outside world, despite the best efforts of governments to prevent it from happening? It seems to me that even comparing Google to radio transmissions is a limited analogy at best, given that the Web is by its nature more interactive and fungible by the average user.
He could conceivably have unexercised options, though, right?
Something tells me it won't be a simple matter of either/or. There will probably be ways for resourceful Chinese citizens to use Google in a manner the authorities don't want, and there will be some areas where Google will have to go along with the government.
A larger question might be this: Is the Chinese public better off with, or without Google?
What sort of restrictions? Environmental policies? Too much regulatory oversight, like the kind that might have prevented the Tyco and Enron scandals from happening? Not enough tax breaks, like the ones that allow many of the biggest American businesses to get away with paying essentialy no tax? Not enough subsidies and protections?
We have a two-party monolithic government concerned only with power and maintaining the status-quo.
We had that during WW I, WW II, and the Cold War. What has changed in our political system that has made America suddenly weak compared to the Chinese?
We have our own fundamentalists that are not interested in personal freedoms.
Agreed, but the Chinese don't have many of the personal freedoms that are enshrined in the Constitution and Bill of Rights, yet they're moving rapidly forward economically.
What the Chinese and Indians and many other people have that we don't have is drive and determination. We have let our society atrophy. The state of Kansas is debating whether "Intelligent Design" should have an equal place in the education system with evolution. We have invaded two countries and are engaged in a global war, but we want our guns and our butter too - look at the number of PCVs (Penis Compensation Vehicles) on the road in America. We think quarter to quarter, always searching for the fast buck. We want quick, easy, painless solutions, and we have succumbed to the belief that individualism equals Americanism.
We Americans have our heads in the sand. We're living on past glories, allowing our democratic institutions to wither away due to lack of interest, and we continue to put forth leaders who represent the most mediocre aspects of our society.
Things seem bleak for traditional journalism right now, but the threat of distributed reporting from blogs, the demise of local newspapers, and this series of scandals could be just the thing to force the profession to rebuild itself in a better image.
That's my take on it as well. The subtle message is that Microsoft used to be closed but is now open, while Apple is still closed.
Let's not forget that Microsoft WMA10 came out into a market where the iPod was king. They're not interested in compatibility, they're interested in owning the market by owning the format and controlling the devices and stores themselves that way.
Exactly. Hillary's assessment is particularly absurd given that you can save non-DRMed WMP files as AAC files. This is really all about which DRM format is going to win. Apple came to market with AAC/FairPlay and people liked it. They recognized that it was a compromise, but it was a reasonable one.
My feeling is that Apple should be doing everything it can to bring more players into the AAC/FairPlay camp, rather than just letting Microsoft draw everyone into the WMA 10 fold. But Microsoft doesn't give a gnat's ass about making things easier on consumers.
They're all for the "music as a subscription" model, because it's a perfect extension of their goal of divesting control from hardware manufacturers. Plus, if you never own the music you listen to, it's easy to keep charging you for it over, and over, and over. Any guess why a music industry flak likes the Microsoft approach better than the Apple approach?
Dell is also sending a message to Microsoft: Just because we haven't embraced Linux at this juncture doesn't mean we won't in the future. It's a good way of letting MS know that he's not in their pocket.
I don't think there needs to be a law for everything, but to me this is a case where hunters are saying that they don't want hunting to become inundated with people who are not hunters.
Hunting isn't just about taking out your high-powered rifle and wasting an animal. You have to be out in the environment. You have to be where the animal is in order to kill it. While the technology for finding and killing animals has become more advanced, there is a connection between the hunter and the prey . I'm not a hunter, but every hunter I've ever talked to takes this seriously.
It seems to me that one of the primary reasons people go out early in the morning and spend long hours in the woods looking for animals to kill, then doing the dirty work of dispatching the animals and hauling their dead bodies is that they want to be closer to the life and death struggle of nature. They want to feel less removed from it, not more removed from it.
In that sense, a ban on Internet hunting is a way of saying that they want to preserve this aspect of hunting, so that it is not overwhelmed by people who have no sense of what hunting is all about, and think of it as merely a video game featuring live animals. While I don't hunt because I don't see the need to kill animals in order to feel closer to nature, or in order to prove my dominance over other creatures, I can understand why hunters would want to keep hunting from becoming an exercise that requires no interaction with the natural world.
As a side note, California does have to focus on balancing the budget, but I hardly think it's a question of balancing the budget or passing a law banning Internet hunting.
Actually, it's learned behavior. We've seen so many fact-warping MS-sponsored studies, astroturfing campaigns, dissembling regarding the nature of their monopoly, and other aggressive PR that it's no wonder people are more than a little skeptical.
This reminds me of something someone told me about graphic card benchmarks. He is a 3d graphics professional, and he was called in by a rather large chip company to help them in a test against another large chip maker's video card. The arrangement was that he would work with the representative from the other company to come up with a "fair" set tests to which both sides could agree.
As the more experienced guy, he was able to get his counterpart to agree to tests that worked squarely in favor of his company's card. This is in a scenario where it is supposed to be evenhanded, since both companies agreed to the test methodology.
So it's bad enough already. Compare a situation like that to one in which Microsoft is commissioning a study, and you can imagine why people react with such profound skepticism.
I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment. But the thing about Microsoft is that they wait for their opponents to make mistakes, and they aggressively capitalize on them. Because Microsoft has such deep pockets, they can afford to think on a longer timeline than most of their competitors, and they can afford to make more mistakes.
They have succeeded remarkably well in spite of their lack of innovation. They don't have to innovate. They just have to be second or third or fourth to market, then bury the innovator with "close enough" products that leverage their Windows and Office monopolies.
I'm not saying that Google is going to loose a head-on battle with Microsoft, but I am saying that just because you have a better product doesn't necessarily mean that you'll be able to beat Microsoft. Those who forget this fact will eventually get clobbered.
Apple - It took Microsoft forever to get to Windows 3.1, but in the mean time Apple failed to take the threat seriously.
Sun - Their recent deal with Microsoft is tacit acknowledgement that back when they had a huge edge in the enterprise, they were not taking Microsoft seriously. Say what you want, but their glory days are long gone.
Netscape - Not for the reason you mentioned. I started using IE because in spite of a built-in distrust of everything Microsoft, it was hands-down better than Navigator. I'm not alone in this assessment.
Borland - This is a local company, and I know a slew of people who worked there. Borland screwed themselves out of market leadership because they didn't have the basic smarts to realize that Microsoft could and would leverage their position to create a better compiler, which they did.
Lotus - SmartSuite was knocked off by MS Office for a variety of reasons, but it was the tight OS/application bundling that really did the trick for MS. This is the sort of MS behavior I'm talking about.
While you're focusing on innovation, innovation *per se* doesn't matter. What matters is that through innovation, marketing, or other business maneuvering, you box in your competitors and beat them in the market. That often sucks for you and me, but that's the way it is, and Microsoft's understanding of this reality is embedded deep in its DNA.
To get an idea of the approach Microsoft will take with search, look at the long-term strategy they're applying with respect to console games. The XBox is now locked in a battle with the PlayStation. They were initially the number three player when they entered the market. Now they're number two. They may never get to number one, but if Sony screws up and rests on their laurels, Microsoft certainly will come out on top.
Right. And if Microsoft can leverage its OS dominance through "good enough" IE built-in MSN Search capabilities, they could conceivably stop Google dead in their tracks. No eyeballs looking at Google, no Google Ads, no Google.
I love Google. Love the company, love their products. Just went to the Cinco de Mayo open house this evening. They are rolling out all kinds of groovy new technology. The people there are smart as hell, and they are definitely technology-driven.
That's what I worry about. In my experience, really smart people with the best technology don't always win when pitted against well-entrenched players who have the marketing and business strategy to displace them.
I'm just being paranoid. ;-)
That saying should be tatooed in reverse on the forehead of every CEO of every company that competes against Microsoft, so that every morning they look in the mirror and see that message in bold black ink.
The aggressiveness and will to succeed that you find in the CEOs of so many technology companies tends to go hand in hand with the sort of hubris that becomes an iron anchor. They succeed temporarily against Microsoft, get happy about it and crow to whomever will listen, and a few years later they get solidly trounced by the Beast of Redmond.
It has been proven over and over again that Microsoft succeeds against opponents who become complacent. Those that don't (Intuit is a good example) can fend off Microsoft's attacks. But I'm seeing signs that Google is already getting too full of themselves. If they're not paranoid of Microsoft, they're screwed.
Don't worry, the only people are dying are those soldiers and marines who volunteered to serve their country, plus of course the Iraqi civilians and resistance fighters. It's not like anyone really has to care, since there's no draft. If your ass isn't in danger, why concern yourself with the plight of people in Iraq?
It works out pretty well. We can all loudly proclaim that America is sacrificing for the greater good, while safely spending our summer watching Darth Vader carve people up into little chunks.
I'm so with you there. That's why it's so funny to see Card bashing on Trek, for having outlived its usefulness. "Ender: The Infant Years" anyone?
So in an attempt to show how rediculous the unpaid advertising is on Slashdot, you put up your own advertisement for a site that essentially functions as a leech. It could not live without Slashdot, yet its purpose is to bash on Slashdot. That's constructive, AC.
You've obviously never lived in Berkeley.
Actually my point was not that business dictates all things, but that those who lead in the technology business tend to be the ones who get all of the press. Like it or not, economics exists, and it is a huge force in all our lives. Technology isn't just formed in a bubble outside of market forces.
Another reason to shut all Americans' mouths with superglue.
It might be handier to superglue our fingers together, so we can't type.
I'm interested in the first two, but not the last two. That's the nature of Slashdot, I suppose. The popular stuff makes the page, and the unpopular stuff doesn't show up as often. But for my part I'll keep my eyes peeled for Linux and Gnome stories (and not just Linux stories about Linus either) to submit.
Google is one of the few market-changing forces in computer tech these days. There's a reason you read a lot about Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, AMD, Intel, etc. on Slashdot. It's because these are the companies that are changing the way other companies do business, and in turn how we all work and play.
Because you didn't include any sort of solution to what you see as an overabundance of stories about Google, I'm curious: What specific types of stories would you like to see?