Anyone who actively follows stocks and business knows that Yahoo message boards, especially the stock boards, are the stupidest wastes of time ever. All it is is filled with garbage. You cannot reference Yahoo message boards and expect to be taken seriously. I'm surprised they haven't taken down those boards like they did their news discussion boards.
Also, FYI IBM is ALWAYS the name dropped when someone wants to start a rumor of a possible buyout. My company has been rumored for 5 years that its going to be bought by IBM. It happens about once a year. It's either IBM, Oracle, CA or EMC that people use as possible companies with deep pockets, ie companies with deep pockets. Again, a completely uncredible rumor.
He's protecting a crime. This isn't something like a whistleblower where revealing the source could cause more harm than good. He is refusing to turn over a tape that could have evidence of a crime, ie. a police officer's head was fractured. It seems like a clearcut good use of contempt of court, in my opinion.
Interesting he refers to Greg Anderson, from the Balco case, who is also in prison for not testifying about whether or not Barry Bonds took steroids. I'm surprised that the author didn't say that imprisoning him could have a chilling effect on personal trainers all over the US.
I have Tivo, I love it, but things like TivoToGo is ridiculously slow when it comes to transferring to and from PCs. I think it was something like 300 kilobits (not bytes) per second. And I am using a network cable connection, not going over wireless. If it's going to take me 3-4 hrs to download a movie, I don't know if that's something that I'd be too interested in. I don't know what they need to do to increase the bandwidth of the network layer on a Tivo but surely that's something that can be improved... right now I would rather drive out to a Blockbuster and rent the movie since that would take less time than downloading a movie.
It never occurred to me, but what an inspired, evil way of killing off open source competitors like MySQL. By offering enterprise-level support for MySQL, it will kill the revenue streams that MySQL would normally get, and over time would starve them of money needed to grow. For a small company like MySQL to flourish, they need to increase the amount of money they get from support and services and the enterprise market is usually their best bet. If Oracle blocks them from this, it really throttles MySQL's growth as a company. Genius!
I wonder if Microsoft could potentially do the same thing. If they offered to give support/services for a brand of Linux, like Debian for example, and give low cost/high quality support for it and just swallow the loss like they swallow the loss for X-box, could this be used to kill Red Hat off in a few years?
He doesn't want to piss off the early adopters or cause people to wait for the price drop, so obviously he's going to say "No way is there going to be a price drop." However, the reality is that the PS3 are not moving. Yes, they don't want to lose even more money on the consoles, but losing $400 as opposed to not only losing $600 but losing mindshare and losing the support of video game manufacturers that won't develop games if not enough people buy the PS3.
Reality dictates that unless there's a miraculous sudden spike of PS3 sales they will be *forced* to drop the prices.
Sorry, but I don't believe in CO2 contributing to Global Warming either. I'm an American, I'm educated in computer engineering (so I have more than the average understanding of chemistry, biology, physics etc than the average American), am not a Christian (so I don't believe that the world is 10,000 years old, etc, and my beliefs are driven by myself and not religion), not a Republican or Democrat (I believe neither party is any good, call me an Independent) and I believe for the most part doing things for the environment is good.
HOWEVER
I think the whole issue of CO2 contributing to global warming has gone ridiculously overboard. It's a theory, just like everything else, and it just doesn't sound right to me, hence I choose not to believe it. Not that I don't believe global warming exists, obviously it exists since the world has gone through many cycles of temperature. I, however, choose to believe that solar activity contributes more to it that CO2 emissions and not CO2 emissions because the theory of humans contributing to global warming through CO2 emissions just doesn't fit to me.
The problem with CO2 and the greenhouse effect is that the theory is far too easily digestible, so the uneducated masses throw it around to the point where it become "fact". It's not fact, it's a theory. No one "thinks" about CO2 and the greenhouse effect anymore, they just assume it's true and admonish anyone else for daring to say differently.
I for one am glad they choose not to show the film in school unless they get a counter argument against it. It's like showing a Michael Moore movie without a counter point, it's just not fair, since Michael Moore movies are so heavily biased. (If you want to know my feelings on Michael Moore, for the most part, I don't personally like how he lays so much bias in his movies, but he's essentially doing what politicians do, which is skew all arguments heavily towards themselves, so I don't see what's wrong with that. I think Bowling for Columbine opened my eyes in some respects and Farenheit 911 made me feel stupid for believing that there were WMDs in Iraq, but again, he could have accomplished those without being so heavily biased.)
It's not the end of the world... it's the first year that these high capacity disks came out, so Sony will probably change their mind about pron as the years go on. And DVD will still be orders of magnitude larger than either HD-DVD or Blu-ray so it's not as huge of a decisive factor as for VHS vs Betamax.
I've been thinking about this for a while, and my answer will probably rustle a few feathers will all the developers in the crowd. I know I don't like the answer since I am a developer as well, but I believe it is correct.
The simple fact is that too much of the software development is left to the peons, ie. the developers. The skillset of the developers are totally random, as is the style, their expertise, etc. It introduces too much variability to the software development process.
Look at civil engineering projects. They are able to create buildings, bridges, roads, etc, and for the most part are much better understood than software development projects. But the peons, ie. the construction workers, do not dictate anything. There is one way of bolting steel together, one way of mixing concrete, etc. The only person who has any say is the chief architect.
However, in software, a lot of the design decisions are left to the developer.
In order to introduce predictability to the software development cycle, unfortunately, all variability must be removed. Developers must not have the freedom to code whichever way they want to, but have a simple, standardized way of accomplishing similar tasks throughout the codebase. This completely removes creativity and enhances predictability and leave all creatvity to the chief architect for the project.
Obviously, I don't like this answer because it's the creativity portion of programing that I enjoy the most, but I think it is for the most part correct. With the people I work with, their skill levels vary from good to horrible. Software development requires a certain level of skill sets that most people don't have and too many people who shouldn't be coders are coders. These are the people that introduce bugs, etc.
Once you guys get jobs in the Real World, you will realize that businesses don't care about technology, they care about solutions.
No business person in their right mind would rewrite all their COBOL code into C or Java just for the sake of modernization. That would be foolish and stupid, and they would deserve to be fired from their jobs. Everything works, why change it. Financial institutions that have their entire livelihood based on these COBOL programs would rather upgrade their hardware and make THAT modern, but keep their legacy code. They already went through a multi-billion dollar fixing for the Y2K industry, that's more than enough for them. The next problem is either 2038 or 2050, when the Y2K issue is revisited because of how most companies implemented their "fix" (any date > 50 would be considered in the 21st century).
I was working at a bank during late 90s and during a building-wide Y2K meeting, one of the project managers was explaining to us how they implemented the solution. Someone in the crowd asked "Won't we go through this problem again in 2050?" He answered "Yes, but I'll be dead then, so I don't care."
That is how business people think... they care about solutions, they don't care about technology. Don't waste your time navel-gazing and trying to figure out brilliant ways of modernization COBOL, because no one who uses it cares. Keep your great ideas for the new ideas where the barrier to implementing new solutions and new technology is much lower.
Not AMEX. They stopped doing this a few years ago. I know because I was a heavy user of this and actually loved it, but I guess it wasn't very popular.
The problem with programming is that too many people that lack the talent are in the programming business. I know because I work with many of them. They are not detail oriented, they don't think strategically, long term, etc and just make a mess of code. They only want to fix the problem they need to fix without worrying about the effect it will have on the system, etc. This is what causes bad programs. Programming is easy enough that any moron can make something work, but to make something continue to work requires an engineering understanding, and this is something most people don't have. It's unfortunate.
What lost mind share??? This laptop isn't stealing "mind share" away from other ideas. If other ideas fail it's because no one cares about them. What these people in this article are whining about are that they think that their way is the best, and anyone else not solving the problem their way is wrong. It's just plain bullshit. This isn't a zero sum game... There's a huge portion of the population that isn't even playing or caring. A new idea won't steal mind share, it will bring new players to the table that otherwise wouldn't be interested.
It's like the lame argument that people blame Ralph Nader for stealing votes from the Democrats. Again, bullshit. A good part of the people who voted for Nader didn't want to vote for Gore OR Bush, so without that alternative, they probably wouldn't have voted. It's not Nader for screwing over Gore, it's Gore's fault for not making himself a more viable candidate.
I'm no Microsoftie, but fuck, enough with making these made-up scenarios where Microsoft will try to kill OSS. Come on! It's really a small percentage of people who come up with these crackpot ideas where they think Microsoft will go around and kill Linux, but IT'S SIMPLY NOT TRUE.
In the past couple of years Microsoft has done what it can do embrace Linux, not kill it. Don't they even install Linux on their VMs to make sure that it works? They have softened some of their license restrictions, they have made more and more of their source code open source... yet every day, there is another article talking about some great conspiracy that Microsoft will entail to take over the world.
How much more do they need to do???
Let's be real, they will never convert to Linux or fully open and free source, but why should they? But given everything that I've seen, Microsoft is filled with pro-Linux types and ethical programmers who would never, ever let the company get away with killing off something like free programming, open source, etc.
When have they EVER, EVER exerted their powers to kill open source? I'll tell you: NEVER. They have only worked to try to co-exist with it in the last couple of years, so please, stop being paranoid, and slashdot please stop posting all this ridiculous nonsense that propagates this stupid attitude.
Uh, Sony, I think you were the only ones who believed that you would actually hit whatever targets you specified. NO ONE ELSE BELIEVED YOU. It's obvious that the chain-of-command in charge of this process was too afraid to tell the powers-that-be that they weren't going to hit the targets, so everyone said "yes", until it became too obvious that they wouldn't. So typical.
Regardless who cares about their shipping estimates, they won't hit their sales estimates either. They've successfully convinced themselves that the North American market is going to pay $600 for a gaming system, and it's a gaming system until they've proven otherwise. Just like the PSP, it could have been so much more, but it's not, because Sony dropped the ball... it's really just a portable gaming system, which I wasted $250+ on because I thought there were be better functionality with it.
Wrong. Back in the 80s, D&D was totally villainized as being unhealthy for kids because it immersed them in a virtual reality and kids would lose touch with reality. And then when Mazes and Monsters came out, it was like throwing gasoline on a fire, people started saying that D&D lead to witchcraft, suicides, etc.
Yes, D&D forces you to interact face-to-face with other humans, but big deal... it's still about 5 nerds gathered together in a basement pretending to be someone they're not. WoW lets you gather together with dozens or hundreds of people, the only difference is that there is no face-to-face contact.
Frankly speaking, it doesn't matter what the game is.
I played Madden Football obsessively, about 2 games before I left for work, and then 3 games during the night. I would make notes on every single player I played, what plays they liked to do etc, in the chance that I would encounter them again. With EA Sports baseball, I played an entire 160 game season in about 3 months, I literally played about 4-5 hrs a day after coming home from work, and all day on the weekends.
Thankfully, I never got into WoW. I bought it, but I just found the entire thing a waste of time... There was no sense of competition, there was no way to "win" the game (like the article says), and mostly it was just a whole bunch of work. I remember I spent a few hours killing and skinning panthers, then converting them to leather so that I could sell it, and I was like, "What the fuck am I doing? This is work. I just came back from 8 hrs of work, why do I want to do this at home as well??"
Since there is 0% probability that I will spend $600 for a gaming system... sorry, I mean home-entertainment-conversion-system-or-whatever-t hey-want-to-call... I will be getting the game system at about the same time as or later than my European brothers.
Until the price drops significantly and until Sony actually makes due with the promises for a breadth of functionality, I won't have any interest in getting it.
I bought the PSP thinking that Sony would support it with lots of features, such as GPS, etc, but they haven't at all. I feel lied to, because I thought it would be supported by Sony and would be something entirely different than just a portable gaming system. The only thing that makes the PSP interesting is the homebrew stuff that occurs. And stupidly, Sony is fighting AGAINST this!
So, until all of Sony's promises about the PS3 pan out, then they won't see a red cent from me. This might take it to 2008 or 2009, who knows!
So Europeans, don't worry, I don't think anyone except the rich early adopters will be getting the PS3 anyway.
I love Google as much as anyone else, but talk about utterly self-indulgent. Yes, they are cool, but they are no HP, not yet anyway. Once they get to 20 years old and contributed as much as HP has over the decades, THEN start worrying about keeping track of your legacy. Right now, all they are is a great search engine, great mail service, and bunch of free (but cool) software like Picasa. They are cool and convenient, but I would hardly describe Google's contributions as important or essential... not yet. If they disappeared overnight, people would be a bit pissed, but every single one of their contributions could be replaced by another service.
I can't believe how many blank pages there were in this dude's thesis! Interesting work, but come on, at least do what we normally do when we can't make our 90 page requirement... use larger fonts, make the margins 1.5", double-lines, etc.
What is the deal with characterizing Symantec as being "unkind" to Firefox? The fact is that Symantec came out with a report that identified more security bugs in Firefox than IE. Why the "sour grapes" attitude about saying that the report was unkind? The truth hurts? I use Firefox just like any other good citizen, and I've almost never used IE unless I had to, so I'm not a Microsoftie. I'm just so tired of all this bias in slashdot where anything against MSFT is good and anything against OSS is bad. That's just not the case, and all this bias in the headlines just serves to trivialize what slashdot is all about.
Grow up guys. If you want to bias all articles towards OSS and against MSFT, why don't you just change your slogan to "News for OSS Nerds". At least you'll be honest. As long as you attempt to portray yourself as a news aggregator that is relevant to all nerds, then keep the bias to your blogs.
I love Jon Stewart and I love the Daily Show. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. For 4 years, Jon Stewart was lambasting George Bush, ridiculing his policies, and Bush won with a greater margin of victory in 2004 than in 2000.
Yes, most young people watch the Daily Show, but it doesn't translate very well in the polls. Say what you want, but the theory was that most younger people would vote Democrat, and that the entertainers had the ear of the young people, and true, the last election had a record number of young people voting. But in the end, Bush still won, so all this hollering and clammering that celebrities do didn't add up to a pile of beans.
The ultimate irony is that Che Guevera's image is being used to sell the stupidest memorabilia imaginable, t-shirts, key chains, caps, bongs, etc. He himself has become an icon for capitalism.
I have the original Offspring Napster T-shirt...
on
Napster On the Block
·
· Score: 2, Funny
In retaliation for Napster giving away free songs, the Offspring started selling t-shirts with Napster's logo on it. I got one during the brief time they were selling it.
As the original poster said, Napster just isn't cool anymore unfortunately, so I can't bare to wear it.
That's the whole spirit of the internet. Do what you want and if people find it of value, they will contribute. Otherwise it will lie by the wayside. Let him do it. Why should wikipedia or anyone else "not be amused"? It's exactly like Linux, if you don't like a particular distribution, then fork it and make your own.
The Internet is Darwinism at its finest, if wikipedia is all that it thinks it is, it will survive, and it won't need union or monopoly mentality to do it... people will just congregate to it naturally because it is "selected for".
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone who actively follows stocks and business knows that Yahoo message boards, especially the stock boards, are the stupidest wastes of time ever. All it is is filled with garbage. You cannot reference Yahoo message boards and expect to be taken seriously. I'm surprised they haven't taken down those boards like they did their news discussion boards.
Also, FYI IBM is ALWAYS the name dropped when someone wants to start a rumor of a possible buyout. My company has been rumored for 5 years that its going to be bought by IBM. It happens about once a year. It's either IBM, Oracle, CA or EMC that people use as possible companies with deep pockets, ie companies with deep pockets. Again, a completely uncredible rumor.
He's protecting a crime. This isn't something like a whistleblower where revealing the source could cause more harm than good. He is refusing to turn over a tape that could have evidence of a crime, ie. a police officer's head was fractured. It seems like a clearcut good use of contempt of court, in my opinion.
Interesting he refers to Greg Anderson, from the Balco case, who is also in prison for not testifying about whether or not Barry Bonds took steroids. I'm surprised that the author didn't say that imprisoning him could have a chilling effect on personal trainers all over the US.
I have Tivo, I love it, but things like TivoToGo is ridiculously slow when it comes to transferring to and from PCs. I think it was something like 300 kilobits (not bytes) per second. And I am using a network cable connection, not going over wireless. If it's going to take me 3-4 hrs to download a movie, I don't know if that's something that I'd be too interested in. I don't know what they need to do to increase the bandwidth of the network layer on a Tivo but surely that's something that can be improved... right now I would rather drive out to a Blockbuster and rent the movie since that would take less time than downloading a movie.
It never occurred to me, but what an inspired, evil way of killing off open source competitors like MySQL. By offering enterprise-level support for MySQL, it will kill the revenue streams that MySQL would normally get, and over time would starve them of money needed to grow. For a small company like MySQL to flourish, they need to increase the amount of money they get from support and services and the enterprise market is usually their best bet. If Oracle blocks them from this, it really throttles MySQL's growth as a company. Genius!
I wonder if Microsoft could potentially do the same thing. If they offered to give support/services for a brand of Linux, like Debian for example, and give low cost/high quality support for it and just swallow the loss like they swallow the loss for X-box, could this be used to kill Red Hat off in a few years?
He doesn't want to piss off the early adopters or cause people to wait for the price drop, so obviously he's going to say "No way is there going to be a price drop." However, the reality is that the PS3 are not moving. Yes, they don't want to lose even more money on the consoles, but losing $400 as opposed to not only losing $600 but losing mindshare and losing the support of video game manufacturers that won't develop games if not enough people buy the PS3.
Reality dictates that unless there's a miraculous sudden spike of PS3 sales they will be *forced* to drop the prices.
Quite possibly enzymes extracted from chicken intestines will probably kill the dreaded Cod Flu virus. And maybe eczema in adults as well.
Sorry, but I don't believe in CO2 contributing to Global Warming either. I'm an American, I'm educated in computer engineering (so I have more than the average understanding of chemistry, biology, physics etc than the average American), am not a Christian (so I don't believe that the world is 10,000 years old, etc, and my beliefs are driven by myself and not religion), not a Republican or Democrat (I believe neither party is any good, call me an Independent) and I believe for the most part doing things for the environment is good.
HOWEVER
I think the whole issue of CO2 contributing to global warming has gone ridiculously overboard. It's a theory, just like everything else, and it just doesn't sound right to me, hence I choose not to believe it. Not that I don't believe global warming exists, obviously it exists since the world has gone through many cycles of temperature. I, however, choose to believe that solar activity contributes more to it that CO2 emissions and not CO2 emissions because the theory of humans contributing to global warming through CO2 emissions just doesn't fit to me.
The problem with CO2 and the greenhouse effect is that the theory is far too easily digestible, so the uneducated masses throw it around to the point where it become "fact". It's not fact, it's a theory. No one "thinks" about CO2 and the greenhouse effect anymore, they just assume it's true and admonish anyone else for daring to say differently.
I for one am glad they choose not to show the film in school unless they get a counter argument against it. It's like showing a Michael Moore movie without a counter point, it's just not fair, since Michael Moore movies are so heavily biased. (If you want to know my feelings on Michael Moore, for the most part, I don't personally like how he lays so much bias in his movies, but he's essentially doing what politicians do, which is skew all arguments heavily towards themselves, so I don't see what's wrong with that. I think Bowling for Columbine opened my eyes in some respects and Farenheit 911 made me feel stupid for believing that there were WMDs in Iraq, but again, he could have accomplished those without being so heavily biased.)
It's not the end of the world... it's the first year that these high capacity disks came out, so Sony will probably change their mind about pron as the years go on. And DVD will still be orders of magnitude larger than either HD-DVD or Blu-ray so it's not as huge of a decisive factor as for VHS vs Betamax.
I've been thinking about this for a while, and my answer will probably rustle a few feathers will all the developers in the crowd. I know I don't like the answer since I am a developer as well, but I believe it is correct.
The simple fact is that too much of the software development is left to the peons, ie. the developers. The skillset of the developers are totally random, as is the style, their expertise, etc. It introduces too much variability to the software development process.
Look at civil engineering projects. They are able to create buildings, bridges, roads, etc, and for the most part are much better understood than software development projects. But the peons, ie. the construction workers, do not dictate anything. There is one way of bolting steel together, one way of mixing concrete, etc. The only person who has any say is the chief architect.
However, in software, a lot of the design decisions are left to the developer.
In order to introduce predictability to the software development cycle, unfortunately, all variability must be removed. Developers must not have the freedom to code whichever way they want to, but have a simple, standardized way of accomplishing similar tasks throughout the codebase. This completely removes creativity and enhances predictability and leave all creatvity to the chief architect for the project.
Obviously, I don't like this answer because it's the creativity portion of programing that I enjoy the most, but I think it is for the most part correct. With the people I work with, their skill levels vary from good to horrible. Software development requires a certain level of skill sets that most people don't have and too many people who shouldn't be coders are coders. These are the people that introduce bugs, etc.
Once you guys get jobs in the Real World, you will realize that businesses don't care about technology, they care about solutions.
No business person in their right mind would rewrite all their COBOL code into C or Java just for the sake of modernization. That would be foolish and stupid, and they would deserve to be fired from their jobs. Everything works, why change it. Financial institutions that have their entire livelihood based on these COBOL programs would rather upgrade their hardware and make THAT modern, but keep their legacy code. They already went through a multi-billion dollar fixing for the Y2K industry, that's more than enough for them. The next problem is either 2038 or 2050, when the Y2K issue is revisited because of how most companies implemented their "fix" (any date > 50 would be considered in the 21st century).
I was working at a bank during late 90s and during a building-wide Y2K meeting, one of the project managers was explaining to us how they implemented the solution. Someone in the crowd asked "Won't we go through this problem again in 2050?" He answered "Yes, but I'll be dead then, so I don't care."
That is how business people think... they care about solutions, they don't care about technology. Don't waste your time navel-gazing and trying to figure out brilliant ways of modernization COBOL, because no one who uses it cares. Keep your great ideas for the new ideas where the barrier to implementing new solutions and new technology is much lower.
Not AMEX. They stopped doing this a few years ago. I know because I was a heavy user of this and actually loved it, but I guess it wasn't very popular.
The problem with programming is that too many people that lack the talent are in the programming business. I know because I work with many of them. They are not detail oriented, they don't think strategically, long term, etc and just make a mess of code. They only want to fix the problem they need to fix without worrying about the effect it will have on the system, etc. This is what causes bad programs. Programming is easy enough that any moron can make something work, but to make something continue to work requires an engineering understanding, and this is something most people don't have. It's unfortunate.
What lost mind share??? This laptop isn't stealing "mind share" away from other ideas. If other ideas fail it's because no one cares about them. What these people in this article are whining about are that they think that their way is the best, and anyone else not solving the problem their way is wrong. It's just plain bullshit. This isn't a zero sum game... There's a huge portion of the population that isn't even playing or caring. A new idea won't steal mind share, it will bring new players to the table that otherwise wouldn't be interested.
It's like the lame argument that people blame Ralph Nader for stealing votes from the Democrats. Again, bullshit. A good part of the people who voted for Nader didn't want to vote for Gore OR Bush, so without that alternative, they probably wouldn't have voted. It's not Nader for screwing over Gore, it's Gore's fault for not making himself a more viable candidate.
I'm no Microsoftie, but fuck, enough with making these made-up scenarios where Microsoft will try to kill OSS. Come on! It's really a small percentage of people who come up with these crackpot ideas where they think Microsoft will go around and kill Linux, but IT'S SIMPLY NOT TRUE.
In the past couple of years Microsoft has done what it can do embrace Linux, not kill it. Don't they even install Linux on their VMs to make sure that it works? They have softened some of their license restrictions, they have made more and more of their source code open source... yet every day, there is another article talking about some great conspiracy that Microsoft will entail to take over the world.
How much more do they need to do???
Let's be real, they will never convert to Linux or fully open and free source, but why should they? But given everything that I've seen, Microsoft is filled with pro-Linux types and ethical programmers who would never, ever let the company get away with killing off something like free programming, open source, etc.
When have they EVER, EVER exerted their powers to kill open source? I'll tell you: NEVER. They have only worked to try to co-exist with it in the last couple of years, so please, stop being paranoid, and slashdot please stop posting all this ridiculous nonsense that propagates this stupid attitude.
Uh, Sony, I think you were the only ones who believed that you would actually hit whatever targets you specified. NO ONE ELSE BELIEVED YOU. It's obvious that the chain-of-command in charge of this process was too afraid to tell the powers-that-be that they weren't going to hit the targets, so everyone said "yes", until it became too obvious that they wouldn't. So typical.
Regardless who cares about their shipping estimates, they won't hit their sales estimates either. They've successfully convinced themselves that the North American market is going to pay $600 for a gaming system, and it's a gaming system until they've proven otherwise. Just like the PSP, it could have been so much more, but it's not, because Sony dropped the ball... it's really just a portable gaming system, which I wasted $250+ on because I thought there were be better functionality with it.
Wrong. Back in the 80s, D&D was totally villainized as being unhealthy for kids because it immersed them in a virtual reality and kids would lose touch with reality. And then when Mazes and Monsters came out, it was like throwing gasoline on a fire, people started saying that D&D lead to witchcraft, suicides, etc.
Yes, D&D forces you to interact face-to-face with other humans, but big deal... it's still about 5 nerds gathered together in a basement pretending to be someone they're not. WoW lets you gather together with dozens or hundreds of people, the only difference is that there is no face-to-face contact.
Frankly speaking, it doesn't matter what the game is.
I played Madden Football obsessively, about 2 games before I left for work, and then 3 games during the night. I would make notes on every single player I played, what plays they liked to do etc, in the chance that I would encounter them again. With EA Sports baseball, I played an entire 160 game season in about 3 months, I literally played about 4-5 hrs a day after coming home from work, and all day on the weekends.
Thankfully, I never got into WoW. I bought it, but I just found the entire thing a waste of time... There was no sense of competition, there was no way to "win" the game (like the article says), and mostly it was just a whole bunch of work. I remember I spent a few hours killing and skinning panthers, then converting them to leather so that I could sell it, and I was like, "What the fuck am I doing? This is work. I just came back from 8 hrs of work, why do I want to do this at home as well??"
I played it 3 times and gave it up.
Since there is 0% probability that I will spend $600 for a gaming system... sorry, I mean home-entertainment-conversion-system-or-whatever-t hey-want-to-call... I will be getting the game system at about the same time as or later than my European brothers.
Until the price drops significantly and until Sony actually makes due with the promises for a breadth of functionality, I won't have any interest in getting it.
I bought the PSP thinking that Sony would support it with lots of features, such as GPS, etc, but they haven't at all. I feel lied to, because I thought it would be supported by Sony and would be something entirely different than just a portable gaming system. The only thing that makes the PSP interesting is the homebrew stuff that occurs. And stupidly, Sony is fighting AGAINST this!
So, until all of Sony's promises about the PS3 pan out, then they won't see a red cent from me. This might take it to 2008 or 2009, who knows!
So Europeans, don't worry, I don't think anyone except the rich early adopters will be getting the PS3 anyway.
I love Google as much as anyone else, but talk about utterly self-indulgent. Yes, they are cool, but they are no HP, not yet anyway. Once they get to 20 years old and contributed as much as HP has over the decades, THEN start worrying about keeping track of your legacy. Right now, all they are is a great search engine, great mail service, and bunch of free (but cool) software like Picasa. They are cool and convenient, but I would hardly describe Google's contributions as important or essential... not yet. If they disappeared overnight, people would be a bit pissed, but every single one of their contributions could be replaced by another service.
I can't believe how many blank pages there were in this dude's thesis! Interesting work, but come on, at least do what we normally do when we can't make our 90 page requirement... use larger fonts, make the margins 1.5", double-lines, etc.
What is the deal with characterizing Symantec as being "unkind" to Firefox? The fact is that Symantec came out with a report that identified more security bugs in Firefox than IE. Why the "sour grapes" attitude about saying that the report was unkind? The truth hurts? I use Firefox just like any other good citizen, and I've almost never used IE unless I had to, so I'm not a Microsoftie. I'm just so tired of all this bias in slashdot where anything against MSFT is good and anything against OSS is bad. That's just not the case, and all this bias in the headlines just serves to trivialize what slashdot is all about.
Grow up guys. If you want to bias all articles towards OSS and against MSFT, why don't you just change your slogan to "News for OSS Nerds". At least you'll be honest. As long as you attempt to portray yourself as a news aggregator that is relevant to all nerds, then keep the bias to your blogs.
I love Jon Stewart and I love the Daily Show. But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. For 4 years, Jon Stewart was lambasting George Bush, ridiculing his policies, and Bush won with a greater margin of victory in 2004 than in 2000.
Yes, most young people watch the Daily Show, but it doesn't translate very well in the polls. Say what you want, but the theory was that most younger people would vote Democrat, and that the entertainers had the ear of the young people, and true, the last election had a record number of young people voting. But in the end, Bush still won, so all this hollering and clammering that celebrities do didn't add up to a pile of beans.
The ultimate irony is that Che Guevera's image is being used to sell the stupidest memorabilia imaginable, t-shirts, key chains, caps, bongs, etc. He himself has become an icon for capitalism.
In retaliation for Napster giving away free songs, the Offspring started selling t-shirts with Napster's logo on it. I got one during the brief time they were selling it. As the original poster said, Napster just isn't cool anymore unfortunately, so I can't bare to wear it.
Good news is if Sony says they're dropping the price from $600 to $400.
That's the whole spirit of the internet. Do what you want and if people find it of value, they will contribute. Otherwise it will lie by the wayside. Let him do it. Why should wikipedia or anyone else "not be amused"? It's exactly like Linux, if you don't like a particular distribution, then fork it and make your own. The Internet is Darwinism at its finest, if wikipedia is all that it thinks it is, it will survive, and it won't need union or monopoly mentality to do it... people will just congregate to it naturally because it is "selected for".