Re:War? It's a revolution. Fight for your Freedom. (Score:4, Funny)
by houghi (78078) on 03:24 PM -- Thursday June 22 2006 (#15585538)

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in courts, we shall fight on the Web and Usenet, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in cyberspace, we shall defend our Imperium, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the portable, we shall fight on the games boxes, we shall fight on the desktops and on the handhelds, we shall fight in the media; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Imperium or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our bought senators, armed and guarded by the BSA would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World Order, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.

Face it, Mozilla is dead (Score:-1, Flamebait)
by Anonymous Coward on 11:24 PM November 20th, 2001 (#2594565)

There comes a time when the only merciful thing to do is pull the plug. When the old-timer has been bloated and incontinent for as long as anybody can remember, it can only be considered an act of kindness to turn off the machines and let a dear friend finally breathe its last. So long, Mozilla, old chum -- sorry it had to come to this.

Mozilla is dead, or it might as well be. No matter how many people are exhausting themselves by pounding on the corpse's chest, the best thing the population of the Net can do -- both for the good of the Mozilla Project and for themselves -- is strip what they can from the body, say a fond farewell and get on with their lives.

Things weren't supposed to end this way. When Netscape played their Hail Mary and released the Navigator source code to the public, it heralded a new beginning for the Web. An open source browser was going to -- in order of difficulty -- save the world, resurrect the dead and beat back the Microsoft juggernaut. Alas, the great, green hope instead ran headlong into nearly every obstacle a software project can face, often more than once, usually as a direct result of its own pig-headed stubbornness. Re-writes, feature bloat and a profound and unsettling misunderstanding of what the consumer market wants have all hobbled Mozilla, almost from the beginning.

Even the Project's most ardent supporters have to admit the possibility that their bouncing baby browser now more resembles a massive, festering cyst. Trapped in the womb for well over two years, the Mozilla Project has made a lot of noise, churned out a lot of code and has gone almost exactly nowhere. Late, fat and ugly, Mozilla is hopelessly moribund, deeply mired in its own filth, with no end in sight. A quick and painless euthanasia is the best option for all concerned.

As usual, the blame can be placed on the lack of responsible adult supervision. Told to create a utopia, the Mozilla Project's programmers have done almost exactly the opposite, letting their far-thinking vision overwhelm such tedious, day-to-day tasks as actually getting a usable one-point-oh product out the door. Oblivious to the fact that their market share was disappearing faster than donuts in the break room, the Mozilla Project programmers repeatedly abandoned real-world progress and accomplishments for -- and this is the technical term -- cool shit. With the sort of over-enthusiastic zeal that used to get missionaries attached to roasting spits, the Project couldn't satisfy itself with merely building a fast, efficient, standards-compliant browser. Instead, it set off on a quest to re-engineer the way Internet applications are built, to construct not just a program, but a "platform," a be-all, end-all, goes-ping monster. The Mozilla Project abandoned the idea of creating something as dull as a browser in favor of building a meta-application, an everything-to-everybody miracle.

Beware of geeks bearing gift economies. Cool, high-tech and nearly pointless features have beset Mozilla like metastasizing tumors. XUL, the Extensible User-Interface Language, gives any moderately competent programmer the ability to completely redesign the program's GUI. Why? Who cares? The mere fact that it sounds sort of neat justifies its existence, and gives it priority over shipping something usable to the ninety percent of the population that has no use for the feature. Does the world need another HTML editor? Chat and instant messaging? Oh, sure. Another news reader? Another mail client? Of course. Vector graphics? MathML? ColorSync? LDAP? Embedding? A cross-platform component manager? A cross-platform widget set? An XML parser? XSL transformations? Yes, yes, yes; more, more, more. Each and every one of these features has found its way into the mainstream of Mozilla development, without rhyme or reason, without a clearly defined market or an interest expressed by anybody without a computer science degree.

At the very least, the Mozilla Project has given the world a pretty good picture of what caffeine poisoning looks like. Only people who never sleep could possibly justify adding any of these toys to a mass-market consumer product before it ships its first version. Coding is fun and all, but come on. There's nothing magical in open source projects that prevent them from becoming feature-bloated boondogles - in fact, absent normal market pressures, it's more likely. It's time, Mozilla: Ship or get off the pot.

The tragedy is that it's all been done before, too -- those who don't remember history are doomed to re-implement it. The Mozilla Project is reproducing, almost one-for-one, all the strategic mistakes Netscape made three or four years ago when Navigator exploded from a simple, boring, functional browser into a platform of its own. The plan was to take over the world then, too, making whichever desktop environment the user chose to run irrelevant in the face of the feature-bloated "Netscape OS." And, boy, remember how well that worked out.

And so: End it. Pull the plug. It's time to abandon Mozilla, to let it go in peace. The parts that work -- nearly everybody agrees that the Gecko layout engine is wonderful; the project management tools are nice -- should be harvested for use by the living, and the rest tied up in a biohazard bag and burned. It's a little sad, yes, but it's also the only reasonable option left.

The rotting smell has gotten too strong to ignore.

*BSD faces a very bleak future. I've seen the same boring cut-n-paste "BSD is dying!" trolls for years now too, so don't dismiss what I have to say as another one of those. I researched many compartive points about all the various flavours of *BSD after my comptroller asked me to deploy an OpenBSD firewall.

Granted 4.2BSD was a very fine OS, but that was in 1983. 4.4BSD, and its brother 4.4BSBD-Lite, were abymsmal performers at best during their heydey in 1993-4. Both Solaris and HP-UX had networking stacks that supported "long fat pipes," multicasting, and TCP header header prediction years before 4.4BSD did.

I don't know why 4.4BSD-Lite became so popular. Perhaps because it was released as OpenSource in 1994? But even then there were much better TCP/IP stacks and VM schemes in use (Solaris, AIX) so availability of source code was an insignificant win at best. All OpenSource does is allow poor quality code to be re-circulated and reused again and again in new systems, while high quality and RFC compliant code is relagated to the pay environment.

Regardless, the codebase of 4.4BSD-Lite became the stepping stone for all the *BSDs that are still around now. The main three *BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD) all use at least 85% of 4.4BSD-Lite's source code, with the rest being mostly new userland code, TCP/IP updates, and multiprocessor support.

The commerical offering, BSDI, is even more appaling - a source code diff shows roughly 94% code reuse. Paying for an archaic and outdated OS...that would explain why BSDI has less than 2% of the server market.

FreeBSD has very close ties with BSDI. I'm not one to preach doom by association, but I'm afraid FreeBSD has doomed itself by the move. If that isn't enough, FreeBSD's C2 security certification is horrible. Even NT can do better than it!

FreeBSD has a reputation of being the "fastest" BSD on x86 hardware. Actual memory bandwidth performance is a fraction of all of Sun's offerings, and the multiprocessor support is a joke since it has a poorly implemented semaphore locking mechanism. I hear a total re-write is planned, and perhaps even a security audit too, so /maybe/ by 2005 FreeBSD will be a contender in the low-end server market.

NetBSD, I'm afraid, is dead before it got off the ground. The goal of running on as many platforms at once is a noble and idealistic one, but in the real world its useless. At best NetBSD is a mediocre hobbyist OS that runs on outdated computers. A match made in hell it would seem, since ancient source code has been hacked to run on ancient computer. Its ports to systems such as the Dreamcast are total folly, offering no more real world use than GUI systems on headless servers. And I think the installed user base of less than 10,000 speaks for itself.

I was hopeful OpenBSD would be better as its reputation for security is interesting. Sadly, its another strikeout. OpenBSD's filesystem is extremely slow, and hardware support is nearly nonexistant. There are also numerous political issues surrouding its development team that are eating away the last bit of hope. Perhaps the reason it is secure is because no one bothers to hack it since the "prize" is mostly worthless.

*BSD users too are dooming thier own OS. As a group, they are a very vocal and rowdy bunch. No real help is given to new users and such an elitest attitude is suicide.

I chose to not deploy an OpenBSD based upon these reasons. It is my humble opinion that either NT or Solaris be used for any significant work, and *BSDs be left to the hobbyists.

An update on Slashdot from I, CmdrTaco. (Score:0, Flamebait)
by Anonymous Coward on 04:13 PM February 21st, 2003 (#5357552)

Hi there. I'm CmdrTaco, one of the ruling despots here at slashdot. Earlier today I realized that I've been deeply troubled by recent events here on slashdot, more troubled than I've been willing to admit to myself. The plebs here have been making alot of noise in the last 24 hours, ever since this thread arose on the "Oracle Breakable After All" story. My attitude was the usual "fuck them all", and I thought the matter undeserving of even a moment of my time. But then a strange thing happened; I was stricken by impotence. I beat and I beat and I beat, and yet even with the aid of the very finest tentacle-rape anime divx selections available, I found myself unable to climax. Even having Hemos choke me with his belt till my face turned blue failed to do the trick. Clearly, something was terribly wrong.

And so, I went soul-searching. I thought back on the other night and the bitchslapping rampage I went on in that thread. I thought of some of the very low UIDs whom I'd smacked down, I thought about the many user moderations that me and the other editors had unjustly overturned with our unlimited mod points. I considered the outcry, the suggestions that we were ignoring the will of our own community, that we were evading a subject that desperately needs discussing, that we were acting autocratically and making hypocrites of ourselves. All these things I pondered, and I pondered long and hard. And this is what I have to say:

Go away.

When me and Hemos began this site so long ago now, we were starry-eyed small-town lovers; young, naive, and drunk on the possibility that a real revolution of sorts might be on the horizon, and that it might involve small furry animals. And so we opened up our labour of love to the world, never suspecting that it would become even half of what it has become today. Things were good, for a time.

But things change. None of you could ever understand just what it feels like, and what it does to a man, to have such a large userbase grow up under your shoddy perl scripts. Unless it happens to you firsthand, you can never truly know. They say that power corrupts, and I am here to tell you that it is true. Once, I cared. I really did. But you people... you went from being individuals, from people I could care about and chat with on #slashdot, to becoming a giant formless mass.. a formless mass seperated into factions; an army of idiots filling my inbox with crap and my RAID array with drivel. Every thread now, I'm lucky if I can find a single comment that doesn't appear to be stamped down by a dim-witted cookie-cutter of a mind. Endless parrotting, pompous bullshit, and people so one-dimensional that it is frightening. I have a secret for you: I too believe that the absurdist noise and distraction of the 'trolls' is the most worthwhile part of slashdot these days. I don't care about anything anymore, save bukkake vids and the occasional good troll.

So then, why do me and my editors censor with an iron fist? Why do we stamp every bit of humour and joy left in this place out and try to make it more and more soullessly grey with each passing day? Because I don't want to have a dialogue with you fucking plebs about the deterioration of this site, I don't want to save it; I want this failed experiment to implode upon the weight of its users' own hypocrisy and hyperbole. You say this site should be a microcosm for the free and open society of the future? Don't you see that it already is? And you wonder why it stinks of shit...

It will continue as it has. The majority of you will come regardless of what we do. I could piss on your mothers and assfuck your fathers and you'd still come to stroke your egos and share your reactionary politics with the world and to waste countless more hours of your miserable days away. The arms-race will continue. You think a bit of mass -1 Offtopics is bad? Brotha you ain't seen nothin yet. The editors will continue to be my hand-picked squad of the biggest fucking assholes I can manage to dredge up. We will continue to ignore your whinging about censorship, indeed we will ramp it up, because we don't fucking care. There will be countless more stories about the latest lame yuppie toys, the latest minor kernel revision, "look what I found in subsection 123.23.1c of this license!", and all manner of other predictable crap for you to hurl your canned responses at and exercise your dogmas on. Katz will continue to offer you his unique brand of insight until the end of time. And we, as always, could care less what you think or want. Droids and trolls alike; you will all lap it up.

You were expecting some great revelation or commitment to reform to become of this? hohohoho... as if I give a damn about the silly dramas you fools generate out of bit-patterns slapping into my DB. I was troubled, but only because I cloaked my true opinions in silence and continued to play the role of naive otaku-boy and open-source ass-puppet. Because I wasn't being honest with myself or with all of you. Now I can speak the truth, and my soul is unburdened. You may now go back to wallowing in the shit; I'm off to blow my load in Hemos' pretty pink face.

Remember this: we are only a mirror.

Thank you.

Have you ever been fucking a girl too long, and realized that, no matter how hot she is, she just doesn't turn you on any more? This doesn't happen with every woman - some get bitchy or try to take your money - but with some, their only fault is that, every time you get in bed with them, they're exactly the same. no variety whatsoever. they just plant their knees and face in the covers and expect you to go about your business.

this bitch is adequacy. it's the same goddamn joke, repeated 3 times a day. it's the same girl that was cute the first time you met her, on her knees asking to get fucked for the three hundred millionth time. nothing ever changes - the highbrow trolls, the elaborately researched articles, the pathetic circle jerk of one-up trolls in the comments, and the incessant bludgeoning of anyone who visits and isn't in on the joke.

what this bitch needs is a smack on the ass. not the light playful slap you use to get her into the mood, but a hard, angry slap, one that will get her to pull her god damned face out of the pillow and stare straight into your eyes. at this point, you're going to get one of two looks: angry and into it, or angry and gone.

either way your relationship will have moved forward. until someone smacks adequacy around, i guess i'd rather jerk off than fuck the bitch.

(1) First Post Attempt.

Slashdot defaults to Oldest Post First, so the very easiest way to gain karma is to get a very early post in the discussion, the higher the better. For maximum speed, it's critical that your post be no longer than two sentences, so just write it up and fire it off with no spell checking or previewing. If you are within the first few non-GNAA/crapflood posts, it's a guaranteed 5 Insightful.

It doesn't even have to be really ontopic -- if you see something about Linux, don't bother reading rest of the story and just QUICKLY post something like "Linux is still too difficult for Grandmas, although I really enjoy the wireless configuration tools on Gentoo." If it's Apple, try "OS X is really sweet with a advanced Unix core and Microsoft is running scared and Longhorn will again copy Apple's innovations."

You will be on top of the entire discussion for the rest of the night!

(2) Bite on Trolls.

I don't know why it is, but Slashbots just love to see someone get trolled hard. So find the nearest, most obvious troll and bite as hard as you can.

Best bet is to post a line-by-line rebuttal to a BSD Is Dying post, -- the BSD fatsos will be spooging their underoos while they moderate you up. It doesn't even matter if you have a coherent rebuttal to a particular point, just tossoff lines such as "Whatever you say." and "Ummm, right.". Yeah, you'll look like a complete tool and lots of people will be laughing at you for being such a sucker, but you'll be at 5 while they're at -1.

(3) Argue with ACs.

Most Slashdot readers believe that all ACs are trolls and M$ Employees. The truth is most of them are just making a quick point and haven't bothered to log in, but you can take advantage of the perception.

Find a random Score:0 AC making a small point such as "RedHat ES costs $300/year" and respond with a off-the-wall manifesto about the history of computing from UNIVAC through BeOS and how mad you still are about Microsoft breaking DRDOS in 1989. Once again, who cares if you makes sense, they'll be slobbering on your pole to mod you up. The fact that you are rambling like a mentally ill homeless person won't matter to these people because you are standing up to those nasty ACs!

(4) Be an Apple Fanboy.

It used to be that Linux fanboys ruled this site, but due to Linux's continual failure at market acceptance and defeating Microsoft, most of them either killed themselves or left for Groklaw where they ban & delete anyone who isn't pro-Linux. So if you want to be a kissup flunky, Apple's the way to go.

There's two ways to go into the Apple Fanboy market. The first is to show a comprehensive knowledge of Apple's shit and babble on about Cocoa or USB Mice or whatever. You can just copy stuff off Apple.com. This works even better if you know something about Apple's many failed "innovations" -- working in PowerTalk or Cyberdog into a post is an instant 5. Of course actually knowing that stuff is pretty pathetic, so don't bother unless you were one of Apple's victims in the 1990s.

The much easier way is to argue with anyone who even has a minor criticism of Apple products and Deny Deny Deny all shortcomings. Say that one mouse button is better than two. Claim that Macs are cheaper than $300 Dells because iPhoto has a retail value of $199. Argue that having a AGP slot is a big downside for regular users. Pretend that your 450Mhz eMac runs OS X and World of Warcraft like a charm.

The truth is nobody's reading Apple threads except hardcore Apple zealots, but as long as they think they're making a difference converting people, the modpoints will flow your way like water.

(5) Regurgitate Conventional Wisdom.

Slashbots believe in the moderation system actually works, so if you notice a pattern in what gets scored highly, you can just parrot it and get in on the action yourself. Who cares if it's true or if it shows actual insight? Not the moderators. Just claim that Porno drives all technological progress, or that Microsoft bought or stole every product they sell. You don't even have to do a good job of it, if they've read it before, they will mod you up.

(6) Have an good argument.

Because 90% of the modpoints flow to trash, this one is actually pretty hard to do. Even if you have a good point to make, likely nobody will read it because this site's audience is Compsci dildos with a pile of math books and subnormal reading comprehension skills, and the rest are ADD tards who are off to the next story already.

The first plan is to reply to the top-rated post (usually a 5:"Funny" oneliner) and put it where people will see it. Nobody cares if it's a complete non-sequitur, they're blowing their mod points on the top of the thread, so you might as well get in on that action.

The second is to play the asshat. Just throw in random insults and tell the person how stupid they are and how little they know about [computing|music piracy|Macs]. The beta-nerds on this site will assume that anyone who is a swaggering dickhead must be really smart and your wit will inspire intense gay longings while they shoot you to five.

Posting my slashdot text files here, so that they may live indefinitely

--------------------

Re:Nooooo! (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on 03:22 PM November 30th, 2001 (#2638713)

Lucky you. I don't WANT to read slashdot, yet I am drawn to it because it sucks so bad. It's like the Family Circus of the internet - stupid every fucking time you read it, but it's there in a great big circle at the bottom of the page. You eyes are drawn to it, and you've read it before you realize what it is you've read! And then you say, "Fuck! That was gay as hell! How goddamned stupid can I be for reading that?!" Yet you read it yesterday, and you will read it again tomorrow. It's like a scar on your face that you can't get rid of, an embarassment that you see because you have to look in the mirror. Yeah, slashdot suck the shit right out of my asshole, but I keep coming back for some inexplicable reason. Fuck you.