I'm a masochist. No, not of the sexual variety. Of the slashdot variety. For some reason, not only do I still continue to read this site, I click on links to stories about cars and phones. The raging stupidity and arrogance is amazing.
And yet I come back.
Does anything around here work anymore? I go to the zoo.pl page (uid changed to mine to protect the guilty) to try to change friend/foe/neutral status, and I get:
OK
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, admin@slashdot.org and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Apache/2.2.3 (CentOS) Server at slashdot.org Port 80
I have to click in three different places to find the right link to let me do a JE.
I was gonna give a laundry list, but fuck it, it's just pissing in the wind. I figure Dice was able to buy it for, what, the price of one week of coffee at Starbucks?
Meanwhile, the pirates offer:
Sometimes the anti-piracy people complain the content industry can't compete with free. But come ON! I had PAYED already and the companies just said "no". Meanwhile the group that doesn't want money, said "yes". This is like paying a hooker to have an headache while your wife is stuffing your wallet full of money and begging for sex. Something ain't right!
And this is why I pirate. Because how else can I send the signal that I am not a sheep who will just keep turning the other cheek? Sure, there are sheep who advocate just that, just wait 3 days, it is not the developers fault etc etc. FUCK THAT! Nothing is every anybodies fault and I as a consumer should just take it all and keep quiet.
NO! And that is my reason why I post about being a pirate. Because just downloading alone isn't enough. Consumer boycotts don't work, there are to many sheep drowning out the silent protest of people like me who just see no other option but to not pay to make it clear I expect more service for my cash.
Because I see no other option. Mails go unanwered, forum posts get ignored, I can get my money back from the store and the sales clerk don't care, not his problem. How can I HURT that manager who thought it was a good idea to do a staggered release, hurt that Steam admin who didn't just flip a switch to prevent customers getting angry. How can I even get the companies involved to acknowledge my existence?
I can't. But I can keep my money in my pocket. That doesn't solve anything but it is a lot more fun having impotent nerd rage with cash then without.
Anyone want a beer over the backs of game developers who haven't learned that if they want an income, they need to tell their managers to not upset their customers?
Word up to the Shane of Westgate for confirming all my stories.
DG
Thanks to whoever burned five.
Wow, you get so many mod points, you feel the need to blast all 10 at me? I'm no longer the most prolific poster on slashdot, why do you bother?
Most people have read "1066 and all that: a memorable history of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 good things, 5 bad kings and 2 genuine dates" (one of the longest book titles I have ever encountered) and some may have encountered "The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody", but these are the exceptions and not the rule. What interesting - but accurateish - takes on history have other Slashdotters encountered?
Limited to 25 posts/day? When did that happen. Lame.
Today's example, following up on yesterdays Facebook IPO flop, reads:
Invest in Facebook Now
In just a few days, Facebook will sell its stock to the public one(sic) of the biggest IPOs in Wall Street history.
Sadly, if you invest in Facebook after it goes public, you're going to be too late.
But if you act TODAY, you can take advantage of a secret way to invest in Facebook BEFORE it goes public
... Get more details immediately.
What a joke. The site pimping this is streetauthority.com - another stock shill with clueless predictions that FB "could" be worth $70 a share. Try telling that to the underwriters who had to buy back millions of shares at $38 so it wouldn't drop below the issue price. Manually entering the final url w/o the junk gives an IIS error page saying that the requested page has been moved. Don't blame them, really
Facebook's IPO was a flop - the only reason the shares didn't end the day on a negative was that the underwriters bought millions of them at the floor price, to support the stock.
Even Groupon, which is now trading at less than a 3rd of its' first-day high, closed over 30% higher than it opened.
So now the underwriters are sitting on millions of shares of FB at $38 apiece. In other words, instead of taking in $171 million in fees, they traded back those fees (and then some) for FB paper that nobody else was willing to buy at $38 a share by days end.
Ignoring the question of the underlying value, which is much less than the IPO valuation (but that's another story), how much is FB worth to someone playing the market? Zynga has been used as a proxy for FB for a while - if you couldn't buy FB stock, at least you could buy their major partner, Zynga.
Trading in Zynga was halted - twice - because of 10% price declines in the stock in a 5-minute period. In other words, Zynga would probably have gone still lower if trading hadn't been halted. Zynga ended the day down "only" 13.42%.
Since the only thing that kept FB shares from going through the issue price floor was massive price support by the underwriters, Zynga continues to be a valid proxy for what Facebook stock would be performing if it weren't for the underwriters intervention.
What does this mean to the underwriters? Realistically, not only did they not make any net income from FB, but the shares they bought back at $38 will be a hard sell at $31 over the next few weeks.
Their only real option is to slowly sell off the shares, a little at a time, in competition with the other half-billion shares, many of which were bought in anticipation of a quick profit on a first-day market "pop" that was over almost as soon as it began.
There's also a limited window of opportunity. 6 months from now, all those Facebook employees who can't sell their shares because of the 6-month lock-in will also be wanting to cash out at least some of their $$$, so that leaves 6 months to unload, while many of the people who bought half a billion shares also look to unload.
None of this takes into account the FB employees who took out loans against their stock grants. This secondary market just got risk-ugly.
So, who benefits? Microsoft, Apple, and Google.
Microsoft, because Facebook is now just another stock, and one that doesn't even pay dividends, so competition with Facebook for employees just got easier. Bing will also pick up some advertisers who are re-examining their committment to FB in light of the triple whammy of GM pulling out, the $15 billion lawsuit, and the FB IPO flop showing that investors don't have that much confidence in future FB growth being anything like the past.
Apple, because people will continue to buy iPads, and iPad users tend to use Facebook less (eventually just responding to birthday reminders and such, at least from what I've seen). Anything that makes FB look like yesterdays news makes Apple's ecosystem look more attractive.
Google, because not only are they now, like Microsoft, going to have an easier time competing for talent, but also because of the dark shadow (think "negative halo effect") the FB IPO dud will have on Facebooks credibility with advertisers, just a few days after GM pulled out of paid FB advertising because it's not worth it and the rumours of other big-name advertisers who are also ready to pull the plug. That money will go to Google, and to some extent, to Bing.
The big loser, of course, is nowhere to be seen. It's anyone on whom Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs dump the overpriced FB paper they're now holding.
On another note, it'll be interesting to see what, if anything, the underwriting banks do with their new positions as significant shareholders of Facebook. They could make Zuckerbergs' life "interesting."
Plus there's the impact it will have on the economy just from reduced expectations all around, and the increased reluctance to invest seed money in other tech ventures.
Oh, and let's not forget the impact on the whole "social media" bubble. That hissing sound you hear? It's the air coming out. FB looks a lot more vulnerable than it did just 24 hours ago.
As a bonus , I'll probably soon reveal the unbelievable story of how I acquired my legal knowledge - by doing something nobody else ever has, and which, until now, would be considered pretty much impossible.
I'd rather not, because there is some danger involved, but it's necessary to achieve my goals in an open and transperent fashion.
Advice and help sought and welcome.
Since programming is now out as a career (over 35, problems with my retinas), I'm going to that refuge of all useless humanity - politics.
Seriously, I've been thinking about it for some time, and level of corruption of the local government is depressing. Not only that, but they've done some pretty nasty things to me over the years, and I'm tired of it.
What ultimately tipped the scales, though, was that I stopped by the hospital to talk with two women who work there on my way to visit one of my sisters, and we got to talking about how the government is trying to fudge its books by artificially inflating apparent receivables.
The latest scam: Sending out notices of tax re-assessments for the last 25 years to the spouses of people who have died. Totally illegal (there's a 10-year limit here). They recently tried this on one of my relatives. Anywhere else, I wouldn't believe it. Quebec - hey, this is just business as usual for Canadas' most corrupt province.
Under this scam, the workers of that department get their bonuses for meeting targets for "enhancing receivables", and if the money never gets collected, that's just another departments problem.
For those just joining in, it's gotten so bad that I had to sue the government when they illegally (and wrongly) tried to claim that I owed $70,000 in a separate matter. The judge agreed that I didn't owe a single penny and that the seizure of my salary was totally illegal, but having to spend money to sue the government when they're illegally lopping of 1/3 of your pay before taxes is not for the faint of heart.
Most people would have taken the lawyers advice and taken the settlement, rather than firing the useless turdle and arguing the case themselves.
It turns out that one of my friends who works at the hospital is also being hounded by the government. Even though she only works a few days a week, they're seizing her salary, and her attitude was "it's the government - nobody wins against the government." Until I talked to her, she was just resigned to paying it - doesn't matter if she actually owes it or not.
I had just come from my lawyers' (yes, I sometimes let lawyers fight my battles for me) because I have to sue the government again (I must be on some list or other
The feds turning a blind eye makes them just as bad.
We currently have a corruption commission getting underway (one the government resisted, then tried to severely hamstring). It won't be enough. We've been there before, and the political will, and the ANGER, just isn't there. People are resigned to "business as usual."
I'm not. I've taken all the crap I'm prepared to take. I've got dirt, and I'm going to use it.
Trying to print an envelope address in openoffice under linux? What a waste of time.
Do the people who code this sh*t actually ever use it? Or do they never use anything else, so they simply don't know that it's possible to do better?
Easy prediction - open source will never be competitive. When it's so bad that I'm tempted to throw a copy of XP (or even Wn95) on the box because linux on the desktop is still 2 decades behind the times anyway, there's a fundamental problem that obviously will never be fixed.
I really hate them, but my next computer is going to be a mac.
After 15 years, we still don't have an un-b0rked browser. CSS 2.1 was done in 1997, and yet firefox, opera, chrome, arora - they all render differently for non-trivial layouts.
15 years, and they still can't get the basics right. It means that the problem is not the implementation, but the underlying concepts that are flawed in fundamental ways.
And there's no blaming Microsoft or Apple for this fiasco.
No, we did this to ourselves. We're all suckers. The people setting the standards did it wrong, and we didn't immediately stone them to death, salt their fields, enslave their families for the next 3 generations, and all that other "Carthage must die!" goodness.
So we have let ourselves become slaves to stupidity.
What a waste of time, energy, brain cells, and just general aggravation. Have fun with html5 + css3, folks - you'll never see it finished in your lifetime, not even if you live for another 100 years.
Apple has it right - apps, not a stupid one-size-fits-nada web browser. Just like they have it right about not releasing stuff until it's good and ready.
Stupid browsers. Stupid us.
The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth. -- Niels Bohr
