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Comment Simply, It Blows (Score 1) 1191

1) Way too much white space

2) El Gigundo pictures that have no business being on the page

3) Cutesy design makes me want to go over to El Reg for the antidote

4) Slashdot is a WORDS site, not a PRETTY design site or a PICTURES site or a social networking site. Can't you Dice morons get this through your head ?

5) Person who hired the folks to do the redesign, their salary should be tied to the readership count, so that when the readership dies he is the person to pay the price. I assume the people who did the redesign just don't know any better...

Comment Seeking Alpha - Short sellers Post up here ! (Score 1) 559

I've been following articles on 3D printing (via Google) and really have to laugh at the articles purveyed as journalism on the Seeking Alpha site. There seem to be few real writer/journalists on the site, rather it looks like a collection of blogger addicts and mail room boys posting for effect.. Their counts go up, they look legitimate and they even assume the mantle of 'knowledge' about a particular topic.

I wonder who pays these shills to write this refuse ? Is Seeking Alpha another one of those sites where you can get any crap published because you can click a submit button ? Or maybe the site is kept afloat by the people short selling & then having a slam article written, like I saw happen over and over and over with 3D systems, so the stock goes down and the short sellers profit ?

My opinion, FWIW, is that Seeking Alpha is a site where market manipulators post up to influence the market.

(YMMV, the opinions of the poster are not necessarily those of Dice corp, etc etc etc)

Comment Re:Watson is a better button pusher (Score 2) 206

When watching the shows I was impressed by how well Watson could look things up. Most of the questions were of that variety, where a simple Google search would easily find the answer.

Any question requiring logic or reasoning usually when to Ken Jennings or that other guy.

Can I prove it ? No. I just remember my thoughts at the time when watching the show. If you want 100% certainty you'll have to pay me to do an analysis...

Comment RIM never heard of due diligence ? (Score 2) 95

I mean, c'mon, do a google search before you name a flagship product, at least check to see if the name has already been used.

The BBx folks (company name BASIS) have been around for over 25 years and have many thousands of sites using their products in the US, Eurozone, and the far east. A large VAR base and some great new products built with Java that run almost anywhere, from server to PC to hand held phone or tablet..

Maybe the RIM folks think they'll get away with it because they're bigger ?

Comment Most of the classic top shelf is there (Score 1) 222

but some of the more recent SF has gotten the short straw, maybe because the folks that read SF 30 years ago haven't read any recently. Me ? Still have an Analog subscription (with a few interruptions over the years), and still see some of the good 2/3/4 parts series turning into books that are worthwhile. Stories that resonated with me while I was growing up have been sort of imprinted, so I understand where the bias comes from for the 40/30 year old classic stories.

Now about that 'wave a wand' or 'cast a spell' stuff ? Not interested.

Comment Were you one of those guys (Score 1) 238

sitting on the floor, indian style, with a laptop balanced on your knees, I forget what the booth was (maybe the SourceForge booth?) at one of the Linux conferences at the Javits center many years ago, constantly work work working to find content to post on /. ? I remember seeing two guys surfing the internet like they were top graduates of the Evelyn Wood speed reading course, just flashing pages back & forth, an almost hypnotic combination of color and graphics. One of the booth people told me 'those guys run a site called slashdot, you probably never heard of it. They're here because we can get them a fast internet connection, theirs went down.'

Many thanks for the good reading material over the years, and for not being M$ butt kissers, and for being mostly irreverent, and for calling a spade a spade (even if it wasn't), and... and... and...

Comment SAP is German for "Our Hand In Your Wallet" (Score 1) 166

I had the wonderful experience of seeing SAP, which was German manufacturing software at the time (1998), sold to an extremely large travel tour operator. SAP kept trying to shoehorn the tour operator into their software. Everything was an 'operation'. Why ? Because that was the only SAP function that would come close to providing the tour operator the functionality they needed. Tour pricing ? The morons ended up reading most of the pricing table each and every time they had to calculate a price.

SAP is smart, they sell upper management only, frequently in bed with consulting organizations like Accenture & such (the culprits that I saw in action at the tour company). After the years go by management is forced to continue so they don't have to acknowledge how big their f#&kup was. Don't believe me? I was there. I watched it all happen. I have talked to the culprits and the victims and the grunts.

After six (!) years this travel company finally had something which would run, pretty much, and the tour pricing was right, most of the time. About the time I left their system uptime was around 85%. All of this is after having a team of 16 programmer/analysts (and spending and spending for OJT), also after spending millions for more and more hardware because SAP is such a resource hog, They went from one big server and a few disks to a super SAN and 60 dual processor blades and lots of other hardware I can't remember at the moment. They still have a crew of 16 programmers to keep this crap system patched & running but it is not pretty by any means. Now that they have customized their system to make it actually work, they have to do partial re-writes every time SAP comes out with a new version (big upgrade $$ for SAP to be sure). I used to feel bad for them, but if management is stupid enough to believe the salesman and not do due diligence before the purchase, it's their own darn fault.

On second thought, SAP is German for "Our Shit Doesn't Stink, To Be Sure!"

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