Senator Barbara Boxer is giving away free money to candidates that are challenging incumbents. The catch is that you have to vote for who you want the money to go to. Pete Ashdown is not only running to unseat Senator Hatch (enemy of geeks everywhere) but is tech savvy himself, given that he is the founder of Utah's oldest ISP. His positions on tech issues should be of interest to many a slashdotter. So if you have a moment, click on the link below and vote for him to get some free money.

Vote for Pete Ashdown.

Every time CleanFlicks or similar services/technologies come up on /. there is a decided bias against them by the submitters, editors, and commenters. They're all missing the bigger picture! As I said in the most recent article:

This is a win for big copyright and a loss for free culture. /.ers are only seeing censorship here when they should be seeing remixing and control of content that you've bought. /. has consistently been on the wrong side of this issue because of a lack of vision about what it represents. How /. can champion Free DVD software for Linux so that you can watch a movie on the OS of your choice but not favor this is a mystery to me. What if that Free player knew how to skip the booring bits (Jar Jar?) or replay the naughty bits in slow mo while leaving the original media untouched? All the /.ers would be lining up behind it! But if someone uses technology for a purpose that is seen as socially conservative all the idiots here go bonkers. Your fear of "censorship" has blinded you to a corporate power grab of your culture.

Can someone out there in journal land explain to me why so many here at /. take the corporate/anti-free stance on this?

I just noticed a new Slashdot feature: tagging.

Ick.

I like tagging when it is appropriate. But tagging slashdot stories is not going to work well. For tags to work they must have some benefit to the individual and some use to the group. The two places they work the best are del.icio.us and flickr. In both cases you organize your data by your tags. Your data is bookmarks and photos respectively. As a side result, you can get statistics about the most popular things with different tags. People don't tag things for the good of the community, they tag things to organize data in some way that is relevent to them.

Take a tagging system that is a failure: amazon.com product tags. Amazon introduced tagging in hopes of getting some new ways of slicing their product database. It turns out that are using the tags mostly for who on their gift list might want the thing. So you end up with lots of tags like "Bob", "Sue", and "Caroline". These tags have almost no use to the larger community. Amazon makes it worse by displaying the top tags for a product even when there are only one or two folks that have tagged something that way.

So why is it bad for Slashdot? Slashdot's implementation doesn't do anything at all for the end user

. The tagging system seems to be designed only around the group aspects. Features that would be needed to make this work:

• Ability to see your articles as your have tagged them.
• See what tags you have specified for a specific article

Without those, people just have no incentive at all to tag anything.

If Slashdot actually changed the page because of how you tag stories the results might be better. For example if somebody tags something "dupe", or "boring" it would be removed from that person's front page. On the other side, if it was tagged "cool" it would remain on the front page for longer.

As it is, I'll probably be tagging stories as to how I feel about them to start with and see if anybody notices. If nothing happens, I'll probably stop tagging altogether.

Please read the alert here. The Broadcast Flag is back, this time as a WIPO treaty, and if you don't speak up, it'll be decided by bureaucrats without any democratic input at all.

The alert provides a web form to write to your congress person. Please do that. And please put the alert up elsewhere, so that other people can help too.

I'm in Washington DC working on this today, and your support will help.

Thanks

Bruce

Please see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=175093&cid=14558550 I don't see a reason for the negative moderation. I'd appreciate if anyone with mod points would help fix this.

Bruce

Why do I dislike Microsoft? It's not because they're so damn big, or charge so much for their OS, or pretend not to be a monopoly, or stifle innovation, or refuse to release the source to their OS. They're a company, companies are expected to try and suck as much money out of the economy as possible. So they make business decisions in line with that singular goal.

No, it's because they're goddamned assholes.

New features developed for their next OS, ones that AREN'T deal-breakers and WOULDN'T keep people from buying the new products, somehow never seem to make it into patches or updates for the older versions of Windows.

An Example: "Lock the Taskbar" was a rather nice and useful feature they added in WinXP. But how hard would it be to add that feature to Win2k? A tiny little patch right? It's not THAT complex, since after all it's just an option that breaks the resize functionality of the taskbar. If there wasn't a switch for it and it happened seemingly at random, it would be called a bug.

There are many other examples of that.

Their refusal to admit that bugs or problems even exist with their OS also ticks me off. It's not that hard either. "Our bad, we screwed up and we're fixing it/have fixed it." Not that hard to say.

I'm sure anyone who's played around with Windows to any extent and kept track will have a nice list of problems they've encountered, but here's my favorite:

There's a bug in Notepad. Roll that around on your tongue. THERE'S A BUG IN NOTEPAD. That's right, they fucked up a featureless text editor. The bug still exists even in Windows XP.

Here's how to do it:
Open up Notepad, of course. Turn on 'word wrap'. Start typing. Enter some huge lines of text, ones that wrap several times. Save the document. Did you notice that the cursor position changed? Start typing again. Things get even more weird from there. Lines will no longer wrap properly. The text may get scrambled. Problems may occur. Your document may even get corrupted. To fix it, you have to turn word wrap off and then back on.

Now, I could understand if this was a bug that only occurred when doing something really bizarre or unexpected or unintended. But this isn't THAT unusual of a series of events. Typing with word wrap on. Saving the document. These are all the usual things I would expect to be able to do with a text editor. Am I wrong?

Slashdot user rodgster sent me 1000 slashdot subscription pages because he likes my comments. Thanks, rodgster!

I have now entered WalMart three times in my life.

Before I go on I should mention that I really don't have time to be shopping today. I am moving today and tomorrow. I have other things to do.

Yet I was a WalMart today at 4:10 am. The prospect of a $378 laptop was too much to resist. There were about a hundred people in line in front of me. Assuming that they didn't all want a laptop I figured that I would be ok.

Wrong.

First, the line got mysteriously thicker as time went on. There were easily 300 people in front of me when the doors opened at 5:00 am. This does not include the people that stood in the parking lot and simply sprinted at the door when it opened. What kind of jerk do you have to be to do that?

Second, they put the laptops in the grocery area. At least this is what I was told. I never saw a laptop box. I went to the electronics area which was a mob scene but lacked laptops for some reason. According to a helpful WalMart employee, the laptops were gone from the grocery area before I got into the store anyhow.

Now if you claim to be selling a sub-$400 laptop but can't/won't sell anywhere near as many as people want then you really aren't selling such laptops. You are simply claiming to. Maybe if they offered rainchecks I would believe them, but they don't and thus I am convinced that it is a scam. Classic bait and switch.

I walked out of WalMart at 5:10 am vowing to never return. Unless they will give me a raincheck, which isn't going to happen.

There seem to be two camps when it comes to computing and technology in general.
1) Those who want something new and better daily
2) Those who whine when something new comes out because all of a sudden what they purchased isn't the best.

STOP IT!
Technology companies aren't putting out 'too many updates'. I have seen too many people whining on Apple forums about this. 'Oh they are putting out too many products, i can't afford them all.'
Oh well. We can't have it both ways. I personally welcome frequent upgrades and i'm more than happy without having the newest (and buggiest) car, wireless, computer, technology stuff..

It all keeps the market fluid so that prices DO drop. Look at stuff like Digidesign's Protools. They put out major platform upgrades every 4-5 years it seems. The prices stay really high. iPods on the other hand drop in price because well, they are small/breakable and there are new ones every year or less.

Subsribers see stories before everybody else. These stories are marked in red to indicate that they aren't published yet. However, the Slashdot interface doesn't tell you how long until they will be published. The stories are just marked as "To be published in the Mysterious Future!"

As a subsriber you also get a customized RSS feed. This feed has all the same stories you see on the home page including the stories soon to be published. Interestingly, the actually publish time for the story is included in the RSS feed. You can tell exactly when the story will go live on Slashdot. My RSS reader really unmasks the "Mysterious Future"

The ancient "--" before the signature to make it bloody obvious where the signature starts should now be replaced by a div around the signature. The old behavior could be emulated by sticking the "--" before the signature using css.

The new CSS layout rocks. It looks much cleaner, although a little flatter. Now that they Slashdot has it, it can be used to do all sorts of nifty new stuff.

So I found the Apple iTunes developer stuff. Contrary to what I remembered it is free to download the API for iTunes. While they give you working code, it is pretty ugly as far as being a visualization. I have hacked it a bit to get a feel for it and have re-implemented the effect that I created way back when by rewiring an Apple // monitor and running my the wires to my stereo speakers through the coils.

So if you have a Mac you can see it. This similar to the WinAmp viz I posted before, but this version is much better. It scales properly and is green on black. Grab it here:
http//www.angelfire.com/games4/anirak/iTunesX_Visualizer.bundle.zip

As usual, unzip the file and place it in the user/Library/iTunes/iTunes Plug-ins/ directory.

If the direct link doesn't work, there is a link in the "links" section towards the bottom of this page

As I put more effort into this I will probably make a page for it, maybe on a .mac account. We'll see what happens.

Edit: corrected second link. It is probably the one to use.

After much hassle with FedEx the Mac mini showed up yesterday. The box it comes in is smaller than any desktop I've seen other than the Cappuchino that I never use.

I plugged everything in and it worked as expected. I began to see the beach ball quite a bit though when multi-tasking, so I decided to go ahead and buy a gig of ram for it.

Luckily, MicroCenter is about a 10 minute walk and a 4 minute drive away. I grabbed the ad at the door and saw that they had a gig of PC3200 for $139. This was a steal. When I finally found it though I was upset. It was a "kit", which wasn't mentioned in the ad. This means that it was actually two 512MB sticks. Only one slot in the mini, so I got a gig stick of PC3200 for $199. The mini takes PC2700, but I've seen rumours that it doesn't take all PC2700. Plus, the PC3200 was cheaper.

I then went to the hardware store since I don't have any puddy knives. They had one type that was thinner and a second type that was thicker but had a sharpened edge. I bought two of the thinner ones, since my experiements with a razor knife had shown me that it wasn't easy to get anything in the edge. Maybe the sharpened ones would have worked better, but they were pretty thick. Anyhow it is not easy to open the thing. It took me over 15 minutes, and I can't say that I didn't leave some little marks. I don't think anyone would notice, but I did. Having two knives made it easier, but once you get one in one side it is hard to get anything in the other side.

I finally got it open and popped the memory and put the new stick in. It works fine.

My first project is going to be writing an OpenGL based music visualization program with a twist. It will actually make a movie out of the visualization that can be written to a DVD. Also, it won't suck the way many visualization programs do. It will actaully react to the music rather than spraying color on the screen for no apparent reason.

Oh, I forgot to mention. No iWork. For some reason I thought it was included, but it has AppleWorks instead. Too bad. I was looking forward to trying out Keynote.

This has been mentioned by others. It has happened to me before. Yet I will complain anew!

FedEx was supposed to drop off my Mac mini today. Instead they left a note on the door. No ringing of the doorbell mind you, just a note on the door. I was home, waiting for it. Why can't they ring the bell? Is it that hard? I called less than ten minutes after the note was left and asked them to come back. They said they would. They never did.

There is now a big note on the door with an arrow pointing at the doorbell.

I have only bought two computers myself. I certainly didn't have the cash to buy the Commodore 64 that my dad brought home when I was in 3rd grade. This is a bit strange, given that I am one of the bigger "computer nerds" that I know. I have a CS degree and I work for big blue. Anyhow, back to the story.

I bought an Apple Performa 614 in college. This was because I was sick of going to the CS lab to do assignments. I wanted to program in my dorm room. Of course it took about 45 minutes to compile anything with only 8 megs of RAM, so I went to Fry's and bought a 16 MB stick, to bring me up to a total of 24 MB. No more thrashing, compiles took mere moments. That computer stayed with me through college and then I gave it to my brother so that he could use it in college, since it already had the software he needed. Even though the Performa line is looked upon now as the dark days of the Mac, I look back on it fondly. They might have been coasting on inertia then, but the foundation of quality that had been laid before carried through, at least in my mind.

I then defected from the Mac camp and bought parts to build my own Celeron 300, which I occasionally overclocked to a magnificent 500 MHz. Why did I defect? Well, mostly because I could cheaply put together a machine that had a 3D card. This would make it easier to improve my 3D asteroids game.

That computer is still running, but doesn't see much use. I get a new laptop from work every few years which has killed my need to buy a fancy machine of my own. Of course I occasionally have wanted to go back to the Mac camp, at least for personal use, but I never had a good excuse, and I while I've had the money to buy one if I wanted, I was never quite able to justify it.

Why am I writing this? Because I just ordered my third computer, a mini Mac. The price is too good to ignore, and I admit that the design impresses me. They lowered the price to the level of impulse buy and they hooked me. Now I just have to find a cheap 1 gig stick of RAM somewhere...