It's obviously adrenaline combined with a sedentary existence.

Could be worse, I didn't get around to posting non-AC until like early '00, which is why I've only got a six digit UID. Still, beats the 7 digit my first registration on ICQ had (Sad too because I knew two girls, neither of them overly nerdy who had 6 digit ones. Sadly I never married either of them. Alas the life of loser! (Wasn't nerdy enough for the nerds, was too nerdy for everyone else :D)

Hemos: Good Luck with the Google job. But out of curiousity, did I just miss a day or did we not have a big front-page posting of you retiring?

Ironically enough I found out about slashdot in 1999 from a rather nerdy little fellow named 'Phil Smith' (No relation to Will Smith!) who was primarily a math teacher doing some initial web design courses in the Business and Computer Science department at our local community college. I started out reading sporatically, juggling it with a MU*ing habit I'd had since six months after getting on the net (Brought on by a combination of an HTML class in '95 when I was but a wee lad, a visit to the Compass Rose booth at a certain festival, and a giant interest in Battletech brought on by a comic shop, Mechwarrior 2, and the short year or so period where we had the benefit of a Virtual World Entertainment location in my otherwise podunk city.) My first skims of the site took place on an AT&T 14.4k modem that was purchased after a rigorous 6 months of chores, grades, and generally responsibility; things that were all shirked when the infinite possibilities of the internet were being discovered.

Sadly nothing has lead to the same level of excitement as the pre-2000 internet. Geocities, Sarna.net, hell, even Gopher! (Which always seemed like an inferior BBS interface to me!)

To all the people I once knew, in all the years prior to 2002. I bid you adieu. And perhaps now slashdot too.

As my parting comments: Mr. Malda: Thanks for all the years of wasted time, links to new places I never would've heard of, interesting links, history, etc of the computer world I've had a negligable impact in, and good luck in your retirement and marriage to Steve Jobs,now that he's finally free to devote his time to you. :)

And to Professor Smith, in case you're reading: 'Yes, yes we did feel the rush. Thanks for showing everybody in class the biggest time waster we could've fathomed back in those days. Without it I might've actually had to work for my links :D'

Just going by the wikipedia article, he's ALSO already held the reins every time Jobs had to take a sick day since '04. Anyone in that sort of position who has stayed at the same company for 7+ years, filling in as CEO but not jumping ship to take an offer to be CEO themselves probably has a strong attachment to the company. I do however wonder if Cook's taking the reins is going to see the reinstatement of the multicolored apple logo....(Read the last para or so of the wikipedia article if you're scratching your head.)

Nah just a basic left hand drive car. And I already had read up some on the rules regarding modified vehicles and conditional use permits (IE you can have a street legal car with slicks but it's only legal to drive in dry conditions.). And actually compared to the euro spec model, mine was downtuned for the US market (Euro model was specced for a higher top speed on the Autobahn and related European roads, while the US model was specced for better low end torque.)

Technically the craft wasn't lost, just the contents. Caution: Contents may shift states during rapid oxidation of module!

Good to know! That happened to be my biggest disincentive to looking at Germany. The other hurdle being to get my car legalized so I could take it with me, and then out to Nurburgring :)

Nothing like playing an ugly little Cherub and jumping in hookers, cops, murderers, and just some average schmuck in order to make your way further into the depths :)

I'm pretty sure it was the 'US University' that was the issue, not the attacking Falung Gong. If they wanna DDOS someone out of existance from their own sovereign computer systems I'm pretty sure that would be ok (right up until their DDOS started affecting the network pipes in between them and the Falung Gong servers.) *HOWEVER* This would be the equivalent of say Canadians coming onto American soil to lob mortars at Mexico. Mexico would take it as tacit approval by the US of the Canadian attacks on them, and might see fit to retaliate against them instead of Canada (since obv the US would be the low hanging fruit for them, from both a geographical and security point of view.)

And Germany still has those 'hacking tools' laws covering nmap, nessus and such, correct? I've been having a hard time (for about ten years now!) finding somewhere worth emigrating to that doesn't have some fscked laws that remove them from my list of potential candidates. Sad really, because every year seems to find the US falling further and further into insanity (as it has been since I was in High School, at least. 9/11 changed everything? No, Columbine changed everything.) Where's my pacifier? This IS a nanny state, isn't it? :D

The only thing worse than an American teamsters union is a Russian one? :D

Yeah, and what is the last id game you remember playing? When Quake 4 came out you could still find Quake collection packs at stores. When Doom 3 came out you could still find Doom Collections out. I would say based on market metrics that Id is well into their twilight, and the sale to ZeniMax just solidified that. The best quote I can provide is 'past accomplishments is no indication of future success.'. The linux ecosystem in general is showing this. I was looking at an old hard disk from 9 years ago the other day. Where has Theora come in the past 8 years? Did anything productive ever happen from the Golgotha source release? (How many of you even remember that?). Has Gnome/KDE finally succeeded Windows on the Desktop? Additionally with every successive kernel version, the userspace to accompany it has grown more bloated. Within about every 6th version of a library or application something is added requiring a later kernel, or a later kernel requiring a later compiler, each in turn leading to a cascade of new packages in order to make your system again stable. Anyone who had to update a system during the devfs to udev period can attest to this, and anyone who's kept a system updated in the interim. Furthermore given that this has gotten labelled as both a troll and flamebait, I'm going to assume the linux fanboys are mostly ubuntu users, because ubuntu is the mac of linuxes. (And I say that with two systems currently including an install. Neither of which will be updating to 11.04 or above.) Honestly the three biggest projects I'm waiting on are uclibc, libc++/libc++abi, and a version of clang that can handle enough gnuisms to compile most apps. Assuming clang can retain compilation on gcc 4.2.x it will be possible to bootstrap to a system that can act as a stable software base without the crazy cascade of packages that linux has become.

... the John Carmack of Open Source *nix Kernels. Seriously, what has he personally done in the past 5 years other than fsck us with first Bitlocker and then Git, a decade long string of incompatible 2.6.x releases, and finally, in order to 'me too' bad judgements by other open source companies, releasing a half baked kernel as 3.0 that might as well have been called 2.7 or 2.8 for all the new features it provides. (That is to say... none?)

Eh, just convert to MineTest and enjoy a multiplayer GPL'd version of Minecraft done in C++ with cross platform support for Windows, linux, and OSX :) It may not be finished, but at least anyone can go and wrench on it. Also shouldn't he have referred to it as a 'Trial of Refusal'?