The recent story on female shark reproduction really drove home what I've been seeing in others comments recently. Slashdot is now quite obviously eliminating certain tags, such as:

http://slashdot.org/tags/lasers (only one shark article?)
http://slashdot.org/tags/frickinlasers (zero found?)
http://slashdot.org/tags/fud (zero found!)
http://slashdot.org/tags/notfud (zero found!)
http://slashdot.org/tags/slashvertisement (zero found!)

Not that I don't blame the effort to increase the quality of tags, but it seems like all the historically popular tags have been retroactively wiped out rather than taking the approach of having a higher threshold for future articles. Tags such as yes/no/maybe are of little value other than a popularity war at the time the article is active and it seems logical to exclude these as simply tag trolling. However, what if someone wants to do a search on what the Slashdot community thinks are slashvertisements, or are articles spouting FUD? Just can't do it, and a potentially useful zeitgeist measure is lost.

So once again, Slashdot jumps the shark? :)
 

As of this posting, user 999378 (texashouston) is the person with the highest account number. Only 622 more users until the millionth. Any bets as to the what the name will be?
 

As this is my second journal entry, I'm clearly not a huge journaler but this is certainly fun!

Inspired by Grub who stole it from Nizo who stole it from heliobacter...

1. Think of the first word that comes to mind when you think of me.

2. Go to: images.google.com and search for that word.

3. Reply to this post with one of the pictures on the first page of results* (but do not tell me the word).

4. Put this in your own journal so that I can do the same.
 

Every week, I get someone replying in regards to my sig letting me know that you don't get karma for funny moderations. Thank you, I know. If you're one of them, then you obviously didn't get my sig. It has nothing to do with humor/humour. The rest, I leave up to you. Reproduced for your edification and in case I think of something better:

--
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
 

Guess all I've been trying to say all along, sometimes in rather trollish terms, is that the real world isn't made of good-vs-evil, black-vs-white. My world has no pure immaculate white, and no pure light-sucking black.

Both extremes are just that: extremes. They're something to be feared, rather than something to seek. (If nothing else, seeked as something to reduce everything to.) And most people do fear them.

The real world is nothing like "Microsoft=EVIL vs SUN=GOOD", nor viceversa. It's not like "Windows=EVIL vs Linux=GOOD" either. Nor viceversa. And it's not like "Government=EVIL vs Pure Anarchy=GOOD". Same thing about corporations.

The real world is a lot more complicated, and a lot less comfortable than those simplifications.

There are plenty of good sides to choosing Solaris or Linux for your desktop or server, but then there also are plenty of damn good reasons to choose Windows. Either choice won't be 100% perfect, but rather a compromise. Either choice won't be 100% universal either: what worked for you, may not work at all for someone else. Etc.

Same about the corporations themselves. If you look at the history of computing, whoever was losing always wanted open standards. Whoever was winning, always wanted proprietary and preferrably patented stuff to lock the customers in.

Sun, IBM, Novell, etc, were all once in the same position where Microsoft is now: trying to lock the customers into one single vendor for upgrades, and into fundamentally incompatible formats and interfaces. That's how the Unix fragmentation happened, if you didn't know that already. (And that's what paved the way for Microsoft to win, incidentally.)

There are no villains and heroes. Just a bunch of greedy people trying to make a buck. Your buck.

Right now, pumping resources into Linux and promoting open standards is their best weapon. But if either of them got back on top, they'd do the same thing all over again.

Either way, remember if you still just feel a need to be a zealot for a multi-billion dolar corporation's interests, at least do yourself and it a service: don't sound like an extremist. Try to at least _look_ aware that the real world is made of shades of grey.

And try to at least look like you care about someone's actual problem, not like a rebel on a holy jihad. Your bosses might listen to a business plan where Linux will save them this much money. They will _not_ however listen to foaming at the mouth about how MS is pure evil and needs to be uninstalled from all computers, at all costs.

Try also to at least look like you've actually taken everything into account. Blowing one single problem out of proportion ("but Windows has viruses!"), and obviously avoiding all else (e.g., the cost to retrain everyone to use Linux), you've lost their attention. Or mine.

Again: a real solution is always the best compromise, among a bunch of crappy compromises. If yours is a clear cut case of 100% good vs 100% evil, you've just told everyone that you didn't do a real analysis. You might as well wear a "I'm not giving you a solution to your problem, I'm giving you a dogma" sign, because that's what everyone will understand.

The more I read Slashdot and other IT sites (e.g., www.theregister.co.uk), the more I'm starting to doubt that it's got anything to do with either technology or journalism. It's pretty much a case where you can predict that any article will be just an excuse to rehash one or more of the following fashionable black-vs-white prejudices. Just because it's fashionable to do so.

1. Microsoft = EVIL, IBM = GOOD, Intel = EVIL, Sun = GOOD, Apple = GOOD, etc. Clear cut cases of super-heroes vs super-villains. (It doesn't matter what MS does. Even if we're talking about offering a compiler for free, it's inherently evil just because it's MS, and it's fashionable to be Anti-MS. Conversely it doesn't really matter what Sun does, and how it never offered more than hot air to support its occasional "We love F/OSS" fits. It's good just because it's foaming at the mouth against MS and Intel.)

2. Any corporation is inherently an incarnation of the Supreme Evil (TM). Unless, of course, it happens to be fighting against MS or Intel, in which case the exact same behaviour now counts as Lawful Good.

3. Anyone who dares question the Good Anti-MS corporations in any way (e.g., a stock analyst daring to say that Sun's cancelling every single CPU it was supposed to release in the next 3 years doesn't exactly inspire confidence to buy Sun stock) is automatically
(A) A loonie,
(B) a retarded drooling user running pirated MS software,
(C) a MS fanboy,
(D) paid by MS to spread FUD, or, of course,
(E) all the above.

4. Your bugs suck, while ours smell sweet and never cause any harm. That the Opera browser I'm writing this in crashes by itself every couple of hours, is of course benign, and shouldn't keep anyone from thinking that it's a great browser. But if IE has some obscure bug in all that pile of code, it's time to gather a proper medieval angry mob, with pitchforks and torches. And call every IE user an idiot, while we're at it.

Corolary: having to update our favourite non-MS programs (e.g., Mozilla or Opera) every 2 weeks against bugs, is just normal and benign, and only idiots don't have the latest version already anyway. Having to download an update to IE 4.5 (or God forbid actually upgrade to IE 6) is an outrage, and someone should kill MS for that.

5. Noone should be allowed to keep me from stealing their work. It doesn't matter if it's music or algorithms. (See the endless foaming at the mouth about algorithm patents.) The fashionable IT whore should never have to pay for anything ever. If you worked to produce something, I should be legally allowed and encouraged to just come over and help myself.

6. Nothing should change, ever. Doubly so if, God forbid, it requires one to learn new skills. Not only we should all still be using a command line, but we should probably still all be programming in COBOL on punched cards.

Corolary: everyone who did learn new skills is to be ridiculed and called names.

Etc.

Wake up people. Reality isn't as simple and clear cut as Superman comics or Star Wars movies. There are no super-heroes or Paladins in shiny armour, and there are no super-villains cackling manically over death-ray blueprints.

If you've read my posts, you may have noticed I'm not quite anti-Microsoft. Let me explain.

I think the computer is a tool. Its worth is no more, and no less, than what programs you run on it and what data you have on it.

Linux has come a long way since I have first used it. It came on a stack of 5" floppies back then. No doubt there. I even installed it on my workstation at work nowadays.

It's not even the only non-MS operating system I've used. Before my rabid Linux zealot days (yeah, hard to believe, but I was one, roughly between 1999 and 2001), I used to be a rabid IBM OS/2 zealot. That wasn't my first non-MS OS either. I've used GEM, CP/M, and a few others before that.

But for what I use my computer at home, and especially for games, I find MS Windows to be a better choice at the moment. Or an easier choice. It's easier to just run something in Windows, especially since I do have a license for it anyway, than to try to make it run in Wine or Wine/X.

Also from my experience it's _far_ easier to tell Joe Average how to run something in Windows, than to educate him in the finer points of Unix administration. You also don't end up explaining stuff like "why isn't my new card supported" or "why can't I play this little VBscript web-based game in Mozilla" or whatever.

Basically that's all I'm saying. It's simply a pragmatic choice. No particular love for either camp.