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Journal: Sigs more retarded than mine. 2

Journal by Orrin Bloquy
Apologies in advance for when my sarcasm meter is broken.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
What the fuck is that even supposed to mean? Wolverine and Batman joining forces after some cliched armpit-sniffing fight with each other?
Social Conservatives just can't compete.
At shuffleboard? What?
"Steve Jobs may have the apple, but Bill Gates has the entire orchard!" --anon engadget blog entry
Holy shit, leave telling jokes to people with functional forebrains.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
News flash: that sketch with Joe Piscopo as Lincoln was not written by Shelby Foote.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
There's a sale on "He's The Real Thing" faux CocaCola shirts down at Savers! Quick, man, before they're all gone! Seriously, man, they said to "Witness for Christ," not "Witless."
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton.
For people who felt "AYBABTU" was too hoi polloi.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I tell my kids that this sig got to go live on the farm where it can play all day.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Don't disappoint your house dog. Smear peanut butter all over your ass. This is slashdot, no one fucking cares.
I play NES games on my GBA. Ask me how.
Sorry, I'm too busy smearing peanut butter on my ass.
ANYONE who claims more than months or even weeks uptime in XP isn't applying patches!
Water wet!
"Hate comes from fear. Fear comes from weakness."
OK, now close your eyes and realize you're hearing this uttered with Grover's voice.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
You misspelled "t yr syrzvz.".
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
West. End. Girrrrllllsssss....

Journal: ROI on commodity computers as a M/PC flamewar gambit

Journal by Orrin Bloquy

"Incidently, if you are a Mac owner, and you've paid for every major release of OS X, you've paid about $500 over the last 5 years for your operating system. Compare this with $120 (assuming 2k upgrade) for the last 5 years for an XP owner."

Offhand, how many people do you know who are using XP SP 2 on the same PC they bought in 2001? What did they pay to upgrade their HD, memory, and if they're gamers, their video card? Are they excited about having slow memory, a PIII, USB 1.0, and a BIOS that can't boot thumbdrives? Are they still using the same tube monitor and ball mouse they bought in 2001?

Bottom line: If Apple made most of their money from hardware vendors whose practices guaranteed replacing the entire package every thirty-six months and corporate/governmental customers locked into product dependence, they could also afford to low-ball the OS costs.

But in terms of business models, they aren't even the same kinds of economies, much less economies to comparable scales. Microsoft's largest customers are wholesalers, governments and corporations; Apple's are still predominantly end users at the bottom of the economic food chain -- where things are expensiver but the sales figures are never misleading.

Why does that last part matter? Back in the 80s, Apple had distributors everywhere around the planet. No matter how small your town was, you probably had a store with a rainbow fruit window sticker. It was great for presence. It was great for PR. It was fuck-awful for sales. Few of those dealers were Apple-only shops, and people bought the crappy PC compatibles they figured they could afford. Apple's retribution towards their distributors made Alec Baldwin's scene in "Glen Garry Glen Ross" look like "The Horse Whisperer." National retail partners like Sears dicked them around on how long they'd sell their merchandise. Even Dell gets it that computers on shelves equals death coming soon.

The guy who sells to Wal-Mart is taking it in the ass, too, because his margins are constantly being squeezed and his "partner" is telling him to outsource to China to get his profits back. In comparison, Microsoft has not only a steady source of income but comparatively little complaint about the rates they're charging. The PC makers gladly fork over $50 for XP Pro, and the corporate customers are being told flatly that they can expect a subscription model whether they like it or not. In return, the drones get an OS guaranteed to remain backwards compatible to every badly-coded VBA corporate app their ancestors wrote.

Now, Vista. Because Windows couldn't evolve gradually, all of a sudden it requires a new breed of hardware, a new box, and damned little in return on the investment.


Journal: Great /. siglines

Journal by Orrin Bloquy

"Allowing programmers to name serious 'flagship' Linux applications is right in line with letting marketing write them." --Kjella

"Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hanger and no one gets hurt." --andrewman327


Journal: Metamoderation, take 2. Please read this.

Journal by Orrin Bloquy

The idea of positive moderation is to make it possible to float the cream to the top for people who choose to filter for a specific category. Being nice to every non-troll post you find is well intentioned, but dilutes this.

There's an actual difference between Insightful, Informative and Interesting, and metamoderation leads me to think a number of slashdotters with mod points find these terms vague enough to be interchangeable, since they're all positive moderations.

Insightful: articulates a perspective which otherwise might go unconsidered. Let's break that down into three parts bceause it seems obvious, but it isn't.

"articulates" -- explains in context, in detail.

"a perspective" -- a viewpoint, not merely an opposing opinion or a cynical barb.

"which otherwise might go unconsidered" -- insight usually makes you go "ah, I hadn't thought of that" or something like it. It isn't someone merely making a point you agree with better than you could, yourself.

Informative -- facts about the subject at hand, like personal experience or a link to an external resource which either enhances its point, puts it in perspective or outright refutes it. Because Informative is a less subjective moderation, a torrent of replies which disprove the post's information is likely to get that post's Informative mod metamoderated Unfair, so if you don't understand the subject well enough to know whether the poster's talking out his/her ass, save your mod points.

Interesting -- As often as not, something useful which doesn't fit into the above two categories. In a thread about HD capacity ceilings, a link to research on the theoretical maximum speeds of magnetic media is technically diverging from the subject at hand, but not enough to qualify as Offtopic. It's Interesting.

If something is informative, don't mod it Interesting. If something is merely interesting, don't mod it Insightful or Informative.

Lastly, reposting an entire article from another site like Wikipedia (instead of, say, linking to it) is more often than not obvious karma whoring. I metamod those down because it's an attempt to confuse quantity with substance and because I end up wasting time scanning for some substituted trolltext in the body. Don't do it. Excerpt, excerpt and link or just link.


Journal: IE7 standards compliance: fact versus hype

Journal by Orrin Bloquy

The MSDN blogs insist that they rewrote IE from the ground up. Uh, no.

Yes, they corrected box model related glitches which were almost entirely the result of miscalculating which thing takes precedence, and there were a slew of them. Congrats on fixing those -- after nearly half a decade of reports and complaints. And yes, it looks like the > operator works now and :hover now works with all valid elements.

Unfortunately, the renderer they claim to have rewritten from scratch has a peculiar feature: every single CSS2 property which wasn't implemented in IE6 is still missing in IE 7 beta 2. Every HTML tag which renders incorrectly in IE 6 renders incorrectly in IE 7 beta 2. Every one. Many of those properties have no effect on the compatibility of existing websites, created in FrontPage or elsewhere.

By total coincidence, IE 7 beta 2 (which was specifically mentioned in their blogs as being the new renderer) has no support for any CSS spec beyond the ones in IE 6, even ones which have been requested repeatedly and implemented for years in all other browsers:

  • CSS content insertion (before:, after:, content:)
  • CSS Quote character selection
  • Quote characters placed around contents of QUOTE elements
  • Correct implementation of BUTTON (IE refuses to pass the VALUE attribute)
  • OBJECT as a valid substitute for IMG (IE places nonremovable scrollbars around image; when given different height/width values, instead of scaling the image it resizes the pseudo-IFRAME around it)

These are only a few. Again, almost none of the missing spec has a negative effect on legacy webpages, and I'm not even mentioning the more abstruse CSS2 specs no other browser cares to implement (e.g. character width).

I'm inclined to believe they rewrote how IE works within the OS and its security model. However, the likelihood that they would intentionally release a developer beta that shows a renderer nearly identical to IE6's only leaves two possible conclusions:

  1. The schedule was rushed and build 5296 aka beta 2 isn't an accurate representation of the new renderer, merely a demonstration of a more accurate object model.
  2. Redmond thinks a waxed paperboard box filled with steaming feces is entitled to be called vanilla ice cream.
User Journal

Journal: I metamoderate therefore I am.

Journal by Orrin Bloquy

I'll keep it short. I appear to get to metamoderate on a regular basis here, and having two posts being modded "Troll" recently (one deserved, one a joke I made too subtle) hasn't changed that any.

One-line comments marked "Insightful" are going to be pounded into the ground unless they're actually insightful. That means, "articulates a point (or point of view) you might not have taken into account," and a short sentence is usually not up to the challenge.

As much as you might enjoy anonymously wielding "Flamebait", "Troll", "Offtopic" and "Redundant", I trebly enjoy metamodding them "Unfair" if it looks like punishment for someone offending your sensibilities while remaining within the subject.

"Informative" posts with incorrect technical advice will be checked in context; if the poster was clearly talking out of their ass, thumbs down on the mod. Don't mod something informative because it *sounded* smart.

Remember, metamoderation serves the purpose of deciding whether *you* get mod points in the future. Jerk off and I'll catch you in it.
