Technology Wank

This just in: geek convicted of first degree murder

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 02:18:56 GMT

I don't know how many of y'all have been following the trial of Hans Reiser, the Linux filesystem developer accused of killing his wife. According to multiple sources, he was convicted today. Of course, a good number of people are still at "so what>" It's not as if ReiserFS was a closed-source effort, so others can still develop on it, even if the original developer is behind bars for the rest of his life. From what I understand, the po-po had a case based entirely on circumstantial evidence (nobody's found her body), as well as a guy who was a bit of a jerk.

Of course, the fine folks at Reddit and Slashdot aren't going to let us down, now are they?

First, a fairly concise description of the case against Reiser.

There's no proof a crime has been committed! (Actually, there is, but that doesn't usually matter on Reddit.)

A protest of the Wikipedian school regarding whether the evidence presented was damning enough.

Here's an argument about whether jurors should even be allowed to decide legal cases.

Law and Order = a sound guide to the American legal system.

Now everyone will think all open source devs are murderers!

I'm not sure what this guy is on about. ZFS has nothing to do with Reiser.

Some black humor about the whole situation, for those interested.

I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Gentoo ricers suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened. (text is a link in the original comment)

Paging the spirit of Johnny Cochrane...:
"This is a FAT32 partition, it comes from microsoft.
It has a 4GB limit, in the age of 5GB DVDs why would you ship a product with a 4GB limit?
It just doesn't make any sense!
If this is FAT32 partition, the jury must acquit!!"

The Slashdot post is full of more commentary, but right now, my brain is going, "Teal deer! Gimme vodka!" So I shall listen to my brain.

Apple revamps iPod lineup, drops iPhone prices - wank ensues.

Thu, 06 Sep 2007 15:52:13 GMT

(*prods community* Anyone here?)

So as a lot of people were expecting, Apple revamped the iPod lineup, changing the form factor of the iPod Nano, increasing the top size on what's now called the iPod Classic, and introducing the iPod Touch, which is effectively an iPhone minus the phone. As for the iPhone? Well, they dropped the price ... by $200.

The early adapters ain't happy.

MacNN sums it all up for you. People are pissed, Apple's deleting ranty posts from its support forums (which, to be fair, are for support and asking other users for technical assistance, not for screaming at Apple), and the MacNN comments thread is full of people who are either screaming or telling the screamers to put on their big girl panties and suck it up. Elsewhere, the Machinist blog on Salon is saying "I told you so". I'm pretty sure Gizmodo is full of spooge, but I'm not wading in there without a deep-sea diving suit.

Full disclosure: I'm a longtime Apple partisan and was an early adapter for the iPhone myself. Yes, I'm sort of peeved about being out the extra cash as a result, but I just can't work up a head of steam about it, possibly because there are a lot of other things I'm much more upset about that have nothing to do with Apple. Win some, lose some; life goes on.

ETA: essinad finds a lode of wank in the comments of these tuaw.com posts:
Apple screwed you: So now what?
Jobs on iPhone price drop: "That's technology."

Lots and lots of people calling Jobs a douche, especially in the second post. Good times. I particularly like the "Screw Apple, I'm buyin' a Dell!" folks. And also comment #44 on the second post: "I think back to the 1984 commercial and now I wonder who the woman with the hammer is. It sure as shit isn't Apple."

Daughter of ETA: Jobs responds. With, among other things, the promise of a $100 store credit for the early adopters. Comments just now rolling in on MacNN, but perhaps this will have the mollifying effect that Apple really sort of needs right now. Points to them for getting on top of it quickly (although in a better world, they might've gotten onto it about 12-18 hours quicker -- still, at least they're trying).

Niece of ETA: What essinad said. Look out for the teal deer. (From the commenters, not essinad.)

The lawyer that 'dissed' a mac

Wed, 18 Oct 2006 12:26:59 GMT

MacOS vs Windows arguments are normally quite tedious after you've sat through a few. However I found this one to be relatively funny. Was going to post to otf but thought it probably wouldn't fit in as well.

This all begins when Lawyer and technology advisor Larry Bodine writes an article detailing how his transition from Windows to Mac was not as smooth as he would have liked. To put it another way, Macs are made of suck. If his argument can be summed up, it seems his Mac doesn't work exactly the same way as his Windows machine does, and this we are to understand, is a bad thing. The reasons why Apple is awful include: the one button mouse, there aren't enough keyboard shortcuts to do things, Microsoft Office isn't very good, the default browser doesn't support flash and his many websites just won't work properly on it. Unsurprisingly there is something of a backlash from Mac fans.

The article makes MacDailyNews. with comments ranging from polite suggestions that the mac can do things he says it can't to the more familiar flames and allegations of stupidity. Other blogs respond here and there, increasingly people begin to suspect Larry is being a little creative with his facts.

Larry Bodine isn't done yet. He posts a response in his blog. After receiving hatemail and nasty phone messages (oh fanboys, where would we be without you?), Larry thinks people need to calm down and realise that it's just a machine. Good idea Larry. To help calm things down, he decides to point out that Macs are the "betamax of the 21st century" and that Apple's 5% market share indicates they must be crap. Somehow I don't think that's going to work Larry.

The comments pile in and questions are being asked. Has he tried any of the advice he's been given? Why did he buy a high-end Mac when he doesn't need something that powerful? Why did he spend so much on a discontinued machine? Someone points out that his websites may not work because they're full of errors and optimised for a pretty outdated web browser. The best summary of inconsistencies is here.

Will Larry leave it? Not yet, he won't. He posts another response boasting about the traffic spike his site has seen but he also wants to clear a few things up . He didn't actually buy the machine 5 months ago like he claimed in the article but rather 15 months ago, but hey, what's a year in the computer world? Plus that modest line about how he was smart and shouldn't need any 'guides' or help with a completely new OS? That was added by his editor. There are a few more questions popping up now. Lots of the comments ask variations of the same thing but also plenty of amusingly indignant mac fans. Will Larry post again? It seems like he might not bother but who knows.

*First lengthy wank report, obligatory requests not to stamp too hard*

Woz Wank

Sat, 04 Mar 2006 15:48:06 GMT

So, journalist Peter Nowak interviews Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple Computer. The interview gets published, but in it, Woz apparently says some harsh things about Apple.

Woz learns about the published interview via an Mac mailing list, and says that his words were taken out of context.

Nowak hears of Woz's post, and feeling that his credibility is at stake, publishes the full transcript of the interview.

However, it seems Woz's concerns weren't unwarranted. Here's an analysis of the article vs. the interview transcript. How Nowak thought he could get away with his edits, especially when the full transcript only lends more credence to Woz's concerns, is beyond me.

Wow! Wank kills an operating system!

Thu, 02 Feb 2006 04:13:03 GMT

A bit of background before I begin this one is in order, as it deals with a lesser-known operating system.

ReactOS was a project to build a free, Windows NT-like operating system. I say "was" because one of the developers pitched a hissy fit for some reason and decided to accuse the project of decompiling Windows code and inserting it into ReactOS, which is, of course, illegal. This accusation has caused the project to shut down operations while they review the over three million lines of source code to look for any potential copyright violations. As such, distribution of the software has also ceased until further notice.

Of course, project developers just claim that the project has been set back for a year, but in the world of free, libre, and open source software, a year is enough time for the developer base to lose interest in a project and move on to other things.

As the linked NewsForge article states, most other FLOSS projects have regular code audits for this very reason. Why ReactOS, which knew itself to be a large project, didn't don one before now is anyone's guess.

GNOME vs. KDE, round 35465463513549811

Wed, 14 Dec 2005 03:42:16 GMT

So, GNOME and KDE people have been duking out their issues with each other on Slashdot and Usenet since KDE was created using the then-proprietary Qt toolkit (now under the GPL) and RMS wanted to have a totally free replacement, which was designed using GTK+ (has always been under the LGPL).

Since v. 2.0, GNOME has been trying to develop towards a human-usable system that has cut out a good number of the multiple options that most people would find arcane and/or useless, or has just made those tools much less visible.

Well, Linus (of pwning Microsoft fame) doesn't like it and thinks that the GNOME people are idiots for wanting a simpler, if less configurable GUI, totally ignoring the fact that not everybody in the universe is so 1337 with C that they can write a kernel for a Unix-like operating system.

This discussion then hits Slashdot and starts up new battle in the flamewar between these groups the likes of which have not been seen since KDE 3.5 (which is verreh, verreh nice, btw) was released.

Of course, this just proves me wrong: I would have thought that Linus would have prefered FVWM2 or something like that.

ETA: According to Jeff Waugh (a guy who gets paid to develop GNOME), "None of this discussion has impacted the healthy working relationship that the desktop developers have built, despite the dim white noise of users beating each other to a pulp in the background."

Just...wow.

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 06:11:23 GMT

Okay, again from Slashdot, this entire post about open sores just brings too much funny to enumerate here.

Welcome and first wank

Wed, 30 Nov 2005 07:18:23 GMT

So, I finally got around to doing this. I created a tech wank community, because there's just so much funneh in tech forums that it really needs to be docummented. Besides, I wouldn't want to have to explain some of the more technical aspects of a GNOME vs. KDE flamewar to casual readers on otf_wank.

To get started, I've got a bit of a fish in a barrel tonight. Today marked the release of KDE 3.5. Of course, this gets posted on Slashdot. Given the nature of Slashdot, there's wank on various aspects of this release, including video and voice support in Kopte, a small web browser fight, and some snide comments about the historical default themes on KDE.

There's also some commentary about naming in Linux-based operating systems, and some general whinging about lack of "major" distro support for KDE.

And that's only page one, ladies and gentlemen. There is a second page that I'm not even going to touch.