Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Monday September 20, 2004

Thanks for the backup!

So late last week there was a thread running amuck on places like /. and the local Unix and Linux mailing lists. It was this one. Now in the past, this kind of fodder would linger around the net for a few days and those of us who talk to customers on a regular basis would be able to give our opinions on the matter, but we never really had backup from the higher ups.

Now the world of blogging is upon us though....

Jonathan responded this way within a day or so and Danese Cooper responded this way. Thanks to both of you!

That gave me the backup I needed to get back to the UUASC mailing list at least. Of course it spawned another whole thread on law suits and what not, but at least it wasn't thrown out to the community as fact and left to lay around there without a couple coherent, well written responses.

Wednesday June 30, 2004

Slashdot and Project Looking Glass; Everyone Has an Opinion

Okay, so I'll admit I look at /. from time to time (though not nearly as much as I used to). I guess in some ways it was very much the first such blogging outlet to gain noteriety. Good proof points for this assertions are the wealth of products and links to things that say "First post!". In many cases it seems people opine with what they've been lead to believe over the years- whether or not their opinion is even interesting. This, of course gave rise moderation, meta-moderation and what not, but I digress.

I looked over there just now and there are a huge number of posts with erronious info. Lots of Looking Glass posts about 'waste of CPU' and bloated Java and the perrenial C/C++ comparison.

Luckily there are some saner and more knowledgeable voices out there as well.

Speaking from experience, Project Looking Glass, for the most part, just exploits the fact that most modern PCs have 3D hardware sitting around collecting dust, waiting for someone to launch Quake or the like. It works quite well on even mid-grade, two year old laptops with cheap Intel graphics chipsets. The whole goal with the project is to rethink how we can make use of these resources to get more done. It would seem to me this is exactly the kind of thing the /. crowd should be into.

I just hope the opportunity to innovate doesn't get lost in the anti-hype of those looking for their two minutes of fame by posting uninformed opinion. . .

p.s.: I still haven't had my first post :)
Updated wirelessly from my Treo... ( Jun 30 2004, 08:54:32 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [2]