/misc/ramblings/techno/geek

Digg vs. Netscape

The saga continues. Why is it always something versus digg? As I'm sure you've already heard, Netscape is attempting to woo away users from digg, reddit, etc., by paying them $1000 a month to post stories to Netscape instead of digg and reddit. The catch? You have to be one of the top users on either of those sites. The other catch? I believe that you have to forsake digg or reddit if you take Netscape up on it's offer.

The offer is stirring up some controversy at digg with the majority of diggers thinking that you'd be a sellout if you took them up on the offer. Or that the money is somehow "dirty" money. WTF? Dirty money??? I've got news for you....all money is dirty. If I take Netscape up on it's offer, I'd just have a $1000 more dirty dollars a month than you. But I digress. Real life dictates to us that we have to earn money to get along in this world. We have to eat, pay for shelter and clothe ourselves. Last time I checked, we couldn't barter for most of this stuff and getting it for free is generally considered illegal. That leaves paying for it with cold hard cash.

Holding up the idea that digg is somehow a model of democracy and a protector of freedom is lunacy. Nobody seems to remember the millions of dollars in venture capital that digg received a year ago. How come there weren't cries of "sell out!" then? Because it was an internet success story. Company starts out with an idea that catches on like wildfire and they in turn, make millions. But somehow, getting paid to do exactly what it is you do on digg, is selling out? Please. Digg's CEO, Jay Adelson has stated that "monetary compensation is out of the question" and "against the principals of Digg". I have to ask then, are the principals of digg such that the owners of the site get millions while diggers, who arguably make Digg what it is, get an overall user ranking? How come monetary compensation wasn't out of the question when the venture capitalists came knocking?

The bottom line is that I believe that the good folks that run Digg deserve monetary compensation because the last time I tried, I couldn't pay my mortgage with a t-shirt. As I believe that the top Diggers deserve monetary compensation for what they do. It won't dilute the quality of the stories that they submit. It won't make Digg any less popular. In fact, Netscapes plan to pay their "anchors", might indeed make it a force to be reckoned with.

Peace..

I'm back to WinXP on my primary desktop. Frankly, because I missed the ability to listen to my music. Suse wouldn't play my mp3's "out of the box". Amarok kept telling me that it didn't like them. I tried to install what I thought I needed through Yast, but an hour later, still no sound out of my speakers. Ridiculous and frustrating. I felt that it actually took me less time to reinstall Windows and get iTunes playing, then it would trying to get Suse to give up some sound.

Eye candy will only get you so far.

The new digg has launched although it's loading extremely slow for me.

Peace out.

Holy crap.

I made the switch. I completely switched over my primary desktop to Linux and it's not the distro that you think. I'm still running Windows XP on my new laptop, but that's only because I need to for work. You may be wondering why I said "Holy Crap"....read on..

The distro I selected for my primary desktop wasn't Ubuntu. It was Suse 10.1. In addition to this, I also got Xgl running on it and this is where the "Holy Crap" came from! I'd seen videos of Xgl before, but running it in person now is uber cool. I showed my wife (who uses the iMac and OS X) and she said "Holy Crap". It's kind of hard to impress someone who's coming from the OS X world.

Peace Out...

Recently installed Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper Drake on an older Compaq desktop I had laying around. The amazing thing about this old comp is that it's very quiet compared to my normal desktop PC...but I digress.

This old Compaq has an Intel i810 graphics chip. Essentially it's the graphics chip built into the motherboard and utilizes system RAM for video memory (ugh). My Benq FP91G+ LCD monitor has a native resolution of 1280x1024. The default installation of 6.06 sets my resolution at 1024x768. This is okay, but I want and like the native resolution. I went to change it under System > Preferences > Screen Resolution but there were no options to set it higher. Crap.

After some research I found out that you can reconfigure xorg by following these steps.

Open a terminal window and type

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Stepping through the configuration solved my problem with the exception of color depth. The default was 24 and I selected that during the configuration. Once I got back to the desktop, I could select 1280x1024 easily enough, but it was unusable. There were vertical lines running the height of my monitor and spaced our horizontally, every inch or so. This wasn't going to work. I finally found out through a little more research, that instead of the default color depth of 24, I reran the configuration and selected a 16bit color depth. Not ideal, but at least my LCD is at it's native resolution.

Numerous websites are now popping up, critical of Digg's 'democratic process' of digging stories, most notably Slashdot's piece, this guy's piece, and yet another. It seems to me that the guys that run Digg need to step up here and explain what's going on. I've had some of my stories get dugg up to about 30 over the course of a 1/2 an hour only to be reported into oblivion over the course of several minutes by watching digg spy. It seemed odd that that many people would report my story that I wrote to the digg team about. They verified that all was hunky dory in Digg land.

Holy crap. This is the funniest fark thread I've seen in a long time.

Just in case you've never heard this, a fellow blogger, Kyle MacDonald, is attempting to trade-up from one red paper clip to a house. It's an amazing idea that's working!

Here is a very cool article on Microsoft's Open Source Lab.

Microsoft’s Open Source Software Lab is an ambitious research project. Located on the company’s main campus, the lab houses more than 300 servers, which collectively run more than 15 versions of UNIX and 50 Linux distributions. It boasts a team of senior-level programmers and system administrators, some of whom were architects of popular Linux distributions or authors of well-regarded books. In short, the lab is one of a few such facilities in the world dedicated to open source research.