Dear website maintainers, editors, and eCommerce entrepreneurs:
Want a successful business? Then you’d better not deal with SubmitCore! They advertise themselves as a link-building service. I explain what a link-building service is about here, and also tell you how to do it yourself for free.
Just to reiterate, the whole point of guest-posting is to have your fine article hosted on an established website, while also linking back to your own website. Google sees the high-ranking authority site with a link to you and awards your site Pageranking points. But to be successful, your copy must be not just non-spammy, not just competent, but really great! Here is a knock-out article on Guest-Posting 101.
But some people would rather go through a paid service, and I have no truck with them. There are some good guest-posting services out there, and it is a legitimate business if done right. But don’t rely on Submit Core. I award them zero out of infinity stars, no points, last place in any contest that matters.
Now, I have not actually done business with SubmitCore. Instead, they tried to do business with me… if there is any “they” there and the whole thing isn’t just a bot. So let’s back up and I’ll share the whole story…
So you might have noticed that this blog lay dormant from about Thanksgiving 2020 through mid-January 2021. That’s typical; I’m too busy at that time of year working for other people’s sites, and then when the holidays come, I want to hibernate, not blog some more.
But now that I’m back to work and reasonably assured that the nation isn’t going to fall…
… I can toddle back to my standard shtick. Over December, I blabbered about a lot of video games, so there’s much to recap!
The below is a post from November 6th, 2011. NINE YEARS AGO AS OF THIS POSTING. It was posted on my old open source blog and got popular enough to get passed around most of the very news sites I talked about in there. Much water has gone under the bridge since then.
I STILL want Dillo! I just gave up and use Lynx for that function now. I couldn’t get Dillo to even compile on a modern system without maintaining it myself. There are thousands of journalists out there that struggle with this same problem every day; they need to get the facts, and all the facts are behind either paywalls or a million popups and autoplaying videos. I wish we just had a blogger’s equivalent of a Press Pass.
I also no longer run any of the below Linux distros. I’m on the Mint bandwagon now. It’s been the default “works out of the box” Linux distro for a few years, but God knows what I’ll have to resort to if Mint gronks.
Anyway, I’m reposting this NINE YEAR OLD post because people loved it and linked to it. Do not be surprised if it is out of date, because it is an old post. Got that?
As the United States witnessed firsthand in the 2016 election, technology is now as good as the prime mover in US politics. From the flap over Clinton’s emails to Trump’s impulsive Twitter rants in the wee hours of the night, and from the Facebook ecology of political posts in the months leading up to November 8th, 2016, to the self-organizing flash mobs of protesters and rioters that emerged after the fact, that election was shaped by electronic communication more than any election before it.
We’ve become more aware of that in the past four years, but it was creeping up on us then.
Which raises a very pertinent question: Just how much is high-tech media going to shape the world? Will we become a race of hyper-sentient empaths? Are we all merging into a hivemind?
When anybody in the world can transmit any amount of information to anybody else in the world in a split second, all barriers have been lifted. There’s really no practical difference between the average person now and an omniscient being, at least as far as an ancient Biblical author would have conceived it. Each of us carries in our pocket a device granting us powers that, one hundred years ago, would have been seen as nigh on godly.
But that’s the trouble with a planet full of omniscient gods: They become a royal pain to boss around. Yet we need to regulate this space now, right now!
I may get around to talking about the rest of gaming news, but it’s going to be hard to get past this first. In my GeekyDomain gig I’m obligated to talk about game trends. Recently when I browse Steam, one game kept shoving itself into my face over and over. Judging from its top-rated position, it seems to be the hottest (oh God stop the puns already!) free casual game lately.
I’ve been tricked into playing a game about seducing demons
So I tried it, beat it even (it takes minutes), and found out what the big deal was. Helltaker is an indie dating sim about assembling a harem of demon girls, after some obligatory puzzle and bullet hell elements. And you, all you depraved people, you wretched goblins made me play that just to see what all the fuss was about.
So now we know why half the fanart base has been taken over by devil girls eating pancakes lately. And honestly, even if I’m not down with this particular scene, I get it, I really do. I even analyze why in that post.
But that doesn’t mean that I quit finding all things concerned with Satanism and Hell to be side-splittingly hilarious. I love how Zdrada has a cross necklace. It’s amazing how well one indie Polish developer managed to capture Western humor so adeptly. That’s vanripper if you want to follow him to see what devilment he gets up to next.
Disclaimer: This post originally appeared on a tech blog. It is reused with permission.
In the world of technology, biometric identification has been slowly creeping from the world of science fiction to fact. On the most far-fetched front, we have iris scanners, predicted by movies such as Minority Report. On the less fantastic front, voice recognition systems have become a more common technology, though we’re still working out the kinks. Facial recognition is also getting good enough to prompt Jamie Zawinski into being fascinated by “dazzle” methods to defeat facial scanning. But the most reliable form of biometric identification has actually been the fingerprint reader.
*NOTE*: This isn’t a normal blog post; this is a declaration of war. It is tactical and dirty because it was a dirty fight already before I got here.
Wait, I thought I was done fighting about free and open source software…
Yes, I distinctly remember closing down my old FOSS-focused blog, delivering my final battle report for the Great Linux Desktop Wars, getting one last laugh at the con artists I helped shut down, and moving on. The mobile market gives the read-only users their software, and we makers and doers have our laptops, so everyone’s happy. Android rules the mobile, Linux rules the server and industrial sector, it’s Miller time, right?
Dr. Roy Schestowitz, one of my old comrades in the FOSS wars, gave me a nice send-off in 2013. So yes, I must have properly retired.
Why is this still happening? Well, actually, a new thing is happening.
The Old Thing that was happening: Everybody had nothing but desktops and laptops. Makers and doers, us working folk, needed these tools to make and do stuff, using Linux and command lines and programming. Read-only users, people who do nothing but consume, wanted computers to be dumbed down TV sets for them to drool on, while hunting us geeks down in the streets to brand our foreheads with the scarlet “elitist” and then force everyone to use Microsoft Windows.
(To make a long story short, OK?)
That thing stopped happening because hallelujah, mobile came along and saved us. The read-onlys could have their TV set in their pocket and never cared about our tools again. It’s been a loooooong time since I heard anybody attack a command line.
But here’s the New Thing happening: Now the read-onlys outnumber the makers 9-to-1, and they are in charge. The read-onlys want to dumb down our tools anyway because they want everybody to use mobile like them and can’t see why we need powerful, complicated tools to do stuff. If they can’t get us onto mobile, beside them, so that no work gets done, they want to break the tools we use on laptop so we’re screwed anyway. Out of spite.
Dangerous things happen when you put a read-only in charge of an open source software project, especially when he’s the CEO of the company that owns it, and is – stop me if you’ve heard this before – yet another trust fund baby born into wealth and prestige who spits on people who do work.
Again, I thought this was over. I don’t want to go back in the trenches, I thought everyone had learned that lesson!
This is about WordPress, Gutenberg, and Matt Mullenweg
Get used to those three terms, because you’ll be seeing them a lot around here in the coming months.
I’ve been way too busy to address the story when it first broke, but that’s how the burrito’s been rolling around here lately. Briefly, here’s the sequence of the story which made my blood boil:
COVID-19 pandemic hits
World recession (if not depression) hits
An unprecedented number of citizens in US file for unemployment
US government issues economic stimulus checks so the economy doesn’t go boom
IRS, banks, and other institutions report a crisis: they can’t help people fast enough because their machines are using… COBOL!
This triggered an avalanche of ignorant technology story headlines the likes of which haven’t been seen since Y2K.
It’s been going on like this for weeks. The drooling stupidity dripping over these stories is inexcusable in the year 2020. The media, let us never forget, is chock full of stubbornly anti-intellectual reporters who flat out refuse to learn because what’s the money in reporting an accurate story?
So, for those of you just joining us (because everybody else lies to you), allow the World’s Oldest Blogging Hacker to explain this mess…
So Zoom is the latest and hottest thing in teleconferencing apps, and it’s become the official video conferencing interface of the 2020 CoronaVirus pandemic. Isn’t that a cheerful backdrop for your company to get famous?
Lately I see a few people having fun with Zoom backgrounds. There’s the burning house meme which went viral. Others have picked backgrounds from The Office or Star Trek: The Next Generation. I figured I’d join in the fun, because if there’s one thing you all need right now to cope with the epidemic, it’s my deep-fried dark sense of humor.
DISCLAIMER: This post originally appeared in another technology blog that is now defunct. It is reprinted here with permission.
In the year 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie led a team of programmers at Bell Labs to develop the Unix operating system, which was to be a successor to Multics. It proved to be a smashing success in the growing computing field and became the standard for operating systems for the next two decades. In the year 1991, a Finnish programmer name of Linus Torvalds had an itch to develop a Free and Open Source (FOSS) port of Unix, and announced his intentions on Usenet mailing lists leading to a famous debate with one computer science professor Andrew Tanenbaum.
We today know Linux as the root of the Android operating system, dominant in the tablet and smartphone market by as much as 85%. But what many people don’t realize is the huge amount of other attempts that were made to create the perfect Unix-like operating system. Like settlers braving the snow to lead a wagon trail out west, the early days of computing marked many attempts to forge a settlement in the digital wild west, and many met defeat. The players in this epic saga might surprise you.
