I have a long-running argument with a friend about Slate. He thinks it is ok — I think it sucks. I just got this email admitting defeat from him.
————–
OK, you’re right. It’s shit and nothing but.
“Windows 7 is the best operating system on the market
“Creed is totally underrated”
The Grand Panjandrum
A few people at Slate are OK. I like Dahlia Lithwick for one, but generally they are only slightly better than Politico. Slightly.
They Live By Night
I’ve recently come to the same conclusion. The Creed reappraisal was the final straw (they did a similar article about Limp Bizkit some months back as well), although Jody Rosen’s hip n’ flip article about music on NPR was also terrible.
Comrade javafascist
Read: “Why Slate Doesn’t Suck: A Counter View to the Prevailing Wisdom” next week only on Slate.com!
Cheryl from Maryland
WaPo owns Slate. Nuff’ said.
geg6
Dahlia Lithwick is the one and only reason to ever click on Slate.
Although, after that post touting how Creed is the bestest, bestest, bestest, and most misunderstood band of all time, even Dahlia may not be enough to get me there.
mcd
Here’s an actual line from the Slate Windows article:
In order to take 30 seconds to do this, you’d have to be shooting heroin with your other hand.
Has this tech writer heard of tabs? Also
JGabriel
@The Grand Panjandrum:
Ha. That about sums it up, perfectly.
.
RedKitten
The only reason I ever read Slate is because a former school classmate of mine, Karim Bardeesy, has had a few pieces on there.
And I read about the freakshows on “Dear Prudence”.
That’s it.
raptusregaliter
I thought you were talking about Creed from “The Office.” He rocks!
The other Creed not so much…
johnny
I actually thought they meant Creed from The Office. I was horrified upon clicking the link.
BTW, Creed crying at the opera music on last night’s show was far more compelling than anything the band of the same name has ever, ever done.
johnny
LOL @raptusregaliter
Just beat me!
mistermix
@geg6: Yeah, and Fred Kaplan isn’t bad, either.
But it’s like picking peanuts out of shit.
Fergus Wooster
@RedKitten:
I agree – I only read Dear Prudence, for the “my fiancee seems to be playing footsie with her brother” entries.
Lithwick rocks, also.
But they don’t make up for Anna Applebaum, and Will “Bell Curve” Saletan, Jack Shafer, Shmuel Rosner et al.
Although the Creed thing was a new low.
soonergrunt
While Creed has always sucked, Windows 7 IS the best operating system for the desktop available today.
Linux and Mac are held back, primarily by the user communities. They are only slightly less annoying cults than the birfers.
Crashman06
I am convinced that Creed article was just a joke. I mean, it has to be, right? Nobody can seriously think they were an underrated band. It’s a joke… a joke…
cleek
i don’t have Weven so i don’t have an opinion, and i know you had a terrible time with it, but i’ve read tons and tons of glowing reviews about it. people really do like it.
and Slate likes the links the Creed piece brings them.
SpotWeld
Should have bet him a beer
SpotWeld
Should have bet him a beer
General Winfield Stuck
Politico is a goddamn wankers rag. And Mike Allen is it’s wanker in chief, along with VanderHei.
TPM takes apart their recent anti-health care reform concern trolling.
From Valerie Jarret
beltane
My mother reads Slate, which is probably why I don’t. She also swears by Politico and the Huffington Post. Enough said.
cleek
@mcd:
not only that, even if you do have multiple FF windows open, the title of the web page will be the title of the taskbar button for that window. just look at the taskbar and find the one that says “Yahoo News” !
duh.
RedKitten
@raptusregaliter:
Indeed!
slag
Dahlia Lithwick should definitely find a new and better gig.
Morbo
@Comrade javafascist:
Extremely plausible as an actual story on Slate. Seems like a good time to link this.
Billy K
Coincidentally, those are the only two articles I’ve commented on this week. The site has become ridiculous beyond parody.
drillfork
With Windows I think it’s always best to stay a step behind. For instance, this XP works great.
But, I’ve never understood the fascination with Macs. It isn’t compatible with IM apps or anything people use, and, despite my very limited use, I’ve experienced tons more Mac freeze screens than I have Windows blue screens of death.
I don’t know if it’s fair to compare Mac loyalists to birfers though, at least not straight up. Mac loyalists are devoted to nonsense like birfers, but they have more of Star Trek nerd-like sensibilities…
Joel
I gave up Slate early last year, when they started giving that fucktard Sean Wilentz a platform. I just didn’t see alternatives before then. I was an Internet naive; I tried Salon for a bit but they were only marginally better. Eventually I found The Atlantic by virtue of my fiancees print subscription. Andrew Sullivsn and TNC opened my eyes to the blogroll. The rest is history.
Ash Can
Speaking of jokes, I sure hope those “vote for Glenn” ads aren’t appearing on any sites other than this. Sure, we know they’re parody, but they might scare non-Juicers away from voting for Bitsy. Eek!
theturtlemoves
Comparing a good review of Windows 7 to a good review of Creed is a little unfair. Unless we are going to have two articles like, “Everyone should download Syphilitic Snake Ubuntu” and “Kid Rock is the next Elvis, only better”.
Warren Terra
You might want to check your tags, it looks like you’re calling your friend an asshole.
It’s a shame the excellent Dahlia Lithwick and Ezra Klein are sullied by Kaplan, but good-paying jobs are rare.
thomas Levenson
@drillfork: Not a heavy IM user…but haven’t had a problem w. AIM w/in Ichat…which I used heavily on a multi-location film project a while back.
FWIW.
Rosali
For a while, my local NPR station was carrying “Day-to-Day” which was basically a radio version of the Slate articles. It was boring and horrible. The radio station’s best decision ever was getting rid of Day-to-Day and putting Fresh Air back on.
geg6
OT, but I thought this was especially funny after watching the Nightline program last night about Scientology.
http://www.blackbookmag.com/article/mary-harron-reveals-inspiration-behind-patrick-bateman/11810
Mary Harron directed American Psycho and reveals who Christian Bale modeled his killer on.
mistermix
@theturtlemoves: How in the hell does anyone know whether W7 is the “best” OS one day after release? Give it a few days to see if any bugs crop up — such as the one that bit John Cole yesterday.
That’s why it’s on par with the Creed article. Creed can’t be “totally” underrated.
It’s not only contrarian bullshit, it’s contrarian absolutist bullshit.
Political Pragmatist
Aging Hippie, so I have no clue about Creed and stopped reading Slate ages ago. But having used MS since DOS 3.3, Win 7 is the best OS yet. I got the beta version in Feb and have not crashed one time since. I really think this is the best and maybe final version of the PC OS.
I was on the air the day Sat Night Fever broke and disco drove me out of the radio biz. Haven’t paid much attention to music since so I can’t comment on the Creed bit, but the Win 7 article is pretty much on target.
They Live By Night
@Joel:
On the whole, I think Salon is far better than Slate. (Or The Atlantic, for that matter.) Andrew O’Hehir is interesting, even when I don’t agree with him (however, Stephanie Zacharek is not) and Glenn Greenwald is unmissable.
theturtlemoves
@mistermix: Hey, I’m not saying Slate doesn’t suck, because it does. And actually, I think “best” really depends on the user and what they are trying to do. 7 is the best for me because I’m a gamer and a developer. Were I a graphic artist or musician, I could see how a Mac would be a happy thing. I can even see a Linux distro if you are a developer doing a lot of coding for enterprise apps that run on flavors of Unix. I just find the Mac vs. PC vs. Linux wars tedious. And I do think the Ubuntu code names are completely ridiculous, even if the distro is pretty good.
Martin
Wut?
Out of the box the IM client supports AIM, Google Chat and all other Jabber based chats. Does Windows even ship with a chat client that supports anything other than MSN?
The very awesome and very free Adium client supports the following:
AOL Instant Messenger
ICQ and
MobileMe (formerly known as .Mac)
MSN Messenger
XMPP (“Jabber”), including
Google Talk and
LJ (LiveJournal) Talk
Yahoo! Messenger, including
Yahoo! Japan
Bonjour, compatible with iChat
MySpaceIM
Facebook Chat
IBM Lotus Sametime
Novell GroupWise
Tencent QQ
Gadu-Gadu
Plus Trillian runs on OS X.
selskie
Slate is owned by MSN, so they’d probably make Windows 7 sounds like the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Fergus Wooster
I remember Hank Hill accosting a Christian rock band modeled on Creed:
“Don’t you fellas get it – you’re not making religion better, you’re just making rock’n’roll worse!”
Cat Lady
Scott Stapp getting punked was one of the more amusing celebrity episodes in recent memory. It couldn’t have happened to a better self-regarding shit stain.
cleek
it’s actually been available for months. yesterday was really just the retail release.
Cat Lady
Now no edit in either Mac/FireFox or MS/IE. Won’t anyone think of the children?
Skullduggery
@selskie:
Microsoft sold Slate to WaPo in 2004.
Zuzu's Petals
Have to admit I’m getting a little addicted to the Mad Men discussion and comments at the TV Club.
I followed the one for The Sopranostoward the end of the series.
J.W. Hamner
Windows 7 may, or may not, be “the best” operating system available… but it’s not contrarian to posit that it is… being that it is well regarded across a range of reviews. To fit with the Creed thing, it would have to be something like “Windows Me: Most underrated OS of all time? “
MNPundit
I liked Creed.
Sentient Puddle
@J.W. Hamner: Actually, these days, I’d say that you’d have to replace Me with Vista to properly fit the contrarian theme. I’ve seen so many mainstream voices (CNN, for instance) say that Vista was their biggest blunder ever, even more than Me or Bob.
Of course, this may be a case of the mainstream not actually remembering jack shit about Me, and contrarianism actually being right. Which would make the universe a splode…
valdivia
@Zuzu’s Petals:
linky please? I love Mad Men and have to do with Ta Nehesi’s one thread on Mondays.
J.W. Hamner
@Sentient Puddle:
I was going to say Vista, but I didn’t want to tempt fate and encourage anyone at Slate to write that article.
Joel
@They Live By Night: I identify with Greenwald, but he’s (stylistically) a difficult read. I think Joan Walsh is a weak editor, and I find Camille Paglia more repulsive than anything on Slate… Koppelman’s pretty good, but Steve Benen was better when he was filling in.
Generally, it’s the gimmicky crap that Slate (and Salon) get involved in that annoy me the most.
Joel
@Zuzu’s Petals: I enjoyed following Freakonomics for S. Venkatesh and a bunch of gangsters following the Wire for seasons 3-5…
valdivia
not enough coffee this morning obviously so is TV Club on Slate?
General Winfield Stuck
The Decider, Act 2
No Mr. Bush, you didn’t sell your soul. You gave to Cheney for his personal pleasure.
Nutella
@General Winfield Stuck:
I’ll be one of many to say he didn’t sell his soul because he doesn’t have one to sell. And he didn’t need the money anyway.
J to the G
Actually, I thought the best Creed (of The Office) moment thus far was his scarfing noodles as everyone else was chain-vomiting. I thought it summed him up well in a single shot.
Creed the band eats ass, though I found some good humor in reading the comments at the end of the article…
The Saff
@Zuzu’s Petals: Yes, link please. The NY Times arts blog has a Mad Men discussion every week. I love how fans of the show pick it apart like these people are real. And only 3 more episodes left in season 3. But Mad Men season #2 on Blu-Ray DVD is amazing. The picture quality is like being at a movie.
Mister Colorful Analogy
@drillfork:
The birfer comment is BS from the perspective of a technical comparison between Macs and PCs. However, if you’re referring to the evangelism that many people have about their choice of OS, I hear you. That said…
I’ve been working with computers since, oh, I dunno…a TRS-80 with 4K of RAM and a cassette player, and an Atari 800 with three, that’s right THREE 64K expansion cartridges. /geezer Seriously, though, I’ve got 14+ years of current IT operations experience, and have managed networks of users running almost every desktop OS in that time. Personally, I currently run a few XP laptops, one XP tablet, an insanely fast OpenSUSE desktop, and a MacBook Pro.
So which one do I use all the time? The MacBook Pro. Why? It just works. Every day. EVERY DAMNED DAY. I turn it on, it boots in less than a minute, and I work/read/have fun. It’s insanely easy to set up anything on it (one example: please compare the process of using Bluetooth stereo headphones between XP and OS X…go on, I’ll wait). It’s fast. The OS doesn’t crash, and you never have to reinstall because of Windows Rot and/or a driver/software installation that went wrong. TimeMachine (the built-in backup) is a joy to use. I could go on…
Yes, it’s true that OS X takes a bit of time to get used to coming from WinWorld (just like an abused dog needs time to adjust to a loving new home), but other than that, it’s an easy switch. Do it. You won’t regret it. I will never go back to a Windows OS (or Linux) as my primary desktop platform. That’s not religion, it’s pragmatism. Even though I can fix or recover from pretty much any problem with a Windows or Linux OS gone awry, why would I want to do that to myself? If you need Windows for a specific piece of software that has no good substitute, use it. I certainly do. Other than that, do yourself a favor, and make your daily computing life something you can use without pain. Get a Mac.
Yer welcome. :)
(and no, I don’t have anything to do with Apple)
tb
This is just embarrassing. Like throwing yourself on the pyre at Carrot-top’s funeral, leaving everyone else standing around thinking “who was that asshole?”
Morgan
@drillfork:
What Martin said. What are you basing this on? Mac OS 8? 10.1? Adium handles pretty much any kind of chat protocol you can think of. My Macbook Pro hasn’t been restarted in weeks, at least, and it never freezes.
James K. Polk, Esq.
That scene in last night’s The Office when the Aria was playing and Creed was tearing up was pure gold.
CalD
I stopped reading Slate 5 years ago. No good can come of it.
Jon H
@theturtlemoves: “7 is the best for me because I’m a gamer and a developer. Were I a graphic artist or musician, I could see how a Mac would be a happy thing. ”
The Mac is a developer’s wonderland. The optimizing tools, which are free, are probably the best anywhere. Commercial products that do similar things are $500 and up.
valdivia
@The Saff:
I would recommend this tv blog which I love reading for their The Wire re-wathcing posts. He does all the tv shows and is very good. I have only just started reading his Mad Men coverage and don’t know if the quality of the comments there is any good but he is generally very good.
They Live By Night
@Joel:
I don’t find Glenn difficult to read, but otherwise I would agree with that. I had actually forgotten that Paglia wrote for Slate. With all her contrarianism and concern-trolling, in my memory she wrote for Slate.
asiangrrlMN
@Ash Can: I just pretend it’s Glenn Greenwald, and all is fine. In fact, I bet most lefties will think of Greenwald first.
Slate: I’ve only been to the site a few times, and I find it insufferable. So, I do not visit it any longer. Problem solved!
Joel
I use a Mac at work and a PC at home.
Like ’em both for different reasons. The PC was a lot cheaper to build and operates much more quickly. It works well as an entertainment center type machine although I know a Mac can do equally well if not better.
The Mac at work does well for Mac OS-specific science apps like GCK (I know there’s lots of PC apps like VectorNTI)…
The most important apps like the Adobe CS and other stuff are multi platform so it doesn’t matter.
Comrade Kevin
New on Slate: Does Slate suck? The answer may surprise you.
ruemara
@drillfork:
Bite me. I’ve had less freezes from sno cone machines than my macs and more than I could count from my windows machines. Every frickin’ thread, there’s a bunch of you windows snobs griping about how awful macs are and the people who use them are such fanboy zombies. STFU. Ever think that you spends so much time bashing them, no wonder they flock to their own defense? Here’s a thought. Don’t like macs, don’t fucking use them.
Sentient Puddle
@ruemara:
Who the hell ever uses that term?
ruemara
@Joel:
To be fair, I use Adobe CS3 on my Dell laptop and despite an annoying set of dll errors sometimes and some overtaxing of the system when I’m swapping between a bunch of apps, it works very nicely.
@ Sentient Puddle.
I do. When I’m being compared to birfers. Or around programmers. either works.
Mark S.
And it didn’t work, because they sounded like a third-rate Pearl Jam tribute band, but even more pretentious.
theturtlemoves
@Jon H: Yeah, but the gamer part is the big one. The Mac still isn’t even close as a gaming platform through no fault of its own. Not many games are ever ported to Mac and certainly not the ones I want to play. Sucks, but that’s the reality.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@They Live By Night:
Salon being better than Slate may be damning with faint praise. Salon’s been sliding downhill ever since Joan took over, and they seemed to fall off the cliff last year. Apart from Glenzilla, Andrew Leonard’s “How The World Works”, and Patrick Smith’s “Ask the Pilot”, there’s nothing worth reading there anymore.
Morgan
@theturtlemoves: What kind of development do you do? Obviously you can’t avoid using Windows if you’re doing .Net development, but for anything else I love developing on my Mac.
Bnad
Salon comics are still good.
Morgan
@Mister Colorful Analogy: Bravo. I use all three OS’s regularly, but I wouldn’t use anything but a Mac for my primary machine. I get basically all the power I could want from the Linux command line combined with a well designed UI that Just Works. I probably wouldn’t be unhappy if I had to rely on Ubuntu, but there’s a reason Macs are becoming very popular among devs who don’t develop specifically for Windows.
Zuzu's Petals
@valdivia:
Hmm, it’s linked through “Mad Men” in my comment, but the hypertext doesn’t show up … possibly because of the italics.
Here ’tis again, sans itals:
Mad Men
Zuzu's Petals
@Joel:
I refuse to renew my Salon Premium membership and told them why. Paglia.
Good God, the woman is shameless. “Palin cleaned Biden’s clock” was about the last straw for me.
L. Ron Obama
Somewhat related, I’ve ditched Parallels for Virtualbox on OS X, and I could not be happier with the switch.
Zuzu's Petals
@The Saff:
See my #79.
I’m not sure the discussion is literary criticism, but the chattiness of it combined with the comments are really kinda fascinatin’ to me.
I noticed that too, about people pondering a character’s motivation and backstory as if he or she were a real person. Same with The Sopranos.
Michael D.
I like the comment on the Creed story:
“Next on Slate, Insane Clown Posse: Voice of a Generation“
Zuzu's Petals
@valdivia:
Wow, interesting…thanks.
I notice he blogs about a lot of other shows. I’ll be interested to see what he thinks about Dexter.
John S.
Except that Adobe CS runs like dog shit on PC, whereas it runs as I suspect it was intended to on Mac.
I have a Mac at the office and a PC at home, both with CS4 on them. I dread having to work from home.
So to this graphic designer, it does matter.
The Saff
@Zuzu’s Petals: Many thanx!
Zuzu's Petals
@Bnad:
I read Patrick’s Smith column almost every week, even bought his book.
Ask the Pilot
RSA
I hate this kind of crap. Manjoo writes 1500 words that boil down to “I like Windows 7 and I think you will, too.” When he includes the word “arguably” the limitations of his article become clear. Wonder of wonders, we are now capable of doing more than arguing about the quality of an interactive system–we can actually test usability properties, over many people, and provide evidence for or against system’s being “intuitive” (however we want to interpret that in measurable terms). One guy’s opinion is just that. One guy’s opinion.
Joshua
Farhad Manjoo was posting bullshit on Salon well before he came to Slate.
I don’t want to call the guy stupid, but a lot of his articles sure are.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Put me down as another person who stopped reading Slate around about the time it finally dawned on me that every article had the same narrative arc: just like the movie Platoon, except that Charlie Sheen is the fearless and intrepid contrarian reporter/pundit, the Evil Sergeant is teh Conventional Wisdom, and the VC are vast armies of strawmen. Without fail, it always end with a friendly airstrike being called in from WaPo headquarters to napalm the strawmen who’ve overrun the compound, and the intrepid contrarian reporter/pundit is the only one left standing as the credits roll.
Phoenix Woman
Salon’s first five years were pretty good — the period from 1998 to 2000 especially — but when the dot-com bubble burst it was decided that they were spending too much money and so let go virtually all of their quality reporters. Instead, they decided to go with the “nyaahh, nyahh, made you looook!” or “oderint dum clickuant” strategy of getting the all-important page views from the most lucrative demographics.
Persia
If you want good Mad Men discussion, try the avclub– http://www.avclub.com. Much better than the comments at Slate.
alhutch
@John S.:
So true. Just because the Adobe CS apps are available on both platforms hardly makes them equal.
I’ve been working as a graphic designer for, yikes, 16 years now. Always on a Mac. Multiple IT directors, former & current bosses have suggested a switch to PC would be more “cost effective”. Funny, I still have a Mac under my desk…
theturtlemoves
@Morgan: Enterprise search on both Windows and Unix platforms, but mostly Windows for me. So, I am running a machine dual-booted with Win 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 with HyperV. So, most of my coding, configuration, etc, is on Windows platforms, albeit servers, rather than desktops.
NobodySpecial
Although I’m no big fan of Creed, I maintain that hate of Creed, like hate of Nickelback, is a wasted exercise. You know what you’re getting when you hear the band name, you know what it’s built the song to do. I remember people throwing hate at quality bands, too. Listen to what you want.
Mister Colorful Analogy
@L. Ron Obama:
Seconded, re: switching to VirtualBox, though in my case, it’s on OpenSUSE and SLES/SLED (versions 10 and 11), and the switch was from VMware. VirtualBox is a sweet piece of software, and works so well that I started using an XP VM to do my Windows admin work instead of booting my dedicated XP laptop. I was even able to configure it to see the BIOS of my host machine so that my OEM licenses for XP would work. Nice, that, though it required Teh Googlez to find the answer.
Highly recommended, and the license (at least last year) was very friendly to both non-commercial and commercial users.
Citizen_X
@tb:
Goddamn, tb, for the fucking win.
I’m still laughing about it.
Batocchio
Dahlia Lithwick, Emily Bazelon, plus a venue for Doonesbury and editorial cartoons. Beyond that, other a few other rare, good articles, it’s utter crap. I only read Kaus when he’s being skewered or by accident, and even then I need to shower afterwards. The man has raised stupid counterintuition to performance art, and we can only give thanks he did not breed with Megan McArdle.
One of the worst articles in Slate I remember trashed the film The Searchers, but also suggested the Martin Scorsese only liked it because his film school teachers told him it was good.
Zuzu's Petals
@Persia:
Yeah. Sometimes you have to wonder if the writers check in at these forums.
Deschanel
Slate is a PC, Salon is a Mac.
Well, not really. But there’s something so uptight and white about Slate, some Dockers-clad smug dick coterie that loves to fancy themselves contrarians when they’re just absolute Beltway hacks who went to “good” schools I guess. Note how they exile black issues to “The Root”, and women to “XX”, where one of the writers told a woman who was drugged and possibly raped that she ought to just buck up. Slate seems to be a freaking snapshot of a certain mentality, small-minded and corporate and right leaning, in the small backwater town of DC.
I far prefer Salon, imperfect as it is. (And the new redesign I hate, it has me spinning, not knowing what’s new..) . I like Greenwald, Conason, Walsh, Havrilesky, Tom Tomorrow, Garrison Keillor.
Salon just has a more generous, inclusive vibe to me as a gay man- Slate frequently runs articles that I feel absolutely sneers at me, what with my demanding those “special rights”! Salon, based in San Francisco and overall a better site, has never made me feel like I’m reading some petty DC asshole’s gripes about some minority’s audaciousness in seeking fairness. Slate doesn’t even seem to consider that gay people read it too, they’re so arrogant and “contrarian”. Or maybe Slate is just a bag of dicks. Kind of seems that way.
Zuzu's Petals
@Deschanel:
I notice they had this interesting Conanson piece front and center.
Well, at least until it got bumped by the Hillary Swank movie, but still …
terry chay
The next to last sentence says it all about Slate
http://www.poynter.org/forum/view_post.asp?id=5589