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Roland Piquepaille Dies
Posted by
kdawson
on Fri Jan 09, 2009 01:33 PM
from the in-memoriam dept.
from the in-memoriam dept.
overheardinpdx writes "I'm sad to report that longtime HPC technology pundit Roland Piquepaille (rpiquepa) died this past Tuesday. Many of you may know of him through his blog, his submissions to Slashdot, and his many years of software visualization work at SGI and Cray Research. I worked with Roland 20 years ago at Cray, where we both wrote tech stories for the company newsletter. With his focus on how new technologies modify our way of life, Roland was really doing Slashdot-type reporting before there was a World Wide Web. Rest in peace, Roland. You will be missed." The notice of Roland's passing was posted on the Cray Research alumni group on Linked-In by Matthias Fouquet-Lapar. There will be a ceremony on Monday Jan. 12, at 10:30 am Paris time, at Père Lachaise.
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Rest in Peace, rpiquepa (Score:5, Insightful)
It is also comforting to see a soul survive and prosper in a technological field and end up where they want to live blogging peacefully. I hope my own retirement and passing are similar instead of some of the mindless inane existences I know my ancestors have lived out in nursing homes and/or in front of a TV.
Re:Rest in Peace, rpiquepa (Score:5, Insightful)
Agree. While I didn't always like his choice of articles, he was one of us and I'm sorry to see him leave.
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Re:Rest in Peace, rpiquepa (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed.
I was one of those folks who said bad stuff about his posts. If he read it I hope he didn't take it personally. He was a good guy and there's true bad things out there to have gotten riled up about instead. I am saddened by this news.
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Re:Rest in Peace, rpiquepa (Score:5, Insightful)
This makes me sad. OK, I know that a lot of people on Slashdot didn't like rpiquepa, and I understand why. But truthfully, I never paid much attention to who submitted what, so I probably read hundreds of his articles. Am I a better person for being a little bit more informed? I think so.
And so are you. We're all just names on the internet to each other. Some of those names, like mine, are more or less anonymous. And some people, like Roland, use their real names on the internet. Are we mortal or not? Obviously, we are. One (more) of us is dead now.
What about our words, our ideas? When the checks to the hosting companies stop and their servers shut down, will our words- all that we really are to each other- not disappear? I'm just rambling. Good night, Slashdot. My condolences to Roland's family.
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Re:Rest in Peace, rpiquepa (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know about that, but on Roland's approach St. Peter was heard to say "oh no, it's Roland".
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Re:Rest in Peace, rpiquepa (Score:5, Funny)
No, actually St. Peter has no idea that Roland is coming. He was using an extension to block everything related to him.
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Re:Translation: This is what he is trying to say. (Score:5, Insightful)
by lowering reader's estimation of how much Slashdot editors can be trusted.
Story submitters can't do that. It is the editors' jobs to separate the wheat from the chaff. Failure to do so is what reflects badly on the editors.
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Re:Translation: This is what he is trying to say. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps that was right, but Roland has earned a place in the slashdot community.
I had a good time tagging all of Roland's articles as "ohnoitsroland". It made my days more bearable, and everytime I saw his stories tagged already, I chuckled.
Roland was a traditional part of Slashdot (for good or bad), and even if only in the form of a meme, I will miss him.
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Re:Translation: This is what he is trying to say. (Score:5, Insightful)
Roland might have been short on netiquette when he first started submitting stories to /., but once the community started to speak out against his copy-and-paste blog entries and use of other people's content to earn ad revenue, he stopped doing all that. all of his submissions of late have linked directly to the source article.
if anything, Roland has contributed greatly to the /. community by submitting a ton of excellent stories--even after he stopped earning ad revenue from submissions--and starting many interesting discussions. so he clearly cared more about /. as a thriving community with a rich online culture than just another business to be monetized. and if you're more worried about Slashdot's value as a business than its usefulness to its users (which is primarily from the discussions that follow each submission), then you clearly don't understand /. as well as Roland did.
your blatant hyperboles and baseless accusations are more dishonest than Roland has ever been. and i doubt you will ever make as great of a contribution to the /. community as he has.
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Re:Know your limits (Score:5, Funny)
In honor of him, we should flood news sites with releases for this subject that redirect readers to a blog.
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Re:Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
4chan.
Yeah, definitely 4chan.
And of course here [darwinawards.com] where it's expected to laugh yer ass off.
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Re:Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Moral bankruptcy was so 2008 - fiscal bankruptcy is all the rage in 2009!
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Re:A taste of Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
On slashdot?
I'd actually be very pleased if my death made it to the front page.
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Re:A taste of Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
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In memoriam (Score:5, Interesting)
http://slashdot.org/tags/ohnoitsroland [slashdot.org]
Re:In memoriam (Score:5, Insightful)
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What happens to... (Score:4, Insightful)
...his blog? Or for that matter, his email account?
Re:What happens to... (Score:5, Informative)
The "Roland Piquepaille" account is a troll.
The actual Roland's account, as mentioned in the story, was "rpiquepa".
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No Need for Insult (Score:5, Funny)
Roland was really doing Slashdot-type reporting before there was a World Wide Web.
Now, Now... there's no need to insult the guy at this point.
Re:No Need for Insult (Score:5, Funny)
Its pretty sad I came here just to post that exact joke. Ronald's passing has opened my eyes on how unoriginal I am. Thank you sir, that is the greatest gift of all.
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Re:No Need for Insult (Score:5, Funny)
Who the fuck is Ronald?
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Hmmm (Score:4, Funny)
Sad news. His postings were a lot better... (Score:5, Insightful)
... than all the slashdotcynicalwhining that pervades the board.
He'll definitely be missed by some of us.
Oi. (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, over the years I've read Slashdot, I got the impression Roland was one of those stereotypical "needs a life" /. posters from all the people complaining about him. Then this happens and I find out that, well, he had a life, and worked at some interesting companies back in the day.
Best wishes to all Roland's people, and at the same time I'm glad that complaining about him from the other basement dwellers is going to stop before too long.
Re:Oi. (Score:5, Insightful)
Just goes to show, live life well until the end because odds are you'll be remembered for the last thing you did, not the first.
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Re:Oi. (Score:5, Funny)
Which means that if you do something awesome, you should never try do anything else, ever.
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slashdot^2 (Score:5, Interesting)
i'll miss his blog. biotech, computers, physics ... it was slashdot^2 ... to bad he had to close down comments a few years ago due to abuse.
he was thinking ahead of his time. i would like to be that anticipating at that age.
Roland Piquepaille - Mod Him Way Up, IMHO (Score:5, Interesting)
I liked his whit, and charming methods of describing things to the readers of this website. He truly embodied what can best be described one of the pioneers of the Slashdot effect. Some people trolled him pretty hard, but he was and will always be remembered as interesting, insightful, funny and underrated.
Roland, may the god(s) of whatever religion you believed in, forever mod you up.
RIP, bro.
Jon Katz (Score:5, Funny)
Is breathing a sigh of relief that he escaped Slashdot alive.
Truly (Score:5, Funny)
He'll be missed.
But honestly, his death should have been reported via a link to his blog that would THEN link to the page discussing his death.
Only a fitting tribute.
It's a bit like (Score:5, Insightful)
The old guy in your local bar. You'd be in there regularly, and there he'd be, holding forth at anybody who'd give him the time of day. You'd make for the other side of the bar, grateful that he'd collared some wet-behind-the-ears Johnny-come-lately rather than yourself, because you'd been there enough times before. He'd be chuntering on in the background and you'd pay him little heed.
And then one day you come into the bar and he isn't there, and you hear he'd passed away, and you realise that you'd miss the old bastard. Because people like that add colour to the world, and what is this life without characters to enrich it, whether you actually like them or not?
That was Roland for me - I'd come here and I'd see an article submitted by him and there'd be some generally good-natured muttering about his modus operandi. Some people clearly didn't like him, but the truth is I couldn't tell you who any of those people are. But if you asked me to name five people who post on Slashdot, he'd be one of them.
So by that measure alone, I for one will miss him, and I think Slashdot will be the poorer for his passing.
Here's to Roland, and to making a difference in any way you can.
Re:Rest in peace (Score:5, Insightful)
There was a period when it was common to see 1/3 to 1/2 of the stories on the front page from Roland, and the stories linking to brief summaries on his own blog rather than to the original article. I can only assume it was a comment on that period.
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Re:Rest in peace (Score:4, Funny)
Mere death won't stop him from posting
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Re:Rest in peace (Score:5, Funny)
You got that right!
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Re:Rest in peace (Score:5, Funny)
I checked his grave, and there was just a link to a different grave with someone else's corpse.
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Re:Rest in peace (Score:5, Insightful)
I transmitted, perhaps unfairly, that anger to Roland and I always tagged his articles with something derogatory. Every post by him was a little pinprick into a wound that had never really healed. Over the years I came to HATE seeing his name atop front page items. I know I'm not alone and lets face it--there has been a love-hate relationship between editors and readers here for quite a while.
But really Roland never did anything that most of us would not do--if given the opportunity. The way some people are posting to this thread you'd think the man had hacked slashcode and figured out how to bypass the editors.
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Re:Rest in peace (Score:5, Funny)
When you see death walking up the path to your door, start typing fast.
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Re:Rest in peace (Score:5, Insightful)
It's very fitting that news of his passing is in the Meta catagory because his submissions were like a Slashdot within a Slashdot. I like the fact that he, like NYCL, wasn't above actually kickin' it with us and participating in discussions. He also made the occasional funnie as well. RIP RP!
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Re:Rest in peace (Score:5, Insightful)
Originally, most of the posts attributed to him provided links directly to his blog rather than to the original source. Once there, you were greeted by a summary that bordered very closely on, what many people considered, outright plagiarism. This, along with the sheer number of times the slashdot editors posted his submissions, caused a lot of slashdot readers to conclude that he was "stealing" stories to generate hits so he could profit from advertising. There was also question of whether there was some kind of improper favoritism going on between Roland and the Slashdot editors.
Personally, I doubt there was any overt quid-pro-quo between Roland and Slashdot. I think he was just a conveniently consistent source of new stories for the editors. As far as the supposed stealing of stories went, he responded relatively quickly by not linking to his own blog most of the time and by providing the summaries in more of his own words. This resolved any potential I, personally, might have had.
However, since then, there has always been a decent amount of eye rolling every time a story was posted with Roland as the source. This is why you see the "ohnoitsroland" meta tag. I think it's probably in jest, though maybe not the most tactful joke.
I would also like to join the people offering condolences to Roland's friends and family for his loss. Regardless of what some people may have thought of his posting style, it's a tragedy when a loved one is lost and my sympathy is with them.
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Re:Rest in peace (Score:5, Informative)
Years ago, perhaps. That hasn't been true in a long time, however.
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Re:Rest in peace (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't bother bringing truth or reason to Slashdot. There's a large contingent of users on this site who seem to have the same amount of religious fervor as your average born-again evangelical, just for a different set of causes.
I'm not sure if I respect loving Jesus or hate Roland less.
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Re:Rest in peace (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I think I speak for all of us when... (Score:5, Interesting)
You certainly don't speak for me, Anonymous Coward.
R.I.P. Roland.
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Re:Wait a second (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Wait a second (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Wait a second (Score:5, Funny)
Ok now THAT makes me doubt this is real.
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Re:Wait a second (Score:5, Funny)
Kdawson made the phone calls to confirm this before posting it.
What is netcrafts phone number?
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Re:Wait a second (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, no, Roland is no more...
http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=1138 [zdnet.com]
It is with great sadness to tell you that our Emerging Technologies blogger Roland Piquepaille has passed away suddenly. His wife Suzanne just confirmed his passing.
Roland, 62, was one of our most passionate bloggers and his ability to explain complex science well was something to behold. Roland spent most of his career in software, mainly for high performance computing and visualization companies, working for example for Cray Research and Silicon Graphics. He left the corporate world in 2001 after 33 years and jumped into blogging.
Roland passed away Monday in Paris. He was hit with a digestive virus that lead to a high fever and health complications beyond that. Suzanne said that the doctors are still trying to quantify how Roland got the virus and the exact details. We spent the last few hours confirming Roland's passing as word began to spread. It has been a rough year for the ZDNet family.
There will be a ceremony held on Monday. Rest in peace Roland, we'll miss you. Suzanne said that Roland had a few posts in the pipeline and wanted them published. If she is able to pull them from Roland's PC we'll put them on his blog to complete his record.
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Re:I will not miss him (Score:5, Informative)
Actually I will. His reporting improved significantly from his early blogging days, so much so that I often did not notice that the story submitted here on Slashdot was from Roland unless the "oh no its Roland" tag appeared. I think this became more of a good natured ribbing rather than slighting him personally. I also subscribed to the nascent "oh yeah it's Roland" tag movement a couple of months back. Now that he is gone, I really do miss him. Rest in peace, friend.
Here is more details about his death [zdnet.com], which appears to be a fast moving gastrointestinal virus.
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Re:We'll miss you, you git (Score:5, Informative)
Well, there's always the old Latin saw: De mortuis nisi nil bonum "Of the dead [say] nothing but good"
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