Slashdot Mirror

According to www.alexa.com www.tv.com is the 1125th most popular site on the internet, 664th for the US audience. If I wasn't as computer literate, I might assume that going to tv.com would bring up information about TV, and magically, it does! Imagine if I could come up with some sort of content for a site called www.sun.com. Maybe I could run a magazine or newspaper called 'The Sun', maybe the UK's largest with over 2,000,000 subscribers. Maybe a classic record label? A band? A cell-phone company?

But I don't think I will, as I think the competition from all the people who decided to call their tabloids and bands DEC would be too much for me to handle.

There is no monolithic entity, no membership, no initiation ritual or brotherhood. It's a loose group whose actions are dictated by a herd mentality.

Kind of reminds you of a certain site we visit now and then (well, except maybe for the membership part). Or maybe you're talking of something else?

Apparently so. From TFA: "Yahoo's embrace of IPv6 is good news for IPv6 proponents because the site reaches more than 25% of all Internet users, Alexa says. Yahoo is the fourth most popular Web site on the Internet."

Alexa helpfully lists it as "anshikapackersmovers" though... Not sure what that is about.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com

The operator of one of the biggest German web sites, the Heise publishing house, held its own IPv6 day on the 16th of September 2010. Their domains got AAAA records in addition to the IPv4 A records and the web servers responded to IPv4 and IPv6. Long story short: The test produced much fewer problems than expected and two weeks after the test, Heise.de enabled IPv6 permanently. The story is here (in German).

Isn't it a little early to call something like this "the most extreme and influential crowdsourcing"?

I agree. I have no idea why this is on Slashdot. It's not technology news. It's not even news at all.

Back in 2008, Rush Limbaugh tried something similar he called "Operation Chaos", where he encouraged his listeners to switch parties and vote in the Democratic Primary to get Hillary Clinton to win and later to keep her in to lengthen the Primary. The idea was that whoever eventually won would emerge weaker and would lose to McCain. Also, Republicans believed that there were more registered Democrats because of Operation Chaos, and when the election actually happened, they would be revealed as actually Republicans and McCain would win.

As we all know, it didn't work. Obama beat McCain handily. So if Rush Limbaugh, who has millions of listeners couldn't pull this off, how can an unknown website do this?

Moreover, I think it's misleading to suggest that "Democrats" are doing this. I expected to see a link to Democrats.org or to at least a high traffic Democratic Party website, such as dailykos.com. But no, this site has so little traffic that it doesn't even have an Alexa ranking In fact, searching for sites that link to this domain reveal not even Democratic sources, but Republicans (freerepublic.com is the #2 domain in results), so clearly this isn't catching on with Democrats. Whois is masked, so we don't know who actually owns the domain, but it's just as likely to be a Republican astroturfing organization.

So, how did this end up on Slashdot? Was this some sort of paid placement situation or attempt by the domain owner to drive more traffic to the site? Some lame idea of saying that "both sides 'do it' and engage in these types of silly games? Somebody has compromising photos of CmdrTaco? I guess we'll never know.

I know this is /. where people doesn't have any clue about money. But does anyone for a second think that a site that is chock full of ads and is the 90th most popular site in the world is not making money? The hosting costs for the site is at most a few hundred dollars per month. The income from advertising is at least $100k per month.

Even if the owners of tpb wouldn't be liable for copyright infringement, they are still guilty of tax evasion on a major scale since they haven't declared the income for it.

I don't want to step on any toes, but mixpanel does not seem to have the kind of traffic or growth that would call for dramatic measures (or articles). It looks like their application must be very I/O-intensive and most, if not all commercial clouds would be bad/limiting for them (does any provider give you numbers comparable to your own 10gbe or IB infrastructure without virtualization?). Sure, they can provide some room for growth on demand, but if it doesn't fit your application because you need I/O both throughput and low latency, you might still want to look at buying your own hardware.

You'll have different problems going that way, from rack temperatures to flakey RAMs, but it's much more flexible and a lot cheaper (in our case, the cost is somewhere around 15-20% of what we'd pay for EC2 including traffic over the past 5 years, as of last year or so when I bothered doing a comparison). Plus you don't need to write dramatic articles when you find out along the way that you aren't getting what you need. And you get to play with interesting hardware, but I realize that not everyone likes that. ;-)

they're the number one internet site according to Netcraft for the US.

Oops... s/Netcraft/ALEXA/

Yahoo!'s (and most of the other search engines) problems was, that they tried to promote most of the auxiliary services through the main site. Though Yahoo! isn't exactly loosing, they just did not get the majority of the search market, but for instance in Japan they are highly popular.. they are also the forth most visited site on the Internet, I wouldn't call that exactly loosing.

Google is doing a lot of stuff too, but most of it is standing alone (i.e. youtube) and is self-promoting.

They could clean up the start page a bit (or at least make it more customizable), but generally they are doing search + ads as primary business and the other stuff is loosely connected.

As for checkout.. well, PayPal was the first major popular global Internet payment option, but they are causing a lot of grief lately and will loose importance.

What will succeed them? My best bet is Amazon Payments, as they have attractive payment conditions (the nearest I have seen so far to micro-payments) and they have an established customer base with access to bank account data and _some_ trust of the users.

Google has no business where people regularly spend money from their account. They will have a hard time to make people set up payment account on their site, but it's not impossible.

And if you think that a site that gains popularity only cost pennies to run or is easily covered by donations, you clearly have never run, or known anyone who has run, a major site.

So number 6 on Alexa's top 500 list isn't major enough for you?

It's standard practice in software development to create a special fast path for a common scenario when performance matters. They can fall back to the slow path if the swf is trying to do something incompatible with the fast path.

A million times yes. Youtube is the third-busiest site in the world, and you'd think Adobe would make a little effort to provide an optimized codepath for that site. I tire of the excuses about how much work Flash has to do to render a video. I guarantee that if they rolled out an optimized function that did without all the cruft not directly related to rendering a video, almost everyone would adopt it overnight.

I wonder how much of his traffic is actually from the US.

Stats from Alexa for Isohunt.com:

Visitors by Country
[Percent of Site Traffic][Rounded]

USA 17.4%
India 9%
UK 7%
Canada 4%
Australia 6%
Japan 4%

Audience Demographics
[Relative to the general internet population]

Age: 18-24
Interest drops off a cliff as the audience ages.

Gender: Male
Has Children: Close call. But probably not.

Education: Some college

Browsing location: Home and School. No surprise there.

idohunt.com

Stop and think about the number of people that use Wikipedia as their first stop shop for information about a topic with which they're not familiar. Then think about the number of people that extend that just a little farther and use Wikipedia as their *one* stop shop for information. This is not a small minority of people in my best estimates based on real world observations. Alexa ranks them sixth, behind only Google, Facebook, Youtube, Yahoo, and Live.com. Search engines tend to give Wikipedia articles a high placement when they correspond to search terms. Their mindshare is such that people will say something to the effect: "Why don't you just Wikipedia it?" They've become a verb, much like how Google is synonymous with search.

Wikipedia admins have the power to shape the information that a decent size of the world's population trusts and relies on for various reasons. They're almost an unofficial Ministry of Truth. The amount of power which they wield is terrifying, and the fact that so few people recognize this is utterly horrific. If you're the type of person that thinks that either Google or Facebook is untrustworthy, you must realize the Wikipedia is several times worse.

The value of a social network is proportional to the number of members it has. Facebook started in 2004 aimed at students, grew for a while, and in 2006 opened membership to everyone. It was two years after that (and two years ago) when Facebook exceeded Myspace, and it's just been pulling ahead since. It's now blown away any previous social network scale now. If you started tomorrow with a compelling site people might use instead of Facebook--the same way that Facebook was a compelling improvement over Myspace--best case it would be two years before you'd even have a shot of being popular enough to be considered a viable alternative here. The unfortunate reality here is that making this sort of site available to most people for free costs somebody money, and that will never go on forever without somebody trying to make a buck. Social networks trying to expand are practically forced into it just to pay for their overhead as popularity increases.

As for the privacy issues, I never told Facebook anything private in the first place; anybody who did is a fool. I didn't care that they were throwing ads in my face that were obviously targeted to interests I listed in my profile to make ad dollars; expected that, all part of getting the site for free, and things like my music/movie likes are quite public information already. But last week when I visited cnn.com to read a news story, and it magically showed me what news stories my Facebook friends had been looking at (and presumably exposing what I was doing to them), that was the point where I felt myself that Facebook had gone rogue. Time to use UnFuck Facebook and crank up the rest of my hostile site defenses now. Facebook I'm now treating like a link that might lead to p0rn: I might still go there if because it's fun sometimes to look at, but I won't be adding to their ad income and I expect the site to be hostile. And I'll go out of my way to avoid all the sites they're selling my info to as well.

Your trying to say that it does not do ONE THING very well. That may be true. But the goal of Flash is not to do one thing. It is to do many things, which by most accounts it does very well.

But when that "one thing" is "viewing every video on the #3 website in the world", you'd thing they'd spend a little effort in making it not suck. I'd get your general point if the subject at hand were, say, that Flash is slower than necessary at converting WordPerfect 5.1 files to color palettes. You can't dismiss cruddy video playback - which is the reason many people have Flash installed in the first place - as "just one thing".

Yes, when put that way, it does seem like a non-issue. However, we are not talking about any ol' website - this is Facebook, the second most visited website in the world. We are also talking about the near-ubiquitous Flash player. If enough steam gets built up behind this movement to bypass Flash usage for displaying streaming media online, we could be looking at a rather different web landscape in the next several years.

I think your statement significantly oversimplifies the issue.

That post is from 2004. Things have changed since then. US readership of /. makes up 45% of traffic according to the latest stats source. Slashdot has a global audience. Every day there are stories posted about other countries, particularly in the YRO section.

Take your cultural imperialism and stick it up your arse! At least 55% of this site's visitors don't want to hear it.

Agreed. If you have the second most popular website in the world serving over 400 billion dynamically generated page views per month from a backend of over 30,000 servers, you absolutely do not want to rely on PHP to serve those pages for you.

This is the same old argument over and over again. Facebook and a couple of other large sites building on PHP don't work the way they do because of PHP, but despite being build on PHP. There's a lot of engineering effort put into those sites, with a not unimportant share of that devoted to things having nothing to do with what PHP handles. With such engineering effort being poured in, Facebook could have been developed in assembly or COBOL, neither of which would have been prove that they are inherently suited for such environments.

Also, don't forget that Facebook is migrating to their C++ based hiphop toolchain and have build their own internal framework, a framework that resembles the Java EE stack in a couple of ways and is NOT available to the general public. The kind of PHP that Facebook does is NOT your typical 'phpfreakz' kind of PHP that is most commonly practiced.

I've also personally talked to the lead developer of Hyves -- the Dutch version of Facebook with some 12 million users -- and he said 'PHP is a little shit language' (PHP is een kut taaltje). I understand that out of context this may not mean much, but he did said that. Additionally, Hyves, Tweakers (a Dutch news site) and a couple of other companies I know that use PHP professionally, some of which I know people working there, almost all seem to agree on that it's very difficult to find really skilled PHP programmers. There is an abundance of programmers that are of the Joe's Burgers variety and have hacked on some PHP script, but that's a completely different category really and not at all what a professional organization is looking for.

So, even though a select few companies are using PHP very professionally, the norm in the PHP market is that it's used by people who barely know the difference between a while loop and an if statement, let alone that they know anything at all about data structures, algorithms, or efficiently structuring their code.

Does PHP offers anything like that? Does the standard PHP library already comes with an MVC framework? Is unicode already natively supported? Is there any name spacing support? Is there ..

Those aren't real problems unless they are actively preventing you from developing your website, which is probably only the case about 2% of the time. The other 98% of the time you never need consider them.

And that's precisely where it all goes wrong. We don't need no education anymore, we don't need no knowledge about CS theory, we don't need no transactions, we don't need no unicode, we don't need no MVC... PHP is so easy... a baby can now program any web site. .... Until it all comes falling down.

It's the typical Visual Basic kind of mindset. A mindset about which you can read everyday on thedailywtf. Sure, idiots can produce crap in any language, but for some reason both PHP and VB seem to produce a disproportionate amount of that.

You sound like you did very well in school, and maybe even graduated at the top of you CS class. You also sound like you may have little real world experience.

I did okay in school and CS went well too, thank you. I'm currently the lead developer of a 12 person strong development team I've worked with for about 7 years. We're building an enterprise application consisting of several 100k LOC and every day have to deal with an infuriating amo

I'm not a particular fan or foe of PHP (it's a tool that can get a certain class of jobs done), but I should point a few things out...

PHP is basically JSP with plain Java SE on it, and a rather poor version of that approach that this. It's perfectly suited for Joe's Burgers 4 page website, but when something more 'advanced' is needed, PHP just doesn't cut it.

Agreed. If you have the second most popular website in the world serving over 400 billion dynamically generated page views per month from a backend of over 30,000 servers, you absolutely do not want to rely on PHP to serve those pages for you.

Does PHP offers anything like that? Does the standard PHP library already comes with an MVC framework? Is unicode already natively supported? Is there any name spacing support? Is there ..

Those aren't real problems unless they are actively preventing you from developing your website, which is probably only the case about 2% of the time. The other 98% of the time you never need consider them.

And I can produce results a hundred times as fast by using Java EE/Java/JBoss AS than with Django/Python and surely PHP. I'm not sure what this proves though... Also, don't forget that hacking together stuff and throwing it out is nice when you're 16 and in high school, but in the real world maintainability, correctness, stability, scalability, etc etc all count and in the end are way more important than just the ability to get some prototype like code out of the door, that 'usually-works-but-breaks-down-every-tuesday-when-it-rains'.

You sound like you did very well in school, and maybe even graduated at the top of you CS class. You also sound like you may have little real world experience. If you're in the bowels of some large corporate IT department where even your boss forgot you existed, you may have the time to plan everything, consider all of the potential problems, and do everything perfectly right the first time through, but it's more likely that either your boss or someone above him will see the cost of you spending six months planning something that will be perfect as way more expensive than just spending three weeks delivering something that is good enough. And this isn't even considering that you may have competition in the marketplace, competition that will put you under if you spend all your time planning while they are delivering actual products.

I'm not sure I see Wikipedia as being the "killer app" for video standards.

I'm not sure that you see just how big Wikipedia actually is. It's not just a big driver of traffic, it's farking huge. According to Alexa, It's number 6 worldwide, after Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Youtube, and Live.com. Wikipedia pulls an astonishing 12-13% of users worldwide!

For comparison:

MySpace is #18, with 3% reach.

Twitter is #12, with 5% reach.

Slashdot is #1,262, with 0.1% reach.

Whatever you do, don't underestimate the gravity of this news - Wikipedia is one of the Internet TITANS!

Woe is Wikipedia, it's only the sixth most visited site and youtube is fourth.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/youtube.com

What we really need is Facebook and the 'adult' tube sites to support open video.

Woe is Wikipedia, it's only the sixth most visited site and youtube is fourth.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wikipedia.org
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/youtube.com

What we really need is Facebook and the 'adult' tube sites to support open video.

... that this hadn't been done sooner. Murdoch no doubt wants some return on his investment, especially since traffic seems to be dropping.

Okay on the list they have go.com as #8 biggest flop. I go to www.go.com and sure enough it looks like I just typed in the wrong URL and got some domain parking crap. And yet, on Alexa it's ranked 15th in the United States. Is Alexa horribly flawed or what is going on with www.go.com? How does a site that looks like that still rank number 15 in the United States? It's above Bing, CNN, Flickr and Wordpress. Huh?

I know that this kind of approach doesn't work against conspiracy theorists, but what the hell...

...

Loosen up dude. They're not out to get you.

Nice ad hominem. This is me talking about real business, not how you imagine you would run a multibillion dollar corporation:

You don't believe it's worth Google, Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Sun, etc. time to astroturf/advocate at the most popular tech news & discussion website in the world (I don't consider what Digg does "discussion")? Do you honestly believe major multinational companies only advertise using the most cost effective method, and disregard all other methods? How many developers do MS, Apple, Google et al employ?

Say you pay 5 developers that are working @ $30/hr (more than entry level) to post on Slashdot for 2 hrs every day. That's $300/day, a little over $100K a year to have your products/services defended and your competitors' products/customers criticized and mocked - on the most influential open forum for techies. 10 hours of total posting a day is pretty extreme, though, but compared to the marketing budgets of the aforementioned companies it is a drop in the bucket. And they each have a warehouse full of buckets.

I would suspect that they all also have some journalists, product reviewers, etc. in their pockets, like you mention. But, just because it's most efficient/profitable for Apple to sell it's products online, doesn't mean it's not profitable to also set up retail stores. Ditto for Microsoft. Every major corporation explores myriad outlets for their advertising/marketing/PR efforts.

I wondered about this myself, but I think it ultimately comes down to trust. Why should advertisers trust Hulu to provide accurate numbers on viewing when they have a clear incentive to bump up their figures? The value of Nielsen is its impartiality.

Now if there were a way for a third-party to manage the logging of web visits, that might pose an alternative to Nielsen, if the advertisers and agencies would take the service provider seriously. So far, web measurement seems to rely on recruited panels like Alexa uses. Measuring web traffic at the servers themselves doesn't seem to be very common as of yet. Of course the web is incredibly decentralized which makes server-based measurements very difficult to manage. Still, a large number of consumers probably visit a fairly small number of sites (a few hundred sites probably constitute a large fraction of all visits in the US), so installing a server-based measurement technique at these sites could be quite effective.

There's a lot more to Nielsen than television ratings, too. They also measure sales data and correlate exposures with product sales. From the linked article:

Nielsen measures product sales, market share, distribution, price and merchandising conditions in tens of thousands of retail outlets such as grocery stores, drug stores, mass merchandisers and convenience stores. Reporting periods can be as short as a single day for selected electronic point-of-sale (POS) information or up to bimonthly for manual field audits. Data-collection methods will vary by country and type of outlet being reported.

Nielsen also measures the purchasing behavior of more than 250,000 households in 27 countries through our industry-leading consumer panels. Our US panel is the largest and most representative static sample in the country.

Majority means more than 50%.

Alexa reckons 47% of Slashdot visitors are from the USA.

"The Alexa Toolbar, an application produced by Alexa Internet, is a Browser Helper Object for Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows that is used by Alexa to measure website statistics." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexa_Toolbar

Hmm, yeah I'd totally agree, using Alexa to determine the viewership of slashdot is 100% viable.

Majority means more than 50%.

Alexa reckons 47% of Slashdot visitors are from the USA.

According to Alexa, Google.com is the #1 site on the internet for traffic, Baidu is #8.

While out of all the countries, the US is definitely home to the most readers of this site, the majority of the readers are not US-based. Those are two different things. If you look at the stats on Alexa you can see that 47.1% of the readers are from the US, while he second place goes to India with a mere 8.8%. That still means that 52.9% of the readers live outside the US though, so the FAQ seems either false or outdated.

Yep the submitter got it wrong. Given that he is posting in English, to an American website

Based on Alexa, USA is indeed biggest single country from which people visit Slashdot but USA+Canada together make up for 50.3% of the Slashdotters. Even with other english speaking countries, it won't get to 60%.

While I agree that with those statistics it is slightly more logical to use USA method of markup in this specific issue (though disagree about that in metric/imperial debate), it certainly isn't that clear cut and Americans aren't anything near an overwhelming majority of the people on Slashdot - that wasn't teh case when FAQ was last updated about the subject, 6 years or so ago. I think that with the recent progression it is safe to say that half a year from now, USA+Canada make up for less than half of the visitors. The news aren't that US centric either. Most of the news are about international issues, technology, EU... In fact, this very story isn't USA centric at all.

Mark Cuban may find it a bit difficult to get the site in Alexia's #1 position to remove themselves from their own list.

Let's just look at the top 50 sites to get an idea of the feasibility of this plan, as reported by Alexa.

First, we filter out all of the Google properties. By my count, that leaves 30.

Next, filter out Microsoft's properties, as the scheme would put theme in the antitrust crosshairs: That leaves 26.

Forget Yahoo; they make a lot more than $1MM annually from Google. We're down to 22.

What's left? Forget LinkedIn -- search results are their bread-and-butter. Likewise the IMDb, Craigslist, Twitter, eBay and Myspace. Wikipedia and the BBC would consider it a breach of their charters. Facebook might be tempted, but their users would protest too much. Only 13 out of 50 remain. Of these, which would play ball? RapidShare would -- they're rather be ignored by search traffic. The Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Turkish social networking sites might. Likewise the porn sites. In truth though, we have only five or six "maybes" in the top 50.

Bottom line, it's an absurd notion -- more old media fantasies of crippling the internet with blunt 19th century methods. I'm not saying that Google is unassailable, but a challenge by a competitor who hasn't put in the sweat-equity is a guaranteed to failure.

Yes, they are. Considering they reach almost 1% of internet users every day (by Alexa's stats), average 6 page views per visitor, 3-4 ads per page their CPM income is at least $2-3/1000 pageviews.

Alexa only shows the amount of visitors in percent and only TPB knows the actual amount, but 1% of internet users daily is A LOT and they're definitely making lots of money from the ads.

It's official, Cuban has lost it. Does he really think that $1M will persuade any of the big players? Heck, even Wikimedia (sixth in Alexa rankings) is not trying to make a profit, would only meet 12% of its operational expenses with a free million. Does he really think Amazon or Ebay would let go one of their major revenue streams? That said, maybe Windows Live (5th in Alexa) wouldn't mind the extra million...

$1M isn't peanuts to everybody. The regular public can't see Google's site rankings, but assuming they're similar to the Alexa rankings, there are some sites that would probably jump at a million dollars. The porn sites, a lot of the bloggers, and some of the shakier social networking sites would probably take the money and run.

But there's something else odd about that list. Many of the top-ranked sites -- 3 of the first 20, for example -- are Microsoft. Again, that's not Google's ranking page, but MS sites are still findable via Google. If MS plans to 'kill' Google, shouldn't they start by taking their own sites off that search engine first?

That top 1000 would include:

• Reddit
• Digg
• wordpress
• eBay
• amazon
• craigslist
• youtube
• google

All of whom would see an immediate drop in revenues if google stopped indexing them, and some of which are actually google owned.

Knowing where a user came from and what they searched for is a bad way of trying to optimise your site. I can name hundreds of situations where someone was proud that they'd generated a huge volume of visits (or page views if you weren't using cookies) of users that then left straight away because it wasn't what they were looking for.

How about this? No cookies there! (the link is partly broken; click the "Traffic Stats" tab)

Reframe traffic is down 14% over the past 3 months according to alexa. Sure I know alexa isn't an exact science but it's a decent ranking system. So if you're dropping to the 234,292 rank it's time to explore every option to make money, including a lawsuit and hope that google buys you to shut you up.

Orkut - pfft
Google Notebook - dead
Google Sites (Jotspot) - useless
Knol - dead

Just sayin'. You did miss Books, Translate, News, and Code, which are pretty big.

Given the demographics of /. readers, as seen here http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.slashdot.org#demographics, I wouldn't be surprised if many here considers the original Doom series great art! :)

Why not? Doom is an excellent and influential piece of popular art: perhaps not the most remarkable game of all time, but definitely one that entertained many people and inspired latter works.

If you want to look at more artful games from that era, try Ultima VII. Epic, sprawling story! Memorable social commentary! Immersive gameworld! Detailed visual and aural work! (Etc, and so forth.)

Given the demographics of /. readers, as seen here http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/www.slashdot.org#demographics, I wouldn't be surprised if many here considers the original Doom series great art! :)

It's getting popular http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/c64web.com/

The problem is that Slashdot is handing out moderation points like candy these days. They're becoming more Digg-like; maybe because their overloads have told them that the more traffic Slashdot gets, the better. Since Digg.com is a good deal more popular than Slashdot, maybe they're trying to emulate Digg more.

Personally, I prefer the older Slashdot where we didn't confuse "troll" with "legitimate criticism of Linux" or "Legitimate rebuttal of conservative idea". The reason Slashdot had moderation in the old days was to stop the brats who would post Goatse links and what not; it was not to stifle legitimate discussion.

The problem is that Slashdot is handing out moderation points like candy these days. They're becoming more Digg-like; maybe because their overloads have told them that the more traffic Slashdot gets, the better. Since Digg.com is a good deal more popular than Slashdot, maybe they're trying to emulate Digg more.

Personally, I prefer the older Slashdot where we didn't confuse "troll" with "legitimate criticism of Linux" or "Legitimate rebuttal of conservative idea". The reason Slashdot had moderation in the old days was to stop the brats who would post Goatse links and what not; it was not to stifle legitimate discussion.

24. Terminals accessing the mainframe.

It's back, and it's called the World Wide Web.

28. Counting in kilobytes.

Sure, the dial-up days are over, but to a web developer trying to make the most of satellite and mobile broadband, every kilobyte still counts.

30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that itâ(TM)ll load this time.

Nintendo never recommended that. The official technique in the cleaning kit manual was more like the one described in this guide.

31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.

Xbox 360.

32. Joysticks.

Every game console since the Nintendo 64. Street Fighter 4. Tetris the Grand Master.

33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.

SSD notebooks.

37. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.

Alexa confirms it: an encyclopedia is ranked #7 among web sites.

40. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.

Some fast food chains are still closed at night and on Sundays, as are the shipping companies.

45. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.

At the moment, I'm a proud non-user of Twitter. Am I behind the times?

49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.

Is this referring to the fact that more Usenet clients have migrated from uuencode to yEnc?

53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.

Wired broadband is not available in the country, and satellite broadband and mobile broadband still lag in speed for the price. Besides, even on cable and DSL, people are trying to download multi-gigabyte operating systems and movies nowadays, and those can still take hours.

Hm, lets see... perhaps because Facebook and Amazon are niche markets?

Niche market? Considering over 100 million people are logging into Facebook every day and Amazon is massive online retail entity I would hardly call them niche.

Some info on Facebook:
- More than 200 million active users
- More than 100 million users log on to Facebook at least once each day

http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics
http://www.alexa.com/topsites

Facebook is the fourth most popular website according to Alexa and Amazon is at 34. Niche? Really?

Alexa just shows the domain.

Not really: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com

I will bet you a vast majority of the hits are my.yahoo.com portal traffic, not search.

You will lose your bet:
43.1% mail.yahoo.com
10.5% search.yahoo.com
8.6% yahoo.com
3.0% news.yahoo.com
2.4% 360.yahoo.com

You're right that it's main part is not search, anyway. But the presence they get from their mail service probably helps them to get a larger audience for their search, too.

http://www.alexa.com/topsites

Only one domain on the entire web gets more traffic than yahoo.com and that's obviously google.com.

In various countries in the far-east, Yahoo beats out Google to the #1 spot.

Yahoo is still a vast presence in search-engine-land.

And yep, my granny says "I'll google it" and promptly clicks on her yahoo.com bookmark. The term means "search" to many users, not any specific brand. In much the same way (at least in the UK) that someone might "hoover the room" with their Dyson.