Slashdot Mirror

well, its on the fuckedcompany website and their link is to economic times times
seems like netscape has been losing the war for a long time. and i think it continues.
its a shame, i like netscape.

fc. I'm only half kidding. There are some knowledgeable people there. Even if they do have the smelly butt.

Rumor has it MP3.com recently laid off 40 people, roughly 15%.
When: May 08 2003
Maybe people just find Kazaa to be so much better.

Why? Well, going long (buying) stock is good when it's going up. Going short (selling before buying, by borrowing the stock from your broker -- you need a margin account for it) makes money when the stock goes down.

Options make money within a certain timeframe on stock moves. Back when I did have money, late 1998 I believe, I thought Dell would move but wasn't sure which direction, so I bought both puts and calls, in equal dollar amounts. The stock moved up, and I made money on the calls and lost 100% on the puts. However, the amount I made was something like 700% (God I miss the 90s!), so the bet paid off bigtime.

Right now, either SCO has something up their sleeve (which the evidence, such as there is, doesn't seem to support) or they're a fuckedcompany and will be sleeping with the fishes before long. One year is plenty of time for this to pan out (if I was more of a gambler, I'd say 3 months).

Dammit, I said all that and turns out there are no options for SCOX stock. Oh well. Here's the current options for DELL in case you want to learn more (the CBOE has more info in their links -- see the Learning Center at the top right).

This layoff news is giving you incredible leverage in this negotiation. Don't be afraid to use it. So once you've done your research, you should talk (not email) to your hiring manager, share your concerns, and ask him what kind of (written) guarantees he can offer you to reduce the risk of impending layoffs. Any promise made over a phone line won't do if the person is being laid off, or if there is a general hiring freeze. And make it clear that you won't accept an offer until you have a signed copy of it in your hands with all the concessions they've made to you.

Here are a couple of links that may be of use:
"In many cases, the same companies that are firing people out one door are hiring people... Don't waste time fretting over the news..."
http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/basics4.htm

How to avoid a "bait and switch" job offer.
http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/crocodile.htm

Don't get fired on day #1.
http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/crocs24dontgetfire d.htm

Beware The Cause Clause.
http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/crocs57causeclause .htm

Due Diligence: Don't take a job without it
http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/hadiligence.htm

Signing non-compete agreements for fun and profit.
http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/crocs66nca.htm

for those that don't know, fuckedcompany is the best 'news' source for stuff like this.

how is a company supposed to adapt to not making any money? go bust? oh yeah, nice one! FOOL ...

Someone forgot the "http://" in the HREF tag and you got pointed to "http://slashdot.org/fuckedcompany.com"

...which, obviously, does not exist. Try this.

Maybe you meant this: working link

What companies that resell advertising space are -reliable- in their payments?

This is the wrong place to ask. I highly recommend that you contact the experts!

Or Revenge, however you want to put it.

What is needed is an organized "army" of individuals willing to "return fire" when something like this happens. Kind of like NATO is supposed to do - whenever a member nation is attacked, all of NATO is supposed to respond to protect their member. When one of us is attacked there needs to be response - organized, continuous response until the attacker either relents or is made irrelevent (ie shows up here).

I have an idea, Slashcourt. We can set up our own trial system (fair, of course), give the accusers the right to make their case, give the accused the right to defend themselves, all online of course.

Sitting back and writing a letter of protest is just going to get them laughing at your expense. It's time to kick it up a notch and return with something that has teeth.

Everyone needs to read The Art of War. Then, find a way to fight back. There are plenty of ways to fight back which can destroy an individual and really damage a corporation, without breaking any laws. Use them on the enemy. Take a look here for some methods that cults use to silence people.

I'm not making any judgment as to whether or not what the guy did was illegal or immoral. My only judgment is for the harshness of his penalty in relation to what he did

Find the person or persons involved with making the penalty so harsh. Take out retribution on them. Be sure they know what it's for.

The memory company Micron is a perfect example. I can not find the figures right now but I believe they recieved over $15 million from the federal government to compensate for potential chip dumping from Hynix in South Korea (which Micron tried to buy but failed). Well, two months ago Micron all but closed both of their US fabs to concentrate on cheaper overseas production.

Here is their H1-B info

ISSUE 1

With the announcement of Slashdot subscriptions, the question becomes "what is the most fucking effective way to fuck Slashdot out of as much fucking money as fucking possible?"

Nested mode.

Nested mode draws a monumental amount of bandwidth compared to Threaded mode, with fewer page views (for subscribers) or banner ads (for non-subscribers)

Let's say that the first page of comments on a heavily-discussed story in threaded mode is 100KB in size. A person reading that story will read some of the sub-level replies to those comments comments, but not all, so let's say he pulls perhaps 200KB of bandwidth maximum, and it will cost him many page views/banner ads. Now, someone viewing that same page in nested mode is entirely likely to pull 500-1000KB, with only a single page view or banner ad. More cost to Slashdot, less income to Slashdot, therefore less PROFIT for Slashdot.

This goes without saying, but we also need to set our thresholds to -1 (yours IS already set to -1, right?), set our "max comment size" to very high (so that gigantic garbage comments display in full), as well as setting "Limit" very high aslo. Crapflooders need to focus more on posting replies to high-rated or early-posted comments instead of (or in addition to) posting top-level comments, because many people don't bother visiting the second page of comments when there's more than one. And we all need to use unkbuster, of course.

Let's summarize:

Threaded mode:

Less bandwidth (small cost for Slashdot)

More page views/ads (large income for Slashdot)

small cost + large income = PROFIT

Nested mode:

More bandwidth (large cost for Slashdot)

Less page views/ads (small income for Slashdot)

large cost + small income = FUCKED

Now, the question becomes, can we cost them more money by subscribing, or by not subscribing? I'd be more than happy to throw $50 at Slashdot if by creative page-loading I could cause it to cost them $100 -- I'd be out $50, but so would they, so I think it'd be worth it. It would definitely do more for the world than throwing $50 at those gay starving African children in Africa. But can we cost them more money by subscribing or by not subscribing?

Most large-scale bandwidth providers charge a few dollars or so per gigabyte. Let's be generous, and say that Slashdot pays $5 per gigabyte. With subscriptions, you pay $5 for 1000 pageviews. Unless your 1000 pageviews average 1.024MB each, Slashdot isn't meeting expenses, they're making a profit. Subscribers will not only be paying their own way, they'll be subsidizing non-subscribers. Slashdot is lying to subscribers, and it's important that potential subscribers know this.

So basically, if you subscribe to Slashdot it's harder to fuck them than if you don't subscribe. So don't subscribe. And encourage your friends not to subscribe

Although this particular message is aimed at trolls / crapflooders / culture jammers / anarchists / discordianists / etc, it's important that we recruit the "normal users" to this crusade without them even knowing what our true purpose is -- just educate them that they'll get better value for their money if they use nested mode (much fewer pageviews than threaded mode, thus their subscription lasts longer), without pointing out to them that this'll also spike Slashdot's bandwidth usage.

In short, encourage subscribes to use NESTED MODE and to lower their thresholds to cut down on the pageviews they spend (actually to increase Slashdot's bandwidth usage)

Once subscribers realize that they can cut their page views down to a fraction by always using only nested mode, Slashdot's bandwidth usage will start to rise and they'll be forced to use larger and more intrusive advertisements to generate more income or make the site even crappier to drive people away to reduce expenses, or both. More intrusive ads will lead to more people joinining the FuckSlashdotNow campaign, or to quit Slashdot, or to merely Junkbuster the ads, fucking Slashdot's income stream further.

Summary:

Trolls / crapflooders / culture jammers / etc / should do this:

1. Junkbuster

2. Use Nested mode, -1 threshold

3. Set max comment size very high.

4. Not subscribe

5. Load as many pages as possible

6. Consume as much bandwidth as possible

7 Load as few advertisements as possible

8. Recruit others to the cause

9. Re-post this message to every thread

10. Rate this comment up whenever you see it posted

11. Stay tuned for more updates.

We should (covertly) encourage non-subscribing normal users to do the following:

1. Not subscribe, because it's not a good value for their money.

2. Use Junkbuster to block banner ads.

We should (covertly) encourage subscribing normal users to do the following:

1. Use Nested mode for the duration of their subscription, so that they'll spend fewer pageviews and get better value for their money.

2. Not resubscribe.

Thanks for reading this first issue of The FuckSlashdotNow Report! I'm currently soliticing ideas for upcoming issues; please e-mail me (e-mail address is in profile) with any comments or suggestions!

ur VARY aprctd fr rdng ths msg, pls fix thx!!!

*EOT*

Right??
its the American way

i only need 80mill and i dont need to work anymore, maybe the community can help me

What happens to Slashdot when CmdrTaco dies?

What happens when CmdrTaco dies?

For example, if all one wishes to do is help insure that internal memos are not leaked to f*ckedcompany, this technology will provide a useful barrier. However, if you are trying to protect patient transcripts, one would hope that a suitable technology is already implemented. After all, MS Office, and MS Office, has many insecurities because it tries to be a business and consumer level jack of all trades. To me, security is enhanced by having only the necessary features integrated into a packaged built for the type of security mandated by the regulations

Even for stopping leaks, success is probably dependent upon enforcement of DCMA. Anyone who copies and pastes will be guilt of circumvention.

No one is buying their personal transporter and they're losing loads of money. Which gives me a nice segue to mention fuckedcompany.com

eCircles did all these things from 1997 until 2000.

They eventually ran out of money and were bought by Classmates.

An unprofitable Internet company buys another unprofitable business company! Who says the Internet boom was over?

An unprofitable Internet company buys another unprofitable business company! Who says the Internet boom was over?

Three sites I regularly visit still don't play well with safari;

my dating site
my mail reporting site
my domian registration site

Somebody explain to me why salon is still around.

Nice attitude you have.

I sent them $50 for a 2-year Premium subscription sometime in 2001. Maybe that has a little to do with it. Even if they fold tomorrow, I still think I got my money's worth. I view them as a sort of charity.

People have some weird attitudes about Salon. I've seen many people cheering for its destruction, who obviously disagree with it politically, but their major argument against it seems to be that Salon isn't profitable. It's one thing to say that about Salon as a corporate entity, but another as a source of news. Not all of us are stockholders- most of us are members of the general public. Salon is one of the few remaining holdouts in the otherwise corporatized U.S. media. And at least they're shelling out money to produce actual content- it's not like they're a worthless dotcom that was surprised to find that people didn't want to buy 20 lb bags of kitty litter online.

Everyone knows Salon is a little pink, and it does print some stupid crap sometimes, but it does cover a lot of topics that otherwise don't receive any attention from the rest of the U.S. media- DMCA/copyright, the erosion of civil liberties, software patents, globalization, deCSS and freedom of speech, webcasting, etc. etc. A lot of their articles appear here on Slashdot. It will be sad when I have to go to foreign sites to get news about crap that's happening here. When the press is reduced to nothing but corporate whores, you'll be sorry.

I do remember when this review came out back in April though, and naturally there was a quick reaction on fuckedcompany. I don't know if Salon was mentioned in the book itself- Pud didn't mention it so I don't think it was. If you dig through you'll find that the Salon review author (Damien Cave) is one of the posters in that thread.

The book's gotten mixed reviews and not just from people who were the targets. But I'd say the value in F'd Company is the website: if you can get beyond the "I'm the first post you {racial/sexist epithet}XXXX{/racial/sexist epithet} and here's my XXX website" posts, there are some posts that have (apparently) real gossip on these companies. He also links to Internal Memos quite often. Fun to read how other people are getting screwed: there's one there called, kinda recursively, Salacious gossip and internal confidential information posted on a tacky website .

Hey, the guy's gonna try to make cash however he can, and there's a finite amount in internet ad revenue and amateur pr0n.

I guess that's what makes Kaplan qualified to author such a book.

My own company (I was an employee, not the owner), back in 2000, was featured on the website, and at the time, had generated the most comments ever. If any of you have a subscription, search the archives for a thread entitled "Amazing Grace." It'll be worth your time, providing a good deal of amusement, that is, until the racist trolls took the thread over.

F'd Servers
PK Interactive files Chapter 7. Last month, Pud got his book promoted on Slashdot's front page on the advice of his salesweasel who told told him bandwith was gonna be too cheap to meter. His salesnozzle didn't tell him when bandwidth would be too cheap to meter. Evidently, not yet. The bill arrived today.
When: 2/21/2003
Company: PK Interactive
Severity: 100 - new hall of fame inductee!
Points: 220
(69 comments in the Happy Fun Slashdot Corner!)

F'd Servers
PK Interactive files Chapter 7. Last month, Pud got his book promoted on Slashdot's front page on the advice of his salesweasel who told told him bandwith was gonna be too cheap to meter. His salesnozzle didn't tell him when bandwidth would be too cheap to meter. Evidently, not yet. The bill arrived today.
When: 2/21/2003
Company: PK Interactive
Severity: 100 - new hall of fame inductee!
Points: 220
(69 comments in the Happy Fun Slashdot Corner!)

What can you do?

1. Require username/password - unless these are paid for, it's hard to stop people from registering

Kind of obvious but slashdot itself shows another alternative, which is to leave accounts free but allow them to build up value over time in the form of a pseudo-curency (karma). This works well to the extent that people, once they've acquired their hard-earned karma, are less likely to act in a troll-like way.

Of course you still get the puerile pests who start their troll-like uterances with something like "You might think I'm trolling but I've reached my karma cap so f*** you, I'll say what I want".

Personally though I find the stuff at less controlled places like fucked company's message boards pretty funny though, just because they are populated by nothing but trolls.

It got onto the Fucked Company boards due to the news story, and they're trolling it now. The original troll was more subtle.

Chris Sontag, hired in October as senior vice-president of SCO's Operating Systems division, leads the intellectual property organization, sources said. Earlier in his career, Mr. Sontag led marketing and product development for Novell...

Our Unix IP is a significant asset. And for several months, we have been holding internal discussions, exploring a wide range of possible strategies concerning this asset," the company said in a statement Monday. SCO hasn't decided how exactly to collect more Unix revenue, the company added.

Better they appear in Fast Company than Fucked Company

A long article with some stupid errors like saying developers code with UML

Is it any wonder Pud used Fastcompany as the parody basis for his better site?

Whoops, just saw FC now has a fat banner up top.

It wasn't so long ago that people were touting text ads as a bandwidth-friendly and clean solution to the banners mess. A lot of major sites (Google...) and other popular sites (fuckedcompany, blogger) adopted them. What happened?

Prior to the DCMA, the owner of copyrighted materials had the right to duplication and distribution of his/her creations. These rights were subject to the abuse of organisations like the RIAA for instance, but at least the artistic community held the rights until they (often naively) negotiated them away.

With the DMCA, safe harbour provisions were created that transfered the right of distribution away from the creator into the hands of the distributor the moment the creator posted his/her material on the net. In effect the creator of a work lost the right to distribute and duplicate their work - without any negotiation or need for the creator to be compensated.

Thus, a company that owns content (which is presently not made available on the net) would be at a disadvantage because the moment they post it - they would effectivly lose control over distrribution. This ruling by the FCC will fix that. By merging media interests with distribution interests the combined mega corporation controls both the distribution as well as retaining control of their copyrighted materials - IE the problem is fixed.

Collateral damage includes anyone who is not powerful enuf to be a major carrier and/or who does not have a significant amount of internet content - enough to make them attractive enough for a large telecomunications interest to want to climb into bed with them.

Slashdot falls into this category. With no means of negotiating a sweetheart "convergance" contract with a telecommunications carrier, slashdot will get hosed on bandwidth charges. Meanwhile, having lost the "right to copy" their presumably copyrighted materials (DMCA transfers these rights to the carriers) Slashdot is unable to participate in the HUGE revenues that stem from the delivery of same to the consumming public.

What a sad commentary on manipulation of the unfolding cyber world.

This development is NOT in our interest! It certainly should be considered rather draconian by anyone aspiring to make a living utilizing the technologys presently being developed for cyberspace.

This group will include most webmasters, many systems admins, most HTML and CGI programmers and probably most of the flash programmers. The group includes a lot of wanna-be-professional web developers and artists - many of whom are doing brilliant work and may never know why the job offers they were hoping for didn't develop.

If anyone things this is an overestimate of the damages - then consider the number of layoffs in the dot.bomb sector. A good place to read on this is at fucked company

Over at FC, Pud declares that these were just shitty business plans and that any company that does not make a profit will simply go out of business. Ya, Pud is pretty ruthless - might not have a heart.

The point IMHO that Pud is overlooking is that some outfits like Slashdot.org do a RATHER GOOD JOB and they also are feeling a cash squeeze. Perhaps its a bad business plan... but I rather think the issue is having your work taken without compensation and being given no access to a rather HUGE revenue stream that this work helps to create.

Let me ask - if it were not for great websites like Slashdot, why would people like us bother to subscribe to an ISP? We pay our ISP's for access to this material and our ISP's pay their upstreams. Somewhere along the way over to the slashdot servers the money flow stops.

Slashdot is a very popular website - even so they have little market clout in the eyes of upsteams. So little slashdot with little bargaining power is placed in the situtation that they can either pack up their bags and go home - or try to find some way to fund the operation.

Meanwhile, if there are say 100,000 slashdot readers then "we" pay at least $25x100,000 = $2,500,000 per month for our interent access. In my case with the dropping content, I find that the docs over at gnu and a few other open source projects makes it worthwhile for me to have a dedicated connection. In total - slashdot probably represents over 10% of the total internet content I look at. I would be very happy if a percentage of the money I pay each month found itself flowing into the pockets of SlashDot.

But without any distribution clout - that isn't likely to happen.

Meanwhile we should expect that organizations like CNN, TSN, and so forth will find they can make good money distrubuting THEIR content - because THEY will have enough clout to bargan for an inside seat in the distribtution game.

In effect, the rest of us subsidize them because the content they have could NEVER create the net.

So why would anime be cheap? There's so much of it out there, that I suspect the US companies making VHS and DVD home video releases are willing to license it pretty cheap for TV in hopes of getting enough exposure that they can cut through the clutter and sell more $25 discs. Series that have run on Cartoon Network (Dragon Ball Z, Gundam Wing, etc.) have had pretty nice sales.

realinvalidname

Just imagine how good a "your documents can't be leaked, can't be stolen, changes can be tracked and you have total control over which employees see what" must sound.
There is value in having control over who sees a document. If nothing else, you know that one of these people leaked the document. However, as has been stated many times before, the DRM will only work if the all machines respect the DRM. Right now one can track changes in a word document, but converting to text makes that tracking irrelevant. DRM is not going to protect against leaks to F Company, much less major news outlets.

OTOH
Anyone with half an ounce of technology smarts would know that simply encrypting sensitive digital documents would be DRM-enough. Who cares if you can copy a 512bit-encrypted PDF if you don't have the key to open it up?
I feel it necessary to cite Schneier's Fallacy of the Very Tall Pole. If you want to protect your property, build a fence, not a taller pole. WRT to your statement, the problem is a)it must be unencrypted to be read and b)you do care who has the encrypted document. First, the document must be unencrypted to be read. The encryption may help you identify the leak, but it won't stop the leak. DRM can help stop the leak by marking certain documents as not-to-be-printed or not-to-email-to-insecure-people, if all equipment respects these tags. Second, a lot of encryption can eventually be broken. If the information will expire in a few months, for instance a love letter, then that is not such a big deal. If the document desribes how you murdered your once true love, you certainly want to keep even the encrypted version under wraps.

And spews doesn't? Spews randomly blocked a consulting company's netblock I worked for part-time simply because that our block was next to a "known spammer's" block.

SPEWS blocks nothing - it LISTS areas of the net that belong to spammers or ISPs that willingly host spammers.

When they politely asked to be removed and pointed out that according to their own evidence file that their netblock had nothing to with spam, they were met with very hostile responses and told to essentially ditch their teleco provider because they'd never unlist anyone.

Bullsh|it meter pegged on this one. One one has ever shown they "talked to SPEWS", SPEWS don't play that game. They also remove places that boot their spammers all the time.

They admitted that they simply block IPs in a form of "collateral damage" because they feel like it to hurt legitimate businesses so they flee their network provider.

"They" must be the people in the NANAE news group or on the Spam-L list. "They" is not SPEWS. Was it you, or these geniuses a the "consulting company you worked for" who neglected to grab a clue on this? Care to name them, I'd like to add them to my "idiots who should never be hired to consult" list.

Look at antispews.org [antispews.org] for more info on their flagrant abuses and why you shouldn't use spews.

Are you kidding? Antispews.org? This place is run by the fscking "Wangomail" spammer Ajay Gayhole, were you the troll whining on FuckedCompany last week, or a you a new one?

Man, don't stand there pissing on us saying it's rain mofo!

The foundstone advisory is amazing considering what that company has gone through

Within the security community, they have been criticized for their treatment of the their people and their general lack of ethics.

I wonder if FuckedCompany.Com knows about this?

It seems to me that the science business sector is playing the same venture capital games that another sector we all know so well has played for the last several years. I really hope for their own sakes that they maintain their integrity.

an Ask Slashdot?
or better yet... an entry on F*ckedCompany.com ?

...the obligatory "I saw this on FC four days ago" link

And second, it pisses me off that a company's board can legally screw the company and pay itself a bonus out of the remaining cash just before they fsck it to death.

What about all that reform the pols were droning on about after EnWorldRonCom?!

If these seem like the actions of a desperate fc, that's because they are. Shall we all look for our favourite quote? I like "Revenues for the third quarter of 2002 were $179,000 versus $10,831,000 in the comparable 2001 period.", although it does struggle for attention when compared to "The third quarter 2002 net loss from operations was $20,622,000 or $1.05 per share". I note as well that their licence fee income is a glorious $43k for the last quarter. Shit, I know contractors who have made that much.Their assets minus liabilities is somewhere in the region of $56M, although we can safely assume a lot of those assets aren't going to be cash in the bank.

Anyway, so it's not me getting the legal hassles, but I say stall the bastards. If you can stall for six months or so they'll just disappear off the radar. Either that or Apple, Real or Microsoft will walk round with the big stick and knock them off the radar.

Best of luck,
Dave

BTW, how much are they looking for?

These guys are just begging to make the front page of fuckedcompany.com. Any bets on how long it will take them to get there?

Seriously, do they really expect people to pay them for a few lines of crappy javascript?
And what's up with calling pop-up blockers "theft-tools". Theft is an actual crime. If I go around all day accusing innocent people of crime, you can be faily sure that I'm eventually going to get sued for slander.
Calling a web browser a theft tool, might just be enough to land them a big fat libel suit. I really hope it is. I hope they get sued into oblivion for making wild accusations about non-existant crimes. If you don't like me blocking pop-ups that's fine, but calling me a criminal for doing it might just be legally actionable.

"Corporations are like cockroaches. They'll survive everything," Lucas said.

Tell that to the companies with the dubious honour of appearing on fuckedcompany.com. :)

At least bet on a Linux distro in a dot-com deadpool.

http://www.fuckedcompany.com

There are 17 HOF-fucks already for Linux companies, and with the economy, I expect a lot more:

http://comments.fuckedcompany.com/fc/phparchives/s earch.php?search=linux

My picks? Lindows and SuSe, and quite possibly Slackware. Lindows because it's iillegal, and SuSe and Slackware due to general lack of popularity, corporate backing, and maintenance.

At least bet on a Linux distro in a dot-com deadpool.

http://www.fuckedcompany.com

There are 17 HOF-fucks already for Linux companies, and with the economy, I expect a lot more:

http://comments.fuckedcompany.com/fc/phparchives/s earch.php?search=linux

My picks? Lindows and SuSe, and quite possibly Slackware. Lindows because it's iillegal, and SuSe and Slackware due to general lack of popularity, corporate backing, and maintenance.

It looks like Java's days are numbered. F'd company

Oh, you mean divine's patent that they acquired with the purchase of Open Market? It must be tough for them, having been featured so many times on Fucked Company...