Slashdot Mirror

Peter Militch was born in Leigh Creek, a town of 900 people that was about 200 miles from the next town and 400 miles from the nearest real city. Leigh Creek was a government owned town - the government owned all the houses, "even the pub," said Peter. "There was no television, no radio, and only a couple of phones in the town. A couple of years ago the government figured out that the town lay right over the biggest seam of coal in Australia and bulldozed the town and built a new town for the inhabitants," Peter added. "So the town where I grew up is now a hole in the ground, 3 miles long and half a mile wide."

"So ... Hugh Pickens wants everyone to be unemployed?"

Who the fuck is Hugh Pickens anyway?

Clicking his name in the article (as well as the one you just linked) brings you to...

http://researchandideas.com/index.php?title=An_Independent_Evaluation_of_Phillips_66,_its_Business_Strategy,_and_Execution#How_Much_Money_Does_the_Marland_Refinery_in_Ponca_City_Earn_for_Phillips_66.3F

What the fuck? Is Hugh Pickens really just Dice?

Thank you for creating Slashdot - the world's premier web site for discussion of technical issues.

Vernor Vinge dedicates "Rainbow's End" to "To the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives - Wikipedia, Google, eBay, and the others of their kind, now and in the future." I believe Slashdot should be added to that list as the most important divergent collaborative tool available on the internet.

Slashdot is a brainstorming tool that generates lots of new ideas, then evaluates them, and presents the results to the reader in a number of formats. Slashdot's implicit view of truth corresponds to the scientific method. In its purest form every comment to a story on Slashdot can be thought as either 1) a hypothesis with supporting data or 2) a counterexample which attempts to nullify a hypothesis. One way to look at Slashdot is as an internet implementation of the scientific method in action.

One of the unique aspects of Slashdot that make it the premier news forum for discussing technical issues on the internet and differentiates Slashdot from similar forums like Digg and Reddit is that stories that appear on the front page of Slashdot are editor-selected while the stories that appear on their front pages of other popular tech discussion web sites are user selected which tends to drive the discussion to a lowest common denominator.

Editor selection of stories tends to maintain a good level of quality of the stories that make it to the front page and gives Slashdot a unique editorial voice. There are some types of stories that routinely show up on other tech discussion sites, that slashdot editors simply will not accept. Slashdot's editors stay away from juvenile material and WTF stories and present an editorial voice of serious consideration of the issues raised.

Thanks again for your defining role in creating the best web site in the world for the serious discussion of technical issues. Your role has been crucial and you will always be remembered.

Why I enjoy writing for Slashdot.

I have a lousy memory so over the past fiteen years, I have set up a series of about 20 Filemaker databases where I keep all the information that I don't want to lose. The strength of Filemaker for me is that it is easy to set up and that the database allows full text searches. Each database is set up using a template that automatically puts in the creation date and time and the modification date and time.

For example, when I started surfing the net in 1996, I set up a Filemaker database for all the interesting web sites I might want to come back to that includes the URL and a text description of the database. Over the years I have about 7,000 entries in the database. What is interesting is to go back and see what sorts of sites I was visiting say in 1998.

Whenever I see an interesting article with information that I may want to access again, I just copy all the text into another database along with the URL of the information. That database now has about 40,000 entries since I started keeping it in 1999.

I have another database that I started keeping in 1992 with all the phone calls that I make and receive and another database. That was very useful to me when I was a project manager and had to keep track of about twenty subcontractors and my agreements with them on what deliverables I would get from them and when they were due.

I have another database that I just call text where I edit text files for emails I send, or slashdot posts like this one before I post them. That one has about 30,000 entries so far.

I even have a database that I keep of slashdot stories that I have submitted and which ones have been accepted. Periodically I do a dump of that database to my web site.

I like to write non-fiction, and if I'm working on an article, then I have a web site set up where I can use a personal Wikipedia to keep track of references and footnotes like this one I have been working on for a while of Stanley Ann Dunham, the mother of President Obama, who grew up in my hometown of Ponca City or this one on the Pioneer Woman Models that I recently had accepted for publication in Oklahoma Magazine.

I don't recommend this methodology for everyone, but it works for me.

I have a lousy memory so over the past fiteen years, I have set up a series of about 20 Filemaker databases where I keep all the information that I don't want to lose. The strength of Filemaker for me is that it is easy to set up and that the database allows full text searches. Each database is set up using a template that automatically puts in the creation date and time and the modification date and time.

For example, when I started surfing the net in 1996, I set up a Filemaker database for all the interesting web sites I might want to come back to that includes the URL and a text description of the database. Over the years I have about 7,000 entries in the database. What is interesting is to go back and see what sorts of sites I was visiting say in 1998.

Whenever I see an interesting article with information that I may want to access again, I just copy all the text into another database along with the URL of the information. That database now has about 40,000 entries since I started keeping it in 1999.

I have another database that I started keeping in 1992 with all the phone calls that I make and receive and another database. That was very useful to me when I was a project manager and had to keep track of about twenty subcontractors and my agreements with them on what deliverables I would get from them and when they were due.

I have another database that I just call text where I edit text files for emails I send, or slashdot posts like this one before I post them. That one has about 30,000 entries so far.

I even have a database that I keep of slashdot stories that I have submitted and which ones have been accepted. Periodically I do a dump of that database to my web site.

I like to write non-fiction, and if I'm working on an article, then I have a web site set up where I can use a personal Wikipedia to keep track of references and footnotes like this one I have been working on for a while of Stanley Ann Dunham, the mother of President Obama, who grew up in my hometown of Ponca City or this one on the Pioneer Woman Models that I recently had accepted for publication in Oklahoma Magazine.

I don't recommend this methodology for everyone, but it works for me.