Slashdot Mirror

Isn't it interesting that, for all the bitching Slashdotters do about corporate-owned shills, advertising, poor service, and biased reporting, they turn none of that critical eye toward Slashdot?

You must read a different slashdot than I do. There aren't any articles I've ever read on this site where the comments don't bitch about dupes, shills, "slashvertisements" (advertisements disguised as stories), bought and paid for stories from pro bloggers (there are bloggers who make a career out of this site, like pipsquelle or whatever his fucking name is).

We're all aware of the problem, and we all bitch about it; but when presented with Viable Alternatives we don't follow through on them.

Therefore, it's fucking obvious slashdotters get what they deserve.

Quoting
With a Magic Wand like that, all you need to do is add a microphone in addition to the accelerometers; and you've got the perfect game controller for a speech-and-swish controled spellcasting game.

There is a lot of really neat roleplaying that comes to mind with a microphone attachment, and it would also be a really cool karaoke machine - especially with the download ability. I can't wait!

The CEO has a patent on his invention. Hm... And here is a somehow interesting post about the guy and his company. As a teenager he invented the floppy disk and leased it to IBM.???

http://technocrat.net/

Way to go Taco! This is a wonderful move, though well overdue.

Now get rid of the dupes, get your editors regularly participating in the comments so they know what /. is like for us regular users, somehow improve signal/noise, get some (non-Katz) feature articles, and you might finally stop the defection to Bruce Perens' excellent technocrat.net!

technocrat.net

needs more readers + article submitters but good start so far

Yes, I also have a problem with a lack of alternatives. There is no lack of other sites that post news for nerds, but there is no site with anywhere near the readership that Slashdot has - Slashdot is a real institution, everbody knows it. Not that the Slashdot readership is all good, hell no; it's just really really large and this quantity entails the existance of a certain degree of quality, if you're willing to look for it or if moderation works as advertised.

That said, one of the sites that always gets mentioned when people ask for alternatives to Slashdot - and rightly so, I guess - is kuro5hin (also known simply as k5). It's really, really different though, different readership (maybe smarter, but only on average), different topics, different moderation system. K5 and Slashdot readers have an odd sort of relationship, you can see remarks about each other regularly on both sides. Maybe somebody else can say more, I always think it's fairly strange. Personally, I've tried to get into K5 a couple of times, never worked out.
Apart from K5, what's left? Recently I bookmarked digg, but I haven't gotten into it, and I doubt I will for reasons outlined in the first paragraph. There have been attempts of explicitly creating an alternative "better" Slashdot, most notably Technocrat by none other than Bruce Perens, which was pretty much a failure, although I am surprised to see there still are lots of news items and between 1 and 5 comments on each (hah!). Oh and of course there's Fark which to me is pretty much like a reverse-K5 from Slashdot's point of view - take from that what you will.

Heh, this has gotten a bit out of hand considering I only wanted to drop a few links to K5 and digg.

See also: Slashdot on Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://technocrat.net/

http://technocrat.net/ may be worth a look; like slashdot, but edited with a bit more sense (IIRC by Bruce Perens? Someone I'd heard of anyway). The main thing it's lacking right now is people to make comments~

Umm... to all the naysayers... wonder why netcraft says slashdot.org uses mod_perl? (sarcasm, no need for -5, Obvious).

I think that his writings are pretty on-the-spot.

His technocrat.net site is pretty on-the-spot, and I'd say better than Slashdot.

He avoids ESR-style broad proclamations and claiming that he's speaking for the entire open source community.

I'm not saying that Perens is perfect, but relative to the other highly-visible members of the OSS community, I find him a lot more acceptable than I find, say, ESR. And unlike RMS, he isn't a fanatic (not that we don't all need an RMS somewhere, but...) and is reasonably personable.

You may not like UserLinux, but Perens is out doing work to try to produce social change. RMS did the same thing, and had plenty of bumps along the way before, after decades of work, getting some recognition. He's one of the people that's actually out trying to *do* something about what most Slashdotters just gripe about.

No, I think Perens is pretty decent.

Just do as I do:

First - submit it to Technocrat - they can use all the stories they can get, so are much more likely to accept your submission.

Second - whenever you submit a story, place a copy into a journal entry. That way, people can see what is being submitted and rejected to Slashdot.

While I understand and agree with the /crew's refusal to make the story queue public (simply - make a thing public, expect it to be trolled), their current refusal to provide any sort of feedback about why a story is rejected just demonstrates their double-standard of "Everybody ELSE must have complete transparency in everything they do, but DON'T YOU DARE ask US to follow that rule!". The argument they have given in the past against providing any sort of feedback was "It would take too much time! We sort too many stories a day!" - BULLSHIT. The time to click a button to say "Dup/Not news for nerds/Already scheduled for later/Too biased, try again" instead of just "rejected" is trivial.

Oh well - IMHO /. reached its zenith in 2000, and has been sliding toward its nadir at ever-growing speed ever since.

Now not only does slashdot post news late from other sites..

http://technocrat.net/article.pl?sid=05/07/27/1422 250&mode=nested

But people also turn to them for comments...

For this entire, lame ass story are right here.

Wow, I've seen stories on Slashdot For Grownups get more comments than this, despite them having something on the order of 1/100th of the user base of this quickly devolving pit.

Remember when Slashdot actually did post stuff that mattered? I bet if your user ID is more than 50,000 more than mine, you don't, as I barely do, including my IDless days.

And so Slashdot continued to decay, crappy story by crappy story, 10 dupes a day.

Here though, I want to at least earn my karma hit, since I know it's coming. I don't particularly give a shit, but I figure I might as well get some bang for my buck... ahem...

FUCK YOU, SLASHDOT!

And Zonk can go suck a big dick, too.

Thank you.

This site isn't bad but not that many readers.

What common slashdot problem pisses you off the most?

1. 404
2. Dupe
3. Roland Piquepaille
4. Broken Code
5. You can't edit your comments
6. Poor spelling (in articles) 7. Poor grammmar (in articles) 8. Stories no one cares about.

In other news slashcode offers a patch.

A new site's coming, and it seems to be decent... technocrat.net

It's slash-based, seems to have decent content, and you can still get a UID small enough to remember if you register. It's still no match for slashdot in terms of sheer volume, but...

two that leap to mind are microRNA-mediated viral immunity and gene regulation or epigenetic memory in plants) that never made it to Slashdot

Try posting stories over at Technocrat. The editor there has a functional brain and no Aeron chair.

Technocrat.net

nt = no text

it's http://technocrat.net/

How about Technocrat?

"The day someone makes a knockoff of Slashdot that's a bit more computer-science oriented and isn't solely aimed at producing the same tired old trolling every day"

Have you seen Technocrat.net? Looks to be just starting, but I'm already impressed: slashdot ran an article on a nanotech textiles protest - technocrat ran one on a group of scientists demonstrating a refined iteration of a carbon nanotube CPU. Comments are on-topic too, touch wood.

(Or there's always ars for CS stuff, but they're hardly a /. knockoff.)

1. I have several e-mail accounts to deal with
2. I chat on IRC daily
3. I follow several USENET news groups
4. I routinely post on a variety of message boards
5. I subscribe to Mental Floss, SysAdmin Magazine and Columbus Monthly
6. I read /. and technocrat and fark and El Reg and Something Awful and Google News and Groklaw and The Onion and Maddox and Ars Technica and USA Today and NewsForge every single day
7. I use Stumble Upon to find random, new and interesting web sites
8. ...AND I CAN'T GET ENOUGH!!!

The site itself, http://www.technocrat.net/ has been down since 11 May 2005. I cannot find any other annoucement, and Bruce's personal site also remains down.

(shrug)

These folks appear to be attempting to make a go of a more serious version of Slashdot: technocrat.net.

"I hope someone will start a 'fork' so that we can all move over."

They did. http://www.technocrat.net/

There's a surprise, huh?

Anyway, Technocrat reported this already.

Why not link to the source at the U of M News Service:

U-M researchers make bendable concrete

Technocrat.net had this article earlier today, and without the extra advertising.

interesting stuff!

Why not link to the source at the U of M News Service:

U-M researchers make bendable concrete

Technocrat.net had this article earlier today, and without the extra advertising.

interesting stuff!

no need: technocrat.net

I agree with you on this. Slashdot is full of hypocrites and group worshiping sheep.

There are some better sites out there.. I happen to like technocrat.net run by Bruce Perens. Not alot of people there but they happen to respect intellectual curiosity overthere.

I said pretty much the same thing in a comment over at Technocrat.

I've said for quite a while now that the technologies used by geeks would have a great effect outside of its original problem domain. Things like Usenet for political parties, Slash for newspapers, comments and trackbacks for magazines, Bugzilla for legislation, Jabber for customer support, etc.

People say geeks are lacking in social skills, but I believe there are significant advances in scaling communication between individuals and communities up to address the problems of huge numbers of people, who all need to get information or express an opinion.

This is great, making it harder to watch TV on the device of your choice - the Broadcast Flag (77 days till lockdown) will seem like a stupid idea now there is competition.
Now Tivo's and PVR's can really take off with RSS enclosed VIDEO AND Film.
Don't forget Ourmedia http://www.ourmedia.org/ which does a similar thing, although they don't have a noporn rule.
The http://technocrat.net/article.pl?sid=05/04/13/2254 235&mode=thread Opening Up of the BBC's back catalogue will get things started. But they are banning anyone outside the US from watching all those great Dr.Who back episodes.
The Archive.org CC http://www.archive.org/movies/collection.php?colle ction=feature_films&PHPSESSID=b0292fc08fb009353794 c2240ea8cbb6 licenced B-movie, Charlie Chaplin and 50's Superman Fleischer cartoon collection is a similar great service, but their encoding sucks.

Folks always ramp on about how low quality downloads are. A properly ripped DIVX watched on a 16.7M colour hires monitor or projector beats the pants of DVD.
And this will mess with Sony's heads, as they plan an i-tunes for movies but knowing Sony, totally crippled by DRM.
And you can charge for people watching your stuff if you like.
BTW the TOS say no porn.

If you don't like the way Slashdot has been going - and apart from the trolls, who does? - then never forget that there are alternatives.

I have a lot of respect for Matt Dillon (as does pretty much everyone who's ever owned an Amiga), but I'm not sure yet that this is a good idea. The early versions of FreeBSD-5 were a mess, sure, but they've somehow managed to wrangle the new complexity into something that really works and works well.

Still, I wish nothing but the best for the whole DragonFly team. If their ideas pan out, then the whole *BSD culture can benefit from them. If they don't, then hopefully we can learn from their mistakes. Good luck, Matt!

Try technocrat.net http://technocrat.net/ for a more mature "Slashdot."

http://technocrat.net/

http://technocrat.net/

I'm still not sure how this would be any more high throughput than RFLP, SSCP, microarray or Taqman assay (or even straight sequencing!) for SNPs/mutation screening.. I mean you'd have the problem of separating out the fragments of DNA first to get exactly the one you wanted in order to weigh it individually, make sure it was completely uncontaminated with protein.. that doesn't appear to me to lend itself to high-throughput techniques.

There are of course loads of biological uses for this kind of technology. Also this story was run yesterday on Technocrat, which has a link to the BBC coverage

Technocrat had this story yesterday - probably have a bit more discussion about it on Slashdot, but we'll have to see about the signal-noise ratio ... ;-)

How about Technocrat?

Maybe there just isn't any "News for Nerds" out there this week, hence the dupes. I mean, the technology world is so slow moving news is hard to come by. Hang on a minute, Technocrat has a load of interesting stories.

We now have 4 paid editors at Technocrat.net and we're running Slashdot for Grown-ups. Please try it out.

Now, about UserLinux: Debian will resolve its problems. We're trying to help. And the project will go on. There will be a commercially-supported UserLinux release about a day after the Debian release. There is nothing else but the Debian release on the critical path.

I have been acquainted with Mark Shuttleworth since the early days of Debian and fully support Ubuntu. UL will borrow from Ubuntu where appropriate. But UL seeks to do all development directly within the Debian organization, in order to achieve maximum transparency and public participation (a better explanation is in the UserLinux white paper). So, where UL borrows from Ubuntu, the result will be checked into Debian.

I would have liked everything to go a year faster, but I'm convinced that the UL rationale is still valid and is important to the future of GNU/Linux.

Thanks

Bruce

You still got your four points, so don't complain. It's no secret that a few people can't handle the tiny amount of power that moderation gives them and that the power goes to their head, or that other moderators might not be on a power trip, but are equally idiotic. And quite a few are either lacking a sense of humor or, again, are too stupid not to get the joke.

On the whole, the moderation system works more often than it fails. I still get indignant for having what I think is an insightful post sincerely written modded down as a troll or flamebait (or worse, over rated when there hasn't been any upwards mods!) But that happens. There are abuses, but it mostly works.

Besides, what are the stakes? Not fucking much, when you think about it. Maybe your fragile ego gets slightly bruised. =) Just don't take slashdot so seriously. Realize that the average intelligence and maturity here are pretty low, but that there are a few bright spots that make it worth it.

Also, consider alternatives. Take all you marbles and go to Technocrat.net. The level of discourse there is much higher. Unfortunately for me, they're a bit too mature for me, and I feel awkward making dumb jokes. Speaking of which, I always find it ironic when my jokes get modded up as insightful, when, as mentioned, my insightful posts get modded down. It's all in the eye of the beholder, I guess.

> What matters is that this article quality on /. is substandard and causing me to look for alternatives to /.

http://technocrat.net/

And as a supplement for OSS/UNIX/Linux stuff in particular, I like:

http://rootprompt.org/
http://www.librenix.com/

Technocrat?

Beware the ugly head of corporatism/fascism: binding arbitration clauses

Here's google's cache of the front page that we beautifully slashdotted. Also, on a related note, many companies offer free SSL certificates if you do a little business with them. Ever-popular GoDaddy recently joined the ranks of those companies. They started offering free SSL certs to open-source projects.

Read my Technocrat article for more info and I also submitted to Slashdot, but it got rejected - oh well.

www.technocrat.net