Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Will Own Part of Corel
<RANT> I need to get something off my chest a minute. If you don't care, just skip below and start reading comments.
Why is it that some people are such asses (and please note, that "some" is perhaps a dozen a day) about having their submissions rejected on Slashdot? Last week we rejected nearly 3000 story submissions and posted about 75. So why is it that sometimes when someone gets their submission, they have to go attack Slashdot? It becomes a conspiracy: favoritism, Rob not caring, Slashdot really sucking these days, the list goes on and on, but it never mentions the real reason.
The fact is that we post a fraction of all submissions. And we don't post any submission just because it contains the word Linux or Microsoft. Just because we reject a submission doesn't mean it doesn't matter, it just means that when it was submitted, it didn't make the cut. I want Slashdot to be a fun mix: stuff that matters. Legos? Linux? Black Holes? Nanotech? If Slashdot was all serious, I wouldn't enjoy reading it or running it. I've always worked hard to make sure that there's a good mix of stories. Stuff that appeals to a wide range of interests within the 'News for Nerds' umbrella.
But I see Web sites all over with these childish little notes on them: "Slashdot rejected my submission, so obviously (fill in blank with conspiracy theory listed above)". This gets worse because in the last 18 months or so, cheesy little Web sites with the word "Linux" or "Geek" in them have started growing exponentially. Don't get me wrong, a lot of really great Web sites have sprung up too, but the fact is that there are hundreds of them now, and a lot of them have hostility towards Slashdot, and take it very personally when they get rejected. I'm not going to link anything and everything they post.
The personal attacks get old; they hurt because we all work so hard making Slashdot happen each day... and attacking us because we didn't agree with your submission doesn't make our jobs any easier.
Oh, and best of all, most every story we post has comments bitching that it shouldn't have been posted. Oh what fun.
All right, I got that off my chest. I'm not mad, I just felt the need to vent a little. Thanks for reading.
update This rant originally was not offtopic: this was in regards to a mean spirited little statement that was attached to this story on AboutLinux.com. The statement was dropped almost immediately after this story appeared. I appreciated that, but an apology would have been nicer.
</RANT>
You'd better beef up your servers before the big :)
IPO!
Rob, I've never registered, mainly out of my own laziness. I have however, followed this news site since before it was a main-page news site(fish and chips, or chips and dips, whatever you called it.. i was more interested in the hamster havoc and duckpins at the time - i laughed my butt off at the duck(He's not wearing shoes!))
Remember your one-liner cgi at the bottom of your hope college web pages, the one that you said would send a message to your console? I must have sent you half a dozen one day, because I thought it was so cool(still think it is, barring the security/decency issues involved)
don't let these people get you down man.
i love reading virtually all of the news items you post on slashdot. heck, i use you guys as a reference when i need to look things up on the web(for example, when i forget where to go to get the xbf/xfcom servers for my laptop with a neomagic video card in it(which i just discovered i dont need anymore.. but DID need once) i hit your archived story of the release of the xbf servers for matrox and nvidia.)
i could ramble some more, but if i havent made my point yet i doubt ill be able to saying much else.... you are appreciated.
Josh Duncan
duncan - at - msmd - dot - net
read the article, and you'll find out why the rant.
This isn't really that big a deal. MS owns a sizable portion of SCO. (The exact percentage escapes me at the moment.)
>a href="http://www.westwoodone.com/ww1/ram/gates.ram ">Gates gets half story. Real Player required.
Thank you.
Gates gets half
Or is this the solution? DeputyDK
hehehe, I actually thought that remark was kinda funny, but true, although somewhat hurtful.
Think about it Microsoft owns 4% which translates to roughly 40 Million bucks.. Microsoft could lose that and it not even make the books. A good chunk of their *employees* are worth more than that amount.. I know I am :)
Remember, the people visiting this site are now your customers...even us ACs. They view ads and you get paid. This industry suffers from frustrated techs who have no perspective dealing with customers who are rude and equally frustrated. It's a very bad combination.
This is your job, these are your customers. You get paid for doing what you do, deal with it. Show some work ethic or find a new career.
I'm sorry for being so harsh, but the lack of work ethic and customer service I have seen in recent years, particularly in tech fields, is very disturbing to me. I hope we can do better.
Thanks,
AC
Yeah. I think so. Get over it.
So does Bill get to "get-down" with Marlen? I hear she's pretty easy.
You all know Slashdot is anti-Microsoft. Why even try to pretend otherwise? People are mad at Slashdot because you try to be all high and mighty about every thing. If Microsoft posts FUD you raise hell, if you guys post FUD it's fine.
You don't even have to be a Microsoft supporter to get annoyed at it. Hypocrisy is hypocrisy no matter if you run Linux, NT, Be, or whatever.
Why not post some of the stories of the great reviews Win2k has gotten? Why not mention IBM has rolled it out on all their desktops? Why not mention Michael Dell expects huge sales of Win2k?
I'll tell you why, it'd hurt your agenda. Instead you just tell your loyal followers/readers what they want to hear and pretend like there is never any good news about Microsoft.
You can call it whatever you want but the bottom line is you're spreading FUD by filtering out good news about Microsoft and filtering out bad news about Linux.
You're making quite a bit of money off this site. We're the customers. Your job is to please us. You have no right to be upset when we're unhappy with the service. You make money off each page view, if I am unhappy with the lack of stories I can't take my hit back. You get paid no matter what.
Maybe I should filter out the banner ads if you're so disgusted with your customers' simple requests. My customers ask me to do the impossible all the time, I often figure out how to do it in order to make them happy. Repeat business is the key to success, I doubt I'd bitch at my customers for making do some work.
Maybe you should consider quitting slashdot since clearly us pathetic little readers take up to much of your time?
I'll trade jobs with you and post more stories AND I won't even bitch at the readers.
What I found curious was the backhanded slap at
Corel stating that they needed to "make peace
with Debian". Does anyone have any idea what
this is in reference to?
It seems to me that if Corel is going to be
slammed for something, provide some evidence
what they're doing wrong?
technocrat.net
He must have changed the story then.
Is the rant in anyway connected to the fact that the previous posts about Microsoft ownership in companies active in the Linux community have been rejected? Microsoft was long one of the largest shareholders in SCO, but posts related to this fact were always rejected. I guess this fact was pretty much common knowledge, but never really put in the context of SCO's more recent Linux related activities.
The real thing is, after a discussion I had in private email with CmdrTaco...he really is a complete egotistical ass. Slashdot has evidently gone to his head, or else he just never was very good at dealing with other humans. Now he bitches about too many sites with the word "Geek" in their title. Wah. You run Slashdot, get used to the word. Even more so...you with on Geeks in Space...so it's awful and horrible when others use it, but you...you're an original.
TheGeek Geekrights (which predates my ownership of the domain, AND Geeks in Space)
I think this would encourage trolls to abuse this and aim to be the "most shamed Author" etc.
@#$%^*, I am trying to read about corel & Microsoft.(Ratzo Rizzo voice) If,& i say If ( Foghorn Leghorn voice) I am interested in considering you rant you should give its own seperate billing, so the replyies from 2 unrelated topics don't get mixed intogether & in inbreed. sheesh , by now you would think you know how to put together the days site. Sorry, but you screwed pooch, big time.
They are taking their last breath with a soon-to-be-failed Linux attempt.
MS owned 10% of CORL before the purposed merger. I don't see where it has helped INPR. The price of INPR has gone nowhere but down since the purposed merger. Most INPR owners (including me) are opposed to the merger
Didn't Microsoft agree to never make a Unix-like OS, when they sold Xenix to SCO? Wouldn't this make MS Linux impossible?
Saw it about 9 months ago here in australia in a university book/software shop. Blue packaging and everything, was really a sight to behold.
scuse me, have to vomit now.
4%, Big F**king deal, MS or anyone could buy upto 5% of any other publicly traded company without even having to report it.
4% ownership has very little say on shareholder voting, and next to nothing on their day-to-day operations...
Linux needs Bill Gates hacking skills.
Imagine if techno-genius Bill Gates was ACTUALLY CONTRIBUTING TO THE LINUX KERNEL !!!
Imagine the innovations. Imagine the compatibility with industry standards such as DirectX and LanManager. I for one cannot wait for the new MS-Linux. Go Bill Go !!!!
Thank You.
dmg
[I am not at my normal web broswer, and I did not log in as I forgot my password. This is the author of the article in question, Bill Henning.]
My apologies for the snide remark at the top of my article; I was peeved that MS owning a part of Corel appeared not to be news.
Rob et al do a great job; SlashDot is my favorite site - and in order that I do not get peeved off in the future, and so that I do not upset Rob et al in the future I will try not to submit news in the future.
I have pulled the snide remark, and you have my apology.
Corel says you must be 18 to download their Linux distribution, because otherwise the GPL would be unenforacble. But the GPL specifically says that you DON'T need to agree to it's terms to use the software. In fact, it is a GPL violation to refuse to give someone a program because they are under 18. They've had other license problems in the past too (the license on their beta was too restrictive, but they fixed it).
The irony is biting, particularly as I just went through a round of emails with Rob last week regarding off-topic meta-commentary on Slashdot in various posts. I'd run across an announcement of the Slashdot/VA merger in an unrelated article -- prior to Slashdot's posting notice of the announcement -- which had been moderated "Offtopic". I contested the rating, and the general practice of down-moderating Slashdot-topic posts, see below for salient commentary.
Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2000 08:32:55 -0500 (EST)
From: Rob Malda <malda@slashdot.org>
To: kmself@ix.netcom.com
cc: cmdrtaco@slashdot.org
Subject: Re: Metamoderation comments
On Tue, 15 Feb 2000 kmself@ix.netcom.com wrote:
> While the moderation is technically true, the fact is that there is *no*
> place on Slashdot to address news or issues concerning Slashdot itself.
> While the post is off _topic_, I feel it is on _meta_topic, and that
> the moderation was inappropriate.
I think its completely offtopic and deserves to be moderated down.
People need to chill out and wait until a story comes along *about* Slashdot
and talk *there* about it. At least then (surprise) I might read it and do
something about it.
--
| Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda | Just want to be misunderstood,
| malda(@)slashdot.org | I wanna be feared in my neighborhood.
| http://slashdot.org/ | Just want to be a moody man,
| cartoonist*lovemachi | say things that nobody can understand.
| ne*obsessivecompulsi | --Pete Townshend, Misunderstood
My point: Slashdot metacommentary is always, if not on topic, at least on metatopic. What's particularly ironic in this case is that Rob could have created an article to post his rant to, and ensuing commentary, but instead chose to post it here, despite what he'd said to me last week.
It's not the off-topicality that I'm objecting to in Rob's rant, it's the hypocrisy.
And I continue to request that there be a persistant, front-page linked, Slashdot-on-Slashdot forum where these conversations are on topic. Failing to provide such a forum, while encouraging the marking of such posts off-topic, is a subtle form of censorship.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Microsoft are now an OpenSource company, releasing GPL products.
Must be time to juxtapose all those Microsoft press releases and interviews with senior figures wherein it was asserted that Microsoft customers had no interest in seeing the source.
Re: Rant. I find it ironic that CmdrTaco is complaining about people not having Linux & Microsoft stories appearing. I started reading ars techinca mainly because it currently has more interesting general science and technology stories than /. (like the holographic teacher systems).
Conspiracy theory time: hey, Rob, did you post that to defray the inevitable attack on the story posting?
...because the Microsoft guys have a lot of money, and they all own a lot of stuff. It's an investment. Like Transmeta.
Let me know when Microsoft owns 50% of something I care about. Then I'll start to worry!
---
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
isn't Corel still suing Microsoft over DR DOS and such?
^ ~
I think you mean Caldera.
how, if at all will microsoft owning 4% of Corel affect the outcome of the lawsuit?
That was already settled out of court. I see no affect possible on the past.
i'd say the fact Corel ships a halfassed, not-fully-developed, debian-based linux distro is probably not the most alarming aspect of all this.
Release early release often. When was that a crime? As far as polished, its right up there with Redhat and Mandrake (except 7.0).
I also agree with the rant. I wish Rob congradulations on a great sight, and the publicity from the other sights....
Hmmm, funny I have no moderation points to use so I have to simply offer corrections. Maybe that should be my new sig...
^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~~
>In general, I think the Slashdot editors do a damn fine job. They
>can't please everybody all the time, but when I see an article I'm not
>interested in the I simply ignore it rather than complaining.
>People who get stressed about the editorial policy of a light-hearted
>geek news site really should get a life.
I've said this before but I hope there's a blacklist that's been created just for
people who claim they submitted stories and then bitch about
it if they don't get "credit" about it. Maybe then these asses
will learn to shut up and clean up their act.
There are some losers you just can't be nice to. You have to step on them like you would a cockroach.
I've submit about a story every 3 months, and I don't think I've had one accepted in like 2 years. ;-) Every time I find out my story was rejected, I feel a bit rejected.
;-)
Honestly though, after a few seconds, I realize you guys get a LOT of stories (every time I post there's like 400 submissions ahead of me), and I know I don't want Slashdot to be posting anything near 400 articles a day. I'm sure that there are 400 people who think there story is just as great/important/life affirming/etc. as mine, so that has to mean most people are going to get disappointed.
This isn't exactly a big leap in logic. I'd suggest to you that those who DON'T make the leap in logic are probably not worth your time and energy.
I sometimes wonder though, if it might be fun to spawn off a seperate site which just lists all the submissions you guys have rejected, if for no other reason than humor.
sigs are a waste of space
I think what is really sad about this is that William Henning submitted his own story to Slashdot, or that's how the web page makes it look at least. If I were on the Slashdot approval team, I'd automatically reject any story submitted by it's author in favor of waiting to see if someone else actually thinks its worth submitting. To do otherwise is to encourage people to promote their own sites here.
--
Making iDirt 1.82 a safer place, one bug at a time.
Somehow, I don't see many people on this site crying over that, if it happens.
Next, a note to CmdrTaco - Hang in there! There -ARE- people here who know how hard you work, how hard it is to maintain a popular site, and how abusive some of the folks out there can be, if they feel they're not getting enough limelight.
If there is ANYTHING I can do to help, feel free. This is an open-ended, no-strings-attached offer. Even if you just want someone to listen, whilst you vent, that's fine. Sometimes, we all need that. You're a nice guy, and deserve better than to be used as a target.
Lastly, a note to all those who complain that their submissions are being rejected: Run your own news site, if you feel that way! DON'T bug us readers, OR the admins, over your petty jelousy. Slashodt posts maybe a dozen or so topics per day. I've YET to see a day in which the queue hasn't shown 220+ submissions ahead of mine. If your odds of getting a single entry in is 1:220, then you'd have to post 220 articles of interest before you'd have an even chance of getting ONE of those posted!
Are you going to stand there and whinge over the other 219? Or are you going to act like a mature human being, accept that you're not God, and read & reply to the topics that ARE covered?
Are you man or mouse? Human or Heffalump? Are you willing to put your pride to one side, and talk about matters of interest, or wallow in childish self-pity?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
This idea of have voting on submission is really taking this discussion site idea to a new level. It would be great to see that on Slashdot in some form or another. The FAQ currently states on the issue:
Believe me when I say the submissions box isn't fit for mainstream consumption. We work really hard to keep a certain standard up on Slashdot, and I feel that opening up the submissions bin would be so prone to abuses, that it would make it much more difficult to maintain.
The point you are making is not very good. Whoever is voting on submissions is not a mainstream consumer. He knows that he has to put up with crap. Hey, when I have moderater access right now I got down to "-1", I see things I NEVER see, when I am at my usual "+2".
There are some valid points, why an intelligent editor might pick better stories than mass voting: He adds presonality and has an overall consistency that might get lost.
So here is the idea: Why not having a seperate SECTION with highly voted stories. Pick, say, every 6 hours the best 3 or what have you, and post them in the section no matter what. If the selection sometimes is lousy and "M$ ate my ballz" makes, so what. Let the visitors of the site decide if they want to see that section or not.
For now, I gonna head over to kuro5hin and check it out.
things. take. time.
--
Thanks for the link to kuro5hin.org . It looks like a cool site and I've been looking for an alternative to Slashdot, not because I don't like it anymore, but because I WOULD LIKE MORE TO READ and Slashdot does not post enough stories for me. I've posted something similar before, but no one seems to care and/or listen. Oh well, whatever. If not here, I can go other places for additional content. I'll still come to Slashdot, but now I have another cool weblog to visit. Anyone else have any other sites they particularly like for Slashdot-style stories and information? I'm sure I'm not the only person who would be interested. Thanks in advance.
Have you looked at kuro5hin.org yet? Very cool site. Check it out.
----------------
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
Not much, really. I guess the main thing that would be annoying us is that Corel haven't really given that much back to Debian, even though they talked about doing so early on. It's also a bit annoying that you can't upgrade cleanly from Corel to Debian. Sometimes people get annoied when Corel don't credit Debian.
I don't think there's anything really major, and certainly nothing insurmountable.
Why wasn't it posted when I submitted it, huh?!? I guess only CmdrTaco gets the right to rant????
/.. "No doubt this'll get moderated down..", "I submitted this last week, and NOW it gets posted.." etc.
/. is pretty good on the whole - but how about an option to see the rejected, 'b-side' stories too if you have too much time to waste? :)
Nah, seriously, there seems to be so many clichés on
The mix of stuff on
- doctea
No offense, but rob's rant should have been moderated to (0, Offtopic). If he needed to say that, he could have posted it as an another article. The corel thing is interesting as heck to me, and now i'm going to have to search through comments pertaining to rob's rant, which i don't paticuarly care about (let the kiddies whine all they want, i've had stories rejected before and don't care) to see comments pertaining to the corel thing. *sigh*
If 90% of everything isn't crap, your standards are too high.
Can someone inform me what the trouble is between Debian and Corel? I have no clue.
On the subject of the rant:
Can Slashdot et. al post more stories/articles in a day? I just want to be able to read more interesting stuff.
Am I missing somthing here, why was this posted along with this 'MS owns a part of Corel' story?
Because the story apparently contained complaints about being mad at Slashdot for rejecting the author's stories; according to the end of Rob's rant, the part Rob was ranting about was simply deleted without comment or explanation.
Jay (=
Stop and consider it. Which has the most assimilating power? For years Microsoft has been our Borg but we created a postive assimilating army to fight back and we call it Linux. Microsoft is only a company but Linux is a viral culture. Trying to stop Linux is like trying to stamp out a the Bible. Pretty damn unlikely right? When the two combine Linux will eventually be the part that shines through. It might actually help our cause if we gave Microsoft a 4% share of all the major Linux companies. Enough to benefit from the profit without being enough to give them control. When they see profit coming from it they'd be foolish to make any attacks and foolish not to grow their own market share by making their apps Linux compatible.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
i'd say the fact Corel ships a halfassed, not-fully-developed, debian-based linux distro is probably not the most alarming aspect of all this.
isn't Corel still suing Microsoft over DR DOS and such?
how, if at all will microsoft owning 4% of Corel affect the outcome of the lawsuit?
At least it's only 4%.. if it were any more you'd have to get really worried about the fact microsoft has a finger in both Word _and_ Wordperfect.
--ps: i agree with rob COMPLETELY about the rant attached to the article. every other story has at least one person whining "why was this rejected when I submitted it?", apparently oblivious to the fact nobody cares. It's probably about the fourth or fifth most irritating thing about slashdot, right behind the people complaining in every other story that the story was unworthy to have made Slashdot's front page. apparently continuing scrolling and not reading or clicking near the article was taking up too much of their time, but posting a comment and bitching was effortless.. apparently cdmrtaco has no right to litter their screens with a linux kernel upgrade announcement that they personally do not care about on slashdot's front page, yet they have the right to litter the screens of the people reading that announcement to announce they don't want to be reading the article they're replying to..--
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Forgive my foggy memory, but didn't Microsoft make some kind of promise to keep out of Unix stuff when they sold Xenix (?) to SCO? Perhaps Linux doesn't count since it's not 'officially' Unix?
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
"Oh, and one more thing:
:)
And we don't post any submission that contains the word Linux or Microsoft."
Hhhhmmmm....
It actually says "And we don't post any submission just because it contains the word Linux or Microsoft. " (emphasis added).
Does it make more sense now?
Cheers,
Tim
It's official. Most of you are morons.
- Someone submits something about nanotechnology. Roblimo, who is having a really bad day, reads it and thinks "aww f***ing great, ANOTHER f***ing nanobot story. I'll post it to f***ing
/dev/null". - A day later the same thing is submitted by someone else. Hemos reads and thinks "Nanos, COOL. I'll post it right away!"
- The original submitter feels somewhat frustrated.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I can understand why the original poster might be a little disappointed. Of course, any reasonable guy understands that this isn't an attack towards him by the theIt's a shame that something as trivial as Microsoft's accidental ownership of Corel/Inprise could generate news. Microsoft's payoff to Inprise is very old news indeed, for some of the same reasons that Microsoft paid off Apple. Who cares if Microsoft owns 4% of Corel? Nobody except the truly paranoid. Will it amount to much of anything? Absolutely not. And to the little poster who said that the DoJ would point to this as another instance of Microsoft trying to buy and suppress, get a life.
As far as the rant is concerned, it is equally pointless.
I would have thought that this was a good idea were it not for the fact that moderation of submissions could be pretty clueless. A lot of moderators aren't experts in a given field and therefore don't know the issues well enough to distinguish between insight and bullshit.
/. crew - they're certainly not experts in every field.
/. community would slaughter it with bad moderation until it disappeared again.
I put more faith in the community at large to evaluate the insightfulness of a story than the
Plus, you have the additional editorial nighmare that if a misleading article gets moderated through and the editors subsequently decide to reject it,then all hell of a flamewar would break loose.
The whole point is that the editors wouldn't have to do that - once it got out that the article was misleading, the
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
I was already frightened of Corel. This news does nothing to alleviate that fact. I wonder if Microsoft will attempt to rid itself of this holding. They continue to say that they have competition in the OS market due to linux. Now they own 4% of a company that's using linux to attempt to redefine their corporate strategy and markets? Doesn't make sense to me.
This is also a relatively minor complaint. /. is still probably the most up-to-date place on the net on most of the issues it covers -- but it could be even more so. If /. were able to work out a system whereby if a story is to be posted, it will actually be posted the first time it is submitted, /. would probably have a scoop (or close to it) on with about every story
Anyway, keep up the good work, Rob & co. We do love you (think of it as having 100,000 attentive mothers fussing over you and encouraging you to do what you can to improve :-)
========
+++For-pay Internet distributed processing.+++
<sig>Guvf vf abg n frperg zrffntr
Can't give geeknews.net credit. To find out what rob is bitching about click here.
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Microsoft owns a silent, non-voting share of Inprise last time I checked. They don't have anybody on the board, so they don't impact on Inprise/Corel's business decisions.
I think there are many more reasons to be skeptical about this (somewhat shady) merger, but they don't have to do with conspiracy theories. There's no reason at all why Corel (productivity/graphics company with a Linux distro targetted at beginners' desktops) needs to be in the same company with Inprise (tools/middleware company with upcoming Linux products targetted at high-end professional developers). There's just no fit there. But some folks figured it would make the two companies seem more credibly like "Linux companies" to some investors who are only looking at keywords, so they let it go through.
--JRZ
Am I missing somthing here, why was this posted along with this 'MS owns a part of Corel' story?
Why not just write an essay and post it seperately, or just post a comment the next time someone bitches?
Oh, and one more thing:
And we don't post any submission that contains the word Linux or Microsoft.
I had to read that like 4 times before it made any sense, you might want to change 'any' to 'all'. It looked like you would notPost a story at all if it included the words 'linux' or 'microsoft'. Witch didn't make to much sense to me...
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
The question you should be asking is How much of the NSA does Corel own
Those canucks have been wanting a piece of our National Security Agency for a long time, since they haven't been able to build there own shadow government worth shit. Now that Corel owns a part of the NSA, they can just use ours on the weekends or something. Plenty of time to disappear 'undesirables'
[ c h a d o k e r e ]
ReadThe ReflectionEngine, a cyberpunk style n
MS owns pieces of so many companies that this was bound to happen.
Please make an About Slashdot Section Give it a Slashbox as "Features" has. Let people submit items to it. Significant articles can be promoted to main page, just as "Ask Slashdot" does.
Then we can have discussions about our discussions system, rather than scattering these metadiscussions within the other articles. At least once a week we go off on a /. tangent in some unfortunate discussion. Save us from ourselves...
This'll be great. Now everytime Corel does something unpopular all of the idiots will be blaming it on MS's 4% ownership of Corel. Great fodder for all of the zealots out there.
What Fools These Mortals Be!
I've posted about 5 stories, one of them got
posted. I could have posted 20-30 stories and
not complaining about them being posted.
When you look at the amount of stories ahead
of you in the queue, it is given that the slashdot
-people may not even have the time to read every
one of them very carefully.
I run my own Linuxssite, in norwegian http://www.linuxguiden.org, and I don't post
every article submitted.
If I really don't think it is interesting to
the readers, I won't post it. It is as easy as that, and really the editors just has to make that choice.
That being said, I don't understand why this
ranting was put under one of the regular news.
Now I have written a comment to the ranting, that
people reading the news, might not be interested
in. It could be moderated down normally, but
the ranting made this posting legit.
Really...post all this ranting under different
headlines than other postings.
Ok, this'll get hammered mercilessly, but as Lando Calrissian once said.. here goes nothing:
Rob, you've been enormously successful with this site. You get million(s) of hits a day. And as your success grows, so does criticism.
You don't learn that studying algorithms and putting together nifty CGI movies, but either in management school (oh, the horror) or through personal experience - as people's attention to your action increases, so does negative coverage. I mean, what're trying to do here is noble; a weblog of matters relevant to a small subsection of the population. Yeah, I know - it's frightening, but the type of geeks we are is and never will be the majority - 'cause if Jon Katz's Hellmouth articles taught us anything, then it was that we're a minority. We were the strange outcasts in school. We were weird. Why? Because we were different from everybody else - yeah, that's right. Everybody else was a majority.
(Bear with me here, I'm getting to a point)
Now, you've created a site that caters to - supposedly - every geek's wet dream, a concoction of tech news, relevant media stuff, general assorted 'rights online' politically-related stories and everything else one could possibly ever care about. And here's the catch. How many stories do you post a day? Not more than a dozen or two. Selected from 400++ daily submissions. Who makes the selections? You do. Hemos does. Roblimo. Emmett. The rest of the gang. And most of those people are either friends of yours or share a fairly near-identical view of what's relevant. Of what's news for nerds. Of what is Stuff That Matters. However, a million page views or so a day to Slashdot is likely to attract the attention of say, 20% of people whose views are fairly different from your own. Of those 20%, perhaps half will fairly violently disagree with the comments attached to stories - and with the general mood of the discussions going on after the stories are posted. I know Slashdot caters to a wide audience, but maybe there're tens of thousands of people reading this, people we're commonly deriding as PHBs. What do they want to read about? Tech news. Stuff that's relevant to their jobs. Perhaps they're even interested in the 63k+ Windows2k bugs, and need to make strategic decisions on how to upgrade their systems. Maybe they care that StarOffice is now supported by Sun. Or that LinuxCare has a deal with Dell. Like that very subsection that we're deriding, another subsection is very dissatisfied when a story they're submitting isn't posted. Perhaps some of the people bitching are not old enough to understand the consequences of their actions. Perhaps they're just annoyed that their latest "M$ SUCKZ, D00D!" article was rejected and Slashdot instead posts something about "Research Institutions and Corporate Interests" - I mean, who carez, D00D? You're not giving any thought to the fact that Slashdot is probably one of the favourite places for script kiddies to go. Their juvenile sense for destruction can express itself in flaming away on the discussion threads. Finally a way for them to publically attract attention to their verbal skills. Finally a forum where their PEERS live. What many people don't figure out is that script kiddies often think that they're ELITE. Some of them may even quickly paste together a website mimicking Slashdot, to attract the same amount of peer attention that you, Rob, have done. So people worship them in the same sense that Rob has become an OSS hero and icon of geeks worldwide. Who became a multimillionaire (Andover money + stock options + VA Linux stock options == lots of AIBOs) simply by turning his hobby into his job. Who wouldn't want to become rich and famous by writing a web page? The complexity of the behind-the-scenes work necessary for Slashdot seems to be lost on many of them, though. Which is why you're in the limelight, Rob. Your work isn't appreciated. You are admired and hated at the same time. The time people spent honing their '$ winnuke www.microsoft.com' skills wasn't used to acquire any social skills. On the internet, people will flame if they dislike who you are, and what you stand for.
Please Rob - don't be amazed and rant at people complaining about story submissions. Slashdot has become increasingly pro-Linux, anti-MS, pro-Libertarian, anti-Responsibility ("don't like that piece of software? hack it yourself!"), and unpalatable for many people. I still like it, but many others don't. Just please don't rant at the reactions caused by the creation of your own hands. It's become very, very big - and all that's missing is the 'Caveat Emptor' banner over the main page.
Finally - in the 'Ask Rob and Hemos anything' interview a while ago, people asked why the story submission queue wasn't opened up for moderation. You guys answered that you didn't really know what the person meant. To clarify: Have a separate page, or possibly even a very very long slashbox, where people can see all the stories currently in the submission queue. People with moderation points (that means more moderators) can then give moderation points to a story. Once the story reaches a certain number of points, it gets moved onto the front page. People can then set their 'threshold' for front page stories, and moderators can still give stories points, so I can for instance decide that I only want to see stories that received 20+ points, etc. Similarly, it's still possible to filter out stories that are on a certain subject - so I can still killfile Apache stories, or FreeBSD stuff.
The result? A truly open source forum. Won't happen, though.
Anyway, here's the end of my offtopic troll flamebait rant. It's really not an ad hominem attack against Rob or anyone else in particular. However, once you reach a certain status/fame, you're subject to attacks by 'lesser' people - as ESR's 'take my job, please' rant once attested.
int end_of_rant();
Alex T-B
While the gist of what you're saying is true, you draw the wrong conclusions. Yes, Rob and Hemos and the rest can do whatever they want with this site, and part of that omnipotence includes allowing or forbidding people from using the site in ways they don't appreciate. They have set up a system where the community gives back its feedback, and if they don't like the feedback then they can change the system.
It's one thing to say: "Hey, we don't think you understand all the effort we put into this site, and we think that you'd realize we're being fair if you did." It's another to complain about people's audacity for "talking back", which is what the site is about in the first place. And the proper place for Rob's rant is not to be attached to this unrelated story but either in its own story, attached to the form you get when you submit a story, or ideally both.
As for the animated oompa loompas, there might be some copyright issues to be worked out first with the Wonka candy company, unless VA Linux is buying them out next. Hey, you never know.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
This is true. MS's investment in Inprise was part of a settlement of the lawsuit Inprise filed against MS for stealing their developers.
I think there are many more reasons to be skeptical about this (somewhat shady) merger
I'm curious if you could elaborate on what you consider "shady" about the deal.
here's no reason at all why Corel (productivity/graphics company with a Linux distro targetted at beginners' desktops) needs to be in the same company with Inprise (tools/middleware company with upcoming Linux products targetted at high-end professional developers). There's just no fit there.
Sure there is... let me try to set it out the way I see it... (bear with me, I'm thinking this through as I go...)
- What Corel brings: name brand office suite, desktop-oriented Linux distribution, high-end graphics apps
- What Inprise brings: open source database (Interbase), app server, developers tools
While they may not "need" to be in the same company, I think combining them makes sense, because:- Inprise's developer tools will be building apps for Linux desktops. Corel is shooting for the Linux desktop market, so it makes sense that they'd want Inprise's developer tools to be "optimized" for Corel's distro.
- Corel/Inprise is in the position to provide a total package to a small business. They have a desktop OS, a database, an app server, a server OS, and an office suite... all of which will presumably be designed to work well together.
The way I see it, Corel/Inprise has about six months to a year to get their act together... when MS starts dropping support for NT 4.x, small businesses currently using NT 4.x will have to upgrade. If they're a really small business (i.e. too small for a full-time sysadmin), then a complete package like what Corel/Inprise can deliver is about their only alternative to Win2000. Further, it could be a very compelling alternative, since it'll be a lot cheaper (both outright, and due to the fact that the hardware won't have to be upgraded as well).So basically, Corel is shooting for the business/consumer desktop, and Inprise helps them on both fronts, and doesn't hurt them anywhere. About the only negative to the whole deal I see is Cowpland.
--
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
I know this comment is waaay too late to effect any changes, or affect any opinion...
/., I have no feedback on my performance - is the article too wordy, too long, not well written, need more info... what? I will never know. I have seen articles posted that were all of the above, yet still make it. I have tried to keep my articles of a moderate length, well written, and mostly informed (although a recent submission better be rejected - because it only shows that I am clueless - hah! Bet it is the one accepted!).
I have submitted a few stories, and always have had them rejected. Sometimes, the next day they have posted the "story", but it was someone else's article. I have gotten upset, sometimes posting OT rants in the article comments anout why I was rejected (and been subsequently moderated down for trolling). I haven't ever vented my frustration via a web page, feeling that was not worth mine or anyone else's time.
I have always wondered, though, why my article submissions were rejected. Unlike the rest of
Now, when I submit an article, I don't get too bent if it isn't accepted, or if someone else "preempts" me with a similar article that is accepted. I merely nod, and go on with life, noting that someone else got there first, and people will still see what I found important as well, and that is what matters in the end.
Still, I wish there was a way that I could see why my submissions failed, so I could strive to make future submissions better. A simple one or two word feedback would be a good start - in fact, with the number of submissions coming in, and the number that HAS to be rejected, leaving those few remaining - perhaps a one or two word feedback on the article, somewhere in the user prefs area so we could check it easily, would be a good way to start.
I am thinking something similar to moderation comments (such as "Troll", "Flamebait", "Informative" - but with a feedback bent: "Too wordy", "More info", "Accepted - Informative")...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Here
Contemplate the idea of having a soft-toy penguin sitting atop your monitor with the words: "Microsoft Linux" printed on it's breast.
:)
Probably the kind of thing Linus T. has nightmares about
At most newspapers, press releases comprise a majority of the mail that floods in every day.
Many editors just throw these away, as most of them are trash anyway.
It's an editor's privilige use news judgement and throw out anything that doesn't work.
A "wall of shame" might work to discourage annoying complaints. Every day, just post the most annoying letter you get to the wall, with your editorial comments.
Intersting. I just installed Corel linux today. The only real snag I ran into was after the install was complete(took less time than yesterday's 2000 installs at work), it wouldn't let me eject the CD out of the drive, and it gave me some cryptic error. rebooted manually, and I was on my way. Just wish i had pico so I could edit samba(wow, I only spent like 3 minutes on samba, and it for the most part works, just need to add permissions). Video didn't even puke. I was amazed. This seems to be a lot better than RH 6.1
What he meant was "We don't post just any submissions with the word 'Linux' or 'Microsoft." (or another way of phrasing it: "We don't post all submissions with the word 'Linux' or 'Microsoft.")
Hail The Taco!
This "story" by CmdrTaco is certainly one of the weirdest I've seen in a while. 10% investment advice and 90% very personally taken _off-topic_ rant justifying rejected submissions.
Or is the rant really off-topic?
As it happens, another - and 100% Linux and Slashdot-related - investment story has been posted to both Linux Weekly News (2/17) and Linux Today (2/19). (Would these be "cheesy little websites with the word "Linux" that CmdrTaco was referring to in his rant?) The story these other two Linux news sites posted was based on an article in the Financial Observer titled "The Latest Rip-offs From Dot-Com Land" and it cast Slashdot's former and current owners in rather bad light. Yes, it was about investing.
"One of the most cynical deals recently involves the merger of two software companies trying to cash in on the Linux operating system craze: Andover.net Inc. of Acton, Mass., and VA Linux Systems Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif.-which went public within 24 hours of each other back in early December. Less than eight weeks later, on Feb. 3, the two companies announced a stock-for-stock merger..."
"As for investors in VA Linux, they are getting hosed... the only really valuable asset Andover.net ever had - it's cash from the I.P.O.-was creamed off by the company's insiders almost the very instant they got their hands on it, leaving VA Linux's shareholders to face a 100 percent increase in the float of their own stock for the privilege of winding up with the worthless trash that the Andover.net bunch dumped at the very first opportunity."
Now, this story with IMO considerable relevance to Slashdot readers (not only because these companies own Slashdot and made her founders very wealthy, but also because so many stories were posted here in the past plugging these companies and their IPO) was certainly submitted a number of times but it's getting rejected while another story about MS having owning 10% of Inprise now ends up with 4% of Corel passes the submission filters.
Call me cynical and a conspiracy theorist but I find it hard to believe that CmdrTaco finds the posted story more interesting or relevant to himself and his audience than the one rejected.
Feel free to moderate this down down down.
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
kuro5hin.org (corrosion) lets readers moderate the submission queue. It's really neat to see it in action for the first time, (log in as a user, then go to "moderate submissions).
As a matter of fact, the website owner hasn't been in town for half the week, and good stories are still making it to the front page. Truly a very interesting website.
--Robert
Indeed. In fact, this is probably a Good Thing(TM). Seriously, MS can't expect to have a great deal of input into the project. However, what if Good Things(TM) were to somehow to drift from MS over to the project? DirectX being a good example. No, really, there's no need to worry. Really. I wonder though, how long before we DO see MS Linux? Mong. ...Student, Artist, Techie - Geek *
* Paul Madley
*...Slacker, Artist, Techie - Geek *
Remember: Nothing is Cool.
Were the conversation really veered off topic was at Aboutlinux not Slashdot. Rob also has the decency to label his rant as such. He even has the decency to invite the reader to skip his diatrabe.
And this is news because what? Microsoft acquires another part of another company? (Yes, I AM JOKING). I'm so hurt my website www.linuxandabandofmonekys.com wasn't posted. We're going to IPO next week!
You stated "We don't post any submissions with the word 'Linux' or 'Microsoft.'"
So where do all the MS/Linux stories come from? Were they submitted without mentioning the forbidden words?
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
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Nicotine free Amish .sig.
This would result in alleviating several problems:
1. The workload on Hemos, Taco, and the others would decrease. Right now, they have to wade through 3000+ submissions a week. Imagine how many of those are _duplicates_. This number would be greatly decreased if the topics had been extensively picked over and streamlined by the time they got to them.
2. Because of this increase in efficiency, more daily stories could be posted. I think it would be great to see 20 or more new stories in a day, instead of a dozen or so. With the current model of story selection, 20 stories a day would mean really, really long workdays for the
2. This degree of participation in Slashdot would be a nice extension of the already significantly democratic nature of the place. I know I would be intersted in contributing more to the selection of stories - wouldn't you?
Remember, in The Cathederal and the Bazaar, what Eric Raymond said about the "Delphi Effect?"
He said:
It will work.
-chris
.
Just another step closer to MS-Linux. :(
And a side-note, we love you really Rob. It's just.. so many readers, so many page hits.. it's not like you couldn't afford to post a couple more articles each day. Reply if you want. :)
The subject of this article looked like "Microsoft Will Own Part of Core!"
Too bad I read it wrong, I figured *that* was the reason core kept dumping on me.
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
Pablo Nevares, "the freshmaker".
First and foremost, lemme say Thank God that it wasn't Hemos that made that rant. Then, not only would I have to put up with all the bitching ABOUT the rant, but also that bitching about the SPELLING in the rant.
I'd like to take this time (and waste this karma) to say a few things I've been keeping to myself, trying not to flame while browsing the archives of Slashdot.
If you don't care, just skip below and start reading comments.
That should have been just enough to shut the lot of you up, yet it still wasn't. Oh well, some people have nothing better to do than bitch. I know I'm not setting a shining example, but I'm tired of having to wade through the "anti-Slashdot" crap attached to every fucking article. Get over yourselves. If you don't like it, leave, or do it yourself.
Not even worth two cents,
Later...
Ignore Alien Orders
I would have thought that this was a good idea were it not for the fact that moderation of submissions could be pretty clueless. A lot of moderators aren't experts in a given field and therefore don't know the issues well enough to distinguish between insight and bullshit.
Plus, you have the additional editorial nighmare that if a misleading article gets moderated through and the editors subsequently decide to reject it,then all hell of a flamewar would break loose.
In general, I think the Slashdot editors do a damn fine job. They can't please everybody all the time, but when I see an article I'm not interested in the I simply ignore it rather than complaining.
People who get stressed about the editorial policy of a light-hearted geek news site really should get a life.
By itself, this is pretty meaningless. However, if Microsoft winds up pursuing this as a larger strategy, it could wind up being very significant. There are similarities between that sort of strategy and Microsoft's method of dealing with Apple. Microsoft has to make certain that competitors are on the market to alleviate concerns about a MS monopoly... if they can make sure that they'll be making a modest profit from their competitors' business, as they did with Apple, it strengthens their overall position.
From article, Conversion
Each share of Series C Stock is convertible, at the option of the holder, after the satisfaction of a two year holding period or upon liquidation of the Company, into fully paid and non-assessable shares of Common Stock based upon a fixed conversion ratio. The conversion ratio is subject to certain adjustments, stock splits or other capital reorganizations.
Non-assessable, I believe, means that it is held in trust and not votable. I could be wrong here, but I am VERY vertain thait this is not they case. My estimates of the value of the the Microsoft "investment" is 12%. Given that the investment was ONLY $25m, it seams unlikely that Inprise would give out such large chunks of the company for SO little money. I don't think that the deal gives Microsoft everything. Additionally, reserving that many shares for convertion doesn't mean that that is the conversion ratio. It could be 10:1 even with 10,000:1 reserved... reserved != issued
Like every other deal that involves a lawsuit, a "fair value" amount is assigned to the IP, and what should be punitive damages becomes an "investment" in non-voting preferred stock.
Non voting stock in this case is nearly worthless. If the company goes bankrupt, preferred stock members receive claims to the liquidation before common stock holders, for tech companies, BFD. Additionally, most preferred stock (traditionally) included guaranteed dividends and they were to be paid before any common stock paid dividends. Now, with low capital gains tax rates, dividends rarely exist. Additionally, this "investment" probably didn't include any dividend rights. It may not even involve liquidation claims.
Microsoft does NOT really own any of Corel/Inprise, nor does it REALLY own any of Apple. This is a way of settling law suits off the books.
The reason for this has to do with accounting practices. IANAA (I am not an accountant), but as I understand corporate finance, everything has to go on the books somewhere. The settlement for IP can go on the books as an asset, the technology rights. However, if it were overpriced, it would be fraudulent accounting. The rest can go in as an asset now, because it represents ownership of sorts. This allows companies to settle court cases without screwing up their books. On paper, Microsoft didn't "lose" $25 million, they spent $25m to get $25m in assets. I don't know how companies handle punitive damages from lawsuits. My guess is that it shows up as a loss, which isn't good.
This way, Inprise and Microsoft's balance sheets are unchanged (cash assets -> other assets) which is good for Microsoft an encourages them to settle. It is good for Inprise because as an investment, it isn't subject to taxes (to my knowledge). Microsoft's cash flow drops, Inprise's rises. For a real business, cash flow is MUCH more important than the balance sheet. The balance sheet affects taxes and corporate reports, cash flow affects the ability to conduct business.
Alex
So I'm just waiting to see when Microsoft turns around with a product to directly compete against Inprise's product, and suffocate them with their already powerful stranglehold on the market.
Hay Taco, If you want to rant about something.. why don't you just rant about something. Sticking it in with a completely unrelated Microsoft post is really really lame man.
On a related note... I think you'll see more and more of MS getting into the Linux game. They have everything to gain and nothing to loose. Anyone with their eyes open can look around and see that there is money in dem dar hills. A fabulous source of NEW money even.
They are a threat to free speech and must be silenced! - Andrea Chen
Fish! LipHo
Why is it that some moderators are such asses (and please note, that "some" is perhaps just one a week) about having their opinions become part of unrelated articles on Slashdot? Last week Slashdot posted about 75 stories and two of them contained offtopic opinions in the article. So why is it that sometimes when someone gets the ability to write an article, they have to go attack Slashdot users? It becomes a conspiracy: favoritism, Rob not caring, Slashdot really sucking these days, the list goes on and on, but it never mentions the real reason.
The fact is that posters are allowed to post their opinions, just like the authors. The moderators can only moderate down a fraction of all submissions. But they can't moderate down any submission that comes from the Author of the article. Just because a user can't understand why Slashdot rejected a submission doesn't mean there was a reason, it just means that when it was submitted, no one felt like posting it. |Everyone want Slashdot to be a fun mix: stuff that matters. Legos? Linux? Black Holes? Nanotech? If Slashdot was all serious, many of us wouldn't enjoy reading it or posting to it.
But I see articles all over with these childish little notes on them: "Why is it that some people are such asses...)".
The personal attacks get old Taco; they hurt because we all work so hard making Slashdot happen each day... and attacking us because we didn't agree with your attitude doesn't make our visits filled with joy.
And that's why I like Jon Katz. If he wants to rant he does it in a separate article. He doesn't subvert a decent piece of news like a Grits poster.
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No Zen is good zen
Well, we already have RMS-Linux (aka GNU/Linux), so why not MS-Linux?
Uh well maybe not but I really don't see any significance in this.
This migth be a bad thing for wine though
We should have all seen this coming. What with all these companies participating in the wild orgy of mergers, somebody was going to get into trouble.
And look what happened: Corel carelessly hooked up with Imprise and less than one month into the affair, we find out it's contracted M$.
This is not the carefree "free merger" days! Today there are many incorporation-transmitted diseases,and with the debilitating M$ at an all time high, no company should merge without proper protection.
<I>and now i'm going to have to search through comments pertaining to rob's rant</I>
And now that you have had your post about Rob's rant moderated to +4 I will not only have to search through your post but also through other post ranting about the abondance of post about Rob's rant.
Anyway, if this (or a similar post) get moderated up I may also have to go through posts ranting about having to go through post ranting about going through post talking about Rob's rant, which probably will provoke somebody to post a rant about going through... Looks like an infinite loop
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
In other words, a minority stake in the company, not enough to "rule the world", so lets not hype this to be more than it is worth, ok /.'ers ?
-- Just the FAQs Ma'am.
With all the rumblings of MS looking and taking serious the Linux threat, and Corel's annoucement of Linux being a big part of their future, the real question becomes...
Will they keep that 4% share?
Right on, good sir. I'm newish to this site, and I think it's downright silly to complain that your story didn't get accepted! I LOVE this site! There is no doubt in my mind that the people who run this site are just very cool. I mean, seriously, what kind of axe could any of our friendly editors have to grind with any posters? It's nothing personal to y'all - jd already hit that by pointing out the slim odds of getting a post accepted. Let's just have fun, and talk about stuff that matters. That's what we're all about, eh?
"The world doesn't really need more busy people, maybe not even more intelligent people. It needs 'deep people'..." -Don Postema"
"The world doesn't really need more busy people, maybe not even more intelligent people. It needs 'deep people'..."