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Postcard From Linuxbierwanderung 2000
Martin Ling writes: "The Linuxbierwanderung 2000 , at Coniston in the UK's Lake District, is currently in full swing. There is an ongoing live site with pictures and a diary, including details of our Beowulf projects. And of course, there's a webcam. Events have included talks on SETI & radio astronomy, wearable computing, and a trip to the Sellafield nuclear plant. Oh, and that whole lot in the village hall is running through one 33.6kbps modem .... Emails to this address should get through, and I will print them on the notice board."
Am I the only one who gets a little jealous when we see all these stories about people going to all these Linux conferences? I never hear about them until after or just before they happen. Is there a site that has information on when where and what the focus of each of the Linux conferences are?
Better yet is there a way we geeks who don't live in cities that don't have these conferences can band together and go in hoards (is that the right term for a group of geeks?) of geeks? Perhaps if we were organized in groups we could save a few $ on airplane and hotel rooms. Someone could probably even make a few $ of they organized these trips and sold them and found some customers.
This is offtopic and deserves to me moderated down. I just felt that it needed to be said.
I am deeply saddened by the increasingly low quality of the trolls and offtopic posts on Slashdot. It seems like an eternity since the golden age of Slashdot trolls. That was the time before Trollmastah had retired and before the lameness filter had been implemented, which pretty much killed off Oog. People try to raise Oog from the dead, but it just ain't happening. I remember when osm was still posting about "Open-sourced copyrighted undistributable Natalie Portman and Drew Barrymore naked and petrified" or some such nonsense, which were actually really funny at the time. I remember the days before osm's fake legal trouble, which pretty much marked the end of his posting on Slashdot, when he would post new, hillarious Natalie Portman fantasies on what seemed like a pretty regular basis. There were others, of course, but my mind is getting weak in my old age.
These days, though, it seems like we've entered a dark age for those of us who set our thresholds to -1. If one ventures into the nether regions of Slashdot now, what do they see? Shit like the parent post, and "30 Ways To Be Offensive At A Funeral," and (God help us) the Beer Guy, whose idiotic spamming alone provides a good reason to browse at 0 or 1. Where have all the great ones gone?
There is some hope for the future of trolls on Slashdot, though. People like Anti Porn and osg have recently shown me that trolling is not an entirely lost art. But they alone cannot save Slashdot. Already, the spamming is so bad that it actually requires effort to find the diamonds in the rough. Clearly, a solution must be found soon, or the -1 region of Slashdot will be lost to us forever.
Dear Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda,
As a loyal reader of Slashdot, I am growing more and more irritated with the constant spam that has deluded the site in the past month or so. I like to read at a threshold of -1 to see all the posts with low moderations -- some of them simply went against Slashdot popular opinion, or are humorous, intelligent trolls that are worth
Most of the spam posts simply regurgitate the same text over and over... for example, the "Napster and Google Sued" and "The Facts" [ZikZak conspiracy] posts show up several times on every story. Given that several "lameness filters" are in any place, it would be easy to institute a filter that simply blocks posts with those message bodies. Alternately, if all of these posts are originally from a certain IP, that IP could simply be banned from Slashdot. Please consider both of these alternatives.
I realize that censoring users may go against the ideals of Slashdot. However, the intelligent posters and "true" trolls are already being censored -- their voices are being drowned out by the idiot(s) who post the same offtopic posts on every single story. And no one will miss the MDMA guy and his idiot friends.
A few attention-starved morons should not be allowed to hijack a popular website and drive out all the other readers. Please don't let the spam epidemic overrun Slashdot -- a few simple filters or bans would solve the problem, and it's high time they were instituted.
Sincerely,
The loyal /. readership
There's still a bunch of us planning on an April Linux bike trip from Versailles to Chinon to Bordeaux, with Wine, Women, CyberCafes, and Linux. Pricing folding bikes and checking with friends who have contacts in France so we can do the CyberCafe tour.
Will in Seattle