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An Inside Look at Venture Capitalists
Christopher Thomas writes: "IEEE Spectrum has a scathing review of venture capitalists this month. Authors Nick Tredennick and Brion Shimamoto paint a devastatingly cynical picture of venture capitalism from the engineers' perspective." Funny to read, but probably 100% accurate. Wow.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
Anyone know more about these guys and why they're so hostile towards capitalism? Any communist connections?
And on the seventh day, God went crapflooding.
What's the widest subject that still passes the lame filter?
I and J should be avoided, W is your friend.
Like this?
That's great.
Hey, I think I'm back to -1 now.
No, you're not. Keep trying.
Great idea. I think I'll do that.
Some suckers are already busy moderating in this thread. They'll be there to help you soon, I guess.
One can hope so anyway.
Yeah, wouldn't it be terrible if moderators neglected their duties?
The end of the world.
Here's some crap to make the thread longer!
Moderator food.
Moderators are falling behind. Quick, suckers, catch up!
I think they're all asleep.
Note to moderators: You're all goat-raping child fuckers. Please moderate this as flamebait.
Or busy fucking each other in the ass.
In all societies, individuals have introduced foreign bodies into the rectum, penis, and vagina, sometimes for sexual gratification and sometimes for unusual psychological reasons. The literature contains many reports of such instances, particularly with respect to foreign bodies in the rectum. Objects reported include stones, coke bottles, plastic vibrators, pencils, sticks, a baseball, knives, screwdrivers, the U-bend of a sink, a sponge rubber ball, glass tumblers, a pickle bottle, and a beer glass. This case report adds to the list a 100-watt electric bulb, an object not previously reported, and describes the technique used for the successful removal of this fragile object. A 54-year-old man presented with the complaint that two days earlier he had drunk whiskey and "did something" to his rectum. He was obviously embarrassed and reluctant to explain his problem. Rectal examination revealed a hard, smooth, globular mass. The results of the rest of the physical examination were within normal limits. When asked specifically, the patient admitted that an electric bulb had been in his rectum for two days. He said he had gotten drunk, accepted a wager of $100 and, using shaving cream as a lubricant, had inserted a 100-watt electric bulb into his rectum. The next day, sober, he realized that he had done a "stupid" thing but believed that the bulb would come out unassisted. After two days he became aware of difficulty defacating, and when he began to experience difficulty urinating, he became frightened and sought medical help. AP and lateral films of the pelvis verified the location of the electric bulb in the rectum, and the patient was taken to the operating room. He was placed in a face-down position with his hips elevated. The buttocks were separated and held apart by a circular metal ring. With the aid of malleable retractors in the rectum, the electric bulb was visualized, but it was not possible to get a gloved finger over the maximum diameter of the bulb. Toy darts with suction cup ends were used to draw the electric bulb to the sphincter. After drying the glass surface of the bulb with ethyl ether swabs, we attempted to attach the suction cup end of the dart to the eletric bulb with cyanoacrylate cement. Four attempts of this maneuver were unsuccessful: the cement would not stick. The patient was then turned to the lithotomy position and another dart was successfully attached to the bulb without any glue, and the bulb was pulled to the sphincter. Three #24 Foley catheters with 30-cc terminal balloons were lubricated with mineral oil and passed over the maximum diameter of the bulb. The catheters were placed at the six, ten and two o'clock positions. Throughout this procedure, a steady pull was maintained on the attached dart. After it was verified by digital examination that the tips and balloons of the catheters were beyond the maximum diameter of the bulb, the balloons were inflated with 30 cc of water, and about 30 cc of mineral oil was injected into the rectum through a Foley catheter. A steady pull of about five pounds was applied to each catheter, and after about ten minutes the sphincter began to dilate and the bulb began to emerge. The electric bulb finally came out through the external sphincter with no further complications. Sigmoidoscopic examination showed no bleeding or other injury to the rectal mucosa. After 24 hours of observation, the patient returned home. The literature describes various methods that have been employed to retrieve foreign bodies from the rectum. Because this electric bulb was a large object (maximum diameter, 61 mm; length from metal end to top, 114 mm) made of fragile glass, special consideration had to be taken to avoid breakage that would have resulted in lacerations to the rectum and adjacent structures, with consequent complications. Ideally, the bulb should be removed intact from the rectum through the anus. If this is not possible, the abdomen must be opened and the bulb gently squeezed through the rectum and the anus, with great care taken to avoid injuring the rectum. Should this method be unsuccessful, the sigmoid colon must be opened and the bulb removed through the abdominal incision; however, opening the sigmoid colon is a very lenghy procedure with severe morbidity and a prolonged recovery period,, and this maneuver should be reserved as an extraordinary measure.
That's what they do.
guff.net
http://omni.bus.ed.ac.uk/~skk
Luc Stepniewski
riddley
The Indie Music Video Showcase
Rose Mary A. Lawrence
LinuxNews
Kracked.com
Power Users BBS
UnixOS2.org
Todd Martin
schweizr.com
Steven M. Wurster
The Dweebspeak Primer
Brian W Brock
Sean McPherson
Nashville Linux Users Group
Jeremy Lepel
Kluster Project
Cincinnati LUG
Simon
Gene McCulley
Jao's linux page
Craig J Constantine
4Tek Seek
Marko Samastur
Stephen Kapp
William Annis
Telirati Forum
Kalamazoo LUG
Net Weasel
Phillip Wong
Hans
grmbl productions
Gabriel Klyber
Landon Boyd
Linux Resources
Peter Gammie
Robert J. Hale III
Rogier Meurs
DiJ
-rb's home page
Matt Grommes
Fred Allen
Joacim Melin
University of Maryland LUG
James Mastros
ajam
Jeremiah Merkl
darke de Loup
Linux and PalmPilot programming
Kris Verbeeck
Chris Wyatt
Tower Electronics
The Linux Web
The Razor's Edge
Windows NT at Suite101.com
Nikhilino Online Systems
Slash.org
David Weinehall
Ray Curtis
Bryan
Shane Erno
Mike Roessing
EntityMUG
Robert Petty
Timothy Bowers
Michael
The Big O
Silicon Valley LUG
katie fitzpatrick
Tanya Huang
Tage Stabell-Kulo
David Espadas Valladares
Edward S. Marshall
Peter Favrholdt
Linux In The Cyberspace
www.bigmall.com
Sylvana & Hans
rubberchicken.org
Fang
www.sonicmedia.com
www.beersoft.net
Acidst0rm
Fabricio Chalub
/dev/kev
Everyone's Linux User Group (ELUG)
Chuga LUG
John McMahon
3 Clicks
News Trolls
Obscura!
OpeDog
Bernard M. Piller
Wilhelm Person
UK training directory
AstroGeek.net
www.haagen-dazs.org
Href Links
Windows Sucks
The Linux Revolution
Ian Harrison
FrogBert
Morphine.com
www.killing-floor.com
Technotronic.com
Dylan X. Kelly
OD
Templates.com
Katja Laakso
Nick 'Zaf' Clifford
www.bennyvision.com
Daniel F. Fraga
WiredX.net
Chris Randall
Rupinder S. Sahsi
Samuel Tan
Ann Arbor 2600
http://rushlimbaugh.org/
Omnispace
linuxline.org
Christopher Schulte
Christine
David Thomas
David Thomas 2
geekbits.com
Nerd Hero
Emil Ong
Ron E. Nelson
Emulators Unlimited
Mark Earnest
dsyates
Michael Gastright
Stephen Williams
www.bigredrockeater.com
The Afterlife
Andrew
Wonko
NewsMonster
Area Systems
Adrian Pearson Dunston
Akintayo Holder
Dengue
3D Inet Gamers Paradise
Muskie Mckay
News Pipeline
The csgeeks Homepage
Greg
Jojo's place
Arterial Design
Joshua L. Adelman
Mathew's Home Page
James Gosling
Swedish Chef
Greg
Josh
Daniel
Alvin P. Phillips
Hob - Java Spectrum Emulator
Geek Culture
Crap Sandwich
Sara Feustle
Jordan Otto
uroam.com
snickersnot
Team LiteStep.Org
Game Hacker
geeknews
Killware.com
urw.org
Peter Prior
SunHelp.org
Frederick M. Gallagher
Josh Reighley
LinuxLords.com
Wonder Geeks
Clockerz.net
Hashsnot
Jonathan Cantrell
BurningInk.com
HoserCam
Simplex
Elite Orbit
mezine.net
Keiron Liddle
Ron Hyntley
Jason Woodward
Steve's Life and Odd Theories
Udhay Shankar N
Drakar
Xane Havenstar
Redback
Game Downloads Online
Geekboys.org
Raphael Gray
Rotz Records
David P. Doan
Payne Stanifer
Graywerx
Linuxarama
Quest of the Unquietmind
About.com Internet Industry
Nathan Walp
katana666
CTRL-ALT-KULISH
David Lay
Hard-Core Security
Dean's Pleasure Emporium
allwrong.com
ipso.itgo
Caleb 15's Linux
Brian Dale Neeley
CGI Extremes
www.up2ng.com
Bob's Room
ReznoR Allied Technologies
Raging Russian
loothi
InfoSysSec
Orik
Herring
MemeSpace
MetaSystema.org
Raelin Firestorm
Ben Crowe
Mike Liska
!Vision
Bayou Linux
CodexM
smartstocks.com
Prontaiville
dotcomma
JameSmith.Com
David at Eeyore
nine9
Sixline Studios
Angkor
MertzWeb
The Fish-Zine
ismedia.org
The Seven Sages Project
Christian Schwingenschloegl
SinoNews Network
Jostein Hanken
frontwheeldrive
Benjamyn
Coolforums
Perriscope Ltd
ASA Linux
Snowware
LinuxShell.org
Jeff Smith
Bastard Azubis From Hell
Santosha's Portal
warped reality dot com
Royans K Tharakan
Something Awful
News.is.Free
psycholinux
UNIX Realm
Extreme Computing
Southside Web Services
Cory Wright
Linuxfantast
ColaLUG
TechRevolt
Jaçana
Netologist.com
Henrik Bjorkdahl
The Lizard Geek
Comp.cx
Jazz Alley XG Midis
Tom Hopkins
Jet City Orange
Ruby Is Canadian!
thesundancekid.org
the Netropolis Collective
Doorn Company
Kevin G. Austin
www.LanSystems.com
Manish Jethani
Computer Science House
www.codedistortion.com
Catalyst Recruiting
Herman Horsten
Leonid Mamtchenkov
Bit-Bucket.Net
www.vanheusden.com
www.tomorrowslinux.com
whatdot.net
BoycottVerizon.com
madpenguin.org
Cybrinx.com
BitLogic
Arius Kaufmann
Andrew Pierce
Satyajit Grover
Cyberia
FreD
German Salazar-Alvarez
the great and funkeriferous soze
Game Downloads Online
grafxzone
Sentinel Systems Internet Security
Teen Nerdz
Nemesis 404
Klaus Frahm
Digital Evil
Dennis Behrens
www.computernerd.com
Karma Space
PhysicsOfASquall
Kate Chapman
Tina "diffuze" Johnsson
Bort13
Benamation
The Mail Resource Center
hackerheaven
jake
Manuh's homepage
Digital Photography Review
Trracer
Gravitysucks.org
FuRaX
injunction.org
KPAC.org
Chaosnetwork
Julien Dubois
Rick R Roth
It's Linux Time!
Ed Miles
Bastard Operator From Hell
Gnometoaster
lucidpenguin.com
burntelectrons.com
Balázs Attila
Jason J. Gullickson
Highland Computing
Disclosed Information
Southwest (UK) Linux User Group
Sir Robin's home
All Free Stuff Page
DangerMedia Guild
RifeTech
Linux Questions
Brad's Page
SAQ
Bad Haiku
blj8.com
Planet Puck
TAkRIZ Interactive ltd.
Brutal News
pile of crap
bluesci.com
JesusGeeks.net
Andrew Sotzing
Brutal Honesty
exit55
Jesse McDougall
Joe Kiser
Future Technology News
TheGreenReaper
Mike Sweetser
Freedom Alliance
Jungo
Holy Crap, It's Late
drunkencomputing
Angel City Bombs
Cumberland Maryland Area Linux Users Group
Pinehead.com
Nonlight
ZErtA
grumpybat.net
Enchantek
ICPO
Team Coverage
toosa.net
Jon Masters
Dxs84
The Atmo3d Domain
KennySoft Linux
Doppleganger.org
AboutProgramming.cjb.net
NetSpade
searchspell
Cinu Chacko
Lord Blacklaw
Mutant.Net
Brain Scan Studios
Designs By Ryan
AboutLinux.cjb.net
The Black Pig
Free Intellectual Property Exchange
4ux Forums
MaximumLinux.org
Hair to Toes Nutrition
suburban
grahm sexton.net
The Saucepot Review
TrevisCorp
Herman Thrust
Batfive
Sagedev.net
machinepresence
The Gaufo Network
The LinTux Network
CyberForces Gaming Nation
Adsurdistan.org
airess.net
Teri Solow
The Grateful Net
GeekPages
Martin Deen
Formatted Backwards
ProBSD Networks
GrooveKitten
iCan
LinuxFreak
Steve Dobinson
Scott Paterson
Tom Parker
Domain of the InAnE
[2~motion]
playground
Information Brokers, Inc.
Nixweb
Spacefem's Planet
Cygnostik Industries
The Sad Truth
Rus.at
ScurvyDogs
GeekCraft
TexasGamers.com
Krakd.kom
OCMod.com
freegraymatter.com
vunerable.net
rayh.co.uk
Trilucid.com
Xkot.net
ReallyNiceJerk.com
Forum-For-Excellence.com
christianmeyer.net
The MUE Network
IT TechnoSphere.Net
www.search-report.org
Ethiopian News Headlines
Americandrone
The Spam Council of Oklahoma
guff.net
http://omni.bus.ed.ac.uk/~skk
Luc Stepniewski
riddley
The Indie Music Video Showcase
Rose Mary A. Lawrence
LinuxNews
Kracked.com
Power Users BBS
UnixOS2.org
Todd Martin
schweizr.com
Steven M. Wurster
The Dweebspeak Primer
Brian W Brock
Sean McPherson
Nashville Linux Users Group
Jeremy Lepel
Kluster Project
Cincinnati LUG
Simon
Gene McCulley
Jao's linux page
Craig J Constantine
4Tek Seek
Marko Samastur
Stephen Kapp
William Annis
Telirati Forum
Kalamazoo LUG
Net Weasel
Phillip Wong
Hans
grmbl productions
Gabriel Klyber
Landon Boyd
Linux Resources
Peter Gammie
Robert J. Hale III
Rogier Meurs
DiJ
-rb's home page
Matt Grommes
Fred Allen
Joacim Melin
University of Maryland LUG
James Mastros
ajam
Jeremiah Merkl
darke de Loup
Linux and PalmPilot programming
Kris Verbeeck
Chris Wyatt
Tower Electronics
The Linux Web
The Razor's Edge
Windows NT at Suite101.com
Nikhilino Online Systems
Slash.org
David Weinehall
Ray Curtis
Bryan
Shane Erno
Mike Roessing
EntityMUG
Robert Petty
Timothy Bowers
Michael
The Big O
Silicon Valley LUG
katie fitzpatrick
Tanya Huang
Tage Stabell-Kulo
David Espadas Valladares
Edward S. Marshall
Peter Favrholdt
Linux In The Cyberspace
www.bigmall.com
Sylvana & Hans
rubberchicken.org
Fang
www.sonicmedia.com
www.beersoft.net
Acidst0rm
Fabricio Chalub
/dev/kev
Everyone's Linux User Group (ELUG)
Chuga LUG
John McMahon
3 Clicks
News Trolls
Obscura!
OpeDog
Bernard M. Piller
Wilhelm Person
UK training directory
AstroGeek.net
www.haagen-dazs.org
Href Links
Windows Sucks
The Linux Revolution
Ian Harrison
FrogBert
Morphine.com
www.killing-floor.com
Technotronic.com
Dylan X. Kelly
OD
Templates.com
Katja Laakso
Nick 'Zaf' Clifford
www.bennyvision.com
Daniel F. Fraga
WiredX.net
Chris Randall
Rupinder S. Sahsi
Samuel Tan
Ann Arbor 2600
http://rushlimbaugh.org/
Omnispace
linuxline.org
Christopher Schulte
Christine
David Thomas
David Thomas 2
geekbits.com
Nerd Hero
Emil Ong
Ron E. Nelson
Emulators Unlimited
Mark Earnest
dsyates
Michael Gastright
Stephen Williams
www.bigredrockeater.com
The Afterlife
Andrew
Wonko
NewsMonster
Area Systems
Adrian Pearson Dunston
Akintayo Holder
Dengue
3D Inet Gamers Paradise
Muskie Mckay
News Pipeline
The csgeeks Homepage
Greg
Jojo's place
Arterial Design
Joshua L. Adelman
Mathew's Home Page
James Gosling
Swedish Chef
Greg
Josh
Daniel
Alvin P. Phillips
Hob - Java Spectrum Emulator
Geek Culture
Crap Sandwich
Sara Feustle
Jordan Otto
uroam.com
snickersnot
Team LiteStep.Org
Game Hacker
geeknews
Killware.com
urw.org
Peter Prior
SunHelp.org
Frederick M. Gallagher
Josh Reighley
LinuxLords.com
Wonder Geeks
Clockerz.net
Hashsnot
Jonathan Cantrell
BurningInk.com
HoserCam
Simplex
Elite Orbit
mezine.net
Keiron Liddle
Ron Hyntley
Jason Woodward
Steve's Life and Odd Theories
Udhay Shankar N
Drakar
Xane Havenstar
Redback
Game Downloads Online
Geekboys.org
Raphael Gray
Rotz Records
David P. Doan
Payne Stanifer
Graywerx
Linuxarama
Quest of the Unquietmind
About.com Internet Industry
Nathan Walp
katana666
CTRL-ALT-KULISH
David Lay
Hard-Core Security
Dean's Pleasure Emporium
allwrong.com
ipso.itgo
Caleb 15's Linux
Brian Dale Neeley
CGI Extremes
www.up2ng.com
Bob's Room
ReznoR Allied Technologies
Raging Russian
loothi
InfoSysSec
Orik
Herring
MemeSpace
MetaSystema.org
Raelin Firestorm
Ben Crowe
Mike Liska
!Vision
Bayou Linux
CodexM
smartstocks.com
Prontaiville
dotcomma
JameSmith.Com
David at Eeyore
nine9
Sixline Studios
Angkor
MertzWeb
The Fish-Zine
ismedia.org
The Seven Sages Project
Christian Schwingenschloegl
SinoNews Network
Jostein Hanken
frontwheeldrive
Benjamyn
Coolforums
Perriscope Ltd
ASA Linux
Snowware
LinuxShell.org
Jeff Smith
Bastard Azubis From Hell
Santosha's Portal
warped reality dot com
Royans K Tharakan
Something Awful
News.is.Free
psycholinux
UNIX Realm
Extreme Computing
Southside Web Services
Cory Wright
Linuxfantast
ColaLUG
TechRevolt
Jaçana
Netologist.com
Henrik Bjorkdahl
The Lizard Geek
Comp.cx
Jazz Alley XG Midis
Tom Hopkins
Jet City Orange
Ruby Is Canadian!
thesundancekid.org
the Netropolis Collective
Doorn Company
Kevin G. Austin
www.LanSystems.com
Manish Jethani
Computer Science House
www.codedistortion.com
Catalyst Recruiting
Herman Horsten
Leonid Mamtchenkov
Bit-Bucket.Net
www.vanheusden.com
www.tomorrowslinux.com
whatdot.net
BoycottVerizon.com
madpenguin.org
Cybrinx.com
BitLogic
Arius Kaufmann
Andrew Pierce
Satyajit Grover
Cyberia
FreD
German Salazar-Alvarez
the great and funkeriferous soze
Game Downloads Online
grafxzone
Sentinel Systems Internet Security
Teen Nerdz
Nemesis 404
Klaus Frahm
Digital Evil
Dennis Behrens
www.computernerd.com
Karma Space
PhysicsOfASquall
Kate Chapman
Tina "diffuze" Johnsson
Bort13
Benamation
The Mail Resource Center
hackerheaven
jake
Manuh's homepage
Digital Photography Review
Trracer
Gravitysucks.org
FuRaX
injunction.org
KPAC.org
Chaosnetwork
Julien Dubois
Rick R Roth
It's Linux Time!
Ed Miles
Bastard Operator From Hell
Gnometoaster
lucidpenguin.com
burntelectrons.com
Balázs Attila
Jason J. Gullickson
Highland Computing
Disclosed Information
Southwest (UK) Linux User Group
Sir Robin's home
All Free Stuff Page
DangerMedia Guild
RifeTech
Linux Questions
Brad's Page
SAQ
Bad Haiku
blj8.com
Planet Puck
TAkRIZ Interactive ltd.
Brutal News
pile of crap
bluesci.com
JesusGeeks.net
Andrew Sotzing
Brutal Honesty
exit55
Jesse McDougall
Joe Kiser
Future Technology News
TheGreenReaper
Mike Sweetser
Freedom Alliance
Jungo
Holy Crap, It's Late
drunkencomputing
Angel City Bombs
Cumberland Maryland Area Linux Users Group
Pinehead.com
Nonlight
ZErtA
grumpybat.net
Enchantek
ICPO
Team Coverage
toosa.net
Jon Masters
Dxs84
The Atmo3d Domain
KennySoft Linux
Doppleganger.org
AboutProgramming.cjb.net
NetSpade
searchspell
Cinu Chacko
Lord Blacklaw
Mutant.Net
Brain Scan Studios
Designs By Ryan
AboutLinux.cjb.net
The Black Pig
Free Intellectual Property Exchange
4ux Forums
MaximumLinux.org
Hair to Toes Nutrition
suburban
grahm sexton.net
The Saucepot Review
TrevisCorp
Herman Thrust
Batfive
Sagedev.net
machinepresence
The Gaufo Network
The LinTux Network
CyberForces Gaming Nation
Adsurdistan.org
airess.net
Teri Solow
The Grateful Net
GeekPages
Martin Deen
Formatted Backwards
ProBSD Networks
GrooveKitten
iCan
LinuxFreak
Steve Dobinson
Scott Paterson
Tom Parker
Domain of the InAnE
[2~motion]
playground
Information Brokers, Inc.
Nixweb
Spacefem's Planet
Cygnostik Industries
The Sad Truth
Rus.at
ScurvyDogs
GeekCraft
TexasGamers.com
Krakd.kom
OCMod.com
freegraymatter.com
vunerable.net
rayh.co.uk
Trilucid.com
Xkot.net
ReallyNiceJerk.com
Forum-For-Excellence.com
christianmeyer.net
The MUE Network
IT TechnoSphere.Net
www.search-report.org
Ethiopian News Headlines
Americandrone
The Spam Council of Oklahoma
The only time we ever delete comments is if the comment contains malformed HTML that is somehow causing Slashdot to fail to display properly. Comments are not deleted on the basis of content. At this point, however, it shouldn't be a big worry. The comment engine is reasonably bulletproof, and it's pretty tough to post a comment that breaks Netscape.
If you posted a comment and you don't see it now, it may have been moderated down below your threshold (see below). If you set your threshold to -1, you should be able to see it again.
Why did it take so long for my comment to appear?
If the system told you that your comment got submitted, it'll show up. Because of the way data gets cached in our system, it could take as much as ten or fifteen minutes (although it doesn't usually take that long).
What's up with "First Post" comments?
"First Post" comments are one of those odd little memetic hiccups that come out of nowhere and run amok. Basically, people with altogether far too much spare time sit and reload Slashdot, hoping that they will get the "First Post" in a discussion. This is one of those things that the moderation system was designed to clean up, and for the most part, it works. "First Post" comments usually get moderated down as off-topic almost instantly.
It seems like the quality of comment posts is declining. Are you doing anything about it?
We have a moderation system.
One of the unfortunate side-effects of the increasing popularity of Slashdot is that the number of trolls, flame-warriors and all-around lamers increases as well, and it only takes a relatively small number of them to make a lot of noise. Keeping this noise to a minimum is one of the primary goals of the moderation system (which is explained in detail elsewhere in this FAQ).
Since this system is essentially an experiment in trying to solve the problems inherent in mass communication, one would expect its success to be variable, and indeed, this is the case. Some days it works great, and some days it doesn't.
Moderation seems restrictive. Is it really necessary?
In short, yes.
As you might have noticed, Slashdot gets a lot of comments. Thousands a day. Tens of thousands a month. At any given time, the database holds 50,000+ comments. A single story might have a thousand replies- and let's be realistic: Not all of the comments are that great. In fact, some are down right terrible, but others are truly gems.
The moderation system is designed to sort the gems and the crap from the steady stream of information that flows through the pipe. And wherever possible, it tries to make the readers of the site take on the responsibility.
The goal is that each reader will be able to read Slashdot at a level that they find appropriate. The impatient can read nothing at all but the original stories. Some will only want to read the highest rated of comments, some will want to eliminate anonymous posts, and others will want to read every last drip of data, from the First Posts! to the spam. The system we've created here will make that happen. Or at least, it sure will try...
How about an NNTP news gateway?
;)
;)
;)
I'd love to, but there are several problems that complicate this: first is the time to program it. An NNTP gateway is definitely on the TO-DO list, but it's lower on the priority list then many other things. Second is advertising: Slashdot costs a lot to run each month, and our performance is measured in terms of dollars and pages. If we can figure out a way to put advertising (and don't worry, it'd be reasonably minimal) into the NNTP comments cleanly, we'd be all set. Finally, the moderation system really doesn't have a counterpart in NNTP.
So you put it all together and you have something that would be pretty nifty, but it has several problems. It'll happen someday, but not tomorrow.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
Have you considered rewriting Slashdot in C?
Since Slashdot is almost entirely database calls to MySQL and text parsing, Perl is the ideal language for it: the hefty work is handled by MySQL (which is already written in C++) and string processing is already Perl's forte. I doubt that we would get a worthwhile enough performance boost by rewriting the code in C to make it worth the effort. mod_perl precompiles and caches the Perl scripts anyway, so the overhead is not really that bad.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
Have you considered PHP?
I tried PHP briefly but rejected it in favor of Perl. This is in no way a criticism of PHP, I just knew Perl already and was quite in love with the language. This was several years ago, and I understand PHP has grown and matured greatly since I made this decision, so my guess is that the limitations and awkwardness that made it undesirable to me back then is largely gone. But at this point, we have a substantial code base all written in Perl, and the effort involved in rewriting it would be prohibitive. Besides, Perl is cool.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
How about a page for rejected or pending story submissions?
This is a frequently requested feature that has several variations that essentially have the same answer: Time and Abuse.
Time is a resource that we always lack, so anything that we do that increases the amount of time required to maintain Slashdot has to be weighed carefully. A good example is the existing submission monitoring functionality. The amount of email I got regarding rejected submissions more then doubled when I added notification. I'm afraid that a public forum for pending/rejected stories would simply complicate the life of our authors.
Abuse is much worse. We get hundreds of submissions a day: we don't need more submissions, we need better ones. A public forum that gets the kind of traffic we get tends to be abused (like, say, the Slashdot comments for example). We don't want to be deleting "First Posts" and "Natalie Portman" type trolls and spams from the submission bin: we're busy enough as is.
Appropriateness From there, we move to the many stories that are submitted which are very wrong for Slashdot. They are horribly off topic, or offensive, or just plain scary. Obituaries for people that aren't dead? Rants about events that never occurred? Random Conspiracy Theories? Bug reports? Feature requests? I don't want to propagate this stuff, and I'm afraid that another public forum for them would only make the problem worse. There is some stuff submitted that would make for a very interesting page, and maybe someday we'll implement that. But as it stands, the overhead and the potential for abuse is so high that we don't want to mess with it.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/21/00
How about giving us a reason for rejecting submissions?
This is a fair request. As it stands, people merely see "Rejected" or "Accepted". The reasons are simply left to their imagination. A simple reason like Offtopic, Boring, Badly Written, Repeat etc would go a long ways towards alleviating that problem. But again, this is more work for our authors: right now we delete 3000 submissions a week. Each takes a half a second to click a button. Even if this adds only 10 seconds of upkeep to each submission, that adds a full day of work each week! So, the answer is "someday".
Honestly, I don't think its a very good idea for another reason too: the amount of email I got regarding story submissions more then doubled when we added the note telling people if their story was rejected. When you have to say 'No' to 500 people a day, it's only logical that dozens of them will contest your decision. I'm afraid that if they have more data, they'll email even more ("What do you mean my story was boring, you bastard!") and my wrists can't handle that
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
How about allowing readers to directly administer the submissions bin?
Slashdot is a very open community; in the user comments our readers are free to say whatever they please. But we feel that the unique nature of Slashdot is largely because the contents of the homepage are determined by a handful of people.
I'm sure a very cool website could be developed based on the concept of allowing public voting to determine the content of the homepage, but that website wouldn't be "Slashdot". If we tried to do it "by committee" it would suffer from the same problem that most projects done by committee suffer from: it would get bland.
Let me put this another way: in the comments, any pro-Linux or anti-MS comment is probably gonna get rated up. Any time Microsoft does anything even slightly naughty, it gets submitted 50 times. Does that mean that it should be posted to the Slashdot homepage? For me personally, I don't want to read the "Bitch at Microsoft" website, but if ruled by popular consensus, Slashdot would very likely degenerate to this point. Since the days of Chips & Dips and the first days of Slashdot, my first goal has always been to post stories that I thought were interesting. I think a lot of people share my idea of interesting, and that's part of why Slashdot became successful.
Slashdot is an eclectic mix of stories maintained by a small group of people, but contributed to by anyone who wants to. I think that the personality and character of Slashdot is part of the fun and charm of the site, and I think it would suck to lose it. That's why the decision of what ends up on the homepage will continue to be determined by me, Hemos, and the rest of the guys.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
How about an AvantGo channel or some other PDA interface
There is one if you go to AvantGo, which basically uses the URL http://slashdot.org/palm, which is also the URL where the Slashdot clipping app gets its content, which can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.slashdot.org/pub/slashdot.pqa.
Answered by: CaptTofu
Last Modified: 12/01/00
How about a WAP Interface?
If you visit Slashdot with a WAP compliant browser, you should get a stripped down view of Slashdot designed for WAP. I wanted it to work on my 12x4 Qualcomm though, so it's pretty stripped down: no comments. Just headlines and stories.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
Getting the slashdot headlines by 'finger @www.slashdot.org' would be nice, don't you think?
You can accomplish the same thing by running wget or lynx --source on the RDF file.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
Slashdot should cache pages to prevent the Slashdot Effect!
Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date!
I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?
So the quick answer is: "Sure, caching would be neat." It would make things a lot easier when servers go down, but it's a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
Is is possible to have META tags that Slashdot looks for in a story link before allowing it to be submitted/posted? Many times a server can't handle the load of a Slashdotting. So can the site have tags to prevent it from being added to a Slashdot story?
Not inconceivable, but I don't really think it's worth the work. Most of the sites that are Slashdotted are prepared for it, and the sites that get smashed usually are caught completely off guard; they wouldn't know of this mysterious opt-out meta tag. (See also Caching Slashdot Stories).
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
It seems that many moderators, because of the way they read comments, (higher thresholds, older comments first), only see comments that are posted with a bonus, or have already been moderated up. Wouldn't it make more sense to require moderators to read at a threshold of 0 with newest comments first?
Yes, it would. This is something we're looking at, and may change. (Another possibility might be randomizing the order of comments or threads.) The problem is that we don't want to make moderating too much of a pain for anyone. This would result in fewer people being willing to moderate, and moderators not doing their job.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/19/00
Have you ever thought about hiding comment scores when people are moderating? It might help alleviate "Group Think."
Yes, this is another thing we've considered. The problem here is that moderators are also supposed to keep one another in check. If a moderator thinks something is rated too high, he or she can bring the score down. So, the effect it might have on "group think" might actually be neutralized if moderators aren't able to counter each other.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/19/00
I have a suggestion for improving moderation.
Please read the Comments & Moderation section before emailing any of us with your suggestion. The vast majority of suggestions I get are ideas that are already explained there. Of the remaining suggestions, most are ideas that I probably should put there. The thing that is typically forgotten is that the moderation system is a complicated collection of checks and balances designed to prevent abuse: almost every suggestion that winds up in my inbox, however well intended, opens up a hole for abuse.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
What about other moderation models such as those used by Kuro5hin, everything2, or advogato.org?
While it's interesting to see what other sites are doing, these sites don't have anywhere near the traffic that Slashdot does. In order to make it work on Slashdot's scale, any moderation system needs to be efficient enough that we can apply it without grinding our servers to a halt. The system we have now, while not perfect, is the best thing we've seen for the scale we're working on. We're always looking for ways to improve it, and when we find them we'll implement them, but for now we'll stick with what we've got.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/19/00
Will some of the subsections spin off as sites in their own right? For example, it would be cool if the YRO section were to hit dead tree form in some way like soon. It's too important to remain outside the radars of 9-5ers in Pleasantville.
There are no formal plans at this time, but it's something we're thinking seriously about.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
How about an NNTP news gateway?
I'd love to, but there are several problems that complicate this: first is the time to program it. An NNTP gateway is definitely on the TO-DO list, but it's lower on the priority list then many other things. Second is advertising: Slashdot costs a lot to run each month, and our performance is measured in terms of dollars and pages. If we can figure out a way to put advertising (and don't worry, it'd be reasonably minimal) into the NNTP comments cleanly, we'd be all set. Finally, the moderation system really doesn't have a counterpart in NNTP.
So you put it all together and you have something that would be pretty nifty, but it has several problems. It'll happen someday, but not tomorrow.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
Have you considered rewriting Slashdot in C?
Since Slashdot is almost entirely database calls to MySQL and text parsing, Perl is the ideal language for it: the hefty work is handled by MySQL (which is already written in C++) and string processing is already Perl's forte. I doubt that we would get a worthwhile enough performance boost by rewriting the code in C to make it worth the effort. mod_perl precompiles and caches the Perl scripts anyway, so the overhead is not really that bad.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
Have you considered PHP?
I tried PHP briefly but rejected it in favor of Perl. This is in no way a criticism of PHP, I just knew Perl already and was quite in love with the language. This was several years ago, and I understand PHP has grown and matured greatly since I made this decision, so my guess is that the limitations and awkwardness that made it undesirable to me back then is largely gone. But at this point, we have a substantial code base all written in Perl, and the effort involved in rewriting it would be prohibitive. Besides, Perl is cool.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
How about a page for rejected or pending story submissions?
This is a frequently requested feature that has several variations that essentially have the same answer: Time and Abuse.
Time is a resource that we always lack, so anything that we do that increases the amount of time required to maintain Slashdot has to be weighed carefully. A good example is the existing submission monitoring functionality. The amount of email I got regarding rejected submissions more then doubled when I added notification. I'm afraid that a public forum for pending/rejected stories would simply complicate the life of our authors.
Abuse is much worse. We get hundreds of submissions a day: we don't need more submissions, we need better ones. A public forum that gets the kind of traffic we get tends to be abused (like, say, the Slashdot comments for example). We don't want to be deleting "First Posts" and "Natalie Portman" type trolls and spams from the submission bin: we're busy enough as is.
Appropriateness From there, we move to the many stories that are submitted which are very wrong for Slashdot. They are horribly off topic, or offensive, or just plain scary. Obituaries for people that aren't dead? Rants about events that never occurred? Random Conspiracy Theories? Bug reports? Feature requests? I don't want to propagate this stuff, and I'm afraid that another public forum for them would only make the problem worse. There is some stuff submitted that would make for a very interesting page, and maybe someday we'll implement that. But as it stands, the overhead and the potential for abuse is so high that we don't want to mess with it.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/21/00
How about giving us a reason for rejecting submissions?
This is a fair request. As it stands, people merely see "Rejected" or "Accepted". The reasons are simply left to their imagination. A simple reason like Offtopic, Boring, Badly Written, Repeat etc would go a long ways towards alleviating that problem. But again, this is more work for our authors: right now we delete 3000 submissions a week. Each takes a half a second to click a button. Even if this adds only 10 seconds of upkeep to each submission, that adds a full day of work each week! So, the answer is "someday".
Honestly, I don't think its a very good idea for another reason too: the amount of email I got regarding story submissions more then doubled when we added the note telling people if their story was rejected. When you have to say 'No' to 500 people a day, it's only logical that dozens of them will contest your decision. I'm afraid that if they have more data, they'll email even more ("What do you mean my story was boring, you bastard!") and my wrists can't handle that
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
How about allowing readers to directly administer the submissions bin?
Slashdot is a very open community; in the user comments our readers are free to say whatever they please. But we feel that the unique nature of Slashdot is largely because the contents of the homepage are determined by a handful of people.
I'm sure a very cool website could be developed based on the concept of allowing public voting to determine the content of the homepage, but that website wouldn't be "Slashdot". If we tried to do it "by committee" it would suffer from the same problem that most projects done by committee suffer from: it would get bland.
Let me put this another way: in the comments, any pro-Linux or anti-MS comment is probably gonna get rated up. Any time Microsoft does anything even slightly naughty, it gets submitted 50 times. Does that mean that it should be posted to the Slashdot homepage? For me personally, I don't want to read the "Bitch at Microsoft" website, but if ruled by popular consensus, Slashdot would very likely degenerate to this point. Since the days of Chips & Dips and the first days of Slashdot, my first goal has always been to post stories that I thought were interesting. I think a lot of people share my idea of interesting, and that's part of why Slashdot became successful.
Slashdot is an eclectic mix of stories maintained by a small group of people, but contributed to by anyone who wants to. I think that the personality and character of Slashdot is part of the fun and charm of the site, and I think it would suck to lose it. That's why the decision of what ends up on the homepage will continue to be determined by me, Hemos, and the rest of the guys.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
How about an AvantGo channel or some other PDA interface
There is one if you go to AvantGo, which basically uses the URL http://slashdot.org/palm, which is also the URL where the Slashdot clipping app gets its content, which can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.slashdot.org/pub/slashdot.pqa.
Answered by: CaptTofu
Last Modified: 12/01/00
How about a WAP Interface?
If you visit Slashdot with a WAP compliant browser, you should get a stripped down view of Slashdot designed for WAP. I wanted it to work on my 12x4 Qualcomm though, so it's pretty stripped down: no comments. Just headlines and stories.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
Getting the slashdot headlines by 'finger @www.slashdot.org' would be nice, don't you think?
You can accomplish the same thing by running wget or lynx --source on the RDF file.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
Slashdot should cache pages to prevent the Slashdot Effect!
Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date!
I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?
So the quick answer is: "Sure, caching would be neat." It would make things a lot easier when servers go down, but it's a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
Is is possible to have META tags that Slashdot looks for in a story link before allowing it to be submitted/posted? Many times a server can't handle the load of a Slashdotting. So can the site have tags to prevent it from being added to a Slashdot story?
Not inconceivable, but I don't really think it's worth the work. Most of the sites that are Slashdotted are prepared for it, and the sites that get smashed usually are caught completely off guard; they wouldn't know of this mysterious opt-out meta tag. (See also Caching Slashdot Stories).
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
It seems that many moderators, because of the way they read comments, (higher thresholds, older comments first), only see comments that are posted with a bonus, or have already been moderated up. Wouldn't it make more sense to require moderators to read at a threshold of 0 with newest comments first?
Yes, it would. This is something we're looking at, and may change. (Another possibility might be randomizing the order of comments or threads.) The problem is that we don't want to make moderating too much of a pain for anyone. This would result in fewer people being willing to moderate, and moderators not doing their job.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/19/00
Have you ever thought about hiding comment scores when people are moderating? It might help alleviate "Group Think."
Yes, this is another thing we've considered. The problem here is that moderators are also supposed to keep one another in check. If a moderator thinks something is rated too high, he or she can bring the score down. So, the effect it might have on "group think" might actually be neutralized if moderators aren't able to counter each other.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/19/00
I have a suggestion for improving moderation.
Please read the Comments & Moderation section before emailing any of us with your suggestion. The vast majority of suggestions I get are ideas that are already explained there. Of the remaining suggestions, most are ideas that I probably should put there. The thing that is typically forgotten is that the moderation system is a complicated collection of checks and balances designed to prevent abuse: almost every suggestion that winds up in my inbox, however well intended, opens up a hole for abuse.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
What about other moderation models such as those used by Kuro5hin, everything2, or advogato.org?
While it's interesting to see what other sites are doing, these sites don't have anywhere near the traffic that Slashdot does. In order to make it work on Slashdot's scale, any moderation system needs to be efficient enough that we can apply it without grinding our servers to a halt. The system we have now, while not perfect, is the best thing we've seen for the scale we're working on. We're always looking for ways to improve it, and when we find them we'll implement them, but for now we'll stick with what we've got.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/19/00
Will some of the subsections spin off as sites in their own right? For example, it would be cool if the YRO section were to hit dead tree form in some way like soon. It's too important to remain outside the radars of 9-5ers in Pleasantville.
There are no formal plans at this time, but it's something we're thinking seriously about.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
How about an NNTP news gateway?
I'd love to, but there are several problems that complicate this: first is the time to program it. An NNTP gateway is definitely on the TO-DO list, but it's lower on the priority list then many other things. Second is advertising: Slashdot costs a lot to run each month, and our performance is measured in terms of dollars and pages. If we can figure out a way to put advertising (and don't worry, it'd be reasonably minimal) into the NNTP comments cleanly, we'd be all set. Finally, the moderation system really doesn't have a counterpart in NNTP.
So you put it all together and you have something that would be pretty nifty, but it has several problems. It'll happen someday, but not tomorrow.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
Have you considered rewriting Slashdot in C?
Since Slashdot is almost entirely database calls to MySQL and text parsing, Perl is the ideal language for it: the hefty work is handled by MySQL (which is already written in C++) and string processing is already Perl's forte. I doubt that we would get a worthwhile enough performance boost by rewriting the code in C to make it worth the effort. mod_perl precompiles and caches the Perl scripts anyway, so the overhead is not really that bad.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
Have you considered PHP?
I tried PHP briefly but rejected it in favor of Perl. This is in no way a criticism of PHP, I just knew Perl already and was quite in love with the language. This was several years ago, and I understand PHP has grown and matured greatly since I made this decision, so my guess is that the limitations and awkwardness that made it undesirable to me back then is largely gone. But at this point, we have a substantial code base all written in Perl, and the effort involved in rewriting it would be prohibitive. Besides, Perl is cool.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
How about a page for rejected or pending story submissions?
This is a frequently requested feature that has several variations that essentially have the same answer: Time and Abuse.
Time is a resource that we always lack, so anything that we do that increases the amount of time required to maintain Slashdot has to be weighed carefully. A good example is the existing submission monitoring functionality. The amount of email I got regarding rejected submissions more then doubled when I added notification. I'm afraid that a public forum for pending/rejected stories would simply complicate the life of our authors.
Abuse is much worse. We get hundreds of submissions a day: we don't need more submissions, we need better ones. A public forum that gets the kind of traffic we get tends to be abused (like, say, the Slashdot comments for example). We don't want to be deleting "First Posts" and "Natalie Portman" type trolls and spams from the submission bin: we're busy enough as is.
Appropriateness From there, we move to the many stories that are submitted which are very wrong for Slashdot. They are horribly off topic, or offensive, or just plain scary. Obituaries for people that aren't dead? Rants about events that never occurred? Random Conspiracy Theories? Bug reports? Feature requests? I don't want to propagate this stuff, and I'm afraid that another public forum for them would only make the problem worse. There is some stuff submitted that would make for a very interesting page, and maybe someday we'll implement that. But as it stands, the overhead and the potential for abuse is so high that we don't want to mess with it.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/21/00
How about giving us a reason for rejecting submissions?
This is a fair request. As it stands, people merely see "Rejected" or "Accepted". The reasons are simply left to their imagination. A simple reason like Offtopic, Boring, Badly Written, Repeat etc would go a long ways towards alleviating that problem. But again, this is more work for our authors: right now we delete 3000 submissions a week. Each takes a half a second to click a button. Even if this adds only 10 seconds of upkeep to each submission, that adds a full day of work each week! So, the answer is "someday".
Honestly, I don't think its a very good idea for another reason too: the amount of email I got regarding story submissions more then doubled when we added the note telling people if their story was rejected. When you have to say 'No' to 500 people a day, it's only logical that dozens of them will contest your decision. I'm afraid that if they have more data, they'll email even more ("What do you mean my story was boring, you bastard!") and my wrists can't handle that
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
How about allowing readers to directly administer the submissions bin?
Slashdot is a very open community; in the user comments our readers are free to say whatever they please. But we feel that the unique nature of Slashdot is largely because the contents of the homepage are determined by a handful of people.
I'm sure a very cool website could be developed based on the concept of allowing public voting to determine the content of the homepage, but that website wouldn't be "Slashdot". If we tried to do it "by committee" it would suffer from the same problem that most projects done by committee suffer from: it would get bland.
Let me put this another way: in the comments, any pro-Linux or anti-MS comment is probably gonna get rated up. Any time Microsoft does anything even slightly naughty, it gets submitted 50 times. Does that mean that it should be posted to the Slashdot homepage? For me personally, I don't want to read the "Bitch at Microsoft" website, but if ruled by popular consensus, Slashdot would very likely degenerate to this point. Since the days of Chips & Dips and the first days of Slashdot, my first goal has always been to post stories that I thought were interesting. I think a lot of people share my idea of interesting, and that's part of why Slashdot became successful.
Slashdot is an eclectic mix of stories maintained by a small group of people, but contributed to by anyone who wants to. I think that the personality and character of Slashdot is part of the fun and charm of the site, and I think it would suck to lose it. That's why the decision of what ends up on the homepage will continue to be determined by me, Hemos, and the rest of the guys.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
How about an AvantGo channel or some other PDA interface
There is one if you go to AvantGo, which basically uses the URL http://slashdot.org/palm, which is also the URL where the Slashdot clipping app gets its content, which can be downloaded from ftp://ftp.slashdot.org/pub/slashdot.pqa.
Answered by: CaptTofu
Last Modified: 12/01/00
How about a WAP Interface?
If you visit Slashdot with a WAP compliant browser, you should get a stripped down view of Slashdot designed for WAP. I wanted it to work on my 12x4 Qualcomm though, so it's pretty stripped down: no comments. Just headlines and stories.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
Getting the slashdot headlines by 'finger @www.slashdot.org' would be nice, don't you think?
You can accomplish the same thing by running wget or lynx --source on the RDF file.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
Slashdot should cache pages to prevent the Slashdot Effect!
Sure, it's a great idea, but it has a lot of implications. For example, commercial sites rely on their banner ads to generate revenue. If I cache one of their pages, this will mess with their statistics, and mess with their banner ads. In other words, this will piss them off.
Of course, most of the time, the commercial sites that actually have income from banner ads easily withstand the Slashdot Effect. So perhaps we could draw the line at sites that don't have ads. They are, after all, much more likely to buckle under the pressure of all those unexpected hits. But what happens if I cache the site, and they update themselves? Once again, I'm transmitting data that I shouldn't be, only this time my cache is out of date!
I could try asking permission, but do you want to wait 6 hours for a cool breaking story while we wait for permission to link someone?
So the quick answer is: "Sure, caching would be neat." It would make things a lot easier when servers go down, but it's a complicated issue that would need to be thought through in great detail before being implemented.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
Is is possible to have META tags that Slashdot looks for in a story link before allowing it to be submitted/posted? Many times a server can't handle the load of a Slashdotting. So can the site have tags to prevent it from being added to a Slashdot story?
Not inconceivable, but I don't really think it's worth the work. Most of the sites that are Slashdotted are prepared for it, and the sites that get smashed usually are caught completely off guard; they wouldn't know of this mysterious opt-out meta tag. (See also Caching Slashdot Stories).
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
It seems that many moderators, because of the way they read comments, (higher thresholds, older comments first), only see comments that are posted with a bonus, or have already been moderated up. Wouldn't it make more sense to require moderators to read at a threshold of 0 with newest comments first?
Yes, it would. This is something we're looking at, and may change. (Another possibility might be randomizing the order of comments or threads.) The problem is that we don't want to make moderating too much of a pain for anyone. This would result in fewer people being willing to moderate, and moderators not doing their job.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/19/00
Have you ever thought about hiding comment scores when people are moderating? It might help alleviate "Group Think."
Yes, this is another thing we've considered. The problem here is that moderators are also supposed to keep one another in check. If a moderator thinks something is rated too high, he or she can bring the score down. So, the effect it might have on "group think" might actually be neutralized if moderators aren't able to counter each other.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/19/00
I have a suggestion for improving moderation.
Please read the Comments & Moderation section before emailing any of us with your suggestion. The vast majority of suggestions I get are ideas that are already explained there. Of the remaining suggestions, most are ideas that I probably should put there. The thing that is typically forgotten is that the moderation system is a complicated collection of checks and balances designed to prevent abuse: almost every suggestion that winds up in my inbox, however well intended, opens up a hole for abuse.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 6/14/00
What about other moderation models such as those used by Kuro5hin, everything2, or advogato.org?
While it's interesting to see what other sites are doing, these sites don't have anywhere near the traffic that Slashdot does. In order to make it work on Slashdot's scale, any moderation system needs to be efficient enough that we can apply it without grinding our servers to a halt. The system we have now, while not perfect, is the best thing we've seen for the scale we're working on. We're always looking for ways to improve it, and when we find them we'll implement them, but for now we'll stick with what we've got.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/19/00
Will some of the subsections spin off as sites in their own right? For example, it would be cool if the YRO section were to hit dead tree form in some way like soon. It's too important to remain outside the radars of 9-5ers in Pleasantville.
There are no formal plans at this time, but it's something we're thinking seriously about.
Answered by: CmdrTaco
Last Modified: 10/28/00
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LLO!!!!
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When I was about 25 years old, I was invited to spend a couple
of weeks at the farm of a friend of the family. Work was becoming a
drag at that time, and it looked like a good way to get away from
the grind for a while. I had been living in an apartment attached to
my parents place at that time, and had no opportunities to get involved
in my favorite pasttime except with the occasional neighborhood dog.
The trip looked like a good opportunity to try out some farm species.
I arrived at the Nebraska farm at the end of June. I had never met
the people before, but my folks had known them for many years. They had
two kids: Clare was 19, and a little homely looking, and John was 20.
He was handsome and trim. Both were in college in Nebraska and staying
at home during the semester break. They eyed me with some suspicion
when I pulled up in the drive, got out and introduced myself to the family.
They took me on a tour of the place, which was over two hundred acres,
and I soon found out what a gold mine this place was to be for an animal
loving person such as myself. They had a male and several females of many
animals: goats, sheep, horses... the works. I had to curb my enthusiasm
and wait for the golden opportunity.
For the first week, I helped out on the farm with the normal
chores. The two kids kept an eye on me for a while, but soon accepted me
as a fixture around the place, and we became good friends. I was going to
bed horny every night,and I found that jerking off was not doing the job...
I needed an animal!
After the first week, I had the complete run of the place and was
trusted by the family. Then during that week, while I was working in the
barn, the father appeared and told me he was taking the family into
Hastings for the day, and for me to hold down the fort. They would not
be back before dark. I told them they could rely on me, and inwardly
thought, now is the time. My two weeks was getting close to being over,
and I was going to have to return home soon. A little later I heard
their car drive away from the farm. I went out and checked around and
sure enough I was alone.
I couldn't decide what animal to try first. I finally settled on
the goats. I had never tried one before, but they looked very sexy and
every day I would see the nannies with their tails straight up walking
around. I went out to the goat area and selected two nice does. One was
a solid gray, and the other a white one with big dark spots. They were
in excellent condition and very clean and most important of all, they
were in heat. I could tell from the swollen, dripping cunts. I took
them in the barn. I found some milking stands in the barn, and I put
the spotted one on stand so she would be high enough for me to reach
and tied the other one next to her. Then I went back for the billy.
The billy goat was a beautiful solid black Nubian. He was about five
years old and had done a lot of breeding. He was well muscled and had a
pair of large nuts. A really handsome beast! I led him to the door of the
barn and he came to attention when he saw the two nannies. I stood there
for a moment and let him call to the nannies, who answered him with quiet
bleats. Once he settled down a little, I went to my knees and started
petting him, then running my hand down his back legs to his balls. As
soon as I touched them, my own cock started to stir.
Since I was alone, I took off my pants and shorts, leaving only my T-shirt
on, then went back to play with those hot nuts. I reached under him with
my other hand and started stroking his sheath. It didn't take him long
to erect, probably because of the nearby nannies. I wanted to suck him
off, but decided to save that for later. For today, I had planned for
the two of us to fuck the nannies side by side. I led him up to the gray
goat and let him sniff her. She immediately squatted and sent a stream of
hot piss right on his nose. I had an enormous boner by then, so we just
let nature take her course.
The billy mounted up and I helped him get in her. I watched closely,
fascinated by the sight of the billy's cock pistoning in and out of the
doe's swollen cunt. After a minute, I stood up and sunk my cock into the
spotted goat on the stand. Because of the stand, I was directly in line
with her cunt. I put my arm over the billy's back and we started fucking
in unison. The billy beat me to an orgasm, and just as he came he lost
his footing and his cock came out squirting. He pumped three or four
squirts all over the goat's genitals, then dismounted and walked away.
I looked down and studied the gray goat's pussy. It was soaking wet with
her juices and piss, and the goat's thick bestial sperm was all over her
asshole and pussy, with some dripping from inside. That was more than I
could take.
I pulled out of the spotted goat and sat on the barn floor behind
the gray goat, and glued my mouth to her slimy cunt. I tounged vigorously
for a couple of minutes, savoring the taste of the billy's sperm and the
other juices. I then realized that I needed to come myself. I had to
squat to reach her, but I was not to be denied sloppy seconds from a
billy goat! I was so excited by this new experience that it didn't
take me long to come. I grabbed her hips and screamed as my cock pumped
my load deep inside her. After that I was exhausted, and totally drained.
The only thing I could do was slip off her and settle to the barn floor
behind her. That's when I heard a sound at the door.
I looked over and saw the family's two kids standing in the
doorway. John had his cock out of his pants and was slowly playing with it.
I was shocked and couldn't do anything but stare at them.
Clare was first to say something. "That was beautiful," she said.
"I just knew you were a seasoned animal lover when I met you."
"How long have you been there?" I asked, thinking that a long kept
secret had just been discovered.
"Since you started," John said.
"I thought you went into town."
"We decided to stay here at the last minute."
"Are you going to tell what you saw?"
"Shit, no!" John responded, "We were hoping you we into animals, so
we could all have some fun together this summer." They were both shucking
their clothes. "I really enjoyed watching you eat out that goat. Have you ever
eaten out a mare in heat? They're really great!"
"Enough talk," Clare said, "Let's have some fun." She grasped John's
cock and stroked it a couple of times. "You're leaking,"she observed,
"You better get plugged into one of those beasts before you shoot all
over the floor. And you," she looked at me, "if you are going to have
sex with animals, you should be naked like they are. Take off the T-shirt.
I'll go see if the billy has any strength left."
I was still shocked and just sat where I was and watched. Clare went
to where the billy was standing. He had found some hay and was quietly
munching. Clare sat on the floor behind him and started playing with his
balls. Her other hand was stroking her pussy. John stepped up to the
spotted goat, and with one stroke sunk his cock in to the balls. He
grunted his approval of her. "Damn, she's nice," he said to no one in
particular. Then he pulled his cock back slowly and just teased her
cunt with the head before sinking it back in and then repeating the
process. The goat was standing with legs spread and not moving an inch,
loving every stroke. I was only inches away and could tell that John
was obviously showing off for me. I was starting to get hard again
watching this. John then reached down, stuck two fingers in the gray
goat's cunt, and scooped out some of the mixture. Then while staring
me right in the eye, he slowly licked his fingers clean.
"You better get your tongue up her cunt before all that wonderful
juice goes to waste," he said. "You should always clean up your animal
after a fuck." I was feeling more comfortable now and I no longer feared
exposure, but I had never had animal sex in front of anyone before, so I
was still reluctant, even though I had a full fledged boner. "Come on,
buddy, eat her out," John teased, "I'll hold her tail for you."
I looked over to see what Clare was doing. She was still stroking
the billy's balls, but now had put her head under his tail and was noisily
licking his asshole. I looked back at John and he smiled and shrugged.
"What can I say, she's my sister." I decided then, what the hell.
They had already seen me doing everything with the animals. Being
watched on purpose was another new experience, one that I did not want
to miss.
I smiled back, took off my T-shirt, and moved to the waiting goat.
w00t
sdfbnmsdfiwerns
hurrm
This is fun.