Slashdot Mirror
Goodbye, "Majestic"
fonixmunkee writes: "Ack, looks like EA is stopping the very cool, ground-breaking game 'Majestic.' The article is here. I got hooked on this from the very start, and in turn got a bunch of friends into it. It's cool to be out for a fancy dinner and have the game calling you threatening your life. Oh well, I'm sure a new spinoff will rise up."
-1 Offtopic
-10 Metamod (Informative?) Who the hell is moderating for trolls?
I'm pretty sure they have Slashdot in Russia.
-Legion
Shut the fuck up you whiny little bitch. Klerck is a person just like you, and he has the same rights to free speech that you do. If you don't like that then I might have to defend Klerck's rights with extreme prejudice!
Natalie Portman.
How about instead of ranting about what's wrong with slashdot and the media today, you tell us what is so goddamned important that we're all missing? How do we fix the problem that media is aimed at the -10 IQ segment? I think slashdot IS a solution. It's a website aimed at nothing more than exposing and socializing the geek agenda.
Yes it's no more accurate than CNN. No more thought provoking than 20/20, and has the same unbiased reporting methods as the National Enquirer. But, as you yourself agree, that's all there is. Mainstream media backs up big business: publishers, media conglomerates, big advertisers etc. You would probably agree that what these sources tell you to think is either wrong or very slanted, but beneficial to their constituants.
Slashdot is no better, but it caters to a different audience. We all collectively lie and find new ways to spin our ideas to propogate our agendas at the expense of our enemies. We call these "facts" although they're derived from out of context quotes, dubious statistics, anonymous sources and other material that'd be thrown out of any court. In other words, we use the same tools as the others.
The value of Slashdot, as well as the thousands of other online tabloids is that they all carry a DIFFERENT target audience, with DIFFERENT objectives and concerns. Each audience cares passionately about their subject, and probably has motivations for believing what they believe. Granted, most of it is biased or social brainwashing, certainly slashdot is. Further, most of the people who read slashdot, in spite of what they think or what their IQ test tells them, are average. They use this site to identify with their peers and become part of a group.
Intelligent people use slashdot, as well as these other targetted sites as data points or indicators. There is quite a lot of useful information to be gained from them, none of which will jump out at you by reading the articles. Since you profess to have such a keen intellect, you should know this already. You have to do a little WORK and take a little TIME from bitching to collect the data and use it. There is money to be had here, or if you're jsut interested in the truth and what you feel the "real danger" is, a chance to prove your own hypothesis.
No one has any interest in writing the truth directly. Many have interest in changing the truth to heir needs, or creating a new truth. Much like you, you write to persuade. In doing so you take bits of truth, mix them with speculation, lies, propoganda and emotionally charged statements and send it all to the world. Dumb people believe this, smart people listen for the important facts presented by everyone and draw their own conclusion. This is common sense.
You indeed have created a truth about yourself and your view. You're jealous of the Slashdot writers because they're making money on something (albeit stupid) that you didn't think up first. They're probably driving a nicer car at a younger age than you currently drive. And maybe the job you do isn't as hard as you think, if these guys can hack togetehr something that as far as I see is fully functional and easy to use, with nothing other than a bunch of old college projects and ill conceived ideas.
At my company stockholders are very smart people who don't want to pay a dime more for a person than they have to. They're not nice people, they're not friendly people, they're rich people wanting to get richer. Unless these guys have found some really stupid investors, I imagine they work very hard for their alleged millions. I suspect more that they work hard and are poorer than you think.
I work with a bunch of geeks. And that's okay. They do their thing and I do mine. Most of the time I'm happy for them, that they get joy and happiness out of playing with electronics. Admittedly I disagree with a lot of their thoughts about life. People used to believe that the Earth was the center of the universe, then it was the sun, but now we all know that the computer is the focal point of the universe, projecting its cathode ray goodness on our souls. You can't eat, sleep, breathe, live or run a business without one, or so we're told.
But if there's one thing I have no tolerance for, it's the geek phenomenon known as slashdot.org, the sorriest case for content on the web I've ever seen pawned off and gleefully accepted by the masses.
When I look at magazines, newspapers, or any other source of information, I judge them on three items: usefulness/uniqueness of content, quality of that content, and the depth of coverage regarding that content.
Slashdot has none of these things. And yet people try to convince me that the people who run that website are working hard at it.
Say what?
That's right - when Andover.net filed its IPO, making the editors of Slashdot instant wannabe millionaires, someone in the office said "Those guys put in a lot of hard work, and they deserve the success."
Now, I write code for a living, and I work hard at it, so I have a good idea of how slashdot operates. I guarantee you that the entire website is little more than leftover code from college projects and other unrelated work. At the very best, it is ill-conceived and poorly developed, which explains in part why the interface is so miserably awful, and the site is unbelievably slow.
Let's theorize what goes on in the average day of the slashdot editors:
10:42 AM - get out of bed.
10:45 AM - first Dr Pepper of the day.
10:46 AM - unglue keyboard from desk, check stock market.
10:56 AM - find a few interesting tech stories on the web. This is easy, since users send them to us all the time.
11:04 AM - post said stories to slashdot, disregarding spelling and journalistic impartiality.
11:08 AM - start playing Quake 3 (or whatever the game of the moment is).
3:15 AM - go to sleep.
If I'm wrong about anything, it's that they get up even later than that. And I couldn't figure out what time that order the pizza for dinner. But they have pepperoni on them.
Content - The content of slashdot is, admittedly, targeted towards geeks. But apparently not very smart ones. Regardless of the target audience, the content is never challenging - it never pushes the reader to think. Have we become a society where the last place you really exercise your brain is in grammar school? The average news article on slashdot is little more than a snippet from some tech rag about a new product that everyone loves, usually with an editorial comment tossed in telling everyone how they should feel about it.
I can get that same crap anywhere else. The TV tells me what to think, newspapers and magazines back them up, and slashdot does the same exact thing and is somehow worshipped as a haven for free thinking.
Quality - Why not try out that spellchecker? One word for you slashdot folks: dictionary. Try one on for size. Work on your spelling and grammar, and once those improve I'll attack the quality of your writing.
Consider this - Jon Katz is the best writer on slashdot. If you're familiar with his work, then you might appreciate that, or you might realize how lousy the writing must be if that's the case.
Katz has written some decent articles for slashdot (In particular, his Hellmouth series). But he's too wrapped up in the medium to see what he writes about. He's too busy dropping buzzwords that define his writing more than his actual content.
But the truly amazing thing about him is - almost everyone who reads slashdot hates Katz. They loathe him. The self-proclaimed geeks who read slashdot don't want to be challenged by his writing. There are people who attack every article he writes, regardless of the content.
Depth - unless its the updated release schedule for the new linux kernel or a new game, you're not going to get much repeat coverage on slashdot. And you're not likely to extract much from an article unless you already knew a certain amount of information about the topic. Once again, the exception might be Katz, who writes multi-part articles, but mostly that's because he's a hopeless wheezebag.
The thing that really scares me is that all sorts of little slashdots are popping up all over the web, popular sources of sludge pawned off on the accepting readers, and we readily accept is all as verse. Is this what 200 years of the Industrial Revolution primed us for? 50 years of television? Or was it something else? In my short lifetime I've watched the quality of information sources decline to a point where coverage is simplistic enough that it could be fictionalized and no one would notice the difference. While people ignore the WTO or slaughters in Burundi, Angola, Cambodia, anywhere else to devote coverage to wonder drugs, the newest Internet craze, the Hollywood minute, or any other sort of "News you can use."
And now, in a time when information should be even more readily available, so much of it is crap that finding the gems is rarely worth the shit you need to shovel. The sort of crap you find at slashdot instead of insightful knowledge about this increasingly impersonal, computerized world that we all blithely accept and even embrace.
And that is why slashdot sucks. That website isn't encouraging any free thought, any independent thinking, and certainly not any dissenting viewpoints on the information age. And we all accept it, even 'credible' websites like Wired frequently link to slashdot as their source of expert information and news updates.
If you're not directly connected to the information you want, you're not likely to find anything of depth nowadays. And if you have that sort of connection, then why do you need the web in the first place?
As if cars, skyscrapers, television, mini malls, supermarkets, drugs, war, and McRainForest (brought to you by the Big Mac!) weren't enough, now we have to venture out on the web with millions of other people, and not once challenge out horizons or open our minds.
Willow John