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Beware of Fake Monkey Automatons
rkinch writes "The Mechanical Music Digest gives this warning about bogus monkey automatons that seem to be flooding the antiques market. These supposedly 19th-century hookah-smoking shrunken monkey heads are actually clever modern reproductions tricked up to look old. That "Marvo the Magic Monkey" specimen hanging on your wall may not really date back to 1879."
I have this image of Taco in a room with all these mechanical talking monkey heads. :)
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this is a joke right? this is stuff that matters???
Why is this on slashdot? Is it April 1? Is the monkey in that machine running slashdot now?
Think of this site like Community TV - it has corporate sponsors, but everything else is a couple of guys who like Star Wars, Legos and xchat. CmdrTaco and Hemos and a few others get paid, but other than one person (roblimo?) who was suggested as legal advisor, it's all just friends running their own site.
No, Slashdot is not a media site any more than a random LiveJournal blog is a media site. It's a group of guys whose personal blog just happens to be incredibly popular, needed bandwidth, and got a company to sponsor them (with provisions that they retain all editorial control).
There have, incidently, been a few user wipes - I've been using Slashdot longer than my rather high uin might suggest (since after the most recent user wipe, I didn't bother making an account for awhile). This is one of the odder stories that has hit the site, but I kinda like it. And I want a couple of those monkeys (I'd open up the box and make new costumes for them, though).
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Evan (no reference)
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Suggestion to timothy and any other editor: if it's nearly impossible for a thread to contain interesting, insightful, or informative posts, perhaps you should rethink publishing it to the front page. Beyond a few wisecracks and a lot of (deserved, IMO) bitching, what else is there really to say about these... these... monkeys?
Here are your mod choices for 99% of this stuffed monkey thread: funny, overrated, underrated, off-topic, troll.
Slashdot was created way back in 1996/1997. By the time traffic grew to the point where serious money was required to run it, Hemos (Jett Bates) took over as the guy who sold ads to advertisers. Ad money was fairly easy to get back then, so this worked out well. Their little company, Blockstackers, created the AdFu, Slashcode, and many other projects.
/. flame treatment. Which was ironic, as the Andover.net buyout thing was put up a week or so later. As Jack said, "don't mess with us -- or we'll buy you out ;)"
Andover, a very respectably REAL LIFE publication with years of experience, noticed Slashdot and thought it'd add well to their Andover.net online version. So they entered into negotiations with Rob and Jeff. Around this time, Jack Byrar (one of the colunmsts of Andover, now working on Newsforge where I used to work) wrote some articles about Linux use that got the
One of the contract requirements was that the core (Jeff, Rob, Jon Pater) have complete veto control over everything. If Andover wanted Slashdot to change its layout, they had could say no and not be fired (or face any other negative reactions).
But then VA Research (recently renamed VA Linux Systems) decided to buy out Andover.net and create OSDN. VA had owned the odd site (I know they had Segfault as an employee thing, but I'm not sure if they bought Freshmeat or Andover did, it's been a while), but they needed something to wrap around their Sourceforge idea (recently stolen from Bowie J. Poag, as Bowie tells it).
Anyways, the integration of many, many diverse sites, each running their own homebrew perl or PHP code didn't end up working out as well as originally hoped. OSDN became a bigger and bigger bit of branding, but the sites themselves didn't support anything like single sign on (although cross-site searching works, AFAIK). Plus, when you think that VA's only big income sources were incredibly low margin hardware and Andover's online advertising, you see why they made some of the decisions they did in 2000 and 2001.
First, they bought Linux.com, created Newsforge.com, and tried to make their dead-tree break with Open magazine. It worked out well enough that Open magazine broke even in the first year, but they needed to restructure seriously in 2001. They divested themselves of Open, and they divested themselves of some sites (like Kuro5hin, which I'm also associated with).
Slashdot (and the rest of OSDN) started to get more invasive advertising around this time too, as a way of getting more revenue from advertisers.
VA Linux Systems are basically a value-added Linux software for business systems company, with OSDN tacked on. How it will work out, I don't know. If they hadn't restructured in 2001, they would've been out of money by now. We'll see what their next SEC filling says.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
I seriously laughed my arse off at all the people posting going "It's a hoax! It's a hoax! Stupid
Just shows the level of idiocy that slashdot has sunk to. I'll probably by $rtbled for this, but guys - your site is lame. Remove anonymous posting, and remove the 20 second and two limit timeouts on posting, and things will *slowly* improve.