Total Commercialization Awareness

jjohnston writes "Salon just posted its technology and business predictions for 2003: Total Commercialization Awareness. Includes: Al-Qaida online, Slashdot sells out, and pets: the new white meat. Cute ..." That's so 1999.

Comments

Wait a minute

[MasterOfMuppets]

Slashdot sells out to Al Qauida?? OMG!!

Judging by that headline...

[Anonymous Coward]

JonKatz must be back.

Re:Judging by that headline...

[GuyMannDude]

JonKatz must be back.

No, if it was a Katz article it would have been named "Total Commercialization Awareness And Globalism In a Post 9/11, Post Columbine World"

GMD

What would have been interesting...

[somebaudy]

They don't make predictions about Salon's fate in 2003.
Will they sell out?
Will they bite the dust and go 404?
I've read so much about their financial problems that I'm surprised to hera they're still around.

Re:What would have been interesting...

[HamNRye]

I've read their site and I am suprised they're still around.

This article was poor. The jokes weren't funny to geeks, incomprehensible to non-geeks. Is this MCSE humor?? The Pets for Food section would have been poor humor on Joe Nobody's Blog, and just plain insulting when the writer was paid by the word for it.

Linking to "wierd" websites and then making lame jokes about them is what Bloggers do best. Let the Bloggers keep on doing it. Seriously, if this had been posted somewhere other than Salon would it even bear mentioning??

~Hammy
Good? Bad? I'm the guy with the gun.

Wake up call!

[saintan]

Is it me or is that picture of Jack Nicholson a bit disturbing for first thing in the morning?

One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other...

[limekiller4]

michael writes:
jjohnston writes "Salon just posted its technology and business predictions for 2003: Total Commercialization Awareness. Includes: Al-Qaida online, Slashdot sells out, and pets: the new white meat. Cute ..." That's so 1999.

The "that's so 1999" Slash article you linked to is about Slash going IPO. The Salon blub reads:

The popular discussion site for fans of open source software will disclose that it's perilously close to bankruptcy and needs to make all Slash code proprietary in order to survive. Slashdot regulars will rebel, and some will attempt to set up alternative discussion sites -- but Slashdot's founder, Rob Malda, will sue under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to prevent any copycat sites. When readers accuse the site of "monopolizing" all the vital discussions of the various ways of cooling your computer with liquid nitrogen, Justice Department officials will threaten prosecution of Sherman antitrust violations. But Slashdot will prevail, after hiring David Boies, litigator to the stars.

Which, while satire, is quite a bit different, don't you think?

Pets - the new white meat?

[BeatlesForum.com]

So does Fluffy really taste like chicken?

Re:Pets - the new white meat?

[TeknoDragon]

it has to be a hoax

the testimonials are too much... not to mention the questionable legality of the roast bald eagle

Check the registrant, the CEO and sysadmin live at the same Redwood City address.

also: checkout his main site

Come on Slashdot!

[gpinzone]

Nice try putting this in the "It's Funny, Laugh" section! Salon uncovers your scheme and you guys try to play it off as a farce!

Snooze

[bildstorm]

Mildly amusing, but even with over 300 mg of caffeine in my system, it's still not that interesting.

I much preferred Dave Barry's recap of 2002.

Re:Snooze

[melvin22]

Just thought I'd put a link to Dave Barry's recap.

Here it is...

Slashdot Timeline

[Anonymous Coward]

2002. CmdrTaco married.

2003. Slashdot publishes 1,000,000th rumor passed off as actual story. The story generates 480 comments, 263 of which agree with the article, and 107 of which point out it's a rumor and are modded down as redundant. The remaining comments are all "first posts."

2003. Slashdot parent corporation VA Research^W Linux^W Software stock worth 35 cents. Rumors that AOL, Microsoft, or even Jimmy the hobo who lives under the Longfellow Bridge may buy it. 2004. VA Software bought by Microsoft for a cup of coffee and a donut. All Microsoft-critical articles mysteriously disappear from Slashdot. Bill Gates as Borg logo replaced with Bill Gates as God.

2004. CmdrTaco loses virginity.

2004. The WIPO Troll returns again, showering Slashdot in 45,000 copies of the same post: "Lick my crotch hairs." Slashdot, despite running on 18 redundant IIS/8.0 servers, buckles under the load. The term "Slashdotted" is replaced with "WIPO-Trolled."

2004. Slashdot officially shut down. Millions of screaming, unwashed geeks invade Redmond campus and lynch Bill Gates.

2005. Linus Torvalds and Anal Cox found dead along with six penguins, a tub of crisco and several used condoms.

2005. CmdrTaco rumored to have had sex again.

2006. CowboiKneel found dead in hotel room with 56 pizza boxes covering his bloated corpse. Three suffocated gay prostitutes are extracted from beneath his body as police remove it with a backhoe.

2007. CmdrTaco actually has sex again. With a woman.

2007. BSD is still officially "dying." No word on when its demise will take place.

2007. CmdrTaco starts new weblog to replace Slashdot, creatively named Dotslash. Remainder of Linux users flock to the site and immediate WIPO-Troll it out of existence.

2008. CmdrTaco has sex with his wife for the first time.

Re:Slashdot Timeline

[halftrack]

Present time: First time the parent troll is slightly on topic and has been modded up as funny.

(We've all seen it before, haven't we?)

Re:Slashdot Timeline

[damiam]

Come on, if you're gonna troll, at least give credit where credit is due.

Re:Slashdot Timeline

[Zontar The Mindless]

Um.... Hasn't this been posted before?

I can't find a link, but I'm pretty sure that it's recycled.

What a joke.

[TheViffer]

The only reason slashdot was mentioned in the article was so it WOULD get posted here knowing full well that it would get dismissed as drivel.

Katharine Mieszkowski: "No one is going to read this crap."

Farhad Manjoo: "You know your right. But how can we get more publicity from it?"

Katharine Mieszkowski: "I know, lets metion slashdot!"

Farhad Manjoo: "Hey, and I know. Go grabs Salon's 2003 plan and replace all mentions of Salon with Slashdot."

Katharine Mieszkowski: "We are going to be famous!"

Re:What a joke.

[SunPin]

Exactly my sentiments. Slashdot should have rejected this submission solely on the grounds that Salon--a magazine that people allegedly read more than,say, New Scientist--was trolling for traffic.

I consider this piece of garbage to be irrefutable evidence that Salon is already dead.

Re:What a joke.

[kin_korn_karn]

yeah, and damn that new york times, putting headlines out there that troll for buyers.

We'll always fnd a way around it!!!

[mustangdavis]

For every 20 minutes on the Web, "viewers" will be required to download three minutes of ads

Who ever wrote this was smoking crack!

People will find a way around this! They will either find some tech way around it, or they will simply stop visiting sites that make you do that.

I run a web site that rely's on ad revenue, but if these annoying forms of advertising don't come to an end, it could be the end of the Internet for everyone except big business. I know that there are VERY few sites that I would tolorate if they had annoying ads that "made" me do something.

Honestly, I think that the person that wrote this was just looking to get a rise out of people. (He got one out of me) Hopefully he will wake people up about this BEFORE this kind of thing becomes reality. What happened to simple, NON-POP-UP banners? Yes, they didn't work well, but they got sites exposure! I make it a point NOT to visit sites with annoying ads .... and the people that play the games I run seem to do the same thing. Of all the clicks we get, 10% go to the traditional, non-pop-up ads, 89.99% to the skyscraper banners, and 0.01% go to pop-up ads. NO ONE clicks on our pop-up ads because they are annoyng ... and the people want them to go away! Now if only everyone else would be smart enough to follow suite of a few thousand MPOG players ...

Re:We'll always fnd a way around it!!!

[grub]

Who ever wrote this was smoking crack! [...] Honestly, I think that the person that wrote this was just looking to get a rise out of people.

With all due respect, you have an amazing grasp of the obvious.

Re:We'll always fnd a way around it!!!

[Alien54]

With all due respect, you have an amazing grasp of the obvious.

I supposed this is an improvement on those who have no grasp of the obvious whatsoever.

;-)

Re:We'll always fnd a way around it!!!

[Greedo]

Now if only everyone else would be smart enough to follow suite of a few thousand MPOG players ...

MPOG players? How many little milk carton caps can you fit in one of those?

Slashdot sells out

[tmark]

Salon just posted its technology and business predictions for 2003...Slashdot sells out

Are you sure these were predictions for 2003, and not some sort of recap ?

*ducks*

Slashdot may sell out but ...

[beanerspace]

The author of the article got it wrong. It should read The popular discussion site for fans of open source software will disclose that it's perilously close to bankruptcy and will rewrite and abstract SlashCode into .NET components using Visual Basic which it will license and monitor through Microsoft Passort ...

Bah.

[grub]

Where's my goddamn Flying Car that I was promised in 2000?

Re:Bah.

[grub]

Where are the robot slaves?

You can get an alpha version here. These early models don't do much though.

Re:Bah.

[istartedi]

I already told ya. Move to Texas or Oklahoma, wait for Spring.

Prediction #1

[NitsujTPU]

Total Information Awareness, the Defense Department's system to record and monitor everything Americans do, will fail to detect coming attacks on the United States -- but TIA will find new life as an invaluable opposition-research tool for political campaigns. For example, Democrats will aim the system at Trent Lott in an effort to discover "patterns" of Republicans with questionable histories on race relations -- and TIA will attempt to predict the next time one of them will make a racist gaffe. This will cause Republicans to call for TIA to be immediately dismantled, but Democrats will accuse them of being soft on terrorism.

Ok, so, I can buy the democrats using the Republicans' own tool against them, but HONESTLY, you think that they'll really use REPUBLICAN party cries that we should have more big brother monitoring, more warfare, more so forth? For them to make that statement would require a change in platform that is distinctly toward the right. They'll use the tool, they'll maybe make predictions, they won't dare tell their constituents that we need more wiretaps... if they did that they might as well change their party mascot to the elephant ;-)

Parody or reality?

[sphealey]

The Salon article is clearly meant to be a parody of year end predictions, but the scary thing is I see no reason why Prediction #1 won't actually occur. Should the TIA database be created as advertised, the temptation to use it for politial ends will be tremendous. And we all know how stong politicians are at resisting temptation.

sPh

Oh

[NitsujTPU]

Duh, it's humor

So they can find duplicates from 1999...

[TheConfusedOne]

But they can't search for duplicate articles from a week ago? :-D

Ummm

[tswinzig]

I do believe Michael was making the joke that Slashdot already "sold out."

8. Slashdot sells out (TRANSLATION)

[ignatzMouse]

Attacking /. gives Salon much needed banner hits.

Re:News for Nerds, not for fans of Open Source

[NDPTAL85]

I got news for you. Thats the way it is for MOST open source websites. It would be interesting to check out the web server logs for www.gnu.org and www.fsf.org

Re:We are sellin out!

[mustangdavis]

Everyone is trying to make a buck.

You must be making a buck ... or atleast I hope you are .... since you aren't (or shouldn't be) paying that much for bandwidth! Are you on cogent or a dial-up?

I found this article to be informative

[teamhasnoi]

at least about the AAA. Once again, I learn something every day. Though the BWC needs a better server.

Re:I found this article to be informative

[frankie]

Damn straight about Salon's prediction #4. I wish I'd known the AAA was a pro-sprawl lobbyist before I renewed last fall. Bastards, spending my money to promote SUVs.

If I kept a blog I'd definitely publish this. I'm going to investigate getting a pro-rated refund, and I'll definitely hit them for a couple dozen maps the day before my membership expires.

too bad you can't mod Salon

[josephgrossberg]

They'd get a Score: -1, Troll

I am glad I have a Salon subscription

[MarkWatson]

.. after reading this extremely funny article.

Good job Katharine Mieszkowski and Farhad Manjoo!

-Mark

wrong, Scoop

[Ender Ryan]

Scoop is written in Perl.

Scoop on Freshmeat

Not only that

[I Am The Owl]

But AlterSlash was threated by no other than legal genius Jeff "Hemos" Bates for violating Slashdot's copyright by accessing the site with scripts. It's more real than you think...

Re:Some of these are kind of funny

[aWalrus]

I wonder how many of those moves are due to arm-twisting by VA lawyers trying to get blood from a stone?

How about none? Slash is open source. People are encouraged to use it. If they find a better alternative they can switch whenever they want to. No one forces them one way or the other. CmdrTaco or VA can't charge them for use of slash, Scoop is not written in C, it's perl, just as slash, and you're a well known troll who, incredibly, gets moderated up rather frequently.
--

I think they gave it to the guy. . .

[kfg]

they promised it to in 1947. They're handing them out in order of invoice number.Better go get a lawn chair and a Porta-Potty(tm), you've got a loooooooooong wait ahead of you.

KFG

haha.

[autopr0n]

Unlike what VA thinks of the SourceForge software (that it has value as a comercial product, yeah right) They should be aware that the /. sourcode isn't really worth anything. I mean, there's lots of blog+comment sofware out there, and a lot of it's better too.

The only thing closing the slash sorce would do would be to antagonize the userbase. Not they seem to mind doing that, but I doubt they would do it for no value.

Anyway, the value in /. is the userbase, and nothing more.

Total Commercialization Awareness

[banzai51]

So James Watt is making a comeback?

And #11

[aufecht]

People actually start forking over money to read the drivel we puke up here at Salon!

Pretty sad

[Sanity]

The slashdot mention seems like a pretty transparent attempt by Salon to get slashdotted. This article isn't particularly amuzing or funny, so I guess they needed some kind of gimmick to boost their hit-rate.

Re:That's nothing!

[bildstorm]

Actually, given the metabolism rate for caffeine, plus the effects on shortening the half-life of caffeine by drinking coffee, it's more like having taking a 200 mg pill to start the day, and then drinking four cups of coffee at a reasonable pace.

Salon accuses Slashdot of selling out.

[Valar]

Slashdot counter attacks by hosing them down with thousands of connections using ad blocker features. Good move, slashdot.

I'm going to Disneyland!

[billstewart]

Actually, it was Disney World, and last month, so I got my prognostications about the future taken care of early instead of my usual procrastination.
Must...obey....Big.....Mouse......