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Technocrat.net Shut Down
twitter writes "Bruce Perens has pulled the plug on Technocrat.net. 'The technocrat.net public discussion site is shut down. This has happened because the site never achieved the ability to financially sustain its editorial staff and system expenses with its revenues. When it became evident that Technocrat was un-viable as a business, I found that I did not wish to keep supporting the site as a hobby. Certain elements of the community that developed here, unfortunately, creep me out. At the end I faced the decision of asking for donations to keep the site running, or letting it die, and it became clear to me that I'd feel better if it would just die. I am very busy building a new software business, with some great new (and yet unannounced) Open Source software in development. I must focus on that for now. Best holiday wishes to you all.'"
I'm gonna guess he got a lot of "ZOMG BRUSE PERENS" sycophants, and was unable to financially justify continuing the site. Hell, last time I looked if a story had two comments in it, it was a red-letter day.
Basically he thought he could throw up a slash installation and that a community would magically form around it. It didn't; and instead he got trolls, jerks and brown-nosers (you know -the usual /. fare).
I always thought perens was decent enough, seeing him here on /.; but it looks like he's just as full of himself as ESR.
Yeah, it's okay, but it doesn't get the balance right. Balance, man. It's all about balance.
Out of all the self-proclaimed open source leaders, Bruce Perens creeps me out the most. I really don't know why people follow him. Everything he touches is lackluster at best.
Others like Stallman (GNU) and ESR (CatB) have caused major philosophical movements. The same can't be said for Perens.
I see Perens to Linux as Sean Hannity is to Conservatism. He's there and not afraid to pipe up. But he really hasn't offered any original ideas that have been worth much.
Sounds like you got a larger than usual dose of The Internet in there. It can get pretty caustic when concentrated!
Seriously, you'll see the same thing happen anywhere where self-declared smart people congregate. Slashdot gets some of it, reddit gets even more of it, and so on. I can see why Bruce would just want to get rid of the whole mess, if it got that bad.
Fuck trolling. Every time I start getting into a good thread about the relative merits of the GPL vis a vis the BSD license, or a deep legal examination of the ramifications of massive copyright theft, or the advantages of using strongly statically typed languages like Perl over Python for implementing LAMP servers... whammo, there's something gaping, oozing, or epitheting the middle of a decent conversation.
Enough already. Why don't you guys go troll a worthier target already, like the mainstream media or Canada. We're trying to literally make the future of the Internet here and you're ruining all over it.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Wait, is that delusions of granduer or a God complex? Both?
Can't say I like the trolls, but pretending that what happens on the semi-productive section of Slashdot is of some grand importance seems like a bit of a reach.
If you read your history there's a period from ~1910-1940 or so when the Soviets were far and away accomplishing more than the west: they built up modern roads and water systems and electrified their nations over that period, while the west dragged its heels and fell into the great depression.
They never really recovered from losing ~15m lives in WWII.
Bringing up the body count is certainly a fair critique, but you have to have some kind of blinders on to think it's in any way a uniquely soviet thing: if you include "surplus" deaths over all of American history, you have to bring in the entire native population of the content, who somehow dwindled from 20-100m in 1776 to 1m today, with almost all such deaths directly attributable to American actions (both public and private) over a 100 year period.
Clearing out space for a new economic system and society is always messy, and it's not exactly intellectually honest to start your timeline from well after the time you guys wrapped up your mass extermination of inconvenient peoples.
It's always fun trying to explain away that assumption that some people seem to get that there's a right or wrong answer to anything, and that even if there was people wouldn't choose a wrong answer because it's more fitting to their personal opinions.
Dealing with a large group of people who think they know everything, and this is true for slashdot as well, is frequently boring, sometimes highly enlightening, and always at risk of showing just what terrifying abuse a person will subject truth and reason to.
Take a look at your options on this special comment configuration page hidden in the guts of the preferences pages (actually it's in the Help pages):
http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=editcomm
That link should take you straight to it.
But even after you sort those issues out, the user pages are still a useless maelstrom of wasted space. The old user pages were just plain better, I don't see a single improvement on the new user page. In fact I don't see anything that hasn't been thoroughly screwed up. One good idea I did get is that in a user page like the old one, it could be handy to show articles you've tagged with the tag you used...I think that was the intention of showing every article you've tagged in the "garbagefall" on the new user page, but it just shows all the tags on the article.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel