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CES 2009 Shrinks With Dwindling Economy
nandemoari writes "Not long after we first heard murmurs Microsoft may be ready to lay off as much as 17 per cent of its workforce, the popular Consumer Electronics Show, held every year in Las Vegas, is rumored to be shrinking alongside the global economy. The Consumer Electronics Association, host of the CES, estimates that the numbers of both exhibitors and visitors will be down in 2009. The CEA expects about 130,000 people will attend this year, down 11,000 from last year. And about 2,700 exhibitors are expected to attend, down from 3,000 in 2008."
A damp basement stagnant with a combination of undeodorized armpits, sour cream and onion chips, and cheetos where a small 15" TV is hooked up to a greasy VHS deck playing reruns of Sailor Moon and Big O. The whole area, whose size is about 110 feet squared, is dimmly lit by a single incandecent bulb but is overpowered by 6 or so glowing CRTs. The floors are littered with montain dew cans but you can find a single can of diet coke which once meant a 400 lb developer or editor was "trying to lose weight".
On one side of the tiny slashdot basement, which shares a corporate overloard of VA Linux (the ficticious business name for the lead editor's mother) are the editors which spend most of their time leeching stories from Arstechnica and Digg. The editor's work process involves taking submissions and fact checking them against wikipedia. Once a submission is fact checked an editor takes the time to deliberately misspells or entirely mangles the summary while at the same time throwing in a missleading link to a sponsor. This process is entirely time consuming usually taking 4-6 hours per submission since editors use 386DX machines with 4-8MB of ram. This can sometimes explain why articles are posted 72 hours after the rest of the world has read and commented on the subject elsewhere.
The other side of the room are the slashdot developers. There is really only about 2 or 3 developers but their obesity problem allows them to get counted twice and get 2 payroll checks. The working day of a developer involves 15 minutes of javascript and perl programming and 4 hour breaks to watch UFO hunters on Sci Fi. On the perl side of the development, most slashdot developers look at how to get every last bit of performance out of their 1 mySQL server running on a 350 mhz G4 Mac by running an SQL query through a loop for about 150000 times. This often explains why it takes 12-16 minutes to submit a comment on the story pages. Being on the forefront of Web 2.0, many (read 2) of their developers push AJAX to the next level by using xmlhttprequest() to download linux ISOs and store them secretly on the page on every page view creating the illusion that slashdot javascript is actually beneficial to their website.
Consumer Electronics Show, held every year in Las Vegas, is rumored to be shrinking alongside the global economy
Thats funny, I heard a similar rumour about Cowboy Neal's dick.
I shudder at the the thought of a 58-year-old Erin Grey in a bikini.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
English isn't your first language, is it?
Just add hot grits.
Big! Strong! Wow! Tada-O!