Slashdot Mirror
PwC Auditors Arrested In Satyam Fraud Inquiry
theodp writes "Indian police arrested two employees from the affiliate of PricewaterhouseCoopers who audited Satyam Computer Services, the IT outsourcing giant at the center of the nation's largest fraud inquiry. The move comes after Satyam founder Ramalinga Raju said he had fabricated $1 billion of assets and confessed to making up more than 10,000 employees to siphon money from the software company. State Farm Insurance has severed its ties with Satyam, citing uncertainty about the company's future as 'the only factor responsible for the termination of the contract,' which will reportedly affect at least 400 on-site Satyam employees. Other customers, including GE, are standing by Satyam, one of the top recipients of H-1B and L visas (so much for those $500 Fraud Prevention and Detection fees!)."
A much better website: http://www.madonna.com
Notice to Sourceforge, Inc. management: Close down Slashdot, sell the domain to a squatter, and focus on your core competency: Sourceforge. It needs a lot of work.
Slashdot no longer serves a unique purpose. The forum is a mess of buggy AJAX, it is irrelevant, the editors have no talent, and the news sucks!
News for Nerds. Stuff That Matters. NOT!
It's not news, it's not written by journalists and it's not stuff that matters. The only true part about their tagline is that it's for nerds. Stupid ones. Ones who are probably wearing some lame t-shirt from ThinkGeek with a stupid expression like "All your haXoRz are belong to us."
This thread about the 2.4.18 kernel release is a typical Slashdot news item. Idiocy, misinformation, testosterone-poisoned posturing, technology punditry, arrogance, bad logic: just another day in Slashdot-land.
The classic exchange is one Slashdotter complaining about ACs (people posting as Anonymous Cowards, i.e., not registered) and another Slashdotter blasting him for being so stupid and then outlining the steps need to get a for-all-intents-and-purposes anonymous Hotmail account and registering on Slashdot with a bogus name.
Lame personalities
Some of the Slashdot people have personality cults which is weird because they are incredibly lame. Every single poll seems to have a reference to a character named CowboyNeal. One of the founders/editors, Rob Malda, goes by the handle CmdrTaco, and his posts are incredibly shallow and stupid (although admittedly not much more than those of the other editors).
Every Slashdot-hater will claim to have a particularly dark place in their hearts for a certain individual, but frankly, they're all about the same. I ran into them in the Linux pavilion of Comdex a couple of years ago and they're a truly sorry bunch of humans. Just more proof that if you had the choice to be smart or lucky, you're much better off being lucky.
The problem with online forums: Why Slashdot isn't different than the rest
Admittedly, Slashdot's lameness isn't unique. As a matter of fact, it's normal. The main problem with online communities is that they do not scale well. While engineers argue about whether or not MySQL-backed sites can handle significant traffic, etc., they are really missing the point. Even if the software can handle it, the community can't.
Throwing more hardware at it doesn't help the problem. Nor does throwing more software. Nor does throwing more moderation. Nor does adding big warning messages to "please search the archives before posting a question." People get tired of hearing the same old questions over and over. What was once a place where new and innovative discussions sprang up every day is now a place where the same ten questions get asked over and over. Many of the most valuable contributors are the first to leave, just like talented employees bailing out of a foundering corporation.
The only hope is to pick a topic that is so esoteric that growth is extremely limited. Splitting up a community into sub-communities is also a possibility, but one that doesn't always work. If done too late, the majority of the most valuable contributors will have already left. Splitting a big blob of noise will result in many little blobs of noise. If done too early, there might not be sufficient energy/critical mass to nurture the newly-founded subcommunities.
What makes FC different?
The, uh, community citizens at F---edCompany.com contribute about the same quality of knowledge as your average forum participant, but unlike Slashdotters, A.) they aren't as arrogant, B.) they all seem to realize where they're posting (i.e., after all, the website is called F---edCompany.com), and C.) Pud (the founder/editor) knows he's a lucky idiot.
The very worst part about online forums
For the newcomer, a vibrant, high-traffic online forum seems like the El Dorado of information. It's not. It's a Pandora's Box, but even worse. The biggest single probl
What's wrong with this analogy?
Lets see - FOSS developers are doing something totally legal and ethical that benefits many other people, and even offers some benefits to the laid off Microsoft employee if he or she can still afford to use a computer. Hate them if you must, but it's like being a buggy whip maker who hates the inventors of that new-fangled horseless carriage.
Illegal downloaders inflict damage to a company's bottom line in at least some cases, but laid off employees are there because of that, plus lots of perfectly legal actions, (i.e. boycotts, spending your entertainment dollars on something else besides music, or your being too broke to have descressionary spending anymore). A big chunk of it is the industry's own choice. Illegal downloading by itself hasn't done nearly all the damage, and it's a least reasonable to claim that the industry's own mistakes were big enough to screw their own people without illegal downloading having any impact at all. Hate the downloaders if you must, but you'll do better in the long run if you at least apportion blame fairly, and don't let your former management pass the buck for its own share of the causes. (So sure, go ahead and hate, but don't hate blindly).
For this mess, 100% of the pain coming back is the consequences of these person's own unethical choices, and any hatred they feel is like the hatred of a caught criminal for the witnesses who fingered him. The rest of us either don't care or actively wish they'd catch a bullet. If you're one of their employees, and genuinely didn't know your management were viciously treasonous bastards, sorry.
Perspective sure is an interesting thing. I'm sure there's some guy on death row right now who killed a whole family because he wanted money for his fix, and from his perspective, there's no difference between him and Jesus walking to the cross, but for the rest of us, there is.
Who is John Cabal?