Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Distributed Online Storage For Families?
StonyCreekBare writes "What options are available for distributed storage for families? My two brothers, my daughter and her husband, and his mother all have homes in various parts of the country. We use various cloud storage providers to keep our shared data. This has numerous limitations and we are starting to think maybe we can do it better ourselves. We all have decent Internet connections, are all somewhat tech savvy, and think that by leveraging the Internet we can maybe provide for our needs better and at lower cost by buying some hardware and doing it ourselves. How would you go about implementing such a family-oriented, distributed cloud platform? What hardware? What applications, beyond simply the preservation and sharing of family data, (grandkids' photos, home videos, and more) would be good to leverage such a platform? Security Cameras? HTPC? VoIP? Home Automation? Primary requirements are Cheap, Secure, Reliable."
What company directs 25% of its users to a partially-working, not-ready-for-production website? Please realize that Beta will not have the features that we want, because it goes against Dice's plans for Slashdot. To their advertisers, Dice presents Slashdot as a "Social Media for B2B Technology" platform. B2B - that's the reason Beta looks like a generic wordpress-based news site. A large precentage of the current userbase might be in IT, but /. is most certainly not a B2B site.
Nevertheless, Dice is desperate to make money off of Slashdot, since it has not lived up to their financial expectations, a fact that they have revealed in a press release detailing their performance in 2013:
Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.
Beta is not a cosmetic change. It is a new design that deliberately ruins the one thing that makes /. what it is today -- the commenting system. There is nothing wrong with Slashdot, from the users' perspective, that demands breaking its foundations. As others have commented, this is an attempt to monetize /. at any any cost, and its users be damned. Dice views its users, the ones who create the site, as a passive audience. As such, it is interchangeable with its intended B2B crowd. We, the current users of Slashdot, are an obstacle in Dice's way.
That is why they ignore the detailed feedback they have received in the months since they first revealed Beta. That is also why they now disregard our grievances. Their claims of hearing us are a deliberate snow job. It is only pretense, since at the same time they openly admit that Classic will be cancelled soon:
"Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready.
Don't hold your breath waiting for Dice to fix Beta. Their vision of Slashdot is a crippled shadow of the site as it is today. Don't let them pull the wool over your eyes. Dice doesn't need us, and it wants us out.
Slashdice delenda est!
Many viable technological solutions are rendered useless by PHBs that do not understand what the users actually want. Fuck beta.
Is it just me, or have the "editors" been exceptionally prolific these past two days? The rate they're working, the stories might still be new and relevant by the time they're posted!
Although they try to drown out the criticism, they cannot shut out the death knell of Slashdot.
There is a reason why "News for Nerds, stuff that matters" no longer appears in the header:
Slashdot Media’s brands include Slashdot and SourceForge. These technology sites provide access to tools, software and forums for enterprise IT professionals working in all industries and companies from the world’s largest to small and medium-sized firms. Slashdot and SourceForge harness the power of social that no other tech site can compete with.
Slashdot Media provides its partners with proven integrated media strategies to effectively influence technology buyers. With over 15 years experience working with the largest and most engaged professional technology communities, Slashdot Media’s expert staff continues to contribute to the success of its partners branding, demand generation, and social media marketing programs.
I, for one, abhor our new corporate overlords.