Stop: Quickies Time

Kodi wrote in to tell us that MozillaZine is holding a vote for the new Mozilla throbber (free membership required). Also the LinuxWorld Expo call for papers deadline is July 6. They're also doing a $25k award for a community program at the show. hzo wrote in to note that you can now hack furby with your Palm V. cpfeifer has noted a Yoda Got Milk parody. rhet sent us a web based jar-jar-gonizer if you aren't overloaded with the wretched beast. Kurt Weinschenker wrote in to tell us that the 99 Darwin Awards nominees are online. S|ack noted that you can now get adminspotting t-shirts. Scorpeye sent us an article about Bachelors in the Silicon Valley and comments about eligible bachelorettes in NY and LA... hmmm... Finally, some articles about the Andover.Net acquisition of Slashdot: Here's Upside, wired (thanks Evro) Salon (thanks Super_Oogie). There were a few more too, but after I've read two I realize I say pretty much the same stuff each time anyway, so its hardly interesting ;)

Comments

Re:Millionaire?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's $14 million, and then there's $14 million.

Here's my take: when asked pointblank if he's a millionaire, Rob says he doesn't know, then his new boss cuts in and says some things can't be talked about (no loss of creative control there!). So I believe he got perhaps a five-figure or six-figure cash advance to close the deal, plus he has stock worth (potentially) millions.

I'm a millionaire myself, but here's the catch. I own 24% of a privately held company, which at its last valuation was worth $5 million, making me worth over $1 million. But only if I sell the stock. Which I couldn't do as one of two co-founders (who would buy all the stock from a co-founder?). So on paper I'm a millionaire, but its not liquid, and in real life I have my mortgage and my paid-off 1993 Honda. No caviar for me -- or Malda either.

So Rob and Hemos have stock, but they can't sell it just yet, so they're millionaires on paper. Remember, their announcement lists all the cool groups they want to donate to eventually -- meaning they don't have the money yet.

If Andover.net goes out of business tomorrow (not likely), their stock is worthless and they just have their advance. If Andover.net goes Yahoo! public, they're multimillionaires.

Ah, well.

Malda worries me

[BOredAtWork]

Come on, we have "quickie time", "throbber", and an inference to MC Hammer's pants all in the same paragraph.

Malda, you need a girlfriend :-p.

--

Our little baby's all grown up *sniff*

[Analog]

Ah, I still remember the big announcement on Chips n Dips about Rob's secret new project. And the time he posted the news about Slashdot being mentioned on another site (unheard of at the time) from class while taking a test. The first try at message boards and the poll about whether or not to keep them. And a thousand other little things that have become Slashdot. A quick look at whois shows that it's been less than two years. It's come so far it seems like it must have been much longer.

All the best, guys. It's been a fun time thus far, and I'm sure it will continue to be. Thanks!

Jar Jar is smarter than I thought

[Tim Macinta]

Whoa! Check out what the Jar Jargonizer translate's "Microsoft" to. I typed kmfms. com into the url translator and was pretty surprised at what it spat out. Jar Jar is growing on me.

Fake Darwin Awards?

[Tet]

Are these Darwin Awards for real? It looks to me like someone's registered the darwinawards.com domain in the hopes of making some money out of it. The Darwin Awards have traditionally been at http://www.officialdarwinawards.com, although that's looking like it hasn't been updated in a while. Who knows. Ho hum...

Re:1 problem I have with the Darwin awards

[loren]

I think the Darwin awards are amusing, and they are a great monument to stupidity of some in the human race.

One problem I've always had with the Darwin awards is that they don't stick to their own criteria. The original description of the Darwin awards was

"... awards for those individuals who better society by removing themselves from the gene-pool."

If you know anything about Biology, any person, living or dead, with living desendants is still in the gene pool. I think all Darwin award nominees with living descendants should be disqualified.

I apologize

[aheitner]

Not a linux community, a nerd community. I agree.

/. does an amazing job of representing exactly the interests of people like the (rising) sophomore CS class CMU.

Still, the Holy OS is pretty important to this community. We spend a lot of time on our computers...and waste a lot of time configuring them... :)

Something just happened to me

[aheitner]

My browser couldn't find the internet due to momentary enormous stupidity, and decided to pull up its last cached copy of /., from late last year IIRC when I was at home and still used this machine.

Jon Katz was ruminating unpopularly in the first of his articles playing with a linux machine and how weird and confusing it was.

GNOME vs. KDE flamewars were going on fast and furious in the unmoderated comments.

No one had heard of, or cared about, Linux the Holy OS or Open Sourceness or User Friendly or anything.

Man, we've come a long way since then. I've been reading /. since nearly the beginning, but even I couldn't have imagined the community that grew up around the little Nerd News sight.

I've posted a few stories myself. I've wasted a lot of time writing comments, and searching out comments by resident cool, funny guys Bruce Perens and Alan Cox.

Now, it ain't news unless it's on /. You can wear the hat and the tshirt. I start my day off in the office with /., then UF. Everything I need in life is a /box. When we won IGF, the first thing I did after seeing the news in a more-or-less reputable story I could link to was skip class (251, no less) and post it on /.

I'd be interested to see if anyone has a copy, HTML or PS or hard copy or whatever, of the earliest /. page we can find.

This is user # 3273 ... I'll be back tomorrow morning, as always... man, I really am a nerd :)

Re:Boycott Slashdot!

[anneke]

I don't think you're giving Rob & Jeff enough credit. Neither they nor anyone else has said that they did it alone-- it *is* all about the community. As you said, they couldn't have done it alone: it was "our" submissions that made it happen. They never denied this.

Rob and Jeff deserve and /amazing/ amount of credit, and have earned every penny they got (okay, maybe not $14 million's worth, but...).

Can any of us say that the average Joe (or AC) among us put in 80 hour weeks running something like slashdot, reading over 300 emails a day (no joke), *and* go to college full-time? I think we should cut them some slack, if not provide open praise for a job well done: here's to the two years they (and the 10+ who helped them as well) gave to The Community (so far), and the community that helped them.
Kudos to you all.

My $.02.

jargify.pl

[Christopher Thomas]

A friend showed me what the Jar Jargonizer did to his web page. It was neat. It occurred to me that this kind of thing could be done very easily with a Perl script, so I wrote one.

Here is a Perl script that with Jar Jar-ify any text fed into it. Because of the way it's set up, it's trivially easy to add more conversions or to modify it into a "borkifier" or any of a wide variety of other translators. If anyone takes offsense at its length, I apologize, but it's on-topic and I don't have a public web page to put it on :).

jarjar.pl

# Define the substitutions to be performed.

@WordList =
(
"I'm", "meesa be",
"I", "meesa",
"me", "meesa",
"you", "you-sa",
"my", "meesa's",
"your", "you-sa's",
"myself", "meesa's self",
"yourself", "you-sa's self",
"am", "be"
);

@SuffixList =
(
"ing", "\'in",
"er", "-a"
);

@PrefixList =
(
);


# Perform the substitutions on each line of input.

while ($Input = )
{
# Replace whole words.

for ($Index = 0; $WordList[$Index]; $Index += 2)
{
$Input =~
s/(^|\W)$WordList[$Index](\W|$)/$1$WordList[$Index + 1]$2/i;
}


# Replace suffixes.

for ($Index = 0; $SuffixList[$Index]; $Index += 2)
{
$Input =~
s/(\w)$SuffixList[$Index](\W|$)/$1$SuffixList[$Ind ex + 1]$2/i;
}


# Replace prefixes.

for ($Index = 0; $PrefixList[$Index]; $Index += 2)
{
$Input =~
s/(^|\W)$PrefixList[$Index](\w)/$1$PrefixList[$Ind ex + 1]$2/i;
}


# Print the modified line.

print $Input;
}

Off the wall, caffine induced thought:

[finkployd]

I wonder if some sorry company (running IIS) will attempt to sue Andover.net because their server went to that big blue screen in the sky when it was referenced on Slashdot?

FinkPloyd

Famous Amos

[ChrisGoodwin]

Well those elves got mad. Really mad. They got hold of their suit elven friends to sue ol' Wally. Those crafty elves bitch slapped Wally so hard that he lost everything. Even that stash that they had given him earlier. Even the ability to use his good name. Even to use the likeness of his face. I do not think that he can legally make a cookie anymore.

I think he's making cookies again, but he can't use Famous Amos or even Wally Amos on them. He can't even advertise as "I used to be Famous Amos."

When it was still Wally, he used to do commercials on a radio station I used to listen to (in like 1981!). I can still remember the phone number because of the way he sang it: 1-800-423-3114

Oh, and I won't buy Famous Amos cookies because of the way he was treated.

I suppose it's gonna be 'Darth Malda' to all us

[Cptn Proton]

little nerds -er- people now. Your all big and growned up with all your millions. Its just a matter of time before you lose your taste for the 'finer things' in life like fast 'puters and stale twinkies outta a machine somewhere.

You're too much a young 'un to know a guy called Wally Amos outta So-Cal. In fact, this was before Al invented the internet. It was when Apple II was in a garage. The TRS-80 model I was really cool then too.

Wally had the most delectable creation of a cookie a human could taste. They came in a plain brown bag. He was known far and wide as 'Famous Amos'. I felt special when I ate them. They were 'my' cookie.

Well then one day some elves wearing suits came by. They lived in a hollow tree. They flashed a big wad of green in Wally's face and that was more money than he'd ever seen at once. Well, he was real tired of all the business end of it anyway. He was good to go and he shook hands with the elves in suits.

At first I didn't understand what happened. the plain brown bags were gone. I could'nt find them anywhere. Lots of time went by. I wondered what I could do. Then one day a yellow bag showed up with the name 'famos amos' on the side. I was so happy I couldn't wait to have one - wait but no - what is this??????? these aren't famous amos cookies - they were't even a good imitation. In fact, they tasted like cardboard with sugar. They were cardboard.

Why would a company market such a vastly inferior product????

The only thing I thought of is that those dammyd tree abusing greedy little elves make the cheapest piece of pastry possible so they can stash real dough away.

Ol' Wally saw what was happening and said 'I know how to do better than this'. And so he went about making cookies again.

Well those elves got mad. Really mad. They got hold of their suit elven friends to sue ol' Wally. Those crafty elves bitch slapped Wally so hard that he lost everything. Even that stash that they had given him earlier. Even the ability to use his good name. Even to use the likeness of his face. I do not think that he can legally make a cookie anymore.

So every time I see the name 'famous amos' at the super market a strange sense of sadness reminds me of what once was. I can only hope that someone who worked in Wally's kitchen reading this will send me his recipe for the chocalate chip macadamia nut cookie.

I really do hope you have your bases covered when dealing with the suits.

Why not all of the Mozilla icons

[unyun]

Why not make it an option in the user's preferences. Be able to use any animated GIF or whatever it uses. Just fill in the filename and have Mozilla use that one. Then everyone can have their own.. websites could give their own out. Maybe have a little "/." up in the corner of the browser.
I think it'd be pretty cool if they would let you set your own. I know you can already do that with IE5... just have to do some registry edits or replace a BMP, but it can be done... it'd be nice to see it under the "Options...".

~unyun~