Based on that, what are your predictions for the next 10 years? And what's slashdot going to be like on its 20th anniversary?
Do you have any long term goals or features planned? Any big overhauls intended? RSS feeds into our brains or something?
Re:Was slashdot ever...
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 1
As a followup question. On your last story you mentioned the point at which you had to move from hosting under your desk to a real host. What about when: - You realized you could make money off of this. - You realized this could be your full time job. - You realized you needed real infrastructure and actual staff. - You realized this would be your full time job and career until you retire. (Have you passed this point at all?)
Re:Do you like Slashdot discussions?
on
Ask Rob Malda
·
· Score: 1
My question is simple: Do you like the discussions that appear on Slashdot stories? Do you read them?
My question originates from the fact that, apparently, you've only commented 368 times. Considering that you've been here "since the beginning," that's not a lot of comments. Avid Slashdotters make about that many comments per year. He probably has an account to post from anonymously. When a site founder posts on his own site one of two things happen: -His posts are good, and by virtue of being famous he gets modded up and some weird personality cult develops. Alternatively he'd influence discussions too much. -His posts are lame, at which point he gets a bad reputation of cluelessness which extends to the site as a whole.
So it's a lose/lose situation. Besides, he probably gives himself unlimited moderation/metamods, which is just as good as commenting and more influential, and makes it easier to keep the kids in line.
Besides it's not like it's hard to create an account. He probably rotates through them.
Didn't you hear? Signal 11 was one of Tacos Aliases.:)
Seems like people are jumping on this as "linux bad!" where in fact the article is fairly neutral, Colinane has one opinion, Huger has another (and generally more accepted) opinion. Its not so much that "Linux is bad" but rather that people thought you'd have 10000 compromised windows machines for each compromised Linux one, or thereabouts. Now the hype is catching up with Linux, and it's interesting to see people's reactions.
Of course, maybe on desktops things are still a lot on Linux's favor, but now servers seem to be more vulnerable than previously thought, especially when serving sloppy custom apps. To the point where a direct comparison with Windows makes sense.
I bet the same thing would happen to OpenBSD if it were more common.
Careful with hyping up your favorite (be it by security, graphics, gameplay, storyline, stock potential). People don't like being disappointed.
2. its much harder to actually claim you have shared a whole song since its usually pieces of file you share. But all the pieces of the song are copyrighted, and you can't really claim fair use sicne you are sending out pieces at random, not selecting a quote to make a critique or a parody.
Besides, I could write a client that keeps track of which pieces I downloaded from whom. A swarm of these clients could ensure they got full copies from each of the targets. More expensive in bandwidth and they'd have to be leechers (legally), but doable.
Because by the time he did the first test and plugged in the new power cable it had turned into night? The lower ambient light made the contrast look that much better.
Of course, I'm just guessing, but he might be stupid rather than untruthful.
Of course,it might be fun to grab a bunch of audiophiles, do double blind tests with their gear and then file a class action lawsuit for fraud against these magazines and manufacturers.
The other reason this won't fly is that cash-flow problem.
Say you pay your developers $X over a month of overtime instead of $2X as a bonus once you ship. A game developer makes no money during the development phase. In fact they make most of their money the first week or two a game is on the shelves.
In the overtime scenario they'd have to take a (possibly an additional) loan for $X to pay for the developers and just pray that they can cover it later. In the bonus scenario, the company can wait until the game ships and they go in the black before compensating.
Of course, the developers probably should get it in writing that they'll get $2X as a bonus once the game ships and sells N units rather than depend on their employer's good will, but that's unlikely.
Or the studio should save money from their past games to pay for the budgeted overtime, but that's unlikely too.
And what on earth makes you think I'm anywhere near the USA?
Re:In a lot of ways, Gimp is more intuitive than P
on
GIMP 2 for Photographers
·
· Score: 3, Informative
I'll give you two features that alone make Photoshop easier to use: - Unified move/scale/rotate/perspective/etc tool with transparency. Want to paste a person on top of a building? A flower on a hat? Paste your logo on a billboard on a photograph? You move, scale, rotate and do everything else in one shot until it looks right. Scale a bit, move, scale, move, rotate, rescale, change transparency, doesn't match quite right, rescale again... ok. On the Gimp, you have to do scaling and rotation separately, which is harder to get right and you lose quality, especially if you do it repeatedly. The best I found was to use the measuring tool on an axis on both source and destination, and then calculate scale and rotation and enter it on the two dialogs, then move. Even the transparent move wasn't implemented until recently, and you have to make sure to disable visibility of the layer before you move. (Or at least you did a month ago) - Adjustment layers: Nondestructive editing is good. Adjust the colors. Adjust the colors of another layer. Doesn't look quite right? Readjust the colors of the first one. In the gimp I end up making copies before a color adjustment so that I can redo it if I need to.
Notice I'm not talking about high powered features, or 256 bit color in YMCA palette or whatever. I'm talking about every day things. Even the layer grouping in Photoshop is very useful even if you don't put in the layer blending effects, making it easy to implement.
There are a couple features from the Gimp I miss when I'm using Photoshop, but the end balance is in photoshop's favor.
For simple editing the Gimp is good. If you don't have Photoshop, the Gimp is good. One-on-one comparison... give it a couple years.
I had an interesting experience: I installed the Gimp for my sister, because I didn't want to pirate PS (half morality, half laziness). She started using it and learned it, even though it wasn't always intuitive. I had to show her a bunch of tricks myself, to help her along.
The interesting part is that once she showed her friends her edited pictures and animations they also started using it. Many tried pirating PS, but... It wasn't translated. It's actually hard to find a download for Photoshop in spanish. This isn't a problem for my sister since she reads english well enough, but a lot of her friends don't, or at least not as easily.
Now all her friends and half her high-school is using the Gimp simply because the translation makes it easier to use, even if windows and office and everything else on their computers is pirated. My sister jokes she should get a prize from the Gimp team, since she spread it around.
(Note that I do know from experience that PS has a lot of nice features, both at the low and high end, but the translation is worth the difference for a lot of people)
I agree that it's a "metaphysical presupposition", and that metaphysical presuppositions are necessary to engage in scientific study, but I don't think that it is necessary to assume that God "doesn't exist" in order to engage in scientific study. I think a better, more general way to put it would be "All other things being equal", or "in a closed system": basically, you need to assume that God is not actively (abnormally) "interfering" with your experiments as you conduct them: whether he exists or not.
You're starting from a fairly modern view of science, and of all nature, that things behave accoridng to some rules. I read somewhere on wikipedia (tried to find the article and failed) an interesting perspective on this: Early on, people believed that air moved up to its own place, dirt moved down to the ground, water in between. Animals behaved in certain ways. The sun set and rose. They believed that things did this because that's what air, water, animals and the sun did! If you know that you have a sense of will, it stands to reason that the air has a will too, and that if you breathe out underwater, the air will bubble up because that's what air wants to do. It's in its nature.
The whole idea of being able to come up with rules, and that things do not have a spirit inside them telling them to behave according to those rules, is what modern science is built upon. But that is not a self-evident thing outside our civilization. I don't know if a farmer in the middle of nowhere will see things our way or not.
In fact, the change to this point of view took a long time. Look at the revolution caused by Newton's laws. Not only were they simple laws that accounted for a wide variety of effects, but once you throw in universal gravitation, suddenly you have laws on how celestial bodies move, unifying a large number of observations, and convincing a lot of people of the predictive power of modern science.
Notice that this difference in points of view does not impact religion at all. Well, maybe the old way is more suited to a polytheistic religion (wind gods, etc) and the scientific way to a monotheistic religion (one creator who set up the rules, got everything started and took a break since the 7th day). Einstein, for example, believed in this kind of a God, one that just set up rules for the universe to follow (ok, I'm oversimplifying).
The problem TFA points out is when the rules you discover contradict what is claimed by the religious institution (not necessarily the religion). Galileo went through that. We'll have to wait and see how the current islamic scientists come out.
What language is this in? What are the first five letters of the alphabet? What are the five vowels?
Other stuff: Are you a human or a computer program? What is the name of this site? (see title bar) Pick a number, any number. (Any number is taken as correct) Leave the following space blank.
Of course, the biggest problem with a limited dictionary of questions like this is that a spammer can sit through them, answer them all, or at least a portion, and then put a script to replay the answers. If the script gets a new question it just refreshes.
I got "derground". If they are getting this from digitized books, they have to work on undoing hyphenation before presenting it to the user.
I wonder, afte this is running for a while, most of the unknown words will be nonsense (jabberwocky, snickersnee) Proper or made up names (Elric of Melnibone? I saw Benoit in the third captcha I solved, I now got one that looks like Visscher), numbers and other things people wouldn't work through.
The other problem is with common words that OCR gets wrong. I've/me are common enough that they might be overrepresented, or undertranslated.
In the end, since this is a university project, the end product is not the product itself (translated books) but rather the papers and master/PhD theses you can write with the data. Are people better at OCR than computers? By how much? How much is people's ability to recognize a word impaired by cutting off the context? Are people better at common words than at proper names and unknown words?
The site went back up right away, since the main comment table already had bigger fields, but the foreign key for the parent relation had to be changed, so we were stuck on flat format for a while.
There a bunch of funny commments in that article though ("That's cool, I'll just pretend I'm on Digg" , '"2^24 comments ought to be enough for anyone" -- CmdrTaco', "...why wasn't this problem discovered on the dev system in advance?", etc)
Yeah. Everything2 has his farewell post. I thought I recalled something more involved though. It's an interesting read, with some insight on moderation and other things. I dind't notice most of these changes because I was always AC and had no karma.
I signed up for slashdot.org slightly over three years ago. Since that time I've seen it go from an obscure "news for nerds" website to being immensely popular with IT professionals. I was here before Linux was hyped. When Voices from the Hellmouth appeared on the front page, like most everybody else at the time, I was stunned into silence. Not only because this was the first time Katz had posted something that didn't stroke his ego, but also because it was a document that stood on its own. One could hear and feel the words because they were true; Like many on Slashdot I had gone through the now well-known geek/outcast stage during my schooling. Although by now it has been dragged through the media and featured so many times that many people's stomachs turn just mentioning it, but it was important at the time. It was definitely a turning point for the entire community. It was also the first time that Slashdot had featured an article of such far-reaching proportions. It was not Slashdot's daily bread and butter, which consisted mainly of short opinion pieces, a "ask the experts"-styled column and, of course, the daily links.
Slashdot at the time, to me was an experiment which was always on the verge of exploding. The scores of posts from users, the quick corrections as the authors realized (once again) that they had posted too soon, the inevitable technical difficulties - through all of this it seemed that the thing that kept the site from melting down was the fact that one could login to Slashdot and see what other people had to say. Whether it was Microsoft's latest underhanded tactic or a cool hack of a random piece of hardware, Slashdot had it covered... and more importantly, had the opinions of other like-minded people for one to read.
During all of that you had me. Like a fair number of other geeks, my job was boring and unchallenging. And like most people in tech support and web design, you get a lot of downtime too. One can only surf the web for so long before you've seen everything and been everywhere. Whatever the four-color glossies say, the interactive world out here is tiring, both mentally and physically. The natural solution, to me, was to lay on the refresh button of my browser and start posting to Slashdot. On practically every article that I could come up with an opinion on, I posted to. Some of them were fine works of literary art. Others were little more than OOG_THE_CAVEMAN posts, except without the capitalization.
In the middle of all this commotion a seemingly unsolvable problem appeared: Slashdot was becoming more popular. Doesn't seem like much of a problem, really, until you realize one of the first laws of the internet: "In any large gathering, the majority of people are idiots". Like Usenet, a subculture rapidly formed whose only objective, it seemed, was to crash the system by overloading it with stupidity. We tried ignoring it. Then we denounced it. Finally, we moderated it.
I probably narrowly missed being one of the "first 200" moderators. I'm glad I missed being selected because "Version 1.0" fared about as well as one could expect. Not only did it start on fire, but it also set a lot of other people on fire. Mass flaming ensued. A lot of normally well-tempered slashdotters suddenly had picked up their pitchfork and were threatening to lynch Rob. Oh, and the trolls? They were right there, continuing their stupid commentary and replying with silly comments... completely unaware that they had caused the Slashdot crew to silently segfault, and probably a lot of the readership in the process.
"Version 2.0", implemented maybe two months later, was pressed into service because the popularity of Slashdot (and hence the number of stupid people) had reached a level which was overwhelming even the 200 mode
Err, One has to ask: When exactly did the site go online? TFA only mentions October 1997. Is there an actual date you can recall or was it lost with the archives?
Let's see, There was the whole voices from the hellmouth thing. A big deal actually, read up on it. CleverNickName's jokes in trekkie threads look really out of place until you figure out who he is. say, here. The first one I saw was a joke on how something was done on the Enterprise, he simply replied "in my day we did it this way..." and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why he was +5 funny. He also had an ask slashdot which redeemed him for a lot of people. Trolling, Karma Whoring, Metamoderation have a whole story that I won't get into. There was a troll who upon leaving/. posted a how-to on how to karma whore, which was an interesting read. I wish I could remember his name. Goatse. That's the reason why links now get the domain name appended. Slashdot got hacked once, because the production site had the same password as a less secure test site. That was an interesting discussion. CommanderTaco's wedding proposal (see the FAQ, favorite story). Achieving record number of posts. Database breaks upon reaching 2**31-1. Site goes back online without threading for a few days.
This is only some I remember. There were other story-related cool stuff. Some interesting interviews as well.
(I have a high UID because I always posted as AC, but I've been here for a long time)
Interesting. Dec 21 1997: - Announcement of the biggest supercomputer being built (30TFlops) - Antitrust rulings overturned, Baby bells deregulated, not being constrained by the AT&T antitrust findings anymore. - Major site hacked (Quake2.com) - Satellite images available (Resolution is 10sq/ft per pixel, and it costs a few hundred bucks a pixel)
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
"Laika died of a heart attack early in the mission (not too surprising!)" There was no mention at the time of Laika dying in orbit, indeed the impression given was thet he safely returned to earth. Later on they mentioned him dying during reentry or euthanized by injection in orbit, or died of fright just after take-off, later on in a book written by one of the Russians who actually worked on the project there is mention of the mutt being electrocuted. - Laika was a she - Sputnik 2 couldn't reenter, so mechanisms were added to euthanize her. There was enough food and supplies to keep her alive for a week. The mechanism was poisoned food, not electrocution. - Wikipedia says she died after 5 to 7 hours into the flight because the temperature control system failed.
Also notice that Laika's death is mostly played up in the US, probably becuase of cold war propaganda. The rest of the world knows who Laika is, and is surprised to learn that she died in orbit.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you have any long term goals or features planned? Any big overhauls intended? RSS feeds into our brains or something?
As a followup question. On your last story you mentioned the point at which you had to move from hosting under your desk to a real host. What about when:
- You realized you could make money off of this.
- You realized this could be your full time job.
- You realized you needed real infrastructure and actual staff.
- You realized this would be your full time job and career until you retire. (Have you passed this point at all?)
My question originates from the fact that, apparently, you've only commented 368 times. Considering that you've been here "since the beginning," that's not a lot of comments. Avid Slashdotters make about that many comments per year. He probably has an account to post from anonymously. When a site founder posts on his own site one of two things happen:
-His posts are good, and by virtue of being famous he gets modded up and some weird personality cult develops. Alternatively he'd influence discussions too much.
-His posts are lame, at which point he gets a bad reputation of cluelessness which extends to the site as a whole.
So it's a lose/lose situation. Besides, he probably gives himself unlimited moderation/metamods, which is just as good as commenting and more influential, and makes it easier to keep the kids in line.
Besides it's not like it's hard to create an account. He probably rotates through them.
Didn't you hear? Signal 11 was one of Tacos Aliases.
Of course, maybe on desktops things are still a lot on Linux's favor, but now servers seem to be more vulnerable than previously thought, especially when serving sloppy custom apps. To the point where a direct comparison with Windows makes sense.
I bet the same thing would happen to OpenBSD if it were more common.
Careful with hyping up your favorite (be it by security, graphics, gameplay, storyline, stock potential). People don't like being disappointed.
Besides, I could write a client that keeps track of which pieces I downloaded from whom. A swarm of these clients could ensure they got full copies from each of the targets. More expensive in bandwidth and they'd have to be leechers (legally), but doable.
Because by the time he did the first test and plugged in the new power cable it had turned into night? The lower ambient light made the contrast look that much better.
Of course, I'm just guessing, but he might be stupid rather than untruthful.
Of course,it might be fun to grab a bunch of audiophiles, do double blind tests with their gear and then file a class action lawsuit for fraud against these magazines and manufacturers.
Repulsorlifts only work for the few meters above a surface. Useful for takeoff and landing, but not necessary for atmospheric flight.
The other reason this won't fly is that cash-flow problem.
Say you pay your developers $X over a month of overtime instead of $2X as a bonus once you ship. A game developer makes no money during the development phase. In fact they make most of their money the first week or two a game is on the shelves.
In the overtime scenario they'd have to take a (possibly an additional) loan for $X to pay for the developers and just pray that they can cover it later. In the bonus scenario, the company can wait until the game ships and they go in the black before compensating.
Of course, the developers probably should get it in writing that they'll get $2X as a bonus once the game ships and sells N units rather than depend on their employer's good will, but that's unlikely.
Or the studio should save money from their past games to pay for the budgeted overtime, but that's unlikely too.
Gil "the ARM" Hamilton doesn't have this problem.
And what on earth makes you think I'm anywhere near the USA?
I'll give you two features that alone make Photoshop easier to use:
... give it a couple years.
- Unified move/scale/rotate/perspective/etc tool with transparency. Want to paste a person on top of a building? A flower on a hat? Paste your logo on a billboard on a photograph? You move, scale, rotate and do everything else in one shot until it looks right. Scale a bit, move, scale, move, rotate, rescale, change transparency, doesn't match quite right, rescale again... ok. On the Gimp, you have to do scaling and rotation separately, which is harder to get right and you lose quality, especially if you do it repeatedly. The best I found was to use the measuring tool on an axis on both source and destination, and then calculate scale and rotation and enter it on the two dialogs, then move. Even the transparent move wasn't implemented until recently, and you have to make sure to disable visibility of the layer before you move. (Or at least you did a month ago)
- Adjustment layers: Nondestructive editing is good. Adjust the colors. Adjust the colors of another layer. Doesn't look quite right? Readjust the colors of the first one. In the gimp I end up making copies before a color adjustment so that I can redo it if I need to.
Notice I'm not talking about high powered features, or 256 bit color in YMCA palette or whatever. I'm talking about every day things. Even the layer grouping in Photoshop is very useful even if you don't put in the layer blending effects, making it easy to implement.
There are a couple features from the Gimp I miss when I'm using Photoshop, but the end balance is in photoshop's favor.
For simple editing the Gimp is good. If you don't have Photoshop, the Gimp is good. One-on-one comparison
I had an interesting experience: I installed the Gimp for my sister, because I didn't want to pirate PS (half morality, half laziness). She started using it and learned it, even though it wasn't always intuitive. I had to show her a bunch of tricks myself, to help her along.
... It wasn't translated. It's actually hard to find a download for Photoshop in spanish. This isn't a problem for my sister since she reads english well enough, but a lot of her friends don't, or at least not as easily.
The interesting part is that once she showed her friends her edited pictures and animations they also started using it. Many tried pirating PS, but
Now all her friends and half her high-school is using the Gimp simply because the translation makes it easier to use, even if windows and office and everything else on their computers is pirated. My sister jokes she should get a prize from the Gimp team, since she spread it around.
(Note that I do know from experience that PS has a lot of nice features, both at the low and high end, but the translation is worth the difference for a lot of people)
You're starting from a fairly modern view of science, and of all nature, that things behave accoridng to some rules. I read somewhere on wikipedia (tried to find the article and failed) an interesting perspective on this: Early on, people believed that air moved up to its own place, dirt moved down to the ground, water in between. Animals behaved in certain ways. The sun set and rose. They believed that things did this because that's what air, water, animals and the sun did! If you know that you have a sense of will, it stands to reason that the air has a will too, and that if you breathe out underwater, the air will bubble up because that's what air wants to do. It's in its nature.I agree that it's a "metaphysical presupposition", and that metaphysical presuppositions are necessary to engage in scientific study, but I don't think that it is necessary to assume that God "doesn't exist" in order to engage in scientific study. I think a better, more general way to put it would be "All other things being equal", or "in a closed system": basically, you need to assume that God is not actively (abnormally) "interfering" with your experiments as you conduct them: whether he exists or not.
The whole idea of being able to come up with rules, and that things do not have a spirit inside them telling them to behave according to those rules, is what modern science is built upon. But that is not a self-evident thing outside our civilization. I don't know if a farmer in the middle of nowhere will see things our way or not.
In fact, the change to this point of view took a long time. Look at the revolution caused by Newton's laws. Not only were they simple laws that accounted for a wide variety of effects, but once you throw in universal gravitation, suddenly you have laws on how celestial bodies move, unifying a large number of observations, and convincing a lot of people of the predictive power of modern science.
Notice that this difference in points of view does not impact religion at all. Well, maybe the old way is more suited to a polytheistic religion (wind gods, etc) and the scientific way to a monotheistic religion (one creator who set up the rules, got everything started and took a break since the 7th day). Einstein, for example, believed in this kind of a God, one that just set up rules for the universe to follow (ok, I'm oversimplifying).
The problem TFA points out is when the rules you discover contradict what is claimed by the religious institution (not necessarily the religion). Galileo went through that. We'll have to wait and see how the current islamic scientists come out.
If you assume english knowledge:
What language is this in?
What are the first five letters of the alphabet?
What are the five vowels?
Other stuff:
Are you a human or a computer program?
What is the name of this site? (see title bar)
Pick a number, any number. (Any number is taken as correct)
Leave the following space blank.
Of course, the biggest problem with a limited dictionary of questions like this is that a spammer can sit through them, answer them all, or at least a portion, and then put a script to replay the answers. If the script gets a new question it just refreshes.
I got "derground". If they are getting this from digitized books, they have to work on undoing hyphenation before presenting it to the user.
I wonder, afte this is running for a while, most of the unknown words will be nonsense (jabberwocky, snickersnee) Proper or made up names (Elric of Melnibone? I saw Benoit in the third captcha I solved, I now got one that looks like Visscher), numbers and other things people wouldn't work through.
The other problem is with common words that OCR gets wrong. I've/me are common enough that they might be overrepresented, or undertranslated.
In the end, since this is a university project, the end product is not the product itself (translated books) but rather the papers and master/PhD theses you can write with the data. Are people better at OCR than computers? By how much? How much is people's ability to recognize a word impaired by cutting off the context? Are people better at common words than at proper names and unknown words?
err, right. 2**24.
Took about a day to fix: http://meta.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/09/1534204
The site went back up right away, since the main comment table already had bigger fields, but the foreign key for the parent relation had to be changed, so we were stuck on flat format for a while.
There a bunch of funny commments in that article though ("That's cool, I'll just pretend I'm on Digg" , '"2^24 comments ought to be enough for anyone" -- CmdrTaco', "...why wasn't this problem discovered on the dev system in advance?", etc)
Yeah. Everything2 has his farewell post. I thought I recalled something more involved though. It's an interesting read, with some insight on moderation and other things. I dind't notice most of these changes because I was always AC and had no karma.
I signed up for slashdot.org slightly over three years ago. Since that time I've seen it go from an obscure "news for nerds" website to being immensely popular with IT professionals. I was here before Linux was hyped. When Voices from the Hellmouth appeared on the front page, like most everybody else at the time, I was stunned into silence. Not only because this was the first time Katz had posted something that didn't stroke his ego, but also because it was a document that stood on its own. One could hear and feel the words because they were true; Like many on Slashdot I had gone through the now well-known geek/outcast stage during my schooling. Although by now it has been dragged through the media and featured so many times that many people's stomachs turn just mentioning it, but it was important at the time. It was definitely a turning point for the entire community. It was also the first time that Slashdot had featured an article of such far-reaching proportions. It was not Slashdot's daily bread and butter, which consisted mainly of short opinion pieces, a "ask the experts"-styled column and, of course, the daily links.
Slashdot at the time, to me was an experiment which was always on the verge of exploding. The scores of posts from users, the quick corrections as the authors realized (once again) that they had posted too soon, the inevitable technical difficulties - through all of this it seemed that the thing that kept the site from melting down was the fact that one could login to Slashdot and see what other people had to say. Whether it was Microsoft's latest underhanded tactic or a cool hack of a random piece of hardware, Slashdot had it covered... and more importantly, had the opinions of other like-minded people for one to read.
During all of that you had me. Like a fair number of other geeks, my job was boring and unchallenging. And like most people in tech support and web design, you get a lot of downtime too. One can only surf the web for so long before you've seen everything and been everywhere. Whatever the four-color glossies say, the interactive world out here is tiring, both mentally and physically. The natural solution, to me, was to lay on the refresh button of my browser and start posting to Slashdot. On practically every article that I could come up with an opinion on, I posted to. Some of them were fine works of literary art. Others were little more than OOG_THE_CAVEMAN posts, except without the capitalization.
In the middle of all this commotion a seemingly unsolvable problem appeared: Slashdot was becoming more popular. Doesn't seem like much of a problem, really, until you realize one of the first laws of the internet: "In any large gathering, the majority of people are idiots". Like Usenet, a subculture rapidly formed whose only objective, it seemed, was to crash the system by overloading it with stupidity. We tried ignoring it. Then we denounced it. Finally, we moderated it.
I probably narrowly missed being one of the "first 200" moderators. I'm glad I missed being selected because "Version 1.0" fared about as well as one could expect. Not only did it start on fire, but it also set a lot of other people on fire. Mass flaming ensued. A lot of normally well-tempered slashdotters suddenly had picked up their pitchfork and were threatening to lynch Rob. Oh, and the trolls? They were right there, continuing their stupid commentary and replying with silly comments... completely unaware that they had caused the Slashdot crew to silently segfault, and probably a lot of the readership in the process.
"Version 2.0", implemented maybe two months later, was pressed into service because the popularity of Slashdot (and hence the number of stupid people) had reached a level which was overwhelming even the 200 mode
Google points back to slashdot. All those articles are archived. Say http://slashdot.org/articles/99/04/25/1438249.shtml
I joined some time afterwards, so I wasn't around for the discussion.
Well, I wanted to use Eponymous Coward, but apparently there's another account with a similar name. Go figure.
Err, One has to ask:
When exactly did the site go online? TFA only mentions October 1997. Is there an actual date you can recall or was it lost with the archives?
Let's see, /. posted a how-to on how to karma whore, which was an interesting read. I wish I could remember his name.
There was the whole voices from the hellmouth thing. A big deal actually, read up on it.
CleverNickName's jokes in trekkie threads look really out of place until you figure out who he is. say, here. The first one I saw was a joke on how something was done on the Enterprise, he simply replied "in my day we did it this way..." and for the life of me I couldn't figure out why he was +5 funny. He also had an ask slashdot which redeemed him for a lot of people.
Trolling, Karma Whoring, Metamoderation have a whole story that I won't get into. There was a troll who upon leaving
Goatse. That's the reason why links now get the domain name appended.
Slashdot got hacked once, because the production site had the same password as a less secure test site. That was an interesting discussion.
CommanderTaco's wedding proposal (see the FAQ, favorite story). Achieving record number of posts.
Database breaks upon reaching 2**31-1. Site goes back online without threading for a few days.
This is only some I remember. There were other story-related cool stuff. Some interesting interviews as well.
(I have a high UID because I always posted as AC, but I've been here for a long time)
Interesting. Dec 21 1997:
- Announcement of the biggest supercomputer being built (30TFlops)
- Antitrust rulings overturned, Baby bells deregulated, not being constrained by the AT&T antitrust findings anymore.
- Major site hacked (Quake2.com)
- Satellite images available (Resolution is 10sq/ft per pixel, and it costs a few hundred bucks a pixel)
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
There was no mention at the time of Laika dying in orbit, indeed the impression given was thet he safely returned to earth. Later on they mentioned him dying during reentry or euthanized by injection in orbit, or died of fright just after take-off, later on in a book written by one of the Russians who actually worked on the project there is mention of the mutt being electrocuted. - Laika was a she
- Sputnik 2 couldn't reenter, so mechanisms were added to euthanize her. There was enough food and supplies to keep her alive for a week. The mechanism was poisoned food, not electrocution.
- Wikipedia says she died after 5 to 7 hours into the flight because the temperature control system failed.
Also notice that Laika's death is mostly played up in the US, probably becuase of cold war propaganda. The rest of the world knows who Laika is, and is surprised to learn that she died in orbit.
Apparently you didn't read the article. The author knows 3d graphics, gave every tool a fair chance and still says blender has a crappy UI.
Just covering your ears and screaming "i'm not listening" isn't going to change the fact that everyone agrees blender's UI sucks.
Yes, it has great workflow features, blah, blah, blah. But the UI still sucks.