Our broken link policy (if we couldn't resolve the problem ourselves with Googling) was to write to the owner of the project listing, wait two weeks, send a reminder, wait five more days, then delete the listing if there was no response. The only time we would just delete a listing was when we couldn't track down any contact information for it. I apologize if you experienced anything other than this, it wasn't how we normally did things.
I worked at freshmeat for fifteen years, and was surprised and saddened by today's news. I wrote down a few thoughts, if anyone would benefit from some behind-the-scenes perspective: http://jeffcovey.net/2014/06/1...
One thing I noticed happening a couple of years ago was that as soon as a domain with even a minimum amount of traffic or visibility in search forums expired, it was quickly purchased by a porn site.
at freshmeat, we regularly get complaints that the homepage link for "myphpapp" is
leading to "lesbolovefest".
i'm settling on a house in ten days. i was lucky in that i used to
work for realtors, so i hired one as my buyer's broker, and he just
gave me access to the mls system and let me search. the mls system's
search features are completely useless, but by going to the websites
of various real estate companies, you can often find mls numbers to
look up. one word of warning: double-check the information you find
in the mls listings. for details on why it's not necessarily
accurate, see my rant at:
i've been looking around at houses lately, but
i haven't found these $5,000 ones. where are
they? i have that it in cash. no mortgage for
me! --
consider giving your time, too.
on
Geek Charities?
·
· Score: 2
i realize the american way is to write a check
and forget about it, but consider giving some of
your time and elbow grease as well. i help run a
computer lab for an inner city community
(http://agape.qis.net/ if one of the kids hasn't pushed the power button on the server again;), and my experience
has been that it's easy to find people to donate
money and hardware, and much harder to find
people willing to spend one afternoon a week
teaching the kids to use the internet.
as you're looking around for places to put your
money, consider whether you could put yourself and
your expertise there as well. you'll find that
it's a lot more fun, and you get to see first
hand whether the project you're contributing to
is doing any good. --
moderators: start doing your job
on
Giving Back
·
· Score: 1
i know it sounds like i'm whining, but this is really starting to bug me. this is the third or fourth time someone has posted something about me personally, and his or her comment has been marked way up, then i reply and either add more information or correct something that's been said, and my reply remains at score:1 so no one ever sees it. it's ridiculous. --
Re:So much more out there...
on
Giving Back
·
· Score: 1
...a LUG in Baltimore(I think?) who helped inner-city, disadvantaged kids get online and get the technological know-how that they'll need...
we always welcome (tax deductible) donations of money or equipment (our average xterminal box is a 486 with 16-32 megs of ram), and, as any nonprofit will tell you, we're always more in need of people's time than their money, so if you know anyone near us who might want to help either with putting machines together or helping the kids, pass the word along.
we're also happy to offer advice & assistance to anyone who's interested in doing the same thing in his/her city. feel free to contact me at jeff.covey@pobox.com.
we're starting our first formal classes this week with an intro to unix class, to be followed by an html class, a course in basic c, maybe an emacs class; whatever various lug members want to teach. should be fun.
as to the.org pavilion at linuxworldexpo, it's rather sad that we've gotten to the point that emmett has to say: "The fact that the.org pavilion gave these people a chance to shine is a big step in the right direction on behalf of the sponsors." of course they should have been there, and the companies who live and breathe on the community's code should have paid their way there and put them proudly on a pedestal for everyone to see instead of hiding them where the pointy haired bossen couldn't find them and be frightened by them.
they should come out of the closest and admit that the heart of their products is being written by teenagers with green hair and noserings, and that that's ok.
linuxworldexpo was a bit odd, because it's not clear for whom it was meant. atlanta was for the community, san diego was for the corporations, thebazaar was for... well, who the hell knows who thebazaar was for, but linuxworldexpo new york seemed to be for the businesses who would tolerate the community so long as it was kept segregated in its own ghetto.
Yup, you forgot to log out again. Actually, the LinuxWorld Geek Compound is probably the coolest place here. Laptops available to surf and check email while sitting in beanbags, with/. staff hanging out. This is the life. --
hehe, sitting on the floor (literally, in a beanbag chair) next to jonkatz+rob... hemos just ran away, oh well. its quite nice here! come down if ya can --
lots of posts saying the webcam's broken: moderate them to 2. post from the person running the webcam: leave at 1.;^)
anyway, current status:
it's not the cameras, and it's not the cables (we've tried two of each). it seems to be the video capture card. when we recorded the beanie awards last night, the signal coming in from the cameras & cables to the video mixing board was fine, but when we ran a cable to the encoding machine, it ran great for awhile, then turned into what you saw yesterday. so, we just turned it off and let thomas and (oops; so sorry, i'm blanking on your name!) take the recording back to the sync to be encoded.
i turned in relatively early last night, so i don't know whether we snagged a replacement card from thomas or not. you'll just have to stay tuned...
p.s.: watch for the beanie awards video; it's fun.:) --
sorry i haven't been on/. all day to give updates. thanks to the folks in #slashdot for telling me what they're getting on their end.
icecast continues to die from time-to-time, but we now have an account on thesync's server, so we can restart it as needed.
as for the boothcam, there's a bad coupling on the video input card. if you jiggle the cable for 20 minutes or so, you can get a clear shot for 10 seconds. of course, you also get this if you *don't* jiggle it... it's total chaos theory at this point. sorry about that. hope you caught the alan cox interview and the nerf battle this morning. --
no mirrors, sorry. it keeps coming and going; it's really frustrating. we had a discussion with the crowd on the lack of women in the computer industry a while ago, and now emmett is ranting on linuxone. the audio only seems to work when there's nothing much going on. grrrr... icecast encodes ok, but then has trouble connecting to the sync. --
we got it all going, then icecast flaked for a what seemed to be a very long and very nerve-racking time. sorry about that; it's all better now. of course, if you're listening now, you're not hearing anything because we're not saying anything.:) just keep it running in the background, and crank it up when the next show starts. in the meantime, you can bring up the webcam and watch me typing this to you.:-) --
i love how they market "winfire" as something good for you rather than a tool for them to gather demographic data.:)
anyway, my recommendation to all businesses like this: do advertising, but do it through email.
that way, you don't have to support clunky platform-specific add-ons or customized browsers, and you're opening yourself up to a much wider market. i would probably take advantage of the offer myself if it were handled this way, and i'm sure many other *nix and mac users would as well.
of course, most any geek is going to either not pick up the mail from his or her foo@freewhatever.com account or procmail it out of existance, but not if the means of getting ads is also the only place where service changes and outages are announced.:) better yet, send mails along the lines of "respond to this message within 48 hours, or your account will be automatically suspended."
not that this is a big issue... most people are not geeks, and are not going to be aware that it's even possible to stop the mail. i can say this with certainty after having watched numerous newbies click on dozens of ads without any idea that the ads weren't part of the search they were doing. "how did i end up on miracle whip? i was searching for the weather report!" --
icewm is needed because not only is it full of features, easy to use, and quite configurable, but because it is extremely fast and lightweight. i run a lab full of 386 and 486 xterminals, and icewm is the default wm, not because i wouldn't like to give the kids kde, but because we can't afford the memory and cpu overhead.
here's a screenshot of a typical desktop in our lab. --
Slashdot Mirror
Our broken link policy (if we couldn't resolve the problem ourselves with Googling) was to write to the owner of the project listing, wait two weeks, send a reminder, wait five more days, then delete the listing if there was no response. The only time we would just delete a listing was when we couldn't track down any contact information for it. I apologize if you experienced anything other than this, it wasn't how we normally did things.
I worked at freshmeat for fifteen years, and was surprised and saddened by today's news. I wrote down a few thoughts, if anyone would benefit from some behind-the-scenes perspective: http://jeffcovey.net/2014/06/1...
i don't think they'll be showing that on the 6:00 news.
at freshmeat, we regularly get complaints that the homepage link for "myphpapp" is leading to "lesbolovefest".
i'm settling on a house in ten days. i was lucky in that i used to work for realtors, so i hired one as my buyer's broker, and he just gave me access to the mls system and let me search. the mls system's search features are completely useless, but by going to the websites of various real estate companies, you can often find mls numbers to look up. one word of warning: double-check the information you find in the mls listings. for details on why it's not necessarily accurate, see my rant at:
http://jeffcovey.net/ramblings/mris.html
--
i've been looking around at houses lately, but i haven't found these $5,000 ones. where are they? i have that it in cash. no mortgage for me!
--
as you're looking around for places to put your money, consider whether you could put yourself and your expertise there as well. you'll find that it's a lot more fun, and you get to see first hand whether the project you're contributing to is doing any good.
--
no shift!!
--
i know it sounds like i'm whining, but this is really starting to bug me. this is the third or fourth time someone has posted something about me personally, and his or her comment has been marked way up, then i reply and either add more information or correct something that's been said, and my reply remains at score:1 so no one ever sees it. it's ridiculous.
--
that was us:
we always welcome (tax deductible) donations of money or equipment (our average xterminal box is a 486 with 16-32 megs of ram), and, as any nonprofit will tell you, we're always more in need of people's time than their money, so if you know anyone near us who might want to help either with putting machines together or helping the kids, pass the word along.
we're also happy to offer advice & assistance to anyone who's interested in doing the same thing in his/her city. feel free to contact me at jeff.covey@pobox.com.
we're starting our first formal classes this week with an intro to unix class, to be followed by an html class, a course in basic c, maybe an emacs class; whatever various lug members want to teach. should be fun.
as to the .org pavilion at linuxworldexpo, it's rather sad that we've gotten to the point that emmett has to say: "The fact that the .org pavilion gave these people a chance to shine is a big step in the right direction on behalf of the sponsors." of course they should have been there, and the companies who live and breathe on the community's code should have paid their way there and put them proudly on a pedestal for everyone to see instead of hiding them where the pointy haired bossen couldn't find them and be frightened by them.
they should come out of the closest and admit that the heart of their products is being written by teenagers with green hair and noserings, and that that's ok.
linuxworldexpo was a bit odd, because it's not clear for whom it was meant. atlanta was for the community, san diego was for the corporations, thebazaar was for... well, who the hell knows who thebazaar was for, but linuxworldexpo new york seemed to be for the businesses who would tolerate the community so long as it was kept segregated in its own ghetto.
oh, btw: "eeeeemmmmmmmmmmmmmeeeeeettt!"
--
Yup, you forgot to log out again. Actually, the LinuxWorld Geek Compound is probably the coolest place here. Laptops available to surf and check email while sitting in beanbags, with /. staff hanging out. This is the life.
--
we have a whole bunch of public access laptops here. i should figure out how to log out so my cookie isn't hanging around all over here...
--
hehe, sitting on the floor (literally, in a beanbag chair) next to jonkatz+rob... hemos just ran away, oh well. its quite nice here! come down if ya can
--
anyway, current status:
it's not the cameras, and it's not the cables (we've tried two of each). it seems to be the video capture card. when we recorded the beanie awards last night, the signal coming in from the cameras & cables to the video mixing board was fine, but when we ran a cable to the encoding machine, it ran great for awhile, then turned into what you saw yesterday. so, we just turned it off and let thomas and (oops; so sorry, i'm blanking on your name!) take the recording back to the sync to be encoded.
i turned in relatively early last night, so i don't know whether we snagged a replacement card from thomas or not. you'll just have to stay tuned...
p.s.: watch for the beanie awards video; it's fun. :)
--
icecast continues to die from time-to-time, but we now have an account on thesync's server, so we can restart it as needed.
as for the boothcam, there's a bad coupling on the video input card. if you jiggle the cable for 20 minutes or so, you can get a clear shot for 10 seconds. of course, you also get this if you *don't* jiggle it... it's total chaos theory at this point. sorry about that. hope you caught the alan cox interview and the nerf battle this morning.
--
closing up the show for the day... i'll get on the phone to thesync tonight; hopefully, we'll be broadcasting all day tomorrow.
--
no mirrors, sorry. it keeps coming and going; it's really frustrating. we had a discussion with the crowd on the lack of women in the computer industry a while ago, and now emmett is ranting on linuxone. the audio only seems to work when there's nothing much going on. grrrr... icecast encodes ok, but then has trouble connecting to the sync.
--
yay! emmet put back on the headset while being interviewed. listen and be amazed. ;^)
--
we got it all going, then icecast flaked for a what seemed to be a very long and very nerve-racking time. sorry about that; it's all better now. of course, if you're listening now, you're not hearing anything because we're not saying anything. :) just keep it running in the background, and crank it up when the next show starts. in the meantime, you can bring up the webcam and watch me typing this to you. :-)
--
anyway, my recommendation to all businesses like this: do advertising, but do it through email.
that way, you don't have to support clunky platform-specific add-ons or customized browsers, and you're opening yourself up to a much wider market. i would probably take advantage of the offer myself if it were handled this way, and i'm sure many other *nix and mac users would as well.
of course, most any geek is going to either not pick up the mail from his or her foo@freewhatever.com account or procmail it out of existance, but not if the means of getting ads is also the only place where service changes and outages are announced. :) better yet, send mails along the lines of "respond to this message within 48 hours, or your account will be automatically suspended."
not that this is a big issue... most people are not geeks, and are not going to be aware that it's even possible to stop the mail. i can say this with certainty after having watched numerous newbies click on dozens of ads without any idea that the ads weren't part of the search they were doing. "how did i end up on miracle whip? i was searching for the weather report!"
--
here's a screenshot of a typical desktop in our lab.
--
whose fault is it that /. says that every new nick i try to register is taken, when it isn't?
--
what's quotemeta? i don't see anything in the faq about it.
--
anyone been able to find a realaudio copy of the story anywhere? i'd like to hear it.
--