Having to re-read a badly-written headline or summary is a minor irritation, yes, but I'm remindinded of the classic legend of Steve Jobs pressuring his engineers to make the Mac boot faster:
"You know, I've been thinking about it. How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day. Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
I'm not quite the zealot that Steve Jobs is, but you get the point. A minor irritation to a million page visitors adds up to a lot of irritation which could have been avoided entirely with just a minute or two of extra care by the editor.
If you read your comment you would assume that Taco is a PITA and his site sucks.
Given that my UID demonstrates that I've been here for several years, the fact that I'm still here is a pretty clear indicator that I like the site.
The question I have is, why are you so hypersensitive about how strongly-worded my comment was? I don't see CmdrTaco crying about it, and it's not like you have anything to do with the publication of this site.
They are also given a window of opportunity to report errors- this system actually works quite well I think.
Respectfully... If the system worked all that well, we probably would not be having this conversation. Every single day Slashdot publishes stories which are rife with extremely basic mistakes which I would be ashamed to show to a High School English teacher, let alone publish for the world to see.
I like your idea of adding new feedback systems, but I still think you would be better off with an experienced human editor giving everything a once-over.
Oh noes! A conversational message-board post about poor spelling in a professional news digest has a spelling error in it! pwned!!!1!
Wow. You sure told me. What was I thinking, expecting a higher standard from professional paid editors than from somebody ranting while his code complies at work?
In any case, endless complaints that Slashdot does not adhere to a standard that it explicitly does not aspire to are boring until they become annoying. Slashdot has gramattical errors all over the place, yes! Thank you! We knew that, and for the 5 billionth time, there is no intent to try to correct it.
Uh, I don't generally complain about spelling and grammar in Slashdot stories, but this is a thread about spelling and grammar on Slashdot. For once, a comment about the sad state of writing on Slashdot is both on-topic and valid, and if we are going to talk about it, I'm putting myself in the camp which says "it really could stand to be a hell of a lot better."
If that pisses you off so much you must leave, don't let the door hit you on the ass! Otherwise may we return to discussing novel topics...
CmndTaco brought it up for the purpose of discussion it. If that pisses you off so much, *you* should leave. Go read other threads.
select Name from LocalLibrary where author = "American" and author = "great"
Mark Twain John Steinbeck J.D. Salinger Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. William Faulkner Herman Melville F. Scott Fitzgerald Ernest Hemingway Jack Kerouac Joseph Heller William S. Burroughs Tom Wolfe [interrupted]
Need I go on?
I'll take the worst novel from any one of those writers over Tess of the Fucking d'Urbervilles any day, you prig.
Well, your hands are still usually the dirtiest part of your body whether you wash them or not, but that doesn't mean that washed hands are not cleaner than unwashed hands.
An infectious disease specialist once pointed out (as far as the spread of bacteria is concerned) that we would be better off greeting each other by french kissing than by shaking hands, but I don't think society is quite ready for such a shift in behavoir, however. For now, the best plan is to 1. Wash your hands a few times a day, and 2. Try to avoid touching your face with your hands as much as possible.
Do that, and you'll probably catch colds and the flu a little less often than those who don't... but your keyboard will still be dirtier than your toilet seat.
Personally, I don't worry about it. I purposely do not wash my hands after flushing the toilet (I prefer my immune system to be fit, its like lifting weights). I did almost kick some guy's ass who I work with because he used to take a piss and then use the 1st or 2nd dirtiest part of his body to flush the toilet -- the bottom of his shoe.
Ummm... if you are going out of your way to keep your hands dirty in order to "toughen up" your imune system, then isn't that other guy doing you a huge favor by rubbing the sole of his shoe on the handle for you? He's giving you a new set of germs to make you more fit!
Often, the more gray an area, the more hotly disputed the viewpoints are.
Which is moderation abuse. Notice that there is no "+1, Truthful" or "-1, Incorrect" mod option. That's because the purpose of moderation is to elevate comments which promote interesting discussion, not to reward those who you personally agree with on some point of dogma.
However, when moderation comes easilly to thousands of users, you gotta take the wheat with the chaff. Slashdot moderation is often abused, and probably always will be so long as it's set up the way it is.
Indeed. There are 18-year old bloggers out there who keep a copy of Strunk & White handy, or at the very minimum paste things into MS-word and look for red & green squiggly lines.
I normally don't play "grammar nazi" with the stories on Slashdot, because all such rants are more or less off-topic, but now that you've opened the floor to discussion on the matter, CmdrTaco, I don't mind telling you that I count myself as one of the people who thinks it's pathetic that your editors can't be bothered to at least fix the very basic and (what should be) obvious mistakes in every story that you run.
As an aside, for awhile we actually had an editor reading Slashdot articles and correcting grammatical mistakes. Turns out it doesn't really matter much. People found other things to complain about.
So, what he's saying is, in his view, the complaints are the problem.
Headlines on his site which look completely moronic are only a problem because they generate complaints, not because they are a mess to read. Were it only not for these troublesome "Squeeky Wheel" users who dare to be critical of our piss-poor use and abuse of the English language, Slashdot would be perfect.
What a shitty attitude!
(But his attitude is only a problem in the sense that it provoked me to complain, of course. Clearly, I'm the real problem here, and if Taco ran this site like a professional, I'd find something else to bitch about.)
The mystery isn't that everything else is so dirty, it's that toilet seats are so clean!
No mystery there at all.
Hands have more bacteria on them than asses. The hand is, by far, the dirtiest part of the human body, because it's the part we touch everything with.
This is true even for obsessive-compulsive hand-washers who use lots of anti-bacterial products. They just have tougher bacteria on their hands.
So something which you smear your hands on all the time (like a keyboard) is going to be dirtier than something you sit on with your bare ass (like a toilet seat.) I agree with the granparent post that this is all very, very old news.
What you are dealing with is not a non-english speaker but most likely a greedy american that wants you to think he's Asian.
To quote Peter Sellers: "Interesting theory, but one small problem. Is stupid!"
This whole thread is a discussion about how people have become reluctant to allow Chinese-sounding players into their groups. If somebody is a gold farmer, the LAST THING they want is for you to think they are Chinese, because their goal is to get invited to instances which they can then ninja loot.
You have it exactly backwards. Gold farmers are typically Asians who would prefer you think they are American or European, not Americans and Europeans who want you to think they are Asians.
Because countries with a lower cost of living and fewer high-paying career opportunities, such as Taiwan and China, are more likely to produce gold farmers (a job which doesn't pay nearly enough to be worth the hassle for most Americans and Europeans.)
It's not that they are ethnically Chinese, it's that they live in China.
Slashdot Mirror
Having to re-read a badly-written headline or summary is a minor irritation, yes, but I'm remindinded of the classic legend of Steve Jobs pressuring his engineers to make the Mac boot faster:
"You know, I've been thinking about it. How many people are going to be using the Macintosh? A million? No, more than that. In a few years, I bet five million people will be booting up their Macintoshes at least once a day. Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?"
I'm not quite the zealot that Steve Jobs is, but you get the point. A minor irritation to a million page visitors adds up to a lot of irritation which could have been avoided entirely with just a minute or two of extra care by the editor.
If you read your comment you would assume that Taco is a PITA and his site sucks.
Given that my UID demonstrates that I've been here for several years, the fact that I'm still here is a pretty clear indicator that I like the site.
The question I have is, why are you so hypersensitive about how strongly-worded my comment was? I don't see CmdrTaco crying about it, and it's not like you have anything to do with the publication of this site.
They are also given a window of opportunity to report errors- this system actually works quite well I think.
Respectfully... If the system worked all that well, we probably would not be having this conversation. Every single day Slashdot publishes stories which are rife with extremely basic mistakes which I would be ashamed to show to a High School English teacher, let alone publish for the world to see.
I like your idea of adding new feedback systems, but I still think you would be better off with an experienced human editor giving everything a once-over.
Whoops, you spelled a word wrong!
Oh noes! A conversational message-board post about poor spelling in a professional news digest has a spelling error in it! pwned!!!1!
Wow. You sure told me. What was I thinking, expecting a higher standard from professional paid editors than from somebody ranting while his code complies at work?
I can't both like a site and find fault with an element of it???
Shit, it's like walking on egg shells with some of you people.
In any case, endless complaints that Slashdot does not adhere to a standard that it explicitly does not aspire to are boring until they become annoying. Slashdot has gramattical errors all over the place, yes! Thank you! We knew that, and for the 5 billionth time, there is no intent to try to correct it.
Uh, I don't generally complain about spelling and grammar in Slashdot stories, but this is a thread about spelling and grammar on Slashdot. For once, a comment about the sad state of writing on Slashdot is both on-topic and valid, and if we are going to talk about it, I'm putting myself in the camp which says "it really could stand to be a hell of a lot better."
If that pisses you off so much you must leave, don't let the door hit you on the ass! Otherwise may we return to discussing novel topics...
CmndTaco brought it up for the purpose of discussion it. If that pisses you off so much, *you* should leave. Go read other threads.
Slashdot asks for paid subscriptions and sells ads.
Even free periodicals (like The Onion) take the trouble to check their spelling. It's not like it's hard.
select Name from LocalLibrary where author = "American" and author = "great"
Mark Twain
John Steinbeck
J.D. Salinger
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
William Faulkner
Herman Melville
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Jack Kerouac
Joseph Heller
William S. Burroughs
Tom Wolfe
[interrupted]
Need I go on?
I'll take the worst novel from any one of those writers over Tess of the Fucking d'Urbervilles any day, you prig.
Or if you installed a toilet in your cube?
Well, your hands are still usually the dirtiest part of your body whether you wash them or not, but that doesn't mean that washed hands are not cleaner than unwashed hands.
An infectious disease specialist once pointed out (as far as the spread of bacteria is concerned) that we would be better off greeting each other by french kissing than by shaking hands, but I don't think society is quite ready for such a shift in behavoir, however. For now, the best plan is to 1. Wash your hands a few times a day, and 2. Try to avoid touching your face with your hands as much as possible.
Do that, and you'll probably catch colds and the flu a little less often than those who don't... but your keyboard will still be dirtier than your toilet seat.
The way to address a plausable-yet-incorrect post is not by down-modding it, but by replying with correct information.
Persoanly, since I've failed to find a formal syntax specification for english
"Elements of Style" by Strunk and White.
It is to publishing grammar what the K&R book is to programming in C.
Now you know, and knowing is half the battle. Go Joe!
Rob, you said at that time that Slashdot is like a bunch of people talking at the local pub, so spelling and grammar isn't important.
But if you go to the pub and someone there is constantly speaking with poor grammar, you still judge him negatively because of it.
Not only that, but most bartenders would not leave a sign hanging out front which says "Rob's Rilly Gud Tavurn."
They would also check their menu for spelling errors.
There's a difference between what you expect of the patrons and what you expect of the establishment.
Do you have a source for your contention that people who wash their hands really frequenly have resistant bacteria?
That was (mostly) a joke.
The truth is that the heavy use of anti-bacterial products by some people has resulted in more resistant bacteria for all of us. Neat, huh?
woosh!
Personally, I don't worry about it. I purposely do not wash my hands after flushing the toilet (I prefer my immune system to be fit, its like lifting weights). I did almost kick some guy's ass who I work with because he used to take a piss and then use the 1st or 2nd dirtiest part of his body to flush the toilet -- the bottom of his shoe.
Ummm... if you are going out of your way to keep your hands dirty in order to "toughen up" your imune system, then isn't that other guy doing you a huge favor by rubbing the sole of his shoe on the handle for you? He's giving you a new set of germs to make you more fit!
By the way: Ewwwww! Wash your hands, you freak!
Often, the more gray an area, the more hotly disputed the viewpoints are.
Which is moderation abuse. Notice that there is no "+1, Truthful" or "-1, Incorrect" mod option. That's because the purpose of moderation is to elevate comments which promote interesting discussion, not to reward those who you personally agree with on some point of dogma.
However, when moderation comes easilly to thousands of users, you gotta take the wheat with the chaff. Slashdot moderation is often abused, and probably always will be so long as it's set up the way it is.
Indeed. There are 18-year old bloggers out there who keep a copy of Strunk & White handy, or at the very minimum paste things into MS-word and look for red & green squiggly lines.
I normally don't play "grammar nazi" with the stories on Slashdot, because all such rants are more or less off-topic, but now that you've opened the floor to discussion on the matter, CmdrTaco, I don't mind telling you that I count myself as one of the people who thinks it's pathetic that your editors can't be bothered to at least fix the very basic and (what should be) obvious mistakes in every story that you run.
Quite honestly, just how hard is it to read through something and check for the odd mistake?
By the way, I hear they have computer programs now that can do that for you. What possible excuse could the editors have for not using them?
Taco's comment here is quite telling:
As an aside, for awhile we actually had an editor reading Slashdot articles and correcting grammatical mistakes. Turns out it doesn't really matter much. People found other things to complain about.
So, what he's saying is, in his view, the complaints are the problem.
Headlines on his site which look completely moronic are only a problem because they generate complaints, not because they are a mess to read. Were it only not for these troublesome "Squeeky Wheel" users who dare to be critical of our piss-poor use and abuse of the English language, Slashdot would be perfect.
What a shitty attitude!
(But his attitude is only a problem in the sense that it provoked me to complain, of course. Clearly, I'm the real problem here, and if Taco ran this site like a professional, I'd find something else to bitch about.)
The mystery isn't that everything else is so dirty, it's that toilet seats are so clean!
No mystery there at all.
Hands have more bacteria on them than asses. The hand is, by far, the dirtiest part of the human body, because it's the part we touch everything with.
This is true even for obsessive-compulsive hand-washers who use lots of anti-bacterial products. They just have tougher bacteria on their hands.
So something which you smear your hands on all the time (like a keyboard) is going to be dirtier than something you sit on with your bare ass (like a toilet seat.) I agree with the granparent post that this is all very, very old news.
What you are dealing with is not a non-english speaker but most likely a greedy american that wants you to think he's Asian.
To quote Peter Sellers: "Interesting theory, but one small problem. Is stupid!"
This whole thread is a discussion about how people have become reluctant to allow Chinese-sounding players into their groups. If somebody is a gold farmer, the LAST THING they want is for you to think they are Chinese, because their goal is to get invited to instances which they can then ninja loot.
You have it exactly backwards. Gold farmers are typically Asians who would prefer you think they are American or European, not Americans and Europeans who want you to think they are Asians.
um.. why keep saying "Chinese" gold farmer?
Because countries with a lower cost of living and fewer high-paying career opportunities, such as Taiwan and China, are more likely to produce gold farmers (a job which doesn't pay nearly enough to be worth the hassle for most Americans and Europeans.)
It's not that they are ethnically Chinese, it's that they live in China.
They market games to 15-year olds for the same reason why they don't make music videos for the latest CD from the Cleveland Orchestra.
Marketing is better at selling flashy crap to young people than it is at targeting more sophisticated tastes.
I was in LA once.
Heh. Don't feel bad. Many of us have been in LA "once."
Few are foolish enough to be in LA twice, if it can at all be avoided.