Who said that I have to use my computer only to reinforce my ideals? That's like using the telephone only to talk about my political views, isn't it? I use both open, free and commercial software on my Linux machine. It has nothing to do with ideals. It has to do with the fact that I think Linux is a higher quality OS than Windows. It doesn't crash. I can more comfortably do more things at once. I leave it on constantly without memory errors. And perhaps the best feature is that I get more out of the box, for a lower price. Sure, I could run a telnet or smtp server on a Windows machine so that I could connect from work, but why go through all the extra effort of finding and/or buying it? The simple fact is that I'm just happier using Linux. When I use Windows I open up a DOS box (people hate when they see me do that:)). Ideals don't enter into it.
One time, while playing pool all by myself, I picked up the balls and put them in the pockets so I'd win. Woohoo! That was some real fun there, I tell ya. I really can say I achieved something.
I can't say I understand the appeal. I mean, easter eggs for stuff that wouldn't otherwise be in the game (secret areas, new characters, etc...) that's cool. But cheats to simply make the game easier to beat? I guess I just don't get it. "I was playing the game for 3 hours every day and it rocked! Then somebody showed me this cool cheat and I beat it in an hour! Now I....well...now I don't have anything to play anymore, and I'm bored."
Wait, they thought that HAL wouldn't work (even though they apparently got permission to use it) because it sounded too much like Hell, and the younger audiences wouldn't understand the reference? So they choose "Omniputer" instead? Why not just call it a "Cyberputer" or something equally meaningless? Novaputer, anyone? How about SuperDuperPuter?
Wow, you totally don't listen. Go back and read the point where I said that if you're paying 50 and they can make 150, then yeah, it is about the money. Of course it is. But not every job change is that cut and dried. If the place down the street is offering 55, but here at work you have 50 AND free soda AND foosball, then maybe the 50 is ok. That's all I'm saying.
You'd be surprised how many obstacles there are to free caffeine:
Our cafeteria offers free coffee, but it is only open in the morning, then lunch, then for an afternoon snack -- you can't get it whenever. Also, it's 6 floors (and an elevator change) away.:(
We've asked for our soda machine (75cents!) to be rigged so that we get free soda. Problem is that we're on a 20floor building and the facilities people argue that our machine would get raided by everyone else (at least partly, but probably not entirely true).
We'd be happy to buy our own soda at CostCo and truck it in. Problems with that:
Where to put it? There is one refrigerator on the floor and we can't exactly just take it over with soda.
Who to do it? We're in the middle of Boston and most people take public transit. Lugging in a few cases of soda regularly is a bit of a pain.
If we try to get our own half-size fridge and hide it in a lab someplace, facilities will ultimately find and take it, I guarantee.
I'm seriously considering getting a few of these babies from ThinkGeek and just putting them under people's desks (they look enough like machinery that I bet facilities wouldn't notice). They only hold a sixpack, though, so we'd have to get a bunch -- maybe one per shared office or something.
Duane
P.S. - As a christmas gift I did get my team the caffeine sampler from ThinkGeek, so I'll be distributing that as soon as it arrives. Hey, it's something, right?
I work at one of those places where, on your first day at work, such a test is just part of the stack of paperwork. Nobody says anything about what the test is, or what it's for, and nobody ever discusses results with you. Most of the people I know (including myself) faked the results because we resented the idea. Under a section that said to describe myself as a person (and take 15 minutes), I wrote "It took me 30 years to figure it out, what makes you think I can summarize it in 15 minutes?" But none of us ever heard a thing about our answers, pro or con.
Make sure you tell people what it is, and what you hope to get out of it. If possible show them some sample questions before they commit to taking it, so that they have more trust you're not going to sneak in any really personal stuff. Explain to them what the results mean. There's plenty of literature out there describing the major MBTI types. People that I know (I was a sociology major) usually enjoyed knowing what type they were, even if they didn't necessarily believe that it was very indicative of them as people.
When I was out speaking at an e-Biz conference in San Diego last February, somebody asked me this question ("What do you suggest for retaining your top talent?") I answered "Call him a vice president and send him to San Diego to speak at a conference." It was only partly a joke.
People like to be challenged and appreciated. If it's really true that your people will be 3 times as valuable after the training, show it. Can you afford to pay them what you think they'd be worth in the market? That would be a good start. If you can't, look at retention bonuses. Everybody will say that it's not about the money, but honestly that depends on the scale. If you're paying $50k and somebody else offers $55k, then yeah, it's not about the money. But if you really mean that they could make $150k elsewhere, then you'll likely find that people take a serious look at those other offers.
But if the money is in the ballpark, then it's vital to keep the workplace interesting. The best consulting houses I know all run a common knowledge base that individuals feel they can feed off of, which is a nice feature. The best hackers know that they don't know everything, but they like the idea of having access to such a distributed knowledge base. Have regular events, too. Not just drinking at the local pub, either. Have offsites where you plan future projects. Give management responsibility to some of your more senior people. Make them feel that there's more to the job than just the Unix training they received.
I don't think that trying to lock people in will work. For starters, instead of sending the message that "The company wants you to improve as a person", you get "The company wants to use you to improve itself". And whether or not that's true in both cases, the thing is that people don't want to have it thrown in their face. Management is well aware that when Java people say they want to work on Enterprise Java Beans, it's to improve their own marketability -- it's not a far stretch to assume that people know that if a company sends you for training, they expect it to be profitable for them as a company. But trying to enforce that will just cause people to resent you, in which case you'll either lose them before the training, or else they'll take the training, grudgingly suffer the minimum contract period, and then definitely leave.
Remember, people do leave. There's nothing you can do about it, once someone has made up her mind. That's what exit interviews are for. If somebody leaves and tells you on the way out "Damnit I've been asking you for 9 months for a refrigerator for the developers", then you get an idea of how important those perks are.
In short, if you're talking about treating some people like the stars of the show, make sure that they feel like it. Let them walk around in their socks, even if there's a company dress code. Give them their own refrigerator if they don't already have one. In the long run these are tiny benefits that won't cost the company much at all. You have an advantage, your people are already there. Contrary to popular belief, the best people don't like to job hop. It's a pain in the neck to change insurance, move 401k money, etc... So you don't really have to compete with every job out there -- you just have to make sure that you work with what you've got and keep it nice for your talent.
There's at least one very good reason for the humanoid shape -- when you start by assuming that your universe of interaction is a world that was intended for humans. If you put a human and a six-wheeled tank on the surface of Mars, sure, the tank will probably win (at least over a semi-flat surface). But what about when you tell them both to go upstairs, through the doorway, pick up the magic 8-ball off the desk and come back? You need a humanoid robot to navigate such terrain, otherwise what happens is you end up having to reengineer your office into something more robot-friendly, and how many places (non-industrial) want to do that?
...and losing, then switching over to the name "Pentium" because it's more trademarkable, and has a "5-ish" ring to it...
...and then figuring out that the next logical progression would be either "hexium" or "sexium", neither of which could be expected to sell very much, so spending the next what, 8 years? coming up with variants like P6, PPro, PIII....
Those that are destined to know such things, will find that they *want* to know such things. I'm of that generation whose first exposure to machines was via BASIC and then assembly language. By the time Windows came around I thought "Wow, this is stupid, you can't express nearly as much with a mouse as you can with a keyboard." But that's me. For awhile I thought "Oh, god, Windows will be the death of the hacker." But you know what? It wasn't. People still hack. KIDS still hack. Just not all of them.
Mind you, I can't stand it when proud parents beam "My boy knows everything about the computer! He's on it all the time!" and what they really mean is he knows nothing but games, as you said. But, whadyyagonnado.
d
"Oh, Jean's grandson is into computers like you were." "Ok, Ma? He moves the mouse and clicks a button. I hacked assembly code. Kids these days don't even know what assembly code is." --actual conversation with my mother
Over the summer the company provided beach balls (deflated) as some sort of promotional deal. Some losers took theirs home. The engineers blew them up (all of them, even those unclaimed ones) and they have been lying around ever since. Many, many things can be done with a beach ball:
Stress test. As you're walking down the hall with a beach ball and someone comes the other way, toss it to him. If he grabs it and tosses it back, good man. If he swats at it like a fly and it goes sailing into the light fixture, he's a little stressed. If he ducks, you've found your next Nerf target.
Testing headshape. Stand behind someone and bounce the ball off his head. See what angle it returns at. Play from a distance, and try to get it to always come back to you. (I am quite serious, we really do play this game).
Bombardment. Named for the technique from the old high school game. Find 3 or more, then toss one at somebody. While he is reaching to catch it, fire the others at his head.
Cube volleyball. Works best with two cubes sharing a wall, but can be played across a hallway (window between cubes optional). Players must stay in their seat.
Distance basketball. Person in cube A sets up a net. Person in cube B attempts to get beachball in net. Works best if net cannot be seen by B.
Plinko (named for the Price is Right game). Stand up in cube. Toss ball randomly into center of cube farm, and hope that it winds up in the cube of someone who doesn't get pissed off easily.
William Tell. Put beach ball on your head. Allow people to shoot nerf darts at it.
Keeping-people-awake-at-meetings game. While someone is at the whiteboard talking, toss the ball around. Don't let it hit the floor. Finds the sleeping people quickly.
Add a Razor scooter or 3 to this and you've got some real potential. Hallway jousts, anyone? Or how about the occasional driveby? (Yes, we really do have at least 4 people with scooters, and they have been known to ride them in the halls. Including the big bosses. It's funny to see your coworkers fall down.)
One of the guys here has an arsenal from ThinkGeek, including the 20+ shot auto fire, and the 6 shot semi-auto koosh gun that fires those rings a good 50 feet or more in a straight line. Plus a whole variety of smaller pistol-sized items. The problem is that they're all too noisy! Emptying a clip at somebody is usually met with a complaint to our boss and we have to stop playing.
I remember the boss told us "After 5pm only." Then the very next day I heard the unmistakable sounds of gunfire at about 2pm. I yelled from the office "After 5, guys!" It continued. "I thought we were going to wait until after 5!" Still, continued. I walk out of my office and into the arsenal cube to see that the boss himself has brought his 7yr old son to work today and he is now shooting every gun in sight with great glee.
Like they often say, one of the real reasons to get out and vote, even if you don't care about the candidates, is that you get a chance to vote on the questions. My problem was that some of those questions needed to really be researched way ahead of time! They give you a nice checklist that says what all the questions are, and then a summary -- "Vote YES if you believe x...vote NO if you believe y..." quite handy. The problem was that for a few of the questions it said "Vote YES if you want the law on subject X to change, vote NO if you want the law to stay the same" without any real explanation of what exactly the change would be! Hope I didn't vote for anything stupid:).
Did vote for one Libertarian, against Ted Kennedy. I'm just so tired of that whole dynasty.
For the local offices where I didn't know anybody, I tended to vote for the person from my town or neighborhood. If I'm in a suburb of Boston, will somebody who lives down on Cape Cod be very accessible?
The turnout was good, I got there at about 8:15 or so and there were about 15 people waiting to get a ballot, and then 30 or so waiting to get out of there. My local polling station is at the old folks' home down the street, so I'm pretty sure that most of the people working the paperwork and the machines voted for Roosevelt -- Teddy, that is. And everything was in serial, not parallel. So when the guy in front of me screwed up his registration (he last voted in Boston and never registered specifically in Quincy) everything ground to a halt, no one else could seem to help me around him.
One of the reasons that I not only voted but am telling people at work to vote is that a number of people on my team are not citizens, and therefore don't get to be involved. I therefore think that part of my responsibility is to demonstrate to them that there are people that take it seriously.
I've used this one on a few occasions:
"Says here you know objected oriented programming?"
'Yes, that's right, I know C++ and some Java.'
"Do you know Smalltalk?"
'No.'
"Good, let's talk about solving this problem using Smalltalk."
'No, I said I don't know Smalltalk.'
"Yes, but you know OO, right? So the language shouldn't matter. If I tell you that Smalltalk is an OO language you should be able to dive right in."
The problem with stuff like the hot/not poll is that the majority of people on the net only know how to offer polarized opinions. Give people a rating system of 1-10 and the majority will vote either 1,2,3 or 8,9,10. Unlike the expected bell curve, you instead get a U. Sure enough, any chick in a bikini rates a 9.8 while face shots of nice average girls usually rack up a 1.3.
There's evidence of this in Amazon and IMDB ratings, which is probably one of the reasons Amazon has started rating the raters so that you get to have some idea of whose opinion is actually worth listening to. I'm sure it's also part of the reason that you only get a 1-5 rating on Amazon, so that the effect is not as noticeable.
Ummm...I confused. Say there is 1 mine hidden on a 10x10 grid. To start I have absolutely zero information about where that mine is. Therefore I must guess at the location. Therefore, 1/100th of the time, I will be wrong on the first guess. Therefore it is impossible to "solve" the game, because you cannot say "You will always win if you start by making move x..." See what I mean? For any "solution" you provide, couldn't I in theory hit a mine on my first attempt and thus not win?
Isn't it? What am I missing?
Oh, the WINE people must be pissed.
on
Microsoft Cracked
·
· Score: 1
What was up with the CNET article insinuating that projects like WINE would benefit from getting access to the stolen source code? That's all we need -- "Oh, well, the source was in the wild, therefore we can assume that you saw it, therefore WINE is illegal." Charming. Mind you, that whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing doesn't work when it's a big company just trying to cause grief for the little guy who has no money.
Although the URL now redirects to linuxjournal, www.linuxresources.com used to maintain a list of people who could/would speak on Linux subjects. I notice in the table of contents that it's still there under the new ownership.
Thank you Slashdot! (I was looking for this)
on
Air-Powered Cars
·
· Score: 1
I saw a brief news story on this car about 2 months ago, but when I told my co-workers of it nobody believed me. Then I couldn't find any web links to it, and they mocked me mercilessly. I would proudly print this story and show it to them, if I hadn't killed them weeks ago in a postal rage. Ah well, at least I know I wasn't crazy.:)
Given that all web sites are...well, web sites, isn't it redundant to want to call them slashdot.web? Am I missing the point? That TLD still doesn't say anything about the nature of that site -- is it porn, or educational, or commercial? (mmmmm, educational commercial porn....)
Slashdot Mirror
Who said that I have to use my computer only to reinforce my ideals? That's like using the telephone only to talk about my political views, isn't it? I use both open, free and commercial software on my Linux machine. It has nothing to do with ideals. It has to do with the fact that I think Linux is a higher quality OS than Windows. It doesn't crash. I can more comfortably do more things at once. I leave it on constantly without memory errors. And perhaps the best feature is that I get more out of the box, for a lower price. Sure, I could run a telnet or smtp server on a Windows machine so that I could connect from work, but why go through all the extra effort of finding and/or buying it? The simple fact is that I'm just happier using Linux. When I use Windows I open up a DOS box (people hate when they see me do that :)). Ideals don't enter into it.
I can't say I understand the appeal. I mean, easter eggs for stuff that wouldn't otherwise be in the game (secret areas, new characters, etc...) that's cool. But cheats to simply make the game easier to beat? I guess I just don't get it. "I was playing the game for 3 hours every day and it rocked! Then somebody showed me this cool cheat and I beat it in an hour! Now I....well...now I don't have anything to play anymore, and I'm bored."
Wait, they thought that HAL wouldn't work (even though they apparently got permission to use it) because it sounded too much like Hell, and the younger audiences wouldn't understand the reference? So they choose "Omniputer" instead? Why not just call it a "Cyberputer" or something equally meaningless? Novaputer, anyone? How about SuperDuperPuter?
Oh, good. Can you see me trying to sell my mom one of these things? "But mom! It's completely unlikely that it'll kill you!"
Wow, you totally don't listen. Go back and read the point where I said that if you're paying 50 and they can make 150, then yeah, it is about the money. Of course it is. But not every job change is that cut and dried. If the place down the street is offering 55, but here at work you have 50 AND free soda AND foosball, then maybe the 50 is ok. That's all I'm saying.
- Our cafeteria offers free coffee, but it is only open in the morning, then lunch, then for an afternoon snack -- you can't get it whenever. Also, it's 6 floors (and an elevator change) away.
:(
- We've asked for our soda machine (75cents!) to be rigged so that we get free soda. Problem is that we're on a 20floor building and the facilities people argue that our machine would get raided by everyone else (at least partly, but probably not entirely true).
- We'd be happy to buy our own soda at CostCo and truck it in. Problems with that:
- Where to put it? There is one refrigerator on the floor and we can't exactly just take it over with soda.
- Who to do it? We're in the middle of Boston and most people take public transit. Lugging in a few cases of soda regularly is a bit of a pain.
- If we try to get our own half-size fridge and hide it in a lab someplace, facilities will ultimately find and take it, I guarantee.
I'm seriously considering getting a few of these babies from ThinkGeek and just putting them under people's desks (they look enough like machinery that I bet facilities wouldn't notice). They only hold a sixpack, though, so we'd have to get a bunch -- maybe one per shared office or something.Duane
P.S. - As a christmas gift I did get my team the caffeine sampler from ThinkGeek, so I'll be distributing that as soon as it arrives. Hey, it's something, right?
Make sure you tell people what it is, and what you hope to get out of it. If possible show them some sample questions before they commit to taking it, so that they have more trust you're not going to sneak in any really personal stuff. Explain to them what the results mean. There's plenty of literature out there describing the major MBTI types. People that I know (I was a sociology major) usually enjoyed knowing what type they were, even if they didn't necessarily believe that it was very indicative of them as people.
People like to be challenged and appreciated. If it's really true that your people will be 3 times as valuable after the training, show it. Can you afford to pay them what you think they'd be worth in the market? That would be a good start. If you can't, look at retention bonuses. Everybody will say that it's not about the money, but honestly that depends on the scale. If you're paying $50k and somebody else offers $55k, then yeah, it's not about the money. But if you really mean that they could make $150k elsewhere, then you'll likely find that people take a serious look at those other offers.
But if the money is in the ballpark, then it's vital to keep the workplace interesting. The best consulting houses I know all run a common knowledge base that individuals feel they can feed off of, which is a nice feature. The best hackers know that they don't know everything, but they like the idea of having access to such a distributed knowledge base. Have regular events, too. Not just drinking at the local pub, either. Have offsites where you plan future projects. Give management responsibility to some of your more senior people. Make them feel that there's more to the job than just the Unix training they received.
I don't think that trying to lock people in will work. For starters, instead of sending the message that "The company wants you to improve as a person", you get "The company wants to use you to improve itself". And whether or not that's true in both cases, the thing is that people don't want to have it thrown in their face. Management is well aware that when Java people say they want to work on Enterprise Java Beans, it's to improve their own marketability -- it's not a far stretch to assume that people know that if a company sends you for training, they expect it to be profitable for them as a company. But trying to enforce that will just cause people to resent you, in which case you'll either lose them before the training, or else they'll take the training, grudgingly suffer the minimum contract period, and then definitely leave.
Remember, people do leave. There's nothing you can do about it, once someone has made up her mind. That's what exit interviews are for. If somebody leaves and tells you on the way out "Damnit I've been asking you for 9 months for a refrigerator for the developers", then you get an idea of how important those perks are.
In short, if you're talking about treating some people like the stars of the show, make sure that they feel like it. Let them walk around in their socks, even if there's a company dress code. Give them their own refrigerator if they don't already have one. In the long run these are tiny benefits that won't cost the company much at all. You have an advantage, your people are already there. Contrary to popular belief, the best people don't like to job hop. It's a pain in the neck to change insurance, move 401k money, etc... So you don't really have to compete with every job out there -- you just have to make sure that you work with what you've got and keep it nice for your talent.
The accompanying video is for the Honda robot, which is big. The Sony robot is the tiny one. I could find no video of the Sony robot.
There's at least one very good reason for the humanoid shape -- when you start by assuming that your universe of interaction is a world that was intended for humans. If you put a human and a six-wheeled tank on the surface of Mars, sure, the tank will probably win (at least over a semi-flat surface). But what about when you tell them both to go upstairs, through the doorway, pick up the magic 8-ball off the desk and come back? You need a humanoid robot to navigate such terrain, otherwise what happens is you end up having to reengineer your office into something more robot-friendly, and how many places (non-industrial) want to do that?
...and then figuring out that the next logical progression would be either "hexium" or "sexium", neither of which could be expected to sell very much, so spending the next what, 8 years? coming up with variants like P6, PPro, PIII....
Mind you, I can't stand it when proud parents beam "My boy knows everything about the computer! He's on it all the time!" and what they really mean is he knows nothing but games, as you said. But, whadyyagonnado.
d
"Oh, Jean's grandson is into computers like you were."
"Ok, Ma? He moves the mouse and clicks a button. I hacked assembly code. Kids these days don't even know what assembly code is."
--actual conversation with my mother
- Stress test. As you're walking down the hall with a beach ball and someone comes the other way, toss it to him. If he grabs it and tosses it back, good man. If he swats at it like a fly and it goes sailing into the light fixture, he's a little stressed. If he ducks, you've found your next Nerf target.
- Testing headshape. Stand behind someone and bounce the ball off his head. See what angle it returns at. Play from a distance, and try to get it to always come back to you. (I am quite serious, we really do play this game).
- Bombardment. Named for the technique from the old high school game. Find 3 or more, then toss one at somebody. While he is reaching to catch it, fire the others at his head.
- Cube volleyball. Works best with two cubes sharing a wall, but can be played across a hallway (window between cubes optional). Players must stay in their seat.
- Distance basketball. Person in cube A sets up a net. Person in cube B attempts to get beachball in net. Works best if net cannot be seen by B.
- Plinko (named for the Price is Right game). Stand up in cube. Toss ball randomly into center of cube farm, and hope that it winds up in the cube of someone who doesn't get pissed off easily.
- William Tell. Put beach ball on your head. Allow people to shoot nerf darts at it.
- Keeping-people-awake-at-meetings game. While someone is at the whiteboard talking, toss the ball around. Don't let it hit the floor. Finds the sleeping people quickly.
Add a Razor scooter or 3 to this and you've got some real potential. Hallway jousts, anyone? Or how about the occasional driveby? (Yes, we really do have at least 4 people with scooters, and they have been known to ride them in the halls. Including the big bosses. It's funny to see your coworkers fall down.)I remember the boss told us "After 5pm only." Then the very next day I heard the unmistakable sounds of gunfire at about 2pm. I yelled from the office "After 5, guys!" It continued. "I thought we were going to wait until after 5!" Still, continued. I walk out of my office and into the arsenal cube to see that the boss himself has brought his 7yr old son to work today and he is now shooting every gun in sight with great glee.
...comptuers..programing...successer...theorom.. .compatable...equivelent...lanuga ges... knowlege...strore...progrmaing...beliving...
What's up with that?
Did vote for one Libertarian, against Ted Kennedy. I'm just so tired of that whole dynasty.
For the local offices where I didn't know anybody, I tended to vote for the person from my town or neighborhood. If I'm in a suburb of Boston, will somebody who lives down on Cape Cod be very accessible?
The turnout was good, I got there at about 8:15 or so and there were about 15 people waiting to get a ballot, and then 30 or so waiting to get out of there. My local polling station is at the old folks' home down the street, so I'm pretty sure that most of the people working the paperwork and the machines voted for Roosevelt -- Teddy, that is. And everything was in serial, not parallel. So when the guy in front of me screwed up his registration (he last voted in Boston and never registered specifically in Quincy) everything ground to a halt, no one else could seem to help me around him.
One of the reasons that I not only voted but am telling people at work to vote is that a number of people on my team are not citizens, and therefore don't get to be involved. I therefore think that part of my responsibility is to demonstrate to them that there are people that take it seriously.
d
"Says here you know objected oriented programming?"
'Yes, that's right, I know C++ and some Java.'
"Do you know Smalltalk?"
'No.'
"Good, let's talk about solving this problem using Smalltalk."
'No, I said I don't know Smalltalk.'
"Yes, but you know OO, right? So the language shouldn't matter. If I tell you that Smalltalk is an OO language you should be able to dive right in."
Gets them most of the time.
I know, I know, off topic. Had to be said.
:)
There's evidence of this in Amazon and IMDB ratings, which is probably one of the reasons Amazon has started rating the raters so that you get to have some idea of whose opinion is actually worth listening to. I'm sure it's also part of the reason that you only get a 1-5 rating on Amazon, so that the effect is not as noticeable.
Isn't it? What am I missing?
What was up with the CNET article insinuating that projects like WINE would benefit from getting access to the stolen source code? That's all we need -- "Oh, well, the source was in the wild, therefore we can assume that you saw it, therefore WINE is illegal." Charming. Mind you, that whole "innocent until proven guilty" thing doesn't work when it's a big company just trying to cause grief for the little guy who has no money.
Although the URL now redirects to linuxjournal, www.linuxresources.com used to maintain a list of people who could/would speak on Linux subjects. I notice in the table of contents that it's still there under the new ownership.
I saw a brief news story on this car about 2 months ago, but when I told my co-workers of it nobody believed me. Then I couldn't find any web links to it, and they mocked me mercilessly. I would proudly print this story and show it to them, if I hadn't killed them weeks ago in a postal rage. Ah well, at least I know I wasn't crazy. :)
Given that all web sites are ...well, web sites, isn't it redundant to want to call them slashdot.web? Am I missing the point? That TLD still doesn't say anything about the nature of that site -- is it porn, or educational, or commercial? (mmmmm, educational commercial porn....)