One of the common threads back then was when people would repost sex stories with the names run through sed, and we weren't exactly privacy nuts -- People knew our real names, but usually also the names of our significant others. My wife-at-the-time saw one of these comments in which she was named as a participant in an explicit story, performing unspeakable acts on myself, Rob, Jeff... I thought she was going to be horrified, but she exclaimed, "I might be the new Natalie Portman!"
M
Re:"You wrote for Slashdot?" -- Unabridged
on
Making a Slashdot Omelet
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The original post had half of my original piece cut away from it, the links stripped out and my name spelled incorrectly. I'd posted the full version of what I'd sent in within the comments -- Then the full version of what I'd submitted was re-edited into the original post, making the unabridged version in the comments completely redundant.
But I'm glad some traditions are alive and well at Slashdot...:)
I get this a lot, even twelve years after I’d written my last piece. It happened again just two weeks ago, talking to a guy from InfoSec.
I was young, idealistic and had no idea what I was doing. I imagine that for most of us, this is still true. We didn’t write for a market or to capitalize on a trend. We wrote about things we liked, and tried to get other people to like them, too.
A cynical perspective could see Slashdot as a place where angry nerds gather and rant anonymously about the topics of the day, but it misses the point. It’s actually a place where hundreds of thousands of people show up to say, ‘Hey, look at this thing, isn’t it cool?’
Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes it’s hell-no, but there’s always an answer.
Nerds are some of the weirdest people you’ll ever meet. They also tend to be intelligent, opinionated and enthusiastically kind. Twelve years later, Slashdot still makes that obvious -- Even when the readers are loudly complaining about software patents, arguing about intellectual property and demanding new Firefly.
“What was it like?”
Rob Malda had managed to learn most of Darth Maul’s moves, and was terrifying with a dual-bladed lightsaber toy. We knew every word to ‘Cowtown’ by They Might Be Giants, and we broke out into song while driving down a highway in Michigan. The ‘geek compound’ was actually a few houses at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac. Jeff Bates did a killer Dr. Evil impression, and was able to eat clementines at a terrifying pace. The one-and-only time I’d ever visited the aforementioned ‘compound,’ I had a flu and was taking a terrifying amount of medication for it, which led to me saying wildly inappropriate things to people I’d just met. No one really seemed to care. I slept on CowboyNeal’s couch, and learned that Rob and I had not only run BBSes ‘back in the day,’ but ran them on the same software as well.
I wrote a lot of pieces that I still enjoy to this day. I also wrote a lot of pieces that I’d prefer to never see again. I approved some stories that I shouldn’t have, and rejected a lot of stories that probably should have gotten more attention. Have I mentioned that I had no idea what I was doing?
I enjoyed my time at Slashdot tremendously, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. It’s unsettling to know that what you’re typing in vi tonight is going to be in front of more than a million smart people tomorrow morning. Then those smart people will be encouraged to comment on what you write, telling you exactly how much of an unparalleled genius/complete moron you are. They may even make a chart.
No matter what we had to say on the site back then, everything at the time was colored by money. The dot-com investment mania was at full strength, and there was a wildly inaccurate assumption that we were all hip-deep in filthy lucre. Writing about technology isn’t terribly lucrative, even if you’re writing for one of the most popular sites on the planet. Putting the technology to use is considerably more valuable: When I left tech writing and journalism to go back to work as an engineer, my income more-than-doubled.
“All good things...”
I left Slashdot to take over as the editor-in-chief of Linux.com, which ended up being a beautiful disaster. I went back to engineering for about a year, then took over as the CEO of the Xiph.org Foundation for a while, and then went back to engineering again. I started a production company and was able to fulfill childhood dreams by working on Star Trek and writing a lot of music for video games. My current time is divided between working in systems engineering, managing my production company and training for my private pilot certificate here in the Valley of the Sun.
Comparing the entirety of the music industry to the entirety of DeviantArt is fucking insane, as most people on DeviantArt do not make at their vocation, let alone their business. You are comparing a 15-year-old kid's drawing of a Yu-Gi-Oh character to the entire catalog of the Beatles.
By lumping 'musicians' as their own group, away from 'artists,' it's like saying that music somehow has a baseline for appreciation that is lower than that of, say, Rodin. Yet the Rodin Museum has to advertise like crazy to get people in the door, and Green Day sells out in seconds.
Does this mean that Green Day is better than Rodin? No. Does this mean that your analogy is nearly indescribably obtuse? Yes.
Music is art. Some music is brilliant. Other music is not. Some paintings are brilliant. Other paintings are not. Do the math -- Music is art.
You also seem to subscribe to the currently popular "super friends justice league" model of problem solving, where one can simply talk with a wild animal and try to understand it and "feel its pain" and then it will not bite anyone. War happens when communication breaks down, or when people are backed into a corner, or when they are over taxed by your justice league, or when people are raised to feel like everyone else should either convert to islam or die. It isn't always about natural resources.
I am both completely opposed to the point-of-view you profess here, but that doesn't stop me from finding your words on the subject unbelievably fun and charming.
We had numerous and public arguments. I thought he was a jerk. He felt the same way about me. Both of us knew the good things the other did for the Free Software and Open Source communities, but every time we got into it, it was nothing but pure argument.
I did respect him, and the work that he's done. While I disagree with a lot of the way he managed things, there's no doubt that he did what he did with the best of intentions. He will be missed as both a leader of the community and a human being.
I wish the staff well in the upcoming days and weeks -- It will not be easy. I would urge complainers, sycophants and jerks to back off for a while. Best wishes to his family and friends.
Reminds me of VA Linux (you might remember them). Their initial business plan was to sell dell computers with a copy of red hat linux installed on it. They purchased andover.net (slashdot, newsforge, freshmeat, etc) for pr/advertising.
Wow. I'm a pretty goddamn jaded motherfucker when it comes to VA Linux, and I *worked* there. You're completely wrong. You're an AC, so I'm not going to go into how stupidly wrong you are.
Sure having inexpensive video camera technology has spawned a LOT of garbage (just spend 2 minutes on youtube to prove this), but it has also allowed people like Kevin Smith to create Clerks. There are many other examples of Indie filmmaking that ONLY became possible with the barrier of entry being lowered to the point where literally anyone could create content for the industry - in this case the film industry.
Which would be a totally valid comment if Kevin Smith hadn't used 16mm black-and-white film to make Clerks. Try again.
You're hardcore for none of those reasons. You're hardcore because you quote Bill Hicks in your signature, and if I had mod points and they had the appropriate category, I'd mod you +1 Kickass. Thanks for making Slashdot part of your personal Flying Saucer Tour.:)
I have also known Rob on and off over the years, and I have *also* donated money. While I understand your interest in keeping the conversation civil, I wanted you to know that I have also been a vocal and financial supporter of Freenode.
Except that both lilo *and* Diablo-D3 are both utterly and completely useless. Lilo 'runs' an IRC network that totally sucks, and Diablo-D3 hits people up for money for his 'game' that has never, ever seen the light of day. I've managed a game project before, and it died (though people recently have indicated interest in bringing it back), but you don't see me spamming for money for it. You would also never see me spamming for money for a project that produces nothing.
When I was running Xiph.Org, both lilo and Diablo-D3 were spamming people for money. It's why Xiph (at least temporarily) left Freenode. Diablo-D3 waged a campaign against LinuxFund for their donations to Xiph which (did, and still does) created free and useful code for the community.
Matter of fact, back when Freenode had 'Freenode Radio,' I had given them a ton of original music to use. They played it for a while, and then took it off the air 'under mutual agreement with the artist,' which was simply a lie -- My music is public domain. The folks that made this claim were eventually caught, fessed up and apologized for lying to me and people that listened to the station. They sucked at this, too; They played my music long after they claimed to 'take it off the air,' they were just too dumb to look at the ID tags of the files.
Bob and Patrick are in the same boat. They're both useless, they're both stupid, they're both utterly ineffectual.
Don't know what to tell you, really. I don't have time for IRC anymore, but if I did, I wouldn't truck with *either* of those cats. Freenode is a black hole of idiocy, and if you really want to dive into it, go ahead -- Just don't expect logic, reason or honesty to win out over egotistical mania and deception. This may be true of *all* IRC networks, but Freenode is the only one where I've seen this kind of shit go down time and time again.
Freenode may be 'Animal Farm,' though without the Orwellian context. Lilo's just too damn stupid to play Napoleon. It's like a normal farm. Backward Farmer Bob Levin and his flock of sheep.
I don't know, smelling things long dead just seems creepy.
Creepier than observing them with your eyes, which you can do by looking up on a dark starry night?
Emmett
Re:Of course time travel is possible!
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
"The President who Never Won"
No poem, but my dollar goes to whoever writes this about Gerald Ford, who was never, ever elected to executive office. He replaced Vice President Spiro Agnew when he resigned, and then replaced Nixon the same way. No one ever voted Gerald Ford into a presidential or vice-presidential office. Crazy.
NEVER EVER give any money to a nonprofit foundation of any size.
As someone who used to be the CEO of the Xiph.Org Foundation, I can tell you that all of the donations went to the creation of free and useful multimedia projects. If you're not down with that, that's okay, I suppose. I assume you are using a brush that is a little too wide.
Emmett
As a former Slashdot author, I can speak from 'beyond the veil' about Slashdot story selection. The truth is that Slashdot only carries maybe 14 stories a day, and people submit hundreds if not thousands. It's a big-ass queue. Some things are overlooked because there's a hell of a lot of things to sort through. From my experience, that is the top reason why your story probably didn't get picked up.
Second, some things are old. Know how many times I deleted 'funny' posts submitted with Bill Gates' mugshot? Probably at least two-thousand.
Third, some things are boring. I don't mean that they're obscure or uninteresting, I mean that they are boring in the sense that they aren't interesting or fun to talk about or discuss. There's not a whole lot to talk about when the subject is something like, 'Gosh, Microsoft Outlook really blows, and a study says so.' While it may create a lot of funny schadenfreude, it's pretty obvious to a whole lot of people. The people that it's not obvious to probably aren't reading Slashdot anyway.
Fourth, you might have a history of being a pain in the ass, and I might have rejected your story because you called me a jerk one time on IRC.
There are a lot of other reasons, but the primary reasons that people complain about getting stories rejected are usually untrue. There were conspiracy theories all over the place that somehow we were gaining financially through the spread of Linux (ha!), through adoption of perl over python, pretty much everything including phase of the moon. Totally unfounded. See points 1-4 above.
I would venture to guess that the reason Rob doesn't discuss why stories are rejected is because it's more than just him. I got very little top-down direction when it came to picking stories from Slashdot from Rob or Jeff. Rob and Jeff are totally different people, I'm very different than CowboyNeal and Jamie, and anyone who knows my politics knows that I am very different than Pudge (though Pudge and I seem to get along fine).
I think Rob's not trying to be secretive or coy, he's just being aware that there are more people behind Slashdot than just himself. Do you really think Rob wants to be in the position of having to chase down Slashdot authors every single time someone wants to know why their story was rejected? He'd have to send an E-mail, ask why, get a response, and then reply to the submitter. Also, he might have to do this two-hundred times a day. Not fun, and totally fruitless.
The United States Post Office is *not* a branch of the federal government. It is a private business. When they went private, they kept a lot of legal things in place, such as the statutes prohibiting mail fraud. Mail fraud is a federal offense, but this wouldn't be mail fraud by any stretch of the imagination. Improper use of a company's materials, mayhaps, but not mail fraud.
You can live off your savings for a while, and the state will pay you some money for unemployment, which is society sacrificing some of its wealth for its members.
Try again. As a worker, your state takes some of your money to go to unemployment. Then when you lose your job, you collect it based on how much you used to make and for how long.
While I agree that I have put tens of thousands of dollars into the unemployment system that I'll never see, I wouldn't call this a charitable contribution. Also, if I collect it, I have to pay taxes on it. Twice! Cool, eh?
Slashdot Mirror
One of the common threads back then was when people would repost sex stories with the names run through sed, and we weren't exactly privacy nuts -- People knew our real names, but usually also the names of our significant others. My wife-at-the-time saw one of these comments in which she was named as a participant in an explicit story, performing unspeakable acts on myself, Rob, Jeff... I thought she was going to be horrified, but she exclaimed, "I might be the new Natalie Portman!"
M
The original post had half of my original piece cut away from it, the links stripped out and my name spelled incorrectly. I'd posted the full version of what I'd sent in within the comments -- Then the full version of what I'd submitted was re-edited into the original post, making the unabridged version in the comments completely redundant.
But I'm glad some traditions are alive and well at Slashdot... :)
M
I get this a lot, even twelve years after I’d written my last piece. It happened again just two weeks ago, talking to a guy from InfoSec.
I was young, idealistic and had no idea what I was doing. I imagine that for most of us, this is still true. We didn’t write for a market or to capitalize on a trend. We wrote about things we liked, and tried to get other people to like them, too.
A cynical perspective could see Slashdot as a place where angry nerds gather and rant anonymously about the topics of the day, but it misses the point. It’s actually a place where hundreds of thousands of people show up to say, ‘Hey, look at this thing, isn’t it cool?’
Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes it’s hell-no, but there’s always an answer.
Nerds are some of the weirdest people you’ll ever meet. They also tend to be intelligent, opinionated and enthusiastically kind. Twelve years later, Slashdot still makes that obvious -- Even when the readers are loudly complaining about software patents, arguing about intellectual property and demanding new Firefly.
“What was it like?”
Rob Malda had managed to learn most of Darth Maul’s moves, and was terrifying with a dual-bladed lightsaber toy. We knew every word to ‘Cowtown’ by They Might Be Giants, and we broke out into song while driving down a highway in Michigan. The ‘geek compound’ was actually a few houses at the end of a suburban cul-de-sac. Jeff Bates did a killer Dr. Evil impression, and was able to eat clementines at a terrifying pace. The one-and-only time I’d ever visited the aforementioned ‘compound,’ I had a flu and was taking a terrifying amount of medication for it, which led to me saying wildly inappropriate things to people I’d just met. No one really seemed to care. I slept on CowboyNeal’s couch, and learned that Rob and I had not only run BBSes ‘back in the day,’ but ran them on the same software as well.
I wrote a lot of pieces that I still enjoy to this day. I also wrote a lot of pieces that I’d prefer to never see again. I approved some stories that I shouldn’t have, and rejected a lot of stories that probably should have gotten more attention. Have I mentioned that I had no idea what I was doing?
I enjoyed my time at Slashdot tremendously, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. It’s unsettling to know that what you’re typing in vi tonight is going to be in front of more than a million smart people tomorrow morning. Then those smart people will be encouraged to comment on what you write, telling you exactly how much of an unparalleled genius/complete moron you are. They may even make a chart.
No matter what we had to say on the site back then, everything at the time was colored by money. The dot-com investment mania was at full strength, and there was a wildly inaccurate assumption that we were all hip-deep in filthy lucre. Writing about technology isn’t terribly lucrative, even if you’re writing for one of the most popular sites on the planet. Putting the technology to use is considerably more valuable: When I left tech writing and journalism to go back to work as an engineer, my income more-than-doubled.
“All good things...”
I left Slashdot to take over as the editor-in-chief of Linux.com, which ended up being a beautiful disaster. I went back to engineering for about a year, then took over as the CEO of the Xiph.org Foundation for a while, and then went back to engineering again. I started a production company and was able to fulfill childhood dreams by working on Star Trek and writing a lot of music for video games. My current time is divided between working in systems engineering, managing my production company and training for my private pilot certificate here in the Valley of the Sun.
I still love tech, and I still love sharing
Heehee.
Comparing the entirety of the music industry to the entirety of DeviantArt is fucking insane, as most people on DeviantArt do not make at their vocation, let alone their business. You are comparing a 15-year-old kid's drawing of a Yu-Gi-Oh character to the entire catalog of the Beatles.
By lumping 'musicians' as their own group, away from 'artists,' it's like saying that music somehow has a baseline for appreciation that is lower than that of, say, Rodin. Yet the Rodin Museum has to advertise like crazy to get people in the door, and Green Day sells out in seconds.
Does this mean that Green Day is better than Rodin? No. Does this mean that your analogy is nearly indescribably obtuse? Yes.
Music is art. Some music is brilliant. Other music is not. Some paintings are brilliant. Other paintings are not. Do the math -- Music is art.
I am both completely opposed to the point-of-view you profess here, but that doesn't stop me from finding your words on the subject unbelievably fun and charming.
Emm
I did respect him, and the work that he's done. While I disagree with a lot of the way he managed things, there's no doubt that he did what he did with the best of intentions. He will be missed as both a leader of the community and a human being.
I wish the staff well in the upcoming days and weeks -- It will not be easy. I would urge complainers, sycophants and jerks to back off for a while. Best wishes to his family and friends.
Emmett
Wow. I'm a pretty goddamn jaded motherfucker when it comes to VA Linux, and I *worked* there. You're completely wrong. You're an AC, so I'm not going to go into how stupidly wrong you are.
Emm
Emmett
GalaxyQuest. And it's not bad.
Emmett
Which would be a totally valid comment if Kevin Smith hadn't used 16mm black-and-white film to make Clerks. Try again.
Emmett
Emm
I have also known Rob on and off over the years, and I have *also* donated money. While I understand your interest in keeping the conversation civil, I wanted you to know that I have also been a vocal and financial supporter of Freenode.
When I was running Xiph.Org, both lilo and Diablo-D3 were spamming people for money. It's why Xiph (at least temporarily) left Freenode. Diablo-D3 waged a campaign against LinuxFund for their donations to Xiph which (did, and still does) created free and useful code for the community.
Matter of fact, back when Freenode had 'Freenode Radio,' I had given them a ton of original music to use. They played it for a while, and then took it off the air 'under mutual agreement with the artist,' which was simply a lie -- My music is public domain. The folks that made this claim were eventually caught, fessed up and apologized for lying to me and people that listened to the station. They sucked at this, too; They played my music long after they claimed to 'take it off the air,' they were just too dumb to look at the ID tags of the files.
Bob and Patrick are in the same boat. They're both useless, they're both stupid, they're both utterly ineffectual.
Don't know what to tell you, really. I don't have time for IRC anymore, but if I did, I wouldn't truck with *either* of those cats. Freenode is a black hole of idiocy, and if you really want to dive into it, go ahead -- Just don't expect logic, reason or honesty to win out over egotistical mania and deception. This may be true of *all* IRC networks, but Freenode is the only one where I've seen this kind of shit go down time and time again.
Freenode may be 'Animal Farm,' though without the Orwellian context. Lilo's just too damn stupid to play Napoleon. It's like a normal farm. Backward Farmer Bob Levin and his flock of sheep.
UN Inspectors are going to find that thief, because that thief has URANIUM TESTICLES. Stealing a laptop from an unlocked police car? Holy shit.
Emmett
Creepier than observing them with your eyes, which you can do by looking up on a dark starry night?
Emmett
"The President who Never Won" No poem, but my dollar goes to whoever writes this about Gerald Ford, who was never, ever elected to executive office. He replaced Vice President Spiro Agnew when he resigned, and then replaced Nixon the same way. No one ever voted Gerald Ford into a presidential or vice-presidential office. Crazy.
NEVER EVER give any money to a nonprofit foundation of any size. As someone who used to be the CEO of the Xiph.Org Foundation, I can tell you that all of the donations went to the creation of free and useful multimedia projects. If you're not down with that, that's okay, I suppose. I assume you are using a brush that is a little too wide. Emmett
I don't own a television, and I was aware of the term in high school, way over ten years ago.
Second, some things are old. Know how many times I deleted 'funny' posts submitted with Bill Gates' mugshot? Probably at least two-thousand.
Third, some things are boring. I don't mean that they're obscure or uninteresting, I mean that they are boring in the sense that they aren't interesting or fun to talk about or discuss. There's not a whole lot to talk about when the subject is something like, 'Gosh, Microsoft Outlook really blows, and a study says so.' While it may create a lot of funny schadenfreude, it's pretty obvious to a whole lot of people. The people that it's not obvious to probably aren't reading Slashdot anyway.
Fourth, you might have a history of being a pain in the ass, and I might have rejected your story because you called me a jerk one time on IRC.
There are a lot of other reasons, but the primary reasons that people complain about getting stories rejected are usually untrue. There were conspiracy theories all over the place that somehow we were gaining financially through the spread of Linux (ha!), through adoption of perl over python, pretty much everything including phase of the moon. Totally unfounded. See points 1-4 above.
I would venture to guess that the reason Rob doesn't discuss why stories are rejected is because it's more than just him. I got very little top-down direction when it came to picking stories from Slashdot from Rob or Jeff. Rob and Jeff are totally different people, I'm very different than CowboyNeal and Jamie, and anyone who knows my politics knows that I am very different than Pudge (though Pudge and I seem to get along fine).
I think Rob's not trying to be secretive or coy, he's just being aware that there are more people behind Slashdot than just himself. Do you really think Rob wants to be in the position of having to chase down Slashdot authors every single time someone wants to know why their story was rejected? He'd have to send an E-mail, ask why, get a response, and then reply to the submitter. Also, he might have to do this two-hundred times a day. Not fun, and totally fruitless.
Anyway, there you go. Hope this helps, etc.
Emmett
The United States Post Office is *not* a branch of the federal government. It is a private business. When they went private, they kept a lot of legal things in place, such as the statutes prohibiting mail fraud. Mail fraud is a federal offense, but this wouldn't be mail fraud by any stretch of the imagination. Improper use of a company's materials, mayhaps, but not mail fraud.
Maybe 'Pax Digitalis,' or 'Pax Digitamus,' but 'Pax Digitalia' makes it sound like 'The Peace of Fingers.'
Try again. As a worker, your state takes some of your money to go to unemployment. Then when you lose your job, you collect it based on how much you used to make and for how long.
While I agree that I have put tens of thousands of dollars into the unemployment system that I'll never see, I wouldn't call this a charitable contribution. Also, if I collect it, I have to pay taxes on it. Twice! Cool, eh?
How long has it been since you've been to Manhattan? Disney runs that whole area now. The pimps are gone.