It is official; Netcraft now confirms: Slashdot is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered fat nerds talking about Linux community when IDC confirmed that Slashdot's market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all message boards that normal people don't care about. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last ]in the recent Richard Stallman-lookalike contest.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Sashdot because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Cowboy Neal is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of recent polls. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time article developers CmdrTaco and Jon Katz only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Slashdot is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Kuro5shin leader Rusty states that there are 7000 users of his crappy site. How many users of Ars Technica are there? Let's see. The number of fat losers at comic book shops versus people using the expression "Micro$oft" on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore, there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Ars Technica users. Open Source posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of posts about people eating diswasher soap. Therefore there are about 700 users of Bitcoin. A recent article put Tolkein fans at about 80 percent of the Slashdot market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Slashdot users. This is consistent with the number of people buying Real Dolls.
Due to the troubles out of Andover, abysmal sales and so on, NewsForge went out of business and was taken over by OSDI who sell another troubled software development model. Now Feed.com is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdothas steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among Cheeto-staind t-shirt wearers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
"open source software along with computers and technology as a whole has gone from the sidelines to a prevalent position in the lives of modern consumers."
And stupid me though that the final goal of open source were to empower us by making us more than mere consumer. I tough that open source was about making us freeer human beings.
irving47 had a similar view yesterday. I think both of your objections are valid. In irving47's case, it's clear tresspassing and in your case it looks a lot like harassment. We need to find a middle ground where events like the one in tfa don't happen but people's privacy isn't compromised.
I'm replying to myself because I forgot to explain why I can be disappointed with a new model if my current computer is good enough.
Actually, the screen of my imac is too small. So I would like to get a bigger one but I have one more reason to dislike the new imac: These 16:9 display are bad. I would be better with a used 16:10 screen from kijiji and a previous-generation macmini, one with integrated dvd. Or, as I said earlier, a beige linux box.
I don't care about the ipad mini. I don't have a use for that kind of gadget. But I say thumb down for this new imac. Yeah it's more powerful, wich is good, but my ssd-upgraded five years old imac is already powerful enough. Yeah it's slimmer but why? When i'm at my desk, I see the imac in 2d anyway. When i'm not at my desk, I don't see it at all. I don't understand why I should care about the width of the thing. I dislike the external DVD drive. It's one more clutter on my workspace that's already swamped by books, papers, dried coffee cups and rotting lunches. They should have kept the current imac's mesurements and use the available space to make it extensible. Oh.... I remember I'm talking about Apple. Do as if I did not say anything. My next computer will be a beige Linux box anyway: most of the softwares I use are FLOSS already so it will not be a big change for me.
Imagine recreating xlib so it doesn't communicate with an X server but directly draws things on the local screen, maybe in a multithreaded fashion. In such a scenario, the ability to share a display between many programs would be lost or alternatively a badly behaviored program could disrupt the other's windows. What kind of increased performance would be obtained (if any) by replacing IPC, as used in X11 (and in wayland too?) for drawing and use in process fonctions instead?
Are you implying that using drug and being a theft are enough to get shot in the back while walking on the street? How the lifestyle of the victim is even relevant to the actions of the aggressor?
"Second, you're probably going to explain how Europe is the center of the world, etc. It's not. It's not even a continent."
I'm not interrested in dick-measuring contest anymore than you.
"All the EUPL can do is fragment the community"
As the EUPL allows one to re-license existing software under the GPL, this point is probably moot.
"Forth, translations? http://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.html [gnu.org] lists Armenian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, Galician, German, Italian, Serbian, Slovak. I'm sure it will grow to much much more than 22. And note "Chinese". This actually covers 20% of the world's population, if that is the criteria you want to argue with."
My point was that none of these translations are official and thus can be misleading to a potential reader. The FAQ on gnu.org itself point to that fact and urge to refer to the english version for business use, hence my accusation of it being anglocentrist. I agree the EUPL care only about european languages and I agree too that's not an ideal situation. However, the merit of the EUPL is to put many languages on a equality basis. If someone's only care is free software, then there is nothing wrong with the GPL but if you take a broader look at the situation, you'll see that freedom is more than being able to hack software. It's also having access to localized software, something that many FOSS already get mostly right and also being able to use one's native language for legal matters and that's definitively something the GPL needs addressing in the future.
"GPLv3 was a global project, with input from hundreds of people around the world." I fear it's becoming increasingly harder to resist to the globish sirens. Can you honestly tell me that nobody raised the same questionning I have right now?
Finally, thank you for bringing a bit of sanity in this discussion.
To turn your argument around and do some substitution, the Eurocentrism of the EUPL is a bad thing, especially since it doesn't apply to Brazil, Philippines or China. How come the EUPL isn't translated into Brazilian Portuguese, Tagalog, or Cantonese? The European Commission certainly has more resources than the FSF, so why don't they do it?
The fact is that the EUPL supports 21 more languages than the GPL. And yes, the EUPL is eurocentrist. It still is better than the GPL.
The reasons given in the FSF link you gave do not match up with the definition of Anglocentrism.
Yes it does. The FSF don't provide translation because they think the right of the non-english peoples is less important than their legal risks.
Indeed, to make another real-world comparison, the Treaty of Tripoli is written in Arabic. An English translation presented to the US Congress was not the official one - it was there for explanation. The official ratified treaty is the Arabic version and the US is bound to it.
Your ~200 years old treaty is between two parties of different languages. In these case it is sometime necessary to choose. Moreover, the US gov certainly had arabic speakers on its side. In the GPL case, you can have a situation where both implicated parties may be non-english speakers but still be tied to an english license because of residual rights from a previous distributor.
the requirements for winning are not that you must be a GPL supporter.
The FSF can't be only bad. I honestly think that they mostly act in good faith. They may be blinded by their cultural bias but that don't make them necessarily evil.
Indeed, Theo de Raadt is the most angry and vociferous troll against the GPL, yet he's won.
So Someone who don't agree with you or the FSF and dare to speak about it is a troll? You probably don't have many friends in life. Theo de Raadt's life is about free software. He's an ally to your cause. Can't you see it?
You are just a troll here to bash the GPL and push Eurocentrism. Not only Eurocentrism, but European Union Centrism.
Your inflamatory message prove that I may not be the real troll here. Take a breath or two, please.
Many softwares released under the FSF umbrella are great achievements with marvelous documentations. However it seems to me that using the GPL for the freedom of the peoples are shortsighted at best. Most Slashdot readers probably don't mind the english-only nature of the GPL but what good is a license for someone who can't understand it? There is 7 000 000 000 peoples on earth and 1 800 000 000(~26%) who understand english somewhat (only 380 000 000 (~0.05%) are native speakers). Yes, there is "unofficial" translation. But this clearly don't cut it. Would you redistribute software binding you to a license you don't understand or barely understand in it's official legal version? In fact, the FSF treat non-english speaker as second-class human, deprieving them of their right to be tied to a contract they understand merely for it's own convenience. I approve of free software and I like the copyleft ideals but I, for one, would be reluctant to redistribute GPL-ed software because of this reason. The GPL isn't freedom at all for most of humanity and the FSF don't give a shit.
There is at least one copyleft license that attempts to adress that shortcoming: the EUPL. This license is translated in 22 languages. It's a far cry from the thousands of languages of humanity but it's clearly a step in the right direction and it's far better than the anglocentrism of the GPL and the FSF. I would really like to see this license used more frequently.
A pre-release version of Windows 8 can be legally downloaded on microsoft.com. Then if you don't want to change your configuration, you can install it inside Virtual Box. You may want to exorcise your computer after that.
After Windows 2000, I switched to a MSDNAA version of Windows 2003 server for my personal computer and find it as good as Win2k and far better than XP. So I should say that MS released a total of two good consumer os.
Now I'm a OS X user and not looking back. If someday I switch to something else, it will be Linux or FreeBSD.
Windows 3.1 was not so bad but buggy Windows 95 was semi-good. got better with osr2 Windows 98 was a big step backward. It got better only with SE Windows ME was uter crap. Actually I skipped this version because I used Win2k at the time.
Windows 2000 was great. Probably the best Windows OS of all time. Windows XP sucked at first. It was basicaly a slower version of Windows 200 with a Teletubbies interface. It only got better with the various service packs. Windows Vista was as shitty as ME. Windows 7 is actualy Vista, but working.
All in all, in the last 20 years, Microsoft released a total of only two good os: Win2k and Win7. A far cry from alternating between good and crap.
I just replaced a week ago the 250gb HD that came with my iMac Alu with a 256gb SSD. I paid about 1$/gb and I can say that my system is noticiably faster. For most of my computer usage, the file system access is still the botteneck, even with the increased speed. Also, stupid OS X needed an external utility to enable TRIM and fiddling in the command line to enable noatime. We clearly need (at least on the apple side) more support from the OS and more speed for the drive.
Slashdot Mirror
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: Slashdot is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered fat nerds talking about Linux community when IDC confirmed that Slashdot's market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all message boards that normal people don't care about. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last ]in the recent Richard Stallman-lookalike contest.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Sashdot because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Cowboy Neal is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of recent polls. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time article developers CmdrTaco and Jon Katz only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Slashdot is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Kuro5shin leader Rusty states that there are 7000 users of his crappy site. How many users of Ars Technica are there? Let's see. The number of fat losers at comic book shops versus people using the expression "Micro$oft" on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore, there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Ars Technica users. Open Source posts on Usenet are
about half of the volume of posts about people eating diswasher soap. Therefore there are about 700 users of Bitcoin. A recent article put Tolkein fans at about 80 percent of the
Slashdot market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Slashdot users. This is consistent with the number of people buying Real Dolls.
Due to the troubles out of Andover, abysmal sales and so on, NewsForge went out of business and was taken over by OSDI who sell another troubled software development model. Now Feed.com is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdothas steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among Cheeto-staind t-shirt wearers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
Fact: Slashdot is dying
"open source software along with computers and technology as a whole has gone from the sidelines to a prevalent position in the lives of modern consumers."
And stupid me though that the final goal of open source were to empower us by making us more than mere consumer. I tough that open source was about making us freeer human beings.
irving47 had a similar view yesterday. I think both of your objections are valid. In irving47's case, it's clear tresspassing and in your case it looks a lot like harassment. We need to find a middle ground where events like the one in tfa don't happen but people's privacy isn't compromised.
One could argues that it is illegal to see cp in the first place.
If you can see it, it should be legal to photography it.
In the '80, Microsoft created the MSX computer platform. I never actualy seen one of those for real so I can't tell if they were any good.
Copying Apple vision worked for MS in the '80s.
I'm replying to myself because I forgot to explain why I can be disappointed with a new model if my current computer is good enough.
Actually, the screen of my imac is too small. So I would like to get a bigger one but I have one more reason to dislike the new imac: These 16:9 display are bad. I would be better with a used 16:10 screen from kijiji and a previous-generation macmini, one with integrated dvd. Or, as I said earlier, a beige linux box.
Apple jumped shark.
I don't care about the ipad mini. I don't have a use for that kind of gadget. But I say thumb down for this new imac. Yeah it's more powerful, wich is good, but my ssd-upgraded five years old imac is already powerful enough. Yeah it's slimmer but why? When i'm at my desk, I see the imac in 2d anyway. When i'm not at my desk, I don't see it at all. I don't understand why I should care about the width of the thing. I dislike the external DVD drive. It's one more clutter on my workspace that's already swamped by books, papers, dried coffee cups and rotting lunches. They should have kept the current imac's mesurements and use the available space to make it extensible. Oh.... I remember I'm talking about Apple. Do as if I did not say anything. My next computer will be a beige Linux box anyway: most of the softwares I use are FLOSS already so it will not be a big change for me.
As I understand it, x.org replaced xfree86. Both are X11 implementation.
Imagine recreating xlib so it doesn't communicate with an X server but directly draws things on the local screen, maybe in a multithreaded fashion. In such a scenario, the ability to share a display between many programs would be lost or alternatively a badly behaviored program could disrupt the other's windows. What kind of increased performance would be obtained (if any) by replacing IPC, as used in X11 (and in wayland too?) for drawing and use in process fonctions instead?
I like the part where the US gov give them immunity for some reasons. Are you sure there is nice guys in that story?
Are you implying that using drug and being a theft are enough to get shot in the back while walking on the street? How the lifestyle of the victim is even relevant to the actions of the aggressor?
cutestevejobs?
you were his own personal minime?
"Second, you're probably going to explain how Europe is the center of the world, etc. It's not. It's not even a continent."
I'm not interrested in dick-measuring contest anymore than you.
"All the EUPL can do is fragment the community"
As the EUPL allows one to re-license existing software under the GPL, this point is probably moot.
"Forth, translations? http://www.gnu.org/licenses/translations.html [gnu.org] lists Armenian, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, Galician, German, Italian, Serbian, Slovak. I'm sure it will grow to much much more than 22. And note "Chinese". This actually covers 20% of the world's population, if that is the criteria you want to argue with."
My point was that none of these translations are official and thus can be misleading to a potential reader. The FAQ on gnu.org itself point to that fact and urge to refer to the english version for business use, hence my accusation of it being anglocentrist. I agree the EUPL care only about european languages and I agree too that's not an ideal situation. However, the merit of the EUPL is to put many languages on a equality basis. If someone's only care is free software, then there is nothing wrong with the GPL but if you take a broader look at the situation, you'll see that freedom is more than being able to hack software. It's also having access to localized software, something that many FOSS already get mostly right and also being able to use one's native language for legal matters and that's definitively something the GPL needs addressing in the future.
"GPLv3 was a global project, with input from hundreds of people around the world."
I fear it's becoming increasingly harder to resist to the globish sirens. Can you honestly tell me that nobody raised the same questionning I have right now?
Finally, thank you for bringing a bit of sanity in this discussion.
Circular argument is circular.
You definition of a circular argument is strange and different.
This makes you an asshole of the first order.
Using insults as an argument is very mature indeed.
You made this thread useless and boring. Thanks.
To turn your argument around and do some substitution, the Eurocentrism of the EUPL is a bad thing, especially since it doesn't apply to Brazil, Philippines or China. How come the EUPL isn't translated into Brazilian Portuguese, Tagalog, or Cantonese? The European Commission certainly has more resources than the FSF, so why don't they do it?
The fact is that the EUPL supports 21 more languages than the GPL. And yes, the EUPL is eurocentrist. It still is better than the GPL.
The reasons given in the FSF link you gave do not match up with the definition of Anglocentrism.
Yes it does. The FSF don't provide translation because they think the right of the non-english peoples is less important than their legal risks.
Indeed, to make another real-world comparison, the Treaty of Tripoli is written in Arabic. An English translation presented to the US Congress was not the official one - it was there for explanation. The official ratified treaty is the Arabic version and the US is bound to it.
Your ~200 years old treaty is between two parties of different languages. In these case it is sometime necessary to choose. Moreover, the US gov certainly had arabic speakers on its side. In the GPL case, you can have a situation where both implicated parties may be non-english speakers but still be tied to an english license because of residual rights from a previous distributor.
the requirements for winning are not that you must be a GPL supporter.
The FSF can't be only bad. I honestly think that they mostly act in good faith. They may be blinded by their cultural bias but that don't make them necessarily evil.
Indeed, Theo de Raadt is the most angry and vociferous troll against the GPL, yet he's won.
So Someone who don't agree with you or the FSF and dare to speak about it is a troll? You probably don't have many friends in life. Theo de Raadt's life is about free software. He's an ally to your cause. Can't you see it?
You are just a troll here to bash the GPL and push Eurocentrism. Not only Eurocentrism, but European Union Centrism.
Your inflamatory message prove that I may not be the real troll here. Take a breath or two, please.
My arguments still stand. You only proved your are better at math than me. Bravo!
That comment was supposed to be informative/funny. I don't care about Microsoft products and in fact don't use them. BTW you are easily disgusted.
Many softwares released under the FSF umbrella are great achievements with marvelous documentations. However it seems to me that using the GPL for the freedom of the peoples are shortsighted at best. Most Slashdot readers probably don't mind the english-only nature of the GPL but what good is a license for someone who can't understand it? There is 7 000 000 000 peoples on earth and 1 800 000 000(~26%) who understand english somewhat (only 380 000 000 (~0.05%) are native speakers). Yes, there is "unofficial" translation. But this clearly don't cut it. Would you redistribute software binding you to a license you don't understand or barely understand in it's official legal version? In fact, the FSF treat non-english speaker as second-class human, deprieving them of their right to be tied to a contract they understand merely for it's own convenience. I approve of free software and I like the copyleft ideals but I, for one, would be reluctant to redistribute GPL-ed software because of this reason. The GPL isn't freedom at all for most of humanity and the FSF don't give a shit.
There is at least one copyleft license that attempts to adress that shortcoming: the EUPL. This license is translated in 22 languages. It's a far cry from the thousands of languages of humanity but it's clearly a step in the right direction and it's far better than the anglocentrism of the GPL and the FSF. I would really like to see this license used more frequently.
A pre-release version of Windows 8 can be legally downloaded on microsoft.com. Then if you don't want to change your configuration, you can install it inside Virtual Box. You may want to exorcise your computer after that.
Hey mod: This is not Flamebait -1. This should be Funny +1. It's funny. Laugh. Why so serious?
Correction:
After Windows 2000, I switched to a MSDNAA version of Windows 2003 server for my personal computer and find it as good as Win2k and far better than XP. So I should say that MS released a total of two good consumer os.
Now I'm a OS X user and not looking back. If someday I switch to something else, it will be Linux or FreeBSD.
You don't recall correctly
Windows 3.1 was not so bad but buggy
Windows 95 was semi-good. got better with osr2
Windows 98 was a big step backward. It got better only with SE
Windows ME was uter crap. Actually I skipped this version because I used Win2k at the time.
Windows 2000 was great. Probably the best Windows OS of all time.
Windows XP sucked at first. It was basicaly a slower version of Windows 200 with a Teletubbies interface. It only got better with the various service packs.
Windows Vista was as shitty as ME.
Windows 7 is actualy Vista, but working.
All in all, in the last 20 years, Microsoft released a total of only two good os: Win2k and Win7. A far cry from alternating between good and crap.
I just replaced a week ago the 250gb HD that came with my iMac Alu with a 256gb SSD. I paid about 1$/gb and I can say that my system is noticiably faster. For most of my computer usage, the file system access is still the botteneck, even with the increased speed. Also, stupid OS X needed an external utility to enable TRIM and fiddling in the command line to enable noatime. We clearly need (at least on the apple side) more support from the OS and more speed for the drive.