The Collaborative Media Foundation turned out to be a tax dodge
While you have every right to have whatever opinion about me you want, you've made this "tax dodge" accusation numerous times. You do realize that you're accusing me of a crime, don't you? And that you don't have any evidence of your accusation, nor does it even make sense. An organization that has not yet been incorporated can't function as a "tax dodge."
All of your facts are wrong, but that's just stupidity. I think that when you accuse me of criminal activity, though, you cross a line. I'd really like you to stop unless you can demonstrate even a hint of evidence.
The problem isn't that they developed their own CMS, but that they had an entire sub-business doing software development going on in there -- a sub-business that didn't bring in any revenue. Slashcode was basically written as a hobby, same with Scoop. Salon went out and hired a dozen coders full time just to build their CMS. At one point in 2000 they were actually considering spinning it off into its own company, but that never got off the ground (that's why I was at their offices, actually, interviewing for a job working on that).
When your business is running an online magazine, software development is pure overhead. It's just smart to keep it to a minimum. Maybe you want a couple guys in there working on the code, but they should at least just be customizing what's already out there, not writing whole new applications from scratch.
So it's not the fact of having coders, but the scale they were working at that I'm pointing out here.
Re:How does a website spend $80mln?
on
Salon Asks for Help
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The fact that sites which avoided getting the priciest digs (I'm looking at you, Kuro5hin) have survived
I got a creepy little jolt of surprise reading that. It's like you were watching me.:-)
It's true, though the comparison is way too strained. I've been to Salon's offices, and even at the height of the 'net boom, they were silly exhorbitant. Even for San Francisco they were over the top. Not to mention all the cash they spent developing their own CMS (yeah, they really did). I would like to see Salon survive, but every time I try to scrape up a little sympathy, I think of those offices, and I just can't.
I wish them the best, and hope they get out of their lease and learn a little thrift. I know they're already practicing a lot of thrift when it comes to paying their writers (they mostly don't). But some lessons are just learned too late.
I have one of the Crusoe Picturebooks, and I'm perfectly happy with it. It's light, and runs a lot cooler than the mobile pentiums. Power consumption is good, though not as stupendous as transmeta claimed it would be. I get about 8 hours on the quad battery (which does double the weight of the machine). Other than that, there really isn't anything to report. The picturebook does feature a horribly broken APM compatibility layer, and ACPI on linux ain't working yet, so no power management to speak of. The crusoe's longrun stuff does work under linux though, as does pretty much everything else on the machine (except the winmodem).
Regardless, you're right that Slashcode is the only package I know of that's been tested with the kind of load and range of attacks that Slashdot gets. I certainly wouldn't argue that it's proven that Scoop could do what Slashcode does, in terms of sheer numbers. That just hasn't been done. Maybe it could, maybe it couldn't, but we don't know for sure.
I do think feature-wise, Scoop kicks Slashcode's ass, but that's to be expected.:-)
PS: The previous defender of Scoop was hurstdog, who is our primary project manager now.
I do think kuro5hin is somewhat like that, though it has gotten a lot bigger and it is harder to build a sense of community in it's diary section since they are gone within an hour of posting
We'll be adding a "friends list" RSN, that will let you know when people you've marked to watch have posted a new diary. It ought to help with the insta-scroll.
and the IRC channel is somewhat boring to me, and lacking varied discussion.
What? You mean sex, computers sex, sex, sex, and computers isn't enough variety for you?
Posters will have to take that up with Google, if they have a problem with it. It's nothing to do with me.
Your 'contract' is invalid because it is factually incorrect.
How so?
Besides which, what's your point? It's posted to a public forum and
now it's in the publc domain.
So, I can go to Salon and take any article posted there because it's posted on the web? That's "posted to a public forum" just as much as any K5 comment is. It's text, which is available on the web, and under copyright. If my copyright notice is invalid, then so is theirs. That's absurd, and any lawyer would tell you so.
Once something is posted on a forum like kuro5hin or slashdot, it is in the public domain (despite the little notice at
the bottom).
That's completely untrue. Here is the relevant copyright notice from K5:
So, when you post a comment here, we take
that to grant Kuro5hin.org and the entirely fictional Mrs. Edna Graustein, of Kansas City,
Mo., the right to display your comment on the page on which it was posted by you. It may
also be displayed on other pages within the site, or reachable through searches or other
means, but it will always and only be here on kuro5hin, and we have no intention of ever
reusing, reprinting, or recreating your comment anywhere else. By posting here, you also
grant us the right to remove your comment if we choose not to want it here. We do not
edit comments, except in extreme cases of comments which include html or other
characters that damage the usability of the site. We do remove comments that are
inappropriate or offensive to the admins.
You lose no copyright control over your words, and are not beholden to us in any way
shape or form.
Kuro5hin.org claims no liability for the accuracy of user's comments, and reserves no
ownership of them whatsoever.
Anything you write is automatically under a copyright, owned by you. By posting to K5, kennedy implicitly agreed to the above. That means that by stealing the comment and posting it here, TheDot has infringed on kennedy's copyright. No permission was ever granted to reprint that comment here. If kennedy wanted to sue, it'd be a pretty easy case to make.
Now who to sue, or how, is another matter. I don't think that would be easy. But just because the law is hard to enforce doesn't make it no longer the law. This is the same attitude that makes people think MP3's are "in the public domain" just because they're easy to copy and the laws against it are hard to enforce. It's not true in that case, and it isn't here either.
Heh. I'm sorry for the rather overly-harsh criticism, michael. I could have put it in a less incendiary way, and wish I had.
I don't criticize slashdot to be fashionable, I do it when I think slashdot could improve. It's been a while since there's been any improvement here, mainly because of that kind of attitude toward criticism. Dude, think about it, if people care enough to criticise, why are you flaming them?
No, I don't care at all about upward moderation. I don't moderate here, I hardly ever post here (my user page has one comment showing right now-- well, two by the time you read this), so what does upward moderation get me?
And, I'd find you comments that misunderstood, but I'm on a modem, and I can't get the story to load before the server times me out, so no dice there. FWIW, the ones that misunderstood were indeed of the dumb, "didn't read the article" variety. No argument there.
Anyway, I'd have to rate your comment -1, Flamebait. Chill, out, man.
There's been a lot of misinterpretation of this article, due mostly to the useless writeup at the top of it. Thanks for the link, but when did Slashdot stories stop providing *any* useful information about the link?
Anyway, the mod system described is not the one on K5. It's in Glasscode, which is the system the article is about. Which does not run K5. (Note: I'm not sure if you understood this or not, Sig11, but a lot of other people got it completely wrong, so that's for them).
Lastly, some advice for the kiro5hin maintainers - don't count on obscuring the statistical system to deter your attackers for long.
Which part of the statistical system do we obscure? If you want a full and detailed explanation of how the various K5 systems work, see our relaunch article.
Otherwise, I agree-- the system always has to be evolving. Think about it-- you cannot create an automated system that isn't eventually susceptible to automated attack. It's that simple. You just have to make it hard enough to attack that it's not worth it, and use the lag time to keep ahead of the kiddys. And sooner or later, you lose the race, pick your ass up, and try again (c.f. this summer for K5).
Oh, sure. Typical of the so-called "Open Source" community, that as soon as someone tries to make a living from their hard work, someone else has to come along and yell "sell out"! Y'know, it's people like you and that commie RMS that are going to put a lot of hard-working programmers out on the street, not to mention all those poor struggling rock stars that you are no doubt stealing music from. Sure, if I'm a sellout, than I suppose that Lars Ulrich and the other artists from the musical group Metallica are also sell-outs, just because they don't want you to steal their hard-earned labor? Well fine then.
VA doesn't own us, they have no interest in owning us, and this is a straight up donation. We will carry a "powered by VA" graphic on the new site, but that's because we think it's cool that VA gave us free hardware (and good stuff too).
Now, mind you, if we feel that VA is being shady, we won't hesitate to tear them a new one.;-) After all, they can't take their stuff back. The point is that VA is well aware that it, as a company, lives or dies by it's reputation and that in this community, reputation is hard to gain and easy to lose. They have a long record of stepping in and helping out sites and organizations that are in need, especially those that cater to their main customer base. This is not evil, this is simply good business, and if a bunch of folks get good hardware that they couldn't otherwise afford out of it, all the better.
When Debian gives away it's distro for free, we see them as being good memebers of the open source community. Yet when VA gives stuff away, a lot of people tend to get that "Hmmm... I don't know..." look. If you were them, what would you do? Help, or not? That's all it is.
Anyway, as always, articles bashing VA will be considered with complete equality by all the readers. Can't do much more than that.
I agree with all of this except the comments about fluffy grue and spiralx. They were both very good members of the K5 community. Yes, they have both trolled here, which sucks. I'm pretty sure fluffy stopped. Anyway, neither of them, to my knowlege were ever conspiracy-prone types, and overall, these are not the people we should be worrying about. But yes, other than that, hear hear.
Here: roblimo actually ordered Inoshiro a pizza, bacuse he hasn't eaten yet today. Roblimo's in MD, Inoshiro's in Canada. That, I think, is above and beyond the call of duty. The conspiracy theory is not true, no other discussion is necessary.
Hey-- I'm trying to work through the email, but it may be a day or so. I think I did get to this one though, you may not have gotten the reply yet.
Anyway, for all those who can't wait, basically, I appreciate all your support a whole lot. A bunch of people have offered various things, from hardware to bandwidth to security services, and they are all appreciated. I'm just trying to get on top of the whole situation right now, but I will get back to everyone who wrote. This community rocks, and is the reason I'm "bitter and hopeful" now rather than bitter and depressed. Thanks all.
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setting the record straight
on
MAPS vs. ORBS
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· Score: 2
I actually did make up a story about how andover is suing me, on April first of this year. As did raph from Advogato. You can see mine on advogato, and his on kuro5hin. Just thought I had to set the record straight on that.
"As rusty says, if he does not accept it immediately, he turns it over to the readers to vote on."
Not true-- I have nothing to do with the process. All stories go into the queue immediately upon submission, and voting begins. Voting determines the fate of the story, completely. I *can* post things manually, but I don't, ever, and voting will always start right away whether I'm around or not. Just a clarification.
Oh yeah, and if anyone else was curious, as of today there were 3500 confirmed users on K5, and though submissions vary wildly, it seems to be between 5 and 20 per day. Of those, usually no more than 5 or 6 end up being posted, but that varies a lot too.
Slashdot Mirror
While you have every right to have whatever opinion about me you want, you've made this "tax dodge" accusation numerous times. You do realize that you're accusing me of a crime, don't you? And that you don't have any evidence of your accusation, nor does it even make sense. An organization that has not yet been incorporated can't function as a "tax dodge."
All of your facts are wrong, but that's just stupidity. I think that when you accuse me of criminal activity, though, you cross a line. I'd really like you to stop unless you can demonstrate even a hint of evidence.
When your business is running an online magazine, software development is pure overhead. It's just smart to keep it to a minimum. Maybe you want a couple guys in there working on the code, but they should at least just be customizing what's already out there, not writing whole new applications from scratch.
So it's not the fact of having coders, but the scale they were working at that I'm pointing out here.
I got a creepy little jolt of surprise reading that. It's like you were watching me. :-)
It's true, though the comparison is way too strained. I've been to Salon's offices, and even at the height of the 'net boom, they were silly exhorbitant. Even for San Francisco they were over the top. Not to mention all the cash they spent developing their own CMS (yeah, they really did). I would like to see Salon survive, but every time I try to scrape up a little sympathy, I think of those offices, and I just can't.
I wish them the best, and hope they get out of their lease and learn a little thrift. I know they're already practicing a lot of thrift when it comes to paying their writers (they mostly don't). But some lessons are just learned too late.
I have one of the Crusoe Picturebooks, and I'm perfectly happy with it. It's light, and runs a lot cooler than the mobile pentiums. Power consumption is good, though not as stupendous as transmeta claimed it would be. I get about 8 hours on the quad battery (which does double the weight of the machine). Other than that, there really isn't anything to report. The picturebook does feature a horribly broken APM compatibility layer, and ACPI on linux ain't working yet, so no power management to speak of. The crusoe's longrun stuff does work under linux though, as does pretty much everything else on the machine (except the winmodem).
Regardless, you're right that Slashcode is the only package I know of that's been tested with the kind of load and range of attacks that Slashdot gets. I certainly wouldn't argue that it's proven that Scoop could do what Slashcode does, in terms of sheer numbers. That just hasn't been done. Maybe it could, maybe it couldn't, but we don't know for sure.
I do think feature-wise, Scoop kicks Slashcode's ass, but that's to be expected. :-)
PS: The previous defender of Scoop was hurstdog, who is our primary project manager now.
I'm kind of pleased at beating the slashdot effect this time. :-)
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There is no K5 cabal.
Jesus hates you. :-)
--
There is no K5 cabal.
We'll be adding a "friends list" RSN, that will let you know when people you've marked to watch have posted a new diary. It ought to help with the insta-scroll.
and the IRC channel is somewhat boring to me, and lacking varied discussion.
What? You mean sex, computers sex, sex, sex, and computers isn't enough variety for you?
--
There is no K5 cabal.
Posters will have to take that up with Google, if they have a problem with it. It's nothing to do with me.
Your 'contract' is invalid because it is factually incorrect.
How so?
Besides which, what's your point? It's posted to a public forum and now it's in the publc domain.
So, I can go to Salon and take any article posted there because it's posted on the web? That's "posted to a public forum" just as much as any K5 comment is. It's text, which is available on the web, and under copyright. If my copyright notice is invalid, then so is theirs. That's absurd, and any lawyer would tell you so.
--
There is no K5 cabal.
That's completely untrue. Here is the relevant copyright notice from K5:
Anything you write is automatically under a copyright, owned by you. By posting to K5, kennedy implicitly agreed to the above. That means that by stealing the comment and posting it here, TheDot has infringed on kennedy's copyright. No permission was ever granted to reprint that comment here. If kennedy wanted to sue, it'd be a pretty easy case to make.Now who to sue, or how, is another matter. I don't think that would be easy. But just because the law is hard to enforce doesn't make it no longer the law. This is the same attitude that makes people think MP3's are "in the public domain" just because they're easy to copy and the laws against it are hard to enforce. It's not true in that case, and it isn't here either.
--
There is no K5 cabal.
For the record, no, the above isn't me. Damn, I don't need to make a Bruce Perens .sig now, do I?
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There is no K5 cabal.
Why do you stay? Why do you still post so much here? What's the point?
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There is no K5 cabal.
I don't criticize slashdot to be fashionable, I do it when I think slashdot could improve. It's been a while since there's been any improvement here, mainly because of that kind of attitude toward criticism. Dude, think about it, if people care enough to criticise, why are you flaming them?
No, I don't care at all about upward moderation. I don't moderate here, I hardly ever post here (my user page has one comment showing right now-- well, two by the time you read this), so what does upward moderation get me?
And, I'd find you comments that misunderstood, but I'm on a modem, and I can't get the story to load before the server times me out, so no dice there. FWIW, the ones that misunderstood were indeed of the dumb, "didn't read the article" variety. No argument there.
Anyway, I'd have to rate your comment -1, Flamebait. Chill, out, man.
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There is no K5 cabal.
Anyway, the mod system described is not the one on K5. It's in Glasscode, which is the system the article is about. Which does not run K5. (Note: I'm not sure if you understood this or not, Sig11, but a lot of other people got it completely wrong, so that's for them).
Lastly, some advice for the kiro5hin maintainers - don't count on obscuring the statistical system to deter your attackers for long.
Which part of the statistical system do we obscure? If you want a full and detailed explanation of how the various K5 systems work, see our relaunch article.
Otherwise, I agree-- the system always has to be evolving. Think about it-- you cannot create an automated system that isn't eventually susceptible to automated attack. It's that simple. You just have to make it hard enough to attack that it's not worth it, and use the lag time to keep ahead of the kiddys. And sooner or later, you lose the race, pick your ass up, and try again (c.f. this summer for K5).
--
There is no K5 cabal.
Inoshiro and I were both severely sleep-deprived when all this occured. You'll have to forgive us.
--
Basically, while we were working on code, VA said "Hey, want a dual processor P3 700, with a gig of memory?" and what would *you* say to that? :-)
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Heh. That whole thread was a hoax cooked up on #kuro5hin. Sorry if it seemed too much like a real argument. :-)
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Oh, sure. Typical of the so-called "Open Source" community, that as soon as someone tries to make a living from their hard work, someone else has to come along and yell "sell out"! Y'know, it's people like you and that commie RMS that are going to put a lot of hard-working programmers out on the street, not to mention all those poor struggling rock stars that you are no doubt stealing music from. Sure, if I'm a sellout, than I suppose that Lars Ulrich and the other artists from the musical group Metallica are also sell-outs, just because they don't want you to steal their hard-earned labor? Well fine then.
--
Ah-hem.
"Show me the money!" :-)
--
Now, mind you, if we feel that VA is being shady, we won't hesitate to tear them a new one. ;-) After all, they can't take their stuff back. The point is that VA is well aware that it, as a company, lives or dies by it's reputation and that in this community, reputation is hard to gain and easy to lose. They have a long record of stepping in and helping out sites and organizations that are in need, especially those that cater to their main customer base. This is not evil, this is simply good business, and if a bunch of folks get good hardware that they couldn't otherwise afford out of it, all the better.
When Debian gives away it's distro for free, we see them as being good memebers of the open source community. Yet when VA gives stuff away, a lot of people tend to get that "Hmmm... I don't know..." look. If you were them, what would you do? Help, or not? That's all it is.
Anyway, as always, articles bashing VA will be considered with complete equality by all the readers. Can't do much more than that.
--
I agree with all of this except the comments about fluffy grue and spiralx. They were both very good members of the K5 community. Yes, they have both trolled here, which sucks. I'm pretty sure fluffy stopped. Anyway, neither of them, to my knowlege were ever conspiracy-prone types, and overall, these are not the people we should be worrying about. But yes, other than that, hear hear.
--
Here: roblimo actually ordered Inoshiro a pizza, bacuse he hasn't eaten yet today. Roblimo's in MD, Inoshiro's in Canada. That, I think, is above and beyond the call of duty. The conspiracy theory is not true, no other discussion is necessary.
--
Anyway, for all those who can't wait, basically, I appreciate all your support a whole lot. A bunch of people have offered various things, from hardware to bandwidth to security services, and they are all appreciated. I'm just trying to get on top of the whole situation right now, but I will get back to everyone who wrote. This community rocks, and is the reason I'm "bitter and hopeful" now rather than bitter and depressed. Thanks all.
--
--
Not true-- I have nothing to do with the process. All stories go into the queue immediately upon submission, and voting begins. Voting determines the fate of the story, completely. I *can* post things manually, but I don't, ever, and voting will always start right away whether I'm around or not. Just a clarification.
Oh yeah, and if anyone else was curious, as of today there were 3500 confirmed users on K5, and though submissions vary wildly, it seems to be between 5 and 20 per day. Of those, usually no more than 5 or 6 end up being posted, but that varies a lot too.
--