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A Pre-History of Slashdot

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Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#341

Post by lightedman »

digi_owl wrote: post #34
hprotagonist wrote: post #9

I have some real fond memories of reading slashdot before classes in high school. I think my favorite was the day Rob proposed, and I was late to AP chemistry because I was frantically reloading the page to see what happened.. Through it i discovered the EFF, the jargon file, the FSF, and much else (hot grits, anyone?), and I miss that community. I haven't spent any serious time there in about 8 years.

I check the comments from time to time, but i fear the place is crawling with paid shills these days.

You can pretty much safely ignore most things coming from 7-digit UIDs and not have to worry about the shills so much.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#342

Post by digi_owl »

Iv wrote: post #252
gfodor wrote: post #107

I remember getting my house's cable modem slashdotted in 2001 when i launched a community site (half-empty.org) I built -- what a wild ride that was. (If you are reading, thanks to Tim Wilde and the rest of the DynDNS crew for all the memories helping me, a young kid, get that site into an actual DC :)) I remember always rolling my eyes at the Linux and Free Software crowd on /. and the anti-Microsoft zeitgeist that…

Open source is the main thing that prevented cyberpunk dystopias that many authors imagined. This community deserves some love.

Free Software, maybe. Open Source, not so much...

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#343

Post by organsnyder »

housel wrote: post #339
organsnyder wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My college laptop (Fujitsu Lifebook P-2046) had a Transmeta Crusoe chip, running at 800 mhz. It was slow as molasses, but could easily do 15 hours of battery life (screen on) with the drive-bay and extended batteries, all in a sub-note form factor. It was a perfect note-taking machine (all of my real dev work was done on desktops or via SSH/telnet). Transmeta may have had a short lifespan, but I think they played a b…

I was still using my Transmeta-based Sony Vaio Picturebook as a router running FreeBSD up through January 2016. Before that in the early 2000s it made a great, extremely portable hacking laptop. The attention Transmeta got on Slashdot was probably instrumental in my buying it.

Slashdot was definitely instrumental to me buying mine. I never would have heard of Transmeta otherwise, and I found out about the Fujitsu through Transmeta's site.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#344

Post by bdamm »

mrmyers wrote: post #279
bdamm wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not owning a TV is pushing my kid to watch a lot of YouTube. I'm seriously considering buying a TV, after living for 30 years without one, just so that I can have a quality entertainment feed that doesn't bend to the new media's idea of what my kid should watch, because what that ends up being is endless advertisements ("open this egg! What's inside? A Ken doll!! Wow!!") and videos of pandas killing each other with c…

I occasionally hear people complaining about ads on youtube, but I have never seen a youtube ad aside from when random people try to show me a video on their computer. Do people just not use adblock+ any more?

You can't avoid the ads if they are presented as videos.

It's actually a cultural phenomenon of people making a living by buying toys and making you tube videos about them. You tube then pipes children's eyeballs to these videos.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#345

Post by digi_owl »

syntheticnature wrote: post #249
digi_owl wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

heh, now i remind myself that i still have User Friendly in the RSS reader. Anyone know what Illiad is up to these days?

Still posting comics? http://www.userfriendly.org/

My impression is that the page has been doing reruns for years now, ever since he posted that he would be taking time off.

I notice that they have since stopped labeling reruns with a original post date in the upper right corner.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#346

Post by dwringer »

int_19h wrote: post #310
dwringer wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really understand the appeal of a friend/foe system. If I don't like a person, I typically try to avoid interacting with them unless/until I find a way to reevaluate them or myself so that I can find something positive, a way to like them. Pretty much the last thing I want is a computer to remind me that I don't like someone. In fact, I wish frequently that I could suppress my own internal feelings of dislike…

The whole point of friend/foe system on Slashdot is that foes' comments are less visible, and friends' are more visible. It's basically a way to say "this person tends to say ridiculous things, and I don't care to read more of them" and "this person tends to say interesting things, I'd love to hear what they have to say on other subjects". So if your approach is to "try to avoid interacting with them", it just automa…

> So if your approach is to "try to avoid interacting with them", it just automates that.

Well, I didn't really mean that I don't read or listen to what they have to say. I just choose not to engage with it.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#347

Post by digi_owl »

qmarchi wrote: post #165
jonstokes wrote: post #52

Slashdot was a major inspiration to us as we grew Ars Technica, not to mention a major source of critical traffic and growth in those early years. Hats off to Rob! I owe you, dude. We all do :-)

Frequent reader of Ars, I don't comment/post much on Civis but enjoy reading the deep dives into updates like Oreo and iOS 11.

Sadly these "deep dives" feels more and more shallow these days. More and more they are about "look and feel" or pixel counting rather than the meat and potatoes.

Frankly these days Ars Technica could just as well be relabeled Apple Technica. The site scuttled their coverage of FOSS and similar under prominent sections, while the Apple stuff keep leaking out from their "infinite loop" section.

These days if it is not Apple related, it gets binned under their generic "gadgets" section.

And this from the site that got me interested in Linux in the first place back when it was black and orange, and housed a multipage introduction to Linux internals.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#348

Post by gcb0 »

musage wrote: post #255
MartinCron wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

most of the people there were ruthlessly crushed by Microsoft business tactics That has to be hyperbole. Even at the height of Microsoft's aggression, there were many professional software devs left uncrushed.

"Most of the people there". Not "most of the people".

if you want to be pedant: "most of the people developing software" would be the most accurate imho.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#349

Post by astrodust »

nvarsj wrote: post #313
astrodust wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest: It prevented some and created others. We got a wealth of free tools that allowed us to create things like Slashdot without crippling license fees and we got a wealth of cheap IoT and poorly programmed devices that can DDOS and bring down GitHub. In the 1990s the fear was that Microsoft would take over everything . Now the concern is that Linux will show up in places it has no business being, collecti…

It's a bit of a stretch to attribute opensource with the rise of IoT. Those devices have plenty of proprietary software as well.

Since the licensing costs are often zero it's made products possible that were previously impossible if they needed to license QNX, Windows CE or something proprietary.

Open-source reduces friction. This is good in some areas and bad in others.

Re: A Pre-History of Slashdot

#350

Post by astrodust »

c3833174 wrote: post #334
astrodust wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest: It prevented some and created others. We got a wealth of free tools that allowed us to create things like Slashdot without crippling license fees and we got a wealth of cheap IoT and poorly programmed devices that can DDOS and bring down GitHub. In the 1990s the fear was that Microsoft would take over everything . Now the concern is that Linux will show up in places it has no business being, collecti…

>Now the concern is that Linux will show up in places it has no business being, collecting data it doesn't need, and connecting to services that aren't necessary But linux is just a kernel and devices based on it are usually easier to reverse engineer. > simple, dumb appliances like your refrigerator or washing machine. Dumb appliances are not going away, you just probably spend too much time on websites that overhyp…

> ...you just probably spend too much time on websites that overhype ioT garbage.

Buying a "dumb" TV these days is an exercise in frustration.

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