So Slashdot is turning into a blog site? Cmdr. Taco left because he wasn't happy with GeekNet's "ambitions" about the site? When do we get SlashHomo? There's so many questions to be asked...
I look forward to the SlashBiFanfic posts. The question is which we'll get more of: Beverly/Jean-Luc/Will, Leia/Luke/Han, Hermione/Harry/Ron, or Zoe/Mal/Wash.
There's profit, then there's profit at all costs. Everyone in business appears to think that there's this tug of war between failure at profitability and failure at providing good customer experience. I have no doubt most telecoms are profitable, but the customer experience sucks donkey balls. You'd think an intelligent person wouldn't spit on other people just because they can and because apparently it not only doesn't hurt the bottom line, but it seems to improve it -- at least for the time being. There's
Yet this is GeekNet's Jump The Shark moment, today, May 1, 2012, for anyone keeping track.
Philosophically, News for Nerds, and the concept of what/. means now has another branding barnacle: BI. I understand BI, big data, and why. I see the horizon of words and phrases like: new paradigm, hadoop(y), your OpenStack engine, and other revenue-generating phrases.
This is branding gone wrong, like putting a Continental kit onto a Kia Rio. We, the customers of/. aren't ideological customers of BIG DATA and BI. We're theorists, engineers, completely whacked out of our mind gamers, and people that make antennas with Pringles cans. I'm shocked that the publishers would believe that they can somehow meld these two concepts together. It's really frightening that they're trying as BI would have told them: only a subsection of/. readers give a rat's patootie about BI, and BI's been around for more than a decade in one form or another.
I remember when I joined Slashdot 5+ years ago, Kuro5hin being bad was the joke.
Now that Slashdot seems to be becoming the joke, where do we go?
Why can't we have nice things? Why is every community we end up going to get shit all over by the idiots in corporate or wherever and turned into a hellhole? See: Facebook, Slashdot, and hundreds of other websites.
I remember when I joined Slashdot 5+ years ago, Kuro5hin being bad was the joke.
Now that Slashdot seems to be becoming the joke, where do we go?
Why can't we have nice things? Why is every community we end up going to get shit all over by the idiots in corporate or wherever and turned into a hellhole? See: Facebook, Slashdot, and hundreds of other websites.
Money, and they see users as a commodity that can be sold for money to advertisers.
I would reinstate my mod points for your comment alone but you're already at 5. Personally I think that/. jumped the shard with the virtually unusable and certainly unstable "web 2.0" Ajackass interface but you make an excellent point. I'm a long time/. user but for the last 2 or 3 years I glance at the site maybe one or twice a week at best and simply don't comment anymore. The articles have become vapid, the user comments little better than Reddit, and now this... Yeah, that's why I always log into/.
CmdrTaco, for all of his bad days, seemed to have an unerring pulse on the interesting stuff that makes a geek's day. Yes, there were colorful sidetracks, and flamewars, and threads that had 700+ comments and drifts that strung to the nebulae.
You meet interesting and thoughtful folks. Some of them are clearly way out on edge of reality. Some beyond. Deciding which is who can be interesting. I don't think that Reddit Getsit, that Digg Diggs, and the other sandpile of social geek communities gets there, either. Hell, even BurningMan has jumped the shark. Slashdot used to *make* the memes, not report on them a dozen days later while grafting the elephant's behind of **BI** onto itself.
Robin, are you listening? Would you give these jokers a klewww? Smack them upside the head, pull their heads out of their butts, and through them back on the cluetrain? Sigh. Big sigh.
Microsoft was in a position to do good, and didn't. Linux wouldn't have risen, Steve Jobs wouldn't have come back from the desert, Solaris might be the King Unix, all sorts of things might have happened if Microsoft's domination and boorish behavior wasn't so thorough and without remorse. As an antagonist, Microsoft proved useful to many. They were the one to beat. They have been beaten. Microsoft provided return for their shareholders, at the cost of business integrity.
I have seen that trend, too. But many open, non-partisan social forums have become political battlegrounds as polarized peoples become trolled, and fights bring ideological thread drifts that bring little to discussion topics.
Domestic policy is another problem: who's turf? Yes, Americans seem to dominate, but I'm interested in international input, and that means *everyone*. It's like slow torture to read the advent of the Big Brother era in the UK, but heartening to hear the Germans are doing something abou
We, the customers of/. aren't ideological customers of BIG DATA and BI. We're theorists, engineers, completely whacked out of our mind gamers, and people that make antennas with Pringles cans.
We're also long haired, raggedy-bearded, pirate-biker rebels, blasted out of our skulls on cocaine and hand ground coffee, and riding our virtual hogs at a thousand miles an hour through the internets, mooning at all the Agents Smiths who try to bring us down to their dreary reality, giving a finger to the socialist-fascist- corporatist Man, and ready to die for our right to party and download music for free.
Statistically somebody has to be at the top of the pile. Market traders work on the same fallacy, that the top few percent of traders must be geniuses when it's mostly just the ones who got lucky from a huge pool. Derren Brown once demonstrated this by making somebody win 10 horse racing bets in a row (he just started with a big enough base of people that every outcome was covered)
Not only that, but BI is as related to Nerds than... say, knitting. Sure, it's related to CS at large, but there are no nerds interested in BI. Businesses are, not nerds. Thus, what does this have to do with slashdot?
automation, instrumentation, database engines, database design, very high speed transform / processing (ETL), information security, storage, etc.
BI, at least form the geek perspective uses just about every discipline in IT and CS; which is why lots and lots of professionals get into; its actually a fascinating world to work in. My only question is does it make sense to have BI topic on Slashdot as 80% of all stories covered here could be put into it reasonably.
Except the motivation for all of your examples is always self contained
What do we like about automation/etc. ? the science behind it (and of course the almost garanteed good laugh thanks to the occasional smart troll and the fact that you are frequently finding insightful posts that challenge or open your preconcieved views on whichever subject)
I won't claim I am anti-business, but I'm sure many just like me like to get here some news which have scientific value/material, and of course it is always good i
I'm inclined to the GP's point of view. Business Intelligence isn't that profound. As the joke goes, Military Intelligence is an oxymoron. Business Intelligence isn't even that respectable. Asking good questions would seem to be the hardest part. I'm sure there are guidelines for that. Shouldn't be hard to get a sense of the sort of questions to ask.
Despite the seeming ease, we see managers, who must be using BI, really screwing up. And often in stupid, heartless, ugly ways that end up misunderstan
I'm assuming that you don't have a job in the commercial sector, which is fine, but means you are arguing from a position of ignorance. Whilst I'm sure doing research into pure computer science, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics or whatever is very interesting and intellectually stimulating, most of us have to earn a living.
And if you are working in a commercial organisation but think you are superior to the dreary number crunchers and PHBs, you're just being childishly snobbish.
Not only that, but BI is as related to Nerds than... say, knitting. Sure, it's related to CS at large, but there are no nerds interested in BI. Businesses are, not nerds. Thus, what does this have to do with slashdot?
No, what you actually mean is that you are a nerd who is not interested in B.I.
We need an alternative. As soon as I find a decent one, I can cut all ties back here.
I suggest something that's sort of social and uses different media. So a sort of "social media".
As for a name, how about somewhere where you can read comments on pages like in a book, and perhaps even see representations of people's faces, so you know who your friends are. Running this up the flagpole to see how it flies in the breeze of blue sky thinking, I'd call if "BookFace"
I think the main reason most of us have stuck around Slashdot all these years is that it has -- barring a few bad experiments -- remained the site of semi-curated content and deeper discussion without the gimmicks or pathetic spamming of other sites. Now they're just trying to become the next Tech Crunch, Gizmodo, Engadget, and so on. I don't hang out at those places and I won't hang out here if that's the direction this keeps going.
SlashBI (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:SlashBI (Score:5, Insightful)
So Slashdot is turning into a blog site?
Slashdot was a blog site before there were blog sites.
Re: (Score:2)
I think the phrase is "... before it was cool." :)
The technical details of BI are very geeky, so that bit could fit.
Re: (Score:1)
I think the phrase is "... before it was cool." :)
No, Slashdot really was a blog before that word had been invented. We used to think the word was fad that would go away.
Re:SlashBI (Score:5, Funny)
Re:SlashBI (Score:5, Funny)
Can I suggest the sub-site SlashBiCurious, since some of us aren't really into BI but want to know more about it.
Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re: (Score:1)
I want SlashBacon now.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
What's the difference beetween a straight guy and a bi-curious guy?
About six pints of lager.
Re: (Score:1)
I look forward to the SlashBiFanfic posts. The question is which we'll get more of: Beverly/Jean-Luc/Will, Leia/Luke/Han, Hermione/Harry/Ron, or Zoe/Mal/Wash.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Nope, stuff that splatters.
Re: (Score:1)
makes more sense than the oxymoronic "business intelligence"
Re: (Score:2)
I remember when the term web log (blog) was first used to describe Slashdot in the late 1990s.
Re:SlashBI (Score:5, Funny)
Next in line, SlashBS where we repost all the bullshit we posted last week so you can complain about dupes all day!
Re: (Score:1)
But we already have that! :)
Re: (Score:1, Offtopic)
Business intelligence. Sounds oxymoronic to me, at least if applied to many among Fortune 500.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
Well... They're among Fortune 500 - They must be doing something wrong.
FTFY.
Re:SlashBI (Score:5, Funny)
Shouldn't you be occupying something today?
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
There's profit, then there's profit at all costs. Everyone in business appears to think that there's this tug of war between failure at profitability and failure at providing good customer experience. I have no doubt most telecoms are profitable, but the customer experience sucks donkey balls. You'd think an intelligent person wouldn't spit on other people just because they can and because apparently it not only doesn't hurt the bottom line, but it seems to improve it -- at least for the time being. There's
Re:SlashBI (Score:5, Insightful)
Thank you.
Yet this is GeekNet's Jump The Shark moment, today, May 1, 2012, for anyone keeping track.
Philosophically, News for Nerds, and the concept of what /. means now has another branding barnacle: BI. I understand BI, big data, and why. I see the horizon of words and phrases like: new paradigm, hadoop(y), your OpenStack engine, and other revenue-generating phrases.
This is branding gone wrong, like putting a Continental kit onto a Kia Rio. We, the customers of /. aren't ideological customers of BIG DATA and BI. We're theorists, engineers, completely whacked out of our mind gamers, and people that make antennas with Pringles cans. I'm shocked that the publishers would believe that they can somehow meld these two concepts together. It's really frightening that they're trying as BI would have told them: only a subsection of /. readers give a rat's patootie about BI, and BI's been around for more than a decade in one form or another.
Re: (Score:2)
I remember when I joined Slashdot 5+ years ago, Kuro5hin being bad was the joke.
Now that Slashdot seems to be becoming the joke, where do we go?
Why can't we have nice things? Why is every community we end up going to get shit all over by the idiots in corporate or wherever and turned into a hellhole? See: Facebook, Slashdot, and hundreds of other websites.
Re: (Score:2)
I remember when I joined Slashdot 5+ years ago, Kuro5hin being bad was the joke.
Now that Slashdot seems to be becoming the joke, where do we go?
Why can't we have nice things? Why is every community we end up going to get shit all over by the idiots in corporate or wherever and turned into a hellhole? See: Facebook, Slashdot, and hundreds of other websites.
Money, and they see users as a commodity that can be sold for money to advertisers.
Re: (Score:2)
Personally I think that
I'm a long time
Re:SlashBI (Score:4, Insightful)
CmdrTaco, for all of his bad days, seemed to have an unerring pulse on the interesting stuff that makes a geek's day. Yes, there were colorful sidetracks, and flamewars, and threads that had 700+ comments and drifts that strung to the nebulae.
You meet interesting and thoughtful folks. Some of them are clearly way out on edge of reality. Some beyond. Deciding which is who can be interesting. I don't think that Reddit Getsit, that Digg Diggs, and the other sandpile of social geek communities gets there, either. Hell, even BurningMan has jumped the shark. Slashdot used to *make* the memes, not report on them a dozen days later while grafting the elephant's behind of **BI** onto itself.
Robin, are you listening? Would you give these jokers a klewww? Smack them upside the head, pull their heads out of their butts, and through them back on the cluetrain? Sigh. Big sigh.
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft was in a position to do good, and didn't. Linux wouldn't have risen, Steve Jobs wouldn't have come back from the desert, Solaris might be the King Unix, all sorts of things might have happened if Microsoft's domination and boorish behavior wasn't so thorough and without remorse. As an antagonist, Microsoft proved useful to many. They were the one to beat. They have been beaten. Microsoft provided return for their shareholders, at the cost of business integrity.
But the Internet is still way cool, a
Re: (Score:2)
I have seen that trend, too. But many open, non-partisan social forums have become political battlegrounds as polarized peoples become trolled, and fights bring ideological thread drifts that bring little to discussion topics.
Domestic policy is another problem: who's turf? Yes, Americans seem to dominate, but I'm interested in international input, and that means *everyone*. It's like slow torture to read the advent of the Big Brother era in the UK, but heartening to hear the Germans are doing something abou
Re: (Score:2)
It's like slow torture to read the advent of the Big Brother era in the UK,
Yes, it's like Nineteen Eighty Four. Fiction.
So long... (Score:3)
Yet this is GeekNet's Jump The Shark moment, today, May 1, 2012, for anyone keeping track.
I think you're right. I've been here a gawd-awful long time, and this latest abomination is by far the worst by several orders of magnitude.
I keep hoping to see an "UPDATE: Suckers! We trolled you good!" appear in the summary, but I don't think that's going to happen.
I wonder if the Romans felt this way as their empire declined and fell?
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if the Romans felt this way as their empire declined and fell?
Pretentious? Moi?
Re: (Score:2)
We, the customers of /. aren't ideological customers of BIG DATA and BI. We're theorists, engineers, completely whacked out of our mind gamers, and people that make antennas with Pringles cans.
We're also long haired, raggedy-bearded, pirate-biker rebels, blasted out of our skulls on cocaine and hand ground coffee, and riding our virtual hogs at a thousand miles an hour through the internets, mooning at all the Agents Smiths who try to bring us down to their dreary reality, giving a finger to the socialist-fascist- corporatist Man, and ready to die for our right to party and download music for free.
And all this from our mom's basements.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I think Bill Hicks was right, about what they should do...
Re:SlashBI (Score:5, Insightful)
Not only that, but BI is as related to Nerds than ... say, knitting. Sure, it's related to CS at large, but there are no nerds interested in BI. Businesses are, not nerds. Thus, what does this have to do with slashdot?
Re:SlashBI (Score:4, Insightful)
Right nobody reading Slashdot cares at all about:
automation,
instrumentation,
database engines,
database design,
very high speed transform / processing (ETL),
information security,
storage,
etc.
BI, at least form the geek perspective uses just about every discipline in IT and CS; which is why lots and lots of professionals get into; its actually a fascinating world to work in. My only question is does it make sense to have BI topic on Slashdot as 80% of all stories covered here could be put into it reasonably.
Re: (Score:3)
What do we like about automation/etc. ? the science behind it (and of course the almost garanteed good laugh thanks to the occasional smart troll and the fact that you are frequently finding insightful posts that challenge or open your preconcieved views on whichever subject)
I won't claim I am anti-business, but I'm sure many just like me like to get here some news which have scientific value/material, and of course it is always good i
Re: (Score:2)
Yep. That's what I do at my nerd job. GP is wrong.
Re: (Score:3)
I'm inclined to the GP's point of view. Business Intelligence isn't that profound. As the joke goes, Military Intelligence is an oxymoron. Business Intelligence isn't even that respectable. Asking good questions would seem to be the hardest part. I'm sure there are guidelines for that. Shouldn't be hard to get a sense of the sort of questions to ask.
Despite the seeming ease, we see managers, who must be using BI, really screwing up. And often in stupid, heartless, ugly ways that end up misunderstan
Re: (Score:2)
And if you are working in a commercial organisation but think you are superior to the dreary number crunchers and PHBs, you're just being childishly snobbish.
Re: (Score:2)
Not only that, but BI is as related to Nerds than ... say, knitting. Sure, it's related to CS at large, but there are no nerds interested in BI. Businesses are, not nerds. Thus, what does this have to do with slashdot?
No, what you actually mean is that you are a nerd who is not interested in B.I.
You have not been elected Chief Nerd on High.
Re: (Score:1)
Yep, so the question is: what alternatives to slashdot exist now that they've decided terrible is the way to be.
Reddit is too memey, digg is a failure, and many of the actual magazines have terrible discussion formulas.
We need an alternative. As soon as I find a decent one, I can cut all ties back here.
Re: (Score:1)
It would be nice to share some interesting links and opinions.
Re: (Score:2)
yet interestingly I look at the front page of slashdot and it's not that much different than it was almost 15 years ago when I started here.
Re: (Score:2)
We need an alternative. As soon as I find a decent one, I can cut all ties back here.
I suggest something that's sort of social and uses different media. So a sort of "social media".
As for a name, how about somewhere where you can read comments on pages like in a book, and perhaps even see representations of people's faces, so you know who your friends are. Running this up the flagpole to see how it flies in the breeze of blue sky thinking, I'd call if "BookFace"
I wonder how many people would "like" this?
Re: (Score:2)
Teh stupid still hurts.
Who knew?
Re: (Score:1)
I think the main reason most of us have stuck around Slashdot all these years is that it has -- barring a few bad experiments -- remained the site of semi-curated content and deeper discussion without the gimmicks or pathetic spamming of other sites. Now they're just trying to become the next Tech Crunch, Gizmodo, Engadget, and so on. I don't hang out at those places and I won't hang out here if that's the direction this keeps going.
Re: (Score:2)
You must be new here. Slashdot.org was CmdrTaco's personal blog.