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FS tells me that Ars Technica reports that Dice is selling the Slashdot and Sourceforge sites. The company in their second quarter earnings announcements stated they have "not successfully leveraged the Slashdot user base to further Dice's digital recruitment business", and are planning to divest this business.
The report goes on to note that in spite of what the report calls "an incredibly loyal and passionate following of tech professionals," Slashdot and SourceForge aren't core to DHI's business and that DHI has partnered with KeyBanc Capital Markets to advise DHI on the sale. There is no buyer lined up yet.
The report also says that Slashdot Media (the aggregate of Slashdot and SourceForge) made $1.7 million in revenue for the second quarter and that it's estimated Slashdot Media will pull somewhere between $15 million and $16 million in revenue for fiscal 2015.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by janrinok on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:45PM
I hope that the new buyers, whenever they are found, know how to treat both sites properly.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by WizardFusion on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:46PM
I think it's too late for that, particularly for Sourceforge.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FrogBlast on Tuesday July 28 2015, @02:49PM
Too late to save them maybe, but not to late to stop actively doing harm to the people who do show up there.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Kell on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:30PM
When our green brethren and sestren walk into the wilderness in search of succor, we will greet them with open arms and lower UIDs.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Gaaark on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:45PM
and then they will curse our sudden but inevitable betrayal!!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Notabadguy on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:37PM
I created an account here just to test this theory.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by plogerjb on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:49AM
Just did the same thing to join you. Thanks for the inspiration, been lurking since the beginning.
I believe in doing the right thing as well as being fair. Sometimes these don't go hand in hand.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Kell on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:26AM
Welcome! :D
We can all feel ever so slightly smug when the 5-digit UIDs start popping up.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 1) by mmlj4 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:23PM
Tinfoil hat time! I don't get the game plan... sure, they've been caught out and so it's time to sell, but let's think about this for a while. Sourceforge's reputation is gone, pissed away in an effort to monetize open source software. They also destroyed freshmeat --- had to, if there was ever going to be any money in sourceforge. Hmm... maybe I get the game plan after all?
Need a Linux consultant [joeykelly.net] in New Orleans?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @07:20PM
Indeed, they've damaged the reputation of both sites, probably beyond repair. ie: Even if Dice is removed from the picture, the staff at both sites have proven that they have no problem acting against the best intentions of the community it has (or had.)
Essentially, they'll basically do whatever the new owners expect, which can easily be the same or worse than the things Dice was making it do. (steamrolling the new beta slashdot interface out despite constant objection and criticism from the community, and all that adware bundling crap being deceptively added to software downloads on sourceforge - and the stealing of projects from their owners under the excuse that it was "abandoned" (when more accurately it was to prevent the owners who had indeed abandoned sourceforge for other hosting alternatives from returning to remove the project officially)
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @10:00PM
Yes, it is awful when the staff of a company has to do what the owner of the company wants. They should be able to do whatever they want!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @10:24PM
socialism ftw!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:06PM
Yeah, but I don't think they will. Who would buy it who did not intend to extract maximum value from it? I don't really see any philanthropic tech billionaire coming along to hand the scumbags at Dice a payday, since the Slashdot community has already been destroyed and the Slashdot diaspora begun.
For me the value of Slashdot was the genesis of an idea, that being a moderation system that enables a higher signal-to-noise ratio, and thus enabling tech- and geek-minded folks to participate in a sort of community they might find it hard to connect with in the offline world. That idea, and that heritage lives on, in Soylent at least. No place else I'm aware of has managed to achieve that success in community building from such a diverse array of people. Other places might achieve community, but they are echo chambers, not places where your verities are challenged; For example, just try questioning the coronation of Hillary Clinton for President on DailyKos or asserting the legitimate American birth of Obama on Drudge and you'll see what I mean.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by jdavidb on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:29PM
No place else I'm aware of has managed to achieve that success in community building from such a diverse array of people.
Absolutely. The Slashdot community changed my mind and built my thoughts on a lot of things. Sometimes I did feel like I was seeing groupthink, but there was still enough variety that there were dissenters to any "mainstream" Slashdot opinion. I'm proud to be a vital part of the mix myself in being a dissenter (hopefully respectfully) on a number of things myself.
I might add that I think there was also great value in the "omelette" CmdrTaco and company assembled daily. Frequently there was much to find fault with, but on the whole their story selection, editing, and guidance of the site kept us coming back over and over again for years.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Francis on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:35PM
The group-think is what got me as much as anything. Posting anything even remotely interesting risked having it buried because it wasn't ideologically pure and it got to the point where people wouldn't even read the summary before posting.
I don't agree that Dice caused that, the site was already dieing when they took it over. But they certainly did hasten it's demise by all the stupid UI changes and efforts to monetize it. The more obnoxious the ads got the less in the mood I was to allow them. Visiting on a mobile device really reveals just how incompetent the design was as you have to scroll quite a ways to get past the ads.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:53PM
Dice wasn't the first to acquire them. I forget now who bought them out first. Was it Andover.net? Anyway I think they tried to monetize it while respecting the community as best they could, and that started the site's slide down the slope. Dice, of course, had no such scruples.
I don't know what Andover.net did to attract riff-raff (meaning hordes of trolls and karma whores), but it was after they bought Slashdot that you started to see "laser beam" jokes and Soviet Russia jokes get moderated to 5 every time. Cowboy Neal polls vanished then, which had been as iconic as "They killed Kenny! You Bastards!" had been on South Park at the time. It was OK at first, because the core editorial staff remained and a lot of the old-timers did, too. But when Dice took over, things went to pot fast.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Tork on Tuesday July 28 2015, @04:15PM
I think what happened was somewhere in the mid-2000's Slashdot gained some sort of mass-appeal. Since Slashdot decided to randomly deputize the Jox Sixpacks with mod-points the community shifted from discussion to debate. No more questions were asked, every response was a jab. I think if Slashdot had maintained a system of moderation that required responsibility the verbal combatants would have lost their incentive to snark. I only hope this site avoids Slashdot's fate. We do have a good community here, keep the youtuber's out.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jpkunst on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:00PM
Pro tip: give "Funny" moderated posts automatically a -6 in your preferences. Works great on both Slashdot and Soylentnews, everything is much more readable. Posts moderated "Funny" almost never are, keeping them out of sight is best.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Nerdfest on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:57PM
The humour on SlashDot was one of the things I liked the best. Yes, there were the ongoing meme jokes (which were still funny on rare occasions), but some of the other humour was some of the best around. I think tech people are some of the funniest around, especially with puns, which I must admit I'm a big fan of.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:50PM
Maybe we should keep Funny for silly/dumb funny, and Touche for my sarcasm ;-)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Funny) by ghost on Tuesday July 28 2015, @07:30PM
Most slashdot jokes were stale and predictable. There were some really great trolls, though.
----
C: A Dead Language?
Gentlemen, the time has come for a serious discussion on whether or not to continue using C for serious programming projects. As I will explain, I feel that C needs to be retired, much the same way that Fortran, Cobol and Perl have been. Furthermore, allow me to be so bold as to suggest a superior replacement to this outdated language.
To give you a little background on this subject, I was recently asked to develop a client/server project on a Unix platform for a Fortune 500 company. While I've never coded in C before I have coded in VB for fifteen years, and in Java for over ten, I was stunned to see how poorly C fared compared to these two, more low-level languages.
C's biggest difficulty, as we all know, is the fact that it is by far one of the slowest languages in existance, especially when compared to more modern languages such as Java and C#. Although the reasons for this are varied, the main reasons seems to be the way C requires a programmer to laboriously work with chunks of memory.
Requiring a programmer to manipulate blocks of memory is a tedious way to program. This was satisfactory back in the early days of coding, but then again, so were punchcards. By using what are called "pointers" a C programmer is basically requiring the computer to do three sets of work rather than one. The first time requires the computer to duplicate whatever is stored in the memory space "pointed to" by the pointer. The second time requires it to perform the needed operation on this space. Finally the computer must delete the duplicate set and set the values of the original accordingly.
Clearly this is a horrendous use of resources and the chief reason why C is so slow. When one looks at a more modern (and a more serious) programming language like Java, C# or - even better - Visual Basic that lacks such archaic coding styles, one will also note a serious speed increase over C.
So what does this mean for the programming community? I think clearly that C needs to be abandonded. There are two candidates that would be a suitable replacement for it. Those are Java and Visual Basic.
Having programmed in both for many years, I believe that VB has the edge. Not only is it slightly faster than Java its also much easier to code in. I found C to be confusing, frightening and intimidating with its non-GUI-based coding style. Furthermore, I like to see the source code of the projects I work with. Java's source seems to be under the monopolistic thumb of Sun much the way that GCC is obscured from us by the marketing people at the FSF. Microsoft's "shared source" under which Visual Basic is released definately seems to be the most fair and reasonable of all the licenses in existance, with none of the harsh restrictions of the BSD license. It also lacks the GPLs requirement that anything coded with its tools becomes property of the FSF.
I hope to see a switch to VB very soon. I've already spoken with various luminaries in the *nix coding world and most are eager to begin to transition. Having just gotten off the phone with Mr. Alan Cox, I can say that he is quite thrilled with the speed increases that will occur when the Linux kernel is completely rewritten in Visual Basic. Richard Stallman plans to support this, and hopes that the great Swede himself, Linux Torvaldis, won't object to renaming Linux to VB/Linux. Although not a C coder himself, I'm told that Slashdot's very own Admiral Taco will support this on his web site. Finally, Dennis Ritchie is excited about the switch!
Thank you for your time. Happy coding.
Egg Troll
(Score: 1) by Absolutely.Geek on Wednesday July 29 2015, @03:28AM
Sometimes you need a +1 Troll mod
Don't trust the police or the government - Shihad: My mind's sedate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2015, @11:49PM
yes, the 'humor' of /. was what introduced us to goatse.
i still flinch whenever I see a picture slowly open in my browser.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:23PM
Do you think we should run the update on EMDrive? The gist is that a new group independently verified a small amount of thrust, although the article is paywalled.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Tork on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:49PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 29 2015, @12:50AM
There's three or four different problems that the moderation system needs to address. (Some of them it successfully addresses.)
One that isn't well addressed is that some people like different subjects than other people. But they system has no abstract category awareness. (My suspicion is that this would need to be customized for each user, as people categorize differently.)
Another is that expertise has value, can can't be automatically detected. Note that I did NOT say it should automatically be given a heavy weight. That should be user adjustable.
Another is that the weighings need to be dynamically adjustable. This means a much more convenient interface for adjusting them as well as a much more complex set of adjustments. Whoops! Big design problem.
Another is... well, you get the idea. When you solve all of these you'll have a major AI program. And one that isn't lightweight when running on the end-user's computer.
So. The perfect is the enemy of the good. What can be designed that will improve things and yet still be light and easy to use? Possibly user assignable categories, with user adjustible weights. multiple profiles, and an easy way to switch between them An easy interface might imply user assignable icons, including user designed icons. (I'd prefer an svg file, but many would prefer png or jpg. Limits on resolution, because the image needs to be displayable in a small area.) These custom icons would only ever appear on the end-users system, never transmitted, so no worries about copyrights, etc.)
OK, so I got sidetracked.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:46PM
Posting anything even remotely interesting risked having it buried because it wasn't ideologically pure
Here's some far out technology or concept or new project, or factual linked correction, usually did pretty well.
Here's the 10000th attempt at trying to make microsoft look good, usually did pretty poorly.
Trying to think of a concrete example of something that was ideologically impure, while simultaneously being interesting, and getting downmodded. Theoretically if someone pointed out a very small corner of the SCO lawsuits as being interesting, heres a small diamond in a giant manure pile type of thing, that would probably have done it.
(Score: 0, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 28 2015, @10:14PM
No kidding. I tried posting comments to the effect that 99.9% of policemen and policewomen are decent people who are serving the common good, or that Snowden's release of documents weren't as pure in motive as he suggests and that he did US citizens more harm than good, or that Assange is simply an arrogant prick who doesn't give a shit about people who leak him information as long as it keeps his name in the news, and so on. You wouldn't believe the vitriol and downward moderation I suffered, those who down-moderate any opinion, not on the merit of the argument or on pesky things like facts, but because it was filled with "evil" thoughts and phrases. You'd be surprised how many self-assured jackasses there were who, if you didn't fit in their arbitrarily-drawn box of morality, that you were some kind of amoral low-life.
. . .
Oops, my bad, it seems I posted that to some red-colored site, not the green site.
. . .
Nevermind.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:42PM
The proofreading mistakes, the basic editing missteps, those all signaled authenticity to me. I have a learned bias against slick, overly-produced anything because it means somebody evil wants to sell me something I don't need or that's bad for me. For me, rough means real. If an article makes it to the front page and the editor or submitter sounds like they're being a little opinionated or even a bit of a dick, it says to me that there's a real person there that really cares about something. I pay attention to that. When something is overly processed and designed for a specific emotional response, it says to me there's a committee chaired by a dickhead MBA who wants to see the delta in the sales numbers, People!
May Soylent make editorial mistakes forever. May Ethanol-fueled never die, may HairyFeet never lay down the standard of Microsoft. If they go, and are not replaced, then Soylent is headed for a rough patch of road.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday July 28 2015, @03:50PM
May HairyFeet never lay down the standard for linux?
FTFY? :)
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday July 28 2015, @04:33PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95YdE89nTgI [youtube.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by jdavidb on Tuesday July 28 2015, @05:02PM
The proofreading mistakes, the basic editing missteps, those all signaled authenticity to me.
Yes, exactly! I couldn't put it into words, but you have done so perfectly. And I think a lot of us have an affectionate spot in our hearts for some of those guys because we saw them in the Real rather than in the Polished modes.
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by tadas on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:11PM
Yes, exactly! I couldn't put it into words, but you have done so perfectly. And I think a lot of us have an affectionate spot in our hearts for some of those guys because we saw them in the Real rather than in the Polished modes.
I'll never forget that there was a misspelling in the post where Taco proposed to Kathleen Fent on the front page. That was definitely real....
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fadrian on Tuesday July 28 2015, @11:12PM
Oh come on... There's authenticity and then there's not giving a crap about doing a decent job. Fuck, I can see a few typos - that's authenticity; what the Slashdot editors were doing was closer to malfeasance. But yeah, long live Soylent, typos and all - at least folks will respond and correct relatively quickly.
That is all.
(Score: 4, Funny) by cmn32480 on Wednesday July 29 2015, @04:05AM
We editors will do our very best to continue to screw up. We promise!
"It's a dog eat dog world, and I'm wearing Milkbone underwear" - Norm Peterson
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday July 29 2015, @06:34AM
I'm kind of surprised that anyone would need to rely on the presence of mistakes to identify slick ad copy... As a general rule, it usually contains tell-tale phrases or sentiments that won't show up in regular competent, professional, or decently-proofread work, just like there are particular styles that signal whether a novel is literary or mainstream/genre fiction.
Also keep in mind that people with a weak grasp of English grammar, spelling & punctuation are no less likely to be using their comments or articles/posts to sell or convince people of something than those of us that try to avoid errors whenever we can. Don't forget, companies have been hiring writers for at least a few years now to promote their products & tarnish their rivals' names while playing the part of somebody from a particular socio-economic, ethnic and/or age group...
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:07PM
Like trolling culture. Slashdot was well-known for its trolling culture, such that an organization (the GNAA, of which Weev was an original leader) which was originally started specifically to troll Slashdot.
That is one thing newer members to both Slashdot and SN often forget. Slashdot and trolling went together like drinkin' beer and smokin' grass. Not many people realize that I first actively participated in Slashdot as a goody-goody non-troll poster, earning high karma, before Slashdot's trolling culture appealed to me. Unlike that of places like 4chan, Slashdot's trolling culture required a finesse, a higher standard often with some bit of research on the parts of both the troller and the trollees whether done subtly or overtly.
All that stuff you see in my journals? The format of which was influenced by Slashdot trolling culture more than anything. Yeah, that's right, I never wrote that big and trashy before Slashdot's dark side got ahold of me. For being "news for nerds, stuff that matters," the Slashdot trolling culture provided a framework which spawned the desolate and loathsome tales you may be reading in my journal right now.
Of all the references to Slashdot that we see today discussed and written into these fora, any references to its once-rich troll culture are conspicuously absent.
(Score: 2) by tadas on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:14PM
I *do* miss OOG, THE OPEN-SOURCE CAVEMAN. He was the only guy I ever wanted to moderate as +5 Troll.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Wednesday July 29 2015, @10:22AM
How can we tell if what you are saying now is truth or trolling? You could be trolling us right now, where in fact you are a goody-goody non-troll poster, but then this runs contrary to your post where you state you are a troll, but that mean you are a troll, but then that means your post is trollish which mean you are a non-troll ..... ERROR DOES NOT COMPUTE ... NO CARRIER - SIGNAL LOST
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:16PM
No place else I'm aware of has managed to achieve that success in community building from such a diverse array of people.
Absolutely. The Slashdot community changed my mind and built my thoughts on a lot of things. Sometimes I did feel like I was seeing groupthink, but there was still enough variety that there were dissenters to any "mainstream" Slashdot opinion. I'm proud to be a vital part of the mix myself in being a dissenter (hopefully respectfully) on a number of things myself.
What I liked about it was that no matter how obscure the subject matter, the community was large enough and diverse enough that you would eventually get beyond the trolls and the usual spouting of uninformed opinions and someone who worked in the field and genuinely knew what they were talking about would post something informative about the topic.
(Score: 1) by NullPtr on Tuesday July 28 2015, @06:13PM
Don't kid yourself, noone is leaving Slashdot.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday July 28 2015, @07:02PM
Do we care? If Slashdot is dominated by trolls now, why should we want them to come to this fair corner of the world?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Wednesday July 29 2015, @02:28AM
Irony would be Bill Gates buying 'em both.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.