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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: 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 Furthermore, allow me to be so bold as to suggest a superior replacement to this outdated language.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.