slashdot

SourceForge finds its advertising rhythm

SourceForge recently reported results for its second fiscal quarter of 2009, and seems to have finally found its rhythm. The company, which for years tried to split its time between software (SourceForge Enterprise, purchased by Collabnet in 2007) and media (Slashdot, ITManagersJournal, Linux.com, etc.), and struggled to tell a coherent story.

As its most recent results suggest, however, SourceForge is beginning to find consistency as a media company, as demonstrated in its year-over-year growth in key areas:

Ad Network revenue increased 84 percent; Premium product revenue grew 100% to $1.0 million; Media uniques grew 9 percent to 36 … Read more

Larrabee performance--beyond the sound bite

Hello, Slashdot.

In a story on PC Pro, Nvidia architect John Montrym (whose name was incorrectly spelled "Mottram") quoted my recent blog post on Larrabee as concluding that "the 'large' Larrabee in 2010 will have roughly the same performance as a 2006 GPU from Nvidia or ATI."

Alas, this isn't really what I said or meant.

What I actually described as equating to "the performance of a 2006-vintage...graphics chip" was a performance standard defined by Intel itself--running the game F.E.A.R. at 60 fps in 1,600 x 1,200-pixel resolution with four-sample antialiasing.

Intel used this figure for some comparisons of rendering performance. If Larrabee ran at 1GHz, for example, Intel's figures show that… Read more

Maybe this Slashdot user should get a Mac

One Slashdot user is blaming his ThinkPad for an inability to use Slashdot error-free. Dude, you should have got a Mac. It works flawlessly with Slashdot.

In fact, as an interesting sidenote, my Mac browsers (Firefox and, on occasion, Safari) work with an increasing array of websites. Yes, Firefox and Safari have always worked with 98 percent of websites, but I would occasionally stumble across one (like Delta.com's print-a-ticket page) that didn't work properly with one or the other. Those poorly designed pages seem to have grown up, or perhaps the browsers have been improving compatibility.

Either … Read more

Slashdot parent company experiences overnight outage

UPDATE (6:04 a.m. PT): SourceForge's sites are back up. UPDATE (1:27 p.m. PT): Comment from SourceForge was added.

On Wednesday morning, there appeared to be some sort of outage at SourceForge Inc., parent company of iconic geek news forum Slashdot and retailer ThinkGeek (among others). Neither SourceForge nor the sites it operates were accessible at 5:30 a.m. PT. According to SourceForge, it was an emergency maintenance window that "caused an unanticipated network outage."

As they might have said at Slashdot rival Fark, "Everybody panic!"

Performance monitoring firm Pingdom reported that Slashdot was down … Read more

MySQL and "commercial extensions:" Core, complements, and semantics

MySQL has placed itself in the middle of a rising furor over its allegedly diminished commitment to open source. To be fair, it has only itself to blame.

It all started with a disgruntled ex-MySQL employee, Jeremy Cole. Cole declared that MySQL's sky was falling because it was to be releasing certain parts of the next version of its database as closed-source software. Marten Mickos responded that he had misunderstood (when, in fact, he had understood very well), it went to Slashdot (where it was of course misconstrued even further), and we're left with a somewhat tepid defense by Marten in the comments section of Slashdot to the self-addressed question, "Why is MySQL now producing some proprietary software?":

The reason is that we have an ambition not only to produce FOSS [free and open-source] code, but also to be a profitable business that can exist for a long time. Each time we make more money, we hire more developers to develop GPL code.… Read more

Want web traffic? Get Dugg

Last week I had two stories Dugg and two stories Slashdotted. The difference in traffic is striking. Digg delivered three times the amount of traffic as Slashdot did. Granted, my stories hit Slashdot in an off-peak time, but it got me thinking: Is Digg the future of web traffic? The tyranny of the mob, as Slashdot's Rob Malda once called it?

If so, I'm concerned. I like the traffic Digg gives me, but I also like the editorial function that Slashdot provides. I have no clue how something becomes popular on Digg - I'm constantly surprised by the types of stories I get Dugg. But I know how to get something Slashdotted: Deliver something that Rob Malda finds interesting.

Certain kinds of stories are more likely to be Dugg: anti-Microsoft screeds, pro-Linux (and especially Ubuntu) and Apple posts (See below). To get Slashdotted, an article needs to chart new territory, even if in these old paths. That's because Rob knows what is new and interesting, and what isn't. Digg doesn't. It's just a crowd (Read: Lowest-common denominator).

Again, I'm not complaining about the traffic. I would simply like to have the crowdsourcing power of Digg with the editorial oversight of Slashdot. Impossible?… Read more

Levanta is dead. Just like LinuxCare.

Levanta, a Linux data center automation company that was reborn from the ashes of Linuxcare, has closed its doors.

I wrote about Levanta and LinuxCare for Slashdot back in December 2005. The company never seemed to get its mojo back from the LinuxCare debacle, despite having a pretty cool product.

The demise of LinuxCare can be attributed to many factors. The first was that enterprises were slow to adopt Linux - in the early '00s, IT spending came to a grinding halt with the dot-com and stock market crash. But the key factor to LinuxCare's spectacular death spiral was … Read more

Digg, Slashdot, and the tyranny of the mob

In a meme reminiscent of Nick Carr ("The cult of the amateur"), Rob Malda of Slashdot fame has riffed on the fallibility of Digg's model:

"...[W]ith sites like Digg, it's the wisdom of the crowds or the tyranny of the mob. You never know what you're going to get."

Some will call this sour grapes on Malda's part. I, however, think he has a point. I don't look to Digg to tell me what's important or newsworthy. It really does reek of a cattle call for she who makes up the silliest headlines or, worse yet, coordinated news "attacks" by groups that know how to goose the system.… Read more

CmdrTaco Q&A: 10 years of Slashdot

Rob Malda, aka "CmdrTaco," founded Slashdot 10 years ago as a way to share online stories with a small group of close friends.

This month, as Slashdot celebrates its 10th anniversary, CmdrTaco is doing the same thing, except that now his group of friends has swelled to 250,000 readers each day and millions of page views (and 5.5 million visitors per month).

Malda has become a bit of a kingmaker, though this has never been his intention. Slashdot can give a company a massive launch to a new project or can dig it a public-relations hole from which it is hard to extricate oneself.

I spent a half hour talking Malda today, trying to plumb the secrets of how to get "Slashdotted" and to decipher Slashdot's effect on the technology world. In the process, it became clear that Slashdot has succeeded precisely because it exhibits the principles of successful open-source and Web 2.0 companies, including an unyielding focus on the customer experience.… Read more