Websites that changed the world? This Observer piece lists fifteen websites that aught to be considered the best of the web. It's a bold claim and although the potted histories are excellent, I'm wondering the extent to which it mostly includes website that have broken the public recognition barrier in the uk rather than changing the
world. How many are simply pioneers in their field? Where for example is
flickr?
posted by feelinglistless
on Aug 13, 2006 -
69 comments
Diggdot.us Digg, slashdot, and del.icio.us/popular - this is a constant browsing cycle for us. So why not combine them into a unified format without all the extra chrome? We can eliminate dupes and add some extra niceities.
posted by srboisvert
on Nov 21, 2005 -
22 comments
Google's sorcery You use it, I use it some 30-40 times a day, but did you ever wonder exactly how they do it? The numbers are staggering:
# Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed.
# Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster.
# Over 30 clusters.
# 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog.
# One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue.
# Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster.
# An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters.
# No complete system failure since February 2000.
Is Google God?
(via
/.)
posted by daHIFI
on Dec 2, 2004 -
40 comments
delenda mp3.com est "Vivendi Universal recently sold the MP3.com domain to CNet. However, they're not selling the approximately one million songs on the archive. (recorded by over 250,000 artists) Instead, they're simply destroying it as of December 3. MP3.com's founder and former CEO, Michael Robertson, is pleading with Vivendi to allow the Internet
Archive to preserve the songs." (via
Slashdot)
posted by kablam
on Nov 23, 2003 -
16 comments
Iraqfilter. "Sometime between April 2003 and October 2003, someone at the White House added virtually all of the directories with 'Iraq' in them to its robots.txt file, meaning that search engines would no longer list those pages in results or archive them." The robots.txt file is here. And here's the
Slashdot discussion. I guess it's hard to restore integrity to the Presidency when people can compare your statements over time.
posted by condour75
on Oct 27, 2003 -
29 comments
Here's A Really Neat "
Ask Slashdot" feature on how much we rely on the good 'ol Net for our daily dose of news and knowledge.
I've gradually abandoned almost all other sources of news, to the point where TV, magazines and news papers have pretty much disappeared from my life, but unlike the Slashdot guy, I still get a fair amount of "
Information" from books.
He's got a good question, and there are some really
Good Answers at Slashdot, but I'm curious about the mefites... "
Is the Internet Your Source of Knowledge?"
From his post:
"...but if I'm trying to look up something and can't find it online in a couple minutes I generally just blow it off, as if there's no other place to look. This realization seems sort of stunning. I'm very curious if other Slashdot readers have become dependent on the Internet to that level, and what their thoughts are on the subject." "
According to
a study Teens and young adults spend more time online than watching TV, and looking at
Other Studies, they all seem to point the same way.
Is print dead?
posted by Blake
on Oct 1, 2003 -
15 comments
If you want something done, do it yourself; tired of the browser timeout that came when he mis-spelled the domain name of one of his favorite (and most-visited) sites, this enterprising young man
took matters into his own hands. But I encourage you to take his advice and not mess with him while
looking for backdoors.
posted by jonson
on Jul 3, 2003 -
29 comments
Blogger Hacked A slashdot reader reported (on slashdot) that "Blogger has been severely hacked into, with users' passwords and e-mail addresses being replaced with 'hacx0redbyme' or 'hax0redbyme.' " Perhaps
the most amusing comment in the ensuing discussion says "I'm glad I don't use a blog... I wouldn't want some l337 hax0r coming in and reading everything about my personal life!" But levity aside, is there some serious implication that a widely used web service is hacked? Is Pyra safe to use?
posted by namespan
on Oct 25, 2002 -
27 comments
UW sells out -- for only $2.3 million. As part of the "Academic Innovation Alliance Initiatives" agreement with Microsoft, the University of Waterloo's Electrical & Computer Engineering department has agreed to teach C# to students. In addition to discussion on uwstudent.org,
Slashdot thread, press releases from
MS and
UW and a
rebuttal release from the UW Federation of Students.
posted by paulschreiber
on Aug 14, 2002 -
20 comments
Today we'll be discussing Jason,
Slashdot's Commander, and
Ernie. Apparently there's going to be a class in blogging taught to journalism grad students. Do you rail against this at all? Is it because most students won't get it and eff up blogging as a whole, or is it because this means that the blog has Sold Out To The Man?
usual "I searched and couldn't find this" disclaimers apply.
posted by verso
on Jul 22, 2002 -
25 comments
Meet Cyc. This endeavor to produce AI has been going on since
1984. In ’86 it asked if it were human; it later asked “if any other computers were engaged in such a project”. It’s strength lies in a database of assumptions and generalities, in the hopes that it will eventually “generalize as much as possible until further generalization would be false”. Is this going to be the breakthrough, or does it just seem really cool? (yes, via
Slashdot)
posted by sherman
on Jun 8, 2002 -
9 comments
How many instances of 'Gee Whiz' can you fit on your hard drive? With cameras mounted on eyeglass frames, he suggests, we can document every moment of our lives and create a second-by-second digital diary. "There won't be any reason ever to forget anything anymore," he says. Vannevar Bush had a similar idea 50 years ago, though in that era the promising storage medium was microfilm rather than magnetic disks.
Hate to parrot /. But this article was just way too fascinating to pass up not sharing it with any of you no-slashdot readers.
posted by crasspastor
on Apr 18, 2002 -
9 comments
Should creation of intellectual property be taxable? The City of Seattle wants to tax the development of software, not the sale, the development.
Across the country state and local governments are starting to consider taxing this. The question is, is software development taxable? If so, is writing a book taxable, painting a picture? People pay sales tax on the software, and businesses pay income, use, and B&O taxes already. Why is this different?
via /.
posted by patrickje
on Mar 12, 2002 -
28 comments
What were you saying on the morning of 9/11? I have been very dissatisfied with
this archive of the news on 9/11. I think this stuff has its place. But, it does not help us tell our grandkids how people were reacting that morning. For posterity's sake, I think it is much more important to record what happened on blogs and other online communities that morning. So, I am trying to collect online conversations that took place
immediately after the news of the attacks broke on September 11. I have one link from
here and one from
Slashdot. Sorry if I am missing out on important ones. My hope is that this post will lead to more links to conversations. I am not interested in
war blogs unless they have a reference to a conversation on the morning of 9/11.
posted by SandeepKrishnamurthy
on Feb 1, 2002 -
48 comments
Alterslash takes all the hard work out of reading
Slashdot. On a single page, it compiles the day's headlines, along with the top five rated comments on each, and graphs the signal % over time for each thread. Think of it as an automatic digest, showing just the best of Slashdot, each day.
posted by mathowie
on Jan 25, 2002 -
15 comments
A New Year's Idea: Pay For Some So, slashdot says A Great New Year's Idea is to Pay For Some Freedom, eg.
BSD,
EFF or
MozillaZine to name just a few, but what else can we do?
Metafilter,
OddTodd,
IMDB [Aren't they already owned by Amazon?], lots of good places to spread the holiday cheer.
Seems like there is no
shortage of Folks who
are looking for something.
I like the idea of
Getting Something In Return, not sure if that makes me greedy, or scroogey.
Seems like the web has really given us a new list of worthy causes...
posted by Blake
on Dec 27, 2001 -
5 comments
Battle Over Blocks These essays offer a thoughtful insight into the Lego bricks we grew up with, and how the toys have changed with the times to reflect an absence of creativity in our society. Features Jeff Bates, cofounder of slashdot.
posted by johnjreeve
on Oct 29, 2001 -
25 comments
Slashdot.info is the address that I randomly typed in, (just for fun) and reached the page. Quite informative. Better than a
spoof page, atleast. Also, the
.biz is not registered yet...
posted by arnab
on Oct 27, 2001 -
3 comments
Slashdot introduces paid subscriptions. -
"I hope you can understand the expensive reality associated with making this site happen every day" We've talked about paid memberships for Metafilter before, and I'd happily pay, but if all of the sites I go to everyday start doing this I'll have to make some hard choices.
Is there any talk about some sort of membership "package"? Sort of like the cable model? I pay one fee and get member access to several websites? How could something like this be organized?
posted by y6y6y6
on Oct 23, 2001 -
22 comments
The end is neigh.
This wonderful little company is just about to unleash an ISP filter system that will allow content providers to decide which users get access, namely, those who have paid them a fee. Your ISP will soon have to pay individual fees to offer you anything. Your rate will go way up, your choices will go way down.
Web surfing as we know it, is dying.
Check the
Slashdot freak-out.
posted by dong_resin
on Jul 13, 2001 -
24 comments
Is Slashdot Toast? I found this using a link from F**kedcompany, who seems to be rather amused by the fact that /. has been down since friday. The posts at geekizoid seem rather flaky for the most part, so I don't know how seriously to take this. But in any case, it's just not like the Slashdot crew to drop off the net without a word.... What have all of you out in MeFi land heard????
posted by BGM
on Jun 24, 2001 -
23 comments
Tivo hackers today released the hack that enables you to get MPEG-2 video out of the box and put it on CDs, share it over the net, etc. No details because the
AVS Tivo site (registration required) is being
slashdotted...but will this precipitate a TiVo crackdown on the hackers?
posted by luser
on Jun 7, 2001 -
21 comments
Hahahah. Big Fish eats another Big Fish. Then says they can't afford to
feed their families.
stop struggling. it's all going to end in misery anyway. now twice as many people can be burnt when ugo collapses.
posted by jcterminal
on May 16, 2001 -
1 comment
Early (around 1910) amazing COLOR photographs from Russia by Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer for the Czar. He essentially had three cameras, each with a separate Red, Green, or Blue filter, and snapped the same shot at the same time. So all the "reds" were recorded, in B&W, on one photographic plate, and likewise down the line. Then he could use the filters to recreate the scene and project it onto a screen in color. (more inside) (props to slashdot for the link)
posted by jwells
on May 7, 2001 -
58 comments
