I think you might be off by a factor of 10. I was definitely reading Slashdot for a while (month or so?) before signing up for an account, but I am not sure I remember a time before accounts. Maybe 1500 people signed up once accounts were created?
If I were at my home machine I could definitely figure out when Slashdot sent my "Welcome" message, but it was probably October of 1998.
The amount of time I spend on Slashdot has definitely decreased over the years, but I still load the homepage 2-3 times a day.
Happy 15th, Slashdot!
Damn newbies...
ObTopic: I agree with a previous poster, that Slashdot's comment system is the worst, except for all of the other ones. I do not post nearly as often as I used to, but for getting a relatively informed take on tech stories? Slashdot is hard to beat. I still read 3-4 stories a day. This is probably down from my maximum back in the early 2000s.
I do agree that Slashdot (and similar comment websites) tend to have a major issue of groupthink. It seems that to have a reasonable discussion on the Internet you not only need a niche subject matter, but also a well-done comment and moderation system. The downside is that both of these requirements tend to encourage groupthink.
Oh, and get off of my lawn!
My biggest pet peeve with Slashdot is that there is no "-1, Factually Incorrect" moderation. When I have moderation points I frequently have to use "Overrated" to fill that niche.
There are not a lot of times, but I have seen a comment that is simply wrong be moderated up (oftentimes a groupthink assumption that turns out to be incorrect).
I find the moderation system one of the best on the Internet. I wish when people had moderation Slashdot would ignore their preferences and instead show comments at "-1, Newest First" to avoid older, higher moderated comments from simply getting moderated even higher at the expense of newer comments that have not had a chance to get moderated up.
But that is just me.
And you should listen to me because I have a four-digit UID, damnit! And get off my lawn!
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So basically, they shut down my account, but are unable to provide any details why. In speaking with lawyers, it is simply not cost effective to try to sue them. I would spend far more in lawyer fees than I could ever hope to earn back. Verizon and Amazon both specifically requested my application for their stores, and it is still happily listed and selling in them.
I have reported about 8 or so in the last year. A few have been fixed (usually as a result of several other people reporting they were having the same issue). I had to fix a couple of bugs myself. The other half were never fixed. One I reported in a Bugzilla type database and within 24 hours it was marked as "Closed" without any comment from a developer. The next release of the software had the same bug. One I reported on a forum for a closed-source application and immediate a dozen or so other users agreed with me (it was a memory leak, causing a background daemon to consume 10-15MB of additional RAM each day it continued to run). The company representative said that they could not reproduce the problem.
Most recently I reported a bug in an exercise tracking piece of shareware. The software imports data from Garmin's software and is able to do a lot more with it. Due to what the shareware developer sees as a bug in the Garmin software, distance for a given activity might change a bit on import. This is fine, and the developer goes to great lengths to explain the discrepancy and why he believes his calculations are more precise. I agree with him and continue to use the software. I eventually realize, however, that while the distance changes and the activity duration (time) stays constant on import, the pace for the activity does not agree with the distance/time. I report this and the developer responds that his software trusts and uses the pace value passed on input, and says that users would bother him to see why the pace value does not match what is in the Garmin software. He explains a way to change the value manually and marks the problem "Resolved".
Note that one of my activities was off by over 40 seconds per mile. What should have been a 6:57 min/mile pace was marked as a 7:49 min/mile. This is a very large discrepancy.
Not very reassuring.
I am another extremely happy customer of pair.com I have been using them for about ten years now and think I have seen a total of about ten minutes of downtime for my server in that time.
Good thing the xServe is not built for the "I need maximum performance in a 1U box", then.
An xServe, with OS X Server, is designed primarily for small businesses to get rid of their IT department by replacing their expensive IT guys and yearly MS CALs with an xServe and maybe one OS X tech. Generally a company with 1,000+ employees will not be using it, so the need for > 48GB RAM or multiple TBs stuffed into a 1U box really is not there.
Or are we just working with the "bigger numbers are better" argument?
Proof is irrelevent. What counts is the credit card company has one standard response to this sort of thing and there is no appeal process for the merchant.
That is absolutely false. I have both worked at a major bank, and contested charges on my own card. The banks take the complaint back to the merchant and give the merchant a chance to respond. They then give the customer a change to respond, and back and forth until a final decision can be made. From personal experience, that decision does not always go the way of the complaining customer.
To thine own self be true. (If not that, at least make some money.)