Son, there's something I've been meaning to tell you...

Maybe someone will update Conway's game of life with these new findings... ..and I'll get a cool new screensaver.

I have two problems with slashdot and this is one of them (the other is the moderation system buries good comments if the article isn't new):

I have learned a lot of stuff from slashdot technical discussions; but I was a humanities (a foreign language and literature) major college, not science and I am in law school now. The groupthink here about the humanities and legal concepts is not just poor, it's often flat out wrong. Of course, if you know how to write a Hello World program in Perl, C, and Python, then you know that assault and battery are the same think, Shakespeare was really Francis Bacon, and Citizen Kane was just some flick.

I'm not saying it's better or worse or anything. Just that it seems to have changed and I'm sure it's changed between the start and the days of old when others were decrying the decline. My original point was only really that it's changed; I wonder if we can reasonably say slashdot has "retained" its audience.

I dunno, there are old-timers here who have been around longer than I have, and I go through cycles of posting and not posting, but I think there's been a pretty marked change in both the kinds of users and the stories. I will probably get moderated to hell for saying this, but when I started lurking and then signed up for an account, slashdot at that time was more like some parts of reddit (to disclaim I post in both places, and I think the general quality of comments are better here, but there was a level of free-wheeling, shared culture that isn't quite as present here - it reminded me of the quirkiness of the jargon file). Back in those days everyone would catch and upvote semi-relevant Simpsons and Red Dwarf quotes for example (I got into RD via slashdot, if I remember correctly).

Perhaps the change in stories has been related; it's gotten a lot more general (it probably started before but I remember noticing the change as and after the politics section was added).

So yeah, the site's still around and there are still people posting and it's still relevant (more than I can say for digg), but the focus and community have changed a lot and for better or worse, as far as "net culture" is concerned, it seems like 4chan and the sites that interact with it's culture (reddit, unyclopedia) have more influence.

Don't get my wrong, I still love the slashie.

I'm curious about CmdrTaco saying the site isn't always what he wants it to be; care to elaborate?

I'm seriously not trying to start a flame war or anything like that; just curious as to how the site has differed from your vision for it.

How many of those Mini 9s ended up getting OS X installed on them? That was the only reason I was planning on getting a 9 and since the Windows version costs more, the Linux version is a no-brainer.

Being sold on the machine and being kept on the machine are two different things.

A lot of these 2D games for these Wii seem to look great at 1080 (well, by a lot I mean this and Muramasa; The Demon Blade). I wonder if this is proof that there may be in fact a Wii HD in the works. I thought they were just the normal fanboy rumors but perhaps Nintendo is already planning on it? Between the motion controls on the other two machines (especially the PS3's) it seems like the 3 major consoles are reaching for parity with each other.

You've been modded funny but I think this is really true; Slashdot's comment moderation system is one of the best on the Net, but the major down side is that comments posted after a while get buried. A lot of good comments just get buried in the mess. I wish there was some way to counter act that but nothing seems readily apparent to me.

No need for you. I tore a ligament in my foot in Japan, had to go to therapy for months. While waiting there one day, downloaded Ace Attorney and Puyo Puyo on my cell phone. Played them waiting everyday I went for months afterwards.

It may have all the features but the UI is worse and it's harder to get to those features. I just want to play my bloody music.

No, but there are no equivalents of Okamiden or Mario RPG on the iPhone.

No, my point isn't first party. I'll take a deep game where ever I can find one. It's that these games are not really possible on a phone with no buttons.

That's my point though (I might be old too but...) anything that tries to do everything isn't going to do anything that well.

For example, I am a gamer. Yeah, if I wanted to, I could play Peggle or whatever on the iPhone. But I am not going to get the last Mario RPG game on the iPhone and I don't want to play the casual games on the iPhone. Making the iPhone a good game machine would compromise it as a phone or a camera, or whatever. One extra function is going to compromise the others in some way and to some degree (even if it's just space on the device, but probably even more).

I mean in relation to the iPod Classic / nano.