There were several waves of mass exodus. It's been a long time, but maybe in '03 a bunch of regular users left to go hang out at Hulver's Site to avoid pervasive and cruel trolling.

http://www.hulver.com/scoop/

Rusty waved sayonara to some of his most active and committed community members then. Hulver put it up just for the old community to hang out and didn't pursue general readership or expansion. It's still around and arguably more active than K5 is now, though also pretty slow.

By '05-'06 K5 was nothing but a trollfest. At that point, I believe rusty was actively seeking large readership and advertising revenue by promoting troll content. For example, there was that "Fuck Natalee Holloway" article, which generated vast numbers of page views. From there the site continued its slide downhill, as rusty pursued more and more salacious material to drive traffic. It became a business model. Those who objected had their accounts summarily shitcanned one by one.

I think rusty was of the opinion that the general community couldn't write well, and he was interested in attracting professionally written material. But he didn't care about substantive content - per se - only prose style. Many of the site trolls were actually good prose writers, so he coddled them.

But a troll's interest was not in crafting useful content that would drive sustained readership. The interest is in shocking and offending the sensibilities of average readers. And so K5 transitioned from publishing useful - if marginally well written - articles about computing, technology, and social issues to the kind of thing that might drive short-term bursts of high traffic by an offended and angry anonymous readership.

rusty made the bet that if he sacrificed an active community producing marginal but useful content in order to coddle those who produce offensive but quality written offensive material, that his site could generate the pageviews necessary for a successful business model. He was wrong.

Now it looks as though they're engaged in a publicity effort to generate a burst of final advertising revenue. For example, we have this story. And at the same time on reddit over in /r/WTF we see this story hit:

http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/15ye9g/girls_guide_towtf_really/

Which generated significant short burst traffic to the site. Timed within a day of each other. But it's a story about bestiality with dogs. Seriously.

And I suppose writing in character a bogus female first person account of having sex with her dog is probably more fun than detailing the latest OS tricks or talking industrial policy. But Slashdot is still around and kicking. It still provides at least a marginal service to its user community that has meaning beyond just pissing people off. K5? Not so. And that's why rusty's site is dead while Slashdot employes people and retains a large user base.

Because a to run a successful forum the community _does_ matter more than a few well written - if obscene - articles.

May rusty enjoy his well deserved obscurity.

> As I recall it -but it's been a while- Rusty made a point of it that he wasn't going to delete the trolls himself.

No. Rusty actively deleted accounts from people who _weren't_ trolls. He threw his hat in with the worst of the worst on the net and drove off his best users and potential customers. He took a hot internet property, one that could have been profitable and socially valuable, and drove it into the ground for reasons entirely his own. Now the site is cobwebs and tumbleweeds.

This is a political problem, not a systems problem.

After over a decade in systems administration, I just a job where for six years I was an IT manager. There, I learned that the skills involved in managing projects and people are a vastly underrated skill among systems specialists. The belief is often that the right system - new hardware; new software - will somehow solve an organization problem that's inherently political in nature. By that I mean, a people problem. And I think you've got a people problem here. Which doesn't mean your documentation system isn't out of date, doesn't need a refresh, etc. It means that a core member of your team is out of step with the needs of the organization, as defined by a majority board vote.

You have three choices:

A) attempt to persuade this board member that his system needs a revamp, set a series of goals to achieve that he'll buy into, and give him the project to manage. Specify benchmarks and a timeline to achieve these goals and have the board review the project on a regular basis. Then the board must fulfill its obligation to the organization by grading project success on an honest but fair basis. If he honestly works toward these goals, then the issue will resolve itself in time. Otherwise, the board must consider the possibility of transitioning him off a leadership role in that project.

B) Fire him. Do it now. Accept the fallout and hire someone else to clean up the mess.

C) Do nothing.

---

Option A: keeps someone in place who has shown himself to be an important team member who has strayed from the needs of the organization, but who recognizes this and shifts course as a result. This is the preferred course.

Option B: cuts your losses now and takes the hit quickly, while the problem is fresh. This is a harsh course, but at least is a response to the problem at hand.

Option C: 'do nothing' is a total loser. A problem recognized and yet not pursued to resolution festers until systems collapse, often at the worst time while leaving the organization unprepared for the consequences.

But the first thing you've got to realize is that Google Docs is not your solution. Google Docs may be a fine system, and a worthy systems choice. But your problem is not 'the system'. Your problem is that one person in a leadership role in the organization has strayed from board consensus, and as a result has assumed command responsibilities he does not legitimately hold. That's what you and the board must address.
 

I think you've got McNamara wrong here.

There are audio recordings of phone conversations between both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson with Defense Secretary McNamara, where McNamara recommended deescalation and withdrawal. Kennedy was leaning toward McNamara's position prior to his assassination, but a newly sworn in President Johnson disagreed strenuously. He ordered McNamara to draw up a memo detailing a new policy to escalate. McNamara, being an 'organization man' in the tradition of Arthur Sloan, believed that it was his role to follow a presidential directive to the best of his ability, even though he personally disagreed with the policy. As the war deteriorated, after a visit to Vietnam to assess the situation personally, McNamara directly told President Johnson that the United States was losing the war. He was fired as a result in '68. Shortly thereafter, due to severe public protests over war policy, Johnson withdrew his name from the Democratic nomination for the '68 election and retired from public life. Nixon won on a campaign to end the war, just as he and President Eisenhower had done in '52 to end the Korean war. However, unlike Eisenhower, Nixon escalated as soon as he took office.

These recordings are available at the respective presidential libraries. Excerpts of them are presented in Errol Morris' _Fog of War_, a documentary about Robert McNamara.

LBJ just escalated a policy that had been set in place long before by Truman in '49. The presumption by Truman, then supported by Eisenhower, was that a domino effect of communist revolutions across Indochina could lead to a Trotskyite victory for communism over the long run (the so-called 'domino theory'). Going back to all the way '49 the United States sent 'advisors' and significant funds and weapons to French controlled Vietnam to sustain operations against communist guerrillas.

Thus, the foreign policy of the United States was to prevent a communist win by engaging in proxy wars rather than direct conflict. But the French lost control and pulled out, ultimately losing Algeria as well. The French gave up on colonialism as a result, but this left the United States to sustain cold war operations in Indochina. Eisenhower increased the 'advisor count' (special operations troops) as a result and Kennedy continued the policy until his assassination.

LBJ just escalated a longstanding policy supported by both Democrats and Republicans back when the country had a unified foreign policy across the parties. And you'll notice that contrary to his campaign pledge to 'end the Vietnam war', Nixon escalated as well. Who just happened to have been Eisenhower's Vice President.

Opposition to the Vietnam war in the Democratic Party in the late sixties and early seventies was only seen in a minority wing of the party that had little policy control at the top. By the time popular majorities opposed the war, Democrats then just rode the populist wave with anti-vietnam war rhetoric. But they had been staunch supporters of the policy from the start of the cold war. Just as had been Republicans.

This is right.

It's more than just about creating social and legal controls over a technology that threatens traditional power structures, though personal computing has done that - just look at how social networking has supported political revolts across the world. Governments and their business patrons fear this power shift.

So, how have they responded?

The western national economies have transformed their income streams from production to rent collection, which has been ongoing since the 1970s. This has devalued all forms of manufacturing, where raw materials are converted to useful things through work, thus devaluing those who perform labor in the process. It's not automation that has destroyed manufacturing in the United States. In fact, that claim is ridiculous on its face, since - by definition - automation increases productivity which presumably should lead to long term industry success.

No, instead, free capital flows shifted productive work overseas where for cheap labor - sometimes slave labor - was available. This is called 'globalism'. But we should view the term a misnomer, due to the disparity between how easy it is to transfer capital across national boundaries versus how labor is locked into the nation state by borders and immigration law. It's not 'global free trade', it's arbitrage. This has happened not just in lock-step with deregulating the financial industry - Wall Street - at the expense of labor, but also because of it. For the power shift from government to the financial sector has had the effect of diminishing the political power of citizens - and especially labor - in the process. Because it's pretty damn hard for the poor to exercise real political power. That transformation benefitted both power bases in government and the financial sector.

But how does all this relate to computing lock-down and DRM?

It's the model for how to understand vendor lock-down in computing. For open computing platforms decentralize power by freeing people to use computing in ways never intended by the vendor (or government). This used to be called innovation. Back in the 1970s, every personal computer was open. The Apple II shipped with a manual that included schematics. Bus specifications were open. Computers booted to BASIC, a programming language by default. Now, not everyone wants to program and computing shouldn't be viewed strictly from that mindset. But, consider what happened to the minicomputing market as a result. Digital, for example, went bankrupt trying to maintain their vendor lock-in due to competition from open systems - primarily the IBM-PC and its clones we still use today. Because people like freedom, even when they don't directly use that freedom to tinker and create themselves.

So, I'm arguing that in the same vein that the financial industry gained protected privileges (deregulation) which gave it market advantage over labor, so too are titans of the software and tech industry, IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, etc have bent law and regulation to their benefit, at the expense of small competitors and even their own customers. Like 'deregulation' for Wall Street, the tech industry has it's own legal maneuver, this time through copyrights, patents, and trademarks, all of which are a form of government regulated monopoly protection.

And all this in the Orwellian name of 'freedom'. In the financial industry, they called it 'free trade'. In the tech industry it's, 'freedom to innovate'. But in both cases the freedom isn't to decentralized down to small business or citizens, it's centralized up toward the largest market players. It's a freedom to engage in monopoly control over markets, whether the labor market, the tech market, or any other market where players are big enough to buy protection from legislators and the court system. Protection, not from other big industry players - by and large - but protection from small competitors who might innovate their way into market dominance, and protection from customers who might choose alternatives were the markets actually opened instead of locked down.

This is about as far from the ideals of Adam Smith and David Ricardo as can be imagined. Smith opposed the power of government intertwined with monopoly players, and actually supported the creation of labor unions. He, opposed free trade when it opposed the interests of nations and its citizens. Which Ricardo's Theory of Comparative Advantage expands upon. Financial industry globalization destroys labor's comparative advantage, by locking labor in while freeing capital. Abuse of 'Intellectual Property' law destroys the tech market by locking competitors and customers into systems where certain privileged industry players collect streams of income from all market activity. Just like a tax.

It's a rentier economy. Where businesses no longer compete to build useful things, they compete for control over legislative bodies for government protection from markets and those who use them. This is not a market economy. It's a form of neo-capitalist feudalism, where, like lords under the protection of a king (government), assert total control over serfs (citizens / markets) within their domains.

And that's why walled gardens and DRM locked down PCs are taking over. This threat of criminalizing the use creation or use of open platform is simply a manifestation of that. Open computing is not akin to a lock-pick, it's real market capitalism. The very last thing monopolists want. And don't think this transformation is limited to finance or the tech industry. It's happening in lessor or greater levels across all markets, across all nation-states. This is the great transformation of power from voting citizens to feudal protectorates. Humanity is seeing nothing less than the manifestation of a new international tyranny based along different political structures than the nation-state, but with the same oppressive result.

Apple certainly has been misbehaving as far as abusing the patent system. I suppose that is wickedness. Here I don't think I witnessed the result of wicked policy as much as their disinterest in my future purchases. I don't think Apple wants to sell Macs any longer, so why care about a customer who buys them?

But your statement brings about an interesting question: Is this Apple's peak? Have they reached a point where fickle consumers will finally walk away due to poor value add, while at the same time pushing away valued long-time repeat customers who relied on an old business model they've since eschewed?

Win 8 looks like a mess. But, frankly, Win 7 isn't that bad. It runs Adobe products just fine. Perhaps I could live with it and Cygwin. MacOS X, though very nice, isn't worth this trouble. And the iMac hardware isn't that great of a value either.

shrug.

I have a similar problem. My advice: If you're still a student, buy Adobe CS5.5 Production for $450. The Premiere interface looks a lot like FCP and it reads FCP and FCE files like a champ. And it's 64 bit, uses GPU acceleration (if your hardware supports it) and runs on both MacOS and Windows. You get platform independence with backward compatibility.

Good luck.

I read the article itself. I do not need you to interpret it for me. I encourage everyone to click on your link and judge for themselves. You're full of it.

You didn't read the article you cited, did you? It made the exact opposite point of what you argue - that iTunes is immensely profitable for the firm. Read the link you posted.

And they'll be okay with that, just so long as you keep using iTunes for your media and software needs.

Excellent point. Fortunately, iTunes doesn't install on FreeBSD. -M

Cite that please. You're arguing that they make little to no money from content distribution through iTunes? I think you're full of it.

Hi Apple! Been a big fan since I dumped Linux in '04 or so. I've really enjoyed MacOS X and my laptops. You sold me a good UNIX with support for Microsoft Office - which I need. But you know what? Ever since you started making money hands over fist with iTunes, you've started REALLY SUCKING as a company. I don't want to buy from you any longer. My next phone will NOT be an iPhone. My next laptop will NOT be another Macbook. I think I'll be perfectly happy with an unlocked Nexus and a laptop running FreeBSD. So... FUCK OFF, Apple. For me, your time has come and gone. -M

To remove my credit card from their database. Also, to remove my customer record. And finally, to let them know just how displeased I am with their business practices.