Seriously. This is what we get paid to do. There's far too much to communicate on a forum, and if the SNR here is typical, you'll get awful, unrelated and just plain wrong advice.

If you can't hire, see if your school has a library science program and look for a good intern.

Failing that, read the Polar Bear book (Rosenfeld & Morville, pub: O' Reilly) yourself and follow the threads to resources particular to your problem.

Tactical help: populate the kewords, title, subject properties in your PDFs and Office docs. If you populate in Office and make a PDF, the properties come along. They're in File>Properties... Filling them out will help any search engine that can consume binary docs make sense of your content.

And there are bulk scan-to-OCR packages out there. Funnel into PDF and populate the properties.

Worth saying again: populate the properties.

Lighter-weight is better.

We're moving to mobile browsing guys; all the pipe-clogging, ARM-processor-choking, cursor-freezing bullshit you're sending down the line had made Slashdot a non-destination for me for a while now.

Have just shut off the Beta2 crap, and it's so much faster, so much easier to use.

Hey, thanks for the tip! THIS is close to the Slashdot I wanna see! (though I'd like all the comments available, please...)

All you need is a modern style sheet for this and it'll work great! (only half-joking).

This is the antidote for the gigantic, CPU-sucking, bandwidth-hogging fscking mess that the Slashdot main page has become.

It's not the UI, it's the whole UX. Slashdot has gotten harder to use, slower to load and no better for all the effort.

What was so wrong with the primarily HTML version that you had to bork it like this?

At a time the world is moving to mobile, you guys are sending down half a meg of front page and making the interaction entirely too tricky and cute to "just plain work" everywhere.

I'm reading Slashdot less and less.

The solution is user education.

fail.

You're dealing with average people, not bright geeks. People won't read. They don't learn, and arguably they shouldn't need to do so to use someone's web site.

People - even some knowledgeable IT folks I know - think that the "lock" icon means an entire transaction, from client to server, is secure - not just that a transaction is conducted through an encrypted pipe.

They think the lock means:

• "you have to have a password to use this site"
• "the web site is specially protected from attack"
• "nothing can see or affect what's happening on my web browser"

None of that is true about working SSL.

Just what are your plans for educating 3-400 million people out of this fog?

The "lock" icon and the marketing text about security has fostered a consistent misconception in their minds. Good luck changing it.

Investigate viability of a 3D Render Farm business.

People doing 3D work don't need this kind of iron to design and animate; they only need it for final render. Makes sense to rent time on it.

There are business out there doing this now - don't know if anyone's made a success of it.

This is Palm we're talking about - any new product from Palm is supposed to kill Palm, not the iPhone...

OTOH, don't wait 'till age 49 to have your first kid (voice of experience here).

I love him like nothing else in the world, but God; my back, my knees...

"Most people who talk about the Beatles as "great music" are talking about their later catalog..."

fail.

Honestly, they don't walk on water, but the Beatles' early pop music was night-and-day different from what had gone before.

No syrup, no sap - at least compared to the industry around them. In their earliest releases as a quartet with George Martin producing, the Beatles made music that was spare, direct, harmonically complex and hummable.

Sure it was fun, but Pop is supposed to be. The harmonies of "Hold Me Tight", the energy of "It Won't Be Long", the jangle, falsetto and close harmony of "Ticket to Ride" - dude, you may not like Pop, but just say so. As pop music goes, there hasn't been much greater.

First off: Nothing is being "consumed".

Secondly, Even IF someone at the NYT became aware of the content by means of an RSS feed pushed out to the Internet by Gatehouse...

Many portals and CMS presentation engines can consume RSS feeds and integrate them into a site. This is not at all uncommon.

For a portal or presentation engine to consume an RSS feed, or for a user with a browser or feedreader to view an RSS feed to which they're subscribed, they have to load it from Gatehouse's site. It doesn't get pushed into Boston.com's site or your browser/feedreader by Gatehouse. You should check into how web publishing works sometime.

We're pretty clearly into "more heat than light" territory here, and I have other things to do with my day off, so I'm pretty much going to stop wailing on this morbid equine now.