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What Does the Open Source Community Need? 20

Posted by Cliff from the stuff-to-think-about dept.
dlc asks: "i have a simple question for slashdot readers. let's say, hypothetically speaking, that i have a Linux box, co-located on a fast pipe, with fresh builds of the kernel, Apache, mod_perl, and MySQL, and i want to contribute back to the community. we already have a slashdot and a freshmeat, a segfault and a themes.org, a linux.com and a kernel.org; what else is there to be done? What do Slashdot readers want that they cannot find somewhere else? Is a user-driven site (such as Slashdot or Freshmeat) preferable to a content driven site (such as linux.com or kernel.org)? "
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What Does the Open Source Community Need? More

What Does the Open Source Community Need?

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  • Then what you want is the Slashdot I discovered in October of 98, just before the Halloween Papers, and therefore before Jon Katz and all of the adolescents he attracts:)
  • I remember something about a song with a chorus that said that, late 70's, early 80's I think.
  • There is no central store keeping all the source code from all the projects on freshmeat and there is no infrastructure to regularly archive the source from universities (where the code is usually deleted after the users leave the unis). We need a real backup system for the net effectively. something like several hundred gigs of optical or some other permanent storage, a fast net connection and a crawler to do the backup.
  • I just made an AskSlashdot post about making an open source QA lab - bughunter.org. Perhaps we could collaborate? :)
  • I checked out the link and found it to be most incredible. However, my idea for the site was a pretty different. In my idea, LXR would simply be a tool available in the site, along with many others. One of the big tools the site would be be focused around would be people, doing user testing and reporting back with problems. Automated testing via other tools and code viewers like LXR would also be there. Perhaps you'd like to collaborate with me on this site?
  • What I want is a sort of "less popular Slashdot," a site that focuses on essentially the same things that Slashdot does, but is not as popular. It seems that Slashdot is almost infested with trolls and the like and "iffy moderators." If anyone knows of a site like this, I would like to hear about it :) (kuro5hin seemed focused way more on science/technology than Slashdot)

    Chris Hagar
  • My flux capacitor is all out of whack and I can't seem to make the trip.

    Chris Hagar
  • I know it's not very glorious, but I'm sure there are tons of projects out there in search of more mirrors.

  • "As a telephone support professional, I have occasionally taken calls from a relay agent who is reading messages typed to her, by a hearing-challenged person, through a TTY machine.

    Much confusion has been caused because the TTY agent makes many of the typical "uneducated" guesses that typical end-users would make, for example typing ";" when she heas me say "colon", et cetera. The hearing-challenged person on the other end has no reason NOT to take the misspellings or mis-typed characters literally, unless he knows the difference.

    Complicating the situation is the fact that TTY Relay agents are forbidden from communicating individually with either party. For instance, If I remind the relay agent that "the backslash is the key above the enter key on your keyboard" then the the agent is not supposed to type "/". The agent is supposed to type "the backslash is the key above the enter key on your keyboard", exactly as I said it. this irritates me and, of course, the end-user as well.

    Has any slashdotter actually interfaced with a TTY machine? I do not know whether TTY emulation (a la LINUX) is the same as a text telephone machine. I'm guessing NO. I've been researching the Internet for three days, but the only TTY machine information I can find is lists of features of "black boxes for sale".

    I have found some software - modem combinations, but the consensus that I'm getting from the sales people from The TTY store, HARC, and Ultratec is that I must have a specialized modem and the end-user's TTY must support ASCII, apparenty not a common feature. This is of no use, as I'm on a LAN and behind a firewall.

    Can anyone point me to good information regarding the use of TTY emulation on a PC to interface with an actual TTY machine?"
  • What I see a need for is sites getting more specific than /. or freshmeat. I don't want to have to sift through 5000 calucators for X to find if there is an algebraic computing project in open source development. Perhaps a site dedicated to Mathematical news and software, or Political news and software.. etc.

    I suppose an analogy would be yoursite::slashdot as perljornal::Linux.com
  • I like a Slashdot more patience.. i think that they reject too much submission... (i don't know why the fuck they do reject a lot...) if the news (more elite or less elite) if the veracity of the content is real... put on the fucking site, but i don't want to see 1000 of non elites news... just in the home the principal news... later i want to read more cool news about a topic... you think about it... "we are alive and kicking ass" apple
  • There are other sites using Slashdot software and covering similar topics. Alas, they don't use English. Thus the readership is lower, the high-level posters ("I am the researcher mentioned in the article from Science and...") are fewer, and the troll quantity is much lower.
    I suppose it correlates with the size of the site.

    I won't point to them so that they don't get "too popular".
    --
  • I like slashdot and I spend a lot of time here, too much! :) One of the ideas I've played with, but lack the skills to implement is a kind of summary or synopsis of the slashdot comments on a story by story basis, and then on a theme by theme basis.

    I figure this could be done initially and crudely using simple word count searches: index all words (skipping "the,and,a" etc.)in a forum and build a histogram. This by itself would be only so-so interesting, but if you expand it to include immediately adjacent words it gets more interesting. Think of a more developed and refined Operating System Sucks-Rules-O-Meter [zgp.org]. And then two neighbouring words, etc.

    Why is this interesting? Because it would be the closest thing to describing what the slashdot community as whole thinks. The meta-slashdot would be a sort of ongoing ballot or poll.

    Although I've only mentioned Slashdot, there's no reason the same technique couldn't be brought to bear on any discussion group.

    -matt
  • I can see it already...


    Histogram for slashdot.org

    Term...................... %age of messages
    "natalie portman"......... 46.4%
    "hot grits"............... 33.5%
    "naked and petrified"..... 27.6%
    "cmdrtaco sux"............ 23.9%
    "linux sux"............... 19.4%
    "linux rox"............... 16.0%

  • Women (Score:2)

    by barzok ( 26681 )
    Oh, wait...that's Mars that needs women (or am I the only one who remembers that song?). Nevermind.

  • For example, a site dedicated to a specific topic, such as Apache, or book reviews? Is there enough of a market, or interest, in any one of these categories? How many new stories are there every day about, e.g., Apache, that would interest readers without becoming ApacheWeek [apacheweek.com], an Apache mirror [apache.org], or a site dedicated to programming Apache [modperl.com]? (not that those are not all great ideas!) I'm definitely OK with being that technical, but the question is, would there be enough reader interest for it to be worthwhile? (i ran with the Apache topic here, but it could apply to a lot of other topics.)

    darren


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]

  • Good idea, although probably a real lot of work for the site -- for this to be truly useful, I think, it would also require cross referencing the results of the slashot histogram with the Freshmeat historgram, and the LWN histogram, and the Linux Today historgram, etc, etc, etc. Maybe this would be a good use for a Beowulf cluster [slashdot.org]...?


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]

  • One of the early ideas I had was something along these lines, as well. A site where people would post their code, and it could be peer-reviewed in the same way that people post comments on Slashdot now, crossed with an LXR [linux.no]-type display with line numbering, named anchors, etc. It's a great idea, I think, but extremely difficult to implement well -- for example, how do you attach comments to particular lines without completely disrupting the flow of the code? There are (mostly non-portable) hacks, such as using DHTML to make the comments collapsible, but things like that might detract from the content of the site.

    Of course, there's very little non-programmer appeal to this sort of a site, and even most programmers would probably only be interested in a few of the postings at any given time. How would you like to log in one day and see only LISP and Applescript stuff? I think I'd get pretty annoyed and stop visiting after a few days of that.... (no offense meant if you happen to use either of those languages; I like LISP myself).

    darren


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]

  • I'm a little leary of setting out specifically to build a "less popular" anything... :)

    But seriously, this is one of the things I've been considering [slashdot.org], but one of the appeals of slashdot is that it covers the "News For Nerds" topic pretty comprehensively. "Patent Issues for Nerds" or "Free Borland Compilers for Nerds" are probably a little too restrictive, and won't get much traffic.

    darren


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]

  • how about a site detailing the important nerd-news, but aimed at non nerds?

    Take the whole amazon/patents thing. Even in the trade papers it's only getting small amounts of coverage. Loads of /.ers are getting really angry and making lots of noise, but when you look at it, they are only preaching to the perverted. Outside the geek forums nobody knows about it.

    If you took things like this, and covered them with all the techno jargon removed (or at least explained) then maybe the "stuff that matters" will propogate further

    possibly...

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