Mandrake to Acquire Conectiva 196
An anonymous reader writes "With a press release Mandrakesoft has announced the acquisition of Conectiva. 'Mandrakesoft, the number one European Linux company, today announced a definitive agreement to acquire Conectiva, the number one Linux company in Brazil and Latin America. This acquisition is expected to increase significantly Mandrakesoft's size and R&D capabilities.'"
geez (Score:3, Insightful)
Dupe (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:#1 European Linux company? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Big day for Mandrakesoft (Score:3, Insightful)
I had to reload the page a couple of times. I thought something had gone wrong the first time because it was showing the same story on the top that it was when I looked at /. this morning...
What does it say about /. when the editors don't think their site is worth reading?
Re:This is a dupe (Score:4, Insightful)
If a press release is posted somewhere, its entirely possible for multiple people to read the same story at a similar time. Consider also the syndication via AP or other sites - look at how Google handles dupes, most single news items have 1000s of sites all saying the same thing.
Each of the readers of these thousands of sites can decide to submit their take on the story, and so for every single bit of syndicated news travelling the web, there could for certain stories be thousands of submissions (i hazard its usually much less though).
The editors themselves have to filter through all these and find out what interests THEM, what stands out from the rest. They have to read and judge all these, and quite quickly decide which to post. The single story you see could be from a flood of 100 similar "dupes" themselves, so the editor thinks its new and picks the best one at that moment.
</ponder>
I can quite easily see WHY they happen, perhaps we could help the editors by making a submission scanner and search function. An interface to google news (as somebody pointed out recently, they manage to index very quickly so would catch most) would be simplest I think. Even just using link domains as an initial "this might already have been posted very recently" test would help them out.
Any perl hacks out there got any ideas?
Re:IF YOU'RE REALLY PISSED ABOUT THE DUPES... (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course there's always a few who will get verbal about issues, but sometimes it's also good to bring them up, you can't necessarily blame them for that either.
I mean, if you say the same article on page 2 and then again on page 8 in your newspaper - once every week, wouldn't you start to think it's time we do something about it?
Re:geez (Score:1, Insightful)
So, we need to come up with some new scheme to decide which stories make the front page.
In my view the moderation and meta moderation system works reasonably well as is, obviously it ain't perfect and it shows bias but its the cumulative bias of the people that read this thing.
Maybe moderation should be cast in to concrete and put on autopilot and there shouldn't be any people with god status anymore.
So couldn't you use moderation to let a number of randomly sampled readers mod up and thus pick the stories worthy of making the front page. You still need a mechanism for filtering dupes. Presumably the people with front page moderator points would need a mechanism to mark dupes of already submitted stories and to group submissions that are dupes that haven't made the front page yet and mod up the best submission on the group. I imagine moderators would be jazzed at the chance to pick front page stories so I'm sure people would be willing to do the work.
And to be honest letting a random group of Slashdot readers with reasonable karma manage the front page couldn't be anyworse than Rob and Co. have been lately. I mean most slashdot readers actually read Slashdot so they can spot dupes which is obviously more than Rob and Co. do. I get the impression that to them Slashdot is just something they make a living and they don't actually like enough to even want to read it.
Having a few omnipotent people choosing the front page stories pretty obviously doesn't work. They are showing huge biases and its become obvious that they don't give a rat's ass about Slashdot because they pretty obviously aren't reading their own site.
Needless to say if Rob and Co. don't care enough to fix the evident and apparently systemic brokeness of late maybe its time for some enterprising people to set up an alternate Slashdot someplace and put it under new management. Not sure it wouldn't be a bad thing to get the goodness of the Slashdot community going someplace without the increasing corprate corruption of VA or whoever it is that owns all this stuff these days. Whenever I think of VA I think of company that had mega block buster IPO and then immediately abandoned the business plan that they told to everyone who bought their stock. Bad, very bad on the integrity front.
Re:Big day for Mandrakesoft (Score:2, Insightful)
What's it say about the readers when they visit a site that they know the owners don't even care about.
Says wonders on "we the people"