Simon Willison's Weblog: slashdot

Quoting Slashdot

2025-10-12T16:18:05+00:00

Slashdot: What's the reason OneDrive tells users this setting can only be turned off 3 times a year? (And are those any three times — or does that mean three specific days, like Christmas, New Year's Day, etc.)

[Microsoft's publicist chose not to answer this question.]

— Slashdot, asking the obvious question

Tags: microsoft, slashdot, ai, ai-ethics

Quoting Steve Wozniak

2025-08-15T16:06:23+00:00

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

— Steve Wozniak, in a comment on Slashdot

Tags: apple, slashdot, careers

Quoting Joel Spolsky

2008-11-19T08:41:35+00:00

Heck, I practically invented the formula of "tell a funny story and then get all serious and show how this is amusing anecdote just goes to show that (one thing|the other) is a universal truth." And everybody is like, oh yes! how true! and they link to it with approval, and it zooms to the top of Slashdot. And six years later, a new king arises who did not know Joel, and he writes up another amusing anecdote, really, it's the same anecdote, and he uses it to prove the exact opposite, and everyone is like, oh yes! how true! and it zooms to the top of Reddit.

— Joel Spolsky

Tags: anecdotes, joel-spolsky, reddit, slashdot

Slashdot's gone CSS

2005-09-22T05:55:52+00:00

Slashdot's gone CSS

They’ve been talking about it for a while—looks like they threw the switch.

Tags: slashdot

Slashdot interview with Mark Shuttleworth

2005-04-06T10:18:50+00:00

Slashdot interview with Mark Shuttleworth

Some great answers on Ubuntu.

Tags: slashdot

Slashdot Humour

2004-04-21T01:52:03+00:00

Spotted in a thread about a newly discovered TCP/IP vulnerability:

No problem (Score:5, Funny)
by niom (638987) on Tuesday April 20, @03:18PM (#8920438)

I'll just switch to UDP.

Re:No problem (Score:5, Funny)
by TheTomcat (53158) on Tuesday April 20, @03:25PM (#8920559)

more like:
UDP just I. switch ll'll to I just

Tags: slashdot

Slashdot trolling phenomena

2003-11-24T20:54:14+00:00

Slashdot trolling phenomena

Natalie Portman, naked and petrified with hot grits

Tags: slashdot

Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards

2003-11-24T00:58:38+00:00

Retooling Slashdot with Web Standards

Slashdot is a great learning exercise for practising CSS

Via Jeffrey Zeldman Presents: The Daily Report

Tags: slashdot

Surviving Slashdot

2003-03-10T12:48:28+00:00

Scott Johnson's Roogle RSS search engine got slashdotted yesterday, and survived the storm unharmed thanks to Scott's quick thinking server admin Demitrious setting up mod_throttle to help handle the load. Demitrious describes the solution in this post.

Tags: slashdot

The slashdot effect

2003-02-05T23:43:01+00:00

Dave Winer asks why Joel Spolsky gets much more traffic when slashdotted than UserLand's hosted sites tend to. Joel explains (it's all down to network effects) and mpt kicks in a few ideas as well.

Tags: dave-winer, joel-spolsky, slashdot

Joe Clark interviews

2002-12-12T12:32:34+00:00

On Monday, Slashdot posted an excellent in depth interview with Joe Clark, author of Building Accessible Websites. In a fantastic display of cluelessness they pasted the XHTML document which Joe sent them straight in to the Slashdot template, <html> tags and all. The good news is that there's more Joe Clark related goodness to come, courtesy of Jonathan Delacour:

... since next week all my posts will be devoted to Joe Clark's Building Accessible Websites: first a book review, then an extended conversation with Joe about accessibility matters.

Tags: accessibility, joe-clark, slashdot, jonathan-delacour

Slashdot on XWT

2002-06-26T11:40:41+00:00

Slashdot has a story on XWT (mentioned previously). Adam Megacz, the author of the system, does an excellent job of defending and explaining the concepts of XWT in the discussion thread attached to the article.

Tags: slashdot

Slashdot threads

2002-06-19T13:45:06+00:00

A couple of interesting threads on Slashdot today: Content Management Software - Build or Buy? and Properly Testing Your Code.

Tags: slashdot

Free books

2002-06-19T09:36:34+00:00

I like free books (who doesn't?), so when a story on Slashdot asked for book recommendations I started a thread asking for links to free technical books available online. Here's a list compiled from the thread:

Dive Into Python: Mark Pilgrim's excellent book on Python, aimed at experienced programmers who wish to learn Python rather than complete newcomers to programming.
Linux From Scratch: Guide to building your own linux distribution.
Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO: Calls itself a HOWTO but it's pretty much a full book on the topic of secure programming.
Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition: GNU/Linux systems administration guide.
Free as in Freedom: Book on RMS and the reasons behind GNU and the Open Source movement.
Thinking In... series: Bruce Eckel's superb series of programming books that focus on basic programming principles while providing a thorough overview of the language. The series includes Python, Java, C++ and C#.
Mastering EJB: Comprehensive guide to Enterprise Java Beans.
EJB Design Patterns: Companion to the above, concentrating on design patterns that can be applied to EJB.
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs: From MIT. Concentrates on fundamental concepts of computing.
Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in ... series: Books describing data structures in object oriented languages, available for C++, Java and C#.
Numeric Recipes in ... series: Algorithm guides, available for C, Fortran 70 and Fortran 90.
Handbook of Applied Cryptography: Practical guide to modern cryptography.
The Art of Assembly Language Programming: Beginners guide to assembly with available versions covering Windows, Linux and DOS.
Object-Oriented System Development: In depth discussion of object-oriented approaches to developing software systems.
GNU Autoconf, Automake and Libtool: Guide to these essential tools for unix developers.
User Interface Design for Programmers: Joel Spolsky's book on User Interface Design.

I have omitted several books that only provide partial tasters on their sites - see the Slashdot thread for a list that includes these. Two other useful lists of free books include the O'Reilly Open Books Project and Libros Recomendados On Line (in Spanish but links to English resources).

Tags: linux, open-source, python, slashdot