I still read Slashdot daily in my RSS reader… for now. While the articles linked to usually contain interesting information, the comments are another story. Comments have always been a big component of Slashdot, but the way they work now feels more like a relic of the past. There have been several blogs which are noteworthy for adhering to the idea that comments do not belong on a blog. If you want to reach out or react to content on the web, there are so many ways to achieve that now that blog comments should be segregated from the blog content and channeled through the appropriate social network.

Whether Slashdot decides to do that is not the point of this post, but that they need to do something different. The content on Slashdot has not decreased in quality, but I think that the comments have. I present three specific articles that I think aptly demonstrates how terrible they really are now.

How to Thwart the High Priests In IT

Okay, so right off the bat I immediately empathize with the title of this post. Anyone who has had the misfortune of working at big companies and dealing with an out-of-control IT bureaucracy probably will feel the same way. As someone who writes software for a living, I am always demanding more of the hardware and software I use to meet my deadlines and ship software. However, any situation involving IT turns into a quagmire. For example, at one time, it was the policy to start encrypting your hard drive on any laptop after some sales executive lost their laptop on vacation. Fine, I enabled encryption on my Ubuntu laptop I was using. Suddenly though, it was apparent that “encryption” meant installing this very specific software suite on a Windows machine. “Linux Encryption is impossible. Because it is Open Source you see.” WOW.

Anyway, here’s a few of the comments on this article:

Fine. When the CORPORATE network blows up, it isn’t “mine”, and I won’t give a shit. How does THAT sound?

“My Network” doesn’t imply “ownership” as much as it does “complete responsibility”, which is why TWITS like you don’t get it. “My Network” is something that I take a great deal of pride in. It is MY responsibility, and therefore it is MY network. It is like the sales guys getting all upset when another sales rep “steals my client”. It isn’t your client, it is the company. That isn’t YOUR desk, it is the company’s. It isn’t your office, it is the Company’s.

You get the point now?

Sounds like the article was written by a tool with no understanding of how enterprise IT works, and no grasp of what bringing alien, unknown systems into contact with critical infrastructure can lead to.

Oh yes, we know you’re important. You don’t have to yell at us.

Testing the MongoDB Global Write Lock Improvements

For some background, MongoDB is a very popular NoSQL solution for persistent storage. This role has typically been filled by a RDBMS until recently. This is largely due to some unique use cases that have arisen from the different type of processing that social networking and other new technologies demand. Well wait one second, I thought that was fairly well known in the tech community?

Congratulations. You matter enough to bother reinventing this wheel again. If you continue to matter for a meaningful amount of time you’ll end up locking individual documents, or whatever you call them. Oracle called that ‘row’ locking. 15 years ago.

For when you’re too cheap to spring for a BerkeleyDB license, some amateur playing a decade of catchup gives you everything you’d ever need, as long as you don’t need support, performance, stability or data integrity.

Um, okay. Well they’re probably right, I mean this NoSQL business is silly then if it’s just rehashing old technology. I guess you could just stick with Oracle, I’m sure they won’t take part in any of this NoSQL Hype. Oops, spoke too soon.

Michael Dell Dismisses Tablet Threat To the PC Market

Okay, the obvious point is that Michael Dell sells PCs, and tablets are a perceived threat on the PC market. Of course, Michael Dell isn’t always right on his predictions anyway.

Trying to do much REAL WORK(tm) on a tablet is an exercise in frustration. By the time you add a keyboard and mouse so that you can be even marginally productive you might as well get the tablet so that you can work even where/when there isn’t a wireless network.

The tablet’s niche is on the couch or the train or the bus

Do I even need to make a comment about this? I think adding a keyboard means you don’t really understand what a tablet is supposed to do, and if you have a hard time doing any work on a tablet, you’re probably using the wrong tablet.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with me on my feelings about these comments, and of course there are some comments that weren’t as out of touch with reality. If anything, I hope it shows how comments don’t necessarily add anything useful to site content.