You have to get acquired by Microsoft first.

Thank you! This was fun.

I had to learn WordPress to help a local org, so I went ahead and did my own blog for fun: https://www.gerisch.org/

Same. I am thankful that this sort of article shows up here.

I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond than a minnow in Microsoft's ocean.

My brother went looking for an N100 with the quietest fan, and gave it to me for Christmas two years ago. It has been an excellent little desktop with no discernable noise that I can tell. Morefine M8S, fwiw.

I was hoping to see a mention of Odex 1 by Odetics. I was working in a printed circuit board factory at the time (1983), and we got to build boards for it. Later on, there was a demo where it lifted one end of a small pickup truck off the ground.

I donate to FutureMe.org because I like the service, and want to see it continue. I used to be able to schedule a monthly donation through Paypal (I think), but something happened, and now I have to remember to send a donation out every year.

My other donations go out monthly to Internet Archive, EFF, and Thunderbird.

There for a while, The TOR Project had a thing where I could contribute by running (paying for) a node on a hosting provider (I think it might have been AWS?). That effort died on the vine and was shut down.

For content creators, I donate to Phoronix.

Yes, and in my opinion, this was what killed Slashdot.

Who knew that giving power to unpaid volunteers who don‘t necessarily have the users or the companies‘ best interest in mind might turn out to be a bad business practice.

I agree with you, and think that if Slashdot were to do a rebirth, it might succeed. Of course, they'd have to figure out what went wrong and put in mechanisms to prevent that.

But the five vote options (insightful, interesting, funny, off-topic, troll) were _useful_. Having a feed based on the score of votes plus friend bonus, friend-of-a-friend bonus, foe penalty, friend-of-a-foe penalty gave me a super news feed I stuck with for almost a decade.

I could see a more complex voting rule set being helpful. But basically, it was really good until it wasn't, and that was a problem of the people behind the scenes there, and not the system itself.