About three years after all the cool people decided that Slashdot wasn't the in-place to be anymore and went off to Kuro5hin, it's finally happened to me. Today's thread about Nat Friedman's Dashboard project shows the sorry state that the site now finds itself in; a few years back, this would have been a 100-reply thread full of people discussing the ideas behind the application, congratulating Nat and the others for getting so much done in so little time, and perhaps a little informed speculation about how this compared to the rumoured design of Microsoft Longhorn. Today, however, it's a 250 comment monstrosity. Hardly anybody talks about the project, and when they do, it's only to complain that Emacs has a feature like this already (well, yes, it does. As Nat explains, it also sucks at it, but who cares, huh? We don't want to improve things, do we?).

It's just so negative. Why can't we be positive for a change? Dashboard looks like a wonderful application, full of interesting promise (in fact, it seems only a few steps away from the Apple Knowledge Navigator adverts from a decade ago, which is pretty cool). It uses the openness of Free Software to work with current software, unlike the Longhorn approach which is going to need a complete rewrite of applications and the filesystem, and it works today. We should be celebrating this stolen march over the competition, rather than shouting it down simply because it happens to use Mono.

On the bright side, if I cut down on the Slashdot-reading, I'll be able to get more work done. Hurrah!

Hmm, apparently, the new A Silver Mt. Zion album has leaked onto the Internet, so I'm now going to try and hunt down a copy for my train trip on Thursday…