The decay of slashdot, Part 1

It breaks my heart when I see stories like this. The first thing that would cross my mind about a website with over a million visitors a day that carries the tagline "News for nerds, stuff that matters", is far from being an obituary for people that, while having their own merit for what they may have done, little have to do with either "news for nerds" or "stuff that matters". I wish my best to the family of the man, but it seems he has lived a long and very productive life and that his time had come. However, I have lost my own brother recently. He was only 25, and while also living a full life and being a very active civil engineer doing his doctorate thesis, the event that took him seems more memorable to a community of geeks than the passing away of the inventor of Doritos. Not because of the horrific situation, but because of the less bad side of that coin being the good that might come from the tribute of a mourning brother wishing to help prevent the same from fate coming to someone else. So, it breaks my heart that Slashdot gladly accepts publishing stories nothing related to what it supposedly stands for, and prefers to reject the publishing of stories helping to spread the word about a potentially lifesaving project to prevent something that could happen to any of them.

New book, maybe?

I've been thinking about writing a new book, this time for people who would like to learn C++ from the beginning. I'm still not sure about going forward with it, and about the details, but it will, without a doubt, already be up to date with the latest revision of C++. My previous book, about good programming practices for C++, has already seen some sales, although not really significant. I'm still unsure if I'm going to merge the subjects of both books or keep them in separate volumes. It will, however, take much more time to release than the first one.