The Andover.net IPO quiet period is finally over. A lot of you have had questions about Slashdot; what's happening, what's going to happen, and so on, that we weren't allowed to answer. Now those questions can be answered, and no one can answer them better than CmdrTaco and Hemos. They're already starting getting stacked up with interview requests from other media, but we decided that you, the loyal Slashdot readers, deserved first crack at them. Submitted questions will be selected by moderators and the usual hangers-on and will be submitted Wednesday afternoon EST. Answers will appear Thursday. (Friday is reserved for Steve Wozniak, who unquestionably deserves a day all to himself!)

Well, before the world goes awry and leaves us in a state of catastrophe, we recorded one last show. We talk about our own Y2K preparation and the recent DVD-related news. If you can still get to a computer, it might be worth a listen.

It's that time again. Yep, we're back with another episode and it's a special one. We talk about the Quake source release, Everything 2 and much more with special guest Darrick Brown.

jtdennis asks: "I just got my Smart Card reader for my American Express Blue card. It's a nifty little thing, but I was wondering if it could be used for other things like logging in to my computer. When I installed it on my NT workstation here at work it added a Smart Card Reader Control panel that said it was a "GCR415 Serial Smart Card Reader (Or Compatible)" Does anyone have any information about this?" Interesting thought. You would need to have the interfacing specifications for the card itself (which I expect are proprietary), but I don't see why this couldn't be done. I just have to wonder if American Express ever expected that this card would be used for such a purpose...

8ballcane asks: "Reading Slashdot regularly, I am sure we have all been privy to the increasing trend of pretrified, grits and yes, Natalie Portman posts, as seen in this story . Moderators have helped in the curtailment of this to some degree, but the sheer amount of these postings has gotten too large. I think that there are many highly intelligent people who read and look at slashdot daily, so I thought this would be the best place to discuss such a problem. The question of the day: How can Slashdot deal with the large amount of off topic and malicious posts from people intent on disrupting all dialog on the subject at hand? " This has always been a problem as Slashdot has grown over the years, and moderation has helped but not solved the problems. What else can we do to help improve the post quality here on Slashdot?

Suck has apparently decided that they need to generate some revenue, and what better way to do that then create a really clever Slashdot parody that I can't help but link. With headlines like 'Red Hat Reports Income' and 'Impossibly Obscure Scientific Discovery Announced' its worth a read. My favorite is the references to my horrible HTML coding style, and the fake headlines in their 'Older Stuff' box. I wonder if I can steal their icons?

Sure, it might be the beginning of winter, but that didn't stop us from having our fun veejay style in this week's show. We talk about DVD encryption, robotic snakes, and more.

A couple of readers pointed us to one of Wired's stories that is journaling the aftermath of a recent Slashdot story. The story was about a web hosting company that pulled a Y2K spoof movie, under pressure from the FBI. The disappointing part is the tone of the e-mails that were sent to the one-man operation. Wired has some samples from said e-mails. Please, before hitting send on e-mails and postings, think about the whole situation. In this case, after checking with legal people, the web-hosting company put back the movie and does not deserve the flame generated against it. The FBI is the culprit in this case, and rather then rail on one guy, we should be banding together to fight against actions like the FBI's. For more discussion read Thoughts from the Furnace, Rob's feature about flaming on the Web.

Yes, fresh from the carnage that is Thanksgiving, it's another mind-blowing episode (14 if you're counting) of GIS. Download, listen and enjoy.

This week Bruce Perens ^[?] learned the hard way that Open Source development has become a popular spectator sport. Or, as I described it a few days earlier, a performing art. Like it or not, things are changing with Open Source development, with the Internet, with the way online news is gathered and spread, and with Slashdot. More ->

C|Net recently made waves with its "Top 10 Hacks" story which seemed to say that Hack==Website Defacement. Derek Glidden found that wrong. And I'm glad he did because he's proposed that we do our own top 10 hacks. He's written a fabulous article, and challanges us to come up with a real list of hacks: The good stuff. Not the script kiddie stuff that the media likes to use to generate extreme headlines. Read this story. Its a good one.

mochaone asks "I've always admired the Slashdot crew for putting together a great site that has vastly contributed to the internet experience. I have an idea for a website that I think has great potential also. I would like to know how slashdot (or any other webcompanies) got started and what tips they might offer? Should I use webhosting services or provide content on my own computers? What's a typical server setup -- separate boxes for web servers, database, banners, etc? T1 line or T3? How often should I backup data if providing content on my own computers and should I store backups offsite? Any other tips are welcome. More interested in the high-level, architectural issues rather than the "Use Debian over Redhat" or "Use Python over Perl" issues. I think those have been covered in other Ask Slashdot features. "

So as many of you know, COMDEX is in vegas next week, and for the first time, I'm actually going. Andover.Net will have a booth in the Linux Pavilion, and Hemos, CowboyNeal, Scoop, and myself will be consuming oxygen there for most of next week. So if you're going, stop in and say hi. We're going to be having a little contest (a Linux install race) and the winners will get fabulous prizes. Its going to be BYOD (Bring your own distribution) so we'll see who comes out on top. We'll have machines for people to get their news fix. We're gonna try to broadcast Geeks in Space segments live. And if any open source developers want to run BOF sessions or something about their projects, contact Josh and try to schedule some time (this is gonna be real informal). Also, if any of the distributions wanna have a rep play in the install contest, let him know too (I've already got a Sucke- I mean Vict- I mean Volunteer from Debian: Hi Shaleh..)

In this week's episode, we talk about tanning, the Microsoft trial, and many things we probably shouldn't. Many thanks to TheSync for hosting this for us. Also, if everything goes well, we should be broadcasting next week from COMDEX, which should be interesting, to say the least.

Its happened before, but with the recent MS happenings, MacWeek, MSNBC and to a certain extent Wired have written stories based largely on Slashdot comments: Specifically those that appeared on Microsoft Addresses World, Instant Legal Analysis and Microsoft==Monopoly. The mainstream media now thinks that picking a few comments from a thread on Slashdot is a story (of course they often don't properly credit or link them). More interesting is that by picking a few extreme comments, or poking fun of "Anonymous Coward" that they somehow have the pulse of Slashdot as a whole. Regardless, they are watching, its fascinating to see what they think we think.

Kitsune Sushi submitted this hot potato: "There have been a few discussions the past few weeks on Slashdot regarding female geeks (probably set into motion at least in part by that Linux Chix article), most of which have been cluttered by a number of "interesting" comments by various males. :) One post that struck me in particular suggested that many male geeks have a hard time finding a romantic interest because their female counterparts are often found in the same place they are: behind their computer monitors. This sort of begs the question: where do most geeks (male or female) most often find their potential partner(s)? Online? Off? Chat rooms? Matchmaker services? University? LUGs? Hmm.. Slashdot..?" What are your experiences with online romances?

Back again with a new episode, we talk about Matrix sequels, cellphone experiments, Echelon, and plenty other subjects. There are plenty of radio shows on the internet, but no one else would record this stuff. This amazing feat of bandwidth consumption can be had at TheSync.

We made several changes today. Most of them are "Under the Hood" and you shouldn't see any difference since we tested the changes out pretty heavily on a devel box. Several odd little bugs have popped up tho, and we're squashing them as quickly as we can. Send your bug reports to pater@slashdot.org. The only noticable change you should see is some structural changes to the user settings pages: it was getting pretty unwieldly so we split it apart to make it easier to deal with.

Back on the scene with a new installment, we talk about the Atlanta Linux Showcase, the horrific loss of Hemos' and Nate's house, and the various addictions that plague our productivity. This agonizingly special episode can be downloaded from TheSync.

So just as proof that life doens't stop when you go to a conference, Hemos got email this morning from nate informing him that his house burned down ^[?] last night. Now some rooms are missing and there is extensive smoke and water damage. Now the geek compound is 25% smaller. On the plus side, both Nate and hemos are safe and insured. Update: 10/16 11:05 by H : And to make matters worse, Chris DiBona threw my cell phone in a bucket of water. On accident. But it's pretty ironic.