Well, we hope you had a good April Fool's here at Slashdot; we're done with weird translations for the day. It's been an interesting day online, from Andrew Leonard's Salon piece to the Google MentalPlex to the l33t.freshmeat.net post over at Freshmeat, and of course, the Advogato joke on Andover. Also check out the 'Windows Games' post on Linux Games. Special thanks to Rinkworks and Babelfish for translations. Personally, my favorite April Fool's site on the entire web can be found here. Oh, you mean it's not? Oh, dear...

streetlawyer submeteu uma ligação completamente surpreender: os staffers aparentemente desconhecidos de Andover.Net têm usado a característica offtopic undocumented da discussão no slash comunicar-se em Slashdot Marketing. A verdade é revelada de repente toda.Update: 04/01 03:37 by H : Or perhaps:streetlawyer submitted a completely surprising (connection?): apparently, unknown Andover.net staffers have been using slash's undocumented offtopic discussion feature to communicate in Slashdot Marketing. All the truth is suddenly revealed.

Patrick and Chris have been working their kung fu overtime for some time now to clean up Slashcode and release a version one point oh. Its available on Slashcode: if you're interested in setting up your own slashdotesque weblog and are up on mod_perl and apache, you'll enjoy it. With 1.0 out, its time to once again start hammering on new features including wireless device support. I hacked in quickie WAP device support, so if your phone handles it, give it a whirl. Avantgo will be coming soon as well, along with many design improvements that will drastically improve performance (thank god!) and simplify administration, and allow usage on a variety of SQL servers.

In our latest episode, we discuss Nate's whereabouts, the new release of Perl, Microsoft's X-Box, Netpliance's i-opener and more.

With Rob out of town, we still managed to carry off a brand spankin' new episode where we talk about domain squatting, our gaming addictions, software patents, and more.

hubertf writes, "Two new channels have been created using Rich Site Summary files, an XML dialect, to provide NetBSD-related news to content providers and their users. The files are parsed by news services today to retrieve information, and re-distribute it in their reader forums and/or sent out via mail directly to your cell phone, if you decide so. Both general NetBSD news and news related to the NetBSD Packages Collection are now available not only from the NetBSD Web site, but also from the sites listed at http://www.netbsd.org/Changes/rss.html. Now all you Slashdot fans can get the latest NetBSD news without leaving /. for a second. 8-) "

Following the Internet filter vote in our hometown this week, Jamie McCarthy stopped by the geek compound to rap with us for a bit, and so we recorded a special update to this week's show and have posted it at TheSync.

After two and a half years we're happy to announce that this is the 10,000th story posted on Slashdot. Uncounted trolls, repeats, server meltdowns, lost nights of code, conferences, quickies, hot grits, flame mails, broken links, 'Score:-1', karma whores, rants, submissions: its been a great ride... along the way we've posted a lot of sweet stories and had some great discussions. We promise to make the next 10,000 suck less! Congrats to Hemos (2153 stories) Roblimo (700) Cliff (693) and Sengan (664). Course I rule all over them with 4478 (I had a 6 month head start tho ;)

Fellow Slashdot Author and geek Emmett Plant stopped by the Geek Compound and therefore warranted another episode. We talk about Red Hat teaming with Real Networks, the new offerings from Palm Computing, and more.

After another hiatus, we've returned with a new installment of news and craziness. We talk about the Mars Polar Lander, Doubleclick, EverQuest, and more. You can find it in the usual place.

You asked for it; you got it. We asked Jon Katz your questions, ranging from the community to religion, and he's offered up his responses. If you can't get enough of our resident gasbag, check out his interview at Playboy, too.

I have gotten a stack of e-mails lately requesting an interview with Jon Katz. And last Friday, after we got Jon up on the little stage in our LinuxWorld booth, where he engaged in a live two-hour dialog with over 100 Slashdot readers and other show attendees, I got the same request in person - over and over. Jon is, without doubt, the most hated Slashdot Author, but he is also the most-read, the most-discussed, and the most puzzling, at least according to the e-mail I get about him. It's time to stop guessing about Jon and why he writes what he does the way he does, and to simply ask him! One question per post, please. The question and moderation cutoff time is Wednesday noon, U.S. EST, at which time I'll forward 10-15 questions to Jon via e-mail. Answers will appear Friday.

I've attached below an open letter from Bruce Twickler and Larry Augustin (Andover.Net and VA Linux Systems respective CEOs) on the subject of the merger and what it means. The letter says almost everything, but I just wanted to say that VA employees will still use submit.pl to get their stories posted like everyone else... and I'll continue to reject most of their stories (just like everyone else). The contracts we had written to guarantee that Slashdot remained editorially under our control under Andover.Net continue unchanged under any ownership. And VA is smart: they know not to tamper with Slashdot.

Well, we're finally closing in on the end of the show (Sleep! I can sleep again!). We're sending out as much streaming audio at mp3-2.thesync.com:8000 as we can - and hopefully we'll have video again by 3 PM EST. Jon Katz is here signing Geeks and will be on at noon EST. The show ends at 4 PM EST - so get it while you can. Update: 02/04 07:06 by CN : Footage from the Beanie awards is available over at TheSync now. See who won, who got hugged, and who got slagged. *grin*

As you may have heard, VA Linux and Andover.Net are gonna be joining up. We thought it would be dishonest not to say something about it, but as you probably understand, we're sorta restricted in what we can say. Of course, you can say whatever you want, and you can read the press release if you're curious about some of the details. Creative control of Slashdot will remain where it always has been.

We're now streaming audio live from the LinuxWorld show floor. You can get it at mp3-2.thesync.com:8000 (and thanks to TheSync for making this happen). Hopefully we'll have video coming out soon. You can now see our fancy dandy live webcam.

Well, we've done one more show before we leave for LWCE from where we'll have multiple icecasts throughout the week. In our latest episode, we talk about the Slash code release, Kevin Mitnick's encrypted data, and the DoubleClick fiasco.

I'm not planning on announcing each and every release of Slash here, but there were several pretty significant problems in the v0.9 release of Slash (mostly the fact that my e-mail was hardcoded in one spot so I'm getting status report e-mail from dozens of new Slashlings as they pop up). Please Upgrade! Details about the release, and future announcements will mostly be posted at Slashcode.com, so if you're using the code or just interested, bookmark it. Second is the matter of Server51. We had a little miscommunication over here and let the cat out of the bag on this when we released Slash v0.9: S51 is Freshmeat's new open source hosting site. It's still very alpha, and only hosting a few projects, but since it's already getting a fair amount of curious visitors, feel free to poke around and send suggestions... it'll be ready for mass consumption "when it's finished" of course ;)

I'm excited to announce that after countless hours of hacking and slashing through piles of perl, Slash 0.9 is finally out. It's definitely a long ways from 1.0, but we think you'll be able to download it from the FTP Server or the CVS Server and, assuming you are comfortable installing mod_perl and mysql, get your own Weblog up and running in a reasonable amount of time. The improvements and changes are too many to list here, but it's almost a full rewrite since the last release. And credit where it's due, Patrick Galbraith has really pulled it together... as both thanks and punishment, he is now the coordinator for Slash. We are starting up a mailing list to coordinate devel. Finally we also are happy to note that we have decided to use the GPL as the official license for the project. There are several other notes below.

We're back with yet another episode to celebrate the fact the world didn't end, and that this time of the year is extremely slow as far as news in concerned. We talk about T.Rex purchasing, Nate's new nickname, and more.