


Slashdot Needs Advertisers (Blatant Plug!)
So over the last few months we've grown again. We now
are completely saturating the T1. But no fear! Greater bandwidth
is just around the corner. Unfortunately, all this extra
speed is going to cost us more money, <PLUG>
We serve up like 1.5 million pages a week, and we need to start
selling more ads to keep going. If you're interested in having
an ad shown to the Slashdot audience, you should contact
hemos@slashdot.org and
ask for the rate card. Our rates are cheap (and even cheaper
if you're a Linux company, or buy a lot of impressions) and we've got a great reader base
of technically savy readers.</PLUG>
Allright, I totally feel like PBS and don't ever want to
do this again *grin*, now back to the important stuff.

Welcome to Slashdot
Welcome to Slashdot, wherein a technologically challenged media critic comes nose to nose with an army of Linux Geeks and lives to tell the tale...

Slashdot Comment fun Continues
Hit the link below to read a few notes regarding the
default threshold, anonymous posting, and the various
modes available for comment display. Its fun and exciting
for everyone. Or maybe not.

SlashNET Forum Log
I've attached the logs from last nights IRC Forum on
SlashNET. Next time around we'll have somebody interesting
to talk to, but if you're curious what I have to say about
things, go ahead and click the link. It was nice talking
to everyone, we'll do this again sometime I'm sure.

SlashNET Forum (And Important Comments Note)
Last minute reminder that your chance to throw virtual
pies or virtual beers at my head is today at 6pm (My
time:EST) on irc.slashdot.org
in #Forum. I'll answer questions about Slashdot or
whatever people are interested in. It'll be fun. Next
note that I made a significant change to the comments display
system last night. This change isn't necessarily permanent,
and is definately open to alteration. Some of you have
noticed and emailed already about it. Click the link below
to read my description and explanation. I'm going to give it
a few days, and put it to a poll.

Jon Katz discovers Slashdot
So Jon Katz wrote up a pretty nifty write up of Slashdot.
Check it out
if you're interested. Its a pretty glowing piece, so
everyone pat yourself on the back and then go about your
lives as usual. Speaking of Slashdot, just a quick reminder
that we've got that IRC forum tomorrow on SlashNET
at 6pm eastern. It's your chance to request features that
are probably already on my TODO list but I won't have time to
write until after graduation or complain about AC posting or
cookies and whatnot. Wesley Crusher questions will
get you /ignore'd *grin*.

Slashdot Mugs
My-Mugs
has set us up a page where you can go and order
Slashdot Coffee Mugs.
So if you want to help keep Slashdot chugging, or just want to
drink more coffee but are to lazy to clean any of your
existing cups, check it out. Either way is fine by me.

SlashNET Forum on Saturday with CmdrTaco?
The Opers on SlashNET (the Slashdot IRC network:irc.slashdot.org), desperate for something productive
to do, have been planning to run
regular forums for awhile now. For some reason, they've
decided that the first victi.. err, guest, to be me. Presumably
nobody more interesting was available.
So I'll be online on Saturday at 6pm Eastern (who am I kidding?
I'm normally online, but this time its official)
to answer any questions folks have about Slashdot.
This is all you ACs chance to insult me in realtime instead
of in the comments section! And the rest of you can ask real
questions about moderation, scoring, why cookies don't work,
or whatever else comes up. You can get some help connecting over at the
SlashNET Homepage. Hopefully
next time we'll get someone interesting.

Slashdot Overload!
So I was greeted this morning to a crazed server- with almost
400 comments, every httpd fork was serving up the MS Memo story
and bringing the server to its knees. I think I know how to solve
it, and will work on that after classes are done today, but
in the mean time, I've disabled viewing replies off the
article. I'll reenable it tonight and you guys can read
it then. Sorry about the hassle.

Assorted Slashdot Notes
Assorted odds and ends to babble about late on a friday
night. Read if you feel like it. Ignore if you like.
Updates on Slashdot's code etc.

What's that 'Jobs' Link?
Just figured I'd quick explain what that
jobs link is over on the left
hand side of the page. There are 3 or 4 extremely common
feature requests for Slashdot, and a service to help find
jobs is probably #3 (after AC filtering and a mailing list,
which both are coming as well). So click that thing if you're
interested in employment. I'm not in charge of it, it's
run by Developers.Net, I'm
merely throwing it up here because of the huge number of people
who asked for something like this on Slashdot. So if you're an unemployed
bum, and want to alter that have at it.

Slashdot Notes
I've got several misc. comments to babble about related
to Slash, Slashdot, and whatever else I think of before
my ISP times me out (this will also answer the mystery of
the (score:x) thing that several of you have emailed about), so
click the link below to read it if you're interested.

Slashdot mentioned in British national newspaper
Tarcus writes "The Guardian national newspaper in Britain mentioned Slashdot in the supplement "The Editor" on Saturday October 10th. There's a link on their "Sites we like" page
The entry in the paper and on the page runs:
If you are not technically inclined, look away now. Slashdot is the place where the IT industry's insiders, and would-be insiders, discuss the latest technical news. If your company's internet team read Slashdot, they're probably pretty good at their job. That said, they won't have much time to do any work because they probably spend their whole day reading and sending messages to Slashdot. "

A Comment About Content
Ever since Chips & Dips I've tried to reserve 5-15% of
Slashdot stories for humor. So today I posted something
pretty tasteless. Something that was obviously a hoax.
Something that anyone who bothered to look at the link
would know was a fake. It was funny, but I didn't
flag it as humor because then nobody would have fallen for
it. I won't do that any more. The flip side of that is that I
can't post hoaxes any more without flagging them as humor.
Takes a lot of the fun out of my day, but I guess I'll
always have the huge number of hate mail from today's
boner to keep me warm at night. It bums me out to know
that I can't post something on my own web site, but I guess
I'll get over it. It's probably for the best. In the
future I guess I'll put that sort of stuff on Taco Hell.

Slashdot:We're Baaack
Allright, we're back in business. Long series of calamities
that I won't bother to explain here. It might be a hard drive
problem, so I'll be making backups every 30 seconds from
here on out. Hopefully we won't have any more of these
little unscheduled interuptions for awhile.

(Un)Exciting Slashdot Notes
The Slash source release is wrapping up. I've decided to get
a version out the door before I go to work on moderation
stuff. The Look & Feel stuff is pretty much functional now
(within reason). Check out Taco Hell
or Slash to see how different articles
on the same server can look. There are glitches yet, but
for the most part, things look pretty good. Hit the link
to read some notes on the moderation debates, as well as
a few notes about recent changes to Slash.

Feature:Slashdot Comments
We've got a problem on Slashdot. Along with amazing
growth we've experienced in the last 6 months, we've
suffered some of the same problems as
usenet. Namely the signal to noise ratio on the comments
is getting out of control. There are real gems in the
comments section, but wading through 'I got the
first comment!' crap, or huge rampant offtopic debates
is wasting bandwidth and time of the thousands of
readers who just want the good stuff. Keep reading
to read the deal. Updated read the end

Slashdot Notes
Well folks its friday and I'm ready to relax, so I'm going
to take a second and just unload the list of stuff that
has changed here recently. Also, note that I've added
a link on the left hand menu to 'Ask Slashdot'. We're
going to start posting more of them, but only put the
more relevant ones of the homepage itself. This will
be handled by Cliff Wood who has done a great job filtering
these things for us. Hit the link below to read to
Slashdot notes.

Spanish mirror of slashdot?
Browsing the web (instead of coding -- CVS frustration) tonight,
I came across Linux Preview,
a site which appears to track slashdot articles and translate
them into spanish. It's not only an attractive site, with additional
touches like Classical Music MP3s, but is also a great idea:
many spanish people can now enjoy our articles. It's just a
shame that it neither credits slashdot, nor our contributors,
but instead claims its own copyright.I hope
Francisco Burzi gets my
hint...
Update: Hint taken. Thanks.