Slashdot Mirror

Well, yesterday's IRC thing went off without me, though had I been there, my questions would have been dumped anyway, so no big deal. It's a pretty long log, so I took the liberty of snipping the good parts and adding some translations for those who don't speak Slash. Hope you enjoy, and I apologize in advance for any inaccuracies.

Question
Answer
Translation

<Questions> w00t asks: Will /. users ever be able to change the "look and feel" of Slashdot? Such as the colors, and general layout?

<CmdrTaco> Maybe a little, but not much. 20:04
It's computationally expensive.
<hemos> The new machines will be 2x P3 1.4 Ghz, with 2 gigs of RAM.
<CmdrTaco> It's programatically tricky.

Even removing images will increase our computational workload. We'll never change this, but patches are always welcome.

Patches are always welcome tho ;)

<Questions> reefer asks: Is there any system in place or a plan on developing some system to prevent duplicate posts?

<CmdrTaco> Whatever. 20:06
Next.
<hemos> Reefer: There is one.

We have a pretty good system that we copied from fark, but Rob still sneaks a couple through.

<Questions> jew asks: At LWCE 2000 NYC, you stated that you were considering developing alternate systems of accessing the site's content than HTTP/HTML. You mentioned NNTP. Have you considered or implemented any alternate means of accessing the site, such as RRS? If not, why?

<CmdrTaco> We don't have time to implement much in the way of other protocols.
<hemos> CmdrTaco: We did try the chat thing with whatever program that was.
Er, not chat. 20:07
Discussion thing.
<CmdrTaco> Yeah, we had an IRC bot.
That gated stories & discussions.
Salsa.
That was fun.
Worked really well.
Nobody used it :)

The trolls had a very popular IRC bot called Slashbot that gated stories, and we murdered comments.pl and banned about a hundred IPs to shut it down, but we shut down our version because no one used it.

<CmdrTaco>Karma isn't worth anything. Why would we change that? 20:09

Except for: how many posts you can make a day, your initial comment score, your ability to moderate or metamoderate, and almost any other interaction with the site, that is. We'll never change karma's fictitious worthlessness like we did before.

<Questions> OcelotLM asks: Have you considered changing the Games colour scheme to something less garish?

<hemos> Hahahaha
<CmdrTaco> Whateever.
Next.
<hemos> You should have seen the first round of it.

Ok, ya, it sucks. Get over it. Remember Slashdot succeeded because our HTML is the best.

<CmdrTaco> (I'm just skipping trolls btw ;)

I'm not going to tell you why moderation is anonymous and why we IP banned www.w3c.org from our site. This is because the answers are not for those among us who do not drink the gin with the tonic.

<Questions> limerickey asks: What happened to John Katz?

<CmdrTaco> We had to let him go during a round of layoffs last summer.
We miss him, and were sad to see him go. 20:15
He added a lot to Slashdot, and it was really unfortunate.
<hemos> the acerbic nature of some of the people also turned him off.

Realized that if he continued to pander his career for Matrix fans, he'd never work as a journalist again. Also the trolls.

<Questions> sebi asks: Did you ever consider adjusting the amount of moderator points based on Metamoderation results (like add a point for every 100 fair metamods, subtract one for every 5 unfair ones ore something like that)

If you were unable to attend or simply wish to review or archive the discussion, we have a text log and an HTML log available. By the end of the forum, over 600 observers were present. Thanks again to Rob and Jeff, everyone who submitted forum questions, and everyone in attendance!

If you were unable to attend or simply wish to review or archive the discussion, we have a text log and an HTML log available. By the end of the forum, over 600 observers were present. Thanks again to Rob and Jeff, everyone who submitted forum questions, and everyone in attendance!

The forum is at 8PM Eastern Daylight Time (-0400). See SlashNET's website for details.

There are controls in place to assure that that sort of thing doesn't happen. This network (SlashNET) has hosted several highly publicized IRC forums in the past and the operators have pretty much got the whole thing down pat. The main #forum channel is moderated, people can talk in #forum.d or whichever other channel they prefer, and questions are submitted to a bot for approval.

A log will be posted on the IRC networks's website, SlashNET.org.

All SlashNET forums are logged. The log of this forum will be posted on SlashNET's website after the forum.

Slashdot IRC Logs are always wonderful sources of wonderful information and history...

- Question/Answer Session
- Mirror of Signal_11 Discussion
- Another IRC log

Slashdot IRC Logs are always wonderful sources of wonderful information and history...

- Question/Answer Session
- Mirror of Signal_11 Discussion
- Another IRC log

I know I'm beating a dead horse here but there needs to be an end to this thievery talk.

You're not going to get an end to it here. Even CmdrTaco uses the term:

<hemos_> Alterslash is illegal.
And is violating copyright.

<CmdrTaco> Thats totally a copyright violation.
Thats really slimey.
I wish people wouldn't steal.

I've already found nemo. He hangs out on /NET!

It really bugs me when the RIAA calls copyright violation, "Stealing."

As much as when CmdrTaco does it?

<hemos_> Alterslash is illegal
<hemos_> And is violating copyright.
[...]
<CmdrTaco> Thats totally a copyright violation.
[...]
<CmdrTaco> Thats really slimey.
[...]
<CmdrTaco> Wow, I didn't know someone was doing that.
<CmdrTaco> *sigh*
<CmdrTaco> I wish people wouldn't steal.

Stay away from Slashnet. Those monkeys will throw their keyboards at you.

Macs are faster in most algorithms with source available.

Not just the 10 famous benchmarks as part of the composite in ByteMark , but at many other things such as the RC5 contest.

according to the RC5 benchmarks AMD is far slower than dual cpu macintoshes (half as fast).

The Pentium 4 takes many cycles (over 7?) to do a simple left shift.

Another reason the mac might be over twice as fast as an amd dual mp board is not just the 2MB l3 cache but the fact that mac can read and write to a cold page of memory simulatneously FASTER than any AMD MP designs which are biased for linear access and streaming. Many memory scatter
benchmarks show this too. Apples newest DDR-RAM machines might not offer this feature though.

Intervention is a cache-coherency optimization that improves performance for dual-processor systems. If one processor modifies some data, that data first gets stored only in that processor's cache. If the other processor then wants that data, it needs to get the new modified values. In previous systems, the first processor must write the modified data to memory and then the second processor can read the correct values from memory. With intervention, the first processor sends the data directly to the second processor, reducing latency by a factor of ten or more.

maybe she's actually a he and he's actually drdink

found him.

> they have an entire article on slashdot,
> a pretty pro Linux group

Herm... I believe the major part of the readers of slashdot use Internet Explorer. I remember the slashdot staff saying this in the irc interview thing, but the log is not here anymore.

BoD

• RC5 is completely parallelizable, so you could theoretically do as many simultaneous operations as you have execution units on your processor, as long as there's enough registers to mask memory load latency. Obviously, there's many more registers on PowerPC architectures than on x86.
  
• The distributed.net core uses the Altivec SIMD extension on the G4, which has a useless rotate instruction, which serves absolutely no purpose that I know of on anything other than RC5 encryption. So I see Intel's point in not including a rotate instruction in SSE2: bit rotation is a completely useless operation except for RC5. Did I make my point clear enough? However, that makes it difficult to use SSE2, given the limited amount of registers available, coupled with the need to emulate a rotate instruction by means of shifts, ORs and an additional temporary register.
  

• number of bits in key rounded to the next 32-bit multiple (64 bits in RC5-64, 96 bits in RC5-72)
  
• number of cyphers round plus one, times 8 bytes (12 rounds in the RSA Secret Key challenge equals 104 bytes)
  
• 8 bytes for two temporary variables, which hold the plaintext before encryption and the cyphertext after encryption, or the cyphertext before decryption and the plaintext after decryption.
  

[acidblood] More registers available (32 in the PowerPC versus 8 in MMX and SSE2), plus 128-bit wide registers (MMX is only 64-bit wide), and the existence of a hardware vector rotate instruction in Altivec, which isn't available in MMX and SSE2.

For those wanting a more readable version, try the HTML version.

a more readable version is at: http://www.slashnet.org/forums/DCTI-20020928.html

Just for the record, we also have a list of the questions that were sent to the bot, but not used due to time constraints. The d.net guys were nice enough to hang around for an hour or so after the forum was over (and after the log ended) to chat with everyone who stuck around.

Link

We've got the DCTI forum logs up if anyone missed the IRC chat.

There is a forum scheduled with the d.net guys on SlashNET this Saturday.

You seem to have no problem calling Jonathan Hedley a theif, and what's he's done doesn't even affect you directly.

<hemos_>Alterslash is illegal. And is violating copyright.
<CmdrTaco> Oh, this is a real site?
<CmdrTaco> Thats totally a copyright violation. [....] I wish people wouldn't steal.

In any case, this is probably just shitty reporting, and what Nokia probably said was that "anyone who sits outside an office and uses a company's wireless network to do their own web surfing is stealing," not "warchalking". Or has the term "warchalking" changed to include those actually surfing as well? Damn Internet, new words get coined one day and their meaning gets perverted the next.

might want to be aware of this little feature at their disposal. Here on SlashNET, we frown at such things. I, as the ircd maintainer, refuse to include such things in our ircd and have refused patches such as this in the past. Evil stuff.

The majority of the OSDN channels that were on OPN (#sourceforge, etc.) have already moved to SlashNET for IRC.

OPN is in a sad state, currently, with lilo constantly soliciting money and/or services from the IRCers. It just all seems rather childish to me.

There's always SlashNet

There's always SlashNET.

You're stealing, you know it, I know it, now be a man about it...

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Well, according to CmdrTaco, it means the same thing as copyright infringement. "Thats totally a copyright violation... I wish people wouldn't steal."

Thank god they shut down napster and stopped piracy.

The CD-Rs were most likely burned from mp3s downloaded from P2P networks. Besides, 10s of thousands of CDs distributed mostly in urban U.S. cities is hardly comparable to the millions that were downloaded across the globe on napster.

Besides, Taco, you almost sound like you condone music piracy. Aren't you the one who said "I wish people wouldn't steal"?

Whoever put my shit on the Internet, I want to meet that motherfucker and beat the shit out of him... - Eminem ( quote)

Users who do not want to take a subscription, or demand that certain changes be made to the website or the editorial policy before they would consider doing so, are often called "whiners"; practices like using software such as the Internet Junkbuster to view ad-free pages without paying are scorned upon by the editors.

Now, let's look at Pater's (aka "Cowboi Kneel") record when it comes to compensating websites for services rendered.
Over at livejournal.com, said slashdot editor keeps a diary.But before I come to the heart of the matter: What is livejournal.com exactly? Let me quote from their website:

LiveJournal.com is a volunteer-run website where you can keep your journal online. We're constantly adding new features and trying to improve the user experience. We cater to all levels of users, from the most technically incompetent to programmers and system administrators. Nearly all development and "business" decisions are discussed in public.

You do not have to pay any money to use this service. You can buy a paid account to show your support and to help us afford better hardware and bring you new features, but you don't have to.

(Emphasis mine.)

You also get some additional features by paying for an account, similar to Slashdot ("feature" there: no ads)

Now, on livejournal.com there are 4 categories of membership:

"Free account" -- this is the default account type, with which you can do almost everything. The most notable exception is that users with free accounts cannot create new styles (editing the HTML for their journal).

"Early Adopter" -- All users before mid-September 2000 are considered early adopters, and have access to a subset of the paid account functionality. They have access to create styles, and view their journal at username.livejournal.com.

"Paid account" -- The user has access to all paid account functionality.

"Permanent Account" -- the user has all paid functionality with no expiration date. The user is either a LiveJournal developer or has contributed a significant amount of time or money to the project.

We would of course expect Neal to support this volunteer-run, non-profit. ad-free website by getting a paid account? Isn't this the Linux, the open source spirit of the new millenium?
After all, he's been keeping his journal there since at least the beginning of April 2002, so he should have had ample time to see if livejournal.com's service is worth the money.

If we now look at Cowboi Kneel's user info, what do we see?

Account type: Free User

Oh no! My assumption was wrong; what, for Christ's sake, happened? Why would Pater not want to support such an excellent site as livejournal.com?

Could it be that Cowboy Neal is a freeloader, that he doesn't what to help a site which does offer some value to him (obviously, as he's been posting there for more than a month)? That he doesn't have any problem whatsoever using up their bandwidth, disk space and volunteer time without giving something in return, all the while (together with the other editors) expecting us, the users of slashdot.com, to donate ( "we regard this as a tip jar" ) to their corporate, profit-driven site?

Could it be that Cowboy Neal is a hypocrite?

Users who do not want to take a subscription, or demand that certain changes be made to the website or the editorial policy before they would consider doing so, are often called "whiners"; practices like using software such as the Internet Junkbuster to view ad-free pages without paying are scorned upon by the editors.

Now, let's look at Pater's (aka "Cowboi Kneel") record when it comes to compensating websites for services rendered.
Over at livejournal.com, said slashdot editor keeps a diary.But before I come to the heart of the matter: What is livejournal.com exactly? Let me quote from their website:

LiveJournal.com is a volunteer-run website where you can keep your journal online. We're constantly adding new features and trying to improve the user experience. We cater to all levels of users, from the most technically incompetent to programmers and system administrators. Nearly all development and "business" decisions are discussed in public.

You do not have to pay any money to use this service. You can buy a paid account to show your support and to help us afford better hardware and bring you new features, but you don't have to.

(Emphasis mine.)

You also get some additional features by paying for an account, similar to Slashdot ("feature" there: no ads)

Now, on livejournal.com there are 4 categories of membership:

"Free account" -- this is the default account type, with which you can do almost everything. The most notable exception is that users with free accounts cannot create new styles (editing the HTML for their journal).

"Early Adopter" -- All users before mid-September 2000 are considered early adopters, and have access to a subset of the paid account functionality. They have access to create styles, and view their journal at username.livejournal.com.

"Paid account" -- The user has access to all paid account functionality.

"Permanent Account" -- the user has all paid functionality with no expiration date. The user is either a LiveJournal developer or has contributed a significant amount of time or money to the project.

We would of course expect Neal to support this volunteer-run, non-profit. ad-free website by getting a paid account? Isn't this the Linux, the open source spirit of the new millenium?
After all, he's been keeping his journal there since at least the beginning of April 2002, so he should have had ample time to see if livejournal.com's service is worth the money.

If we now look at Cowboi Kneel's user info, what do we see?

Account type: Free User

Oh no! My assumption was wrong; what, for Christ's sake, happened? Why would Pater not want to support such an excellent site as livejournal.com?

Could it be that Cowboy Neal is a freeloader, that he doesn't what to help a site which does offer some value to him (obviously, as he's been posting there for more than a month)? That he doesn't have any problem whatsoever using up their bandwidth, disk space and volunteer time without giving something in return, all the while (together with the other editors) expecting us, the users of slashdot.com, to donate ( "we regard this as a tip jar" ) to their corporate, profit-driven site?

Could it be that Cowboy Neal is a hypocrite?

Users who do not want to take a subscription, or demand that certain changes be made to the website or the editorial policy before they would consider doing so, are often called "whiners"; practices like using software such as the Internet Junkbuster to view ad-free pages without paying are scorned upon by the editors.

Now, let's look at Pater's (aka "Cowboi Kneel") record when it comes to compensating websites for services rendered.
Over at livejournal.com, said slashdot editor keeps a diary.But before I come to the heart of the matter: What is livejournal.com exactly? Let me quote from their website:

LiveJournal.com is a volunteer-run website where you can keep your journal online. We're constantly adding new features and trying to improve the user experience. We cater to all levels of users, from the most technically incompetent to programmers and system administrators. Nearly all development and "business" decisions are discussed in public.

You do not have to pay any money to use this service. You can buy a paid account to show your support and to help us afford better hardware and bring you new features, but you don't have to.

(Emphasis mine.)

You also get some additional features by paying for an account, similar to Slashdot ("feature" there: no ads)

Now, on livejournal.com there are 4 categories of membership:

"Free account" -- this is the default account type, with which you can do almost everything. The most notable exception is that users with free accounts cannot create new styles (editing the HTML for their journal).

"Early Adopter" -- All users before mid-September 2000 are considered early adopters, and have access to a subset of the paid account functionality. They have access to create styles, and view their journal at username.livejournal.com.

"Paid account" -- The user has access to all paid account functionality.

"Permanent Account" -- the user has all paid functionality with no expiration date. The user is either a LiveJournal developer or has contributed a significant amount of time or money to the project.

We would of course expect Neal to support this volunteer-run, non-profit. ad-free website by getting a paid account? Isn't this the Linux, the open source spirit of the new millenium?
After all, he's been keeping his journal there since at least the beginning of April 2002, so he should have had ample time to see if livejournal.com's service is worth the money.

If we now look at Cowboi Kneel's user info, what do we see?

Account type: Free User

Oh no! My assumption was wrong; what, for Christ's sake, happened? Why would Pater not want to support such an excellent site as livejournal.com?

Could it be that Cowboy Neal is a freeloader, that he doesn't what to help a site which does offer some value to him (obviously, as he's been posting there for more than a month)? That he doesn't have any problem whatsoever using up their bandwidth, disk space and volunteer time without giving something in return, all the while (together with the other editors) expecting us, the users of slashdot.com, to donate ( "we regard this as a tip jar" ) to their corporate, profit-driven site?

Could it be that Cowboy Neal is a hypocrite?

Users who do not want to take a subscription, or demand that certain changes be made to the website or the editorial policy before they would consider doing so, are often called "whiners"; practices like using software such as the Internet Junkbuster to view ad-free pages without paying are scorned upon by the editors.

Now, let's look at Pater's (aka "Cowboi Kneel") record when it comes to compensating websites for services rendered.
Over at livejournal.com, said slashdot editor keeps a diary.But before I come to the heart of the matter: What is livejournal.com exactly? Let me quote from their website:

LiveJournal.com is a volunteer-run website where you can keep your journal online. We're constantly adding new features and trying to improve the user experience. We cater to all levels of users, from the most technically incompetent to programmers and system administrators. Nearly all development and "business" decisions are discussed in public.

You do not have to pay any money to use this service. You can buy a paid account to show your support and to help us afford better hardware and bring you new features, but you don't have to.

(Emphasis mine.)

You also get some additional features by paying for an account, similar to Slashdot ("feature" there: no ads)

Now, on livejournal.com there are 4 categories of membership:

"Free account" -- this is the default account type, with which you can do almost everything. The most notable exception is that users with free accounts cannot create new styles (editing the HTML for their journal).

"Early Adopter" -- All users before mid-September 2000 are considered early adopters, and have access to a subset of the paid account functionality. They have access to create styles, and view their journal at username.livejournal.com.

"Paid account" -- The user has access to all paid account functionality.

"Permanent Account" -- the user has all paid functionality with no expiration date. The user is either a LiveJournal developer or has contributed a significant amount of time or money to the project.

We would of course expect Neal to support this volunteer-run, non-profit. ad-free website by getting a paid account? Isn't this the Linux, the open source spirit of the new millenium?
After all, he's been keeping his journal there since at least the beginning of April 2002, so he should have had ample time to see if livejournal.com's service is worth the money.

If we now look at Cowboi Kneel's user info, what do we see?

Account type: Free User

Oh no! My assumption was wrong; what, for Christ's sake, happened? Why would Pater not want to support such an excellent site as livejournal.com?

Could it be that Cowboy Neal is a freeloader, that he doesn't what to help a site which does offer some value to him (obviously, as he's been posting there for more than a month)? That he doesn't have any problem whatsoever using up their bandwidth, disk space and volunteer time without giving something in return, all the while (together with the other editors) expecting us, the users of slashdot.com, to donate ( "we regard this as a tip jar" ) to their corporate, profit-driven site?

Could it be that Cowboy Neal is a hypocrite?

Users who do not want to take a subscription, or demand that certain changes be made to the website or the editorial policy before they would consider doing so, are often called "whiners"; practices like using software such as the Internet Junkbuster to view ad-free pages without paying are scorned upon by the editors.

Now, let's look at Pater's (aka "Cowboi Kneel") record when it comes to compensating websites for services rendered.
Over at livejournal.com, said slashdot editor keeps a diary.But before I come to the heart of the matter: What is livejournal.com exactly? Let me quote from their website:

LiveJournal.com is a volunteer-run website where you can keep your journal online. We're constantly adding new features and trying to improve the user experience. We cater to all levels of users, from the most technically incompetent to programmers and system administrators. Nearly all development and "business" decisions are discussed in public.

You do not have to pay any money to use this service. You can buy a paid account to show your support and to help us afford better hardware and bring you new features, but you don't have to.

(Emphasis mine.)

You also get some additional features by paying for an account, similar to Slashdot ("feature" there: no ads)

Now, on livejournal.com there are 4 categories of membership:

"Free account" -- this is the default account type, with which you can do almost everything. The most notable exception is that users with free accounts cannot create new styles (editing the HTML for their journal).

"Early Adopter" -- All users before mid-September 2000 are considered early adopters, and have access to a subset of the paid account functionality. They have access to create styles, and view their journal at username.livejournal.com.

"Paid account" -- The user has access to all paid account functionality.

"Permanent Account" -- the user has all paid functionality with no expiration date. The user is either a LiveJournal developer or has contributed a significant amount of time or money to the project.

We would of course expect Neal to support this volunteer-run, non-profit. ad-free website by getting a paid account? Isn't this the Linux, the open source spirit of the new millenium?
After all, he's been keeping his journal there since at least the beginning of April 2002, so he should have had ample time to see if livejournal.com's service is worth the money.

If we now look at Cowboi Kneel's user info, what do we see?

Account type: Free User

Oh no! My assumption was wrong; what, for Christ's sake, happened? Why would Pater not want to support such an excellent site as livejournal.com?

Could it be that Cowboy Neal is a freeloader, that he doesn't what to help a site which does offer some value to him (obviously, as he's been posting there for more than a month)? That he doesn't have any problem whatsoever using up their bandwidth, disk space and volunteer time without giving something in return, all the while (together with the other editors) expecting us, the users of slashdot.com, to donate ( "we regard this as a tip jar" ) to their corporate, profit-driven site?

Could it be that Cowboy Neal is a hypocrite?

Users who do not want to take a subscription, or demand that certain changes be made to the website or the editorial policy before they would consider doing so, are often called "whiners"; practices like using software such as the Internet Junkbuster to view ad-free pages without paying are scorned upon by the editors.

Now, let's look at Pater's (aka "Cowboi Kneel") record when it comes to compensating websites for services rendered.
Over at livejournal.com, said slashdot editor keeps a diary.But before I come to the heart of the matter: What is livejournal.com exactly? Let me quote from their website:

LiveJournal.com is a volunteer-run website where you can keep your journal online. We're constantly adding new features and trying to improve the user experience. We cater to all levels of users, from the most technically incompetent to programmers and system administrators. Nearly all development and "business" decisions are discussed in public.

You do not have to pay any money to use this service. You can buy a paid account to show your support and to help us afford better hardware and bring you new features, but you don't have to.

(Emphasis mine.)

You also get some additional features by paying for an account, similar to Slashdot ("feature" there: no ads)

Now, on livejournal.com there are 4 categories of members:

"Free account" -- this is the default account type, with which you can do almost everything. The most notable exception is that users with free accounts cannot create new styles (editing the HTML for their journal).

"Early Adopter" -- All users before mid-September 2000 are considered early adopters, and have access to a subset of the paid account functionality. They have access to create styles, and view their journal at username.livejournal.com.

"Paid account" -- The user has access to all paid account functionality.

"Permanent Account" -- the user has all paid functionality with no expiration date. The user is either a LiveJournal developer or has contributed a significant amount of time or money to the project.

We would of course expect Neal to support this volunteer-run, non-profit. ad-free website by getting a paid account? Isn't this the Linux, the open source spirit of the new millenium?
After all, he's been keeping his journal there since at least the beginning of April 2002, so he should have had ample time to see if livejournal.com's service is worth the money.

If we now look at Cowboi Kneel's user info, what do we see?

Account type: Free User

Oh no! My assumption was wrong; what, for Christ's sake, happened? Why would Pater not want to support such an excellent site as livejournal.com?

Could it be that Cowboy Neal is a freeloader, that he doesn't what to help a site which does offer some value to him (obviously, as he's been posting there for more than a month)? That he doesn't have any problem whatsoever using up their bandwidth, disk space and volunteer time without giving something in return, all the while (together with the other editors) expecting us, the users of slashdot.com, to donate ( "we regard this as a tip jar" ) to their corporate, profit-driven site?

Could it be that Cowboy Neal is a hypocrite?

Hemos:
Here's the reality:
You block ads.
You cost us money.
Ultimately, I mean.

With the artists making a quarter-cent per downloaded song, they're probably just as happy to see it fail.

When asked about why the actual artist got so little, an RIAA representative answered "The value of the is questionable. The way we see it, we provide all the bandwidth, and without our promotions no one would even know about the artist. We have a lot of costs, so we should get a lot of money."

An RIAA representative was quoted as saying "People need ot [sic] understand that this system is much more akin to a tip jar then a true subscription."

The scariest part:

It's really scary tho- more then half of Slashdot's readers NEVER read a comment. - CmdrTaco

Half the people who come here never read more than the crap on the front page.

Yes (search for the string alterslash). Prepare for some serious cease 'n' desist action, pal.

An earlier suggestion of using mod_gzip to compress pages before transmission is a great idea to reduce server bandwidth by nearly an order of magnitude. This should be implemented as a matter of urgency imho.

From the IRC Log at 17:16:

Questions
Metaliman asks: How much bandwidth does slashdot use in a day?
CmdrTaco
12-20 megabits on the main box.
probably half thta on the images box.
Less since we started gzipping.
we were spiking at like 35 total.
next?

-- --

In this comment, Micah suggested "...mod_gzip works wonders on Slash based sites, so I have no idea why they don't use it here."

To which CowboyNeal replied "We already use it. It's a noticeable amount of bandwidth that we save, but it's far from half"

-- -- --

So you see, you had the right idea, but were beaten to the punch.

NOW LEARN TO FREAKING SPELL

A little bit of karma whoring, but as a SlashNET server administrator I'd like to point out that we have servers in the U.S.A., Europe and Australia. So, use:
- eu.slashnet.org
- us.slashnet.org
- au.slashnet.org

You may also check out our brand new fancy website at www.slashnet.org for more information :)

From what I understand, EFnet is a real mess because they don't use things like ChanServs/nickservs, etc, so stupid script kiddies will try to DDoS servers and users in attempts to take over channels (yes, extremely stupid)

I wonder why the colorado.edu people didn't just move to another network? Undernet, I believe, supports more advance authentication methods. There's slashnet :) and some others. They could also have tried going it alone, as a server for the local university.

I don't really think IRC is dying per-se, but these big networks are really becoming untenable. In my experience, it seems to be dividing up into niche community networks like slashnet, espernet (RPG stuff) with a few major rooms -- such as #slashdot and #kuro5hin on slashnet -- where most people hang out.

Also, in all this time I never knew what Efnet stood for, just finding that out was worth clicking the story :P

Quite trivial, mind you, but wouldn't it be confused with this Cyclone?

--

DoS attacks just aren't cool ever.

From:
http://www.slashnet.org/for ums /Slashdot-05Oct00.html

[21:17:34] <CmdrTaco> bob_jones_iii is being an annoying prick.
[21:17:43] <CmdrTaco> can we kill him? someone dos him ;)

Sheesh. Not cool. Ever. Except when it's convenient. (I Quote from comment #125 by arcade on the comments thread from http://slashdot.org/articl es/ 00/10/07/0025253_F.shtml:

Cmdrtaco sounded a lot more like a scriptkiddie than I really liked. Comments like:

bob_jones_iii is being an annoying prick. can we kill him? someone dos him ;)

Really really disappointed me. Sure, he's got a smiley there, but still. I wouldn't be surprised if someone actually DoS'ed the sucker because "o allmighty Taco told them to".

Slightly offtopic? Perhaps. Making a point? Absolutely.

Feel free to make a new one that can take the input of the text log and output something in HTML. The current script was given to me by jwz. I am happy with it so I have no incentive to update it. If you can present something better, I'd be interrested to see it and possibly use it.