Slashdot Mirror
NetBSD 1.6 Has Been Branched
jschauma writes "Following Todd Vierlings announcement to the current-users Mailinglist, the NetBSD 1.6 Release Process has begun. This means not only that 1.6 has been branched off the cvs-tree, but also that daily snapshots will soon be available. Changes from 1.5 to 1.6 are listed here.
A brief announcement including a best-case scenario release timetable is available from here.
Whooot."
Dispite all of the blathering about how BSD is a dying breed of OS, the developers who have dedicated their time to BSD continue to make strides.
Hats off to the NetBSD team!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I've had a funny day, and that was still in the top 5 funny things that has happened, well done :)
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
With 1.6 is there going to be support for any new platforms? I haven't used NetBSD (can you tell?) but I would love to try it out on a couple of Netwinders. Seeing the Netwinder page on netbsd.org with no information on it is a tease ;)
For all practical purposes, Trolls are dead.
:)
I wonder if a Turn Undead scroll would work.
Just a warning. The troll under the BSD bridge appears to dislike people: flea bite. I got de-karma-ized.
I think the only BSD version will be long live is
OpenBSD, they have better control of source code
and nice utilities and audited code.
As I understand it, this will be the first release where all architectures are ELF based. No more recompiling the linker to avoid annoying warning messages on the Vax! The compiler will also be brought more upto date, and X will be version 4.2.0. Having followed the NetBSD security mailing list for a while, there will also be some nice little tweaks to the default install.
I'm a little bit unclear on whether this release will feature native threading support, which is the only API I'm missing from a certain other Unix-like operating system. Anyone reading know the score on threading support in 1.6?
Chris
Now we have to deal with OpenBSD trolls too?
Net and Free both use teams to control them. If someone gets pissed and leaves then life will go one for the rest. Several have left FreeBSD over the years and they keep moving forward.
If Theo decided that he was done or got fed up with all the other idiots out there(there's always idiots out there) then he could shut OpenBSD down tomorrow. Of course the source is all available and there are plenty of OpenBSD developers out there and maybe one or more would pick up the torch.
Theo still owns the copyright for the name and CD layout. The end result would be a fork of OpenBSD but how good would it be without Theo at the helm?
I love OpenBSD but *even* I realize that an OS is not a religion. They all have their respective areas for strengths and weaknesses. None are perfect and I think all 3 are very solid for their areas. I wouldn't pick OpenBSD for SMP or if I had a MIPS box but it sure would be a the top of the list for say bridging, firewall, routing, etc. and would be just fine for a single processor DHCP, webserver, AFS, etc.
No native threading yet. There is the nathanw_saB RANCHES?r ev=1.38&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&only_wit h_tag=HEAD) and
branch to -current, which implements scheduler
activations to come up with a native thread
implementation. It's worth checking out
doc/BRANCHES (e.g. cvsweb:
http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/doc/
read the pointers nathanw has put in that file
to understand the difference between this implementation,
what Linux initially chose, and user threading libs
like e.g. gnu pth.
IIrc, there was this question somewhen on current-users ML, too, and ppl have said
that it's likely there will be a new release (be it 1.7 or 2.0 or whatever) after quite short time
(compared to previous releases) which will merge
nathanw_sa and sommerfeld_i386_mp to both get
i386 MP support into it as well as the native
thread library.
Hth
I follow BSD pretty regularly, and it seems like FreeBSD and OpenBSD churn out new releases every 6 months or so give or take, but from what i know of NetBSD it's been a while since they had a release. Does anyone know the reason for this, is it maybe due to less developers or integrating more things into the release. I remember reading on here a bit ago about zero buffering in the ethernet is it that stuff that's causing the hold up?
ahh, the egg in the basket..
Did you know that NetBSD's ports collection is actually slightly larger than OpenBSD's? Everyone knows that FreeBSD is a cornucopia of packages....possibly even more than Debian, depending on how you count.
Personally, I think if FreeBSD wants become more sucessful it needs to place the highest emphasis on porting to a few more architectures. Start with PPC and sparc64 since they're already fielded and widely used, then work on ia64 and x86-64 after that. I say this because x86 won't be around forever....look at all the consolidation and standardization among consumer PC's already...the trend is toward 'set top boxes' but I think it's been slowed with the tech economy's depression. Intel's insane price cuts on CPU's can only be hastening this devastation of profit margins.
With a commerical advocate in Wasabi Systems, NetBSD is poised to make a big splash in the growing embedded/wireless business and might well be the OS for anyone interested in wireless applications to focus on.
(Reposted from an eariler story -- worth reading.)
It is now official - a Slashdot poll has confirmed: Slashdot is dyingYet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently a poll on the site confirmed that up-to-date and factually-correct stories account for less than 40 percent of all submitted news stories, that the user-moderation system has fallen to pieces through the oppressive power of the editors, and that subscribers don't need to pay and can use such software as JunkBuster to filter out adverts. Coming on the heels of the latest MSNBC survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more readers, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Kuro5hin technology site popularity test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for the site. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose readers. Red ink flows like a river of blood. The subscribers scheme is the most endangered of them all, having lost 62% of its paying readers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot editor and homosexual-rights campaigner Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) states that there are 700 paying subscribers to Slashdot. How many normal readers are there? Let's see. The number of subscriber versus reader posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 1 to 4. Therefore there are about 700*4 = 2800 normal casual readers. Anonymous Coward posts are about half of the volume of the typical posts. Therefore there are about 1400 readers who can't be bothered setting up an account. A recent article put the Trolls, who post sexual insults, foul ASCII art pictures and links to vile sites, at about 80 percent of the Slashdot readership. Therefore there are (700+8400+4200)*4 = 19600 trolling readers. This is consistent with the number of Troll posts.
Due to the troubles of Andover.net, abysmal hit counts and so on, Slashdot went out of business and was taken over by OSDN who run another troubled site. Now OSDN is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in readership. It is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geeky hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
So why now? Why did Slashdot fail? Once you get over the myriad of incompatible personalities, particularly among the editors who have repeatedly failed to check for serious inaccuracies in their stories (see the FreeBSD 4.5 "release" as a shocking example), it's clear that subscribers will continue to decrease. Using software such as JunkBuster, readers can eliminate adverts without having to pay any money. These two significant factors, along with the corrupted "moderation" scheme (where editors have infinite power over the regular moderators), only confirm yet further that Slashdot's glory days are coming to an end.
Fact: Slashdot is dying
(Reposted from an eariler story -- worth reading.)
It is now official - a Slashdot poll has confirmed: Slashdot is dyingYet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently a poll on the site confirmed that up-to-date and factually-correct stories account for less than 40 percent of all submitted news stories, that the user-moderation system has fallen to pieces through the oppressive power of the editors, and that subscribers don't need to pay and can use such software as JunkBuster to filter out adverts. Coming on the heels of the latest MSNBC survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more readers, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Kuro5hin technology site popularity test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for the site. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose readers. Red ink flows like a river of blood. The subscribers scheme is the most endangered of them all, having lost 62% of its paying readers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot editor and homosexual-rights campaigner Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) states that there are 700 paying subscribers to Slashdot. How many normal readers are there? Let's see. The number of subscriber versus reader posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 1 to 4. Therefore there are about 700*4 = 2800 normal casual readers. Anonymous Coward posts are about half of the volume of the typical posts. Therefore there are about 1400 readers who can't be bothered setting up an account. A recent article put the Trolls, who post sexual insults, foul ASCII art pictures and links to vile sites, at about 80 percent of the Slashdot readership. Therefore there are (700+8400+4200)*4 = 19600 trolling readers. This is consistent with the number of Troll posts.
Due to the troubles of Andover.net, abysmal hit counts and so on, Slashdot went out of business and was taken over by OSDN who run another troubled site. Now OSDN is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in readership. It is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geeky hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
So why now? Why did Slashdot fail? Once you get over the myriad of incompatible personalities, particularly among the editors who have repeatedly failed to check for serious inaccuracies in their stories (see the FreeBSD 4.5 "release" as a shocking example), it's clear that subscribers will continue to decrease. Using software such as JunkBuster, readers can eliminate adverts without having to pay any money. These two significant factors, along with the corrupted "moderation" scheme (where editors have infinite power over the regular moderators), only confirm yet further that Slashdot's glory days are coming to an end.
Fact: Slashdot is dying
(Reposted from an eariler story -- worth reading.)
It is now official - a Slashdot poll has confirmed: Slashdot is dyingYet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently a poll on the site confirmed that up-to-date and factually-correct stories account for less than 40 percent of all submitted news stories, that the user-moderation system has fallen to pieces through the oppressive power of the editors, and that subscribers don't need to pay and can use such software as JunkBuster to filter out adverts. Coming on the heels of the latest MSNBC survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more readers, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Kuro5hin technology site popularity test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for the site. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose readers. Red ink flows like a river of blood. The subscribers scheme is the most endangered of them all, having lost 62% of its paying readers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot editor and homosexual-rights campaigner Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) states that there are 700 paying subscribers to Slashdot. How many normal readers are there? Let's see. The number of subscriber versus reader posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 1 to 4. Therefore there are about 700*4 = 2800 normal casual readers. Anonymous Coward posts are about half of the volume of the typical posts. Therefore there are about 1400 readers who can't be bothered setting up an account. A recent article put the Trolls, who post sexual insults, foul ASCII art pictures and links to vile sites, at about 80 percent of the Slashdot readership. Therefore there are (700+8400+4200)*4 = 19600 trolling readers. This is consistent with the number of Troll posts.
Due to the troubles of Andover.net, abysmal hit counts and so on, Slashdot went out of business and was taken over by OSDN who run another troubled site. Now OSDN is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in readership. It is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geeky hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
So why now? Why did Slashdot fail? Once you get over the myriad of incompatible personalities, particularly among the editors who have repeatedly failed to check for serious inaccuracies in their stories (see the FreeBSD 4.5 "release" as a shocking example), it's clear that subscribers will continue to decrease. Using software such as JunkBuster, readers can eliminate adverts without having to pay any money. These two significant factors, along with the corrupted "moderation" scheme (where editors have infinite power over the regular moderators), only confirm yet further that Slashdot's glory days are coming to an end.
Fact: Slashdot is dying
(Reposted from an eariler story -- worth reading.)
It is now official - a Slashdot poll has confirmed: Slashdot is dyingYet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently a poll on the site confirmed that up-to-date and factually-correct stories account for less than 40 percent of all submitted news stories, that the user-moderation system has fallen to pieces through the oppressive power of the editors, and that subscribers don't need to pay and can use such software as JunkBuster to filter out adverts. Coming on the heels of the latest MSNBC survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more readers, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Kuro5hin technology site popularity test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for the site. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose readers. Red ink flows like a river of blood. The subscribers scheme is the most endangered of them all, having lost 62% of its paying readers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot editor and homosexual-rights campaigner Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) states that there are 700 paying subscribers to Slashdot. How many normal readers are there? Let's see. The number of subscriber versus reader posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 1 to 4. Therefore there are about 700*4 = 2800 normal casual readers. Anonymous Coward posts are about half of the volume of the typical posts. Therefore there are about 1400 readers who can't be bothered setting up an account. A recent article put the Trolls, who post sexual insults, foul ASCII art pictures and links to vile sites, at about 80 percent of the Slashdot readership. Therefore there are (700+8400+4200)*4 = 19600 trolling readers. This is consistent with the number of Troll posts.
Due to the troubles of Andover.net, abysmal hit counts and so on, Slashdot went out of business and was taken over by OSDN who run another troubled site. Now OSDN is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in readership. It is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geeky hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
So why now? Why did Slashdot fail? Once you get over the myriad of incompatible personalities, particularly among the editors who have repeatedly failed to check for serious inaccuracies in their stories (see the FreeBSD 4.5 "release" as a shocking example), it's clear that subscribers will continue to decrease. Using software such as JunkBuster, readers can eliminate adverts without having to pay any money. These two significant factors, along with the corrupted "moderation" scheme (where editors have infinite power over the regular moderators), only confirm yet further that Slashdot's glory days are coming to an end.
Fact: Slashdot is dying
(Reposted from an eariler story -- worth reading.)
It is now official - a Slashdot poll has confirmed: Slashdot is dyingYet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently a poll on the site confirmed that up-to-date and factually-correct stories account for less than 40 percent of all submitted news stories, that the user-moderation system has fallen to pieces through the oppressive power of the editors, and that subscribers don't need to pay and can use such software as JunkBuster to filter out adverts. Coming on the heels of the latest MSNBC survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more readers, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Kuro5hin technology site popularity test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for the site. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose readers. Red ink flows like a river of blood. The subscribers scheme is the most endangered of them all, having lost 62% of its paying readers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot editor and homosexual-rights campaigner Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) states that there are 700 paying subscribers to Slashdot. How many normal readers are there? Let's see. The number of subscriber versus reader posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 1 to 4. Therefore there are about 700*4 = 2800 normal casual readers. Anonymous Coward posts are about half of the volume of the typical posts. Therefore there are about 1400 readers who can't be bothered setting up an account. A recent article put the Trolls, who post sexual insults, foul ASCII art pictures and links to vile sites, at about 80 percent of the Slashdot readership. Therefore there are (700+8400+4200)*4 = 19600 trolling readers. This is consistent with the number of Troll posts.
Due to the troubles of Andover.net, abysmal hit counts and so on, Slashdot went out of business and was taken over by OSDN who run another troubled site. Now OSDN is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in readership. It is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geeky hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
So why now? Why did Slashdot fail? Once you get over the myriad of incompatible personalities, particularly among the editors who have repeatedly failed to check for serious inaccuracies in their stories (see the FreeBSD 4.5 "release" as a shocking example), it's clear that subscribers will continue to decrease. Using software such as JunkBuster, readers can eliminate adverts without having to pay any money. These two significant factors, along with the corrupted "moderation" scheme (where editors have infinite power over the regular moderators), only confirm yet further that Slashdot's glory days are coming to an end.
Fact: Slashdot is dying
(Reposted from an eariler story -- worth reading.)
It is now official - a Slashdot poll has confirmed: Slashdot is dyingYet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently a poll on the site confirmed that up-to-date and factually-correct stories account for less than 40 percent of all submitted news stories, that the user-moderation system has fallen to pieces through the oppressive power of the editors, and that subscribers don't need to pay and can use such software as JunkBuster to filter out adverts. Coming on the heels of the latest MSNBC survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more readers, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Kuro5hin technology site popularity test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for the site. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose readers. Red ink flows like a river of blood. The subscribers scheme is the most endangered of them all, having lost 62% of its paying readers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot editor and homosexual-rights campaigner Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) states that there are 700 paying subscribers to Slashdot. How many normal readers are there? Let's see. The number of subscriber versus reader posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 1 to 4. Therefore there are about 700*4 = 2800 normal casual readers. Anonymous Coward posts are about half of the volume of the typical posts. Therefore there are about 1400 readers who can't be bothered setting up an account. A recent article put the Trolls, who post sexual insults, foul ASCII art pictures and links to vile sites, at about 80 percent of the Slashdot readership. Therefore there are (700+8400+4200)*4 = 19600 trolling readers. This is consistent with the number of Troll posts.
Due to the troubles of Andover.net, abysmal hit counts and so on, Slashdot went out of business and was taken over by OSDN who run another troubled site. Now OSDN is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in readership. It is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geeky hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
So why now? Why did Slashdot fail? Once you get over the myriad of incompatible personalities, particularly among the editors who have repeatedly failed to check for serious inaccuracies in their stories (see the FreeBSD 4.5 "release" as a shocking example), it's clear that subscribers will continue to decrease. Using software such as JunkBuster, readers can eliminate adverts without having to pay any money. These two significant factors, along with the corrupted "moderation" scheme (where editors have infinite power over the regular moderators), only confirm yet further that Slashdot's glory days are coming to an end.
Fact: Slashdot is dying
(Reposted from an eariler story -- worth reading.)
It is now official - a Slashdot poll has confirmed: Slashdot is dyingYet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently a poll on the site confirmed that up-to-date and factually-correct stories account for less than 40 percent of all submitted news stories, that the user-moderation system has fallen to pieces through the oppressive power of the editors, and that subscribers don't need to pay and can use such software as JunkBuster to filter out adverts. Coming on the heels of the latest MSNBC survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more readers, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Kuro5hin technology site popularity test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for the site. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose readers. Red ink flows like a river of blood. The subscribers scheme is the most endangered of them all, having lost 62% of its paying readers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot editor and homosexual-rights campaigner Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) states that there are 700 paying subscribers to Slashdot. How many normal readers are there? Let's see. The number of subscriber versus reader posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 1 to 4. Therefore there are about 700*4 = 2800 normal casual readers. Anonymous Coward posts are about half of the volume of the typical posts. Therefore there are about 1400 readers who can't be bothered setting up an account. A recent article put the Trolls, who post sexual insults, foul ASCII art pictures and links to vile sites, at about 80 percent of the Slashdot readership. Therefore there are (700+8400+4200)*4 = 19600 trolling readers. This is consistent with the number of Troll posts.
Due to the troubles of Andover.net, abysmal hit counts and so on, Slashdot went out of business and was taken over by OSDN who run another troubled site. Now OSDN is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in readership. It is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geeky hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
So why now? Why did Slashdot fail? Once you get over the myriad of incompatible personalities, particularly among the editors who have repeatedly failed to check for serious inaccuracies in their stories (see the FreeBSD 4.5 "release" as a shocking example), it's clear that subscribers will continue to decrease. Using software such as JunkBuster, readers can eliminate adverts without having to pay any money. These two significant factors, along with the corrupted "moderation" scheme (where editors have infinite power over the regular moderators), only confirm yet further that Slashdot's glory days are coming to an end.
Fact: Slashdot is dying
(Reposted from an eariler story -- worth reading.)
It is now official - a Slashdot poll has confirmed: Slashdot is dyingYet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently a poll on the site confirmed that up-to-date and factually-correct stories account for less than 40 percent of all submitted news stories, that the user-moderation system has fallen to pieces through the oppressive power of the editors, and that subscribers don't need to pay and can use such software as JunkBuster to filter out adverts. Coming on the heels of the latest MSNBC survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more readers, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Kuro5hin technology site popularity test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for it because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for the site. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose readers. Red ink flows like a river of blood. The subscribers scheme is the most endangered of them all, having lost 62% of its paying readers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Slashdot editor and homosexual-rights campaigner Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) states that there are 700 paying subscribers to Slashdot. How many normal readers are there? Let's see. The number of subscriber versus reader posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 1 to 4. Therefore there are about 700*4 = 2800 normal casual readers. Anonymous Coward posts are about half of the volume of the typical posts. Therefore there are about 1400 readers who can't be bothered setting up an account. A recent article put the Trolls, who post sexual insults, foul ASCII art pictures and links to vile sites, at about 80 percent of the Slashdot readership. Therefore there are (700+8400+4200)*4 = 19600 trolling readers. This is consistent with the number of Troll posts.
Due to the troubles of Andover.net, abysmal hit counts and so on, Slashdot went out of business and was taken over by OSDN who run another troubled site. Now OSDN is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in readership. It is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among geeky hobbyist dabblers. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.
So why now? Why did Slashdot fail? Once you get over the myriad of incompatible personalities, particularly among the editors who have repeatedly failed to check for serious inaccuracies in their stories (see the FreeBSD 4.5 "release" as a shocking example), it's clear that subscribers will continue to decrease. Using software such as JunkBuster, readers can eliminate adverts without having to pay any money. These two significant factors, along with the corrupted "moderation" scheme (where editors have infinite power over the regular moderators), only confirm yet further that Slashdot's glory days are coming to an end.
Fact: Slashdot is dying