Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Turns 5
As much as I avoid discussing Slashdot on Slashdot, I figured I'd just take
a moment to say that Slashdot is 5 years old now. I've written a
Journal Entry with a few more comments on the subject. And yes we know we jumped the shark about a week after we registered the domain name, but we just don't care! Here's hoping we're here 5 years from now doing exactly the same thing with the same folks. (As a side note, due to a data importing bug, we really don't know exactly when we made our debut, but I spent september 97 putting the site together... and when we went live, we didn't even have comments for the first week or so!)
You get comments almost immediately! First Post!
when we went live, we didn't even have comments for the first week or so!)
A whole week before a "First Post" appeared. Bliss.
I am a Karma Library.
They didn't buy a Super Bowl ad.
You've taken five years away from my life and I want them back now!
If not, the penguin gets it :P
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
That are not corporate sites, like Microsoft.com, etc
I'm talking...ad-supported.
Slashdot is the site I spent 90% on when I'm connected to the internet. It's the first thing I read every day.
Slashdot is a source of info, of pure fun and of substancial debates.
Congrats, Mista Taco!
{{.sig}}
now i can out geek all the geeks i know, by telling them i have the same birthday as slashdot.
woo-hoo.
(pretend there's something witty here)
On a related note, it would be interesting for someone to study the effects of /. on society, along the same lines as this story. I don't know about anyone else, but /. tends to be one of my greatest joys and frustrations all in one. The ability to voice your opinion in such an open manner can have a staggering effect, and I would be interested to see a study trying to quantify exactly what that effect is.
"Herbivores eat well cause their food never, ever runs."
Five years of
- AYBABTU
- Can you imagine a beowolf cluster of these?
- Natalie Portman naked and petrified
- Hot grits (down your pants)
- First post!
- goatse.cx
- Page widening
- BSD is dying
- Author Stephen King dead at 54
Like I said, feels like more..."If you think education is expensive, try ignorance" - Derek Bok
"We've posted nearly 30,000 stories. Deleted a million submissions. Served half a billion pages." ..and brought thousands of servers worldwide to their knees.
Wonder who got the first First Post?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
Hauling Down And Stomping Websites For Over 5 Years.
Every webmasters nightmare.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
I can't wait for someone to submit this story in a week and it gets posted again.
Here is the oldest archived one
Happy Birthday Slashdot!
Congrats! I sure hope that you last another 5 five years. But is the site profitable? Could it stand on its own? Could you guys buy it back if VA decides to shut it down?
Lasers Controlled Games!
about the Lone Gunman fiasco.
>
That's Interesting, that corresponds with a slow drop in productivity of the Tech sector...
Hmmm
Technology is most abused by the very people it was created to help
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door--that way Lumberg can't see me, heh--after that I sorta space out for an hour.
Yeah, I just read Slashdot, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Thanks Slashdot! Happy B-Day from all the Peter Gibbon's in this world!
I started scanning /. about three years ago. I had just started with a new company, and no other company I had worked for previously allowed lowly employees like me internet access. With slow dial-up at home, this data pipe into my work computer was amazing.
/. through some mention in a Canadian magazine I had purchased at an airport. Now, I'm not techno-geek, but I'm also not a techno-phobe. Yes, I have Windows. But yes, I run Mozilla. I'm kind of "middle of the road" when it comes to computers.
/. to be at the very least interesting, and at the very most informative and entertaining. I've learned a lot about computers, programming and technology through this site. But I've also learned a lot about law, public opinion and other diverse topics.
/. posters, it's frequently the most stimulating thing I read all day.
/. and the /. community.
/., I've managed to use a lot of what I read to my advantage. frequently, my coworkers will come to me for problems instead of bothering with our slowwwwww IT dept!
I found
I've always found the content on
I may have missed the first two years, but I'll read for the next two to make up. Although I may not always agree with
Thanks,
SIDE NOTE -- because of
TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
we didn't even have comments for the first week or so!
Is this the 'Golden Age of Slashdot' that I hear so much about?
The opposite of progress is congress
And deleting posts, while morally abhorrent, is the only way to keep ourselves from accidentally reading a 3 page long "taco snotting" FAQ.
Slashdot generally does not delete comments. Among over 4 million comments posted after the moderation system began, fewer than a half-dozen have been deleted, mostly for flagrant copyright infringement. Other than that, you can get 99.999% of everything posted, even the trash, by reading at -1.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Here's a link to the site. Strange they didn't provide one in the article. Perhaps they're afraid it'll get Slashdotted?
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
The first usenet posting (or at least the first i could find) that mentions slashdot seems to be this one dated Nov. 11 - 1997. That seems to be fairly soon after the release IMO.
Incompetence Floats
Early slashdot is just as valuable as early usenet, and I think we need to find a way to make it accessible. Isn't there some NNTP gateway code somewhere? Could slashdot export month-old stories for google groups to pick up? I bet the google guys would even help develop a new protocol if necessary.
Most valuable of all would be to establish a mechanism that other web discussion boards could use, and encourage them to make their archives available. Imagine the power of all your favorite weblogs searchable through one interface. This would be a boon for users and net historians alike.
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
Who else remembers the days of Chips n Dips? :-)
/. readers, I have to say it's been incredible watching this site grow into what it has become. Congratulations Taco and the rest of the crew; you have not only created a wonderful destination for nerds interested in stuff that matters, but you have also at least in some part created an entire genre of sites. For this, we all thank you.
As one of the first
Back when I was running Red Hat 4.2. I have 1300 comments (this is 1301). 1300. At approx 1 to 2 minutes per comment that's 20 to 40 hours spent commenting on slashdot. Shit. I want that day back!
Best Slashdot Co
Thanks goes to the people that puts a golden lining on the internet! Slashdot is the best site in the world for techies that wants to know.
/. and envy it?
I wonder just how much Microsoft admires
HTTP/1.1 400
Funny how this appeared just above the "what is the net doing to you" article. That is some perverse synchronicity.
I don't even remember my first post or when exactly it was I first registered. I used to think having a UID above 10,000 made me a Jonny come lately. Now I'm like the girzzled old man that shoos little kids off his front lawn. Maybe from now on I'll use a hose instead of my cane.
Windows still sucks, Linux is still in beta, AMD makes chips worth buying, 3Dfx is no more, AOL is spelled EVIL, Apple is cool again, Be is no longer cool (sorry OpenBeOS guys), Netscape is abbriviated EVIL, Internet Explorer still sucks, Lord of the Rings was finally made into a movie, The Phantom Menace blew goats, Natalie Portman is still hot despite her lack of petrification, apparently all my base are belong to someone, the internet is now aplace where evil cool people hang out, being a geek still gets you beat up, slashdot has advertisements, Rob STILL doesn't acknowlege story submitters and user comments as being important in the slightest to the popularity of slashdot, Stephen King has died several times at various ages, and even I have imagined a Beowulf cluster of naked and petrified Natalie Portmans pouring hot grits down my pants.
It's been a strange five years. If I didn't like the ride can I get a refund?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Over 3 million servers stress tested.
Over 2 million servers successfully slashdotted.
Welcome to the home of the 1337 H4X0RS!
What are 5-Year-Olds Like?
How I Move:
- I enjoy activities requiring hand skills.
- I draw a recognizable person.
- I am skilled and accurate with simple tools.
- I can sit still for brief periods.
- I enjoy jumping, running and skipping.
- I have adult-like posture in throwing and catching.
- I have great physical drive.
- I like dancing, am rhythmic and graceful.
- I sometimes roughhouse and fight.
- I am well coordinated.
How I Think:How I Get Along:
Crafted with love by a fellow slashdotter!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
i like the freudian slip of saying "fist" instead of "first" after you mention goatse.cx
that is priceless.
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
My only main quibble with Slashdot is why aren't YEARS SHOWN ON STORIES!?
It's great seeing 'October 01'.. but what year is that? Why do Slashdot stories not display the year? It's a pain in the ass when you search for an old story, but all you get is the date and not the year.
Am I the only one who noticed this yet?
mogorific carpentry experiments
from here
/. "gets it".
OT: History of the World, part N+1 (Score:4, Funny)
by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 12, @08:12PM EDT (#25)
2.5 million B.C.: OOG the Open Source Caveman develops the axe and releases it under the GPL. The axe quickly gains popularity as a means of crushing moderators' heads.
100,000 B.C.: Man domesticates the AIBO.
10,000 B.C.: Civilization begins when early farmers first learn to cultivate hot grits.
3000 B.C.: Sumerians develop a primitive cuneiform perl script.
2920 B.C.: A legendary flood sweeps Slashdot, filling up a Borland / Inprise story with hundreds of offtopic posts.
1750 B.C.: Hammurabi, a Mesopotamian king, codifies the first EULA.
490 B.C.: Greek city-states unite to defeat the Persians. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the Greeks "get it".
399 B.C.: Socrates is convicted of impiety. Despite the efforts of freesocrates.com, he is forced to kill himself by drinking hemlock.
336 B.C.: Fat-Time Charlie becomes King of Macedonia and conquers Persia.
4 B.C.: Following the Star (as in hot young actress) of Bethelem, wise men travel from far away to troll for baby Jesus.
A.D. 476: The Roman Empire BSODs.
A.D. 610: The Glorious MEEPT!! founds Islam after receiving a revelation from God. Following his disappearance from Slashdot in 632, a succession dispute results in the emergence of two troll factions: the Pythonni and the Perliites.
A.D. 800: Charlemagne conquers nearly all of Germany, only to be acquired by andover.net.
A.D. 874: Linus the Red discovers Iceland.
A.D. 1000: The epic of the Beowulf Cluster is written down. It is the first English epic poem.
A.D. 1095: Pope Bruce II calls for a crusade against the Turks when it is revealed they are violating the GPL. Later investigation reveals that Pope Bruce II had not yet contacted the Turks before calling for the crusade.
A.D. 1215: Bowing to pressure to open-source the British government, King John signs the Magna Carta, limiting the British monarchy's power. ESR triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1348: The ILOVEYOU virus kills over half the population of Europe. (The other half was not using Outlook.)
A.D. 1420: Johann Gutenberg invents the printing press. He is immediately sued by monks claiming that the technology will promote the copying of hand-transcribed books, thus violating the church's intellectual property.
A.D. 1429: Natalie Portman of Arc gathers an army of Slashdot trolls to do battle with the moderators. She is eventually tried as a heretic and stoned (as in petrified).
A.D. 1478: The Catholic Church partners with doubleclick.net to launch the Spanish Inquisition.
A.D. 1492: Christopher Columbus arrives in what he believes to be "India", but which RMS informs him is actually "GNU/India".
A.D. 1508-12: Michaelengelo attempts to paint the Sistine Chapel ceiling with ASCII art, only to have his plan thwarted by the "Lameness Filter."
A.D. 1517: Martin Luther nails his 95 Theses to the church door and is promptly moderated down to (-1, Flamebait).
A.D. 1553: "Bloody" Mary ascends the throne of England and begins an infamous crusade against Protestants. ESR eats his words.
A.D. 1588: The "IF I EVER MEET YOU, I WILL KICK YOUR ASS" guy meets the Spanish Armada.
A.D. 1603: Tokugawa Ieyasu unites the feuding pancake-eating ninjas of Japan.
A.D. 1611: Mattel adds Galileo Galilei to its CyberPatrol block list for proposing that the Earth revolves around the sun.
A.D. 1688: In the so-called "Glorious Revolution", King James II is bloodlessly forced out of power and flees to France. ESR again triumphantly proclaims that the British monarchy "gets it".
A.D. 1692: Anti-GIF hysteria in the New World comes to a head in the infamous "Salem GIF Trials", in which 20 alleged GIFs are burned at the stake. Later investigation reveals that mayn of the supposed GIFs were actually PNGs.
A.D. 1769: James Watt patents the one-click steam engine.
A.D. 1776: Trolls, angered by CmdrTaco's passage of the Moderation Act, rebel. After a several-year flame war, the trolls succeed in seceding from Slashdot and forming the United Coalition of Trolls.
A.D. 1789: The French Revolution begins with a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Bastille.
A.D. 1799: Attempts at discovering Egyptian hieroglyphs receive a major boost when Napoleon's troops discover the Rosetta stone. Sadly, the stone is quickly outlawed under the DMCA as an illegal means of circumventing encryption.
A.D. 1844: Samuel Morse invents Morse code. Cryptography export restrictions prevent the telegraph's use outside the U.S. and Canada.
A.D. 1853: United States Commodore Matthew C. Perry arrives in Japan and forces the xenophobic nation to open its doors to foreign trade. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Japan finally "gets it".
A.D. 1865: President Lincoln is 'bitchslapped.' The nation mourns.
A.D. 1901: Italian inventor Guglielmo Marcoli first demonstrates the radio. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich immediately delivers to Marcoli a list of 335,435 suspected radio users.
A.D. 1911: Facing a break-up by the United States Supreme Court, Standard Oil Co. defends its "freedom to innovate" and proposes numerous rejected settlements. Slashbots mock the company as "Standa~1" and depict John D. Rockefeller as a member of the Borg.
A.D. 1929: V.A. Linux's stock drops over 200 dollars on "Black Tuesday", October 29th.
A.D. 1945: In the secret Manhattan Project, scientists working in Los Alamos, New Mexico, construct a nuclear bomb from Star Wars Legos.
A.D. 1948: Slashdot runs the infamous headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN." Shamefaced, the site quickly retracts the story when numerous readers point out that it is not news for nerds, stuff that matters.
A.D. 1965: Jon Katz delivers his famous "I Have A Post-Hellmouth Dream" speech, which stated: "I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the geeks of former slaves and the geeks of former slave geeks will be able to sit down together at the table of geeks... I have a dream that my geek little geeks will one geek live in a nation where they will not be geeked by the geek of their geek but by the geek of their geek."
A.D. 1969: Neil Armstrong becomes the first man to set foot on the moon. His immortal words: "FIRST MOONWALK!!!"
A.D. 1970: Ohio National Guardsmen shoot four students at Kent State University for "Internet theft".
A.D. 1989: The United States invades Panama to capture renowned "hacker" Manual Noriega, who is suspected of writing the DeCSS utility.
A.D. 1990: West Germany and East Germany reunite after 45 years of separation. ESR triumphantly proclaims that Germany "gets it".
A.D. 1994: As years of apartheid rule finally end, Nelson Mandela is elected president of South Africa. ESR is sick, and sadly misses his chance to triumphantly proclaim that South Africa "gets it".
A.D. 1997: Slashdot reports that Scottish scientists have succeeded in cloning a female sheep named Dolly. Numerous readers complain that if they had wanted information on the latest sheep releases, they would have just gone to freshsheep.net
A.D. 1999: Miramax announces Don Knotts to play hacker Emmanuel Goldstein in upcoming movie "Takedown"
A.D. 2000: On January 1st Microsoft NZ web site is first to announce that they have survived year 21000 bug. Slashdot community rejoices and lots of people swear the new millennium starts next year. ESR agrees that
A.D. 2001: Mozilla release is expected during this millennium, although plans are to integrate it with the upcoming linux-2.4.0-test92-pre17-ac3.1-25.9, which would mean a slight delay.
As you can see from my user id number, I've been around here for a while. And I didn't even get an account for a while... Anyone with a lower id still around? What do *you* remember from 5 years ago?
/, as root" (or similar destructive advice)?
Reminiscing for a minute: Remember when...
* the Enlightenment window manager was still using DR (development release) in the versions?
* having to download 50 different graphics libraries to install Enlightenment?
* the first time someone told you to run "ldconfig -v" ?
* the first time someone told you to run "rm -rf
* a time before GNOME vs. KDE, because there was neither?
* you were the only kid on your block (in your school, at your job) who knew what an mp3 was?
* big companies announcing Linux support was a big deal?
* when XFree86 supported about 10 video cards?
What else?
How's my programming? Call 1-800-DEV-NULL
Oh sure... it's not so unique any more but that's because you guys turned back all the code for the site to the community so there are Slashdot clones all over the place. When I first stumbled across /. it was truly unique. It was the first interactive site I found that gave Linux users a place to come to for news about an OS that back then was pretty much unheard of. And then, miracle of the Web, we could even add to the articles!!!
/. user. And I want Slashdot to know it. Happy birthday.
:)
"Unheard of in 1997?" you ask. Let me give you an example. In 1997 my daughter was a sophomore at the local community college. In a computer course she was given an assignment to write a report on an operating system that was not made by Microsoft.
Since I was her Dad... and I had used Linux since 1993, she wrote her report on Linux and I helped her. She did a great job but only received a B. The instructor wrote across her paper, "marked down because Linux is a nonexistent system". The instructor thought she had meant to write the report about Unix and got the name wrong!
So if we've been pushy here on our forum we have good reason. Even now the rest of the media pretty much doesn't understand the Linux movement. They don't understand the "support" issue (I suppose hiring competent people is too much to ask). They don't understand the technical issues (two MS programmers were once given credit for "inventing" symbolic links). And, they don't understand the social issues (we're a community, dammit!).
I am proud to be a Linux advocate and a
And thanks.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
Blue's News
/., but it's a pretty widely respected gaming news site.
It's not quite as popular as
As Blue's tagline says: "Established 1995. Over an eighth of a billion visitors since 1997."
AnandTech and Tom's Hardware are also up there.
Frankly, a lot of sites have been around since 1997. Find some non-university/corporate sites that have been around for 10 years with (relatively) high hit counts and it's more meaningful.
Some idiots forgot their original passwords and had to create new accounts (like me). I remember creating this account and thinking ""A user number in the THIRTEEN THOUSANDS?!?! Everyone will think I'm a freaking n00b!" I don't feel so bad now though :-)
Unfortunately, most of the early people moved on. Slashdot used to be a very different thing than it is today, with far fewer posts per thread, and with more of an emphasis on discussion than comments. The moderation system kinda did away with that by breaking the linearity of most comments and hiding some others, and the massive influx of new users made those types of discussions unfeasible anyway. When this all happened, many of us whined and complained, but a huge number of users simply left.
There is nothing so pathetic as seeing a beautiful young theory roughed up by a tough gang of facts.
but there are still a hell of a lot o half arsed discussion sites out there that have a flat layout for comments
In an earlier life, when I was a DECcie we had a corporate network with maybe 100000 users and we had this groupware thingie called VAXnotes. Of course DEC couldn't sell it for shit, but it had a huge impact on the company internally.
The software was rather primitive. You installed it and created a conference on your box. The format went something like SLSHDT::COBOL for example, discussing the finer arts of Cobol. SLSHDT was the DECnet node, where it resided (limited to 6 chars, but those where the good ol' days).
Within the conference everybody could create an entry and after that it was just one flat stream of comments.
There where confererences for every product and every obscure piece of software which this company manufactured and produced. That was nifty, because if you had a Cobol question it wouldn't take an hour until somebody from Cobol engineering jumped in with a knowledgeable and comprehensive answer. But the most interesting part of the whole system where the EI (employee interest) conferences, which ranged from cats through tarrot over DEC issues (HUMANE::DIGITAL) up to Soapbox (damn! I can't even remember the node name...).
While it was primitive from a "layout" point of view I have never since experienced the power that a network can have on its participants. They where some really, really smart people bitching and flaming away, but sticking together whenever required. At one time we even pledged to get the best hated Soapbox contributor (Jamie, who was a very fat git, NOT!) to a boxbash in Bawston from Reading, UK.
It was also around that time (1993) when a really, really smart engineer (let's call him Dan K) mentioned something he was working on, something that would change the world, something so fucking (he didn't say fucking, since that was verboten) revolutionary it would blow us out of our socks. He couldn't really mention what it was, but it was later marketed under the term WWW.
Yep, it was a primitive form of discussion, but it didn't matter, not at all and it was one of the aspects in DECs culture, which made this company so great!
It saddens me until today, that one of the most important companies in computer history was sold off by a slick guy with a bad hairdo to some box-assembling marketing organisation in Texas.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk