Slashdot Mirror
Thanks For Reading: 15 Years of News For Nerds
Slashdot turns 15 this month! You may have noticed that we’ve swapped out the usual logo for the first of the reader-contributed designs we'll be featuring this month. (If you think you have a better idea, we'd love to see it; all artists whose designs we choose to run will get Slashdot anniversary T-shirts, and one will get a Nexus 7 tablet.) We're also happy to announce an overdue feature here on Slashdot: a blog with information from the developers and editors. We'll use it to provide updates and background information about the site's development (for instance, new features or fixed bugs, or changes in the user interface), and try to answer reader questions about the site at greater length than the FAQ. Shameless tease: today, you can read about the launch of Slashdot mobile in the inaugural post. We might use the blog to expound on story choice or to make non-critical announcements, too. You probably don't come to Slashdot generally to read about Slashdot, though, so don't worry &mdash the blog will live safely and quietly in the background until you want to read it. Since this is a new feature, we're still working out exactly how it should best be used, so feel free to make suggestions below on what you'd like to see. Between now and the end of October, look for a passel of other treats, too, starting with an interview with Woz later today. We hope you'll get together with other readers at one of the many parties planned for later this month, also. Slashdot exists for and because of everyone who reads the site; thank you for being part of it.
To everyone involved, on both sides of the fence!
The new logo is really great BTW.
The title gives the impress "thanks for reading, we're shutting down /. kthxbi"
as always, tl;dr
Thank you Slashdot. You created one of the greatest communities on the internet. Yeah, it is a community, despite the fact that we mostly argue with each other all the time :-) No other site comes close to being as insightful and interesting, and occasionally hilarious.
I'm sure there will be lots of "Slashdot is dying" posts, but I think it is more of an inevitable change. Long gone as the Emacs vs. vi holy wars, to be replaced with the Android vs. iOS wars. How long ago the late 90s seem now.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
No thank you /. for enabling me to be across such a wide range of technology issues, it actually helps earn boss respect to be across so many things that I attribute to /. news.
Thank you for bringing me a community with people that are more than willing to give me sleepless nights.
Thank you for giving me a reason to surf on the job, just to check if that rat bastard Anonymous Coward has brought insult to my name, once more.
Thank you for bringing us a site that is immediately quoted on a bazillion dupe wannabee sites once it gets slashdotted.
Thank you for reminding me that I am a geek, no matter where I work, whom I work for - ultimatively Im really your bitch and nobody else.
Thank you for occasionally making me a moderator and handing me anything between 5 to 15 moderator points just to take it away from me a few days later, just to tell me that every geek is created equal.
Thank you for posting subjects making it possible to discuss no one else but us geeks would ever dream of discussing.
And ultimatively...
Thank you for being the one and only site out there, reminding us all of - that we have no life, really - we dont! ;)
Any of us with a /. UID under 15,000 or so were here before logins (since there were that many of us who signed up the first few days).
What makes me feel old is that I'm working on the same floor of the same building I was in 1998, back when I first saw Slashdot and happiness was a warm DEC Alphastation.
I'll never forget September 11th 2001 on Slashdot. When I first heard the news that somebody had flown a plane into the World Trade Centre I reflexively checked the BBC website. It was unreachable - completely swamped. I checked CNN and that was swamped too. I went to Slashdot and they were reporting it and available so on-and-off I followed the story on Slashdot and on TV all day.
By the evening on the TV they had already gathered their pundits and reduced the days events to a continuous 10 second loop of a plane hitting a building. It was already starting to look like a music video.
Meanwhile on slashdot there were real conversations going on with real people who had been there, seen it or been affected by it. I remember one comment in particular - somebody wrote about psychologists being dispatched (volunteering I think) to go to school bus stops to tell some of the waiting kids that their parents were dead.
L.
You know, like implementing things like IPv6 and UTF-8 support.
I hear each and every AC is going to get 15 mod points for /. 15th anniversary, spread the news !
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Here is one old timer checking in. Although I'm more of a passive consumer of slashdot these days. Although this is not really slashdot's fault, I'm more of a passive consumer of mailing lists, discussion groups, usenet, etc these days as well. (Having a day job and a family does have a higher priority for me than participating in forum discussions these days.)
Speaking of, when will we get unicode support?
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
My sig points to some research I did to answer this question.
EDIT: For those of you not logged in, the sig says http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Having had legitimate posts downvoted to "Flamebait" for offending community pretense, I'm not going to pretend Slashdot is a Utopia. People are still people, and people are still stupid, even when they're smart. On the internet, this all gets turned up to 11.
However, Slashdot is a better example of what the net can be than "social networking" like Facebook, Myspace, Digg, Fark, Reddit, etc. These sites are clustered around the idea of people socializing through the internet. As a nerd, I think that's foolish. You socialize around being a person who likes to be with other people, and you find people who you respect.
A lot has changed in the past 15 years. UNIX is now mainstream, running on thousands of devices. Even more, computer technology and networking are now mainstream, with ordinary people navigating wi-fi hotspots and even writing code for their phones. What once was special and unique is no longer so removed from the experience of normal people.
I miss CmdrTaco and his guidance, but think the team is doing a good job. That's fortunate, as they have quite a task ahead of them: remaining focused on what it is they do well in a world that has surged past their original mission, and now needs new types of guidance with new uses of technology.
In the last 15 years I've had 4 different jobs, I've moved 4 times in 3 different countries, I divorced and got remarried and I've had a lot of personal changes. In all these years Slashdot has been a refuge for me, even an obsession when I had nothing else going on, or when I was stuck over the weekend in some foreign country. I always felt part of this community even if sometimes I've been modded down into oblivion.
Being a nerd and a geek is cooler now, but we are still fringe elements of society at large, so I never want to underestimate the need and value of the few good virtual places where we can be accepted and talk to others like us. So today, I just want to say thank you Slashdot for being there. We've all grown together.
I guess this is an appropriate post for me to comment in. Nice work Slashdot, still going strong.
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Yeah, it's pretty low.
# Hack the planet, it's important.