Slashdot Mirror
20 Years of Stuff That Matters
Read on for a trip down memory lane.
Update: Slashdot founder CmdrTaco has taken to Medium with some of his own Slashdot nostalgia.
The most obvious place to start would be some of the stories listed in the Hall of Fame. While Slashdot isn't a political site, we do post particularly relevant political news, and two of the three most commented-on posts were about the winning of a U.S. presidential election. John Kerry's concession to George W. Bush in 2004 drew 5687 comments, more than half again as much as Barack Obama's victory in 2008. Interestingly, Obama's name was thrown around in the 2004 thread as possible future candidate, but many thought he'd be running for vice president alongside Hillary Clinton or another, more established Democrat name. A few other tidbits: health care was mentioned much more often in the 2008 discussion, while comments on the military were four times as common in 2004. The economy was discussed slightly more in 2004, while mentions of the banking system in 2008 far surpassed the 2004 count.
While a few other political discussions rank in the top 10 for total comments, total views is another story. A quick and simple post about source code leaks for Windows 2000 and NT has garnered over 700,000 views. It generated a great deal of insightful commentary on the security implications of the leak and how the code should be approached by developers curious to get a look. Many users warned others off of glancing at Microsoft code, fearing that copyrighted samples would find their way into open source projects, thus giving Microsoft a tool with which to disrupt the projects. This leak followed one a few months earlier of the Half-Life 2 source code, which garnered a strong but much different reaction. Many called for Valve to go ahead and open source the game, since the cat was out of the bag. Others were worried about the influx of bots and cheats for the game, since the people writing those tools had much clearer access to the game's internals.
Two of our other most popular posts, and two of the most significant to us internally, are posts about somebody trying to get us to delete comments. We've always taken a strong stance both for preserving freedom of speech, and for simply providing a reliable wall upon which readers can scribble their words and know the words won't disappear. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act made that difficult in a few situations, and we made sure to be open and transparent about what happened. In early 2000, Microsoft asked us to kill off a few comments. We asked you folks how we should proceed, and you had no shortage of suggestions. Then, almost a year later, the Church of Scientology happened to notice a Slashdot comment which contained copyrighted text: part of the Fishman Affidavit, court documents that contained church course materials as well as criticism of the organization and its leadership. This was part of a war Scientology had been waging for several years to keep the documents secret. We were forced to remove the comment, but CmdrTaco's notification post thoroughly demonstrated how useless such an action was in the digital age, and encouraged people to reach out to their representatives to speak against the DMCA. He wrote, "This is the first time since we instituted our moderation system that a comment has had to be removed because of its content, and believe me nobody is more broken-hearted about it than me." He also went out of his way to point out the bad press surrounding the church for various other incidents. Fortunately, those types of requests seem to be largely behind us, now.
As the site evolved in those early days, the staff began to realize that the Slashdot community wasn't just absorbing the news and moving on; it was digesting the news and coming back with knowledgeable additions in the discussion. As interesting as an article may be, the community's response to it could generate informed discussion that surpassed the article tenfold. The staff considered how to harness this attribute to help the community, and shortly thereafter Ask Slashdot was born. In the time since then, almost 10,000 reader questions have been answered by other readers, and they frequently form the basis for the site's most informative discussions. The most popular was certainly "What's keeping you on Windows?" from 2002, a question that was revisited almost a decade later. Many of the specific reasons changed in that time, but the ability to easily play games was a sticking point for users in both discussions. There have been many common refrains over the years: how to get into IT or programming, how to get kids into it, what kind of phone/GPU/HDD/monitor to buy, or how best to put together some arcane but useful device or program. They occasionally get rather esoteric: questions about finding beautiful code, depressing sci-fi, or trying to pin down the biggest lies told by hardware and software vendors. Ask Slashdot is also sometimes used as a method of defense. Early this year, when the Stop Online Piracy Act and its sibling PIPA threatened freedom of speech on the web, we used it as a vehicle to show precisely why the legislation was bad, and figure out what more could be done to prevent them from being signed into law.
Slashdot's audience has always been very much about science, as well. This manifests itself in several different ways. For one, since readers' level of scientific education is higher, on average, than the general population's, any attack on science meets with strong opposition. For example, debates about creationism in the classroom spark a great deal of interesting discourse. While there's often a fair amount of vitriol, there are also well-reasoned and politely stated arguments. Other science-related topics sidestep the arguing in favor of excitement and wonder; when SpaceShipOne achieved the X-prize in 2004, the comment section was ripe with hopes for the commercial space sector (which is continuing to blossom today) and the possibility of ubiquitous spaceflight in our lifetimes. More recently, the discussion of CERN's supposed faster-than-light neutrinos, which took place over many months, brought into sharp relief the difficulties bleeding-edge science faces, and the resilience of the scientific method itself, which compelled researchers to come forward with results they suspected were wrong and then engage the scientific community in the task of confirming or repudiating them.
One of the greatest things about the Slashdot community is its above average level of understanding for all things technical. Commenters, submitters, and interviewees alike understand they don't have to use layman's terms to describe complex concepts. One of the best examples happened earlier this year when a group of fusion researchers from MIT got together to answer questions from readers on the state of fusion power. They didn't hold back, and were happy to provide a ton of very interesting information on how fusion reactors work, what it will take to make it a viable technology, what the safety issues are, and more. Similarly, there have been some fantastic, techinical answers from people like John Carmack, Vint Cerf, and Bjarne Stroustrup. But even when the interviews aren't highly technical, the community's strong opinions can lend themselves to contentious but productive discussions, as happened with Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich over the band's fight against file sharing, a Marketing exec for Microsoft Windows over some of the company's competitive practices, and Richard Stallman about the ethics of free software and open source.
It's also interesting to go back and look at stories that flew under the radar at the time, but later developed into huge, ongoing news items. For example, the launch of WikiLeaks in 2007 met mainly indifference and doubts that such a repository could do anything useful. Similarly, Google's unveiling of Android in 2007 brought a lot of speculation as to how open it would be and whether another phone OS could succeed. Facebook didn't get a mention on the site until late 2005, and its opening to the public the next year brought skepticism that it could trump MySpace or operate without compromising user privacy. The announcement of SpaceX by Elon Musk was blandly titled "Another Private Space Startup." Wikipedia got a couple of mentions in early 2001, even from Jimmy Wales himself. And, not exactly under the radar, but who can forget the early critique of Apple's original iPod?
On a more somber note, this collection of old stories wouldn't be complete without mentioning the day of September 11th, 2001. Here is how the page looked that day. News organizations around the world got a lesson in how people flock to the internet in times of emergency, and Slashdot was no exception. Readers congregated to share news as it was happening, and the staff frantically shut off portions of the site to keep it from buckling under the strain. It's a set of problems that have largely been solved in 2017, but they were new back then.
The last couple years have seen our world become more polarized than ever before, or at least it seems that way, likely because of the internet. Some of the most discussed and visited stories of the past year include the election of Donald Trump, Google firing engineer James Damore for writing a memo, to Silicon Valley investors calling for California to secede from the United States. One non-political, less polarizing story that made the Slashdot 2017 Hall of Fame was "Slashdot Asks: What's Your Favorite Sci-Fi Movie?", which is about as Slashdot as Slashdot gets, and the comments are well worth the read.
We hope this walk back through Slashdot's history provided a nostalgic diversion for you. With over 162,000 to pick from, it's inevitable that we'll leave some good ones out, so feel free to share in the comments any particular stories that have stuck in your memory. A lot of you have been around and contributing to the site for years, and we hope you'll stick around for years more. This is part of our 20-year anniversary celebration, and we've set up a page to coordinate user meet-ups. We'll be continuing to run some special pieces throughout the month, so keep an eye out for those.
... or was forced out...
9/11. At the time, my habit was to login and go to sites like cnn.com for the morning's news. None of the normal news sites would come up. That is odd I thought. Continued onto /., where I first saw the post about it. I immediately went and turned on the TV. Crazy stuff.
Indeed, unfortunately only rarely news for nerds.
20th post!
I enjoy coming here.
Even if it has gotten worse (and that varies), Slashdot still has the best comment layout and system out of any news site I read
I think it's time to revisit the moderation system here.
Back when stories would routinely get 500 or more comments, it was helpful to have the moderation system pick out the best ones. But that's no longer the case. It's now rare for a story here to break even 200 comments. A lot of them are well under 100 comments.
I've seen stories where there aren't any comments shown by default, even when there have been 20 or more comments posted!
To make matters worse, abusive moderating is a real problem here now, and I keep seeing the most interesting comments modded down to 0 or -1, meaning they aren't visible by default.
So the end result is that I have to always browse at -1. This, of course, makes the moderation system redundant. If I have to view all comments anyway just to see content worth reading, then Slashdot might as well just get rid of its moderating system completely and show us all of the comments by default.
The moderation system here made sense 15 years ago, when this site was far more popular than it is today. But now that there are fewer commenters, and presumably a smaller moderator pool, the moderation system does more harm than good. It impedes our ability to read good comments.
It's time for the current moderation system to go, I think. We don't want a shitty Reddit or Hacker News style moderation system here, of course. That's why it would be best just to get rid of the moderation system and show all comments by default.
The last 5 years have been a dumpster fire.
Who could ever forget The Glorious Meept!!?
In all seriousness:
But I must have been one of the first posters!
Mazeltov old friend.
I forget when the Beanies died but the attempt to revive them in 2014 saw the editors try to put Anita Sarkeesian on the same level as Malala Yousafzay:
https://slashdot.org/story/14/...
It was such a mistep that they were too embarrassed to even follow up with a winner. Good times.
P.S. I should note this was done under the previous owner (Dice).
Where are mentions of OMG Ponies! and the Parrot runtime?
Creimer wasn't a problem until the trolls went after him this year. There's some people you just don't want to pick a fight with.
I'll echo the sentiment expressed by others here.
Slashdot may have survived 20 years, which is remarkable, but in the past 3-5 years it's definitely been on the wane.
Many articles are just reposts from arstechnica, engadget, current political news, and trending social media stories.
Meaningful comments have been replaced by anonymous coward trolls and actual registered trolls.
The once-vaunted "slashdot effect" has diminished and I expect soon enough, in the next 2-4 years, that slashdot will be no more.
Slashdot is a husk of it's former self. The garbage submissions, bots and right wing kiddies are brutal. Very little interesting discussion goes on here any more.
The new management said it was coming real soon when they took over.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Slashdot had the best moderation system, and tech community in the beginning. Then they made so many stupid changes like limiting the amount of posts ACs could make per day. All this did was reduce traffic and lead people to unlimited places like 4chan. Then they started arbitrarily rearranging the order of posts, probably in some misguided attempt to end "first posters" even though the moderation system already handled that. Change the post order just made it a chore to come back and find old threads later in the day to continue the discussion from your break or whatever. This site used to be the most addictive site on the internet, but after those foolish changes, I barely visit anymore, much less actually post something. What kind of idiot updates they're site to be LESS addictive? Dumbasses.
My one and only accepted story submission turned out to be the launch article for apple.slashdot.org
My little piece of Slashdot history .... otherwise, my comments have been consistently useless for 20 years now.
Only users with 4 digit IDs should be allowed to post in this thread.
I've wasted many hours here. The news coverage has changed over the years, not always for the better, but I still keep coming back.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
Why isn't there a way to search my own posts ? And why is search in general still mostly broken ? I mean it's not like you have to use perl or something, right ? Right ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Like we ever leave our keyboards.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
February 14, 2002 - The day that CmdrTaco's life changed forever: https://slashdot.org/story/02/...
This week also marks the 20th anniversary of Jakob Neilsen's article, How Users Read on the Web. (published Oct. 1, 1997)
Maybe the Slashdot editors should have a look at this article, given the tome that was included in today's post.
should have let that theme stay, it was good for a laugh.
It would be introducIng me to goat.se
I didn't remember that it was 20 years. I would actually have guessed 21 years ago. All I know is I was sitting in my college dorm and a friend from across the hall mentioned that a site we had been reading had just gone live with user accounts and I should jump on it to get a low account ID. He had already signed up and has a 3 digit account. I didn't care enough at the time, so I waited an hour or two. By that time I got a high four digit ID since so many people had already signed up. That was the speed of how important these things were to people 20 years ago. There were two tech sites that I read all day every day at that point, because new articles were posted sporadically, and you wanted your FIRST PSOT! /. was by far the most relevant site to me at the time, but I also read Tweak3d. Stories on /. in the first few years were very entertaining. Most didn't get a ton of comments, and then you'd come across a story that was overwhelmed with comments and you'd go through and read every one, often posting a response or three in some of the more active threads - even if you were posting anonymously in order to not lose your editor points or whatever they called them back then. And then you'd come across the duplicate posts, probably by some editor who was drunk at the time and didn't remember the story having already been posted. Comments on those were brutal. A few years after that there was a new staff member (I don't recall the name) that had more blog style articles that weren't strictly in the same vein as the normal /. articles, and people hated him with a passion! He was more of a professional journalist than a techie that was writing news for their friends like the other editors. The point is that there was real atmosphere. There was a real sense of belonging to a site that mattered and was interesting and creative at the same time.
But things changed over the years. It was around 2010 or 2011 that the changes really took effect. The stories got less relevant, comments got less interesting, etc. Personally I still enjoy /. and read it every day, but I've probably only posted a dozen comments in the past 10 years, and it's rare that I even bother to look at the first few comments.
The mojo is gone. The excitement that used to surround each story, and the way the people commented (yes, even including a couple of the original trolls that would FILL the comment section with repeated random garbage) is just different. It's likely because the founders are gone, and /. has gone through multiple corporate overlords since those first few years. Stories are more boilerplate and more like the stories on other websites now.
There are likely still tens of thousands of lurkers like me from the early days that still read /. almost daily. Bring back the mojo and they'll start participating again.
And Goatse scarred me for life.
It's been a roller coaster ride for sure. Although the growing anti-science in the latter half of the site's existence has made it difficult for the original highly technical population to continue participating, Slashdot still manages to hold its niche together.
I look forward to another 20 years. :-)
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Your comment reminded me of heroes. And there's one Slashdot Hero that I'd like to thank for his fantastic contributions over the years: John C. Randolph, also known as "jcr".
There are few users here whose comments I look forward to reading. John is among those commenters. When I'm scrolling through the comments rapidly and "~jcr" catches my eye, I stop and read the comment every time.
John embodies the original spirit of Slashdot. Unlike so many here, he has a huge amount of hands-on industry experience working on important computing systems. Yet at the same time he has such a strong understanding of politics, economics, and so many other fields.
He brings important insight and wisdom to the discussion here, and he has helped expand my understanding of the world far beyond what it otherwise would have been. In many ways he has become an indirect mentor to me. As I've read his comments over the years I have grown intellectually.
And before anyone wrongly claims that I'm John posting this, let me assure you that I'm not. I could never achieve even a fraction of what John has achieved.
Thank you, John, for all of your comments. They truly are the hidden gems of this website.
Happy Birthday, Slashdot!
For all your cruftiness, and all the complaints, you're still also the source of some of the most interesting discussions I run across on a day-to-day basis.
-- Sent from a computer.
Use to be news for nerds, stuff that matters Now, it's more like POLITICAL news that doesn't matter. Get enough of that garbage on 99.9% of the other sites.
Tech community is larger than ever, so why aren't we growing? One idea is to allow customized story feeds where individual slashdot users can post their own story or import all/selected stories posted by site owners and and other users. If some of these become popular, they will drive more traffic to ads and to the main page. This will let us move away from being bland and mainstream for everyone. Some are interested in hardcore science and in depth tech. Some may want to discuss onslaught of political correctness that silences beneficial practical use of such science and tech. And so on.
The thing that got me hooked on /. was the regular polling of opinion. Invariably, CowboyNeal often won.
The Voices from the Hellmouth series seemed like one of the most important stories on /. as enabled the masses of readers to express their own experiences of being bullied or treated by others within school. It seemed to be one of the first articles about us rather than about some technology or company.
Recall that this story was from back in '99, way before being in IT/computers was cool or mainstream.
Slashdot is still great. Happy birthday, and congratulations on finally implementing unicode.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Happy Birthday. There were a pile of gnome stories way back when about every little change, Linux desktop supremacy was just around the corner, or so we thought,
Does anyone remember before you could register a handle? I seem to remember browsing the site and being able to sign the bottom of a post with any handle or am I crazy? There was no reason to register if I remember right, then some change happened and everyone was registering like mad,
Haven't been to Digg in years (except to see if it is still there). Haven't been on Fark in about a year now (miss those boobies!). Only Slashdot remains on my daily list.
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention him. He was quite a prolific and controversial poster here.
I've always been the go-to person for information, opinions, and guidance in my social group. When people ask where I get news and ideas, Slashdot is always at/near the top. It's a variety of related news plus some incredibly insightful comments. The value in my life has been thus far immeasurable.
Especially in the wake of the Columbine shooting. The Jon Katz post "Voices from the Hellmouth" (https://news.slashdot.org/story/99/04/25/1438249/voices-from-the-hellmouth) helped me understand that what I was experiencing wasn't abnormal. Nerds, geeks, gamers, goths, loners, introverts -- they were all being profiled as potential mass-murderers. Many were treated as suspects in thought crime. Many were forced into counseling out of such fear. And still the worst was that it was so extremely taboo to say, "While I don't condone what they did, I completely understand why they did it." And that taboo prevented any real reduction in pain for those "at risk" social rejects.
When I went to college, I went in as "me". Long black hair, dark clothing, and chains. People were scared to be around me at first. One person asked me to play a game a gin rummy in my first week at the dorms. He used that game to inquire why "I was angry with life". (This is why I loved the first year of college. It was OK to ask awkward questions and get into deep discussions.) It was the first time someone had attempted that discussion with me. I told him that I wasn't angry with life, but that many things had happened in my life that made me feel contemplative and rebellious against certain ways of life. I continued and explained that I had decided that if "those people" looked like that, then I didn't want to identify is one of them by looking like them.
His eyes burst open like he just suddenly understood a massive part of his own high school experience 4 months too late. We continued to play cards, but I couldn't get the hang of gin rummy. We played poker instead.
In the following years, I decided to reinvent myself. The dark clothing went away. The hair went from long to short to long to short again. I got a bit athletic. I started learning about sports and held manly conversations with people about cars, football, and guns. (You know how it is... you learn one thing about at topic and suddenly you have to LEARN EVERYTHING.) Eventually, I discovered that I had become an undercover nerd. You wouldn't know it from looking at me, but half the time, I just want to go home and play Everquest. (Ya. I still play Everquest.) So when I break out my white-hot data skills, or legal knowledge, or when something at work requires me to learn a new vendor system and I master it in a couple days sufficient to send bug reports to the vendor, people flip out (with joy!).
In today's workplace, people LOVE to have a nerd on hand. They'll happily put up marginal social quirks to have nerd powers in the office across the way. The nation's most visible million/billionaires are nerds. People WANT to look nerdy to be hip. People are demanding that teachers make more FEMALE nerds so we can reach NERD EQUITY. And today, the discussion of the high school harassment is completely blown wide open. Bullying, cyber-bullying, sexual harassment, microaggressions, picoaggressions, quantumshade -- today, in many schools, being mean is bad.
It's not perfect. Your mileage may vary. But it's better.
Still, every 4/20, when people are joking about weed on campus, I'm solemn because I remember what happened with a couple of kids felt so rejected and so alone that they retreated into a cesspool of resentment and no one cared to notice until the violence came. (Seems similar to the building of a lot of white resentment building in the nation today.) I have to explain to people that the root of the problem wasn't simply mental illness or the existence of guns. A major part of the problem was that people felt that it was absolutely OK for kids to torture kids.
I've been part of higher education outreach into low-i
In the not-too-distant past the dominant voice on this site took a hard right turn. During the administration of Obama we saw a constant barrage of anti-Obama and anti-Clinton news bits on the front page, while simultaneously seeing articles that championed various right wing causes.
Sure, we see some front page articles now that point out a subset of the failings of the current POTUS, but regardless of how much someone loves him it would be nearly impossible to not have to come to face with his failings on at least a daily basis.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
One of my favorite articles can be found here: DirecTV's Secret War On Hackers - https://hardware.slashdot.org/...
I've used it in taglines and wherever I could pass it on, and get another chance now : )
The real problem is that he kept feeding those trolls, so obviously they'd come back for more.
I don't see 3- and 4-digit user ids very often. Glad some are still around!
Some have accused Slashdot of forsaking its mantra in search of more hits. While it may have been diluted a bit over the years, this is still my go-to for the nerdiest news. Hope you'll be around for another 20!
Growing up in the 90's this site was exciting like a secret club with all the science and tech info that regular people would never talk about, or the news might pick up only months later. Now it's a place to catch days old mainstream news, too many of them non-tech, too many of them political.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
I started reading in 1999 but didn't create an account until a year later or so. I got wind of the place through a college instructor who talked of things such as Linux Install Parties - which at the time was the nerdiest sounding thing I had ever heard. I remember people posting links to tiny grainy videos of the prequel Star Wars and Matrix trailers hosted on their personal servers. I remember waiting sometimes up to a day to visit sources linked in stories because they were "slashdotted". I remember spilling my guts and talking shit and having actual insightful conversations with people - or getting modded down and having to think about the dumb ass stuff I was talking about. That had a big effect about how I thought about online communication that I don't think my tiny brain had contemplated before.
I remember learning about new things, reading different points of view and growing up from a scraggly 20-something to a scraggly 40-something and watching my attitudes change over time (going back to old comments ... wow).
Slashdot was everything I loved about IRC at the time but with a moderation system and some really interesting people. It's still kinda this today. I mean I still read every damn day so there's gotta be something goin' on here right? RIGHT? Anyway, when Taco left it didn't feel the same, and certainly we've had a lot more political, and slashvertisement stories than outright nerdly or technical ones but still more sedate and varied than other sources that still somehow exist.
The only thing that has really left me with chills about this place is how people saw 15+ years ago how invasive technology would become and how much more difficult privacy would be to maintain and even how most people would likely give it up for nothin'... it seemed incredibly far-fetched at the time. Man...
Anyway Happy 20th /. Thanks for filling my compile time since 1999!
crazy dynamite monkey
Except for that one day.
I haven't logged in for years, but did today. Happy Birthday, Slashdot!
I'd completely managed to lose all recollection that Jon Katz ever existed... then I read your post.
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Twenty years ago, someone came up with the idea to take already existing news stories, post a link to them and let people provide the content with their opinions. In return give them the pleasure of viewing your advertisements which generates millions of dollars for the company which bought the original idea. Yes, I believe some self congratulations is in order. Bastards ;^)
from an old fart (10379)
Been on here since 99 or so, when i got my first tech job and slashdot was set as the homepage from my predecessor. Haven't stopped reading since.
Sure i play around with reddit, but their moderation system, shadowbans, and the fact that each subreddit only has a handful (if that) of moderators keeps me coming back here. There is far too much groupthink on any other aggregator with comments that I have tried, and the quality of comments on slashdot is always top notch. The AC system is also a rare delight in the new world order of disquis forums and such.
So keep on keeping on slashdot! Even fatboy slim had a song about you back in the day! linky
My personal favourite article from recent memory was the one about peoples favourite sci-fi films. Which I keep mining for new gems to watch on a friday night.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
For some reason, the full text triggers the lameness filter, but follow the link to the History of the World, where The Glorious MEEPT!! plays a role...
https://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=64664&cid=5990632
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Happy birthday /.
Thank you for bringing us together. Thank you for having the curating system that has highlighted so many insightful and funny comments. I've learned a lot from /. in the ~17 years I'm browsing the site (made this account a long time after I started to read my daily news here), and I hope to still be learning new things 20 years from now.
Happy Birthday Slashdot!
I started here after reading an interview with Dave Taylor, formerly of id Software. Stuck around for a while. Wandered to greener pastures and come back every once in a while to see how the old girl is doing.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Many of the comments I have read are lamenting that /. just ain't what it used to be. Kind of true, kind of not.
What keeps me coming back are the pure simplicity of the site and the opportunity to learn by having the more esoteric stories explained by truly knowledgeable people.
Happy bday Slashdot. May Cowboy Neal never die!
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
I have been doing this for 20 years! Loading the /. website, how cool is that? Thanks CmdrTaco! I loved the pool question too, for example the one that asked how do you prefer to install the toilet paper, with the feed on top or bellow? Priceless! Will try to search for my earlier screenshot, but I lost my original Linux desktop after running a defrag for ext2, my worst idea ever, hit ctrl+c and lost everything. The author said, sorry about that, didn't think about writing a callback for ctrl+c ...
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
Despite the lows of the last years, still my favourite site. Congratulations to all involved in keeping this nerd temple.
stween@islay:0:~$ host -t aaaa slashdot.org
slashdot.org has no AAAA record
Oh.
Been reading for a solid 12(??) years, but heard about it when it first kicked off back in the late 90s. The person that told me about it is actually dead now, strangely.
It used to be fun to go and check the polls Slashdot does, but I haven't participated in one for years now.
I read science news elsewhere and wonder why cool stuff like that isn't getting posted here...
Here's to another 20, in any case.
-
Happy Birthday /.
It is difficult to fathom that the site has been around for 20 years, because I've "only" been online for 25 or so and I can't possibly be that old. Right? Right??
In Soviet Russia...michael would be rotting in Siberia!
No wireless. Fewer topics than Reddit. Lame.
I have many memories of Slashdot, some good, and some bad.
9/11
That Jon Katz asshat
Natalie Portman, and hot grits.
But I never visit any more.
http://unxmaal.com
tl;dr
I'll wait for the dupe post
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
You have to deduct all the April 1st days.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Slashdot stayed up while the other sites choked on the massive onrush of traffic. From what I understand, they disabled recursive IP checks and a few other things, but overall the site stayed the same while the others went HTML lite just to get something out there.
Lots of SysAdmins earned their stripes that day dealing with that nightmare.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
I saw this posted in the morning when it only had a few comments. Most of them saying how bad the site is now compared to its glory days. And although I haven't logged in a quite some time to post, I must say I still ready daily and find the discourse fascinating. Sure, there's a lot of chaff to go through, but as others put it, that's true of any website.
/. has been through the hands of quite a few now, but the most important part remains: its users. I really enjoy finding that one post that goes into such extraneous detail that presents new to me information and concepts. Something I wouldn't have come across otherwise. And of course, you can usually find excellent lengthy posts - something that is sorely missed in typical social media websites.
So thank you, posters, editors, and owners. Here's to another 20 years!
In Soviet Russia, Slashdot celebrates you!
My abilities are only limited by my imagination
Sad I am getting so old it hurts to flail my arms like that any more. Post little but still read daily.
Sure, 9/11 was big. But JonKatz's Voices from the Hellmouth about Columbine was a big deal. Yes, we all grew tired of JonKatz eventually, but a lot of people opened up about their horrible experiences being bullied in high school. There's been a lot of improvements in schools recognizing bullying, though a lot of that has just moved online and gotten worse there. Still, for those of us who were here, that was a really memorable time. I'm surprised there was no mention.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
Nostalgia? Pass the Gravol.
The only large parameter I've ever cared about here is whether sharp story submissions encourage sharp dialogue.
Why so often—during various epochs—story submissions tapering off into a woolly final sentence? Is it an actually goal here (by some) to unleash an obligatory pocket-protector Olympics of beat-the-buzzer geek stereotypy?
Trolls, consider yourself trolled—for the extremely predictable lolz.
No, true nerd-hood is about going through life in the spirit that no consequential detail is ever too small to hold up to the tomographic megaphone—for as long as it takes. Wool is what other people like to pull over the fine technical fine print. I continue to celebrate every wool-free story submission that /. has ever run.
Blessed be the pinprick lightsaber that shears sheep.
I don't think there are many websites that have made such a big impact as this site has made. Even though I don't really have time to partake in the discussions here (or at other websites for that matter due to real life) I still visit slashdot more or less daily and I often find interesting news here. Lets hope the site continues to run for 20 more years (by that time we will all be highly paid consultants working to fix the imminent 2038 year bug :) )
Fatty McFatface spotted.
This post is about creimer, not you.
For some reason these don't come up when viewing the "starting on 20010911" page, but the original and followup stories as 9/11 was happening are here:
https://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1314258/world-trade-towers-and-pentagon-attacked
https://slashdot.org/story/01/09/11/1640219/us-attack----more-updates
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
It's a shitty website but the alternatives are worse!
love is just extroverted narcissism
I can't believe it's been 20 years.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Two decades is a reasonable age and Slashdot's first quarter century isn't all that distant, so we might as well start putting the paleohistory in order. This needs an era classification scheme, and mcmonkey seems to have given us an ideal metric for era boundaries: the number of digits in the Slashdot ID. As every proper techie will understand, this gives us a logarithmic scale which normalizes the population explosion nicely.
Well I know where to start, but the rest needs input:
1 digit - Tacomordium - life emerges by accident from the primordial nerd soup. ... ...
2 digits - [Suggestions?]
3
4
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I organised the 10 year party in Canberra, Australia, at the "Uni Pub". I organised a plasticised "attendance card" for those who came. I still carry my card in my wallet. So, I can be called a "card-carrying Slashdoter".
Looking at space, radio, science and computing from a 'down-under' amateur enthusiast perspective.
I've only been reading for 17 or 18 years but the site has been a bit part of my daily experience for a long time. Kudos.
Hey, where do I sign up for all these anniversary parties at!? https://www.wired.com/2007/10/...
I gave up on Fark back in the early '00s, after I realized they were tracking people who used more than one user account. If it detected a cookie from another user when you logged in, it would link both those accounts in their database and hit them all when a ban happened. For a couple of years after that I spent some time on a site called F*king Otaku, then discovered 4chan from one of its users. I'm mostly on /a/ and /pol/, but also on half a dozen other boards from time to time. I got used to the default anonymous posting there, and for a while I would post on Slashdot with the AC checkbox more often than without it. Now I post under my user name more often again, because that lets me check replies a few days later.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
While Slashdot isn't a political site
LULz
Just imagine a Beowolf cluster of Slashdots.
This space unintentionally left blank.
I have to admit, the layout does look a bit dated but in a retro/cool kind of way. It's still my go to site for tech news. And I love that it's build by geeks...for geeks.
Best comments section around. Some of them are funny, some of them are brilliant, some of them piss me off. But I still find myself spending more time on the reaction to the story than the story itself. Here's to another 20 years!
I started reading ./ when my English was really poor and hardly understood the more technical texts. We had a 15th aniversary party here in Mexico City and cannot believe we're 20 now.
I visit the site once a week, now we have many more ways to get news.
I remember reading Slashdot (roughly) 20 years ago, using lynx on a RS6000 terminal at college. At that time we had to compile stuff by ourselves to enjoy the internet... Slashdot was one of the few sites that didn't try to sell stuff to us. Wasted more hours reading stories here than attending math courses...
NoScript shows at least 11. I had to open this in Chrome even to post, because the posting link was disabled in Firefox.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
This comment is likely to get so downmodded (Offtopic, or Overrated) that my Karma will go from 'Excellent' to 'Bad', or whatever is worst these days, but I don't care. This is worth it.
I do hereby record my username and number on this thread, on this article, on this auspicious day, for several reasons:
1) It's likely to stick around for posterity
2) It will annoy all the people who need to be annoyed and sadly, some people who don't deserve it (collateral damage)
3) I can say "I told you so" when Islam, helped along by BAMN/Anti-fa starts civil wars based on doctrine and ideological hate in the West in years to come, from my kingdom in the lake district, the last small c conservative nation that will be left after this happens
4) In between now and the war, true free speech will be more and more curtailed. We must use it whilst we can, for it's most important purpose - to tell the truth, the facts.
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
"Lost my 5 digit userid when I couldn't remember"
This is what happens when.... what were we talking about?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B - D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Happy Birthday /.
It's amazing that it still exists, not as cool as it used to be, but still has some value.
So very nice to see all the low user ID's posting today.
It was Chips & Dips when I found it, can't recall what site I found the notice on though, some geeky place lost to memory.
I thought it was so professional when it went color with the teal headers, beautiful and unique.
Other than Kuro5hin, /. was my "go to" site every day for years.
I still have my FREE Dmitry Sklyarov T shirt, remember that corporate/state clown act, a harbinger of oppressions to come?
And I do miss OGG! the caveman.
So many great memories, and so glad it's still here.
This is a long shot, but I'm looking for the founder of, I believe it was called the HellHole BBS, based in the Palo Alto area decades ago.
I did some electrical work in his parents house (he was in High School), and we talked about this new website called SlashDot.
Just wondering if he's still around.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_European_Communities_membership_referendum,_1975
I think you'll find that's a super majority.
Like all good Brexit morons, you don't let the truth get in the way of your hyperbole.
I found this place oh so long ago, all the other sites I was paying attention to then have mostly passed on.
Mostly lurking, looking for some tidbit of sanity not available anywhere else.
The Gates Borg icon was fun.
Keep paying the bills and doing what you do so well, or poorly or somewhere in between.
Been following Slashdot since close to the beginning and still tune in every day. The site has certainly changed and not always for the better, but I'm still here so subjectively it can't be all bad. I am not going to use this opportunity as many commenters do to list various stuff that could change - why not leave that for the 364 other days of the year and today just be happy for all the good bits. Thanks for keeping the site around.
Thank you for 20 years of nerd-news addiction! Happy, happy birthday!
It's not effective enough; I still see your comments, APK.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
In the early days, Slashdot was the place that broke many IT news stories and acted as the bridge to get these into the mainstream media. Something that was acknowledge BBC back in 1999 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci... Things have changed a little, it is no longer slashdot taking the same lead but the role of the net in breaking news has only increased.
We also shouldn't forget the Slashdot Effect which unintentionally knocked sites of the net with the amount of inbound traffic it provided.
...what are the Bennett Hasleton's thoughts on that matter.
I originally used the name ‘slashdot’ on my desktop a year earlier when I got my first static IP in the Voorhees Hall dorm room
Voorhees Hall? Did the dress code include hockey masks?
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
those days when a front page story caused the origin site to go down... that is something i will never forget.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
I must admint that it's been a while since i logged in. I usually only read, and you can do that without.
Back in the days /. was my home as now is reddit.
What I love about ./ is the tech focus.
Happy Birthday! Keep up the work!
Could be worse. Could be raining.
It would be interesting to understand the amount of bandwidth required to service a front page post in 24 hours historically and compared to today
now we find netflix is serving 100 Gbps from an Open Connect Appliance...
regards
John Jones
https://john.jones.name
Like many, been coming here for years. '99/'00 timeframe IIRC. Visiting on and off, with a large interval between states. Wasn't until this post that I remembered I had a login; albeit a non-leet sub-5 digit UID. Thanks for all the great stories, commentary, and community Slashdot!!!
zzzzzzzzz what? Am I to late?
Get off my lawn!
Happy birthday Slashdot!
It's been a wild ride and I'd like to think the pace of change will decrease, but I doubt it.
Strap in for the next 20! See you in 2037!
You do realize that your issue (whether it is some form of schizophrenia, break down, autism or some learned helplessness) is preventing you from actually understanding what is written there and preventing you from grasping how trivial this traffic was to modern systems already 10 years ago.
It's disappointing and you have my sympathy because if you were a well adjusted individual, you would be doing much better in life. On the other hand, you post so much inane stuff that misleads other people, it's irritating.
Have you not noticed that barely anyone else on the web goes around threatening people and uses argumentum ad nauseam in an attempt to declare victory in an argument or try to motivate people to do something you want?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
because I am mostly correct on issues
What issues do you have in mind that you have been "mostly correct" on? I might not have seen them, I mostly see you quoting your favorite scriptures, recruiting for your favorite cult, and repeatedly lying about the constant everyday role of your faith in your life. I will give you credit for being consistent, but not for being correct.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Happy 20th /.! But being old doesn't mean you should stop supporting older features like the old Palm site. Some of us still use those...
"Powers. I have them."
By the way APK, that Anon post wasn't me.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Happy birthday, Slashdot! Here's to the next 20 years!
Congratulations and thanks for both the entertainment and learning opportunities.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Holy carp nuggets! Happy birthday /.!
I remember meeting Rob briefly at one of the Atlanta Linux Symposium, what a great memory. My work life wouldn't be the same without the comments, experience and insight I gained here. Big thanks.
I said no... but I missed and it came out yes.
...i guess
Came here for the story but decided to log in again and say hi.