Slashdot

Being in a relationship is not easy, more than half of all first marriages fail in this country. That statistic doesn't improve if you spend most of your time reading your favorite website and not tending to the needs of your family. Instead of asking me to help fix your relationship maybe you should try playing with your kids, talking to your wife, and not staring at a computer screen all day. You should realize that the help link doesn't provide help with your life. It's mostly for getting passwords and stuff. Below you'll find a collection of people that should have reached out to Dr. Phil and not Dr. Sam.

I get a lot of mail from obviously unbalanced people. Enough in fact, that I've often wondered if there was a institution that allowed their patients to only read Slashdot. We've even had a few visits from some questionable individuals. A man who tried to bribe me with a car if I let him "reverse engineer" Rob Malda's Life comes to mind. He insisted on Rob being present for the process and couldn't explain to me what it entailed, so I suggested he leave. The personal visits are rare, however, compared to the amount of mail I get. Here are a few of my favorites; let's hope these people have started to take their medication. Read below and don't be worried if you don't understand all of it.

There is no shortage of comments about us selling out or running advertisements as stories. As you might expect there is no shortage of mail with the same theme. What I enjoy most about them is all the different corporate entities and sometimes political parties, that we are supposedly working for. If even half of them were true, I would have a stack of W-2s as long as my arm every year for the tax man. The truth of the matter is, nobody here sits in their Microsoft smart chair, talking on their minion iPhone, while playing in the Google money pool. (If someone knows how to get into the Google money pool, please send me a mail.) Conspiracy theories have been around as long as man, so I guess it should come as no surprise that Slashdot has a few of it's own. Read below to find out who is pulling our strings.

Since we covered people who wanted out of Slashdot last week, I thought we'd look at some people who wanted back in. These users found that living without Slashdot was a lot harder than they thought. Maybe you've just been married and are finding out your wife is less interesting than Slashdot or maybe you were bad and want to make amends. These people found out it's hard to make it without your favorite website. Keep reading to find out what they'll do to get back.

Everyone likes to belong to something. Whether it be for fun, a sense of belonging, or a need for attention, a group gives you a feeling of solidarity. Surrounding yourself with people that share common goals and ideas can be comforting. Sometimes however, you realize that you hate the people you've surrounded yourself with. Your religion doesn't allow you to read anything that has profanity or you've subscribed to Slashdot thinking you could learn more about hockey. This week's collection is composed of people who don't want to play, read, or be associated with us anymore. Read below to find out how bad they want out.

There is an old Japanese proverb that goes, "Better than a thousand days of diligent study is one day with a great teacher." This week's mail is all about teaching. Whether it is about the seriousness of psychic ability, a short history of trolls or explaining how much free time and malice your dad's attorney has, these people just want to impart information. If what they sent me is any indication, they had a lot of sick days. Click on the link below to become enlightened.

In this week's Disagree Mail, I try to show the range of messages I get. It's not all angry or insane, sometimes it's sent to us for no apparent reason. We start off a little mad, slip into a whole bunch of crazy and finish with someone who has a complaint about racism at his favorite restaurant. Read below to get started.

I am responsible for reading most of the help requests sent to Slashdot. Most of the mail I get in a day is what you would expect, comments and concerns about postings, user accounts and Slashdot itself. There are a very special group however that get passed around the office due to the inordinate level of anger, lack of understanding and just plain weirdness they possess. Through the years I've collected many and still get such gems on a regular basis. We thought it would be fun to share some of our favorite rants, ramblings and ruminations with the rest of you. I give to you the first of many installments of Slashdot's disagree mail. The names have been changed to protect the idiot — hit the link below to drink it in.

For the last few months we've been beta testing Idle.slashdot.org, our offtopic humor/meme/viral video/pictures section. Like many of you, we spend most of our waking hours on-line seeking stuff to entertain our brains, but most replicators out there pick so much content that it's incredibly boring filtering through the mediocrity to find the funny. We intend to fill our idle section with a very small collection of the very best the net has to offer, making it the most efficient way to waste your time. Some of this content will make it back to the Slashdot mainpage, but much of it will be new content that we wouldn't dare soil the precious Slashdot mainpage with. We are also using it as a test bed for new functionality on Slashdot — currently the page is a reasonably dynamic/interactive experience with various voting controls and filtering options. Finally you will see occasional original content, starting with a recurring special feature today where Samzenpus shares some real tech support email from some of our most intelligent readers. We hope you will enjoy wasting a slice of your day with us, and in addition will submit content through the usual channels, but put it into the 'Idle' section so we know not to take it seriously. Now go about your day — it's mid August, so I'm sure everything you do is urgent, exciting, and oh-so-interesting.

This week we have a few new functions for you comment readers guaranteed to amaze and enchant. Or at least to make your day a little more efficient. The biggest update is that the system should remember what comments you've already read (for a few weeks anyway) but there's some other less interesting stuff as well. Hit the link below to read more.

Thanks to everyone who tested on Friday, as well as to all of SourceForge's netops crew, our corporate overlords at SourceForge for paying the bill, and of course all the engineers on Slashteam- Jamie McCarthy, Tim Vroom, Chris Nandor, Chris Brown, and Scott Collins, we are now running on the new iron in a cage in Chicago. We'll run a story in a few days about the ridiculously overpowered new hardware we have now, but now is the part of sprockets where we dance.

After many years of living in California, Slashdot is preparing to move to a new data center in Chicago, and we need your help. We have our new site running a dump of our database from a few days ago. You can hit it at beta.slashdot.org. Please go there, post comments, submit stories, and do whatever you do normally. Or maybe abnormally — run crawlers, write poll spamming robots or something. If you find any crazy issues, please submit them to our sourceforge tracker. If you're curious, the new system features 18 2x quad-core 2.3 GHz webservers each with 8 gigs of RAM, and 4 quad-core 2.3 GHz databases with 16 gigs of RAM.

Netcraft confirmed it ... Slashdot was dying for several hours (along with SourceForge, which shares a corporate overlord and router). Some planned downtime from our provider apparently didn't come back up quite as planned. Sorry for the inconvenience. On the upside, we're moving to a new network and hardware soon, so the site should be much faster and more stable rsn.

Today, on the last day of our 10 year anniversary navel gazing spectacular, I present the final (thank god!) chapter in my 4 part history of Slashdot. I've written about the creation, the explosion, and the corporatization. Today I talk about where we are today, and what I see as our future, and how I feel about it. Clicky click the magic link below to read the last "thrilling" chapter, and celebrate with me the fact that I won't have to spend this much time writing about Slashdot for another decade.

From Brisbane to Beunos Aires... From the UK to France to Romania... from New York to San Francisco and everywhere in between, we had well over 100s of parties and over 2,300 registered attendees scattered around the world. Many of them got boxes of t-shirts and ThinkGeek gift certificates (and some of them even got them on time). We've seen cakes with legos and logos, we seen nerf gun fights, and even a lawn sporking. I've put a tiny sampling of my favorite pictures online. The grand prize winner is of the $1k store credit at ThinkGeek is Lindsi from Minneapolis. Their party featured a lolcats cake, a taco bar and a dude in a helmet smashing computers with a sledge hammer in a raining parking lot. They earned it. We had a great time in both Palo Alto and Ann Arbor- I hope you guys had fun wherever you gathered. See you again in 2017!