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Slashdot.org

www, DNS, Slashdot and other Evils

Allright here's the deal guys, I am personally waging war against the 'www' prefix that gets added to web sites and I guess I forgot to mention it here. I think www is stupid- it's hard to say (9 times longer than 'web'). Originally it was nice because people see 'www' and they think web site, but now, if you see words.connected.with.dots on a commercial, you either know what that means, or you just don't need to know.

As part of the DNS switchover, I made 'www' stay on the old server. Just use 'Slashdot.org' to get here. I've been getting a lot of email from people who think the DNS is still foobar, but I've been really doing this on purpose. web.slashdot.org will also work, but I'd prefer just plain old slashdot. So all you webmasters out there join me, and alias your web sites as web and link them through that. Maybe someday we won't sound silly saying 'www' every 30 seconds when talking about the net to someone.

Update Couple of points. I think 'www' is implicit when talking about a web site. A commercial with a URL is advertising a web site, so they don't need the www. If you want a prefix, cool- use web. or w3. A lot of the discussion here is missing my point- we still need mail.foo.com and ftp.foo.com, but when 'talking' (in real life here guys- remember what it is like to talk to people outside of IRC :) it is dumb to pronounce www. It's just inefficient- 99% of the time it could be dropped. And I know the DNS is screwy still- I've sent dozens of emails to internic- it'll happen eventually.

Slashdot.org

Help Rob/Get a Mug!

Ok this is a wierd one:for those who don't know, I'm an Art Minor at Hope College. My next project in my Advanced Ceramics class is to make and sell 20 items. I intend to make either oversized coffe mugs or beer steins, but I need to sell them. They'll be probably $10 plus S&H for anyone in the US. I don't know about international orders. They won't have a slashdot logo or anything, but they will be hand made by me! Woohoo! So if you want to help me get a good grade, and would be willing to shell out $10 for a handmade ceramic mug, send me an email so I know how many to make. Only ask if you want one- I don't want to have a dozen leftover since they take quite awhile to make... and we all know how little spare time I have left these days.

Update:No logos. No Penguins. No Custom Requests. Sorry guys, these are art projects first and foremost. I started the first 8 today and they look pretty crazy though. If anyone wants a vase (mothers day is coming up!) let me know- a friend in the class (who is much better than me) is making vases so he can go to a ceramics convention over spring break. They'll probably cost more than the mugs, but they'll be really cool.

Slashdot.org

New Server

Well Slashdot has moved from Ariel (An Alpha/166) to Triton (A Dual P133). You probably should notice a speed gain, but there probably are some bugs that occured in shipping. The first server lasted through our first million hits, let's hope this one handles the next 10 million. Oh, and big thanks to My Roommate, Dave DeMaagd for letting us use this machine for free until we get some cash. Everyone send him a thank you note at demaagd@imagegroup.com right this second 'cuz without him, Slashdot probably wouldn't have lasted much longer...
Slashdot.org

DES II Effort

I am happy to report that as a team, Slashdot has now moved into the top ten. All of you out there who haven't joined yet, the time is now! The revolution is imminent..rather...how about you join up with this? For those of you wondering how to join the team, some kindly people have included instructions. Many thanks to Erik Berry for his detailed instructions, and remember, when DES II is cracked (should be soon), all the clients will automatically switch back to RC5, so hopefully we can start cranking through there as well.
Slashdot.org

Slashdot turns a Million

Well it had to happen sooner or later. At 8:00 EST Slashdot got it's 1 millionth hit. Here's the skinny-someone at ppp-206-170-2-11.sntc01.pacbell.net and was reading the comments on the Gnome/KDE Editorial I posted earlier today. But alas our boy (or girl, we could have a girl) was running IE3 under Windows NT! Ack! Will the offender stepforth and recieve his punishment of thirty lashes with an AOL 50 free hours floppy disk?
Slashdot.org

Slashdot Publicity

Apparently famous people read Slashdot too! We've had posts from many major corporations and many major colleges and universities, and now ddt (Dave Taylor, of Doom/Id fame, now of Golgotha/Abuse/Crack Dot fame) actually linked me in his .plan file! He linked the recent Apple and Rhapsody article with the comment "We are not supporting another Apple game unless Apple puts Rhapsody on gamer's desktops. That's my ultimatum." Wow! Makes me wonder which of my other hero's might be reading this site. Now if we can just get a few advertisers *grin*.
Slashdot.org

Slashdot Opens Up To Advertisers

Well it had to happen sometime. I've finally worked most of the messy details for how we're going to keep Slashdot going, and better yet, to help it grow! Now as soon as we find a few cool sponsors, we're going to get us a nice fast new server. If you're interested in advertising here, mail me but remember, our standards are very high:We want cool, relevant ads, without tacky animation and excessive glitz to suck up our bandwidth. If you're interested, let me know.
Slashdot.org

20/20 Party

Wow! I haven't seen that active of a channel since #Quake the night the original came out. We had 150 or so people chatting away during 20/20 on the East Coast. Way cool. We have some logs here for those who missed the party. The best part was the page after page of screaming during Bill's 'Solo'. Very funny.

Hopefully #slashdot will remain a regular thing. We've got a bot now and hopefully we can have another party again soon.

Slashdot.org

Slashdot Simulcast Tonight!

OK we're going to try to make this happen tonight guys. The Bill Gates on 20/20 interview ought to be a laugh riot, and we thought that Slashdot should be along to celebrate. So tonight, join #Slashdot on efnet. I'll be there from 10pm (EST) until I get to sleepy to keep typing. I'll try to answer questions about the recent hoopla surrounding the site, and together we can lampoon Mr. Bill has he chit chats with Barbara Walters! Load of BitchX or IrcII or even MiRC (snicker) and join the party!
Slashdot.org

Future of Slashdot (Part 2)

I am absolutely amazed at the volume of response you all have generated. I thank each of you for the emails (over 100 in the last 5 hours) and the posts to the comments section (also over 100 in 5 hours). I've been reading your emails now for the last 3 and a half hours and have reached some sort of conclusion. Follow the link below and I'll talk about it.
Slashdot.org

The Future of Slashdot (Very Important!)

These last few months Slashdot has been growing at an amazing rate. We've been getting 20-25k hits a day recently. As the site grows, I begin to think more and more about the site, its future, and myself. Recently I've been approached by several companies and people who see great Potential in the site. At the same, I am torn apart by my desire to continue maintaining the site as a hobby. Follow the link below to read my opinions and some options about the future of the site.
Slashdot.org

Slashdot Headaches

I just wanted to explain yesterday to ya'll quick a second. For 4-5 hours yesterday Slashdot was a bit under the weather. I'm not exactly sure why it died, except to say that we got linked from somewhere fairly sizable since we were getting several times the usual number of hits. Probably due to my Netscape Editorial or something. Anyway, I guess that means that the time to start thinking about hardware upgrades has moved up a bit.
Slashdot.org

Slashdot Content Stolen

Well they say that immitation is the most sincere sort of flattery, but blatantly stealing isn't flattery, it just makes me irritable. It seems that Mr. Philip Saunders has decided to start stealing most of Slashdot's articles. Think I'm kidding? Check out this link to what philip calls "Lord Cyric's Linux "News" Page.

The page basically takes all of my icons, and most of the better Slashdot articles, makes some or no modifications to them, and reposts them- after stripping out the names of Me and the other fine authors who write for Slashdot. After all of this, Phillip doesn't even Link Slashdot back. If you appreciate what I'm doing here, and think what Phillip is doing is tacky, send him email at p.saunders@agsm.unsw.edu.au and ask him to stop. Or at the very least, credit his sources.

Thanks to Scoop for alerting me to this. Scoop is the way cool guy who maintains Fresh Meat, the best source of Linux Software Update information.

Slashdot.org

Slashdot User Abuse

Allright I hate to do this, but I want to appeal to Slashdot User's sense of decency. Recently the signal to noise ratio on the User Talk Back section of each article has got really bad. The swearing, the stupid comments, the name calling.

Please play fairly kids. I like reading the comments- most of the time reading you guys comments really makes my work seem worthwhile, but when I see crap posted I feel like I have no choice but to just remove that feature from the site. Don't make me do that guys- think before you post.

Slashdot.org

Slashdot Bug Fixes

Well I hopefully have at least temporarily fixed some of the speed problems that Slashdot users have been complaining about. My page generation script was originally executed each time a user hit the homepage. This was fine until I started getting 10,000 hits per day. This problem will come back when we get to 20,000 hits per day, but maybe by then Sun or Digital will donate a nice machine to the cause (can anyone pull some strings for me? :)
Slashdot.org

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