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.

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.

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!

Today is your last chance to enter the Slashdot 10-Year Anniversary party contest. All you need to do is send pictures, videos, or whatever party evidence you can email to anniversary at slashdot dot org. The winner will be whoever sends the things that make their party look the coolest, the most nerdish etc. We've seen signs, games, etc so far... and of course, the winner gets $1k at ThinkGeek. Both the Ann Arbor and Silicon Valley parties were great. Much alcohol consumed. Old friends chatted with. New friends met. I hope many of you around the net got your t-shirts and had good times.

Today we have Part 2 in our exciting 2 part series about the infrastructure that powers Slashdot. Last week Uriah told us all about the hardware powering the system. This week, Jamie McCarthy picks up the story and tells us about the software... from pound to memcached to mysql and more. Hit that link and read on.

If you can imagine working in the office of a school for gifted, troubled, and criminally insane children, inside an international airport, you can get a taste of what it is like to do support for Slashdot. I've worked here around 5 years now and have seen some crazy things. From a guy showing up at the office and offering me a car if I let him "reverse engineer Rob Malda's life", to people shaking and on the verge of tears because they got a Slashdot sticker. I was really tempted to take the car by the way but the thought of Rob spending his last few weeks in a hole, while this guy lowered a bucket of lotion and water down to him once a day, made me feel bad. Most of my time is spent answering email. Most days I receive about 50. When it's busy I can get well over a hundred. As everyone knows, people are precisely 500% more rude and angry online than they are in real life. Something about not having to see the tears or dodge the fist of the person you are swearing at brings out the worst in some people. We decided it would be fun to go through some of the more 'interesting' mails we've got through the years as part of our 10 year anniversary. Below you'll find some of my favorite rants, conspiracy theories and tantrums. (CT: Don't forget to put in your charity bid for the EFF- time is almost up.)

When last we left off, Slashdot had grown beyond my ability to maintain it as a hobby, as well as beyond the simple DEC Alpha Multia 166 that had served it so well for the first week or two, and then immediately buckled under the traffic. Here in Part 2, we ride the wave of Slashdot's growth from early '98 until whenever my wrists get tired enough that I stop yakking until next week.

We last interviewed CmdrTaco, along with Hemos, in January 2000. Slashdot's 10th anniversary seems like a good time to put Rob back on the hot seat. He's older now and married, his former hobby site now has well over one million registered user IDs, and Linux has gone from "upstart" operating system to a normal part of the IT landscape. So ask away, one question per post. Expect to see answers to at least 10 of the highest-moderated questions next week. And if you miss your chance to participate in this interview, don't worry. We'll probably do another one with CmdrTaco sometime between 2014 and 2017. CT: Also the clock is ticking if you want to sign up for a Slashdot 10-Year Anniversary party if you want a T-Shirt or a shot at the $1k ThinkGeek gift certificate.

Reminder to check for parties in your area. You can still create new parties through the weekend, but you'll need to RSVP ASAP in order to make your location eligible to get a care package of ThinkGeek gift certificates, and Slashdot T-Shirts. Remember to read the discussions on your party to be notified of location changes or updates. Party planners- make sure your email address is up to date- we'll need to get a shipping address for shirts. We've upped the number of shirts to 700 to accommodate a quite impressive number of parties and attendees. The corporate drones demand that I share with you official rules to be eligible for the $1000 gift certificate. The winner will be selected by me, based on who sends in the picture/video/story from their party that proves theirs was best/coolest/whatever. Some folks have already contacted me with some creative ideas so the competition is gonna be tough. Choreography? Synchronized Swimming? Group Chanting? Streaking? Lastly, A special note to Ann Arbor party attendees (Oct 20!)- we've moved the location to Leopold Bros. It's only a block away, but they can handle a larger group. I'll be in attendance trading T-Shirts for booze ;) The Palo Alto party is looking large as well. Looking forward to attending both.

October marks 10 friggin years of Slashdot, and nobody is more surprised about any of this than me. Throughout the month we'll be running a series of navel gazing meta news articles about our history, infrastructure and plans for the future. We're also going to give away 500 t-shirts and ThinkGeek gift certificates to people willing to organize and attend their own local Slashdot parties. One lucky winner will get a cool grand to blow at ThinkGeek! I'm going to attend "official" gatherings in Ann Arbor, MI on Oct 20 and in Palo Alto, CA on Oct 25. But you can read on for details about party organization and how you can win the grand prize.

A few quick notes on some recent code updates. The smaller function is that we've added text messaging stuff for phones. If you visit the messages page (you must be logged in) you can define your cell phone's email address, and get notifications sent to it. The more interesting update is for Discussion2 users (turn it on on any article page). There is an option now to restrict page sizes and you will retrieve comments by score. This means you can configure your Slashdot to return smaller, more bandwidth friendly pages that you can expand without loading fresh pages. Anyone still running D1 is a sucker.

Logged in users have noticed for some time the request to drink from the Slashdot Firehose. Well now we're ready to start having everybody test it out. It's partially a collaborative news system, partially a redesigned & dynamic next-generation Slashdot index. It's got a lot of really cool features, and a lot of equally annoying new problems for us to find and fix for the next few weeks. I've attached a rough draft of the FAQ to the end of this article. A quick read of it will probably answer most questions from how it works, what all the color codes mean, to what we intend to do with it.

Slashdot users of the Discussion2 system now have a new 'Update' button visible on their floating control slider, as well at the end of the discussion. This button will update your page to include comments posted since the page was loaded, so now you can keep discussion pages up to date without doing a full reload. It's nowhere near complete yet, but it's a nice step that goes a long ways towards making it easier to use larger discussions while they are actively updating. If you aren't using Discussion2, you need to log in, and toggle the checkbox visible on every page. You probably need bother only if you are using Firefox 1.5 or 2.x or Safari. You can send bug reports to me if you want.

We have a number of Slashdot features that we've added in recent months that I've neglected to mention so I wanted to take a moment to share them with everyone today. I'd like to start by reminding all logged in users to try playing with our new experimental Discussion2 system. It's very nearly complete at this point. You can activate it with a checkbox on any article page (provided you actually have logged in). Read on to learn about Podcasts, IM, improved quoting in discussions, new subscriber options and more.

Daedius writes "My comrade Hugh Perkins is living in Asia and he has been without reliable internet connectivity for many days. He uses l33t hacks to get his daily dose of Slashdot in desperate times." From the posting: "The Taiwan earthquake has brought telecommunications in the Taiwan/Hong Kong region to a standstill. I am living in Shenzhen and am unable to read Slashdot directly for several days. Gmail and Google have privileged bandwidth and local servers and both continue to work perfectly from the region. Could there be some way to use Google or Gmail to read Slashdot? A solution was to upload an executable to my web hosting in America that would receive zipped executables by email, execute them, then email me the results."