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.
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 [slashdot.org], 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 wor
I literally found out about the 9/11 attack on Slashdot. In an off-topic post somebody made.
I logged on in the morning and loaded up Slashdot to see what was up. There was an off-topic post in an unrelated thread about the 9/11 attack having occurred, so I went outside the 'nerd enclave' to find out what it was about.
I didn't find out about it on Slashdot, but I went to the BBC news site and they weren't responding - the only time I've ever seen that site die under load. Slashdot was still working fine.
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.
Same here./. was the first web site I visited after waking up that morning. When I saw the stories (about planes hitting the WTC, and buildings collapsing), my first thought was that someone had hacked the site, and this was someone's idea of a sick joke.
Its amazing that sites run by major media organizations with huge amounts of money all buckled under the load but a geek site without a huge amount of money behind it was able to survive without failing. (at least I assume the money behind Slashdot at that time was less than the money behind entities like CNN)
None of the normal news sites would come up. That is odd I thought. Continued onto/., where I first saw the post about it.
Interesting that we'd be mentioning the news lifeline that/. was on 9/11.
At the time, I worked in Oklahoma at a company whose corporate access point to the Internet was in the basement of tower 2. When it collapsed, we lost connectivity (of course). That's when I decided I had to go home for the day. I was NOT going to do without the first-hand online news on/., and it was clear nobody was actually going to be getting any real work done that day.
Nope. Time to go home where I can get news and cry for a
Never worry about theory as long as the machinery does what it's supposed to do.
-- R. A. Heinlein
One notable story I heard about first on /. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Thank you, John C. Randolph (~jcr) (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org], 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 wor
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It goes without saying because, well, who doesn't?!
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The quality formerly known as "Belief that you're God's gift" to posting is not so uncommon on the green line site.
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I wonder if his AIM account is still active. Is AIM even still active?
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I literally found out about the 9/11 attack on Slashdot. In an off-topic post somebody made.
I logged on in the morning and loaded up Slashdot to see what was up. There was an off-topic post in an unrelated thread about the 9/11 attack having occurred, so I went outside the 'nerd enclave' to find out what it was about.
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Not long after that, I remember someone naively thinking that the Slashdot effect would still work on the BBC.
And then someone else posted usage logs: Slashdot effect added ~100k additional hits to a total that was running at ~2M normal users at that time.
(the exact numbers may be out, but it was one of the first times that a site was demonstrated to be large enough to soak up /. without even blinking)
Slashdot+ Linux = The Rock during 9/11 (Score:2)
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.
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Same here. /. was the first web site I visited after waking up that morning. When I saw the stories (about planes hitting the WTC, and buildings collapsing), my first thought was that someone had hacked the site, and this was someone's idea of a sick joke.
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It's interesting that you heard about it here first, but you tried it here last :)
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Its amazing that sites run by major media organizations with huge amounts of money all buckled under the load but a geek site without a huge amount of money behind it was able to survive without failing. (at least I assume the money behind Slashdot at that time was less than the money behind entities like CNN)
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None of the normal news sites would come up. That is odd I thought. Continued onto /., where I first saw the post about it.
Interesting that we'd be mentioning the news lifeline that /. was on 9/11.
At the time, I worked in Oklahoma at a company whose corporate access point to the Internet was in the basement of tower 2. When it collapsed, we lost connectivity (of course). That's when I decided I had to go home for the day. I was NOT going to do without the first-hand online news on /., and it was clear nobody was actually going to be getting any real work done that day.
Nope. Time to go home where I can get news and cry for a