idle.slashdot.org is slashdot's place for off-topic videos/humour/viral web junk. Official announcement.
posted by blue_beetle on Aug 14, 2008 - 40 comments

Slashdot poster has brilliant legislative reform idea: "Source Control for Bills in Congress." What if sneaky changes to pending legislation showed up as soon as they were made instead of in ominously worded media reports months later?
posted by grobstein on Mar 7, 2007 - 62 comments

Slashdot runs out of comments
posted by forwebsites on Nov 9, 2006 - 74 comments

Websites that changed the world? This Observer piece lists fifteen websites that aught to be considered the best of the web. It's a bold claim and although the potted histories are excellent, I'm wondering the extent to which it mostly includes website that have broken the public recognition barrier in the uk rather than changing the world. How many are simply pioneers in their field? Where for example is flickr?
posted by feelinglistless on Aug 13, 2006 - 69 comments

Diggdot.us Digg, slashdot, and del.icio.us/popular - this is a constant browsing cycle for us. So why not combine them into a unified format without all the extra chrome? We can eliminate dupes and add some extra niceities.
posted by srboisvert on Nov 21, 2005 - 22 comments

EP3 Trailer Awesome.
posted by jimjam on Mar 10, 2005 - 87 comments

Roland Piquepaille, author of the excellent Technology Trends blog and frequent contributor to Slashdot, is accused of using plagirism, Slashdot and his own blog to pump up his Blogads revenue. Long quotes and summarization of sources are staples of the blogging culture. When revenue is involved, some infer that the blogger owes more than just credit to their sources. [via Eyebeam Reblog].
posted by tomharpel on Dec 29, 2004 - 27 comments

yesterday: news.com
today: Slashdot
tomorrow: digg
posted by johnnydark on Dec 14, 2004 - 23 comments

Google's sorcery You use it, I use it some 30-40 times a day, but did you ever wonder exactly how they do it? The numbers are staggering:

# Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed. # Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster. # Over 30 clusters. # 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog. # One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10-15 begin to be a real issue. # Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster. # An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters. # No complete system failure since February 2000.

Is Google God? (via /.)
posted by daHIFI on Dec 2, 2004 - 40 comments

Libertarian Presidential candidate Michael Badnarik answers Slashdot's questions.
posted by bitpart on Sep 20, 2004 - 11 comments

politics.slashdot.org ... Can politics.metafilter.com be far behind?
posted by togdon on Sep 7, 2004 - 7 comments

Slashdot just a bit late?
posted by hobbes on May 9, 2004 - 33 comments

Control Lightshow Over Dublin Sky From A Webpage. (link goes to /. with the story and links)
posted by tomplus2 on Apr 26, 2004 - 1 comment

Complaint to nic.cx results in goatse.cx being suspended. Obligatory online petition is started. Screams and sobbing are heard on a regular basis on Slashdot. Links are SFW, but any investigation further may not be. This is truly a dark time for the internet.
posted by angry modem on Jan 15, 2004 - 70 comments

Alterslash is a screen-scraped version of Slashdot that improves on the original.
posted by holloway on Jan 6, 2004 - 10 comments

delenda mp3.com est "Vivendi Universal recently sold the MP3.com domain to CNet. However, they're not selling the approximately one million songs on the archive. (recorded by over 250,000 artists) Instead, they're simply destroying it as of December 3. MP3.com's founder and former CEO, Michael Robertson, is pleading with Vivendi to allow the Internet Archive to preserve the songs." (via Slashdot)
posted by kablam on Nov 23, 2003 - 16 comments

The news at a glance. Categorized news photos. [via slashdot]
posted by srboisvert on Nov 18, 2003 - 5 comments

Neil Gaiman Q&A on Slashdot. Another on Sequential Tart. If you loved the books find out about the author (who has a blog and has been mentioned here a few times).
posted by srboisvert on Nov 3, 2003 - 18 comments

Iraqfilter. "Sometime between April 2003 and October 2003, someone at the White House added virtually all of the directories with 'Iraq' in them to its robots.txt file, meaning that search engines would no longer list those pages in results or archive them." The robots.txt file is here. And here's the Slashdot discussion. I guess it's hard to restore integrity to the Presidency when people can compare your statements over time.
posted by condour75 on Oct 27, 2003 - 29 comments

Here's A Really Neat "Ask Slashdot" feature on how much we rely on the good 'ol Net for our daily dose of news and knowledge.
I've gradually abandoned almost all other sources of news, to the point where TV, magazines and news papers have pretty much disappeared from my life, but unlike the Slashdot guy, I still get a fair amount of "Information" from books.
He's got a good question, and there are some really Good Answers at Slashdot, but I'm curious about the mefites... "Is the Internet Your Source of Knowledge?" From his post:"...but if I'm trying to look up something and can't find it online in a couple minutes I generally just blow it off, as if there's no other place to look. This realization seems sort of stunning. I'm very curious if other Slashdot readers have become dependent on the Internet to that level, and what their thoughts are on the subject." "
According to a study Teens and young adults spend more time online than watching TV, and looking at Other Studies, they all seem to point the same way.
Is print dead?
posted by Blake on Oct 1, 2003 - 15 comments

If you want something done, do it yourself; tired of the browser timeout that came when he mis-spelled the domain name of one of his favorite (and most-visited) sites, this enterprising young man took matters into his own hands. But I encourage you to take his advice and not mess with him while looking for backdoors.
posted by jonson on Jul 3, 2003 - 29 comments

What a bunch of feral Slashdotters had to say when Blogger... got hacked recently “I would put forth the theory that communication may have been one of the very shortcomings that channelled so many veteran Slashdotters into their chosen field of hunched backs, Help Desk apps that prevent human communication, and Barney Miller-school hair concepts” – John Kusch
posted by joeclark on Oct 28, 2002 - 33 comments

Blogger Hacked A slashdot reader reported (on slashdot) that "Blogger has been severely hacked into, with users' passwords and e-mail addresses being replaced with 'hacx0redbyme' or 'hax0redbyme.' " Perhaps the most amusing comment in the ensuing discussion says "I'm glad I don't use a blog... I wouldn't want some l337 hax0r coming in and reading everything about my personal life!" But levity aside, is there some serious implication that a widely used web service is hacked? Is Pyra safe to use?
posted by namespan on Oct 25, 2002 - 27 comments

UW sells out -- for only $2.3 million. As part of the "Academic Innovation Alliance Initiatives" agreement with Microsoft, the University of Waterloo's Electrical & Computer Engineering department has agreed to teach C# to students. In addition to discussion on uwstudent.org, Slashdot thread, press releases from MS and UW and a rebuttal release from the UW Federation of Students.
posted by paulschreiber on Aug 14, 2002 - 20 comments

Today we'll be discussing Jason, Slashdot's Commander, and Ernie. Apparently there's going to be a class in blogging taught to journalism grad students. Do you rail against this at all? Is it because most students won't get it and eff up blogging as a whole, or is it because this means that the blog has Sold Out To The Man? usual "I searched and couldn't find this" disclaimers apply.
posted by verso on Jul 22, 2002 - 25 comments

Meet Cyc. This endeavor to produce AI has been going on since 1984. In ’86 it asked if it were human; it later asked “if any other computers were engaged in such a project”. It’s strength lies in a database of assumptions and generalities, in the hopes that it will eventually “generalize as much as possible until further generalization would be false”. Is this going to be the breakthrough, or does it just seem really cool? (yes, via Slashdot)
posted by sherman on Jun 8, 2002 - 9 comments

So, is Dr. Richard Paley a hoax or not? According to slashdot, we were talking about this site here yesterday evening, but I must have missed it.
posted by dchase on Apr 23, 2002 - 1 comment

How many instances of 'Gee Whiz' can you fit on your hard drive? With cameras mounted on eyeglass frames, he suggests, we can document every moment of our lives and create a second-by-second digital diary. "There won't be any reason ever to forget anything anymore," he says. Vannevar Bush had a similar idea 50 years ago, though in that era the promising storage medium was microfilm rather than magnetic disks.

Hate to parrot /. But this article was just way too fascinating to pass up not sharing it with any of you no-slashdot readers.
posted by crasspastor on Apr 18, 2002 - 9 comments

Should creation of intellectual property be taxable? The City of Seattle wants to tax the development of software, not the sale, the development. Across the country state and local governments are starting to consider taxing this. The question is, is software development taxable? If so, is writing a book taxable, painting a picture? People pay sales tax on the software, and businesses pay income, use, and B&O taxes already. Why is this different? via /.
posted by patrickje on Mar 12, 2002 - 28 comments

What were you saying on the morning of 9/11? I have been very dissatisfied with this archive of the news on 9/11. I think this stuff has its place. But, it does not help us tell our grandkids how people were reacting that morning. For posterity's sake, I think it is much more important to record what happened on blogs and other online communities that morning. So, I am trying to collect online conversations that took place immediately after the news of the attacks broke on September 11. I have one link from here and one from Slashdot. Sorry if I am missing out on important ones. My hope is that this post will lead to more links to conversations. I am not interested in war blogs unless they have a reference to a conversation on the morning of 9/11.
posted by SandeepKrishnamurthy on Feb 1, 2002 - 48 comments

Alterslash takes all the hard work out of reading Slashdot. On a single page, it compiles the day's headlines, along with the top five rated comments on each, and graphs the signal % over time for each thread. Think of it as an automatic digest, showing just the best of Slashdot, each day.
posted by mathowie on Jan 25, 2002 - 15 comments

A New Year's Idea: Pay For Some
So, slashdot says A Great New Year's Idea is to Pay For Some Freedom, eg. BSD, EFF or MozillaZine to name just a few, but what else can we do?
Metafilter, OddTodd, IMDB [Aren't they already owned by Amazon?], lots of good places to spread the holiday cheer. Seems like there is no shortage of Folks who are looking for something.
I like the idea of Getting Something In Return, not sure if that makes me greedy, or scroogey.
Seems like the web has really given us a new list of worthy causes...
posted by Blake on Dec 27, 2001 - 5 comments

Slashdot finally admits that Linux is HARD... obviously, read the comments at +3. Sorry to post a /. link, but this is of historical import.
posted by GriffX on Dec 7, 2001 - 101 comments

Battle Over Blocks
These essays offer a thoughtful insight into the Lego bricks we grew up with, and how the toys have changed with the times to reflect an absence of creativity in our society. Features Jeff Bates, cofounder of slashdot.
posted by johnjreeve on Oct 29, 2001 - 25 comments

Slashdot.info is the address that I randomly typed in, (just for fun) and reached the page. Quite informative. Better than a spoof page, atleast. Also, the .biz is not registered yet...
posted by arnab on Oct 27, 2001 - 3 comments

Slashdot introduces paid subscriptions. - "I hope you can understand the expensive reality associated with making this site happen every day" We've talked about paid memberships for Metafilter before, and I'd happily pay, but if all of the sites I go to everyday start doing this I'll have to make some hard choices.

Is there any talk about some sort of membership "package"? Sort of like the cable model? I pay one fee and get member access to several websites? How could something like this be organized?
posted by y6y6y6 on Oct 23, 2001 - 22 comments

New worm doing the rounds. Great.
posted by nico on Sep 18, 2001 - 23 comments

Arnold had a full grill in Total Recall, but Hopes for manned — and especially a "womanned" mission to Mars — might hinge on teeth. The bone-weakening effects of zero-gravity environments might lead to permanent tooth loss, says a government dentist. via Slashdot
posted by adampsyche on Aug 28, 2001 - 13 comments

Scary story about how the MPAA wields it's bought and paid-for DMCA. (via slashdot)
posted by skallas on Aug 23, 2001 - 8 comments

Oh my god, the internet has porn on it! (Again.) The U.S. Congress makes their annual re-discovery that not everything on the internet is child-friendly. This time they noticed the Gnutella network. (Yes, I got the link from Slashdot - but I like discussing things here rather than there.)
posted by RylandDotNet on Jul 27, 2001 - 31 comments

The end is neigh. This wonderful little company is just about to unleash an ISP filter system that will allow content providers to decide which users get access, namely, those who have paid them a fee. Your ISP will soon have to pay individual fees to offer you anything. Your rate will go way up, your choices will go way down. Web surfing as we know it, is dying. Check the Slashdot freak-out.
posted by dong_resin on Jul 13, 2001 - 24 comments

Is Slashdot Toast? I found this using a link from F**kedcompany, who seems to be rather amused by the fact that /. has been down since friday. The posts at geekizoid seem rather flaky for the most part, so I don't know how seriously to take this. But in any case, it's just not like the Slashdot crew to drop off the net without a word.... What have all of you out in MeFi land heard????
posted by BGM on Jun 24, 2001 - 23 comments

After small web sites didn't receive a single nomination in last year's Online Journalism Awards, Robin Miller of Slashdot is offering to pay the $100 entry fee for five of the best examples of small-site journalism published since July 2000. Who deserves the money?
posted by rcade on Jun 19, 2001 - 8 comments

Tivo hackers today released the hack that enables you to get MPEG-2 video out of the box and put it on CDs, share it over the net, etc. No details because the AVS Tivo site (registration required) is being slashdotted...but will this precipitate a TiVo crackdown on the hackers?
posted by luser on Jun 7, 2001 - 21 comments

"Three of the top Net-nerd forum/discussion sites, Metafilter, Plastic.com and Slashdot, have threads discussing ways to block these ads." Ouch. I don't know which I resent more: "Net-nerd" or being grouped with "Plastic.com".
posted by Steven Den Beste on Jun 7, 2001 - 23 comments

Hahahah. Big Fish eats another Big Fish. Then says they can't afford to feed their families.
stop struggling. it's all going to end in misery anyway. now twice as many people can be burnt when ugo collapses.
posted by jcterminal on May 16, 2001 - 1 comment

Slashdot addict? Time to kick the habit.
posted by darukaru on May 15, 2001 - 14 comments

Early (around 1910) amazing COLOR photographs from Russia by Prokudin-Gorskii, photographer for the Czar. He essentially had three cameras, each with a separate Red, Green, or Blue filter, and snapped the same shot at the same time. So all the "reds" were recorded, in B&W, on one photographic plate, and likewise down the line. Then he could use the filters to recreate the scene and project it onto a screen in color. (more inside) (props to slashdot for the link)
posted by jwells on May 7, 2001 - 58 comments

There's an excellent (!) Slashdot thread going on concerning the 2600/DeCSS case.
posted by sonofsamiam on May 2, 2001 - 1 comment

"I knew lots of rednecks that had taken potshots at the [Goodyear] blimp."
posted by holloway on Apr 29, 2001 - 9 comments