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

Thank god, a judge was smart enough to throw out an injunction against all the web site owners that posted the DeCSS source code. This suit was completely pointless because DeCSS is used for *playback* of DVDs, not copying (which can be done bit-for-bit digitally). The people who should be punished for this are the dorks that came up with the weak encryption in the first place.
posted by mathowie on Dec 29, 1999 - 0 comments

Behold the power of slashdot. When slashdot ran a story about an ISP shutting down a guy hosting a FBI spoof video, the owner of the single person ISP became inundated with hate mail. It's seems like this is happening fairly often: slashdot runs a story based on some early information that may or may not be checked, the zealots get fired up and go on the rampage. The last time I remember it happening was the bogus Dreamcast telnet story that resulted in numerous angry calls to Sega's tech support lackeys. It's sad to see that even a group of mostly educated geeks often reacts with pack mentality before thinking of the implications of what they're doing.
posted by mathowie on Nov 30, 1999 - 0 comments

As I was reading about this product at Amazon, I noticed they now let people 'score' the reviews. Will highly regarded reviews float to the top? That would make the products with 40+ reviews a lot more useful. Since Amazon patented one-click ordering and even sued Barnes and Noble over it, does this mean Slashdot should come after Amazon for adopting their moderation ideas?
posted by mathowie on Nov 21, 1999 - 0 comments

Someone sent this to me, apparently it was mentioned somewhere on slashdot, but I can't find the reference. It's a final exam from a special college course on the future of computing. Question 11 is especially intriguing.
posted by mathowie on Nov 11, 1999 - 1 comment

/. has a link to a contest to find the slowest booting NT server. That's one of the things that really bugs me about NT. My workstation takes about 15 minutes and this very server (MetaFilter) takes at least 10 minutes to reboot.
posted by mathowie on Oct 29, 1999 - 0 comments

Woo hoo! I got my story about the 30th anniversary of the Internet posted at Slashdot. My original version included photos, so you might want to check out that version instead.
posted by mathowie on Sep 4, 1999 - 0 comments

Unisys has spoken. They've finally admitted that most creators of web graphics will not be held liable for their silly $5,000 licenses. I guess it's not time to burn all gifs yet.
posted by mathowie on Aug 31, 1999 - 1 comment