LinuxFest Northwest takes place this weekend in Bellingham, Washington. It's one of my favorite conferences — a long-running, volunteer-run, low-hype gathering with two days of presentations, demonstrations, and kibbitzing at Bellingham Technical College. I'm on the way there now, in an oddball fashion, having hopped a ride from Seattle on the giant bus that Dice.com (the Dice which bought Slashdot's parent company last year) has rented for an ongoing advertising road-trip to promote their stock in trade as employment matchmakers. Since Bellingham is at the north end of their range, I'm going from Seattle to the festival that way.

If you'll be in the area, the conference is excellent and free (!); the bus has enough of an internet connection that I hope to give some demonstrations of the Slashdot admin interface for anyone who'd like to see the flow of stories as the editors do, and click the buttons that will send at least a few pieces of spam to the special circle of hell for which they are destined.

As of today, what was Geeknet Media has been utterly transformed: now we're Slashdot Media. Actually, it's just the name that's been utterly transformed, at least as far as this site is concerned. We're still News For Nerds, Stuff That Matters — just now with more Slashdot. (And for that matter, we're still just as grateful for and reliant on your news submissions and ideas as ever. Tell us what you want to see.)

What it all means:

For Slashdot readers? Not much. For readers (and editors, and programmers, etc.), this change has no impact on what you'll see on the page, how we select stories, the layout of the page, or anything else except trivial things like the nomenclature on copyright and other legal notices. For others? Slashdot's an advertising-supported site; selling the ads that effect that support — "the business side," vs. "the editorial side" — has its own logistics and its own internal logic. The folks around the world who are in the business of buying ad space online will see the new name in places like letterhead and contracts.

Why? Why? Why?

Because of the business changes last year (if you're not keeping score, Slashdot and ThinkGeek are no longer part of the same umbrella group), this name change was agreed on to prevent confusion about who's who. That makes it easier for the business-side folks to lease out your valuable eyeballs, so we can keep the lights on (well, keep the monitors on) and keep up the flow of news, interviews, reviews, and the occasional bit of snark. And besides, "Slashdot" has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? If you have any questions about this name change, feel free to pass them along to feedback@slashdot.org; we'd like to know if you have any concerns worth addressing for everyone in a followup post.

We at Slashdot would like to wish everyone a happy Pi day! It’s one of the few minor holidays we feel is worth actively noting because it celebrates concepts very close to this community’s heart. It’s not just the number itself; it’s an opportunity to glorify math, knowledge, and nerdiness.

Large-scale celebration of Pi Day began in 1988, mostly through the efforts of physicists Larry Shaw and Ron Hipschmann at the San Francisco Exploratorium. The Exploratorium still runs Pi Day events 25 years later, including Pi-themed processions and pie for dessert. In 2009, Pi Day became semi-official through a vote by the House of Representatives. (They did a better job with Pi than did Indiana, who almost legislated it to be 3.2.)

The best way to celebrate Pi Day is to get together with some friends and talk math over a pie. You could even go for a pizza pie, since a pizza with radius 'z' and height 'a' has volume = pi * z * z * a. If you're too busy, there are plenty of Pi Day events to check out on the Internet, too. Princeton is holding a video contest to celebrate the day, or you can check out the pi pies people are making. If you'd care for a game, head over to the Pi Day Challenge, which features a series of pi-related logic puzzles. Or just spend the day learning about pi.

Cool pi facts: Pi is currently known to about 10 billion decimal places. You can calculate pi using the Fibonacci sequence. A few years ago, Steven Rochen mapped the digits of pi to musical notes and turned it into a violin solo (video). Others have made music from pi as well. Mankind didn't know the first hundred digits of pi until the year 1701. How many digits of pi can you recite? The record for memorization currently stands at 67890 digits. The record for reciting pi while juggling three balls is just under 10,000.

South By Southwest Interactive is getting underway today in my home city of Austin; I'm going to see as much as I can today, Saturday, and Monday, with video camera in hand. If there's anything in particular you'd like to see (this list of exhibitors may give some ideas), leave a note here. As with any big gathering (hundreds of exhibits, tens of thousands in the madding crowd), there is much too much for any one person to see. Plenty to choose from, in fact — start-ups, gaming, and more. I hope to get a look at the forthcoming Digital Bolex camera, too.

A message from Gaurav Kuchhal (Head of Product, Slashdot)

While it's been in beta for a bit, we are very proud to announce the new mobile interface for Slashdot (m.slashdot.org). The new Slashdot mobile experience is the first major set of innovations for Slashdot in years. We’ve built the mobile user experience with the future in mind, embracing a more personal, a more social and certainly a more mobile web.

We've built this new mobile interface optimized exclusively for your touch smartphones and tablets. This new mobile site gives existing readers a new way to engage with Slashdot, and attracts the new audience by allowing them to sign in using their Twitter, Facebook or Google+ social profiles.

Features:

• Read comments and stories in a mobile-friendly view (no more squinting!)
• Most popular stories shown right at the top
• Access the latest (even unposted!) stories right from the Firehose
• See rich user profiles of your friends and foes
• Quickly sign in with your Twitter, Google+ or Facebook account
• See beautiful achievement badges
• Quickly participate in polls
• Show off your latest Gravatar

What's under the hood?
The new Slashdot mobile site is built on top of open HTML5 web architecture and serves as a first step to improve the entire Slashdot site experience. We built this app using the latest technologies and frameworks such as Backbone, Zepto, Underscore, Hamstache, Jasmine, and Sass. Since there are so many mobile devices and capabilities, we targeted webkit browsers, and Android versions above 2.3. While the site should work in FF and Opera, we really recommend you use the latest version of Chrome. For more information about browser capability, see our FAQ.

A thanks to the community!
We didn't start sketching the blueprints based on what we thought a mobile experience should be - we asked YOU. From in-person interviews, user surveys, and all of your feedback we listened to your thoughts (and you had a lot!). From our initial alpha launch, to our tablet and smartphone betas, we want to thank all of you for patiently testing each version and giving great feedback. Slashdot IS Slashdot because of the community and we love every comment.

Point your mobile browser to m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

We hope 2012 has been good to you (or was good to you, depending on your time zone) and that 2013 is even better. The world did not boil off into space in earlier, which is at least a good start on both counts.

It's been an eventful year in the world of Slashdot, and we're glad you're reading. We started shooting videos (the cycle will be a bit more complete when we get some videos from CES, which starts in the second week of January), interviewed people like Richards Dawkins and Stallman (answers pending), celebrated 15 years of News for Nerds (if you've been along for the ride and scanned them all, know you've had something like 125,000 stories flashed into your head), and changed corporate affiliation.

On this last day of the year from our vantage point in the central U.S., here's a reminder that Slashdot has communication channels besides what you see by hitting the front page. We try not to clutter the page too often with meta-information in the flow of stories, but you can tap into slightly more if you'd like:

Our Twitter feed: This is a good way to keep up on headlines as they appear on Slashdot while you enjoy your active, outdoor lifestyle, and every so often the twitter feed features a note or three that appears only on Twitter.

The Slashdot page on Facebook. Here, too, you can see the stories that appear on Slashdot, as well as a few extras or notes about the site itself. For instance, you can see a a bit of of reader artwork, and photos from our anniversary gatherings. If you have a Slashdot-related image, send it along -- we'd like to add more.

If you've got a smartphone or a tablet, try a different approach to Slashdot with the mobile version. The same stories you'll find on the main site, but presented in a way we hope takes better advantage of (read "suffers less from") the smaller screen, touch interface, etc, of mobile devices. It works, but it's also a work in progress; tell us what you like about it or hate about it, so we can iterate in your favor.

For MBA-caliber scanning of headlines (and firewall sneaking, too, if you would like to read somewhere that Slashdot is blocked by censorware), you can also read Slashdot's stories in the form of a newsletter; it's easy to sign up (you'll need an account and an email address, because that's how it arrives) by clicking "Newsletter" in the menu at the upper right of the page.

Also remember that there are, besides Slashdot (at last count, but stay tuned) three sister sites that focus more narrowly and feature boatloads of original stories on the domains of data centers, the cloud, and business intelligence, as well as tv.slashdot.org, which collects all of the videos that we've shown on Slashdot along with some others.

Finally, our all-purpose (all singing, all dancing) email address is feedback@slashdot.org. If you've got an interface idea, a problem, a query, or the number to a Swiss bank account you'd like to share, sending to feedback@slashdot.org means the editors will see it. (We regret that we can't respond to every email, but if you report a bug or make a cool suggestion, it will get passed on to the right people!)

Have a happy and safe holiday — and enjoy the next orbit of the only Earth-like planet of which we are thus far aware.

Reader contributions are what make Slashdot Slashdot. We've posted more than 125,000 news items over the years, and the vast majority of them started out as reader suggestions. Someone read (or wrote!) a cool story, or witnessed an interesting event, or was stumped by a technical or ethical question, and thought it was worth sharing with the rest of the world.

(Submitting a story to Slashdot should be fairly painless. Hit the submission guidelines, and then the submission form to stack an item on the pile for consideration.)

But sometimes we (the editors) goof by either overlooking or introducing errors, and sometimes we (the all-inclusive "we" of humanity) goof. If you find that you've submitted a story but left out a vital link, or got hijacked by a cut-and-paste demon, or hit "Save" when you meant to his "Keep Editing," here's the best way to fix it:

• Resubmit, using the same submissions form :) Except in unusual circumstances, that's far easier for us to deal with that attempting to fix things by email, over the phone, or in the smoke signals. Versioning is the work of the devil, especially when it means mixing streams of communication.
• Point out that it's a resubmission, and briefly explain why. ("I'm resubmitting to fix some bitrot; site changed its addressing scheme right after I read this article," say, or "I didn't realize that Finnish keyboards put the 'Enter' button inside the space bar," etc.)
• If you've still got a link to the previous submission (the one you're updating), we'd appreciate it if you could include it (it's something like "https://slashdot.org/submission/$number-here/your-previous-articles-title"). That makes it easy to compare the new one to the old and understand why you've resubmitted. Any given editor might have not realize that you'd submitted a different version previously, especially if you submitted it anonymously.

That's it!

Note: We must decline far more of the submissions that come in to Slashdot than we run; that's the nature of the beast. So we can't guarantee in advance that any particular submission will run on the page, but we definitely give re-submits a close eye.

For a bigger-picture view of the submissions process, see our previous blog entry, too.

As always, we try to answer reader questions (whether personally, or by incorporating design changes, or by explaining in ways like this blog) that are sent to feedback at Slashdot dot org; pop us a note if you've got a question, suggestion, or complaint.

One of the purposes of this blog is to provide a more detailed explanations of various aspects of Slashdot -- things that don't fit in the FAQ. Today we'll address a common point of confusion among users trying to share news with the world: What happens to my submission once I've submitted it?

Once you finish typing up your summary and hit submit, two things happen immediately: you're shown a permanent link at which your words will reside for as long as our database does, and your submission is entered into the top of the firehose. If you'd like to keep an eye on your submission, I'd suggest either bookmarking its permanent link, or watching it from the submissions tab of your user page. It'll always be in those two places regardless of what happens to it. More on that later.

When your submission has successfully entered the firehose, a few more things. Other readers will be able to read, vote on, and comment on your submission. You can comment on it too, so if you stumble upon a correction that needs to be made, or more information you want to add, feel free to drop it there. You're also quite welcome to send us an email for that sort of thing — feedback@slashdot.org will hit all of us, or you can contact individual editors using their username @slashdot.org.

Speaking of the editors: at the same time, the editors will be looking over your submission for possible acceptance. Unless you're submitting in the wee hours of the night, it's likely they’ll see your submission the moment it comes in. Don't fear that it will get missed — the editors' workspace is basically an expanded view of what users see in the firehose, with a bunch of tools for working on submissions, whacking spam, and so forth. We get a much broader view of the incoming stream of information, and user submissions stand out.

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that your submission is going up on the page immediately. There's often a delay, and since users only see one end of the process, it can sometimes feel like nobody's paying attention. But don't worry, that's definitely not the case. The reality is simply that Slashdot's front page runs on a schedule. We try to have a new piece of news at the top of the page at regular intervals so that you get something new every time you visit. One of the side-effects of this schedule is that if five interesting things happen at 8:00 AM, they get spread out over the next couple hours instead of all going on the page at once.

So when will my submission be approved?
Approved submissions generally go up on the page within several hours of being submitted, but not always. If the article you submitted isn't of immediate importance, it will probably wait until the time-sensitive news has been posted. For example, say two submissions come in at exactly the same time. One is about some big company buying another company, and the other is an opinion piece about sci-fi movies. We’ll post the one about the two companies first since it's "hard" news, and something people want to know about immediately. That's not to say the opinion piece is less interesting or less deserving of being posted — it's simply a matter of prioritizing.

One of the big parts of the editors' jobs is prioritizing stories. Sometimes we'll have more interesting stories than we can reasonably post in a day, and the surplus (interesting but time-insensitive articles) spill over into the next day, assuming there's not another flood of good stories. Other times, there will be a few slow news days in a row, so we'll hunt around for any interesting submissions we can find. Also, if there are stories of particular interest to people in particular countries, we’ll try to run those stories when it's daytime in that part of the world.

My submission disappeared from the firehose!
Unfortunately, we can’t run everything we receive. If your submission is gone from the firehose view, it's unlikely to be posted. There are many reasons for this -- it may be that we already ran something about the news you linked, or that it was just too far off-topic for our readership. It's also possible that somebody else submitted the same news and we chose their submission instead. We love getting submissions on the same story from 10 different users, but the down side is that we have to decline 9 of them. Declining doesn't mean we don't appreciate your submission, or that it isn't useful -- often times if we get a few different good submissions, we’ll blend them together.

But my submission was red!
Our scoring system works mostly like you'd expect, but we put in a few tweaks to highlight good submitters. If you've had several submissions accepted, your new ones will enter the firehose at a higher color level than the average submission. This is to make them stand out for readers browsing the firehose. Give it some time -- if people continue to like it, it will stay high. However, as above, if it's a dupe or if it's offtopic, it may disappear despite the high rating.

What can I do to maximize my chances of having a submission accepted?
We have a handy list of submission guidelines that will help immensely. A quick look through the stories on the front page will help, too, to give you an idea for how long and how many links to use. If formatting and hyperlinking is turning you off, don't worry too much about that — as long as the editors get your words and links, we can make it look right. One big suggestion would simply be to write what you know. Whoever you are, you're pretty smart, and you probably know more than the average reader about something. Focus on that. If you know a bunch about Linux desktop environments, write about those! If you're a huge sci-fi fan, send us some sci-fi news and reviews! If you’re an expert on cosmology, keep us apprised of all of latest discoveries!

Again, as always, if you have questions about any part of the process, don't hesitate to contact us.

(A message from Gaurav Kuchhal (Head of Product, Slashdot)

Getting beta all the time ...
We're proud to announce the final beta version of our mobile site. Now, from both your smartphone and your tablet, you can read Slashdot and interact with the community.

Over the past several weeks, we've been hard at work building this mobile site and releasing it to you in stages. Your comments (hundreds!) and feedback on the alpha version have driven its design.

What's new in this beta?

• Notifications: Did someone reply to your comment? Was your story submittal approved? Now you can see all these updates in one place.
• Firehose: Quickly skim through the latest story submissions and vote on your favorites. Also, submit new stories directly from your phone or tablet.
• Richer Profile: Want to learn more about another user? Now you can tap on any username and quickly see past story submissions and comments. Tap 'Friend' or 'Foe' to follow their updates.
• Friend's Activities: Keep up with the latest activities from your friends and foes, from their story submissions to comments.

Anything big I should know?
Since we're geeks, we purposely built a mobile site using the latest open web technologies, but compatibility with hundreds of mobile devices is still challenging with HTML5. Since carriers don't always update their devices with the latest browser software, if you are using an Android device, we recommend using the Chrome browser directly from Google, not the version packaged with your handset. If you are using an iOS device, we recommend using iOS version 6.

What's next?
We're always polishing and refining the functionality of the site, so before we move to v1.0 we want to make sure we've addressed any pressing issues that you find. It's easy to join in the beta from any supported mobile device: just load up mbeta.slashdot.org and start reading. If you find any problems or have ideas for improvement, please use this survey form to give feedback.

(And as always, you can fire complaints and suggestions about all aspects of the site to feedback@slashdot.org.)

We've had over the years a mix of entrepreneurs, activists, archivists, makers, artists, engineers hackers, musicians, gamers, sysadmins, writers, actors, and even the occasional gadfly ... who else would you like to see in that mix?

Some people are harder to reach than others, and some people we'd like to interview either don't want to or aren't able to. But the more ideas we have on this front, the more interesting a mix we can bring to the table. (And, if you have a line on anyone in particular, we'd love an introduction or a personal plug.)

So: if you have someone in mind, or even just a class of someone's generically defined, please pass it along, so we can try to get in contact. Send email to us at with "interview" somewhere in the subject line. Taxonomy, phylogeny, etc. Since perception of worthiness is unevenly distributed, please give as much information as you can:

• WHO - (By name, or at least narrowed down to an identifiable class)
• WHY - Why do you want this person on Slashdot? (Use small words; reputation is a sometimes thing.)
• WHERE - We hope to be able to get more of our interview guests on video; if they're in the U.S. or Canada, that's much easier to arrange.
• HOW - Do you know the best way to reach your intended interview target? Let us know!

(And Yes, this is an attempt to get a jump on a New Year's resolution.)

Besides appearing on the site proper, Slashdot stories are mirrored with various degrees of human involvement in several different ways — they go out in curated newsletters (especially good for people who can't view the site at work -- available in daily headline and best-of-the-week flavors), via RSS, on Twitter, and on Slashdot's page at Facebook. This week, we (overdue!) finally swapped out the low-res Slashdot logo that had been on the Facebook page with a slightly better one -- but the replacement had some flaws, too. "What's with the weird artifacting around the characters?" asked reader ModernGeek, and promptly supplied a better version. With his permission, we're now using that one instead — Thanks!

Related, eldavojohn's tessellation (one of the logos that appeared last month, long may they wave) has been reworked as the cover image for that page. Do you have any appropriate art you'd like to see there? If so, we'd like the chance to consider it, so email us at feedback@slashdot.org.

(And reader Wilhelm Rahn had his own idea, too, about improving &mdash YMMV — the 15th anniversary logo that ThinkGeek came up with.)

YOU SPOKE. At least, some combination of bots and human users spoke! ;)

Of many logo entries we recieved for last month, we could only run 31 of them on the front page (one for each day of October). We listed several of our favorites in a poll, and asked you to weigh in. Several thousand clicks later, voting has slowed, and it looks like Ignacio Marquez's Memory Test of October 29 is the winner, with 22 percent of the vote, so Ignacio takes the Nexus 7 tablet. (Actually, he'll have to wait while it ships to Argentina.)

Many thanks to all of the artists who submitted ideas -- we hope you had as much fun in making them as we did in seeing them.

Many thanks to all the readers who've sent in logo designs (NOTE: the last few days are all filled out now; further submissions will be enjoyed, but only as art ;)), asked questions of Linus, Richard Dawkins and our other interview guests this month, or gotten to meetups to hang out with fellow readers. Some of them are happening this weekend, too -- check out the Anniversary Parties page: (If one's in striking distance, feel free to show up -- T-shirts are limited, but at the larger parties especially there will likely be a few extras. I know I'm bringing a small handful to Houston's gathering this evening, 8 PM at Agora -- 1712 Westheimer Rd, Houston, TX 77098.)

On that last front: If you made it to a meetup and took any pictures, we'd like to hear about where they're posted (send email to feedback@slashdot.org with "photos" somewhere in the subject line), so we can attach them at least to the photo gallery on our linked Facebook page.

Tease of the week: You can look forward soon to an announcement about Slashdot Mobile for tablets.

And a request for feedback, too: Who should we interview? A future blog post may explore this is greater depth, but if you know of someone you'd like to see interviewed in Slashdot style, or via video, use that feedback@slashdot.org address again, but but "interview suggestion" in the subject, and let us know not just a name, but your reasoning. Appropriate contact information is always useful, too.

Just a few quick notes today:

- The 15th Anniversary Slashdot meetups are in progress! Some have already taken part (like Seattle's and Pasadena's), and many are taking place this weekend and next (In Toronto, Mexico City, Raleigh, Ann Arbor, NYC, Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Francisco, and many others). Continuing thanks go out to the organizers and attendees for bearing with the glitches in our process in putting these together. Many lessons learned for the next go-'round.

We'd appreciate it, if you're attending or organizing one of these gatherings, if you tag any photos / tweets / etc. with "slashdot15" (As here, on twitter, and/or "slashdot," and/or slashdot15-$TLA, where &TLA is replaced with the three-letter airport code of the nearest major airport.

- We've been happily overwhelmed by the clever submissions which have rolled in to replace for each day of this month the normal Slashdot logo. Take a look at the ones we've selected so far. You're welcome to submit one, too -- selected artists will get one of the limited edition Slashdot anniversary T-shirts, and the artist judged best of the month will land a Nexus 7 tablet.

- Next month, you'll hear more about the Slashdot Mobile alpha for tablets; one step at a time.

- A video experiment in the works: Hallowe'en. This is tentative, but we think it would be fun to showcase readers' cool and clever Hallowe'en projects. So: Are you animating your house demons? Scaring children any technically interesting way, with candy-serving robots, automated strobes, or talking gravestones? Using Arduinos to control LEDs on your costume, or serving blue drinks with rising mist? If so, we'd like to see some video about it, and show it off to the rest of the world, too. If you've got a geeky approach to October 31st, send email to feedback@slashdot.org with "halloween video" in the subject and tell us some details. If you've already put video on a site like YouTube, mention the link, too!