.... with far too much time on their hands and far too little psychological stability to completely ruin a forum for thousands. I think many, if not most of us, have seen that happen - one bad apple and all that. Add in the social media awareness of P.R. firms (or special interest groups) who will hire paid commenters to astro-turf a particular point of view and you have a recipe for mass incommunication.

I welcome restrictions on who can comment and what someone can say such that we raise the signal to noise ratio and tone down the inanity, the crazy and the spam. I think we have left the era of unrestricted speech in much the same way that we once left the era of unrestricted radio communications. Just as we once started licensing in order to make use of the airwaves for everyone, we now have to monitor and moderate in such as way so as outlandish ideas ideas will not be restricted but outlandish people will be.

The above is the best, most easily implemented and workable solution of any of the responses that I have seen so far. I've done the above myself and it works extremely well. It generally takes only a few hours to port over and it all can be done online. I highly recommend that you implement this as the solution.

I have to agree with the above. Put your communications skills to work and go to the manager who told you this and politely ask for some concrete things you can do to improve as well as some past examples of where he believes you went wrong. Slashdot isn't going to (can't) help you with those things.

If in the hopefully unlikely chance your manager is not able to provide concrete examples of mistakes and ways to improve then you are being screwed over and that last "criticism" was actually a heads up for you that your next performance review and eventually your job is in jeopardy (been there and got the pink slip) . In such a case start networking around the company and see if you land a position with a different manager asap.

I agree.
The problem is NOT that someone is DDOSing you.
The problem is that you have "diagnosed" an occasionally slow internet connection as a DDOS attack without any expertise in the area to make such a determination.
This is akin to so many of my clients telling me that they have a virus because their computer is running slow (when it almost inevitably turns out to be something else).

At any rate what you need to know is that you will NEVER be able to properly diagnose the issue on a venue like /. The medium just does not lend itself to that.

What you need to do is hire a good consultant with networking experience to go over your system and correctly diagnose what the problem is. Yes it will cost you a couple hundred dollars to do that. Or you could live with the problem if it isn't worth that much money to you. Those are really your only sensible choices.

I must also add - one should question why none of the literally tens of thousands of users during the four month Beta fell ill to the mysterious IOS7 induced "nausea". This "illness" only appeared shortly after the product was actually released.

The "IOS 7 is making me sick" campaign is a brilliant example of social advertising engineering by a competitor. I began seeing the "sick" posts in various Apple related forums about a week ago and noticed them immediately because of their unusual (imho) wording. Now it's gone to /. and the Guardian apparently. Bravo M$oft or Samsung (or whomever) ! Someone in marketing should get a raise for this.

In the meantime, no Guardian reporter (or anyone else it appears) appears to question why IOS 7 is apparently responsible for a rash of nausea yet we have no epidemic of people vomiting while playing video games.

It's probably true that "IT is not a revenue generator" per se.
On the other hand it's pretty damn hard to generate revenue these days without spreadsheets, accounting systems, printers, a LAN, email ....

My thoughts exactly! The person doing the interviewing has essentially zero interview skills - this is the very first /. video that I have ever watched. From the lack of quality content it likely will be my last. An extremely fascinating guest completely wasted by a high-school level interviewer.

Alpine

...because personally I would have given up after reading half of the utterly useless comments here.

This is what you need to do and it will work:
Find a highly reputable P.R. firm that deals with SEO. I'm not talking about the kind of SEO "specialist" that you find on Craigslist - I'm talking about the kind that handles Fortune 500 businesses. The P.R. firm will begin creating sensible blogs in your name having something to do with an interest of yours or possibly a business. The will create Facebook pages, Google+ pages, Twitter tweets as well. The P.R. firm will also create articles about you and/or your business which will appear on a variety of small sites . The will link everything together through a variety of sites that they own. The Blogs and P.R. releases and everything else will change the page rank so that your good press will appear way above the bad foreign sites that concern you.

All the above will probably cost you between 5 and 10K at the very least but it will solve the problem. You will have to decide if the expense is justified - you could well consider it a tax deductible expense if the P.R. company concentrates on a business of yours.

A related note. - in the heyday of Slashdot what I suggested would have been one of the very first comments and the most highly rated. It speaks to where the readership has fallen to today that you have had to sift through dozens of useless comments talking about lawsuits, freedom of speech , trademarking your name (wtf!) and even a couple of misogynists raging about "teh wimmen" :(

"At 15 degrees Right Ascension, Tau Ceti is a little far off the solar system plane for an exploratory trip just now"

Ahhhh .... so YOU'RE the guy who came up with making the Kessel run in only 12 parsecs.

Worst at-home tech support ever...

That guy in china you referred to who stabbed 20 people ..... all of them survived. Sadly not so much Lanza'a gun assault.
Guns ARE the problem. No one "needs" and AR-15 semi except police, military and mass murderers.

1. Lack of an actual vehicle to take 10 people let alone 80K people to Mars

2. Lack of a support infrastructure to support 80K people on Mars

3. Lack of any actual technology to extract air water and food for 80K people on mars.

However I am sure that Mr. Musk will have all the above minor nits worked out in the next 11 years by which time he'll be recruiting for the Tau Ceti mission no doubt.

1. It won't be either a hurricane or even a tropical depression when it hits the upper east coast next Tuesday according to the National Weather Service( http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at3+shtml/205618.shtml?5-daynl#contents )

2. Total Rainfall potential predicted by the NWS for the Pennsylvania , New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts areas is estimated to be - wait for it - a whopping 3 to 7 inches FOR THE ENTIRE FIVE DAYS through Wednesday. ( http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/qpf/zoom/Rainfall_Days_1-5.gif )

Didn't we go through this last year with the storm of the century that was supposed to flood New York but never really materialized and aren't we all a bit tired of the ridiculously overwrought news stories that get propagated all over the internet in order to drive page views?

When the NWS puts out a Frankenstorm warning then maybe it's time to get concerned but until then ...