You may wonder what exactly happens to a site when Slashdot sends its legions of page requests to it. Well, The Metric System blog has an analysis of what happened on November 6th when they received 31,218 page views. You see the breakdown by site and you also see an increase in traffic by 89,094%. While this may by anecdotal, it's the first time I've seen hard numbers on the Slashdot/Digg effect.

One of my favorite series has released its third movie, "Bender's Game." Wired has an interview with some staff from Rough Draft Studios (The Simpson's Movie, Ren & Stimpy) that was entertaining. Get out and buy Futurama to support the show!

Obama was brutally attacked by MPAA lobbyists mere hours after his acceptance speech today. Who else is already pandering to the president elect?

I had this come to me today.

Is this legit? A well crafted spam/mining operation? Sent to zillions of /.ers?

My tinfoil hat is buzzing, probably for no reason as is the norm.

Dear grub: My name is Lily Liu. I am a PhD student carrying our a project with my supervisor Christian Wagner (iscw@cityu.edu.hk) who is a professor at City University of Hong Kong. We are trying to understand the popularity of Slashdot to its active contributor, such as you. We hope you might be able to help us in our effort by answering three questions.

*Question 1:*
In your opinion, what (if so) makes Slashdot special among online discussion sites? Is it the content, the group of people it draws in, the discussion engine (e.g., content rating and filters), or possibly other factors?

*Question 2: *
Compared with other discussion sites you know or/and have used, do you consider Slashdot's technology platform to be better? In other words, does it encourage (a) more sense of community or (b) more active participation?
(In answering please also feel free to mention the other discussion site or sites you might be comparing to)

*Question 3:*
As a unique user in Slashdot, could you please rate your own reciprocity by assessing what you get from the community compared with what you contribute to it?(you can give an answer such as: i think i get more or i contribute more,of course we would be very appreciative for your explanation of detail)
**

Please let us know at your earliest convenience. We will quickly summarize results and gladly send you a summary, if you are interested (and sufficient replies are received to create a meaningful summary).

Thank You for Your Time and Valuable Feedback!

Sincerely,
Lily

Rock Out video from the great new disc Motorizer.

They had to change "Rock out, with your cock out, impress your lady friends" to just "Rock out, rock out, impress your lady friends"

Ah well, all is great. Hope they make it back here, you feel like you've been through 10 rounds with Mike Tyson after a show.

From the mouth of John Cleese, it's official: Sarah Palin is funnier than Michael Palin!

I hate to sound like an Amazon fanboy ... what with their 1-click patent crap and all ... but if you've read my comments related to anti-DRM you know I love their MP3 service. It's completely DRM-less (unlike Apple's) and has quite the selection. Well, today I discovered that the yet to be released David Byrne & Brian Eno album has a free MP3 listed for download on Amazon.

This excites me as I hope to see all music distributors (labels, retailers, sites, etc) move towards a model similar to that of Afternoon Records site where the artists pick one or two songs from each album to be distributed for free. Although this doesn't satisfy the N'Syncs and Britney Spears of the music world (where one pop single should sell an entire album of 95% filler), it completely draws me into purchasing more and more music from artists that write their own music.

These selections still seem few and far between on Amazon (Brian Setzer, Ted Nugent & The Apples in Stereo are the only others I can find at the moment) but let's hope this spreads.

I can't tell if this is legit or not but Torvalds may be blogging. It's just inane enough that it might be him though it doesn't have the same feel as his posts that I've read at the KernelTrap.

For example, he seems to use _exclamation_ on kernel threads instead of exclamation like the blog has.

If you're a coder who uses .NET, I recently came across some new neat tools by ItJustWorks. The four tools are:

• IJW Profiler for .NET & Java
• Corfu Text Editor
• IJW Framework
• IL to Native Compiler

There's a worthwhile This American Life episode about 419 scammers (Act I just past the intro).

Quite interesting (and I must admit it's a more than a little amusing). It begs the question: Do 419 scammer scammers take their anti-scamming too far?

A developer posted a brief blog outlining the libraries that Google Chrome uses. Since it's open source, you can see how many (and which) libraries they chose to use. Interesting stuff if you want to get an idea of what is needed to start an open source browser like Chrome. Another blog talks about the security implications of this.

Artists like the eloquent poet Kid Rock are taking a stand against iTunes as they continue to see album sales fall while their hit singles skyrocket in sales on the popular music distribution application. He will be joining Jay-Z in not putting his latest album up for sale on iTunes. I guess Kid's fans were either sending him a message he didn't want to hear or it's just not fair to give consumers a choice. Either way, the world will mourn the loss of Kid's music on iTunes. </sarcasm>

Just over a minute, you have time to check out this great ad spoof.

Some time ago I asked for virtual machine advice. Having read the comments and other stuff on various blogs and sites I opted to try VMWare, VirtualIron and VirtualBox.

Here we are nearly a year later and I have to say that (IMHO) Bang for the Buck goes to...drum roll VirtualBox!

The basic edition is open source, well supported and just plain works. A small download of less than 30 MB will get you running.

It isn't a bare metal install, but on my testing with Linux as a host OS it screams running XP and OpenSolaris. I have an OpenBSD VM set up but haven't gotten X to work yet. Installing the guest extensions gives you all sorts of cool stuff.

Eleventy thumbs up!

How robust is your religion? Have all the boundary cases been tested and thought out or does it have more holes and contradictions than the USSR's Penal System? Well, the Vatican is shoring up some questionable parts of Catholicism in regards to those pesky extraterrestrials that may or may not exist. In fact, some major theologians are speculating that each sentient creature would need its own Jesus Christ to save them from certain doom while others claim that it was a one shot deal for everybody. Still others speculate that there could be an alien race that never committed sin. Guess the movies have it wrong. A recent Vatican Newsletter proclaims: "The extraterrestrial is my brother."