This comes from shadow wrought, stoolpigeon, JC, Smitty, and originally, I think, RM6f9

Post a comment to this thread, and I will:

1. Tell you why I befriended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a color, a photo, etc..
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
7. In return, you must post this in your Journal/Blag/whatever.


Update: Ahh, the 2 minute rule... killing my productivity from answering all these... I'll get to you eventually, but it'll be off and on over the next day or two. Sorry!

In the last few weeks, we've switched most users over to the new 'D2' discussion system- a fully ajaxified discussion system. There are a number of minor bugs, but I figured I'd toss up a few quick notes to address the biggest user complaints.

1. you can turn it off if you log in. Some people get stuck in there ways, and no matter what we build it will never make you happy. So you can have the old lame system and we'll all enjoy the new cool system without you.
2. you can get 'nested' mode back by dragging the 2 thresholds together in the floating slider. they connect and become a single thing. it's quite nifty, and if you are logged in the setting is remembered so you don't have to click to navigate deep threads.
3. you can get more comments at once from the 'prefs' link. the default is currently 50, but choosing 'many' changes that (currently) to 250, which means you will get roughly the average number of comments in a typical slashdot story. Yes you will need to click 'more' on a huge discussion, but at that point we're talking about very large pages and slower computers like to choke on huge pages anyway so we have to balance size and performance.

there are 2 huge wins here for everyone... the first is retention of context. You can wade into a thread, retrieve more comments, change your threshold, all without losing your place like you did in the old system. And using the WASD keys to navigate makes it very easy to peruse discussions in a number of interesting ways. mouseover the help text in the floater for more information about how they work. We're open to suggestions on how this should work- i'm not totally happy with it yet... but it *is* possible to mash a single key and go from start to end of a discussion, which pleases me.

the second is that the default users see the highest score comments first. You can change this by logging in and toggling the retrievable order to oldest first, but for most people this means that the first comments they see will be the best. There are so many great comments on Slashdot, but most users don't see them because they are buried within the discussion. I think this goes a long ways towards helping.

A final word about the ads in there- unfortunately there are ads in the new system. Changing from a static page-page-page system to a dynamic ajax system with a single 'page load' causes us to serve hundreds of thousands of fewer ads. We worked out roughly how long people read discussions and are trying to strike a balance so that you see roughly the same number of ads under this system as you would have under the old one. We'll tweak it of course, but we gotta pay the bills here people!

And obviously all of this is a work in progress. Pudge is leading development work on this. The next project is to make it possible to post without losing your place in the discussion, and then to refine navigation keybindings and thread expansion/contraction controls to make the whole UI clean. We appreciate constructive criticisim. There are bugs (especially in IE, but almost no slashdot user runs IE) but we're mashing them out- thanks for your feedback on them. As we sand off the rough edges I think you'll all find the new system a vast improvement if you just play with it for a bit and give it a fair chance. Not all change is bad ;)

So, you upmod me with one of the non-karma affecting mods, then downmod me with a troll or whatever, rinse and repeat, and that's how you take away all the karma without actually changing the numbers.

Yet, one can troll anonymously all day.

Lame. No wonder the site just steadily declines in quality.

Since this is not yet documented, I figured I would mention this here now... we are experimenting with some very rudimentary keystroke navigation in the discussion2 system. We support both FPS style WASD keybindings, as well as the standard vi layout of HJKL. Down/Up will cycle you through next/previous comment chronologically... left/right will cycle you through next/previous in thread order. Holding SHIFT down while you press the navigation key will collapse the previous comment. And when you get to the end, pressing down or right will attempt to retrieve more comments if you want them.

What this means is that you can now use D2 to simulate most of the most popular viewing modes of the original discussion system. By dragging both the abbreviate & display sliders right next to each other you effectively remove abbreviated comments which simulates nested mode. By toggling comment retrieval order to 'Oldest First' and using up down, you can effectivel read the discussion from oldest to newest. And of course the default settings gives you the best comments first, providing a nice default view of discussions for most anonymous users (who rarely participate and we want to really show only the best comments).

You can also disable D2 in the comment prefs (the word 'prefs' in the floating dialog box) if you are logged in. Right now we're testing D2 for a large percentage of anonymous readers. As soon as we finish IE7 support we'll roll out D2 for the rest of the ACs.

So, my karma goes from positive to bad overnight, with no new down-mods in my recent posting history.

Whats up with that?

Taco, you may not necessarily like me or my opinions, but your mods don't seem to have such a problem with it.

Why not let the users decide? They made this site, not you. You'd be smart to keep that in mind. Your opinions and commentary are retarded, and you and the other "editors" consistently show yourselves to be technically inept pseudo-activists and astroturfing drones.

The Ann Arbor party seemed to go great- lots of people packed Leopold Bros place, doing battle with barflies and football fans. It was somewhat bizarre watching obvious normal bar people try to figure out what this large crowd of 'different' people were all about. We handed out a ton of t-shirts, drank much alcohol, ate nachos etc. Our party had a great number of Slashdot and SourceForge staffers... all folks who have been with Slashdot for so many years it's hard to remember Slashdot without them. I'm not exactly sure how many people eventually showed up... a lot of our RSVPs didn't show, and a lot more didn't bother sign up at all, so I think the two balanced out.

For me personally these sorts of things are always difficult. I'm not very good at crowds. I can smile for a picture, but I'm perpetually nervous when surrounded by strangers who have certain expectations of me. There's a reason I live life behind a keyboard!

Further compounding matters lately is baby induced chronic sleep deprivation. Me want REM cycles. It's always nice to get out and have a beer. Kathleen & I get only so many hours "out" together now, gotta make each one count. The party attendees were all cool... and understanding that I was pretty tired.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who showed up... I've still got the california party later this week. Hopefully my throat heals up by then. The only real problem with this location was the acoustics... I had to shout to be heard, and stick my ear in front of people to hear them (baby crying has done some amount of hopefully temporary ear damage). My throat is raaaaw from yelling. Sucking on cough drops helps.

As for other parties, boxes have been shipped. Hopefully they have arrived to most places on time, although I think they were shipped on a slowish shipping option so I'm not sure. I know some folks got shirts on friday, but I'm sure the others will arrive monday or so. Also, keep in mind that we only had 700 shirts and 2300 attendees from 136 parties with more than 5 attendees. So obviously not every party is getting a box... when we sent out the bulk mail, we had over 100 replies, and I'm sure there was nowhere near enough to fill even that.

But shirts or not, I hope your parties go well. Remember to submit videos or pictures or whatever to anniversary at slashdot dot org for your chance at the $1k ThinkGeek gift certificate grand prize.

So if you only count anniversary parties with 5 or more attendees, we have 128 venues with a grand total of 2366 attendees. The largest parties include Pudge's in seattle with 129, mine in Ann Arbor with 194 and Hemos's in CA with 197.

I'm sure that there will be many RSVPs that no show, but still, that's still an awful lot of interest. We'll be shipping shirts to a good number of those parties, but we have triple the attendees to shirts available, so we'll see just how far we're able to spread the love. Emails will be going out to party planners in the next couple days to get postal addresses.

As we're nearing 100 signed up people for the A2 Slashdot anniversary party, we've changed the venue to Leopold Bros... it's just a block south from the other place and they can handle us. I've also got word that we'll be printing a few hundred extra shirts since there was already like 50 parties with 5+ people in attendance. We certainly won't have enough for everyone, but we'll make a good dent in it.

I will of course put this information into a story next reasonable chance I get for a story, but I figured at least I could get the word out there. The anniversary party entry on the official page has been updated with the new location & address.

The A2 party already has like 70 signed up. We're going to have to rethink venue or time I think if we really have that many people. Wait a few more days and see what we can work out. Keep reading in the party forum for info. We have 500 shirts to print and hand out... it'll be fun to see where they go.

more info as I get it. There will be notes on future stories as days get closer.

If any of you are using an iPhone and are willing to help test out some Slashdot handheld crap, shoot me off a note... my email is the same address as always, and if you can't guess it, you probably can't help anyway ;) I've built a stylesheet and Tim put together a few little options that we think will make a few bits of Slashdot look nice on an iPhone (or really most lower resolution displays) but unfortunately none of us actually HAVE one yet... so anyway, let us know. Or if you work at Apple, send us freebies dammit!

So today I wondered what it is about Apple, that they generate buzz when others dont. For a while, I was modded up, and had my karma back and was engaged in a little discussion about it. For a moment, it was like the old days - back when /. was a tech discussion site.

Then someone decided I wasn't toeing the line - I guess they felt I was criticizing Apple (I wasnt, but who cares, right?). Suddenly, not only the original post, but everything in my recent posting history is -1.

So, who can do that but the editors? I don't know, I don't care.

I know this is a paid Apple astroturfing site.

It just used to be better.

Not a complaint - I much prefer trolling bucketcunt jackasses than I do discussing technology with geeks.

Oh well, even with terrible karma I can piss you off twice a day.

And all it takes is a simple "apple sucks". And it enrages and infuriates you right to your brittle little bones, doesn't it? Your skin isn't thick enough to allow criticizm of your favorite company, is it? I can point out features Zune has that iPod doesnt, you will foam at the mouth. If I point out features my Treo has that the iPhone doesnt, you will shake with rage.

Well, live in fantasy land. Yeah, iPhone will revolutionize life what with its ability to make you buy more of Steve Jobs DRM bullshit. Maybe one day they'll even be a mainstream player! Hooray.

You keep dreaming, I'll keep wasting your mod points and pissing you off.

Sorry to all the nay-sayers, but I pretty confident now that multiply isn't going away. I already find myself going to that page before slashdot. I'd suggest picking it up, just so you have an ID there and are associated with it in case we don't come back.

Here's me as a starting person to be joined to. Make sure you give me you /. id when you join, though.

FYI - I've requested to the site a way to grab /. historical journal entries, and they are considering it (they already have this feature for blogger, blogspot, etc...). I'd also like to see cross-posting for those too stubborn to leave...

I'm migrating to multiply. My nick there is ememalb.

Come say hi.

Multiply has all the stuff slash does, plus a whole lot more. I like it mucho better.

See you there. Or not...your call.

Hey, any of youse guys use minicom?

It's kickin my ass. I've got a cisco 2851 router I'm tryin to configurate on a wee bit.

The baud rate settings are 115200 on the router, and even when I set them to that in minicom it chokes like I'm force-feeding it Anna Nicole's bloated corpse.

Any ideas?

I'm ememalb, who the fuck are you? ;)

Post your multiply usernames here, so we can keep it all in one place.

Unless you don't want to, in which case...ok.