Ok, I fixed it. Please do let me know of any other problems you encounter, and I will try to address them as quickly as I am able.

Hi,
I'm sorry, I didn't realize that journal.pl was broken. I will attempt to get it fixed today. As I noted in a previous post, we don't have a QA team, nor do we have a complete list of site functionality. I tested every function of the site I have ever used, and I asked all of my fellow slashdotter's here to do the same. Everything that was tested worked, but clearly not every piece of functionality was tested. If there are other items, please do let us know and we will repair them as quickly as we can.

Hi There Taco Cowboy,
I have been accused at times of being one of the "newcomers" you mention, and perhaps to some extent I am. The UID I use now is a seven digit, but event the first UID I had here was not in the 4 digit (or even the 5 digit) range. That having been said, I am working here now. Slashdot is changing, as indeed it must, though I hope we can steer it in a direction that is still positive. I personally hope that you would be willing to stick around, and even give us some feedback/insight that would help us steer slashdot into a bright future...

P.S. In response to your unanswered question: Android is an operating system unto itself... It is based on linux, though highly specialized (originally for phones, though version 3.0 was/is intended for tablet, and 4.0 seeks to re-unite the two branches). I would not expect that android apps will run on linux without significant effort, and the same would also be true in reverse.

Cool, thanks for the tip.

Excellent question.
Personally I never buy desktop's pre-made speicifically because I don't want to be forced to pay for a windows license I don't want, and am not going to use. Sadly, however, I don't get that luxury when it comes to a laptop. When I buy a laptop I am forced to pay for a windows license, even though the very first thing I do with the laptop is install linux on it. It makes me sad to know that no matter how much I dislike Windows (and Microsoft), my hard earned money still ends up in their pockets everytime I by a laptop. Add to that what they've done to makers of android phones, it becomes very difficult to use technology without forking over money to Microsoft.
Really the only way to get on the internet or carry a smart phone without giving money to Microsoft is to use all Apple products, and frankly that is not high on my list of things to do either.

Let me explain this to you like you are a two year old, because apparently that's about how smart you are:
Everything else on the site that needs to search for content uses a search engine, and that is working correctly.
For some reason search.pl does not use a that search engine, and is now broken.
Instead search.pl uses the the "match against" functionality of mysql to search
We recently upgrade to a new version of MySQL
In case you weren't aware, we have no QA team, we only have three engineers, and one web designer. There is virtually no documentation of the system, and what little there is is out of date, and in some cases just plain wrong. We are doing the best we can with the resources we have, and the entire team has worked very very hard over the past few weeks to make changes to the infrastructure without which keeping this site running would have been a nightmare. So yes, I got annoyed by some jerk telling me that I suck, and that all of my hard work was a waste... So you can whine and complain about how slashdot used to be great, and how you miss the old days, or you could try to actually help out by reporting issues that you find. You could try to contribute to the community rather than just whining about how we must miss all the good engineers that used to work here. Or you could just fuck off.

Hi Luke,
I believe I have tracked down and corrected the root cause of this issue. If you continue to experience issues, please let me know, or send an email to feedback at slashdot and I'll try to resolve it as quickly as I can.
Cheers, PerlJedi

The biggest thing I would say is a positive in this move is that we are on regularly supported and maintained versions of the software. Apache 1.3 (what we were on before) is no longer supported by the Apache foundation, and it is no longer getting regular security patches. In fact, we were using a binary which was compiled from source in house, rather than installed via a package manager. Most sysadmins I know squirm a bit (with good reason) thinking about trying to offer long term operational support to systems that rely on third party software that cannot be managed via a package manager, and must be compiled by hand for any updates or patches.
The upgrade to MySQL 5.5 is/was a similar situation. We were running on out-of-date version of mysql, that was compiled in house. We were actually running it on 6 servers, and those servers were having trouble keeping up. The new set up is running on two new servers, backed by RAID arrays of SSD. This setup is having no trouble keeping up with traffic, and has horse power to spare. One of our limitations with the old system was that we were unable to modify several of the larger tables in the database, so when we wanted to build a feature that required an extra column for one of those tables, we have to put the new column in a separate table and use a join. Since we went live on the new setup, I have modified columns on more than one of the tables that has more than 1 million records, the the update completed in minutes, without causing queries to lock up and bring the site to a stand still.

Yes, search is broken, and we have a ticket open to fix it. You want to know why its broken? Because some genius decided not to use the search engine to run searches, but rather to use plain SQL to run searches. The index page uses a query to a search engine, but for some reason search uses plain SQL. And what brilliant mind made that module? Pudge.

This was me, by the way... I just didn't notice I wasn't logged in.