A good friend of mine from colege is currently spending a good deal of time with one Chris Aillon, yeah you know the Red Hat, Netscape, FireFox guy?

I find it amusing, that despite the fact I have never done any real programming to speak of or even run Linux as my main OS for more than a week at a time, I have a supremely lower /. UID than the great caillon(629714).

Of course it could juat mean I'm old, and the fact that me and my old high-school buddies used to move DOS, Mac and OS/2 Warez on Efnet back in the day is proof of previous script-kiddie lamer tendencies.

I just wonder, does anyone still remeber the old handles "FunkMan" and "EpilepticRat"?

The first person that can find me a package with "EpilipticRat of #macfilez" with my complete icon-logo wins a prize. Or if anyone can find an original "JawzX #macfilez" logo... I think I lost both of those years ago in an unfortunate SCSI bus vs. Static electricity event...

Jeeze, kiddies and thier Warez, will they ever learn?

just remember, "information wants to be free!" I remember yelling that in the hallway in junior-high, it was like a whole little "Hackers" micro-cosom back then.

It's simple, we need another moderation option here on slashdot. All the old ones can stay, but I propose we add a -.5 value with the name "Pedantic Rant". Since many pedants are not really trolls, or really off-topic, or even particularly redundant, this would allow us to cut down on the karma-whoring "Interesting" or "Informative" rating that many pedantic posters receive. By making it a -.5 we could seperate them from the trolls, but still give them a little poke. If this seems too extreme, perhaps the "Pedantic Rant" could be a 0 point value, but for each "pedant" vote an "intersting" or "informative" would be converted to a "pedantic rant", allowing the post to maintain a good score while simultaniously describing it accurately.

I'm not sure if I'm getting old, or just turning into an intolerent sociopath,but lately I've noticed myself being far more irritated, angy., pissed-off even, with stupid and or jerky people. I'm a nativer Vermonter, and have lived here all my life, just the other day I actualy had to TRY HARD not to yell "Go back to New Jersy, you assholes!" to an SUV of people arguing in the parking lot of my local grocery store. I mean, I had to litteraly bite my tounge. Am I becoming an angry insensitive jerk, or are people really getting more and more irritating? I mean these people were YELLING in the parking lot about wether they were going to get bottled water or soda to drink on the drive home. Yeah it's stupid what they were doing, but I've never had such a strong response to those kinds of sheannagans before.

My current boss is an ass-hole, and everyone admits it, including him, and I've been able to ignore my personal problems with him and maintian an employee/empoloyer relationship, but recently he fired another employee because "he was sick of telling him what to do". Well that's a hipocritical load of shit. My boss yells and stomps arround if anyone does anything WITHOUT him telling them to. He lies and scheemes to our suppliers (I mean Lies, ot little white ones...) and complains about shipping charges and acts like it's the end of the world when somone doesn't call him back, but all day long I get calls form customers who were expecting to hear from him, and havn't. The guy's a fuckwad, and I've just about had enough of it. I used to deal with crap like this all the time, hell I actualy quit my last job because the ass holes wouldn't give me a raise (they have since hired somone at TWICE my salery after spending 6 months without a printer operator) At least here I get raises and bonuses, but at what point does personal hatred of the boss over ride money? Gah! work sucks I guess.

People are ass holes, (and dumb) and I guess I just have to deal with it.

For years i have been a faithfull /. reader, and I still find it to be a good clearing-house for geek related information and news, but the users..ugh. Note my ID#, I've been here a while and I've seen plenty of posters claim "the end is near!"
Most of those times I've been able to pass it off as super geeks lamenting that people who didn't learn to program in Fortran were visiting the site, but with the popularity of OSS growing, Slashdot is defiantely attracting fewer IT professionals and true geeks, and more "users". Is this a bad thing? Not nessasarily, but it's changed much of what shows up on the front page of Slashdot. Take for example the apple stories, it's not that there are more of them, it's that they are showing on the front-page, instead of the Apple section. There are still plenty of real meaty geek-storied under the Developers, IT and Linux headings. I don't think we can judge slashdot entirely by it's "cover", but there have been more changes in the last year than I've seen in the last three. Is it the end? Maybe it's time to build 2 slashdots, Pro, and Consumer. None of this subscriber BS either, hell maybe even keep the subscriber system, just offer a Pro and Consumer version! Keep the flame wars on the consumer end and let the real geeks have inteligently modded and informative rambles on the Pro side! it's still more user friendly than a mailing list, and despite the dupes, it's less hassle than sifting all the other tech sites yourself...

Wha'dya think?

Y'know, youd think that AOL for broadband would work with Direcway 6000 systems, since they sell the damn things, but it doesn't. Well it does, but there are proxy conflicts that no one -either on Direcway's or AOL's end- wants to admit is their fault... great.