Slashdot keeps you informed on everything that really matters

I doubt that I would ever have heard of these annual awards if I hadn't tripped across a notice on the front page of Shashdot.

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Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Slashdot keeps you informed on everything that really matters

Oct. 11, 2000

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers

   This year's Ig-Noble Peace Prize went to the British Royal Navy. It was honored for changing the training requirements of sailors during maneuvers. Instead of firing cannons, sailors now shout "Bang!"
   How do I know this?
    I read Slashdot.
    The folks who run the Slashdot Web site at http://slashdot.org say it offers "News for nerds, stuff that matters." Typical of Slashdot, that description is half serious and half twaddle. Slashdot is the first Web site I go to when I've been away from the computer for a while and want to know if the world is still in one piece. It's not so much nerdy as enthusiastically inquisitive, but it does tell you what really matters.
    Take the Ig-Nobel Prizes, for example. (You're supposed to say the name as if it were "ignoble" -- get it?) I doubt that I would ever have heard of these annual awards if I hadn't tripped across a notice on the front page of Shashdot.
    The Ig-Nobel Awards, which the Ig-Nobel Prize committee says honor individuals whose achievements cannot or should not be reproduced, are given out in Cambridge, Mass., home of MIT and Harvard, every fall. (Go to http://www.improbable.com/ig/ig-2000-winners.html for a list of prize winners and a description of why each of them won.)
    The Ig-Nobel Prizes are a joke, of course -- they don't have any connection to the real Nobel prizes -- but these days we need a little levity to brighten our lives. That's just what Slashdot does, too. It provides some balance.
    How about a locust that drives a car? Or how about finding out how each of the New York Senate candidates feels about the Postal Service's "plan" (an old hoax) to charge for e-mail? Both major candidates said they were against it. (Duh . . . .)
    Slashdot isn't all craziness. A recent issue of Slashdot pointed out that recent advances could make titanium (a very strong and extremely light metal) just as cheap to make as aluminum. Is this important? If you own stock in a company that uses titanium (hint: think of any aircraft manufacturer), such news might make you ecstatic.
    Or how about a report on a black hole far out in space that is spewing stuff out of both sides of the hole? Or a plea to give Microsoft the bum's rush for its propaganda against Linux? Or a new movie based on computer graphics from a company called Squaresoft -- and you get to see the movie trailer, too?
    Slashdot was founded three years ago by Rob Malda, who calls himself "Cmdr. Taco." It's now owned by Andover.net, a company known best for its support of the Linux operating system.
    The site is so popular that it has given birth to an Internet phenomenon called "Slashdotting." Web sites mentioned in Slashdot articles can draw so many "hits" that their Web servers collapse under the strain of hundreds of thousands of attempted connections an hour. If your site is mentioned in Slashdot and your server crashes, your Web site has been "Slashdotted." Apparently, it's an honor.
    Slashdot keeps track of developments in the main alternative operating systems for PCs -- Linux, Free BSD (and related versions of BSD Unix), BeOS and the QNX operating system. A related site, Freshmeat, at http://freshmeat.net/, hosts one of the world's largest collections of indexed Linux files. If you have a Linux PC or are simply curious about what's available for Linux, you should check out Freshmeat. You'll find a good list of related sites on the right side of the page, too.