Roto-Rooter Man's Journal: Slashdot Server Malfunctioning AGAIN

An old favorite creation of mine (2001 maybe?), saved for posterity:

For the second time tonight, Slashdot's backend is so mangled that I can't log in or view nested comments. Of course, we've come to expect this by now; it's not an infrequent occurance. My real gripe is about the complete lack of professionialism on the part of the Slashdot staff.

The site is supposedly viewed by many thousands of people every day. Presumably they have adequate resources, or they wouldn't waste their money keeping Jon Katz around. So why is their server down or screwed up so often? It doesn't reflect well on Slash, VA, or Linux; it's really amateur stuff. Isn't there a level of redundancy that could easily prevent these troubles? Hell, even trollaxor.com is up and running tonight.

Another thing to point out is that I rarely see non-troll users mentioning these downtimes. Is the open source community used to sitting around and waiting until problems clear up? Slashdot's downtime is like an uncle's molestation conviction - you just don't talk about it, because it might bring shame to the family. Those fools don't know how to fix their own systems, but they know that however screwed up they are, they're still better than a Windows server would be, yes siree...

I suppose we can't expect too much professionalism from a bunch who don't even bother to spell check their stories. Hell, they obviously don't even read their own site very often, judging by the number of double posts. Maybe I'm the only one who finds it insulting to see a modern business run more sloppily than a high school newspaper. Maybe I've come to expect too much from a few washed-up, wannabe geeks from Michigan.

But all I ask is one simple thing. If you don't take pride in what you do, and you waltz through the world day after day without one iota of concern for the quality of the product you produce, aren't you just going through the paces? Maybe before they write another trite story bashing Microsoft's sloppy product line, they should take a look at the quality of the service Slashdot is contributing to the "geek" world.