Features
Slashdot features discussion forums on a variety of technology- and science-related topics, or "News for Nerds", as its motto states. The site is well known for its bias towards the open source software movement. Articles are divided into the following sections:
- Apple – news related to products from Apple Inc., such as Mac OS X or iPhone.
- Ask Slashdot – articles that seek advice from users about jobs, computer hardware, software glitches, philosophical problems, or more.
- Book Reviews – original book reviews on (not necessarily) tech books.
- BSD – news about the various modern versions of UNIX derived from the UCB distribution.
- Developers – news about software or programming.
- Features – original, feature-length articles.
- Games – gaming news.
- Geeks in Space – a web audio broadcast featuring several of the editors of Slashdot (outdated; no new episodes have been posted recently).
- Idle – miscellaneous and humorous articles, pictures, and videos.
- Interviews – interviews with various people related to science and technology.
- Information Technology (IT) – anything that people with "Information Technology" in their job description might be interested to know.
- Linux – news specific to the Linux operating system (any variant or distribution).
- Politics – news typically relevant to politics of the United States, but occasionally featuring international political news. It was originally created to cover the 2004 United States Presidential Election.
- Polls – a poll is usually run on the site in the right-hand margin, asking users their choice on a variety of topics. In the earlier years of the site, one of the options that could be selected was CowboyNeal, the handle of Jonathan Pater, an administrator of the site. This became known as the CowboyNeal option. During the summer of 2005, he stopped being in charge of the polls, and as a result the CowboyNeal option all but disappeared.
- Science – news on science-related topics (e.g. cool technology, space telescope observations, interesting medical research).
- Your Rights Online (YRO) – news on topics pertaining to internet privacy and digital rights.
Read more about this topic: Slashdot Trolling Phenomena
Famous quotes containing the word features:
“These, then, will be some of the features of democracy ... it will be, in all likelihood, an agreeable, lawless, particolored commonwealth, dealing with all alike on a footing of equality, whether they be really equal or not.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“It is a tribute to the peculiar horror of contemporary life that it makes the worst features of earlier times—the stupefaction of the masses, the obsessed and driven lives of the bourgeoisie—seem attractive by comparison.”
—Christopher Lasch (b. 1932)
““It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat
And its eyes shut with overeagerness
To see what people found so interesting
In one another, and had gone to sleep
Of its own stupid lack of understanding,
Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off, and died against the windowpane.””
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)