Slashdot appears to be dead - or, at the very least, deeply resting. Now it's not been a healthy place for a very long time - just compare today's sanitised front-page with the blinkenlight hacks you'd get before the turn of the millennium - but, even in it's current state, for it to have lasted over 20 years, under so many owners, while the web undertook such rapid change, was a deeply impressive achievement.
Now it's death shouldn't be that big a deal for me, my tastes have changed and I've not been a regular reader for over a decade but... it's Slashdot! And Slashdot made up a pretty big part of my original forays onto the internet and, for better or worse, pointed me in the direction of a number of things that had a long term impact on my development as a person. To let it pass without even a murmur of acknowledgement would be a mistake.
It's the end of an era.
And I feel old.
