Who does this?

Where did the nicknames "CmdrTaco" and "Hemos" come from?

Why is that question so important to every friggin' reporter that wants to bother us? "CmdrTaco" is a reference to a Dave Barry article where he lists places not to take a date. Among them is any place called "The Commander Taco" or something like that. My nickname on my local BBSs was 'Icarus' but unfortunately when I started using the Internet in high school, I found my name already taken.

Frankly I'm not quite sure, but here is my theory: In the real world, people have names ("Bob," "George," "Archibald") that they are given at birth. They are as a general rule quite uninteresting.

Reporters need an "angle." They want to make things interesting, and if you interview a guy named "Bob" you can't really ask him about his name ("Yeah, in a past life I was a cork.") because he didn't choose it. But in the geek world, we tend to pick nicknames for ourselves. The reporters think to themselves "Ooo! A name like CmdrTaco must be significant and will allow me to provide a window into this person's soul!"

The irony is that most geeks don't hold huge significance to their nicks. I mean, they are protective of them, and they want them to be unique (there are a zillion Bobs out there, but very few CmdrTacos... well, except on Quake and EverQuest servers where apparently there are people who pretend to be me all the time). Whenever a reporter asks me the question, I think, "Shit, this guy has no clue at all!" It's just such a cliche of a question (along with "How long have you been doing this?" and my personal favorite "What is Slashdot?").

This is a shorthand expression that refers to one of the core debates in the Free Software and Open Source movement. It stems from a shortcoming in the English language: the word "free" has two meanings. The first is "free" as in "free speech." This is the Latin word "Liber." When you see "free speech," the writer is talking about a fundamental human right like freedom of speech.

The other half is easy to understand for cheapskates. Beer costs money. "Free beer" just means that someone doesn't want to pay money for something.

The other aspect to this is the subtle difference between the Open Source Initiative and The Free Software Foundation. OSI believes that software can be developed better if it is done in the open. The FSF believes that it is ethically wrong for software to be closed. This is, of course, an oversimplification, but you get the idea.

The zealots are pretty loud on all of these points, and understanding them is critical to understanding many of the central debates on Slashdot.

If you want to learn more about this issue, you might start by checking out the following websites:

What is the "Slashdot Effect?"

When Slashdot links a site, often a lot of readers will hit the link to read the story or see the purty pictures. This can easily throw thousands of hits at the site in minutes. Most of the time, large professional websites have no problem with this, but often a site we link will be a smaller site, used to getting only a few thousand hits a day. When all those Slashdot readers start crashing the party, it can saturate the site completely, causing the site to buckle under the strain. When this happens, the site is said to be "Slashdotted."

Recently, the terms "Slashdot Effect" and "Slashdotted" have been used more generally to refer to any short-term traffic jam at a website.