Rob Malda

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Rob Malda at LinuxWorld Boston 2006

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Rob Malda (born May 10, 1976), also known as CmdrTaco, is the founder of the website Slashdot. He is a graduate of Hope College and Holland Christian High School.

His moniker originates in the Dave Barry book Claw Your Way to the Top: How to Become the Head of a Major Corporation in Roughly a Week (ISBN 0878576525). 'Commander Taco' is the final entry in a list of bad restaurants for business lunches.^{[citation needed]}

In 1997 Rob Malda and Jeff Bates created Slashdot while undergraduates of Hope College ^[1]. After running the site for two years on a shoestring ^[2], they sold the site to Andover.net, which was later acquired by VA Linux Systems ^[3]. Malda now runs the site out of the SourceForge, Inc. office in Dexter, MI ^[4].

Rob Malda also writes a monthly column for Computer Power User. His article is titled "The Department of Stuff" and has titles like adwords.txt and goodblog.txt. According to his magazine bio, "He spends his time fiddling with electronic gizmos, wandering the 'Net, watching anime, and trying to think of clever lies to put in his bio so that he seems cooler than he actually is." (CPU Magazine)

Malda is also infamous for his dismissive description of Apple Computer's then newly introduced iPod: "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame."^[5] This quote has often been used to illustrate the gulf between Slashdot's "techno-elite" and ordinary computer users.

On Valentine's Day of 2002, Malda proposed to Kathleen Fent using the front page of Slashdot and she accepted.^[6]. They were married on December 8, 2002 in Las Vegas, Nevada.^[7] They currently have one child, Zachary, who was born in August, 2007.^[8]^[9]