Slashdot Mirror

Remember when information density was a thing? On my glorious 30", 1600px-high display at work, this page takes THREE screenfuls. https://about.mattermost.com/

Select all, copy, paste, word count: 298 words.

As for file size, the page itself -- no includes -- is 650k. When I save as an archive with scripts and images, it's 4.5 MB.

FOR ONE FUCKING PAGE. With 298 words. Unreal.

And this page, from Apple: https://www.apple.com/iphone/c... -- long rant at http://pixelcity.com/index.php...

TL;DR: 1,049 vertical pixels are used for SIX lines of text.

Yeah. I love iPhones, but... fuck. Flatline for 6 years and counting.

http://pixelcity.com/index.php...

I'm late to the party but I'm hoping that the new powers that be will read every comment once the story has closed. Most of my ideas are either relatively simple code fixes, or fixable by human attention. And I think you'll find that unlike "ban ACs"/"keep ACs", there would be little debate around any of these.

Let's see, how many of my ideas from eight years ago are still relevant?

1. Though it has a long, proud tradition, dupes should be avoided. Slashdot has gotten much, much better in the last few years, but it still happens every so often.

2. Spelling and grammar. PLEASE. And make sure the headlines are parse-able by humans.

3. Useful links. Don't link to a blog post about a blog post about a blog post about a story, unless they have useful commentary that you're highlighting. Just go right to the original. (Or a really good description/summary of it, if the original source is very technical, like a multi-hundred-page published paper.)

4. Fact-checking. Make sure this isn't a hoax. Also, in general, things should be new. Just because some guy just discovered something that someone else posted in 2011, that doesn't mean you need to post about it today.

5. Read the comments. Update the story as needed. If a bunch of people write to say that a story is wrong, fix it!

Other things not mentioned by me in 2008:

1. Use standard tags in standard ways. I think the <i> tag is still broken, though it works in preview mode. And neither

1. ordered

nor

• unordered

lists work.

2. Add a "-1, factually incorrect" mod.

3. Add a rich-text editor. Just a simple one -- bold, ital, underline, UL, OL, subscript, superscript, quote, link, and a few others. (Yes, I know the "few others" are subject to much debate. But you can ship a few and revise alter as needed, right?) And/or support some flavor of Markdown. But allow HTML, because Markdown still sucks for common tasks like linking to URLs that end in parentheses, which many Wikipedia articles do. Eg., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

4. I'm not going to say that unicode support is easy, but it's probably not too hard to support a few more basic characters like smart quotes and em- and en-dashes so it doesn't look like ass when you copy and paste text from another website. Decent rich-text editors usually have this built in.

5. Make a decent mobile view. DO NOT a) worry about supporting every feature or b) make it overly app-like. (Related: make mobile apps?) ALL I WANT is to see a story's headline, the body, who posted it and when, and the number of comments. Something like this http://pixelcity.com/slashdot/... which I made years ago but got tired of maintaining after the Nth code change. Here is my old project page, which was one PHP script. AvantSlash does much more.

That's all I can think of for now. Just fix all that and then I'll share more ideas. :D

I'm late to the party but I'm hoping that the new powers that be will read every comment once the story has closed. Most of my ideas are either relatively simple code fixes, or fixable by human attention. And I think you'll find that unlike "ban ACs"/"keep ACs", there would be little debate around any of these.

Let's see, how many of my ideas from eight years ago are still relevant?

1. Though it has a long, proud tradition, dupes should be avoided. Slashdot has gotten much, much better in the last few years, but it still happens every so often.

2. Spelling and grammar. PLEASE. And make sure the headlines are parse-able by humans.

3. Useful links. Don't link to a blog post about a blog post about a blog post about a story, unless they have useful commentary that you're highlighting. Just go right to the original. (Or a really good description/summary of it, if the original source is very technical, like a multi-hundred-page published paper.)

4. Fact-checking. Make sure this isn't a hoax. Also, in general, things should be new. Just because some guy just discovered something that someone else posted in 2011, that doesn't mean you need to post about it today.

5. Read the comments. Update the story as needed. If a bunch of people write to say that a story is wrong, fix it!

Other things not mentioned by me in 2008:

1. Use standard tags in standard ways. I think the <i> tag is still broken, though it works in preview mode. And neither

1. ordered

nor

• unordered

lists work.

2. Add a "-1, factually incorrect" mod.

3. Add a rich-text editor. Just a simple one -- bold, ital, underline, UL, OL, subscript, superscript, quote, link, and a few others. (Yes, I know the "few others" are subject to much debate. But you can ship a few and revise alter as needed, right?) And/or support some flavor of Markdown. But allow HTML, because Markdown still sucks for common tasks like linking to URLs that end in parentheses, which many Wikipedia articles do. Eg., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

4. I'm not going to say that unicode support is easy, but it's probably not too hard to support a few more basic characters like smart quotes and em- and en-dashes so it doesn't look like ass when you copy and paste text from another website. Decent rich-text editors usually have this built in.

5. Make a decent mobile view. DO NOT a) worry about supporting every feature or b) make it overly app-like. (Related: make mobile apps?) ALL I WANT is to see a story's headline, the body, who posted it and when, and the number of comments. Something like this http://pixelcity.com/slashdot/... which I made years ago but got tired of maintaining after the Nth code change. Here is my old project page, which was one PHP script. AvantSlash does much more.

That's all I can think of for now. Just fix all that and then I'll share more ideas. :D

Yeah. It's all the fanboys.

Fans of making money, that is.

> This is why I am writing my own simple reader.

Aah... you too? :-)

And if anyone has their own host and wants something full-featured right now, look no further than Tiny Tiny RSS which, despite the name, is not all that tiny. If you use PHP and want to start rolling your own, I recommend starting with MagpieRSS.

Sincerely. Even though I still use this system that I banged together a few years ago (more info here), the new mbeta page looks really nice.

Sincerely. Even though I still use this system that I banged together a few years ago (more info here), the new mbeta page looks really nice.

Once I realized a couple years ago how much (little) space my whole collection (about 200 CDs) would take up when ripped losslessly compared to how big my hard drives were, I re-ripped all my CDs as ALAC and I'll just transcode as needed. I had previously ripped them all as 192kbps MP3. It's not so much "I can hear the difference" as much as it is "there's no reason not to and I'm an anal-retentive neatnik and I like knowing that what I have is as good as it can possibly be." My whole collection is only about 60 GB in ALAC.

This way I can have songs as 128k AAC for my phone and fit 50% more than I used to, and another copy of my collection is at 96k so I can stream it out of my house on my low-end DSL. (Yes, the quality at that level is noticeable, but it's for those "I really want to hear this one random song right now" times.) I use AAC for use on my iDevices but I can make them MP3s for use anywhere else. Note that listening to ALAC on a disk-based iPod will run through battery faster than usual because the hard disk will have to spin up for pretty much every song.

as seen in Chrome and Firefox 4.

And it's even worse in Safari.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0/whatsnew/

Wrong. Here is just one of several solutions to stream video from a computer to an iPad.

This can be done with a standard web server. Simply set up a web server that makes all your music available on your network, then point your iPod Touch to it. Compatible music files will play in "Quicktime".

Someone even put up instructions about it. http://www.pixelcity.com/iphone-streaming-music/

As far as I can tell you still can't listen to more than one song at a time--you've still got to navigate, click on a song, navigate more, click on another, etc. So you can't, say, easily listen to a whole album. (Correct me if I'm wrong but the two UPnP apps look very limited.) If that's all you're going to do, you may as well save your money and use this (share through Apache) or this (install a custom (but open-source) service.)

<plug mode="shameless">
I couldn't agree more. Slashdot on mobile devices mostly sucks. I (and others, apparently) have written systems to scrape Slashdot and turn it into something vaguely usable. Here is a really stripped-down version for BlackBerry and here is a slightly spiffier one for iPhone/Pre/Android/etc. Here is a description of what I did, how, why, and source. Only works for the front page but that's enough to get me my "fix" while standing in line at the store. :-)
</plug>

<plug mode="shameless">
I couldn't agree more. Slashdot on mobile devices mostly sucks. I (and others, apparently) have written systems to scrape Slashdot and turn it into something vaguely usable. Here is a really stripped-down version for BlackBerry and here is a slightly spiffier one for iPhone/Pre/Android/etc. Here is a description of what I did, how, why, and source. Only works for the front page but that's enough to get me my "fix" while standing in line at the store. :-)
</plug>

<plug mode="shameless">
I couldn't agree more. Slashdot on mobile devices mostly sucks. I (and others, apparently) have written systems to scrape Slashdot and turn it into something vaguely usable. Here is a really stripped-down version for BlackBerry and here is a slightly spiffier one for iPhone/Pre/Android/etc. Here is a description of what I did, how, why, and source. Only works for the front page but that's enough to get me my "fix" while standing in line at the store. :-)
</plug>

Time to load Slashdot 2.0: [still waiting] [still waiting]

Though there's a 50-50 chance the C64 would render it better.

And if you're on an iPhone, it sucks even worse. The CSS is totally borked--the right column is a fixed width and overlaps your comment scores so you can't see them at all.

It even messes up on a tablet PC when in portrait mode. I think that almost takes talent to mess up. I read on a psp, provided the site doesn't break the poor thing by being too big.

And if you're on an iPhone, it sucks even worse. The CSS is totally borked--the right column is a fixed width and overlaps your comment scores so you can't see them at all. But thank God for cruft! You can still go to http://slashdot.org/users.pl?nick=YourNameHere and see the old version.

Speaking of code and the iPhone, it's be nice if there were a good version of Slashdot for the iPhone and iPod touch (and Palm Pre, and Blackberry Storm, and Android), like every single other major site out there. (Even Wikipedia works well on iPhone now!) The ancient page for Palm doesn't quite cut it anymore. I've started on my own PHP script to pull the page and reformat it for iPhone but that only works for the main page (and a little bit for the story pages)--it'd be nice if the entire site were in a wrapper like that. That's the whole point of CSS--to be able to do things like that EASILY. I did my workaround in a couple afternoons--it wouldn't take long at all to write a simple wrapper for the whole site. Just remove all the chrome and add a 'viewport' setting and you're 90% done.

And if you're on an iPhone, it sucks even worse. The CSS is totally borked--the right column is a fixed width and overlaps your comment scores so you can't see them at all. But thank God for cruft! You can still go to http://slashdot.org/users.pl?nick=YourNameHere and see the old version.

Speaking of code and the iPhone, it's be nice if there were a good version of Slashdot for the iPhone and iPod touch (and Palm Pre, and Blackberry Storm, and Android), like every single other major site out there. (Even Wikipedia works well on iPhone now!) The ancient page for Palm doesn't quite cut it anymore. I've started on my own PHP script to pull the page and reformat it for iPhone but that only works for the main page (and a little bit for the story pages)--it'd be nice if the entire site were in a wrapper like that. That's the whole point of CSS--to be able to do things like that EASILY. I did my workaround in a couple afternoons--it wouldn't take long at all to write a simple wrapper for the whole site. Just remove all the chrome and add a 'viewport' setting and you're 90% done.

Hmm... it might take a lot. I made these images* by combining many still images and it reduced the noise but it would be a stretch to really increase the effective resolution. I suppose an array of phone recordings would sound better than stock but it would take a lot to get the quality up to anything reasonable, and I think even a hundred combined signals wouldn't be enough for anyone to mistake the result for a 48k studio piece.

* those pics were taken during a lunar eclipse with my DV camera (25x optical zoom.) I didn't even use a tripod--just pointed it and held it as steadily as I could, the combined the layers in Photoshop. "Shot 1" was the first picture taken, and "Shot 1 (4 layers)" was made by combining four subsequent frames. Later shots were made by combining 6 or 9 layers. There's one raw frame of the first shot for comparison. Long story short: frame noise is random, so combining frames averages it out.

Two little things--

1) check the link in my .sig for a possible streaming solution. (Actually, in case someone reads this in the future and I change my .sig, here it is: http://pixelcity.com/iphone-streaming-music/ ) Not sure what your UPnP requirement is, but if you want to listen to music outside your house (i.e., outside your network), all you need to do is open port 80. It's not a perfect solution--believe me, I'd *love* to have a native music player that let me listen to playlists, etc., rather clicking on one song at a time*--but it comes in handy for me when I feel like listening to a song I don't have on my iPod. (Now that I have that system, I actually have very little music on my phone--I use what little space I have for movies.)

2) Actaully, the iPod touch comes in 8 and 16 GB flavors. It's the iPhone that is (was) 4 GB and 8 GB.

* limited playlist support coming in November, thanks to an incredibly crude workaround I thought of. :-)

There's still lots of fun stuff that can be done with Web 1.0... even on an iPhone. (shameless plug)

Actually, what I'd really like to see would be a return to true Web 1.0 roots--you know, device independence, things like that. To be honest, the iPhone's method of shrinking web pages is just a not-so-elegant workaround. It's nice sometimes, but I'd prefer it if the iPhone just reflowed plain pages like this to 320 pixels wide (without a viewport specified) like my Axim does.* (I say this as a happy iPhone owner and developer.)

* in landscape mode the iPhone just shows unstyled pages with no zoom, 480px wide, but in portrait mode it shrinks them. Which is fine for sites with columns but I wish it would just say "No styling info? Just show it at 1x" for really plain nothing-but-headings-and-paragraphs type pages.

Nice job on the GIF. I'm not usually one to toot my own horn, but this is also a perfect application of the thing I mention in my .sig. Basically, I use PHP to generate some repetitive javascript which, when combined with an image map, creates a neat effect. Source code and examples are here, and here is this technology applied to the Iapetus pics.

I'm too late to get modded up, so tell your friends! :-)

Nice job on the GIF. I'm not usually one to toot my own horn, but this is also a perfect application of the thing I mention in my .sig. Basically, I use PHP to generate some repetitive javascript which, when combined with an image map, creates a neat effect. Source code and examples are here, and here is this technology applied to the Iapetus pics.

I'm too late to get modded up, so tell your friends! :-)

There was a comparison done early in 2002. Results are here. I know from my own experience that OpenOffice.Org virtually never has problems with M$-Office files. I've now switched fully to OpenOffice.Org for everything except Access databases cos I got fed up of Word and Excel corrupting documents so I had to retype them. I have to have M$-Office on my PC due to corporate standards, I just don't use it for wordprocessing, presentations or spreadsheets. No one has complained about not being able to open one of my files (well, except one guy who complained when I sent him a PDF that he couldn't edit it, he was even more pissed off when I replied "That's the point!").

Stephen

OK, one more cool pic--one of the inside to answer all the "how do they fit all that $#!+ in there?" posts. :-)

this thing is super-sweet. in case of slashdotting, here are the two coolest pics. anyone know what these things cost? I didn't see it mentioned in the review and iwillusa.com is also down.

this thing is super-sweet. in case of slashdotting, here are the two coolest pics. anyone know what these things cost? I didn't see it mentioned in the review and iwillusa.com is also down.

Ack! My DSL is already glowing. Shoulda known better, even for such a lightweight page. OK, it's now mirrored on a real server.