Slashdot Mirror
System Downtime, Maintenance
When I originally "designed" (I use the term loosely since evolved is more accurate) the system, "Sections" were meant to be for "Data Types"... for example "Book Reviews". A book review is fundamentally different than a Slashdot "Article" because it has extra fields like the ISBN code. At the same time I essentially coded "Skins" because each "Data Type" needed custom look & feel type stuff so that the story could actually display the unique data fields.
So when we created YRO and the BSD section and later on the Apple section, I just reused the skinning part of "Sections".. it was the easiest way to do it, but it created problems later: under the old design a story could only have one "Section"... some sections defined "Data Type" and others defined "Subject Matter" (like Apple or BSD)... thats why bsd.slashdot.org can never include a book review, and apple.slashdot.org can't include an 'Ask Slashdot'. This confounded users of our search page to no ends, to say nothing of frustrating editors who couldn't include topical stories within their appropriate section.
Undoubtedly we'll see some bugs to pop up... so please be patient and submit bug reports. We'll be wacking bugs for a few days... there's always a few of them that don't pop up until you put them in front of the half a million users on the real hardware. Thanks for understanding!
Thanks for the advanced notice!!!!!
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Don't suppose you're going to add editing posts as an option are you? Ah, no - Didn't think so, it's only 2004 after all!
People that believe in their opinions don't post AC.
9pm eastern... Whats that in GMT? ;)
Good luck with the upgrade, I hope Sod and his law stay far... FAR away.
How can you say that civilisation's do not advance... in every war we invent new ways to kill you.
Taco, all you do is describe what the current design (step of evolution) is, but what are the changes?. Obviously, you will have removed those restrictions, but you don't say so. :)
And re-doing the layout in proper css?
-- With a Henry Rollins song now in my head.
about professionalism when slashdot is upgrading, and instead of a nice, slashdot-style page coming up saying "The system is down for maintenance".. we get a big, ugly HTTP error.
Greater accessibility for people with disabilities? Better scaling to non-standard interfaces, such as text-only browsers, cell phones, and PDAs? The ability to more easily "skin" slashdot, simply by changing the relevant css? The fact that, because there are essentially only two different kinds of layout on /. (front page and comments), the css would be cached and would therefore require that clients be server less information refresh, both decreasing server load and time to client?
The fact that tables were not designed to be used as a layout system, but rather were meant to tabulate data, and this unholy marriage of structure and content greatly decreases the accuracy of browsers, because they have no way of knowing whether a table is a table (excel/gnumeric style) or some glorified layout scheme?
CSS renders faster? Sometimes (often) much faster?
Is that good enough, or do I need to go on? Technology moves forward for a reason. It isn't that we web developers don't like tables, we just like them to be used as tables.
google turns up a few useful-looking links on the subject of flash and freebsd. Nonetheless you're running a desktop which is marginal in popularity at best as a desktop OS and you're bitching about not having a supported version of flash player? Next you'll be complaining about a lack of mozilla for the atari 800.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"