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NASA Pondering Two Public Contests To Build Small Space Exploration Satellites
coondoggie writes "NASA today said it was looking into developing two new Centennial Challenge competitions that would let the public design, build and deliver small satellites known as Cubesats capable of operations and experiments near the moon and beyond. The first challenge will focus on finding innovative ways to allow deep space communications with small spacecraft, while the second focuses on primary propulsion for small spacecraft."
If you move me to the beta slashdot abortion i'll add this place to the block list and never visit again.
Too many other news sites regurgitate the exact same storys i see here. And all of them don't look as shitty as the beta slashdot.
Stop being stupid
I'll join the crowd and help post in every thread that pops up, and upvote all the other comments I can find doing the same.
Slashdot Beta is not fixable - it is trash code that should be abandoned as a "lessons learned" exercise. It's not even a close decision - it's pretty much unanimous amongst the users - the ones that provide 90+% of any meaningful content on this particular site in particular.
If this advice that everyone is giving isn't honored by the local 'beta' admins, I believe it's time to start communicating with the people in charge, and pulling the levers of power a bit - and hopefully get these folks a stern talking to about what they were throwing away.
Shorter version: THE BETA SUCKS. LOSE IT.
Ryan Fenton
Beta != Slashdot
Once there's only beta, slashdot will cease to be slashdot. FUCK SOULLESS BETA
That's a dollar and a pound of cheese more than the Slashdot beta is worth.
Geez, when are they going to shit can this beta web site. It is total garbage.......
I've been a Slashdot quite a while, been so long I can't remember. This new beta site needs to go. The current layout works just fine. The new one looks like one of those SEO spam sites used to get clicks. Please make it go away.
The Beta is not appealing to your base. Don't make your base stay home like Romney did. They'll go to Reddit or something other good site and stay there forever.
DON'T ROMNEY SLASHDOT
There are only 47% of us left as it is.
I've been coming to this place for a while, mostly for the discussion.
I don't post much at all, but without an effective and easy way to consume/produce comments, this place is fucking worthless.
DOWN WITH BETA.
On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.
Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.
If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this in a new tab. After seeing that, click here to return to classic Slashdot.
We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
Commentors - only discuss Beta
http://slashdot.org/recent - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories
Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.
Captcha: fuckbeta
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4757125&cid=46169357
http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4757125&cid=46169451
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4757045&cid=46168351
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4756947&cid=46167453
I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!" I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - "I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!"
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Someone told me that slashdot beta was developed by al-qaeda operatives. I don't want to support terrorists.
Can anyone confirm this?
"NASA today said it was looking into fucking beta that would let the public fuck, bugger and dickplow beta known as "fucking beta" capable of sucking and being fucked near the moon and beyond. The first challenge will focus on finding innovative ways to allow deep fucking beta with small spacecraft, while the second focuses on fucking beta for small spacecraft."
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Look I visit this site nearly every day and more than once a lot of days and have for nearly 10 years. I rarely log in, a few times in past couple of years. I also admit that I use adblockers so it is unlikely you have or will ever make any money off of me. BUT THE BETA SUCKS. You will lose my eyeballs if you implement it. It just has too much white spaces and is not information dense enough for me.
Slashdot fartbiter
The Beta makes my clown weep
Oh God, more whiskey
Yes, the trend is quite clear. Let's stay on it and see where it takes us. Who knows, by this time tomorrow, the editors might have explained the nature of dark matter, invented a better electric car battery, and brought back "Farscape". Either that, or their heads will have exploded. I see it as a win-win situation.
Here is Dice's "Contact Us" page. Everybody be sure to call them tomorrow using whatever numbers from that page you can get to ring. Tell every darn receptionist in every darn one of Dice's holdings, along with anyone you can get them to connect you to, that the Slashdot beta is terrible and you won't shut up until it goes away. Fax them a well-illustrated complaint or two or three. Send them a choice letter via snail mail, along with whatever memorabilia you wish.
They keep soliciting our feedback, they can get our feedback, right where it counts.
Spread the word by mentioning this in every article's comments.
The most obvious contact points are:
Dice Holdings Inc.
1040 Avenue of the Americas, 8th Floor
New York, NY 10018
T: 212-725-6550
F: 212-725-6559
Slashdot
594 Howard St Suite 300
San Francisco, CA 94105
Tel: +1-877-433-5638
www.slashdot.com
So I guess I still haven't been forced over to the dark side yet, but I went to try it out again to just see if it still sucks as bad as last time. And yup, it does. Completely unreadable, absurd amount of scrolling, ridiculous forced spacing, asinine column widths. Seriously, what's it going to take to make this die?
What do you guys think a fair price for slashdot would be? I'm curious because I'm thinking about starting a kickstarter or something to buy slashdot and turn it into a community run forum.
This site is valuable because of the community it has. I don't come here for the articles, I come here for the discussions. I know that the majority of the people who come here do so for the same reasons. DICE doesn't get that, and once they kill the community there won't be any real way to rebuild it. I think that would be a shame since I love this place. For all its flaws I think the community here is awesome.
So, what do you guys think? Is it at all within the realm of reason to buy slashdot and make it ours?
--Cheers,
Greg
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki...
It will be better to purchase from an owner who is a good farmer and a good builder.
Where has the option to disable advertising gone?
Here's the funny thing. Out of appreciation of being given a choice, I chose to not disable. However, now that it's gone, I feel as if it's forced down my throat.
I haven't tried Beta, but I'm gonna go ahead and join the revolt simply because "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". I'm satisfied with Slashdot Classic.
This Beta garbage dies in a burning ball of galactic-temperature-infused inferno...
I should have seen this coming for months and set up a slashdot clone we could all move to... Hmm, shortsighted!
Shut it off... Turn it off NOW! Bad, BAD experiment!
Nuff said. You're just pouring gas on a fire with your base. Slashdotters are apparently happy with the site as is and appreciate its familiar usefulness. Beta fucks it up. FUCK BETA.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
Slashdot Beta is the worst thing I have encountered in years. It's like someone took the metrics for time on page, click through rate, and advertising sales stats for pages viewed and total hits to create this abomination which is in no way useful to the users. I can get the content of Slashdot on Reddit/TechCrunch/AndroidCentral and more. I come here for the comments and the discussion. If you insist on killing the community I will throw in the towel on this site myself. Even "Slashdot Classic" used to be better before it was rolled out. Stop making things worse! It's like common sense doesn't work on you people.
AnimePapers.org: Anime Wallpapers Handled With Care
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We'll prolly just end up with disabled accounts, but at this point that's not much of a loss. ;-(
--- Bigger bits, softer blocks, tighter ASCII.
Try it.
New Economic Perspectives
I guess Ars is the place to go, even though the comments system is nearly as bad as the Slashdot Beta, at least the stories are fresher. The beginning of the end was when they launched SlashBI and we all thought it was an April Fools gag.
I generally left the advertisements enabled because i wanted to support slashdot, heck some were even interesting occasionally. but until they shove beta up their ass i will keep ads disabled and definitely wont give them a click
If I wanted tons of wasted white space and larger fonts, I'd run windows 8 on a 50" TV. But I don't do that. Because I don't want that. Just like I DONT WANT THE BETA. Kill it, please.
Come back Jon Katz! All is forgiven! Screw Beta!
The people that wanted to post comments had 5 hours of nausea generated by beta. They'll be back, and with lots of complaints.
Learn to love Alaska
I feel like the beta is being pushed simply because it's new, and they're ignoring that it's not *better*. I've seen this before: after enough money's been invested in something a company will move forward with it whether it is actually good or not simply to avoid admitting they were wrong and the New Thing needs work.
/.'s brand and following - what they definitely paid more for than whatever they've thrown at the beta dev.
I hope Dice doesn't keep pushing this without substantial changes. Outside of outraging their user base it will cost them in destroying
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
That is if they didn't die of a cerebral hemorrhage after actually trying to read Stinkdot Beta.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Seek out the guilty!
Who is he?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Just because the Slashdot Beta site is remarkably shitty it does not mean we need to resort to something that drastic. Jesus Christ, son, be careful what you wish for!
hashtag buckfeta yes.
~Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, but Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.
Fucking SlashBeta. Nobody wants to talk about tiny spacecraft. :(
Where will I go to talk about tiny spacecraft where I can read just the gems, without having to wade through all the dross in some bullshit forum format? For that matter, where can I go to read about tiny spacecraft where the people posting actually know anything? So much of WannabeSpace is jammed full of know-nothings who wouldn't recognize the rocket equation if it bit them on the ass. Sure, even on Slashdot, I'd only expect 100 or so posts, from the still credible mob of users (hundreds of thousands?), and a bunch of those would be bad jokes, but at least there'd be something.
Fucking beta...
http://beta.slashdot.org/submi...
Beta is the current Charlie-Foxtrot the Slashdot community is dealing with, and we're nothing if not navel-gazing when it comes to change. Though usually that change isn't quite as damaging as Beta is in the current form. However, for /. to continue to be a useful source of information, the commentators should prove the necessity they are to the success of the site by actually posting useful content, along with the quite justified complaints about the new system being forced on the users.
That having been said, this is a very interesting change in direction for the microsat community. Most microsats live for a few months (at best) in Low Earth orbit. The current NASA contests are for what are essentially the first deep-space microsats, which can potentially (with the right design) perform useful science for decades or more, far away from Earth. Just how much useful propulsion can you cram into a satellite that weighs 3 pounds? With cheap, consumer-level sensors and a few government waivers, I would think quite a lot. The potential of a swarm of mini-RTG-powered microsats zooming around the Solar System towards or around various planets could yield quite a lot of useful science. Not to mention that this could be a useful demonstration for future Von-Newmann probes, simple machines created from raw materials, in an asteroid or planetary moon and spread throughout the Solar System (and beyond?), exploring, replicating, and continuing to send valuable data to Earth to inform future exploration or colonization..
Every attempt to improve Slashdot's display -except- for the Threaded view introduced by Taco well over a decade ago has been a dismal and utter failure that nobody actually likes.
Even those that thought they liked the previous round of UI "improvements" because they had never seen Slashdot in its glory breath a sigh of relief when shown how to enable "Classic" with the old D1 discussion system.
Seriously, Dice: We're all leaving once "beta" becomes the only reality. We'll build something else. And we'll slashdot every article with comments telling folks about the new place, and moderate all such comments as "Informative" while moderating any topicful commentary as "Offtopic."
Once we find a new place to hang out (and we will -- many hands make light work), we'll all be doing our best to destroy whatever value the ghost of Slashdot might have once had.
Do you know how I know that this will happen? Because this is the first time that the folks on Slashdot have actually agreed on anything, ever, in the history of these pages. It is an unprecedented and historic event. And any time you get this number of disagreeable people disagreeing in unison, change is inevitable.
Fuck your beta.
Kid-proof tablet..
http://slashdot.org/submission/3320177/slashdot-beta-discussion To avoid having clicking on the beta-infested link.
Mugnyte (and others), clean your links. Most are going to be beta-ised now.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
Just how much useful propulsion can you cram into a satellite that weighs 3 pounds? With cheap, consumer-level sensors and a few government waivers, I would think quite a lot. The potential of a swarm of mini-RTG-powered microsats zooming around the Solar System towards or around various planets could yield quite a lot of useful science.
I wonder just how well a cubesat can survive out beyond Earth's Van Allen belts. And transiting them, for that matter. Especially given such choices as consumer-grade sensors and other electronics. Such chips really don't like hard radiation, and that form factor makes it rather difficult to wedge in any sort of effective radiation shielding, or sufficient redundancy to maintain sanity when you take a particle to the knee.
And I suspect there's a minimum functional size for an RTG that is larger than a CubeSat. One would think covering 3 adjacent faces of the cube with 44% efficient solar cells would do the job. It's not like there's even room for a lot of electronics to use that power.
It's a fascinating topic that still has a lot of room for development. Historically, satellite designers have thought in terms of tons and hundreds of millions of dollars. Thinking in terms of grams and individual dollars is alien to the endeavor. This year will see only the third CubeSat conference. There are a piddling 15 papers listed on cubesat.org, only 14 of which have links. That's a pretty miserable showing for 15 years of development.
Here's hoping SpaceX continues to accommodate CubeSat secondary payloads.