Sony Selling Off VAIO Computer Business

Kensai7 writes "Confirming reports from earlier in the week, Sony has announced plans to sell off its VAIO computer division to a Japanese investment fund. Japan Industrial Partners (JIP) will take control of the operation for an undisclosed fee, and Sony will 'cease planning, design and development of PC products.' For a variety of reasons 'including the drastic changes in the global PC industry,' Sony says 'the optimal solution is to concentrate its mobile product lineup on smartphones and tablets and to transfer its PC business to a new company.'" I have some nostalgia for the tiny old VAIO laptops; I wish more companies incorporated the swiveling camera that they came with.

Comments

Sad news

[Anonymous Coward]

i am on my 3rd sony vaio product - have been using them for the past decade pretty much. OMG. Sony's vaio design team is awesome!!! Very sad news.

Re:Sad news

[Koen Lefever]

Mod -1 ontopic.

Re:Sad news

[Anonymous Coward]

They've been crap for 5+ years

Re:Sad news

[Anonymous Coward]

Complaining in the comments is not enough! This is the person responsible for beta. Contact her, buy a LinkedIn subscription if you have to, and tell her what you think.

Note: it seems that links no longer work in beta. Here is the URL: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alicehill

Re:Sad news

[andreicristianpetcu]

Another company ruined by WIndows 8. Why don't computer manufacturers switch already to GNU/Linux distros? ElementaryOS, LinuxMint, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE. There are lots of choices.

Re:Sad news

[Scutter]

Because only a tiny percentage of PC users want to use (or have even heard of) Linux. Like it or not, we are in the minority.

Re:Sad news

[tripleevenfall]

I think it would be more accurate to say, "another company ruined by the iPad"

Re:Sad news

[Wookact]

+1 Interesting

Re:Sad news

[xclr8r]

Or ruined by themselves. I remember at least the early vaio's had proprietary fire wire connections and I haven't looked back since.

Re:Sad news

[snaggl3tooth]

I haven't been redirected once to beta yet. Is there something wrong with my computer? I'm being serious.

Re:Sad news

[HaZardman27]

If you find out, please share it with the rest of us so we can also avoid the beta.

Re:Sad news

[MMC Monster]

Oddly enough, not one story on slashdot in the last couple days about Beta. So, of course, we discuss it in every other story on the site.

I tried it again today and if you think the article and comments sections are horrible, you should see the user profile section.

We cannot see how many replies a comment we had written has received. I find this an important tool to answer questions I have (just look at some of my previous comments) about the topic at hand.

Why couldn't they have just adjusted the style sheet a bit and let everything else stay the same? If they wanted to open up another site, they could have just done that and left /. alone. The domain name can't be *that* lucrative for them.

Re:Sad news

[tripleevenfall]

Although I agree with you about not wanting to buy such a PC, it's mostly neckbeards who care about that kind of stuff.

For most consumers a PC is a disposable item they use for a year or two, and they don't know what a firewire is.

Re:Sad news

[jedidiah]

> Because only a tiny percentage of PC users want to use (or have even heard of) Linux. Like it or not, we are in the minority.

Plenty of people want to use Linux. Plenty of people want to use something else. They just can't get beyond this "it must be DOS compatible" mental block on tends to associate with PCs.

The entire PC platform is a victim of decades of pervasive FUD. The whole thing may go down because people can't separate PCs from the crapulence that is Microsoft.

Re:Sad news

[Bert64]

And the primary reason for that is that the manufacturers are not promoting machines running it, and are sometimes even prevented from doing so by agreements with MS.

Very few people actually want to use windows either, most use whatever is available and don't actually care what it is. A lot of people actually hate windows, and only tolerate it because they are unaware or afraid of any alternatives.

Most of the arguments against linux are entirely bogus and have been proven untrue. With appropriate marketing from hardware manufacturers and a half decent distro (ie not the crap unsupportable distros netbooks often had), linux would sell just fine. At the very least a dual boot system could be offered, with appropriate marketing about the benefits of using it.

As for the arguments often levelled against linux:

Lack of drivers - this only matters for post-purchase install, if your supplying linux with the hardware then you're going to be supplying linux compatible hardware.
Difficult to install - as above, if its supplied with hardware it will already be installed. plus linux is actually easier to install than windows these days anyway.
Can't buy boxed software - as if people do this anyway, linux distros use a repository system, and apple/google have proven that users actually like this approach.
Unfamiliar software - most people pretty much only browse the web, you have firefox and chrome on linux and you don't hear people complaining that safari on ipad is unfamiliar.
Lack of games - true, although its improving with steam etc, and relatively few people play many games (hence the popularity of integrated gfx which arent up to the job of playing games), a lot play online flash games which work on linux,

Re:Sad news

[jedidiah]

> Although I agree with you about not wanting to buy such a PC, it's mostly neckbeards who care about that kind of stuff.

Except it's really only Apple fanbois that care one way or the other about firewire in general.

Re:Sad news

[Anonymous Coward]

(Score: 5, Absurd)

They just can't get beyond this "it must be DOS compatible" mental block on tends to associate with PCs.

Fortunately, Windows 95 should resolve that pesky reliance on DOS and free us from the tyranny of the command line. Then, X Windows FTW! Jeesh, KDE is just as good. And Gnome uses callbacks! VISAFB all the way!

I'm placing my bets on SCO OpenServer. HP-UX is obsolete. Netcraft confirms it.

Re:Sad news

[jedidiah]

You think it's absurd but I actually remember when the Microsoft hegemony started. It wasn't with Windows 95. It was long before.

People like to pretend that something other than the biggest turd available won the market. It hurts their brains to contemplate it.

Re:Sad news

[tripleevenfall]

Ok, to be precise:

Neckbeards care about firewire interoperability and wouldn't buy a PC with a proprietary connector even if they don't actually use firewire

Apple fanbois, who for some reason might have been considering a Sony laptop instead of a Macbook despite their status as fanbois, might have cared. Or they might just have bought an adapter, which they are well used to doing.

Re:Sad news

[maynard]

Most of the arguments against linux are entirely bogus and have been proven untrue.

Here is the problem with Linux. And *BSD as well.

It doesn't run the commercial software I need to successfully fulfill my objectives.

We can point our fingers at Adobe, Microsoft, and other commercial players who limit access of their apps to expand their own markets at the expense of Linux. But the model that open source would engender network effects and overtake commercial players who would shoot their own feet by refusing to develop on the platform...well, that turned out to be false.

The open source community beat commercial players on a limited playing field in server space. And then the commercial players changed the game. Ironically, Linux has become even more irrelevant as a populist movement because of its backend success.

The Linux desktop lost for valid reasons. It's been out there long enough to catch hold and it hasn't. It's long past time to look inward on that front. It's popular failure is entirely self-inflicted.

Re:Sad news

[ColdWetDog]

You live in a funny world -

In MY world, sucks to be me I suppose, I have to use PROGRAMS. That are only written for Windows (maybe OS X, but few Enterprise programs are in OS X). Those PROGRAMS won't run on Linux or WINE (or Windows 7 but that's another issue).

In MY world, we have to attach to a network with fairly strict controls. Yes, a Linux network could do that, but since Linux won't run the PROGRAMS, it's hardly worth the effort.

PROGRAMS, PROGRAMS, PROGRAMS. Yes, the various distros have wonderful repositories for free software. Some of it excellent. A lot of it crap.

Your narrow world is just one reason why Linux won't displace Windows. Linux has, and will continue to make inroads into computing at a number of levels, the desktop does not appear to be one of them.

Re:Sad news

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually remember when the Microsoft hegemony started. It wasn't with Windows 95. It was long before.

I'm guessing it was when Bill Gates and a consortium of static RAM manufacturers had Tom Pittman whacked in the mid-1970s so Microsoft could bury TinyBasic before 4KB became the de-facto standard.

Re:Sad news

[Anonymous Coward]

> Because only a tiny percentage of PC users want to use (or have even heard of) Linux. Like it or not, we are in the minority.

Plenty of people want to use Linux. Plenty of people want to use something else. They just can't get beyond this "it must be DOS compatible" mental block on tends to associate with PCs.

The entire PC platform is a victim of decades of pervasive FUD. The whole thing may go down because people can't separate PCs from the crapulence that is Microsoft.

That hasn't stopped Macs, or tablets running Android or iOS, from growing over the past decade.

The people who want to use desktop Linux already do. Those who need Windows compatibility use Wine, or a VM, or dual-boot. And that's not as much of an issue anymore, because most everything is on the web, or in a standard format for which an alternative exists.

There just aren't that many people who want to use desktop linux.

Re:Sad news

[ElectricTurtle]

So you're saying it's about developers? Developers, developers, developers?

Re:Sad news

[der_joachim]

^This! Sony has the nasty habit of using their own proprietary 'standards'. My wife still has an old Vaio lying around with a MMC reader, which is Sony only.

Re:Sad news

[JWW]

Thats a great idea. They should take the /. beta site and run it somewhere else. Have the same stories and then see how it does against the classic site.

Over the history of /. UI changes have been minimal an planned out/deployed over a long time period. Flashy shit was generally avoided with more of an eye toward functionality.

The forced march to beta speaks directly against the "News for Nerds" ethos. It all flash and eye candy and gaudy mass market type of website crap.

Re:Sad news

[TheGratefulNet]

I thought it was about meatballs. bork bork bork!

Re:Sad news

[TheGratefulNet]

you mean 'memory stick'. mmc is nearly the same as sd-card.

Re:Sad news

[ColdWetDog]

Well, yes. If, for example, Adobe wrote Creative Suite to run on Linux, a lot of folks who use those programs would consider moving off of OS X, especially given Apple's reluctance to come up with mid priced tower hardware instead of high tech ashtrays.

Autodesk does run on Linux but here you're talking high five and into the six figures - effectively not 'desktop'. And there is some other very, very pricey Linux enterprise software, but in this scenario, the workstations are really just chump change.

If MS ported the Office Suite to Linux, well, hell would probably freeze over, Stahlman would expire in a bought of apoplectic fury and quite a few places who don't rely on Windows based Line of Business software would switch, but I don't think that's happening any time soon.

So yes, Developers, Developers, Developers. Ballmer was right about that.

Re:Sad news

[tooslickvan]

No one wants to use Linux or Windows. Have you tried to use an operating system? All you can do is copy files and set the time. It's fun the first few times, but it becomes boring really fast. No, people do not want to use an operating system; they want send email, browser the web, check stock quotes, send goofy pictures to their friends. That's what they want.

Re:Sad news

[Zalbik]

You missed some fairly important points:

1) Lack of familiarity: People bitch and moan and complain whenever MS makes the slightest change to their UI. Imagine having to learn a new OS, as well as all the new apps.
      "Uhh, where's my C: drive?"
      "Where did all my favorites go?"
      " How do I get my pictures off my camera?"

2) Lack of online support. Any of the above question, you can easily Google the answer to for windows. Or you can even call Microsoft....and they may actually help. Try and ask where your C: drive is on a Linux forum, and see all the polite and helpful responses you get.

3) Lack of "buddy" support. Most poeple know someone who is a "computer expert" at Windows. Often they are only an "expert" because they are a rabid gamer, use Windows at work, generally "good" with computers. A much smaller number are "experts" because they are in IT or IS. A very small number are "experts" at Linux

4) Migration. It's a huge PITA moving items from one windows version to the next, and getting things set up in a similar manner that the user is accustomed to. Moving to a whole new OS is a massive pain.

Re:Sad news

[Anonymous Coward]

If I was writing a new piece of software (that is not SaaS) then I would:

1. Ensure good separation of concerns (MVC).
2. Employ careful design which is implementation agnostic (Plenty of UML).
3. Consider employing compatibility layers where it does not create a significant performance issues, conditional compilation in small areas, or even non-native code where appropriate.

Then producing a version for whatever OS comes along would not be as much of a problem (apart from testing, testing, testing, of course). And to me this is just good business sense as despite best efforts to ensure backwards compatibility there is no certainty that an application will necessarily run on a new version of an operating system from the same vendor, and it retains flexibillity to target unexpected new players as well as the existing ones. But even without this it makes sense simply from a development and resourcing of development, and provides the flexibility for new versions of V and C.

I can't see that I have a unique insight here and that several thousand managers haven't already worked this out, so presumably if Linux does gather a reasonable market share then software could appear quite rapidly with the testing aspect being the most significant stumbling block, partly because on Linux the underlying libraries providing compatibility layers may change rapidly (the other approach being statically linking into the binary, but giving rise to bloat, but these days space isn't at such a premium that this might not be a good tradeoff compared to support call load).

Re:Sad news

[Penguinisto]

Good point - I think it began way back when DOS 2 (or was it 3?) came out, and Windows was just a bonus option that came with the machine (I had an old Amstrad 286 that arrived that way, and Windows was just a shitty TUI interface you turned on if you forgot where you put something, or wanted to organize stuff on your uber-expensive 10MB hard disk.)

As for the Vaios, I liked the one I did have - a Z1RA with an early P4 and a whole 2GB of RAM. Slick as hell, and for its time a very light (as in low-weight) little laptop.

Only two problems I had with it was the ungodly high pricetag, and Sony's nasty habit of making everything so proprietary, that you wasted CPU cycles on the crapware.

Re:Sad news

[mikael]

I remember when Dos-Shell came out - it allowed you to view two directory listings side by side in a 120 x 50 text window split in half. That was considered revolutionary at the time.

Re:Sad news

[Anonymous Coward]

No Skyrim. No Quicken for my tax software. No expensive electron microscope scanner control system. Youtube performance blows.

Yup, my arguments are entirely bogus.

Re:Sad news

[Bert64]

1, People were not familiar with ipads or android tablets, and yet people now use them...

2, theres plenty of linux related forums, calling microsoft gets you nowhere without a support contract and most people would call whoever they bought the machine from - if the machine came with linux then the supplier is just as likely to provide linux support.

3, there are very few actual windows experts, the system is simply far too opaque to understand it thoroughly... and besides, the same could be said about macos, android, ipad etc.

4, yes it is, and its designed that way for exactly this reason, but you assume people actually have something to move - many dont, a lot of people quite happily dropped their existing systems and started using ipads, or using different machines for different purposes.

Re:Sad news

[Bert64]

In *YOUR* world...

for the vast majority of people the only network they have to attach to is the router their isp supplied, and the only program they want to run is probably a web browser.

out of repository programs are a huge pain in the ass, its hard enough getting users to update using a single central tool, but getting them to update (and in many different ways) all the different applications they're running too? that's a completely unreasonable expectation of the average end user and the result has been an epidemic of malware. even microsoft recognise this and are trying to operate a central repository now.

it is your world that is narrow, in the consumer space users have very limited needs, and dont want to deal with all the hassles associated with windows.. thats why chromeos and android, both linux based and both considerably more hassle free than windows, are making inroads.

Re:Sad news

[Bert64]

So linux doesn't cater to your niche requirements?
windows doesn't cater to my niche requirements.

were talking about end users who just want to browse the web safely and with the minimum of hassle, not the 0.0000001% of people who want to operate electron microscopes.

Re:Sad news

[Anonymous Coward]

AC at work.
I work in a large university where there are only a small number of "programs" or "applications" that are in use. I run Fedora 20 on my work desktop, which all the rest of the staff who interact with me drool over because it is "so cool." They are also quite certain that I am much smarter than they are because they know that "Linux is for geeks."
What "programs" do I need that I can't use FOSS for? Well, ummmmm, ummm,,, I do have to use Wine for Filemaker because the university pays for a bulk Windows license and no one but me knows that they could just add a Linux version to that license. But I don't care because Filemaker on Wine is trivial. Everything else I, or anyone of the thousands of faculty or staff using the vast bulk of the computers here on campus or at home could be using Linux.
Why don't they? You have your answer which is, what exactly? My answer is quite simple: "Linux never was used for desktops because it is not a commercial product and consumers are trained from birth to consume based on advertising input. If you don't believe me look at Apple sales, something built entirely on advertising and marketing ("We are better, we are even the best!"). One could have built a Linux desktop that looked and performed like a Mac years ago, but no one really wanted to. Actually a few did, no I forget the links, but we have all seen them. The point is there was no one to sell them as a major commercial enterprise, so no one was interested.
Finally was the geek factor. This all happened when geeks were derogated, so no one wanted to be a geek. Now the real geeks are hidden and the pseudo-geeks all buy Macs because they are really consumers. The pseudos always win you know.

So who is left

[nurb432]

IBM sold all theirs off, HP/Compaq have merged, and Dell, who knows what is going on with that.

Re:So who is left

[jawtheshark]

Perhaps we are indeed witnessing the downfall of the PC era.

Re:So who is left

[Big Hairy Ian]

HP/Compaq have merged

Current affairs are not your strong point that was nearly a decade ago!

Re:So who is left

[nurb432]

I didn't say when.. only that they did.

Re:So who is left

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean back when Slashdot was good? STOP THE BETA

Re:So who is left

[nurb432]

I think the industry has been its own undoing, as efficiency has increased, prices have dropped and its been harder and harder to make money even tho PCs still sell. If you cant move the volume you cant survive.

We may end up with a single company making them here soon.

Re:So who is left

[QuasiSteve]

Who is left - based on products actually available in stores in NL (and this is not 100% coverage):
HP+Compaq (437), Lenovo (270), Asus (260), Acer (191), Toshiba (173), Dell (166), [Sony (68)], Samsung (66), MSI (58), Fujitsu (37), Medion (21), Apple (20), Packard Bell (19), BTO (8). Then there's a few more from Panasonic, Razer, Gigabyte, Wortmann, System76, Google and Alternate. Medion and BTO are local-ish brands, Wortmann seems like a peculiar import out of Germany. ( Source:tweakers.net pricewatch )

Looks like there's plenty left in the notebook/laptop/etc. market. Still, it's sad to SONY exit the market as the VAIOs were rather shiny - the matching price tags didn't exactly help their popularity despite the shiny factor, though.

Re:So who is left

[east coast]

Slashdot Beta is still around, that's who.

Fight the power, brother. Speak out against the beta.

Re:So who is left

[maynard]

Perhaps we are indeed witnessing the downfall of the PC era.

Is that good or bad?

For open platforms manufactured by large companies, it's bad. We can still buy barebones PCs and cheap laptops, but there's an obvious transition away toward locked down systems like tablets and consumer products.

OTOH: the old PC was a successor to prior hobby platforms that were fully open. The old ALTAIR / IMSAI, Heathkit, SWTPC, Apple II, etc world of 8 bit before it went corporate. If IBM had had its way, what we're seeing today would have happened much sooner. Ironically, we can thank Microsoft for stalling that outcome for decades. It had already happened twice with mainframe and minicomputer players decades before, as they swiped ideas and technology developed in university labs for commercialization and then locked them down.

So maybe this shift will engender a resurgence of very slow systems designed for hobbyists to built from scratch. A bifurcation of commercial products for the general public and a hobby community that might lead to hands on hardware / software development of entirely new platforms. A real resurgence of competition without commercial pressure because it's being done just for fun.

Such systems wouldn't fulfill the expectations of consumers. Nor should they. But they might be cool to tinker with. And that could have second order effects down the road that could impact future markets in unexpected ways. Or not. And who cares?

A hobbyist / commercial hardware split might be for the best.

Or, maybe I'm talking nonsense. I often do.

Re:So who is left

[nurb432]

So maybe this shift will engender a resurgence of very slow systems designed for hobbyists to built from scratch.

FPGA

Re:So who is left

[plasticsquirrel]

East Asian companies, basically. Acer (Taiwan), Asus (Taiwan), Lenovo (China), Samsung (Korea), and Toshiba (Japan). In Japan and Europe, they also have NEC (Japan) and Fujitsu (Japan). Not all of them are selling traditional desktops in western markets, though, which is unfortunate. As for western companies, the number of big manufacturers has really been cut down to a tiny number -- Dell and HP, basically.

Re:So who is left

[HideyoshiJP]

I remember listening to a discussion on Leo Laporte's Windows Weekly podcast with Paul Thurott and Mary Jo Foley regarding this.They seem to be under the impression that the PC manufacturers, in their mid-to-late 2000s price wars not only hurt the image of the PC with a race to the bottom, but also set an unsustainable price point. Admittedly, this is just one factor in the decline of the PC, but that certainly helped set the stage.

Re:So who is left

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple? They sell PCs. They can even run Windows.
The many PC vendors are rather a pain than a good feature:
- they all only offer Windows
- they have proprietary bits in the least differentiating and convenient bits: non-standard chargers and power connectors on laptops, non-standard batteries on laptops.
And the Vaio brand has been destroyed a while ago. It used to mean high quality gear that's super light and has awesome and smart features. Now you can get a VAIO that is simple a low res 15 inch laptop that doesn't even look pretty. How can the brand mean anything?

Re:So who is left

[gnasher719]

There was a discussion a while ago, where Phil Schiller was attacked because he said that of the companies making PCs when the Macintosh project was started, none were selling PCs anymore except Apple. Sony was given as a counter-example (although Sony only sold to the Japanese market at the relevant time, and stopped selling PCs for a while in the 90's), but now they are exiting anyway.

Re:So who is left

[jedidiah]

> Apple? They sell PCs. They can even run Windows.

Apple sells overpriced novelty form factors.

PC vendors on the other hand all sell machines with components that are interchangeable with one another. This is even a factor in their undoing as it is far easier to keep an old PC running than a Mac. I can put a standard aftermarket video card or SSD in an old craptacular PC and it can be as useful as a new Mac (or PC).

I remember my old Vaios. Both of them were tweaked with aftermarket RAM and hard drives because it was simply cheaper that way. It was also a trivial thing to do.

Re:So who is left

[ColdWetDog]

Will you settle down. Up your prozac or single malt as desired. Or perhaps both.

I know you hate Apple with some sort of delighted passion, but they're one of the few companies making money (remember that stuff?) in this environment. Somebody thinks they're doing something right.

Funny thing about my novelty level MacBook Pro - It's the only computer in the hospital that can run our legacy system (stuck on XP), our new system (Win 7 only), KDE and OSX. Everybody else is carrying two laptops or has two desktops or thin clients. Yes, that's novel, but it puts a different spin on your rant.

Re:So who is left

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing about my novelty level MacBook Pro - It's the only computer in the hospital that can run our legacy system (stuck on XP), our new system (Win 7 only), KDE and OSX. Everybody else is carrying two laptops or has two desktops or thin clients.

That's amazing, really. I can run Win7, XP, KDE, and OS X on my fucking netbook.

Re:So who is left

[codepigeon]

Holy shit, I thought you were just naming computer companies. There is no way you can get a brand new packard bell.....until i did a quick search. Wow. I learned something today
http://www.packardbell.co.uk/pb/en/GB/content/home

Re:So who is left

[Drew617]

Not without violating Apple licensing terms. You may not give a shit - I don't either with my equipment at my house - but the folks who employ him probably do.

Re:So who is left

[nevermore94]

Personally, I think there are only 2 brands left worth buying. If you run a business and want to buy a large batch of cheaper computers with good support, you go with Dell. If you are a developer or gamer and want to buy a top of the line laptop you go with ASUS. I am both and I am on my 3rd ASUS in 10 years from www.xoticpc.com and I have been perfectly happy with all of them. So, there are still good manufactures and sellers out there.

Re:So who is left

[SoCalChris]

Well, Packard Bell will tell you that it's a new computer.

Re:So who is left

[Wdomburg]

Dell, who knows what is going on with that.

Leveraged buyout, narrowly averted proxy fight, some shake up of C-level executives, and a workforce reduction of a few thousand.

You're welcome.

Re:So who is left

[mikael]

Sony did the same. But they usually made around several dozen different models around a single laptop chassis and priced each model separately, and had different sized screens, disk-drives and memory configurations and maybe an option TV tuner board. By far the LCD screen was the most expensive replacement, at around $1000 . Some companies actually accepted the old screen as a trade-in discount. So it was cheaper to buy the model with the highest resolution screen, but the lowest price, then replace the hard disk drive and memory. But the GPU's were always custom made. There was no way of upgrading as they had custom connectors.

Re:So who is left

[Anonymous Coward]

They killed themselves off by dumping the PCI connector for graphics boards around 2004/2005. Not everyone could afford to buy a new PC at that time as there was a recession going on. Then the TV technology review channels were telling people, "It's not worth buying a £1500 high-end PC system if it's going to become obsolete in two years. You are better off buying the sub-£1000 price PC every year". Game magazines showed people how to build a gaming rig for £600. That set up the expectations for low prices. Now with Sony selling off their PC division, the Japanese realize that they have been out-miniaturized by tablets and smartphones in the consumer and commercial markets.

Re:So who is left

[QuasiSteve]

What Parent Poster said.

Okay, maybe not entirely. Let's instead admire the fact that the Arduino platform is, in many ways, what early computers were to people a generation or two ago. But growth out of that and onto more powerful platforms (Raspberry Pi or BBB, maybe a PCduino first or Intel's oddball attempt at smashing a PC and an Arduino together) will indeed drive a push toward FPGA use. Xilinx is certainly doing its share to help make that happen (it is in their interest, after all.) by making reasonably cheap development boards, not to mention very cheap solutions that others then turn into development boards. For $50 you can have a decent FPGA (Spartan-3A) dev board in a breadboard-friendly package. Breadboard... FPGA... $50. Crazy. Crazy cool.

That's one direction. Then there's the other direction - it has become easier than ever before for people to start using their smartphones and tablets for hobby programming / I/O purposes (at least in the Android landscape). It just tends to get lost among the hundreds of clones of Candy Crush, twitter/facebook clients or the latest photo-filter-effect fad.

The PC will remain but might return to its business roots - which in turn means they might actually return to just being thin clients ('cloud'.. bleh.)

But the idea of the GP and many others had it can definitely still be found, perhaps now more than ever, just not necessarily in the PC ecosystem.

Swiveling camera...

[TWX]

From the summary:

I wish more companies incorporated the swiveling camera that they came with

Yeah, a swiveling camera would have been handy on Chatroulette. With fixed cameras embedded in the screen frame it's much harder to actually see the reactions from the other participants...

Why sell? Why not burn and collect insurance?

[erroneus]

I do not agree with some of the comments here. I have found Sony laptops and desktops to be wanting in so many ways not the least of which is the repairability. It amazes me they could actually put that many screws into such tight spaces. The screws must double the weight of their machines or more. And the durability of their machines? Ridiculous. I can't say that I ever bought or used any of their "high end" machines, but the ones I have worked with had problems at all levels. And I hate the software. There's simply nothing I like about Sony computers. They need to disappear, not get passed on to the next unfortunate recipient.

Help kill beta!

[unitron]

Join the Slashcott!

February 10th - 17th

Re:Help kill beta!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.suntimes.com/news/s...

Re:Help kill beta!

[Anonymous Coward]

But what will I do on valentine's day?!

Sony Viaos suck anyway.

Also, so does Beta.

Re:Help kill beta!

[MtHuurne]

It all depends on the numbers. If there is 5% less traffic in that week, they'll ignore it. If there is 50% less traffic, they might take notice.

Also, unlike most boycotts, this protest is not against an unpopular corporate policy, but against the product itself. The beta interface has such poor usability that I can't see myself using it, even if I wanted to.

Re:Help kill beta!

[Anonymous Coward]

To all Sysadmin Firewall block Slashdot February 10th - 17th in protest

Re:Help kill beta!

[unitron]

It all depends on the numbers. If there is 5% less traffic in that week, they'll ignore it. If there is 50% less traffic, they might take notice.

Also, unlike most boycotts, this protest is not against an unpopular corporate policy, but against the product itself . The beta interface has such poor usability that I can't see myself using it, even if I wanted to.

Actually, *we* are the product.

Our presence at the site is what they sell to advertisers.

We're also the producers of the product by attracting each other here.

We need to help Dice more fully grasp that concept.

Over on slashdotmedia.com they brag "Slashdot averages 4,653 comments on a daily basis..."

If we can change that to a 3 digit number for 7 days, maybe it'll be like the old farmer treating the mule with kindness who starts by whacking it on the head with a 2x4.

"First you have to get its attention"

Fuck Beta

[portraitofsanity]

Slashdot Overlords, You can continue posting new stories, but we will just keep complaining about the beta. Can you meet us halfway and actually create a story for us to dump hatred into so that we can go back to commenting on articles we haven't read? This isn't going to go away, and you might have realized this is not the most patient and incapable group. In a week this whole community can be destroyed or moved...

Buck Feta

[Anonymous Coward]

I have nostalgia for when Taco ran this place.

Prove you're not a corporate tool, timothy, and cancel Beta.

Captcha: fuckbeta

Congratulations Slashdot! Beta SUCKS

[TheNastyInThePasty]

My advice to the peons working on Slashdot: find another job. The veracity with which this "upgrade" is being pushed displays a stubborness that can only be attributed to MBAs with no idea of what Slashdot is about. The fact that the commenting system is such an afterthought in the Beta is as much evidence as I need that the people pushing this redesign never use this site.

I know you don't get to decide whether or not the Beta moves forward or which design gets used, but believe this: You WILL be blamed when it fails. You work for a corporation now and the higher ups with undoubtedly throw you under the bus when they have to explain to their bosses or shareholders why the website redesign failed. This failure is going to be associated with you and your teammates and it will set back any hopes you have of being promoted within the company. Take the advice of me and my fellow Slashdotters: Get out now.

Re:Congratulations Slashdot! Beta SUCKS

[Anonymous Coward]

And don't forget to fuck the beta!

Re:Congratulations Slashdot! Beta SUCKS

[Anonymous Coward]

That is an important point.

Fuck beta.

Re:Congratulations Slashdot! Beta SUCKS

[Anonymous Coward]

Voracity, which means a huge appetite, not Veracity, which means truth.

Re:Congratulations Slashdot! Beta SUCKS

[onkelonkel]

Veracity means truth, or accuracy or conforming to facts. What word were you looking for?

Re:Congratulations Slashdot! Beta SUCKS

[TheNastyInThePasty]

Audacity was the word I was thinking of. Arrogance.

Re:Congratulations Slashdot! Beta SUCKS

[Anonymous Coward]

Oddly I wonder what they thought they would be getting with the new beta?

Keep existing customers?

Get New customers?

Save Money on something?

If its not filling these out in order with big happy plus signs next to them, then they should be saying the beta test was a success, put the classic back up, and go back to the drawing board with the beta.

Re:Congratulations Slashdot! Beta SUCKS

[Anonymous Coward]

And here I read it as ferocity.

Re:Congratulations Slashdot! Beta SUCKS

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess he meant 'voracity.' Though I'd probably say 'tenacity', or 'zeal'.

Re:Fuck Beta

[Threni]

1. Metro
2. Unity
3...Apple Maps
4...
5 SLASHDOT BETA!

On-topic comment

[StripedCow]

I was going to make an honest, on-topic comment.

But... screw it.
Fuck Beta!

Slashdot Beta: Day two

[sl4shd0rk]

It was a fitful night. Not much rest. The way the tragic events unfolded yesterday had left a type of brain trauma I've not quite experienced before. Whitespace.... gobs and gobs of it.. summaries taking up the entirety of my browser window..... the damn thing was relentless and sneaky; Sometimes redirecting to a familiar and sane UI, yet other times..... DEAR GOD MAKE IT STOP!!!!!...... *gaaack*... *AAaccck* *synack*... *thump*.

Re:Slashdot Beta: Day two

[Anonymous Coward]

Another day, another comment whining about change. STFU and go away.

Re:Slashdot Beta: Day two

[ColdWetDog]

You first....

Re:Alice Hill, President of Slashdot Media

[2phar]

"Proven track record innovating and improving iconic websites ( Slashdot.org, Sourceforge.net) while protecting their voice and brand integrity"

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

You can't replace CmdrTaco with someone who has "10+ years experience managing large-scale consumer Web properties"

Re:Good for Sony, drop the underperforming unit.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not working at all. Even with cookies disabled, you're still randomly directed to the Beta abomination.

Maybe you should change to a better browser ?
I'm using Opera 12.15 and I'm not being redirected to the new /. unless I open it directly (and why in god's name would I do such a stupid act ?)

The new /. sucks royally. Keep the classic version.

Re:Fuck Beta

[plasticsquirrel]

Indeed, a company that neglects the views of a site's user community is truly clueless. Slashdot has its own traditions, and Slashdotters like the fact that it has an older and faster design that allows more content on the page. That's part of what makes this site special. If Dice doesn't understand some of these very basic matters, then I don't trust them with the future of Slashdot.

The new design is really ugly Web 3.0 crap, by the way. Just a bunch of huge pictures, excessive whitespace, and fade effects -- treating a technical website like a picture book for Joe Sixpack! Part of the greatness of Slashdot was always its special moderation system, also, which controlled discussions in a positive way (not just +1 or -1 for dumb-dumbs). Talk about not understanding your demographic...

It's confirmed.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: Slashdot is dying.

        One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Slashdot community when IDC confirmed that Slashdot page views has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all websites. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Slashdot has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Slashdot is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by the stupid fucking beta website and the wholesale discard of user feedback.

        You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Slashdot's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Slashdot faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Slashdot because Slashdot is dying. Things are looking very bad for Slashdot. As many of us are already aware, Slashdot continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

        Slashdot Beta is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core users. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Slashdot users Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Slashdot is dying.

        All major surveys show that Slashdot has steadily declined in market share. Slashdot is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Slashdot is to survive at all it will be among S&M enthusiasts. Slashdot continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Slashdot is dead.

That crippling bombshell sent Slashdot fans into a tailspin of mourning and denial. However, bad news poured in like a river of water.

Re:Why sell? Why not burn and collect insurance?

[magic maverick]

That's what I think about the new Slashdot Beta. It's awful. "There's simply nothing I like about [Slashdot Beta]. [It] need[s] to disappear, not get passed on to the next unfortunate recipient." In all the important ways it is unusable. It won't even load comments for me! It just says something silly like nah ah. WTF? So much for professionalism.

Oh, and I have JavaScript enabled for slashdot.org and fsdn.com so that shouldn't be a problem. (Unless they want me to whitelist some random other domains. Well, fuck that. I'd rather just leave.)

And without comments, /. is nothing. The comments are the only reason to bother coming here.

What is the big deal with VAIO?

[damn_registrars]

I never understood the appeal of the Sony laptops. It seemed like they were trying to hit the Apple price point but with reliability that made the Apple laptops look like the greatest feat of engineering since the wheel. Add to that all the bloatware that Sony installed as standard and I really can't find an advantage.

Re:What is the big deal with VAIO?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think VAIOs had a repution for nice screens.

Re:What is the big deal with VAIO?

[Kensai7]

This came very close to my own experience. Sadly. I wish I could find a premium PC manufacturer who simply cared about delivering the computer without any sort of installed software, not even the OS (because even there there could be tweaking)...

Re:What is the big deal with VAIO?

[Anonymous Coward]

VAIO laptops were extremely high end laptops - lightweight and feature-packed - back in 1997.

The MacBook Pro didn't come along until 2006.

Now VAIO's are proprietary garbage, but in the late 90's, if you wanted the best laptop money could buy, you'd get a VAIO.

Also, Fuck Beta.

Re:What is the big deal with VAIO?

[Spamalope]

Add to that all the bloatware that Sony installed as standard and I really can't find an advantage.

At work a secretary played a Celine Deon CD on her PC, infecting it with one of the Sony root-kits just as I was making purchasing decision. I'm sure you're shocked to learn I placed Sony in the 'Hell No!' list.

Should the Sony Vaio division use their severance pay to hire hits on the Sony media division execs? They excluded Sony from consideration from a bit more than $100k of purchases I made...

Re:What is the big deal with VAIO?

[tlhIngan]

I never understood the appeal of the Sony laptops. It seemed like they were trying to hit the Apple price point but with reliability that made the Apple laptops look like the greatest feat of engineering since the wheel. Add to that all the bloatware that Sony installed as standard and I really can't find an advantage.

Well, they were trying to also "Apple-ify" the PC - actually putting in some really nice design and all that.

They basically tried to target the high end PC market like Apple does - nicer cases and all that.

Of course, the problem is, though, Apple could pull it off because they're sufficiently "different", Sony, not so much - as everything there really did reek of the "Sony Tax" - what you got could be obtained cheaper elsewhere. Unlike Apple, which at least provided stuff that people did find different (like unique ports - Thunderbolt, FireWire (6 wire, not the 4 wire crap) and unique power plugs.

Of course, Sony also ruined it all by installing gobs of crapware. SO they tried to be Apple hardware wise, but unlike Apple (who practically installs very little software by default), they load it up with gobs of crap that make it so it's a really painful experience to use.

Re:What is the big deal with VAIO?

[damn_registrars]

but in the late 90's, if you wanted the best laptop money could buy, you'd get a VAIO.

As someone who sold computers in the late 90s, I strongly disagree. The VAIO laptops were no better, and in some occasions were actually worse. The Thinkpad was the laptop for the person who wanted the best they could buy (and by some arguments they it still is).

Holey shit bros

[schlouse]

SONY SELLS BETA FOR UNDISCLOSED FEE

Dice touched my pee pee now it burns help me digg you have to

Seriously???

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, when redirected to the new “improved” /. beta site I looked at it and immediately looked for the link to take me back to the original site. Seriously???

WoW, my first post on /.

fuck beta

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck beta

Wookie or Beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can answer this. I would rather be orally pleasured by a wookie than use beta.

One-way street to BETA

[davecb]

You can't get out of beta if you try it, as they removed the link that returns you to classic. Fortunately, you can delete all the beta cookies and return to normal...

Re:One-way street to BETA

[Anonymous Coward]

Site: beta.slashdot.org

name: view_pref

Content: view-standard

Re:One-way street to BETA

[Anonymous Coward]

The URL http://slashdot.org/?nobeta=1 works for me. Which is good because without javascript, beta doesn't.

Re:One-way street to BETA

[jafac]

yeah, that was a dick-move.

Good riddance. Worst computers EVER to work on.

[nctritech]

As someone who has had to rip open and repair Sony VAIO desktops and laptops for a long time, I can say with authority that they're the WORST computer brand EVER when it comes to the repair business. Every computer has two different model numbers, there are a seemingly infinite number of minor incompatible variants, finding used parts is a ridiculous endeavor (because everything has to have multiple model and part numbers and almost no part seems to be drop-in compatible) and I don't care if I never see another one on my workbench ever again.

Any full-sized laptop that requires you to remove the keyboard, all the top plastics, and heaps of fragile FPC cables just to get to the hard drive and memory is automatically ultra-shitty shit and the engineers responsible should be bear dick punched. Maybe the new owners will fix some of this mess. /rant

Re:Good riddance. Worst computers EVER to work on.

[schlachter]

Any laptop that HAS top plastic is ultra shitty shit.

Re:Good riddance. Worst computers EVER to work on.

[Rinikusu]

I've worked on my Sony TRxA series subnotebooks and I agree that they're rather frustrating. But they don't compare at all to the time I had to disassemble a 12" Powerbook G4 to replace the harddrive. I wish all laptops were as easy to work on as my Thinkpads, but we can't have everything in life.. :(

Re:Good riddance. Worst computers EVER to work on.

[Mitreya]

I can say with authority that they're the WORST computer brand EVER when it comes to the repair business.

That may very much be, but I can say that Sony VAIO laptops (Z series) were the only viable competition to macbook air that I was able to find. Most of the PC laptops insist on using low-resolution displays (good luck finding 1600x900 display!) and are heavy. Granted, this was 2 years ago, but I do not think market has improved much.

Re:Good riddance. Worst computers EVER to work on.

[Anti-Social Network]

Not to mention the tiny, thin screws that had a tendency to break off at the head and/or strip if you so much as look at them wrong- and which, of course, required a (smaller) different screwdriver head to take out, assuming you were successful. And the special ACPI devices which are unintuitive to get drivers for when you've got to do a reload. Whoever designed those all-in-ones with no access to the internals needs a severe talking too.

Re:Good riddance. Worst computers EVER to work on.

[nctritech]

Ah yes, the ACPI device SNY5001. Sony Firmware Extension Parser. I totally would think of that when I see "Unknown Device" and "ACPI\SNY5001". Thanks, Sony!

Re:Good riddance. Worst computers EVER to work on.

[Anonymous Coward]

Initially I thought you were complaining about Slashdot Beta ...

Re:Good riddance. Worst computers EVER to work on.

[Anti-Social Network]

I just did one that had that AND "ACPI\SNYA008" as well: "SONY Wireless State Driver." Because of course, when I think A008, I think of the physical switch to turn off the wireless antenna. It's only natural.

Re:Your feedback is important to us

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't drive there and drop by, but...

Can someone find a real person to call there, in the right department ?

Re:Nostalgia?

[jez9999]

Yeah I know. Their notice says "we want to hear from you to make sure that the redesigned page has all the features you expect", but how many people have already told them that their arbitrary width restriction is fucking retarded and leaves half the widescreen monitor empty? Yet they've done nothing to fix it.

Re:Nostalgia?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

So far I've seen Beta only once - the /. page showed up all messed up, and asked me if I wanted to try it out, to which I quickly said no - and since then I haven't been bothered.

But I must say, if Beta truly is as atrocious as I've once seen it, I won't be visiting this here site much in the future.

Betamax

[dysmal]

I sincerely hope that BETA dies a quicker and more painful death than Sony's BETAMAX.

I imagine the Slashdot beta

[gallondr00nk]

Looks absolutely dreadful on a Sony Vaio.

Re:Your feedback is important to us

[Anonymous Coward]

And post the details to the forum so we can organise a structured and methodical calling schedule to ensure that a moment doesn't go by where they are not intimately aware of just what a mistake this terrible thing Beta is.

A Message from the Beta's Target Audience

[hendrips]

Dear Slashdot,

I'm fairly sure that I know what you're trying to do with Beta crap. You're trying to lure in a younger, more hip readership that's less technical but brings in more revenue. In other words, this "Web 2.0" redesign is trying to attract people exactly like me. I'm young, male, middle-class, and (possibly) looking for a new job, which I suspect is exactly the demographic you're aiming the Beta at. I'm also less technically inclined - I'm an actuary, not a programmer or an IT guy. As you can see from my posting history, I've only been here a short time, although I read and posted anonymously for a while at first.

But I hate Slashdot Beta every bit as much as the old fogies who are complaining above me. I don't come to Slashdot for flamebait articles or glitzy graphics, I come here because I want to learn about and discuss technical topics that I don't encounter in my day-to-day work. I read the discussions here so that I can understand the technical stuff that my office's IT lady tells me, and so that I can better understand the technology that I interact with. I comment in discussions here because I want to avoid the teenage, brain dead, narcissistic, color vomiting "new new internet" bullshit twittering that's infecting discourse on the rest of the internet.

I've just started participating in the Slashdot community. I'm pretty sure that I'm the exact demographic you want to attract. You had such a good opportunity to reel me in permanently. Yet you've utterly failed with Slashdot Beta. I've already abandoned a fair number of web communities after they gutted their discussion system or went too far with the Web 2.0 nonsense. Likewise, I'll regretfully, but quickly, abandon Slashdot if I'm forced into this Beta bullshit against my will and against the obvious will of the community here.

Sincerely,
hendrips, a representative member of your target audience
   

Re:A Message from the Beta's Target Audience

[CrashNBrn]

Slashdot's next step, replace the commenting system with Disqus. Oh yeah, good times.

Japan Industrial Partners (JIP)

[Tarlus]

"JIP"... How appropriate.

Re:Nancy Reagan says to just say no...

[Anonymous Coward]

Worked for Vader toooooooooooo!

They look good, but...

[thevirtualcat]

... that's about the only nice thing I have to say about them.

It's been a good five years since I worked in computer repair, but at the time they are overpriced for their specs and incredibly difficult to repair. I don't know if this has changed, but a recent trip to a Sony store suggests to me that it hasn't.

Also, Sony's blunders with DRM and their ties to the content industry have not exactly helped their reputation with being trustworthy. (VAIO! Comes with rootkit already installed!)

Also, what is this beta shit? I can live with "Web 3.0: The war on saturation." But not all of us have 1920x1080 monitors sitting on our desks...

Re:They look good, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

But not all of us have 1920x1080 monitors sitting on our desks...

Oh, don't worry. As a matter of fact, the new narrow corridor of text should be perfect for all the 640x480 screens!

This just in...

[Anonymous Coward]

beta.slashdot is so bad that Sony had to sell its computer business.

I salute you

[OrugTor]

My Vaio is 10+ years old and never a problem. Granted, it's an outlier especially wrt the hard drive but still...

Re:I salute you

[Anonymous Coward]

I am having such a horrible experience with a Vaio ultrabook that I will never again buy a Sony computer. Two years ago I bought a Windows 7 Vaio laptop and other than an odd quirk here or there, it has been rock solid (and still is). Granted, I paid $2k for this laptop in an era when I could have got a comparable heavier laptop for a third of that.

Fast forward two years. The new Vaio Ultrabooks are released with high res screens, long battery life and weigh in at 2 pounds. I was nervous about Windows 8, but after going to a Sony store to experiment a bit, it seems quite usable with a touch screen laptop--and admittedly I'm 99% of the time in desktop mode. So I bite the bullet and spend nearly another $2k on a laptop, partially because I had such a good experience with the previous Vaio.

The first thing I notice when I get the computer is that it can't stay connected to the internet for more than a few minutes. A call to tech support identifies a patch that had been released a couple months prior to fix this known issue. I realize that it's hard to keep computer images updated, but to not even include a notice that I have to update a driver before I do anything else was definitely a fail. I spent an hour or two frustrated by the issue and also had to log a tech support call.

Next thing I realized is that the computer wouldn't stay asleep. It repeatedly wakes up and drains the battery. I'm a pretty advanced Windows user and I know where to go to disable this behavior. However, I found that device manager would not retain the setting to disable wake-up. After ever reboot, the wake event would be re-enabled for the network card. What's more, it didn't really seem to matter if the wake event was disabled--the computer still woke up. This is a serious issue for me because if I forget to plug the computer in, then it wakes up, drains the battery and then turns off without saving any open file. What's more--after all the troubleshooting I've done with Sony, the computer has started to experience many more flaky behaviors that make it an unstable environment.

I've spent at least 30 hours on the phone with tech support and probably just as many calls. The computer has been into the repair shop twice and been reimaged twice. I have asked for a refund and the standard answer is that I must continue to troubleshoot because a refund is not an option. 6 months into having this laptop I am still using my old laptop and I'm out $2000.

As a result, I will never buy another Sony laptop, and quite likely I won't buy another Sony product. I'm also telling all my tech friends this story to discourage them from purchasing a Sony laptop. The main reasons I went with Sony were the high screen resolution, light weight and long battery life. I paid a premium because of my positive experience with my previous Sony laptop, but this experience has completely negated that. These days there are plenty of vendors who offer Ultrabooks that are comparable to Sony and that is where I will look in the future and direct friends.

In case anyone from Sony is listening, a couple of the support reference numbers are: E58542413 and E58548948 At this point, I am incredibly frustrated and am nearly at the point that I am wondering if I can take them to small claims court to get my money back.

Re:Fuck Beta

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand how moderation works. If it were a handful of "assholes" (i.e. people that have different opinions from ElementOfDestruction) and no one else then said handful's posts would not receive the +5 insightfuls people have been willingly sacrificing their points for.

Re:Why sell? Why not burn and collect insurance?

[jedidiah]

I had good luck with my Sony laptops. However, that's been a long time. I tried the "laptop as desktop replacement" thing and entirely got over it long before it became a trendy thing in general.

Perhaps they tried to be too much like Apple.

Official News

[thexile]

Slashdot Beta sucks. FUCK YOU DICE.

Re:Fuck Beta

[jones_supa]

Indeed, a company that neglects the views of a site's user community is truly clueless.

Not only clueless, but it's sheer stupidity. They release a turd site and ask feedback to improve it. Then they take none of that feedback into consideration and begin rolling that same site into live. A site which no one likes. Then no one comes here anymore. What else is this than pure stupidity?

All right. I will calmly watch this show to the end and see what the final result is. But if it resembles anything like what they are cooking now, I am left with no other options than to leave this website.

So Sony is

[g0bshiTe]

Weren't Dell computers a JIP?

So now Sony Viaos will be JIP's?

I had always thought they were good computers.

Re:Fuck Beta

[ColdWetDog]

1. Metro
2. Unity
3...Apple Maps
4...
5 SLASHDOT BETA!

6. Oracle
7. Lotus Notes
8. Healthcare.gov
9. PS/2
10. WIndows ME
11. Microsoft Bob
12. Clippy
13. Clippy
14. Clippy
15. Lotus Notes

"May no new thing arise" - Spanish prayer

Re:Fuck Beta

[ColdWetDog]

A witch! A witch!

Burn her!

Find a duck!

Re:Fuck Beta

[jones_supa]

Can you meet us halfway and actually create a story for us to dump hatred into so that we can go back to commenting on articles we haven't read?

Actually there is a story. The problem is that it's hidden in the Slashdot Blog which most of us do not even know to exist.

Posted 3 days ago: Update on the March of Progress: How Slashdot's New Look Is Shaping Up.

Re:Slashdot is like the USSR its about to collapse

[Anonymous Coward]

Beta Slashdot is the US...!

Re:Fuck Beta

[Common Joe]

Indeed. The wave is moving very quickly. Dice may have already lost it, but if they try right now and address it, there still may be time to save Slashdot. I'd rather see Slashdot saved than move off it, but I'm not sticking around out of nostalgia.

-- Common Joe

Valentines Day Slashcott: Boycott Slashdot because "Fuck Beta!": February 10 - 17

And Support Okian Warrior's alternate slashdot idea! A note from Okian can be found here: http://www.altslashdot.org/wiki/index.php?title=AltSlashdot. And be patient. It looks like the site and his email has been slashdotted.

FTSB

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck the Slashdot Beta.
The day that I can no longer access the slashdot site in pre-beta form is the day that the slashdot link is removed from all browsers on all devices and the site will never be visited by me again.

Period.

I've done this before with other sites (went paywall, private, etc.) and slashdot will be no different.

If a business ignores its customers, they will ignore you.

I will boycott from Feb 10 (00 hours UTC) - Feb 17 (24 hours UTC). During that time I will start looking for other sites with similar offerings as my new front page.

(I have a login, but sometimes I'm just too lazy to use it)

At Sony headquarters

[jones_supa]

When they saw the new Slashdot Beta site at Sony engineering, they concluded that it's not worth to make computers anymore.

sony rootkit

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

never forget, never forgive

Slashdot Beta: Remarkable success!

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to congratulate Dice Holdings on transforming Slashdot into a pinnacle of uniformity! Well done! In my teens I was wary of Slashdot's interesting articles and community-oriented operations and design. As a young technically minded STEM enthusiast I naturally sought the sensationalist, vague opinions displayed in common mainstream media regarding mundane and predictable topics. Fortunately, after fifteen years of drudging through Slashdot's frustratingly captivating technical niche, I've been rewarded with low quality articles that finally have a matching UI designed to drive away those aggravating similarly-minded niche commentators that leave nuggets of information more valuable than the articles themselves.

Slashdot Beta is a more resounding success than even SlashBI!

Therefore, it is with regret that I must inform the Slashdot team that I will be moving to reddit.com -- the URL is shorter, and hence the same style of information is more accessible with less effort. Keep up the good work!

Sincerely,

Long time reader

Fuck Beta, Fork Alpha.Time to resurrect slashcode?

[seandiggity]

http://www.slashcode.com/www.slashcode.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/slashcode/

food for thought: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SlashDot

Good

[ilsaloving]

Sony has no business making computers. Or at least, they have no business doing anything beyond designing hardware. The one time I got to play with a Vaio was when a manager asked me to 'set up' their brand new machine for them.

Long story short: The Vaio isn't a laptop. It's a marketing machine for selling other Sony products. Everywhere you turn, Sony was trying to sell you additional products, movies, music. There was so much crapware on that machine that it ran embarrassingly poorly, and the only option was to use the recovery disks to reinstall *just* the OS and the drivers. The only saving grace was that the 'additional applications' was a separate disk, so I was able to skip that part.

The machine ran very nicely after that. But an average person isn't going to know to do all this. I was personally offended that a supposedly reputable company would inflict this kind of trash on people. Turned me right off of the brand, despite the hardware being very nice.

Of course, my outrage then was nothing compared to when I learned Sony was putting rootkits on their music CDs, removing features from their PS2s, etc.

Hopefully this new company can repair the crater that Sony made of their PC business.

Re:Fuck Beta

[aitmanga]

And we should be flooding this e-mail address with complaints along with the Slashcott: feedback@slashdot.org with the subject beta-feedback

Bad news but ...

[kharchenko]

Somehow I bet the investment fund will do better job building laptops than Dice keeping Slashdot alive. FUCK BETA!

It's all because of Beta.

[denzacar]

That would not have happened had those Dice assholes not try to push Beta on everyone.

Fuck Beta. It killed vaio.
Also, those dolphins washing up dead on the beaches? Beta killed them too.

Re:It's all because of Beta.

[Wolfrider]

Thanks, Obama! :P

/ Blame Canada... :B

Re:Fuck Beta

[jones_supa]

Or alternatively "beta_feedback". It was with an underscore in the yellow sticker on the front page. Not sure which one is better (if they have a subject-based mailbox redirect for the beta feedback, that is).

Re:Fuck Beta

[Scared Rabbit]

I've been visiting slashdot for about the same amount of time. Yesterday I was redirected to the beta. I immediately logged in to look for a way to set it to default to classic, but couldn't find one. The day that classic slashdot is gone is the last day I'll visit slashdot.

And this is the beginning of the end...

[vikingpower]

...of another great line of hardware ( albeit expensive ). What a shame.

Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

I own a 15 inch vaio s. Core i7, 12 GB, full hd screen and... It's a piece if crap. It looks like crap, it feels like crap and runs Linux like crap too. Hopefully those who'll buy the PC arm will bring back the vaio brand to its former glory.

Time to start over

[tim_gladding]

2nd VAIO here, currently shopping for my 3rd but this news has given me pause. Sad day.

Remember folks

[squiggleslash]

We must kill Beta because Slashdot currently has the greatest user interface ever designed.

(Urgh.)

Re:Remember folks

[demonlapin]

At least the prior fuckups didn't completely kill usability.

Fuck beta.

Re:Remember folks

[squiggleslash]

This one really doesn't kill usability any more than the prior ones. And in some ways it's an improvement - there are features missing, and they need to be returned (in particular, some equivalent of /~username/comments, and WHERE IS MY JOURNAL POSTING BUTTON?!) but in many ways it's cleaner and easier to read than the older version. D2 is junk. And genuine "classic" mode has been broken for years. Hell, I can't even customize my preferences any more with it because most are missing as they're not needed in D2.

The current Slashdot UI is awful. It needs to go. It's needed to go ever since D2 was introduced. D2 is terrible, broken from the beginning. The breaking of real classic is unforgivable. Beta is a good start, and I think Slashdot's management could do with some constructive suggestions on how to fix the few (and they are few) problems with it.

As it is, you jackasses who insist on taking over every comment thread with your Beta hate are doing nobody any favors. You're making it harder for us to discuss the stories, and you're offering nothing constructive. You're acting like children, taking it out on everyone over something minor.

Please stop. Please. If you really hate it so much, go start your own site. You can even run it on Slashcode, it's open source. You demonstrate day after day after day posting these hysterical anti-beta spam comments that you provide nothing of value to us, so your loss will be unnoticed.

Re:Remember folks

[Teancum]

Please stop. Please. If you really hate it so much, go start your own site. You can even run it on Slashcode, it's open source. You demonstrate day after day after day posting these hysterical anti-beta spam comments that you provide nothing of value to us, so your loss will be unnoticed.

It will end after awhile. In the meantime, I think there is something deserved here where at least a dialog between those making this change and those readers who are pissed should take place. When changes like this were proposed in the past, Rob Malda and the other original Slashdot guys would start a post specific to the issue and let people at least vent their spleen on that post. At this point it is a little too late for that kind of informed dissent.

At the moment, there is no dialog, and some people (certainly more than just one or two) are trying to complain in a venue that is at best the only real place for recourse. Most larger threads usually had something which was a sidebar for complaints about slashdot, only in this case it is much more in your face about the upcoming change.

Re: Remember folks

[Anonymous Coward]

It will never end. After we kill beta. We will continue posting for another year at least of how we killed beta. At least until the next presidential election. We have unlocked our inner troll. It will be anarchy.
everybody browses at -11 nowdays because the "serious" comments are written by mrs woods 2nd grade class. Beta has simply exposed the flaw we knew all along this sight sux. Not as bad as linux, but that is a diffeerent type of beta.

Re:Remember folks

[Dodgy G33za]

Welcome to the world of protest. Where people being upset at something enough to take action there will always be people inconvenienced by said action.

It is called free speech. Please feel free to continue and we will do likewise.

Re:Remember folks

[squiggleslash]

This is called vandalism, not free speech. Free speech would imply that you're attempting to impart an actual message to people able to affect change. Standing on a street corner yelling "Down with Zoning Ordinance 94!" is free speech because insofar as you're inconveniencing someone, you're doing so temporarily and aiming your message at people the vast majority of whom are voters.

I have no say in Slashdot's redesign. You are permanently making it virtually impossible for me to engage in discussions by vandalising them. You are not addressing your protests at those who matter because they're not reading discussions about Sony to try to get feedback on Beta. They've started actual forums for that topic.

So no, it's not free speech. It may be the imparting of views, but so is me taking a random passer by in Iran and screaming "Vladimir Putin sucks" over and over again so she can't hear who she's talking to on her cellphone. Please, please, go fuck yourselves.

Re:Remember folks

[squiggleslash]

No, there is dialog. There have been multiple stories posted about the subject, there's also email and even phone contact. There's no reason, zero, to believe that spamming forums about Sony, jQuery, and so on, is a legitimate form of communication but that posting to the normal channels is not.

And let's be honest here, this, while repeated over and over and over again by the Anti-Beta spammers, is a flat out lie:

At the moment, there is no dialog

There is. Changes are being made. Dice has officially changed position from "We'll change it in a few months" to "We'll change it only when it has feature parity", which is a fairly substantial step and takes care of about 90% of what the spammers are complaining about.

And I see little tweaks here and there going on in real time, as if... maybe they're updating Beta according to user feedback?

Spamming threads, vandalizing the discussion system, is not a reasonable approach here. You're punishing the contributors, while having the gall to claim you speak for us.

You don't. You're terrible people. I can't wait for you guys to start your boycott. Please make it permanent.

Re:Remember folks

[Teancum]

The dialog did not happen until after I posted my comment. IMHO it is too little too late and ass backward, and it has been largely one of pontificating rather than trying to get actual feedback too. There is no sign that they care either, but at least it is a start.

In other words, these protest posts actually worked and did their job. I'll agree that if these kind of posts continue to swamp stories completely driving out other "legitimate" discussion it is sort of stupid, but it was the lack of feedback and a dialog which was the issue. It took drastic action on the part of some real leaders within the Slashdot community to drive that point home.

Also, don't stereotype as much as it seems you are doing right now. There is a range of opinions about the topic and you have somehow lumped me into some faceless mob. I suppose that is also nothing new on Slashdot, but I hope there is an understanding that those who are posting are real people and not some sort of weird video game. That is also something which Dice seemed to have forgotten as well.

Re:Remember folks

[squiggleslash]

The dialog has been going on from the start, via a variety of different means (FFS the little warning box that kept popping up pointed out they wanted feedback.) They posted a story yesterday, but suggesting that they weren't going to do so if people didn't vandalize Slashdot seems a massive leap of logic. This is a major change, they released a preview and shoved it in front of a large subset of Slashdot in order to test it - why oh why would you think a forum to discuss the changes wouldn't be on the way? Why bother with a limited preview if you're not interested in feedback?

As far as the "faceless mob" thing goes, sorry, but I guess if you lie down with dogs... what are we getting at the moment? Thoughtful journal entries on how Beta could be improved? Explanations of why Beta misses the mark and D2 is the mostest awesomest thing ever in relevent subthreads? Or huge quantities of crap posted to every discussion forum containing a phrase that rhymes with "Buck Pita" and demands that Dice cancel the project, with only vague, usually formatting complaints, actually mentioned?

Add your voice, however well intentioned, to that mob, and, well, you become a part of it, much as you wanted to complain about the length of Dr Frankenstein's lawn and decided the best way to do it is to grab a torch and pitchfork and join that angry crowd that's heading up to his castle.

Re:Remember folks

[Anonymous Coward]

And what usability are you talking about?
The article links that you never read before you make a stock response on how it sucks?

Re:Remember folks

[gIobaljustin]

It's not free speech if it's something I don't like! Your post isn't free speech; it's vandalism. What an eyesore!

Re:Remember folks

[blackest_k]

slashdot always has been a noisy site.
slashdot beta is awful and not what any of the people who contribute to the site want.
There really is only one place to organise any form of protest against the proposed changes and that is slashdot.
Even the trolls are protesting slashdot beta, I tend to think more in the nature of trolling than protesting. on the positive side there seems to be less of the usual trolling posts.

It's out there now that there is going to be a boycott of slashdot from the 10th to the 17th
I don't think it matters by how much the traffic drops more who decides to boycott the site and that really needs to be the registered users who contribute to the site.

What makes Slashdot good is the writers who contribute on a regular basis. We may not get paid and we don't always get modded up to +5 but without us slashdot becomes a sewer with no redeeming features. At least for a week. Even if you can't give up slashdot for a week, don't post don't moderate. Just let the anonymous cowards do their thing. Apologies to the ac's that do make positive posts as ac but even as an ac don't
bother commenting. let the trolls run riot for that week.

A week of no posts worth reading should make dice realise that without the freely given contributions from us slashdot is worthless.it will be effective. What can dice do? get the editors to post while all of slashdots real writers take a break. Set timothy and soulskill the task of moderating the entire site and without positive content what will they moderate?

Like christmas future in a christmas carol let them see what slashdot can become, just for a week.

There is a value in slashdot but like myspace that value can go down as well as up.

Re:Fuck Beta

[Anonymous Coward]

Beta SUX hard

+1

And Sony just dropped Reader Store too...

[Anonymous Coward]

I just received an email, Sony Reader Store is closing next March. Accounts will be transferred to Kobo.
Sony is streamlining their business...

Re:Fuck Beta

[Anonymous Coward]

It sucks so bad we need a newsgroup just to moan about it:
rec.arts.bash.slashdot

not for much longer

[Anonymous Coward]

If you pop the hood on android, that sure as hell aint dos.

JIP?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, if I own a Sony I'm gonna get JIP'ed soon?

Re:Why sell? Why not burn and collect insurance?

[mikael]

Well, at least having screws are better than having held together by glue, and the high-end models (PCG-GRT series) did have the hard disk drive on the edge of the laptop rather than some cage in the middle of the chassis.

I know what you mean about all those screws. Replacing the screen or even the cooling assembly would require several ice trays to put every different component. The best way to describe how Sony must have designed a laptop was to start off with a gaming PC with a GTX Titan GPU and motherboard, then slice up the motherboard until everything could fit inside the profile of a laptop.

Around 2004, the "high-end" models had Nvidia Geforce 5600Go's with about 64 Megabytes of memory, which was enough to run Bzflag. It was impressive to see a laptop do texture mapping, when previously, it would have taken a Silicon Graphics Extreme to do the same.

They weren't computers

[atari2600a]

They were EXPENSIVE. The customer base they were targeting is the one that's walking right past the Sony store in the mall & right into the Apple store. They never even looked right either. Always long in one dimension, usually width. Fujitsu had the better line of pocket-sized laptops hands-down, & I'm pretty sure I've never serviced nor maintained VAIO back to life.

JIP?

[oDDmON oUT]

Sounds too much like gyp.

That said I am in the apparent minority that will not mourn for VAIO.

I found them to be totally polar devices, either loved or hated by their users; there was no middle ground.

Yay! Fewer crappy computers!

[Chas]

Less crap computers to deal with.

Sure, the things always looked sexy.
But they'd break if you looked at them funny.
That and all the attempts to inject stupid, Sony-proprietary connectors on everything...

I won't miss VAIO at all.

I can't even get beta to work!

[Anonymous Coward]

When I try this topic under beta all I see is
"Shazbot! We ran into some trouble getting the comments.
Try again... na-nu, na-nu!"
wtf is that?

Um

[digitalPhant0m]

I think they did.

witness Sony's death throes

[enzo1]

Vaios are good looking, well-engineered, well-built. (Not considering what another said about repair accessibility.) Unlike all other Sony products, the Vaio brand exceeeds the offerings of the competition. With this move, Sony is now entirely irrelevant.

I don't get it

[msobkow]

What's so horrible about the Beta interface? It seems to work. I read my comments. I posted this reply. Functionality achieved.

I don't ask much of a forum.

Calling GNFOS and The Turd Report

[t0qer]

This is a rallying cry for all old school trolls to report back to duty. GNFOS you need to spam, "Use beta? You're a GNFOS" and Turd report, you need to give us a daily detailed report on how your turds look better than the beta.

great design ... bad price

[Anonymous Coward]

The VAIO was the design leader in laptops. Forward thinking and great eye for proportion. Too bad it is being sold off.

Re:Yay! Fewer crappy computers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think Vaio was probably their most standard compliant product, at least the ones I've used. Other than a MemoryStick slot(accompanied by a SD card slot), I can't think of anything proprietary they used. USB, Firewire(i-link), DC jack, VGA, HDMI all standard stuff. Their biggest problems were the poor price/performance and the tons of 3rd party crapware(scratch that, sony first party tools were as good as crapware as well). On top of that they were just a generic Windows laptop with little to no synergy with the other sony products, like built-in smooth integration with cameras, sound systems and playstation. Maybe if they had used a beefed up version of their own BSD based OS, the Orbis used, on the playstation devices, and market the Vaio as a useful hub for their ecosystem, maybe it would have turned out better. The laptop pc market is already overcrowded and competitive as hell. On top of that Android/iOS are taking the casual crowd for themselves. If you're not going to prioritize your PC business, you better get out. And sony is already 3~4 years too late at that. Stop being reactive and become pro-active for **** sake.

Kensai7

[terrywirth5]

Maybe Sony will sell to oppo who puts swiveling cameras on its smartphones.

long overdue

[Anonymous Coward]

and next time, try a name that is easy to understand, such as the prince symbol, which i can't paste here

Ancient Wisdom

[Reziac]

There are two kinds of fools:

One says, "This is old, and therefore good.

The other says, "This is new, and therefore better."

Full rant over in the appropriate discussion.

SLASHDOT BETA SUCKS.

Anyone else remember the Delphi Forums, or Google Groups, or Yahoo Groups, before their Powers That Be "modernized" 'em?? No? that's because after the change, they became shadows of their former selves, the province of n00bs and spammers.

SLASHDOT BETA SUCKS.

Oh, and so do VIAO computers. Good riddance.

Repeating for emphasis, not comic effect:

SLASHDOT BETA SUCKS.

Haters please leave

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm tired of all you knee-jerk contrary elitist nerds. If you hate change, just leave, good riddance.
The actual content of /. is the best thing of the site, always was. Really aware people bringing the real tech info to us faster than anything.
The comments, however, have just gotten moronic.
Upping a comment that basically just says 'IE sucks', 'Linux rules', 'Flash sucks', 'HTML5 is a standard'.
Or worse, 'this is old news, everyone knows this'... when basically no-one does, 100% Anti-Informative.
Get a life, we were doing that back in the 90's .

Add to the discourse, not just try to lamely prove how uber-geek you are.
And Mods, stop bumping up post that don't actually add to the conversation, it's just getting stale.
If the comments were better, you could make the site pink and I wouldn't care.

Also, I don't really think the new design is bad at all, the current one is old and blah, so go for it.

Sony messed this up big time with bloatware

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with other commenters that the Vaio range are an excellent design - the problem was the range and depth of crapware that they shoved into each PC. Redundant wifi managers, audio and video players, sound managers, etc. all led to a horrible user experience, bloated and slow response and very marginal benefits. What a waste

Think on the bright side.

[supernerdboy]

At least it is not as bad as Opera 13-19! Although it might just be a change issue for most. I remember hatring Newegg BATA, but now I can not remember what I missed about it.

Fork Slashdot

[bchat]

The slashdot.org code is open source. Someone with the time and bandwidth should bring up an alternate site where the community can continue and any needed changes can be made to the comment system to improve it. Just post a link to the new site in all the slashdot comments and we'll go there instead.