Slashdot Mirror
The Standards Wars and the Sausage Factory
Esther Schindler writes "We all know how important tech standards are. But the making of them is sometimes a particularly ugly process. Years, millions of dollars, and endless arguments are spent arguing about standards. The reason for our fights aren't any different from those that drove Edison and Westinghouse: It's all about who benefits – and profits – from a standard. As just one example, Steven Vaughan-Nichols details the steps it took to approve a networking standard that everyone, everyone knew was needed: 'Take, for example, the long hard road for the now-universal IEEE 802.11n Wi-Fi standard. There was nothing new about the multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) and channel-bonding techniques when companies start moving from 802.11g to 802.11n in 2003. Yet it wasn't until 2009 that the standard became official.'"
Yep. How long before they come fed up with these protests and start deleting comments, or moderating them into oblivion? Please continue the fight, and also, pleace comment outside of their control here on reddit (where I may soon be moving to if classic goes away): http://www.reddit.com/r/social...
I don't like how beta was made (without serious consultation and requirements gathering) and I don't like the final product (site that no longer meets the needs of its community) so in this case I'm not eating whether I've seen the sausage factory or not.
FUCK BETA!!
A little history of Slashdot courtesy of Wikipedia. What it was before It was destroyed by Beta. I tried posting this before but could not see it with beta. What am I doing wrong? I guess I will have to keep on trying until I can read it. Maybe that is why they call it beta. I am sure they will fix everything and everyone will be happy again. Tell me if you can read this. I am really upset that I can not see my own posts Maybe that is why they call it beta. I am sure they will fix everything and everyone will be happy again. Can you see this? I can't. What is wrong? Is this why they call it beta? I hope someone will be able to fix this because I am not happy it is not working. Maybe after the beta test is over it will work. It sure doesn't work now. I am getting even sadder.PLEASE HELP ME!!!!! The origins of the site now known as Slashdot date back to July 1997 when Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda started a personal website called Chips & Dips, which featured a single "rant" each day about something that interested him – typically something to do with Linux or open-source software. At the time, Malda was a student at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, majoring in computer science. The site became Slashdot in September 1997 under the slogan "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters," and quickly became a hotspot on the Web for news and information of interest to computer geeks.[4] The name "Slashdot" came from a somewhat "obnoxious parody of a URL" – when Malda registered the domain, he desired to make a name that was "silly and unpronounceable" – try pronouncing out, "h-t-t-p-colon-slash-slash-slashdot-dot-org".[5] By June 1998 the site was seeing as many as 100,000 page views per day and advertisers began to take notice.[4] By December 1998, Slashdot had net revenues of $18,000, yet its Internet profile was higher, and revenues were expected to increase. On June 29, 1999, the site was sold to Linux megasite Andover.net for $1.5 million in cash and $7 million in Andover stock at the IPO price. Part of the deal was contingent upon the continued employment of Rob Malda and Jeff Bates and on "the achievement of certain milestones". With the acquisition of Slashdot, Andover.net could now advertise itself as "the leading Linux/Open Source destination on the Internet".[6][7] Andover.net eventually merged with VA Linux on February 3, 2000,[8] which changed its name to SourceForge, Inc. on May 24, 2007, and became Geeknet, Inc. on November 4, 2009.[9] Slashdot's 10,000th article was posted after two and a half years on February 24, 2000,[10] and the 100,000th article was posted on December 11, 2009 after 12 years online.[11] During the first 12 years, the most active story with the most responses posted was the post-2004 US Presidential Election article "Kerry Concedes Election To Bush" with 5,687 posts. This followed the creation of a new article section, politics.slashdot.org, created at the start of the 2004 election on September 7, 2004.[12] Many of the most popular stories are political, with "Strike on Iraq" (March 19, 2003) the second-most-active article and "Barack Obama Wins US Presidency" (November 5, 2008) the third-most-active. The rest of the 10 most active articles are an article announcing the 2005 London bombings, and several articles about Evolution vs. Intelligent Design, Saddam Hussein's capture, and Fahrenheit 9/11. Articles about Microsoft and its Windows Operating System are popular—a thread posted in 2002 titled "What's Keeping You On Windows?" was the 10th-most-active story, and an article about Windows 2000/NT4 source-code leaks the most visited article with more than 680,000 hits.[13] Some controversy erupted on March 9, 2001 after an anonymous user posted the full text of Scientology's "Operating Thetan Level Three" (OT III) document in a comment attached to a Slashdot article. The Church of Scientology demanded that Slashdot remove the document under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A week later, in a long article, Slashdot editors explained their decision to remo
In the Quakenet comments.
Gee, who do you think has unlimited mod points and a vested interest in shutting down the anti-beta posts?
The funny thing is, as another poster pointed out, the /. editors would be the first ones to cry "Censorship!" if some other site attempted to silence *their* users.
The cow says "Moo." The dog says "Woof." The Timothy says "Thanks, valued customer. We appreciate your input."
Here of my own accord, actually. We'll have an official posting coming out soonish, but I wanted to let people know we're listening in the meantime.
Timothy has been responding to a ton of emails -- mainly the ones with bug reports and constructive suggestions. But our inboxes got blown up pretty well over the past 24 hours, and it takes time to consolidate several thousand data points.
You seem pretty worried about this, but there sure are a lot of high-scoring anti-beta comments on every story.
Also, we don't delete comments.
There have been a lot of great emails from users with tweaked screenshots showing how they'd prefer the layout to look. Some people have even sent us CSS/HTML tweaks.
But mainly, it just helps to have a detailed explanation of a specific task, and how the beta site prevents you from completing/accomplishing it. For example, direct links to individual comments isn't implemented yet. So, if you were to say, "Every time I leave a comment, I go to the comment link and bookmark it in my browser to keep track of it. The beta doesn't let give me direct comment links, so I can't do this anymore.' That would be something well-defined and actionable.