Windows Replacement? ReactOS 0.3.16 Gets Themes, CSRSS Rewrite, and More

jeditobe writes with this announcement from the ReactOS home page: "The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.3.16. A little under a year has passed since the previous release and a significant amount of progress has been made. More than 400 bugs were eliminated. Some of the most significant include completion of the CSRSS rewrite and the first stages of a shell32 rewrite. 0.3.16 is in many ways a prelude to several new features that will provide a noticeable enhancement to user visible functionality. A preview can be seen in the form of theme support, which while disabled by default can be turned on to demonstrate the Lautus theme developed by community member Maciej Janiszewki. Another user visible change is a new network card driver for the RTL8139, allowing ReactOS to support newer versions of QEMU out of the box." You can download release images here. Want to see how it handles Windows software? Here are demos of Office 2003, Photoshop CS2, and OpenMPT.

Comments

Please stop the redirection to beta

[Anonymous Coward]

You claim you heard us and are working on fixing the shortcomings of beta. Then why do you keep redirecting us randomly to it, knowing it is defective in its current state ?
Stop redirecting, fix the problems as you perceive them to be, and try again.

Many opponents of beta don't believe that it is possible to fix it, but that is irrelevant. If YOU believe it needs fixing and that it is possible, your current random redirection of large groups of visitors does not make sense. It only infuriates people. The redirection to a broken product is likely the single reason for the protest in the comments to continue, and only drives more people to the alternative slashdot initiatives. Most people would probably be happy to
wait and see how you fix beta, but no, you have to push it in our face every 4th time we visit, broken as it is.

On the other hand, if you think beta is fine, and it is ok to redirect people there, then why not simply disable classic altogether and get it over with ?

kind regards,
your "audience"

Re:Please stop the redirection to beta

[LookIntoTheFuture]

...then why not simply disable classic altogether and get it over with ?

This has me stumped too. Dice obviously doesn't give a fuck about our family. The current Slashdot without the beta has more value than they could possibly understand, and they are going to flush it down the toilet so they can pursue their "vision" of caching in on the Slashdot name. Which won't make them money like they think it will. Sad, indeed.

Mod me down too. It really doesn't matter any more.

Re: Please stop the redirection to beta

[Anonymous Coward]

the toilet so they can pursue their "vision" of cashing in on the Slashdot name.

Re:Please stop the redirection to beta

[LVSlushdat]

Dice's response to the crap that is beta is surrealistically like EA's response to the mindless rollout of the latest SimCity.. I find it difficult to see what Dice brought to the table when they bought Slashdot.. unless their plan was to destroy it, in which case they're doing a bang-up job... You Go!! Dice..

Obligatory.. FUCK BETA!!

Re:Please stop the redirection to beta

[tragedy]

I don't really like to contribute to the off topic threads on this any more, but I have to still throw in my two cents here. Dice did buy Slashdot. It's sad that it's been bought by an entity that doesn't seem to care for the community and the history of Slashdot the way we do, but they do own it.

People have talked about boycotts and Slashdot alternatives and both of those are perfectly valid ways of attempting to influence Slashdot or just plain leave it behind. I'm wondering, however, if anyone has considered putting together an offer to Dice to buy Slashdot back from them? I've been using Slashdot since very close to the start (came in after Chips and Dips, but very shortly after that and lurked and posted as AC for a long time before getting an account). I have enough of an emotional investment in the site that I'd certainly be willing to throw a few thousand dollars into owning a piece of it. How many Slashdotters are there who care enough to do the same? Could we get together twenty thousand people willing to throw in a thousand dollars each and pay Dice the $20 million they paid for Slashdot? 200,000 willing to pay $100.00 each? Are there anything like that number of Slashdotters who really care? Anyone know what the best way to do that would be? Would a Kickstarter campaign be a valid avenue, or would it be better to create some sort of co-op or corporation and sell shares, or are there other ways a large group of people could get together to do something like this (in a form that might allow for a return on investment, but probably not)?

Has anyone already proposed this? Is anyone already working on it? I would search comments for that, but Slashdot's search tools have been broken and near useless for years, even before Dice came along. Maybe if the community actually owned Slashdot, we could do something about the problems with Slashdot. Personally, I've always wanted an open API for Slashdot so that users can use whatever front-end suits their fancy and even download the entire Slashdot database (well, not the entire database, obviously, but the comments and articles certainly). Maybe, if we owned it, we could actually do something like that and everyone, including Dice, could be happy about how it turned out.

It's probably a pipe dream, however. There's a lot of vocal complaint (enough to really damage enjoyment of Slashdot lately and I'm sorry to be adding to this thread for that reason), but I don't know if there's really enough of a "core" Slashdot readership left who would be willing to put in that much for our beloved site.

boycott slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

please join us, currently at http://soylentnews.org/ (which will be up in few hours). Tomorrow we will start collecting suggestions for a new name for altslashdot. People will have one week to submit suggestions for a new name. Then we will have voting. If you are really an old timer, then you would know Bruce Perens. He is very excited to be working with us.

Join beta.

[Anonymous Coward]

Join our side. It may have problems, but they can be fixed. Beta is your friend. Beta is life.

Re:a better Beta

[fisted]

mod parent up

Re:a better Beta

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot will soon return as http://soylentnews.org/

Down-mod all you want, you can't stop the signal.

Please read before modding down.

[emmagsachs]

I have visited this website on a near-daily basis for over a decade. I have greatly benefited from its community, whether +5 Insightful or -1 Troll. It thus saddens me to watch Slashdot be changed into a bland, cookie-cutter news site, a la the present incarnations of Engadget and Digg. I am perhaps in the minority in this, but I kindly urge you to read this post, and others like it, and to consider joining the week-long Slashcott that begins on Feb 10th. I realize that posting off-topic comments such as this is disrupting the Slashdot experience for many of you, and I do apologize for it. But can you honestly say that the new Beta interface does not already disrupt Slashdot for all of us? These anti-Beta posts can quite rightly be viewed as "a series of shock slogans and mindless token tantrums", to borrow a phrase, but since we feel that we are ignored by Dice, this is the best that I, like many other slashdotters, could come up with.

What company directs 25% of its users to a partially-working, not-ready-for-production website? Please realize that Beta will not have the features that we want, because they interfere with Dice's plans for Slashdot. Dice presents Slashdot to their advertisers as a "Social Media for B2B Technology" platform. B2B - that's the reason Beta looks like a generic wordpress-based news site. To be sure, a large precentage of Slashdotters work in IT, but Slashdot is most certainly not a B2B site.

Nevertheless, Dice is desperate to make money off of Slashdot, even at the cost of losing much of its current userbase. Turning Slashdot into a social platform for IT "decision makers" is a Haily Mary attempt to recoup the failed investment Dice made in buying Slashdot. As they have revealed in a press release detailing their performance in 2013, this acquisition has not lived up to their financial expectations:

Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.

The new Beta interface is not the result of a superficial makeover. Keeping in mind that Dice felt confident enough to present it as the new face of Slashdot to 25% of its visitors, it is safe to say that the new commenting and moderation system is exactly how they intended it to be. It is a new design that deliberately cripples the one thing that makes Slashdot what it is today, viz. thebest commenting and moderation system online today. From the users' perspective, there is nothing wrong with Slashdot that demands gutting its foundations and dumping the one part of Slashdot we exactly like. As others have commented, this is an attempt to monetize /. at any any cost, and its users be damned. Dice views its users, the ones who create the site, as a passive audience. As such, it is interchangeable with its intended B2B crowd. We, the current users of Slashdot, are an obstacle in Dice's way.

This is why they ignore the detailed feedback we have given them in the months since Beta was first revealed. This is also why they now disregard our grievances and complaints. Their claims of hearing us are a deliber