The same can happen with Google. Just saying. The main difference is that Google's stuff is usually web apps, so you can't even download the last version.
The problem was that when you tried to change the filter, whether through the preference panels or just by changing the sliders, it didn't save the change. So the next time, it was back to 0/0 or later 3/3. But it seems someone saw my gripe this time and fixed it, and it is now correctly staying at my preferred 2/1 setting.
If "classic mode" still had it working, then that wasn't very helpful, because it was crap and I ditched it 15 years ago, so there is no way I would have stumbled over it. I like being able to collapse sub-threads after I read them.
Ao-7 does not transmit telemetry since recovery. The transponder is active on a random basis whenever it is in sunlight, and the beacons are unmodulated.
As I recall, its telemetry has to be requested with a special command signal, which is kept confidential, and can I think it can cause unstable behavior or something. And it is constantly in sunlight most of the time, except during certain months of the year, because of its altitude and inclination.
The transponder mode is also not quite random when it stays in sunlight; it was designed to switch modes every 24 hours or so (or with a command), and darkness resets it, though I recall reading that the automatic mode switch can be a little unstable. But sure, it's random if you suddenly decide you want to make contact with it and don't have a recent history of when it last switched modes.
But really, in its current state, it seems like a perfect challenge for hams who want to do some satellite contacts. It is primitive and weak enough that you have to do some work to make use of it. So in that sense, it is doing exactly what it was put there for.
And most recently, they have apparently removed the thread collapse widget, which was the only thing that made a comments thread with hundreds of replies readable, by collapsing sub-threads that have clearly gone off into the weeds. This also helped with the tendency for people to reply to the top post, then the top post below that, etc., clumping the reply tree to the top. Maybe that caused people to actually load comments to read the replies, because now there's no point, so less bandwidth and server load for them. Good riddance, I guess.
The even cooler thing was that someone had gone to the trouble of renewing its license during those 21 years. The Mode B uplink uses a band that is no longer allocated for satellite service, and that renewal is the reason that there is now an FCC waiver for using it.
As long as its orbit is high enough not to have atmospheric drag, and it doesn't hit something, of course it's still in orbit. Without atmospheric drag, orbits can last for centuries.
What would be more interesting is if it is still operational after all these years, like OSCAR 7.
Thanks to google, and a ctrl-F for/99/, the oldest post of mine I can find is from December 1999, in a thread about Galaxy Quest. This was about two months before I got DSL on 2000-02-29. (I have been running servers on static IP DSL ever since then.)
My main reaction to this was surprise that Galaxy Quest was that old. My other surprise was remembering that there was a time before Slashdot had the <quote> tag. And now in less than an hour I get to watch another episode of The Orville.
Yes, the comments are the thing. This is one of the few sites on my short list of checking reglarly, the other main one these days is hackaday. Some articles I read the headline and move on, some I read TFS and move on, and some I go in to read the comments to see what other people have to say. I only go to TFA very rarely, I just care about the summary and opinions. TFA is often a regurgitated version of some other article anyhow, with fluff and errors added. When it matters, the original, original article is usually linked from a comment.
I gave up on Fark back in the early '00s, after I realized they were tracking people who used more than one user account. If it detected a cookie from another user when you logged in, it would link both those accounts in their database and hit them all when a ban happened. For a couple of years after that I spent some time on a site called F*king Otaku, then discovered 4chan from one of its users. I'm mostly on/a/ and/pol/, but also on half a dozen other boards from time to time. I got used to the default anonymous posting there, and for a while I would post on Slashdot with the AC checkbox more often than without it. Now I post under my user name more often again, because that lets me check replies a few days later.
It really still does. If I made a new forum web site, I would want to steal it. Most other moderation systems operate on the digg/reddit model of "everybody gets to moderate everything". This converges toward groupthink, suppressing ideas that don't line up with the majority. Sure, some obviously politically-influenced moderation happens on Slahshdot, but you have to read to get mod points, and you have to pick and choose where you spend them. And there is still a limit of -1 to +5, so any early mod-bombing of a post can be undone by later moderation. Then there is metamoderation to give a (hopefully) anonymized check on bad moderation, like a sort of QA sampling check.
There was one thing that they got wrong at the start, and that was letting people see exactly what moderation had been done. After a few incidents where a particular message got dozens of mods, some attracted just because there were already so many, it now only reports the top three categories, in percentages rounded to 10%. I was sad to see that and the visible karma point status go, but they encouraged gaming the system.
The only other user moderation model I saw was kuro5hin/scoop, where everybody got to vote, but it was only an averaged 0-3 rating. It also had a "users vote up the articles" mechanism. It may or may not have worked if there were more users to give it enough momentum, but kuro5hin was always a poor shadow of Slashdot, and eventually only the trolls, and one asperging blogger were left. There were even a few times when an article would successfully troll people from outside the site. I would still call it a failure, and blame it on the "everybody gets to vote on everything" thing, only instead of converging to groupthink it converged to trollthink.
Well, Slashdot's moderation is good except for that silly change to metamod many years ago. It used to have buttons that said "agree/disagree". At some point they must have hired someone to "improve" Slashdot, who then went nuts trying to change shit for the sake of changing shit to look like he was doing something. The metamoderation buttons were changed to "+" and "-". They FAQ was never updated to say exactly what this meant. The tooltips say "Vote this item up/down", without it being clear what "this item" means that you are voting for.
It's ambiguous whether +/- means the original message should have been modded up/down, or whether you are voting to agree or disagree with the moderation. Is "this item" the message or the moderation? What makes this so important is that if you misunderstand, you can kill that person's moderation karma and he might not get it again for months.
As I understand it, Slashdot has support to ban Unicode ranges, which they basically set to "everything". Even more annoying, there is a problem where entered Unicode (usually smart quotes) gets its encoding screwed up, resulting in two Latin-1 characters instead. This is probably due to incorrectly specified text encodings.
The most interesting one is where a trademark character results, then that gets another conversion to "TM'. At the very least, we should be allowed to use the HTML entity names (the entities with real names like "™", not the ones that give an arbitrary Unicode character). Most of those seem to be blocked, even though they don't cause problems.
I think some of the problem is that they banned almost everything "just in case", rather than banning just the specific things that cause problems, then only banning more things when they become a problem.
Slashdot died when they came up with SlashBI, which I think was also shortly after CmdrTaco left. The site might not have been a bad idea, but branding it with Slashdot, then shilling it hard to regular Slashdot users, to whom it was completely irrelevant, that was stupid.
As an old, old-timer here, I can tell you that the karma cap is 50. Or at least it was before they hid it, but I don't think they would have bothered to change it.
I think the most important "feature" is tools. Microsoft is really good about deprecating old OS versions out of Visual Studio. If you want support for features of the newer OS, you can only build for what is supported by more recent versions of VS. Since the ESR isn't going to use new OS features, they don't need to use a newer version of VS, and can continue to use a legacy build machine during the ESR period.
Film for x-rays was already gone at least five years ago. Dental x-rays are done with a wired USB imager. Larger x-rays use big imager packs that slot into a reader. Anything bigger than a chest x-ray is a CT scan. Most importantly, the imagers are more sensitive than film and need less radiation to do their job. And if there's a bad shot, you don't have to wait for chemical developers, you just snap another one while the patient is still at the chair/table.
I would say that many of those businesses already died, and what we have now is the remaining niche after collapse. Just because we have automobiles and jet planes doesn't mean there isn't still a need for buggy whips.
But telemarketing? I wish they would die. They're like roaches, always hiding except for the times when they run past you.
They changed their name to srad.jp, but seem to have about the same low number of posts as I remember from years past. If you want to call that dead, then it was never alive.
Or you could, you know, create an account and log in? The posting thresholds are effectively gone when you post with a username. Only when I use the "Post Anonymously" checkbox do I have to deal with the posting limits.
They can't even get the comment thresholds to work anymore. They've been broken for months, I can't save any changes I make to them and have to drag the sliders every time I open a new article.
Slashdot Mirror
The same can happen with Google. Just saying. The main difference is that Google's stuff is usually web apps, so you can't even download the last version.
Shouldn't it be more like "Help! I've fallen and I can't stop floating!"
I'll donate some slack to them.
Then I'll get back to waiting for the return of Kibo.
The problem was that when you tried to change the filter, whether through the preference panels or just by changing the sliders, it didn't save the change. So the next time, it was back to 0/0 or later 3/3. But it seems someone saw my gripe this time and fixed it, and it is now correctly staying at my preferred 2/1 setting.
If "classic mode" still had it working, then that wasn't very helpful, because it was crap and I ditched it 15 years ago, so there is no way I would have stumbled over it. I like being able to collapse sub-threads after I read them.
Ao-7 does not transmit telemetry since recovery. The transponder is active on a random basis whenever it is in sunlight, and the beacons are unmodulated.
As I recall, its telemetry has to be requested with a special command signal, which is kept confidential, and can I think it can cause unstable behavior or something. And it is constantly in sunlight most of the time, except during certain months of the year, because of its altitude and inclination.
The transponder mode is also not quite random when it stays in sunlight; it was designed to switch modes every 24 hours or so (or with a command), and darkness resets it, though I recall reading that the automatic mode switch can be a little unstable. But sure, it's random if you suddenly decide you want to make contact with it and don't have a recent history of when it last switched modes.
But really, in its current state, it seems like a perfect challenge for hams who want to do some satellite contacts. It is primitive and weak enough that you have to do some work to make use of it. So in that sense, it is doing exactly what it was put there for.
And most recently, they have apparently removed the thread collapse widget, which was the only thing that made a comments thread with hundreds of replies readable, by collapsing sub-threads that have clearly gone off into the weeds. This also helped with the tendency for people to reply to the top post, then the top post below that, etc., clumping the reply tree to the top. Maybe that caused people to actually load comments to read the replies, because now there's no point, so less bandwidth and server load for them. Good riddance, I guess.
The even cooler thing was that someone had gone to the trouble of renewing its license during those 21 years. The Mode B uplink uses a band that is no longer allocated for satellite service, and that renewal is the reason that there is now an FCC waiver for using it.
As long as its orbit is high enough not to have atmospheric drag, and it doesn't hit something, of course it's still in orbit. Without atmospheric drag, orbits can last for centuries.
What would be more interesting is if it is still operational after all these years, like OSCAR 7.
Oh crap, I just realized that threading also wasn't implemented then. It's hard to imagine Slashdot without being able to collapse entire sub-threads.
Thanks to google, and a ctrl-F for /99/, the oldest post of mine I can find is from December 1999, in a thread about Galaxy Quest. This was about two months before I got DSL on 2000-02-29. (I have been running servers on static IP DSL ever since then.)
My main reaction to this was surprise that Galaxy Quest was that old. My other surprise was remembering that there was a time before Slashdot had the <quote> tag. And now in less than an hour I get to watch another episode of The Orville.
Yes, the comments are the thing. This is one of the few sites on my short list of checking reglarly, the other main one these days is hackaday. Some articles I read the headline and move on, some I read TFS and move on, and some I go in to read the comments to see what other people have to say. I only go to TFA very rarely, I just care about the summary and opinions. TFA is often a regurgitated version of some other article anyhow, with fluff and errors added. When it matters, the original, original article is usually linked from a comment.
I think that should be "No Unicode."
I gave up on Fark back in the early '00s, after I realized they were tracking people who used more than one user account. If it detected a cookie from another user when you logged in, it would link both those accounts in their database and hit them all when a ban happened. For a couple of years after that I spent some time on a site called F*king Otaku, then discovered 4chan from one of its users. I'm mostly on /a/ and /pol/, but also on half a dozen other boards from time to time. I got used to the default anonymous posting there, and for a while I would post on Slashdot with the AC checkbox more often than without it. Now I post under my user name more often again, because that lets me check replies a few days later.
Slashdot had the best moderation system
It really still does. If I made a new forum web site, I would want to steal it. Most other moderation systems operate on the digg/reddit model of "everybody gets to moderate everything". This converges toward groupthink, suppressing ideas that don't line up with the majority. Sure, some obviously politically-influenced moderation happens on Slahshdot, but you have to read to get mod points, and you have to pick and choose where you spend them. And there is still a limit of -1 to +5, so any early mod-bombing of a post can be undone by later moderation. Then there is metamoderation to give a (hopefully) anonymized check on bad moderation, like a sort of QA sampling check.
There was one thing that they got wrong at the start, and that was letting people see exactly what moderation had been done. After a few incidents where a particular message got dozens of mods, some attracted just because there were already so many, it now only reports the top three categories, in percentages rounded to 10%. I was sad to see that and the visible karma point status go, but they encouraged gaming the system.
The only other user moderation model I saw was kuro5hin/scoop, where everybody got to vote, but it was only an averaged 0-3 rating. It also had a "users vote up the articles" mechanism. It may or may not have worked if there were more users to give it enough momentum, but kuro5hin was always a poor shadow of Slashdot, and eventually only the trolls, and one asperging blogger were left. There were even a few times when an article would successfully troll people from outside the site. I would still call it a failure, and blame it on the "everybody gets to vote on everything" thing, only instead of converging to groupthink it converged to trollthink.
Well, Slashdot's moderation is good except for that silly change to metamod many years ago. It used to have buttons that said "agree/disagree". At some point they must have hired someone to "improve" Slashdot, who then went nuts trying to change shit for the sake of changing shit to look like he was doing something. The metamoderation buttons were changed to "+" and "-". They FAQ was never updated to say exactly what this meant. The tooltips say "Vote this item up/down", without it being clear what "this item" means that you are voting for.
It's ambiguous whether +/- means the original message should have been modded up/down, or whether you are voting to agree or disagree with the moderation. Is "this item" the message or the moderation? What makes this so important is that if you misunderstand, you can kill that person's moderation karma and he might not get it again for months.
As I understand it, Slashdot has support to ban Unicode ranges, which they basically set to "everything". Even more annoying, there is a problem where entered Unicode (usually smart quotes) gets its encoding screwed up, resulting in two Latin-1 characters instead. This is probably due to incorrectly specified text encodings.
The most interesting one is where a trademark character results, then that gets another conversion to "TM'. At the very least, we should be allowed to use the HTML entity names (the entities with real names like "™", not the ones that give an arbitrary Unicode character). Most of those seem to be blocked, even though they don't cause problems.
I think some of the problem is that they banned almost everything "just in case", rather than banning just the specific things that cause problems, then only banning more things when they become a problem.
Slashdot died when they came up with SlashBI, which I think was also shortly after CmdrTaco left. The site might not have been a bad idea, but branding it with Slashdot, then shilling it hard to regular Slashdot users, to whom it was completely irrelevant, that was stupid.
Wow, that's such an amazingly insightful, interesting, and informative post. Not.
As an old, old-timer here, I can tell you that the karma cap is 50. Or at least it was before they hid it, but I don't think they would have bothered to change it.
Try changing them, the problem is in the code that saves them back to your user settings.
I think the most important "feature" is tools. Microsoft is really good about deprecating old OS versions out of Visual Studio. If you want support for features of the newer OS, you can only build for what is supported by more recent versions of VS. Since the ESR isn't going to use new OS features, they don't need to use a newer version of VS, and can continue to use a legacy build machine during the ESR period.
Film for x-rays was already gone at least five years ago. Dental x-rays are done with a wired USB imager. Larger x-rays use big imager packs that slot into a reader. Anything bigger than a chest x-ray is a CT scan. Most importantly, the imagers are more sensitive than film and need less radiation to do their job. And if there's a bad shot, you don't have to wait for chemical developers, you just snap another one while the patient is still at the chair/table.
I would say that many of those businesses already died, and what we have now is the remaining niche after collapse. Just because we have automobiles and jet planes doesn't mean there isn't still a need for buggy whips.
But telemarketing? I wish they would die. They're like roaches, always hiding except for the times when they run past you.
They changed their name to srad.jp, but seem to have about the same low number of posts as I remember from years past. If you want to call that dead, then it was never alive.
Or you could, you know, create an account and log in? The posting thresholds are effectively gone when you post with a username. Only when I use the "Post Anonymously" checkbox do I have to deal with the posting limits.
They can't even get the comment thresholds to work anymore. They've been broken for months, I can't save any changes I make to them and have to drag the sliders every time I open a new article.