We haven't received any such requests since I've been working here, so no, nothing's been turned over to the Feds or anybody else. I'm not aware of any requests happening before that either, but I couldn't say for sure.
The closest we've come, to my knowledge, was a DMCA takedown request after copyrighted Scientology material was posted in a comment. The comment ended up being deleted, but I think the post pretty clearly illustrates how we felt about that. There was also a time Microsoft asked us to remove some comments back in 2000. Those comments stayed in place.
I actually have no idea if we have a "policy" for such requests, since it hasn't come up. If it were up to me, I'd tell them to get stuffed. I suspect CmdrTaco would as well. Honestly, I don't know what records we'd have that would be worth requesting.
We've pushed a fix that should address the CPU thrashing. If it continues after a reload, please let us know. We've also moved the username link out of the sidebar to address the clipping issues.
Working on other bugs now. Great feedback so far, keep it coming.
Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. I agree that we should do it more, but I don't think we should do it "instead," as you say. I prefer linking to both. The vast majority of people do not want to download a PDF and spend an hour reading through an academic paper when there's a (reasonably well-informed) news article available. But, for those who do, it should be an option.
The other big problem is that many of these scientific papers are paywalled -- and we're not talking about a mickey-mouse Rupert Murdoch paywall. A 1-year subscription to Nature, for example, is $200. Reading only an abstract doesn't tell you much about the quality of the research or potential applications.
As always, if you read something linked from here and think coverage is better elsewhere, you're more than welcome to hit us with an email saying so.
It's not a matter of being the most reliable; it's a reliable, content-generating, influential news source.
A very small percentage of our summaries link to the NYTimes. Regardless, we're always disappointed when a site we occasionally link turns into a pay site. Some stories we can pick up elsewhere, some we can't.
The bigger problem is that it's one less source -- not just a link target, but a source -- that provides tech news. And other sites are assuredly watching and taking cues from the NYT, the WSJ, etc., to see how they can either turn a profit or turn a bigger profit. A drop in the bucket, perhaps, but enough drops will fill the bucket. As more and more sites put up paywalls, news junkies will have less free news to read.
On the other hand, nobody reads the linked articles anyway, so maybe it's not so bad!
Is the UI customizable (like WOW) or fixed (like COH)? Wow spoiled me for MMOs - I want to be able to customize it as I want it.
You can do a little customization, but nothing extensive. You can move around your frames and re-size them quite easily, and do some neat things with targeting.
It doesn't measure up to WoW's UI, though. You'll definitely miss some simple things, like focus, target-of-target, health totals, and buff timers.
The industry is barely a decade old and according to this guy there are paradigms that have been established that hold forever.
There are certainly some well-established paradigms, though I don't believe they'll hold forever.
Think back to Everquest and Ultima Online -- both great games for their time, but there's not much interest anymore besides nostalgia. This is because the industry matured and realized that people didn't want to spend hours and hours beating on a practice dummy or struggling to solo rats five levels below them. With modern games, developers are expected to give enough quest-related content for players to reach the level cap by themselves without that level of monotony.
And really, it's fine to break that rule if you offer compelling enough gameplay that people don't care. (See This Is The Only Level.) You just need to have more of something than the early games had if you want a successful game.
"Apparently, this guy has not heard of creativity and innovation."
Quite the opposite -- I'd say those are two of the "expected" quantities in a new MMO.:)
It's hard to describe, and I'll grant that I may be wrong, but there is a difference.
For example, things like moving an item in my inventory -- when I click-hold to drag an item, it often takes close to a second for the item to actually attach to my cursor, but there's no delay when I finally place it in another slot. For all other MMOs I've played, that's been reversed -- dragging is instantaneous, dropping may take a moment. Things like targeting behave slower than I'd expect, too.
In short, I'm not explicitly referring to the use of abilities, which obviously need to be verified by the server. (Though the lag on abilities is what affects gameplay the most, which is why I mentioned it.) The best analogy I can think of would be playing a poorly-optimized console game on an old, slow wireless controller.
Slashdot Mirror
Updated with a new link, just in case.
We're working on the 503 problems. Sorry it's been such a pain.
We haven't received any such requests since I've been working here, so no, nothing's been turned over to the Feds or anybody else. I'm not aware of any requests happening before that either, but I couldn't say for sure.
The closest we've come, to my knowledge, was a DMCA takedown request after copyrighted Scientology material was posted in a comment. The comment ended up being deleted, but I think the post pretty clearly illustrates how we felt about that. There was also a time Microsoft asked us to remove some comments back in 2000. Those comments stayed in place.
I actually have no idea if we have a "policy" for such requests, since it hasn't come up. If it were up to me, I'd tell them to get stuffed. I suspect CmdrTaco would as well. Honestly, I don't know what records we'd have that would be worth requesting.
We've pushed a fix that should address the CPU thrashing. If it continues after a reload, please let us know. We've also moved the username link out of the sidebar to address the clipping issues.
Working on other bugs now. Great feedback so far, keep it coming.
For now you can duplicate that functionality with this URL formatting: http://slashdot.org/index2.pl?startdate=20110125
Don't disregard delving deeply despite distracting descriptors.
Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't. I agree that we should do it more, but I don't think we should do it "instead," as you say. I prefer linking to both. The vast majority of people do not want to download a PDF and spend an hour reading through an academic paper when there's a (reasonably well-informed) news article available. But, for those who do, it should be an option.
The other big problem is that many of these scientific papers are paywalled -- and we're not talking about a mickey-mouse Rupert Murdoch paywall. A 1-year subscription to Nature, for example, is $200. Reading only an abstract doesn't tell you much about the quality of the research or potential applications.
As always, if you read something linked from here and think coverage is better elsewhere, you're more than welcome to hit us with an email saying so.
Fixed, thanks.
Would you accept a picture of a spider as restitution?
Updated with the proper link. Thanks.
It's not a matter of being the most reliable; it's a reliable, content-generating, influential news source.
A very small percentage of our summaries link to the NYTimes. Regardless, we're always disappointed when a site we occasionally link turns into a pay site. Some stories we can pick up elsewhere, some we can't.
The bigger problem is that it's one less source -- not just a link target, but a source -- that provides tech news. And other sites are assuredly watching and taking cues from the NYT, the WSJ, etc., to see how they can either turn a profit or turn a bigger profit. A drop in the bucket, perhaps, but enough drops will fill the bucket. As more and more sites put up paywalls, news junkies will have less free news to read.
On the other hand, nobody reads the linked articles anyway, so maybe it's not so bad!
Something broke it temporarily. It should be fixed now: http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/09/12/10/1333202/The-Star-Wars-Christmas-Special-Still-Exists
Greedy databases rose up and demanded free space. We negotiated a settlement.
There was a disturbance in the force. This is not the post you're looking for.
You can remove a tag you've entered with the "-" sign. (e.g. -yro or -games or -whatcouldpossiblygowrong)
I'll see if we can get a legend or something for equating tags to topic icons.
Is the UI customizable (like WOW) or fixed (like COH)? Wow spoiled me for MMOs - I want to be able to customize it as I want it.
You can do a little customization, but nothing extensive. You can move around your frames and re-size them quite easily, and do some neat things with targeting.
It doesn't measure up to WoW's UI, though. You'll definitely miss some simple things, like focus, target-of-target, health totals, and buff timers.
The industry is barely a decade old and according to this guy there are paradigms that have been established that hold forever.
There are certainly some well-established paradigms, though I don't believe they'll hold forever.
Think back to Everquest and Ultima Online -- both great games for their time, but there's not much interest anymore besides nostalgia. This is because the industry matured and realized that people didn't want to spend hours and hours beating on a practice dummy or struggling to solo rats five levels below them. With modern games, developers are expected to give enough quest-related content for players to reach the level cap by themselves without that level of monotony.
And really, it's fine to break that rule if you offer compelling enough gameplay that people don't care. (See This Is The Only Level.) You just need to have more of something than the early games had if you want a successful game.
"Apparently, this guy has not heard of creativity and innovation."
Quite the opposite -- I'd say those are two of the "expected" quantities in a new MMO. :)
It's hard to describe, and I'll grant that I may be wrong, but there is a difference.
For example, things like moving an item in my inventory -- when I click-hold to drag an item, it often takes close to a second for the item to actually attach to my cursor, but there's no delay when I finally place it in another slot. For all other MMOs I've played, that's been reversed -- dragging is instantaneous, dropping may take a moment. Things like targeting behave slower than I'd expect, too.
In short, I'm not explicitly referring to the use of abilities, which obviously need to be verified by the server. (Though the lag on abilities is what affects gameplay the most, which is why I mentioned it.) The best analogy I can think of would be playing a poorly-optimized console game on an old, slow wireless controller.
Unfortunately, due to the difficulty in evaluating such an achievement, it did not make it through our beta-testing process.
Neither did ScuttleMonkey.