How are they supposed to let the folk who run the site know how upset they are? At least it was under the first post, which is pretty much always a throw-away.
P.S.: I may not be as upset as he is, but I'm not fan of Beta, either. I *am* currently testing it, and it's not really terrible, but that's all I can say in its favor.
P.P.S.: This is just to test how it reacts to unicode: OK, it looks good before I post it, but it didn't show up in the preview...so now I'll post. (It was largely Greek letters.)
That said, if reports about window managers beginning to rely on systemd are valid, this may have been a foced move. I, personally, see no reason to move from sysvinit, but if KDE starts to perform poorly, because it's assuming that it can depend on systemd to supply some services....well, I'd be unhappy.
When is the last time you hand configured your monitor, putting in desired refresh rate, etc.?
I'm not convinced that this is a good move, but I'm also not convinced it's a bad one. I don't know. It's beyond my area of expertise.
FWIW, I don't understand why the init process needs to be changed. My feeling is pretty much "It ain't broke, so don't fix it.", but there may be valid reasons. Two different groups of people seem to think so.
Personally, I prefer the traditional init system from UnixV...but then I also prefer grub over grub2. I like to be able to edit my scripts easily, and not dig through several files and try to puzzle out the documentation. (In the case of grub2 my puzzling out the documentation hasn't been that successful...I frequently need several attempts to get a change that would have been simplicity itself in grub. OTOH, I've only got one machine that I can use, so any change is difficult. If I make a mistake, I may need to reinstall the whole system. I can't just look up an answer on the internet...because that requires the machine to be working.)
MSWind may not be dead, but the signs are strong that MSWind8 is. IIUC MS is already planning to release MSWind9 fairly soon.
OTOH, I don't closely follow MS decisions. Perhaps they've changed their minds again, and are now planning to stick with it.
Still, it's not just that MSWind7 is good enough. (Is it? I've never used it, and due to the last MS EULA I read I have no intention of using it. But it could be. After all, MSWind95B was better than MSWind98.) But people have been refusing to use MSWind8 in droves. So much so that they quickly rushed out a patch upgrade to 8.1...which apparently solves some of they problems (whatever they were), but not enough to satisfy people. So much so that some manufacturers have started selling MSWind7 again. (That must have taken some smooth talking to get MS to allow it.)
Sorry, but that's a goal, not necessarily an achieved state. E.g., during the 1990's one needed to be careful while configuring ones monitor lest one cause the system to damage it. By the late 1990's there were automated tools to set the parameters, and I can't remember the last time I've seen the warning "Be careful with this setting as you may damage your hardware.", but it's been there in the not-so-distant past. (Would it actually have damaged my monitor? I was never experimental enough to investigate.)
FWIW, I buy from ZAReason. There are other vendors, but for me it's local. I've never had a problem with "You shouldn't have installed that OS!". Of course, it comes with Linux installed, and the other OSes I've installed have just been other versions/distros of Linux. Don't know what they'd say if I installed BSD.
Pogo sells systems with MSWind, Linux, or both installed. To me that's not benefit, besides, they're farther away.
IIUC, the DMCA only applies to the person filing the takedown request. Not to someone who directed him to do it.
P.S.: I've also heard of companies stating in court that yes, they knew they didn't have any ownership in the material they were demanding be taken down, and asserting, without penalty, that the court couldn't do anything about it.
IANAL, so there may well be some technicalities that I'm not understanding here. But if the punishment of someone for falsely filing a takedown request rates headlines, you know it almost never happens...and I don't mean the false takedown request.
What makes you think it's perjury? IIUC the DMCA merely requires that you "have a good faith belief" that you are acting correctly. And a lawyer is entitled to believe his client, however dishonest. Even then, proving that someone didn't believe something is quite a trick. It's comparatively easy to show that they had no reasonable grounds for belief (still quite difficult), but showing that they didn't believe.... I don't think I've ever heard of anyone being prosecuted under that section of the DMCA.
OTOH, IANAL. Perhaps I'm not understanding the situation correctly. But that isn't the way *I'd* bet.
I'm certain that utf-8 posting would have been welcomed wihtout significant objections. If Beta can handle that, they haven't bothered to tell us so.
As far as I know, there is NO advantage to Beta. None. Zilch. Zip. Zero. There are significant disadvantages to it.
So why should anyone be willing to accept it? It decreases the benefit of the site to the end user and doesn't provide any known counterbalancing benefit.
It is not at all clear to me that if the community is forced into using the Beta site, that it will be worth coming back. If most of the better posters leave, then there wouldn't be anything to come back for, even if the software of the site were to become perfect. And there is little to no indication that that is even plausibly in the offing.
I don't have any plans of boycotting Slashdot, but I do have plans of continuing to examine alternatives. And I have an expectation that in the not too distant future one or more of those alternatives will have become more attractive as a place to read and post than Slashdot will be. This isn't because I feel that I will find a place better than Slashdot currently is (well, was a week ago).
P.S.: I find the Beta site to be ugly, as well as having other problems. I've mentioned a few of them in other posts.
FWIW, I still prefer the design that Slashdot had.... well, I guess it must be 13 years ago or more now. But this one wasn't terrible once I got a faster computer and a larger screen. And it *is* convenient that there isn't a long pause after each post that you click on to read.
I've seen a few times where it ended up better. Usually, however, for reasons that had nothing to do with the cosmetic changes. And in every case it was a minor change....except two: 1) The introduction of the GUI. I'm still not totally happy with that one, because it made a lot of things a lot harder. But if you weren't a developer, it was a magical improvement. 2) The introduction of color into the GUI. That was another big improvement. Of course there were a lot of problems that needed to be straightened out, but...
Other than those two times, however, every case I can think of where a user interface made a big change made things worse. (I'm counting color into text as minor.)
There is no proof yet that it won't kill the site. I doubt that everyone that says they are leaving now is actually leaving, but I don't doubt that many are. So it has ALREADY damaged the community that gives the site value. There has been many people asserting that they will leave if or when "BETA" becomes mandatory. I doubt that that is true of all of them, but...
The community gives the site its value. Each time the community is damaged, the site becomes less valuable not only to the advertisers, but also to the other members of the community. So they are more likely to leave. I haaven't used the new Beta enough to have strong feelings about it, but such feelings as I have are negative. And they are strong enough that I have started investigating alternative sites. I only have so much time. If I start heavily investigating another site, I will be spending less of the time on Slashdot. Which will make it less valuable to be, as a part of the value is seeing how people react to the opinions that I post. This is a feedback process. It's weak, but it's widely distributed throughout the community. And feedback is cumulative. Each of these changes is decreasing the value of the Slashdot site to me...so I'm less likely to come back frequently. And this, also, is distributed widely throughout the community.
The site has already been badly damaged because earlier comments were not responded to in a convincing way, and this is before any final action is taken.
Well, I don't own the site, and they have the right to do as they see fit, but if I were a shareholder I would consider suing them for mismanagement.
You are conflating two seprate concepts. Graphene and bulk graphite are not the same, even though graphite is largely composed of small layers of graphene. Much of the insulation/resistive nature of the graphite is due to the poor mesh between the different pieces of graphite. If this can be solved, then it's not implausible that conductive graphite wires would be possible. I'm not sure about practical. Joining pieces of graphene while maintaining smooth edges sounds quite difficult. And you would need thousands of these wires, which would need to maintain nano-scale continuity from one end of the wire to the other. Seems a bit iffy to me. Not to mention that you couldn't join two wires in any simple way. And, IIUC, the conductivity is only along the smooth edge. So you get one-dimensional current flow, unless you use AC and depend on induction to spread the charge evenly between the wirelets.
All in all, it doesn't sound like a very promissing application. Not this decade, and probably not the next. Within a chip wiring, however, may be a very different animal. And current flow without (much?) resistance could ameliorate one source of heating.
We don't really know that they won't fix the identified problems before imposing it on people who don't want it. We may have a strong belief, but that's not the same.
FWIW, I'm not promissing to leave. But I'm sure not promissing to stay. It depends on what alternatives I can find, and how bad the final version is. Mind you, most of the explicit criticisms I've seen have been reasonable. But the strongly emotional ones, whether of praise or dislike (and both exist), don't convince me. What will convince me is utility...MY utility.
FWIW, my hopes for a viable Slashdot are not high, but they do exist. And it would be nice if people didn't really totally abandon ship sooner than necessary....while continuing to work on and search for lifeboats, of course.
Not only that, but he pointed it out more accurately than I could have. I would have had to leave it at "but a prolate sphereoid isn't pointed".
Even so, I'm not sure that a simple series, no matter WHAT the basis, could manage the ridgings at the points of the football. That's a pretty complex curve.
The post button of classic is at the very bottom of the page. I had always assumed that this was intentional to discourage people from starting new threads.
At the top is more convenient, but possibly less desireable. On the balance I count this as a negative feature of beta. OTOH, the first time I tried to find it on the current/. system I wasn't successful. So it should be easier to find. But not, in my opinion, easier to use.
Next: I may be double-posting, I can't tell. The title of the post isn't automatically filled in. I count this as another negative. I could always edit the title of the post if I wanted to, now, apparently, I *must* edit the title. This is not desireable. Many times (i.e., usually) it is desireable to maintain the same title throughout the thread.
The party that most frequently promises that it will cut taxes, only cuts taxes on those earning 3 standard deviation above the median. (I *think* I'm exaggerating...but I'm not sure.)
I'm not sure that "private messages" is a good idea. The others are excellent.
OTOH, judging by what I've heard of the beta I won't be here to see if they ever get implemented. It's truely unfortunate, as I don't know of a decent replacement for Slashdot, but they seem determined to kill it.
FWIW, I still consider the prior design to be much more usable than the current design. Getting used to something isn't the same as likeing it, it just means that I still find the payoff to be positive...even if not nearly as positive as it was before. If it goes negative, I'll stop coming, though I'll give it a week or so to see how much I can get used to it.
FWIW, the reason given for the change, "It's been a long time since we changed things" is absolutely moronic. Or perhaps even stupider than that.
Slashdot Mirror
How are they supposed to let the folk who run the site know how upset they are? At least it was under the first post, which is pretty much always a throw-away.
P.S.: I may not be as upset as he is, but I'm not fan of Beta, either. I *am* currently testing it, and it's not really terrible, but that's all I can say in its favor.
P.P.S.: This is just to test how it reacts to unicode:
OK, it looks good before I post it, but it didn't show up in the preview...so now I'll post. (It was largely Greek letters.)
An earlier post by another proponent of OpenRC said that it was still too beta to be adopted, even though he regretted it.
That said, if reports about window managers beginning to rely on systemd are valid, this may have been a foced move. I, personally, see no reason to move from sysvinit, but if KDE starts to perform poorly, because it's assuming that it can depend on systemd to supply some services....well, I'd be unhappy.
Did you intend that to make any sense? If you did, you need to explain a bit more.
When is the last time you hand configured your monitor, putting in desired refresh rate, etc.?
I'm not convinced that this is a good move, but I'm also not convinced it's a bad one. I don't know. It's beyond my area of expertise.
FWIW, I don't understand why the init process needs to be changed. My feeling is pretty much "It ain't broke, so don't fix it.", but there may be valid reasons. Two different groups of people seem to think so.
Personally, I prefer the traditional init system from UnixV...but then I also prefer grub over grub2. I like to be able to edit my scripts easily, and not dig through several files and try to puzzle out the documentation. (In the case of grub2 my puzzling out the documentation hasn't been that successful...I frequently need several attempts to get a change that would have been simplicity itself in grub. OTOH, I've only got one machine that I can use, so any change is difficult. If I make a mistake, I may need to reinstall the whole system. I can't just look up an answer on the internet...because that requires the machine to be working.)
MSWind may not be dead, but the signs are strong that MSWind8 is. IIUC MS is already planning to release MSWind9 fairly soon.
OTOH, I don't closely follow MS decisions. Perhaps they've changed their minds again, and are now planning to stick with it.
Still, it's not just that MSWind7 is good enough. (Is it? I've never used it, and due to the last MS EULA I read I have no intention of using it. But it could be. After all, MSWind95B was better than MSWind98.) But people have been refusing to use MSWind8 in droves. So much so that they quickly rushed out a patch upgrade to 8.1...which apparently solves some of they problems (whatever they were), but not enough to satisfy people. So much so that some manufacturers have started selling MSWind7 again. (That must have taken some smooth talking to get MS to allow it.)
Sorry, but that's a goal, not necessarily an achieved state. E.g., during the 1990's one needed to be careful while configuring ones monitor lest one cause the system to damage it. By the late 1990's there were automated tools to set the parameters, and I can't remember the last time I've seen the warning "Be careful with this setting as you may damage your hardware.", but it's been there in the not-so-distant past. (Would it actually have damaged my monitor? I was never experimental enough to investigate.)
FWIW, I buy from ZAReason. There are other vendors, but for me it's local. I've never had a problem with "You shouldn't have installed that OS!". Of course, it comes with Linux installed, and the other OSes I've installed have just been other versions/distros of Linux. Don't know what they'd say if I installed BSD.
Pogo sells systems with MSWind, Linux, or both installed. To me that's not benefit, besides, they're farther away.
System76 sells laptops with Linux installed.
Why were you dealing with Dell again?
OK, that's one.
IIUC, the DMCA only applies to the person filing the takedown request. Not to someone who directed him to do it.
P.S.: I've also heard of companies stating in court that yes, they knew they didn't have any ownership in the material they were demanding be taken down, and asserting, without penalty, that the court couldn't do anything about it.
IANAL, so there may well be some technicalities that I'm not understanding here. But if the punishment of someone for falsely filing a takedown request rates headlines, you know it almost never happens...and I don't mean the false takedown request.
If this is well intentioned, and well done, then it should apply to all, or almost all, government agencies.
Because it singles out the EPA, I suspect a political agenda, and don't trust it.
What makes you think it's perjury? IIUC the DMCA merely requires that you "have a good faith belief" that you are acting correctly. And a lawyer is entitled to believe his client, however dishonest. Even then, proving that someone didn't believe something is quite a trick. It's comparatively easy to show that they had no reasonable grounds for belief (still quite difficult), but showing that they didn't believe.... I don't think I've ever heard of anyone being prosecuted under that section of the DMCA.
OTOH, IANAL. Perhaps I'm not understanding the situation correctly. But that isn't the way *I'd* bet.
I'm certain that utf-8 posting would have been welcomed wihtout significant objections. If Beta can handle that, they haven't bothered to tell us so.
As far as I know, there is NO advantage to Beta. None. Zilch. Zip. Zero. There are significant disadvantages to it.
So why should anyone be willing to accept it? It decreases the benefit of the site to the end user and doesn't provide any known counterbalancing benefit.
It is not at all clear to me that if the community is forced into using the Beta site, that it will be worth coming back. If most of the better posters leave, then there wouldn't be anything to come back for, even if the software of the site were to become perfect. And there is little to no indication that that is even plausibly in the offing.
I don't have any plans of boycotting Slashdot, but I do have plans of continuing to examine alternatives. And I have an expectation that in the not too distant future one or more of those alternatives will have become more attractive as a place to read and post than Slashdot will be. This isn't because I feel that I will find a place better than Slashdot currently is (well, was a week ago).
P.S.: I find the Beta site to be ugly, as well as having other problems. I've mentioned a few of them in other posts.
FWIW, I still prefer the design that Slashdot had .... well, I guess it must be 13 years ago or more now. But this one wasn't terrible once I got a faster computer and a larger screen. And it *is* convenient that there isn't a long pause after each post that you click on to read.
I've seen a few times where it ended up better. Usually, however, for reasons that had nothing to do with the cosmetic changes. And in every case it was a minor change....except two:
1) The introduction of the GUI. I'm still not totally happy with that one, because it made a lot of things a lot harder. But if you weren't a developer, it was a magical improvement.
2) The introduction of color into the GUI. That was another big improvement. Of course there were a lot of problems that needed to be straightened out, but...
Other than those two times, however, every case I can think of where a user interface made a big change made things worse. (I'm counting color into text as minor.)
There is no proof yet that it won't kill the site. I doubt that everyone that says they are leaving now is actually leaving, but I don't doubt that many are. So it has ALREADY damaged the community that gives the site value. There has been many people asserting that they will leave if or when "BETA" becomes mandatory. I doubt that that is true of all of them, but...
The community gives the site its value. Each time the community is damaged, the site becomes less valuable not only to the advertisers, but also to the other members of the community. So they are more likely to leave. I haaven't used the new Beta enough to have strong feelings about it, but such feelings as I have are negative. And they are strong enough that I have started investigating alternative sites. I only have so much time. If I start heavily investigating another site, I will be spending less of the time on Slashdot. Which will make it less valuable to be, as a part of the value is seeing how people react to the opinions that I post. This is a feedback process. It's weak, but it's widely distributed throughout the community. And feedback is cumulative. Each of these changes is decreasing the value of the Slashdot site to me...so I'm less likely to come back frequently. And this, also, is distributed widely throughout the community.
The site has already been badly damaged because earlier comments were not responded to in a convincing way, and this is before any final action is taken.
Well, I don't own the site, and they have the right to do as they see fit, but if I were a shareholder I would consider suing them for mismanagement.
You are conflating two seprate concepts. Graphene and bulk graphite are not the same, even though graphite is largely composed of small layers of graphene. Much of the insulation/resistive nature of the graphite is due to the poor mesh between the different pieces of graphite. If this can be solved, then it's not implausible that conductive graphite wires would be possible. I'm not sure about practical. Joining pieces of graphene while maintaining smooth edges sounds quite difficult. And you would need thousands of these wires, which would need to maintain nano-scale continuity from one end of the wire to the other. Seems a bit iffy to me. Not to mention that you couldn't join two wires in any simple way. And, IIUC, the conductivity is only along the smooth edge. So you get one-dimensional current flow, unless you use AC and depend on induction to spread the charge evenly between the wirelets.
All in all, it doesn't sound like a very promissing application. Not this decade, and probably not the next. Within a chip wiring, however, may be a very different animal. And current flow without (much?) resistance could ameliorate one source of heating.
We don't really know that they won't fix the identified problems before imposing it on people who don't want it. We may have a strong belief, but that's not the same.
FWIW, I'm not promissing to leave. But I'm sure not promissing to stay. It depends on what alternatives I can find, and how bad the final version is. Mind you, most of the explicit criticisms I've seen have been reasonable. But the strongly emotional ones, whether of praise or dislike (and both exist), don't convince me. What will convince me is utility...MY utility.
FWIW, my hopes for a viable Slashdot are not high, but they do exist. And it would be nice if people didn't really totally abandon ship sooner than necessary....while continuing to work on and search for lifeboats, of course.
Not only that, but he pointed it out more accurately than I could have. I would have had to leave it at "but a prolate sphereoid isn't pointed".
Even so, I'm not sure that a simple series, no matter WHAT the basis, could manage the ridgings at the points of the football. That's a pretty complex curve.
You exaggerate. It's still better than most sites, I think. Of course, I never go to most sites.
I think you are wrong about Goatse being better than Beta...even less worse would, in my opinion, be wrong.
You are right, it's there now. But a year or so ago it was only at the bottom. (And it was at the bottom.)
The post button of classic is at the very bottom of the page. I had always assumed that this was intentional to discourage people from starting new threads.
At the top is more convenient, but possibly less desireable. On the balance I count this as a negative feature of beta. OTOH, the first time I tried to find it on the current /. system I wasn't successful. So it should be easier to find. But not, in my opinion, easier to use.
Next: I may be double-posting, I can't tell. The title of the post isn't automatically filled in. I count this as another negative. I could always edit the title of the post if I wanted to, now, apparently, I *must* edit the title. This is not desireable. Many times (i.e., usually) it is desireable to maintain the same title throughout the thread.
Who? How?
The party that most frequently promises that it will cut taxes, only cuts taxes on those earning 3 standard deviation above the median. (I *think* I'm exaggerating...but I'm not sure.)
I'm not sure that "private messages" is a good idea. The others are excellent.
OTOH, judging by what I've heard of the beta I won't be here to see if they ever get implemented. It's truely unfortunate, as I don't know of a decent replacement for Slashdot, but they seem determined to kill it.
FWIW, I still consider the prior design to be much more usable than the current design. Getting used to something isn't the same as likeing it, it just means that I still find the payoff to be positive...even if not nearly as positive as it was before. If it goes negative, I'll stop coming, though I'll give it a week or so to see how much I can get used to it.
FWIW, the reason given for the change, "It's been a long time since we changed things" is absolutely moronic. Or perhaps even stupider than that.