My kingdom for an "edit" button! (Or, more brains.) The papers linked in TFS were from December 1975 and January 1976. So yeah, I'm not saying they need to be totally discarded, but we have tools commonly available now that were nearly unimaginable back then. I mean, it's possible that someone once said "wouldn't it be great if you could have a searchable electronic encyclopedia that fit in your pocket?" but I don't know how long they figured that would take to actually happen or if they accounted for that possibility in their findings.
40 years ago was 1976. The Apple 1 kit was introduced April 1, 1976. So any paper published was most likely written before the authors even knew of its existence. I'm pretty sure no Apple 1s wound up in schools. The Apple II was still a year away. Yeah, things have changed just a bit since then.
Do we have to have this argument every year? The reason SF is expensive has very little to do with recent trends in the tech industry -- they're just a current, visible scapegoat. There's a good, thorough overview here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/...
I was born in SF in the 70s and stayed in the area until after college. It has ALWAYS been expensive. It's a great place and I'd move back in a second if I could afford to, but I can't, so I don't. Yeah, it sucks that police, firefighters, and teachers can't often afford to live nearby, but it's been that way for DECADES.
Once upon a time, CRT monitors were everywhere. LCDs were desirable but they were newer than CRTs, thus more expensive to make. But as the cost of manufacturing LCDs came down close to CRTs, they took over. All other things being equal, LCDs were more desirable than CRTs *AND* they were LESS expensive to ship. Ergo, they won.
Now, gas cars were everywhere. Electric cars are more desirable (in general) but they are newer than gas cars, thus more expensive to make. But as the cost of manufacturing electric cars comes down, they'll take over. All other things being equal, electric cars will be more desirable than gas cars (cheaper to "fill", quieter, etc.) *AND* they'll eventually be LESS expensive to make since they are much less complicated than gas cars. Ergo, they'll win.
LCDs had some other obstacles to overcome, eg. image quality, but eventually, that got worked out. Electric cars have some obstacles to overcome, eg. range and charge time, but that will get worked out. As of this minute, a Tesla Model S is just about perfect for most families, other than that it currently costs $90k. But remember when 15-20" LCD monitors were $2,000?
(I used computers to make an analogy about cars. Do I get a prize?)
Tromer said that the changes make GnuPG Ãoemore resistant to side-channel attack since the sequence of high-level arithmetic operations does not depend on the secret key.Ã
Hey, speaking of character encoding on Slashdot... - or - Hey, use the "Preview" button!
Bonus funny: that changed from a lowercase 'a' with a '^' to an uppercase 'A' with a '~' while posting.
Yup! And you should have a wife and a mistress. Because...
(tl;dr -- skip to the bold.)
An architect, an artist and an engineer were discussing whether it was better to spend time with the wife or a mistress. The architect said he enjoyed time with his wife, building a solid foundation for an enduring relationship.
The artist said he enjoyed time with his mistress, because of the passion and mystery he found there.
You just can't guess right what the engineer said. "I like both." "Both?" Engineer: "Yeah. If you have a wife and a mistress, they will each assume you are spending time with the other woman, and you can go to the lab and get some work done."
What if I DON'T want to read Wired ALL the time, but I DO want to OCCASIONALLY read an article? My choices are 1) pay a buck or 2) disable my adblocker and hope nothing bad happens to me?
Interesting. <i> is broken in some old places like here http://slashdot.org/journal/21... but it works in new posts today. FYI, once upon a time, someone thought it would be a good idea to treat <i> like a blockquote. Not sure why.
I'm late to the party but I'm hoping that the new powers that be will read every comment once the story has closed. Most of my ideas are either relatively simple code fixes, or fixable by human attention. And I think you'll find that unlike "ban ACs"/"keep ACs", there would be little debate around any of these.
1. Though it has a long, proud tradition, dupes should be avoided. Slashdot has gotten much, much better in the last few years, but it still happens every so often.
2. Spelling and grammar. PLEASE. And make sure the headlines are parse-able by humans.
3. Useful links. Don't link to a blog post about a blog post about a blog post about a story, unless they have useful commentary that you're highlighting. Just go right to the original. (Or a really good description/summary of it, if the original source is very technical, like a multi-hundred-page published paper.)
4. Fact-checking. Make sure this isn't a hoax. Also, in general, things should be new. Just because some guy just discovered something that someone else posted in 2011, that doesn't mean you need to post about it today.
5. Read the comments. Update the story as needed. If a bunch of people write to say that a story is wrong, fix it!
Other things not mentioned by me in 2008:
1. Use standard tags in standard ways. I think the <i> tag is still broken, though it works in preview mode. And neither
ordered
nor
unordered
lists work.
2. Add a "-1, factually incorrect" mod.
3. Add a rich-text editor. Just a simple one -- bold, ital, underline, UL, OL, subscript, superscript, quote, link, and a few others. (Yes, I know the "few others" are subject to much debate. But you can ship a few and revise alter as needed, right?) And/or support some flavor of Markdown. But allow HTML, because Markdown still sucks for common tasks like linking to URLs that end in parentheses, which many Wikipedia articles do. Eg., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
4. I'm not going to say that unicode support is easy, but it's probably not too hard to support a few more basic characters like smart quotes and em- and en-dashes so it doesn't look like ass when you copy and paste text from another website. Decent rich-text editors usually have this built in.
5. Make a decent mobile view. DO NOT a) worry about supporting every feature or b) make it overly app-like. (Related: make mobile apps?) ALL I WANT is to see a story's headline, the body, who posted it and when, and the number of comments. Something like this http://pixelcity.com/slashdot/... which I made years ago but got tired of maintaining after the Nth code change. Here is my old project page, which was one PHP script. AvantSlash does much more.
That's all I can think of for now. Just fix all that and then I'll share more ideas.:D
I like that you're here and participating in the discussion. I have a lot of ideas of how to make the site better (both to my own standards and to a large portion of the community's) BUT I won't bother to list them because I'm sure others will make all the same suggestions, and I'm sure other others will suggest the opposite in each case. And for those that everyone agrees on, there are probably technical hurdles to overcome.:-/ But in the unlikely event that you're short of ideas, feel free to reach out and I can totally help you fix this place.:-)
Come to think of it, you should go ahead and post a story: "What would you do to fix Slashdot?" I'd leave a comment there.
I can appreciate the difficulty of the task that lies ahead of you and the rest of the team and I wish you all well. I hope you're able to run a successful site without having to resort to sensational stories and infinitely obnoxious ads. I know it can't be easy to make money from a million angry, twitch-posting, ad-blocking nerds.
That said, make a nice T-shirt and I'll buy it. Basic black with a green / and a white . for $25... sold.
123Business.com loads its 50 resources in a few seconds, renders as quickly as the content loads, and works with JavaScript disabled. (And it only wants to load 4 scrips.) Yes please!
3D printers may never get there. Lego bricks are injection-molded to very tight tolerances -- 2 to 20 microns, depending on the source you read. (0.0008 to 0.00008 inches) Google "lego tolerance" to learn more. Even 20 microns is still less than a thousandth of an inch. Warm, freestanding plastic isn't currently close. Even if a printer can put down a 20-micron-thick layer of plastic, that doesn't mean you can build a vertical wall and maintain that precision the whole way.
And you can't even make a slightly larger brick and sand and polish it down to fit, because the inside dimensions are just as important for fitting bricks together. Anyone can make a precise cube, but making a 5-sided box with perfect 1.6mm thick walls is a whole different project.
Slashdot Mirror
Well-endowed girls everywhere will be complaining, "Why does Amazon always want me to jump up and down?!?"
I don't know if it's actually accurate or not, but it sure looks accurate.
My kingdom for an "edit" button! (Or, more brains.) The papers linked in TFS were from December 1975 and January 1976. So yeah, I'm not saying they need to be totally discarded, but we have tools commonly available now that were nearly unimaginable back then. I mean, it's possible that someone once said "wouldn't it be great if you could have a searchable electronic encyclopedia that fit in your pocket?" but I don't know how long they figured that would take to actually happen or if they accounted for that possibility in their findings.
40 years ago was 1976. The Apple 1 kit was introduced April 1, 1976. So any paper published was most likely written before the authors even knew of its existence. I'm pretty sure no Apple 1s wound up in schools. The Apple II was still a year away. Yeah, things have changed just a bit since then.
Do we have to have this argument every year? The reason SF is expensive has very little to do with recent trends in the tech industry -- they're just a current, visible scapegoat. There's a good, thorough overview here: http://techcrunch.com/2014/04/...
I was born in SF in the 70s and stayed in the area until after college. It has ALWAYS been expensive. It's a great place and I'd move back in a second if I could afford to, but I can't, so I don't. Yeah, it sucks that police, firefighters, and teachers can't often afford to live nearby, but it's been that way for DECADES.
This is a big improvement over v. 1.0, which were launched from the flare dispensers of stationary F-16s and F/A-18s. Good work.
I'm not worried, as long as there are still human users. Artificial intelligence is no match for genuine stupidity.
0, didn't know it existed.
> Why do so many successful people drink water?
link please.
Electric cars will take over.
Once upon a time, CRT monitors were everywhere. LCDs were desirable but they were newer than CRTs, thus more expensive to make. But as the cost of manufacturing LCDs came down close to CRTs, they took over. All other things being equal, LCDs were more desirable than CRTs *AND* they were LESS expensive to ship. Ergo, they won.
Now, gas cars were everywhere. Electric cars are more desirable (in general) but they are newer than gas cars, thus more expensive to make. But as the cost of manufacturing electric cars comes down, they'll take over. All other things being equal, electric cars will be more desirable than gas cars (cheaper to "fill", quieter, etc.) *AND* they'll eventually be LESS expensive to make since they are much less complicated than gas cars. Ergo, they'll win.
LCDs had some other obstacles to overcome, eg. image quality, but eventually, that got worked out. Electric cars have some obstacles to overcome, eg. range and charge time, but that will get worked out. As of this minute, a Tesla Model S is just about perfect for most families, other than that it currently costs $90k. But remember when 15-20" LCD monitors were $2,000?
(I used computers to make an analogy about cars. Do I get a prize?)
"Hey, look at my phone! It's playing this video through light networking!"
"Really? Let me see."
(turns phone around)
"Hey, it stopped playing."
:-/
This thing where some stories show up collapsed on the front page? Kill that. If it's worth posting, it's worth showing.
Example: pixelcity.com/collapsed.png
whipslash/CowboyNeal in 2016! Seriously, this is awesome.
Loving the real-time improvements!!!!!11 :D :D :D
Tromer said that the changes make GnuPG Ãoemore resistant to side-channel attack since the sequence of high-level arithmetic operations does not depend on the secret key.Ã
Hey, speaking of character encoding on Slashdot...
- or -
Hey, use the "Preview" button!
Bonus funny: that changed from a lowercase 'a' with a '^' to an uppercase 'A' with a '~' while posting.
Yup! And you should have a wife and a mistress. Because...
(tl;dr -- skip to the bold.)
An architect, an artist and an engineer were discussing whether it was better to spend time with the wife or a mistress. The architect said he enjoyed time with his wife, building a solid foundation for an enduring relationship.
The artist said he enjoyed time with his mistress, because of the passion and mystery he found there.
You just can't guess right what the engineer said. "I like both." "Both?" Engineer: "Yeah. If you have a wife and a mistress, they will each assume you are spending time with the other woman, and you can go to the lab and get some work done."
One more thing: all pages should function 100% and look fine when viewed with JavaScript disabled.
What if I DON'T want to read Wired ALL the time, but I DO want to OCCASIONALLY read an article? My choices are 1) pay a buck or 2) disable my adblocker and hope nothing bad happens to me?
Interesting. <i> is broken in some old places like here http://slashdot.org/journal/21... but it works in new posts today. FYI, once upon a time, someone thought it would be a good idea to treat <i> like a blockquote. Not sure why.
I'm late to the party but I'm hoping that the new powers that be will read every comment once the story has closed. Most of my ideas are either relatively simple code fixes, or fixable by human attention. And I think you'll find that unlike "ban ACs"/"keep ACs", there would be little debate around any of these.
Let's see, how many of my ideas from eight years ago are still relevant?
1. Though it has a long, proud tradition, dupes should be avoided. Slashdot has gotten much, much better in the last few years, but it still happens every so often.
2. Spelling and grammar. PLEASE. And make sure the headlines are parse-able by humans.
3. Useful links. Don't link to a blog post about a blog post about a blog post about a story, unless they have useful commentary that you're highlighting. Just go right to the original. (Or a really good description/summary of it, if the original source is very technical, like a multi-hundred-page published paper.)
4. Fact-checking. Make sure this isn't a hoax. Also, in general, things should be new. Just because some guy just discovered something that someone else posted in 2011, that doesn't mean you need to post about it today.
5. Read the comments. Update the story as needed. If a bunch of people write to say that a story is wrong, fix it!
Other things not mentioned by me in 2008:
1. Use standard tags in standard ways. I think the <i> tag is still broken, though it works in preview mode. And neither
nor
lists work.
2. Add a "-1, factually incorrect" mod.
3. Add a rich-text editor. Just a simple one -- bold, ital, underline, UL, OL, subscript, superscript, quote, link, and a few others. (Yes, I know the "few others" are subject to much debate. But you can ship a few and revise alter as needed, right?) And/or support some flavor of Markdown. But allow HTML, because Markdown still sucks for common tasks like linking to URLs that end in parentheses, which many Wikipedia articles do. Eg., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
4. I'm not going to say that unicode support is easy, but it's probably not too hard to support a few more basic characters like smart quotes and em- and en-dashes so it doesn't look like ass when you copy and paste text from another website. Decent rich-text editors usually have this built in.
5. Make a decent mobile view. DO NOT a) worry about supporting every feature or b) make it overly app-like. (Related: make mobile apps?) ALL I WANT is to see a story's headline, the body, who posted it and when, and the number of comments. Something like this http://pixelcity.com/slashdot/... which I made years ago but got tired of maintaining after the Nth code change. Here is my old project page, which was one PHP script. AvantSlash does much more.
That's all I can think of for now. Just fix all that and then I'll share more ideas. :D
I like that you're here and participating in the discussion. I have a lot of ideas of how to make the site better (both to my own standards and to a large portion of the community's) BUT I won't bother to list them because I'm sure others will make all the same suggestions, and I'm sure other others will suggest the opposite in each case. And for those that everyone agrees on, there are probably technical hurdles to overcome. :-/ But in the unlikely event that you're short of ideas, feel free to reach out and I can totally help you fix this place. :-)
Come to think of it, you should go ahead and post a story: "What would you do to fix Slashdot?" I'd leave a comment there.
I can appreciate the difficulty of the task that lies ahead of you and the rest of the team and I wish you all well. I hope you're able to run a successful site without having to resort to sensational stories and infinitely obnoxious ads. I know it can't be easy to make money from a million angry, twitch-posting, ad-blocking nerds.
That said, make a nice T-shirt and I'll buy it. Basic black with a green / and a white . for $25... sold.
Good luck!
123Business.com loads its 50 resources in a few seconds, renders as quickly as the content loads, and works with JavaScript disabled. (And it only wants to load 4 scrips.) Yes please!
> Other things to keep in mind:
> *
One more -- fucking render <UL>s.
And then, check out my sig. :-)
If you sell a new one every 2 years at $400/each, thats still almost 3 billion dollars a year in revenue. Drop it to $200/phone and its still 1.3b.
What happens when you drop that to $40/phone? http://www.microsoft.com/en-us...
3D printers may never get there. Lego bricks are injection-molded to very tight tolerances -- 2 to 20 microns, depending on the source you read. (0.0008 to 0.00008 inches) Google "lego tolerance" to learn more. Even 20 microns is still less than a thousandth of an inch. Warm, freestanding plastic isn't currently close. Even if a printer can put down a 20-micron-thick layer of plastic, that doesn't mean you can build a vertical wall and maintain that precision the whole way.
And you can't even make a slightly larger brick and sand and polish it down to fit, because the inside dimensions are just as important for fitting bricks together. Anyone can make a precise cube, but making a 5-sided box with perfect 1.6mm thick walls is a whole different project.