Try again. T-Mobile has subscription-based WiFi hotspots in popular locations like Starbucks. Seems like this move is about lining T-Mobile's pockets just as much as regular cell service.
seriously, how come this is the first that i've heard of this kind of idea?
You want the honest answer or the sugarcoated one?
Sugar: JScience is getting attention now because Sun is standardizing it through the JCP.
Honest: Because you've been living in Microsoft la-la land? JScience has been around in the form of the J.A.D.E. library for at least 5 or 6 years; probably longer. Jean-Marie has worked diligently over the years to make sure that Java has had top-notch support for scientific programming. The fact that he's getting recognition by the JCP members is nothing short of splendid. He deserves every bit of it.:)
Couple this with a nice, but small capacitor, with a capacity for 2-3 shocks (probably 5-15mA per discharge will be sufficient), and you've got a nice little pacemaker that recharges itself.
Amusingly, self-charging pacemakers have existed for the better part of 40 years. Pacemakers used to be powered by radioisotopes which had a power-producing lifespan far in excess of the patient's remaining expected lifespan. The only catch with such pacemakers was that they had to be removed after death to recover the valuable Pu-238 materials for remanufacturing and reuse.
According to this article by a Dr. David Prutchi PhD, the devices fell out of favor due to the availability of lithium batteries capable of lasting a decade before replacement. However, one does have to wonder if the public fear of all things nuclear didn't contribute to the downfall of such devices.
The early generation Laserdiscs had analog audio tracks, I believe in PWM, later augmented by genuine digital encoding after chip technology made it less expensive to do.
Indeed. Later Laserdisc recordings used PCM for audio, making them sort of a hybrid between Laserdisc and Compact Disc technology.
eight-bit micros in the early 1972s were slow
I presume you mean microchips and not microcomputers? Sorry, you had me confused for a moment there. I was wondering where in the world you were going to find a proper microcomputer back in 1972!:-P
FWIW, decoding would have been done on custom chips rather than the early 8-bit microprocessors. Such processors sacrificed far too much power in order to be generic computational machines. One could thus get better performance out of a dedicated chip. It would be able to run at a higher clock rate and chew through more data per second. Unfortunately, it still wouldn't have been enough to handle a complex datastream like MPEG. There just wasn't enough bandwidth in the systems!
(The slowness of CPUs is still true today. It's just that high performance CPUs are so readily available that it doesn't make sense to waste high-end fab facilities on application-specific chips. Thus ASIC technology generally lags behind the cutting edge Intel chips.)
Bit-slice chips could have handled it but weren't cost-effective for consumers.
If you look at a lot of the early multimedia work, they actually did create designs in a very similar fashion. The SuperPaint framebuffer, for example, was constructed of hundreds of memory chips all wired together to provide a single, gigantic byte-shift register. It was usable, but had some odd limitations. (e.g. to change a pixel you had to wait for that byte to shift back around into the working part of the register)
In any case, let's just say that SuperPaint wasn't exactly affordable.;)
Russell may have conceived of a technology, but Gregg was the first to actually implement a working means to digitally handle audio and music on a disc for mass consumption.
Just to pick at a nit here, Gregg's work was an analog recording, not digital. If you look at the direct derivitive of Gregg's work - the LaserDisc - you'll find that the data is encoded in a Pulse Width Modulation format. This allowed for NTSC signals to be directly recorded to discs long before the invention of digital encoding technologies like MPEG.
In fact, the microprocessor technology necessary to decode a digital datastream into television quality video cost millions of dollars back when the LaserDisc was introduced to the market. During development of the format, the necessary framebuffer devices were still in development and wouldn't reach truecolor capabilties until the New York Institute of Technology experiment in 1977. (They took three 8-bit, grayscale framebuffers manufactured by Evans & Sutherland and wired them together to create a 24-bit display.)
So as you can imagine, an analog design was far superior to a digital video format back when Laserdiscs were introduced.:-)
go back in time and give him the designs for the bluRay.
It wouldn't help anything. Today's optical discs are based on the continual refinement of manufacturing processes. You could go back in time and explain how to make a BluRay disc and player, but no one would be able to manufacture discs with tight enough tolerances or microchips of sufficient speed and power to play back the data stream. And that's leaving out the issue of finding an HDTV set to make full use of the format. (HDTV was invented in 1969, but wasn't commercially viable until the 90's.)
Most people don't think about it, but inventions are driven as much by infrastructure as they are by smart people. If you lack the necessary industrial base, having all the technical knowledge in the world won't help you. (Witness a lot of third-world countries. The knowledge for a lot of technology is available, but they can't manufacture it.) To close the gap you still need to build tools which you refine and/or use to build better tools which you refine and/or use to build better tools, so on and so forth.
I really haven't seen any hard evidence that all that many 'web jockeys' were getting some $100k salary, unless they lived in the valley
I'm guessing that's what they're referring to. Though it's kind of amusing that they'd be using the example of HTML and Javascript, seeing as how those two are a cornerstone of Web2.0. In fact, Javascripting has gone from a simple thing that you assign to juniors to a full-up development language that now you need sophisticated developers to wrangle. Welcome, Web2.0.
Of course, I'm also bemused by the idea that the Dot-Com "culture" belonged to the Dot-Coms. The Dot-Commers got the idea from the Valley technology companies back in the 80's. Back when Atari stomped the earth, Microsoft had to actually compete, a B&W Macintosh was the height of technology, and new microcircuit inventions were popping up every other day. While those companies didn't go to the extremes that Dot-Com companies went to, they were still well-known for their coddling of developers. Loose dress-codes (shocking!), arcade machines in the office (gasp!), flexible working hours (aka 24x7), comfortable environments (dibs on the bean bags!), and just a general attitude of "do what comes natural" were the way that Valley offices were run from the day that Nolen Bushnell founded Atari on forward to today. (Minus a few wrong turns for "seriousing up" of such companies. Yar, I'm looking at you.)
No wonder you're confused. He's not saying that in the slightest. Did you read the interview? The actual interview, not the one filtered through Slashdot and the media?
The truth is that very few games are developed without reference to past games. There's always going to be titles that build on a previous mechanic or game. But there's a fine line between that and very bold-faced rip-offs that aren't adding anything to the game and are just trying to make a quick buck.
They think they can do a quick knock-off to help pay the bills and then they can work on their big magnum opus but that rarely happens. [...] The casual space should be encouraging a huge amount of creative design but there's a lot of imitation and that's a shame. In case that isn't percolating, he's saying that you're not going to get rich off of a quick Tetris clone. You might, however, get rich off of a new twist on Tetris that shows high production values and original thinking.
Which makes perfect sense when you think about it. How many times has Tetris been copied? Enough to where no one is interested in purchasing a clone, right? So why is Tetris DS successful? Or for that matter, why was it given an IGN Choice Award? And why did people rush out and buy Tetris Worlds for their PS2s? It's all just Tetris, so people should be tired of it, right? Why would they pay money for those variations when your average software developer can barely give away his Tetris clone?
Production values and originality. Learn it, live it, love it.
He's implying that they're stupid? I don't see that at all. What I see is that he's trying to share his experience, for better or for worse. Like he said, the Bejeweled clones don't really impact their market. His point is that if the market wants to grow, it's going to have to find its own killer titles.
Read as a whole, I get two things out of what he said:
1. Popcap has experience with making clones, so they feel like they are in a good position to comment on it.
2. Copying game mechanics is pretty normal for the industry. But if you're going to do it, do it right. Add your own flare, make it interesting, and above all try to differentiate yourself.
No, I don't know. The guy is trying to tell people how to make money and they're getting all upset about it. They act as if he said that they're taking money from Popcap by making clones. Which he didn't say. You know?
Ok, I was about to jump in here with a frothing at the mouth reply of, "After all the millions of dollars you've made on a stupid flash game that's been ported to nearly every platform in existence, you have the gall to complain about cheap ripoffs? Make something new!"
Then I RTFA. The original interview, not the one linked to.
The Popcap rep actually says this: "There are a couple of Bejeweled variants like Jewel Quest that have carved out there own niche but it hasn't caused a huge problem for us."
He then goes on to express a concern about indies copying each other. Not about it impacting PopCap's bottom line, but about the Indie industry as a whole. Specifically, he says this about other developers:
They think they can do a quick knock-off to help pay the bills and then they can work on their big magnum opus but that rarely happens. Once they start down that road of making rip-off games you never make a huge fortune off it and you end up working hand to mouth. They don't have time to work on larger projects that take a risk. And that has a negative effect on the industry as a whole. It should be a really creative opportunity to have a small team that has the luxury of creating whatever it wants and getting to market without the usual cumbersome problems that come from publishers and other factors. The casual space should be encouraging a huge amount of creative design but there's a lot of imitation and that's a shame. Translation: If you make copies to make a quick buck, all you're ever going to make are quick copies. Try to improve upon formulas and show some originality in your games.
So Bechtolsheim says Sun has been "somewhat absent" from the supercomputer market in the last few years. OK, I'll bite. Exactly what markets has Sun been going gangbusters in since about 1999?
Funny, I was just wondering when exactly Sun was in the Super Computer market. Sun was a low-end Unix machine company that transformed itself into a high-end Unix server/mainframe company. (I remember drooling over the brand new 64-way specs of the E10000 Starfire.) AFAIK, they never even touched the domain of supercomputing. But maybe I'm missing something?
You're not seriously comparing the complexity of a Gameboy emulator to that of a Nintendo 64 emulator, are you?
a 144 KiB Windows executable
That executable links to no shared libraries, system calls, drivers, or anything else, right?
And it's not just the code size. You need to consider what kind of data the emulator might need to track at runtime. The console memory is only half the battle. You need to track the general state just like any other program. Some advanced features like JITting (an actual possibility since Nintendo knows both their system and their software) will chew through memory like candy.
That's not what he's saying. What he's saying is that when aluminum wings break off, there's minimal damage to the surrounding areas. Carbon fiber breakage, on the other hand, has the potential to explode into bits and pieces of highly energetic shards that can kill, maim, and otherwise cause general destruction.
Long story short.
Aluminum: Safe to test in indoor testing facility. Carbon Fiber: Likely to destroy the test facility and anyone unlucky enough to be in it.
The largest game on the Virtual console is only 32MB, being Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.
Indeed. Which would leave only 32MB of memory Subtract 4MB for the N64 RAMBUS memory and you're down to 28. Another 4MB for the expansion pack when in use and we're down to 24. (Though I don't think any games use the expansion pack yet?) 24-28MB is the amount of space the emulator+OS has to fit within. That's not a whole lot of space by modern standards. While I think Nintendo could do it, they may be playing it safe to allow for bigger games in the future.
And the Wii doesn't have 64MB of RAM, it has 88MB.
The Wii has 64MB of GDDR3 main memory, 24MB of 1T-SRAM (!) for the GPU's use, and and extra 3MB of GPU cache/working memory for the framebuffer and whatnot. Basically, the 24MB isn't really open for general purpose usage. At least, that's not how the known specs present it.
Keep in mind though the 512MB of built-in memory and (current) inability to load games/saves directly from SD cards.
I don't think that the SD Card limitation is an overall Wii limitation, but rather an issue with the Virtual Console emulation. If you think about it, the VC games are all games that originally ran off of ROM. If Nintendo is using the internal flash as virtual ROM rather than loading it into memory (and let's admit, there are only 64MB of RAM) then the SD Card might not provide fast enough data transfer rates to ensure full-speed emulation in all instances. Especially for larger games on faster systems like the N64 and upcoming NeoGeo.
It's not clear yet how much support for the SD slot the Nintendo devkit currently provides, but there is still a high probability that running WiiWare games off of SD cards will be supported by the time those games launch.:)
Look just above the comment prefs box at the top of every article. (Just below the summary, above the comments themselves.) There should be a small checkbox on the right side of the dark gray area that says, "I am willing to help test Slashdot's New Discussion System." Checking it activates the discussion system of DOOM. Unchecking it brings you the DOOM and GLOOM that we're all familiar with.
Professionals run their own damn servers with their own damn XMPP-implementation.
If you don't have anything better to do than run your own email server, then you're not much of a professional. I think every professional has been there and done that, but the maintenance and time requirements are too demanding in the long-term. It's much easier to farm out your email and IM to a service like GMail, where you have a dedicated set of professionals ensuring that you have the latest upgrades, maximum performance, and best spam protection that our eggheads at large have managed to develop.
That's not to say we don't use Exchange or Lotus Notes in our day jobs. (Though I often wish my company would just sign up for GMail for Domains.) However, all our IM activities and personal correspondence go through something much more streamlined, portable, and easy to use.
I do have to admit that the system has improved greatly since I last tore it to shreds. Unfortunately, I still can't stomach it. The moment I turn it on, all the posts I want to read disappear. In order to get some semblance of a reasonable display, I have to drag all the comment preferences to the bottom of the slider-box, thus showing me a nested view of all posts. Which raises the question: why didn't I use the nested view in the first place?
My feeling on the system is that the Slashdot editors are excited about the possibilities that DHTML & AJAX provide. Which is perfectly normal. Unfortunately, the simplest solution is sometimes still the best solution. Having a long page of nested comments allows me to read everything top to bottom very quickly while still keeping track of who's replying to whom. (Most of the time, anyway.) The only improvement I can see is to allow comments and their sub-threads to be collapsed. That would provide an easy way to mark a thread as having been read. (In case I lose my place on the page, for whatever reason.) But I don't see any real reason for AJAX as the content of the page greatly outweighs the size of its interface.
If I have questions about Slashdot, such as "What does that No Karma Bonus checkbox do?", where should I ask them?
I just ask in an addendum to my post. Always worked for me.
BTW, "No Karma Bonus" turns off your extra "bonus" point for having good karma. Thus checking that box would make your post show up as +1 rather than +2. It used to be more useful when only a handful of posters had it, but now all it takes is to hang around long enough and you'll get the +1 bonus. Sooo, you can mostly ignore it if you wish. I still use the checkbox when I'm saying something that I don't want to stand out (e.g. replying "Good catch!" to someone) and yet don't want to make a signed AC post for.
Slashdot Mirror
Try again. T-Mobile has subscription-based WiFi hotspots in popular locations like Starbucks. Seems like this move is about lining T-Mobile's pockets just as much as regular cell service.
You want the honest answer or the sugarcoated one?
Sugar: JScience is getting attention now because Sun is standardizing it through the JCP.
Honest: Because you've been living in Microsoft la-la land? JScience has been around in the form of the J.A.D.E. library for at least 5 or 6 years; probably longer. Jean-Marie has worked diligently over the years to make sure that Java has had top-notch support for scientific programming. The fact that he's getting recognition by the JCP members is nothing short of splendid. He deserves every bit of it.
Amusingly, self-charging pacemakers have existed for the better part of 40 years. Pacemakers used to be powered by radioisotopes which had a power-producing lifespan far in excess of the patient's remaining expected lifespan. The only catch with such pacemakers was that they had to be removed after death to recover the valuable Pu-238 materials for remanufacturing and reuse.
According to this article by a Dr. David Prutchi PhD, the devices fell out of favor due to the availability of lithium batteries capable of lasting a decade before replacement. However, one does have to wonder if the public fear of all things nuclear didn't contribute to the downfall of such devices.
Indeed. Later Laserdisc recordings used PCM for audio, making them sort of a hybrid between Laserdisc and Compact Disc technology.
I presume you mean microchips and not microcomputers? Sorry, you had me confused for a moment there. I was wondering where in the world you were going to find a proper microcomputer back in 1972!
FWIW, decoding would have been done on custom chips rather than the early 8-bit microprocessors. Such processors sacrificed far too much power in order to be generic computational machines. One could thus get better performance out of a dedicated chip. It would be able to run at a higher clock rate and chew through more data per second. Unfortunately, it still wouldn't have been enough to handle a complex datastream like MPEG. There just wasn't enough bandwidth in the systems!
(The slowness of CPUs is still true today. It's just that high performance CPUs are so readily available that it doesn't make sense to waste high-end fab facilities on application-specific chips. Thus ASIC technology generally lags behind the cutting edge Intel chips.)
If you look at a lot of the early multimedia work, they actually did create designs in a very similar fashion. The SuperPaint framebuffer, for example, was constructed of hundreds of memory chips all wired together to provide a single, gigantic byte-shift register. It was usable, but had some odd limitations. (e.g. to change a pixel you had to wait for that byte to shift back around into the working part of the register)
In any case, let's just say that SuperPaint wasn't exactly affordable.
Just to pick at a nit here, Gregg's work was an analog recording, not digital. If you look at the direct derivitive of Gregg's work - the LaserDisc - you'll find that the data is encoded in a Pulse Width Modulation format. This allowed for NTSC signals to be directly recorded to discs long before the invention of digital encoding technologies like MPEG.
In fact, the microprocessor technology necessary to decode a digital datastream into television quality video cost millions of dollars back when the LaserDisc was introduced to the market. During development of the format, the necessary framebuffer devices were still in development and wouldn't reach truecolor capabilties until the New York Institute of Technology experiment in 1977. (They took three 8-bit, grayscale framebuffers manufactured by Evans & Sutherland and wired them together to create a 24-bit display.)
So as you can imagine, an analog design was far superior to a digital video format back when Laserdiscs were introduced.
It wouldn't help anything. Today's optical discs are based on the continual refinement of manufacturing processes. You could go back in time and explain how to make a BluRay disc and player, but no one would be able to manufacture discs with tight enough tolerances or microchips of sufficient speed and power to play back the data stream. And that's leaving out the issue of finding an HDTV set to make full use of the format. (HDTV was invented in 1969, but wasn't commercially viable until the 90's.)
Most people don't think about it, but inventions are driven as much by infrastructure as they are by smart people. If you lack the necessary industrial base, having all the technical knowledge in the world won't help you. (Witness a lot of third-world countries. The knowledge for a lot of technology is available, but they can't manufacture it.) To close the gap you still need to build tools which you refine and/or use to build better tools which you refine and/or use to build better tools, so on and so forth.
Right you are! So I imagine you remember the name of the guy that "Yar" got its name from? ;)
Nah, Katamari is going to be on the Wii now. It was too difficult to port to the PS3. Instead, Sony is going for "Nada THREE!"
(Don't get me started on how the Playstation is like television. 5,000,000 options, nothing worth playing at the moment.)
I'm guessing that's what they're referring to. Though it's kind of amusing that they'd be using the example of HTML and Javascript, seeing as how those two are a cornerstone of Web2.0. In fact, Javascripting has gone from a simple thing that you assign to juniors to a full-up development language that now you need sophisticated developers to wrangle. Welcome, Web2.0.
Of course, I'm also bemused by the idea that the Dot-Com "culture" belonged to the Dot-Coms. The Dot-Commers got the idea from the Valley technology companies back in the 80's. Back when Atari stomped the earth, Microsoft had to actually compete, a B&W Macintosh was the height of technology, and new microcircuit inventions were popping up every other day. While those companies didn't go to the extremes that Dot-Com companies went to, they were still well-known for their coddling of developers. Loose dress-codes (shocking!), arcade machines in the office (gasp!), flexible working hours (aka 24x7), comfortable environments (dibs on the bean bags!), and just a general attitude of "do what comes natural" were the way that Valley offices were run from the day that Nolen Bushnell founded Atari on forward to today. (Minus a few wrong turns for "seriousing up" of such companies. Yar, I'm looking at you.)
*THWACK* WAKE UP!
No wonder you're confused. He's not saying that in the slightest. Did you read the interview? The actual interview, not the one filtered through Slashdot and the media? The truth is that very few games are developed without reference to past games. There's always going to be titles that build on a previous mechanic or game. But there's a fine line between that and very bold-faced rip-offs that aren't adding anything to the game and are just trying to make a quick buck.
They think they can do a quick knock-off to help pay the bills and then they can work on their big magnum opus but that rarely happens. [...] The casual space should be encouraging a huge amount of creative design but there's a lot of imitation and that's a shame. In case that isn't percolating, he's saying that you're not going to get rich off of a quick Tetris clone. You might, however, get rich off of a new twist on Tetris that shows high production values and original thinking.
Which makes perfect sense when you think about it. How many times has Tetris been copied? Enough to where no one is interested in purchasing a clone, right? So why is Tetris DS successful? Or for that matter, why was it given an IGN Choice Award? And why did people rush out and buy Tetris Worlds for their PS2s? It's all just Tetris, so people should be tired of it, right? Why would they pay money for those variations when your average software developer can barely give away his Tetris clone?
Production values and originality. Learn it, live it, love it.
"You're not making any money" isn't a good reason? Wow. Just wow.
He's implying that they're stupid? I don't see that at all. What I see is that he's trying to share his experience, for better or for worse. Like he said, the Bejeweled clones don't really impact their market. His point is that if the market wants to grow, it's going to have to find its own killer titles.
Read as a whole, I get two things out of what he said:
1. Popcap has experience with making clones, so they feel like they are in a good position to comment on it.
2. Copying game mechanics is pretty normal for the industry. But if you're going to do it, do it right. Add your own flare, make it interesting, and above all try to differentiate yourself.
No, I don't know. The guy is trying to tell people how to make money and they're getting all upset about it. They act as if he said that they're taking money from Popcap by making clones. Which he didn't say. You know?
Then I RTFA. The original interview, not the one linked to.
The Popcap rep actually says this: "There are a couple of Bejeweled variants like Jewel Quest that have carved out there own niche but it hasn't caused a huge problem for us."
He then goes on to express a concern about indies copying each other. Not about it impacting PopCap's bottom line, but about the Indie industry as a whole. Specifically, he says this about other developers: They think they can do a quick knock-off to help pay the bills and then they can work on their big magnum opus but that rarely happens. Once they start down that road of making rip-off games you never make a huge fortune off it and you end up working hand to mouth. They don't have time to work on larger projects that take a risk. And that has a negative effect on the industry as a whole. It should be a really creative opportunity to have a small team that has the luxury of creating whatever it wants and getting to market without the usual cumbersome problems that come from publishers and other factors. The casual space should be encouraging a huge amount of creative design but there's a lot of imitation and that's a shame. Translation: If you make copies to make a quick buck, all you're ever going to make are quick copies. Try to improve upon formulas and show some originality in your games.
That's all he said. Really.
Funny, I was just wondering when exactly Sun was in the Super Computer market. Sun was a low-end Unix machine company that transformed itself into a high-end Unix server/mainframe company. (I remember drooling over the brand new 64-way specs of the E10000 Starfire.) AFAIK, they never even touched the domain of supercomputing. But maybe I'm missing something?
That executable links to no shared libraries, system calls, drivers, or anything else, right?
And it's not just the code size. You need to consider what kind of data the emulator might need to track at runtime. The console memory is only half the battle. You need to track the general state just like any other program. Some advanced features like JITting (an actual possibility since Nintendo knows both their system and their software) will chew through memory like candy.
That's not what he's saying. What he's saying is that when aluminum wings break off, there's minimal damage to the surrounding areas. Carbon fiber breakage, on the other hand, has the potential to explode into bits and pieces of highly energetic shards that can kill, maim, and otherwise cause general destruction.
Long story short.
Aluminum: Safe to test in indoor testing facility.
Carbon Fiber: Likely to destroy the test facility and anyone unlucky enough to be in it.
Indeed. Which would leave only 32MB of memory Subtract 4MB for the N64 RAMBUS memory and you're down to 28. Another 4MB for the expansion pack when in use and we're down to 24. (Though I don't think any games use the expansion pack yet?) 24-28MB is the amount of space the emulator+OS has to fit within. That's not a whole lot of space by modern standards. While I think Nintendo could do it, they may be playing it safe to allow for bigger games in the future.
The Wii has 64MB of GDDR3 main memory, 24MB of 1T-SRAM (!) for the GPU's use, and and extra 3MB of GPU cache/working memory for the framebuffer and whatnot. Basically, the 24MB isn't really open for general purpose usage. At least, that's not how the known specs present it.
It should be right above that, in the dark gray area. Though it sounds like people with the Michigan Testing gizmo don't have it.
I don't think that the SD Card limitation is an overall Wii limitation, but rather an issue with the Virtual Console emulation. If you think about it, the VC games are all games that originally ran off of ROM. If Nintendo is using the internal flash as virtual ROM rather than loading it into memory (and let's admit, there are only 64MB of RAM) then the SD Card might not provide fast enough data transfer rates to ensure full-speed emulation in all instances. Especially for larger games on faster systems like the N64 and upcoming NeoGeo.
It's not clear yet how much support for the SD slot the Nintendo devkit currently provides, but there is still a high probability that running WiiWare games off of SD cards will be supported by the time those games launch.
Look just above the comment prefs box at the top of every article. (Just below the summary, above the comments themselves.) There should be a small checkbox on the right side of the dark gray area that says, "I am willing to help test Slashdot's New Discussion System." Checking it activates the discussion system of DOOM. Unchecking it brings you the DOOM and GLOOM that we're all familiar with.
If you don't have anything better to do than run your own email server, then you're not much of a professional. I think every professional has been there and done that, but the maintenance and time requirements are too demanding in the long-term. It's much easier to farm out your email and IM to a service like GMail, where you have a dedicated set of professionals ensuring that you have the latest upgrades, maximum performance, and best spam protection that our eggheads at large have managed to develop.
That's not to say we don't use Exchange or Lotus Notes in our day jobs. (Though I often wish my company would just sign up for GMail for Domains.) However, all our IM activities and personal correspondence go through something much more streamlined, portable, and easy to use.
I do have to admit that the system has improved greatly since I last tore it to shreds. Unfortunately, I still can't stomach it. The moment I turn it on, all the posts I want to read disappear. In order to get some semblance of a reasonable display, I have to drag all the comment preferences to the bottom of the slider-box, thus showing me a nested view of all posts. Which raises the question: why didn't I use the nested view in the first place?
My feeling on the system is that the Slashdot editors are excited about the possibilities that DHTML & AJAX provide. Which is perfectly normal. Unfortunately, the simplest solution is sometimes still the best solution. Having a long page of nested comments allows me to read everything top to bottom very quickly while still keeping track of who's replying to whom. (Most of the time, anyway.) The only improvement I can see is to allow comments and their sub-threads to be collapsed. That would provide an easy way to mark a thread as having been read. (In case I lose my place on the page, for whatever reason.) But I don't see any real reason for AJAX as the content of the page greatly outweighs the size of its interface.
I just ask in an addendum to my post. Always worked for me.
BTW, "No Karma Bonus" turns off your extra "bonus" point for having good karma. Thus checking that box would make your post show up as +1 rather than +2. It used to be more useful when only a handful of posters had it, but now all it takes is to hang around long enough and you'll get the +1 bonus. Sooo, you can mostly ignore it if you wish. I still use the checkbox when I'm saying something that I don't want to stand out (e.g. replying "Good catch!" to someone) and yet don't want to make a signed AC post for.