Well, the example I gave was the network. Yes, chroot does help seperate groups processes (although it's important to understand the seperation is insecure by design, that is any root process can easily escape a chroot environment and have access to the main file system, which means you're limited in what types of process you can run if you want a chroot'd environment to be "secure"), but there do exist operating system functions that are not and never have been accessable via the filesystem.
The example I gave, networking, is part of the reason for LXC. LXC in turn is inspired by (and developed by the same developers as) an independent project called OpenVZ, which is used by many hosting providers to provide a kinda poor-man's VPS service. Each LXC domain has its own virtual network device, with its own IP address. Each LXC domain has a secured filesystem, with no risk of a "break out".
As I said, my understanding is that zones is similar in concept to LXC, not chroot. chroot only covers a small part of what zones does. As an aside, chroot is actually a feature of every version of Unix since version 7 (late seventies/early eighties), if zones and chroot were equivalent, it'd be a redundant feature.
I believe zones are closer to Linux's LXC system than chroot. chroot is just a filesystem thing, zones/LXC is an entire wrapper around a tree of processes that covers everything - the file system, the network, and so on.
Kinda the opposite. The entire point of modern transit-less suburbia is social engineering. The entire idea was to force automotive usage, largely because a particular breed of crackpot libertarian (and unfortunately not even out-of-the-mainstream type - even Margaret Thatcher spoke in support at times) believes cars are "pro-freedom" and obsessed about that in the first half of the last century.
Transit developed pretty naturally in the last half of the nineteenth century and when implemented in an organic way is usually profitable and popular. Of course, today, it's rarely profitable, especially in the US, but that's in part due to two major reasons.
The first is that the suburban movement has made it pretty damn near impossible to implement in most parts of the US, and so what's there is expensive and difficult to use.
The other is that in places like, for example, New York City, the high demand for in-city living (in a country starved of urban development, what urban space survives is in extremely short supply) means living costs are already through the roof, and the city itself needs to ensure basic services are kept affordable or else lose people able to fill essential but underpaid jobs. In some cases, like transit, this is just good policy anyway, the cost of expanding the road system far outweighs any subsidy you give transit to ensure its ongoing popularity.
Transit came first. Social engineering was used to get people off transit by the far right. Politicians have refused, over and over again, to do more than dip their toe in transit despite the massive popularity of such a position until relatively recently. And now you're claiming that it's transit that's social engineering? Bollocks.
The dialog has been going on from the start, via a variety of different means (FFS the little warning box that kept popping up pointed out they wanted feedback.) They posted a story yesterday, but suggesting that they weren't going to do so if people didn't vandalize Slashdot seems a massive leap of logic. This is a major change, they released a preview and shoved it in front of a large subset of Slashdot in order to test it - why oh why would you think a forum to discuss the changes wouldn't be on the way? Why bother with a limited preview if you're not interested in feedback?
As far as the "faceless mob" thing goes, sorry, but I guess if you lie down with dogs... what are we getting at the moment? Thoughtful journal entries on how Beta could be improved? Explanations of why Beta misses the mark and D2 is the mostest awesomest thing ever in relevent subthreads? Or huge quantities of crap posted to every discussion forum containing a phrase that rhymes with "Buck Pita" and demands that Dice cancel the project, with only vague, usually formatting complaints, actually mentioned?
Add your voice, however well intentioned, to that mob, and, well, you become a part of it, much as you wanted to complain about the length of Dr Frankenstein's lawn and decided the best way to do it is to grab a torch and pitchfork and join that angry crowd that's heading up to his castle.
No, there is dialog. There have been multiple stories posted about the subject, there's also email and even phone contact. There's no reason, zero, to believe that spamming forums about Sony, jQuery, and so on, is a legitimate form of communication but that posting to the normal channels is not.
And let's be honest here, this, while repeated over and over and over again by the Anti-Beta spammers, is a flat out lie:
At the moment, there is no dialog
There is. Changes are being made. Dice has officially changed position from "We'll change it in a few months" to "We'll change it only when it has feature parity", which is a fairly substantial step and takes care of about 90% of what the spammers are complaining about.
And I see little tweaks here and there going on in real time, as if... maybe they're updating Beta according to user feedback?
Spamming threads, vandalizing the discussion system, is not a reasonable approach here. You're punishing the contributors, while having the gall to claim you speak for us.
You don't. You're terrible people. I can't wait for you guys to start your boycott. Please make it permanent.
This is called vandalism, not free speech. Free speech would imply that you're attempting to impart an actual message to people able to affect change. Standing on a street corner yelling "Down with Zoning Ordinance 94!" is free speech because insofar as you're inconveniencing someone, you're doing so temporarily and aiming your message at people the vast majority of whom are voters.
I have no say in Slashdot's redesign. You are permanently making it virtually impossible for me to engage in discussions by vandalising them. You are not addressing your protests at those who matter because they're not reading discussions about Sony to try to get feedback on Beta. They've started actual forums for that topic.
So no, it's not free speech. It may be the imparting of views, but so is me taking a random passer by in Iran and screaming "Vladimir Putin sucks" over and over again so she can't hear who she's talking to on her cellphone. Please, please, go fuck yourselves.
It's a very good start. Your mistake (and the reason why so many Slashdot posters have suddenly turned into 2 year olds throwing their rattles out of their strollers because mommy took their bottle away) was releasing it too early when it's clearly not ready.
Here's what MUST be fixed for me to switch over:
Must be able to post to journal
Must be able to view journals of friends (/my/amigos)
Friends/Foes interface with moderation modifiers or equivalent (actually I'm happy to see a simplification: a check box allowing me to block all foes, and conversely another allowing me to make sure all contributions by friends are always shown, possibly with some kind of CSS styling to make the latter more prominent, it doesn't have to be an "Add 2 for friends" type crap
Posting comments: either include the drop down allowing me to select the formatting, or bite the bullet and introduce a rich text editor like TinyMCE. I'm tempted to suggest the toddlers will throw a fit about that too, as many consider it patronizing, but it's 2014 FFS, and in any case hand-crafted HTML has been f---'d ever since you had to start every single post with "<P>" or else see a blank line between the first two paragraphs.
That's not to say that'd make Beta perfect, but it'd make it an adequate replacement where it's better than, say, the original Slashdot (not D2, the actual original) simply because Pudge broke so much.
Other suggestions:
Lose the sidebar on articles.
Lose the empty boxes in the sidebar.
Pictures are... well, I guess it's not a major problem but honestly you have a tech audience here, we're not that excited by them. At the very least see them as a content thing, not a styling thing - that is, add them in moderation to stories, if and only when they add value, don't simply add them to give Slashdot a particular look
The "moderation tabs" thing above the discussion really doesn't add much with the current moderation scheme. Moderators tend to be fairly liberal about what constitutes Interesting vs Informative for example, as in most cases posts that are one will be examples of the other. I'm not sure it'd be useful if that were fixed. Consider using the space for something else.
What happened to the Karma bonus?
That's it. It's a great start. Unfortunately you kinda went about releasing it really badly, which means I'm not even sure you'll get a chance to finish it. Perhaps the best thing you can do right now is to promise to make D2 and classic available to those who desperately want it for the foreseeable future.
Finally, a plea: you have unlimited mod points and a way to zap people's karma to less than zero. Perhaps, with fair warning, it's time you used those tools against those who are destroying every single story discussion. (Sorry guys, but you are. You are terrible, terrible people, and it's time something was done about the damage you're causing.)
jQuery isn't a hack around various glitches. It's an alternative way to access the DOM that happens to be more programmer friendly.
The DOM is usually exposed in the form of a giant object of objects that spits out arrays, more objects, and more arrays as you drill down into it. It's ugly.
jQuery, as the name implies (did you notice it was called "jQuery"?) provides a simpler access method where you use queries based upon a CSS-like selection language, with the results being provided to anonymous functions, or chained to other jQueries, or just updated in batch, effectively allowing you to easily and elegantly loop through the DOM using some of the nicer aspects of Javascript.
That's it. The fact that it provides a degree of platform independence is a nice-to-have, but jQuery would still exist if the DOM were genuinely standardized and implemented consistently across all browsers.
I don't even feel they're right. To believe that Beta is terrible is to believe that D2 is adequate and classic (real classic) isn't terribly, terribly, broken.
Neither are true. D2 is godawful. It's worse than Beta. FFS you're defending "sliders" that import "the best" comments from the back-end and insert them dynamically? CmdrTaco's belief that you can somehow determine the 100 best comments based upon moderation scores and build a discussion from that?
And the original: broken. I can't even change my modifiers any more. It always was broken to an extent, Pudge took what was there, broke it further, introduced D2, and then claimed that those of us still using the original system were in such a minority (which was, of course, because D2 became default and they made lots of efforts to break the original) that the new bugs he kept introducing into the original system were no big deal and didn't need fixing.
To this day the user page of each user is practically useless. Oh the last few posts I made... with no context, misleading moderation information, occasional mixing in of recent journal entries, oh and where's the fucking button to post a journal?
Behold the modern Slashdot UI: D2 with sliders, and the FIREHOSE used for everything else.
This is what you want Slashdot to keep?
What's the real problem with Beta? There are some functions missing - but, you know, it's a beta, you'd expect that. But the stupidity of D2 is gone. No more sliders. Just a straightforward threshold and the ability to filter by moderation.
It's a good start. It deserves constructive criticism.
This one really doesn't kill usability any more than the prior ones. And in some ways it's an improvement - there are features missing, and they need to be returned (in particular, some equivalent of/~username/comments, and WHERE IS MY JOURNAL POSTING BUTTON?!) but in many ways it's cleaner and easier to read than the older version. D2 is junk. And genuine "classic" mode has been broken for years. Hell, I can't even customize my preferences any more with it because most are missing as they're not needed in D2.
The current Slashdot UI is awful. It needs to go. It's needed to go ever since D2 was introduced. D2 is terrible, broken from the beginning. The breaking of real classic is unforgivable. Beta is a good start, and I think Slashdot's management could do with some constructive suggestions on how to fix the few (and they are few) problems with it.
As it is, you jackasses who insist on taking over every comment thread with your Beta hate are doing nobody any favors. You're making it harder for us to discuss the stories, and you're offering nothing constructive. You're acting like children, taking it out on everyone over something minor.
Please stop. Please. If you really hate it so much, go start your own site. You can even run it on Slashcode, it's open source. You demonstrate day after day after day posting these hysterical anti-beta spam comments that you provide nothing of value to us, so your loss will be unnoticed.
The Financial Times isn't as right wing as you'd expect given it's readership, so no, it wouldn't be a counterweight.
I don't understand your point about the truthfulness of the Guardian, you break up into meaningless gobbledigook trying to come up with a justification for arguing it doesn't tell the truth. The Guardian does, by and large, tell the truth. Truth isn't a left/right thing, it's either true or it isn't. What a truthful newspaper reporter that has an agenda does is report news that's important to that agenda. The Guardian, for example, would devote more column inches to a big story involving an environmental disaster, for example, than a right wing newspaper, but the latter might be more concerned about millionaires leaving the country complaining about high taxes.
Your last comment adds nothing to the discussion: I explained at length why "both sides" isn't going to leave you more informed, and patronisingly telling me to "try it sometime" ignores the fact I obviously have otherwise I wouldn't explain, at length, why it doesn't work and isn't practical in reality.
But feel free to continue to live in a bubble where you think that the truth can be determined by taking facts stated by one group with certain interests, lies told by a competing establishment group that has similar interests, and taking the average.
The Guardian may have a left wing agenda but it tells the truth. The Daily Mail routinely lies. So no, the truth wouldn't be somewhere in the middle of the two.
Even if you picked an honest right wing newspaper (maybe The Telegraph? Not sure as to its reputation these days), I'm not sure the "both sides" principle has ever worked in practice anyway. Having a diverse source of news is one thing, but simply finding resources with what you think are opposing political views far from guarantees you'll get the whole picture. Journalism itself has a bias - ask yourself, for example, why most mainstream news organizations promote war until war actually breaks out, then turn on their heel and oppose it. The answer's fairly simple, and can be sought by putting yourself in the shoes of a journalist and figuring out what they want to cover.
First, no matter what anti-X11 proponents claim is their aim, it doesn't mean that Wayland isn't going to be a kludgy mess in five years.
Second, nobody's arguing for "one size fits all". X11 proponents who point out that Wayland will not be as functional as X11 are pointing out that there are things we use that X11 has that Wayland will ditch.
And FWIW, that doesn't mean that Wayland is discarding useless features. It means those features will be grafted on later, one way or another. And when they are, they'll contribute to the kludge ridden crapfest that Wayland will inevitably become, not somehow cause it to be cleaner.
You can always get a simpler design by removing features. It's the restoration of functionality that fucks things up. Wayland is the wrong solution: not only does it not result in an adequate replacement for X11, but the things Wayland's developers complain about with X11 will get worse, not better, because of the approach they're taking. Had they decided to go for a one-to-one feature complete replacement, they'd still have problems, but the end result would be less, not more, kludgy once given a few years of real use.
Here's an idea mods, just because YOU think Wayland is going to work doesn't mean it will, and it certainly doesn't mean people who bring their experience to the table are "wrong" or "off topic". Go fuck yourselves. Seriously.
Basically it's a rewrite/redesign of X11, made by people who think that you can deal with the problems that come up in any tried and tested piece of code that, inevitably for any older code, has become "unclean", by writing a new version.
Pretty much anyone who's over the age of 30 who's been involved in software development for any substantial period of time knows that Wayland isn't going to solve it, and that in five years it'll be just as hacky and ugly as X11 is perceived to be - with the added bonus that it won't be anything like as powerful (because by design it won't - I'm serious, they're removing most of X11's core feature set, including the network transparency.)
No, he's right. You see Unity was the reaction to GNOME 3, the part where people "in charge" of the GNU/Linux UI realized that GNOME 3 was a lemon, and decided to "fix" it.
I don't think anyone was suggesting POTS is perfect, but having a 100% reliability rate when you've tried to use a phone is better than virtually all VoIP services, and that was very obviously the grandparent's intended point.
There's little question that the elimination of POTS (or ISDN *chortle*) will result in a net decrease in the security associated with access to emergency services. The question I guess is two fold - what can be done to reduce that security, and to what extent - given the degree to which cellphones have overlaid our communications infrastructure with multiple redundant, and accessable everywhere, alternatives to POTS will reduce the risks that would have been considerable just 20 years ago.
The article you link to doesn't say the figures are incorrect, it merely whines that liberals are inaccurately characterizing states like most of those in the North East as "Blue states", and states in the South as "Red States". The basis of his complaint is that many of the states in the Red or Blue columns seem to kinda sorta vote the opposite way in congressional elections, which might sound sensible except he's not using aggregate figures, but simply numbers of representatives elected, which means his figures don't consider the gerrymandering - intentional and natural - that means # reps rarely represents % support.
He also complains that local party support also dismisses the complaint, arguing that, for example, New Jersey is a "red" state because it has a Republican governor. This makes little sense - local parties and local party candidates reflect the extremes within a particular state, you can't compare a Republican governor in New Jersey to one in Alabama.
It's a bad argument and he should feel bad. Liberals are right to use Presidential candidates as the basic shorthand. It's the one case where the majorities in each state can be determined, and where the same point of view is on display and voted upon in each state.
As far as the free shipping goes - It's not just about two day shipping, the "free" (non-Prime) supersaver shipping option only applies on orders over $25. Ordering one book or one DVD won't qualify. Prime, on the other hand, lets you order something for $5 and not have to either find $20 worth of other stuff you don't really want, or add 20-50% to the price just to cover shipping costs.
By itself that's of questionable value, but quite nice, but the fact Prime also includes a Netflix type streaming service and an eBook library makes the subscription worthwhile, at least at its present price, for me.
And BTW, for nuance to die, doesn't it have to live first? I don't recall a single time in history where nuance was all the rage.
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Barack H. Obama is the 44th President of the United States.
His story is the American story â" values from the heartland, a middle-class upbringing in a strong family, hard work and education as the means of getting ahead, and the conviction that a life so blessed should be lived in service to others.
With a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas, President Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961. He was raised with help from his grandfather, who served in Patton's army, and his grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle management at a bank.
After working his way through college with the help of scholarships and student loans, President Obama moved to Chicago, where he worked with a group of churches to help rebuild communities devastated by the closure of local steel plants.
He went on to attend law school, where he became the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. Upon graduation, he returned to Chicago to help lead a voter registration drive, teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago, and remain active in his community.
President Obama's years of public service are based around his unwavering belief in the ability to unite people around a politics of purpose. In the Illinois State Senate, he passed the first major ethics reform in 25 years, cut taxes for working families, and expanded health care for children and their parents. As a United States Senator, he reached across the aisle to pass groundbreaking lobbying reform, lock up the world's most dangerous weapons, and bring transparency to government by putting federal spending online.
He was elected the 44th President of the United States on November 4, 2008, and sworn in on January 20, 2009. He and his wife, Michelle, are the proud parents of two daughters, Malia, 14, and Sasha, 11.
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Well, the example I gave was the network. Yes, chroot does help seperate groups processes (although it's important to understand the seperation is insecure by design, that is any root process can easily escape a chroot environment and have access to the main file system, which means you're limited in what types of process you can run if you want a chroot'd environment to be "secure"), but there do exist operating system functions that are not and never have been accessable via the filesystem.
The example I gave, networking, is part of the reason for LXC. LXC in turn is inspired by (and developed by the same developers as) an independent project called OpenVZ, which is used by many hosting providers to provide a kinda poor-man's VPS service. Each LXC domain has its own virtual network device, with its own IP address. Each LXC domain has a secured filesystem, with no risk of a "break out".
As I said, my understanding is that zones is similar in concept to LXC, not chroot. chroot only covers a small part of what zones does. As an aside, chroot is actually a feature of every version of Unix since version 7 (late seventies/early eighties), if zones and chroot were equivalent, it'd be a redundant feature.
I believe zones are closer to Linux's LXC system than chroot. chroot is just a filesystem thing, zones/LXC is an entire wrapper around a tree of processes that covers everything - the file system, the network, and so on.
Kinda the opposite. The entire point of modern transit-less suburbia is social engineering. The entire idea was to force automotive usage, largely because a particular breed of crackpot libertarian (and unfortunately not even out-of-the-mainstream type - even Margaret Thatcher spoke in support at times) believes cars are "pro-freedom" and obsessed about that in the first half of the last century.
Transit developed pretty naturally in the last half of the nineteenth century and when implemented in an organic way is usually profitable and popular. Of course, today, it's rarely profitable, especially in the US, but that's in part due to two major reasons.
The first is that the suburban movement has made it pretty damn near impossible to implement in most parts of the US, and so what's there is expensive and difficult to use.
The other is that in places like, for example, New York City, the high demand for in-city living (in a country starved of urban development, what urban space survives is in extremely short supply) means living costs are already through the roof, and the city itself needs to ensure basic services are kept affordable or else lose people able to fill essential but underpaid jobs. In some cases, like transit, this is just good policy anyway, the cost of expanding the road system far outweighs any subsidy you give transit to ensure its ongoing popularity.
Transit came first. Social engineering was used to get people off transit by the far right. Politicians have refused, over and over again, to do more than dip their toe in transit despite the massive popularity of such a position until relatively recently. And now you're claiming that it's transit that's social engineering? Bollocks.
This is not a copyright dispute. This is about using someone else's resources (albeit the taxpayer's) according to the rules they set out.
The dialog has been going on from the start, via a variety of different means (FFS the little warning box that kept popping up pointed out they wanted feedback.) They posted a story yesterday, but suggesting that they weren't going to do so if people didn't vandalize Slashdot seems a massive leap of logic. This is a major change, they released a preview and shoved it in front of a large subset of Slashdot in order to test it - why oh why would you think a forum to discuss the changes wouldn't be on the way? Why bother with a limited preview if you're not interested in feedback?
As far as the "faceless mob" thing goes, sorry, but I guess if you lie down with dogs... what are we getting at the moment? Thoughtful journal entries on how Beta could be improved? Explanations of why Beta misses the mark and D2 is the mostest awesomest thing ever in relevent subthreads? Or huge quantities of crap posted to every discussion forum containing a phrase that rhymes with "Buck Pita" and demands that Dice cancel the project, with only vague, usually formatting complaints, actually mentioned?
Add your voice, however well intentioned, to that mob, and, well, you become a part of it, much as you wanted to complain about the length of Dr Frankenstein's lawn and decided the best way to do it is to grab a torch and pitchfork and join that angry crowd that's heading up to his castle.
No, there is dialog. There have been multiple stories posted about the subject, there's also email and even phone contact. There's no reason, zero, to believe that spamming forums about Sony, jQuery, and so on, is a legitimate form of communication but that posting to the normal channels is not.
And let's be honest here, this, while repeated over and over and over again by the Anti-Beta spammers, is a flat out lie:
There is. Changes are being made. Dice has officially changed position from "We'll change it in a few months" to "We'll change it only when it has feature parity", which is a fairly substantial step and takes care of about 90% of what the spammers are complaining about.
And I see little tweaks here and there going on in real time, as if... maybe they're updating Beta according to user feedback?
Spamming threads, vandalizing the discussion system, is not a reasonable approach here. You're punishing the contributors, while having the gall to claim you speak for us.
You don't. You're terrible people. I can't wait for you guys to start your boycott. Please make it permanent.
This is called vandalism, not free speech. Free speech would imply that you're attempting to impart an actual message to people able to affect change. Standing on a street corner yelling "Down with Zoning Ordinance 94!" is free speech because insofar as you're inconveniencing someone, you're doing so temporarily and aiming your message at people the vast majority of whom are voters.
I have no say in Slashdot's redesign. You are permanently making it virtually impossible for me to engage in discussions by vandalising them. You are not addressing your protests at those who matter because they're not reading discussions about Sony to try to get feedback on Beta. They've started actual forums for that topic.
So no, it's not free speech. It may be the imparting of views, but so is me taking a random passer by in Iran and screaming "Vladimir Putin sucks" over and over again so she can't hear who she's talking to on her cellphone. Please, please, go fuck yourselves.
It's a very good start. Your mistake (and the reason why so many Slashdot posters have suddenly turned into 2 year olds throwing their rattles out of their strollers because mommy took their bottle away) was releasing it too early when it's clearly not ready.
Here's what MUST be fixed for me to switch over:
That's not to say that'd make Beta perfect, but it'd make it an adequate replacement where it's better than, say, the original Slashdot (not D2, the actual original) simply because Pudge broke so much.
Other suggestions:
That's it. It's a great start. Unfortunately you kinda went about releasing it really badly, which means I'm not even sure you'll get a chance to finish it. Perhaps the best thing you can do right now is to promise to make D2 and classic available to those who desperately want it for the foreseeable future.
Finally, a plea: you have unlimited mod points and a way to zap people's karma to less than zero. Perhaps, with fair warning, it's time you used those tools against those who are destroying every single story discussion. (Sorry guys, but you are. You are terrible, terrible people, and it's time something was done about the damage you're causing.)
jQuery isn't a hack around various glitches. It's an alternative way to access the DOM that happens to be more programmer friendly.
The DOM is usually exposed in the form of a giant object of objects that spits out arrays, more objects, and more arrays as you drill down into it. It's ugly.
jQuery, as the name implies (did you notice it was called "jQuery"?) provides a simpler access method where you use queries based upon a CSS-like selection language, with the results being provided to anonymous functions, or chained to other jQueries, or just updated in batch, effectively allowing you to easily and elegantly loop through the DOM using some of the nicer aspects of Javascript.
That's it. The fact that it provides a degree of platform independence is a nice-to-have, but jQuery would still exist if the DOM were genuinely standardized and implemented consistently across all browsers.
That's how I feel too.
I don't even feel they're right. To believe that Beta is terrible is to believe that D2 is adequate and classic (real classic) isn't terribly, terribly, broken.
Neither are true. D2 is godawful. It's worse than Beta. FFS you're defending "sliders" that import "the best" comments from the back-end and insert them dynamically? CmdrTaco's belief that you can somehow determine the 100 best comments based upon moderation scores and build a discussion from that?
And the original: broken. I can't even change my modifiers any more. It always was broken to an extent, Pudge took what was there, broke it further, introduced D2, and then claimed that those of us still using the original system were in such a minority (which was, of course, because D2 became default and they made lots of efforts to break the original) that the new bugs he kept introducing into the original system were no big deal and didn't need fixing.
To this day the user page of each user is practically useless. Oh the last few posts I made... with no context, misleading moderation information, occasional mixing in of recent journal entries, oh and where's the fucking button to post a journal?
Behold the modern Slashdot UI: D2 with sliders, and the FIREHOSE used for everything else.
This is what you want Slashdot to keep?
What's the real problem with Beta? There are some functions missing - but, you know, it's a beta, you'd expect that. But the stupidity of D2 is gone. No more sliders. Just a straightforward threshold and the ability to filter by moderation.
It's a good start. It deserves constructive criticism.
This one really doesn't kill usability any more than the prior ones. And in some ways it's an improvement - there are features missing, and they need to be returned (in particular, some equivalent of /~username/comments, and WHERE IS MY JOURNAL POSTING BUTTON?!) but in many ways it's cleaner and easier to read than the older version. D2 is junk. And genuine "classic" mode has been broken for years. Hell, I can't even customize my preferences any more with it because most are missing as they're not needed in D2.
The current Slashdot UI is awful. It needs to go. It's needed to go ever since D2 was introduced. D2 is terrible, broken from the beginning. The breaking of real classic is unforgivable. Beta is a good start, and I think Slashdot's management could do with some constructive suggestions on how to fix the few (and they are few) problems with it.
As it is, you jackasses who insist on taking over every comment thread with your Beta hate are doing nobody any favors. You're making it harder for us to discuss the stories, and you're offering nothing constructive. You're acting like children, taking it out on everyone over something minor.
Please stop. Please. If you really hate it so much, go start your own site. You can even run it on Slashcode, it's open source. You demonstrate day after day after day posting these hysterical anti-beta spam comments that you provide nothing of value to us, so your loss will be unnoticed.
The Financial Times isn't as right wing as you'd expect given it's readership, so no, it wouldn't be a counterweight.
I don't understand your point about the truthfulness of the Guardian, you break up into meaningless gobbledigook trying to come up with a justification for arguing it doesn't tell the truth. The Guardian does, by and large, tell the truth. Truth isn't a left/right thing, it's either true or it isn't. What a truthful newspaper reporter that has an agenda does is report news that's important to that agenda. The Guardian, for example, would devote more column inches to a big story involving an environmental disaster, for example, than a right wing newspaper, but the latter might be more concerned about millionaires leaving the country complaining about high taxes.
Your last comment adds nothing to the discussion: I explained at length why "both sides" isn't going to leave you more informed, and patronisingly telling me to "try it sometime" ignores the fact I obviously have otherwise I wouldn't explain, at length, why it doesn't work and isn't practical in reality.
But feel free to continue to live in a bubble where you think that the truth can be determined by taking facts stated by one group with certain interests, lies told by a competing establishment group that has similar interests, and taking the average.
We must kill Beta because Slashdot currently has the greatest user interface ever designed.
(Urgh.)
The Guardian may have a left wing agenda but it tells the truth. The Daily Mail routinely lies. So no, the truth wouldn't be somewhere in the middle of the two.
Even if you picked an honest right wing newspaper (maybe The Telegraph? Not sure as to its reputation these days), I'm not sure the "both sides" principle has ever worked in practice anyway. Having a diverse source of news is one thing, but simply finding resources with what you think are opposing political views far from guarantees you'll get the whole picture. Journalism itself has a bias - ask yourself, for example, why most mainstream news organizations promote war until war actually breaks out, then turn on their heel and oppose it. The answer's fairly simple, and can be sought by putting yourself in the shoes of a journalist and figuring out what they want to cover.
Two problems with this response.
First, no matter what anti-X11 proponents claim is their aim, it doesn't mean that Wayland isn't going to be a kludgy mess in five years.
Second, nobody's arguing for "one size fits all". X11 proponents who point out that Wayland will not be as functional as X11 are pointing out that there are things we use that X11 has that Wayland will ditch.
And FWIW, that doesn't mean that Wayland is discarding useless features. It means those features will be grafted on later, one way or another. And when they are, they'll contribute to the kludge ridden crapfest that Wayland will inevitably become, not somehow cause it to be cleaner.
You can always get a simpler design by removing features. It's the restoration of functionality that fucks things up. Wayland is the wrong solution: not only does it not result in an adequate replacement for X11, but the things Wayland's developers complain about with X11 will get worse, not better, because of the approach they're taking. Had they decided to go for a one-to-one feature complete replacement, they'd still have problems, but the end result would be less, not more, kludgy once given a few years of real use.
aaaaaaaaaaaaaand the abusive moderation starts.
Every. Fucking. Time.
Here's an idea mods, just because YOU think Wayland is going to work doesn't mean it will, and it certainly doesn't mean people who bring their experience to the table are "wrong" or "off topic". Go fuck yourselves. Seriously.
Basically it's a rewrite/redesign of X11, made by people who think that you can deal with the problems that come up in any tried and tested piece of code that, inevitably for any older code, has become "unclean", by writing a new version.
Pretty much anyone who's over the age of 30 who's been involved in software development for any substantial period of time knows that Wayland isn't going to solve it, and that in five years it'll be just as hacky and ugly as X11 is perceived to be - with the added bonus that it won't be anything like as powerful (because by design it won't - I'm serious, they're removing most of X11's core feature set, including the network transparency.)
No, he's right. You see Unity was the reaction to GNOME 3, the part where people "in charge" of the GNU/Linux UI realized that GNOME 3 was a lemon, and decided to "fix" it.
Unity is Windows 8.1 for GNU/Linux.
I don't think anyone was suggesting POTS is perfect, but having a 100% reliability rate when you've tried to use a phone is better than virtually all VoIP services, and that was very obviously the grandparent's intended point.
There's little question that the elimination of POTS (or ISDN *chortle*) will result in a net decrease in the security associated with access to emergency services. The question I guess is two fold - what can be done to reduce that security, and to what extent - given the degree to which cellphones have overlaid our communications infrastructure with multiple redundant, and accessable everywhere, alternatives to POTS will reduce the risks that would have been considerable just 20 years ago.
The article you link to doesn't say the figures are incorrect, it merely whines that liberals are inaccurately characterizing states like most of those in the North East as "Blue states", and states in the South as "Red States". The basis of his complaint is that many of the states in the Red or Blue columns seem to kinda sorta vote the opposite way in congressional elections, which might sound sensible except he's not using aggregate figures, but simply numbers of representatives elected, which means his figures don't consider the gerrymandering - intentional and natural - that means # reps rarely represents % support.
He also complains that local party support also dismisses the complaint, arguing that, for example, New Jersey is a "red" state because it has a Republican governor. This makes little sense - local parties and local party candidates reflect the extremes within a particular state, you can't compare a Republican governor in New Jersey to one in Alabama.
It's a bad argument and he should feel bad. Liberals are right to use Presidential candidates as the basic shorthand. It's the one case where the majorities in each state can be determined, and where the same point of view is on display and voted upon in each state.
Yes I do have Prime and yes we frequently order things that are well below $10 in price.
As far as the free shipping goes - It's not just about two day shipping, the "free" (non-Prime) supersaver shipping option only applies on orders over $25. Ordering one book or one DVD won't qualify. Prime, on the other hand, lets you order something for $5 and not have to either find $20 worth of other stuff you don't really want, or add 20-50% to the price just to cover shipping costs.
By itself that's of questionable value, but quite nice, but the fact Prime also includes a Netflix type streaming service and an eBook library makes the subscription worthwhile, at least at its present price, for me.
*sigh* That's the joke.
I guess from the responses (and even the +1 Interesting) I better rule out "comedy writer" as a career...
So an obscure platform that only a small band of hardcore fans used was never ported to GNU/Linux?
Yep.
And BTW, for nuance to die, doesn't it have to live first? I don't recall a single time in history where nuance was all the rage.