I tried the beta this morning. There was no obvious way to show only the comments rated 4* and above. There are ways of seeing funny or insightful posts, but you don't get to control how many.
Did you notice the little gear menu, to the right of the links for funny/insightful/etc.?
What does seem to be missing is collapsed comments - comments that are scored below a certain threshold being displayed as a single line that I can click on to expand them.
I don't think you have understood. We don't want you to slow down. We want you to stop; reverse; appologise for being so out of touch with your user base; and promise to never do anything so stupid again.
Not quite. That's what we THINK we want. What we REALLY want is slightly different.
We don't want you to say you'll slow down, because we hear that as "continue to do exactly the same boneheaded thing you were going to do, just delayed for awhile."
But we don't really want you to stop and go backwards. What we want is for you to make sure that you're not leaving anything important behind when you do move forward. Lots of us have our own little irritations with things we consider to be "broken" in the beta site - my big one is that I couldn't see a way to set up abbreviated comments (where I see only a single line for comments that are scored below my threshold, but I can click on it if I decide I want to expand any specific comment). I have that now, but on the beta site, it appears to be missing. Others have complained about other functionality that seems to be missing. We need to be assured that you're not going to plow ahead without these features.
That doesn't mean you have to go backwards, because Lord knows the old site has some issues that need fixing. But remember that if you alienate your user base in an attempt to attract more users, you'll be left with nothing, because the existing user base is the only thing that makes Slashdot worth a damn. Nobody comes here to read your content, they come here to read ours.
I could go on with this list extensively, but know that your audience understands this kind of marketspeak and translate it immediately into "We follow this policy that we know you will hate because we think it will improve our revenue."
...EVEN IF THAT'S NOT HOW YOU MEANT IT. Understand that we'll translate it this way anyway, so be careful what you say.
The comment system isn't finished yet, that's for sure
But that's the most frustrating thing of all! This is/. Comments should have been the first thing you got right. The comments make the site.
Alternately, if you know the comment system isn't finished but want to get people testing everything else so you can fix those bugs first, great! Understand that the comments are what makes Slashdot worth anything, and therefore the comment system is the metric by which the average Slashdotter will judge everything else that you do. So, put a big obnoxious warning at the top of every page on the beta site saying "Hey guys, we know comments are broken, we're still working on that part! Please give us feedback on everything else for now. Specifically, we know we have the following problems which we plan to fix before rolling this out to everyone..."
Nonsense! Javascript slows down the browsing experience.
Or speeds it up, depending on how it's used. Sometimes a nice clean bit of JavaScript can eliminate the need for another page load, and a little AJAX query can quickly fill something in without the need to load a completely new copy of the entire page again. Of course JavaScript can also be used to do stupid annoying things, and on a site like this, they should definitely make sure the site degrades very well.
If NPR sounded less like MSNBC, I doubt the Republicans would bother with their pittance of the federal budget. NPR is so left wing that commercial talk radio is almost exclusively right wing.
I'm not sure if you never listen to NPR, or never watch MSNBC...
I used to expect a lot more from Slashdot, but now that none of the old-guard are left it's steadily and inexorably slipping in the same fashion that kuro5hin, The Register, and other tech sites have slipped.
The "old guard" editors didn't know how to do their jobs either. Note my user ID; I remember. I come here for the comments, not the articles.
If you ask a transit rider how to get there by car, they may not give you the best directions. Try asking them how to get there by bus. If they don't know the answer offhand, they certainly know how to quickly find out.
Back in the Win95/98 days, I can't tell you how many people mentioned to me that they had tried defragmenting their hard drive as a troubleshooting step.
Turd or not, it is really called the Affordable Care Act (actually Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) Nowhere in the congressional record will you see a bill called Obamacare or the GOP trying to amend Obamacare. However, you will find plenty of citations to the PPACA.
You're right about the first part, but wrong about the second part.
H.R.132 : ObamaCare Repeal Act H.R.1005 : Defund Obamacare Act H.R.2087 : Protecting Taxpayer Dollars and Identity under Obamacare Act H.R.2125 : No IRS Implementation of Obamacare Act H.R.2443 : Safeguarding Children Harmed by Obamacare's Onerous Levies Act H.R.2682 : Defund Obamacare Act of 2013 H.R.3067 : No Obamacare Subsidies for Members of Congress Act of 2013 S.177 : ObamaCare Repeal Act S.1292 : Defund Obamacare Act of 2013 S.1497 : No Exemption for Washington from Obamacare Act
I should mention, in case it wasn't clear, that my comment about Planned Parenthood was an example I made up, not something mentioned in the study I linked to.
According to this report (PDF), there are three distinct groups within the Republican party: the Tea Party, evangelicals (the Religious Right), and moderates. There are stark differences between the three groups, but another poster mentioned "the power of cognitive dissonance" - no matter which of the three Republican subgroups you belong to, you're going to have a natural tendency to WANT to agree with the other two, because you're a Republican. For example, Evangelicals think the government shouldn't fund Planned Parenthood because abortion is murder, and the Tea Party thinks the government shouldn't fund Planned Parenthood because it's wasteful government spending, but Evangelicals are going to adopt "smaller government" as part of their argument and Tea Partiers will adopt the moral case as part of their argument.
Partisan politics aside, you can't rule your house in an undemocratic manner and expect people to take you seriously when you blame the other party for all the trouble.
Well, you can, apparently. They're going to be reelected, you know. Most of them.
If you were working at a private employer and they said "we can't pay you, and you can go home, but we promise to pay you back at some indeterminate time in the future", would you consider that a paid vacation? I wouldn't.
I just want to quickly point out that the government did NOT "promise to pay you back at some indeterminate time in the future". After the shutdown was over, they decided to do it, just as most people thought they probably would (based on a similar decision 17 years ago) but during the shutdown there was no such promise.
On the flip side, some of those who were getting a little time off may have been out spending some money. If contractors were furloughed under the terms of their contract, then they should not consider themselves as screwed.
Just because you have a contract that says you can be screwed, doesn't mean you're not getting screwed.
Another fun fact is that there's no actual "debt ceiling" right now. At all.
The fiscal deal passed by Congress on Wednesday doesn't actually increase the debt limit. It just temporarily suspends enforcement of it. We the people just gave a bunch of politicians a blank check.
Sure, but it's a blank check to pay the bills those same politicians have already incurred. The debt limit doesn't stop Congress from spending too much money, because by the time it gets to that point, it's already far too late.
My iPhone 4 seems to handle iOS7 pretty well. I've found that although the UI *looks* slow, the responsiveness is actually not that bad - for example, when entering my PIN on the lock screen, under iOS 5 and 6 sometimes there would be a bit of lag and it wouldn't register all the keypresses if I tapped the numbers faster than the phone was ready for. With iOS 7, there's even more lag in the visual and auditory feedback when pressing the buttons, but it registers all the keypresses correctly despite the lag, so even though it looks worse it works better.
And of course it's not just slow - everything looks worse. The new Windows 8-inspired theme looks stupid anyway, but on the iPhone 4 all the transparency effects are disabled, so it looks even worse, but it functions. There are some nice features and enhancements. I really haven't had any significant problems.
Conflict of interest. If the NRC is funded by those it regulates, it has an incentive to keep those funds coming, which won't happen if it shuts down plants.
So just like the Patent & Trademark Office then? (They're still open.)
How does the government shutdown affect the FAA's ability to make these sorts of policy changes? I would assume that the people who make these decisions have been furloughed, so all existing regulations stand until Congress gets their heads out of their asses?
Also, is there any danger posed by dozens of Kindles flying around the cabin in the event of a crash landing? I realize the current regulations allow non-electronic items such as books, but is this a concern at all?
It's encouraging to see these kinds of changes coming. I'm glad the FAA is revisiting this issue (or will be once we start paying them again).
It could have been, if the people who created it had known what the hell they were doing. And it has gotten a lot better in recent years (for example register_globals has actually been removed from the language now), but where they started from was so mind-numbingly stupid that I don't see how they could ever make it actually good, without also breaking it in ways that would make everyone stop using it.
And here's a specific and detailed side-by-side comparison between PHP and Perl: http://www.tnx.nl/php.html
But you're spot-on about the "meta problem": most people who write in PHP have no idea what they're doing, so most PHP code out there is badly written, so if you're learning the language, there's a very good chance that you're learning from someone who didn't know what they were doing.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried the beta this morning. There was no obvious way to show only the comments rated 4* and above. There are ways of seeing funny or insightful posts, but you don't get to control how many.
Did you notice the little gear menu, to the right of the links for funny/insightful/etc.?
What does seem to be missing is collapsed comments - comments that are scored below a certain threshold being displayed as a single line that I can click on to expand them.
I don't think you have understood. We don't want you to slow down. We want you to stop; reverse; appologise for being so out of touch with your user base; and promise to never do anything so stupid again.
Not quite. That's what we THINK we want. What we REALLY want is slightly different.
We don't want you to say you'll slow down, because we hear that as "continue to do exactly the same boneheaded thing you were going to do, just delayed for awhile."
But we don't really want you to stop and go backwards. What we want is for you to make sure that you're not leaving anything important behind when you do move forward. Lots of us have our own little irritations with things we consider to be "broken" in the beta site - my big one is that I couldn't see a way to set up abbreviated comments (where I see only a single line for comments that are scored below my threshold, but I can click on it if I decide I want to expand any specific comment). I have that now, but on the beta site, it appears to be missing. Others have complained about other functionality that seems to be missing. We need to be assured that you're not going to plow ahead without these features.
That doesn't mean you have to go backwards, because Lord knows the old site has some issues that need fixing. But remember that if you alienate your user base in an attempt to attract more users, you'll be left with nothing, because the existing user base is the only thing that makes Slashdot worth a damn. Nobody comes here to read your content, they come here to read ours.
I could go on with this list extensively, but know that your audience understands this kind of marketspeak and translate it immediately into "We follow this policy that we know you will hate because we think it will improve our revenue."
...EVEN IF THAT'S NOT HOW YOU MEANT IT. Understand that we'll translate it this way anyway, so be careful what you say.
The comment system isn't finished yet, that's for sure
But that's the most frustrating thing of all! This is /. Comments should have been the first thing you got right. The comments make the site.
Alternately, if you know the comment system isn't finished but want to get people testing everything else so you can fix those bugs first, great! Understand that the comments are what makes Slashdot worth anything, and therefore the comment system is the metric by which the average Slashdotter will judge everything else that you do. So, put a big obnoxious warning at the top of every page on the beta site saying "Hey guys, we know comments are broken, we're still working on that part! Please give us feedback on everything else for now. Specifically, we know we have the following problems which we plan to fix before rolling this out to everyone..."
Nonsense! Javascript slows down the browsing experience.
Or speeds it up, depending on how it's used. Sometimes a nice clean bit of JavaScript can eliminate the need for another page load, and a little AJAX query can quickly fill something in without the need to load a completely new copy of the entire page again. Of course JavaScript can also be used to do stupid annoying things, and on a site like this, they should definitely make sure the site degrades very well.
Oh hush, let him make his point. :-P
If NPR sounded less like MSNBC, I doubt the Republicans would bother with their pittance of the federal budget. NPR is so left wing that commercial talk radio is almost exclusively right wing.
I'm not sure if you never listen to NPR, or never watch MSNBC...
I used to expect a lot more from Slashdot, but now that none of the old-guard are left it's steadily and inexorably slipping in the same fashion that kuro5hin, The Register, and other tech sites have slipped.
The "old guard" editors didn't know how to do their jobs either. Note my user ID; I remember. I come here for the comments, not the articles.
we really have no idea
Surely what giraffe meat tastes like is still known to mankind; it's not like they're extinct or anything...
As is so often the case, those of us posting here on Slashdot have no idea. Of course someone does, but we don't.
If you ask a transit rider how to get there by car, they may not give you the best directions. Try asking them how to get there by bus. If they don't know the answer offhand, they certainly know how to quickly find out.
Thanks, I got these titles from thomas.loc.gov and it didn't occur to me that they wouldn't be the official titles.
Back in the Win95/98 days, I can't tell you how many people mentioned to me that they had tried defragmenting their hard drive as a troubleshooting step.
Turd or not, it is really called the Affordable Care Act (actually Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) Nowhere in the congressional record will you see a bill called Obamacare or the GOP trying to amend Obamacare. However, you will find plenty of citations to the PPACA.
You're right about the first part, but wrong about the second part.
H.R.132 : ObamaCare Repeal Act
H.R.1005 : Defund Obamacare Act
H.R.2087 : Protecting Taxpayer Dollars and Identity under Obamacare Act
H.R.2125 : No IRS Implementation of Obamacare Act
H.R.2443 : Safeguarding Children Harmed by Obamacare's Onerous Levies Act
H.R.2682 : Defund Obamacare Act of 2013
H.R.3067 : No Obamacare Subsidies for Members of Congress Act of 2013
S.177 : ObamaCare Repeal Act
S.1292 : Defund Obamacare Act of 2013
S.1497 : No Exemption for Washington from Obamacare Act
Do you have one like it for democrats?
Unfortunately not, but if you find one, let me know!
I should mention, in case it wasn't clear, that my comment about Planned Parenthood was an example I made up, not something mentioned in the study I linked to.
Actually, yes: Tea Party = Religious Right. It's not one-to-one, but the two are closely linked.
According to this report (PDF), there are three distinct groups within the Republican party: the Tea Party, evangelicals (the Religious Right), and moderates. There are stark differences between the three groups, but another poster mentioned "the power of cognitive dissonance" - no matter which of the three Republican subgroups you belong to, you're going to have a natural tendency to WANT to agree with the other two, because you're a Republican. For example, Evangelicals think the government shouldn't fund Planned Parenthood because abortion is murder, and the Tea Party thinks the government shouldn't fund Planned Parenthood because it's wasteful government spending, but Evangelicals are going to adopt "smaller government" as part of their argument and Tea Partiers will adopt the moral case as part of their argument.
Partisan politics aside, you can't rule your house in an undemocratic manner and expect people to take you seriously when you blame the other party for all the trouble.
Well, you can, apparently. They're going to be reelected, you know. Most of them.
If you were working at a private employer and they said "we can't pay you, and you can go home, but we promise to pay you back at some indeterminate time in the future", would you consider that a paid vacation? I wouldn't.
I just want to quickly point out that the government did NOT "promise to pay you back at some indeterminate time in the future". After the shutdown was over, they decided to do it, just as most people thought they probably would (based on a similar decision 17 years ago) but during the shutdown there was no such promise.
On the flip side, some of those who were getting a little time off may have been out spending some money. If contractors were furloughed under the terms of their contract, then they should not consider themselves as screwed.
Just because you have a contract that says you can be screwed, doesn't mean you're not getting screwed.
Another fun fact is that there's no actual "debt ceiling" right now. At all.
The fiscal deal passed by Congress on Wednesday doesn't actually increase the debt limit.
It just temporarily suspends enforcement of it.
We the people just gave a bunch of politicians a blank check.
Sure, but it's a blank check to pay the bills those same politicians have already incurred. The debt limit doesn't stop Congress from spending too much money, because by the time it gets to that point, it's already far too late.
My iPhone 4 seems to handle iOS7 pretty well. I've found that although the UI *looks* slow, the responsiveness is actually not that bad - for example, when entering my PIN on the lock screen, under iOS 5 and 6 sometimes there would be a bit of lag and it wouldn't register all the keypresses if I tapped the numbers faster than the phone was ready for. With iOS 7, there's even more lag in the visual and auditory feedback when pressing the buttons, but it registers all the keypresses correctly despite the lag, so even though it looks worse it works better.
And of course it's not just slow - everything looks worse. The new Windows 8-inspired theme looks stupid anyway, but on the iPhone 4 all the transparency effects are disabled, so it looks even worse, but it functions. There are some nice features and enhancements. I really haven't had any significant problems.
Conflict of interest. If the NRC is funded by those it regulates, it has an incentive to keep those funds coming, which won't happen if it shuts down plants.
So just like the Patent & Trademark Office then? (They're still open.)
How does the government shutdown affect the FAA's ability to make these sorts of policy changes? I would assume that the people who make these decisions have been furloughed, so all existing regulations stand until Congress gets their heads out of their asses?
Also, is there any danger posed by dozens of Kindles flying around the cabin in the event of a crash landing? I realize the current regulations allow non-electronic items such as books, but is this a concern at all?
It's encouraging to see these kinds of changes coming. I'm glad the FAA is revisiting this issue (or will be once we start paying them again).
And here's an even better article about specifically what makes PHP so awful: http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/
PHP is actually a pretty nice language.
No it isn't.
It could have been, if the people who created it had known what the hell they were doing. And it has gotten a lot better in recent years (for example register_globals has actually been removed from the language now), but where they started from was so mind-numbingly stupid that I don't see how they could ever make it actually good, without also breaking it in ways that would make everyone stop using it.
Here's a general rant about how stunningly awful PHP is: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/the-php-singularity.html
And here's a specific and detailed side-by-side comparison between PHP and Perl: http://www.tnx.nl/php.html
But you're spot-on about the "meta problem": most people who write in PHP have no idea what they're doing, so most PHP code out there is badly written, so if you're learning the language, there's a very good chance that you're learning from someone who didn't know what they were doing.