Dice can certainly *try* to market the slashdot brand in this fashion since they own it now, but this strategy will fail. There is absolutely no doubt about that.
What IP is there in the site that we couldn't take with us?
Unfortunately something like 15 years worth of usernames and comments, because although the comments are still owned by each respective user I doubt the database is.
There is literally *not one single thing* that works in any manner that can even begin to approach what is commonly referred to as "usability". That in and of itself is constructive criticism because it would be impossible to enumerate every problem with the new site.
Though I support the idea in principle I seriously doubt it'll get the PHB's attention since they have such an obvious lack of respect for, and understanding of the slashdot community.
There are many of us who have been providing *constructive* criticism for *many months* only to have it fall on deaf ears. Now that the beta is being forced on users in a graduated rollout you're going to be hearing these complaints more and more often until either:
1. The Slashdot admins capitulate and concede the beta was a giant mistake. 2. Slashdot Beta has functionality and usability parity with the standard site. 3. Those of us who absolutely hate the new site leave and never come back. 4. Comments complaining are stifled and silenced.
Oh, does the beta display unicode properly? If not, what good is it? If it does, have they tested it on links?
No, the beta site doesn't display JACK FUCKING SHIT properly. It's a menagerie of uselessness with random fonts, difficult to follow comment threads, random fonts, no real division between the forced comment titles and the comment itself (WTF, seriously?), random fonts, and just a general shitshow.
I don't know if you can even put links in comments anymore let alone unicode.
But at least there are random changes in the fonts so we can challenge our patience trying to read the comments.
Oh yea, I forgot to mention: WTF is this shit about? Why so many "contributors" and what is their purpose for slashdot? Stumbling upon this reminds me of the Simpsons where Homer discovers a secret plot to move the Springfield Isotopes to Albuquerque and no-one would believe him.
I'm telling y'all, something nasty is about to happen to/.
It's like it has been specifically designed to alienate as many existing users here as it possibly could.
Unless the overlords at Dice are so unfathomably, unbelievably incompetent, this is the only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn which poses another conundrum: without the users the slashdot.org domain has no value whatsoever. Rather than alienate the 15 years or so of slashdot users in an attempt to attract new users, Dice would have been much better off creating something new from scratch.
Although that worked in IE 10 Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, nerfed that feature in some IE 11 update and AFAIK they haven't surreptitiously added it back yet.
Not having used IE since ver 7 I was really surprised that IE 10 and 11 are actually decent enough to use for a while when some firefox or chrome update breaks shit, but it still has its fair share of annoyances. Please allow me to enumerate a few of my annoyances with IE 11:
1. You can block flash fairly easily, but only on a site-by-site basis, and once you whitelist a site you can't remove it without removing *every other site* you've whitelisted. C'mon IE, I only want to allow flash to watch some stupid video on this site this one time...
1.a Oh yeah, flash is baked in to the browser now, but it seems to be a shitty version that stutters on streaming videos making it a crapshoot whether or not it'll be watchable.
2. There is a built-in tracking/ad blocker but again, there's no fine-grained control without really dicking around with some... file.. somewhere. IOW it's not intuitive and it's very difficult to whitelist a particular site's ads without fucking IE's whole ad blocking program.
3. IE finally renders shit correctly, uhh, except for all the "legacy" shit that was built with workarounds for older versions of IE, like e.g. vBulletin.. And I don't "get" IE well enough to tell it how to tell the site to STFU and give me the firefox version (which renders correctly in IE BTW) since IE doesn't seem to like to play nice with user-agent strings outside of its archaic F12 devtools..
4. Fucking font rendering SUCKS. Microsoft took an enormous step backwards with their font renderer in windows 8/8.1 and it really shows in IE.
5. IE is now reliable at recovering the pages when it crashes, which is good 'cause it crashes a lot.
I'd like to interject that I sometimes use and enjoy IE now, but I just need to get this off my chest.
6. Private browsing is good, unless you want to have 2 or more private browsers open on the same site like e.g. two or more gmail accounts open simultaneously, which you can't do because the cookies are shared amongst them... Well, you can if you have one open in the standard IE and the other in private mode, BUT NO MORE.
7. it's finally reasonably secure, or at least the competition is now equally insecure.
Any more I don't choose a browser because it has features I like, I choose a browser because the competition has pissed me off, and it's an arms race to see which one can get to the bottom first... Firefox is shitty, chrome is shitty, IE is shitty but which one is going to piss me off the most today?
What it brings to the table is the ability to select from your music library and play the music from the steam overlay in-game or from the steam big picture interface. No need to leave the game to open another shell or DE, no need to fiddle with the commandline, none of that. Instead, pause game, select music, resume game rather than pause game, switch to xmms (or whatever), manage music from xmms which may or may not work with a joypad, switch back to the game then resume play. It's just convenience.
It's a way of integrating the user's local music library with their local steam game library from within the steam application interface. Basically it's one step towards making the steam application into a general purpose media player rather than just a game library management interface.
With Steam Music, you can now listen to your music collection while playing games. Once you’ve pointed Steam to your local music directory, your Steam Library will include Album and Artist views of your collection.
Sounds like, for now, this is a convenience feature for steam users to access their own music while gaming rather than a distribution method.
Yep, and they seem to be banking on this SlashCloud and SlashBI, etc. SlashBullShit as of late so I bet they're going in the "original content" with minimal user interaction/minimal community direction. I bet the slashdot.org domain will be up for cheap in a couple years when DICE has finished looting the last corpse here so if someone still has an installation of SlashCode laying around we could probably get the site back up to speed pretty quickly in that eventuality.
It must suck to be Malda and see your website baby all grown up to be a junkie whore like this.
There was a very noticeable improvement in my friend's cat's gait when she (the cat) began taking a Cosequin supplement, so unless the placebo effect works for animals there was almost certainly something in the capsule that was beneficial to the cat.
Superintendent Chalmers: A graphics system... in the linux kernel... and hasn't changed... since the '90s? Principal Skinner: Yes! Superintendent Chalmers: May I see it? Principal Skinner: Er, no.
Yeah, but why not though? Sometimes innovation is spurred by a certain naive ignorance, which is to say that there can be valuable insight by not being indoctrinated by idiom and custom, which is yet another way to say that sometimes "not knowing any better" is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
The classic design in 2014? Not too bad. The classic design in 2018? Probably not going to cut it.
Your point is moot: there won't even *be* a slashdot in 2018. Slashdot had a good run but the beginning of the end was when Malda left, and dice is *entirely clueless* about what slashdot really is.
Dice can certainly *try* to market the slashdot brand in this fashion since they own it now, but this strategy will fail. There is absolutely no doubt about that.
What IP is there in the site that we couldn't take with us?
Unfortunately something like 15 years worth of usernames and comments, because although the comments are still owned by each respective user I doubt the database is.
Oh, and CowboyNeal.
It's eye candy as much as Spring Surprise is a nice bit of chockie.
There is literally *not one single thing* that works in any manner that can even begin to approach what is commonly referred to as "usability". That in and of itself is constructive criticism because it would be impossible to enumerate every problem with the new site.
But to answer your question, here is the official thread with plenty of detailed criticisms and suggestions
Alas, I suppose I just have better things to do with my time than spamming here.
Eat your own words.
Though I support the idea in principle I seriously doubt it'll get the PHB's attention since they have such an obvious lack of respect for, and understanding of the slashdot community.
There are many of us who have been providing *constructive* criticism for *many months* only to have it fall on deaf ears. Now that the beta is being forced on users in a graduated rollout you're going to be hearing these complaints more and more often until either:
1. The Slashdot admins capitulate and concede the beta was a giant mistake.
2. Slashdot Beta has functionality and usability parity with the standard site.
3. Those of us who absolutely hate the new site leave and never come back.
4. Comments complaining are stifled and silenced.
I'm thinking #3 is the most likely possibility.
I hope you're promoting those comments because it's probably the only way the dipshits who run this place will get the message.
Oh, does the beta display unicode properly? If not, what good is it? If it does, have they tested it on links?
No, the beta site doesn't display JACK FUCKING SHIT properly. It's a menagerie of uselessness with random fonts, difficult to follow comment threads, random fonts, no real division between the forced comment titles and the comment itself (WTF, seriously?), random fonts, and just a general shitshow.
I don't know if you can even put links in comments anymore let alone unicode.
But at least there are random changes in the fonts so we can challenge our patience trying to read the comments.
Oh yea, I forgot to mention: WTF is this shit about? Why so many "contributors" and what is their purpose for slashdot? Stumbling upon this reminds me of the Simpsons where Homer discovers a secret plot to move the Springfield Isotopes to Albuquerque and no-one would believe him.
I'm telling y'all, something nasty is about to happen to /.
It's like it has been specifically designed to alienate as many existing users here as it possibly could.
Unless the overlords at Dice are so unfathomably, unbelievably incompetent, this is the only reasonable conclusion that can be drawn which poses another conundrum: without the users the slashdot.org domain has no value whatsoever. Rather than alienate the 15 years or so of slashdot users in an attempt to attract new users, Dice would have been much better off creating something new from scratch.
It's totally mind-boggling.
Thank you!! I really appreciate this.
Although that worked in IE 10 Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, nerfed that feature in some IE 11 update and AFAIK they haven't surreptitiously added it back yet.
Not having used IE since ver 7 I was really surprised that IE 10 and 11 are actually decent enough to use for a while when some firefox or chrome update breaks shit, but it still has its fair share of annoyances. Please allow me to enumerate a few of my annoyances with IE 11:
1. You can block flash fairly easily, but only on a site-by-site basis, and once you whitelist a site you can't remove it without removing *every other site* you've whitelisted. C'mon IE, I only want to allow flash to watch some stupid video on this site this one time...
1.a Oh yeah, flash is baked in to the browser now, but it seems to be a shitty version that stutters on streaming videos making it a crapshoot whether or not it'll be watchable.
2. There is a built-in tracking/ad blocker but again, there's no fine-grained control without really dicking around with some ... file.. somewhere. IOW it's not intuitive and it's very difficult to whitelist a particular site's ads without fucking IE's whole ad blocking program.
3. IE finally renders shit correctly, uhh, except for all the "legacy" shit that was built with workarounds for older versions of IE, like e.g. vBulletin.. And I don't "get" IE well enough to tell it how to tell the site to STFU and give me the firefox version (which renders correctly in IE BTW) since IE doesn't seem to like to play nice with user-agent strings outside of its archaic F12 devtools..
4. Fucking font rendering SUCKS. Microsoft took an enormous step backwards with their font renderer in windows 8/8.1 and it really shows in IE.
5. IE is now reliable at recovering the pages when it crashes, which is good 'cause it crashes a lot.
I'd like to interject that I sometimes use and enjoy IE now, but I just need to get this off my chest.
6. Private browsing is good, unless you want to have 2 or more private browsers open on the same site like e.g. two or more gmail accounts open simultaneously, which you can't do because the cookies are shared amongst them... Well, you can if you have one open in the standard IE and the other in private mode, BUT NO MORE.
7. it's finally reasonably secure, or at least the competition is now equally insecure.
Any more I don't choose a browser because it has features I like, I choose a browser because the competition has pissed me off, and it's an arms race to see which one can get to the bottom first... Firefox is shitty, chrome is shitty, IE is shitty but which one is going to piss me off the most today?
What it brings to the table is the ability to select from your music library and play the music from the steam overlay in-game or from the steam big picture interface. No need to leave the game to open another shell or DE, no need to fiddle with the commandline, none of that. Instead, pause game, select music, resume game rather than pause game, switch to xmms (or whatever), manage music from xmms which may or may not work with a joypad, switch back to the game then resume play. It's just convenience.
It's a way of integrating the user's local music library with their local steam game library from within the steam application interface. Basically it's one step towards making the steam application into a general purpose media player rather than just a game library management interface.
From the FAQ:
Supported Audio File Formats
At the moment only MP3 files are supported. This will change over time.
From the announcement:
With Steam Music, you can now listen to your music collection while playing games. Once you’ve pointed Steam to your local music directory, your Steam Library will include Album and Artist views of your collection.
Sounds like, for now, this is a convenience feature for steam users to access their own music while gaming rather than a distribution method.
"Man, that Slashdot beta was a real Doberhuahua"
Yep, and they seem to be banking on this SlashCloud and SlashBI, etc. SlashBullShit as of late so I bet they're going in the "original content" with minimal user interaction/minimal community direction. I bet the slashdot.org domain will be up for cheap in a couple years when DICE has finished looting the last corpse here so if someone still has an installation of SlashCode laying around we could probably get the site back up to speed pretty quickly in that eventuality.
It must suck to be Malda and see your website baby all grown up to be a junkie whore like this.
There was a very noticeable improvement in my friend's cat's gait when she (the cat) began taking a Cosequin supplement, so unless the placebo effect works for animals there was almost certainly something in the capsule that was beneficial to the cat.
and then they offered server side "rendering"
LOL, what was the idea behind that? Did it parse the html/javascript code and send you an animated .gif as a screenbuffer or what?
Well I, for one, learned something interesting today, so you may rest assured that your comment did not go unappreciated.
Superintendent Chalmers: A graphics system... in the linux kernel... and hasn't changed... since the '90s?
Principal Skinner: Yes!
Superintendent Chalmers: May I see it?
Principal Skinner: Er, no.
Yeah, but why not though? Sometimes innovation is spurred by a certain naive ignorance, which is to say that there can be valuable insight by not being indoctrinated by idiom and custom, which is yet another way to say that sometimes "not knowing any better" is a good thing.
Damn, that *was* a clumsy sentence.
PHP is unparalleled for people who want to make a webpage without having to understand HTTP.
Or PHP for that matter...
(...kidding...)