Because the people behind gtk3 are actively hostile to everyone but the GNOME project. Not only breaking functionality that non-GNOME projects need, but seeking out GTK applications and pressuring them to remove functionality just because GNOME Shell no longer uses it.
Details and further criticisms are all over the web; a couple starting points are here or here .
GTK is generally seen as a dead end these days. Many if not most of the folks who develop GTK apps that aren't part of the core GNOME project are scrambling to port to QT or something else. And GNOME itself is a struggling project and has been bleeding market share for 4 years now.
With all the work that has been poured into MoarVM, MoarVM Perl 6 is now painfully slow.
This is a tremendous improvement. The best they'd ever managed with Parrot was "abysmally slow." Before that, perl 6 implementations ranged from "diabolically slow" to "the madness-inducing manifestation of the visage of Gn'oguracha, Elder Slug-God of Unspeed."
A typical statement from a recent presentation: "2013.08 was about 3,600x slower than Perl 5. 2014.08 is 34x slower. Better. But still sucks."
If they keep pouring in the effort, eventually they may reach parity with Perl 5, which was simply very slow. It is unlikely they will ever approach the performance of modern javascript engines, which are just plain slow.
I'd been thinking this would never see the light of day.
The Cairo backend stuff was a focus in 2010 and 2011 and everyone thought 0.49, the first version with the new renderer, was going to be released in 2012.
Whatever happened in those three years, I'm glad they've turned the corner and hopefully future development can be release early release often again.
ATI was fabless, and though AMD did still own their own fabs for three years after the ATI acquisition, that was completely irrelevant since TSMC still fabbed all the chips anyways. There were rumblings about doing some chips on AMD's own fabs but it never came to pass.
So the grandparent is right. ATI / AMD Graphics and Visual Solutions and nVidia have both always been fabless.
People who think owning your own fabs is always fabulous are disconnected from the realities of the semiconductor industry. It just isn't feasible for most companies to duplicate all the huge material and R&D investments that have to be continually at full throttle just to have any chance to compete in the fab space. Gamers, who care disproportionately about retail add-in graphics cards, routinely overestimate the size of the graphics card industry; Intel's revenue is over 10x either nVidia's or AMD's. Only a fab that gets a lot more business than just nVidia's can possibly hope to compete. TSMC fits that bill.
I'm not saying "let's stop calling free range meat 'free range' and start applying that label to plants." If you seriously thought I was then your reading comprehension skills need a lot of work.
Most people who buy "free range" or "organic" food feel a moral passion about it because they think they're doing something positive for the environment, animal welfare, or both. They are dead wrong. The organic and free range food craze is not an environmental benefit but an environmental menace. That's what I was saying.
If your purchases of free range or organic food are only motivated by taste, then my earlier post doesn't really address you at all. But "tastes more like I think it's supposed to" is a lousy gluttonous excuse for taking actions that lead to ecological disaster.
You don't need to. Livestock require 8-20x more land per gram of protein produced than plant based protein sources. Switching entirely to plant based foods would allow returning >90% of that land to its natural state and growing crops only on the most suitable 10%.
(Of course, the shift in land use need not be entirely restricted to those lands; if livestock were abandoned the protein crops needed to replace them could be grown anywhere, not just on land formerly used for livestock. And your 80% figure is wrong anyways- it could be close to the total percent of that used for grazing, but most certainly not for the portion of that which is "unsuitable for growing anything except grass.")
Diabetes is actually less common in vegetarians than the general population, and diabetes has a strong positive correlation with overall meat intake.
The insistence that the type of carbohydrate doesn't matter to diabetes risk is absolutely false. Plenty of plant based foods contain sufficient calories without causing problems with blood sugar.
Protein intake in many first world countries, especially the US, is hugely higher than it has been in any other era of the world. People subsisted just fine off grains and beans for millennia, without the high incidence of diabetes that exists in today's age of high meat intake and high refined sugar intake.
"more distributed" means more land use. The studies on this have already been done: moving from battery farms to free range requires 20% more feed per gram of protein (largely due to the lack of precisely temperature-regulated environments) and on the order of 10x more land use.
10x the land use=huge habitat destruction and increased global warming. We already use 1/3 of the earth's total land area for livestock.
The extra food those chickens have to consume is not "free" in any environmental sense no matter where the chickens are. It costs a lot of energy and land. And human labor is an astoundingly costly input, even just from an environmental perspective.
Your views of the labor market and modern food production are totally disconnected from reality. Your conclusion basically is "the only reason we quit all being hunter-gatherers is because of The Man. Take out a handful of shadowy puppet masters and we'd all go back to happy neolithic paradise." Modernization of food production is the central thing that has raised the standard of living from the stone age to the present day, and economic efficiency is not some kind of bogeyman.
Raising enough eggs to meet present demand for them in "free range" ways that meet with your moral approval would require tremendous habitat destruction, accelerate global warming, and increase poverty and death across the world. How is that any more humane than the present situation?
Also, most eggs don't come from very good places. Yes, some come from nice, free range farms. But the reality is that most come from dirty, filthy, factory farmed facilities, that are bad for the environment
but the reality is that though "nice free range farms" may make people feel warm and fuzzy they are MUCH WORSE for the environment than battery farms. Feed inputs are ~20% higher per gram of protein, and land use is obviously tremendously higher. We already use an entire third of the planet's land surface to support livestock; trying to raise all that livestock in "organic, free range" ways just because people have an aversion to modern food production methods would actually require tremendous habitat destruction and accelerate global warming.
The same thing is true of other trendy organic etc methods. They are less efficient in ways that matter not only economically but environmentally. There are reasons people moved away from the "old ways" to be able to feed the planet.
Moving almost entirely to plant-based food is the only way to substantially improve the environmental impact of our food production, and it's urgent for us to do.
Hampton Creek's mission is an important part of that. It's just unfortunate that they seem to some extent to have bought into the anti-science, environmentally counterproductive attitudes of the Whole Foods crowds.
But frequentist analyses aren't any more "objective," they just hide biases from view and include inductive biases that aren't even rationally compatible with any consistent state of belief.
With Bayesian analysis your starting point is out in the open and must be justifiable and defensible; analysts are accountable for their priors.
You can also, of course, examine what would follow from several different priors. This is much more straightforward than trying to shake the hidden biases in a frequentist model.
Any "nerd" who posited that bandwidth and storage concerns would be so totally irrelevant that we'd happily waste 10-20x as much of them for practically zero benefit was not so much a "nerd" as a total idiot. Having more bandwidth means you want to do more with it, not waste it for no reason.
Real "nerds" worth the cred understand that not only does lossy compression provide great results at small fractions of the sizes of the best lossless representations, but research into lossy compression also helps us understand the structure of real-world information, intelligence, and human perception in new ways.
A future where we have lossy formats which achieve results equal to today's formats in a quarter the bandwidth because we've come to better understand the structure present in real-world signals and the ways humans perceive and interpret information is a cooler and more exciting future than one in which we [url=http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/01/19/the-hidden-expense-of-energy-costs-print-is-costly-online-isnt-free/]waste exajoules of energy and help destroy the planet[/url] by sending each other millions of terabyte-sized high resolution lossless cat videos.
Oh, by the way, one of my pet peeves is seeing vector animations from Homestar Runner, AtomFilms, etc uploaded to raster streaming video sites. The original vector animations had bitrates low enough for dial-up, ran smoothly on a Pentium III, and scaled flawlessly to any resolution. The raster (usu. H264) versions frequently look much much worse despite 20x the bitrate and dedicated processing hardware.
Vector animations like Homestar Runner are the original purpose of Flash- the one thing it is actually quite good at, and has been quite good at since Macromedia released Flash 3 in 1998. That's part of how it became ubiquitous- it did one thing and did it well. Even now there isn't really a better alternative- there's nothing that has the capabilities, the cross-environment rendering consistency, the install base, and the tool support Flash vector animations have.
It's just really unfortunate that after the Adobe acquisition Flash became a way of shoehorning a subpar and insecure "rich content platform" into that ubiquitous install base. For quite a while now streaming raster video has been a dominant use of flash, where it's been inferior to other solutions and only used because of its large install base and its support for DRM.
The main advantage of a SSD for most users is not the 5x faster sequential performance, it's the >100x faster access times. RAID does improve throughput but it does very little to improve access times and random IOPS.
How about not recklessly endangering others' lives and not showing contempt for democracy and the rule of law?
If you want to spend a few trillion dollars of your own money to build your own private road network where you can drive at whatever speed you darn well please, go right ahead. But if you want to use the road infrastructure paid for by your fellow citizens, you need to live with the rules your fellow citizens have put in place.
Protecting the rest of us from numbskulls like you is not just honest work, it's a great benefit to society. You could do the rest of us a benefit too by not touching a steering wheel or gas pedal ever again.
Perhaps tomato soup may have some beneficial effects, but if you really want to find feelings of well-being and contentment, you should have more ketchup.
Ketchup contains natural mellowing agents which help you stop worrying about your minor medical ailments. You don't need homeopathic medicine; you don't need a placebo. All you need is to relax, have some ketchup, and let your body take care of things naturally.
These are the good years, in the golden sun, A new day is dawning, a new life has begun, The river flowing like ketchup on a bun.
Our old Chevy Sprint- a 5 passenger hatchback- weighed < 1500lb and got 44mpg city / 53 hwy. For the sake of "safety" the Smart Fortwo- a dinky two-passenger car with little cargo room- weighs 2250 lb and gets 34 city/ 38 hwy. The engineer giveth, and the safety inspector taketh away.
Safety involves tradeoffs, and people should be able to make their own informed decisions about their own safety and the risks they will tolerate. Safety regulations should be based on the damage your car does to other cars (and to pedestrians and cyclists), since you shouldn't get to decide what risks other people face.
Failing to admit that safety involves tradeoffs, and regulating cars only based on their own occupants' safety, has led to a curb weight arms race. The easy way to be safer, if you ignore the tradeoffs, is to make your car heavier compared to the average; but when the average weight rises everyone is less safe (especially pedestrians and cyclists), all the advances in engines and materials are outweighed, and MPGs stay stagnant.
The problem is: we may think it strange that a universal translator that does such a miraculous job everywhere else would be so nonfunctional with this language, Trekkies will come up with some silly technobabble explanation, but the only real reason is that a universal translator is just a handwaving plot device for writers' convenience, and here for once they found it inconvenient. Their way of dealing with it may be illogical, but tossing the crutch for one episode allows them to explore new ground.
Almost every piece of technology in Star Trek is there for one of two reasons: it made the writers' jobs easier (e.g. universal translator, replicator, the badly overused holodeck) or it made the set designers' and special effects guys' jobs easier, esp. in the original series (e.g. transporter). In each case, these technologies would have vast and far reaching impacts that the series never took into account because it wouldn't serve the items' purpose as handwaving conveniences. You have replicators, but whenever you want to have an object be valuable or difficult to obtain, somehow the replicator just can't get it quite right. You have transporters that can teleport tremendously fragile objects like people instantly across thousands of miles, but whenever you want characters to have an adventure physically retrieving an object, or whenever you want characters to be in real peril off ship, somehow the object is inherently untransportable or the transporters can't get a lock on people.
As I've said in another post here, a lot of the problem is that you sent people back to beta again and again to solicit more feedback before the very most basic problems- esp. content width and comment section information density - had been addressed at all.
This gave people the impression that those things weren't going to change, and solidified in people's minds the idea that beta was horrific and that a redirect to beta was a reason to scream.
Though the present beta isn't ready, it is enough of an improvement over the earlier betas as to reassure me somewhat about the future of the site. But until a few minutes ago I had no idea of its improvements because previous horrific betas' lack of improvement over the months had trained me to avoid beta like the plague.
Because of how awful previous betas were, and how gradual and unannounced the improvements have been, the knee-jerk reaction to "oh, we're going to try redirecting you to beta!" is "OH HECK NO YOU DON'T."
The beta is still terrible, but it is substantially less terrible than the versions I looked at last year. During that time, I and many others gave careful feedback but it seemed like there was awfully little improvement over time. It got to the point that a redirect to beta just instinctively causes panic and anger because people have had such terrible experiences with it in the past.
I'm afraid that in the past couple of days some of the complaints and feedback I've given were no longer accurate for today's beta.
I still think the information density and the comment system have a long way to go. I still think the (thankfully slightly rarer now) stock photographs are uninteresting, uninformative, stupid, uninformative, and a total waste of space.
But at least you're not only using a third of my screen's width for content, making it so only ~3 comments can be seen on screen at a time, etc. like previous betas did. That was horrific. Before you redirect anyone to beta, help them know about what's been improved with beta and apologize for past mistakes.
And for pete's sake, give people the option to switch the silly color scheme. Should be simple enough.
The receptionist type who answered was polite, said they'd already had several calls today, jotted down my complaints to relay once more to a guy who's involved with the beta, and said "we're withholding his snacks until this is fixed." They said it was nice to realize there were people out there who were passionate about the site.
Make your voice heard. Let them know that wasting screen space, butchering comment sections, etc are going to result in their visitors leaving en masse. If the phone is ringing all day, day in and day out, with users who don't want to see this place ruined, perhaps things will turn around.
I don't like to see people breaking the law. But what I really don't like to see is a torrent search where the only results are 480i DivX versions. Good grief, people. Can't you see how this damages a movie's reputation? If you must upload pirated movies, upload 1080p x264 encodes or I will double the damages when the case comes to court. Now, please excuse me; I need to get some more popcorn.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the people behind gtk3 are actively hostile to everyone but the GNOME project. Not only breaking functionality that non-GNOME projects need, but seeking out GTK applications and pressuring them to remove functionality just because GNOME Shell no longer uses it.
Details and further criticisms are all over the web; a couple starting points are here or here .
GTK is generally seen as a dead end these days. Many if not most of the folks who develop GTK apps that aren't part of the core GNOME project are scrambling to port to QT or something else. And GNOME itself is a struggling project and has been bleeding market share for 4 years now.
With all the work that has been poured into MoarVM, MoarVM Perl 6 is now painfully slow.
This is a tremendous improvement. The best they'd ever managed with Parrot was "abysmally slow." Before that, perl 6 implementations ranged from "diabolically slow" to "the madness-inducing manifestation of the visage of Gn'oguracha, Elder Slug-God of Unspeed."
A typical statement from a recent presentation: "2013.08 was about 3,600x slower than Perl 5. 2014.08 is 34x slower. Better. But still sucks."
If they keep pouring in the effort, eventually they may reach parity with Perl 5, which was simply very slow. It is unlikely they will ever approach the performance of modern javascript engines, which are just plain slow.
I'd been thinking this would never see the light of day.
The Cairo backend stuff was a focus in 2010 and 2011 and everyone thought 0.49, the first version with the new renderer, was going to be released in 2012.
Whatever happened in those three years, I'm glad they've turned the corner and hopefully future development can be release early release often again.
The article is about GPUs.
ATI was fabless, and though AMD did still own their own fabs for three years after the ATI acquisition, that was completely irrelevant since TSMC still fabbed all the chips anyways. There were rumblings about doing some chips on AMD's own fabs but it never came to pass.
So the grandparent is right. ATI / AMD Graphics and Visual Solutions and nVidia have both always been fabless.
People who think owning your own fabs is always fabulous are disconnected from the realities of the semiconductor industry. It just isn't feasible for most companies to duplicate all the huge material and R&D investments that have to be continually at full throttle just to have any chance to compete in the fab space. Gamers, who care disproportionately about retail add-in graphics cards, routinely overestimate the size of the graphics card industry; Intel's revenue is over 10x either nVidia's or AMD's. Only a fab that gets a lot more business than just nVidia's can possibly hope to compete. TSMC fits that bill.
I'm not saying "let's stop calling free range meat 'free range' and start applying that label to plants." If you seriously thought I was then your reading comprehension skills need a lot of work.
Most people who buy "free range" or "organic" food feel a moral passion about it because they think they're doing something positive for the environment, animal welfare, or both. They are dead wrong. The organic and free range food craze is not an environmental benefit but an environmental menace. That's what I was saying.
If your purchases of free range or organic food are only motivated by taste, then my earlier post doesn't really address you at all. But "tastes more like I think it's supposed to" is a lousy gluttonous excuse for taking actions that lead to ecological disaster.
You don't need to. Livestock require 8-20x more land per gram of protein produced than plant based protein sources. Switching entirely to plant based foods would allow returning >90% of that land to its natural state and growing crops only on the most suitable 10%.
(Of course, the shift in land use need not be entirely restricted to those lands; if livestock were abandoned the protein crops needed to replace them could be grown anywhere, not just on land formerly used for livestock. And your 80% figure is wrong anyways- it could be close to the total percent of that used for grazing, but most certainly not for the portion of that which is "unsuitable for growing anything except grass.")
Diabetes is actually less common in vegetarians than the general population, and diabetes has a strong positive correlation with overall meat intake.
The insistence that the type of carbohydrate doesn't matter to diabetes risk is absolutely false. Plenty of plant based foods contain sufficient calories without causing problems with blood sugar.
Protein intake in many first world countries, especially the US, is hugely higher than it has been in any other era of the world. People subsisted just fine off grains and beans for millennia, without the high incidence of diabetes that exists in today's age of high meat intake and high refined sugar intake.
"more distributed" means more land use. The studies on this have already been done: moving from battery farms to free range requires 20% more feed per gram of protein (largely due to the lack of precisely temperature-regulated environments) and on the order of 10x more land use.
10x the land use=huge habitat destruction and increased global warming. We already use 1/3 of the earth's total land area for livestock.
c.f. this or this.
The extra food those chickens have to consume is not "free" in any environmental sense no matter where the chickens are. It costs a lot of energy and land. And human labor is an astoundingly costly input, even just from an environmental perspective.
Your views of the labor market and modern food production are totally disconnected from reality. Your conclusion basically is "the only reason we quit all being hunter-gatherers is because of The Man. Take out a handful of shadowy puppet masters and we'd all go back to happy neolithic paradise." Modernization of food production is the central thing that has raised the standard of living from the stone age to the present day, and economic efficiency is not some kind of bogeyman.
Raising enough eggs to meet present demand for them in "free range" ways that meet with your moral approval would require tremendous habitat destruction, accelerate global warming, and increase poverty and death across the world. How is that any more humane than the present situation?
The interview says
but the reality is that though "nice free range farms" may make people feel warm and fuzzy they are MUCH WORSE for the environment than battery farms. Feed inputs are ~20% higher per gram of protein, and land use is obviously tremendously higher. We already use an entire third of the planet's land surface to support livestock; trying to raise all that livestock in "organic, free range" ways just because people have an aversion to modern food production methods would actually require tremendous habitat destruction and accelerate global warming.
The same thing is true of other trendy organic etc methods. They are less efficient in ways that matter not only economically but environmentally. There are reasons people moved away from the "old ways" to be able to feed the planet.
Moving almost entirely to plant-based food is the only way to substantially improve the environmental impact of our food production, and it's urgent for us to do.
Hampton Creek's mission is an important part of that. It's just unfortunate that they seem to some extent to have bought into the anti-science, environmentally counterproductive attitudes of the Whole Foods crowds.
But frequentist analyses aren't any more "objective," they just hide biases from view and include inductive biases that aren't even rationally compatible with any consistent state of belief.
With Bayesian analysis your starting point is out in the open and must be justifiable and defensible; analysts are accountable for their priors.
You can also, of course, examine what would follow from several different priors. This is much more straightforward than trying to shake the hidden biases in a frequentist model.
that'd be this link
that'll teach me to use preview esp. when I've been spending too much time on sites where the article discussions use bbcode
Any "nerd" who posited that bandwidth and storage concerns would be so totally irrelevant that we'd happily waste 10-20x as much of them for practically zero benefit was not so much a "nerd" as a total idiot. Having more bandwidth means you want to do more with it, not waste it for no reason.
Real "nerds" worth the cred understand that not only does lossy compression provide great results at small fractions of the sizes of the best lossless representations, but research into lossy compression also helps us understand the structure of real-world information, intelligence, and human perception in new ways.
A future where we have lossy formats which achieve results equal to today's formats in a quarter the bandwidth because we've come to better understand the structure present in real-world signals and the ways humans perceive and interpret information is a cooler and more exciting future than one in which we [url=http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/01/19/the-hidden-expense-of-energy-costs-print-is-costly-online-isnt-free/]waste exajoules of energy and help destroy the planet[/url] by sending each other millions of terabyte-sized high resolution lossless cat videos.
Oh, by the way, one of my pet peeves is seeing vector animations from Homestar Runner, AtomFilms, etc uploaded to raster streaming video sites. The original vector animations had bitrates low enough for dial-up, ran smoothly on a Pentium III, and scaled flawlessly to any resolution. The raster (usu. H264) versions frequently look much much worse despite 20x the bitrate and dedicated processing hardware.
Vector animations like Homestar Runner are the original purpose of Flash- the one thing it is actually quite good at, and has been quite good at since Macromedia released Flash 3 in 1998. That's part of how it became ubiquitous- it did one thing and did it well. Even now there isn't really a better alternative- there's nothing that has the capabilities, the cross-environment rendering consistency, the install base, and the tool support Flash vector animations have.
It's just really unfortunate that after the Adobe acquisition Flash became a way of shoehorning a subpar and insecure "rich content platform" into that ubiquitous install base. For quite a while now streaming raster video has been a dominant use of flash, where it's been inferior to other solutions and only used because of its large install base and its support for DRM.
Absolutely not.
The main advantage of a SSD for most users is not the 5x faster sequential performance, it's the >100x faster access times. RAID does improve throughput but it does very little to improve access times and random IOPS.
How about not recklessly endangering others' lives and not showing contempt for democracy and the rule of law?
If you want to spend a few trillion dollars of your own money to build your own private road network where you can drive at whatever speed you darn well please, go right ahead. But if you want to use the road infrastructure paid for by your fellow citizens, you need to live with the rules your fellow citizens have put in place.
Protecting the rest of us from numbskulls like you is not just honest work, it's a great benefit to society. You could do the rest of us a benefit too by not touching a steering wheel or gas pedal ever again.
It's their future (and their past thirty years), not mine. Just tossing in a reference to one of the longstanding repeating acts on everybody's favorite radio variety show.
Perhaps tomato soup may have some beneficial effects, but if you really want to find feelings of well-being and contentment, you should have more ketchup.
Ketchup contains natural mellowing agents which help you stop worrying about your minor medical ailments. You don't need homeopathic medicine; you don't need a placebo. All you need is to relax, have some ketchup, and let your body take care of things naturally.
These are the good years, in the golden sun,
A new day is dawning, a new life has begun,
The river flowing like ketchup on a bun.
Ketchup. For the good times.
A message from the Ketchup Advisory Board.
Our old Chevy Sprint- a 5 passenger hatchback- weighed < 1500lb and got 44mpg city / 53 hwy. For the sake of "safety" the Smart Fortwo- a dinky two-passenger car with little cargo room- weighs 2250 lb and gets 34 city/ 38 hwy. The engineer giveth, and the safety inspector taketh away.
Safety involves tradeoffs, and people should be able to make their own informed decisions about their own safety and the risks they will tolerate. Safety regulations should be based on the damage your car does to other cars (and to pedestrians and cyclists), since you shouldn't get to decide what risks other people face.
Failing to admit that safety involves tradeoffs, and regulating cars only based on their own occupants' safety, has led to a curb weight arms race. The easy way to be safer, if you ignore the tradeoffs, is to make your car heavier compared to the average; but when the average weight rises everyone is less safe (especially pedestrians and cyclists), all the advances in engines and materials are outweighed, and MPGs stay stagnant.
The problem is: we may think it strange that a universal translator that does such a miraculous job everywhere else would be so nonfunctional with this language, Trekkies will come up with some silly technobabble explanation, but the only real reason is that a universal translator is just a handwaving plot device for writers' convenience, and here for once they found it inconvenient. Their way of dealing with it may be illogical, but tossing the crutch for one episode allows them to explore new ground.
Almost every piece of technology in Star Trek is there for one of two reasons: it made the writers' jobs easier (e.g. universal translator, replicator, the badly overused holodeck) or it made the set designers' and special effects guys' jobs easier, esp. in the original series (e.g. transporter). In each case, these technologies would have vast and far reaching impacts that the series never took into account because it wouldn't serve the items' purpose as handwaving conveniences. You have replicators, but whenever you want to have an object be valuable or difficult to obtain, somehow the replicator just can't get it quite right. You have transporters that can teleport tremendously fragile objects like people instantly across thousands of miles, but whenever you want characters to have an adventure physically retrieving an object, or whenever you want characters to be in real peril off ship, somehow the object is inherently untransportable or the transporters can't get a lock on people.
Fridge logic and dubious explanations abound, yet somehow the show goes on.
As I've said in another post here, a lot of the problem is that you sent people back to beta again and again to solicit more feedback before the very most basic problems- esp. content width and comment section information density - had been addressed at all.
This gave people the impression that those things weren't going to change, and solidified in people's minds the idea that beta was horrific and that a redirect to beta was a reason to scream.
Though the present beta isn't ready, it is enough of an improvement over the earlier betas as to reassure me somewhat about the future of the site. But until a few minutes ago I had no idea of its improvements because previous horrific betas' lack of improvement over the months had trained me to avoid beta like the plague.
Because of how awful previous betas were, and how gradual and unannounced the improvements have been, the knee-jerk reaction to "oh, we're going to try redirecting you to beta!" is "OH HECK NO YOU DON'T."
The beta is still terrible, but it is substantially less terrible than the versions I looked at last year. During that time, I and many others gave careful feedback but it seemed like there was awfully little improvement over time. It got to the point that a redirect to beta just instinctively causes panic and anger because people have had such terrible experiences with it in the past.
I'm afraid that in the past couple of days some of the complaints and feedback I've given were no longer accurate for today's beta.
I still think the information density and the comment system have a long way to go. I still think the (thankfully slightly rarer now) stock photographs are uninteresting, uninformative, stupid, uninformative, and a total waste of space.
But at least you're not only using a third of my screen's width for content, making it so only ~3 comments can be seen on screen at a time, etc. like previous betas did. That was horrific. Before you redirect anyone to beta, help them know about what's been improved with beta and apologize for past mistakes.
And for pete's sake, give people the option to switch the silly color scheme. Should be simple enough.
Calling the number Dice lists for Slashdot results in a recording which in turn tells you to call 415-625-0856.
The receptionist type who answered was polite, said they'd already had several calls today, jotted down my complaints to relay once more to a guy who's involved with the beta, and said "we're withholding his snacks until this is fixed." They said it was nice to realize there were people out there who were passionate about the site.
Make your voice heard. Let them know that wasting screen space, butchering comment sections, etc are going to result in their visitors leaving en masse. If the phone is ringing all day, day in and day out, with users who don't want to see this place ruined, perhaps things will turn around.
I don't like to see people breaking the law. But what I really don't like to see is a torrent search where the only results are 480i DivX versions. Good grief, people. Can't you see how this damages a movie's reputation? If you must upload pirated movies, upload 1080p x264 encodes or I will double the damages when the case comes to court. Now, please excuse me; I need to get some more popcorn.
--Christina Brobacke, Västmanlands Tingsrätt