And then, of course, all the special interest stuff is available online, including on the NBC and MSNBC sites. And you get to read and watch without all the talking head commentary.
It's good news to hear that the new UI will exist in parallel with the old one; this isn't what the banner advertised, which is why people got so upset
"Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready"
Yes, that's the new messaging, and it implies that the old Classic Slashdot is going away, and the only trigger for this is that someone is confident it's ready -- the same someone who is confident Beta is ready for default use. So it basically boils down to "Classic Slashdot is going away at some unnamed future date, when we feel like making it go away."
If I make you lunch every day of your life and it's always hamburgers, and then suddenly start serving you a pita (just the bread) instead, and then when you complain, tell you that you can get the burger if you ask for it, and that I won't stop making that option available until I'm sure I've got the pita just right, what would your reaction be?
Well, those few needed tweaks never stop piling up.
I'm with you there... the original issues were a pain to fix, so it was easier to start with a clean implementation where you could get all those tweaks right at the start. Continual modification will only take you so far.
On top of that, UX research and (more importantly) user expectations continue to evolve.
I've been involved with UX research for years; what's happened is that people have forgotten the original research and are slowly re-inventing it. Some people just realized that the "desktop" paradigm is useless today, when most people's desktop consists of a computer. This new design research doesn't really touch Slashdot much, except for maybe the whitespace/content rules, which the new UI breaks. User expectations with how the data can be consumed continue to evolve... this means that from the design process, the content should be separated from the design such that it can easily be served up in whatever way is required by a simple API. Possibly this is happening with beta, but that messaging hasn't got out to the users; we've had no way of even playing with that functionality.
To keep up with that, websites either need to constantly change in small increments, or to do it in big chunks. We'd been doing the former for a while, but the decision was made to start fresh. I totally understand how jarring it is to see such a huge amount of change all at once, but we also have to look at what the website will look like a few years down the road.
The classic design in 2014? Not too bad. The classic design in 2018? Probably not going to cut it.
People aren't complaining about the design; they're complaining about the functionality. They'd love a new "from scratch" design that puts comments and moderation as top priority, using modern UI elements and message passing. Unfortunately, that's not what has been delivered so far.
If you want it explained by someone who doesn't currently have the same vested interest, ask CmdrTaco -- he's the one who came up with the contributions system in the first place; I think that at least one point, he grokked the experience, and as he was part of its growth, he probably has some perspective -- not necessarily on the UI, but on how to grow the userbase in a positive way and how to keep sight of what keeps this place vibrant.
No matter who you're trying to attract to the site or how (making it so that people can post articles to their Facebook wall, etc), the UI and the stack that supports it has to be driven by the same elements that drive the site's popularity. In this case, that's the comments Slashdot appeals to the same people that like MST3k -- it's a completely different paradigm than you get with Facebook or Instagram. If you're attempting to attract new users who are familiar with those interfaces and make them feel comfortable here, you're not going to do it by mimicking existing design systems at a cost to the commenting and moderating system. You're going to do it by making the Slashdot paradigm so attractive that they're willing to leave their walled gardens of force-fed information and come on over to the anarchic wilderness where everyone is a valued contributor (even government shills and anonymous pundits). Not by cloning what already exists.
It's good news to hear that the new UI will exist in parallel with the old one; this isn't what the banner advertised, which is why people got so upset. After months of submitting feedback, it appeared that the UI was to be replaced without the largest concerns being acknowledged or addressed in messaging or in the beta.
I've got one really good suggestion for going forward: have a permanent "beta" link on the header -- that links to site ideas that people can moderate, and also has a ticket tracking system for actual changes made to the "trunk" beta so that interested parties can see what's actually being fixed. This would also allow you to get immediate feedback if a specific change wasn't going over well, and give you somewhere you could go to grab fresh ideas that are likely to meet with community approval. This won't work for all changes (after all, if you're attempting to attract a new crowd, pandering to the existing crowd, even if they're experts on UI and feedback systems isn't going to be enough), but it would be a good weather vane, and help people to feel like they know where things are heading. In short, it would have prevented the blow-up you're having to run damage control over with this beta (which does have good elements, just a lousy delivery).
Oh, I thought that was going a different route... where Dice spins off Slashdot, installs Timothy as CEO, and leaves him as the sole victim of Beta wrath, while Dice.com walks away whistling....
No; Volkswagon is the Linux of car manufacturers -- it's the people's car. BMW is the Apple of car manufacturers. And of course, Windows is the K-Car. Interestingly, we don't appear to have a viable Toyota/Honda in the OS marketplace.
I know as the middleman, you're not really in the best situation to answer, but where *is* the confusion? We've had a laundry list of requested improvements to slashcode for years, and instead of seeing them get fixed (with some notable exceptions), we get a superficial GUI replacement that makes the most common actions more difficult, and ignores the idiosyncrasies of its specific target audience and instead moves over to a more "standardized" stack that in the past drove many people to abandon other discussion sites for slashdot in the first place.
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.
Slashdot is using OpenID, right? So we could have a javascript on the new site that lets you log in with your openID and transfer all the comments over from the old slashdot to the new forum. It'd be missing all the content not owned by people who switch, but you could always have links back to fill in the holes. Of course, this is the part that may be on legal shaky ground.
Or, from a less sarcastic angle, they've realized that the ads and ad summaries aren't getting enough view time, so they've adjusted the UI to fix the ratio. Unfortunately, fixing the ratio won't likely fix the problem....
Didn't they make the source code open source a while back? It'd be a shame to lose our old user IDs and post history, but someone could easily write a replacement including a script that allowed people to pull stuff from their old account using OpenID.
Mod up. Yep. and i'm willing to burn my excellent karma supporting this off-topic war.
War? On the one hand, you've got slashdot users, who know what they like. On the other side, you've got Dice employees, who have been tasked with creating something new.
Oh, does the beta display unicode properly? If not, what good is it? If it does, have they tested it on links?
Honest questions, as I've never ever seen the beta site; with javascript disabled, I even missed the previous interface update, as the non-js version hasn't changed in years....
just assume the highest number of it. Case closed.
mod up... this is the best way to handle the numbers. When looking for trends, you'll know it's trending when the range jumps. But considering the numbers should be in the 0-xxx range, and often aren't, trend analysis is kind of useless; there should already be concern just based on the static range numbers.
That's one link, but almost any other will show the same result.
Even comparing teacher salaries to other jobs results in them being paid well in the United States.
Your link shows per pupil spending, not teacher pay. I have no figures and am not looking them up now, but while I know the mid-high end teacher pay is pretty good, the low end in lower paying states (read: mostly the south) is low.
I'd also like to mention that teaching supplies and materials (curriculum's the big one) and insurance are big chunks of that $/student ratio in the US -- most countries use old books or "open source" materials which cost very little, and spend most of the money on teachers and teacher training. A good teacher can teach well out of pretty much any material -- good material is useless if you've got overworked and underpaid people teaching to the test. Kid's don't read the material; they are walked through it by the teachers. Only the kids that discover they can read the material themselves and learn what's needed, and ask questions, will excel. And that's not taught in most schools.
Sounds like if you can arrange it, a talk with their teachers might be useful, so you can at least find out what the expectations are. Your kids are likely finding that not only can they use homework time to get a monopoly on your attention, but that they find the time with you to help them learn the material much better than they can in class... so they don't learn it in class and instead bring it home to do.
Initially it'll take time out of your evening disengagements, but if you talk to the teachers, find out expectations for homework and whether this work is above and beyond classwork or is just stuff they didn't do when they should have in class, you'll be able to address this issue much better with your kids.
It's also possible (unlikely, since your B.S. would have come with large doses of critical thinking) that your kids are manipulating you in to providing them with the answers the teachers were trying to get them to figure out for themselves -- development of critical thinking, tying together the ideas presented in class, etc. If this is the case, your help with their homework is actually getting them farther and farther behind in class, as they continue to fail to grasp the core concepts -- but are slipping under the radar at school as their assignments all come back relatively correctly done, so the teacher doesn't know until much later in the year where the real learning issues are (the teachers spend most of their time babysitting the troublemakers, which your kids probably aren't).
So yeah; make a few appointments to talk with the teachers who are assigning these large amounts of homework. If the kids are in highschool and the homework is distributed across all subjects, it's time to talk with your kids first, as they're obviously slacking off/not actually reading the textbooks/not asking questions when they don't understand. Encourage them to be active learners instead of passive lumps of grey matter -- the incentive is that they'll have more time to play EVE with you after school, because they'll have little to no homework.
But it doesn't escape... extreme government regulation of curricula.
Government regulation of curricula exists to protect children from being taught "Creation Science" in public schools. You want to fix over-regulation in schools? Fix the root cause. Otherwise, I'm all in on that one.
Root cause being people? How best to fix people? Through education? Should we regulate that?
Slashdot Mirror
You could try streaming from a different country as well:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
And then, of course, all the special interest stuff is available online, including on the NBC and MSNBC sites. And you get to read and watch without all the talking head commentary.
It's good news to hear that the new UI will exist in parallel with the old one; this isn't what the banner advertised, which is why people got so upset
"Most importantly, we want you to know that Classic Slashdot isn't going away until we're confident that the new site is ready"
Yes, that's the new messaging, and it implies that the old Classic Slashdot is going away, and the only trigger for this is that someone is confident it's ready -- the same someone who is confident Beta is ready for default use. So it basically boils down to "Classic Slashdot is going away at some unnamed future date, when we feel like making it go away."
If I make you lunch every day of your life and it's always hamburgers, and then suddenly start serving you a pita (just the bread) instead, and then when you complain, tell you that you can get the burger if you ask for it, and that I won't stop making that option available until I'm sure I've got the pita just right, what would your reaction be?
Well, those few needed tweaks never stop piling up.
I'm with you there... the original issues were a pain to fix, so it was easier to start with a clean implementation where you could get all those tweaks right at the start. Continual modification will only take you so far.
On top of that, UX research and (more importantly) user expectations continue to evolve.
I've been involved with UX research for years; what's happened is that people have forgotten the original research and are slowly re-inventing it. Some people just realized that the "desktop" paradigm is useless today, when most people's desktop consists of a computer. This new design research doesn't really touch Slashdot much, except for maybe the whitespace/content rules, which the new UI breaks.
User expectations with how the data can be consumed continue to evolve... this means that from the design process, the content should be separated from the design such that it can easily be served up in whatever way is required by a simple API. Possibly this is happening with beta, but that messaging hasn't got out to the users; we've had no way of even playing with that functionality.
To keep up with that, websites either need to constantly change in small increments, or to do it in big chunks. We'd been doing the former for a while, but the decision was made to start fresh. I totally understand how jarring it is to see such a huge amount of change all at once, but we also have to look at what the website will look like a few years down the road.
The classic design in 2014? Not too bad. The classic design in 2018? Probably not going to cut it.
People aren't complaining about the design; they're complaining about the functionality. They'd love a new "from scratch" design that puts comments and moderation as top priority, using modern UI elements and message passing. Unfortunately, that's not what has been delivered so far.
If you want it explained by someone who doesn't currently have the same vested interest, ask CmdrTaco -- he's the one who came up with the contributions system in the first place; I think that at least one point, he grokked the experience, and as he was part of its growth, he probably has some perspective -- not necessarily on the UI, but on how to grow the userbase in a positive way and how to keep sight of what keeps this place vibrant.
No matter who you're trying to attract to the site or how (making it so that people can post articles to their Facebook wall, etc), the UI and the stack that supports it has to be driven by the same elements that drive the site's popularity. In this case, that's the comments Slashdot appeals to the same people that like MST3k -- it's a completely different paradigm than you get with Facebook or Instagram. If you're attempting to attract new users who are familiar with those interfaces and make them feel comfortable here, you're not going to do it by mimicking existing design systems at a cost to the commenting and moderating system. You're going to do it by making the Slashdot paradigm so attractive that they're willing to leave their walled gardens of force-fed information and come on over to the anarchic wilderness where everyone is a valued contributor (even government shills and anonymous pundits). Not by cloning what already exists.
It's good news to hear that the new UI will exist in parallel with the old one; this isn't what the banner advertised, which is why people got so upset. After months of submitting feedback, it appeared that the UI was to be replaced without the largest concerns being acknowledged or addressed in messaging or in the beta.
I've got one really good suggestion for going forward: have a permanent "beta" link on the header -- that links to site ideas that people can moderate, and also has a ticket tracking system for actual changes made to the "trunk" beta so that interested parties can see what's actually being fixed. This would also allow you to get immediate feedback if a specific change wasn't going over well, and give you somewhere you could go to grab fresh ideas that are likely to meet with community approval. This won't work for all changes (after all, if you're attempting to attract a new crowd, pandering to the existing crowd, even if they're experts on UI and feedback systems isn't going to be enough), but it would be a good weather vane, and help people to feel like they know where things are heading. In short, it would have prevented the blow-up you're having to run damage control over with this beta (which does have good elements, just a lousy delivery).
Oh, I thought that was going a different route... where Dice spins off Slashdot, installs Timothy as CEO, and leaves him as the sole victim of Beta wrath, while Dice.com walks away whistling....
No, it's always about hiding the relevant bits behind a shiny interface.
No; Volkswagon is the Linux of car manufacturers -- it's the people's car.
BMW is the Apple of car manufacturers.
And of course, Windows is the K-Car.
Interestingly, we don't appear to have a viable Toyota/Honda in the OS marketplace.
I know as the middleman, you're not really in the best situation to answer, but where *is* the confusion? We've had a laundry list of requested improvements to slashcode for years, and instead of seeing them get fixed (with some notable exceptions), we get a superficial GUI replacement that makes the most common actions more difficult, and ignores the idiosyncrasies of its specific target audience and instead moves over to a more "standardized" stack that in the past drove many people to abandon other discussion sites for slashdot in the first place.
Unicode support please :)
I think that was just the knock-on thread effect... your moderators appear to be modding you up at the moment.
Why is it this is one of the only days this month I don't have mod points?
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.
Slashdot is using OpenID, right? So we could have a javascript on the new site that lets you log in with your openID and transfer all the comments over from the old slashdot to the new forum. It'd be missing all the content not owned by people who switch, but you could always have links back to fill in the holes. Of course, this is the part that may be on legal shaky ground.
Or, from a less sarcastic angle, they've realized that the ads and ad summaries aren't getting enough view time, so they've adjusted the UI to fix the ratio. Unfortunately, fixing the ratio won't likely fix the problem....
Er, not that wiki appears to already be feeling the effects of slashdotting just from curious people looking at the front page.
As I haven't been experiencing the pain of beta, I thought I'd manually go over there and see what the problem was.
Here's what I got:
Not for long, they won't....
Didn't they make the source code open source a while back? It'd be a shame to lose our old user IDs and post history, but someone could easily write a replacement including a script that allowed people to pull stuff from their old account using OpenID.
Mod up. Yep. and i'm willing to burn my excellent karma supporting this off-topic war.
War? On the one hand, you've got slashdot users, who know what they like. On the other side, you've got Dice employees, who have been tasked with creating something new.
Oh, does the beta display unicode properly? If not, what good is it? If it does, have they tested it on links?
Honest questions, as I've never ever seen the beta site; with javascript disabled, I even missed the previous interface update, as the non-js version hasn't changed in years....
just assume the highest number of it. Case closed.
mod up... this is the best way to handle the numbers. When looking for trends, you'll know it's trending when the range jumps. But considering the numbers should be in the 0-xxx range, and often aren't, trend analysis is kind of useless; there should already be concern just based on the static range numbers.
DARPA Publishes Tons of Open Source Code, Data
Why does everything think it's so cool to use a comma instead of the word "and" in a headline? Does the printed media even still do it?
They save a total of one space over the ampersand even; pretty soon it'll become common practice I bet.
Can source code be measured in tons?
Is that Metric or Imperial? We wouldn't want to mess up the conversion....
What evidence do you have that teachers are underpaid in America relative to other countries?
America spends more per student on education than most countries.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
That's one link, but almost any other will show the same result.
Even comparing teacher salaries to other jobs results in them being paid well in the United States.
Your link shows per pupil spending, not teacher pay. I have no figures and am not looking them up now, but while I know the mid-high end teacher pay is pretty good, the low end in lower paying states (read: mostly the south) is low.
I'd also like to mention that teaching supplies and materials (curriculum's the big one) and insurance are big chunks of that $/student ratio in the US -- most countries use old books or "open source" materials which cost very little, and spend most of the money on teachers and teacher training. A good teacher can teach well out of pretty much any material -- good material is useless if you've got overworked and underpaid people teaching to the test. Kid's don't read the material; they are walked through it by the teachers. Only the kids that discover they can read the material themselves and learn what's needed, and ask questions, will excel. And that's not taught in most schools.
Sounds like if you can arrange it, a talk with their teachers might be useful, so you can at least find out what the expectations are. Your kids are likely finding that not only can they use homework time to get a monopoly on your attention, but that they find the time with you to help them learn the material much better than they can in class... so they don't learn it in class and instead bring it home to do.
Initially it'll take time out of your evening disengagements, but if you talk to the teachers, find out expectations for homework and whether this work is above and beyond classwork or is just stuff they didn't do when they should have in class, you'll be able to address this issue much better with your kids.
It's also possible (unlikely, since your B.S. would have come with large doses of critical thinking) that your kids are manipulating you in to providing them with the answers the teachers were trying to get them to figure out for themselves -- development of critical thinking, tying together the ideas presented in class, etc. If this is the case, your help with their homework is actually getting them farther and farther behind in class, as they continue to fail to grasp the core concepts -- but are slipping under the radar at school as their assignments all come back relatively correctly done, so the teacher doesn't know until much later in the year where the real learning issues are (the teachers spend most of their time babysitting the troublemakers, which your kids probably aren't).
So yeah; make a few appointments to talk with the teachers who are assigning these large amounts of homework. If the kids are in highschool and the homework is distributed across all subjects, it's time to talk with your kids first, as they're obviously slacking off/not actually reading the textbooks/not asking questions when they don't understand. Encourage them to be active learners instead of passive lumps of grey matter -- the incentive is that they'll have more time to play EVE with you after school, because they'll have little to no homework.
But it doesn't escape ... extreme government regulation of curricula.
Government regulation of curricula exists to protect children from being taught "Creation Science" in public schools. You want to fix over-regulation in schools? Fix the root cause. Otherwise, I'm all in on that one.
Root cause being people? How best to fix people? Through education? Should we regulate that?
Hmm... for that matter, after my bot has clocked a certain number of CPU cycles, does it reach the age of majority?
Under an evil dictator we're stuck until the dictator dooms us with one of the classic blunders -- getting involved in a land war in Asia.
Of course, no democratic leader would ever make that mistake, right? How soon we forget ...
Inconceivable!