Okay, here's the deal. You want a phone, so you buy a base unit (that probably has the screen). Once you've done that, you choose what CPU (Single-core? Dual-core? Quad-core? Octa-core?) you want, how much RAM (512MB? 1GB? 2GB?), how much storage (16GB? 32GB? 64GB?), what kind of camera (None, 2MP, 4MP, 16MP with telescopic zoom lens?), Location system (Cell Tower Only? A-GPS? GLONASS + GPS + Compass?), Radios (Bluetooth? Wifi (a? n?), cellular radio (None? CDMA? GSM/Edge? UMTS? LTE?), card reader, and battery you want.
Want to update at a later time? Not a problem! Swap out that tired old dual-core ARMv7 for the latest dohexa-core 64-bit ARMv11! Running out of RAM too often? Throw another 2GB in there. Find you're taking more pictures than you thought? Swap out the basic 4MP shooter for a 28MP beast! Want to do work with 3D mapping? Add a second camera!
The idea is to make phones as modular as (or even more so than) a home PC.
Yes, you have to put back together any sections that came off, and replace any parts that too catastrophic damage and broke. Unlike the current method, where you have to replace the whole damned thing.
Doesn't much matter. 1,000 threads hammering an account that will only accept an attempt every second will take just as long as 10,000 threads, or even 1. It's tied to the account, not the IP.
I believe one of the goals of the AROS project is to have a drop-in replacement for workbench/kickstart ROMs for m68k systems. So you could use their ROM on UAE and have a compatible system built entirely from open-source software. If that's your thing...
Speaking purely from a look perspective, there are a mess of problems.
Huge amounts of whitespace on either side. This is 2014, and there are a million tutorials on how to make a fluid design.
Complete lack of contrast. I have no problem with the text contrast, but there's so little difference between comments, and between stories, no delineation or separation.
Basic problems - Some fonts in the CSS are defined as "Helvetica sans-serif". There needs to be a comma in there, Chris!
In slashdot comments, there are 3 levels of display: Open, summarized and hidden. In the new beta, there are again 3 options: Open, closed and hidden. "Closed" is not as versatile as "summarized".
Using JQuery to get the comments I have little-to-no problem with. But slashdot's main point is the long list of comments. The current AJAX system is limiting, at the very least (only grabbing 100 comments), and while it does have some options, it seems that none of those are available here. I had some issues with sorting this out with pure CSS (the Javascript was interfering with it), but I believe it is possible to implement this comment folding properly.
I've done a fair amount with pure CSS (Userstyle for Stylish here), including fixing the acres-of-whitespace width issue (Though I could do more if the source was in a better order), and bringing back the nicely contrasting bars to comments. I'm sure there is more that could also be done, and I'm seriously considering playing with GreaseMonkey to sort out some of the more egregious Javascript problems, but that's going to remain something on the back burner for now. This is obviously a beta site, and a work-in-progress, and I'm only doing this as a personal amusement in my spare time. I'll gladly answer any questions on this, and I'm certainly more than willing to lend a hand to make one of my favourite sites better.
There is much potential here. Unfortunately, a cannonball at the top of the Eiffel Tower also has much potential. Only time will tell how this is going to work out. But for the moment, it seems, SlashDot Beta is not ready for prime time. Heck, at this stage I'd barely call it a beta.
No, you're not missing anything. What I can do (with CSS) is make it so that items that are "Removed" by the filter are instead collapsed down to their titles. I might be able to do even more than that, but that's all I've come up with so far. I'll let you know if I manage any more.
Block images from stock image servers? They're annoying on all news sources/blogs, not just slashdot beta.
If the stock images have a common server (or url start) then you could. Or you could use an ad blocker for this.
Replace each stock image with the top result from a google image search for "stick figure" and the ALT text? Might as well have fun with it.
No, I'm afraid not. But if you wanted to do such a thing, you could configure yourself a squid proxy to do that kind of thing.
Replace "on hover" and "on mouseover" with "on click"? Just because I ran my pointer over a menu bar as opposed to navigating around it does not mean my desire was to spend the next 10 seconds trying to get the resulting popup menu to go away.
No, those are Javascript events, and CSS can't touch them. However, if this (and the second request above) is the kind of thing you want to do, you can use GreaseMonkey to inject your own custom Javascript, which could do all those funky things you want.
Does it make the site remember your saved comment threshold preference and only send you the comments above the threshold you have in your profile?
Does it avoid having to use the slider on every page to specify the slider?
This is my main beef with beta, the rest I can work around or live with.
Doing some supplemental testing, I'm not sure what your beef is. On my machine (Running current FireFox Nightly), When you set your preferred threshold (using the dropdown above the comments), the value you specify gets set in a cookie, which then gets re-loaded on each subsequent page view. So I'm not sure where these issues are coming from. The code is there (and working) to do it.
Does it make the site remember your saved comment threshold preference and only send you the comments above the threshold you have in your profile?
No, because it's just CSS. However, I'm thinking this could be solved with a little greasemonkey tweaking.
Does it avoid having to use the slider on every page to specify the slider?
Again, no. It's just CSS.
Does it avoid the need to have Javascript enabled for the domain?
I believe it will work without Javascript enabled. Of course, you won't HAVE any comments then, as they're loaded with Javascript. But these days, a vast majority of the web requires Javascript to function.
Does it use your computer resources to hide thresholds you are not interested in?
Again, no. But I'm spotting a theme here...
This is my main beef with beta, the rest I can work around or live with.
So, your problem seems to be that the new site isn't using your saved preference for what comments to display. This is something that is (at the moment) beyond the capabilities of my little stylesheet tweaks.
Microsoft has always attempted to follow an "Every 3 years" release schedule for new consumer operating systems, and they've pretty much kept to that schedule, apart from skipping a release in 2004:
1995: Windows 95
1998: Windows '98
2001: Windows XP
2004: Skipped
2006: Windows Vista
2009: Windows 7
2012: Windows 8
2015: Windows 9
So why is everyone acting so surprised when they keep following this trend?
I'm sorry. You were complaining about a news (Yes, news) story about a talk from CCC (Which is highly popular with, and immensely relevant for, nerds), posted on Phoronix (A website that devotes itself almost entirely to information, news and reviews on hardware and software from a Linux-based perspective), about a lot (120+) of security holes (Things that matter) in the X11/X.org servers (Which are the basis for (almost) all GUI-driven applications in Linux, *BSD and some of OSX).
By my count, that makes this story "News", "For Nerds", and "Stuff that matters". Oh, and the irony in posting that Phoronix is a "Link Farm" on/. is almost entirely palpable.
How on earth did this get +2 "Interesting"? The ravings of a madman (Really! No mixed-fibre clothing! No shellfish! No shaving of any part of the head! And Heathens are perfectly fine to buy as slaves. And let's not forget "An eye for an eye") whose ideas of morality and correctness were way out of line when the "Good Book" was written (4-legged insects are unclean! As is pretty much everything else, ever!) has precisely what bearing on our lives?
If you want to live by the rules Leviticus (and most of the rest of the Old Testament) dictates, do feel free. I'm sure such draconian dictates will ensure you die an early death as you struggle to deal with impossible to live up to standards, "Original Sin", and pre-medieval healthcare (Really! Even Obamacare is better than the crap in Leviticus for dealing with illness!).
Of course, there is always the possibility that you are merely trying to force your ideals down everyone else's throat, and grabbing the very first passage from the very worst parts of John's Book of Ravings that enables you to take a supposedly pious and "Enlightened" stance on something that has been socially acceptable since at least 800BC.
Or you're a troll, using a quasi-religious stance to get a rise out of the/. community. In which case, well done. You got me.
And it depends on what part of the eye you're talking about. The Rods (The detail-oriented parts of the eye) see at around 30Hz. The Cones (The black-and-white but higher light sensitivity and faster responding parts) see at around 70Hz. This is why CRT monitors were recommended to be set at 72Hz or higher to avoid eyestrain - at 60Hz the Rods couldn't see the flickering of the display, but the Cones could, and the disparity caused headaches (You could also see the effect if you looked at a 60Hz monitor through your peripheral vision - it appears to shimmer).
There is the "iDisplay" app, and I believe there's a port of VNC too, but they're nowhere near low enough latency for this. And I'm not suggesting using android phones, just their displays (Which are generally speaking, standard sizes).
In fact, as they were showing, this display has a wider horizontal FOV than you can actually see, leading to wasted space. They also seem to be using last-gen 7" tablet displays (1280x720 or 1280x800), which are good, but something like the display from an iPhone 5S on each side would make it lighter, higher resolution, and somewhat more immersive. Though it also seems to me that this system could be driven by most higher-end video cards natively (albeit with an added software shader to create the fisheye-like effect needed for the fresnel lenses). So make a standard head-tracking mount, with modular and interchangable displays that run off a standard connector (MicroHDMI, for instance, or Micro DisplayPort). You could even have the same lenses, so it's just the display being changed, and then the displays themselves could also be used as tertiary information displays on systems. It would give the product longevity, and upgradability, and would require no software changes (Other than to pick the new, higher resolution for the displays in-game), and no hardware changes to the HMD if you use a standard size and mounting (5" smartphone screen, say).
The thing with graphics improvements is that GPUs are getting better in linear scale, but quality improvements need to happen in logarithmic scale. Going from 100 polys to 200 polys looks like a huge leap, but going from 10,000 polys to 10,100 polys doesn't. I personally think the next big thing will be on-card raytracing (As NVidia has already demonstrated some). Massively parallel raytracing tasks are like candy for GPGPUs, but there is a lot of investment in Rasterising at the moment, so that is their current go-to method.
Obduct
Ob*duct"\, v. t. [See Obduce.] To draw over; to cover. [Obs.]
So this isn't made up (At least, not by Cyan) at all. Perhaps you should endeavour to expand your vocabulary somewhat. Or, to put it in terms you might more easily understand: "Use dictionary, learn words, speak better."
Time flows the same in England as it does in the US, and they get the information at the same instant as the US (Barring marginal transmission delays). If it was a case of hours and timezones, I might agree with you somewhat, but as the freakin' summary quotes: "During an experiment in late September," (Emphasis mine).
Even assuming that means September 30th, that's 7 days the US press has had to sit on this. At that point, the fact that the UK is 5-7 hours ahead doesn't make an iota of difference (Well, technically I guess it makes 4.1666% of difference, but that's hardly the point).
Oh, and why is <sup> getting stripped out of/. HTML?
Slashdot Mirror
Want to update at a later time? Not a problem! Swap out that tired old dual-core ARMv7 for the latest dohexa-core 64-bit ARMv11! Running out of RAM too often? Throw another 2GB in there. Find you're taking more pictures than you thought? Swap out the basic 4MP shooter for a 28MP beast! Want to do work with 3D mapping? Add a second camera!
The idea is to make phones as modular as (or even more so than) a home PC.
Yes, you have to put back together any sections that came off, and replace any parts that too catastrophic damage and broke. Unlike the current method, where you have to replace the whole damned thing.
Doesn't much matter. 1,000 threads hammering an account that will only accept an attempt every second will take just as long as 10,000 threads, or even 1. It's tied to the account, not the IP.
I believe one of the goals of the AROS project is to have a drop-in replacement for workbench/kickstart ROMs for m68k systems. So you could use their ROM on UAE and have a compatible system built entirely from open-source software. If that's your thing...
Yes. Linux prevents it. Right. And what software do these routers run as their firmware? That's right, a customized version of Linux.
Speaking purely from a look perspective, there are a mess of problems.
I've done a fair amount with pure CSS (Userstyle for Stylish here), including fixing the acres-of-whitespace width issue (Though I could do more if the source was in a better order), and bringing back the nicely contrasting bars to comments. I'm sure there is more that could also be done, and I'm seriously considering playing with GreaseMonkey to sort out some of the more egregious Javascript problems, but that's going to remain something on the back burner for now. This is obviously a beta site, and a work-in-progress, and I'm only doing this as a personal amusement in my spare time. I'll gladly answer any questions on this, and I'm certainly more than willing to lend a hand to make one of my favourite sites better.
There is much potential here. Unfortunately, a cannonball at the top of the Eiffel Tower also has much potential. Only time will tell how this is going to work out. But for the moment, it seems, SlashDot Beta is not ready for prime time. Heck, at this stage I'd barely call it a beta.
No, you're not missing anything. What I can do (with CSS) is make it so that items that are "Removed" by the filter are instead collapsed down to their titles. I might be able to do even more than that, but that's all I've come up with so far. I'll let you know if I manage any more.
Block images from stock image servers? They're annoying on all news sources/blogs, not just slashdot beta.
If the stock images have a common server (or url start) then you could. Or you could use an ad blocker for this.
Replace each stock image with the top result from a google image search for "stick figure" and the ALT text? Might as well have fun with it.
No, I'm afraid not. But if you wanted to do such a thing, you could configure yourself a squid proxy to do that kind of thing.
Replace "on hover" and "on mouseover" with "on click"? Just because I ran my pointer over a menu bar as opposed to navigating around it does not mean my desire was to spend the next 10 seconds trying to get the resulting popup menu to go away.
No, those are Javascript events, and CSS can't touch them. However, if this (and the second request above) is the kind of thing you want to do, you can use GreaseMonkey to inject your own custom Javascript, which could do all those funky things you want.
Does it make the site remember your saved comment threshold preference and only send you the comments above the threshold you have in your profile?
Does it avoid having to use the slider on every page to specify the slider?
This is my main beef with beta, the rest I can work around or live with.
Doing some supplemental testing, I'm not sure what your beef is. On my machine (Running current FireFox Nightly), When you set your preferred threshold (using the dropdown above the comments), the value you specify gets set in a cookie, which then gets re-loaded on each subsequent page view. So I'm not sure where these issues are coming from. The code is there (and working) to do it.
Does it make the site remember your saved comment threshold preference and only send you the comments above the threshold you have in your profile?
No, because it's just CSS. However, I'm thinking this could be solved with a little greasemonkey tweaking.
Does it avoid having to use the slider on every page to specify the slider?
Again, no. It's just CSS.
Does it avoid the need to have Javascript enabled for the domain?
I believe it will work without Javascript enabled. Of course, you won't HAVE any comments then, as they're loaded with Javascript. But these days, a vast majority of the web requires Javascript to function.
Does it use your computer resources to hide thresholds you are not interested in?
Again, no. But I'm spotting a theme here...
This is my main beef with beta, the rest I can work around or live with.
So, your problem seems to be that the new site isn't using your saved preference for what comments to display. This is something that is (at the moment) beyond the capabilities of my little stylesheet tweaks.
Got Stylish for FireFox or Chrome? Have a userstyle that does it's best to fix most of the problems with Slashdot beta. I haven't got everything the same, but I'm doing what I can. Making the web a better place, one stylesheet at a time...
So why is everyone acting so surprised when they keep following this trend?
Well, it works for Apple...
I'm sorry. You were complaining about a news (Yes, news) story about a talk from CCC (Which is highly popular with, and immensely relevant for, nerds), posted on Phoronix (A website that devotes itself almost entirely to information, news and reviews on hardware and software from a Linux-based perspective), about a lot (120+) of security holes (Things that matter) in the X11/X.org servers (Which are the basis for (almost) all GUI-driven applications in Linux, *BSD and some of OSX).
By my count, that makes this story "News", "For Nerds", and "Stuff that matters". Oh, and the irony in posting that Phoronix is a "Link Farm" on /. is almost entirely palpable.
Probably one of these: http://www.realtruck.com/images/products/curt-trailer-hitch-multi-ball-mounts-class-iii/thumbs-480x360/curt-trailer-hitch-multi-ball-mounts-class-iii.jpg The aforementioned "Three Prongs" are to accomodate the 3 different sizes of trailer ball receiver there currently are on the market with a single unit.
How on earth did this get +2 "Interesting"? The ravings of a madman (Really! No mixed-fibre clothing! No shellfish! No shaving of any part of the head! And Heathens are perfectly fine to buy as slaves. And let's not forget "An eye for an eye") whose ideas of morality and correctness were way out of line when the "Good Book" was written (4-legged insects are unclean! As is pretty much everything else, ever!) has precisely what bearing on our lives?
If you want to live by the rules Leviticus (and most of the rest of the Old Testament) dictates, do feel free. I'm sure such draconian dictates will ensure you die an early death as you struggle to deal with impossible to live up to standards, "Original Sin", and pre-medieval healthcare (Really! Even Obamacare is better than the crap in Leviticus for dealing with illness!).
Of course, there is always the possibility that you are merely trying to force your ideals down everyone else's throat, and grabbing the very first passage from the very worst parts of John's Book of Ravings that enables you to take a supposedly pious and "Enlightened" stance on something that has been socially acceptable since at least 800BC.
Or you're a troll, using a quasi-religious stance to get a rise out of the /. community. In which case, well done. You got me.
Well, I knew it was one way round. And I also know that 1/3rd of mine aren't working properly.
And it depends on what part of the eye you're talking about. The Rods (The detail-oriented parts of the eye) see at around 30Hz. The Cones (The black-and-white but higher light sensitivity and faster responding parts) see at around 70Hz. This is why CRT monitors were recommended to be set at 72Hz or higher to avoid eyestrain - at 60Hz the Rods couldn't see the flickering of the display, but the Cones could, and the disparity caused headaches (You could also see the effect if you looked at a 60Hz monitor through your peripheral vision - it appears to shimmer).
Maybe, but there are some enterprising people working on it
There is the "iDisplay" app, and I believe there's a port of VNC too, but they're nowhere near low enough latency for this. And I'm not suggesting using android phones, just their displays (Which are generally speaking, standard sizes).
In fact, as they were showing, this display has a wider horizontal FOV than you can actually see, leading to wasted space. They also seem to be using last-gen 7" tablet displays (1280x720 or 1280x800), which are good, but something like the display from an iPhone 5S on each side would make it lighter, higher resolution, and somewhat more immersive. Though it also seems to me that this system could be driven by most higher-end video cards natively (albeit with an added software shader to create the fisheye-like effect needed for the fresnel lenses). So make a standard head-tracking mount, with modular and interchangable displays that run off a standard connector (MicroHDMI, for instance, or Micro DisplayPort). You could even have the same lenses, so it's just the display being changed, and then the displays themselves could also be used as tertiary information displays on systems. It would give the product longevity, and upgradability, and would require no software changes (Other than to pick the new, higher resolution for the displays in-game), and no hardware changes to the HMD if you use a standard size and mounting (5" smartphone screen, say).
You mean like this one
The thing with graphics improvements is that GPUs are getting better in linear scale, but quality improvements need to happen in logarithmic scale. Going from 100 polys to 200 polys looks like a huge leap, but going from 10,000 polys to 10,100 polys doesn't. I personally think the next big thing will be on-card raytracing (As NVidia has already demonstrated some). Massively parallel raytracing tasks are like candy for GPGPUs, but there is a lot of investment in Rasterising at the moment, so that is their current go-to method.
So this isn't made up (At least, not by Cyan) at all. Perhaps you should endeavour to expand your vocabulary somewhat. Or, to put it in terms you might more easily understand: "Use dictionary, learn words, speak better."
Time flows the same in England as it does in the US, and they get the information at the same instant as the US (Barring marginal transmission delays). If it was a case of hours and timezones, I might agree with you somewhat, but as the freakin' summary quotes: "During an experiment in late September," (Emphasis mine).
Even assuming that means September 30th, that's 7 days the US press has had to sit on this. At that point, the fact that the UK is 5-7 hours ahead doesn't make an iota of difference (Well, technically I guess it makes 4.1666% of difference, but that's hardly the point).
Oh, and why is <sup> getting stripped out of /. HTML?