" 'The aim is to give people information when they need it rather than months after teachable moments have passed,' "
This is a very important thing, and it's kind of sad that it IS something that people in business sometimes realize, rather than being something we could assume everyone capable of forming complete sentences understands.
And that's why it is really important that Timothy, who thinks we form a passive 'audience' here, who somehow imagines that occasionally pushing the button to publish a user submission under his name, without even fixing the obvious typos first, qualifies him as the creator of the site, really needs to feel some backlash today. Not in 6 months when the whole site goes, today.
It's also why each and every member of the staff that encouraged the delusion that this 'beta' was a reasonable, workable idea needs to be gone now. Not in 6 months when the whole site goes, today.
Because those teachable moments are short, and these are not minor little mistakes anyone could make. These are possibly the biggest mistakes anyone in their position could make, in regards to their work. They are mistakes that you would expect from someone who was just recruited from a business school last week and had spent no more than 20 minutes lurking before deciding to change everything.
"Clearly, the great majority of your users do *not* think it's time for another redesign."
I am not sure that is a correct inference. It's not a bad time for a redesign in my opinion. But this is a very bad redesign. It's not a matter of timing. It's a matter of not fixing anything that was actually broken, and further breaking things that currently work on top of it.
There is never a good time for a redesign like that.
"It's the damn auto-refresh on the main page. It was bad enough when it used AJAX to load new content - any new story would push down the one I was reading the summary of, causing me to lose my place. But for a while now it's been reloading the whole page (http://slashdot.org/?source=autorefresh), which is even worse. I've found no way to disable this "feature"."
If you want change, change something that needs changing.
Fix UTF for instance. That would be great. And waaaay overdue.
Slashdot was ugly but functional from the start. Historically each time it's been reworked it's gotten prettier, but less functional. This latest effort appears to take that sad story to its logical conclusion - it tries hard to be pretty but it's completely forgotten that it's supposed to be a functional tool.
BMI was designed for population studies and it is actually appropriate there. The flaws in the calculation in regards to individuals can be severe, but in a study of a large population they cancel out and you get a fairly accurate estimate of the status of the population as a whole.
But of course when applied to a single individual, there is no opportunity for the errors to average out and the results are worse than useless.
Excellent post, completely right. BMI is a useful proxy in population statistics but worse than useless when applied to individuals.
To get something usable for individuals you would not only need to correct for gender but also for skeletal proportions (body shape,) by the way. Imagine two people, the same height, but the pelvic girdle and shoulders of the one is twice as wide as the other. Their healthy weights are NOT going to be the same.
"Yes, once the plant dies, the C14 is locked in and starts decaying. But A.C. was asking about the atmosphere -- isn't that supposed to be constant?"
No. It's not.
That's why C14 dates come in two varieties - raw and calibrated.
There are calibration charts that correct the raw score to an actual historical year, based on the known levels of C14 for each year. These charts go back thousands of years, and have been assembled carefully using data from tree rings, varves, etc.
If your date is so early that calibration data does not exist for it, your raw score can only be roughly correlated with a year, and other methods of dating are recommended instead.
"AMD also was all proprietary and their FOSS drivers are not as feature rich as the closed source."
Their Free drivers may not be as 'feature rich' but they're a heck of a lot more stable and compatible than the blobware.
I'm planning to buy new video hardware about the middle of the year and their chances of getting my money just went from 0 to... well to nonzero at least.
"All i really want in a UI is the ability to switch between these apps without having to mentally switch contexts. On a non-touch computer, a menu list of installed apps+taskbar with a stacking window manager is ideal."
Try WindowMaker. There is no desktop, it's the 'root window' - a floating thing of light and color. There is no button to get your cluttered list of apps+taskbar, there are two buttons with which to get whichever one you need at the moment, and they are both on your mouse. Just click the appropriate button on any exposed pixel of root window to summon them.
"Linux users are not the only ones who are rejecting the new UIs. Everyone hates how windows 8 works. "
Eh, I do not hate it. It's not my cup of tea but I can use it to get the job done. The metro UI is ugly and nonfunctional but it's a lot easier to get back to the desktop than to quit from vi;)
In my experience it's the Windows lovers who hate it. Which may or may not bode well for MicroSofts continuing business.
"There is clearly a need for new UIs for touch based machines. The mistake is trying to create one UI that works for both worlds - this is the mistake Win8 and GNOME3 made."
It's particularly ironic for MS. The Chicago group (that was what became Windows 95/Win32) considered a dual interface concept nearly identical to Metro and rejected it. They determined that it would make the OS more difficult, not easier, to use.
It was a lousy metaphor when first proposed and it remains a lousy metaphor today.
And ironically while the article defines a "classic desktop" with icons on it (how gauche!) it goes on to mention WindowMaker, which offers a root window metaphor instead. That's my personal favorite.
"Desktops" in the sense of KDE or GNOME are just too creepy, too cluttered, too always trying to make you do things their way. They include WAY too much garbage I will not use and do not want. KDE *is* more tolerable than GNOME for me (since Gnome 2 at least, bleah) but it's not really what I want. It's still too much in the way and it's still doing too much.
Even E tries too hard, though it's a lot of fun. FVWM and the like are functional but too ugly to really make me happy. WindowMaker is the best, minimal, functional, and still gorgeous. Everything a Window Manager should be.
"people are trying to model old ways to doing things, or designing, in a new medium for which those old ways either are poorly suited, or do not use correctly. I think that is what the minimalist movement in web designs tries to suggest and why commercial sites get it so wrong. Not only are they trying to model something old, they are overplaying their message and are too unaware to see that all they are doing is creating lots of annoying clutter. "
YES.
I have been warning about this since shortly after I first saw Netscape.
(And also the crap-pile that is slashdot, see how it mangles normal compound letters, don't even think about trying to throw any genuine foreign language orthography around here, UTF? WTF is UTF?)
"IANAL, but I don't think granting easements and the like would be included in those activities prohibited by (b). But it's (a) that I dislike the most. Why prohibit a municipality from offering services? "
Municipalities *should* be generally prohibited from offering services like that, on the grounds that they have an unfair advantage (they can tax your money then spend it to compete against you among other things) and there is a whole line of undesirable consequences that flow from that - driving out other providers and discouraging new ones from entering the market.
But of course there is nothing resembling a free market here to begin with - the big US ISPs are spatial monopolies that were built on exactly that kind of privilege and fear anything that might threaten their ability to rake in profits every month while doing the absolute bare minimum in return.
I have a button in my browser to over-ride all css and it gets used a LOT.
Your fancy 'sophisticated' website probably looks like absolute crap the moment someone tries to use a browser (or simply configuration) you didnt test with. Very often it's more than simply ugly, it's actually broken and this is necessary to get it to function.
"Screen Readers need the page semantics separated from the style and typography."
Correct. (So does everything else, btw.)
This is what HTML is designed to provide, and what "web designers" have always tried to defeat. All typographic tags are supposed to be treated as 'hints' that can and may be ignored by the layout engine of $client.
"That is what HTML5 was supposed to allow."
Funny thing. This is what every version of HTML has been supposed to do, and if used properly all of them can do that. But in actuality if you write valid HTML3 all you need do further is avoid a handful of specific tags. When you go to HTML4 you have to start avoiding entire sections of the spec (e.g. css) and 5 will be more of the same. Because people pushing new features into the spec are not interested in more accurate semantic markup or in improving the ability of browsers to make the layout decisions - they are primarily interested in pushing ever more intrusive advertising, and the most effective way to do that is through exploiting the fact that every major browser lays prostrate and lets the website have far more control of the browser than it should have.
"Considering the confusion created over the meaning of the new elements, it is doubtful that a good solution for screen readers exists. "
How would you define the problem that you think has no solution here?
If it's a way to disturb the blind with obnoxious and obtrusive advertising, you're probably right.
If it's a way to make your content available to them, the solution is easy.
"When Krushchev said "we will bury you" at the UN, he *meant* "we will be around after you are gone" like "a son buries his father". It was a common Russian expression, and we had access to fine, nuanced Russian translators. Instead it became this famous threat of nuclear Armageddon, please pass the collection plate for more nukes of our own."
And more recently when a certain Persian was widely reported to have said "Israel must be wiped off the map" (and people still repeat this every day) what he actually said is reported by competent translators as more along the lines of "the regime occupying Jerusalem will one day vanish from the pages of time."
It's nothing new. War is a racket, and that means it has a marketing department.
"There are lots of different devices, but ultimately there are only a manageable number of general types among them: smartphone-ish, tablet-ish, laptop-ish, large laptop/desktop-ish, and maybe a few speciality things."
Where do screen readers fit in there? Oh yeah, they dont.
See you what to kid yourself that you can do without device-independence because you can narrow the display device down enough, practically, to live without it.
And that kind of thinking forms a lock-in favoring devices of the sorts that are already popular, discouraging innovation.
Real device independence does not just get you most devices of popular types. It gets you all of them, and stuff that no one has invented yet as well.
If that's what you want to do just do it. Throw up a.pdf instead of a webpage.
Mangling HTML to make it like.pdf instead is the worst possibility. Yet historically that is what they keep doing. I wont hold my breath waiting for that to change. So expect to see 'regions' garbage stay.
Slashdot Mirror
"I think the recent slashdot poll was directly tied to the redesign."
Slashdot still has polls?
I have not seen one in years, I thought they decided it was too much work and discontinued them.
Perhaps they actually just made them dependent on javascript?
Either way they were effectively removed so far as I and many other slashdotters are concerned.
" 'The aim is to give people information when they need it rather than months after teachable moments have passed,' "
This is a very important thing, and it's kind of sad that it IS something that people in business sometimes realize, rather than being something we could assume everyone capable of forming complete sentences understands.
And that's why it is really important that Timothy, who thinks we form a passive 'audience' here, who somehow imagines that occasionally pushing the button to publish a user submission under his name, without even fixing the obvious typos first, qualifies him as the creator of the site, really needs to feel some backlash today. Not in 6 months when the whole site goes, today.
It's also why each and every member of the staff that encouraged the delusion that this 'beta' was a reasonable, workable idea needs to be gone now. Not in 6 months when the whole site goes, today.
Because those teachable moments are short, and these are not minor little mistakes anyone could make. These are possibly the biggest mistakes anyone in their position could make, in regards to their work. They are mistakes that you would expect from someone who was just recruited from a business school last week and had spent no more than 20 minutes lurking before deciding to change everything.
"Clearly, the great majority of your users do *not* think it's time for another redesign."
I am not sure that is a correct inference. It's not a bad time for a redesign in my opinion. But this is a very bad redesign. It's not a matter of timing. It's a matter of not fixing anything that was actually broken, and further breaking things that currently work on top of it.
There is never a good time for a redesign like that.
"It's the damn auto-refresh on the main page. It was bad enough when it used AJAX to load new content - any new story would push down the one I was reading the summary of, causing me to lose my place. But for a while now it's been reloading the whole page (http://slashdot.org/?source=autorefresh), which is even worse. I've found no way to disable this "feature"."
Refreshblocker.
"... and they said that Classic Slashdot will be disabled in due Time. Whether you like it or not."
And the irony is, Classic Slashdot has been disabled for YEARS.
What they are calling Classic Slashdot, D2, is an inferior imitation. And even that is to be soon gone.
And not long after that, this will become a landing page for a domain registrar...
"I do think all websites, even sites like Slashdot, need to evolve."
Evolution involves adaptive changes, changes that improve the function of an organism to enable it to better survive.
It's obvious that slashbeta impairs function in many ways. Is there any way you can cite in which it improves function?
If you want change, change something that needs changing.
Fix UTF for instance. That would be great. And waaaay overdue.
Slashdot was ugly but functional from the start. Historically each time it's been reworked it's gotten prettier, but less functional. This latest effort appears to take that sad story to its logical conclusion - it tries hard to be pretty but it's completely forgotten that it's supposed to be a functional tool.
BMI was designed for population studies and it is actually appropriate there. The flaws in the calculation in regards to individuals can be severe, but in a study of a large population they cancel out and you get a fairly accurate estimate of the status of the population as a whole.
But of course when applied to a single individual, there is no opportunity for the errors to average out and the results are worse than useless.
Excellent post, completely right. BMI is a useful proxy in population statistics but worse than useless when applied to individuals.
To get something usable for individuals you would not only need to correct for gender but also for skeletal proportions (body shape,) by the way. Imagine two people, the same height, but the pelvic girdle and shoulders of the one is twice as wide as the other. Their healthy weights are NOT going to be the same.
"Yes, once the plant dies, the C14 is locked in and starts decaying. But A.C. was asking about the atmosphere -- isn't that supposed to be constant?"
No. It's not.
That's why C14 dates come in two varieties - raw and calibrated.
There are calibration charts that correct the raw score to an actual historical year, based on the known levels of C14 for each year. These charts go back thousands of years, and have been assembled carefully using data from tree rings, varves, etc.
If your date is so early that calibration data does not exist for it, your raw score can only be roughly correlated with a year, and other methods of dating are recommended instead.
"AMD also was all proprietary and their FOSS drivers are not as feature rich as the closed source."
Their Free drivers may not be as 'feature rich' but they're a heck of a lot more stable and compatible than the blobware.
I'm planning to buy new video hardware about the middle of the year and their chances of getting my money just went from 0 to... well to nonzero at least.
"All i really want in a UI is the ability to switch between these apps without having to mentally switch contexts. On a non-touch computer, a menu list of installed apps+taskbar with a stacking window manager is ideal."
Try WindowMaker. There is no desktop, it's the 'root window' - a floating thing of light and color. There is no button to get your cluttered list of apps+taskbar, there are two buttons with which to get whichever one you need at the moment, and they are both on your mouse. Just click the appropriate button on any exposed pixel of root window to summon them.
"Linux users are not the only ones who are rejecting the new UIs. Everyone hates how windows 8 works. "
Eh, I do not hate it. It's not my cup of tea but I can use it to get the job done. The metro UI is ugly and nonfunctional but it's a lot easier to get back to the desktop than to quit from vi ;)
In my experience it's the Windows lovers who hate it. Which may or may not bode well for MicroSofts continuing business.
"There is clearly a need for new UIs for touch based machines. The mistake is trying to create one UI that works for both worlds - this is the mistake Win8 and GNOME3 made."
It's particularly ironic for MS. The Chicago group (that was what became Windows 95/Win32) considered a dual interface concept nearly identical to Metro and rejected it. They determined that it would make the OS more difficult, not easier, to use.
Best I know (and I hope I am wrong!) WM is unmaintained, so yes, adding anything at this point would be too much to add.
Compositor support would be very nice, but I can live without it more easily than I can live without WindowMaker.
It was a lousy metaphor when first proposed and it remains a lousy metaphor today.
And ironically while the article defines a "classic desktop" with icons on it (how gauche!) it goes on to mention WindowMaker, which offers a root window metaphor instead. That's my personal favorite.
"Desktops" in the sense of KDE or GNOME are just too creepy, too cluttered, too always trying to make you do things their way. They include WAY too much garbage I will not use and do not want. KDE *is* more tolerable than GNOME for me (since Gnome 2 at least, bleah) but it's not really what I want. It's still too much in the way and it's still doing too much.
Even E tries too hard, though it's a lot of fun. FVWM and the like are functional but too ugly to really make me happy. WindowMaker is the best, minimal, functional, and still gorgeous. Everything a Window Manager should be.
"people are trying to model old ways to doing things, or designing, in a new medium for which those old ways either are poorly suited, or do not use correctly. I think that is what the minimalist movement in web designs tries to suggest and why commercial sites get it so wrong. Not only are they trying to model something old, they are overplaying their message and are too unaware to see that all they are doing is creating lots of annoying clutter. "
YES.
I have been warning about this since shortly after I first saw Netscape.
People (even people young enough they cannot remember the days of print) still try to use HTML as a way of producing facsimiles of old clichés from the newsprint era onscreen, and get frustrated when it does not coÃperate. They whine and the language gets changed to accommodate them and because of this stupidity we have lost most of the things HTML was designed to give us, and receive instead virtual black and white newspapers with flash ads that jump out in full color to assault us at various points as we try to read.
(And also the crap-pile that is slashdot, see how it mangles normal compound letters, don't even think about trying to throw any genuine foreign language orthography around here, UTF? WTF is UTF?)
"IANAL, but I don't think granting easements and the like would be included in those activities prohibited by (b). But it's (a) that I dislike the most. Why prohibit a municipality from offering services? "
Municipalities *should* be generally prohibited from offering services like that, on the grounds that they have an unfair advantage (they can tax your money then spend it to compete against you among other things) and there is a whole line of undesirable consequences that flow from that - driving out other providers and discouraging new ones from entering the market.
But of course there is nothing resembling a free market here to begin with - the big US ISPs are spatial monopolies that were built on exactly that kind of privilege and fear anything that might threaten their ability to rake in profits every month while doing the absolute bare minimum in return.
Apologies, it appears you are right.
It's a little odd though. If you search microsoft IE 8 they only offer it on XP and Vista. Not an option for Win7, you need IE9 instead.
Wikipedia says that Win7 shipped with IE8, I cant remember the last time I saw it on Win7 though, OEMs are adding IE9 on their own I guess.
"For instance, here on my work computer, I'm using IE8 on Win7. "
Gonna have to call bullshit on that. Win7 shipped with IE9 and there is no downgrade option. Did you mean Vista?
You are right, spying is not the best word. This is untargetted mass surveillance. "Spying" implies something more targetted.
Really.
I have a button in my browser to over-ride all css and it gets used a LOT.
Your fancy 'sophisticated' website probably looks like absolute crap the moment someone tries to use a browser (or simply configuration) you didnt test with. Very often it's more than simply ugly, it's actually broken and this is necessary to get it to function.
"Screen Readers need the page semantics separated from the style and typography."
Correct. (So does everything else, btw.)
This is what HTML is designed to provide, and what "web designers" have always tried to defeat. All typographic tags are supposed to be treated as 'hints' that can and may be ignored by the layout engine of $client.
"That is what HTML5 was supposed to allow."
Funny thing. This is what every version of HTML has been supposed to do, and if used properly all of them can do that. But in actuality if you write valid HTML3 all you need do further is avoid a handful of specific tags. When you go to HTML4 you have to start avoiding entire sections of the spec (e.g. css) and 5 will be more of the same. Because people pushing new features into the spec are not interested in more accurate semantic markup or in improving the ability of browsers to make the layout decisions - they are primarily interested in pushing ever more intrusive advertising, and the most effective way to do that is through exploiting the fact that every major browser lays prostrate and lets the website have far more control of the browser than it should have.
"Considering the confusion created over the meaning of the new elements, it is doubtful that a good solution for screen readers exists. "
How would you define the problem that you think has no solution here?
If it's a way to disturb the blind with obnoxious and obtrusive advertising, you're probably right.
If it's a way to make your content available to them, the solution is easy.
"When Krushchev said "we will bury you" at the UN, he *meant* "we will be around after you are gone" like "a son buries his father". It was a common Russian expression, and we had access to fine, nuanced Russian translators. Instead it became this famous threat of nuclear Armageddon, please pass the collection plate for more nukes of our own."
And more recently when a certain Persian was widely reported to have said "Israel must be wiped off the map" (and people still repeat this every day) what he actually said is reported by competent translators as more along the lines of "the regime occupying Jerusalem will one day vanish from the pages of time."
It's nothing new. War is a racket, and that means it has a marketing department.
"There are lots of different devices, but ultimately there are only a manageable number of general types among them: smartphone-ish, tablet-ish, laptop-ish, large laptop/desktop-ish, and maybe a few speciality things."
Where do screen readers fit in there? Oh yeah, they dont.
See you what to kid yourself that you can do without device-independence because you can narrow the display device down enough, practically, to live without it.
And that kind of thinking forms a lock-in favoring devices of the sorts that are already popular, discouraging innovation.
Real device independence does not just get you most devices of popular types. It gets you all of them, and stuff that no one has invented yet as well.
Or it would if you could refrain from killing it.
The issue is that you can have layout-level control, or you can have device independence.
PDF gives you one, HTML used properly gives the second, choose one.
It's called postscript.
If that's what you want to do just do it. Throw up a .pdf instead of a webpage.
Mangling HTML to make it like .pdf instead is the worst possibility. Yet historically that is what they keep doing. I wont hold my breath waiting for that to change. So expect to see 'regions' garbage stay.