For those who haven't seen "slashdot media" yet, our beloved/. is now categorized as "Social Media for B2B Technology". See for yourself: http://slashdotmedia.com/about...
Go on, click the "Tour the new Slashdot" button (can't be opened in a new tab) and wait for the nausea to kick in. Meaningless marketing buzzwords, "feedback tools", "user engagement" and so on and so forth.
It's over. The trained monkeys in marketing have won. A sad day indeed.
As an Austrian, if you asked me what language I speak I'd probably either say Austrian or German with a Viennese accent. The differences in pronunciation and vocabulary compared to regular German (as well as pretty much all accents spoken in Germany and Switzerland) are large enough that our language seems to be an important part of our national identity.
And honestly, there's quite the language barrier between Austrians and Germans and communicating might take a conscious effort on both sides to speak the agreed-upon "standard German". And even then you might find out that regular words you use all the time are unknown to the other party.
Hell, even some friends and I sometimes have trouble understanding each other because of differences in dialects, and we only live 200km (~120 miles) apart. Never mind weird parts of the country like Vorarlberg where even a friend who's into linguistics couldn't understand any freaking thing they were saying.
At the University where I study, pretty much everything runs on Linux or other UNIX-based systems. Even a large amount of the student population runs Linux as their preferred OS.
Students and staff have an LDAP account. All mails go to your.maildir and you can upload your personal website to your public_html folder in your home directory. Wherever you go, chances are there's a number of headless PXE booting terminals that boot a Linux environment according to your status and privileges and also mount your central home directory.
Local WLAN offers 802.1x authentication, VPN and IPSec and unencrypted access with a web-based authentication gateway. To remotely access resources, you can either use VPN and mount your home directory via NFS or ssh to a public student server and do ssh forwarding from there or use X11 forwarding.
Pretty much all operating systems are supported. Detailed instructions and support are provided for Windows, Linux, OS X.
I am aware that this setup is not very common, but it does prove that it is indeed possible to run the IT of an entire university with thousands of students on Linux and support every major operating system.
I'm also sure that you university could easily support Linux if they only wanted to. Linux already supports nearly every protocol you could throw at it and most Linux users know what they are doing. Just enable some non-proprietary protocol, post an example configuration file and you should be good to go.
Some examples of how good Linux support looks like can be found here and here.
Just as a second opinion: I agree with the sibling post. Your layout is quite a bit confusing, I got lost in the navigation and your front page has tons of links that might get identified as keyword spam (your link texts are way too good and specific). Also, you might want to try decriptive URLs, i.e. having the car's name as part of the URL.
That preferences page still works and slashdot is usable again. Thank you:D
Also, I've said it before and will say it again: please leave D1 available as an option for those of us who do not feel at ease with the new discussion system and thank you, dear slashdot developers, for spending your time on our good, old-fashioned and trusted D1 keeping it somewhat bug free and usable across all those changes that/. has gone through in recent years. It's greatly appreciated and one of the reasons I vote with my wallet and subscribe to this site.
If this helps, here's the POST when I hit save according to wireshark:
op=saveModalPrefs&data=reskey%3DYUob6eh13LDwQwkzvjhk%26formname%3Dprefs2_d1%26uid%3D940221%26refreshable%3D%26discussion2%3Don%26domaintags%3D2&reskey=YUob6eh13LDwQwkzvjhk
Did D1 ever support that? Maybe I missed that option, back when there actually were tons of options to get/. just right for your needs. I've always read at threshold +3, nested with reparenting and can't for the life of me figure out where to move those sliders to get 30 - 45 comments at +2 or +3 like I'm used to.
That "th3j35t3" guy appears to be a major idiot, admitting to various DDoS attacks and being very public about his actions and convictions.
He's even gone so far as to develop his own pretty DoS tool with green fonts on black background with twitter integration that exploits uber-secret knowledge, like opening many connections that slowly feed http headers to apache, thereby using up all available children.
What will be interesting, though, is his own encrypted insurance file, that supposedly contains various information about the people behind wikileaks, although - like the wikileaks insurance file - you can't really prove it contains anything but random garbage. I rather choose to believe that the guy is a bored, stupid teen who read too many articles about the fantasy anarcho-hacking world of the 90s...
I didn't mean to imply that one of those was better - I regularly use and am sysadmin for both of them. What I meant to say was that there are so few packages compared to debian because redhat's enterprise-class phone support will support bugs and configuration issues for all ~2500 packages and many of their engineers have deep understanding of or are involved with the upstream projects. You simply couldn't afford to have people available 24x7 with guaranteed response times for the number of packages in debian's repositories.
The number might seem small at first, especially compared to other distros. The main difference, though, is that those packages aren't just nice addons to the base system but rather supported 24/7 and kept updated for quite a few years from now.
I congratulate the/. team for applying so many changes that would make the site more interesting and increase usability for a number of users. Also, I know that playing with all the new-fangled AJAX stuff is pretty and can be fun to develop.
On the other hand: Please don't ignore us users who still use the good old classic style. I simply like my/. without fancy effects and strange navigation bars. Threshold of 3, nested, oldest comments first, re-parenting comments and a link i can open in a new tab to read the stuff below my threshold is all I want and need.
Long story short: While developing all the exciting new stuff, please don't completely ignore or remove (*shock* *horror*) ye goode olde Slashdot layout. It works currently, has served many people well for quite a while now and hopefully doesn't cause too much work for you guys. Just please fix it every now and then in case you break it.
"Web messages" should be indicated at the very top of the index page near "Idle is a waste of your time..." and similar announcements. Your messages are shown here and the preferences are here.
By the way, I'm using the old/. style without all the AJAX stuff, maybe that's got something to do with it?
I forgot to mention that although Open Source software has greatly advanced over the years, it apparently still won't protect you from forgetting to select the "Plain Old Text" formatting option.
I can't really say anything about the cost of proprietary software, so I thought you might appreciate some information about what Open Source can be used for:
My university has many thousands of students in all kinds of maths, engineering and technology-related fields. There's a custom zope installation for managing your schedule and course registration that's also used for other things like a secure central authentication gateway for professors who want to roll their own systems yet still need to interface with the main system.
Every student has an account on an HP-UX Server, although this could also be done with cheap Linux servers. There's a public_html directory for your student website and a maildir for your mail in your home directory. There's also many cheap SUN/Intel terminals strewn across the entire campus (hallways, computer rooms, learning rooms, etc.) which can pxe boot into either kiosk mode (a browser that can only access the university's website) or pxe boot into a login screen. Once logged in, it will PXE boot yet again into an environment suitable for your profile or the location you're at (e.g. certain labs might have different kinds of environments). Your default environment is a basic KDE desktop system with your home directory mounted, kmail set up to read your.maildir, OpenOffice.org and many other productivity features.
Now that I have described it to some degree, I hope the advantages are becoming apparent. By utilizing the nature of Open Source software and the fact that you can freely combine them into something that suits your specific needs you can provide your students and staff with a high degree of flexibility. I can simply log in from any computer on campus or anywhere in the world and check my mails with any mail client I prefer, work from anywhere on my stuff, can forward X sessions so I can access restricted resources with Firefox running on the internal network but displayed on my computer at home, etc etc. The administrative costs are also pretty low since all you'll have to do is go and replace or install a cheap PXE booting terminal and it's ready to boot. Since there's only few PXE environments in use your ongoing maintenance cost is pretty much approaching zero.
All you need to implement this kind of setup is some resource planning and a few experienced UNIX admins to implement it and keep it running. No more expensive maintenance contracts with 20 different companies, no more fighting with vendors who are completely unable to have their proprietary stuff talk to each other and no more proprietary interfaces and protocols that prevent you from running a well-integrated infrastructure.
You're right, CentOS isn't really much of a desktop distro, but you should still give it a chance. I've been using it as a desktop for the last year (switched from FreeBSD) and I'm pretty happy with it. It's a stable base system (no PulseAudio or other beta-quality stuff) with a basic [kde|gnome] desktop environment and all of your additional needs (multimedia, etc) can be satisfied by a handful of external repositories you can add to yum. You can even simply use all the stable base stuff from CentOS and simply use fedora repositories for most other things.
Slashdot Mirror
For those who haven't seen "slashdot media" yet, our beloved /. is now categorized as "Social Media for B2B Technology". See for yourself: http://slashdotmedia.com/about...
Go on, click the "Tour the new Slashdot" button (can't be opened in a new tab) and wait for the nausea to kick in. Meaningless marketing buzzwords, "feedback tools", "user engagement" and so on and so forth.
It's over. The trained monkeys in marketing have won. A sad day indeed.
I think you got this story a little mixed up
As an Austrian, if you asked me what language I speak I'd probably either say Austrian or German with a Viennese accent. The differences in pronunciation and vocabulary compared to regular German (as well as pretty much all accents spoken in Germany and Switzerland) are large enough that our language seems to be an important part of our national identity.
And honestly, there's quite the language barrier between Austrians and Germans and communicating might take a conscious effort on both sides to speak the agreed-upon "standard German". And even then you might find out that regular words you use all the time are unknown to the other party.
Hell, even some friends and I sometimes have trouble understanding each other because of differences in dialects, and we only live 200km (~120 miles) apart. Never mind weird parts of the country like Vorarlberg where even a friend who's into linguistics couldn't understand any freaking thing they were saying.
Students and staff have an LDAP account. All mails go to your .maildir and you can upload your personal website to your public_html folder in your home directory. Wherever you go, chances are there's a number of headless PXE booting terminals that boot a Linux environment according to your status and privileges and also mount your central home directory.
Local WLAN offers 802.1x authentication, VPN and IPSec and unencrypted access with a web-based authentication gateway. To remotely access resources, you can either use VPN and mount your home directory via NFS or ssh to a public student server and do ssh forwarding from there or use X11 forwarding.
Pretty much all operating systems are supported. Detailed instructions and support are provided for Windows, Linux, OS X.
I am aware that this setup is not very common, but it does prove that it is indeed possible to run the IT of an entire university with thousands of students on Linux and support every major operating system.
I'm also sure that you university could easily support Linux if they only wanted to. Linux already supports nearly every protocol you could throw at it and most Linux users know what they are doing. Just enable some non-proprietary protocol, post an example configuration file and you should be good to go.
Some examples of how good Linux support looks like can be found here and here.
Independent...
Just as a second opinion: I agree with the sibling post. Your layout is quite a bit confusing, I got lost in the navigation and your front page has tons of links that might get identified as keyword spam (your link texts are way too good and specific). Also, you might want to try decriptive URLs, i.e. having the car's name as part of the URL.
Ah, that must be an option. I get the same design, but "x replies beneath your current threshold" instead of the collapsed comments.
That preferences page still works and slashdot is usable again. Thank you :D
Also, I've said it before and will say it again: please leave D1 available as an option for those of us who do not feel at ease with the new discussion system and thank you, dear slashdot developers, for spending your time on our good, old-fashioned and trusted D1 keeping it somewhat bug free and usable across all those changes that /. has gone through in recent years. It's greatly appreciated and one of the reasons I vote with my wallet and subscribe to this site.
If this helps, here's the POST when I hit save according to wireshark: op=saveModalPrefs&data=reskey%3DYUob6eh13LDwQwkzvjhk%26formname%3Dprefs2_d1%26uid%3D940221%26refreshable%3D%26discussion2%3Don%26domaintags%3D2&reskey=YUob6eh13LDwQwkzvjhk
I keep trying just that, but this options doesn't actually do anything for me.
Did D1 ever support that? Maybe I missed that option, back when there actually were tons of options to get /. just right for your needs. I've always read at threshold +3, nested with reparenting and can't for the life of me figure out where to move those sliders to get 30 - 45 comments at +2 or +3 like I'm used to.
Why can't I select the classic discussion system (D1) any more? Please don't say this has been discontinued :(
Could that have been Ballerburg for the Atari?
Go look at the cables. It'll only be a problem if your name is xxxx xxxxxxx.
He's even gone so far as to develop his own pretty DoS tool with green fonts on black background with twitter integration that exploits uber-secret knowledge, like opening many connections that slowly feed http headers to apache, thereby using up all available children.
What will be interesting, though, is his own encrypted insurance file, that supposedly contains various information about the people behind wikileaks, although - like the wikileaks insurance file - you can't really prove it contains anything but random garbage. I rather choose to believe that the guy is a bored, stupid teen who read too many articles about the fantasy anarcho-hacking world of the 90s...
I didn't mean to imply that one of those was better - I regularly use and am sysadmin for both of them. What I meant to say was that there are so few packages compared to debian because redhat's enterprise-class phone support will support bugs and configuration issues for all ~2500 packages and many of their engineers have deep understanding of or are involved with the upstream projects. You simply couldn't afford to have people available 24x7 with guaranteed response times for the number of packages in debian's repositories.
The number might seem small at first, especially compared to other distros. The main difference, though, is that those packages aren't just nice addons to the base system but rather supported 24/7 and kept updated for quite a few years from now.
This anecdote sums it up quite nicely. Now all we need is a few more of those and we have data :P
On the other hand: Please don't ignore us users who still use the good old classic style. I simply like my /. without fancy effects and strange navigation bars. Threshold of 3, nested, oldest comments first, re-parenting comments and a link i can open in a new tab to read the stuff below my threshold is all I want and need.
Long story short: While developing all the exciting new stuff, please don't completely ignore or remove (*shock* *horror*) ye goode olde Slashdot layout. It works currently, has served many people well for quite a while now and hopefully doesn't cause too much work for you guys. Just please fix it every now and then in case you break it.
Oh great, now I won't only have to ignore those idiots but also go the extra mile and add a DROP rule in ip6tables.
That one seems like it took a lot of work and preparation. Better than the last 2 years, /. :)
By the way, I'm using the old /. style without all the AJAX stuff, maybe that's got something to do with it?
I forgot to mention that although Open Source software has greatly advanced over the years, it apparently still won't protect you from forgetting to select the "Plain Old Text" formatting option.
I can't really say anything about the cost of proprietary software, so I thought you might appreciate some information about what Open Source can be used for: My university has many thousands of students in all kinds of maths, engineering and technology-related fields. There's a custom zope installation for managing your schedule and course registration that's also used for other things like a secure central authentication gateway for professors who want to roll their own systems yet still need to interface with the main system. Every student has an account on an HP-UX Server, although this could also be done with cheap Linux servers. There's a public_html directory for your student website and a maildir for your mail in your home directory. There's also many cheap SUN/Intel terminals strewn across the entire campus (hallways, computer rooms, learning rooms, etc.) which can pxe boot into either kiosk mode (a browser that can only access the university's website) or pxe boot into a login screen. Once logged in, it will PXE boot yet again into an environment suitable for your profile or the location you're at (e.g. certain labs might have different kinds of environments). Your default environment is a basic KDE desktop system with your home directory mounted, kmail set up to read your .maildir, OpenOffice.org and many other productivity features.
Now that I have described it to some degree, I hope the advantages are becoming apparent. By utilizing the nature of Open Source software and the fact that you can freely combine them into something that suits your specific needs you can provide your students and staff with a high degree of flexibility. I can simply log in from any computer on campus or anywhere in the world and check my mails with any mail client I prefer, work from anywhere on my stuff, can forward X sessions so I can access restricted resources with Firefox running on the internal network but displayed on my computer at home, etc etc. The administrative costs are also pretty low since all you'll have to do is go and replace or install a cheap PXE booting terminal and it's ready to boot. Since there's only few PXE environments in use your ongoing maintenance cost is pretty much approaching zero.
All you need to implement this kind of setup is some resource planning and a few experienced UNIX admins to implement it and keep it running. No more expensive maintenance contracts with 20 different companies, no more fighting with vendors who are completely unable to have their proprietary stuff talk to each other and no more proprietary interfaces and protocols that prevent you from running a well-integrated infrastructure.
You're right, CentOS isn't really much of a desktop distro, but you should still give it a chance. I've been using it as a desktop for the last year (switched from FreeBSD) and I'm pretty happy with it. It's a stable base system (no PulseAudio or other beta-quality stuff) with a basic [kde|gnome] desktop environment and all of your additional needs (multimedia, etc) can be satisfied by a handful of external repositories you can add to yum. You can even simply use all the stable base stuff from CentOS and simply use fedora repositories for most other things.