Hey,

it's a good thing to have an editor respond directly in the comments rather than with prewritten PR. So thanks for stepping out into the rotten vegetable pelting. It sucks. But it's for the best. Many more out here aren't throwing and have cupped their ears to listen instead. And from my perspective, this kind of dialog is what I'd like to hear.

There are some bugs to squash with beta commenting. I'm sure you're aware of that. And like many I think the layout and font selection could use some work. But there's been an abusive overreaction here by some members of the community and I'm sure it's no fun to stand in your shoes right now.

I want to offer some encouragement and to let you know that some of us support the goal of a software upgrade. Yet many of these complaints are valid. So sift out the wheat from the chaff and focus on actionable feedback to get it right. And don't let personal annoyance with overwrought temper tantrums get in the way of doing your job. A lot of people complain, but the fact is that this site still draws a large readership after many successful years. In the long run it's easy to fail. So you guys are doing something right.

Get past this shit and point your guns at /r/technology. There are whole plains full of profit out there in Redditland waiting to be claimed. Competition is good.

The UK doesn't seem to give a toss about its obligations as an EU member, but giving complete police access to medical records without court order appears to violate EU privacy guidelines. Never mind all reasonable expectations of privacy. Here's a telegraph article which suggests that the NHS policy violates EU guidelines and could lead to a ban. That the UK would likely ignore.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/hea...

Honestly, there are places where national health care systems really do work. But man does the USA/UK alliance do their best to confirm every libertarian paranoid fear about rogue government abusing private data in publicly held records. What a mess.

Well of course you agree with me. My UID # is lower than yours. It's axiomatic.

LOL. Have you seen those complaints that the new system doesn't display UID numbers? Now there's a decision /. beta devs made I agree with.

Sandwich Geeks is going through a rev 4 rewrite. Much earlier opening, rearranged story line, slower build up, less backstory more frontstory.

Belated happy new year dude!

I'm going to defend the current state of that beta. It's shit. I'd be hard pressed to believe that even editors and owners don't realize the problems. And that they continue toting a ridiculous public line in opposition to obvious reality is simply an expected part of playing their public relations game. They can't speak truth. To do so would harm a set of internal and external business procedures entirely orthogonal to truth-telling.

Look, they've got all these sunk costs dumped into this ongoing project. It's turned into a debacle. Corporate owners don't want to write it off as a loss and editors are skipping around and around a ring of chairs, conspicuously short at least one spot for all. Who gets the boot when the music stops playing? That's what they're thinking.

We've all been there. A project goes sour and fingers point every which way and the first person to stand up and point at an actual problem which doesn't involve laying blame but work implementing a viable solution gets his finger chopped off and then a pink slip in interoffice mail.

So you propose more community yelling in the hope that leaders on the inside won't buy better earplugs. But they have every incentive to ignore the community. From personal at the job level to corporate at the image level. Ironically, everyone walking lockstep over a cliff is an easier sell than trying to convince one to rush over and jump for the good of all.

The old slashcode was OSS. I'm guessing this new stuff isn't. But maybe opening it up and soliciting community involvement might be a way out of this impasse. Might be a hard sell to the pointey-heads though.

(Of course, a true communist would reply: it will be free, because taxes will pay for it.)

Taxes have nothing to do with communism. In a communism all productive assets is owned by the state. That means farmland, power plants, factories, and all deeded property. Personal property is excluded; the state doesn't care about your model train collection.

Intellectual property would fall under state deeded property just as housing does. That's because only the state manages property deeds and assigns ownership. That the ownership is automatically assigned to the state merely simplifies bureaucratic administrative overhead. The state might be inefficient in aggregate, but not so in the Registration of Deeds office.

I know it's nit picky, but your statement conflates that communist system with every other government system imagined. Every government that has existed taxed its citizens to provide for a common good. Governments tax to build roads, bridges, schools, military and police departments. New research and development is funded through education grants. For example: the internet. Also: medical research. In fact, a lot of tax money is spent on drug development.

Perhaps you think government shouldn't do these things. Some even think government should be abolished. But to argue the abolishment of government on the pretense that taxes equals communism mixes terms and beliefs such that the rationale is nothing more than nonsense. It's no argument. It's not anticommunist or pro-USA or holds any ideological consistency.

According to TFA:

SMS Management and Technology won the IT initial development contract in June 2009 in a deal initially expected to be worth at least $2.5 million per year.

The audit office questioned the value of the project, which is estimated to have reached $38.5 million for associated systems and applications by 30 June 2013.

So, across four years what should have cost $10M wound up costing nearly $40M. However:

Within 18 months, however, four change orders had been processed, increasing the value of the deal to over $15.4 million in the first two years

Thus, change orders from a client who changed milestones mid-stream:

The milestones for the contract were not tightly specified, nor was the extent to which the industry partner staff would be integrated with or separated from internal bureau IT staff roles and deliverables.

Leading to a situation where, "The contract began to resemble a time and materials contract rather than a fixedâfee contract contingent on achieving milestones and deliverables." Meaning that the client kept changing their mind so often the consulting firm was required to baby a system they hadn't thought through to begin with and had thus grown into a monstrosity that served disparate and disorganized goals.

No wonder it went over budget.

But that has nothing to do with open source and everything to do with bad project management. Notice that they've solved the problem by choosing "...a replacement, based on an off-the-shelf software product."

Which, if it meets their needs - bully for them. But is more likely an imposed solution to a problem they hadn't clearly defined to begin with. Thus, it's likely they'll find themselves in the same situation. Not because open source software is bad, or the commercial software is bad, or the consulting firm was probably bad... but because the bureau of meteorology has no idea what it wants to do with this data.

The problem here is with undefined goals set by management. Until they face that fact they'll go round this merry-go-round again and again. And taxpayers will foot the bill.

Most of the arguments against linux are entirely bogus and have been proven untrue.

Here is the problem with Linux. And *BSD as well.

It doesn't run the commercial software I need to successfully fulfill my objectives.

We can point our fingers at Adobe, Microsoft, and other commercial players who limit access of their apps to expand their own markets at the expense of Linux. But the model that open source would engender network effects and overtake commercial players who would shoot their own feet by refusing to develop on the platform...well, that turned out to be false.

The open source community beat commercial players on a limited playing field in server space. And then the commercial players changed the game. Ironically, Linux has become even more irrelevant as a populist movement because of its backend success.

The Linux desktop lost for valid reasons. It's been out there long enough to catch hold and it hasn't. It's long past time to look inward on that front. It's popular failure is entirely self-inflicted.

Perhaps we are indeed witnessing the downfall of the PC era.

Is that good or bad?

For open platforms manufactured by large companies, it's bad. We can still buy barebones PCs and cheap laptops, but there's an obvious transition away toward locked down systems like tablets and consumer products.

OTOH: the old PC was a successor to prior hobby platforms that were fully open. The old ALTAIR / IMSAI, Heathkit, SWTPC, Apple II, etc world of 8 bit before it went corporate. If IBM had had its way, what we're seeing today would have happened much sooner. Ironically, we can thank Microsoft for stalling that outcome for decades. It had already happened twice with mainframe and minicomputer players decades before, as they swiped ideas and technology developed in university labs for commercialization and then locked them down.

So maybe this shift will engender a resurgence of very slow systems designed for hobbyists to built from scratch. A bifurcation of commercial products for the general public and a hobby community that might lead to hands on hardware / software development of entirely new platforms. A real resurgence of competition without commercial pressure because it's being done just for fun.

Such systems wouldn't fulfill the expectations of consumers. Nor should they. But they might be cool to tinker with. And that could have second order effects down the road that could impact future markets in unexpected ways. Or not. And who cares?

A hobbyist / commercial hardware split might be for the best.

Or, maybe I'm talking nonsense. I often do.

I'm still on classic (after 30 seconds or so on beta) so I don't even have anything to complain about until they actually take classic away.

The beta commenting system is so bad I couldn't even preview and post from there. But I'm sympathetic to beta fuck ups. What's actually broken will work out in time and the stylistic issues people dislike will either lead to an exodus or be resolved in some unexpected way. For example, I dumped Final Cut Pro when Apple went to X and have been pleased with Adobe Premiere. But I have to admit that Apple has resolved many of the initial complaints made about FCP X. I'd reconsider now, even though l'm happy with Premiere. /. admins have to do something. They're getting eaten alive by Reddit /r/technology and the site is arguably a better service with more interesting comments. I'd like to see a resurrection of /. as a tech news aggregation power site. Reddit is showing real problems with mod abuse. There's an opportunity retune and challenge for audience share here if they get it right. The admins don't have to target all of Reddit. Just the slice they're perfect to steal market share for.

Competition is good.

The beta needs work. The comment forum is problematic. Images are a bit too big for my taste and they're not well selected to fit the theme of each story - but that's an editorial problem, not a software glitch. Still, the software clearly isn't ready for prime time. Yet a site update is warranted. And I think /. has plenty of life left in it with the right community and editorial mix.

ADMINS: If you're reading this, why not post a sticky for community bitching and get the site designers involved? Yank this shit from the stories forums and find a proper place for it that's open to discussion with the players and public so no one feels their view has been stifled. It's for the best. You've got a community revolt going on here.

But to the bitchfest crew, this shitstorm of offtopic crapflooding has made /. comments utterly unreadable for ontopic discussion. That sucks. I actually clicked this link to read real comments and got nowhere.

And I'm contributing to the mess. Fuck. Sorry about that.

amacbride wrote: "Um, in the very first sentence..."

You're right and fixed. Thank you! It's the only spelling error of the man's name in the essay. Copyedit errors happen.

"Furthermore, I think 2001 the film works precisely because of the tension between Clarke's fundamentally optimistic view of human nature, and Kubrick's pessimistic one."

Read on and I think you'll find we're very much in agreement on that point. -M

globaljustin wrote: "(when he bothers to try and summarize)"

That's a fair point. I could cut the word count down significantly and recast several of the ideas into separate academic papers. But I was shooting for a more general audience, one who might need a breakdown of the film scene by scene. Those who haven't seen the film more than once. But I could have done better. Every piece of work has its warts.

I'm on to other projects now, but may one day revisit the work and attempt a more concise revision.

OK, so I get it now. Timothy linked to a /. review of that book in the submission intro, and you linked to an Amazon review of that book as well. But the book wasn't written by me. I got confused.

However, I read the Amazon review and thought - beyond her criticisms of a book I haven't read - some of what she said about the movie was very interesting. I'd love to read her essay on 2001 and will definitely do a google search and look for it. I suspect she'd trash my work, but also believe that in her criticisms I'd learn many interesting new things.

On the fence here over whether I'd prefer she review my essay. Woman got a harsh tonue. Lol. -M

I own many of Clarke's books, including 2001. I'm sorry to say, but I think you should check your sources on that one. See here. Further, I checked the essay source and found 26 instances of the name "Clarke" and no misspellings of "Clark". Can you quote a portion of text where you found the error? If so, I'll fix it. -M