Okay, I'm getting tired of explaining this over and over in every discussion where someone whines that Apple could take over the world if only they'd sell OS X for generic PCs. On a lazy Sunday afternoon, I found another blog that mentions this. Having nothing better to do, I responded to that posting and decided to really flesh out my argument and put it here (slightly edited from the version posted there) so I can just link to it in the future. So, without further ado, here it is:

"Release OS X for beige boxes... Your company could be the next Microsoft."

Uh huh. And look at Microsoft now: They may be a huge, rich company with tremendous marketshare, but it was proven in a court of law that they achieved those things through no small use of illegal means. Currently, they're the laughing stock of the industry, struggling to get Vista out the door (years-late and gutted of all its compelling features), and with their employees burned out, demoralized, updating their resumes and one step shy of open revolt (if you believe what you read on minimsft). I much prefer Apple just the way it is, thanks.

Have you even considered what would go into selling OS X for generic PCs? Everyone who advocates this seems to harbor the illusion that they could cobble together a PC from any old spare parts they had lying around, and by putting OS X on it magically end up with something that works as well as a real Mac. Not bloody likely.

First, tight integration of the hardware and software is what makes a Mac a Mac. The OS X developers know exactly what hardware they're writing for, and can take full advantage of its capabilities. The limited pool of hardware also makes testing a much less onerous proposition. The Windows developers have to code to "lowest common denominator,"-- the alphabet soup of acronyms and abbreviations representing the hardware standards Windows supports. All they can do is hope that all the commodity hardware implements those standards correctly, because they have no hope of testing all the possible hardware combinations that can be (and probably have been, somewhere in the world) assembled into a functioning PC. Microsoft has spent twenty years and untold billions trying to approximate the "It just works" aspect of the Mac, and the best they've been able to come up with is "It usually works, but quite often it doesn't and we don't know why. Maybe if you reboot..." I'm a field tech, and the most common Windows problem I hear is "[Feature/application] worked fine all day yesterday, but when I came in this morning it didn't."

Second, where would all the Mac drivers come from for all those commodity components? Jobs can't snap his fingers and suddenly have driver support in OS X for all the cheap, generic hardware pouring out of the factories in Asia. Even when NeXTStep was available for x86, it only came with a short list of supported generic hardware. If you wanted to install and run NeXTStep on something that wasn't on that list, you were SOL. So then the drivers would have to be produced by the companies making the hardware. Crappy hardware drivers are a big part of what makes the Windows experience miserable, and those companies have been putting out Windows drivers for years. What makes you think they'd do a better job of producing Mac drivers without any prior experience at it? Furthermore, multiple components from multiple vendors mean support becomes a nightmare. Right now if you have a Mac problem, it falls to Apple to solve it because they make the hardware and software. I don't know how many times I've heard of and experienced finger pointing matches between Microsoft support people and the hardware vendor support people, each blaming the other for some random problem instead of trying to address it. I've even had that happen with Dell, and they make the whole damn box! It's not a problem for techies who are able to troubleshoot their own problems, but OS X is supposed to be the savior from that sort of thing. It won't be if it runs on generics.

Third, it would not be profitable for Apple to sell OS X for generics because they'd have to price it to make up for at least some of the revenue loss due to the resulting lost Mac sales. The people who currently bitch about the price of a Mac will not buy an OS from Apple that costs as much as their cheap PC did (if not more). And don't even tell me Apple could price it lower and make it up in volume, because a stroll through the dot-com boneyard proves that the "we'll make it up in volume" business model flat out doesn't work. Most of Apple's revenue comes from their computer sales, not iPods. They have to maintain that revenue somehow to fund R&D, or you'll see OS X stagnate like Netscape Navigator did when Microsoft killed Netscape's revenue by making IE free.

Fourth, even if Apple did sell it for generic PCs, many, many, many people would still download it illegally, anyway-- particularly if Apple priced it to try to compensate for lost hardware sales. That means more lost revenue, because now people stealing the OS haven't even purchased a Mac on which to run it. So sooner or later Apple would be adding activation to OS X out of necessity. Honestly, considering how hard the "we want everything for nothing" crowd has already worked to crack the developer copies of OS X Intel and subsequent updates, I wouldn't be surprised to see OS X 10.5 ship with installation keys and/or activation.

Finally, do you think Microsoft would stand idly by while Apple made this incursion into "their" turf? Look what happened to Be, Inc. Hell, look what happened to Netscape and Go Corp, for that matter. The only thing that saved NeXT from the same fate was Apple purchasing them. No, Microsoft would quickly retaliate if Apple started selling OS X for any old PC. They'd probably discontinue Office for OS X, and lean on Dell and the other big-name PC makers to ensure they didn't ink any deals to sell PCs preloaded with OS X. In other words, Microsoft would just go back to their old, anticompetitive ways to the degree they could get away with it.

~Philly

Reasoned replies and/or constructive comments are appreciated.

If you go to our new bookmark page you can see our new taggable bookmark thingee. The tagging faq has a few entries specifically about it, including HTML for javascript bookmarking from your toolbar.

the most important part of this to US is that after a URL has been bookmarked, you have the option to write a journal about it, or submit it directly to the Slashdot authors for consideration as an article.

Also you can write a journal entry about it. Journal users will note a new function as well, a Submit to Slashdot function is now included in the Journal form. ticking that box will submit your story to the editors for consideration as a story.

The concept is roughly that you can now use the post-to-slashdot javascript to bookmark a URL. Then, once bookmarked you can write a journal entry about it. And when you check the appropriate box, that story is submitted to the editors. It's all quite simple, and it allows you to blog/submit/bookmark in one place.

Also bookmarks are taggable, so please try to tag them as best you can. We have a lot of stuff coming to this, but for now it's all in testing so please give feedback.

Our fax machine started making a strange noise a few weeks ago. A clicking/popping/mechanical sort of noise. The sort of noise that pretty clearly indicates that the unit is ready to be retired. So I unplugged it. The noises stopped. Peace and tranquility returned to my environment. All is well.

This morning jeff arrived and actually needed to send a fax. Since this happens approximately once a quarter, he was understandably upset that the fax machine wouldn't work. It wouldn't even turn on any more.

What happened next was a blur- sort of Orange County Chopper combined with Office Space. The evidence I present to you now:

We all feel much better.

Hrm. The latest piece of spam to hit my spambucket had a German title ("Gesundheit u. Medizin"), and the sender address was Ethelred. Apparently he's giving away Cadillac Escalades...

Then two more: one with content of "shagface" (and nothing else - no URL, nothing being advertised, nothing!) - and "Hey, Thanks for everything. I really appreciate all your help. Lila", which claimed to come from an Israeli email address and was sent to at least 8 addresses on this domain.

I can understand spammers promoting their online Viagra sales or whatever - but bizarre partly-German messages about free Cadillacs? Maybe they're just trying to validate their list, by seeing how many people actually reply - assuming the return address they put is actually valid?

Maybe I should just be glad they're still identified as spam, usually because of the open relays being abused to deliver them...

Today i let a couple of mistakes get through to the homepage. I got a ton of hate mail. I'm feeling really good about myself- especially because my email is lagged by about 45 minutes, so I'm getting the bug reports about 30 minutes after the story goes live. I'm usually quite prompt about correcting stuff that needs it... but SMTP latency is killing me today.

I make mistakes. I'm only human. But i really hate when the feedback mechanism breaks down. And it really is depressing getting 100 messages pop into your box telling you how much you suck for a mistake that was totally honest.

Usually i'm pretty good at letting the water roll off my back when people are mean in email. But the last few weeks has seen my inbox take a turn for the viscious. I'm used to hate mail. I'm used to name calling. But lately it just seems like it's getting worse. Or maybe I'm just getting more sensitive to it.

There are a handful of things that people just flat out don't understand about what we do... the main one is the difference between reading "The Bin" and "The Homepage". On a typical day I might read a few hundred story submissions. I might read another hundred pages that are potentially Slashdot material. And during a typical daddy pants shift, I might post a half a dozen.

This occurs day after day. I might delete a submission that 12 hours later is posted by another editor (maybe there is less to choose from at 11pm than there was at 11am... or maybe a better URL came along to a story that was rejected earlier).

So I kind of see the Slashdot Index differently than others. Some days, like when I'm wearing the pants I'm looking at every story very closely. I concern myself with timing, mix, spelling, quality. Other days the stories aren't mine. I see them differently: I see a story i left in the bin with a note saying "Maybe later?" or a story i rejected because it had a crappy URL. I see several stories I've never seen before. I enjoy those the most.

The problem is that over 8 years of submissions, my posts, and other people's posts start blurring together. I've posted over 10,000 stories. I've rejected hundreds of thousands of submissions. Sometimes I'm simply not going to remember a story from 3 days ago posted by someone else. It's not that I didn't read it- it's that I might have read it 30 times in different places.

There are technical solutions that go a long ways... we have a bunch of keyword searching things in the back end that alerts me if a story with similiar words came up in the last week. But that works spottily at best. The real fall back is the fact that most stories are posted 30 minutes early and screened before subscribers. And this works GREAT. Readers let me know about typos or URL problems in advance. Many articles get fixed, updated, and occasionally deleted during this window. Which unfortunately doesn't work if my SMTP server decides to make me wait 45 minutes for my mail. Stupid protocol. I posted a story for 15:14 GMT. At 15:36 I get a ping saying I have mail. I check the window and see dozens of emails telling me, in increasing hostility, about my error. Those emails were sent as early as 15:00. Bah.

We've discussed using IM and such for disseminating time critical information, but the real issue is GETTING the information. By using email, we raise the bar high enough that people don't arbitrarily spam it. If we put a text field right next to the index, we get so much junk it becomes a meaningless stream of worthless data. To much to keep track of. (Yes, we tried). Email works well for this purpose most of the time since it requires at least a tiny bit more effort than filling in a text field and clicking a button. I think it's a psychological thing- a web form is disposable.. and e-mail is more tangible.

And then the conspiracy theories: Submittor X is paying me to post his stories. Submittor Y is being rejected because I hate him. Advertiser Z gets all their stuff submitted because they are paying us Google is paying me to post their stuff. Yesterday a guy yelled at me for rejecting all his Google stories angry that I'm not posting enough about it.

The truth is less interesting- some guys know how to write good submissions so they get picked a lot. Some advertisers create original content that we find appealing. Since we reject 98% or more of all submissions, so the odds that YOUR submission just got rejected are pretty good. And Google is currently a very hot topic. Just like SCO was a few years ago, and KDE/GNOME was a few years before that. And when each of those stories were at their respective zenithseseses, I got hatemail for posting to much and not enough of those too. It's lose lose sometimes.

So anyway, i'm not in the happiest mood lately. The other reason is that yesterday my iMac shit itself. This particular computer is a normally just a dumb terminal containing little more than mail, web browser, and games, so normally this would be no big deal. Unfortunately i've been working for several weeks now to digitize my families home movies from the 80s, and edit them down as a christmas present for my parents.

The actual digitizing and editing has gone relatively smoothly. But this work in the last few weeks has created 80+ gigs of data that I obviously haven't backed up yet.

Now fortunately the hard drive is OK and it appears that only the operating system blew up. OS X won't let me reinstall tho, so I'm going to have to reformat. So now this machine is mounted as a firewire drive and i'm trying to copy everything over. The problem now is that it takes iDVD like 12 hours of master a DVD... and Christmas is this weekend... so I need to get all 3 DVDs finished, mastered, and copies burnt for relatives. I had plenty of time until my video editing machine needed to barf!

Anyway... it's been a long couple of weeks for me. I'm looking forward to a bit of a holiday break. Maybe it will bring a little more civility to my inbox.

1. Legal first name? James
2. Were you named after anyone? No
3. Do you wish on stars? No
4. When did you last cry? When my cat died a few years ago, I think.
5. What is your favorite lunch meat? Chicken or beef, I suppose.
6. What is your birth date? Feb 24
7. If you were another person, would YOU be friends with you? Probably
8. Do you use sarcasm a lot? Yep.
9. What are your nicknames? None.
10. Would you ever bungee jump? Maybe.
11. Do you untie your shoes when you take them off? Not normally.
12. Do you think that you are strong? Fairly
13. What is your favorite ice cream flavour? Mint choc chip
14. Shoe size? 11 UK, 12 US I think - varies a little with manufacturer
15. Red or pink? Red
16. Who do you miss most? Moving targets.
18. What color pants and shoes are you wearing? None right now, usually jeans and black shoes.
19. What are you listening to right now? A TV show
20. What did you eat for breakfast? Toasted cheese
21. If you were a crayon, what color would you be? Stripey :-)
22. What is the weather like right now? Cold, Damp and grey. It's Scotland.
23. Last person you talked to on the phone? My best friend, if text counts; my mother if not.
24. The first thing you notice about the opposite sex? Hair.
25. Do you like the person who sent this to you? I saw it in a set of friends' JEs; I guess I like them!
26. Favorite drink? Lemonade or coffee.
27. Hair color? Dark brown
28. Do you wear contacts? No.
29. Favorite food? Steak.
30. Last movie you watched? Erm... no idea.
31. Favorite day of the year? No idea
32. Scary movies or happy endings? Scary
33. Summer or winter? Winter
34. Hugs or kisses? Yes please :P
35. What is your favorite dessert? Cheesecake
36. Living arrangements? House.
38. What's on your mouse pad? The rest of the chair.
39. What did you watch last night on TV? ST:TNG, right now.
40. Favorite smell?
41. Favorite junk food?
42. Rolling Stones or Beatles? No.
43. What's the farthest you've been from home? Physically, Texas; culturally, France, whose Prime Minister was apparently talking about the need to "clean the immigrant scum with a power hose". Lovely.

The CSS upgrade went pretty much as smoothly as could be expected. A number of minor glitches showed up and we immediately smashed, and a few other glitches remain, but no 'Show Stopper' type bugs. There are some complaints by some of the users of various modes that get very little play (Light Mode, Opera, and believe it or not, Mosaic) but all in all I'd call the whole thing a success.

We knew light mode would irritate people so let me discuss it a bit here: Light Mode serves two seperate purposes: to provide a low bandwidth Slashdot for people with slow network connections, and to provide people who want a simplified design with just that.

The plan is to seperate those two tasks. The latter is simply new CSS themes targetted to a handful of common design desires. Since the site degrades relatively well, simply using "No" stylesheet actually accomplishes much of what light mode did anyway.

The bandwidth issue is trickier since it requires some actual code logic. Simple things like stripping out a lot of the menus and slashboxes that people don't need is a huge start. It's relatively simple to do but time consuming to do it right.

All of this is actually relatively minor simply because the number of people who actually use light mode number in the hundreds, and its hard to justify spending several days of work writing code to please such a small group, especially because when you get down to that level, they actually want a dozen different things. Some want "Feature Complete" and others want "Stripped Down For Handheld XXX" and others want something in the middle. Facts are we can't appeal to EVERY desire, but we sure do try where it makes sense.

The good news is that the code is in CVS, and now that we have stylesheets, a lot of things that were "Impossible" under the old code are probably just a couple lines in a custom stylesheet.

A few people asked about a redesign of Slashdot which I made mention of in the announcement yesterday. If you want to get started, the gist of it is that Yes, we will have some sort of contest. What prizes? What Rules? When? I have no idea. But if those silly little limitations don't scare you, and you want to get cracking now, let me make a few suggestions:

• The new Slashdot design will have to have all the user interface components you see today. Just because you don't like the section index or the banner ads, a winning design will still need to have them. Now you can move stuff around, or even hide some of it in roll-over menus, but the new design must retain all the links you see today.
• Design elements that ought to persist: the slashdot signature shade of green, the curve in the upper left hand corner, the caliseo font. It would have to be one hell of a design to get me to sacrifice these things which I regard as essential to Slashdot's "Look". I want a new design, but whatever is new will need to pay lip service to the original design. Some sort of visual consistency.
• The topic icons will need to be placed on white unless you plan to rebuild all of them. We don't have source material for a lot of them, and rebuilding a hundred topic icons from scratch is not likely.
• We'll want mockups of the index, an article (with comments!) and probably the user preference page.
• If you can do it entirely within CSS, that would be fantastic. Some minor code changes would be done for a fantastic design, but mostly we want skins to work entirely within a standardized css framework.

With CSS wrapping up, Slashteam is ready to take on some new projects. Pudge has been working on a new form validation system that is more extensible. This will make new forms of validation easier to add, and better error messages. Also the search system is due for a rewrite. The API is designed and the front end is mostly complete. Now its just a matter of building new guts so that it actually finds the right stories. And don't get me started on the moderation system rewrite: after a number of biz related needs (subscriber stuff and daypass advertising stuff) we're finally ready to return to the beast that is Moderation.

Apparently a new study indicates BSE (Mad Cow Disease) may have first infected cattle as a result of human remains in their feed. An interesting reversal of the previous assumptions about CJD's origins - which raises the obvious chicken/egg problem: if CJD actually spread to cattle to become BSE, where did CJD really come from?

These are actual notes from Doctors' patient charts...

1. Patient has chest pain if she lies on her left side for over a year.

2. On the 2nd day the knee was better and on the 3rd day it disappeared completely.

3. She has had no rigors or shaking chills, but her husband states she was very hot in bed last night.

4. The patient has been depressed ever since she began seeing me in 1993.

5. The patient is tearful and crying constantly. She also appears to be depressed.

6. Discharge status: Alive but without permission.

7. Healthy appearing decrepit 69 year-old male. Mentally alert but forgetful.

8. The patient refused an autopsy.

9. The patient has no past history of suicides.

10. Patient has left his white blood cells at another hospital.

11. Patient's past medical history has been remarkably insignificant with only a 40 pound weight gain in the past three days.

12. Patient had waffles for breakfast and anorexia for lunch.

13. Between you and me, we ought to be able to get this lady pregnant.

14. Since she can't get pregnant with her husband, I thought you might like to work her up.

15. She is numb from her toes down.

16. While in the ER, she was examined, X-rated and sent home.

17. The skin was moist and dry.

18. Occasional, constant, infrequent headaches.

19. Patient was alert and unresponsive.

20. Rectal exam revealed a normal size thyroid.

21. She stated that she had been constipated for most of her life, until she got a divorce.

22. I saw your patient today, who is still under our car for physical therapy.

23. Both breasts are equal and reactive to light and accommodation.

24. Exam of genitalia reveals that he is circus sized.

25. The lab test indicated abnormal lover function.

26. The patient was to have a bowel re-section. However, he took a job as a lawyer instead.

27. Skin: Somewhat pale but present.

28. The pelvic examination will be done later on the floor.

29. Patient was seen in consultation by Dr. Blank, who felt we should sit on the abdomen and I agree.

30. Large brown stool ambulating in the hall.

31. Patient has two teenage children, but no other abnormalities.

(This rant brought to you by a chunk of my life wasted trying to achieve something in Excel which should have been trivial, but was needlessly complicated by Microsoft's use of defective bacteria to write software.)

You might think a search and replace function was trivial. Indeed, I'm sure that even the non-programmers among us could figure it out given a good book or two and a few hours to experiment. However, that is why you aren't working for Microsoft, developing infuriating paperclips...

Yep, that's right. The lobotomized ass-spawn who brought us such masterpieces of user-friendly software as MS Bob and That Infernal Paperclip managed to screw up one of the most basic text manipulation functions, "Replace". Try it on a cell too large, you're hit with "Formula too large." Never mind that it is text, with no formula in sight. Never mind that Excel allows manual editing (plus saving, loading, importing and exporting) of this data just fine. Never mind that OpenOffice's spreadsheet component manages it just fine. *snarl*. Where would I like to go today? Well, how about a trip a decade into the future, by which time hopefully Microsoft have managed to recruit somebody with programming skills good enough to pass at least a high school beginners' programming exam?

Never one to be outdone by Microsoft, the Novell DHCP server decides this would be a good day to start disabling DHCP allocations. Time to retire that particular bug collection, I think.

Finally, to crown it all, I find out a guy from my old school (a couple of years below me) died yesterday. Can anything else find a way to go wrong before bed?

Scary. One woman in England, with fifteen children (plus seven miscarriages) is claiming welfare payments equivalent to an $89,000/yr salary - in addition to free housing, healthcare and education, of course. Last Christmas she spent around $9k, including two PS2s, two TVs and a few bicycles. Her comment on this? The house the taxpayer provides for her isn't big enough. Never a thought of trying to earn money herself to fund her way of life, of course: that's everyone else's problem...

Promising comments from the top - he doesn't have the power to implement it, of course, but should have some influence.

After my last JE, I found myself losing service entirely for around ten minutes during a journey - starting right in the middle of a mid-size city. Oh, that wonderful legacy technology...

The cellphone industry seems even more enthusiastic about bizarre acronyms than most technology areas, but this guy knows his way around them better than many. A good explanation of the nature of TDMA, GSM (actually an alternative layer on top of TDMA, as he explains) and CDMA, as well as the two competing CDMA derivatives, WCDMA (also known as UMTS or "3g") and CDMA2000, although he does focus more on the lower levels of the technology and how GSM's weaknesses are causing major headaches for the networks using it, rather than the security flaws in the higher levels...

Just joining in QotOR's trend here...

(x) smoked a cigarette -- most of a packet one night, along with a couple of cigars.
( ) crashed a friend's car -- only my own - see below...
( ) stolen a car (a friends)
(x) been in love -- haven't we all?
(x) been dumped -- sort of, depending who tells it...
( ) shoplifted -- caught my best friend doing it once, though.
( ) been fired
(x) been in a fist fight -- sort of: broke someone's wrist with my face once...
( ) snuck out of your parent's house
(x) had feelings for someone who didn't have them back
( ) been arrested
( ) gone on a blind date
( ) lied to a friend
( ) skipped school
( ) seen someone die
( ) had a crush on one of your internet friends -- too limited for that. I'd need to meet someone in person first.
(x) been to Canada
( ) been to Mexico -- Texas, but only the far side of it. I do love Tex-Mex food, though...
(x) been on a plane -- including the front seat.
(x) purposely set a part of yourself on fire
(x) eaten sushi -- one of my favorite foods, in fact.
(x) been skiing
(x) met someone from the internet
(x) been at a concert
(x) taken painkillers
( ) love someone or miss someone right now
(x) laid on your back and watched cloud shapes go by
( ) made a snow angel
( ) had a tea party -- never been to Boston, either.
(x) flown a kite
(x) built a sand castle
( ) gone puddle jumping
( ) played dress up -- unless being on TV counts
( ) jumped into a pile of leaves
(x) gone sledding
(x) cheated while playing a game -- single-player only!
(x) been lonely
(x) fallen asleep at work/school
( ) used a fake ID -- had a guy from Pakistan try to buy one from me for EUR7000 once though.
(x) watched the sun set
( ) felt an earthquake
(x) slept beneath the stars -- if in tents counts
(x) been tickled
( ) been robbed
(x) been misunderstood
( ) petted a reindeer /kangaroo
(x) won a contest
( ) run a red light/stop sign
( ) been suspended from school
(x) been in a car crash -- brakelines cut. Not good. I didn't need medical attention after that one, though, unlike the bus crash which had me kept in overnight for observation, since I passed out later that day, having left a head-shaped dent in the back of the bus; come to think of it, that's the only night I've ever spent in hospital.
( ) had braces
(x) felt like an outcast/third person
( ) eaten a whole pint of ice cream in one night
(x) had deja vu
( ) danced in the moonlight
( ) liked the way you looked
(x) witnessed a crime
(x) questioned your heart
( ) been obsessed with post-it notes
( ) squished barefoot through the mud
( ) been lost
(x) been on the opposite side of the country
( ) swam in the ocean
(x) felt like dying
(x) cried yourself to sleep
( ) played cops and robbers
( ) recently colored with crayons
( ) sung karaoke
(x) paid for a meal with only coins -- in a country where the smallest note is around $9 and the largest normal coin almost $4, that's not hard...
(x) done something you told yourself you wouldn't do
( ) made prank phone calls
(x) laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose
(x) caught a snowflake on your tongue
(x) danced in the rain
( ) written a letter to Santa Claus
(x) been kissed under the mistletoe
( ) watched the sun rise with someone you care about -- I want to
(x) blown bubbles
( ) made a bonfire on the beach
( ) crashed a party
( ) gone rollerskating
(x) had a wish come true
( ) jumped off a bridge
( ) ate dog/cat food
( ) told a complete stranger you loved them
( ) kissed a mirror
( ) sang in the shower
(x) had a dream that you married someone
(x) glued your hand to something -- superglue. Fortunately, it didn't stick for long.
( ) kissed a fish
(x) sat on a roof top
( ) screamed at the top of your lungs
( ) done a one-handed cartwheel
( ) talked on the phone for more than 5 hours -- unless the Internet counts. Record: over 150 hours on a single call, back when per-minute charges applied except to calls starting on a weekend...
(x) stayed up all night
( ) picked and ate an apple right off the tree
(x) climbed a tree
(x) had a tree house
( ) scared to watch a scary movie alone
( ) believe in ghosts
( ) have more than 30 pairs of shoes
( ) worn a really ugly outfit to school
( ) gone streaking
( ) gone doorbell ditching
( ) played gay chicken? -- uh, what is that?
( ) pushed into a pool/hot tub with all your clothes on
( ) told you're hot by a complete stranger
( ) broken a bone -- cut the tip of my finger off once, but reattached it
(x) been easily amused
( ) caught a fish then ate it
( ) caught a butterfly
(x) laughed so hard you cried
( ) cried so hard you laughed
( ) cheated on a test
(x) forgotten someone's name -- all the time. Which is strange, since I have an excellent memory for almost everything else...
( ) french braided someone's hair
( ) gone skinny dipping in a pool/hot tub -- a friend tried to talk me into it once, but no...
(x) been threatened to be kicked out of your house
( ) loved someone so much you would gladly die for them

If you visit Slashcode.com you will notice that it is now running a brand spanking new CSS template designed by OSTGs Wes Moran and implemented by Tim Vroom and the rest of Slashteam. As some of you are aware, Slashcode.com is a testbed for Slashdot's code development. It gets features a few days before Slashdot so we can test the code on a live site. Of course the site is virtually unused, but that's not really the point for us. It's more about making sure the stuff actually works.

Which is where you come in. If you know a thing or two about CSS and web design, I'd appreciate a look at the site. You can email me if you have specific feedback, comments, criticism. I'd especially like it if people logged in and played with that. You'll notice that a lot of form elements look different. Some intentionally. Some because we haven't actually got around to creating CSS stylesheet entries for the dozens of custom things out there. Also, the comment code itself is completely unchanged. The display of forums will remain pretty much icky old HTML until we either (A) Rewrite the engine (which is planned, but a big project or (B) Someone submits a patch that does it for us. So if you want your chance to get your name in lights on Slashdot, this is a project worth considering. There's a mailing list and a CVS server. What are you waiting for?

The Slashdot CSS theme itself is well underway- the core HTML you see on www.slashcode.com is almost exactly what will be on Slashdot itself, we just need to finish a few parts, fix a few bugs, and work finish the Slashdot Stylesheet. We're looking to have that done in the next few weeks, although actually deploying it on Slashdot itself is a pretty huge project. I want to do it in august since it's usually really quiet, and we have a lot of data that needs to be converted in addition to the actualy site templates.

Pudge has been working a lot on that problem. Specifically we've got scripts to fix HTML in all editor & user contributed content spaces. A lot of this is under way already. Old comments are being automatically fixed in the background. HTML in articles from 1998 is being corrected. Scripts are working very hard. And in some cases, tired editors have been re-reading stories from 1998 to correct HTML errors that boggle the mind. None of this is perfect, so don't be to surprised if you find something wonky. Feel free to mail me URLs if you see it. We've got almost 60,000 articles, 900,000 users, and like 13 million comments. There will be mistakes.

Lastly, once Slashdot has successfully been ported to CSS, we'll have a lot more design flexibility. I expect that soon after we'll actually be ready to give the tired old design a facelift. If anyone has ideas, you can start playing with designs today by simply modifying www.slashcode.com's CSS stylesheet. my guess is we'll have a contest similiar to the T-Shirt contest we ran awhile back- users can contribute designs and I'll select from the best a new look for Slashdot. I'm really looking forward to that. I'll miss having Slashdot be "My" design, but the site still looks like 1997 and it's time for new life to go with fancy new web technology.

Also, my rogue hit 60 in WoW a few days ago. I also made my Volcanic armor set and have a few nifty other items w/ high fire resist. Now to get attuned and visit that toasty place known as Molten Core! And somehow save another 400gp for my epic mount. There's just no end to this game.