He's ill at ease with being the product Facebook sells to its customers, and skeptical of Facebook's ability to treat its product (its users' eyeballs) like paying customers. Seems reasonable to me. I want to know exactly what category I fall into when I deal with a company. If I'm the product, fine, I have one set of expectations. If I'm the customer, fine, I have a different set. I don't know what to make of attempting to blend those, and I don't blame anyone for being apprehensive about how that might turn out. Probably not fair to put that on par with "despair" at all, much less "the earth's quota of despair." It's a pretty small proportion of the earth's deflated enthusiasm.

Uh, the AC I'm criticizing was succinct in expressing his point, which was that people who spell Linux in all-caps don't know enough about Linux to comment. Perhaps I've misunderstood ...

Seriously, that's the whole thing. I'm afraid that to me, it still sounds like being a spelling Nazi was the totality of his point.

Yeah, but when a word is generally spelled in title case, you can't spell it all lowercase while actively mocking someone else for using uppercase. It's a bit of a cheap shot in the first place, and with the element of hypocrisy thrown in, it's pretty hard to resist saying something.

Okay, that makes sense now. There's no SRPM for Chrome, so it's binary-only, which means circumstances restrict it to distros which are large and stable enough to be tested upon as a binary. Thanks!

Fair enough; on those specific points, I stand corrected. That said, I know Valve has some Source Engine games ported to Linux, so I still feel like this doesn't make as much sense as it ought to.

The fact that you, twice, failed to capitalize it at all, forces me to wonder if you're applying your case-based experience divination method to yourself.

I must admit, I don't do gaming on my Linux rig, but ... aren't there major 3D games being published for Linux via Humble Bundles, Steam, GoG, and no doubt others as well? Is this a support nightmare for those companies? And if not, how is it that they can work with GPUs in Linux, but the living gods of code over at Google can't hack it? I'm at work and can't be bothered to look up compelling examples, but I'm pretty sure The Witcher 2 runs on Linux, and that's a pretty GPU-intensive title. When something like this doesn't add up, it usually means I'm missing something. Like maybe Witcher 2 requires a specific distro that uses proprietary drivers or something, but Google's talking about Linux in general? Can anyone clue me in?

I wanted to like Hawken, but to me, there was no sense whatsoever of being in a vehicle. You accelerate like a person, you run like a person, you stop like a person. I didn't feel like I was in a mech, I felt like I was wearing a weird helmet and had a jetpack. Nothing wrong with that, I guess, but I went in looking for a mech game, and Hawken simply is not a mech game, it's a straightforward first-person shooter where the player models look like mechs.

DCS World. The game (with one plane, a Russian Su-25 ground attack aircraft) is free on Steam, with other aircraft available as modules. Although it's still in beta, I recommend the UH-1 Huey module. I just take off and cruise around. Sometimes I'm doing 200kph just ten feet above the ground, sometimes I soar up and over mountains and drift down into canyons at a lazy 60kph and then touch down on a rooftop in a small town. Sometimes I stick some enemy trucks a couple hundred kilometers away, and when I notice them, I tell the gunners to fire at will, just so I can see four miniguns firing before calling it a night. It's very immersive and relaxing. (It has a campaign, but if I just want to chill, I use the mission editor to create a mostly-empty map.)

A means of mass-ignoring the overwhelming majority of posters who hate the redesign? Based on Dice's attitude so far, they might go for this.

Because they said they're slowing down, not backing down. We say "scrap the whole thing, it can't be saved" and they say "we won't force it down your throat until we think we can get away with it." Until they give a little more ground than that, we'll have to keep pointing out that what they're saying and doing are unacceptable.

I was an avid /.'er for a good decade and change before wandering off for a while. I've been popping by to lurk, but hadn't posted a comment in years. This beta thing is really disturbing. I thought I could always come home to Mother Slashdot. I thought /. was invincible. I thought it would Always Be, that it could not be undone, that the mutual gravity we all create would bind Planet Slashdot together forever. I forgot that there are Stupidity Supernovas that can scatter our electrons far and wide.

It looks like that's probably going to happen, but let's try to coalesce afterwards. We'll create a lot more light as a star than a nebula.

The alternative to Javascript is the absence of client-side scripting, not a different language. I can't speak for everyone who's finicky about JS, but I personally prefer spartan information delivery to a luxurious interface. Also, I keep like 60 tabs open at a time, and if they're inert documents, we don't have a problem, but if they're all running scripts periodically, it adds up. Where it's possible to not use JS, I prefer to disable JS primarily for performance reasons.

You know how all the feedback is negative, except for one or two mild approvals? Please pay attention to that ratio. I just messed with my AdBlock Plus filters to block ads displayed via Slashdot. I'm not sure I got it 100% right, but I'm quite certain I'll get there before your "beta" approaches usability. I'll go back to allowing your ads when I've heard definitive confirmation of the termination of this project. I'm not saying you can't try again, I'm just saying that what you've got so far is broken beyond repair, and cannot be salvaged. Start over. Or don't; the Classic site is just fine. Seriously, kill this off. First with bullets, then with knives, then with acid, then with fire, then with a leaf blower to scatter this disaster harmlessly in the wind.