Comment Re:What about a joke ? (Score 1) 49
What with April 1st and so on...
Everyday is April Fool's Day with Slashdot Beta....
What with April 1st and so on...
Everyday is April Fool's Day with Slashdot Beta....
Alex Kibkalo, a former Microsoft employee has been arrested yesterday for stealing and leaking company secrets..... Kibkalo is a Russian national and has worked for Microsoft for seven years; he has joined 5nine Software in August 2013 as Director of Product Management for Security and Management products after quiting his job at Microsoft.
I wonder how he worked for MS for 7 years as H1-B Visas are supposed to be limited to 6 years.
The Wall Street Journal just ran an article about why shipping oil by rail is more profitable than shipping by pipeline:
Basically, shipping the oil by rail costs more, but using a train gives the oil producer the flexibility to ship to the refinery that will pay them them most for the oil. Shipping by pipeline only allows the producer to ship the oil to the refinery at the end of that pipeline.... and the oil producer has to commit to use the pipeline for a very long time.
Apparently, Warren Buffet figured this out years ago because he bought the BNSF Railway back in 2009. A BNSF train is shown in the picture attached to the Bloomberg article.
They've been trying to build one for years (Keystone XL) but have been stonewalled at every turn by Obama.
The WSJ points out that the proposed Keystone pipeline runs north-south, while the oil producers want to ship their oil east-west because the demand for oil is greater on the coasts than in Texas.
Luigi Maraldi, 37, reportedly called his parents to say he was in Thailand and not on board the flight. Mr Maraldi told the
we announced the deal with Facebook on wednesday after the market closed. during the process, we realized there was a chance we might not be able to get the deal wrapped up and signed on wednesday and it could delay.
when the risk of the delay became real, i said: "if we don't get it done on wednesday, it probably wont get done. i have tickets on thursday to fly out to Barcelona which i bought with miles and they are not easily refundable or even possible to change. this has to be done by wednesday or else!!!"
My partner is an elementary school principal. Her school has a small "data room", only accessed by teachers, in which she has posted "data walls". Her data walls are actually printouts of very large spreadsheets -- each row is a child, and the hundred of columns represent individual concepts that children have to master. For example, one column might represent "being able to add fractions", another might represent "being able to subtract fractions", another might be "being able to correctly conjugate verbs", etc.
The really cool thing is that these spreadsheets are generated (by software) after the children take computerized tests. Instead of just giving a numeric score, the software will show exactly *which* concepts the child does and does not know.
You would think teachers would love this technology because it would allow them to focus their instruction time on concepts their students have not mastered. Sadly, that's not the case -- instead, many long-time teachers who had always gotten "good" and "excellent" evaluations are suddenly being shown that they are not actually very good teachers. For example, the software can easily show that *none* of the students in a particular classroom have mastered a particular concept, such as adding fractions. If no student in that particular elementary classroom is able to add fractions, then it is pretty obvious that the teacher in that classroom does not know how to effectively teach adding fractions. Hearing that is pretty threatening to a teacher who has taught the same way for two or three decades.
Anyway, I posted because what the article calls a "data wall" is not really a data wall.
Dice.com is currently outfitting a bus for their upcoming "Tech Trek" tour: Dice is hittin' the road!
Maybe Paul server guy works for them? Presumably they would not want anyone taking pictures of the people responsible for Beta.
On Gawker, Sam Biddle points out that while AOL claimed it couldn't afford its old retirement plan, it is able to afford "Shingy," who Biddle describe as a "professional nothing". Shingy's job title is "Digital Prophet," which means "he's gloating about the fact that he has a make believe job at AOL, unlike most tech charlatans, who try to conceal it":
Look, you have to understand something: Slashdot discussions generate interesting content by allowing tons of garbage to be posted, mixed around, and evolved. Part of the evolution comes from the interactive nature of community discussion, and part of it comes from the moderation process. For this evolution process to work properly, you have to be able to see a lot of posts at once, all in one shot. You need to be able to see some contextual information about the people posting comments. When you post your own comments, you need to be able to quote or link to other posts easily. When you want to moderate, you need to be able to do it in place, at the comment you intend to moderate.
Beta breaks all of these vital features; without them, the nature of Slashdot discussion changes completely. People will read fewer comments because the new layout hinders rapid seeking, scanning, and comprehension of potentially valuable posts... all while making it much more difficult to skim past the stuff that doesn't interest you. When people read fewer comments, they post fewer comments. When the total number of comments starts to drop, the exploration of the discussion space becomes much less thorough. Potentially valuable or interesting discussion paths will be missed. Those rare, but highly sought after gems of insight and wisdom borne from the cesspool of chaos will become much more scarce.
You want to know why people hate the beta so much? It's because it kills the evolutionary discussion dynamic that makes the community what it is. There's nothing else like it, and many of us do not want to lose it.
(Adapted from my original post on Slashdot:http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4761849&cid=46192975)
Happiness is twin floppies.
