Hey at least it still *looks* like an X-Wing and not an iWing, like what happened to the Enterprise...

Where those rovers made what?

Whilst I doubt it would trigger the 'gunshot detector', it does stand a good chance of getting the school shut down for the day anyway

Eh, it'll never be as good as the book.

This is something I've found as well. I've never received any formal instruction in grammar, but I like to think that my standard of writing is fairly high. A few years ago however, I started trying to learn a foreign language and found that my lack of understanding of the grammar of my own language made it much more difficult to relate to the rules of the foreign language.

Password reset process doesn't necessarily need it either. You can just tell the user '*if* you entered a valid username, we're sending you reset instructions', without revealing whether there was a match or not.

The only (non-technical) reason I can think of is that they think that longer passwords are more likely to be forgotten, and they don't want to deal with the support calls.

On the other hand, the people I work with who constantly forget their passwords can't even remember a string of 3 or 4 numbers, so maybe the length doesn't really make a lot of difference there.

I think we have a winner!

I tried recently to change my banking password to something much longer, only to find there's a limit of just 14 characters. None of the several bank staff I asked about it could tell me why that is.

I can do this, no problem. It really doesn't take long to learn where a few knobs are. If they're designed well, the shape also tells you which direction they are pointing and therefore what their current setting is. There's no need to look in order to find or change any of their settings.

I want them to refer to me as 'it'. Is there an option for that?

As someone trying to compete by building a 'Better Product'... unfortunately this is true.

What is $6.3 million of goodwill, anyway?

I really do. I checked out the beta back in October. I felt, like now, that the front page and headers and stuff were alright, even quite nice looking, but that the comments section had been totally ruined. I said so in an email to the feedback address. I got a personal reply from Timothy agreeing that yes, comments were the most important part of the site, and that he understood the complaint about all the whitespace.

Looking at it now, at least it's no longer fixed width, but there are still huge amounts of pointless padding and margins everywhere, and comments are still confined to a column of about 55% of the window width. Compared with the existing design, every comment takes up about 150% of the current vertical space whilst simultaneously providing about 10% of the current information.

I quite like the new navigation, and the article list... don't really need such a massive font, but I could get used to it. But it still seems like nobody's really listening regarding the comments. They keep saying that they understand and agree, but still seem to be missing just how incredibly seriously they should be taking this. There's nothing special about the news on Slashdot. It's usually old, with a poor summary. What's special is the community of people who comment here. Without them, there is no reason to come here. Until the comments are fixed, the new design never stands the slightest chance of being accepted, no matter what they do to it.

There's obviously no way the redesign is going to be cancelled. It's going to happen, so let's concentrate on fixing it. Here's what you need to do: drop everything else for now, it's not anywhere near as important. Polish all the shiny bits later. Work on the comments, right now, for as long as it takes, until the community approves.

There won't be any relevant story comments in future if Slashdot doesn't start listening to its users.