Wrong! A good QA process prohibits the QA team from changing anything. QA can either approve the product or else send it back to the developers. In the end, QA is paid the same. Thus, QA has no vested interest in either approving or rejecting the product.

I very much like the old design. It "scans" very easily. (By "scans", I mean by the human eye and mind, not by an electronic device.)

One thing that needs to be fixed is your use of non-standard HTML and CSS. Your home page has 140 HTML errors. Your CSS has 28 errors.

Also, the yellow box that led me to this page (http://meta.slashdot.org/story/14/02/06/2329227/slashdot-tries-something-new-audience-responds) and is repeated to the top of this page says:
                        WE HEAR YOU We did tell you we wanted feedback. Hereâ€(TM)s our response.
Note the strange characters that appear in place of a simple apostrophe in "Here's".

Before you embark on a new design, make sure you are not propagating your errors.

In the University of California system 50+ years ago, a PhD candidate had to pass proficiency tests in TWO foreign languages. In the 1960s, that requirement was modified to allow the candidate to substitute a computer language for one of the foreign languages.

The more I read about dark matter and dark energy pervading the universe, the more I think about ether (also spelled "aether" or "æther"), which also was supposed to fill the universe. Dark matter and dark energy will never be found because they are as real as ether. See the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A....

When I receive misdirected E-mail, it almost always results from someone selecting the wrong David or wrong Ross from their address book. That is, both the intended recipient and I are both known to the sender. The sender's address book is organized by names, not by E-mail addresses.

I used to get phone calls in the middle of the night for a David Ross who was an attorney, either in private practice or in the District Attorney's office. The caller would be drunk and picked out the wrong David Ross from the phone book. Again, this was a problem with my name, not with my phone number.

There are apparently many, many David Rosses. I have met two others face-to-face, both times in doctors' offices. I have exchanged E-mail with several others. I even created a Web page about this situation at http://www.rossde.com/Ross.html.

How do I handle misdirected E-mail? On the first occasion, I reply quoting the original message. I tell the sender they have the wrong David Ross. If there is one of those caveats about condfendiality and deleting misdirected messages, I also inform the sender that such warnings are unenforceable, that the sender must bear full responsibility for ensuring correct addressing of such messages.

On subsequent instances from the same sender, I use a small application that returns the message in a format that indicates the stated E-mail address is invalid. That is, the message will appear as if bounced. If that does not work, I finally threaten to make any subsequent messages public by posting them on a newsgroup.

I put an electric Hanukkah menorah in a front window. It is now put away, however, because Hanukkah ended over two weeks ago.

With both Firefox and SeaMonkey, it is very easy to spoof agent strings, to lie to Web servers by indicating I am using some browser that I have not installed. Actually, the default configuration of SeaMonkey has the user string
          Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0 SeaMonkey/2.22.1
which says it is both Firefox and SeaMonkey.

My preferred browser is SeaMonkey. It has the same "guts" as Firefox but a different user interface that I consider far superior to Firefox. By "guts", I mean the same HTML rendering engine, the same Internet interface, the same SSL processes, and often the same third-party extensions. However, SeaMonkey allows experienced users to tailor the browser in ways that Firefox does not.

It appears that Mozilla has been slowly "dumbing down" Firefox. In the process, the developers have also gone overboard in attempting to make Firefox super-safe for users, which is the main cause of the loss of tailoring. This safety is not restricted to browsing the Web safely but also in configuring the user's own computer. This sometimes means a loss of functionality, overcome by a proliferation of third-party extensions.

Overall, many experienced users feel that Mozilla is trying to make Firefox too similar to Chrome in order to compete against Chrome. What Mozilla refuses to accept is the fact that, if a user wants Chrome, that user will install Chrome and not Firefox.

So far, Sea Monkey has been able to avoid these Firefox deficiencies.

I listen to streaming broadcasts sent over the Internet directly by radio stations. Most of these stations are non-profit, many of them part of National Public Radio. They seem not only to be surviving but even thriving. Three of the stations are sufficiently close that I can listen to them over the "airwaves". The rest of them are available only via Internet streaming.

Of course my taste in music is mostly classical, music that is still entertaining and appreciated more than a month after it is first released. In many cases, the recordings are no longer available commercially. If the cited trend in this article is true, perhaps young listeners might learn of the majesty of Beethoven, the emotion of Tchaikovsky, the joy of Gershwin.

If you are using Firefox or SeaMonkey as your browser (both Mozilla-based), get the SecretAgent extension from https://www.dephormation.org.uk/SecretAgent/. Since I installed it in SeaMonkey, not only do many sites have trouble locating where I am, some sites cannot even determine on which continent I am located.

For Mozilla-based browsers such as Firefox and SeaMonkey, the SecretAgent extension conflicts with the PrefBar User Agent menulist.

Because some Web sites I visit are sensitive to what user agent they see, I unchecked (disabled) the "Rotate User Agent" checkbox in SecretAgent. Then, if I used the PrefBar User Agent menulist to spoof some other browser, it kept resetting to my actual user agent. Since I consider the PrefBar capability to be very important, I removed SecretAgent. The PrefBar capability was then restored.

Install the PrefBar extension in Firefox or SeaMonkey. Enable the Restore Tab button.

By the way, accidentally closing a tab in SeaMonkey should be rare since the X to close is at the far right of the tab bar, not on the tab. Putting the X on the tab itself has proven dangerous because it is then too easy to close a tab when trying to select the adjacent tab on the right.

I worked for Unisys and one of its predecessors for 24 years. At the time Unisys was created -- Burroughs did a hostile takeover of Univac -- the combined company had some 130,000 employees; and about half of its business was with the U.S. military. Now the company has about 22,800 employees and seems to have no military business. I stuck with the company even when they started treating salaried software professionals as if they were hourly assembly-line workers. I stuck with them when they imposed an 18-month salary freeze that did not apply to executive bonuses. I left when it was obvious that any manager who brought new work to our site would be fired.

According to Section 10.4.4 of RFC 2616, 403 means:

The server understood the request, but is refusing to fulfill it. Authorization will not help and the request SHOULD NOT be repeated. If the request method was not HEAD and the server wishes to make public why the request has not been fulfilled, it SHOULD describe the reason for the refusal in the entity. If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 404 (Not Found) can be used instead.