Upon loading the site just now, I found I've been moved back to the classic slashdot system. I'd like to thank the admin responsible. It's nice to be able to read posts again.

If that were correct how would the Docklands Light Railway operate above ground without any drivers at all? The sad reason that drivers are needed is because of the unions. They automated the Victoria line years ago (1960s) but the unions threatened action and the resulting chaos that a drivers strike would have caused on the lines which were not automated forced them to keep drivers on each train even though they are completed unnecessary.

P.S.

Timothy and other Slashdot Editors,

I am afraid that I must post an addendum to my previous call for assistance. The difficulty of the interface appears to be more considerable than I had initially realised.

Unfortunately, the interface does not load all comments on the page. In fact, only one comment is loaded on any given page, and the "load more comments" area / button provided, when pressed, does not in fact load anything. As such I am unable to determine whether my previous comment has been replied to, or indeed whether it has been posted at all. In short I can no longer see or read comments.

In the hope that this message will be seen, I will periodically attempt to post messages of aid in a scattering of stories. Whether these "post in a bottle" will reach you, or float at all, is something I can only hope for at this point.

In the meantime I shall see if the pieces of flat design driftwood can be lash togther into a makeshift civilisation of sorts. However this island appears quite desolate. The floating header follows whereever I go. Perhaps I will try to converse with it.

In any case I remain your hopeful servant,

A poster trapped in Beta

Timothy and other Slashdot Editors,

I regret making such an offtopic post, but I am afraid that I have found myself trapped on the "new" new Slashdot Beta site and I cannot seem to leave it.

The site features an extremely modern "flat" design. So modern in fact that there do not appear to be any visible links, menus, navigation bars, page divisions, or icons at all. A "slide out" option to move back to Slashdot classic pops up from time to time, only to disappear as I try to click it. I believe I may need to use a "charm" type gesture or spell in order to properly summon such advanced features, but I am not privy to the precise incantations.

As such I am currently stuck on the new Slashdot Beta with no way of returning to a more usable interface. I find this most unsatisfactory, somewhat frustrating, and feel I have little other option but to send this call for assistance.

I possess an advanced STEM degree and over 25 years expierience with technology, software and the web. I feel I can positively contribute to discussion on this site, but this new interface is making the site too difficult to use.

Yours

A user trapped on Beta

There are more than two companies left, they just share the same parent owners. In the west you have Seagate and Western Digital. In the east you have Hitachi, Toshiba and Samsung. Hitachi may be owned by WD, but they still do their own R&D and models.

This helps WD avoid putting all its eggs in one basket, and also gives them access to the Japanese market. Designed/Made in Japan counts for a lot here.

And expect the departments to be consolidated. Hard drives are a commodity - there is VERY little profit to be made in drives and because the products are basically fungible, competition has driven the prices to the absolute bottom.

They are, however, also precision made mechanical devices where clearances and tolerances are tight. And they are also mass-produced which means having to account for variations in the pieces both in the mechanical design and in the software design.

To do this requires a lot of experience and it's something that's actually quite expensive to purchase because it's specialized.

It's why there are dozens of SSD manufacturers out there - compared to an SSD, a hard drive is like a car with thousands of pieces that have to work together. An SSD is quite simple - just a circuit board, flash memory, controller and ancillary parts that can be put together in any contract manufacturer. But a hard drive requires a manufacturing facility dedicated to making the stuff.

You are missing the point. All of my Android phones include the ability to add a MicroSD card. I don't care how much memory is on the phone, my data (pictures etc) doesn't reside there. Apple's continued refusal to add a MicroSD slot is just more of their way of ripping off their customers.

You're absolute correct. Google is ripping off users as well with their Android phone too!.

Oh wait, Google only offers 16 and 32GB Nexus phones and tablets with NO SD SLOT. Perhaps the owner of the Android OS is also guilty of ripping people off!

Oh wait, you said Apple, not Google.

Anyhow, managing multiple SD cards is a pain - did you put the app on this one, or that one, or where is that damn music file? Oh wait, why am I getting this error, did I not insert the right SD card? It's fine if you start with a 32GB now, then upgrade to 64GB later and then move on up, but since few Android phones have more than 32GB of internal storage (WHY?!) it means you're limited to 96GB of storage without entering the whole card-swap madness. Hell, I think the SD slot is just an excuse for manufacturers because they know 99% of the time, it'll either be empty, or they'll toss in a 16GB card and it'll live in there for the rest of its life. (Which is probably why they put it so you often have to remove the battery to eject them or other such madness rather than a slot on the outside).

Ronald Reagan would not be the first President to be deified.

Look at the monuments in Washington DC to various Presidents. Washington (Obelisk), Jefferson (Pantheon), Lincoln (Parthenon).

All of these are designs used by previous cultures in the worship of their Gods.

We just don't call it that because most of our citizens are nominally monotheistic.

Governments can accomplish a lot.

That's not the point here. It's a fact that governments always do their best to cover up their mistakes and self-aggrandize.

Holding up whatever public administration is in place at the current time in scorn for doing that is political gamesmanship at best, and demagoguery at worst.

It's inherent in the system (cf Monty Python).

Did you see the stats for the growth of their middle class over the past 15 years or so?

I'm not disputing that the country is ardently capitalist and has tightly guarded elite circles. But for most people in there, that's not where they are aiming for. What they want is basically just comfortable living, and their standard for it is getting pretty close to what the West enjoys. And with every new generation, there are millions more actually enjoying it - even though there's still hundreds of millions locked out. But for now, the trend is good.

> BTW, this is emblematic of the Obama administration

It's emblematic of EVERY administration going back thousands of years. Right wing present that this is something new but their world view seems to be completely uninfluenced by an appreciation of human nature or history.

For example:

Augustus was a shrewd and effective manager of his own public image. Itâ(TM)s now easy to take for granted that images of political leaders decorate our currency â" Augustus was among the first rulers to widely disseminate images of his own face on coins.

Itâ(TM)s hard to imagine even the most ardent Democrats supporting the literal deification of Barack Obama or erecting small shrines in his honor throughout Washington DC. By contrast, after Julius Caesar was posthumously declared a god, Augustus, as his adopted son, became known as the son of god. Along with the other gods, he received dedications at small crossroads shrines throughout Rome.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Books...

We seriously considered chronic lyme as a possibility and even got testing. The test came back negative, although there can be false negatives. We ultimately ruled it out on the basis of certain key symptoms being absent. Basically, we considered a LOT of things and did our best to rank the changes of each illness that might explain the symptoms. We were open to the idea of more than one cause but considered it a remote possibility; fortunately we were right.

Anyhow, homozygous MTHFR C677T can be serious, especially if there are other complicating mutations. Compared to some people my wife has a moderate problem. She had chronic fatigue (not to be necessarily confused with CFIDS), brain fog, autoimmune disease, gluten intolerance, weight gain, pale skin, hairloss, and many more symptoms. But she never lost feeling in her limbs; some people do. When you mess up the methylation cycle, all sorts of things can go wrong.

I'm not sure why you (an anonymous coward, so why am I feeding the trolls?) think that this mutation is of "dubious clinical significance." It's one of the more serious mutations, and the appropriate treatments have worked. Taking methylfolate, a few different forms of B12, and several other supplements has caused massive improvement in energy, return of proper skin tone, hair regrowth, appropriate weight loss, and so on. In other words THE TREATMENT WORKED.

This is one of those fortunate cases where a hard-to-find single cause has been identified. It explains ALL of the symptoms (many of which are secondary, caused by a deficiency caused by the underlying problem), and the treatment has worked very well. It's a little hard to get the exact dosages of vitamins right, because as soon as you get enough of one thing, the body will start repairing things, which requires other chemicals, and cause a deficiency in another thing, etc. So the fix isn't an over-night sort of thing but the progress is rapid.

And my biggest complaint is not that the MDs didn't know how to diagnose this. My complaint is that they EXPLICITLY REFUSED to help us when we were trying to track down the cause. Seriously. Most doctors just didn't have a clue and were unwilling to "do a lot of speculative testing," while some out-right said they refused to help us. Even if we came in with a list of tests to do to try to narrow down a range of possibilities (like a decision tree), they wouldn't do it. We had to figure this out completely on our own.

I don't expect MDs to know everything or be super-human. But I do expect them to listen and take patients seriously.

Sounds like you work for a crap employer. Most companies nowadays recognise that developers are far more productive with at least 2 monitors. Where I work we all have 2 dell monitors attached to a laptop docking station for our company issue laptop so we can actually use 3 screens if you don't mind one being smaller than the other two.

Why? Personally I try and avoid working unpaid hours from home, if it was part of my job requirement then I would want the company to buy be the necessary gear.

I don't mind the off bit of being on call to reboot servers and such, but that hardly requires anything more than a laptop screen.

Then why look at this card at all? You must be able to get something FAR cheaper if all you want is 2d real estate for software development. Wouldn't 2 or 3 cheaper cards be a far better purchase, even if you needed to buy a new motherboard to support it.

Ifr they were listening they would fix this crap. The problem though is that the stuff he points out all seems like the sort of horrible boring drivel that most devs hate fixing. they want to work on new features that are fun to implement, not digging through tons of other peoples code and all you see at the end is a few dialog boxes not being displayed when they don't make sense to.

This is one of the reasons why commercial software generally does this sort of thing much better, because you can assign this bug to someone then tell them their bonus depends on it getting fixed this sprint.

Doing that with unpaid devs is more tricky :)