I've seen the comment forums filled with off-topic posts about a badly deployed beta upgrade. Community members are pissed and they're venting and they want site owners to not just listen but act on community concerns. And so we see a temper tantrum that likely has only alienated corporate owners and made life for editorial staff miserable.
(Of course, a true communist would reply: it will be free, because taxes will pay for it.)
Taxes have nothing to do with communism. In a communism all productive assets is owned by the state. That means farmland, power plants, factories, and all deeded property. Personal property is excluded; the state doesn't care about your model train collection.
Intellectual property would fall under state deeded property just as housing does. That's because only the state manages property deeds and assigns ownership. That the ownership is automatically assigned to the state merely simplifies bureaucratic administrative overhead. The state might be inefficient in aggregate, but not so in the Registration of Deeds office.
I know it's nit picky, but your statement conflates that communist system with every other government system imagined. Every government that has existed taxed its citizens to provide for a common good. Governments tax to build roads, bridges, schools, military and police departments. New research and development is funded through education grants. For example: the internet. Also: medical research. In fact, a lot of tax money is spent on drug development.
Perhaps you think government shouldn't do these things. Some even think government should be abolished. But to argue the abolishment of government on the pretense that taxes equals communism mixes terms and beliefs such that the rationale is nothing more than nonsense. It's no argument. It's not anticommunist or pro-USA or holds any ideological consistency.
According to TFA:
SMS Management and Technology won the IT initial development contract in June 2009 in a deal initially expected to be worth at least $2.5 million per year.
The audit office questioned the value of the project, which is estimated to have reached $38.5 million for associated systems and applications by 30 June 2013.
So, across four years what should have cost $10M wound up costing nearly $40M. However:
Within 18 months, however, four change orders had been processed, increasing the value of the deal to over $15.4 million in the first two years
Thus, change orders from a client who changed milestones mid-stream:
The milestones for the contract were not tightly specified, nor was the extent to which the industry partner staff would be integrated with or separated from internal bureau IT staff roles and deliverables.
Leading to a situation where, "The contract began to resemble a time and materials contract rather than a fixedâfee contract contingent on achieving milestones and deliverables." Meaning that the client kept changing their mind so often the consulting firm was required to baby a system they hadn't thought through to begin with and had thus grown into a monstrosity that served disparate and disorganized goals.
No wonder it went over budget.
But that has nothing to do with open source and everything to do with bad project management. Notice that they've solved the problem by choosing "...a replacement, based on an off-the-shelf software product."
Which, if it meets their needs - bully for them. But is more likely an imposed solution to a problem they hadn't clearly defined to begin with. Thus, it's likely they'll find themselves in the same situation. Not because open source software is bad, or the commercial software is bad, or the consulting firm was probably bad... but because the bureau of meteorology has no idea what it wants to do with this data.
The problem here is with undefined goals set by management. Until they face that fact they'll go round this merry-go-round again and again. And taxpayers will foot the bill.
I'll admit Slashdot has serious balls to link to a news site that just got its own redesign, with the exact response that this site's beta got (and deserved just as much).
No, it deserved it more. Next to nbcnews.com, beta.slashdot.org is a masterpiece of clean Web design. (Hell, the new nbcnews.com makes buzzfeed.com look not too bad.)
The main thing we want is a site that doesn't look old and stale, because that will slowly drive readers and contributors away.
1924 called, it wants its idea back. At least cars aren't getting their styling tweaked every year any more.
(Beta is, to be fair, not the utter complete piece of shit that, say, the current version of nbcnews.com is; I sincerely hope everybody responsible for that either learns a lesson from this or never finds employment in anything even vaguely related to website design again. But that's setting the bar spectacularly low.)
EVERYONE HATES LOAD MORE COMMENTS. either autoload them as you scroll down, or better yet just fucking load them to begin with.
+10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10 (and no auto-load)
I kind of feel as though the walls are closing in on my a bit on the left and right. why so little text and so much empty space?
+10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10
How about collapsing some of these posts? Commenters should hook us in with a decent title, and that is all we should see until we click it. otherwise, we just CONSUME page space for no good reason, and it makes the conversation harder to follow.
+(10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10)^(10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10^10)
A DE isn't a thing, it's a application providing a layer of crap on top of your WM.
An application is a "thing".
And a DE isn't an application, it's a combination of a toolkit library or libraries, a window manager on systems where you have a "window manager" program (e.g., systems with an X11-based GUI), some applications (file managers, etc.), and various other utilities implementing other "global" parts of the environment (such as a taskbar). You don't, for example, get KDE merely by running KWin as your window manager (assuming it can run on a system with no other KDE components than Qt and some KDE libraries).
Most of the arguments against linux are entirely bogus and have been proven untrue.
Here is the problem with Linux. And *BSD as well.
It doesn't run the commercial software I need to successfully fulfill my objectives.
We can point our fingers at Adobe, Microsoft, and other commercial players who limit access of their apps to expand their own markets at the expense of Linux. But the model that open source would engender network effects and overtake commercial players who would shoot their own feet by refusing to develop on the platform...well, that turned out to be false.
The open source community beat commercial players on a limited playing field in server space. And then the commercial players changed the game. Ironically, Linux has become even more irrelevant as a populist movement because of its backend success.
The Linux desktop lost for valid reasons. It's been out there long enough to catch hold and it hasn't. It's long past time to look inward on that front. It's popular failure is entirely self-inflicted.
Perhaps we are indeed witnessing the downfall of the PC era.
Is that good or bad?
For open platforms manufactured by large companies, it's bad. We can still buy barebones PCs and cheap laptops, but there's an obvious transition away toward locked down systems like tablets and consumer products.
OTOH: the old PC was a successor to prior hobby platforms that were fully open. The old ALTAIR / IMSAI, Heathkit, SWTPC, Apple II, etc world of 8 bit before it went corporate. If IBM had had its way, what we're seeing today would have happened much sooner. Ironically, we can thank Microsoft for stalling that outcome for decades. It had already happened twice with mainframe and minicomputer players decades before, as they swiped ideas and technology developed in university labs for commercialization and then locked them down.
So maybe this shift will engender a resurgence of very slow systems designed for hobbyists to built from scratch. A bifurcation of commercial products for the general public and a hobby community that might lead to hands on hardware / software development of entirely new platforms. A real resurgence of competition without commercial pressure because it's being done just for fun.
Such systems wouldn't fulfill the expectations of consumers. Nor should they. But they might be cool to tinker with. And that could have second order effects down the road that could impact future markets in unexpected ways. Or not. And who cares?
A hobbyist / commercial hardware split might be for the best.
Or, maybe I'm talking nonsense. I often do.
I'm still on classic (after 30 seconds or so on beta) so I don't even have anything to complain about until they actually take classic away.
The beta commenting system is so bad I couldn't even preview and post from there. But I'm sympathetic to beta fuck ups. What's actually broken will work out in time and the stylistic issues people dislike will either lead to an exodus or be resolved in some unexpected way. For example, I dumped Final Cut Pro when Apple went to X and have been pleased with Adobe Premiere. But I have to admit that Apple has resolved many of the initial complaints made about FCP X. I'd reconsider now, even though l'm happy with Premiere.
Competition is good.
The beta needs work. The comment forum is problematic. Images are a bit too big for my taste and they're not well selected to fit the theme of each story - but that's an editorial problem, not a software glitch. Still, the software clearly isn't ready for prime time. Yet a site update is warranted. And I think
ADMINS: If you're reading this, why not post a sticky for community bitching and get the site designers involved? Yank this shit from the stories forums and find a proper place for it that's open to discussion with the players and public so no one feels their view has been stifled. It's for the best. You've got a community revolt going on here.
But to the bitchfest crew, this shitstorm of offtopic crapflooding has made
And I'm contributing to the mess. Fuck. Sorry about that.
Just hit up SlashBI.
The goggles, they do nothing!
#3803. You've been at slashdot for more than a while. What is your view of beta Slashdot?
From what I've read here, my view is "I'd like to avoid it if at all possible". If I can temporarily try it, and revert (and complain) if it really sucks, I might try it just to make sure they haven't "improved" it as much as, say, nbcnews.com has "improved" recently.
Tried it. It hasn't "improved" quite to the the extent of nbcnews.com, but it's definitely an "improvement" in that sense. (More shiny, less useful; too many big pictures. I'm waiting for headlines like "15 ways to improve your
#3803. You've been at slashdot for more than a while. What is your view of beta Slashdot?
From what I've read here, my view is "I'd like to avoid it if at all possible". If I can temporarily try it, and revert (and complain) if it really sucks, I might try it just to make sure they haven't "improved" it as much as, say, nbcnews.com has "improved" recently.
I think it's funny how they mock the N. Korean government for presenting Kim Il Sung as a god and yet they are all too happy with their year 2014 that pushes some ordinary human being, who may not have even existed
...and who, if he did exist, was born a few more than 2,014 years ago in any case.
One way to make your old car run better is to look up the price of a new model.
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