This reminds me of SF short story, where people came up with idea of robotic doves (birds) acting as police and paralysing people who wanted to commit murder. But they had to adapt to do the job properly - to detect intent even in most ruthless killers. Soon they started to prevent people killing insects. After that, it was not possible to switch off TV set. And solution for that was to create self-evolving robotic killer hawks to catch the doves... anybody knows what was the name of the story, cannot find it now?

You're looking for Robert Sheckley's 1953 short story Watchbird , via Project Gutenberg. There was a TV adaptation in 2007's Season 1, Episode 6, Masters of Science Fiction.

Great read.

The only flaw I see here is that you imagine there will always be something useful or valued for a person to do.

Have you ever thought that this isn't a recession, it's the entire economic system re-balancing due to the efficiencies of technology and the large amount of jobs shed or changed because of it?

I take it you've never used one.

In general windows use it speeds up the programs you use often quite a bit.

> and one wonders how exactly that is done while still being OS agnostic.

You write/read to sectors mapped as blocks, if you read/write to the same block more then a few times then it's worth caching. That's how block caches work.

The comments on the site (as of this time) give some pretty good reasons why using slices of a circle aren't the best way to describe fractions. Most of the time it is easier for the mind to tell if two lengths are the same versus if two slices of a circle are the same. It is a much simpler calculation to determine length (line) then volume (pie piece).

I've posted most of this on the "blog" site where it's likely to be read instead of buried in a 1000-post thread, but this seems the right place to follow up with your well-articulated, broad-based global objections (with which I agree 110%), and outline the nits.

Upon re-reading this list, it's depressing just how many things about the 3.0 redesign that I'm already thinking of blocking/hacking out client-side via greasemonkey or local CSS overrides. The depressing part isn't that I'm willing to do it; I love the site enough to go through the trouble. The depressing part is that the only reaction I can have to all this effort is to start thinking about how I can disable it.

1) Images: Meh, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I can understand users' frustration, but they're trivial to block client-side.

2) Whitespace:

Narrow the spacing between lines.

It's like reading in doublespaced/triplespaced form.

3) Whitespace. I think people have
told you the fixed-width column
was too narrow. But just in case,
here's another reminder.

4) Content and presentation of article summaries:
(From the click-to-expand department)

All that whitespace, and you can't even display the full article summary? Because some web designer said all summaries had to fit within a maximum number of vertical pixels before requiring a mouse click? And you(...rest of this objection after the jump ... *click*)
believed him? Really? :)

5) Comments. User numbers (UIDs) need to be displayed. They're a useful indicator age of account and therefore useful for helping mentally filter trolls/shills. (Umm, sorry, noobs, but if your UID indicates an account created in the past day or so, it takes me a while to accept you as a regular ;)

6) Comments. Timestamps need to be timestamps. Sometimes it's critical to know who was the first to make a joke or link to a reference. "A few minutes ago" or "An hour ago" isn't enough. Going further out, "Two years ago" is meaningless if you're talking about things like whether someone called a corporate takeover or tech development before or after the news actually came out. To illustrate the problem by way of example, "1 year ago" could mean at any time during 2012, 2013, or 2014, for any time period from 8 months ago to 18 months from now, and is no longer useful for gauging whether someone successfully predicted the eventual fate of Blackbrry. Slashdot is an easily-googlable source of record, and it's *vital* to know on what day it reported on something.

P.S. Just because you read it on a blog doesn't mean it's true. http://graysky.org/2013/09/blog-timestamp/ And even this author notes that for some publishing, the timing is highly relevant. If you want to be the blog of record, your content is such content.

7) Comments. Needs filtering or a one-click-load-all-comments button.

D1, its bugs notwithstanding, could do this with three middle clicks into new tabs of about 100 comments per tab.

D2 could do this with two drags over the slider and a load-all-comments. (or a load-500-comments and then a load-all-comments).

D3 doesn't seem to be able to do this as far as I can tell.

8) Black-on-grey is less readable than black-on-white.

Sorry, OS X people, this is fail. I can tolerate this only because I can manually override it client-side. It's horrible and makes the site unreadable, but, well, it's something even an idiot like me can forcibly override client-side in 5 minutes. It's hardly the worst defect of the redesign.

9) Floating DIVs. Really? *REALLY?!?!* Some of us use something other than mice or greasy fingers on touchscreens to scroll.

10) Auto-refresh. There's a preference to disable this, right? Right?

11) Will D1 be preserved? I felt that D2 was something I could adapt to, and on occasion, I prefer its presentation to that of D1. This is unusable, and I will leave if it goes through as presented.

12) Like most UX redesigns, I know that the overwhelming flood of negative feedback will be ignored. We're just the users. We don't know a thing about design, and it's the designer's attitude that matters, not whether it's usable or not.

This means I'm likely to be leaving for other places soon. I'm not sure where I'll go yet, but I'll find a community somewhere. Fark's fun but nontechnical. Digg's dead, and good riddance. Reddit requires too many mouse clicks to do anything. HN is clean, elegant, technical, informative and so bone-dry sterile that I can only go there once a day.

Thank you, /., for 15 years of providing a place for funsightformative coments. There was truly no place like this. I respect that the Dice sale was as good an exit as you could have made under the circumstances (I thought SlashBI might have actually gotten some traction given some time), but failing to prevent their UX people from killing Slashdot was a pretty ignoble end to what was once a proud website.

Good luck in your future endeavors.

Signing off, Tackhead (#54550)
5-digit-club, with 43 achievements, 2^9 +5 comments, 2^8 consecutive daily reads, embarassingly low 2^2 metamod score; I suppose I'd have metamoderated more often if the UI for that hadn't been broken in the upgrade to Slashdot 2.0, (I still don't know if +/- means that the comment was good/bad, or if the moderation done to the comment was fair/unfair, and yes, that distinction is important in the case of "+1 Funny" vs "-1 Flamebait" because the mod missed the joke) and maybe it's fitting that Diana Moon Glampers: UX Designer was my last +5.

(P.S.: Does anyone know how I can tell how many comments I've posted in total? I'd like to know before I go.)

So what's the plan going forward? I've had a couple of hours to cool down and formulate my objections more objectively.

1) Images: Meh, I can take 'em or leave 'em. I can understand users' frustration, but they're trivial to block client-side.

2) Whitespace:

Narrow the spacing between lines.

It's like reading in doublespaced/triplespaced form.

3) Whitespace. I think people have
told you the fixed-width column
was too narrow. But just in case,
here's another reminder.

4) Content and presentation of article summaries:
(From the click-to-expand department)

All that whitespace, and you can't even display the full article summary? Because some web designer said all summaries had to fit within a maximum number of vertical pixels before requiring a mouse click? And you(...rest of this objection after the jump ... *click*)
believed him? Really? :)

5) Comments. User numbers (UIDs) need to be displayed. They're a useful indicator age of account and therefore useful for helping mentally filter trolls/shills. (Umm, sorry, noobs, but if your UID indicates an account created in the past day or so, it takes me a while to accept you as a regular ;)

6) Comments. Timestamps need to be timestamps. Sometimes it's critical to know who was the first to make a joke or link to a reference. "A few minutes ago" or "An hour ago" isn't enough. Going further out, "Two years ago" is meaningless if you're talking about things like whether someone called a corporate takeover or tech development before or after the news actually came out. To illustrate the problem by way of example, "1 year ago" could mean at any time during 2012, 2013, or 2014, for any time period from 8 months ago to 18 months from now, and is no longer useful for gauging whether someone successfully predicted the eventual fate of Blackbrry. Slashdot is an easily-googlable source of record, and it's *vital* to know on what day it reported on something.

P.S. Just because you read it on a blog doesn't mean it's true. http://graysky.org/2013/09/blog-timestamp/ And even this author notes that for some publishing, the timing is highly relevant. If you want to be the blog of record, your content is such content.

7) Comments. Needs filtering or a one-click-load-all-comments button.

D1, its bugs notwithstanding, could do this with three middle clicks into new tabs of about 100 comments per tab.

D2 could do this with two drags over the slider and a load-all-comments. (or a load-500-comments and then a load-all-comments).

D3 doesn't seem to be able to do this as far as I can tell.

8) Black-on-grey is less readable than black-on-white.

Sorry, OS X people, this is fail. I can tolerate this only because I can manually override it client-side. It's horrible and makes the site unreadable, but, well, it's something even an idiot like me can forcibly override client-side in 5 minutes. It's hardly the worst defect of the redesign.

9) Floating DIVs. Really? *REALLY?!?!* Some of us use something other than mice or greasy fingers on touchscreens to scroll.

10) Auto-refresh. There's a preference to disable this, right? Right?

11) Will D1 be preserved? I felt that D2 was something I could adapt to, and on occasion, I prefer its presentation to that of D1. This is unusable, and I will leave if it goes through as presented.

12) Like most UX redesigns, I know that the overwhelming flood of negative feedback will be ignored. We're just the users. We don't know a thing about design, and it's the designer's attitude that matters, not whether it's usable or not.

This means I'm likely to be leaving for other places soon. I'm not sure where I'll go yet, but I'll find a community somewhere. Fark's fun but nontechnical. Digg's dead, and good riddance. Reddit requires too many mouse clicks to do anything. HN is clean, elegant, technical, informative and so bone-dry sterile that I can only go there once a day.

Thank you for 15 years of providing a place for funsightformative coments. There was truly no place like this. I respect that the Dice sale was as good an exit as you could have made under the circumstances (I thought SlashBI might have actually gotten some traction given some time), but failing to prevent their UX people from killing Slashdot was a pretty ignoble end to what was once a proud website. Good luck in your future endeavors, but if there's no D1/D2 preservation, I'm afraid I won't be riding this train to wherever it's going.

Signing off,
5-digit-club, with 43 achievements, 2^9 +5 comments, 2^8 consecutive daily reads, embarassingly low 2^2 metamod score; I suppose I'd have metamoderated more often if the UI for that hadn't been broken in the upgrade to Slashdot 2.0, (I still don't know if +/- means that the comment was good/bad, or if the moderation done to the comment was fair/unfair, and yes, that distinction is important in the case of "+1 Funny" vs "-1 Flamebait" because the mod missed the joke) and maybe it's fitting that Diana Moon Glampers: UX Designer was my last +5.

(P.S.: Does anyone know how I can tell how many comments I've posted in total? I'd like to know before I go.)

If you've ever used GoDaddy's economy webhosting you'll see the storage backend of the VM or shared host you get is terribly over committed. Actual bandwidth to machine seems fine, so if your site/web app fits in memory and doesn't do too much seeking around on the disk, you'll be ok.

Detection is the hard part. There is very little difference between some of these bot nets and legitimate traffic in most cases.

>But, yes, there was an instance where a news network skipped mentioning the #3 place in delegate count or some such because it was Ron Paul and they didn't want to mention Ron Paul on TV.

An instance? Way more then one.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR7oBdgazJI