If any of you are using an iPhone and are willing to help test out some Slashdot handheld crap, shoot me off a note... my email is the same address as always, and if you can't guess it, you probably can't help anyway ;) I've built a stylesheet and Tim put together a few little options that we think will make a few bits of Slashdot look nice on an iPhone (or really most lower resolution displays) but unfortunately none of us actually HAVE one yet... so anyway, let us know. Or if you work at Apple, send us freebies dammit!

The discussion2 system had 2 notable changes in this weeks code refresh that I'd love to hear feedback on (use email if you can't post here). The first is Scott's very excellent new draggable slider control. Everyone mostly figured out the slider tool before, but it was very unresponsive... but no longer! It has some layout niggles under some browsers, but it functions properly in most of them.

Equally exciting is new dynamic updating... the old code actually transferred the full discussion and displayed/hid content as requested by your settings. Thew new code properly requests comments as needed, and when needed. This cuts page sizes dramatically for people reading with filters turned up very high. It also puts us a few stone throws away from a 'refresh' button which can just add newly posted comments in place. There's some work to be done yet, but it's made a lot of progress. I hope you like it.

We've tested everything under most of our most common browsers... if you're curious they are very roughly FF2 38%, FF1.5 19%, IE7 8%, Safari 7%, Opera 3%. Missing from our compatibility list is IE6 with 13% of our traffic. Fixing IE6 is non-trivial and we'd certainly take patches... but since the IE6 population lost a point or two last month anyway, and fixing the code is pretty substantial, we'll probably be focusing our development time on the larger and growing platforms (FF2 and IE7 obviously being the most important).

Anyway, merry-whatever-you-believe to everyone out there. I'm spending my holidays the same as always- driving from family gathering to family gathering. Roads suck but the person I like being with most is in the car too, so it doesn't matter.

As long as we are dreaming big dreams about colonies on the moon and Saturn's moon Titan, how about making a cloud city into reality? Not on Earth, of course, but floating high among the cloud tops of the outer gas giants such as Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, where there is no solid ground to stand on.

The idea is more feasible than you might think. One surprise is that gravity turns out to be a non-issue -- even though these planets have many times more mass than the Earth, the fact that they are gas giants makes them much less dense than our planet, reducing the force of gravity at the "surface". For instance, at the altitude where the air pressure is at one atmosphere, the gravitational force is a benign 0.9 G on Saturn and Uranus, and 1.1 G on Neptune. (This is unfortunately not true of Jupiter, where the gravitational force in the cloud tops is around 2.4 G.)

Right now, nobody is planning any balloon missions to the gas giants. But I wonder how hard it would be to construct a large "cloud base", suitable for permanent habitation. Obviously you would start with unmanned balloon probes, which would find each other and link up to create a platform. One of the early "pioneer" balloons would have to contain a massive power source, preferably a sizeable nuclear reactor -- with the distances involved, solar power is not an option.

At some point the balloon platform could only grow by producing its own materials, as "importing" them from outside is ridiculously expensive. The atmospheres of the outer planets are abundant in hydrocarbons, mostly in the form of methane, so synthetic materials could be produced in conjunction with the energy from the nuclear reactor. From this perspective, Saturn might be more attractive, as its atmosphere contains significant amounts of nitrogen (in ammonia), oxygen (in water vapor), and phosphate (in phosphine), allowing the creation of more complicated plastics. Robotic labs in the balloon platform would separate out the required elements from atmospheric gases, react them into plastics, form the plastics into structural elements, and construct the station -- all of which would have to be automated processes.

As the mass of the station grows, the automated construction process would have to produce new balloons. And before the first humans arrived, the automated construction process would have to produce pressurized living spaces, including life support systems. Humans could travel to the station in a special space vehicle that converted into a blimp after entering the atmosphere; the blimp could maneuver into the station and dock with it for personnel transfer, like the Goodyear Blimp. Getting away would be a little trickier. It is possible to extract rocket fuel from atmospheric gases, but the rocket would have to be enormous to achieve escape velocity, which is 2-3 times that of Earth (the lower density does not help you here). Sending humans away from Earth is a challenge even for the largest contemporary rockets, much less rockets made out of plastic by an automated robot.

Still -- as fanciful as all this sounds -- it has previously been made as a serious proposal, in a paper entitled "Helium-3 Mining Aerostats in the Atmosphere of Uranus", by Jeffrey van Cleve. Outer gas giants have enormous stores of Helium-3, which is a potential fuel for fusion energy. In the distant future, Helium-3 might be a highly valuable substance, making a permanent mining colony on a gas giant feasible.

Interesting fact for today.

As all good Canadian schoolchildren know, the Province of Newfoundland joined Canada in 1949. What most good Canadian schoolchildren do not know is that, from 1907 to 1934, Newfoundland had the status of an independent Dominion in the British empire, effectively an independent nation, and legally equivalent to Canada at the time.

Newfoundland exchanged British rule for Dominion status on September 26, 1907, simultaneously with New Zealand. Due to the financial hardships and political crises imposed by the Great Depression, the Newfoundland government agreed to suspend its Dominionship on February 16, 1934, and revert to British rule, becoming the only British dominion to surrender its status.

During that time, Newfoundland had ten Prime Ministers, starting with Edward Patrick Morris and ending with Frederick C. Alderice.

The precise legal definition of "Dominion" leaves some question as to Newfoundland's true independence. Dominions were self-governing entities that were entitled to organize their own militaries and pursue their own trade relations, but that were not entitled to pursue an independent foreign policy from Great Britain. Over time, the definition evolved to the point of the Balfour declaration of 1926, which stated that the dominions "are autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth". Although the Balfour declaration left little doubt about the independence of the Dominions, formal de jure independence was finally realized by the Statute of Westminster in 1931, but Newfoundland never ratified it before reverting to British rule.

Thus, de facto if not de jure, Newfoundland was an independent nation prior to confederation with Canada, making it the only Canadian provice that was at one time a nation. How do you like them apples, Quebec?

And finally, a trivia question. Which US states were independent before achieving statehood? I can think of three; there might be more. (My answer is in the comments.)

I'm an assistant professor of computer engineering at a large public university. I'm also the department newbie, having been hired over the summer, so my first class as a real, live, full-time, tenure-track, daddypants-wearing prof wrapped up on Friday. I was teaching a digital logic design course, which was assigned to me randomly, and outside my area of specialty. Still, I was very pleased when I found out I would be teaching it - I liked it as an undergrad, and was a lab assistant for a similar course as a graduate student.

(As an aside, I should mention something for those who have never been on the salaried side of the desk at an institution of higher learning. At my school, the sum total of the direction I received was to be told what course I would be teaching, and to be given the calendar description of that course. Nobody ever asked to see my course notes, my handouts, my exams, or my assignments; nobody in the administration ever sat in on a lecture. I could have been teaching Faust or talking about my dog and nobody would have been the wiser. That's not to say that support was unavailable: the department bends over backwards to give help to faculty who want it, but they stay completely out of the way unless you ask. It's an exhilarating amount of freedom for someone fresh off of the PhD-postdoc treadmill.)

I thought I would do something a little different from those professors who had taught the class before, and borrow an idea from the prof who taught it when I was a lab assistant. I decided it would be a great experience for the students to take the last three weeks of lab periods and do a design project, where they would build something interesting such as a digital clock, a game, or something else similar. Using the in-house FPGA board (we use the Altera UP2, which is standard for a lot of computer engineering programs), it should have been easy for the students to come up with some interesting, non-trivial design problem, giving them design experience and reinforcing the lessons from the class. And everyone would be in awe of my pedagogical greatness.

Should have been. I forgot the most important rule of engineering design, which is that designs never fail in theory, they fail in practice.

The students had no end of problems, most of which were the university's fault for having poor equipment (and mine for not anticipating their needs). For example, the UP2 board has two chips: an EPM7128 for small projects (perfectly suitable for simple lab-bench stuff), and a Flex10K for larger projects (which most of the students ended up having to use). I guess nobody had ever used the Flex10Ks before, because nobody had soldered the appropriate headers onto the boards. After some scurrying around to get that problem fixed, there were no ribbon cable connectors to attach to the headers, meaning that an ad-hoc and very inefficient solution had to be found.

Then the Flex10K was found not to provide enough current to power external seven-segment displays. There were voltage problems with externally-attached chips - some students wasted their money buying external components that did not end up working, which surprised me in a lot of cases. There was a shortage of boards: three boards were left for the students to sign out after hours; because of the lack of ribbon-cable connectors, it was basically impossible for them to share, because they couldn't just unplug their circuit and hand the board to their friend.

And then - because I underestimated the difficulty of the project - I only assigned it to be worth 10% of the students' grade, in spite of the fact that everyone was putting in long hours in the lab for a solid week or more before the due date.

In the end I was very impressed with what the students produced: a couple of clocks, a "slot machine", an LCD text display, a tic-tac-toe game, and so on. A lot of the projects achieved their main objectives, in spite of the problems, and I marked leniently to acknowledge the long hours that everyone put in.

In the wrap-up class on Friday, I asked for feedback on the project, and got a host of these complaints. I am dreading my course evaluation results (but hey: get a low mark in the beginning and then move up; it's all about the improvement).

I'm having the students write up a list of hardware problems they encountered, and with the benefit of this experience, I think I will do the project again next time. But we professors learn things every day, too.

Being a supporter of intellectual property (IP) protections*, and because I seem to enjoy banging my rhetorical head against a wall, I am frequently led into debates about the relative merit of IP laws. My impression, reinforced by this recent exchange, is that the arguments commonly heard against IP are weak, and almost laughably so. So here's a short list of poor arguments against IP protection that should be avoided:

• If we abandoned IP protections, there would be much more innovation than there is today, because we could learn from other people's contributions. There's nothing preventing you from reading, e.g., a patent and discovering how something works. This is the whole point of patents. Also, if this is true, then why aren't jurisdictions where IP enforcement is lax (e.g., China, southeast Asia, the former Eastern bloc) beating the pants off the United States as far as innovation is concerned? Indeed, more effort in these places seems to be directed towards infringement than innovation, which completely belies the argument. I have yet to hear a convincing counter to this point, which is the biggest elephant in the room for the anti-IP crowd.
• In the absence of IP, people will still innovate, and people will still get paid to innovate. A watered-down statement of the above, and true. But they would not innovate as much, because corporate and private research would be difficult to fund. It would be much riskier to develop, and harder to fund, a start-up tech company, because a much larger company could use its full resources to reverse-engineer the start-up's product, and use its reach to shut the start-up out. These risks scare away investors. To a much larger degree than today, professional innovators would only be funded by the government or by wealthy benefactors (e.g., at universities). I don't see as utopian a world where innovation takes place at the whim of the government or for the pleasure of the rich.
• In technology, being first to market is more important than having IP protection. Often true, but without protection, investing in innovation is riskier (because a competitor could copy your product at any time), and the comparative payoffs for investing in innovation are smaller (because your pricing power is gone once your innovative advantage is gone). Again, investors react to higher risk and lower payoff by getting out of the market.
• Once your product is stale, your market is gone, so you have to innovate. There doesn't seem to be any lack of buyers for, say, toasters. Their technology hasn't changed in decades, and in a lot of cases, neither has their style. There are enormous markets for well-made, static products.
• The Renaissance was one of the most innovative periods in human history, and they had no IP protection. True. But this is my favorite weak argument. The Renaissance did not have science as we know it today. There was no steam engine, no mass production, no replaceable parts. The economy of most nations was based primarily on agriculture. The printing press only made its appearance towards the end of the period. So basically, this argument boils down to the following: "In a world that is nothing like the one in which we live, they innovated without IP."

I support IP laws because innovation drives our economy, they support the little inventors by giving their ideas real value, and mostly because they have been demonstrated to work in practice. There are many things about them that suck, granted, but there is no evidence whatever that the alternative represents an improvement.

*I support reform of IP laws, but not abolition.

If you have enabled the Discussion2 beta, you will notice a number of confusingly titled links appearing in comments. These control expansion/contraction of threads in several different ways. They are confusingly titled because we want you to try each of them and let us know which ones you like best without concerning yourself explicitly with how they work.

You can email your feedback to me (try d2 at cmdrtaco dot net) or some of you can actually post here.

I think next week will have a patch with a number of D2 changes (including some results from this experiment hopefully) so your help is really appreciated.

As web applications grow more and more featureful, I slowly find myself replacing desktop apps with web apps. This really makes a lot of navigation on the desktop a real pain in the ass. Example: Gmail. It's probably open in a tab right now. Not sure which one... occasionally we accidentallly close tabs. But if I use quicksilver to open 'gmail' it will open a NEW tab every time. Same if I use the gmail notifier.

Applications each open individually, and they know that they get focused when activated/launched whatever. But effectively firefox may (or may NOT!) actually encapsulate 2-3 different applications... spreadsheets, email, or say, the bookmarks that I use to maintain Slashdot's submissions bin.

I'm not exactly sure how to deal with this. I imagine this problem will only grow if good web applications continue to replace desktop applications.

one of the many emails I get on an almost daily basis is email requests to be included on the slashdot supporters list. I read these emails, and every few weeks filter out the junk links (SEO spam etc) and add a few to the list. I try to include only links that look like they are actual people. I'm not crazy picky, but I don't include really obvious stuff. Some folks get annoyed if I don't choose there link, but here's a recent one that really kind of blew my mind. I won't tell you the domain name for obvious reasons, but this guy emailed me 3-4 times over the course of a few days. Finally today I got this one:

Subj:Please don't fuck people around, thanks

Now he rambles a bit, but regardless, I don't need rudeness in my inbox, so I finally reply to this guy. He'd send me like 4 messages, so I figured I'd tell him to stop it. I simply wrote

I am not going to link you back. that is very rude.

This was like 4 hours ago. And keep in mind that the preceding message was the only one I wrote. These all came from him in rapid succession:

Yes thanks,
how about not naswering on my prevoius e-mails ?

How about FUCK DMOZ.ROG ?
Sorry
But i don't know any more who is more Crude, or Rude
any way thanks for your answer ...

followed by...

Thanks, your button has been removed.
At least i don't need to play a prostitute in order to get a link on your
site.

And minutes later he links me one of the entries on the supporters page that his site is better than. But then the truth comes out:

If i did not wrote that subject would you answer me than ?
I apologize, i stop smoking now in 5 weeks :-)

Ok, so that explains it. He quit smoking. That sucks. Must be rough. But then he needs to further clarify:

PLEASE IS THERE A WAY I CAN APOLOGIZE FOR THIS ?
I'm on the web since 1997 ...
I'm sorry ...
I'm 43 years old (married + 4 children)
I have stopped smoking last 5 weeks, this might have reduced my patience ...
Thank You.
This is my last e-mail and i will be not bothering you.

Now I actually kind of feel bad about all of this. I mean, not like baby punching bad, but at least an aww thats unfortunate. Until I get...

OK i understand, you hate muslims ...

WTF?! Muslims? When did that come into it? It's pretty clear that this guy's english is not his first language, but who am I to judge? My english is my first language and I'm barely literate. But somehow this guy has determined that I hate his religion, even tho I didn't even know what it was. But wait, that's not all:

OK i think you are a Spam filter not a human right ?
If I use "Fu*ck" word you react directly ...
OR are you Serbian and hate Albanians ?

and most recently:

Probaly you don't know what APOLOGIZE is.

Poor spam filter.

Mind you all of these messages were sent minutes apart- when I was out picking my car up from the shop! But it doesnt' end. While writing this journal entry I got

OK i see you hate Jews,
I'm half jewish ...
but i can't hep

Now wait a minute, I thought he was muslim. And I was serbian? I'm very confused as to who I hate atm. But I'll end this with his last message

Hmm in no way i can trigger any other answer ?!

I guess this is the closest thing to triggering any answer I can think of.

Over the last few months, the office has become home to a variety of creatures. It started when samzenpus brought in a turtle. He found this poor creature stuck in road tar. He saved the thing from certain death, cleaned the tar off him and dropped him in an aquarium. Soon after Hemos brought in an old tank to put in some salt water fish. Not to be outdone I finally fulfilled a childhood fantasy by getting a pet Ball Python that i have named Col. Tubesnake.

He's doing well. He's been eating his mice like a good little snake. This morning he didn't seem interested in the mouse tho, which i understand. I've been giving him frozen feeder mice from the pet shop which don't seem to do much for his hunter instincts. This time I warmed the thing on my coffee cup heater thingee and got it a lot warmer then before and tossed it in the tank. He struck almost before the mouse hit the ground. Snakes kick ass. The question is who will be the first to get a scorpion or tarantula.

Random popular culture notes: Aaron Sorkin's new Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip premiered earlier this week and has a lot of potential. Good cast, and of course since Sorkin is basically my jesus, I really hope the show comes together. Tonight is the premiere of The Office. Not much else on network TV worth watching this season, which I guess leaves me time to farm for herbs and raid in warcraft and wish the expansion would come out.

More than half of yesterday's discussion revolved around IE support. We PLAN IE support, we're just not knocking ourselves out to get that done while everything else is in flux. IE7 is definitely a priority. Not sure about 6. It really depends on how far we get, and when IE7 comes out, and how busted their javascript really is. patches would rock- this is all client side stuff and I bet someone with IE and a debugger could get some compatibiltiy in for any browser without that much effort, none of us are IE experts tho, so I'd rather we spend time on new functions.

The way D2 was rolled out for testing was that we actually had two discussion systems in place for awhile. One was a University of Michigan Research project written by nate. We used that as a rough framework to build our system. Subscribers got our system. Odd numbered users got our system, even got ours. Nate's system was given to a few hundred users, while ours was given to an ever growing number of readers that we rolled out over the course of a couple months. This is how we roll out many functions that aren't ready for prime time. Giving everythign to everyone all at once has performance issues for us. A slower rollout makes sure that we can work the kinks out before we give it ultimately to anonymous users.

If you use the handheld/low bandwidth options, the floaty control widget can cause problems. We know. It's on the list, but since only a tiny percentage of users are using those modes, it's not a top priority. The fix is relatively simple: the floaty needs a toggle from top to side. The code has a widget for a top floaty, but it's an older version. Basically I want to make the side floaty work properly (drag & drop instead of clickable for example) then redesign it to work up top and add the toggle. But that problem is easy to solve.

A VERY key point that a few users got is that this doesn't solve the problem that the old system has in favoring older threads. There is no good solution to this, short of randomizing top level comments. The REAL solution is to rework the scoring system to re-value threads with more granularity then -1..5. That of course is the plan.

As for one-click moderation, this is a baby step for us. The new moderation system is vastly different then the old one... and in-place moderation was critical to make it work.

A number of readers commented on the highest comments first not existing in this system... thats true, but you can fake it reasonably well. By setting the threshold fairly high, and hiding a good number of comments you can easily filter to score:4 or score:5 comments. Admittedly that doesn't give you 5s then 4s then 3s, but for mature discussions there are already dozens of comments. The new moderation will aim to address this problem in more detail, but I think a high enough threshold is BETTER then simply sorting by score becaause it's possible for you to navigate up or down without a page load when you do find a comment that you think might be worthy of further research.

As for patches, tf23 and a few others noted that we don't provide much in the way of direction. Well thats kinda true- the SF project page has tons of feature requests. If you emailed me and asked for my opinions on any of those features i'd tell you. I simply reject all feature requests that are worthless. Some of them are low priority, or things that I just wouldn't use for Slashdot. I read the mailing list- although I have little to say there. I've learned that if I'm not paying people, I don't usually get what I want for Slashdot, and thats fine. Code what you think works for your stuff. But if you want it on Slashdot, ask me how it should work or if it's crazy. Sometimes I reject ideas becasue our hardware can't handle extra queries. Other times I reject them because they have serious social issues or I decide that cluttering the UI isn't worth it for a tiny percentage of users who want a function. But there's a lot of fairly obvious stuff that could be fixed. I mentioned a number of things in the story I posted yesterday too. And a lot of that stuff is totally in the javascript- no downloading and installing slashcode to test even required.

Anyway the feedback on D2 is mostly favorable. I'm disappointed that the bulk of the discussion yesterday focused on the fact that we've chosen to beta test on the single browser used by most of our readers and worry about compatibility later. It meant I got less real feedback then I might like. But I think that's always the case- if there is one glaring issue, readers can't see past it to talk about the hundred other issues that are honestly more helpful...

What's interesting to me is figuring out how users can navigate this datastructure intelligently. What does it MEAN to expand a thread. To collapse a thread? Do I need siblings? Do I need expand-all? I don't want 35 buttons... where is the line between needless clutter and the necessary UI? Interesting problems to solve. Fun stuff. What's tough is that some readers want everything and the kitchen sink, but most users will find 3-4 buttons sufficient (and others will think 2 is intimidating). We have to balance minimalism, functionality, and hardware limitations. I find it enjoyable.

Got nice and sick last week. Very unpleasant. Especially around Day 2 when the tivo had (for the first time in years) that very awesome No Recordings message. Live TV is hell.

Just a few minor notes from the front: We are almost ready to start deploying the beta discussion system to readers besides our subscribers. Tim has been working on an improved control widget which hopefully will make a lot more sense then the terrible UI we kludged together to get things started. We're going to start buy giving access to the system from a random sampling of users. There are bugs in various browsers that will need to be worked out, and the UI will need to be refined, but I think everyone will be happy with how it works. It's definitely becoming very clear where the performance problems in different browsers are. It's a pain.

BackSlash continues to be an interesting experiment meeting with totally unsurprising commentary from readers. Many are angry and missing the points. Others are appreciating it for what it is. But just to raise a few points about it, Backslash currently exists as an experiment to merge automated moderation with traditional "Editing". This serves 2 purposes: one is to create "Original" content for readers unwilling to read public forums. These people are MOST of you. They don't want to read any forum. The end. But there are great things in the forums. So if we can bridge this gap, we can make Slashdot Forums useful to the majority of readers who don't want to wade through them. The second point is that this gives us another data point for training/revising/improving the moderation system. Random data points of good comments from a few trusted sources. We have a lot of Score:5 comments and a lot of Score:1 comments that are quite good too. The new moderation system will give us a lot more flexibility in selecting moderators, and controling the influence that they wield within the system. I'm hoping that the Backslash stories will give us a good data point for seeding that system.

We have one other project that cropped up recently that i'm hoping to deploy this week. It might be fun. It might be stupid. But it's a fun experiment. You'll have a strong opinion either way when you hear it.

Also we'll be hiring another editor before the end of the summer. If you are interested, send me a resume and 10-12 example Slashdot stories that you've written from scratch based on links you've found.

Now that the redesign contest is over, we've mostly finished up the implementation. A number of obnoxious issues turned up (they always do!) but they've mostly been dealt with. I think we might be crashing a beta version of opera, and a few less used browsers have some compatibility problems, as well a few menus and lesser seen widgets are skinned yet with older versions of the site design. Mostly that just is showing us places that weren't properly DIVd and CLASSd when we moved to CSS.

But the dust is settling so we can start working on our next project which I'm excited to say actually has the approval to hire an engineer. So if you are an experienced programmer with the fancy web20 ajax mojo on his resume, send it my way. This person will be working on the new discussion system, on dynamic user preferences, and some surprises that we've been working on for awhile now that doesn't really have user interfaces yet. I guess send me the usual stuff- location, salary requirements, experience, resume etc. I've got a few names already. Relocation isn't required, but being in michigan wouldn't hurt for occasional meetings.

Speaking of the new discussion stuff, it's worth noting that subscribers usually see beta functionality first. Right now they can see the new CSS/DOM/Javascript/Dynamic/Fancypants discussion system. It's buggy, slow, and damnit better than the version live on the site if you have a fast computer and a web browser that doesn't choke on it. There are a few minor features left for us to implement, and then we hope to start rolling it out as an optional thing for an ever widening pool of beta testers. I'm really excited.

One of the best things about D2 is that it dramatically cuts the need to load new pages. You can expand/contract threads dynamically. The problem with this is that we have a serious information overload. So we need a new user interface to accomodate this. Currently we have a simple drop down menu of thresholds. The new version has at least 2 seperate thresholds ('Visible' and 'Abbreviated'). So figuring out an intuitive and compatible way to view that information is an interesting challange. As always, I'm open to ideas so feel free to shoot emails my way. The current version simply has More/Less and Better/Worse buttons. This is a nasty kludge that won't cut it in the future.

In less interesting news, my alliance guild dropped nef for the second time last sunday. It's a really fun fight. I finally saw the Wallace & Gromit movie and really loved it. I still haven't seen the season finale of The Sopranos. X-Men was popcorn fluff, but I was at least entertained. And re-heated sweet & sour chicken from the local chinese take-out place does not taste nearly as good as it did last night.

Now go about your day.

The contest is not over. The rules say that we will take entries through tonight. But at this moment, there are really only 3 entries in serious consideration. You are all welcome to continue to submit until the contest ends, but understand that I am really flooded with entries, so you are likely to get little more than confirmation of receipt at this point, unless your entry is in serious competion.

I share now for you 3 "finalists". One of these is a definite favorite (I won't say which one) but with tweaking, I think any of these could be the next Slashdot. That is, unless someone rolls in with something perfect. I believe you have seen all of these before, but I include them now just for discussion purposes. Wes has been poking and prodding at the HTML/CSS under the hood so we can judge on that as well. None of these substantially alter the HTML under the hood, so implementation is relatively simple. We'd have to make variants for the sections, and resolve some layout issues in some of the parts of the site, but thats not to tough. It's possible that we could deploy the winning design next week.

Alex's entry has gone through many variations, and here is one of his latest. His new article footer looks great, although I might re-order things a bit. He added a space for messaging, but I don't think I like it in the slashbox column- I would probably move it back to where it is now, but I might use the same design. He uses the a light grey background in the menu, the slashboxes, the article footer, and the section menu intgrated into the header: but he chooses to delineate elements 3 different ways: a grey line, a white line, and nothing at all. I'm not sure which way works best, but I'd probably noodle around with that somewhat. The titles of slashboxes & the left hand menu don't need to be capsed: It's a little loud. We want the eye in the middle, not the navigational elements. I'm not sure about the green line between multiple abbreviated articles. I'd also like to see the horizontal line on the indented block quoted text line up on the left with the titlebar & footer. He also has mocked up a few other pages so you can see how he would translate this design to other parts of the site. I feel that this design is quite clearly Slashdot. It's a cleaner version of what we have today. It solves some problems with the current layout, we could still incorporate some javascript to expand/contract the menus. We'd need to think a bit about the upper right hand corner yet: is all we want is search, or do we want some user preference type stuff up there? But the vast majority of questions are answered.

Michael's entry continues to just feel unfinished to me. The curve and shadow effect that he's scooped out of the menu and title looks simply fantastic. I'm not precisely sure what a horizontal ad would look like, and I feel that the titlebars of the articles would look better if they were green. The slashboxes are a little simple for my tastes. In my browser at least, some of the fonts are unreadably small. I think that as it stands, this design simply feels incomplete to me, which is a bummer since it starts out so strongly. It has possibly the most attractive header/menu bar, but the article/slashboxes need work. In fact, of the 3 finalists I post today, I think this one is the least complete. It lacks a number of elements that are critical- login boxes, the message space etc. The abbreviated articles have no punch, and the slashboxes need delineation. This design gets strong response from almost everyone I show it to... but it lacks a number of puzzle pieces. But damn if it doesn't look good.

Peter Lada's design definitely doesn't suffer from that problem. He has covered every detail that i would need. This last revision has new abbreviated articles that look great. I honestly don't think I'd use his fancy little javascript in the upper right that toggles the search/login space. I don't really think it's necessary. I'd probably make the logo bigger: he's trying to keep it sized above the menu column, but I wish it would have a bit more punch size. I don't know if that size is worth breaking the 'barrier' between his 3 clearly defined left column. But his menu is functional and an elegant solution to the clutter we have over there. His slashboxes look clean and obvious. The ad positions will all work here. His poll button even has a nice sense of 'pop' to it. One issue raised here is that his articles might be a bit generic. Do they look to much like everything else on the internet? Thats hard to say... I mean, maybe the whole internet just looks like Slashdot in 1997 ;)

So there they are, my 3 favorites at 11am. The contest officially closes at the end of the day today. Everyone is welcome to revise their entries, or submit something new, but please understand that my repsonses will be minimal unless your design is something I like as much as the three above. For you folks in the comments, I'd love to see your comments on the actual HTML/CSS above. They each require slightly different amounts of effort for us to actually implement (and as Wes noted, some of them improve upon our HTML anyway, so it would be worth it). Remember this is not a democracy- I'm making the decision here. But I really am reading all the comments and taking everyone's feedback into consideration.

Good luck to everyone who is entering.

So after trying to write thank you e-mails to birthday well wishers, I had gmail shut me down. They thought I was a spammer. This made redesign evaluations a bit of a trick. But I'm hopefully caught up.

Today's entries are largely repeats. Most (all?) of them have been posted in my journal before. Some have been revised. Some have not. I'm not planning on posting any more mockup links to jpgs. These are essentially "Finalists". The contest still is not "Closed"- We plan to take entries at least through tomorrow. Revisions to any design are welcome. If you have been exchanging emails with me, try to reply to your old emails with updates to I can keep threads together. There have been 200+ entries, and I can't keep all ya'll straight.

Michael Johnson's design has gone through a few variations, but I keep coming back to this one. I think this one needs work yet to win. I'd prefer green article titles. I want to see what he will do with that upper right hand corner. I think his left hand menu could use some fanciness. The slashbox fonts are to small for my tastes. His 'Read More' space could stand out. Abbreviated text font size is really small (and doesn't stick out well). But I think that with a few hours of work, we could make this work.

Matt Walker's entry is another sharp one. I think his logo metallic shading affect is to much- it needs to be much more subtle. Also I can't tell if he wants his background to be dark grey or dark green- there's floating green edge on the logo that doesn't work. But his menu choices are solid. His slashboxes stick out and have a lot of pop. His articles look nice.

Nate Ziarek's design features a very attractive left hand menu, and interesting slashboxes. The menu is HUGE here, and he doesn't use the upper right hand corner- but if you move the preferences up there and make the left menu a little narrower, this is an excellent entry.

Chuck Han's entry is the only one to feature a blinking curser ;)

Ian MacLeod's design has a LOT going for it, and one crippling bad thing: the main problem is his choice to use a light green background. It just doesn't work for me. It just feels soft. I'm not sure how I feel about the floating left column topic icons either, but I share this entry because I think his 'Rea More' graphic is great. The fading in on the left, and the curve on the right... it's a simple cool design. The drop down menus look nice for his menus. Most/All of the necessary navigational elements are here and well done. I'd like to see this with a white background in the main space instead. But it's very elegant. A great entry.

Alek Bendiken's submission is another great one. His slashboxes look cool. His header is spacious and efficient. Th gentle gradiant on the titlebars looks great. I don't care for the line between is quoted text and unquoted text- I think the line should go, and he should put a vertical line to the left of the quote and/or more space. I think the article footer is a bit bland. Unlike many entries, he paid attention to his footer. I might switch the curves from left to right... I might not. It's subtle but wonderful. This design doesn't have tags, system messages, or abbreviated articles, but it's a really great entry.

Peter Lada's entry is back once again. The issues I have with this design now are really minor. I think he uses his triangular arrow things inconsistently: I think a triangle really visiaully says 'click to expand' which works on the left hand menu- except he uses down arrows on every menu item. He has right arrow on department lines and abbreviated articles, but there's no expansion in there. I'd want to work out some minor details, but this is a great design that really looks like 'Slashdot'.

As I said before, the contest is not closed, but we are now beginning to judge on compatibility, and implementation details. Eg, how much HTML did each design change. How much 'Work' would it take us to deploy, and how well does each design work on various browsers. I'd appreciate feedback on these points especially from anyone willing to post comments here. We want our winner to look good, be compatible, and accessible, as well as lightweight.

So keep 'em coming. This is the home stretch... I want to pick a winner soon!