lanroth - Slashdot User

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Why Can't Slashdot Classic and Slashdot Beta Continue to Co-Exist? 9

Submitted by Hugh Pickens DOT Com on Thursday February 06, 2014 @11:07AM

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes: Slashdot has been a big part of my life since I had my my first stories accepted over ten years ago. Some people my age do crossword puzzles to keep their mental agility, some do sudoko, or play bridge. I enjoy searching for and putting together a story a day for slashdot because it helps keep me on my toes to have readers find errors and logical fallacies in my submissions and I enjoy learning from the different points of view expressed on a story I have submitted. That's why I have been so discouraged in the past several years to see readership in slashdot drop off. As a close observer of this web site, I know that ten years ago it was unheard of for any accepted story to get less than 100 comments and there was at least a story a day that got over 1,000 comments. Those days are long gone. Not it's not uncommon to see some stories garner only a few dozen comments. That's how web sites die. If you slip below a critical level of readership, readers will abandon the site completely. I know from my own experience running a web site devoted to the Peace Corps that I used to have hundreds of comments to some of my stories but once comments slipped below a certain threshold, then they disappeared altogether. I think that slashdot is nearing that threshold and I fear that imposing Slashdot Beta on the site's readership will push it over the edge and I don't want to see that happen. I'd like to propose that slashdot continue running slashdot classic and slashdot beta in parallel. I'll stick with classic most of the time. One of the best features of slashdot classic is that comments can be displayed in four formats (threaded, nested, no comment, and flat) and in two directions (oldest first and newest first) providing a lot of flexibility in watching conversations develop. I switch between the formats several times a day depending on what I want to see. But slashdot beta also has its advantages in certain situations. Slashdot needs a blockbuster story or two every day where people can pile on and slashdot beta facilitates this by putting the most commented story at the top of the page and I think that is a good thing. Still I'll use slashdot beta occasionally when I'm on a mobile device but slashdot classic will be the format I use on my desktop. So don't deprecate slashdot classic. That would be like Microsoft disabling Windows 7 and forcing everyone to use Windows 8. And not even Microsoft is that stupid.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Can some of us get together and rebuild this community? 21

Submitted by wbr1 on Thursday February 06, 2014 @08:41AM

wbr1 writes: It seems abundantly clear now that Dice and the SlashBeta designers do not care one whit about the community here. They do not care about rolling in crapware into sourceforge installers. In short, the only thing that talks to them is money and stupid ideas.

Granted, it takes cash to run sites like these, but they were fine before. The question is, do some of you here want to band together, get whatever is available of slashcode and rebuild this community somewhere else? We can try to make it as it once was, a haven of geeky knowledge and frosty piss, delivered free of charge in a clean community moderated format.

Submission + - Slashdot BETA Discussion (slashdot.org) 60

Submitted by mugnyte on Thursday February 06, 2014 @03:27AM

mugnyte writes: With Slashdot's recent restyled "BETA" slowly rolled to most users, there's been a lot of griping about the changes. This is nothing new, as past style changes have had similar effects. However, this pass there are significant usability changes: A narrower read pane, limited moderation filtering, and several color/size/font adjustments. BETA implies not yet complete, so taking that cue — please list your specific, detailed opinoins, one per comment, and let's use the best part of slashdot (the moderation system) to raise the attention to these. Change can be jarring, but let's focus on the true usability differences with the new style.

Comment Re:Anyone seen any android phones ? (Score 1) 135

by lanroth on Wednesday April 15, 2009 @09:35AM (#27585241) Attached to: Android 1.5 SDK Is Released

I'm using Android 1.1 on an HTC Kaiser (aka the Tilt, the Vario III depending on who you got it from). This is a Windows Mobile phone that Android is being ported to.

Not all the hardware on the phone is supported by the Linux kernel but that situation improves week by week. I spend most of my time in Android, only booting back to Windows when I need to load TomTom or upgrade my Linux kernel.

More information can be found here:

http://www.androidonhtc.com/

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=3629317

I'd really like to upgrade my phone 'cos there're better ones on the market now. The trouble is I'm quite used to having both windows and linux on my phone and there's precious few phones out there that'll do that.

Submission + - HTC TyTN II PDA Phone lacks video performance 3

Submitted by

Anton Nilsson

on Thursday January 03, 2008 @08:07AM

Anton Nilsson writes: "Taiwaneese PDA giant HTC released their latest flagship PDA phone called HTC TyTN II (also known as Kaiser, Tilt and MDA Vario III) but recent discoveries show that maybe it's not so much a powerhouse after all. Due to lack of proper driver support for the video part of the Qualcomm MSM7200 chipset users are left with a seriously handicapped unit with very poor support for gaming, video and photo. Granted, the phone is mostly intended for business users who will rarely see the effects of these issues but it's still leaving thousands of customers who want to fully utilize the phone with a slightly bitter taste in their mouths.

A petition for driver support has been posted and almost 4000 people have signed it. It has been sent to HTC on numerous occasions yet when contacted HTC still claims to be unaware of any such issues.

You can check out the petition here:
http://www.petitiononline.com/tytn2vid/

Potential buyers of this much hyped set beware until these issues are resolved."

Researchers Prove Existence Of New Type Of Electron Wave 60

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wednesday July 04, 2007 @06:04PM from the welle-of-information dept.

ScienceDaily is reporting that physicists at the University of New Hampshire have discovered the existence of a new type of electron wave on metal surfaces. "The acoustic surface plasmon, which will have implications for developments in nano-optics, high-temperature superconductors, and the fundamental understanding of chemical reactions on surfaces. [...] 'The existence of this wave means that the electrons on the surfaces of copper, iron, beryllium and other metals behave like water on a lake's surface,' says Diaconescu, a postdoctoral research associate in the Condensed Matter Group of the physics department at UNH. 'When a stone is thrown into a lake, waves spread radially in all directions. A similar wave can be created by the electrons on a metal surface when they are disturbed, for instance, by light.'"

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