Use the Slashdot poll for something useful for a once.

Looks like Beta has hidden the comments on the polls. Coincidence?

Joking apart, putting up a list of features to vote on will just be chaotic. Better to put a list of high-level principles up first. For example:

1. Slashdot is about commenting on stories.
2. Slashdot is about finding out about new stuff in tech
3. Slashdot is about creating a community of like-minded people

etc.

Which one of those gets the most votes sets the direction for any re-design. Discreet functions like "mod up" or "quote OP" would just wear everyone down I think.

"My companies websites (Insurance) have an IE share of about 40%."

I concur. W3Schools is completely unrepresentative of a normal web demographic and I never know why people take their reports seriously. I worked for 5 years at a multi-national online travel agent operating in 48 countries. I posted some stats on our browser usage about 18 months ago as part of a similar rant about some loons called StatCounter claiming that Chrome was now the majority browser in the UK. There is no way in hell that IE has declined over 40% since then:

http://webtorque.org/?p=1802

(BTW the differences between China and India on weekends is quite striking though)

"You are confusing features with capabilities. The problem with features is mostly about complexity and interface."

No, you're confusing good UI design with bad UI design. That's a different thing to what I'm talking about because in your example features can be rendered easy or hard to use by the way they are designed into the interface. Put it another way, you can have great features poorly executed, or poor features well executed - and in both cases the outcome is fail. Features are neutral until executed (AKA designed).

Instead, what I'm talking about is the knee-jerk reaction of product managers (as opposed to designers) who immediately start listing "better features" in order to compete with a rival. They don't realise that what they need to do instead is list customer needs, then come up with features from there. That's much harder to do of course. Who cares if I have 1080p video if I don't need to record any video?

 

"detect speed, altitude, temperature, light and position. It has built-in GPS, Bluetooth 4.0 and a microphone. ..."

OK. It'll fail.

When will product managers understand that trying to compete by stuffing features into products does not a better product make? Has the tech design industry learnt *nothing* from the likes of Apple?

When Google's "inferior" product completely crushes them, I bet these idiots will be crying to their mystified managers that they didn't "market" it hard enough.

Muppets.

The article only notes that teenagers are driving much less. Total miles driven has only declined very slightly in the last few years (starting with the recession), and was steadily climbing for decades prior to that.

Here's a chart: http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/DOT-Miles-Driven.php

There are times when transhumanists cause me to wax seriously nostalgic, for that magical bygone era, when society's answer to potentially extinction-inducing abominations, was to build a large, blazing pile of logs, and place the freak of nature in question, exactly at the center of it.

In most cases of course, when Muslims indulge in this type of behaviour, I consider it as barbaric and uncivilised as anyone else, but for some reason I'm willing to make an exception where transhumanism is concerned. There's just something about human/machine integration, and the erosion of privacy and control of our basic biological functions as a result, that causes me to want to reach for a torch and pitchfork.

Yeah, because its realistic for people to be their own code auditors for a whole OS, and for each install and update. It is entirely realistic if you know what you are doing. My default FreeBSD install fits into 65 Mb of RAM. As I have observed before on this site many times; narrow mindedness and aggression have a marked tendency to go together. The more ignorant a person is, the more adamant they usually are about expressing it. Not all of us live according to argumentum ad novitatem.

What 'busy traffic' used to look like: http://blueicehouse.com/n5ssi/i35_riverside_may_1957.jpg

(part of this wonderful collection: http://gmlongroof.4umer.com/t7911-great-old-pics-austin-texas)

More recent photos: http://www.texasfreeway.com/austin/photos/i35/i35.shtml

Basically, our definitions of traffic density have changed.

"Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded." - Yogi Berra.

OK, that doesn't quite fit this situation, but you are only putting one variable into your equation - more roads. There's also:

• - More population. A lot more - the use population has grown something like 25% in the part 30-40 years.
• - More population in suburbs, and other changes to density.
• - And as a consequence of the previous item, more miles driven per capita, especially in some areas. Just because teens aren't driving doesn't mean nobody is.

Another factor - most driving is no longer 'fun' - It's fighting traffic. it's a job.

The only place you don't see traffic these days is car commercials.

I haven't seen anything that lists any Apple funding, although some articles mention Rackspace.

The primary political tension I was referring to was the continual battle between the county government and the city government here. The city has a very large (and pretty good) library system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Public_Library); they could have taken on this site as well. But it was probably easier to go bookless by not being part of the SAPL system (and Nelson Wolff, a county guy, couldn't get any credit if SA did it).

Turns out, this library is well within the city - it just happens to be funded by the county government (which isn't unheard of, although it was probably done for political reasons here).

I would argue that wi-fi and e-readers are not a complete replacement for a physical library location. Among other things, the building has useful services like desktop computers, meeting spaces, computer classes, and a place to pick up and learn about those e-readers.

The $2.3 million spent on this library could have
bought e-readers for a large percentage of the populace, easily one per household, and put free wifi on every major street corner.

Doubt it. Bexar County has 1.7 million people: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bexar_County,_Texas

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senkaku_Islands:

"The island group consists of five uninhabited islets and three barren rocks."

In other words, purely symbolic and having no real impact on anyone. These ain't no Falkland Islands.

Far east Asian foreign policy is even more about playing off internal factions than it is in the West. I bet this is just a case of the Chinese making nasty noises in the hope that a) somebody will be placated, and b) Japan will know this and just play along until things die down.

The chances of nukes and bang bangs over this are very, very low. See also North Korea.