Because that's about as funny as helping people install Windows 95 over the phone, and reciting those various feature-splash-screens, roughly as they appeared on the user's screen, from memory...

I'm not proud of this, mind you...

Unfortunately I'm finding it difficult to disagree with you.

When there wasn't an unlimited amount of screen or an unlimited amount of graphics capability, interface designers had to be very diligent in how they used what they had. With only eighty columns and twenty-five rows, or if you were lucky, one-hundred-thirty-two columns and forty-four rows, there wasn't a lot of room for waste or poor design.

Modern web designers have embraced the ooh-shiny parts of modern HTML specifications but haven't held on to the basic purpose, to efficiently convey information. Beta is an example, embracing eye-candy at the expense of that which the site's purpose is for, to convey information that's mostly text-based.

I also used to use Lynx/links/elinks as testing for what I wrote. I haven't written HTML in a big way in some time, but I imagine that most pages will fail the text-mode test.

Yeah, I kind of like the classic, large-icon image on the corner of some stories, if anything is included at all. I don't see a need for pictures for the bulk of stories, it's like the use of stock footage on the evening news when they have something that's important but not visual.

the news.google.com site looks loads better than this new thing.

Come to think of it, news.google.com looks a lot like the current Slashdot main page. A narrow, plain nav column on the left, a large body column in the middle, and a 25%ish column on the right.

I opened it. Unlike the current design, it did not scale to fit my 1400x1050 screen, leaving large whitespace borders on both edges. If that's what it does on a 4:3 screen with a narrower horizontal resolution than many modern widescreen "high definition" displays, then this is a bad thing.

Additionally there was less content on the initial screen than there is on the current design. Much of the time I skim the headlines, if I find one I find relevant I immediately read the blurb. If the blurb appeals then I follow the link(s) or read the comments. This new layout doesn't offer as much content on a given screen, and one thing I learned in design in general, if you don't grab your audience with little more than a glimpse, then you've lost your audience.

I did design for some ads for some fandom events, and within the form factor of the ad I had to answer who/what why, and when, and to a lesser extent, where. I had to name the event, give the viewer a reason to go to the event, give the date for the event, and for events that weren't in the normal venues or where the venue itself was an advantage, name the venue. All of this information needed to be conveyed in little-more than a snapshot.

While Slashdot or any bulletin board system is not the same as an ad, it is important to present the frame of the discussion in a format that allows the casual browser to see the important stuff pop out instantly. The current layout, with different presentations, reverse colors for somethings, etc, works to do that. The new format didn't give me the impression of being well organized in that regard. One needs the headline to convey the important "grabber' in a way that actually commands attention. The new system didn't do that for me.

Anyone else getting tired of zombies? They're starting to appear in bad corporate cell-phone ads now.

It was cute for awhile, but there seem to be people taking it seriously enough that they're changing their lifestyles based on the idea. It's silly.

And Apple is dying...

Yeah, but generally that kind of screwing has a strongly anticipated immediate short-term benefit, even with the long-term ramifications. I don't see such euphoria in the original case...

I'm pretty sure that it always had been an ideal, but it seems to not be an ideal anymore, to at least a significant portion of the population.

It's one thing to sing praises of true achievements that go beyond what an average person reaches; that doesn't bother me too much if it's done with reason. I do object when mediocrity is celebrated, or when things of shock value are celebrated when they're actually poorly done. The entertainment industry is an example of the celebration of mediocrity, when we're told this is popular in order to make it popular, or when no-talent hacks are so worked or massaged or modified to make them talented that there is very little of the original underneath.

I guess that we're now living in the Age of Autotune. Instead of embracing raw talent, we manufacture it, and look down on some that are naturally talented when they're compared to the manufactured nature of others.

I'm starting to wonder if they're just trolling us. Facebook's policies and very reason for existence runs contrary to what I was taught as a child, which was anti-narcissism (ie, any sort of notoriety based on achievement, not simple vanity), speaking when one only has something to say and keeping one's personal life personal (as opposed to, "look at me with this drink in my hand! Look at me with this puppy! Look at me with these whores!"), and now, keeping one's finances close to one's chest. The Internet age with the ability to own a domain name and effectively vanity-publish has changed some of that, but "Social Media" has made it extremely simple to talk-at people without necessarily talking-to people.

I never signed up for Facebook in the first place. I'd had my own domain for a time, and ran my own web log, but decided that it wasn't worth the effort and that what I was willing to share with the rest of humanity wasn't something that the rest of humanity was interested in. When I've seen others using Facebook I continue to get that vibe. I don't know what I'd do in your shoes, but having never had an account and seeing all of the BS makes me happy that I never did have an account in the first place.

I'm waiting to see this all unfold.

WHat is going to happen is...

What's going to happen is that some pissed off outgoing network admin is going to write blank configurations over all of the saved configs on their network switches and routers, but not reboot them. They'll run fine for awhile until maintenance or power issues cause them to reload, then they'll be about as useful for network routing as the racks they're bolted into.

They should include option of enabling this but as long as its not the default most people will not use it.

Yeah! Chord-middle is much better! I don't ever have to worry about accidentally scrolling while middle-clicking that way...

Seriously, I use one of those four-button-plus-scroll-wheel trackballs. Taking functionality away is pretty low on my list of good things. Letting it be customizable, sure, but removing the option? Annoying to say the least...

Heh. I'm waiting for someone to compile it for the Cisco platform... I'd love to play Zork via 9600 baud serial connection on a $100,000 core router... to the exclusion of doing any actual routing, of course...

Sad thing is, I've known book-smart people that made terrible decisions about anything unrelated to their areas of expertise, so his analogy isn't as poor as you'd think. I'm not going to say that Apple is done, but this behavior is consistent with other times that Jobs wasn't running the place. Given that short of seances or Ouija Boards he's unavailable to drive the product innovation that has been Apple's only true trick to remaining strong, I don't forsee a bright future

As far as I've been able to tell, most espionage of a materiel type requires spying on companies, as it's those companies that are the true producers of materiel, not governments themselves.