This anecdote sums it up quite nicely. Now all we need is a few more of those and we have data :P

I congratulate the /. team for applying so many changes that would make the site more interesting and increase usability for a number of users. Also, I know that playing with all the new-fangled AJAX stuff is pretty and can be fun to develop.

On the other hand: Please don't ignore us users who still use the good old classic style. I simply like my /. without fancy effects and strange navigation bars. Threshold of 3, nested, oldest comments first, re-parenting comments and a link i can open in a new tab to read the stuff below my threshold is all I want and need.

Long story short: While developing all the exciting new stuff, please don't completely ignore or remove (*shock* *horror*) ye goode olde Slashdot layout. It works currently, has served many people well for quite a while now and hopefully doesn't cause too much work for you guys. Just please fix it every now and then in case you break it.

Oh great, now I won't only have to ignore those idiots but also go the extra mile and add a DROP rule in ip6tables.

That one seems like it took a lot of work and preparation. Better than the last 2 years, /. :)

"Web messages" should be indicated at the very top of the index page near "Idle is a waste of your time..." and similar announcements. Your messages are shown here and the preferences are here.

By the way, I'm using the old /. style without all the AJAX stuff, maybe that's got something to do with it?

I forgot to mention that although Open Source software has greatly advanced over the years, it apparently still won't protect you from forgetting to select the "Plain Old Text" formatting option.

I can't really say anything about the cost of proprietary software, so I thought you might appreciate some information about what Open Source can be used for: My university has many thousands of students in all kinds of maths, engineering and technology-related fields. There's a custom zope installation for managing your schedule and course registration that's also used for other things like a secure central authentication gateway for professors who want to roll their own systems yet still need to interface with the main system. Every student has an account on an HP-UX Server, although this could also be done with cheap Linux servers. There's a public_html directory for your student website and a maildir for your mail in your home directory. There's also many cheap SUN/Intel terminals strewn across the entire campus (hallways, computer rooms, learning rooms, etc.) which can pxe boot into either kiosk mode (a browser that can only access the university's website) or pxe boot into a login screen. Once logged in, it will PXE boot yet again into an environment suitable for your profile or the location you're at (e.g. certain labs might have different kinds of environments). Your default environment is a basic KDE desktop system with your home directory mounted, kmail set up to read your .maildir, OpenOffice.org and many other productivity features. Now that I have described it to some degree, I hope the advantages are becoming apparent. By utilizing the nature of Open Source software and the fact that you can freely combine them into something that suits your specific needs you can provide your students and staff with a high degree of flexibility. I can simply log in from any computer on campus or anywhere in the world and check my mails with any mail client I prefer, work from anywhere on my stuff, can forward X sessions so I can access restricted resources with Firefox running on the internal network but displayed on my computer at home, etc etc. The administrative costs are also pretty low since all you'll have to do is go and replace or install a cheap PXE booting terminal and it's ready to boot. Since there's only few PXE environments in use your ongoing maintenance cost is pretty much approaching zero. All you need to implement this kind of setup is some resource planning and a few experienced UNIX admins to implement it and keep it running. No more expensive maintenance contracts with 20 different companies, no more fighting with vendors who are completely unable to have their proprietary stuff talk to each other and no more proprietary interfaces and protocols that prevent you from running a well-integrated infrastructure.

You're right, CentOS isn't really much of a desktop distro, but you should still give it a chance. I've been using it as a desktop for the last year (switched from FreeBSD) and I'm pretty happy with it. It's a stable base system (no PulseAudio or other beta-quality stuff) with a basic [kde|gnome] desktop environment and all of your additional needs (multimedia, etc) can be satisfied by a handful of external repositories you can add to yum. You can even simply use all the stable base stuff from CentOS and simply use fedora repositories for most other things.