I'm pretty damn sure for another $50M you could license a tech transfer from Amazon and have your own fucking AWS, in your own datacenter.

Employing one of the three top consulting houses was probably what sunk it. They are big bureaucracies that mirror the government, really. Just think what those consulting houses do: they help clients who are clueless enough not to be able to do the work themselves. If the client can't do the work, you think they'll know enough to gauge consultant's performance? Nope.

LOL, you have no idea what it takes to scale something like facebook. Compared to it, healthcare.gov could run on one high-end server for all I care.

It's really, really simple, in a way. The rules and their interactions form a basis of a more complex set of behaviors that emerge when you start executing them.

It's like with ants: a single ant is pretty dumb. But put them together, and you've got beautiful emergent behavior. In case of bureaucracy, you've got a bunch of "intelligent", "well meaning" simple rules. Put them together, and the emergent behavior is a pile of crap. It's like why IP internetworking won over X.25.

Both the behavior of ants and the behavior of the bureaucracies "defies reason". We're quite literally at the edge of human understanding. All that we know is that the less rules, the better it will be. Yes, so some excesses will slip through, but oh well. Right now it's all a big well meaning excess. The way government contracts are done is really just as if you paid the workers 10%, and the rest got paid to crack whores.

Yeah, I can't get over the fact that many Blu-Ray discs have fucking progress bars before the menu shows up. It's like YouTube, just local.

Can't you just buy a chain saw, a climbing harness, some rope and slowly but methodically take them down? It really isn't that hard. Been there, done that.

Yeah. I have a Sony TV and a Sony Blu-Ray player - both less than 2 years old. The crypto negotiation takes about a second, with blank screen and audible pops. On most Blu-Ray discs it happens at least twice before you get to playing the movie. With DVDs it sometimes takes place 4 times. I swear that an old CRT TV and a VCR were faster to cold-boot to a visible, playing movie, with inclusion of loading the tape, than the current generation of HD gear. It says something when a system that could, theoretically, be up and playing in 5 seconds from power-up is almost a factor of magnitude away from what the hardware allows it to do. It really takes the cake when such a system is about as "fast" as an electromechanical variant. Yeah, VCRs are nowhere near the quality of even DVDs, but still.

I'm analyzing plenty of other code, thank you, slashdot's is very, very low on my list. It might have even fallen off the list :)

Maybe they just don't fucking read books. It may be that simple :(

The stories are nothing but conversation starters. They are usually so badly edited so as to be useless for anything more than that anyway. It takes a truly amazing amount of presbyopia on the part of Dice to presume anything else. Nobody cares much about your lousy stories, slashdot.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, but who the fuck has the time to analyze the source code of a news site they simply read? Sure, if you're in web design of one sort or another you'd want to learn from the others by reverse-engineering, but that's not what any significant fraction of users is doing. I'm pretty sure slashdot could randomly insert links to bank accounts, with passwords, into the html comments, and it'd be missed for a long time.

You're mischaracterizing the issue. Narrow columns work just fine - get any paperback book and see how many characters there are per line. Compare that to the current layout on a modern wide screen. Long lines are unreadable. That doesn't mean that there should be just one column of content, though. Someone with brains can surely come up with a way of laying out a discussion in multiple columns. Sure it may not be a trivial algorithm, but that's, supposedly, what the professionals are for. Why can't slashdot innovate? Why can they only copy all the bad things others do?

Why won't you hire actual, you know, people who do usability professionally, and have them tell the designer folks what should be the constraints for design? Unfortunately, most designers demonstrably suck in the usability department. They simply don't have the training nor understanding necessary to do it right, in spite of the correct examples glaring at them from stuff that has been around for very, very long before they were born...

Widening it is actually the wrong thing to do. There are two orthogonal issues: 1. Use of the screen real estate. 2. Keeping the line lengths reasonable. The solution has been found a couple hundred years ago, just look in a newspaper. Slashdot really needs a multi-column layout.

The bigger problem is that the widescreens make a lot of web content unreadable. Long lines are horribly hard to read. If an entire paragraph takes two lines of a couple hundred characters each, filling a wide screen, then that's a problem.

Slashdot needs to switch to two-column mode on wide screens. There's a reason why books are formatted for pages that are longer in vertical direction than horizontal.