Or, like me, lost access to their first id. (I no longer have access to the original email account and I had forgotten the password)

I hear it's going to be called "Dungeon Keeper Beta".

User agent sniffing allows you to create a site for mobile phones and tables. I don't think slashdot should become a "responsive site". If they want to spend some time making a mobile site that looks nice on phones and tablets (provided there is a cookie you can use to always see the full site or it respects the fact that you're submitting a desktop user agent string) then ultimately I'm fine with that.

You haven't answered the spirit of my question. The fastest growing platform may very well be global, but this is slashdot, where people come to contribute and foster community, they tend to be nerds like programmers, engineers, and scientists who don't usually do their work on mobile devices, and where typing long things is de jure... I'm going to guess mobile matters substantially less to the average slashdot person and the desktop version that you comment on matters a whole heckuvalot.

And again, we can have our cake and eat it, too. Keep this version of the site, redirect mobile agent strings to "m.slashdot.org" while not making it a piece of shit like beta is....

I so often disagree with your posts, yet how fitting that I am so touched by this post, so in agreement, when the community is threatened. I applaud you, sir.

I think one of the things I really like about the NYPD is that they don't call us New Yorkers their "audience". On the side of the cars they have the words "Community Professionalism Respect".

Seems to have been slashdotted.

We've uncovered your problem. It is this axiom. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

I believe this is absolutely wrong. Why do you think this? Because you can't show it to generic citizen and get them to go "oooh"? When your community pretty much thinks that the two worst things the site is doing are bad quality writeups and changing the UX, it makes me think what you really want is different community.

Whose expectations are higher? Can you write persuasively that the latest UX research matters on a "news for nerds" site? We want to talk about it UX research, but there is a fundamental reason we want the striped down look with a focus on comment features. What few needed tweaks would make slashdot suck in 2018 if they were *never* done? What will this design not cut in 2018?

You know the first thing I think when I see beta? I crave the high contrast of the real slashdot with its obvious separation of elements clearly delineated for rapid visual processing. Then I look at the comments section, and everything just bleeds together like some sort of horrible endless sea of white. Look at classic, a clearly defined title bar with a nice subbar. It FEELS better. Like classic is the improvement on "beta".

Also, notice how the "contribute" links are always well distanced from the comments on classic and not on beta? They complete the "Framed" look that allows you to so rapidly assimilate information in classic and make it clear what the user is supposed to do next. Also, those heavy underlines really scream "I'm a functional thing to do". What is wrong with underlines that has been uncovered in the latest UX research?

Classic has full use of horizontal space, and there's a sidebar which tells me about *me* so I can follow threads I've been talking in right off the bat. UX should be about getting the people the links they want to see, right?

In every way but possibly in the "pleasing people who love gradients, drop shadows, and low contrasts that blind old people" department, classic is more readable, usable, functional, and "feel good". You are futzing with a popular brand, and I can only assume that is because you do not valuable the people for whom this is an everyday part of their lives.

Why we need a new site? We're nerds, we're okay with shit looking like this forever, because it is about content and not presentation.

Well, there are numerous problems with this comparison. You want to measure real wage, not the money wage. The real wage/money wage ratio for Britain is probably obviously higher than that for the US worker. Consider, a British pound trades for 1.65 US Dollars right now. After that, you factor in taxes (everyone loves to do that, right?) .

And, then you factor in things like standard of living. Everyone loves to point out the increased gas costs and rent, but not underline the fact that more people don't own a car, or even feel like they need to, because of public transportation. Like, I live in NYC because I hate driving, so it's a "feature" to me. YMMV. Google employees, for instance, save money because of amenities like the Google busses we're hearing so much about. Then you have to factor in the social services that are provided for each country. It is a lot cheaper to be pregnant in Britain. Yes, because the taxes are higher, but if you factor in taxes, you have to factor in what you're getting for them.

I haven't done the work, but I'd be interested in the results.

I feel like the first two chapters of http://www.scribd.com/doc/1139... do a really good job of showing you to be wrong.

I'll bite. I do think that RMS has a point about the open source compiler of record being under the GPL, as well as the operating system and other essential build tools and core platform elements. Many people will rightly point out, yet again, that GPL is a pretty aggressive license for most userland software, but when it comes to the platform itself, this aggression seems to be quite desirable. Also, these value statements seem temporally bound to the moment. Maybe in the future we will live in a set of legal and intellectual circumstances where RMS has basically won and that maybe a good thing.

So I wonder he isn't right about it being sad that LLVM is not under copyleft.

Hmm, so you're saying that if we're going to have legal handguns, then we should let retired cops have concealed handguns because given the first variable, total safety for everyone else improves? Even if that is so, the problem is that he didn't cite a study and used the phrase "study after study" in a polemic issue with highly charged emotions. For that, he was up moderated. To my lights, this degrades the quality of the discussion on Slashdot, and I wanted to point that out.

Ahh, I like so much that you qualified your views as speculation. But, that said, your speculations are interesting to me. I find myself agreeing that it is highly plausible that economic disparity , more specifically a very low "real wage" for many people seeking employment, absolutely are factors in overall gun violence, as well as cultural oppression, etc.

One would argue that many people think they can code better projects and do (Say, an unknown Finnish student in 1992). There is a ton of duplication in the software space, but that might not be a bad thing. I think it is so easy to forget that we're building things that may last centuries, millenia. Individual information problems may morph under hardware changes, but a lot of these things we're figuring out could go the distance. I hope the open source movement never loses that audacity, even if it a times it is blind, arrogant, and wrong.