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Comment Re:The sad destruction of Slashdot (Score 1) 45

I'm dismayed at how much Dice cares so little for its legacy audience. It's long time readers and the community here that allows no BS to go unchecked. Beta was so big and fucking ugly it was easy for those with soul to largely rebel and reject it. Where's Beta now? They pretty much gave up. But now with the hideous changing of comment counts and remove of the original "read more" link layout, the sign has been posted. Dice and its soulless corporate minions intend to slowly take shots here and there, little by little. Slowly they will destroy this venerable, classic old home to many on the web. And it's just a GOD DAMN SHAME.

removing the well mknown "read more" link from the bottom of the news item and instead creating a grotesquely large #-of-comments counter next to the heading is counter-intuitive and bad interface design.

I read the heading, if it anyhow interests me I read the summary and if I still feel interested I go for the "read more". This is top-down and the old design ws in harmony with it. Now I'm forced to go back again and click the link on the opposite end of the entry. This design interrupts the "natural flow" of eyeball and mouse-pointer movements and actually results in dimished clicks.

I guess some marketing droids decided to try and give /. more of an 2.0 appearance in the hope of attracting new (younger, more consume-oriented) readers and raise income froms ads. But destroying the usability of the site does not attract new users, it alienates the current users instead. If dice want to bring slashdot to the presence they should add features this site has ignored for much to long:

Too geekish? Think again! FB does all of those and look how many clicks they net in...

Comment Re:Car analogy? (Score 1) 67

You may remember the bit in The Hitchikers Guide about London based designers driving their Porsche against a tree with their leather jacket strapped at the front of the car to give it the perfect pattern of lines and that air of being-used-fullness.
TFA describes what is the analogy of doing this with 1000 Porsches on the same leather jacket and later read the license plates of each of them within 100 nanoseconds from the scratches in the jacket.

Comment Re:WindOwS X (Score 3, Insightful) 154

The PC won the computer wars years before the Mac came out, since it had the magic initials on it (IBM). It never lost its dominance in market share, although it became clear over time that the dominance actually belonged to the OS (PC-DOS, then MS-DOS).

The PC won the computer wars over Apple because IBM did not care to hunt down or even hinder clones while Apple did.
There was an evolving cloners scene in Taiwan and environs eager to try their (re)engineering skills with the Apple II but Cuppertino scared them away.
Enter IBM with that PC box and the cloners switch horses, meet no resistance and succeed to create a world standard almost immediately.
IBM wins, cloners win, consumers win, world economy had a new cycle to run through and IP evangelists decided to wait a decade or two before organizing the roll back.

Comment Re:Other explanations: (Score 1) 94

11. The shadow of god.

He stood there in his multiverse lab, shaking the tube with that new mixture of fundamental constants and just when he added a spoonfull of antimatter reductor something unfortunate happened and the whole thing went "bang" in a very bad way. He was super fast to duck down for shelter but the shockwave was faster and caught him rolled up like a ball.
Thus the resulting universe has been god-forlon right from the very beginning.

Comment Re: this is one more reason (Score 3, Interesting) 136

"America" - or rather the commerce/3-letter/politico corporatistic conglomerate rooted in the US of A - does it cause it believes it can. They feel they have a monopoly in the field of international money transfer and when I take a look at my options to transfer money to a internet based business in NZ or in fact even at home (within the EU) they do.
It is Visa or MasterCard of Paypal. and apparently all of them listen when a US senator tells them with whom they should not make business.

Why is it that basic backgound infrastructure like financial networks, social media, internet search, is so firmly in US hands an there is no serious competitor based in a different locale?
It might be that constantly waging war against half the planet supplies better means to establish worldwide networks.

You are in the hall of the mountain king.