The Standards Wars and the Sausage Factory 234
Esther Schindler writes "We all know how important tech standards are. But the making of them is sometimes a particularly ugly process. Years, millions of dollars, and endless arguments are spent arguing about standards. The reason for our fights aren't any different from those that drove Edison and Westinghouse: It's all about who benefits – and profits – from a standard. As just one example, Steven Vaughan-Nichols details the steps it took to approve a networking standard that everyone, everyone knew was needed: 'Take, for example, the long hard road for the now-universal IEEE 802.11n Wi-Fi standard. There was nothing new about the multiple-in, multiple-out (MIMO) and channel-bonding techniques when companies start moving from 802.11g to 802.11n in 2003. Yet it wasn't until 2009 that the standard became official.'"
Re:Beta sucks (Score:4, Informative)
Yep. How long before they come fed up with these protests and start deleting comments, or moderating them into oblivion? Please continue the fight, and also, pleace comment outside of their control here on reddit (where I may soon be moving to if classic goes away): http://www.reddit.com/r/social... [reddit.com]
Sausage Beta (Score:2, Informative)
I don't like how beta was made (without serious consultation and requirements gathering) and I don't like the final product (site that no longer meets the needs of its community) so in this case I'm not eating whether I've seen the sausage factory or not.
FUCK BETA!!
Test of text rendering Slashdot Beta (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I don't think Dice realizes (Score:4, Informative)
In the Quakenet [slashdot.org] comments.
Re:Begun they have... (Score:3, Informative)
Gee, who do you think has unlimited mod points and a vested interest in shutting down the anti-beta posts?
The funny thing is, as another poster pointed out, the /. editors would be the first ones to cry "Censorship!" if some other site attempted to silence *their* users.
Re:Begun they have... (Score:5, Informative)
Here of my own accord, actually. We'll have an official posting coming out soonish, but I wanted to let people know we're listening in the meantime.
Timothy has been responding to a ton of emails -- mainly the ones with bug reports and constructive suggestions. But our inboxes got blown up pretty well over the past 24 hours, and it takes time to consolidate several thousand data points.
Re:Beta sucks (Score:5, Informative)
You seem pretty worried about this, but there sure are a lot of high-scoring anti-beta comments on every story.
Also, we don't delete comments.
Re:Begun they have... (Score:5, Informative)
There have been a lot of great emails from users with tweaked screenshots showing how they'd prefer the layout to look. Some people have even sent us CSS/HTML tweaks.
But mainly, it just helps to have a detailed explanation of a specific task, and how the beta site prevents you from completing/accomplishing it. For example, direct links to individual comments isn't implemented yet. So, if you were to say, "Every time I leave a comment, I go to the comment link and bookmark it in my browser to keep track of it. The beta doesn't let give me direct comment links, so I can't do this anymore.' That would be something well-defined and actionable.