Screen rotation is also a thing on desktop. My Dell has three external monitors, side by side, all rotated in portrait; use a decent window manager and you can have a decent 3×2 grid of windows that easily leads to Perfect Window Placement™ just by using Move Window to Top (Bottom) Half. Gnome and pals know how to handle both horizontal and vertical RGB subpixel arrangements and automatically switches configuration as you rotate the screen.
Mobiles and tablets have such high resolution monitors nowadays they probably run without subpixel AA at all…
No. Even if they both have monitors that move with your head, they are very, very different products. One's a head-attached smartwatch. Another's a presence creator.
I like that your main argument against trees for organizing files is that people use specific applications per file type to organize them... _in trees._ Photos are sorted by year first and album then. Songs are sorted by artist first and album then. People understand trees just fine.
Also, the problem of being unable to put the same thing in more than a place is a) not one fixed by app silos b) part of our daily life while sorting physical objects c) fixed with filesystem links (soft/hard).
Your argument only proves today's mainstream file management programs/save as dialogues/etc. are inadequate. Trees remain the best simplest model to organize files in a filesystem
Most of the time protection kicks in _because_ the question has received many "thanks!", "me too!", or spam answers by new users. Indeed, the third deleted answer on any question automatically triggers protection.
"I want to be in places where I can be myself, which might include chuckling at the same old jokes or discussing how much my job sucks. The more SO/SE is a place where I cannot be myself, the less desirable a place it is for me to be."
There's nothing stopping you from being your whole self on chat, but it's the relentless focus on signal that makes Stack Overflow what's wholly Stack Overflow.
You can't just build communities by randomly amassing people together. Communities need to have a common goal; in our case it's the building of the best goddamn Q&A sites we can possibly make out of the SE engine. That's what leads us to be "all business" on the site while wholly goofing off on chat :)
Well, that's your goal, for a very specific definition of "best". But as you can see from the feedback here, you're driving off otherwise qualified people who had different goals, or different notions of "best".
It's not like there's some limited quantity of votes or badges. Or that there's too much fun in the world. So the only reasonable complaint there is that the home page shouldn't have them. Gosh, could there be a technical solution for that?
Time however is a finite resource and it is effectively wasted on 'fun' questions. Every 'fun' question steals time off the actual Q&A content that is the whole point of SE.
Hiding stuff that doesn't below under the rug doesn't make the problem go away, fixing the problem does.
In a gamification environment moreover you need to make sure that the rewards are given for activities you want users to do more of. Participation in 'fun' questions is not one such thing. Since they get ALL the votes etc. they naturally attract more of the same 'fun' questions.
Time is variable with participation. By driving me off through closing and deleting things that don't fit your personal vision, you have reduced the amount of total work time available. Not just for the fun things, but for all things.
Gamification points are also not finite. But if you are really concerned with over-rewarding things that are too gosh-darned fun, just stop rewarding them. It's an easy fix. E.g., instead of marking a question closed, you mark it as just-for-fun; points stop accruing.
I guess what you could be saying is that time is finite for some particular group of people. In which case, you've introduced an us-vs-them dynamic, and are basically declaring that the system is about serving the desires of the in group, rather than all participants or all readers. In which case: have fun with your bat and ball.
The problem is mainly that chat.SO sucks in a lot of ways and probably should be reduced to a single room where all SO regulars who have time to chat do chat - together. That's the way pretty much all other sites do chat (including MSO) and it's... saner. I just don't know how much it'd scale.
That doesn't work for interest-specific communities. HTML5-ers, Java-ers, and haskell-ers will probably not talk about the same topics with each other as they would with other people that share their interests, as in their own interest-specific community.
Isn't that why on freenode, you have communities based around particular langauges? #java, #haskell, #html5, etc. etc? Not to mention social versions, like #haskell-blah and what have you.
SE is not meant to be a replacement for reddit or traditional forums. If you want to have discussion by all means have discussion. Just don't do it on SE because SE wasn't made for discussion.
Just because echo doesn't read from files doesn't mean it's useless. If you need to read from files you just use cat instead. Sure, you can coerce both to do the other's job, but it'll be messy and only work half the time and other people will be annoyed at you. Different solutions for different needs.
It's really the software. It isn't made to host lists. Votes on lists are historically on the item (OMG YES JQUERY!!!!!), not on the answer (You should use jQuery because a. b. c. d.), and that isn't how the rest of the site works.
Besides in a Q&A network, a "list question" has "list answers" where every "answer" is a "list", rather than an item of that list. Even that doesn't really work because that's not historically the way the site is actually used.
The theory (a very sound one, based on internal observation) is that the strict "answers, not discussion" format is what attracts and retains high quality participants.
I really strongly believe that it's an either/or proposition, you either get discussion or you get quality answers to questions. Discussion "sucks the air out", so to speak.
And since there are already so many places for discussion on the internet, it's better for us to focus on Q&A.
Mobiles and tablets have such high resolution monitors nowadays they probably run without subpixel AA at all…