Slashdot Mirror

Well, I certainly don't want to be considered to be a troll, but here goes anyway.

The problem is we have a relatively small number of Star Wars/Lucas haters that speak very loudly on Slashdot and they speak out of proportion of the general population.

I'm assuming that they didn't like Episodes I and II for various reasons (some more emotional than anything else), and they are desperate to get others to feel the same way. Their fantasy is that if they say it enough, people will start to believe them and a whole movement will rise up and picket Star Wars movies or something. Ticket sales will drop and people will be burning Special Edition DVDs in the streets. Then George Lucas will fly the Star-Wars-hater who wrote the most vitriolic post on Slashdot first class to California to meet him at Skywalker Ranch, where he'll plea with them to write the new movies and beg for forgiveness for their perceived criticisms. The begging will give way to soft music and gentle romance ...

Or something like that.

Well, it isn't going to happen. The fact of the matter is the silent majority of people enjoyed the movies quite a bit. It's been said before the Episodes I and II are the same general quality as Episodes IV, V, and VI.

> Millions? Find 5 people total who liked either episode 1 or 2,
> they don't even have to like both. I challenge you.

I don't even have to do that. Look at Alexa.com. Star Wars.com is ranked 1,146th, while Slashdot (which, surprising at it seems, does have non-Star Wars-hating content, so it's still not a fair comparison) is 1,391th. So even if 50% of the stories on Slashdot were about how horrible Lucas is, you still have a lot more people who think a few people are blowing things out of proportion, and just want to enjoy a movie [1]. That is to say Star Wars.com has far more people visiting it (and I presume they're not visiting to keep their anger and hate fresh) than technology enthusiasts are currently visiting Slashdot, where only a small fraction of the stories are related to Star Wars.

Another data point: Episodes I, II, IV, V, and VI have done about the same in box office dollars. So people aren't staying away in droves like the Star-Wars-haters would like to believe. Screaming "Greedo did NOT shoot first!" doesn't make you [2] sound any more intelligent.

Basically all the Star Wars-hating is a tempest in a tea cup. If you disagree, fine, but don't feel like you have to post your vitriol in every Star Wars story that gets posted on Slashdot. Remember, the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. So if Lucas has really ruined the franchise, you shouldn't care and you shouldn't be posting on a Slashdot Star Wars story anyway. Then you can ignore me.

Or mod me as a troll.

[1] I am of course not suggesting that just because millions of people enjoy Star Wars makes it a good series movies. I am saying that a dozen or so screaming Lucas-haters does not make it a bad set of movies.

[2] Obviously I'm using you in the plural sense meaning not just the poster, but the Star-Wars-haters in general.

Well, I certainly don't want to be considered to be a troll, but here goes anyway.

The problem is we have a relatively small number of Star Wars/Lucas haters that speak very loudly on Slashdot and they speak out of proportion of the general population.

I'm assuming that they didn't like Episodes I and II for various reasons (some more emotional than anything else), and they are desperate to get others to feel the same way. Their fantasy is that if they say it enough, people will start to believe them and a whole movement will rise up and picket Star Wars movies or something. Ticket sales will drop and people will be burning Special Edition DVDs in the streets. Then George Lucas will fly the Star-Wars-hater who wrote the most vitriolic post on Slashdot first class to California to meet him at Skywalker Ranch, where he'll plea with them to write the new movies and beg for forgiveness for their perceived criticisms. The begging will give way to soft music and gentle romance ...

Or something like that.

Well, it isn't going to happen. The fact of the matter is the silent majority of people enjoyed the movies quite a bit. It's been said before the Episodes I and II are the same general quality as Episodes IV, V, and VI.

> Millions? Find 5 people total who liked either episode 1 or 2,
> they don't even have to like both. I challenge you.

I don't even have to do that. Look at Alexa.com. Star Wars.com is ranked 1,146th, while Slashdot (which, surprising at it seems, does have non-Star Wars-hating content, so it's still not a fair comparison) is 1,391th. So even if 50% of the stories on Slashdot were about how horrible Lucas is, you still have a lot more people who think a few people are blowing things out of proportion, and just want to enjoy a movie [1]. That is to say Star Wars.com has far more people visiting it (and I presume they're not visiting to keep their anger and hate fresh) than technology enthusiasts are currently visiting Slashdot, where only a small fraction of the stories are related to Star Wars.

Another data point: Episodes I, II, IV, V, and VI have done about the same in box office dollars. So people aren't staying away in droves like the Star-Wars-haters would like to believe. Screaming "Greedo did NOT shoot first!" doesn't make you [2] sound any more intelligent.

Basically all the Star Wars-hating is a tempest in a tea cup. If you disagree, fine, but don't feel like you have to post your vitriol in every Star Wars story that gets posted on Slashdot. Remember, the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. So if Lucas has really ruined the franchise, you shouldn't care and you shouldn't be posting on a Slashdot Star Wars story anyway. Then you can ignore me.

Or mod me as a troll.

[1] I am of course not suggesting that just because millions of people enjoy Star Wars makes it a good series movies. I am saying that a dozen or so screaming Lucas-haters does not make it a bad set of movies.

[2] Obviously I'm using you in the plural sense meaning not just the poster, but the Star-Wars-haters in general.

I've said it before, but it is important enough to be worth repeating.

The Wikimedia project that runs Wikipedia and other sites desperately needs more people to help [spymac.com] run the site. Both to develop the software and administer the servers. The growth of Wikipedia is phenomenal and traffic is increasing at a rapid pace. However, without proper planning, the system will not be able to keep up with demand. The site gets over 80 million hits a day, so it would certainly be an interesting project to work on from a technical standpoint. Oh, and did I forget to say it runs on Linux?

The other thing that Sanger misses in his "hey look I used to be important in this thing too" essay is that that what Wikipedia needs most is better referencing of facts. The only criticism left of Wikipedia is the percieved lack of reliability. The best (only?) way to combat this is to cite individual facts to the most authoritative source available. With that Wikipedia can be more reliable than any other single source available. Not perfect, because someone can dispute any fact, but Wikipedia might be able to be the best out there at it. There is certainly a lot of work going on in this area, but also many who write on Wikipedia fail to see the writing on the wall and reallize this really is the only valid criticism left. There are a number of projects working to organize and solve this problem, see the project on verifiability for one.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? &range=2y&size=medium&compare_sites=&y=r&url=mozil la.org

i'm wondering if the recent improvements to MSIE have reduced the incentive to install firefox?

p.

I believe Alexa shows traffic in their site info when you search for certain sites. Don't know about bandwidth used though.

p0rn ads on NASA? That'd be odd...

I, for one, welcome our geeky Free One Day Pass overlords. Weirdest Lego-block-composed ad ever (from what I saw).

The about page on archive.org states they received funding from 'Alexa Internet' http://www.alexa.com/. Is this the same Alexa that is known for spyware applications?

Many of you were probably already aware Wikipedia had reached 500,000 articles. What may be of even more interest to many Slashdot readers though is that the Wikimedia project that runs Wikipedia and other sites desperately needs more people to help run the site. Both to develop the software and administer the servers. The growth of Wikipedia is phenomenal and traffic is increasing at a rapid pace. However, without proper planning, the system will not be able to keep up with demand. The site gets over 80 million hits a day, so it would certainly be an interesting project to work on from a technical standpoint. Oh, and did I forget to say it runs on Linux?

The other thing Wikipedia needs most is better referencing of facts. The only criticism left of Wikipedia is the percieved lack of reliability. The best (only?) way to combat this is to cite individual facts to the most authoritative source available. With that Wikipedia can be more reliable than any other single source available. Not perfect, because someone can dispute any fact, but Wikipedia might be able to be the best out there at it. There is certainly a lot of work going on in this area, but also many who write on Wikipedia fail to see the writing on the wall and reallize this really is the only valid criticism left. I for one am promoting work on a list of Wikipedia's otherwise best articles that do not cite their sources properly. If you want to contribute to something, researching and citing facts in these articles could be one of the most valuable things you could do.

MIME-encoded text, actually. Which can be a pain-in-the-ass to deal with, especially for attachments.

mbox formatting doesn't care about the format of the text inside a text message. MIME is a standard, but it's just text in the end, so it gets stored into mbox-formatted files just fine.

As for attachments, yes, MIME is the RFC-compliant internet standard for storing attachments. So you should store them that way, and use any of a number of utilities conversant in this standard for extracting them as needed. Two alternatives are to either store them in decoded form (which is fine), or use some proprietary format (which is worse). If you store them in decoded form, then some structure will be necessary for storing them separately so that they can be easily matched with letters. It should be pretty easy to come up with a convenient format. My predisposition would be towards making a directory for each mbox file (perhaps with a .d suffix instead of .txt), with a subdirectory for each letter that contains attachments, and the decoded attachments in the subdirectory. To make them easy to carry around, you could zip or tar them up.

On the other other hand, you could use a format which is trying to become an internet standard, and is making some headway in that direction -- ARC format, which was made for archiving documents of various formats into a standard format. It's a little harder to manipulate than simple text files, though. Its complexity has discouraged casual home use, though many libraries, universities, and companies are adopting it for their archives.

-- TTK

That's a silly question. Several of our servers reach 2Gb of logs in 12 hours with normal access.

There are a set of 15 mirrored servers, which serve one site, where each server would collect 2Gb of log files in approximately 6 hours. I won't link to the site itself (adult), but Here is the Alexa reference. It's rough hosting a site that's one of the largest on the Internet.

If we need the logs on a temporary basis (like for abuse monitoring), we 'cat /dev/null > logfile' every couple hours. Otherwise, we don't even keep the logs at all.

I like the sites, where we have the luxury of keeping logs, and it doesn't take forever to grep them for interesting things. My own site is frequented by interesting agencies daily. That's all I read the logs for any more. The NSA and CIA visited on Feb 9th. We have a few regular readers at the Department of Homeland Security. It's no secret, We say "Hi" once in a while. :)

http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites?ts_mode=glo bal&lang=none

they are quite visible. In global top 20 web sites, 6 sites are chinese web sites.

Something like that, yes: Alexa's statistics

That is nothing you should worry about - Wikipedia's traffic is much, much higher than that of slashdot, so the idea that Wikipedia could be slashdotted is just as nonsensical as slashdotting, say, Google.

I would also look for prior art in Alexa's existing patents and public software. In the latter case, I believe zBubbles, Alexa Internet's comparison shopping tool from 1999/2000, did dynamic linking from pages to products, going so far as to insert product links (bubbles) into pages as the user visits them.

Here's a description of zBubbles from the Motley Fool, 3 Jan 2000:

After you download zBubbles, whenever you visit a commerce site that the software is programmed to compare against, a small icon in the corner of your Web browser changes color. Then, next to the product that you're viewing, small Z icons appear. When you click an icon, a "bubble" pops up to cover one-fifth of your screen. The bubble shows you where else you can buy the product, or related products, and it links to websites that may offer a cheaper price or even a better product. The bubble also tells you if Amazon sells the product and, if it does, you can buy the product from Amazon without leaving the site you're visiting. (It also links to customer product reviews housed on Amazon.)

If that's the case, then what happens to things like Amazon's Alexa? They put out a toolbar specifically TO track where you go (and they don't try to hide it in the least), for the purpose of tracking website popularity.

Somehow, I don't think they'll even notice a slashdotting.

That would be funnier if Wikipedia's traffic rank wasn't ten times as high as that of Slashdot. :)

I would very much disagree; a well written indexable site *can* be taken to the top of any engine, but googles algorithm as well as those of yahoo and msn are based most predominently on the number of incoming links and the anchortext they use (hence the former effectiveness of the googlebomb). The engines judge a site by a faulty, manipulation prone metric, and poeple, as people often do, exploit this.
If I were to guess, I would think that the first engine to use those fancy BSO plugins to judge where people go (as opposed to where people link) would take the market...compare the alexa sorting of dmoz to that of google and it become appeart real quickly that visitors are a less faulty metric then pagerank.
As an unfortunate aside, I think that M$ will trump google here, they have a potentially better dataset to draw from (windows IE integration as opposed to a google toolbar), and a move in this direction would temporarily lesson advertising revenue as advertisers saw increase placement (googles only customer, a small portion of microsofts revenue)

It seems Google has been linking to answers.com for a little while for select users. Over the past few weeks, I was occasionally sent there. It appears to have started in January, judging from the Alexa data.

They are still experimenting with putting Google Image search on the front page. I experienced this last night when Google showed me this page.

Finally, I don't really like the new Google invite text box, I think it makes the interface a little ugly. And why must they switch it every month? I swear, that is like the dozenth place I've seen it.

Alexa.com. That means that ebaumsworld.com is about the 500th most visited site on the Internet, and Slashdot is around the 1000th most visited. Look here. It's a useful tool, as far as you want to trust their statistics (probably not too far).

Slashdot is a mighty beast which I would never wish upon a man's sever, but its traffic is a joke to the big boys.

Slashdot is a mighty beast which I would never wish upon a man's sever, but its traffic is a joke to the big boys.

Slashdot is a mighty beast which I would never wish upon a man's sever, but its traffic is a joke to the big boys.

Slashdot is a mighty beast which I would never wish upon a man's sever, but its traffic is a joke to the big boys.

Slashdot is a mighty beast which I would never wish upon a man's sever, but its traffic is a joke to the big boys.

even better is the fact that xanga gets far more traffic than either one. Imagine what would happen if THEY blacked out. :o

You do realize that LiveJournal handles far more traffic than Slashdot, and when Slashdot got linked on the front page of LJ, Slashdot started spewing out errors (more than normal).

Oh hey, Slashdot just went down as I was typing this. Smooth.

Alexa's page ranking also puts Wikipedia well above Slashdot.

Whilst I don't doubt that wikipedia is useful to a far wider audience (and receives more hits) than slashdot, your logic neglects to take into account where alexa's page ranking comes from. It is apparently taken from "aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users" - is the proportion of slashdot visitors with this toolbar going to be lower than that for wikipedia or other sites, given slashdot's target audience?

Now, if you want to get more interesting, Yahoo! Japan got us pretty well once or twice after linking to something from their front page, which gave more than 400 extra hits per second; we survived. :)

Alexa's page ranking also puts Wikipedia well above Slashdot.

I can believe it, just look at this graph.

MS would lose very little if everybody switched to Firefox.

How much business could Apple be loosing through misdirections to this site? Lets find out.

Small traffic...

Hmmmmmmm

Not only gee-whizzy, but also browser-slow-downin'. Whenever I open a page with a default-sized photo on Flickr, my browser (whether Firefox or IE) takes about 1-2 seconds to 'digest' the page. But this is technology -- it can be changed. The service they provide IS good and VERY popular.

For the record: for several hours this was top news on the front page of aftonbladet.se, the most visited Swedish news site, with the headline "Don't use Internet Explorer". Hopefully at least a few people followed their link to mozilla.org...

It appears that the Wikipedia is doing a rather better job of meeting the needs of readers to find information than the Encyclopedia Britannica is online. To the tune of ten times the number of page views as Britannica.com. Readers are voting with their feet and the winner isn't EB.

It appears that the Wikipedia is doing a rather better job of meeting the needs of readers to find information than the Encyclopedia Britannica is online. To the tune of ten times the number of page views as Britannica.com. Readers are voting with their feet and the winner isn't EB.

Can you guys explain why your site was getting so much more traffic this time last year as opposed to this year?

I can take a guess at outside sources linking to Penny Arcade and your first Child's Play, but that doesn't seem to account for the steady slide that's being going on this year.

Thanks for the strip, by the way!

Well, according to Alexa, slashdot's going to win. Of course, PA does have some impressive servers, and I doubt everyone will click-through...

And, the Flash is faster. I mean, c'mon. He's the FLASH.

unless the author of this sensational article reviewed their httpd logs for the user agent 'msnbot' clear back to 2003, they have not ruled out the possibility that microsoft's spider simply crawled the site in question, before msn search was a tech news feature. brett tabke's webmasterworld forums mention sitings of msrbot from microsoft in april 2003, and widespread msnbot activity starting december 2003. its also possible that microsoft seeded their search index by licensing it from a comparable index source, e.g. the alexa crawl.

Linux is a good choice for a supercomputing cluster? No shit sherlocks. This isn't front page news, it's barely news at all. No wonder readership figures are declining.

This is lame, this isn't even interesting, I assume slashdot is being paid for this product placement? I've a mind to join these people and find a site that has actual news, instead of this crappy engadget clone that slashdot has now become.

Loads of people in this thread think they know enough to not even read the fucking article. Not that it's a particularly interesting story as such, but at least know whereof you speak. No wonder this is happening.

Another Star Wars story so slashdotters can complain about how Lucas raped their childhood. Is it any wonder this is happening?

The imilly site is just a shill for Alexa. Just check out the class action lawsuit (on Alexa's own site) as well as http://simplythebest.net/info/spyware/alexa_spywar e.html, http://www.ntcompatible.com/story6200.html, and http://www.barbarabrabec.com/homebiz/computer_Alex a_IE_crashproblem.htm to name a few. Face it: Alexa has a very long and ugly history of spyware.

Dear CharlesDonHall: THINK! Why do you think an outfit such as Alexa provides a built-in web search? To give you something with no strings attached? To say "sorry about all that spyware in the past, see we are nice folks now". No they setup yet another service to SPY ON YOU!

And microsoft lets them ... not because people were urging microsoft to provide them with yet another Alexa experience. The fact that Microsoft gives you a builtin "feature" to download the Alexa toolbar just shows where their prioritie$ lie.

Harmless indeed!

Peroutka's site gets more traffic than Nader's too.

"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."

George Orwell - Animal Farm

BTW look at the media blackout,

cnn1 cnn2

nader

alexabadnarik alexanader

I could see maybe 5 or 10 mentions on CNN but ZERO? zilch, nada. Yet 523 seperate items on nader. Then compare the alexa links, put in votenader.org on the compare sites.(Wouldn't let me do it via a link)

"All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others."

George Orwell - Animal Farm

BTW look at the media blackout,

cnn1 cnn2

nader

alexabadnarik alexanader

I could see maybe 5 or 10 mentions on CNN but ZERO? zilch, nada. Yet 523 seperate items on nader. Then compare the alexa links, put in votenader.org on the compare sites.(Wouldn't let me do it via a link)

Here is a comparison of the traffic levels.

On the one hand I'm mortified that I clicked the link before I recognized the name as being that of the data aggregator I've scraped off so many computers, on the other i'm fascinated by the relative levels tracked.

Here is a comparison of the traffic levels.

On the one hand I'm mortified that I clicked the link before I recognized the name as being that of the data aggregator I've scraped off so many computers, on the other i'm fascinated by the relative levels tracked.

Here is a comparison of the traffic levels.

Whoops, that's a typo. It should be this. Sorry.