Slashdot Mirror

Usually "light pollution" is considered to be lighting up the sky.

See http://ch.dmoz.org/Society/Issues/Environment/Ligh t_Pollution/Regulation/ Yes, I campaign against this, but this is about very excessive quantities of light causing a nuisance to humans (and causing mortality of flora/fauna, human health problems (e.g.: cancer due to disruption of melatonin production), stopping astronomical observation &c), therefore is probably even more justified than current regulation of other wavelengths.

This is annoying. They can protect trademark without having to be assholes about it. If they sent a letter that stated their case and asked that the tag, "as popularized by the Google(tm) World Wide Web search engine" (or something like it) be added to avoid confusion, the sites would be in the clear and Google would come off looking (and smelling) like a champ.

I am always surprised how altruistic really-smart(tm) geeks and their projects are co-opted by the lawyers (I say take Shakespeare's advice... kidding). As a geek, in their place, I would be ashamed.

You can be a good person and extend that into successful businesses. It takes effort and a willingness to stay true to yourself. Hopefully the Google founders will catch on.

They could choose to fight some of the fights they've come across (the whole scientology and China things). Instead they take passive stabs. Annoying at best... dangerous also...

I say... stop using google for a week. Explore what else is out there. A significant drop in searches for an extended period of time might get noticed. You may even discover other search technologies out there that are more useful and more to your liking.

Use Dmoz.org as a first shot at the very least.

Why not also make mention of www.DMOZ.org a human created directory based on volunteers indexing a subject. Over 50,000 volunteers so far.

Another interesting engine is the Open Directory Project which has editors (anyone can be an editor) instead of being automated.

Is the internet, which can be used for almost anything besides transferring actual physical objects (wouldn't that be cool!)

• Z-Corp makes color 3-D printers that make plastic objects. These'll generally run you under $10k.
• Strata Sys makes stereolithography printers. More expensive, and not in color, but stronger. They're about $30k.
• EOS GmbH makes printers that make metal parts. You can print out replacement parts for your car, rocket ship, etc. (Warning - web site uses Flash, Mozilla-squashed popups, annoying no-copy PDFs) No mention of price on the site :-/

Maybe I'm missing some site, but I'm wondering why there aren't any big geek personals sites.

This /. thread, which I found quite funny, inspired to check out some of the sites and this made me ask why there is no geeks & nerds dating category at the ODP. There are a few sites on this in the ODP but no category specifically for it. So I decided to create one in my ODP bookmarks and add sites there if I notice any and/or when I have some of that strange concept, free time.

• Some similar stuff at the ODP geek category.

• Also see Sex Tips for Geeks (quite funny) by Eric S Raymond (of hacker fame).

The problem is simple. No flitering is perfect.
Why shouldn't kids from Scunthorpe be preveted from finding out about their home town? Or those doing research on birds finding out about the Blue Tit (or any of the other Tits?) Or reading this post, or yours?

Ok, the Open Directory Project is a huge directory of categorised websites, and has thousands of editors. It also has filters for "kids", "teens" and "mature teens". Isn't there some way to link filtering software with that - i.e. if a site isn't shown when you're searching ODP on the kids setting, then the connection isn't allowed unless you're an adult.

If a site is inappropriate but not in the directory, then someone at the library reports this and it gets added. On the other hand, if a site is needlessly blocked, that could also be reported and resolved. You could also hint to the large adult sites that it would be nice if they cooperated (e.g. endlessly cry "think of the children!" until they agreed).

Obviously it wouldn't be a perfect system, but it would be better than Net Nanny and the like, and open to much more scrutiny

[Flameproofing] Or alternatively, you could use one of the "truly Free" directories.

/me waits for someone to point out the fatal flaw in my idea ...

Google uses Dmoz as a pagerank source. Just submit your site through Google's forms, I've had stuff listed within 1-2 days.

It looks to me like Castle Technologies just happens to sell machines which have RISC OS on them. One of many companies in the UK.
Wouldn't the company in violation be RISCOS Ltd?

It seems like part of the problem is the history of styles and Opera. If I'm reading that right.

Data encrypted with secure methods does NOT depend on the underlying OS. Why encrypt anything, if you can just crack the OS?

Oh, wait, I forgot that encrypted data gets sent plain through emails, and is posted publically, and is used on public, non-secure systems. Doesn't dnet post the encrypted message, and offer rewards for cracking?

It doesn't matter is you crack the OS because properly secured data is not dependent on anything else.

This means that running it on anything but Linux is a bad idea, b/c you cannot read the source...

You realize Linux is just a kernel, right?

And not the only one?

(I realize I've probably been trolled, but...)

I agree that RSS is probably the most popular semantic web thingy at the moment.

However only RSS 1.0 is based on RDF and is a standard with an open committee in control, RSS 2.0 is plain XML and is controlled by Dave Winer...

One of the best collection of RSS resources is the one Ben Hammersley maintains on DMOZ.

> What's the problem with SQL

Fuller answer at The Third Manifesto, Database Debunkings and elsewhere.

But to cut a long story short, SQL does not support relational prescriptions as data independence (SQL views are not consistently updateable), nor respect relational proscriptions (undifferentiated NULLs), nor abide by the fundamental relational principles (pointers violate the Information Principle, OO extensions mess the simple domain, attribute, tuple, relation that is central to the relational model).

> on Mysql, precisely?

Its language is not proper SQL at all: it does not support transactions properly, nor has the necessary data types, and has been adding features kinda haphazardly without neither admitting to past mistakes nor presenting a clear roadmap to either SQL or the relational model. It should be called PseudoSQL, or SubSQL, or SimplerThanSQL.

Paul Di Filippo. -- For instance The Steampunk Trilogy. Great SF set in the Victorian era.

Kim Stanley Robinson -- Somehow writes hard SF and social SF at the same time. You can't miss the Red Mars series, a mastodontic saga about the terraforming of Mars.

Some other names to look out for is Ken MacLeod and Alastair Reynolds.

Hmmm, I don't know. Which do you use more, Google (search engine) or Open Directory Project (without the search engine into the directory)??? The advantage of a search engine over a directory (hierarchical file system, dmoz, whatever) only increase when the user submits some metadata when saving the file (google has very little metadata to work with).

There was recently a slashdot article about Distributed Proofreaders in support of Project Gutenburg. Volunteers proofread one page at a time from public domain books which have been scanned and OCRed.

The nice thing about these two is that you can spend as much or as little time as you would like. Have an hour a month? Thats fine. Want to spend 16 hours a day? You can. If you want to do less later or you just want to try it out, that is no problem.

There was recently a slashdot article about Distributed Proofreaders in support of Project Gutenburg. Volunteers proofread one page at a time from public domain books which have been scanned and OCRed.

The nice thing about these two is that you can spend as much or as little time as you would like. Have an hour a month? Thats fine. Want to spend 16 hours a day? You can. If you want to do less later or you just want to try it out, that is no problem.

...the variants of programming languages available to us. Just when you think you've got your "favorite" language pegged, along comes another to tempt and tease you. Just check out the dmoz.org site out for a list of programming languages. It's nuts!

...the variants of programming languages available to us. Just when you think you've got your "favorite" language pegged, along comes another to tempt and tease you. Just check out the dmoz.org site out for a list of programming languages. It's nuts!

The Corrupted Audio CDs category at the ODP has several background stories, many from /.

Try Google Directory. It's the same content from the Open Directory Project, but all googlified.

There is a national DMA opt out method (voluntary adherence, tho), but several legally enforcable state do not call lists you can enroll in.

I hit .biz's from time to time.

How do I know? I use OpenNIC which voted not to support ICANN's .biz TLD, as it conflicted with Pacific Root's prior implementation of the .biz TLD. Therefore, any of these .biz's for ICANN registered sites get me a nice unresolvable domain error. Granted, I don't think any of those .biz's were actually being used properly, but I still found them.

All the info you could posisbly need about the .biz dispute

The open directory project is part of your insurance in thise area. The open directory project maintains the largest link collection. If google were to go down, you would set your spider to all the links in the ODP as a starting point and create a new index. If you are really worried about this, grab the dump of all the urls and descriptions of dmoz. Some of us do this every month.

It works fine but here is address as a link.

XHTML intro

CSS intro (you don't want to use XHTML without CSS)

Javascript

Good luck.

Dmoz maintains a list of dead-end pages.

W e l l , I 'l l l e t y o u d e c i d e f o r y o u r s e l f .

Well, Acorn made the Archimedes (which, despite Apple's claims, was the first home computer to use a RISC processor) and then the RISC PC (a old 202Mhz model is sitting next to me at the moment) - just as they were about to launch the RISC PC II (aka Phoebe), Morgan-Stanley Dean Whitter decided that Acorn's shares in ARM Plc (the designers of a whole range of RISC processors - originally the company was called Acorn Risc Machines, then Advanced Risc Machines) were worth more than the company itself and the split the company up.

Most IP rights and staff went to Element 14, but the rights to the RISC OS operating system were sold to Pace who have sub-licenced the rights to RISC OS Ltd. The "Acorn" name and logo itself were sold off to Acorn's largest distributor Castle Technology.

More information is available.

I can only suggest the great wealth of links located at dmoz. There's pretty much everything you need to learn about the series and then some.

Adoption for mainstream in this context could also be defined as those that are creating software. Yes, there is good evidence of this, eg shops such as IBM and Sun have dontated -and use- considerably to the open source movement.

But 'open' and 'mainstream' imho, is more than just software.

Well, I guess you need an open protocol to start with. Mmmm. Maybe like http?

Then you need an open data format. Well, with all it's faults of mixing formatting with data, html could fit that bill.

So arguably, if you say that the web is mainstream, then you've satisfied much of the above.There are definitely open source implementations of these.

But why stop there? What about data that that software manipulates? Yes, there is evidence for that being 'open' as well, eg dmoz.org provides the categorized information used by (last time I looked) Google, AOL, etc. It's a dump with a fairly 'open' license on re-use. In the information retrieval and knowledge management world, there are such things as WordNet , again a collaboration amongst many people with a fairly open license
(Please no hate mail on the fact these are not GPL equivalents - it is merely to demonstrate a point)

The value of a piece of software is not just the programming - in some cases added value by data is even more valuable.

*cough* Arsenal *cough*

Here's a bunch of links.

The parent post is probably referring to the history of Australia and how convicts used to be sent there back in the 17/1800's. Hence how Australia used to be the "largest prison in the world". Obviously, it isn't anymore - but you can still insult Australians by asking if their ancestors had to pay to get there or had transport (the deportation). For more info, you may find these sites of use.

Yep, there is another C5. Specifically, Sir Clive Sinclair's (he of the ZX Spectrum 1980's computer fame) failed electric vechicle. The Segway and the Sinclair C5 have been compared to each other quite a bit here in Britain....

Although I'm not going to discount Soviet scientists, who definetly did have a really great grasp of higher mathematics, I don't see how you can say that a "design bureau" is functionally different than a corporation. Both are driven by greed, one for money, the other for power (which might as well be the same thing). That's not the same as a computer being made by "the people". If you want to talk about computers made by people, check out this list, and don't drag out something that's really got nothing to do with freedom.

Emulators like Power 64 (OS 9) and VICE (Win32, etc.) work very well if you feel nostalgic and would like to play with a virtual Commodore 64 again.

There is also a plethora of Commodore links over at dmoz that includes dozens of software archives containing everything ever released for the computer.

And if you just feel like talking about stuff like this the best place to hang out with the current Commodore community is over at the newsgroup comp.sys.cbm.

:>

Really. It still is pretty decent, though I find I use Google and others more now..

Open Directory Project beats the pants off Yahoo for topic/category searches.

Alari

http://dmoz.org/

Google uses it too.

deviantart does have some nice artwork, but it also has some really annoying features that distract from the art and make it suspect: popunders, silly icons, and an excess of spam.

When I first clicked on a thumbnail, I was like bracing myself for some stupid redirect. Is there really a picture here? Had I been coming from another resource like a directory I might have been inclined to back out.

How credible is the art in the context of deviantart.com? I associate user icons and graphics for emoticons with tweener sites, or sites designed to sell things to tweens. Some of the art definitely seemed juvenile to me, and if I had seen a different collection of thumbnails on the frontpage I might not have known that the site had anything of interest to adults.

I'm sure I'll be going back to deviantart.com, but probably only to keep tabs on a handful of artists that appeal to me. The site itself is definitely not doing a whole lot to promote the work in my view. They're providing bandwidth and a showcase and a forum--which is probably far more important to the artists than you realize--even if (or especially if) it's just like "Great pic, dude!" But the distractions are real and provide a strong disincentive to return.

Seul/Edu Educational Application Index
Suel.org Home Page
Dmoz.org Linux: Projects: Education
tux4kids

Yes - it is more important to have access to clean water, food on the table and a roof over your head than a computer that is hooked up to the Internet. However the two should not be mutually exclusive. In addition not having *access* to technology today will lead to increased inequality between individuals in developed and developing countries tomorrow. And access must comprise more than just computers and connections -> capacity to use the computer, the macro-economic environment and socio-cultural environments, integration of ICT in daily lives, relevant content ...

For those interested in more background material, dmoz offers a good starting point.

The file itself consists of some layers of fluff and pointers and indices and encoding not normally found in Postscript, but the rendering part that is used to paint the page in the end is pretty much Postscript. As far as I know it includes the whole Postscript programming language.

Close, but not quite. From what I've read, PDF is a subset of Postscript. Postscript is a Turing-complete Forth-like programming language which happens to have a lot of graphical stuff in it. PDF is a simpler page description language.

This is why Postscript files can always be converted to PDF, but especially tight and elegant Postscript programs (I would guess only hand-coded ones nowadays) will end up much larger as PDFs.

The DMOZ language descriptions page has more information about Postscript:

Postscript is a page description language developed by Adobe systems in the hope of providing a portable format that would use the best features of every system.

Postscript is a block structured procedural language that is similar to Forth.

Each postscript document is a computer program that when run produces the printed pages of the document.

Originally Adobe Systems intended for postscript documents to be fully portable between different printing devices, but certain computer companies insisted on including machine language routines in the documents produced by their systems and so the portability between different printers was lost.

In response, Adobe created the PDF format, which allows formatting to be tightly controlled on web and printed pages, but requires a special PDF viewer.

The field is more complicated than that. Saari has made a career out of pushing the Borda count. There are useful applications for it, but I pretty firmly believe public elections are not

It's a pity that Condorcet is ignored here, because he was da man. Condorcet's method kicks butt when compared to Borda and Approval (Approval is simpler to implement, though).

There's a whole bunch of links to articles like this one in the Voting System category in Netscape Open Directory.

Rob

Why oh why did you link to the New York one? Don't you know there are more?

There's also an effort to make a national one.

And don't forget the DMA lists.

Tablet PCs are touch screens with handwriting recognition that run software just like a desktop personal computer. Early designs have been released and the first generation of models are expected to hit the market in late 2002. read and learn more.

http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Issues/Eco nomic/Monopolies_and_Oligopolies/
http://dmoz.org/Society/Issues/Economic/Monopolies _and_Oligopolies/