Slashdot Mirror

• Arabic - Lots of question marks.
• Chinese Simplified - Lots of question marks.
• Chinese Traditional - Lots of question marks.
• German - Works!
• French - Works!
• Hebrew - Lots of question marks.
• Japanese - Lots of question marks.
• Polish - Mostly works, some question marks.
• Spanish - Works!
• Italian - Works!

I found no way to change your character set in either of these programs, although they may use your system's default character set.

Mozilla has no problem displaying any glyphs from these character sets on my computer. It would be nice if other Linux programs got to that point too. (I tested this by copying text from the World categories of the open directory project.)

I guess one place to start would be to figure out what type of computer games women do play. My wife, who is also a quite capable UNIX admin who still enjoys a game of spider , tetris and a few other old-school favorites. I've got a little girl who is bored with flight simulators and such, and prefers puzzle like games where she finds things or builds things.

In other words, from a programmer's perspective perhaps the problem is that games for girls just aren't as sexy or as wham-bam to write as games for guys? Perhaps it isn't as profitable to engage in writing these programs because its hard to dress them up and make them fly?

I mean my wife and I joke about this all the time. Here I want to conquer the world, and there she wants to make it more livable.

This really is a powerfull concept. A unified DB and FS.

How new. Let's PICK a way to do it.

--fred

Multi-User Dungeon
Multi-User Domain
Multi-User Dimension
Multiple User Domain
Multiple User Dialogue
Mauve Ugly Ducks ... and the list goes on.

Jouster

At Google, go to the "Directory" tab, or go to DMOZ.org (Open Directory) itself. DMOZ is bigger, better organized, has fewer broken links, no ads, and is built by hand by people who know their categories and are interested in keeping them linking only to sites with meaningful content.

First, I would suggest going directly to the categories at dmoz.org rather than the Google relistings. Google picks up revised RDF dumps from DMOZ whenever they please, but the lag in the cycle is pretty long. If you are looking for the "fresher" data, go directly to the source.

Second, DMOZ can become what you say it is only with proper editing. The project itself may list 50000+ editors, but they're volunteers and there is a lot of ground to cover. A large number of edits are made by those "high up" in the directory structure to "lower"/"deeper" categories less well understood. Certain branches of the project are neglected; others eat editors for breakfast with the amount of work that needs to be done. Volunteer and help out.

You may also want to investigate ChefMoz and MusicMoz, too.

We who are editors at dmoz hold a lot of power right now. Its time for you to share in some of that power. Head over to dmoz and apply to edit your favorite category.

Can't decide where to apply?

• How about editing the category for the kind of car that you own.
• How about editing the category for your favorite video game.
• Or maybe you are interested in some Band, Actor, or Author.

We who are editors at dmoz hold a lot of power right now. Its time for you to share in some of that power. Head over to dmoz and apply to edit your favorite category.

Can't decide where to apply?

• How about editing the category for the kind of car that you own.
• How about editing the category for your favorite video game.
• Or maybe you are interested in some Band, Actor, or Author.

We who are editors at dmoz hold a lot of power right now. Its time for you to share in some of that power. Head over to dmoz and apply to edit your favorite category.

Can't decide where to apply?

• How about editing the category for the kind of car that you own.
• How about editing the category for your favorite video game.
• Or maybe you are interested in some Band, Actor, or Author.

We who are editors at dmoz hold a lot of power right now. Its time for you to share in some of that power. Head over to dmoz and apply to edit your favorite category.

Can't decide where to apply?

• How about editing the category for the kind of car that you own.
• How about editing the category for your favorite video game.
• Or maybe you are interested in some Band, Actor, or Author.

We who are editors at dmoz hold a lot of power right now. Its time for you to share in some of that power. Head over to dmoz and apply to edit your favorite category.

Can't decide where to apply?

• How about editing the category for the kind of car that you own.
• How about editing the category for your favorite video game.
• Or maybe you are interested in some Band, Actor, or Author.

We who are editors at dmoz hold a lot of power right now. Its time for you to share in some of that power. Head over to dmoz and apply to edit your favorite category.

Can't decide where to apply?

• How about editing the category for the kind of car that you own.
• How about editing the category for your favorite video game.
• Or maybe you are interested in some Band, Actor, or Author.

Someone already mentioned multiproxy. Also check out Java Anonymous Proxy and Peekabooty. You seem kind of new to the game of paranoia. Why not just start here and do some reading.

It's important to understand exactly what these anonymous services get you and who and what they are protecting against so take some time and realistically educate yourself to the risks and threats.

Oh, and don't forget to check out Freenet

The Meta Description tag is copied from the "list this site" function in Open Directory when an editor adds a listing to a site (if there is one).

As such, it is the best chance you get to influence or possibly dictate the description listed in the Directory, as well as any directories it feeds. (Google Directories, AOL, and some other big ones.)

A well written meta description tag is likely to be left nearly intact by the editor. That allows you to include search terms in the description people might use to find your site. (The editor may not think of the same terms on their own.)

Any link you submit to Open Directory should have a description tag in it, including the home page or sub-subject oriented pages of your site.

Beyond the home page, I do not bother with meta-tags anymore, and tell web customers to not bother either. As far as I can tell, most search spiders rely on what a human would see to list content nowdays, so the best way to get good listings is to have a content-rich, well made site.

I still use meta-refresh tags occasionally for reorganizing sites or bouncing traffic off what would be a dead link. (Stupid marketing department does not proofread or think to check their URLs.)

Otherwise, meta tags are a waste of time. (Contact, copyright, author, and other information should be visible without viewing source code, in my opinion.)

here.

try here

I understand 7.3 will do replication natively so keep your eye out for it.

Postgres is no Oracle/DB2/MSSQL killer yet but it is gaining momentum, it's already quite feature rich and has a lot of the ground work done for Enterprise features that will appear in upcomming releases.

Small, portable, virtual-machine based, simple enough for kids to get started (and excited on) it's powerful enough for 'real stuff'. Check out the FAQ based on a Squeak Swiki.

Oh, and as Logo had Seymor Papert as 'the guy' behind it Squeak had Alan Kay who did lots of early work on 3D graphics, ARPAnet, windowing interfaces, modern oo programming, and inventor of the Dynabook.

> Such accusations are not very useful (nor friendly) without something more specific.

Sorry, but database field is too rich to give all the specifics in a Slashdot post. You can go to DB Debunk, Open Directory or Wiki Encyclopaedia for specifics: or better yet, buy An Introduction to Database Systems by Chris J Date.

And no, I was not caring to be much friendly. I believe people should educate themselves before publishing their thoughts to the world, and the database field has suffered much already from people who did not.

But just because you seem interested, a relational database is based on two-valued predicate logic, where predicates are expressed by n-tuples organized on relations, which are time-varying values of relation variables. This is what makes it so simple and powerful. If you break this model, as SQL did, you get something at the same time more complex and less powerful. Programming languages should adapt to it, not the other way round.

> building sets *into* the programming language may make inter-language info sharing harder

I fail to see that. Can you point to somewhere where this is demonstrated? On the contrary, if a programming language gets the relational elements right, they will be the same as in any other programming language that does the same. They would all get the data structures directly from the RDBMS. What that subtracts from tables? It is just higher level, because relations do not have ordering, duplicates, undifferentiated NULLs and all the inconsistencies of SQL.

> it would be interesting to see OO-like classes based on sets rather than trees.

Read The Third Manifesto, and make sure to buy the book too. A class, by definition, is a set. So it maps to data types on the programming language, and domains on the database. Not only maps in the sense of having some relation to, but they are identical. The inheritance thing is orthogonal, and should be done thru Specialisation by Constraint.

> Are you saying that the xBase approach is "flat"?

I said what I said, please read carefully. I said that more distant from relational than xBase would be OO and flat files, but that does not make xBase relational. It is what was called navigational in olden times. But you miss the point, because you have not yet grokked how distant SQL is from the relational model.

...and for those of you who want real HOWTOs, guides, etc., to make your own Lego-man picture essay, check these out:

here,
here,
here,
here, and
here

I am the editor for the category on DMOZ.

http://dmoz.org/Computers/Education/Hardware/HowTo s_and_Tutorials/Build_Your_Own_PC/

Any additional submissions would be more than welcome!

You are losing one of the primary advantages of using a "prototyping" language in the first place.

Just for the record, a "prototype-based language" has an actual meaning in the programming world (see: Self and Javascript), so it's sorta confusing to call Perl a "prototyping language" to me.

But whatever! Just thought you might want to know!

But if you want to play a wizard with the greatest magic system available to date, check Ars Magica (This link wasn't working at the time of writing. Hence the strange domain.)

A few great sites in the Open Directory Project

You forgot:

Phase 2: Soil Underpants, Sell on Internet

ANY search engine service that deliberately ignores META information deserves to be boycotted.

get you a 404-Not Found

Since you need to have links to your site from other sites to get rated highly in Google, it is almost impossible to get them, as people who may be interested in linking to your site won't find it on Google.

If you run a new site, you should submit it to the relevant category of www.dmoz.org, the open directory project. A listing in there gets you into Google within a month.

Also, marking up your site well - using <h1>...</h1> instead of <p><b>...</b></p>, for example - will work wonders: Google (and, I imagine, other engines) pays more attention to text in headings than body text.

It is great, that Mozilla progresses and that Slashdot supports the work by directing traffic to their site. But I really hope that /. could give other and new browser projects coverage as well. Many of them have innovative ideas, and potential, and probably would not mind a few more volunteer developers. Slashdot is in great position to give these too the needed momentum. Why don't you release an article about one of them today already?

A little off topic but relevant to above post....

When you have people using FM spectrum for free you get a much wider variety of music played by people who really care. No ads, and no endless soft rock (unless the DJ wants to play soft rock...)

check out Pirate Radio for more.

There are 5 replication products listed for PostgreSQL in dmoz. At least one, pgreplicator seems mature. Has anyone used it?

And the shuttle design we have now, the one with the horrible semi-reusable solid fuel boosters and the ultra-expensive non-reusable tank was a political compromise due entirely to budget cuts and funding limits. The real shuttle design was fully reusable and much safer: no uncontrollable solid boosters to blow up.

Slashdot has proved to be an excellent resource for links to the Buran's design. Thanks slashdotters!

Well, I have this question about the American shuttle's design compromises. I have heard that political pressure from the USAF, and the military-industrial complex, resulted in a larger shuttle, capable of carrying larger, military payloads. I read that a smaller shuttle would have been cheaper to build and run.

True?

Safety? The Burans had four ejection seats.

The Buran could have carried five times the payload of the American shuttle.

Well, Cliff,

There's plenty of good stuff out there, but you'll have to do some editing. As somebody who grew up around teachers and has worked in textbook publishing I can assure you that teachers all have to do it too. Their stuff sucks far worse than anything referenced here.

While Project Gutenberg is great, you should also check out on-line encyclopedias like NuPedia, and Everything2 which are all open source, as is The Open Directory Project . A great source of fiction, which can be a wonderful learning tool, is Baen Books who have put hundreds of book online and are eager to have them downloaded and spread around.

For science materials, there are lots of great sites for kids done by educators pursuing whever they're into. All of which you'll want to use to spice up access to sites like Science Daily that are handy but a bit too serious some days for young minds.

Which brings me to Make Stuff which should fill in quite nicely for the "arts and crafts" part of most school curricula.

For biography I'ld check out American National Biography and for history a good start can be made with pages like Anyday which can be amazing or useless, all based on where *you* go from the starting point that they provide. Places like Colonial America are designed just for this but again, check out more than one.

For reference material you should check out Theodora which, while not meant to be open source, is very handy, Geographic.Org, which is open source and student-oriented, should do the rest. I've found that the CIA sourcebook is terrible, as folk should have long since figured out. Biased, misinformed, and sometimes just wierd; leave it behind. However if you hunt you'll find that within various.gov sites there's tons of great stuff, from manuals on camping to stuff on solar panels.

The space science community is very kid friendly, from NASA down to the local Mars Society chapter, having plenty of materials on quite a range of topics that you're free to reproduce and spread around. If you can handle it, the neopagan community is reliably eager to provide information and links on ancient indo-european history, from the government of Sumeria, to Celtic ironwork. (You might be surprised at how many neopagans have advanced degrees in history and/or literature.)

Speaking of limits, you'll always have to be careful that your kids aren't ending up places they shouldn't be but again, every teacher and librarian faces that one.

Lastly, the reason that I've got all this ready to hand is that I took it from my source database, more of which can be found on my web site, which is primarily oriented towards adults and older kids but does have plenty of other links like the ones here.

Best of luck to you and be sure to post back to slashdot in a few years about how it's going.

Rustin H. Wright - Information Geek
"It's all about the information, Marty. Little ones and zeros!"

A very efficient way of boosting your google ranking is to be listed on the DMOZ Open Directory Project. Google gives so much importance to listings there, so it is a good idea to try your best to be listed there.

Also, since Google works by checking the links to you, it's a good idea to go through your web server logs to find which are the pages which are linking to you. Submit those to as many search engines as you can afford to. Besides having Google seeing more links to you, more people would be entering that page which is linking to you, and thus more people are likely to click on your link. Hence more hits!

He says:

I do not have access to Google's page ranking technology, and apart from some partial details on their site, they keep their ranking techniques tight lipped to avoid intentional rank manipulating. As such, everything I say in this article is purely speculative based upon analysis of search results for various terms and phrases

No details? They published the algorithm in 1999! If he looked it up, he would have understood PageRank is a page-to-page relationship (not site-to-site), and avoided the idiotic statement "Is it really a democracy that every page on these megalinked aggregate sites become premiere voices of their topic?".

Apparently, this moron didn't even search Google -- the paper is the third result for a search on "PageRank". Why are we taking search engine advice from some imbecile who doesn't use search engines?

The Google team publishes more inside information than any search engine. There's a whole ODP category for Google research papers.

To put that into perspective, there are some 750 pages dealing with mantids that are linked from Google, and that limit is simply because that's the maximum results that Google will return for a particular search term.

That's not even true. Google will return up to 1000 results in a search. Can this guy even count?

There are a lot of better resources about Google on the Web. Why did Slashdot go with this guy?

Just a shameless plug here for the Open Directory Project. Leaving aside occasional occurances of editor-fraud or editor-abuse (which are quickly tracked down by the meta-editors), this is the best way to determine a site's real value.

A human looking at the page to subjectively/objectively determine its value is something that can't be replaced by a spider and an AI program.

URL cloaking, hidden text, keyword tricks, etc... don't matter. =)

-jc

Internet Ninja, smart of you to point out the Google-Sets based visualization. I think that this dataset is potentially even more interesting then web-pages.

The only problem with Google-Sets, is that they were designed to be used with multiple search terms, not a single seed. Thus the data returned is often noisy, as can be seen by people questioning the links.

Wouldn't it be cool if Google's data were cleaned up enough that you could determine the exact degree of relatedness between any two concepts? That way, any area of interest could be mapped using a graphing tool like TouchGraph. And mapped in real time too, I am still getting around to generating a cronological record of how relationships between publications change over time.

My feeling is that this cleanup will happen, and visualizing the results will be the motivation for doing so. A text based list of similar items disguises the errors in the ranking because readers don't give that much importance to the order of appearance. A graph on the other hand can show hundereds of associations as opposed to 20 or so items that are usually shown in a list. Thus, a graph magnifies the errors in calculated similarity degrees, which makes it a powerful tool for improving the formulas involved in the calculations.

There is much more to be said about TouchGraph, but there will be more supporting material to say it later, so let me just finish with a couple of links.

Amazon has also released an API, and an TouchGraph powered Amazon Browser is in the works for that. Screen-shot
Work is being done to integrate the TGGoogleBrowser with the ODP and to represent hierarchical information using background colors.
More information about future devolompents is available via this thread on Webmaster World

Thanks, --Alex

Nope. The best path to geosynchronous orbit is not a straight line. You conserve fuel and pick the desired longitude by beginning with an elliptical orbit.

I'm a liberal/socialist, no commie tho. Help me. Read my journal.

So in addition to your misunderstanding of physics, you don't get human nature, economics, or spelling? At least you recognize that you need help. That's the first step.

There are some LAFs available. Personally, I like the Metal theme. Although the Windows LAF isn't perfect, I like it best.

As an aside, I found helpdesk.com by trying the old www.YOUR_SEARCH_HERE.com approach (introduced to me when a friend wanted to find information on boobs.

Know of any more? Submit the URL and I'll take care of them.
Find any on that list that are are no longer free? Email me or update the URL and I'll take care of it.

The Alphora Dataphor DAE is the first relational database management system since IBM BS12 and the QUEL version of Postgres.

It was coded for MS .Net, thus it should be readily portable to Ximian Mono or GNUs & Southern Storms DotGNU Portable.Net.

If such a potentially useful software became publicized and free software, we could have a really innovating no Marketspeak intended , probably killer application the proprietary vendors would have a hard time scrambling after.

And that with unreprochable theoretical foundations attested by the luminars of the field.

Defining a 'best' in electronic music is like defining a 'best' in rock....Electronic music has the most sub-genres of any music type I know of. Nevertheless, there are the major categories, but keep in mind that often the most talented artists do not confine their music to one type alone.

The most well known word for electronic music is probably techno, however techno != electronic, rather it is a type of electronic popular earlier in the 90s, while electronic music was growing more mainstream. You'll most often hear (for subgenres):

Techno | Trance | Drum n' Bass | Breakbeat | House | Jungle | Industrial | Ambient | Chill

often used with the modifiers 'hard', 'acid', or 'progressive' as in hard house, or progressive trance. In a lot of ways, these are self-explanatory...hard means that the music is rougher, and is usually faster paced; drum n bass consists of drum beats and heavy basslines.

Everyone here will try to tell you the best artist to listen to....but I can tell you for sure that I know no two people with the same taste in electronic music. You really have to discover for yourself the kind that interests you most. I suggest listening to some generic online radio if you want to know the mainstream electronica, most of which is a carryover from europe's tech-pop eurotrash trance. That's where you'll find the names most people will refer to you.

However, the best way to discover electronic music is to support your local scene. I would list true local websites, but being low-budget community supported as they are, I wouldn't subject them to the bandwidth of the slightest slashdotting. You can, however, find your nearest real record store (good electronic comes out on analog lps for real djs) and they will be happy to direct you to flyers and websites informing you of local happenings. Go out and hear some of your best local djs, and truly experience the music for yourself (many djs of different styles will play in the same night) - that will be the fastest path to knowing your interests. Also, once you find a dj you like, find out his/her influences, and that will point you to some excellent (lesser-known?) artists.

Some of the best cuts are the hardest to find, but there's a ton of great music out there. I wish you (all) luck, and PLUR!!

If you have a duel machine...

Somebody watching Revolutionary Girl Utena a little too much recently?

Before starting out, I know this is lame, but it's my closeest brush with easter egging.

Well, I recall popping some in on a high school's website during a period when I was involved there. Seeing there wasn't much scope to put in output HTML except for maybe an Open Directory implementation I chucked on one day, I found it was quite easy to put in stuff in the HTTP headers of Perl and ASP scripts...

Along with a website archive from that era, the perl script with the second longest easter egg resides elsewhere. :) I even figured out how to get to mention marijuana on a school website without trouble. Ah, the days. Hmmm. I'm babbling now so Ill shut up.

...by an Italian, as recently recognized by the U.S. House of Representatives.

And what about another wireless communication inventor

The most fuel efficient car you can get in the US is still the Hybrid Electtric Honda Insight. I have about 63 mpg average over the two years that I've had mine.

Have you checked Netflix's anime section? What about other DVD mailers?

What are you doing to prevent the new generation of more sophisticated search engine spammers- spammers that use advanced software such as WebPosition Pro, spammers that feed fake pages to the Google crawler, spammers that make bogus link pages to their own sites? Doesn't this new level of sophistication on their part mean that in large part Google must emphasize human website reviewers, such as those provided by the Open Directory Project, to a greater degree?

I can imagine so. Not only because you can probably consider all individual map- and texture-makers working in an "almost open-source" environment already. Sure, there might have been some debate recently over who owns mods created for a specific game, but on the whole game designers seem to encourage this kind of behavior by not restricting mod creation too unreasonably. We can only hope Verant doesn't become a big player in moddable games.

Some might say some open-source games to be fairly pretty already. Admittedly, there aren't many open-source 3-D games out there, but the more people can use a 3-D engine the better they get -- like pretty much anything -- so we have only good things to look forward to.

Well, we also have bad things to look forward to until then, but we've always had to deal with this anyway.

If I produce software, music, or writings, these are the results of my work and efforts, and nobody is entitled to steal them! Hell yeah if someone where to take the master tapes and recordings leaving you with just the happy memories of the hours you spend in a recording studio (if you still make music becouse you like doing it that is!) That would suck, that would be plain theft. And it is not that far from what some recording companies do with some of their less valued artists. Ie everyone who works their ass of making music and sees most of their money disapear in martketing britney to ten year olds. This while if said coorporations actually looked at the numbers the riaa gives them in research they paid for instead of making "piracy numbers" up to get the dmca-v2 trough, then they would see these ten year olds are not the most likely demographic to buy cd`s, (thats the >20 group btw)

So, the recording companies need to stop thinking of their job as selling cd`s but rather think of it a licencing music and distributing it in any way they customers want it. They could stop the mafia pratices amongst artists, just to see what heapons

If no-one would buy them over $10, the producers would have to lower their prices, simple law of supply and demand.Yesss. but now enter the world of "intelectual property", the whole point of copyright is to provide a "limited" monopoly on a particulair work, do you see any of this magical "same product, ten bucks cheaper" competition for microsoft? Same goes for music, there is no competition amongst these, let alone a supply-and-demand kind of relation. I think its time to discus these limitation on copyright monopolies, and to discus it withous listening to huge copyright holders who simply claim every bit of income they lose in due to "piracy" without even looking if they might simply be having problems with the price/quality of their products (like getting diverse artist to atract a big audiance, instead of marketing the one-size-fits-all,if you push britney bands to everyone).

Venues for...
Television theme songs
High-quality bootlegs for bands that permit concert taping

This comment is probably too late to be noticed, but more reviews can be found here and here.

argggg, the riaa does *not* screw the artists, thats the job of the bigger-then-the-empire-state-building labels they represent!(they do most defnantly not represent smaller labels, they cant affort the fees)

These five are the ones screwing artist, they own the copyrights to the recordings, they pay the production cost, they pay the artist they cant afford to lose everything they ask for(bling,bling), they pay the whats left to the rest of their artist after managment and their marketing contractors have had their cut ofcourse. They rather "invest" in martketing the playbacking "teenager" + drumcomputer of the month which they think is attractive for a broad audiance (ie everythng age the statistis the riaa collects for them they would know its the male,age >30 people who buy records, and they like "real" music ;-)