Slashdot Mirror

• start with "I just heard some sad news on talk radio"; "listening" doesn't scan corectly
  
• follow with the 'no details' bit, even if there were details
  
• then the 'contributions' sentence, qualified with the "even if you didn't enjoy" (possibly with "agree" substituting for "enjoy")
  
• and ending with the "Truly a(n) _______ icon.
  

http://www.livejournal.com/users/groklaw/40692.htm l

Sun's quality of support is excellent, and we're willing to pay for it.

The insanely-expensive and ridiculously badly-written vertical-market software we run on it, on the other hand ...

Diva's Law: The quality of software is inversely proportional to sticker price.

Personally, I'm just going to use jwz's new script for all my communications:

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."

http://jwz.livejournal.com/256229.html

Yes, and we can see the relationship in the field of software: where the quality of software is inversely proportional to the sticker price.

Metafilter
Les Jones
Bruce Landon - landonline
City Comforts Blog
Marginal Revolution
Long story; short pier
Tom Maszerowski on Livejournal
bbCity.co.uk

This doesn't make any sense, to take a small, profitable bit of software (not profitable enough to offset bandwidth charges perhaps but it was making money) and then start giving it away-- this is obviously a move to kill the marketshare of products like Movable Type which has a commercial and non-commercial license and Radio Userland which I think is purely commercial-- so that users will use Google's blogging system in preference to probably AOL Journals, another free system that seeks to wipe-out the marketshare of another popular blogging or "Journal" system, LiveJournal .

I'm not saying that competition is bad-- but history has shown us that anyone giving something away of a class that was previously valued for real money is typically doing it for anti-competitive reasons. It might not be long before something like:

1. Background. In 1998, the United States sued Microsoft, alleging violations of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1, 2.(1) After trial, the court found Microsoft had violated Section 2 by unlawfully maintaining its monopoly in the market for Intel-compatible PC operating systems ("OSs") and by unlawfully attempting to monopolize the market for internet browsers, and that it had violated Section 1 by illegally tying its Windows operating system and its Internet Explorer ("IE") browser. The court ordered Microsoft to submit a plan of divestiture that would split the company into an OS business and an applications business, and ordered interim conduct restrictions. Microsoft, 253 F.3d at 45.

1. Background. In 2006, the United States sued Google, alleging violations of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act, 15 U.S.C. 1, 2.(1) After trial, the court found Google had violated Section 2 by unlawfully maintaining its monopoly in the market for personal content management systems ("blogs") and by unlawfully attempting to monopolize the market for search engines, and that it had violated Section 1 by illegally tying its search engine and its journaling ("blog") software. The court ordered Google to submit a plan of divestiture that would split the company into an search engine business and an applications business, and ordered interim conduct restrictions. Google, 253 F.3d at 45.

The collective Internet should reevaluate models like Freenet and make a "weaker," more light-weight distributed peer-to-peer information distribution system-- its weaker because you simply don't need the overhead of hardcore anonymity and privacy because pretty much all of the users will want to be "found" by those reading on the Internet. Google's got enough brains to figure out how to make that searcable so we need not worry about that.

Maybe it's that it's too late and I'm not thinking very well.

I totally agree with your "shareware" comment, though. I pay $30/year for Salon.com, $25/year for LiveJournal, $2/month for afraid.org FreeDNS, $9/month for SuicideGirls.com (so sue me, punk girls are hot)... anyway, I don't have to pay for most of these things to get the functionality I want, but I pay anyway because I want to support these particular content providers especially, and also the "free" Internet in general.

My Ammo box PC is better!. [livejournal.com]

I wrote about how to fix the legal system so tactics like DirecTV's little scam wouldn't work, back in January 2002. Here's the link to it. The basic idea is that if you threaten someone with legal action, you have to put money in an escrow account that they can use for their defense. When they spend money on legal fees, they also have to do the same thing, and you can use the money out of their escrow. Now if the sides are balanced financially, it'll all come out a wash, but if you're the little guy, you'll be able to use his escrow money to pay your legal bills and your escrow. Presto, no more bankruptcy tactics, and all of us little guys can just laugh at scumbags like DirecTV and SCO, like we should be able to without fear in the first place.

Speaking as a LiveJournal support volunteer, I can say that though there have been more than a few requests on this matter, some of them have been made by people that actually have a brain. What they're doing on AOL still bewilders me.

I can't believe that nobody's mentioned e-sheep yet. e-sheep rocks! Apocamon, The Spiders, Barracuda, they're all great. And jwz loves 'em too.

'Don't write the code. Connect two things with an object, and hit a button.'

hmm ... Is it just me, or does that sound an AWFUL lot like what Apple's had in Interface Builder for a while now?


Creating an OS X Web Browser without writing any code


That quite literally is connecting a few things and hitting a button to get a working web browser.

... then contradict yourself in the body. Cameraphones are useless to you, but the general public definitely sees a use for them, and they are selling quite well. It's interesting to be able to post pictures of a fire near your office to your online journal while you're still out.

Just because you don't see anything interesting doesn't mean that the rest of the world doesn't. I'm still kicking myself for not having my camera snap-on when I wound up driving next to the Batmobile (the 60's one!).

I've been a hardcore netizen since 1998, when I used to dial up from my uncle's home to a text-only shell account with a 1,500 bps modem :-) I remember waiting minutes to download a single JPEG file, then transferring it to my local machine using Kermit, and opening it up in Internet Explorer 3.0 on Windows 95, only to realise that it's the wrong one! Those were the days when I learnt to use Pine and Lynx, my favourite mail/www combo.

Those were the days of Internet success stories: ICQ, Napster, Winamp. Remember ShellSock?

In a perfect geek encounter, I met bluesmoon on comp.lang.java. Google didn't even exist back then.

Now, when I look around, I see "techies" with 5-10 years of experience in the software industry and no clue what All Your Base... means :-) Clearly, these guys have been here for the money. I, however, am here because I love it. The Internet is changing lives, and I want to be responsible for some of it. Somebody give me that perfect job! :-D

LISTENER: A book for the Internet in sixty entries by Warren Ellis.

From: http://www.livejournal.com/community/lj_biz/195987 .html

Subject: AOL blocking LiveJournal.com, try two
From: Evan Martin
To: postmaster@aol.com
Organization: Danga Interactive
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 2003 16:23:40 -0700

Hello,
I mailed you yesterday about a problem we're having interoperating with AOL member pages. (I have included that text below.)

Since we haven't heard back from you, we've instituted a temporary workaround. However, this is not a technically correct solution, nor will it work in all cases.

In technical terms: we rewrite URLs to AOL member pages to use FTP instead of HTTP so there is no Referer header sent.

Because we haven't heard back from you, I can only hope that this problem was accidentally caused by some automated system process, and eventually you will be able to fix it. If there is anything more we can do to help speed that process, please let us know.

-- Evan from LiveJournal.com

Have fun.

AOL is probably just afraid that Jamie Zawinski will blog something about them when he used to work there and link to something on their servers!

TinyURL uses a Location: header, which should kill off the referer, yes. But asking everyone to TinyURL their images is a bit much, don't you think? Besides, some browsers don't like having 3XX statuses (stati?) as replies to their image requests, so you'd break some people.

AOL just needs to stop doing that shit. Clamp down on the people transferring 200 gigs in the exhibitionism-community-of-the-week, and leave everyone else alone.

Jouster (My LJ)

Following the second link in the text, I ended up at this image.
Yet another reason not to like AOL users. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go wash out my eyes with nitric acid.

Ever felt like programing your own web browser, but don't feel like writing the code? Well, now you don't have to!

With Cocoa and Webkit, you can make a fully functional web browser without writing a single line of code. Check out the codeless browser From the same wonderful apple engineers who brought you the 13 line text editor.

I'm hoping this kind of ease of creation will lower the bar to making your own browser, and encourage independant programers to innovate in the interface department 'since they don't have to worry about rendering unless they want to.

There are allready some cool applications using webkit, like the live preview window in SubEthaEdit (the amazingly cool text editor formerly known as Hydra), or the japanese NagaraBrowser a webbrowser that can replace your desktop picture.

The problem is that it's other people deciding what data comes through.

For instance, LiveJournal. Users have found that AOL is blocking HTTP requests through REFERRERs too . Nothing like having a Journal, and then putting a link to your AOL homepage (AOL Journal, etc) on your LJ profile, only to have people blocked when trying to click through (to see it in action, and you don't have referers disabled, go to fadedsanity's profile and click on the website link "p r i n c e s s". You'll get a 404. Now alter the URL (or whatever you have to do to clear the referrer) and reload the page... it works!). Sure, it's understandable to prevent image embedding (though they appear to only be doing it selectively, like with www.livejournal.com, but not ziemkowski.livejournal.com for instance), but hypertext links as well? That's just too much!

The annoying issue is that this will undoubtedly lead to hacks (or even features) to stop sending referers, which will affect website statistics, etc.

Why should the above AOL subscriber not be able to link to her own site? Because other users have marked LiveJournal.com emails as spam? So it isn't just third parties than can be upset; she should be, anybody who wants to access her site through her journal should be, and the third party (LJ) should be.

Wouldn't it have been a lot less problematic to add a custom bayesian filtering system with spam ratings, that runs on the subscriber's system? I'm sure AOL could have designed an interface and methodology for such a system that would be extremely straightforward to users yet much more effective, all without relying on one subscriber to know what another subscriber thinks of another person's messages? Heck, they could have advertised that they have "Smart" email filtering, yadda yadda yadda.

You'd think that a company that has acquired sources of programming creativity like Netscape and WinAmp, would be able to meet the interests of their subscribers and investors much better than they have with this.

How much longer until AOL blocks referers from slashdot?

The problem is that it's other people deciding what data comes through.

For instance, LiveJournal. Users have found that AOL is blocking HTTP requests through REFERRERs too . Nothing like having a Journal, and then putting a link to your AOL homepage (AOL Journal, etc) on your LJ profile, only to have people blocked when trying to click through (to see it in action, and you don't have referers disabled, go to fadedsanity's profile and click on the website link "p r i n c e s s". You'll get a 404. Now alter the URL (or whatever you have to do to clear the referrer) and reload the page... it works!). Sure, it's understandable to prevent image embedding (though they appear to only be doing it selectively, like with www.livejournal.com, but not ziemkowski.livejournal.com for instance), but hypertext links as well? That's just too much!

The annoying issue is that this will undoubtedly lead to hacks (or even features) to stop sending referers, which will affect website statistics, etc.

Why should the above AOL subscriber not be able to link to her own site? Because other users have marked LiveJournal.com emails as spam? So it isn't just third parties than can be upset; she should be, anybody who wants to access her site through her journal should be, and the third party (LJ) should be.

Wouldn't it have been a lot less problematic to add a custom bayesian filtering system with spam ratings, that runs on the subscriber's system? I'm sure AOL could have designed an interface and methodology for such a system that would be extremely straightforward to users yet much more effective, all without relying on one subscriber to know what another subscriber thinks of another person's messages? Heck, they could have advertised that they have "Smart" email filtering, yadda yadda yadda.

You'd think that a company that has acquired sources of programming creativity like Netscape and WinAmp, would be able to meet the interests of their subscribers and investors much better than they have with this.

How much longer until AOL blocks referers from slashdot?

The problem is that it's other people deciding what data comes through.

For instance, LiveJournal. Users have found that AOL is blocking HTTP requests through REFERRERs too . Nothing like having a Journal, and then putting a link to your AOL homepage (AOL Journal, etc) on your LJ profile, only to have people blocked when trying to click through (to see it in action, and you don't have referers disabled, go to fadedsanity's profile and click on the website link "p r i n c e s s". You'll get a 404. Now alter the URL (or whatever you have to do to clear the referrer) and reload the page... it works!). Sure, it's understandable to prevent image embedding (though they appear to only be doing it selectively, like with www.livejournal.com, but not ziemkowski.livejournal.com for instance), but hypertext links as well? That's just too much!

The annoying issue is that this will undoubtedly lead to hacks (or even features) to stop sending referers, which will affect website statistics, etc.

Why should the above AOL subscriber not be able to link to her own site? Because other users have marked LiveJournal.com emails as spam? So it isn't just third parties than can be upset; she should be, anybody who wants to access her site through her journal should be, and the third party (LJ) should be.

Wouldn't it have been a lot less problematic to add a custom bayesian filtering system with spam ratings, that runs on the subscriber's system? I'm sure AOL could have designed an interface and methodology for such a system that would be extremely straightforward to users yet much more effective, all without relying on one subscriber to know what another subscriber thinks of another person's messages? Heck, they could have advertised that they have "Smart" email filtering, yadda yadda yadda.

You'd think that a company that has acquired sources of programming creativity like Netscape and WinAmp, would be able to meet the interests of their subscribers and investors much better than they have with this.

How much longer until AOL blocks referers from slashdot?

• First 10+ "new accounts a day" : 1999-11-08.
• First 100+ "new accounts a day" : 2000-06-12
• First 1000+ "new accounts a day" : 2001-04-16

According to an item in the LJ FAQ, LJ was started sometime in March 1999 while blogger.com says it was launched in August 1999. Those are the two older ones I can think of and if they really are the two oldest it appears that LJ beat blogger to the punch.

LiveJournal.com seems to have made a pretty good success of it. Granted, the "Wil Wheaton's" of the world don't use it.

Means I can't talk to my North Korean friend either. Bugger.

Did you destroy this animal while you were at it?

Sexually suggestive? How about downright lewd?

If I'm interpreting you correctly, you want:

1) A global system of trust metrication, rather than one per website - so I can certify you as a non-troll once and for all, rather than once on each website.

2) A system which is not in the total command of a single website - in other words, one in which different websites can have a different "root of trust".

I'm assuming you want:

3) attack resistance as Raph Levien defines it

since the experience of sites like Kuro5hin especially demonstrate that non-attack-resistant trust metrics are pretty much a waste of time, and I can only assume that those who advocate collateral-damage string-and-sealing-wax methods like blocking IP address blocks don't realise that attack resistance in the trust metric is possible.

My TrustFlow trust metric was designed exactly to fulfill these criteria, and I believe it is the only one that does so at this time. It's pretty simple to understand, and a fast Perl/C implementation is available under the GPL (ask me if you need it relicensed).

As an experiment, I wrote a program that applied TrustFlow to the LiveJournal friends graph. Nearly 70,000 people have now tried it and users mostly report that it does a pretty good job of reflecting who is close to them in the graph.

In theory, you could set a trust root key and a trust threshold, and users could provide PK-signed documents proving that they are trusted to a particular extent by that root key by showing a subset of the trust graph. If you want to do this, though, ask for my help, there are some subtleties.

The metric, and the implementation, are discussed in the Trust Metrics LiveJournal community. I draw your particular attention to the entry describing the metric and the TrustFlow for LiveJournal FAQ.

If I'm interpreting you correctly, you want:

1) A global system of trust metrication, rather than one per website - so I can certify you as a non-troll once and for all, rather than once on each website.

2) A system which is not in the total command of a single website - in other words, one in which different websites can have a different "root of trust".

I'm assuming you want:

3) attack resistance as Raph Levien defines it

since the experience of sites like Kuro5hin especially demonstrate that non-attack-resistant trust metrics are pretty much a waste of time, and I can only assume that those who advocate collateral-damage string-and-sealing-wax methods like blocking IP address blocks don't realise that attack resistance in the trust metric is possible.

My TrustFlow trust metric was designed exactly to fulfill these criteria, and I believe it is the only one that does so at this time. It's pretty simple to understand, and a fast Perl/C implementation is available under the GPL (ask me if you need it relicensed).

As an experiment, I wrote a program that applied TrustFlow to the LiveJournal friends graph. Nearly 70,000 people have now tried it and users mostly report that it does a pretty good job of reflecting who is close to them in the graph.

In theory, you could set a trust root key and a trust threshold, and users could provide PK-signed documents proving that they are trusted to a particular extent by that root key by showing a subset of the trust graph. If you want to do this, though, ask for my help, there are some subtleties.

The metric, and the implementation, are discussed in the Trust Metrics LiveJournal community. I draw your particular attention to the entry describing the metric and the TrustFlow for LiveJournal FAQ.

If I'm interpreting you correctly, you want:

1) A global system of trust metrication, rather than one per website - so I can certify you as a non-troll once and for all, rather than once on each website.

2) A system which is not in the total command of a single website - in other words, one in which different websites can have a different "root of trust".

I'm assuming you want:

3) attack resistance as Raph Levien defines it

since the experience of sites like Kuro5hin especially demonstrate that non-attack-resistant trust metrics are pretty much a waste of time, and I can only assume that those who advocate collateral-damage string-and-sealing-wax methods like blocking IP address blocks don't realise that attack resistance in the trust metric is possible.

My TrustFlow trust metric was designed exactly to fulfill these criteria, and I believe it is the only one that does so at this time. It's pretty simple to understand, and a fast Perl/C implementation is available under the GPL (ask me if you need it relicensed).

As an experiment, I wrote a program that applied TrustFlow to the LiveJournal friends graph. Nearly 70,000 people have now tried it and users mostly report that it does a pretty good job of reflecting who is close to them in the graph.

In theory, you could set a trust root key and a trust threshold, and users could provide PK-signed documents proving that they are trusted to a particular extent by that root key by showing a subset of the trust graph. If you want to do this, though, ask for my help, there are some subtleties.

The metric, and the implementation, are discussed in the Trust Metrics LiveJournal community. I draw your particular attention to the entry describing the metric and the TrustFlow for LiveJournal FAQ.

So would that make this canabalism instead of just sick?

One problem for Slashdot has been all the comments, even if the page that is output is cached somewhat. One solution that livejournal.com has created, and is now being investigated by /. and Sourceforge is MemcacheD, run by danga, the 'parent company' of Livejournal. It will cache comments in memory, and user information so it doesn't have to be dragged out of a database, even one as quick as MySQL.

When they decided to use KHTML for Safari, I thought they would at least release the source code for Safari and not just the changes to KHTML..

Would it have killed you to spend 0.12 seconds on google before opening your mouth?

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects/webco re /

That's every part of safari that matters, right there, for your FSF-approved open source development pleasure. No, the shiny front-end isn't included, but that's not going to bother too many coders considering that you can write your own frontend in as little as one line of code, or if you're feeling particularly clever, zero lines of code. (Note: while the examples given are in ProjectBuilder on MacOS X, there's no intrinsic reason why you couldn't do the same trick with GnuSTEP on Linux, and a GTK+ wrapper would only be slightly more work.)

And WebCore isn't the only "unique" OSX software that they've released the source to. Need a streaming media server? A fully functional ZeroConf implementation? A crypto-key management framework? All there for the taking.

No, Apple isn't going to release the source for iPhoto or Final Cut so you can play with them for free. Cry me a freakin' river. Then get a job.

And while I'm here: the casual, contracted form of "would have" is "would've", not "would of". Please spread the word.

It's sad when the BEST online music site out there only serves 3% of the computing population, STILL has proprietary DRM (even the Macheads don't seem to care) and worst of all the selection sucks! Don't believe me? Try to download "Ray of Light" by Madonna from iTunes. What the hell good is a music service that only carries a few select choons by artists that I may or may not give a damn about? I want to be able to get ANY music this way. If I can't... well... I know how I *can*!

my personal experience with BuyMusic

It's not just European units. It seems to be all iPods outside of the United States.

I know that personally, my first generation 10GB model iPod was volume dropped, and I'm in Australia.

Why these guys are frowning :)

from my blog: Tonight I read about a new online music service called "BuyMusic.Com" for the first time. It is billed as a "iTunes for PC users" and this is a conspicuously empty niche in the music business at the moment. I've looked at other services such as Pressplay and MusicNet, but so far they have all sucked in terms of sound quality, value and ridiculous limitations on what you can do with the music that you legitimately purchase. Is BuyMusic any better? Let's find out. I found the link on the front page of Google news. It was attributed to an article from TechTV.com which comes off as both a commercial for the new service and a fairly harsh dig at Apple and iTunes. They make the point that the tracks are slightly less expensive at BuyMusic ($.79 as opposed to $.99) and the obvious problem that only people who own Macs are currently capable of accessing iTunes. They also make a big deal about the service's music catalog which stands at around 300,000 tracks. So I go to the BuyMusic site. The home page is fairly well designed, with top 100 singles and top album listings front and center. At first glance the selection is about what I would expect - Norah Jones is here, as well as Justin Timberlake, Shania Twain and 50 Cent. Okay, so it's not my favorite music but this is what sells so I can't blame them for putting it up front. The real test will come when I try to find some of my favorite music - in other words, something a music fan (as opposed to a 12 year old girl) might actually want to buy. There are some ads on the page, but nothing too intrusive. One is for Windows Media Player 9, which is interesting because it contains an implementation of Microsoft's latest Digital Rights Management technology. WMP9 is also notable for its very open-ended End User License Agreement (EULA) which means basically that if you install this software then you also give Microsoft the legal right to download and install updates to your computer at any time and without asking for your permission. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I just never liked the sound of that. I wonder if it is a required download to use the service. Yep. That makes the other ad somewhat ironic - it is for a Nomad 20GB MP3 Jukebox. Ironic because regular MP3s don't have any DRM built in and a good DRM system would probably prevent the user from transferring legitimately purchased music onto the player. I have yet to find out exactly what format of music this service is actually selling... Are they MP3s or Microsoft Media Player files or some other proprietary format like the one that Apple is using? Time to forge on and find out... So I begin to look around the page for the catalog navigation buttons. Off to the left is a list of genres... Looking down the list I notice that although there is a separate category for "Blues" there is no category at all for "Dance Music." Weh oh. Not a good sign. So I click on Pop/Rock which I figure is the closest thing to dance music they have listed here. Although it lists twenty-something variations on Pop/Rock such as "Teen Pop" and "Experimental Rock" there is still no indication of dance music. Scrolling down the page I do find an album I like however - John Mayer's "Room for Squares." The album price is listed as $12.69. Not too bad, I tell myself. Clicking onto the album info page I encounter my first harsh truth about BuyMusic: They don't have everything that's listed in their catalog. For example, even though the album price was given as $12.69, a note on the album's page says "For Sale as Individual Tracks Only." Furthermore, only four of the twelve tracks can be downloaded, for $.99 each. The first single

Red Hat?