Slashdot Mirror

But the only way to get that size a mass of volunteers is to work on a "sure thing" project with an established design that moves towards a goal everyone can already see -- to copy an established product.

But the only way to get that size a mass of volunteers is to work on a "sure thing" project with an established design that moves towards a goal everyone can already see -- to copy an established product.

If you want your own Internet, the information is all there. For free.

If you want your own Slashdot, that's all there for free, too.

Stop whining and go build them. Until then, STFU.

Thanks!

Please do download our code (and email us at security@slashcode.com if you find any bugs). We quote arguments in the approved fashion before using them in a query string, and additionally we do regex whitelist-style filtering on many commonly-used params (e.g. $form->{cid} is guaranteed to be numeric). Generally we're pretty good at this stuff. Which is not to say we never make mistakes...

I'm not sure that even electronic publishing could ever be free, just keeping the disks spinning and bandwidth paid for the usefull life of an article has an monitary expense. I will admit that the monitary expense is minor compared to the costs of editorial and peer review, yet these cost are not exclusively a monitary expense, the initial editorial and peer review could easily be payment in kind for publication credit. I would explain what I'm thinking about as a chimera of Slashdot and arXiv.org. The editors would be editors and be resonsible for maintence of the actually sections and their continuity, there would be an advisory board and advisory boards for the subject sections like at arXiv.org and the whole thing could be karma based. So an article would be submitted, when the editorial board signns off, it goes to the advisory board who would either veto it for errors or vote on it it to establish a ranking for science and topical interest, if the ranking is high enough it gets published on the main page or the subject pages, failing that in stays in the firehose for a while then gets archived. Because topicality is considered for display position and it's web-based all of the mundane things like hardware/software/sysadmin expenses could easily be advertiser sponsored. The "related stories" feature would be very inteesting especially if it could be weighted to provide both agreeing and disagreeing related articles.

But Slashdot is open source, so that analogy fell apart rather quickly...

Digg's had this for days, but what's nice about /. is the comments. The comment system on Digg is awful, they really should be embarrassed about it. Would it kill them to copy the comment system from Slash or Scoop? Hell, even mid 90's forum style would be a massive improvement.

Going even further off topic, why can phpBB copy it as well? It's even worse than Digg. Not to mention running it's a guaranteed way to get your server 0wn3d.

My browser and other browsers are downloading this exact same page.. look it's parallel programming and no one had to do anything special.

I'm gonna bet there are a lot of groups and developers that completely disagree with that statement. I'm thinking of the Apache Group, MySQL developers, Perl developers, Slashcode developers, Linux developers, etc...

Hmm, the article you linked to says that Slashdot runs PHP -- I'm pretty sure that isn't the case.

You are correct.

Anything you want to know about how to interface with slashdot you can learn from slashcode. The wonders of open source.

"The transfer to a publisher is a matter of contract."

Yes.

"The publisher cannot transfer to you any rights it did not acquire from the work's creator."

In the absence of copyright law, it is not the publisher who would grant me any rights exactly. It is the act of publishing. And since you gave him the right to publish...

If you didn;t like that outcome, you would be free to insist that a printer get a signed contract with each book transfer that would bind the purchaser or some such.

"The purpose of copyright law is to encourage the production of creative works by guaranteeing that a work's creator has a chance to derive financial benefit from his work"

Yes.

"It is not a grant of monoploy."

Oh, but it is. I am not saying it is a particularly bad example if done right, but it is one none the less.

"It's a recognition of, and protection of, the existence of rights that occur naturally when we create something."

This is not so and most of human history bears this out.

"Very few people could devote a career to, say, writing novels, if anyone could grab the first copy off the printing press, start copying it and compete with them for sales."

Any yet many people are now making careers writing Free Software under just such conditions. I think we are going to start seeing the same thing in other fields as time goes on. People are already writing the licenses in anticipation of this and some are writing the works and using the licenses.

"E.g., if it wasn;t for copyright law, you could copy Picasso print, slap your name on them, and sell them as yours."

No, we could easily have a law against plagiarism to stop that. You don't need to mix the two concepts to make your point.

Copyright law only needs to stop you from copying a Picasso print with his name on it and selling the copies.

"Or, I could grab all off Slashdot's code, open a site called Slashdot, start selling ads, and the current proprietors could do nothing to stop me."

Sort of like what you can get from here:

http://www.slashcode.com/about.shtml

you mean?

"In those circumstance, I doubt Picasso would have painted or that Slashdot would exist."

Who knows what any particular individual would have done? Certainly copyright law is premised (in some places at least) on the thought that more will create in the presence of copyright pretections afforded them by law, and I do not need to argue for or against that.

Still you ignore history as there still exist in this world many works of art from the days before there was nay copyright law.

Also, look into the fashion industry today. I hear that in many countries if not all, they operate without the benefit of copyright protections.

"Repeating or reciting something you've read is not copying the physical object on which language encoding that joke was originally placed."

So what, all we have to do to be cool in your view with respect to copyright is to pull a Fahrenheit 451?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit_451

Just get everyone to memorise a chapter of any book we want to copy. Have them recite it while another person copies it down. Publish the new "version" and all is ok? Certainly not with any copyright law I am aware of today. What is your take on this?

"Your reference to "public domain" presupposes the notion that, in the absence of law, anything that anyone makes would be owned by everyone else, not by the person who made the thing."

You are incorrect here. It maintains that anything anyone publishes becomes "public domain" in the absence of copyright law. Not anything anyone makes... anything they publish...

"Being in the "public domain" is a status granted and regulated by the law of man, not of nature."

We obviously disagree on this point big time.

all the best,

drew

Why all this work? Banning users and risking a riot?

Nah, just go here: http://www.slashcode.com/

It's a system to automatically hide unfavoured anonymous users, has cool time limits to prevent one great idea posted immediately after posting another (good for disrupting the flow of ideas) and, as a bonus, threads get messed up, like when answers come up to shrunk lower-rated comments.

Guaranteed to avoid both trolls and annoying truths.

Sometimes I see duplicate stories on Slashdot. What's up with that?

These are just mistakes on the part of the staff. They happen. We have posted over ten thousand stories in our history. The occasional duplicate is inevitable.

If you see a duplicate, you can mail the story's author. If the story is still quiet, we may pull it down. However, once the comments are rolling in, we often leave the story up so that the discussion can continue.

Some people have suggested that there might be a software solution to this problem. If you think you've got one, visit the Slashcode site and submit a diff. As long as it isn't a performance hit, I'd consider using it. (Be aware however that the trick of searching for duplicate URLs isn't as helpful as you might think, since the same story can appear in multiple locations.)

Hey, if you think there is a bug in Slashdot's story-selection algorithm, there's nothing stopping you from fixing it. :)

Because discussions on the Microsoft/Novell deal aren't the place to talk about the broken comment system?

It's not likely the editors would be able to fix it anyway (plus, they don't even read submissions, why would they read the comments?), if you want it fixed, notify the maintainers of Slashcode.

It's an anti-spam technique that allows non-members time to read before responding, and members time to watch for the article to actually go live-live. Presumably, it helps cut down on the "First Post!" trolling. The period only lasts about a minute or two, so it's not really a big deal. I'm sure it's semi-documented in the Slashcode somewhere.

Why don't you find out for yourself?

Yes, that is a good idea. It would be about the code used to run Slashdot. You could call it Slashcode or something.

No one is censoring him. Colbert is perfectly free to start his own online encyclopedia with its own rules the way he wants it. Save the censor term for real censorship (i.e. when the inevitable evil mod MODS ME DOWN!)

No one would be censoring you. You are perfectly free to start your own discussion website and run it the way you'd like it.

Also, a complaint about how you'll be modded down is second only to the 'typical slashbot' karma whoring technique.

Proprietary-loving? OK, just for the record, of Google Code Hosting and Slash, which is open-source? :)

(That is so not fair of me. Google would probably love to open-source Hosting, but, as described in the session a little while ago, in order to make it as tightly integrated with Bigtable and search and mail and everything, they really can't release it without releasing a ton of their core proprietary code too. Which obviously they can't.)

FTA: "If you're a fan of a particular CMS or if you're part of a CMS project team, then we're looking for your nominations."

What's more curious is, from the rules: "3. The five open source Content Management Systems with the most nominations will go through to the final 4. The top three will be voted for by a panel of three judges. A final fourth vote will come from the results of a public vote on www.PacktPub.com."

So it seems the number of nominations matters a lot in case of this award, which doesn't necessarily promote quality over popularity.

I also wonder if slashcode itself should be amongst the runners. Slashcode isn't really widely used for various reasons (e.g. installation, perl development, features) and it's not like if 5000$ would make any difference to slash developers (I'm wrong?). Which makes me ask what are the requisite features a CMS must have to be considered a CMS. Agreeing on some definitions would be useful for such a contest.

http://www.slashcode.com/
It's the same code Slashdot uses and, from the layout of your website, looks just like what you'd want. However, I'm 99% sure it's in English, and there might not be translations available to where the UI is in your language. Although, it might be in a format where it doesn't matter what language you use, I'm not sure.

Huh, some perl driven web apps:
http://www.slashcode.com/
http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/

I have been trolled. Hope this helps. Have a nice day.

Personally I prefer Java Servlets, with perl a second place, then python, then bash, then C, then php.

It's open source so submit a fucking patch you lazy cocksucker!

Yeah. Agreed. They did do a CSS theme kind of like the old slashdot on Slashcode. Why not give us, the users, a choice of this new, terrible design, or the old one?

What they should have done is given users another CSS to choose from. Slashcode is running a pretty close to the Old Slashdot layout but in CSS.

I don't like the colors either. They are lame.

the movement isn't a top-down organization, but, well, a diverse movement, so its not all that much something that is "led" by "leaders"

So true, I agree completely. Just like ESR's "Cathedral and the Bazaar", OSS is the bazaar, there is no real leader, someone to sue, someone to blame, its just there, and it works, and that is what scares the suits and whatnot.

I see Linux as "ours". It started out as Linus' baby, but its free, and anybody is capable of doing a fork of it at anytime just like XFree86 to X.org did. Heck, look at slashdot. Its open source, anybody can go to http://slashcode.com/ and put up a slashdot "killer" at any time, but does it happen? No. Why? Because slashdot is more than slashcode, its people like me and you that make slashdot work. We openly bash on slashdot all the time and the editors don't delete the posts, they frequently get modded up and the discussion diverges from there.

The cathedral way of doing things is certainly a way of doing things, but its not the only way. A big topic that comes here multiple times a week is the failing cathedral way of music distribution and the RIAA. The bazaar method of music distribution is scary for them, and they go to the bigger cathedral, the government and court rooms to maintain their cathedral existence.

I really think this newer bazaar way of doing things is pretty cool. Look at Wikipedia, slashdot, GNU, Linux, etc. All of these things are very successful, but there is no real boundary or ownership of any of these things. They are free. And the bizarre thing about it is that people make money off of it.

Another thing that is cool about Linux and OSS is that the "cathedrals" are participating in the bazaar as well. Big brand name companies like Apple, IBM, SGI, HP, etc are embracing and contributing and benefitting from this stuff.

I think it should be mentioned that Slashcode doesn't work on Windows or at least no one has been able to do it yet.

So it seems that if you want to start out developing this on your box, you really need to have some of the more freindly versions of Linux running (read above post for suggestions).

Just a forewarning if you're only a Windows user and you are thinking about this.

I believe the standard setup is:
* Debian or Red Hat Linux
* Perl
* Apache
* mod_perl
* MySQL

Don't like Slashdot? Grab the slashcode and set up a site just like it which reflects your values better. Thousands of people have done exactly that.

Thousands eh?

Yes, I agree it is strangely better than the normal style. Although I think the normal style sucks (it hurts my eyes). I didn't notice this at first because I was making a user style that consisted of the css from http://slashcode.com/ and a few tweaks, which looks much more professional IMHO.

There are greasemonkey scripts to allow collapsing threads. And scripts to collapse stories and remove sidebars and figure out how much time you waste on /. and add mirrors and whatever else you want on slashdot.

I'd give them a look before I demanded the slashcode writers add features you want (or write the code yourself and submit it to slashcode), unlike other news sites this is an OSS project.

Slashdot is free as in speech, too. http://www.slashcode.com/

The best news is that means fresh quotes for slashteam to hide in the source code.

It's open source -- go for it :)

You mean like SlashCode?

wiki.slashdot.org : WikiSlashdot
Add a Wiki plugin to slashode and host it on slashdot. This it will attract the trolls away from Wikipedia and introduce a persistant layer to the debate that takes place on slashdot.

Individual changes could be moderated just like on slashdot and the user could elect to ignore changes with a low score.

*goes to http://www.slashcode.com/sites.pl*

Wow! That's a _LOT_ of sites running slashcode!

What about the Slashcode? Now with CSS!

Are there any meaningful sites out there that run slashcode?

I'd like to believe so. http://slashgisrs.org/ - we're trying to be pertinent and useful. But since we're less than 2 months old, we don't have the readership /. gets. But we still have 6000 daily hits :-) It's very specific: for the geospatial community out there.

Normally, you can find other slashcode projects there: http://www.slashcode.com/sites.pl but this part of the site is down since the last slash-css update.

slashcode is *hard* to correctly install and setup. But it *is* a great tool once everything runs at a steady state :-)

Cheers!

You're only talking about the appearance.

Slashdot runs on Slashcode (http://www.slashcode.com/). If you want to, you can change the appearance of it with skins and whatnot. I would also recommend Drupal (http://www.drupal.org/ and Zope (http://www.zope.org/). Hire somebody to create a nice skin for it, and any one of the above systems should be able to neatly handle the backend work.

Well the code is open so anyone can change it whenever they want. I sincerely hope that if somebody decided to do a major architectural overhaul while still preserving the functionality of the site, then the devs would be welcoming of that. (I know if someone offered to do all my work and make it easier me for me to do other things going forward, while giving my clients and users enhanced performance and functionality, I would say "YES.")

The contest is a good way to get some publicity for the aesthetic improvements, but if anyone wants to hack on /. then they should. If you email the devs with an overview of your intentions beforehand, you will have a higher likelihood of getting your changed merged, I would guess. Well, if they don't do that then shame on them, but that's what I would do.

I think you are just trolling.

To being with Slashcode ( what drives this ) will *only* work with MySQL ( http://www.slashcode.com/docs/INSTALL ) and has never supported db2.

Secondly, i have a sourceforge project and i can connect to a MySQL database from my project's sf-hosted server-side page.

http://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?doci d=4297&group_id=1#mysql

Slashcode was designed to route around this...

If it's good enough for Slashdot.....

Can't use height:100% in IE 5 and Opera 5. It creates large vertical gaps. In Opera 5 they are the size of the window, in IE 5 they can be enormous.

Also change Read More... from block-level list items to in-line elements like those seen between div class="commentSub" [ Reply to This | Parent ].

Can't use height:100% in IE 5 and Opera 5. It creates large vertical gaps. In Opera 5 they are the size of the window, in IE 5 they can be enormous.

Also change Read More... from block-level list items to in-line elements like those seen between div class="commentSub" [ Reply to This | Parent ].

Why don't you guys have a formal testing process in place for slashcode?

They do. Beta code gets tested here before it's put on Slashdot. Now the upgrade process often generates quite a few 503s (since Slashdot is actually down during that time), but it's just a temporary problem.

If you're still getting 500s and 503s, try deleting all your cookies that point to "slashdot.org". Sometimes the upgrades have problems with old cookies.

You mean like this site that has been acting as the beta site for Slashdot?