Slashdot Mirror

In fact, I think Slashdot is at its worst when it gets onto topics that aren't part of its core unixy mission, i.e. when the editors aren't choosy enough. Some of the dopiest discussion happens when Slashdotters start expounding on subjects they know nothing about, or when the Slashdot editors make bad choices of articles on physics, astronomy, etc. (My own pet peeve is all the physics posts that don't link to the original paper, which is almost always available on arxiv.org.)

The traditional response to people who don't like getting their Slashdot submissions rejected is that anyone who doesn't like Slashdot's editorial policies can always start their own Slash clone. This is a valid response, but I think it's interesting that Glasscode seems to make more of an effort to encourage people to start up new sections on a variety of topics. It'll be interesting to see if the quality of discussion on all these sections turns out to be good.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Slashcode may not be the best model in many other cases. For instance, I run a slash-ish site for book reviews, focusing on reviews of free books. The selectivity-about-topics part of Slashdot is obviously completely inappropriate for this kind of site, since the equivalent of a Slashdot article is a book, and there's no reason to exclude books. Also, a particular book is likely to be discussed only sporadically, not in a Slashdot-style feeding frenzy, so I didn't need Slashdot's mechanisms for getting rid of first-post trolls, but I did have to implement a system for people to ask to receive e-mail notifications when discussion is posted about a book they're interested in.

A lot of things are a matter of taste and culture, and one size does not fit all. A lot of Slashdotters are paranoid types who have filled the margins of their copy of Cryptonomicon with conspiracy theories. So it makes sense that Slashdot allows anonymous posts. However, for most discussion sites, the single simplest thing that can be done to get rid of trolls is simply to disallow anonymous posting -- make people at least put their nick on their posts, if not their real name and e-mail. For book reviewing, it's particularly important to have some idea of who the reviewer is and what his qualifications are.

BTW, this last issue -- does the person posting know their posterior from a cavity in the earth? -- is, in my opinion, the place where Slashdot is the most deficient. It's fine when you're reading discussion on a computer topic, since most Slashdotters are computer nerds, and mistakes get pointed out really quickly. But it's a big problem in the science section. A lot of the people posting there got their ideas about science from Star Wars. You get ridiculous stuff like people saying that asteroid mining can be accomplished by "dropping" asteroids into the Earth's atmosphere, where air drag will slow them down and let them crash to the surface. So this is an example of how one design doesn't necessarily work for everything that even one discussion site tries to do.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Slashcode may not be the best model in many other cases. For instance, I run a slash-ish site for book reviews, focusing on reviews of free books. The selectivity-about-topics part of Slashdot is obviously completely inappropriate for this kind of site, since the equivalent of a Slashdot article is a book, and there's no reason to exclude books. Also, a particular book is likely to be discussed only sporadically, not in a Slashdot-style feeding frenzy, so I didn't need Slashdot's mechanisms for getting rid of first-post trolls, but I did have to implement a system for people to ask to receive e-mail notifications when discussion is posted about a book they're interested in.

A lot of things are a matter of taste and culture, and one size does not fit all. A lot of Slashdotters are paranoid types who have filled the margins of their copy of Cryptonomicon with conspiracy theories. So it makes sense that Slashdot allows anonymous posts. However, for most discussion sites, the single simplest thing that can be done to get rid of trolls is simply to disallow anonymous posting -- make people at least put their nick on their posts, if not their real name and e-mail. For book reviewing, it's particularly important to have some idea of who the reviewer is and what his qualifications are.

BTW, this last issue -- does the person posting know their posterior from a cavity in the earth? -- is, in my opinion, the place where Slashdot is the most deficient. It's fine when you're reading discussion on a computer topic, since most Slashdotters are computer nerds, and mistakes get pointed out really quickly. But it's a big problem in the science section. A lot of the people posting there got their ideas about science from Star Wars. You get ridiculous stuff like people saying that asteroid mining can be accomplished by "dropping" asteroids into the Earth's atmosphere, where air drag will slow them down and let them crash to the surface. So this is an example of how one design doesn't necessarily work for everything that even one discussion site tries to do.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Sure, the vast majority of people who download the book don't buy. Actually, I suspect most who download it don't read it :-) But who cares? It's still free advertising.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

A lot of the books on the site are purely digital, and there's not publisher at all in the traditional sense. In all the browsing windows, free books show up with icons that show whether they're free. There is also a mechanism in some of the browing pages to exclude non-free books from your searches.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

You should also realize that publishers make a disproportionate amount of their money from a few lucrative categories, like cookbooks, self-help books, and thrillers. Believe it or not, an awful lot of books are profitable neither for the publisher nor for the authors. Most book authors don't make enough money to support themselves by writing alone.

A lot of people make content just to scratch their own itch. Van Gogh never sold a painting during his lifetime.

And people also need to stop thinking as if making something available for free means you can't also sell it for money. Tell that to Red Hat.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

At the risk of sounding like a broken record and a shameless self-promoter, it would be more useful if people would review free books on The Assayer.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

At the risk of sounding like a broken record and a shameless self-promoter, it would be more useful if people would review free books on The Assayer.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

I was also surprised when a couple of high-school teachers ordered stacks of the CD-ROM version of my own (college-level) free physics textbook for their AP physics classes. Personally I wouldn't want to be a student and have to work from a CD-ROM for a whole course, but maybe for these schools the financial situation was either CDs or nothing.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

And when it comes to nonfiction, it can make a lot of sense to allow people to fork off their own versions.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Another thing to do if you support this experiment with free (-as-in-beer) information is to write a review of one of these books on The Assayer, which is a nonprofit site I run for user-submitted book reviews with an emphasis on free books. All reviews are copyleft licensed, and the site is noncommercial.

All ten of the Baen books are now listed (so far without reviews) in the site's literature section.

One of the main arguments people have made against free books is that without a publisher, you have no filter in place to get rid of the junk. The Assayer aims to disprove that argument by providing a forum for people to discuss which free books are good and which are bad.

</self-promotion>

By supporting Baen in this experiment, you'll also be helping encourage publishers to take the next step, which is to publish books that are free-as-in-speech, or at least partially free-as-in-speech, e.g. using OPL with the A&B options that prevent other print publishers from selling the same book in print. Until they take that step, there's always the possibility that publishers will make free-as-in-beer books not free again. This has happened with about 30 Macmillan computer science titles. You'll find them all listed on IPL as if they were free, but when you click on the link, you get a message saying they're no longer available for free.

You also have to realize that the publishing industry really doesn't know how this is going to play out. They'll try stuff and see if it works. They'll try antibooks. They'll try lame stuff like putting books online, but only with every single page as a bitmap, so that it's completely impractical to read them. (iUniverse, Dorling Kindersley, and Electric Press do this.)

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Another thing to do if you support this experiment with free (-as-in-beer) information is to write a review of one of these books on The Assayer, which is a nonprofit site I run for user-submitted book reviews with an emphasis on free books. All reviews are copyleft licensed, and the site is noncommercial.

All ten of the Baen books are now listed (so far without reviews) in the site's literature section.

One of the main arguments people have made against free books is that without a publisher, you have no filter in place to get rid of the junk. The Assayer aims to disprove that argument by providing a forum for people to discuss which free books are good and which are bad.

</self-promotion>

By supporting Baen in this experiment, you'll also be helping encourage publishers to take the next step, which is to publish books that are free-as-in-speech, or at least partially free-as-in-speech, e.g. using OPL with the A&B options that prevent other print publishers from selling the same book in print. Until they take that step, there's always the possibility that publishers will make free-as-in-beer books not free again. This has happened with about 30 Macmillan computer science titles. You'll find them all listed on IPL as if they were free, but when you click on the link, you get a message saying they're no longer available for free.

You also have to realize that the publishing industry really doesn't know how this is going to play out. They'll try stuff and see if it works. They'll try antibooks. They'll try lame stuff like putting books online, but only with every single page as a bitmap, so that it's completely impractical to read them. (iUniverse, Dorling Kindersley, and Electric Press do this.)

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Anyone else think this might be useful?
Yes! All the people who wrote the books listed there!

Unfortunately, I think K-12 may be the hardest place to start making free-information inroads into textbooks. The politics you have to go through in most states to get a K-12 book approved is just horrendous.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

This is not going to motivate people to switch away from Windows when they buy a new box, because the new box is going to come with the latest Windoze.

What about people who are thinking of upgrading a preexisting box from Win x to Win x+1? Will they throw up their hands at this and switch to Linux instead? Probably the reason they need to upgrade from Win x is that their favorite game (or other software) requires Win x+1. Unless their game is available for Linux (which it probably isn't), Linux isn't going to work for them.

For most people, it's not Windoze versus Linux, it's Windoze versus MacOS. Sorry, but you can't switch your x86 from Windoze to MacOS.

MS are the masters of forcing people to stay on the upgrade treadmill. This is, unfortunately, a very smart move.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

OK, I too lust for a cube instead of my G4, but then I take a cold shower and the feeling passes.

One thing people should keep in mind when they discuss prices of Macs is that it's always inaccurate to compare with Windoze boxes. With a Mac, you're always getting 24-bit color, sound input and output, and, of course, the world's best and most mature GUI. Nearly all Macs come with video input (used to be those coax connector thingamies, now I guess it's a different interface). All this was true back when a "multimedia" PC meant that it had a CD-ROM drive and 8-bit color. The cheapest PCs are still the ones that lack all these extras.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

More than one mouse button is a joke. The people at MS who decided to design their GUI around a many-button mouse were the same losers who gave Word the talking paperclip and the default set of control panels that looks like the cockpit of a fighter jet.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

"Jury-rigged tools"? Did I say that? I can't seem to find it in my original post.

Your hand-baked approach to putting physics on the web didn't work so well, because, as you point out, there was no way to separate form from content that way.
Not at all. PageMaker does have stylesheets and other mechanisms for separating form from content. They work fine, and that wasn't the problem with the conversion to html. The problem with conversion to html was that I had to do the equations as bitmaps. Maybe you should actually read people's posts before replying to them. The whole thing is a www/html/browser problem, not a problem with PageMaker (although PageMaker is replete with other problems, like crashing a lot).

...then you slam on TeX for, well, trying to enforce that useful separation.
The key word is enforce. I don't want it enforced, because sometimes machines are stupid and makes the wrong choices.

The people who use tools to design tools to make tools. We are the lords of the Shell, the emperors of Perl, we dominate the DOM.
I'd think the appropriate attitude for a Lord of Bits would be that if you want to do something, the computer shouldn't make you have to jump through hoops to do it. Do you also want a language that doesn't let you operate on data types at the bit level? Do you want an OS like Windows that doesn't let you change the startup screens? Gosh, if MS didn't enforce a particular startup screen on you, someone might get hurt.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The other problem with doing equations as bitmaps is that it breaks the functionality of the web. Visually impaired people can make the font bigger, but the equations will stay small. You can't search through it. You can't do text-to-speech. You can't change your stylesheet and have all the equations change style as well.

As far as LaTeX,

1. it's never going to be learned by more than 0.01% of the world's population,
2. it represents a 1970's-style approach to making a user interface (ooh, you mean I get my own terminal instead of having to hand someone a stack of punched cards?), and
3. its aggressive stance on separating form from content means that you have to jump through hoops to make a complicated layout turn out how you want it.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

If Opera or iCab ever support it, that would probably finally motivate me to dump NS 4.72. But I'm sorry, I just refuse to downgrade to the latest NS/Mozilla/IE. Every browser is just bigger, slower, and more buggy than the last. What I really want is NS 4.73 -- you know, the bug-release version of NS 4.72 that would never crash, and would fix bugs like incorrect rendering of stylesheets.

I think we're looking at a really long delay -- maybe 10 years -- before anyone can really start writing MathML into their pages with any confidence that the typical user will have a browser that displays it correctly. Look at Java 1.1. It's been years since 1.1 came out, and I still have to have a warning at the top of my 1.1 applet's page explaining that it won't work with the NS+MacOS combination.

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

I hate to sound like a stuffy academic, but I have a PhD in physics, and the whole thing sounds goofy to me. I'm not an expert on this kind of zero-point-energy-of-empty-space stuff, but it seems to me that to release the zero-point energy of empty space, you have to leave that space in a lower energy state after you're done. We don't know if such a lower-energy state even exists.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

Also, it's a common misconception that black holes are like cosmic vacuum cleaners. Stuff normally just orbits past a black hole without passing through the event horizon. That haze in the photo is stars, not gas, so there's no friction to help stuff slow down instead of orbiting past.

For persepective, try going to this page and typing in a random NGC galaxy number (ngcxxx, where the x's are random digits). If you do a few of these, you'll probably notice a lot of them have funky shapes. Sometimes this can be attribited to something like a recent collision, and sometimes you just have to say it's a funky-shaped galaxy and we don't know why. I skimmed their paper, and they don't even refer to this particular galaxy in it.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

The original paper is here.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews

But Amazon is still a pretty yukky company in lots of ways:

• They try to patent obvious software methods.
• They have a lousy record on privacy (1, 2).
• They have a union-busting campaign, complete with instructions on their internal web pages explaining how managers can thwart union organizers.
• Did you know that when you write a review on their site, it becomes their property?
  • All submitted comments become the licensed property of Amazon.com as set forth in our Legal Notices.
  Of course this means that all those user reviews will go in the bit bucket if Amazon goes belly up (which seems likely, since the company as a whole has never made a profit). And of course, Amazon doesn't allow reviews of books they can't sell, which leaves out a lot of free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer books. (OK, I admit I'm biased -- I run a web site for user-submitted book reviews, with an emphasis on free books.)