Slashdot Mirror
FreshPorts
Dan Langille, creator and maintainer
of the FreeBSD Diary, has just
unleashed FreshPorts on the world.
In a nutshell, this is a changing list of new and updated ports in the
FreeBSD ports tree, making it easy to keep bang up to date with new software
as it's ported. It's a natural companion to Wolfram Schneider's fortnightly port update messages.
How many trolls were there before moderation?
Two IIRC - Meept and DAVEO.
How many trolls are there now, after the 70-second delay, lameness filter, caps filter, word length filter, and all of Rob's other attempts to get rid of us?
Not that many if you count the difference between a troll and a spammer. I've written trolls here on /. and they add to the conversation - spam doesn't.
But I do agree that Rob's going about it the wrong way. Short of AI there's never going to be a way to filter spam out, and he's just making this site a challenge with his "lameness filter" and other ideas. But since I browse at -5 it's still annoying.
I think the vast quantity of spam (they're not clever enough to qualify as trolls) on this story and others is in direct response to Rob's new "lameness filter" which tries to prevent things from being posted in all caps. Since there are plenty more annoying things than all caps (as we can see here) this is both a) a waste of time and b) asking for trouble.
Every time Rob adds a new feature to cut down on noise (e.g. moderation, 70 sec delay etc.) it seems to result in massive increases in spam from the lamers. Oh well, since they've only got a ten minute attention span it'll probably die down in a while.
it's is a nifty idea to romantisize freeBSD however, as it is currently lurking in the shadows of linux celebraty.
-Jon
this is my sig.
>We've got Linux, what the heck to we need Free/Open/NetBSD(I) for?
Given that BSD existed long before Linux, The same question can be asked...why work on Linux?
Linux is nothing but a rip-off of Unix, whereas BSD is from the code of Unix.
(how are those 2 answers, troll? Given you claim you were not trolling, perhaps the above 2 answers will be understandable in a non-trolling way.)
How about this: the GPL licence (the freedom of the tool) VS BSD (the freedom of the human) Some people think the freedom to do what the human wants to do to a tool (sourcecode/resulting executable) is MORE important than the rights of a tool. The human race has gotten to where we are today via tool usage, and the GPL is more restrictive about how the tool is to be used than the BSD Licence.
>It's not a question to be dismissed.
Sure it can. You make these 'grand proclamations' about how linux is wonderful, yet you provide no facts. Just bluster.
>Standards are just needed so badly.
Who decides these 'standards'? *YOU*? You are nothing but an AC trolling. The only 'sptandard' I'm seeing from you is "linux"....which has what, 150+ seprate versions? The redhatisnotlinux site acknologies these version ARE fragmented and different when they advocate "build binary distributions for ALL MAJOR Linux distributions. " Real good idea....lets get behind a standard with 150+ different versions.
>spreading our development efforts so thinly
As you are *SO* concerend about such then advocate these measures:
1) The LSB should include ANY OS that wants to support the API via a compatibility layer
2) All userspace code sould be under a BSD licence so EVERYONE can share the code
3) All drivers should be BSD licenced so everyone can share
4) People who write code for Linux should be going to the old tomes/old hackers and asking how to make PORTABLE code, such that ALL UNIX(tm) forms can benifit from the program.
The final point, as made by ESR, is monoculture==bad, diversity==good. This is better expressed as the History of Unix development. Many ideas are tried, and what wins out is the "better" idea. Without the diverse code base to TRY new ideas, you end up going down blind allies.
What you advocate is picking one path, and somehow I'm betting most of the world would find following a troll down a blind ally to be unpalitable
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I think that it should be based on number of lines taken up for all posts. ((A line > 80 characters or BR) = line) rather than number of bytes.
Yeah, because a BR tag is only 4 bytes - you can have loads of those in any given byte limit. And it would have an effect on large irrelevent articles, at least once they'd gone down to -1.
Most of the more irritating spam (good point about spam v. troll in your other post btw) could be detected using a simple algorithm to spot redundancy.
It's never going to go away (unless Rob comes up with an AI post filter :) ) but it can certainly be limited with some checks which should be fairly simple to encode in Perl. Of course any attempt will draw the spammers into more attempts to circumvent it so they'd have to be good.
Hopefully accounts like "flam0r" will get bitchslapped by Rob soon, but then they can always create more accounts. Oh well...
Go to the Customise Comments page and save it as HTML. Find the FORM tag and change the action to point to http://slashdot.org/users.pl, and then look down for the "SELECT name=uthreshold" tag. Under that, find the "OPTION selected value=-1" tag and change the -1 to a -5.
Save the page, load it in your browser, set your threshold to -1 in the list and submit it. Lo and behold, you can now see comments all the way down to -5. The /. censorhip where bitchslapped accounts are forced to -2 is defeated :)
Two relatively easy things that would help IMHO are:
Just some thoughts :)
It's good that somebody actually sat down and worked something like this out... I'm sure there are many people out there that will find this an invaluable resource.
The only thing I'm wondering is how this will work across the different BSD's, and the different Releases of each BSD, if it implements the same sort of patch system as the ports collections of these fine OS's use at the present time.
-Ryan