Slashdot Mirror
Wading Through Weblogs, One Idea at a Time
candot writes "Remember the recent slashdot story on NASA cancelling the moon hoax book? Wonder what other weblogs are saying about the subject?
Launched today (in beta), the Waypath Project is an attempt to network the weblog community, connecting weblogs that share common themes, ideas, and topics. The Waypath Project's Related Weblog Navigation engine analyzes weblog entries to determine their core conceptual makeups, compares them with one another to find out how related they are, and presents you with its best guess as to what's related to your original input. This is done all automatically. Look for the disclaimers about varying quality you'd expect from an automated classification system, such as at Google News. You're encouraged to embed WP results in your weblog pages. Be the first on your block to try it out, today -- unless it gets slashdotted, then tomorrow. Resources are limited, so pace yourselves."
You R Gay.
www.goatse.cx
fp! hahaha!
I cannot locate anywhere the DLink DWL-650+ 802.11b wireless LAN card drivers for Linux!
This is the PC card that uses the Texas Instruments chipset that supposedly does 22Mbps (although it doesnt work very well on Windows....)
Someone please help me!!
Please!!
Written by losers FOR losers. The only people who give a fuck about weblogs are sad pathetic wretches too insecure to form their own opinions on the most trivial of topics.
It seems to me that blogs are a haven for angsty, mal-adjusted, teenage primadonnas. Is this an article directed at the ever growing teenage portion of the Slashdot audience? Really, who reads these things, they're a waste of time.
?-|||-----x<*))))><
It's proprietary, closed-source, dirt slow, written in Java, inaccurate, and prone to nasty debug screens.
Take a look at slashdot, livejournal, and everything2 -- everything works like clockwork. I think the open source community could, and should, write better code for this.
Wonder what other weblogs are saying about the subject?
Ummm... no. But thanks anyway.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Write your OWN drivers, you fucking LAMER! You've got the source code because Linux is the BEST thing in the world! Don't waste my time. I'm writing another patch for oclock.
Be the first on your block to try it out, today -- unless it gets slashdotted, then tomorrow. Resources are limited, so pace yourselves.
Others have said it but here it is again. Slashdot is a great resource but many interesting sites become inaccessable due to their servers not being able to handle the load. Why can't Slashdot set up a cache of the interesting pages like google does?
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
... for example slashdot is a news and discussion site rather than a genuine^H^H^H^H^H^H^H out an out weblog. It may not have been such when the site started, but a large number of slashdot subscribers look at this site as a source of nerd news, not trivia, and definitely not to peek into other peoples diaries.
As for the hoax, the less discussion on the subject the better. It cannot be conclusivey proved that it was a hoax, and those who believe it was one will not listen to reason.
I always thought that combining the setup of Everything2 and a massive amout of blogs would create something great. This is a step in this direction. Is there anybody else agreeing that combining E2 with Waypath would make the best reference source ever?
Because that would involve them either manually downloading and saving the cached copy or actually spending time to write code to automatically download and cache a copy of everything that's linked. If you want the feature, submit the patch to slashcode. Then it might eventually end up on slashdot.
But in this case it wouldn't help at all since it's more of an application than a web site. All the pages are dynamic... it's like trying to cache Google.
[This is a plug]
/.); but really it can use anything as a trust metric.
Memigo spots memes and interesting news ahead of weblogs, including Slashdot, instead of relying on trailing metrics like blogs. How? it monitors how users rate individual articles and creates personalised recommendations for each user (yep, kinda like Amazon).
The sites and articles are also inserted into a web of trust, so when a new article/meme shows up, it inherits the trusts of its author and recommenders. The point is to be a leading indicator of interest and sniff out interesting news first...
To be fair, memigo parses a few blogs too (that tend to make news, rather than follow them, such as
Try it, you will be pleasantly suprised --yes, you need a login for the personal recommendations, but there is no requirement for any personal info, including any sort of e-mail address...
Jesus Christ, what the hell is this!? First an article abour a compost bin, then something about the three residents of Idaho being able to get more porn, and now some shit about WEBLOGS!? Yeah, I can definitely see why something about the changing of the name of OpenBeOS isn't as important as rotting garbage...
For those who can't be bothered to go and read it/for when it gets Slashdotted:
No problem.
Q C: www.google.com/+google&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 :-P
http://216.239.53.100/search?q=cache:fHxHiYDn3e
(posting anonymously for the obvious reasons)
Heres a screenshot!
I think it has more to do with copyright violations than anything else.
The majority of sites posted here have ad banners, so naturally, they like it when people visit their site. Whether or not it gets slashdotted is irrelevant. If even the first few thousand people get through, that's change in the webmaster's pocket.
By caching the pages they link to, they not only steal the webmaster's content for profit(no doubt the cached pages will be ON slashdot, and thus have slashdot banners), but they will also be depriving the webmaster of revenue.
I don't think the guys at Slashdot could handle that many lawsuits at once.
"People should be allowed to keep midgets as pets."
- Gov. Jesse Ventura
If an infinite number of bloggers write an infinite number of postings, and a search engine cross-references them all, does this give us anything more than Word Salad? If the site wasn't broken I'm curious enough to try it, but I'm sceptical. Most blogs are (possibly) interesting if you know the people: otherwise, they are about as thrilling as someone else's holiday snaps. And the most used category is going to be me me me...
Also, newsy weblogs such as /. end up being cross-referenced anyway, because sooner or later someone posts a 'hey have you seen what they are saying on...' message.
Virtually serving coffee
I do remember. Those were the good old days.
Jonahweb.com has stuff.
Only thing is it doesn;t work.. hmm MS Beta release?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Because that would involve them either manually downloading and saving the cached copy or actually spending time to write code to automatically download and cache a copy of everything that's linked.
Maybe Slashdot should invest $40 and buy a copy of Black Widow site mirroring tool? Maybe it is a legal thing but google has a cache of many sites including ones taken down.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
the Waypath Project is an attempt to network the weblog community, connecting weblogs that share common themes, ideas, and topics.
They're called "Web rings". You might remember them.
Asides from that, who the hell cares what some kid in Tacoma thinks about the NASA book? Or, for that matter, who the hell cares what a kid in Tacoma thinks about anything? No one.
WBELOGS == TEH GEYEST! Just stop.
wget http://www.softbytelabs.com/download/trial.exe
oh wait...
Have Linux installed at your place in Amsterdam, for cheap
Which must include you as well, look you posted here!
So sally breaks up with don, whose weblog indicates he's now really hot for janet, could care less about Don but really like Barry, who donkey punched Jane, who is best friend with Sally. Hrm... makes it so much clearer now
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Others have answered it but here it is again.
So just as a test I plopped the URL http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20021107. html from the /. story Could Eolas End Microsoft's Browser Dominance? into the search field on the Waypath Project page and well all it ended up giving me was a bunch of Microsoft related hits, nothing to really do with the specifics of the article itself. Maybe the word "Microsoft" is too prevalent and therefor overweighted?
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
If you want to know what weblogs are saying about the Nasa moon hoax story then I recommend you get psycholog^H^H^H^H put a bookmark on good old Blogdex. Fine format, good leads to web stories both nerdy and not. You want links (and related weblogs) for the text of the UN Resolution on Iraq, the hockey dad suing to get his son named MVP, or a simple tool to give you the size and text of any web page? They're on Blogdex today.
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
Slow news day, huh /. ?
Be the first on your block to program your weblog to automatically generate amusing nonsense when polled by a blog hog.
Idiot.
What, no mention of Blogdex, the Media Diffusion Index? It's several years old, and is pretty good at picking current trends.
~GoRK
I think they could set up a cache.slashdot.org server and have it fetch copies of all the links right before the story is posted. Then put a [cached] link for each one in the 'Related Links' section to the right of the story header. Of course they couldn't have banners on top, that would be violating copyright. But a simple google style cache of every link in the story would be a useful add-on to slashcode.
Why can't Slashdot set up a cache of the interesting pages
/. links to are. It couldn't work unless someone grabbed a copy of the code (and data) and setup their own waypath machine in the osdn cage
in this case because most of the pages on waypath are dynamically generated - a lot of the sites
"We're being slashdotted. If things are a little slow, that's why. Hey, at least you made it this far. "
:P
Someone warned them
Who is this Karma guy and why is he bad ??
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Really? I'm here for CmdrTaco.
There are lots of browser choices, but there is no one reasonable default choice that can be made available to users. And many of the browsers have something wrong with them.
Konqueror is great - but it has had showstopping bugs in the last two major versions. 2.2.2 had a horrible bug which caused it to lock up sometimes when selecting any text in an input box. I set up Red Hat boxes for numerous friends and coworkers, and trying to explain why the primary browser locked up so often was quite difficult. I thought 3.0 would save us, but alas - it has an even worse bug whereby forms submit incorrectly about 1 time in 5, causing most functionality-oriented sites (including the TrustCommerce merchant admin site) to be completely unusable. My other major complaint with Konq is its jerky page updates: clicking a link will cause a big white box to suddenly obscure part of the current page - compare to Mozilla which updates the display very cleanly. 3.0 was significantly better on this front, but it's still enough of a problem to hurt the user experience. Finally, it's still slow when you have a lot of browser windows open. The worst is when you middle-click a link to a large PNG image (say, the screenshots on the GNOME site). I minimize the window while the image is loading, but in the meantime my other browser windows become _very_ unresponsive; trying to scroll is jerky and difficult. Very unpleasant.
Mozilla-based browsers are the best. They render most pages correctly and enjoy the support of being the basis for Netscape. However, Mozilla is not integrated with any desktop environment, making tasks such as printing, accessing the file open or save dialogs, and cut-n-paste unpleasant. Galeon is the best browser currently available, to my mind, but the lack of anti-aliased fonts keeps me going back to Konqueror. Opera is good but commercial, and suffers badly from the default fonts being ugly.
Solution? Browser developers need to focus on removing the remaining impediments to user-friendliness. Konq needs to be faster and smoother in its display, and stop shipping with major bugs that make it nearly unusable. Mozilla needs to get better desktop integration (such as letting you specify your mail client and ditching that lame file dialog for the default GTK dialog) and anti-aliased fonts for rendering. Whichever browser is the first to come to completeness on these points should then be chosen as the default by distributions. It's a tight race, and one that will no doubt be won in the next couple of months. Hopefully it will be a tie - having several 'best' browsers would be awesome!
2. Prompting for a filesystem scan. /dev/rd/c0d0p2", possibly answer a bunch of cryptic questions, and then reboot. Does anyone enjoy going through this process? Does anyone find themselves wanting to answer "no" to the question of whether to fix inode 327? I doubt it. The system should just fix the filesystem, even if it means losing a few recently-written inodes, and get on with booting, without asking the user anything.
If you accidentally cut the power to your desktop at the wrong moment, here's what happens. The system boots, tries to scan the filesystem, can't recover the journal, and panics. You are prompted to enter the root password, and then you're expected to type some cryptic commands like "fsck
Think it's better server-side? No: it's much, much worse. Now when a machine hardlocks (say, due to hardware that is overheating due to heavy load - a common scenario if you're using standard PC hardware and your webserver gets /.ed), and you call the colocation facility to ask them to reboot the box, the thing doesn't come back online. Now you've got to ask the person in the facility to wheel a monitor over and plug it in, give them your root password, and tell them to type the aforementioned cryptic command. This SUCKS, bad. (Apparently it sucks so much my grammar is starting to suffer!)
3. Printing needs to be easier to configure. /etc/printcap; I never could seem to get it to work quite right, especially for sharing printers on the network. I found it easier to write device drivers for the Linux kernel than to set up a stupid printer! (I have written a total of three device drivers for the kernel, but I have yet to construct a working printcap file.) Today things are better: GUI programs such as Red Hat's printconf-gui and Mandrakes PrinterDrake make it possible for mere mortals to set up a printer. But still they remain too difficult. For example, Red Hat does not install the printer on startup: the user needs to know to type "su" and then "printconf-gui" at the command prompt. Both have the problem of prompting you for which driver you would like to use for certain printer types. For example, I have a basic HP Deskjet at home. Mandrake gave me two choices for the driver, while Red Hat give me a whopping five! Asking the user questions they are likely to find irrelevant is very bad UI design. The user doesn't care what driver they use, they just want to be able to print at the maximum speed and quality possible. If you want to hide this choice in an "advanced" tab somewhere, that's fine: but don't force them to make the choice!
For years I struggled with
Printer install should work like this. You run the printer install program, and it gives you two choices: "Set up a printer attached to my computer", and "Set up a printer from the network." The first choice looks in /proc/sys/dev/parport/parport?/autoprobe and determines the type of printer that is connected and choses a driver for it. It displays the type of printer detected, then asks you one last question: "Do you want to share this printer with people on your local network?" After answering this question, it sets up the printer, and you're done. Sorted.
4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
Most Linux distributions come with a ton of applications, development tools, and support for all sorts of fancy devices. But none of this is very obvious when you boot into KDE or GNOME for the first time. The menu contains a few apps but they are scattered about and don't have names that reveal what they do. The vast majority of tools on the system aren't even in the menus. We need to make it easy for a new user to find out how to do stuff with their shiny new OS, without having to do a web search to find out.
This is, IMO, Linux's top strength on the desktop. Windows comes with an email client, a crap browser, and Freecell. MacOS has the same, but iTunes in place of Freecell. You really can't do much with a default install of either OS. On the other hand, Linux comes with a wealth of applications and toys that could keep the user busy for years without ever downloading or purchasing any additional software. Let's make this obvious! Here's how.
There should be an "I want to..." dialog (though this can be turned off if you're an advanced user). It should be a large icon on the desktop which is very obvious to any user. Clicking it will open the dialog. At the top is written the text, "I want to..." and below are a long list of things that you can do with your system. These might need to be grouped by expandable categories, as the list could get very long. Here are a few things I suggest:
- Browse the web
- Read email
- Chat (IRC/AOL/Yahoo/Jabber/...)
- Burn a CD
- Install a printer
- Set up a modem
- Set up a DSL or cable modem
- Make my computer serve web pages
- Share my files with others on my local network (NFS)
- Access someone else's shared files (NFS)
- Download pictures from my digital camera (GPhoto)
- Paint a picture or touch up a photograph (Gimp)
ELX is the one distro I have seen that tries something like this, but it suffers from the same problem as the KDE & GNOME menus: it gives you a list of programs you can run, instead of tasks that you can do. People use computers to do things, not to run programs.5. Cleaner redraws.
This has long been a complaint of mine in almost every OS and desktop environment: slow or flickery window updates. I have only ever seen one OS do it right, and that's Mac OS X. This isn't a speed issue, really; it's a how-you-update-the-screen issue. Mac OS X pops a window onto the screen all at once. Presumably it does any drawing that it needs to do on a back buffer and then blits it to the screen when it's all done, just like a video game. Even on a slower system, it still appears very "clean" - the window just takes a little while to appear. But you don't see any ugly drawing artifacts in the meantime. Mac OS X is great.
The latest version of Windows is not bad; mostly I think this is due to the fast speed of modern hardware coupled with the minimal eye candy that the OS offers. Things like the file explorer still don't update all at once, but it's a minor point; they've mostly got it right.
KDE, on the other hand, continues to flicker and pop. Here's a key example: click on the "home" icon in your menu bar. The window pops onscreen, but many of the drawing elements (the files themselves, but many widgets) are temporarily drawn as large white or grey boxes. A split second later the full images appear. Even on a high-end system it looks a little funny; on a slow system it looks terrible.
This is not a functionality issue, so in many ways its not that important. But it is a "user experience" issue; people coming from Mac OS X or even Windows will find their experience a little less pleasant, and that makes them less likely to come back.
6. Die stray processes, die!
In Linux when a process messes up you can exit X, drop to a console, and start running "killall kdeinit", "killall mozilla", etc, but this is lame and for non-technical users it boils down to the same thing. Possible solution: when in X, WM should keep track of processes and the windows they are attached to. When an app has no windows concat(or the main window is not open), the WM should attempt to kill them (first normally, then with -9). This functionality could be configured for debugging whereby instead of killing them, it attaches gdb to the process so that developers could figure out why there are stray processes.
7. Easy way of sharing files.
Ideally a right-click on a directory and chose "share this directory". Be able to pull up a list of all folders you are sharing and change permissions or remove the sharing.
8. Sound support.
OSS was great a few years ago and continues to offer support for modern cards (including professional quality ones such as the Midiman Delta 1010, which is what I have) but it is commercial and it is showing its age. ALSA is a superior solution and has been rolled into the dev kernel. Once it makes its way into the stable kernel and distros start using it uniformly (Mandrake, SuSE, and a few others have offered it for some time now) along with a good configuration tool, audio on Linux will rock.
9. No common editor which supports "soft wrapping."
By which I mean displaying things wordwrapped, even when it's one long line. This means you can go back and edit the line and the rest of the paragraph will reformat itself automatically. Evolution's message editor does this, but that doesn't help me for composing text files (like this one!). Others I've tried - Kate, GEdit, and even vi - only support "hard wrapping", where it inserts a newline when you get to the end of the line. Then when you insert more words into the paragraph later, the formatting gets all screwy.
10. No easy way to configure X - especially change resolution on the fly.
This varies by distribution, but I the resolution issue is a common one. (The only distro I have seen that does it right was Corel 1.0. You could change your resolution from the KDE control panel. However, I believe this is because they were using the commercial X server Metro-X.) It boggles my mind that, after all these years, the best way to configure X is to run Xconfigurator from the console! This is perhaps the longest running embarrassment of the free software desktop.
I like sites like this
I mean, Waypath is at one level convenient, but no more so than well established weblog communities such as
blo.gs, the Eaton WebPortal and blogs4God. Moreover, when it comes to gleaning headline news via a blog, I would suspect the real weapon of cohice would be our personal aggregators such as Amphetadesk and HotSheet?
Which is where the WMDI comes in. It helps me identify sites via xml-ish mechanisms such as the Dublin Core Initiative
Then again, your mileage may vary.
--- have you healed your church website?
That reply in the FAQ is 2 years old. Lots has changed since then. Storage is cheaper and Slashcode has been updated. There must be a way around the cache problem even if it was just selective to those who volunteer a link to their own small sites. I wonder if Slashdot has ever been threatened with a lawsuit for causing a denial of service attack?
And how is this off topic if it was brought up in the subject header? Dang.
Today's vices may be tomorrow's virtues.
This list of 10 Linux problems is pure cut-and-paste of an article by Adam Wiggins. (The witty title is, however, Anonymous Coward's own contribution.)
Making trouble today for a better tomorrow...
This looks similar to Blogdex at the MIT Media Lab.
Anyone who is interested should look at both of them.
It sounds an aweful lot like Daypop... But then, I can't seem to access daypop either. Hm.
---
Open Source Shirts
on the topic of big computers searching through weblogs, there is also blogdex which lists what news has been making the most noize.
What about BlogStreet. http://www.blogstreet.com/ They had introduced this concept called Blog Neighborhoods months back and seem to be doing a much better job at finding related weblogs. I also like their weblogs search engine, now that daypop has been down since forever.
I'm a day late, but I was away from computing yesterday. I run another project called Tangnet, that is sort of a similar idea, but (at this point) makes no attempt to link blog postings by idea, but focuses more on common traits between the authors of blogs. It's new but growing.
Why do mathematicians insist on using words that already have another
meaning? "It is the complex case that is easier to deal with." "If it
doesn't happen at a corner, but at an edge, it nonetheless happens at a
corner."
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