But they don't. That's the core of the problem. Anyway, I'm sure a lot of people browse at +1 or higher even when moderating, which would explain why so many good AC comments stay at 0. while non-AC trolls (often) get +5 Insightful.
Personally, I think it would be much better to get rid of the current mod system altogether and implement something akin to the article scoring in some of the newsreaders like strn. Let me choose my own scores, based on the people I know I like to read, and apply those scores automatically when I request an article. Sure, some people will refuse to read anyone who disagrees with them, but that's their problem, not yours, and one you can't solve anyway. At least it isn't a problem for everyone else the way bad moderation is.
...meta-mod is a partial solution only.
Meta-moderation isn't even a partial solution; it's just the first step in an infinite regression. Who moderates the meta-moderators? I meta-moderate every day; if even 5% of the users did similarly, there's no way you could be reviewing them all.
Interestingly, elsewhere in this thread, you've said that Slashdot's moderation is a good thing. Now you say that there should be an end to the "karma game". What ideas do you have in mind for this? Allowing moderation, but not accumulating it on a per-user basis as "karma"? Or simply not displaying one's karma score? Do you want to get rid of the +1 bonus too?
In fact, some trolls have been clearly labeled "Troll" by their authors. Yet they got modded up anyway, often as "Insightful"! And you guys still think that the moderation system works?
Bullshit, Michael. If Slashdot sucks, it's because of two factors: (1) Overwhelming popularity, and (2) inept management.
Popularity is obviously involved; the site has probably thousands of regular posters out of its 200k+ accounts; a new story can get 100 comments in less than half an hour. It's impossible for anyone to keep up with it all, and even if the moderation system was basically sensible (which it never has been), it still wouldn't be enough. As it is, the totally broken moderation system does little but encourage conformity and amuse the trolls.
Management: Two factors here. One, wretched journalism standards, e.g. Taco's report yesterday that Red Hat claimed to have invented Open Source, or the Hotmail debacle that streetlawyer mentioned; two, the moderation system; three, the refusal of management/admins to do anything about it other than whine that it's the fault of the trolls.
I've been spending a lot of time at Kuro5hin lately. Admittedly, as a less-popular site, it doesn't have Slashdot's popularity problem, by a long shot, but I think as it grows it will do better than Slashdot at retaining the things that make it good. The way that users vote on topics works really well, and the thresholds can be raised as the site becomes more popular, so I think it can scale up fairly gracefully. I'm less enthusiastic about Kuro5hin's comment moderation, but it's no worse than Slashdot's, and arguably better.
Slashdot's editorial system makes the quality of the site highly dependent on you editors. Of the lot of you, only timothy can be relied on at all to post quality articles. That has more to do with why Slashdot sucks (if it does; hey, I still read it, so obviously I haven't completely given up hope) than any number of trolls.
The thing I hate most of all is when banner ads are stored on Akamai, because Akamai is also used for legitimate purposes. The loopback-address trick thus doesn't work very well; Junkbuster or similar filtering-proxy software is better, since you can mask out particular URLs with regexps.
As I understand it, the orignal Gnutella project at Nullsoft is dead; AOL presumably didn't approve, particularly considering their impending merger with Time/Warner. There are now a number of independent Gnutella clones, most of them fully compatible with the Nullsoft Gnutella protocol, and I think they're all open-source. Consult the Gnutella site (not hosted by Nullsoft/AOL, nor operated by Nullsoft employees AFAIK) for details.
The end of Napster is sort of sad, but then again my immediate reaction when I first heard of the company was "Is this a joke? They're going to get sued to death!" The whole idea of starting a company to sponsor MP3 piracy was just inane. (I've heard all the arguments about how Napster has "legitimate uses" -- I'm just no more impressed by them than the judge was. It is simply obvious, even without Fanning's leaked emails, that Napster's real purpose was to facilitate piracy.)
Now, if you really want to do this sort of thing right, you don't start a company and advertise what you're doing. That's dumb. You also don't have a centralized server whose operators can be sued. Instead, you set up a decentralized system where everyone is a client and a server. Gnutella is one possibility, but it still allows you to identify where the pirated files are located (on various servers, identifiable by their IP addresses, which may be dynamic but do have a specific meaning at any given moment). Freenet is better still; the files are distributed in such a way that you can't tell where they are, and in fact a given file may not be in any one place in its entirety. Now that's tricky to sue.
So I think it's pretty stupid for people to be talking about setting up new Napster servers. You want to get sued? Fine, go ahead. Your pockets are probably a lot less deep than Napster's, but the RIAA will be happy to take whatever you've got. In the meantime, those of us with clues will be working with Gnutella and Freenet, doing essentially the same thing you are, but not getting sued. Take your pick.
...it sounds like an MP3 file itself could still be covered by copyright, but the act of putting it up on a web site, or GnutellaNet, or whatever, would be treated as a "broadcast" of that copyrighted material, and therefore downloading it is no different from listening to the radio, and does not constitute "piracy".
strongly disagree that beginner languages should be dynamically typed: type discipline is probably the FIRST thing a prospective programmer should learn
I think this is one of those "agree to disagree" situations. I'd say the first thing a beginner should learn is how to think algorithmically. And I don't think that "learning discipline" needs to involve being put into a straitjacket. People who write very large, complex programs in dynamically-typed languages such as Erlang, Scheme, or Smalltalk seem to do just fine without static typing. The comp.lang.functional newsgroup has debated static vs. dynamic typing many times, and neither side seems to be able to convince the other. The people who use statically-typed languages are always convinced that without static typing all hell would break loose, and the dynamic-typing advocates insist that their experience says otherwise.
Re:C++ as a teaching language/programming obscure?
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Who's Afraid Of C++?
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· Score: 1
Constructors: Yes, constructors and destructors are good things to have, as you say. There are still gotchas around them, though, relating to implicit conversions, failure to declare the destructor as virtual (or, just as badly, doing so when it's catastrophic to do so), etc.
Function overloading: I didn't say it wasn't useful. I use it all the time. It does have gotchas, though, because programmers sometimes don't realize which version of a function will be used, leading to exceedingly subtle bugs.
Exceptions: Actually, it isn't that hard to be exception-safe, but the language doesn't do it for you, which is a serious problem. A good auto-pointer class (not the one in the ANSI C++ library) can do wonders in this regard, however.
Templates: Call them "generic" as opposed to "polymorphic" if you wish. I guess I used "polymorphic" more in the sense that the functional programming community uses it. The OO community doesn't tend to use it that way because OO languages usually don't have polymorphism except via message passing. C++ further limits it by insisting on an inheritance relationship, which is not required in, for example, Smalltalk or OCAML.
You're right that some of the things that are wrong with C++ are due to Stroustrup's original criteria for the language -- these things are essentially "broken by design". And they do help to preserve backward-compatibility with C, but then again, I view that as one of C++'s biggest problems. It wants to be an abstract, high-level language, but at the same time it wants to be substantially source-code compatible with C, a language so low-level that it is often described as a "portable macro-assembler". These two goals conflict very badly, and in consequence, C++ implements its high-level abstractions too simplistically, with too many annoying restrictions and gotchas, and, at the same time, subverts its low-level features.
We're wandering off-topic here, but what the hell...
Incidentally, Haskell is not really hard to learn. It decomposes into various subsets in a very clean way. I wouldn't recommend beginners learn much about monads, for example, or modules, or some of the other more esoteric features.
Sure, but you can't write anything useful in Haskell without knowing about monads! You can't do any I/O, or use strict evaluation, or even obtain pseudo-random numbers, without them. Now, this is arguably a good thing, since monads are a very powerful and elegant concept, but they're still a bitch to learn.
Also, Haskell's type system is rather daunting to the beginner. I lean towards the notion that beginner languages ought to be dynamically typed, precisely to avoid that complexity. That's one reason Scheme is a good beginner language, in spite of its parenthesis-ridden syntax.
I've been coding since you were in short trousers, boy!
Not that again. You don't know if that's true, and even if it is, so what? What matters is how well you understand the subject, not how long you've been working in it. And to judge by your comments in this thread, your understanding is rather weak. Or maybe your priorities are just badly screwed up, since you seem to think that C++ is good just because it's currently in high demand in the market.
But a skilled programmer will find that she can use C++ to produce faster and more efficient code than is possible with Perl.
I don't disagree with that. I just think it's irrelevant. Nobody's trying to rewrite GNOME in Perl, and for most of the things Perl is used for, it is fast enough. If you're such a great master of programming, why do you still have this teenage-hacker-ish attitude that everything has to be as fast as possible?
it sounds like you think every program, including simple shell scripts, should be written in C++.
Well, almost.
That sort of says it all, I think.
Re:C++ as a teaching language/programming obscure?
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Who's Afraid Of C++?
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· Score: 2
I take all your points about C++, but I don't feel that they really prove my original point to be `nonsense': to some degree, C++ is closer to the problem that C.
I really don't think so. C++ does have a few improvements over C, such as templates, exceptions, overloading, and the ability to declare variables anywhere in a function. But it also adds tremendous complexity and lots of nasty gotchas that make it actually harder to use (for anyone less than an expert) than C. It's true that for someone like me, C++ is preferable, because I know the language better than just about anyone I've ever met, and over the last dozen years I've developed a number of useful techniques for dealing with (and avoiding) C++'s problem areas. But it's a bitch of a language to learn well, which I think outweighs its advantages overall, especially when there are a number of vastly superior languages out there (again: Erlang, Smalltalk, OCAML, and probably others. You mentioned Haskell, which has its pluses but in its own way is nearly as hard to learn well as C++.)
I can't stand Perl, so I won't try to defend it. However, Grim Metamoderator is correct that C++ isn't really a good OO language.
I still want to address your points individually, though, because a lot of what you're saying is not really Perl-specific and, I think, represents a very limited understanding of programming.
1. "Perl is slow." Well, that depends. For many tasks, Perl (or Python, etc.) is fast enough. Then again, for a very complex application, it can be very challenging to get good performance out of C++, because one means of controlling complexity is to develop high-level abstractions and then write most of the program using those abstractions. If the abstractions are poorly chosen, or poorly implemented, performance suffers badly. This is not a point in C++'s favor, since it forces you to do a lot of annoying, low-level dirty work yourself (thread interactions, memory management, etc.). Anyone who thinks C or C++ is necessarily fast ought to spend a week using Windows 98 on a slow Pentium. In contrast, a well-designed higher-level language (e.g. Erlang or OCAML) supplies you with a set of well-implemented abstractions proven over many years of use in a wide variety of programs.
2. "Perl makes inefficient use of resources." Same argument as #1, really; CPU cycles (speed) being just one example of system resources.
3. "Perl is hard to maintain." Well, I can't help but agree with that one. Then again, I think C++ is pretty hard to maintain, too. Its simplistic static type system and association of polymorphism with class inheritance tends to result in extremely brittle designs that don't age well.
4. "Perl is unnecessary." I don't think it's just Perl you're objecting to here; it sounds like you think every program, including simple shell scripts, should be written in C++. I have to say that sounds kind of crazy to me.
5. "C++ programming is a valuable skill." Well, that's true today, but who knows -- five years from now, it might be yesterday's language, replaced by whatever hot new language (or paradigm) comes along. It's happened before, you know.
Re:C++ as a teaching language/programming obscure?
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Who's Afraid Of C++?
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· Score: 2
One should be able to program in the `problem domain' rather than the `solution domain', and object-orientated languages such as C++ are a step towards being able to do that.
Nonsense. C++ mostly differs from C in two ways: (1) trivial syntax, like writing object.method(...) instead of method(&object,...); and (2) excessive complexity (the various gotchas related to constructors, function overloading, exceptions, templates, etc.). There is very little that C++ gives you that wouldn't be done better with a good module system plus true polymorphism (neither of which exists in C or C++; their idea of "modules" is limited to static functions and C++ namespaces, and C++ polymorphism is badly restricted by its association with class inheritance. Templates are a better example of C++ polymorphism, but they can be inefficient if you don't know how to use them well, and require recompilation every time you need to apply them to a new type).
If you want to see what can really be done in the way of helping programmers to think about the problem rather than all the annoying details of the solution, look into languages like Smalltalk, Erlang, and OCAML, all of which are vastly better than C++.
Re:C++ as a teaching language/programming obscure?
on
Who's Afraid Of C++?
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· Score: 1
Personally, I think C++ is a bad teaching language because computers don't think in objects. They think in memory locations and in blocks of code - exactly like C, nothing like C++.
I don't agree that C++ is all that different from C -- essentially, the C++ object model is just C structs associated with a table of function pointers. The syntax of object.method(...) is just a stylistic thing; in C, you would say method(&object,...) and it would amount to the same thing.
I agree with one aspect of what I think you're saying, which is that students should start off learning how the machine works at a low level, studying a language like C (and, later, assembly, to learn about the things that C hides from you). But once they've learned that, they should also learn higher-level (more abstract) languages, because how "the computer thinks" is really just the way a Von Neumann machine thinks. Other models of computation are possible and useful, and should be learned also, particularly since they are so easily emulated.
look at the thousands of man-hours that have gone into creating Slash..
Slashdot has required a lot of work, yes. But you can download the Slashcode and put up your own work-alike site pretty easily. That, of course, is one of the nice things about open source... you don't have to reinvent everything.
Well, I hope you'll post an update once the odds have turned against you and you've died in the flaming wreckage of a 737 on which some idiot was illegally using his cellphone during the flight.
When you post a comment to Slashdot, you are granting a license to all readers of Slashdot to read your post free of charge.
You don't need to have a right to read a document if you can get hold of it (well, unless it's government-classified or something of that sort, I guess). But I would agree that posting a comment on a website implicitly grants the website the right to "copy" your comment in the sense of transmitting it response to HTTP requests and including it in backups of the website's data.
Furthermore, you are giving the owners of Slashdot the license to relocate, edit, and publish your comments in another forum. Like it or not, that seems a reasonable precondition to using the website.
I don't think that necessarily follows, but I guess it seems reasonable. Of course, Jon Katz is not an owner of Slashdot, and it's his name on the cover. But I suppose Andover.net could hire him to compile and write commentary for a collection of Slashdot comments for them to publish. Okay.
So if the author of a comment owns the copyright to it, what legal right do you have to take those comments and use them as you see fit without consulting with the author? Is your moral and legal judgment so flawless (even in your own mind) that you feel free to do anything you think is "right", no matter what?
Slashdot Mirror
Personally, I think it would be much better to get rid of the current mod system altogether and implement something akin to the article scoring in some of the newsreaders like strn. Let me choose my own scores, based on the people I know I like to read, and apply those scores automatically when I request an article. Sure, some people will refuse to read anyone who disagrees with them, but that's their problem, not yours, and one you can't solve anyway. At least it isn't a problem for everyone else the way bad moderation is.
Meta-moderation isn't even a partial solution; it's just the first step in an infinite regression. Who moderates the meta-moderators? I meta-moderate every day; if even 5% of the users did similarly, there's no way you could be reviewing them all.Interestingly, elsewhere in this thread, you've said that Slashdot's moderation is a good thing. Now you say that there should be an end to the "karma game". What ideas do you have in mind for this? Allowing moderation, but not accumulating it on a per-user basis as "karma"? Or simply not displaying one's karma score? Do you want to get rid of the +1 bonus too?
In fact, some trolls have been clearly labeled "Troll" by their authors. Yet they got modded up anyway, often as "Insightful"! And you guys still think that the moderation system works?
Popularity is obviously involved; the site has probably thousands of regular posters out of its 200k+ accounts; a new story can get 100 comments in less than half an hour. It's impossible for anyone to keep up with it all, and even if the moderation system was basically sensible (which it never has been), it still wouldn't be enough. As it is, the totally broken moderation system does little but encourage conformity and amuse the trolls.
Management: Two factors here. One, wretched journalism standards, e.g. Taco's report yesterday that Red Hat claimed to have invented Open Source, or the Hotmail debacle that streetlawyer mentioned; two, the moderation system; three, the refusal of management/admins to do anything about it other than whine that it's the fault of the trolls.
I've been spending a lot of time at Kuro5hin lately. Admittedly, as a less-popular site, it doesn't have Slashdot's popularity problem, by a long shot, but I think as it grows it will do better than Slashdot at retaining the things that make it good. The way that users vote on topics works really well, and the thresholds can be raised as the site becomes more popular, so I think it can scale up fairly gracefully. I'm less enthusiastic about Kuro5hin's comment moderation, but it's no worse than Slashdot's, and arguably better.
Slashdot's editorial system makes the quality of the site highly dependent on you editors. Of the lot of you, only timothy can be relied on at all to post quality articles. That has more to do with why Slashdot sucks (if it does; hey, I still read it, so obviously I haven't completely given up hope) than any number of trolls.
The thing I hate most of all is when banner ads are stored on Akamai, because Akamai is also used for legitimate purposes. The loopback-address trick thus doesn't work very well; Junkbuster or similar filtering-proxy software is better, since you can mask out particular URLs with regexps.
As I understand it, the orignal Gnutella project at Nullsoft is dead; AOL presumably didn't approve, particularly considering their impending merger with Time/Warner. There are now a number of independent Gnutella clones, most of them fully compatible with the Nullsoft Gnutella protocol, and I think they're all open-source. Consult the Gnutella site (not hosted by Nullsoft/AOL, nor operated by Nullsoft employees AFAIK) for details.
Now, if you really want to do this sort of thing right, you don't start a company and advertise what you're doing. That's dumb. You also don't have a centralized server whose operators can be sued. Instead, you set up a decentralized system where everyone is a client and a server. Gnutella is one possibility, but it still allows you to identify where the pirated files are located (on various servers, identifiable by their IP addresses, which may be dynamic but do have a specific meaning at any given moment). Freenet is better still; the files are distributed in such a way that you can't tell where they are, and in fact a given file may not be in any one place in its entirety. Now that's tricky to sue.
So I think it's pretty stupid for people to be talking about setting up new Napster servers. You want to get sued? Fine, go ahead. Your pockets are probably a lot less deep than Napster's, but the RIAA will be happy to take whatever you've got. In the meantime, those of us with clues will be working with Gnutella and Freenet, doing essentially the same thing you are, but not getting sued. Take your pick.
When you're downloading SETI@HOME, you're downloading COMMUNISM!
Heh, heh.
...it sounds like an MP3 file itself could still be covered by copyright, but the act of putting it up on a web site, or GnutellaNet, or whatever, would be treated as a "broadcast" of that copyrighted material, and therefore downloading it is no different from listening to the radio, and does not constitute "piracy".
Function overloading: I didn't say it wasn't useful. I use it all the time. It does have gotchas, though, because programmers sometimes don't realize which version of a function will be used, leading to exceedingly subtle bugs.
Exceptions: Actually, it isn't that hard to be exception-safe, but the language doesn't do it for you, which is a serious problem. A good auto-pointer class (not the one in the ANSI C++ library) can do wonders in this regard, however.
Templates: Call them "generic" as opposed to "polymorphic" if you wish. I guess I used "polymorphic" more in the sense that the functional programming community uses it. The OO community doesn't tend to use it that way because OO languages usually don't have polymorphism except via message passing. C++ further limits it by insisting on an inheritance relationship, which is not required in, for example, Smalltalk or OCAML.
You're right that some of the things that are wrong with C++ are due to Stroustrup's original criteria for the language -- these things are essentially "broken by design". And they do help to preserve backward-compatibility with C, but then again, I view that as one of C++'s biggest problems. It wants to be an abstract, high-level language, but at the same time it wants to be substantially source-code compatible with C, a language so low-level that it is often described as a "portable macro-assembler". These two goals conflict very badly, and in consequence, C++ implements its high-level abstractions too simplistically, with too many annoying restrictions and gotchas, and, at the same time, subverts its low-level features.
Also, Haskell's type system is rather daunting to the beginner. I lean towards the notion that beginner languages ought to be dynamically typed, precisely to avoid that complexity. That's one reason Scheme is a good beginner language, in spite of its parenthesis-ridden syntax.
I still want to address your points individually, though, because a lot of what you're saying is not really Perl-specific and, I think, represents a very limited understanding of programming.
1. "Perl is slow." Well, that depends. For many tasks, Perl (or Python, etc.) is fast enough. Then again, for a very complex application, it can be very challenging to get good performance out of C++, because one means of controlling complexity is to develop high-level abstractions and then write most of the program using those abstractions. If the abstractions are poorly chosen, or poorly implemented, performance suffers badly. This is not a point in C++'s favor, since it forces you to do a lot of annoying, low-level dirty work yourself (thread interactions, memory management, etc.). Anyone who thinks C or C++ is necessarily fast ought to spend a week using Windows 98 on a slow Pentium. In contrast, a well-designed higher-level language (e.g. Erlang or OCAML) supplies you with a set of well-implemented abstractions proven over many years of use in a wide variety of programs.
2. "Perl makes inefficient use of resources." Same argument as #1, really; CPU cycles (speed) being just one example of system resources.
3. "Perl is hard to maintain." Well, I can't help but agree with that one. Then again, I think C++ is pretty hard to maintain, too. Its simplistic static type system and association of polymorphism with class inheritance tends to result in extremely brittle designs that don't age well.
4. "Perl is unnecessary." I don't think it's just Perl you're objecting to here; it sounds like you think every program, including simple shell scripts, should be written in C++. I have to say that sounds kind of crazy to me.
5. "C++ programming is a valuable skill." Well, that's true today, but who knows -- five years from now, it might be yesterday's language, replaced by whatever hot new language (or paradigm) comes along. It's happened before, you know.
If you want to see what can really be done in the way of helping programmers to think about the problem rather than all the annoying details of the solution, look into languages like Smalltalk, Erlang, and OCAML, all of which are vastly better than C++.
I agree with one aspect of what I think you're saying, which is that students should start off learning how the machine works at a low level, studying a language like C (and, later, assembly, to learn about the things that C hides from you). But once they've learned that, they should also learn higher-level (more abstract) languages, because how "the computer thinks" is really just the way a Von Neumann machine thinks. Other models of computation are possible and useful, and should be learned also, particularly since they are so easily emulated.
Your profit is that you now have the thing you created. There is nothing to recoup.
If you're thinking that you actually have to file copyright papers, or attach a copyright notice, to have a copyright, then you are quite wrong.