It's not the UI, it's the whole UX. Slashdot has gotten harder to use, slower to load and no better for all the effort.
What was so wrong with the primarily HTML version that you had to bork it like this?
At a time the world is moving to mobile, you guys are sending down half a meg of front page and making the interaction entirely too tricky and cute to "just plain work" everywhere.
You're dealing with average people, not bright geeks. People won't read. They don't learn, and arguably they shouldn't need to do so to use someone's web site.
People - even some knowledgeable IT folks I know - think that the "lock" icon means an entire transaction, from client to server, is secure - not just that a transaction is conducted through an encrypted pipe.
They think the lock means:
"you have to have a password to use this site"
"the web site is specially protected from attack"
"nothing can see or affect what's happening on my web browser"
None of that is true about working SSL.
Just what are your plans for educating 3-400 million people out of this fog?
The "lock" icon and the marketing text about security has fostered a consistent misconception in their minds. Good luck changing it.
I think that situation (about which I fret) varies with the personalities involved. He and I are quite close now, and I hope I can model my own Dad's love and acceptance throughout the time we have together, however brief or long.
"Most people who talk about the Beatles as "great music" are talking about their later catalog..."
fail.
Honestly, they don't walk on water, but the Beatles' early pop music was night-and-day different from what had gone before.
No syrup, no sap - at least compared to the industry around them. In their earliest releases as a quartet with George Martin producing, the Beatles made music that was spare, direct, harmonically complex and hummable.
Sure it was fun, but Pop is supposed to be. The harmonies of "Hold Me Tight", the energy of "It Won't Be Long", the jangle, falsetto and close harmony of "Ticket to Ride" - dude, you may not like Pop, but just say so. As pop music goes, there hasn't been much greater.
If you wanted to remain anonymous, why'd you hand 'em a credit card? Isn't this exactly how police track people on the run?
I say pay only with rolled coin!;)
Secondly,
Even IF someone at the NYT became aware of the content by means of an RSS feed pushed out to the Internet by Gatehouse...
Many portals and CMS presentation engines can consume RSS feeds and integrate them into a site. This is not at all uncommon.
For a portal or presentation engine to consume an RSS feed, or for a user with a browser or feedreader to view an RSS feed to which they're subscribed, they have to load it from Gatehouse's site. It doesn't get pushed into Boston.com's site or your browser/feedreader by Gatehouse. You should check into how web publishing works sometime.
We're pretty clearly into "more heat than light" territory here, and I have other things to do with my day off, so I'm pretty much going to stop wailing on this morbid equine now.
I wasn't aware that you could contract out of the Law.
Of course you cannot. But this is exactly my point: if you aren't doing fair use (and it's valid in my opinion to ask for a court ruling on this), then you have arguably agreed to the Creative Commons license on the RSS feed you're consuming. Fair use and acceptance of the license are both covered under the law, so you're not contracting out of it either way.
I mean, anybody can link to anything on the WWW.
Yes, but as noted in my post above, this is not about linking. It's about using the copyrighted content to label the links. TFAs summary is misleading. Someone else in the main thread clarified that it is indeed about the license on the RSS feed, because that's apparently what the NYT is consuming.
Here's that license statement from the feed:
Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported), except where noted.
Doesn't look like Boston.com is attributing the feed either. And it's certainly not noncommercial. I stand by what I said: it looks like fair use to me (though it's looking less-so the more I find out about the actual situation), but it's reasonable to disagree with that position - and it looks like they'll do so in court
No argument from me that using the exact headline and first sentence makes the content much easier to use (I'm a usability professional, and it's what I'd recommend someone do if they're trying to make these articles easy to find - if they had a clear right to use the content, fair use or otherwise).
And as I stated, it looked a lot like fair use to me - but reading this thread further, it looks like the license that Gatehouse put on the RSS feed explicitly disallows exactly this kind of commercial use.
If we were talking about a GPL violation, everyone here would be up in arms supporting Gatehouse. What would be the fair use situation if Microsoft used the API and init methods of the Linux kernel (please forgive the tortured analogy to "headline and first sentence"), modified them and didn't offer the source back to the community?
Fact of the matter is, no amount of torrenting, joyous piracy or copy/pasting content on the web will make copyright laws go away. Open source software is one of the beneficiaries of these laws, as are both Gatehouse and the New York Times. If society decides the copyright situation needs to change, the honest thing to do is change the laws.
All I was saying about fair use was that it was that one might have a reasoned discussion about whether this is fair use - it's not a slam dunk either way.
One could reasonably argue that copying verbatim headlines and first sentences in their entirity is fair use. I think it is, but that's a valid discussion to have. It's not about linking as much as copying the Gatehouse content and using it to label the links.
Boston.com's position as a competing entity (vs. Google's position as a search engine) lends credence to this point. Boston.com is essentially getting Gatehouse to write it's site's local content for them.
It's not as though the links were titled "Aritcle 7 from Gatehouse" instead of Gatehouse's actual title. The former case would indeed be about linking vs. about copyright.
otoh, Gatehouse ought to love having a megasite drive traffic to them. All I can imagine is that they're looking at their metrics and seeing people back right out. They ought to work on keeping those visitors once they get em.
ditto here - small ISP, downstream from Cogent, I'm cut off from my web server and mail service. Can't even see my web host's sales or support pages. I get out through office VPN or personal VPN and everything works...
I've voted in a bunch of elections and that's not been my experience. Since it's the responsibility of states and localities to run them, practices can and do vary. In several elections, I've been handed an anonymous chit that tells the guy guarding the machines: "this guy is registered and legit to vote". The chit is reused by other voters. In Georgia's current touchscreen system, the chit is an electronic card, and it is handed to me between the time I've had my registration checked and the time I get to the machine - without being shoved in a machine to add my identity to the chit. Probably secret here too. (note: I'm not defending paperless voting: paper trail is the only sane way to go, IMO).
I suppose you could do a statistical analysis of the time at which I got to the machine and what time votes were cast, but honestly, why not just rig the election, take over, scrap the constitution and throw me in Gitmo for complaining?
The summary says "Internet Votes". Doesn't say "non-Internet Votes" which more accurately describes the situation (as TFA describes). Not really Internet Voting at all...
How can internet voting be both guaranteed "secret" - as in "can't tie the user to the choice of candidate", and at the same time ensure that individuals (never mind bots) aren't casting more than one vote?
Frankly "whim" is what the iTunes App store model has taught us to expect. (full disclosure: I am an iPod Touch user and want to buy apps Apple has removed).
When it's the decision of someone other than the owner of the phone to stop an application from running, does it matter whether it's a "whim" or not?
I'd think that the nerds here would know the difference between the deficit and the debt, but apparently not. They both involve the federal government of the US's indebtedness, and they both start with "d", but they're not the same thing.
The deficit is how much more we've spent in a year than we have. The deficit adds to the national debt.
The debt (the national debt) is how much we owe as a nation - the whole pile.
One of the first hits on Google said the CBO pegged the 2008 deficit at $219 billion US (probably not correct anyomre). The debt-clock is overflowing into the $10 trillions. That should give you an idea of the difference between the terms you're tossing around.
The deficit and the debt are not the same thing any more than the sales tax and the purchase price are the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the UI, it's the whole UX. Slashdot has gotten harder to use, slower to load and no better for all the effort.
What was so wrong with the primarily HTML version that you had to bork it like this?
At a time the world is moving to mobile, you guys are sending down half a meg of front page and making the interaction entirely too tricky and cute to "just plain work" everywhere.
I'm reading Slashdot less and less.
The solution is user education.
fail.
You're dealing with average people, not bright geeks. People won't read. They don't learn, and arguably they shouldn't need to do so to use someone's web site.
People - even some knowledgeable IT folks I know - think that the "lock" icon means an entire transaction, from client to server, is secure - not just that a transaction is conducted through an encrypted pipe.
They think the lock means:
None of that is true about working SSL.
Just what are your plans for educating 3-400 million people out of this fog?
The "lock" icon and the marketing text about security has fostered a consistent misconception in their minds. Good luck changing it.
Investigate viability of a 3D Render Farm business.
People doing 3D work don't need this kind of iron to design and animate; they only need it for final render. Makes sense to rent time on it.
There are business out there doing this now - don't know if anyone's made a success of it.
I think that situation (about which I fret) varies with the personalities involved. He and I are quite close now, and I hope I can model my own Dad's love and acceptance throughout the time we have together, however brief or long.
Britney Spears has something in common with Mozart and Beethoven: No one has heard any of them perform live music.
This is Palm we're talking about - any new product from Palm is supposed to kill Palm, not the iPhone...
OTOH, don't wait 'till age 49 to have your first kid (voice of experience here).
I love him like nothing else in the world, but God; my back, my knees...
"Most people who talk about the Beatles as "great music" are talking about their later catalog..."
fail.
Honestly, they don't walk on water, but the Beatles' early pop music was night-and-day different from what had gone before.
No syrup, no sap - at least compared to the industry around them. In their earliest releases as a quartet with George Martin producing, the Beatles made music that was spare, direct, harmonically complex and hummable.
Sure it was fun, but Pop is supposed to be. The harmonies of "Hold Me Tight", the energy of "It Won't Be Long", the jangle, falsetto and close harmony of "Ticket to Ride" - dude, you may not like Pop, but just say so. As pop music goes, there hasn't been much greater.
If you wanted to remain anonymous, why'd you hand 'em a credit card? Isn't this exactly how police track people on the run? I say pay only with rolled coin! ;)
Many portals and CMS presentation engines can consume RSS feeds and integrate them into a site. This is not at all uncommon.
For a portal or presentation engine to consume an RSS feed, or for a user with a browser or feedreader to view an RSS feed to which they're subscribed, they have to load it from Gatehouse's site. It doesn't get pushed into Boston.com's site or your browser/feedreader by Gatehouse. You should check into how web publishing works sometime.
We're pretty clearly into "more heat than light" territory here, and I have other things to do with my day off, so I'm pretty much going to stop wailing on this morbid equine now.
I wasn't aware that you could contract out of the Law.
Of course you cannot. But this is exactly my point: if you aren't doing fair use (and it's valid in my opinion to ask for a court ruling on this), then you have arguably agreed to the Creative Commons license on the RSS feed you're consuming. Fair use and acceptance of the license are both covered under the law, so you're not contracting out of it either way.
I mean, anybody can link to anything on the WWW.
Yes, but as noted in my post above, this is not about linking. It's about using the copyrighted content to label the links. TFAs summary is misleading. Someone else in the main thread clarified that it is indeed about the license on the RSS feed, because that's apparently what the NYT is consuming.
Here's that license statement from the feed:
Doesn't look like Boston.com is attributing the feed either. And it's certainly not noncommercial. I stand by what I said: it looks like fair use to me (though it's looking less-so the more I find out about the actual situation), but it's reasonable to disagree with that position - and it looks like they'll do so in court
No argument from me that using the exact headline and first sentence makes the content much easier to use (I'm a usability professional, and it's what I'd recommend someone do if they're trying to make these articles easy to find - if they had a clear right to use the content, fair use or otherwise).
And as I stated, it looked a lot like fair use to me - but reading this thread further, it looks like the license that Gatehouse put on the RSS feed explicitly disallows exactly this kind of commercial use.
If we were talking about a GPL violation, everyone here would be up in arms supporting Gatehouse. What would be the fair use situation if Microsoft used the API and init methods of the Linux kernel (please forgive the tortured analogy to "headline and first sentence"), modified them and didn't offer the source back to the community?
Fact of the matter is, no amount of torrenting, joyous piracy or copy/pasting content on the web will make copyright laws go away. Open source software is one of the beneficiaries of these laws, as are both Gatehouse and the New York Times. If society decides the copyright situation needs to change, the honest thing to do is change the laws.
All I was saying about fair use was that it was that one might have a reasoned discussion about whether this is fair use - it's not a slam dunk either way.
One could reasonably argue that copying verbatim headlines and first sentences in their entirity is fair use. I think it is, but that's a valid discussion to have. It's not about linking as much as copying the Gatehouse content and using it to label the links.
Boston.com's position as a competing entity (vs. Google's position as a search engine) lends credence to this point. Boston.com is essentially getting Gatehouse to write it's site's local content for them.
It's not as though the links were titled "Aritcle 7 from Gatehouse" instead of Gatehouse's actual title. The former case would indeed be about linking vs. about copyright.
otoh, Gatehouse ought to love having a megasite drive traffic to them. All I can imagine is that they're looking at their metrics and seeing people back right out. They ought to work on keeping those visitors once they get em.
Dan Lockton's fantastic Architectures of Control blog pointed out this week that the city of Sutton is already engaged in a similar, and yet more tangible project
"If it's not there by yesterday, it willen never on-have be there."
Fixed that for you...
ditto here - small ISP, downstream from Cogent, I'm cut off from my web server and mail service. Can't even see my web host's sales or support pages. I get out through office VPN or personal VPN and everything works...
I've voted in a bunch of elections and that's not been my experience. Since it's the responsibility of states and localities to run them, practices can and do vary.
In several elections, I've been handed an anonymous chit that tells the guy guarding the machines: "this guy is registered and legit to vote". The chit is reused by other voters. In Georgia's current touchscreen system, the chit is an electronic card, and it is handed to me between the time I've had my registration checked and the time I get to the machine - without being shoved in a machine to add my identity to the chit. Probably secret here too. (note: I'm not defending paperless voting: paper trail is the only sane way to go, IMO).
I suppose you could do a statistical analysis of the time at which I got to the machine and what time votes were cast, but honestly, why not just rig the election, take over, scrap the constitution and throw me in Gitmo for complaining?
what do you think would be the best possible system to replace DTS with?
I think DTS disappeared with the release of SQL Server 2005. I'm pretty sure it's all .NET code now...
Yeah, looked at the summary, looked at TFA later.
The summary says "Internet Votes". Doesn't say "non-Internet Votes" which more accurately describes the situation (as TFA describes). Not really Internet Voting at all...
DC
How can internet voting be both guaranteed "secret" - as in "can't tie the user to the choice of candidate", and at the same time ensure that individuals (never mind bots) aren't casting more than one vote?
It's not always tech, but it's never dumbed-down. 2 hours a week. Podcast available.
Frankly "whim" is what the iTunes App store model has taught us to expect. (full disclosure: I am an iPod Touch user and want to buy apps Apple has removed).
When it's the decision of someone other than the owner of the phone to stop an application from running, does it matter whether it's a "whim" or not?
DC
I'd think that the nerds here would know the difference between the deficit and the debt, but apparently not. They both involve the federal government of the US's indebtedness, and they both start with "d", but they're not the same thing.
The deficit is how much more we've spent in a year than we have. The deficit adds to the national debt.
The debt (the national debt) is how much we owe as a nation - the whole pile.
One of the first hits on Google said the CBO pegged the 2008 deficit at $219 billion US (probably not correct anyomre). The debt-clock is overflowing into the $10 trillions. That should give you an idea of the difference between the terms you're tossing around.
The deficit and the debt are not the same thing any more than the sales tax and the purchase price are the same thing.
Will I still be able to get cartridges for my 2600?
errrr:
Knock Knock! Knock Knock!
Who's there?
Argo!
Argo who?
ARRRR! Go Fsck yerself! Heh heh heh...
---
Knock Knock! Knock Knock!
Who's there?
Shirley!
Shirley who?
ARRRR! Go Fsck yerself! Heh heh heh...