I'm wondering, are there alternative implementations of Slash? Of Wiki? Is everything written in Perl (no value judgment here)?
How difficult would it be to port Slash to Java Servlets? Wiki?
The reason I'm asking is not because I'm a Java bigot or anything, but because (1) it seems to be the platform of choice for the Apache Project, and (2) I have a couple of webapps deployed, and I would like to know how difficult would be to integrate Slash/Wiki with them.
Any comments from developers/porters welcome. Thank you!
You're probably more interested in the sections about "Anti-Abuse" features. Comment filters are described, along with their failings, and the example of how to modify Slash code itself involves making the filters less strict to posters with karma above an administrator defined level. It also describes things like IP and Network blacklists.
I don't know why, but the idea of the rating system being open gives me the creeps. The problem I see is that if the implementor/developer/whatever is a "benevolent tyrant", everything is fine; otherwise you could very well participate in a slash-powered blog that springs a totalitarian trap on you, the unsuspecting reader, at any time. What I like of Advogato is that the rating system is tunable but very difficult to subvert without replacing it wholesale; after all, you can't change much Warshall's algorithm.
Of course I'm aware that this is not of your concern, and Open Source being what it is the possibility for subversion is no more and no less than with any other piece of software; my question is then whether there are more robust rating systems or not, in the sense that subverting them would radically alter the "look-and-feel" of the blog.
Yes, and another thing about moderating. I've been refusing to moderate for a few months simply because I've noted that you can loose your own karma for moderating.
I thought that was what karma means...It makes you think before you mod down ("do I really want to loose one karma point on this post?"), and it makes you think before you mod up ("do I really want to loose one karma point on this post?"). Either way, you think before you mod (I am tempted to add a "QED", but I'm reading too much Dijkstra lately, and I'm slowly appreciating the inherent ugliness in case analysis. If only I could come up with a constructive proof that "karma works").
I disagree.... Honestly, I worry that seeing who axed your last post might encourage retributive axing of their later post.
Human nature being what it is...:-). Seriously, though, I think that for better or worse, the mod system works, in this sense: Slashdot has an "Uber-editor", a virtual entity composed of the individual effort of every moderator. I might not agree with this "Uber-editor" slant, but that's expected; and I have the option of not reading/..
Look at this from the economic viewpoint (the laws of the market...) or from the complex systems viewpoint (emrgent behavior); either way, I think it makes sense and explains the "feeling" I have of/..
I've read the Chord technical note. After ten or so pages of generic blurb, it struck me as perfectly obvious: binary search on doubly-linked circular lists! But unfortunately, it seems that simple and workable solutions can only be found when everything else has been discarded, an excercise that CS people seem better suited at.
The Chord protocol is not perfect; its more obvious omission is the lack of a large-scale implementation to prove its viability. But I think it's a step in the right direction, involving people with massively-parallell computing background that I think its very relevant to the P2P infrastructure.
In the end, P2P seems to be no more than the implementation of a distributed keyed store on a high-latence, low-bandwidth, high-failure-rate massively parallell supercomputer.
I think the point was that Apple is not targeting any one audience in particular
I think Apple does, and that's what drives Katz mad. As I understand the "editorial", Katz is criticizing Apple for not bowing (and appealing) to the bourgeois sensibility.
It might be true that "be bland, not bold" may help you sell more, but it's a moral stance that nobody is forced to take.
Woa, I never thought of christianity as an air-borne pollutant and food poison! Is there any over-the-counter assay for it, something like a pregnancy test?
Yep. The net is a commercialized extension of existing systems in The Real World. More spam for everybody...
No utopia of free thought and expression, with furious online debates in a sort of "Digital Renaissance".
I still want to live in it. Oh yes, there will always be street thugs, malcontents, pimps and whores, and rotten produce being sold on the sidewalks, and more often than not you'll find yourself ankle-deep in sewage, but so what? You'll find open-air exhibits, museums, stadia, theaters, painters and sculptors and storytellers for hire, sex to blow off your senses, the Brunos and the Michelangelos and the Galileos and the Caravaggios all around. That age lasted 80-odd years in the whereabouts of Rome, under the very nose of the papacy, and look what remained of it! Us, no more and no less.
Even more importantly, most of the people that are now getting onto the Internet don't share the same values as Katz. Instead of being excited about the "sexual revolution" they are trying to find ways to keep their children from being immersed in pornography. And they certainly aren't interested in what gay teenagers are doing online (other than trying to make sure that they aren't trying to solicit sex from their sons).
It got me thinking, if I had a child, I would put a filter to make sure no christians solicit her...ehm...soul? Whatever.
What Katz doesn't understand is that for some people don't want to be a part of these "liberated" communities that he is so happy about. What he calls expression, I call pornography. And where he sees discussion, all too often all I see is pointless drivel aimed at the absolute lowest common denominator.
Yes, ducky, he does. He's just embitterned at the sad wake-up call that humanity at large just isn't worth the effort. He's slowly coming to grips with it, and it hurts him a lot and it is causing him a lot of pain. Be kind and gentle with him, this is a very difficult moment.
No, actually it's a good opinion piece. I remember The Age of Paine, actually, when Wired was Rosetto's brainchild, a travelogue of voyages into the future we might have enjoyed. I'm (barely) old enough to remember a childhood without computers or videogames, a puberty with strange Z80 contraptions, an adolescence with BASIC and Pascal...I don't know, I can relate to dear old Jon.
Do not think I'm a bleeding-heart left-leaning liberal (I might be, but it is of no import here. If this tells you anything, then I'll come out of the closet and declare myself Argentine), but I think the key word is corporatism.
And as of style...let's say I prefer JK's lacrymose elegies than his bombastic denounces. All in all, this one cut it for me.
IIRC, Atlantis is traditionally described as a ring island system, with the "downtown" located in the middle of these rings, of which there were 3 I believe.
My favorite Atlantean (Atlantic? Atlantish?) theory is that it was actually a Creto-Mycaenean kingdom in Santorini, an Aegean island-volcano. It remains of it no more than a broken stone ring, the base of the caldera.
Zeus, Jupiter, and Jove are all the same.. not only in that they're the same god, but also the word itself. The original greek zeus has the stem iov- . in latin, there is no 'J'. the jupiter is literrally
'Father zeus', Iov-pater.. later bastardised into Jupiter.
The same stem I-O-U (wich you spell as "v", but is actually a "w", as Jovis was pronounced "yowis") appears in Jehovah, or Yahweh. Graves makes a case of pointing out the parallell development between the Jovian-Apollinean shift in Graeco-Roman religion with the Judaeo-Christian shift in Middle-Eastern religion.
Re:take out the fucking smart quotes
on
God's Debris
·
· Score: 1
"IMHO, if you haven't read Knuth's work, you aren't a programmer."
There are plenty of people out there who've read (and even understood) Knuth's books, yet who still write horrible spaghetti code. [...] At the same time, I have seen plenty of good (even "very good") software engineers who have never even seen Knuth's books.
If you haven't read E.W.Dijkstra's work, you're not a programmer. Help yourself.
"I believe this is actually the case, and that causality is a perceptual phenomenon imposed on our mind by our senses."
I think you're missing something. Nothing can be imposed on anything because that denotes cause ("Senses cause phenomenon").
Good point. I guess I have to think more carefully about this, but my reply would be something like this: don't forget that causality is a phenomenon and never a mechanism (causality by itself doesn't cause anything to be). And essentially, phenomena are ultimately perceived by the human mind; thus the locus of the physical manifestation of causality is mind-dependent, and somewhat arbitrary. In other words, what we call "a real phenomenon" is no more and no less that a construct of the mind (because we humans perceive it, and if you insist on the sense/mind duality, mentalize it), and so it could be argued that there is no "real reality" ("real" in the sense of "independent from the mind") distinguishable from the "mind reality".
Insofar the human mind is involved, it is perfectly logical to speak of causality; my point is that causality cannot be extrapolated from a phenomenon in the mind to a phenomenon in reality, since the very existence of a reality unthinked of and unthinkable independent of the human mind is, by its very definition, not an object of thought.
Please note, I'm not saying that the Universe without us humans doesn't exist; what I'm trying (struggling) to say is that the Universe without minds is devoid of content, devoid of phenomena: pure geometry and no algebra. And I'm not the first to say it; this is the very argument the Scholastics posited for the existence of God.
Quote me on this sound-byte: The universe knows no physics, only man does.
This means nothing really causes anything, since it can be proved that both A caused B and B caused A. The universe runs entirely on coincidence if this is the case.
I believe this is actually the case, and that causality is a perceptual phenomenon imposed on our mind by our senses. Note, however, that coincidence is not the same thing as simultaneity, so:
This also leaves the door open for headache-inducing paradoxes (give two duelers tachyon pistols and they will both shoot each other before the other fires)
Actually, our mind will try to come with scores of different explanations for a seemingly paradoxical event stemming from the confounding of coincidence with simultaneity that we call causality.
A classic example of the cart not knowing how to pull the horse. I'd rather kill the writers of that filthy email client, who in their infinite wisdom decided that putting VBScript and attachment autorun on it was a Good Thing
It is perhaps a little dense on the music front, although I love music anyway.
The Art of Fugue is a complex work. It sounds great if you don't know a iota from a gigue; but the more you listen to it and learn about it, the more you discover. It is the Mandelbrot Set of music.
There is an analysis of Bach's Fugues and Canons at http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~tas3/bachindex.html, with scores (they are incredible: you just see the patterns in the music: the transpositions, the oppositions, the contrary motions) and commentary; you can pop your favorite version on your MP3 playlist (my favorite is Gustav Leonhardt's rendition on Deutsches Harmonia Mundi, but I'd trust Kenneth Gilbert's, Ton Koopman's or Rinaldo Alessandrini's (here are the details: http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/cds/hmu1169.htm), all of them top-notch harpsichordists. As long as it's not on the piano, and especially not by Glenn Gould, I guess it's OK) and read the analysis.
It's about self-reference in arts, language, logic and mathematics. Or about self-reference in language, any language that is structured enough. But, as a book on the musicological aspects of the Art of the Fugue it is pretty dense, since you have to untangle the mathematical references that illuminate on the structural aspects of Bach's opus. As a book on Escher's art it is rather slim, amounting to more or less twenty smallish, black and white pictures. As a book on Gödel's Incompletness Theorem it is rather too longwinded, because once you understand the "main trick" (quining a coded sentence), the rest comes easily enough by a diagonalization argument; but GEB explains and explains and dissects and dissects and makes a lot of too little.
And despite all, somehow the book manages to be quite good: it is funny, entertaining and quite illuminating. After reading it I have come to love Bach more than I ever did.
Of course, it would have been a far better book had the turtle not been such a wise-cracker, and Acchiles not such a dimwit.
To Anne [Rice], her characters are a part of herself. For someone that's not her to write situations and events involving those characters that for all we know may completely destroy the chracterization set up for them is almost like abuse.
Ah, the ol' Romantic conception of the author as the voice in the text! Some people could use some pomo post-structuralism for a change. Y'know, all there is is the text, and the text is in itself? I'm fed up with authors not wanting to let go of what they write. Let's face it, folks, writing is hard. It is hard technically, and it is hard emotionally.
All writing is, in a way, cathartic: you are there, reified in the words you wrote. Look at yourself. Look at yourself. Now let go. Let go. Feel better? Yeah, that feels better. Now, what's left? A text. Who speaks in the text? The text itself. It's that yourself? No, it's not.
Of course, IP is real and its laws are enforceable (and enforced). I just want to say: hey, it's not the only plausible (or even possible) worldview; witness OS philosopical outlook. I just want to say: I believe that what you say it's not longer you yourself, hence, it's not longer yours to control, not yours anymore.
Earn money with it if you want, eat from its proceeds; but don't try to control its life, because the text already has a life of its own.
Slashdot Mirror
I feel deeply ashamed. Thank you for the correction.
I'm wondering, are there alternative implementations of Slash? Of Wiki? Is everything written in Perl (no value judgment here)?
How difficult would it be to port Slash to Java Servlets? Wiki?
The reason I'm asking is not because I'm a Java bigot or anything, but because (1) it seems to be the platform of choice for the Apache Project, and (2) I have a couple of webapps deployed, and I would like to know how difficult would be to integrate Slash/Wiki with them.
Any comments from developers/porters welcome. Thank you!
I don't know why, but the idea of the rating system being open gives me the creeps. The problem I see is that if the implementor/developer/whatever is a "benevolent tyrant", everything is fine; otherwise you could very well participate in a slash-powered blog that springs a totalitarian trap on you, the unsuspecting reader, at any time. What I like of Advogato is that the rating system is tunable but very difficult to subvert without replacing it wholesale; after all, you can't change much Warshall's algorithm.
Of course I'm aware that this is not of your concern, and Open Source being what it is the possibility for subversion is no more and no less than with any other piece of software; my question is then whether there are more robust rating systems or not, in the sense that subverting them would radically alter the "look-and-feel" of the blog.
I thought that was what karma means...It makes you think before you mod down ("do I really want to loose one karma point on this post?"), and it makes you think before you mod up ("do I really want to loose one karma point on this post?"). Either way, you think before you mod (I am tempted to add a "QED", but I'm reading too much Dijkstra lately, and I'm slowly appreciating the inherent ugliness in case analysis. If only I could come up with a constructive proof that "karma works").
Human nature being what it is...:-). Seriously, though, I think that for better or worse, the mod system works, in this sense: Slashdot has an "Uber-editor", a virtual entity composed of the individual effort of every moderator. I might not agree with this "Uber-editor" slant, but that's expected; and I have the option of not reading /..
Look at this from the economic viewpoint (the laws of the market...) or from the complex systems viewpoint (emrgent behavior); either way, I think it makes sense and explains the "feeling" I have of /..
I've read the Chord technical note. After ten or so pages of generic blurb, it struck me as perfectly obvious: binary search on doubly-linked circular lists! But unfortunately, it seems that simple and workable solutions can only be found when everything else has been discarded, an excercise that CS people seem better suited at.
The Chord protocol is not perfect; its more obvious omission is the lack of a large-scale implementation to prove its viability. But I think it's a step in the right direction, involving people with massively-parallell computing background that I think its very relevant to the P2P infrastructure.
In the end, P2P seems to be no more than the implementation of a distributed keyed store on a high-latence, low-bandwidth, high-failure-rate massively parallell supercomputer.
I think Apple does, and that's what drives Katz mad. As I understand the "editorial", Katz is criticizing Apple for not bowing (and appealing) to the bourgeois sensibility.
It might be true that "be bland, not bold" may help you sell more, but it's a moral stance that nobody is forced to take.
Let me tell you, from this side of the black hole it sounds more surreal than eleven-dimensional spacetime.
Maybe we're all radiating slowly away...
Woa, I never thought of christianity as an air-borne pollutant and food poison! Is there any over-the-counter assay for it, something like a pregnancy test?
I still want to live in it. Oh yes, there will always be street thugs, malcontents, pimps and whores, and rotten produce being sold on the sidewalks, and more often than not you'll find yourself ankle-deep in sewage, but so what? You'll find open-air exhibits, museums, stadia, theaters, painters and sculptors and storytellers for hire, sex to blow off your senses, the Brunos and the Michelangelos and the Galileos and the Caravaggios all around. That age lasted 80-odd years in the whereabouts of Rome, under the very nose of the papacy, and look what remained of it! Us, no more and no less.
It got me thinking, if I had a child, I would put a filter to make sure no christians solicit her...ehm...soul? Whatever.
Yes, ducky, he does. He's just embitterned at the sad wake-up call that humanity at large just isn't worth the effort. He's slowly coming to grips with it, and it hurts him a lot and it is causing him a lot of pain. Be kind and gentle with him, this is a very difficult moment.
I mean it.
No, actually it's a good opinion piece. I remember The Age of Paine, actually, when Wired was Rosetto's brainchild, a travelogue of voyages into the future we might have enjoyed. I'm (barely) old enough to remember a childhood without computers or videogames, a puberty with strange Z80 contraptions, an adolescence with BASIC and Pascal...I don't know, I can relate to dear old Jon.
Do not think I'm a bleeding-heart left-leaning liberal (I might be, but it is of no import here. If this tells you anything, then I'll come out of the closet and declare myself Argentine), but I think the key word is corporatism.
And as of style...let's say I prefer JK's lacrymose elegies than his bombastic denounces. All in all, this one cut it for me.
My favorite Atlantean (Atlantic? Atlantish?) theory is that it was actually a Creto-Mycaenean kingdom in Santorini, an Aegean island-volcano. It remains of it no more than a broken stone ring, the base of the caldera.
The same stem I-O-U (wich you spell as "v", but is actually a "w", as Jovis was pronounced "yowis") appears in Jehovah, or Yahweh. Graves makes a case of pointing out the parallell development between the Jovian-Apollinean shift in Graeco-Roman religion with the Judaeo-Christian shift in Middle-Eastern religion.
Dónde aprendió usted el español? ;-p
If you haven't read E.W.Dijkstra's work, you're not a programmer. Help yourself.
Good point. I guess I have to think more carefully about this, but my reply would be something like this: don't forget that causality is a phenomenon and never a mechanism (causality by itself doesn't cause anything to be). And essentially, phenomena are ultimately perceived by the human mind; thus the locus of the physical manifestation of causality is mind-dependent, and somewhat arbitrary. In other words, what we call "a real phenomenon" is no more and no less that a construct of the mind (because we humans perceive it, and if you insist on the sense/mind duality, mentalize it), and so it could be argued that there is no "real reality" ("real" in the sense of "independent from the mind") distinguishable from the "mind reality".
Insofar the human mind is involved, it is perfectly logical to speak of causality; my point is that causality cannot be extrapolated from a phenomenon in the mind to a phenomenon in reality, since the very existence of a reality unthinked of and unthinkable independent of the human mind is, by its very definition, not an object of thought.
Please note, I'm not saying that the Universe without us humans doesn't exist; what I'm trying (struggling) to say is that the Universe without minds is devoid of content, devoid of phenomena: pure geometry and no algebra. And I'm not the first to say it; this is the very argument the Scholastics posited for the existence of God.
Quote me on this sound-byte: The universe knows no physics, only man does.
I believe this is actually the case, and that causality is a perceptual phenomenon imposed on our mind by our senses. Note, however, that coincidence is not the same thing as simultaneity, so:
Actually, our mind will try to come with scores of different explanations for a seemingly paradoxical event stemming from the confounding of coincidence with simultaneity that we call causality.
A classic example of the cart not knowing how to pull the horse. I'd rather kill the writers of that filthy email client, who in their infinite wisdom decided that putting VBScript and attachment autorun on it was a Good Thing
The Art of Fugue is a complex work. It sounds great if you don't know a iota from a gigue; but the more you listen to it and learn about it, the more you discover. It is the Mandelbrot Set of music.
There is an analysis of Bach's Fugues and Canons at http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~tas3/bachindex.html, with scores (they are incredible: you just see the patterns in the music: the transpositions, the oppositions, the contrary motions) and commentary; you can pop your favorite version on your MP3 playlist (my favorite is Gustav Leonhardt's rendition on Deutsches Harmonia Mundi, but I'd trust Kenneth Gilbert's, Ton Koopman's or Rinaldo Alessandrini's (here are the details: http://www.medieval.org/emfaq/cds/hmu1169.htm), all of them top-notch harpsichordists. As long as it's not on the piano, and especially not by Glenn Gould, I guess it's OK) and read the analysis.
It's about self-reference in arts, language, logic and mathematics. Or about self-reference in language, any language that is structured enough. But, as a book on the musicological aspects of the Art of the Fugue it is pretty dense, since you have to untangle the mathematical references that illuminate on the structural aspects of Bach's opus. As a book on Escher's art it is rather slim, amounting to more or less twenty smallish, black and white pictures. As a book on Gödel's Incompletness Theorem it is rather too longwinded, because once you understand the "main trick" (quining a coded sentence), the rest comes easily enough by a diagonalization argument; but GEB explains and explains and dissects and dissects and makes a lot of too little.
And despite all, somehow the book manages to be quite good: it is funny, entertaining and quite illuminating. After reading it I have come to love Bach more than I ever did.
Of course, it would have been a far better book had the turtle not been such a wise-cracker, and Acchiles not such a dimwit.
The Pillow Book Yummy, McGregor, yummy.
Why don't y'all go sleep siesta under a jacaranda? Wait, no jacarandas on the northern hemisphere...make it a saguaro, then, lulled by the coyotes...
To Anne [Rice], her characters are a part of herself. For someone that's not her to write situations and events involving those characters that for all we know may completely destroy the chracterization set up for them is almost like abuse.
Ah, the ol' Romantic conception of the author as the voice in the text! Some people could use some pomo post-structuralism for a change. Y'know, all there is is the text, and the text is in itself? I'm fed up with authors not wanting to let go of what they write. Let's face it, folks, writing is hard. It is hard technically, and it is hard emotionally.
All writing is, in a way, cathartic: you are there, reified in the words you wrote. Look at yourself. Look at yourself. Now let go. Let go. Feel better? Yeah, that feels better. Now, what's left? A text. Who speaks in the text? The text itself. It's that yourself? No, it's not.
Of course, IP is real and its laws are enforceable (and enforced). I just want to say: hey, it's not the only plausible (or even possible) worldview; witness OS philosopical outlook. I just want to say: I believe that what you say it's not longer you yourself, hence, it's not longer yours to control, not yours anymore.
Earn money with it if you want, eat from its proceeds; but don't try to control its life, because the text already has a life of its own.