Meanwhile, back in the US, the Republicans claim they want to take us back to space but aren't willing to put their money where their mouth is (though they're quite happy to cut funding for robotic exploration in order to free up the funds!), the Democrats seem to be opposing space exploration on the grounds that the Republicans are for it, and NASA's manned space division doesn't seem to be able to get its act together enough to actually give us a safer orbiter, never mind something that can take us to the Moon or Mars.
No, you're misreading. I said the popular crowd had been moving into the net for years, and blogging was just the latest demonstration that the net isn't "ours" anymore.
People who post on Slashdot generally aren't the popular crowd.
Same here. If it's not terribly distracting, I glance at it and either look into it or tune it out. If it's screaming for attention, I'll block it as fast as I possibly can.
Last December the Cruel Site of the Day linked to a pair of really good articles on avoiding clutter when designing a website. Unfortunately the site that published them (Dev-something) was so full of ads that the articles were basically unreadable, providing a perfect object lesson in what not to do. I think there were 6 or 7 animated ads on the first page alone, with another 2 or 3 static ads. I blocked everything out of sheer self-defense, read the articles, and never went back to the website again.
I'm reminded of a comment Unisys made on the GIF patent a couple of years ago, around the time it expired. They said that the creation of PNG was a perfect demonstration that their patent on LZW compression had done what it was supposed to and spurred innovation: without it, no one would have bothered to create the new image format.
Instead, Judge Purdy found Cuthbert guilty, because he had initially lied to the police about what he had done; Cuthbert originally told the police one story and later changed it.
I've been wondering if this is the same guy who (supposedly) was arrested for using Lynx to access a charity site. If that was his original story -- "I didn't hack the site, I just accessed it using Lynx!" -- and it turned out to be untrue (as in he tried a known exploit, though only to verify info) -- that would fit with the article about the conviction.
Mandrake + Conectiva = Mandriva. Still not a fan of the name, but I'm just glad they chose it before they added Lycoris. Mandriva is weird enough. And it sounds like the name of an equatorial third-world country. "The Republic of Mandriva." Or maybe, given the way business types tend to look at FOSS, "The People's Republic of Mandriva."
Yes. I've been using the branch nightlies for the past two weeks, and each morning I click Help->Check for Updates and it downloads anywhere from 20-500K and asks me to restart the browser. Twice it's been unable to apply a patch and has automatically downloaded and installed the complete package as a fall-back.
The one annoying thing is that if I wait a few days, I have to run this cycle several times, one to go from Monday's build to Tuesday's, one to go from Tuesday's build to Wendesday's, etc. Fortunately this is only an issue for nightly testing, since the update cycle on the release version is going to be much slower. The 1.0 cycle has had 7 updates over the course of a year. At that rate, the chances of missing two are pretty low if you're paying attention or if auto-update is active. It also makes it more practical for Mozilla to create patches that skip versions (i.e. going straight from 1.5.0 to 1.5.2 without requiring you to install the 1.5.1 patch first).
Firefox extensions include version compatibility info so that if a browser upgrade changes functionality that an extension relies on, the now-broken extension won't take down the browser. That's why when Beta 1 first came out a lot of extensions were disabled: They were marked as being compatible through 1.1 (Deer Park Alpha) and 1.5 beta 1 was 1.4. Similarly, beta 2 is internally 1.4.1, and so now that all those extensions are marked as compatible through 1.4, the new beta disables them just in case. (The Nightly Tester Tools extension has a nice feature which will relabel your extensions as compatible with your current Firefox version.)
A workaround has been to mark an extension as being compatible through some high number -- 1.4.99 for example -- though most extension developers don't seem to be doing this. I expect the "Treat 1.5.* as 1.5.infinity" feature is designed to resolve this problem, since actual extension-breaking changes won't be intentionally introduced in a maintenance update. An extension developer can test with 1.5, label it as compatible with "1.5.*" and no one will have to worry about updating that compatibility flag until they start working on 2.0.
Forward slash bringing up the find toolbar is intended behavior -- unless you mean you're typing it in a form field or the address bar or something, in which case there's some sort of focus bug in the app.
The newsreader is now in Thunderbird, which combines email, newsgroups and RSS/Atom feeds -- and I mean a real feed reader, not the LiveBookmarks half-implementation that Firefox has.
That said, I have no idea what work has been done on it, since I haven't used a regular news reader in years.
I play EQ2, which had a plague event back in June, and people didn't like the plague, but you did infect your friends for fun, as a joke, because you know it's not real.
Yeah, any time people know they are in an artificial situation, they will act differently than they would in real life. Online game? Check. Murder mystery dinner party? Check. Dreaming? Check. Sociological experiment? Check.
I figure it comes down to consequences. If you know there won't be any, or if you know they depend on something different than they would in the real situation, you'll try things you would never consider if you thought the situation was really happening.
Not sure, but I recall reading somewhere that deliberately infecting someone with a fatal, incurable disease has been considered by at least one court or jurisdiction to be "assault with a deadly weapon." I would expect that, as with many legal issues, intent is a key consideration, though I can imagine negligence ending up in the equation if someone just doesn't bother to tell his/her partner about the results of that test...
Showing up at work with a cold? No problem, colds are rarely fatal (at least to people healthy enough to work). And at it's risky behavior, rather than malicious. On the other hand, walking around and deliberately sneezing on your co-workers' keyboards would be another matter entirely!
The part about not having any links in the email is good. But not good enough. You could have been told to go to mypaypalsecurity.com and logon.
This is where user education and organizational consistency come in. IIRC, PayPal does everything through www.paypal.com. If you've never, ever logged in somewhere other than that one site, you might be slightly suspicious to see mypaypalsecurity.com. And if every administrative message that really comes from PayPal has no links, you might notice something funny about the message that does have one. (It's not a cure-all, of course -- witness the number of successful "Apply this update from Microsoft!" trojans. But it'll make it easier for some people to spot the phish.)
Contrast this with, say, Citibank, which does some stuff through citibank.com, some through accountonline.com, I think has citicards.com and at one point was still using c2it.com. And I think they sometimes use third parties for email and redirectors. There's no consistency, so if you get something that says citibanklogin.com, you think "Oh, they've just added a new domain" and click/type it... and then you're on the fake site.
Everyone just hates the absolutely asinine fake word that now accompanies it, and realize that most things which use said word to describe themselves are, in fact, junk.
Remember, 90% of everything is crap. And 90% of what's left is aimed at a different target audience. Your challenge is to find that 1% that's both good material and on a topic you find interesting.
As a subset of hacker culture, Slashdot has a large population of people who subscribe to the "popular=banal" meme. While there is quite a bit of stuff that is both popular and banal, it does not logically follow that either (a) all that is banal will be popular or that (b) all that is popular must be banal. But (b) is good material for elitism, so it's a (pun not intended) popular interpretation. Blogs are clearly popular, therefore by this reasoning they must be crap.
There's also the fact that, with blogging software, people who don't have coding skills have further flooded the internet. The net has long since ceased to be a nerds-only club, but those of us who remember being outcasts in high school, or are now, still like the idea of having our own place. Blogging is the latest incursion into the net by the popular crowd that has been text messaging, IMing, etc. for the last few years.
Some bloggers have the skills to put up a website, but it's just more convenient to use a CMS. If you build your site by hand, you have to not only copy your page template over each time you create a new page, you have to update any navigation links you have, add the page to your "What's new" blurb, update your search index (you do have a search index, don't you?), etc.
Or you can let your content management system -- or blogging tool if you prefer -- take care of that for you, and just focus on the writing.
(While we're at it, writing skills and coding skills don't necessarily go together. Some people have both, and some people have only one. And some people have neither. There are blogs by all three classes of people.)
And don't forget the people who are only really blogging for their friends. Someone on LiveJournal, for instance, might have an audience of 10 people -- but that just means they have a very niche audience. Just because something is available to everyone doesn't mean it's aimed at everyone.
Of course, that class of blog isn't making any money, either. It's the equivalent of getting together with your friends and playing basketball, rather than playing for a community league, a school, or a pro team.
You're right. Everyone just jumped on the opportunity to attack Microsoft. It's not like they would have ridiculed some random company that came up with the idea of disposable DVDs.
Yes, DIVX was a complete flop. And a couple of years later, FlexPlay was a complete flop. It's a dumb idea, but people keep trying to get it to work. That's what made the story so believable.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, back in the US, the Republicans claim they want to take us back to space but aren't willing to put their money where their mouth is (though they're quite happy to cut funding for robotic exploration in order to free up the funds!), the Democrats seem to be opposing space exploration on the grounds that the Republicans are for it, and NASA's manned space division doesn't seem to be able to get its act together enough to actually give us a safer orbiter, never mind something that can take us to the Moon or Mars.
Dontcha love partisan politics?
No, you're misreading. I said the popular crowd had been moving into the net for years, and blogging was just the latest demonstration that the net isn't "ours" anymore.
People who post on Slashdot generally aren't the popular crowd.
Same here. If it's not terribly distracting, I glance at it and either look into it or tune it out. If it's screaming for attention, I'll block it as fast as I possibly can.
Last December the Cruel Site of the Day linked to a pair of really good articles on avoiding clutter when designing a website. Unfortunately the site that published them (Dev-something) was so full of ads that the articles were basically unreadable, providing a perfect object lesson in what not to do. I think there were 6 or 7 animated ads on the first page alone, with another 2 or 3 static ads. I blocked everything out of sheer self-defense, read the articles, and never went back to the website again.
I'm reminded of a comment Unisys made on the GIF patent a couple of years ago, around the time it expired. They said that the creation of PNG was a perfect demonstration that their patent on LZW compression had done what it was supposed to and spurred innovation: without it, no one would have bothered to create the new image format.
I don't think anyone was convinced.
I've been wondering if this is the same guy who (supposedly) was arrested for using Lynx to access a charity site. If that was his original story -- "I didn't hack the site, I just accessed it using Lynx!" -- and it turned out to be untrue (as in he tried a known exploit, though only to verify info) -- that would fit with the article about the conviction.
Does anyone know whether this is the same case?
Mandrake + Conectiva = Mandriva. Still not a fan of the name, but I'm just glad they chose it before they added Lycoris. Mandriva is weird enough. And it sounds like the name of an equatorial third-world country. "The Republic of Mandriva." Or maybe, given the way business types tend to look at FOSS, "The People's Republic of Mandriva."
Yes. I've been using the branch nightlies for the past two weeks, and each morning I click Help->Check for Updates and it downloads anywhere from 20-500K and asks me to restart the browser. Twice it's been unable to apply a patch and has automatically downloaded and installed the complete package as a fall-back.
The one annoying thing is that if I wait a few days, I have to run this cycle several times, one to go from Monday's build to Tuesday's, one to go from Tuesday's build to Wendesday's, etc. Fortunately this is only an issue for nightly testing, since the update cycle on the release version is going to be much slower. The 1.0 cycle has had 7 updates over the course of a year. At that rate, the chances of missing two are pretty low if you're paying attention or if auto-update is active. It also makes it more practical for Mozilla to create patches that skip versions (i.e. going straight from 1.5.0 to 1.5.2 without requiring you to install the 1.5.1 patch first).
A BitTorrent client built into a browser? That's the craziest thing I've heard since--
Oh, wait, I'm posting this using Opera.
A BitTorrent client built into a browser? That's a great idea!
Firefox extensions include version compatibility info so that if a browser upgrade changes functionality that an extension relies on, the now-broken extension won't take down the browser. That's why when Beta 1 first came out a lot of extensions were disabled: They were marked as being compatible through 1.1 (Deer Park Alpha) and 1.5 beta 1 was 1.4. Similarly, beta 2 is internally 1.4.1, and so now that all those extensions are marked as compatible through 1.4, the new beta disables them just in case. (The Nightly Tester Tools extension has a nice feature which will relabel your extensions as compatible with your current Firefox version.)
A workaround has been to mark an extension as being compatible through some high number -- 1.4.99 for example -- though most extension developers don't seem to be doing this. I expect the "Treat 1.5.* as 1.5.infinity" feature is designed to resolve this problem, since actual extension-breaking changes won't be intentionally introduced in a maintenance update. An extension developer can test with 1.5, label it as compatible with "1.5.*" and no one will have to worry about updating that compatibility flag until they start working on 2.0.
Forward slash bringing up the find toolbar is intended behavior -- unless you mean you're typing it in a form field or the address bar or something, in which case there's some sort of focus bug in the app.
The newsreader is now in Thunderbird, which combines email, newsgroups and RSS/Atom feeds -- and I mean a real feed reader, not the LiveBookmarks half-implementation that Firefox has.
That said, I have no idea what work has been done on it, since I haven't used a regular news reader in years.
Yeah, any time people know they are in an artificial situation, they will act differently than they would in real life. Online game? Check. Murder mystery dinner party? Check. Dreaming? Check. Sociological experiment? Check.
I figure it comes down to consequences. If you know there won't be any, or if you know they depend on something different than they would in the real situation, you'll try things you would never consider if you thought the situation was really happening.
Not sure, but I recall reading somewhere that deliberately infecting someone with a fatal, incurable disease has been considered by at least one court or jurisdiction to be "assault with a deadly weapon." I would expect that, as with many legal issues, intent is a key consideration, though I can imagine negligence ending up in the equation if someone just doesn't bother to tell his/her partner about the results of that test...
Showing up at work with a cold? No problem, colds are rarely fatal (at least to people healthy enough to work). And at it's risky behavior, rather than malicious. On the other hand, walking around and deliberately sneezing on your co-workers' keyboards would be another matter entirely!
This is where user education and organizational consistency come in. IIRC, PayPal does everything through www.paypal.com. If you've never, ever logged in somewhere other than that one site, you might be slightly suspicious to see mypaypalsecurity.com. And if every administrative message that really comes from PayPal has no links, you might notice something funny about the message that does have one. (It's not a cure-all, of course -- witness the number of successful "Apply this update from Microsoft!" trojans. But it'll make it easier for some people to spot the phish.)
Contrast this with, say, Citibank, which does some stuff through citibank.com, some through accountonline.com, I think has citicards.com and at one point was still using c2it.com. And I think they sometimes use third parties for email and redirectors. There's no consistency, so if you get something that says citibanklogin.com, you think "Oh, they've just added a new domain" and click/type it... and then you're on the fake site.
SARA (Security Auditor's Research Assistant) is based on the old SATAN design.
But enough about "websites"...
Obviously, they're giving 110%
I shoulda learned to play them drums...
Remember, 90% of everything is crap. And 90% of what's left is aimed at a different target audience. Your challenge is to find that 1% that's both good material and on a topic you find interesting.
As a subset of hacker culture, Slashdot has a large population of people who subscribe to the "popular=banal" meme. While there is quite a bit of stuff that is both popular and banal, it does not logically follow that either (a) all that is banal will be popular or that (b) all that is popular must be banal. But (b) is good material for elitism, so it's a (pun not intended) popular interpretation. Blogs are clearly popular, therefore by this reasoning they must be crap.
There's also the fact that, with blogging software, people who don't have coding skills have further flooded the internet. The net has long since ceased to be a nerds-only club, but those of us who remember being outcasts in high school, or are now, still like the idea of having our own place. Blogging is the latest incursion into the net by the popular crowd that has been text messaging, IMing, etc. for the last few years.
Really, though, I think it's mainly elitism.
Some bloggers have the skills to put up a website, but it's just more convenient to use a CMS. If you build your site by hand, you have to not only copy your page template over each time you create a new page, you have to update any navigation links you have, add the page to your "What's new" blurb, update your search index (you do have a search index, don't you?), etc.
Or you can let your content management system -- or blogging tool if you prefer -- take care of that for you, and just focus on the writing.
(While we're at it, writing skills and coding skills don't necessarily go together. Some people have both, and some people have only one. And some people have neither. There are blogs by all three classes of people.)
And don't forget the people who are only really blogging for their friends. Someone on LiveJournal, for instance, might have an audience of 10 people -- but that just means they have a very niche audience. Just because something is available to everyone doesn't mean it's aimed at everyone.
Of course, that class of blog isn't making any money, either. It's the equivalent of getting together with your friends and playing basketball, rather than playing for a community league, a school, or a pro team.
You're right. Everyone just jumped on the opportunity to attack Microsoft. It's not like they would have ridiculed some random company that came up with the idea of disposable DVDs.
Oh, wait...
Yes, DIVX was a complete flop. And a couple of years later, FlexPlay was a complete flop. It's a dumb idea, but people keep trying to get it to work. That's what made the story so believable.
Actually, I saw several of them. Generally around 4 or 5, Informative.