-5 used to suffice, but to be sure, set it to -50, or -1000. There is no minimum score, except the bounds of the numeric data type used to score it (at least that's what I figure).
No, it means it costs them more to stamp out Linux systems than Windows systems. Remember, Microsoft operating systems have a huge lead as far as OEM distribution is concerned, and Dell's been doing that for years. They have the science of shipping Windows systems down pat.
With Linux systems, they likely have to do their installations completely differently, probably with at least some mild human intervention.
Slashdot is to MS vs DOJ thing as the mainstream press was to the Bill/Monica thing. The normal press isn't covering this trial NEARLY as much as Slashdot is.
Just enter your preferences and turn off the "Microsoft" subject. I think that's what I'm about to do. I want to read news about new and interesting things, not more about "Evil Microsoft".
Slashdot has been selling ads for months, before all these changes. There's a difference between putting up banner ads to make money and putting up banner ads to pay for the site. Rob isn't making much (any?) money off of slashdot.
So again, how do these most recent changes suddenly make the site "commercial" in nature?
This can be done with CSS very easily. It's just a matter of doing the HTML so as to be CSS-friendly and allowing the client to select the style sheet of your choice.
I think this (was/is?) being looked into by the Slashdot folk. The thought at the time was to turn everything into a NNTP-style back-end, where you could get at the comments and articles without needing to go through the web site.
This is because the site is optimized for a Palm Pilot, where there is precious little screen real estate. A banner graphic on a 1200x1024 screen is just as noticable as a small text ad on a Palm Pilot screen.
Perhaps a different version of the site specifically for things like WebTV and Palm Pilots would be nice to have.
In theory, with strict HTML and the proper use of stylesheets (something that most browsers lack), you can just define different stylesheets for the different presentation layouts (palm pilots, webTV, normal browsers, printed/hard copy)...
The ads are what keep Slashdot in business. If you allowed people to turn the ads off, most people would, which means most people would not be tempted to click on an ad one day when something mildly interesting does manage to pop up. This means Rob does not get any money and Slashdot will go away.
Stop whining. Those ads are the only reason Slashdot is here right now. You might even wish to consider clicking on one of them one day and buy something to support Slashdot.
Perhaps you should consider e-mailing the Junkbuster people. It's not Rob's job to ensure that his page works through every single little content filtering and proxying mechanism that's out there. If the page does not display correctly when you're using a filtering agent, it's the filtering agent's fault.
That issue is the single biggest problem people complain about. It's only fair that it be stressed.
How long does it take to process a submitted story
on
Motorola sues Intel
·
· Score: 1
It was probably looked over by a different "author" (or even the same one who changed his/her mind) and discarded the first time around. Don't take it personally (or do take it personally; I don't care..)
I'm not trying to say Linux is a "GNU product" per se. That might have sounded a bit confusing. What I mean is that there's a lot of stuff that can be classified as "GNU", and the more name recognition they can get out of it, the more likely people will trust GNU utilities over proprietary ones, etc. The Linux OS in its present form does consist primarily of the "Linux kernel" and the "GNU utility set".
Though I do agree that this whole business seems a bit silly to be pursuing so stubbornly. It's "Linux". *shrug*
People see "MS Outlook" and say, "Hey, that's a Microsoft product. It must be (fantastic|easy to use|bloated|evil|feature-rich)." If someone sees just plain "Outlook" and aren't familiar with it, they don't really know very much about who made it.
Similarly, if someone sees "GNU/" they think "Hey, that's a GNU product. It must be (open source|free|difficult to use|for hackers|cool|whatever)."
At least that's the way I see it... If we can establish a "brand name" out of the GNU acronym, it could be useful in other places.
So when you hand someone a business card that has your URL in Russian, how are they supposed to type that into their browser when they're using a Latin keyboard?
We should be working to unify the world into some common standard ways of doing things, not trying to find ways to let each individual demographic express their *own* ways of doing the Internet. If we do, we end up fragmenting the Internet and causing much confusion and stress.
Most every computer has some way of expressing letters using the regular Latin alphabet, and since that's how the Internet is run today, it makes sense to keep things like URLs and your basic Internet framework standardized and accessible to everyone.
If you really want to be able to use your local alphabet/character set in URL's, you should convince your browser vendor to accept that character set in the URL string and do some conversions into the Latin alphabet (i.e. Greek theta -> Latin "th"). That way you can give your Russian URL out to all your russian buddies and they can type it in using the russian character sets, but it really ends up resolving to a normal ISO/latin hostname...
1. There are literally dozens of comments preceeding yours that states the same thing, along with dozens of replies that basically state items 2 and 3 below.
2. There are little arrows and X's on each side bar panel that let you move each panel up or down or remove it from your view. Perhaps you missed them or were unclear as to their function.
3. Rob added an update a while ago to the article that basically stated item 2 above for those that couldn't figure it out.
Please read existing comments and any updates to the article before you make yourself look foolish.
How in the world does this make them more commercial? I mean I could see where the people were coming from when the same "commercialization" thing was brought up with the introduction of the banner ads, but Rob is simply implementing what people have been suggesting for several months -- a user configurable Slashdot.
I don't see how this makes them more "commercial"...?
This would be better done using stylesheets or browser-side changes. You can, of course, specify what font you want your browser to use besides the normal Times New Roman.
With newer browsers, you should be able to define your own stylesheet and apply it to the pages you want, so there shouldn't be any reason why you can't do this on your own.
Likewise, with HTML4, Rob can theoretically define one or more stylesheets for the site, and users should be able to pick and choose what stylesheet they want applied to the raw HTML to get the look and feel they want. To the best of my knowledge, though, there aren't any browsers out there yet that are fully compliant in this regard (except perhaps ngLayout). You can even define different stylesheets for on-screen viewing and print viewing, so it'd be trivial to make a "printer friendly" version of the site simply by allowing the browser access to the "printer friendly" stylesheet. If only web browser makers and authors were aware of these nifty standards...
You may wish to have a 3-hour-long installation process for MS Word, but most people don't. Word comes pre-configured with some very typical, fair defaults. Most people want the features that are enabled by default to be enabled for the lifetime of that installation. You are in the minority by wishing any of those individual features disabled (or enabled) contrary to the default preferences.
Your aerospace professor may be damn intelligent when it comes to aerospace, but your comment merely tells me that he simply does not read manuals. I bet he had problems following directions back in college.
I remember a thread a while back about how Microsoft was evil (again) *because* these MS Office products were "dumbing down" the general population, making things so intuitive and easy that the people using the applications didn't have to be smart. It saddens me that you people do not know how to perform the simplest of configuration tasks under Word.
I've used Word perhaps 20-30 times in my life, for, say, a cumulative 8-10 hours. I haven't touched Word for the last 9 months, but I have no doubt in my mind that I can open it up now and locate the preferences in question in under 30 seconds.
but I tend to use keyboard commands and shortcuts very often, and the problem is probably due to the fact that I grew up with WP5.1 for dos, and haven't been able to unlearn it.
I'm sure this is it.. Word has keyboard shortcuts of its own, and I'm sure any die-hard Word user (which I am not) would say they had similar difficulties converting to WordPerfect.
I actually don't know how to make an uneven 3 column document with differing widths.
I'm not stupid either, the argument of point and click is worthless because the complexity is above point and click.
Forgive me for sounding condescending, but I guess I left out "drag" when I said "point and click". In Word, there's a ruler bar across the top with things like your table edges marked off. To adjust your widths, just drag those marks to the left or the right. Depending on how you've set your toolbars up, creating visible borders on one or multiple edges of a table cell is as easy as selecting the cell and clicking on the toolbar button that most closely matches your desired outline type. I'm sure WordPerfect has just as much functionality, but they just approach it entirely differently, which is why you might be having a hard time with it in Word. This is to be expected, and I don't feel it's a failing of the product. One should not criticize product X because its behavior differs from product Y. (I'm not saying you were or anything, but others are.)
I've personally created pamphlets, brochures and flyers using Word without much difficulty. I had to learn the terminology and what a few of those obscure Word features were for in the process, but again, this is to be expected, and I doubt it'd be any easier in any other Office suite.
Though you're right, Word (or any other word processor for that matter) isn't well suited for certain tasks. I've had to use PageMaker when building full-color magazine advertisements, for example.
It's all about using the best (most efficient/productive) tool for the task.
Oh come on, are you trying to tell me you are unable to locate the place where these preferences are defined? This isn't difficult, folks. It's point-and-click. If you honestly cannot locate the Preferences section in Word where these items are configured, you have some more serious problems.
I think you're just feeling bitter because I'm actually committing Slashdot-blasphemy by actually *defending* Microsoft. Yes, I'm defending them. I don't like them and I think their products tend to be unstable and bloated, but dammit, I'll defend anyone that's being mislabeled and flamed unfairly. Get over it.
Microsoft's software, which they presumably are going to use as the basis for the central server, is about 2-3 orders of magnitude less reliable than that "20-year-old mainframe", based on uptime figures. And the central server is only one part of the reliability chain, a failure in a router or network hub will take down the system even if both the server and the client system are running perfectly.
Then this "Megaserver" venture will fail and Microsoft will lose money. Microsoft operating systems tend to be unreliable. You know it, I know it, and most everyone at Microsoft knows it (though they aren't going to say so). Since everybody knows that implementing this "Megaserver" thing with out-of-the-box Microsoft solutions will result in an unreliable and unstable "Megaserver", logic dictates that a better solution will be devised to ensure reliability and data integrity.
If they build this thing using known unreliable software, it will fail. They know this, which is precisely why a better solution will be (or has already been) devised. Microsoft's business tactics may be questionable, and their consumer products tend to be unreliable, but they're not a stupid company, and they do have some intelligent programmers in their pay. I haven't seen any real problems with that Terraserver lately, for example.
Slashdot Mirror
-5 used to suffice, but to be sure, set it to -50, or -1000. There is no minimum score, except the bounds of the numeric data type used to score it (at least that's what I figure).
No, it means it costs them more to stamp out Linux systems than Windows systems. Remember, Microsoft operating systems have a huge lead as far as OEM distribution is concerned, and Dell's been doing that for years. They have the science of shipping Windows systems down pat.
With Linux systems, they likely have to do their installations completely differently, probably with at least some mild human intervention.
Slashdot is to MS vs DOJ thing as the mainstream press was to the Bill/Monica thing. The normal press isn't covering this trial NEARLY as much as Slashdot is.
Just enter your preferences and turn off the "Microsoft" subject. I think that's what I'm about to do. I want to read news about new and interesting things, not more about "Evil Microsoft".
Slashdot has been selling ads for months, before all these changes. There's a difference between putting up banner ads to make money and putting up banner ads to pay for the site. Rob isn't making much (any?) money off of slashdot.
So again, how do these most recent changes suddenly make the site "commercial" in nature?
This can be done with CSS very easily. It's just a matter of doing the HTML so as to be CSS-friendly and allowing the client to select the style sheet of your choice.
I think this (was/is?) being looked into by the Slashdot folk. The thought at the time was to turn everything into a NNTP-style back-end, where you could get at the comments and articles without needing to go through the web site.
Perhaps it would be easiest if a locality was chosen, and things like date/time formats (time zones, etc.) and the like could be determined from that.
This is because the site is optimized for a Palm Pilot, where there is precious little screen real estate. A banner graphic on a 1200x1024 screen is just as noticable as a small text ad on a Palm Pilot screen.
Perhaps a different version of the site specifically for things like WebTV and Palm Pilots would be nice to have.
In theory, with strict HTML and the proper use of stylesheets (something that most browsers lack), you can just define different stylesheets for the different presentation layouts (palm pilots, webTV, normal browsers, printed/hard copy)...
Surely by "enhance" you mean "strip down, mutilate and otherwise dumbify", yes?
The ads are what keep Slashdot in business. If you allowed people to turn the ads off, most people would, which means most people would not be tempted to click on an ad one day when something mildly interesting does manage to pop up. This means Rob does not get any money and Slashdot will go away.
Stop whining. Those ads are the only reason Slashdot is here right now. You might even wish to consider clicking on one of them one day and buy something to support Slashdot.
Hah, yah right.
Perhaps you should consider e-mailing the Junkbuster people. It's not Rob's job to ensure that his page works through every single little content filtering and proxying mechanism that's out there. If the page does not display correctly when you're using a filtering agent, it's the filtering agent's fault.
I've always seen it as the original poster said--without spaces. Where did you read that spaces were required before and after?
That issue is the single biggest problem people complain about. It's only fair that it be stressed.
It was probably looked over by a different "author" (or even the same one who changed his/her mind) and discarded the first time around. Don't take it personally (or do take it personally; I don't care..)
It's just The Way Things Work (tm).
I'm not trying to say Linux is a "GNU product" per se. That might have sounded a bit confusing. What I mean is that there's a lot of stuff that can be classified as "GNU", and the more name recognition they can get out of it, the more likely people will trust GNU utilities over proprietary ones, etc. The Linux OS in its present form does consist primarily of the "Linux kernel" and the "GNU utility set".
Though I do agree that this whole business seems a bit silly to be pursuing so stubbornly. It's "Linux". *shrug*
People see "MS Outlook" and say, "Hey, that's a Microsoft product. It must be (fantastic|easy to use|bloated|evil|feature-rich)." If someone sees just plain "Outlook" and aren't familiar with it, they don't really know very much about who made it.
Similarly, if someone sees "GNU/" they think "Hey, that's a GNU product. It must be (open source|free|difficult to use|for hackers|cool|whatever)."
At least that's the way I see it... If we can establish a "brand name" out of the GNU acronym, it could be useful in other places.
So when you hand someone a business card that has your URL in Russian, how are they supposed to type that into their browser when they're using a Latin keyboard?
We should be working to unify the world into some common standard ways of doing things, not trying to find ways to let each individual demographic express their *own* ways of doing the Internet. If we do, we end up fragmenting the Internet and causing much confusion and stress.
Most every computer has some way of expressing letters using the regular Latin alphabet, and since that's how the Internet is run today, it makes sense to keep things like URLs and your basic Internet framework standardized and accessible to everyone.
If you really want to be able to use your local alphabet/character set in URL's, you should convince your browser vendor to accept that character set in the URL string and do some conversions into the Latin alphabet (i.e. Greek theta -> Latin "th"). That way you can give your Russian URL out to all your russian buddies and they can type it in using the russian character sets, but it really ends up resolving to a normal ISO/latin hostname...
1. There are literally dozens of comments preceeding yours that states the same thing, along with dozens of replies that basically state items 2 and 3 below.
2. There are little arrows and X's on each side bar panel that let you move each panel up or down or remove it from your view. Perhaps you missed them or were unclear as to their function.
3. Rob added an update a while ago to the article that basically stated item 2 above for those that couldn't figure it out.
Please read existing comments and any updates to the article before you make yourself look foolish.
How in the world does this make them more commercial? I mean I could see where the people were coming from when the same "commercialization" thing was brought up with the introduction of the banner ads, but Rob is simply implementing what people have been suggesting for several months -- a user configurable Slashdot.
I don't see how this makes them more "commercial"...?
This would be better done using stylesheets or browser-side changes. You can, of course, specify what font you want your browser to use besides the normal Times New Roman.
With newer browsers, you should be able to define your own stylesheet and apply it to the pages you want, so there shouldn't be any reason why you can't do this on your own.
Likewise, with HTML4, Rob can theoretically define one or more stylesheets for the site, and users should be able to pick and choose what stylesheet they want applied to the raw HTML to get the look and feel they want. To the best of my knowledge, though, there aren't any browsers out there yet that are fully compliant in this regard (except perhaps ngLayout). You can even define different stylesheets for on-screen viewing and print viewing, so it'd be trivial to make a "printer friendly" version of the site simply by allowing the browser access to the "printer friendly" stylesheet. If only web browser makers and authors were aware of these nifty standards...
You may wish to have a 3-hour-long installation process for MS Word, but most people don't. Word comes pre-configured with some very typical, fair defaults. Most people want the features that are enabled by default to be enabled for the lifetime of that installation. You are in the minority by wishing any of those individual features disabled (or enabled) contrary to the default preferences.
Your aerospace professor may be damn intelligent when it comes to aerospace, but your comment merely tells me that he simply does not read manuals. I bet he had problems following directions back in college.
I remember a thread a while back about how Microsoft was evil (again) *because* these MS Office products were "dumbing down" the general population, making things so intuitive and easy that the people using the applications didn't have to be smart. It saddens me that you people do not know how to perform the simplest of configuration tasks under Word.
I've used Word perhaps 20-30 times in my life, for, say, a cumulative 8-10 hours. I haven't touched Word for the last 9 months, but I have no doubt in my mind that I can open it up now and locate the preferences in question in under 30 seconds.
I'm just trying to get them approved by the FDA...
but I tend to use keyboard commands and shortcuts very often, and the problem is probably due to the fact that I grew up with WP5.1 for dos, and haven't been able to unlearn it.
I'm sure this is it.. Word has keyboard shortcuts of its own, and I'm sure any die-hard Word user (which I am not) would say they had similar difficulties converting to WordPerfect.
I actually don't know how to make an uneven 3 column document with differing widths.
I'm not stupid either, the argument of point and click is worthless because the complexity is above point and click.
Forgive me for sounding condescending, but I guess I left out "drag" when I said "point and click". In Word, there's a ruler bar across the top with things like your table edges marked off. To adjust your widths, just drag those marks to the left or the right. Depending on how you've set your toolbars up, creating visible borders on one or multiple edges of a table cell is as easy as selecting the cell and clicking on the toolbar button that most closely matches your desired outline type. I'm sure WordPerfect has just as much functionality, but they just approach it entirely differently, which is why you might be having a hard time with it in Word. This is to be expected, and I don't feel it's a failing of the product. One should not criticize product X because its behavior differs from product Y. (I'm not saying you were or anything, but others are.)
I've personally created pamphlets, brochures and flyers using Word without much difficulty. I had to learn the terminology and what a few of those obscure Word features were for in the process, but again, this is to be expected, and I doubt it'd be any easier in any other Office suite.
Though you're right, Word (or any other word processor for that matter) isn't well suited for certain tasks. I've had to use PageMaker when building full-color magazine advertisements, for example.
It's all about using the best (most efficient/productive) tool for the task.
Oh come on, are you trying to tell me you are unable to locate the place where these preferences are defined? This isn't difficult, folks. It's point-and-click. If you honestly cannot locate the Preferences section in Word where these items are configured, you have some more serious problems.
I think you're just feeling bitter because I'm actually committing Slashdot-blasphemy by actually *defending* Microsoft. Yes, I'm defending them. I don't like them and I think their products tend to be unstable and bloated, but dammit, I'll defend anyone that's being mislabeled and flamed unfairly. Get over it.
Microsoft's software, which they presumably are going to use as the basis for the central server, is about 2-3 orders of magnitude less reliable than that "20-year-old mainframe", based on uptime figures. And the central server is only one part of the reliability chain, a failure in a router or network hub will take down the system even if both the server and the client system are running perfectly.
Then this "Megaserver" venture will fail and Microsoft will lose money. Microsoft operating systems tend to be unreliable. You know it, I know it, and most everyone at Microsoft knows it (though they aren't going to say so). Since everybody knows that implementing this "Megaserver" thing with out-of-the-box Microsoft solutions will result in an unreliable and unstable "Megaserver", logic dictates that a better solution will be devised to ensure reliability and data integrity.
If they build this thing using known unreliable software, it will fail. They know this, which is precisely why a better solution will be (or has already been) devised. Microsoft's business tactics may be questionable, and their consumer products tend to be unreliable, but they're not a stupid company, and they do have some intelligent programmers in their pay. I haven't seen any real problems with that Terraserver lately, for example.