Because then the people in the arena would see nothing. And I'd say it's a safe bet that there are more events in any arena than are televised. The arena managers make the deals for ads in the arena, NOT the TV people. Blue screen ads have no value for them, it would cost them too much money.
I do some contract work for a company that makes those signs, and from everything I know, this is BS. Especially in the pro sports area, there are national marketing companies that contract with things like Coke and Nike, and they do this in conjunction with the TV network folks. Coke doesn't want Pepsi ads being displayed when they have bought the rights to the ads in the game.
At least one of the competitors to the company I deal with is a "complete package deal", where the company pays for the signs, the person running the signs, and lines up all the advertisers. The arena/stadium owners just collect a (large) check.
Also, at least the company I deal with has the ablity to easily change the ads that are displayed depending on the game. It would be trivial for them to show the bluescreen only when there is a TV broadcast.
Next time they will probably sue in Nebraska or something.
If they sued in Nebraska, I would show up, and I presonally know at least a half dozen other people that would too. The time it takes to get from Lincoln to Omaha is less than many peoples daily commutes in large cities, so it wouldn't matter where the court case was filed.
Debian seems to be getting too big to be managed. (by the user and wakkerman)
I don't think I agree, or at least, I don't think the size is the cause of the management problems with the Debian project. They have had similar problems back in the 0.93 release and probably before that too.
There are many packages and they are getting more and more. ("What? There is a new window manager? - Package it!") - I don't think this is the responsibility of a distribution.
A distribution should be the base system to run linux. Every more advanced system should be installed by the unix administrator.
Well, that is your opinion, but I disagree. I see no reason why every administrator should duplicate their efforts by doing all the configuration, patch applying and integration for "every more advanced system."
That is one of the things I like about Debian, if there is a useful program out there, then chances are it has already been packaged and that makes my life easier.
To make it even more worse, packages like netstd get split up in many others and packages which should be split, don't. (Look at tetex-bin. You only need xlib6g because there is xdvi in it. - If you drop xdvi in it's own package you don't have to install xlib6g and xbase on your servers)
Your example of tetex-bin might be a legitimate complaint, I'm not sure, there might be technical reasons why xdvi has to be there.
However, in general, I don't have a problem with lots of small packages. The required packages are automatically selected for you, so you just select the programs you want, and it makes no difference to me if it needs 1 or 1000 other packages to be installed.
I think your missing the point. It's not a matter of whats *fair* or whats right... The government wants to make a statement of "You murder a white girl and you will get more than a little slap on the wrist" And I'm all for it.
Your analogy of killing a nigger doesn't fit here because we are not talking about him killing some nigger, he murdered a white girl. Try making a series of obscene phone calls to Jane Doe and then do it to the WhiteHouse. Would you expect to receive a harsher penalty for the former or the latter? Lets face it, murdering a white girl is not the act of a well centered, mentally balanced individual.
I think if you are stupid enough to murder a white girl then you deserve whatever you get. If you don't want to get fined and go to jail then act like a responsible human. It's really not that hard to do.
I'm very surprised that there has been no mention to the (I thought) famous phrase about "No one will survive the attack of the killer Micros!" by Eugene Brooks. In the late 80's, Eugene described how micros were going to kill off all other types of computers
One of the few references that I can find on the web is here in a 1990 paper.
Basically, this handwriting has been on the wall for well over a decade, and one can only hope that SGI recouped their investment in the first few years after purchasing Cray.
I was really happy to be able to recommend those great ZWorld contollers at a job a while back. An absolute dream to work with. I recommend them all over the place now.
Funny you should mention Z-World controllers. I just was working on a project with them. My experience is that the library code is very buggy, or at least the RS232 and RS485 network code is. Much of the rest is very inefficient. Their CRC-16 routine was so inefficient that I was almost able to beat it by rewriting it in C. Fortunately, they supply the source code so you can go and fix the bugs, but it is still a real pain in the neck.
There are a lot of similar boards out there now that are based on the x86/68k/StrongARM/etc., that are both competive in price with Z-World, and much faster. Trying to use a Z-80 to execute a C-like language just doesn't seem to be a good fit. I expect life is going to be very tough for Z-world and folks like it.
>instructions that don't work well together (it's a pain to add an 8bit counter to a 16bit total)
>You mean like:
> INC C > LD B,0 > ADD HL,BC
>(surround the LD B,0 with a PUSH/POP if needed)?
yes, exactly, especially if the counter happens to be in A, you end up with stuff like this:
PUSH BC
LD C,A LD B,0 ADD HL,BC POP BC
instead of just:
ADD HL,A
or at worst:
ADD L,A
ADC H,0
I mean, you can do an "ADD HL,BC", so it can do a 16 bit add, but you can't anyways easly use that hunk of hardware. I guess I would be more forgiving if the Z80 couldn't do a 16 bit add at all (it's an 8-bit computer after all). It just seems like to do even the simplest things with the Z80 is like working out a puzzle of which registers you should put data and how to get from point A to point B.
I guess I just object to the Z80 being described as "a nice, simple, clean architecture." It isn't, but none of the warts are fatal either...
It's great for beginners at assembly programing - it has a nice, simple, clean architecture and instruction set.
You got to be kidding. The Z80 is the only architecture that I would rank worse than the x86. Irregular registers, instructions that don't work well together (it's a pain to add an 8bit counter to a 16bit total), it's hard to put stuff into the index registers and using the index registers are incredibly slow, etc.
I'm really surprised that the Z80 is used as much in the embedded world as it is. While the transistor count of a Z80 might be small, now a days, that cost savings is going to be swamped by the cost of testing/packaging anyway.
How many people actually have negative karma? Let alone, -10? I have a hard time seeing this as a big problem, but I'm not really up on the stats here...
As far as getting hit for being redundant, well, I think that is A Good Thing. You should read most of the stuff before you post. If what you want to say (or close to it) has already been said, then you keep quiet. This isn't talk.bizarre where "upping the volume" is considered k3wl.
If I could get these shipping companies to use [ the mail box ] I would be in delivery heaven!
It is illegal for anyone to put anything in the mailbox except for offical USPS mail. It is illegal for anyone to take anything out of a mail box if they aren't the owner/tenent. It is illegal to damage a mail box. These are federal offenses.
Oh, it is also illegal to ship anything via FedEX unless it absolutely possitively has to be there overnight. If you ship a regular letter or anything else that isn't time critical via FedEX or UPS, you are commiting a federal offense.
I once got a box of cookies from my GF, and she taped a letter to it. She just paid the bulk rate for the box, but when I picked it up, the USPS folks made me open the letter attached to the box and since it was a "letter", I had to pay the (then) $25 for them to ship a letter.
But if you can't or don't contribute in that way, please donate money to the FSF instead.
I am not sure how useful it is to donate money to free software projects, after all, the people involved aren't doing it for the money. Other things, like donating code, good detailed bug reports, donating documenations, etc. are probably much more effective.
If you do choose to donate money, I would highly recommend the FSF. I have tried to donate money to three free software projects and only the FSF routinely cash my checks. One project never cashed any of my checks and didn't even return email inquiries about them.
The FSF, on the other hand, has been very professional and seems to be the best organized. For example, the only "problem" that I had with them is that they sent me a new "GNU's bulletin" for each check that I sent them, which I considered a waste of money. One note to them fixed the "problem" completely.
If you do consider trying to contibuted non-code related things to any free software project, I would suggest sending them an email first asking them what would be most useful to them. If they say "money would be good", I would suggest sending them one small check and see if they cash it. If they do, send more checks and/or a larger checks. Remember, processing checks takes effort, and it isn't the "fun stuff" of the project. If a project doesn't cash your check or want your money, don't begrudge them. They are volunteers and are putting time/effort into the organization out of the goodness of their hearts.
Anyway, as I said in the beginning, contributions of your time/effort seem to be more effective than contributions of money.
There were a lot of hoodlums out there, but Al Capone was targeted because he was so successful. Poor Al, he was competing in a nearly pure capitalist environment and the big bad governement comes in and seizes his assets and destroys his livelihood. If we had just left him alone, the price of gin would probably be much cheaper now.
What has a fragmented and competitive unix market done for Unix?
The "fragmentation" of Unix has allowed Unix to survive when almost all other operation systems that were around in the late 70's have died.
Think about it. How many OSes can trace their roots to something based in the 70's/early 80's and are still at all healthy today? Well, MS-DOS->Windows, Unix, OS/MFT->OS/MVS->?, System-3->System-36/38->AS/400, VM/CMS and that is about it.
You might try arguing VMS, but it is basically dead and you really can't claim that it continues on in WinNT because while there is a developer chain, there is no code from VMS in WinNT. You could also argue that MPE has survived, but I don't think you would call it healthy.
In the early days, Unix wasn't supported by any major vendor, and most vendors actively fought it. DEC labeled Unix as "snake oil", IBM didn't start supporting Unix until very late with the IBM RT, HP dabbled in it, but they really preferred that you used one of their other operating systems. Apollo laughed at Unix and said it was a passing phase, workstations needed an OS that wasn't designed for teletypes.
Today, you can run Unix on the vast majority of computers out there, something that no other operating system can come close to claiming.
I'm not going to claim that the infighting hasn't cost Unix dearly, it has.
However, thanks to the fragementation, Unix can't be kill just because one company goes belly up or decides to make a "strategic switch" to another OS. AT&T tried to get into the computer market in a big way, and then decided to back out, but that didn't kill Unix. Microsoft decided to push Unix (in the form of Xenix), but then got into a spat with AT&T and sold it off to it's largest VAR (SCO), but that didn't kill Unix either.
Linux and the *BSD versions of Unix are in a even stronger position to survive. When 386BSD stopped being developed, other people picked it up from where it left off and spawned FreeBSD and NetBSD. When SLS stopped being updated, Slackware picked it up. If Redhat dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow, no source code would be lost forever the way RSTS has been lost.
Unix isn't the best OS out there. It isn't the best financed. It certainly isn't the best marketed. The fragmented Unix market is the only thing that has kept Unix alive.
Can you honestly say the last 30 years of infighting was a good thing?
[... ] its aim is a complete overhaul of the current NetLib code, with special attention paid towards footprint, maintainability, and performance.
When I saw this, my heart jumped with joy!
Netlib, one of the original free code repositories is in dire need of being re-written/cleaned up. I once tried to translate lsode.f into C. At first, I tried to translate it without using goto's. Then, I tried to translate it even with goto's. Then I used some code from Numerical Recipies in C.
*sigh*
Does anyone else remember getting stuff from Netlib via email?
Could someone explain to me how the 150+ committers on FreeBSD are more centralized than Linus?
You have to compare FreeBSD more to a Linux distribution, than to just the Linux kernel, although this isn't quite accurate either.
The *BSD developers hack on the kernel, the install system, the package system and a large number of the utilities/programs that are distributed with their system. They also do "ports" of packages that are outside of their control.
Compare this with, say, the Debian GNU/Linux which has 400 developers that can commit changes to their distribution. These 400 developers mostly just do ports, although some work on the install and packaging systems.
The kernel that Debian uses is based off of either the development tree or the release tree of Linux, depending on which the Debian folks thinks is the best thing to do at the time. They also add patches that they think are appropriate and select additional device drivers. The other Linux distributions do similar things with their kernels. So, while there is one central body that controls the FreeBSD kernel, Linus has a lot less direct control about what gets put into the Debian distribution.
To the best of my knowledge, FreeBSD only has one "vi", while Debian has at least three, each of which has a Debian maintainer, and the upstream developers. The Debian user can easily choose whether they want vim or nvi as their editor and the upstream developers have very little control over which they choose, or how the different vi's get packaged by Debian.
While FreeBSD has much more central control than the Linux distributions, I'm not sure that this is really A Bad Thing. It has plusses and minuses.
In the case of the Linux kernel, Linus having a very central control of it has worked well, as has FreeBSD. On the other hand, Debian's freedom to pick and choose which kernel will work best for them frees Linus up from having to worry about the release schedules of the distributions. He, and the rest of the Linux kernel crowd, can worry about developing the kernel, the same goes for the developers of glib, lilo, binutils, etc. It is up to the various distributions to make sure they all work well together.
Open Source useless in this and similar cases
on
Open Source Windows
·
· Score: 2
According to www.openresources.com, Debian 2.1 is over 70 Million lines of code. And that's managable by a group of volunteeers.
Please note this in the message you were responding to from Cassius:
It wold be impossible to comprehend and modify in a useful way unless you had a team of literally thousands [...]
Debain has over 400 developers which mostly just maintain packages. Each of those packages have upstream developers who do most of the non-debian specific work. Think of the number of upstream developers for the Linux kernel, glibc, gnome, XFree86, KDE, gcc, etc. So, Debian does have litterally thousands of people working on it.
That being said, Cassius finishes the line with "[... ][ working in very close conjunction with you (i.e. in the same building as you 8 hours a day)." which clearly Debian doesn't have. So, I guess in someways you are both right. You would need litterally thousands of people, but they wouldn't have to be in the same building.
I wonder it this type of technique could be used to generate clock sources on a computer chip?
Distributing clock signals is one of the hard problems with modern processors and cost a lot of chip realestate. By using something like this, it is possible that people could build faster and smaller CPU.s
This could also make overclocking a thing of the past, real quick like.
while i do agree that a Free Software/opensource alternitive is a good idea, we are also driving away alot of people from computers, everytime someone makes a good product for a computer it gets opensource alternative and everyone uses that. In the end it wont make people turn to programming open source programs but instead drive them away from computers.
I couldn't find any discussion about what license they are talking about using. Bochs, for example, isn't OSS by any stretch of the imagination. (See the license for bochs here.)
If it is not going to be free software, why would anyone want to help for free?
You seem to be bringing up more a question of what the moderators should be able to do, than who they are.
Well, my intent was to point out how moderators should be selected, but you are right that I didn't express that very clearly. Contrary to what Rob says, I think that who would be a good moderator is related to what they can do.
The point I tried to make was that even a "gang of 400" is effectively the same as "everyone votes", because the chances that group of people that large is very far from the norm is very small. Even if you work to make a group of 400 different, it will be hard to move it that much from the norm. You could create a "litmus test" and move the norm on one particular subject, but chances are you would still be close to the norm on other subjects.
My other point is that having everyone vote (or effectively everyone) leads to a Tyranny of the Majority and that can stifle well reasoned, but unpopular views. One way to counteract this is to give each moderator the ability to use up most of their voting power on one post.
So, I think Rob should either have a "small" group of moderators, say 50-100, which are carefully selected to promote diversity and contrary views, or he should use a much larger group (effectively everyone) and have options that promote contrary views.
But I certainly want there to be a large enough pool of moderators that those minority opinions are well sampled.
According to my statistics book, the "sampling theory" says that any group that is larger than around 30 or so is going to be OK if you only have a one dimensional distribution. Slashdot would need a larger number because of the diversity of topics and the different ways to "judge" an article, but unless you have less than a hundred or so moderators, you are going to almost certainly have someone in that group that will agree with a particular article.
Look at how the US constitution is structured:
The people who wrote up the US constitution also were afraid of the Tyranny of the Majority and did several things to counteract it.
First, they made a representational government rather than a purely democratic government. It is much easier for someone with a well reasoned, but unpopular idea to convince a few other representatives that the idea is good than it is to convince the entire population.
Secondly, they created the Bill of Rights and an independent judiciary. Again, it is easier to convince a small jury or a judge of a well reasoned, but unpopular point of view than it is to convince everyone.
Neither of these are perfect in practice, and they don't strike me as being useful for slashdot. Do you really want campaigns to elect moderators or have a grievance system that lets people who think a moderator is biased against them the chance to over rule a moderators vote? Personally, I don't think that/. is important enough to put that much effort into it.
This leads me back to either having a "few (50-100), specially select moderators", or something like the ability for moderators to use up most of their voting power to promote an unpopular opinion. Other ideas are most welcome.
P.S. While I disagree with some of your post, I very much enjoyed reading it. It made me think. This is why I read and post to slashdot.
IMHO: Every reader should be able to moderate/cast a vote on any item at any time subject to appropriate weighting.
In another post about the Tyranny of the Majority I argue that it isn't necessary to have everyone who reads/. to be a moderator because even 400 moderators is, statistically speaking, going to be a very close approximation of the whole population.
I think that allowing everyone to vote is more of a political decision than a practical decision. I would prefer if every non-AC could vote, but only if the problems with keeping diversity of opinions and preventing self-selection can be worked out. Otherwise, I think we would be better off with fewer moderators. There is also the point with fewer moderators, abuses are easier to track and fix.
If their posts have been well-received, their moderation carries weight. If their previous moderations have agreed with other highly-ranked moderators, their moderation carries weight. If they are CmdrTaco, their moderation carries weight. (emphasis mine)
This will lead to a very self-selecting group. The more you agree with the folks in power, the more power you are likely to get. I think this is A Bad Thing. It works well for google because you are trying to find self-selecting groups.
[...] if they're anonymous, [...] their moderation carries less weight.
I can't see any meaningful way that AC's can have a vote. If you let all AC's vote, then anyone who wants to really change a score can just go in and keep boosting the score as an AC. If you let the AC's only vote once, then most of the time AC's wont get to vote.
Although I'm guity of posting too much, I do agree that it is a very serious problem.
IMHO, I think that when calculating your "alignment", you should have a small penalty for every article you post and for every byte you post. People who post lots of long articles and occasionally get a score of 2 or 3 are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
[... ] the basic idea is that if you moderate the same way as a lot of good moderators do, then you too are a good moderator.
Ok, so/. is already Linux-centric. Chances are the current group of moderators tends to think that linux==good, everything else==bad. In order for you to become a moderator, you have to match the current moderators, so you have to tow the party line. Even if you start off with only a mild bias, this self=selecting process is going to make things much worse over time.
That way, when I notice a poster whose comments are really cogent, I can mark that person as a potential moderator.
My problem with this idea is that being a good writer doesn't necessarily mean you would be a good moderator, or vice versa. The same is true for good programmers != good documentors, etc.
How can you easily judge the quality of a moderator? Seriously, I don't know. Suggestions are welcome.
How do you tell the difference between someone who is trying to promote a "contrary view" and someone who is promoting crap? If someone posts an article before they meant to, and then repost the completed article, should a moderator lower the score of the incomplete one? What might be considered "off topic", or "redundant" to one moderator might not viewed differently by most other people.
The problem of selecting "good moderators" strikes me as a very hard problem, and one I don't have any good ideas of how to solve.
Personally, I am very concerned about the "tyranny of the majority." That is, if you have a democratic process where everyone gets one vote, then 51% of the people can easily silence the other 49%.
I think it is very important promote contrary views. I think it is very important not to become a self selecting group, where only certain views are tolerated.
Statistically speaking, even a sample of 400 people taken at random is going to be indistinguishable from the entire population. So, having 400 or 4,000 or 40,000 moderators makes very little difference, because they all effectively represent the entire population of slashdot. OK, so Rob isn't selecting people at random, but it is not clear to me that the typical moderator is much different than the typical/. user either before or after this new way of selecting moderators.
One of the methods that has come out of studies on the voting process is that giving each person more than one vote, and let them distribute those votes any way they like, promotes diversity. This is contrary to the "one person, one vote" view that is so ingrained in the American thought process, but it doesn't give anyone more power, it just gives minorities a chance to target their vote to their own views. This lets the 49%, or 15%, or whatever a much better chance of getting 49% or 15% of the final voice, instead of nearly 0% that typically comes out of a democratic process.
I also don't want an elite few deciding which articles are most interesting, but with the number of people reading/., 400 isn't "a few", at least when compared with most elected offices.
Slashdot Mirror
I do some contract work for a company that makes those signs, and from everything I know, this is BS. Especially in the pro sports area, there are national marketing companies that contract with things like Coke and Nike, and they do this in conjunction with the TV network folks. Coke doesn't want Pepsi ads being displayed when they have bought the rights to the ads in the game.
At least one of the competitors to the company I deal with is a "complete package deal", where the company pays for the signs, the person running the signs, and lines up all the advertisers. The arena/stadium owners just collect a (large) check.
Also, at least the company I deal with has the ablity to easily change the ads that are displayed depending on the game. It would be trivial for them to show the bluescreen only when there is a TV broadcast.
If they sued in Nebraska, I would show up, and I presonally know at least a half dozen other people that would too. The time it takes to get from Lincoln to Omaha is less than many peoples daily commutes in large cities, so it wouldn't matter where the court case was filed.
I don't think I agree, or at least, I don't think the size is the cause of the management problems with the Debian project. They have had similar problems back in the 0.93 release and probably before that too.
There are many packages and they are getting more and more. ("What? There is a new window manager? - Package it!") - I don't think this is the responsibility of a distribution.
A distribution should be the base system to run linux. Every more advanced system should be installed by the unix administrator.
Well, that is your opinion, but I disagree. I see no reason why every administrator should duplicate their efforts by doing all the configuration, patch applying and integration for "every more advanced system."
That is one of the things I like about Debian, if there is a useful program out there, then chances are it has already been packaged and that makes my life easier.
To make it even more worse, packages like netstd get split up in many others and packages which should be split, don't. (Look at tetex-bin. You only need xlib6g because there is xdvi in it. - If you drop xdvi in it's own package you don't have to install xlib6g and xbase on your servers)
Your example of tetex-bin might be a legitimate complaint, I'm not sure, there might be technical reasons why xdvi has to be there.
However, in general, I don't have a problem with lots of small packages. The required packages are automatically selected for you, so you just select the programs you want, and it makes no difference to me if it needs 1 or 1000 other packages to be installed.
Your analogy of killing a nigger doesn't fit here because we are not talking about him killing some nigger, he murdered a white girl. Try making a series of obscene phone calls to Jane Doe and then do it to the WhiteHouse. Would you expect to receive a harsher penalty for the former or the latter? Lets face it, murdering a white girl is not the act of a well centered, mentally balanced individual.
I think if you are stupid enough to murder a white girl then you deserve whatever you get. If you don't want to get fined and go to jail then act like a responsible human. It's really not that hard to do.
One of the few references that I can find on the web is here in a 1990 paper.
Basically, this handwriting has been on the wall for well over a decade, and one can only hope that SGI recouped their investment in the first few years after purchasing Cray.
Funny you should mention Z-World controllers. I just was working on a project with them. My experience is that the library code is very buggy, or at least the RS232 and RS485 network code is. Much of the rest is very inefficient. Their CRC-16 routine was so inefficient that I was almost able to beat it by rewriting it in C. Fortunately, they supply the source code so you can go and fix the bugs, but it is still a real pain in the neck.
There are a lot of similar boards out there now that are based on the x86/68k/StrongARM/etc., that are both competive in price with Z-World, and much faster. Trying to use a Z-80 to execute a C-like language just doesn't seem to be a good fit. I expect life is going to be very tough for Z-world and folks like it.
yes, exactly, especially if the counter happens to be in A, you end up with stuff like this:
instead of just: or at worst: I mean, you can do an "ADD HL,BC", so it can do a 16 bit add, but you can't anyways easly use that hunk of hardware. I guess I would be more forgiving if the Z80 couldn't do a 16 bit add at all (it's an 8-bit computer after all). It just seems like to do even the simplest things with the Z80 is like working out a puzzle of which registers you should put data and how to get from point A to point B.I guess I just object to the Z80 being described as "a nice, simple, clean architecture." It isn't, but none of the warts are fatal either...
You got to be kidding. The Z80 is the only architecture that I would rank worse than the x86. Irregular registers, instructions that don't work well together (it's a pain to add an 8bit counter to a 16bit total), it's hard to put stuff into the index registers and using the index registers are incredibly slow, etc.
I'm really surprised that the Z80 is used as much in the embedded world as it is. While the transistor count of a Z80 might be small, now a days, that cost savings is going to be swamped by the cost of testing/packaging anyway.
As far as getting hit for being redundant, well, I think that is A Good Thing. You should read most of the stuff before you post. If what you want to say (or close to it) has already been said, then you keep quiet. This isn't talk.bizarre where "upping the volume" is considered k3wl.
It is illegal for anyone to put anything in the mailbox except for offical USPS mail. It is illegal for anyone to take anything out of a mail box if they aren't the owner/tenent. It is illegal to damage a mail box. These are federal offenses.
Oh, it is also illegal to ship anything via FedEX unless it absolutely possitively has to be there overnight. If you ship a regular letter or anything else that isn't time critical via FedEX or UPS, you are commiting a federal offense.
I once got a box of cookies from my GF, and she taped a letter to it. She just paid the bulk rate for the box, but when I picked it up, the USPS folks made me open the letter attached to the box and since it was a "letter", I had to pay the (then) $25 for them to ship a letter.
USPS sux.
I am not sure how useful it is to donate money to free software projects, after all, the people involved aren't doing it for the money. Other things, like donating code, good detailed bug reports, donating documenations, etc. are probably much more effective.
If you do choose to donate money, I would highly recommend the FSF. I have tried to donate money to three free software projects and only the FSF routinely cash my checks. One project never cashed any of my checks and didn't even return email inquiries about them.
The FSF, on the other hand, has been very professional and seems to be the best organized. For example, the only "problem" that I had with them is that they sent me a new "GNU's bulletin" for each check that I sent them, which I considered a waste of money. One note to them fixed the "problem" completely.
If you do consider trying to contibuted non-code related things to any free software project, I would suggest sending them an email first asking them what would be most useful to them. If they say "money would be good", I would suggest sending them one small check and see if they cash it. If they do, send more checks and/or a larger checks. Remember, processing checks takes effort, and it isn't the "fun stuff" of the project. If a project doesn't cash your check or want your money, don't begrudge them. They are volunteers and are putting time/effort into the organization out of the goodness of their hearts.
Anyway, as I said in the beginning, contributions of your time/effort seem to be more effective than contributions of money.
Bingo!
There were a lot of hoodlums out there, but Al Capone was targeted because he was so successful. Poor Al, he was competing in a nearly pure capitalist environment and the big bad governement comes in and seizes his assets and destroys his livelihood. If we had just left him alone, the price of gin would probably be much cheaper now.
The "fragmentation" of Unix has allowed Unix to survive when almost all other operation systems that were around in the late 70's have died.
Think about it. How many OSes can trace their roots to something based in the 70's/early 80's and are still at all healthy today? Well, MS-DOS->Windows, Unix, OS/MFT->OS/MVS->?, System-3->System-36/38->AS/400, VM/CMS and that is about it.
You might try arguing VMS, but it is basically dead and you really can't claim that it continues on in WinNT because while there is a developer chain, there is no code from VMS in WinNT. You could also argue that MPE has survived, but I don't think you would call it healthy.
In the early days, Unix wasn't supported by any major vendor, and most vendors actively fought it. DEC labeled Unix as "snake oil", IBM didn't start supporting Unix until very late with the IBM RT, HP dabbled in it, but they really preferred that you used one of their other operating systems. Apollo laughed at Unix and said it was a passing phase, workstations needed an OS that wasn't designed for teletypes.
Today, you can run Unix on the vast majority of computers out there, something that no other operating system can come close to claiming.
I'm not going to claim that the infighting hasn't cost Unix dearly, it has.
However, thanks to the fragementation, Unix can't be kill just because one company goes belly up or decides to make a "strategic switch" to another OS. AT&T tried to get into the computer market in a big way, and then decided to back out, but that didn't kill Unix. Microsoft decided to push Unix (in the form of Xenix), but then got into a spat with AT&T and sold it off to it's largest VAR (SCO), but that didn't kill Unix either.
Linux and the *BSD versions of Unix are in a even stronger position to survive. When 386BSD stopped being developed, other people picked it up from where it left off and spawned FreeBSD and NetBSD. When SLS stopped being updated, Slackware picked it up. If Redhat dropped off the face of the earth tomorrow, no source code would be lost forever the way RSTS has been lost.
Unix isn't the best OS out there. It isn't the best financed. It certainly isn't the best marketed. The fragmented Unix market is the only thing that has kept Unix alive.
Can you honestly say the last 30 years of infighting was a good thing?
YES.
When I saw this, my heart jumped with joy!
Netlib, one of the original free code repositories is in dire need of being re-written/cleaned up. I once tried to translate lsode.f into C. At first, I tried to translate it without using goto's. Then, I tried to translate it even with goto's. Then I used some code from Numerical Recipies in C.
*sigh*
Does anyone else remember getting stuff from Netlib via email?
You have to compare FreeBSD more to a Linux distribution, than to just the Linux kernel, although this isn't quite accurate either.
The *BSD developers hack on the kernel, the install system, the package system and a large number of the utilities/programs that are distributed with their system. They also do "ports" of packages that are outside of their control.
Compare this with, say, the Debian GNU/Linux which has 400 developers that can commit changes to their distribution. These 400 developers mostly just do ports, although some work on the install and packaging systems.
The kernel that Debian uses is based off of either the development tree or the release tree of Linux, depending on which the Debian folks thinks is the best thing to do at the time. They also add patches that they think are appropriate and select additional device drivers. The other Linux distributions do similar things with their kernels. So, while there is one central body that controls the FreeBSD kernel, Linus has a lot less direct control about what gets put into the Debian distribution.
To the best of my knowledge, FreeBSD only has one "vi", while Debian has at least three, each of which has a Debian maintainer, and the upstream developers. The Debian user can easily choose whether they want vim or nvi as their editor and the upstream developers have very little control over which they choose, or how the different vi's get packaged by Debian.
While FreeBSD has much more central control than the Linux distributions, I'm not sure that this is really A Bad Thing. It has plusses and minuses.
In the case of the Linux kernel, Linus having a very central control of it has worked well, as has FreeBSD. On the other hand, Debian's freedom to pick and choose which kernel will work best for them frees Linus up from having to worry about the release schedules of the distributions. He, and the rest of the Linux kernel crowd, can worry about developing the kernel, the same goes for the developers of glib, lilo, binutils, etc. It is up to the various distributions to make sure they all work well together.
Please note this in the message you were responding to from Cassius:
It wold be impossible to comprehend and modify in a useful way unless you had a team of literally thousands [...]
Debain has over 400 developers which mostly just maintain packages. Each of those packages have upstream developers who do most of the non-debian specific work. Think of the number of upstream developers for the Linux kernel, glibc, gnome, XFree86, KDE, gcc, etc. So, Debian does have litterally thousands of people working on it.
That being said, Cassius finishes the line with "[ ... ][ working in very close conjunction with you (i.e. in the same building as you 8 hours a day)." which clearly Debian doesn't have. So, I guess in someways you are both right. You would need litterally thousands of people, but they wouldn't have to be in the same building.
Distributing clock signals is one of the hard problems with modern processors and cost a lot of chip realestate. By using something like this, it is possible that people could build faster and smaller CPU.s
This could also make overclocking a thing of the past, real quick like.
Hmmm...
Oh yes, here it is...
while i do agree that a Free Software/opensource alternitive is a good idea, we are also driving away alot of people from computers, everytime someone makes a good product for a computer it gets opensource alternative and everyone uses that. In the end it wont make people turn to programming open source programs but instead drive them away from computers.
If it is not going to be free software, why would anyone want to help for free?
Well, my intent was to point out how moderators should be selected, but you are right that I didn't express that very clearly. Contrary to what Rob says, I think that who would be a good moderator is related to what they can do.
The point I tried to make was that even a "gang of 400" is effectively the same as "everyone votes", because the chances that group of people that large is very far from the norm is very small. Even if you work to make a group of 400 different, it will be hard to move it that much from the norm. You could create a "litmus test" and move the norm on one particular subject, but chances are you would still be close to the norm on other subjects.
My other point is that having everyone vote (or effectively everyone) leads to a Tyranny of the Majority and that can stifle well reasoned, but unpopular views. One way to counteract this is to give each moderator the ability to use up most of their voting power on one post.
So, I think Rob should either have a "small" group of moderators, say 50-100, which are carefully selected to promote diversity and contrary views, or he should use a much larger group (effectively everyone) and have options that promote contrary views.
But I certainly want there to be a large enough pool of moderators that those minority opinions are well sampled.
According to my statistics book, the "sampling theory" says that any group that is larger than around 30 or so is going to be OK if you only have a one dimensional distribution. Slashdot would need a larger number because of the diversity of topics and the different ways to "judge" an article, but unless you have less than a hundred or so moderators, you are going to almost certainly have someone in that group that will agree with a particular article.
Look at how the US constitution is structured:
The people who wrote up the US constitution also were afraid of the Tyranny of the Majority and did several things to counteract it.
First, they made a representational government rather than a purely democratic government. It is much easier for someone with a well reasoned, but unpopular idea to convince a few other representatives that the idea is good than it is to convince the entire population.
Secondly, they created the Bill of Rights and an independent judiciary. Again, it is easier to convince a small jury or a judge of a well reasoned, but unpopular point of view than it is to convince everyone.
Neither of these are perfect in practice, and they don't strike me as being useful for slashdot. Do you really want campaigns to elect moderators or have a grievance system that lets people who think a moderator is biased against them the chance to over rule a moderators vote? Personally, I don't think that /. is important enough to put that much effort into it.
This leads me back to either having a "few (50-100), specially select moderators", or something like the ability for moderators to use up most of their voting power to promote an unpopular opinion. Other ideas are most welcome.
P.S. While I disagree with some of your post, I very much enjoyed reading it. It made me think. This is why I read and post to slashdot.
In another post about the Tyranny of the Majority I argue that it isn't necessary to have everyone who reads /. to be a moderator because even 400 moderators is, statistically speaking, going to be a very close approximation of the whole population.
I think that allowing everyone to vote is more of a political decision than a practical decision. I would prefer if every non-AC could vote, but only if the problems with keeping diversity of opinions and preventing self-selection can be worked out. Otherwise, I think we would be better off with fewer moderators. There is also the point with fewer moderators, abuses are easier to track and fix.
If their posts have been well-received, their moderation carries weight. If their previous moderations have agreed with other highly-ranked moderators, their moderation carries weight. If they are CmdrTaco, their moderation carries weight. (emphasis mine)
This will lead to a very self-selecting group. The more you agree with the folks in power, the more power you are likely to get. I think this is A Bad Thing. It works well for google because you are trying to find self-selecting groups.
[...] if they're anonymous, [...] their moderation carries less weight.
I can't see any meaningful way that AC's can have a vote. If you let all AC's vote, then anyone who wants to really change a score can just go in and keep boosting the score as an AC. If you let the AC's only vote once, then most of the time AC's wont get to vote.
Although I'm guity of posting too much, I do agree that it is a very serious problem.
IMHO, I think that when calculating your "alignment", you should have a small penalty for every article you post and for every byte you post. People who post lots of long articles and occasionally get a score of 2 or 3 are part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Ok, so /. is already Linux-centric. Chances are the current group of moderators tends to think that linux==good, everything else==bad. In order for you to become a moderator, you have to match the current moderators, so you have to tow the party line. Even if you start off with only a mild bias, this self=selecting process is going to make things much worse over time.
My problem with this idea is that being a good writer doesn't necessarily mean you would be a good moderator, or vice versa. The same is true for good programmers != good documentors, etc.
How can you easily judge the quality of a moderator? Seriously, I don't know. Suggestions are welcome.
How do you tell the difference between someone who is trying to promote a "contrary view" and someone who is promoting crap? If someone posts an article before they meant to, and then repost the completed article, should a moderator lower the score of the incomplete one? What might be considered "off topic", or "redundant" to one moderator might not viewed differently by most other people.
The problem of selecting "good moderators" strikes me as a very hard problem, and one I don't have any good ideas of how to solve.
I think it is very important promote contrary views. I think it is very important not to become a self selecting group, where only certain views are tolerated.
Statistically speaking, even a sample of 400 people taken at random is going to be indistinguishable from the entire population. So, having 400 or 4,000 or 40,000 moderators makes very little difference, because they all effectively represent the entire population of slashdot. OK, so Rob isn't selecting people at random, but it is not clear to me that the typical moderator is much different than the typical /. user either before or after this new way of selecting moderators.
One of the methods that has come out of studies on the voting process is that giving each person more than one vote, and let them distribute those votes any way they like, promotes diversity. This is contrary to the "one person, one vote" view that is so ingrained in the American thought process, but it doesn't give anyone more power, it just gives minorities a chance to target their vote to their own views. This lets the 49%, or 15%, or whatever a much better chance of getting 49% or 15% of the final voice, instead of nearly 0% that typically comes out of a democratic process.
I also don't want an elite few deciding which articles are most interesting, but with the number of people reading /., 400 isn't "a few", at least when compared with most elected offices.