initially, the publishers will charge low bulk rates to get everyone to switch over.
It's called the Free Digital Textbook Initiative. Notice the word "free" in the name. CLRN is only compiling recommended lists of free materials that correlate with state standards. I don't think they even expect the traditional publishers to participate at all. See this comment for a lengthier explanation of what's actually going on.
Well good job on all the above but an important question needs to be asked in all these E-initiatives. Who's in charge of making certain that quality standards are being upheld in the creation of educational material?
I think the staff of CLRN is doing the first level of filtering. They're definitely checking whether books are aligned with standards, and I don't think they plan to just go ahead and put any submission at all on the list, regardless of quality. And of course textbook selection is ultimately something that's handled at the level of the district, school, department, or individual instructor.
I'm confused by the subject line you wrote, "I'm participating in this as QA," versus the question asked in your post. Are you participating in QA? If so, then I'm not clear on why you're asking the question, rather than sharing your experiences.
I'm participating in the CLRN Free Digital Textbook Initiative as the author of a physics book. When this was discussed on slashdot recently, I posted skeptically. The same day, I got an email from Brian Bridges, the director of CLRN, saying that he'd seen my slashdot post, and he wanted to reassure me that it really was going to happen. They'd already made a list of potential candidates who they wanted submissions from, and I was on it. I had to go through my books and figure out how they correlated with the list of topics (Word document) that the state standards say are supposed to be covered in high school physics. Then there was a process where I had to set up an account on their server, fill out some online forms, and upload the Word file showing how my topics correlated with the standards.
There does seem to be somewhat of a fog of uncertainty surrounding this whole thing. One thing I've noticed is that although Schwarzenegger has named three top-level state education officials who are supposed to carry this out, some of these people are actually his political opponents. In case anyone hasn't noticed, this is all motivated by the hellish California state budget situation. This article has some useful information about California's dysfunctional textbook selection system, and a previous, unsuccessful free-textbook effort called COSTP, where the state tried to produce a history textbook via wikibooks.org. The present effort seems to be doing a pretty good job of eliminating the bureaucratic obstacles; Bridges sent me a detailed email explaining how to fill out all the forms, saying what it was safe to leave blank, etc.
One thing that I wasn't very clear on before was whether they envisioned this as something that would involve traditional textbook publishers, individual authors who'd put their own stuff on the web, or both. Although I'm sure they don't want to arbitrarily tell certain private entities, like the traditional publishers, that they can't participate, it seems clear to me now that it's aimed at the nontraditional folks like me. Note the word "free" in the name of the initiative. No traditional publisher is going to give their book away for free in digital form. It's true that the big college and high school textbook publishers are very actively involved in an effort to distribute a lot of their books in digital form, but not for free. From what I've observed at the community college where I teach, the idea seems to be to get students to rent DRM'd textbooks. When the student stops paying the rent, they can no longer use the book. This would have the effect of eliminating the used book market, which the publishers hate with a passion. (That's the reason they bring out new editions so frequently.) So no, I don't think any traditional publishers will participate. The general picture really does seem to be that they're doing this as an alternative to the traditional publishers. Further circumstantial evidence comes from the fact that the state has already tried to do a collaboration with wikibooks. One big question in my mind is whether there will be a giant push-back from the traditional publishers to keep this from happening. Seems like a no-brainer if it really advances to the stage where their market is threatened.
A lot of the slashdot posts so far have been about the issue of how students will access the books. Since the initiative has "Free" in the name, I don't think we're going to see too many barriers to access here (rentals, DRM, logging in to a web site to access the book, etc.). Taking my own books as
I've never enjoyed Lem's novels. They tend to be extremely dull, IMO, and often there's virtually no characterization. What I really enjoyed by Lem was the Cyberiad, which is anthology of satirical fairy tales about two robotic inventors. They're funny, but they also have a lot of interesting intellectual content in them. There's a lot of really funny wordplay; I think his translator must have sold his soul to the devil in order to be able to translate the verbal craziness so well from Polish into English.
Is it possible to "get" a degree in physics (let alone a special area of physics) with the most advanced course being "Optics and Modern Physics?" I think in my undergrad we touched on relativity in required physics courses with several advanced courses devoted entirely to it and its special forms.
I teach physics at a nearby community college (not ELAC). Community colleges in the US generally offer a bunch of different flavors of introductory physics. At my school, for instance, there are four different flavors of physics: Physics 130 (gen ed), 205-206 (algebra-based, for biology majors), 210-211 (calc-based, for biology majors), and 221-223 (calc-based, for physical science and engineering majors). I guarantee you ELAC's will match up almost exactly with these, because everything has to articulate properly with the Cal State and UC systems. You don't take more than one of these sequences. If he got an AA in physics at ELAC, presumably he had to take the highest-level physics sequence (probably the one they list as General Physics), plus 2 years of calculus. The physics sequence would include some of the more gee-whiz topics like relativity and quantum physics, but at a fairly basic level.
Mostly, it doesn't sound to me like they did anything wrong.
They raised admissions standards.
They lowered the student-to-faculty ratio from 16 to 14.
They raised faculty salaries (and also changed the definition of salaries to fold in benefits, which apparently is allowed by U.S. News, so it was simply a mistake not to do so previously). These are all things that you would absolutely expect a school to do if they wanted to improve their academic reputation.
They seem to have good results to show from their efforts. "[...]the retention rate of freshmen has climbed to 89 from 82 percent and the graduation rate to 78 from 72 percent."
They did increase the number of large classes at the same time that they increased the number of small classes. TFA claims this was done in a cynical effort to match up their numbers with the exact criteria used by U.S. News. Maybe so, but it's also just an ordinary thing that big state schools have been doing for a long time. When I took freshman chemistry at UC Berkeley, they had 300 students in the room, but a lot of my other classes only had 20 or 30. That's just a normal way to make the school's money go further. The fact that the over-all faculty to student ratio did improve shows that they weren't just cooking the books.
Watt said that Clemson officials, in filling out the reputational survey form for presidents, rate "all programs other than Clemson below average," to make the university look better. "And I'm confident my president is not the only one who does that," Watt said.
This one seems bad. However, she hasn't provided any evidence for her claim that it was widespread.
What really seems to upset a lot of the people quoted in the article is that they perceive Clemson as getting more elitist, which they thing is not appropriate for a land-grant university. Well, "elitist" is what you become when you join the elite.
The second link from the slashdot summary, describing the current product, is extremely short, and is essentially the same text as the slashdot summary. A longer and better article is here. This page has technical specs: 12-inch touchscreen (1024x768 4:3), via nano, 1 GB ram, 4 GB flash, wifi, accelerometer, camera, 3 lb, currently running ubuntu.
Sorry, but $300 is not "dirt cheap," IMO. Zareason.com or system76.com will routinely sell you a full-featured desktop system for $300. WalMart and Sears have sold desktop machines like the Everex gPC as cheap as $200. Target has had the eeePC for $280. This is not even something you'd want to use as a full-function computer, so I'd say $300 is actually pretty expensive. Of course some people may be willing to pay for style or convenience. But as far as convenience, I'm not convinced I'd want something portable like this that didn't have a lid to protect the screen.
"Dirt cheap" is going to be ARM-based computers retailing for $50-100, which we'll probably have within a few years.
Unfortunately, my own stats (and I have installed Ubuntu on lots of different hardware configurations) indicate that in only about 30% cases it just works with all the hardware that an average user will immediately notice to fail. Wireless, sound cards, video cards (missing 3d support and more), ACPI quirks...
In the physics lab at the community college where I teach, I have 8 random boxes that I picked up cheap at garage sales, swap meets, etc. They're all running ubuntu. I never had any problem installing ubuntu on any of them, never had to do any more than stick in the CD and fill in the information it requests in the gui. Out of the eight machines, the only problem I have was that on one of them, sound doesn't work. (It works on the others.)
It's true that some people have trouble installing linux on some hardware, and getting the full functionality working right. However, your statement that 70% of installs are broken in just way out of line with my experience.
In any case, I would agree that linux is not going to expand its share of the desktop unless people start buying it preinstalled. Installing an OS is definitely way beyond what most users want to attempt. However we don't have to wait for google to do that. For instance, zareason.com and system76.com will be happy to sell you a linux box.
The real issues, IMO are (1) total lack of marketing of linux, (2) excessive returns to retailers that sell linux machines, (3) flaky and inconsistent availability of very low-end linux machines via retail channels, and (4) price competition, and Microsoft's willingness to price Windows low enough on low-end machines so that they sell for the same price as ones with linux on them.
Linux has already been edged out of the netbook market by Windows, so it's going to be interesting to see how an even more crippled system could possibly compete.
Hi, Remus, nice to run into you here! I didn't realize that you were both on slashdot and on rasfc.
I wonder if it has anything to do with Add-ons? I have none, zero, as I'm not allowed to install them here at work.
It's definitely nothing to do with firefox add-ons, because it occurs for me in a completely fresh install of Opera, if I'm logged in. (Doesn't occur if I'm logged out.)
I'm logged in and followed your steps. No white on white.
Right, I'm assuming it's a user-specific preference that I have set one way and you have set another way. You presumably don't have the pref set on your account, so you don't see the bug, regardless of whether you're logged in or logged out. Quite a few users are experiencing the problem, so now I guess we just need to figure out what preference setting all those users have in common.
Anyone know where to look for this sort of thing in the user settings? There are 16 different subcategories of preferences under Your Preferences at slashdot.org/help.
Aha. I did a little more testing, and I found that the bug doesn't seem to depend on the browser, but does seem to depend on user preferences. If I'm logged out, I don't get the bug in firefox or opera. If I'm logged in, I get the bug in both browsers. I don't know which user prefs would be relevant, though. Maybe other slashdotters who understand prefs better would be able to figure that out.
Opera passes an even tougher css test than acid3 -- unlike firefox and safari, it renders the titles of slashdot comments correctly.
Yes, that's a joke.
To see what I'm talking about, use firefox or safari to navigate to the slashdot homepage, and then click on the "Read More..." link for a story in the news, science, or technology sections. (This Opera article is in the tech section, but if you have your default threshold for comments set high, like I do, you won't get any titles of comments displayed right now, simply because there aren't any highly up-moderated comments yet, so you won't get any comments displayed.) What you'll see is that the titles of stories are displayed in white on a white background.
This comment explains that it's due to a CSS bug in the stylesheets in certain sections. Here is a bug report that I did today in sourceforge. I couldn't find any earlier reports of this problem by searching on sourceforge's bug tracker, but they might exist -- this problem has been around for quite some time now. As a work-around, you can click on the story's title in the threshold form.
It would be interested to hear whether this is universally reproducible with firefox and safari, but please be very careful to follow the exact instructions above. It depends on which section the article is in, and it depends on whether or not you're getting a cached version of the story.
The fact that the slashdot crew hasn't noticed this bug on their own after such a long period of time makes me wonder how much attention they really pay to the site. (This is assuming that the bug really does occur for all firefox users.) We've had dupes and grammatical mistakes in summaries forever, but now that the firehose is handling submissions, it looks like the whole site is just on autopilot.
The 25% statistic leads to a page that quotes the National Institute on Alcohol Recovery, where I can only find mainly underage drinking statistics. Nothing especially about the 25% part.
"One-quarter of all emergency room admissions, one-third of all suicides, and more than half of all homicides and incidents of domestic violence are alcohol-related."
Throw out some statistics about violence from alcohol if you're going to compare it to hard drugs.
Do more folks get mugged for money for alcohol or for drugs? I'm not sure of that.
Alcohol is cheap (in some forms, at least). Heroin is expensive, because it's illegal. If heroin was legalized, it would no longer be a market monopolized by criminal gangs, and its price would no longer be artificially high. People would no longer have to steal to be able to support their habit (and we could start treating it as a medical problem, not a law-enforcement problem).
I'm not saying alcohol is a magic happy thing that doesn't hurt anyone. But are you saying alcohol is the same as crack or crystal meth in terms of societal effects?
In the UK, alcoholics constitute about 5% of the population (2.8 million "dependent drinkers" in 2001 out of a 2001 population of 58.8 million). I doubt that 5% of the population is addicted to crack. 25% of emergency-room visits in the US are alcohol-related. I wasn't able to find a statistic for the total number of emergency room visits per year in the U.S., but various subcategories of emergency-room visits are up to 4 million, so conservatively assuming 4 million emergency room visits per year, that's a minimum of 1 million alcohol-related ones. For comparison, at the height of the crack epidemic the total number of crack-related emergency room visits per year in the U.S. was 55,000. This chart shows that tobacco kills 400,000 people per year in the U.S., alcohol about 100,000, and about 5,000 (hard to read the number off the chart accurately, since it's so tiny).
titles of comments are invisible? Not on my system (ff3, fedora 10, etc).
What system are you running?
Firefox 3 on ubuntu jaunty.
The invisibility of the titles depends on which version of the story you're looking at. Apparently they have some versions that are cached or something like that. On my system, if I go to the slashdot homepage and then click on one of the "Read more..." links, the titles of comments are white on a white background, so they're invisible.
i doubt CmdrTaco is reading anything below +5 insightful;)
Actually I think this suggests something I've suspected for a long time now: that the slashdot crew doesn't read slashdot. If they were reading slashdot, they would presumably have noticed by now that the titles of comments were invisible. (Either that or they've given up on linux, switched to windows, and are using IE as their browser.) The firehose has eliminated the need for them to do a lot of editorial work. They've basically set the system up so that it runs itself, and they just collect their checks every month.
In the meantime, you can hit 'change' in the threshold form to set things straight.
If you do that, you lose the summary. To get it to render right without losing the summary, click on the title of the article, where it appears in the threshold form.
Who cares about switching? Amazon went for new users.
Yep. I never used iTunes because it didn't run on my OS, and it had DRM (light DRM, but DRM nevertheless). The first time I ever bought music online was from Amazon, and now I'm buying all my music on Amazon. All Amazon had to do to get my business was to offer me the opportunity to pay my money in return for an mp3 file, which nobody else was willing to let me do.
The Kindle is exactly analogous. It has a proprietary format, with DRM. Google says they want to have a format that works on a variety of devices, which presumably means no DRM. If they execute the idea well, I'll probably buy my first electronic book from Google.
coming from google who are trying to make software be available only via a browser and clunky javascript makes this rather ironic
The transcript leaves out a few things from the video, the main one being that Brin gives a list of applications he has specifically in mind: gmail, chrome, and Native Client. Of these, only gmail is a javascript application. Chrome doesn't run in a browser, Chrome is a browser. And Native Client is an attempt to get out of the very situation you're complaining about, where web-based apps have to be written in javascript. NativeClient (NaCl) is a browser plugin that allows native x86 code to run in a browser. If you read the paper on NaCl I linked to above, the emphasis on security is impressive. They clearly understand what a disaster things like ActiveX have been in terms of security, and they're serious about making it safe with all kinds of fancy techniques.
A couple of other observations:
They're not kidding about making performance a priority, it's not a new priority for them, and they seem to be doing well at it. When I first tried the Google Docs spreadsheet, its performance was completely unacceptable. A year or so later, it was mentioned on Slashdot again. I was all set to make a snarky post about its poor perfomance, but then I stopped and decided to try it again to see if the performance was still as bas as I remembered. It was much better, so I posted on Slashdot to say so. I then got an email from one of the developers working on Google Docs to say he was glad I'd noticed the improvement, because it had been their main priority recently.
In the video, Brin refers to "Page's law" as the "inverse of Moore's law." I would actually say it's not so much an inverse of it as a corollary of it. Developers are always going to be as sloppy as they can get away with being, and they're always going to prefer to work with languages and APIs that give them the maximum amount of abstraction, platform-independence, and expressiveness. Software houses are always going to market proprietary software based on features (which the user can read about before making a decision to buy), not on performance (which the user can't test until he's paid for the software and tried it out on his own machine). Therefore they're always going to write software that performs as badly as they can get away with. That means that if Moore's law improves hardware performance by a factor of x over a certain period of time, software developers are just naturally going to write software that performs worse by a factor of x over that same period of time.
The really scary thing about browser-based apps, in my opinion, is that they represent a huge threat to open-source software, exactly at the moment when the OSS software stack is starting to be pretty comprehensive, mature, and usable. If you look at the web apps out there, essentially all of them are under proprietary licenses, and nearly all of them are impossible to run without a server running the completely closed-source server-side code. Although Google generally seems pretty friendly toward OSS, I don't really want to have to rely on their good intentions. They are, after all, a publicly traded company, whose only reason for existing is to maximize returns for their shareholders. From this perspective, NaCl is actually pretty scary. The default with javascript is that at least you get to see the source code of the client-side software, even if it's under a proprietary license; I think it's only natural for me to demand this if my web browser is going to run random code off of some stranger's web site. With NaCl, the default will be that all I ever get to see is the object code of the program. This is even worse than java applets; java is actually relatively easy to disassemble into fairly readable source code. (And in any case, java applets never caught on.)
This type of compiler has a performance advantage over the more common separate compilation systems, simply because it can inline anything anywhere, and thus optimize far more aggressively. But it's next to useless for developing large software systems, and thus mostly really useful only for writing smallish programs, in very high-level style, that perform some really expensive computations really fast.
Interesting...but what's to stop you from using it to write a smallish library, and then linking the library to other software?
I disagree with the slashdot summary. The article is really not that interesting at all. It's very shallow, and it's aimed at a general audience, not a geek audience. I didn't learn anything from it at all. Seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
It's called the Free Digital Textbook Initiative. Notice the word "free" in the name. CLRN is only compiling recommended lists of free materials that correlate with state standards. I don't think they even expect the traditional publishers to participate at all. See this comment for a lengthier explanation of what's actually going on.
I think the staff of CLRN is doing the first level of filtering. They're definitely checking whether books are aligned with standards, and I don't think they plan to just go ahead and put any submission at all on the list, regardless of quality. And of course textbook selection is ultimately something that's handled at the level of the district, school, department, or individual instructor.
I'm confused by the subject line you wrote, "I'm participating in this as QA," versus the question asked in your post. Are you participating in QA? If so, then I'm not clear on why you're asking the question, rather than sharing your experiences.
I'm participating in the CLRN Free Digital Textbook Initiative as the author of a physics book. When this was discussed on slashdot recently, I posted skeptically. The same day, I got an email from Brian Bridges, the director of CLRN, saying that he'd seen my slashdot post, and he wanted to reassure me that it really was going to happen. They'd already made a list of potential candidates who they wanted submissions from, and I was on it. I had to go through my books and figure out how they correlated with the list of topics (Word document) that the state standards say are supposed to be covered in high school physics. Then there was a process where I had to set up an account on their server, fill out some online forms, and upload the Word file showing how my topics correlated with the standards.
There does seem to be somewhat of a fog of uncertainty surrounding this whole thing. One thing I've noticed is that although Schwarzenegger has named three top-level state education officials who are supposed to carry this out, some of these people are actually his political opponents. In case anyone hasn't noticed, this is all motivated by the hellish California state budget situation. This article has some useful information about California's dysfunctional textbook selection system, and a previous, unsuccessful free-textbook effort called COSTP, where the state tried to produce a history textbook via wikibooks.org. The present effort seems to be doing a pretty good job of eliminating the bureaucratic obstacles; Bridges sent me a detailed email explaining how to fill out all the forms, saying what it was safe to leave blank, etc.
One thing that I wasn't very clear on before was whether they envisioned this as something that would involve traditional textbook publishers, individual authors who'd put their own stuff on the web, or both. Although I'm sure they don't want to arbitrarily tell certain private entities, like the traditional publishers, that they can't participate, it seems clear to me now that it's aimed at the nontraditional folks like me. Note the word "free" in the name of the initiative. No traditional publisher is going to give their book away for free in digital form. It's true that the big college and high school textbook publishers are very actively involved in an effort to distribute a lot of their books in digital form, but not for free. From what I've observed at the community college where I teach, the idea seems to be to get students to rent DRM'd textbooks. When the student stops paying the rent, they can no longer use the book. This would have the effect of eliminating the used book market, which the publishers hate with a passion. (That's the reason they bring out new editions so frequently.) So no, I don't think any traditional publishers will participate. The general picture really does seem to be that they're doing this as an alternative to the traditional publishers. Further circumstantial evidence comes from the fact that the state has already tried to do a collaboration with wikibooks. One big question in my mind is whether there will be a giant push-back from the traditional publishers to keep this from happening. Seems like a no-brainer if it really advances to the stage where their market is threatened.
A lot of the slashdot posts so far have been about the issue of how students will access the books. Since the initiative has "Free" in the name, I don't think we're going to see too many barriers to access here (rentals, DRM, logging in to a web site to access the book, etc.). Taking my own books as
I've never enjoyed Lem's novels. They tend to be extremely dull, IMO, and often there's virtually no characterization. What I really enjoyed by Lem was the Cyberiad, which is anthology of satirical fairy tales about two robotic inventors. They're funny, but they also have a lot of interesting intellectual content in them. There's a lot of really funny wordplay; I think his translator must have sold his soul to the devil in order to be able to translate the verbal craziness so well from Polish into English.
I teach physics at a nearby community college (not ELAC). Community colleges in the US generally offer a bunch of different flavors of introductory physics. At my school, for instance, there are four different flavors of physics: Physics 130 (gen ed), 205-206 (algebra-based, for biology majors), 210-211 (calc-based, for biology majors), and 221-223 (calc-based, for physical science and engineering majors). I guarantee you ELAC's will match up almost exactly with these, because everything has to articulate properly with the Cal State and UC systems. You don't take more than one of these sequences. If he got an AA in physics at ELAC, presumably he had to take the highest-level physics sequence (probably the one they list as General Physics), plus 2 years of calculus. The physics sequence would include some of the more gee-whiz topics like relativity and quantum physics, but at a fairly basic level.
Mostly, it doesn't sound to me like they did anything wrong.
They raised admissions standards. They lowered the student-to-faculty ratio from 16 to 14. They raised faculty salaries (and also changed the definition of salaries to fold in benefits, which apparently is allowed by U.S. News, so it was simply a mistake not to do so previously). These are all things that you would absolutely expect a school to do if they wanted to improve their academic reputation.
They seem to have good results to show from their efforts. "[...]the retention rate of freshmen has climbed to 89 from 82 percent and the graduation rate to 78 from 72 percent."
They did increase the number of large classes at the same time that they increased the number of small classes. TFA claims this was done in a cynical effort to match up their numbers with the exact criteria used by U.S. News. Maybe so, but it's also just an ordinary thing that big state schools have been doing for a long time. When I took freshman chemistry at UC Berkeley, they had 300 students in the room, but a lot of my other classes only had 20 or 30. That's just a normal way to make the school's money go further. The fact that the over-all faculty to student ratio did improve shows that they weren't just cooking the books.
This one seems bad. However, she hasn't provided any evidence for her claim that it was widespread.
What really seems to upset a lot of the people quoted in the article is that they perceive Clemson as getting more elitist, which they thing is not appropriate for a land-grant university. Well, "elitist" is what you become when you join the elite.
The second link from the slashdot summary, describing the current product, is extremely short, and is essentially the same text as the slashdot summary. A longer and better article is here. This page has technical specs: 12-inch touchscreen (1024x768 4:3), via nano, 1 GB ram, 4 GB flash, wifi, accelerometer, camera, 3 lb, currently running ubuntu.
Sorry, but $300 is not "dirt cheap," IMO. Zareason.com or system76.com will routinely sell you a full-featured desktop system for $300. WalMart and Sears have sold desktop machines like the Everex gPC as cheap as $200. Target has had the eeePC for $280. This is not even something you'd want to use as a full-function computer, so I'd say $300 is actually pretty expensive. Of course some people may be willing to pay for style or convenience. But as far as convenience, I'm not convinced I'd want something portable like this that didn't have a lid to protect the screen.
"Dirt cheap" is going to be ARM-based computers retailing for $50-100, which we'll probably have within a few years.
In the physics lab at the community college where I teach, I have 8 random boxes that I picked up cheap at garage sales, swap meets, etc. They're all running ubuntu. I never had any problem installing ubuntu on any of them, never had to do any more than stick in the CD and fill in the information it requests in the gui. Out of the eight machines, the only problem I have was that on one of them, sound doesn't work. (It works on the others.)
It's true that some people have trouble installing linux on some hardware, and getting the full functionality working right. However, your statement that 70% of installs are broken in just way out of line with my experience.
In any case, I would agree that linux is not going to expand its share of the desktop unless people start buying it preinstalled. Installing an OS is definitely way beyond what most users want to attempt. However we don't have to wait for google to do that. For instance, zareason.com and system76.com will be happy to sell you a linux box.
The real issues, IMO are (1) total lack of marketing of linux, (2) excessive returns to retailers that sell linux machines, (3) flaky and inconsistent availability of very low-end linux machines via retail channels, and (4) price competition, and Microsoft's willingness to price Windows low enough on low-end machines so that they sell for the same price as ones with linux on them.
In what way do you consider Linux "crippled?"
Ah, there you go -- that works for me, too. Thanks!
Hi, Remus, nice to run into you here! I didn't realize that you were both on slashdot and on rasfc.
It's definitely nothing to do with firefox add-ons, because it occurs for me in a completely fresh install of Opera, if I'm logged in. (Doesn't occur if I'm logged out.)
Right, I'm assuming it's a user-specific preference that I have set one way and you have set another way. You presumably don't have the pref set on your account, so you don't see the bug, regardless of whether you're logged in or logged out. Quite a few users are experiencing the problem, so now I guess we just need to figure out what preference setting all those users have in common.
Anyone know where to look for this sort of thing in the user settings? There are 16 different subcategories of preferences under Your Preferences at slashdot.org/help.
Yes, thanks for the correction! I meant headers of comments.
As described in this comment, it turns out to depend on user preferences in some way that I don't completely understand yet.
Aha. I did a little more testing, and I found that the bug doesn't seem to depend on the browser, but does seem to depend on user preferences. If I'm logged out, I don't get the bug in firefox or opera. If I'm logged in, I get the bug in both browsers. I don't know which user prefs would be relevant, though. Maybe other slashdotters who understand prefs better would be able to figure that out.
Opera passes an even tougher css test than acid3 -- unlike firefox and safari, it renders the titles of slashdot comments correctly.
Yes, that's a joke. To see what I'm talking about, use firefox or safari to navigate to the slashdot homepage, and then click on the "Read More..." link for a story in the news, science, or technology sections. (This Opera article is in the tech section, but if you have your default threshold for comments set high, like I do, you won't get any titles of comments displayed right now, simply because there aren't any highly up-moderated comments yet, so you won't get any comments displayed.) What you'll see is that the titles of stories are displayed in white on a white background.
This comment explains that it's due to a CSS bug in the stylesheets in certain sections. Here is a bug report that I did today in sourceforge. I couldn't find any earlier reports of this problem by searching on sourceforge's bug tracker, but they might exist -- this problem has been around for quite some time now. As a work-around, you can click on the story's title in the threshold form.
It would be interested to hear whether this is universally reproducible with firefox and safari, but please be very careful to follow the exact instructions above. It depends on which section the article is in, and it depends on whether or not you're getting a cached version of the story.
The fact that the slashdot crew hasn't noticed this bug on their own after such a long period of time makes me wonder how much attention they really pay to the site. (This is assuming that the bug really does occur for all firefox users.) We've had dupes and grammatical mistakes in summaries forever, but now that the firehose is handling submissions, it looks like the whole site is just on autopilot.
"One-quarter of all emergency room admissions, one-third of all suicides, and more than half of all homicides and incidents of domestic violence are alcohol-related."
Alcohol is cheap (in some forms, at least). Heroin is expensive, because it's illegal. If heroin was legalized, it would no longer be a market monopolized by criminal gangs, and its price would no longer be artificially high. People would no longer have to steal to be able to support their habit (and we could start treating it as a medical problem, not a law-enforcement problem).
In the UK, alcoholics constitute about 5% of the population (2.8 million "dependent drinkers" in 2001 out of a 2001 population of 58.8 million). I doubt that 5% of the population is addicted to crack. 25% of emergency-room visits in the US are alcohol-related. I wasn't able to find a statistic for the total number of emergency room visits per year in the U.S., but various subcategories of emergency-room visits are up to 4 million, so conservatively assuming 4 million emergency room visits per year, that's a minimum of 1 million alcohol-related ones. For comparison, at the height of the crack epidemic the total number of crack-related emergency room visits per year in the U.S. was 55,000. This chart shows that tobacco kills 400,000 people per year in the U.S., alcohol about 100,000, and about 5,000 (hard to read the number off the chart accurately, since it's so tiny).
According to this comment it's bad CSS that only occurs in some subjects. I find that news, science, and tech are messed up, but linux and yro are ok.
Firefox 3 on ubuntu jaunty.
The invisibility of the titles depends on which version of the story you're looking at. Apparently they have some versions that are cached or something like that. On my system, if I go to the slashdot homepage and then click on one of the "Read more..." links, the titles of comments are white on a white background, so they're invisible.
Actually I think this suggests something I've suspected for a long time now: that the slashdot crew doesn't read slashdot. If they were reading slashdot, they would presumably have noticed by now that the titles of comments were invisible. (Either that or they've given up on linux, switched to windows, and are using IE as their browser.) The firehose has eliminated the need for them to do a lot of editorial work. They've basically set the system up so that it runs itself, and they just collect their checks every month.
If you do that, you lose the summary. To get it to render right without losing the summary, click on the title of the article, where it appears in the threshold form.
Yep. I never used iTunes because it didn't run on my OS, and it had DRM (light DRM, but DRM nevertheless). The first time I ever bought music online was from Amazon, and now I'm buying all my music on Amazon. All Amazon had to do to get my business was to offer me the opportunity to pay my money in return for an mp3 file, which nobody else was willing to let me do.
The Kindle is exactly analogous. It has a proprietary format, with DRM. Google says they want to have a format that works on a variety of devices, which presumably means no DRM. If they execute the idea well, I'll probably buy my first electronic book from Google.
The transcript leaves out a few things from the video, the main one being that Brin gives a list of applications he has specifically in mind: gmail, chrome, and Native Client. Of these, only gmail is a javascript application. Chrome doesn't run in a browser, Chrome is a browser. And Native Client is an attempt to get out of the very situation you're complaining about, where web-based apps have to be written in javascript. NativeClient (NaCl) is a browser plugin that allows native x86 code to run in a browser. If you read the paper on NaCl I linked to above, the emphasis on security is impressive. They clearly understand what a disaster things like ActiveX have been in terms of security, and they're serious about making it safe with all kinds of fancy techniques.
A couple of other observations:
They're not kidding about making performance a priority, it's not a new priority for them, and they seem to be doing well at it. When I first tried the Google Docs spreadsheet, its performance was completely unacceptable. A year or so later, it was mentioned on Slashdot again. I was all set to make a snarky post about its poor perfomance, but then I stopped and decided to try it again to see if the performance was still as bas as I remembered. It was much better, so I posted on Slashdot to say so. I then got an email from one of the developers working on Google Docs to say he was glad I'd noticed the improvement, because it had been their main priority recently.
In the video, Brin refers to "Page's law" as the "inverse of Moore's law." I would actually say it's not so much an inverse of it as a corollary of it. Developers are always going to be as sloppy as they can get away with being, and they're always going to prefer to work with languages and APIs that give them the maximum amount of abstraction, platform-independence, and expressiveness. Software houses are always going to market proprietary software based on features (which the user can read about before making a decision to buy), not on performance (which the user can't test until he's paid for the software and tried it out on his own machine). Therefore they're always going to write software that performs as badly as they can get away with. That means that if Moore's law improves hardware performance by a factor of x over a certain period of time, software developers are just naturally going to write software that performs worse by a factor of x over that same period of time.
The really scary thing about browser-based apps, in my opinion, is that they represent a huge threat to open-source software, exactly at the moment when the OSS software stack is starting to be pretty comprehensive, mature, and usable. If you look at the web apps out there, essentially all of them are under proprietary licenses, and nearly all of them are impossible to run without a server running the completely closed-source server-side code. Although Google generally seems pretty friendly toward OSS, I don't really want to have to rely on their good intentions. They are, after all, a publicly traded company, whose only reason for existing is to maximize returns for their shareholders. From this perspective, NaCl is actually pretty scary. The default with javascript is that at least you get to see the source code of the client-side software, even if it's under a proprietary license; I think it's only natural for me to demand this if my web browser is going to run random code off of some stranger's web site. With NaCl, the default will be that all I ever get to see is the object code of the program. This is even worse than java applets; java is actually relatively easy to disassemble into fairly readable source code. (And in any case, java applets never caught on.)
Interesting ...but what's to stop you from using it to write a smallish library, and then linking the library to other software?
I disagree with the slashdot summary. The article is really not that interesting at all. It's very shallow, and it's aimed at a general audience, not a geek audience. I didn't learn anything from it at all. Seriously.