Well, it could be that someone else made a joke about it, leaked to early, and Google just thought it was a great idea when they learnt about it.
Here, an astronomer I work for who has a high media profile had an article about it on the "text-TV" pages of a national TV station, where "he" invited" people to get registered as volunteer astronauts for a manned mission to Saturn, and they even gave his e-mail address.
He had nothing to do with the joke, but obviously he thought it was very cool, so he just followed up on it when the e-mails started coming...
I think you are right on there. My father finds it most frustrating when a program is asking him questions he has no idea how to answer.
Actually, migrating to Linux has helped him a bit in this respect, since I, who maintain his system, can make most of those decisions for him, even remotely.
What bothers him a bit now, is that he feels there are so many new things to learn, even after making the decisions. To that I go "tough, you're an engineer, you're supposed to teach yourself things", and he tends to accept that after a bit of yelling.
In the Linux world, I think it should be the distributors job to make the tough decisions. Perhaps there could even be a market for tailor-made distros, people tell you what their needs are, and you compile a distro for them....
You're not alone in seeing dmoz falling apart. I joined dmoz just as it was renamed from gnuhoo to newhoo (you know what-hoo didn't like either), and so I was in there really early.
What happened with dmoz is that it attracted a lot of spammers, and since once people were approved as editors, they could cause a lot of damage, they started to screen new signups, and rejected something like 95% of applicants.
You weren't the only one to experience rejection in spite of good credentials. At the time, dmoz had the potential to attract many good scholars, since many good scholars were actually involved in making directories of web resources. But it most of them, and you can't tell a good scholar to try and sign up twice, or start playing in the shallow waters. He's not interested in that.
OTOH, Some people got additional privileges, but the problem was that many of those had no clue at all. For example, I was really pissed when I experienced one meta-editor overruling editorial decisions I made in category, and it was extremely clear that the meta-editor had no clue whatsoever what s/he was doing in there. After a flamefest in the foras, I quit editing that category, and it remains in a sorry state.
Another problem was that many had the goal of growing beyond Yahoo at all costs...
Eventually, I quit editing alltogether. It is several years going by now.
I think your perception about a small club is wrong, however, because it was not my perception from the inside. It was a lot of controversy around these issues, and many suggested that the policy of rejecting 95% and having possibly good people play in shallow waters was a bad idea. The problem with the spammers is something one would have to deal with differently.
All in all, I think it boils down to giving individuals too much power: Instead of letting one editor have power to post (and meta-editors clean up if it was wrong), one could have a voting system. By letting meta-editors have absolute power over topical editors, it certainly corrupted meta-editors too, same problem, same solution.
I think the downfall of dmoz is due to the very same mechanisms that cause anybody that gets too much power to become corrupt. Power corrupts, and every social system has to deal with it.
the average citizen doesn't really give a damn about the law.
Funnily, we're headed in the direction of how communism fell apart.
I read an interesting article by renowned russian political scientist Boris Kagarlitsky, where he wrote some ramblings around Linux vs. Microsoft, the western way of doing things vs. that what became prevalent under communism.
The interesting thing in his argument is that rewritting an operating system from scratch is a typical western thing to do: If you don't like the system, you replace it with something better, you don't just ignore the rules. In Soviet Russia (uhm, You!:-) ), people were so used to stupid rules and regulations that they didn't even think about it, they were quietly ignored, and not a single mind would think about reforming them, that was simply not possible.
As an aside, he used as one of his examples that russian crackers had access to Windows source code for three months, meaning, in Soviet Russia, you don't care about writing a open OS from scratch, you grab the source of whatever exists....:-) And allthough Russia isn't Soviet anymore, the mentality still exists. Actually, I tried to refute that argument, becuase I'm extremely surprised if the availability of source code wouldn't lead to many high-profile exploits.
But, I found that I really couldn't refute it...
Furthermore, he argued, civil disobedience, i.e. breaking the law loudly to get your case before the courts, wasn't at all an option in Soviet Russia. You'll be locked up even if the law was stupid.
So, instead, people would quietly ignore the law, or, as you put it "don't really give a damn about the law."
Isn't a bit ironic that America is headed towards a situation where millions are quietly ignoring the law, when the western way should have been to reform it?
I have to say that I'm glad of this. It gives me comfort to know that I'm not subject to the arbitrary rule of a body that one, I have not elected, two, does not represent me or my interests in any recognizable fashion, and three, is not subject to the dictates of the citizens.
So, when the day comes that your own government was not elected by you, does not represent you and is not subject to your dictates, who are you going to turn to?
The ICC will never have the mandate nor the resources to hear cases that are not about human rights violations.
It will be an important tool in bringing dictators, war criminals and the like to justice, if given sufficient mandate from everybody.
While the UN certainly has many flaws, I truly believe that it is a step in the right direction to give away some sovereignity to an international court, in case my own government and my own courts simply stop functioning.
If you think there is only the slightest chance that this will happen in the US, you might want to look into it.
Yes, I'm Norwegian and I can confirm that. It was a lot of noise, and it was released somewhat later.
It sounds rather weird, and I don't think it could have happened today. Funnily, there has always been humour and satire that has made the big waves. Nevertheless, there has always been some really good shows on Norwegian TV, in fact in particular on the state-owned, license-based national TV.
I think it looks very interesting, and it is much better than both Passport and Liberty Alliance in that you control your own data and decide yourself what you want to share (if I have understood it correctly).
I haven't seen it been discussed a lot on/., and:
2004-02-22 20:10:08 Shibboleth For User Info Exchange (developers,privacy) (rejected)
Well, AOL. Up to reading this article, I was in the "dethrone Pluto" camp, but I found Gravity Rules instantly appealing.
But there is this thing with "rough". You have to draw the line somewhere... For example "Deviates from a sphere with at most 1%". I think that'll do it for me.
The funny thing is when you've got a planet and a large moon... You need to be more precise as to what's a moon too...
I think that's when I get to the point when I say "Forget the names, give me the numbers!"
That's what I think about Seyfert galaxies, for example. First, you had just "Seyfert Galaxies", then you had "Seyfert type 1" and "Seyfert type 2", then you had some like Seyfert 1.2, 1.5 and 1.8.... And to really make the situation clear, there are galaxies that go from being Seyfert 1 to Seyfert 1.8 and back....;-)
RTFA, to the end! He is arguing his point excellently, you can't just draw the line based on size, it's a bad idea.
From the/. blurb, I got the same idea as you did, and my vote would earlier be the same as yours, Pluto is not a planet, it's a Kuiper belt object.
However, when reading his Gravity Rules criterion at the end, I found it instantly very appealing. He makes an excellent point there. A Planet is something that gets very rounded by gravity. In the end, you'll need to draw a line anyway, because of mountains, but that's at most 1%.
Oh, please.... This is not about lighting angle. Look, the pictures you present as proof has been photoshopped. That's not image reduction. The nose isn't even in the right place. If you want to do some real data reduction, you need to do like a friend of mine did: Get the raw data, have a beer, and hack a few scripts. this is the result.
I suspect this has something to do with Norway...
Not only are we only 4.5 million people, most of whom don't care too much about langauge (I haven't even been bothered to download a Norwegian version of OO.o), but we have two different official languages that are almost identical.
The two are called "bokmal" and "nynorsk", and neither are spoken, "bokmal" is used by the majority, and was influenced by the Danish, whereas "nynorsk" was constructed about 150 years ago based on a few spoken dialects.
But since there are many really good Mozilla, KDE and OO.o developers who write "nynorsk", all these three had "nynorsk" i18n and l10ns very quickly, often long before "bokmal".
Then, because "nynorsk" enjoys very strong protection by law, IANAL, but I think it would be against the law not to have a "nynorsk" version of software that was available in "bokmal". Wooah. So, what happened was a migration in many public offices to OO.o, and they funded the translation and some development of OO.o, and continued to mount pressure on MS to provide a translation.
To MS, it is no way they could justify the cost of i18n and l18n Office to "nynorsk", but they did it anyway.
Why? Obviously, if the migration of OO.o in public offices had continued at that pace in "nynorsk"-land, there would suddenly be many communities in Norway that could report large cost-savings and well-working free software, and suddenly, MS Office would have been replaced in the entire public sector in Norway, and that would be really bad for MS....
Currently, many forms are passed as Word documents, and MS Office is considered a "standard app" in public offices. MS has public offices with a rope around their necks, and has so far been quite successful in stopping any migration.
So, no, they're not seeing the light. They are responding to something that could make people dump their products, but where responding to customer demands would be extremely expensive for them.
So, they are trying to get their customers to carry that cost themselves.
Hm, I'm from Norway, and while I feel relatively free at the moment, have gotten a bit more faith in the legal system, and feel that I have some influence on the local government, I still see the situation deroriating rapidly. Even if Norway is not a member of the EU, we will most likely have to make this a law anyway, so much for democracy...
Actually, I'm looking towards South America, specifically Brazil.
Brazil seems to be improving rapidly, still, Lula seems to keep his eyes open and doesn't take in whatever comes from the large nations and corporations like most do. Brazil also seems to have quite a few good hackers allready, so it has a good start.
He's probably being told from the large ones that he has to enact draconian laws to encourage economic growth, and he is probably to some extent forced to do it through international treaties and bilateral "trade agreements".
If we could convince a nation's leader that, to the contrary, to encourage growth, you have to let go of stringent laws and foster creativity, then we could have a free country. Furthermore, if geeks would move there en masse and create the greatest brainpool anywhere, encouraging the whole society to become creative, then it would lead the way for the rest of the world. Right now, I think Lula seems to be the leader most likely to be convinced this can be the case.
With a free country getting some real mindshare, it could easily take the lead...
I'd really like to hear what the brazilians here have to say about it.
My parents (both in their mid-sixtees) have a Debian Woody-based workstation (with KDE 3.0, OO 1.0 and Firefox) and a laptop that came with WinXP. I made it very clear that Windows is unsupported, end of discussion.
I've also spent hours explaining to them why free as in speech is important, and how morally corrupt MS is. They understand that they just can't ask me to support MS.
They are pretty happy with it. My mother likes it very much, she has few problems. Not only is she surfing, reading e-mail and stuff, she also uses Amaya to create web pages for her class. She use SFS to get them onto my machine. Dad's not quite so happy, because he has bought into that "I shouldn't have to learn anything to use a computer" crap. But I am getting him to realize how wrong that is (after all, he is a civil engineer), so things are improving.
I recently got Debian onto moms laptop, as I needed to borrow it. As far as I know, they are not booting WinXP a lot anymore, they are mostly Debian users.
Really, I would recommend that approach to everyone: Make them use the OS you think is good, and try to make that OS work well for them. You can do most administration tasks remotely by SSH.
Huh, really? That's over a full 180 km ride, I suppose? Last time I went to the doctor to have a few tests, we did a bicycle test where I had a sustained output over the last minute of 400W. That's when the doctor wouldn't let me go any further. But I think the most powerful rowers have an output well in excess of 500W, in the course of a race (those guys train a lot).
Hehe, well, I was at a lecture given by a researcher in this field, and he said that under some really, really unlikely circumstances, there could be some unsustained fusion going on. Not big, but big enough to cause an explosion. Actually, they were gearing up in case it happened, but said "we did the experiments on Saturday night, so, if successful, we would be the only casualities...":-)
But the really bad thing was that I worked in that building many saturday nights at that time...
Well, for one thing: Laws tend to be "harmonized". I expect this to become law here in Norway very soon too. No, I do not expect there will be a public debate, and if it is, it will mean nothing for the law.
I think this may mean that the "Semantic Web" is dead. It never was allowed the time to take off, but an important part of it was to allow computers to make sense out of data, for example having agents roam around and gather facts, and present it to the user any way the user likes.
You'd bet if anybody tries this, it will get beaten to the ground by this law at the first attempt, and any subsequent attempts to research or commercialize applications doing this would get into so deep legal problems it will simply not be feasible.
So much for Intellectual Property encouraging innovation.
I looked at RSS around the time 2.0 was released, and soon realized I didn't like the goals of 2.0 and decided to stay with 1.0, but I haven't actually written any code for it yet.
So, it is good to hear some news!
But I'm curious about Atom, any idea when it'll reach 1.0?
The configuration problem is simple. I have a desktop machine named 'snark'. It is connected, via the house Ethernet, to my wife Cathy's machine, which is named 'minx'. Minx has a LaserJet 6MP attached to it via parallel port. Both machines are running Fedora Core 1, and Cathy can print locally from minx. I can ssh minx from snark, so the network is known good.
I have nearly the same setup up at my parent's house, except that both machines run Debian Woody and it is a OfficeJet T65. Using the config tools in KPrinter, I had it working within 5 minutes. It was so easy I really don't know why it worked, it just worked (I kinda hate that, I'd like to understand things). Also, the machine without the printer can boot into windoze, and printing from windoze also works without problems, just declare it as a internet printer or something and that's it...
So I don't think I can help ESR here, since I don't know what he did wrong, but for me, it just worked.
The next thing I want to do is to add that printer to my own home network (both are connected to the Internet through ADSL), but have a username/password authentication for my machine. But I haven't gotten around to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
Here, an astronomer I work for who has a high media profile had an article about it on the "text-TV" pages of a national TV station, where "he" invited" people to get registered as volunteer astronauts for a manned mission to Saturn, and they even gave his e-mail address.
He had nothing to do with the joke, but obviously he thought it was very cool, so he just followed up on it when the e-mails started coming...
Wohooooo, now that we have two independent implementations, perhaps we can get RFC 1149 on the standards track?!?!
Actually, migrating to Linux has helped him a bit in this respect, since I, who maintain his system, can make most of those decisions for him, even remotely.
What bothers him a bit now, is that he feels there are so many new things to learn, even after making the decisions. To that I go "tough, you're an engineer, you're supposed to teach yourself things", and he tends to accept that after a bit of yelling.
In the Linux world, I think it should be the distributors job to make the tough decisions. Perhaps there could even be a market for tailor-made distros, people tell you what their needs are, and you compile a distro for them....
What happened with dmoz is that it attracted a lot of spammers, and since once people were approved as editors, they could cause a lot of damage, they started to screen new signups, and rejected something like 95% of applicants.
You weren't the only one to experience rejection in spite of good credentials. At the time, dmoz had the potential to attract many good scholars, since many good scholars were actually involved in making directories of web resources. But it most of them, and you can't tell a good scholar to try and sign up twice, or start playing in the shallow waters. He's not interested in that.
OTOH, Some people got additional privileges, but the problem was that many of those had no clue at all. For example, I was really pissed when I experienced one meta-editor overruling editorial decisions I made in category, and it was extremely clear that the meta-editor had no clue whatsoever what s/he was doing in there. After a flamefest in the foras, I quit editing that category, and it remains in a sorry state.
Another problem was that many had the goal of growing beyond Yahoo at all costs...
Eventually, I quit editing alltogether. It is several years going by now.
I think your perception about a small club is wrong, however, because it was not my perception from the inside. It was a lot of controversy around these issues, and many suggested that the policy of rejecting 95% and having possibly good people play in shallow waters was a bad idea. The problem with the spammers is something one would have to deal with differently.
All in all, I think it boils down to giving individuals too much power: Instead of letting one editor have power to post (and meta-editors clean up if it was wrong), one could have a voting system. By letting meta-editors have absolute power over topical editors, it certainly corrupted meta-editors too, same problem, same solution.
I think the downfall of dmoz is due to the very same mechanisms that cause anybody that gets too much power to become corrupt. Power corrupts, and every social system has to deal with it.
Funnily, we're headed in the direction of how communism fell apart.
I read an interesting article by renowned russian political scientist Boris Kagarlitsky, where he wrote some ramblings around Linux vs. Microsoft, the western way of doing things vs. that what became prevalent under communism.
The interesting thing in his argument is that rewritting an operating system from scratch is a typical western thing to do: If you don't like the system, you replace it with something better, you don't just ignore the rules. In Soviet Russia (uhm, You! :-) ), people were so used to stupid rules and regulations that they didn't even think about it, they were quietly ignored, and not a single mind would think about reforming them, that was simply not possible.
As an aside, he used as one of his examples that russian crackers had access to Windows source code for three months, meaning, in Soviet Russia, you don't care about writing a open OS from scratch, you grab the source of whatever exists.... :-) And allthough Russia isn't Soviet anymore, the mentality still exists. Actually, I tried to refute that argument, becuase I'm extremely surprised if the availability of source code wouldn't lead to many high-profile exploits.
But, I found that I really couldn't refute it...
Furthermore, he argued, civil disobedience, i.e. breaking the law loudly to get your case before the courts, wasn't at all an option in Soviet Russia. You'll be locked up even if the law was stupid.
So, instead, people would quietly ignore the law, or, as you put it "don't really give a damn about the law."
Isn't a bit ironic that America is headed towards a situation where millions are quietly ignoring the law, when the western way should have been to reform it?
So, when the day comes that your own government was not elected by you, does not represent you and is not subject to your dictates, who are you going to turn to?
The ICC will never have the mandate nor the resources to hear cases that are not about human rights violations.
It will be an important tool in bringing dictators, war criminals and the like to justice, if given sufficient mandate from everybody.
While the UN certainly has many flaws, I truly believe that it is a step in the right direction to give away some sovereignity to an international court, in case my own government and my own courts simply stop functioning.
If you think there is only the slightest chance that this will happen in the US, you might want to look into it.
It sounds rather weird, and I don't think it could have happened today. Funnily, there has always been humour and satire that has made the big waves. Nevertheless, there has always been some really good shows on Norwegian TV, in fact in particular on the state-owned, license-based national TV.
Yeah, you're right, that's a good rule.
I know that, but is it as much as 1%...? I thought the deviation was on the order of km, not 10 km. But I admit to not having checked.
I think it looks very interesting, and it is much better than both Passport and Liberty Alliance in that you control your own data and decide yourself what you want to share (if I have understood it correctly).
I haven't seen it been discussed a lot on /., and:
2004-02-22 20:10:08 Shibboleth For User Info Exchange (developers,privacy) (rejected)
Yeah, this is, IIRC, the original conclusion that was drawn after having formulated Murphys law...
But there is this thing with "rough". You have to draw the line somewhere... For example "Deviates from a sphere with at most 1%". I think that'll do it for me.
The funny thing is when you've got a planet and a large moon... You need to be more precise as to what's a moon too...
I think that's when I get to the point when I say "Forget the names, give me the numbers!"
That's what I think about Seyfert galaxies, for example. First, you had just "Seyfert Galaxies", then you had "Seyfert type 1" and "Seyfert type 2", then you had some like Seyfert 1.2, 1.5 and 1.8.... And to really make the situation clear, there are galaxies that go from being Seyfert 1 to Seyfert 1.8 and back.... ;-)
From the /. blurb, I got the same idea as you did, and my vote would earlier be the same as yours, Pluto is not a planet, it's a Kuiper belt object.
However, when reading his Gravity Rules criterion at the end, I found it instantly very appealing. He makes an excellent point there. A Planet is something that gets very rounded by gravity. In the end, you'll need to draw a line anyway, because of mountains, but that's at most 1%.
Yup, and if you need to learn how to use a compass, I'll just plug my pages about it. It is a bit dated, I hope to be able to return to it soon.
Oh, please.... This is not about lighting angle. Look, the pictures you present as proof has been photoshopped. That's not image reduction. The nose isn't even in the right place. If you want to do some real data reduction, you need to do like a friend of mine did: Get the raw data, have a beer, and hack a few scripts. this is the result.
I suspect this has something to do with Norway... Not only are we only 4.5 million people, most of whom don't care too much about langauge (I haven't even been bothered to download a Norwegian version of OO.o), but we have two different official languages that are almost identical.
The two are called "bokmal" and "nynorsk", and neither are spoken, "bokmal" is used by the majority, and was influenced by the Danish, whereas "nynorsk" was constructed about 150 years ago based on a few spoken dialects.
But since there are many really good Mozilla, KDE and OO.o developers who write "nynorsk", all these three had "nynorsk" i18n and l10ns very quickly, often long before "bokmal".
Then, because "nynorsk" enjoys very strong protection by law, IANAL, but I think it would be against the law not to have a "nynorsk" version of software that was available in "bokmal". Wooah. So, what happened was a migration in many public offices to OO.o, and they funded the translation and some development of OO.o, and continued to mount pressure on MS to provide a translation.
To MS, it is no way they could justify the cost of i18n and l18n Office to "nynorsk", but they did it anyway.
Why? Obviously, if the migration of OO.o in public offices had continued at that pace in "nynorsk"-land, there would suddenly be many communities in Norway that could report large cost-savings and well-working free software, and suddenly, MS Office would have been replaced in the entire public sector in Norway, and that would be really bad for MS....
Currently, many forms are passed as Word documents, and MS Office is considered a "standard app" in public offices. MS has public offices with a rope around their necks, and has so far been quite successful in stopping any migration.
So, no, they're not seeing the light. They are responding to something that could make people dump their products, but where responding to customer demands would be extremely expensive for them.
So, they are trying to get their customers to carry that cost themselves.
Actually, I'm looking towards South America, specifically Brazil.
Brazil seems to be improving rapidly, still, Lula seems to keep his eyes open and doesn't take in whatever comes from the large nations and corporations like most do. Brazil also seems to have quite a few good hackers allready, so it has a good start.
He's probably being told from the large ones that he has to enact draconian laws to encourage economic growth, and he is probably to some extent forced to do it through international treaties and bilateral "trade agreements".
If we could convince a nation's leader that, to the contrary, to encourage growth, you have to let go of stringent laws and foster creativity, then we could have a free country. Furthermore, if geeks would move there en masse and create the greatest brainpool anywhere, encouraging the whole society to become creative, then it would lead the way for the rest of the world. Right now, I think Lula seems to be the leader most likely to be convinced this can be the case.
With a free country getting some real mindshare, it could easily take the lead...
I'd really like to hear what the brazilians here have to say about it.
My parents (both in their mid-sixtees) have a Debian Woody-based workstation (with KDE 3.0, OO 1.0 and Firefox) and a laptop that came with WinXP. I made it very clear that Windows is unsupported, end of discussion.
I've also spent hours explaining to them why free as in speech is important, and how morally corrupt MS is. They understand that they just can't ask me to support MS.
They are pretty happy with it. My mother likes it very much, she has few problems. Not only is she surfing, reading e-mail and stuff, she also uses Amaya to create web pages for her class. She use SFS to get them onto my machine. Dad's not quite so happy, because he has bought into that "I shouldn't have to learn anything to use a computer" crap. But I am getting him to realize how wrong that is (after all, he is a civil engineer), so things are improving.
I recently got Debian onto moms laptop, as I needed to borrow it. As far as I know, they are not booting WinXP a lot anymore, they are mostly Debian users.
Really, I would recommend that approach to everyone: Make them use the OS you think is good, and try to make that OS work well for them. You can do most administration tasks remotely by SSH.
Well, you gotta choose something, I suppose, and given there are about 300 distros, I think that's not a very bad place to start....
Huh, really? That's over a full 180 km ride, I suppose? Last time I went to the doctor to have a few tests, we did a bicycle test where I had a sustained output over the last minute of 400W. That's when the doctor wouldn't let me go any further. But I think the most powerful rowers have an output well in excess of 500W, in the course of a race (those guys train a lot).
...and if you lump on one leg, they'll put you to death very cleanly and painlessly.... :-)
But the really bad thing was that I worked in that building many saturday nights at that time...
I think this may mean that the "Semantic Web" is dead. It never was allowed the time to take off, but an important part of it was to allow computers to make sense out of data, for example having agents roam around and gather facts, and present it to the user any way the user likes. You'd bet if anybody tries this, it will get beaten to the ground by this law at the first attempt, and any subsequent attempts to research or commercialize applications doing this would get into so deep legal problems it will simply not be feasible.
So much for Intellectual Property encouraging innovation.
So, it is good to hear some news!
But I'm curious about Atom, any idea when it'll reach 1.0?
I have nearly the same setup up at my parent's house, except that both machines run Debian Woody and it is a OfficeJet T65. Using the config tools in KPrinter, I had it working within 5 minutes. It was so easy I really don't know why it worked, it just worked (I kinda hate that, I'd like to understand things). Also, the machine without the printer can boot into windoze, and printing from windoze also works without problems, just declare it as a internet printer or something and that's it...
So I don't think I can help ESR here, since I don't know what he did wrong, but for me, it just worked.
The next thing I want to do is to add that printer to my own home network (both are connected to the Internet through ADSL), but have a username/password authentication for my machine. But I haven't gotten around to do that.