If it becomes a universal portal, it will be useless for me./. is my portal of preference today because the content and the links are very much in line with what I want to see. I don't need to enter keywords into a search engine and then work my way through the chaff, someone else has already done this for me.
I come to/. looking for interesting links and there they are all lined up nice and neat.
It's got easy db access, and it's fairly universal.
You could still keep the web server version for "plain"/. or for readers that don't have a java capable browser. Add new features to the java client and support them with less server load.
It would be straightforward to implement a headline scanner applet, a preferences applet, etc. Eliminating the need to send gobs of html codes for formatting commands that are used over and over and over would help preserve bandwidth. Ever look at at the html source and see how little of the data that is transferred is actual content?
What I'd really like to see is a "thread update" watcher. With a java applet it would be easy. Just let it ping the server every minute or so to see if there are any new comments to a thread that I am watching. No need to do endless reloads.
Add an ad-dumper and I'd really be satisfied, for a while. Uh, by an ad dumper, I mean a device or page that displays all of the ads that are current on/. at once. Sometimes the ads are as interesting as the content.
X11amp plugin. Scan the covers and you're off to the races. No need for covers to be stored on the cdindex.
Hmm, now that I think about it, it might be nice if we had thumbnails of the cover art next to the database listings that are displayed on the web page. It would also be nice for "lookup then shop" kind of activities.
I wonder if the copyright holders would object to this form of free advertising? I guess we could always try it and then if someone objects, pull their thumbnail.
Most embedded systems don't give a flip what day, hour, minute, or second it is, much less what year it is. The early warning systems don't care what day or year it is, they only care about things like the weather, signal strength, solar activity and so on.
The missile control systems don't care what time it is. All they care about is whether they have gotten a signal that says "Start your engines". After that signal is received, all they care about is fuel pressure, combustion chamber temperature, velocity, current position, throttle valve settings, etc.
The machines that regulate the operation of power plants don't care what time it is. They work on signals like line voltage and current, torque on the generator drive shaft, rpm of the turbine, inlet steam temperature and pressure and so forth. The systems at power plants that produce data for human consumption are not the ones that control the operation of the machinery. They are the loggers and display systems. The only "kind of time" that the controllers really care about is a delta. As in, "How long has it been since I turned that valve to the new setting?"
The only systems that are _really_ dependent on "human" calendar dates and times are logging and accounting systems that produce data that is in some way supposed to eventually be read, processed, and acted upon _by_humans_.
I imagine that the worst thing that is going to happen due to the 99-00 turnover is that some of us will be late in receiving some paperwork, ie. checks and bills; and believe me, no one is going to get their power cut off because some computer has decided that you have not paid your bill for 100 years. It takes a human hand to cut you off. No one is going to be evicted because they didn't get credited for their mortgage payment in time. Everyone in any kind of an accounting job is going to be very sensitive to this kind of stuff for several months before and after the rollover and no one wants to be sued for being to quick to follow the reccomendations of possibly faulty software.
f*ck, fsck are both 'safe' ways to spell fuck. Fuck is a "bad" word. That is, it is not the kind of word that a gentleman would casually use in the presence of ladies nor would any decent boy say it in front of his mother. Technically it refers to coital activity as in "She stood on her toes facing the wall and I fucked her from behind". Although the usage has grown to include all sorts of foul meanings.
Generally, being fucked(up) is a bad thing. After a long hard night out drinking, the next morning it would be appropriate to say "Owww, turn off the lights! My head is all fucked up. I need an aspirin." Obviously, if it is a fine looking member of the opposite sex that is responsible for the fucking, then it is not such a bad situation.
Typical expressions: "Aw man, he's really fucked up." "Shit! We've been fucked." "No fucking way I'm going to let you..."
Another common phrase that is often used as an insult is "You mother fucker...". Now these words being used for insult might at first seem odd since this fucking is what fathers typically do to mothers and there's nothing bad about being a father or mother. The insult derives from the situation where a man is fucking a mother, and he is _not_ her husband(although he is possibly the father of her children).
Fsck used in this context is also an appropriate pun that references a rather unpopular utility. That is, you don't really want to ever have to use the fsck utility. Quite often when you do have to use the fsck utility, it is because your file system is fucked up. If the fsck util can't fix everything by itself, then things on your disk are likely to be F-ucked U-p B-eyond A-ll R-ecognition.
Hell, I'd even get one of the girls in the office to take you out to dinner with half of that $1000 to spend, just so long as we get to keep that 64 node cluster after you leave. That would be cool, a 400%(or so) performance boost in our sims.
I guess I'll have to take your word for it since none of us have credentials here.
Do the other moderators follow the same guidelines?
Do you strive to uh, err, on the side of not-moderating?
Is it possible to promote a whole tree, or perhaps to prune and graft so that the chaff can be thrown out and the good stuff re-threaded to the the root article?
I guess the tough question is what is noise? Hell, even FPs are entertaining sometimes, especially when they come in 8th or so. The trouble is/. is trying to serve a big heterogeneous mess of people and all have different ideas about what constitutes noise and signal. Even their own personal thoughts about what is noise and what is not change over time. I guess I would just let what I think is noise pass through and let everyone apply their own individual filters rather than worry about upsetting people by filtering too much.
I've already moved my default article score threshold to -2 just so I don't have to go through a series of reloads in order to see what everyone is bitching about. I'm already leaning towards setting it to the minimum and forgetting about it.
I also agree about the legitimate points being made and some lively threads that disappeared earlier because some unkown moderator had dropped the score of a parent post. I still have not figured out why this is done on any thread, subject or whatever. All it does is raise more questions.
Are the mods supposed to be our surrogate parents?
Is there some stuff posted here that we really shouldn't see, unless of course we really want to see it? IOW, we click three or four times to read all the headers instead of once.
Is Rob fearful of "looking bad" as more and more of the "rest of the world" checks out his page?
Who are the moderators, really?
Is there a real honest-to-goodness formal policy on how/why/when a comment gets downgraded or not?
Have you ever experienced race conditions where two or more mods have tried to downgrade the same comment at the same time?
What is the lowest possible article score? Are we 8/16/32/64 bit here?
Do any of the mods read the threads that spring from downgraded comments just in case there was something of value posted?
> Writing books just doesn't have that same flow on possibilities.
They are called "speaking" engagements, tours, etc. All generate revenue, and more sales.
Take a step back and really think about what is "sold" when you sell software and books. Both are based on ideas. Both revolve around information. Both serve some purpose, or multiple purposes. Both are the result of brainwork, more or less.
For example: Software game - there are entertainment, education, and social effects. It's fun. Perhaps you learn something about the world, history, science or whatever. There are online game get-togethers. You meet people in some fashion or another to talk about the game, strategy, tactics, etc.
"Hardware" book - Entertainment is obvious. Education is obvious. Social effects from talking about the book(as we do right now, right here), lending the book to a friend or whatever.
How about construction, AKA designing, writing, developing, debugging? Much thought and a lot of head sweat is applied to making good software. The same is true for a good book. Just as the skeleton of a program may simply flow from your fingertips, so the outline of a good book can smoothly flow through the keyboard. Just as any prog needs testing, evaluation, editing, and other forms of re-work to make it just right, or as right as the writer can make it; so does a good book. And just as some 2nd or 3rd party coder or user can read/run a release, find shortcomings, discover the bugs in a program, and make suggestions; so can an editor/proofer/reader do the same for a book.
The only things left to compare are sales and follow-on revenue sources and I think that writers and publishers have been taking advantage of these since the beginning, they just haven't realized it yet.
A good piece of code can generate follow-on support revenue because people use it. The same applies for books. People will want to hire the author for speaking engagements because they want him to expand upon the stuff expressed in the book. They will pay for autograph and photo sessions just to have a bit of memorabilia. They might even go and buy a hardcopy of the book just 'because'. Don't forget such tremendous follow-on opportunities like movies.
And of course there will always be ads. Why can't Jon release his next "book" entirely on line on a web page? There are good reasons to do so. First of all there is nearly zero publishing cost, just like software. He can generate revenue by having banner ads on each "page" of the book, just like a software site. There are additional features available online that are not available to dead tree style books. Links are just the start. How about making the book "live"? As readers send in suggestions, make the changes! Announce each revision. So we start having versioned books, which in a limited fashion we already do. More readers will come and check out the new release, just like software. They'll see your banners again. They'll run a 'diff' and/or patch just like software.
Is anyone getting the idea that "free bookware" can be done just like free software? I think that it can be done in much the same fashion as music, printed news, databases like phone books, and so on. The "information age" is going to change a lot of things, and just 'cause you can't think of a way to make money using the new tech, doesn't mean that someone else can't.
...what continues to impress me is what a well rounded and sane man he is. Cool and calm of character in the midst of this maelstrom we call Linux and he continues to stress that his priorities are all in favor of his family.
Then the news comes out that he likes zoos and his wife is a karate champion. What he's doing is setting an example for all male geeks. Live a full and active life, be a proper, multi-dimensional person and you won't have any problems finding babes, friends, or followers....
Even DOS has too much baggage. Multitasking in and of itself is not a problem since anything that responds to interrupts is fundamentally multitasking. Most real time OS/app failures revolve around a failure to respond to some stimulus(interrupt) in time. IOW, can we guarantee that the proc will get the data and produce the proper response in time, every time, in every situation.
There are hundreds of OSs available for embedded apps that have a wide range of features, facilities, and no surprise, response times. Some have disk/file i/o modules, some do virtual memory, some do networking...
None that I know of are called win* or *nix or *nux.
Running on slackware 3.0+(sort of, lots of updates since 3.0 was installed)...Netscape 4.05 cruises right along. No problems on the periodic tables(all fast and clean), no problems with/. or FM either. Plays on-line realtime java games just fine(try battlefield at bonus.com). The usual method for browsing/. is to open-link-in-new-window with center button click and read on from there. Some threads and branches and replies produce dozens of windows. It all works fast and proper with no problems at all.
I must admit that it flunks the layout test at the mozilla site, but it doesn't crash.
Uptime record 132 days was recently halted for hardware re-arrangement:-( I use this box to build online database applications using apache/perl/mod-perl/mysql/postgresql/jdbc and the online shopping package called minivend. It also functions as email server for my family so it's not exactly just sitting there idle all day either.
Slashdot Mirror
impartial
ambivalent
purple?
Pigs have four legs "protruding".
A ppro180/256 at the office has been running nice and cool at 233 on an asus mb for over a year. No glitches at all.
...you don't spend any time in your car anyway.
;-)
If it becomes a universal portal, it will be useless for me. /. is my portal of preference today because the content and the links are very much in line with what I want to see. I don't need to enter keywords into a search engine and then work my way through the chaff, someone else has already done this for me.
/. looking for interesting links and there they are all lined up nice and neat.
I come to
It's got easy db access, and it's fairly universal.
/. or for readers that don't have a java capable browser. Add new features to the java client and support them with less server load.
/. at once. Sometimes the ads are as interesting as the content.
You could still keep the web server version for "plain"
It would be straightforward to implement a headline scanner applet, a preferences applet, etc. Eliminating the need to send gobs of html codes for formatting commands that are used over and over and over would help preserve bandwidth.
Ever look at at the html source and see how little of the data that is transferred is actual content?
What I'd really like to see is a "thread update" watcher. With a java applet it would be easy. Just let it ping the server every minute or so to see if there are any new comments to a thread that I am watching. No need to do endless reloads.
Add an ad-dumper and I'd really be satisfied, for a while. Uh, by an ad dumper, I mean a device or page that displays all of the ads that are current on
X11amp plugin. Scan the covers and you're off to the races. No need for covers to be stored on the cdindex.
Hmm, now that I think about it, it might be nice if we had thumbnails of the cover art next to the database listings that are displayed on the web page. It would also be nice for "lookup then shop" kind of activities.
I wonder if the copyright holders would object to this form of free advertising? I guess we could always try it and then if someone objects, pull their thumbnail.
It's a typo.
...still not finished...groan...I wonder what the bandwidth of the link is?
...that the AC above is correct.
Most embedded systems don't give a flip what day, hour, minute, or second it is, much less what year it is. The early warning systems don't care what day or year it is, they only care about things like the weather, signal strength, solar activity and so on.
The missile control systems don't care what time it is. All they care about is whether they have gotten a signal that says "Start your engines". After that signal is received, all they care about is fuel pressure, combustion chamber temperature, velocity, current position, throttle valve settings, etc.
The machines that regulate the operation of power plants don't care what time it is. They work on signals like line voltage and current, torque on the generator drive shaft, rpm of the turbine, inlet steam temperature and pressure and so forth. The systems at power plants that produce data for human consumption are not the ones that control the operation of the machinery. They are the loggers and display systems. The only "kind of time" that the controllers really care about is a delta. As in, "How long has it been since I turned that valve to the new setting?"
The only systems that are _really_ dependent on "human" calendar dates and times are logging and accounting systems that produce data that is in some way supposed to eventually be read, processed, and acted upon _by_humans_.
I imagine that the worst thing that is going to happen due to the 99-00 turnover is that some of us will be late in receiving some paperwork, ie. checks and bills; and believe me, no one is going to get their power cut off because some computer has decided that you have not paid your bill for 100 years. It takes a human hand to cut you off. No one is going to be evicted because they didn't get credited for their mortgage payment in time. Everyone in any kind of an accounting job is going to be very sensitive to this kind of stuff for several months before and after the rollover and no one wants to be sued for being to quick to follow the reccomendations of possibly faulty software.
I had just seen "Clockwork Orange" this last week and "Dr. Strangelove" today. I guess I have been subconciously gearing up for "Eyes Wide Shut".
I am saddened to hear this news.
File-Exit
We already covered the basic mobile office...
How about starting it up in the winter?
Un/Locking the doors?
Reporting alarms and current location(via GPS) to the police?
If you've got a general purpose computer in the car, all you need is a cell-phone...
It is still a good example of how low tech, skill, and determination can defeat an army of gov lackeys armed with high tech gear.
f*ck, fsck are both 'safe' ways to spell fuck.
Fuck is a "bad" word. That is, it is not the kind of word that a gentleman would casually use in the presence of ladies nor would any decent boy say it in front of his mother. Technically it refers to coital activity as in "She stood on her toes facing the wall and I fucked her from behind". Although the usage has grown to include all sorts of foul meanings.
Generally, being fucked(up) is a bad thing. After a long hard night out drinking, the next morning it would be appropriate to say "Owww, turn off the lights! My head is all fucked up. I need an aspirin." Obviously, if it is a fine looking member of the opposite sex that is responsible for the fucking, then it is not such a bad situation.
Typical expressions:
"Aw man, he's really fucked up."
"Shit! We've been fucked."
"No fucking way I'm going to let you..."
Another common phrase that is often used as an insult is "You mother fucker...". Now these words being used for insult might at first seem odd since this fucking is what fathers typically do to mothers and there's nothing bad about being a father or mother. The insult derives from the situation where a man is fucking a mother, and he is _not_ her husband(although he is possibly the father of her children).
Fsck used in this context is also an appropriate pun that references a rather unpopular utility. That is, you don't really want to ever have to use the fsck utility. Quite often when you do have to use the fsck utility, it is because your file system is fucked up. If the fsck util can't fix everything by itself, then things on your disk are likely to be F-ucked U-p B-eyond A-ll R-ecognition.
See man fsck.
Hell, I'd even get one of the girls in the office to take you out to dinner with half of that $1000 to spend, just so long as we get to keep that 64 node cluster after you leave. That would be cool, a 400%(or so) performance boost in our sims.
the /. effect for today.
I guess I'll have to take your word for it since none of us have credentials here.
/. is trying to serve a big heterogeneous mess of people and all have different ideas about what constitutes noise and signal. Even their own personal thoughts about what is noise and what is not change over time. I guess I would just let what I think is noise pass through and let everyone apply their own individual filters rather than worry about upsetting people by filtering too much.
Do the other moderators follow the same guidelines?
Do you strive to uh, err, on the side of not-moderating?
Is it possible to promote a whole tree, or perhaps to prune and graft so that the chaff can be thrown out and the good stuff re-threaded to the the root article?
I guess the tough question is what is noise? Hell, even FPs are entertaining sometimes, especially when they come in 8th or so. The trouble is
I've already moved my default article score threshold to -2 just so I don't have to go through a series of reloads in order to see what everyone is bitching about. I'm already leaning towards setting it to the minimum and forgetting about it.
I also agree about the legitimate points being made and some lively threads that disappeared earlier because some unkown moderator had dropped the score of a parent post. I still have not figured out why this is done on any thread, subject or whatever. All it does is raise more questions.
Are the mods supposed to be our surrogate parents?
Is there some stuff posted here that we really shouldn't see, unless of course we really want to see it? IOW, we click three or four times to read all the headers instead of once.
Is Rob fearful of "looking bad" as more and more of the "rest of the world" checks out his page?
Who are the moderators, really?
Is there a real honest-to-goodness formal policy on how/why/when a comment gets downgraded or not?
Have you ever experienced race conditions where two or more mods have tried to downgrade the same comment at the same time?
What is the lowest possible article score? Are we 8/16/32/64 bit here?
Do any of the mods read the threads that spring from downgraded comments just in case there was something of value posted?
> Writing books just doesn't have that same flow on possibilities.
They are called "speaking" engagements, tours, etc. All generate revenue, and more sales.
Take a step back and really think about what is "sold" when you sell software and books. Both are based on ideas. Both revolve around information. Both serve some purpose, or multiple purposes. Both are the result of brainwork, more or less.
For example:
Software game - there are entertainment, education, and social effects. It's fun. Perhaps you learn something about the world, history, science or whatever. There are online game get-togethers. You meet people in some fashion or another to talk about the game, strategy, tactics, etc.
"Hardware" book - Entertainment is obvious. Education is obvious. Social effects from talking about the book(as we do right now, right here), lending the book to a friend or whatever.
How about construction, AKA designing, writing, developing, debugging? Much thought and a lot of head sweat is applied to making good software. The same is true for a good book. Just as the skeleton of a program may simply flow from your fingertips, so the outline of a good book can smoothly flow through the keyboard. Just as any prog needs testing, evaluation, editing, and other forms of re-work to make it just right, or as right as the writer can make it; so does a good book. And just as some 2nd or 3rd party coder or user can read/run a release, find shortcomings, discover the bugs in a program, and make suggestions; so can an editor/proofer/reader do the same for a book.
The only things left to compare are sales and follow-on revenue sources and I think that writers and publishers have been taking advantage of these since the beginning, they just haven't realized it yet.
A good piece of code can generate follow-on support revenue because people use it. The same applies for books. People will want to hire the author for speaking engagements because they want him to expand upon the stuff expressed in the book. They will pay for autograph and photo sessions just to have a bit of memorabilia. They might even go and buy a hardcopy of the book just 'because'. Don't forget such tremendous follow-on opportunities like movies.
And of course there will always be ads. Why can't Jon release his next "book" entirely on line on a web page? There are good reasons to do so. First of all there is nearly zero publishing cost, just like software. He can generate revenue by having banner ads on each "page" of the book, just like a software site. There are additional features available online that are not available to dead tree style books. Links are just the start. How about making the book "live"? As readers send in suggestions, make the changes! Announce each revision. So we start having versioned books, which in a limited fashion we already do. More readers will come and check out the new release, just like software. They'll see your banners again. They'll run a 'diff' and/or patch just like software.
Is anyone getting the idea that "free bookware" can be done just like free software? I think that it can be done in much the same fashion as music, printed news, databases like phone books, and so on. The "information age" is going to change a lot of things, and just 'cause you can't think of a way to make money using the new tech, doesn't mean that someone else can't.
...what continues to impress me is what a well rounded and sane man he is. Cool and calm of character in the midst of this maelstrom we call Linux and he continues to stress that his priorities are all in favor of his family.
Then the news comes out that he likes zoos and his wife is a karate champion. What he's doing is setting an example for all male geeks. Live a full and active life, be a proper, multi-dimensional person and you won't have any problems finding babes, friends, or followers....
Even DOS has too much baggage. Multitasking in and of itself is not a problem since anything that responds to interrupts is fundamentally multitasking. Most real time OS/app failures revolve around a failure to respond to some stimulus(interrupt) in time. IOW, can we guarantee that the proc will get the data and produce the proper response in time, every time, in every situation.
There are hundreds of OSs available for embedded apps that have a wide range of features, facilities, and no surprise, response times. Some have disk/file i/o modules, some do virtual memory, some do networking...
None that I know of are called win* or *nix or *nux.
...but the k6 outsold the p2 last year. It is certainly already ahead of the p3. Those 50/5 figures might be backwards.
Running on slackware 3.0+(sort of, lots of updates since 3.0 was installed)...Netscape 4.05 cruises right along. No problems on the periodic tables(all fast and clean), no problems with /. or FM either. Plays on-line realtime java games just fine(try battlefield at bonus.com). The usual method for browsing /. is to open-link-in-new-window with center button click and read on from there. Some threads and branches and replies produce dozens of windows. It all works fast and proper with no problems at all.
:-( I use this box to build online database applications using apache/perl/mod-perl/mysql/postgresql/jdbc and the online shopping package called minivend. It also functions as email server for my family so it's not exactly just sitting there idle all day either.
I must admit that it flunks the layout test at the mozilla site, but it doesn't crash.
Uptime record 132 days was recently halted for hardware re-arrangement
How do you make money by selling Linux?
Make fancy cases! Sell blue ones, flat ones, boxy ones, skinny ones, tall ones...