I've seen articles about this and how it can be used to grow tomotoes underground back in the 90's. Exact same principle and everything. Parts renamed perhaps to give it a new glow?
Yep. After all, those posts came after this one, and at some point, you have to blow the whistle and get the fans off the court so you can continue:
Jeff was certainly curt, and perhaps should have been gentler in making the point, but he's probably right too. In his judgment (and mine too, fwiw) that thread was doomed to produce very little impact, a lot of noise.
Something GNOME enthusiasts on this list often seem to forget is that its *not* just their time. When you send a message to a mailing list, you are asking for everyone to spend some time on it. When you start a thread that will draw lots of replies, you are, unwittingly or not, asking for everyone on the list (including hackers) to spend lots of time.
I define the GNOME enthusiast community as: those who are actively involved with and interested in GNOME but have NOT contributed large quantities of code, translation or documentation (there are several exceptional cases, for example Jeff himself, but not a lot). We need enthusiasts and should value them! It provides a source of excitement, sociability, feedback on how we're doing in different areas, and sometimes even new ideas.
But right now, the lists have become driven by the enthusiast community to the extent that hackers have gone into hiding. A good thread on desktop-devel-list *should* be predominantly (75% or more, say, as a totally arbitrary number) posts by core GNOME hackers related to that area. Look at a thread now.... probably 90% of the posts are by enthusiasts. That's taking "being in touch with the community" a little too far to the point that its hard to get work done;-)
For example, most of the people actually writing code that will be in the next GNOME release have probably been actively deleting every message to this theme thread! Its not because they don't care, its because they don't want to take the time away from working on gnome to wade through all the noise. And they shouldn't have to.
Compared to its peak as a lively discourse among the hackers doing core contributions to the gnome codebase, desktop-devel-list is almost a dead list in terms of "useful things accomplished". Part of the problem is a *very* high noise level, and also very annoying persistent threads of the bike shed variety.
Something people only relatively recently involved in GNOME (last couple years) wonder is about the relative silence / non-responsiveness of core hackers. It seems like desktop-devel-list, despite all the traffic, has very few people who are getting something done (see usability gnome org for an even worse example of this that is even more my fault). That the lists we (core hackers) used to haunt have become a tangle of weeds is one of the major factors driving this.
As community leaders in GNOME, one of our jobs is to shepherd the lists so they do not become exceedingly noisy (and scare away important hacker to hacker traffic). But we have largely abdicated this responsibility in the last couple years. markmc tried to fight the tide about a year ago, but eventually gave up. Its hard *because* we're actually very nice people, and thus none of us want to be the list nazi. But its also very important to have this sort of pruning to be a healthy community.
We've been talking about this a lot lately in s33kret cabal discussions. That we feel the need to have these private circles is part of the problem! Nobody, even those of us involved in the cabal (and especially not Jeff who is an outspoken supporter of openness and inclusion), want this sort of private exclusionary construct.
So what's the point?
1) Desktop-devel-list, #gnome-hackers, etc have been drowned by a deluge of well meaning (and healthy, when found in moderation) enthusiast involvement. 2) The loss of effective communication channels has had a major negative impact on the amount and p
May as well give up locking my car, becuase there will always be car thieves, and if they want to get in they will.
Actually, you have a point and shouldn't worry about locking your car except to deter the occasional bum looking for a place to sleep. Or if you can't give up that habit, at least don't leave anything in it for people to take.
Car locks don't do anything to deter a car thief.
As for your handing over your wallet to a mugger pacifist idea, explain that to your girlfriend after she's dragged away at gunpoint and raped. This exact scenario happened to a friend of mine in Atlanta. If you think I'm being dramatic, go hang out at a police station or a courthouse for a week. Shit happens. Shoot back.
Lastly, if you want to reduce the number of gun deaths, educate people about guns and real statistics on violence. Not speculative guesses in oblique web forums.
I have this problem with my brain. I read tens, maybe hundreds of words a day. I take video recordings with my eyes and audio with these things on the side of my head. I forget what they are called. I have been recording and storing this information since the early 1970's so I'm prior art.
The problem is, my retrieval - it's not so good. Sometimes I have simple read errors such as forgetting the name of my girlfriend. As if that isn't bad enough, sometimes I cannot retrieve an entire section of audio and video, or I get them misaligned. The most drastic case I seem to be able to read right now is when I recalled this cutie pie from college telling me to talk dirty to her. But in reality, that was my step-grandmother.
If I can get the bugs worked out, I'm sure my life would be much easier.
I want to run a video recorder company now just so I can use this one:
PLEASE NOTE: Some Quantum Physics Theories Suggest That, When Unobserved, This Product May Cease to Exist or May Exist Only in a Vague and Undetermined State. Therefore all warranties are in effect only while this product is under the direct observation of a human being.
and secretly snap video of people glancing back at frantically.
Having a life in the US entitles anyone in the country to complain. It's called citizenship, silly ac, and it doesn't go away if you aren't available on a single day every four years to stand in a line. Besides, the presidency and the federal government have been fabricating a need for the overbloated existence since before the civil war.
And I hardly call standing in a line now and then action. Men of action don't speak anonymously.
These guys aren't liberal, they're not politicians, and nobody really knows what the majority of the population agrees with, so don't spout of as if you do.
Notice that agreement from the majority of the voting population is not the same as the population in general. Besides that, it is far more respectful to have your own opinions and actually base them on facts, even if they have been known for a while, than to preach your blinded, pseudo-conservative, distracted, herd mentality.
silly ac. To suggest that past events have no affect on the future...
If Slashdot has a useful byte in it's codebase, this is one it can handle. Hear me out:
Each time someone attempts a ridiculous trademark like this, we get a first posting of the article. Once the trademark application goes up for review in the trademark publication, we ought to see another post (See, perfect for Slashdot!) listing the publication and how to respond and refute the mark.
The US trademark process has a stopgap for jokers who try this. I say we use./'s system to augment that part of the process and slap these fools down!
Okay, so next up, SCO tries to sue the NASDAQ small cap exchange for their delisting policies.
The current shareholders of SCO sue them for failing to file the necessary paperwork to maintain the listing and thereby affecting their ability to trade the stock.
And I'll be sued for pointing out the obvious demise of this company. Finally.
I'm working on this for my Sager 4760, which has a built in video camera at the top of the border around the display.
It's a z-star branded chip with a pb0330 sensor, Someone recently wrote a driver which supports it: the spca50x module
So I installed this, installed camorama to test it and mvc-0.8.9 to perform the monitoring. I'm still working on toggling it properly when xscreensaver-command is called and sending the files to another system/ftp site, but it's very promising.
This is the last piece of hardware on this machine in want of a proper linux driver (save the ati radeon chip).
The point is, it's not hard to set this type of thing up, and it's a fun project to work on with an instant gratification factor. If you have time and have to leave your systems in an open environment sometimes, it's a great project.
What the heck are you talking about? Your own website has a placeholder page for crying out loud!
Besides, websites are the scorge of the software industry. The Internet would be much more useful if less time was spent trying to differentiate brands and more time was spent making similar functions, such as store locators, online purchasing and information catalogs more consistent.
I sincerely hope that google breathes new life into the locality domains for the US. The use of domains such as computers.boulder.co.us or flowers.boaz.al.us would do a lot for partitioning the flood of information that now exists on the Net.
Imagine the possibilities of the supporting searches such as "pizza site:atlanta.ga.us". And actually getting pizza places in the area? Top that with a simple UI on Googles page and the ability to add your local to firefox's url box (typing pizza tries pizza.atlanta.ga.us first)
If this becomes or is already a part of their plan, I'd pay a premium. The flattening of the DNS namespace is to me the second most tragic side effect of the Internet's adoption. The first of course being spam.
Yep, look for a joke about a bear in a bar in Billings, Montana. I was in an Irish pub this weekend and heard a women tell it splendidly. I could never tell jokes - I always have to write them down.
Tony Blair, Bill Gates and Bono walk into a bar within 5 minutes of one another and sit down.
With an obvious need to one up the other two egos in the room, Tony orders a kamikazi and says, "I know they say the three of us are quite unstable, but I believe I have you chaps beat, even on that front. I overthrew a country on the advice of a Texan." He passes a "one-free-knighting" coupon to the bartender for escro on his challenge.
Gates, drinking a screwdriver and squiggling on a piece of paper, blurts out "It's not like Britain didn't do that to the same people before. Try dominating the world with a collection of buggy software and an army of marketroids. Allow the single most significant collaborative creation of the 20th century to be brought to its knees. Then get back to me". He passes a check totaling the GNP of a small country to the bartendar to see Blair's challenge.
Bono, not even inclined to remove his sunglasses responds passes a black I-pod to the bartender. "You see that blonde, at the end of the bar? I'm going to eat her now." He downs his tequila, walks up the blonde, stabs her repeatedly, then eats her, and returns to the conversation.
The bartender interjects and says to Bono "I don't think your instability counts... after all, you're on drugs, and that makes it artificial." Bono, looking puzzled because he hadn't taken a pill in at least three days says "Hell, I'm not on drugs". The bartender passes the pot to Gates, refills the men's drinks and replies, "of course you are, that was a bar-bitch-you-ate".
Step 1: Start a company with potential as a natural monopoly. Step 2: Convince the government that your growth is good for the country and have them pay for your infrastructure. Step 3: Print money until the government realizes they screwed up and break you up. Step 4: Realize you screwed up by not having tighter reigns on the government. Step 5: Work behind the scenes for a few decades to get the government back under control. Step 6: Remerge and continue where you left off - printing money.
Slashdot Mirror
I've seen articles about this and how it can be used to grow tomotoes underground back in the 90's. Exact same principle and everything. Parts renamed perhaps to give it a new glow?
Kris
Yep. After all, those posts came after this one, and at some point, you have to blow the whistle and get the fans off the court so you can continue:
;-)
Jeff was certainly curt, and perhaps should have been gentler in making
the point, but he's probably right too. In his judgment (and mine too,
fwiw) that thread was doomed to produce very little impact, a lot of
noise.
Something GNOME enthusiasts on this list often seem to forget is that
its *not* just their time. When you send a message to a mailing list,
you are asking for everyone to spend some time on it. When you start a
thread that will draw lots of replies, you are, unwittingly or not,
asking for everyone on the list (including hackers) to spend lots of
time.
I define the GNOME enthusiast community as: those who are actively
involved with and interested in GNOME but have NOT contributed large
quantities of code, translation or documentation (there are several
exceptional cases, for example Jeff himself, but not a lot). We need
enthusiasts and should value them! It provides a source of excitement,
sociability, feedback on how we're doing in different areas, and
sometimes even new ideas.
But right now, the lists have become driven by the enthusiast community
to the extent that hackers have gone into hiding. A good thread on
desktop-devel-list *should* be predominantly (75% or more, say, as a
totally arbitrary number) posts by core GNOME hackers related to that
area. Look at a thread now.... probably 90% of the posts are by
enthusiasts. That's taking "being in touch with the community" a little
too far to the point that its hard to get work done
For example, most of the people actually writing code that will be in
the next GNOME release have probably been actively deleting every
message to this theme thread! Its not because they don't care, its
because they don't want to take the time away from working on gnome to
wade through all the noise. And they shouldn't have to.
Compared to its peak as a lively discourse among the hackers doing core
contributions to the gnome codebase, desktop-devel-list is almost a dead
list in terms of "useful things accomplished". Part of the problem is a
*very* high noise level, and also very annoying persistent threads of
the bike shed variety.
Something people only relatively recently involved in GNOME (last couple
years) wonder is about the relative silence / non-responsiveness of core
hackers. It seems like desktop-devel-list, despite all the traffic, has
very few people who are getting something done (see usability gnome org
for an even worse example of this that is even more my fault). That the
lists we (core hackers) used to haunt have become a tangle of weeds is
one of the major factors driving this.
As community leaders in GNOME, one of our jobs is to shepherd the lists
so they do not become exceedingly noisy (and scare away important hacker
to hacker traffic). But we have largely abdicated this responsibility in
the last couple years. markmc tried to fight the tide about a year ago,
but eventually gave up. Its hard *because* we're actually very nice
people, and thus none of us want to be the list nazi. But its also very
important to have this sort of pruning to be a healthy community.
We've been talking about this a lot lately in s33kret cabal discussions.
That we feel the need to have these private circles is part of the
problem! Nobody, even those of us involved in the cabal (and especially
not Jeff who is an outspoken supporter of openness and inclusion), want
this sort of private exclusionary construct.
So what's the point?
1) Desktop-devel-list, #gnome-hackers, etc have been drowned by a deluge
of well meaning (and healthy, when found in moderation) enthusiast
involvement.
2) The loss of effective communication channels has had a major negative
impact on the amount and p
May as well give up locking my car, becuase there will always be car thieves, and if they want to get in they will.
Actually, you have a point and shouldn't worry about locking your car except to deter the occasional bum looking for a place to sleep. Or if you can't give up that habit, at least don't leave anything in it for people to take.
Car locks don't do anything to deter a car thief.
As for your handing over your wallet to a mugger pacifist idea, explain that to your girlfriend after she's dragged away at gunpoint and raped. This exact scenario happened to a friend of mine in Atlanta. If you think I'm being dramatic, go hang out at a police station or a courthouse for a week. Shit happens. Shoot back.
Lastly, if you want to reduce the number of gun deaths, educate people about guns and real statistics on violence. Not speculative guesses in oblique web forums.
I have this problem with my brain. I read tens, maybe hundreds of words a day. I take video recordings with my eyes and audio with these things on the side of my head. I forget what they are called. I have been recording and storing this information since the early 1970's so I'm prior art.
The problem is, my retrieval - it's not so good. Sometimes I have simple read errors such as forgetting the name of my girlfriend. As if that isn't bad enough, sometimes I cannot retrieve an entire section of audio and video, or I get them misaligned. The most drastic case I seem to be able to read right now is when I recalled this cutie pie from college telling me to talk dirty to her. But in reality, that was my step-grandmother.
If I can get the bugs worked out, I'm sure my life would be much easier.
So. What were we talking about again?
I want to run a video recorder company now just so I can use this one:
PLEASE NOTE: Some Quantum Physics Theories Suggest That, When Unobserved, This Product May Cease to Exist or May Exist Only in a Vague and Undetermined State. Therefore all warranties are in effect only while this product is under the direct observation of a human being.
and secretly snap video of people glancing back at frantically.
Nice post!
Having a life in the US entitles anyone in the country to complain. It's called citizenship, silly ac, and it doesn't go away if you aren't available on a single day every four years to stand in a line. Besides, the presidency and the federal government have been fabricating a need for the overbloated existence since before the civil war.
And I hardly call standing in a line now and then action. Men of action don't speak anonymously.
silly ac.
Oh, Oh! And their backing away from displaying video display, because the Mac Mini doesn't ship with a display like the Imac does.
That settles it: I'm backing away from this article.
These guys aren't liberal, they're not politicians, and nobody really knows what the majority of the population agrees with, so don't spout of as if you do.
Notice that agreement from the majority of the voting population is not the same as the population in general. Besides that, it is far more respectful to have your own opinions and actually base them on facts, even if they have been known for a while, than to preach your blinded, pseudo-conservative, distracted, herd mentality.
silly ac. To suggest that past events have no affect on the future...
Okay, you need to go back to bed and start over...
My favorite part of the article: Someone thought that circling the invisible galaxy in the picture was a helpful move.
Personally, I think articles with discoveries this exciting need to be written with more enthusiasm
If Slashdot has a useful byte in it's codebase, this is one it can handle. Hear me out:
./'s system to augment that part of the process and slap these fools down!
Each time someone attempts a ridiculous trademark like this, we get a first posting of the article. Once the trademark application goes up for review in the trademark publication, we ought to see another post (See, perfect for Slashdot!) listing the publication and how to respond and refute the mark.
The US trademark process has a stopgap for jokers who try this. I say we use
Can I get a hell-ya?
Okay, so next up, SCO tries to sue the NASDAQ small cap exchange for their delisting policies.
The current shareholders of SCO sue them for failing to file the necessary paperwork to maintain the listing and thereby affecting their ability to trade the stock.
And I'll be sued for pointing out the obvious demise of this company. Finally.
I'm working on this for my Sager 4760, which has a built in video camera at the top of the border around the display.
It's a z-star branded chip with a pb0330 sensor, Someone recently wrote a driver which supports it: the spca50x module
So I installed this, installed camorama to test it and mvc-0.8.9 to perform the monitoring. I'm still working on toggling it properly when xscreensaver-command is called and sending the files to another system/ftp site, but it's very promising.
This is the last piece of hardware on this machine in want of a proper linux driver (save the ati radeon chip).
The point is, it's not hard to set this type of thing up, and it's a fun project to work on with an instant gratification factor. If you have time and have to leave your systems in an open environment sometimes, it's a great project.
Nice to see such a thing in action!
Did you look at the "great looking sites" he identified? The cobbler's clients don't have shoes either.
It's a sad day for graphics design. Heh.
What the heck are you talking about? Your own website has a placeholder page for crying out loud!
Besides, websites are the scorge of the software industry. The Internet would be much more useful if less time was spent trying to differentiate brands and more time was spent making similar functions, such as store locators, online purchasing and information catalogs more consistent.
The rollie pollie.
armadillo.
Both can roll up and away...
So that's why I can never get first post!
And cup your hands beside your head. You should be able to scroll again.
Hitler? What are you trying to kill the conversation?
I sincerely hope that google breathes new life into the locality domains for the US. The use of domains such as computers.boulder.co.us or flowers.boaz.al.us would do a lot for partitioning the flood of information that now exists on the Net.
Imagine the possibilities of the supporting searches such as "pizza site:atlanta.ga.us". And actually getting pizza places in the area? Top that with a simple UI on Googles page and the ability to add your local to firefox's url box (typing pizza tries pizza.atlanta.ga.us first)
If this becomes or is already a part of their plan, I'd pay a premium. The flattening of the DNS namespace is to me the second most tragic side effect of the Internet's adoption. The first of course being spam.
too late!
No way man! Reader beware! Besides, read the grandparent. He *begged* for a bad joke on topic. What was I supposed to do?
Yep, look for a joke about a bear in a bar in Billings, Montana. I was in an Irish pub this weekend and heard a women tell it splendidly. I could never tell jokes - I always have to write them down.
Tony Blair, Bill Gates and Bono walk into a bar within 5 minutes of one another and sit down.
With an obvious need to one up the other two egos in the room, Tony orders a kamikazi and says, "I know they say the three of us are quite unstable, but I believe I have you chaps beat, even on that front. I overthrew a country on the advice of a Texan." He passes a "one-free-knighting" coupon to the bartender for escro on his challenge.
Gates, drinking a screwdriver and squiggling on a piece of paper, blurts out "It's not like Britain didn't do that to the same people before. Try dominating the world with a collection of buggy software and an army of marketroids. Allow the single most significant collaborative creation of the 20th century to be brought to its knees. Then get back to me". He passes a check totaling the GNP of a small country to the bartendar to see Blair's challenge.
Bono, not even inclined to remove his sunglasses responds passes a black I-pod to the bartender. "You see that blonde, at the end of the bar? I'm going to eat her now." He downs his tequila, walks up the blonde, stabs her repeatedly, then eats her, and returns to the conversation.
The bartender interjects and says to Bono "I don't think your instability counts... after all, you're on drugs, and that makes it artificial." Bono, looking puzzled because he hadn't taken a pill in at least three days says "Hell, I'm not on drugs". The bartender passes the pot to Gates, refills the men's drinks and replies, "of course you are, that was a bar-bitch-you-ate".
Here's how it goes:
Step 1: Start a company with potential as a natural monopoly.
Step 2: Convince the government that your growth is good for the country and have them pay for your infrastructure.
Step 3: Print money until the government realizes they screwed up and break you up.
Step 4: Realize you screwed up by not having tighter reigns on the government.
Step 5: Work behind the scenes for a few decades to get the government back under control.
Step 6: Remerge and continue where you left off - printing money.