How cynical people can be. First off, I'm bypassing moderating your comment DOWN because I do believe you deserve a response, despite your rudeness and cynicism. Secondly, "ThinkGeek" is it's own entity and is not a "Slashdot equivalent" of anything. Yes, we are owned by the same company, but there is little communication between the two camps.
It's pretty damned sad that you can't see the question for what it is (a request for help, and a valid Ask Slashdot) than as a "troll for VA ad dollars". Not a once do I even mention VA in the story (I even say entrepreneurial in the text! Since when does "entrepreneurial" imply "VA Linux"?)
I posted this question due to the fact that there have been several questions hitting the bin mentioning that ThinkGeek has problems sending certain products to certain countries. There's not a damned thing they can do about it, either. Simple things like caffeine-added products (Penguin Mints, anyone) are ILLEGAL to send to places like Sweden!
So there are people out there that can't get what they want from ThinkGeek and they are looking for alternatives. Just what in the hell is wrong, or amazing in all of that?
Since WMBC is at a university, we feel it's part of our goal to "educate" people about _real_ alternative music. Since UMBC is a big geeky school, the radio station computers run on Linux, and WMBC has more computer functionality than your typical station. We keep track of our CDs using a database written in PHP and MySQL. Each CD has a review, which tracks are recommended and which are profane (and unsuitable for airplay), and frequently some "for fans of" text. This same database also keeps track of our spins, ie what each DJ plays. Listeners can check out the last 10 songs played on the radio, or search the database for all the songs played in the past year.
Ultracool! I have a local college radio station as well, and I've been trying to improve their online presence for a long time.
They have been online for a long time, but I think they've only started streaming their broadcasts over the past few years (and I was advocating this a few years before they actually got it done). Still, I'm glad they are on the web, and when you have the time to release your software, be sure I'll start pestering them to use it, or something like it. I've heard so many good songs from WUVT's programming that just don't get much mainstream play and it would behoove them if somehow, they could get those playlists out to both their local listeners, and their online ones as well!
Got me there. I meant it "in the relative sense". Honestly? 10,000 of these things running in the US by 2006 would be "more commonplace" than the 1 to 10 that there are now. Even so, I'm more enthused at the fact that there are people out there still looking for alternatives, more anything else.
The karma caps can be set on a site-by-site basis. The value set for Slashdot is for Slashdot and if you set up a site, you can increase or decrease it accordingly.
The values you want are 'maxkarma' and 'minkarma' in the Variables section.
Actually, I don't know. I didn't tune it for these tests - all the weblogs were pretty much at the stock install settings. Block caching was turned on though.
You are going to need to fiddle with these settings. You are also going to need to fiddle with the tuning of Apache and MySQL as well. Chances are your MySQL settings could use tweaking and your MaxClients setting in Apache could be lowered and MaxRequests could be raised.
To expect every weblog to be set to be properly configured for your system out of the box is ridiculous!
Fiddle around with the system a bit...that is why you installed it, correct? If you are having problems with performance, check out the #slash channel on Slashnet! Most of the developers working on Slash hang there and are more than happy to help with such issues.
Your criticism has been noted, however, and when the development team has time to sit down and rest a bit (read, after Slashdot is ported) maybe we'll have time to write up a performance guide for Slash (in addition to all of the copious documentation that needs to be written). However, you could greatly speed up the time it needs to take to research all this by trying out settings and letting us know how it all works.
We can only do what we get feedback on. Performance feedback on various systems would be invaluable right now, so for you and anyone else testing Slash: if you have speed problems, LET US KNOW. Send your MySQL settings and your httpd.conf to the Slash developer's mailing lists and those there may makerecommendations to you as to where settings can be adjusted to give to some extra performance (again, when we have the time to do so).
The resources are out there for you to get assistance with your problems. Feel free to use them.
First off, folks...Ask Slashdot articles tend to get posted in BATCHES. That means that when I do get around to posting something, it WILL sit in the queue for a few days, especially when I post ahead unlike most authors do. Ask Slashdot is only a portion of the work I do for this site (and others) under the OSDN banner. I try to do the best I can when I validate submissions, so when this one was apporoved (I think it was approved either the 29th or the 30th) I was willing to give the poster the benefit of the doubt since it looked like he HAD checked his info. I was running behind due to travel and trying to have a life outside of work, so it got approved and in the lag time...AFS was released.
Oh well. I don't profess to be perfect, and these things happen. I post Ask Slashdot articles to help people get their questions answered, and if an answer occurs during the interim between submission approval and "publishing" time, then all I can do is appologize and keep on doing what I do.
So I appologize on this matter of mis-timing, but it's not something that I can exactly control. I will try to be a bit more careful to what gets posted, but this question was valid and I try to make it a point that questions like this get posted even if the possibility of an answer is forthcoming.
I can let some spelling and grammar mistakes slide but this blantant grammar faux pas should really be cleaned before it goes public. Its in the title of the article! Even a 5th grader knows the grammar above is incorrect.
What can I say, eh? It was a LOOONG day yesterday and things usually go better than it did. You've had some of those, haven't you?
Anyway, It's been fixed, and I have loads of egg on my face.
Cliff, you can't back out of this one. If you are seasoned, then you know you can use whatever environment you want. You just need to make sure it compiles & runs with the TA's environment.
Do you really expect the TA to set up all of the possible environments that a student might use? Just to grade a program?
Why not? Codewarrior is available not only for Windows, but also for Macintosh, Be, Linux and Solaris. Schools have huge computer labs and I'd highly doubt that any college with an accredited College of Computer Science is going to base all of those labs solely on one platform. I don't think it's all that diffucult to make 3 or 4 machines available for the use of compiling student programs. No, I don't expect the TA to do it, but I would expect a school of higher learning to do so. Especially since the environment that they have chosen has good cross-platform support!
I apologize for misinterpreting your commentary, although judging by some of the other comments in this thread, I don't think I'm the only one who thought it was motivated by an over-zealousness to
advocate Linux.
I can't help that. My commentary was not in any way intended to advocate Linux but rather to question current policies in higher education. Any assumed advocacy is something that folks have read into my comments and that is something I really can't control.
Not necessarily. The ANSI/ISO standard for C++ has been a moving target for years, and there is still
a lack of standardization amongst compilers. Of course, it's getting better, and most code should
compile and run the same using any modern compiler. But in every C++ compiler I've used for a reasonable period of time, I've still encountered many quirks. I speak from experience. I have even run into problems between different versions of gcc when submitting code for an assignment.
This is true enough, but how often do these problems come up when dealing with entry level code? We aren't talking about extremely complex stuff here.
Secondly, the submittor nowhere said his professor isn't teaching according to the C++ standard.
No, and he didn't say that his professor was teaching to the standard either. Quite frankly, my large worry is that teaching classes on a specific environment will make things difficult for students when they try to employ their knowledge elsewhere without the benefit of the tools they were forced to use in college.
Also, if you really think telling students "you can use any environment you want, just make sure the code is ISO-compliant" is at all a feasible alternative to telling them "make sure your code compiles and runs using CodeWarrior for Windows", then you've obviously never taught or TA'ed a course before!
No, I haven't, but I still find it hard to believe that in today's colleges with their access to technology that it's that all that difficult to give students a choice. Why -require- "Codewarrior for Windows" when it's also available for Solairs, Linux, Mac and Be? If the environment is all important here, why also standardize on a platform? Most colleges have huge computer labs with a variety of machines. I find it hard to believe that a few of these machines can't be made available to TA's for the purposes of grading projects.
The less explicit you are, the more students you're going to have screwing up somehow, and complaining that "it worked fine on my system". Moreover, there are things to consider outside of the language itself, such as what kind of project management to use (i.e. makefiles), libraries, etc.
Interesting. How is forcing "Codewarrior for Windows" on students, less explicit than just requiring just "Codewarrior"? (BTW, standardizing on the environment isn't going to make the mantra of "it worked on my system" any less popular). Also, I believe project management (build scripts, Makefiles and all that other baggage) should be taught in entry level courses anyways before students are too comfortable with doing this via the IDE.
Before I asked "Why not give students the tools and knowledge they need to work under any environment?" and you replied:
Because that's impossible!
Impossible? Do you honestly believe that? Have you tried? That's the reason why I posted this question. If it's so impossible (read: "highly improbable") then why is that, and what might be taken to make the improbable, possible?
Ok, I'm on a bit of a roll here now. I'll probably get moderated down for this, but I don't even understand why Slashdot would post this question. Actually, the question is a good one; he merely is asking a technical question. It's Cliff's attempt to turn it the discussion into something political with his
commentary that's stupid. Oh, poor Linux user! The horror of having to use Windows for 2 minutes to verify that the code compiles and runs on it (assuming they're not using features or libraries specific to CodeWarrior, which for an entry-level C++ course I would assume they're not)! I know we're Linux zealots, but why can't some people in this community just accept the fact that NOT EVERYONE USES LINUX, and there are going to be occasions when you're FORCED TO USE WINDOWS (or
Macs, or...) For god's sake, stop WHINING and being offended and deal with it!
Pardon, but I think you've misinterpreted entirely what my commentary was about. You say that I make it a political issue about Linux when in fact, I said no such thing and I'll reference my commentary again:
I find it disappointing that schools think that "teaching programming" involves locking their students into a specific environment. I know it makes it easy for the teachers and TAs when it comes to technical support, but what about those students who already have a handle on their own system, are willing to learn the language (and its pitfalls in all environments) who can't (or won't) run the required software for whatever reason? Is this limited form of teaching really teaching?
Note: No mention of Linux. No mention of Windows. No political statement of the sort.
My commentary was about limiting the evironment that a person uses to learn. Why is it that for an entry level coding class must it necessary to standardize environments? Sure if you go to class and you want an easy time staying with the professor, then use the same environment that he is using, but ANSI C++ is ANSI C++ and if the professor is not teaching to the standard then that is a problem. ANSI C++ code should compile fine on any compiler from Solaris to BSD to Windows and Macintosh, and if a user has grown up (and maybe fiddled with C++ while in high-school) around an environment, why force him into foreign environment just to teach him a language? Why not give students the tools and knowledge they need to work under any environment?
There is a plugin that integrates Netscape Messenger with PGP, unfortunately, there is a catch (isn't there always?): it's only available for Windows. Maybe some kind hacker out there can take a look at this program and come up with something functionaly equivalent for Linux.
If you'd look at the "GUI Toolkit" site referenced in the article, you'd know how far off the mark Freshmeat and SourceForge are from what poster is looking for. Freshmeat and SourceForge serve specific purposes, but comparisons of toolkits is not one of them.
This MAY be because of the fact that Jamie (please not the PROPER spelling, guy) is busy as hell working on other projects in addition to Slashdot. But that may not have occured to you, did it?
BTW - Several people have answered your question in this SID, please read them and quit thinking that everything is a personal attack against you. People will take you more seriously that way.
That's because there's now a place to report such things without having to fill Rob's in-box with stuff that other people are now handling. If you really have a problem with Slashdot not working properly (suspect you've found a bug?) then you can talk about it here.
loqutous dropped me a line containing information about a site on homestead that had Autoconf and Automake tutorials. This one might be worth a looksee.
Mozilla M16 works great, and the speed really isn't that much of a factor when dealing with straight HTML. The problem comes when you start using forms. And I'm not talking about 5-10 form elements on a page (although you'll start to see the performance hit there), I'm talking about pages with -hundreds- of form elemends...like the pages you deal with when administrating your average, large, Slashcode based site.
Last time I did timing trials using the Slashdot backend with M16 (actually, M16 was the FIRST Mozilla build that I could do this on without it crashing), and it took Mozilla over 200 seconds for it to render the submissions bin with 114 submissions in it. I figured this was due to the debug code that the Mozilla milestones seem littered with, so I grabbed the source and recompiled with as many debugging options as I could find turned off and tried again. The results were less than spectacular, that same page rendered 10 seconds faster, but the end result was still over 200 seconds...
...and this on Pages that IE and Netscape Communicator can render in under 20 seconds.
Honestly, Mozilla looks great, the render handles just about anything I've thrown at it, but it's still -really- slow under X11 and that's still a problem. I hope the Mozilla development team has luck in getting these issues solved.
Slashdot Mirror
Our idea of a fair price, or theirs.
Honestly, the person to be asking this question to would be the artist, but since they don't own the work they aren't the ones setting the price.
And that is part of the problem.
Misspelling fixed. I just noticed it. This is what happens when you rush to post so you can take care of other work related tasks.
It's pretty damned sad that you can't see the question for what it is (a request for help, and a valid Ask Slashdot) than as a "troll for VA ad dollars". Not a once do I even mention VA in the story (I even say entrepreneurial in the text! Since when does "entrepreneurial" imply "VA Linux"?)
I posted this question due to the fact that there have been several questions hitting the bin mentioning that ThinkGeek has problems sending certain products to certain countries. There's not a damned thing they can do about it, either. Simple things like caffeine-added products (Penguin Mints, anyone) are ILLEGAL to send to places like Sweden!
So there are people out there that can't get what they want from ThinkGeek and they are looking for alternatives. Just what in the hell is wrong, or amazing in all of that?
Ultracool! I have a local college radio station as well, and I've been trying to improve their online presence for a long time.
They have been online for a long time, but I think they've only started streaming their broadcasts over the past few years (and I was advocating this a few years before they actually got it done). Still, I'm glad they are on the web, and when you have the time to release your software, be sure I'll start pestering them to use it, or something like it. I've heard so many good songs from WUVT's programming that just don't get much mainstream play and it would behoove them if somehow, they could get those playlists out to both their local listeners, and their online ones as well!
Sorry about the confusion, there.
Yes, but vegetables are renewable. Fossil fuels are not. ;)
*ahem* Scientology? *ahem*
Check out the slash1toslash2 script in the utils/ directory.
The values you want are 'maxkarma' and 'minkarma' in the Variables section.
You are going to need to fiddle with these settings. You are also going to need to fiddle with the tuning of Apache and MySQL as well. Chances are your MySQL settings could use tweaking and your MaxClients setting in Apache could be lowered and MaxRequests could be raised.
To expect every weblog to be set to be properly configured for your system out of the box is ridiculous!
Fiddle around with the system a bit...that is why you installed it, correct? If you are having problems with performance, check out the #slash channel on Slashnet! Most of the developers working on Slash hang there and are more than happy to help with such issues.
Your criticism has been noted, however, and when the development team has time to sit down and rest a bit (read, after Slashdot is ported) maybe we'll have time to write up a performance guide for Slash (in addition to all of the copious documentation that needs to be written). However, you could greatly speed up the time it needs to take to research all this by trying out settings and letting us know how it all works.
We can only do what we get feedback on. Performance feedback on various systems would be invaluable right now, so for you and anyone else testing Slash: if you have speed problems, LET US KNOW. Send your MySQL settings and your httpd.conf to the Slash developer's mailing lists and those there may makerecommendations to you as to where settings can be adjusted to give to some extra performance (again, when we have the time to do so).
The resources are out there for you to get assistance with your problems. Feel free to use them.
We are evil that way, aren't we?
Ah well...
Oh well. I don't profess to be perfect, and these things happen. I post Ask Slashdot articles to help people get their questions answered, and if an answer occurs during the interim between submission approval and "publishing" time, then all I can do is appologize and keep on doing what I do.
So I appologize on this matter of mis-timing, but it's not something that I can exactly control. I will try to be a bit more careful to what gets posted, but this question was valid and I try to make it a point that questions like this get posted even if the possibility of an answer is forthcoming.
Anyway, It's been fixed, and I have loads of egg on my face.
Sorry 'bout that.
Oops. Sorry about the italics in the last post. I thought I had closed the tag and aparently didn't.
Before I asked "Why not give students the tools and knowledge they need to work under any environment?" and you replied:
Impossible? Do you honestly believe that? Have you tried? That's the reason why I posted this question. If it's so impossible (read: "highly improbable") then why is that, and what might be taken to make the improbable, possible?
My commentary was about limiting the evironment that a person uses to learn. Why is it that for an entry level coding class must it necessary to standardize environments? Sure if you go to class and you want an easy time staying with the professor, then use the same environment that he is using, but ANSI C++ is ANSI C++ and if the professor is not teaching to the standard then that is a problem. ANSI C++ code should compile fine on any compiler from Solaris to BSD to Windows and Macintosh, and if a user has grown up (and maybe fiddled with C++ while in high-school) around an environment, why force him into foreign environment just to teach him a language? Why not give students the tools and knowledge they need to work under any environment?
I hope this clears up any misunderstanding.
You can find it's homepage at Bear Software.
It's another option if you are comfortable with Netscape and just want to quickly fire off an encrypted message.
If you'd look at the "GUI Toolkit" site referenced in the article, you'd know how far off the mark Freshmeat and SourceForge are from what poster is looking for. Freshmeat and SourceForge serve specific purposes, but comparisons of toolkits is not one of them.
BTW - Several people have answered your question in this SID, please read them and quit thinking that everything is a personal attack against you. People will take you more seriously that way.
- Cliff
That's because there's now a place to report such things without having to fill Rob's in-box with stuff that other people are now handling. If you really have a problem with Slashdot not working properly (suspect you've found a bug?) then you can talk about it here.
loqutous dropped me a line containing information about a site on homestead that had Autoconf and Automake tutorials. This one might be worth a looksee.
Last time I did timing trials using the Slashdot backend with M16 (actually, M16 was the FIRST Mozilla build that I could do this on without it crashing), and it took Mozilla over 200 seconds for it to render the submissions bin with 114 submissions in it. I figured this was due to the debug code that the Mozilla milestones seem littered with, so I grabbed the source and recompiled with as many debugging options as I could find turned off and tried again. The results were less than spectacular, that same page rendered 10 seconds faster, but the end result was still over 200 seconds...
...and this on Pages that IE and Netscape Communicator can render in under 20 seconds.
Honestly, Mozilla looks great, the render handles just about anything I've thrown at it, but it's still -really- slow under X11 and that's still a problem. I hope the Mozilla development team has luck in getting these issues solved.
You want a general chat area? Try creating an sid that doesn't exist, and you can create one.