Exactly. I remember when I was a kid asking my mom how TV worked. She told me that you push this button right here and it turns the TV on, then you twist this dial to change channels and this little knob makes it louder or quieter. Completely unsatisfied with this answer, I went to my dad and he gave me the answer I was looking for....you see there's this station that transmits an encoded signal that's picked up by this antenna here.....and so on.
I remember reading the Metcalfe column predicting the imminent demise of the internet and thinking at the time that it was clearly a case of chicken little or sensationalism or both. But I never heard what eventually came of it. Thanks for filling me in. Anybody know if there's an.mpeg or videotape of him chowing down on that column? I'd love to see that!
Such a site is the Linux Documentation Project. It has gone through several updates in the past year or so and is much more up to date than it used to be. The problem is that Linux (and related software) is a swiftly moving target and there will always be more developers than documenters. This means that documentation will always be lagging. Think it's bad now? Wait for the 2.4 kernel.:)
I think there are a couple of other reasons that Windows is perceived to be easier than Unix/Linux. One is that you hear everybody say it all the time. Linux is more powerful; Windows is easier (in part because it's less powerful). But it's not that black-and-white. Windows is actually pretty difficult and non-intuitive for certain things.
The other is that documentation for Windows abounds and most of it doesn't come from Microsoft. Go buy a modem, look in the manual (or CD) and it will lead you by the nose how to set up dial-up networking under Windows. Is there documentation for Linux? You know the answer as well as I do. Often I have found that doing something in Linux turns out to be extremely easy but arriving at the point where I knew what to do was difficult due to lack of documentation. Case in point: how do you add dial-on-demand to pppd? Answer: add the word demand to the pppd options file. What could be easier? But how long did I have to dig around in man pages, how-tos and comp.os.linux.help to find that out? Perhaps an hour. The mythical average user isn't going to dig around in any newsgroup even 15 seconds, he's going to say "screw it where's my pointy clicky interface?"
There is some truth to this but I think it is part myth as well. It is difficult learning Unix if all you know is Windows. But I can say from experience it's even more difficult learning Windows if all you know is Unix. Once you grok Unix fully it just sorta makes sense, but I don't think it's possible to get to that point with Windows. There just doesn't seem to be any deep underlying philosophy or paradigm in Windows the way there is with Unix.
You're quite right in saying that rejecting common mode noise is the easiest - you just subtract the common mode out and what's left is siganl. What these guys are doing is just the opposite, from what I can tell. They are looking for a (common mode) signal in the presence of noise that is many orders of magnitude louder.
So as you say, much filtering is needed. I was struck by the similarity of this project to detecting SETI-type signals and I wonder if they could benefit from a SETI@home sort of distributed computing approach. Anybody know more about this?
I thought this bit was pretty cool:
The project team hopes to accelerate research into this and other objects observed by releasing the data - 60 images totaling 250 megabytes - to the astronomical community now, rather than retaining it within the project team for additional research.
They would have been within their rights to hang on to these data, instead they chose to release them in the hopes that someone else will be able to make sense out of them.
Maybe, just maybe, that's why it hasn't been modded up.
Re:Huh? (considerably off topic, but oh well..)
on
Opera 4.0b1 For Linux
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I'm thinking the ATI....here's why. I had a similar problem w/ an ATI Rage. Gifs would not always get rendered correctly (sometimes I would see a black outline of the image only) and the machine would BSOD in NT daily. When running Linux it would just wedge solid for no apparent reason. I mean it was just completely hung - couldn't telnet into it or anything. Maybe it was the driver, but if so, it was the Windows driver and the Linux driver. I replaced the card w/ a G400 and haven't had a problem in two weeks. Anybody want a Rage II cheap?
You raise a lot of good issues, and I agree to a certain point. But/. has joined the big leagues and that means that a certain level of professionalism is expected. It's not just Rob's little pet project anymore. When I see bad grammar, spelling errors (how many times has CT spelled "too" T-O?), repeated or inaccurate stories and the like, frankly I'm a bit embarassed. I think that it's not unreasonable to expect more from one of the (if not *the*) flagship web sites of the open source movement. I don't think it's too much to ask to make the site look sharp and professional or to do a little research before putting up a story.
I sympathize with Rob, I really do. It must be painful to see your creation attacked by trolls and spammers from one direction, and an endless stream of complaints from the other. But some of these complaints are legit. And he has gotten secretive in his changes to the mod system, and defensive about them. A lot of the complaints would be nipped in the bud if he just told us "Hey guys, there have been some changes, here's what they are and here's why I made them." That's more in the open source spirit than secretly making changes to the Slashcode. (Yes, I know I can just go look at it, but for one thing, I'm not a perl poet and secondly, I'm not interested in diffing the code every couple of weeks to see what changes have been made.) In the irc log he talks about how he gets tired of hearing the same suggestions over and over. Then why doesn't he publish the ones that have already suggested and the reason they haven't been implemented? Somebody else said that they never read the faq. Well there's no reason to - it hasn't been updated in over a year. And it *still* says "updated 9.9", that would be 9.9.1999.
Af for the mod system itself, I don't think it's horribly broken. The biggest problem is that moderators aren't doing a good job. That's not a problem that can be fixed within the system. There are some things that might help, but if moderators are modding trolls up, that's a societal problem that is outside the scope of any moderation scheme. Some things that *could* improve the system are:
1) Make karma hidden again. Karma shouldn't be a spectator sport. I know it's a rush to see your karma increase, but it's just a number. If you're getting modded up more than down you know it's increasing - you don't need to see the number in your user page to know that. Posting a thoughtful reply or participating in a lively discussion should be reward enough. Yes there will be significant lashback, but Rob's just gonna have to put on the asbestos suit for a couple of weeks and ride it out. Maybe some people will leave too. That might not be a bad thing. Are the posters that only post to see their karma increase the type we want around here anyway? To me that's the definition of a karma whore.
2) Require a higher karma to get mod points. Maybe the vets are better at recognizing the trolls and karma whores. Maybe not, but it seems like it's worth a shot.
3) Give some feedback from M2 to the moderators. Right now if I mod a post and it gets whacked in M2, I don't know why or even which mod was the one that did it. It would be helpful to know which one of my mods was thought to be unfair and why. Hopefully better moderation would be the result. Perhaps not, maybe all we'd get is things clustered more toward the mean.
4) Force moderators to browse at -1, newest first instead of +1 highest score first. In other words, ignore the settings in comments.pl when you have mod points. Many older posts that should be modded up are simply ignored because the moderators only see the ones that have already been modded up.
Having said all that, for the most part the mod system works. Most of the truly insightful comments end up at the top of the heap and most of the crap gets buried on the bottom where it belongs. It's not perfect, but I'm not sure it can be. That shouldn't stop us (or CT) from improving it if possible, however.
Lastly, I think we're all (especially Rob) taking this thing waaaay too seriously. Let's lighten up and make this place fun again. Ok?
Some good suggestions, here are a couple of my additions...
Close the loop on M2. By this I mean that as things are now, if you mod a post up and then get meta-modded as unfair, you will lose a karma point. This is good, but you don't know why you lost it. Let the moderator know which mod was the one that cost him the karma point. Also, if a post was modded up but the moderator got whacked in M2, the original poster should lose the karma point. The reverse is also true.
Make karma *mean* something. Right now, the only good it does is for the +1 bonus. After that it doesn't matter if you're at 50 or 500 karma, unless you are planning to go on a trolling spree. Maybe the higher your karma, the more mod points you get, or you get mod access more often.
Also using the +1 bonus should cost you a point of karma. Lately I've seen a bunch of pretty clueless posts that started at +2.
I fear though, that no matter what system you come up with, the trolls will find a way to disassemble it. I hope this isn't the case, but they are more determined than we are and they seem to have a lot more time on their hands.
Sure, as long as a state congress passes the law saying so... heck, you could even define Pi as 3 if you wanted... Didn't the State of Illinois do exactly that once? It's been overturned, of course, but the fact that they did it in the first place is scary.
I agree with you though that if enough people decide something is true, then it is. Most everybody got together and decided that this year was the turn of the century instead of next year, so it therefore it is. There is Platonic Truth and then there is reality....and I'm not sure one has much to do with the other.
I had the same reaction. My first thought was "Have mercy! That thing is butt-ugly". If the Jetsons had an Etch-a-sketch, this is what it would look like. And the colors! What marketroid thought of "Audrey-Meadow"? That yellow color (Audrey-Sunshine) is utterly hideous. Fortunately, none of them are available right now.
The problem is not one of sharing, it's that there are many things in the heavens to look at and not enough telescopes to go around. This problem is compounded by the fact that observing can only be done at certain times (night, when there is no moon, when the object you want to observe is visible, etc.).
This problem can be helped somewhat by offloading some of the more mundane tasks to amateur astronomers. These include finding Earth-crossing asteroids and comets and making observations of variable stars. Think of it as distributed net for telescopes.
can't the DOJ go back to Judge Jackson and ask him to remove the stay.
Probably, but there's no guarantee that he will.
MS would then go to the appeals court to attempt to get the stay removed, correct?
No, they would attempt to get the stay re-instated and they would probably succeed.
Would it be worth the effort?
Sure it would.....for the lawyers. More motions to file, more court appearances, more billable hours. Other than that, there would be no difference from the situation as it exists today. Meanwhile, M$ will go on doing what they do best.
BTW, I don't really think the SC was wrong in this decision. Also, I don't think the DoJ really thought they'd get the SC to hear the case. But it didn't cost them much to try and who know...they might have won. They didn't and now it's time to get on with the appeal.
It forces Microsoft to 'behave' more than they would otherwise do...
How? This delay just gives M$ more time for 'business as usual'. They aren't "in check"; they aren't "behaving"; they are trying to maintain the status quo as long as possible. Don't believe me? Take a look at this . What exactly is "slowing them down in their voracious ways"??
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. I remember when I was a kid asking my mom how TV worked. She told me that you push this button right here and it turns the TV on, then you twist this dial to change channels and this little knob makes it louder or quieter. Completely unsatisfied with this answer, I went to my dad and he gave me the answer I was looking for....you see there's this station that transmits an encoded signal that's picked up by this antenna here.....and so on.
My copy arrived yesterday. I'm a happy boy :) :) :)
I remember reading the Metcalfe column predicting the imminent demise of the internet and thinking at the time that it was clearly a case of chicken little or sensationalism or both. But I never heard what eventually came of it. Thanks for filling me in. Anybody know if there's an .mpeg or videotape of him chowing down on that column? I'd love to see that!
Ok, this is too freaky.....I was just listening to that song on the way to work a few minutes ago.
Such a site is the Linux Documentation Project. It has gone through several updates in the past year or so and is much more up to date than it used to be. The problem is that Linux (and related software) is a swiftly moving target and there will always be more developers than documenters. This means that documentation will always be lagging. Think it's bad now? Wait for the 2.4 kernel. :)
True, end users just wanna get their work done.
I think there are a couple of other reasons that Windows is perceived to be easier than Unix/Linux. One is that you hear everybody say it all the time. Linux is more powerful; Windows is easier (in part because it's less powerful). But it's not that black-and-white. Windows is actually pretty difficult and non-intuitive for certain things.
The other is that documentation for Windows abounds and most of it doesn't come from Microsoft. Go buy a modem, look in the manual (or CD) and it will lead you by the nose how to set up dial-up networking under Windows. Is there documentation for Linux? You know the answer as well as I do. Often I have found that doing something in Linux turns out to be extremely easy but arriving at the point where I knew what to do was difficult due to lack of documentation. Case in point: how do you add dial-on-demand to pppd? Answer: add the word demand to the pppd options file. What could be easier? But how long did I have to dig around in man pages, how-tos and comp.os.linux.help to find that out? Perhaps an hour. The mythical average user isn't going to dig around in any newsgroup even 15 seconds, he's going to say "screw it where's my pointy clicky interface?"
There is some truth to this but I think it is part myth as well. It is difficult learning Unix if all you know is Windows. But I can say from experience it's even more difficult learning Windows if all you know is Unix. Once you grok Unix fully it just sorta makes sense, but I don't think it's possible to get to that point with Windows. There just doesn't seem to be any deep underlying philosophy or paradigm in Windows the way there is with Unix.
Just remember there's M2 - hopefully people use it.
I do. I'll be looking for that one in a few days.
You're quite right in saying that rejecting common mode noise is the easiest - you just subtract the common mode out and what's left is siganl. What these guys are doing is just the opposite, from what I can tell. They are looking for a (common mode) signal in the presence of noise that is many orders of magnitude louder.
So as you say, much filtering is needed. I was struck by the similarity of this project to detecting SETI-type signals and I wonder if they could benefit from a SETI@home sort of distributed computing approach. Anybody know more about this?
...are you a fan of Ozric Tentacles? If not, you're probably really confused right now. :)
I thought this bit was pretty cool:
The project team hopes to accelerate research into this and other objects observed by releasing the data - 60 images totaling 250 megabytes - to the astronomical community now, rather than retaining it within the project team for additional research.
They would have been within their rights to hang on to these data, instead they chose to release them in the hopes that someone else will be able to make sense out of them.
Maybe, just maybe, that's why it hasn't been modded up.
I'm thinking the ATI....here's why. I had a similar problem w/ an ATI Rage. Gifs would not always get rendered correctly (sometimes I would see a black outline of the image only) and the machine would BSOD in NT daily. When running Linux it would just wedge solid for no apparent reason. I mean it was just completely hung - couldn't telnet into it or anything. Maybe it was the driver, but if so, it was the Windows driver and the Linux driver. I replaced the card w/ a G400 and haven't had a problem in two weeks. Anybody want a Rage II cheap?
You raise a lot of good issues, and I agree to a certain point. But /. has joined the big leagues and that means that a certain level of professionalism is expected. It's not just Rob's little pet project anymore. When I see bad grammar, spelling errors (how many times has CT spelled "too" T-O?), repeated or inaccurate stories and the like, frankly I'm a bit embarassed. I think that it's not unreasonable to expect more from one of the (if not *the*) flagship web sites of the open source movement. I don't think it's too much to ask to make the site look sharp and professional or to do a little research before putting up a story.
I sympathize with Rob, I really do. It must be painful to see your creation attacked by trolls and spammers from one direction, and an endless stream of complaints from the other. But some of these complaints are legit. And he has gotten secretive in his changes to the mod system, and defensive about them. A lot of the complaints would be nipped in the bud if he just told us "Hey guys, there have been some changes, here's what they are and here's why I made them." That's more in the open source spirit than secretly making changes to the Slashcode. (Yes, I know I can just go look at it, but for one thing, I'm not a perl poet and secondly, I'm not interested in diffing the code every couple of weeks to see what changes have been made.) In the irc log he talks about how he gets tired of hearing the same suggestions over and over. Then why doesn't he publish the ones that have already suggested and the reason they haven't been implemented? Somebody else said that they never read the faq. Well there's no reason to - it hasn't been updated in over a year. And it *still* says "updated 9.9", that would be 9.9.1999.
Af for the mod system itself, I don't think it's horribly broken. The biggest problem is that moderators aren't doing a good job. That's not a problem that can be fixed within the system. There are some things that might help, but if moderators are modding trolls up, that's a societal problem that is outside the scope of any moderation scheme. Some things that *could* improve the system are:
1) Make karma hidden again. Karma shouldn't be a spectator sport. I know it's a rush to see your karma increase, but it's just a number. If you're getting modded up more than down you know it's increasing - you don't need to see the number in your user page to know that. Posting a thoughtful reply or participating in a lively discussion should be reward enough. Yes there will be significant lashback, but Rob's just gonna have to put on the asbestos suit for a couple of weeks and ride it out. Maybe some people will leave too. That might not be a bad thing. Are the posters that only post to see their karma increase the type we want around here anyway? To me that's the definition of a karma whore.
2) Require a higher karma to get mod points. Maybe the vets are better at recognizing the trolls and karma whores. Maybe not, but it seems like it's worth a shot.
3) Give some feedback from M2 to the moderators. Right now if I mod a post and it gets whacked in M2, I don't know why or even which mod was the one that did it. It would be helpful to know which one of my mods was thought to be unfair and why. Hopefully better moderation would be the result. Perhaps not, maybe all we'd get is things clustered more toward the mean.
4) Force moderators to browse at -1, newest first instead of +1 highest score first. In other words, ignore the settings in comments.pl when you have mod points. Many older posts that should be modded up are simply ignored because the moderators only see the ones that have already been modded up.
Having said all that, for the most part the mod system works. Most of the truly insightful comments end up at the top of the heap and most of the crap gets buried on the bottom where it belongs. It's not perfect, but I'm not sure it can be. That shouldn't stop us (or CT) from improving it if possible, however.
Lastly, I think we're all (especially Rob) taking this thing waaaay too seriously. Let's lighten up and make this place fun again. Ok?
I'm not usually one to suspect conspiracies, but I find it odd that the pictures of the Aurora on that page are missing. Hmmmmm, indeed......
I'm almost getting tired of hearing about Microsofts security flaws, and their inability to deal with them.
They will only learn when their customers start to feel the same way you do.
MSFT is on NASDAQ.
Eeek, I didn't think of that.....you're probably right.
Some good suggestions, here are a couple of my additions...
Close the loop on M2. By this I mean that as things are now, if you mod a post up and then get meta-modded as unfair, you will lose a karma point. This is good, but you don't know why you lost it. Let the moderator know which mod was the one that cost him the karma point. Also, if a post was modded up but the moderator got whacked in M2, the original poster should lose the karma point. The reverse is also true.
Make karma *mean* something. Right now, the only good it does is for the +1 bonus. After that it doesn't matter if you're at 50 or 500 karma, unless you are planning to go on a trolling spree. Maybe the higher your karma, the more mod points you get, or you get mod access more often.
Also using the +1 bonus should cost you a point of karma. Lately I've seen a bunch of pretty clueless posts that started at +2.
I fear though, that no matter what system you come up with, the trolls will find a way to disassemble it. I hope this isn't the case, but they are more determined than we are and they seem to have a lot more time on their hands.
Sure, as long as a state congress passes the law saying so... heck, you could even define Pi as 3 if you wanted...
Didn't the State of Illinois do exactly that once? It's been overturned, of course, but the fact that they did it in the first place is scary.
I agree with you though that if enough people decide something is true, then it is. Most everybody got together and decided that this year was the turn of the century instead of next year, so it therefore it is. There is Platonic Truth and then there is reality....and I'm not sure one has much to do with the other.
I had the same reaction. My first thought was "Have mercy! That thing is butt-ugly". If the Jetsons had an Etch-a-sketch, this is what it would look like. And the colors! What marketroid thought of "Audrey-Meadow"? That yellow color (Audrey-Sunshine) is utterly hideous. Fortunately, none of them are available right now.
The problem is not one of sharing, it's that there are many things in the heavens to look at and not enough telescopes to go around. This problem is compounded by the fact that observing can only be done at certain times (night, when there is no moon, when the object you want to observe is visible, etc.).
This problem can be helped somewhat by offloading some of the more mundane tasks to amateur astronomers. These include finding Earth-crossing asteroids and comets and making observations of variable stars. Think of it as distributed net for telescopes.
can't the DOJ go back to Judge Jackson and ask him to remove the stay.
Probably, but there's no guarantee that he will.
MS would then go to the appeals court to attempt to get the stay removed, correct?
No, they would attempt to get the stay re-instated and they would probably succeed.
Would it be worth the effort?
Sure it would.....for the lawyers. More motions to file, more court appearances, more billable hours. Other than that, there would be no difference from the situation as it exists today. Meanwhile, M$ will go on doing what they do best.
BTW, I don't really think the SC was wrong in this decision. Also, I don't think the DoJ really thought they'd get the SC to hear the case. But it didn't cost them much to try and who know...they might have won. They didn't and now it's time to get on with the appeal.
It forces Microsoft to 'behave' more than they would otherwise do...
How? This delay just gives M$ more time for 'business as usual'. They aren't "in check"; they aren't "behaving"; they are trying to maintain the status quo as long as possible. Don't believe me? Take a look at this . What exactly is "slowing them down in their voracious ways"??