Yes, people don't seem to have caught what's happened. Google has bought the deja news archive, but what you can see now is Google's own archive of the last six months of usenet.
They are currently dumping the Deja data into their own archive format.
We can infer:
the old deja interface, which implies also all the many links to articles archived at deja, is probably gone forever - dead code.
Google have bought the data, not the code.
Google haven't yet written their interface - it will probably be some time before it appears. What we have now is a primitive fill-in.
This inept timing suggests deja's demise was rather hastily decided.
Overall, I think this is a sad day for usenet. Deja was a useful service even to those using nntp based newsreaders - the ability to search all usenet headers for a particular IP address, for example, was a fine thing. The deja search was flexible and powerful, if you knew how to use it.
Long term, Google may produce an interface as useful as deja's, and even without some of the annoying quirks - and if they do that will be great.
But you have got to question the abruptness with which they have removed the ability to post for thousands of people. (MailAndNews won't be getting any quicker anytime soon, I bet:-) --
Here's hoping that they also remove the advertising via news article linking thing that Deja tried too.
Nah, as a frequent deja user, much annoyed by the present inability to post but optimistic about the future facilities, given google's excellent record, I can't recall seeing any advertising links within articles as you suggest. I think you're thinking of Remarq, which tried to do this for a short time before its timely and entirely deserved death (as a free service.) --
I like the idea: type a 5 command pipe on your gui-aware shell/terminal, drag it off onto the desktop, drag a file out of your file manager onto the new pipe icon on the desktop - it runs the pipe on the file (hopefully the last item in your pipe was something sensible like | less -S which would then pop up on your screen.)
Or: drag a url onto your gui-aware terminal and it runs your fave textmode browser and goes to the url...
Are there any xterm replacements doing this sort of thing?
The source package (8.2.3) I just downloaded from ftp.isc.org (busy little server, today:-) halted during make all with an unknown directive error at (iirc) line 109 in asserions.h
On inspection I found I this line started with #defile rather than the more usual #define
So what is this? Typo at release time? cosmic ray? random bit error in the ftp pipe? signature pun by truly 1337 h4x0rs after installing trojan source package? isc development team get a sense of humor and respond to being featured on/. ?
I guess some compromises will inevitably be made,
given the differing natures of the two media, but you may be pleasantly surprised, and perhaps even slightly reassured, as I was, by the answers to "fan questions" given by director Peter Jackson at the video archive part of the lotr site.
He specifically addresses some of these points: Council of Elrond is in the movie - though no doubt played for cinematic impact, for example. Also interesting were long and thoughtful answers on the thorny question of racist (and "patriarchal") interpretations of the original work.
--
Anslinger [the head of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics] testified to Congress in 1937, warning, "Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug known to Mankind,"
This and other lies colored the view of two generations about drugs and explains much of the present situation. Political parties are now as bound by these attitudes as they ever were - the path of least effort is not to question the status quo.
However, some countries in South America are apparently no longer prepared to go along with this facade. In fact the president of Uruguay,
Jorge Batlle has recently come out in favor of widespread legalisation. See:
... check out quasimodo and then someone write a network audio stream plugin for it (or petition the author;) you could then run a copy of quasimodo on each "node" and route the audio signal(s) between them.
This has to happen sooner or later, with some software or other!:-)
Quasimodo author PBD has some pretty good arguments on his site that it is worth doing DSP audio processing on generic PCs, BTW. You can take a look at some dedicated (non-networked, and non-GNU/Linux) hardware solutions at
Creamware's site - in particular their high-end-studio-in-a-PC, Scope
Latency will be a problem - not because of delays audible to the human ear, but because of the difficulty of synchronising different tracks that have arrived by different network paths. Net-latency-caused discrepancies of a couple of milliseconds could introduce phase problems in audible ranges. Perhaps a "broadcast clicktrack" plugin of some kind could solve that..?
mangle the filename in the manner
music.mp3%20 Users browsers should just strip off
the excess space, but the 'autobot' the ISP is
running should miss it.
Nice idea, but in practice I think most ISPs would
not trust deletion of users' data to a bot
(call me naive..)
In practice a deletable site is more likely to
come to your attention via excessive logged
transfers or from a letter from a lawyer.
I've personally deleted many users' data without
consulting them, because it was obvious to me
(from an inspection of logs and the user's
site) that there was copyright violation
on a massive scale (and consequently our ass
would be grass in court.) And by the way, on
no occasion did my actions provoke even one
complaint from an aggrieved user.
I've also
taken the other view many times, and left things
in place because the situation wasn't as clear
cut.
Sounds like the admin in this case didn't take
enough care to check the situation out, but
sure, sometimes deleting the data is the Right
Thing: sometimes you just don't have
to be a lawyer, but
It's easy and fast for NON-programmers to learn, develop, etc.
Here's a true story: A (non-programming)
friend of mine works for a company who decide
to set up a scripted website. They're pretty
much IT-stupid.
They get their design ideas
together and hold a meeting to decide on a
platform. I've been selling my friend (their
most IT-non-stupid member of staff) on a Free
solution (php) and he puts this point of view
at their meeting. The management decides that
Cold Fusion is what they want.
They buy Cold
Fusion and hire a developer (spending about
2 grand) The developer screws up and doesn't
deliver anything that looks like it's going
to work. Panic, as they have demo and launch
dates looming.
After getting the go-ahead from
management, my friend locates an off the shelf
php app that does most of what they need. He's
now modifying it to fill in the gaps, and both
their launch and demo have been successful.
Now I'm not drawing any conclusions about Cold
Fusion - they were unlucky with their developer -
but it's interesting to consider:
they didn't consider doing the development
in cold fusion themselves. Producing any
reasonably complex app requires the ability to
think like a programmer. It therefore needs a
programmer, no matter how wonderful the IDE.
It was possible to find a suitable php
solution in such short order precisely because
php is Free Software. Online help, ideas and
solutions abound because of the prevailing ethos
among php developers.
php is obviously not that intimidating
to learn. My friend's previous experience with
writing software consisted in copying character
by character some programs published in computer
magazines of the early eighties:-)
1. Bill Gates' credit card details
2. Source code for Bob
3. Cheat list for Solitaire
4. Online application form for donations from the Bill and Melinda foundation
5. Wish list for enhancements to MS-DOS 3.3
6. Complete set of MP3s of Steve Ballmer rocking out
7. Original code for Linux
8. Discarded Office Assistants including Penfield the crazy Judge and Linus the toad
9. Contents of Bill's desktop trash folders for the last five years
10. Contact details for Bill's personal stylist
'politics' as a large and fuzzy-edged strand of human activity
and
party politics - the mainstream political scene
The former is likely to be around as long as humans are.
The latter may well be under threat, but will likely continue to
evolve in its characteristic hyper-darwinian way to "meet the challenges"
of a "wired world". The threat is real, however, because there are some
necessary relations between politics, power and information. With luck,
in this limited sense of "politics", Jon Katz may be right.
Cynics have long held that politics is the applied science of lying
and there is a grain of truth in that view - in real politics
control of information is, if not all, at least a very great deal.
Remember the 'science of lying' is a branch of information theory.
From the point of view of the politician, sustaining power is a matter of
"getting the electorate to agree" - the news media are partners and
sometime adversaries in the delicate game of defining what's
important, what's out to lunch and what's irrelevant for the electorate.
It's a read-only client/server model, with very many clients and very
few servers. Controlling the agenda effectively ('lying') is easy in this
model.
With enhanced communications through computer networks, many other
models are possible. Now this is a bit of a truism in the hacker
community - and is often taken to mean some form of 'electronic
democracy' where the government kindly devolves power through online
referenda and focus groups and the like, but I think these other
models are likely to be implemented over the (dead or horribly maimed)
bodies of the old ones or expire themselves (viz the recent
"vote auction" fiasco.)
At this relatively early stage of the game, where everyone is still
waking up to what is happening, a lot of chips have still to fall
and it's pretty much impossible to guess the specifics of the outcome.
But as the information spectrum broadens, as it becomes easier and easier
for information sharing, opinion forming and mass action to be
co-ordinated by self-selecting groups, it's possible that strategies
and models will emerge that actually challenge the power base of the
existing poliitical system.
So what would be the napster / gnutella killer app for online activists?
Well, if Freenet delivers then that is probably going to help (the yet to
come legal struggle over freenet - for which the recent cases can be seen
as limbering up - will be interesting because it will identify those whose
vested interests are threatened by it...) but I think by and large we
already have the software tools in web media (you're looking at one!).
We are still waiting for the concepts and 'forms of life' that will make
these effective political tools.
One area that comes to mind is 'active consumerism' - buying according
to ethical criteria - which if enacted on a really large scale can
certainly have impact. Like the man said: "Get organised."
Slashdot Mirror
They are currently dumping the Deja data into their own archive format.
We can infer:
- the old deja interface, which implies also all the many links to articles archived at deja, is probably gone forever - dead code.
- Google have bought the data, not the code.
- Google haven't yet written their interface - it will probably be some time before it appears. What we have now is a primitive fill-in.
- This inept timing suggests deja's demise was rather hastily decided.
Overall, I think this is a sad day for usenet. Deja was a useful service even to those using nntp based newsreaders - the ability to search all usenet headers for a particular IP address, for example, was a fine thing. The deja search was flexible and powerful, if you knew how to use it.Long term, Google may produce an interface as useful as deja's, and even without some of the annoying quirks - and if they do that will be great.
But you have got to question the abruptness with which they have removed the ability to post for thousands of people. (MailAndNews won't be getting any quicker anytime soon, I bet :-)
--
Actually, I'm pretty sure the rule is: sentences with prepositions should not end, when I last chatted with Yoda, anyway..
--
--
Or: drag a url onto your gui-aware terminal and it runs your fave textmode browser and goes to the url...
Are there any xterm replacements doing this sort of thing?
--
Cosmic ray then - or more likely some duff memory in my machine :-(
--
On inspection I found I this line started with #defile rather than the more usual #define
So what is this? Typo at release time? cosmic ray? random bit error in the ftp pipe? signature pun by truly 1337 h4x0rs after installing trojan source package? isc development team get a sense of humor and respond to being featured on /. ?
Please let me know!
--
I guess some compromises will inevitably be made, given the differing natures of the two media, but you may be pleasantly surprised, and perhaps even slightly reassured, as I was, by the answers to "fan questions" given by director Peter Jackson at the video archive part of the lotr site.
He specifically addresses some of these points: Council of Elrond is in the movie - though no doubt played for cinematic impact, for example. Also interesting were long and thoughtful answers on the thorny question of racist (and "patriarchal") interpretations of the original work.
--
try:
--
.sigs: Just Say No!
--
See, for example, http://www.ecst.csuchico.edu/~droopy/drughist.html (sample quote:)
This and other lies colored the view of two generations about drugs and explains much of the present situation. Political parties are now as bound by these attitudes as they ever were - the path of least effort is not to question the status quo.However, some countries in South America are apparently no longer prepared to go along with this facade. In fact the president of Uruguay, Jorge Batlle has recently come out in favor of widespread legalisation. See:
or the original story (in spanish) at--
This has to happen sooner or later, with some software or other! :-)
Quasimodo author PBD has some pretty good arguments on his site that it is worth doing DSP audio processing on generic PCs, BTW. You can take a look at some dedicated (non-networked, and non-GNU/Linux) hardware solutions at Creamware's site - in particular their high-end-studio-in-a-PC, Scope
Latency will be a problem - not because of delays audible to the human ear, but because of the difficulty of synchronising different tracks that have arrived by different network paths. Net-latency-caused discrepancies of a couple of milliseconds could introduce phase problems in audible ranges. Perhaps a "broadcast clicktrack" plugin of some kind could solve that..?
Sloppy generalisations on the other hand ...... :-)
Period.
Augh. I thought I was using the preview button!
--
"Honestly. You can trust me with that rm command."
In practice a deletable site is more likely to come to your attention via excessive logged transfers or from a letter from a lawyer.
I've personally deleted many users' data without consulting them, because it was obvious to me (from an inspection of logs and the user's site) that there was copyright violation on a massive scale (and consequently our ass would be grass in court.) And by the way, on no occasion did my actions provoke even one complaint from an aggrieved user.
I've also taken the other view many times, and left things in place because the situation wasn't as clear cut.
Sounds like the admin in this case didn't take enough care to check the situation out, but sure, sometimes deleting the data is the Right Thing: sometimes you just don't have to be a lawyer, but
They get their design ideas together and hold a meeting to decide on a platform. I've been selling my friend (their most IT-non-stupid member of staff) on a Free solution (php) and he puts this point of view at their meeting. The management decides that Cold Fusion is what they want.
They buy Cold Fusion and hire a developer (spending about 2 grand) The developer screws up and doesn't deliver anything that looks like it's going to work. Panic, as they have demo and launch dates looming.
After getting the go-ahead from management, my friend locates an off the shelf php app that does most of what they need. He's now modifying it to fill in the gaps, and both their launch and demo have been successful.
Now I'm not drawing any conclusions about Cold Fusion - they were unlucky with their developer - but it's interesting to consider:
1. Bill Gates' credit card details
2. Source code for Bob
3. Cheat list for Solitaire
4. Online application form for donations from the Bill and Melinda foundation
5. Wish list for enhancements to MS-DOS 3.3
6. Complete set of MP3s of Steve Ballmer rocking out
7. Original code for Linux
8. Discarded Office Assistants including Penfield the crazy Judge and Linus the toad
9. Contents of Bill's desktop trash folders for the last five years
10. Contact details for Bill's personal stylist
We have to distinguish here between
- 'politics' as a large and fuzzy-edged strand of human activity
andThe former is likely to be around as long as humans are.
The latter may well be under threat, but will likely continue to evolve in its characteristic hyper-darwinian way to "meet the challenges" of a "wired world". The threat is real, however, because there are some necessary relations between politics, power and information. With luck, in this limited sense of "politics", Jon Katz may be right.
Cynics have long held that politics is the applied science of lying and there is a grain of truth in that view - in real politics control of information is, if not all, at least a very great deal. Remember the 'science of lying' is a branch of information theory.
From the point of view of the politician, sustaining power is a matter of "getting the electorate to agree" - the news media are partners and sometime adversaries in the delicate game of defining what's important, what's out to lunch and what's irrelevant for the electorate.
It's a read-only client/server model, with very many clients and very few servers. Controlling the agenda effectively ('lying') is easy in this model.
With enhanced communications through computer networks, many other models are possible. Now this is a bit of a truism in the hacker community - and is often taken to mean some form of 'electronic democracy' where the government kindly devolves power through online referenda and focus groups and the like, but I think these other models are likely to be implemented over the (dead or horribly maimed) bodies of the old ones or expire themselves (viz the recent "vote auction" fiasco.)
At this relatively early stage of the game, where everyone is still waking up to what is happening, a lot of chips have still to fall and it's pretty much impossible to guess the specifics of the outcome. But as the information spectrum broadens, as it becomes easier and easier for information sharing, opinion forming and mass action to be co-ordinated by self-selecting groups, it's possible that strategies and models will emerge that actually challenge the power base of the existing poliitical system.
So what would be the napster / gnutella killer app for online activists?
Well, if Freenet delivers then that is probably going to help (the yet to come legal struggle over freenet - for which the recent cases can be seen as limbering up - will be interesting because it will identify those whose vested interests are threatened by it...) but I think by and large we already have the software tools in web media (you're looking at one!). We are still waiting for the concepts and 'forms of life' that will make these effective political tools.
One area that comes to mind is 'active consumerism' - buying according to ethical criteria - which if enacted on a really large scale can certainly have impact. Like the man said: "Get organised."
BTW: Politics is still very important to some people, eg microsoft - enough to spend a few million dollars on anyway. See: this article (based on this report) (just give me the report, already!)