Lyris rules. I have tried every other piece of software, and Lyris beats them all in terms of features and stability. John Buckman is very very good about getting feature requests into new releases; almost all changes to the Lyris codebase are now feature requests from regular users.
I've set up and run mailing lists with hundreds of users, and one list has run continuously for nearly ten years. It strikes me that what these "introduction to mailing lists" books really need is a chapter on the practical, human aspects of running a mailing list. I think that most of the Slashdot crowd really wouldn't have any problems with the technology of mailing lists. The most difficult aspect of running a newspaper is not necessarily getting the type pressed upon the page.
If we take mailing list technology as a given, there are still some pieces of advice that I think are required for anyone running a mailing list:
- Always moderate your mailing list. There are too many e-mail worms and other nasty crap that happens via e-mail these days. It's possible to infect hundreds of people instantaneously via an unmoderated mailing list. This stuff can be caught if a human reads every submission.
- Moderate daily. People hate seeing their messages sit in queue for too long.
- Moderate mistakes. One-line "I agree" posts, "fuck you" posts, posts that clearly were not intended for the list, and empty posts should never go to the list.
- Resist the urge to limit discussion. If someone has an opinion that you disagree with, this is exactly the sort of thing that you want to see on your list. Most moderators make the mistake (as they do on Slashdot) that because they disagree with the poster's opinion, it shouldn't be seen by anyone. A healthy disagreement is critical to the survival of any online forum.
Engineers, wake up. You are responsible for your inventions, and you have to live with the moral consequences of those inventions. This is exactly what Bill Joy was trying to tell us. Robert Oppenheimer employed 5,000 people to build his bomb, and after it was employed against Japanese civilians he declared to Harry Truman, "Mr. President, I have blood on my hands." To the engineers building the bomb, it was a neat hack. They did not question the moral implications of the device until it was proven. If you build something that you expect to change the world, don't snivel about your "overwhelming feelings of guilt". Either accept the moral implications of your invention or don't build it.
Re:it seems we could do more to help the effort.
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 1
Geek: not all problems in the world can be solved by typing on a keyboard. Seeing as how computer discs have been recently outlawed in Afghanistan there isn't going to be very much online information to gather.
Doesn't it seem more likely that the current stem-cell media noise is an excuse for Clark? When Jim Clark committed this money ($150M IIRC) he was awash in cash and AOL stock from his recently sold Netscape. In other words he was plenty richer when he told Stanford that he was going to donate mucho bucks to them. Now the NASDAQ is sucking wind and Clark's millions aren't looking so vast anymore. So Clark seizes on a plausible-sounding excuse -- "it's those conservative stem-cell bastards!" -- and refuses to give up $60M of his own money. Based on reading Clark's argument, it would seem that Clark should donate MORE money to Stanford, to make up for the loss in government funds.
Look: you don't get to be the president of even a dot-com without having some knowledge of PR. Clark has spun an entertaining story that even the Times bought, and saved himself enough cash to secure a comfy retirement in the Adirondacks. Simple as that.
Geeks beware: as of this writing the Linux drivers for the Linksys WPC11 are IMHO unusable for setting up a simple home firewall/router. This is the cheapest Linksys 802.11b card out and it's the only one that Fry's carries. The WPC11 requires an experimental Linux kernel plus patches plus editing some constants at the beginning of a header file and recompiling a driver to get them to work. Apparently the WPC11 is basically just a glue card that makes the PCMCIA core visible on the PCI bus. See here for more info on getting the Prism chipset working with Linux and problems with the WPC11. If you want to build a working router with the WPC11 in less than a day with a spare PC, you'll have to swallow your open-source pride and install a copy of Windows 98 and WinProxy. I did so last week and got it working in less than an hour.
Sony is going to be in a tizzy about this technology. While Sony has been very open about giving away middleware licenses, it's all been under NDA controls; Sony now officially has no control over what games get published on the PS2 and which ones do not. This is the worst possible situation for Sony; they make their profits based on royalty sales of third-party games. Now a third-party developer can develop PS2 games without getting any proprietary technology directly from Sony and without paying Sony a cent. There was recently a decision in Sony vs. Connectix in the US that makes it less likely that Sony can successfully pursue unlicensed game development. Given the $130 loss on each piece of hardware, this means that Sony is set to lose a big pile of cash. When Sony upper echelons get wind of this, the guy who released the Linux port in Japan will be demoted to toilet cleaner.
Even high-quality Windoze-centric shops have gone away - just look at Looking Glass studios for one. Gone! And they didn't do ANY linux. And they had great games, and excellent sales. And they were liquidated just last year.
Your analysis is a bit superficial. I recently spoke to one of the senior people at Looking Glass who specifically told me that the failure of Looking Glass was due to a rocky relationship with Eidos, the publisher on the Thief series and System Shock. While their games sold relatively well, their business relationship assumed that an acquisition would occur at some point, and since this never occurred Looking Glass went under.
Strangely, these days, the home console market is the only place where sophisticated computer games have a fair chance of being profitable. The sales volumes are significantly greater than those sales for Linux... and Windows.
You're substituting hearsay for actual sales numbers. A typical PS2 or Dreamcast title is considered to sell well at around 200K units; sales of over 500K are uncommon. Hit PC titles regularly sell upwards of a million units, with no royalties paid to the platform manufacturer. That's why TRSTS breaks out game sales by PC and then by console; hit PC game sales, at this time anyway, always eclipse sales of hit console games.
The reason why PC games are not very profitable right now is because the retail channel is stuffed with PC games. It's much harder to sell into the retail channel if you're a PC game publisher than it was 2 years ago. I would say that all US game publishers have laid off staff within the past 12 months.
Loki took a risk by developing for an unproven game platform. They took a further risk by trying to sell games into a slower game market; consumers last Christmas bought more lower-priced software and spent less money on A+ games. In other words, more people bought more games at $19.99 and $29.99 and there was less of a market for premium games. So even though the size of the market increased slightly, margins dropped on those games, and developers and publishers took it on the chin. NPD says things are looking up. I hope that's the case. Until then, take a clue from the dot-com plague and try not to develop any games for unproven markets, kids.
Slashdot desperately needs is a full-time lawyer. It's a great site for Internet geek stuff but nobody on the site has the first fucking clue about liability law. That in itself would not necessarily be awful if it were not the case that all discussions here invariably end up with a bunch of laymen talking legal theory. Lawyers, help!
Hiding your engineers is pretty typical for the entertainment software industry. The cheapest way to recruit quality employees is to steal them from another company. I've had managers from other companies attempt to steal my employees away with false promises and trivial pay increases. Top game development talent is always hard to come by. There's a protocol in the game development community that says that a manager will not steal a programmer from another manager. Doing so is basically a declaration of war.
There are several videogame companies -- id and Prolific come to mind -- that have voicemail greetings that specifically tell recruiters to fuck off.
Okay, we're maybe 65 posts into the thread, and I haven't seen a single legal use of P2P above this point that is in actual implementation today. If the Slashdot crowd has no real idea of any current-day, non-theoretical use of P2P, it's likely that there is none. Screw P2P. Stop stealing stuff with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Lyris rules. I have tried every other piece of software, and Lyris beats them all in terms of features and stability. John Buckman is very very good about getting feature requests into new releases; almost all changes to the Lyris codebase are now feature requests from regular users.
I've set up and run mailing lists with hundreds of users, and one list has run continuously for nearly ten years. It strikes me that what these "introduction to mailing lists" books really need is a chapter on the practical, human aspects of running a mailing list. I think that most of the Slashdot crowd really wouldn't have any problems with the technology of mailing lists. The most difficult aspect of running a newspaper is not necessarily getting the type pressed upon the page.
If we take mailing list technology as a given, there are still some pieces of advice that I think are required for anyone running a mailing list:
- Always moderate your mailing list. There are too many e-mail worms and other nasty crap that happens via e-mail these days. It's possible to infect hundreds of people instantaneously via an unmoderated mailing list. This stuff can be caught if a human reads every submission.
- Moderate daily. People hate seeing their messages sit in queue for too long.
- Moderate mistakes. One-line "I agree" posts, "fuck you" posts, posts that clearly were not intended for the list, and empty posts should never go to the list.
- Resist the urge to limit discussion. If someone has an opinion that you disagree with, this is exactly the sort of thing that you want to see on your list. Most moderators make the mistake (as they do on Slashdot) that because they disagree with the poster's opinion, it shouldn't be seen by anyone. A healthy disagreement is critical to the survival of any online forum.
This isn't a mirror, just a redirect to the soon-to-be-overwhelmed Apple site. Somebody mod this poorly considered post down.
Engineers, wake up. You are responsible for your inventions, and you have to live with the moral consequences of those inventions. This is exactly what Bill Joy was trying to tell us. Robert Oppenheimer employed 5,000 people to build his bomb, and after it was employed against Japanese civilians he declared to Harry Truman, "Mr. President, I have blood on my hands." To the engineers building the bomb, it was a neat hack. They did not question the moral implications of the device until it was proven. If you build something that you expect to change the world, don't snivel about your "overwhelming feelings of guilt". Either accept the moral implications of your invention or don't build it.
Geek: not all problems in the world can be solved by typing on a keyboard. Seeing as how computer discs have been recently outlawed in Afghanistan there isn't going to be very much online information to gather.
Doesn't it seem more likely that the current stem-cell media noise is an excuse for Clark? When Jim Clark committed this money ($150M IIRC) he was awash in cash and AOL stock from his recently sold Netscape. In other words he was plenty richer when he told Stanford that he was going to donate mucho bucks to them. Now the NASDAQ is sucking wind and Clark's millions aren't looking so vast anymore. So Clark seizes on a plausible-sounding excuse -- "it's those conservative stem-cell bastards!" -- and refuses to give up $60M of his own money. Based on reading Clark's argument, it would seem that Clark should donate MORE money to Stanford, to make up for the loss in government funds.
Look: you don't get to be the president of even a dot-com without having some knowledge of PR. Clark has spun an entertaining story that even the Times bought, and saved himself enough cash to secure a comfy retirement in the Adirondacks. Simple as that.
Geeks beware: as of this writing the Linux drivers for the Linksys WPC11 are IMHO unusable for setting up a simple home firewall/router. This is the cheapest Linksys 802.11b card out and it's the only one that Fry's carries. The WPC11 requires an experimental Linux kernel plus patches plus editing some constants at the beginning of a header file and recompiling a driver to get them to work. Apparently the WPC11 is basically just a glue card that makes the PCMCIA core visible on the PCI bus. See here for more info on getting the Prism chipset working with Linux and problems with the WPC11. If you want to build a working router with the WPC11 in less than a day with a spare PC, you'll have to swallow your open-source pride and install a copy of Windows 98 and WinProxy. I did so last week and got it working in less than an hour.
Sony is going to be in a tizzy about this technology. While Sony has been very open about giving away middleware licenses, it's all been under NDA controls; Sony now officially has no control over what games get published on the PS2 and which ones do not. This is the worst possible situation for Sony; they make their profits based on royalty sales of third-party games. Now a third-party developer can develop PS2 games without getting any proprietary technology directly from Sony and without paying Sony a cent. There was recently a decision in Sony vs. Connectix in the US that makes it less likely that Sony can successfully pursue unlicensed game development. Given the $130 loss on each piece of hardware, this means that Sony is set to lose a big pile of cash. When Sony upper echelons get wind of this, the guy who released the Linux port in Japan will be demoted to toilet cleaner.
Even high-quality Windoze-centric shops have gone away - just look at Looking Glass studios for one. Gone! And they didn't do ANY linux. And they had great games, and excellent sales. And they were liquidated just last year.
Your analysis is a bit superficial. I recently spoke to one of the senior people at Looking Glass who specifically told me that the failure of Looking Glass was due to a rocky relationship with Eidos, the publisher on the Thief series and System Shock. While their games sold relatively well, their business relationship assumed that an acquisition would occur at some point, and since this never occurred Looking Glass went under.
Strangely, these days, the home console market is the only place where sophisticated computer games have a fair chance of being profitable. The sales volumes are significantly greater than those sales for Linux... and Windows.
You're substituting hearsay for actual sales numbers. A typical PS2 or Dreamcast title is considered to sell well at around 200K units; sales of over 500K are uncommon. Hit PC titles regularly sell upwards of a million units, with no royalties paid to the platform manufacturer. That's why TRSTS breaks out game sales by PC and then by console; hit PC game sales, at this time anyway, always eclipse sales of hit console games.
The reason why PC games are not very profitable right now is because the retail channel is stuffed with PC games. It's much harder to sell into the retail channel if you're a PC game publisher than it was 2 years ago. I would say that all US game publishers have laid off staff within the past 12 months.
Loki took a risk by developing for an unproven game platform. They took a further risk by trying to sell games into a slower game market; consumers last Christmas bought more lower-priced software and spent less money on A+ games. In other words, more people bought more games at $19.99 and $29.99 and there was less of a market for premium games. So even though the size of the market increased slightly, margins dropped on those games, and developers and publishers took it on the chin. NPD says things are looking up. I hope that's the case. Until then, take a clue from the dot-com plague and try not to develop any games for unproven markets, kids.
Slashdot desperately needs is a full-time lawyer. It's a great site for Internet geek stuff but nobody on the site has the first fucking clue about liability law. That in itself would not necessarily be awful if it were not the case that all discussions here invariably end up with a bunch of laymen talking legal theory. Lawyers, help!
Hiding your engineers is pretty typical for the entertainment software industry. The cheapest way to recruit quality employees is to steal them from another company. I've had managers from other companies attempt to steal my employees away with false promises and trivial pay increases. Top game development talent is always hard to come by. There's a protocol in the game development community that says that a manager will not steal a programmer from another manager. Doing so is basically a declaration of war. There are several videogame companies -- id and Prolific come to mind -- that have voicemail greetings that specifically tell recruiters to fuck off.
Okay, we're maybe 65 posts into the thread, and I haven't seen a single legal use of P2P above this point that is in actual implementation today. If the Slashdot crowd has no real idea of any current-day, non-theoretical use of P2P, it's likely that there is none. Screw P2P. Stop stealing stuff with it.