Re:CSI - Crummy Science for Idiots
on
The Rise of CSI
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· Score: 3, Informative
Furthermore, Quincy frequently went after "larger issues" like...
Like punk rock. In Next Stop Nowhere: Quincy, the Punk Rock Episode, Quincy tackled punk rock, with exactly that sort of "larger issue" attitude. It showed how punk threatened our early-80s values, showing a mosh pit in which someone was stabbed with an ice pick, "punk" self-mutilation, etc.
Luckily the whole thing wrapped up safe, with ol' Quice dancing to the sounds of Tommy Dorsey, and asking: "Why would anyone want to listen to music that makes you hate, when you can listen to music that makes you love." Why indeed.
Right now, sites remove things of value and ask people to contribute to get that back. That doesn't seem to work.
Right now, sites add irritations (ads that aren't desired) and then charge to remove them. That doesn't work and it's obnoxious.
The answer is clearly to ADD to the site with SUBSCRIBER-ONLY tidbits.
With Slashdot, those tidbits could be quite small. A higher karma cap, for example, would cost Slashdot NOTHING, probably not change the moderation model one bit, and would encourage a TON of subscription. Hell, even a little dot next to the handle, to indicate that the poster is a subscriber, would cause people to sign up.
People want a feeling of membership! People want to feel that their contribution is meaningful! And the nice thing is... it IS.
Also, I think you got it exactly right that the collective brainpower here could be used constructively to come up with better concepts.
I dunno if you heard, but in the living room of our ancient human ancestors, there are drawings - drawings on the walls of the caves.
It turns out that people need art just as much as they need an occupation and just as much as they need friends.
You can certainly complain about the quality of that art, but you can't complain about what people get out of it, because most of those people aren't you. They are the only ones qualified to evaluate the quality of their experience. They may not be as intelligent as you are, but if they believe their lives are fulfilling, then their lives ARE fulfilling - for them.
For a long time, Yahoo! was seemingly ignoring the free "add URL" things they were getting and only adding to the directory those entries that were accompanied by their $199 "premium" service which guaranteed that they would look at your entry.
Now they've gone to a $299/year RECURRING fee for listing.
MS got to where they are today by taking advantage of several business practices tied directly to their ability to "lock in" their users and partners. For MS, it's all about leverage, not to higher profits, but to doing what will lock in their users in ways that are profitable to them.
With Linux, that's impossible. Due to licensing and open technologies, you can't hide system calls, you can't obscure protocols or file formats. You can stamp up and down and insist that only you can change the technology, but nobody will realy listen, even if you're using an embedded box. (Thus the arise of the Tivo hacker.)
What MS has been trying to do is to extend their lock-in beyond just desktop software -- to servers (mission 40% accomplished), set-tops, portables, and now to data and the internet itself, first with MSN (where they learned it's not so easy) and now with.Net and Passport (where they'll learn they haven't learned their lesson yet, IMO).
If they were to be successful at creating a model that allows them the same sort of monopoly lock-in with set-top boxes as they have had with software, the big corporate media nonsense you see happening right now would be a pittance. Want to burn a copy of that Universal CD you're listening to? MS wants to be the company that gives you the permission - or prevents you - from doing so. Want to play XBox Madden 2005 against your friend in Springfield? MS will make it possible, with your Passport data from zone.com - and keep a record of what you've done.
This is all wild, idle speculation of course. My crystal ball has been totally wrong before. But MS is close to reaching the upper limit on the desktop, as far as how much revenue they can squeeze out of IT departments for forever upgrading Windows and Office. that's why they're now going to software "rental" plans, anti-piracy raids, and XP installation verification.
That's difficult stuff to push on a bust market that's a little skeptical of the promise of tech, but MS has no choice really; if their stock price does not continue to increase, their employees take the hit. For MS, it could be a case of grow or perish. They already gave more stock out once to counter the employee's needs when the stock stagnated for a while... they surely can't do that during an extended period of time.
Consider the small, non-corporate sites that can't manage the traffic throughput, versus the big, highly-connected sites. Which ones win under this scenario? Already we see major "independents" like K5 and Adequacy, creaking along, trying to keep up with the tides. Let's hope the phrase "All connected up but with nowhere to surf" isn't the watchword of the next decade...
"In other words, we are focusing more toward the actual skill of the player rather than luck."
This is the only thing that worries me, personally, because frankly I suck. Maybe it's age, maybe it's the lack of patience to go check out the ultra-elite message boards where I can get the key bindings to use all these weird-ass dodges and double-secret jumps. Maybe it's the tendonitis which slows down my trigger finger.
I can be competitive, but it's taken a year to get there, and when people are dominating I'm just not good enough.
I hope there is still a place for me, the aging crappy FPS gamer. I'm the one who messes up your team by not playing well enough. I'm the one who accidentally fires at you when you're on the ledge, knocking you off and killing you. I'm the one who runs while firing the rocket launcher, forgetting that I'm about to run past a pole where my rocket will just blow me up, blow me up damn good. I don't want to be the lame one, it just happens.
You elite players need people like me in order to climb the ladder. Every army needs its cannon fodder. But if there are too many dodge keys to remember, no chance of being even the slightest bit effective doing anything, I'll just have to pass and you elites are only going to be left killing yourselves.
And as long as the dot-com boom continues to revolutionize the way we all shop, work, and live, these kinds of 99.999% reliable sites will be very important to us! Because there will be sites other than Amazon and Ebay that cannot withstand even an hour of down time without endangering the very existence of the companies with those sites!
The future lies in big buildings paying big money for big reliable redundant systems with big corporations paying big rent to make sure their big connectivity is almost permanent! Luckily the new pop-up ads will pay for it all!
Why, the only thing stopping people from getting to the completely-reliable sites located there is the fact that 99.99999999% of the routers on the net aren't in that building! But the last two nodes of any traceroute will be absolutely rock-solid! As long as there is some money left to pay bright, qualified network engineers, including 24x7 manned duty! Way to go!
(Phew. I didn't think I had a reserve of enough sarcasm to complete the post.)
In the Philly area, what is now Voicenet was originally a files-n-pr0n BBS back in the day. The gent who ran it was a serious hobbyist. His system grew to something like 50 lines. Nowadays, with T1s leading into Ascend boxen, managed by a single Radius server, 50 lines is not unthinkable. But hobbyists back then knew nothing of Unix. So 50 lines meant that he had 50 386s! And no rack mounting... these were on cheap bent-metal racking with scores of wall warts for the modems! I think it was all in his garage or something.
I heard that the guy was astounded out of his gourd to see one of the first SLIP-oriented ISPs set up correctly with those same 50 lines run from two Sun pizza boxes.
(My own BBS lives on in the form of a web community. The Cellar, est. 1990. The IotD in my sig is just a part of it.)
At one point Mr. Nielsen wanted something like $25K just to talk to people. I don't know if the bubble collapse changed any of that, but it seems like the guy is oriented around letting out just as much knowledge as will make him a valuable commodity.
Usability is such a weird thing, but it seems like it's something that's slowly infusing into the open source movement, which is great. It's one of those things that non-programmers can do if they have a knack for it. It's certainly one of those thngs that few programmers can do alone... programmers have to realize that they just think differently than the rest of the world.
None of this should take anything away from your accomplishments, mpt: I want to genuinely thank you for doing what you do. If it seems like/.ers are whiny about these things, well sure, what AREN'T we whiny about? The bottom line is that Mozilla is far, far better for what you have done. Thank you, thank you, a million times thank you!
If you only have two systems that you spread your data across, buy two compact flash readers (or smart media readers) and just use a CF card (or SM card).
If you have a system that doesn't have USB, but does have a floppy, use the SM option. You can buy an adapter that lets a system read an SM card in a floppy drive.
If you have a notebook without USB, use the CF option. Buy a CF - pc card adapter.
Either of these options will let you expand your CF / SM "drive" with new memory as the market changes. It also lets you spread your data across different cards if you have to. It also works as a beautiful add-on for digital cameras that don't support USB.
The down side is that CF and SM cards don't have a little loop on them for your keychain.
Microsoft plans to offer Passport up as a system to facilitate micropayments. They are targeting the owners of the many unprofitable information sites that are being propped up by venture capital (and pathetically meager ad revenues) today. This will force users to use Passport and pay for the information they receive off the web, with Microsoft taking a cut every time. Microsoft will become the largest middleman in the world, and multinational banks will look on in envy.
Micropayments? Getting a cut of internet sales? Sites being propped up by venture capital? Money being made from "internet wallets"?
It all sounds soooo "late 1999", doesn't it? Which is approximately when the business plan for Passport was turning this dumb wallet into a replacement for the operating system as a means to survive.
Forward to today. The hot model is site subscription with premiums. The internet is facing skepticism as only 3% believe it is an important information source. There IS no venture capital money - forget about propping anything up. The only sites that are seen as viable are those with a strong business model oriented around actually making money - not giving bits of money up to other vendors, when your competition is busy leaving the net altogether.
Remember the Amazon vs B&N vs Borders war? Try borders.com now. Amazon doesn't want Passport if it's the only Internet vendor that anyone uses -- Passort can only do them harm. Neither will any of the Yahoo Stores. If the size of the whole pie is smaller, the worth of a slice of that pie is diminished as well, y'know?
Getting in bed with MS is not like getting a Visa merchant account to handle payments. Along with your customers' financial data, MS could have access to their personal information, buying habits, etc. This means that the competitors of any MS partner will avoid signing up, no matter what. I'm not talking about Borland, here; I'm talking about AOL Time Warner, Sony, Sears, Visa/MC themselves, and many others that aren't rolling off the tip of my tongue.
Dominating the software world is one thing; dominating the rest of the world is entirely another.
Most companies have barged cluelessly into the net and it has hurt them. I don't see why MS's hard right turn into the net should not give them a few fits as well. And they're hardly omnipotent - as your "Bob" example should point out.
TIME's article is best
on
This is IT?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
This is one case where the Time article is the real winner, and the first one that you should go to - don't bother with any of the others, in fact.
Amongst the great quotes:
And he is well aware that uprooting the vast urban infrastructure that supports cars, from parking garages to bridges and tunnels, won't happen soon. Which is why he has pinned his greatest hopes not on the U.S. but abroad, especially in the developing world.
...for a while, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration wanted to classify the Segway as a "powered industrial truck."
The slowest setting, now called training mode, used to be jokingly referred to around DEKA as CEO mode.
There are a lot of comments talking about the legal ramifications, but you don't want to forget the personal/social ramifications to your community.
Your community is not about you; it's about your subject first, then about all the people who find your subject interesting, and about getting them together to communicate. This is important to remember. A lot of community owners find themselves so entranced by their status as benevolent dictator that they quit being benevolent. It's usually an ego-related thing. This is the worst-case scenario. Avoid it.
If you delete posts that people generally expect to be deleted, you'll find your community happy and rewarding. This includes spam, obvious mistake posts with no content, personal information that shouldn't have been communicated, and cases where someone set out to purposefully cause trouble with the system or the community.
If you delete posts that even one person finds useful, you'll find yourself in the middle of a controversy. Think about it from the user's point of view. A user may spend hours developing a post, even days contemplating what to say in a situation. Maybe they didn't take hours to write the post that you edited or deleted, but users don't want to even think about the possibility that their words may disappear. Delete a few posts without warning, even in a site that announces that it's heavily moderated, and you may find the community goes quiet for a few days. This sort of thing happens all the time.
This goes triply for editing posts instead of removing them. I would never participate in a system where my own, attributed words could be changed around as the site owner sees fit. Would you? Why would you? Why would anyone?
Also remember that a good, strong community will police itself to a degree. This sort of thing is not possible on someplace like/. where its popularity, has lead to effective anonymity. When most/. readers read most/. posts, they don't know or care who wrote it. This isn't true of smaller forums where there is a stronger sense of community.
For a long time, newsgroups were the only net community going, and they were so prone to abuse that the communities in them had to develop a combination of thick skin and newbie-flaming. In fact, many people wrote that the flame was an important, necessary tool for the survival of these communities; if people wrote things that the community didn't like, they flamed, and this was their only defense mechanism. And for a while, it worked, until the net grew all out of proportion...
The point is, you may feel that you desperately need to take action as the site owner and moderator, but your best action may well be to leave well-enough alone and let your community take care of it.
grepping for ":on" won't do it for 7.0 and later! chkconfig reports the xinetd-based services at the end with just a plain "on". This includes all the really critical services, including wu-ftpd itself.
It's much much easier than it sounds
on
Design For Community
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I've been doing it since 1986, and my current community, referenced in my sig, has been around for 11 years.
(That's cellar.org, not the Image of the Day.)
The big difference is that when I started it, I did it for the community; when you did it, you did it for your employer, who did it for their own reasons, none of which had ANYTHING to do with the community.
I mean COME ON NOW. The community itself cannot be an afterthought.
On my community, there are no ads. There is no business plan. There isn't even a Paypal/Amazon tip jar. Commerce is not the point - is NEVER the point. The community is not about money, nor is it about me as benevolent dictator. The community is about communication. Nothing else matters.
What do people want out of a community? They want security - to know their words aren't going away. They want utility - to know they aren't going to have to wade through copious amounts of spam or other crap to get what they want. They want unfettered access to each other. They don't want to sit there and work out who's making money or whether the post they write is going to be deleted or whether the post they're replying to was written by a marketing bot.
They want reality in droves. They don't fit into a marketing plan. If they do, it's by accident, and next month they won't.
I built a community because my goal in life is to help people communicate using technology, and I am fascinated by the collision of technology and culture. Excite built communities to make a buck. Our online existence is transparent - the people can tell what we're all about and why. Is it not obvious why mine has lived all these years while Excite is gone?
As far as Slashdot's mis-steps on the way to growth: I ask, how much of that is due to losing sight of what is critically important - the community and its vitality? If Slashdot fails, is it because there aren't hundreds of thousands of tech people who deperately want to connect with each other and communicate with each other? Or is it because it now serves a different master?
TV has a tough job to do, in using only 23 minutes or 46 minutes to develop a plot and resolve it with any sort of realism at all. Not to mention the many interruptions in which your drama must flow correctly. If they can take shortcuts with characters, they will.
In RL, it's important to have social situations secondary to the job. That way your social life and your job life can remain independent - and any job issues won't affect your friendships.
Although I am the sort to have few friends, and thus not an expert, I would say that depending on your job for your social life would be a bad idea in RL.
One, in case the marketing folks at H/P haven't noticed, three days ago consumer confidence was just reported to be at it's lowest point in a decade. A very bad time to push a $999 device that doesn't really add all that much value. If I had a thousand dollars, which I don't, there are about thirty devices in line before this one. Hell, a "beater" used car for the winter should be in line before this thing.
Two, with his dep't tag and repeated pushing of exactly this sort of consumer toy, it suggests that Taco is lusting after these $999 devices, which is what he shouldn't be admitting during a time when he is trying to leverage the tech news weblog model into more intrusive revenue generation. It makes me want to turn off the ads in my/. preferences, and not join any sort of membership model.
I have given a lot to sites through the Amazon and Paypal tip jars. I support sites that really need the money and are using it for bandwidth and hardware, not expensive toys. Back in the day, I even sent Taco a graduation gift, which represented the/. tip jar of its time.
At this point, other webmasters are quitting the business or turning their sites into non-profit ventures that don't support even their own salary. I don't deny anyone the right to make money, but I do have to decide what to do with my own limited resources.
Slashdot Mirror
Like punk rock. In Next Stop Nowhere: Quincy, the Punk Rock Episode, Quincy tackled punk rock, with exactly that sort of "larger issue" attitude. It showed how punk threatened our early-80s values, showing a mosh pit in which someone was stabbed with an ice pick, "punk" self-mutilation, etc.
Luckily the whole thing wrapped up safe, with ol' Quice dancing to the sounds of Tommy Dorsey, and asking: "Why would anyone want to listen to music that makes you hate, when you can listen to music that makes you love." Why indeed.
That was a fine game. I don't know why it died... it had to take almost no bandwidth at all to run.
Who wants to code the open source client-server version?
Someone offered to blow me for mine! But I didn't take them up on it.
Right now, sites remove things of value and ask people to contribute to get that back. That doesn't seem to work.
Right now, sites add irritations (ads that aren't desired) and then charge to remove them. That doesn't work and it's obnoxious.
The answer is clearly to ADD to the site with SUBSCRIBER-ONLY tidbits.
With Slashdot, those tidbits could be quite small. A higher karma cap, for example, would cost Slashdot NOTHING, probably not change the moderation model one bit, and would encourage a TON of subscription. Hell, even a little dot next to the handle, to indicate that the poster is a subscriber, would cause people to sign up.
People want a feeling of membership! People want to feel that their contribution is meaningful! And the nice thing is... it IS.
Also, I think you got it exactly right that the collective brainpower here could be used constructively to come up with better concepts.
I dunno if you heard, but in the living room of our ancient human ancestors, there are drawings - drawings on the walls of the caves.
It turns out that people need art just as much as they need an occupation and just as much as they need friends.
You can certainly complain about the quality of that art, but you can't complain about what people get out of it, because most of those people aren't you. They are the only ones qualified to evaluate the quality of their experience. They may not be as intelligent as you are, but if they believe their lives are fulfilling, then their lives ARE fulfilling - for them.
For a long time, Yahoo! was seemingly ignoring the free "add URL" things they were getting and only adding to the directory those entries that were accompanied by their $199 "premium" service which guaranteed that they would look at your entry.
Now they've gone to a $299/year RECURRING fee for listing.
MS got to where they are today by taking advantage of several business practices tied directly to their ability to "lock in" their users and partners. For MS, it's all about leverage, not to higher profits, but to doing what will lock in their users in ways that are profitable to them.
With Linux, that's impossible. Due to licensing and open technologies, you can't hide system calls, you can't obscure protocols or file formats. You can stamp up and down and insist that only you can change the technology, but nobody will realy listen, even if you're using an embedded box. (Thus the arise of the Tivo hacker.)
What MS has been trying to do is to extend their lock-in beyond just desktop software -- to servers (mission 40% accomplished), set-tops, portables, and now to data and the internet itself, first with MSN (where they learned it's not so easy) and now with .Net and Passport (where they'll learn they haven't learned their lesson yet, IMO).
If they were to be successful at creating a model that allows them the same sort of monopoly lock-in with set-top boxes as they have had with software, the big corporate media nonsense you see happening right now would be a pittance. Want to burn a copy of that Universal CD you're listening to? MS wants to be the company that gives you the permission - or prevents you - from doing so. Want to play XBox Madden 2005 against your friend in Springfield? MS will make it possible, with your Passport data from zone.com - and keep a record of what you've done.
This is all wild, idle speculation of course. My crystal ball has been totally wrong before. But MS is close to reaching the upper limit on the desktop, as far as how much revenue they can squeeze out of IT departments for forever upgrading Windows and Office. that's why they're now going to software "rental" plans, anti-piracy raids, and XP installation verification.
That's difficult stuff to push on a bust market that's a little skeptical of the promise of tech, but MS has no choice really; if their stock price does not continue to increase, their employees take the hit. For MS, it could be a case of grow or perish. They already gave more stock out once to counter the employee's needs when the stock stagnated for a while... they surely can't do that during an extended period of time.
Consider the small, non-corporate sites that can't manage the traffic throughput, versus the big, highly-connected sites. Which ones win under this scenario? Already we see major "independents" like K5 and Adequacy, creaking along, trying to keep up with the tides. Let's hope the phrase "All connected up but with nowhere to surf" isn't the watchword of the next decade...
...his wife [sobbing]: "Dammit Tom! You could measure how far it was to the moon! But you couldn't see the distance between... between US!
This is the only thing that worries me, personally, because frankly I suck. Maybe it's age, maybe it's the lack of patience to go check out the ultra-elite message boards where I can get the key bindings to use all these weird-ass dodges and double-secret jumps. Maybe it's the tendonitis which slows down my trigger finger.
I can be competitive, but it's taken a year to get there, and when people are dominating I'm just not good enough.
I hope there is still a place for me, the aging crappy FPS gamer. I'm the one who messes up your team by not playing well enough. I'm the one who accidentally fires at you when you're on the ledge, knocking you off and killing you. I'm the one who runs while firing the rocket launcher, forgetting that I'm about to run past a pole where my rocket will just blow me up, blow me up damn good. I don't want to be the lame one, it just happens.
You elite players need people like me in order to climb the ladder. Every army needs its cannon fodder. But if there are too many dodge keys to remember, no chance of being even the slightest bit effective doing anything, I'll just have to pass and you elites are only going to be left killing yourselves.
And as long as the dot-com boom continues to revolutionize the way we all shop, work, and live, these kinds of 99.999% reliable sites will be very important to us! Because there will be sites other than Amazon and Ebay that cannot withstand even an hour of down time without endangering the very existence of the companies with those sites!
The future lies in big buildings paying big money for big reliable redundant systems with big corporations paying big rent to make sure their big connectivity is almost permanent! Luckily the new pop-up ads will pay for it all!
Why, the only thing stopping people from getting to the completely-reliable sites located there is the fact that 99.99999999% of the routers on the net aren't in that building! But the last two nodes of any traceroute will be absolutely rock-solid! As long as there is some money left to pay bright, qualified network engineers, including 24x7 manned duty! Way to go!
(Phew. I didn't think I had a reserve of enough sarcasm to complete the post.)
In the Philly area, what is now Voicenet was originally a files-n-pr0n BBS back in the day. The gent who ran it was a serious hobbyist. His system grew to something like 50 lines. Nowadays, with T1s leading into Ascend boxen, managed by a single Radius server, 50 lines is not unthinkable. But hobbyists back then knew nothing of Unix. So 50 lines meant that he had 50 386s! And no rack mounting... these were on cheap bent-metal racking with scores of wall warts for the modems! I think it was all in his garage or something.
I heard that the guy was astounded out of his gourd to see one of the first SLIP-oriented ISPs set up correctly with those same 50 lines run from two Sun pizza boxes.
(My own BBS lives on in the form of a web community. The Cellar, est. 1990. The IotD in my sig is just a part of it.)
At one point Mr. Nielsen wanted something like $25K just to talk to people. I don't know if the bubble collapse changed any of that, but it seems like the guy is oriented around letting out just as much knowledge as will make him a valuable commodity.
/.ers are whiny about these things, well sure, what AREN'T we whiny about? The bottom line is that Mozilla is far, far better for what you have done. Thank you, thank you, a million times thank you!
Usability is such a weird thing, but it seems like it's something that's slowly infusing into the open source movement, which is great. It's one of those things that non-programmers can do if they have a knack for it. It's certainly one of those thngs that few programmers can do alone... programmers have to realize that they just think differently than the rest of the world.
None of this should take anything away from your accomplishments, mpt: I want to genuinely thank you for doing what you do. If it seems like
If you only have two systems that you spread your data across, buy two compact flash readers (or smart media readers) and just use a CF card (or SM card).
If you have a system that doesn't have USB, but does have a floppy, use the SM option. You can buy an adapter that lets a system read an SM card in a floppy drive.
If you have a notebook without USB, use the CF option. Buy a CF - pc card adapter.
Either of these options will let you expand your CF / SM "drive" with new memory as the market changes. It also lets you spread your data across different cards if you have to. It also works as a beautiful add-on for digital cameras that don't support USB.
The down side is that CF and SM cards don't have a little loop on them for your keychain.
It turns out that al Qaeda is actually a bitter DR-DOS user group.
Micropayments? Getting a cut of internet sales? Sites being propped up by venture capital? Money being made from "internet wallets"?
It all sounds soooo "late 1999", doesn't it? Which is approximately when the business plan for Passport was turning this dumb wallet into a replacement for the operating system as a means to survive.
Forward to today. The hot model is site subscription with premiums. The internet is facing skepticism as only 3% believe it is an important information source. There IS no venture capital money - forget about propping anything up. The only sites that are seen as viable are those with a strong business model oriented around actually making money - not giving bits of money up to other vendors, when your competition is busy leaving the net altogether.
Remember the Amazon vs B&N vs Borders war? Try borders.com now. Amazon doesn't want Passport if it's the only Internet vendor that anyone uses -- Passort can only do them harm. Neither will any of the Yahoo Stores. If the size of the whole pie is smaller, the worth of a slice of that pie is diminished as well, y'know?
Getting in bed with MS is not like getting a Visa merchant account to handle payments. Along with your customers' financial data, MS could have access to their personal information, buying habits, etc. This means that the competitors of any MS partner will avoid signing up, no matter what. I'm not talking about Borland, here; I'm talking about AOL Time Warner, Sony, Sears, Visa/MC themselves, and many others that aren't rolling off the tip of my tongue.
Dominating the software world is one thing; dominating the rest of the world is entirely another.
Most companies have barged cluelessly into the net and it has hurt them. I don't see why MS's hard right turn into the net should not give them a few fits as well. And they're hardly omnipotent - as your "Bob" example should point out.
How kpmg.com renders in Mozilla
Amongst the great quotes:
There are a lot of comments talking about the legal ramifications, but you don't want to forget the personal/social ramifications to your community.
/. where its popularity, has lead to effective anonymity. When most /. readers read most /. posts, they don't know or care who wrote it. This isn't true of smaller forums where there is a stronger sense of community.
Your community is not about you; it's about your subject first, then about all the people who find your subject interesting, and about getting them together to communicate. This is important to remember. A lot of community owners find themselves so entranced by their status as benevolent dictator that they quit being benevolent. It's usually an ego-related thing. This is the worst-case scenario. Avoid it.
If you delete posts that people generally expect to be deleted, you'll find your community happy and rewarding. This includes spam, obvious mistake posts with no content, personal information that shouldn't have been communicated, and cases where someone set out to purposefully cause trouble with the system or the community.
If you delete posts that even one person finds useful, you'll find yourself in the middle of a controversy. Think about it from the user's point of view. A user may spend hours developing a post, even days contemplating what to say in a situation. Maybe they didn't take hours to write the post that you edited or deleted, but users don't want to even think about the possibility that their words may disappear. Delete a few posts without warning, even in a site that announces that it's heavily moderated, and you may find the community goes quiet for a few days. This sort of thing happens all the time.
This goes triply for editing posts instead of removing them. I would never participate in a system where my own, attributed words could be changed around as the site owner sees fit. Would you? Why would you? Why would anyone?
Also remember that a good, strong community will police itself to a degree. This sort of thing is not possible on someplace like
For a long time, newsgroups were the only net community going, and they were so prone to abuse that the communities in them had to develop a combination of thick skin and newbie-flaming. In fact, many people wrote that the flame was an important, necessary tool for the survival of these communities; if people wrote things that the community didn't like, they flamed, and this was their only defense mechanism. And for a while, it worked, until the net grew all out of proportion...
The point is, you may feel that you desperately need to take action as the site owner and moderator, but your best action may well be to leave well-enough alone and let your community take care of it.
grepping for ":on" won't do it for 7.0 and later! chkconfig reports the xinetd-based services at the end with just a plain "on". This includes all the really critical services, including wu-ftpd itself.
I've been doing it since 1986, and my current community, referenced in my sig, has been around for 11 years.
(That's cellar.org, not the Image of the Day.)
The big difference is that when I started it, I did it for the community; when you did it, you did it for your employer, who did it for their own reasons, none of which had ANYTHING to do with the community.
I mean COME ON NOW. The community itself cannot be an afterthought.
On my community, there are no ads. There is no business plan. There isn't even a Paypal/Amazon tip jar. Commerce is not the point - is NEVER the point. The community is not about money, nor is it about me as benevolent dictator. The community is about communication. Nothing else matters.
What do people want out of a community? They want security - to know their words aren't going away. They want utility - to know they aren't going to have to wade through copious amounts of spam or other crap to get what they want. They want unfettered access to each other. They don't want to sit there and work out who's making money or whether the post they write is going to be deleted or whether the post they're replying to was written by a marketing bot.
They want reality in droves. They don't fit into a marketing plan. If they do, it's by accident, and next month they won't.
I built a community because my goal in life is to help people communicate using technology, and I am fascinated by the collision of technology and culture. Excite built communities to make a buck. Our online existence is transparent - the people can tell what we're all about and why. Is it not obvious why mine has lived all these years while Excite is gone?
As far as Slashdot's mis-steps on the way to growth: I ask, how much of that is due to losing sight of what is critically important - the community and its vitality? If Slashdot fails, is it because there aren't hundreds of thousands of tech people who deperately want to connect with each other and communicate with each other? Or is it because it now serves a different master?
TV has a tough job to do, in using only 23 minutes or 46 minutes to develop a plot and resolve it with any sort of realism at all. Not to mention the many interruptions in which your drama must flow correctly. If they can take shortcuts with characters, they will.
In RL, it's important to have social situations secondary to the job. That way your social life and your job life can remain independent - and any job issues won't affect your friendships.
Although I am the sort to have few friends, and thus not an expert, I would say that depending on your job for your social life would be a bad idea in RL.
...in several ways.
/. preferences, and not join any sort of membership model.
/. tip jar of its time.
One, in case the marketing folks at H/P haven't noticed, three days ago consumer confidence was just reported to be at it's lowest point in a decade. A very bad time to push a $999 device that doesn't really add all that much value. If I had a thousand dollars, which I don't, there are about thirty devices in line before this one. Hell, a "beater" used car for the winter should be in line before this thing.
Two, with his dep't tag and repeated pushing of exactly this sort of consumer toy, it suggests that Taco is lusting after these $999 devices, which is what he shouldn't be admitting during a time when he is trying to leverage the tech news weblog model into more intrusive revenue generation. It makes me want to turn off the ads in my
I have given a lot to sites through the Amazon and Paypal tip jars. I support sites that really need the money and are using it for bandwidth and hardware, not expensive toys. Back in the day, I even sent Taco a graduation gift, which represented the
At this point, other webmasters are quitting the business or turning their sites into non-profit ventures that don't support even their own salary. I don't deny anyone the right to make money, but I do have to decide what to do with my own limited resources.
If it included strong encryption software, it could in fact be classified for export as "munitions".
"Read this, and other stories, in this month's edition of 'Duh' magazine."