And I can't really buy games off the shelf, nor printers, or a lot of other hardware, and have it work. Oh, and Linux does have its own problems, weird things breaking, spending hours figuring out what exactly is wrong, and then diving into a text file to change some obsure setting. Most of those 20,000 apps are shit. Sorry.
You mean like the sound cards and printers that don't work under Vista? Or the fact that you have to dive into a text file to change some "obsure" setting to uncripple the video game you just bought? I don't think Windows can claim the technical advantage here.
Should everyone and anyone be allowed to use Wikipedia as free hosting service for whatever they want?
Yes. As long as they're presenting facts, why not? I have "Randompage" in my daily reading and I can't count how many times I've stumbled upon an interesting subject I never would have found on my own. Sometimes the fascination is simply that someone cared enough about post-Soviet Peruvian widget carving to document it in excruciating detail.
When I was a kid, I pretty much read the World Book Encyclopedia from cover to cover. There were a lot of subjects that I thought were boring, but I'm glad I was exposed to them and knew that they existed. Well, I want the same think for Wikipedia. It's in the unique position of having a chance to redefine what an encyclopedia can be. They've already tossed away the idea that one can only be written by hand-picked authors. Why not also the idea that one has to be limited in scope to fit in a predefined box?
How about this: implement a simplified version of Google's PageRank algorithm within Wikipedia that shows how many other topics link to any given topic. List that number at the top of each page. Add "minimum interestingness" as a user preference so that weird pages not linked anywhere else don't show up on your radar - not that they're likely to anyway. Pick an arbitrary level as the default for visitors who aren't logged in. That way everyone gets what they want: the Deletionists get an article pool as tiny as they could ever dare hope for, and Completists can wallow in cruft to their hearts' content.
You're right. I'm pissed because I happened across an article I found interesting but flawed, put in a little effort to clean it up, and saw it get deleted because some jackass didn't feel it worthy. Because, you know, Wikipedia is running short on hard drive space and all of those little-read articles are using up its network bandwidth.
Speaking of which, the admins might read up on the Network Effect that says that a million decent articles are a lot more useful than a thousand perfect ones. Certain folk have decided to the contrary, and that they personally are the ones to judge fitness.
That was pretty funny, but you hit on a sore spot of mine: notability deletions. See, there are destructive bastards who like to brag about the articles they've deleted and delight in destroying Wikipedia. Because these "notability" jackboots are tolerated and you're only allowed to see the articles that meet their nebulous standards, Wikipedia is useless to me as a resource. It may cover a lot of the common information on a subject but there's a good chance all the interesting dark corners have been labeled as "cruft" and removed.
I don't mind flame wars. There's nothing you can say to hurt my feelings. Remove my words and pretend they never existed, though, and now we've got a problem. To hell with Wikipedia and the arrogant bastards that patrol it.
Even when someone claims to be a WalMart employee when they aren't? In order to spread propaganda?
Yes, even then. First, understand that I don't think this is a good thing to be doing. I'm not pro-union, but neither am I pro-megacorp. Still, the natural freedoms enumerated in the first amendment extend to things I don't agree with. I don't see any constitutionally or philosophically sound reason why the Wal-Mart CEO shouldn't have the same rights I enjoy.
And I'm pretty sure that even if we let him do it, we shouldn't shield those sockpuppets anonymity by law to make sure he can't get unmasked.
I disagree. If I get to, he gets to (and vice versa). Maybe sometime I'll want to say something that he'll disagree with, and I don't want him to have the necessary precedent to shut me up. Again, it's not that I think he should be doing this, but that I truly believe that defending his rights is the same as defending mine.
After all, we'd be outraged if Walmart managers started series of grassroots anti-union blogs in a number of places...
Only the hypocrites among us. The rest would realize that Wal-Mart's employees also enjoy the freedom to speak, even when we don't approve of the message.
I didn't read anywhere that he wanted to keep on punishing you. His intent as I read it was that if the government thinks you're a terrorist, then they should arrest you and have a trial. If they don't think you're a terrorist, then they should let you go back to what you were doing before.
Why people never learn to admit that some people think Perl looks nicer than the language they love most?
For most of the same reasons that make it hard to admit that their wife is an alcoholic or that their son wants to become a Hari Krishna. There are certain truths that make it difficult to believe in a rational society. Yours is one of them.
What kind of real items are you buying in Second Life?
Money. SL lets you buy and sell real world currency. If someone has a credit card on file, you could use their character to buy quite a lot of money and transfer it to another user before trading limits kicked in. I'm sure there are no end of effective laundering schemes to get it back out cleanly.
They are deploying their Perl on Rails app so that they can have more dynamic content, which they couldn't have before because they're limited to static files and perl scripts.
Well, I still think the correct interpretation is that they have a huge number of templated pages that are regularly statically generated. Maybe it's not a daily cron job that recreates the whole site, but a script that takes a template you just edited and turns it into a static page by running some Perl magic on it.
I'm guessing that "static" here means "non-interactive", not that each page exists in source form as the complete end-user-ready HTML. A huge advantage of this is that your webserver can employ massive naive caching; if two users requrest "foo.html", the second can be served from cache and not from having to regenerate the page. Maybe they want a few pages to be interactive while retaining a large chunk of static content.
They're talking about having tens of thousands of files in a directory, and having an archive of data on all shows the BBC is showing, but no mention of using anything other than flat files!
Flat files that are pre-generated from a database backend, maybe. As in a cron job each night that does something like "for show in db.select(shows): generatestaticpage(show)". I'd be amazed if the whole site was just one big Dreamweaver folder that gets published.
I really can't imagine what their circumstances would have to be for it to be a sane option to rewrite Ruby on Rails in Perl.
"We have a database engine. We have a template system. We have a language that everyone in-house knows. Let's write a generalized method for combining the three!"
I suspect that happens a lot more often than you'd think. If anything, I consider it a testament to the BBC that they've decided to release their code so that everyone else doesn't have to reinvent it.
Disclaimer: I much prefer Python, and to me the BBC is that extra channel that has "Coupling" and "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares". I have no special love for Perl or the BBC. I just think that it's pretty cool of them to do this and wish them luck.
Sounds like a bunch of Perl coders who cant be bothered to learn another platform trying to keep themselves in jobs.
Sounds to me like a bunch of Perl coders with a few million lines of corporate code who thought this would be easier than learning another language for one specific smallish project.
Oh, definitely. What I meant is that you don't have to appeal to mankind's nobler senses to sell digital. "Here's your order,cheap and now" wins out over loftier ideals every time, and it's a happy coincidence here that digital distribution meets all of those goals.
and in an increasingly "green-friendly" world the concept of digital distribution, which requires no printing presses, no petroleum-based products, etc., is the way forward.
I couldn't care less about the "greenness" of digital vs. physical distribution. I care a whole lot about the idea of wanting to hear an album and having on my computer 5 minutes later. That's what clinches the deal for me, and I suspect for most people.
Believe it or not, SPAM really isn't all that bad when done properly. Slice it thin and fry it with onions for a yummy sandwich. Seriously, although it looks disgusting, it's can be pretty good. People don't keep buying it because it's awful.
In fact, just because you 'invent' a new word, such as "Ptbbth", and 50 years later it coincidentally
gets used to described chunky ham-handed hormel-loving sloths named Jay in the common lexicon,
you can't sue the world to reclaim the word you 'invented'. Sorry, it's called fair use. Patent law 101.
Considering you're mixing patents, trademarks, and copyright (via "fair use"), I think we can safely file your legal opinion under "talking out my ass".
You still can run a web site on modified GPL3 software and not share the modifications you made. It's the AGPL3 (http://www.fsf.org/agplv3-pr) that prohibits this.
Quite correct. Fortunately, it's almost trivially easy to beat the AGPL.
I'm guessing it's the old IRC-workalike feature where you type:
/me is tired.
and it sends:
Just Some Guy is tired.
Nothing big, but still something you get used to having around. Having said that, I still hate iChat. Metacontacts, Apple! Metacontacts! Who wants to have a separate contact list for each account they log into?
Vista Similarity #5: He tries to claim that time machine is awful, because it does file-level, not block-level incrementals, it doesn't work on network shares by default
How so? I've been backing up to a 100GB CIFS share on my FreeBSD server for a few weeks now. Is that a no-no or something?
Spam is sent because spammers can make money by sending it. Period.
Right. And the hope is that once we make it sufficiently expensive to get a significant amount of spam delivered, it'll no longer be financially worthwhile. I think we're probably approaching that point. I wrote a spam-filtering recipe and now see maybe 1% of all the crap thrown at it. That means it's now 100 times more costly per delivered message than it used to be. We all know that spammers pay for only a fraction of the highjacked resources they use, but even then they still have to pay something. Well, that something costs a lot more than it did 5 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like the sound cards and printers that don't work under Vista? Or the fact that you have to dive into a text file to change some "obsure" setting to uncripple the video game you just bought? I don't think Windows can claim the technical advantage here.
mod_proxy can be your friend. There's probably no need to regenerate a whole page every single time it's requested.
Yes. As long as they're presenting facts, why not? I have "Randompage" in my daily reading and I can't count how many times I've stumbled upon an interesting subject I never would have found on my own. Sometimes the fascination is simply that someone cared enough about post-Soviet Peruvian widget carving to document it in excruciating detail.
When I was a kid, I pretty much read the World Book Encyclopedia from cover to cover. There were a lot of subjects that I thought were boring, but I'm glad I was exposed to them and knew that they existed. Well, I want the same think for Wikipedia. It's in the unique position of having a chance to redefine what an encyclopedia can be. They've already tossed away the idea that one can only be written by hand-picked authors. Why not also the idea that one has to be limited in scope to fit in a predefined box?
How about this: implement a simplified version of Google's PageRank algorithm within Wikipedia that shows how many other topics link to any given topic. List that number at the top of each page. Add "minimum interestingness" as a user preference so that weird pages not linked anywhere else don't show up on your radar - not that they're likely to anyway. Pick an arbitrary level as the default for visitors who aren't logged in. That way everyone gets what they want: the Deletionists get an article pool as tiny as they could ever dare hope for, and Completists can wallow in cruft to their hearts' content.
Yeah, I still remember how I saw the world before I became a mailadmin. That sigh was for innocence lost.
You're right. I'm pissed because I happened across an article I found interesting but flawed, put in a little effort to clean it up, and saw it get deleted because some jackass didn't feel it worthy. Because, you know, Wikipedia is running short on hard drive space and all of those little-read articles are using up its network bandwidth.
Speaking of which, the admins might read up on the Network Effect that says that a million decent articles are a lot more useful than a thousand perfect ones. Certain folk have decided to the contrary, and that they personally are the ones to judge fitness.
That was pretty funny, but you hit on a sore spot of mine: notability deletions. See, there are destructive bastards who like to brag about the articles they've deleted and delight in destroying Wikipedia. Because these "notability" jackboots are tolerated and you're only allowed to see the articles that meet their nebulous standards, Wikipedia is useless to me as a resource. It may cover a lot of the common information on a subject but there's a good chance all the interesting dark corners have been labeled as "cruft" and removed.
I don't mind flame wars. There's nothing you can say to hurt my feelings. Remove my words and pretend they never existed, though, and now we've got a problem. To hell with Wikipedia and the arrogant bastards that patrol it.
Yes, even then. First, understand that I don't think this is a good thing to be doing. I'm not pro-union, but neither am I pro-megacorp. Still, the natural freedoms enumerated in the first amendment extend to things I don't agree with. I don't see any constitutionally or philosophically sound reason why the Wal-Mart CEO shouldn't have the same rights I enjoy.
And I'm pretty sure that even if we let him do it, we shouldn't shield those sockpuppets anonymity by law to make sure he can't get unmasked.I disagree. If I get to, he gets to (and vice versa). Maybe sometime I'll want to say something that he'll disagree with, and I don't want him to have the necessary precedent to shut me up. Again, it's not that I think he should be doing this, but that I truly believe that defending his rights is the same as defending mine.
Only the hypocrites among us. The rest would realize that Wal-Mart's employees also enjoy the freedom to speak, even when we don't approve of the message.
I didn't read anywhere that he wanted to keep on punishing you. His intent as I read it was that if the government thinks you're a terrorist, then they should arrest you and have a trial. If they don't think you're a terrorist, then they should let you go back to what you were doing before.
You beat me to it. It's not an ad hominem attack, it's presentation of a relevant track record.
On my Dish Network system, it's on BBC America.
For most of the same reasons that make it hard to admit that their wife is an alcoholic or that their son wants to become a Hari Krishna. There are certain truths that make it difficult to believe in a rational society. Yours is one of them.
Money. SL lets you buy and sell real world currency. If someone has a credit card on file, you could use their character to buy quite a lot of money and transfer it to another user before trading limits kicked in. I'm sure there are no end of effective laundering schemes to get it back out cleanly.
Well, I still think the correct interpretation is that they have a huge number of templated pages that are regularly statically generated. Maybe it's not a daily cron job that recreates the whole site, but a script that takes a template you just edited and turns it into a static page by running some Perl magic on it.
I'm guessing that "static" here means "non-interactive", not that each page exists in source form as the complete end-user-ready HTML. A huge advantage of this is that your webserver can employ massive naive caching; if two users requrest "foo.html", the second can be served from cache and not from having to regenerate the page. Maybe they want a few pages to be interactive while retaining a large chunk of static content.
Flat files that are pre-generated from a database backend, maybe. As in a cron job each night that does something like "for show in db.select(shows): generatestaticpage(show)". I'd be amazed if the whole site was just one big Dreamweaver folder that gets published.
I really can't imagine what their circumstances would have to be for it to be a sane option to rewrite Ruby on Rails in Perl."We have a database engine. We have a template system. We have a language that everyone in-house knows. Let's write a generalized method for combining the three!"
I suspect that happens a lot more often than you'd think. If anything, I consider it a testament to the BBC that they've decided to release their code so that everyone else doesn't have to reinvent it.
Disclaimer: I much prefer Python, and to me the BBC is that extra channel that has "Coupling" and "Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares". I have no special love for Perl or the BBC. I just think that it's pretty cool of them to do this and wish them luck.
Nice sig, BTW. :-)
Sounds to me like a bunch of Perl coders with a few million lines of corporate code who thought this would be easier than learning another language for one specific smallish project.
Oh, definitely. What I meant is that you don't have to appeal to mankind's nobler senses to sell digital. "Here's your order,cheap and now" wins out over loftier ideals every time, and it's a happy coincidence here that digital distribution meets all of those goals.
I couldn't care less about the "greenness" of digital vs. physical distribution. I care a whole lot about the idea of wanting to hear an album and having on my computer 5 minutes later. That's what clinches the deal for me, and I suspect for most people.
Believe it or not, SPAM really isn't all that bad when done properly. Slice it thin and fry it with onions for a yummy sandwich. Seriously, although it looks disgusting, it's can be pretty good. People don't keep buying it because it's awful.
Considering you're mixing patents, trademarks, and copyright (via "fair use"), I think we can safely file your legal opinion under "talking out my ass".
Quite correct. Fortunately, it's almost trivially easy to beat the AGPL.
That's because qmail's known exploits mainly affect new hardware. Cool, huh? Buy a new server and watch it automatically get less secure.
I'm guessing it's the old IRC-workalike feature where you type:
and it sends:
Nothing big, but still something you get used to having around. Having said that, I still hate iChat. Metacontacts, Apple! Metacontacts! Who wants to have a separate contact list for each account they log into?
How so? I've been backing up to a 100GB CIFS share on my FreeBSD server for a few weeks now. Is that a no-no or something?
Right. And the hope is that once we make it sufficiently expensive to get a significant amount of spam delivered, it'll no longer be financially worthwhile. I think we're probably approaching that point. I wrote a spam-filtering recipe and now see maybe 1% of all the crap thrown at it. That means it's now 100 times more costly per delivered message than it used to be. We all know that spammers pay for only a fraction of the highjacked resources they use, but even then they still have to pay something. Well, that something costs a lot more than it did 5 years ago.