I used to have the overflow set very low with the threshold at 0 and the highlight threshold at 2, so basically I'd see threaded mode with anything worth 2 or higher immedeately visible, which provided me with pretty consistent quality of reading while still being able to easily check out posts with interesting headers. while reading through the comments to this story I noticed a worse signal to noise ratio... there were 2+ value posts that would have remained at value 1 in normal moderation. so actually, imho, the current system is causing a decline in the signal to noise ratio while it was invented to improve it.
after tossing around a few ideas I personally thing that this would be a good system:
a person who would now have a default posting value of x would default at 1, but could self-moderate his comments at posting time to anywhere between 0 and x inclusive. x could be between 0 and 4.
self-demotion would not count as a demotion in your alignment calculation. you can't post at -1 however, because basically nobody should post -1 value posts.
self-promotion would count as normal promotion in the alignment calculation. this could lead to abuse, but abusers will quickly be demoted back to a reasonable value. at least it would be better than the current system which basically forces everybody with a high default value to abuse...
it seems a bit twisted imho... you can become a moderator by posting a lot of good comments (emphasis on "good", not on "a lot"), but then you practically prevent moderators from posting. moderators are by definition the people who generally have something interesting to say, but you put them in the dilemma of posting or moderating.
on one side, the rule will prevent people from moderating posts that may oppose or advocate their vision, but I think the average moderator is intelligent enough not to do that. and the fact that there are a lot of moderators also works here, because a post that is valued too high or too low will be re-evaluated by other moderators and put back where it belongs, while still allowing moderators to post there on average good comments. or am I completely mistaken about this?
...is that something other than objects can be owned. the concept that land can be owned already was bad, but the concept that ideas and techniques can be owned is even worse.
indeed, as the article says, humans are basically greedy and egocentric, but in a community greed and egocentrism become slowdowns. say, person A invents the wheel and patents the concept. person B invents domesticating horses, and patents that concept. person C then has the bright idea that you could make a cart using the wheel concept, and then let a domesticated horse pull it, but the idea can't be put in practice because person C can neither use the wheel nor the horse. and even if he were to gain the cooperation of person A or B then the other part would still be missing. if person A and B had not "owned" the concepts then person C could have carried out his improvement, and the whole community, including person A and B would have gained from that.
you don't have to be very old in the computer world to be a hacker. my first computer was a Commodore 16, and then was a big black void until I got myself a 486/33, and I only got online like three years ago. I would definitely not call myself a hacker, but I'm learning, and I love the hacker mentality, the culture. being a hacker is not in calling yourself a hacker but in being called a hacker by other hackers, and I hope to reach that some time.
I see two kinds of mentalities. there's the immature mentality. those people get a kick out of breaking into other systems or spreading virii and love playing God and destroying things. often these people are spoiled teenagers who play with action figures and guns. if they're teenagers I understand them, every teenager goes through such a period, I did it too. but then they grow up and the kick of power wanes away, and they become people who break into systems to expose security leaks and fix them, people who build virii to keep virus protection programs up to date and pre-empt malicious virus makers. as I said, MOST people grow up. unfortunately some don't...
I won't deny that I've toyed around with things like BO and Netbus, but only to see what it could do. once in a while I scan the network to see if anybody is running BO or Netbus and warn them before somebody takes advantage of it. it's a real shame BO and Netbus got abused like they were because they could have been magnificent remote administration tools, but that's a whole nother can of worms.
anyway, there'll always be evil hackers; either teenagers or people who forgot to grow up.
if you sign up for a class you are supposed to know basically what the goal of the class is and what you are going to learn, which is in the official description of that class. the official description of the class in discussion here is probably something like "the goal of this class is to teach students the basic use of the Microsoft Windows '95 operating system and the Microsoft Office suite, specifically Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Excell." (don't pin me down on that one folks).
so, if you sign up for that class while all you know about it is that somebody said that "you can handl it if you can point and click" then YOU haven't done enough to find out exactly what the class was all about. considering the wording of the comment it's very probable that it was just a geste by a teacher to indicate that it entails really the very basics of how to use a computer.
what those students are doing is the same as, for example, suing the military because you didn't make it through basic training, which you took because a veteran told you that it's a piece of cake.
the whole point is that they should have known what the class was about when signed up, and they apparently didn't know what it was about.
Lucas could be the case because of the Death Star and the Evil Empire are named, and because there was a Star Wars parody in UF. However, not one single bad word is ever spoken about Lucas or about Star Wars as a whole; all Lucas could sue Illiad on is infringement of copyright.
AT&T. The connection with the Death Star is obvious when you look at their logo. However, AT&T has afaik never been named in UF, let alone dragged through the mud.
Microsoft. First of all, Microsoft is the only company that is consistently being degraded. Furthermore, Microsoft was used as the Evil Empire and Bill Gates as the Emperor in the Star Wars parody, which firmly ties Microsoft to the Evil Empire and the Death Star. And on top of that, Microsoft is crazy enough to sue for something like this.
Ladies and gentlemen, I think the evidence is obvious. The jury can come to no other conclusion than that Microsoft is the guilty party.:-)
aren't there any cheaper Twiddler-like thingies out there? I'd _love_ to have one, but I don't really feel like shelling out a month's worth of scholarship for it:-)
our university news server doesn't have a full feed either, but when you ask the postmaster for a certain newsgroup you'd like to read chances are it'll be added without any hassle.
small ISPs could make a system that if five or more clients want to read a certain newsgroup they'll patch it through, and removing alt.binaries.* articles after a day also saves a lot of space.
and for those who want other newsgroups there's always deja news.
the big problem is that the Internet is international. if certain content is illegal in the US then the sites containing that material will just move to somewhere outside the US. if, to counter that, it becomes illegal to download such content, how are you planning to enforce that? by evesdropping on somebody's internet communication, by infringing on the client's privacy?
legislation is still at least half a century behind. it has a lot of catching up to do, and until it does that there can't possibly be any effective laws on the internet.
didn't they have that in star trek? Picard and a woman playing a duet in a Jeffery's tube somewhere, Picard playing his little flute, and that woman playing a rollup keyboard...
unless you put a clock in the processor... but taking the clock out of the processor is what the bus speed and multiplier were invented for in the first place, so that would make no sense at all.
)O( the Gods have a sense of humor,
oh wait... that TV was $300...
on
The $299 PC
·
· Score: 1
that used to get you a bad TV or a bad stereo set , now it can also get you a bad computer... bravo.
my TV was $400 (second hand 2 yrs old), my stereo was $700, my computer was $2,000. that gives me a pretty good TV, a pretty good stereo, and a pretty good computer. anything cheaper almost can't be "pretty good"
well uh, I had the situation in mind as it is here (in the Netherlands). you take driving lessons, and when you think you're ready you apply for a driving test. usually your exam will be within two weeks, but in prime time (end of the summer holiday) it might take a month. when you've passed the test you get a certificate with which you can immedeately pick up your drivers licence at the city hall (if it's open), and in most city halls the waiting time is less than 15 minutes.
door to door computer cops? then you really misinterpreted me. you could use a computer without a computer licence. what I propose is kind of like a diploma. of people with that licence/diploma you can expect a certain base knowledge about computers and the internet so you can give quick and to the point tech support if necessary, and so companies could require it just like any other diploma/licence/degree.
and as for writing tests... hellooooo, it's a COMPUTER licence, so you'd probably do it on a computer.
disallowing somebody without a licence to use a computer is evil, and simply can't be done. perhaps the word licence was ill chosen and diploma would be better, because that's the general idea I had in mind.
same thing happened long ago with cars. the first cars were all driven by the techies who knew exactly how the car worked and who knew exactly what they were doing. then cars became gradually easier to use and cheaper, and dummies started to drive cars... and that's why the drivers licence was born.
so why not have a computer licence? and an internet licence as an extention to it.
then you can split users up in people who have a licence and people who don't have a licence, and from the people with a licence you can expect that they have at least the basic skills needed to use a computer or to use the internet so you can just give those people quick tech support if needed. and companies could require their employees to have a computer and/or internet licence.
I mean, currently tech support assumes zero intelligence and zero computer knowledge in their clients. let me tell you a tech support story...
I tried to get Forsaken to work on mplayer, but somehow it always failed to launch correctly. so I asked around on mplayer, nobody knew. I dug through the FAQs and help files, nothing there. so I send a message to the mplayer tech support. I get an automatic reply to read the FAQ, and to reply on that message if what I need to know weren't in the FAQ. so I smack reply. a week later I receive a message from mplayer tech support lecturing me on latency and packetloss and the basic workings of the internet! so they didn't even actually read my mail, because I specifically said that it couldn't possibly be a latency or packetloss problem. so I told them that in a reply, and !#$^&!#$^ again I get that automated RTFFAQ message.
now if there were computer licences they could have had seperate tech support for people with and people without licences, and ofcourse having an internet licence means you already know about the workings of ping and packetloss and that you already know to read the FAQ first so they could have just given me direct on topic tech support.
I've seen this coming for a long time. technology has rushed faaaar ahaid of the law. there will be more and more of these privacy and copyright cases that are caused only because the law hasn't caught up with the software industry and the internet yet. it's the wild west out here, and in this wild west the law is also just one of the cowboys...
come on, even the American military can't possibly be dumb enough to tie sensitive information to the internet with millions of happy hackers out there who could earn millions of dollars selling that information to, say, Iraqi, or Russians, or even French...
the trick is that in an open source environment companies don't have to make anything from scratch. so where they would have spent 5 million to make something from scratch they can now take something that already exists and for a mere 1 million change it into what they want.
I agree. I have a semi-3-button mouse. you know, a 2-button mouse with a 3rd button on the side that acts as half a left click (a "grab"). that little thing is very useful in 3d modelling and other graphics utilities. and in x usually the 3 button emulation works nicely enough.
the instant I find a 3 button mouse with a "grab" button on its side I'll buy it tho:-)
Slashdot Mirror
here go my two cents :-)
:-)
I used to have the overflow set very low with the threshold at 0 and the highlight threshold at 2, so basically I'd see threaded mode with anything worth 2 or higher immedeately visible, which provided me with pretty consistent quality of reading while still being able to easily check out posts with interesting headers. while reading through the comments to this story I noticed a worse signal to noise ratio... there were 2+ value posts that would have remained at value 1 in normal moderation. so actually, imho, the current system is causing a decline in the signal to noise ratio while it was invented to improve it.
after tossing around a few ideas I personally thing that this would be a good system:
a person who would now have a default posting value of x would default at 1, but could self-moderate his comments at posting time to anywhere between 0 and x inclusive. x could be between 0 and 4.
self-demotion would not count as a demotion in your alignment calculation. you can't post at -1 however, because basically nobody should post -1 value posts.
self-promotion would count as normal promotion in the alignment calculation. this could lead to abuse, but abusers will quickly be demoted back to a reasonable value. at least it would be better than the current system which basically forces everybody with a high default value to abuse...
I hope I actually managed to make myself clear
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
it seems a bit twisted imho... you can become a moderator by posting a lot of good comments (emphasis on "good", not on "a lot"), but then you practically prevent moderators from posting. moderators are by definition the people who generally have something interesting to say, but you put them in the dilemma of posting or moderating.
on one side, the rule will prevent people from moderating posts that may oppose or advocate their vision, but I think the average moderator is intelligent enough not to do that. and the fact that there are a lot of moderators also works here, because a post that is valued too high or too low will be re-evaluated by other moderators and put back where it belongs, while still allowing moderators to post there on average good comments. or am I completely mistaken about this?
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
...is that something other than objects can be owned. the concept that land can be owned already was bad, but the concept that ideas and techniques can be owned is even worse.
indeed, as the article says, humans are basically greedy and egocentric, but in a community greed and egocentrism become slowdowns. say, person A invents the wheel and patents the concept. person B invents domesticating horses, and patents that concept. person C then has the bright idea that you could make a cart using the wheel concept, and then let a domesticated horse pull it, but the idea can't be put in practice because person C can neither use the wheel nor the horse. and even if he were to gain the cooperation of person A or B then the other part would still be missing. if person A and B had not "owned" the concepts then person C could have carried out his improvement, and the whole community, including person A and B would have gained from that.
*sigh*... utopia... a beautiful country indeed...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
you don't have to be very old in the computer world to be a hacker. my first computer was a Commodore 16, and then was a big black void until I got myself a 486/33, and I only got online like three years ago. I would definitely not call myself a hacker, but I'm learning, and I love the hacker mentality, the culture. being a hacker is not in calling yourself a hacker but in being called a hacker by other hackers, and I hope to reach that some time.
I see two kinds of mentalities. there's the immature mentality. those people get a kick out of breaking into other systems or spreading virii and love playing God and destroying things. often these people are spoiled teenagers who play with action figures and guns. if they're teenagers I understand them, every teenager goes through such a period, I did it too. but then they grow up and the kick of power wanes away, and they become people who break into systems to expose security leaks and fix them, people who build virii to keep virus protection programs up to date and pre-empt malicious virus makers. as I said, MOST people grow up. unfortunately some don't...
I won't deny that I've toyed around with things like BO and Netbus, but only to see what it could do. once in a while I scan the network to see if anybody is running BO or Netbus and warn them before somebody takes advantage of it. it's a real shame BO and Netbus got abused like they were because they could have been magnificent remote administration tools, but that's a whole nother can of worms.
anyway, there'll always be evil hackers; either teenagers or people who forgot to grow up.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
that "... specifically Microsoft Windows and ..." should ofcourse be "... specifically Microsoft Word and ..."
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
if you sign up for a class you are supposed to know basically what the goal of the class is and what you are going to learn, which is in the official description of that class. the official description of the class in discussion here is probably something like "the goal of this class is to teach students the basic use of the Microsoft Windows '95 operating system and the Microsoft Office suite, specifically Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Excell." (don't pin me down on that one folks).
so, if you sign up for that class while all you know about it is that somebody said that "you can handl it if you can point and click" then YOU haven't done enough to find out exactly what the class was all about. considering the wording of the comment it's very probable that it was just a geste by a teacher to indicate that it entails really the very basics of how to use a computer.
what those students are doing is the same as, for example, suing the military because you didn't make it through basic training, which you took because a veteran told you that it's a piece of cake.
the whole point is that they should have known what the class was about when signed up, and they apparently didn't know what it was about.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
Nonsense. That might happen occasionally, but Illiad's portrayal of Microsoft is usually pretty accurate.
:-)
Ah, but Microsoft doesn't _want_ to be portrayed accurately
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
Possible candidates: Microsoft, Lucas or AT&T.
:-)
Lucas could be the case because of the Death Star and the Evil Empire are named, and because there was a Star Wars parody in UF. However, not one single bad word is ever spoken about Lucas or about Star Wars as a whole; all Lucas could sue Illiad on is infringement of copyright.
AT&T. The connection with the Death Star is obvious when you look at their logo. However, AT&T has afaik never been named in UF, let alone dragged through the mud.
Microsoft. First of all, Microsoft is the only company that is consistently being degraded. Furthermore, Microsoft was used as the Evil Empire and Bill Gates as the Emperor in the Star Wars parody, which firmly ties Microsoft to the Evil Empire and the Death Star. And on top of that, Microsoft is crazy enough to sue for something like this.
Ladies and gentlemen, I think the evidence is obvious. The jury can come to no other conclusion than that Microsoft is the guilty party.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
aren't there any cheaper Twiddler-like thingies out there? I'd _love_ to have one, but I don't really feel like shelling out a month's worth of scholarship for it :-)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
our university news server doesn't have a full feed either, but when you ask the postmaster for a certain newsgroup you'd like to read chances are it'll be added without any hassle.
small ISPs could make a system that if five or more clients want to read a certain newsgroup they'll patch it through, and removing alt.binaries.* articles after a day also saves a lot of space.
and for those who want other newsgroups there's always deja news.
the big problem is that the Internet is international. if certain content is illegal in the US then the sites containing that material will just move to somewhere outside the US. if, to counter that, it becomes illegal to download such content, how are you planning to enforce that? by evesdropping on somebody's internet communication, by infringing on the client's privacy?
legislation is still at least half a century behind. it has a lot of catching up to do, and until it does that there can't possibly be any effective laws on the internet.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
I found out long ago that my site was blocked by censorware... probably because it contains information on paganism and witchcraft and such... *sigh*
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
didn't they have that in star trek? Picard and a woman playing a duet in a Jeffery's tube somewhere, Picard playing his little flute, and that woman playing a rollup keyboard...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
unless you put a clock in the processor... but taking the clock out of the processor is what the bus speed and multiplier were invented for in the first place, so that would make no sense at all.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
so I'll have to hand you guys that one :-)
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
that used to get you a bad TV or a bad stereo set , now it can also get you a bad computer... bravo.
my TV was $400 (second hand 2 yrs old), my stereo was $700, my computer was $2,000. that gives me a pretty good TV, a pretty good stereo, and a pretty good computer. anything cheaper almost can't be "pretty good"
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
well uh, I had the situation in mind as it is here (in the Netherlands). you take driving lessons, and when you think you're ready you apply for a driving test. usually your exam will be within two weeks, but in prime time (end of the summer holiday) it might take a month. when you've passed the test you get a certificate with which you can immedeately pick up your drivers licence at the city hall (if it's open), and in most city halls the waiting time is less than 15 minutes.
door to door computer cops? then you really misinterpreted me. you could use a computer without a computer licence. what I propose is kind of like a diploma. of people with that licence/diploma you can expect a certain base knowledge about computers and the internet so you can give quick and to the point tech support if necessary, and so companies could require it just like any other diploma/licence/degree.
and as for writing tests... hellooooo, it's a COMPUTER licence, so you'd probably do it on a computer.
disallowing somebody without a licence to use a computer is evil, and simply can't be done. perhaps the word licence was ill chosen and diploma would be better, because that's the general idea I had in mind.
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
darn that's fast...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
nt
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
a computer licence.
same thing happened long ago with cars. the first cars were all driven by the techies who knew exactly how the car worked and who knew exactly what they were doing. then cars became gradually easier to use and cheaper, and dummies started to drive cars... and that's why the drivers licence was born.
so why not have a computer licence? and an internet licence as an extention to it.
then you can split users up in people who have a licence and people who don't have a licence, and from the people with a licence you can expect that they have at least the basic skills needed to use a computer or to use the internet so you can just give those people quick tech support if needed. and companies could require their employees to have a computer and/or internet licence.
I mean, currently tech support assumes zero intelligence and zero computer knowledge in their clients. let me tell you a tech support story...
I tried to get Forsaken to work on mplayer, but somehow it always failed to launch correctly. so I asked around on mplayer, nobody knew. I dug through the FAQs and help files, nothing there. so I send a message to the mplayer tech support. I get an automatic reply to read the FAQ, and to reply on that message if what I need to know weren't in the FAQ. so I smack reply. a week later I receive a message from mplayer tech support lecturing me on latency and packetloss and the basic workings of the internet! so they didn't even actually read my mail, because I specifically said that it couldn't possibly be a latency or packetloss problem. so I told them that in a reply, and !#$^&!#$^ again I get that automated RTFFAQ message.
now if there were computer licences they could have had seperate tech support for people with and people without licences, and ofcourse having an internet licence means you already know about the workings of ping and packetloss and that you already know to read the FAQ first so they could have just given me direct on topic tech support.
oh well...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
I've seen this coming for a long time. technology has rushed faaaar ahaid of the law. there will be more and more of these privacy and copyright cases that are caused only because the law hasn't caught up with the software industry and the internet yet. it's the wild west out here, and in this wild west the law is also just one of the cowboys...
)O(
the Gods have a sense of humor,
come on, even the American military can't possibly be dumb enough to tie sensitive information to the internet with millions of happy hackers out there who could earn millions of dollars selling that information to, say, Iraqi, or Russians, or even French...
---
the Gods have a sense of humor,
the trick is that in an open source environment companies don't have to make anything from scratch. so where they would have spent 5 million to make something from scratch they can now take something that already exists and for a mere 1 million change it into what they want.
---
the Gods have a sense of humor,
I agree. I have a semi-3-button mouse. you know, a 2-button mouse with a 3rd button on the side that acts as half a left click (a "grab"). that little thing is very useful in 3d modelling and other graphics utilities. and in x usually the 3 button emulation works nicely enough.
:-)
the instant I find a 3 button mouse with a "grab" button on its side I'll buy it tho
---
the Gods have a sense of humor,
now there's an operating system that's completely customizable, and has perhaps millions of years of testing behind it...
---
the Gods have a sense of humor,