I've been a Mac user since System 6 and a Linux user since Slackware 3.5. I'm posting this from my iBook, which is actually proxying through Squid running on a Slackware server and NATing out through a different Slackware server (I really like Slackware, although I've got a a couple other distros installed to play with). I am not a Redmond PR person.
Vista doesn't piss me off the way XP always did. They've fixed a LOT of annoying crap. For example:
1) if you want to install onto a RAID that needs drivers that don't ship with the OS, you can browse the driver CD (with a normal GUI open file dialog) from the installer. With XP, you have to press F6 at the right time, then insert a floppy disk containing the driver in whatever location XP's installer will look for it. If you don't have a floppy drive, you're stuck.
2) if you're copying a thousand files across the network and two thirds of the way through something fails due to a temporary problem, you get a "Try Again" button. On XP, the entire operation simply dies, leaving you with some files copied and some files not.
3) They finally got rid of the annoying "My" in front of everything, and with the notable exception of "Program Files", have optimized most common directory names for CLI usage. C:\Users\Phroggy\AppData\ is a lot less unwieldy to type at a command prompt than C:\Documents and Settings\Phroggy\Application Data\. Many of the new names are exactly the same as Mac OS X uses.
4) When you're entering a WEP key, you only have to type it in once, and since there's a good chance everyone around you already knows the WEP key, you have the option to make it visible so you can check for typos, instead of just displaying bullets. With XP, you get no such option, and you have to type it twice, which is completely retarded (since the consequence of a typo is simply a failure). (Ironically, most wireless routers only make you type it once when setting the WEP key, which is when requiring it to be entered twice for verification would be a good idea.)...and more. Sure, none of these are really earth-shattering, but when you add them all up, it's like a breath of fresh air compared to XP. Of course, compared to other options, it's still a turd.
My belief is that the actual pool of meta-moderators is almost identical with the moderators, so the game-players are 'validating' themselves. Maybe so, but as far as I know, meta-moderation is open to just about anyone on a daily basis, which is exactly how you suggested moderation should work. And even if it is just game-players validating themselves, they're not really validating themselves, they're validating other game-players, which isn't the same thing at all - we Slashdotters are most definitely not all of one mind. And if you're suggesting that people who don't currently moderate or meta-moderate should be involved in the system... well, I don't see how that could possibly be implemented in a reasonable way.
Of course, the big problem is that moderation is a game, and a broken game. There are some sincere and honest moderators, but many of the negative mod points are used to suppress intelligent discussion, not encourage it. That's why the FAQ about moderation says you should focus on positive moderation, and just ignore the stuff you don't like instead of modding it down.
Simplified example would be a creationist moderator who sees a sophisticated and articulate explanation of evolution. What easier response than to mod that poster into oblivion? This kind of abuse is exactly why meta-moderation exists. If you mod down a post that shouldn't have been modded down (or mod up a post that shouldn't have been modded up), someone else will meta-moderate your moderation as inappropriate, and you'll lose karma. Lose too much karma, and not only are you less likely to be given mod points, but you also get a penalty to your initial score when you post a comment.
No, I haven't seen any recent examples (though my current book, Pinker's "How the Mind Works", could motivate me in that direction), but perhaps that's because the vocal pro-evolution people have already been obliviated and left/. (and I'm on my way out the door). Did I read that correctly? You think the pro-evolution people have left Slashdot, and it's mostly Creationists who are left? That's about as out of touch with reality as labeling Fox News "the liberal media".
In the answers I noticed that Malda is apparently aware there are problems with moderation. However, his response appears to be to increase the complexity of the game rather than to focus on his first principles. Which principles are those, exactly, and how would you suggest that Slashdot's moderation system could be simplified in such a way as to better emphasize those principles?
I have two concrete recommendations that might improve/. via simplified moderation. First would be the elimination of anonymous negative moderation. There are times when anonymity is justified, but this is *NOT* one of them. If you want to criticize someone, then you should be big enough to put your name on it. Alright, I'm not sure I agree with you, but I can accept that this is a valid idea that should warrant further discussion.
Second would be to basically give everyone a voice in moderation and some mod points. One approach would be for every normal member to have from one to five mod points per day, basically linked to your karma. I would suggest one additional wrinkle for the karma: If your mod is countered several times, that would be grounds for reducing your karma. So, essentially you're talking about keeping the same moderation system we have now, but scaling it up so we'd get a hundred people moderating on a particular post, instead of five people moderating on a particular post? Sorry, but I think that would cause more problems than it would solve, not the least of which is that most of us don't come here to moderate, we come here to read. I don't mind occasionally doing my part to contribute, but I don't want to moderate every day. There are other sites that let anyone vote for/against any post, and they usually suck.
By the way, did you know you can customize your preferences to assign a bonus score to "funny" posts, so you'll see more of them?
Not if they have to re-route you through a different hub. Then the original clearance would most likely be invalid. Right - just because the government says it's safe for you to fly through Minneapolis doesn't mean you wouldn't be a terrorist if you flew through Denver!
But seriously, it sounds like this isn't what's going on at all; they're not going to prevent anyone from making last-minute travel plans, just getting head start on... whatever it is they do with passenger lists... for whoever's already been booked three days before departure, which is most of us.
I've done a lot of work using Perl and a lot of work using PHP, and the one constant I found with Perl was there are generally 10 ways to code a particular algorithm in which 9 of them are generally unreadable by novice Perl programmers. This is absolutely true. Perl has such a complex syntax that it takes a long time to learn the whole language, and until you do, you can't read anyone else's code because they wrote it using a different subset of the language than you've learned, and you can't even figure out what to look up in the documentation.
But as long as 1) nobody else ever has to read the code, or 2) the only people who will read the code are Perl experts, it's great. Perl may be harder to read than PHP, but once you learn it, it's easier to write.
Adding these two lines to the top of every Perl script will help immensely with catching errors: use strict; use warnings;
As long as they're not both running on port 80 on the same IP address, there should be no problem. By default, Apache will bind to every interface it can find, but just add a Listen directive to change that.
Sorry for being even more pedantic, but "less than lethal" still means not lethal. The correct term is actually "less lethal", as in "less lethal than shooting someone with a handgun loaded with standard bullets". Tasers and bean bags CAN be lethal, under unusual circumstances, but they're not as lethal as other options.
My church has some very nice equipment that cost a lot of money. It was bought, and is used, for a specific purpose: to help facilitate worship services and the various other activities we do at the church. Yes, we have an expensive projector in the sanctuary - we use it to show lyrics on the screen while singing, and the pastor uses PowerPoint as a visual aid during his sermons. Sometimes he uses brief excerpts from movies to illustrate a point. We have a very nice sound system, because if we didn't, technical issues could distract people from worshipping God, and we're willing to spend money to prevent that.
However, there are plenty of things we'd like to do, that we can't, because we don't have the money. Our projector is dying - it's several years old and the blue polarizer is fried, so there's sort of an ugly yellow blob in the middle of the picture, and we've determined that it will be cheaper to buy a new one than to have this one repaired. We need a couple of UPSes, so a brief power failure in the middle of a Sunday morning sermon doesn't cause a five minute disruption (this happened a few months ago while the speaker was trying to explain a visual illustration, and the tech people had to scramble to get it back on the screen after waiting for the computer to reboot). We've got some issues with lighting. We want to set up a sound system with permanently mounted speakers in another part of the building where we have activities like potlucks, which will allow us to easily do all kinds of things that currently take a lot of work to set up. We can't take care of any of these right now, because our priorities are elsewhere.
My question is what is your bridge to trying to justify homosexuality when it is called an abomination (Old and New Testament)? Just as Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 call gay sex "detestable" and "an abomination" respectively, Leviticus 19:19 prohibits wearing cotton/polyester blends, 19:27 says not to trim your beard or shave off your sideburns, and 19:28 forbids tattoos. The argument is that if we're not going to take all the other commandments from Leviticus seriously, then we shouldn't take the ones about gay sex quite so seriously either.
Romans 1 uses words like "shameful", "unnatural" "indecent" and "perversion". The precise meaning of some of it is open to interpretation, but I think it's undeniable that according to this passage, homosexuality is wrong and has consequences. This is stated in the context of an explanation though, not as a commandment not to do it.
Apple hasn't responded to the claims yet other than sending him a packet to return the iPod. Nor should they. They haven't seen it yet. What could they possibly say that would be in any way constructive?
The problem is that "Outlook Express" and "Outlook" actually share nothing in common except for the name and the fact that they both do email. Beyond that they're two separate codebases, managed by two separate teams. It's unfortunate that they're named similarly, since Outlook Express' issues have tarnished the fact that Outlook proper is actually a very good, secure, and competent email client. The name "Outlook Express" was chosen deliberately to cause confusion: either Microsoft wanted to take advantage of Outlook's good reputation ("hey, Outlook is pretty good; the lite version is probably adequate for my needs"), or they wanted Outlook to be able to take advantage of Outlook Express's reputation ("hey, Outlook Express is pretty good; the full version must be even better").
The original name is Microsoft Internet Mail & News, which is why the filename is (still) msimn.exe. I remember running the Mac version of Internet Mail & News back in 1996 or so; it was the best mail client I could find at the time (compared to things like Claris Emailer, Eudora, and of course the e-mail component of Netscape Communicator).
Don't give them ideas! PLEASE don't give them ideas! Give them ideas? Please! This is exactly the reason we need to get rid of software patents: anybody with half a brain who knows anything about the technology involved could have come up with exactly those possible solutions, and quickly assessed the infeasibility of implementing them. The idea of forcing the players to connect to the Internet to authorize playback of certain discs, or the idea of making an area of the disc writable by the player, are OBVIOUS, and nobody has to GIVE them to the MPAA or Sony or whoever designed HDDVD.
The longest part about checking out for me is waiting for some luddite to stop futzing with writing a check and use a check card or cash instead. Seriously? I never have this problem - I figure everyone who uses checks has been writing checks to pay for their groceries for decades, and has got the process pretty nailed down - they start filling it out while the checker is scanning and bagging their items, so when they get the total, writing in the number and tearing it off takes just about as long as entering a PIN and waiting for approval.
now, I'm no civil engineer, but I would bury a large metal-covered-in-concrete tube and run all the lines and effectively all future lines through this tube, so that the streets only ever have to be dug up and repaved once (or unless the street itself became obsolete). High voltage power lines running through the same tube as your phone and cable TV wires is probably a pretty bad idea. So, it's reasonable to assume that each utility has their own tubes. Can you legally require the phone company to allow you to run your wires through their tubes?
Ah, but therein lies the rub. Does the listener possess a standard head or one with vacuum tubes? Because tubes sound better. More like a dump truck really, not a series of tubes...
DSL seemed to out as well because I'm over three miles from the phone office. I was very surprised that something hadn't already been done to make DSL available to silicon valley residents. I'm sure there are ways they could extend the range of DSL in an affordable way. There is, it's called a remote terminal - essentially, they install a small DSLAM in a box somewhere in your neighborhood, and your copper phone line runs into that. Then they run a fiber optic line from there to the CO. You get a great connection, because the copper loop is only from your house to that box, probably half a mile or less.
What I want to know is why Covad can't run their own lines to your home themselves. I live in a neighborhood that uses aerial wires on poles, so that part would be a little easier, but at the end of my street the wires go underground, then across a bridge, then underground some more, then up the side of a cliff and eventually to the CO.
Imagine how much it would cost to get the necessary permits from the city to close a lane of traffic for a couple of miles, then hiring a road construction crew to actually dig up the streets (while not accidentally destroying existing telephone, electric, cable, fiber optic, water, sewer, or natural gas lines), and of course re-paving everything when you're done.
Second, what kind of feature phone/PDA maker creates a device that doesn't include a usable SDK and APIs so that developers can add functionality without compromising the core firmware and creating the brick-on-update problem. The kind that has never made a phone before, and wants to make sure they work the bugs out of their product before they open it up for other people to mess with.
And to be honest, acquiring NextStep back when they did was a failure. NextOS and those cubes, as cool as they were, pretty much tanked. It took them a decade to actually start using a derivation of that OS commercially again (the original OS X Server), and a few more years after that before it was truly ready as a desktop/workstation environment. Apple acquired NeXT in 1996, and Mac OS X Server 1.0 was released three years later, not ten. The consumer version of Mac OS X 10.0 was released in 2001. The big mistake Apple made was in not anticipating the need for Carbon; they expected all application developers to rewrite their apps in Cocoa. Adobe's rejection of Cocoa was the main thing that forced Apple to create Carbon, and doing so is the reason Mac OS X took so long to get out the door, but it was definitely worth it - Mac OS X would have flopped without native apps.
a nation is a group of people so are is perfectly acceptable. Not in US English. Presumably the submitter isn't American, so it's valid grammar in their dialect of English, but it isn't in ours - thus the confusion.
# # If "yes", the user must be listed as a member of the first gid 0 group # in/etc/group (called "root" on most Linux systems) to be able to "su" # to uid 0 accounts. If the group doesn't exist or is empty, no one # will be able to "su" to uid 0. # SU_WHEEL_ONLY no
I understand that, but that has nothing to do with what we were talking about.
If a non-root user could chroot, they could create their own root filesystem under their home directory, including their own ~/etc/passwd and ~/etc/group files that would put them in the wheel group when they ran "chroot ~". Fortunately, non-root users cannot chroot, and the above is a good example of why not.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been a Mac user since System 6 and a Linux user since Slackware 3.5. I'm posting this from my iBook, which is actually proxying through Squid running on a Slackware server and NATing out through a different Slackware server (I really like Slackware, although I've got a a couple other distros installed to play with). I am not a Redmond PR person.
...and more. Sure, none of these are really earth-shattering, but when you add them all up, it's like a breath of fresh air compared to XP. Of course, compared to other options, it's still a turd.
Vista doesn't piss me off the way XP always did. They've fixed a LOT of annoying crap. For example:
1) if you want to install onto a RAID that needs drivers that don't ship with the OS, you can browse the driver CD (with a normal GUI open file dialog) from the installer. With XP, you have to press F6 at the right time, then insert a floppy disk containing the driver in whatever location XP's installer will look for it. If you don't have a floppy drive, you're stuck.
2) if you're copying a thousand files across the network and two thirds of the way through something fails due to a temporary problem, you get a "Try Again" button. On XP, the entire operation simply dies, leaving you with some files copied and some files not.
3) They finally got rid of the annoying "My" in front of everything, and with the notable exception of "Program Files", have optimized most common directory names for CLI usage. C:\Users\Phroggy\AppData\ is a lot less unwieldy to type at a command prompt than C:\Documents and Settings\Phroggy\Application Data\. Many of the new names are exactly the same as Mac OS X uses.
4) When you're entering a WEP key, you only have to type it in once, and since there's a good chance everyone around you already knows the WEP key, you have the option to make it visible so you can check for typos, instead of just displaying bullets. With XP, you get no such option, and you have to type it twice, which is completely retarded (since the consequence of a typo is simply a failure). (Ironically, most wireless routers only make you type it once when setting the WEP key, which is when requiring it to be entered twice for verification would be a good idea.)
Excellent. I LOVE the idea of modifying existing touch-screen voting machines for this purpose.
By the way, did you know you can customize your preferences to assign a bonus score to "funny" posts, so you'll see more of them?
But seriously, it sounds like this isn't what's going on at all; they're not going to prevent anyone from making last-minute travel plans, just getting head start on... whatever it is they do with passenger lists... for whoever's already been booked three days before departure, which is most of us.
But as long as 1) nobody else ever has to read the code, or 2) the only people who will read the code are Perl experts, it's great. Perl may be harder to read than PHP, but once you learn it, it's easier to write.
Adding these two lines to the top of every Perl script will help immensely with catching errors:
use strict;
use warnings;
PHP in contrast to Perl
As long as they're not both running on port 80 on the same IP address, there should be no problem. By default, Apache will bind to every interface it can find, but just add a Listen directive to change that.
Sorry for being even more pedantic, but "less than lethal" still means not lethal. The correct term is actually "less lethal", as in "less lethal than shooting someone with a handgun loaded with standard bullets". Tasers and bean bags CAN be lethal, under unusual circumstances, but they're not as lethal as other options.
My church has some very nice equipment that cost a lot of money. It was bought, and is used, for a specific purpose: to help facilitate worship services and the various other activities we do at the church. Yes, we have an expensive projector in the sanctuary - we use it to show lyrics on the screen while singing, and the pastor uses PowerPoint as a visual aid during his sermons. Sometimes he uses brief excerpts from movies to illustrate a point. We have a very nice sound system, because if we didn't, technical issues could distract people from worshipping God, and we're willing to spend money to prevent that.
However, there are plenty of things we'd like to do, that we can't, because we don't have the money. Our projector is dying - it's several years old and the blue polarizer is fried, so there's sort of an ugly yellow blob in the middle of the picture, and we've determined that it will be cheaper to buy a new one than to have this one repaired. We need a couple of UPSes, so a brief power failure in the middle of a Sunday morning sermon doesn't cause a five minute disruption (this happened a few months ago while the speaker was trying to explain a visual illustration, and the tech people had to scramble to get it back on the screen after waiting for the computer to reboot). We've got some issues with lighting. We want to set up a sound system with permanently mounted speakers in another part of the building where we have activities like potlucks, which will allow us to easily do all kinds of things that currently take a lot of work to set up. We can't take care of any of these right now, because our priorities are elsewhere.
Romans 1 uses words like "shameful", "unnatural" "indecent" and "perversion". The precise meaning of some of it is open to interpretation, but I think it's undeniable that according to this passage, homosexuality is wrong and has consequences. This is stated in the context of an explanation though, not as a commandment not to do it.
The original name is Microsoft Internet Mail & News, which is why the filename is (still) msimn.exe. I remember running the Mac version of Internet Mail & News back in 1996 or so; it was the best mail client I could find at the time (compared to things like Claris Emailer, Eudora, and of course the e-mail component of Netscape Communicator).
Imagine how much it would cost to get the necessary permits from the city to close a lane of traffic for a couple of miles, then hiring a road construction crew to actually dig up the streets (while not accidentally destroying existing telephone, electric, cable, fiber optic, water, sewer, or natural gas lines), and of course re-paving everything when you're done.
Anyone in Portland should check out FreeGeek and consider volunteering.
Oh, by the way: from /etc/login.defs on Linux:
/etc/group (called "root" on most Linux systems) to be able to "su"
#
# If "yes", the user must be listed as a member of the first gid 0 group
# in
# to uid 0 accounts. If the group doesn't exist or is empty, no one
# will be able to "su" to uid 0.
#
SU_WHEEL_ONLY no
I understand that, but that has nothing to do with what we were talking about.
If a non-root user could chroot, they could create their own root filesystem under their home directory, including their own ~/etc/passwd and ~/etc/group files that would put them in the wheel group when they ran "chroot ~". Fortunately, non-root users cannot chroot, and the above is a good example of why not.