>Hmmm... As I recall, Adolf Hitler called himself >a National Socialist. So, I guess the various >Socialist parties in Europe are all anti-semitic?
That's not what he was saying and you know it. Christians ARE often seen as loonies, but most educated people know better than to take the entire lot as similar to the wackos who are on the outside screaming. I don't think this guy was just trying to troll.
I lived in Germany for a year, and they all asked me if I brought guns with me to school or not, if I smoked crack, and so on. That's all they see in the newspaper. The newspaper reports on the out of the ordinary, but when that's all you see, you come to think of it as the ordinary. I think the same is true of christians. You don't see christians praying in church on the news, because that's ordinary. But you do see them shooting abortion providers and so on. When the out-of-the-ordinary becomes the ordinary, people get things confused.
Listen man, I understand your gripe about the moderation here, but you have to understand that not only is this mob rule, but you shouldn't be posting for moderation points anyway.
Don't post hoping that your post will get moderated up or down. Post if you have something to say, and skip the post if you think it's not really all that important.
It's about judgement - and the best you can do with anybody in such an anonymous forum as/. is to *trust* people. That may sound naive, but what do you suggest as an alternate strategy? Trust the moderators to be honest, and your posts will be rated accordingly. There are things in life that are more important than a positive karma on slashdot. And generally, the moderators really aren't that bad, in that it's hard to have a negative karma unless you're really just a troll, which you don't seem to be.
Sometimes my cynical side wants to come out and smack people around, the doomsayers, for coming up with things just sound like they're destined to become the next buzzword - "Cyberclysm". Furthermore, my cynical side wants to say that the alarmists who are constantly talking about what's going to happen...what's going to happen? are doing the same as any other american - trying to make a buck.
But the real truth is that people sometimes are at odds with the technology that runs things, but that's not because people are stupid or because there's too much technology. Quite the contrary - humans are absolutely brilliant creatures, and we can (most likely) saddle anything we build as long as we keep our wits about us.
Where I think the problem lies is when the advance of technology outstrips education among the general population. Technology is taking off like a rocket, but the base levels of education aren't really improving all that much in America, or as far as I know, elsewhere either. I don't like hearing people tell me that the U.S. has a great literacy rate and that we shouldn't complain because other people have it worse - that may be true but that's no reason to just think of everything as adequate and not work on anything anymore. Once the education improves both in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, the technology that seems to be driving us to this new buzzword that's a mix of Cyber(insert-your-favorite-noun-here) and Cataclysm won't seem nearly as threatening or offensive to anybody. Understand it, and it's a tool. But like racism, or any other product of ignorance (ignorance NOT stupidity) if you don't understand it, it will cause fear and problems.
MDA http://opop.nols.com/
Science, Religion, and giving up ground
on
Galileo's Daughter
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· Score: 1
Galileo is a person who for me started what has been a centuries long progression of formalized religion and the church backing up to the progress of science. First it was galileo, and many have come after him, forcing the church to slowly and stubbornly give up ground.
Galileo was persecuted, eventually the church came around and said "oops" - first accepting that there might be some shred of truth to what he had to say, then admitting that maybe he was on to something, and finally agreeing that yes, it was the case that the earth revolves around the sun.
I have heard that Leonardo DiVinci drew considerable heat for his dissection of cadavers, which yielded many insights into anatomy. Surely nobody can dispute the importance of knowledge of anatomy.
Darwin stood up and told the world what he thought, and Creationists didn't believe it, (He was lucky he lived when he did - if he had lived at the time or before galileo I don't think the church would have been as kind to him as they were to galileo) but gradually, the idea of evolution and the underlying sense that it makes has wormed its way into our heads.
Although I'm not sure of exactly when, I've been told that the vatican has recently acknowledged evolution for the first time. (That's 2nd hand though, I'm not sure if that's accurate)
As the church through the centuries is constantly finding itself backing itself into a corner, admitting that more and more of science might have some measure of truth to it, you have to wonder when it will stop or IF it will stop. Not intending to draw flame, but rather as a statement of opinion, I see the church as peddling mythology and comfortable fibs, while science peddles nothing - it offers only the truth or a reasonable method of getting the truth.
I think that the story of Galileo is central to the state of daily consciousness not because of the specific facts that it represented (earth, sun, which revolves around which), but because of the scientific-driven secularism that it seems to have started.
I go to school at VCU in Richmond Virginia, and I can tell you first hand that virginians like to think that we're on the cutting edge of technology. Motorola semiconductor plants which may or may not be build here, of course we've got AOL, and many other tech companies in NOVA (northern VA).
The governor, Jim Gilmore, even appointed a special group for information technology advising recently. Among the appointees? The president of VCU, (who is a PhD *history* major, and who I know couldn't compute his way out of a wet paper bag) Steve Case, one of everybody's favorite evil internet millionaires. All in all, it's a very colorful collection of goons we've got down here in the good ol' boy state.
It seems that businesses for quite some time now have been falling all over each other trying to get to the internet to ply their wares, and governments are no different, only in that what they're selling is slightly different. They want prestige for "fostering a technology friendly environment where the innovation of tomorrow becomes a reality".
Jeez, I wonder when the state government page is going to start carrying pr0n banners...:) if they really want to stay on the leading edge of things, then they need to get started on more shameless commercialism, (although selling crappy license plates where $plate =~ s/[Aa]/\@/g; is a good start) and catch up with the rest of the internet.
Re:The Second Coming of Ender
on
Ender's Shadow
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· Score: 2
I can't address the topic of the possible movie, since I don't know anything about it, but I don't really think that a book like this is due to mercenary tendancies.
Whenever you have a book that is as interesting as Ender's game was, there are all kinds of questions not only about the characters, but about the world that the author created in the book that don't get resolved. Hell, if they were resolved, then every fantasy/sci fi book that created itself a new universe would be extremely long.
With a shift in perspective, you get another look at the same universe, the same events within the book, and I find that type of thing extremely valuable. While I haven't read this new book yet, I think that I'll probably enjoy it quite a bit because I enjoyed Ender's Game and I remember wondering about many different aspects that weren't explained in the book.
Creativity and art has everything to do with looking at things from different perspectives, and I think that's what Card is probably doing. Or at least, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for now - at least until I start seeing Ender beanie babies, ender t-shirts, and ender glow in the dark boxers in every store on the planet.:)
David
People who are new to Orson Scott Card's Books
on
Ender's Shadow
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· Score: 1
I think it would be very interesting to see reviews for these types of books by people who are nongeeks and haven't read the series. People who are long time fans of a series of course have reviews that are just as valid as anybody else's, but at the same time, they are looking at a book from a completely different perspective.
For example, I haven't read this book, but I get the feeling from the description that anybody could read it and still understand everything without the legacy knowledge of the previous books.
I'd just be interested in seeing what people think of the book when looking through a different set of eyes, since I'm already an OSC fan.:)
It's people like Matt Welsh that make linux what it is.
Look at the guy!! He's kicking ass all over the place, getting things done, pushing code, working on a Ph.D, he started the LDP, etc. etc. etc
Self starting motivated people who apparently are able to squeeze 50 hours out of every day get things done and make linux the kick ass system that it is. Sometimes there is infighting, (not necessarily with Matt Welsh) sometimes there is arguing, but it is people like RMS, ESR, Torvalds, Welsh, and so on that keep things going in the long run.
A proposal: Canonization in the linux community requres public knowledge of your middle name so we can make you into a three letter acronym. I propose that we find out Matt Welsh's middle name so we can call him M$MIDDLE_INITIALW:)
This isn't meant to come down on HP, just an observation.
I don't know if it's because I'm on a weird part of the learning curve or because of deficiencies in the book, but there were a lot of things that I was dying to know about that weren't covered in the book. It would have been nice to have had information organized by conceptual topic in the index as well as by code. E.g. how to create right click popup menus is the conceptual topic, but using gnome_widget_popup_foo is the code topic.
Also, what I really wanted that the book didn't have was entries in the index for ALL functions that were discussed (or mentioned) in the book, not just the ones that had minisections about them. That way, even if the function was only mentioned, you can still get a feel for what it relates to by checking out the information that surrounds where it was mentioned, if you know what I mean.
The book as far as an intro to Gnome though was very good. I enjoyed reading it, and I'm damn sure glad that it exists. A book of this type doesn't have to cover everything, (as HP pointed out that it can't) but it does a fairly good job at what it *should* do, which is to allow the reader to get a toe-hold into gnome, to the point where reading the reference documentation will actually be helpful. I found that the book was a success in that respect.
There are already many companies that just don't sell their software, they only rent it. For example, the SAS institute sells licenses which always terminate...I don't know that you can buy a license that doesn't terminate.
Among commercial software, this isn't always SUCH a bad idea, (if you're of the opinion that commercial software is a good idea in the first place) because some products are "cutting edge" and you really wouldn't want to buy the thing because in two years you'd have to buy it again to get some vital functionality.
Don't you see the opportunity? Don't you see the superb opportunity to warp and twist their fragile little minds to follow our evil cult of communist (ack!) free software loving (argh!) establishment-shunning (ahhh!) philosophy of world domination through strategic placement of penguins all over the globe!!!!
MUHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA....oh sorry.
We could get them all on the net by age 4!!! That way, they could be exposed to all the evil nastiness that flows through the veins of all linux users like a black vomitous fluid, intoxicating them...inebriating them...rendering them unable to use proprietary software!!!!
Don't you understand??? We ARE the people our parents warned us about!!!!
Who counts? People who's software is in Redhat? On the contrib net? People who can verify that they've written something? (I've written a mean implementation of hello world in C...fastest algorithm YOU'LL ever see..)
Goldman Sachs is doing the underwriting - aka since it's a small offering they're going to offer it to their clients first. Unless you're a client of GS chances are you'll have to buy it on the open market not at IPO. That sucks.
My initial opinion about slashdot getting acquired was "OH SHIT". Then of course a few thoughts float by...
Malda's gotta eat, so does Hemos, slashdot is the kind of site that will never stop getting too big for its britches (or at least no time soon) and the acquisition of slashdot is a good thing, right?
No.
People may wheel and argue about whether or not free software and the community movement that linux represents is communist or not, and whether it's anti buisness or not, but I personally feel that one thing that free software (and the community) is that companies CANNOT BE TRUSTED. If the opposite were true, why would the GPL need a clause that says companies may not adopt the source and close it down if they were reputable?
I know this sounds really shitty, but I would rather that slashdot stayed smaller, and maybe didn't do everything possible to appease everyone on the planet then take it too far and in trying to appease everyone, be forced into something like an acquisition for financial reasons.
I know that that's very insensitive to the needs of CmdrTaco and Hemos, but the question comes to mind, what is ANYBODY in this buisness for? I am not accusing Malda and the rest of being mercenaries only out for the glorification of the buck, but my cynicism at this announcement is rooted in the fact that I don't trust companies and i see no compelling reason why slashdot or any of its readers should either. What are they getting out of it? If it were just the advertising revenue....well, I just don't trust them that's all.
Just as Bruce Perens addressed OSI with "It's time to talk more about the freedom in free software" I think slashdotters should ask themselves what they're in it for.
In closing, I do not doubt Rob Malda's sincerity AT ALL. He's proved crucial to the whole community, and the last possible purpose of this is to complain about him, but I just don't think this is the right move. As the BOFH once said, "I have an irrational fear of anything that looks like the thin end of a wedge".
David Allen
DETAILS!!! Where are the details!!!!????
on
RSA slightly broken
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· Score: 1
I read the article, and I'm a big fan of the RSA system but the article tells you nothing about the propsed machine, just that there's going to be on. Sure, I can see that the NYT might want to water things down a bit for their readers but they could at least link to somewhere where there's more tech info.
Currently, with packages like maple and mathematica, on a decent box you can factor primes that are reasonably big, but nowhere near in the range of what RSA uses. This special "machine" Shamir says he's thought up...I need the details!!!
I can't particularly think of anything that they've done, and more than that, it's kind of funny that a community that tends to be as strong spirited as the linux community often needs a bad guy to beat up on.
I used redhat linux, I can often be found downloading the latest upgrades, I think rpm is rad, but I'm probably going to be moving to Debian. Why? Because I'm becoming more and more of a GNU hardliner in my old age. (20) I just like the idea of a more ideologically "pure" distribution in that Debian is NOTHING but Free Software.
It seems to me as though we're almost headed toward the type of paradox that is there with Microsoft - it seems everybody hates them but at the same time, they have 80% market share. How does that work exactly? I am not comparing redhat to microsoft in terms of what they do, but rather they both have huge market shares of their respective markets, and both seem to be disliked.
All though I don't know if Rob would approve, you can always do exactly what you're doing now, which is, post as an anonymous coward and still be able to moderate the discussion. I think the main thing was that he didn't want people to abuse the priveledge of moderation because of the fact that so many people aren't very objective in general, and aren't necessarily going to be objective in posting and moderating. (Not saying anything about you, just in general)
You know, Rob, I knew you were dedicated to slashdot and that it took up a lot of your time, but this kind of stuff, with moderation access schemes this complex, is really first rate stuff. Even though I enjoy moderation, it is excellent to know that I can switch it off with a click and look at slashdot in all of the comments in their, ahem, "glory".
Still using MSQL, maybe it's because I don't do SQL much that I have no idea how you did all of this.
Keep in mind, Rob, that the kind of stuff you're implementing right now is the kind of stuff people get paid wheelbarrows full of dollars for. (But don't let that convince you to take a job elsewhere and desert/.!!)
I honestly don't care if I become a moderator, but I don't think it would be that bad...kinda cool.
One possibility would be to also have the moderators stick to a certain quota of grading too, although I don't know how feasible that would be - depending on the articles, to make moderators stick to a relatively standard value, for example, if you're a moderator, and the sum of all of your moderation is -1200, something's wrong. Likewise, if you have a value of 5000 points assigned to the various articles you've moderated, that's not good either..
Many slashdotters do not speak english as their first language, and I for one, as a veteran of a foreign language, can appreciate how damn hard it is to say what you're trying to say while speaking or writing a foreign language.
And besides, it may be a bit distracting to read the spelling and grammar, but who is it really that needs a shiny package to appreciate what's inside? I don't... and that's why I get my linux over the internet. I don't need a shiny box to enjoy the contents, and I don't think that the author of the article has to wait and study and learn perfect oxford, (or south compton) english before he is permitted to express his views with the slashdot community.
Give the guy a break, and hopefully along with me you'll realize that he deserves to be commended on his article's content AND his english skills. (Whatever his native tounge is, I doubt most people can speak that as well as he speaks english)
Bottom line: The point is the point. If you understood what was written in the article, then I'd say that the article was good enough for slashdot. This isn't the New York times, and I think it would totally SUCK if people got flamed for writing poorly. Think about the people that WOULDN'T write in who SHOULD.
It is his site - but I have to wonder occasionally what people expect. I wonder if it's possible to really thoroughly test code without god-knows-how-many slashdotters pounding on it in all possible ways to find things that are wrong.
I think that the new moderation stuff is neat. I've noticed that the page is broken sometimes, but usually when it comes back and is not broken anymore, it tends to be better. Broken Code != Evil Rob.... ->(= brokencode evilrob) (nil)
It's pretty nifty what one can accomplish with perl. Good job rob it's pretty spiffy.
I for one don't really use it, mostly because I don't want to exclude ANYTHING slashdot carries, but it's very cool to be able to do that type of thing.
What would be interesting to me is to get stats later on to see how many people excluded Jon Katz articles. I certainly didn't, and I'd love to see how many people that act like they hate him actually go through with it. After all, if they excluded him, they wouldn't have anything to bitch about, right? They're not going to do it IMHO.
There are some DAMN good cryptanalysts out there. Coming up with a code that looks like total gibberish to everyone, and coming up with a code that withstands the most complex cryptanalytic attacks is something different altogether. It reminds me of Dr. Weil's proof of Fermat's last theorem: We'll see if the math crunching that inevitably follows such a "discovery" holds it up to be what she says it is.
Wouldn't want to find out that my up and coming degree will be worthless in the future.
What I'm sick of is all of the people who assume that I'm in computer science because of the money. Assuming we're all nerds in good standing here, I'm not in it for the bucks and I don't think many other people here are either.
I could be wrong though...
The big difference between CS and IT majors - the CS majors are the creators and the IT majors are the doers or the users of what the CS majors create. You may take that as either an insult or a compliment to IT people depending on your temperment at the moment of reading this post.:)
I think it sucks that scoop got so much flame mail, but at the same time, there are a few things on the side to be thought about...
I think scoop is completely within his rights to do whatever he wants with his web site up to and including tanking it, putting up just one simple grey rant page, but something's sticking in the back of my head...
As we read in so many jon katz editorials, people just have to have thick skin. Flaming people for putting in shit loads of FREE work is really weak, but at the same time, if I were scoop, I would have put that rant at the top of the new page, and with it a little note that says if you don't like it go ahead and TRY to find a site that kicks 1/5 as much ass as freshmeat.
I don't really agree with the decision to yank the whole damn thing in favor of just one grey rant page, but it's his man, and you have to respect his choice.
I REALLY HOPE THAT FLAMERS DON'T MESS UP FRESHMEAT.NET FOR THE REST OF US.
To scoop: please understand by reading jon katz's articles that of the people that email you telling you that they hate the new UI, you're only getting 2% of all responses to the page. Trolls suck, but they're a part of the experience I guess you could say.
Freshmeat.net kicks ass and if you don't like it, don't flame the guy who did it, but rather, shoot yourself.:)
Slashdot Mirror
>Hmmm... As I recall, Adolf Hitler called himself >a National Socialist. So, I guess the various >Socialist parties in Europe are all anti-semitic?
That's not what he was saying and you know it. Christians ARE often seen as loonies, but most educated people know better than to take the entire lot as similar to the wackos who are on the outside screaming. I don't think this guy was just trying to troll.
I lived in Germany for a year, and they all asked me if I brought guns with me to school or not, if I smoked crack, and so on. That's all they see in the newspaper. The newspaper reports on the out of the ordinary, but when that's all you see, you come to think of it as the ordinary. I think the same is true of christians. You don't see christians praying in church on the news, because that's ordinary. But you do see them shooting abortion providers and so on. When the out-of-the-ordinary becomes the ordinary, people get things confused.
Listen man, I understand your gripe about the moderation here, but you have to understand that not only is this mob rule, but you shouldn't be posting for moderation points anyway.
/. is to *trust* people. That may sound naive, but what do you suggest as an alternate strategy? Trust the moderators to be honest, and your posts will be rated accordingly. There are things in life that are more important than a positive karma on slashdot. And generally, the moderators really aren't that bad, in that it's hard to have a negative karma unless you're really just a troll, which you don't seem to be.
Don't post hoping that your post will get moderated up or down. Post if you have something to say, and skip the post if you think it's not really all that important.
It's about judgement - and the best you can do with anybody in such an anonymous forum as
MDA
http://opop.nols.com/
Sometimes my cynical side wants to come out and smack people around, the doomsayers, for coming up with things just sound like they're destined to become the next buzzword - "Cyberclysm". Furthermore, my cynical side wants to say that the alarmists who are constantly talking about what's going to happen...what's going to happen? are doing the same as any other american - trying to make a buck.
But the real truth is that people sometimes are at odds with the technology that runs things, but that's not because people are stupid or because there's too much technology. Quite the contrary - humans are absolutely brilliant creatures, and we can (most likely) saddle anything we build as long as we keep our wits about us.
Where I think the problem lies is when the advance of technology outstrips education among the general population. Technology is taking off like a rocket, but the base levels of education aren't really improving all that much in America, or as far as I know, elsewhere either. I don't like hearing people tell me that the U.S. has a great literacy rate and that we shouldn't complain because other people have it worse - that may be true but that's no reason to just think of everything as adequate and not work on anything anymore. Once the education improves both in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, the technology that seems to be driving us to this new buzzword that's a mix of Cyber(insert-your-favorite-noun-here) and Cataclysm won't seem nearly as threatening or offensive to anybody. Understand it, and it's a tool. But like racism, or any other product of ignorance (ignorance NOT stupidity) if you don't understand it, it will cause fear and problems.
MDA
http://opop.nols.com/
Galileo is a person who for me started what has been a centuries long progression of formalized religion and the church backing up to the progress of science. First it was galileo, and many have come after him, forcing the church to slowly and stubbornly give up ground.
Galileo was persecuted, eventually the church came around and said "oops" - first accepting that there might be some shred of truth to what he had to say, then admitting that maybe he was on to something, and finally agreeing that yes, it was the case that the earth revolves around the sun.
I have heard that Leonardo DiVinci drew considerable heat for his dissection of cadavers, which yielded many insights into anatomy. Surely nobody can dispute the importance of knowledge of anatomy.
Darwin stood up and told the world what he thought, and Creationists didn't believe it, (He was lucky he lived when he did - if he had lived at the time or before galileo I don't think the church would have been as kind to him as they were to galileo) but gradually, the idea of evolution and the underlying sense that it makes has wormed its way into our heads.
Although I'm not sure of exactly when, I've been told that the vatican has recently acknowledged evolution for the first time. (That's 2nd hand though, I'm not sure if that's accurate)
As the church through the centuries is constantly finding itself backing itself into a corner, admitting that more and more of science might have some measure of truth to it, you have to wonder when it will stop or IF it will stop. Not intending to draw flame, but rather as a statement of opinion, I see the church as peddling mythology and comfortable fibs, while science peddles nothing - it offers only the truth or a reasonable method of getting the truth.
I think that the story of Galileo is central to the state of daily consciousness not because of the specific facts that it represented (earth, sun, which revolves around which), but because of the scientific-driven secularism that it seems to have started.
MDA
http://opop.nols.com/
I go to school at VCU in Richmond Virginia,
:) if they really want to stay on the leading edge of things, then they need to get started on more shameless commercialism, (although selling crappy license plates where $plate =~ s/[Aa]/\@/g; is a good start) and catch up with the rest of the internet.
and I can tell you first hand that virginians
like to think that we're on the cutting edge
of technology. Motorola semiconductor plants
which may or may not be build here, of course
we've got AOL, and many other tech companies in
NOVA (northern VA).
The governor, Jim Gilmore, even appointed a
special group for information technology advising
recently. Among the appointees? The president of VCU, (who is a PhD *history* major, and who I know couldn't compute his way out of a wet paper bag) Steve Case, one of everybody's favorite evil internet millionaires. All in all, it's a very colorful collection of goons we've got down here in the good ol' boy state.
It seems that businesses for quite some time now have been falling all over each other trying to get to the internet to ply their wares, and governments are no different, only in that what they're selling is slightly different. They want prestige for "fostering a technology friendly environment where the innovation of tomorrow becomes a reality".
Jeez, I wonder when the state government page is going to start carrying pr0n banners...
I can't address the topic of the possible movie, since I don't know anything about it, but I don't really think that a book like this is due to mercenary tendancies.
:)
Whenever you have a book that is as interesting as Ender's game was, there are all kinds of questions not only about the characters, but about the world that the author created in the book that don't get resolved. Hell, if they were resolved, then every fantasy/sci fi book that created itself a new universe would be extremely long.
With a shift in perspective, you get another look at the same universe, the same events within the book, and I find that type of thing extremely valuable. While I haven't read this new book yet, I think that I'll probably enjoy it quite a bit because I enjoyed Ender's Game and I remember wondering about many different aspects that weren't explained in the book.
Creativity and art has everything to do with looking at things from different perspectives, and I think that's what Card is probably doing. Or at least, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for now - at least until I start seeing Ender beanie babies, ender t-shirts, and ender glow in the dark boxers in every store on the planet.
David
I think it would be very interesting to see reviews for these types of books by people who are nongeeks and haven't read the series. People who are long time fans of a series of course have reviews that are just as valid as anybody else's, but at the same time, they are looking at a book from a completely different perspective.
:)
For example, I haven't read this book, but I get the feeling from the description that anybody could read it and still understand everything without the legacy knowledge of the previous books.
I'd just be interested in seeing what people think of the book when looking through a different set of eyes, since I'm already an OSC fan.
It's people like Matt Welsh that make linux what it is.
:)
Look at the guy!! He's kicking ass all over the place, getting things done, pushing code, working on a Ph.D, he started the LDP, etc. etc. etc
Self starting motivated people who apparently are able to squeeze 50 hours out of every day get things done and make linux the kick ass system that it is. Sometimes there is infighting, (not necessarily with Matt Welsh) sometimes there is arguing, but it is people like RMS, ESR, Torvalds, Welsh, and so on that keep things going in the long run.
A proposal: Canonization in the linux community requres public knowledge of your middle name so we can make you into a three letter acronym. I propose that we find out Matt Welsh's middle name so we can call him M$MIDDLE_INITIALW
This isn't meant to come down on HP, just an observation.
I don't know if it's because I'm on a weird part of the learning curve or because of deficiencies in the book, but there were a lot of things that I was dying to know about that weren't covered in the book. It would have been nice to have had information organized by conceptual topic in the index as well as by code. E.g. how to create right click popup menus is the conceptual topic, but using gnome_widget_popup_foo is the code topic.
Also, what I really wanted that the book didn't have was entries in the index for ALL functions that were discussed (or mentioned) in the book, not just the ones that had minisections about them. That way, even if the function was only mentioned, you can still get a feel for what it relates to by checking out the information that surrounds where it was mentioned, if you know what I mean.
The book as far as an intro to Gnome though was very good. I enjoyed reading it, and I'm damn sure glad that it exists. A book of this type doesn't have to cover everything, (as HP pointed out that it can't) but it does a fairly good job at what it *should* do, which is to allow the reader to get a toe-hold into gnome, to the point where reading the reference documentation will actually be helpful. I found that the book was a success in that respect.
There are already many companies that just don't
sell their software, they only rent it. For
example, the SAS
institute sells licenses which always terminate...I don't know that you can buy a license that doesn't terminate.
Among commercial software, this isn't always SUCH a bad idea, (if you're of the opinion that commercial software is a good idea in the first place) because some products are "cutting edge" and you really wouldn't want to buy the thing because in two years you'd have to buy it again to get some vital functionality.
Muhahahaha...children using computers.
Don't you see the opportunity? Don't you see the superb opportunity to warp and twist their fragile little minds to follow our evil cult of communist (ack!) free software loving (argh!) establishment-shunning (ahhh!) philosophy of world domination through strategic placement of penguins all over the globe!!!!
MUHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHA....oh sorry.
We could get them all on the net by age 4!!! That way, they could be exposed to all the evil nastiness that flows through the veins of all linux users like a black vomitous fluid, intoxicating them...inebriating them...rendering them unable to use proprietary software!!!!
Don't you understand??? We ARE the people our parents warned us about!!!!
Who counts? People who's software is in Redhat? On the contrib net? People who can verify that they've written something? (I've written a mean implementation of hello world in C...fastest algorithm YOU'LL ever see..)
Goldman Sachs is doing the underwriting - aka since it's a small offering they're going to offer it to their clients first. Unless you're a client of GS chances are you'll have to buy it on the open market not at IPO. That sucks.
My initial opinion about slashdot getting acquired was "OH SHIT". Then of course a few thoughts float by...
Malda's gotta eat, so does Hemos, slashdot is the kind of site that will never stop getting too big for its britches (or at least no time soon) and the acquisition of slashdot is a good thing, right?
No.
People may wheel and argue about whether or not free software and the community movement that linux represents is communist or not, and whether it's anti buisness or not, but I personally feel that one thing that free software (and the community) is that companies CANNOT BE TRUSTED. If the opposite were true, why would the GPL need a clause that says companies may not adopt the source and close it down if they were reputable?
I know this sounds really shitty, but I would rather that slashdot stayed smaller, and maybe didn't do everything possible to appease everyone on the planet then take it too far and in trying to appease everyone, be forced into something like an acquisition for financial reasons.
I know that that's very insensitive to the needs of CmdrTaco and Hemos, but the question comes to mind, what is ANYBODY in this buisness for? I am not accusing Malda and the rest of being mercenaries only out for the glorification of the buck, but my cynicism at this announcement is rooted in the fact that I don't trust companies and i see no compelling reason why slashdot or any of its readers should either. What are they getting out of it? If it were just the advertising revenue....well, I just don't trust them that's all.
Just as Bruce Perens addressed OSI with "It's time to talk more about the freedom in free software" I think slashdotters should ask themselves what they're in it for.
In closing, I do not doubt Rob Malda's sincerity AT ALL. He's proved crucial to the whole community, and the last possible purpose of this is to complain about him, but I just don't think this is the right move. As the BOFH once said, "I have an irrational fear of anything that looks like the thin end of a wedge".
David Allen
I read the article, and I'm a big fan of the RSA system but the article tells you nothing about the propsed machine, just that there's going to be on. Sure, I can see that the NYT might want to water things down a bit for their readers but they could at least link to somewhere where there's more tech info.
Currently, with packages like maple and mathematica, on a decent box you can factor primes that are reasonably big, but nowhere near in the range of what RSA uses. This special "machine" Shamir says he's thought up...I need the details!!!
I can't particularly think of anything that they've done, and more than that, it's kind of funny that a community that tends to be as strong spirited as the linux community often needs a bad guy to beat up on.
I used redhat linux, I can often be found downloading the latest upgrades, I think rpm is rad, but I'm probably going to be moving to Debian. Why? Because I'm becoming more and more of a GNU hardliner in my old age. (20) I just like the idea of a more ideologically "pure" distribution in that Debian is NOTHING but Free Software.
It seems to me as though we're almost headed toward the type of paradox that is there with Microsoft - it seems everybody hates them but at the same time, they have 80% market share. How does that work exactly? I am not comparing redhat to microsoft in terms of what they do, but rather they both have huge market shares of their respective markets, and both seem to be disliked.
All though I don't know if Rob would approve, you can always do exactly what you're doing now, which is, post as an anonymous coward and still be able to moderate the discussion. I think the main thing was that he didn't want people to abuse the priveledge of moderation because of the fact that so many people aren't very objective in general, and aren't necessarily going to be objective in posting and moderating. (Not saying anything about you, just in general)
You know, Rob, I knew you were dedicated to slashdot and that it took up a lot of your time, but this kind of stuff, with moderation access schemes this complex, is really first rate stuff. Even though I enjoy moderation, it is excellent to know that I can switch it off with a click and look at slashdot in all of the comments in their, ahem, "glory".
/.!!)
Still using MSQL, maybe it's because I don't do SQL much that I have no idea how you did all of this.
Keep in mind, Rob, that the kind of stuff you're implementing right now is the kind of stuff people get paid wheelbarrows full of dollars for. (But don't let that convince you to take a job elsewhere and desert
I honestly don't care if I become a moderator, but I don't think it would be that bad...kinda cool.
One possibility would be to also have the moderators stick to a certain quota of grading too, although I don't know how feasible that would be - depending on the articles, to make moderators stick to a relatively standard value, for example, if you're a moderator, and the sum of all of your moderation is -1200, something's wrong. Likewise, if you have a value of 5000 points assigned to the various articles you've moderated, that's not good either..
Many slashdotters do not speak english as their first language, and I for one, as a veteran of a foreign language, can appreciate how damn hard it is to say what you're trying to say while speaking or writing a foreign language.
And besides, it may be a bit distracting to read the spelling and grammar, but who is it really that needs a shiny package to appreciate what's inside? I don't... and that's why I get my linux over the internet. I don't need a shiny box to enjoy the contents, and I don't think that the author of the article has to wait and study and learn perfect oxford, (or south compton) english before he is permitted to express his views with the slashdot community.
Give the guy a break, and hopefully along with me you'll realize that he deserves to be commended on his article's content AND his english skills. (Whatever his native tounge is, I doubt most people can speak that as well as he speaks english)
Bottom line: The point is the point. If you understood what was written in the article, then I'd say that the article was good enough for slashdot. This isn't the New York times, and I think it would totally SUCK if people got flamed for writing poorly. Think about the people that WOULDN'T write in who SHOULD.
http://opop.nols.com/index.shtml
It is his site - but I have to wonder occasionally what people expect. I wonder if it's possible to really thoroughly test code without god-knows-how-many slashdotters pounding on it in all possible ways to find things that are wrong.
....
I think that the new moderation stuff is neat. I've noticed that the page is broken sometimes, but usually when it comes back and is not broken anymore, it tends to be better. Broken Code != Evil Rob
->(= brokencode evilrob)
(nil)
It's pretty nifty what one can accomplish with perl. Good job rob it's pretty spiffy.
I for one don't really use it, mostly because I don't want to exclude ANYTHING slashdot carries, but it's very cool to be able to do that type of thing.
What would be interesting to me is to get stats later on to see how many people excluded Jon Katz articles. I certainly didn't, and I'd love to see how many people that act like they hate him actually go through with it. After all, if they excluded him, they wouldn't have anything to bitch about, right? They're not going to do it IMHO.
There are some DAMN good cryptanalysts out there. Coming up with a code that looks like total gibberish to everyone, and coming up with a code that withstands the most complex cryptanalytic attacks is something different altogether. It reminds me of Dr. Weil's proof of Fermat's last theorem: We'll see if the math crunching that inevitably follows such a "discovery" holds it up to be what she says it is.
Wouldn't want to find out that my up and coming degree will be worthless in the future.
:)
What I'm sick of is all of the people who assume that I'm in computer science because of the money. Assuming we're all nerds in good standing here, I'm not in it for the bucks and I don't think many other people here are either.
I could be wrong though...
The big difference between CS and IT majors - the CS majors are the creators and the IT majors are the doers or the users of what the CS majors create. You may take that as either an insult or a compliment to IT people depending on your temperment at the moment of reading this post.
I think it sucks that scoop got so much flame mail, but at the same time, there are a few things on the side to be thought about...
:)
I think scoop is completely within his rights to do whatever he wants with his web site up to and including tanking it, putting up just one simple grey rant page, but something's sticking in the back of my head...
As we read in so many jon katz editorials, people just have to have thick skin. Flaming people for putting in shit loads of FREE work is really weak, but at the same time, if I were scoop, I would have put that rant at the top of the new page, and with it a little note that says if you don't like it go ahead and TRY to find a site that kicks 1/5 as much ass as freshmeat.
I don't really agree with the decision to yank the whole damn thing in favor of just one grey rant page, but it's his man, and you have to respect his choice.
I REALLY HOPE THAT FLAMERS DON'T MESS UP FRESHMEAT.NET FOR THE REST OF US.
To scoop: please understand by reading jon katz's articles that of the people that email you telling you that they hate the new UI, you're only getting 2% of all responses to the page. Trolls suck, but they're a part of the experience I guess you could say.
Freshmeat.net kicks ass and if you don't like it, don't flame the guy who did it, but rather, shoot yourself.