This is much more common than what you might think. 90% of news articles these days are actually just recycled press releases. Companies, organizations, nutbags, and other misfits push out a press release to thousands of "news organizations," who then recycle much of the release verbatim, and then release it as "news".
The downside is that 90% of news is of low quality with no investigation or questioning ever occuring during the writing of the article.
The updside is that, if you know how to work the system, you can get massive coverage for your comany/organization/sex toy shop.
I'll second this. One of the most commong phishing techniques I see in e-mails is the old "I can see the link text there so it must be right" scam. Something like:
Of course, Slashdot has a nice solution (the "[scammer.com]" bit). AFAIK, no webmail services protect users against this. Apple's Mail doesn't, unfortunately, but what about the legions of less tech-savvy people?
Not a lot of common users instictively know that eBay would never send an e-mail like "Your account info must be updated NOW or else we will cancel your account" and then require name, address, credit card info, SSN, fingerprint, DNA sample, and face scan.
It seems like such a simple fix too: if the link text looks like a URL or looks like a fakey one (ex: http;\\ebay.c0m), see if it matches where the actual URL points. If they don't match, warn the user.
I've tried switching my friends and family to Firefox (those on PCs, anyways. Safari rul3z!!!OMGLOLWTF), but none, I mean not a single one, will stay on it due to this exact problem. They all come to me about three days after they switch and describe the performance problems in more or less the same way. When they go back to IE, the problems disappear. Guess which browser they'll be using from now on? Firefox just destroyed the thin thread of chance they had with those potential users.
All that evangelism, all that hype, all that work- for nothing.
Are there any efforts currently underway to get these critical flaws taken more seriously by the Firefox development team? Any "official" response from the higher ups?
"i" is a standard indexing variable name. Anywhere it's used in code, you can usually assume that you;re doing some sort of scanning over an array of some sort.
So it's standard enough, I think.
Re:Brilliant kids have different goals.
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
·
· Score: 1
The goal of life isn't to effect the most change. I figure, as long as you do more good than bad, you can be remembered to have contributed to whatever game this is we're all playing in. The game of life. The great struggle to make big bombs. The everlasting battle of penis size and masculinity. Whoever has the most toys, wins.
Ghandi contributed to the team. So did my grandma. So will many of us.
We all win. Here's your medals. The post-game party will be held... Well, we don't really know yet. Start your own party if you like.
The best advice I ever got was to write "why", not "what" a piece of code does.
// Increment counter counter++;
See? Completely useless. Let's try again:
// We've processed one more message counter++;
Ah, much better! Any Computer Science peon knows that "counter++" increments counter. What they might not know is why. Those simple bits of "why" comments can make reading code so much easier.
Organizational comments (those that delineate what chunks of code inside of a method do) can be helpful, too. (Ex: "// Normalize string", "Encode string", "Send String") They make narrowing in on a particular "task" performed in a method even easier.
Other than that, however, the biggest and most persistent and most annoying problem I have is poorly-engineered code. Some people just do not know how to apply their college degrees. I wish CS degrees had a bigger emphasis in software engineering. Would you hire an architect who couldn't design anything bigger than a porta-potty? Why does the CS industry get away with doing the same thing?
Oh stop it stop it, look here, you can't become a bloody fiscal hermit crab every time the Firefox undergoes a self-correction. Firefox's market has no where to go but up.
So the pop-locker on crates is going to use my change to buy a PowerBook so he can explore the world? Probably not. Same for the homeless kids.
If you can afford to live under a roof in SF, you can probably afford a connection to the internet. If you can't, tough. It's called "not being rich". Those who live in relative poverty aren't going to have a nice shiny modern computer with a 802.11 card anyways.
If you ask me, the money wasted on this program should go to programs like 826 Valencia[1], which is an open-door writing and reading center that lets any kid come in and expand their world through writing.
Maybe S.F. could fund open computer centers for kids? After-school programs? Soup kitchens? Unicorn programs?
I didn't format this because I'm tired and it's bed time. Sorry.
-------------
Carl Fogel is a founding developer of the Subversion project. Subversion is sponsored by CollabNet and under the company's employ, Karl describes himself as the CollabNet-to-developer liaison. In the following, Karl explains the inception of the open source Subversion project, what it has required to build its community, and what he has learned in order to successfully maintain it. Karl's vantage is interesting not just from the perspective of managing such a community but also because the Subversion project itself is one of the required sorts of software technologies used in open source development.
Subversion is a type of software configuration management (SCM) tool known as a version control system. These types of tools are important toward letting developers collaborate on software projects. Subversion is part of the tigris.org community's focus on building collaborative software development tools. CollabNet provides enterprises with distributed software development solutions. It's used by companies such as Sun Microsystems, HP, and Barclays Global Investors to help coordinate development teams spread out around the world.
Part III of the Concerted Disruption, Climb Aboard series.
We started Subversion about five years ago, and I think it is a little bit different from a lot of open source projects because we started with the goal of replacing a specific piece of open source software... We were trying to replace CVS.
You had a good reference point.
We had a great reference point and also that saved us from a lot of arguments about what should and shouldn't be in our first release. We could say that if it's in CVS it should be in our 1.0 version, if it's not in CVS it doesn't need to be. There was an inherent controversy reduction substance in our projects--at least before 1.0. Now we get into all those discussions that we put off. But we have a foundation/relationship already built with all these people that makes it a lot easier to do that because they all worked together to get to 1.0.
As to how we got those developers. The numbers we have right now are roughly thirty full committers--people who can commit anywhere in the source code, thirty partial committers--people that just do documentation fixes, fix support scripts, or something like that but do not have commit rights in all the code. Of those thirty full committers, I'd say roughly fifteen are really active on a day-to-day basis. You get some others that come flying in like Han Solo every now and then--they fix a bug and then they go out and you don't hear from them for a few months.
The way we founded it was mainly word-of-mouth. We knew the CVS space pretty well, we started contacting those people, they talked to their friends, and pretty soon people just showed up. We actually held physical, open-to-the-public design meetings when we began the project in San Francisco. Some of those people are still with the project today. But you know, one of best committers is in Slovenia and he certainly didn't come to those design meetings. But we wouldn't be where we are without him.
---
Could you please clarify your role in the project?
I guess you could call it, founding developer. CollabNet only employs somewhere between three and four of those committers. We don't all work 100 percent on Subversion all the time. Somewhere between three and four is accurate. My role was mainly--you know I had a lot of experience working with open source projects before, and in particular with CVS, which helped to get me involved with version control--it was sort of to set the tone at the beginning of the project--a CollabNet-to-developer liaison when necessary, although there haven't been that many conflicts, we haven't needed a liaison that much. My role is also to write code.
It's hard to put my finger on it exactly but when you have a bunch of volunteers, the main curr
"The terrorists will never succeed in taking away our freedoms and civil liberties!"
Well, technically, they're using our own politicians to accomplish that, if that is indeed their goal. Now that is a feat: getting your enemy to obtain your goal for you.
Slashdot Mirror
This is much more common than what you might think. 90% of news articles these days are actually just recycled press releases. Companies, organizations, nutbags, and other misfits push out a press release to thousands of "news organizations," who then recycle much of the release verbatim, and then release it as "news".
The downside is that 90% of news is of low quality with no investigation or questioning ever occuring during the writing of the article.
The updside is that, if you know how to work the system, you can get massive coverage for your comany/organization/sex toy shop.
Those are my 2 cents, and they're free.
Actually, using RIAA math, your 2 cents just cost me eleventy billion dollars.
2 cents X 200,000 computer views of comment X 100 potential users per comment X 235 (HAPPY FUN NUMBER!) = ELEVENTY BILLION DOLLARS.
Thanks to you, I'm now a starving musician. Ass.
You're an editor?!
I'll second this. One of the most commong phishing techniques I see in e-mails is the old "I can see the link text there so it must be right" scam. Something like:
Update your account here: http://ebay.com/updateAccount.html
Of course, Slashdot has a nice solution (the "[scammer.com]" bit). AFAIK, no webmail services protect users against this. Apple's Mail doesn't, unfortunately, but what about the legions of less tech-savvy people?
Not a lot of common users instictively know that eBay would never send an e-mail like "Your account info must be updated NOW or else we will cancel your account" and then require name, address, credit card info, SSN, fingerprint, DNA sample, and face scan.
It seems like such a simple fix too: if the link text looks like a URL or looks like a fakey one (ex: http;\\ebay.c0m), see if it matches where the actual URL points. If they don't match, warn the user.
Amen.
I've tried switching my friends and family to Firefox (those on PCs, anyways. Safari rul3z!!!OMGLOLWTF), but none, I mean not a single one, will stay on it due to this exact problem. They all come to me about three days after they switch and describe the performance problems in more or less the same way. When they go back to IE, the problems disappear. Guess which browser they'll be using from now on? Firefox just destroyed the thin thread of chance they had with those potential users.
All that evangelism, all that hype, all that work- for nothing.
Are there any efforts currently underway to get these critical flaws taken more seriously by the Firefox development team? Any "official" response from the higher ups?
"i" is a standard indexing variable name. Anywhere it's used in code, you can usually assume that you;re doing some sort of scanning over an array of some sort.
So it's standard enough, I think.
The goal of life isn't to effect the most change. I figure, as long as you do more good than bad, you can be remembered to have contributed to whatever game this is we're all playing in. The game of life. The great struggle to make big bombs. The everlasting battle of penis size and masculinity. Whoever has the most toys, wins.
Ghandi contributed to the team. So did my grandma. So will many of us.
We all win. Here's your medals. The post-game party will be held... Well, we don't really know yet. Start your own party if you like.
More nincompoopery from the TSA. Pretend muteness.
"Are you a terrorist?"
*scribbles on paper*
"Oh! Oh. Ok, pass on through. It's ok guys, he's a mute!"
The best advice I ever got was to write "why", not "what" a piece of code does.
See? Completely useless. Let's try again:
Ah, much better! Any Computer Science peon knows that "counter++" increments counter. What they might not know is why. Those simple bits of "why" comments can make reading code so much easier.
Organizational comments (those that delineate what chunks of code inside of a method do) can be helpful, too. (Ex: "// Normalize string", "Encode string", "Send String") They make narrowing in on a particular "task" performed in a method even easier.
Other than that, however, the biggest and most persistent and most annoying problem I have is poorly-engineered code. Some people just do not know how to apply their college degrees. I wish CS degrees had a bigger emphasis in software engineering. Would you hire an architect who couldn't design anything bigger than a porta-potty? Why does the CS industry get away with doing the same thing?
I have an idea how they could use the $100 laptop: Sell it and use the money for better health-care or maybe even food.
Shocking idea, I know.
Oh stop it stop it, look here, you can't become a bloody fiscal hermit crab every time the Firefox undergoes a self-correction. Firefox's market has no where to go but up.
(With apologies to Family Guy)
Why has no one made a "yo momma" joke about the code name yet? Come on, you perverts! Breezy Badger!
Slashdot: News for nerds, stuff Boing Boing posted, like, a week ago.
To which the computer science major said "no" because money has been tight ever since his job got shipped off to India. :-/
More featured concepts include a wearable, shock proof and waterproof device, the SURV1
They misspelled "pad of paper and a pencil".
Here's a start:
Bloggy Style - News you can get behind.
But those who can afford wireless-enabled computers already have internet connections. So, this benefits... Almost no one!
Well, tourists. Tourists might be able to get something out of this. But we just wardrive anyways.
So the pop-locker on crates is going to use my change to buy a PowerBook so he can explore the world? Probably not. Same for the homeless kids.
If you can afford to live under a roof in SF, you can probably afford a connection to the internet. If you can't, tough. It's called "not being rich". Those who live in relative poverty aren't going to have a nice shiny modern computer with a 802.11 card anyways.
If you ask me, the money wasted on this program should go to programs like 826 Valencia[1], which is an open-door writing and reading center that lets any kid come in and expand their world through writing.
Maybe S.F. could fund open computer centers for kids? After-school programs? Soup kitchens? Unicorn programs?
[1] http://826valencia.org/
And that's Google's fault?
Ow! I need some aspirin!
--- = page break
... We were trying to replace CVS.
I didn't format this because I'm tired and it's bed time. Sorry.
-------------
Carl Fogel is a founding developer of the Subversion project. Subversion is sponsored by CollabNet and under the company's employ, Karl describes himself as the CollabNet-to-developer liaison. In the following, Karl explains the inception of the open source Subversion project, what it has required to build its community, and what he has learned in order to successfully maintain it. Karl's vantage is interesting not just from the perspective of managing such a community but also because the Subversion project itself is one of the required sorts of software technologies used in open source development.
Subversion is a type of software configuration management (SCM) tool known as a version control system. These types of tools are important toward letting developers collaborate on software projects. Subversion is part of the tigris.org community's focus on building collaborative software development tools. CollabNet provides enterprises with distributed software development solutions. It's used by companies such as Sun Microsystems, HP, and Barclays Global Investors to help coordinate development teams spread out around the world.
Part III of the Concerted Disruption, Climb Aboard series.
We started Subversion about five years ago, and I think it is a little bit different from a lot of open source projects because we started with the goal of replacing a specific piece of open source software
You had a good reference point.
We had a great reference point and also that saved us from a lot of arguments about what should and shouldn't be in our first release. We could say that if it's in CVS it should be in our 1.0 version, if it's not in CVS it doesn't need to be. There was an inherent controversy reduction substance in our projects--at least before 1.0. Now we get into all those discussions that we put off. But we have a foundation/relationship already built with all these people that makes it a lot easier to do that because they all worked together to get to 1.0.
As to how we got those developers. The numbers we have right now are roughly thirty full committers--people who can commit anywhere in the source code, thirty partial committers--people that just do documentation fixes, fix support scripts, or something like that but do not have commit rights in all the code. Of those thirty full committers, I'd say roughly fifteen are really active on a day-to-day basis. You get some others that come flying in like Han Solo every now and then--they fix a bug and then they go out and you don't hear from them for a few months.
The way we founded it was mainly word-of-mouth. We knew the CVS space pretty well, we started contacting those people, they talked to their friends, and pretty soon people just showed up. We actually held physical, open-to-the-public design meetings when we began the project in San Francisco. Some of those people are still with the project today. But you know, one of best committers is in Slovenia and he certainly didn't come to those design meetings. But we wouldn't be where we are without him.
---
Could you please clarify your role in the project?
I guess you could call it, founding developer. CollabNet only employs somewhere between three and four of those committers. We don't all work 100 percent on Subversion all the time. Somewhere between three and four is accurate. My role was mainly--you know I had a lot of experience working with open source projects before, and in particular with CVS, which helped to get me involved with version control--it was sort of to set the tone at the beginning of the project--a CollabNet-to-developer liaison when necessary, although there haven't been that many conflicts, we haven't needed a liaison that much. My role is also to write code.
It's hard to put my finger on it exactly but when you have a bunch of volunteers, the main curr
So, like, they want me to cut it up, move pieces around, and combine it in funky-fresh ways with other schedules?
Or maybe a mash-up?
"The terrorists will never succeed in taking away our freedoms and civil liberties!"
Well, technically, they're using our own politicians to accomplish that, if that is indeed their goal. Now that is a feat: getting your enemy to obtain your goal for you.
Linux has no anti-Microsoft strategy yet people are migrating from Windows to Linux.
These days, Linux is an anti-Microsoft strategy.