Several people have suggested moderation or filtering schemes, in which users can say, essentially, which posts they like and which they don't like. Depending on the approach, the system could even learn, either by user (e.g. the Bozo filter) or by content (e.g. Baysian filtering), etc. It then promotes the posts people like, and hides the ones they don't like. (Sounds familiar?)
There is a fundamental problem with this though, which is particularly acute for a site such as yours that exists for the sake of political debate.
If you do this, then users will tend to be presented with opinions that are most similar to their own, and have dissenting opinion hidden from them. That's going to stifle debate and make the site much less interesting.
The only real way to do it is to find a small team of dedicated moderators who are able to objectively rate content according to its intrinsic worth rather than according to the opinion expressed. That's hard.
-fstrict-aliasing is a *very* balsy flag to use if you haven't actually written the software yourself. It's a pretty safe bet that building a lot of unknown software with -fstrict-aliasing will break it. There's a good reason strict aliasing is off by default -- valid C programs (easy ones to write, too) will die with this option, occasionally and in odd ways.
Getting slightly off-topic, but if you care about strict aliasing optimisations, you can use Fortran. The language is structured in such a way that the compiler knows exactly what aliasing is going on, and can optimise accordingly.
While those are all good examples of nice design using CSS, they all suffer from page-width problems. None of them except inc.com make any attempt to scale to the width of the window, and even inc.com breaks when the window is too narrow.
This is one of my biggest bugbears with CSS design - creating pages that use the whole width of the browser window whatever the window size, and look good at all widths is just so hard. (Of course, with tables, you might as well not even try, but that's not the point.)
I think you are missing the point that the web so easily could be an ideal medium for non-visual information.
For example, if you compare the technology required to read a paper book out loud to that required to read an electronic text file out aloud, I'm sure you will see that the latter is a far easier task. There's no reason to make it difficult, but designers do, just because they think it is more important to have a heading in their own choice of font (presented as a bitmap) than for a minority to be able to read it.
You might also like to bear in mind that local government in the UK has a duty to make information available in a form that people can understand. That's why most leaflets tell you where to get hold of a large-print version, or in audio tape form. (Presumably your neighbour tells you this from the original leaflet if you can't read it yourself!)
So I ask again: The web is ideally suited to avoid the effort required to make paper documents universally accessible. Why make it difficult?
Usually, there are terms and conditions attached to the redistribution of code that came with the development environment, and that almost certainly includes code generated by wizards and so on.
For example, the MSVC license tells you exactly which DLLs you can redistribute, and example code usually has a statement at the top. Wizard-generated code surely won't be any different.
It would be easier to pipe the HTML through lynx before feeding it into a spam filter. That wouldn't get rid of the zero-size font tricks, but a spam filter could easily be trained to see spaces as not significant.
Having said that, I have a very effective spam filter that simply rejects any message that contains the string 'att1.htm', but none of the letters e, i, o, or u. In effect, any message sent as just HTML (i.e. no plaintext version) gets rejected as spam. I've never had a false positive with this, as Outlook always includes a plaintext version for non-HTML mail clients.
More recently, spammers have started including the plaintext string "This message contains an HTML formatted message but your email client does not support the display of HTML. Please view this message in a different mail client or forward this email to a web-based mail system." Of course, that's trivially easy to detect as spam.
You should always presume that someone is listening. This is just another reminder that the world needs to move to secured application layer transport protocols as mandatory
Of course there is always the alternative view that these people simply didn't care if someone was evesdropping on their email. I know I wouldn't be at all bothered.
People still send postcards - think of it - in this day and age when paper envelopes are so easily available...
I was thinking more of a modern tablet computer (15" touch-sensitive colour LCD screen). If you put a button for the thumb on the top near the edge, and four more buttons for the fingers on the underside, you could operate it while hand-holding it.
Your example had all five buttons on the top, which means it has to be rested on something to use it. Perhaps it's time we saw some truly ergonomic and inovative computer design.
Slightly off-topic, but it seems to me that some kind of chording keyboard would be ideal for tablet computers. The buttons could be built into the places where your fingers of one hand naturally fall when holding it. I'd love to see something like this - all the advantages of a small form-factor, without losing the ability to type.
It can be done with mod_rewrite - a quick search on Google will show how.
You don't need to worry about the <?xml...?> - the spec says it's optional, and in fact it is better to leave it out for IE6's sake, because it causes IE6 to enter quirks mode.
Given that even fewer servers, particularly those run by ISPs for their personal subscribers rather than run by companies for themselves, get the MIME type right for X* than they do for HTML+CSS...
Have you tried using an.htaccess file? Some ISPs at least allow it.
AddType application/xhtml+xml xhtml
and variants may help. I haven't tried this myself though, as I'm quite comfortable serving up xhtml as html-lookalike 8-)
Re:For those unfortunate times...
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
Another thing: most newer cars simply don't need to be jumped. Usually a car is 10 years old before its enough of a piece of shit to need jumping
Leaving the headlights on may be difficult as most cars have an alarm that warns you. But I don't think a car needs to be 10 years old before you are able to accidently leave the interior light on over a long weekend...
Re:For those unfortunate times...
on
42-Volt Autos
·
· Score: 1
In addition to those with a 12 Volt system, early pure 42 Volt cars will likely have a converter that you can use to start off of a 12 volt car, or I think, help start a 12 volt car.
That would be one impressive converter. A typical starter motor uses in excess of 250 amps. at 12 volts.
When I got my broadband (DSL) I bought it for one specific reason. Flatrate. I want to be connected at all times.
Just because an account is metered, it doesn't mean it is not always-on. If the ISP meters by bandwidth (rather than time, e.g. telephones), you'll still only pay for the traffic that you generate. If you don't use your PC on Tuesday, you don't pay any incremental cost for that day, even though the connection is still 'on'.
I'm sure that if many ISPs start charging per MB it won't take long before there is software available that can monitor your usage and warn you when you reach some user-defined threshold, so that you can avoid any unexpectedly high bills.
So why don't someone write a Windows driver for UFS?... Maybe it's because there's so many variants
I think the main reason is that writing a file system device driver for Windows is just so difficult. There are hundreds of potential applications for a file system driver besides the obvious. e.g. what about a Win32 equivalent of/proc, or a file system inside a regular file, etc?
If writing NT file system drivers was reasonably straightforward, there'd be a plethora of shareware examples knocking about, and a quick Google search would bring up various tutorials and example code.
I've spent some time researching this. If someone does know of a simple example driver with documentation I could use to develop a driver of my own, I'd love to hear about it.
Rollercoasters, bungie jumping, and all those things, are all just sanitised pseudo-challenge. The fact is that we have become so health and safety obsessed (at least in the western world) that these things we do to get that adrenaline rush are no more than synthetic substitutes for the real thing. Every last movement, g-force, and scream has been calculated to the 19th decimal place by computers. Soon we'll be able to just plug our brains in matrix-style for our regular fix of dial-up thrills.
That said, there's nothing wrong with any of this. I love rollercoasters as much as anyone (we have precious few really good ones here in the UK).
But if you want a real challenge, I suggest you take off on a round-the-world trip, try trekking through the rain forest somewhere, take a ride on the roof of a bus in India, or perhaps if you feel up to it, sail single-handed across the Atlantic or something. (Disclaimer: I haven't tried all of these things 8-)).
Recipients should be able to file a complaint once per message per sender. The rating of a person or business would be cumulative (though possibly normalizing toward zero over time as old ratings "drop off"), recipients could just set a maximum evil amount
I love it! Slashdot Karma for email 8-) Who will metamoderate the users?
People who want to continue to receive messages from mailing lists, online banking, etc, will have to add these sources to their whitelist.
It's a bit of a faf though, and I suspect many people will either not understand how to, not bother, or forget at least one address.
The solution is to have the incoming messages moved into a 'holding' folder that the recipient can see, and check in just the same way as checking through a 'spam' folder. This would remind the user to add false positives in the 'holding' folder to the whitelist. After a while, you can safely stop checking your 'holding' folder. Wouldn't it be good if this is what Earthlink are doing?
I think a scheme like this could be made to work, at least for webmail. For POP3, it could be a bit more tricky...
Not entirely fair. Even if simply running software did count as modify/copy (which I doubt), the restriction is that you make available the source just as the binaries. Since you are the one doing whatever you are doing, you have the source.
The only thing you can't do is break the link between source and binary by making the binaries available in some way that the source isn't.
So you can modify GPL software to your heart's delight in-house and never release the changes you made, just as long as you don't release the binaries either.
Huh? Most people think that nuclear power creates giant insects, will cause their children to become homocidal glowing-eyed telepaths, and that the power plants are ready to explode catastrophically at any moment
Oh really? I thought the main concerns were over the increased leukemia rates near nuclear installations and the long-term storage of hazadous materials.
Slashdot Mirror
Several people have suggested moderation or filtering schemes, in which users can say, essentially, which posts they like and which they don't like. Depending on the approach, the system could even learn, either by user (e.g. the Bozo filter) or by content (e.g. Baysian filtering), etc. It then promotes the posts people like, and hides the ones they don't like. (Sounds familiar?)
There is a fundamental problem with this though, which is particularly acute for a site such as yours that exists for the sake of political debate.
If you do this, then users will tend to be presented with opinions that are most similar to their own, and have dissenting opinion hidden from them. That's going to stifle debate and make the site much less interesting.
The only real way to do it is to find a small team of dedicated moderators who are able to objectively rate content according to its intrinsic worth rather than according to the opinion expressed. That's hard.
Yes, if only min-width and max-width were more widely supported... Even Konqueror doesn't yet honour them.
-fstrict-aliasing is a *very* balsy flag to use if you haven't actually written the software yourself. It's a pretty safe bet that building a lot of unknown software with -fstrict-aliasing will break it. There's a good reason strict aliasing is off by default -- valid C programs (easy ones to write, too) will die with this option, occasionally and in odd ways.
Getting slightly off-topic, but if you care about strict aliasing optimisations, you can use Fortran. The language is structured in such a way that the compiler knows exactly what aliasing is going on, and can optimise accordingly.
While those are all good examples of nice design using CSS, they all suffer from page-width problems. None of them except inc.com make any attempt to scale to the width of the window, and even inc.com breaks when the window is too narrow.
This is one of my biggest bugbears with CSS design - creating pages that use the whole width of the browser window whatever the window size, and look good at all widths is just so hard. (Of course, with tables, you might as well not even try, but that's not the point.)
I think you are missing the point that the web so easily could be an ideal medium for non-visual information.
For example, if you compare the technology required to read a paper book out loud to that required to read an electronic text file out aloud, I'm sure you will see that the latter is a far easier task. There's no reason to make it difficult, but designers do, just because they think it is more important to have a heading in their own choice of font (presented as a bitmap) than for a minority to be able to read it.
You might also like to bear in mind that local government in the UK has a duty to make information available in a form that people can understand. That's why most leaflets tell you where to get hold of a large-print version, or in audio tape form. (Presumably your neighbour tells you this from the original leaflet if you can't read it yourself!)
So I ask again: The web is ideally suited to avoid the effort required to make paper documents universally accessible. Why make it difficult?
Usually, there are terms and conditions attached to the redistribution of code that came with the development environment, and that almost certainly includes code generated by wizards and so on.
For example, the MSVC license tells you exactly which DLLs you can redistribute, and example code usually has a statement at the top. Wizard-generated code surely won't be any different.
It would be easier to pipe the HTML through lynx before feeding it into a spam filter. That wouldn't get rid of the zero-size font tricks, but a spam filter could easily be trained to see spaces as not significant.
Having said that, I have a very effective spam filter that simply rejects any message that contains the string 'att1.htm', but none of the letters e, i, o, or u. In effect, any message sent as just HTML (i.e. no plaintext version) gets rejected as spam. I've never had a false positive with this, as Outlook always includes a plaintext version for non-HTML mail clients.
More recently, spammers have started including the plaintext string "This message contains an HTML formatted message but your email client does not support the display of HTML. Please view this message in a different mail client or forward this email to a web-based mail system." Of course, that's trivially easy to detect as spam.
You should always presume that someone is listening. This is just another reminder that the world needs to move to secured application layer transport protocols as mandatory
Of course there is always the alternative view that these people simply didn't care if someone was evesdropping on their email. I know I wouldn't be at all bothered.
People still send postcards - think of it - in this day and age when paper envelopes are so easily available...
Now I'm waiting for the tea-pot casemod...
Interesting.
I was thinking more of a modern tablet computer (15" touch-sensitive colour LCD screen). If you put a button for the thumb on the top near the edge, and four more buttons for the fingers on the underside, you could operate it while hand-holding it.
Your example had all five buttons on the top, which means it has to be rested on something to use it. Perhaps it's time we saw some truly ergonomic and inovative computer design.
Slightly off-topic, but it seems to me that some kind of chording keyboard would be ideal for tablet computers. The buttons could be built into the places where your fingers of one hand naturally fall when holding it. I'd love to see something like this - all the advantages of a small form-factor, without losing the ability to type.
It can be done with mod_rewrite - a quick search on Google will show how.
...?> - the spec says it's optional, and in fact it is better to leave it out for IE6's sake, because it causes IE6 to enter quirks mode.
You don't need to worry about the <?xml
Given that even fewer servers, particularly those run by ISPs for their personal subscribers rather than run by companies for themselves, get the MIME type right for X* than they do for HTML+CSS...
.htaccess file? Some ISPs at least allow it.
Have you tried using an
AddType application/xhtml+xml xhtml
and variants may help. I haven't tried this myself though, as I'm quite comfortable serving up xhtml as html-lookalike 8-)
Another thing: most newer cars simply don't need to be jumped. Usually a car is 10 years old before its enough of a piece of shit to need jumping
Leaving the headlights on may be difficult as most cars have an alarm that warns you. But I don't think a car needs to be 10 years old before you are able to accidently leave the interior light on over a long weekend...
In addition to those with a 12 Volt system, early pure 42 Volt cars will likely have a converter that you can use to start off of a 12 volt car, or I think, help start a 12 volt car.
That would be one impressive converter. A typical starter motor uses in excess of 250 amps. at 12 volts.
When I got my broadband (DSL) I bought it for one specific reason. Flatrate. I want to be connected at all times.
Just because an account is metered, it doesn't mean it is not always-on. If the ISP meters by bandwidth (rather than time, e.g. telephones), you'll still only pay for the traffic that you generate. If you don't use your PC on Tuesday, you don't pay any incremental cost for that day, even though the connection is still 'on'.
I'm sure that if many ISPs start charging per MB it won't take long before there is software available that can monitor your usage and warn you when you reach some user-defined threshold, so that you can avoid any unexpectedly high bills.
how do you make a vending machine that reliably accepts three different sizes of bills?
Oddly, such vending machines are commonplace in Europe, where all bank notes are different sizes.
Internet Explorer seems to me to be the only browser capable of rendering it correctly...
It doesn't honour the user's font size preference in IE.
So why don't someone write a Windows driver for UFS? ... Maybe it's because there's so many variants
/proc, or a file system inside a regular file, etc?
I think the main reason is that writing a file system device driver for Windows is just so difficult. There are hundreds of potential applications for a file system driver besides the obvious. e.g. what about a Win32 equivalent of
If writing NT file system drivers was reasonably straightforward, there'd be a plethora of shareware examples knocking about, and a quick Google search would bring up various tutorials and example code.
I've spent some time researching this. If someone does know of a simple example driver with documentation I could use to develop a driver of my own, I'd love to hear about it.
Rollercoasters, bungie jumping, and all those things, are all just sanitised pseudo-challenge. The fact is that we have become so health and safety obsessed (at least in the western world) that these things we do to get that adrenaline rush are no more than synthetic substitutes for the real thing. Every last movement, g-force, and scream has been calculated to the 19th decimal place by computers. Soon we'll be able to just plug our brains in matrix-style for our regular fix of dial-up thrills.
That said, there's nothing wrong with any of this. I love rollercoasters as much as anyone (we have precious few really good ones here in the UK).
But if you want a real challenge, I suggest you take off on a round-the-world trip, try trekking through the rain forest somewhere, take a ride on the roof of a bus in India, or perhaps if you feel up to it, sail single-handed across the Atlantic or something. (Disclaimer: I haven't tried all of these things 8-)).
Recipients should be able to file a complaint once per message per sender. The rating of a person or business would be cumulative (though possibly normalizing toward zero over time as old ratings "drop off"), recipients could just set a maximum evil amount
I love it! Slashdot Karma for email 8-) Who will metamoderate the users?
People who want to continue to receive messages from mailing lists, online banking, etc, will have to add these sources to their whitelist.
It's a bit of a faf though, and I suspect many people will either not understand how to, not bother, or forget at least one address.
The solution is to have the incoming messages moved into a 'holding' folder that the recipient can see, and check in just the same way as checking through a 'spam' folder. This would remind the user to add false positives in the 'holding' folder to the whitelist. After a while, you can safely stop checking your 'holding' folder. Wouldn't it be good if this is what Earthlink are doing?
I think a scheme like this could be made to work, at least for webmail. For POP3, it could be a bit more tricky...
Not entirely fair. Even if simply running software did count as modify/copy (which I doubt), the restriction is that you make available the source just as the binaries. Since you are the one doing whatever you are doing, you have the source.
The only thing you can't do is break the link between source and binary by making the binaries available in some way that the source isn't.
So you can modify GPL software to your heart's delight in-house and never release the changes you made, just as long as you don't release the binaries either.
Huh? Most people think that nuclear power creates giant insects, will cause their children to become homocidal glowing-eyed telepaths, and that the power plants are ready to explode catastrophically at any moment
Oh really? I thought the main concerns were over the increased leukemia rates near nuclear installations and the long-term storage of hazadous materials.
Yes, NetBSD runs quite happily on 1/4 of a cpu.