As much RAM as you can afford has always been the key. However, sometimes you need disk space on a server more than you need memory. Depends on load.
Going OT onto Linux...
I have a very light window manager (ratpoison) and always use Phoenix and mutt, so I have low memory requirements. However, this doesn't help on WinXP boxes, where the OS itself is the issue, even trimmed down it's a HOG full of features most of us don't need, and the eye candy is just plain waste of space.
Memory is still precious when you've got your OS eating up 128M of it (WinXP) and you have slightly older hardware.
When 1Gb of memory becomes standard, then maybe. In any case, it is downright inefficient to have the same code in 3 or 4 places in memory, even if you have got loads to spare.
Not necessarily an "Old crappy movie" (They have Warchowski brothers' "Bound" this month) and there are no ads in the movie itself. The movies are generally selected for their quality, but are older because they then cost less to license. DVD is a format that opens up all sorts of possibilities in this type of promotion, because they're very cheap to mass produce.
As for the dupes, well at least at final approval time there could be a list of the last 10 stories approved (maybe more, in a scrolling list) so that it *should* be reasonably obvious. Getting a good workflow system is not easy, but it is a goal to aspire to.
I like the idea of summaries of good stories. That fits in well with the annual review concept. I don't think it would have to be more encompassing than Slashdot - after all, the topics here aren't just computer related (we have science, astronomy, new products, tech wherever it is in the home, car, and just plain geek toys, software releases for business and for the home, etc). It stands up on its own, otherwise why would it be so popular already?
I'm not sure about the "several months" thing. I wasn't even thinking of a polished magazine, but rather a printed version of a edited content from Slashdot.
Of course professional sites make mistakes. I made allusions to that in my previous post. However, I think that some mistakes (like dupes) come from the fact that editors who take over on a story don't read what is already up on the site, and that somewhere maybe the workflow could be improved. If you have half hour lead times on new submissions, then why do two dupes appear on the home page, for example, a couple of stories apart? Don't you even check for that?
Now, some dupes are inevitable if the staff aren't doing their homework and haven't read the latest stories... but surely they could at least scan the last two days before finally approving a story for posting. Readers get it straight away, why not the editors?
Professionalism, for me, is correct English, rapid corrections of mistakes, and a minimum of proof reading and workflow adherence. I'm not suggesting radical changes.
The DVD thing, by the way, is a film magazine with a free DVD each month which is an old film (over 5 years from release) and a review of upcoming releases.
The printed Slashdot, incidentally, could be an annual review or similar, watching a technology take hold and including reader reaction from first suggestions to actual product launch and takeoff (or bombing) of the product.
As far as Arming America is concerned, I don't know the story well enough, but I imagine that if the book was reasonably convincing enough, and taken as genuine, then it is not a lack of professionalism to write a positive review. Rather, it was a "panel of experts" that debunked it.
Leaving old content up which refers to this work can only be due to a poor content management interface I guess.
South Park's animation is cheesy deliberately, but I bet the putting together of the show is pretty "professional". Professional for me is about procedures, quality control, and get-what-you-pay-for. You can pay for unprofessional work, but you won't pay twice.
Now informal, you usually don't pay for. Seeing mistakes happen from time to time is perfectly human. However, SlashDot doesn't seem to have mastered the learning from the mistakes part. I do support SlashDot, and any initiatives that you have to make it a revenue stream, but I think there are two main ways you can do that, initially:
Selling white-labelled content (this means it has to be top quality, no dupes, etc) to other content providers (rather than allowing a free feed) -> I think this might be workable around some of the tech sites that are out there
Being as good as you can with tech news, tying in advertising based on story submissions (selling your soul a little bit), upping the content ante a little bit as far as your editors are concerned, and looking for something like a magazine tie-in which could easily use content from the site, and other classic advertising revenue, as a sort of Slahdot-on-Paper. If you could get funding to run a test printing of a SlashDot magazine, that might be very interesting
Now the original purpose for the site that you mention, is indeed noble. However, times have changed, and it is hard to make a living in this cutthroat Internet place now. But I know of a number of companies who are trying to get content "right", and the first idea (whitelabelled, perhaps specially edited content) might just work, sold the right way. Imagine - you have companies who could use a properly summarised review of the "public opinion" on a number of technologies. These people may never read Slashdot - and yet it is such a good indicator of tech trends, especially since you guys can sort the wheat from the chaff pretty well.
Oh, and in the corporate world, as far as I am concerned, the language has to be perfect.
So, if you're going to pay for it, then you jolly well should see content that isn't duplicated. I am continually surprised by this. It takes me very little time to see 90% of dupes, and the spelling part is important too.
If you're running a business that has paying subscribers, they should NOT see double content. Getting your editorial teams organised would be a step forward for SlashDot. It's a huge site, has a large userbase, but reeks of unprofessional practices. Get organised, and people will pay for the content. But if any people think they could do better, they are not going to part with cash. A clean editorial organisation is no too much to ask for $20 a year, heck you can subscribe to a magazine with free DVD on it for 6 months for that price, dude.
OK but let's just say that the average American is just a bit lardier than your average Brit or Aussie. I've been to the US and am from the UK, so I can reasonably say that the heavier were the US people. Never been to Oz though, can only quote David Boon and Shane Warne as examples of lardy people who qualify as "athletes" almost in Oz.
British women are on the lardy side though, I'll give you that.
Shrove Tuesday (or pancake day) or "Mardi Gras" was on Tuesday. Why is this not posted until Thursday then? The pancake stories were for pancake day.
I am British BTW, so that means I think pancakes are pancakes, not those HUGE dripping in syrup (I wonder why Americans are overweight) batter mountains that you in the US eat;-)
p.s. I'm joking, taking a rise... I love US based pancakes although I've only ever eaten them in Haiti at the Villa Creole. But it's a statistical fact that the average American is overweight and I'm sure all this oversize stuff you do is the cause of it.
Not where I live they don't. In fact, not in most places except the most developed nations.
Good point about the water thing though. A lot of people don't think about shit like that when they're putting in thousands of dollars of computer equipment next to dusty machines, etc - they just don't have a clue about the environment stuff that is needed, because they don't come from the previous computer culture where everything was so valuable, breakable, and unreliable!
I've seen inches of dust inside top end Cisco hardware in factories, poor air conditioning that is often left switched off at busiest times (power drain too high) and servers worth $$$ just sitting on a cold concrete floor with cables running all over the place. Madness.
Yeah well I'm basing my ideas on old stories I heard. Note my sig. How many places do you think even have water systems here?
Oh, and Halon was only ever used in rooms that people don't go in. The consoles were all wired out, and if anyone went in, as they unlocked the door they also disabled the system. Something like that.
Thanks for your answer. Much more interesting reasons than on the original webpage.
I like reading HTML with linebreaks between paragraphs. If you didn't use the GIF kludge you could let people use their own custom sytle sheets in something like Opera, in order to read the page as they like.
The beauty of electronic media is that the reader has the choice on how he or she reads your text. Now, if you want to impose a format, the best one might be to offer PDF, Postscript and LaTeX versions for download.
Anyhow, your work, your choices. I like that you want to support sadistic archeaologists who still surf with pre 3rd generation browsers, but your HTML would parse better if you just did it "clean" and then added a style sheet that presented the pages how you wanted.
This still wouldn't stop your content from being readable in pre 3rd generation browsers, and losing the indentation for 0.n% of your readership isn't such a bad thing IMHO.
Yeah but I don't like paragraph indentation anyway.
Especially on a VDU screen. Maybe on paper, I'm not sure. CSS would be the way to go in that case. Older browsers would render it without the indent, but so what? They could get a linebreak instead...
"(Sorry about the 1pix.gif kludge, but this seems to be the most universally compatible hack to create "normal" paragraph indentation in HTML. I know it breaks text-only browsers, but nothing's perfekt.)"
What's wrong with the P tag? Or & nbsp ; (without the spaces of course). Explaining that would be interesting.
Nothing in it about the writing style, or anything else much. The sort of thing you would not get a good grade for as an English essay book review assignment at 13-14 years old at school.
What does your WinXP setup use for IP address? DHCP?
That should work in Linux too. My father has NTL and I got RedHat 6.2 connecting fine through his cable modem with DHCP, just had to make sure DHCP was activated on his machine.
Don't setup firewalling until you get your connection working (Mandrake, RedHat have over zealous defaults for newbies).
Automated paint facilities, where cars are sent through coating ovens to have their high-gloss finishes baked on, account for more than a third of the cost of most car factories
So, maybe steel is cheaper than plastic, but you still have to paint it. No calculation of the difference between painted steel and finished sollx plastic was made...
This is linked to the fact that VoIP is illegal in Morocco, and the state telco charges high rates for international connections either way.
There are illegal pirates doing some VoIP but it's unreliable, poor quality, and shut down very quickly.
For the record, local calls are about US$2 per hour, so it's not so bad. International calls are ridiculously expensive.
Outgoing single calls (not leaky PABX or aggregated stuff) are too hard to detect, so a blind eye is turned. But terminating international traffic over an IP gateway will get your business shut down quite quickly indeed.
Do you have a place on your site where one could sign up to show interest in a Linux client? Then, if enough interest is shown, you could get a beta out to those people?
I make calls all the time. If you live in a place where international calls cost too much, then a quality sacrifice is fine.
In my experience, net2phone is as good as some international phone calls I have made with a regular phone anyway. You *must* have good ping times to the phone provider's gateway though, otherwise it sucks. Also, a decent modem or broadband is needed. Software modems (winmodems) give crappy quality.
Slashdot Mirror
Written, yes. Printed, no. Gutenburg invented the printing press about 550 years ago. Before that it was all handwriting. Unless you count evidence from China using clay printing processes 450 years before.
CrazyBrowser already gives embedded IE tabbed browsing.
As much RAM as you can afford has always been the key. However, sometimes you need disk space on a server more than you need memory. Depends on load.
Going OT onto Linux... I have a very light window manager (ratpoison) and always use Phoenix and mutt, so I have low memory requirements. However, this doesn't help on WinXP boxes, where the OS itself is the issue, even trimmed down it's a HOG full of features most of us don't need, and the eye candy is just plain waste of space.
When 1Gb of memory becomes standard, then maybe. In any case, it is downright inefficient to have the same code in 3 or 4 places in memory, even if you have got loads to spare.
As for the dupes, well at least at final approval time there could be a list of the last 10 stories approved (maybe more, in a scrolling list) so that it *should* be reasonably obvious. Getting a good workflow system is not easy, but it is a goal to aspire to.
I like the idea of summaries of good stories. That fits in well with the annual review concept. I don't think it would have to be more encompassing than Slashdot - after all, the topics here aren't just computer related (we have science, astronomy, new products, tech wherever it is in the home, car, and just plain geek toys, software releases for business and for the home, etc). It stands up on its own, otherwise why would it be so popular already?
Of course professional sites make mistakes. I made allusions to that in my previous post. However, I think that some mistakes (like dupes) come from the fact that editors who take over on a story don't read what is already up on the site, and that somewhere maybe the workflow could be improved. If you have half hour lead times on new submissions, then why do two dupes appear on the home page, for example, a couple of stories apart? Don't you even check for that?
Now, some dupes are inevitable if the staff aren't doing their homework and haven't read the latest stories... but surely they could at least scan the last two days before finally approving a story for posting. Readers get it straight away, why not the editors?
Professionalism, for me, is correct English, rapid corrections of mistakes, and a minimum of proof reading and workflow adherence. I'm not suggesting radical changes.
The DVD thing, by the way, is a film magazine with a free DVD each month which is an old film (over 5 years from release) and a review of upcoming releases.
The printed Slashdot, incidentally, could be an annual review or similar, watching a technology take hold and including reader reaction from first suggestions to actual product launch and takeoff (or bombing) of the product.
As far as Arming America is concerned, I don't know the story well enough, but I imagine that if the book was reasonably convincing enough, and taken as genuine, then it is not a lack of professionalism to write a positive review. Rather, it was a "panel of experts" that debunked it. Leaving old content up which refers to this work can only be due to a poor content management interface I guess.
South Park's animation is cheesy deliberately, but I bet the putting together of the show is pretty "professional". Professional for me is about procedures, quality control, and get-what-you-pay-for. You can pay for unprofessional work, but you won't pay twice.
Now informal, you usually don't pay for. Seeing mistakes happen from time to time is perfectly human. However, SlashDot doesn't seem to have mastered the learning from the mistakes part. I do support SlashDot, and any initiatives that you have to make it a revenue stream, but I think there are two main ways you can do that, initially:
Now the original purpose for the site that you mention, is indeed noble. However, times have changed, and it is hard to make a living in this cutthroat Internet place now. But I know of a number of companies who are trying to get content "right", and the first idea (whitelabelled, perhaps specially edited content) might just work, sold the right way. Imagine - you have companies who could use a properly summarised review of the "public opinion" on a number of technologies. These people may never read Slashdot - and yet it is such a good indicator of tech trends, especially since you guys can sort the wheat from the chaff pretty well.
Oh, and in the corporate world, as far as I am concerned, the language has to be perfect.
Jus' kiddin', CmdrTaco Sir...
So, if you're going to pay for it, then you jolly well should see content that isn't duplicated. I am continually surprised by this. It takes me very little time to see 90% of dupes, and the spelling part is important too.
If you're running a business that has paying subscribers, they should NOT see double content. Getting your editorial teams organised would be a step forward for SlashDot. It's a huge site, has a large userbase, but reeks of unprofessional practices. Get organised, and people will pay for the content. But if any people think they could do better, they are not going to part with cash. A clean editorial organisation is no too much to ask for $20 a year, heck you can subscribe to a magazine with free DVD on it for 6 months for that price, dude.
British women are on the lardy side though, I'll give you that.
I am British BTW, so that means I think pancakes are pancakes, not those HUGE dripping in syrup (I wonder why Americans are overweight) batter mountains that you in the US eat ;-)
p.s. I'm joking, taking a rise... I love US based pancakes although I've only ever eaten them in Haiti at the Villa Creole. But it's a statistical fact that the average American is overweight and I'm sure all this oversize stuff you do is the cause of it.
Not where I live they don't. In fact, not in most places except the most developed nations.
Good point about the water thing though. A lot of people don't think about shit like that when they're putting in thousands of dollars of computer equipment next to dusty machines, etc - they just don't have a clue about the environment stuff that is needed, because they don't come from the previous computer culture where everything was so valuable, breakable, and unreliable!
I've seen inches of dust inside top end Cisco hardware in factories, poor air conditioning that is often left switched off at busiest times (power drain too high) and servers worth $$$ just sitting on a cold concrete floor with cables running all over the place. Madness.
Oh, and Halon was only ever used in rooms that people don't go in. The consoles were all wired out, and if anyone went in, as they unlocked the door they also disabled the system. Something like that.
Yeah right. Like if you have a lot of computers in a room, then you're going to use water extinguishers? Ever heard of Argon and all that?
Then again, they could belong to your sister.
I like reading HTML with linebreaks between paragraphs. If you didn't use the GIF kludge you could let people use their own custom sytle sheets in something like Opera, in order to read the page as they like.
The beauty of electronic media is that the reader has the choice on how he or she reads your text. Now, if you want to impose a format, the best one might be to offer PDF, Postscript and LaTeX versions for download.
Anyhow, your work, your choices. I like that you want to support sadistic archeaologists who still surf with pre 3rd generation browsers, but your HTML would parse better if you just did it "clean" and then added a style sheet that presented the pages how you wanted. This still wouldn't stop your content from being readable in pre 3rd generation browsers, and losing the indentation for 0.n% of your readership isn't such a bad thing IMHO.
Especially on a VDU screen. Maybe on paper, I'm not sure. CSS would be the way to go in that case. Older browsers would render it without the indent, but so what? They could get a linebreak instead...
"(Sorry about the 1pix.gif kludge, but this seems to be the most universally compatible hack to create "normal" paragraph indentation in HTML. I know it breaks text-only browsers, but nothing's perfekt.)"
What's wrong with the P tag? Or & nbsp ; (without the spaces of course). Explaining that would be interesting.
Nothing in it about the writing style, or anything else much. The sort of thing you would not get a good grade for as an English essay book review assignment at 13-14 years old at school.
Rubbish.
Very interesting piece. If I had mod points I'd mod it up.
The whole US/Israel relationship needs to be analysed like this.
What does your WinXP setup use for IP address? DHCP?
That should work in Linux too. My father has NTL and I got RedHat 6.2 connecting fine through his cable modem with DHCP, just had to make sure DHCP was activated on his machine.
Don't setup firewalling until you get your connection working (Mandrake, RedHat have over zealous defaults for newbies).
Automated paint facilities, where cars are sent through coating ovens to have their high-gloss finishes baked on, account for more than a third of the cost of most car factories
So, maybe steel is cheaper than plastic, but you still have to paint it. No calculation of the difference between painted steel and finished sollx plastic was made...
There are illegal pirates doing some VoIP but it's unreliable, poor quality, and shut down very quickly.
For the record, local calls are about US$2 per hour, so it's not so bad. International calls are ridiculously expensive.
Outgoing single calls (not leaky PABX or aggregated stuff) are too hard to detect, so a blind eye is turned. But terminating international traffic over an IP gateway will get your business shut down quite quickly indeed.
Do you have a place on your site where one could sign up to show interest in a Linux client? Then, if enough interest is shown, you could get a beta out to those people?
In my experience, net2phone is as good as some international phone calls I have made with a regular phone anyway. You *must* have good ping times to the phone provider's gateway though, otherwise it sucks. Also, a decent modem or broadband is needed. Software modems (winmodems) give crappy quality.