Actually, these sites are well aware that a lot of people use junk data. That's okay -- it's not being used for anything critical at this point (and IMO will onlt be 'critical' if/when sites start moving to pay models en masse). The more interesting & useful side effect of having these registration models is that it provides an anchor to *far* better demographic modelling of the site.
From this point of view, you could tell them that you, NYT reader # 07593146, are a twelve eyed Tralfamadorean that lives on the fourth planet from Betelgeuse for all they'd care, because you're still giving them the data that they *really* need:
Basic demographics: NYT reader #07593146 reads from one computer at home & two from work, tends to follow stories about computer technology, usually enters the site from $third_party, and can be relied on to view $number of ad impressions per day
General ad targeting: a while back she/he/it was looking up travel stories about Europe, so they might be interested in airfare deals
Specific ad targeting: she/he/it tends to spend time reading the car reviews and, while there, always lingers on station wagon ads & never follows links for SUVs. Knowing this, car advertisers might want to pay more to target station wagon ads at this customer, etc
adapting to evolving preferences & technologies: It has been noticed lately that this user isn't registering any pop{up,under} ad impressions, suggesting that they've adopted some kind of filtering software (maybe Mozilla, but if so they're also spoofing the user-agent string). With that in mind, they might decide to stop trying to serve popups to this person, and deliver more intrusive traditional ads instead, leaving the popup inventory to users of different browser software for now.
Sanity check: Gee, for a 12-eyed Tralfamadoerean, user #07593146 doesn't seem to interested in any of our stories on exobiology, astrophysics, geopolitics, or opthamology. Maybe we shouldn't trust that data...:)
Mission accomplished. This kind of profiling is all based on simple traffic analysis, and most of it isn't really possible without a pervasive registration scheme. This is a damn goldmine to web publishers. If people actually trusted the publishers & were honest on their profiles, that would be icing on the cake, but playing games like this really isn't as much of an obstacle as you might be hoping.
Hey, the people running the site are computer nerds too, they think the same way you are and know the same tricks you do. There is no race of Tralfamadoreans around Betelgeuse, but that doesn't stop them from being attentive...:)
Re:UFO stories: can't even assume they're not made
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Starcraft
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· Score: 2
Very interesting. In APRO / NICAP / whatever's defence, it's possible that they were, with all good intentions, citing a supposedly reliable source and everyone just didn't do their homework -- the UFO people may have accepted the original source without verification, and the original source may have in turn gotten it's information from other, also unverified sources. And so on up the chain of researchers until you get to the one original person who, accidentally or as a hoax, got the information wrong.
Really, the New Scientist article is quite good, and I can see where this probably happens all the time, whether it's in hard science, social science, or in this case pseudo-science. People don't take the time to check that their sources are being accurate or honest, and so misinformation easily spreads...
This is quantum physics we're talking about -- the true answer is indeterministic. If you try to measure it, you stand some probability of getting these unexpected results:)
I'm not sticking up for our culture's pervasive advertising, far from it. I think I can say that I get at least as annoyed at it as anybody -- in addition to being an ad monkey myself, I am a frequent reader of Adbusters, and am wholly sympathetic with a lot of their ideas. So please don't give me this "pound sand" nonsense.
What I'm getting at is the assertion that "internet advertising does not work, period". What does that mean? That it doesn't work for the consumer? Maybe so -- as we agree, a lot of people are jaded & block this crap out. For the advertiser? Well it does tend to pay the bills, and has for years (slash decades, slash centuries, depending on your distribution medium) and I'd tend to think that self-interested advertisers wouldn't be paying for people to get all this free stuff on their behalf if they weren't getting something in return. How many web sites do you go to that you have to pay for? For most people, little if anything. How much did you pay for your newspaper this morning? Did you realize that the subscription/cover price covers perhaps 1/4 the cost of producing it? The same ratio more or less holds up for magazines too.
So, given all that, does advertising work for society as a whole? In a weird kind of way, it is is a hidden redistributor of wealth, where companies spend their cash so that something that you want can be had for much less than it would have cost without their support, and all you have to do in return is pay attention (or pretend to pay attention) to a message that they inject along with whatever you were trying to get. You can be all snarky and say that you're immune to such messages, and hey that's great for you, but if you're benefiting from the effects of that system -- and by using this advertising driven web site, you are -- then you are part of the working system whether you like it or not.
Psst, you see the way you start your rant by referring to "the almighty click-through"? Yeah, that's bunk. The whole world, including you it seems, figured out years ago that clickthrough rates aren't a panacea, but that's okay. If you consider the alternative -- that all other forms of advertising have no equivalent at all to the tiny percentage of clickthroughs that web ads get -- then even that little bit is more than the rest. So if all your reasoning falls out of that assumption, then all your reasoning doesn't hold together very well.
As someone involved in advertising for a major newspaper -- I do not speak for my employer yadda yadda yadda -- the advertisers *are* responsive, and these ad types, especially the obtrusive/obnoxious ones, really do earn more. I for one would be happy to see more Google style muted ads as opposed to popups, pop unders, flash, java, etc., but the fact is that these more aggressive ad tactics *are* paying the bills for a lot of big sites, and the possibility of trying something more understated & brave like Google has done is a risk that they can't afford to try.
The fact is, as many have said before, yes the savvy users will figure out how to block this kind of content, using browsers that can reject popups and ad-proxies that can remove certain image geometries -- but most don't. If you really want to freeload, if you really are *that* offended by the ads, and if you have the tools to do it then yeah, getting around the ads isn't that hard. But most people don't do that. Many wouldn't know where to start with filtering ads, while others understand that ads allow them to get this content for free and accept that as a fair trade. The population of people savvy enough & annoyed enough to cut ads off is very small. For various reasons, by and large, people accept web ads. Rant all you want, but this is overwhelmingly true, and I think it's an encouraging sign.
I think your cynicism runs a little too deeply here. The ad community does want to do what works -- hey, this is their livlihood we're talking about -- and to a large extent they are for better or worse moving in a fruitful direction. The user community, by & large, seems to be willing to accept some degree of obtrusiveness in advertising, especially when it allows high quality sites to remain free. There is an intimate feedback loop here where, on a day to day basis & also more long term, each side is able to adapt to the needs & concerns of the other -- if big ads pay the bills more easily, users will tolerate them, and if users complain about popups, at least some advertisers have taken the hint to remove them.
As you note, other media have been fine tuning this for decades longer, but then the nature of the web allows much more direct feedback (partly including the clickthroughs that you disparage), and some lessons learned in other media can be applied to the web as well, so I don't think it's going to take us another 40 years until web ads come of age. I think they're more mature than you give them credit for. The dotcom boom may be over, but the web -- and with it, web ads -- has not & will not go away any time soon. There is still much to learn & adjust, and the industry overall may be reeling, but there are pockets that are self-sustaining & profitable -- even in this economy. Cut 'em some slack, willya?:)
Am I hallucinating or have none of the high-rated posters even mentioned Philip K Dick? All this babbling on about how important clever ideas are for good science fiction -- hint guys: clever ideas are important for *all* fiction -- and yet no one has dwelled on PKD? For shame...
That said though, I personally have always found genre fiction to be more than a little stifling. I don't have any problem with a good scifi yarn but a steady diet of it leaves me a little anemic, and as far as I can tell a steady diet of it leaves a lot of the writers pretty anemic as well. This isn't just a problem with scifi by the way -- I also find a steady diet of westerns, mysteries, or whatever else to be boring.
Maybe that's why my favorite "scifi" people would have to include Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, and [if a film maker can count] Stanley Kubrick. All of them have dabbled in scifi, but their targets have been much bigger than just the scifi niche market; if scifi makes a good backdrop for telling a story -- cf. the time travel stuff in Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse-Five_ or the doomsday device in Kubrick's _Dr Strangelove_ -- then great, that's fine by me. But you don't have to use these props all the time to get good ideas across, and over-relying on them can be just as bad as not being willing to try them at all.
That is completely not how science works. You don't understand anything until you can come up with an idea -- preliminary understanding, a hypothesis -- and then *come up with an experiment*. If you're lucky, the experiment will affirm your hypothesis; if you're not then results will be inconclusive (& you need to do a better experiment) or you're just proven wrong.
In any event, the key piece is constant experimentation, not just mental noodling. That stuff has to suffice for some kinds of physics & astronomy research, where the experiments can be difficult or impossible to do, but biology is so, well, wild & woolly, that the only way forward is to constantly test your ideas by experimentation.
C is not a big language, and it is not well served by a big book.
When I was a high school student, my English teacher quoted us a great line from Blaise Pascal:
Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai par eu le loisir de la faire plus courte. Translated: I am sorry for the length of my letter, but I had not the time to write a short one.
What else is there to say? There is wisdom in these two statements that I can't really expand on, and the trend towards bigger tech books certainly ignores.
Like K&R's book, a lot of these tech books of arcana are about highly specialized areas. Taking a random stroll down the books that have a current place on my desk shelf, I've got books on: MySQL & Perl for the Web, HTML4, Programming Internet Email, VPNs, NFS/NIS, SQL, Perl DBI, TCP/IP admin, Bash, mod_perl, Perl LWP, and others. All of these are small subjects, and at a glance it doesn't look like any of these books goes much above 400 pages. Ah, I tell a like -- the mod_perl "eagle book" is much longer, but then it gets deep into the Apache API, so it isn't exactly padded.
On the other hand, some of the longer books I've got -- one of FreeBSD, one on MySQL, Perl Cookbook, etc -- tend to cover a much wider variety of sub-topics within their stated area, but it's hard to do this in a non-superficial way. It's one thing to go down a checklist & mention every subject area (the FreeBSD & MySQL books seem to be guilty of this); it's much harder to say just enough about each area to be continually useful (Perl Cookbook does well here).
In general, there's a sweet spot between brevity & long windedness. A proper density of information is hard to strike. If there is much to be said about a subject, then I personally would rather see aspects of the larger subject broken out into a more coherent text -- witness all the Perl books that, aside from the language itself, really don't have anything to do with one another (algorithm theory, database programming, client side http, server side http, graphics programming, win32 administration, web database automation, xml, bioinformatics, etc). Is the subject is big enough & cohesive enough to cover overlapping, related areas in one text -- Apache/mod_perl being a good example -- then fine, keep them together and let the book grow longer. But on the other hand if everything you need to know about the SQL implementation of half a dozen RDBMS engines will fit in a skinny little 200 page pamphlet, then let's just save everyone some time and not try to pad that out any further. I for one will never spend my money on those 1000+ page monsters unless they're in the remainder bin & it seems like five bucks would be worthwhile if I ever have to deal with one of those beasts some day.
Hello, anonymous coward, or shall we say goombah99. Could we maybe not have the exact same [mildly trollish] message posted almost verbatim every couple of days? It's bad enough when the site editors repeat stories and the trolls go on & on with their nonsense. Please try not to make things worse. Thank you.
What if my choice is to get all content from the web site, not from Gator? Last time I checked, most people didn't "choose" to install Gator, it piggy backed on software that they really wanted. Their point about giving the user choice is a valid one, but their business practices pretty firmly contradict with their stated good intentions. Not that that's likely to be legally significant here, but still...
2. Separation of code from content : if you don't count DTML as "code", that may be true.
DTML is but one of several template schemes Zope offers. The technology is evolving fast, and even recent books are a little out of date on this one, but if DTML doesn't meet your needs then check some of the otheralternatives. In particular, Zope Page Templates, with their HTML attribute based markup, are a very interesting approach that has the nice side effect of keeping everything within perfectly well formed HTML -- thus keeping the web monkeys with their whizz bang frontdreamy editors happy.
3. Authentication scheme
Again, you have a wide variety of options here -- basically anything you want, anything you could do in pure Apache, etc. A quick search for authentication & authorization on Zope.org turned up this nice paper on the component architecture of the security system.
In general most of your points deserve these kind of pat responses. It seems to me that the Zope system *is* very good, but the software itself is evolving much faster than the documentation is managing to keep up. That's not to say that the documentation doesn't exist -- it does, and help is out there if you want it -- but once the software hits a certain stable plateau a revamping of the documentation would be very welcome. Zope is an excellent system though. What finally won me over was to see a presentation on it at a Boston Perl Mongers meeting and having everyone watch in awe at the things this Python software could do so easily, with responses to the effect of "mod_perl is nice and all, but why haven't we come up with something high level like this?" Good question...
Re:Sorry you are wrong: raid cannot be partioned
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10.2.2 Is Coming
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· Score: 2
Thank you for the pointless anger. It was both informative and stimulating. That said, if you'll recall, the point I was objecting to was that "you can't partition a disc with multiple file systems using Apple's tools." This is patently untrue and I personally have done this. It seemed to me -- and still does -- that if you had a detail like this wrong, maybe the larger point was questionable as well. But in the end, I'm not the one to say so -- I didn't say anything at all about what works or doesn't in a RAID array. That's not an area of expertise or even more than passing familiarity to me, so I'd rather not be drawn into an argument about it. If you say RAID is broken and no one can dispute you, fine, but at least make sure that your argument rests on a sturdy foundation & the supporting points you use actually support you. This time around, they didn't.
You mean now that Lockheed is building most or all of the JSF variants? No, Boeing is still huge, but they're getting serious competition, and have had major upsets by Airbus on the commercial side & Lockheed on the commercial side. The war won't necessarily be a windfall for Boeing...
Re:Raid 5, the missing feature
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10.2.2 Is Coming
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Well apple does not yet support partitioning a disk with different File systems.
FYI, I was running 10.0 on an iMac which I had split into multiple partitions, of which one was UFS and the others were HFS+. This was all with standard tools -- the installer let me do it so I just did it. I've since switched to all HFS+, but I don't see why Apple would have removed the functionality.
So -- have you actually tried it or are you just spouting off?
Ya know it's funny, not two weeks ago I was talking to a friend's dad, and he came *this close* to convincing me that we should start the restaraunt chain of the twenty first century. The twentieth century, as older readers will recall, had these things called "trains", and for some reason it was popular to convert old train boxcars into diners. Huzzah! Now we can take those California scrapyards full of B-17s and 747s and turn them into a chain of restaraunts.
The cool thing would be that all your expense goes into ambience -- go for that classy old Pam Am style, and maybe have the maitre 'd wear a leather jacket. If the food sucks, hey, so what, your customers will be expecting that anyway -- as long as they're being charged less than a hundred bucks for the experience of getting out alive with a full stomach, they'll leave happy.
Dammit it could work, all you need to do is find places in or near major cities & you could start a chain to rival Hard Rock Cafe or Planet Hollywood. Zoning laws could be an issue, but hey in that case just stay out of New England at first -- I know of placed in Smyrna Tennessee & Florence South Carolina that would be happy to help get you started...
tee hee:)
And before anyone goes knocking these people for being crackpots to sell airplane homes (hey, I think it's a fun idea but I know damn well I could never talk my fiance into it:), check out their last auction: 2.1 million dollars to sell an ICBM silo home. Yow!
Please don't speak "on behalf of the Slashdot community" with that kind of vitriol. It's bad enough when people on the site are obnoxious to each other, it's certainly not any better on the 99.9999% of the world that isn't Slashdot, and it's *definitely* not the tone of voice that should be used when sending a letter to a member of congress. "You'll get more flies with honey..."
I just tried to send her this but couldn't. Yay, using Slash as a stand in for participatory democracy:
As a technology professional and, based on someone who I think would agree with most of your political stances (that is, I'm want to be nice about this), please have your website amended by a qualified professional. The form used to send this message has a couple of problems that really ought to be addressed:
There is no good reason for a web form such as this to force visitors to use a particular kind of browser software to access it. In spite of the recent court decision t hat would suggest otherwise, Microsoft has been tried & convicted as an abusive monopolist, and if visitors take the initiative to use alternative software they should be applauded, not excluded. Keeping out users based on their commercial choices seems very anti-democratic to me.
Skimming the HTML source of this form, I note that it includes hidden fields for "mailto" and "url". That is a very bad sign, because there are well known security problems with certain freely available web form processing programs that are widely used on the web today, and one of the signatures of these dangerously broken programs is that they allow users to set fields like this. The reason that is a problem is that it allows a malicious user to send false data to your program, and by so doing hijack it & do anything from send out spam mail to carry out certain forms of identify theft or defamation of character. Rather than allowing the user to set this data in the web form, you would be much better off by moving that data into your server script instead. Your tech staff will hopefully know how to do this; if not I would be happy to answer any questions. To give a couple of reference URLs, I offer:
Thank you for your attention, and for God's sake keep voting against Bush's war against Iraq. I'm sure history will prove that you were right to oppose this. Your speech against it, at http://www.house.gov/tubbsjones/pr021009.htm, was wonderful. Thank you.
Hey, it got written up, it might as well get posted somewhere. Maybe her staff will decide to start reading Slashdot today...
The mainstream news in question, I forgot to mention, was All Things Considered on NPR. That's mainstream enough, no? Personally, I don't really think it's that unreasonable -- spouting off was really unprofessional, and he couldn't have gotten to where he is/was-at-that-point without having a pretty good sense of what a judge should & should not do. He had to have suspected what the results of speaking so freely would have been, so assuming that he knew what it would lead to doesn't seem like such a big leap to me.
Jackson's an idiot. He should have seen it coming and kept his dumb mouth shut.
Then again, some of the mainstream news commentary at the time suggested, conspiracy theory-esque, that maybe this was all calculated. The idea is, every judge *has* to know what a no-no it is to discuss a pending case with the press, and het he did repeatedly & didn't make his point of view much of a secret.
Why would he do that? Maybe it was his way of washing his hands of the whole affair. Consider. Think about how much pressure that case was, to have that much public scrutiny, to have every two bit Slashdot Linux zealot or free market libertarian weighing in with impromptu amicii curie briefs on what they felt the judge should do. And then to face the prospect of years more in appeal?
Fuck that man. It seems to me Jackson already had his mind made up well before the trial was over, so he issued a quick, harsh decision and made sure that he wouldn't be allowed anywhere near the appeals round. Maybe he felt that, with appeals & whatever else, the harsh penalty he wanted could never be, and in any case it wasn't worth giving that much of his own personal life for that many more years. Why be a martyr, right?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, these sites are well aware that a lot of people use junk data. That's okay -- it's not being used for anything critical at this point (and IMO will onlt be 'critical' if/when sites start moving to pay models en masse). The more interesting & useful side effect of having these registration models is that it provides an anchor to *far* better demographic modelling of the site.
From this point of view, you could tell them that you, NYT reader # 07593146, are a twelve eyed Tralfamadorean that lives on the fourth planet from Betelgeuse for all they'd care, because you're still giving them the data that they *really* need:
Mission accomplished. This kind of profiling is all based on simple traffic analysis, and most of it isn't really possible without a pervasive registration scheme. This is a damn goldmine to web publishers. If people actually trusted the publishers & were honest on their profiles, that would be icing on the cake, but playing games like this really isn't as much of an obstacle as you might be hoping.
Hey, the people running the site are computer nerds too, they think the same way you are and know the same tricks you do. There is no race of Tralfamadoreans around Betelgeuse, but that doesn't stop them from being attentive... :)
Really, the New Scientist article is quite good, and I can see where this probably happens all the time, whether it's in hard science, social science, or in this case pseudo-science. People don't take the time to check that their sources are being accurate or honest, and so misinformation easily spreads...
This is quantum physics we're talking about -- the true answer is indeterministic. If you try to measure it, you stand some probability of getting these unexpected results :)
I'm not sticking up for our culture's pervasive advertising, far from it. I think I can say that I get at least as annoyed at it as anybody -- in addition to being an ad monkey myself, I am a frequent reader of Adbusters, and am wholly sympathetic with a lot of their ideas. So please don't give me this "pound sand" nonsense.
What I'm getting at is the assertion that "internet advertising does not work, period". What does that mean? That it doesn't work for the consumer? Maybe so -- as we agree, a lot of people are jaded & block this crap out. For the advertiser? Well it does tend to pay the bills, and has for years (slash decades, slash centuries, depending on your distribution medium) and I'd tend to think that self-interested advertisers wouldn't be paying for people to get all this free stuff on their behalf if they weren't getting something in return. How many web sites do you go to that you have to pay for? For most people, little if anything. How much did you pay for your newspaper this morning? Did you realize that the subscription/cover price covers perhaps 1/4 the cost of producing it? The same ratio more or less holds up for magazines too.
So, given all that, does advertising work for society as a whole? In a weird kind of way, it is is a hidden redistributor of wealth, where companies spend their cash so that something that you want can be had for much less than it would have cost without their support, and all you have to do in return is pay attention (or pretend to pay attention) to a message that they inject along with whatever you were trying to get. You can be all snarky and say that you're immune to such messages, and hey that's great for you, but if you're benefiting from the effects of that system -- and by using this advertising driven web site, you are -- then you are part of the working system whether you like it or not.
:)
Psst, you see the way you start your rant by referring to "the almighty click-through"? Yeah, that's bunk. The whole world, including you it seems, figured out years ago that clickthrough rates aren't a panacea, but that's okay. If you consider the alternative -- that all other forms of advertising have no equivalent at all to the tiny percentage of clickthroughs that web ads get -- then even that little bit is more than the rest. So if all your reasoning falls out of that assumption, then all your reasoning doesn't hold together very well.
As someone involved in advertising for a major newspaper -- I do not speak for my employer yadda yadda yadda -- the advertisers *are* responsive, and these ad types, especially the obtrusive/obnoxious ones, really do earn more. I for one would be happy to see more Google style muted ads as opposed to popups, pop unders, flash, java, etc., but the fact is that these more aggressive ad tactics *are* paying the bills for a lot of big sites, and the possibility of trying something more understated & brave like Google has done is a risk that they can't afford to try.
The fact is, as many have said before, yes the savvy users will figure out how to block this kind of content, using browsers that can reject popups and ad-proxies that can remove certain image geometries -- but most don't. If you really want to freeload, if you really are *that* offended by the ads, and if you have the tools to do it then yeah, getting around the ads isn't that hard. But most people don't do that. Many wouldn't know where to start with filtering ads, while others understand that ads allow them to get this content for free and accept that as a fair trade. The population of people savvy enough & annoyed enough to cut ads off is very small. For various reasons, by and large, people accept web ads. Rant all you want, but this is overwhelmingly true, and I think it's an encouraging sign.
I think your cynicism runs a little too deeply here. The ad community does want to do what works -- hey, this is their livlihood we're talking about -- and to a large extent they are for better or worse moving in a fruitful direction. The user community, by & large, seems to be willing to accept some degree of obtrusiveness in advertising, especially when it allows high quality sites to remain free. There is an intimate feedback loop here where, on a day to day basis & also more long term, each side is able to adapt to the needs & concerns of the other -- if big ads pay the bills more easily, users will tolerate them, and if users complain about popups, at least some advertisers have taken the hint to remove them.
As you note, other media have been fine tuning this for decades longer, but then the nature of the web allows much more direct feedback (partly including the clickthroughs that you disparage), and some lessons learned in other media can be applied to the web as well, so I don't think it's going to take us another 40 years until web ads come of age. I think they're more mature than you give them credit for. The dotcom boom may be over, but the web -- and with it, web ads -- has not & will not go away any time soon. There is still much to learn & adjust, and the industry overall may be reeling, but there are pockets that are self-sustaining & profitable -- even in this economy. Cut 'em some slack, willya? :)
*deep breath* Oh. Wait. You're not joking.
Thats even funnier! Ha ha ha ha ha ha....
As the great scientist Peter Venkman said, "you're right Ray, no human could stack books this way." Sure....
heh, sorry, couldn't resist...
That said though, I personally have always found genre fiction to be more than a little stifling. I don't have any problem with a good scifi yarn but a steady diet of it leaves me a little anemic, and as far as I can tell a steady diet of it leaves a lot of the writers pretty anemic as well. This isn't just a problem with scifi by the way -- I also find a steady diet of westerns, mysteries, or whatever else to be boring.
Maybe that's why my favorite "scifi" people would have to include Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, and [if a film maker can count] Stanley Kubrick. All of them have dabbled in scifi, but their targets have been much bigger than just the scifi niche market; if scifi makes a good backdrop for telling a story -- cf. the time travel stuff in Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse-Five_ or the doomsday device in Kubrick's _Dr Strangelove_ -- then great, that's fine by me. But you don't have to use these props all the time to get good ideas across, and over-relying on them can be just as bad as not being willing to try them at all.
Boo US.
In any event, the key piece is constant experimentation, not just mental noodling. That stuff has to suffice for some kinds of physics & astronomy research, where the experiments can be difficult or impossible to do, but biology is so, well, wild & woolly, that the only way forward is to constantly test your ideas by experimentation.
What else is there to say? There is wisdom in these two statements that I can't really expand on, and the trend towards bigger tech books certainly ignores.
Like K&R's book, a lot of these tech books of arcana are about highly specialized areas. Taking a random stroll down the books that have a current place on my desk shelf, I've got books on: MySQL & Perl for the Web, HTML4, Programming Internet Email, VPNs, NFS/NIS, SQL, Perl DBI, TCP/IP admin, Bash, mod_perl, Perl LWP, and others. All of these are small subjects, and at a glance it doesn't look like any of these books goes much above 400 pages. Ah, I tell a like -- the mod_perl "eagle book" is much longer, but then it gets deep into the Apache API, so it isn't exactly padded.
On the other hand, some of the longer books I've got -- one of FreeBSD, one on MySQL, Perl Cookbook, etc -- tend to cover a much wider variety of sub-topics within their stated area, but it's hard to do this in a non-superficial way. It's one thing to go down a checklist & mention every subject area (the FreeBSD & MySQL books seem to be guilty of this); it's much harder to say just enough about each area to be continually useful (Perl Cookbook does well here).
In general, there's a sweet spot between brevity & long windedness. A proper density of information is hard to strike. If there is much to be said about a subject, then I personally would rather see aspects of the larger subject broken out into a more coherent text -- witness all the Perl books that, aside from the language itself, really don't have anything to do with one another (algorithm theory, database programming, client side http, server side http, graphics programming, win32 administration, web database automation, xml, bioinformatics, etc). Is the subject is big enough & cohesive enough to cover overlapping, related areas in one text -- Apache/mod_perl being a good example -- then fine, keep them together and let the book grow longer. But on the other hand if everything you need to know about the SQL implementation of half a dozen RDBMS engines will fit in a skinny little 200 page pamphlet, then let's just save everyone some time and not try to pad that out any further. I for one will never spend my money on those 1000+ page monsters unless they're in the remainder bin & it seems like five bucks would be worthwhile if I ever have to deal with one of those beasts some day.
Wow, congratulations Goombah, you've got an identity thief. It's like you're living in a techno cyber ninja thriller. I'm so jealous :)
Hello, anonymous coward, or shall we say goombah99. Could we maybe not have the exact same [mildly trollish] message posted almost verbatim every couple of days? It's bad enough when the site editors repeat stories and the trolls go on & on with their nonsense. Please try not to make things worse. Thank you.
What if my choice is to get all content from the web site, not from Gator? Last time I checked, most people didn't "choose" to install Gator, it piggy backed on software that they really wanted. Their point about giving the user choice is a valid one, but their business practices pretty firmly contradict with their stated good intentions. Not that that's likely to be legally significant here, but still...
DTML is but one of several template schemes Zope offers. The technology is evolving fast, and even recent books are a little out of date on this one, but if DTML doesn't meet your needs then check some of the other alternatives. In particular, Zope Page Templates, with their HTML attribute based markup, are a very interesting approach that has the nice side effect of keeping everything within perfectly well formed HTML -- thus keeping the web monkeys with their whizz bang frontdreamy editors happy.
Again, you have a wide variety of options here -- basically anything you want, anything you could do in pure Apache, etc. A quick search for authentication & authorization on Zope.org turned up this nice paper on the component architecture of the security system.
In general most of your points deserve these kind of pat responses. It seems to me that the Zope system *is* very good, but the software itself is evolving much faster than the documentation is managing to keep up. That's not to say that the documentation doesn't exist -- it does, and help is out there if you want it -- but once the software hits a certain stable plateau a revamping of the documentation would be very welcome. Zope is an excellent system though. What finally won me over was to see a presentation on it at a Boston Perl Mongers meeting and having everyone watch in awe at the things this Python software could do so easily, with responses to the effect of "mod_perl is nice and all, but why haven't we come up with something high level like this?" Good question...
Thank you for the pointless anger. It was both informative and stimulating. That said, if you'll recall, the point I was objecting to was that "you can't partition a disc with multiple file systems using Apple's tools." This is patently untrue and I personally have done this. It seemed to me -- and still does -- that if you had a detail like this wrong, maybe the larger point was questionable as well. But in the end, I'm not the one to say so -- I didn't say anything at all about what works or doesn't in a RAID array. That's not an area of expertise or even more than passing familiarity to me, so I'd rather not be drawn into an argument about it. If you say RAID is broken and no one can dispute you, fine, but at least make sure that your argument rests on a sturdy foundation & the supporting points you use actually support you. This time around, they didn't.
You mean now that Lockheed is building most or all of the JSF variants? No, Boeing is still huge, but they're getting serious competition, and have had major upsets by Airbus on the commercial side & Lockheed on the commercial side. The war won't necessarily be a windfall for Boeing...
So -- have you actually tried it or are you just spouting off?
speaks for itself, really...
The cool thing would be that all your expense goes into ambience -- go for that classy old Pam Am style, and maybe have the maitre 'd wear a leather jacket. If the food sucks, hey, so what, your customers will be expecting that anyway -- as long as they're being charged less than a hundred bucks for the experience of getting out alive with a full stomach, they'll leave happy.
Dammit it could work, all you need to do is find places in or near major cities & you could start a chain to rival Hard Rock Cafe or Planet Hollywood. Zoning laws could be an issue, but hey in that case just stay out of New England at first -- I know of placed in Smyrna Tennessee & Florence South Carolina that would be happy to help get you started...
tee hee :)
And before anyone goes knocking these people for being crackpots to sell airplane homes (hey, I think it's a fun idea but I know damn well I could never talk my fiance into it :), check out their last auction: 2.1 million dollars to sell an ICBM silo home. Yow!
Please don't speak "on behalf of the Slashdot community" with that kind of vitriol. It's bad enough when people on the site are obnoxious to each other, it's certainly not any better on the 99.9999% of the world that isn't Slashdot, and it's *definitely* not the tone of voice that should be used when sending a letter to a member of congress. "You'll get more flies with honey..."
Hey, it got written up, it might as well get posted somewhere. Maybe her staff will decide to start reading Slashdot today...
The mainstream news in question, I forgot to mention, was All Things Considered on NPR. That's mainstream enough, no? Personally, I don't really think it's that unreasonable -- spouting off was really unprofessional, and he couldn't have gotten to where he is/was-at-that-point without having a pretty good sense of what a judge should & should not do. He had to have suspected what the results of speaking so freely would have been, so assuming that he knew what it would lead to doesn't seem like such a big leap to me.
Then again, some of the mainstream news commentary at the time suggested, conspiracy theory-esque, that maybe this was all calculated. The idea is, every judge *has* to know what a no-no it is to discuss a pending case with the press, and het he did repeatedly & didn't make his point of view much of a secret.
Why would he do that? Maybe it was his way of washing his hands of the whole affair. Consider. Think about how much pressure that case was, to have that much public scrutiny, to have every two bit Slashdot Linux zealot or free market libertarian weighing in with impromptu amicii curie briefs on what they felt the judge should do. And then to face the prospect of years more in appeal?
Fuck that man. It seems to me Jackson already had his mind made up well before the trial was over, so he issued a quick, harsh decision and made sure that he wouldn't be allowed anywhere near the appeals round. Maybe he felt that, with appeals & whatever else, the harsh penalty he wanted could never be, and in any case it wasn't worth giving that much of his own personal life for that many more years. Why be a martyr, right?