:) I'm not trying to troll, honest -- I just can't understand the fascination with that movie. It wasn't really bad, it was just boring & derivative & predictable -- just like a lot of action movies. I can't see why this one has become so popular when other really good movies -- ones that get into some of the same themes even -- remain relatively obscure.
And I'm not really talking so much about Yeoh. "Biggest movie" is kind of a flexible point anyway -- from what I understand, 'Crouching Dragon Hidden Tiger' will probably be bigger in Asia than the Matrix was here in the US, so any question of "bigger" has to state where you're talking about geographically. Further, she was also in one of the recent James Bond movies, which maybe (I don't know for sure) made more than the Matrix did, at least in terms of net profits after tie-ins and what have you. So you also have to account for whether 'biggest' deals with the number of people that saw & enjoyed it, the money it made, etc.
Anyway, as I understand it she's already a well known & liked martial arts star in Hong Kong, who's movie industry is almost as big as Hollywood, so I don't see why having to be successful in the US is such a big criteria for overall success, which she already has.
One thing the article didn't mention was range, which I was told would be 120-150 miles.
Flying or shooting? The latter would be pretty impressive, the former would make it barely worth taking off. I'm assuming you mean "can hit a target at 120-150 miles", and not "can fly on patrol for 120-150 miles"....
I'm guessing Michelle Yeoh backed out after she found out what a stinker the first one was, and realized that sequels (with the exception of "Empire Strikes Back") are invariably worse than the original. When it's bad & can only get worse, sticking around isn't a good idea.
;)
I know, I know, a lot of geeks love that movie (I'm guessing it's the weird leather superhero skinsuits -- surely not the corny plot;), but damn I thought it was awful.
Pi. Now there was a movie computer nerds ought to be interested in...
But then there are other problems; even I sometimes don't read at -1 or 0, because I want to avoid the trolls. I try to avoid modding up +2 or +3, unless they are *really* good, and concentrate on modding the +1s and the responses to +2 or +3, that provide good counterarguments.
Would it help if we took a new look at the browsing system, rather than moderation? What if we were able to add a rule to the display options such that you don't see any posts moderated as "-1 Troll"?
Better still, what if you like to read Slashdot for a good laugh, don't mind if the topic strays a bit, and really don't like those posts that make you learn something. It would be nice if you could add virtual adjustments for each level of moderation: +1 funny, +0 offtopic, and -2 informative.This way, you can filter out the things you don't want to see, while bringing back in some of the ones you weren't interested in.
The next step from there would be to open everything way up: you've gone part of the way from crude "good / bad" descriptions to a more meaningful content based description. You can augment that by adding in more adjectives for moderation. These adjectives don't have to be so much in terms of good vs bad, but rather as adjectives are meant to be: descriptions.
Political. Poetic. Surreal. Sublime. Yet Another Microsoft Bashing. Yet Another Linux Stroking.
You get the idea.
The final step would be to make moderation a much more common occurance, because you would have to gather much more input to determine which posts have which attributes. I'm not sure where the line there should be -- on one hand, it's tempting to say all users can always moderate once they get the 20 karma points or whatever it is. That would probably be a black hole for system abuse though. Maybe a second tier? Those above, say, 30-50 points {?} could moderate all the time, while those between 20 and that upper tier cutoff would get to periodically like they do now. I'm not sure, it would have to be fleshed out if the idea got anywhere near that far.
In any event, I've been disappointed in the moderation system for months now, and some sort of change would be very welcome.
I dunno, is there a moderator's training page to provide good behavior?
If you thought that the auto companies would feel threatened by this, and would want to suppress it, then no, you would not go to them. Sounds a little conspiracy theorist, but all the same I think it's a fair point.
If some CalTech physicist came up with viable fuel cells, do you think Exxon would finance his research & marketing? If someone from CERN produced a useful & net-positive fusion reactor, do you think the various power companies, with their existing plants and related revenues, would be willing to change course and throw their resources behind this research.
Or here's one -- if some kids came up with a robust, scalable, powerful operating system in their spare time, do you think Microsoft would adopt it, or would they do everything they can to neutralize it?
Sad to say, I think this happens all the time...
Won't be released until 2002, eh?
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Well, it's nice to know that the upcoming Star Wars movie won't be the only huge letdown next year...;)
Fair enough, but what about the person sitting down in front of the web for the first time in, say, a library in Jakarta or Mumbai? What if this person just knows to type in (or, more likely, click on) Yahoo, and is then presented with this bewildering stream of English text?
You're smart enough to know how to override this (say, by logging into something like my.yahoo.com, and thus getting your own language preferences), while the newbie, who understands neither computers nor English, is able to get started without any unnecessary obstacles.
I agree that a lot of these "usability enhancements" do absolutely nothing to enhance usability, especially for say the typical Slashdot reader that knows the way around a computer without any problems. But technically proficient people are not the norm (sadly), and when it can be done well (e.g. without pissing off the experts or further confusing the novices), there is a lot to be said for enabling those novice users to get up to speed quickly.
I see this as such an example. The possible benefit to non-English speaking users (a hugely underrepresented group) is more than enough to offset the comparitively mild annoyance that experts will be imposed with, especially considering that the only people that should be getting the foreign editions will ideally be the visitors from those foreign countries and, presumably, the experts there will be smart enough to figure out how to switch to English if that's what they prefer. It's not exactly "first do no harm" (because it is making the experts do a bit more work), but it's better than the current "only do much harm" method.
Of course, on the other hand, sorting out which language to feed to a visitor from, say bilingual Montreal is left as an exercise for the implementor....:)
What's so bad about this? I don't really care for the censorship angle, but on the plus site, this could do wonders for the internationalization & localization of web content. If a site as big & complex as Yahoo can tailor itself to local markets, then surely smaller sites can apply at least some of the same strategy.
I know this already happens in limited form -- lots of sites have local editions, e.g. bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, ikea.com just to name three of the top of my head. But to go a step further and automagically give visitors the right version (presumably with a version to switch languages / locales, to catch the inevitable errors) would be a huge boost to bringing the web to the non-English speaking world.
I know that there's a lot of talk about doing this sort of thing, but this would be the first largescale application of it that I'm aware of. I'd love to see this take off...
Funny how you complain about low-functionality internet capable devices in your post, then mention the low-functionality internet capable Dreamcast in your.sig. You make saying yes and no at the same time look so easy...:)
Also, if Intel really believed the P4 was its best chip, why are the colored guys on TV hyping the P3 like there's no tomorrow? (No, that's not a racist remark. If you've seen the ad, you know what I mean.)
Neither of its first two demos ran in my IE5 browser, even though I have the most recent version of Flash installed and can view other Flash sites.
Well, like I say, it's under development and needs support at this point in order for Simon to finish it. It's a lot of work to do in one's spare time, and what's really needed is for someone to step forward and offer resources to further the development of it -- presumably by supporting Simon so he can work on it full time, unless he finds some other arrangement. (I just know the guy -- I certainly don't speak for him.)
Babbage, I also want to commend you for the "Dubya is not my President" message on your posting. [snip] What a fraud!
Heh. Thanks. Not that that really changes fact that with this decision, we've stopped being a constitutional republic and are now a constitutional monarchy, just like the British we fought to be free of.
Not that this has anything to do with Perl::Flash, aside from the slight British connection...
Wow cool, Perl::Flash is ready for Slashdot. Simon has been working on this project for a while now (six months or a year?) and is looking for someone to sponsor him, Damian Conway-esque, so that he can work on it full time and come up with a way to hack Flash with open source tools like Perl.
The idea is that Flash is a really interesting technology -- vector graphics, lighweight complex animations, yadda yadda yadda -- but you need proprietary tools to work with it, and the integration with the web browsers is spotty at best -- e.g. they aren't searchable, they don't really support all the standard features like the back button, etc.
That's where Perl::Flash comes in. First & foremost, it's an authoring tool for generating (either one-at-a-time or dynamically-on-the-fly) Flash animations, but I would suspect that it can also be used -- perhaps in Mozilla? -- for other types of manipulation of the Flash file. Cool stuff.
I've just learned that this hasn't been officially released yet -- Simon's on vacation -- so those of you that can get to the twoshortplanks site are seeing experimental code that wasn't yet meant for public review like this. Keep that in mind as you review this stuff -- beta isn't even nearly the word for the code here, so don't be hard on Simon and don't be cruel in pointing out flaws in the code or the ideas: everything is a work in progress at this point.
Whoever this 'antiher0' person is, s|he has revealed this project perhaps a bit too soon....
Or for that matter, "operating systems" that run in the browser plug-in sandbox, like Inferno, or the Java Virtual Machine.
It is an interesting way to tackle certain problems: rather than writing a whole operating system to abstract away the complexity of working with the hardware, you get another operating system to do the heavy lifting, and all you have to worry about is interfacing with the [hopefully well documented, or better still open source] API. And since Moore's Law is on your side, you can get away with this layered approach without too much of a performance hit, freeing you do work on more interesting high level problems.
This is all assuming, of course, that the underlying OS is more of an assistant than a straightjacket -- we want enough rope to not only hang ourselves, but to do so in a cool variety of ways:) -- and then you get into some other interesting-yet-pointless-and-kinda-boring questions about the difference between one of these "new operating systems" and pre-existing layered techniques like, say, Flash in web browsers or Gnome on top of X-Windows. Yeah, I'll agree that it's a stretch (at best) to call Gnome or Flash an operating system, and yeah I'll agree that there might not be so much difference between those plugin components and this idea.
But so what? If what you're dealing with is some kind of extension to existing tech that makes it in fact something pretty fundamentally a different thing, does that not make it any less interesting? Put another way, if you're into cars (which I'm not, but this is the best example I can think of), is a souped up hotrod any less impressive than a factory built sports car? The Porsche/Linux may be a more impressive machine for being designed so well from the ground up, but at the same time, the rebuilt VW-Bug-with-the-911-engine/Athena goes just as quick, and it's impressive to see what people can do with that platform.
I dunno, it's an interesting but probably unresolvable question. If Athena can be made to run on it's own, as BeOS can, that'll win it some cred points. I'm not sure if that matters though -- if they can accomplish some of their design goals while working inside the sandbox, it's still going to be an interesting achievement. I'm all for seeing people do new & interesting things with too-stale platforms like Windows & Linux...
My favorite *nix book is definitely O'Reilly's Unix Power Tools. I can't decide how suitable for newbies it would be -- it has an impressive array of in-depth information on pretty much everything you'll have to deal with.
The best thing about it is the nice balance between:
"here's what you need to do" in a step by step, recipie type way,
and "here's why you need to do what you need to do" which you can use to understand what you're doing
The former helps you get started with the basics you need to Get Things Done Quickly And Easily ("how do I set up the boot process, how do I arrange my home directory, how do I automate frequent, repetitive tasks...") while the latter segues into the things you'll need to know to start breaking the rules once you know what you're doing, and thus Get Even More Things Done By Having Complete Control Over Your Tools.
The depth & breadth of information might be overwhelming if you don't recognize some of the material coming into the book , but you'll quickly appreciate the overview it gives you of the many things that Unix makes easy -- shell interaction with the machine, shell shortcuts & history, process management, input & output streams, pattern matching, file management, file security, resource usage, searching through files, editing files from the shell (sed, awk, etc) through editors (vi, emacs), and beyond (perl), etc. I've got two shelves full of O'Reilly books, alot of which cover the same things the Power Tools book does, but still it's the one I come back to over and over again. I bought it after having read most of the others, and I wish I'd come across it sooner, because it made everything Fall Into Place & Make Sense for me.
And though I don't think I could possibly rate it any more highly (unless it went into X-Windows &/or network stuff a bit more), it's worth adding that no, I'm not being paid to go on & on about it -- I just think it's that good...:)
The critical problem with any 3d interface proposal for a typical PC is that they all try to represent an N-dimensional information space by building a 3-dimensional visualization that is interacted with using -- here's the rub -- 2-dimensional interface tools: monitor, mouse, and keyboard. The fact is, N here is a very large number, and going from 2 dimensional representations to 3 dimensional representations is at most a trivial step towards the actual complexity of the system.
The keyboard isn't much of a problem, but it's tricky to get a useful rendering of 3d space on a flat monitor (Quake doesn't cut it -- we really ought to have something more immersive to be useful) and a mouse just isn't designed to plot anything other than X,Y mappings. You need some sort of way to plot a point in space -- one of those old Virtual Reality Gloves or something -- to workably interace with a 3d environment.
The problem is, as much work as it's going to take to get something like that going -- with new hardware interfaces of some kind and new software technologies to work it out -- it's still an inadequate solution to the underlying problem. The small step from 2d modeling to 3d modeling is barely worth it when you're trying to get to a representation of a, say, 1000d information space -- especially considering all the work it'll take, both on the part of developers and users.
What we really need to do is rethink how we abstract out the complexity of increasingly powerful information systems. How can we represent this data in a way that humans can grapple with? Making a 1000d interface might be theoretically possible, but people can't even handle 4d models, and some of us aren't even that great with 3d or 2d ones:)
Work like this is IMO a dead end. Until something comes along that really rethinks how we model intricately complex dataspaces, we're going to be sitting on the Desktop plateau for a while, at least in terms of actual progress towards system usability.
Every time I see this name, I assume people are talking about British Perl Monger David Cantrell, instead of American Linux Hacker David Cantrell. Obviously the open source world needs better naming conventions...:)
These are all excellent suggestions. I'd also append onto #5 that PDFs are appreciated by a lot of people. I think it's annoying to use them most of the time, but others disagree and that's okay -- they're cross platform and print well, so they're worth using. People also like Word documents, but I'm a lot less eager to support that format for a whole lot of reasons (cross-platform issues, cross-version issues, macro viruses, Word sucks, etc:).
I'd also point out Philip Greenspun'sscorecard.org, a clearing house for environmental data. It's a very accessible, data-rich site that might be a sort of model for things a government data-distribution site could do.
I hope posting a specific offer doesn't count as trolling, but the one person I know that lives in France (an English guy living in Paris, as it happens) mentioned recently that his company is looking for help:
Just a quick note to say that we are looking for Java developers, and also for an editor. If anyone is interested in a change of scenery (Paris is certainly an experience) and working with a cool international team on a cool project,
please send a CV to jobs@(deleted).com.
Even though the company is based in France, the working environment is English.
Have a look at http://www.(deleted).com to get a background of the company. The site is shit, but all the manpower is geared to getting the new site ready for the launch on Monday.
In the interest of pseudononymity I've removed the email & web addresses, though if you want them you may contact me privately.
I visited Amsterdam a year or so ago and saw a lot of places (e.g. Manpower) posting job listings for tech work. The thing is, the listing would be in the language of the job (i.e. Dutch) and a whole lot of them (way over half) were in English, implying to me that an [North] American would probably be okay finding work there.
My friend in Paris makes it sound like a great place to live for a few years -- if my girlfriend could come with me without endangering her US citizenship application, I'd be over there myself right now. I say you should go for it...
...but not save. Thus you can't create new documents, and you can't revise old ones. How useful is that? How often do you find yourself opening up old documents just to look at them? Personally, I never do -- I might open an occasional oldie so I can rewrite part of it or something, but I never just reminisce over old documents. Locking out that feature *does* cripple the software -- I'd say people *did* read it, and are rightfully annoyed by what they saw.
It was brought to my attention that these names may be a test of sorts:
Perhaps they're truing to experiment. They've picked some very specific domains such as aero, some vague ones such as.info, some "jazzy" ones such as.biz... to see how each prosper?
In that case, the adding of domains for the actual good of the Internet
will be round 2.
If that's the case, then how long is ICANN going to study the response (which I think probably will (or should:) be negative) before having a next round of name declarations?
Alternately, what about the possibility of going around DNS? Are there any alternative systems that could be opened up? I seem to remember one called X-something-or-other, but damn if Google won't show it to me with that...:)
(Not that bad ideas from Katz are anything new...:). I just posted this to the last article on the election (in response to this, but the comment fits better here now...:
Why is it necessarily impossible for a computer to make an electronic and a physical copy of information.
It's not impossible at all, and on the face of it I have no problem with the idea. The problem is that you're investing all your trust in little machines and networks, and I can't understand why you think that would help things here. The big problem in this election, it seems, is bad interface design. That's a problem all over, especially but not at all exclusively with computer systems. What needs to be done here is rethinking the interface, not digitizing the back end for it.
It's like saying that a car got in an accident because the wipers were broken & the driver couldn't see, then replying that it wouldn't have been a problem if the car had been a diesel or LP engine or something -- the engine has nothing to do with matters here, the broken interface is the true culprit.
I don't see why some of us have to be so resistant to change that we make such foolish assumptions that data can only exist in one place.
It's not resisting change, it's refusing to accept it blindly. Consider: a lot of these proposals surround the idea of online voting, on grounds that [1] encryption is strong these days, [2] online transactions are pretty secure now, and [3] results would be fast. Consider each of those points more carefully though:
Brute force cracks of any encryption scheme are pretty easily feasible now, especially in a networked world. It may be impractical in most case, but consider the stakes here -- choosing the Leader Of The Free World. Do you really think no one would try? Don't you think $enemy_state_du_jour might want to take a shot at it? If concern about Chinese tampering with campaigns was a problem before, you haven't seen anything yet.
Ok, so you can authorize & authenticate a secure connection between a client & a server. Wonderful. Only problem: how do you know that the right person submitted the authorization token? If you mail my password the week before the election, but I'm on a business trip in Brunei, my Vietnamese girlfriend will check my mail for me. What's to stop her (or my 7 year old wunderkind, or the creepy guy next door, etc) from logging on & voting as me? All the system knows is that someone claimed to be Chris Devers, correctly stated that "the blue mongoose flies at midnight", and then voted for $whoever.
On the server end, what about a DOS attack that brings down the polling server in a district where one candidate has too much of an edge, or some kind of DNS or IP spoofing attack that siphons off all the would be votes for that district into some digital circular file somewhere, lost in the great bit bucket in the sky. And nevermind attacks that actually breach the server somehow, corrupting whatever database tables or installing whatever worms or trojans or what have you. Suffice to say, there's all kinds of fun ways to violate the integrity of the polling system.
Then there all the fun out-or-band attacks that could be done. When my legit absentee ballot arrives in the mail, will they invalidate it if voter records show I already voted online? Which, if either, would count? To turn it around, could someone covertly submit absentee ballots for every person that is known to support an opponent & will vote online, thus invalidating their votes & turning the election to the other side? How about a distributed Perl script cracking tool to vote online for every registered voter in a district, trying each password against each voter, in an attempt to stuff or invalidate ballots? When pressed, it would be relatively easy to product paper documentation of the forged results, no matter which side of the attacks you may be trying to press. Again, there are lots of ways to overwhelm the system.
Finally, as for fast results -- look, speed just isn't the problem here, the constitution gives months to decide for a good reason. Proposals that center around the idea of speeding up results are fixing the wrong problem.
I'm not totally against using computers as a tool in elections, but I see some huge problems with the idea and no clean solutions to them any time soon. Proposals that fix a non-problem while exacerbating the real problems will not win approval. Any proposal that dismisses with the idea of on-site, accountable, secure elections will win my disgust, because you're scrapping what's good about the current system & replacing it with something that can never be trusted.
If you really want to see digital elections happen, then hey go for it, but you had better come up with a clear, safe, and fair system that thinks through the sorts of problems with what you've described thus far. Choosing national leadership is far too important for anything less.
Re:I don't trust it & never will
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Why is it necessarily impossible for a computer to make an electronic and a physical copy of information.
It's not impossible at all, and on the face of it I have no problem with the idea. The problem is that you're investing all your trust in little machines and networks, and I can't understand why you think that would help things here. The big problem in this election, it seems, is bad interface design. That's a problem all over, especially but not at all exclusively with computer systems. What needs to be done here is rethinking the interface, not digitizing the back end for it.
It's like saying that a car got in an accident because the wipers were broken & the driver couldn't see, then replying that it wouldn't have been a problem if the car had been a diesel or LP engine or something -- the engine has nothing to do with matters here, the broken interface is the true culprit.
I don't see why some of us have to be so resistant to change that we make such foolish assumptions that data can only exist in one place.
It's not resisting change, it's refusing to accept it blindly. Consider: a lot of these proposals surround the idea of online voting, on grounds that [1] encryption is strong these days, [2] online transactions are pretty secure now, and [3] results would be fast. Consider each of those points more carefully though:
Brute force cracks of any encryption scheme are pretty easily feasible now, especially in a networked world. It may be impractical in most case, but consider the stakes here -- choosing the Leader Of The Free World. Do you really think no one would try? Don't you think $enemy_state_du_jour might want to take a shot at it? If concern about Chinese tampering with campaigns was a problem before, you haven't seen anything yet.
Ok, so you can authorize & authenticate a secure connection between a client & a server. Wonderful. Only problem: how do you know that the right person submitted the authorization token? If you mail my password the week before the election, but I'm on a business trip in Brunei, my Vietnamese girlfriend will check my mail for me. What's to stop her (or my 7 year old wunderkind, or the creepy guy next door, etc) from logging on & voting as me? All the system knows is that someone claimed to be Chris Devers, correctly stated that "the blue mongoose flies at midnight", and then voted for $whoever.
On the server end, what about a DOS attack that brings down the polling server in a district where one candidate has too much of an edge, or some kind of DNS or IP spoofing attack that siphons off all the would be votes for that district into some digital circular file somewhere, lost in the great bit bucket in the sky. And nevermind attacks that actually breach the server somehow, corrupting whatever database tables or installing whatever worms or trojans or what have you. Suffice to say, there's all kinds of fun ways to violate the integrity of the polling system.
Then there all the fun out-or-band attacks that could be done. When my legit absentee ballot arrives in the mail, will they invalidate it if voter records show I already voted online? Which, if either, would count? To turn it around, could someone covertly submit absentee ballots for every person that is known to support an opponent & will vote online, thus invalidating their votes & turning the election to the other side? How about a distributed Perl script cracking tool to vote online for every registered voter in a district, trying each password against each voter, in an attempt to stuff or invalidate ballots? When pressed, it would be relatively easy to product paper documentation of the forged results, no matter which side of the attacks you may be trying to press. Again, there are lots of ways to overwhelm the system.
Finally, as for fast results -- look, speed just isn't the problem here, the constitution gives months to decide for a good reason. Proposals that center around the idea of speeding up results are fixing the wrong problem.
I'm not totally against using computers as a tool in elections, but I see some huge problems with the idea and no clean solutions to them any time soon. Proposals that fix a non-problem while exacerbating the real problems will not win approval. Any proposal that dismisses with the idea of on-site, accountable, secure elections will win my disgust, because you're scrapping what's good about the current system & replacing it with something that can never be trusted.
If you really want to see digital elections happen, then hey go for it, but you had better come up with a clear, safe, and fair system that thinks through the sorts of problems with what you've described thus far. Choosing national leadership is far too important for anything less.
I don't trust it & never will
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Elections are far too important to go all digital & networked this way. Not everything needs to be fast & technological. A lot of countries spend much more times with elections than we do -- three days, a week, etc. That would be a far better way to improve things.
The most obvious problem with your system is that it leaves no paper trail. In a rare situation like this one where a recount is needed, I would never trust a computer system alone. The database can be corrupted or compromised. The network connections, though relatively secure, are not invulnerable. Admittedly, traditional old or non tech methods are open to compromise too, of course, but they have the trump card of tangible evidence of the vote in the form of some paper ballot.
I'm not against applying technological measures on top of the old ones -- scan in the ballot & process it however you would like, for example. But I have not been so seduced by technology as to believe that it is some kind of pixie dust that, when generously applied, would make all the problems we're dealing with this year would go away.
Slashdot Mirror
And I'm not really talking so much about Yeoh. "Biggest movie" is kind of a flexible point anyway -- from what I understand, 'Crouching Dragon Hidden Tiger' will probably be bigger in Asia than the Matrix was here in the US, so any question of "bigger" has to state where you're talking about geographically. Further, she was also in one of the recent James Bond movies, which maybe (I don't know for sure) made more than the Matrix did, at least in terms of net profits after tie-ins and what have you. So you also have to account for whether 'biggest' deals with the number of people that saw & enjoyed it, the money it made, etc.
Anyway, as I understand it she's already a well known & liked martial arts star in Hong Kong, who's movie industry is almost as big as Hollywood, so I don't see why having to be successful in the US is such a big criteria for overall success, which she already has.
Flying or shooting? The latter would be pretty impressive, the former would make it barely worth taking off. I'm assuming you mean "can hit a target at 120-150 miles", and not "can fly on patrol for 120-150 miles"....
;)
I know, I know, a lot of geeks love that movie (I'm guessing it's the weird leather superhero skinsuits -- surely not the corny plot ;), but damn I thought it was awful.
Pi. Now there was a movie computer nerds ought to be interested in...
Would it help if we took a new look at the browsing system, rather than moderation? What if we were able to add a rule to the display options such that you don't see any posts moderated as "-1 Troll"?
Better still, what if you like to read Slashdot for a good laugh, don't mind if the topic strays a bit, and really don't like those posts that make you learn something. It would be nice if you could add virtual adjustments for each level of moderation: +1 funny, +0 offtopic, and -2 informative.This way, you can filter out the things you don't want to see, while bringing back in some of the ones you weren't interested in.
The next step from there would be to open everything way up: you've gone part of the way from crude "good / bad" descriptions to a more meaningful content based description. You can augment that by adding in more adjectives for moderation. These adjectives don't have to be so much in terms of good vs bad, but rather as adjectives are meant to be: descriptions.
Political. Poetic. Surreal. Sublime. Yet Another Microsoft Bashing. Yet Another Linux Stroking.
You get the idea.
The final step would be to make moderation a much more common occurance, because you would have to gather much more input to determine which posts have which attributes. I'm not sure where the line there should be -- on one hand, it's tempting to say all users can always moderate once they get the 20 karma points or whatever it is. That would probably be a black hole for system abuse though. Maybe a second tier? Those above, say, 30-50 points {?} could moderate all the time, while those between 20 and that upper tier cutoff would get to periodically like they do now. I'm not sure, it would have to be fleshed out if the idea got anywhere near that far.
In any event, I've been disappointed in the moderation system for months now, and some sort of change would be very welcome.
Does this count? As they say, read the FAQ... :)
If some CalTech physicist came up with viable fuel cells, do you think Exxon would finance his research & marketing? If someone from CERN produced a useful & net-positive fusion reactor, do you think the various power companies, with their existing plants and related revenues, would be willing to change course and throw their resources behind this research.
Or here's one -- if some kids came up with a robust, scalable, powerful operating system in their spare time, do you think Microsoft would adopt it, or would they do everything they can to neutralize it?
Sad to say, I think this happens all the time...
Well, it's nice to know that the upcoming Star Wars movie won't be the only huge letdown next year... ;)
You're smart enough to know how to override this (say, by logging into something like my.yahoo.com, and thus getting your own language preferences), while the newbie, who understands neither computers nor English, is able to get started without any unnecessary obstacles.
I agree that a lot of these "usability enhancements" do absolutely nothing to enhance usability, especially for say the typical Slashdot reader that knows the way around a computer without any problems. But technically proficient people are not the norm (sadly), and when it can be done well (e.g. without pissing off the experts or further confusing the novices), there is a lot to be said for enabling those novice users to get up to speed quickly.
I see this as such an example. The possible benefit to non-English speaking users (a hugely underrepresented group) is more than enough to offset the comparitively mild annoyance that experts will be imposed with, especially considering that the only people that should be getting the foreign editions will ideally be the visitors from those foreign countries and, presumably, the experts there will be smart enough to figure out how to switch to English if that's what they prefer. It's not exactly "first do no harm" (because it is making the experts do a bit more work), but it's better than the current "only do much harm" method.
Of course, on the other hand, sorting out which language to feed to a visitor from, say bilingual Montreal is left as an exercise for the implementor.... :)
I know this already happens in limited form -- lots of sites have local editions, e.g. bbc.co.uk, cnn.com, ikea.com just to name three of the top of my head. But to go a step further and automagically give visitors the right version (presumably with a version to switch languages / locales, to catch the inevitable errors) would be a huge boost to bringing the web to the non-English speaking world.
I know that there's a lot of talk about doing this sort of thing, but this would be the first largescale application of it that I'm aware of. I'd love to see this take off...
Funny how you complain about low-functionality internet capable devices in your post, then mention the low-functionality internet capable Dreamcast in your .sig. You make saying yes and no at the same time look so easy... :)
Heh -- guess not. Not that ours seems to matter all that much at this point....
They rule... very good people to represent a company like Intel....
Well, like I say, it's under development and needs support at this point in order for Simon to finish it. It's a lot of work to do in one's spare time, and what's really needed is for someone to step forward and offer resources to further the development of it -- presumably by supporting Simon so he can work on it full time, unless he finds some other arrangement. (I just know the guy -- I certainly don't speak for him.)
Heh. Thanks. Not that that really changes fact that with this decision, we've stopped being a constitutional republic and are now a constitutional monarchy, just like the British we fought to be free of.
Not that this has anything to do with Perl::Flash, aside from the slight British connection...
This is like saying that taking out a classified ad is the same thing as being plastered all over the front cover of USAToday or the New York Times.
Just because something is in the paper or on the web doesn't mean it's being thrown out for public scrutiny....
The idea is that Flash is a really interesting technology -- vector graphics, lighweight complex animations, yadda yadda yadda -- but you need proprietary tools to work with it, and the integration with the web browsers is spotty at best -- e.g. they aren't searchable, they don't really support all the standard features like the back button, etc.
That's where Perl::Flash comes in. First & foremost, it's an authoring tool for generating (either one-at-a-time or dynamically-on-the-fly) Flash animations, but I would suspect that it can also be used -- perhaps in Mozilla? -- for other types of manipulation of the Flash file. Cool stuff.
I've just learned that this hasn't been officially released yet -- Simon's on vacation -- so those of you that can get to the twoshortplanks site are seeing experimental code that wasn't yet meant for public review like this. Keep that in mind as you review this stuff -- beta isn't even nearly the word for the code here, so don't be hard on Simon and don't be cruel in pointing out flaws in the code or the ideas: everything is a work in progress at this point.
Whoever this 'antiher0' person is, s|he has revealed this project perhaps a bit too soon....
It is an interesting way to tackle certain problems: rather than writing a whole operating system to abstract away the complexity of working with the hardware, you get another operating system to do the heavy lifting, and all you have to worry about is interfacing with the [hopefully well documented, or better still open source] API. And since Moore's Law is on your side, you can get away with this layered approach without too much of a performance hit, freeing you do work on more interesting high level problems.
This is all assuming, of course, that the underlying OS is more of an assistant than a straightjacket -- we want enough rope to not only hang ourselves, but to do so in a cool variety of ways :) -- and then you get into some other interesting-yet-pointless-and-kinda-boring questions about the difference between one of these "new operating systems" and pre-existing layered techniques like, say, Flash in web browsers or Gnome on top of X-Windows. Yeah, I'll agree that it's a stretch (at best) to call Gnome or Flash an operating system, and yeah I'll agree that there might not be so much difference between those plugin components and this idea.
But so what? If what you're dealing with is some kind of extension to existing tech that makes it in fact something pretty fundamentally a different thing, does that not make it any less interesting? Put another way, if you're into cars (which I'm not, but this is the best example I can think of), is a souped up hotrod any less impressive than a factory built sports car? The Porsche/Linux may be a more impressive machine for being designed so well from the ground up, but at the same time, the rebuilt VW-Bug-with-the-911-engine/Athena goes just as quick, and it's impressive to see what people can do with that platform.
I dunno, it's an interesting but probably unresolvable question. If Athena can be made to run on it's own, as BeOS can, that'll win it some cred points. I'm not sure if that matters though -- if they can accomplish some of their design goals while working inside the sandbox, it's still going to be an interesting achievement. I'm all for seeing people do new & interesting things with too-stale platforms like Windows & Linux...
The best thing about it is the nice balance between:
- "here's what you need to do" in a step by step, recipie type way,
- and "here's why you need to do what you need to do" which you can use to understand what you're doing
The former helps you get started with the basics you need to Get Things Done Quickly And Easily ("how do I set up the boot process, how do I arrange my home directory, how do I automate frequent, repetitive tasks...") while the latter segues into the things you'll need to know to start breaking the rules once you know what you're doing, and thus Get Even More Things Done By Having Complete Control Over Your Tools.The depth & breadth of information might be overwhelming if you don't recognize some of the material coming into the book , but you'll quickly appreciate the overview it gives you of the many things that Unix makes easy -- shell interaction with the machine, shell shortcuts & history, process management, input & output streams, pattern matching, file management, file security, resource usage, searching through files, editing files from the shell (sed, awk, etc) through editors (vi, emacs), and beyond (perl), etc. I've got two shelves full of O'Reilly books, alot of which cover the same things the Power Tools book does, but still it's the one I come back to over and over again. I bought it after having read most of the others, and I wish I'd come across it sooner, because it made everything Fall Into Place & Make Sense for me.
And though I don't think I could possibly rate it any more highly (unless it went into X-Windows &/or network stuff a bit more), it's worth adding that no, I'm not being paid to go on & on about it -- I just think it's that good... :)
The keyboard isn't much of a problem, but it's tricky to get a useful rendering of 3d space on a flat monitor (Quake doesn't cut it -- we really ought to have something more immersive to be useful) and a mouse just isn't designed to plot anything other than X,Y mappings. You need some sort of way to plot a point in space -- one of those old Virtual Reality Gloves or something -- to workably interace with a 3d environment.
The problem is, as much work as it's going to take to get something like that going -- with new hardware interfaces of some kind and new software technologies to work it out -- it's still an inadequate solution to the underlying problem. The small step from 2d modeling to 3d modeling is barely worth it when you're trying to get to a representation of a, say, 1000d information space -- especially considering all the work it'll take, both on the part of developers and users.
What we really need to do is rethink how we abstract out the complexity of increasingly powerful information systems. How can we represent this data in a way that humans can grapple with? Making a 1000d interface might be theoretically possible, but people can't even handle 4d models, and some of us aren't even that great with 3d or 2d ones :)
Work like this is IMO a dead end. Until something comes along that really rethinks how we model intricately complex dataspaces, we're going to be sitting on the Desktop plateau for a while, at least in terms of actual progress towards system usability.
Every time I see this name, I assume people are talking about British Perl Monger David Cantrell, instead of American Linux Hacker David Cantrell. Obviously the open source world needs better naming conventions... :)
I'd also point out Philip Greenspun's scorecard.org, a clearing house for environmental data. It's a very accessible, data-rich site that might be a sort of model for things a government data-distribution site could do.
In the interest of pseudononymity I've removed the email & web addresses, though if you want them you may contact me privately.
I visited Amsterdam a year or so ago and saw a lot of places (e.g. Manpower) posting job listings for tech work. The thing is, the listing would be in the language of the job (i.e. Dutch) and a whole lot of them (way over half) were in English, implying to me that an [North] American would probably be okay finding work there.
My friend in Paris makes it sound like a great place to live for a few years -- if my girlfriend could come with me without endangering her US citizenship application, I'd be over there myself right now. I say you should go for it...
...but not save. Thus you can't create new documents, and you can't revise old ones. How useful is that? How often do you find yourself opening up old documents just to look at them? Personally, I never do -- I might open an occasional oldie so I can rewrite part of it or something, but I never just reminisce over old documents. Locking out that feature *does* cripple the software -- I'd say people *did* read it, and are rightfully annoyed by what they saw.
If that's the case, then how long is ICANN going to study the response (which I think probably will (or should :) be negative) before having a next round of name declarations?
Alternately, what about the possibility of going around DNS? Are there any alternative systems that could be opened up? I seem to remember one called X-something-or-other, but damn if Google won't show it to me with that... :)
It's like saying that a car got in an accident because the wipers were broken & the driver couldn't see, then replying that it wouldn't have been a problem if the car had been a diesel or LP engine or something -- the engine has nothing to do with matters here, the broken interface is the true culprit.
It's not resisting change, it's refusing to accept it blindly. Consider: a lot of these proposals surround the idea of online voting, on grounds that [1] encryption is strong these days, [2] online transactions are pretty secure now, and [3] results would be fast. Consider each of those points more carefully though:On the server end, what about a DOS attack that brings down the polling server in a district where one candidate has too much of an edge, or some kind of DNS or IP spoofing attack that siphons off all the would be votes for that district into some digital circular file somewhere, lost in the great bit bucket in the sky. And nevermind attacks that actually breach the server somehow, corrupting whatever database tables or installing whatever worms or trojans or what have you. Suffice to say, there's all kinds of fun ways to violate the integrity of the polling system.
Then there all the fun out-or-band attacks that could be done. When my legit absentee ballot arrives in the mail, will they invalidate it if voter records show I already voted online? Which, if either, would count? To turn it around, could someone covertly submit absentee ballots for every person that is known to support an opponent & will vote online, thus invalidating their votes & turning the election to the other side? How about a distributed Perl script cracking tool to vote online for every registered voter in a district, trying each password against each voter, in an attempt to stuff or invalidate ballots? When pressed, it would be relatively easy to product paper documentation of the forged results, no matter which side of the attacks you may be trying to press. Again, there are lots of ways to overwhelm the system.
I'm not totally against using computers as a tool in elections, but I see some huge problems with the idea and no clean solutions to them any time soon. Proposals that fix a non-problem while exacerbating the real problems will not win approval. Any proposal that dismisses with the idea of on-site, accountable, secure elections will win my disgust, because you're scrapping what's good about the current system & replacing it with something that can never be trusted.
If you really want to see digital elections happen, then hey go for it, but you had better come up with a clear, safe, and fair system that thinks through the sorts of problems with what you've described thus far. Choosing national leadership is far too important for anything less.
It's like saying that a car got in an accident because the wipers were broken & the driver couldn't see, then replying that it wouldn't have been a problem if the car had been a diesel or LP engine or something -- the engine has nothing to do with matters here, the broken interface is the true culprit.
It's not resisting change, it's refusing to accept it blindly. Consider: a lot of these proposals surround the idea of online voting, on grounds that [1] encryption is strong these days, [2] online transactions are pretty secure now, and [3] results would be fast. Consider each of those points more carefully though:On the server end, what about a DOS attack that brings down the polling server in a district where one candidate has too much of an edge, or some kind of DNS or IP spoofing attack that siphons off all the would be votes for that district into some digital circular file somewhere, lost in the great bit bucket in the sky. And nevermind attacks that actually breach the server somehow, corrupting whatever database tables or installing whatever worms or trojans or what have you. Suffice to say, there's all kinds of fun ways to violate the integrity of the polling system.
Then there all the fun out-or-band attacks that could be done. When my legit absentee ballot arrives in the mail, will they invalidate it if voter records show I already voted online? Which, if either, would count? To turn it around, could someone covertly submit absentee ballots for every person that is known to support an opponent & will vote online, thus invalidating their votes & turning the election to the other side? How about a distributed Perl script cracking tool to vote online for every registered voter in a district, trying each password against each voter, in an attempt to stuff or invalidate ballots? When pressed, it would be relatively easy to product paper documentation of the forged results, no matter which side of the attacks you may be trying to press. Again, there are lots of ways to overwhelm the system.
I'm not totally against using computers as a tool in elections, but I see some huge problems with the idea and no clean solutions to them any time soon. Proposals that fix a non-problem while exacerbating the real problems will not win approval. Any proposal that dismisses with the idea of on-site, accountable, secure elections will win my disgust, because you're scrapping what's good about the current system & replacing it with something that can never be trusted.
If you really want to see digital elections happen, then hey go for it, but you had better come up with a clear, safe, and fair system that thinks through the sorts of problems with what you've described thus far. Choosing national leadership is far too important for anything less.
The most obvious problem with your system is that it leaves no paper trail . In a rare situation like this one where a recount is needed, I would never trust a computer system alone. The database can be corrupted or compromised. The network connections, though relatively secure, are not invulnerable. Admittedly, traditional old or non tech methods are open to compromise too, of course, but they have the trump card of tangible evidence of the vote in the form of some paper ballot.
I'm not against applying technological measures on top of the old ones -- scan in the ballot & process it however you would like, for example. But I have not been so seduced by technology as to believe that it is some kind of pixie dust that, when generously applied, would make all the problems we're dealing with this year would go away.