What the Q3Arena software is doing amounts to theft. The information that id is collecting is valuable to them, in that it will serve as market research for their future releases. This valuable information is being collected from the users without their knowledge or consent. id is stealing information from you, and the only way[1] you have to fight back is by not buying their software.
About 1+E30 people have made the insipid argument about the user-agent line of an HTTP request. The facts are that everyone knows the user-agent line is being sent, and you can make a valid HTTP request without sending the user-agent or even when sending a bogus user-agent. Q3Arena is not giving you either of these options.
-jwb
1: The other recourse you have is to hack your machine to spike their data collection system. Won't they be surprised at the number of people playing Q3Arena on those spanky Tseng ET4000s?
Here's why this is important. I'm sure others will add enlightening comments, also.
UPS and its clones FedEx, DHL, and Airborne are absolutely key to the emerging economy. They are the third leg of the Internet commerce triad. The first leg is the connection between the consumer and the service provider or retailer. Today this is the web. The second leg is the information system at the retailer, including their web site and thier inventory system. The third leg is the delivery of the goods to the consumer. That is where UPS comes in.
Note that this is basically the same model as mail order commerce, just with a different transport for the first leg. Hence UPS is also vastly important in that sector.
I think people underestimate the importance of UPS to the Internet. It is absolutely key. Certainly, it could be replaced by another delivery company, but the problem of trust still remains.
I have been running d.net clients since the first months, using my trusty P60. Today I have the clients running on some serious hardware, and I still plan to run them in the future.
I am somewhat disappointed that the folks running d.net continue to make the same mistakes repeatedly. First, and in my eyes worst, is the fact that they are not able to advertise their contests worth a damn. Take a look at their home page. The announcement of the CSC contest starting is after several paragraphs of numbing boredom, in the same typeface as everything else. Distributed.net needs to learn to use the H1 tag. If they want people to switch their clients, they need a big, flashing siren or something!
The second problem is one that I'm sure a slashdotter with more time than I have will cover more thoroughly here. In short, the clients need to be opened. If you must obfuscate the block authentication scheme, then you have no authentication scheme to speak of. The poor design of d.net client security has been demonstrated by multiple occassions of people faking results. One principle of security is that you should always assume that the attacker knows exactly how your security mechanism works. It would be great if d.net could overcome this problem and harness communal brainpower for testing, bugfixing, and enhancement. Think of open source as a distributed.net for brains:)
Linux and the broader free software movement already bridge the gaps between modern governmental philosophies. It is part socialist, part communist, part capitalist, and part anarchist. The movement accepts contributions according to the ability of the people. The means of production (CVS repositories, network links, web sites) are owned by the people. The people are free to make closed software if they want, and can sell the free software for as much as they choose. Finally, everybody gets as much free software as they want, without limit.
If you observe the free software community long enough, you can see that its trajectory will allow it to break all historical bounds of government, law, and power. Information will be free. Encryption will be widespread. Intellectual property will not be hoarded. Multinational corporations will not hold power over nations.
I guess ATI's hype machine is counting on the short memory of the buying public, but they can make no such assumptions about the collective memory of Slashdot!
Okay, so ATI's MAXX is rendering alternate frames on a different chip. Sounds precisely like a 3dfx SLI setup. And if you look outside of the 3D world, there have already been parallel processing display adapters. I once owned a Radius Firestorm 192 which featured three S3 864 chips. Each one was responsible for a color: one chip for red, one for blue, and one for green. The card was really, really fast in its day, and produced the sharpest picture I have ever seen, including that of my current Millenium II.
Yes, well I did precisely that, and the printers.conf file is updated fine. In fact, when I print the jobs are spooled on the disk and logged in the error and access logs. It's just that nothing ever gets to the printer!
Sigh. If I'm really interested, I'll join your mailing list.
I took the plunge and installed it, so now I can make a report.
Compile went fine, but I dislike build systems that don't show the compiler's output. This is open-source, folks. If you show the compiler output maybe some hacker will send a patch to fix your warnings.
The installation script cups.install is missing from the distribution, and
The uninstallation script is also missing.
In direct conflict with the README.txt file, The make install does not backup your current printing system!
After I installed it, it didn't work
I couldn't get it to talk to my HP LaserJet using JetDirect, even though I can easily contact it using my original printing setup and also via telnet. Oh well, it comes with the source so I guess I could hack on it.
This is an intersting project, and in the long run I think that having a more device-independent framework for printing will benefit the Unix community.
I do have one question, though. Instead of distributing an enormous archive of their custom GhostScript, why don't they just contribute their patches back to the GhostScript folks? I would like to test this, but frankly my own printing setup is working just fine, and I don't want to replace the whole thing en masse.
The amount of radiation released by this accident is tiny compared to the millions of tons of slightly radioactive fly ash spewed out of the smokestacks of coal-fired power plants in China.
China consumes ~25% of the world's coal production.
Netscape always eats 100% CPU when doing gethostbyname from it's external async DNS process. This happens regardless of whether you type the site name on the command line or in the location bar.
It isn't really a bug, since it is implemented exactly the way it was designed. It is still a bad design. Maybe you should send them a note.
If you don't want netscape to spin on the CPU, you can export the environment variable NO_ASYNC_DNS with any value. Be warned that this will cause netscape to block for possibly long periods when doing DNS (a la 3.x).
I just want to make sure that we are on the same page. You want the riders of public transit to pay their fair share. That seems reasonable. No public transit system in the US makes an operating profit. They are all subsidized by the taxpayer in some way or another. I agree with you that the transit user should pay their share.
It follows from your philosophy that car drivers should pay their fair share, also. The fair share should include:
The cost of building roads, highways, tunnels, and bridges
The cost of pollution due to automobile exhaust, tire wear, fluid leakage, etc.
The cost of health care for those involved in automobile accidents
The true cost of publically subsidized real-estate purchases in the form of parking spaces and right-of-way
The cost of traffic law enforcement, parking meter patrol, curb painting, etc.
All in all I think this is a great idea. Car drivers should pay their fair share, as should public transit riders. And my tax money shouldn't go to subsidize either one of them.
A fine demonstration that Perl is for real people trying to use a computer as a means to an end, and C is for people with too much time on their hands.
As a side benefit, this program works for arbitrarily long binary blocks.
-jwb
Re:Having everyone always moderate is dangerous
on
Moderation Ideas
·
· Score: 2
Actually, wild fluctuations are what happens now! A moderator moderates an article up to 5, then it goes back down to three, then up to four, down again, until the moderators get bored.
In my system, the scores are *much* more stable. For example, suppose 1000 people have given an article an average score of 5/10. Now another user comes along and gives the article a ranking of 10/10. What is the article's score? Still 5/10.
One of the best parts of this system is it's stability.
-jwb
Re:Having everyone always moderate is dangerous
on
Moderation Ideas
·
· Score: 2
What is your opinion on this subject if you take it outside of the context of HTML delivered over HTTP? You say that moderation is a chore, and I completely agree! But the reason I think moderation is a chore is because 1) all of those select boxes make the page load and render slowly 2) When I wont to moderate I have to wait for the page to reload.
I believe that both of these problems would go away with the use of a custom desktop client. Imagine that you are sitting in front of your computer using KSlashClient. To vote on an article, all you have to do is click on a gradient strip. Full left is 0, full right is 10. When you click, your vote is transmitted to the discussion server adn registered, but you don't have to wait for anything. The vote is delivered asyncronously while you continue to read (and rate) the rest of the comments. Suddenly moderation isn't a chore any more.
Now, let's take your pathological case. Little Johnny has the day off from 3rd grade and is rating all of the flames 10 out of 10. Nobody else is around so them flames are the highest ranked articles in the discussion.
When all of the hard-working rational adults logon to read slashdot, they immediately see "Gnome SUCKS KDE RULES!!!!! (Score 10)" and they think "WTF?" So they click on the zero end of their voting scale and read on. I believe that there are a lot more good, thinking people on slashdot then there are vapid flamers, so the result would be an immediate and decisive downgrading of the flames to the bottom of the list.
As a benefit, since Johnny's personal score is 0.2 and the rational adults all have 6-10, Johnny's votes are easily overpowered.
What do you think?
-jwb
Re:The slashdot moderation system is flawed
on
Moderation Ideas
·
· Score: 2
Well you are in luck because I have even been thinking of a scalable implementation of the rating network stuff. I'll try to layout some database tables for you but please excuse me if my explanation isn't perfectly clear.
One table holds all of the comments. The table has the userid of the author, the comment id of the comment, a score, and the total number of votes cast.
Another table has all of the authors with a userid, a score, and the total number of votes cast for that author.
A third table holds the individual scores for each author by each user. The worst case for this table is that it grows to n^2 where n is all of the users on slashdot. In practice it will not grow to n^2 because not everyone will vote for every author.
A fourth table holds all of the individual votes for an article. Assuming there are n readers and p articles, the potential size of this table is p*n. That shouldn't be too bad as most people don't post articles and only some people will vote for every article.
There are two things which pin the whole system together. For purposes of calculating an article's score, the user's own votes get a weight of 10 out of 10. The user can specify the weight of the community vote on a scale from 0 to 10. So as you count the score for the article, you multiply your own vote for that author by 10. Other authors that you have previously ranked get weighted depending on how you ranked them, and the rest of everybody gets the wieght that you grant to the public at large. Any article that can't be assigned a personal score just gets the community score. Every article always has at least one vote: when the author posts the comment is automatically scored to some constant, perhaps 10/10.
Anyway as you can see I've been modelling this for some time. With the right indexing scheme and efficient SQL, this should scale really well. It would be a bigger load over time, but over time computing power is increasing so you come out even.
Regards, jwb
The slashdot moderation system is flawed
on
Moderation Ideas
·
· Score: 5
Rob,
Please accept my humble criticism of slashdot's comment system. I have been thinking about this system a lot lately and designing a replacement for it. I have no delusions of replacing slashdot: slashdot is a community that would be hard to duplicate. The only problem I have with slashdot is the comment mechanism, and I will present those problems and some possible solutions.
Problem: Moderation race conditions. Joe and Jane are both moderators reading a slashdot article. They both see a comment that they think is interesting, but not incredible. They both choose to spend one moderator point to raise the article to "Score: 2 (interesting)". They continue to read the comments and click the "moderate" button a few minutes later. Now the article is rated 3, but neither of them thought it was worthy of 3. Moderation has failed for both of them. One of them could choose to moderate it back down to 2, but then the article would be rated "Score: 2 (overrated)", which does not reflect their true opinion of the article.
Solution: Instead of incremental ratings (+1, -1), allow the moderator to score the article on a range, say from 0 to 5. Then if two moderators assign a score of 2, the article's score is 2, not 3.
Problem: Only a few people have a few moderation points at once. This leads to several worst-case failures. One of them is that no moderators will read a given article, and the comments in that article will be clustered around 0 and 1, making the "Show highest scores first" setting much less useful.
Solution: Allow all readers to be moderators all of the time. There will never be a deficiency in the number of moderators with this method. The number of people scoring articles will be directly proportional to the number of people reading that article. When 100% of the participants can cast votes, there is no outlying possibility if lack of moderation.
Problem: The community ranking does not allow for individual preferences. The individual may have a strong opinion for or against a certain author, but the score given by the moderators is unlikely to reflect his preference.
Solution: Use a network of preferences to tailor the rankings that a user sees and to delegate the ranking of articles.
I believe that the ideal system would allow the user to cast a vote on every comment posted. The comment display system would use the user's voting history to score and sort the comments on every new article. Take an example:
Joe, John, Jack, Jerry, Jane, and Jennifer are all users. In the past, Joe has given articles by Jack an average rating of 4.2 (out of 5), and has given John an average ranking of 3.8. Joe has consistently rated Jerry at 0. Joe, John, and Jerry all have overall ratings (the average rating given by all the system's users) of 2.
In a new article, Jane, who has never posted a comment before, posts an unusually insightful comment. John, Jack, and Jerry all post their usual stuff. All three of them rate Jane's article at 5, but the overall community ranking for Jane is only 3. When Joe reads the comments for the article, the article display system will give John and Jacks votes more weight than the community vote, because Joe has rated those two authors highly. The system will completely ignore Jerry's votes because Joe doesn't think much of him.
The result is that Jane's article (along with John's and Jack's) are listed at the top of the page, instead of lost in the middle of the pack. Other users with completely different preferences will get completely different displays. When there are no personal votes for an author or article, the community ranking can be used to score the article.
Whew, I hope that example was clear. It really isn't very complex or even original. It is just like what firefly was doing 5 years ago, but with a little less complexity and a lot more scalability. If slashdot were to implement a reputation management system like this, I think it would be a much better place.
Sigh. Unfortunately this method would also be against the license agreement. Remember, the license specifically forbids using the beta compiler for anything besides evaluation and testing.
I never said that the EGCS/GCC folks should not be able to include optimizations that are also included in the Compaq compiler. However they should develop these optimizations from their own effort or by Compaq's willing generosity, not by reverse engineering Compaq's compiler despite the license agreement.
Last, I never said there was anything immoral about reverse engineering. I do believe that violating the license agreement is immoral. Consider the license agreement to be a promise. Compaq is offering us a compiler. They are saying "Here is this compiler. You may have it if you agree to not reverse engineer it." And when you download the compiler, you are saying "Yes Compaq, I promise to not reverse engineer the compiler." Then if you decide to reverse engineer the compiler anyway, you have broken your promise, which I do think is highly immoral.
I hope that the GCC/EGCS folks download this compiler, compile a bunch of test cases with both it and GCC/EGCS, and then find all the good bits in the final assembler and put those sort of optimizations into GCC/EGCS.
I don't hope for anything of that sort. I believe that such an action would constitute reverse engineering of the Compaq compiler, and would therefore be against the explicit language of the license agreement.
Compaq wrote it and they are entitled to whatever licensing terms they want. While I believe that Compaq should contribute their optimiations to the community, I don't believe they should be forced to and in the absence of Compaq's willingness I guess the GNU folks are just going to have to rely on their own formidable genius and cunning to come up with a better optimized compiler.
Replying to myself, here are the offensive part sof the license at their web site
2. GRANT:
Compaq Computer Corporation ("Compaq") grants you the right to use the Software solely for testing and evaluation. The Software shall not be used for any other purpose and you agree to destroy or erase all copies of the Software upon Compaq's release of the code in final form.
You may copy the Software into the local memory or storage device of any number of computers for your testing and evaluation. The number of computers must be identified in the upcoming screen. You may make archival or back-up copies of the Software.
3. COPYRIGHT
The Software is protected by copyright laws and international treaties. Your use of the Software and associated documentation is subject to the applicable copyright laws and the express rights and restrictions of these License Agreement.
4. RESTRICTIONS
You may not rent, lease, or otherwise transfer the Software. You may not make the Software available over the internet or similar networking technology. You may not remove any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary notices from the Software or the media. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Software, except to the extent Compaq cannot prohibit such acts by law.
Slashdot Mirror
Junkbuster will filter outgoing HTTP headers. Mozilla can be patched to not send user-agent. In Lynx it is a user option!
I choose Junkbuster.
-jwb
About 1+E30 people have made the insipid argument about the user-agent line of an HTTP request. The facts are that everyone knows the user-agent line is being sent, and you can make a valid HTTP request without sending the user-agent or even when sending a bogus user-agent. Q3Arena is not giving you either of these options.
-jwb
1: The other recourse you have is to hack your machine to spike their data collection system. Won't they be surprised at the number of people playing Q3Arena on those spanky Tseng ET4000s?
UPS and its clones FedEx, DHL, and Airborne are absolutely key to the emerging economy. They are the third leg of the Internet commerce triad. The first leg is the connection between the consumer and the service provider or retailer. Today this is the web. The second leg is the information system at the retailer, including their web site and thier inventory system. The third leg is the delivery of the goods to the consumer. That is where UPS comes in.
Note that this is basically the same model as mail order commerce, just with a different transport for the first leg. Hence UPS is also vastly important in that sector.
I think people underestimate the importance of UPS to the Internet. It is absolutely key. Certainly, it could be replaced by another delivery company, but the problem of trust still remains.
-jwb
I am somewhat disappointed that the folks running d.net continue to make the same mistakes repeatedly. First, and in my eyes worst, is the fact that they are not able to advertise their contests worth a damn. Take a look at their home page. The announcement of the CSC contest starting is after several paragraphs of numbing boredom, in the same typeface as everything else. Distributed.net needs to learn to use the H1 tag. If they want people to switch their clients, they need a big, flashing siren or something!
The second problem is one that I'm sure a slashdotter with more time than I have will cover more thoroughly here. In short, the clients need to be opened. If you must obfuscate the block authentication scheme, then you have no authentication scheme to speak of. The poor design of d.net client security has been demonstrated by multiple occassions of people faking results. One principle of security is that you should always assume that the attacker knows exactly how your security mechanism works. It would be great if d.net could overcome this problem and harness communal brainpower for testing, bugfixing, and enhancement. Think of open source as a distributed.net for brains :)
-jwb
If you observe the free software community long enough, you can see that its trajectory will allow it to break all historical bounds of government, law, and power. Information will be free. Encryption will be widespread. Intellectual property will not be hoarded. Multinational corporations will not hold power over nations.
Get ready.
Compaq sells boxed K7 machines. Check out the Presario 5800 series.
Okay, so ATI's MAXX is rendering alternate frames on a different chip. Sounds precisely like a 3dfx SLI setup. And if you look outside of the 3D world, there have already been parallel processing display adapters. I once owned a Radius Firestorm 192 which featured three S3 864 chips. Each one was responsible for a color: one chip for red, one for blue, and one for green. The card was really, really fast in its day, and produced the sharpest picture I have ever seen, including that of my current Millenium II.
Anyway, just thought I'd remind ATI of the past.
-jwb
Sigh. If I'm really interested, I'll join your mailing list.
Cheers
-jwb
I couldn't get it to talk to my HP LaserJet using JetDirect, even though I can easily contact it using my original printing setup and also via telnet. Oh well, it comes with the source so I guess I could hack on it.
-jwb
I do have one question, though. Instead of distributing an enormous archive of their custom GhostScript, why don't they just contribute their patches back to the GhostScript folks? I would like to test this, but frankly my own printing setup is working just fine, and I don't want to replace the whole thing en masse.
Cheers
-jwb
Just go to their download page. The source is listed in the select box along with the binary platform versions - jwb
China consumes ~25% of the world's coal production.
-jwb
It isn't really a bug, since it is implemented exactly the way it was designed. It is still a bad design. Maybe you should send them a note.
If you don't want netscape to spin on the CPU, you can export the environment variable NO_ASYNC_DNS with any value. Be warned that this will cause netscape to block for possibly long periods when doing DNS (a la 3.x).
-jwb
The Netscape Linux developers were on Slashdot many months ago urging Linux users to send bug reports. They really do want the product to be stable.
-jwb
I just want to make sure that we are on the same page. You want the riders of public transit to pay their fair share. That seems reasonable. No public transit system in the US makes an operating profit. They are all subsidized by the taxpayer in some way or another. I agree with you that the transit user should pay their share.
It follows from your philosophy that car drivers should pay their fair share, also. The fair share should include:
All in all I think this is a great idea. Car drivers should pay their fair share, as should public transit riders. And my tax money shouldn't go to subsidize either one of them.
-jwb
The message US tax policy is sending is that work should be discouraged, and consumption, especially via the internet, should be encouraged.
-jwb
There are links to Amazon.com and O'Reilly.
Cheers,
-jwb
A fine demonstration that Perl is for real people trying to use a computer as a means to an end, and C is for people with too much time on their hands.
perl -e '$d = join("",); @b=split(/\s/,$d); foreach (@b) {print pack("B8",$_);}'
As a side benefit, this program works for arbitrarily long binary blocks.
-jwb
Actually, wild fluctuations are what happens now! A moderator moderates an article up to 5, then it goes back down to three, then up to four, down again, until the moderators get bored.
In my system, the scores are *much* more stable. For example, suppose 1000 people have given an article an average score of 5/10. Now another user comes along and gives the article a ranking of 10/10. What is the article's score? Still 5/10.
One of the best parts of this system is it's stability.
-jwb
What is your opinion on this subject if you take it outside of the context of HTML delivered over HTTP? You say that moderation is a chore, and I completely agree! But the reason I think moderation is a chore is because 1) all of those select boxes make the page load and render slowly 2) When I wont to moderate I have to wait for the page to reload.
I believe that both of these problems would go away with the use of a custom desktop client. Imagine that you are sitting in front of your computer using KSlashClient. To vote on an article, all you have to do is click on a gradient strip. Full left is 0, full right is 10. When you click, your vote is transmitted to the discussion server adn registered, but you don't have to wait for anything. The vote is delivered asyncronously while you continue to read (and rate) the rest of the comments. Suddenly moderation isn't a chore any more.
Now, let's take your pathological case. Little Johnny has the day off from 3rd grade and is rating all of the flames 10 out of 10. Nobody else is around so them flames are the highest ranked articles in the discussion.
When all of the hard-working rational adults logon to read slashdot, they immediately see "Gnome SUCKS KDE RULES!!!!! (Score 10)" and they think "WTF?" So they click on the zero end of their voting scale and read on. I believe that there are a lot more good, thinking people on slashdot then there are vapid flamers, so the result would be an immediate and decisive downgrading of the flames to the bottom of the list.
As a benefit, since Johnny's personal score is 0.2 and the rational adults all have 6-10, Johnny's votes are easily overpowered.
What do you think?
-jwb
Well you are in luck because I have even been thinking of a scalable implementation of the rating network stuff. I'll try to layout some database tables for you but please excuse me if my explanation isn't perfectly clear.
One table holds all of the comments. The table has the userid of the author, the comment id of the comment, a score, and the total number of votes cast.
Another table has all of the authors with a userid, a score, and the total number of votes cast for that author.
A third table holds the individual scores for each author by each user. The worst case for this table is that it grows to n^2 where n is all of the users on slashdot. In practice it will not grow to n^2 because not everyone will vote for every author.
A fourth table holds all of the individual votes for an article. Assuming there are n readers and p articles, the potential size of this table is p*n. That shouldn't be too bad as most people don't post articles and only some people will vote for every article.
There are two things which pin the whole system together. For purposes of calculating an article's score, the user's own votes get a weight of 10 out of 10. The user can specify the weight of the community vote on a scale from 0 to 10. So as you count the score for the article, you multiply your own vote for that author by 10. Other authors that you have previously ranked get weighted depending on how you ranked them, and the rest of everybody gets the wieght that you grant to the public at large. Any article that can't be assigned a personal score just gets the community score. Every article always has at least one vote: when the author posts the comment is automatically scored to some constant, perhaps 10/10.
Anyway as you can see I've been modelling this for some time. With the right indexing scheme and efficient SQL, this should scale really well. It would be a bigger load over time, but over time computing power is increasing so you come out even.
Regards,
jwb
Rob,
Please accept my humble criticism of slashdot's comment system. I have been thinking about this system a lot lately and designing a replacement for it. I have no delusions of replacing slashdot: slashdot is a community that would be hard to duplicate. The only problem I have with slashdot is the comment mechanism, and I will present those problems and some possible solutions.
Problem: Moderation race conditions. Joe and Jane are both moderators reading a slashdot article. They both see a comment that they think is interesting, but not incredible. They both choose to spend one moderator point to raise the article to "Score: 2 (interesting)". They continue to read the comments and click the "moderate" button a few minutes later. Now the article is rated 3, but neither of them thought it was worthy of 3. Moderation has failed for both of them. One of them could choose to moderate it back down to 2, but then the article would be rated "Score: 2 (overrated)", which does not reflect their true opinion of the article.
Solution: Instead of incremental ratings (+1, -1), allow the moderator to score the article on a range, say from 0 to 5. Then if two moderators assign a score of 2, the article's score is 2, not 3.
Problem: Only a few people have a few moderation points at once. This leads to several worst-case failures. One of them is that no moderators will read a given article, and the comments in that article will be clustered around 0 and 1, making the "Show highest scores first" setting much less useful.
Solution: Allow all readers to be moderators all of the time. There will never be a deficiency in the number of moderators with this method. The number of people scoring articles will be directly proportional to the number of people reading that article. When 100% of the participants can cast votes, there is no outlying possibility if lack of moderation.
Problem: The community ranking does not allow for individual preferences. The individual may have a strong opinion for or against a certain author, but the score given by the moderators is unlikely to reflect his preference.
Solution: Use a network of preferences to tailor the rankings that a user sees and to delegate the ranking of articles.
I believe that the ideal system would allow the user to cast a vote on every comment posted. The comment display system would use the user's voting history to score and sort the comments on every new article. Take an example:
Joe, John, Jack, Jerry, Jane, and Jennifer are all users. In the past, Joe has given articles by Jack an average rating of 4.2 (out of 5), and has given John an average ranking of 3.8. Joe has consistently rated Jerry at 0. Joe, John, and Jerry all have overall ratings (the average rating given by all the system's users) of 2.
In a new article, Jane, who has never posted a comment before, posts an unusually insightful comment. John, Jack, and Jerry all post their usual stuff. All three of them rate Jane's article at 5, but the overall community ranking for Jane is only 3. When Joe reads the comments for the article, the article display system will give John and Jacks votes more weight than the community vote, because Joe has rated those two authors highly. The system will completely ignore Jerry's votes because Joe doesn't think much of him.
The result is that Jane's article (along with John's and Jack's) are listed at the top of the page, instead of lost in the middle of the pack. Other users with completely different preferences will get completely different displays. When there are no personal votes for an author or article, the community ranking can be used to score the article.
Whew, I hope that example was clear. It really isn't very complex or even original. It is just like what firefly was doing 5 years ago, but with a little less complexity and a lot more scalability. If slashdot were to implement a reputation management system like this, I think it would be a much better place.
Regards,
jwb
I never said that the EGCS/GCC folks should not be able to include optimizations that are also included in the Compaq compiler. However they should develop these optimizations from their own effort or by Compaq's willing generosity, not by reverse engineering Compaq's compiler despite the license agreement.
Last, I never said there was anything immoral about reverse engineering. I do believe that violating the license agreement is immoral. Consider the license agreement to be a promise. Compaq is offering us a compiler. They are saying "Here is this compiler. You may have it if you agree to not reverse engineer it." And when you download the compiler, you are saying "Yes Compaq, I promise to not reverse engineer the compiler." Then if you decide to reverse engineer the compiler anyway, you have broken your promise, which I do think is highly immoral.
-jwb
I don't hope for anything of that sort. I believe that such an action would constitute reverse engineering of the Compaq compiler, and would therefore be against the explicit language of the license agreement.
Compaq wrote it and they are entitled to whatever licensing terms they want. While I believe that Compaq should contribute their optimiations to the community, I don't believe they should be forced to and in the absence of Compaq's willingness I guess the GNU folks are just going to have to rely on their own formidable genius and cunning to come up with a better optimized compiler.
-jwb
2. GRANT:
Compaq Computer Corporation ("Compaq") grants you the right to use the Software solely for testing and evaluation. The Software shall not be used for any other purpose and you agree to destroy or erase all copies of the Software upon Compaq's release of the code in final form.
You may copy the Software into the local memory or storage device of any number of computers for your testing and evaluation. The number of computers must be identified in the upcoming screen. You may make archival or back-up copies of the Software.
3. COPYRIGHT
The Software is protected by copyright laws and international treaties. Your use of the Software and associated documentation is subject to the applicable copyright laws and the express rights and restrictions of these License Agreement.
4. RESTRICTIONS
You may not rent, lease, or otherwise transfer the Software. You may not make the Software available over the internet or similar networking technology. You may not remove any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary notices from the Software or the media. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the Software, except to the extent Compaq cannot prohibit such acts by law.
-jwb