You seriously got me to dust off an account started in ~2001 that that hadn't bothered to log in for 3 years. I gave up on slashdot for a long time. I'm cautiously optimistic that you might be able to right this ship.
Thanks for what you've done so far. It really goes a long way to reassuring us that someone actually cares after 7+ years of neglect.
For the same reason spam has never gone away....it's simply a numbers game.
It is, but I don't think that it's the same numbers game you think it is. My unconfirmed suspicion (because I have no idea how you'd test this theory) is that spam doesn't work. However, it's cheap to send a shitton of it, and there's a fairly low barrier of entry.
Where I suspect spam makes its money is when sleazeballs see spam they, like you, think it's a number's game. At which point they decide to shell out some money to a spammer to spam something. Who is going to spread the word that they tried spamming and it didn't work? What spammer is going to publicize real click-rates?
Maybe one in a thousand spams doesn't actually get a click like many people think it does. But maybe one in 100,000, in a million, gets someone to believe it works enough to spend money on it. Is that enough to keep spam alive? The belief that it works?
Actually, it's way more (statistically) interesting than that. If you have 1 day of measurements, Day 2 can be the same temp, the record high, or the record low. If you have 2 days of measurements, Day 3 is slightly less likely to be a 'record' high or low. If you have 1000 days of measurements, Day 1001 is not super likely to be a record high or record low.
But it takes enough time to capture very rare extreme events that the chance of a 'record' high or low (or drought or precip) doesn't smoothly trend towards zero. If you look at weather records, there are distinct, order-of-magnitude-spaced blips in time of record-setting observations. Once in a decade heat-waves, hundred-year floods, etc.
There is an entire (tiny) branch of climate science that looks at the statistical probability of extreme, record-setting events happening with and without climate change. The record-setting weather events captured in the last decade are very, very statistically unlikely to happen without outside forcing. It's not just record high temps - it's cold, flood, drought, storm intensity, etc. And if you look at what possible outside forcing could create events like these, there's really nothing other than anthropogenic climate change that could do it.
Well actually, a small part of it does. The albedo of trees is generally very different than the albedo of the ground or vegetation around the trees. This creates differential heating between forest and non-forest, and the differential localized heating drives differences in localized air pressure. As soon as you have this, you end up with wind as the air flows from low to high pressure.
It's the same thing as a ocean/sea breeze or mountain breeze, just on a smaller scale.
(I'd add a close tag to being pedantic, but apparently I can not.)
I posted this below, but now in browsing down through deeper replies, I see that the GP's comment is tied to what I suggested about Karma and I'd like to expand on it.
Use Karma to decide starting moderation score. Sure, some people will abuse this by shitposting once in a blue moon because they can, but that will get moderated down. That's really a long tradition here.
I' d forgotten about New York Country Lawyer, but that's a great example of someone who consistently posted amazing stuff, and who should have often started off with a bit higher moderation than he did. It doesn't have to be much either. If most people are browsing at +2, having really high Karma might allow you to post at +3. Then you'd start above the noise.
99% positive moderation? Maybe +4.
If it's easier to lose Karma based off of downmods than it is to gain it through upmods, people will need to regularly post decent comments to stay above the noise. This is going to take some delicate balancing and some trial and error, but it could do wonders for the comments here.
Yes, with one condition. That you don't automate this, and reserve the right to prevent them from showing up.
Why?
Because I've been here long enough (refused to sign up and posted AC for years until signing up was sort-of necessary to be visible) to know that we will always have a bunch of stupid yahoos with too much free time on their hands dicking around. Internet posters have a serious quality problem that's fine when you have checks in place (moderation isn't half bad here, e.g.) but which destroy sites when you don't. You can't count on enough 'News for nerds, stuff that matters' people to counteract a bunch of morons with a lot of free time when it comes to what gets posted on the front page.
The firehose is a great asset, but only if you leverage it properly and put some limits and checks on it. You can't rely on us doing that for you.
So I haven't had the time recently to participate as a commenter, but I still skim a bit. This opportunity made me log back in - well done. Check my sig from 2-3 years ago - I've hated what/. has become for a long time, but I'm still lurking. Thanks for reaching out to try to make this place better.
Consider leveraging Karma much more.
* Karma impacts posting frequency limits and initial comment moderation level upon post * Gain Karma for upmods, lose for downmods * Gain Karma for metamoderating and voting on the Firehose * Lose Karma for moderating * Sell a little Karma to support the site * Trade Karma for Ad Views. View to get Karma, spend Karma to not see Ads
As long as you can get 90% of the benefit from participating, nobody will bat an eye at being able to buy 10% more Karma to help support the site. If you go too far into 'pay to say', you'll find a hostile crowd.
This has been a pet peeve of mine for ages now as well. However, this particular instance is what convinced me to finally get off my ass and do what I've been meaning to do for about 2 years now:
1) New Gmail account
2) Fake Facebook account
3) Fake Twitter account
4) Use these for every sign-in thing on all the stupid websites that have a boner for social media.
These accounts will never have friends. They won't have any followers to spam. "Will you allow us to post to your feed?" 'Sure. Even I will never ever see it.'
I'm happily experimenting with a couple news readers now despite their asinine requirement that I sign in or otherwise attach one of the above.
I don't think high speed rail and stealth fighters are in the same category....sure, both take some serious tech, but one requires fly-by-wire, and the other doesn't need any way to maneuver. Yes, the materials science aspect of both requires some impressive technology. But there's a ton more to stealth planes than just the materials.
I'm fairly impressed with the "Magic Mouse" - in the things I use daily, I often need a side-to-side scroll. It's pretty darn slick for stuff like that.
Of course it did! It's a major infrastructure change! It's not like we were "upgrading the internet" to make it run faster. The entire issue was that our current addressing infrastructure was inadequate. It's like saying, "this road doesn't go to the housing development that they're building up the road - we should make it longer", then complaining that the existing drivers didn't see any benefit. Everyone on the internet right now is fine - it's everyone who's not that this will benefit. So of course it's work without benefit for those of us here now!
I don't ever look at my mouse, unless it's hung up on something or otherwise not working. I'm not even sure how I'd break 20 years of training on that front, much let alone why I would want to.
Apple has made some nice mice - this just seems ridiculous.
I stopped even thinking about my wallpaper about 6 years ago when I realized that I never saw it, because I always have multiple things opened full screen. For the same reason I quickly found out that KDE 4 desktop widgets were worthless for me.
Hell, on login I have Thunderbird and a couple of folders open up. I don't even see my desktop then. I'm guessing I'm closer to a majority with this than a minority. Still, glad to hear you're rediscovering your past.
Well, since you have local copies on all your computers, I'm not sure how "vulnerable to business failure" it really is. At the worst, you just don't have the service. You still have all your files.
But in another couple of years, how much will you remember what you lost? How much will you miss it?
I posted up above about a recent article about us becoming digital pack-rats. Personally, I haven't looked at anything I created 4 years ago in about...4 years. Stuff I created a decade ago? Probably 8 years ago was the last time I looked at any of it.
While I have mirrored TB drives now, and a static backup from about 4 months ago in a crate, the really essential stuff that I have backed up off-site is pretty minimal. Because very little of my data is really essential.
Compared to what? Film? Or not taking pictures at all?
Really, for that much data, you really want to mirror a couple of TB drives, and then share with your neighbor/friend/family member far away/ like you're doing. On a similar setup.
I think the original question really boils down to, "In this day and age of hundreds of GB of personal data, how do you store it and back it up?"
I read a nice article some time ago about us becoming too attached to our data. That we were really keeping too much, and that we should gracefully let it die. Because really, when we pass away, who's going to want to dig through 1100 pictures of Mexico that we took? Nobody. They'll want the two pictures of us on our honeymoon. The picture a year that shows some kid growing up. They're not going to want to read every email we ever received - they want to see the dozen of when we fell in love.
Personally, I've got a pair of mirrored TB drives, and a chock-full 250gb drive in a box in the other room that has a copy of everything essential from about 3 months ago. My home and work computer each have copies of important work stuff, roughly up to date. If my house burns down? I'm going to lose a ton of shit, including a lot of data. But you know what? I probably don't need 99% of it. I don't need all the music and movies, D&D campaigns, papers I wrote in college, etc. When I set up these TB drives, I made a dir in my home directory that was called "old home dir". I didn't move anything out of it that I didn't need. And you know what? 95% of the stuff in it is still there after 4 months. When I did that a couple years ago, the percentage was about the same.
When it comes right down to it, our electronic data is going to be pretty much the same as our physical data from a century ago. Water leaks, mold, and sunlight destroyed most of our photos and documents. Failed HDs will destroy most of them now. But the world will go on.
Getting back onto topic, look into DropBox. Distributed copies on multiple computers, drag and drop interface, history and version control. Damn handy.
If the acceleration is logged with a timestamp, it's not going to be too hard to estimate velocity in a number of circumstances. Negative acceleration for a few seconds, no acceleration for 30 seconds, positive acceleration...looks like you just stopped at a stoplight. If you put your foot down, it's pretty easy to calculate your final velocity. And as you say, there might well be corroborating evidence from the GPS/tower.
Then why work corporate IT? Work in academic IT areas. I'm back to school after 10 years out, working on a PhD. I've put in some time in IT, and I love programming. Now, I'm working on computer modeling. I'm doing more of the science than the programming, but there's still a fair bit of programming to be done. We have a guy in our research group who is pure IT/programming. He sets up our clusters, scripts up the tricky stuff, works on web interfaces for things - pretty much has free reign to do awesome.
I did the corporate IT job for a bit - I never looked back after I left. That shit blows. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that you can most likely follow your passion somewhere you can embrace it and enjoy both your job and your life.
I use a pay-as-you-go phone. Texts cost me $0.20, and calls $0.10/min, the first call of the day is $1. I don't want anyone other than the people I've given my number to have that number.
I have a preferred method of contact for all the important people and businesses in my life. Those companies that go outside that get the cold shoulder from me. One of my credit card companies isn't going to see any more business from me because they decided one day that it would be a good idea to start calling my cell every few hours. All our contact previous has been by mail or email. If they can't respect that, fuck them. (They got the number as an emergency number while I was traveling. To decide that they can try to call it to sell me shit using it is not cool.)
Yes, once there were telephone directories, where everyone was listed. That worked great when calls cost a fair bit of money, and marketers hadn't started cold calling everyone in that book. Now, we're inundated by marketing. I'm not so worried about identity theft - it's the intrusive marketing that I'm 100% against. The fact that I can't tell the post office to fuck off makes me consider moving all the bills I can onlne, and just not ever opening my mail box. They'll stop jamming shit into it when it gets full.
All this ties back to Facebook - we're running short of new ways to reach people for marketing. Facebook is providing that new avenue. There's a reason they don't have a date of birth, address, phone number, full name, likes/dislikes/organizations/networks/religions/politics/etc on me. It was pretty damn clear to me that when I signed up, it was just a matter of time before it became another avenue for marketing. Unlike the postal service, I can at least stop going there if it gets bad.
It seems to me that this makes it very hard for developers to set any sort of budget, or make any predictions about profit. "We assume that we'll be able to sell 10,000 apps at $1 each. That will give us $10,000 in revenue." Now, it's, "Amazon will sell some number of our app at some price. We can't really guess either, since they are interdependent."
I can't see any serious development business liking this.
Tree Style Tabs - they form a tree, and you can put it on the left side. Merge another line or two at the top, and you'll find that you have seemingly lots more vertical space. I do this on my little EEE 7". But the Tree Style Tabs felt so much better once I got used to them that I use them everywhere now.
Ditto on the Tree Style Tabs. They're a godsend on small screens that happen to be fairly wide.
They also make more intuitive sense to me - everything on the top bar is static, save the URL. The tabs are on the left, in trees showing where each was spawned from. You can close a single tab or a tree easily. They are far easier to organize in my head that way. I really don't know why that hasn't become a standard feature in a browser yet.
Slashdot Mirror
You seriously got me to dust off an account started in ~2001 that that hadn't bothered to log in for 3 years. I gave up on slashdot for a long time. I'm cautiously optimistic that you might be able to right this ship.
Thanks for what you've done so far. It really goes a long way to reassuring us that someone actually cares after 7+ years of neglect.
For the same reason spam has never gone away....it's simply a numbers game.
It is, but I don't think that it's the same numbers game you think it is. My unconfirmed suspicion (because I have no idea how you'd test this theory) is that spam doesn't work. However, it's cheap to send a shitton of it, and there's a fairly low barrier of entry.
Where I suspect spam makes its money is when sleazeballs see spam they, like you, think it's a number's game. At which point they decide to shell out some money to a spammer to spam something. Who is going to spread the word that they tried spamming and it didn't work? What spammer is going to publicize real click-rates?
Maybe one in a thousand spams doesn't actually get a click like many people think it does. But maybe one in 100,000, in a million, gets someone to believe it works enough to spend money on it. Is that enough to keep spam alive? The belief that it works?
Actually, it's way more (statistically) interesting than that. If you have 1 day of measurements, Day 2 can be the same temp, the record high, or the record low. If you have 2 days of measurements, Day 3 is slightly less likely to be a 'record' high or low. If you have 1000 days of measurements, Day 1001 is not super likely to be a record high or record low.
But it takes enough time to capture very rare extreme events that the chance of a 'record' high or low (or drought or precip) doesn't smoothly trend towards zero. If you look at weather records, there are distinct, order-of-magnitude-spaced blips in time of record-setting observations. Once in a decade heat-waves, hundred-year floods, etc.
There is an entire (tiny) branch of climate science that looks at the statistical probability of extreme, record-setting events happening with and without climate change. The record-setting weather events captured in the last decade are very, very statistically unlikely to happen without outside forcing. It's not just record high temps - it's cold, flood, drought, storm intensity, etc. And if you look at what possible outside forcing could create events like these, there's really nothing other than anthropogenic climate change that could do it.
Then does nothing exist because there are no pockets, or does everything exist because there are no pockets?
Well actually, a small part of it does. The albedo of trees is generally very different than the albedo of the ground or vegetation around the trees. This creates differential heating between forest and non-forest, and the differential localized heating drives differences in localized air pressure. As soon as you have this, you end up with wind as the air flows from low to high pressure.
It's the same thing as a ocean/sea breeze or mountain breeze, just on a smaller scale.
(I'd add a close tag to being pedantic, but apparently I can not.)
But Methanol is delicious! It tastes like blindness.
I posted this below, but now in browsing down through deeper replies, I see that the GP's comment is tied to what I suggested about Karma and I'd like to expand on it.
Use Karma to decide starting moderation score. Sure, some people will abuse this by shitposting once in a blue moon because they can, but that will get moderated down. That's really a long tradition here.
I' d forgotten about New York Country Lawyer, but that's a great example of someone who consistently posted amazing stuff, and who should have often started off with a bit higher moderation than he did. It doesn't have to be much either. If most people are browsing at +2, having really high Karma might allow you to post at +3. Then you'd start above the noise.
99% positive moderation? Maybe +4.
If it's easier to lose Karma based off of downmods than it is to gain it through upmods, people will need to regularly post decent comments to stay above the noise. This is going to take some delicate balancing and some trial and error, but it could do wonders for the comments here.
Yes, with one condition. That you don't automate this, and reserve the right to prevent them from showing up.
Why?
Because I've been here long enough (refused to sign up and posted AC for years until signing up was sort-of necessary to be visible) to know that we will always have a bunch of stupid yahoos with too much free time on their hands dicking around. Internet posters have a serious quality problem that's fine when you have checks in place (moderation isn't half bad here, e.g.) but which destroy sites when you don't. You can't count on enough 'News for nerds, stuff that matters' people to counteract a bunch of morons with a lot of free time when it comes to what gets posted on the front page.
The firehose is a great asset, but only if you leverage it properly and put some limits and checks on it. You can't rely on us doing that for you.
So I haven't had the time recently to participate as a commenter, but I still skim a bit. This opportunity made me log back in - well done. Check my sig from 2-3 years ago - I've hated what /. has become for a long time, but I'm still lurking. Thanks for reaching out to try to make this place better.
Consider leveraging Karma much more.
* Karma impacts posting frequency limits and initial comment moderation level upon post
* Gain Karma for upmods, lose for downmods
* Gain Karma for metamoderating and voting on the Firehose
* Lose Karma for moderating
* Sell a little Karma to support the site
* Trade Karma for Ad Views. View to get Karma, spend Karma to not see Ads
As long as you can get 90% of the benefit from participating, nobody will bat an eye at being able to buy 10% more Karma to help support the site. If you go too far into 'pay to say', you'll find a hostile crowd.
This has been a pet peeve of mine for ages now as well. However, this particular instance is what convinced me to finally get off my ass and do what I've been meaning to do for about 2 years now:
1) New Gmail account
2) Fake Facebook account
3) Fake Twitter account
4) Use these for every sign-in thing on all the stupid websites that have a boner for social media.
These accounts will never have friends. They won't have any followers to spam. "Will you allow us to post to your feed?" 'Sure. Even I will never ever see it.' I'm happily experimenting with a couple news readers now despite their asinine requirement that I sign in or otherwise attach one of the above.
I don't think high speed rail and stealth fighters are in the same category....sure, both take some serious tech, but one requires fly-by-wire, and the other doesn't need any way to maneuver. Yes, the materials science aspect of both requires some impressive technology. But there's a ton more to stealth planes than just the materials.
I'm fairly impressed with the "Magic Mouse" - in the things I use daily, I often need a side-to-side scroll. It's pretty darn slick for stuff like that.
Problem was it greated more work without benefit.
Of course it did! It's a major infrastructure change! It's not like we were "upgrading the internet" to make it run faster. The entire issue was that our current addressing infrastructure was inadequate. It's like saying, "this road doesn't go to the housing development that they're building up the road - we should make it longer", then complaining that the existing drivers didn't see any benefit. Everyone on the internet right now is fine - it's everyone who's not that this will benefit. So of course it's work without benefit for those of us here now!
You apparently don't know the difference between "some" and "all"...
I don't ever look at my mouse, unless it's hung up on something or otherwise not working. I'm not even sure how I'd break 20 years of training on that front, much let alone why I would want to.
Apple has made some nice mice - this just seems ridiculous.
I stopped even thinking about my wallpaper about 6 years ago when I realized that I never saw it, because I always have multiple things opened full screen. For the same reason I quickly found out that KDE 4 desktop widgets were worthless for me.
Hell, on login I have Thunderbird and a couple of folders open up. I don't even see my desktop then. I'm guessing I'm closer to a majority with this than a minority. Still, glad to hear you're rediscovering your past.
Well, since you have local copies on all your computers, I'm not sure how "vulnerable to business failure" it really is. At the worst, you just don't have the service. You still have all your files.
But in another couple of years, how much will you remember what you lost? How much will you miss it?
I posted up above about a recent article about us becoming digital pack-rats. Personally, I haven't looked at anything I created 4 years ago in about...4 years. Stuff I created a decade ago? Probably 8 years ago was the last time I looked at any of it.
While I have mirrored TB drives now, and a static backup from about 4 months ago in a crate, the really essential stuff that I have backed up off-site is pretty minimal. Because very little of my data is really essential.
That's 3 to 5 cents a shot, not negligible.
Compared to what? Film? Or not taking pictures at all?
Really, for that much data, you really want to mirror a couple of TB drives, and then share with your neighbor/friend/family member far away/ like you're doing. On a similar setup.
I think the original question really boils down to, "In this day and age of hundreds of GB of personal data, how do you store it and back it up?"
I read a nice article some time ago about us becoming too attached to our data. That we were really keeping too much, and that we should gracefully let it die. Because really, when we pass away, who's going to want to dig through 1100 pictures of Mexico that we took? Nobody. They'll want the two pictures of us on our honeymoon. The picture a year that shows some kid growing up. They're not going to want to read every email we ever received - they want to see the dozen of when we fell in love.
Personally, I've got a pair of mirrored TB drives, and a chock-full 250gb drive in a box in the other room that has a copy of everything essential from about 3 months ago. My home and work computer each have copies of important work stuff, roughly up to date. If my house burns down? I'm going to lose a ton of shit, including a lot of data. But you know what? I probably don't need 99% of it. I don't need all the music and movies, D&D campaigns, papers I wrote in college, etc. When I set up these TB drives, I made a dir in my home directory that was called "old home dir". I didn't move anything out of it that I didn't need. And you know what? 95% of the stuff in it is still there after 4 months. When I did that a couple years ago, the percentage was about the same.
When it comes right down to it, our electronic data is going to be pretty much the same as our physical data from a century ago. Water leaks, mold, and sunlight destroyed most of our photos and documents. Failed HDs will destroy most of them now. But the world will go on.
Getting back onto topic, look into DropBox. Distributed copies on multiple computers, drag and drop interface, history and version control. Damn handy.
If the acceleration is logged with a timestamp, it's not going to be too hard to estimate velocity in a number of circumstances. Negative acceleration for a few seconds, no acceleration for 30 seconds, positive acceleration...looks like you just stopped at a stoplight. If you put your foot down, it's pretty easy to calculate your final velocity. And as you say, there might well be corroborating evidence from the GPS/tower.
Then why work corporate IT? Work in academic IT areas. I'm back to school after 10 years out, working on a PhD. I've put in some time in IT, and I love programming. Now, I'm working on computer modeling. I'm doing more of the science than the programming, but there's still a fair bit of programming to be done. We have a guy in our research group who is pure IT/programming. He sets up our clusters, scripts up the tricky stuff, works on web interfaces for things - pretty much has free reign to do awesome.
I did the corporate IT job for a bit - I never looked back after I left. That shit blows. If there's one thing that I've learned, it's that you can most likely follow your passion somewhere you can embrace it and enjoy both your job and your life.
I use a pay-as-you-go phone. Texts cost me $0.20, and calls $0.10/min, the first call of the day is $1. I don't want anyone other than the people I've given my number to have that number.
I have a preferred method of contact for all the important people and businesses in my life. Those companies that go outside that get the cold shoulder from me. One of my credit card companies isn't going to see any more business from me because they decided one day that it would be a good idea to start calling my cell every few hours. All our contact previous has been by mail or email. If they can't respect that, fuck them. (They got the number as an emergency number while I was traveling. To decide that they can try to call it to sell me shit using it is not cool.)
Yes, once there were telephone directories, where everyone was listed. That worked great when calls cost a fair bit of money, and marketers hadn't started cold calling everyone in that book. Now, we're inundated by marketing. I'm not so worried about identity theft - it's the intrusive marketing that I'm 100% against. The fact that I can't tell the post office to fuck off makes me consider moving all the bills I can onlne, and just not ever opening my mail box. They'll stop jamming shit into it when it gets full.
All this ties back to Facebook - we're running short of new ways to reach people for marketing. Facebook is providing that new avenue. There's a reason they don't have a date of birth, address, phone number, full name, likes/dislikes/organizations/networks/religions/politics/etc on me. It was pretty damn clear to me that when I signed up, it was just a matter of time before it became another avenue for marketing. Unlike the postal service, I can at least stop going there if it gets bad.
It seems to me that this makes it very hard for developers to set any sort of budget, or make any predictions about profit. "We assume that we'll be able to sell 10,000 apps at $1 each. That will give us $10,000 in revenue." Now, it's, "Amazon will sell some number of our app at some price. We can't really guess either, since they are interdependent."
I can't see any serious development business liking this.
Tree Style Tabs - they form a tree, and you can put it on the left side. Merge another line or two at the top, and you'll find that you have seemingly lots more vertical space. I do this on my little EEE 7". But the Tree Style Tabs felt so much better once I got used to them that I use them everywhere now.
Ditto on the Tree Style Tabs. They're a godsend on small screens that happen to be fairly wide.
They also make more intuitive sense to me - everything on the top bar is static, save the URL. The tabs are on the left, in trees showing where each was spawned from. You can close a single tab or a tree easily. They are far easier to organize in my head that way. I really don't know why that hasn't become a standard feature in a browser yet.