No need to get so flamey about it. It's true that a sketch artist can make a picture based on what someone can remember, but that's because they're taking the limited data from the witness and putting it together with their own knowledge of what people look like. You don't believe that more witnesses would result in a more accurate picture? --
HTML is not the best interface for everything. I think many software designers have yet to learn that. Netscape's e-mail and news works very well in the interface it has. I definitely wouldn't want it to look like, say, DejaNews (or just "Deja" as they like to be called now). HTML has limitations, and there's no reason to unnecessarily apply those limitations to other things. Anyway, what would a Web-like interface accomplish? Nothing except to confuse the user about how the Internet works. If e-mail clients look like Hotmail, then Microsoft can call Hotmail an e-mail client and get away with it. --
Though it's okay, it IS WRONG to go out there under the shield of the Free Software Foundation, fraudulently make people believe that you are this loving "organization" that just wants to help people get software.
Fraudulently? They never forced anyone to pay for Red Hat.
If RH is going to be a company, then they need to be a company. If they want to do Linux, then they should make their own kernel.
So since Caldera is a company, they should have to make their own kernel? Same with any other version of Linux run by a "company?" I have no idea why you think Red Hat making a separate kernel would be of any benefit to the Linux community.
Seeing as how the Linux kernel is under a free license, Red Hat is going to have a hellified battle in court if they ever try the Microsoft route and become 100% propriatory.
What is Red Hat doing to make the kernel proprietary? Linux-Mandrake is direct evidence that it isn't. You can get Red Hat for free, either from Red Hat themselves, from Cheapbytes, or from a Red Hat derivative like Mandrake. The only reason they are restricting the use of the name is because they don't want to have to support everyone else's distribution. Of course they'd have a hellish battle in court if they broke the GPL... but where did you get the idea that they were going to do that? --
"Flamebait" marked on a post defending a post that was also unjustly marked "Flamebait"? Maybe "Offtopic" would have worked, but IMO the original post was valid. Are there any real M2's yet? --
Fully-functional COAS... that must be something like "the unstoppable Windows NT", right? I speak as a former OpenLinux 2.2 user. The features are nice, of course, but its interface is lousy, it's inconsistent (especially when it comes to printers), and half the time it doesn't even work - it just exits without changing anything or even giving some kind of error. --
I'll tell you my experiences with it... Caldera was the first distro I used when I converted to Linux. It made the transition very easy. It's also really pretty - it uses a graphical login by default, andeven "text mode" runs in 80x30 VGA mode. However, there were annoying things about it that wouldn't go away. It claimed to be compatible with RedHat, but most binaries didn't work right. COAS was a nice touch, but it had a terrible interface and didn't work half the time. KDE switched back and forth from tty7 to tty8 for no apparent reason. If the mouse was in the top-left 640x480 pixels of the screen while switching from KDE's terminal, some graphical garbage would end up in the corresponding position on the screen. Changing runlevels (except using halt and reboot) often hung the computer. And the whole system suffered from the Macintosh disease - "You don't need to know that. Now be a good user and look at the pretty pictures." So today I backed up my home directory, downloaded the ISO Mandrake 6.0, and overwrote Caldera with it. I already like it, even though it won't work with my Matrox Mystique at resolutions past 640x480. I'll figure out what to do about that tomorrow. Now everyone's talking about Mandrake 6.1 - is this a stable version or not? Where can I get it? --
The option for lowering your own score is actually a very neat idea. That might even put a stop to the usage of the phrase "All right, moderate me down", which means "Moderate me up or I'll cry censorship" - The appropriate response to that would be "Moderate it down yourself!"
Your idea sounds good in theory, but let's look at the real-life example, one of two people who actually has Troll status: DAVEO. His recent posts are not trolly at all, some of them are even quite interesting, as long as you can look past the 3rd person and the bad grammar. So now the moderation system is working, as the moderators bump up the posts that don't deserve -1. Unless his Karma went reeeeeeeally low in his early posts, he should be back up to 0 soon, and might even get back to 1 someday. However, your system would keep him down at -1 for a long time, while the really lame trolls would just get another account or post as AC.
Now, the idea of having to maintain your karma is a good idea, but I don't really like the system you propose - it's too complicated, and having the karma (well, karma and reputation) be cumulative in that way means that someone would have to learn a bit of calculus to figure out their chances of getting to +2 status. Anyway, what does it mean to "reset Karma to 0" when it's recalculated every time they log on? Would an amount equal to the amount of karma they had be subtracted? This could send people below -2 Karma as good posts drop off the list.
I don't know what I'm doing either. Since I've often heard phrases such as "when I get my moderator points again", there are obviously people who routinely get moderator status. I've been reading Slashdot once a day for about 4 months, posting about 10 comments in a week, but never had moderator points. Now I'm not complaining about that - it's just that it seems that the points are usually given out to a subset of slashdot readers even more specific than the criteria listed on the page about moderation. Of course, the most likely reason is that 4 months isn't long enough to be considered a regular Slashdot reader. I'm fine with that. Unlike the whiners who set their threshold low and then announce that they're leaving because of the low comment quality, I plan on staying here. But if that is the case, zyklone should think about how many posts there are in 4 months. There's a HECK of a lot. Long enough to see "countless posts" about anything. --
Oh great, you just HAD to bring Linux into this... now there's going to be a new kind of distribution wars.
"I use Gaussian because it's mathematically pure!" "Fat-tails is a distribution for the REAL WORLD!" "Yeah, but fat-tails just copied Gaussian and added a little bit!" etc. --
Anyone who knows Dvorak worth anything doesn't need a Dvorak keyboard. Just use a Dvorak keymap. If you're touch-typing, it doesn't matter what the keys say.
And they could save the problem of wasting space - just have a circular screen with special circular software! So what if you need a course in geometry to resize a window! (For the humor impaired, that's a joke. I think any non-square monitor is completely stupid, and I extend this to include a Mac's rounded corners.) --
...and IE6 will be one of their final steps to complete world domination. IE 6.65 will contain a feature called "Microsoft ActiveSeventhSeal", which will immediately be broken in version 6.66 to support the proprietary ARMAGEDDON tag. --
New York too. The fact is that the lottery money does go to the schools, but to make up for it the politicians cut the normal budget for the schools (they're getting it from the lottery now! And anyway, our median IQ is still 100! Let's go spend the money on our campaigns.) --
Actually, it seems more likely that it'd result in an OS that nobody understands and crashes as much as Windows. But MS would convince people to use it anyway. --
So 15 cells seemed to have no logical purpose, but the chip stopped working without those cells...
This reminds me of the "Magic Switch" story in the Jargon File... a switch on a mainframe had only one wire connected to it, with the other end connected to a ground pin, so it obviously wouldn't work - yet flipping it from the position labeled "More Magic" to the position labeled "Magic" caused the computer to crash. --
Have you seen what an IPv6 looks like? I believe it's 8 groups of 4 hexadecimal digits. So take the number of IPs you just mentioned, and square it. --
Yes, but some ways were more doubtful than others. I read this page once that started with an inconsistent method of assigning "colors" to numbers, which had something to do with different types of numbers (repeating, truncating, transcedental) and something to do with whatever the guy decided they should be. He went on to prove Fermat's Last Theorem using these "facts". Sure, and I can square the circle if you just redefine what a circle is...
I don't know if this is the same person. Probably not. But it just goes to show that some people will believe anything if it sounds technical enough. --
This is just like the short-term solutions to the Y2K problem, like using hexadecimal for the decades or going back to 1972 - it works for NOW, but it just puts off the inevitable transition. A plan to squeeze a few more IPs out of IPv4 is simply a quick and dirty solution that, given the exponential growth of the Internet, would only last about a few years (I have no idea how he thinks this will last another 100 years - I assume his math is as bad as his grammar.) And it ignores the main benefit of IPv6, which is that IP addresses will not have to be rationed out in the way they are now. Dynamic IPs will become a thing of the past. I know that the transition is going to be difficult, but we should learn from Y2K - the transition has to be made sometime, and it's better to do it sometime before it becomes a necessity. --
Slashdot Mirror
No need to get so flamey about it. It's true that a sketch artist can make a picture based on what someone can remember, but that's because they're taking the limited data from the witness and putting it together with their own knowledge of what people look like.
You don't believe that more witnesses would result in a more accurate picture?
--
HTML is not the best interface for everything. I think many software designers have yet to learn that. Netscape's e-mail and news works very well in the interface it has. I definitely wouldn't want it to look like, say, DejaNews (or just "Deja" as they like to be called now). HTML has limitations, and there's no reason to unnecessarily apply those limitations to other things.
Anyway, what would a Web-like interface accomplish? Nothing except to confuse the user about how the Internet works. If e-mail clients look like Hotmail, then Microsoft can call Hotmail an e-mail client and get away with it.
--
So since Caldera is a company, they should have to make their own kernel? Same with any other version of Linux run by a "company?"
I have no idea why you think Red Hat making a separate kernel would be of any benefit to the Linux community.
What is Red Hat doing to make the kernel proprietary? Linux-Mandrake is direct evidence that it isn't.
You can get Red Hat for free, either from Red Hat themselves, from Cheapbytes, or from a Red Hat derivative like Mandrake. The only reason they are restricting the use of the name is because they don't want to have to support everyone else's distribution.
Of course they'd have a hellish battle in court if they broke the GPL... but where did you get the idea that they were going to do that?
--
"Flamebait" marked on a post defending a post that was also unjustly marked "Flamebait"? Maybe "Offtopic" would have worked, but IMO the original post was valid. Are there any real M2's yet?
--
Fully-functional COAS... that must be something like "the unstoppable Windows NT", right? I speak as a former OpenLinux 2.2 user.
The features are nice, of course, but its interface is lousy, it's inconsistent (especially when it comes to printers), and half the time it doesn't even work - it just exits without changing anything or even giving some kind of error.
--
I'll tell you my experiences with it...
Caldera was the first distro I used when I converted to Linux. It made the transition very easy. It's also really pretty - it uses a graphical login by default, andeven "text mode" runs in 80x30 VGA mode.
However, there were annoying things about it that wouldn't go away. It claimed to be compatible with RedHat, but most binaries didn't work right. COAS was a nice touch, but it had a terrible interface and didn't work half the time. KDE switched back and forth from tty7 to tty8 for no apparent reason. If the mouse was in the top-left 640x480 pixels of the screen while switching from KDE's terminal, some graphical garbage would end up in the corresponding position on the screen. Changing runlevels (except using halt and reboot) often hung the computer. And the whole system suffered from the Macintosh disease - "You don't need to know that. Now be a good user and look at the pretty pictures."
So today I backed up my home directory, downloaded the ISO Mandrake 6.0, and overwrote Caldera with it. I already like it, even though it won't work with my Matrox Mystique at resolutions past 640x480. I'll figure out what to do about that tomorrow.
Now everyone's talking about Mandrake 6.1 - is this a stable version or not? Where can I get it?
--
Nobody has a starting score of 3. Not even Bruce Perens. I don't think you need to worry about that.
--
The separate +1 and -1 points is a good idea. Not overly complicated like some other suggestions are.
If the moderation system is messed with too much, it'll become completely incomprehensible and result in even more complaining newbies.
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The option for lowering your own score is actually a very neat idea. That might even put a stop to the usage of the phrase "All right, moderate me down", which means "Moderate me up or I'll cry censorship" - The appropriate response to that would be "Moderate it down yourself!"
--
So now the moderation system is working, as the moderators bump up the posts that don't deserve -1. Unless his Karma went reeeeeeeally low in his early posts, he should be back up to 0 soon, and might even get back to 1 someday.
However, your system would keep him down at -1 for a long time, while the really lame trolls would just get another account or post as AC.
Now, the idea of having to maintain your karma is a good idea, but I don't really like the system you propose - it's too complicated, and having the karma (well, karma and reputation) be cumulative in that way means that someone would have to learn a bit of calculus to figure out their chances of getting to +2 status. Anyway, what does it mean to "reset Karma to 0" when it's recalculated every time they log on? Would an amount equal to the amount of karma they had be subtracted? This could send people below -2 Karma as good posts drop off the list.
--
I don't know what I'm doing either.
Since I've often heard phrases such as "when I get my moderator points again", there are obviously people who routinely get moderator status. I've been reading Slashdot once a day for about 4 months, posting about 10 comments in a week, but never had moderator points. Now I'm not complaining about that - it's just that it seems that the points are usually given out to a subset of slashdot readers even more specific than the criteria listed on the page about moderation.
Of course, the most likely reason is that 4 months isn't long enough to be considered a regular Slashdot reader. I'm fine with that. Unlike the whiners who set their threshold low and then announce that they're leaving because of the low comment quality, I plan on staying here. But if that is the case, zyklone should think about how many posts there are in 4 months. There's a HECK of a lot. Long enough to see "countless posts" about anything.
--
Hey! I'm not non-asped! I use Lynx and Netscape about equally, so I'm at least half-asped!
Oh wait, that didn't sound any better.
--
I don't think the current directory can do much to them. /. could wreak havoc on them, though.
However, I don't think slashdotting their form is such a good idea. Remember the story of Cheryl the Unisys secretary.
--
Oh great, you just HAD to bring Linux into this... now there's going to be a new kind of distribution wars.
"I use Gaussian because it's mathematically pure!"
"Fat-tails is a distribution for the REAL WORLD!"
"Yeah, but fat-tails just copied Gaussian and added a little bit!"
etc.
--
And they could save the problem of wasting space - just have a circular screen with special circular software! So what if you need a course in geometry to resize a window!
(For the humor impaired, that's a joke. I think any non-square monitor is completely stupid, and I extend this to include a Mac's rounded corners.)
--
...and IE6 will be one of their final steps to complete world domination. IE 6.65 will contain a feature called "Microsoft ActiveSeventhSeal", which will immediately be broken in version 6.66 to support the proprietary ARMAGEDDON tag.
--
New York too. The fact is that the lottery money does go to the schools, but to make up for it the politicians cut the normal budget for the schools (they're getting it from the lottery now! And anyway, our median IQ is still 100! Let's go spend the money on our campaigns.)
--
Actually, it seems more likely that it'd result in an OS that nobody understands and crashes as much as Windows. But MS would convince people to use it anyway.
--
So 15 cells seemed to have no logical purpose, but
the chip stopped working without those cells...
This reminds me of the "Magic Switch" story in the Jargon File... a switch on a mainframe had only one wire connected to it, with the other end connected to a ground pin, so it obviously wouldn't work - yet flipping it from the position labeled "More Magic" to the position labeled "Magic" caused the computer to crash.
--
Mutate "This sentence is recursive." using German. It recurses. Don't worry, the script eventually gives up.
--
I attempted to read it. It was unreadable.
--
Have you seen what an IPv6 looks like? I believe it's 8 groups of 4 hexadecimal digits.
So take the number of IPs you just mentioned, and square it.
--
I read this page once that started with an inconsistent method of assigning "colors" to numbers, which had something to do with different types of numbers (repeating, truncating, transcedental) and something to do with whatever the guy decided they should be.
He went on to prove Fermat's Last Theorem using these "facts". Sure, and I can square the circle if you just redefine what a circle is...
I don't know if this is the same person. Probably not. But it just goes to show that some people will believe anything if it sounds technical enough.
--
This is just like the short-term solutions to the Y2K problem, like using hexadecimal for the decades or going back to 1972 - it works for NOW, but it just puts off the inevitable transition.
A plan to squeeze a few more IPs out of IPv4 is simply a quick and dirty solution that, given the exponential growth of the Internet, would only last about a few years (I have no idea how he thinks this will last another 100 years - I assume his math is as bad as his grammar.) And it ignores the main benefit of IPv6, which is that IP addresses will not have to be rationed out in the way they are now. Dynamic IPs will become a thing of the past.
I know that the transition is going to be difficult, but we should learn from Y2K - the transition has to be made sometime, and it's better to do it sometime before it becomes a necessity.
--
Hmm. I do remember how, upon dissecting a grasshopper in Biology class, I noticed that the inside looked like chicken...
--