oh, you've got to understand -- posting a coral cache link isn't something that's supposed to be well thought-out with some sort of reason to believe that it will improve access to the site. it's just something you're supposed to feel obsessed and compelled to post.
just post the coral cache link without thinking. coral. post the coral. no! DON'T THINK! JUST POST! CORAL! POST CORAL! DO IT!
the potential for user data loss is a red herring to the quest for security.
when was the last Windows virus you heard of that erases files? they're few and far between. as the trends of the past five years of malware will attest, the costs of insecure software are in damage to local and global networks, and in the compromise of sensitive information.
"it'll still wipe out your home directory!" is no critique of a security regime. if a user has no ability to recover from data deleted by a software process, then i am left absolutely baffled wondering why they are storing that data on a failure-prone -- no... failure-inevitable -- hard disk drive.
limiting the impact of security breaches simply to the contents of/home/username is a dramatic improvement over the wild-west "everyone's an admin!" approach.
hell, this is good for RIGHT-handers. for 20 years, the video game industry has been making controllers that to me just seem like an absurd mirror image of what they should be.
(kind of odd that quake-style controls are just the opposite, huh?)
the reason i've never owned a video game console is because, as far as i can tell, for the entire history of this industry, the controller designers have assumed that people want to control motion with their left hand and events with their right.
honestly, putting the joypad/stick/mouse in my left hand is nearly as uncomfortable trying to manipulate a pencil left-handed.
i took one look at this controller and the first thing i noticed was that OH MY GOD! FINALLY! someone had built a controller that lets me use my dominant (right) hand for the finer motion control, and puts the event controls where they should be!
way to go, nintendo. i may actually buy a console system now!
While the download status window is adequate, I strongly agree with his suggestion to replace it with a status bar or toolbar. Fortunately, we can already obtain this functionality using an extension: Download Statusbar by Devon Jensen is truly wonderful, and while it may be a bit too configurable for the average user, those who are looking for a nice replacement to the built-in download manager.
Honestly, I have never succeeded in getting a page faster from Coral than from the original source. Maybe it's just my location? Metropolitan Atlanta? But I doubt it.
Add to that the fact that Coral doesn't rewrite any URL's, so images still load from the original server, and hyperlinks still point to the original server, and the endless cries of "Coral cache! Coral cache!" are just a very useless, very ignorant suggestion that will accomplish next to nothing for thirsty slashdot readers.
being headlined by one person is the significant distinction. most people have zero interest in what one individual has to rant, but are glad to read a site where many can share their ideas.
slashdot and wikipedia allow thousands and thousands of people to submit stories, and a staff of editors (even if they do produce some dupes most days) -- not an individual -- screens the material for the site.
this is waht separates it from blogs: it is a product of the site's readership, not a top-down site controlled by a blogger.
from the perspective of most web users, BLOGGERS ARE SPAMMERS. normal bloggers, with what appears to be human-authored (if useless) content -- yes. THAT'S SPAM because it abuses hyperlinking to artificially inflate search engine rankings.
we're not saying that sites full of viagra ads need to go. we're saying that doc searls and others with a million lines of drivel a week ARE SPAM and NEED TO GO.
the proportion of people who read this crap is astoundingly small, and you need to be penned in to an area of the web where we don't have to see you, and we don't have to hear you.
a few weeks ago, a search for "DOC" resulted in some annoying blog at the top of the results.
today, that same search puts the U.S. Department of Commerce and the New Zealand Department of Conservation at the top.
likewise, a search for "Lawrence" had some blog at the top, and today we get Lawrence University, the Lawrence, KS newspaper, and the Lawrence Livermore laboratories.
the blogs still do show up on the front page, so clearly google's search algorithm needs more tuning -- but we are winning the battle.
bloggers are a group who openly and aggressively play games with google's site ranking algorithms in order to push their personal home pages to the front of the list for terms that people just aren't using to refer to them. it should come as no surprise that their annoying link-spamming will be countered as aggressively.
Phone companies hate when consumers are allowed to do what they want with their phones.
that sort of customer-abuse is fairly typical with verizon (the 'get it now' variety of shackles and chains), but cingular hasn't been known for it.
until apple and motorola stumbled through the door with this absurd monstrosity, cingular's flagship mp3 phone was the nokia 6230, which will accommodate up to a gigabyte of bog-standard SD flash memory (the slot's right under the battery), play mp3's without the ridiculous DRM lockdown, and exchange data freely over bluetooth with any OS that will listen.
i hope this isn't a sign that cingular is going down the lock-'em-in, bleed-'em-dry verizon road, but i suppose it won't ever be an issue for me. by the time my 6230 stops receiving calls and SMS'es, the "ROKR" will be as distant and quaint a memory as those first-gen parallel-port samsung YEPP players.
(which isn't to say I didn't get a good many hours of listening out of my parallel-port YEPP...:-)
802.11 was a temporary stand-in for other wireless networking technologies, during the few years that the later technologies weren't commercially feasible. i, for one, will be glad to see it go.
mysql> select count(*) from users where id not in (select id from users where id%2 != 0); +----------+ | count(*) | +----------+ | 48 | +----------+ 1 row in set (0.01 sec)
well, if your taste in music is centered around hardcore punk/metal/post-hardcore, then, at least for their webmaster, finding things that sound very similar is as simple as SELECT * FROM artists JOIN albums ON artist.album_title = album.title;
ignorance of web server software is no excuse for failing to operate it correctly. rather, it is a compelling reason to RTFM, find someone to help you, or not to get involved in the web at all.
that's exactly right. while fuddrucker's failure to ask permission was poor netiquette, there is nothing ethically or legally (afaik) wrong with linking content from another server. that's what the world wide web was designed to do, and it does it very well. plus, there's a good argument to be made that caching a local copy and redistributing it would have constituted copyright infringement.
of course, the poor webmaster whose server got slammed also did the right thing. the challenge of people "hotlinking" your content and "stealing" your bandwidth is best countered by technological measures -- not by rules, laws, or complaints. by employing the tools contained in a vast, featureful web server, he was able to stop fuddrucker's from using his content in a way he didn't approve, as well as solve a technological problem using the appropriate means -- not by making threats and demands.
on the internet, controlling the use of your content is simple. configure your software to transmit it only to those whom you'd like to have it.
some people think that "making product B look like product A" will make people switching from A to B feel more at home, and thus more likely to use product B.
of course, this falls apart after about six seconds, because looking like product A entails an expectation that B will function like A. when it doesn't, the user has clearly been misled and is likely to just switch back to A.
(incidentally, this is the same flaw seen in complaints that GNOME and KDE do not mimic Windows).
bloggers were falling all over themselves for howard dean, remember? he didn't come close to being nominated, let alone elected. and the "blogosphere" wept.
blogs serve as an "echo chamber" for like-minded people. they link to each other, post in agreement with each other, and then count the posts and post about how much they agree with each other some more.
pat robertson has never even been as close to nomination or public office as howard dean was to the presidency. uncovering a lie he told is not even a blip on the political radar.
it is inevitable that bloggers will eventually gain an understanding of the true scale of this echo chamber. once they begin to realize that they have dedicated several megabytes of bandwidth preaching mostly to the choir, their numbers will fall off, and blogging will give way to the next internet fad.
in the meantime, all i need is a good search engine that keeps them out of sight.
Slashdot Mirror
oh, you've got to understand -- posting a coral cache link isn't something that's supposed to be well thought-out with some sort of reason to believe that it will improve access to the site. it's just something you're supposed to feel obsessed and compelled to post. just post the coral cache link without thinking. coral. post the coral. no! DON'T THINK! JUST POST! CORAL! POST CORAL! DO IT!
when was the last Windows virus you heard of that erases files? they're few and far between. as the trends of the past five years of malware will attest, the costs of insecure software are in damage to local and global networks, and in the compromise of sensitive information.
"it'll still wipe out your home directory!" is no critique of a security regime. if a user has no ability to recover from data deleted by a software process, then i am left absolutely baffled wondering why they are storing that data on a failure-prone -- no... failure-inevitable -- hard disk drive.
limiting the impact of security breaches simply to the contents of /home/username is a dramatic improvement over the wild-west "everyone's an admin!" approach.
(kind of odd that quake-style controls are just the opposite, huh?)
the reason i've never owned a video game console is because, as far as i can tell, for the entire history of this industry, the controller designers have assumed that people want to control motion with their left hand and events with their right.
honestly, putting the joypad/stick/mouse in my left hand is nearly as uncomfortable trying to manipulate a pencil left-handed.
i took one look at this controller and the first thing i noticed was that OH MY GOD! FINALLY! someone had built a controller that lets me use my dominant (right) hand for the finer motion control, and puts the event controls where they should be!
way to go, nintendo. i may actually buy a console system now!
While the download status window is adequate, I strongly agree with his suggestion to replace it with a status bar or toolbar. Fortunately, we can already obtain this functionality using an extension: Download Statusbar by Devon Jensen is truly wonderful, and while it may be a bit too configurable for the average user, those who are looking for a nice replacement to the built-in download manager.
Add to that the fact that Coral doesn't rewrite any URL's, so images still load from the original server, and hyperlinks still point to the original server, and the endless cries of "Coral cache! Coral cache!" are just a very useless, very ignorant suggestion that will accomplish next to nothing for thirsty slashdot readers.
slashdot and wikipedia allow thousands and thousands of people to submit stories, and a staff of editors (even if they do produce some dupes most days) -- not an individual -- screens the material for the site.
this is waht separates it from blogs: it is a product of the site's readership, not a top-down site controlled by a blogger.
and likewise, alex chiu is "personal science"?
from the perspective of most web users, BLOGGERS ARE SPAMMERS. normal bloggers, with what appears to be human-authored (if useless) content -- yes. THAT'S SPAM because it abuses hyperlinking to artificially inflate search engine rankings.
we're not saying that sites full of viagra ads need to go. we're saying that doc searls and others with a million lines of drivel a week ARE SPAM and NEED TO GO.
the proportion of people who read this crap is astoundingly small, and you need to be penned in to an area of the web where we don't have to see you, and we don't have to hear you.
today, that same search puts the U.S. Department of Commerce and the New Zealand Department of Conservation at the top.
likewise, a search for "Lawrence" had some blog at the top, and today we get Lawrence University, the Lawrence, KS newspaper, and the Lawrence Livermore laboratories.
the blogs still do show up on the front page, so clearly google's search algorithm needs more tuning -- but we are winning the battle.
bloggers are a group who openly and aggressively play games with google's site ranking algorithms in order to push their personal home pages to the front of the list for terms that people just aren't using to refer to them. it should come as no surprise that their annoying link-spamming will be countered as aggressively.
actually, it's a bit more like shoveling dog poop out of the oven to save your roast.
although i'm glad to hear i'm not the only one who took a file to a spare SD card without success :-)
that sort of customer-abuse is fairly typical with verizon (the 'get it now' variety of shackles and chains), but cingular hasn't been known for it.
until apple and motorola stumbled through the door with this absurd monstrosity, cingular's flagship mp3 phone was the nokia 6230, which will accommodate up to a gigabyte of bog-standard SD flash memory (the slot's right under the battery), play mp3's without the ridiculous DRM lockdown, and exchange data freely over bluetooth with any OS that will listen.
i hope this isn't a sign that cingular is going down the lock-'em-in, bleed-'em-dry verizon road, but i suppose it won't ever be an issue for me. by the time my 6230 stops receiving calls and SMS'es, the "ROKR" will be as distant and quaint a memory as those first-gen parallel-port samsung YEPP players.
(which isn't to say I didn't get a good many hours of listening out of my parallel-port YEPP... :-)
802.11 was a temporary stand-in for other wireless networking technologies, during the few years that the later technologies weren't commercially feasible. i, for one, will be glad to see it go.
maybe, and maybe not, but they will help the READERS who -- believe it or not -- are often interested in the same answers as the original poster!
mysql> select count(*) from users where id not in (select id from users where id%2 != 0);
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 48 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
mysql>
mysql> select count(*) from users where id not in (1, 2, 3, 4, 5);
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 93 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.12 sec)
mysql> create table strings (stuff varchar(8));
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.03 sec)
mysql> insert into strings values ('abcdefghijk');
ERROR 1406 (22001): Data too long for column 'stuff' at row 1
mysql>
(ducks)
ignorance of web server software is no excuse for failing to operate it correctly. rather, it is a compelling reason to RTFM, find someone to help you, or not to get involved in the web at all.
of course, the poor webmaster whose server got slammed also did the right thing. the challenge of people "hotlinking" your content and "stealing" your bandwidth is best countered by technological measures -- not by rules, laws, or complaints. by employing the tools contained in a vast, featureful web server, he was able to stop fuddrucker's from using his content in a way he didn't approve, as well as solve a technological problem using the appropriate means -- not by making threats and demands.
on the internet, controlling the use of your content is simple. configure your software to transmit it only to those whom you'd like to have it.
i think you spelled point wrong.
of course, this falls apart after about six seconds, because looking like product A entails an expectation that B will function like A. when it doesn't, the user has clearly been misled and is likely to just switch back to A.
(incidentally, this is the same flaw seen in complaints that GNOME and KDE do not mimic Windows).
it's kernel.org. they mirror other people's stuff.
COOL!!!
bloggers were falling all over themselves for howard dean, remember? he didn't come close to being nominated, let alone elected. and the "blogosphere" wept.
blogs serve as an "echo chamber" for like-minded people. they link to each other, post in agreement with each other, and then count the posts and post about how much they agree with each other some more.
pat robertson has never even been as close to nomination or public office as howard dean was to the presidency. uncovering a lie he told is not even a blip on the political radar.
it is inevitable that bloggers will eventually gain an understanding of the true scale of this echo chamber. once they begin to realize that they have dedicated several megabytes of bandwidth preaching mostly to the choir, their numbers will fall off, and blogging will give way to the next internet fad.
in the meantime, all i need is a good search engine that keeps them out of sight.
mod this right up, fun reading!