I can't be bothered to count exactly, but on a quick skim-count, I think you generated about 130 replies. Bravo man, well played. I haven't seen anybody so successfully goad the open source crew into such a storm of indignation with so few words in quite a few years. I was beginning to think the art was dead here on slashdot, most efforts are way too heavy-handed are largely ignored, but yours really hit the spot.
Your average MoS compilation is bus compressed so hard that I don't dare subject my amps to it, go anywhere near the clip light with that stuff
i.e.: It's compressed so hard that if it clips, it doesn't just clip a few imperceptible samples on occasional peaks, it clips baaaaaad, and constantly.
Honestly, Twitter traffic is fairly useless for anyone as the visitors tend to be one-time flybys who spend less than a few seconds on your endsite and just end up lowering your time on site and raising your bounce metrics. If you want engagement you better be using some other network
Do you have analytics data behind that statement? Assuming you do, from what kind(s) of business? (Something vague like "major US household consumables e-commerce" if you don't want to give out your workplace).
This isn't a [citation needed] snark, I'm just curious because recently someone claimed the exact opposite - that they see traffic from twitter as having a much higher conversion rate than any other network, which surprised me. For reference, this person was a musician, so conversions = buying mp3s, and they're relatively unfamous non-major-label artists, but not unsigned randoms, they're established within their scene.
While I'm commenting, can't resist snarking at this quote from the article...
Because the interested reader is forced to go to the URL shortener
Forced? LOL, no; count me in with the "no, the interested reader, upon seeing a URL shortener link, decides he is no longer interested" crew.
Honestly, if it's any good whatsoever, within a few days someone (else) will post it on facebook, slashdot, metafilter or one of the other blogs and forums I frequent which have no ridiculous length restrictions on what gets shared.
But I realise this is straying into "get off my lawn" territory, and my behaviour in this regard is statistically irrelevant, and nobody cares that I don't "get" twitter. (I tried, really and truly I did. I signed up and followed supposedly interesting/intelligence sources like NASA and NewScientist and gave it a while to see if any utility accrued, but every time I log in I just see a jumble of TLA ACRNM INTLSM JRGN http://dodgy.url/1m92f sentence fragment #stupid and think fuck this, I'll just visit their website.)
Sorry... I hate seeing numbers thrown around as if it somehow makes this case more important than others. I'm glad to see that Simon Singh stood up for his comments and also that he is now extremely famous and has furthered his career by this episode.
You have that spectacularly backwards.
The number isn't thrown around to suggest this figure / this case is unusual, it's thrown around to suggest this is usual. Want to defend yourself? That'll cost you ~5 years of a typical wage, then. Suddenly caving in and "apologising" looks quite attractive after all, regardless of how strong you thought your principles were.
The whole reason he could afford to stick the course defending this is that he was already "rich and famous". By the time this kicked off he already had several best-selling books, a BAFTA award, Emmy nomination, an MBE and a fairly high profile career in print, radio and TV. I understand he may not be a familiar name across the pond, but within this country I struggle to think of many people in his field (science journalism / popular science) with a higher profile over the last couple of decades. Maybe Brian Cox, Patrick Moore, Ben Goldacre... it's really not a long list at any rate.
That's the whole point. If some fresh-out-of-grad-school science-interested junior journalist on £18k p.a. had written this, been sued, and faced a £100k bill, they would almost certainly have had to fold: science 0, legal bullies 1.
This man could have just retracted it and bought a Porsche but instead he used his "fame" and wealth to fight the case as a matter of moral principle, legal precedent, and a platform to explicitly draw attention to the general campaign for libel law reform. Snide insinuations he used the lawsuit for personal promotion are hardly fair.
<snark>No, you're the one not paying attention.</snark>
Sorry, I couldn't resist, but that's not actually fair, his sentence is indeed ambiguous. Where you inferred "which is without...", I inferred "but without...".
Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a French news agency, the oldest one in the world, and one of the three largest with Associated Press and Reuters.[citation needed]
On topic, reading the comments here is funny. I muck about on production all the time. No other choice - there is no dev environment. No budget for one. After arguing the point for a couple of years they compromised and gave us a dev "server" on a virtual server with a load of other stuff. Yeah, turns out that didn't work so well. SQL Server virtualised = massive silent data corruption, apparently. So now I'm back to remote desktopping onto the live box and hoping I can fix things faster than the public are likely to notice them. I know it's so very, very wrong, but in a weird way I dread leaving this job and going somewhere where they do it properly, it'll feel so stuffy and constricting.
(To forestall all the indignant outrage, no, I don't work on anything remotely relevant to public health or safety. No matter how much I screw up, nobody is going to lose their life, or even their money. If this weren't the case, I dare say that dev box would have a duly higher organisational budgetary priority.)
It's a little over a decade since I did mine, and I don't know how much they've changed. But FWIW mine involved partly learning algorhythms / programming - in Pascal, with tiny bits of assembly - and partly a bunch of theoretical stuff such as binary (floating point) arithmetic, BNF, Codd's normal forms, basic hardware/architecture principles & protocols, etc. I can't claim to remember the proportion very accurately. Somewhere between 30:70 and 50:50 I think.
I'm not sure what it is about his claims that are supposed to be so ludicrous.
The timescale.
For example, a million lines of code seems at least plausible, as long as we bear in mind the following.... {snip}... To be honest, the authors of this article seem to be rather too cocksure in dismissing all this.
The article is not exactly dismissing any of that, as far as I can see. They're dismissing that it'll happen within 10 years.
I'm not that familiar with Kurzweil's predictions, but this seems fairly reasonable to me.
I don't really know shit about programming OR neurochemistry, but looking at the rate of progress in AI so far I'm more inclined to lean towards the linked blog than Kurzweil.
Ultimately though we'll have to come back in 2020 and see.
YouGov's methodology is to obtain responses from an invited group of Internet users, and then to filter these responses in line with demographic information. It draws these demographically-representative samples from a panel of about 250,000 people in the UK
if he is in the UK, GP is right about NMW. If he isn't, he couldn't earn from YouGov anyway.
There are left-leaning political articles on the front page of reddit? Amazing. When I gave up on the place, the front page was the exclusive domain of 4chan memes, copycat submissions and bacon circlejerking. And any comment/submission complaining about it was met with "DUH it's YOUR fault for having a shit front page, just unsubscribe from all the reddits people actually read and submit to, and subscribe to the ones with 9 readers and one submission every 14 months, and then you don't get stupid crap flooding your front page".
Strangely, I haven't been asked to metamod (or otherwise metamodded) in, er, 3 or 4 years maybe? (Honestly can't remember) but I seem to have mod points almost permanently. Not right now, admittedly, but I only ever seem to have a day or so without mod points before I get more again. Also, I fairly often "spend" at least one of my one points in a way that some people might call "trolling via moderation" - e.g. upvoting a comment which says Linux is a bit shit and Windows ain't bad, or musicians and filmmakers deserve to be paid for their work under the terms they offer or GTFO, or some other viewpoint like that which is anathema to the general/. groupthink. I would have expected the resulting metamods to have reduced my mod point allocation, but apparently not.
You are wrong. Effect is a verb and GP used it correctly. If you don't believe me, perhaps you will believe this stick man. If you don't believe the stick man, try the dictionary.
Email is a crappy way to send large files so FTP still fills the gap.
That's not exactly a great justification for "random" FTP connections.
At my place I have a legitimate need for FTP, so do a few other people. These people submit a business case to IT and get FTP access. Everybody else does not. It may also be limited to specific sites, I'm not sure.
Btw (and I probably shouldn't say this, considering I'm going through their proxy, and they are probably reading this) - this is coming from a company whose IT dept appear to consider "reboot the server" as a decent first line of problem-solving for pretty much any ticket I submit, even ones where I carefully spell out that it's a client-side issue. So it can't exactly be rocket science to limit FTP to those who need it.)
For starters, why is the javascript comment stuff utterly broken on idle? Clicking a comment title doesn't ajax-y expand the comment but loads a whole new comments.pl?cid=### page, the old fashioned way. Moderation isn't even possible at all, because the necessary function is hooked via the non-functional-javascript to the select box onchange. It's been like this for months. I was tempted to insert a rant about how the hell has nobody in the/. staff noticed this and bothered to sort it out already, and what the hell happened to graceful degradation best practices anyway, but it's so idiotically broken that I wonder -- forgive my extreme naivety -- if it can't be/.'s fault, and there must be some bizarre issue with my browser configuation. (Although I get the same at home and at work, so that seems doubtful.) Any ideas?
OR, you need to brush up [thegateway.org] on the very basics of corporate saving face [wikimedia.org] methods. Oh yeah, A letter. They really fought this tooth and nail,
OR, you need to brush up on the meaning of "for example", and follow GP's advice about 2 seconds googling before digging yourself in even further. He didn't say, or even imply, that the letter was the full extent of their efforts, so your cutting sarcasm about how much signing the letter taxed their PR team doesn't do much except make you look even more stupid.
The only time direct, intrusive monitoring is used should be when there is already a credible level of evidence of serious wrong-doing
I strongly disagree.
Do you really?
Any time there's any evidence that you're not doing your job, "intrusive" monitoring is justified.
Don't you think that in this context "not doing your job" and "serious wrong-doing" amount to the same thing?
It sounds to me like you're saying the same thing. When evidence arises that you're not delivering on your responsibilities, monitoring is justified to find out wtf you are doing instead. (As opposed to monitoring everybody, in regardless of evidence they're not performing their duties.)
Racially homogeneous? You have no idea what you're talking about.
Hush now. It's just the standard American Idiot response to these discussions. It comes out like clockwork Every. Single. Time. some facts/statistics are cited which point to <<non US country>> being better in the league tables of <<any quality of life indicator whatsoever>>.
Please don't burst their cute little bubble of everywhere in Europe being essentially a single extended family of identical-looking smiling brothers and sisters. Without that as an excuse for why they have poorer press freedom, incarceration rates, life expectancy, drug addiction, etc, etc, I fear the poor darlings might just implode.
So just hush up and pretend immigration and globalisation somehow escaped Europe altogether, Sweden is entirely composed of cute little matching Scandi-elves, etc.
Bebo didn't need any help from AOL to ruin it. Have you ever actually seen a Bebo profile? It's like a bunch of feral children somehow discovered social networking despite being illiterate if not outright lobotomised.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't be bothered to count exactly, but on a quick skim-count, I think you generated about 130 replies. Bravo man, well played. I haven't seen anybody so successfully goad the open source crew into such a storm of indignation with so few words in quite a few years. I was beginning to think the art was dead here on slashdot, most efforts are way too heavy-handed are largely ignored, but yours really hit the spot.
He's talking about clipping, not compression.
No, he's talking about both.
Your average MoS compilation is bus compressed so hard that I don't dare subject my amps to it, go anywhere near the clip light with that stuff
i.e.: It's compressed so hard that if it clips, it doesn't just clip a few imperceptible samples on occasional peaks, it clips baaaaaad, and constantly.
Perry Bible Fellowship already did it.
Honestly, Twitter traffic is fairly useless for anyone as the visitors tend to be one-time flybys who spend less than a few seconds on your endsite and just end up lowering your time on site and raising your bounce metrics. If you want engagement you better be using some other network
Do you have analytics data behind that statement? Assuming you do, from what kind(s) of business? (Something vague like "major US household consumables e-commerce" if you don't want to give out your workplace).
This isn't a [citation needed] snark, I'm just curious because recently someone claimed the exact opposite - that they see traffic from twitter as having a much higher conversion rate than any other network, which surprised me. For reference, this person was a musician, so conversions = buying mp3s, and they're relatively unfamous non-major-label artists, but not unsigned randoms, they're established within their scene.
While I'm commenting, can't resist snarking at this quote from the article...
Because the interested reader is forced to go to the URL shortener
Forced? LOL, no; count me in with the "no, the interested reader, upon seeing a URL shortener link, decides he is no longer interested" crew.
Honestly, if it's any good whatsoever, within a few days someone (else) will post it on facebook, slashdot, metafilter or one of the other blogs and forums I frequent which have no ridiculous length restrictions on what gets shared.
But I realise this is straying into "get off my lawn" territory, and my behaviour in this regard is statistically irrelevant, and nobody cares that I don't "get" twitter. (I tried, really and truly I did. I signed up and followed supposedly interesting/intelligence sources like NASA and NewScientist and gave it a while to see if any utility accrued, but every time I log in I just see a jumble of TLA ACRNM INTLSM JRGN http://dodgy.url/1m92f sentence fragment #stupid and think fuck this, I'll just visit their website.)
Sorry... I hate seeing numbers thrown around as if it somehow makes this case more important than others. I'm glad to see that Simon Singh stood up for his comments and also that he is now extremely famous and has furthered his career by this episode.
You have that spectacularly backwards.
The number isn't thrown around to suggest this figure / this case is unusual, it's thrown around to suggest this is usual. Want to defend yourself? That'll cost you ~5 years of a typical wage, then. Suddenly caving in and "apologising" looks quite attractive after all, regardless of how strong you thought your principles were.
The whole reason he could afford to stick the course defending this is that he was already "rich and famous". By the time this kicked off he already had several best-selling books, a BAFTA award, Emmy nomination, an MBE and a fairly high profile career in print, radio and TV. I understand he may not be a familiar name across the pond, but within this country I struggle to think of many people in his field (science journalism / popular science) with a higher profile over the last couple of decades. Maybe Brian Cox, Patrick Moore, Ben Goldacre... it's really not a long list at any rate.
That's the whole point. If some fresh-out-of-grad-school science-interested junior journalist on £18k p.a. had written this, been sued, and faced a £100k bill, they would almost certainly have had to fold: science 0, legal bullies 1.
This man could have just retracted it and bought a Porsche but instead he used his "fame" and wealth to fight the case as a matter of moral principle, legal precedent, and a platform to explicitly draw attention to the general campaign for libel law reform. Snide insinuations he used the lawsuit for personal promotion are hardly fair.
<snark>No, you're the one not paying attention.</snark>
Sorry, I couldn't resist, but that's not actually fair, his sentence is indeed ambiguous. Where you inferred "which is without...", I inferred "but without...".
What's even sicker is the legal wonks sitting around scratching their goatees
I misread that last word and it made it even sicker still.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agence_France-Presse
Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a French news agency, the oldest one in the world, and one of the three largest with Associated Press and Reuters.[citation needed]
Walk away from it in nonchalant slow motion, quipping as it explodes.
Whoosh.
On topic, reading the comments here is funny. I muck about on production all the time. No other choice - there is no dev environment. No budget for one. After arguing the point for a couple of years they compromised and gave us a dev "server" on a virtual server with a load of other stuff. Yeah, turns out that didn't work so well. SQL Server virtualised = massive silent data corruption, apparently. So now I'm back to remote desktopping onto the live box and hoping I can fix things faster than the public are likely to notice them. I know it's so very, very wrong, but in a weird way I dread leaving this job and going somewhere where they do it properly, it'll feel so stuffy and constricting.
(To forestall all the indignant outrage, no, I don't work on anything remotely relevant to public health or safety. No matter how much I screw up, nobody is going to lose their life, or even their money. If this weren't the case, I dare say that dev box would have a duly higher organisational budgetary priority.)
I don't know what the A level syllabus is
It's a little over a decade since I did mine, and I don't know how much they've changed. But FWIW mine involved partly learning algorhythms / programming - in Pascal, with tiny bits of assembly - and partly a bunch of theoretical stuff such as binary (floating point) arithmetic, BNF, Codd's normal forms, basic hardware/architecture principles & protocols, etc. I can't claim to remember the proportion very accurately. Somewhere between 30:70 and 50:50 I think.
I'm not sure what it is about his claims that are supposed to be so ludicrous.
The timescale.
For example, a million lines of code seems at least plausible, as long as we bear in mind the following.... {snip}... To be honest, the authors of this article seem to be rather too cocksure in dismissing all this.
The article is not exactly dismissing any of that, as far as I can see. They're dismissing that it'll happen within 10 years.
I'm not that familiar with Kurzweil's predictions, but this seems fairly reasonable to me.
I don't really know shit about programming OR neurochemistry, but looking at the rate of progress in AI so far I'm more inclined to lean towards the linked blog than Kurzweil.
Ultimately though we'll have to come back in 2020 and see.
This is why upload services should simply just strip out the un-needed info of the pictures.
Imgur does do that.
YouGov's methodology is to obtain responses from an invited group of Internet users, and then to filter these responses in line with demographic information. It draws these demographically-representative samples from a panel of about 250,000 people in the UK
if he is in the UK, GP is right about NMW. If he isn't, he couldn't earn from YouGov anyway.
There are left-leaning political articles on the front page of reddit? Amazing. When I gave up on the place, the front page was the exclusive domain of 4chan memes, copycat submissions and bacon circlejerking. And any comment/submission complaining about it was met with "DUH it's YOUR fault for having a shit front page, just unsubscribe from all the reddits people actually read and submit to, and subscribe to the ones with 9 readers and one submission every 14 months, and then you don't get stupid crap flooding your front page".
Strangely, I haven't been asked to metamod (or otherwise metamodded) in, er, 3 or 4 years maybe? (Honestly can't remember) but I seem to have mod points almost permanently. Not right now, admittedly, but I only ever seem to have a day or so without mod points before I get more again. Also, I fairly often "spend" at least one of my one points in a way that some people might call "trolling via moderation" - e.g. upvoting a comment which says Linux is a bit shit and Windows ain't bad, or musicians and filmmakers deserve to be paid for their work under the terms they offer or GTFO, or some other viewpoint like that which is anathema to the general /. groupthink. I would have expected the resulting metamods to have reduced my mod point allocation, but apparently not.
You are wrong. Effect is a verb and GP used it correctly. If you don't believe me, perhaps you will believe this stick man. If you don't believe the stick man, try the dictionary.
Email is a crappy way to send large files so FTP still fills the gap.
That's not exactly a great justification for "random" FTP connections.
At my place I have a legitimate need for FTP, so do a few other people. These people submit a business case to IT and get FTP access. Everybody else does not. It may also be limited to specific sites, I'm not sure.
Btw (and I probably shouldn't say this, considering I'm going through their proxy, and they are probably reading this) - this is coming from a company whose IT dept appear to consider "reboot the server" as a decent first line of problem-solving for pretty much any ticket I submit, even ones where I carefully spell out that it's a client-side issue. So it can't exactly be rocket science to limit FTP to those who need it.)
No, really it's not being nasty for its own sake. It's being nasty for the sake of humour. This is FICTION. Satire, comedy, sketch, vignette, etc.
You might not find it funny, which is fair enough, but at least file the author under "bad comic" instead of "cruel sociopath".
/. is broken.
For starters, why is the javascript comment stuff utterly broken on idle? Clicking a comment title doesn't ajax-y expand the comment but loads a whole new comments.pl?cid=### page, the old fashioned way. Moderation isn't even possible at all, because the necessary function is hooked via the non-functional-javascript to the select box onchange. It's been like this for months. I was tempted to insert a rant about how the hell has nobody in the /. staff noticed this and bothered to sort it out already, and what the hell happened to graceful degradation best practices anyway, but it's so idiotically broken that I wonder -- forgive my extreme naivety -- if it can't be /.'s fault, and there must be some bizarre issue with my browser configuation. (Although I get the same at home and at work, so that seems doubtful.) Any ideas?
OR, you need to brush up [thegateway.org] on the very basics of corporate saving face [wikimedia.org] methods. Oh yeah, A letter. They really fought this tooth and nail,
OR, you need to brush up on the meaning of "for example", and follow GP's advice about 2 seconds googling before digging yourself in even further. He didn't say, or even imply, that the letter was the full extent of their efforts, so your cutting sarcasm about how much signing the letter taxed their PR team doesn't do much except make you look even more stupid.
Oh look, first two links from the 2 seconds googling, they went to the High Court for a judicial review.
idiot ... check user input with ... a regex
ahem.
The only time direct, intrusive monitoring is used should be when there is already a credible level of evidence of serious wrong-doing
I strongly disagree.
Do you really?
Any time there's any evidence that you're not doing your job, "intrusive" monitoring is justified.
Don't you think that in this context "not doing your job" and "serious wrong-doing" amount to the same thing?
It sounds to me like you're saying the same thing. When evidence arises that you're not delivering on your responsibilities, monitoring is justified to find out wtf you are doing instead. (As opposed to monitoring everybody, in regardless of evidence they're not performing their duties.)
Racially homogeneous? You have no idea what you're talking about.
Hush now. It's just the standard American Idiot response to these discussions. It comes out like clockwork Every. Single. Time. some facts/statistics are cited which point to <<non US country>> being better in the league tables of <<any quality of life indicator whatsoever>>.
Please don't burst their cute little bubble of everywhere in Europe being essentially a single extended family of identical-looking smiling brothers and sisters. Without that as an excuse for why they have poorer press freedom, incarceration rates, life expectancy, drug addiction, etc, etc, I fear the poor darlings might just implode.
So just hush up and pretend immigration and globalisation somehow escaped Europe altogether, Sweden is entirely composed of cute little matching Scandi-elves, etc.
Bebo didn't need any help from AOL to ruin it. Have you ever actually seen a Bebo profile? It's like a bunch of feral children somehow discovered social networking despite being illiterate if not outright lobotomised.