Directories
Niche directories sound great. Operate a definitive list of great sources of information for people to access. Hope they start using you as their own bookmarks for this topic. On the whole our feedback shows most people are happy with google, AV, etc... for 90% of links, so don't need this kind of thing. These are costly to maintain well, and of little benefit.
Interestingly I'm part of a team that runs such a site and while there is a whole bunch more content, after all its the website of a usenet newsgroup, alot of people (at least according to the site statistics) seem to use it as a bookmark substitute.
Why is this interesting? Originally the bookmarks weren't a major part of the site, but the section seems to have grown, taking on a life of its own. Certainly its become the backbone which draws traffic to the site.
Moral of the story? It seems to me that the
more popular "community" sites grow, they aren't
designed. There isn't any point trying to design
a killer community site because you'll almost never figure out what the people want. Its definately not a case of "build it, and they will come" no matter how good your ideas are...
While I disagree with the original poster, I'm afraid you're wrong. Parachute systems for 747's are on the drawingboard and have been tested on smaller planes.
For instance see this article in AvStop aviation magazine, which even has some pictures.
Some higher resolution pictures of the system in action can be found here; deploying, breaking and decent.
Windowmaker is not a desktop. It's a window manager, which is merely one component of the desktop. Gnome is NOT a window manager, but can work with other window managers. Originally it worked with Enlightenment, but now it works with Sawfish and Windowmaker as well.
I have in the past ran Windowmaker underneath GNOME, but have gone back to running it on its own. Why? I simply don't understand what I need GNOME (or KDE) for? Running GNOME gets me a panel with a menu in it and a place to drop icons. Erm, I already have a menu for commonly used apps which pops up if I left click on the desktop. I also have somewhere to stuff commonly used apps under Windowmaker (although I don't use it).
What advantage has a Desktop Enivronment over a Window Manager? A bunch of desktop icons that lets you browse the filesystem graphically? I don't particularly want to do that. What else? Maybe its just me, but why are people getting excited over GNOME and KDE, just because it make the Liunx desktop look more like Windows?
McMaster calculates that 1,200 square feet of solar panels on the roof of a garage receiving 2,200 hours of sunshine a year could, with the help of an electrolysis device no bigger than a washing machine, produce enough hydrogen and oxygen to drive an MRE-powered car 200 miles a day.
Right, 1200 sq. ft. is 34 ft. on side (10.5m for people using sensible units). Thats alot of solar panels, leaving aside how much that many panels would cost, that a very big garage roof you've got there!
2200 hours of sunshine per year is 6 hours per day, unless you're living somewhere (very) sunny its unlikely your going to get this each and every day. So, erm, what happens in winter when you get a long spell of bad weather, you stop driving?
Finally, 200 miles? I drive over a thousand one day last week. Most weekends I do trips that average more than 200 miles one way. This isn't a particulary impressive total unless you use your car to commute 5 miles into work, and then go shopping at the local store.
The oxygen would be bottled in scuba-like tanks that would snap into place under the hood. The hydrogen, more volatile and more dangerous, would be piped around the car's chassis through 180 feet of tubing, divided into 3-foot sections, each sealed off from the next by a set of valves.
The hydrogen would be stored where? Distributed throughout the entire chassis? I really don't like that idea, that just increases the target area for collisions and does very little to increase safety. Most of the designs I've seen for this sort of thing store the H2 in cryogenic form in a (very) well protected tank, safety is usually increased by using some sort of honeycomb structure inside the tank. To be brutally honest, that seems far more sensible.
September 11th was a great example of this. When the fit really hit the shan, all the major news sites got slammed, failed, and people went back to watching CNN, MSNBC, or whatever.
For me on the 11th the only news I got from the net I got via Slashdot, and the links it gave to independant sites, the major news sites were crippled.
That said, on the day, I stayed current by listening to BBC Radio 4. I found that slighly ironic, as the net was cripped and the major TV
stations were reporting any stray rumour as fact,
I fell back on the oldest of the broadcast mediums, radio, as the best source of information.
Turning off people's connection is rude. Asking a 75 year old senior citizen, who is just happy to read a few web pages and send mail to his grandkids to keep up an endless stream of patches because a bunch of hackers can disrupt the net is backwards.
Why? Internet access isn't a right, just like (despite what your average American might think) driving a car is not a right. If you want access to the internet (a peer to peer network) its your problem to make sure you don't have a broken setup that will annoy people. In other words your part of the bargin is not to do anything that will break the network, its your responsibility. Having a broken web server that gets infected by the latest worm is breaking the bargin.
Al.
Re:My take on things
on
More WTC News
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The terrorist supposedly told the passengers they also had a bomb. It seems that for the 3 planes that hit the passengers probably didn't know they were going on a crash course, and were told they would not be harmed. Given that they were probably hoping for the best. Supposedly the 4th plane crashed in PA b/c the passengers DID find out they would be screwed either way.
Personally I think the terrorists have shot themselves in the foot, they've made it extremely
unhealthy to hijack a plane. Before the 11th the best move when hijacked was to sit tight, most hostages made it out alive. Now? Now we have to
assume that they're going to use the plane as a bomb, that by doing nothing we're killing ourselves and thousands of innocents.
If I end up on a hijacked plane I'm not going to sit back and let myself die and kill thousands in the process, before I would have sat back and hoped for the best, because that was the sensible thing to do. Now the sensible thing to do is to fight, kill them before they kill you. Personally,
I wouldn't give tuppence for the life of the next guy that tries to hijack a plane.
Al.
Re:An article from a Canadian Journalist.
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 1
This, from a Canadian newspaper, is worth sharing...
Written in 1973, not exactly breaking news, and
not exactly accurate, even at the time.
I don't really see the problem, if Google want to keep a cached copy of my site thats fine with me. Why should I care if someone keeps an off-site backup for me without charging me for the privilage?
Yeah, really fscking long ones; plus they've got this vertical oscillation. I think Sol's orbit is 200 MYears and the oscillation is 26 MYears. It's thought there may be some correlation between mass extinctions here on earth and when we go through the thickest part of galaxy.
The periodicity of the Sun's vertical oscillation is closer to 30Myr, but appart from that you're correct. See for instance Rampino (1997) in the Journal of Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy, or Rampino et al. (1997) in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
For a more popular slant, and a slightly more famous name, you could also have a look at Shoemaker (1999) in the Annual Review Of Earth And Planetary Sciences (Yes, that Shoemaker, as in Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9).
So how the heck do you beam numbers from the phone, I can't find any options for this.
You point it at the IrDA sensor on the laptop, enable IR on the phone, and run the command line utility on the laptop. The laptop pulls the numbers from the phone, rather than the phone pushing numbers to the laptop.
I recently bought myself the Motorola Timeport 250 (Euro model), 3 band phone, only to find that the I-R capability was lousy. Not only is there no way to use the I-R port to beam numbers off, I have never been able to get it to successfully sync with my Handspring Visor or portable computer.
Well I've got the same phone and I disagree, you can quite easily beam the numbers off using the simple command line tools distributed with GSMlib, see http://www.pxh.de/fs/gsmlib/. From there its a simple shell script away from my PalmIII using pilot-link, see http://www.gnu-designs.com/pilot-link/. Going in the reverse direction is just as easy.
I've not had any trouble at all using the IR on the phone to talk to either my laptop, Plam or FIR module on my desktop.
Well, I just returned from a conference in Dublin, Ireland, and I was terrified to see that there are cameras everywhere! I mean, it's probably not an inch of that city that isn't covered, and it's not only indoors, but outdoors as well. Even the university campus has infrared cameras all over the campus.
It isn't just the Irish Republic, if you live in the United Kingdom you are now amoungst the most monitored people on the planet. According to the BBC programme I watched a few days ago (and if its on TV it must be true?) you're likely to be observed on average 30 times per day, more if you're driving.
CCTV cameras are as common as muck over here, we've had them for years in steadily incrasing numbers, people are already running the sort of software that seems to be such a big issue with people in the States at the moment. It hasn't seem to have affected ``normal'' life over here at all...
Crashes with MemoryMgr.c, Line: 4340, NULL handle. Perhaps its interfering with some of my other extensions. Or the half dozen other things I've got installed with patch system traps on the Palm. None the less, sloppy coding by Big Blue...
The link to the vest in the articler seems to be broken, here is the real link, and here is the RealPlayer low bandwidth and high bandwidth infomercials. It actually looks okay, although at $159 I don't think I want one, especially as they don't seem to come in Small (and yes guys, Geeks come in Small too!).
Damn, you've done it now! I think I'm about to spend $200 + shipping on a bag. Actually the build your own bag shock applet is perhaps one of the best uses of this (foul and acursed) technology I've ever seen. I think we've finally found a site designed with a clue people.
The eHolster is disturbingly similar a weapons harness. Don't be suprised if somebody addresses you as "officer".
I can't lay my hands on an actual reference, but I remember a news story about something like the Eholster a few years ago.
Apparently the "holster" was designed to carry the (luggable) mobile phones of the day. Some poor guy was wearing one in a trendy London wine bar and someone mistook it for a gun. Bearing in mind this was London, not New York, he was somewhat suprised to be greeted by the Armed Response Team on leaving the bar.
Looking at the eHolster I'm not sure I'd want to risk wearing one on the streets.
While I have Mozilla 0.9 installed I've found myself dropping back to using Netscape 4.77 most of the time. So I jumped at the chance to try out the new 0.9.3 build, maybe it puts right all the things that make me uncomfortable with Mozilla!?
So I have a look at mozilla.org and see that there are some nice spiffy new binary RPMs available for RH7.x, excellent, don't even have to bother compiling it. Download and install, open
a new window, rehash, and, err...
% mozilla /usr/bin/mozilla: line 156: 3018 Segmentation fault (core dumped)
$MOZ_PROGRAM -remote "openurl(about:blank,new-window)" 2>/dev/null >/dev/null
Error sending command.
%
Oh well, I guess I'm going to have to compile it after all...
The US has a representative government and laws are by the people and for the people. Non-lawyers must discuss these matters and try to come to terms with them, because ultimately we all decide on what laws we want to be governed by.
Hello? This is the rest of the world! Hello? *jumps up and down frantically waving* There are a considerable number of people that don't live within the boundaries of the USA, some of them even read Slashdot.
The site limits not only words, but the number of accesses. From the site FAQ:
One unfortunate result is that people sometimes hit the limits too early. We can only distinguish hubs, and not individual machines. If 40 accesses have already come from the same server at your ISP, you will unfortunately be blocked. If this happens, we apologize. Please try again (earlier) tomorrow.
This one will be slashdotted fairly quickly, at least for those people using large carriers.
This sounds like a terrible plan. As mentioned, a simple counter would blow this thing out immediately.
Agreed, this doesn't really sound like a workable solution.
However, a number the represented how closely related an incoming email and a known spam message would be a useful metric. Then you could have fuzzy filters that determined how close you would want to be before outright rejecting a similar message, or maybe just relocating it to a seperate inbox.
I've been thinking about how the internet is evolving quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. I'm a regular on one of the few USENET groups left where the content to flamage ratio is still heavily skewed towards content. Except that in the last couple of weeks we've been hit hard by several trolls, and a bunch of people that don't know the difference between USENET and a web board.
While I agree with you that some sort of fuzzy logic filter could do the job, and neural nets and genetic algorithims also spring to mind as possible solutions. I just think it says it all if we have to start integrating this sort of stuff into anything handling SMTP traffic just to keep the spam down.
While Dmitry remains in custody, I have not read the EFF (or any other organization/individual) will provide him counsel. Given the nature of the U.S. judicial system, it would be vital for Sklyarov to have extremely credible criminal defense attorneys.
Taken from the EFFector Vol. 14, No. 15 (July 22nd 2001)
EFF has been in contact with the Assistant U.S. Attorney (AUSA)'s
office trying to track Mr. Sklyarov's whereabouts and speak with him
directly. While the arrest took place in Las Vegas, the complaint was
executed in San Jose, meaning that Mr. Sklyarov will be sent to
California to stand trial. We have spoken with his colleagues,
criminal defense attorneys and others to help with his defense. After
he arrives in California, our first order of business is to get Mr.
Sklyarov out of jail on a bond pending his trial. EFF has begun to
pull together a top-notch legal team to help him defend his right to
talk about and distribute the Advanced eBook Processor software
program, and we'll be ready to step in as soon as it is appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
Directories
Niche directories sound great. Operate a definitive list of great sources of information for people to access. Hope they start using you as their own bookmarks for this topic. On the whole our feedback shows most people are happy with google, AV, etc... for 90% of links, so don't need this kind of thing. These are costly to maintain well, and of little benefit.
Interestingly I'm part of a team that runs such a site and while there is a whole bunch more content, after all its the website of a usenet newsgroup, alot of people (at least according to the site statistics) seem to use it as a bookmark substitute.
Why is this interesting? Originally the bookmarks weren't a major part of the site, but the section seems to have grown, taking on a life of its own. Certainly its become the backbone which draws traffic to the site.
Moral of the story? It seems to me that the more popular "community" sites grow, they aren't designed. There isn't any point trying to design a killer community site because you'll almost never figure out what the people want. Its definately not a case of "build it, and they will come" no matter how good your ideas are...
Al.There are NO such parachutes...
While I disagree with the original poster, I'm afraid you're wrong. Parachute systems for 747's are on the drawingboard and have been tested on smaller planes.
For instance see this article in AvStop aviation magazine, which even has some pictures.
Some higher resolution pictures of the system in action can be found here; deploying, breaking and decent.
Al.This isn't news, this theory has been around for some time. There have been many papers published on this, recent journal papers include...
I could go on, but a quick search on ADS gives 219 relevant papers.
Al.Windowmaker is not a desktop. It's a window manager, which is merely one component of the desktop. Gnome is NOT a window manager, but can work with other window managers. Originally it worked with Enlightenment, but now it works with Sawfish and Windowmaker as well.
I have in the past ran Windowmaker underneath GNOME, but have gone back to running it on its own. Why? I simply don't understand what I need GNOME (or KDE) for? Running GNOME gets me a panel with a menu in it and a place to drop icons. Erm, I already have a menu for commonly used apps which pops up if I left click on the desktop. I also have somewhere to stuff commonly used apps under Windowmaker (although I don't use it).
What advantage has a Desktop Enivronment over a Window Manager? A bunch of desktop icons that lets you browse the filesystem graphically? I don't particularly want to do that. What else? Maybe its just me, but why are people getting excited over GNOME and KDE, just because it make the Liunx desktop look more like Windows?
Al.McMaster calculates that 1,200 square feet of solar panels on the roof of a garage receiving 2,200 hours of sunshine a year could, with the help of an electrolysis device no bigger than a washing machine, produce enough hydrogen and oxygen to drive an MRE-powered car 200 miles a day.
Right, 1200 sq. ft. is 34 ft. on side (10.5m for people using sensible units). Thats alot of solar panels, leaving aside how much that many panels would cost, that a very big garage roof you've got there!
2200 hours of sunshine per year is 6 hours per day, unless you're living somewhere (very) sunny its unlikely your going to get this each and every day. So, erm, what happens in winter when you get a long spell of bad weather, you stop driving?
Finally, 200 miles? I drive over a thousand one day last week. Most weekends I do trips that average more than 200 miles one way. This isn't a particulary impressive total unless you use your car to commute 5 miles into work, and then go shopping at the local store.
The oxygen would be bottled in scuba-like tanks that would snap into place under the hood. The hydrogen, more volatile and more dangerous, would be piped around the car's chassis through 180 feet of tubing, divided into 3-foot sections, each sealed off from the next by a set of valves.
The hydrogen would be stored where? Distributed throughout the entire chassis? I really don't like that idea, that just increases the target area for collisions and does very little to increase safety. Most of the designs I've seen for this sort of thing store the H2 in cryogenic form in a (very) well protected tank, safety is usually increased by using some sort of honeycomb structure inside the tank. To be brutally honest, that seems far more sensible.
Al.Did you ever hear about fake credit card lately? Its so hard faking them nobody does.
No, its so easy to steal the numbers and then use them that nobody bothered faking the actual cards.
Al.September 11th was a great example of this. When the fit really hit the shan, all the major news sites got slammed, failed, and people went back to watching CNN, MSNBC, or whatever.
For me on the 11th the only news I got from the net I got via Slashdot, and the links it gave to independant sites, the major news sites were crippled.
That said, on the day, I stayed current by listening to BBC Radio 4. I found that slighly ironic, as the net was cripped and the major TV stations were reporting any stray rumour as fact, I fell back on the oldest of the broadcast mediums, radio, as the best source of information.
Al.Turning off people's connection is rude. Asking a 75 year old senior citizen, who is just happy to read a few web pages and send mail to his grandkids to keep up an endless stream of patches because a bunch of hackers can disrupt the net is backwards.
Why? Internet access isn't a right, just like (despite what your average American might think) driving a car is not a right. If you want access to the internet (a peer to peer network) its your problem to make sure you don't have a broken setup that will annoy people. In other words your part of the bargin is not to do anything that will break the network, its your responsibility. Having a broken web server that gets infected by the latest worm is breaking the bargin.
Al.The terrorist supposedly told the passengers they also had a bomb. It seems that for the 3 planes that hit the passengers probably didn't know they were going on a crash course, and were told they would not be harmed. Given that they were probably hoping for the best. Supposedly the 4th plane crashed in PA b/c the passengers DID find out they would be screwed either way.
Personally I think the terrorists have shot themselves in the foot, they've made it extremely unhealthy to hijack a plane. Before the 11th the best move when hijacked was to sit tight, most hostages made it out alive. Now? Now we have to assume that they're going to use the plane as a bomb, that by doing nothing we're killing ourselves and thousands of innocents.
If I end up on a hijacked plane I'm not going to sit back and let myself die and kill thousands in the process, before I would have sat back and hoped for the best, because that was the sensible thing to do. Now the sensible thing to do is to fight, kill them before they kill you. Personally, I wouldn't give tuppence for the life of the next guy that tries to hijack a plane.
Al.This, from a Canadian newspaper, is worth sharing...
Written in 1973, not exactly breaking news, and not exactly accurate, even at the time.
Al.I don't really see the problem, if Google want to keep a cached copy of my site thats fine with me. Why should I care if someone keeps an off-site backup for me without charging me for the privilage?
Al.Yeah, really fscking long ones; plus they've got this vertical oscillation. I think Sol's orbit is 200 MYears and the oscillation is 26 MYears. It's thought there may be some correlation between mass extinctions here on earth and when we go through the thickest part of galaxy.
The periodicity of the Sun's vertical oscillation is closer to 30Myr, but appart from that you're correct. See for instance Rampino (1997) in the Journal of Celestial Mechanics and Dynamical Astronomy, or Rampino et al. (1997) in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
For a more popular slant, and a slightly more famous name, you could also have a look at Shoemaker (1999) in the Annual Review Of Earth And Planetary Sciences (Yes, that Shoemaker, as in Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9).
Al.So how the heck do you beam numbers from the phone, I can't find any options for this.
You point it at the IrDA sensor on the laptop, enable IR on the phone, and run the command line utility on the laptop. The laptop pulls the numbers from the phone, rather than the phone pushing numbers to the laptop.
Al.I recently bought myself the Motorola Timeport 250 (Euro model), 3 band phone, only to find that the I-R capability was lousy. Not only is there no way to use the I-R port to beam numbers off, I have never been able to get it to successfully sync with my Handspring Visor or portable computer.
Well I've got the same phone and I disagree, you can quite easily beam the numbers off using the simple command line tools distributed with GSMlib, see http://www.pxh.de/fs/gsmlib/. From there its a simple shell script away from my PalmIII using pilot-link, see http://www.gnu-designs.com/pilot-link/. Going in the reverse direction is just as easy.
I've not had any trouble at all using the IR on the phone to talk to either my laptop, Plam or FIR module on my desktop.
Al.Well, I just returned from a conference in Dublin, Ireland, and I was terrified to see that there are cameras everywhere! I mean, it's probably not an inch of that city that isn't covered, and it's not only indoors, but outdoors as well. Even the university campus has infrared cameras all over the campus.
It isn't just the Irish Republic, if you live in the United Kingdom you are now amoungst the most monitored people on the planet. According to the BBC programme I watched a few days ago (and if its on TV it must be true?) you're likely to be observed on average 30 times per day, more if you're driving.
CCTV cameras are as common as muck over here, we've had them for years in steadily incrasing numbers, people are already running the sort of software that seems to be such a big issue with people in the States at the moment. It hasn't seem to have affected ``normal'' life over here at all...
Al.Crashes with MemoryMgr.c, Line: 4340, NULL handle. Perhaps its interfering with some of my other extensions. Or the half dozen other things I've got installed with patch system traps on the Palm. None the less, sloppy coding by Big Blue...
Al.The link to the vest in the articler seems to be broken, here is the real link, and here is the RealPlayer low bandwidth and high bandwidth infomercials. It actually looks okay, although at $159 I don't think I want one, especially as they don't seem to come in Small (and yes guys, Geeks come in Small too!).
Al.I use and recommend Timbuk2 messenger bags...
Damn, you've done it now! I think I'm about to spend $200 + shipping on a bag. Actually the build your own bag shock applet is perhaps one of the best uses of this (foul and acursed) technology I've ever seen. I think we've finally found a site designed with a clue people.
Al.The eHolster is disturbingly similar a weapons harness. Don't be suprised if somebody addresses you as "officer".
I can't lay my hands on an actual reference, but I remember a news story about something like the Eholster a few years ago.
Apparently the "holster" was designed to carry the (luggable) mobile phones of the day. Some poor guy was wearing one in a trendy London wine bar and someone mistook it for a gun. Bearing in mind this was London, not New York, he was somewhat suprised to be greeted by the Armed Response Team on leaving the bar.
Looking at the eHolster I'm not sure I'd want to risk wearing one on the streets.
Al.Same problems here on an Athlon 800 running RedHat 7.0. From what I can tell, it's a permissions problem.
<P>I didn't even bother having a poke around...</P>
Al.
While I have Mozilla 0.9 installed I've found myself dropping back to using Netscape 4.77 most of the time. So I jumped at the chance to try out the new 0.9.3 build, maybe it puts right all the things that make me uncomfortable with Mozilla!?
So I have a look at mozilla.org and see that there are some nice spiffy new binary RPMs available for RH7.x, excellent, don't even have to bother compiling it. Download and install, open a new window, rehash, and, err...
Oh well, I guess I'm going to have to compile it after all...
Al.The US has a representative government and laws are by the people and for the people. Non-lawyers must discuss these matters and try to come to terms with them, because ultimately we all decide on what laws we want to be governed by.
Hello? This is the rest of the world! Hello? *jumps up and down frantically waving* There are a considerable number of people that don't live within the boundaries of the USA, some of them even read Slashdot.
Al.--
The site limits not only words, but the number of accesses. From the site FAQ:
This one will be slashdotted fairly quickly, at least for those people using large carriers.
Al.--
This sounds like a terrible plan. As mentioned, a simple counter would blow this thing out immediately.
Agreed, this doesn't really sound like a workable solution.
However, a number the represented how closely related an incoming email and a known spam message would be a useful metric. Then you could have fuzzy filters that determined how close you would want to be before outright rejecting a similar message, or maybe just relocating it to a seperate inbox.
I've been thinking about how the internet is evolving quite a bit over the last couple of weeks. I'm a regular on one of the few USENET groups left where the content to flamage ratio is still heavily skewed towards content. Except that in the last couple of weeks we've been hit hard by several trolls, and a bunch of people that don't know the difference between USENET and a web board.
While I agree with you that some sort of fuzzy logic filter could do the job, and neural nets and genetic algorithims also spring to mind as possible solutions. I just think it says it all if we have to start integrating this sort of stuff into anything handling SMTP traffic just to keep the spam down.
Al.--
While Dmitry remains in custody, I have not read the EFF (or any other organization/individual) will provide him counsel. Given the nature of the U.S. judicial system, it would be vital for Sklyarov to have extremely credible criminal defense attorneys.
Taken from the EFFector Vol. 14, No. 15 (July 22nd 2001)
Al.--