Slashdot's karma system is strictly a middle-down mechanism in that the effectivness only applies to the lower parts of the system, For what it was originally meant to do, weed out trolls/spam/FP bastards, it does well but turning it into a promotion as well as a punishment system it's perfect.
I've had a hand in designing more than a few user-based content control systems and while I like Moderation and M2 a lot I think it really got pointed in the wrong with with calling it 'Karma' and publishing comment ranks, et al, for the very reason you state "What's the point in posting a comment if nobody will read it". A system based on bad stuff down as efficiently as possible seldom works at pushing good stuff up.
However, this brings up a very, very important question: then why are you posting it, because you have something important to say or because you want to be moderated highly? Playing for the audience like posting a comment just to get modded up is as bad as, if not worse than, the stuff moderation was designed to prevent because it make it that much harder to filter out the noise, and it makes everything more suspect in the end.
In a way the primitive FOAF stuff slashdot could help with that, but it would take some complexity, kind of like the Eigen Vector paradigm that Advogoto tried way back when. The problem there is I have never seen a trust matrix done well yet that can handle unclean (e.g. ye olde random) users being a part of the system.
And what any of this has to do with Google, I have no idea!
You choice chould be swayed by security; I don't know about the new i5/OS generation, but back when it was called OS/400 it had one of the highest ratings for both security and stability of any mid-range system in its market. Whether this is because OS/400 really was more secure or just too obscure to exploit is up to personal opinion.
have a glance at uControl. Turns the up-down and left-right motion into a scrolling actaion (a la the wheel) when you press "fn" while sliding your finger on the touchpad.
I use it on my iBook and it's quite comfortable to hit the 'fn' key with your pinky.
I run quizilla.com, a pseudo-entertainment site that does 60-70 million pages a month, at least 2/3rds being dynamic database backed.
The site faq has the grity details, but basically everything is running on 8 web servers with a cluster of 4 database servers. Mod_perl is used for the most highly trafficed pages, though some less used pages are still static CGIs.
For the way I have it set up, this farm has reached it's limit with the web servers getting pegged pretty constantly during peak hours, and the database servers aren't far behind (mostly due to lack of ram).
The site makes heavy use of Memcached as well as a homebrew ghetto load balancing system based on apache mod_rewrite and some ansilary code.
If I had my druthers, I'd keep the number of machines but have the web heads be 2.8-3ghz Xeons or Opterons with 1.5 GB ram each and the database servers could be dual 1.8ghz xeons with at least 3GB ram each. Idea memcache would be at least 2GB, but more is always better. From my guess, a setup like that would run my site at 100mil quick pages a month, instead of like now where pages often take 5 seconds or more.
One big things that you don't really notice until you try to make things on this scale is that optimization is king -- optimize the hell out of your code. A stray regex might not look expensive, but when it's happening twenty times a second on every machine it quickly adds. up.
Code is almost always the weakest link in a big cluster in that seldom are things sufficiently planned -- I've had huge growing pains since I never planned on scalling past one machine so when i had to move to 2,3,4 and up to 8 is has been a real hassle making things work "right" in a massive cluster. Plan for clustering from the get-go if you even have the slightest inkling it will do high traffic volumes.
I feel your pain, but I disagree with that it's acting out anger -- instead, from my experiences I feel that it's not anger but a lack of ability or experience with dealing with someone who says, either directly or indirectly, that something you made is "wrong".
One thing the FOSS paradigm has done is made it possible that people with no experience in the social aspects of software development to write code that is potentially used by millions of people. It can open up a "cowboy culture" where everyone is at odds with everyone else and where, if I may borrow a line from a certain movie, "we're all our own countries with temporary allies and enemies".
I say this with the benefit of hindsight, to be sure: I was a once a pimply, antisocial code-contributor and inlooking back on my own exchanges I see that I was as bad as it gets: if someone found a bug in what I did, instead of fixing it I would spend all my energy in combating the person who reported it because surely this person was out to get me. It wasn't until a few years later when I got a "professional" job that my boss pulled me asside one day and gave me a half-hour verbal bitch-slap that I realized that a bug report is usually someone who _wants_to_help_me_. Basically, I was too arrogant to see that, and now that I'm "old and wise" I see that same thing on others.
Of course, I'm not saying you should let them off the hook because thay don't know any better.. in fact, I'd hazard the sentement that more bitch-slapping needs to be done in the open-source world!
I don't know were I'm going with this, but that's my two cents.
Actually, that's wrong too -- you simply paid in a different way. It cost you time to install that plugin, however small amount it was. You still paid, it just probably didn't benefit Slashdot.
Since when was any "big iron" a personal computer, eh? How often have you seen a Cray for sale at CompUSA or Time?
People made the same argument about Apple claiming it was the first 64-bit personal computer: "I have an Ultra 5 right here on my desk", but a Sun is not a personal computer, neither is an RS/6000, ad nauseum.
And remember, in the USA, "the fastest" really means "as fast as the competition." As long as all three brands of washing powder clean as well as each other they are the "the best".
My reason (aside from not wanting to drop that much cash) for not getting an iPod is quite simple -- I don't like iTunes and I don't like having to use it (or any other program for that matter).
I mean, I'm a Mac user, but I don't like that the iPod functions as a hard drive and yet I can't just copy MP3s to it and have them play; I have to load them in iTunes and build playlists and syncronize everything (at least, the last time I payed with my gf's iPod it was like that -- if this is not the case then someone please let me know). This to me is counterintuative.. the only thing that iTunes gives you is playlists and something similar to that can be effected by using directories as artist/album delimiters. It's a hard drive and I should be able to treat it just like a hard drive and it should be smart enough.
Instead, I got a (comparativly) cheap PocketPC and a 256MB CF card or about half the cost of an iPod (and it's a PDA, ad infinatum). Yes, I know that 256MB != 15GB but if I transcode things to.10 quality Ogg I can fit maybe 10 albums on it and it gives me incentive to change what music I have on it regularly.
Wall and auto adapters for USB devices are not crazyif you have a use for them.
For example, I have an auto USB power adapter which has a standard USB plug that provides only power. I also have the USB sync/charge cable for my pocketPC in the car (so I can play tunes without running down my battery) and a USB charge cable for my Ericsson t68i phone -- they can both use the same cigarette lighter adapter plugin, all I have to do it switch cables.
Having things that charge on USB is not crazy either. Another example, I just want on a drip a few weeks ago and with me I carried the aforementioned cables for my PDA and phone. I also carried my USB-equiped laptop so when I wanted to charge my phone I plugged it into the usb socket -- this way I can care 2 less bulky square AC adapters.
First and most obvious is that everyone has them -- everyone probably has as least one PS/2 Mouse and Keyboard lying around somewhere and MoBo manufacturers don't want to potentially alienate part of their market.
Another reason is that USB Legacy Emulation (as it is sometimes called) is still not foolproof. Goes like this: To use a PS/2 KB you have to talk to the keyboard controller which is almost certainly based off the controller original IBM 8256 (or whatever it was) which in turn talks to the keyboard encoder which is also almost certainly based on the original IBM AT encoder. After all, manufacturers have had two decades to standardize.
But to talk to a USB keyboard you have to engage the USB chipset, root hub, any other intermediary hubs and then talk to the keyboard; and all of these devices potentially don't impliment the standards in the same way (because USB is young by comparison) or combinations of them screw the standard up. In this case, PS/2 is left as a fallback.
Case in point, I have a USB KVM switch to let my PC and Mac use one kayboard, mouse and monitor. If I just plug the USB keyboard directly into my PC and turn on "USB Legacy keyboard emulation" in BIOS I can then use that USB keyboard to access BIOS function. HOWEVER, the KVM switch integrates a USB hub that doesn't strictly follow the USB 1.1 standard and so when the USB keyboard is communicating with the PC through the switch Legacy Emulation doesn't work and I can't access BIOS (works fine in Windows , however).
It's not that ditching PS/2 isn't a good idea (because it is), but there is still a lot of doubt and issues that need to be worked out before then.
Funny thing, I have the 4-disc Slackware 3.1 CD set still at home in my bookcase. I bought it at Hastings (a local book/music/software store) in 1996 because it was cheaper than one of the music CDs I wanted -- after all, 4 CDs for $12 is $3 a CD, and I couldn't beat that!
It installed perfectly on my parents 386/25 with 4MB, and it is, to this day, the only time I've got X to run correctly on the very first try.. though I couldn't tell you how I did it.
If you wanted to use your 2400 v.42bis to attack someone, you'd almost get more mileage out out grabbing it by its serial cable and whipping it around -- it would do more damage!
The RAM in the beige G3s is (AFAIK) standard PC100. At least I purchase standard PC100 memory, install it and it works fine. I have two machines maxed out at 768MB of PC100.
Trust me, it's not. On some of the later machines, maybe, but the Beige G3s and First Gen Blue&white G3's use PC66 with a different voltage (5v vs 3v) and, I'm told, different bank refresh rate. But I'm certain about the voltage difference.
I have an old beige G3/300 sitting next to me with a Compusa brand Radeon 9000 pci and it works as good as you can expect. Of course, I also learned that TNT2's won't work (through trial and error), so it's a hit-or-miss thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Imminent Death of the Net Predicted!
Who wants to go with me to the SCO Forum this year? Held, appropriately, at The Mirage.
Hah! I mock your five-digit user ID!
Slashdot's karma system is strictly a middle-down mechanism in that the effectivness only applies to the lower parts of the system, For what it was originally meant to do, weed out trolls/spam/FP bastards, it does well but turning it into a promotion as well as a punishment system it's perfect.
I've had a hand in designing more than a few user-based content control systems and while I like Moderation and M2 a lot I think it really got pointed in the wrong with with calling it 'Karma' and publishing comment ranks, et al, for the very reason you state "What's the point in posting a comment if nobody will read it". A system based on bad stuff down as efficiently as possible seldom works at pushing good stuff up.
However, this brings up a very, very important question: then why are you posting it, because you have something important to say or because you want to be moderated highly? Playing for the audience like posting a comment just to get modded up is as bad as, if not worse than, the stuff moderation was designed to prevent because it make it that much harder to filter out the noise, and it makes everything more suspect in the end.
In a way the primitive FOAF stuff slashdot could help with that, but it would take some complexity, kind of like the Eigen Vector paradigm that Advogoto tried way back when. The problem there is I have never seen a trust matrix done well yet that can handle unclean (e.g. ye olde random) users being a part of the system.
And what any of this has to do with Google, I have no idea!
"They dropped [...] all of the art, 20% of the art..."
..Guess they dropped people good at math, too?
(moderator note: this is -1 Redundant, btw).
You choice chould be swayed by security; I don't know about the new i5/OS generation, but back when it was called OS/400 it had one of the highest ratings for both security and stability of any mid-range system in its market. Whether this is because OS/400 really was more secure or just too obscure to exploit is up to personal opinion.
Qsecofr vs. root, eh?
G4U, a unix based cloning tool.
AFAIK steel is not completly opaque to X-rays.
Damn you. Damn you Salizar!
What was that saying?
"To view it, we have to decrypt them. If we can decrypt them, we can rip them."
The only "secure" media format is a CD laminated between two plates of steel.
I got one just yesterday from T-mobile for free with activation, but it is available online unlocked for cheap.
The Motorola V188
No camera.
No IR.
No bluetooth.
Standard mini-usb for syncing.
GSM quad-band (850, 900, 1800, 1900) with GPRS.
Yes, it is colour, but it's basically as minimal as you can get righ now.
have a glance at uControl. Turns the up-down and left-right motion into a scrolling actaion (a la the wheel) when you press "fn" while sliding your finger on the touchpad.
I use it on my iBook and it's quite comfortable to hit the 'fn' key with your pinky.
I run quizilla.com, a pseudo-entertainment site that does 60-70 million pages a month, at least 2/3rds being dynamic database backed.
The site faq has the grity details, but basically everything is running on 8 web servers with a cluster of 4 database servers. Mod_perl is used for the most highly trafficed pages, though some less used pages are still static CGIs.
For the way I have it set up, this farm has reached it's limit with the web servers getting pegged pretty constantly during peak hours, and the database servers aren't far behind (mostly due to lack of ram).
The site makes heavy use of Memcached as well as a homebrew ghetto load balancing system based on apache mod_rewrite and some ansilary code.
If I had my druthers, I'd keep the number of machines but have the web heads be 2.8-3ghz Xeons or Opterons with 1.5 GB ram each and the database servers could be dual 1.8ghz xeons with at least 3GB ram each. Idea memcache would be at least 2GB, but more is always better. From my guess, a setup like that would run my site at 100mil quick pages a month, instead of like now where pages often take 5 seconds or more.
One big things that you don't really notice until you try to make things on this scale is that optimization is king -- optimize the hell out of your code. A stray regex might not look expensive, but when it's happening twenty times a second on every machine it quickly adds. up.
Code is almost always the weakest link in a big cluster in that seldom are things sufficiently planned -- I've had huge growing pains since I never planned on scalling past one machine so when i had to move to 2,3,4 and up to 8 is has been a real hassle making things work "right" in a massive cluster. Plan for clustering from the get-go if you even have the slightest inkling it will do high traffic volumes.
I feel your pain, but I disagree with that it's acting out anger -- instead, from my experiences I feel that it's not anger but a lack of ability or experience with dealing with someone who says, either directly or indirectly, that something you made is "wrong".
One thing the FOSS paradigm has done is made it possible that people with no experience in the social aspects of software development to write code that is potentially used by millions of people. It can open up a "cowboy culture" where everyone is at odds with everyone else and where, if I may borrow a line from a certain movie, "we're all our own countries with temporary allies and enemies".
I say this with the benefit of hindsight, to be sure: I was a once a pimply, antisocial code-contributor and inlooking back on my own exchanges I see that I was as bad as it gets: if someone found a bug in what I did, instead of fixing it I would spend all my energy in combating the person who reported it because surely this person was out to get me. It wasn't until a few years later when I got a "professional" job that my boss pulled me asside one day and gave me a half-hour verbal bitch-slap that I realized that a bug report is usually someone who _wants_to_help_me_. Basically, I was too arrogant to see that, and now that I'm "old and wise" I see that same thing on others.
Of course, I'm not saying you should let them off the hook because thay don't know any better.. in fact, I'd hazard the sentement that more bitch-slapping needs to be done in the open-source world!
I don't know were I'm going with this, but that's my two cents.
For those who ever used it, it looks as though IBM is taking on PHP as a replacement for its old web language "Net.Data".
Actually, that's wrong too -- you simply paid in a different way. It cost you time to install that plugin, however small amount it was. You still paid, it just probably didn't benefit Slashdot.
It's a zero-sum game we're playing, choombata.
"...coming to /. (a free site) and rattle on..."
Whoa there, sparky.
Since when is Slashdot free? Not since around 1998.
Being subjected to ads and having them hit your eyeballs is a form of payment. You pay for Slashdot. Say it again.
Since when was any "big iron" a personal computer, eh? How often have you seen a Cray for sale at CompUSA or Time?
People made the same argument about Apple claiming it was the first 64-bit personal computer: "I have an Ultra 5 right here on my desk", but a Sun is not a personal computer, neither is an RS/6000, ad nauseum.
And remember, in the USA, "the fastest" really means "as fast as the competition." As long as all three brands of washing powder clean as well as each other they are the "the best".
My reason (aside from not wanting to drop that much cash) for not getting an iPod is quite simple -- I don't like iTunes and I don't like having to use it (or any other program for that matter).
.10 quality Ogg I can fit maybe 10 albums on it and it gives me incentive to change what music I have on it regularly.
I mean, I'm a Mac user, but I don't like that the iPod functions as a hard drive and yet I can't just copy MP3s to it and have them play; I have to load them in iTunes and build playlists and syncronize everything (at least, the last time I payed with my gf's iPod it was like that -- if this is not the case then someone please let me know). This to me is counterintuative.. the only thing that iTunes gives you is playlists and something similar to that can be effected by using directories as artist/album delimiters. It's a hard drive and I should be able to treat it just like a hard drive and it should be smart enough.
Instead, I got a (comparativly) cheap PocketPC and a 256MB CF card or about half the cost of an iPod (and it's a PDA, ad infinatum). Yes, I know that 256MB != 15GB but if I transcode things to
Wall and auto adapters for USB devices are not crazyif you have a use for them.
For example, I have an auto USB power adapter which has a standard USB plug that provides only power. I also have the USB sync/charge cable for my pocketPC in the car (so I can play tunes without running down my battery) and a USB charge cable for my Ericsson t68i phone -- they can both use the same cigarette lighter adapter plugin, all I have to do it switch cables.
Having things that charge on USB is not crazy either. Another example, I just want on a drip a few weeks ago and with me I carried the aforementioned cables for my PDA and phone. I also carried my USB-equiped laptop so when I wanted to charge my phone I plugged it into the usb socket -- this way I can care 2 less bulky square AC adapters.
First and most obvious is that everyone has them -- everyone probably has as least one PS/2 Mouse and Keyboard lying around somewhere and MoBo manufacturers don't want to potentially alienate part of their market.
Another reason is that USB Legacy Emulation (as it is sometimes called) is still not foolproof. Goes like this: To use a PS/2 KB you have to talk to the keyboard controller which is almost certainly based off the controller original IBM 8256 (or whatever it was) which in turn talks to the keyboard encoder which is also almost certainly based on the original IBM AT encoder. After all, manufacturers have had two decades to standardize.
But to talk to a USB keyboard you have to engage the USB chipset, root hub, any other intermediary hubs and then talk to the keyboard; and all of these devices potentially don't impliment the standards in the same way (because USB is young by comparison) or combinations of them screw the standard up. In this case, PS/2 is left as a fallback.
Case in point, I have a USB KVM switch to let my PC and Mac use one kayboard, mouse and monitor. If I just plug the USB keyboard directly into my PC and turn on "USB Legacy keyboard emulation" in BIOS I can then use that USB keyboard to access BIOS function. HOWEVER, the KVM switch integrates a USB hub that doesn't strictly follow the USB 1.1 standard and so when the USB keyboard is communicating with the PC through the switch Legacy Emulation doesn't work and I can't access BIOS (works fine in Windows , however).
It's not that ditching PS/2 isn't a good idea (because it is), but there is still a lot of doubt and issues that need to be worked out before then.
I still play Ultima IV.
No, I mean _I'm_still_playing_Ultima_IV_.
I've been stuck in the Stygean(sp) Abyss for about 15 years now.
This is not a game for playing, it is a game for turning off and avoiding.
Funny thing, I have the 4-disc Slackware 3.1 CD set still at home in my bookcase. I bought it at Hastings (a local book/music/software store) in 1996 because it was cheaper than one of the music CDs I wanted -- after all, 4 CDs for $12 is $3 a CD, and I couldn't beat that!
It installed perfectly on my parents 386/25 with 4MB, and it is, to this day, the only time I've got X to run correctly on the very first try.. though I couldn't tell you how I did it.
If you wanted to use your 2400 v.42bis to attack someone, you'd almost get more mileage out out grabbing it by its serial cable and whipping it around -- it would do more damage!
Then how will legitimate mail arrive?
That still exists?
Trust me, it's not. On some of the later machines, maybe, but the Beige G3s and First Gen Blue&white G3's use PC66 with a different voltage (5v vs 3v) and, I'm told, different bank refresh rate. But I'm certain about the voltage difference.
I have an old beige G3/300 sitting next to me with a Compusa brand Radeon 9000 pci and it works as good as you can expect. Of course, I also learned that TNT2's won't work (through trial and error), so it's a hit-or-miss thing.