"If we get users comfortable with shelling out cash for web content, maybe more of them will buy slashdot subscriptions. Let's run some articles about compelling web content for sale. After people are used to buying the good stuff, maybe they'll subscribe to/."
I have a couple questions. Could you make it clearer what you need to do to be eligible for this plum?
Subscribe to slashdot.
Set the maximum ads you see per day to 10 or greater.
Turn off ads on the Index (is that the homepage?)
When a story is set to be posted in:
more than twenty minutes - subscribers will see it twenty minutes before everybody else.
less than twenty minutes - subscribers will see it immediatly, everybody else will see it when it gets posted.
zero minutes - everybody sees it at the same time.
Anything else?
If subsribers can't add comments to a story that hasn't been posted yet, can we at least have a form that says "Paste in the url of a story that this story duplicates and the admin will be notified"?
ipowerweb is a great bandwidth deal. That throws off my calculations by a little bit but only so much. I also don't think that you can get a 10 minute video blog into 1 MB. Somebody else want to prove me wrong?
So lets figure out how much video blogging will cost. Lets say that you produce a 10 minute peice a day, and that 500 people tune in each day. Lets say that you put your video in a postage sized window and it comes out to 1MB. Thats half a GB a day.
The current rates for bandwidth at this scale are about $1/GB of transfer. You will be spending about $180 a year for bandwidth for just 500 people. By contrast, you can get a text blog out to 4000 people a day for $50 a year (easily).
Even then your blog is going to be low production quality, low recording quality, low compression quality, and in a postage stamp sized window. I wouldn't watch your blog.
Maybe the 500 person thing is a bit to high given that nobody will watch. But say your blog does get popular. You will be spending 35 cents for every person that views a 1 MB download every day for a year.
My back of the envelope calculations show that video blogging is not ready for primetime.
Can you offer any advice that doesn't seem to be inherently career-limiting (such as playing whistle-blower and talking to the regulating agencies, labor department, legal department, union leaders, and so forth)?
Nathan Wallwork doesn't think that telling every blackhat cracker that reads slashdot about these insecurities will be career-limiting. I wanted what is boss will think? I think he would have been better off with the regulating agencies.
The hole, in a distant galaxy is considered to be the biggest ever found. Unfortunatly, without the space shuttle, the scientists aboard the station may never get home to tell of it.
I used Gnome for two years and then recently switched to KDE. Gnome had several bugs that I was tired of. The sidebars that I had would sometimes reinit themselves wrong when I restarted. This caused two or even three copies of each sidebar to come up sometimes. I upgraded to 2.0 and the number of desktops was stuck at 4 (I want 6) and many of the applets I really loved didn't work anymore (game, xmms, screenshooter).
So I'm giving KDE a try. It has problems too. The most annoying one to me is the way that it switches focus when I use my scrollwheel. It has options for what to do when clicking any of the mouse button (focus, raise, etc) but not the scrollwheel. When you scroll a window that is not focused and not on top, it gives focus to that window but does not raise it. This maybe wouldn't be bad, but then clicking on the window also does not raise it. You have to focus some other window then come back.
Another thing I don't like about KDE is that it is hard to add buttons to launch X (not KDE) applications to the sidebars. In gnome I could add a launcher easily. In KDE I have to add a non KDE app, it gives me a browse dialog. I don't know where my apps are, probably usr/bin/ or usr/local/bin, I don't want to hunt around, so I try to click on my terminal button so I can do a `which app`. The dialog has the sidebar. Doh.
The choices for applets in KDE is very underwhelming. In gnome 1 I was able to put applets for gaim and xmms in my sidebar. They are unobtrusive there and available on all my desktops. It was wonderful. KDE doesn't have these.
Sure the KDE apps all look the same and act the same, but they are not powerful compared to other stuff. I always use Mozilla as my web browser, open office as my word processor, etc. The KDE stuff are nice, but not as full of features. As soon as you add in non-KDE apps, you lose much of this consistency.
And it protects your from finger slips, and your friends telling you its really cool to type in "rm -rf/".
If you are a person that is reading about root and how to get it, you are probably the type of person that is willing to figure out what you should and shouldn't do to your system. If you have a bunch of users you trust, I'd think that would be a good argument for why you shouldn't give them root.
Too bad that it doesn't tell you how to escalate your priveleges from user to root the same way that you can escalate your priveleges to master key in your apartment building using your apartment door key.
That would be really worthy of Slashdot.
The one thing that appears to be missing is the section "Why shouldn't I run as root all the time if I'm the only one using my system." In your house (comparing your single user system to your house) nobody can control you like a puppet. Somebody can't move your arms and legs and force you to take a sledgehammer to the hot water heater. If you are running Unix as root, any code that you run could make you do just that. It's worth protecting yourself against virii by not running as root.
This is one patent that should be granted. It's no one-click shopping patent, it's no "put an e- in front of it" patent. If Google weren't doing it, then I wouldn't have thought to do it myself.
Having a patent on it means that Google will be the only viable search engine for the next twenty years if it chooses not to license the patent. Is that what we really want? I could see four or five years, but twenty years is a good percentage of my lifetime. Google is an innovative company, but who's to say somebody couldn't do it better after a few years by building on the idea. The first implementation almost always sucks compared to clones.
I would be very interested to see how regular expressions (a core part of the JavaScript language) stack up in various browsers. Netscape has had good support for regexps since 4.0, IE since 5.0. Opera still seems to be lacking in these regards.
I'm basing this on my experience writing a contact form that thwarts spam. It has (optional) client side verification of the fields based on regular expressions. (The same regular expressions are then used again on the server, the client side stuff just makes it fail fast.) When a web browser thinks it supports JavaScript, but doesn't do it well enough this runs into problems. I keep finding browsers that like the regular expressions I use.
If you are using an uncommon browser, I would appretiate the testing. Please go to my contact page and fill out a valid email address but no subject or message. If your browser works correctly, you should not get an error about the email address. Then send me the results. (If you do have problems, disable JavaScript first.)
I would be very interested to see how regular expressions (a core part of the JavaScript language) stack up in various browsers. Netscape has had good support for regexps since 4.0, IE since 5.0. Opera still seems to be lacking in these regards.
I'm basing this on my experience writing a contact form that thwarts spam. It has (optional) client side verification of the fields based on regular expressions. (The same regular expressions are then used again on the server, the client side stuff just makes it fail fast.) When a web browser thinks it supports JavaScript, but doesn't do it well enough this runs into problems. I keep finding browsers that like the regular expressions I use.
If you are using an uncommon browser, I would appretiate the testing. Please go to my contact page and fill out a valid email address but no subject or message. If your browser works correctly, you should not get an error about the email address. Then send me the results. (If you do have problems, disable JavaScript first.)
I work for a company that made sixty some odd atari games. We no longer make games (quit that when atari went under in the 80s) but the source code is still in a cabinent in the offices. Besides the copyright problems (code was written for hire, subsequently licensed, etc.) the stuff is all archived on reel to reel tapes. Even if we had the correct machine to read them (I'm not sure), I don't know what kind of shape the media is in and it would be a pretty big undertaking to get it all onto a hard drive and the internet.
The Linux TCP/IP is an area of code that is known to be robust. It has been analysed again and again. Windows TCP/IP stack is widely regarded to be inferior on many counts. If you choose TCP/IP as your area of study I don't doubt that you will come out with these results. If you chose another area such as USB protocol, you would find very different results.
TCP/IP is better on linux because many very talented people have worked on it. This is an area in which open source software development has worked well. However, it does not mean that open source developement always works better.
The parent post was modded up as funny, but PageRank was actually named after Larry Page. It was not called PageRank because it ranks web pages.
Larry and others at google has said this in the past. Although I can't find proof on Google's web site (darn lousy search engine they use;-), I did find this in an article on SearchEngineWorld:
Google examines link structures all over the web. By doing so, it can give every page a popularity rating known as "PageRank" (named after Google cofounder Larry Page). When you do a search, URLs with high PageRanks are more likely to be listed first. However, this will only happen if the pages also match other criteria, such as containing your search terms or being identified as being relevant to your search terms by analyzing the context of links.
According to this article, it was originally called "BackRub":
Google began as a search engine called BackRub. It was so named for what was its, (at the time), unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to and from a given website as part of its algorithms to search results. This approach to link analysis gained BackRub a growing reputation among those who had seen the technology. Today this technology is know as Google's patented "PageRanks" technology.
If you are hoping that making your software open source will attract developers, it probably won't. You will very likely have to keep your development team at the current size. The mozilla project experienced this. They thought that when they open sourced the web browser, everybody would start improving it. They didn't. Finally, some outside developers contribute to Mozilla, but it took several years for a very high visibility product.
I don't think that many people would be willing to get up to speed on your development to help you out. There isn't much they will get out of it; developers usually code to scratch an itch. You might get somebody that does a better visual representation or somebody that tries to do some optimization to get better results for themselves, but you will be very lucky to get that.
On the other hand, why wouldn't you go open source? For the most part it can't hurt. You are not trying to sell your software. What if some other observatory realized that they could control their telescopes with your code? They might just do so and find that they could make improvements to your code. Other than the cheating issues with Seti, I can't think of much of anything. And then again, it is well known how to cheat anyway.
Gradual change may be the answer to some retraining problems. I upgraded from Redhat 7.3 to Redhat 8.0 yesterday at work. Talk about a pain! Redhat threw Apache 2.0 at me (a significant difference from 1.3) , Gnome 2.0 at me (also significantly different), new applications, and a new kernal. I would have been much happier taking those one at a time. Gnome and apache took quite a while each to configure to my tastes.
On the otherhand, I download a new Mozilla nightly build about once a week and the changes are so gradual that I rarely get thrown for a loop.
While with linux, I know I have the option of going with a distribution that I can manage myself more effectively than Redhat, outside the Linux world not many people have that luxury. Look at the hated Microsoft service packs. Look at people delaying upgrading their Macintosh OS. Look at people still using Windows 95.
As a user, I am happier with many small changes that are each easy to learn and deal with than a group of large changes that catapult me into the middle of the lake.
But did you run the server for PICTORIAL and take a cut of the money the test taker paid every time you administered a test?
If not, you do not have prior art because your situation does not meet all of the patents claims. The good news, as I said earlier, there are lots of ways to write online tests that do not infringe on this patent.
The first computer is the server. Their patent is for Test Maker makes test and puts it on Test Server. Test Maker and Test Server share revenue from Test Taker no matter where the test is taken.
Breadth: Doesn't cover all online tests
on
Online Testing Patented
·
· Score: 4, Informative
The patent does not cover all online tests. There are numerous ways to avoid infringing on this patent.
In claim 1:
wherein a test-taker is required to pay to take the compiled test;
If there is no money involved you do not violate this patent. If you pay for a course and take a test as part of that course there are other ways around it
In claim 13:
wherein a test-maker and a proprietor of the first computer share the revenues generated by the test-taker taking the test.
There must be at least two parties making money of the testing. The first being the test maker and the second being the person who owns testing computer. If you make your own tests and host the tests on your own computer, you do not infringe.
There are also claims about creating and filing tests. It appears that if you were to choose a category for your test and then create the test in that category you would not infringe. (As opposed to creating the test, putting it in a temporary folder, and then moving it to the proper place as covered by the patent.)
Although I am skilled in the art, I am no patent lawyer. The patent system says that only a patent lawyer, and not somebody skilled in the art can say what a patent is about, so run this by your patent lawyer before making tests online.
Slashdot Mirror
"If we get users comfortable with shelling out cash for web content, maybe more of them will buy slashdot subscriptions. Let's run some articles about compelling web content for sale. After people are used to buying the good stuff, maybe they'll subscribe to
</conspiracy>
The correct link for the article, since the article was moved off the home page into the archives.
NY Times Technology (no reg req): AOL Is Planning a Fast-Forward Answer to TiVo
CNN Money: AOL eyes TiVo-like offering
- Subscribe to slashdot.
- Set the maximum ads you see per day to 10 or greater.
- Turn off ads on the Index (is that the homepage?)
When a story is set to be posted in:- more than twenty minutes - subscribers will see it twenty minutes before everybody else.
- less than twenty minutes - subscribers will see it immediatly, everybody else will see it when it gets posted.
- zero minutes - everybody sees it at the same time.
Anything else?If subsribers can't add comments to a story that hasn't been posted yet, can we at least have a form that says "Paste in the url of a story that this story duplicates and the admin will be notified"?
ipowerweb is a great bandwidth deal. That throws off my calculations by a little bit but only so much. I also don't think that you can get a 10 minute video blog into 1 MB. Somebody else want to prove me wrong?
The current rates for bandwidth at this scale are about $1/GB of transfer. You will be spending about $180 a year for bandwidth for just 500 people. By contrast, you can get a text blog out to 4000 people a day for $50 a year (easily).
Even then your blog is going to be low production quality, low recording quality, low compression quality, and in a postage stamp sized window. I wouldn't watch your blog.
Maybe the 500 person thing is a bit to high given that nobody will watch. But say your blog does get popular. You will be spending 35 cents for every person that views a 1 MB download every day for a year.
My back of the envelope calculations show that video blogging is not ready for primetime.
how do we (ahum) fix the end user? With a pair of pliers, of course.
The ISS discovered a remote black hole
The hole, in a distant galaxy is considered to be the biggest ever found. Unfortunatly, without the space shuttle, the scientists aboard the station may never get home to tell of it.
So I'm giving KDE a try. It has problems too. The most annoying one to me is the way that it switches focus when I use my scrollwheel. It has options for what to do when clicking any of the mouse button (focus, raise, etc) but not the scrollwheel. When you scroll a window that is not focused and not on top, it gives focus to that window but does not raise it. This maybe wouldn't be bad, but then clicking on the window also does not raise it. You have to focus some other window then come back.
Another thing I don't like about KDE is that it is hard to add buttons to launch X (not KDE) applications to the sidebars. In gnome I could add a launcher easily. In KDE I have to add a non KDE app, it gives me a browse dialog. I don't know where my apps are, probably usr/bin/ or usr/local/bin, I don't want to hunt around, so I try to click on my terminal button so I can do a `which app`. The dialog has the sidebar. Doh.
The choices for applets in KDE is very underwhelming. In gnome 1 I was able to put applets for gaim and xmms in my sidebar. They are unobtrusive there and available on all my desktops. It was wonderful. KDE doesn't have these.
Sure the KDE apps all look the same and act the same, but they are not powerful compared to other stuff. I always use Mozilla as my web browser, open office as my word processor, etc. The KDE stuff are nice, but not as full of features. As soon as you add in non-KDE apps, you lose much of this consistency.
If you are a person that is reading about root and how to get it, you are probably the type of person that is willing to figure out what you should and shouldn't do to your system. If you have a bunch of users you trust, I'd think that would be a good argument for why you shouldn't give them root.
That would be really worthy of Slashdot.
The one thing that appears to be missing is the section "Why shouldn't I run as root all the time if I'm the only one using my system." In your house (comparing your single user system to your house) nobody can control you like a puppet. Somebody can't move your arms and legs and force you to take a sledgehammer to the hot water heater. If you are running Unix as root, any code that you run could make you do just that. It's worth protecting yourself against virii by not running as root.
Having a patent on it means that Google will be the only viable search engine for the next twenty years if it chooses not to license the patent. Is that what we really want? I could see four or five years, but twenty years is a good percentage of my lifetime. Google is an innovative company, but who's to say somebody couldn't do it better after a few years by building on the idea. The first implementation almost always sucks compared to clones.
I'm basing this on my experience writing a contact form that thwarts spam. It has (optional) client side verification of the fields based on regular expressions. (The same regular expressions are then used again on the server, the client side stuff just makes it fail fast.) When a web browser thinks it supports JavaScript, but doesn't do it well enough this runs into problems. I keep finding browsers that like the regular expressions I use.
If you are using an uncommon browser, I would appretiate the testing. Please go to my contact page and fill out a valid email address but no subject or message. If your browser works correctly, you should not get an error about the email address. Then send me the results. (If you do have problems, disable JavaScript first.)
Nothing like being called a dipshit for making a mistake.
I'm basing this on my experience writing a contact form that thwarts spam. It has (optional) client side verification of the fields based on regular expressions. (The same regular expressions are then used again on the server, the client side stuff just makes it fail fast.) When a web browser thinks it supports JavaScript, but doesn't do it well enough this runs into problems. I keep finding browsers that like the regular expressions I use.
If you are using an uncommon browser, I would appretiate the testing. Please go to my contact page and fill out a valid email address but no subject or message. If your browser works correctly, you should not get an error about the email address. Then send me the results. (If you do have problems, disable JavaScript first.)
I work for a company that made sixty some odd atari games. We no longer make games (quit that when atari went under in the 80s) but the source code is still in a cabinent in the offices. Besides the copyright problems (code was written for hire, subsequently licensed, etc.) the stuff is all archived on reel to reel tapes. Even if we had the correct machine to read them (I'm not sure), I don't know what kind of shape the media is in and it would be a pretty big undertaking to get it all onto a hard drive and the internet.
TCP/IP is better on linux because many very talented people have worked on it. This is an area in which open source software development has worked well. However, it does not mean that open source developement always works better.
Larry and others at google has said this in the past. Although I can't find proof on Google's web site (darn lousy search engine they use ;-), I did find this in an article on SearchEngineWorld:
According to this article, it was originally called "BackRub":
Another reference: http://www.eyrie.org/~zednenem/2002/08/30/
I don't think that many people would be willing to get up to speed on your development to help you out. There isn't much they will get out of it; developers usually code to scratch an itch. You might get somebody that does a better visual representation or somebody that tries to do some optimization to get better results for themselves, but you will be very lucky to get that.
On the other hand, why wouldn't you go open source? For the most part it can't hurt. You are not trying to sell your software. What if some other observatory realized that they could control their telescopes with your code? They might just do so and find that they could make improvements to your code. Other than the cheating issues with Seti, I can't think of much of anything. And then again, it is well known how to cheat anyway.
So you have a bizarre czar at your bazaar?
On the otherhand, I download a new Mozilla nightly build about once a week and the changes are so gradual that I rarely get thrown for a loop.
While with linux, I know I have the option of going with a distribution that I can manage myself more effectively than Redhat, outside the Linux world not many people have that luxury. Look at the hated Microsoft service packs. Look at people delaying upgrading their Macintosh OS. Look at people still using Windows 95.
As a user, I am happier with many small changes that are each easy to learn and deal with than a group of large changes that catapult me into the middle of the lake.
If not, you do not have prior art because your situation does not meet all of the patents claims. The good news, as I said earlier, there are lots of ways to write online tests that do not infringe on this patent.
The first computer is the server. Their patent is for Test Maker makes test and puts it on Test Server. Test Maker and Test Server share revenue from Test Taker no matter where the test is taken.
In claim 1:
If there is no money involved you do not violate this patent. If you pay for a course and take a test as part of that course there are other ways around itIn claim 13:
There must be at least two parties making money of the testing. The first being the test maker and the second being the person who owns testing computer. If you make your own tests and host the tests on your own computer, you do not infringe.There are also claims about creating and filing tests. It appears that if you were to choose a category for your test and then create the test in that category you would not infringe. (As opposed to creating the test, putting it in a temporary folder, and then moving it to the proper place as covered by the patent.)
Although I am skilled in the art, I am no patent lawyer. The patent system says that only a patent lawyer, and not somebody skilled in the art can say what a patent is about, so run this by your patent lawyer before making tests online.