In particular, I'm wondering if we're going from 1-2 in-line ads and 1-2 sidebar ads to 3-7 in-line ads. (In other words, is this "cleaning" just an excuse to put more ads in-line with the search results? Let's not forget this is Google, who won market-share in part by way of putting ads on a noticeable yellow background. Anybody noticed the background colour for ads these days?:)
So $1 a week is doable. I'd be willing to pay $4/mo for any number of high-quality sites (Wired, Ars, NYT, etc. - the biggies). On the other hand, I'd also like to echo many other people in this tread: the problem isn't ads, it's the third-party ads delivered via ad networks via HTML/JS/Flash/etc..
I might still pay the $4/mo to get rid of the ads, but I'd also be fine whitelisting Wired if they served ads first-party that were vetted by Wired staff (like they used to do with print ads). Right now, I'll simply not patronize any site that disallows ad blockers. That's crazy talk, and dangerous to boot.
If you guys are serious about turning Slashdot around I wish you all the luck, and if there's anything the community can do to help, please don't hesitate to ask us. That might include asking us to change our behaviour (both to improve things from first principles, and if we need to change our behaviour to adapt to a change to the system).
I've been reading (and rarely contributing to:) Slashdot for a long time, and over the past year I've been looking for alternatives. I still haven't found any that were better; I'd even considered starting a new one. I will be very pleased if it turns out competent people acting in good faith have taken the helm.
Would anyone be interested in the option to see the most popular stories from the firehose on the front page? They'd have to hit a very high popularity threshold and also would be marked/color-coded as such.
* Continue making posts about good content worthy of discussion * Avoid the trolling and pandering that's been too obvious in too many posts/stories * Avoid the Slashvertisements (and if you have to do them, tell us about it and why you're doing it - even if you just want to make more money to gilt your monocles)
If there's anything you can do about the obvious astroturfing that happens in the comments that would be nice, but I think that's playing with fire. The moderation system seems to work reasonably well most of the time, maybe just tweak the weights a bit (so anybody who positively moderated an obviously astroturfing or trolling comment has less karma).
Feel free to change the UI some, but don't try to differentiate via the UI. And please nothing 'flat':)
Hah, I just read the article. Not even the article is sensationalistic - just the headline. The article clearly states that these people haven't been brought in for clinical tests yet, so they can't possibly know whether the subjects missing one of the genes in question are healthy or not.
What if, for instance, you find that that "perfectly functional" person has a rare modification to another gene that allows them to get by without the missing gene?
What if, for instance, that gene is only required when you've been exposed to some common element or set of circumstances that the "perfectly functional" person just happened to avoid, by chance?
What if, for instance, that "perfectly functional" individual isn't, in fact, perfectly functional? What if, for instance, any complications simply haven't yet become apparent?
The headlines and any articles that say we could do without a given gene are almost certainly sensational. I will give the benefit of the doubt and assume the original paper doesn't make any such ridiculous claims.
Some negative comments might actually be pretty reasonable. That they "only just figured this out" means some combination of the following three things:
1. Nobody tested this until just now, meaning our understanding of the Casimir effect was sufficiently incomplete that nobody should have been writing on the topic with any confidence or authority. A real scientist familiar with the topic probably wouldn't have been; but "real scientists" are sufficiently thin on the ground that you could likely have gone through a doctorate in science and not met one. Teachers in particular, at all levels, seem pretty prone to talking and acting like they're hot shit.
2. Nobody thought to test this until just now, which means that some pretty dumb assumptions were made (they're dumb because they were assumptions and incorrect).
3. Nobody thought to test this until just now, and it's a pretty _obvious_ test too, so either nobody spent any time on it or they were extremely myopic. (Something I've seen in many "scientists"' publications these days; overspecialization to the point of virtual uselessness. They're competent to gather data but not design interesting tests.) I'm only vaguely familiar with our knowledge of the Casimir effect (which is sometimes good!), and I would certainly test all sorts of patterns - on each surface - to figure out how that affects the effect.
Of course this discussion is based on the assumption that what the summary talks about is in the article, which I haven't checked, and that the article faithfully summarizes what's in the paper, which I haven't checked, and that the paper purports that this is new knowledge, which I haven't checked. It's quite possible that what's published in the paper is already well-known.
(BTW, I also know you're either not obese or you're obese and you've never successfully stuck to a very low-calorie diet for any length of time. Almost certainly the former, since the idea that somebody can eat 1,200kcal/day and not lose weight is so utterly foreign to you. That means that you're likely eating 2500kcal+/day. Probably the former For five years I maintained a ~1000kcal/day diet - average, never going over 1500kcal in a given day - and managed to gain 50bs of fat over that time. Yes it is possible for people to subsist off a piece of bread and an egg for breakfast, a can of tuna for lunch, and a small dinner. It's just very, very unpleasant.)
You are incorrect. Though people eating so little usually suffer from severe lethargy and a host of neurological/psychological problems, they don't necessarily lose weight. (Let me state again: you're simply incorrect. You aren't aware of all the variables.)
I can probably explain what happened to your sister (and help her). I can also bet she's suffered pretty severe psychological/neurological changes as well (though she might hide them from her family). If you want to start a conversation, ping me at dbharris@eelf.ddts.net
I've started reading the text through, and all I can say is: GO CANADA!
As a Canadian I've been dreading our role in these negotiations. I feel that we really haven't pressed our position sufficiently in bilateral treaties with the US when it comes to commerce (this goes back decades). This is exasperated by the current Federal party in power in parliament (though it's a minority), which demonstrably follows the US lead in many areas.
However, it seems that at least in this case, our government (as distinct from parliament, I might add) is clearly pushing for the Right Stuff(tm). At least as hard as the EU, maybe harder. As an example, it seems that wherever punishments (remedies) for infringers are mentioned, Canada (and usually the EU) has added: [the judicial authorities] "shall take into account the need for proportionality between the seriousness of the infringement and the remedies ordered as well as the interest of third parties."
In other words, no ridiculous court cases where a 16-year-old gets saddled with a $750,000 judgement against them because they downloaded a few tracks from Kazaa (or whatever the kids are using these days:) and didn't know enough to turn it off.
Okay, clearly you have no idea what you're talking about, because a Cisco Universal Broadband Router is a bit of kit used to terminate DOCSIS lines. In other words, it's for cable-modem broadband, not wireless. It would be useless to you.
That said, for others who're reading and who might be interested in some high-end, Linux-based packet-processing kit (because really, the prices Cisco and Juniper and the rest of them charge really are past the ass-raping point of the screw-me spectrum), you could check out Vyatta: http://www.vyatta.com/
Your comment ("the reason people ignore you is because you're a dick") is clearly a troll, but it was also moderated Insightful... which might also be a troll:)
Nevertheless, assuming for a moment that you're being truthful in your expression, then I have this to say:
This is what is wrong with the world today. Billions upon millions of morons who don't know what they're doing, and people trying to show them how to (or, hell, what the fuck - people trying to beat them into) do(ing) it the right way.
You want these assholes who can't even figure out how to correctly measure something to build the bridge you drive over twice a day? How about the building you work in?
Or I dunno, maybe you'd prefer having _only_ people who will point out errors when they see them working on it? How about your doctor? You want your operating room filled with maybe one smart guy who recognizes an error and six people who don't know any better? And you're saying that, when the smart guy recognizes the error and tries to point it out (no matter HOW he does it, though I'm betting the original poster isn't that much of an asshat at work), he's being a dick?
Okay, so you don't buy that MySQL couldn't survive as a strictly open-source project without the ability to sell proprietary/closed-source licenses (like they currently can). I wouldn't argue that.
How do you respond to this scenario?:
Oracle owns MySQL. Oracle shapes MySQL's development very slowly over the course of a decade or two, cementing it in its current niche (and, thus, it will never be a threat to Oracle's ridiculously fat profit margins).
In this scenario, do you think there will sufficient impetus to fork and grow an open-source-only MySQL project (with a different brand and basically a new community starting from scratch)?
Surely you can agree that the desire for such will be radically reduced, possibly to the point that it's not feasible?
Even if it is feasible, surely you can agree that it would almost certainly slow down MySQL's developments in this direction by years? (For many years MySQL has been growing more and more feature-rich, arguable to expand the roles that it can play. I would say pretty much all of their current momentum is in this direction.)
Something you should consider is "perfect market" vs. "real world".
In a perfect market, outsourcing is the main way of taking advantage of economies of scale. You don't run your own national telecommunications network, you outsource it to the national network. You end up paying (cost - economies of scale + profit). The trick is, if you can reach those economies of scale with your datacenter, and you're a competent bunch, you end up paying (cost - economies of scale). So you can save money. There are obvious security and accountability advantages too.
That's the perfect market. In the real world, these folk charge far more than (cost - economies of scale + profit). They cater to inept organisations who couldn't collaboratively tie their shoes up without a contractor to show them how to do it. So you end up paying (cost_of_incompetents_doing_the_job - economies of scale + profit). The profit part of the equation is miniscule compared to the differences between "cost" and "cost of incompetents doing the job". If the home-grown data center would be big enough (I don't know that it would be, given the brief description in the post), and if it was competently-run, then you can save huge amounts of money by doing it in-house (again, aside from all other benefits).
This post has dealt exclusively with cost. Personally I would consider the other factors (security, accountability) to be the deciding factors, assuming that both options implemented services competently.
Slashdot Mirror
"service that is another letter on top of that time syncing protocol"?
So anybody have any before vs after pics?
:)
In particular, I'm wondering if we're going from 1-2 in-line ads and 1-2 sidebar ads to 3-7 in-line ads. (In other words, is this "cleaning" just an excuse to put more ads in-line with the search results? Let's not forget this is Google, who won market-share in part by way of putting ads on a noticeable yellow background. Anybody noticed the background colour for ads these days?
Heh, speling and grammar my is bad. Also apparently I didn't quote correctly. Oops, I suck.
Please don't feed the trolls :)
:)
(Down that way lies bitterness and poor decision-making
So $1 a week is doable. I'd be willing to pay $4/mo for any number of high-quality sites (Wired, Ars, NYT, etc. - the biggies). On the other hand, I'd also like to echo many other people in this tread: the problem isn't ads, it's the third-party ads delivered via ad networks via HTML/JS/Flash/etc..
I might still pay the $4/mo to get rid of the ads, but I'd also be fine whitelisting Wired if they served ads first-party that were vetted by Wired staff (like they used to do with print ads). Right now, I'll simply not patronize any site that disallows ad blockers. That's crazy talk, and dangerous to boot.
If you guys are serious about turning Slashdot around I wish you all the luck, and if there's anything the community can do to help, please don't hesitate to ask us. That might include asking us to change our behaviour (both to improve things from first principles, and if we need to change our behaviour to adapt to a change to the system).
:) Slashdot for a long time, and over the past year I've been looking for alternatives. I still haven't found any that were better; I'd even considered starting a new one. I will be very pleased if it turns out competent people acting in good faith have taken the helm.
I've been reading (and rarely contributing to
Would anyone be interested in the option to see the most popular stories from the firehose on the front page? They'd have to hit a very high popularity threshold and also would be marked/color-coded as such.
Yep, this seems like a change worth trialling.
The basics:
:)
* Continue making posts about good content worthy of discussion
* Avoid the trolling and pandering that's been too obvious in too many posts/stories
* Avoid the Slashvertisements (and if you have to do them, tell us about it and why you're doing it - even if you just want to make more money to gilt your monocles)
If there's anything you can do about the obvious astroturfing that happens in the comments that would be nice, but I think that's playing with fire. The moderation system seems to work reasonably well most of the time, maybe just tweak the weights a bit (so anybody who positively moderated an obviously astroturfing or trolling comment has less karma).
Feel free to change the UI some, but don't try to differentiate via the UI. And please nothing 'flat'
I wonder if it was something as embarrassing as an imperial/metric conversion gone wrong? :)
Hah, I just read the article. Not even the article is sensationalistic - just the headline. The article clearly states that these people haven't been brought in for clinical tests yet, so they can't possibly know whether the subjects missing one of the genes in question are healthy or not.
What if, for instance, you find that that "perfectly functional" person has a rare modification to another gene that allows them to get by without the missing gene?
What if, for instance, that gene is only required when you've been exposed to some common element or set of circumstances that the "perfectly functional" person just happened to avoid, by chance?
What if, for instance, that "perfectly functional" individual isn't, in fact, perfectly functional? What if, for instance, any complications simply haven't yet become apparent?
The headlines and any articles that say we could do without a given gene are almost certainly sensational. I will give the benefit of the doubt and assume the original paper doesn't make any such ridiculous claims.
Or alternatively, people with these attributes (which may actually be positive in any other context) are prone to religion.
Some negative comments might actually be pretty reasonable. That they "only just figured this out" means some combination of the following three things:
1. Nobody tested this until just now, meaning our understanding of the Casimir effect was sufficiently incomplete that nobody should have been writing on the topic with any confidence or authority. A real scientist familiar with the topic probably wouldn't have been; but "real scientists" are sufficiently thin on the ground that you could likely have gone through a doctorate in science and not met one. Teachers in particular, at all levels, seem pretty prone to talking and acting like they're hot shit.
2. Nobody thought to test this until just now, which means that some pretty dumb assumptions were made (they're dumb because they were assumptions and incorrect).
3. Nobody thought to test this until just now, and it's a pretty _obvious_ test too, so either nobody spent any time on it or they were extremely myopic. (Something I've seen in many "scientists"' publications these days; overspecialization to the point of virtual uselessness. They're competent to gather data but not design interesting tests.) I'm only vaguely familiar with our knowledge of the Casimir effect (which is sometimes good!), and I would certainly test all sorts of patterns - on each surface - to figure out how that affects the effect.
Of course this discussion is based on the assumption that what the summary talks about is in the article, which I haven't checked, and that the article faithfully summarizes what's in the paper, which I haven't checked, and that the paper purports that this is new knowledge, which I haven't checked. It's quite possible that what's published in the paper is already well-known.
(BTW, I also know you're either not obese or you're obese and you've never successfully stuck to a very low-calorie diet for any length of time. Almost certainly the former, since the idea that somebody can eat 1,200kcal/day and not lose weight is so utterly foreign to you. That means that you're likely eating 2500kcal+/day. Probably the former For five years I maintained a ~1000kcal/day diet - average, never going over 1500kcal in a given day - and managed to gain 50bs of fat over that time. Yes it is possible for people to subsist off a piece of bread and an egg for breakfast, a can of tuna for lunch, and a small dinner. It's just very, very unpleasant.)
You are incorrect. Though people eating so little usually suffer from severe lethargy and a host of neurological/psychological problems, they don't necessarily lose weight. (Let me state again: you're simply incorrect. You aren't aware of all the variables.)
Or you're wrong about what causes obesity.
I can probably explain what happened to your sister (and help her). I can also bet she's suffered pretty severe psychological/neurological changes as well (though she might hide them from her family). If you want to start a conversation, ping me at dbharris@eelf.ddts.net
Let me fix that for you: If you give anybody (particularly an asshole) an inch, they take a mile. Oh, and cops are generally assholes.
Seriously? Really?
C'mon.
C'mooon.
Enough said.
I've started reading the text through, and all I can say is: GO CANADA!
:) and didn't know enough to turn it off.
As a Canadian I've been dreading our role in these negotiations. I feel that we really haven't pressed our position sufficiently in bilateral treaties with the US when it comes to commerce (this goes back decades). This is exasperated by the current Federal party in power in parliament (though it's a minority), which demonstrably follows the US lead in many areas.
However, it seems that at least in this case, our government (as distinct from parliament, I might add) is clearly pushing for the Right Stuff(tm). At least as hard as the EU, maybe harder. As an example, it seems that wherever punishments (remedies) for infringers are mentioned, Canada (and usually the EU) has added: [the judicial authorities] "shall take into account the need for proportionality between the seriousness of the infringement and the remedies ordered as well as the interest of third parties."
In other words, no ridiculous court cases where a 16-year-old gets saddled with a $750,000 judgement against them because they downloaded a few tracks from Kazaa (or whatever the kids are using these days
DAMNED FUCKING RIGHT. TAKE THAT YOU BASTARDS.
Okay, clearly you have no idea what you're talking about, because a Cisco Universal Broadband Router is a bit of kit used to terminate DOCSIS lines. In other words, it's for cable-modem broadband, not wireless. It would be useless to you.
That said, for others who're reading and who might be interested in some high-end, Linux-based packet-processing kit (because really, the prices Cisco and Juniper and the rest of them charge really are past the ass-raping point of the screw-me spectrum), you could check out Vyatta: http://www.vyatta.com/
Enjoy. HTH.
Your comment ("the reason people ignore you is because you're a dick") is clearly a troll, but it was also moderated Insightful ... which might also be a troll :)
Nevertheless, assuming for a moment that you're being truthful in your expression, then I have this to say:
This is what is wrong with the world today. Billions upon millions of morons who don't know what they're doing, and people trying to show them how to (or, hell, what the fuck - people trying to beat them into) do(ing) it the right way.
You want these assholes who can't even figure out how to correctly measure something to build the bridge you drive over twice a day? How about the building you work in?
Or I dunno, maybe you'd prefer having _only_ people who will point out errors when they see them working on it? How about your doctor? You want your operating room filled with maybe one smart guy who recognizes an error and six people who don't know any better? And you're saying that, when the smart guy recognizes the error and tries to point it out (no matter HOW he does it, though I'm betting the original poster isn't that much of an asshat at work), he's being a dick?
Christ, what's wrong with you? Seriously?
Okay, so you don't buy that MySQL couldn't survive as a strictly open-source project without the ability to sell proprietary/closed-source licenses (like they currently can). I wouldn't argue that.
How do you respond to this scenario?:
Oracle owns MySQL. Oracle shapes MySQL's development very slowly over the course of a decade or two, cementing it in its current niche (and, thus, it will never be a threat to Oracle's ridiculously fat profit margins).
In this scenario, do you think there will sufficient impetus to fork and grow an open-source-only MySQL project (with a different brand and basically a new community starting from scratch)?
Surely you can agree that the desire for such will be radically reduced, possibly to the point that it's not feasible?
Even if it is feasible, surely you can agree that it would almost certainly slow down MySQL's developments in this direction by years? (For many years MySQL has been growing more and more feature-rich, arguable to expand the roles that it can play. I would say pretty much all of their current momentum is in this direction.)
"MySql is a low-end [DB]" ... "[some] companies replacing their Oracle database with a MySql one, but those are very few and far between"
:)
And you can be pretty bloody sure that if Oracle owns MySQL, that'll never change.
Something you should consider is "perfect market" vs. "real world".
In a perfect market, outsourcing is the main way of taking advantage of economies of scale. You don't run your own national telecommunications network, you outsource it to the national network. You end up paying (cost - economies of scale + profit). The trick is, if you can reach those economies of scale with your datacenter, and you're a competent bunch, you end up paying (cost - economies of scale). So you can save money. There are obvious security and accountability advantages too.
That's the perfect market. In the real world, these folk charge far more than (cost - economies of scale + profit). They cater to inept organisations who couldn't collaboratively tie their shoes up without a contractor to show them how to do it. So you end up paying (cost_of_incompetents_doing_the_job - economies of scale + profit). The profit part of the equation is miniscule compared to the differences between "cost" and "cost of incompetents doing the job". If the home-grown data center would be big enough (I don't know that it would be, given the brief description in the post), and if it was competently-run, then you can save huge amounts of money by doing it in-house (again, aside from all other benefits).
This post has dealt exclusively with cost. Personally I would consider the other factors (security, accountability) to be the deciding factors, assuming that both options implemented services competently.