Whats even more ridiculous is the assumption that more computing power MUST lead to some sort of magic AI. Err no. Thats like plugging your computer in a 220 outlet and expecting it to run twice as fast. This kind of AI is a software/theory/psychologica/semantic/epistemologi cal/neurologic/behavior problem. Yeah, good luck with that.
>how does that system (which I like, don't get me wrong) guard against one person with twenty usernames?
Yeah, that's a good question and after I hit post I thought about it myself. I would think at this point taco should implement nofollow, thus getting rid of the incentive to raise one's search engine ranking. At metafilter, for example, you have to be a member for 30 days before you can post and membership is 5 dollars, so they don't have the mass-signup problem.
I understand Taco's concerns but one of my own projects has been linked to slashdot and (too lazy to check) I think I even got a story in here once. Never did i think "OMG I'm going to the top Google, Yahoo, Teoma, Msn, etc." I was just glad to contribute and get recognition. Lots of people clicked on my username and visited my sites, etc. It was fairly pleasant all around. Even my webhost didn't collapse.
So the idea that nofollow ruins incentive doesn't fly with me and in my own personal experience wasn't a big motivator. I think Taco is simply mistaken on this issue.
>If you become a popular submitter it is because you submit relevant stories.
I don't even like the idea of a popular submitter. There are enough people here submitting stuff that we don't even need them. Limiting submissions to 1 or 2 a day is probably the best way to go. Why?
1. Now that we know that people can just write scripts and submit unlimited stories thats a -disincentive- to submit. Why should I get off my ass, write a summary, check my links, spelling, etc when Beatles Beatles will just mass post the very same CNET article except with a worse summary.
2. Unlimited submissions in general is just a bad idea. There really should be a limit for the sake of community spirit.
Metafilter had this exact same problem. Users would post to the front page multiple times daily to the point it would just get ridiculous and 3 or 4 voices were dominating the site. Matt changed the site so you could only post once a day to the front page. The quality of the site went up dramatically. Same when he implemented ask.metafilter.com. You could ask a question daily (or more than daily) and the questions became very "chatty" and silly. Then he limited the questions to once a week, so most people think before wasting their once a week question.
Essentially, limiting the submission system will produce a more varied information ecology, encourage nobodies without scripting systems to submit, and get rid of the "search engine optimization" spammers.
Not to mention, I dont think nofollow will even make a difference to these people. Some will do this just for the challenge or just to see page hits on their ad-ridden sites.
Lets face it, lawyers who get caught up in big class-settlement types are more of the ambulance chsing kind. They can't negotiate well and most members of the settlement group will settle for anything. So they just work with Sony for the least expensive settlement the judge will allow. And here it is! The lawyers get paid, the plaintiffs get some token crap, and everyone wins.
Ideally, the damages should include time spent cleaning their rootkit off windows machines. What would best buy charge for that? Or the local computer shop?
Also, American legislators really need to take a look at the Sony company. If this was a US company it probably would have been found guilty of various antitrust actions. A content company which also makes players, which also makes DRM, which also makes CDs, which also signs artists, which also makes game systems, game systems with blu ray players, etc. I don't usually tow the "big buisness sucks" line, but Sony tends to make Microsoft look like Richard Stallman, yet there is little to no outrage.
What does that mean? That anyone who does anything remotely creative must be using a mac, because, well, macs are kewl to the kiddies? Because Apple uses pictures of artists in their commercials?
Oh please.
A machine is a tool and a surprsingly small amount of people take the fanboy OS wars seriously. Good for them. I hope Fripp enjoys his cash, makes some decent music, and doesnt have to deal with OS fanatics.
>So I can't use this. >Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Oh the irony of your sig! As long as they have conservative pro-business types like you to bend over and take it they will keep producing restrictive DRM and incompatible junk as such is the will of a very free market with little to no consumer protections.
See, this is why so many people don't like to hear the free trader types quote Milton Friedman chapter and verse. Without real protections for the consumer you're getting (and have gotten) much poorer products and services. Limiting the freedom of the market for basic consumer demands like compatibility, making backups, etc is the way to go. Meanwhile, enjoy your useless TV because of the format wars, interface wars, the war on analog ins and outs, and the DRM wars.
The US being one of the moist violent societies on earth and the home of various rebelious art movements not the least of which is rock and roll, well, something tells me the conspiracy theorists are full of it.
If anything fluoride is needed in a country without universal health insurance and free dentistry.
So when in Japan going to step up to Sony's anti-competitive practices. They're part of the content industry and pushing their DRM + Blu Ray because they can "bundle" these into their new PS3, which is in another unrelated market - console gaming.
MS wishes it was half as evil as Sony gets away with. All this anti-MS rhetoric is keeping people away from seeing one of their larger enemies, this one with no government sanctions as Japan really isn't into that kind of thing.
Yep. Not only is Sony in the movie industry they also are going to produce the first mass blu ray player called the Playstation 3. Whatever Sony decides goes. Is Japan lax on anti-trust legislation? Sony's position of being both in the content industry and producing media players is abusive and gives them an unbelievable leg up on all competition.
Only on slashdot would that comment be considered insightful.
Where are you going to get your groupware from? Don't like paying for exchange, then pay for something like *shudder* Scalix.
Exchange isn't just an email server, it also does groupware, unlike Sendmail. If your company only does email and bought Exchange then guess what? Its your company's fault for buying a Lexus when all they needed was a Hyundai. Sorry, but you can't blame MS for this one.
Well, that's right and that's wrong. For instance, I'd much rather have incredibly fast RAM than simply more RAM. Imagine a typical winXP machine, using standard applications you usually don't go past 512megs of RAM. Customers who are in this range would benefit more from faster RAM than than simply more RAM.
Also this applies to broadband. Comcast's business model is to keep increasing download speeds. At a certain point the laws of diminishing returns kick in. I don't really care if that iso takes 4 minutes instead of 6. I do care about how low my upstream cap is (for filesharing). I do care about how crappy my latency is (for gaming/voip).
There's more to these things than just how big they are. See also: the megahertz myth.
1. Would probably be anti-competitive and may cause more legal problems for MS.
2. Will make MS look really bad if they can't keep up or rewrite a web browser. The world's largest software company can't handle their own web browser code? Major PR and industry set back.
3. Would be a waste of almost HALF A BILLION dollars considering the money already put into IE. MS could afford to buy most small countries, but that doesn't mean its a good idea.
4. Won't do activeX and other MS propriety stuff out of box. The labor to fix this could be spent elsewhere - making IE7.
But the idea does mean Dvorak gets another paycheck. Bravo, man. Someday I hope to have a cush job like yours.
Eventually all this will (if it hasnt already) bite them serverly in the ass. Losing the Europe market isn't an option. Its huge. The stockholders would get management replaced if they pulled a stunt like that. Not to mention the EU is right and is doing what America is unable or unwilling to do herself.
>but I bet that what we most commonly use the web for nowadays is not what even Sir Tim had in mind.
So? Linus probably never thought he'd be writing code for missile trajectory systems. Edison would be completely and utterly confused by 21st century life, culture, and technology.
As far as myspace goes, to each his own. At the very least it has a positive social function in the exchange of ideas and networking, albeit for a certain demographic. Just because you aren't a teen anymore doesn't mean that suddenly all teens suck or that things were 'better' before.
If people are concerned about control, legacy, content filtering, etc then they should stay out of the open game. Go proprietary like Compuserv, Prodigy, and to a lesser extent AOL. Technology which decentralizes information like the internet or the printing press leads to many things. Hearing people complain about ordinary blogs, LJ, myspace, etc must have been just like hearing the Catholic church complain about how people are learning to read their own bibles or are publishing criticism of government and the church. Some things never change it seems.
It also should be weighed on the severity of the error. I mean, you won't hear that Steve Ditko is a "chaos magician" in Britnannica or that random newspaper editors had a role in both Kennedy assisinations. I'd also would like to see a study on bias. The wikipedia people work hard to get a clean POV, but you have the problem of motivation. The people most motivated to edit GWB's bio page (or any semi-controversial figure) are either going to be loud-mouth supporters or loud-mouth detractors. Sometimes when I browse the wikipedia I find some serious bias, edit it, and find that the motivated biased person just goes back and re-edits it. That's a great demotivator. People who put in time to make it work just get editied out by the nuts with too much free time on their hands.
Even Wales says there's going to be changes to stop such free and open-editing. Hopefully, these problems are just growing pains for one of the coolest projects on the web.
>but one day it will be too far and we won't have even realised
So? Am I the only person who thinks it might be a good idea to raise some animals closer to our level? A smarter mouse or a smarter dog is just that, a smarter animal not a human babie with paws instead of hands. Ethically, its arguably helping animals and practically it would make things like search and rescue operations run a lot smoother if the dog understood more abstract concepts and could communicate better with its handlers.
Its funny how every few years there's a major ethical line to cross and once its crossed its not a big deal. Remember the big concerns over c-sections, enriching foods with vitamins, television 'radiation' in the home, golden rice, vaccinations, etc? Yeah, neither do I. Outside of a nutjob marginalized super-minority no one sees these things as threatening anymore, nor do they have data to back up their claims. I'm sure a lot of the "yuck factors" we're seeing today will make us look like those who protested against spoiling milk by adding vitamin D or developing goldenrice to provide vitamin A to those who are deficient in it.
As we approach easier manipulation of ourselves and our environment the so called "yuck factor" will keep coming up and as we get used to these things it will go on the back burner as the talking heads start worrying about the next big thing like nanomachines or whatever the near future might hold.
Right. One of the traps of creating sci-fi is that the assumptions that people will all be these quiet stoic types is too often believed. Look at the wooden acting from Natalie Portman (and others) in the new Star Wars movies. Those born in the republic are so cultured they're like Victorians who are too embarrased to properly display emotion, which kinda kills the whole acting thing. Good writing, be it sci-fi or not, has to do with flawed everyday humans not some near-future stoics. Look at Bladerunner, even the replicants come off more human that Aeon Flux or Padmé Amidala.
Note to sci-fi movie makers: If you write a future where everyone is on qualuudes, then tell us they are on qualuudes, or else the audience will assume its just a bad movie.
This was actually a really good interview. At first I was a bit put off by the fact that jeff wasn't some mover or shaker in the industry, but as I kept reading, the more I appreciated he wasn't. Lots of good ground level stories, advice, etc here. He spoke freely as possible, which is quite a change from the content-free PR focuesed interviews you see here sometimes I'm not even that interested in the industry and I found it enthralling. The early days of anything are usually interesting and the sometimes ordinary people they pick up for 2 dollars over minimum can be the best employees and storytellers.
When you get a bit older and your list of gift receivers gets huge and you really don't know exactly what someone wants then you'll see the wisdom of the gift card. Especially when it saves someone from waiting in line to return something they dont want or already have.
Not to mention, Xmas is pretty much forced on everyone is in the US. For some people I'll make some real effort and buy/create a really nice gift, but to expect me or anyone to do this for everyone is ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
Whats even more ridiculous is the assumption that more computing power MUST lead to some sort of magic AI. Err no. Thats like plugging your computer in a 220 outlet and expecting it to run twice as fast. This kind of AI is a software/theory/psychologica/semantic/epistemologi cal/neurologic/behavior problem. Yeah, good luck with that.
>how does that system (which I like, don't get me wrong) guard against one person with twenty usernames?
Yeah, that's a good question and after I hit post I thought about it myself. I would think at this point taco should implement nofollow, thus getting rid of the incentive to raise one's search engine ranking. At metafilter, for example, you have to be a member for 30 days before you can post and membership is 5 dollars, so they don't have the mass-signup problem.
I understand Taco's concerns but one of my own projects has been linked to slashdot and (too lazy to check) I think I even got a story in here once. Never did i think "OMG I'm going to the top Google, Yahoo, Teoma, Msn, etc." I was just glad to contribute and get recognition. Lots of people clicked on my username and visited my sites, etc. It was fairly pleasant all around. Even my webhost didn't collapse.
So the idea that nofollow ruins incentive doesn't fly with me and in my own personal experience wasn't a big motivator. I think Taco is simply mistaken on this issue.
>If you become a popular submitter it is because you submit relevant stories.
I don't even like the idea of a popular submitter. There are enough people here submitting stuff that we don't even need them. Limiting submissions to 1 or 2 a day is probably the best way to go. Why?
1. Now that we know that people can just write scripts and submit unlimited stories thats a -disincentive- to submit. Why should I get off my ass, write a summary, check my links, spelling, etc when Beatles Beatles will just mass post the very same CNET article except with a worse summary.
2. Unlimited submissions in general is just a bad idea. There really should be a limit for the sake of community spirit.
Metafilter had this exact same problem. Users would post to the front page multiple times daily to the point it would just get ridiculous and 3 or 4 voices were dominating the site. Matt changed the site so you could only post once a day to the front page. The quality of the site went up dramatically. Same when he implemented ask.metafilter.com. You could ask a question daily (or more than daily) and the questions became very "chatty" and silly. Then he limited the questions to once a week, so most people think before wasting their once a week question.
Essentially, limiting the submission system will produce a more varied information ecology, encourage nobodies without scripting systems to submit, and get rid of the "search engine optimization" spammers.
Not to mention, I dont think nofollow will even make a difference to these people. Some will do this just for the challenge or just to see page hits on their ad-ridden sites.
Lets face it, lawyers who get caught up in big class-settlement types are more of the ambulance chsing kind. They can't negotiate well and most members of the settlement group will settle for anything. So they just work with Sony for the least expensive settlement the judge will allow. And here it is! The lawyers get paid, the plaintiffs get some token crap, and everyone wins.
Ideally, the damages should include time spent cleaning their rootkit off windows machines. What would best buy charge for that? Or the local computer shop?
Also, American legislators really need to take a look at the Sony company. If this was a US company it probably would have been found guilty of various antitrust actions. A content company which also makes players, which also makes DRM, which also makes CDs, which also signs artists, which also makes game systems, game systems with blu ray players, etc. I don't usually tow the "big buisness sucks" line, but Sony tends to make Microsoft look like Richard Stallman, yet there is little to no outrage.
>very un-windows-user-ish.
What does that mean? That anyone who does anything remotely creative must be using a mac, because, well, macs are kewl to the kiddies? Because Apple uses pictures of artists in their commercials?
Oh please.
A machine is a tool and a surprsingly small amount of people take the fanboy OS wars seriously. Good for them. I hope Fripp enjoys his cash, makes some decent music, and doesnt have to deal with OS fanatics.
>So I can't use this.
>Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Oh the irony of your sig! As long as they have conservative pro-business types like you to bend over and take it they will keep producing restrictive DRM and incompatible junk as such is the will of a very free market with little to no consumer protections.
See, this is why so many people don't like to hear the free trader types quote Milton Friedman chapter and verse. Without real protections for the consumer you're getting (and have gotten) much poorer products and services. Limiting the freedom of the market for basic consumer demands like compatibility, making backups, etc is the way to go. Meanwhile, enjoy your useless TV because of the format wars, interface wars, the war on analog ins and outs, and the DRM wars.
>It helps people become docile and consentful.
The US being one of the moist violent societies on earth and the home of various rebelious art movements not the least of which is rock and roll, well, something tells me the conspiracy theorists are full of it.
If anything fluoride is needed in a country without universal health insurance and free dentistry.
LED traffic lights are a lot older than 5 years. The town I used to live in installed them ages ago.
So when in Japan going to step up to Sony's anti-competitive practices. They're part of the content industry and pushing their DRM + Blu Ray because they can "bundle" these into their new PS3, which is in another unrelated market - console gaming.
MS wishes it was half as evil as Sony gets away with. All this anti-MS rhetoric is keeping people away from seeing one of their larger enemies, this one with no government sanctions as Japan really isn't into that kind of thing.
Yep. Not only is Sony in the movie industry they also are going to produce the first mass blu ray player called the Playstation 3. Whatever Sony decides goes. Is Japan lax on anti-trust legislation? Sony's position of being both in the content industry and producing media players is abusive and gives them an unbelievable leg up on all competition.
Only on slashdot would that comment be considered insightful.
Where are you going to get your groupware from? Don't like paying for exchange, then pay for something like *shudder* Scalix.
Exchange isn't just an email server, it also does groupware, unlike Sendmail. If your company only does email and bought Exchange then guess what? Its your company's fault for buying a Lexus when all they needed was a Hyundai. Sorry, but you can't blame MS for this one.
>"Nobody needs that much memory",
Well, that's right and that's wrong. For instance, I'd much rather have incredibly fast RAM than simply more RAM. Imagine a typical winXP machine, using standard applications you usually don't go past 512megs of RAM. Customers who are in this range would benefit more from faster RAM than than simply more RAM.
Also this applies to broadband. Comcast's business model is to keep increasing download speeds. At a certain point the laws of diminishing returns kick in. I don't really care if that iso takes 4 minutes instead of 6. I do care about how low my upstream cap is (for filesharing). I do care about how crappy my latency is (for gaming/voip).
There's more to these things than just how big they are. See also: the megahertz myth.
Block ads. Works for me.
1. Would probably be anti-competitive and may cause more legal problems for MS.
2. Will make MS look really bad if they can't keep up or rewrite a web browser. The world's largest software company can't handle their own web browser code? Major PR and industry set back.
3. Would be a waste of almost HALF A BILLION dollars considering the money already put into IE. MS could afford to buy most small countries, but that doesn't mean its a good idea.
4. Won't do activeX and other MS propriety stuff out of box. The labor to fix this could be spent elsewhere - making IE7.
But the idea does mean Dvorak gets another paycheck. Bravo, man. Someday I hope to have a cush job like yours.
Hehe. One of the best comments I've seen in a long time.
Where can I buy a book of slashdot libs? Is thinkgeek stocking them yet?
>"ok...well see you later Europe."
Of course you would. This would be following:
Security... well see you later!
Interoperability... well see you later!
Open standards... well see you later!
Competitive prices... well see you later!
Eventually all this will (if it hasnt already) bite them serverly in the ass. Losing the Europe market isn't an option. Its huge. The stockholders would get management replaced if they pulled a stunt like that. Not to mention the EU is right and is doing what America is unable or unwilling to do herself.
Yeah, that was my first concern. That ramp looks serious, I wonder if its been tested on motorcycles, scooters, etc.
Other than that it seems like a good idea to me.
>but I bet that what we most commonly use the web for nowadays is not what even Sir Tim had in mind.
So? Linus probably never thought he'd be writing code for missile trajectory systems. Edison would be completely and utterly confused by 21st century life, culture, and technology.
As far as myspace goes, to each his own. At the very least it has a positive social function in the exchange of ideas and networking, albeit for a certain demographic. Just because you aren't a teen anymore doesn't mean that suddenly all teens suck or that things were 'better' before.
If people are concerned about control, legacy, content filtering, etc then they should stay out of the open game. Go proprietary like Compuserv, Prodigy, and to a lesser extent AOL. Technology which decentralizes information like the internet or the printing press leads to many things. Hearing people complain about ordinary blogs, LJ, myspace, etc must have been just like hearing the Catholic church complain about how people are learning to read their own bibles or are publishing criticism of government and the church. Some things never change it seems.
>it should be the number of errors per article.
It also should be weighed on the severity of the error. I mean, you won't hear that Steve Ditko is a "chaos magician" in Britnannica or that random newspaper editors had a role in both Kennedy assisinations. I'd also would like to see a study on bias. The wikipedia people work hard to get a clean POV, but you have the problem of motivation. The people most motivated to edit GWB's bio page (or any semi-controversial figure) are either going to be loud-mouth supporters or loud-mouth detractors. Sometimes when I browse the wikipedia I find some serious bias, edit it, and find that the motivated biased person just goes back and re-edits it. That's a great demotivator. People who put in time to make it work just get editied out by the nuts with too much free time on their hands.
Even Wales says there's going to be changes to stop such free and open-editing. Hopefully, these problems are just growing pains for one of the coolest projects on the web.
>Let's not forget how important our information infrastructures are and how dependent we have been on computers for quite sometime.
Yes, and let us not forget how the freerepublic is site for nuts and quacks.
>The human race slowly becoming extinct because everyone would rather hump a perfect digital partner
DON'T DATE ROBOTS! -His Highness the Space Pope
>but one day it will be too far and we won't have even realised
So? Am I the only person who thinks it might be a good idea to raise some animals closer to our level? A smarter mouse or a smarter dog is just that, a smarter animal not a human babie with paws instead of hands. Ethically, its arguably helping animals and practically it would make things like search and rescue operations run a lot smoother if the dog understood more abstract concepts and could communicate better with its handlers.
Its funny how every few years there's a major ethical line to cross and once its crossed its not a big deal. Remember the big concerns over c-sections, enriching foods with vitamins, television 'radiation' in the home, golden rice, vaccinations, etc? Yeah, neither do I. Outside of a nutjob marginalized super-minority no one sees these things as threatening anymore, nor do they have data to back up their claims. I'm sure a lot of the "yuck factors" we're seeing today will make us look like those who protested against spoiling milk by adding vitamin D or developing goldenrice to provide vitamin A to those who are deficient in it.
As we approach easier manipulation of ourselves and our environment the so called "yuck factor" will keep coming up and as we get used to these things it will go on the back burner as the talking heads start worrying about the next big thing like nanomachines or whatever the near future might hold.
Right. One of the traps of creating sci-fi is that the assumptions that people will all be these quiet stoic types is too often believed. Look at the wooden acting from Natalie Portman (and others) in the new Star Wars movies. Those born in the republic are so cultured they're like Victorians who are too embarrased to properly display emotion, which kinda kills the whole acting thing. Good writing, be it sci-fi or not, has to do with flawed everyday humans not some near-future stoics. Look at Bladerunner, even the replicants come off more human that Aeon Flux or Padmé Amidala.
Note to sci-fi movie makers: If you write a future where everyone is on qualuudes, then tell us they are on qualuudes, or else the audience will assume its just a bad movie.
This was actually a really good interview. At first I was a bit put off by the fact that jeff wasn't some mover or shaker in the industry, but as I kept reading, the more I appreciated he wasn't. Lots of good ground level stories, advice, etc here. He spoke freely as possible, which is quite a change from the content-free PR focuesed interviews you see here sometimes I'm not even that interested in the industry and I found it enthralling. The early days of anything are usually interesting and the sometimes ordinary people they pick up for 2 dollars over minimum can be the best employees and storytellers.
>giving thoughtful and meaningful gifts
Heavy with the moralizing today eh?
When you get a bit older and your list of gift receivers gets huge and you really don't know exactly what someone wants then you'll see the wisdom of the gift card. Especially when it saves someone from waiting in line to return something they dont want or already have.
Not to mention, Xmas is pretty much forced on everyone is in the US. For some people I'll make some real effort and buy/create a really nice gift, but to expect me or anyone to do this for everyone is ridiculous.