Methodology is the study of methods. The sentence "when other methodologies are more appropriate" therefore makes no sense. The proper word to use here would be "methods". This error seems to be common and rarely corrected so I thought I'd point it out.
You are right, of course. The problem is that the misuse came into common use before the correct use was firmly entrenched. Thus, whether we like it or not, it is correct in the sense that it is widely used and understood. I bristle at enough of the linguistic atrocities committed around me that I understand the urge to post a correction. Thanks for not turning it into a grammar flame.
After twenty some years, its obvious that object-oriented programming is not a panacea.
While I can't speak for him, I don't think Bjarne Stroustrup ever said that OO was a panacea. I'll speak for myself instead and give some of my own opinions on it.
I use OO in C++ regularly these days. However, because of the nature of the projects I have worked on, I have also worked with procedural code: legacy C code, a reporting language, shell scripts. I have also played a bit with generic programming. My conclusion is that the best paradigm for any problem is the one that leads to the simplest solution. OO is best when it elegantly expresses the problem domain.
I've seen some wonderfully elegant OO C++ code. I've written some good OO C++ code. And I have seen some truly awful inheritance hierarchies that seemed nearly bottomless, with methods inherited from ancestral classes 10 or 12 steps up the tree.
Back in the mid-80's I was told by an interviewer that I should give up my plans to become a programmer because 4th Generation Languages would make programmers obsolete. A decade and a half later, I am still writing code. The hard part is rarely the expression of the design in code. That is a skill, and an important one, but if it were the hard part of programming, then 4GLs might have made us obsolete. The hard part is analyzing the problem domain and designing the solution. C++ and OO are two tools for achieving the goal of working code and, judging solely from the amount of code written using them and their longevity, good ones.
Now, has OO run out of steam? No, not really. A more specific question might be: Now that a large number of programmers have been using OO for a while, or trying to, what have we learned about when OO is useful and when other methodologies are more appropriate?
Statistics being used to prove nothing
on
LonelyNet
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· Score: 3
For me, being on line is almost exclusively a social activity. I post to Slashdot, Usenet and several mailing lists. I am carrying on a correspondence with lots of people. In fact, I suspect that a subtle part of the appeal of the Free Software community is the desire to talk to people like ourselves. We aren't all socially inept just because we're nerds. We're intense and passionate about our interests, and they don't happen to be the same as those of the guys watching the game at the sports bar down the street.
I've talked about this before. The Net has made possible communities without location. Slashdot is an excellent example of that. We have quite a range of personalities here. We have a few shared interests about which our interest ranges from serious to passionate. But we speak the same language. I dug up an article,The Outsiders, last year about the difficulties that highly intelligent people ave socially. It debunks the theory that it is due primarily to social ineptitude. Instead, the author theorizes, with studies to back him up, that the problem is one of gradual alienation because of differing rates of development in childhood and different interests.
I have thought for years that most self-selecting non-mainstream interests tend to attract groups with an average intelligence higher than that of society as a whole. I emphatically do not mean that any given member of such a group is exceptional by association. But there are two reasons corresponding to the low and high ends of the spectrum. At the low end, there is a question of ability and opportunity. The self-selection process tends to weed out the least able. At the high end, the article that I cited above points out that the highly intelligent tend to have many interests, often too many for the time that they can devote to them. Thus, through both ability, and desire, they are more likely to participat in many interests.
One important fact to consider is that most human characteristics that can be measured quantitatively fall on a bell curve statistically. There are fewer individuals at the high and low ends of the curve. If the article (The Outsiders) is correct and there is actually a communication gap between people of radically differing intelligence, then finding people to talk to requires a larger population for people at the extremes. The Net does exactly that. Not only are there a huge number of people easily accessible here, but it is easy to find communities for nearly any interest.
Far from being a lonely place, the Net is perhaps the medium of choice for forming communities out of widely scattered people with unusual interests.
I learned a long time ago that not everyone likes the same things I do. And I learned to seek out sources for reviews that share my tastes and my needs. As a result of that, I have a copy of Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler sitting in front of me. I bought it partly based on the review on Slashdot. I bought and read The Practice of Programmer by Kernighan and Pike in part because of this review. To those of you taking the time to post book reviews here, I offer my thanks. You are being read.
As an example, a few days ago, on the "life on other planets" article, I decided to do a little experiment. I had an opportunity to get a first post, so I made a long-winded seemingly-insightful comment which had absolutely nothing to do with the article, but seemed like it since it was related to the idea of life on other worlds being improbable but not impossible. Trite, banal, and completely pointless - but yet it got moderated up to +5.
This is the kind of thing which the trolls apparently have an issue with.
That sounds like some pretty awful moderation. I wasn't aware of that. I've certainly posted for Karma myself often enough, but I'm not in it just for the damn Karma, so when I do it I post something useful. In fact, I had been writing some notes on how to improve your Karma with the intention of posting them. I think I'll wait.
Do we need some dedicated moderators looking for specific things? I don't think cosmetic patches to the current system can stop bad moderation.
Free software has two things going for it in this case. First, there is a long history of evolution rather than completely scrapping good software. There is no reason that the best solution can't evolve from the partial solutions that already exist, just as CVS was built as a new set of tools on top of the perfectly good RCS file format and initially even used RCS under the hood.
Second, there are a number of good tools that already solve parts of the problem available in source. Anyone with an interest in solving this can go to it. It sounded to me like a proposal to start developing a new tool. I look forward to seeing the prototype.
Over the next few months, other rumors (all undoubtedly from "reliable sources") will be published suggesting that Intel's next generation "Athlon killing" processors are only a few days away, yet until the Willamette is released no sooner than October, Intel will have nothing new to offer.
This is looking somewhat sooner than October. We'll just have to see how long it takes them to start producing in significant quantities. Let's hope for Intel's sake that it isn't October. I wonder if that article prompted the demo.
A bunch of folks who don't know anything jumping on a bandwagon late, and getting the style but not the substance.
Yes, there are a lot of those. There are always going to be. And there are going to be candidates whose web sites are declared to be open source with no understanding of what that means. That doesn't mean that the Jargon File itself is useless. First, parts of it are hilarious. But more importantly, it gives a single resource that we can all point to for definitions of hackerly jargon and word play.
No matter how long you've been a hacker, and we were all newbies once, there are going to be terms that are new to you. I remember reading a predecessor to the Jargon File back in the early 80's. I thought I was a programming god because I had written a few barely interesting games in BASIC. And I grew up. I've written a lot of code since then (a million or two lines of code might be a good guess). I know how naive I was then. And I use a fair number of the terms in the Jargon File.
I was going to ask why ESR moved it to jargon.org, but after going there the reason is obvious. The jargon.org server is suffering from a moderate case of the Slashdot Effect:
1. Also spelled "/. effect"; what is said to have happened when a website being virtually unreachable because too many people are hitting it after the site was mentioned in an interesting article on the popular Slashdot news service. The term is quite widely used by/. readers, including variants like "That site has been slashdotted again!" 2. In a perhaps inevitable generation, the term is being used to describe any similar effect from being listed on a popular site.
So I went looking for mirrors. None of these are official. They are just what a search on Google turned up:
I found quite a few more, but all of them on older versions. I certainly don't want to kill either of these two sites, so please folks, if you are mirroring The Jargon File, update your mirrors and post the links.
None of the things he suggested are incompatible with why I want GNU/Linux, but no of them directly further it either. I need an environment that I can tailor to my own needs. Programming is a way of capturing knowledge in a form in which it can later be used. I automate routine tasks with shell scripts and Perl and Emacs Lisp and I forget the details. The reason is simple. GNU/Linux has a programmer interface. It is as important as a user interface for my style of use.
Any environment that cuts me off from not only the tools that I have built over the years, but any mechanism for building more is going to decrease my productivity. I can walk up to nerly any Linux system anywhere and expect to find bash and perl. Half of them at least will probably have either GNU Emacs or XEmacs. Most will have gcc and g++. My tools can travel with me in the Unix world and even more so in the Open Source world.
In the headlong rush to make Linux more approachable for the average user, there has been and will be a concentration on the user interface. This almost always means the GUI. This is not a bad thing. GUIs are excellent for anything you are using for the first time or that you use very infrequently. They can turn the task of remembering commands into one of recognizing them on menus or icons. But for tasks that are done dozens of times a day, there is no user interface that can provide greater leverage than being able to script them, and if they are automatic enough, make even the task of launching them disappear by handing them to cron.
Don't ever abandon the true power of GNU/Linux for GUI glitz. If the power of the programmer interface ever disappears, so will many of the people who are the strength of the open source community. The people who build it must have the tools to build it with. And those tools should be available on every installed system or no farther away than the CD it came on.
For the past few days, the amount of moderation done has been practically non-existant. It's not just a case of moderation posts being wasted on trolls...I haven't seen very much positive moderation either.
I've been wondering about this myself. I know that there has been moderation going one because I got moderator points yesterday (all used positively since I just ignore the trolls). But I've noticed that it has been quite some time since anything I have written has been moderated either way. I had just suspected that I was being overly fond of my own writing, but hearing this from someone else makes me wonder.
1) People should get a rating based on the TIME they have been a Slashdot, not just this "karma". New members posts start at -1, no exceptions. After three months, they start at 0. After three more months, they start at 1. This means that if a troll wants to troll, he'll have to put in his dues for six months. If he then wants to blow it all on a single, grand, troll parade...fine. He can start all over.
It doesn't matter whether you start new users at -1, 0 or 1 when we can set our moderation thresholds. I think starting people at -1 is going to discourage worthwhile new posters. Instead, keep the Anonymous Cowards at 0, new users at 1, and try some version of the next suggestion:
2) Karma needs to weigh much, much more. People with karma over 50 should start posting at 2. People with karma over 100 should start posting at 3. People with karma over 200 should start posting at 4 and people with karma over 500 (if they exist) must be worth reading.
I think this would serve nicely as a self-regulating mechanism. If you like having a strong positive Karma, and the benefits that go with it, you continue to post useful comments.
3) Each post takes exponentially longer to be posted to the system. First post takes one second to reach the forum. The next takes two seconds. The following takes four. Then eight, sixteen and so forth. In the end, if someone really wants to post more than 20 messages in a single day, they'll have to wait until tomorror for people to see them. That way these floods STOP.
I think you mean each post from the same user on a given day. Is there an easy way to enforce this on a single Anonymous Coward?
4) More moderation. I'd much rather see a war of moderation than a war of trolls. Give anyone with karma over 100 permanent moderation status. The only way it gets revoked is if them make a posting, and then it is revoked for twenty-four hours (thought on that article permanently).
I wonder how well that would work. I tend to post regularly, with a comment or two on at least one or two articles a day. I'd rarely be allowed to moderate except when I've been out of touch for a day. However, a few people with permanent moderator status who are willing to take on the burden of moderating trolls down might not hurt.
I suspect there will be disagreements about moderation regardless of the policy. I know that I have moderated up at least one article that had been moderated down, and I find myself disagreeing with maybe 5% of the moderation when I meta-moderate. There's no way to please everyone.
Was it your idea to claim that algore2000.com web site is "Open Source"? Do you even understand what Open Source means, or did you just decide to put yet another buzz word on the site, along with "information superhighway", which Al Gore likes to use so often?
This question certainly needs to be asked, but I think there is a need to be specific about the full issue. Here is my attempt to state the question as completely as possible, with links:
The algore2000 website claims to be an "open site". The is clearly an attempt to choose a term other than Open Source after the reaction of the Open Source community to the initial application of that label to the site. The statement, here begins with:
In the spirit of the Open Source movement, we have established the Gore 2000 Volunteer Source Code Project. www.algore2000.com is an "open site".
Invoking the name of the Open Source movement is clearly an attempt to either court it as a constituency or for help with the web site, or both. If you want that, you can't go with half measures. I read the legal notice. I realize that the limitations on who can contribute are an effort to be sure that all of the contributed source code is kept strictly on the legal side of election laws. That's fine. However, to be Open Source a project must meet certain criteria, including:
The software must be freely redistributable.
Source code must be included with the distribution.
Derivative works, as long as they are clearly labelled as such, are allowed.
The license must not discriminate against any field of endeavour.
The license must not be specific to a product.
The first item would clearly allow an unmodified mirror of the algore2000 web site, but not under your direct control. The second, if the site is entirely HTML and images has been met simply by putting it on the web. The rest, take together, would allow an opponent to copy the look and feel while changing the content or anyone to create a parody.
There are other conditions on the Open Source web site (http://www.opensource.org/). Please, tell us specifically which ones you are honoring and which ones you are deviating from as an "open site" and why.
In fact, a Slashdot-like forum, possibly using the same code, could be just the ticket. Moderation by lots of eyes to make the better material bubble to the top could save even the people to do the final screening for the lawyers some time.
Some of the things that we, the non-lawyers can do for the lawyers are:
Find documented cases of prior art for patent disputes. The lawyers know the legal terms, but there is no way that they can stay current on as many technical specialties as we can.
Put them in contact with experts in those specialties.
Explain technologies and terminology. Okay, we aren't all good at putting the really heavy terminology into layman's terms, but some people here can.
I think the breakdown is probably valid. And the primary reason it is happening is obvious. This is a competition for what is often called mindshare, but which is more fundamental than even that. We are spending our single most precious resource here: time. And few of us have the time to spend on all of these things in depth.
However, I don't think that the analogy with continents is correct. Perhaps a better analogy would be with either cable channels or with magazines and newspapers. The reason is that we don't have to move physically to change our allegiance from one to another. In fact, we don't have to switch completely, and reallocating our time from one to another is even quicker than dropping one magazine subscription in favor of another. It is as quick as changing channels. And when you channel surf on the net, you never have to miss your favorite show.:-)
But in terms of the iCraveTV and DeCSS injunctions, (which the courts handed down in January), both are keeping people from accessing the product of the Motion Picture Association.
They're not at all. I don't follow you're logic there.
For another public figure to not understand the question would be understandable. But he is the head of the MPAA. It is with his sanction that the lawsuits have been filed. The first sentence of his answer is simply not true, but is the policy of the MPAA. For him to ave said otherwise would have been incredible. The second appears to be willful ignorance on his part, prehaps a disavowal of responsibility for understanding.
This one answer and the context in which it was given speaks volumes. Whether he doesn't know, doesn't understand, or is pretending ignorance isn't particularly relevant. He is publically stating that the central issue of the lawsuits is irrelevant and is trying to shift the focus.
This isn't even about profits. In the end, DVD will be opened up to the world or it will die. There are too many bright people out there who will be happy to replace it with something that the MPAA doesn't control. And that is the central issue. These two lawsuits are about the MPAA defending the illusion that it is still relevant. Over the next few years, it will change or it will disappear. These lawsuits, if they are won, can only serve to delay that for a moment.
This issue was mentioned in some circles (not the mainstream press, unfortunately) in the wake of the OJ Simpson trials. The problem is that the public, and most of the pundits, it appears, were not educated about the fact that the odds of a false negative and the odds of a false positive are related but not the same.
This brings up too issues. The first is the tendency to believe that technology can put complex techniques within the capabilities of people without training in the field. The second, closely related, is the belief that the reliability of the technology is not effected by the possibility of human error. On anything where the odds are stated as being that long, the two things I always ask are:
Do we understand the odds? Are we aware of all of the factors that might be significant when we are trying to get results to that many decimal places? There are any number of factors that can be ignored when you are looking for imprecise answers.
What were the opportunities for human error or corruption? I would expect them to be fairly high relative to the long odds stated here.
Many states have web sites for their state legislature. NY State's Senate and Assembly web sites include pending legislation. Presumably, similar systems are in place elsewhere. I can't search everywhere. But I think the aseembled hoards from Slashdot can. Watch what your state is doing. Rally the troops. Let's show them what a grassroots movement looks like backed by the Web.
One developer, informed of Microsoft's bug estimates, said all new software ships with lots of bugs but few software vendors are willing to acknowledge this reality. "The fact that Microsoft found that many bugs indicates to me just how thorough their testing processes are," said the Windows developer, who requested anonymity.
It could mean that they have done a really good job of finding the bugs, or it could mean that there are a lot of bugs to be found. It depends on a number of factors. What's the arrival rate of new bug reports? How are the known bugs distributed? How does that distribution compare to the distribution of new code in the system since the last release? How does the bug distribution compare to the distribution of testing effort? We don't know enough here other than to say that if this memo really is from within MS, we have no reason to dispute that they know about this many bugs.
For those of you reading this for whom English is not your native language. There are some things that can make free software more appealing in non-English speaking countries. Update or write HOWTOs for configuring Linux for your language/locale. Contribute to the translation of messages, documentation and man pages into your language. Contribute to the free Unicode font effort. Create a dictionary for ispell or aspell for your language if there isn't already one available.
Did the Geeks create the Net or the Net create the Geeks? There is no answer to this question. Each generation of geeks creates the foundation for those that follow. The Net has become a gathering place for many small and widely dispersed, self-selected groups because it makes possible community divorced from location. Large cities have often drawn minorities to them in the past. If you are a minority (linguistic, racial, religious, or otherwise), you stand a better chance of being able to get together with your fellows in a high concentration of people, even if they are no more common there.
If you draw the definition of geek broadly enough, then it fits any marginalized minority. True enough, it is frequently used almost that broadly. And oddly enough, I suspect there are some other odd commonalities among those of us who fit the definition of 20 years ago, bright, focused on intellectual interests to the exclusion of more common hobbies, socially awkward to some degree. Many of us have never been called geeks by anyone who isn't actually a geek. As The Jargon File points out in A Portrait of J. Random Hacker, the typical hacker is a voracious reader on a surprisingly wide range of subjects. Reading that description, I saw more of myself in it than I saw in Katz's piece above. I knew when I read it that the person or people who wrote it understood.
Not surprisingly, geeks can harbor a xenophobic streak of their own. Geeks often see the workplace, and the world, as split into two camps-those who get it and those who don't. The latter are usually derided as clueless "suits," irritating obstacles to efficiency and technological progress. "We make the systems that the suits screw up," is how one geek described this conflict.
This particular statement reminded me instantly of The Programmers' Stone. It describes the tension between what The Stone referred to as mappers and packers. One of the things that I regret about print media is that it must, of necessity, be more self-contained. Readers are less well served by references to other sources rather than led to further clarification. In this case, I believe that the discussion in The Stone about the effect of education on children's natural tendency towards mapping may shed more light on what geeks are than any single other source I have read recently. We are the ones who have not forgotten how to map, but who in many cases felt isolated because of that. Another article that examines this same issue from the perspective of intelligence and psychology is The Outsiders. If you've had a difficulty communicating with non-geeks, both of these articles are worth reading.
Find a blind friend. I have one and she's quite technically competent for a non-programmer. She just can't see. Put your friend in front of a Linux box with Emacspeak loaded on it. If your friend can navigate the site, it is probably sufficiently friendly for the blind. I've been trying to get her to visit Slashdot to tell me what she thinks. She told me Saturday night that she hasn't been here... yet.
Other companies (Redhat, VA Linux) have shown that they understand how to maintain the goodwill of the open source community. Eric Raymond's article The Magic Cauldron spells out several ways to make money in open source. I'd like to know more about Corel's plans, but I think we'll just have to wait and watch. They have certainly done the right things on Wine, so I'm hopefully that we will see more good things from them in the future.
Earthweb, by Marc Stiegler is an excellent exploration in fiction of some of the implications, both good and bad, of more freedom on the net and more protection of privacy. Marc's web site for the book is here. Both the related books and related links are interesting, partly because Marc is a programmer who has explored prototypes of some of the things he discusses in the book. If you are interested in a preview of the book, the publisher, Baen Books has put several chapters on the Web here.
For Marc and Baen, if you are reading this, a sequel would be welcome. The story left that possibility open while not desparately screaming for it like far too many books these days.
Circa 1991 or so, he was like the king of internet porn on usenet.
I can't either confirm or deny that. Until about a year ago, my Usenet feed was somewhat filtered. All I know is that he was a regular poster to a number of newsgroups, and that he made the suggestion that I posted a link to.
I just got wind of this. It seems a web service for reading Usenet will be highlighting keywords within the articles displayed through their site with links to advertisers who have purchased that service. The press release from the service itself is here. It is high time to start digitally signing everything with either PGP or GPG and licensing it only for unaltered redistribution.
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the OpenContent or any portion of it, thus forming works based on the Content, and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
a) You must cause the modified content to carry prominent notices stating that you changed it, the exact nature and content of the changes, and the date of any change.
b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the OC or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License, unless otherwise permitted under applicable Fair Use law.
Slashdot Mirror
Methodology is the study of methods. The sentence "when other methodologies are more appropriate" therefore makes no sense. The proper word to use here would be "methods". This error seems to be common and rarely corrected so I thought I'd point it out.
You are right, of course. The problem is that the misuse came into common use before the correct use was firmly entrenched. Thus, whether we like it or not, it is correct in the sense that it is widely used and understood. I bristle at enough of the linguistic atrocities committed around me that I understand the urge to post a correction. Thanks for not turning it into a grammar flame.
After twenty some years, its obvious that object-oriented programming is not a panacea.
While I can't speak for him, I don't think Bjarne Stroustrup ever said that OO was a panacea. I'll speak for myself instead and give some of my own opinions on it.
I use OO in C++ regularly these days. However, because of the nature of the projects I have worked on, I have also worked with procedural code: legacy C code, a reporting language, shell scripts. I have also played a bit with generic programming. My conclusion is that the best paradigm for any problem is the one that leads to the simplest solution. OO is best when it elegantly expresses the problem domain.
I've seen some wonderfully elegant OO C++ code. I've written some good OO C++ code. And I have seen some truly awful inheritance hierarchies that seemed nearly bottomless, with methods inherited from ancestral classes 10 or 12 steps up the tree.
Back in the mid-80's I was told by an interviewer that I should give up my plans to become a programmer because 4th Generation Languages would make programmers obsolete. A decade and a half later, I am still writing code. The hard part is rarely the expression of the design in code. That is a skill, and an important one, but if it were the hard part of programming, then 4GLs might have made us obsolete. The hard part is analyzing the problem domain and designing the solution. C++ and OO are two tools for achieving the goal of working code and, judging solely from the amount of code written using them and their longevity, good ones.
Now, has OO run out of steam? No, not really. A more specific question might be: Now that a large number of programmers have been using OO for a while, or trying to, what have we learned about when OO is useful and when other methodologies are more appropriate?
For me, being on line is almost exclusively a social activity. I post to Slashdot, Usenet and several mailing lists. I am carrying on a correspondence with lots of people. In fact, I suspect that a subtle part of the appeal of the Free Software community is the desire to talk to people like ourselves. We aren't all socially inept just because we're nerds. We're intense and passionate about our interests, and they don't happen to be the same as those of the guys watching the game at the sports bar down the street.
I've talked about this before. The Net has made possible communities without location. Slashdot is an excellent example of that. We have quite a range of personalities here. We have a few shared interests about which our interest ranges from serious to passionate. But we speak the same language. I dug up an article,The Outsiders, last year about the difficulties that highly intelligent people ave socially. It debunks the theory that it is due primarily to social ineptitude. Instead, the author theorizes, with studies to back him up, that the problem is one of gradual alienation because of differing rates of development in childhood and different interests.
I have thought for years that most self-selecting non-mainstream interests tend to attract groups with an average intelligence higher than that of society as a whole. I emphatically do not mean that any given member of such a group is exceptional by association. But there are two reasons corresponding to the low and high ends of the spectrum. At the low end, there is a question of ability and opportunity. The self-selection process tends to weed out the least able. At the high end, the article that I cited above points out that the highly intelligent tend to have many interests, often too many for the time that they can devote to them. Thus, through both ability, and desire, they are more likely to participat in many interests.
One important fact to consider is that most human characteristics that can be measured quantitatively fall on a bell curve statistically. There are fewer individuals at the high and low ends of the curve. If the article (The Outsiders) is correct and there is actually a communication gap between people of radically differing intelligence, then finding people to talk to requires a larger population for people at the extremes. The Net does exactly that. Not only are there a huge number of people easily accessible here, but it is easy to find communities for nearly any interest.
Far from being a lonely place, the Net is perhaps the medium of choice for forming communities out of widely scattered people with unusual interests.
I learned a long time ago that not everyone likes the same things I do. And I learned to seek out sources for reviews that share my tastes and my needs. As a result of that, I have a copy of Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code by Martin Fowler sitting in front of me. I bought it partly based on the review on Slashdot. I bought and read The Practice of Programmer by Kernighan and Pike in part because of this review. To those of you taking the time to post book reviews here, I offer my thanks. You are being read.
That sounds like some pretty awful moderation. I wasn't aware of that. I've certainly posted for Karma myself often enough, but I'm not in it just for the damn Karma, so when I do it I post something useful. In fact, I had been writing some notes on how to improve your Karma with the intention of posting them. I think I'll wait.
Do we need some dedicated moderators looking for specific things? I don't think cosmetic patches to the current system can stop bad moderation.
Free software has two things going for it in this case. First, there is a long history of evolution rather than completely scrapping good software. There is no reason that the best solution can't evolve from the partial solutions that already exist, just as CVS was built as a new set of tools on top of the perfectly good RCS file format and initially even used RCS under the hood.
Second, there are a number of good tools that already solve parts of the problem available in source. Anyone with an interest in solving this can go to it. It sounded to me like a proposal to start developing a new tool. I look forward to seeing the prototype.
This is looking somewhat sooner than October. We'll just have to see how long it takes them to start producing in significant quantities. Let's hope for Intel's sake that it isn't October. I wonder if that article prompted the demo.
A bunch of folks who don't know anything jumping on a bandwagon late, and getting the style but not the substance.
Yes, there are a lot of those. There are always going to be. And there are going to be candidates whose web sites are declared to be open source with no understanding of what that means. That doesn't mean that the Jargon File itself is useless. First, parts of it are hilarious. But more importantly, it gives a single resource that we can all point to for definitions of hackerly jargon and word play.
No matter how long you've been a hacker, and we were all newbies once, there are going to be terms that are new to you. I remember reading a predecessor to the Jargon File back in the early 80's. I thought I was a programming god because I had written a few barely interesting games in BASIC. And I grew up. I've written a lot of code since then (a million or two lines of code might be a good guess). I know how naive I was then. And I use a fair number of the terms in the Jargon File.
I'm a geek and I'm proud of it.
So I went looking for mirrors. None of these are official. They are just what a search on Google turned up:
I found quite a few more, but all of them on older versions. I certainly don't want to kill either of these two sites, so please folks, if you are mirroring The Jargon File, update your mirrors and post the links.
None of the things he suggested are incompatible with why I want GNU/Linux, but no of them directly further it either. I need an environment that I can tailor to my own needs. Programming is a way of capturing knowledge in a form in which it can later be used. I automate routine tasks with shell scripts and Perl and Emacs Lisp and I forget the details. The reason is simple. GNU/Linux has a programmer interface. It is as important as a user interface for my style of use.
Any environment that cuts me off from not only the tools that I have built over the years, but any mechanism for building more is going to decrease my productivity. I can walk up to nerly any Linux system anywhere and expect to find bash and perl. Half of them at least will probably have either GNU Emacs or XEmacs. Most will have gcc and g++. My tools can travel with me in the Unix world and even more so in the Open Source world.
In the headlong rush to make Linux more approachable for the average user, there has been and will be a concentration on the user interface. This almost always means the GUI. This is not a bad thing. GUIs are excellent for anything you are using for the first time or that you use very infrequently. They can turn the task of remembering commands into one of recognizing them on menus or icons. But for tasks that are done dozens of times a day, there is no user interface that can provide greater leverage than being able to script them, and if they are automatic enough, make even the task of launching them disappear by handing them to cron.
Don't ever abandon the true power of GNU/Linux for GUI glitz. If the power of the programmer interface ever disappears, so will many of the people who are the strength of the open source community. The people who build it must have the tools to build it with. And those tools should be available on every installed system or no farther away than the CD it came on.
For the past few days, the amount of moderation done has been practically non-existant. It's not just a case of moderation posts being wasted on trolls...I haven't seen very much positive moderation either.
I've been wondering about this myself. I know that there has been moderation going one because I got moderator points yesterday (all used positively since I just ignore the trolls). But I've noticed that it has been quite some time since anything I have written has been moderated either way. I had just suspected that I was being overly fond of my own writing, but hearing this from someone else makes me wonder.
1) People should get a rating based on the TIME they have been a Slashdot, not just this "karma". New members posts start at -1, no exceptions. After three months, they start at 0. After three more months, they start at 1. This means that if a troll wants to troll, he'll have to put in his dues for six months. If he then wants to blow it all on a single, grand, troll parade...fine. He can start all over.
It doesn't matter whether you start new users at -1, 0 or 1 when we can set our moderation thresholds. I think starting people at -1 is going to discourage worthwhile new posters. Instead, keep the Anonymous Cowards at 0, new users at 1, and try some version of the next suggestion:
2) Karma needs to weigh much, much more. People with karma over 50 should start posting at 2. People with karma over 100 should start posting at 3. People with karma over 200 should start posting at 4 and people with karma over 500 (if they exist) must be worth reading.
I think this would serve nicely as a self-regulating mechanism. If you like having a strong positive Karma, and the benefits that go with it, you continue to post useful comments.
3) Each post takes exponentially longer to be posted to the system. First post takes one second to reach the forum. The next takes two seconds. The following takes four. Then eight, sixteen and so forth. In the end, if someone really wants to post more than 20 messages in a single day, they'll have to wait until tomorror for people to see them. That way these floods STOP.
I think you mean each post from the same user on a given day. Is there an easy way to enforce this on a single Anonymous Coward?
4) More moderation. I'd much rather see a war of moderation than a war of trolls. Give anyone with karma over 100 permanent moderation status. The only way it gets revoked is if them make a posting, and then it is revoked for twenty-four hours (thought on that article permanently).
I wonder how well that would work. I tend to post regularly, with a comment or two on at least one or two articles a day. I'd rarely be allowed to moderate except when I've been out of touch for a day. However, a few people with permanent moderator status who are willing to take on the burden of moderating trolls down might not hurt.
I suspect there will be disagreements about moderation regardless of the policy. I know that I have moderated up at least one article that had been moderated down, and I find myself disagreeing with maybe 5% of the moderation when I meta-moderate. There's no way to please everyone.
This question certainly needs to be asked, but I think there is a need to be specific about the full issue. Here is my attempt to state the question as completely as possible, with links:
The algore2000 website claims to be an "open site". The is clearly an attempt to choose a term other than Open Source after the reaction of the Open Source community to the initial application of that label to the site. The statement, here begins with:
Invoking the name of the Open Source movement is clearly an attempt to either court it as a constituency or for help with the web site, or both. If you want that, you can't go with half measures. I read the legal notice. I realize that the limitations on who can contribute are an effort to be sure that all of the contributed source code is kept strictly on the legal side of election laws. That's fine. However, to be Open Source a project must meet certain criteria, including:
The first item would clearly allow an unmodified mirror of the algore2000 web site, but not under your direct control. The second, if the site is entirely HTML and images has been met simply by putting it on the web. The rest, take together, would allow an opponent to copy the look and feel while changing the content or anyone to create a parody.
There are other conditions on the Open Source web site (http://www.opensource.org/). Please, tell us specifically which ones you are honoring and which ones you are deviating from as an "open site" and why.
Some of the things that we, the non-lawyers can do for the lawyers are:
I think the breakdown is probably valid. And the primary reason it is happening is obvious. This is a competition for what is often called mindshare, but which is more fundamental than even that. We are spending our single most precious resource here: time. And few of us have the time to spend on all of these things in depth.
:-)
However, I don't think that the analogy with continents is correct. Perhaps a better analogy would be with either cable channels or with magazines and newspapers. The reason is that we don't have to move physically to change our allegiance from one to another. In fact, we don't have to switch completely, and reallocating our time from one to another is even quicker than dropping one magazine subscription in favor of another. It is as quick as changing channels. And when you channel surf on the net, you never have to miss your favorite show.
For another public figure to not understand the question would be understandable. But he is the head of the MPAA. It is with his sanction that the lawsuits have been filed. The first sentence of his answer is simply not true, but is the policy of the MPAA. For him to ave said otherwise would have been incredible. The second appears to be willful ignorance on his part, prehaps a disavowal of responsibility for understanding.
This one answer and the context in which it was given speaks volumes. Whether he doesn't know, doesn't understand, or is pretending ignorance isn't particularly relevant. He is publically stating that the central issue of the lawsuits is irrelevant and is trying to shift the focus.
This isn't even about profits. In the end, DVD will be opened up to the world or it will die. There are too many bright people out there who will be happy to replace it with something that the MPAA doesn't control. And that is the central issue. These two lawsuits are about the MPAA defending the illusion that it is still relevant. Over the next few years, it will change or it will disappear. These lawsuits, if they are won, can only serve to delay that for a moment.
This brings up too issues. The first is the tendency to believe that technology can put complex techniques within the capabilities of people without training in the field. The second, closely related, is the belief that the reliability of the technology is not effected by the possibility of human error. On anything where the odds are stated as being that long, the two things I always ask are:
Many states have web sites for their state legislature. NY State's Senate and Assembly web sites include pending legislation. Presumably, similar systems are in place elsewhere. I can't search everywhere. But I think the aseembled hoards from Slashdot can. Watch what your state is doing. Rally the troops. Let's show them what a grassroots movement looks like backed by the Web.
From the article:
One developer, informed of Microsoft's bug estimates, said all new software ships with lots of bugs but few software vendors are willing to acknowledge this reality. "The fact that Microsoft found that many bugs indicates to me just how thorough their testing processes are," said the Windows developer, who requested anonymity.
It could mean that they have done a really good job of finding the bugs, or it could mean that there are a lot of bugs to be found. It depends on a number of factors. What's the arrival rate of new bug reports? How are the known bugs distributed? How does that distribution compare to the distribution of new code in the system since the last release? How does the bug distribution compare to the distribution of testing effort? We don't know enough here other than to say that if this memo really is from within MS, we have no reason to dispute that they know about this many bugs.
For those of you reading this for whom English is not your native language. There are some things that can make free software more appealing in non-English speaking countries. Update or write HOWTOs for configuring Linux for your language/locale. Contribute to the translation of messages, documentation and man pages into your language. Contribute to the free Unicode font effort. Create a dictionary for ispell or aspell for your language if there isn't already one available.
Did the Geeks create the Net or the Net create the Geeks? There is no answer to this question. Each generation of geeks creates the foundation for those that follow. The Net has become a gathering place for many small and widely dispersed, self-selected groups because it makes possible community divorced from location. Large cities have often drawn minorities to them in the past. If you are a minority (linguistic, racial, religious, or otherwise), you stand a better chance of being able to get together with your fellows in a high concentration of people, even if they are no more common there.
If you draw the definition of geek broadly enough, then it fits any marginalized minority. True enough, it is frequently used almost that broadly. And oddly enough, I suspect there are some other odd commonalities among those of us who fit the definition of 20 years ago, bright, focused on intellectual interests to the exclusion of more common hobbies, socially awkward to some degree.
Many of us have never been called geeks by anyone who isn't actually a geek. As The Jargon File points out in A Portrait of J. Random Hacker, the typical hacker is a voracious reader on a surprisingly wide range of subjects. Reading that description, I saw more of myself in it than I saw in Katz's piece above. I knew when I read it that the person or people who wrote it understood.
Not surprisingly, geeks can harbor a xenophobic streak of their own. Geeks often see the workplace, and the world, as split into two camps-those who get it and those who don't. The latter are usually derided as clueless "suits," irritating obstacles to efficiency and technological progress. "We make the systems that the suits screw up," is how one geek described this conflict.
This particular statement reminded me instantly of The Programmers' Stone. It describes the tension between what The Stone referred to as mappers and packers. One of the things that I regret about print media is that it must, of necessity, be more self-contained. Readers are less well served by references to other sources rather than led to further clarification. In this case, I believe that the discussion in The Stone about the effect of education on children's natural tendency towards mapping may shed more light on what geeks are than any single other source I have read recently. We are the ones who have not forgotten how to map, but who in many cases felt isolated because of that. Another article that examines this same issue from the perspective of intelligence and psychology is The Outsiders. If you've had a difficulty communicating with non-geeks, both of these articles are worth reading.
Find a blind friend. I have one and she's quite technically competent for a non-programmer. She just can't see. Put your friend in front of a Linux box with Emacspeak loaded on it. If your friend can navigate the site, it is probably sufficiently friendly for the blind. I've been trying to get her to visit Slashdot to tell me what she thinks. She told me Saturday night that she hasn't been here ... yet.
Other companies (Redhat, VA Linux) have shown that they understand how to maintain the goodwill of the open source community. Eric Raymond's article The Magic Cauldron spells out several ways to make money in open source. I'd like to know more about Corel's plans, but I think we'll just have to wait and watch. They have certainly done the right things on Wine, so I'm hopefully that we will see more good things from them in the future.
Earthweb, by Marc Stiegler is an excellent exploration in fiction of some of the implications, both good and bad, of more freedom on the net and more protection of privacy. Marc's web site for the book is here. Both the related books and related links are interesting, partly because Marc is a programmer who has explored prototypes of some of the things he discusses in the book. If you are interested in a preview of the book, the publisher, Baen Books has put several chapters on the Web here.
For Marc and Baen, if you are reading this, a sequel would be welcome. The story left that possibility open while not desparately screaming for it like far too many books these days.
Circa 1991 or so, he was like the king of internet porn on usenet.
I can't either confirm or deny that. Until about a year ago, my Usenet feed was somewhat filtered. All I know is that he was a regular poster to a number of newsgroups, and that he made the suggestion that I posted a link to.
I just got wind of this. It seems a web service for reading Usenet will be highlighting keywords within the articles displayed through their site with links to advertisers who have purchased that service. The press release from the service itself is here. It is high time to start digitally signing everything with either PGP or GPG and licensing it only for unaltered redistribution.
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