VERY good point here. Note that if you read the article, simply owning the software was not the only charge... they broke laws with these cracking tools. The city was not simply bringing felonly charges on the individuals simply for owning the cracking tools.
Check out this link. Lots of interesting tidbits & tips. It doesn't cover some of the newer options (like disabling the shopping button), but covers a few other interesting things. http://www.inmind.com/p eople/phrank/commonly/userprefs.html
Take a look at http://terraserver.microsoft.com/ Yeah, it's a Micro$oft site, but the images are pretty impressive. The coverage is currently quite patchy, but some of the photos are almost as impressive as the sample photos from this article.
dynamic content makes the technical quantity of distinct "pages" far greater than a billion.
Surely you are correct. However, the operative term in that phrase is "indexable". I'm quite sure that neither Inktomi nor many other "spiders" such as AltaVista (to name one big one) can traverse links to dynamically generated pages. So even if the number of indexable pages is over one billion, that indeed leaves much content out of the big picture.
I had discussed this with my friends, and we all agreed that Michael J Fox could pull it off quite well. I don't know that he's muscular necessarily, but he never appears "flabby" or anything. If he was a few years younger it might help too...
This is not an attack on the author of the comment two levels up from mine... but please, why must people discuss the moderation of their own comments??
It's nearly always secondary to the topic at hand. Please, people... Stop your comments about "I'm gonna get moderated down for this, but..." sympathy cries. And please don't beg "Please moderate this up so people can see it" either. Sometimes it comes across like a child begging for attention.
Moderators will (and should) moderate as they see fit, without having to read the "please (do/do not) moderate me (up/down)" cries.
Check out dates of the reply posts at the bottom of that page... this is one of the many wwwboards that clearly has the 19100 bug. The programmer who wrote it apparently assumed that the localtime function would always return a two digit year. WRONG!
The messed date format says 1/1/100 on the reply posts.
How did you teach yourself Perl without reading the documentation?
By reading lots of FAQ's, tutorials, etc on multitudes of webpages... and reading other people's code. It was certainly a messy way to go about it, I'll give you that! I wouldn't encourage anybody else to learn it the way I did. Certainly my investments in Perl books have been completely worth it!
Ah -- if it's identical to C's, then I understand why it would cause such a ruckus to change it. I agree that it would cause more mess than benefit. Still makes me wonder why it wasn't 4-digit year from the start.;)
Indeed, this could be the root of a y2k bug in many Perl scripts. I'm self-taught in Perl, and discovered many things (the hard way) on my own. This was one of them. But you gotta admit, returning "the number of years since 1900" seems pretty lame.
You'd think that the localtime function could be rewritten to simply return the full year in a 4-digit format. Aside from messing up scripts that do $year+=1900, why not?
For those out there more knowledgeable than I, why hasn't this been done?
It really ticks me off to see people spreading the FUD about cookies. Especially when it's all in the vein of marketing. Clearly, Schmidt wants to plug his new "digitalme" online identification-management service, and needed a good reason to do so. Here's another example of someone exploiting the media to get gratuitous advertisement. He wants to say that his "digitalme" is better than cookies, and that's all fine and dandy. But it's not a real big deal yet. But maybe if he claims that he was the victim of credit card fraud through insecure cookies it will get him more attention. Hell, he's not even sure it was due to cookies (if it even happened at all):
Although he isn't sure exactly how his card number was lifted, Schmidt says he believes it was through a mechanism that reads the cookies-files sitting on a user's desktop and storing personal information, such as passwords and preferences.
Besides this, most any company that I would do online business with has the integrity & knowledge to NOT store credit card information in my cookie. Very few do so.
Mirror of Mooning Picture Perhaps if/when other things need mirroring I'll just slap 'em up on the angelfire site. Or I might remove the page altogether. I dunno.
I'm glad to see that yet another corporate giant isn't too big to realize what's in their best interests when it comes to web serving reliability.
Now if OnSale and other online-stores would only switch to Apache, it would make my surfing alot easier. Many times I've been surfing for that special piece of hardware only to find myself drumming my fingers on the desk waiting for their lame server to send me a page or two. If these competitors keep using their IIS or Netscape servers, they're only going to drown in their own downtime & latency.
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at some peoples' ignorance. I didn't realize that the BBC News was a tabloid. But listen to their un-scientific banter... what are their sources of this news?
Every international telephone call, fax, e-mail, or radio transmission can be listened to by powerful computers capable of voice recognition. They home in on a long list of key words, or patterns of messages. They are looking for evidence of international crime, like terrorism.
It sounds like science fiction, but it's true.
Wow. It can monitor every phone call, fax, radio transmission? Voice recognition? Evidence of international Crime? Let's think about this for a moment.
I know that at this very moment there are people being trained in the US Armed Forces whom the USA spends thousands and thousands of dollars on so they might learn Russian, Japanese, and other languages. Once they learn these languages, many are stationed at bases which have tapes of conversations, or in some cases live transmissions of radio signals, etc. These translators sit for hours and hours listening to boring conversations about the weather, foreign soldiers having phone-sex conversations with their sig. O's, etc all in the hopes of catching the *really important* information (whatever that might be). So now we can not only pick up all these transmissions, but can filter out the unimportant garbage? Can understand colloquialisms? Can determine the true value/threat of a given conversation? That's abso-fucking-lutely amazing. And to think that this whole time that all the real computing brainiacs have been working for the US Armed Forces, et. al. Who'da thunk it?
Please, be rational. This sort of technology doesn't just sound like science fiction, it is science fiction. Get a grip.
Perhaps this defeats the purpose of "archiving" the stories when they get old, but. . .
When I want to search Slashdot for a given topic, the search results are often of stories that have been archived. The problem is that when I want to read the worthwhile comments on a particular story, its very difficult because the archived page shows ALL comments, not just the ones above my threshhold. Hell, I even have to wade through the -1 postings of "first post!" and crap like that... Would there be any way to make the moderated-up comments displayed at the top?
You could sort the threads by score, highest to lowest, top to bottom. Is this too difficult to do without increasing server load / database size? Any thoughts on this?
What's the big deal? They want to sell ads on the webpage, not within the whois database itself.
"There are thousand of locations who link to Whois and all have the option of selling ads on those pages. To preclude NSI from doing this would be unfair and could be viewed as a restraint of trade."
If you're using whois from the command line, you will likely not see those animated GIF banner ads, am I right? So now let me ask you again -- do you really care?
I believe I'll have to re-read all of Rob's points on how moderation works, how they get their points, etc... but what about this?
Let moderators post AND moderate any article.
But... for each single article that is read by a moderator, they are given only 1 (one) moderation point, which they can use to promote or demote only a single post within the comments relating to that article. Once they have moderated any post (within a given article) up or down one point, that's it. They have no more moderation power over any other posts within the same article. And if they don't use that single moderation point while the article is available on the front page of/., they lose it. This would prevent the moderators from posting a comment for a given article as an AC and then moderating it up (since they'd only be able to moderate their own comment to a 1 which they could do if they were logged in anyways). Having only ONE point to offer for moderation would make sure that these moderators use their point very wisely.
I really do think that if a moderator is allowed only to moderate OR post, there will be less quality posts, and the moderators will be forced into silence when we could also be getting feedback from them.
Indeed, it seems that many people are so much less introverted when conversing upon the 'net that they don't really take heed to the fact that there is a real person on the end of the conversation. They'll spill their guts about anything and everything, and often telling the things about their personal lives we don't want to hear.
Through many different ways I've met people from online games, IRC, etc and despite the fact that the conversations were purely ASCII, using all those characters like (* ! $ _ etc) help to emphasize sarcasm, humor, sadness, etc. And many times, you really can get a good idea whether or not the person you're speaking (typing) to on the other end is really who they say they are, or if they're just "blowing smoke up your ass".
For example, I'll describe to you someone who I've worked with a bit, and have known only via the web. He runs some websites, and I occasionally write small, custom Perl scripts for his sites. Now, when first meeting him I found that he was 15 years old. Okay, that's fine. I can respect anybody as long as they can be somewhat mature whilst conversing and avoid talking like a "warez d00d'. But then he goes on to tell all sorts of tall tales. They're not all impossible or unlikely, but take them all together and you see what I mean. A few of them are: His dad makes $350,000 per year. (not hard to believe all by itself) He makes literally thousands of dollars per month without hardly any effort because he runs all of his porn sites so well. (Wow, thousands? that's some site!)( He expresses his concern about being able to pay me for my scripts (very inexpensive), yet says he's got this really expensive sports car. (strange finances, fast cars?) Talks way too much about how many "girlfriends" he's got and how often he's "getting a piece". (*UGH* like I care or need to know)
And you get the idea. Why do people try so hard to impress others on the Internet? Or in any other way, for that matter? Shit, I've always been more impressed by a simple friendliness and honesty than tall tales of money & sex. If I find a person whom I can hold a "geek-ish" conversation with, that's enough for me. I'm not interested in their personal lives' details that supposedly describe how popular they are or how successful they are.
Give me some simple intelligent feedback amongst all the noise on the net. Then I'll be impressed.
Rob, I gotta say that all your improvements have been wonderful! You'll never see any flames from my direction. I'm sure that people will come up with more complicated ways to make the preferences even more useful, and that's great - - but I'm thrilled with what we have right now.
Really, I couldn't be happier. With all the new preferences available (especially Nested mode - Rocks!) I can't help but log in to use all those options. For the first time in months, I'm logging in, reading more comments, and actually posting a thing or two from time to time.:)
So keep up the great work. I'm spending more and more time at Slashdot every day since these changes have taken place. Remeniscent of USENET, but with a great way to filter out all the crap.
And kudos to the moderators: Been doing a great job, and I've enjoyed reading all of the "moderated-up" comments. Makes/. SOOO much more enjoyable.
Woooo! Viva Slashdot! (okay, I'm trying to calm down, really....)
I agree wholeheartedly. Wood's article was indeed a bit more stimulating, without so much fluff about himself that Katz tends to include in each article. I will say that Wood could probably ease up on the use of all his analogies and metaphors, but I enjoyed his writing.
Katz, like most journalists of any stature, considers himself a central element of every story he writes. Count the number of personal pronouns he uses in a typical Katzdot piece and the number of times he makes himself the subject of a sentence. If they were a trigger in a drinking game, you'd have a guaranteed recipe for morning-after hangovers. I laughed at this one. Quite true! Now before I get flamed by the Katz defenders, yes, I have considered turning on the Katz filter, but haven't brought myself to do it quite yet. I guess I keep hoping that the next Katz article I read will prove to be worth it. Sooner or later I'll make up my mind whether any of them really are worth reading.
Let's first suppose that I commonly use flattened or nested mode (maybe works fine with other modes?)... Let's also suppose (hypothetically) my threshold is set to 1, I'm using nested mode, and I'm a moderator(*). Now all the messages above my threshold would be displayed in a "full" mode, showing the posting's Title, Author, Score, and full posted message. Any messages below my threshold would also be listed, but in a less-prominent manner. These "below-threshold" posts would show up only as a small line containing the Subject, Author, Score, and # of replies, with a link to the full message if I decide to read it, or if I find that there's a reply to a "score==0" posting that is within my threshold. This would clear up problems if I was a moderator(*) because I could use my threshold while still having links to lower-scored posts available, that I might score them higher/lower, etc. This also might clear up problems that people have with complete censorship. So no matter what your threshold is, a low-scoring posting would never be completely invisible to any user. Or, Hell... the option to always/never display below-threshold postings can be in the preferences.
Thoughts, anybody?
(*) No, I'm NOT a moderator, btw. This is a purely hypothetical situation.
Slashdot Mirror
VERY good point here. Note that if you read the article, simply owning the software was not the only charge... they broke laws with these cracking tools. The city was not simply bringing felonly charges on the individuals simply for owning the cracking tools.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Check out this link. Lots of interesting tidbits & tips. It doesn't cover some of the newer options (like disabling the shopping button), but covers a few other interesting things.
http://www.inmind.com/p eople/phrank/commonly/userprefs.html
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Take a look at
http://terraserver.microsoft.com/
Yeah, it's a Micro$oft site, but the images are pretty impressive. The coverage is currently quite patchy, but some of the photos are almost as impressive as the sample photos from this article.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
dynamic content makes the technical quantity of distinct "pages" far greater than a billion.
Surely you are correct. However, the operative term in that phrase is "indexable". I'm quite sure that neither Inktomi nor many other "spiders" such as AltaVista (to name one big one) can traverse links to dynamically generated pages. So even if the number of indexable pages is over one billion, that indeed leaves much content out of the big picture.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Mirror here: http://www.angelfire.com/sd/sdmirror/exam.html
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I had discussed this with my friends, and we all agreed that Michael J Fox could pull it off quite well. I don't know that he's muscular necessarily, but he never appears "flabby" or anything. If he was a few years younger it might help too...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I agree with Alorelith completely.
This is not an attack on the author of the comment two levels up from mine... but please, why must people discuss the moderation of their own comments??
It's nearly always secondary to the topic at hand. Please, people... Stop your comments about "I'm gonna get moderated down for this, but..." sympathy cries. And please don't beg "Please moderate this up so people can see it" either. Sometimes it comes across like a child begging for attention.
Moderators will (and should) moderate as they see fit, without having to read the "please (do/do not) moderate me (up/down)" cries.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Check out dates of the reply posts at the bottom of that page... this is one of the many wwwboards that clearly has the 19100 bug. The programmer who wrote it apparently assumed that the localtime function would always return a two digit year. WRONG!
The messed date format says 1/1/100 on the reply posts.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
How did you teach yourself Perl without reading the documentation?
By reading lots of FAQ's, tutorials, etc on multitudes of webpages... and reading other people's code. It was certainly a messy way to go about it, I'll give you that!
I wouldn't encourage anybody else to learn it the way I did. Certainly my investments in Perl books have been completely worth it!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Ah -- if it's identical to C's, then I understand why it would cause such a ruckus to change it. I agree that it would cause more mess than benefit. Still makes me wonder why it wasn't 4-digit year from the start. ;)
Thanks!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Indeed, this could be the root of a y2k bug in many Perl scripts. I'm self-taught in Perl, and discovered many things (the hard way) on my own. This was one of them. But you gotta admit, returning "the number of years since 1900" seems pretty lame.
You'd think that the localtime function could be rewritten to simply return the full year in a 4-digit format. Aside from messing up scripts that do $year+=1900, why not?
For those out there more knowledgeable than I, why hasn't this been done?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Your signature is number 00001318
Hmm, we need a few more than this...
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Admit it -- you just gotta see pictures of them, right? Here you go.
http://www.angelfire.com/sd/sdmirro r/index.html
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
There's a mirror of two pictures and one of the MPEGs here:
http://www.angelfire.com/sd/sdmirror/
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Mirror of Mooning Picture
Perhaps if/when other things need mirroring I'll just slap 'em up on the angelfire site. Or I might remove the page altogether. I dunno.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I'm glad to see that yet another corporate giant isn't too big to realize what's in their best interests when it comes to web serving reliability.
Now if OnSale and other online-stores would only switch to Apache, it would make my surfing alot easier. Many times I've been surfing for that special piece of hardware only to find myself drumming my fingers on the desk waiting for their lame server to send me a page or two. If these competitors keep using their IIS or Netscape servers, they're only going to drown in their own downtime & latency.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I know that at this very moment there are people being trained in the US Armed Forces whom the USA spends thousands and thousands of dollars on so they might learn Russian, Japanese, and other languages. Once they learn these languages, many are stationed at bases which have tapes of conversations, or in some cases live transmissions of radio signals, etc. These translators sit for hours and hours listening to boring conversations about the weather, foreign soldiers having phone-sex conversations with their sig. O's, etc all in the hopes of catching the *really important* information (whatever that might be). So now we can not only pick up all these transmissions, but can filter out the unimportant garbage? Can understand colloquialisms? Can determine the true value/threat of a given conversation? That's abso-fucking-lutely amazing. And to think that this whole time that all the real computing brainiacs have been working for the US Armed Forces, et. al. Who'da thunk it?
Please, be rational. This sort of technology doesn't just sound like science fiction, it is science fiction. Get a grip.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Perhaps this defeats the purpose of "archiving" the stories when they get old, but. . .
When I want to search Slashdot for a given topic, the search results are often of stories that have been archived. The problem is that when I want to read the worthwhile comments on a particular story, its very difficult because the archived page shows ALL comments, not just the ones above my threshhold. Hell, I even have to wade through the -1 postings of "first post!" and crap like that... Would there be any way to make the moderated-up comments displayed at the top?
You could sort the threads by score, highest to lowest, top to bottom. Is this too difficult to do without increasing server load / database size? Any thoughts on this?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
If you're using whois from the command line, you will likely not see those animated GIF banner ads, am I right?
So now let me ask you again -- do you really care?
I believe I'll have to re-read all of Rob's points on how moderation works, how they get their points, etc... but what about this?
/., they lose it. This would prevent the moderators from posting a comment for a given article as an AC and then moderating it up (since they'd only be able to moderate their own comment to a 1 which they could do if they were logged in anyways). Having only ONE point to offer for moderation would make sure that these moderators use their point very wisely.
Let moderators post AND moderate any article.
But... for each single article that is read by a moderator, they are given only 1 (one) moderation point, which they can use to promote or demote only a single post within the comments relating to that article. Once they have moderated any post (within a given article) up or down one point, that's it. They have no more moderation power over any other posts within the same article. And if they don't use that single moderation point while the article is available on the front page of
I really do think that if a moderator is allowed only to moderate OR post, there will be less quality posts, and the moderators will be forced into silence when we could also be getting feedback from them.
Just my $.02.
Indeed, it seems that many people are so much less introverted when conversing upon the 'net that they don't really take heed to the fact that there is a real person on the end of the conversation. They'll spill their guts about anything and everything, and often telling the things about their personal lives we don't want to hear.
Through many different ways I've met people from online games, IRC, etc and despite the fact that the conversations were purely ASCII, using all those characters like (* ! $ _ etc) help to emphasize sarcasm, humor, sadness, etc. And many times, you really can get a good idea whether or not the person you're speaking (typing) to on the other end is really who they say they are, or if they're just "blowing smoke up your ass".
For example, I'll describe to you someone who I've worked with a bit, and have known only via the web. He runs some websites, and I occasionally write small, custom Perl scripts for his sites. Now, when first meeting him I found that he was 15 years old. Okay, that's fine. I can respect anybody as long as they can be somewhat mature whilst conversing and avoid talking like a "warez d00d'. But then he goes on to tell all sorts of tall tales. They're not all impossible or unlikely, but take them all together and you see what I mean. A few of them are:
His dad makes $350,000 per year. (not hard to believe all by itself)
He makes literally thousands of dollars per month without hardly any effort because he runs all of his porn sites so well. (Wow, thousands? that's some site!)(
He expresses his concern about being able to pay me for my scripts (very inexpensive), yet says he's got this really expensive sports car. (strange finances, fast cars?)
Talks way too much about how many "girlfriends" he's got and how often he's "getting a piece". (*UGH* like I care or need to know)
And you get the idea. Why do people try so hard to impress others on the Internet? Or in any other way, for that matter? Shit, I've always been more impressed by a simple friendliness and honesty than tall tales of money & sex. If I find a person whom I can hold a "geek-ish" conversation with, that's enough for me. I'm not interested in their personal lives' details that supposedly describe how popular they are or how successful they are.
Give me some simple intelligent feedback amongst all the noise on the net. Then I'll be impressed.
Rob, I gotta say that all your improvements have been wonderful!
:)
/. SOOO much more enjoyable.
You'll never see any flames from my direction. I'm sure that people will come up with more complicated ways to make the preferences even more useful, and that's great - - but I'm thrilled with what we have right now.
Really, I couldn't be happier. With all the new preferences available (especially Nested mode - Rocks!) I can't help but log in to use all those options. For the first time in months, I'm logging in, reading more comments, and actually posting a thing or two from time to time.
So keep up the great work. I'm spending more and more time at Slashdot every day since these changes have taken place. Remeniscent of USENET, but with a great way to filter out all the crap.
And kudos to the moderators: Been doing a great job, and I've enjoyed reading all of the "moderated-up" comments. Makes
Woooo! Viva Slashdot!
(okay, I'm trying to calm down, really....)
I agree wholeheartedly. Wood's article was indeed a bit more stimulating, without so much fluff about himself that Katz tends to include in each article. I will say that Wood could probably ease up on the use of all his analogies and metaphors, but I enjoyed his writing.
Katz, like most journalists of any stature, considers himself a central element of every story he writes. Count the number of personal pronouns he uses in a typical Katzdot piece and the number of times he makes himself the subject of a sentence. If they were a trigger in a drinking game, you'd have a guaranteed recipe for morning-after hangovers.
I laughed at this one. Quite true!
Now before I get flamed by the Katz defenders, yes, I have considered turning on the Katz filter, but haven't brought myself to do it quite yet. I guess I keep hoping that the next Katz article I read will prove to be worth it. Sooner or later I'll make up my mind whether any of them really are worth reading.
Has this been suggested already? I'm not sure...
Let's first suppose that I commonly use flattened or nested mode (maybe works fine with other modes?)...
Let's also suppose (hypothetically) my threshold is set to 1, I'm using nested mode, and I'm a moderator(*).
Now all the messages above my threshold would be displayed in a "full" mode, showing the posting's Title, Author, Score, and full posted message. Any messages below my threshold would also be listed, but in a less-prominent manner. These "below-threshold" posts would show up only as a small line containing the Subject, Author, Score, and # of replies, with a link to the full message if I decide to read it, or if I find that there's a reply to a "score==0" posting that is within my threshold.
This would clear up problems if I was a moderator(*) because I could use my threshold while still having links to lower-scored posts available, that I might score them higher/lower, etc.
This also might clear up problems that people have with complete censorship. So no matter what your threshold is, a low-scoring posting would never be completely invisible to any user. Or, Hell... the option to always/never display below-threshold postings can be in the preferences.
Thoughts, anybody?
(*) No, I'm NOT a moderator, btw. This is a purely hypothetical situation.