Light mode has questionable reasons for still existing after this change. We're probably going to obviate/replace/improve it in the coming months (pick your verb).
We obviously did not forget about it, as another commenter suggested. Tim and Wes put in quite some effort to make sure it was still supported in some form. But much of its reason for existence will (soon) be able to be accomplished by simply changing style sheets. You the user can do that with various hacks; on our side, as Rob mentioned in his writeup for this story, we hope to provide some mechanism for users to pick different style sheets sometime soon.
Light mode was a kind of a half-assed hack that tried to do "show me Slashdot a little cleaner," "reduce my bandwidth for my 56K modem," and "give me the bare necessities for my mobile device," and IMHO didn't do any of those very elegantly. And the implementation kinda sucked too, so we want to get rid of it for code cleanup reasons. We're going to do mobile support properly (eventually) and let style sheets do the cleaning up. The third justification was bandwidth, and webpage bandwidth is pretty irrelevant in 2005.
For now (at least), Light mode means no slashboxes, which makes sense to me (at least). If you want slashboxes, the workaround is to turn Light mode off. If you're in the ~1% of Slashdot readers who simply must have the Light-mode look and slashboxes too, I'm afraid you'll have to bear with us until we get the changes I described above implemented.
And now I just realized Rob said much the same thing in his updated "response to reader notes," so go read that:)
You're in Light Mode. Slashboxes don't appear in Light Mode for obvious reasons (and I believe that's a change from before). Go to Preferences: Homepage and uncheck Light, then save. That should do the trick.
Having said that, I get a 500 error randomly on any post...
You're getting 50x errors this morning? Details please. On what type of pages, or on all pages? What times were you seeing this approximately? What fraction of pages?
Feel free to submit a bug but for this week's changes, if you prefer, you can email me directly: jamie@slashdot.org.
(You don't need to report 50x errors from last night, that is, Wednesday from 11 PM to midnight U.S. eastern time. To prevent problems, we took the entire site down for a very long time while we applied a huge set of changes.)
Configure your database software to think that data is written when it's not, and corruption is not the software's fault, it's yours. Or, in this case, arguably the IDE drives' fault for lying to their controllers. In any case, stop blaming MySQL.
See LiveJournal's post-mortem (scroll to "Disk cache issues") and Slashdot's story for more on this. If you administer databases, you should be aware of the problems with IDE drives, because if you misunderstand how they work, you can misconfigure any RDBMS to corrupt your data.
The 500s you see are almost always due to load on the webheads (rendering pages takes a lot of CPU) and occasionally to planned restarts (we toast a few hundred connections every time we upgrade the code, basically because we're too lazy to gracefully integrate restarts with the LB proxy). Sometimes due to a DDoS or network outages.
We haven't had any serious MySQL load problems in over a year, with the exception of one targeted DDoS which wedged up our search DB slave for a while. Slashdot hasn't had any MySQL reliability problems since we moved to 4.0. Our master DB has been running the same version of 4.0.x since early 2003 and it just keeps going, it never crashes. Later versions of 4.0.x are probably more reliable, but we have no need to upgrade because it just works. The only time it went down was last month when the OS finally threw a kernel panic, which sucked, but wasn't MySQL's fault.
Anyway, the point someone was trying to make is that MySQL isn't ready for high-traffic enterprise sites, which I hope we can all agree is just silly. Slashdot's not even the best example, go look at Wikipedia, CraigsList, LiveJournal, Yahoo, Google, etc.
Do you know MySQL has had transactions for years now? And SAVEPOINT transactions (like Postgres, I believe). And views in 5.0. The table-locking engine you're thinking of (MyISAM) hasn't been current for maybe 4 years. If you can't handle 100 users at once blame your design, not MySQL -- MySQL powers Slashdot:)
I think the comment from the MySQL rep was something like "we're working on it, those of you who know what it is will be very excited, the rest of you won't care..."
Some WoW servers allow PvP combat, some don't; you choose when you start your character.
You can't attack players of your own faction, and my guess is that farmers choose to farm in areas dominated by their own faction so that the chance of any of the enemy happening by is slim. Also, it's a really big game world, and, except in major cities, players are spread out sparsely, so you're not likely to run into someone farming in an out-of-the-way place. Finally, you don't gain gold, items or experience from killing a player of the opposing faction, so there's little incentive for players to target such farmers.
Of course it's censorship. It's preventing person A from seeing the website set up by person B.
The only question is whether censorship should be supported as a tool for helping eliminate spam, even in the case where person B's only error was signing up with Yahoo as their service provider. Personally, I don't think ends justify means, and if they did I think I'd start with an end like eliminating child pornography, or terrorism, or something. But some people think spam is more important than those things. If you think that way, fine. But don't fool yourself about the means you're supporting.
Obviously you feel very strongly about spam. You feel that spam is so important that websites which offer to sell spam software should be blacklisted, along with many other innocent websites hosted at the same ISP.
What else do you feel strongly about?
There are websites, I am sure, that describe in detail how to commit murder and get away with it. Some readers may find those sites, and using that knowledge, go commit violent crimes -- just as some readers of spam sites may purchase email harvesting software and then go commit the crime of sending bulk email. I assume you would support blacklisting ISPs that host violent-crime advice, since surely everyone agrees that murder is worse than spamming.
There are ISPs that host neo-Nazi propaganda calling for the murder of all non-whites. Do you think that's better or worse than offering spam software for sale? Should those ISPs be blacklisted?
Escort services? Simulated rape porn? "The Anarchist's Cookbook"? A list of abortion providers' addresses? Al Qaeda recruitment and propaganda? I want to know which of these you think is equally as bad as, or worse than, hawking a CD with a million email addresses on it. How many things do you think merit blocking all of an ISP's innocent websites?
You have your list. Others have their own lists -- and, frankly, there are a billion people who think porn is vitally important and your fixation on spam is stupid. Do you really want the internet segmented? Do you think advancing your pet cause is worth walling off the internet into warring quarters? Do you really want to wield a censor's black pen?
We don't like disrespecting authority in this country. Nor do we like open documentation of how police methods work:
For years, Taser maintained that its stun guns never caused a death or serious injury. As proof, Taser officials said no medical examiner had ever cited the weapon in an autopsy report.
But Taser did not have those autopsy reports and didn't start collecting them until April [2004]. Using computer searches, autopsy reports, police reports, media reports and Taser's own records, The Republic has identified 88 deaths after police Taser strikes in the United States and Canada since 1999.
"Now, we are going to set this pile of evil ablaze, but
because these are children's toys, the fire will spread quickly, so please
stand back and try not to inhale the toxic fumes."
Personally, I thought the "fall" was so poorly executed that I could hardly figure out what happened.
Right, there's simply no believable motivation. He had a couple of nightmares and thought they might come true, OK. So why did he confide in one friend and not the other? I can almost believe that he thought both groups were trying to manipulate him, but no plausible reason was given for him turning to the Chancellor to confide in and not asking any of the Jedis, hey, anyone know how to stop death premonitions from coming true?
And once he went over to the Chancellor's side, practically the first thing the Chancellor did was say, hey, that thing I promised you I could do for you, well I have no idea how to do it, but let's go try to figure it out maybe! How dumb does this kid have to be that he doesn't rethink a little at that point?
And those are just the plot holes. The effort to sell me on the part that did make sense was just pathetic.
the only laughs I got were when Amidala told Anakin she was pregnant, and he was like "uh..., uh...., oh yeah, that' uh... great" (though I don't think that was supposed to be funny), and when the wookies were swinging from vines, howling like Tarzan.
Acting in front of a screen could partly responsible, I suppose. But Christensen and Portman had zero chemistry even when looking into each other's eyes. And it wasn't a problem in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which was 100% green-screened.
I think the fault lies both with Lucas and his principal actor.
Yes. Every scene where anyone did anything like that.
Which is to say, most of the movie. In Spiderman 1 and 2 the defying-physics stuff actually worked because it gave Spiderman a kind of half-alien insecty twitch. Every CG actor in Sith, flipping and flying around, just looked CG.
The fight choreography was terrible too. Whether in close quarters or the middle of an empty room, apparently light-saber fights look identical, nothing but big flashy sweeping strokes. Compare to the trailer swordfight in Kill Bill 2, or the bathroom martial arts combat in Unleashed.
You got two replies already saying "no," and I'll be the third. VNC works through a restart. The only things plugged into it are power, ethernet, and miscellaneous USB devices (iMic, hub, APC UPS monitor, and telephone adapter).
Yeah, Slashdot might help raise awareness in the geek community, but as far as general "critical mass" goes, LJ has zillions more active logged-in users than we do:)
Macs are sometimes a little too smart for VNC -- if they do not detect a monitor connected, they do not create a console display and the VNC server will fail because it does not have a display
Old Macs, maybe. I had to plug in a display dongle to a Mac IIci server back around 1995. But the Mac mini doesn't need one. I have a mini in my basement, and it works fine over VNC with nothing plugged into its video port.
Slashdot Mirror
Upgrades don't have problems with old cookies.
Hahahahahaha :)
We obviously did not forget about it, as another commenter suggested. Tim and Wes put in quite some effort to make sure it was still supported in some form. But much of its reason for existence will (soon) be able to be accomplished by simply changing style sheets. You the user can do that with various hacks; on our side, as Rob mentioned in his writeup for this story, we hope to provide some mechanism for users to pick different style sheets sometime soon.
Light mode was a kind of a half-assed hack that tried to do "show me Slashdot a little cleaner," "reduce my bandwidth for my 56K modem," and "give me the bare necessities for my mobile device," and IMHO didn't do any of those very elegantly. And the implementation kinda sucked too, so we want to get rid of it for code cleanup reasons. We're going to do mobile support properly (eventually) and let style sheets do the cleaning up. The third justification was bandwidth, and webpage bandwidth is pretty irrelevant in 2005.
For now (at least), Light mode means no slashboxes, which makes sense to me (at least). If you want slashboxes, the workaround is to turn Light mode off. If you're in the ~1% of Slashdot readers who simply must have the Light-mode look and slashboxes too, I'm afraid you'll have to bear with us until we get the changes I described above implemented.
And now I just realized Rob said much the same thing in his updated "response to reader notes," so go read that :)
You're in Light Mode. Slashboxes don't appear in Light Mode for obvious reasons (and I believe that's a change from before). Go to Preferences: Homepage and uncheck Light, then save. That should do the trick.
The four slashes are a bug, thanks, we'll get that fixed ASAP.
You're getting 50x errors this morning? Details please. On what type of pages, or on all pages? What times were you seeing this approximately? What fraction of pages?
Feel free to submit a bug but for this week's changes, if you prefer, you can email me directly: jamie@slashdot.org.
(You don't need to report 50x errors from last night, that is, Wednesday from 11 PM to midnight U.S. eastern time. To prevent problems, we took the entire site down for a very long time while we applied a huge set of changes.)
Just checking, your bosses know MySQL supports OpenGIS, right?
Configure your database software to think that data is written when it's not, and corruption is not the software's fault, it's yours. Or, in this case, arguably the IDE drives' fault for lying to their controllers. In any case, stop blaming MySQL.
See LiveJournal's post-mortem (scroll to "Disk cache issues") and Slashdot's story for more on this. If you administer databases, you should be aware of the problems with IDE drives, because if you misunderstand how they work, you can misconfigure any RDBMS to corrupt your data.
We haven't had any serious MySQL load problems in over a year, with the exception of one targeted DDoS which wedged up our search DB slave for a while. Slashdot hasn't had any MySQL reliability problems since we moved to 4.0. Our master DB has been running the same version of 4.0.x since early 2003 and it just keeps going, it never crashes. Later versions of 4.0.x are probably more reliable, but we have no need to upgrade because it just works. The only time it went down was last month when the OS finally threw a kernel panic, which sucked, but wasn't MySQL's fault.
Anyway, the point someone was trying to make is that MySQL isn't ready for high-traffic enterprise sites, which I hope we can all agree is just silly. Slashdot's not even the best example, go look at Wikipedia, CraigsList, LiveJournal, Yahoo, Google, etc.
Do you know MySQL has had transactions for years now? And SAVEPOINT transactions (like Postgres, I believe). And views in 5.0. The table-locking engine you're thinking of (MyISAM) hasn't been current for maybe 4 years. If you can't handle 100 users at once blame your design, not MySQL -- MySQL powers Slashdot :)
I think the comment from the MySQL rep was something like "we're working on it, those of you who know what it is will be very excited, the rest of you won't care..."
You can't attack players of your own faction, and my guess is that farmers choose to farm in areas dominated by their own faction so that the chance of any of the enemy happening by is slim. Also, it's a really big game world, and, except in major cities, players are spread out sparsely, so you're not likely to run into someone farming in an out-of-the-way place. Finally, you don't gain gold, items or experience from killing a player of the opposing faction, so there's little incentive for players to target such farmers.
The only question is whether censorship should be supported as a tool for helping eliminate spam, even in the case where person B's only error was signing up with Yahoo as their service provider. Personally, I don't think ends justify means, and if they did I think I'd start with an end like eliminating child pornography, or terrorism, or something. But some people think spam is more important than those things. If you think that way, fine. But don't fool yourself about the means you're supporting.
What else do you feel strongly about?
There are websites, I am sure, that describe in detail how to commit murder and get away with it. Some readers may find those sites, and using that knowledge, go commit violent crimes -- just as some readers of spam sites may purchase email harvesting software and then go commit the crime of sending bulk email. I assume you would support blacklisting ISPs that host violent-crime advice, since surely everyone agrees that murder is worse than spamming.
There are ISPs that host neo-Nazi propaganda calling for the murder of all non-whites. Do you think that's better or worse than offering spam software for sale? Should those ISPs be blacklisted?
Escort services? Simulated rape porn? "The Anarchist's Cookbook"? A list of abortion providers' addresses? Al Qaeda recruitment and propaganda? I want to know which of these you think is equally as bad as, or worse than, hawking a CD with a million email addresses on it. How many things do you think merit blocking all of an ISP's innocent websites?
You have your list. Others have their own lists -- and, frankly, there are a billion people who think porn is vitally important and your fixation on spam is stupid. Do you really want the internet segmented? Do you think advancing your pet cause is worth walling off the internet into warring quarters? Do you really want to wield a censor's black pen?
That goes directly to the video; you will want to prepare to adjust speaker volume and your blood pressure as you watch.
Linked from Hullabaloo.
We don't like disrespecting authority in this country. Nor do we like open documentation of how police methods work:
We're working on it :)
Because, obviously, other people using the same Tor network you're using have been abusing RSS feeds through it.
"Now, we are going to set this pile of evil ablaze, but because these are children's toys, the fire will spread quickly, so please stand back and try not to inhale the toxic fumes."
Right, there's simply no believable motivation. He had a couple of nightmares and thought they might come true, OK. So why did he confide in one friend and not the other? I can almost believe that he thought both groups were trying to manipulate him, but no plausible reason was given for him turning to the Chancellor to confide in and not asking any of the Jedis, hey, anyone know how to stop death premonitions from coming true?
And once he went over to the Chancellor's side, practically the first thing the Chancellor did was say, hey, that thing I promised you I could do for you, well I have no idea how to do it, but let's go try to figure it out maybe! How dumb does this kid have to be that he doesn't rethink a little at that point?
And those are just the plot holes. The effort to sell me on the part that did make sense was just pathetic.
Nope, neither of those were supposed to be funny.
Acting in front of a screen could partly responsible, I suppose. But Christensen and Portman had zero chemistry even when looking into each other's eyes. And it wasn't a problem in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which was 100% green-screened.
I think the fault lies both with Lucas and his principal actor.
Yes. Every scene where anyone did anything like that.
Which is to say, most of the movie. In Spiderman 1 and 2 the defying-physics stuff actually worked because it gave Spiderman a kind of half-alien insecty twitch. Every CG actor in Sith, flipping and flying around, just looked CG.
The fight choreography was terrible too. Whether in close quarters or the middle of an empty room, apparently light-saber fights look identical, nothing but big flashy sweeping strokes. Compare to the trailer swordfight in Kill Bill 2, or the bathroom martial arts combat in Unleashed.
You got two replies already saying "no," and I'll be the third. VNC works through a restart. The only things plugged into it are power, ethernet, and miscellaneous USB devices (iMic, hub, APC UPS monitor, and telephone adapter).
Yeah, Slashdot might help raise awareness in the geek community, but as far as general "critical mass" goes, LJ has zillions more active logged-in users than we do :)
Old Macs, maybe. I had to plug in a display dongle to a Mac IIci server back around 1995. But the Mac mini doesn't need one. I have a mini in my basement, and it works fine over VNC with nothing plugged into its video port.