"As the article points out, there are only 250,000 Navajo speakers left on the planet... Surely they should be concentrating on languages that... will be the most likely to survive long in to the future."
I won't be at all surprised when this anti-Apple satire shows up in far-right-wing Christian literature. Remember the Onion story,
"Harry Potter Books Spark Rise in Satanism Among Children"? Turns out it was taken seriously by many fundamentalist "news" agencies, including
WorldNetDaily.
So many people believed the Onion story was true that
Snopes
had to debunk it!
"I'm quite sure that in between submitting nodes on e2, and having lunch in Holland, MI, Rob and Jeff are reading the comments behind some of the articles that pique their interest. Knowing that, how can they say (in public, with a stright-face) that comments are an insignificant part of Slashdot?"
I think you'll find that neither Rob nor Jeff ever said that (in public, with a straight face:). If I'm mistaken, please point out where.
Some editors' comments have been taken out of context and their meaning twisted around... they probably ended up in your mind equivalent to your paraphrase above. I can say with certainty that none of us has ever said or meant that.
"the credit card option's been on the subscribe page for about a week now. They only just got around to announcing it today."
Nope; it just showed up for an hour in the middle of the night, during a code refresh about a week ago. But has been absent from then until about 20 minutes ago. You were probably one of like 3 people who saw the dang thing last week:)
"What he argues is that there most likely existed a global environmental disaster, most likely a flood, that occured in ancient times and was incorporated into the myths of many cultures."
A flood at the end of the last Ice Age (ca. 9,000 BC)? I am shocked, shocked to learn that the melting of planet-girdling glaciers could somehow be linked with deluges of water.
Unfortunately, Netscape 6 and Mozilla (and WinAmp and ICQ and all the other currently skinnable programs) are just the first waves of this infestation. Checkbox feature parity is inevitable in this coolness-addled world, and soon every application will provide the much-needed ability to make it look like cheese.
I wonder if the final, gold, 1.0 release will be on the two-year anniversary of the
much worse Mozilla bashing:
There comes a time when the only merciful thing to do is pull the plug. When the old-timer has been bloated and incontinent for as long as anybody can remember, it can only be considered an act of kindness to turn off the machines and let a dear friend finally breathe its last. So long, Mozilla, old chum -- sorry it had to come to this.
"I'm still pissed I never bought a Segar Ardic (sp?) t-shirt"
I still have my Serdar Argic T-shirt, the howling in the wires world tour. I've worn it maybe once, it's always seemed in bad taste.
For those who don't remember,
Serdar Argic
was a half-human, half-bot who crossposted to almost every Usenet group for months (over a year?) about his pet cause. That cause was whitewashing the Turkish genocide of the Armenians back during the First World War. In fact he claimed the Armenians committed all the crimes, against the Turks. And he had the facts to prove it! Bizarre.
Since he grepped the whole newsfeed and quasi-auto-replied to any post mentioning "Turkey," he became very popular around Thanksgiving...
Re:How to Google Whack...
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The idea of the sport is to type two words into Google and come back with exactly one page on the web that contains both of them. Not zero pages, not two, but one.
To make the game challenging, you can't quote the words (making them into a phrase). And they both have to be actual English words which Google itself recognizes (I think Google uses dictionary.com's dictionary, so you can doublecheck yourself there).
The more common the words, the cleverer the Googlewhack is considered to be -- few Googlewhacks use words you would consider "common."
Try it yourself, just think up two obscure words and type them into Google. If you get zero hits, you're too obscure, try again. Much more likely that you'll get 5 or 10 or 20 or 150 hits, in which case your goal is simple: get more obscure, until that number gets down to 1!
Script tags in User Space, in fact any unapproved HTML tags, have been
disabled for security reasons.
Existing data has been modified to comply (by running the strip_html function).
Conspiracy theories will probably abound, but the bottom line is, this was a security hole that we should have closed a long time ago. Better we do it now than after someone gets hurt.
Anyone who wants to discuss this is welcome to start a journal or
discussion.
It is offtopic here. I am only posting this because it's a security matter, and I will moderate myself down:)
"digest functionality should be included into the slashdot site"
Which is the part of the digest functionality that you are wanting? The graphs? Or having top-rated comments displayed all on one page along with the stories' introtext?
That doesn't seem really useful to me, esp. since I'm not sure how they pick just a handful of top-rated comments that are at Score:5, but if there's a lot of demand for it we could probably do it.
And again, if you don't understand why Rob and Jeff took the copyright issue so seriously, reread what they said (and remember the Hellmouth book affair).
Yeah, actually I lean toward agreeing with you on this one... but I'm a coder not a marketer. I'd have to rename plugins/Subscribe to plugins/TipJar and that sounds like work.
"The ONLY type of ad that has uniformly received POSITIVE comments from Slashdot users is the Google-style text ad.... You'd think someone upstairs would have noticed all this? Apparently not."
We hear ya. This is an interesting possibility. We'll look into it.
Your unwarranted presupposition is why this article is so interesting. My first reaction too was "there's no way."
But then I remembered my Digital Electronics class in college where we ran square waves at high frequencies through LEDs... seeing the light seem to fix itself on "on" past any respectable Hertz, I mentioned to the professor "so its power-on time must be shorter than its power-off." His response was "...well, or your eyes just aren't good enough to see that fast." He was right: LEDs aren't like incandescent lights, they can turn on and off very, very fast.
I had just never thought of the little RD/SD lights as transmitting any information, under the refresh rate of my eye. If you'd asked me I would have assumed the manufacturers would have considered this and put a delay into the power-on/power-off times of their LEDs, even one millisecond would do fine.
But many of them didn't. And nobody thought to check until these guys decided to write their paper.
"If you use a positive option system (where you send the subscriber an email or redirect to a web page saying, 'sorry! you must re-up for another five clams to see this page')...
"On the other hand, if you use a negative option subscription system (we keep charging your credit card five bucks until you tell us to stop)..."
There's an excluded middle you're ignoring -- we don't do either of those things. Our subscription system only affects whether you see ads on the page, we don't block you from reading or writing anything. And these subscriptions are one-time deals.
Your advice on wooing contributors is appreciated... as Rob said, we're mulling over future features, and who knows, maybe a T-shirt will qualify as a feature. Which would be fine with me... less programming...
Click on the Preview button to check formatting (1 hit)
Submit the page (1 hit)
Are you done? Nope. You'd better hope your comment doesn't get mod'd up--because you'll get "messages" telling you that. Link to that page? (1 hit). You'd better hope you haven't contributed something provocative that produces replies--because you'll have to read each reply (1 hit apiece), and possibly post a response (3 hits per response, see above).
Nope -- by default, everything you just described costs you nothing.
Your default configuration leaves ads on comments.pl pages (reading and writing) which is a minor annoyance but doesn't use up any of the pages you've paid for. And the messages.pl click is free too (as well as adless).
See, we've thought of these things:)
Of course, if you really need to see comments.pl pages ad-free, and are willing to pay a penny to post, you can just set that preference by clicking the "subscribe" link. Up to you.
"Remember, a.s.o is from the same drooling morons who have ended each and every story in the last three years about new Apple hardware announcements with the exact same lame gag about one-button mice."
Why do you say that? Go look at the bio for
Pudge
who has posted most of the stories in apple.slashdot.org. He's been coding Slashdot for a while but this is the first time he's posting stories. He's done most of the stories in the new Apple section.
I've been a Mac user since 1987 and am typing right now on my trusty G4 (with a zero-button mouse). Timothy wasn't much of a Mac fan until he actually used one... now I think an iBook is his main machine. And Rob likes Macs except for little hardware quirks (and if his mentioning three-button mice twice a year really bugs you that much, you're a bigger Slashdot fan than most, I tip my cap to ya).
The Slashdot crew as a whole doesn't agree on much, but we all appreciate good technology, and most of us appreciate the Mac.
"get those damn stories about a company succeeding with unix on the desktop off the front page"
Don't worry, we'll continue to have some Apple on the front page (there's one today in fact).
Slashdot Mirror
Like Klingon.
So many people believed the Onion story was true that Snopes had to debunk it!
I think you'll find that neither Rob nor Jeff ever said that (in public, with a straight face :). If I'm mistaken, please point out where.
Some editors' comments have been taken out of context and their meaning twisted around... they probably ended up in your mind equivalent to your paraphrase above. I can say with certainty that none of us has ever said or meant that.
http://web.lfw.org/jminc/CowboyNeal/http://slashdo t.org/
That will never happen.
- Hemos
Nope; it just showed up for an hour in the middle of the night, during a code refresh about a week ago. But has been absent from then until about 20 minutes ago. You were probably one of like 3 people who saw the dang thing last week :)
A flood at the end of the last Ice Age (ca. 9,000 BC)? I am shocked, shocked to learn that the melting of planet-girdling glaciers could somehow be linked with deluges of water.
I wonder if the final, gold, 1.0 release will be on the two-year anniversary of the much worse Mozilla bashing:
Click preferences on the menu at the left, then check "Collapse Sections." Then click "Save."
I don't know about K5, but we've had article polls since November 1998...
Star Wars: Episode 1 Teaser Sheets
http://osdn.com/newsletters/
:)
I still have my Serdar Argic T-shirt, the howling in the wires world tour. I've worn it maybe once, it's always seemed in bad taste.
For those who don't remember, Serdar Argic was a half-human, half-bot who crossposted to almost every Usenet group for months (over a year?) about his pet cause. That cause was whitewashing the Turkish genocide of the Armenians back during the First World War. In fact he claimed the Armenians committed all the crimes, against the Turks. And he had the facts to prove it! Bizarre.
Since he grepped the whole newsfeed and quasi-auto-replied to any post mentioning "Turkey," he became very popular around Thanksgiving...
To make the game challenging, you can't quote the words (making them into a phrase). And they both have to be actual English words which Google itself recognizes (I think Google uses dictionary.com's dictionary, so you can doublecheck yourself there).
The more common the words, the cleverer the Googlewhack is considered to be -- few Googlewhacks use words you would consider "common."
Try it yourself, just think up two obscure words and type them into Google. If you get zero hits, you're too obscure, try again. Much more likely that you'll get 5 or 10 or 20 or 150 hits, in which case your goal is simple: get more obscure, until that number gets down to 1!
Conspiracy theories will probably abound, but the bottom line is, this was a security hole that we should have closed a long time ago. Better we do it now than after someone gets hurt.
Anyone who wants to discuss this is welcome to start a journal or discussion. It is offtopic here. I am only posting this because it's a security matter, and I will moderate myself down :)
Which is the part of the digest functionality that you are wanting? The graphs? Or having top-rated comments displayed all on one page along with the stories' introtext?
That doesn't seem really useful to me, esp. since I'm not sure how they pick just a handful of top-rated comments that are at Score:5, but if there's a lot of demand for it we could probably do it.
And again, if you don't understand why Rob and Jeff took the copyright issue so seriously, reread what they said (and remember the Hellmouth book affair).
But: good point.
We hear ya. This is an interesting possibility. We'll look into it.
But then I remembered my Digital Electronics class in college where we ran square waves at high frequencies through LEDs... seeing the light seem to fix itself on "on" past any respectable Hertz, I mentioned to the professor "so its power-on time must be shorter than its power-off." His response was "...well, or your eyes just aren't good enough to see that fast." He was right: LEDs aren't like incandescent lights, they can turn on and off very, very fast.
I had just never thought of the little RD/SD lights as transmitting any information, under the refresh rate of my eye. If you'd asked me I would have assumed the manufacturers would have considered this and put a delay into the power-on/power-off times of their LEDs, even one millisecond would do fine.
But many of them didn't. And nobody thought to check until these guys decided to write their paper.
Anyone here who is silly enough to put
into their User Space should be aware that they are begging to have their passwords stolen.
That is all.
It won't.
Ooh, irony! :) :)
There's an excluded middle you're ignoring -- we don't do either of those things. Our subscription system only affects whether you see ads on the page, we don't block you from reading or writing anything. And these subscriptions are one-time deals.
Your advice on wooing contributors is appreciated... as Rob said, we're mulling over future features, and who knows, maybe a T-shirt will qualify as a feature. Which would be fine with me... less programming...
Nope -- by default, everything you just described costs you nothing.
Your default configuration leaves ads on comments.pl pages (reading and writing) which is a minor annoyance but doesn't use up any of the pages you've paid for. And the messages.pl click is free too (as well as adless).
See, we've thought of these things :)
Of course, if you really need to see comments.pl pages ad-free, and are willing to pay a penny to post, you can just set that preference by clicking the "subscribe" link. Up to you.
OMFG, you're right.
Why do you say that? Go look at the bio for Pudge who has posted most of the stories in apple.slashdot.org. He's been coding Slashdot for a while but this is the first time he's posting stories. He's done most of the stories in the new Apple section.
I've been a Mac user since 1987 and am typing right now on my trusty G4 (with a zero-button mouse). Timothy wasn't much of a Mac fan until he actually used one... now I think an iBook is his main machine. And Rob likes Macs except for little hardware quirks (and if his mentioning three-button mice twice a year really bugs you that much, you're a bigger Slashdot fan than most, I tip my cap to ya).
The Slashdot crew as a whole doesn't agree on much, but we all appreciate good technology, and most of us appreciate the Mac.
Don't worry, we'll continue to have some Apple on the front page (there's one today in fact).
http://bsd.slashdot.org