I can sit here watching it with Etheral and not cach it trying to do things other then what its supposed to be doing.
If its managing to send information back to Opera Software secretly without going across the network to do it, then thats quite impressive.
Obviously I can't know everything it does without the source, but do I have the time to go through all the source of Netscape 6 to find things they changed from Mozilla? For that matter, do I have the time to go through the Mozilla source looking for things?
I've watched it, and I'm reasonably confident its not doing things it shouldn't be. I can live with that, seeing as how it also works as a browser far better then anything Netscape has released in years.
by default the search bar in IE goes to MSN Search, the Radio Toolbar has a prominent link to the Microsoft Radio Guide, etc. The default bookmarks are also full of MS stuff.
The problem is that Netscape has taken it over the top with Netscape 6. In IE, it makes sense. The search bar has to go somewhere, so it goes to MSN. (I wonder if you can change it? I've never looked.) The whole program isn't riddled with "buy me" crap, and you don't have to sign up for Netcenter, MSN, or anything else to use it.
Its a matter of scope. Logically, one would expect links back to the browser creator somewhere, Netscape just took it way too far and hurt the overall usability of the browser because of all the crap.
Thankfully, there is the Mozilla releases, which are better then any Netscape release anyway.
This was their chance. They chose to release a buggy, not quite done product that contains built in spyware. (Check Linux Today for the article about that, I don't have the url handy. But the Smart Download tool has this neat feature of sending every file you download to AOL.)
Netscape is no better then Microsoft when it comes to browsers, except Microsoft beat Netscape at their own game when it came to proprietary HTML extensions: Microsoft's were better.
Some of these bugs aren't minor, they're fairly serious "you can't use the DOM properly on a table" types of problems, and things which used to work in 4.x and don't anymore. In its current state, all Netscape 6 will do is create another browser to code for, with another set of quirks and bugs.
There is some help if you don't use the DOM, since things like HTML 4 and CSS seem to be working pretty well.
But I guess the problem is that the Netscape people want to release no matter what, and you almost have to beat on them with a book to get them to include fixes. Anybody remember a few weeks ago when we had the bug that was causing large grey lines in everything? They had to be browbeaten to include a fix for that.
That reminds me of Microsoft, who suffers severe criticism for doing it. So why should Netscape get special treatment?
As someone trying to get results from the 1996 election online, I remember that.
What happened is a major link/core router/something really important like that died unexpectidly, and then people trying to get the election results had to be redirected around it, which made a huge mess. It wasn't a result of the election.
Kind of like if you have a hockey game in Toronto, it generates more traffic downtown around that time. If the Subway unexpectidly closes for another reason, the traffic will get worse as people find other ways to the game. But the Subway closing may be the result of construction or a terrorist, and not because of the hockey game. Its just that you see the results of the closure get magnified during the time of the hockey game, when the Subway is more needed.
If the polls all open/close at the same time, lets say 8am-8pm EST, that would mean that in newfoundland they are open from 10:30am-10:30pm which is too late to get people heading to work, and in BC from 5am-5pm, too early to get the commuters coming home.
I'd like to see it come out in book form, its really too bad that it hasn't.
I remember when the original story was first posted, it shocked me. Apparently it shocked a lot of other people too, here is what one person had to say:
"When Voices from the Hellmouth
appeared on the front page, like most everybody else at the time, I was stunned into
silence. Not only because this was the first time Katz had posted something that
didn't stroke his ego, but also because it was a document that stood on its own. One
could hear and feel the words because they were true; Like many on Slashdot I had
gone through the now well-known geek/outcast stage during my schooling. Although by
now it has been dragged through the media and featured so many times that many
people's stomachs turn just mentioning it, but it was important at the time. It was
definitely a turning point for the entire community. It was also the first time that
Slashdot had featured an article of such far-reaching proportions."
- Signal 11
The big problem with it was that not enough people can see it online. Sure, they *can*, but it doesn't carry a lot of weight with them, whereas a book does. While I can direct somebody at a URL, it just doesn't have the same impact to most of the population as dropping a book on their coffee table would.
Ok... yes you guys may have fucked up by doing the book before asking. But its done now, you can't change it. You said that nobody you have been able to find has refused, I would say thats good enough. There is enough potential for the book to actually accomplish some good that it shouldn't be killed because of an honest mistake by well intentioned people.
As many people have pointed out, this would essentially be Napster/BMG making money by us letting other people suck *our* bandwidth up. Gee, thats a system and a half.
This still doesn't help find out which mp3's are legal and which ones arent, or where to get high quality ones from?
The only way I can see this working that doesn't suck is if we get a new user "BMG" which sits on every napster server with a huge connection and acts as an official server for the high quality BMG legal mp3's.
Of course they'd rather make money while letting us do all the work and incur all the costs.
If you read the Nader responses article, one of the questions that was sent to Bush/Gore also got posted to another website, where both camps did respond to it.
Rambus was soundly rejected as a long term memory platform months ago by the industry and the public at large simply refusing to buy it. At this point its pretty much common knowledge that the vast majority of new computers will not be shipping with RDRAM.
What might have an effect is if there is a boom in the sale of new computers when all the new tech comes out, but a price increase won't be caused because of Rambus. The market already knows that its a dead end.
This is not Cnet. This is Slashdot. Biased headlines are part of what make Slashdot what it is: CT&Crew posting about what they're interested in.
Nobody is making you "swallow CmdrTaco's opinion", unless you have no ability to think for yourself.
Quite obviously, he thinks it looks like barf. I disagree, I think it looks more like cow dung. But since he's the one who gets to post the news, the headline gets to say it looks like barf.
If you don't like it, you could always go read Cnet instead. Many of us like the personal touch.
First off, those numbers sound way off, but a lot of other people have already talked about that.
IIS is faster then Apache on really big hardware according to what I've seen (and what your doing of course), but the exact opposite is true when you get to more ordinary machines.
Case in point, here in my work I have the Intranet webserver, which is a Celeron 333a w/192mb ram and a Seagate 8gb U2W SCSI drive. It runs NT and IIS4. (Its a small company and I had to spend the budget on more important things like network infrastructure and a backup system)
My testbed machine is a Pentium 200MMX, 64mb, 6gb ide drive (not even UDMA:-(, but thats what youg et when you use spare parts:-) ).
The IIS machine has serious problems when things get busy. On dynamic pages using ASP, the machine easily gets crippled when doing things like large XML parsing, or anything involving a database (because the database server is not a seperate machine).
The little linux server can do the same things (when ported to php) without breaking a sweat.
Its hardly scientific, but with the applications I designed for the company, Apache/PHP is a far better solution from the point of speed. A lot of this is because of issues with the size of IIS, you can't easily trim it and NT down in the same way you can Linux, so you wind up with a lot of overhead.
Its not noticable on a big machine, but on everyday hardware the overhead does a real number on what IIS can do.
The general concensus is right though, you should see if you can get Dell to send you some demo boxes and do the comparison yourself, because in the end performance will depend on your applications more then anything else.
Just as a parting thing... most of the benchmarks out there that show that IIS is faster are all on big hardware. I would say that how well they do in a quad CPU setup doesn't matter when your only looking at a single processor server for what your buying.
How slash rates your example comment would seem to depend on the order the ratings were given.
If the post started at 0, we can figure it out like this:
- Goes to rating 5 (+5)
- Goes back to 1 (-4)
- Goes back to 5 (+4)
There is still a point left. Now you can mod a score 5 post up, and the poster gains karma, but the post can never go over score 5.
So consider this (same example)
- Start at score 0
- Get modded up 10 straight times (score 5, +10)
- Get modded down 4 times (score 1, -4)
Now the post shows as score 1, but the poster still gains 6 karma (+10 + -4)
This is an extremely unlikely example, but you can see the drastic difference order makes in slash vs in an averaging system (where order is meaningless).
3. Not really. Say I make a post thats good, but not great.
Now for some bizzare reason, it gets modded up to 5, when there is no way its ever worth that. But its not flamebait, its not a troll, its not redudant, offtopic, etc. Now if a person mods down a good post as flamebait, that person will get destroyed in meta-moderation.
Thats where overrated is useful, its for dropping a post from 5 that doesn't deserve to be there without calling it a troll post.
4. Maybe they just haven't updated it lately. It might be a good idea for some of us to log tonights chat and create some new FAQ entries from it for them (as was suggested in the story actually:-) ). I know when I was running a discussion board sometimes the last thing I wanted to do was update the FAQ, so its hard to blame them.
I'm not terribly familiar with the K5 system, so I'm curious about something...
Can everybody rate posts?
If everybody can rate posts, then here at/. you could quickly run into a problem of trolls simply rating everything in reverse. Then we run into the same problem we have now, needing more good people rating then bad ones (right now we need more good moderators vs bad ones for the system to work).
If we end up with a lot of troll accounts that simply rate everything badly no matter what, then we would need some kind of way of rating the raters to weed out the bad ones, which is what MetaModeration does right now.
So what would happen is only certain people would be allowed to rate, and we end up with a system very similar to the one we have now, except for some different math.
Thats what happens when its written by a self-confessed "perl junkie" originally.:-)
I mean really, if I were going to write somethig like this, it'd be written in ASP (vbscript) and talking to MS-SQL through OLEDB and ADO, because thats what I'm most comfortable with. I could do it in other things, but remember the context/. started in.
It didn't start out with any plan to be as big as it is now, it was a couple of people doing something for fun. Back then, the choice of perl probably made perfect sense, especially since thats what they wanted to use. (just like back then I would have done it in ASP, in that context it makes perfect sense)
They don't seem to want to rewrite the whole thing into another language, but the code is out there for somebody else to do it if they want to.
Well... one issue with that is that the system is currently designed to enable someone to view every post no matter how crappy, if that is what they want to do.
Unless you make -2 a normally browsable level, you take that away. And if you make -2 browsable, you've just defeated the whole purpose, because then it just replaces what -1 is supposed to be, the black hole of posts.
1. AFAIK, no cap for some people is just a rumor, unless its a bug. (a bug in slashcode?? never!;-) )
2. Some people do read the faq (like me, I'm weird that way). One idea I've heard is to create a section for things like Slashdot news and changes that aren't big enough to make the front page. That way, people who are actually interested in changes can read them, and otherwise they don't fill up the main page (or not get posted at all for fear of filling up the main page).
3. I have no idea. Overrated and Underrated are pretty hard to metamod though, because you have to know the original score to know if the overrated is actually fair. Over/Underrated do seem to be a good way for trolls with modpoints to get around the system though, so maybe something could be worked out?
4. In the infamous CT/Sig11 irc log floating around, this actually came up. The problem is that they see suggestions that have already been throught up a few hundred times before, and I guess they just have a hard time replying to them over and over and over again. The suggestions actually have to fall into a pretty narrow set of limits to be even considered too, because of issues like server/database load.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is that ftp.somesite.com tracks when I downoad from ftp.somesite.com, and not from ftp.someothersite.com, or http.athirdsite.com
Smartdownload sends *everything*, irregardless of where it comes from.
I can sit here watching it with Etheral and not cach it trying to do things other then what its supposed to be doing.
If its managing to send information back to Opera Software secretly without going across the network to do it, then thats quite impressive.
Obviously I can't know everything it does without the source, but do I have the time to go through all the source of Netscape 6 to find things they changed from Mozilla? For that matter, do I have the time to go through the Mozilla source looking for things?
I've watched it, and I'm reasonably confident its not doing things it shouldn't be. I can live with that, seeing as how it also works as a browser far better then anything Netscape has released in years.
I reported a bug to Netscape back in 4.00 (a way back when) about a missing ; in a stylesheet being able to crash the browser.
By 4.6 (the last version I bothered to put on my computer), the bug was still there. Thats what, a year?
The smartdownload feature is a bigger privacy hole, it sends back a list of every file you download to AOL.
:)
Opera is your friend, it doesn't do nonsense like that.
by default the search bar in IE goes to MSN Search, the Radio Toolbar has a prominent link to the Microsoft Radio Guide, etc. The default bookmarks are also full of MS stuff.
The problem is that Netscape has taken it over the top with Netscape 6. In IE, it makes sense. The search bar has to go somewhere, so it goes to MSN. (I wonder if you can change it? I've never looked.) The whole program isn't riddled with "buy me" crap, and you don't have to sign up for Netcenter, MSN, or anything else to use it.
Its a matter of scope. Logically, one would expect links back to the browser creator somewhere, Netscape just took it way too far and hurt the overall usability of the browser because of all the crap.
Thankfully, there is the Mozilla releases, which are better then any Netscape release anyway.
Have you ever actually seen that thing? Its gigantic. It requires external power to work. No doubt it generates more heat then a Nuclear Reactor.
Who would actually have bought the thing considering the cost (and considering that it still only really had 32mb of usable memory)?
The last several milestones have all had major speed improvements.
Take a look at m9, and then take a look at m18. The progress is astounding, in that m18 is almost useful as a regular browser on my Pentium 233.
This was their chance. They chose to release a buggy, not quite done product that contains built in spyware. (Check Linux Today for the article about that, I don't have the url handy. But the Smart Download tool has this neat feature of sending every file you download to AOL.)
Netscape is no better then Microsoft when it comes to browsers, except Microsoft beat Netscape at their own game when it came to proprietary HTML extensions: Microsoft's were better.
Now we have not quite done spyware.
Nah, I'll take Mozilla, thank you.
Some of these bugs aren't minor, they're fairly serious "you can't use the DOM properly on a table" types of problems, and things which used to work in 4.x and don't anymore. In its current state, all Netscape 6 will do is create another browser to code for, with another set of quirks and bugs.
There is some help if you don't use the DOM, since things like HTML 4 and CSS seem to be working pretty well.
But I guess the problem is that the Netscape people want to release no matter what, and you almost have to beat on them with a book to get them to include fixes. Anybody remember a few weeks ago when we had the bug that was causing large grey lines in everything? They had to be browbeaten to include a fix for that.
That reminds me of Microsoft, who suffers severe criticism for doing it. So why should Netscape get special treatment?
As someone trying to get results from the 1996 election online, I remember that.
What happened is a major link/core router/something really important like that died unexpectidly, and then people trying to get the election results had to be redirected around it, which made a huge mess. It wasn't a result of the election.
Kind of like if you have a hockey game in Toronto, it generates more traffic downtown around that time. If the Subway unexpectidly closes for another reason, the traffic will get worse as people find other ways to the game. But the Subway closing may be the result of construction or a terrorist, and not because of the hockey game. Its just that you see the results of the closure get magnified during the time of the hockey game, when the Subway is more needed.
You know nothing of Canada, do you?
If the polls all open/close at the same time, lets say 8am-8pm EST, that would mean that in newfoundland they are open from 10:30am-10:30pm which is too late to get people heading to work, and in BC from 5am-5pm, too early to get the commuters coming home.
Brillaint solution.
I'd like to see it come out in book form, its really too bad that it hasn't.
I remember when the original story was first posted, it shocked me. Apparently it shocked a lot of other people too, here is what one person had to say:
"When Voices from the Hellmouth
appeared on the front page, like most everybody else at the time, I was stunned into
silence. Not only because this was the first time Katz had posted something that
didn't stroke his ego, but also because it was a document that stood on its own. One
could hear and feel the words because they were true; Like many on Slashdot I had
gone through the now well-known geek/outcast stage during my schooling. Although by
now it has been dragged through the media and featured so many times that many
people's stomachs turn just mentioning it, but it was important at the time. It was
definitely a turning point for the entire community. It was also the first time that
Slashdot had featured an article of such far-reaching proportions."
- Signal 11
The big problem with it was that not enough people can see it online. Sure, they *can*, but it doesn't carry a lot of weight with them, whereas a book does. While I can direct somebody at a URL, it just doesn't have the same impact to most of the population as dropping a book on their coffee table would.
Ok... yes you guys may have fucked up by doing the book before asking. But its done now, you can't change it. You said that nobody you have been able to find has refused, I would say thats good enough. There is enough potential for the book to actually accomplish some good that it shouldn't be killed because of an honest mistake by well intentioned people.
Here's one vote for printing the book.
As many people have pointed out, this would essentially be Napster/BMG making money by us letting other people suck *our* bandwidth up. Gee, thats a system and a half.
This still doesn't help find out which mp3's are legal and which ones arent, or where to get high quality ones from?
The only way I can see this working that doesn't suck is if we get a new user "BMG" which sits on every napster server with a huge connection and acts as an official server for the high quality BMG legal mp3's.
Of course they'd rather make money while letting us do all the work and incur all the costs.
Wow, Capitalism sucks.
If you read the Nader responses article, one of the questions that was sent to Bush/Gore also got posted to another website, where both camps did respond to it.
So thats an indirect response.
Rambus was soundly rejected as a long term memory platform months ago by the industry and the public at large simply refusing to buy it. At this point its pretty much common knowledge that the vast majority of new computers will not be shipping with RDRAM.
What might have an effect is if there is a boom in the sale of new computers when all the new tech comes out, but a price increase won't be caused because of Rambus. The market already knows that its a dead end.
Why?
This is not Cnet. This is Slashdot. Biased headlines are part of what make Slashdot what it is: CT&Crew posting about what they're interested in.
Nobody is making you "swallow CmdrTaco's opinion", unless you have no ability to think for yourself.
Quite obviously, he thinks it looks like barf. I disagree, I think it looks more like cow dung. But since he's the one who gets to post the news, the headline gets to say it looks like barf.
If you don't like it, you could always go read Cnet instead. Many of us like the personal touch.
It is a performance issue if *everyone* can moderate. That increases the number of moderators tremendously.
If everybody is rating every post, think of the extra server load over a few posts getting modded by a few people.
First off, those numbers sound way off, but a lot of other people have already talked about that.
:-(, but thats what youg et when you use spare parts :-) ).
IIS is faster then Apache on really big hardware according to what I've seen (and what your doing of course), but the exact opposite is true when you get to more ordinary machines.
Case in point, here in my work I have the Intranet webserver, which is a Celeron 333a w/192mb ram and a Seagate 8gb U2W SCSI drive. It runs NT and IIS4. (Its a small company and I had to spend the budget on more important things like network infrastructure and a backup system)
My testbed machine is a Pentium 200MMX, 64mb, 6gb ide drive (not even UDMA
The IIS machine has serious problems when things get busy. On dynamic pages using ASP, the machine easily gets crippled when doing things like large XML parsing, or anything involving a database (because the database server is not a seperate machine).
The little linux server can do the same things (when ported to php) without breaking a sweat.
Its hardly scientific, but with the applications I designed for the company, Apache/PHP is a far better solution from the point of speed. A lot of this is because of issues with the size of IIS, you can't easily trim it and NT down in the same way you can Linux, so you wind up with a lot of overhead.
Its not noticable on a big machine, but on everyday hardware the overhead does a real number on what IIS can do.
The general concensus is right though, you should see if you can get Dell to send you some demo boxes and do the comparison yourself, because in the end performance will depend on your applications more then anything else.
Just as a parting thing... most of the benchmarks out there that show that IIS is faster are all on big hardware. I would say that how well they do in a quad CPU setup doesn't matter when your only looking at a single processor server for what your buying.
Interesting...
How slash rates your example comment would seem to depend on the order the ratings were given.
If the post started at 0, we can figure it out like this:
- Goes to rating 5 (+5)
- Goes back to 1 (-4)
- Goes back to 5 (+4)
There is still a point left. Now you can mod a score 5 post up, and the poster gains karma, but the post can never go over score 5.
So consider this (same example)
- Start at score 0
- Get modded up 10 straight times (score 5, +10)
- Get modded down 4 times (score 1, -4)
Now the post shows as score 1, but the poster still gains 6 karma (+10 + -4)
This is an extremely unlikely example, but you can see the drastic difference order makes in slash vs in an averaging system (where order is meaningless).
3. Not really. Say I make a post thats good, but not great.
:-) ). I know when I was running a discussion board sometimes the last thing I wanted to do was update the FAQ, so its hard to blame them.
Now for some bizzare reason, it gets modded up to 5, when there is no way its ever worth that. But its not flamebait, its not a troll, its not redudant, offtopic, etc. Now if a person mods down a good post as flamebait, that person will get destroyed in meta-moderation.
Thats where overrated is useful, its for dropping a post from 5 that doesn't deserve to be there without calling it a troll post.
4. Maybe they just haven't updated it lately. It might be a good idea for some of us to log tonights chat and create some new FAQ entries from it for them (as was suggested in the story actually
I'm not terribly familiar with the K5 system, so I'm curious about something...
/. you could quickly run into a problem of trolls simply rating everything in reverse. Then we run into the same problem we have now, needing more good people rating then bad ones (right now we need more good moderators vs bad ones for the system to work).
Can everybody rate posts?
If everybody can rate posts, then here at
If we end up with a lot of troll accounts that simply rate everything badly no matter what, then we would need some kind of way of rating the raters to weed out the bad ones, which is what MetaModeration does right now.
So what would happen is only certain people would be allowed to rate, and we end up with a system very similar to the one we have now, except for some different math.
Last I heard, karma was capped at 50.
:-)
Seeing as how I'm not there, this is not first hand information.
Thats what happens when its written by a self-confessed "perl junkie" originally. :-)
/. started in.
I mean really, if I were going to write somethig like this, it'd be written in ASP (vbscript) and talking to MS-SQL through OLEDB and ADO, because thats what I'm most comfortable with. I could do it in other things, but remember the context
It didn't start out with any plan to be as big as it is now, it was a couple of people doing something for fun. Back then, the choice of perl probably made perfect sense, especially since thats what they wanted to use. (just like back then I would have done it in ASP, in that context it makes perfect sense)
They don't seem to want to rewrite the whole thing into another language, but the code is out there for somebody else to do it if they want to.
Well... one issue with that is that the system is currently designed to enable someone to view every post no matter how crappy, if that is what they want to do.
Unless you make -2 a normally browsable level, you take that away. And if you make -2 browsable, you've just defeated the whole purpose, because then it just replaces what -1 is supposed to be, the black hole of posts.
1. AFAIK, no cap for some people is just a rumor, unless its a bug. (a bug in slashcode?? never! ;-) )
2. Some people do read the faq (like me, I'm weird that way). One idea I've heard is to create a section for things like Slashdot news and changes that aren't big enough to make the front page. That way, people who are actually interested in changes can read them, and otherwise they don't fill up the main page (or not get posted at all for fear of filling up the main page).
3. I have no idea. Overrated and Underrated are pretty hard to metamod though, because you have to know the original score to know if the overrated is actually fair. Over/Underrated do seem to be a good way for trolls with modpoints to get around the system though, so maybe something could be worked out?
4. In the infamous CT/Sig11 irc log floating around, this actually came up. The problem is that they see suggestions that have already been throught up a few hundred times before, and I guess they just have a hard time replying to them over and over and over again. The suggestions actually have to fall into a pretty narrow set of limits to be even considered too, because of issues like server/database load.