Er, yeah, if you're going to say something sucks at least have the decency to use it first. In a world of rampant fanboyism I would think that would be a welcome change.
Go buy an XBox if you want to play games. Microsoft doesn't really care if you can't play top-shelf titles on Windows 8, and would probably prefer the hassle of not supporting DirectX for the general PC class systems. They'd be much happier selling you an XBox. Not only does it lock you into their console, it helps lock game developers into their console too.
This is not remotely insightful. MS is positioning Windows 8 as a tablet OS to compete with the iPad and Android. Games are extremely important in that arena and the better the games the more likely people will buy your product. MS knows this so, yes, they most certainly do care about DX and the suitability of W8 for gaming.
Nine times out of ten there has been scaremongering about EU regulations, the disastrous consequences haven't occurred. Maybe it's because the regulations weren't as bad in the first place, maybe it's because of the public outbreak, I really don't know... but these sort of issues tend to get fixed. Maybe certain sections are reworded, maybe technology companies are given a special permission to sell their latest models even if they break the limit, acknowledging that it's needed for the technologies to kick off so they can later be optimized (Latest Intel processors require a lot less energy than they used to).
What are the chances that flawed legislation would get these kinds of revisions if people didn't speak up? If the constituency hadn't voiced their concerns would SOPA have just died a quiet death too? Yes, crying wolf at every little thing loses its effectiveness after a while but when the criticism is justified you'd better speak loudly while you still can because when the law gets signed its over.
Not sure what games you're playing but I've found just about anything I care to play runs just fine on mid-range gear. Skyrim, Crysis, Deus Ex, Gears of War, etc. all play very well on my system and I know I'm not pulling anywhere near 500 watts. I'd have to put it on the kill-a-watt but I'd guess 200 at most.
Sure you could regulate the really high end power hungry stuff of the market but to what end? Most people don't buy that stuff anyway so the victory would be pyrrhic at best and what you can definitely expect is the mid range to be the new "high end" with the requisite price tags to boot. People that insist on the best of the best will just chain several cards together so the power envelope for the system isn't likely to change anyway.
Seems like pointless meddling to me. But then again the EU isn't exactly known for its domestic graphics card industry so why not drum up a little jingo support and throw a little red tape on foreign companies in the name of environmentalism. Kind of reminds me why it costs so much more to rent cars at the airport. It's a hell of a lot more politically palatable to tax visitors that can't vote for the other guy than to aim the gun at the home team.
Plus why cant AMD and NVIDIA just do what they do in the Macbook pros?
Sure but knowing the way bureaucracy works, they'd just get dinged anyway on the higher end part. Not only that but how much would that capability add to the cost of the typical discrete card? I'll bet the driver development, additional silicon, and added complexity comes at a fair price.
The market only bears so much especially when you are talking about bloating high end GPUs with components that have nothing to do with the singular purpose of the almighty frame rate. I guess those are the headaches the marketing people get paid to have though.
I've found that when someone I know takes an interest in programming and comes to me for help I usually steer them towards the language I'm most familiar with that's high enough level that the learning curve isn't going to kill them. If the person thinks they want to write little scripts to perform various little functions behind the scenes on their computer I'll introduce them to Python since it excels at ease of use and is very good for systems programming and automation.
If they have any interest in making things happen on the web then I naturally suggest html/css/javascript. Especially since if they have a few websites that they spend a lot of time on, they can get started easily writing greasemonkey scripts to add cool functionality. With a fairly brief introduction, they can start hacking right away with the javascript console that ships with most browsers and see results immediately.
So, yeah, I'd suggest Python or Javascript for the 9 year old. Probably Javascript as he'll get the most bang for the beginner buck out of it and most importantly he'll be able to impress his friends sooner!
Huge multi-national discount chain doesn't want to sell a product the sole purpose of which is to get people to spend money somewhere else. News at 11.
According to what I could dig up their results are an amalgamation of about 50 percent Bing with the rest being wikipedia, wolfram alpha, Yahoo, and its own web crawler. So it does serve a little more purpose than to just throw a direct api pull from Bing on the screen. I figure much of the straight up web results are probably from Bing while the custom stuff like the special site search tools are their own sauce. But even the ":wq" for wikiquote is essentially the same as typing "site:wikiquote.org" on Bing. It would be trivial for the ddg backend to translate ":wq" or any other special search of that type into the equivalent Bing compatible form and you'd never have to know. I'm not saying they do that or they don't but it would be trivially easy to do so maybe they are. For what it's worth though, I just did a direct comparison of ":wq leonard nimoy" and "site:wikiquote.org leonard nimoy" on ddg and bing respectively and the results seemed different enough to have distinct value and neither seemed subjectively superior to the other.
Android has now become the new windows XP; Vulnerable with patches taking years to get to end users, and millions of users who don't patch their systems even when they are available.
I hate to be the one to break the news to you but every OS has unpatched vulnerabilities. Every. Single. One. Check Secunia or your favorite security site if you don't believe me and marvel at the number of known security holes that vendors have left unadressed. There are something like 500 million Android devices in the wild. When some malware epidemic of epic remote Pwnage happens then you can call Android the new Windows XP. Many hackers might consider an Android device an even juicier target than XP since it is almost guaranteed to contain intimate personal details. Yet life goes on and despite the weekly scare stories the security press likes to churn out, Android users are mostly free from pretty much any malware that they didn't explicitely install themselves either by pirating apps, using third party unvetted app stores, or the rare malicious app that slips through Google's fingers and ends up on the official Play Store (a rarity that is only getting harder for authors to succeed at since Google started really paying attention). My daily driver is a fully updated Galaxy Nexus but you'll have to pardon me for not getting too up in arms over my assortment of lesser Android devices as they've all been trundling along on whatever version of Android they shipped with/got updated to and not a one has yet to show any signs of being the worse for it.
a lot of NFC enabled android phones out there that are vulnerable
By an attack that requires the victim's phone to first actually be on (NFC deactivates when the screen is off), within a very small number of centimeters aligned at just the right place with the attacker's device, in communication for an extended period of time, have NFC actually on at all, and the user to be totally oblivious as a stranger who both miraculously is on the ball enough to strike at just the right moment and takes advantage of all of these variables being perfectly aligned for him to do his dirty work. Um, yeah. Maybe I should play the numbers too since I'm apparently the recipient of the cosmos' so ridiculously contrived you can still smell the glue statistical outlier joke of the day award. Or I'll just have a shirt printed saying "The Universe hates me and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".
To get basic results, you are correct that the search engine doesn't need any personal information. However, being charitable and assuming that the technology is mature, having a search engine that can produce individually tailored results can be immensely useful. The fact that I can just type in the word "restaurant" and Google will automatically give me results tailored to my location and food preferences is quite useful. I would imagine looking up searchers' locations via ip address for every search would be pretty slow so them knowing where I live or getting the GPS data off my mobile device makes a lot of sense. The realistic alternative being for me to type "restaurants $ZIPCODE" is just annoying and thanks to technology pointless. Google being able to identify me as a user also makes it easy for me to use their "block site" filter in the search results so the same undesired domains don't keep popping up every time I search for things that trigger them. Of course, while I may question the usefulness of a particular site, that doesn't mean somebody else might not think it's great so just spitting the exact same results for every single person like the soup line in Oliver Twist seems unnecessarily simple-minded and even worse it introduces a cognitive burden on the user that can be avoided with an accurate enough set of pertinent user characteristics.
It's hard to see how a suitably designed search engine can't produce superior results by knowing more about its users. I understand the privacy worries but, assuming they didn't exist, I believe it's fair to say that most people would have no qualms about a modern day "Oracle of Delphi" that isn't limited to just giving canned answers to every phrase entered into it. And as search engine technology gets more and more sophisticated, the good answers should get even better. Ultimately culminating in you not even having to ask in the first place. Some people might think that's a bad thing but I for one look forward to it.
There will always be providers for the niche that prefers their results in the raw and that's a good thing. Personally I use Google and provide them with as much information as I am comfortable with and I have been happy with the results. Thanks to competition, you shouldn't have any problem satisfying your preference of getting the same answer to "sushi" whether you are in HI or NY (first raw result is for a restaurant in Santa Clara CA). While I'll be enjoying my lunch at the place right down the street that I never heard of before but happens to be the very second result Google returned for me.
Yes and for multiple reasons. First of all, for general searches, it gets its results from Bing which has been shown over and over to be inferior to Google and will likely remain so for the forseeable future. The second issue is on the ironic side as two of their main claims to fame are "We don't track you" and "We don't filter bubble you". As we are seeing in the hilariously named "Bing it on" marketing campaign, a search engine knowing certain things about the user like where they are (filter bubble), and what the person has searched for and found useful in the past (tracking) are vitally important for getting better and more relevant search results. If you take the Bing challenge and open Google in another tab running the same searches you will find the results in your own other browser tab are more relevant than the Bing challenge and the ersatz Google results it displays. Of course this is because the Bing challenge is denying the user the ability to take advantage of what Google knows about them when performing the searches. The really funny thing is that for many people Google still does a better job.
The bottom line is a search engine that knows nothing about its users and uses an inferior api to the class leader is naturally going to deliver an inferior experience and while this niche satisfies some people, it is very unlikely to truly go mainstream or become highly successful.
That means ANY other browser you use on the device is safe from this attack, yes even though it's also using webkit. Like Chrome...
Many users (possibly even most) are content with the default browser so this is really a piss-poor solution. Not only that but last I checked iOS only opens links in other apps with Safari. It is doubtful a significant number of the people effected will be able or willing to do what it takes to fix this bug^H^H^H feature. For a mobile OS with one of its primary claims to fame being a satisfactory small-screen internet browsing experience to be so easily exploitable in the normal process of enjoying said experience is just embarrassing. So much for sandboxing and encryption and a walled-garden app store when all the hapless user has to do is surf to a given web page to get their device compromised. Truly shameful.
Great, and how long do you think it will be until all of them are upgraded to the "current version"? a year? 2 years? Never is my guess.
I would say get a Nexus were it not for the tarnishing given the line by the Verizon debacle so I'll just say get a Nexus with GSM. And if the Galaxy Nexus isn't your speed then wait just a couple of months until Google releases the planned multiple simultaneous Nexus lines. As far as patching and new versions of the operating system go, Google is updating Android and releasing security fixes responsibly but it is still up to the OEMs to actually release for their individual handsets. The formula works though if market share is the goal and my understanding is that for Google, it is. More people using internet capable smartphones = more people viewing ads. And unlike the iPhone or any other competitor, Google's presence on the vast majority of Android handsets is a given and won't be changing any time soon.
For the general consumer, I'm not convinced that most even care about Android functionality updates. Many users of the OS are smartphone first-timers and would be loath to install anything that made significant changes to how the phone looked or behaved. OEMs do need to focus on security updates though as that is a genuinely pressing issue. Much more so than whether Aunt Tilly is running ICS or Jellybean in my opinion.
Smartphone AR apps are inferior to Google Glass for one simple and glaring reason. With the phone, you have to look at the whole scene through the smartphone camera and screen. Glass on the other hand overlays the 'augmented' part over the real world. The former is annoying and fatigues the eye while the latter is much more natural.
I've got about 50 sleeper accounts stored in my MS Access database, ready for trolling.
Of course you do and you've probably got a script that rotates them for you. Of course most people write similarly even when they're using different troll accounts so a sufficiently sophisticated Bayesian spam filter would catch some of it and a dedicated mod crew of oldtimers would sniff most of the rest out like bloodhounds on a 3-day meth bender.
If karma is ever a problem, you can just scroll to the bottom of the page, find something that looks good, and post it at the top to steal mod points.
Cue up the Baysian filter again to check how similar a post is to what's already in the database so even ripping material from other stories will get you busted. Forget about any upmods adding to your karma from that comment and do it too many times, welcome to the hellban. Maybe a karma ding for even trying. That ought to cut your 50 accounts down to size soon enough.
If there were a jail implemented, I'd just use proxies (the proxy detector is actually bullshit; it's piss easy to find a working proxy).
Yes, you could keep creating accounts and storing them up. The key would be to shorten the posts between you debuting one of your accounts and it getting hellbanned. Sounds like fun. One thing I'd implement almost immediately is geo-locating the ip that people create accounts from and see if they subsequently post from a completely implausibly different location. Say you create the account with a Finnish IP but you post from a Chilean one a week later and then a Georgian one week later. I'll be very sure to spend some time checking your posts out. If their innocuous, carry on but trolling via proxies, hello hellban.
Yes, truly dedicated trolls will defeat any means. Just like with security, the key is to make the payoff worth less than the effort. If geeknet really cared, it could make trolling a lot harder. And to keep you on your toes, I'd let you get a couple of runs in so the system didn't get too predictable. The bottom line is you can never completely eliminate trolling but you can cut down on the casual stuff so the really interesting posters like yourself could get even more personal attention.
his
Check your privilege, sexist. There are female trolls too.
My suggestion is do whatever these guys have done to keep eternal September at bay as long as possible.
ITT: Others brightly chime in with awesome ideas of how to innovate in forums
As far as Slashdot, disallowing AC posts might help raise the level of discussion. Maybe remove the karma cap and make the number publicly available maybe beside the user name. Since the community is large and healthy, disallow new users from posting for at least 3 days to stop some of the hit and run trolling. Something else that could be tried is maybe make a person lose some karma points everytime they post. That way people would more likely post things they think will get modded up rather than "me too" type stuff. Last but not least, how about bringing on the mighty "hell ban"? When a user trolls and trolls until his karma gets terrible, instead of just starting off his posts at -1 from then on, you bring in the hell ban. From the posters perspective, he is posting as normal and he can see his posts like he always could. But from the perspective of everybody else, his posts never actually appear. What happens is the poster eventually seeing that nobody is feeding his trolling, moves on or starts another account hopefully with a better attitude.
Slashdot Mirror
Er, yeah, if you're going to say something sucks at least have the decency to use it first. In a world of rampant fanboyism I would think that would be a welcome change.
Works for me.
Sure you can. Right click, Inspect Element, Delete Node. Presto! Works every time.
What defaults would those be? The having to hold down one extra keyboard button to run unsigned code from a random unknown location on the Internet?
Do you really think thats a bad thing?
Yeah so the aunt Tillys of the world learn they have to hold an extra key down to install the dancing bunnies. What's the difference?
Go buy an XBox if you want to play games. Microsoft doesn't really care if you can't play top-shelf titles on Windows 8, and would probably prefer the hassle of not supporting DirectX for the general PC class systems. They'd be much happier selling you an XBox. Not only does it lock you into their console, it helps lock game developers into their console too.
This is not remotely insightful. MS is positioning Windows 8 as a tablet OS to compete with the iPad and Android. Games are extremely important in that arena and the better the games the more likely people will buy your product. MS knows this so, yes, they most certainly do care about DX and the suitability of W8 for gaming.
Nine times out of ten there has been scaremongering about EU regulations, the disastrous consequences haven't occurred. Maybe it's because the regulations weren't as bad in the first place, maybe it's because of the public outbreak, I really don't know... but these sort of issues tend to get fixed. Maybe certain sections are reworded, maybe technology companies are given a special permission to sell their latest models even if they break the limit, acknowledging that it's needed for the technologies to kick off so they can later be optimized (Latest Intel processors require a lot less energy than they used to).
What are the chances that flawed legislation would get these kinds of revisions if people didn't speak up? If the constituency hadn't voiced their concerns would SOPA have just died a quiet death too? Yes, crying wolf at every little thing loses its effectiveness after a while but when the criticism is justified you'd better speak loudly while you still can because when the law gets signed its over.
Sure you could regulate the really high end power hungry stuff of the market but to what end? Most people don't buy that stuff anyway so the victory would be pyrrhic at best and what you can definitely expect is the mid range to be the new "high end" with the requisite price tags to boot. People that insist on the best of the best will just chain several cards together so the power envelope for the system isn't likely to change anyway.
Seems like pointless meddling to me. But then again the EU isn't exactly known for its domestic graphics card industry so why not drum up a little jingo support and throw a little red tape on foreign companies in the name of environmentalism. Kind of reminds me why it costs so much more to rent cars at the airport. It's a hell of a lot more politically palatable to tax visitors that can't vote for the other guy than to aim the gun at the home team.
Plus why cant AMD and NVIDIA just do what they do in the Macbook pros?
Sure but knowing the way bureaucracy works, they'd just get dinged anyway on the higher end part. Not only that but how much would that capability add to the cost of the typical discrete card? I'll bet the driver development, additional silicon, and added complexity comes at a fair price.
The market only bears so much especially when you are talking about bloating high end GPUs with components that have nothing to do with the singular purpose of the almighty frame rate. I guess those are the headaches the marketing people get paid to have though.
My hovel for a Slashdot admin account. You'd be +15 Hilarious and -10 Buy Me Another Dr. Pepper and Keyboard!
If they have any interest in making things happen on the web then I naturally suggest html/css/javascript. Especially since if they have a few websites that they spend a lot of time on, they can get started easily writing greasemonkey scripts to add cool functionality. With a fairly brief introduction, they can start hacking right away with the javascript console that ships with most browsers and see results immediately.
So, yeah, I'd suggest Python or Javascript for the 9 year old. Probably Javascript as he'll get the most bang for the beginner buck out of it and most importantly he'll be able to impress his friends sooner!
Exactly what I was thinking. But, hey, why inject common sense into public discourse, right?
Huge multi-national discount chain doesn't want to sell a product the sole purpose of which is to get people to spend money somewhere else. News at 11.
According to what I could dig up their results are an amalgamation of about 50 percent Bing with the rest being wikipedia, wolfram alpha, Yahoo, and its own web crawler. So it does serve a little more purpose than to just throw a direct api pull from Bing on the screen. I figure much of the straight up web results are probably from Bing while the custom stuff like the special site search tools are their own sauce. But even the ":wq" for wikiquote is essentially the same as typing "site:wikiquote.org" on Bing. It would be trivial for the ddg backend to translate ":wq" or any other special search of that type into the equivalent Bing compatible form and you'd never have to know. I'm not saying they do that or they don't but it would be trivially easy to do so maybe they are. For what it's worth though, I just did a direct comparison of ":wq leonard nimoy" and "site:wikiquote.org leonard nimoy" on ddg and bing respectively and the results seemed different enough to have distinct value and neither seemed subjectively superior to the other.
Android has now become the new windows XP; Vulnerable with patches taking years to get to end users, and millions of users who don't patch their systems even when they are available.
I hate to be the one to break the news to you but every OS has unpatched vulnerabilities. Every. Single. One. Check Secunia or your favorite security site if you don't believe me and marvel at the number of known security holes that vendors have left unadressed. There are something like 500 million Android devices in the wild. When some malware epidemic of epic remote Pwnage happens then you can call Android the new Windows XP. Many hackers might consider an Android device an even juicier target than XP since it is almost guaranteed to contain intimate personal details. Yet life goes on and despite the weekly scare stories the security press likes to churn out, Android users are mostly free from pretty much any malware that they didn't explicitely install themselves either by pirating apps, using third party unvetted app stores, or the rare malicious app that slips through Google's fingers and ends up on the official Play Store (a rarity that is only getting harder for authors to succeed at since Google started really paying attention). My daily driver is a fully updated Galaxy Nexus but you'll have to pardon me for not getting too up in arms over my assortment of lesser Android devices as they've all been trundling along on whatever version of Android they shipped with/got updated to and not a one has yet to show any signs of being the worse for it.
a lot of NFC enabled android phones out there that are vulnerable
By an attack that requires the victim's phone to first actually be on (NFC deactivates when the screen is off), within a very small number of centimeters aligned at just the right place with the attacker's device, in communication for an extended period of time, have NFC actually on at all, and the user to be totally oblivious as a stranger who both miraculously is on the ball enough to strike at just the right moment and takes advantage of all of these variables being perfectly aligned for him to do his dirty work. Um, yeah. Maybe I should play the numbers too since I'm apparently the recipient of the cosmos' so ridiculously contrived you can still smell the glue statistical outlier joke of the day award. Or I'll just have a shirt printed saying "The Universe hates me and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".
To get basic results, you are correct that the search engine doesn't need any personal information. However, being charitable and assuming that the technology is mature, having a search engine that can produce individually tailored results can be immensely useful. The fact that I can just type in the word "restaurant" and Google will automatically give me results tailored to my location and food preferences is quite useful. I would imagine looking up searchers' locations via ip address for every search would be pretty slow so them knowing where I live or getting the GPS data off my mobile device makes a lot of sense. The realistic alternative being for me to type "restaurants $ZIPCODE" is just annoying and thanks to technology pointless. Google being able to identify me as a user also makes it easy for me to use their "block site" filter in the search results so the same undesired domains don't keep popping up every time I search for things that trigger them. Of course, while I may question the usefulness of a particular site, that doesn't mean somebody else might not think it's great so just spitting the exact same results for every single person like the soup line in Oliver Twist seems unnecessarily simple-minded and even worse it introduces a cognitive burden on the user that can be avoided with an accurate enough set of pertinent user characteristics.
It's hard to see how a suitably designed search engine can't produce superior results by knowing more about its users. I understand the privacy worries but, assuming they didn't exist, I believe it's fair to say that most people would have no qualms about a modern day "Oracle of Delphi" that isn't limited to just giving canned answers to every phrase entered into it. And as search engine technology gets more and more sophisticated, the good answers should get even better. Ultimately culminating in you not even having to ask in the first place. Some people might think that's a bad thing but I for one look forward to it.
There will always be providers for the niche that prefers their results in the raw and that's a good thing. Personally I use Google and provide them with as much information as I am comfortable with and I have been happy with the results. Thanks to competition, you shouldn't have any problem satisfying your preference of getting the same answer to "sushi" whether you are in HI or NY (first raw result is for a restaurant in Santa Clara CA). While I'll be enjoying my lunch at the place right down the street that I never heard of before but happens to be the very second result Google returned for me.
We're having pretty good luck advertising on Google. Maybe MS should raise the bids on their adwords a few pennies. Can't hurt.
Unfortunately duckduckgo is shit
Yes and for multiple reasons. First of all, for general searches, it gets its results from Bing which has been shown over and over to be inferior to Google and will likely remain so for the forseeable future. The second issue is on the ironic side as two of their main claims to fame are "We don't track you" and "We don't filter bubble you". As we are seeing in the hilariously named "Bing it on" marketing campaign, a search engine knowing certain things about the user like where they are (filter bubble), and what the person has searched for and found useful in the past (tracking) are vitally important for getting better and more relevant search results. If you take the Bing challenge and open Google in another tab running the same searches you will find the results in your own other browser tab are more relevant than the Bing challenge and the ersatz Google results it displays. Of course this is because the Bing challenge is denying the user the ability to take advantage of what Google knows about them when performing the searches. The really funny thing is that for many people Google still does a better job.
The bottom line is a search engine that knows nothing about its users and uses an inferior api to the class leader is naturally going to deliver an inferior experience and while this niche satisfies some people, it is very unlikely to truly go mainstream or become highly successful.
On iPhone, can use alternate browser to avoid.
That means ANY other browser you use on the device is safe from this attack, yes even though it's also using webkit. Like Chrome...
Many users (possibly even most) are content with the default browser so this is really a piss-poor solution. Not only that but last I checked iOS only opens links in other apps with Safari. It is doubtful a significant number of the people effected will be able or willing to do what it takes to fix this bug^H^H^H feature. For a mobile OS with one of its primary claims to fame being a satisfactory small-screen internet browsing experience to be so easily exploitable in the normal process of enjoying said experience is just embarrassing. So much for sandboxing and encryption and a walled-garden app store when all the hapless user has to do is surf to a given web page to get their device compromised. Truly shameful.
Great, and how long do you think it will be until all of them are upgraded to the "current version"? a year? 2 years? Never is my guess.
I would say get a Nexus were it not for the tarnishing given the line by the Verizon debacle so I'll just say get a Nexus with GSM. And if the Galaxy Nexus isn't your speed then wait just a couple of months until Google releases the planned multiple simultaneous Nexus lines. As far as patching and new versions of the operating system go, Google is updating Android and releasing security fixes responsibly but it is still up to the OEMs to actually release for their individual handsets. The formula works though if market share is the goal and my understanding is that for Google, it is. More people using internet capable smartphones = more people viewing ads. And unlike the iPhone or any other competitor, Google's presence on the vast majority of Android handsets is a given and won't be changing any time soon.
For the general consumer, I'm not convinced that most even care about Android functionality updates. Many users of the OS are smartphone first-timers and would be loath to install anything that made significant changes to how the phone looked or behaved. OEMs do need to focus on security updates though as that is a genuinely pressing issue. Much more so than whether Aunt Tilly is running ICS or Jellybean in my opinion.
How about studies of AC first posters with nothing worthwhile to say resorting to the predictably boring ad hominem?
Do you 'wear' your car keys too?
Smartphone AR apps are inferior to Google Glass for one simple and glaring reason. With the phone, you have to look at the whole scene through the smartphone camera and screen. Glass on the other hand overlays the 'augmented' part over the real world. The former is annoying and fatigues the eye while the latter is much more natural.
Well, that's informative. I was wondering why unicode didn't work here.
I've got about 50 sleeper accounts stored in my MS Access database, ready for trolling.
Of course you do and you've probably got a script that rotates them for you. Of course most people write similarly even when they're using different troll accounts so a sufficiently sophisticated Bayesian spam filter would catch some of it and a dedicated mod crew of oldtimers would sniff most of the rest out like bloodhounds on a 3-day meth bender.
If karma is ever a problem, you can just scroll to the bottom of the page, find something that looks good, and post it at the top to steal mod points.
Cue up the Baysian filter again to check how similar a post is to what's already in the database so even ripping material from other stories will get you busted. Forget about any upmods adding to your karma from that comment and do it too many times, welcome to the hellban. Maybe a karma ding for even trying. That ought to cut your 50 accounts down to size soon enough.
If there were a jail implemented, I'd just use proxies (the proxy detector is actually bullshit; it's piss easy to find a working proxy).
Yes, you could keep creating accounts and storing them up. The key would be to shorten the posts between you debuting one of your accounts and it getting hellbanned. Sounds like fun. One thing I'd implement almost immediately is geo-locating the ip that people create accounts from and see if they subsequently post from a completely implausibly different location. Say you create the account with a Finnish IP but you post from a Chilean one a week later and then a Georgian one week later. I'll be very sure to spend some time checking your posts out. If their innocuous, carry on but trolling via proxies, hello hellban.
Yes, truly dedicated trolls will defeat any means. Just like with security, the key is to make the payoff worth less than the effort. If geeknet really cared, it could make trolling a lot harder. And to keep you on your toes, I'd let you get a couple of runs in so the system didn't get too predictable. The bottom line is you can never completely eliminate trolling but you can cut down on the casual stuff so the really interesting posters like yourself could get even more personal attention.
his
Check your privilege, sexist. There are female trolls too.
Ha ha. Didn't didn't know? There are no women on the internet.
We need a rethink of forum/chat systems.
My suggestion is do whatever these guys have done to keep eternal September at bay as long as possible.
ITT: Others brightly chime in with awesome ideas of how to innovate in forums
As far as Slashdot, disallowing AC posts might help raise the level of discussion. Maybe remove the karma cap and make the number publicly available maybe beside the user name. Since the community is large and healthy, disallow new users from posting for at least 3 days to stop some of the hit and run trolling. Something else that could be tried is maybe make a person lose some karma points everytime they post. That way people would more likely post things they think will get modded up rather than "me too" type stuff. Last but not least, how about bringing on the mighty "hell ban"? When a user trolls and trolls until his karma gets terrible, instead of just starting off his posts at -1 from then on, you bring in the hell ban. From the posters perspective, he is posting as normal and he can see his posts like he always could. But from the perspective of everybody else, his posts never actually appear. What happens is the poster eventually seeing that nobody is feeding his trolling, moves on or starts another account hopefully with a better attitude.