And whoever became involved, they had to be "Outside" the linux/open source world to a certain degree: we didn't want anyone to think that a company might buy us simply to gain an advantage in the story select.
But I doubt it will ever happen on/. I'm working on an open source slash-like news system called Scoop, and this is the next step in development. I don't really care what they do here anymore, but I'd really like to see how well a site with open editing as well as commenting would work.
My existing code lives at scoop.kuro5hin.org, and www.kuro5hin.org is running scoop as well. The downloadable sources are screwed up right now, but that will be fixed this weekend, along with (hopefully) open content moderation.
Well, after searching around the link the marketing 'droid gives in the update, the best I can find is an SDK. You can link their C libs into your own app, using an API. This, too, is not open source, and does not in fact "give developers access to the source." One wonders if any programmers still work at AltaVista, and if anyone has asked them what source code is lately.
Nevertheless this has nothing at all to do with the affiliate program they announced in the infamous press release, and we can conclude that the whole thing was either a shameless publicity stunt, or a genuine lack of understanding of what "Open Source" means by some marketing geek. I'll be charitable and assume the latter, and we can likely expect this to continue. Open Source is a hot buzzword right now, and will get mis-applied to more and more things. For a comparable example, witness the current total meaninglessness of the word "deconstruct" in Lit circles. That was once a very precise word for a particular form of literary criticism. Then it became a buzzword, and now it's been so diluted that even real deconstructionists are afraid to use it.
By kuro5hin, InaccurateNet News UPDATED February 1, 2000
In a shameless attempt to gain attention from popular news sites that will post any story that includes the phrase "Open Source," internet portal site AltaVista announced that it will begin giving away the source code to it's search engine while actually doing no such thing.
Today Altavista rolled out an affiliate program which "allows" web sites to include html that links to the altavista search engine. Altavista did not address the question of why this is interesting, when people have been including search engine textboxes on their pages since 1994. Instead they prominently featured the phrase "Open Source" in the press release title, and went on to not mention even once how "allowing users to include html" could be interpreted as "releasing the source code to it's search engine."
You may still download a crippled trial version of Altavista's intranet search tools, which you may uncripple for a registration fee. But the bold maneuver of issuing a press release that uses the words "open source" is taking the internet by storm.
"We see this press release as an unprecedented opportunity to leverage traffic from weblogs that don't do even the most rudimentary fact-checking," said an Altavista spokesman. "And we know for a fact that there are some very high traffic sites which auto-post any press release that uses the words 'open source,' without a human editor even being involved."
The perl scripts which post content at the popular computer news site Slashdot declined to comment on the allegations that no human is involved in story posting anymore, saying only, "It looks like a hole in the GNU GPL [may allow] people to practically turn GNU-free software into proprietary software..."
----------------
Note: This is intended mostly to be a flame at altavista, and to mildly poke fun at slashdot. Please take it for the humor it is. Thanks. --The Mgmt.
It's clearly the same person who kept railing on about Slashdot's not releasing the Slash code and whatnot.
There were several people complaining about this. I was one of them, but it's not me doing the attacking. For the record, I'm thrilled that the code's out, and have no further problem with slashdot or it's management.
You're right though that/. appears to be suffering what amounts to a DOS attack, in the comments. Maybe we could rename it a "Denial of Signal" attack.
My only suggestion for this is that basically, totally anonymous posting should go. Here's how I would do that:
To post a comment, you must have a user account and be logged in.
You MAY choose to post your comment anonymously. The system will know who you are, but your name will not be associated publicly with your post.
User accounts must be confirmed via email before being activated. That is, you sign up,/. sends you a "confirm" mail, and you return it to activate the account.
Accounts may be disabled by admins because of abuse of the comment system, which constitutes a DOS atack, as I mentioned above.
The overall effect of this is that it would be much more difficult to automate the slashdot-bombing procedure, as you'd have to create a new email account and user account every time you got booted. I think this would kill about 90% of the worst crap posted here.
Note that I'm talking about the long pasted-in text posts, and the really just useless crap. Some of the trolls are amusing, and I don't think they'd get all get booted.
As for the user account hijacking problem, I assume there are some security issues with the slash code. Bummer.
Secondly, they said that RH doesn't come with many monitoring tools.
Heh. I read that bit, and glanced over to my gnome panel, where live graphical readouts show me how much hard drive space I have left, and how much processor, memory, and swap I'm using, just to make sure that I hadn't been imagining them. But no, they were all still there, telling me everything's fine. These applets are standard with Gnome, and thus with RedHat 6.1, and, the best part, you can run them while you're doing other things. Ever run Windows performance monitor? Good lord, right there is your best demonstration of the quantum-mech principle that observing something is an interaction, and therefore changes the observed. If they had that running during the test, no wonder they got bad performance from W2K.
Anyway, this is an article that tries hard to be fair, written by someone who is really clearly much more familiar with the windows world. They just flat-out missed a lot of the tools that RedHat comes with, apparently because of a lack of familiarity.
You might be interested in PHPSlash, which is another attempt at creating a Slashdot-like system under the GPL.
I've looked at PHPslash, and I wish them the best of luck. I do have a preference for perl, mainly because I write perl all day for work, and the cost of switching back and forth between perl and PHP is oddly high. They're very similar, but not quite similar enough, so whenever I write in PHP for a while, my perl gets all screwed up.:-) Plus there's a lot of code I can swipe from work projects that helps move Scoop along. As you say, competition is a good thing.
I'm trying to make it easier for people to contribute to Scoop. Yesterday I wrote new install instructions that should make it alot easier for people, and the next thing I'm going to be doing is revising what I've written so far, commenting, organizing, and writing developer docs. There's several things that need to be done before I really expect anyone to help (like, um, posting stories for example!), but thanks for the encouragement. Check back soon.
Ok, I'll start with the easy solution. I just excluded roblimo in my preferences. Maybe my perception that the quality of slashdot has gone down is just all the noise that keeps showing up on the front page with his name on it. We shall see.
Note that this is a really harsh solution, from me. this post pretty well explains what I usually think of self-censorship. JonKatz makes me angry sometimes, and irritated others, and occasionally even amused. So I don't want to just screen him out. Roblimo... I just don't really care to see anymore. Apathy is the worst punishment (even Katz knows that!;-)).
As for finding or creating something better, well, I'm trying to help others create by writing free software for them to use. Scoop is a from-scratch slash clone which is already licensed under the GPL. It's not my real job, so development is in my spare time, but it's coming along. Maybe with weblog software that's usable, others will be able to create more interesting communities.
Well, Bruce, for *literate* hackers, the title "Win98 0wNz j00r L4M3R Azz" with a question mark at the end (which is how it ran) indicated that it was a question, rather than a statement of fact. But be that as it may. I know that you're human, and like most humans you feel that "0wNz" and "L4M3R Azz" are phrases that only apply to 'l337 H4x0Rz with whom you totally agree - and that any 'l337 H4x0R that doesn't adhere strictly to the Official Bruce Perens Party Line is wrong, sensationalist, biased, and (no doubt) an irresponsible l4M3r.
I posted this piece because I felt "l33td00d@aol.com" raised some subtle but interesting technical points about r00ting L4m3Rz that were worth discussion and clarification. I honestly did not expect to get flamed over my decision to post his submission.
I believe that l33t H4x0r tricks and h4X, like l33t h4x0rz themselves, should be discussed as openly and publicly as possible so that everyone knows who is 0wN3d by whom. However, words (especially l33t H4x0r words) are far more slippery than code. With words the question, "R j00 4 L4m3R?" is often far harder to answer than it is in software.
Please accept my humble apology. I was wrong. I will try not to make the mistake of posting anything on Slashdot ever again.
-----------------------------
Ok, the last bit was only wishful thinking. But before you dismiss this as a menaingless troll, read it carefully. How different is posting the legal opinions of someone who has no legal knowledge from posting the technical opinions of somone who has no technical knowledge? Robin would have been run out of town on a rail if he had actually posted "Win98 0wNz j00r L4M3R Azz?" but since it was "arcane legal matters," he was perfectly justified? Hackers tend to have very finely tuned bullshit detectors, and mine goes to full alert whenever Robin-the-Taxi-Guy starts defending himself.
Slashdot is dying. I started reading here for the articles. I hardly ever even read the comments. Whatever I may say about CmdrTaco, he has a good nose for interesting content. As soon as he pretty much stopped being the editorial manager, and turned it over to this joker, the content went to hell. But there's still the community, which is often a rich source of information and new ideas. So now I read the comments more than I even pay attention to the stories.
But how long can a site maintain an interesting community if it no longer has the content to draw interesting people. Sooner or later (sooner, I think) the smart people here will get sick of all the crap and move somewhere else (like technocrat.net, where the S/N is still blissfully high).
The life of slashdot is like a microcosm of the life of Silicon Valley. First there were the geeks, geeking out and doing cool stuff. Then they made some money, and the businesspeople moved in. Now you can't swing a patch cable without hitting twelve lawyers and eighteen CEO's. But where are all the geeks? They're moving on.
Hey, that'll be easy! I'll just fire up my editor here and grab the latest slash code...
Oh, damn. I knew there was something wrong with that plan. Well, I guess you'll just have to wait until Rob applies Service Pack 6 for Slash2000, and you know, he's been so busy counting his money lately and everything... well, it might be a while.
Slashdot would still smell exactly like it did a year ago. But Rob will be done with the new scent formula any day now, so then you can all put the right ingredients into your iSmell. Really. They have an internal smell date that they fully intend to make. It's a huge job. Only three people in the world know how difficult it is to formulate a new smell. But they could never have gotten as far as they have without all the wonderful smells that others on the internet have created and given away for free. And for that they are truly grateful. So just you wait. The new smell will knock your socks off, and bowl you right over. Any day now...
If you took most of us, sat us down once a week, and said "write an interesting essay by tomorrow", most of us would have a hard time doing much better than Katz.
As Cartman might say, this is hella true. Witness, for example, some of the weaker attempts at humor on my site. Sitting down and writing something that might be worth someone else's time to read, under any circumstances, is hard. Under a deadline, it's waaaay hard. And who the hell knows if it even ended up being worth the effort you spent on it? I, personally, would love to have Katz-level feedback, even if much of it was negative.
BUT. So, assume Katz has to sit down and write something for tomorrow's/. What to do? What's his thought process? He seems to earnestly believe that he's saying important things that need to be said. That he and he alone is a voice of sanity and cool, analytical savvy. Is it all just a put-on? Is it the pressure of the deadline, and the easy way out? Or does Katz write to the dictates of his soul (such as it may be)?
Personally, if I had to take a stand on "freedom of speech, and the web" and I had to have my stand expounded upon by tomorrow, I'd at least try to be thought-provoking. I can only assume that Katz would try to be as well. So the conclusion there is that Katz is, or can be, an extrordinarily shallow thinker.
I'd rather not believe this, so the other conclusion is that he's just relatively lazy, and rather than try out an unpopular stand, or attempt to push the analysis to a level beyond what we all already know, he merely recycles common knowledge using big words, in the finest tradition of pop sociology worldwide.
Which is it? Who knows. Maybe I'll try writing a 1500-word essay on "Freedom of Speech, and Flamage on the Net" by tomorrow, and see what I can come up with. It'd be an interesting experiment, anyway, and one that I doubt many people here have tried.:-)
I saw it, because I read at -1 and tend to read nearly all the comments, when I do read them. And this post served a purpose for me. It expressed, clearly and concisely, what I and no doubt many many others were thinking at the moment, thus obviating the need for me to post something like it, only much more long-winded and incoherent. Much like this, in fact. But take that sentiment to be a stand-in for the thoughts of (I'd estimate) 1/4 to 1/3 of the people who read this article and didn't post, and thank the AC that it only really had to be said once.
And yes, I know I can set my prefs to screen out Katz. I find that very option vaguely creepy, along with comment thresholds. For me, they end up being counterproductive, since as soon as I set a comment threshold, I'm curious as to what the AC's said that got them moderated to the bottom of the list. So I invariably end up reading the "hidden" posts anyway. Maybe it's just a personal problem.
And as for why I still read Katz, I can't quite explain that either. Part of it is I still keep expecting him to write something worthwhile, and I'd rather not miss it. Part of it is just a fascination at the sheer gall of the guy, and the nuts it must take to step up to the plate and spout the classic (as someone else put it) "northern white male liberal" Party Line. It's fascinating in the same way that Brad Pitt's character in Kalifornia (sort of an uber-white-trash archetype) was fascinating, as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of a particular stereotype. I read Katz, or watch the movie, and I ponder the questions:
Do they know they're a walking, talking, living stereotype?
Do they have deeper thoughts that they're afraid or unwilling to share, or is this really all there is?
Are they capable of stepping outside their own view and looking at the issue from that of someone radically different from them? For example (in the case of Katz) a white supremacist? Or a m4d Haxx0r flaming sKript Kiddee?
It's kind of an anthropological curiosity, I guess. This turned out to be way too long-winded. Oh well. Take it for what it's worth:-)
Jesus H. Christ. I just feel silly all over for being part of this. First we have a silly story posted, then a bunch of tightasses get all riled up over it. But THEN (the kicker) the editor of the site gets just as bitchy back to the flamers. What a ridiculous medium this is. Please, people, attempt to maintain SOME sense of decorum? If not the rabble in the comments section, could we at least have it from the staff? (That means you too, Malda).
I used to have a server named "Woody" where I worked. Despite all the obvious potential, I didn't put two and two together until one fine day, when, after a brief outage, I announced brightly: "Woody's back up!"
I'd also like to point out, on a political note, that Al Gore may have invented the internet, but he's not getting the uptime that Bob Dole gets, with his woody. If I were running Woody, the box would HAVE to be named "Viagra".
Hemos got a quote in an article about how much AOL is hated, in the business section of the Post, as well. It's toward the bottom. It still cracks me up that they always print "Jeff 'Hemos' Bates" whenever they quote him. Maybe he should just adopt "Hemos" as his middle name, and save them the quotes.:-)
Hey guess what? This already exists. There's a mailing list called slash-help which was formed to help nurse people through the painful slash setup process, and to announce further development and whatnot. Once, it would have been a fertile field for just what you proposed. A truly open development project which Rob wouldn't have had to work on himself. Now, though, it's unlikely anyone there is gonna help His Highness Malda, and the list is more of a "how can we get rid of this awful legacy albatross that is Slash?" Frankly, Rob blew it. He's squandered the potential development community by being repeatedly arrogant, obnoxious, and completely dismissive of the principles/. supposedly supports. So, basically, it's too late for that. But it would have been an excellent idea, back in the day.
Still, I'm willing to give groups like SourceForge and Slashdot quite a lot of slack in the matter.
I'm willing to give them some slack, but maybe less than you. Yes, producing a useful site is a noble and worthwhile goal. But the overall wastefulness of writing bad code still irks me. Imagine if the Slash code was portable, sensible, and open-source. The overall results would be:
1) It would be easier for Rob and others to implement new features. It would take less time, and be less likely to break existing features. This is a natural result of good code, and on obvious Win for everyone.
2) Say the work Rob and others put into the code is X. Then say the benefit of having Slashdot is Y (vague terms, but you get the idea). If the code is ugly and closed, the total benefit gained from X is simply Y. This is well and good. But then imagine that the code is open and portable. So there is some additional benefit to be had from all the other sites that could use it. Call this Z. Good prgramming is inherently more beneficial than bad. In essence, bad programming is wasteful, since it restricts it's own use and limits the benefit we all gain from it.
I hate to feel like my work has been wasted. But many web programmers don't seem to feel that their work has any value outside of the websites they are personally running. If the webmasters who collectively wrote Apache felt that way, how much poorer would the whole web be now? All the justifications for why open source is better than closed apply just as well to web applications. It hurts me to see MS hoard and hide all their work and deprive the world of any benefit we might be able to gain from it. It hurts me equally to see a tool as powerful as slashdot hide it's code and only grant us the value of the site content itself. For MS to do it, well, that's their choice, wrong though it may be. But for slash to do it, that's just hypocrisy and selfishness.
I will certainly cut sourceforge massive slack. They're doing the right thing. Their code is now a project on sourceforge itself, and anyone can contribute to it's improvement. But Rob and co. have had plenty of time to do things right, and simply, arrogantly, refuse to. No more slack is deserved here.
Absolutely they deserve commendation, for releasing the code, and for being right here and offering to help. I know how dodgy web apps can get, and how environment-dependent they often are. My post wasn't meant to be a criticism so much as a pointer to where they might want to go next.
That said, I don't think that the way things usually are, right now, is the way they should be. That is, if I'm writing an application, it's my responsibility to ensure that it will still work, even if you keep your docs in/usr/local/httpd/public_html, or etc etc. I have issues with the way the so many web developers seem to feel that "if it works for me, then it's good enough." It's NOT good enough. If I spend months of my time writing code, and when I'm finished I discover that I've created something so non-portable and incomprehensible that I'm the only one who could possibly use it, I feel like I've lost something. I feel like I've failed in some important way. More web developers should feel this way, and projects should be opened up earlier than they currently are. I don't know if this is coherent or not, but my point is that the majority of web development processes are ad-hoc and undisciplined, and therefore, in some important way, broken.
I've of course been guilty of this myself. But I try. When I'm writing something, I try to always be thinking about how this could be made to run in another environment, how someone could easily configure it for their system, how to make it portable. The excuse that "we coded ourselves into a corner" just doesn't cut it. If you have, then fork the code and rewrite it from the ground up, if you have to.
This is not at all meant to be a flame at you, or at VA, or anyone. It's just my thoughts on a common problem I see in web apps. The "good enough" syndrome. Hopefully as the field matures, we'll see people working harder to avoid the "write once, run ONLY HERE" mentality.
It's never a waste to release code. Good show. What would help most would be a couple pointers to where the basic config stuff is, and perhaps a quick sketch of what your setup is like (so we'd know roughly what might go where). Also, are you guys running this on php 3 or 4? I'm as good as the next guy at figuring out how to get a web application running (ok, probably better than the average next guy), but I wasn't really sure where to begin with this. Granted I only spent about 10 minutes fooling with it.:-)
And hey, since it's a sourceforge project, maybe others will step in and write some docs. Hell, maybe I will, if I figure out what's what.
There really is no SourceForge install procedure, since our site is spread across 14 servers.
You can play with pieces of the site by setting up Apache/PHP and pointing the document root to this distribution. It will be necessary as well to setup MySQL and setup tables as described in db/sourceforge.sql.
After that...:)
I'm not sure we'll ever really have something as simple as an autoconf install, but we may be able to get certain modules to work better as independent systems.
- The SourceForge Crew (END)
----------------------------
Needless to say, that's somewhat less than helpful. I did that, and I get a lot of php errors. This appears to be in the spirit of "Here's what we run. You can use it to inspire your own development." Don't expect to install this and have your own little "mini-sourceforge." Good that they released something though, unlike certain other so-called Open Source advocates.
"Moderation is good, in theory." -Larry Wall
Re:Here's one - if anyone's interested
on
The GCHQ Challenge
·
· Score: 2
Slashdot Mirror
"Outside the community" like VA? Ha.
--
My existing code lives at scoop.kuro5hin.org, and www.kuro5hin.org is running scoop as well. The downloadable sources are screwed up right now, but that will be fixed this weekend, along with (hopefully) open content moderation.
--
Nevertheless this has nothing at all to do with the affiliate program they announced in the infamous press release, and we can conclude that the whole thing was either a shameless publicity stunt, or a genuine lack of understanding of what "Open Source" means by some marketing geek. I'll be charitable and assume the latter, and we can likely expect this to continue. Open Source is a hot buzzword right now, and will get mis-applied to more and more things. For a comparable example, witness the current total meaninglessness of the word "deconstruct" in Lit circles. That was once a very precise word for a particular form of literary criticism. Then it became a buzzword, and now it's been so diluted that even real deconstructionists are afraid to use it.
Wish you could moderate the submission queue?
UPDATED February 1, 2000
In a shameless attempt to gain attention from popular news sites that will post any story that includes the phrase "Open Source," internet portal site AltaVista announced that it will begin giving away the source code to it's search engine while actually doing no such thing.
Today Altavista rolled out an affiliate program which "allows" web sites to include html that links to the altavista search engine. Altavista did not address the question of why this is interesting, when people have been including search engine textboxes on their pages since 1994. Instead they prominently featured the phrase "Open Source" in the press release title, and went on to not mention even once how "allowing users to include html" could be interpreted as "releasing the source code to it's search engine."
You may still download a crippled trial version of Altavista's intranet search tools, which you may uncripple for a registration fee. But the bold maneuver of issuing a press release that uses the words "open source" is taking the internet by storm.
"We see this press release as an unprecedented opportunity to leverage traffic from weblogs that don't do even the most rudimentary fact-checking," said an Altavista spokesman. "And we know for a fact that there are some very high traffic sites which auto-post any press release that uses the words 'open source,' without a human editor even being involved."
The perl scripts which post content at the popular computer news site Slashdot declined to comment on the allegations that no human is involved in story posting anymore, saying only, "It looks like a hole in the GNU GPL [may allow] people to practically turn GNU-free software into proprietary software..."
----------------
Note: This is intended mostly to be a flame at altavista, and to mildly poke fun at slashdot. Please take it for the humor it is. Thanks.
--The Mgmt.
----------------
Wish you could moderate the submission queue?
Wish you could moderate the submission queue?
There were several people complaining about this. I was one of them, but it's not me doing the attacking. For the record, I'm thrilled that the code's out, and have no further problem with slashdot or it's management.
You're right though that /. appears to be suffering what amounts to a DOS attack, in the comments. Maybe we could rename it a "Denial of Signal" attack.
My only suggestion for this is that basically, totally anonymous posting should go. Here's how I would do that:
- To post a comment, you must have a user account and be logged in.
- You MAY choose to post your comment anonymously. The system will know who you are, but your name will not be associated publicly with your post.
- User accounts must be confirmed via email before being activated. That is, you sign up,
/. sends you a "confirm" mail, and you return it to activate the account. - Accounts may be disabled by admins because of abuse of the comment system, which constitutes a DOS atack, as I mentioned above.
The overall effect of this is that it would be much more difficult to automate the slashdot-bombing procedure, as you'd have to create a new email account and user account every time you got booted. I think this would kill about 90% of the worst crap posted here.Note that I'm talking about the long pasted-in text posts, and the really just useless crap. Some of the trolls are amusing, and I don't think they'd get all get booted.
As for the user account hijacking problem, I assume there are some security issues with the slash code. Bummer.
Wish you could moderate the submission queue?
I want to find the Programmer's Stone. The language in which I can write this program:
while (1) {
do $everything;
}
"We're on a mission from Gahd."
--The Blues Brothers
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
Heh. I read that bit, and glanced over to my gnome panel, where live graphical readouts show me how much hard drive space I have left, and how much processor, memory, and swap I'm using, just to make sure that I hadn't been imagining them. But no, they were all still there, telling me everything's fine. These applets are standard with Gnome, and thus with RedHat 6.1, and, the best part, you can run them while you're doing other things. Ever run Windows performance monitor? Good lord, right there is your best demonstration of the quantum-mech principle that observing something is an interaction, and therefore changes the observed. If they had that running during the test, no wonder they got bad performance from W2K.
Anyway, this is an article that tries hard to be fair, written by someone who is really clearly much more familiar with the windows world. They just flat-out missed a lot of the tools that RedHat comes with, apparently because of a lack of familiarity.
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
I've looked at PHPslash, and I wish them the best of luck. I do have a preference for perl, mainly because I write perl all day for work, and the cost of switching back and forth between perl and PHP is oddly high. They're very similar, but not quite similar enough, so whenever I write in PHP for a while, my perl gets all screwed up. :-) Plus there's a lot of code I can swipe from work projects that helps move Scoop along. As you say, competition is a good thing.
I'm trying to make it easier for people to contribute to Scoop. Yesterday I wrote new install instructions that should make it alot easier for people, and the next thing I'm going to be doing is revising what I've written so far, commenting, organizing, and writing developer docs. There's several things that need to be done before I really expect anyone to help (like, um, posting stories for example!), but thanks for the encouragement. Check back soon.
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
Note that this is a really harsh solution, from me. this post pretty well explains what I usually think of self-censorship. JonKatz makes me angry sometimes, and irritated others, and occasionally even amused. So I don't want to just screen him out. Roblimo... I just don't really care to see anymore. Apathy is the worst punishment (even Katz knows that! ;-)).
As for finding or creating something better, well, I'm trying to help others create by writing free software for them to use. Scoop is a from-scratch slash clone which is already licensed under the GPL. It's not my real job, so development is in my spare time, but it's coming along. Maybe with weblog software that's usable, others will be able to create more interesting communities.
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
I posted this piece because I felt "l33td00d@aol.com" raised some subtle but interesting technical points about r00ting L4m3Rz that were worth discussion and clarification. I honestly did not expect to get flamed over my decision to post his submission.
I believe that l33t H4x0r tricks and h4X, like l33t h4x0rz themselves, should be discussed as openly and publicly as possible so that everyone knows who is 0wN3d by whom. However, words (especially l33t H4x0r words) are far more slippery than code. With words the question, "R j00 4 L4m3R?" is often far harder to answer than it is in software.
Please accept my humble apology. I was wrong. I will try not to make the mistake of posting anything on Slashdot ever again.
-----------------------------
Ok, the last bit was only wishful thinking. But before you dismiss this as a menaingless troll, read it carefully. How different is posting the legal opinions of someone who has no legal knowledge from posting the technical opinions of somone who has no technical knowledge? Robin would have been run out of town on a rail if he had actually posted "Win98 0wNz j00r L4M3R Azz?" but since it was "arcane legal matters," he was perfectly justified? Hackers tend to have very finely tuned bullshit detectors, and mine goes to full alert whenever Robin-the-Taxi-Guy starts defending himself.
Slashdot is dying. I started reading here for the articles. I hardly ever even read the comments. Whatever I may say about CmdrTaco, he has a good nose for interesting content. As soon as he pretty much stopped being the editorial manager, and turned it over to this joker, the content went to hell. But there's still the community, which is often a rich source of information and new ideas. So now I read the comments more than I even pay attention to the stories.
But how long can a site maintain an interesting community if it no longer has the content to draw interesting people. Sooner or later (sooner, I think) the smart people here will get sick of all the crap and move somewhere else (like technocrat.net, where the S/N is still blissfully high).
The life of slashdot is like a microcosm of the life of Silicon Valley. First there were the geeks, geeking out and doing cool stuff. Then they made some money, and the businesspeople moved in. Now you can't swing a patch cable without hitting twelve lawyers and eighteen CEO's. But where are all the geeks? They're moving on.
Farewell /. It was fun while it lasted.
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
;-)
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
Oh, damn. I knew there was something wrong with that plan. Well, I guess you'll just have to wait until Rob applies Service Pack 6 for Slash2000, and you know, he's been so busy counting his money lately and everything... well, it might be a while.
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
As Cartman might say, this is hella true. Witness, for example, some of the weaker attempts at humor on my site. Sitting down and writing something that might be worth someone else's time to read, under any circumstances, is hard. Under a deadline, it's waaaay hard. And who the hell knows if it even ended up being worth the effort you spent on it? I, personally, would love to have Katz-level feedback, even if much of it was negative.
BUT. So, assume Katz has to sit down and write something for tomorrow's /. What to do? What's his thought process? He seems to earnestly believe that he's saying important things that need to be said. That he and he alone is a voice of sanity and cool, analytical savvy. Is it all just a put-on? Is it the pressure of the deadline, and the easy way out? Or does Katz write to the dictates of his soul (such as it may be)?
Personally, if I had to take a stand on "freedom of speech, and the web" and I had to have my stand expounded upon by tomorrow, I'd at least try to be thought-provoking. I can only assume that Katz would try to be as well. So the conclusion there is that Katz is, or can be, an extrordinarily shallow thinker.
I'd rather not believe this, so the other conclusion is that he's just relatively lazy, and rather than try out an unpopular stand, or attempt to push the analysis to a level beyond what we all already know, he merely recycles common knowledge using big words, in the finest tradition of pop sociology worldwide.
Which is it? Who knows. Maybe I'll try writing a 1500-word essay on "Freedom of Speech, and Flamage on the Net" by tomorrow, and see what I can come up with. It'd be an interesting experiment, anyway, and one that I doubt many people here have tried. :-)
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
And yes, I know I can set my prefs to screen out Katz. I find that very option vaguely creepy, along with comment thresholds. For me, they end up being counterproductive, since as soon as I set a comment threshold, I'm curious as to what the AC's said that got them moderated to the bottom of the list. So I invariably end up reading the "hidden" posts anyway. Maybe it's just a personal problem.
And as for why I still read Katz, I can't quite explain that either. Part of it is I still keep expecting him to write something worthwhile, and I'd rather not miss it. Part of it is just a fascination at the sheer gall of the guy, and the nuts it must take to step up to the plate and spout the classic (as someone else put it) "northern white male liberal" Party Line. It's fascinating in the same way that Brad Pitt's character in Kalifornia (sort of an uber-white-trash archetype) was fascinating, as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of a particular stereotype. I read Katz, or watch the movie, and I ponder the questions:
- Do they know they're a walking, talking, living stereotype?
- Do they have deeper thoughts that they're afraid or unwilling to share, or is this really all there is?
- Are they capable of stepping outside their own view and looking at the issue from that of someone radically different from them? For example (in the case of Katz) a white supremacist? Or a m4d Haxx0r flaming sKript Kiddee?
It's kind of an anthropological curiosity, I guess. This turned out to be way too long-winded. Oh well. Take it for what it's worth"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
I'd also like to point out, on a political note, that Al Gore may have invented the internet, but he's not getting the uptime that Bob Dole gets, with his woody. If I were running Woody, the box would HAVE to be named "Viagra".
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
I'm willing to give them some slack, but maybe less than you. Yes, producing a useful site is a noble and worthwhile goal. But the overall wastefulness of writing bad code still irks me. Imagine if the Slash code was portable, sensible, and open-source. The overall results would be:
1) It would be easier for Rob and others to implement new features. It would take less time, and be less likely to break existing features. This is a natural result of good code, and on obvious Win for everyone.
2) Say the work Rob and others put into the code is X. Then say the benefit of having Slashdot is Y (vague terms, but you get the idea). If the code is ugly and closed, the total benefit gained from X is simply Y. This is well and good. But then imagine that the code is open and portable. So there is some additional benefit to be had from all the other sites that could use it. Call this Z. Good prgramming is inherently more beneficial than bad. In essence, bad programming is wasteful, since it restricts it's own use and limits the benefit we all gain from it.
I hate to feel like my work has been wasted. But many web programmers don't seem to feel that their work has any value outside of the websites they are personally running. If the webmasters who collectively wrote Apache felt that way, how much poorer would the whole web be now? All the justifications for why open source is better than closed apply just as well to web applications. It hurts me to see MS hoard and hide all their work and deprive the world of any benefit we might be able to gain from it. It hurts me equally to see a tool as powerful as slashdot hide it's code and only grant us the value of the site content itself. For MS to do it, well, that's their choice, wrong though it may be. But for slash to do it, that's just hypocrisy and selfishness.
I will certainly cut sourceforge massive slack. They're doing the right thing. Their code is now a project on sourceforge itself, and anyone can contribute to it's improvement. But Rob and co. have had plenty of time to do things right, and simply, arrogantly, refuse to. No more slack is deserved here.
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
That said, I don't think that the way things usually are, right now, is the way they should be. That is, if I'm writing an application, it's my responsibility to ensure that it will still work, even if you keep your docs in /usr/local/httpd/public_html, or etc etc. I have issues with the way the so many web developers seem to feel that "if it works for me, then it's good enough." It's NOT good enough. If I spend months of my time writing code, and when I'm finished I discover that I've created something so non-portable and incomprehensible that I'm the only one who could possibly use it, I feel like I've lost something. I feel like I've failed in some important way. More web developers should feel this way, and projects should be opened up earlier than they currently are. I don't know if this is coherent or not, but my point is that the majority of web development processes are ad-hoc and undisciplined, and therefore, in some important way, broken.
I've of course been guilty of this myself. But I try. When I'm writing something, I try to always be thinking about how this could be made to run in another environment, how someone could easily configure it for their system, how to make it portable. The excuse that "we coded ourselves into a corner" just doesn't cut it. If you have, then fork the code and rewrite it from the ground up, if you have to.
This is not at all meant to be a flame at you, or at VA, or anyone. It's just my thoughts on a common problem I see in web apps. The "good enough" syndrome. Hopefully as the field matures, we'll see people working harder to avoid the "write once, run ONLY HERE" mentality.
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
And hey, since it's a sourceforge project, maybe others will step in and write some docs. Hell, maybe I will, if I figure out what's what.
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
(INSTALL)----------------
There really is no SourceForge install procedure, since our
site is spread across 14 servers.
You can play with pieces of the site by setting up Apache/PHP
and pointing the document root to this distribution. It will
be necessary as well to setup MySQL and setup tables as described
in db/sourceforge.sql.
After that...
I'm not sure we'll ever really have something as simple as
an autoconf install, but we may be able to get certain modules
to work better as independent systems.
- The SourceForge Crew
(END)
----------------------------
Needless to say, that's somewhat less than helpful. I did that, and I get a lot of php errors. This appears to be in the spirit of "Here's what we run. You can use it to inspire your own development." Don't expect to install this and have your own little "mini-sourceforge." Good that they released something though, unlike certain other so-called Open Source advocates.
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall
It's in a comment at the top of the source.
"Moderation is good, in theory."
-Larry Wall