As a seasoned PostgreSQL user I'm very excited about this release, I especially like the new Savepoints feature (described in this article). This wonderful feature finally makes it possible to roll back only part of a transaction. Sweet!
You do have a point there, moderation does alleviate that problem here, but I was thinking about those cases where a high ranking comment is posted by someone with bad karma (it does happen more often than one would think). This sort of karma based system would in a way penalize such users and try to make them work on keeping their karma at least neutral. But people who troll a lot would probably not care much about their odd relevant high ranked comments not being indexed by Google and friends and I doubt they would troll less.
rel="nofollow" on Slashdot based on karma?
on
Google Cans Comment Spam
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Will this be implemented on Slashdot as well? Perhaps those with karma lower than neutral would get a rel="nofollow" tag added to the URLs they post?
Christian Sandvig of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has been studying the brouhaha, believes regulators ought to enforce more openness.
That's the problem right there. He should have been studying the brouhehe as in 802.11e. For those of you not in the know BROUHAHA stands for Bandwidth Radio Optimized Universal High Availability Hotspot Access or IEEE 802.11a.
BROUHEHE, naturally, stands for Bandwidth Radio Optimized Universal Hybrid Enhanced Hotspot EQuality or IEEE 802.11e.
Actually, I believe "the exception (that) proves the rule" uses the word "prove" in one of its other meanings - to test something.
I guess you did not bother to RTFM, here's the relevant segment:
Hmm. It grieves me to say this, but you're right. While the interpretation I gave, namely that the exception tests the rule, has a long history (it dates back at least to 1893), I'll concede that your take on it is the original sense of the proverb.
That said, your example could use a little work. We need something that better conveys the import of this ancient maxim. I have just the thing--an illustration from the Roman orator Cicero, sometimes cited as the source of the legal doctrine in question.
Cicero was defending one Bilbo. (No relation to Frodo.) Bilbo was a non-Roman who was accused of having been illegally granted Roman citizenship. The prosecutor argued that treaties with some non-Roman peoples explicitly prohibited them from becoming Roman citizens. The treaty with Bilbo's homeboys had no such clause, but the prosecutor suggested one should be inferred.
Nonsense, said Cicero. "Quod si exceptio facit ne liceat, ubi non sit exceptum..." Oops, I keep forgetting how rusty folks are on subjunctives. Cicero said, if you prohibit something in certain cases, you imply that the rest of the time it's permitted. To put it another way, the explicit statement of an exception proves that a rule to the contrary prevails otherwise.
if X can be exempted, why can't Y be exempted if his reasons are quite similar?
By stating that X is exempted you are confirming the fact that X is an exception to the rule and this is exactly how that saying that the exception proves the rule came about. If you prove the existence of a case is an exception that implies that a rule contrary to that exception must be valid for all other cases.
Which was my entire point. Most of us CAN read all the way to the end of that ten word sentence.
You don't first read the whole sentence, then buffer it, semantically decipher it (and decide how to pronounce used to) and then pronounce the processed sentence, that's not how humans read out loud, pronunciation decisions are made in a very localized context that is no bigger than a few words. Besides, you are taking my humorous post way too seriously.
I disagree. Using a *different* form to express a language can actually remove abstractions.
But encapsulating the core, underlying language like that only masks the real problems with the underlying language. In time people will be totally unaware of those inconsistencies and peculiarities of the underlying language and when things go wrong they will not know how to fix them. This would be just a workaround for problems that should be fixed where they were introduced - in the underlying language itself.
First he sells PayPal and now he's wasting his money on this? It's not that the project is not worthwhile, it's just that there are more economical and efficient ways of achieving what he set out to do.
We'd like Merlin to be the best performing engine of its class (LOX/Kerosene, GG cycle turbo-pump) ever made and it looks like we have a decent shot at getting there.
Just how is their Merlin engine different from the Russian RD-180? It sounds like a rip-off which they are trying to improve and claim they invented something radically new. Renting Baikonur and hiring Russian specialists would have cost him half as much and the results would be much better, IMHO.
That's "used to" as in "you-zd two" (present tense), and not "you-st two" (past tense). See the difference? Taken in context it's clear that the present tense is meant.
The ifconfig program used to... - that alone is not enough to be able to tell the difference, you have to read the entire sentence to see what was meant. That was my point. Inserting 'which is' or putting a comma between program and used would have solved the ambiguity.
Your editor would make the code easily legible and comprehensive to humans.
Such an editor introduces an unnecessary layer of abstraction which only makes coding more complex and error-prone. The real experts will need to know how to at least read if not write the underlying XML code because there will be cases where just using your abstract higher-level editor will be insufficient to track down a bug. There is no need for this, parsers are not going to be more efficient because of it and humans will not be able to do their jobs better because of it.
Programs are written by humans and they should stay easily legible and comprehensive to humans. Going to such extremes as to use XML as the author of the article suggests would defeat that purpose, it's a common trap that people who get too deeply involved with something fall into - they want to make everything use the object of their obsession. I don't recall any ASN.1 zealots trying to push for something that extreme, but with XML there are more and more people who are pushing for XML to be where it should not.
Minor correction, nit-picking
on
Forensic Discovery
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· Score: 2, Informative
Security luminaries Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema wrote one of the first vulnerability scanners (SATAN) almost 10 years ago; SATAN was the precursor to ISS Scanner, Retina and nmap. Venema wrote such well-known security applications as the TCP Wrapper program and the Postfix mail server.
SATAN was also known as SANTA to those sensitive to sacrilegious references. Also, it's TCP Wrappers.
The products themselves would be proprietary, but the techniques and components used to make them would be open to all, meaning more bio-products, competition, smaller markets and faster improvements, Jefferson said.
A company I consult with has a policy like that in place, but instead of enforcing it by separating the work like you suggested they have a flexible Tutos based system which provides time tracking capabilities, so developers are free to divide that time as they please. They modified Tutos to display the ratio between the time spent on company-based and volunteer work in a graphical way on every page. The work done for the company is shown as a green bar and volunteer work is shown as a blue bar which turns red if the ratio goes beyond what is expected. It works well, the managers do not even have to keep a close eye on things because most people are disciplined enough if they are made aware of how they are spending their time like that. Of course they could always lie and pretend to be working on a company-based project, but without any significant results to show they can't do it for long. It's a cool system if you have moderately disciplined and self-motivated people who enjoy that kind of freedom and know to appreciate it.
It's from the NY Times magazine, so you know the drill...
What, now I need a drill to read the article?! What's next, a freakin laser on a shark who will make his way through raw sewage up into the HQ of the NY Times magazine and copy the original article onto the USB flash drive located on his belly where his belly button would be if he were human?!
This isn't a Learn how to become a guru CVS admin in 21 minutes kind of site. Nothing you can tell him here will be a good enough substitute for real hands-on experience. That's why he needs to first research this on his own as best he can and then ask for advanced tips when he has a deeper understanding of the issues involved. So far he's only shown that he knows as much about CVS as anyone who is willing to spend 10 minutes reading up on it would.
Oh, come on, don't be lazy, Google is your friend. You want free advice for something you are getting paid to do and for which you do not want to spend a couple of hours researching and learning. Why was this question even approved? Is this news for nerd or news for lazy newbs?
Am I the first to notice his extended middle finger in the 2nd photo? Just before that photo was taken Bill was asked: "So, how would you best describe your attitude towards your customers?"
To me, this is the most important part of the article:
VeriSign is lobbying actively to hold onto its.net stewardship, however, lining up written support from major players including Microsoft and I.B.M.
At $5 a year for each domain name, VeriSign earns an estimated $30 million annually from administering.net - far less than its revenues for.com, which has 200 million names at $6 each.
I've been thinking about registering a.net domain, but now I'm not so sure anymore. VeriSign is very likely to lose and the transition process will not be an easy one as I'm sure VeriSign will fight tooth and nail to keep.net even after the final decision.
Producing something for a desired effect like that is not art, it's a manufacturing process if you make it this automatic. Any monkey can produce such regurgitated music, so why should I pay them, I can buy the software myself and make such music. There is a way to make use of this kind of principle without automating and dehumanizing it, for example, Neil Sedaka wrote Oh, Carol by studying the number 1 hits in a number of countries around the world for weeks and then he drew on that to come to some conclusions which helped him shape his creative output.
This automated way described in the article takes away that creative role from the artist by providing the output as well. Why do you need such monkey artists? If you really want that kind of music just set up a system that automatically generates songs which would be free to download to the first 2,000 people who would be required to rank the song and then at the end of each week make the top ranked song available for sale to everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
That's Professor Orin V. Kerr AKA Professor KerniVOre.
As a seasoned PostgreSQL user I'm very excited about this release, I especially like the new Savepoints feature (described in this article). This wonderful feature finally makes it possible to roll back only part of a transaction. Sweet!
You do have a point there, moderation does alleviate that problem here, but I was thinking about those cases where a high ranking comment is posted by someone with bad karma (it does happen more often than one would think). This sort of karma based system would in a way penalize such users and try to make them work on keeping their karma at least neutral. But people who troll a lot would probably not care much about their odd relevant high ranked comments not being indexed by Google and friends and I doubt they would troll less.
Will this be implemented on Slashdot as well? Perhaps those with karma lower than neutral would get a rel="nofollow" tag added to the URLs they post?
Christian Sandvig of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who has been studying the brouhaha, believes regulators ought to enforce more openness.
That's the problem right there. He should have been studying the brouhehe as in 802.11e. For those of you not in the know BROUHAHA stands for Bandwidth Radio Optimized Universal High Availability Hotspot Access or IEEE 802.11a.
BROUHEHE, naturally, stands for Bandwidth Radio Optimized Universal Hybrid Enhanced Hotspot EQuality or IEEE 802.11e.
Actually, I believe "the exception (that) proves the rule" uses the word "prove" in one of its other meanings - to test something.
I guess you did not bother to RTFM, here's the relevant segment:
Hmm. It grieves me to say this, but you're right. While the interpretation I gave, namely that the exception tests the rule, has a long history (it dates back at least to 1893), I'll concede that your take on it is the original sense of the proverb.
That said, your example could use a little work. We need something that better conveys the import of this ancient maxim. I have just the thing--an illustration from the Roman orator Cicero, sometimes cited as the source of the legal doctrine in question.
Cicero was defending one Bilbo. (No relation to Frodo.) Bilbo was a non-Roman who was accused of having been illegally granted Roman citizenship. The prosecutor argued that treaties with some non-Roman peoples explicitly prohibited them from becoming Roman citizens. The treaty with Bilbo's homeboys had no such clause, but the prosecutor suggested one should be inferred.
Nonsense, said Cicero. "Quod si exceptio facit ne liceat, ubi non sit exceptum ..." Oops, I keep forgetting how rusty folks are on subjunctives. Cicero said, if you prohibit something in certain cases, you imply that the rest of the time it's permitted. To put it another way, the explicit statement of an exception proves that a rule to the contrary prevails otherwise.
if X can be exempted, why can't Y be exempted if his reasons are quite similar?
By stating that X is exempted you are confirming the fact that X is an exception to the rule and this is exactly how that saying that the exception proves the rule came about. If you prove the existence of a case is an exception that implies that a rule contrary to that exception must be valid for all other cases.
Which was my entire point. Most of us CAN read all the way to the end of that ten word sentence.
You don't first read the whole sentence, then buffer it, semantically decipher it (and decide how to pronounce used to) and then pronounce the processed sentence, that's not how humans read out loud, pronunciation decisions are made in a very localized context that is no bigger than a few words. Besides, you are taking my humorous post way too seriously.
I disagree. Using a *different* form to express a language can actually remove abstractions.
But encapsulating the core, underlying language like that only masks the real problems with the underlying language. In time people will be totally unaware of those inconsistencies and peculiarities of the underlying language and when things go wrong they will not know how to fix them. This would be just a workaround for problems that should be fixed where they were introduced - in the underlying language itself.
First he sells PayPal and now he's wasting his money on this? It's not that the project is not worthwhile, it's just that there are more economical and efficient ways of achieving what he set out to do.
We'd like Merlin to be the best performing engine of its class (LOX/Kerosene, GG cycle turbo-pump) ever made and it looks like we have a decent shot at getting there.
Just how is their Merlin engine different from the Russian RD-180? It sounds like a rip-off which they are trying to improve and claim they invented something radically new. Renting Baikonur and hiring Russian specialists would have cost him half as much and the results would be much better, IMHO.
That's "used to" as in "you-zd two" (present tense), and not "you-st two" (past tense). See the difference? Taken in context it's clear that the present tense is meant.
The ifconfig program used to... - that alone is not enough to be able to tell the difference, you have to read the entire sentence to see what was meant. That was my point. Inserting 'which is' or putting a comma between program and used would have solved the ambiguity.
Your editor would make the code easily legible and comprehensive to humans.
Such an editor introduces an unnecessary layer of abstraction which only makes coding more complex and error-prone. The real experts will need to know how to at least read if not write the underlying XML code because there will be cases where just using your abstract higher-level editor will be insufficient to track down a bug. There is no need for this, parsers are not going to be more efficient because of it and humans will not be able to do their jobs better because of it.
Programs are written by humans and they should stay easily legible and comprehensive to humans. Going to such extremes as to use XML as the author of the article suggests would defeat that purpose, it's a common trap that people who get too deeply involved with something fall into - they want to make everything use the object of their obsession. I don't recall any ASN.1 zealots trying to push for something that extreme, but with XML there are more and more people who are pushing for XML to be where it should not.
Security luminaries Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema wrote one of the first vulnerability scanners (SATAN) almost 10 years ago; SATAN was the precursor to ISS Scanner, Retina and nmap. Venema wrote such well-known security applications as the TCP Wrapper program and the Postfix mail server.
SATAN was also known as SANTA to those sensitive to sacrilegious references. Also, it's TCP Wrappers.
The products themselves would be proprietary, but the techniques and components used to make them would be open to all, meaning more bio-products, competition, smaller markets and faster improvements, Jefferson said.
Basically, a BSD style license.
Dev Anand, the legendary actor and film maker from India, is also amongst the first to collaborate with Cinema on Web (COW).
That's it, I'm revoking his membership from our Anonymous COWherd X club.
A company I consult with has a policy like that in place, but instead of enforcing it by separating the work like you suggested they have a flexible Tutos based system which provides time tracking capabilities, so developers are free to divide that time as they please. They modified Tutos to display the ratio between the time spent on company-based and volunteer work in a graphical way on every page. The work done for the company is shown as a green bar and volunteer work is shown as a blue bar which turns red if the ratio goes beyond what is expected. It works well, the managers do not even have to keep a close eye on things because most people are disciplined enough if they are made aware of how they are spending their time like that. Of course they could always lie and pretend to be working on a company-based project, but without any significant results to show they can't do it for long. It's a cool system if you have moderately disciplined and self-motivated people who enjoy that kind of freedom and know to appreciate it.
It's from the NY Times magazine, so you know the drill...
What, now I need a drill to read the article?! What's next, a freakin laser on a shark who will make his way through raw sewage up into the HQ of the NY Times magazine and copy the original article onto the USB flash drive located on his belly where his belly button would be if he were human?!
Those of us who can actually read to the end of a sentence without having to stop to take a breath had no problem with it at all.
That's only because you read out loud. Everyone in your office heard you read that as "used to" as in "I used to read out loud when I was a child."
This isn't a Learn how to become a guru CVS admin in 21 minutes kind of site. Nothing you can tell him here will be a good enough substitute for real hands-on experience. That's why he needs to first research this on his own as best he can and then ask for advanced tips when he has a deeper understanding of the issues involved. So far he's only shown that he knows as much about CVS as anyone who is willing to spend 10 minutes reading up on it would.
Oh, come on, don't be lazy, Google is your friend. You want free advice for something you are getting paid to do and for which you do not want to spend a couple of hours researching and learning. Why was this question even approved? Is this news for nerd or news for lazy newbs?
Nice overview, although the wording may have been chosen with some more thought, take for example this entry on ifconfig:
The ifconfig program used to configure network interfaces
OMG, but now it's been relegated to kitchen duty?! ifconfig dishwasher0? How will I configure network interfaces now?
was overhauled.
*whew* Damn you for scaring me like that!
Am I the first to notice his extended middle finger in the 2nd photo? Just before that photo was taken Bill was asked: "So, how would you best describe your attitude towards your customers?"
To me, this is the most important part of the article:
VeriSign is lobbying actively to hold onto its .net stewardship, however, lining up written support from major players including Microsoft and I.B.M.
At $5 a year for each domain name, VeriSign earns an estimated $30 million annually from administering .net - far less than its revenues for .com, which has 200 million names at $6 each.
I've been thinking about registering a .net domain, but now I'm not so sure anymore. VeriSign is very likely to lose and the transition process will not be an easy one as I'm sure VeriSign will fight tooth and nail to keep .net even after the final decision.
Producing something for a desired effect like that is not art, it's a manufacturing process if you make it this automatic. Any monkey can produce such regurgitated music, so why should I pay them, I can buy the software myself and make such music. There is a way to make use of this kind of principle without automating and dehumanizing it, for example, Neil Sedaka wrote Oh, Carol by studying the number 1 hits in a number of countries around the world for weeks and then he drew on that to come to some conclusions which helped him shape his creative output.
This automated way described in the article takes away that creative role from the artist by providing the output as well. Why do you need such monkey artists? If you really want that kind of music just set up a system that automatically generates songs which would be free to download to the first 2,000 people who would be required to rank the song and then at the end of each week make the top ranked song available for sale to everyone else.