Does anyone really think they gave a damn about the GPL as a philosophy rather than a means of getting a cheap OS, for which a port of most emulators already exists?
First of all, directly and publically violating a well-known license is quite different from providing a general purpose system which can, as it happens, be used to violate licenses.
Second, I want to know what the benefit to them is in holding back. It's a safe guess that their kernel tweaks are pretty specific to their hardware. It's not *that* hard to do some Linux kernel work to get a new handheld going -- Nokia did the 770, and there are tons of other folks who have built embedded systems based on Linux. I just can't see a huge competitive advantage in *not* releasing their source.
I could maybe understand it if their source code infringed on someone else's copyright, but this is the Linux kernel -- there aren't that many places to crib things from to stuff into it.
Why can't the silly build script just pack up a tarball of the sources? It's not rocket science, and it doesn't seem likely to hurt them much.
Finally, it seems like most of the people who might develop for this machine are exactly the same people who would be offended by a manufacturer ignoring the GPL.
USB mass storage devices are just block devices, it's up to the host to decide how to use what is essentially just a big array of blocks.
Yup, that's why I said usually. The only filesystem that everyone supports is FAT. If you reformat, my media stops working with my camera, with my PSP, etc.
Well put. I'm glad somebody brought this up. I believe it is imperative that the Open Source world begin to refactor into managed languages -- whether through Mono/CLR, an enhanced JVM with multi-language support, or something completely original (PyPy, etc.).
I have discovered that a general rule of thumb for determining the quality of an open source software package is that the newer the language of implementation, the worse the software. Almost all of the really reliable, high-performance Unix software is written in C. Go to C++, things get less good. Go to perl...and I don't think I've ever used a piece of Java software that wasn't buggy.
One complaint that I don't hear much about Java and C#/.NET is that they encourage you to write multithreaded programs. As you can tell from my signature, I don't have a high opinion of multithreaded software.
I use FC4. I *do* use four GNOME or GTK apps most of the time -- gkrellm, firefox, xmms, and sawfish.
But these are not really bad programs. There isn't really much by way of good competition for any of these. I don't run the "GNOME Desktop", and Fedora does not force you to do so. Just create a.xsession, and have it start your window manager. Use xbindkeys to launch programs. Hey, presto -- no icons on your desktop, no GNOME bar.
The good Christians I've met are the ones who actually have enough faith in the bible to share it with others intead of trying to get it passed as law.
I knew a Lutheran pastor once who said that any belief that can't stand up to questioning isn't worth believing in.
Why is it so hard for non religious scientists to acknowledge that we've not discovered all the answers, and indeed, may never do so?
I don't think it is -- we *know* that it's impossible for us to find all the answers.
What gets people up in arms is not those that argue that ID is possible -- I suspect that any philosopher is going to tell you that ID, while not provable, is certainly possible. The problem is that a bunch of folks that want to use the public schools to indoctrinate people to join their organization want to convince people to act contrary to science, as a result of admitting that ID is possible.
ID is not a scientific theory. It is not falsifiable. It is a question of metaphysics. Every person should say "yeah, there could be a Creator". However, those people should also be equally willing to say "yeah, he could be a flying spaghetti monster". This fact shouldn't make you act an iota different in the real world, because you've got no evidence for there being a God any more than you do there being a devil playing at being God. And most of the folks who want to put ID into public schools are not trying to present ID in this very abstract and metaphysical sense, but as something that has practical impact for people. They're trying to take a very, very weak philosophical argument, and parlay it via some irrationality and marketing into a recruitment system for their organization. That's what folks like me dislike.
And it gets worse when those people try to then use their organization to do things like oppose genetic research or push to cut funding of AIDS-fighting organizations because they promote condom use. Now that weak philosophical argument, given a little marketing and a bit of gullibility, begins producing real-world problems for the rest of the folks out there.
I'm a firm believer in microevolution, but not macroevolution.
Why?
We know that nucleotides get flipped, that mutations happen. We know that this causes physical changes.
The only requirement to buy into macroevolution is that you believe that enough of those flips can result in two critters different enough that they can't succesfully breed with each other any more. Surely you don't have an objection to that? I'd have a hard time believing in the non-existence of macroevolution -- I don't see why it *wouldn't* happen.
If that is what is know to be true, then how did matter form in the beginning?
That doesn't answer the question. How did God form? Same answer applies to matter.
The question of whether God exists or not, is, frankly, not something that can be proven one way or another. For any process that you observe in the universe, I can say "Yeah, but God made that happen." Thus, ID cannot be proven one way or another.
On the *other* hand, you can definitely show that ID is not a scientific theory.
Furthermore, science never purports to tell us truth. Science simply says that given the assumption that we can use induction on reality, in the long run, we will wind up with a more effective predictive model. Science is actually a very practical thing.
Since the human mind is pretty much inherently based on the use of induction -- your brain learns things based on past stimuli and experiences, you're kinda stuck living with the assumption that induction works. Given that, assuming that you're reasonably rational (i.e. not thinking about God isn't going to cause you to commit suicide or any extreme cases like that) you probably want to use science to determine your model of the world, and act based on that model.
So you can assume that there is or isn't a God, but it shouldn't affect how your live your life.:-)
The best argument for ID is that maybe people *aren't* best off being rational -- maybe having a better predictive model *isn't* helpful. Maybe a person that believes that there's a God upstairs has a better chance of survival than one that doesn't -- say, for instance, that a kid wants to commit suicide after his mother dies, but being told that she's in an afterlife prevents him from killing himself.
The problem is that this doesn't go over really well with ID advocates that I've talked to, because they inherently need to believe that they are right for this to work, so they can't *realize* that they're being irrational. It's hard to really truly believe in something just for the theraputic benefits of that belief.
A patent on FAT doesn't really have much of a use for them now; at least none that I can think of. Just let the filesystem become an open standard now, MS.
USB HID Mass Storage devices apparently usually use FAT.
Now, granted, I don't know whether they implement long filename support (which is what Microsoft's patent is on, IIRC), but FAT is still very relevant in the embedded device world, even if desktop boxes are now using NTFS instead of FAT.
Institute a cap on the total number of stories a given submitter can get accepted (per day, week, month...whatever). A cap doesn't hurt legitimate submitters, while limiting the payoff for linkwhores.
A Slashdot UID is not an expensive ID.
Thus, restrictions purely on a pure-ID basis don't work. The spammer will just create more UIDs.
That's a nicely put idea. There's no reason that adding Digg-like features means giving up a Slashdot-like system. If one is better than the other, users will wind up using it.
our search system needs a lot of work. Our source code is available. If someone wants to help, that'd be swell. We have some dupe checking code. It works often. Of course it can never be perfect. We post a lot of stories about certain topics, some closely related. It gets messy fast.
On two occasions in the past, I've tried sitting down to produce a patch to Slashcode, and both times got bogged down in getting it up and running.
Generally, when I want to submit a patch to a project, I'm willing to spend a fair amount of time actually hacking, but it really sucks to spend a day just trying to get a software package working so that you can work on it. Maybe for someone that does a lot of web development, this would go faster, but I do more systems programming than web development.
I know this sounds horribly lazy and all, but that's how it is.:-) Normally, if I run into a missing feature or bug, it's because the software is already running on my computer. In the case of Slashcode, I'm using the software -- from my remote web browser, but don't yet know what has to be done to get a local copy working.
Ultimately the question here is: should we intentionally make Slashdot worse, because a lot of our readers think that Google's PageRank algorithm is broken?
That's a nice way of putting it -- however, it is at least plausible that Google could start penalizing websites that have many links to known spam sites (for all I know, they may do this already -- I'm sure that the search engine spammers are already familiar with this). Nofollow links could be ignored. If Google made such a change, then it would be in your interest to use nofollow to prevent your own PageRank from dropping (though I guess Slashdot doesn't really need a high PageRank).
I thought about that (even about trying to automatically find similar submissions and have a list of related rejected stories), but then I thought about the spam potential. I mean, maybe you could have three groups -- recommended, not recommended, and uttery crap, but I don't think that many people would get much from the rejected story list, just because it's so large.
I guess its part of the whole open source mentality, but at the same time I don't see anyone stepping up and submitting code to solve problems.
I've tried a couple times. Slashcode suffers from the simple problem that it's a pain to get running.
I'm willing to spend a week hacking on something, but not on just getting it running so that I can start hacking. On two different occasions I tried getting Slashcode running on my machine and gave up after spending a day on it. If it were easier to get running, I'd have submitted at least two patches by now.
For most OSS, this is not a problem. If something is bothering you about a software package, it's already running your your system. However, Slashdot is an OSS website -- it isn't running on my computer, and so it's a pain to test your changes...
I'd like to second you on the ability to "burst" comments. A spammer cares about the constant rate at which he can spam. A legitimate user generally only cares about the burst rate.
I wouldn't mind seeing my karma either beyond "excellent" which I don't remember when I was not in that category.
I thought it was fun, even if it didn't do anything. CT apparently stopped it to prevent whoring. Maybe it wasn't worthwhile, but I thought that it was nifty.
Oh, well. Fans count is more meaningful anyway.:-)
Relaxation of the lameness filter too. I rarely get hit with the lameness filter, but I have for stuff that was not "lame", and I had to add junk and preview a number of times to see how much more junk I need to add in order to get past it.
Almost *all* the time I hit this, It's because I'm trying to post a snippit of source code, and Slashdot mangles it. Occasionally, a preformatted log.
My understanding is that Slashcode does this to keep people from making the main page unreadable.
Here's an idea: Have an JOURNAL tag. Any text surrounded by JOURNAL goes in a new journal entry. That journal entry gets a link back to the post, and the place where the JOURNAL-surrounded text was gets a link to the journal entry. That way, you can provide snippits of source code and similar easily, but folks can read the main page without trolls screwing it up.
There is a Greasemonkey script that sticks a Coral Cache link on each link on slashdot.org. The only drawback is that you wind up with these [CC] snippits if you copy and paste text with links.
I guess that I'd rather have a script that adds a contextual menu item for links to "Go to Coral Cache...".
I think that the idea of remaining ontopic came into being on Usenet.
On Usenet, to keep the hierarchy useful, it was entirely appropriate to try to keep discussions on topic. It was easy to just span over into another newsgroup that more appropriately covered some point. If you are discussing C++ in comp.lang.c, it's reasonable for someone to ask you to go to comp.lang.c++.
However, Slashdot doesn't have tens of thousands of newsgroups that are always active that a poster can follow up to or crosspost to to move the thread to another newsgroup. Slashdot has maybe six active stories on the main page at once, and no ability to "crosspost". So, unlike Usenet, if you want to post, you have to post in the active story. Maybe the article is about C, but if you want to say somethin about a similar, C++ feature, you have to stick your post in that story.
By virtue of that, I don't think that Offtopic is all that helpful on Slashdot, whereas on Usenet, it is.
But again, i don't want to throw out a good submission just because a user doesn't have appropriate karma/history/low UID.
You've built a sophisticated system, Slashcode, that uses heuristics to try to guess what content is interesting to various people, so that they don't look at all of it. Sometimes people don't read all the comments, and sometimes it's going to screw up and people are going to miss good comments. But, on the average, it works well.
I'm not familiar with how you skim through submissions, but you might consider only reviewing, say, 50% of the submissions, or whatever percentage you can handle, and passing them through a heuristic filter first...and just having a rejection flag that says "didn't pass heuristics", if you don't think that that's likely to result in people spending time trying to beat the filter. The lameness filter applies to comments...surely something that looks for affiliate IDs or too many misspelled words in a submission could filter out submissions that are not very useful?
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone really think they gave a damn about the GPL as a philosophy rather than a means of getting a cheap OS, for which a port of most emulators already exists?
First of all, directly and publically violating a well-known license is quite different from providing a general purpose system which can, as it happens, be used to violate licenses.
Second, I want to know what the benefit to them is in holding back. It's a safe guess that their kernel tweaks are pretty specific to their hardware. It's not *that* hard to do some Linux kernel work to get a new handheld going -- Nokia did the 770, and there are tons of other folks who have built embedded systems based on Linux. I just can't see a huge competitive advantage in *not* releasing their source.
I could maybe understand it if their source code infringed on someone else's copyright, but this is the Linux kernel -- there aren't that many places to crib things from to stuff into it.
Why can't the silly build script just pack up a tarball of the sources? It's not rocket science, and it doesn't seem likely to hurt them much.
Finally, it seems like most of the people who might develop for this machine are exactly the same people who would be offended by a manufacturer ignoring the GPL.
Or rather "I ignored you the first two times you told me, so I should get to keep ignoring you!"
USB mass storage devices are just block devices, it's up to the host to decide how to use what is essentially just a big array of blocks.
Yup, that's why I said usually. The only filesystem that everyone supports is FAT. If you reformat, my media stops working with my camera, with my PSP, etc.
Well put. I'm glad somebody brought this up. I believe it is imperative that the Open Source world begin to refactor into managed languages -- whether through Mono/CLR, an enhanced JVM with multi-language support, or something completely original (PyPy, etc.).
I have discovered that a general rule of thumb for determining the quality of an open source software package is that the newer the language of implementation, the worse the software. Almost all of the really reliable, high-performance Unix software is written in C. Go to C++, things get less good. Go to perl...and I don't think I've ever used a piece of Java software that wasn't buggy.
If you like statically typed languages C# has no equal.
ML is more heavily statically-typed than C#.
One complaint that I don't hear much about Java and C#/.NET is that they encourage you to write multithreaded programs. As you can tell from my signature, I don't have a high opinion of multithreaded software.
I use FC4. I *do* use four GNOME or GTK apps most of the time -- gkrellm, firefox, xmms, and sawfish.
.xsession, and have it start your window manager. Use xbindkeys to launch programs. Hey, presto -- no icons on your desktop, no GNOME bar.
But these are not really bad programs. There isn't really much by way of good competition for any of these. I don't run the "GNOME Desktop", and Fedora does not force you to do so. Just create a
Take a look at the FAQ.
The good Christians I've met are the ones who actually have enough faith in the bible to share it with others intead of trying to get it passed as law.
I knew a Lutheran pastor once who said that any belief that can't stand up to questioning isn't worth believing in.
Why is it so hard for non religious scientists to acknowledge that we've not discovered all the answers, and indeed, may never do so?
I don't think it is -- we *know* that it's impossible for us to find all the answers.
What gets people up in arms is not those that argue that ID is possible -- I suspect that any philosopher is going to tell you that ID, while not provable, is certainly possible. The problem is that a bunch of folks that want to use the public schools to indoctrinate people to join their organization want to convince people to act contrary to science, as a result of admitting that ID is possible.
ID is not a scientific theory. It is not falsifiable. It is a question of metaphysics. Every person should say "yeah, there could be a Creator". However, those people should also be equally willing to say "yeah, he could be a flying spaghetti monster". This fact shouldn't make you act an iota different in the real world, because you've got no evidence for there being a God any more than you do there being a devil playing at being God. And most of the folks who want to put ID into public schools are not trying to present ID in this very abstract and metaphysical sense, but as something that has practical impact for people. They're trying to take a very, very weak philosophical argument, and parlay it via some irrationality and marketing into a recruitment system for their organization. That's what folks like me dislike.
And it gets worse when those people try to then use their organization to do things like oppose genetic research or push to cut funding of AIDS-fighting organizations because they promote condom use. Now that weak philosophical argument, given a little marketing and a bit of gullibility, begins producing real-world problems for the rest of the folks out there.
I'm a firm believer in microevolution, but not macroevolution.
Why?
We know that nucleotides get flipped, that mutations happen. We know that this causes physical changes.
The only requirement to buy into macroevolution is that you believe that enough of those flips can result in two critters different enough that they can't succesfully breed with each other any more. Surely you don't have an objection to that? I'd have a hard time believing in the non-existence of macroevolution -- I don't see why it *wouldn't* happen.
If that is what is know to be true, then how did matter form in the beginning?
That doesn't answer the question. How did God form? Same answer applies to matter.
The question of whether God exists or not, is, frankly, not something that can be proven one way or another. For any process that you observe in the universe, I can say "Yeah, but God made that happen." Thus, ID cannot be proven one way or another.
:-)
On the *other* hand, you can definitely show that ID is not a scientific theory.
Furthermore, science never purports to tell us truth. Science simply says that given the assumption that we can use induction on reality, in the long run, we will wind up with a more effective predictive model. Science is actually a very practical thing.
Since the human mind is pretty much inherently based on the use of induction -- your brain learns things based on past stimuli and experiences, you're kinda stuck living with the assumption that induction works. Given that, assuming that you're reasonably rational (i.e. not thinking about God isn't going to cause you to commit suicide or any extreme cases like that) you probably want to use science to determine your model of the world, and act based on that model.
So you can assume that there is or isn't a God, but it shouldn't affect how your live your life.
The best argument for ID is that maybe people *aren't* best off being rational -- maybe having a better predictive model *isn't* helpful. Maybe a person that believes that there's a God upstairs has a better chance of survival than one that doesn't -- say, for instance, that a kid wants to commit suicide after his mother dies, but being told that she's in an afterlife prevents him from killing himself.
The problem is that this doesn't go over really well with ID advocates that I've talked to, because they inherently need to believe that they are right for this to work, so they can't *realize* that they're being irrational. It's hard to really truly believe in something just for the theraputic benefits of that belief.
A patent on FAT doesn't really have much of a use for them now; at least none that I can think of. Just let the filesystem become an open standard now, MS.
USB HID Mass Storage devices apparently usually use FAT.
Now, granted, I don't know whether they implement long filename support (which is what Microsoft's patent is on, IIRC), but FAT is still very relevant in the embedded device world, even if desktop boxes are now using NTFS instead of FAT.
Institute a cap on the total number of stories a given submitter can get accepted (per day, week, month...whatever). A cap doesn't hurt legitimate submitters, while limiting the payoff for linkwhores.
A Slashdot UID is not an expensive ID.
Thus, restrictions purely on a pure-ID basis don't work. The spammer will just create more UIDs.
That's a nicely put idea. There's no reason that adding Digg-like features means giving up a Slashdot-like system. If one is better than the other, users will wind up using it.
our search system needs a lot of work. Our source code is available. If someone wants to help, that'd be swell. We have some dupe checking code. It works often. Of course it can never be perfect. We post a lot of stories about certain topics, some closely related. It gets messy fast.
:-) Normally, if I run into a missing feature or bug, it's because the software is already running on my computer. In the case of Slashcode, I'm using the software -- from my remote web browser, but don't yet know what has to be done to get a local copy working.
On two occasions in the past, I've tried sitting down to produce a patch to Slashcode, and both times got bogged down in getting it up and running.
Generally, when I want to submit a patch to a project, I'm willing to spend a fair amount of time actually hacking, but it really sucks to spend a day just trying to get a software package working so that you can work on it. Maybe for someone that does a lot of web development, this would go faster, but I do more systems programming than web development.
I know this sounds horribly lazy and all, but that's how it is.
Ultimately the question here is: should we intentionally make Slashdot worse, because a lot of our readers think that Google's PageRank algorithm is broken?
That's a nice way of putting it -- however, it is at least plausible that Google could start penalizing websites that have many links to known spam sites (for all I know, they may do this already -- I'm sure that the search engine spammers are already familiar with this). Nofollow links could be ignored. If Google made such a change, then it would be in your interest to use nofollow to prevent your own PageRank from dropping (though I guess Slashdot doesn't really need a high PageRank).
Showing rejected story list may be nice.
I thought about that (even about trying to automatically find similar submissions and have a list of related rejected stories), but then I thought about the spam potential. I mean, maybe you could have three groups -- recommended, not recommended, and uttery crap, but I don't think that many people would get much from the rejected story list, just because it's so large.
I'd be happy with once every two months. I doubt that Slashdot changes that drastically on a week-by-week basis.
I guess its part of the whole open source mentality, but at the same time I don't see anyone stepping up and submitting code to solve problems.
I've tried a couple times. Slashcode suffers from the simple problem that it's a pain to get running.
I'm willing to spend a week hacking on something, but not on just getting it running so that I can start hacking. On two different occasions I tried getting Slashcode running on my machine and gave up after spending a day on it. If it were easier to get running, I'd have submitted at least two patches by now.
For most OSS, this is not a problem. If something is bothering you about a software package, it's already running your your system. However, Slashdot is an OSS website -- it isn't running on my computer, and so it's a pain to test your changes...
I'd like to second you on the ability to "burst" comments. A spammer cares about the constant rate at which he can spam. A legitimate user generally only cares about the burst rate.
:-)
I wouldn't mind seeing my karma either beyond "excellent" which I don't remember when I was not in that category.
I thought it was fun, even if it didn't do anything. CT apparently stopped it to prevent whoring. Maybe it wasn't worthwhile, but I thought that it was nifty.
Oh, well. Fans count is more meaningful anyway.
Relaxation of the lameness filter too. I rarely get hit with the lameness filter, but I have for stuff that was not "lame", and I had to add junk and preview a number of times to see how much more junk I need to add in order to get past it.
Almost *all* the time I hit this, It's because I'm trying to post a snippit of source code, and Slashdot mangles it. Occasionally, a preformatted log.
My understanding is that Slashcode does this to keep people from making the main page unreadable.
Here's an idea: Have an JOURNAL tag. Any text surrounded by JOURNAL goes in a new journal entry. That journal entry gets a link back to the post, and the place where the JOURNAL-surrounded text was gets a link to the journal entry. That way, you can provide snippits of source code and similar easily, but folks can read the main page without trolls screwing it up.
You know how you get some geek cred for getting a story posted? I'll bet it's worth more to convince CT to modify Slashdot.
There is a Greasemonkey script that sticks a Coral Cache link on each link on slashdot.org. The only drawback is that you wind up with these [CC] snippits if you copy and paste text with links.
I guess that I'd rather have a script that adds a contextual menu item for links to "Go to Coral Cache...".
I think that the idea of remaining ontopic came into being on Usenet.
On Usenet, to keep the hierarchy useful, it was entirely appropriate to try to keep discussions on topic. It was easy to just span over into another newsgroup that more appropriately covered some point. If you are discussing C++ in comp.lang.c, it's reasonable for someone to ask you to go to comp.lang.c++.
However, Slashdot doesn't have tens of thousands of newsgroups that are always active that a poster can follow up to or crosspost to to move the thread to another newsgroup. Slashdot has maybe six active stories on the main page at once, and no ability to "crosspost". So, unlike Usenet, if you want to post, you have to post in the active story. Maybe the article is about C, but if you want to say somethin about a similar, C++ feature, you have to stick your post in that story.
By virtue of that, I don't think that Offtopic is all that helpful on Slashdot, whereas on Usenet, it is.
But again, i don't want to throw out a good submission just because a user doesn't have appropriate karma/history/low UID.
You've built a sophisticated system, Slashcode, that uses heuristics to try to guess what content is interesting to various people, so that they don't look at all of it. Sometimes people don't read all the comments, and sometimes it's going to screw up and people are going to miss good comments. But, on the average, it works well.
I'm not familiar with how you skim through submissions, but you might consider only reviewing, say, 50% of the submissions, or whatever percentage you can handle, and passing them through a heuristic filter first...and just having a rejection flag that says "didn't pass heuristics", if you don't think that that's likely to result in people spending time trying to beat the filter. The lameness filter applies to comments...surely something that looks for affiliate IDs or too many misspelled words in a submission could filter out submissions that are not very useful?