Chapter 8 of the book is all about the mechanics and philosophy of building a community out of the random visitors who stumble on your website. Most of it isn't limited to running a Slash site, and a lot of it is common sense stuff if you have a background in journalism or publishing.
We tried to come up with a good mixture of ethical and practical ideas, like how to keep readers informed of things, writing author guidelines, and handling mistakes and errata. There's also a discussion on the moderation system (in chapters 6 and 8), including some of the ways in which it can fail. Krow has a nice bit in there about the point at which user moderation is useful (for small sites, it generally isn't).
You're probably more interested in the sections about "Anti-Abuse" features. Comment filters are described, along with their failings, and the example of how to modify Slash code itself involves making the filters less strict to posters with karma above an administrator defined level. It also describes things like IP and Network blacklists.
The approach we take in the book is that these features (moderation, filters, blacklists) are merely tools that administrators can use to keep their site running and their quality of discussion and service high. If you have to use them, make the rules plain and simple and stick by them, but don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off.
For what it's worth, I put forth the idea that having a recurring story about the site itself, where the administrators and editors participate in the comments, is one of the best things a site can do.
I'm not privy to a lot of details specific to the operations of Slashdot itself, so my opinion on those is merely wild speculation... though I have read the code and do know what's possible.:)
Re:Xfree is sufferring from poor PR
on
Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's an interesting analysis. While I could argue some of the finer points (kernel development is different by not using CVS, many Linux servers never even install XFree86), that's not really the point.
I nominate you. Find out all you can about XFree86, watch the changelogs, write stories for Linuxtoday or wherever, and spread real information about it. Open up an editor and start developing.
If not you, who will do it?
Re:Why doesn't some one pay?
on
Xfree86 4.2.0 Out
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You're someone.
(So am I, and I don't know anyone who is capable of doing this. Raph may, though -- he's discussed it before.)
Do you mean that the number of transistors (0) in your laser pointer will double within 18 months, or that the speed of light increase similarly? I'm intrigued by the latter possibility.
I haven't done it in a year and a half, but it was as easy as copying the file to the printer share just as if you were copying a file to a directory. You can either do that from the command line with a mapped share or to a UNC, or by dragging and dropping the file icon to the printer icon. I'm pretty sure this is what you want.
I still disagree. If I came across @list[0] in a code review, I'd mark it as wrong. There's a reason Perl warns about it. Any Perl developer who doesn't yet understand the idea of context needs to know it to do anything serious with the language. Any Perl developer who knows better and uses it in production code just to be cute needs a better outlet for his creativity.
If your organization eschews coding standards (especially those that follow compiler warnings!), you'll be very lucky to avoid several common pitfalls. I'd rather have every developer on my team willing and able to modify any part of the code. If that means I have to use 2-space tabs, so be it. If that means I have to teach other people how to use anonymous subroutines and the map operator, so be it.
I trust my fellow developers to follow best practices for a reason -- to make development (including maintenance) easier for everyone. They're smart enough to adapt to intelligent standards.
Sorry, that's wrong. The correct way to refer to a single item in a list is $list[0]. @list[0] refers to a list of elements. (An list of one item is still a list.) See this Slashdot article for more.
You're asking for subtle bugs by conflating them. (Whether or not this was a good design decision, it'll be fixed in Perl 6.)
Perhaps people consider these comments flamebait because your comment boils down to "Perl is unsuited for large applications because I don't like it."
If you'd care to back up your assertions with specific examples, you might have a better chance of being taken seriously. I'd tend to avoid assertions like "because Matt Wright wrote some awful stuff several years ago, it's impossible for anyone to write clear, thoughtful, or well-designed programs in Perl."
Since you didn't spell it PERL, I'm assuming you do have a serious point.
How is this a failing of the "open source development model"? If anything, it looks like a success.
I read it as an acknowledgement that both men have done good things in the past, and that sponsorship would allow them to produce more work at the same (or greater) levels of quality.
If either Dr. Conway or Dan were *begging* for money, that would be one thing. This, however, wasn't their idea. I suspect they'd keep doing what they're doing anyway. Well, except for the Damian World Tour.:)
Probably the best solution is to rewrite the code in C, possibly embedding it right in a web server, or vice versa.
How will that help? It's running in mod_perl, which is compiled Perl effectively embedded in the web server. The bottleneck on the server side is usually the database. The templates are compiled at server startup, so they're in shared memory for all of the child processes.
I'm not saying it can't be done in C, I'm just dubious that it'll have a significant speed benefit, compared to the time it would take.
Fine. You do have regression tests for all the bugs you've fixed and all of the features you've added, along with notes on why you've added things? If so, it's called refactoring. Otherwise, it's a recipe for a different kind of buggy mess.
Don't confuse strategic design with tactical. Oh dear, another bad analogy!
I understand Linus to be saying that he didn't forsee things like the iPaq or the OS/390 port when he started his terminal program in '91. That's strategic. That doesn't preclude him from designing an API or a data structure. That's tactical.
If there is extraterrestrial life, I'd rather it play Solitaire than Quake. Bring on the superintelligent vegetables! (Maybe they have graphics boards dedicated to card shuffling algorithms.)
You're probably thinking of PERL. As nearly as I can tell, PERL is a dumbed down version of Perl (see the difference?) used for writing buggy, insecure message boards and spam gateways posing as mailer forms. It has as much in common with Perl as JavaScript does Java, circa 1995.
True. They're both used to categorize stories. Think of Topics as subject and Sections as theme, or even genre. The nice thing about Sections is that they can be relatively independent, almost like having a unique Slash site for each.
Agreed, you have to listen to their arguments to make counter arguments.
My point was simply that you are as free not to believe RMS as he is free to express his opinion. Does that mean that he can tell you what to do? Yes. You just don't have to do it.
I disagree that the FSF is arguing that all software should fall under the GPL, or that their should be some sort of enforcement of that principle. In the Freedom or Power essay, RMS and Kuhn state that they do not advocate the act of choosing a license that does not respect the freedoms they promote. Again, this does not mean you have to use the GPL for code on which you hold copyright, nor do you have to agree. They are simply expressing their position.
The GPL is an albeit clever hack for a system RMS finds distasteful. I think RMS would willingly abandon the GPL if there were no need for it.
Until the FSF has the power to force copyright holders to apply the GPL to their code, I don't have a problem with their opinion. I may not entirely agree, but if I don't, I'm free to ignore them.
(Personally, that line of thought makes ESR much more palatable. Try it!)
I don't mean to be flippant, but just as RMS is free not to use proprietary software, you are free not to listen to him.
Re:The 2.4 series was treated like odd-numbered on
on
Linux 2.4.16 Released
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· Score: 1
Perhaps even-numbered kernels need a bit more of a testing stage before release.
You're absolutely right. Linus and company should regularly make available tarballs and patches of the current progress, encouraging people to download them and to report any bugs before they put out tarballs and patches and expect people to download them!
er, wait...
(Now setting up integration boxes in a compile farm, that's a good idea!)
The point is, if a brain-less Andromeda gets more young folks onto sci-fi, so that when they grow up then can enjoy intelligent shows in the same genre, I'm all for it!
If Andromeda-lite is more successful than Full Strength Andromeda, I don't hold a lot of hope for more intelligent shows to be produced. Maybe Babylon 5 will be available on DVD, but if skiffy sells, who will take a chance on something better?
Hey, Andromeda isn't perfect (oddly and unrealistically choreographed gunfights stick out as of late), but there's a lot of intelligence and planning in the backstory and in the development so far. It would be a shame to give that up for episode after episode of "Good guy in silver starship, bad guy with funny forehead and dark starship with lots of pointy bits."
On the other hand, they could pull a Chris Carter and pretend they weren't aliens all along. "We're sailors. This is HMS Andromeda." That would be worth watching for the irony value alone.
Re:oh gawd.. Did he really say that?
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Which part of
we do not advocate... the "freedom to choose any license you want for software you write".
did you misunderstand? (emphasis mine)
What the authors are saying is that power is asserting your will on other people, that copyright law makes software authors enforce that power, and that that situation removes freedoms from users and other developers.
As you can guess, they're against it. So they recommend the GPL as a means of guaranteeing those freedoms. They do not say that the GPL is the only way of doing so, and they do not say that other licenses should be prohibited by legal or social means.
They only say that certain freedoms are important, that the GPL protects them, and that they do not advocate licenses that restrict those freedoms. Perhaps implicit in this is the idea that licenses proscribing usage guidelines are either pragmatically or legally unenforcable. So the "use" card is useless.
I'm beginning to think that several people intentionally read too much into this for a convenient excuse to complain. (This last comment is not directed at Twisted Logic, who correctly points out that choosing not to use a piece of software is a basic freedom.)
I see the RIAA as more protecting the "rights" of content distributors than content creators.
Maybe it's helpful to analyze the point of the GPL in those terms. Like it says, general copyright does not (and cannot) proscribe or prohibit most kinds of use. Modification and redistribution are protected by the GPL and restricted by copyright.
As I read the story, RMS and Kuhn reject the idea of any license which allows anyone down the line to restrict the modification and redistribution rights provided by the GPL. Their moral imperative is to promote sharing, and they recognize that the cost of that is to restrict certain activities of developers down the line.
It's a definite spectrum, but I don't think the FSF is so far on one end as the apparent prevailing opinion of story posters so far would have you believe.
Slashdot Mirror
Chapter 8 of the book is all about the mechanics and philosophy of building a community out of the random visitors who stumble on your website. Most of it isn't limited to running a Slash site, and a lot of it is common sense stuff if you have a background in journalism or publishing.
We tried to come up with a good mixture of ethical and practical ideas, like how to keep readers informed of things, writing author guidelines, and handling mistakes and errata. There's also a discussion on the moderation system (in chapters 6 and 8), including some of the ways in which it can fail. Krow has a nice bit in there about the point at which user moderation is useful (for small sites, it generally isn't).
You're probably more interested in the sections about "Anti-Abuse" features. Comment filters are described, along with their failings, and the example of how to modify Slash code itself involves making the filters less strict to posters with karma above an administrator defined level. It also describes things like IP and Network blacklists.
The approach we take in the book is that these features (moderation, filters, blacklists) are merely tools that administrators can use to keep their site running and their quality of discussion and service high. If you have to use them, make the rules plain and simple and stick by them, but don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off.
For what it's worth, I put forth the idea that having a recurring story about the site itself, where the administrators and editors participate in the comments, is one of the best things a site can do.
I'm not privy to a lot of details specific to the operations of Slashdot itself, so my opinion on those is merely wild speculation... though I have read the code and do know what's possible. :)
I nominate you. Find out all you can about XFree86, watch the changelogs, write stories for Linuxtoday or wherever, and spread real information about it. Open up an editor and start developing.
If not you, who will do it?
(So am I, and I don't know anyone who is capable of doing this. Raph may, though -- he's discussed it before.)
Done.
Do you mean that the number of transistors (0) in your laser pointer will double within 18 months, or that the speed of light increase similarly? I'm intrigued by the latter possibility.
I'd put The Princess Bride on that list. There's a movie that lives up to the book.
I haven't done it in a year and a half, but it was as easy as copying the file to the printer share just as if you were copying a file to a directory. You can either do that from the command line with a mapped share or to a UNC, or by dragging and dropping the file icon to the printer icon. I'm pretty sure this is what you want.
If your organization eschews coding standards (especially those that follow compiler warnings!), you'll be very lucky to avoid several common pitfalls. I'd rather have every developer on my team willing and able to modify any part of the code. If that means I have to use 2-space tabs, so be it. If that means I have to teach other people how to use anonymous subroutines and the map operator, so be it.
I trust my fellow developers to follow best practices for a reason -- to make development (including maintenance) easier for everyone. They're smart enough to adapt to intelligent standards.
You're asking for subtle bugs by conflating them. (Whether or not this was a good design decision, it'll be fixed in Perl 6.)
If you'd care to back up your assertions with specific examples, you might have a better chance of being taken seriously. I'd tend to avoid assertions like "because Matt Wright wrote some awful stuff several years ago, it's impossible for anyone to write clear, thoughtful, or well-designed programs in Perl."
Since you didn't spell it PERL, I'm assuming you do have a serious point.
I read it as an acknowledgement that both men have done good things in the past, and that sponsorship would allow them to produce more work at the same (or greater) levels of quality.
If either Dr. Conway or Dan were *begging* for money, that would be one thing. This, however, wasn't their idea. I suspect they'd keep doing what they're doing anyway. Well, except for the Damian World Tour. :)
Dan is in charge of the Parrot internals for Perl 6.
I'm not saying it can't be done in C, I'm just dubious that it'll have a significant speed benefit, compared to the time it would take.
"was"? Try the chicken sometime. That's a company with a consistent core competency. :)
Fine. You do have regression tests for all the bugs you've fixed and all of the features you've added, along with notes on why you've added things? If so, it's called refactoring. Otherwise, it's a recipe for a different kind of buggy mess.
I understand Linus to be saying that he didn't forsee things like the iPaq or the OS/390 port when he started his terminal program in '91. That's strategic. That doesn't preclude him from designing an API or a data structure. That's tactical.
If there is extraterrestrial life, I'd rather it play Solitaire than Quake. Bring on the superintelligent vegetables! (Maybe they have graphics boards dedicated to card shuffling algorithms.)
You're probably thinking of PERL. As nearly as I can tell, PERL is a dumbed down version of Perl (see the difference?) used for writing buggy, insecure message boards and spam gateways posing as mailer forms. It has as much in common with Perl as JavaScript does Java, circa 1995.
True. They're both used to categorize stories. Think of Topics as subject and Sections as theme, or even genre. The nice thing about Sections is that they can be relatively independent, almost like having a unique Slash site for each.
You'd be surprised how flexible Slash is.
My point was simply that you are as free not to believe RMS as he is free to express his opinion. Does that mean that he can tell you what to do? Yes. You just don't have to do it.
I disagree that the FSF is arguing that all software should fall under the GPL, or that their should be some sort of enforcement of that principle. In the Freedom or Power essay, RMS and Kuhn state that they do not advocate the act of choosing a license that does not respect the freedoms they promote. Again, this does not mean you have to use the GPL for code on which you hold copyright, nor do you have to agree. They are simply expressing their position.
The GPL is an albeit clever hack for a system RMS finds distasteful. I think RMS would willingly abandon the GPL if there were no need for it.
Until the FSF has the power to force copyright holders to apply the GPL to their code, I don't have a problem with their opinion. I may not entirely agree, but if I don't, I'm free to ignore them.
(Personally, that line of thought makes ESR much more palatable. Try it!)
I don't mean to be flippant, but just as RMS is free not to use proprietary software, you are free not to listen to him.
You're absolutely right. Linus and company should regularly make available tarballs and patches of the current progress, encouraging people to download them and to report any bugs before they put out tarballs and patches and expect people to download them!
er, wait...
(Now setting up integration boxes in a compile farm, that's a good idea!)
If Andromeda-lite is more successful than Full Strength Andromeda, I don't hold a lot of hope for more intelligent shows to be produced. Maybe Babylon 5 will be available on DVD, but if skiffy sells, who will take a chance on something better?
Hey, Andromeda isn't perfect (oddly and unrealistically choreographed gunfights stick out as of late), but there's a lot of intelligence and planning in the backstory and in the development so far. It would be a shame to give that up for episode after episode of "Good guy in silver starship, bad guy with funny forehead and dark starship with lots of pointy bits."
On the other hand, they could pull a Chris Carter and pretend they weren't aliens all along. "We're sailors. This is HMS Andromeda." That would be worth watching for the irony value alone.
What the authors are saying is that power is asserting your will on other people, that copyright law makes software authors enforce that power, and that that situation removes freedoms from users and other developers.
As you can guess, they're against it. So they recommend the GPL as a means of guaranteeing those freedoms. They do not say that the GPL is the only way of doing so, and they do not say that other licenses should be prohibited by legal or social means.
They only say that certain freedoms are important, that the GPL protects them, and that they do not advocate licenses that restrict those freedoms. Perhaps implicit in this is the idea that licenses proscribing usage guidelines are either pragmatically or legally unenforcable. So the "use" card is useless.
I'm beginning to think that several people intentionally read too much into this for a convenient excuse to complain. (This last comment is not directed at Twisted Logic, who correctly points out that choosing not to use a piece of software is a basic freedom.)
Maybe it's helpful to analyze the point of the GPL in those terms. Like it says, general copyright does not (and cannot) proscribe or prohibit most kinds of use. Modification and redistribution are protected by the GPL and restricted by copyright.
As I read the story, RMS and Kuhn reject the idea of any license which allows anyone down the line to restrict the modification and redistribution rights provided by the GPL. Their moral imperative is to promote sharing, and they recognize that the cost of that is to restrict certain activities of developers down the line.
It's a definite spectrum, but I don't think the FSF is so far on one end as the apparent prevailing opinion of story posters so far would have you believe.