Recent Comments

Did you make up Ballmers nickname or is that his login too?

This seems to be studying leadership roles via the worker/boss mentality, in which case I would probably tend to agree in a very narrow way: Privacy at work doesn't exist, and for the sake of the company (liability usually being near the top of the list) it probably shouldn't. Being a boss means knowing what your employees are doing.
Does that mean my boss should look into my private life? Absolutely not; not even in the case of a pre-employment background check (which nowadays seems to include perusing social media).

Me and my dog Arrow...

I have a Nissan Leaf that I use as my daily driver. I can go a respectable 70 miles per day around town on my normal 80% charge. Every night when I park it in the garage, I plug it into the standard 110V wall charger. Although I have the faster 220V charger, the charge time is never an issue as it charges overnight.

Because I still own my previous gas powered vehicle, I've never tried going on a road trip where I have to rely on third party charging stations. Living in San Antonio, for example, I would have to stop twice to get to the coast - each stop being several hours.

It's his own nickname. I think it was his login at Microsoft or something. I didn't make it up. :)

I have nothing more to say about what you typed, other than to say that BillG is an awesome nickname and I will now always refer to him as such.

I'm planning for this to be my next car. I don't really understand why the range is a huge problem. Any trip longer than 3-400 miles is more economical to fly, so you would need to charge once, maybe twice along the way. And after 200 miles of driving, I'm ready for a recharge too. I'll appreciate the time to eat and relax for a bit.

Or for the 4 times a year that I take a trip that long, maybe it is better to rent a traditional car.

We had the white on blue IBM 386s for keyboarding...man I hated that class. It was so pointless, yet mandatory.

Got to appreciate the process of creative destruction, and you will if you ever work for an organization that's gotten choked with deadwood: useless middle managers, antiquated processes set in stone, ridiculous petty assistants ruling their little fiefdom like would-be dictators. The only way to fix it is to bring in a guy with a hatchet (or hey, a woman with a hatchet). That goes for Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft, the government, you name it.

Managers are like cancer. Got to occasionally cut them out before they metastasize and run amok all over your business. I think Microsoft had this coming a long time ago, but Monkeyboy Ballmer and BillG had way too much influence over every process that would've let to change. I say, let this guy swing his axe, and chop Microsoft up into something that makes good products again. It's been too long. I know it's hip to hate on Microsoft, and I am a Linux/BSD guy, but back in the day, they made some pretty good stuff. Just not anymore. Microsoft Outlook 97 was pretty damned good. Microsoft Outlook 2013 is a steaming pile of horse manure and I wish it would rot in bit hell. Just an example.

I'm kind of with Quadrox on this one. If all this guy is doing is taking other primary sources and banging them into Wikipedia's database, wouldn't it be more useful to get those primary sources in shape where they are available, etc.? And if they're already available, maybe more effort should go into linking to them and letting people know they exist, then screen scraping data just for the purpose of getting into Wikipedia.

I haven't seen any of these articles but if they're just stubs they are likely not that useful. I know whenever I hit a stub article I avoid it entirely, thinking incomplete means probably never reviewed and therefore untrustable.

Maybe somebody should tell this geezer to take up another hobby, like building model trains or something.

I think currently the power is swinging strongly in the direction of governments and away from citizens and consumers (not the same thing, mind you: a pet peeve). And given that power, governments naturally err on the side of wanting more power, even before they have an actual need for that power. It's like saving it up, in case it's ever useful. (like bandwidth or CPU time) :)

Apparently Aereo is asking that, since the Supreme Court declared it a "cable company", it should immediately receive cable company status, which the FCC has been previously reluctant to grant to internet-only companies.

The Supreme Court and FCC should have to eat their words now and grant the cable status. Don't give them ketchup either!

The most interesting thing about this article is the map showing how currently Tesla owners have to very carefully and strategically map their route 100 miles at a time from charging station to charging station. That is proof positive we've got some more work to do. I have no problem with an electric or hybrid car, but the economics are still not quite there. (Funny anecdote, I've got a friend with a degree in electrical engineering who works on submarines and drives one. He says, 'I'm probably the only guy on earth who knows more about how to repair one of these things than how to repair a car with a gasoline engine!)

I do however look forward to the day we can generate power otherwise and stop our dependence on Middle East oil. Then we can let that whole region just slide back into the obscurity from where it came.

Amazing how hard the existing cable monopolies will fight to ensure nothing innovative or vaguely consumer friendly hits the market. I cut the cable ages ago and don't regret it for a second. For one, I watch what I want when I want it. Secondly, no advertising. Thirdly, no stupid "package deals" where phone and internet and cable are wrapped up into one bundle whose price slowly ratchets upward while the quality slides.

Big cable companies ought to be nuked into high orbit. They're the worst of the worst, in America at least.

What amazes me is that despite the collossal sums of money and energy that go into advertising and marketing, they still get it wrong (for me, at least) like 90% of the time.

Most ads that follow me around the internet these days are for things I've already bought. I picked up a surf watch a couple of weeks ago. Now everywhere I go the sidebar advertisement is for a (different) surfwatch. Fuck off, pal, I already bought one. Secondly, I went to wordreference.com to look up how to say "surgical stapler" in French (my dog has liver cancer and the vets speak French here). Suddenly, everywhere I go, Google is helpfully showing me adverts for staplers, the kind you'd see in an office.

That's two fails. I'm glad to see they're looking into mobile ads. I hope they discover eventually that adverts on phones are a huge waste of time. If the conclusion is otherwise, your phone is about to become a nuisance in ways previously unimaginable, like that crap where you walk by a coffee shop and your device buzzes you with a coupon for that store. Again, fuck off, pal!

of the people who actually understand the ways they plan to exploit this data to control outcomes in society. I mean money and power are the usual suspects and I guess I understand how money and power give you the ability to have more things you want the way you want them, but at some level you want other people to have money and power too don't you? Don't you lose the ability to be surprised and challenged by peers if you obtain the ability to control all outcomes?

Sorry, didn't have time to write up a proper article.

I like Audacity but it has or had a fatal flaw in that all of its work files seem to be completely uncompressed. It's very easy to run out of room. (A little 40 MB MP3 can turn into one or more 1 GB files/directories.)

I hope one day they use a compressed working file format by default.

I'd really rather have a full featured video editor and let that take care of audio editing "for free". There are lots of projects in various states of development. OpenShot seemed to be the choice for the nonprofessional crowd. It's... okay. Still doesn't compare to the ease of use of Windows editors.

Man. I wish I'd read all this before I tossed out my answer to the poll post. This is good fodder.

I keep meaning to get it running in a VM so I can install an old version of WordPerfect, and enjoy nostalgia for the good old days. I don't think I would want to be glued to a copy of WP anymore (particularly not the new version), but I hate the Microsoft Ribbon interface so passionately I think looking at an old DOS application might actually do me good.

I still remember back in University in '93 though when the computer lab had something like 40 PCs and 15 Macs, and everyone lined up for the Macs to do their papers on. Writing was on the wall for that interface for word processing. Thinking back, the machines must have been like IBM XTs or 286es, and the Macs I remember were Fat Macs or Mac SEs. Good times. I actually wrote papers back then instead of farting around on the Internet.

I've used it to convert old cassettes to Ogg Vorbis. You play the cassette into the microphone jack, and then chop up the tracks using Audacity. Easy peasy.

I'm going to have to look at that one. I looked at musicTeX a bit, and then moved to Lilypond, which I loved in theory but which I found horrendously frustrating - seemed you needed to write custom code (I forget, was it SLANG or something?) pretty soon in the process. It may have improved since then.

I know David Kastrup is working on the Lilypond project - brilliant programmer behind the previewTeX system for emacs and also highly involved in aucTeX. If you've ever used LaTeX on emacs, he's your man.

Thanks! I wanted something that would be useful to:

1. Pick the experts out of the crowd and elevate their posts.
2. Encourage civility/helpfulness/other community behaviors. (I've seen forums that would encourage flames and rudeness, so customizable ratings are important.)
3. Make the trolls easier to flag - without automatically suppressing their speech. (Some people really believe that crazy stuff. They need to be mocked, not silenced.)
4. Let moderate/quiet/scared people have a voice without requiring them to be vulnerable to backlash. The bad stuff is out there, and most people don't agree with it, but most people aren't going to post their disagreement - they'd rather just click a button.
5. Something a little more nuanced. Whee "Funny Troll"!

The problems with the above system that I can see are:

• Do you make aggregate post ratings public? That might convince some people not to post at all. (Is that good? More signal, less noise? What about the people who take pride in their Troll Level 9000?)
• How the heck could anyone make this scalable? I guess if anyone could though, you guys could!
• What tags do you permit? A list of tags could easily shape the discussion - people will be trying to earn specific ones, avoid others, etc - but you still have to make sure to cover "what people are going to really feel about a post", or they'll start using tags for other meanings and your measuring system will be out of whack.
  • Do you permit normal users to apply topic-specific tags to posts? So you could have users tag a post as being "about Linux" or "about free speech", whatever you choose to call those topics. That could help with catching the experts, but might subject the expert-finding system to easier gaming.
  • The absolute basic tags you'd need to apply to catch people's feelings (I think) would be something like:
    • The gut check stuff:
      • Agree
      • Disagree
      • Rude
      • Unhelpful
      • Funny
      • Serious
    • The nice stuff:
      • Polite
      • Helpful
      • Interesting
    • The factual stuff:
      • True
      • False
      • Mostly-true
      • Mostly-false
      • Half-true
      • Troll
    • I thought about including stuff like "stupid" and "hell yeah" but I figure if you're trying to encourage civility you probably shouldn't allow the silent majority to outright insult people in their tags. XD
    • There's probably stuff I'm missing here. This post is already way too huge, though.
• How can this system encourage people to read and tag more new posts?
  • Give a "reader rating"? "You have read and tagged 900+ posts! Congratulations!"
  • Give their tags more weight? So long as you don't let the bots take over.
  • Can you rate a tagger based on how many people agree with their tags? The only thing that seems good for is determining whether someone is with the group mind or against it on certain topics.
  • Let the good ones have custom tags? I have a bad feeling about that - but I'd love to earn a tagging rep so I could tag people "whackadoodle" or "window-licker". Maybe moderators would have to approve the custom tags to keep them civil or whatever. That could get overwhelming, but they're short, right?

I think Slashdot was headed this way but stopped when it got to be "good enough". I got the "multi-tagging" idea from Pipedot, though. I noticed how once multiple people agree that a post is off-topic, it gets flagged off-topic - unless more people agree that it's funny. When moderating, I've actually fished around until I found the adjective other moderators wanted to apply so I could make it show up right away - is this post "insightful" or "interesting", oh let's click that one since the word will show up faster. When I caught myself doing that, I realized that the site must store both tags - and I thought, why not show them?

Things to look out for:

• What if 9 bajillion people tag a controversial post 200 different things? I think you should only show the top 10 tags but then you run the risk of moderation being shouted down. Shown tags are more likely to receive metamoderation, though, so my expectation is that tags that get added quickly (or were added by the original poster) will win out, and tags that are outright wrong will be dropped quickly from the list.
• What about people specifically posting only in certain topics, trying to raise their rank to "expert" in those topics? I... guess you end up with a very informative site then?
• Find a way to handle a threaded conversation that is 1000+ comments gracefully - ha! Good luck! XD

See, toldja I put too much thought into this! But it is a very fun topic!

.... things that make you go hmmmm....

This is not exactly the right thread perhaps... but MuseScore is an excellent musical notation software available for Linux systems. I switched a friend from Sibelius to MuseScore about three or four years ago and for his needs he says he likes MuseScore better (than the version of Sibelius going at that time). Admittedly he is not a power user, but he does draft up a surprising amount of scores in very little time...

Thank you. I have not heard of Traverso before.

By the way, Audacity has found its uses in quite unexpected places... for example to analyse signals captured by SDR (Software Defined Radio).

I agree with most of what you are saying, but I would like to add another point.

While it is true that you can't stop people from doing this, I am somewhat concerned that resources are spent (disk space, processing time etc.) on article stubs that hardly anyone is ever going to miss. Yes, the cited example of some obscure philipene fishing village that nobody would have known about otherwise is a very fine anecdote, but it's no more than that.

ow many of the other fishing village stubs are ever going to be looked up by anyone ever? Wikipedia is always asking for more money, is it really worthwhile to spend a lot of resources (8.5 % af all articles is not nothing) on this stuff?

is it better Wikipedia lack articles that humans can't or won't write?

Yes. As long as it's properly cited (not that many people look anyway) it's easier access to information. A starting point for further research.

Can robot-written articles be trusted?

No more or less than any other article. There are many reasons articles shouldn't be trusted, including paid editors, people with biased views, people with out of date information.. etc. You shouldn't take anything at face value, that's what citations and research are for.

Should they be labeled and approved?

Maybe the accounts should be labeled like payed editors are now supposed to be now. I don't see why they need more approval than a "real" person. If you find out a bot has reoccurring problems, ban it 'til it's fixed. Reverting and deleting isn't a major issue.

And lastly: is all this work even worth it in the first place? Do these bot-written articles even add any value to everyone's favorite information site?

The authors must believe it is worth it. You can't stop it. If people want to they will find a way to flood Wikipedia with whatever articles they want. By trying to limit them you will only inconvenience "real" users.

This is really well thought-out; thanks for being so thorough. In fact I'm still chewing on it. The fact that this system doesn't exist anywhere on the 'Net that I'm aware of makes it intriguing - it's a departure in a totally new direction. Cool.

I still use it for Dell BIOS updates on my Linux systems :)

There's an option missing, as performed by Popular Science: shut down all communication. Lack of communication is still a form of communication. It's a fringe option, though it's one I wish more news sites would look into. (I'm sick of running across people who'd like to just shoot all them immigrints what're here to steal our jobs an' vote for Obama!!!)

Here's what I'd like to see. I'm putting heavy emphasis on tagging below because it's a form of "silent speech" - it's something that the mythical Moderate Middle or Silent Reader can do without expending much effort, and thus should encourage more participation, even from people who are afraid to speak up.

• Take the Slashdot/Reddit system of up/down tags and expand it so posts can have multiple tags.
• Expand the number of predefined tags to cover things like "Disagree" and "Rude" - it's dumb when people use "Troll" as a synonym for "I disagree" and the tagging system should discourage that by actually including terms people will want to use - even if it doesn't give them a positive or negative value on the back end.
• Get rid of the public +1 and -1 associated with each tag. They're still there, they're just hidden and can be changed up as you get to know the site's community.
• By default, do not apply negative modifiers to tags like "Disagree". Just show the tag. Users can apply their own +/- filters for tags, but they've got to log in and build their filters. The default modifiers should be heavy on the positives and light on the negatives to promote discussion.
• Allow users to vote on tags people already added instead of supplying their own. Up-voting or down-voting a tag is the same as sending in a tag for that post - you only get one vote per post. Plus, it's instant meta-moderation - a lot of people disagreeing that something is Funny means that tagger's idea of funny is off for your audience.
• Allow users to tag their own post, but don't give that tag any + or - value. "Ohhh, they were going for Funny with that comment."
• When people get enough highly-rated posts (whatever "enough" is) in a specific topic (judged by the tags on the topics they post in) like "law" and "engineering" and "linux", tag those users as "linux-expert" or "law-hobbyist" or whatever. They could remove or downgrade their own expertise-tags, of course.
• Aggregate post tags and apply them to the user - "Rude", "Helpful", "Controversial", or whatever. Positive tags could serve as a form of rank; negative tags would serve as a warning. It doesn't have to be public, though. I'm of two minds on that.
• Allow people to use the friend/foe/following stuff - they're going to anyway. Keep an eye on those friend/foe/follow networks though - anyone who +1s the same person's posts, or all posts that are about the MPAA being good guys, or whatever, needs to be examined by moderators.
• Keep moderators around. Someone's got to boot the spammers and spank the trolls, plus humans seem to be better at spotting voting rings than machines are.
• Make the comments part of the "story". Include them in the RSS feed, promote the ones that elaborate on the topic with more information and resources, have a "comment of the week", etc. If you want a community, hand out community status, put the community in the public eye, make the community members famous.

I put way too much thought into this and then edited it down to just the bare bones. I hope it's coherent.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/introducing-raspberry-pi-model-b-plus/

We think you're going to love Model B+, but to ensure continuity of supply for our industrial customers we'll be keeping Model B in production for as long as there's demand for it.

and

#comment-957489" rel="nofollow">http://www.raspberrypi.org/introducing-raspberry-pi-model-b-plus/#comment-957489

We stopped making Model Bs for a month so we could fill the channel with enough B+ to deal with the demand we get when we make a new product. They're back in production again now, so you won't have to wait for long.

Better badly formatted than non-existent. Submit away, and we'll figure out which ones to fix and which ones to ditch.

I have mentioned this on SoylentNews several times, but I believe the only sensible moderation system is one where you cannot only add or subtract one, but where you can give your exact rating of a comment. Then let the average decide.

And if you are too concerned with single moderations instantly getting a comment to +5, then make it so the score can never be higher than the number of moderations.

Regarding the price point, remember that the components hardly changed in this upgrade. The main change is the layout and they added few extra connectors or replaced them. I doubt the new power supply increased the cost much, if at all. The SoC and memory are the same and their price went down since the original release.
So, I would have been surprised if the price changed much considering they are non-profit organisation.

By the way, the model B+ is already for sale at Element14 or similar stores. Also the old revision B disappeared overnight, I thought they will be getting rid of the old stock at discounted price???

The problem with stealing from sites with bigger user bases is that they'll also have the larger discussion threads. So we'll have a nicer interface for the story and discussion, but not a lot of discussion.

Still, content is essential. Good content could draw in more good comments.

So, what I (and I presume most people who want more out of the usb ports than the raspberry pi natively offers) do is use a powered USB hub. Works if you want to plug in an external hard drive, a beefier 802.11G/N adapter than the pi can power on its own, or really, whatever you normally can plug into a usb port on a desktop. Also, naturally, because it's a hub, you now have more ports to plug in keyboards, mice, or whatever else you care to plug in.

That's not to say that more ports aren't welcome, as this thing does look like they've made some really nice improvements (and while keeping the price the same; I'm impressed), just to point out that you can probably do more with the device you bought than it sounds like you realize.

While holding the price point! I might have to just go buy a second one.

Yes, it is good to see that someone listened to the user feedback.

This is the right kind of progress. I just bought a RaspbPi to play with, and was immediately kind of put off by the sketchy SD card slot and having to swap out keyboard for USB keys because of the lack of USB ports. Furthermore because the USBs are unpowered you simply can't put an external hard drive on them, which kind of limits anyone hoping to make a NAS controller out of them or something.

You should also see this article then: http://www.itworld.com/software/374952/life-after-users-detroits-internet "Life after Users: the Detroits of the Internet." It singles out Usenet for abuse, which gets my goat, as I am a Usenet fan to this day. But it's a pretty good article.

Sure, someday places like Fark and Reddit are going to be MySpaced. Kuro5hin goes on that list. Various versions of Technocrat too.

be considered digital communities that may or may not be abandoned in coming years -- or does it have to mean a place with graphics?

7. Profit!

I think I like the idea of being able to identify other users whose judgement you respect (based on their history of moderation) and being able to weight their moderation picks more heavily than others for dictating what you see. Thus, if ContributerIRespect gives 1 upvote for a particular comment, I might want to see it given a rank of 3 upvotes by ContributersIDontKnow and given a rank of 5 upvotes by ContributesIDontRespect. I can see how this system might normalize on a small number of "elite" commenters who most people respect, but it would still be interesting to see if this raised the general level of a comment thread or narrowed the general scope of a comment thread or some other effect and whether these effects added value. Maybe this is the "Following Friends" option in the poll, but I feel like a weighting system is more nuanced than just deciding to follow someone or not. I also realize that this is a subsetting algorithm which presumes the community being moderated is large enough to need subsetting. For small communities such as Pipedot at present, I actually prefer to read everything posted because there isn't enough content to even require moderation.

So what about a forum that allows up/down votes with no upper or lower limit per post which rates all posts from 1 to 10 on scale where 10 equates to the current highest upvoted post and 1 is the lowest. Question is, would the cream still float to the top...

I often think that fishing with lines is a much fairer game for the fish (than fishing with nets) because, maybe, the fish -- or at least some of the fish -- have at least a hope of "getting away". On the other hand, if I really needed to catch fish and nets worked better, I'd probably end up using the nets. My view on all the sophisticated weapons appearing in the world these past decades typically depends on whether I anticipate being the fish or the fisherman in the ensuing "life and death" struggles.

The more I look at this poll, the more I realize it could be improved. Oh well! It's perhaps more ripe for a true conversation/topic and the poll just gets it flowing. Looking at it again I see Google+ and Facebook (Like) are essentially the same thing. And I missed the Slashdot Karma system.

I think currently I'm interested in a simple vote up for posts I like, a vote down for posts that are offensive, trolling, flamey, or inconsiderate. And a few tags for things that are useful to filter out (in your preferences you can opt to filter out "funny" for example). Then the Karma system so good posters can get rewarded. But whether to apply global karma (everyone's experience is affected by the group's opinion of a user's karma) or if karma works the way Usenet kill files do, where my opinion of posters affects only how they are presented on my screen? That's an interesting subject too.

So much room for experiment.

How about "Minus one sends a mild electric shock to the poster of the troll/flamebait post"?

"My life's a mess, because under that dress she's got a P-E-N-I-S."

I think Bryan's got a point though.

"Funny" is pretty obvious. So is "informative": It provides new, useful information. "Flamebait" and "Offtopic" both speak for themselves. But "Troll" and "Flamebait" are damned close, that's for sure.

"Interesting" and "Insightful" is more subtle. Both provide information the reader finds compelling. Insightful is supposed to be more profound - some post of such high quality that the reader thinks the poster has unraveled the mystery, or touched upon the heart of the conundrum. Interesting is not as profound, and might just be a curiosity. But both go beyond simply providing more information.

I don't think I've ever used "overrated" or "underrated" though. And "redundant" seems rude.

Perhaps we're zeroing in on a better mod scheme? I'd propose:

Funny: on Slashdot I liked having a 'funny' tag so I could filter it out; I didn't appreciate those posters who just go for a quick laugh and add nothing of value.
Offtopic: useful, helps keep the subject on track and also filter out spam
Good post: a combination of interesting/insightful/whatever. Basically: Plus one
Flame/Troll: combine the two. Basically: Minus one.

There is no mod for "I don't like your post" because of the risk of abuse. Bad posts just sit and rot. But you can assign negative points to posts that intend to offend or derail the conversation.

I've considered cross-posting something before (I think I have done once or twice actually), but usually forget until after I've already submitted it once. What do editors here think about badly formatted submissions that need fixing up? :-)