the algorithm would produce a file exactly as long as the input, but entirely filled with zeros.
Haha -- not only that, but in order to "decrypt" the ciphertext, you need to supply the original plaintext as the key!
Very nicely put. There's a big difference between Slashdot and a news site or even your average news aggregator, both in audience size and professional makeup, and that's what has made the site so successful for so long. You did a great job expressing that -- now hopefully a corporate suit somewhere will read this and (more importantly) understand it.
I'm not hopeful
Slashdot's biggest selling point, as it's always been, is the conversation the stories generate.
Exactly. And how does the new design reflect this?
On the new design it looks like you cannot link to a specific comment or thread. Check out your user page and look at your comment history. No links to comments, no comment scores.
I suppose comments are simply an unsightly appendage in their new "modern" design (they must clash with all the bullshit social media icons everywhere). Just think of all the "old cruft" they could get rid of if there were no comments: threaded layout, moderation, meta-moderation, karma, all users with a UID less than 7 digits, etc. Replace all that with a flat "top 20" comments listing and a little "Like this on Facebook!" button and it'll be nirvana.
It makes the comment section - which is a large part of the slashdot experience - seem like something tacked onto the end of a news article where people post one line responses.
I hope to hell someone with a say in the matter reads this and understands what it really means. I'll give you a hint:
If you make this change, you will kill Slashdot.
I'm not exaggerating even slightly. Many people spend time here to read and participate in the commentary. By shoehorning the comments into that tiny space beneath the article you're saying "comments aren't important", something which will in all likelihood be soon followed by "comments are a liability" and then "comments now require moderation before being posted". People tolerate the Slash-Bi(sexual) crap now because it takes a second seat to the real meat of the articles and commentary. By reversing those roles you're telling 85% of the active userbase that they're no longer welcome.
Whatever site is left after this change takes effect -- maybe it will make enough advertisement and tracking money to satisfy Dice, but it won't be Slashdot and it won't last a year. Remember what happened to Digg? Yeah, I didn't think so.
By the way, if anyone hasn't gone and looked at the comments section on an article, go look now and then tell me I'm wrong.
Seriously? I hated Why's Guide... it was stupid. I'm sorry. Just get to the point.
As someone not interested in learning Ruby I actually enjoyed reading Why's Guide. It's very creative and clever and fun. Why clearly has a talent for creative writing (and for drawing cute little foxes).
That said, would I use it as a way to really learn how to program in Ruby? Absolutely not. I'd much rather have something closer to an O'Reilly animal book, or Learn Python the Hard Way.
Lua's reference guide is great, but I prefer a bit more than just a language's grammar since part of learning a new language is understanding its "why" and "how" as well as the "what" (for me, at least).
hosting 32 terabytes of DRAM memory and up to 384 processor cores with 8-threads per core.
Good news everyone! There's finally a machine that can run a Minecraft server without throwing a java.lang.OutOfMemoryError!
This looks like fake to me.
Maybe this whole thing is a false flag false flag!! Did you ever think about that??
Oh no, of course not. You sheeple don't know how to spot a conspiracy even when it's hovering menacingly right over you.
I was torn between TV and books, because both media allow you to tell a rich story.
I agree. The only problem with TV is that it's effectively open-ended in terms of time and scale, which many developers and writers don't seem to be able to handle well. Story arcs start meandering and characters develop in sudden fits and spurts. Then there's the dreaded "unexpected final season" where poor planning catches up with them and they make a hatchet rush job of the end. And of course the "last ditch effort for another season or movie". The Stargate showrunners were stupidly bad when it came to this. Every one of the series finished with a non-ending because the morons hoped that by having a cliffhanger they could contrive another season or direct-release movie out of the studio/publisher. But when it failed (and repeatedly), you simply have a show with a shitty ending.
A bad movie leaves viewers annoyed at wasting a couple of hours. A TV series with a horrible conclusion leaves longtime viewers disgruntled and sometimes quite angry. But yes, a well-constructed TV show can provide many, many hours of great storytelling.
Why not 'candybar', or whatever non-commercial name? Seems like a silly choice.
Well, probably because "candy bar" doesn't start with a K.
And I'm not sure I buy the "not familiar with" story. More likely somebody made an offhand suggestion of KitKat and marketing messed their shorts over the idea of "cross marketing opportunities".
"Key Lime" would have been a great name.
Patents are, and should be, about technical issues only
Well, I'd have to say this fails on those merits as well. I fail to see how "show an advertisement based on message content" is either inventive or non-obvious to an expert in the field.
Oh, but they have a "computing device" and a "cloud". APPROVED.
Judging by the other replies, I seem to be one of the few people who actually finds the redesign to be easier to read. I always hated the old design, though I'm not a regular visitor of Yahoo Sports in any way. Come to think of it, that may be why - are we sure this isn't just a case of Change is Bad?
Really? A partially-transparent background with a huge colorful distracting picture of a stadium behind it is easier to read? The huge animated advertisement at the top and an unintuitive fixed nav bar on the left and a sometimes-floating-sometimes-fixed nav bar on the right? Are we sure this isn't just a case of Shiny is Good?
I know, replying to APK about magical hosts files is pointless, but here we go anyway:
Can you answer these two questions:
How many domains and subdomains does Facebook operate?
Please make sure to include those added in the last 4 hours!
Can you enumerate every domain used to host advertising and/or malware on the planet?
Please make sure to account for dynamically changing and the infinite number of wildcard domains!
If you cannot give me exact answers, then your hosts file method is useless and obsolete. Please wake up and stop peddling your crap here.
The ETag method is a clever solution to cookieless tracking. I find this method I stumbled upon a couple of weeks ago a bit startling. I had no idea the amount of information routinely sent from my browser/computer to web servers-- information about plug-ins, time zone, screen resolution, accepted headers, etc WITHOUT letting me know. It is enough to give more than 21 bits of identifying information and uniquely identifies me among the 3M visits.
Yep. It's absurd, and unfortunately many "privacy-enhancing" tools (for example, anything that alters the user agent) can actually make a browser more unique rather than less-so.
NoScript is an exception, and one that works very well. I know it's parroted on Slashdot a lot, but if you care about privacy and security on the web there isn't a single better option. Using Panopticlick on my browser as an example:
Without NoScript: Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 3,316,576 tested so far. Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys at least 21.66 bits of identifying information.
With NoScript: Within our dataset of several million visitors, only one in 2,433 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours. Currently, we estimate that your browser has a fingerprint that conveys 11.25 bits of identifying information.
Still not great, but a lot better than unique. It's quite unfortunate that the web evolved with the assumption that arbitrary code may be executed in the browser. If we had started out instead with an opt-in approach to Javascript, I think things would be quite a bit better now in terms of privacy and security than they currently are.
Um, no. The sky is not falling. They reset the value of the pref. Big whoop.
about:config -> javascript.enabled = false.
You are a dumbass, and a part of the problem. A year from now they will remove the javascript.enabled option entirely because "nobody is using it because it's a hidden preference" and "we need to make room for more twitterbook bullshit".
Chances are you can still modify those options through the about:config page (I hope).
Removing an option from the UI is the first step to Mozilla deleting the option altogether. Look to autoHide tabs for an example of this already happening, and tabs-on-bottom planned on being removed. When they force tabs on top I will stop using/upgrading Firefox.
This is why I get pissed off by the asshats who say "don't complain about the UI option, you can change it in about:config". 1-2 years after the UI is changed, the option, in all its forms, will be gone.
No directory.
