Since this is not yet documented, I figured I would mention this here now... we are experimenting with some very rudimentary keystroke navigation in the discussion2 system. We support both FPS style WASD keybindings, as well as the standard vi layout of HJKL. Down/Up will cycle you through next/previous comment chronologically... left/right will cycle you through next/previous in thread order. Holding SHIFT down while you press the navigation key will collapse the previous comment. And when you get to the end, pressing down or right will attempt to retrieve more comments if you want them.

What this means is that you can now use D2 to simulate most of the most popular viewing modes of the original discussion system. By dragging both the abbreviate & display sliders right next to each other you effectively remove abbreviated comments which simulates nested mode. By toggling comment retrieval order to 'Oldest First' and using up down, you can effectivel read the discussion from oldest to newest. And of course the default settings gives you the best comments first, providing a nice default view of discussions for most anonymous users (who rarely participate and we want to really show only the best comments).

You can also disable D2 in the comment prefs (the word 'prefs' in the floating dialog box) if you are logged in. Right now we're testing D2 for a large percentage of anonymous readers. As soon as we finish IE7 support we'll roll out D2 for the rest of the ACs.

The Ann Arbor party seemed to go great- lots of people packed Leopold Bros place, doing battle with barflies and football fans. It was somewhat bizarre watching obvious normal bar people try to figure out what this large crowd of 'different' people were all about. We handed out a ton of t-shirts, drank much alcohol, ate nachos etc. Our party had a great number of Slashdot and SourceForge staffers... all folks who have been with Slashdot for so many years it's hard to remember Slashdot without them. I'm not exactly sure how many people eventually showed up... a lot of our RSVPs didn't show, and a lot more didn't bother sign up at all, so I think the two balanced out.

For me personally these sorts of things are always difficult. I'm not very good at crowds. I can smile for a picture, but I'm perpetually nervous when surrounded by strangers who have certain expectations of me. There's a reason I live life behind a keyboard!

Further compounding matters lately is baby induced chronic sleep deprivation. Me want REM cycles. It's always nice to get out and have a beer. Kathleen & I get only so many hours "out" together now, gotta make each one count. The party attendees were all cool... and understanding that I was pretty tired.

Anyway, thanks to everyone who showed up... I've still got the california party later this week. Hopefully my throat heals up by then. The only real problem with this location was the acoustics... I had to shout to be heard, and stick my ear in front of people to hear them (baby crying has done some amount of hopefully temporary ear damage). My throat is raaaaw from yelling. Sucking on cough drops helps.

As for other parties, boxes have been shipped. Hopefully they have arrived to most places on time, although I think they were shipped on a slowish shipping option so I'm not sure. I know some folks got shirts on friday, but I'm sure the others will arrive monday or so. Also, keep in mind that we only had 700 shirts and 2300 attendees from 136 parties with more than 5 attendees. So obviously not every party is getting a box... when we sent out the bulk mail, we had over 100 replies, and I'm sure there was nowhere near enough to fill even that.

But shirts or not, I hope your parties go well. Remember to submit videos or pictures or whatever to anniversary at slashdot dot org for your chance at the $1k ThinkGeek gift certificate grand prize.

This feels like a mega-spam entry, and I'm very self conscious about posting it, but I'm excited about this and I wanted to share . . .

I just published my third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. I mention it here because it's all about growing up in the 70s, and coming of age in the 80s as part of the D&D/BBS/video game/Star Wars figures generation, and I think a lot of Slashdot readers will relate to the stories in it.

I published a few of the stories on my blog, including Blue Light Special. It's about the greatest challenge a ten year-old could face in 1982: save his allowance, or buy Star Wars figures?

After our corduroy pants and collared shirts and Trapper Keepers and economy packs of pencils and wide-ruled paper were piled up in our cart, our mom took our three year-old sister with her to the make-up department to get shampoo and whatever moms buy in the make-up department, and my brother and I were allowed to go to the toy department.

"Can I spend my allowance?" I said.

"If that's what you want to do," my mom said, another entry in a long string of unsuccessful passive/aggressive attempts to encourage me to save my money for . . . things you save money for, I guess. It was a concept that was entirely alien to me at nine years old.

"Keep an eye on Jeremy," she said.

"Okay," I said. As long as Jeremy stood right at my side and didn't bother me while I shopped, and as long as he didn't want to look at anything of his own, it wouldn't be a problem.

I held my brother's hand as we tried to walk, but ended up running, across the store, past a flashing blue light special, to the toy department. Once there, we wove our way past the bicycles and board games until we got to the best aisle in the world: the one with the Star Wars figures.

I'm really proud of this book, and the initial feedback on it has been overwhelmingly positive. I've been reluctant to mention it here, because of the spam issue, but I honestly do think my stories will appeal to Slashdotters.

After the disaster with O'Reilly on Just A Geek, I've decided to try this one entirely on my own, so I'm responsible for the publicity, the marketing, the shipping, and . . . well, everything. If this one fails, it will be because of me, not because a marketing department insisted on marketing it as something it's not.

Of course, I hope I can claim the same responsibility if (when?) it finds its audience . . . which would be awesome.

So if you only count anniversary parties with 5 or more attendees, we have 128 venues with a grand total of 2366 attendees. The largest parties include Pudge's in seattle with 129, mine in Ann Arbor with 194 and Hemos's in CA with 197.

I'm sure that there will be many RSVPs that no show, but still, that's still an awful lot of interest. We'll be shipping shirts to a good number of those parties, but we have triple the attendees to shirts available, so we'll see just how far we're able to spread the love. Emails will be going out to party planners in the next couple days to get postal addresses.

http://jobs.slashdot.org/job/f108a484996a2d4a4c4e3efd38becb6d/?d=1&bc=1&nsc=1

As we're nearing 100 signed up people for the A2 Slashdot anniversary party, we've changed the venue to Leopold Bros... it's just a block south from the other place and they can handle us. I've also got word that we'll be printing a few hundred extra shirts since there was already like 50 parties with 5+ people in attendance. We certainly won't have enough for everyone, but we'll make a good dent in it.

I will of course put this information into a story next reasonable chance I get for a story, but I figured at least I could get the word out there. The anniversary party entry on the official page has been updated with the new location & address.

The A2 party already has like 70 signed up. We're going to have to rethink venue or time I think if we really have that many people. Wait a few more days and see what we can work out. Keep reading in the party forum for info. We have 500 shirts to print and hand out... it'll be fun to see where they go.

more info as I get it. There will be notes on future stories as days get closer.

I have never been tempted to go for a first post, until now.

http://meta.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=313513&op=Reply&threshold=2&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=20811157

I saw the 10th anniversary discussion pop up, with no comments, as I was checking email this morning. I've never even seen a first post opportunity before. I've never gone for it. And here was the chance to get the 10th anniversary first post.

I had only seconds to think. What would I say? How could I craft the perfect post?

I couldn't. I had to go for something simple, short, quick to type.

I went for a post that would:
a) seem completely banal.
b) show the 'typical' slashdot bravado about lower user nums being better.
c) NOT mention the first post. That was a tough call, but I thought it would be better to seem as if I didn't care about such a 'monumental' accomplishment. As though I were just posting because I thought my comment were actually germane to the conversation.

All in all, for 5 seconds of thought, I feel like it came off ok. If I'd had more time I would have tried to craft something more interesting, but I had no idea this was coming up.

If any of you are using an iPhone and are willing to help test out some Slashdot handheld crap, shoot me off a note... my email is the same address as always, and if you can't guess it, you probably can't help anyway ;) I've built a stylesheet and Tim put together a few little options that we think will make a few bits of Slashdot look nice on an iPhone (or really most lower resolution displays) but unfortunately none of us actually HAVE one yet... so anyway, let us know. Or if you work at Apple, send us freebies dammit!

Simple tasks like switching between Firefox and Thunderbird are driving the load on my machine up over 4, and if I'm trying to run Amarok at the same time, it drives it up to 8. In fact, my machine frequently climbs up into the 7-9 range, bringing my apps to a crawl and frustrating the hell out of me.

So I've decided it's time to buy a new computer. I'm going to replace my aging Sony Vaio desktop machine (which runs Linux) with something newer that has more RAM, a faster processor, and a bigger hard drive.

The thing is, I'm not entirely sure where to start looking. A quick walk through Circuit City a month or so ago lead me to believe I can get a rather "big" computer for as low as five hundred bucks, which further leads me to believe that if I were to buy something online, I can get a huge pile of RAM, a fast processor, and a big honkin' hard drive for even less.

I run Kubuntu, and use KDE as my desktop (though I occasionally switch to Gnome when I get bored) and I mostly use Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Amarok, and run PokerStars in wine. I'm looking for something that can do all of that without slowing my machine to a crawl.

Anyone have any suggestions on where to start looking?

Edit: I don't think I have the patience to build my own machine out of individual parts. I also don't have any real loyalty to any particular company or architecture. New Egg has lots of machines with AMD processors, and though I've always had Intel processors because more things seemed to run on x86, that's not as much of an issue as it once was, right?

So, a number of people on the World Wide Web seem to be in a quiet quest for a Windows driver for Apple's USB Modem. Possibly because it's a cute little modem, possibly just because it's there. As someone who keeps a toolbox of gizmos handy for techrepair, it would be nice to have one POTS modem that worked with either any PC or Mac.

Now, Motorola seems to make a "universal" driver available for their PCI/Serial/AMR modems of this flavor: Windows_SM56_6.12.07_DFV. I don't know if it works or not with the Apple variant; I don't have the requisite hardware for testing handy. (I may update this when I do... or not.)

Alternatively, one can beat the Windows XP driver out of Apple the hard way. To wit, download Bootcamp 1.1.2, which in theory binds you to this license and says you can "use the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer for evaluation purposes only". I am NOT a lawyer, but I feel that selling the modem and providing the driver to use it under Windows only if you use a Macintosh would constitute an unlawful instance of "tying" under Anti-trust law; since I only want my damn modem driver, I plan to ignore that, and I hope Apple's lawyers go fsck their hard disks.

Any OS X computer can open the BootCamp1.1.2.dmg disk image; inside, you will find the "Install Boot Camp Assistant.mpkg"; inside that package's Contents/Resources folder, you will find the BootCampAssistant.pkg; and in the Contents folder of that, a gzipped pax archive named (in the traditional imaginative computer geek fashion) "Archive.pax.gz". Using the command line "gunzip" and "pax" tools, one may beat out from the contained "Applications/Utilities" folder the "Boot Camp Assistant.app". Inside of that Application's "Contents/Resources" folder one finds the "DiskImage.dmg", which the assistant (if run) burns to CD. That CD (or the disk image itself) has a couple programs, one of which is "Install Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP.exe".

With that, you can head over to a Windows box. Running that program will (at least briefly) create "Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP.msi", probably in somewhere like %HOMEPATH%\"Local Settings\Temp\_is6E\" or something. I'd recommend renaming the file to something shorter, just to make life easier. Next, you can extract from this .msi file (using something like Qwerty-MSI, if the evidently more popular Less MSIérables remains unavailable) the actual "Modem Driver" folder (somewhere like "SourceDir\program files\Macintosh Drivers for Windows XP 1.1.2" holds it). Voila — a drivers install... for XP only. Cosmetic examination suggests it's at least passing similar to the generic Motorola driver, but there's at least some minor differences, possibly because it's USB.

So, you can download the driver... buried within an MSI file, in an executable installer, in a disk image, in a subfolder of an .APP package, in a Gzipped Pax Archive, in a subfolder of a package, in a subfolder of a makepackage, in another disk image. Insert obvious "the bottom of a locked filing cabinet, in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the leopard'" jokes here.

I wonder if the driver works worth a damn....

Saw this in Kymermosst's journal.

I find it hard to believe anything a 50-question test tells me, but here's the idea:

Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge's Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults. In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher. The test is not a means for making a diagnosis, however, and many who score above 32 and even meet the diagnostic criteria for mild autism or Asperger's report no difficulty functioning in their everyday lives.

I scored a 35.

Sure it's clichéd, but clichés usually have basis in fact: I'd guess that most people on Slashdot score slightly higher than average. Based on the questions, it seems many people interested in technology and engineering may be slightly autistic, being detail-oriented and slightly to largely unsocial.

Or it's just me.

So, one of the professors in the department I support is teaching her last semester before retirement, and has started giving away a lot of the extra books from her office. Being a biblophile, I've grabbed a few. One was Milton R. Wessel's 1974 "Freedom's Edge: the Computer Threat to Society." This, of course, was back when ARPANet had only around 50 IMPs, and contemporary with the end of the Watergate scandal.

Thus, like many efforts to look ahead, it's obviously dated. It was still in the days of Big Iron mainframes, with the idea of widespread real-time computer interaction a scarce-believable notion. Legislatures had made only incidental consideration of computers in the law. And yet, the book hints at the problems we face today: Identity theft, Network Neutrality, the Digital Divide, the effect of data aggregation on privacy, and the impact of digital reproduction on copyright. Looking back at looking forward is often helpful at seeing the present in a different light.

There's probably a few libraries that still have copies, and Amazon lists a couple used copies for sale at under $5 shipped. However, it's probably not going to reach a lot of people at this point, and Wessel did have some interesting insights. Being a lawyer of the Big Blue, Ma Bell, Organization Man age, he pictured a centrallized "Computer Utility" rather than the anarchic mass of the modern Internet. Despite the radical difference in design, the function is peculiarly similar. His attitude is also shows the pre-Nixon trust in elected officials that has since (certainly in Gen-X and later) largely shattered. He came up with some precepts on the lines of a "bill of rights" or "ten commandments" of computer usage over the course of the book... which I'll excerpt from the book here. The anecdotes and reasoning leading him to them make for interesting reading, but the precepts are most worth reconsidering from a modern perspective... both what they may have right, and what they have dead wrong. (The first and seventh seem relevant to the Network Neutrality debate.)

Computer Utility Rule 1: Access to a computer utility system shall not be unreasonably be withheld.

Computer Utility Rule 2: The information disclosed by a computer utility system seeking response must be such as to permit the respondent to provide an intelligent answer.

Computer Utility Rule 3: The infromation furnished by a computer utility system must be such as to serve the public interest.

Computer Utility Rule 4: A computer utility credit card shall not unreasonably be withheld from any individual.

The Data Bank: A mass data bank shall be permitted to operate only if the benefits associated with its operation outweigh the related risks.

Standards: Computer standards should be fixed by fairly selected and representative public organizations, so as to encourage maximum reasonable interchange among computer systems and between economic units, without unreasonably impeding technological development.

Public Computer Service: Public and quasipublic-sponsored computer services must be supplied on terms and conditions which result in their fair and equitable distribution to the public.

The Computer Economic Grid: The failure of a discrete unit of a computer economic grid must result in immediate disconnect from the grid without unreasonable harm to or interference with the rest of the system.

Human Response: The supplier of computer services to the public must afford the ultimate consumer reasonable human response and interaction, or be liable absolutely for error and harm done.

Computer Societal Impact: Government officials, professionals in and out of the computer industry, educators, and other leaders must study the impact of the computer on society, discuss and publish their efforts, and inform the public of their views.

Public Understanding Rule 1: Laymen must not hesitate to ask questions of computer professionals because they consider the computer too complex, or are reluctant to disclose their ignorance.

Public Understanding Rule 2: Computer professionals must answer lay questions in terms which are understandable to laymen.

Some of the battles these are intended to fight can now be regarded as laughably lost. (One of his "public interest" concerns in rule three was the need to regulate "certain excesses of slang and sex" as with TV.) However, they aren't a bad building block in the discussion of how the Internet should be made to work.

Happened to notice this post, but it was too old to reply:

  by eddy the lip (20794) Alter Relationship on Mon Aug 15, '05 03:28 PM (#13326226)

(sorry, been away from slashdot for a few days, or I would have replied sooner).

You got me on that one - I never did this myself. A friend way back in the day claimed to have jacked his TRS-80 up to 1MB. Now, this was many years ago, when people actually used the TRS-80 for other than geek nostalgia value, so I may be misremembering (or have been outright duped. I was young. It could happen....) He bragged to me about it 'cause I was stuck with the standard 32KB.

A bit of googling didn't turn up anything that would substantiate the viability of the claim. And now I have an unresolved mystery from my youth to contend with. Thanks a lot ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zilog_Z80 (the processor in the TRS-80)

16 bit address registers + 8 bit data = 64k bytes memory max.
Hence your friend with the 1MB was lying.
Well, maybe he managed to solder on a MB chip, but the TRS-80 couldn't have used it.

The discussion2 system had 2 notable changes in this weeks code refresh that I'd love to hear feedback on (use email if you can't post here). The first is Scott's very excellent new draggable slider control. Everyone mostly figured out the slider tool before, but it was very unresponsive... but no longer! It has some layout niggles under some browsers, but it functions properly in most of them.

Equally exciting is new dynamic updating... the old code actually transferred the full discussion and displayed/hid content as requested by your settings. Thew new code properly requests comments as needed, and when needed. This cuts page sizes dramatically for people reading with filters turned up very high. It also puts us a few stone throws away from a 'refresh' button which can just add newly posted comments in place. There's some work to be done yet, but it's made a lot of progress. I hope you like it.

We've tested everything under most of our most common browsers... if you're curious they are very roughly FF2 38%, FF1.5 19%, IE7 8%, Safari 7%, Opera 3%. Missing from our compatibility list is IE6 with 13% of our traffic. Fixing IE6 is non-trivial and we'd certainly take patches... but since the IE6 population lost a point or two last month anyway, and fixing the code is pretty substantial, we'll probably be focusing our development time on the larger and growing platforms (FF2 and IE7 obviously being the most important).

Anyway, merry-whatever-you-believe to everyone out there. I'm spending my holidays the same as always- driving from family gathering to family gathering. Roads suck but the person I like being with most is in the car too, so it doesn't matter.