Hmm, I wonder how well it works.

- Oshyan

Yes, the "transparency" doesn't need to be the same between different systems, but as a foundational principle I think it's a good one for many systems.

Do you think people would elect effective editors? Or would it just be the same dumb social game all over again? I suggest a meritocracy.

- Oshyan

Note that AAM slows down hard drive performance noticeably however. It's the price you pay for quiet I guess.

- Oshyan

Cool, I'll check it out then. Thanks.

- Oshyan

Yeah, I hope these come down in price (and go up in size) soon! I wonder though, what of the normal NAND read/write cycle limitations? Isn't it usually something like 1000? Or am I thinking of a similar but not identical tech? I'm sure they must have accounted for this...

Actually, it sounds like pricing isn't that bad. For a 16GB array it's a little over a $500 premium in Japan for a Sony laptop. Hopefully it'll be popular and come down fast.
http://www.engadget.com/search/?q=ssd

- Oshyan

So you want to recreate Slashdot? Seriously, the only difference there is the "domain expert" focus - how you define these experts and how they are assigned/elected. On Slashdot it's purely a social thing, there appears to be no other merit involved, but there's nothing to say that a similar election by the general public wouldn't get you the George Bush of content editors. Oops, got a little political there, sorry.

Ok, so I like the idea of turning things on their head, but isn't this how a lot of sites already work? Isn't what people are excited about with Digg the fact that "the people" have more direct control? So even if you did successfully create such a site and the content were "better" (is this measurable?), would anyone really care?

I'm still curious whether a true example of this model already exists. I suspect it does, or darn close to it. Slashdot is actually pretty close, as I mentioned. Again the main differentiator is the definition of experts at the filter/editor level. If an even closer example can be found, I think the measure of its success might be instructive in this argument.

Then the question becomes: what is the goal of your site? Is it a place for a lot of smart people to enjoy quality stories, but not necessarily to attract "the masses"? If so I think that's a realistic goal. But you will inevitably be dealing with a minority and this includes your submitting body of general visitors. To really get the proper aggregate you'd need to attract more public interest, but can you do that without the Digg draw, the MySpace draw? The reason all of these sites are big - despite their glaring flaws (and I fully acknowledge them) - is people like to be told their important and given some level of power to show it (MySpace customization, for example). So what would be done with this proposed site to get people's interest and show its value over Digg to the average person? Once again this is much less of an issue if the average person is not the audience.

Just remember that Average Joe seems pretty happy with Digg so really what you're trying to do is convince people that the "exciting, hip, new "unbiased", people-driven way of finding news" is wrong, and that's hard work. This is not a fundamentally wrong concept, it's just fighting against human nature IMO. I would love to be convinced otherwise!

- Oshyan

Good stuff. Nothing earth shattering there, but some good solid advice.

- Oshyan

Bug tracking etiquette and convention always seems a little different from system to system and project to project. I haven't used the DC Mantis setup yet, but in general the assignee of the bug is the one who marks "resolved" and someone else tests and marks "closed". In a professional development situation someone else is formally verifying and/or regressing bugs, in which case it would be marked closed by whoever is doing the verification (not necessarily the original reporter). In this case the conventions may need adjusting unless the reporter can be counted on to verify the resolution and close it. I doubt anyone has time to be the official DC bug tester, so maybe closing bugs just won't happen normally.

In most bug trackers I've seen you can't usually update the original bug *text*, although you can sometimes change other stuff like version, priority, etc. This also depends on permissions. But in any case if you have mode to add the usual convention is to do so in a subsequent comment/note because then you maintain the history of the bug. This is precisely what the note feature is for.

Finally, in my experience it is the developer that will mark something as resolved and specify a resolution/reason. This gives them a function to notify others when it has been taken care of on their end as well as the ability to mark as resolved bugs they decide not to fix ("featured"), feature requests they decide not to implement, etc. Bug *closure* is the step taken after resolution, and indicates that the bug fix has been tested and verified.

- Oshyan

Hehe, that's really a cool and fun contest. I will see if I can enter something, but unfortunately members of my team would be scattered around the world.

- Oshyan

Hear-hear Tekzel! Good to hear some confirmation of the stuff I've seen. I do private computer support, but I see the same sorts of customers and problems you probably do at a shop. McAfee is god-awful. Recant mouser, recant!

- Oshyan

That sucks! I hope it's not so difficult for everyone. If this is "standard behavior", I don't think we'll be seeing a lot of homebrew Xbox games.

- Oshyan

Oho, nice! I hadn't expected anything that good given the performance of other devices based on similar tech. I wonder if the improvement is due to parallelization or something. Anyway pricey, but it seems like it might be to a reasonable level even within a year or so, which is awesome. Especially for people like a friend of mine who are extremely sensitive to noise.

- Oshyan