3monkeys

A few days ago I submitted a story on digg, Linux: Introducing The Data Corruption Bug, from Kernal Trap. I took a few people by surprise that I would post an article critical of Linux, but as an self-respecting journalist would (like there are many self-respecting journalist), I bypassed my personal bias and submitted the article. One friend in particular, Roy Schestowitz, was particularly interested in letting me know that I had stumbled over to the Dark Side. If asked Roy if I could share his thoughts with my readers and he has graciously agreed.

I will have to admit that the comment along with associated links made for much more of an interesting read.

It all starts from the first comment on the story from DocWhoWho.

buggy linux crap

Then Roy makes one response — one long response. Note: The following has been formatted to be more visually appealing to the reader.

True. All software has some bugs. Except Vista. It’s perfect. Microsoft says so.

Vista Bug re-appears

Nice… minus one million, three hundred eight thousand, two hundred fifty nine bytes… how is that any where near or mathematically altered to 2.11 MB?

http://jadeallen.com/toms/index.asp?DoAction=ReadDay&ID=359

Windows Vista’s Hideous Wakeup Support

One thing we just can’t wrap our mind about is the terrible, broken, and completely pitiful support for waking Vista up from a Deep Sleep or hibernation.’ Any time you attempt to wake Vista up from Hibernation or “Deep Sleep” (S3-induced sleep mode), it dies. It’s either a BSOD, or a driver error, or a broken network, no DWM, lack of sound… the list goes on, and on. So much for an operating system to “power” the future! (No pun intended!) That’s with properly-signed drivers and no buggy software on multiple PCs…

http://neosmart.net/blog/archives/299

TI won’t rush into Microsoft Vista readily

Corporate American, no, make that corporate everywhere is treating Vista like a dead animal found in the woods, they will poke it with a stick, but there is no way they will take it home. Take TI for instance, it is not going to touch the wonder OS for another two years or so.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36259

Installing A PS/2 Mouse Turns Off Firewall, Huh!

I plugged in the PS/2 mouse, rebooted the PC and on restart XP found the PS/2 mouse and suggested rebooting again, which I did. When it restarted the Microsoft Firewall had been switched off. How do I know, because it told me I had no firewall.

http://crunchysoftware.wordpress.com/2006/12/09/ps2-mouse-turns-off-firewall/

Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0 Sucks!

I know Microsoft’s release of IE 7.0 is in beta, but I still didn’t expect it to be such a big piece of crap and cause hours of misery.
[...]
What Microsoft hoped would help it win back Firefox “switchers” has done nothing but add one more to their growing ranks.

http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2006/02/microsoft-ie-70-sucks.html

Just One Question For Vista: Does It Simply Work — Like An Apple?

Jim Allchin responds over on his blog regarding a recent news report quoting him as saying that he would have bought a Mac if he weren’t working for Microsoft in an email to Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates.

[...]

So the challenge for Microsoft, and in some ways to an even larger extent Allchin himself personally, is to ship Vista in a state that is as bug free as the Mac.
Vista is Allchin’s final legacy at Microsoft. After a long successful career this is his last hurah and in order to be successful it simply must be perfect.

http://biz.yahoo.com/seekingalpha/061213/22341_id.html?.v=1

Life with Vista – Is this dogfood really for the dogs?

I’m an absolute freak when it comes to .NET technologies. My blog is called the “.NET Addict”, so it should be pretty obvious that the day Vista’s RTM build came out, I downloaded it and installed it on every Vista-capable machine I had in my possession. I’ve been using Vista for several weeks now and I’ve come to a couple of conclusions that I think might startle and shock some of you.

http://dotnetaddict.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/vista_dogfood.htm

Vista Breaks Applications

The big secret at Redmond is that existing applications and new products will not work with Vista.
Microsoft really doesn’t want you to know this, but many of your existing applications won’t work with Vista. In fact, some brand new products won’t work with Vista.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2062318,00.asp

Vista… Don’t Try to Copy and Paste

Vista gave me the following when trying to copy a file:
Error 0x800705AD.

Ohh, well of course… I should have known error 0x800705AD means the user tried to COPY AND PASTE. Are you shitting me?! Insufficient quota? WTF are you talking about Vista. First let’s check that I have enough disk space:

Ok, now by my calculations 413 MBs < 22.8 GBs. I can normally figure out almost any computer related problem.

http://buckwheats.wordpress.com/2006/12/12/vista%e2%80%a6-don%e2%80%99t-try-to-copy-and-paste-o/

Vista: Behind the scenes

Some of the glitches were already known. Many were things that have already been fixed, and a few were too new and need investigating. None appeared to be a show-stopper.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9590_22-6133491.html

Analysts: Microsoft Changes Meaning Of ‘Release Candidate‘

Two industry watchers say Microsoft is corrupting the term, leading to major confusion among customers and others about whether the operating system is truly ready to evaluate.

Two analysts Thursday accused Microsoft Corp. of changing the meaning of “release candidate” by pushing out a version of Windows Vista that still needs major work.

[...]
Joe Wilcox, an analyst with JupiterResearch, said that Microsoft’s corrupted the term.

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=192700055&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News

Now folks, I don’t know if Roy was drinking a lot of coffee that morning, but this has to qualify for one of the longest replies in digg history.

Update:

I was asked to give a word and character count for the comment — 841 Words, 5364 characters.

Until next time.

-3Monkeys

Popularity: 19% [?]

Muhammad Saleem over at The Mu Life has put together an extensive proposal of improvements for digg. To summarize he proposes the following:

I have ordered the problems and the solutions from most pressing to least pressing (or most useful to relatively less useful).

1. Listening to the community
2. Creating a trusted submission platform
3. Retiring the Bury-Brigade
4. Preventing the community from mass blind-voting
5. Abating the Digg Effect
6. Solving the duplicate story submission problem
7. Handling content that isn’t safe for all audience

I agree with each of his points, I would have ordered the issues in a different order. Specifically, I would have listed number 6, Solving the duplicate story submission problem as number 2. It would be number 1, but without his current number 1, Listening to the community, everything else is irrelevant.

I would add to his suggestions a few points of my own. In no particular order, they are listed below.

• Opacity of burys, for both the type of bury and user.
• A review process for banned sites
• Completely ignore blocked users. Currently only comments are ignored while submissions are still shown.
• Improvements to load times site wide.
• Fully threaded comments.

Until next time.
-3Monkeys

Popularity: 3% [?]

One of the reasons I have become somewhat disenchanted with digg is the quality of the content. There have been many theories as to why the quality has dropped. When I pondered this issue and how to analyze it, the first line of attack was to determine who was submitting the majority of articles to digg. Digg allows each and every user to view this information, simply navigate to http://digg.com/topusers and sort by submitted. Below is a screen shot at the time this article was written.

If we consider the numbers, this shows that between the top 8 submitters a total of 23,953 stories have been submitted, of which only 2442 stories have reached the front page of digg. This translates to a 10% success rate, or to look at it another way 9 articles out of every 10 were not interesting enough to make the front page. The problem is not isolated to these users. I’ve noticed over time that other users have employed similar tactics; submitting 50 to 75 stories a day. A quantity of stories that highly suggest that the articles are not being read at all before being submitted.

Only one person enjoys a 100% submission rate. The remaining digg users must do one of two things to be promoted: Submit quality articles, or submit vast quantities of articles in the hope that one gets promoted. If the goal of digg is for users to get their articles promoted, then either method is acceptable. If however, the goal of digg is to promote quality content then only the first method is applicable.

My personal method is to review my RSS feeds, choose stories that I personally am interested in, read them and finally select the handful that are of acceptable quality to submit. There are times where I find an article that is suitable for submission to several sites such as digg, dzone and Netscape, when so I will submit to each of those sites. There are other times that an article is acceptable for one site but others. In that instance, I only submit to the appropriate site. I will admit, as most successful social bookmarkers would, that I have submitted poor content from time to time, but in general I take pride in submitting quality content over quantity.

So where does that leave digg? Limit the number of submissions on a hourly, daily or weekly basis and encourage bookmarkers to read the articles first and reward them for quality submissions. This course of action may have some effect on spam submissions as well. Will digg do this? Perhaps not, if you consider diggs revenue model is based on an advertising stream from page views and ad clicks, it may be monetarily more attractive to have more submissions (and dupes for that matter, but that is another story). But would this really limit the number of page views? Consider that the upcoming queue has thousands of stories at any given time. It is unlikely that any one person will see but a fraction of those stories.It

is not necessarily the upcoming queue that contributes the most to diggs low quality content. The real problem is when the low quality stories reach the front page. Front page articles increase the number of views by ten fold in a very short time. It is at this point that the majority of diggs userbase notice the low quality and complain. digg may want to consider some type of moderation, by either staff or trusted members, of stories before they are actually promoted to the front page.

Digg is certainly suffering from scaling and needs to reconsider strategies to combat its decline in quality while maintaining its revenue model. Being the largest player in User Generated and Controlled Content area of social bookmarking, digg must address this issue. If not, eventually another site will and digg will quickly fall the way of other failed dot coms. The Netscape paid Navigator model may be a step in the right direction, however, the jury is still out and it is obvious that Netscape does not generate nearly the page views or traffic that digg currently enjoys.

3Monkeys

Popularity: 6% [?]