Slashdot Mirror

... and who don't feel like googling in the middle of reading Slashdot posts:

astroturfing: n. The use of paid shills to create the impression of a popular movement, through means like letters to newspapers from soi-disant `concerned citizens', paid opinion pieces, and the formation of grass-roots lobbying groups that are actually funded by a PR group (astroturf is fake grass; hence the term). This term became common among hackers after it came to light in early 1998 that Microsoft had attempted to use such tactics to forestall the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust action against the company. This backfired horribly, angering a number of state attorneys-general enough to induce them to go public with plans to join the Federal suit. It also set anybody defending Microsoft on the net for the accusation "You're just astroturfing!".

The quadruple bucky strikes back!

But would a software-based emulator accurately reproduce the behavior of the infamous "More Magic" switch?

That's a serious question, by the way. How can it be proven that an emulated system will perform exactly the same way that the original system would?

Consider that even among the most popular emulators, those for videogame consoles and handhelds, you won't find many claimed by their authors to have more than 99% compatbility.

Yes, gaming hardware may possibly be more difficult to emulate than well-documented business hardware due to the number of custom chips that effectively have to be reverse-engineered, but do you want to migrate your mission-critical systems from physical hardware to emulated hardware only to find that they depend on the 1% of functionality that's not accurately emulated?

Slashdot ate my nice spaceship operators :)

So that should be:

[British <=> American]
etc.

Sorry! :(

http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/g/Godwin_s_La w.html

Firstly, this is a second-hand story but the source is highly reliable. A friend of mine was piecing together an old 486 system to use as a home network server. For shits and giggles, really. It was one of those older 486's that didn't have pin orientation on the CPU - and you know where I'm going with this already. He 180'ed the CPU by mistake and fired the computer up and couldn't figure out why the computer wouldn't POST. Several minutes of head-scratching later, a billowing cloud of magic smoke comes pouring out of the case! Naturally, he turns the computer off and realizes the 486 is in wrong (and after presumably letting it cool back down) re-inserts it correctly. Surprisingly, the damn thing worked like a champ for months afterward. (Suppose it still had enough magic smoke left to run ;-)

Amiga Persecution Complex?

From the Jargon Dictionary: "FUD /fuhd/ n. Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon."

I just thought I'd share, since when I read the article I thought WTF is FUD?

From the Jargon Dictionary: "FUD /fuhd/ n. Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: "FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See IBM. After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a competitive weapon."

I just thought I'd share, since when I read the article I thought WTF is FUD?

some edict from The Fuhrer at Homeland Security

May I refer you to Godwin's Law?

Godwin's Law, you lose.

You're missing the whole point of threads, as have Google, unfortunately.

"Ninety percent of everything is crap". Source

Just trying to identify my three 'worst moments with electronics', seems like there are more than I can go into... 1. Learning about the magic smoke that lives in integrated circuits while miss wiring a bread board in electronics lab. 2. Realizing that the FMU 113b that I just pulled out of an alcohol tank still had the detonator in it. 3. 'Discovering' that the fan in the powersupply of my daughters recently upgraded PC had failed by frying my hand on the top of the case. Luckily, all situations were survivable and cost me nothing more than an elevated heart rate ;)

I read the article, and I call bullshit. And FUD.

There is nothing special or unique about the computers in that particular office.

It's just a completely normal office. They are blaming their computer problems on some esoteric, invented problem rather than what's really causing them.

The person they interviewed, from Data Clean, specializes in building "clean rooms." Never in the history of computers have we needed a clean room to operate a computer. Obviously Rich Hill just wants some extra contract work.

The Justice Department's IT division has been one of the great success stories of WOM technology.

The first computer "bug" was found by Lieutenant Grace Murray Hopper while she was on Navy active duty in 1945.

Although this is accepted wisdom in various quarters, the use of the word "bug" as a defect predates Lt. Hopper by quite some time. Specifically, as the above link points out, the term was used to indicate a glitch as far back as the 19th century, and Shakespeare himself used the the term to indicate a disruptive person in Henry VI, part III.

Some say the Second Amendment Protects the First Amendment

"Reichsminister Ashcroft"??? ... you may have violated Godwin's Law

Godwin's Law

i laughed my ass off when i read that. i havent heard of the law before.

"...Other sources report that `kluge' was common Navy slang in the WWII era for any piece of electronics that worked well on shore but consistently failed at sea."

I've somehow confused it with the idea of getting computing power out of the atoms themselves

We already do this. They're called Computrons

I think using the term "Netzis" qualifies for Goodwin's Law.

You mean STFW, don't you?

This is called a heisenbug, in case you are wondering. They occur mostly due to a smashed stack and are indeed damn hard to track.

You can of course use assembly to track the bug, but I myself find that tedious. If you are programming in plain C (and not C++), you can use lint, a tool that evaluates sourcecode, very often. When lint reports no more possible problems you are done.

If you happen to use C++ you'll probably have to shell out big bucks for a linter or be out of luck because there are only commercial linters available.

Tho, that's why I always have a Linux system with valgrind, which is amongst other things a memory debugging tool, available on it (unfortunately valgrind does not work on any of the BSDs). Valgrind will scream and give a stack backtrace when your program does something wrong - be it an off-by-one error, be it memory being read uninitialized or whaterver. A truly genial tool.

I was think of getting a P5 after I heard that Black & White supported it.

P5 + B&W = not too good.

Although B&W says it uses a "hand" to control everything, that's really just a different looking mouse cursor. B&W's interface is highly optimized towards use with a regular mouse (gestures and everything), so you wouldn't gain anything from having 5 fingers to bend. Although it would give a new meaning to gorilla arm... ("I got gorilla arm from slapping my monkey too much")

(But then again, my P5 is really too inaccurate to use for anything. Even clicking desktop icons is a challenge)

This may be trite : but that kind of argument could have been used to allow the Nazis to exterminate a whole lot more than 6 million Jews, or to assert that the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was immoral, or other such drivel.

It's not that it's trite, it's just that you've exercised Godwin's Law.. Game over, man, game over.

...there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending effects will be unsuccessful.

What if the next episode of Enterprise is just a total piece of crap, an hour wasted for each of the 20 million geeks watching it? Hell, that's happened a few times already, more or less depending on who you ask. Say they've produced 10 real stinkers, x20 million viewers, x1 hour. That's 200 million hours wasted. Do the show's writers deserve to die?

And this famous usenet tradition relates to your last sentence.

What if the next episode of Enterprise is just a total piece of crap, an hour wasted for each of the 20 million geeks watching it? Hell, that's happened a few times already, more or less depending on who you ask. Say they've produced 10 real stinkers, x20 million viewers, x1 hour. That's 200 million hours wasted. Do the show's writers deserve to die?

And this famous usenet tradition relates to your last sentence.

I have experienced that debates on nuclear tend to go over to irrationality quite fast. According to Godwin's law Lovelock has already lost the argument, but whatever.

First, oil use produces waste that causes moderate, gradual modification of the environment. Nuclear can cause much worse effects. Ok, I know, this side of the world we have super-duper-safer reactors; but the main consumer of energy will sometime soon be China. I personally don't trust anyone with nuclear power anyway.
However bad an accident is in a refinery, there's no way a city can be obliterated by it, or a continent poisoned. The damage is intrinsecally limited. A nuclear reactor (maybe supercritical?) can do much worse, and these things do happen at some point--No matter how good security can be, there is no such thing as 100% safety.

Right now only a fraction of world energy is being produced by nuclear, and thus you hear people boasting about "hundreds of years" before depletion of the sources. Of course what many forget is that, if all energy were to be produced by nuclear, this time would shorten to a few decades. This also means that less economical fissile fuel sources would have to be used, driving up the already high prices of nuclear power.

Many nuclear plants means more people working on nuclear tech. Many planes in the air means also more people training to become pilots, and some might get by unobserved studying only how to fly, and not how to land. See where it's going?

Please go to a university library and look up this article: Paine, Jeffrey R., "Will nuclear power pay for itself?", The social science journal, vol. 33, n. 4, pages 459-473, 1996, JAI press. Paine analysed the real (as opposed to speculated) data about nuclear power production, to conclude that nuclear power may at best be economically marginal, paying back for itself only after large times and only in the most optimistic conditions. RTFA before saying it's crap; it's also available on ScienceDirect if you have access to it. I have heard often, in the academic environment, that nuclear in some cases is not even producing enough energy to pay for its cycle: what you get out at the power plant can be less than what you put in extraction, purification, enrichment, transport and security.

And, after this happened (Fish for non-Italian speakers, but there are surely plenty of English articles, I'm only being lazy), the very last thing we need is more fissile material going around.

IMHO, until someone cracks fusion, nuclear is a very interesting technology that had however better not be applied. It's immature, expensive, easily misused. Maybe the positive attitude towards nuclear power by many Americans is due never being hit by something like the Chernobyl cloud. Yet, I read somewhere that new reactors have not been built in the US since 79.

Short term: natural gas.
Mid term: solar, wind, tide, hydro, other renewables.
Long term: fusion.
That's how I see it at least. All these sources can be converted to hydrogen.

Now, Mozilla merely suffered from "second system syndrome."

This is a brief description of astroturfing. I honestly had no idea what the heck it was.

No, this isn't an attempt at karma-whoring. Don't mod me up if you think it is. I figured it'd be more helpful to Google it myself and post the definition then to post a stupid one-liner "WTF is astroturfing?"

From the jargon file entry for field circus:

Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer with a flat tire?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer who is out of gas?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

Q: How can you tell it's your field circus engineer?
A: The spare is flat, too.

From the jargon file entry for field circus:

Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer with a flat tire?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer who is out of gas?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

Q: How can you tell it's your field circus engineer?
A: The spare is flat, too.

One argument against "features" is that once they're there, they are very hard to remove. Features are too easy to add. The addition of features is not automatically brilliant. Fortunately, the world is beginning to realise this, and not automatically updating their operating systems and MS-Office just because they have new, infinitesimal, features.

The alternate approach, is to be forced to justify why new features *must* be added, and why they can't be developed using existing facilities. Read about creeping featurism

However, comparing social situations with those of the Nazis really should not incur the invoking of Godwin's Law.

This is not what the FP in this thread did. He/she called his/her Republican/neo-con opponents "Nazis", and thus lost whatever argument she/he may have had with them.

Anyway, as stated, the law is quite explicit:

whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost

The law was taken on the passions of post-9/11 -- there was enough wisdom to make it automaticly expire. Hopefully, it will not be renewed. While it is in effect, FBI is right for pushing hard and ACLU is right for making noise. Enjoy...

whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress

;)

-calyxa

For those of you who had no idea what Godwin's Law was... Definition, courtesy of The Jargon Dictionary.

Theoretically though, I wonder what the law says about this. The hard disk, being an object, would go to the next of kin, but does that include data too? Data is usually more expensive than harddisk, so that doesnt seem right..but then does that mean some govt official sits and deletes data of all deceased people's hard disks. that doesnt dound right either.

Godwin is a real human, and was recently Interviewed on /.. The other thing about his law is that if someone attempts to invoke Godwin's law, the thread will continue eternally. See Jargon File Mirror.

... an unprecedented system that would give their entire school - from the faculty to the food service staff - simultaneous access to a computer.

Is there a big red button in the server room, labeled "BREAK GLASS IN CASE OF SLASHDOT" or something?

They simply turned the switch to 'more magic'.

(A reference)

Mu.

Define "outside observer" to the universe... and therein lies your problem. It's a meaningless question, since it is impossible to observe from the outside. Additionally, since time is a dimension along with space and those 3+1 dimensions exist within the universe, there is no time outside of the universe. Or at least, not what we'd call time. Or space, for that matter.

Think of a person living on a sheet of paper, with length, height, and time. They have no depth. Additionally, remember that length, height and time all end at the surface of the paper. Just "above" the paper, there is no length, height or time. There is something else (since you've moved in a 3rd spacial dimension) and there might be some other time dimension up there, but not the same ones.

Oh, and anything you'd use to observe the inhabitants of the sheet of paper universe (i.e. light) are also constrained to stay on the surface of the paper. This is why your question cannot be answered - any observer outside the universe has no ability to view anything in the universe, since no information-carrier can leave the universe.

-T

Microsoft is known for paying people to try to sway public opionion: info here .

It this why, in the last 6-months, Slashdot has had a rash of "Nintendo is Dying" stories?

I'll really know we've been astroturfed if I see a "poor beleagured Nintendo" story.

It's called gorilla arm (the Jargon Dictionary)

As a result, I made a webpage against the asshole (which we'll call spamtard henceforth). Naturally, spamtard did not like the webpage, and so he kept larting it, and, as a result, the page kept being mirrored and moving all over the place. At one point, there was upwards of 20 copies of it all over the place, copies spamtard kept larting left and right.

Eventually, I received an e-mail from a mirrorer who was asked by a police detective to take down the page "or else, criminal charges will be laid". The mirrorer also made clear that the police was looking for me, and that I should contact them, or else they will supoena my ISP for my personal information and lay criminal charges (for what crime? I never learned it).

Spamtard had complained to the fuzz about my webpage when he saw that he could not have it taken off!!! And a detective was bored enough to pursue the case...

It is interesting that the police did not attempt to contact me personally at that time, but that they resorted to intimidating threats through a third party. According to my counsel, the police was doing a fishing expedition and trying to give me rope so I could hang myself.

Naturally, I DID NOT contact the police, because they have no jurisdiction over where I live, and one should never volunteer information to the police (this is basically a consent search), especially if they are investigating you.

About three months later, I (finally) received an e-mail from the police, asking me to call them, and, again threatening with criminal charges if they had to subpoena my personal information.

Again, I did not contact them. So, three weeks later, I get another e-mail saying that I should call them, because now they have my "personal" information, and if I do not do so, they would send a local cop to investigate me.

The "detective" included my "personal" information he was able to get.

It was totally wrong.

Again, I continued my intensive campaign of doing nothing at all. I suppose the poor chap who was listed as my "personal information" got harassed by the cops; hopefully, he did not cave-in to their bullshit bullying.

Worse, spamtard publicly aknowledged getting back information from the police. This meant that the police was passing back information to the criminal!!! So, if the criminal ever learned my true identity, I would be nothing but toast!!!

A few weeks afterwards, we learn on NANAE that spamtard was harassing police departments over mirrored copies of the web page! A phone conversation between the detective and an ISP operator also indicated that finally, there would be no criminal charges laid against me, because the prosecuting attorney did not think they could get a conviction.

This is very strange that I have been the target of a criminal investigation without having formally been identified nor directly contacted, and that I learn through a third party

One of the keys to the fast load times on the Cube is the small disk. It's reduced data area significantly reduces the average seek time required to get from one point on the disk to another. The other is, as you mentioned, a lot of innovation and engineering going into predictive loading and similar techniques.

Yes... clever alignment of data comes to mind. I had to think of The Story of Mel in the Jargon Files, where they describe a very clever alignment of code on ancient drum-memory.