Slashdot Mirror

Conker's Bad Fur Day (remember "The Great Mighty Poo"?).

Just a thought.

Here's an Everything2 writeup about this joke.

Good post! Funny and insightful. I do find it very amusing that some people forget that every piece of literature produced for the last few hundred/thousand years could be considered a "ripoff" of everything else. Rowling rips off mythology and rips off Lucas, who in turn rips off mythology himself. Virtually every great or popular work of literature these days rips off some sort of legend; even the apogee of Western literature is a badly-disguised ripoff of the Odyssey. And that was probably a take-on of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Need I go on?

A concept that many geeks are apparently not familiar with.

All of the mental masturbation behind "never underestimate the bandwidth of a (VEHICLE) full of (TYPE OF MEDIA)" has already been done. Rather than perpetuate this stupid plug-and-chug exercise, read the results.

As the owner of this thread, I would like to announce that this thread is closed to new posts.

Dear Fellow Patriots:

Read all about your fearless loser
here

Cheers,
W00t

Get Your War On 12

This is not new. It has been generally surmised that quipus (khipus, qipus) served as a carrier of complex informations. See e.g. this page for pictures and info.

According to the article, the quoted scientist merely says that the permutations possible in a quipu weaving might indicate a septary (not, by any means, a binary) code. He also says he's looking for a Rosetta stone equivalent.

Well, do go on looking, old fellow. But I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a whip-toting archaeologist-hero to stumble out of a collapsing jungle temple with a quipu-to-English dictionary under his arm. Remember, the Incas were one of the more institutionally stupid (and thus, extinct) civilizations in history - after independently inventing the wheel, they used it for children's toys exclusively.

And he expects to unearth the original quipu RFC? It's probably in quipu, too. And eaten by a llama.

The article brought up images in my mind of Lain's bedroom with all the intense looking tubing to cool down her NAVI.

I'm not really sure why I don't experiment with this stuff. My workplace has tons of this stuff just lying around since we use it to cool down LASERs and intense pulsed light devices.

The neatest thing about the characters in PS:Torment was that they reacted in a plausible way, given their strange situations and surroundings. Everyone has a motivation, and it's not always what you think. Take the character Morte, who I mentioned above. While he seems to be nothing more than rather cliched comic relief in the beginning, his character gains a significant amount of depth.

And of course, who can forget Minsc from Baldur's Gate, and his miniature giant space hamster Boo? "Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the eyes!"

How to cure tailgating.

How bad was it? It came with a CD-ROM that was supposed to automate the process of setting up a Beowulf cluster. None of the software on the CD-ROM worked. Running the install script printed out a message telling you to go to a Web site and download the newest beta version of the software. No such software was available ... ever. O'Reilly shortly withdrew the book ... and, reportedly at least, fired the editor who approved it for publication.

Want more details? Here you go. Waiting for this book, and then discovering slowly just how awful it was, set back a clustering project at my workplace by several months, by the way.

1) The article says that the proposed law was revised to cover ALL online media: "a March 2003 draft dropped the word 'professional' and intentionally covered all 'online media' of any type." Unless there are other exclusions elsewhere in the law, this means bloggers, slashdotters, everythingians, online newspapers and magazines, websites covering history, sites hosting PDFs of scientific articles, etc.

2) If this were passed, I'd expect to see bloggers, etc., reduce the number of specific people they criticized, just to avoid the "right" of reply. Otherwise, in an article that criticized numerous people, you'd end up with an unmanageable cascade of replies, replies to replies, replies to replies to replies.

3) The article says that the reply *can* be a link. Can the original author insist that it be a link, or can the responder require that the author post it on the original site?

4) (really a combination of 2 and 3) Does this mean that the mandated "right" to reply is endless? If I criticize someone on my site, and she makes me link to something on her site, does the presence of that article *on her site* then give me the "right" to reply? In other words, does her reply automatically confer on me the right to reply? How many steps are permitted? How many links will need to be posted on the original page?

5) Do groups have the "right" of reply, or does that just apply to individuals? If I criticize Microsoft, "the Linux community," the Democrats, the Republicans, Slashdot, Scientology, whatever, must I allow them to reply on my site? If I want to avoid triggering Bill Gates's "right" to reply, can I get around this by talking about "the senior leadership at Microsoft"?

6) This isn't mandating a "right to reply" anyway. You always have the right to reply. I just don't think you have the right to force me to publish certain things on my website, be those documents or links. I think free speech does just fine without that.

Posted by Cliff on Tuesday June 17, @10:59PM
from the keeping-focus-on-the-career dept.
Famanoran asks: "I've recently been diagnosed ADHD? and am now taking Hey, look! That dog has a big puffy tail!!! Hee hee hee! Here, Puff! Come here, boy!"

10% of the American public would pay $5 to see Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) fight a big mean dog on Pay TV. 86% of all viewers would root for the dog. 100% of women viewers would root for the dog.

The funny thing is, this is so obvious that even the cartoonist of Dilbert predicted what you describe happening in his book "The Dilbert Future" about seven or eight years ago.

If your company goes thru with these insane working conditions you will understand the meaning of this word soon.

Hey, I know COBOL, and I'm "only" 28.

Now, to be honest, I've never worked with COBOL professionally. The reason why I decided to learn COBOL is in fact pretty much related to the subject: At 26 I had just quit my job. As I browsed the job market, I realized that the jobs related to languages like COBOL and Fortran has sky-high salaries. That's why I sat down and read lots about COBOL.
Not just for the money, but also to help keeping a rare language alive.

And, well, you guessed it - I never got the COBOL job.

The reason most of the employers ask for COBOL programmers age 40+ is because they often have lots and lots of experience that a 26 year old never will have. Maybe I'll get one in 10 years, who knows. :)

Well, I'm 28 now, and I am currently learning C++, and I find it pretty hard to pick up. I started with BASIC at 9 and continued with assembler from 13 to 24, then I went on with Perl, Pascal and ANSI-C.

In fact I find it hard to learn C++ since I have the assembler "in my vains", to put it that way.
If I chose something else than asm back then, I'd probably pick up C++ easier today then what I do now. In contrast, I find it easier to pick up "functional" languages and other assembler variants.

By the way I'm the oldest guy where I work right now - the others are 18-25. :-o

As was suggested here, may be the Purist Edit can help ease your pain.

If someone spends a year writing music

Then "someone" will get sued by the owner(s) of the musical work(s) that "someone" accidentally copied.

I'm putting finishing touches on a somewhat rigorous argument that uses copyright statutes, case law, music theory, and combinatorics to prove that it's nearly impossible to write a completely original song nowadays. See an early draft here; if you want to see the next draft, please reply to remind me to give you the URL when it's up.

I hardly think so, old bean. Mensa has people like Gary Bushell in it, and he's a frightful oik.

However, I'd be very surprised if Microsoft used anything from Linux, considering it's actually legal and therefore far more tempting to use something from the BSDs, and there are not many features Linux has but the BSDs lack.

Okay, V was an 'okay' show - just okay. I have a fundamental problem with their story premise that I just can't muster enough suspension of disbelief to swallow.

They come to Earth for two reasons:

1. Water
2. Food

Kinda reminds me of the pong gag on the Simpson's halloween special a few years back. "All species who have mastered inter-galactic travel raise their tentacles."

do you e2 or do you be browsin'?

I'm here. Come on over, put your feet up. :)

Triv

THANK YOU for linking to e2!

Now for the next hour - or maybe the next few - I will waste my time going to pages such as this.

Once again, thanks!

--Jason

THANK YOU for linking to e2!

Now for the next hour - or maybe the next few - I will waste my time going to pages such as this.

Once again, thanks!

--Jason

THANK YOU for linking to e2!

Now for the next hour - or maybe the next few - I will waste my time going to pages such as this.

Once again, thanks!

--Jason

AAC@Everything2

at everything2, the jargon file has been stuck into the mishmash... where you are free to add on to nodes. and free to add nodes generally. I'm not saying this is a replacement, but as a resource, e2... has more stuff.

at everything2, the jargon file has been stuck into the mishmash... where you are free to add on to nodes. and free to add nodes generally. I'm not saying this is a replacement, but as a resource, e2... has more stuff.

That's definitely not cool by me, especially since, back in 1993, I submitted several terms I made up with fabricated histories, and ESR failed to include them in the dictionary.

OTOH, some other putative references have been happily absorbing all the bullshit I can make up for some time now, so I guess it all evens out in the end.

Actually, I was thinking about it and realized that while not dedicated to the Jargon file perhaps Everything2 would be the easiest place to do this. So I went noding and quickly found that it had already been done. So we're ahead of the game.

The obvious fix, of course, is to make a Jargon File fork that is collectively maintained, like Everything2 or your favourite wikipedia.

I'd never in Hell actually start such a project though. Judging from ESR's recent divorce with sanity, the poor sod who headed such a project would probably be treated to a surprise showing of Eric's gun collection.

*sigh* http://www.everything2.com?node=Neoconservative.

Neoconservatives tend not to own guns.

Which wintel motherboards have fw 800 and hypertransport? I'd be interested.

I wasn't really going to comment on this, but since it got modded up 5, Insightful...
nForce, nForce2
You might be further interested in knowing that hypertransport was primarily designed by AMD and is used in all of their Opteron systems, and will also be used in all Athlon64 systems. I guess that's not wintel per se... but it's a PC motherboard nonetheless.

Furthermore, if there is a demand for fw 800 on PCs, they will have it... a small upside of not being at the whim of a single company *cough*Apple*cough*.

After two clicks, I am here... I liked your's better... I think...

It should actually give you much better bandwidth than a standard 802.11 antenna. 78 Mb/s??

TWO clicks later, I'm at this node, and am now going to waste anywhere from 1 hour to the rest of the day clicking nodes... thank you very much for linking to e2.

here you go

Almost as interesting as the article itself is the fact that timothy has finally attained a 1:1 mispelled to correctly spelled word ratio. This is clearly a monumental achievement as it indicates that he is well on his way to reaching the golden ratio (1.618): the ratio at which we will find all of timothy's posts extremely attractive.

Everyone's rooting for you timothy. Don't give up.

It's called Kobe beef, and damn is it tasty.

This is really targetted at Computer Users who complain about how their eyes hurt, especially after a long day of staring at the computer monitor.

I have had 15/20 vision all my life, and I've also been a heavy user of computers since 1979. People ask how the heck I have maintained my eyesight. It is really simple: turn the brightness down!

Here are my tips for adjusting your computer monitor:

• Display an image that contains a lot of BLACK, not grey, but black image. A perfect example is your boot loader, like lilo, if it doesn't have graphics. The black background should be black, not a shade of grey. If it is, turn down the brightness on your monitor. That is the dial that usually has a picture of a sun (or a circle with lines coming out from it).
• Now turn down the contrast all the way. That is the dial with the half-filled circle. Turn it up until you can read the text without straining.
• Now, if your monitor supports color temperature, adjust it to the 6000 or 6500 setting. This has a bit of a yellowish hue to the white, but you'll appreciate it later.

That's it. Note that if you are working on computer graphics, this will NOT make the colors bright and pretty, so you'll probably have to go back to the eye-killing settings. But if you're a coder who is just doing text and web browsing all day, USE THIS. Your eyes will thank you for it.

Even better: do the same thing I mentioned above, but with an LCD screen. CRT monitors are worse for your eyes than LCD.

If you're playing first person shooters like Quake, you will probably have to crank up the brightness dial. Just remember to turn it back down later!

But copyrights don't prevent others from creating what they would have created independently.

Tell that to (the estate of) George Harrison. He wrote "My Sweet Lord", not knowing that it was a copy of "He's So Fine". Harrison lost Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music to the tune of nearly $1.6 million.

The standard for copying under American copyright law is access (the defendant had access to the plaintiff's work even once) plus similarity (the defendant's work is substantially similar to the plaintiff's work). In musical works, substantial similarity can be arrived at by coincidence (about one in 47,000, but compare this to the number of existing musical works), and according to Bright Tunes, a plaintiff can apparently get the court to assume access if the song has been played on commercial radio.

So what steps can a songwriter take when writing a song to avoid accidentally copying a published song?

The $100 M blockbuster is a fixed cost that can be spread over all of the copies.

So is the cost of extraction of the pirate master.

often the pirate media simply does not work. If the failure rate is 50%

Fifty percent? Has that failure rate been observed in practice? And if so, is it any better than the legitimate route? I've experienced some pretty high failure rates when renting DVD videos, where "failure" == "disc is so scratched up that playback stutters in a key scene".

You have spent 15 minutes

I wasn't staring at the status bar for 15 minutes. I was reading Slashdot for a lot of that time.

acquiring a song which may be corrupt.

If a particular rip is widely shared, it's likely not to be corrupt.

Kazaa doesn't have a built in burning tool yet, so add in the cost of Nero -- either in dollars or the time it takes to obtain a pirate copy.

Most PCs come with a CD burner plus software nowadays.

Now the class of consumers who have unlimited time or otherwise undervalue their time is limited to those who are either unemployed or employeed beneath some poverty line

This is quite a large class, even ignoring the fact that the American economy is in the toilet. Assuming that the number of minors with a work permit is equal to or less than the number of adults enrolled full-time in university, at least as many Americans are unemployed or underemployed as are under 18.

I used to think that I thought "outside the box".

I was raised on - well, I raised myself on - Buckminster Fuller, The Kids Whole Earth Future Catalog, various forms of philosophy from purely materialist to purely spiritualist and everything in between - not excluding existentialist, of course.

And then I read "The Story of B", and realized I was just seeing the edges of the box. From the inside.

See: http://www.ishmael.com/ for more info.

The world we have created is a product of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking. -Albert Einstein

Someday after mastering winds, waves, tides and gravity, we shall harness the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, man will discover fire. - Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

My two cents (more like five dollars):

The behavior you see in many online RPGs, in which "familial associations" form between groups of players, is basically similar to the formation of cliques in high and middle (US) schools. The only difference is that the cliques have weapons, magic, booty and lots of XP; the sum of these is what determines the worth of a person in the online world, just as "fashion" and "who you know" are the determinants of self-worth in cliques IRL.

In fact, if you take some steps back and look at the most infamous mobs, could it not be argued that they are simply cliques with guns that join together to commit crime and bribe those in power?

And then there's the issue of newbie hazing, which is analogous to cliques blackballing those who are not members of the "in" crowd, again quite similar to what happens when the mob gains control over a city and "elects" its officials. Online RPGs, especially and notoriously Everquest, are extremely culpable in this regard. Newbies who do not join a guild or other crowd of "in", upper-level characters will find themselves ostracized and devoured by trolls (not necessarily the Slashdot variety).

The issue of newbie hazing wasn't really touched on by the paper, but I argue that it is a huge problem and that it is not just limited to online RPGs, but also many websites with "experience" systems. Everything2 specifically comes to mind but I'm sure there are many other examples of sites where an attempt by a newbie to contribute to the community at large will be rejected because the newbie doesn't have the right connections nor the XP to stand on their own. What about Slashdot? The karma system works because trolls are controlled and a newbie can stand on their own, and the only real privelege granted by "experience" is a +1 karma bonus to initial posts. Newbies can do everything those with "Excellent" karma can do and the moderation system cares a lot more about the age of an account than its karma. Again, contrast with Everything2, and with Everquest.

So, I argue that the points the paper makes are quite valid outside the world of Everquest and are applicable to many, many online and offline environments. (Apologies to Everythingers who might be rubbed the wrong way by the above comments, but I have seen with my own eyes that Everything and Everquest have an awful lot in common from the newbie's perspective.)

"Within 60 days you will receive over 50,000 inches of PENIS."

This could lose a lot of votes though, particularly if they ignore the comments they had via the web. Is this the poll tax of the Labour Party? Could they lose an election because of it? Probably not on it's own- but it could trigger an ireversible slide- Tony Blair already rammed through the Gulf War II, and that wasn't particularly popular either; if he does this as well he is creating a pattern, and one that can lose him the election.

Once that's the case, it's the rare person who'll have a reason to bitch about millions of people sharing a perfect digital or physical copy of something they created, because everybody is already living like kings. And those millions of fans equal a lot a goodwill "whuffie" that can buy some great waterfront property.

--

See this discussion of the Sicarii for an answer to the question, "What can a terrorist do in Roman times."

came across this on everything2. Might be worth perusing.