Slashdot Mirror

Well, you can tell. You'll notice that most of my posts which are at +2 are just (Score: 2), rather than, for example, (Score: 2, Informative). Similarly, that's how you can tell the difference between someone whose default posting level is -1 and someone who just got moderated down.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Or you could go by that one commercial with the person shooting the animals - as in with a camera - which is the best kind of sport hunting I can think of, since you can show off the animal you caught (on film) without harming it (unless you believe that photons hitting an emulsion takes away the soul of the last thing the photons bounced off of).
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

• > "Readers will notice that one of your fellow readers is abusing the system."

• Right away, the tone is "us vs. them". "One of your fellow readers?" Remember when the Slashdot editors were part of the community that read their site? Now, we're "readers". They're "editors".

• Face it, folks. Slashdot is a big-money "portal" site now. The fact that the spambot is being treated as such a crisis is evidence. Slashdot is just like ZDNet or MSNBC with a pronounced pro-Linux bias. The ".org" extension is deceptive and should be dropped.

• The spambot is just a simple shell script. It could have been written at any point in Slashdot's life. I'm sure many people who visit this site have had the idea of auto-posting at one point. So why did it happen now?

I don't condone activism of that sort, but I read his diatribe as meaning that he wanted to vent some frustration and make a point while doing it. I dunno.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

• Another idea: anonymous posters must enter a name and email address
• at the time of posting if they do not log in. If you want to constantly post garbage, you'll have to spend time rotating your name spoof over and over.

• To share the moderation load, you should be able to view only unmoderated comments, i.e. ones that need your touch.

• I do not believe anyone should get any automatic bonuses. But it should be very common for people to get automatic penalties.

• 1) Check to see if the method is a GET or POST. It's much easier to whip up a quick script for a GET since it reads the variables from the URL string.

• 2) Karma needs to weigh much, much more. People with karma over 50 should start posting at 2. People with karma over 100 should start posting at 3. People with karma over 200 should start posting at 4 and people with karma over 500 (if they exist) must be worth reading.

  I think this would serve nicely as a self-regulating mechanism. If you like having a strong positive Karma, and the benefits that go with it, you continue to post useful comments.

As an example, a few days ago, on the "life on other planets" article, I decided to do a little experiment. I had an opportunity to get a first post, so I made a long-winded seemingly-insightful comment which had absolutely nothing to do with the article, but seemed like it since it was related to the idea of life on other worlds being improbable but not impossible. Trite, banal, and completely pointless - but yet it got moderated up to +5.

This is the kind of thing which the trolls apparently have an issue with.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Oh, I was under the impression (based on screenshots etc.) that the Riva128 didn't do bilinear, though the updated version (the 128ZX) did.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Oh, and the original picture is hidden in my website (yes, that's the diplomat photo for the porcupine race I added to Civ:CTP during LokiHack).
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

To turn off the filtering, BTW, you have to start up Q3, bring up the console, wait a billion years for the console to become visible, set the texture mode to GL_NEAREST, and wait a billion years again. It'd seem there's no way to keep Q3's texture filtering off by default unless they changed their mind since q3test 1.08 (even if you set the texture mode in the config, it'd revert to the default of bilinear, and there was no way to select anything less than bilinear in any GUI). Kind of annoying, since there ARE some cards out there with sufficient fillrate which don't implement filtering in hardware (the Riva 128 springs to mind), and just because it won't be quite as pretty on those cards doesn't mean they should be unsupported entirely... I mean, come ON, it probably takes more code to *disallow* them (by forcing at least bilinear filtering).

Oops, heh, sorry about that. But anyway, yes, you can most likely do aalib rendering for Quake3 already, but it'll be [even more of] a pain to deal with.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Well, actually, this results from an email conversation I had with him when he first showed up on slashdot. I gave him a polite suggestion that he not be so condescending to his target audience. His response was to mention how long he'd been a writer at Wired and how he'd written several books, and that therefore I must be full of shit.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

I think all the filter settings were removed recently, since I had to go back in and recheck the little checkbox. Very annoying.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

• I don't know. I get tons of very nice email. The public message boards of Slashdot tend to be populated by teenagers who resent the fact that I'm not a computer geek. I'm not a programmer, so some resent that, too. But I think my opinions are controversial. In my nine years [of Internet writing], the public posts have tended to be very hostile. But I think it is healthy for me to be challenged. This is what keeps you from being a New York Times op-ed page gasbag. My job is to make people think, to start conversations.

I recommend reading the Playboy interview. It's actually somewhat insightful, without being incredibly condescending and down-speaking. I wonder if he only talks down to geeks; he sure doesn't patronize the Playboy interviewer like he does to the Slashdot readers.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

He even went back to his old, tired arguments about how since he's written a bunch of books and articles that means he's a better writer (and therefore person) than anyone who would say otherwise.

In the meantime, recently all my filters seem to have disappeared... I had checked the JonKatz 'ignore' checkbox in my prefs so that I wouldn't have to put up with the irritating blurbs to his articles, but between JonKatz articles being posted by other people and my filter settings disappearing, I'm getting way too much Katz for my liking. It almost seems like a conspiracy to force people to read his stuff. (Yeah, I know, "You don't have to read it." Yes, and I'd rather not waste the bandwidth on downloading his blurbs or on the aggrivation that I get from accidentally reading them.)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

I think it's interesting (not in a JonKatz way, mind you) how lately I've been reading the comments for the funny trolls more than for the hope of seeing something truly insightful...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

My choice for Arthur would be Miles, from Murphy Brown, but that's just MHO.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Wow, too bad you didn't get that first post you were going for. Better luck next time.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Good guess, actually. Male chameleons have horns.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

A favorable review of the Linux desktop, finally someone with a clue saying that we don't need 1e-6soft Office or anything...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Now, that said, given that the piece was about Everything, it'd have been nice if it had more than about two paragraphs' worth about it without having lots of fluff rambling on and on around it. It seems like a JonKatz article, but even less relevant. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

I just want a tail, and maybe prosthetic quills. (I know I'm not alone on this one. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Sorry, McDonalds beat you to it. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Oh well, Rob doesn't have a color fetish like I do (look it up on everything2... seems to be down right now so I can't make a link right to the node), so I think I'd still win the contest. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

From what I've seen, most guys force their wives to slave away and make sammiches for all their buds while acting like completely irresponsible, inconsiderate jerks, since it's up to the duty of the wife to keep her hubbie happy.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

In the meantime, I wouldn't mind seeing some of the ads. Hopefully the better ones will make it onto normal TV hours, but that seems to happen so rarely...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

I'm not being closed-minded, I'm stating my disgust with things which speak as a definite authority on something which nobody can know with any certainty.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

1. Search-and-replace: a lot of site-specific things can simply be replaced by global variables, which can be put into some other included configuration file. (It IS PERL, after all.)
2. CowboyNeal has absolutely no life outside of his job (whatever it is) and BSI projects, and lately he's been permaidle on #everything - rare for him - meaning he was definitely pulling some major hours elsewhere.
3. Depending on how the code is structured (I haven't looked at it yet), it may have only seemed to be site-specific but maybe there was some simple way to liberate it. And in any case, it's not like they wrote hand-coded assembler which would only work on one particular release of libc6.1 on Debian 2.2 (Potato) which had been last apt-get updated on 1999/12/23.

Karma was never something designed to be boasted about, and although it was fun to have a publically-visible high karma, I got an enormous backlash from little snots who decided that my high karma was a sign that I was simply out to gain karma in any way I possibly can. Read my user info for more information.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

I just love articles like these, which plainly state what will be the case by such-and-such a time. A $1000 computer will be as powerful as a human brain by 2020, just like we will have lunar colonies by 1999. At least it goes into the question "What is me?" which such fluff pieces usually gloss over, but still, this just seems more like a badly-written overly-assertive speculation piece, stolen out of many uncredited pages of amateur science fiction and making far too many assumptions about the progress of computing; even if a 2050 computer chip has as many transistors as necessary to emulate every neuron of every human brain on Earth, that still doesn't mean that it'll have actual intelligence; by that time we still may not know how neurons work at the level needed to emulate a brain. Nor may we know how to "download" information from real neurons, especially not in a non-destructive, lossless way.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

I love you.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Oh, zzt.org is pretty cool too. PlanetQuake meets ZZT. I like. :) (How long do you think it'll take for some PlanetQuake junkie to "discover" ZZT like when Scorched Earth suddenly became the ultra-trendy Quake scene kr4d-31337 g4m3 0f th3 m0nth? :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

No better time to invest. I just sunk $500 into them while their stock's cheap. (Disclaimer: I am not a stock advisor.)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Well, I wasn't saying that it wasn't the DeCSS source, but that it'd be more interesting for the MPAA to find, seeing as how I doubt they have any competent people with a C compiler and Linux and netpbm (with PNG support) installed. Of course, "This is not the DeCSS source" is somewhat false, but also somewhat true - it's not the DeCSS source, it's an image which contains the DeCSS source hidden in the lower bits. It's on the same level as the "This is not a pipe" image in Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. It's a statement which is simultaneously true and false, while also being somewhat self-referential (after all, it could be referring to the statement "This is not the DeCSS source").
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

I personally think UnrealScript is a sweet language, and I can't wait for Unreal binaries for Linux (so that I can finally play and create with Unreal, which I purchased so long ago). Even if I never get around to that, the principles behind it are what drive my thoughts for a 3D MUCK system I'm working on in what passes for my spare time.

Back in the "good old days" when Epic Megagames was Potomac Computer Systems, I exchanged snailmail with him all the time. Every now and then I'd send him some program I was working on, and he'd send me a beta of whatever game he was working on (I was probably one of the first people on the planet to have, and beat, the first episode of Jill of the Jungle); one time he even gave me the registered version of ZZT. I still have that around somewhere, though it's kinda hard to use it since it's on a 5.25" disk. :)

In any case, I just wanted to publically express my thanks to him here. Once upon a time I emailed him directly and he was obviously very busy (Unreal was "about to come out;" this was a couple years before it finally did :) and I doubt he's gotten any less busy nowadays.

I wonder if there's been any thought of writing a portable ZZT engine clone... anyone know of any good ZZT game archives? (Yeah, I know ZZT itself is free(beer) now, and would be free(speech) if the source code weren't lost... I'm too lazy to get dosemu working again though. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

1. This is a classic saga: The morning after AOL-Time-Warner-EMI a 15 year old kid takes on the New World Order. There's something seriously wrong if you're not reading about this off-Slashdot and being briefed by your Granny. Even more important than mirroring the source is mirroring the truth.

2. Who unplugged ESR and RMS and (insert 3-letter guru here)? For once, I'd like to know what they think. The media listens to them. They command influence. Typical: when you need them they're as silent as lambs.

3. ThinkGeek, where's the DeCSS t-shirt? Something like this, but without the acid-casualty background. Memorize it and grafitti it on movie posters. Mugs. Tatoos. Stickers. Screensavers. Flyers. BeerMats. The only cure for the discontents of commodification are more commodities.

4. The human spirit views censorship as damage and routes around it.

As far as the more general case of hiding stuff in sound, yes, that happens too. This is a technique called steganography, and it can be applied to any digital data stream. Apparently I'm not the only one who's been using steganography to distribute the DeCSS source. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

here you go.

If you want to throw some monkey wrenches into the MPAA's finding of DeCSS source, try mirroring this instead. Something I hacked up in about half an hour. Have fun. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

If you want to throw some monkey wrenches into the MPAA's finding of DeCSS source, try mirroring this instead. Something I hacked up in about half an hour. Have fun. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

I found it ironic that he at least got the 42nd though. :)
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

On a related note, their sci-fi section is lithe with nothing but the despicable hormonally-crazed Seven Of Nine worship which has completely turned me off on the sci-fi "scene" at large. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they were also into the pointless desparately-waiting-for-Natalie-Portman-to-become- legally-fuckable debacle shortly following Phantom Menace.

It wouldn't surprise me if it were an IGN publication which "Atari" (the author of this well-reasoned article) was mostly talking about, either. They tend to fall into the trap of showing off the "beautiful rendering" of female characters rather than giving useful screenshots.

But hey, I just read it for the articles. And rarely, at that.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a .

This reminds me of a time that an acquaintence was asking me, "Well, why didn't they just make these more powerful processors and game engines *earlier*, rather than make us waste all of our money having to keep on upgrading?" I tried explaining to her how it takes some time to actually research and develop things, and that these designs don't come to fruition instantaneously - it requires experience, and work built up atop work, and other factors which require that time pass before new things can be invented. Otherwise we'd already have widespread fusion generators powering 3GHz quantum computers and 12Gbit wireless Internet connections on our bodyheat-powered wearable GFlop supercomputers.

This portable methanol power cell is in its infancy, but any "greater technology" isn't exactly going to appear overnight before this comes to fruition.

Progress is a linear set of steps, a process of innovation and improvement and creation and invention, not a sudden end to a desire. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but father time is what got her pregnant.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a .

In any case, as the subject says, PICO == PIne COmposer. I don't believe Pilot (the sucky PINE-style directory browser) stands for anything. While we're at it, PINE stands for two things; the official name is "Program for Internet News and Email," but as every real UNIX-head knows, it's really "PINE Is Not ELM," which expands to "PINE Is Not ELM Is Not ELectronic Mail" and so forth. Yay. Depending on how you parse it, it might end up meaning, to you anyway, "${PINE} is not Electronic Mail;" I don't know what PINE is supposed to be then.

I just use Mutt nowadays though. I got sick of PINE changing its semantics and doing evil stuff behind my back (such as suddenly deciding, when the university admins upgraded to 4.10, to use the broken, not-very-well-hidden-at-all ~/mbox file instead of just keeping stuff in my nice, quota-free /var/spool/mail file). Now my stuff goes exactly where I want it, and I could still use PICO for editing if I wanted (but I don't, so I just use vim instead).
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a .

Mac doesn't make anything. Apple makes the Mac.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a .

When a stock doesn't skyrocket up, and instead grows slowly for a long period of time, and honestly reflects a company's performance in the real world (rather than being inflated by hype and creative accounting), it's not at all healthy.

Am I missing something? Since when is a hyped-up, short-term, IPO-only-or-you-have-no-chance-in-hell-of-investin g, no-profit-showing stock better than one which actually grows?
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a .

From http://astro.nmsu.edu/~lhuber/leaphist.html The Gregorian calendar is thus based on a cycle of 400 years, which comprises 146097 days. Since 146097 is evenly divisible by 7, the Gregorian civil calendar exactly repeats after 400 years. Dividing 146097 by 400 yields an average length of 365.2425 days per calendar year, which is a close approximation to the length of the tropical year. Comparison with Equation 1.1-1 reveals that the Gregorian calendar accumulates an error of one day in about 2500 years. Although various adjustments to the leap-year system have been proposed, none has been instituted.

----------------

As far as realtime changes to a system: do you really want code which wouldn't compile to be executed at arbitrary times on a public system? On-the-fly trial-by-fire testing is no way to do a production system, and properly-done C++ systems don't take a lot of time to recompile (that's what having separate source files is for, after all). Also, with live scripts, then you have to worry about remembering to back up the realtime-tweaked versions.

C/C++ string handling isn't non-existent, it just requires some thought behind it. There's plenty of regexp libraries; aside from that, strstr(), and strchr(), what do you need? (That said, on Hobbes, I rewrote my own version of strstr which was optimized to run a little bit faster at the expense of getting the last match instead of the first match, since probably 99% of the CPU time during a search is spent in strstr().) And, if you want to get fancier, that's what vector is for. :)

Scripts run in their own enclosed shell and binaries don't, but binaries don't need to either. The binary is the shell.

And um, generally if you're the webmaster of a large website, you can install gcc yourself. I did on Hobbes without a problem... and binaries are no more necessarily directory-specific than a script.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

This archive runs on an ancient RS/6000, about the processor equivalent of a 486/66. And it doesn't have much memory, either.

I wrote the entire engine and interface in highly-tuned C++. Because of the requirements of the search, it must go through every single file's entry in the archive (or at least under the topmost directory specified). I made extensive use of the nature of UNIX filesystems for the actual database (each directory has a file index called .file.idx, and builds a recursive search index called .search.idx which contains the current directory and all search indices of lower directories). If I had done things a bit more intelligently I could have probably kept a single .search.idx cached in memory instead of having to reload it on every search (which is painful, since the toplevel directory's .search.idx is something like 2 megs now), but the fact remains that it still goes relatively quickly, particularly considering the nature of the search and the antiquity of the machine it's running on.

I had briefly considered PERL, but I quickly shot that idea down for several ideas:

1. I had initially prototyped an earlier version of the search engine in csh using grep. (This was before I wrote the new database engine; the old, flaky, always-dying-and-losing-whole-file-databases one made it so one basically had to just parse the 00index.txt files anyway.) The average search took well over 3 minutes. Completely unacceptable. Granted, csh isn't the fastest thing around, but the script wasn't using anything which PERL could have done better (it was just iterating through a bunch of files and running grep on them).

Mind you, the C++ I used was incredibly low-level. I used it basically as C with objects; no STL, no inheritance, etc., because I didn't need them, and didn't want the overhead (though in hindsight, if I had used an STL vector instead of rolling my own dynamic arrays it would have been the same speed and involve a lot less bugfixes).

But basically, what I learned from the example of the csh search engine: Parsing text databases slow. Parsing binary databases fast.

Which reminds me, I still need to ask Dave Rocks (my boss at NMSU) if I can GPL the engine source. I'm sure it'll do someone else some good; not everyone out there wanting to run a file archive engine can afford the overhead of SQL. Hobbes had plenty of bandwidth for its purposes (10Mbit) but 32 megs of RAM and an ancient RS/6000 just aren't enough for anything SQL-based...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.

Linked off the "1000 pentiums" story re Genetic Programming, the Salon article says:


Recently, researcher Lee Spector, an associate professor of computer science at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, used genetic programming to create a fast algorithm for evaluating data structures known as and/or trees. The GP-evolved algorithm was faster than any created by humans and led to the discovery of a new quantum rule.


If anyone thinks that Terminator/Matrix/Borg scenarios are totally unrealistic, they just don't understand the ability of GAs/GP to go beyond human potential. Our capabilities occupy just one local minimum in the solution space. AI machinery won't be constrained to that small valley of possibilities, as the research highlighted in Salon shows.

And on a lighter note:


The Faceprints project uses genetic programming to study human perceptions of physical beauty. Human test subjects are presented with several computer-generated images of faces. They vote on which faces are most attractive. The faces that the test subjects consider most attractive are crossbred, using GP techniques. As wave after wave of human test subjects rate the faces on attractiveness, a face evolves that matches most people's conception of beauty. The "most evolved face" in the Caucasian Female category is a green-eyed, Teutonic vixen who would not be out of place on "Baywatch."


Hmmm .... :--)

When someone gets a -5 for the day, their entire /24 subnet should be banned with the message "Sorry, but [username,] a user at (their IP address) at (time of last bad posting) has messed things up for you by being an abusive poster. You may want to contact your ISP's abuse department so this user [(email address)] can be dealt with. This temporary block can go away in 24 hours."

Of course, this global block would only apply to ACs and registered users whose karmas are less than, say, +10.

I think with the threat of someone losing their Internet access they'd think twice before racking up a -5 daily karma.

Of course, this is still open to abuses (as I stated elsewhere), and it'd certainly be problematic for non-trolls who get affected by this - but that's the whole point. Kind of the "Since Private Pyle has donuts, I'm going to make the rest of you do pushups while he eats them all!" trick.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.