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I don't even HAVE a Reddit account but even I know about this:
http://nullprogram.com/am-i-sh...

In fact, it is in my favorites (for some reason?). No, I have no idea why that is. I don't recall putting it in my favorites but I started typing shadowbanned and that appeared in my address bar - I was just gonna go find it again for you guys.

I've never even posted to Reddit, in my life. There is, technically, a KGIII there. I looked. They're into basketball. They also write like a normal person. No, I have no idea who they really are. There's a few people out there who use the moniker and they are people who are not me. I've had one person (maybe two - I'm not positive if the second was intentional) actually try to impersonate me.

Alas, they don't write as poorly as I do. They even claimed to live in Maine but they got the area wrong. They had a PayPal link up for a while, for one or another thing, and the username inside of that was a female name. I have no idea... They weren't someone I know in real life - I don't think. Ah well, that was ages ago and I digress...

At any rate, if anyone's curious if they're shadow-banned then the above URL will help you figure that out. It checks to see if your posts show at Reddit. It also checks Voat.

All torrents are trackerless by default. You usually have to turn it.

As long as the private flag DRM isn't set, which prevents you from turning it on.

We've had decentralized tracking for years now, based on the Kademila distributed hash table. As long as the .torrent creator didn't turn on the private flag DRM, this system works really well, and I think it tends to provide an even richer set of peers from which to choose.

We also have OpenBittorrent which is a tracker that has no idea what it's tracking, putting it in a safer legal position than trackers have normally been in. Any torrent can use that if they wish.

The legal bottleneck is in distributing the .torrent files themselves. This involves more than just distribution, too. You want to have user feedback to weed out malicious or fake torrents. You want to have up-to-date seeder/leacher information. This is the weak spot in BitTorrent right now. That's what makes TPB and Mininova and the like so important.

Plus, the web page is badly formatted. On my 1280x1024 monitor, over half the width of the screen is filled by a fat blue bar on each side.

Yeah, that just bad design and it's all too common. Web pages are supposed to be liquids.

I also wrote a tool to wrap files in PNGs two years ago. It's a command line that would be operated in a similar way to a compressor, like gzip. As for file sizes, it should only limited by the PNG format itself.

http://nullprogram.com/projects/pngarch/

Or just grab the repository,

git clone http://git.nullprogram.com/pngarch.git

All data is stored in visible pixels, not hidden away in metadata. It also has some simple parity checks to make sure the image wasn't damaged somewhere along the way (some kind of lossy transformation), and keeps track of the original filename by storing that in the image as well.

(Retrospectively, I think it could probably be a lot better than the state I left it in.)

No, it reinforces your non-sequitur argument that only people who use computers like you do are doing "real work".

I would bet that most interactive computer use is done solely for entertainment, which isn't real work, and the operating system doesn't matter much. I never said people using computers differently than me weren't doing real work. You are putting words in my mouth.

Just because you don't understand it, doesn't mean it's disorganised.

In my experience, most of the time configuration files in the /etc directory for a particular program are named /etc/name (now bring phased out) or /etc/name.conf or if it is more complicated /etc/name/ with /etc/name/name.conf probably being the "main" one. If not this, then very close to it (".cfg", ".ini"). The man page will also list the configuration file, and the configuration file has its own man page. These are all text files that I can manipulate with a powerful text editor, or other powerful text manipulation tools.

Here are some typical Windows registry paths,

HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-21-4230677753-242917041-4215019230-1000\Identities\{64B7BE73-9160-4010-AA24-347327EB9AD3}
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Identities\{64A8BE73-9160-4010-AF24-347327EB9AD3}
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\CLSID\{00020524-0000-0000-C000-000000000056}

Which must be manipulated using a program with an extremely poor interface. I think it's impossible to pretend that this is organized. Ridiculous to pretend.

I'm also very sure that versioning it will be nowhere as nice as it is versioning /etc.

If you've never seen bad drivers take down a Linux machine, you can't have been using it for very long.

I've had problems with drivers, yes, but none that needed me to reboot the machine. This probably has to do with not using proprietary drivers, generally the most buggy ones, with Linux.

End users are happy to open password protected zip files to get at the malware goodness inside when they're being promised free stuff. Do you seriously think need to set +x would make a meaningful difference ?

That extra step would probably cut down that attack vector by at least 90%, and couldn't be done completely by accident.

At certain tasks. For, say, designing a 100-storey skyscraper or adding digital effects to a film, they're useless.

I'm pretty sure that data is saved to files, and files are generally most quickly managed with a shell.

That's because creating filenames that can't be manipulated by the majority of existing software would be extrememely dumb.

Which is due to stupid design decisions by Microsoft. Thanks for reinforcing my point.

So the real problem is actually a poorly designed third party software package.

I have almost never had a need for anything outside the repositories. When I did, I would install it in my home directory, where the package manager and it won't fight.

Not according to any benchmarks I've ever seen.

First search results for benchmarks: http://www.tmsnetwork.org/blog/comparison-web-browsers-javascript-benchmark-scores

Shows IE about 10 times slower than FF3.5, Safari, and Chrome. I got my 100x factor from running this: http://nullprogram.com/download/mersenne/ When I ran it with IE7 it took about 100x longer than the above browsers. IE8 can't run it, so I don't know how it does.

Rubbish. It's got all the major features most people give a damn about.

Cal

I guess this counts as a shameless plug, but I wrote about this using a sci-fi, self replicating minefield as an analogy: Controlling a Minefield. As someone else said, it simply comes down to digital signatures, though it doesn't even need to even be that complicated to do simple things.

Any method of generating a problem and its solution at the same time, where the problem is very difficult to solve, would work.

For a simple approach as an example, before the worms are spread, various one-time commands could be set up by first finding two large primes, multiplying them together, and storing that composite in the worms and associate it with a command. Finding the two primes from the composite is impractical, but if the authors wants to issue a command, they just broadcast the two primes. It would be easy for the worms to verify that these are the correct primes, and then execute the corresponding command.

This can also be done with the knapsack problem.

A visualization toolkit? Just write some C from scratch. :-P

More seriously, I recently wrote a Mandelbrot set renderer in C. The program is geared towards running on clusters because it uses many processes to generate a single fractal or series of fractals as part of a zoom sequence. I happened to have just done a writeup about it over at my website, null program. I have videos of some zoom sequences up there for viewing pleasure.