Slashdot Mirror

The last thing that I want to do when I get home is stare at a screen for the 40 minute it takes to read an article that is as long as this one.

I found this earlier today: http://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/8uffa/online_journalism_a_few_years_ago_vs_today_pic/

The real gems are the comments on how to improve your online readability with bookmarklets that change font & backgrounds.

Google search for various Theora vs H.264 comparisons.

Because you provide no URLs, I'll assume that you mean the top ten Google results from http://www.google.com/search?q=various+Theora+vs+H.264+comparisons, as viewed in the United States. One of the results states: "the Theora version doesn't have quite the color saturation and contrast balance of the H.264 version but they're really not that far apart. Overall, I think I again prefer the H.264 version". Another implies that Theora doesn't scale to high resolutions: "Theora does have a major weakness with regards to HD video: the maximum motion vector length is only 16 pixels." Another result implied that Google would rather pay the royalties than the bandwidth.

This is a comment I spotted on Reddit the other day.

It's details like these that you'll never see on Slashdot or Digg or anyone else, most especially not on Rob Weird's blog. Who is an employee of IBM, btw. No, instead it's OMFG TEH OOXML SPEC IS 23,000,000 BAZILLION PAGES LONG, LOL MS SUCKS and so on. Drown the facts in a deluge of negative tailor-made clever headlines. Simple and effective. Keeps the sheep happy.

Seems to be: http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/8mp7t/obama_picks_exastronaut_to_lead_nasa/c09ru0v

They were not, by and large, falsely imprisoned.

If someone is imprisoned because they were convicted of a false, bad, law they are falsely imprisoned.

As some of the USA's Founding Fathers said, paraphrasing, it's better to let 10 guilty go free than to falsely convict 1 innocent. In the California medical marijuana case Gonzales v. Raich the federal judge wouldn't allow the jurors to know that California law allows medical marijuana. Nor do many judged allow jury nullification, a method by which the Founding Fathers supported as a way for citizens to tell politicians laws were bad. After jurors in Ed Rosenthal's case convicted him then found out "he was growing the stuff for the city of Oakland" they were outraged. Perhaps as the Fully Informed Jury Association, FIJA, has called for we need another Tea Party.

Falcon

Holy crap check out this thread (and load ALL the comments, it gets really good near the bottom):
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8i1u7/want_the_phone_number_to_the_your_cars_warranty/

Some readers over there got a hold of their phone numbers and were dissecting their automated phone system (figuring out all the extensions, unprotected inboxes, etc).

Best Ideas from that thread:

1. Put up billboard ads with their number with the following text:
"If you give up when we hang up, you're not what we want. $120 per hour cash. (800) 499-5711"

2. Put up personal ads in Craigslist with their number

3. Call them to sell them home insurance

4. Set a fax machine on autodial on them.

5. Call and ask about the auto warranties, then put them on hold and play this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3yiSb6s3AY

6. Call them with one of the popular sound boards (try to get them to sell a warranty to Detective John Kimball).

etc

My solution requires an angry Reddit army:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8i1u7/want_the_phone_number_to_the_your_cars_warranty/

Why go for the kill when you can just cause them the same anguish they've been causing you and your peers?

But scientists already determined it's not the lack of exercise that is making Americans fat, it's the excess intake of food.

Which makes your point moot, like that guy from 4chan.

Turns out there was an error in the methadology used in the original comparison, which hit x264 for more than 4 dB of difference.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8iphn/theora_encoder_improvments_comparable_to_h264/c09eyvc

Edit: HAHAHA! We figured out what was wrong--thanks a ton, gmaxwell, for coming on IRC and resolving this! Turns out his testing methodology was flawed... but not in the way I thought!
Turns he out he did everything correctly... but he used ffmpeg for outputting the raw y4m file to have its quality measured by dump_psnr (but not for theora). Apparently, ffmpeg flags the output chroma as "420mpeg2" instead of "420", which results in over 4db of PSNR being slashed off of x264's results unfairly.
Oops. We already have a patch submitted to ffmpeg for the problem and a retraction of the Theora comparison results is in the works. Thanks to gmaxwell for taking the initiative and David Conrad (Yuvi) for finding the bug!

The Doom9 thread on the same topic:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=146893

Anyway, given H.264 is a more recent codec that is highly optimized for PSNR and has had many years of refinement in a number of implementations, it's hard to conceive of how Theora could even approach it in compression efficiency, let alone beat it.

Capitalism tries to externalize (and therefore ignore) all costs.

No, that's corporatism and the Corporate Aristocracy Thomas Jefferson warned of when he said "I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."

Falcon

On reddit 2 days ago!

http://www.reddit.com/r/environment/comments/8h6wr/google_rents_goats_to_replace_lawnmowers/

http://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/8hcir/i_need_a_super_cheap_super_tiny_pc_that_has_a/

This is what judicial systems are made for! Putting people the state does not like in jail.

Almost. It's really for the state putting the people corporations don't like in jail.

Eh. Same thing.

seems that cobol has some good frameworks that could compete with rails and growing django
it's supported on modern web type terminals VT100 compatible

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8bpdq/cobol_on_cogs_supports_standard_terminals_vt100/

But is gets worse. Knowing, and yes, we have years of data to back this up but knowing that the population generally increases (*with the exception of Germany which is almost a negative population growth rate) [...]

No, just about every affluent country has negative population growth. The total populations of affluent countries are increasing only due to immigration.

Paradoxically, spreading a more energy-consuming lifestyle, ie. a higher standard of living, would result in lower or negative total population growth to the point where our energy needs may also stabilize. This is also disregarding advances in efficiency, which do come along now and again.

Or our energy needs may continually increase. Hard to say really. What is certain however, is that the harder it is to develop more energy sources, the more expensive energy will become, and our energy consumption will plateau from that alone (and likely drive more developments in efficiency). Basic economics.

The elucidating comment I've read on this so far was from http://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/85nk2/spitzer_the_aig_bonuses_are_a_smokescreen/c08bmtg

__________________________________________________________________
About the current CEO:

        * He's being paid 1 dollar a year.
        * He gets no bonuses, either way.
        * He gets no stocks.
        * He didn't sign these contracts, he inherited them.

About the people who tanked AIG:

        * They are gone.
        * They were few.

About the people who received the bonuses:

        * They did not kill AIG
        * They were offered these bonuses last year, to stay for another year, and clean up the mess.
        * They reduced $2.7 trillion of shit to $1.6 trillion of shit.

About the bonuses:

        * They are less than .1% of the bailout money.
        * They were offered last year, to retain people until they cleaned up the mess.
        * They were NOT meant to retain people for next year.

What if we didn't pay them?

        * The people who are (successfully) cleaning up the mess, would leave.
        * Then, they would sue (rightfully so).
        * AIG would have to try to replace them, while trying to prevent losses on the suddenly 'unmanaged' accounts.
        * AIG might be forced into bankruptcy, for defaulting (aka: we lose).
        * AIG might survive, but take further losses, and need more help (aka: we lose).

Personal thoughts:

        * We should have let them fail, but we didn't, it would be idiotic to let them fail now.
        * The current CEO deserves nothing but respect, but instead, he gets death threats.
        * The people who stayed on, and cleaned up the mess, deserve to be well paid. They saved us a ton of money, and the bonuses are marginal in comparison.

Analogy:

The people from FP (financial products) are the burger flippers at McDonalds. The people who got the bonuses work the counter at McDonalds. The burger flippers made some seriously shitty burgers. They got fired. The counter crew has spent the last year trying to find places to safely unload those burgers (worm farms, bacteria labs, etc.) It was a dirty job, and Mike Rowe wasn't available.

Yes, I'm contradicting a post I made yesterday. I watched the full hearings on C-Span today http://c-span.org/Watch/watch.aspx?MediaId=HP-R-16464, and learned a hell of a lot from them. Yeah, I changed my mind, but that's what I do when I learn that the facts don't match my perception.
__________________________________________________________________

Eh, I mentioned this on Reddit a while ago and nothing has changed since:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7yqa3/i_appreciate_the_use_of_open_source_softwarebut/

"It's not so much that the CLR's limitations prevent it from running dynamic languages but that the CLR's limitations require you to invent a lot of your own infrastructure to run dynamic languages. If the CLR in itself assumes that it can resolve all method dispatches (or jump targets or attribute accesses) statically at compile time, you have to invent your own dynamicity atop that. If the CLR does not support first class functions, you have to invent your own approach. If the CLR does not support first-class continuations, you have to invent your own calling structure. Ditto named parameters, optional parameters, default parameters, and whatever other features that the CLR doesn't support.

I'm not saying that the CLR doesn't support all of those features -- I know that it does support some of them, to some degree. The DLR supports more. The question is whether Turing equivalence (and I hate this argument) is sufficient, or whether you're better off not inventing your own method dispatch system."

Apparently, a scoop is 3/4 of a cup.

The more you know...

Circuit City had a bad reputation. If you could buy something somewhere else, you would probably go there. Now it looks to me as though Office Depot is ODing on the same foolish management ideas.

It would be interesting if we could know two things: 1) Exactly how much Office Depot makes by selling overpriced "protection" plans. 2) How much it will cost Office Depot because of stories about the company being abusive on Reddit.com, Digg.com, and Slashdot.

That Digg link leads to a New York Times article about the Office Depot CEO. Quoting: "The worst chief executive of the year was Steve Odland of Office Depot, according to Glassdoor.com's reviewers. He had an 80 percent disapproval rating."

CEOs in the U.S. often make 475 times the pay of the average person. I suppose it doesn't matter to many CEOs if the company they are managing dies. The CEOs make millions as fast as possible, and when the company dies, they retire or do something else.

That isn't honest, I think it is psychologically self-destructive, but it seems to me that's the way things often are.

Warren Buffett warned about bank failures in 2003. It was certainly no secret; anyone with any interest in financial business knew about the problem. Bank executives knew that what they were doing would be the end of their companies. I suppose they were making so much money (sometimes $40 million per year) that they didn't feel it was necessary to care. It was understood, and often discussed even on TV, that the U.S. taxpayer would pay for any problems that were created; that is happening exactly the way it was planned.

Replying to myself,

On reddit there's a link to a decompiled version.

It seems to do pretty much what I guessed. However, there are various function calls scattered through the code, like "sub_4022C0();", which aren't in the decompiled code, and probably come from a DLL.

So it looks like the .exe itself is just WinMain that calls the functions that do the real work, reports stats and does some logging. Whatever it actually does seems to be elsewhere.

Somebody traced the execution, and linked it here: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/83hjr/symantec_covering_up_the_piftsexe_file_and/c0857t5 [reddit.com]

Got that from a reply in the first thread. I can not guarantee its accuracy though

Somebody traced the execution, and linked it here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/83hjr/symantec_covering_up_the_piftsexe_file_and/c0857t5

Furthermore 4chan's /b/ seems to have a field day with this. Norton discussion boards appear very slow.

Thank you for illustrating why slashdot needs a "-5 cancer please DIAF" modifier.
Please Return from where you came.

Signal-To-Noise

If only there were a few million people out there willing to filter through this stuff and decide what was good and what wasn't.

Yeah, you're right, blogging will never take off.

No one knows who wrote TrueCrypt. No one knows who maintains TC. Moderators on the TC forum ban users who ask questions. TC claims to be based on Encryption for the Masses (E4M). They also claim to be open source, but do not maintain public CVS/SVN repositories and do not issue change logs. They ban folks from the forums who ask for change logs or old source code. They also silently change binaries (md5 hashes change) with no explanation... zero. The Trademark is held by a man in the Czech Republic ((REGISTRANT) Tesarik, David INDIVIDUAL CZECH REPUBLIC Taussigova 1170/5 Praha CZECH REPUBLIC 18200.) Domains are registered private by proxy. Some folks claim it has a backdoor. Who Knows? These guys say they can find TC volumes:

http://16systems.com/TCHunt/index.html

For these reasons, I won't use it. Encryption is important and TC looks great and makes great claims, but TC should be more transparent.

from: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7otuy/who_wrote_this_software_an_excia_agent/

Inkscape is a vector editor, and doesn't support automatic layout when you move items around. At least that I know of, if you can tell me how, you'll make me very happy. That said, I use Inkscape for making presentation graphics in Linux, but it's not really a Visio replacement.

Reddit had a thread on this topic a few months ago, which you can find here: AskReddit: What is the best Visio replacement?

Some of the better suggestions were:

• OmniGraffle - Great, but Apple only
• Gliffy
• Project Draw
• yEd
• OpenOffice.org Draw
• Dia

... as long as there is a crowbar at hand at the LHC.

Your logic is shallow and deflective. It was also predicted that you would troll me for my UID, because you are an obvious troll, and therefore you are obvious. Did you know that obvious is a synonym for stupid?

I have never professed to be the beta tester who originally owned this account. I have also posted numerous comments professing to my wanting a small piece of Slashdot history because I happen to love this website, along with most of the regular users here.

But my comment was not about me. It was about you being a huge douchebag for posting on a dead man's account.

Your lack of respect for this community is now obvious and very distasteful. Please close your account.

Digg and/or Reddit are that way -----------------

Then of course, there's the part where the virtual protesters call for death to all virtual juice, eventually succeeding in virtually eliminating all the juice.

I see that Israel is doing pretty well on their side of the propaganda war. Your comment is pretty much exactly what Israel is saying, and it's completely different from what the Palestinians are saying. Israel has traditionally had a lock on the news coverage of this dispute, especially in the United States. The interesting part about the Web in this story is that Palestine is managing to get their side out somewhat more effectively than usual - see, for example, http://www.reddit.com/r/politics

But programming book lists crop up all over the place. In this Stifflog interview with Yegge, Torvalds, Hansson, Norvig, Thomas, Van Rossum, Gosling, Stroustrup and Bray the interviewees mention their favourite books (of the most popular I think only K&R and Programming Pearls weren't on your list).

Many people have Knuth's Art of Programming on their shelves (but it's harder to find people who have read all of it).

One of the Kernel Hacker Bookshelf series on LWN recommends Unix Internals.

One of the consultants who taught at my University said that the Mythical Man Month and Peopleware were good. I've read these too and can also recommended them (although they are more about managing programmers rather than programming per se). The consultant also recommended Design Patterns (although he said not to read the book cover to cover but rather to just be aware of them so you could refer to them later).

Reddit has a Must Read Programming books thread.

I've heard the "Dragon Book" (Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools I think is the 2nd edition) being talked of favourably.

What is the single most influential book every programmer should read? thread on Stackoverflow.

Many people seem to recommend reading Godel, Escher, Bach...

Joel Spoolsky's list of books every programmer should read.

Maybe someone will collect the 20 most popular books into one easy to read post rather than the scattershot of links I've given you here...

wat http://www.reddit.com/user/circletimessquare/

Can someone please rustle up a good old Scientology bashing article, please?

WTF? How the hell would that news for nerds? If you want Scientology shit, go back to the scientology subredit

There's a thread at Reddit that's listing some unfiltered ISPs.

programming.reddit.com and compsci.reddit.com both have nice articles and discussion at times. However, I don't think any internet discussion site will again reach the greatness that was Slashdot 8-10 years ago.

programming.reddit.com and compsci.reddit.com both have nice articles and discussion at times. However, I don't think any internet discussion site will again reach the greatness that was Slashdot 8-10 years ago.

What I have not seen mentioned is the following, planned by the same government:

A great firewall will be erected around Australia. Australians will not have the option to opt out of 'illegal' content.
If you are Australian, take ACTION NOW!!! I've already contacted the current local (Liberal) member and Senator Conroy. This firewall, if it is to work at all, will slow speeds by up to 75% and will cripple the communications of an entire nation. The solutions needed to make sure that corporate VPNs and other tools keep working is non-existent. This is not a hoax. Please let the tech community be able to tell them what we think.

http://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/76ya5/australians_will_be_unable_to_optout_of_the/
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=1399635276&eid=-255
http://nocleanfeed.com/takeaction.html This is being discussed on Whirlpool but NEEDS TO HIT THE MEDIA TODAY!

There is a discussion about a game for programmers here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/72777/light_bot_a_very_nice_game_for_programmers/

Reddit's headline for this story: Oldest rocks on Earth found in northern Canada - 5999.98 years old! No, just kidding, 4.28 Billion.

Better then google in this case would be programming.reddit.com.
There you will find that python programmers are whiny babies, and you should go use lisp or haskell like a real man.
Or someone will helpfully comment that "IDE's are hard, lets go shopping!"

But in all seriousness, the MOST of the folks at programming.reddit.com are pretty helpful, and that is a better forum for programming related questions then slashdot at the moment.

Silly python implementation of a revised variant here

Apparently it's Oracle. (via reddit)

Maybe I'm not imagining it after all. There's a thread on Reddit with a few posters claiming that it wasn't blank before. No screenshots though.

I prefer this quote:

PHP: There's more than one way to do it, all of which are wrong.

Yes, that is the original artcle. universetoday.com picked it up first, then I picked *that* up and posted it on Reddit's space section first..
http://www.reddit.com/comments/6ukw2/phoenix_about_to_announce_potential_for_life_on/
Then it appears on slashdot..
Then on digg..
Then on the other news networks.
So aviationweek >> universetoday >> reddit >> slashdot >> digg. It just the way god wants things. Get used to it.
Oh, did you see that picture of me on universetoday? http://www.universetoday.com/2008/07/12/cosmic-monster-n44-by-don-goldman/ pasterfari!

http://www.reddit.com/comments/6u4bm/googles_information_gathering_thechniques/

Here is most of the original article.
The pesky junk filter meant I had to snip some of the code out - sorry.
Posting AC for the usual reason(s).

Foxconn deliberately sabotaging their BIOS to destroy Linux ACPI
Edit: Please tell Foxconn what you think of their behavior:

http://www.foxconnchannel.com/support/online.aspx

You need to put in an email, and then it will bring up a form, choose Complain/Suggest.

Edit: Welcome Digg, Reddit, and Slashdot.

http://digg.com/linux_unix/Foxconn_d..._destroy_Linux
http://www.reddit.com/comments/6tcv8...their_bios_to/
(Will add Slashdot when I know the final URL)
------------
I disassembled my BIOS to have a look around, and while I won't post the results here,I'll tell you what I did find.

They have several different tables, a group for Windws XP and Vista, a group for 2000, a group for NT, Me, 95, 98, etc. that just errors out, and one for LINUX.

The one for Linux points to a badly written table that does not correspond to the board's ACPI implementation, causing weird kernel errors, strange system freezing, no suspend or hibernate, and other problems, using my modifications below, I've gotten it down to just crashing on the next reboot after having suspended, the horrible thing about disassembling any program is that you have no commenting, so it's hard to tell which does what, but I'll be damned if I'm going to buy a copy of Vista just to get the crashing caused by Foxconn's BIOS to stop, I am not going to be terrorized.

-----
How to fix:

Get Intel's BIOS ACPI source compiler:

sudo apt-get install iasl

Dump your DSDT table:

sudo cat /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/DSDT > dsdt.dat

Disassemble it:

iasl -d dsdt.dat

Open it in Gedit:

gedit dsdt.dsl

Fix Foxconn sabotage:

Find, the section that starts out with

Code:

If (_OSI ("Windows 2000"))
{
Store (0x04, OSVR)
}

Go down til you get to the first

Code:

}
Else
{

Past that you should see Linux alongside Windows NT, which is above another Else that leads to Windows Me.

Should look like:

Code:

If (MCTH (_OS, "Linux"))

{
Store (0x3, OSVR)
}

Change it to:
Code:

If (_OSI ("Linux"))
{
Store (Zero, OSVR)
}

Copy the section, and remove it and the other characters (CAREFULLY PRESERVING SYNTAX!!!!)

Then move the Linux section to right underneath Windows 2006 section.

_Code removed to get past junk filter_

So there you have it!

You made some good points, and the anonymous poster also kind of touched on this but there is a 3rd path for 'advertising' beyond your 2-point list---metainformation.

A forum for discussing the content, or in some way giving feedback for a directories, imho, is extremely valuable. I don't need to buy a million shovels, even if they are an exceptionally good deal, because I'm not specialized in shovel distribution. But if I see a well built shovel for a dollar, that lasts longer than 5 years or so, you bet I'd be willing to make a post on a forum linked with the shovel. Same goes for other things--- ncix has forums for each peice of computer equipment that you can buy, consequently the difference between shopping at a place like BestBuy and NCIX is that the latter you're likely to get real feedback, real information that you can use to become informed on a product, whereas the former you're just likely to get suckered in by a salesman. It's not really a directory, but it's information about a directory, usually provided by the users of the directory.

Similarily, I guess, you can provide feedback about #2. reddit, for example, allows you to discuss the banner adds on the site. So you can say the product sucks, for example. This activity is fairly new, expect more from this in the future.

Google kind of does this, but could certainly do a lot more. If there was a 'click here to discuss this URL' on every search result on Google, complete with support for, say, orkut members to log in, ideally with /. or reddit like discussion threading, well firstly stuff like StumbleUpon would be all but forced to use Google as a backend, and second everyone would be much better informed on not only every URL, but how people perceive every URL. A huge benefit.

StumbleUpon, imho, was ahead of it's time, but it's become a bloated peice of garbage. But the idea of a universal discussion based on webpage has yet to truly come to fruition, and in this context, it has yet to truly become the solid 3rd part of 'advertising'.

This is why we've spent billions (trillions?) fighting a war on "terror,"

Not true. The billions have been spent because of U.S. government corruption. The U.S. government is being guided to do exactly what weapons and oil investors want.

Here is some information copied from numerous places:

There is evidence that whoever controls the U.S. government is planning to declare martial law. That's a top-rated story on Digg.com.

Search for "martial law" on digg.com or reddit.com. There are hundreds of links.

Cheney's company Halliburton is building prisons. There has never been an adequate explanation why. Do a Google search.

The U.S. House of Representatives Homeland Security committee is not allowed to see the martial law plan.

According to the New Yorker Magazine, the Bush administration has already started another war in Iran. See President George W Bush backs Israeli plan for strike on Iran.

Bush and Cheney and their friends and families and associates are oil and weapons investors. Weapons investors want war all the time. Oil investors want to restrict the supply of oil, so that the price will rise.

The war with Iran has the same purpose as the war in Iraq. It will allow whoever controls the U.S. government to restrict the flow of oil even more, making the price go even higher.

The war with Iran is extremely unpopular with U.S. citizens. It is said that whoever is doing the planning will do terrorist acts in the U.S. and blame them on Iranians. That will allow the declaration of martial law. It is said that the planners have put a lot of time into passing laws that allow them to have more control and that they will not allow Barack Obama to become president because he would undo their work.

The U.S. government has manipulated the facts in other cases so that it will be allowed to start a war. One example is the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. "In truth, Hanoi's navy was engaged in nothing that night but the salvage of two of the boats damaged on 2 August."