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AMD To Hide MHz Rating From Consumers
pezpunk writes: "Tom's Hardware is reporting here that AMD's next-generation Athlons will be identified by model number rather than Mhz rating. This means that an Athlon will be designated an "Athlon 1600" even though it's only a 1.4Ghz part. The true clock speed of the chip will NOT be shown either on the chip itself or even in the BIOS. Apparently, they're desperate to compete with higher-clocked Pentiums in the minds of consumers -- proof that even the underdog can pull dirty marketing tricks =("
first 2 millionth post! corky6921
Shout out the The O.P.P.!!! WASSUP YO!
OK, many of you have probably noticed a lot of ascii art flooding this board lately. You're no doubt wondering why CmdrTaco's much encountered "lameness filters" are ineffective against it. To answer that question, I'm going to take you on a Perl journey, deep into slashcode. Think of it as being a bit like "Heart of Darkness", or if you're a typical slashdot pleb, "Apocalypse Now!"
The first files we'll be looking at are the infamous "bitchslap" and "modslap". I think these are a pretty decent introduction to how Rob's mind works when he's coding angry: Here's bitchslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to the section labelled "main program logic". BTW. "main program logic" is a ridiculously grandiloquent phrase for what we are seeing here.
Note how draconian this is. I like to think of this code as a memorial to slashdot-terminal, it's first victim. You can see how Malda deliberately broke his "self-regulating" moderation system, to give the admins of slashdot dictatorial powers. This code allows any admin using it to drop a user's default threshold to -1 instantly, and drop his karma down to a level from which it is unlikely to recover. I've heard that this script has been used on slashdot in a modified form, with the -defaultpoints set to less than -1, completely eliminating a user's post from normal viewing, unless people edit their query string manually.
On to modslap [slashcode.com]. Scroll down to "main program logic" again.
OK, what you're seeing here is Taco's method of restricting the flow of crack to moderators, to keep them nice and jumpy. If you don't mod the way he likes, your moderating days are over, and your karma plummets to bitchslap levels. An ugly tool.
To recap, the man we are dealing with here is obviously an anti-democratic tyrant. Censorship is his weapon, and he is vigilantly watching his censors, to ensure that no freedom is allowed to enter his domain. I believe he also lives in a hut with a man driven crazy by his proximity. The hut is surrounded by skulls on poles, but the skulls face inward. Remember that.
We're nearing the locus of my investigation now. You've heard the legends, now gaze into the face of comments.pl's so-called "troll detection code!"
comments.pl [slashcode.com]: Scroll down to the section under "here begins the troll detection code".
You may be wondering why it's such an ungodly piece of crap. I feel that we are seeing evidence of an ingrained unwillingness to think before coding.
The first few tests are fairly simple, based on regexps and length. They're pretty laughable, from an information theory perspective. If you don't believe me, the flood of ascii art should supply adequate evidence of what I'm talking about. Language is a complex thing, and a few simple tests are insufficient to distinguish English from ascii art, especially when the ascii artists are willing to take extreme measures to see their work posted. Regular posters do not have the patience for such chicanery.
The final test is my favourite, though. It begins under the comment ending with this charming sentence: "These ratios are _very_ conservative a comment has to be absolute shit to trip this off". An interesting claim. Considering the number of posts I've tripped this filter on without doing anything out of the ordinary, I'd say "conservative" means the same thing to Taco as it means to George W. Bush, nb. "nazi". What we are talking about here, is the postercomment compression test. (The horror! The horror!) "postercomment" is just the name of the field your comments are sent in, by the way. It isn't cool top secret slashspeak. It's just a variable name.
What this does is, it actually compresses your comment using zlib, then checks the change in size to decide if you are a troll or not! Furthermore, the code comments indicate that if you trip this test, slashcode thinks you are a "luser". Code like this makes it pretty clear that it takes one to know one, Rob!
As someone who as actually seen Rob Malda use the phrase "it won't scale" to dismiss questions about why parts of the moderation system weren't done in a more equitable fshion, I'd like to take this opportunity to laugh until I give myself a hernia.
Anyone who has studied information theory knows that the redundancy of english is estimated at about 50%. This value is fairly key in what we are seeing here, it determines a fair estimate of how effective compression of english text can be before we start to lose information. Taco's estimates were based, in his words, on "...testing out several paragraphs of text...". Doesn't sound like a particularly large sample group. What's more, it's indicative of poor software engineering practice. As is the recent bout of outages.
A few final criticisms. Firstly, there are far better, less memory intensive, and above all, less stupid methods of performing textual analysis than checking it's compression ratio. If Taco had any idea about computer science, he might have investigated a few before making a fool of himself in public like this. It's pretty clear that he's getting more and more frustrated with the situation on slashdot, and doesn't realise that if he ruled with an even hand, rather than a bitchslapping script and an army of trained thought police, the problems would not be so grave.
Secondly, I thought of a much more effective method of eliminating asci art posts, and it will never cause problems for genuine posters. What's more, it's extremely compact and doesn't even require regexps. I won't reveal it here, as I am not willing to assist in a reign of terror that I find to be reprehensible.
As further evidence of the lengths Malda and Co. may be willing to go to, you can find a commented out section that enables the deletion of posts and their descendant threads. We have no reason to believe that this will not be employed on slashdot.
Editorial notes: I don't use Perl and this is really the first time I've examined it closely. It's pretty much convinced me that I'm not missing much. I use real languages such as C and C++ and occasionaly asm to do most of my work, and I, along with 95% of the enterprise world, find Java to be the best solution for web programming. For most scripting tasks, shell script suffices. For more complicated scripting tasks, Python provides a more sensibly designed scripting environment. Additionally, as if to provide further evidence of Malda's incompetence as a programmer, I've hit the junk character post every single time I've previewed this comment, and am now forced to resort to edit it. Regretfully, I have been forced to replace the Perl fragments I was using with hyperlinks. Very unsatisfactory.
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ascii spork
when r u gonna kill yourself...
he's a jew
I dunno about dirty schoolgirl panties, but some dirty schoolboy asses would sure hit the spot.
Jon Katz
-- The_Messenger
Yeah: Just as Hitler hid himself in a bunker and shot himself in the head, we wait to see your dumb ass do the same.
This was truly a Nazi post
Heh.
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
And, you know what? Within a week, we all sigh with relief, because the old units never worked anyway!
When was the last time you heard the MIPS or FLOPS rating for a processor? When the RISC processors came out, and scored 100 x the nearest CISC chip, we suddenly started hearing how worthless those ratings really were. (Which was true, only the people saying it had been using them to crush the competition under their feet, the previous week.)
What's the FLOPS rating for a Pentium IV? Anyone seen it listed on any of Intel's adverts? Curious, that.
Truth is, there -is- no meaningful number you can use, to describe a processor. Applications will vary so much in performance, depending on how well they exploit the various caches and pipelines, that any value you get will be useless for any realistic comparison.
Worse, the bottlenecks for the main memory, the PCI bus, any local busses, etc, ad nausium, are so much more significant than the processor. Sure, building a faster chip will earn lots of green bits of paper, whereas building a better motherboard will simply earn lots of whining from hardware manufacturers.
The reality is, though, that processors today would be perfectly adequate, if the support hardware were up to scratch. (Anyone remember the problems the 486DX-50's caused? Those worked at 50 MHz, direct. Great design, but the hardware needed to run it killed it. The 486DX2-66 was really just a DX-33 with some fancy over-clocking. The support hardware was all standard stuff. That's why it caught on.)
It's time to take another look at that hardware, though. I doubt it's changed much since the DX-33 days, except with a few extra levels of caching. It's still convection-cooled, for the most part. The connectors are still badly designed and cheaply made. Sockets are built to be easy for plebs, not easy on components.
Compare this with a VME or VMX bus, where the backplane alone costs more than most top-end PCs and where ease-of-use can go jump in a lake. These are systems where customers can afford to pay, and don't want to pay for junk.
I'm not saying PC manufacturers should suddenly switch over to VMX-style architecture (128-bit busses can get a little interesting, and besides, I've some PCI cards I'd like to keep using!), but it's time to do some re-designing. If a user wants to be babied, they're not going to handle hardware installation, anyway. They're going to go to a shop. Providing idiot-proof systems is simply driving up the number of idiots and driving down the performance of computers.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
could you whore for karma any more than this?
I think you believe that Rob will call you personally at home and thank you for coming to his defense. It is sad. Find a fucking life.
BTW, what makes you think that Malda would be making big bucks anywhere writing shit Perl code? In case you have not heard, there are an abundance of unemployed Perl losers out there. He will be another one when VA goes under. Programmers who write crappy code are not in demand now, only skilled ones.
Have a nice day.
He doesn't have the time to kill himself. His daddy makes him spit-shine and suck his cock 20 times a day on weekdays. Buisy, buisy, buisy cocksucker.
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testing
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