Return of the Quickies

Finally home long enough to compile some quickies. option8 sent us the MacCrate which probably isn't up to code. Course neither is this one (thanks pkr) Speaking of cases, Deega sent us a site where you can get air brushed cases. rafa noted that Propaganda Volume 12 is out. UM_Maverick has started YALS called Linuxtopia.com pq wrote in with a picture that proves that a spell checker is probably a good idea. RoLlEr_CoAsTeR found something on Brunching Shuttlecocks which lets you combine Advertising and Perl: its actually extremely clever. Speaking of perl, ThePixel noted Perl Toys, which I think we mentioned a year or so ago, but with Christmas coming up, it probably is worth checking out again. Especially if you want magnetic poetry. Speaking of stuff to buy, JbirdUAH noted that Copyleft has Slashdot frisbees! Just in time for Winter! jhopson sent us a retelling of beowulf starring people you know. Lexie (who should really ask CowboyNeal out) sent us Eunuch which I'm not gonna explain, but its definitely wierd. motardo noted that Dalnet is for sale on eBay. Ant noted that Google seems to have an interesting result if you search for 'More evil than satan himself'. Speaking of evil, jsfetzik sent us Sinux the Linux for sinners. And how about Captain Zion's link to FsckU-FsckMe(tm) which is not for children, but is pretty amusing. Maybe you'll find auto.pron.org a little more wholesome. Finally, jetpack pointed us to Forum2000, which I'd never seen before, but am glad I did. It was mentioned in a comment awhile ago, and then we were assimilated. Super wierd.

Comments

What MacCrate?

[Mr. Piccolo]

There is no link. I assume it's like the Crate guitar amplifier that literally is (was?) a wooden crate.

Pretty cool, I guess.

Wha?

[spinkham]

That "fuck you, fuck-me" device has an eject button? Don't even wanna know ;-)

Forum 2000?

[gordyf]

Is Forum2000 real?

I don't think it is - I saw one question where the guy had made a spelling mistake (he left off a letter on the last word of his question) and the system filled it in in the replies. Could be a spell checker, but a human replying would skip a mistake like that and maybe not see it at all. I'd expect a computer to misunderstand it..

Re:Forum 2000?

[Sloppy]

I think it's a hoax. Some of the threads are just too funny. If it's real, it has a better sense of humor than most real people. The site's down right now, so I can't supply a specific pointer, but the "Miss Rand, I underestimated you" thread was totally unbelievable (and hysterically funny :-). No way a computer did that. No fucking way!

---

Re:Forum 2000?

[Smack]

The best part is that the code is "composed of about 11 million lines of C++ and Intercal code."

Here's what a quick web search on "Intercal" reveals:

"INTERCAL. The language designed to be Turing-complete but as fundamentally unlike any existing language as possible. Expressions that look like line noise. Control constracts that will make you gasp, make you laugh, and possibly make you hurl. Data structures? We don't need no steenking data structures! "

:)

Re:More good too...

[gargle]

Ok,here's my theory:
A lot of people describe MS as evil or satan on their web pages, so it isn't that surprising that MS would show up, since this would make google think that MS is an authority on evil or satan.
However, a search for just "evil satan" doesn't work.
"evil more satan" works though. This is probably because the word "more" appears frequently on MS's home page, and these 3 terms together are enough to bring MS to the top of the list.

Disney is more evil than satan too!

[gargle]

Try: more evil than satan
or: evil more satan

Disney comes up 3rd and 2nd on those searches respectively... perhaps the web knows something everyone else doesn't....

Re:sellling dalnet vs selling shares

[Rude Turnip]

whats regulatory issues of selling shares on ebay if i can just sell a company regardles???

You may be referring to the news item I had submitted yesterday.
You can safely ignore the AC's comment about "approved forums" and the SEC wanting to control everything. The reason that guy got in trouble trying to sell stock on Ebay is because he was trying to sell unregistered shares in a company that didn't exist yet; there weren't even any disclosure documents. Now, if you wanted to try to sell your 100 shares of publicly traded XYZ, Inc. on Ebay (when it was allowed on Ebay), that would be different, because there would be plenty of information available about XYZ, Inc., such as 10-Ks, news releases and analyst coverage. You don't need a tightly regulated stock market to do that since the shares of the company are "legitimate." You can even sell shares to your next door neighbor by simply recording the transfer of shares with XYZ, Inc. and your neighbor giving you $$ for your shares.

It's hard to discuss the legalities of selling Dalnet since I don't know anything about its capital structure, ie is it an S corp, C corp, an LLC (limited liability company) or a limited partnership? Whatever it is, I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that it's privately held, in which case you should hire a business valuation analyst to provide a disinterested opinion of value. Of course, we still have to look at the big picture and realize that we *are* just wasting our time talking about another crackpot auction on Ebay.

Ask Slashdot, Ask F2K : An A-B Comparison.

[Black Parrot]

F2K wants "full" questions with lots of circumstantial detail, rather than simple one-liners. Not feeling very prosy tonight, I just quoted the most recent Ask Slashdot query over. In a day or two we can see how their panel of philosophers' answers measure up to our own panel of experts.

--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?

Re:Pizza box: GPL question.

[Ticker]

They must make the source available to everyone who has the binaries, but they are not required to make the binaries publically available.

Google games explained

[tilly]

Google has a ranking system which is based on the way that the net is linked. It brings up matches, and sorts them according to its ranking.

A lot of pages (good and bad) link to Microsoft's home page. Therefore that page has a high rating. So if it matches enough words in your query to be a match, it will be one of the first ones.

Always.

Now if they could just get past those duplicate pages. OK, so issue foo of The Linux Gazette matched the query. OK, everyone and his dog mirrored it. OK, I looked at it. Now can I please look at what comes next..?

*sigh*
Ben

You can tell it's fake

[Black Parrot]

...because none of the philosophers ever come back with "First Post!"

> I get the feeling that the less intelligent (and less humorous) posts are generated by the machines, while humans handle the others (e.g. the Slashdot posts and many done by the "Crack Baby" or whatever).

I'm inclined to agree. There was a response telling all the Slashdotters to get lost, in a context where a machine probably wouldn't have a clue that it was being slashdotted. (OTOH, /. had been mentioned in another query, so it's just possibly genuine if, for example, the machines stay "activated" for all the recent threads, rather than just the current one.)

In general, what they're trying (pretending?) to do is not that far from what lots of other researchers are trying to do in NLP and text data digestion right now, so it may be for real after all. But my best guess is that it's a combination of "for real" and responses generated by slave^H^H^H^H^Hstudent labor.

Possibly they are primarily interested in collecting the questions. I've participated in research meetings where we seriously aired the idea of setting up a "for entertainment" web app for the ulterior motive of capturing subtle types of NL data. Surely we weren't the only ones to think of it.


--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?

Re:You can tell it's fake

[kosak]

The attention we are receiving from ./ is most welcome! We are experiencing some technical difficulties due to the vastly increased load; we appreciate your patience during this time of transition.

We are pleased to report, however, that our recently acquired redundant parallel storage system has gone a long way to help buffer this crisis.

We do have a special request for Slashdot readers: we would greatly appreciate it if you would restrict your postings to original questions, rather than material cut&pasted from our home page or from other sources. Repetitive, unoriginal input text tends to cause numerical instability in our NLP algorithms (performance of the FPUs in our Kryotech Athlon 900s seems to be particularly sensitive to divides by near-zero numbers)

Thank you!

More google games

[Bryan_Crowl]

Why not try this on google
'the best os' or 'the best free sex'

interesting results, click the link below

The best free sex

The best os

We need to change the quickie Icon..

[tonhe]

I vote that we change the quckie icon to something more appropriate...
Like.. a small headshot of Jenny McCarthy or maybe Pamela Anderson...

I dunno.. Just a though

__
~/ony

Pizzaboxes

[jfunk]

I have a pizzabox computer.

Mine says "Sun" on it, though...

Damn you, Forum 2000, in Tux's Name!!

[ravenskana]

Forum 2000 and Bill have destroyed Linux, apparently: http://www.forum2000.org/matrix/forum_reply?cookie =people&lm=940641941
Amusing.

Fake, or at least somewhat

[Anonymous Coward]

Being a CMU student, I can say that most of what is on the main Forum 2000 page is complete bullshit. If there were a project with that kind of hardware devoted to it here at CMU, it certainly would be more than a side project. Also, while these grad students might really be trying very hard to avoid working on their thesises, writing a 11 million lines of C++ and intercal in their spare time is rather unlikely. Finally if that doesn't convince you, their master control room screenshot was lifted from an article about Linux being used for rendering in Titanic.

Re:Fake, or at least somewhat

[Skim123]

Regardless if it is real or not, I've gotten some pretty neat answers from the computer. (I'm sure it was the computer, a quick response (within 20 seconds) at a late hour in the night...)

Anyway, I asked it an Analysis of Algorithms homework question, asking for big theta of a recursive algorithm. Specifically, I asked for big theta of:

T(n) = a if n = 0 or n = 1
T(n) = T(n-1) + T(n-2) + C*n for all other values of n

and Evil Spock responded that it grew linearly since T(2) = 2a + 2c.

If a computer did that, that is freakin' incredible.

Re:FuckU FuckMe

[hedgehog_uk]

There once was a fellow from Cheam
Who invented a fucking machine
Concave or convex
It could fit either sex
And was incredibly easy to clean

Re:Beer as a coolant...

[Hard_Code]

Alcohol has a lower freezing point than water, though...so you can get it much cooler before it freezes up on you.