How many times could one article use the phraseology, "...proving that..." and "the moral of the story is..."? Rhetorical question.
The special(ly inane) report was advertised as the "10 Craftiest Hacks" and the "10 Most Subversive Hacks", but it's neither. And what's with the slam at Kevin Mitnick on the front page of the article? My understanding is that industrial espionage involves companies spying on each other for competitive advantage, not one man's virtual dumpster diving.
CNET's definition of spoofing is "the interception and jumbling of information from a content-providing Web server before it reaches a person browsing the site...very popular in 1997." Definitely the borderline lame-assness the Jargon File refers to in its spoof entry. I'm worrying I missed out on that crazy 1997 spoofing fad. Hmm.
I really can't tell whether the article is simply lame or perniciously brain-dead. The tone of the AirTran hack description is misbegottenly whiny, calling morbid humor "crass" (if you can believe that).
Finally, I bet "Real-world hackers" could get within a thousand yards of Meg Ryan. Especially if they're Real World "hackers."
The Big U is based on Stephenson's experiences at Boston University, whose campus is actually responsible for student deaths in that it compels them to cross a throughway to get anywhere, leading to a few hit-and-runs every so often.
Here's a Neal Stephenson FAQ: this one at dmoz which quotes Neal as saying that "Big U" will be reprinted "Over my dead body." Later quotes have him saying he doesn't want the resources necessary to publish a book wasted on the "Big U", but it may happen just to keep people from spending $200 on the book.
There are a bunch of nice profiles/interviews on him out there; check out dmoz's comprehensive listing.
Holy Fire: Senescence, Innovation, Stagnation
on
Ask Bruce Sterling
·
· Score: 1
Having read Holy Fire, I have to ask, how much does it reflect your own views or fears? Is there a point to being a dramatically avant-garde and iconoclastic bourgeois starving artist/hacker/philosopher when you're twenty? Where do you come down on the whole safety vs. freedom issue? Is the future going to be just god-awful boring, or am I missing the point?
I agree with you that paper is easier to read and annotate. However, it's harder to shape, reconfigure, and retransmit. I often print out my programs and read from printouts. I believe in the toilet development cycle. On the other hand, you can't test a paper printout of your code and tweak-n-run (or tweak-n-compile). Paper is good because of its permanence; it's bad because of its permanence.
Speaking of publishing houses, I'm writing a book for a publishing house that doesn't even lay out using computers. After the manuscript has been submitted, any changes are extraordinarily costly and time-consuming. That's just awful. But also somewhat beside the point.
I'm talking particularly about collaborative processes, e.g. largescale coding projects, or website development, or even political discussion. There, paper is a powerful broadcast medium, but crappy for feedback response. A lot of it comes down to the whole CVS issue, making sure that everyone is, if you'll pardon the expression, on the same page. That's just too damn hard with paper if you're talking about something that multiple people are contributing to.
If you're the only one working on a project, then paper is awesome. It's nice even to have paper copies of documents. But only copies. If I go to a meeting and meeting notes are handed out, that's pretty cool. But I'd want them also available in electronic form somewhere, preferably with some discussion mechanism attached.
As everything we do becomes more and more "living", the advantages of paper will become fewer. Would you print out the code of some collaborative project to look at, if by the time you came back from the toilet the code would be changed in some way? Everything's going organic, baby. Fortunately, we can expect that paper will become "living" too. (See Diamond Age, e.g.)
I really believe some of the problem with both software development and all tech-work in general is our need for paper. At my office, productivity, efficiency, and reliabilty is harmed by the fact that everyone has their own method of dealing with stuff, a lot of it being the constant print-out of web-pages and other computer docs, because there's no one set-up that's good enough. I know it makes QA a nightmare, because you can't find the specs, or problems aren't reported in a standard way, etc. etc.
Let's face it: the promise of HTML won't be realized until the whole Web is Slashdotized (not Slashdotted!). By that I mean that every page can be personalized--for that, effectively, is what these comment forums allow us to do. By the time this thread is fully played out and moderated, the this thread will be more useful than the original article, because it will allow access to the article, and have insightful and useful comments and links highlighted. Can't really do that with paper.
If you think about it, Slashdot is analagous to a QA system. Speaking about that, it might be cool to make a Slashdot-style interface to Bugzilla. Why shouldn't the whole Web, and by extension, the whole world, have a QA system? (I suspect some might argue that's the idea behind Everything.)
The Web has a ways to go before I can really feel it's cool. Which is why Mozilla could be the most important app ever.
Mean hop distance is relatively easy to measure, as IP addresses are nicely arranged. Measuring clicks takes a bit more work, I feel. A somewhat cryptic document by another guy at caida.org puts the average hop at 14-15. A great link with more info is the Internet Distance Maps Project.
The problem with any of these analogies is that there's no need for a Southwest on the Web, really; it doesn't cost any more to go directly from Boston to Los Angeles on the Web than it does to go through a bunch of other cities. You have to define what the cost is (some type of relvancy index, I suppose) before any analogy would make sense.
That said, other than webrings, Search engines could be your Southwests. They get you to places directly, but they traverse the web themselves through a series of links.
Another possible interpretation: any real surfer is her own Southwest, who, when trying to find a piece of information, hits various hubs, and follows links to the source in a somewhat roundabout but usually successful manner. The analogy's weak.
There's a much closer analogy to Southwest airlines when you look at the Internet than the Web, clearly; then you do have well-defined hubs (the big backbone routers) and carriers, who, admittedly, use each others' networks. It would be as if Southwest could get you from Dallas to Porvoo, Finland by flying you on its planes through its hubs to New York, then getting you on a British Airways plane to London, then a FinnAir plane to Helsinki, then a FinnAir prop to Porvoo. Feel free to extend that analogy...
Exactly. I'd upmoderate you, but my karma blows (see above) and thus can't. I really believe in networked info like the public key servers, CPAN, and other mirrors (e.g. Linux); it's the only way that the little guys can really hope to fight the big guys (corps). Of course, it's not implementable in a lot of cases: hard for there to be independent/. mirrors and such, with current tech; in other cases, copyright makes such mirroring difficult. But the big guys are already getting together to do mirroring for their own crap (see Akamai ); why can't we do it too?
As you can see from checking my user info, I'm at -8. Restarting is certainly one possibility; another would be to write such scintillatingly good posts that they get wildly up-moderated. The problem with that is that you have to write a scintillatingly good comment pretty quickly; posts written after the first hour or two of a/. posting, I think, are largely ignored. More, I'm not a Linux guru, so my posts are generally only of moderate interest to the mean/.er. My user number isn't massively low (15267) but just think what it would be if I made a new account. The horrors.
Is there any way to delete an account? There isn't an obvious one. And it's not mentioned in the FAQ.
Taco talks a bit in the FAQ about there not being Karma tracking implemented. I sure would appreciate it. He even almost admits that it's kind of crappy to only show recent posts but count old posts in your Karma. I really think there should be a statute of limitations on karma...after a while, old posts stop contributing to karma, and it fades. Yes, I know that doesn't really follow what real karma would do, but this ain't really karma.
In case anyone reads this, is there any way at all to search for all the comments written by a user, or at least by myself? I can't find any way that pulls up the old comments, so I can't even find out why my karma is so low. (Note the lovely end run on on-topic-ity (yes, ontopicity is not a word, and if it did, it probably would mean the general study of imagery; but why use the correct word (relevancy) when you can use nested parentheses (in honor of the short story Kappa Nu Nexus (by Avram Davidson (et al.)?)).
I too have a terribly negative karma, mainly due to, I think, the first very few posts I made, which I accidentally reposted as I learned the system, and were thus hypermoderated into the ground as off-topic. Now my karma is so low I'll probably never get out.
The above omment shouldn't have been moderated down. Naming issues have been one of Apple's big concerns over the years, as evidenced by the above list. Jobs was able to ride a free wave of simple naming for a little bit, by replacing all the product line with new products, but now he's running into problems again; 3 different laptops with identical names, the multiple iMac revisions with no clear name differential, etc. Product diversification is necessary to growth, but is confusing for consumers.
Cripes! Don't buy from Barnes & Nobles, the Walmart of the book world. Support local booksellers (see BookWeb.org, the American Booksellers Association site) and libraries. An organization of independent booksellers serves effectively the same purposes and goals as Slashdot: peer equivalency, idea exchange, and independence.
This is as good a time as any to debut my Corporate Web site at http://www.kband.com/corporate/corporat e.pl. I've been recently tracking Cisco , so it's got a very full listing of the 40 acquisitions Cisco has made. The WSJ explicates that the size of the deal is based on the valuation of similar companies that have recently IPO'd, namely Juniper, popularly described as a Cisco-killer. Juniper's at $11 bil. If anyone wants to discuss Cisco with me in private, please e-mail me, as I'm working on a book on the company.
Should/. end its Amazon partnership? I know revenue streams are cool, but Barnes&Noble might be a better choice now. I think this should be made a/. poll.
That's craft more than art. Art is generally more than cleverness and determination, as that project certainly exhibited. Some of the Obfuscated Perl Contest code are closer to art (utter inscrutability helps, IMHO); for example: *_=\$#;$/=q#(.)#;$#=10;$^X=~s|.*/||;$\=chr;$#=gm time $#;substr($#,$^F#^F*$^F**$^F-1)=al;s$\$/( )\$/\$/$e\ $2\u\$^X\$2\$3o\$1r$ && print time
My assumption is that these rumors are just that. For the last few years and especially since Jobs signed on, sale rumors surface every few months. People even read the Microsoft investment (which the DOJ trial revealed was primarily a payoff to bury patent disputes) as indication that they wanted to buy, when it was a token payment in terms of a percentage of Apple stock. Because Jobs in his role as Pixar CEO is in bed with Disney, they'll always be mentioned in buy-out rumors. Similarly, his friendship with Oracle CEO Ellison (who's on the Apple board) means that they'll be mentioned.
I don't believe the stockholders want Apple to be sold. ZDNet is just engaging in another round of Apple-bashing, based on whisperings of actual alliances and deals to come with other big players.
I have to agree with your statements. Frankly, it's very hard for a SF movie to impress, especially in the "Yeah, that's what this SF concept is all about" way. SF literature is so much more varied, dense, and complex that most SF movies can only capture the "Wow" of SF.
The Matrix was a very cool movie, but not a great SF movie. It was a great "comic book" movie. But again, as said above, The Matrix isn't uniquely special in the pantheon of movies. It's kind of the I.M. Pei of action movies -- it'll get the credit and looks good, but is built upon the work of others who noone outside of aficionados have heard of.
I have hopes that the 13th Floor, based upon a novel by a brilliant SF writer Daniel Galouye, delivers on the promise of a great VR film. But we've been missing perhaps the greatest VR film of all time in our discussion, TRON!!!
Re:What's the difference between Flamebait and Tro
on
Slashdot Notes
·
· Score: 1
I think he means "Flame", not Flamebait. It's certainly true that Flamebait and Troll are nearly identical in meaning.
Re:Scores should be inherited up the comment tree
on
Slashdot Notes
·
· Score: 2
Not so! There are certainly many cases where a critical review of an awful, awful book or movie is worth reading, while reading or viewing the source of the response would probably cause brain damage. However, those fighting the post-modernist second-hand phenomenon (what's the SF story that revolves around that point?) would disagree.
Re:Where is your sense of Yuma?
on
Slashdot Notes
·
· Score: 1
The reasons for moderations certainly give more of an idea of the moderation history. For example, the above post, when I responded to it (right now) had a score of 2 for Redundancy, so I know it was marked _down_ to a 2. I'm assuming that auto-moderation is still extant, so either smithdog has a high default score, or there's a moderation battle going on over his post. My opinion on/. moderation remains the same: the fewer controls on moderation, I think, the better. The recursivity of a tightly regulated moderation mechanism is too hard for my brain to parse intelligently, however. Reminiscent of Hofstadter's GOD (Genie over Djinn).
That certainly makes more sense. I hope also that this will encourage more moderators to take action. I would like there to be no caps on moderation; it'd be interesting to see how high (and low) posts would get moderated. Imagine what the score would be on "In the Beginning..." by Stephenson would be if that were a post! Should the stories themselves be moderated? That'd be interesting. Probably unnecessary, but potentially amusing.
Slashdot Mirror
How many times could one article use the phraseology, "...proving that..." and "the moral of the story is..."? Rhetorical question.
The special(ly inane) report was advertised as the "10 Craftiest Hacks" and the "10 Most Subversive Hacks", but it's neither. And what's with the slam at Kevin Mitnick on the front page of the article? My understanding is that industrial espionage involves companies spying on each other for competitive advantage, not one man's virtual dumpster diving.
CNET's definition of spoofing is "the interception and jumbling of information from a content-providing Web server before it reaches a person browsing the site...very popular in 1997."
Definitely the borderline lame-assness the Jargon File refers to in its spoof entry. I'm worrying I missed out on that crazy 1997 spoofing fad. Hmm.
I really can't tell whether the article is simply lame or perniciously brain-dead. The tone of the AirTran hack description is misbegottenly whiny, calling morbid humor "crass" (if you can believe that).
Finally, I bet "Real-world hackers" could get within a thousand yards of Meg Ryan. Especially if they're Real World "hackers."
The Big U is based on Stephenson's experiences at Boston University, whose campus is actually responsible for student deaths in that it compels them to cross a throughway to get anywhere, leading to a few hit-and-runs every so often.
Here's a Neal Stephenson FAQ: this one at dmoz which quotes Neal as saying that "Big U" will be reprinted "Over my dead body." Later quotes have him saying he doesn't want the resources necessary to publish a book wasted on the "Big U", but it may happen just to keep people from spending $200 on the book.
There are a bunch of nice profiles/interviews on him out there; check out dmoz's comprehensive
listing.
Having read Holy Fire, I have to ask, how much does it reflect your own views or fears? Is there a point to being a dramatically avant-garde and iconoclastic bourgeois starving artist/hacker/philosopher when you're twenty? Where do you come down on the whole safety vs. freedom issue? Is the future going to be just god-awful boring, or am I missing the point?
I agree with you that paper is easier to read and annotate. However, it's harder to shape, reconfigure, and retransmit. I often print out my programs and read from printouts. I believe in the toilet development cycle. On the other hand, you can't test a paper printout of your code and tweak-n-run (or tweak-n-compile). Paper is good because of its permanence; it's bad because of its permanence.
Speaking of publishing houses, I'm writing a book for a publishing house that doesn't even lay out using computers. After the manuscript has been submitted, any changes are extraordinarily costly and time-consuming. That's just awful. But also somewhat beside the point.
I'm talking particularly about collaborative processes, e.g. largescale coding projects, or website development, or even political discussion. There, paper is a powerful broadcast medium, but crappy for feedback response. A lot of it comes down to the whole CVS issue, making sure that everyone is, if you'll pardon the expression, on the same page. That's just too damn hard with paper if you're talking about something that multiple people are contributing to.
If you're the only one working on a project, then paper is awesome. It's nice even to have paper copies of documents. But only copies. If I go to a meeting and meeting notes are handed out, that's pretty cool. But I'd want them also available in electronic form somewhere, preferably with some discussion mechanism attached.
As everything we do becomes more and more "living", the advantages of paper will become fewer. Would you print out the code of some collaborative project to look at, if by the time you came back from the toilet the code would be changed in some way? Everything's going organic, baby. Fortunately, we can expect that paper will become "living" too. (See Diamond Age, e.g.)
I really believe some of the problem with both software development and all tech-work in general is our need for paper. At my office, productivity, efficiency, and reliabilty is harmed by the fact that everyone has their own method of dealing with stuff, a lot of it being the constant print-out of web-pages and other computer docs, because there's no one set-up that's good enough. I know it makes QA a nightmare, because you can't find the specs, or problems aren't reported in a standard way, etc. etc.
Let's face it: the promise of HTML won't be realized until the whole Web is Slashdotized (not Slashdotted!). By that I mean that every page can be personalized--for that, effectively, is what these comment forums allow us to do. By the time this thread is fully played out and moderated, the this thread will be more useful than the original article, because it will allow access to the article, and have insightful and useful comments and links highlighted. Can't really do that with paper.
If you think about it, Slashdot is analagous to a QA system. Speaking about that, it might be cool to make a Slashdot-style interface to Bugzilla. Why shouldn't the whole Web, and by extension, the whole world, have a QA system? (I suspect some might argue that's the idea behind Everything.)
The Web has a ways to go before I can really feel it's cool. Which is why Mozilla could be the most important app ever.
Crap; I didn't nest my parentheses correctly. I deserve to be smacked (but not by downmoderation, please! I can't afford that blow to my karma).
Mean hop distance is relatively easy to measure, as IP addresses are nicely arranged. Measuring clicks takes a bit more work, I feel. A somewhat cryptic document by another guy at caida.org puts the average hop at 14-15. A great link with more info is the
Internet Distance Maps Project.
For more pretty pictures, check out the Internet Mapping Project.
The problem with any of these analogies is that there's no need for a Southwest on the Web, really; it doesn't cost any more to go directly from Boston to Los Angeles on the Web than it does to go through a bunch of other cities. You have to define what the cost is (some type of relvancy index, I suppose) before any analogy would make sense.
That said, other than webrings, Search engines could be your Southwests. They get you to places directly, but they traverse the web themselves through a series of links.
Another possible interpretation: any real surfer is her own Southwest, who, when trying to find a piece of information, hits various hubs, and follows links to the source in a somewhat roundabout but usually successful manner. The analogy's weak.
There's a much closer analogy to Southwest airlines when you look at the Internet than the Web, clearly; then you do have well-defined hubs (the big backbone routers) and carriers, who, admittedly, use each others' networks. It would be as if Southwest could get you from Dallas to Porvoo, Finland by flying you on its planes through its hubs to New York, then getting you on a British Airways plane to London, then a FinnAir plane to Helsinki, then a FinnAir prop to Porvoo. Feel free to extend that analogy...
Exactly. I'd upmoderate you, but my karma blows (see above) and thus can't. I really believe in networked info like the public key servers, CPAN, and other mirrors (e.g. Linux); it's the only way that the little guys can really hope to fight the big guys (corps). Of course, it's not implementable in a lot of cases: hard for there to be independent /. mirrors and such, with current tech; in other cases, copyright makes such mirroring difficult. But the big guys are already getting together to do mirroring for their own crap (see Akamai ); why can't we do it too?
As you can see from checking my user info, I'm at -8. Restarting is certainly one possibility; another would be to write such scintillatingly good posts that they get wildly up-moderated. The problem with that is that you have to write a scintillatingly good comment pretty quickly; posts written after the first hour or two of a /. posting, I think, are largely ignored. More, I'm not a Linux guru, so my posts are generally only of moderate interest to the mean /.er. My user number isn't massively low (15267) but just think what it would be if I made a new account. The horrors.
Is there any way to delete an account? There isn't an obvious one. And it's not mentioned in the FAQ.
Taco talks a bit in the FAQ about there not being Karma tracking implemented. I sure would appreciate it. He even almost admits that it's kind of crappy to only show recent posts but count old posts in your Karma. I really think there should be a statute of limitations on karma...after a while, old posts stop contributing to karma, and it fades. Yes, I know that doesn't really follow what real karma would do, but this ain't really karma.
In case anyone reads this, is there any way at all to search for all the comments written by a user, or at least by myself? I can't find any way that pulls up the old comments, so I can't even find out why my karma is so low. (Note the lovely end run on on-topic-ity (yes, ontopicity is not a word, and if it did, it probably would mean the general study of imagery; but why use the correct word (relevancy) when you can use nested parentheses (in honor of the short story Kappa Nu Nexus (by Avram Davidson (et al.)?)).
I too have a terribly negative karma, mainly due to, I think, the first very few posts I made, which I accidentally reposted as I learned the system, and were thus hypermoderated into the ground as off-topic. Now my karma is so low I'll probably never get out.
The above omment shouldn't have been moderated down. Naming issues have been one of Apple's big concerns over the years, as evidenced by the above list. Jobs was able to ride a free wave of simple naming for a little bit, by replacing all the product line with new products, but now he's running into problems again; 3 different laptops with identical names, the multiple iMac revisions with no clear name differential, etc. Product diversification is necessary to growth, but is confusing for consumers.
Cripes! Don't buy from Barnes & Nobles, the
Walmart of the book world. Support local booksellers (see BookWeb.org, the American Booksellers Association site) and libraries. An organization of independent booksellers serves effectively the same purposes and goals as Slashdot: peer equivalency, idea exchange, and independence.
This is as good a time as any to debut my Corporate Web site at http://www.kband.com/corporate/corporat e.pl.
I've been recently tracking Cisco , so it's got a very full listing of the 40 acquisitions Cisco has made. The WSJ explicates that the size of the deal is based on the valuation of similar companies that have recently IPO'd, namely Juniper, popularly described as a Cisco-killer. Juniper's at $11 bil.
If anyone wants to discuss Cisco with me in private, please e-mail me, as I'm working on a book on the company.
Should /. end its Amazon partnership? /. poll.
I know revenue streams are cool, but
Barnes&Noble might be a better choice now.
I think this should be made a
That's craft more than art. Art is generally morem time
/-$k*$k+int((($p=$b)+50)/132*$n)*$k]=$;):($_=$#
than cleverness and determination, as that project
certainly exhibited. Some of the Obfuscated Perl
Contest code are closer to art (utter inscrutability
helps, IMHO); for example:
*_=\$#;$/=q#(.)#;$#=10;$^X=~s|.*/||;$\=chr;$#=g
$#;substr($#,$^F#^F*$^F**$^F-1)=al;s$\$/( )\$/\$/$e\
$2\u\$^X\$2\$3o\$1r$ && print time
or
$k=100,$_=P,$n=200;print while(($z++?($_="",$z):
($_.="6\r$n $k $n "))0)*sin(log abs $p-5),$#[int(($l=$a)-70)
[$*++==$k*$n?exit:$*]?O0h:God))
On a side note, I learned Pig Latin ended -ay,
not -a. Hmm. Maybe a continental question?
Check the bug database. If it's not in there, then add it. Bugzilla is too cool.
My assumption is that these rumors are just that. For the last few years and especially since Jobs signed on, sale rumors surface every few months. People even read the Microsoft investment (which the DOJ trial revealed was primarily a payoff to bury patent disputes) as indication that they wanted to buy, when it was a token payment in terms of a percentage of Apple stock. Because Jobs in his role as Pixar CEO is in bed with Disney, they'll always be mentioned in buy-out rumors.
Similarly, his friendship with Oracle CEO Ellison (who's on the Apple board) means that they'll be mentioned.
I don't believe the stockholders want Apple to be sold. ZDNet is just engaging in another round of Apple-bashing, based on whisperings of actual alliances and deals to come with other big players.
Objection, your honor.
YM subjective.
I have to agree with your statements. Frankly, it's very hard for a SF movie to impress, especially in the "Yeah, that's what this SF concept is all about" way. SF literature is so much more varied, dense, and complex that most SF movies can only capture the "Wow" of SF.
The Matrix was a very cool movie, but not a great SF movie. It was a great "comic book" movie. But again, as said above, The Matrix isn't uniquely special in the pantheon of movies. It's kind of the I.M. Pei of action movies -- it'll get the credit and looks good, but is built upon the work of others who noone outside of aficionados have heard of.
I have hopes that the 13th Floor, based upon a novel by a brilliant SF writer Daniel Galouye,
delivers on the promise of a great VR film. But we've been missing perhaps the greatest VR film of all time in our discussion, TRON!!!
I think he means "Flame", not Flamebait. It's certainly true that Flamebait and Troll are nearly identical in meaning.
Not so! There are certainly many cases where a critical review of an awful, awful book or movie is worth reading, while reading or viewing the source of the response would probably cause brain damage. However, those fighting the post-modernist second-hand phenomenon (what's the SF story that revolves around that point?) would disagree.
The reasons for moderations certainly give more of an idea of the moderation history. For example, the above post, when I responded to it (right now) had a score of 2 for Redundancy, so I know it was marked _down_ to a 2. I'm assuming that auto-moderation is still extant, so either smithdog has a high default score, or there's a moderation battle going on over his post. My opinion on /. moderation remains the same: the fewer controls on moderation, I think, the better. The recursivity of a tightly regulated moderation mechanism is too hard for my brain to parse intelligently, however. Reminiscent of Hofstadter's GOD (Genie over Djinn).
That certainly makes more sense. I hope also that this will encourage more moderators to take action. I would like there to be no caps on moderation; it'd be interesting to see how high (and low) posts would get moderated. Imagine what the score would be on "In the Beginning..." by Stephenson would be if that were a post! Should the stories themselves be moderated? That'd be interesting. Probably unnecessary, but potentially amusing.