Thank You! What A TWIT! The 360 was most definitely NOT a 'minicomputer'. It was a real firebreathing ECL (emitter-coupled-logic for the uninformed) monster of it's time! The printers attached to those buggers could barf up well over 1000 *lines per minute* at 132 columns! ECL is *STILL* the fastest logic family in existence, with propagation times in the single and sub digit *picoseconds*! And it's coming back! I had the opportunity as a kid to cobble together a very cpu intensive brute force prime program (didn't know of the sieve yet) for 0-10000 in fortran IV , ran it on a 360/65 with a whopping 512k (yes K!) of core and it finished in a time of milliseconds, including the compile. Don't EVEN try to diss those old mainframes! They ROCKED!
We all seem to assume that since objects are shifted red in spectrum, that they MUST be moving away! HUH? How about this? How about a universe so huge that its collective mass at a distance produces a black SPHERE that makes everything near one seem to be sucked away into a void? Mathematics don't disargue a model like this. Run the numbers. Try it. More sane than entropy is, without a doubt.
Excellent point about Paul Tsongas (who,alas, really *did* have health problems) that feeds directly into this discussion. In '92 I had the 'privilege' of listening to Hillary be interviewed on a Chicago radio talk show (WLS r00lz!) wherein she proceeded to distort, twist, and outright lie about the good Mr. Tsongas' positions, so as to cast him some sort of extremist/not/to/be/trusted. Her oily weaseliness, coupled with her husband's overall used car salesman persona, soured me on the Clintons right then and there. History has since proven those intuitions correct. AlGore gives off those selfsame weasel radiations on a non-stop basis. The interview above is abject proof. Trust your instincts on this one, guys. If you *must* choose a democrat, go bradley. At least he's real, agreement or not. As to the 'publicans... sheesh... I dunno... Maybeeee... Alan Keyes is a nut, but he's an HONEST nut!?!?! With HONESTLY held convictions?!?! Help me here...
Dude, serious engineers decry fly-by wire for everything but military aircraft, where losing a few is a given. Not an option for civilian aircraft, where hundreds could die. Boeing is being very rational and conservative if they are (rightly) maintaining hydraulic control as primary. Ever hear of *bugs*, my friend? The 777, I don't know about. You may be right there. If so, 'DOH!' As for airframes, I grant you that. (As well as british dominance in race engine building. HUH? 'wretched' a term I once saw describing british auto reliability. Whoda thunkit?) But Europe != france! My beef with france is their notoriously Xenophobic, NIH attitude about just about everything. Hell, they actually have what amounts to a ministry of cultural purity! You don't grow intellectually thinking like that. As a person, or as a nation.
I don't mean to bash the french, but... If the quality of their automobiles (internationally regarded as hideous crap eclipsed only by the former eastern bloc) is any indication of their engineering acumen, perhaps the potential client for the aforementioned contract made a *very* smart decision by going Boeing. (ooh! a pun!)
To give you an idea how open the perl world is, some joker posted the entire CD in tar.gz form (learning perl; camel book; cookbook, yada yada) to comp.lang.perl.misc a few weeks ago. 100 consecutive 64k posts. I HAD to download it 'cause I 'suck' my groups into INN. It WAS complete! The only folks who said a word about it, that I detected, were a couple of lurkers and those whining (justifiably) about bandwidth. Christiansen and Schwartz, whose work had just been offered up to the globe, and lurk and post to the group, never objected! (to my knowledge) Classy guys, those perloid fellas!
Wow! If you're right, the cpu allocation in linux is pretty primitive. I have a scary alternative idea, though... How about some of us set about crafting a neural or fuzzy scheduler? Neural nets have have an incredible way of optimising to a problem. Speed might be difficult at first, but a simple checksum or crc pattern stream might provide enough clue to a neural net to allow it to balance loads in a meaningful way. Cached past patterns could be used for future prognostications... I can guarantee you one thing: someone will try this strategy, at some point. Might as well be us!
I am TOTALLY with you on this. The universe is NOT chaotic, it's just orderly on a gigantic scale. We as humans seem to think that this huge thing is all about US. We get confused, so we assume the universe is confused also. How vain. This universe is causal. Period. It's just SO BIG that it's causality isn't easily visible. Chaos DOES exist. Chaos is NOT random. It's just excruciatingly orderly at a microfine level that most of us cannot see. Randomness does NOT exist. It's a fantasy that wannabe gurus create for themselves.
Dr Lederman; I picked up your book, "The God Particle" recently, and am enjoying it immensely. Seeing this q&a session on slashdot, I thought I would ask a question that my buddies and I have tossed about at cocktail parties for the last 20 years, at least. You might have a clue or two as to whether we're total fools, or inspired thinkers. My query is thus: Is it possible that, if the universe does not result from a big bang scenario, but is instead a steady state mechanism, that the background radiation attributed to Koop, et al , and Hubbel expansion, be explained by a virtual infinitude of mass at great distances. IE that our observed red shift for distant objects could be relativistic in nature, and NOT the result of movement? This would seem to indicate that at great distances, our universe, from our observational location, would bend toward spherical singularity. Black sphere, if you will. Not too difficult a model to visualise. Gives 'no matter where you go, there you are' a whole new meaning! I'm no cosmologist (I only know enough to make myself look stupid) But I've never seen this idea posited anywhere, and it seems rather obvious to me as some thing to at least be examined somewhat. It's clean, simple, and could explain quite a bit. Am I an idiot?
I've got a goofy pet hypothesis to explain A an B's behaviour: they're same particle, but their 3d projection is a tad out of whack; not parallel with our 'normal' universe. Since their 'core' existence isn't *here* right now, all we see is the behaviour of the parent particle's constituent components. Hey, I said it was a goofy hypothesis!
It's a theoretical (?) construct. A bottle with no inside or outside. Both are the same. Very useful idea for cosmology and physics. Reflects reality rather well for certain situations.
I'm a huge fan of cliff's; saw him recently on cspan debating some big time computer writer on the merits of the web. He was ALL over the place! Dancing atop the podium, wild gesticulation, pure stoll. He's right about the net/web not being a particularly good place to live one's life. Wetware sytems need intimate contact with other wetware systems to flourish and grow. Not to mention propagate... 8-p The site is an excellent read, too. A total hoot!
Doesn't the claim of inclusion of patented technology in a software product elevate that product from mere 'publication' to the status of 'mechanism', and bring down all of the various liability scrutiny that any other 'machine' would fall under?
GPL software uses no such spurious patent claims and would thus be immune.
I wonder if this liability argument could be brought to bear in regard to the whole software patent controversy. It would seem that if I claim patent protection for my software, the I MUST assume consequential and incidental liability for it's failure, since, by having patented it, it's no longer *merely* software. It's a full blown *product* like a toaster or an automobile. If it fails, I should then be liable for any damages or losses such failure causes. If I were in charge of risk assessment for a large software concern, the LAST thing I would want would be a bunch of patents hanging about making 'claims' about our products that then could be used against us later in court. We'd go down in flames, fueled in part by our own public documents and hubris. IANAL, but I've seen legal arguments like this hold a lot of water in the past. Critiques of my reasoning are welcomed.
The whole smell of this reminds me of something I read that spoke of french landowners in the 16th or 17th centuries attemting to tax the WIND that blew over their land onto peasant provinces. recently saw something on PBS that referred to a 'window tax' that taxed the very light that flowed into one's abode. As a result, very few buildings in ?london? featured windows. (see the irony?) We've slid back into those days, again, methinks. Charged a fee for our own thoughts and their fruits. This is obscene. We must arrest it's spread. I advise all of you to (not a good idea, I know) to FLAME Jeff Bezos at every opportunity you can. If he's on a radio talk show, call up, get on and invite him to explain his lame patent, and why it's non-obvious. Then challenge him mercilessly. Blow off his politico shit, and then hit him again. And again. And again. Remind him, and SHAME him (cool!) with the fact that the internet COULD NOT RUN without FREE software. Ask him when he's going to contribute back to the community that made his fortune possible. Be a gadfly. Never relent! I know I never will! I KNEW he was a weasel the very first time I saw his 'face'.
He tries too hard because he doesn't know his audience well enough to realise that they ARE a clicque! I hate clicques, and I'm very close to bailing on./ . The movers and shakers of the open source movement are very regularly pissed upon here. Noone here seems to want to WORK! I am SO disappointed. Katz tries to bridge cultures, and I think he succeeds, brilliantly. He has courage that most of you AC pussies don't. He at least attaches his name to whatever he writes. (no offense to you).
What most of the pussies who slam Katz seldom, if ever, think about is that they are dissing an admitted outsider while they lounge around as a comfy, self elected member of an exclusive (must be, in order to be hip) CLICQUE. You have become that which you despise, my brothers. When I was in school, clicque members were the objects of my contempt. They still are. I just love this. Alleged, wannabe geeks eating their own. True geeks delight in your collective folly. Katxz is as much a True Geek as anyone here. He's finding his way. In fact, he's BETTER! He was not Born To It, via an intellectual family background. He's attempting a total personal shift of his paradigm, values and all. As one who has traversed this path since birth, I ASSURE you that you don't attempt it for cynical profit. Breaking away from one's past in a meaningful way for yourself is truly agonising. Apparently none of the wusses attacking Katz have ever made such a change. I pity them.
I'm only a cgi / db / perl novice compared to some of the folks here, but it seems to me we could whip up a real frenzy of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Amazon's system. I know that, I, for one, would NEVER use it. What is happening here is that a well-known site is setting and retrieving a cookie (plain-text, if I'm not mistaken, regardless of any session encryption involved) on the shopper's machine. Now, I'm no rocket scientist, but I can easily envision a sniffer daemon running on the user's machine that could conceivably nab a credit card number as a specific *consequence* of amazon's system. That would open amazon up to a metric shitload of lawsuits from irate consumers. What we actually have here is a business model that works *against* the best interests of amazon's customers, and the stockholders of the originator of the patent, and *for* the interests of internet scammeisters. Major security f**k up. Get my drift? Class action, anyone?
I hate to keep reiterating myself on this subject and am flatly amazed at the lack of fervor on the topic, but here goes yet again... Three words... Geek's Day Off.. Pick a day. All self styled geeks stay home that day. Turn off your pager. Take your phone services off hook. Forget about email. 24 hrs. of no geeks available anywhere. The results would be truly spectacular. Let these bozos know who's REALLY boss. We're benign, most of the time, but a collection of severely nasty m****r f****rs when we're riled. GDO would make Y2K look like a harmless glitch. Atlas shrugs. You get the picture. I'd bet even microsofties would care enough to participate.
This isn't so much a response to the previous post as it is a response for me to find to remind me of what the hell I was thinking this fragile night. The above post offends me in an EXTREMELY deep way. I will not even address this person directly, although I should. This (parent) post is the product of fear. (Vanity can work for us here. Perhaps he'll returneth to his own vomit) I am absolutely certain that the experiences he describes (vaguely) are his own. He has put his fate in the hands of OTHERS. For geeks, this is failure. Geeks are proto-warriors. We should comport ourselves as such. If it was not our failure, then the original source of that failure must either be known, or educated. Failing that, cast them back into the roiling pit. If you are sufficiently convinced of your righteousness, you will be believed. SEE: I-CHING.
I know my comment to the parent post might inflame a bit of controversy, but here goes... The reason the 'jive' translations, or, for that matter, the 'redneck' translations resonate is because they cater to a stereotype. The stereotype itself, and its derivation is the big problem in these discussions. I posit that stereotypes exist because, at some level, they are *true*. They are not true for an aggregate population of any ethno/religious/political category in toto but they *are* true, often, for the loudest, and most visible members of those populations. This issue has been explored in depth by numerous serious sociology type persons (no, I don't have citations easily at hand), and the plain truth is that Stereotypes fairly accurately predict the overall experience a non member of a group might have with that group. Go to new york. They're testy. Go to France. They're rude. Go to Harlem (this might have changed). Get your car stripped. Different groups have different rules. They understand, internally, where and where not to go within their world. Outsiders see the dynamics more clearly afterwards , because they're 'martians' in that realm. They only see the surface, though. Hence stereotypes. Stereotypes aren't necessarily bad. They can provide a group with some much needed feedback on how they are performing. Stereotyped peoples (I'm white, and stereotyped as well) should either pay much more attention to why they are seen in a particular way, or cease complaining about those assessments that piss them off. One more thing, and this is to schmaltz, personally. If you are so fscking afraid of freedom that you cannot tolerate dissenting voices, I heartily encourage you to seek ye a totalitarian paradise. Try Iran. Or PRC. Afghanistan. I am in no way obliged to be 'sensitive' to anyone's neurotic or psychotic delusions. They must handle them for themselves. I've been there. I know how it has to work.
I really should have said much more in my original post. I'm pretty good at spotting bad code and improving it. The slashdot source, for example, that I've seen so far contains tons of unhandled error situations, call overhead, etc, etc, etc. I was originally thinking of my experiences in the mid 80's porting game code, some of it written in (ack!) basic. The offending author steadfastly refused to document anything he did. He wrote code thet was compiled using a p-code c64 compiler (blitz) and I was expected to move it over to a native code compiler on the apple (einstein). P-code is compact. Native is large. Get the picture? What would *you* do? I fired up Glen Bredon's Sourceror and disassembled the blitz runtime library and massaged it to run on the apple. It all worked, in the end. his code ran on the apple, unmodified. Never published, though. Game was ultimately lame. Sigh...
Slashdot Mirror
Thank You!
What A TWIT!
The 360 was most definitely NOT a 'minicomputer'. It was a real firebreathing ECL (emitter-coupled-logic for the uninformed) monster of it's time! The printers attached to those buggers could barf up well over 1000 *lines per minute* at 132 columns!
ECL is *STILL* the fastest logic family in existence, with propagation times in the single and sub digit *picoseconds*! And it's coming back!
I had the opportunity as a kid to cobble together a very cpu intensive brute force prime program (didn't know of the sieve yet) for 0-10000 in fortran IV , ran it on a 360/65 with a whopping 512k (yes K!) of core and it finished in a time of milliseconds, including the compile.
Don't EVEN try to diss those old mainframes! They ROCKED!
We all seem to assume that since objects are shifted red in spectrum, that they MUST be moving away!
HUH?
How about this?
How about a universe so huge that its collective mass at a distance produces a black SPHERE that makes everything near one seem to be sucked away into a void? Mathematics don't disargue a model like this.
Run the numbers. Try it.
More sane than entropy is, without a doubt.
Excellent point about Paul Tsongas (who,alas, really *did* have health problems) that feeds directly into this discussion.
In '92 I had the 'privilege' of listening to Hillary be interviewed on a Chicago radio talk show (WLS r00lz!) wherein she proceeded to distort, twist, and outright lie about the good Mr. Tsongas' positions, so as to cast him some sort of extremist/not/to/be/trusted.
Her oily weaseliness, coupled with her husband's overall used car salesman persona, soured me on the Clintons right then and there. History has since proven those intuitions correct.
AlGore gives off those selfsame weasel radiations on a non-stop basis. The interview above is abject proof. Trust your instincts on this one, guys. If you *must* choose a democrat, go bradley. At least he's real, agreement or not.
As to the 'publicans... sheesh... I dunno... Maybeeee... Alan Keyes is a nut, but he's an HONEST nut!?!?! With HONESTLY held convictions?!?!
Help me here...
Dude, serious engineers decry fly-by wire for everything but military aircraft, where losing a few is a given. Not an option for civilian aircraft, where hundreds could die. Boeing is being very rational and conservative if they are (rightly) maintaining hydraulic control as primary. Ever hear of *bugs*, my friend?
The 777, I don't know about. You may be right there. If so, 'DOH!'
As for airframes, I grant you that. (As well as british dominance in race engine building. HUH? 'wretched' a term I once saw describing british auto reliability. Whoda thunkit?) But Europe != france!
My beef with france is their notoriously Xenophobic, NIH attitude about just about everything. Hell, they actually have what amounts to a ministry of cultural purity!
You don't grow intellectually thinking like that. As a person, or as a nation.
I don't mean to bash the french, but...
If the quality of their automobiles (internationally regarded as hideous crap eclipsed only by the former eastern bloc) is any indication of their engineering acumen, perhaps the potential client for the aforementioned contract made a *very* smart decision by going Boeing. (ooh! a pun!)
To give you an idea how open the perl world is, some joker posted the entire CD in tar.gz form (learning perl; camel book; cookbook, yada yada) to comp.lang.perl.misc a few weeks ago. 100 consecutive 64k posts. I HAD to download it 'cause I 'suck' my groups into INN. It WAS complete! The only folks who said a word about it, that I detected, were a couple of lurkers and those whining (justifiably) about bandwidth.
Christiansen and Schwartz, whose work had just been offered up to the globe, and lurk and post to the group, never objected! (to my knowledge)
Classy guys, those perloid fellas!
Wow! If you're right, the cpu allocation in linux is pretty primitive. I have a scary alternative idea, though...
How about some of us set about crafting a neural or fuzzy scheduler? Neural nets have have an incredible way of optimising to a problem. Speed might be difficult at first, but a simple checksum or crc pattern stream might provide enough clue to a neural net to allow it to balance loads in a meaningful way. Cached past patterns could be used for future prognostications...
I can guarantee you one thing: someone will try this strategy, at some point. Might as well be us!
I am TOTALLY with you on this. The universe is NOT chaotic, it's just orderly on a gigantic scale.
We as humans seem to think that this huge thing is all about US. We get confused, so we assume the universe is confused also.
How vain.
This universe is causal. Period. It's just SO BIG that it's causality isn't easily visible.
Chaos DOES exist. Chaos is NOT random. It's just excruciatingly orderly at a microfine level that most of us cannot see.
Randomness does NOT exist. It's a fantasy that wannabe gurus create for themselves.
Dr Lederman;
I picked up your book, "The God Particle" recently, and am enjoying it immensely.
Seeing this q&a session on slashdot, I thought I would ask a question that my buddies and I have tossed about at cocktail parties for the last 20 years, at least. You might have a clue or two as to whether we're total fools, or inspired thinkers.
My query is thus:
Is it possible that, if the universe does not result from a big bang scenario, but is instead a steady state mechanism, that the background radiation attributed to Koop, et al , and Hubbel expansion, be explained by a virtual infinitude of mass at great distances. IE that our observed red shift for distant objects could be relativistic in nature, and NOT the result of movement?
This would seem to indicate that at great distances, our universe, from our observational location, would bend toward spherical singularity. Black sphere, if you will. Not too difficult a model to visualise. Gives 'no matter where you go, there you are' a whole new meaning!
I'm no cosmologist (I only know enough to make myself look stupid) But I've never seen this idea posited anywhere, and it seems rather obvious to me as some thing to at least be examined somewhat. It's clean, simple, and could explain quite a bit.
Am I an idiot?
I've got a goofy pet hypothesis to explain A an B's behaviour: they're same particle, but their 3d projection is a tad out of whack; not parallel with our 'normal' universe. Since their 'core' existence isn't *here* right now, all we see is the behaviour of the parent particle's constituent components.
Hey, I said it was a goofy hypothesis!
Cliff rocks!
Marketing Klein bottles is so... HIM!
Finally! Someone gets the joke!
It's a theoretical (?) construct.
A bottle with no inside or outside. Both are the same.
Very useful idea for cosmology and physics.
Reflects reality rather well for certain situations.
I found that bit hilarious myself. Tickled me mauve! You are not alone.
We're everywhere!
I'm a huge fan of cliff's; saw him recently on cspan debating some big time computer writer on the merits of the web. He was ALL over the place! Dancing atop the podium, wild gesticulation, pure stoll.
He's right about the net/web not being a particularly good place to live one's life. Wetware sytems need intimate contact with other wetware systems to flourish and grow.
Not to mention propagate... 8-p
The site is an excellent read, too. A total hoot!
Something just dawned on me.
Doesn't the claim of inclusion of patented technology in a software product elevate that product from mere 'publication' to the status of 'mechanism', and bring down all of the various liability scrutiny that any other 'machine' would fall under?
GPL software uses no such spurious patent claims and would thus be immune.
I wonder if this liability argument could be brought to bear in regard to the whole software patent controversy. It would seem that if I claim patent protection for my software, the I MUST assume consequential and incidental liability for it's failure, since, by having patented it, it's no longer *merely* software. It's a full blown *product* like a toaster or an automobile.
If it fails, I should then be liable for any damages or losses such failure causes.
If I were in charge of risk assessment for a large software concern, the LAST thing I would want would be a bunch of patents hanging about making 'claims' about our products that then could be used against us later in court. We'd go down in flames, fueled in part by our own public documents and hubris.
IANAL, but I've seen legal arguments like this hold a lot of water in the past.
Critiques of my reasoning are welcomed.
The whole smell of this reminds me of something I read that spoke of french landowners in the 16th or 17th centuries attemting to tax the WIND that blew over their land onto peasant provinces. recently saw something on PBS that referred to a 'window tax' that taxed the very light that flowed into one's abode. As a result, very few buildings in ?london? featured windows. (see the irony?)
We've slid back into those days, again, methinks. Charged a fee for our own thoughts and their fruits. This is obscene. We must arrest it's spread.
I advise all of you to (not a good idea, I know) to FLAME Jeff Bezos at every opportunity you can. If he's on a radio talk show, call up, get on and invite him to explain his lame patent, and why it's non-obvious. Then challenge him mercilessly. Blow off his politico shit, and then hit him again. And again. And again.
Remind him, and SHAME him (cool!) with the fact that the internet COULD NOT RUN without FREE software.
Ask him when he's going to contribute back to the community that made his fortune possible.
Be a gadfly. Never relent!
I know I never will!
I KNEW he was a weasel the very first time I saw his 'face'.
He tries too hard because he doesn't know his audience well enough to realise that they ARE a clicque! ./ .
I hate clicques, and I'm very close to bailing on
The movers and shakers of the open source movement are very regularly pissed upon here. Noone here seems to want to WORK!
I am SO disappointed.
Katz tries to bridge cultures, and I think he succeeds, brilliantly.
He has courage that most of you AC pussies don't. He at least attaches his name to whatever he writes. (no offense to you).
What most of the pussies who slam Katz seldom, if ever, think about is that they are dissing an admitted outsider while they lounge around as a comfy, self elected member of an exclusive (must be, in order to be hip) CLICQUE.
You have become that which you despise, my brothers.
When I was in school, clicque members were the objects of my contempt. They still are.
I just love this. Alleged, wannabe geeks eating their own.
True geeks delight in your collective folly. Katxz is as much a True Geek as anyone here. He's finding his way.
In fact, he's BETTER! He was not Born To It, via an intellectual family background.
He's attempting a total personal shift of his paradigm, values and all.
As one who has traversed this path since birth, I ASSURE you that you don't attempt it for cynical profit. Breaking away from one's past in a meaningful way for yourself is truly agonising.
Apparently none of the wusses attacking Katz have ever made such a change.
I pity them.
I'm only a cgi / db / perl novice compared to some of the folks here, but it seems to me we could whip up a real frenzy of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Amazon's system.
I know that, I, for one, would NEVER use it.
What is happening here is that a well-known site is setting and retrieving a cookie (plain-text, if I'm not mistaken, regardless of any session encryption involved) on the shopper's machine.
Now, I'm no rocket scientist, but I can easily envision a sniffer daemon running on the user's machine that could conceivably nab a credit card number as a specific *consequence* of amazon's system. That would open amazon up to a metric shitload of lawsuits from irate consumers.
What we actually have here is a business model that works *against* the best interests of amazon's customers, and the stockholders of the originator of the patent, and *for* the interests of internet scammeisters.
Major security f**k up.
Get my drift?
Class action, anyone?
I hate to keep reiterating myself on this subject and am flatly amazed at the lack of fervor on the topic, but here goes yet again...
Three words...
Geek's Day Off..
Pick a day. All self styled geeks stay home that day. Turn off your pager. Take your phone services off hook. Forget about email. 24 hrs. of no geeks available anywhere.
The results would be truly spectacular.
Let these bozos know who's REALLY boss. We're benign, most of the time, but a collection of severely nasty m****r f****rs when we're riled. GDO would make Y2K look like a harmless glitch.
Atlas shrugs. You get the picture.
I'd bet even microsofties would care enough to participate.
This isn't so much a response to the previous post as it is a response for me to find to remind me of what the hell I was thinking this fragile night.
The above post offends me in an EXTREMELY deep way.
I will not even address this person directly, although I should.
This (parent) post is the product of fear. (Vanity can work for us here. Perhaps he'll returneth to his own vomit)
I am absolutely certain that the experiences he describes (vaguely) are his own.
He has put his fate in the hands of OTHERS. For geeks, this is failure. Geeks are proto-warriors.
We should comport ourselves as such. If it was not our failure, then the original source of that failure must either be known, or educated.
Failing that, cast them back into the roiling pit.
If you are sufficiently convinced of your righteousness, you will be believed.
SEE: I-CHING.
I am NOT playing here, people...
I know my comment to the parent post might inflame a bit of controversy, but here goes...
The reason the 'jive' translations, or, for that matter, the 'redneck' translations resonate is because they cater to a stereotype. The stereotype itself, and its derivation is the big problem in these discussions.
I posit that stereotypes exist because, at some level, they are *true*.
They are not true for an aggregate population of any ethno/religious/political category in toto but they *are* true, often, for the loudest, and most visible members of those populations.
This issue has been explored in depth by numerous serious sociology type persons (no, I don't have citations easily at hand), and the plain truth is that Stereotypes fairly accurately predict the overall experience a non member of a group might have with that group.
Go to new york. They're testy.
Go to France. They're rude.
Go to Harlem (this might have changed). Get your car stripped.
Different groups have different rules. They understand, internally, where and where not to go within their world. Outsiders see the dynamics more clearly afterwards , because they're 'martians' in that realm. They only see the surface, though.
Hence stereotypes.
Stereotypes aren't necessarily bad. They can provide a group with some much needed feedback on how they are performing.
Stereotyped peoples (I'm white, and stereotyped as well) should either pay much more attention to why they are seen in a particular way, or cease complaining about those assessments that piss them off.
One more thing, and this is to schmaltz, personally.
If you are so fscking afraid of freedom that you cannot tolerate dissenting voices, I heartily encourage you to seek ye a totalitarian paradise. Try Iran. Or PRC. Afghanistan.
I am in no way obliged to be 'sensitive' to anyone's neurotic or psychotic delusions. They must handle them for themselves. I've been there. I know how it has to work.
Good point.
I really should have said much more in my original post.
I'm pretty good at spotting bad code and improving it. The slashdot source, for example, that I've seen so far contains tons of unhandled error situations, call overhead, etc, etc, etc.
I was originally thinking of my experiences in the mid 80's porting game code, some of it written in (ack!) basic. The offending author steadfastly refused to document anything he did. He wrote code thet was compiled using a p-code c64 compiler (blitz) and I was expected to move it over to a native code compiler on the apple (einstein).
P-code is compact. Native is large. Get the picture?
What would *you* do?
I fired up Glen Bredon's Sourceror and disassembled the blitz runtime library and massaged it to run on the apple.
It all worked, in the end. his code ran on the apple, unmodified.
Never published, though. Game was ultimately lame.
Sigh...