You disgust me. You are the kind of person who looks that the Sistine Chapel ceiling and sees wasted effort that could have been put into building homes for the poor. You are the kind of bastard that burned Alexandria's library, fearful and ignorant of the knowledge contained within.
Look!! Ayn Rand has set up a Slashdot account! For reasons I can only speculate on, the infallible Ms. Rand has named herself "Jabberwocky" and signs her posts "Evan". This must be part of some grand scheme to end collectivism everywhere, just like when Francisco D'Anconia started blowing up his own copper mines!
The article identified six types of cheating, but completely failed to identify any reasonable solution for the first one: reflex augmentation.
It is not terribly difficult to write a script to execute commands without the use of the mouse. In Quake 2, the only real effect was that some people had godlike aim - and this was usually pretty easy to spot.
But consider what reflex augmentation could do in Warcraft 2, for example. One could write a script that caused the "mouse" to "click" on your Town Hall and Barracks, automatically creating peons and ogres at a set rate, while you controlled everything else.
Would this even be possible to spot?? From the server side, it would just look like someone had insanely good reflexes. And, of course, it would be easy to tone it down just a little - occasionally have your script "mis-click" just to the left of the town hall, put in tiny delays, etc.
It seems to me that the only way to prevent reflex augmentation would be to force the player to play on someone else's computer with a very restrictive account... any thoughts?
Here is a surefire way to ensure that the third installment is posted.
1) Have CmdrTaco pay $1 for the text. He has an actual job, so he can probably afford it.
2) Have Jon Katz post the entire novel as a Slashdot article. It has to be Katz because a 90-page post would look suspicious if it were any other author.
3) Tie all the trolls' machines together in a gigantic beowulf cluster and launch a massive brute force DoS against King's website.
Total downloads: 1. Total payments: 1. Honesty rating: 100%.
Well, I wouldn't say that text-based chat is the future of communications.
Right now, I'm wondering a few things. 1) Does the IRC protocol lend itself--at all--to the inclusion of video conferencing? 2) How easy is it to encrypt audio/video signals? I can't imagine it would be much harder than encrypting text, but in a medium where time-delays are unacceptable, there would have to be a pretty tight algorithm for encoding/decoding.
Of course, when speaking with someone whose first language is not your own, it's often easier to read your in broken, screwy form than to understand it when you add an accent that is incomprehensible to you.
Did you notice how hard I tried not to use the word "English" in that sentence?
In conclusion, encrypted video conferencing would be a good step toward solid, private communication, but sometimes it would be even more difficult to understand than plain text.
If Scour looses this one, we're well beyond the time for elections and judicial appeal. That would be time for guns and subversion.
"This year, it's the ballot or the bullet! The ballot or the bullet! It's either going to be the ballot or the bullet! You're going to have to choose - will it be the ballot or the bullet? The ballot or the bullet. It's going to be the ballet or the bullet." --Malcolm X
P.S. It's spelled "loses". When you use two o's, you get "loose". Thus, if I refer to you as a "loser", I am implying that you are "one who loses"; if I refer to you as "looser", I am implying that one or more of your orifices are less tight than the average heterosexual male.
Also, after careful reading, it should be clear that the parent post is not flamebait, and this is.
I went ahead and read the message board there. None of the posters actually had any information about Nvidia's hijinx - they were just reacting to an ideology they found distasteful. People like to react - hence, the popularity of trolls.
I sometimes wonder if I could get Slashdotted by putting up a web page about how Microsoft sued me for claiming that all MCSEs were weenies. I don't think it would be unlikely. Slashdot, like the National Enquirer, doesn't exactly do extensive checking-up on its sources.
It's more like the small farmer turning his money-losing farm into a self-supporting commune instead of looking for a big agribusiness conglomerate to buy him out.
Except, in this case, the developers are abandoning their project. If you read the article, it claims that the reason for open-sourcing the product was that "it wasn't exactly the kind of thing you could unload in a going-out-of-business sale."
It's more like a farmer who hasn't had any bids from big agribusiness conglomerates finally sticking up a sign that says "Farm here if you want", and moving to Vegas to become a Blackjack dealer.
Still, the abandonware beachhead isn't a great moral victory for OS. It's kind of like fighting World War 2 by waiting for the Nazis to get fed up with the snootiness of the French and decide they didn't want the country anyway.
I'd agree with Kyle that strongarming reviews is not a very ethical practice.
However, while his site blasted Nvidia for doing just that, I didn't see any kind of proof, or even evidence, that it had been going on. All there were were links to what we were assured was formerly an open letter blasting Nvidia for the practice. When I visited those links, all I found was a new open letter essentially apologizing to Nvidia for making invalid claims.
As it stands right now, I don't think it's improbable that Nvidia found a bad review, emailed their stance (i.e. "There are some misleading things with this article; our product is actually good") and that their letter was misinterpreted by some nervous web-journalist as a "cease and desist" letter.
In conclusion, I'm going to have to see much more compelling proof to get angry.
That article was not easy to read. For a while, I kept thinking, "Wait a minute.. this is about open source software... not open source telephony." I mean, the focus of the article was some ten-year-old abandonware made by a company that was going out of business. That sort of grudging "Fine, we're out of business, we'll open the damn thing" mentality is good for the Open Source movement, but it isn't exactly a triumph of ideology.
Anyway, I guess the article in question is more about "internet voice conferencing" than anything else - something that's been around for quite a while, but apparently with ugly time delays. I didn't actually read anything that claimed that this open-source conferencer solved the problem, but I guess the idea is that eventually, we'll solve the problem. And by "we", I don't mean "me", so don't bother asking me for it.
In conclusion, this is a Good Thing, but not exactly earth-shattering.
Now if this was a secular institution with no pretense of moral job requirements then it might be another issue.
Well, I work in a secular institution with no pretense of moral job requirements. We had a guy who was downloading a lot of porn a couple years ago. We went to the guy, talked to him, and asked him to put it on one of the servers in the NOC.
Harvard is almost like a foreign country to most of us - these people have so little in common with average Americans that they probably are more removed from us than, say, the average Brit or Australian. After all, the media has somewhat homogenized culture all throughout the western world, but huge chunks of inherited money seem to carry their own culture.
Similarly, hard-core Christianity is also a little confusing to me. I'm sure if this guy had been a professor at BYU, he would have been fired for drinking coffee. All I can say is that you should think long and hard about working for a Christian. Unless there's some advantage I'm overlooking in having religion tied into your job security, it's better to separate church and work.
Yes, I realize that PERL was written in C. I also realize that nasm (the assembly compiler) was written in C, and that C itself was written in C.
Still, Slashdot did post a "benchmark comparison" study a couple months ago, which found that text parsing "as written by experienced, competent programmers" in C didn't hold up against Perl's text parsing.
I agree that it's a little weird to benchmark something against its parent. Maybe what they meant is "PERL handles text better than YOU."
Another reason Perl holds the web together is that even though its benchmarks suck for number-crunching, it out-performs both Java and C (Yes, C, and I found that unusual) when it comes to parsing text. In fact, if I remember the "Benchmark" story on Slashdot from a couple months ago, Perl was six times faster than Java for text-based stuff.
And since the web's content is so heavily text-based (because plain text is a universal standard, HTML is text-based, and because most pages' content is text), it's easy to see why PERL dominates.
Different tools for different jobs. If you want to write a first-person shooter or operating system, use C. If you want to write a script that converts newlines in text files between \r\n and \n, PERL would probably be the best choice. If you want to write an ASCII game, I'd go with QuickBasic 5.
In conclusion, PERL rules, and if this upgrade is good, that's cool, and if it isn't, no one is going to force us to upgrade our interpreters.
I thought of that shortly after posting. No, really, I did.
Still, for every constitutionally-protected right we have, there are many more that are not granted any protection at all. And age minorities are a very easy target since everyone makes arguments like "Oh yeah, I went through that. You'll get over it when you turn x years old."
I think it's just disturbing that the government could, for example, prohibit fishing to people under 25, or ownership of a car to people under 30, and they'd be well within their constitutional boundaries. I'm not even sure anyone would fight it too hard, since those under 30 rarely have political leverage, or even vote.
If it's constitutional to slap an age restriction on drinking that occurs after the age of citizenship and voting, it occurs to me it would also be constitutional to slap an age restriction on anything else. For example, the government can constitutionally say, "No one under the age of 75 has protection against cruel and unusual punishment."
legislatures cannot restrict access to information, even to minors.
Interesting. I can't recall seeing any cigarette ads on television lately, can you? And whatever happened to that delightful smoking camel?
I'm also a little disappointed that, for all those years, I'd been abstaining from reading the articles in Playboy for apparently no good reason at all.
It's true. Constitutional protections do not apply to minors. Minors do not have, for example, the right to freedom of speech or freedom of assembly, because the U.S. Constitution does not recognize them as citizens.
I can't see how it's either just or constitutional to deny someone who can vote and die for his country the right to drink and gamble, but since the 18-21 demographic doesn't exactly carry a strong vote, I don't see that changing any time soon.
But let's face it - if you're under 18, you're fucked. You don't have any constitutional protections, and you're completely at the whim of your local/state governments. Sorry. If you don't like it, well, the only the only thing my friends could come up with back in the day was substituting marijuana for beer and vandalizing any institution we couldn't enter. It wasn't a solution, but it was kind of fun.
In conclusion, if you see a video game behind a curtain, and you're under 18, throw a brick at it and run as fast as you can in one direction.
I believe this may be the first penis bird ever to be moderated up.
I'd also like to say that the title of this article is misleading by using the word "shoddy". Since 85% of Slashdotters only read the title and then post immediately, many will comment, "How can you be sued just because your web page sucks?? Isn't that subjective??"
In fact, this web design company offered to provide certain services and failed. It's probably a really simple breach-of-contract matter that happens all the time.
I agree that this solution to the area code quandary is efficient, neat, and fun.
However, if you want to go through a Microsoft Word document sent to you by your semi-illiterate Windows-using friend, and change all instances of "marajuna" to "marijuana", it would be faster to boot up MS-Word under Wine and use the search/replace than use a utility to change the file format, use global replacements, and send it back to him in plain text with all his formatting removed.
Slashdot Mirror
I can understand being moderated "overrated", considering that what I said was dumb.
But "offtopic"? This article was about both the G4 cube and its companion laptop, and my post concerns the cube re: my rack-mount concerns etc.
You guys suck.
You disgust me. You are the kind of person who looks that the Sistine Chapel ceiling and sees wasted effort that could have been put into building homes for the poor. You are the kind of bastard that burned Alexandria's library, fearful and ignorant of the knowledge contained within.
Look!! Ayn Rand has set up a Slashdot account! For reasons I can only speculate on, the infallible Ms. Rand has named herself "Jabberwocky" and signs her posts "Evan". This must be part of some grand scheme to end collectivism everywhere, just like when Francisco D'Anconia started blowing up his own copper mines!
The article identified six types of cheating, but completely failed to identify any reasonable solution for the first one: reflex augmentation.
It is not terribly difficult to write a script to execute commands without the use of the mouse. In Quake 2, the only real effect was that some people had godlike aim - and this was usually pretty easy to spot.
But consider what reflex augmentation could do in Warcraft 2, for example. One could write a script that caused the "mouse" to "click" on your Town Hall and Barracks, automatically creating peons and ogres at a set rate, while you controlled everything else.
Would this even be possible to spot?? From the server side, it would just look like someone had insanely good reflexes. And, of course, it would be easy to tone it down just a little - occasionally have your script "mis-click" just to the left of the town hall, put in tiny delays, etc.
It seems to me that the only way to prevent reflex augmentation would be to force the player to play on someone else's computer with a very restrictive account... any thoughts?
This is all nonsense!
Bell Labs didn't create Unix!! I created Unix!! Bell labs is the devil!!!
Here is a surefire way to ensure that the third installment is posted.
1) Have CmdrTaco pay $1 for the text. He has an actual job, so he can probably afford it.
2) Have Jon Katz post the entire novel as a Slashdot article. It has to be Katz because a 90-page post would look suspicious if it were any other author.
3) Tie all the trolls' machines together in a gigantic beowulf cluster and launch a massive brute force DoS against King's website.
Total downloads: 1. Total payments: 1. Honesty rating: 100%.
Well, I wouldn't say that text-based chat is the future of communications.
Right now, I'm wondering a few things. 1) Does the IRC protocol lend itself--at all--to the inclusion of video conferencing? 2) How easy is it to encrypt audio/video signals? I can't imagine it would be much harder than encrypting text, but in a medium where time-delays are unacceptable, there would have to be a pretty tight algorithm for encoding/decoding.
Of course, when speaking with someone whose first language is not your own, it's often easier to read your in broken, screwy form than to understand it when you add an accent that is incomprehensible to you.
Did you notice how hard I tried not to use the word "English" in that sentence?
In conclusion, encrypted video conferencing would be a good step toward solid, private communication, but sometimes it would be even more difficult to understand than plain text.
If Scour looses this one, we're well beyond the time for elections and judicial appeal. That would be time for guns and subversion.
"This year, it's the ballot or the bullet! The ballot or the bullet! It's either going to be the ballot or the bullet! You're going to have to choose - will it be the ballot or the bullet? The ballot or the bullet. It's going to be the ballet or the bullet." --Malcolm X
P.S. It's spelled "loses". When you use two o's, you get "loose". Thus, if I refer to you as a "loser", I am implying that you are "one who loses"; if I refer to you as "looser", I am implying that one or more of your orifices are less tight than the average heterosexual male.
Also, after careful reading, it should be clear that the parent post is not flamebait, and this is.
I went ahead and read the message board there. None of the posters actually had any information about Nvidia's hijinx - they were just reacting to an ideology they found distasteful. People like to react - hence, the popularity of trolls.
I sometimes wonder if I could get Slashdotted by putting up a web page about how Microsoft sued me for claiming that all MCSEs were weenies. I don't think it would be unlikely. Slashdot, like the National Enquirer, doesn't exactly do extensive checking-up on its sources.
It's more like the small farmer turning his money-losing farm into a self-supporting commune instead of looking for a big agribusiness conglomerate to buy him out.
Except, in this case, the developers are abandoning their project. If you read the article, it claims that the reason for open-sourcing the product was that "it wasn't exactly the kind of thing you could unload in a going-out-of-business sale."
It's more like a farmer who hasn't had any bids from big agribusiness conglomerates finally sticking up a sign that says "Farm here if you want", and moving to Vegas to become a Blackjack dealer.
Still, the abandonware beachhead isn't a great moral victory for OS. It's kind of like fighting World War 2 by waiting for the Nazis to get fed up with the snootiness of the French and decide they didn't want the country anyway.
I'd agree with Kyle that strongarming reviews is not a very ethical practice.
However, while his site blasted Nvidia for doing just that, I didn't see any kind of proof, or even evidence, that it had been going on. All there were were links to what we were assured was formerly an open letter blasting Nvidia for the practice. When I visited those links, all I found was a new open letter essentially apologizing to Nvidia for making invalid claims.
As it stands right now, I don't think it's improbable that Nvidia found a bad review, emailed their stance (i.e. "There are some misleading things with this article; our product is actually good") and that their letter was misinterpreted by some nervous web-journalist as a "cease and desist" letter.
In conclusion, I'm going to have to see much more compelling proof to get angry.
That article was not easy to read. For a while, I kept thinking, "Wait a minute.. this is about open source software... not open source telephony." I mean, the focus of the article was some ten-year-old abandonware made by a company that was going out of business. That sort of grudging "Fine, we're out of business, we'll open the damn thing" mentality is good for the Open Source movement, but it isn't exactly a triumph of ideology.
Anyway, I guess the article in question is more about "internet voice conferencing" than anything else - something that's been around for quite a while, but apparently with ugly time delays. I didn't actually read anything that claimed that this open-source conferencer solved the problem, but I guess the idea is that eventually, we'll solve the problem. And by "we", I don't mean "me", so don't bother asking me for it.
In conclusion, this is a Good Thing, but not exactly earth-shattering.
Now if this was a secular institution with no pretense of moral job requirements then it might be another issue.
Well, I work in a secular institution with no pretense of moral job requirements. We had a guy who was downloading a lot of porn a couple years ago. We went to the guy, talked to him, and asked him to put it on one of the servers in the NOC.
Harvard is almost like a foreign country to most of us - these people have so little in common with average Americans that they probably are more removed from us than, say, the average Brit or Australian. After all, the media has somewhat homogenized culture all throughout the western world, but huge chunks of inherited money seem to carry their own culture.
Similarly, hard-core Christianity is also a little confusing to me. I'm sure if this guy had been a professor at BYU, he would have been fired for drinking coffee. All I can say is that you should think long and hard about working for a Christian. Unless there's some advantage I'm overlooking in having religion tied into your job security, it's better to separate church and work.
Yes, I realize that PERL was written in C. I also realize that nasm (the assembly compiler) was written in C, and that C itself was written in C.
Still, Slashdot did post a "benchmark comparison" study a couple months ago, which found that text parsing "as written by experienced, competent programmers" in C didn't hold up against Perl's text parsing.
I agree that it's a little weird to benchmark something against its parent. Maybe what they meant is "PERL handles text better than YOU."
Another reason Perl holds the web together is that even though its benchmarks suck for number-crunching, it out-performs both Java and C (Yes, C, and I found that unusual) when it comes to parsing text. In fact, if I remember the "Benchmark" story on Slashdot from a couple months ago, Perl was six times faster than Java for text-based stuff.
And since the web's content is so heavily text-based (because plain text is a universal standard, HTML is text-based, and because most pages' content is text), it's easy to see why PERL dominates.
Different tools for different jobs. If you want to write a first-person shooter or operating system, use C. If you want to write a script that converts newlines in text files between \r\n and \n, PERL would probably be the best choice. If you want to write an ASCII game, I'd go with QuickBasic 5.
In conclusion, PERL rules, and if this upgrade is good, that's cool, and if it isn't, no one is going to force us to upgrade our interpreters.
I thought of that shortly after posting. No, really, I did.
Still, for every constitutionally-protected right we have, there are many more that are not granted any protection at all. And age minorities are a very easy target since everyone makes arguments like "Oh yeah, I went through that. You'll get over it when you turn x years old."
I think it's just disturbing that the government could, for example, prohibit fishing to people under 25, or ownership of a car to people under 30, and they'd be well within their constitutional boundaries. I'm not even sure anyone would fight it too hard, since those under 30 rarely have political leverage, or even vote.
I can think of a couple.
There's "Bust a Move", which wouldn't be very violent if you were to take out the graphic of tiny dinosaurs being squashed to death.
Ummm...
Then there's that "Pro Skater" game. It includes vandalism and skating, which are both crimes in most cities, but very little physical violence.
"Pole Position" isn't terribly violent, although emulating it would certainly be more dangerous than emulating "Mortal Kombat".
And, once in a while, there are trivia games, although why someone would pay to play a trivia game is somewhat beyond me.
If it's constitutional to slap an age restriction on drinking that occurs after the age of citizenship and voting, it occurs to me it would also be constitutional to slap an age restriction on anything else. For example, the government can constitutionally say, "No one under the age of 75 has protection against cruel and unusual punishment."
Isn't that weird?
legislatures cannot restrict access to information, even to minors.
Interesting. I can't recall seeing any cigarette ads on television lately, can you? And whatever happened to that delightful smoking camel?
I'm also a little disappointed that, for all those years, I'd been abstaining from reading the articles in Playboy for apparently no good reason at all.
It's true. Constitutional protections do not apply to minors. Minors do not have, for example, the right to freedom of speech or freedom of assembly, because the U.S. Constitution does not recognize them as citizens.
I can't see how it's either just or constitutional to deny someone who can vote and die for his country the right to drink and gamble, but since the 18-21 demographic doesn't exactly carry a strong vote, I don't see that changing any time soon.
But let's face it - if you're under 18, you're fucked. You don't have any constitutional protections, and you're completely at the whim of your local/state governments. Sorry. If you don't like it, well, the only the only thing my friends could come up with back in the day was substituting marijuana for beer and vandalizing any institution we couldn't enter. It wasn't a solution, but it was kind of fun.
In conclusion, if you see a video game behind a curtain, and you're under 18, throw a brick at it and run as fast as you can in one direction.
Hey, Turing!!
Before firing off a rebuttal to a comment, you should sit down and think... "Huh. Is he making a joke?"
Otherwise, you look... well... I'll omit how you look in order to avoid losing Karma.
I believe this may be the first penis bird ever to be moderated up.
I'd also like to say that the title of this article is misleading by using the word "shoddy". Since 85% of Slashdotters only read the title and then post immediately, many will comment, "How can you be sued just because your web page sucks?? Isn't that subjective??"
In fact, this web design company offered to provide certain services and failed. It's probably a really simple breach-of-contract matter that happens all the time.
I agree that this solution to the area code quandary is efficient, neat, and fun.
However, if you want to go through a Microsoft Word document sent to you by your semi-illiterate Windows-using friend, and change all instances of "marajuna" to "marijuana", it would be faster to boot up MS-Word under Wine and use the search/replace than use a utility to change the file format, use global replacements, and send it back to him in plain text with all his formatting removed.
Different Tools for Different Jobs.
Okay, but:
[Alt-F]foo[tab]bar[Enter]
Even if I'm generous and count Alt and F as two separate keystrokes, we have 10 to your 14.
Come on, man, how hard is it to type www.winehq.com</a>???
In conclusion, I hate you.