A favorable review of the Linux desktop, finally someone with a clue saying that we don't need 1e-6soft Office or anything... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, for starters, it only refers to the original everything (though this is justified, since E2 hadn't really been publically announced until after this article was written), which isn't a slashdot spinoff, and has been cast to the wind. Secondly, this guy has obviously not actually noded on Everything; node names aren't automatically linked (it's still manual), and there's currently no strength for soft links. That issue is, of course, being worked on.
Now, that said, given that the piece was about Everything, it'd have been nice if it had more than about two paragraphs' worth about it without having lots of fluff rambling on and on around it. It seems like a JonKatz article, but even less relevant.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Honestly, when I read his blurb, I thought it said "strangest man," which was something I took offense to, because I want to be the strangest, well, sentient being around...
Oh well, Rob doesn't have a color fetish like I do (look it up on everything2... seems to be down right now so I can't make a link right to the node), so I think I'd still win the contest.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
From what I've seen, most guys force their wives to slave away and make sammiches for all their buds while acting like completely irresponsible, inconsiderate jerks, since it's up to the duty of the wife to keep her hubbie happy. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Instead, I watched "The Big Game," Cartoon Network's overhyped parody of the Superbowl. I thought it was hilarious overall, though the game itself was tedious (that was probably the point, though). Oh, and they had great spoofs of ads. Various Gap commercials were turned into "CAT" commercials (one had Tom playing some swing-jazz tune on a bass, one had all of Hanna Barbera's pantsless characters trying to sing "I just can't get enough" with "Everyone wearing no pants" at the end)... then there was the joy of the overhyped halftime show, which ended up not being seen due to "technical difficulties" which ended up making fun of Cartoon Network in general. Unfortunately, for part of it, my local cable provider decided to be real stupid and not know the difference between parody ads and real ads, and ended up striping over a few of them.:/
In the meantime, I wouldn't mind seeing some of the ads. Hopefully the better ones will make it onto normal TV hours, but that seems to happen so rarely... --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
That wasn't my point. My point was that the 'paper,' such as it is, is speaking as an authority on what will, with certainty, happen, and was basically that in addition to a rehash of many amateur sci-fi attempts, as well as some not-so-amateur essays from Larry Niven, for example (he raises similar points when it comes to teleporting people - if it's making a copy then destroying the original, it certainly wouldn't be the original person who has just materialized on the other end).
I'm not being closed-minded, I'm stating my disgust with things which speak as a definite authority on something which nobody can know with any certainty. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Re:You weren't waiting for a clean release!
on
Slash v0.9 Released
·
· Score: 3
Actually, in their defense, I do believe that they could go from one point to another in just a few days, for the following reasons:
Search-and-replace: a lot of site-specific things can simply be replaced by global variables, which can be put into some other included configuration file. (It IS PERL, after all.)
CowboyNeal has absolutely no life outside of his job (whatever it is) and BSI projects, and lately he's been permaidle on #everything - rare for him - meaning he was definitely pulling some major hours elsewhere.
Depending on how the code is structured (I haven't looked at it yet), it may have only seemed to be site-specific but maybe there was some simple way to liberate it. And in any case, it's not like they wrote hand-coded assembler which would only work on one particular release of libc6.1 on Debian 2.2 (Potato) which had been last apt-get updated on 1999/12/23.
Basically, I don't know what to believe, but frankly I don't really care so much, and there's plenty of explanations for any standpoint. Yes, this could just be some "investor relations" crap Andover.net suddenly decided to pull to raise their stock price, or it could be Rob and company suddenly realizing that they have had a decent release for some time, or maybe they really did work their asses off to make it releasable. I'm inclined to believe the latter. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Karma was never something designed to be boasted about, and although it was fun to have a publically-visible high karma, I got an enormous backlash from little snots who decided that my high karma was a sign that I was simply out to gain karma in any way I possibly can. Read my user info for more information. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I just love articles like these, which plainly state what will be the case by such-and-such a time. A $1000 computer will be as powerful as a human brain by 2020, just like we will have lunar colonies by 1999. At least it goes into the question "What is me?" which such fluff pieces usually gloss over, but still, this just seems more like a badly-written overly-assertive speculation piece, stolen out of many uncredited pages of amateur science fiction and making far too many assumptions about the progress of computing; even if a 2050 computer chip has as many transistors as necessary to emulate every neuron of every human brain on Earth, that still doesn't mean that it'll have actual intelligence; by that time we still may not know how neurons work at the level needed to emulate a brain. Nor may we know how to "download" information from real neurons, especially not in a non-destructive, lossless way. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Oh, man, that is so *cool*... too bad the 3D block graphics kinda ruin the better 3D graphics to be represented as colored ASCII art.:) I'd much rather see something that just makes proper use of 2D graphics... xterm et al are likely out of the question, since DOS ASCII is such a vastly different encoding from anything used in most modern terminals, but graphic tile rendering could easily enhance the quality of ZZT, much like xnethack/gtknethack.
Oh, zzt.org is pretty cool too. PlanetQuake meets ZZT. I like.:) (How long do you think it'll take for some PlanetQuake junkie to "discover" ZZT like when Scorched Earth suddenly became the ultra-trendy Quake scene kr4d-31337 g4m3 0f th3 m0nth?:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
No better time to invest. I just sunk $500 into them while their stock's cheap. (Disclaimer: I am not a stock advisor.) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, I wasn't saying that it wasn't the DeCSS source, but that it'd be more interesting for the MPAA to find, seeing as how I doubt they have any competent people with a C compiler and Linux and netpbm (with PNG support) installed. Of course, "This is not the DeCSS source" is somewhat false, but also somewhat true - it's not the DeCSS source, it's an image which contains the DeCSS source hidden in the lower bits. It's on the same level as the "This is not a pipe" image in Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. It's a statement which is simultaneously true and false, while also being somewhat self-referential (after all, it could be referring to the statement "This is not the DeCSS source"). --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I think it's safe to say that quite a few CS geeks have been brought up to more modern programming practices thanks to Tim Sweeny's earlier work, most notably ZZT. ZZT wasn't much of a game on its own; where it shined was the fact you could extend it by writing your own games, since it included an object-oriented message-passing trivially-multi-tasking scripting language of its own, including a rather cool IDE. I learned quite a bit of high-level programming stuff simply by toying with this rather low-level interface; I learned about message-passing, parallel processing, deadlock-avoidance, and object-oriented programming in general thanks to sitting in front of my old 286 with Hercules monochrome into the wee hours of the night. I even learned about bad interface design by playing a lot of other peoples' games which assumed that I had a color display.
I personally think UnrealScript is a sweet language, and I can't wait for Unreal binaries for Linux (so that I can finally play and create with Unreal, which I purchased so long ago). Even if I never get around to that, the principles behind it are what drive my thoughts for a 3D MUCK system I'm working on in what passes for my spare time.
Back in the "good old days" when Epic Megagames was Potomac Computer Systems, I exchanged snailmail with him all the time. Every now and then I'd send him some program I was working on, and he'd send me a beta of whatever game he was working on (I was probably one of the first people on the planet to have, and beat, the first episode of Jill of the Jungle); one time he even gave me the registered version of ZZT. I still have that around somewhere, though it's kinda hard to use it since it's on a 5.25" disk.:)
In any case, I just wanted to publically express my thanks to him here. Once upon a time I emailed him directly and he was obviously very busy (Unreal was "about to come out;" this was a couple years before it finally did:) and I doubt he's gotten any less busy nowadays.
I wonder if there's been any thought of writing a portable ZZT engine clone... anyone know of any good ZZT game archives? (Yeah, I know ZZT itself is free(beer) now, and would be free(speech) if the source code weren't lost... I'm too lazy to get dosemu working again though.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Do you mean hiding an MP3 in an image, or hiding the DeCSS source in an MP3? To hide the source in an MP3 you'd run into lossiness issues, unless you were to hide it in terms of, say, a 1KHz carrier signal, in which case you'd have to hack the encoder and decoder itself. For hiding an MP3 in an image, keep in mind that it'd take an 8MB (uncompressed) image to hide a 1MB MP3, using a trivial steganography algorithm like the one I'm using (each byte of the image &= 0xF7, then |= one bit of the input data).
As far as the more general case of hiding stuff in sound, yes, that happens too. This is a technique called steganography, and it can be applied to any digital data stream. Apparently I'm not the only one who's been using steganography to distribute the DeCSS source.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
If you want to throw some monkey wrenches into the MPAA's finding of DeCSS source, try mirroring this instead. Something I hacked up in about half an hour. Have fun.:) --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
IGN, generally a good source of reviews and previews of the latest console gaming hardware and software, has one of the most disgustingly stupid sections on their site. For Men, their repugnantly male-supremist rag, purports to be a vital resource for game players. I had no idea that spouting off uninformed "facts" regarding Jamie Lee Curtis's genitalia and constantly belittling anyone who doesn't have a two properly-functioning testicles and a penis he regularly shoves into a female orifice (or approximation thereof) was useful for anyone. They have no "for women" section. They advertise this section blatantly alongside all of their useful content.
On a related note, their sci-fi section is lithe with nothing but the despicable hormonally-crazed Seven Of Nine worship which has completely turned me off on the sci-fi "scene" at large. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they were also into the pointless desparately-waiting-for-Natalie-Portman-to-become- legally-fuckable debacle shortly following Phantom Menace.
It wouldn't surprise me if it were an IGN publication which "Atari" (the author of this well-reasoned article) was mostly talking about, either. They tend to fall into the trap of showing off the "beautiful rendering" of female characters rather than giving useful screenshots.
But hey, I just read it for the articles. And rarely, at that. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a .
I hope you realize that those other (unnamed) sources of power will also take some time to develop and make feasible. It's not like within the five years of developing handheld methanol power sources, pocket fusion devices will suddenly become ubiquitous or anything.
This reminds me of a time that an acquaintence was asking me, "Well, why didn't they just make these more powerful processors and game engines *earlier*, rather than make us waste all of our money having to keep on upgrading?" I tried explaining to her how it takes some time to actually research and develop things, and that these designs don't come to fruition instantaneously - it requires experience, and work built up atop work, and other factors which require that time pass before new things can be invented. Otherwise we'd already have widespread fusion generators powering 3GHz quantum computers and 12Gbit wireless Internet connections on our bodyheat-powered wearable GFlop supercomputers.
This portable methanol power cell is in its infancy, but any "greater technology" isn't exactly going to appear overnight before this comes to fruition.
Progress is a linear set of steps, a process of innovation and improvement and creation and invention, not a sudden end to a desire. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but father time is what got her pregnant. --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a .
Personally, I've outgrown Pico at this point, and I thoroughly dislike how, although it's open-source, it's not Free. You can distribute patches against the code, but you can't distribute modified code or binaries compiled from it. Very annoying. It's also not nearly configurable enough for my needs; when I'm doing any real work, I just use Emacs (though I use vi for quick jobs and email).
In any case, as the subject says, PICO == PIne COmposer. I don't believe Pilot (the sucky PINE-style directory browser) stands for anything. While we're at it, PINE stands for two things; the official name is "Program for Internet News and Email," but as every real UNIX-head knows, it's really "PINE Is Not ELM," which expands to "PINE Is Not ELM Is Not ELectronic Mail" and so forth. Yay. Depending on how you parse it, it might end up meaning, to you anyway, "${PINE} is not Electronic Mail;" I don't know what PINE is supposed to be then.
I just use Mutt nowadays though. I got sick of PINE changing its semantics and doing evil stuff behind my back (such as suddenly deciding, when the university admins upgraded to 4.10, to use the broken, not-very-well-hidden-at-all ~/mbox file instead of just keeping stuff in my nice, quota-free/var/spool/mail file). Now my stuff goes exactly where I want it, and I could still use PICO for editing if I wanted (but I don't, so I just use vim instead). --- "'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a .
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, too bad you didn't get that first post you were going for. Better luck next time.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Good guess, actually. Male chameleons have horns.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
A favorable review of the Linux desktop, finally someone with a clue saying that we don't need 1e-6soft Office or anything...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Now, that said, given that the piece was about Everything, it'd have been nice if it had more than about two paragraphs' worth about it without having lots of fluff rambling on and on around it. It seems like a JonKatz article, but even less relevant. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I just want a tail, and maybe prosthetic quills. (I know I'm not alone on this one. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Sorry, McDonalds beat you to it. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Oh well, Rob doesn't have a color fetish like I do (look it up on everything2... seems to be down right now so I can't make a link right to the node), so I think I'd still win the contest. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
From what I've seen, most guys force their wives to slave away and make sammiches for all their buds while acting like completely irresponsible, inconsiderate jerks, since it's up to the duty of the wife to keep her hubbie happy.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
In the meantime, I wouldn't mind seeing some of the ads. Hopefully the better ones will make it onto normal TV hours, but that seems to happen so rarely...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I'm not being closed-minded, I'm stating my disgust with things which speak as a definite authority on something which nobody can know with any certainty.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
- Search-and-replace: a lot of site-specific things can simply be replaced by global variables, which can be put into some other included configuration file. (It IS PERL, after all.)
- CowboyNeal has absolutely no life outside of his job (whatever it is) and BSI projects, and lately he's been permaidle on #everything - rare for him - meaning he was definitely pulling some major hours elsewhere.
- Depending on how the code is structured (I haven't looked at it yet), it may have only seemed to be site-specific but maybe there was some simple way to liberate it. And in any case, it's not like they wrote hand-coded assembler which would only work on one particular release of libc6.1 on Debian 2.2 (Potato) which had been last apt-get updated on 1999/12/23.
Basically, I don't know what to believe, but frankly I don't really care so much, and there's plenty of explanations for any standpoint. Yes, this could just be some "investor relations" crap Andover.net suddenly decided to pull to raise their stock price, or it could be Rob and company suddenly realizing that they have had a decent release for some time, or maybe they really did work their asses off to make it releasable. I'm inclined to believe the latter.---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Karma was never something designed to be boasted about, and although it was fun to have a publically-visible high karma, I got an enormous backlash from little snots who decided that my high karma was a sign that I was simply out to gain karma in any way I possibly can. Read my user info for more information.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I just love articles like these, which plainly state what will be the case by such-and-such a time. A $1000 computer will be as powerful as a human brain by 2020, just like we will have lunar colonies by 1999. At least it goes into the question "What is me?" which such fluff pieces usually gloss over, but still, this just seems more like a badly-written overly-assertive speculation piece, stolen out of many uncredited pages of amateur science fiction and making far too many assumptions about the progress of computing; even if a 2050 computer chip has as many transistors as necessary to emulate every neuron of every human brain on Earth, that still doesn't mean that it'll have actual intelligence; by that time we still may not know how neurons work at the level needed to emulate a brain. Nor may we know how to "download" information from real neurons, especially not in a non-destructive, lossless way.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I love you.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Oh, zzt.org is pretty cool too. PlanetQuake meets ZZT. I like. :) (How long do you think it'll take for some PlanetQuake junkie to "discover" ZZT like when Scorched Earth suddenly became the ultra-trendy Quake scene kr4d-31337 g4m3 0f th3 m0nth? :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
No better time to invest. I just sunk $500 into them while their stock's cheap. (Disclaimer: I am not a stock advisor.)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Well, I wasn't saying that it wasn't the DeCSS source, but that it'd be more interesting for the MPAA to find, seeing as how I doubt they have any competent people with a C compiler and Linux and netpbm (with PNG support) installed. Of course, "This is not the DeCSS source" is somewhat false, but also somewhat true - it's not the DeCSS source, it's an image which contains the DeCSS source hidden in the lower bits. It's on the same level as the "This is not a pipe" image in Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. It's a statement which is simultaneously true and false, while also being somewhat self-referential (after all, it could be referring to the statement "This is not the DeCSS source").
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I personally think UnrealScript is a sweet language, and I can't wait for Unreal binaries for Linux (so that I can finally play and create with Unreal, which I purchased so long ago). Even if I never get around to that, the principles behind it are what drive my thoughts for a 3D MUCK system I'm working on in what passes for my spare time.
Back in the "good old days" when Epic Megagames was Potomac Computer Systems, I exchanged snailmail with him all the time. Every now and then I'd send him some program I was working on, and he'd send me a beta of whatever game he was working on (I was probably one of the first people on the planet to have, and beat, the first episode of Jill of the Jungle); one time he even gave me the registered version of ZZT. I still have that around somewhere, though it's kinda hard to use it since it's on a 5.25" disk. :)
In any case, I just wanted to publically express my thanks to him here. Once upon a time I emailed him directly and he was obviously very busy (Unreal was "about to come out;" this was a couple years before it finally did :) and I doubt he's gotten any less busy nowadays.
I wonder if there's been any thought of writing a portable ZZT engine clone... anyone know of any good ZZT game archives? (Yeah, I know ZZT itself is free(beer) now, and would be free(speech) if the source code weren't lost... I'm too lazy to get dosemu working again though. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
As far as the more general case of hiding stuff in sound, yes, that happens too. This is a technique called steganography, and it can be applied to any digital data stream. Apparently I'm not the only one who's been using steganography to distribute the DeCSS source. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
If you want to throw some monkey wrenches into the MPAA's finding of DeCSS source, try mirroring this instead. Something I hacked up in about half an hour. Have fun. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
I found it ironic that he at least got the 42nd though. :)
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
On a related note, their sci-fi section is lithe with nothing but the despicable hormonally-crazed Seven Of Nine worship which has completely turned me off on the sci-fi "scene" at large. It wouldn't surprise me at all if they were also into the pointless desparately-waiting-for-Natalie-Portman-to-become- legally-fuckable debacle shortly following Phantom Menace.
It wouldn't surprise me if it were an IGN publication which "Atari" (the author of this well-reasoned article) was mostly talking about, either. They tend to fall into the trap of showing off the "beautiful rendering" of female characters rather than giving useful screenshots.
But hey, I just read it for the articles. And rarely, at that.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a .
This reminds me of a time that an acquaintence was asking me, "Well, why didn't they just make these more powerful processors and game engines *earlier*, rather than make us waste all of our money having to keep on upgrading?" I tried explaining to her how it takes some time to actually research and develop things, and that these designs don't come to fruition instantaneously - it requires experience, and work built up atop work, and other factors which require that time pass before new things can be invented. Otherwise we'd already have widespread fusion generators powering 3GHz quantum computers and 12Gbit wireless Internet connections on our bodyheat-powered wearable GFlop supercomputers.
This portable methanol power cell is in its infancy, but any "greater technology" isn't exactly going to appear overnight before this comes to fruition.
Progress is a linear set of steps, a process of innovation and improvement and creation and invention, not a sudden end to a desire. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but father time is what got her pregnant.
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a .
In any case, as the subject says, PICO == PIne COmposer. I don't believe Pilot (the sucky PINE-style directory browser) stands for anything. While we're at it, PINE stands for two things; the official name is "Program for Internet News and Email," but as every real UNIX-head knows, it's really "PINE Is Not ELM," which expands to "PINE Is Not ELM Is Not ELectronic Mail" and so forth. Yay. Depending on how you parse it, it might end up meaning, to you anyway, "${PINE} is not Electronic Mail;" I don't know what PINE is supposed to be then.
I just use Mutt nowadays though. I got sick of PINE changing its semantics and doing evil stuff behind my back (such as suddenly deciding, when the university admins upgraded to 4.10, to use the broken, not-very-well-hidden-at-all ~/mbox file instead of just keeping stuff in my nice, quota-free /var/spool/mail file). Now my stuff goes exactly where I want it, and I could still use PICO for editing if I wanted (but I don't, so I just use vim instead).
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a .
Mac doesn't make anything. Apple makes the Mac.
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a .