Nothing else interesting is happening today, so a story gets duped? Cool! Now I know that I have a 0.0000001% chance of getting a story posted to SlashDot, if only I could post on a day in which nothing interesting is happened.
I would like to take the opportunity to introduce an offtopic response.
I've recently noticed that Google has started pulling pages in response to DCMA complaints. Has anyone else noticed this? I've tried to do a search for this topic on SlashDot, but I really must say that SlashDot's search engine returns crappy, useless results.
Anyways, I tried to submit this as a story, but it got rejected. But JOY, there's a new fucking tabless page and that gets posted! Can someone wake me up, is this the world we live in? Is this important news?
So. I've taken to a new strategy, of which this post is the first step. I will now begin submitting my stories to existing slashdot articles, no matter what the topic.
Furthermore, I will write an automated query agent to submit my story as the first post to the next available article that appears.
All bow down before the man who would not shut his mouth...
One fucking problem. This ad now requires you to "Select your mortgage rate here." Fuck that. I don't own a home, and I'm not going to click their stupid fucking flash ad just to make their marketing people feel worthwhile.
The beauty of commercials is that you don't have to watch one. But now some fuckhead advertiser wants me to play the game he designed. Fuck him (or her.) Pretty soon we'll be having to play crossword puzzles with advertising slogans just to read the fucking article.
And I feel really fucking sorry for blind people with screen readers.
If you think this post had alot of obscenities, you should have seen the email I sent to salon.
Combined with those handheld printers that work by "rubbing" the printer over paper, I can foresee some serious "wax on, wax off" action in the future.
You think that site is bad, try mining through Symantec's site. Their online store, combined with their poor product differentiation between product models and product lines (i.e. Norton products vs. Symantec products) make it impossible for anyone to be a Symantec guru. My friend is a product manager there, and I always give him flack about it.
It would be nice if, in parallel to the Internet, another network was developed to hold only symantically organized knowledge. That network would be free of marketing and commercial business, and would ostensibly be the largest repository of organized knowledge in the planet. Think Internet2, based entirely in XML.
Similar to HTML's current weakness in separating presentation from content, the web today has a weakness in separating content sites from sales sites. Do a search in Google, especially for programming or technical topics, and you're more likely to retrieve 100 links to online stores selling a book on that topic, than finding actual content regarding that topic. This lack of ability to separate queries for knowledge, verses queries for product sales literature, is especially frustrating for scientists and programmers. I think Google is taking a step towards this with Froogle, meaning that if Froogle becomes popular enough, it's possible that Google will strip marketing pages from their search results.
Worse even, is when someone registers a thousand domains (plumbing-supplies-store.com, plumb-superstore-supplies.com, all-plumbing-supplies.com, etc) and posts the same marketing page content ("Buy my plumbing supplies!") on each domain. A search on Google will then retrieve 100 separate links containing the same identical garbage. You would think that Google could detect this "marketing domain spam" and reduce the relevancy of such search results.
Anyways, I can't complain, because I can find nearly anything on the web I need, compared to 10 years ago.
In Korea, there are several subscription services where you can download and watch full movies (ex. www.cineko.com). I guess it helps that nearly every household in Korea as a T1.
God, it sucks to be in a backwards country ruled by the obsolescence curve. In Japan, the free cell phones that come with plans are better than the phones we pay $299 for with a 2-year plan.
Mandrake has every right to sell advertisements? That's true, but if for some reason Microsoft decided to do the same with Longhorn, everyone on slashdot would be jumping down Bill's throat.
In 10 years, I hope my Mac has a mouse with 2 buttons; a webcam that works with more than just a single piece of beta software; a multimedia platform that doesn't require me to update for a yearly fee; an operating system that lets me adjust whatever settings I want; a hardware manufacturer that transcends cultish secrecy as a way of hyping its new products; and freedom from marketing campaigns that rely on telling me how cool my computer is because a 14 year old enjoys using the world's fastest personal computer.
In 10 years, I hope my PC has an operating system that doesn't need to be patched every day; a processor that won't be outdated in three months; networking that recovers gracefully from unexpected events without crashing the computer; and the freedom to use solutions that aren't stifled by one corporation's attempt to rule the world via software monopoly.
In 10 years, I hope my other PC has an operating system that works with all the hardware that's out there, without recompiling drivers; applications that can be installed and uninstalled without knowing the entire directory hierarchy of my system; the ability to adjust settings without manually editing text configuration files; and the ability to figure out basic operations without consulting a man page or HOW-TO.
In 10 years, I hope my Palm PDA becomes fun to use, my PocketPC becomes reliable to use, my cellphone becomes affordable to use, and my microwave becomes intuitive to use.
There are several causes of software crashes. Let's address the obvious ones:
race conditions. From the FreeBSD Developers' Handbook: "A race condition is anomalous behavior caused by the unexpected dependence on the relative timing of events. In other words, a programmer incorrectly assumed that a particular event would always happen before another."
Race conditions are particularly difficult for developers to address, since they propogate at many levels within the system (hardware level, OS-assigned resource level, application instruction level, etc.) Also, only realtime operating systems or simple embedded systems guarantee the relative ordering of certain events. Complexity has a direct correlation to the inability to guarantee timing.
deadlocks. Deadlock occurs when multiple processes compete for limited resources. From Sun's Java Classes: "The simplest approach to preventing deadlock is to impose ordering on the condition variables." Sometimes, it is difficult or impossible to guarantee cooperation among competing resources.
unsafe application environments. An operating system can establish limitations upon applications, such that those applications never exceed certain safety boundaries (e.g. access to areas of the filesystem, system resources, etc.)
Most operating systems that thoroughly employ these limitations are considered "user-unfriendly." More user-friendly operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, inherently eschew these safeguards by default, allowing applications to perform actions that potentially result in a crash. Application environments such as Sun's Java do a good job of "sandboxing" an application's access to resources, such that system crashes are unlikely.
unsafe hardware architecture. A computer's hardware consists of a primitive architecture that is unable to guarantee proper operation. The current PCI bus and "IRQ" interrupt scheme is particularly susceptible to computer crashes, if hardware drivers are programmed incorrectly.
third-party software and hardware. The support for third-party software and hardware results in an operating system environment which is open and generalized enough to be susceptible to crashes. For example, if you allowed anyone to come into your house and plug any manner of devices into your power outlets, you could conceivably experience a power outage as the circuit breaker kicks in to prevent electrical damage. That's the danger of exposing your outlet to strangers.
In order to create a system that enables applications to perform tasks as complex as controlling the entire computer (e.g. screen savers, hotkey programs, power toys, etc.), applications must be given the theoretical power to perform tasks that can crash the computer. The result is that the computer crashes when the application works improperly.
application complexity. Regardless of how smart a developer is, the developer's ability to guarantee the functional correctness of a system decreases in proportion to the complexity of that system. Simple systems therefor are much less likely to crash than complicated systems. Whether they do, or not, depends on the safeguards that were put in place to augment the developer's ability to guarantee the functional correctness of a system. NASA's procedures for programming misison-critical systems relies on any number of safeguards to ensure functional correctness of those systems.
I've read this book recently, and must disagree with the reviewer's assessments.
Although I'm not a fan of extreme programming (it seems counter-intuitive to my highly structured mind), the aspects mentioned by this book have accurately reflected the last five years of experience I've had as lead architect and developer at a custom development firm.
Let me give an example. The reviewer condescends the book for assuming a "Strategist" role is necessary in a successful project, since the customer undoubtedly knows his or her own business.
In my experience, which may not be the gospel truth, but is valuable nonetheless, the customers often do not know their own business. The individuals of an organization sometimes know nothing more than the rote daily routine with which they've been guided over the years. Ask them an insightful question about why or how a process came to exist, and they might give contradictory or vague answers. It is the role of the strategist to exhume the truths and necessities of an organization, which are not always superficial or easily understood.
The reviewer also disbelieves that SQL code is ever embedded within web pages. Many quick and dirty (or under-engineered) web sites do use some form of embedded SQL, however. I'm often called in to clean up such sites, and make them more secure and modular.
The book is admittedly light on related topics, and perhaps a more academic treatment of extreme programming would have been more useful. And I do agree with the reviewer in that many statements within the book seem like advertisements for the author's own company.
Nonetheless, Extreme Programming is a practice understood by few (comparitively speaking), and this book serves as a good bridge between Extreme Programming and more structured development methodologies.
Did you social engineer your publisher?
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
Kevin,
Was your recent book, "The Art of Deception," mainly an attempt to social engineer a book publisher? That book was such a POS, I'm curious as to how you got it published.
BTW, now that you're out of jail, will you miss hearing the words, "Free Kevin?" Are you willing to go back to jail to hear them?
This book has fantastic pace. I bought it tonight while waiting for a bus, and five hours later, I've finished it. It's rare that my undivided reading attention is captured without an occassional break.
That said, this book would make an excellent movie. Or, perhaps not.
It would be a movie that constantly moves forward, never allowing for boredom. Unfortunately, as is usual for Crichton, a forceful suspension of disbelief is required in order to accept the technology, plot, and characters.
Using his patented writing process, Crichton chooses and researches a concept until he understands the lingo, and then weaves a story around it. The resulting stories, including Prey, do fall far short of being scientific. However, they are at least scientifically entertaining.
Prey deals with the topics of nanotechnology, evolution, and distributed intelligence, and the consequences of such technology running amuck.
Crichton takes an immature science and, at the first plausible experimentation of that science, parlays it into the worst possible scenario over which his heroes must triumph. Unfortunately, this formula is continually overused within his patented process.
In a Crichton world, if somehow the government developed an anti-gravity machine, then the very first experimentation of that machine would result in massive negative consequences. Not the second experiment, or the experiment five years from now, but the First. And it wouldn't be gradual-bad, like pollution or the ozone layer. It would be all-at-once bad.
In reality, technology never works well enough to fail so horribly right from the start. To quote Prey, "To believe otherwise was to believe that the Wright brothers could build a rocket and fly to the moon instead of flying three hundred feet over sand dunes at Kitty Hawk."
Instead of considering the millions of reasons of why something wouldn't go wrong, Crichton focuses on the one or two improbable ways in which it might. The reader is forced to accept ten or so of these conditions in a row, increasingly invalidating any excuses for bad things to get worse.
Consequently, a scientific subject that was researched carefully turned into something that would only appeal to unscientific minds (perhaps those likely to see the movie.)
Since the premise for Crichton's books have not been ruled out entirely, it isn't difficult to overlook the technological absurdities. However, it is much more painful to experience Crichton's treatment of the characters within this story.
A forty year old programmer-turned-househusband and father of three continually makes decisions as though solving a technical problem was more important than protecting his family. At one dangerous place he dies nearly three times, but doesn't care whether his wife leaves the hospital prematurely to come join him. The protaganist never agonizes over anything; he thinks scientifically but plans unscientifically, and takes time between death scenes to tell his children not to argue. The contrived motivations within the plot demean any depth these characters might have had. If Crichton expects us to relate to any of them, I don't know why.
In short, Prey will take away your hours and leave you entertained. But your scientific mind may hate you for it.
Why is it that slashdot posts this shit, but doesn't cover noteworthy events like the release of Trillian?
Is it because SlashDot is anti-microsoft, and doesn't like to post anything having to do with Windows, unless it's bad?
I for one have never had anything posted on slashdot. Why? Who the fuck knows. I submit something interesting, it gets rejected, and then bullshit like this gets posted.
In fact, he went home, devised a solution, and then told you that his prior company had IP rights to the solution so that he could go behind your back and sell it himself.
... the first player that can double as a portable hard disk
... the first player with upgradeable firmware
Does the company actually believe this marketing bullshit? This MP3 player is far from the first player that can double as a hard disk, nor is it incredibly advanced with 'upgradeable firmware.'
Shit like this really pisses me off.
This post is fucking bullshit. After having tried to submit various *legitimate* posts to SlashDot during the last year, each with perfect spelling, great grammar, and insightful information, each has been rejected.
But drivel like this shit gets through. How fucking lame, SlashDot moderators.
Have a nice fucking holiday.
In this case, the Transporter Fountain creates not equations but hundreds of millions of "symbols" which can be used to reconstruct the data. The sending side transmits these symbols until the box on the receiving end confirms that it's collected enough symbols. The receiving box then performs an XOR operation on the symbols to derive the original data.
So, assuming that each "symbol" is at least one byte, then creating "hundreds of millions" of these symbols would result in hundreds of megabytes of data. Furthermore, the guy quoted 20MB as being a large amount of data to send.
Conclusion: Only sales & marketing would try to sell a product that turns 20MB into 100MB, sends it via UDP, only in order to have the results XOR'd together.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it interesting that the average score for posts on this topic is about 1.5.
Nothing else interesting is happening today, so a story gets duped? Cool! Now I know that I have a 0.0000001% chance of getting a story posted to SlashDot, if only I could post on a day in which nothing interesting is happened.
I've recently noticed that Google has started pulling pages in response to DCMA complaints. Has anyone else noticed this? I've tried to do a search for this topic on SlashDot, but I really must say that SlashDot's search engine returns crappy, useless results.
Anyways, I tried to submit this as a story, but it got rejected. But JOY, there's a new fucking tabless page and that gets posted! Can someone wake me up, is this the world we live in? Is this important news?
So. I've taken to a new strategy, of which this post is the first step. I will now begin submitting my stories to existing slashdot articles, no matter what the topic.
Furthermore, I will write an automated query agent to submit my story as the first post to the next available article that appears.
All bow down before the man who would not shut his mouth...
One fucking problem. This ad now requires you to "Select your mortgage rate here." Fuck that. I don't own a home, and I'm not going to click their stupid fucking flash ad just to make their marketing people feel worthwhile.
The beauty of commercials is that you don't have to watch one. But now some fuckhead advertiser wants me to play the game he designed. Fuck him (or her.) Pretty soon we'll be having to play crossword puzzles with advertising slogans just to read the fucking article.
And I feel really fucking sorry for blind people with screen readers.
If you think this post had alot of obscenities, you should have seen the email I sent to salon.
For a little recursive humor, trying searching "XFree86 adult" on MSN.
Combined with those handheld printers that work by "rubbing" the printer over paper, I can foresee some serious "wax on, wax off" action in the future.
Does it? I always thought that's exactly what google is filtering out behind the "12345 more results were omitted because they were similiar" thingy.
You think that site is bad, try mining through Symantec's site. Their online store, combined with their poor product differentiation between product models and product lines (i.e. Norton products vs. Symantec products) make it impossible for anyone to be a Symantec guru. My friend is a product manager there, and I always give him flack about it.
Similar to HTML's current weakness in separating presentation from content, the web today has a weakness in separating content sites from sales sites. Do a search in Google, especially for programming or technical topics, and you're more likely to retrieve 100 links to online stores selling a book on that topic, than finding actual content regarding that topic. This lack of ability to separate queries for knowledge, verses queries for product sales literature, is especially frustrating for scientists and programmers. I think Google is taking a step towards this with Froogle, meaning that if Froogle becomes popular enough, it's possible that Google will strip marketing pages from their search results.
Worse even, is when someone registers a thousand domains (plumbing-supplies-store.com, plumb-superstore-supplies.com, all-plumbing-supplies.com, etc) and posts the same marketing page content ("Buy my plumbing supplies!") on each domain. A search on Google will then retrieve 100 separate links containing the same identical garbage. You would think that Google could detect this "marketing domain spam" and reduce the relevancy of such search results.
Anyways, I can't complain, because I can find nearly anything on the web I need, compared to 10 years ago.
In Korea, there are several subscription services where you can download and watch full movies (ex. www.cineko.com). I guess it helps that nearly every household in Korea as a T1.
God, it sucks to be in a backwards country ruled by the obsolescence curve. In Japan, the free cell phones that come with plans are better than the phones we pay $299 for with a 2-year plan.
Can you hear me now?
"Does this mean I can finally record that rock opera I've always dreamed about?"
No you can't, you fucking tard. You need talent first.
I hate posts that end with stupid questions like this.
Mandrake has every right to sell advertisements? That's true, but if for some reason Microsoft decided to do the same with Longhorn, everyone on slashdot would be jumping down Bill's throat.
In 10 years, I hope my Mac has a mouse with 2 buttons; a webcam that works with more than just a single piece of beta software; a multimedia platform that doesn't require me to update for a yearly fee; an operating system that lets me adjust whatever settings I want; a hardware manufacturer that transcends cultish secrecy as a way of hyping its new products; and freedom from marketing campaigns that rely on telling me how cool my computer is because a 14 year old enjoys using the world's fastest personal computer.
In 10 years, I hope my PC has an operating system that doesn't need to be patched every day; a processor that won't be outdated in three months; networking that recovers gracefully from unexpected events without crashing the computer; and the freedom to use solutions that aren't stifled by one corporation's attempt to rule the world via software monopoly.
In 10 years, I hope my other PC has an operating system that works with all the hardware that's out there, without recompiling drivers; applications that can be installed and uninstalled without knowing the entire directory hierarchy of my system; the ability to adjust settings without manually editing text configuration files; and the ability to figure out basic operations without consulting a man page or HOW-TO.
In 10 years, I hope my Palm PDA becomes fun to use, my PocketPC becomes reliable to use, my cellphone becomes affordable to use, and my microwave becomes intuitive to use.
Man, 10 years never felt like such a long time.
- race conditions. From the FreeBSD Developers' Handbook: "A race condition is anomalous behavior caused by the unexpected dependence on the relative timing of events. In other words, a programmer incorrectly assumed that a particular event would always happen before another."
- deadlocks. Deadlock occurs when multiple processes compete for limited resources. From Sun's Java Classes: "The simplest approach to preventing deadlock is to impose ordering on the condition variables." Sometimes, it is difficult or impossible to guarantee cooperation among competing resources.
- unsafe application environments. An operating system can establish limitations upon applications, such that those applications never exceed certain safety boundaries (e.g. access to areas of the filesystem, system resources, etc.)
- unsafe hardware architecture. A computer's hardware consists of a primitive architecture that is unable to guarantee proper operation. The current PCI bus and "IRQ" interrupt scheme is particularly susceptible to computer crashes, if hardware drivers are programmed incorrectly.
- third-party software and hardware. The support for third-party software and hardware results in an operating system environment which is open and generalized enough to be susceptible to crashes. For example, if you allowed anyone to come into your house and plug any manner of devices into your power outlets, you could conceivably experience a power outage as the circuit breaker kicks in to prevent electrical damage. That's the danger of exposing your outlet to strangers.
- application complexity. Regardless of how smart a developer is, the developer's ability to guarantee the functional correctness of a system decreases in proportion to the complexity of that system. Simple systems therefor are much less likely to crash than complicated systems. Whether they do, or not, depends on the safeguards that were put in place to augment the developer's ability to guarantee the functional correctness of a system. NASA's procedures for programming misison-critical systems relies on any number of safeguards to ensure functional correctness of those systems.
That's a good starting point, for now.Race conditions are particularly difficult for developers to address, since they propogate at many levels within the system (hardware level, OS-assigned resource level, application instruction level, etc.) Also, only realtime operating systems or simple embedded systems guarantee the relative ordering of certain events. Complexity has a direct correlation to the inability to guarantee timing.
Most operating systems that thoroughly employ these limitations are considered "user-unfriendly." More user-friendly operating systems, such as Microsoft Windows, inherently eschew these safeguards by default, allowing applications to perform actions that potentially result in a crash. Application environments such as Sun's Java do a good job of "sandboxing" an application's access to resources, such that system crashes are unlikely.
In order to create a system that enables applications to perform tasks as complex as controlling the entire computer (e.g. screen savers, hotkey programs, power toys, etc.), applications must be given the theoretical power to perform tasks that can crash the computer. The result is that the computer crashes when the application works improperly.
Synesthesia is just a glitch in the Matrix.
I'd rather be lucky than good.
I've read this book recently, and must disagree with the reviewer's assessments.
Although I'm not a fan of extreme programming (it seems counter-intuitive to my highly structured mind), the aspects mentioned by this book have accurately reflected the last five years of experience I've had as lead architect and developer at a custom development firm.
Let me give an example. The reviewer condescends the book for assuming a "Strategist" role is necessary in a successful project, since the customer undoubtedly knows his or her own business.
In my experience, which may not be the gospel truth, but is valuable nonetheless, the customers often do not know their own business. The individuals of an organization sometimes know nothing more than the rote daily routine with which they've been guided over the years. Ask them an insightful question about why or how a process came to exist, and they might give contradictory or vague answers. It is the role of the strategist to exhume the truths and necessities of an organization, which are not always superficial or easily understood.
The reviewer also disbelieves that SQL code is ever embedded within web pages. Many quick and dirty (or under-engineered) web sites do use some form of embedded SQL, however. I'm often called in to clean up such sites, and make them more secure and modular.
The book is admittedly light on related topics, and perhaps a more academic treatment of extreme programming would have been more useful. And I do agree with the reviewer in that many statements within the book seem like advertisements for the author's own company.
Nonetheless, Extreme Programming is a practice understood by few (comparitively speaking), and this book serves as a good bridge between Extreme Programming and more structured development methodologies.
Kevin,
Was your recent book, "The Art of Deception," mainly an attempt to social engineer a book publisher? That book was such a POS, I'm curious as to how you got it published.
BTW, now that you're out of jail, will you miss hearing the words, "Free Kevin?" Are you willing to go back to jail to hear them?
This book has fantastic pace. I bought it tonight while waiting for a bus, and five hours later, I've finished it. It's rare that my undivided reading attention is captured without an occassional break.
That said, this book would make an excellent movie. Or, perhaps not.
It would be a movie that constantly moves forward, never allowing for boredom. Unfortunately, as is usual for Crichton, a forceful suspension of disbelief is required in order to accept the technology, plot, and characters.
Using his patented writing process, Crichton chooses and researches a concept until he understands the lingo, and then weaves a story around it. The resulting stories, including Prey, do fall far short of being scientific. However, they are at least scientifically entertaining.
Prey deals with the topics of nanotechnology, evolution, and distributed intelligence, and the consequences of such technology running amuck.
Crichton takes an immature science and, at the first plausible experimentation of that science, parlays it into the worst possible scenario over which his heroes must triumph. Unfortunately, this formula is continually overused within his patented process.
In a Crichton world, if somehow the government developed an anti-gravity machine, then the very first experimentation of that machine would result in massive negative consequences. Not the second experiment, or the experiment five years from now, but the First. And it wouldn't be gradual-bad, like pollution or the ozone layer. It would be all-at-once bad.
In reality, technology never works well enough to fail so horribly right from the start. To quote Prey, "To believe otherwise was to believe that the Wright brothers could build a rocket and fly to the moon instead of flying three hundred feet over sand dunes at Kitty Hawk."
Instead of considering the millions of reasons of why something wouldn't go wrong, Crichton focuses on the one or two improbable ways in which it might. The reader is forced to accept ten or so of these conditions in a row, increasingly invalidating any excuses for bad things to get worse.
Consequently, a scientific subject that was researched carefully turned into something that would only appeal to unscientific minds (perhaps those likely to see the movie.)
Since the premise for Crichton's books have not been ruled out entirely, it isn't difficult to overlook the technological absurdities. However, it is much more painful to experience Crichton's treatment of the characters within this story.
A forty year old programmer-turned-househusband and father of three continually makes decisions as though solving a technical problem was more important than protecting his family. At one dangerous place he dies nearly three times, but doesn't care whether his wife leaves the hospital prematurely to come join him. The protaganist never agonizes over anything; he thinks scientifically but plans unscientifically, and takes time between death scenes to tell his children not to argue. The contrived motivations within the plot demean any depth these characters might have had. If Crichton expects us to relate to any of them, I don't know why.
In short, Prey will take away your hours and leave you entertained. But your scientific mind may hate you for it.
Why is it that slashdot posts this shit, but doesn't cover noteworthy events like the release of Trillian?
Is it because SlashDot is anti-microsoft, and doesn't like to post anything having to do with Windows, unless it's bad?
I for one have never had anything posted on slashdot. Why? Who the fuck knows. I submit something interesting, it gets rejected, and then bullshit like this gets posted.
If I seem pissed it's because it fucking sucks.
In fact, he went home, devised a solution, and then told you that his prior company had IP rights to the solution so that he could go behind your back and sell it himself.
This post is fucking bullshit. After having tried to submit various *legitimate* posts to SlashDot during the last year, each with perfect spelling, great grammar, and insightful information, each has been rejected. But drivel like this shit gets through. How fucking lame, SlashDot moderators. Have a nice fucking holiday.
Conclusion: Only sales & marketing would try to sell a product that turns 20MB into 100MB, sends it via UDP, only in order to have the results XOR'd together.
Where do they get these people?