Re:MOD PARENT UP -- OR GET ATTACKED BY ITALIANS!
on
Webcomics Dissected
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I understand that Pokey the Penguin did not introduce non-sequiturs as a comic technique. But it's really much deeper than MSPaint + penguins + non-sequiturs. It's hard to explain... but... um, I assert that it is much deeper. Take my word for it or don't, but whatever it is about Pokey, something strikes me as being sheer brilliance, far beyond simply stacking one non-sequitur upon another. I know of many other non-sequitur-oriented comics, such as Zippy the Pinhead, and I usually just don't find them as brilliantly hilarious as Pokey.
Spamusement: If you don't read it, then you're a worthless excuse for a human being!
Dude. This guy collects spam with amusing subject lines, and he illustrates them in completely unexpected ways. Is that fucking awesome or what?
Furthermore, it's by Steven Frank of Panic, Inc. They make excellent OS X applications. Support him by partaking in his software and/or his funny.
That would have been funny ...
on
Webcomics Dissected
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· Score: 2, Insightful
... if you had said it three years ago, and if the story had something to do with webcomics somehow gaining inordinate power. Better luck next time!
MOD PARENT UP -- OR GET ATTACKED BY ITALIANS!
on
Webcomics Dissected
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· Score: 4, Funny
I totally fucking agree. Pokey, despite its sporadic-at-best update schedule, is one of the extremely few comics actually worth reading, especially after seven years of publication. But more importantly, it's pretty much the only webcomic with a fundamentally creative concept behind it. There are tons of dumb webcomics out there with believable characters, consistent and coherent storylines, good graphics, and actual punchlines. But it gets old after a while. (The uninitiated may think I'm being sarcastic, but I swear I'm not. I get jokes, I can see the point, I just don't usually laugh at them. Yet there's something inexplicably hilarious about Pokey, which some people immediately recognize, but which totally eludes most people.) Like the Dada movement, which rebelled against everything art meant to people, Pokey creates its own art form by rebelling against everything mainstream comics stand for. Examples, as above: believable characters, coherent storylines, good graphics, and typical jokes with punclines (or at least attempts at jokes). By swearing off all this, Pokey concocts a truly original style of humour. It irreverently omits everything associated with typical humour, yet it makes its thousands of fans laugh hysterically, episode after episode. Pokey is the anti-comic. Pokey is the Lucifer rebelling against the God of mainstream comics, and offering comic enlightenment to man. No, I take that back, Pokey is God, and The Authors are His prophet, and all those other comics are false idols.
Of course, by now, Pokey's influence is so widespread that people don't appreciate its achievements. It's true. Sure there are a few things that are obviously Pokey parodies or bootlegs, most of them mediocre at best such as the ever-lame Prodley the Puffin, but it truly has affected the collective consciousness of the comic universe. Whenever you see a comic which intentionally lacks a typical punchline yet seems oddly amusing, or which features a recurring but nonsensical pattern, or is simply surreal and beyond explanation, remember that Pokey brought you that. However indirectly, over his seven years in the spotlight, this little pixellated penguin and his poorly-drawn pals in the Arctic Circle have had a profound impact on the world of webcomics. And nobody should forget that. I for one would like to offer Pokey and his pals a grand HOORAY!
Hah, Comic Sans. Come on, every serious web designer uses 18-point italic all-caps underlined Courier for text, and Zapf Dingbats for headers.
(But seriously, it is very easy to change the default font locally. At the present, I am happily reading Slashdot in the elegant DSType book face "Esta". And I occasionally switch hither and thither among Jenson, Garamond, Poliphilus, Caslon, and Optima, because I am a typography geek. Slashdot's design doesn't do them justice, though.)
Re:How to bring down Google - Do-Not-Search law.
on
Has Google Peaked?
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· Score: 1
Oh, and props to whoever modded parent "funny."
Re:How to bring down Google - Do-Not-Search law.
on
Has Google Peaked?
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· Score: 1
I can see why you posted this anonymously, because that's (figuratively) the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
You want to destroy such a useful and important tool, something that makes the World Wide Web ten times more useful, just because it can help people more easily find personal information about you? News flash: if you don't want people to find personal information about you on the Web, then don't put it there. If some other site has information about you, then ask them to remove it. (I don't know if there's already a law, but if not, then there should be one requiring website operators to remove personal information about a person if they request. That would be a proposal serving the same purpose as yours, but less idiotic.) If you don't want people to find out your interests, for example by searching for your name and finding archives of mailing lists you subscribe to, then don't subscribe to mailing lists that archive to the public web. In whatever case, "Knowledge Wants To Be Known." (Like "Information Wants To Be Free," but not as vague or ideologically-loaded.) Once some knowledge about you is available on the public World Wide Web, it is pointless to try to control it by stopping people from searching it. Even if search engines are required to obey a do-not-search law, they will be replaced by decentralised systems. Someone could apply the Kademlia algorithm to a distributed spidering/searching network, for example, and if it ran on an anonymous system like I2P, then there would be no way to shut it down. Besides, it would be tricky to interpret a "do-not-search" in the context of a non-central search system. The fact is, it is hard to fix a social problem (invasion of privacy) with a technological solution (preventing companies from compiling indexes of information already available to the public, and letting the public search it easily).
Also, you say: "For example, John Smith can exclude himself from being searched. Only problem is, how to ensure other John Smiths are not excluded as well ? This is a 'bug', and will be sorted out soon." No, a "bug" is a functional error in a program. This is a fatal flaw in your already-stupid plan. You're pretty much admitting that there's no solution to this. How do you propose search engines differentiate betwixt different people of the same name? It would need some very advanced Artificial Intelligence, one which could presumably pass the Turing test, because it would have to understand human language. And if Google develops such a technology, then that alone could probably sustain them corporately, even if their search is crippled by the law.
True, but that doesn't actually protect your conversations from Google. People connected between your Internet connection and Google's server won't be able to monitor your conversations, but Google itself will, which is just as undesirable. Another reply has already mentioned Off-The-Record Messaging, a good solution for existing systems.
Of course I do. That was very obvious from his weblog entry announcing it. But that doesn't mean it's not a better format, or that it couldn't be made into a format better than the various XML-based RSSes.
When ever there's a technical niche to be filled, then given a set of possible candidates, costing equally as much (resource- and price-wise) to use, and having approximately equal functionality, the first one to become widely used will probably stay widely used, unless a future competitor has very important technical merits that can not be back-ported to the existing system.
Actually, everything I said there is basically common sense, but said in a particularly fancy way. RSS wins because it was the first to become widely used, and for the huge majority of uses (millions of random users with their feed-readers), switching to Atom would just break compatibility and offer no technical merits. Why is it any wonder that RSS won?
And by technical merits, I mean those observable to normal users. If J. Random Blogger can't see how switching to Atom makes things better, then why would he do it? Maybe the underlying architecture of Atom is much better. (I don't know; I haven't actually read an explanation of its improvements, aside from being standardized.) But if the RSS feeds of the present work just fine, which they do, then nobody's going to switch. I mean, if the Internet community made their protocol/format choices solely on technical merit, then not only would JSON-RPC have superseded XML-RPC, but I should also think thatwe'd be using a variant of Aaron Swartz's RSS 3.0 instead of the XML-based formats by now. It would save bandwidth, make it easier for humans to read and write feeds, and make it easier to parse and generate. (Yes, to parse it you'll have to write a a few custom regexes or something, but you won't need to include a 3MB XML-parsing library.) And we wouldn't need to worry about internationalisation issues like encoding, because RSS 3.0 feeds are UTF-8 by definition. Unfortunately, this is not about technical merits, just like capitalistic competition is never entirely about offering higher-quality goods or services. It's all about marketing, really -- marketing just enough for your product to get a foothold.
Google didn't choose the "wrong" specification. They chose a doomed one, maybe, but that doesn't make it bad.
The most likely explanation is that the teenagers who tend to play games like GTA are more likely to be in a mindset anyway. Wimpy pacifist teenagers like me are more likely to play Pacman or Tetris. (Though the former arguably encourages violence against tiny bitmapped ghosts, it isn't particularly graphic.)
If someone told me to play GTA for a while, I probably wouldn't enjoy it, because I don't like violence. It certainly would not make me into a violent person. I'm not suggesting that everyone who plays these games is already predisposed toward violence, but most likely, a statistically larger portion of them are so than the general population. And that would fully explain this correlation.
The point I was trying to make when I said that the Internet didn't need XML was that in recent years, people have been acting like XML is the solution to every problem. And that is not so. It doesn't matter if it has had a few good applications.
Yes, it is. You have a feed with a number of entries branching from it, each of which have information branching from them - descriptions, dates, etc. That's a tree structure.
It has a fixed depth. That's not a tree, or at least not a good use of a tree. With HTML for example, the depth is arbitrary.
What, then, is RSS transporting, if not text?
When I say "mark up," I mean things like:
This is some <abbr>HTML</abbr> with <em>markup</em> interspersed.
Er, you do realise that XML is merely a simplified subset of SGML, on which HTML is based?
Yes.
The meaning of "simplified" is questionable here, though. It's easier to parse and generate, but harder to read and write. Simplified for computers, but made more complex for humans.
Hard to agree that the Internet "got along just fine", when its killer app is based on something that is very similar to XML, only far more complicated
But the older versions of HTML were not in XML, so for all intents and purposes, it was a custom format. (Yes it was SGML, but in general, people didn't write generic SGML parsers. They wrote parsers for individual applications of SGML.)
Sounds like RSS to me.
Are you kidding? RSS is nothing like a tree. Of course anything is a tree when you express it in XML. RDF is a tree when you use the standard XML serialisation, but in its actual data model, it's absolutely nothing more than an unordered set of triples. RSS, similarly, is a header and then a list of items. The header and the items can both have properties. This is not a tree structure, and you do not use tags to mark up text. That's both of XML's valid uses wasted.
On the contrary, if you look at (X)HTML, you see that it is very much a tree, given how deep most pages go. And of course, you do use tags to mark up text in addition to using them to specify the structure. So the use of this syntax and model in HTML is fully justified.
Yeah, I've heard of YAML, and I like it very much. But just so you know, this isn't "my" format. Aaron Swartz (who is also responsible for the RDF-based RSS 1.0) specified it in 2002.
<item> <title>ZOT OB Not Quite as Bad as Expected?</title> <link>http://it.slashdot.org/ar ticle.pl?sid=05/08/18/146220&from=rss</link> </item>
<item> <title>RSS Version 3 Specs Up for Review</title> <link>http://slashdot.org/article. pl?sid=05/08/18/1353238&from=rss</link> </ite m> ... </channel> </rdf:RDF>
or...
Title: Slashdot Link: http://slashdot.org/ Description: News for nerds, stuff that matters
Title: ZOTOB Not Quite as Bad as Expected? Link: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/18/146 220&from=rss
Title: RSS Version 3 Specs Up For Review Link: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/18/135323 8&from=rss ...
Fuck XML's bloatedness. Simple data structures deserve simple file formats. And fuck the supposed "interoperability" and "standards-compliance" of XML, because this RSS 3 format can be parsed with one line of Python using only standard functions.
In fact, fuck XML altogether. The Internet got along just fine using custom text/binary based formats for three decades. Then some fucktards came along and said, "Hey, maybe if we take a markup language intended for specifying attributes of text, and we add some more syntactical rules, all of our problems will be solved!" And then thousands of other clueless W3C-worshippers believed it.
And now we have Tubgirl-esque protocols such as XML-RPC and XMPP (Jabber) which people somehow actually take seriously. What's wrong with people? I know we have huge hard drives and a lot of bandwidth these days, but that doesn't mean we should be going out of our way to waste it!
(I mean no disrespect to the web/Internet standards process as a whole, or the organisations involved. I just think XML is hideously overused. It does have its place, like XHTML -- the DOM does make it possible to do interesting things with DHTML and JavaScript. But the tag-based syntax is optimised for specifying a tree-structured document and the attributes of text it contains. It sickens me that people don't realise this. A data model like RSS is in no place to be specified with XML.)
Similarly to that idea, I have Vanitypedia. It's like Wikipedia in that the information has to be factually correct and neutral -- the difference is that it doesn't have to be at all noteworthy.
I haven't publicised VP at all yet, but hopefully, it will someday become the world's leading source of factual information about completely unimportant things, eventually even surpassing Slashdot.
Tor is completely open-source and peer-reviewed. The protocol is documented, and there is already at least one third-party implementation (JAP) that can access the same network. You really think it has evil Government spyware in it? Give me a break.
Heheh, vulgar variable names. That brings back memories. I was 7 years old, programming in BASIC on my Apple IIGS, writing a very long, silly, useless program. And I used vulgar variable names wherever possible... at least whatever vulgar words I knew at that point. Years later, I learned that Apple BASIC only took the first two letters of a variable name into consideration.:'(
In retrospect, this explains why I was having that bug involving the BOOBIE$ and BONER$ variables.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand that Pokey the Penguin did not introduce non-sequiturs as a comic technique. But it's really much deeper than MSPaint + penguins + non-sequiturs. It's hard to explain... but... um, I assert that it is much deeper. Take my word for it or don't, but whatever it is about Pokey, something strikes me as being sheer brilliance, far beyond simply stacking one non-sequitur upon another. I know of many other non-sequitur-oriented comics, such as Zippy the Pinhead, and I usually just don't find them as brilliantly hilarious as Pokey.
I don't know. Personal taste, I guess.
Spamusement: If you don't read it, then you're a worthless excuse for a human being!
Dude. This guy collects spam with amusing subject lines, and he illustrates them in completely unexpected ways. Is that fucking awesome or what?
Furthermore, it's by Steven Frank of Panic, Inc. They make excellent OS X applications. Support him by partaking in his software and/or his funny.
... if you had said it three years ago, and if the story had something to do with webcomics somehow gaining inordinate power. Better luck next time!
I totally fucking agree. Pokey, despite its sporadic-at-best update schedule, is one of the extremely few comics actually worth reading, especially after seven years of publication. But more importantly, it's pretty much the only webcomic with a fundamentally creative concept behind it. There are tons of dumb webcomics out there with believable characters, consistent and coherent storylines, good graphics, and actual punchlines. But it gets old after a while. (The uninitiated may think I'm being sarcastic, but I swear I'm not. I get jokes, I can see the point, I just don't usually laugh at them. Yet there's something inexplicably hilarious about Pokey, which some people immediately recognize, but which totally eludes most people.) Like the Dada movement, which rebelled against everything art meant to people, Pokey creates its own art form by rebelling against everything mainstream comics stand for. Examples, as above: believable characters, coherent storylines, good graphics, and typical jokes with punclines (or at least attempts at jokes). By swearing off all this, Pokey concocts a truly original style of humour. It irreverently omits everything associated with typical humour, yet it makes its thousands of fans laugh hysterically, episode after episode. Pokey is the anti-comic. Pokey is the Lucifer rebelling against the God of mainstream comics, and offering comic enlightenment to man. No, I take that back, Pokey is God, and The Authors are His prophet, and all those other comics are false idols.
Of course, by now, Pokey's influence is so widespread that people don't appreciate its achievements. It's true. Sure there are a few things that are obviously Pokey parodies or bootlegs, most of them mediocre at best such as the ever-lame Prodley the Puffin, but it truly has affected the collective consciousness of the comic universe. Whenever you see a comic which intentionally lacks a typical punchline yet seems oddly amusing, or which features a recurring but nonsensical pattern, or is simply surreal and beyond explanation, remember that Pokey brought you that. However indirectly, over his seven years in the spotlight, this little pixellated penguin and his poorly-drawn pals in the Arctic Circle have had a profound impact on the world of webcomics. And nobody should forget that. I for one would like to offer Pokey and his pals a grand HOORAY!
"Honor" and then "colourful". What's up with using the American spelling for one and the international spelling from the other?
Hah, Comic Sans. Come on, every serious web designer uses 18-point italic all-caps underlined Courier for text, and Zapf Dingbats for headers.
(But seriously, it is very easy to change the default font locally. At the present, I am happily reading Slashdot in the elegant DSType book face "Esta". And I occasionally switch hither and thither among Jenson, Garamond, Poliphilus, Caslon, and Optima, because I am a typography geek. Slashdot's design doesn't do them justice, though.)
Oh, and props to whoever modded parent "funny."
You want to destroy such a useful and important tool, something that makes the World Wide Web ten times more useful, just because it can help people more easily find personal information about you? News flash: if you don't want people to find personal information about you on the Web, then don't put it there. If some other site has information about you, then ask them to remove it. (I don't know if there's already a law, but if not, then there should be one requiring website operators to remove personal information about a person if they request. That would be a proposal serving the same purpose as yours, but less idiotic.) If you don't want people to find out your interests, for example by searching for your name and finding archives of mailing lists you subscribe to, then don't subscribe to mailing lists that archive to the public web. In whatever case, "Knowledge Wants To Be Known." (Like "Information Wants To Be Free," but not as vague or ideologically-loaded.) Once some knowledge about you is available on the public World Wide Web, it is pointless to try to control it by stopping people from searching it. Even if search engines are required to obey a do-not-search law, they will be replaced by decentralised systems. Someone could apply the Kademlia algorithm to a distributed spidering/searching network, for example, and if it ran on an anonymous system like I2P, then there would be no way to shut it down. Besides, it would be tricky to interpret a "do-not-search" in the context of a non-central search system. The fact is, it is hard to fix a social problem (invasion of privacy) with a technological solution (preventing companies from compiling indexes of information already available to the public, and letting the public search it easily).
Also, you say: "For example, John Smith can exclude himself from being searched. Only problem is, how to ensure other John Smiths are not excluded as well ? This is a 'bug', and will be sorted out soon." No, a "bug" is a functional error in a program. This is a fatal flaw in your already-stupid plan. You're pretty much admitting that there's no solution to this. How do you propose search engines differentiate betwixt different people of the same name? It would need some very advanced Artificial Intelligence, one which could presumably pass the Turing test, because it would have to understand human language. And if Google develops such a technology, then that alone could probably sustain them corporately, even if their search is crippled by the law.
In conclusion, you are an idiot.
True, but that doesn't actually protect your conversations from Google. People connected between your Internet connection and Google's server won't be able to monitor your conversations, but Google itself will, which is just as undesirable. Another reply has already mentioned Off-The-Record Messaging, a good solution for existing systems.
Of course I do. That was very obvious from his weblog entry announcing it. But that doesn't mean it's not a better format, or that it couldn't be made into a format better than the various XML-based RSSes.
Actually, everything I said there is basically common sense, but said in a particularly fancy way. RSS wins because it was the first to become widely used, and for the huge majority of uses (millions of random users with their feed-readers), switching to Atom would just break compatibility and offer no technical merits. Why is it any wonder that RSS won?
And by technical merits, I mean those observable to normal users. If J. Random Blogger can't see how switching to Atom makes things better, then why would he do it? Maybe the underlying architecture of Atom is much better. (I don't know; I haven't actually read an explanation of its improvements, aside from being standardized.) But if the RSS feeds of the present work just fine, which they do, then nobody's going to switch. I mean, if the Internet community made their protocol/format choices solely on technical merit, then not only would JSON-RPC have superseded XML-RPC, but I should also think thatwe'd be using a variant of Aaron Swartz's RSS 3.0 instead of the XML-based formats by now. It would save bandwidth, make it easier for humans to read and write feeds, and make it easier to parse and generate. (Yes, to parse it you'll have to write a a few custom regexes or something, but you won't need to include a 3MB XML-parsing library.) And we wouldn't need to worry about internationalisation issues like encoding, because RSS 3.0 feeds are UTF-8 by definition. Unfortunately, this is not about technical merits, just like capitalistic competition is never entirely about offering higher-quality goods or services. It's all about marketing, really -- marketing just enough for your product to get a foothold.
Google didn't choose the "wrong" specification. They chose a doomed one, maybe, but that doesn't make it bad.
I haven't RTFSed (read the f'ing study), but I am strongly inclined to believe that they're correlating two things but drawing a false conclusion about their relation.
The most likely explanation is that the teenagers who tend to play games like GTA are more likely to be in a mindset anyway. Wimpy pacifist teenagers like me are more likely to play Pacman or Tetris. (Though the former arguably encourages violence against tiny bitmapped ghosts, it isn't particularly graphic.)
If someone told me to play GTA for a while, I probably wouldn't enjoy it, because I don't like violence. It certainly would not make me into a violent person. I'm not suggesting that everyone who plays these games is already predisposed toward violence, but most likely, a statistically larger portion of them are so than the general population. And that would fully explain this correlation.
HTML requires a tree structure and interspersed markup. RSS requires neither.
Yes.
The meaning of "simplified" is questionable here, though. It's easier to parse and generate, but harder to read and write. Simplified for computers, but made more complex for humans.
But the older versions of HTML were not in XML, so for all intents and purposes, it was a custom format. (Yes it was SGML, but in general, people didn't write generic SGML parsers. They wrote parsers for individual applications of SGML.)Are you kidding? RSS is nothing like a tree. Of course anything is a tree when you express it in XML. RDF is a tree when you use the standard XML serialisation, but in its actual data model, it's absolutely nothing more than an unordered set of triples. RSS, similarly, is a header and then a list of items. The header and the items can both have properties. This is not a tree structure, and you do not use tags to mark up text. That's both of XML's valid uses wasted.
On the contrary, if you look at (X)HTML, you see that it is very much a tree, given how deep most pages go. And of course, you do use tags to mark up text in addition to using them to specify the structure. So the use of this syntax and model in HTML is fully justified.
Yeah, I've heard of YAML, and I like it very much. But just so you know, this isn't "my" format. Aaron Swartz (who is also responsible for the RDF-based RSS 1.0) specified it in 2002.
Don't forget Gopher!
(Good point, though. The Web equals the Internet only to idiots who think that AOL or the blue 'e' on their desktop is the entirety of the Internet.)
I'm glad you posted that.
I realise that Aaron was probably joking, in order to make fun of Dave Winer, but still, the XML crap is totally pwn3d by his version of RSS 3.
Seriously. Which of these is more compact and easy to read:
or...
Fuck XML's bloatedness. Simple data structures deserve simple file formats. And fuck the supposed "interoperability" and "standards-compliance" of XML, because this RSS 3 format can be parsed with one line of Python using only standard functions.
In fact, fuck XML altogether. The Internet got along just fine using custom text/binary based formats for three decades. Then some fucktards came along and said, "Hey, maybe if we take a markup language intended for specifying attributes of text, and we add some more syntactical rules, all of our problems will be solved!" And then thousands of other clueless W3C-worshippers believed it.
And now we have Tubgirl-esque protocols such as XML-RPC and XMPP (Jabber) which people somehow actually take seriously. What's wrong with people? I know we have huge hard drives and a lot of bandwidth these days, but that doesn't mean we should be going out of our way to waste it!
(I mean no disrespect to the web/Internet standards process as a whole, or the organisations involved. I just think XML is hideously overused. It does have its place, like XHTML -- the DOM does make it possible to do interesting things with DHTML and JavaScript. But the tag-based syntax is optimised for specifying a tree-structured document and the attributes of text it contains. It sickens me that people don't realise this. A data model like RSS is in no place to be specified with XML.)
I know I'm going to get modded down for saying this, but I've noticed that whenever someone says this in a comment, they get modded up to +5.
I haven't publicised VP at all yet, but hopefully, it will someday become the world's leading source of factual information about completely unimportant things, eventually even surpassing Slashdot.
Tor is completely open-source and peer-reviewed. The protocol is documented, and there is already at least one third-party implementation (JAP) that can access the same network. You really think it has evil Government spyware in it? Give me a break.
I don't think that's possible. This is about 3D face cameras. Jacko doesn't have a 3D face anymore.
Some of their member states may not have adopted it, but if the UN created an official Internet-management agency, I expect it would.
But would this make it illegal to use such services, or only to host them within Canadian jurisdiction? I suppose Google's safe if it's the latter.
Really? I don't know what version I had, but I could have sworn it only used the first two letters.
Do you know if QBasic does that? At the time, I also had an old IBM, so I might have been thinking of that one.
Heheh, vulgar variable names. That brings back memories. I was 7 years old, programming in BASIC on my Apple IIGS, writing a very long, silly, useless program. And I used vulgar variable names wherever possible... at least whatever vulgar words I knew at that point. Years later, I learned that Apple BASIC only took the first two letters of a variable name into consideration. :'(
In retrospect, this explains why I was having that bug involving the BOOBIE$ and BONER$ variables.