Ok, GIMP wizards! Now's youre chance to shine. Bring us Matrix Reloaded screen captures with Linus' face oover Reeves', and Darl's over Smith's in the Big Brawl..."
Wow, normally I'd have to pay for that kind of entertainment!
...that no one uploaded a zip bomb.
For the uninitiated, that's where you make a huge file or series of files containing nothing but a single character (e.g. a null character) repeated millions/billions of times over and then compressed. Since such perfectly repetitive data compresses so well, it's easy to upload the resulting small file (on the order of a few dozen kilobytes) and wait for the server to get thrown off unzipping it.
NineNine's post is a troll and flamebait (like a good number of the things he posts). Besides, database data storage security doesn't necessarily depend on the database you use but how you store it - e.g. storing passwords in a MySQL database. Unless you're a complete fuckhead who doesn't even bother to lock the doors of their house you won't store them in plaintext in the DB. But if you do, you'll get burned by your own MySQL incompetence. Then you will post on Slashdot and bitch about how insecure MySQL is because of your own stupidity.
but on the other hand it's not funny because it's true; it's worrying. A media player should not segfault just because of a choppy MP3! In fact, no program should segfault just by reading in a slightly screwed up file, full stop. I'm not joking here, mplayer can be damn unstable at times - I have an MP3 of the song "I Ran" which mplayer core dumps on. Kind of funny, in it's own worrying way. Fortunately, since DreamWorks are creating video and not playing it back, they won't have to witness this kind of error.
This is a fluff article.
on
Does Google = God?
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It just has some vague statistics about increasing numbers of Google searches and DNS requests in the last three years, then some specualtion by a talking head tech pundit about how "the rate of technological integration has intensified" and how in future everybody will be connected to everybody else.
Well, I can't understand what is the problem with fansites. If I had created Harry Potter I think that I would not have had any problems with people doing free advertising for my books. After all, its those people that buy my book.
Erm...have you seen some of the Harry Potter fansites? A lot of them are respectable, but the rest - well, that's one whole other hornet's nest.
Good post! Funny and insightful. I do find it very amusing that some people forget that every piece of literature produced for the last few hundred/thousand years could be considered a "ripoff" of everything else. Rowling rips off mythology and rips off Lucas, who in turn rips off mythology himself. Virtually every great or popular work of literature these days rips off some sort of legend; even the apogee of Western literature is a badly-disguised ripoff of the Odyssey. And that was probably a take-on of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Need I go on?
...speaking seriously, a rich pro-open-source organisation should patent that and then get it legally made public domain (if possible). At least then we know that a large corporation will actually patent that first.
...or was the article blurb just a bunch of buzzwords stuck together? I mean, each of the clauses in it on its own made sense but the whole blurb just seemed kind of incoherent. It's very thin on actual specifics; this sounds like it could just be more vapourware, unfortunately.
I disagree that leaving one's computer on all the time, is the best course of action, but I digress. I personally feel that the time it takes for a PC to boot really isn't that long: my PC loads up the GRUB bootloader screen in about 10-20 seconds, pauses for 3 seconds (if I want to change kernel) and boots Linux, which only takes about 60-90 seconds. I wouldn't say that waiting two minutes in the morning for your PC to boot is really that bad.
In addition to this, you have to look at Tetris' sheer simplicity. Think about it - it's just a big empty space and falling, movable blocks. If you do well the blocks start falling faster and faster. Then you die. And yet it is all-absorbing and highly immersive. Tetris is truly amazing just for the ratio of enjoyment-to-complexity it has.
The funny thing is, this is so obvious that even the cartoonist of Dilbert predicted what you describe happening in his book "The Dilbert Future" about seven or eight years ago.
"Or do you think you know more then the moderators?"
I probably don't know more in general than the moderators, but I'd say I know more about moderation than the moderators. I've seen a "Slashdot is gay" troll modded up to (3, Insightful). I've seen a Matrix Reloaded spoiler modded up to 4; ditto article text trolls. I've seen countless curt though otherwise insightful comments modded down to (-1, Flamebait). I've seen driveby moderations of controversial comments and I've been the victim of a rogue moderator who hit five or six of my comments with Overrated moderations. I've seen trollish pro-Windows and pro-Linux rants with bad spelling and grammar modded up to 2 or 3. I've seen a repost of the "Gentoo Linux Zealot translator" modded up to 4. I've seen posts that do nothing but suck up to the moderators get a score of 5 with Interesting or Insightful moderations. People getting the first or second post have been hit with -1, Redundant. The list goes on and on.
Please don't try to tell me that the moderators know what the hell they're doing. I've seen too many examples of it being perverted. The M1 system is fundamentally broken:
People get unequal numbers of points
Moderators are randomly chosen from the/. population
There are random intervals of time between M1 opportunities
The sheep effect: latter moderations of a comment generally duplicate that of the first
Overrated and Underrated: why?
Ridiculously easy to subvert
Ridiculously widely subverted
Can't handle large crapfloods
So, no, I don't think the moderators are smart enough to think for themselves.
Worse, still, apparently CmdrTaco himself refuses to fix the trolls. He says himself in the FAQ that he has no plans to make Underrated or Overrated M2'able, or to stop the editors from having more mod points, or to just give everyone more mod points, or anything else which could help the system. His changes have just served to obfuscate the system; hiding "Overrated" and "Underrated" from the "Score: X, Modifier" text, using percentages to show total moderations and keeping the system for selecting and removing moderators wrapped up in a pile of unreadable Slash code: don't tell me it's not unreadable, since I have a copy of the "overhauled" Slash 2.2.6 Perl code, and it's buried in subfolder upon subfolder with a dozen different types of files.
And what will happen now? I'll no doubt be slapped with a (-1, Offtopic) or (-1, Troll) by those very same moderators the parent post is defending, which serves to reinforce my point. The moderation system and the moderators themselves are horrendously broken and no one is willing to do anything about it; the users are too apathetic and moronic, the trolls are too busy trying to further demonstrate the stupidity of it and the head honchos are burying their heads in the sand or attacking other innocents with bitchslaps to compensate for their bruised egos. Just beneath the seemingly successful surface of moderation lies a horrible seething, teeming mass of gleeful trolls, random users and vindictive editors clawing at each other. Is there a way out? Yes, but unfortunately there is little you can do about it. The only people who can really make an immediate difference are the site coders, but they're too far removed from it to noticce what's going on. You can try to help by no longer moderating - M2 instead. If enough people do this then maybe it might just make them sit up and notice.
I hope you appreciate the salient points I have made. Thank you for taking the time to read this post and moderating me "Insightful".
"1 ESR is basically redefining everyone around you to only exist in your own personal universe, where you of course are the most important person alive."
So you're saying that 1 unit of ESR is equivalent to solipsism?
Q: What did the constipated mathematician do? A: He worked it out with a pencil!
Q: What's purple and commutes? A: An Abelian grape.
Q: Why do you never hear the number 288 on television? A: It's two gross.
Q: What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a rock climber? A: Nothing. You can't cross a vector and a scalar.
Q. How many mathematicians does it take to change a lightbulb? A. 1, he gives the lightbulb to 3 engineers, thus reducing the problem to a previously solved joke.
Q: What's big, grey, and proves the uncountability of the reals? A: Cantor's diagonal elephant.
Q: What's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice? A: Zorn's Lemon.
Q: What's yellow, normed, and complete? A: A Bananach space.
Q: What is very old, used by farmers, and obeys the fundamental theorem of arithmetic? A: An antique tractorisation domain.
Q: What is hallucinogenic and exists for every group with order divisible by p^k? A: A psilocybin p-subgroup.
Q: What is often used by Canadians to help solve certain differential equations? A: the Lacrosse transform.
Q: What is clear and used by trendy sophisticated engineers to solve other differential equations? A: The Perrier transform.
Q: Who knows everything there is to be known about vector analysis? A: The Oracle of del phi!
=======
Halfway through a recent airplane flight from Warsaw to New York, there was nearly a major disaster when the flight crew got sick from eating the fish. After they had passed out, one of the flight attendants asked over the intercom if there were any pilots in the cabin.
An elderly gentleman, who had flown a bit in the war, raised his hand and was rushed into the cockpit of the 747. When he got there, took the seat, and saw all the displays and controls, he realized he was in over his head. He told the flight attendant that he didn't think he could fly this plane. When asked why not, he replied,
"I am just a simple Pole in a complex plane"
So, they just had to rely on the method of steepest descents.
=======
You know that during the Great Flood, Noah brought along two of every species for reproductive purposes. Well, after a few weeks on the ark, all the couples were getting along fine, except for these two snakes. Day and night, Noah worried that this was going to mean the end of this species.
Finally when the flood ended and the ark hit ground, the two snakes darted out of the ship and headed to the nearest picnic table where they started to "go at it". It was then that Noah realized that...
AOL probably doesn't believe they can retrace the software release. What they do believe is that they can protect themselves from legal action by yanking it from their own web site so they can say "Hey, we did all we could to stop them distributing it." Even though it's locking the stable door after the horse has bolted, it will at least provide them with a legal defence if necessary.
This might be considered redundant, but this is the only explanation of the simplex method I can comprehend. IANA Linear Programmmer, so I may be wrong. Bear that in mind.
The simplex algorithm is a way of solving Linear Programming problems. Linear Programming problems require you to find an optimal solution for a series of constraints.
An example might be:
You are a baker, and you have 20 pounds of flour and a dozen eggs. You can make either loaves of bread (requiring four pounds of flour each) or cakes (requiring three pounds of flour and two eggs each). A loaf of bread sells for $1 and a cake for $4. How can you maximise or minimise your profit? (Those last two are the optimal solutions: minimising or maximising.) Let's say we want to maximise profit.
We can illustrate the problem on a 2-D graph, using one axis for the number of loaves and one axis for the number of cakes. We draw inequalities as lines on the graph to demonstrate the boundaries; for example, we can make at most six cakes (which then implies two loaves, making you $26 in total) and at least zero cakes (which then implies five loaves, making you $5 in total). Thus, if cakes = 6, loaves = 2 and if cakes = 0, loaves = 5. We can plot these as two points on the graph (e.g. at co-ordinates (6,2) and (0,5)) and then join the two points to get a line, which is one of our boundaries; on one side of the line are feasible solutions and on the other impossible ones (e.g trying to make more than six cakes).
In addition to this there are two more boundary lines, x=0 and y=0 (since we can't make fewer than zero cakes or fewer than zero loaves). These three boundary lines define a triangle, a polygon with three vertices. Inside the polygon are feasible solutions, on the outside...well, you probably can guess.
The simplex method would work here by taking advantage of the fact that the optimal solution must be at a vertex of this polygon defined by the problem. Here it works very quickly since there's only three vertices to try.
Now say we add another constraint, such as that loaves require 15 minutes to make, cakes require 25, and we only have four hours to bake what we need. This constraint would be represented by another axis on the graph, making it three-dimensional. Once again we would get a closed shape with straight edges; a 3-D shape instead of a 2-D polygon. Again, the optimal solution now lies at one of the vertices of this shape.
The simplex method can be used here. We can continue adding more constraints on resources. This adds more axes to the graphs and each time the number of dimensions is incremented. Some problems may involve shapes in 20 or 30 dimensions, or even more with tens of thousands of vertices (any of which could be an optimal solution). Here the simplex method uses a probabilistic method to make its way to the vertex which gives maximum yied (in this case, profit.)
I'll leave someone else to go into the specifics of how the simplex method traverses it. It's a very nice algorithm though, working in polynomial time.
So...which drives are safe? Smaller drives? Drives with lengthier warranties? Older drives? Slower drives? All of the above? I need some hints here!
(Though so far my family's been lucky; three computers and no hard disks crapping out. Admittedly, though, the most recently purchased computer was bought about eight months ago.)
Slashdot Mirror
"The review of FreeBSD 5.1 says it lacks the stability of v4.8"
A BSD lacking stability? *universe explodes*
Ok, GIMP wizards! Now's youre chance to shine. Bring us Matrix Reloaded screen captures with Linus' face oover Reeves', and Darl's over Smith's in the Big Brawl..."
Wow, normally I'd have to pay for that kind of entertainment!
...that no one uploaded a zip bomb. For the uninitiated, that's where you make a huge file or series of files containing nothing but a single character (e.g. a null character) repeated millions/billions of times over and then compressed. Since such perfectly repetitive data compresses so well, it's easy to upload the resulting small file (on the order of a few dozen kilobytes) and wait for the server to get thrown off unzipping it.
NineNine's post is a troll and flamebait (like a good number of the things he posts). Besides, database data storage security doesn't necessarily depend on the database you use but how you store it - e.g. storing passwords in a MySQL database. Unless you're a complete fuckhead who doesn't even bother to lock the doors of their house you won't store them in plaintext in the DB. But if you do, you'll get burned by your own MySQL incompetence. Then you will post on Slashdot and bitch about how insecure MySQL is because of your own stupidity.
Good day, kind sir.
but on the other hand it's not funny because it's true; it's worrying. A media player should not segfault just because of a choppy MP3! In fact, no program should segfault just by reading in a slightly screwed up file, full stop. I'm not joking here, mplayer can be damn unstable at times - I have an MP3 of the song "I Ran" which mplayer core dumps on. Kind of funny, in it's own worrying way. Fortunately, since DreamWorks are creating video and not playing it back, they won't have to witness this kind of error.
It just has some vague statistics about increasing numbers of Google searches and DNS requests in the last three years, then some specualtion by a talking head tech pundit about how "the rate of technological integration has intensified" and how in future everybody will be connected to everybody else.
Here's an Everything2 writeup about this joke.
Well, I can't understand what is the problem with fansites. If I had created Harry Potter I think that I would not have had any problems with people doing free advertising for my books. After all, its those people that buy my book.
Erm...have you seen some of the Harry Potter fansites? A lot of them are respectable, but the rest - well, that's one whole other hornet's nest.
Good post! Funny and insightful. I do find it very amusing that some people forget that every piece of literature produced for the last few hundred/thousand years could be considered a "ripoff" of everything else. Rowling rips off mythology and rips off Lucas, who in turn rips off mythology himself. Virtually every great or popular work of literature these days rips off some sort of legend; even the apogee of Western literature is a badly-disguised ripoff of the Odyssey. And that was probably a take-on of the Epic of Gilgamesh. Need I go on?
...speaking seriously, a rich pro-open-source organisation should patent that and then get it legally made public domain (if possible). At least then we know that a large corporation will actually patent that first.
...or was the article blurb just a bunch of buzzwords stuck together? I mean, each of the clauses in it on its own made sense but the whole blurb just seemed kind of incoherent. It's very thin on actual specifics; this sounds like it could just be more vapourware, unfortunately.
I disagree that leaving one's computer on all the time, is the best course of action, but I digress. I personally feel that the time it takes for a PC to boot really isn't that long: my PC loads up the GRUB bootloader screen in about 10-20 seconds, pauses for 3 seconds (if I want to change kernel) and boots Linux, which only takes about 60-90 seconds. I wouldn't say that waiting two minutes in the morning for your PC to boot is really that bad.
In addition to this, you have to look at Tetris' sheer simplicity. Think about it - it's just a big empty space and falling, movable blocks. If you do well the blocks start falling faster and faster. Then you die. And yet it is all-absorbing and highly immersive. Tetris is truly amazing just for the ratio of enjoyment-to-complexity it has.
"Is there some sort of Slashdot Book of Laws that dictates that these things must happen?"
You're new, here, aren't you?
Model M keyboard.
Need I say more?
Real nerds use ed, grep and mkdir to organise and analyse text!
The funny thing is, this is so obvious that even the cartoonist of Dilbert predicted what you describe happening in his book "The Dilbert Future" about seven or eight years ago.
I probably don't know more in general than the moderators, but I'd say I know more about moderation than the moderators. I've seen a "Slashdot is gay" troll modded up to (3, Insightful). I've seen a Matrix Reloaded spoiler modded up to 4; ditto article text trolls. I've seen countless curt though otherwise insightful comments modded down to (-1, Flamebait). I've seen driveby moderations of controversial comments and I've been the victim of a rogue moderator who hit five or six of my comments with Overrated moderations. I've seen trollish pro-Windows and pro-Linux rants with bad spelling and grammar modded up to 2 or 3. I've seen a repost of the "Gentoo Linux Zealot translator" modded up to 4. I've seen posts that do nothing but suck up to the moderators get a score of 5 with Interesting or Insightful moderations. People getting the first or second post have been hit with -1, Redundant. The list goes on and on.
Please don't try to tell me that the moderators know what the hell they're doing. I've seen too many examples of it being perverted. The M1 system is fundamentally broken:
- People get unequal numbers of points
- Moderators are randomly chosen from the
/. population
- There are random intervals of time between M1 opportunities
- The sheep effect: latter moderations of a comment generally duplicate that of the first
- Overrated and Underrated: why?
- Ridiculously easy to subvert
- Ridiculously widely subverted
- Can't handle large crapfloods
So, no, I don't think the moderators are smart enough to think for themselves.Worse, still, apparently CmdrTaco himself refuses to fix the trolls. He says himself in the FAQ that he has no plans to make Underrated or Overrated M2'able, or to stop the editors from having more mod points, or to just give everyone more mod points, or anything else which could help the system. His changes have just served to obfuscate the system; hiding "Overrated" and "Underrated" from the "Score: X, Modifier" text, using percentages to show total moderations and keeping the system for selecting and removing moderators wrapped up in a pile of unreadable Slash code: don't tell me it's not unreadable, since I have a copy of the "overhauled" Slash 2.2.6 Perl code, and it's buried in subfolder upon subfolder with a dozen different types of files.
And what will happen now? I'll no doubt be slapped with a (-1, Offtopic) or (-1, Troll) by those very same moderators the parent post is defending, which serves to reinforce my point. The moderation system and the moderators themselves are horrendously broken and no one is willing to do anything about it; the users are too apathetic and moronic, the trolls are too busy trying to further demonstrate the stupidity of it and the head honchos are burying their heads in the sand or attacking other innocents with bitchslaps to compensate for their bruised egos. Just beneath the seemingly successful surface of moderation lies a horrible seething, teeming mass of gleeful trolls, random users and vindictive editors clawing at each other. Is there a way out? Yes, but unfortunately there is little you can do about it. The only people who can really make an immediate difference are the site coders, but they're too far removed from it to noticce what's going on. You can try to help by no longer moderating - M2 instead. If enough people do this then maybe it might just make them sit up and notice.
I hope you appreciate the salient points I have made. Thank you for taking the time to read this post and moderating me "Insightful".
No one's heard of OpenOffice.org because everyone else uses MS Office.
"1 ESR is basically redefining everyone around you to only exist in your own personal universe, where you of course are the most important person alive."
So you're saying that 1 unit of ESR is equivalent to solipsism?
Q: What did the constipated mathematician do?
A: He worked it out with a pencil!
Q: What's purple and commutes?
A: An Abelian grape.
Q: Why do you never hear the number 288 on television?
A: It's two gross.
Q: What do you get when you cross a mosquito with a rock climber?
A: Nothing. You can't cross a vector and a scalar.
Q. How many mathematicians does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. 1, he gives the lightbulb to 3 engineers, thus reducing the problem to a previously solved joke.
Q: What's big, grey, and proves the uncountability of the reals?
A: Cantor's diagonal elephant.
Q: What's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice?
A: Zorn's Lemon.
Q: What's yellow, normed, and complete?
A: A Bananach space.
Q: What is very old, used by farmers, and obeys the fundamental theorem of arithmetic?
A: An antique tractorisation domain.
Q: What is hallucinogenic and exists for every group with order divisible by p^k?
A: A psilocybin p-subgroup.
Q: What is often used by Canadians to help solve certain differential equations?
A: the Lacrosse transform.
Q: What is clear and used by trendy sophisticated engineers to solve other differential equations?
A: The Perrier transform.
Q: Who knows everything there is to be known about vector analysis?
A: The Oracle of del phi!
=======
Halfway through a recent airplane flight from Warsaw to New York, there was nearly a major disaster when the flight crew got sick from eating the fish. After they had passed out, one of the flight attendants asked over the intercom if there were any pilots in the cabin.
An elderly gentleman, who had flown a bit in the war, raised his hand and was rushed into the cockpit of the 747. When he got there, took the seat, and saw all the displays and controls, he realized he was in over his head. He told the flight attendant that he didn't think he could fly this plane. When asked why not, he replied,
"I am just a simple Pole in a complex plane"
So, they just had to rely on the method of steepest descents.
=======
You know that during the Great Flood, Noah brought along two of every species for reproductive purposes. Well, after a few weeks on the ark, all the couples were getting along fine, except for these two snakes. Day and night, Noah worried that this was going to mean the end of this species.
Finally when the flood ended and the ark hit ground, the two snakes darted out of the ship and headed to the nearest picnic table where they started to "go at it". It was then that Noah realized that...
Adders can't multiply without their log tables.
AOL probably doesn't believe they can retrace the software release. What they do believe is that they can protect themselves from legal action by yanking it from their own web site so they can say "Hey, we did all we could to stop them distributing it." Even though it's locking the stable door after the horse has bolted, it will at least provide them with a legal defence if necessary.
I suppose it would only be marginally slower to implement; compare the neighbours and shift to the best one.
This might be considered redundant, but this is the only explanation of the simplex method I can comprehend. IANA Linear Programmmer, so I may be wrong. Bear that in mind.
The simplex algorithm is a way of solving Linear Programming problems. Linear Programming problems require you to find an optimal solution for a series of constraints.
An example might be:
You are a baker, and you have 20 pounds of flour and a dozen eggs. You can make either loaves of bread (requiring four pounds of flour each) or cakes (requiring three pounds of flour and two eggs each). A loaf of bread sells for $1 and a cake for $4. How can you maximise or minimise your profit? (Those last two are the optimal solutions: minimising or maximising.) Let's say we want to maximise profit.
We can illustrate the problem on a 2-D graph, using one axis for the number of loaves and one axis for the number of cakes. We draw inequalities as lines on the graph to demonstrate the boundaries; for example, we can make at most six cakes (which then implies two loaves, making you $26 in total) and at least zero cakes (which then implies five loaves, making you $5 in total). Thus, if cakes = 6, loaves = 2 and if cakes = 0, loaves = 5. We can plot these as two points on the graph (e.g. at co-ordinates (6,2) and (0,5)) and then join the two points to get a line, which is one of our boundaries; on one side of the line are feasible solutions and on the other impossible ones (e.g trying to make more than six cakes).
In addition to this there are two more boundary lines, x=0 and y=0 (since we can't make fewer than zero cakes or fewer than zero loaves). These three boundary lines define a triangle, a polygon with three vertices. Inside the polygon are feasible solutions, on the outside...well, you probably can guess.
The simplex method would work here by taking advantage of the fact that the optimal solution must be at a vertex of this polygon defined by the problem. Here it works very quickly since there's only three vertices to try.
Now say we add another constraint, such as that loaves require 15 minutes to make, cakes require 25, and we only have four hours to bake what we need. This constraint would be represented by another axis on the graph, making it three-dimensional. Once again we would get a closed shape with straight edges; a 3-D shape instead of a 2-D polygon. Again, the optimal solution now lies at one of the vertices of this shape.
The simplex method can be used here. We can continue adding more constraints on resources. This adds more axes to the graphs and each time the number of dimensions is incremented. Some problems may involve shapes in 20 or 30 dimensions, or even more with tens of thousands of vertices (any of which could be an optimal solution). Here the simplex method uses a probabilistic method to make its way to the vertex which gives maximum yied (in this case, profit.)
I'll leave someone else to go into the specifics of how the simplex method traverses it. It's a very nice algorithm though, working in polynomial time.
So...which drives are safe? Smaller drives? Drives with lengthier warranties? Older drives? Slower drives? All of the above? I need some hints here!
(Though so far my family's been lucky; three computers and no hard disks crapping out. Admittedly, though, the most recently purchased computer was bought about eight months ago.)