Re:A brilliant book....Sexuality and Race, Too
on
The Left Hand of Darkness
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Varley's trilogy (Titan, Wizard, Demon) is excellent, yes, really enduring characters, awesome setting. I think some of his other works speak more directly to issues of gender and all the other distinguishing marks of culture... the "Persistence of Vision" short story collection is just incredible. One of the first stories of his I read as a kid was "The Barbie Murders" which is just a classic sf story. Dammit Varley needs to start cranking out more work, it's all just so good.
Probably the most influential sf work on gender, just because it came before most everything else and was so uncompromising, was Theodore Sturgeon's
VenusPlusX. The sad thing is that its peeks into the "real world," the comic and disturbing gender roles of the 1950s, are not dated, fifty years later.
*
don't want you to own CDs that can be played on computers,
or anything smarter than a dumb CD player hooked up to your analog stereo,
*
asked Congress to pass a bill
that required all computers to provide copy prevention technology that would criminalize exactly what you describe, and
*
passed the DMCA,
which allows them to use any crappy access control measures they want, and not only will it be illegal for you to walk right around them, it will be illegal for you to tell someone else how to walk right around them.
"Wow. Making a copy of this music is gonna be reaaaaallly difficult."
In about ten years it sure as hell will be, unless Congress is repeatedly hit with the cluestick.
And maybe even if they are. The computer manufacturers, content providers, and production companies (who are merging and will all be the same eventually anyway) would much prefer you to lease a Playstation, rather than own a computer. Much more profitable in the long-term. Sure, some companies will lose out if the industry makes the transition from selling you a Turing Machine to selling you a souped-up Gameboy. But the industry as a whole will benefit.
I don't think you know what you're talking about. QuickTime runs on a variety of platforms. People think that because the (popular, closed-source) "Sorenson" is proprietary that the whole system is. It's not.
Go download
all the tech specs, including file format and APIs and such. "Well-defined" and "standard" are two words that definitely apply to QuickTime and its codec platform.
"Technically, there is little reason to put animation, MPEG video, audio, and other features all into the same viewer: the amount of content that usefully mixes multiple formats is negligible."
Yeah, who would want to have, like, audio and video play at the same time. Whatever...
Baldur's Gate II
has the "Built for Mac OS X" sticker on the box but is slow, dog-slow, basically-unplayably-slow on OS X. I haven't gotten out of the prison yet, I keep getting killed by goblins with their Slow Frustration of Death spells apparently. I booted into OS 9 once to check and it was much more fun (but I still got killed, I suck).
Oh wait, someone found an
OS X speedup recommendation
for BG II earlier today. Hrm. Well, maybe I'll give it another try in 16-bit color. Bah.
Tropico
is fun enough; SimCityesque weighted toward economics -- as dictator you control wages and prices. I may give it to my early-teen nephew this year, it's pseudo-educational. Consider it for your sister.
The Return to Castle Wolfenstein demo kicks ass on OS X... very fast if you have enough RAM, though the interface still needs some work. I'm looking forward to the real release. And I'm thinking about getting
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
too just to see if it's any good; it sounds good.
Booting over into OS 9, Summoner
got a fair bit of my time but I eventually got bored.
Oni
I liked but got progressively harder to where I just couldn't handle it; I ended up just using the cheat codes to finish.
Majesty
is a well-balanced "Yet Another Warcraft" game, single-player fairly easy, multi-player eh OK. Again that's a consideration for your sister (yes you kill stuff but it's all like dragons and floating eyeballs, not gory, just fantasy).
Oh, and Unreal Tournament I still break out when I feel the need to shoot stuff.
(I don't work at Inside Mac Games, I just appreciate one of the few decent remaining game sites that focuses on the Mac.)
"most features found in QuickTime today such as streaming capability and portal functionality were derived from RealMedia's software"
I had a QuickTime movie of my rabbits, on my personal homepage in 1995 which, if you had the QT plugin installed, would start playing as soon as it calculated it could reliably play the whole movie without having to pause. The little control bar filled up with gray and then it started playing automatically... very cool.
Considering that the prototype of pro-quality streaming was
QuickTime Conferencing
in 1994, allowing n people each to stream video to n-1 friends, I think you've got your chronology turned around a bit.
And I don't know what you mean by "portal functionality" but if you mean what I think, that's pretty trivial:)
"It's a media format wrapper (not a codec like MPEG as most of these Slashfools are contending). That's all."
Well, that's kind of the point; it wasn't just a codec. At a time when everyone else was doing FLC animation (shudder) or straight-shot MPEGs, Apple envisioned a media format which was extensible and flexible. Its design played well with time. Basically the multimedia revolution has been another case of Apple being the skunkworks R&D department for the entire industry.
"It's really an open secret that the editors will
mod comments and even 'bitchslap' them. I think this is as bad as
editing a user since the moderation is supposed to be done by
users who earn their mod points, while the editors, as the
superusers have unlimited points to mod as they wish.
I wish the editors will realize one day how stupid this is and
remedy it. Otherwise it is akin to an election which has no real
power."
We do mod comments, yes, but we're fair about it.
I can say this with some certainty because, like all
moderations, ours get metamoderated -- so if we start unfairly
modding people up or down, we get email a couple of days later
letting us know we screwed up!
I can't speak for the other Slashdot editors, but as for me --
of all my mods in the last several months, only two have gotten
Unfair judgements. Both were trolls that had posted links that
looked like they went somewhere informative but didn't. Apparently
the metamoderators didn't bother to check the links, oh well. So I
stand by my record of massive Fairness.
Basically I spend mod points where I see that I can save our
regular moderators some time. Slashdot gets a lot of crap posted
anonymously that is obvious trolling, flamebaiting, or
offtopickism, and it would get itself modded down to -1 anyway if
we flooded the system with mod points. My taking care of it lets
our users focus a little more on picking out what they
consider to be the good stuff to mod up, rather than just having a
troll cost them a point (and the opportunity to participate in the
discussion).
In short, I do a little bit of grunt-work, so that our users
can be more choosy and careful, genuinely improving the quality
and controlling the tenor of the site. And the built-in feedback
of our M2 system will let me know if I ever stray too far from how
the users think the site should be run.
Also, for the record, "bitchslap" refers to a
specific
script
in the codebase which retroactively sets all of a user's comments
to score:-1. Important point: it's only ever been used on user
accounts that posted using scripts. And it hasn't been used in
months, AFAIK, since the existing moderation/metamod system has
been working so well.
Community-forum websites like Slashdot are their BBSes. Different tech, but then the tech was always evolving anyway.
Jamie McCarthy
co-sysop of Thieves' World FIDO:)
"How Close Are We To Cloning Time?" by Frank Miele
on
First Cloned Human Embryo
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Skeptic magazine
had an
excellent issue
in 1999 regarding cloning. Unfortunately the only article they have online is Frank Miele's
How Close Are We To Cloning Time? It's about half discussion of the scientific facts, and half an overview of the ethical issues.
It's a shame Michael Shermer's article on ethics isn't online. Shermer finds most objections to cloning to be variations on "that's God's provenance and we shouldn't go there" which he finds absurd. "If God meant us to fly, we'd have wings" and such. Very thought-provoking, whether you agree with him or not.
If you find cloning interesting, I recommend getting the
back issue.
According to The Unix-Haters Handbook, the original reason was that some older versions of "sync" required the operator to wait several seconds before the filesystem realized, yes, it really did have to flush those sectors to disk. Somehow typing "sync" three times became a magical incantation, with most admins unaware that the second two "syncs" only served as a pause, to slow down the typist so the first one had time to take effect.
Superstition has preserved the incantation although all modern implementations of "sync" flush the data immediately.
Kind of like how a lot of unix admins who got started "back in the day" will still stick a -print in their list of find arguments, even though most modern finds assume it by default. Habit...
BTW, don't hold me to those exact numbers, Hemos copy'n'pasted something I just typed into IRC without reflecting on it too much:)
The problem is that there's way too much data to write to any storage medium to analyze later. The bandwidth makes hard drives look like tiny, tiny straws. When they throw the switch and the protons or whatever start smacking into each other, they get many collisions in a row, several every millisecond, maybe dozens every millisecond (depending on collider circumference I imagine). The huge array of detectors around the collision point stream out big chunks of data for each collision. The first line of defense is a network of computers that get handed each collision, or parts of it broken down, in round-robin order or something. Their job is to sift through X megabytes very quickly to decide whether there's anything "interesting" in this collision that warrants being remembered. If no flags go up, the data just gets dropped on the floor.
The datagrid described in the article is, as far as I can tell, set up to process data after that "first line of defense" -- even after dropping the majority of the bits on the floor, there is still a prodigious amount that has to be sifted through, just to check that the Higgs didn't leave a track or something. That's a different sort of engineering project.
My point was just that, yes, the amount of data involved here really is amazingly large.
I haven't read the Smallpox book reviewed here. But if you're interested in the history of disease, I heartily recommend
Rats, Lice and History.
Not a boring text, it meanders all over the place with a very dry wit and makes a truly horrible subject enjoyable to read about.
"Why would it take the airlock on Mars a full hour to open? Pressure should make little difference, since people are wearing spacesuits. Is it for decontamination? Quarantine? Fun?"
Apparently it's to vacuum the dust of Mars off your suit. Mars dust is so fine that if you track it inside the hab it'll choke everything up in short order.
Here's the presentation by Robert Dacey (Director of IS Issues at the GAO), which the AP story references. Always more enlightening to go to the source:
A case-sensitivity issue is exactly what it was. A reader had reported it earlier today but I didn't believe him. It should be
fixed now (though if the remainder of this comment after the word "fixed" is in italics, I screwed up and will have to fix it again:)
"But down here in the posters' trenches, the consensus is that it sucks ass. Way too many people catch the lameness filter for a short subject..."
It sucks ass to have to type more than one character for a subject?
I log every instance of the compress filter doing its thing. In the last 20,000 comments or so that have been posted to Slashdot, it's blocked exactly two attempts to post because of a too-compressible subject. Both times the poster could easily have added about one character and it would have gone through.
And of the last 20,000 successfully posted comments, there have been exactly 50 blocked attempts because of compression on the text. (Note that two blocked previews followed by a successful post, which is typically what happens, counts for 2 of that 50.) The blocked posts are mostly things like the same link pasted in over and over, or one that was 23K worth of "...
testtesttestesttesttestesttesttestest..."
Big chunks of whitespace look too much like ascii art and are frequently caught (where "frequently" means "well under 1%"). The solution is simple: trim out the whitespace. Sooner or later I'll get around to a feature that lets the Slash code trim it out automatically if you ask.
As I say, the code changed a couple of weeks ago, becoming much better. I am always very interested to hear about its failures, please, submit bug reports and let me know exactly what legitimate comment you were stopped from posting. But be precise. I have the debug logs, so vague anecdotes aren't convincing. And in this case, you're complaining about stuff that has already been addressed. Get with the times:)
Actually the gzip filter is a really clever way to determine whether you're posting ascii art or repetition.
It's been eased up a couple of weeks ago and now catches very little except ascii art. It used to catch comments posted in the mode "Code" pretty frequently but that's been fixed as well.
If anyone has good examples of genuine attempted comment text that trips the compression filter, email it to me and I'll see about fixing it.
"I asked for editors to stop putting stupid shit in with the stories."
I went back and looked at the stories you referenced, including the one this thread is attached to, and either you're trolling me or you have a very low threshold.
Rob's
comment
on the launch of Windows XP was "I know this affects a fair number of users but for the life of me I just don't know why." That's flamebait?
On the next article you referenced, Rob
remarked:
"A mild controvery occured yesterday.... Here is a followup." Flamebait?
Rob's
commentary
on Microsoft losing their delay appeal was: "The link doesn't say much more than that the appeals court denied the delay."
And his writeup of
this
story is just-the-facts too.
There's no stupid shit. You imagined it I guess. Or you just have a problem with us running any stories about Microsoft at all. I'm annoyed that I got involved in this discussion, since I had hoped some constructive criticism would come out of it. Not from you apparently.
"I seriously think at this point this may be the last time I read Slashdot for quite a while..."
"And it would greatly improve the quality of/. if the editors would stop giving their opinions of things in the story text and logged in as themselves and posted like a regular user. It would sure increase the respect that editors get."
Heh. Welcome to Slashdot. It's always been like this and always will be. If you prefer your news sites pretending to be objective, go read CNET or PCWorld. Here, you know where we stand... and it's only flamebait if you disagree:)
The quality of discussion on Slashdot did start to suck somewhere between when I first started reading (my original UID is 4847) and its low point sometime last year. The site's just been a victim of its own success; there is no other place where so many people are so vocal, and there are inherent problems with discussion forums of this size. Nobody else has solved these problems that I know of, so we're figuring things out as we go. I totally agree with you when you write:
"the features and overall content of Slashdot is quite nice, but the size and readership/discovery of Slashdot is what has driven it downhill"
But -- it has been getting consistently better, and is now much better than it was six months or a year ago. I've been working on Slash moderation code, so I've been reading the comments obsessively. I'm seeing the same quality of discussion now at +1 that used to be found only at +2, which is actually a huge jump. The next step is to make +4 and +5 into what they should be:)
Stick around. If it bugs you too much to read now, come back in another six months and start reading again; I bet you'll like what you find.
Coincidentally, this was announced
three years to the day
after the leaking of Microsoft's plans to "de-commoditize" the open protocols that make up the internet. Fate must be winking at Bill.
"Email is not a freaking right - it is a privledge. SO you either ask your ISP to handle it in a different manner or just deal with it like other things in your life you can't control."
That's OK if you think that (I disagree) but I just want to be clear -- TeleGlobe is using MAPS to block websites, and in fact all internet traffic. Not just email.
I probably should have made that more clear in the story itself, but anti-spammers keep assuring me that everybody already knows that MAPS blocks websites... apparently not...
Slashdot Mirror
Timezones.
Probably the most influential sf work on gender, just because it came before most everything else and was so uncompromising, was Theodore Sturgeon's VenusPlusX. The sad thing is that its peeks into the "real world," the comic and disturbing gender roles of the 1950s, are not dated, fifty years later.
This is why the record companies...
* don't want you to own CDs that can be played on computers, or anything smarter than a dumb CD player hooked up to your analog stereo,
* asked Congress to pass a bill that required all computers to provide copy prevention technology that would criminalize exactly what you describe, and
* passed the DMCA, which allows them to use any crappy access control measures they want, and not only will it be illegal for you to walk right around them, it will be illegal for you to tell someone else how to walk right around them.
In about ten years it sure as hell will be, unless Congress is repeatedly hit with the cluestick.
And maybe even if they are. The computer manufacturers, content providers, and production companies (who are merging and will all be the same eventually anyway) would much prefer you to lease a Playstation, rather than own a computer. Much more profitable in the long-term. Sure, some companies will lose out if the industry makes the transition from selling you a Turing Machine to selling you a souped-up Gameboy. But the industry as a whole will benefit.
Yeah, who would want to have, like, audio and video play at the same time. Whatever...
Oh wait, someone found an OS X speedup recommendation for BG II earlier today. Hrm. Well, maybe I'll give it another try in 16-bit color. Bah.
Tropico is fun enough; SimCityesque weighted toward economics -- as dictator you control wages and prices. I may give it to my early-teen nephew this year, it's pseudo-educational. Consider it for your sister.
The Return to Castle Wolfenstein demo kicks ass on OS X... very fast if you have enough RAM, though the interface still needs some work. I'm looking forward to the real release. And I'm thinking about getting Giants: Citizen Kabuto too just to see if it's any good; it sounds good.
Booting over into OS 9, Summoner got a fair bit of my time but I eventually got bored. Oni I liked but got progressively harder to where I just couldn't handle it; I ended up just using the cheat codes to finish. Majesty is a well-balanced "Yet Another Warcraft" game, single-player fairly easy, multi-player eh OK. Again that's a consideration for your sister (yes you kill stuff but it's all like dragons and floating eyeballs, not gory, just fantasy).
Oh, and Unreal Tournament I still break out when I feel the need to shoot stuff.
(I don't work at Inside Mac Games, I just appreciate one of the few decent remaining game sites that focuses on the Mac.)
I had a QuickTime movie of my rabbits, on my personal homepage in 1995 which, if you had the QT plugin installed, would start playing as soon as it calculated it could reliably play the whole movie without having to pause. The little control bar filled up with gray and then it started playing automatically... very cool.
Considering that the prototype of pro-quality streaming was QuickTime Conferencing in 1994, allowing n people each to stream video to n-1 friends, I think you've got your chronology turned around a bit.
And I don't know what you mean by "portal functionality" but if you mean what I think, that's pretty trivial :)
Well, that's kind of the point; it wasn't just a codec. At a time when everyone else was doing FLC animation (shudder) or straight-shot MPEGs, Apple envisioned a media format which was extensible and flexible. Its design played well with time. Basically the multimedia revolution has been another case of Apple being the skunkworks R&D department for the entire industry.
We do mod comments, yes, but we're fair about it.
I can say this with some certainty because, like all moderations, ours get metamoderated -- so if we start unfairly modding people up or down, we get email a couple of days later letting us know we screwed up!
I can't speak for the other Slashdot editors, but as for me -- of all my mods in the last several months, only two have gotten Unfair judgements. Both were trolls that had posted links that looked like they went somewhere informative but didn't. Apparently the metamoderators didn't bother to check the links, oh well. So I stand by my record of massive Fairness.
Basically I spend mod points where I see that I can save our regular moderators some time. Slashdot gets a lot of crap posted anonymously that is obvious trolling, flamebaiting, or offtopickism, and it would get itself modded down to -1 anyway if we flooded the system with mod points. My taking care of it lets our users focus a little more on picking out what they consider to be the good stuff to mod up, rather than just having a troll cost them a point (and the opportunity to participate in the discussion).
In short, I do a little bit of grunt-work, so that our users can be more choosy and careful, genuinely improving the quality and controlling the tenor of the site. And the built-in feedback of our M2 system will let me know if I ever stray too far from how the users think the site should be run.
Also, for the record, "bitchslap" refers to a specific script in the codebase which retroactively sets all of a user's comments to score:-1. Important point: it's only ever been used on user accounts that posted using scripts. And it hasn't been used in months, AFAIK, since the existing moderation/metamod system has been working so well.
Community-forum websites like Slashdot are their BBSes. Different tech, but then the tech was always evolving anyway.
Jamie McCarthy :)
co-sysop of Thieves' World FIDO
It's a shame Michael Shermer's article on ethics isn't online. Shermer finds most objections to cloning to be variations on "that's God's provenance and we shouldn't go there" which he finds absurd. "If God meant us to fly, we'd have wings" and such. Very thought-provoking, whether you agree with him or not.
If you find cloning interesting, I recommend getting the back issue.
According to The Unix-Haters Handbook, the original reason was that some older versions of "sync" required the operator to wait several seconds before the filesystem realized, yes, it really did have to flush those sectors to disk. Somehow typing "sync" three times became a magical incantation, with most admins unaware that the second two "syncs" only served as a pause, to slow down the typist so the first one had time to take effect.
Superstition has preserved the incantation although all modern implementations of "sync" flush the data immediately.
Kind of like how a lot of unix admins who got started "back in the day" will still stick a -print in their list of find arguments, even though most modern finds assume it by default. Habit...
The problem is that there's way too much data to write to any storage medium to analyze later. The bandwidth makes hard drives look like tiny, tiny straws. When they throw the switch and the protons or whatever start smacking into each other, they get many collisions in a row, several every millisecond, maybe dozens every millisecond (depending on collider circumference I imagine). The huge array of detectors around the collision point stream out big chunks of data for each collision. The first line of defense is a network of computers that get handed each collision, or parts of it broken down, in round-robin order or something. Their job is to sift through X megabytes very quickly to decide whether there's anything "interesting" in this collision that warrants being remembered. If no flags go up, the data just gets dropped on the floor.
The datagrid described in the article is, as far as I can tell, set up to process data after that "first line of defense" -- even after dropping the majority of the bits on the floor, there is still a prodigious amount that has to be sifted through, just to check that the Higgs didn't leave a track or something. That's a different sort of engineering project.
My point was just that, yes, the amount of data involved here really is amazingly large.
Good catch. I think Timothy should be updating the story right about now. Thanks.
I haven't read the Smallpox book reviewed here. But if you're interested in the history of disease, I heartily recommend Rats, Lice and History. Not a boring text, it meanders all over the place with a very dry wit and makes a truly horrible subject enjoyable to read about.
Apparently it's to vacuum the dust of Mars off your suit. Mars dust is so fine that if you track it inside the hab it'll choke everything up in short order.
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d02231t.pdf
Management apologizes for the inconvenience :)
It sucks ass to have to type more than one character for a subject?
I log every instance of the compress filter doing its thing. In the last 20,000 comments or so that have been posted to Slashdot, it's blocked exactly two attempts to post because of a too-compressible subject. Both times the poster could easily have added about one character and it would have gone through.
And of the last 20,000 successfully posted comments, there have been exactly 50 blocked attempts because of compression on the text. (Note that two blocked previews followed by a successful post, which is typically what happens, counts for 2 of that 50.) The blocked posts are mostly things like the same link pasted in over and over, or one that was 23K worth of "... testtesttestesttesttestesttesttestest..."
Big chunks of whitespace look too much like ascii art and are frequently caught (where "frequently" means "well under 1%"). The solution is simple: trim out the whitespace. Sooner or later I'll get around to a feature that lets the Slash code trim it out automatically if you ask.
As I say, the code changed a couple of weeks ago, becoming much better. I am always very interested to hear about its failures, please, submit bug reports and let me know exactly what legitimate comment you were stopped from posting. But be precise. I have the debug logs, so vague anecdotes aren't convincing. And in this case, you're complaining about stuff that has already been addressed. Get with the times :)
It's been eased up a couple of weeks ago and now catches very little except ascii art. It used to catch comments posted in the mode "Code" pretty frequently but that's been fixed as well.
If anyone has good examples of genuine attempted comment text that trips the compression filter, email it to me and I'll see about fixing it.
I went back and looked at the stories you referenced, including the one this thread is attached to, and either you're trolling me or you have a very low threshold.
Rob's comment on the launch of Windows XP was "I know this affects a fair number of users but for the life of me I just don't know why." That's flamebait?
On the next article you referenced, Rob remarked: "A mild controvery occured yesterday.... Here is a followup." Flamebait?
Rob's commentary on Microsoft losing their delay appeal was: "The link doesn't say much more than that the appeals court denied the delay."
And his writeup of this story is just-the-facts too.
There's no stupid shit. You imagined it I guess. Or you just have a problem with us running any stories about Microsoft at all. I'm annoyed that I got involved in this discussion, since I had hoped some constructive criticism would come out of it. Not from you apparently.
See ya.
If you don't mind, please email me at jamie@mccarthy.vg... thanks :)
Heh. Welcome to Slashdot. It's always been like this and always will be. If you prefer your news sites pretending to be objective, go read CNET or PCWorld. Here, you know where we stand... and it's only flamebait if you disagree :)
The quality of discussion on Slashdot did start to suck somewhere between when I first started reading (my original UID is 4847) and its low point sometime last year. The site's just been a victim of its own success; there is no other place where so many people are so vocal, and there are inherent problems with discussion forums of this size. Nobody else has solved these problems that I know of, so we're figuring things out as we go. I totally agree with you when you write:
But -- it has been getting consistently better, and is now much better than it was six months or a year ago. I've been working on Slash moderation code, so I've been reading the comments obsessively. I'm seeing the same quality of discussion now at +1 that used to be found only at +2, which is actually a huge jump. The next step is to make +4 and +5 into what they should be :)
Stick around. If it bugs you too much to read now, come back in another six months and start reading again; I bet you'll like what you find.
Coincidentally, this was announced three years to the day after the leaking of Microsoft's plans to "de-commoditize" the open protocols that make up the internet. Fate must be winking at Bill.
The National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) has an excellent paper which details exactly what "harmful to minors" means.
That's OK if you think that (I disagree) but I just want to be clear -- TeleGlobe is using MAPS to block websites, and in fact all internet traffic. Not just email.
I probably should have made that more clear in the story itself, but anti-spammers keep assuring me that everybody already knows that MAPS blocks websites... apparently not...