One day an Ass put on a Lion's skin and proceeded to amuse himself by taking a stroll through the woods, trying to scare all animals he encountered. He brayed at a Wolf in what he thought to be a good enough imitation of a lion's roar, and the Wolf ran away into the bush. He did the same to a Monkey, and the monkey too ran up into a tree. The Ass was proud of himself. At long last he saw a Fox, and proceeded to do his best imitation of a lion's roar at him too.

The Fox however was a lot less than impressed, and answered, "Ho ho ho, if it isn't an ass trying to look important. Congratulations, though, I almost took you seriously until you opened your mouth."

Not minding the Ass's dejected looks much, the Fox continued, "But seriously, don't you have something else to do or someone else to bother? I've worked 60 hours this week so far, and it's only Friday _morning_, and, frankly, I have neither the time nor the mood to entertain you guys." And the Fox trotted along, ignoring the Ass.

The Ass was now depressed and he went to the side to munch on some leaves, and he started drawing doodles in the dirt with a hoof to pass the time and take his mind off the brutal rejection he had just received. He ate and he doodled, but somehow he just couldn't take his mind off it.

Suddenly he heard a voice nearby, "Ah, finally someone with some fashion sense. I was starting to think it's a lost cause..." As the startled Ass rose his eyes, he saw an impressively tall Lion in front of him, eyeing him and his doodles in the dirt.

"I'm toast," thought the Ass, "there's no way a Lion would mistake me for the real thing."

So, in desperation, the Ass started to bray at him. "Syyynergy!" He brayed. "Leverage! TCO! Customer-centric! Industry best-practices!"

"Ah, " brayed the new 'Lion' right back, in the best donkey language, "so you speak management too. This day is looking brighter already. Between you and me, the other candidates are a joke. Have you seen what they wear to an interview? By the way, you _are_ here about the job opening, right?"

"Huh? What job?," replied the bewildered Ass.

"Well, to keep the story short," brayed the 'Lion', "I used to be the manager of this forest clearing, but they promoted me, so now I have to find a replacement. And Tim here," said the 'Lion' pointing to yet another Ass dressed in a lion skin, "is our HR representative. He'll help me pick a good candidate. I guess you haven't sent in a CV either, since you're not here for the interview, but I guess we could bend the rules a bit if you want to take part anyway."

"Uh, ok..." answered the Ass, still not entirely sure what he's walked into.

"I see you brought a sample of your work too," continued the 'Lion', pointing a hoof at the doodles in the dirt. "Nice flowchart. What is it of?"

"Oh, that," grinned the Ass, "nothing in particular. I was just thinking of food, mostly."

"And you drew a good hundred square metres of flowchart just about that? I'm impressed. Reminds me of some of my best work: the corporate regulation and flowchart of how to piss. Admittedly, it was mostly to annoy the Wolf, but I digress. Well, I can't make a definitive commitment yet, so this is strictly off record and non-binding, but I think your chances are good. We'll call you later if we decide to hire you."

In the interest of fanboys and zealots everywhere, and to spare them the minimal thinking effort, I propose the following form. All the options are genuine from genuine posts encountered on the Internet in the last decade. The wording may not be the original, but the spirit hasn't been altered at all.

You are a liar, and the feature/bug (cross out the one that doesn't apply) you talk about doesn't even exist, because:
 
[] I haven't personally seen it happen, therefore it doesn't exist.
[] It only happens once every 1-2 hours on my computer. (But that won't stop me from both it doesn't exist.)
[] ... and even that is my fault. (But that won't stop me from pretending that I'm an expert on what to do on your computer.)
[] Nobody told me about it.
[] It only seems to happen to a couple (of hundreds) of whiners.
[] "Everyone" knows it's not true.
[] "Everyone" knows it can't be true for programs made by _______________ (insert company.)
[] I once worked as Level 1 tech support at an ISP, and had to deal with your kind of idiots every day.
 
You're only claiming that because you're:
 
[] paid by _______________ (insert same, or competitor company) to post that
[] brainwashed by __________________ (insert same, or competitor company)
[] not elite enough to like the right stuff, let me tell you what your tastes should be.
[] a liar.
[] a troll.
[] in denial.
[] against innovation.
[] having mental problems that you confuse for having different tastes than I do.
[] too stupid to use a computer.
 
The problems you encountered -- and which I still claim that it doesn't exist -- are your own damned fault, and can be solved by:
 
[] defragging your computer. (Race conditions and crashes just appear out of nowhere, if you forget to defrag your computer.)
[] activating AA in your drivers. (AA solves rendering artefacts. Broken graphics and glitches are called artefacts too. You do the maths.)
[] buying a new quad-core triple-SLI compressor-cooled overclocked computer. (What do you mean your config matches the recommended specs? If you don't have a computer that cost $5000, you shouldn't be playing games at all.)
[] replacing your motherboard with a compatible one.
[] turning off your firewall and/or antivirus.
[] rebooting your computer. (As any Level 1 tech support guy knows, that's the miracle cure for everything.)
[] learning to play the damned game. (Yes, falling through the ground is just because you're a noob.)
[] stopping being so lame as to do or like other things in a game than I do.
[] saving every 5 minutes in a different slot.
[] using the cheats / external trainer programs. (Hey, it's already playable with that cheat, so stop asking to fix the game.)
[] stopping posting about it! If people find out that the game sucks, there won't be enough players to make mods that fix it!
[] introspection and realizing that only your mental problems and personality deffects prevent you from seeing things exactly my way.
[] packing your computer in the original carton, taking it back to the shop, and telling them that you're too fucking stupid to own a computer.
 
I am an authoritative source on the subject because:
 
[] I have used the program for few minutes.
[] ... on a friend's computer.
[] I have installed it on a computer.
[] Although I haven't yet, I plan to use the program in the future.
[] ... and I have a good feeling about it.
[] I have read about it in another thread.
[] A couple of people have aggreed with me before.
[] I know that _______________ (insert company) would never do that.
[] My user id is lower.
[] I have a gazillion of level 70 characters! On every server!
[] I was in the beta! (But somehow it's just not recorded anywhere.)
[] I could pwn your sorry ass in the game.
[] I could beat you up IRL.
[] My dad probably makes more money than yours.
[] I once worked as Level 1 tech-support for an ISP, and that makes me the expert on all software, hardware and users.
 
Furthermore, I'd like to state that:
 
[] you're a liar.
[] you're a noob.
[] I'm going to mod you down in other threads for disaggreeing with me.
[] someone should mod you down in this thread too, for disaggreeing with me.
[] you'll only have the right to criticize it, when you can make a better program.
[] if you don't like it, fix it yourself.
[] you're too damn impatient. It will rule after they patch it and/or people make mods that fix it.
[] it's people like you who are the problem with society today.
[] you're living proof of what's wrong with education today.
[] we need a goddamn IQ test before letting idiots like you use a computer.
[] you mis-spelled "math" as "maths", therefore you're stupid and uneducated, and nobody should listen to your opinion.
[] I don't even understand what your problem is. Learn to write more than a paragraph, noob.
[] nobody has time to read a whole page about where the bug happens. If you can't say it in 1 sentence or less, it's not worth reading.
[] people should just respect and listen to us who've earned our expertise in Level 1 tech support.

There was once a slave born in Phrygia in Asia Minor, named Aesop. He wasn't particularly handsome or strong, but he had a particularly remarkable wit. One day, when the caravan and its slaves were leaving for Ephesus, the slave driver divided the burdens into rather unequal shares, and let each slave pick his. Aesop picked the heaviest burden of them all, a large bread basket, about twice as heavy as anything else there. The other slaves called him a fool for it, but Aesop knew that he'd have the last laugh. For, you see, the bread was used to feed the slaves and by the end of the very first day, Aesop had nothing to carry except an empty basket.

He was pretty proud of its wit.

On the third day, the team leader... err... slave driver called a meeting and announced that the caravan owner wasn't satisfied with their progress, and they'd be late in reaching their goal (Ephesus) at this rate. So the tasks would have to be re-evaluated, to match each team member's strengths.

Aesop was given half of Wally's share, who was already limping under the load of four papyrus scrolls, about half a pound each, with prayers for the Temple of Aphrodite in Ephesus. So two of them were dumped into Aesop's empty basket. "Well, that's still not too bad," thought Aesop.

The next day, a couple more slaves complained that they can't keep up the pace, and Aesop got half of their share too. One more day, and he was back to his original load. When trying to complain to the slave driver, Aesop was reminded that he's already shown off his strength, and it's only normal to use each resource to its fullest. As a consolation, he was also given a few canned motivational slogans, like "There's no I in team", which only managed to insult Aesop's intellect.

By the end of the week, Aesop was not just tired, but also hungry. All the energy for carrying that heavy basket had to come from somewhere, and he was already at the limit of his body's reserves. Aesop went to ask the slave driver for a raise in his rations, but was told he should be thankful to still have this job.

"We could use slaves from India instead of you!," he was told, "They carry twice the load for half the rations."

"So what are you going to do, then? Free me?"

"Well, no," said the slave driver, "you're still a slave, you still have to work for your bread one way or another. And you've signed a non-compete clause, so you're not going to work for a caravan any time soon. But we could sell you to a tin mine or to an asbestos weaving shop. I hear they have a life expectancy shorter than a mouse in the temple of Bastet in Bubastis."

Aesop doubted that anyone can carry twice the load for half the rations, but went back to hauling the basket. By the time they reached Ephesus, Aesop was looking disturbingly like a walking skeleton, but they made it in time. The caravan owner and the slave driver gave themselves a bonus for the good job, while the slaves were told again that they should be happy to still have their jobs. Still, they had the rest of the day off.

By the start of the next day, the caravan was assembled to leave again for the next town, this time a nearby town. While the others got their loads, Aesop was taken aside and told the good news that for his performance on this project, he's getting a raise of half a slice of bread a day. Then he was given a large empty sack and a shovel and told to fill it with sand. That would be his load for this trip.

"You've got to be kidding!" said Aesop, "Do they really need sand over there?"

"Well, no, not really," answered the slave driver, "See, they're on a beach anyway. But we'll only make the big trip to Ephesus again next year, and I have to somehow justify keeping the team until then. Otherwise the corporate rules say I'd have to get rid of you here, and get someone else next year. So we'll have to make up some work, so you can still get paid. Well, or at least fed."

Aesop rolled that around a bit in his head, but somehow "at least I get fed" failed to reduce the sting of the fact that he was doing something purely useless and fake.

"Can I at least fill it with leaves or grass, then? I mean, it's not like anyone actually needs the sand."

"I'd love to let you do that," shrugged the slave driver, "but, see, we're paid by the kilo. Plus, I couldn't justify keeping someone with your abilities around, if you'd actually have less workload than someone cheaper."

A couple of years go by like that, and Aesop is starting to look pretty muscular by now, if rather thin. He's even up to two extra slices of bread per day, which isn't bad by slave standards. Or wouldn't be if the workload hadn't doubled in the meantime too.

The team is assembling in Ephesus to pick their burdens, and Aesop is already reaching for his usual shovel and the two empty sacks. As I was saying, the load had increased in the meantime. As he's picking the shovel up, the slave driver approaches Aesop. He's accompanied by two hoplites from the caravan's guard.

"I'm sorry, Aesop, but I'm affraid I'll have to let you go. Sorry. Rest assured it's nothing personal, it's just business."

"You mean, as in, go free?" a broad hopeful grin widens on Aesop's face.

"Well, no," the slave driver shakes his head, "you're still a slave, you still have to work for your bread, and we still have a duty to make the most money out of you one way or another. But we sold you to some guys from Etruria who needed a gladiator. When they saw your muscles, it was an easy sell. Said something about needing a match for some slave from Gaul called 'The Ripper.' Our security people here will accompany you out."

"But... why?" stutters a shocked Aesop. "Have I not been your best slave? Have I not hauled loads that nobody except a mule or Hercules himself could have hauled?"

"Try to understand, Aesop, it really is just business." answers the slave driver. "You also eat more than any other slave, and we have a fiduciary duty to make money for the shareholders. It adds up, and the market is tough. We don't make as much per transport. Management has already promised to reduce costs by firing the most expensive personnel and replace them with cheaper slaves from India. Which reminds me, before you leave, show that new Indian guy where you usually get sand from."

Holy freakin' crap! Posting on a legendary website!!!

/.?

tor?por? [tawr-per] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation
-noun
1. sluggish inactivity or inertia.
2. lethargic indifference; apathy.
3. a state of suspended physical powers and activities.
4. dormancy, as of a hibernating animal.
[Origin: 1600-10; L: numbness, equiv. to torp(?re) to be stiff or numb + -or -or1]

--Synonyms 2. stolidity, listlessness, lethargy. 4. sleepiness, slumber, drowsiness.

Like most people, I have several email accounts that I keep track of, and I've noticed a disturbing trend. I have used the paypal service to do online billing and to make purchases over the internet for a variety of goods and services (nothing exotic; we're talking online games, web hosting, real's superpass service.). So far, nothing unusual there.

What's truly bizarre, in my mind, is that over the course of the last year I have consistently been targetted for phishing emails in the email account that I use with paypal. On a slow month I'll get four letters to that account, on approximate average, however, I get no less than 10 emails a week (all of which I forward to spoof@paypal.com).

In my other email accounts, including one that I have used in articles I've had published? Na-da. Zip.

That's right, I get none. Not a single attempt.

On my other email accounts I regularly get spam, particularly the drive-by type spam where they're going down a list alphabetically of email addresses, and sometimes I just get random spam.

I have never once gotten a phishing email in any of my other email addresses. This leads me to one conclusion; somehow the phishers have access to a widely-available (the fact my mailbox is hit so frequently makes me suspect that) list of paypal users and their email addresses.

Where would they get that list?
Who would give out the email addresses of their paypal using clients?

I'm throwing this out there to the slashdot audience to see wether or not I'm alone in getting deluged by phishers on a regular basis and also to see what insights Slashdotters would have on why this is happening only (or at least predominantly) to people who use Paypal.

If this is happening as widespreadly as I suspect, isn't it time we geeks started asking some questions and figure why this is happening?

Why do I keep coming back? Apart from habit it's the fact that amidst the stupidity you occasionally get (genuinely) insightful comments and still learn how to do shit here. Like this comment for example.

I had no idea of how to do the windows equivalent of chmod -x; now I do.

If my prior comments on wikipedia are any guide, after the post drops off the front page, a wikipedia editor with mod points will mod-bomb all my (currently 5,5,5,4) comments in the Wikipedia story.

The wikipedia administration, for whatever reason, is extraordinarily defensive and hates to see criticism remain un-suppressed. If this is reminiscent of a cult, well, if the show fits....

Get-Rich Links:

How to Almost Live on Blogging

How Much Do I Earn From Blogging

Placing Adsense Between Posts (are you listening, Taco?)
 
Blogging For Profit Using Adsense

Blogging For Dollars (dated, 2003)

Given the combination of outsourcing, and the fact that modern languages such as perl and java are too advanced to offer hand holding for, I have to ask: is there room for ameteurs or self-taught hobbyists in the programming field?

At first glance, one would think 'no'. As stated; the languages are too complex to learn without a CS degree and also the economic realities are such that if you aren't making your living coding you need to GFTO and make room for someone who is.

This makes recent industry moves a bit inexplicable, however. While it's natural that companies such as IBM and Novell would take over hobbyist projects such as Linux, and that the 'desktop battle' would be fought by the corporate sponsors of GNOME, that's not exclusively what is going on. There are major sites which offer no-cost hosting and support services for hobbyist projects (freshmeat and sourceforge are two such sites) and there is also an upswing in development tools which are distributed free to encourage hobbyist development (the GNU compiler for one, there's also Microsoft's latest Visual Studio offerings).

Given the conflicting nature of the facts as they are one has to look deeper for an explaination. A proliferation of freely available development tools encourages the formation of a gift culture which the industry can turn to who will work for little more than food-stamps. Currently, IT professionals are a financial liability, but by courting the hobbyists market, corporate america has a built-in development force which is second to none in the first world for cost.

So, the next time that you fire up that "free" copy of Visual Studio or run GCC on your "Free" OS, remember this - you're using tools designed and written to put honest, hard-working Professionals out of a job.

Ask yourself how you can manage to sleep at night knowing whose paying the price of your tools.

Yahoo News has an interesting story on the latest findings on the ice ball discovered last year, that some people are calling our 10th planet (which was previously reported here on slashdot). The article states that according to Hubble, the diameter of UB313 measures 1,490 miles; making it marginally larger than Pluto (which is about 1,422 miles across.). This, in part, is refueling the debate as to what should or should not be considered a planet.

The article also mentions that Michael Brown (a California Institute of technology researcher who happens to be studying UB313) has nicknamed the planet "Xena".

Over the years I've found myself using the GUI (usually GNOME) a lot more. Even so, there are a few apps I prefer to use the CLI versions of; mostly ftp, irc (bitchx) and ...bittorrent.

However, typing out "btdownloadcurses blah" gets to be tedious; so I thought about shortening it to just 'bt', through an alias or something. Then I realised this would be a perfect thing to break out my (amazingly) meager porgramming skills for.

So, I figured it shouldn't be too hard to write a simple program which checks to see if there's at least two arguments (the name of the program, and an additional argument) and if there is, start an instance of btdownloadcurses out on the argument.

It took me 3 hours to figure out which exec to use (execl, execvp, execlp, etc), including discovering that I need to set a path and figuring out how to set one. I was finally able to spawn an instance of btdownloadcurses with the following code:

#include stdio.h>
#include unistd.h>
#include string.h> //slashcode freaks out on the includes, so I deliberately typo'd for readability

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
char torr[4096];
int lenny;
const char *p_envp[] = {"PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin","TERM=vt220",0};
lenny=strlen(argv[1]+1); //room for NULL
                if(argc > 1)
                {
                                memcpy(torr,argv[1],lenny);
                                printf("%s\n",torr); //debugging, lol
                                execle("/usr/bin/btdownloadcurses", "btdownloadcurses ",torr,0,p_envp);
                }
                return 0;
}

However, though it would run the bittorrent client, it would still crash for reasons which are largely unknown to me.

So, in the end I said "fuck it" and went with a shell script:

#!/bin/sh
btdownloadcurses $1

lol C.

On the uphand, I think I've just popped my struct cherry on this program, even though the p_envp struct is a direct ripoff of a program on page 354 of Linux Programming 2nd Edition.

Bookmarks, "from the nice in theory suck in practice department"

I like the bookmarks idea (as you can see from the journal below this one); but having just tried to use it...it doesn't work!

Since I can't save these to my bookmarks, I guess I'll save them to my journal instead. This is basically just stuff I'm reading ATM and I'll want to look back at after I've ripped my computer apart again (and lost my bookmarks).

A NetBSD kernel documentation overview (circa 2002)

C, Assembly, Perl, Lisp, Python, & PHP Programming Links

NetBSD Device Driver Writing Guide
  I wish I was that 1337!

Porting device drivers to the 2.6 kernel

Way back in the days of yore, you could make a PIF file for windows 3.x with a "?" in a certain place (memory fails me on where, probably "command arguments", under the advanced part of the pif editor) and this would throw up a neat little dialog box where you could type in a line to use as the arguments to a command.

I know there's an easy way to do that with XUL/java; fuck if I can be bothered to figure out what it is, though. Which is a shame because then I could add bookmarks right from my firefox bookmark bar (yes, I can add the url and then fill out the information on /.; it's not the same).

Anyway, I like the /. bookmarks idea, now when I half-read a news item and think "wow, /. would love this" I no longer have to stop to read the article; just ^v&^c the url and submit.

Actually, this is neat, simply because I regularly see stories and articles on here I would like to go back to later. I can see myself amassing a collection of links on this thing. I wonder what the limit is?

It's a neat feature (unlike the tagging, which is wtf?), it's a shame that Taco, et al have waited so long to revisit the slashcode and add interesting feature and inter-activity (shit, k5 beat them by 6 years on that one!). Think for a minute what /. would be like if we had this in 2000.

Sorry for the wank and lack of substance, but at least I didn't post any dogdy links!