Slashback: Beetle, Reading, Streams 57
Can you read me? Over. With both feet in the stream of continuing evolution and convergence of distributed voting, online metaknowledge and probably a few other things, Johnathan Nightingale has created a site called Canonical Tomes, lately featured on Kuro5hin.
It's a really cool way to approach the "top picks" in a given subject, and fun to browse especially in the fields you're not very familiar with: the trick is a community voting system -- visit it and pick your favorites.
It also raises the question, though, of how to avoid an early lead from remaining permanent; how do new but excellent books gain a foothold? And what about situations where the popular books aren't the best ones? Kudos to Johnathan for putting this together, now it's your turn to point out the best books in your field to others.
Gee, Wally, I can colorize you from this "Linux" machine! starlady writes "Linux.com has an interview up with the developers of GStreamer. GStreamer, as mentioned here before, is a full featured multimedia framework with functionality for everything from mp3 playback to audio and video editing."
An excerpt, quoting developer Wim Taymans: "First of all, GStreamer is a real framework. This means that it can be used for a generic media player as well as serve as the core of large multimedia render farms. The GStreamer core is built in such a way that it is media agnostic, it doesn't know or care what media data it is handling. The interpretation of the media types is entirely handled by the plug-ins."
And though everyone is excited about video, things like this will make Linux a lot more capable as an audio capturing and manipulation platform, too.
The real question is, did you get in trouble?
Regarding the dangling beetle which caused the city fathers of San Francisco some small consternation, Ms Golden Gate 2001 writes: "In case you're still fretting, or wondering, here are a few first-hand pieces of info about the stunt (I hope you guys weren't really believing what you read in the papers, now were you? ;-)
- the Bug was hung by cable and nylon webbing from a two-point suspension system (check the math -- that's not so easy: you try figuring out how to sling cable from *both* sides of the bridge to hang something nicely centred!)
- the Bug was never in sight of any commmuter after the initial 1-minute deployment (*under* the bridge!)
- the first to be informed were the traffic helicopters
- the Ironworkers who cut it down (in minutes) thought the job was well done ("They could probably get a job as ironworkers")
- the Bug was stripped of nasties, and as the Ironworkers said, it's a new habitat (just like when they sink a ship to create an artificial reef, only smaller, MUCH smaller)
All that technology, and it's still nigh impossible to get the facts heard over the Brownian noise :-P At least this is a good forum for venting without swords!
P.S. It's National Engineering Week in Canada! (Look out below!)"
Goths, Vandals, and Slashdotters. (Score:2)
I created an account and got one book added to an empty category, but now it's choking on my second try, and the home page won't even come up anymore.
Barbarians, every one of us! Let's go rent a movie!
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Re:the goldenbeetle hack was cool (Score:2)
However as a Canadian living in SF, I thought it was great.
Re:About your sig (Score:1)
Cheers,
Karma Sink
word of mouth, Usenet (Score:2)
Another approach is posting to Usenet - when I was after a book on meteorology, I posted to sci.geo.meteorology [sci.geo.meteorology] (explaining my background and what I was looking for) and three different people from different universities recommended Wallace and Hobbs' Atmospheric Science [dannyreviews.com], which turned out to be just what I was after.
Danny.
Re:Gstreamer needs: (Score:1)
I'm not saying that it would be impossible, but it'd require a lot of collaboration with the hardware makers as well as some tweaking on the software end.
No, they haven't gotten in trouble... (Score:5)
I've met some of the people involved in the beetle project and had the whole hanging procedure described to me. Let's just say, it wasn't easy and some people involved must have had balls made of steel.
As a former UBC engineer, I really couldn't wipe the smile off my face for days, not just because of the stunt but of the publicity that it caused and how it will help to increase spirit in the engineering faculty. Since i've graduated i've heard and seen less and less people come out to events sponsored by the Engineering Student Society. Something like this will (hopefully) show people that there really is more to school than just going to class and doing your homework...
I was very proud to be able to meet some of hte people involved and personally congradulate them for a job well done. Of course, I have no idea what their names are or what they look like anymore :-)
Re: "All your bridge are belong to us." (Score:1)
Other than the stealth, logistics, and "balls of steel" this wasn't that hard - they have had many years to perfect the engineering part of the stunt on other bridges.
Hopefully it motivates some young kids to go into Engineering...
Mash: Another Multimedia toolkit (Score:1)
Re:OK, I give up. How? How??!?!? (Score:2)
Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
Another Prank (Score:1)
O'Toole's Commentary on Murphy's Law:
Re:Beetle stunt (Score:1)
Re:Beetle stunt (Score:2)
Re:Beetle stunt (Score:1)
Actually, I know a guy who works for the Coast Guard in the Bay. Apparently the fact that the bug was hanging from the bridge was preventing shipping traffic from entering and leaving the Bay. Time is money, and someone decided that it would take to long to remove the thing nicely. It's not as if they had all the time in the world to deal with it.
And fair enough, in my view. It's like putting a bug on the runway at SFO. Auto traffic isn't the only, or even the most important, traffic.
Claim your namespace.
Re:Goths, Vandals, and Slashdotters. (Score:2)
<halfserious>Or we could start our own.</halfserious>
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Re:OK, I give up. How? How??!?!? (Score:2)
the goldenbeetle hack was cool (Score:2)
Personally I thought they should have left it there, given it's apparent well-designed linkage. It'd make an interesting monument to human ingenuity as well as a slightly subversive statement regarding people being too uptight to see the humor in a VW bridge-dingleberry ("dingleberry- n. southern US slang, the little bits of fecal matter that stick to the fur/feathers of an animal's nether regions post-evacuation"). And hey, the beetle is also a nod to the counter-culture mecca SF was in the 60s.
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org [geekaustin.org]
Re:Beetle stunt (Score:1)
Re:Beetle stunt (Score:1)
... unless it landed on them...
Sorry.
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Re:OK, I give up. How? How??!?!? (Score:2)
The hope is to shoot the string and weight out until it is taut, then let gravity (coupled with centrifugal force to keep the string taut) swing it down and around.
I really don't know how wide the bridge is, nor how high above the water it is - but I doubt it is very wide - doesn't it only have 2 or 3 lanes of traffic in each direction? - so maybe only 50 or 60 feet wide or so? Make it about 20 feet thick, and you are looking at perhaps 100-130 feet of monofilament, tops.
Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
Re:Another Prank (Score:1)
Re:No, they haven't gotten in trouble... (Score:1)
Sorry if my lack of english skills make my comment any less believable.
Re:Gstreamer needs: (Score:3)
Re:the goldenbeetle hack was cool (Score:1)
Since when is dingleberry a buzzword?
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News for geeks in Austin: www.geekaustin.org [geekaustin.org]
Beetle stunt (Score:5)
Couple of comments about the VW beetle hanging from the GG bridge:
the Bug was never in sight of any commmuter after the initial 1-minute deployment (*under* the bridge!)
This isn't quite true. On the northbound approach to the bridge, coming from SF, there is a stretch of road (Marina Blvd I believe) that has a full sideview of the bridge, from maybe a mile away. By the peak of commute time, news of the event was all over the radio, so people were slowing down along this stretch of road to have a look.
So yes, you couldn't see the car from the bridge itself, but to imply there was no impact on the commute is very wrong.
the Bug was stripped of nasties, and as the Ironworkers said, it's a new habitat (just like when they sink a ship to create an artificial reef, only smaller, MUCH smaller)
Like Neal Stephenson says in Zodiac, ANYTHING you drop in the ocean will become a habitat, because that's where the fish live! Just because you dropped garbage down there and the fish start swimming around it, that doesn't make it a good, environmental thing to do. That iron and steel will be down there, rusting, for decades. For no good reason. In fact, I'm surprised they chose to snip the cables instead of pull it up, or instead of lowering it onto a barge.
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Sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.-- Cool Hand Luke
Righting a wrong (Score:1)
Re:wow! (Score:2)
Community Book Ratings (Score:2)
It seems to me that an awful lot of this is dependant on things like attitude of the community. For example, take a look at the content [slashdot.org] of freenet. As described, the typical member could be "a crypto-anarchist Perl hacker with a taste for the classics of literature, political screeds, 1980s pop music, Adobe software, and lots of porn"
Somehow I think that the books recommended by that cultural cross section would be different than that of the Reader's Digest [readersdigest.com] (which has a circulation [readersdigest.com] approaching 100 million)
which is exactly why gstreamer gets developed (Score:4)
News (Score:1)
Newsflash: Ocean not consisting of tap water! (Score:2)
As you know, sea water is about 3% "salt". That does not only mean regular table salt, NaCl, but pretty much any element or compound that exists on the planet and is soluble in water. I haven't checked the iron content of the ocean, but I'd be surprised if it's not in the megazillions of tonnes.
insufferable preaching section:
Iron is a perfectly natural element in nature, and to put it back in nature is not in general a bad thing.
More controversially, the same can be said of, among many other things, uranium, which is quite common in ocean water.
end of preaching. phew!
PS. Could the bug actually be seen from Marina Blvd? It was reported to be a very foggy day.
automated kvetching (Score:1)
All in one media, or as I like to call it, gouloshware, which is disrespectful to goulosh everywhere, is M$-style thinking, and worse, can be a very bad thing in the occassionally laggy x-windows system environment. Have you tried playing "Tuxedo T. Penguin: A Quest for Herring"?
Let's look at M$ for just a moment. Eons ago, technologically speaking, even Windows(tm) had to call on lots of little programmes that did one task at a time. This saved on processor space. This is still not such a bad idea.
Today, you only use three applications to run a programme: Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player and M$ Office. Depending on what modules you load in IE, it's not so bad; of course, it's also the least original programme from M$. The other two can take as long as Star Office trying to load in a C environment, and stability during that time isn't garunteed by the M$ Bill of Gates.
My theory is: In 2000 XP, all applications will be open by M$ new Internet Media Office, which will require 2Ghz processor, 4.4 terrabytes of disk space and 9GB RAM. Clippit will nolonger work alone, and many fun creatures will hop and play on the screen. You will also receive the following easter eggs: five flight simulators, Age of Empires: A Time of Conquest, MacOs X with DVD, Atari's top 100, Commodore's top 100, video Bill Gates being Janet Reno's Dominatrix, a complete list of everything M$ has ever stolen*, "War and Peace", M$ Encarta: The World of Bill, "Blue Screen of Life: M$ Stress Re-Organization" plus free stress game, a copy of M$ Bob, a complete collection of every paper by "The Onion" and finally, "Bill's Top 100 In & Out Burger fast-food franchises of North America"
Now, it's one thing if you have a programme for the sheer purpose of working all the media into one comprehensive pro-gartum something or other, but in the WSOGMM, it's just not worth it for standard use.
No, I did not miss the article; I've just been dying to whine about this for awhile, and gstream was about as close as the subject may come in the next month.
As usual, I'm now going to steal something just to make my article longer:
Microsoft Windows 2000 is based on technology produced by Xerox, Apple, IBM, Bell Labs, Valence Software, ZoomIt Co.,Red Hat, Symantec, Spyglass, Sun Microsystems, Santa Cruz Operation, Corel, VisiCorp, Cooper Software, LinkAge Software, Caldera, General Magic, Dynamic Systems, Citrix, AT&T, the GNU Project, Sendmail Inc., Novell, Borland/Inprise, Digital Research, NeXT, Informix, Netscape, and the following universities: Yale, Dartmout, MIT, Berkeley and Stanford. BlueScreen technology is an original Microsoft innovation created by the BlueScreen Development Team, headed by Steve Ballmer and Ed Muth. This paragraph continues to comply with the Department of Injustice's Vigilante Kangaroo Court Consent Decree (TM).
Thank you for marking me as off-topic and dropping my Karma into a double-digit negative number. Now, I must throw bejana beans at my guests.
Re:word of mouth, Usenet (Score:2)
I'm glad the site exists, but I'm a bit skeptical that it's going to work. Think what's going to happen when all the Slashdot Trolls see it and run over to screw it up just for the fun of it.
And there are probably problems anyway. I did not see any mechanism for cross-listing books between multiple categories, nor for correcting erroneous entries. Also, the field for price was somewhat surprising, assuming they plan to be around for more than a couple of years. Meanwhile, there are no fields for indicating the year the book came out, nor what editions exist.
To be useful, it will probably need a full-time board of editors to maintain the site. They'll have the troll crap to shovel out, they'll have haphazard category and subcategory definitions, they'll have books posted in the wrong categories, and they'll have books will erroneous entries, grammar and spelling errors in the titles and/or descriptions, and political asides that shouldn't be there.
Also, I rather suspect that most of the submissions will be from authors or publishers ("Buy this book!") or from individuals with a political axe to grind. The voting system naively limits you to three votes, as if the site's creators were unaware how easy it is to get disposible voting accounts, so I expect to see ridiculous voting outcomes within a few days.
Finally, I notice that when you have entered a book's info you are politely prompted to "submit query". It looks like the code may need some cleanup.
All in all, I suspect that it's another noble effort doomed to failure due to naivety and all the problems associated with internet voting.
Also, I wonder if it isn't just a site that hopes to make a big splash in the news and then get bought out by the next p0rtal-wannabe within a few months, so that the creators don't really need to worry about all the very obvious problems with such a site.
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You're quite wrong... (Score:1)
Certainly, staticism alone is not a valid mode of epistemological advancement, but can any method which wholly abandons static principles and knowledge lead beyond self-referential factualism? Although this has been heavily debated, general consensus holds that it is in fact not possible. While the implications of this will be fleshed out and argued over for decades, the immediate applications are both obvious and non-trivial.
Commonly held traditions in literature are critical for progression of social normalizing factors. Although it could certainly be argued that an individual's canon must necessarily supersede one founded on principles of democratic advancement, it is worth noting that not a solitary instance of corresponding phenomena has been observed. Admittedly, non-observation does not entail non-existence, but broader sociological and literary analysis continues this account accross multiple social strata.
In conclusion, while I believe your model is fundamentally flawed, you are correct in your assessment of the shortcomings of common-archetypal aesthetic representationalism.
Re:Beetle stunt (Score:1)
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Re:Gstreamer needs: (Score:2)
Re:Newsflash: Ocean not consisting of tap water! (Score:2)
>More controversially, the same can be said of, among many other things, uranium, which is quite common in ocean water.
Uranium, in its natural state, is rather harmless (not completely though). This is not true of all elements though.
A few elements that are quite lethal in their natural states:
Re:the goldenbeetle hack was cool (Score:1)
-antipop
Re:No, they haven't gotten in trouble... (Score:1)
Not in trouble??? Wanker Bush can't even drive in the wrong lane without getting thrown in the pokey. How can these guys get away with hanging under a bridge?
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Re:OK, I give up. How? How??!?!? (Score:2)
Re:Newsflash: Ocean not consisting of tap water! (Score:2)
Re:Newsflash: Ocean not consisting of tap water! (Score:1)
Earlier this year i saw an item in a newspaper that said of all the poison deaths in the united states. (for children) iron overdose was the most common. The method of overdose was from swallowing their parents vitamen tablets. It takes a couple days for a child to die from iron overdose, i have heard it isn't very pretty, the body just starts shutting down. There is no way to remove it from the system once its there.
Anyway I wouldn't go drinking water that is brown/red from iron content. Adults can overdose too, just takes more of it.
Re:wow! (Score:1)
And hey, what's this "even a bug"? That car is one of the finest vehicles ever made (and the only car with running boards I've ever been able to afford).
Re:automated kvetching (Score:1)
Re:the goldenbeetle hack was cool (Score:2)
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Re:Goths, Vandals, and Slashdotters. (Score:1)
Re: "All your bridge are belong to us." (Score:1)
Most of these bug-realted comments have had a "I wonder how they did it?" subtext to them. Universities don't teach engineers how to be criminals, they teach them how to use principles of physics to aid and improve our lives.
We need more curious, well-educated youth to make the next big advances in our world, and new engineers will help to make that happen.
Sorry my comments got your shorts in a knot.
Re:Beetle stunt (Score:1)
http://www.geocities.com/mainscreenturnon/ [geocities.com]
Re:Gstreamer needs: (Score:1)
Gstreamer needs: (Score:4)
Re:Community Book Ratings (Score:1)
Is circulation the same as readership? Reader's Digest says it "reaches almost 100 million readers" Doesn't that assume one circulated copy can reach more than one reader?
Re:OK, I give up. How? How??!?!? (Score:1)
Re:OK, I give up. How? How??!?!? (Score:2)
Heh - all of this is sounding to complicated to be practical, though - there is probably a simpler solution.
Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
Re:OK, I give up. How? How??!?!? (Score:1)
Re:Beetle stunt (Score:5)
I understand what you're saying, but seriously the impact of a rusty beetle is neutral. It probably doesn't help the fish, but it won't hurt them either.
Re:Beetle stunt (Score:5)
What really tweaked the noses of Americans was this: UBC owned joO! All your bridge are belong to us!
Hey, s'alright. We Canucks are a humble bunch. We know how hard it is to admit that we r0oL you. Shucks.
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Cannonical Tomes (Score:3)
I mean, much of what people feel *must* be read is actually just stuff that everyone else has - what linguists call creating common language rather than actually expanding knowledge. As such, to rely on common knowlege to create a list of common knowledge might create stagnancy rather than a dynamic work.
Not that I'm saying having a set of liturature people are expected to read is a bad thing - rather, that cannonizing that liturature via plebian masses might stifle the ability for others to truly create.
As such, though I hate sounding so incredibly elitist, creating the sight for "everyman" to decide the cannonical works is less meaningful than just letting the college professors do it - at least they are going out there to find the new stuff, and include works that challenge traditional thought - even if they personally find those works "wrong."
What's a class on government without facsim, for instance? But, who'se going to be the gutsy one to add "My Struggle" to the list of political works? Certainly not me!
At the same time, however, this does open the "cannonical" list up to works that would not otherwise see play - things like "stomp" as a cannonical play, as opposed to "le mis," or something. It's certainly a project that I'll watch, if not participate in!
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Re:Beetle stunt (Score:2)
Why is this such a bad thing? Last I checked, iron is a pure element, and steel is mostly iron. When steel and iron rust, they create iron oxide. There's nothing particularly bad about iron oxide. It already exists in plenty of places in nature. Ever seen redish-brown rocks? Many of them (probably not all, but many) are that color because of naturally occurring iron oxide, aka Rust. If the fish wanna live in a rusty car, so be it. let them. It's hardly an environmental crime.