I wanted to link directly to Malice's blog from my sig, but a blogger URL is just too long. But hey, I wanted to see everybody's theories anyway, so post them here if you want.

This post just appeared in my metamod queue. "Flamebait" isn't quite correct, but it's close enough to "Offtopic" not to matter. But I couldn't bring myself to endorse the moderation -- because I strongly agree with the observation.

I know some of you think that the mod system is completely broken, so what the heck. Well, if I ever become convinced of that, I'll stop frequenting Slashdot.

It's been over a year since I last shared my submissions.

• 2002-01-26 19:19:09 Upscale, and I mean, *Upscale*, Cell Phones (articles,tech) (rejected)
  Does anybody remember those overpriced cellphones Nokia tried to sell to Cross Pen crowd? Months later they accepted this story from somebody else, probably because he was less sarcastic than me.
• 2002-02-07 16:29:29 An impressive new meta-search engine (articles,tech) (rejected)
• 2002-02-12 15:31:05 The Cold War's Legacy of Mutation (articles,science) (accepted)
  Too many twits saw this as an X-Men reference
• 2002-02-12 16:24:28 Star Trek: TMP finally released (articles,movies) (rejected)
  Something about the director's cut finally getting out or something. Probably just as well it was rejected
• 2002-02-13 18:01:38 When lightening strikes (articles,science) (rejected)
• 2002-02-13 18:11:12 Can the Mac invade the Unix workstation market? (articles,unix) (rejected)
  The short answer: no.
• 2002-03-22 18:07:46 Guilt-Free Meat (articles,science) (rejected)
  The older SF that I prefer has things like "meat trees" or "chicken vats". But in this nanotech/cyberpunk world, cultured meat is no longer a geeky concept
• 2002-03-26 01:19:38 It's not a cell phone -- it's an Instrument! (articles,tech) (rejected)
  Tried again for the actual product launch
• 2002-03-30 22:30:04 Thumbs Up! (articles,tech) (rejected)
  I'm mystified at this rejection. It turns out that things like cell phones and game controlers are causing basic changes in the human hand. I'd have thought Slashdotters would be fascinated
• 2002-04-16 15:45:24 The Threat of Nanodust (articles,tech) (rejected)
• 2002-04-18 15:48:44 Google Lockouts (articles,internet) (rejected)
• 2002-06-20 16:34:20 Just when you thought it was safe to download .... (articles,security) (rejected)
• 2002-07-16 22:54:25 Schneier Calls Unicode Insecure (articles,news) (rejected)
• 2002-09-20 17:04:43 Firefly Premieres Tonight (articles,tv) (accepted)
  Two sad/silly things about this one: Lots of clueless conspiracy freaks "proving" that I was a shill for Fox. And internal network politics managed to kill the show even before the first episode aired. Another thing: I liked the show better than 90% of the TV SF I've seen, but the sad fact is that Joss Whedon doesn't have a "hard SF" mindset.
• 2003-04-17 05:49:30 Six wireless protocols in one (sort of) little PDA (articles,portables) (rejected)
  I tried for a humorous take, and got rejected. More solemn submission accepted a few days later.
• 2003-05-10 07:14:45 A Palm for Every Purpose (articles,pilot) (accepted)
  Being a compulsive/professional nitpicker, I always say "Palm" instead of "Palm Pilot". Strictly speaking "Pilot" only refers to certain discontinued models, though most people still refer to all Palm PDAs as "Palm Pilots". Maybe the temptation to make masturbation jokes is why....
• 2003-06-06 06:18:46 The Sim on TV (articles,tv) (rejected)
  Duh! Was on Slashdot months ago!
• 2003-06-30 17:30:47 Do the Google Dance! (articles,internet) (rejected)
• 2003-06-30 17:58:11 Can Madison Save Itanium? (articles,intel) (rejected)
• 2003-07-09 16:28:14 Can WirelessMAN solve the Last Mile Problem? (articles,wireless) (rejected)
  Metro Area Networks may well be the Next Big Thing. Shortsighted of the editors not to be interested.
• 2003-07-19 21:51:49 The end of the Devil's Highway (articles,news) (rejected)
  U.S. 666 (so named because it was the sixth spur of old Route 66), got renamed. I thought it was a good story, but I guess it wasn't geeky enough.

I freely admit it: this post was fairly modded down. But just because a downmod is fair, doesn't mean it makes sense. This is an obscure post that nobody's gonna read anyway, unless they read everything (as some Slashdotters seem to do, don't ask me why). So why waste your points on it? To punish me? I generate karma a lot faster than I can possibly use it up

People need to stop thinking about moderation as a moral issue and use their points in a useful way. That means making the forum more interesting, not punishing people who irritate you.

One of the few movie critics I have any respect for is Kenneth Turan. He manages to say something interesting about a movie whether he loves it or hates it. In a word, he's smart. So I'm a little taken aback to find him liking T3: RotM. Maybe I'll have to go see it.

I'm glad that this post made people laugh. But I did have a serious point. These guys who think they can extort a policy change from Microsoft have seen too many movies. I think a lot of nasty stuff happens because people try to act out the unreal fantasies that Hollywood peddles.

Some years back, there was a case in Monterey CA of a guy trying to act out the murders in one of the sleaziest films ever made. Fortunately homocide isn't as easy as the movie made it seem. But maybe all movies should come with a "don't try this at home!" warning.

There's a fellow named Al Kossow. He collects old computer stuff, including a huge trove of computer manuals which he has generously made availablein PDF format. (Warning: these are scanned-in bitmaps, not PS text streams, so the file sizes are huge.) Of particular interest is a IBM 7030 Reference Manual, authentic even to the coffee cup ring on the front cover! I find this particular document fascinating because it is probably the first computer manual ever to use the term "byte".

The 7030 (better known as the Stretch) was not actually a byte-architecture: the addressible unit was a 64-bit word. If I'm reading the manual correctly, a 7030 byte was a variable-length bit field within a machine word. According to various sources, the term was coined by Werner Buchholz, an engineering manager on the project, as a play on "bit".

The 7030 was a commercial disaster. It was never as fast as it was supposed to be, and shut down the line after manufacturing only 3. But it was a valuable disaster, because the innovations that went into the Stretch proved to be valuable to IBM later on, and indeed to the whole computing industry.

This was all in the late 50s. Later, in 1965, IBM introduced the 360 series. The 360 line embraced a huge range of models, from 64-bit scientific mainframes to 16-bit business minicomputers. Despite the difference in word size, machine code was portable between all models. This was possible because the 360 series abandoned word addresses in favor of a smaller character-sized address unit: the now familiar 8-bit byte.

Oh, the trials and tribulations of being a mental packrat and compulsive browser. I used to think that electronic references would make life easier for me, because I wouldn't get distracted as I do when thumbing through a hardcopy reference book. But online references, particularly the web, make things worse -- it's too easy to cross link and free associate.

Earlier today, I was checking up on my favorite cam girl, and found an amusing story where some guys in a bar made fun of her choice of tipple. I sent her a teasing email:

From: Zicsoft
To: Malice <malice@beautydestroyed.com>
Subject: It wasn't your footwear

It was the fact that your tipple is a fruit-flavored Swedish beverage. For shame! ;)

Next time, order a Skkorpio!

While on the Skkorpio web site, I noticed a link to the web site of an Austrialian science show. Now, one of the "presenters" of this show is one Jill, Duchess of Hamilton. Intriguing name. Why, in Australia of all places, would somebody insist on using such a pretentious title?

Never did figure that out, though Jill Hamilton sounds like an interesting person. Journalist, historian, gardener. Advocate of using native plants instead of conventional high-maintenance garden species. (I heartily approve. Aside from the ecological effects, such gardens look much less sterile.) In the course of my Googling, I found an article on the Dukes of Hamilton from the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition.

The 11th edition? My ears pricked up. I've long wanted a copy of this one. It was a total rewrite of the encylopedia, done by some of the leading scholars of the day. A few years later, Sears Roebuck bought the whole operation and moved it to Chicago. Later editions had existing articles butchered to make room for new material, and to satisfy political and religious pressure groups. Then in 1942, it went to the University of Chicago, where it got swept up in Robert Maynard Hutchins "great books" ideology.

Never got my own copy, for various reasons. Turns up in used bookstores for a few hundred bucks. Serious scholars always have their own copies, but I've never been a serious scholar. An online version would be worth doing, though, if you could get around the copyright issues.

Turns out there aren't any -- Sony Bono was asleep that day. Anybody can scan it in and publish it, though they have to be careful with the Britannica trademark, which is still active. The scan I found was at 1911Eencyclopedia.org. Alas, it's a pretty half-assed effort. Nobody's gotten round to making sure that each HTML file corresponds to an actual article. Never mind proofreading it. Plus they have obnoxious popups. Glad I noticed that before I hit the Donate button.

You can buy the 11th on CD-ROM for only $100. If I weren't unemployed, I would have already done so.

Found a great Wikipedia article on the 11th. With a link to a project that's doing a proper free version. Guess I'll have to volunteer.

Maybe I should resent it when I'm modded down by the "oh shut up" types. But I don't. Indeed, it gives me that smug feeling you get when you know you've made an important point, and people don't want to admit it.

Somehow, IE has decided that my startup page is in the restricted zone. What's my startup page? about:blank!

I've been thinking of tweaking my own version of Mozilla for Windows. Problem: the official build uses the Microsoft C++ compiler (just the command line thing, not the Visual C++ IDE), and I don't feel like buying a copy. The latest release can be built with GCC instead, but the resulting binaries won't run CL-compiled plugins. So no Java!

Mozilla.org seems to be having a hard time staying away from closed-source apps. Training videos are provided only in Real format, which means that Free Software True Believers can't look at them.

I'm not a FSTB, but I do thoroughly dislike Real's software products. (Intrusive, badly designed, tend to fuck up your system.) Hard for me to understand why everybody's so dependent on them. When I worked at SGI, we would watch company meeting MPEG streams on our IRIX workstations. Of course, that was our own technology (since spun off), but it used standard formats. Open source equivalents exist, but none are ready for end-users yet. So everybody uses proprietary Real and Microsoft formats. Too bad!

Recently, somebody filed an "Ask Slashdot", asking for books on Quantum Mechanics. I couldn't resist making the obvious pun. I would have thought everybody had heard it already -- if you listen to NPR, you hear it in a Car Talk blurb almost once a day. But my post quickly got modded up to the max.

Everyone likes to be loved, but is it right to be loved for this kind of reason? Have to try to put this question in a form that would interest Randy Cohen.

My post included a link to the Volkswagen Quantam Repair Manual on Amazon. For some strange reason, all the reader reviews refer to a German social thinker named Habermas. Some of them also refer to his leading translator, an American named Pensky. Obviously some kind of sociology in-joke. Anyway, mental packrat that I am, I immediately went to Google to look these guys up.

On the way, I got stuck in a small but highly irritating side trip. See, there's this guy named Daniel Takriti. He appears to be a webmaster for various German online shopping sites. As a sideline, he spams Google.

How do you spam a search engine? Suppose you Google for "Habermas Pensky". You'll get a lot of hits on www.24-7-bestsellersbox.com and www.bestbookcity.com. Neither of these sites has any actual content. If you click on these links, you are immediately forwarded to Amazon.com -- using a paid-referral link, of course. Obviously these sites do something quite different when the Googlebot visits them.

This wasn't a big waste of my time, but a totally unnecessary one. I just hate this shit.

Just discovered Salam Pax, an entertaining blogger who logs in from Baghdad. His geeky orientation (how many people would compare postwar Iraq to a William Gibson novel) should make him a favorite among Slashdotters.

I'm looking at "Mass Storage Leaves Microchips in the Dust". One of the keyword-sensitive ads at the top of the page is for Storage USA!

This new games section skin hurts my eyes. But that's only appropriate, no?