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Slashdotted
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The ShowcaseNerd-Its Nerd Trends Last Ten
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Slashdotted
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The ShowcaseNerd-Its Nerd Trends Last Ten
What is OmniNerd?
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RE: Slashdotted by PowerPointSamurai :: NR6 :: Show
I’d say the article was rather well received by the people who matter at Slashdot. There has always been a lot of Slashdot groupies that will piss and moan about anything to get attention and have no business there to begin with. I think these two posts put it most eloquently:
> Re:So it’s basically fixed point math.
>(Score:5, Funny)
> by CyricZ (887944) Alter Relationship on Saturday February 11, @06:24PM (#14696579)
>I doubt they’re smoking anything. And if they are, it’s likely a substance that enhances one’s journalistic abilities.
This story has everything to do with what this site stands for. It directly involves Apple, mathematics, software design, software analysis, software realiability, and so forth.
Remember, one of the traits of the true, traditional hacker was to experiment with systems in order to better understand them. That holds especially true of proprietary software systems, where the source code cannot be easily or readily viewed.
Indeed, this is a very interesting story that should appeal perfectly to the general Slashdot audience.
and:
> Re:So it’s basically fixed point math.
>(Score:4, Insightful)
> by nathanh (1214) Alter Relationship on Saturday February 11, @07:30PM (#14696926)
>(http://www.manu.com.au/)
"This story has everything to do with what this site stands for. It directly involves Apple, mathematics, software design, software analysis, software realiability, and so forth."
"Indeed, this is a very interesting story that should appeal perfectly to the general Slashdot audience."
The hacker audience who is interested in such things has been dwindling both in numbers and as a percentage. Now the "general Slashdot audience" prefers to fawn over the latest consumer product from Apple, to complain about Microsoft, or to inexpertly argue their "Rights Online".
Articles about technology, impressive hacks, homebrew projects, science and mathematics would be extremely welcome. Unfortunately the editors are infatuated with content-free articles that are little more than advertisements for products like the PS3 and Xbox and iPod.
In short, don’t take the dismissive and sarcastic posts by posers and wanna-be geeks to heart. The majority of the comments were constructive debate and the content of that debate was better than average. In short, your article was interesting and got people thinking and talking about how the system works. That’s what OmniNerd and Slashdot are for.
RE: Slashdotted by PowerPointSamurai :: NR6 :: Show
Forgot another good one:
> Re:Is it really surprising?
>(Score:5, Informative)
>by CyricZ (887944) Alter Relationship on Saturday February 11, @06:32PM (#14696628)
>Yes, it’s interesting. If you find such topics boring, then perhaps you shouldn’t be reading Slashdot. I’m sure you’ll find reading material more entertaining and suitable for lower intelligence level at Disney.com [disney.com].
Many people who read this site care about issues like this. We find it interesting to experiment with software systems, especially those which we do not have direct access to the source code of. It’s fun to see how a consumer-grade application reacts to unexpected data, for instance.
He could have decompiled the application. But doing so would likely have been in violation of the licensing agreement he agreed to before using said software. You may question the legality of such agreements, but he may not have wanted to take the risk of publishing his findings. Litigation is expensive, after all.
Not only that, but it’s quite difficult to decompile a program written in C, C++ or Objective-C. That’s especially true when you’re dealing with an optimized program. It often isn’t obvious what a particular chunk of assembly code is doing, and thus is basically useless for such analysis.