alt title(s): General TropesTropes are storytelling devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations.
via tvtropes.org
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Tropes - Television Tropes & Idioms
45 Beautiful Dual-Screen Wallpapers
via sixrevisions.com
If you're like me, and use multiple monitors then here are some nice dual screen desktops, I recommend using UltraMon for displaying a different desktop on each monitor, among other useful things.
Anthropomorphization
Anthropomorphization
Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish tendency to anthropomorphize hardware and software. English purists and academic computer scientists frequently look down on others for anthropomorphizing hardware and software, considering this sort of behavior to be characteristic of naive misunderstanding. But most hackers anthropomorphize freely, frequently describing program behavior in terms of wants and desires.
Thus it is common to hear hardware or software talked about as though it has homunculi talking to each other inside it, with intentions and desires. Thus, one hears “The protocol handler got confused”, or that programs “are trying” to do things, or one may say of a routine that “its goal in life is to X”. Or: “You can't run those two cards on the same bus; they fight over interrupt 9.”
One even hears explanations like “... and its poor little brain couldn't understand X, and it died.” Sometimes modelling things this way actually seems to make them easier to understand, perhaps because it's instinctively natural to think of anything with a really complex behavioral repertoire as ‘like a person’ rather than ‘like a thing’.
At first glance, to anyone who understands how these programs actually work, this seems like an absurdity. As hackers are among the people who know best how these phenomena work, it seems odd that they would use language that seems to ascribe consciousness to them. The mind-set behind this tendency thus demands examination.
The key to understanding this kind of usage is that it isn't done in a naive way; hackers don't personalize their stuff in the sense of feeling empathy with it, nor do they mystically believe that the things they work on every day are ‘alive’. To the contrary: hackers who anthropomorphize are expressing not a vitalistic view of program behavior but a mechanistic view of human behavior.
Almost all hackers subscribe to the mechanistic, materialistic ontology of science (this is in practice true even of most of the minority with contrary religious theories). In this view, people are biological machines — consciousness is an interesting and valuable epiphenomenon, but mind is implemented in machinery which is not fundamentally different in information-processing capacity from computers.
Hackers tend to take this a step further and argue that the difference between a substrate of CHON atoms and water and a substrate of silicon and metal is a relatively unimportant one; what matters, what makes a thing ‘alive’, is information and richness of pattern. This is animism from the flip side; it implies that humans and computers and dolphins and rocks are all machines exhibiting a continuum of modes of ‘consciousness’ according to their information-processing capacity.
Because hackers accept that a human machine can have intentions, it is therefore easy for them to ascribe consciousness and intention to other complex patterned systems such as computers. If consciousness is mechanical, it is neither more or less absurd to say that “The program wants to go into an infinite loop” than it is to say that “I want to go eat some chocolate” — and even defensible to say that “The stone, once dropped, wants to move towards the center of the earth”.
This viewpoint has respectable company in academic philosophy. Daniel Dennett organizes explanations of behavior using three stances: the “physical stance” (thing-to-be-explained as a physical object), the “design stance” (thing-to-be-explained as an artifact), and the “intentional stance” (thing-to-be-explained as an agent with desires and intentions). Which stances are appropriate is a matter not of abstract truth but of utility. Hackers typically view simple programs from the design stance, but more complex ones are often modelled using the intentional stance.
It has also been argued that the anthropomorphization of software and hardware reflects a blurring of the boundary between the programmer and his artifacts — the human qualities belong to the programmer and the code merely expresses these qualities as his/her proxy. On this view, a hacker saying a piece of code ‘got confused’ is really saying that he (or she) was confused about exactly what he wanted the computer to do, the code naturally incorporated this confusion, and the code expressed the programmer's confusion when executed by crashing or otherwise misbehaving.
Note that by displacing from “I got confused” to “It got confused”, the programmer is not avoiding responsibility, but rather getting some analytical distance in order to be able to consider the bug dispassionately.
It has also been suggested that anthropomorphizing complex systems is actually an expression of humility, a way of acknowleging that simple rules we do understand (or that we invented) can lead to emergent behavioral complexities that we don't completely understand.
All three explanations accurately model hacker psychology, and should be considered complementary rather than competing.
via catb.org
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Charles Bukowski, How To Be A Great Writer
Charles Bukowski, How To Be A Great Writer
you’ve got to fuck a great many women
beautiful women
and write a few decent love poems.
and don’t worry about age
and/or freshly-arrived talents.just drink more beer
more and more beerand attend the racetrack at least once a
week
and win
if possiblelearning to win is hard -
any slob can be a good loser.and don’t forget your Brahms
and your Bach and your
beer.don’t overexercise.
sleep until moon.
avoid paying credit cards
or paying for anything on
time.remember that there isn’t a piece of ass
in this world over $50
(in 1977).and if you have the ability to love
love yourself first
but always be aware of the possibility of
total defeat
whether the reason for that defeat
seems right or wrong -an early taste of death is not necessarily
a bad thing.stay out of churches and bars and museums,
and like the spider be
patient -
time is everybody’s cross,
plus
exile
defeat
treacheryall that dross.
stay with the beer.
beer is continuous blood.
a continuous lover.
get a large typewriter
and as the footsteps go up and down
outside your windowhit that thing
hit it hardmake it a heavyweight fight
make it the bull when he first charges in
and remember the old dogs
who fought so well:
Hemingway, Celine, Dostoevsky, Hamsun.If you think they didn’t go crazy
in tiny rooms
just like you’re doing nowwithout women
without food
without hopethen you’re not ready.
drink more beer.
there’s time.
and if there’s not
that’s all right
too.93 notes Date: 11.15.09 Time: 20:56 PM
Stendhal Syndrome
a psychosomatic illness that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to art, usually when the art is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art is in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world.
My mathematical prowess brings all the girls to the yard.
Ask her to think of any number. Then have her double it, add 12, divide by 2, and subtract the original number. Before she’s done, tell her the answer: 6. It will always be 6.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
RatioMaster
RatioMaster
RatioMaster 1.8.9 was released on August 22th, 2009.
* Intro *
RatioMaster is an application designed for spoofing uploads on BitTorrent trackers. It connects to a tracker and behaves like a normal BitTorrent client, but without actually uploading to / downloading from other peers in the swarm. It reports to the tracker that it's uploading (or downloading or both, it's your choice) at a certain rate, thus making it useful for artificially increasing your ratio on certain sites that track a user's overall ratio (total uploaded/total downloaded).
RatioMaster has hardcoded emulations for the most commonly used BitTorrent clients, but it is also able to parse external files for emulation settings, thus making it easily extensible for your favorite client and easy to update when new versions of said clients are released. The client files (extension ".client") are actually renamed XML files and the syntax should be pretty straight-forward. The emulation layer includes support for parameter order in GETs, reproduction of HTTP headers, generation of application-specific peer_ids and keys and more. RatioMaster can also parse the tracker reannounce time from the tracker's HTTP response, and combined with the fact that you can specify down and up rates makes it pretty hard to detect by any anti-cheat scripts, if not downright impossible. Other features, like a TCP listener (so as to appear connectable on the tracker's peerlist) and a leecher counter (so as to stop any uploads when a torrent has 0 leechers) also contribute to RatioMaster's spoofing abilities.
Memory Reader
Starting from version 1.6 RatioMaster have integrated Memory Reader tool that useful when you want to read exact Peer ID, Key, Port and Number of peers announce parameters from your regular torrent client (like uTorrent,Azureus,Bitcomet or others). Look for the 'Memory Reader' button in Advanced Tab.Command Line support
Starting from version 1.7 RatioMaster supports command line options.This feature is useful if you want to run several torrents from batch file or shortcuts with predefined setting:
Possible keys :
/minimize - RM will start minimized/start - RM will load latest torrent (or the one provided in command line) and automatically start it/downloadRate, /uploadRate - RM will set download and upload speed/percent - RM will set finished percent (0% = start leeching, 100% = seeding)/hide - RM will start in hidden mode, minimized and no tray icon .Use at your own risk, as far as i know the only way to stop it, is to kill process in Task Manager.
Examples (torrentpath.torrent is a full path to the torrent file) :
ratiomaster.exe torrentpath.torrent- will load the torrent
ratiomaster.exe torrentpath.torrent /start- will load the torrent from torrentpath and run it with default options
ratiomaster.exe torrentpath.torrent /start /uploadRate:250 /downloadRate:200 /percent:100- will load the torrent and start it with 250 upload,200 download,and finished 100%
ratiomaster.exe /uploadRate:250- will set provided value,all others will be default from settings
ratiomaster.exe /minimize /start- will start ratiomaster in minimized mode with last loaded torrent.
Saving individual torrent settings
Starting from version 1.7 RatioMaster saves individual settings for each torrent and uses those settings next time that you are loading same torrent. Setting files are stored in '/Torrents Config' subfolder of the ratiomaster.exe folder.
* Contact *
Website: http://www.moofdev.net/
Forums: http://www.moofdev.net/forums/
Email: ratiomaster_06 AT yahoo DOT com or dev AT moofdev DOT net
* Requirements *
RatioMaster requires that you've got the .NET Framework version 2 installed. You can get it from Microsoft.
* How to use *
1. Get a .torrent file associated with the tracker you want to spoof.
2. Load or Drag/Drop that file into RatioMaster.
3. Change the settings in the Options group to your liking: upload speed, download speed (set to 0 to spoof upload only), finished (how much of the file do you want to appear that you have - set to 100% if you want to appear as a seeder)
4. Choose 'Client Simulation' in Advanced Tab to be the same type as your regular torrent client.
5. Optionally, look through the Advanced and Network tabs and see if you need anything changed there, like using a specific port or announcing through a proxy server. Most users won't need to change anything here.
6. Press the Start button and watch the bytes start rolling.
7. After a while, when you decide you've spoofed enough, press the Stop button to announce to the tracker that you're ending your session.
Guide to writing your own client files
* Things to remember *
First of all, don't use very high upload speeds. Some trackers check sessions for very big upload rates. Using a 6 MB/s upload rate when your IP belongs to an ISP who only has a 512 kbps plan is plain stupid. Check the moofdev forums on more info on maximum safe speeds reached by other users on different trackers.
Never spoof uploads on a tracker with few peers. If there are only 2 leechers and they're downloading at a maximum of 300 kB/s, and you're spoofing an upload of 2 MB/s, it will look suspicious.
Keep the software up-to-date. Sometimes bugs are found that may get you banned on sites. RatioMaster includes an automatic version checker and will notify you when a new version is released. Update!
If you're going to take part in discussions on the moofdev forums, or other forums that deal with this sort of software, don't use the same username you use on trackers. We've had instances of tracker admins visiting the forums to see whether any of our users were members on their trackers and... well, you can assume what happened next.
Read the forums. Sometimes users will report that a certain tracker simply cannot be fooled. It's better to stay informed than be banned on your favourite tracker.
Last, but not least, only spoof when you NEED to. By cheating on a torrent, you're disrupting the swarm and going against the spirit of p2p. Unless you really need to increase your ratio and there's no better way (short of paying money - pay2leech trackers are a lot worse than cheating peers), don't cheat.
* Copyrights and acknowledgements *
RatioMaster (the software) was written by RatioMaster_06 (the person), with contributions by JTS-UD (yes it's an acronym!). We'd like to also thank:
- 12345B for moderating our forums, finding important bugs in beta builds, fixing my syntax errors and typos and for being a nice guy :)
- our anonymous betatester, who intensively tested every beta, came up with ideas and also made some nice icons for us
- Azurine, Samson and Thunder for beta testing and bug reports
- All other people we forgot, who helped with their ideas
Copyright © 2005-2009 RatioMaster_06, moofdev.net. All rights reserved.
Previous page: Welcome
Next page: RatioMaster Downloads
via moofdev.net
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
