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[humorix] Crashback: Citations, Copyrights, Crashes
Crashback: Citations, Copyrights, Crashes
July 25, 2002
The bubble has burst. Linux Weekly News is almost gone,
and Taco Boy will probably be forced to launch an
"ASCII-thon Pledge Drive" to help save Slashdot within the
coming months.
Humorix, however, with its six regular readers (up 200%
from last year), is still going strong. Today is the
fourth anniversary of the first Humorix article, which, in
"dotcom years", makes us 2800 years old.
With the demise of Linux true news sites, Humorix may need
to fill in the gap by publishing real news in addition to
fake stuff. Indeed, we're already doing that. Several of
our stories that were labeled as "Fake News" have become
reality (or semi-reality).
However, even though we've engaged in deceptive advertising
by mislabeling our true content as deceptions, it's our
policy to never give out refunds. So there.
* Don't cite your sources, get expelled for plagarism.
Do reference your sources, go to jail.
In "Court Rules Against 'Deep Citations'"[1], we
unfabricated a story in which copyright vultures...er,
lawyers were going after scholars for including page
numbers within their bibliographies, thus including direct
links to material in violation of copyright law. While such
an argument hasn't held up in court, it's only a matter of
time according to this editorial[2].
* The Webification of Television continues
Ted Turner might not be unveiling his own All-Commercial
Channel[3] yet, but that doesn't matter, because the
network TV stations have already embarked on the path of
intrusive, pop-up advertising[4] that has long been the
mainstay of those Internet pioneers, porn webmasters.
Since we all know that watching television while skipping
the ads is a crime worse than theft (at least according to
our media overlords), it looks like we'll either have to
break our "Simpsons" addictions -- or prepare to sit locked
in front of the tube for several hours just to catch a
twenty-two minute show.
* Attack of the Meta-meta-meta-meta-complaint-bounce-flames
Back in November 2000, we "reported"[5] that a flood of
spam emails, followed by email bounces, followed by
meta-bounces, followed by flames about the meta-bounces,
etc., had caused the Internet to crash. One writer for
everybody's favorite tech publication, Ziff-Davis, recently
warned[6] that something like that could really happen.
* Turn your code into @$_(*+_\?-:\@_*:"<>~($=`@#^(>[];
In one Humorix classic (well, only if you're so easily
amused that you would consider anything we publish as
"classic"), we described how some geek working in his
basement had created "Polymorph"[7], a compiler that
"allows code from many languages to co-exist in a state of
superposition within the same source file."
Somebody has done just that, although we're not sure if he
was working in a basement at the time. The Perl module
"Inline"[8] gives programmers the freedom to further
obfuscate their code by including snippets from several
different languages within the same file. If your Perl
code only vaguely resembles line noise, the Inline module
will make it indistinguishable.
* A better Slashdot than Slashdot
A few years ago, we featured a meta-portal website called
"SlashGrok"[9] that would take Slashdot, filter out all of
the crap (i.e., 99% of everything), and produce a condensed
version for people who want to get caught up on the news
without spending hours reading Anonymous Coward's latest
rants about Microsoft.
The real website AlterSlash comes close[A], and even
includes cute signal-to-noise graphs for each article.
>From what we can tell, however, the AlterSlash software is
not yet capable of correcting Taco Boy's many atrocious
spelling and grammatical errors. Darn.
* These profits are not here yet
It's been nearly three years since that glorious day when
the geeks of the world waited to hear the official
announcement of Transmeta's first product. We here at
Humorix were the first to speculate that Transmeta was a
front for illegal immigration[B] and that their products
were a hoax[C].
Okay, so Transmeta isn't smuggling in Finns as part of some
fiendish conspiracy. But the company still doesn't seem to
have much in the way of products, except for Linus
Torvalds' celebrity status. We'll score this as a win.
[1] http://humorix.org/articles/jun02/deep-citations.shtml
[2] http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd0709-deeplink.html
[3] http://humorix.org/articles/aug01/turner.shtml
[4] http://slashdot.org/articles/02/07/15/208217.shtml
[5] http://humorix.org/articles/nov00/net-collapse.shtml
[6] http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2105350,00.html
[7] http://humorix.org/articles/apr01/polymorph.shtml
[8] http://inline.perl.org/inline/home.html
[9] http://humorix.org/articles/jun99/slashgrok.shtml
[A] http://www.alterslash.org/
[B] http://humorix.org/articles/dec98/finnback.shtml
[C] http://humorix.org/articles/nov99/transmeta-expose.shtml
--
Humorix: Linux and Open Source(nontm) on a lighter note
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