MS shill spreading FUD on Kuro5hin

Post #15,625 by marlowe 10/29/01 8:45:15 PM Reply	MS shill spreading FUD on Kuro5hin [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/26/204645/29\|As a matter of fact, they do own the place]. He's been an intern there, so there's a good chance he's being paid for this. I won't excerpt, because the content is nothing new. But I have an observation to make, for I have observed a pattern. The opinions commonly associated with unthinking acceptance of what one is taught not only predominate on K5, they dominate. (This is what being pro-Microsoft and being anti-American have in common. I can't imagine any other common denominator.) The moderation mechanisms guarantee mob rule, and the mob consists of rabid sheep. I'm in a foul mood because I just found out there's a forced march to WIN2K under way where I work. My dual boot option is about to be taken from me by the sheep in charge. We have got to find a way to neutralize the power of the stupid, before they've destroyed everything of value on this planet. They are owned and directed by the evil, who have no qualms about manipulating them. It's not just forcing us to run Windows anymore. Lately the evil have started to have the stupid ram airplanes into office buildings. This is a very bad trend. A slippery slope, if you will. [link\|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/index.html\|http://www.angelfir...e/index.html] Sometimes "tolerance" is just a word for not dealing with things.
Post #15,626 by static 10/29/01 8:50:12 PM Reply	K5 has gotten too popular. It's heading down the same slippery slide that SlashDot went down about two or three years ago. Of course, it's making a somewhat different journey, due to the differences in moderation and story selection, but it's going that direction anyway. Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #15,630 by ben_tilly 10/29/01 9:05:10 PM Reply	And one that many Usenet groups went down before that As I have said in a number of forums, popularity kills the ability to have a healthy online community. I also suspect that the recurring technical problems on the original IWE were a filter that helped keep the quality up... Cheers, Ben
Post #15,645 by static 10/29/01 10:44:59 PM Reply	Yes, I was also thinking something along those lines. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #15,657 by kmself 10/30/01 12:08:41 AM Reply	Have to admit The goal behind K5 is to be able to scale beyond the limitations of other forums, notably Slashdot. Currently K5 traffic is about 10% of its big brother. All told, the comment quality level is pretty good. But there are [link\|http://www.usemod.com/cgi-bin/mb.pl?KuroshinSubmissionQueue\|significant problems with the K5 submission queue]. The site also needs filters (eg: don't display posts below n score (with other variants). I consider the site moderately successful -- the portions I've had a hand in, namely the comment moderation, work well -- good content is promoted, bad content sinks, middlin' stuff gets a middlin' score, very unlike Slashdot. Moreover, there are reasonably few trolls and mindless posts -- levels now at a few per day, but they tend to weed out quickly. Submissions more or less suck. WRT Carnage4Life, he's been part of the K5 community since September, 2000, if not before. I might note we've got [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/user?userid=23\|our own Microsoft mole] here. C4L's not made a secret of his affiliations, though he could well have been more open about them. The commentary in his article was reasonably balanced last I checked, and he's got the ghost of a point. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?`
Post #15,658 by static 10/30/01 12:20:01 AM Reply	True enough. For it's volume, yes, the comment quality is pretty good, as is the signal-to-noise ratio, etc etc. It is indeed the story queue which needs some work. That Wiki page looks interesting... I'll go add some thoughts to it. Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #15,660 by ben_tilly 10/30/01 12:36:18 AM Reply	An admission of my own I don't know how well K5 does or does not work since for some reason its discussion has never interested me. Perhaps it is just the wrong mix of stories for me. Perhaps has to do with the audience attracted. But in several tries, I never once found myself being drawn back to the site and its discussion, and so I never became a regular there. Cheers, Ben
Post #15,679 by rusty 10/30/01 2:30:03 AM Reply	No hard feelings I still think you're a Perl God. ;-)
Post #15,698 by ben_tilly 10/30/01 9:28:00 AM Reply	Decisions, decisions Do I bask in the undeserved glow, or do I point out the chasm between myself and someone like [link\|http://www.yetanother.org/damian/\|Damian Conway]? Cheers, Ben
Post #15,731 by wharris2 10/30/01 11:43:34 AM Reply	Are you on the high side of the chasm? Since the site displays dark green on black on my monitor, and since I can't read a bloomin' think on the site, I can't tell whether you're ridiculing him or praising him. "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Post #15,739 by ben_tilly 10/30/01 12:07:35 PM Reply	A more readable version [link\|http://www.yetanother.org/damian/b+w/\|Is here]. And no, I would not call myself on the high side of someone like that. I mean, I can make Perl mostly do what I want, sure. But you don't find me deciding that I want to make Perl into Latin, turn Perl into a quantum computer, turn my error messages into Haiku, autocorrect typos in function names, etc, etc, etc. Take a look at his projects list. Those are his current projects while on a sabbatical paid for by Perl people who want him to have more time to flabbergast the rest of us... Cheers, Ben
Post #15,751 by wharris2 10/30/01 1:09:30 PM Reply	Much better "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
Post #15,668 by marlowe 10/30/01 1:34:20 AM Reply	Leading to an unpleasant dilemna. Popular sites devolve into mindless crap. Unpopular sites are, by virtue of their unpopularity, irrelevant. The overall level of intelligence on IWETHEY is much higher than the norm for the general online population. Even the people I disagree with here impress me as being smarter than some people I agree with elsewhere. But I can't escape the feeling I'm caught in some debating club here. Are we making a difference? Are we at least limiting the power of dumbocracy? Or are just chattering amongst ourselves? Just recently I've reviewed my reasons for rejecting Objectivism all those years ago. They're still valid, but the fact that I even needed to review them is disconcerting. Also, they all seem a little less important now than then. My sense of proportion is shifting. The appeal of Objectivism to the intelligent (which are not necessarily non-stupid) is that it's an expression of anger at the invincible stupidity of the masses. It's no real solution to the problem, but at least it acknowledges the problem. I'm smart enough that I can manipulate stupid people for my own amusement, and keep them distracted enough that they do less damage. I've done it before. But I felt bad afterwards, as if I'd debased myself somehow. There are lots of people throughout history giving that sort of thing a bad name, and nobody giving it a good name. What I want is a solution. Powerlessness sucks. It's no fun being right when you're not the one making decisions. I might just settle for small acts of revenge, such as: #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { while(1) printf("\\t\\t\\b\\b\\b\\b\\b\\b"); return 0; } [link\|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/index.html\|http://www.angelfir...e/index.html] Sometimes "tolerance" is just a word for not dealing with things.
Post #15,659 by pwhysall 10/30/01 12:23:57 AM 10/30/01 12:27:32 AM Reply	Nah. It can't go down the same slippery slope. It'll go down a slippery slope, but it's not the same one as Slashdot. Thing is, you see, there's some fundamental differences between K5 and Slashdot Stuff That Happens On K5 But Not On Slashdot Open story queue. Yes, the queue is broken. But the simple fact is that the audience writes and votes on the material up for discussion. Mojo, not karma. Mojo works in a fundamentally different way, being ranged over 0..5, rather than the -whatever..+whatever that karma is. Everyone on K5 is within 5 mojo points of each other. No anonymous posting. Probably the single biggest factor in increasing the S/N ratio was the death of Anonymous Hero. The mere fact of having to provide a valid email address and having to activate the account from that email address means that trolls and spammers have to work quite hard to get lots of accounts. No illusions about The Management. The K5 Cabal (which I wouldn't be a part of, [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org/?op=special;page=random#whoelse\|oh no][1], even if it did exist) have made it quite clear on numerous occasions that trolls, spammers and co WILL be deleted. I know that spammer accounts have been deleted unilaterally. Slashdot umm and ahh about "censorship", but when it comes down to it, generally let the morons do their thing. So, in the light of that (aside - it's a measure of how good Mozilla is becoming that I've had the confidence to compose this entire screed in the textbox, rather than an external editor), I'd say that K5 will not drown in spam, penis birds and trolls, but rather in boring stories about US politics. But hey, that's what the teeming masses seem to want. [1] I know there have been some witterings about "The K5 Cabal" and people claiming to be part of it. Basically, if you ain't on that list, you ain't in the cabal, which doesn't exist. Peter Earl Grey, Hot Shill For Hire [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] Edited by pwhysall Oct. 30, 2001, 12:27:32 AM EST Expand All History
Post #15,661 by static 10/30/01 12:38:36 AM Reply	Yah. You're right. I was a bit hasty. The story moderation is clearly superior to SlashDot and the other advantages you list are also correct. It's not the same slippery slope it will go down as SlashDot, but one not too dissimilar. Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #17,640 by tablizer 11/9/01 11:54:47 PM Reply	The ultimate test is to see how they ....handle an anti-OOP troll :-) ________________ oop.ismad.com
Post #17,791 by static 11/11/01 6:55:16 PM Reply	Okay, then. I'll be watching. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #15,662 by kmself 10/30/01 12:49:55 AM Reply	Gee, that's not a conclusion you just jumped to, is it? C4L's been around K5 for well over a year. He's not being as wide-open about disclosing his biases as he could be, but was definitively outed in the discussion. And that discussion seems to be pretty balanced. If you're going to smear someone's reputation, you'd best find yourself some proof to back yourself up with. Unless you really like the smell of a slander/libel suit in the morning. To the rest of the lemmings here, raise your hands if you actually read and researched the article in question and claims posted. My own honest assessment of C4L's post: weak argument, a ghost of a point, and maybe it was influenced by his experience, maybe it wasn't. I can assure you Rusty's no great fan of MSFT though. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?`
Post #15,669 by rusty 10/30/01 1:39:43 AM Reply	Conclusions jumped to long ago... Lemme expand on this... C4L has been around since nearly the beginning, as well as being one of the few remaining clue-wielding users still at Slashdot. He's smart, knowlegeable about a wide range of things, and writes great articles, which frequently criticize MS more than they praise it. He's never made it any secret that he worked there at one time, and if you actually read his articles, it's clear that if MS is paying him to astroturf, they're not getting their money's worth. Case in point: I love his work, and I still hate MS. Oh, and there's one other thing that makes the claim of "C4L == MS Shill" so riotously funny you'd all just die laughing, but unfortunately I can't tell you what it is. Trust me though, it makes you look like such an unbelievable ass, along with Eloquence and all the other idiots who participated in a thread similar to this on the K5 article. The opinions commonly associated with unthinking acceptance of what one is taught not only predominate on K5, they dominate. That's so asinine I don't even know where to begin. Anyone wishing to contribute to the "buy marlowe a clue fund" please send paypal donations to marlowe_clue@kuro5hin.org. On second thought, never mind. We could never collect enough... Meanwhile, both anti-MS zealots and pro-MS zealots (as well as pro- and anti-American zealots, and any zealot of any other type) should seek medical help for their rectal-cranial inversions. I'm frankly sick and fucking tired of K5 being accused of being shills for $THING because someone read an article that disagreed with their inbred^H^H^H^Hborn biases. We aren't shills for anything. Get it straight. And if you are unwilling to approach any subject with an open mind, go read whatever site will simply reaffirm your existing ideas. I'm sure you can find one. To those of you IWeThey-ers who just suffered through this diatribe unnecessarily, I apologize. It wasn't aimed at you. :-) This isn't my site, so I don't necessarily have to be nice. :-)
Post #15,674 by pwhysall 10/30/01 2:08:15 AM Reply	Hey, glad to see ya :) Hell, given some of the stuff I've posted on here in recent weeks, you're not out of the "nice zone" yet :-) Welcome aboard! Peter Shill For Hire [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal]
Post #15,677 by rusty 10/30/01 2:27:53 AM Reply	Re: Hey, glad to see ya :) I dig the new server. Still hate the ezBoard style, though. :-) Glad to hear I'm not jumping in and stomping on community norms. This "MS shill" thing irritates me to no end, though. And especially from marlowe, who is clearly one of those people. You know, "The world has nothing to teach me, for I am better than all of you." Look, it's great fun: Just recently I've reviewed my reasons for rejecting Objectivism all those years ago. Hehehe. He actually put enough effort into thinking about Objectivism that he has reasons he can review for having rejected it. And to think, I just recognized it as a desperate attempt by the vain to justify their self-love. What are the odds that his reasons were that Ayn Rand didn't actually name him personally in any of her writings? I'm smart enough that I can manipulate stupid people for my own amusement, and keep them distracted enough that they do less damage. marlowe, Hitler, Huey Long, Ronald Reagan, Ronald McDonald, that guy down at the used car lot... should I go on? Such eminent company he keeps. What I want is a solution. Powerlessness sucks. (Note: The following is not an insult.) Look around you. Try to figure out that you're not the greatest pinnacle of human acheivement. Learn something. Teach someone something. Make the world better, instead of just flushing yourself down your gold-plated navel. It's no fun being right when you're not the one making decisions. News flash: maybe there's a reason you're not the one making the decisions. Ah well. I've probably trashed this thread enough by now. Have you all gone through this with marlowe before? Am I just now discovering a great toy that you've all already played with and put back in the closet? "An angry fieldmouse." I love it. :-) -- K5 is awful in a completely different way than Slashdot
Post #15,681 by pwhysall 10/30/01 2:35:23 AM Reply	Re: Hey, glad to see ya :) I dig the new server. Still hate the ezBoard style, though. :-) Yeah, well. Me Too.</aol> We've had this discussion here at length, I can tell you :) It is better, inasmuch that threads are, well, threaded, rather than the all-but-random display style of EzBug. No ads, too - props to Jason and Scott for making this happen. But beware. Scott's planning on rewriting this (he built it from nothing in three weeks in Zope), but he's not yet finally specified the language. Expect to see implementations in Forth, 68000 assembler and Cobol. Oh, and Java :) Peter Shill For Hire [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal]
Post #15,707 by admin 10/30/01 9:57:37 AM Reply	Don't forget INTERCAL I've specified the language (or at least, I've narrowed it to two web coding environments)... just need the time. And if Someone Else decides to finish the PHP version that I started, I may never have to rewrite it. ;-) Refresh me, though. Which parts of the ezShite style do you hate? Regards, -scott anderson
Post #15,709 by marlowe 10/30/01 10:17:04 AM Reply	Smells like ad hominem. Just face it. K5 is a dud. I pointed out the problems at the beginning because they were there at the beginning. I stayed because I had some hope things could be fixed. But this comment shows you're not even willing to face the issues squarely. I'm sorry this hurts your feelings, but it has to be said. Quit sniping at the messenger and face reality. [link\|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/index.html\|http://www.angelfir...e/index.html] Sometimes "tolerance" is just a word for not dealing with things.
Post #15,744 by ben_tilly 10/30/01 12:23:30 PM Reply	Speaking of sniping at the messenger... I think you should read what Rusty wrote, carefully. Yes, it is ad hominem in the true meaning of, "Attack the man". That doesn't mean that the attack is entirely unjustified... Cheers, Ben
Post #15,755 by rusty 10/30/01 1:50:56 PM Reply	An Ad Hominem for an Ad Hominem "Attack the man" seemed like the only reasonable strategy, since that's what marlowe started the thread off with. And, marlowe, it really doesn't hurt my feelings. Sorry. I do hope you find a site that you can enjoy, and it's clear that it won't be K5. I'd say we'll miss you, but I'd be lying.
Post #163,985 by pwhysall 7/12/04 2:43:53 PM Reply	I love archaeology. Still think K5 is a dud? 3 years later, 50000 users, software powering a number of high profile sites? Does that crow taste GOOD? Peter [link\|http://www.debian.org\|Shill For Hire] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal] [link\|http://guildenstern.dyndns.org\|Blog]
Post #164,147 by Ashton 7/13/04 7:11:34 AM Reply	Ah.. fossils. But then, all this blather was from the rudderless years, that floundering: pre-discovery of the PNAC.. and Direction. Since those unfortunate years of angst, he has become Washed in the Blood of the Neoconman hymn. No more callow quavering uncertainties with an, "it may be that.." or... "I may be missing something, but -" (Like this wavering opus of measured ~~objectivity~~Objectivity?) No more conditionals! Now he's rilly Certain of those certainties. And You Aren't.
Post #15,671 by marlowe 10/30/01 1:53:41 AM Reply	No, that's an observation of an overall pattern. And studiously ignoring the larger picture is not a rebuttal. The evidence for my interpretation of events is all gathered neatly into one untidy bundle [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|here]. No matter where you start browsing this material, the conclusion is inescapable, provided you don't stop when the pattern begins to become uncomfortably clear. Non-PC views are marginalized, even censored. Meanwhile, stupid crap about zits and booze and kind bud and how it's America's fault you can't get laid somehow manage to float to the top. Carnage4Life is either a shill or a brainwashed idiot. And for a brainwashed idiot, he's putting a fair amount of effort into things. Granted, it's mostly cut-and-paste from standard Microsoft FUD releases, but he still has to format and spellcheck all that. Maybe it would be more to the point to say that there's a lot of effort behind what he and his kind are doing. How about this, Karsten - instead of calling him a shill, I'll call him a brainwashed idiot. Would you prefer that? I can give him the benefit of the doubt about his motives, or about his intelligence, but not both. Take your pick. And the submission queue is only broken in the sense that Athenian democracy was broken on the day it condemned Socrates to death. From a strictly technical point of view, it's working more or less as designed. But the fundamental concept is, well, it's not exactly ordered liberty, is it? I'd say that Rusty's experiment in direct democracy serves as a reminder of just why it is we don't allow those under the age of eighteen to vote. And saying that it's better than Slashdot is hardly a compelling defense. Not that I'm conceding that point. K5 is awful in a completely different way than Slashdot, thus making direct comparison meaningless. [link\|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/index.html\|http://www.angelfir...e/index.html] Sometimes "tolerance" is just a word for not dealing with things.
Post #15,675 by pwhysall 10/30/01 2:12:08 AM Reply	Reading this... ...reminds me of a very angry fieldmouse. Dunno why. If you don't like K5, don't read it. Peter Clue-bearing Shill For Hire [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal]
Post #15,682 by kmself 10/30/01 2:49:23 AM Reply	Where to begin As has been pointed out to you, twice, C4L's hardly a newcomer to K5. I wouldn't say he's an example of K5 being overrun, or a sudden explosion in membership is to blame. Don't get me wrong: I think his article is lukewarm at best. For the nth time, there's the ghost of a point. He (and several cohorts posting in comments) rather more or less precisely manage to miss a few key issues. On the other hand, he's also stating what's pretty much an irrefutable truth: open source, "bazaar" style development, isn't enough to ensure high-quality code. Some people manage to lose track of that fact. But the viewpoint isn't as prevasively held as C4L seems to think. His essay is rather strongly shaded. Is the guy brainwashed? I don't know. He's a college kid, he spent the summer at Microsoft, he got to meet Bill Gates. That has an influence. But he's still in his formative years. I expect his opinions on things are subject to revision for a while yet. Regarding the submission queue, if you'll actually read (gee, am I asking so much from y'all, twice in a day?) the Meatball Wiki material, the voting system doesn't work as originally implmeneted -- a delta system (the K5 SubQue voting mechanism) tends toward no decision as the voting population increases. This can be demonstrated. It's a statistical outcome. Cutting to the chase, the system I suggested would be to have an editorial roundtable for stories to sit -- for anything from an hour or two to a couple of days as it was revised and targeted at an appropriate section. Then the story would be pitched to the main site, based on the same five-point moderation scale as comments. Sufficiently high mods would hit front page, lower would be section, lower than that, diary. I'm not opposed to a public-input system. I am opposed to systems that don't work: Slashdot moderation, K5 sub queue. The distinction should be clear. I'm not convinced that a fully open queue is the right way to run a site. It would be cool to have sections with editors -- again, they could compete against each other. Give a mix of public votes between slightly controlled systems may achieve the best results. There's a literature on group decision making you may want to aquaint yourself with -- direct democracy is not the only, and certainly not the best in all circumnstances, way to go. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?`
Post #15,701 by boxley 10/30/01 9:43:03 AM Reply	Nope kinda like bens answer, went and wasnt amused/enthused tshirt front "born to die before I get old" thshirt back "fscked another one didnja?"
Post #15,704 by boxley 10/30/01 9:53:03 AM Reply	I read the article in question, I am not a MS$ fan The points he made were all valid and not FUD at all. Open source is not inherently more secure than closed for some of the same reasons. With the source code I can look for explicit ways to break it. Without the source code I can use tools to find breakpoints that will break it. I will break it. Open or not. He was just noting this point for the Pile Ons that bleat about MS without knowing a danged thing about coding, computers or networks. thanx, bill tshirt front "born to die before I get old" thshirt back "fscked another one didnja?"
Post #15,727 by marlowe 10/30/01 11:20:48 AM Reply	Missing the forest for the trees. It's the selectivity. The article is one-sided to as to present a distorted view of reality. That's no accident. It's the nature of propaganda. Likewise K5 as a whole. [link\|http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/marlowe/index.html\|http://www.angelfir...e/index.html] Sometimes "tolerance" is just a word for not dealing with things.

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