SoylentNews

The Saga continues. I submitted a lot of very fine articles on Charlottesville, and its aftermath. Many of these were disallowed, which is fine. But that all of them were seemed a bit of a bias on the part of the editors. So I started a brief campaign where I posted "No Comment" to new articles. This got me spam-mod-bombed (hey, a new Soylent word!), and my karma fell to depths I did not know were possible. So far, so good.

          So, I made fuss, or a journal entry, explaining the situation, and calling all good solylentils to come to the aid of their site. And come you all did. Some actually said they would mod me up, for no reason, which while nice, seemed a bit irrational. Appreciated, nonetheless. And so my karma has recovered. Some of this might be due to admins revoking the spam mods that were place on me. But they give no notification, and if the post in question has fallen off my "info" list, I really have no way of checking.

    And then there is the question of punishment. If someone spam modded me, and it was not a fair spam mod (and I assure my fellow soylentils that I would never spam you, in any pure and simple sense), then they should have been put on probation, having their moderation privileges revoked for a month. This has probably happened to us all, it happened to me, when I accidentally spam modded something, was banned, and made the case the the "spam" mod was too close to the "troll" mod, and so was restored. But this leads us to the topic at hand: what the heck is a spam-mod?

    So, as the drama about the spam-modding of yours truly was being played out, the Celestial (sorry, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 just hit Redbox) The Mighty Buzzard took it upon himself to adminsplain what constitutes a spam mod-able post. Yes, crass commercialism is spam. Rushstatus https://soylentnews.org/~kapilsingh/journal/ is spam. We all have no problem with this. But the other part of the guidelines for what is spam is decidedly subjective.

Spam can come in many forms, but it differs from a troll comment in that it will have absolutely no substance, is completely undesired, are detrimental to the site, or worse.

The Mighty Buzzard kept suggesting that my protest posts fit this category, so I had no choice but to mod his assertion of this as spam, since it had "absolutely no substance, was completely undesired, and was detrimental to the site, and worse". So I spam modded The Mighty Buzzard. He had it coming.

      Wait a sec, and think about this. I spam modded one of the admins of the site. I am a lowly soylentil. I barely can remember my password for the site. And I spam mod the person who seems to be, by his own admission, responsible for rescinding spam mods? Is this anything but a symbolic action? To TMB's credit, he asserted he would not do so, but left it to the editors. https://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=21277&page=1&cid=559394#commentwrap Nice reclusal, but only in the confidence of the exact same outcome. And his confidence was confirmed.

    So now the Mineorgy Bacculumard has succeeded in having me mod-banned. As I said, my karma is restored, and perhaps higher than ever (another thing admins never let us see), but I am banned from moderation for a month, just when TMB, in a typically random attempt to fix the moderation system, upped the daily mod points to 10! And even worse, both Eth and Runaway made posts that, for almost the first time, I would have modded up! Oh, the irony! So where do we go from here?

    The suggest path is that I email admin, and explain how my spam mod was all a mistake, which admittedly does happen. But it did not in this case. TMB was repeating the basis for suppressing certain viewpoints on this forum, and I must maintain that this does constitute a post of "absolutely no substance, was completely undesired, and was detrimental to the site, and worse". We pretend to be a site that values free speech above all. But when TMB can make his own subjective determination as the the value of another soylentil's post? He needs to be spam-modded.

    So I am non-violent philosophically, long existence on earth will kind of make that point to you, but if anyone else feels like living dangerously, you could spam mod The Mighty Buzzard, just to make the point. Would not have any effect on his ability to do the wonderful coding he does to keep us all up and foaming at the mouth, but it might make the point that we, the few, the proud, the Soylentils, came here because we wanted a site controlled by its members, not some corporate entity or administrative elite. I, for one, do not want to think our volunteer editors have become exactly what we fled when we left the other site.

    Welcome your comments, but I will not be able to mod them up, so take that as a given, if I could.

Yours,
aristarchus of Samos

Boy Scouts 'Exploring' Co-Ed Programming Provokes Girl Scout Ire

Girl Scouts Accuse Boy Scouts of Recruiting Girls, Souring Century-Old Friendship

Editorial: On their honor, the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts should settle their boundary issues

Parents, Don’t Let Your Girls Join the Boy Scouts

Lots Of Girls Want To Join The Boy Scouts. What's The Problem With That?

I can sense film scripts being written about this.

In case anyone has not been paying attention, the events in Charlottesville have revealed the true nature of SoylentNews. SN sides with the Nazis. Now, like the TMB, this is done under the cover of "free speech", so that, I guess, Nazis can express their side of the violence they do against Jews, homosexuals, Roma, Communists, the developmentally disabled, and jmorris.

Aristarchus has been extraordinarily targeted. After submitting a HUGE number of submissions, I have been pilloried, and subject to at least four unjustified spam mods, and now my karma is so low that I cannot even come back as Runaway1955! Truly a sad state of affairs! And, I also did not realize that after a certain level of karma, one can no longer mod negatively, only positively, and certainly not spam mod in retaliation. Neat system. To suppress free speech!!!

Well, I said long ago that if we did not control the alt-right influence, the promise that was SoylentNews would be lost. Now, I am quite convinced that it is. I have started a "no comment" campaign, so that when the editors fed us stories that do not reflect the true interests of Soylentils, we can register our objection by making note of the fact that we will not comment. And comments are what could have made this site. And I said, I will not leave, but, I also will no longer comment.

Not sure what this all means, but we have gone from BuckFeta to SuckOylent, for sure.

Redefining 'Drug Bust': German Police Seize 5,000 Pills In Shape Of Trump's Head

'Donald Trump-shaped' ecstasy pills seized by German police

German Police Seize Thousands of 'Trump' Ecstasy Tablets

Germany’s orange ecstasy pills have Trump’s name — and face — all over them

Molly!

Joss Whedon fan site shuts down after ex-wife's critical essay

Joss Whedon's Ex-Wife Warns He's A Hypocrite 'Preaching Feminist Ideals'

Joss Whedon Is a 'Hypocrite Preaching Feminist Ideals,' Ex-Wife Kai Cole Says (Guest Blog)

Five times Joss Whedon, self-proclaimed 'woke bae', blew his feminist credentials

So farewell then.

Warp Life is a particularly fast implementation of Conway's Game of Life. Golly may be faster but it doesn't run on the smaller devices, just the iPad.

If you're willing to help, I'll need the UDIDs of each device you want to test with. Follow these instructions to obtain your device's UDID.

Mail your UDID(s) to mdcrawford@gmail.com.

You could really help a brother out if you would forward the URL to my beta test page to anyone you genuinely feel would be interested in or would benefit from it:

http://www.warplife.com/beta-testing

This is written from the perspective of a Gentoo user.

So, my trusty if not pedestrian Logitech 3 button wheel mouse started giving out. It's not quite dead yet, but it'll be stone dead any moment! So last weekend I went to Best Buy to see what they had. The Corsair Glaive stood out: not overly complex, good weight, and only slightly too big for my hands. Eh, nothing's perfect, but it was good enough.

I grabbed it, got home, plugged it in, and was promptly disappointed as nothing happened! After having flashbacks to the bad old days—I can barely remember the last time I had something as basic as a mouse not work under Linux—I accepted my fate. I had purchased a mouse that was not supported under Linux. It even works in my EFI BIOS, but not Linux! Depressed, I skulked over to Windows, turned the mouse LEDs pretty pink, and realized while playing $current_waste_of_time that this mouse was awesome. I simply could not return it!

So, I scoured DuckDuckGo and even begrudgingly took Google out of my hosts file temporarily. I upgraded to sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-4.12.6, but no such luck. The hid-corsair module did not even attempt to load, but at least I was getting HID errors in dmesg. I found the ckb-next project, a fork of app-misc/ckb in my Portage tree, but still no support for my new mouse!

Without attempting to learn too much about Linux's HID system, I noted that hid-corsair has support for other Corsair mice, such as the Corsair Scimitar. So I rolled up my sleeves and gave the first obvious thing a try: compile a kernel that sees my Glaive as a Scimitar.

Have a uuencoded patch! (Note: This is after the Gentoo patches have already been handily applied by emerge. Follow cafebabe's usual instructions or install app-arch/sharutils for uuencode/uudecode.)

begin 644 glaive.patch.gz
M'XL(".79F5D``V=L86EV92YP871C:`"]5NMNVC`8_9T^A;5)5<N28#MWJE8*
MD%*K@;`$NE7;9'5)*-$JZ!+8JG5]]SF!%$*!CG2=!8%\]OF.+^?8#J+!``A^
M#*K3)*XFL5^]B4;3.T$6$195X3H<3<;C:A!'/\(XJ0ZC(/T*_C@.17\K1KB^
MN6*@#="]2J52AI+#$&D"9!\,D%&#6@UB$>8%"%"&<$\0A!=T;4ZA"Q@"A&NR
M7)-U49,E%4J2AN<4E6+)AH,,+/'LH8,LE/8B#QF`O0E[`+R-!H!XU.J8==MJ
M'C2<SBEIT3/2I`W']4SB'K)&W#U((WVO3IO6!6E8!^G?"ZO3=%RZ:,J#18NE
M,#TWX"%XX%^>R&N0-NF9+NVZ#G5;]2SKNY=F;=DFN;`*.=F\A*,@&FR?H"Y&
M"/_5_%RV.J;]A#^+YFE2VJ"L]I.K*"XO_QFZE`-FT-<V08'ET0=*3=%%`ZF&
M9"CR-A^HAL%K4%ZX8!90<@]P'*A4L]_D9S3QA^!@&(0_A)/;>!Q,_<DAN,\J
M_:LD_$MAUE)5;@,4-5?+\G-,:0>5.(E^A>#D&"#F[?U]$`=AXG_2E"_@^!C`
M.Z0L!;4\J,X2+&KT>0W3TR)HS(-PD`^)X]@,TV@T&&=#YL&;T^@N&EV#Z2V(
MP]MQ/`$I-(YN)^/X\^C-X=':"=:0QFL8+R980SH++$TP!V8E'W_?L])M@=;-
MQKE-6F>]W?:'/5`HK[);L*;/<ZS=.[C[!_9\.&*/DI:.@D0<EG)+AMS=RAGL
M56V\S/!H8:DF(U$RV%$&5=G88F&L*SPVX$)ALP!Z/,:"<!"--KGM7(-L=:AK
M=DGSE+@62#WS5=*?!ZK*.J#Q+'!5>W-@R$2U'5@4U!PFITHJ4B[IU;7,'L/8
M9MWCF+EE%&[NWKPM95&GW2'4Z[NNT^\TJ8(85L+8+Z'8:?(U7^7OTRC^EI0X
MBM;DV$W%:Q*\FIXW<RU=TI`F,L5B5==4;8NR=9G7C86NV2N3>;YOWJ^N]3,7
MK16=\]E.][Y/W'/:<2CID!YUK:[C]CSP>ZG.M#^8EQ[M.K;]N`_O1KSBD_]&
MO.JSDL3O=B8N^O0?CG?)S4^XM[BWV(.6U=N0OVG93RZB:8QVR4?3[67'HM/M
AD0:[F;8==DSS.W6_V29/LK<)NSTWUG;P#S>UH6/M#0``
`
end

Hmm, should that be GLAIVE instead of GLAIVE_PRO? Anyway, after rebooting with my fresh kernel, I noted that I still received errors in dmesg:

[ 1344.597093] usb 10-2: new full-speed USB device number 5 using xhci_hcd
[ 1344.893040] usb 10-2: New USB device found, idVendor=1b1c, idProduct=1b34
[ 1344.893045] usb 10-2: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[ 1344.893047] usb 10-2: Product: Corsair Gaming GLAIVE RGB Mouse
[ 1344.893050] usb 10-2: Manufacturer: Corsair
[ 1344.893052] usb 10-2: SerialNumber: [redacted]
[ 1344.896435] input: Corsair Corsair Gaming GLAIVE RGB Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.0/0000:04:00.0/usb10/10-2/10-2:1.0/0003:1B1C:1B34.000D/input/input28
[ 1344.896962] hid-generic 0003:1B1C:1B34.000D: input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [Corsair Corsair Gaming GLAIVE RGB Mouse] on usb-0000:04:00.0-2/input0
[ 1344.898989] hid-generic 0003:1B1C:1B34.000E: item 0 1 0 8 parsing failed
[ 1344.899004] hid-generic: probe of 0003:1B1C:1B34.000E failed with error -22
[ 1344.899012] corsair 0003:1B1C:1B34.000E: Fixing up report descriptor
[ 1344.900019] input: Corsair Corsair Gaming GLAIVE RGB Mouse as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.0/0000:04:00.0/usb10/10-2/10-2:1.1/0003:1B1C:1B34.000E/input/input29
[ 1344.954935] corsair 0003:1B1C:1B34.000E: input,hiddev96,hidraw5: USB HID v1.11 Mouse [Corsair Corsair Gaming GLAIVE RGB Mouse] on usb-0000:04:00.0-2/input1
[ 1344.955015] usbhid 10-2:1.2: couldn't find an input interrupt endpoint

The errors reported by hid-generic and usbhid are the same as before (highlighted), but then corsair fixes up the report descriptor and (almost) all is well.

My mouse is at least working as an input device. I was surprised that the button under the mouse wheel to adjust sensitivity works as well.

The only major problem left for me is that by default, the mouse LEDs have this sickly neon piss yellow color instead of pretty pink! This is where ckb-next will come in to the picture.

I did some quick hacks on ckb-next using the same strategy of trying to interface with the Glaive as though it were a Scimitar. It sees my Glaive, shuts off the LEDs, and then promptly disables the mouse! So that's not quite working yet. Turning it off and on again (unplugging and re-plugging) restores the mouse to working order. If I can figure this out, I'll post a part 2.

I'm working on a macOS - it's not Mac OS X anymore - USB Video driver. This is by far the most complex driver that I've ever developed.

It works now, but only for a hardwired resolution and pixel depths. There are lots of other problems, the worst one being that it doesn't play nice with power management. There are vast quantities of "// TODO:" comments.

When I get it to beta - hopefully Real Soon Now - I'll be getting a huge paycheck. When it's completely finished, I'll get another one.

My client is a fabless semiconductor firm. They sell chips to manufacturers who sell finished products to end-users. Hopefully my whizzy new driver will enable them to sell lots more chips.

We're big in China.

I told my client about my mental illness. They were totally cool with it. But I haven't mentioned my experience with homelessness.

In other news, I have a mad crush on a barista, but as yet she doesn't seem to return my interest.

An external SSD has become Samsung's first drive to hit the market with 64-layer V-NAND. It includes a 10 Gbps USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type-C connection and capacities ranging from 250GB to 2TB:

Moving on to the pricing aspect, it must be remembered that the Portable SSD T5 is a pilot vehicle for Samsung's 64-layer V-NAND as its production ramps up. Samsung naturally expects this to be a low-volume, high-margin part. Therefore, despite the higher density, consumers should not expect much difference in the cost per GB compared to other external SSDs in the market. The 2TB variant will have a MSRP of $800 and the 500GB will retail at $200. At 40 cents/GB, it is priced close to other such products currently in the market.

Also at Samsung, PCWorld, The Verge, PCMag, and YouTube.

Not a submission because: Intel First to Market With 64-Layer 3D NAND SSDs

You’ll Never Be as Radical as This 18th-Century Quaker Dwarf