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Something Completely Different by frankie · 2000-07-07 02:12 · Score: 2 · on The Cathedral And The Bizarre

I was away from my Mac earlier this week, so I didn't get to post in the previous discussion. Here's my $.02 :

Why is everyone saying there is no open source on the Mac?

My favorite NNTP client is a descendant of NewsWatcher, open source for Mac
My favorite Telnet client is a descendant of NSCA Telnet, open source for Mac
Want other examples? Try VersionTracker. And here's some more.
Want to write your own? Apple gives you the tools.

So just what is up with these articles?

Re:DC "demo scene" using CDR is a possibility now by vkim · 2000-06-19 04:34 · Score: 1 · on Free Dreamcast Development System Started

Here's a direct link to the image file (about 1.5 meg zipfile, 8 megs decompressed into .cdp file for NTI CD-Copy)

http://www.ece.nwu.edu/~vicjkim/downloads/dccdx.zi p

press release by headLITE · 2000-06-12 18:49 · Score: 2 · on Nano-Plotters May Reduce Circuit Size

Finally... a story where this is *not* offtopic... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-05-19 20:38 · Score: 5 · on Oxford Yanks Student Page Over Spoof DeCSS

and I'm asleep at the keyboard. Doh!

Oh well... here it is.
Add your own, and spread this far and wide:

This announcement brought to you by the DeCSS Polar Bear.

Why Creed is so cool by Evro · 2000-04-13 23:58 · Score: 2 · on Napster, Gnutella, Bans, Lawsuits And More

I am sick of this shit. I mean really. It was bad enough when the Harry Fox Agency shut down the OLGA, but now I see that my once-beloved Eric Clapton Lyric Archive has been shut down by Warner. THIS WAS A SITE WITH LYRICS!! AND ONLY LYRICS! People are no longer permitted to write down the lyrics to songs so that others may know them???

Anyway, the reason Creed is so cool is that you can actually download some of their tabs from their site. Check it out here. Of course, that's not the only reason they're so cool, but it's definitely a start. I don't know their stance on MP3, but they've got Liquid Audio up on their site so perhaps they'd be more open to it than Metallica (who, at this point, are so uncool it hurts).

__________________________________________________ ___

Time for Slashdot to take a stand... by Anonymous Coward · 2000-04-05 03:12 · Score: 4 · on MPAA Files Another Injunction Against 2600

The following is a list of all the mirrors from the 2600 site.

Has JonKatz ever BEEN to Chicago? by andy@petdance.com · 2000-04-02 09:21 · Score: 1 · on Movie Review: 'High Fidelity'

It makes total sense to place the movie in Chicago. Chicago has tons of indie record stores. I'm certain that Cusack was thinking fondly of the Chicago record stores like Reckless Records, The Quaker Goes Deaf, Vintage Vinyl, Gramaphone, as well as dearly departed favorites like The Turntable, Wax Trax!, Pravda and Empire Records (no, not what the movie was named after).

Even without the good reviews it's been getting, I'd go see it because it's so obvious from the previews that Cusack loves the same record stores I have.

Re:Ender's Game, anyone? by Thunderhead · 2000-03-14 13:14 · Score: 1 · on Wormhole Generator (Kinda) Patented

two electrons in the same quantum state except for spin, and you know the spin of one of them and then change it, the spin of the other electron is changed instantly, regardless of distance. However, I think this interaction occurs at the speed of light, and not instantly.

Actually, it's not a theory, it's Einstein -Podolsky-Rosen, which was recently proved as a law of quantum mechanics with a neat little experiment...
In a nutshell, EPR implies that in an entangled state, certain particles would seem to violate local reality by "agreeing" on their quantum state, with no perceptible particle exchange (which means it's not limited by the speed of light), even when separated by great distances.

The problem is, for now, that we have no way of predetermining quantum states in entangled pairs, meaning we can't yet use it for FTL data transmission. But it is the principle behind quantum teleportation, which is unspeakably cool.

ObKomputerGeek->Relevance: Information stored in quanta has some freaky properties.

Dangers of a Salaried Bureaucracy. by threaded · 2000-01-31 17:23 · Score: 1 · on Workers - Including Linus - Left in Limbo by INS

Benjamin Franklin said some things about this in his speech Dangers of a Salaried Bureaucracy delivered during the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

The upside is that such organizations always have as their main aim the consolidation of their own position. Whenever this aim clashes with others, the bureaucracy sacrifices the purpose rather than jeopardize its own privileges. Hence it will less and less serve the purpose to which it was founded, eventually becoming redundant.

I Disagree (a bit offtopic) by Spud+Zeppelin · 1999-12-23 03:42 · Score: 1 · on The Obsessed Inventor of the Paper Computer

Note: I already self-moderated this down by suppressing my bonus...

The Libertarian voting system you describe creates a huge number of problems -- not the least of which are that there is no mechanism for reflecting "second choice" and consequently most "strategic voting" schemes fail miserably.... I'm convinced what you'd get are a bunch of fringe candidates winning elections with 5% of the vote. It may not be a bad way to run a primary, however, so long as the top n (2? 3? 5?) votegetters wind up on a closed (ie. no write-ins) ballot.

And when you get to closed ballots, the "vote for one" system we use today is a disaster when you have more than two candidates in an election. Dr. Don Saari of Northwestern has done extensive research in voting theory, and openly advocates the use of Borda counts (voters rank-order the n candidates, their top choice gets n-1 points, second choice n-2, etc., last choice gets 0) in elections to avoid the sorts of electoral "tragedies" (ie. where the last choice of a majority of the electorate winds up winning the election) we've had recently.

By the way, as an aside, the pre-printed cards system you advocate all-but-forces the ballots to be hand-counted... driving the cost of conducting the election up significantly.

This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.

Re:Both views are the same by r · 1999-06-24 05:08 · Score: 1 · on State of Computer Game AI

First (pedantic), `alife' is the _wrong_ term to use for modular/threaded programming techniques (Brooks' subsumption architechture etc.) The former refers to virus simulation/evolution, the latter being a methodology inspired by the modular nature of the brain.

you're right, but genetic programming is precisely what game programmers are usually doing - they use (or plan on using) some sort of evolutionary technique to breed a 'perfect' behavior algorithm (which probably means breeding a perfect finite state machine to control the creature).

frankly, most of computer game ai is pretty simple - it's mostly finite state machines for behavior control, sometimes augmented with 'fuzzy' (i.e. nondeterministic) state progression. there are some attempts at doing more that that - afaik, crash bandicoot and jedi knight both use subsumption for behavior control - but those are few and far between.

btw, for some papers on future directions and game ai research, i'd check out the web page from the 1999 aaai symposium on computer games and artificial intelligence.

Re:Unreal most realistic yet by Anonymous Coward · 1999-06-24 04:43 · Score: 0 · on State of Computer Game AI

this will be a shameless plug, but you may want to take a look at my alphaskaarj project - my work using techniques from robotics to build a more intelligent unreal monster...

rob

Enron is a formidable company by rmcd · 1999-05-24 21:33 · Score: 1 · on Bandwidth as Commodity

Enron is an extraordinary company. Their bandwidth initiative is outlined here. Jeff Skilling, the President, has vision and the ability to put the resources together to pull things off. Under his leadership they were one of the companies which have shaped the market for natural gas since deregulation in the '80s, they have been a key player in the market for electricity, and they were one of the first to trade weather contracts (for example allowing one to speculate on the average temperature in St Louis in April -- you wouldn't use a contract like this, but think about utilities). I heard Skilling give a talk; he said that Enron is working with the New York Mercantile Exchange about creating a bandwidth futures contract!).

For the reasons others have mentioned in this thread, bandwidth trading is inevitable. Check out band-x as an example of what is happening now.

rmcd

Northwestern University has sone... by Anonymous Coward · 1999-04-01 17:23 · Score: 0 · on Robotic Dogs

I'm a sophomore at NU. Our CS professor who works on these (http://www.cs.nwu.edu/~ian/) brought it to class for show and tell.

It's pretty cute. Currently it can wander around and not walk into things. It's movements are a lot like that of a puppy. He also said Sony's biggest problem was getting it to be cheap enough. The number he gave was $500.

He talked about the vision code, which is a combination of scheme and C.

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