Slashdot Mirror

There are still a few old ones kicking around. I've seen one at the entrance of the car park at Bradgate Park in Leicestershire, in England. It's not very Tardis like, but it's a police box nonetheless. This page has a picture of it at the bottom of the page, along with various others around the country.

... Thus spoke the creator: "Truth will triumph. It always does. However, I figure truth is a variable, so we're right back where we started from."

* Galloway Gallegher, in "The Proud Robot" by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore)

found finally at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Truth

CC.

FYI: "A writer who seems to have fallen into obscurity these days is Henry Kuttner. He died young and his reputation has been eclipsed by the writers who came after him. But both on his own and in collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore he produced some of the funniest stories I have ever read. Some have been collected -- though long out of print Robots Have No Tails occasionally surfaces in second hand bookshops. Make it your business to seek it out. It contains all the stories about Galloway Gallagher, a man whose subconscious is a brilliant scientist. When he is sober he is just an ordinary person, but when roaring drunk his subconscious takes over and makes the most incredible inventions. The stories concern the efforts of a hungover and very repentant Gallagher trying to figure out just what he's built this time. Why, for example, could he possibly have built a robot with a transparent body? And having done that, why did he make it so vain that all it wants to do is stand in front of a mirror watching its cogs go round? To find the answer to that conundrum, read The Proud Robot." (c.f)

I've never heard of any form of AI whose inventor didn't chronically overstate its' abilities. I haven't looked at Numenta, but $10 says it's a more generalised form of something like this.

That's not to say that such things aren't cool, if only from the point of view of difficulty involved in coding even basic implementations of such...but I wouldn't hold high expectations of it actually being able to do much. They never can. An author will rave about what he's supposedly achieved, you download it, run it, and it basically sits there looking at you.

The only place I've ever seen AI that I've been able to get excited about is games, and the only three games where that was really the case were Half Life, Black and White, Quake 3 to a lesser extent, and (if you put a lot of work into it) the Sims 2. Of those three, Black and White is the only game I've seen which had something that came close to genuinely emergent AI. The Sims doesn't; on the surface it looks awesome, but dig down and all you really find are a lot of seperate implementations of rote fuzzy logic interacting with each other. That's not to say that that isn't impressive programming either; fuzzy can get fiendishly complex if you're trying to do a lot with it.

My point is that all of these are smoke and mirrors, or what's also referred to as weak AI. The Black and White creature AI is, as I've said, the only thing which comes vaguely close to looking like it could be genuinely adaptive in a multipurpose way, and yet I'm guessing that would probably turn out to be an illusion if I could see behind the curtain as well. AFAIK, Strong AI doesn't exist, and I'm extremely skeptical that it ever will outside of some kind of at least partially biological scenario.

Original Article on the net, referred to in TFA.

Posting anonymously because I don't need the karma :-)

It was Islam who organized crusades specifically to convert or terminate members of all other religions.

How, exactly, do you think Islam spread as far and wide as it did in the first 500 years it existed? You need to read more Middle Eastern, North African, and Central Asian history if you think that Islam didn't ruthlessly conquer its way across the globe and put unbelievers to the sword.

Start with the conquest of the Middle East. Continue to the conquest of the Indian subcontinent.

There's no need to single out and smear Christianity. Both Islam and Christianity have had a lot of awful things done in their names that their core teachings reject. Practically any world religion that is practiced by more than 5% of the world's population has had awful things done in its name. Even Zen Buddhism was used by militarists in pre-WWII Japan, and Hinduism, frequently seen in the west as the religion of Gandhi, was the rallying cry of massacres by Hindu nationalists against Muslims.

You see, the most execrable person of modern times, Hitler, deemed himself a Christian. Yet no one blames Christianity for what he and his minions did.

Actually, a lot of people do, but I'd like to note that while Hitler and his cronies were fond of using religion to manipulate the masses, Hitler himself was not fond of Christianity in private. If anything, he was an agnositic with mystic tendencies and a fondness for the occult. Here's a good article with links to other good articles taking the issue on. The Wikipedia also has a good article.

You have to understand that Hitler was a rather shrewd politician. All the examples that you gave were from speeches or Mein Kampf, all of which were intended for public consumption, and which were probably not representative of his actual beliefs, as they conflict with what he said in private where he would be more likely to express his true views. Please read the link provided.

Put another way, all Muslims are prone to utter death threats at those that disagree with them?
Probably not, but at the same time, not all Nazi's were prone to run their own little concentration camps in their own basement. It's called division of labour (and probably a Gausian distribution for support of the actions in questions). "Put another way," what percentage of the Muslim world has expressed support for freedom of speech at the expense of their compatriots? (This is not a retorical question, I'm interested in an answer).

Adolf Hitler was a Christian
Hardly.
Here are some quotes by Hitler, most from "Hitler's Table Talk" (published 1953):
"National Socialism [Nazism] and religion cannot exist together.... "
"Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure."
"The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death.... When understanding of the universe has become widespread... Christian doctrine will be convicted of absurdity"
"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity."
"When all is said, we have no reason to wish that the Italians and Spaniards should free themselves from the drug of Christianity. Let's be the only people who are immunised against the disease."
"Pure Christianity-- the Christianity of the catacombs-- is concerned with translating Christian doctrine into facts. It leads quite simply to the annihilation of mankind. It is merely whole-hearted Bolshevism, under a tinsel of metaphysics."

4D Boxing decreased the efficientcy of the fighter the more fights he had under his belt. More info at http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/fisherch/games/4d boxing.htm

It' now abandonware, but still a decent boxing game for the PC [for something made in 1991].

Nothing in the patent nullifies my pagerank defeating technique - put lots of links to my homepage in slashdot posts modded to +5 funny!

I prefer cars that don't have windows

Radio Active

Claimed here

Here's a 4 page PDF of the open letter that can be printed out for distribution.

Does anyone feel like packing it up in to a brochure dispensible format?

(There is no .sig)

We run an Enemy Territory Server called Beginner's Park 3. We have a website at http://bpark3.com/. We use a slightly customized version of the systats package to track our stats. You can even chat "!stats" in-game on our servers (see links to our servers from the webpage) and get a summary of your stats including your ranking, accuracy, favorite weapon, etc.
systats is a fairly active project and has a really nice stat tracking system but it is very person centric. IMO, it's great for public servers but for clan matches games I think I'd prefer a program called StatWhore which is designed to summarize stopwatch games.

For our stats system, to try and deal with "stat-whoring"---where, for example, players allow themselves to be killed over and over by another to boost the latter's stats---we developed a weak secondary dominance statistic that basically awards more points to those who kill players with higher K / D ratios. This has helped to encourage the better or more stat-conscientious players to play against each other instead of ganging up on the weaker players.

So I recommend systats for public-type servers, it's very flexible, and I recommend StatWhore for matches. As for whether or not stats are important, I think they're fun as long as you don't find yourself worrying everytime you play about how it'll affect your stats. I think a good stats system should try and prevent that. We've tried to do this, but are still considering improvements.

--Zaedyn (aka auachapan)

Wow, I'm happy with my current ISP then! From their FAQ:

Can I run my own webserver on my paradise.net High Speed service?

You can run a webserver on a paradise.net cable or DSL connection. We provide a static IP for every cable connection and will provide one for a DSL connection on request.

Hitler made plenty of pious references to Christianity in public. In private he made many derogatory comments about it; you can read many of them here and here. (Yes, those pages are both by Christians. But unlike those rather lame sites you gave, these at least mention the evidence on the other side of the argument, and examine the views of actual historians, quoting them at length. So I have no qualms in citing them.) Have you never heard of a politician lying to the public before now? Furthermore, he made a pact with the Catholic Church which had clear political benefits for him, as something like 30% or more of Germans (from memory) were Catholics, and so the Church represented a possible source of opposition to his regime. The pact eliminated that threat cheaply. Finally, here's a quote from a respected recent historian of the Third Reich, Michael Burleigh:

National Socialism, like other totalitarian dictatorships, parodied many of the eschatological and liturgical attributes of redemptive religions, while being fundamentally antagonistic towards the Churches: rivals, as the Nazis saw it, in the subtle, totalising control of minds. However, the overwhelmingly Christian character of the German people meant that Hitler dissembled his personal views behind preachy invocations of the Almighty, and distanced himself from the radically irreligious within his own Party, even though his own views were probably more extreme. During the Weimar period, he periodically traduced the Roman Catholic Centre Party for engaging in coalitions with "atheist internationalists" in the SPD. In reality, his views were a mixture of materialist biology, a faux-Nietzchean contempt for core, as distinct from secondary, Christian values, and a visceral anti-Clericalism. Even though he disdained a confrontation with wearers of "petticoats and cassocks", in the long term a showdown would come:

The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that my life's final task will be to solve the religious problem. Only then will the German nation be entirely secure once and for all. I don't interfere in matters of belief. Therefore I can't allow churchmen to interfere with temporal affairs. The organised lie must be smashed. The State must remain the absolute master. When I was younger, I thought it was necessary to set about matters with dynamite. I've since realised that there's room for a little subtlety. The rotten branch falls of itself. The final state must be: in St Peter's chair, a senile officiant; facing him, a few sinister old women, as gaga and as poor in spirit as anyone could wish. The young and healthy are on our side.

Rude though they were, these views were roughly congruent with the heated rhetoric of nineteenth-century Church-State conflicts. But, in what followed, Hitler forsoo

Back in my Mac OS 7.X days I found Black Night. This program does the best job I've seen on a Mac.

Hmm, sounds like the Eye of Vecna to me.

Bugger! downloadable video available here. Be nice to that link as I just googled for it.

I while ago I did my own experimenting with Java generated fractal audio. I took a different approach - using the fractal data to produce raw samples rather than MIDI notes.
I wrote it up at this page: http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/~andrew-1/fractal /

(you will need a recent JVM from SUN to use the applet)

20c per MB?

Exactly which ripoffhouse are you getting your cable from? I would think these guys but even they offer X free traffic.

We should give everyone a decent picture of our pricing over here and let them see for themselves:

Xtra

Paradise

iHug

Those are three major ISPs around here but all of them hover at about the same price. Personally, I'm with Xtra for historic reasons but that will be changing. Oh, also, these are only ADSL links. Cable is available over here as well (like the first poster stated) but it's even more limited than ADSL rollouts here (yeah, I'm jealous it isn't available in my area yet). Moving and making a living in a South Pacific isalnd has its perks, but one of them isn't choice in the communications arena, broadband or not. I almost look back fondly at the Baby Bells and growing up in West Virginia, then the shock treatment kicks in and I'm all better. :) j/k

Pity there's no wireless access where I live. Nearby though in the city whose council brought online one of the first freenets (the ISP concept, not the P2P system) there's the excellent CafeNET wireless network that's been working pretty well. (Disclosure: I used them at the weekend at the behest of the competition and free December weekends they're currently running to promote their wirelessing the whole of the city's Golden Mile in an claimed world first. But they have a solid setup.)

They ordinarily charge by the byte, instead of by time, which I consider more fairer:

• discourages people doing massive downloads and clogging things (OTOH, I've no idea if this is a problem)
• you can run IM while eating your bagel and not worry that you're wasting valuable browsing time (and then spreading crumbs on your keyboard)

In short -- IMHO -- I think we shouldn't be thinking of whether x currency units per unit of time is worth it -- it should be how much you want to transfer for how many currency units (NZD, USD, EUR, AUD, GBP, whatever). The effective cost per megabyte is more than the 20 I am liable to pay for cable modem excess bandwidth, but at this point can be stomached for occasional access for e-mail (and that they aren't considering expiring unused credit, yet).

Also relevant I believe is the cost of equipment for this service among other competing technologies, but I'll leave that to others.

Everytime I saw a Gamorrean!

a Garmorrean looks nothing like someone wearing bone armor in Star wars galaxies.

Spy: Please, please! Bitte, believe me! I'm not a shpy. I come here seeking political asylum.

Bloodnok: Well, take a bus to the House of Commons, that's the finest political asylum in the world! Ooohh, yes! They're all there you know, aaaooooowalalalalaaaaaaaaaaaaaayeeaaahhhhhaaa! Including Max Geldray, the well known long playing record!!

Which raises an interesting question: Should /. 'ask' permission to link?

I think they most definately should.
With broadband connections in New Zealand, traffic in excess of your allocated traffic cap costs around 20 cents per megabyte (depending on the ISP). Given that a 2mbps downstream / 256kbps upstream connection from paradise.net.nz only comes with a 1 gigabyte international traffic allowance, someone running a site off their home cable connection that gets slashdotted is going to be in for a big bill.

Kuro5hin has a great writeup on the subject here.

Check this out. The 256k is what I have.
(A New Zealand Dollar buys about 50 US cents. Joe Average earns less New Zealand dollars than Joe Average (US) earns.)

Such prices do exist. In countries that speak English what's more.

I worked for Capcom Coin-Op when this game Super Puzzle Fighter came out. Yes, the name itself pokes fun at the whole fighting genre, of which the Street Fighter franchise was Capcom's cash cow. It features cutesy cartoons of the Street Fighter characters fighting while you play a falling-blocks game against your opponent.

This game had amazing appeal in our showroom. There was always a line to play it, including everyone from the assembly line on up to the top execs.

I never found out how the game did on location. I was in Capcom's pinball division, which was shut down shortly thereafter.

The Embassy cinema in Wellington, New Zealand, was the location of the Australasian premiere last night. In the red carpet thing beforehand, they unveiled a model of Gollum attached to the cinema (last year they had a cave troll).

I was there, with my trusty digital camera, and here's a photo of it. The overhead wires ruin my shot a bit, but there's a better picture here.

I liek to think you are right, and that most people DO buy CD's after hearing mp3s. I always try to buy CD's of mp3s that I like

Please read this cartoon.

I wonder, though, whether there's a question that hasn't been asked many times? He hasn't done any real work lately, so there's no fresh meat. And as I imply, he doesn't have to give interviews, especially freebies (?) like this.

Ex: "Reputation as a bad actor" is a bad Q, but he could have said something sympathetic about it, explained what it is like to be criticized unfairly or typecasted, what he thinks his best work is, and so on. Yes, he's probably said it somewhere else, but we don't know the answers.

After all -- he's the expert on interviewing William Shatner! And I seriously doubt that if a novel queswtion came alone, he'd do it justice. (I cite in a parallel thread a Jeri Ryan interview I liked -- she's no philosopher, but she's polite, and has a sense of humor about herself.)

Most of the Star Trek people keep a lower profile outside of the cons -- I think Shatner likes the attention, and promotes himself doing it. But where's the quid pro quo?

I agree the questions were, er, sub-optimum (the editors have thin skins). Of course, they were all tendered by people here. I'm glad they didn't give him mine (you can search if you like) because I know he would have butchered it. The video I saw of him was evidently an exceptional performance.

But neither were the Q's insulting, and nothing stops one from digressing a bit to flesh things out, or even make up for an amateur interviewer. I mean, they ask pretty dumb questions on The Tonight Show etc. but that doesn't stop the celebrities from doing their darndest to be entertaining, because it reflects on them. They know people expect something when they show up to listen to you. I also know from what I've seen that Shatner can do better -- though for him it always seems like an act.

To show I'm not an implacable meany, here is an online interview with Jeri Ryan I enjoyed. I thought she did a nice job, provided some insight to the kind of person she is, and was funny. The questions are not generally "Barbara Walters" deep thought questions.

How about Pamela Anderson? Zero-G boobs already primed and ready for test flight! Plus she's probably the best-known Canadian world-wide ... I'd suuuuure like to be the guy auditioning all those wannabe asstronauts if she walked in the room.
I'd dim the lights just a touch and in she walks... beautiful delicious Canadian flesh, right there in front of me! The strapless evening-wear would probably burst at that point, and I'd jump her then and there in front of all the lesser dudes on the committee. Oooohh. Powerrrr.
somebody slap me
coffee. i need coffee

Of course, if you're hosting domains that you want to be visible from the Internet on that DNS server (as may well be in the case of an ISP), then you wouldn't want to make that above change to your named.conf, or those domains would no longer be visible from the Internet.

I doubt it's the same for all ISPs, but in the case of the ISP I'm with, the DNS servers that they tell their customers to use are the same ones listed in the NS record for their domain, and all domains hosted with them.

Thanks for your mirror. If you do this again (please please please keep doing this, google does not cache images)
you can create a link in slashdot by using plain html:
&lt a href = "
http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/mish/swg/" &gt here &lt/a&gt
results in :
here

Making a link like this will prevent /. to create spaces in links.

Also, as far as I know, none of the citylink-connected ISPs will give you a gigabit connection, although you can get 10 or 100 megabit. You can get a gigabit ethernet connection between two buildings, though.

You can also get a 2 megabit wireless citylink connection, which has a larger coverage area than the faster wired connections.

] This got me thinking: Why can't I freeze down the process and thaw it back up at a later time?
It ought to be possible to take all the connected memory pages and save them in some way, preserve file handles and pointers, and everything.
Maybe net-connections would die, but that's understandable.

Time for you to read my notes on KaosBSD, it has a built in autosave which records the state of the programs it's running.
] Has any work been done in this field? If not, shouldn't there be? I'd like to contribute in some way, but I think it's a bit over my head.."
Just leave a note in my Journal or email me if you want something done.

] Laptops have been doing this in some form for years: most laptops, when they run out of power, or when told by the user will go into "suspend" mode which is similar to what the poster is describing, however outside of laptops, I haven't seen this done.
Sleeping processes also do something similar, sending their memory pages into swap so other running processes can use the memory. What, if anything, is preventing someone from taking this a step further?

I'm already doing this in KAOS, but it's different from suspend or sleep because it uses a status file to track the processes of every program.
This lets individual agents of any app crash and the other agents pickup what that agent was doing and keep your work, you don't lose it.
Say you're writing a report and the agent crashes, you might lose about a minutes work (depending on the autosave rate) instead of the hours you would lose by not saving in MS office.
Or maybe you're running a web browser with a dozen tabs on a window, then that agent crashes. You can then choose to start a new window with all those tabs loaded with the pages you were surfing, which is way better than trying to reload a browser by the history logs.

] by sklib: It's not possible to hibernate a single process. Maybe not in windows, but KAOS can hibernate a single process. You can pause it and then save the state file or hibernate which saves the state then quits.
] During thawing, to restore the process's memory structure, one would have to do one of two things: Either put the process *exactly* where it was before in system memory, which may not be possible because other programs (perhaps even the OS?) are running in that memory space now.
My system is different, it uses status files that say what it's doing. It wouldn't need to wrry about the memory use.
The other option is to reallocate new memory for the process, and then go through and fix every pointer in the process to point to new memory locations. I will remind you that this is not possible, because processes can do very strange things with pointers and it's not possible to keep track of all of them from the object code side.
The need to reallocate new memory is not a concern if you uses status files.

] Now, if the process could hibernate itself... well that's the same as hitting Save, and Exit in any program.
Which is why I have put hibernate in KAOS, I'm sick and tired of losing track of websites I'm surfing then trying to reload from history.
] So the only problem here is that programs that take weeks and/or months to compute stuff need to be written in such a way that you can save every once in a while, so when the power DOES go out, you don't lose that much of what you've processed.
Actually it's easier to write the OS so that programs autosave to a status file about once a minute regardless of if they are surfing websites or looking for little green men.

] In my opinion OS-level hibernation (which already exists for many windows versions, and seems like it should exist for those big mainframes) coupled with some smart programming (no intractable problems here)
I'm programming KaosBSD which can run on anything OpenBSD knows about and maybe port it to some of the things NetBSD supports.
The smart programming is the status manager which all apps can use to autosave.
This is part of the unique way that apps run as part of the system. It can also offer other app services inside your app.
The best example is the calculator, it can popup as a panel you use in any app.
] would put a thorough end to these shenanigans with losing months of processing time just because the power went out 5 minutes before it finished.
Yes, I've run Seti@home and had that happen dozens of times. It always annoys me to see a day of processing go down the drain.

http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/~vkemp/gbcam.htm

ten more minutes of searching and i found the site i was thinking of:
Gameboy Camera Parallel Port Interface
website features colour photographs taken using the gameboy camera, though since it didn;t use an ir filter the images appear washed out. Also has a lot of other info about hacking the gameboy camera.

Hit these... q3pointrelease_130.exe
q3pointrelease_130.exe
q3pointrelease_130.exe
q3pointrelease_130.exe

Actually I had over 30 mirrors but the Lameness filter decided it would be in your best intrest if you did'nt see them Head over here for more

Best game for programmers?

Anyone for Core War?

Brief summary for the unwary: The core, as all know, is the memory. You write little programs in a dialect of assembler which try to kill each other by overwriting critical sections of the enemy's code.

...if your program can find it. Since all you really know is that the other warriors are lurking in the core, somewhere...

--
Repton.
--
Repton.

For a listing of the other pins Capcom made, check out the pinball link archive: http: //homepages.paradise.net.nz/~frenzy/pinlinks/games /games_manu_capcom.htm

The short of it is, pinball is a mechanical game. A pinball machine in the arcade takes a lot of abuse. Parts break. Switches stick. It just plain gets dirty. It's a very high maintenance item for any arcade owner or route operator, for not a very high return. The latest Mortal Street Kombat Fighter will pay for itself in a matter of weeks, and the only maintenance it requires is to wipe the screen and empty the cashbox. Pinball machines are lucky if they pay themselves off in months, and they require constant adjustment. Is it any wonder that operators don't want to buy them?

*sigh* Programming pinball machines was the best job I've ever had, with some of the best people. At least I got a BBB machine after I left. My wife tells me to think of it this way: How many people get paid for a year and a half to build themselves their own pinball machine?

Anon wrote
Paul Wilkins, who apparently has waaaay to much free time, has graciously donated two HTML "screenshots" of ttyquake which he created by hand. No, really. He typed in all those little characters while reading from jpeg screenshots I sent him. His mother must be so proud.

Hrm... I wonder if this guy has ever heard of "OCR" software?

Paul responds OCR would have been an easier way to do it but the letters wouldn't have come out right because the jpgs were fuzzy as hell. At the time of doing them I was looking for something to concentrate on over a weekend, and this provided me with just right sort of thing. It was something that I am interested in, and it was a good chance for me to improve a small part of the internet. Why put up a program for Ascii-Quake and then have jpg screen-shots of it? It didn't make sense.

It also gave me experience with FrontPage, and with that experience a good reason to move from GUI HTML editors onto ones like Arachnophillia.

Still, I'd really like to find out how I can rewrite those screens so you can go from white to grey and back to white without having to use the font tags. With them in there the text version is larger than the jpg!!