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Domain: upenn.edu
Stories and comments across the archive that link to upenn.edu.
Comments · 1,164
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Possible because WOTWorlds is in the public domainWar of the Worlds was original published in 1898. At the time, US copyright lasted for 28 years, and was renewable at that point for a second 28 year term, so copyright could have lasted until 1954. Now that it's public domain, no-one needs to ask permission to make a film out of it.
In comparison, H.G. Wells died in 1946. If Wells had lived under current US copyright law (life+70), WotW would not be public domain until 2016.
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Re:Strange syntax
why not use Java as the scripting language?
Part of the challenge of the IFPC contest was that the ant language is significantly less powerful than what people are accustomed to coding in. In order to write anything that isn't horribly painful, you have to write your own compiler.
The only per-ant state that is remembered is the state number (ants are limited to 10000 states). For instance, in order to remember which way your ant is pointing you can't just remember it in some variable, you have to make six copies of your program and jump between copies any time you turn right or left.
What this means for the game is that when an ant reaches food, it can never remember how to get back without actually marking some sort of trail (which might lead nowhere). Coordinating complex behavior between multiple ants is difficult, though not impossible.
-jim
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Corewar links correction
The corewars site linked to in the story has never been known to be active or complete.
The KOTH server is home to the "pro" hills of which 94NOP is the most active.
The most up-to-date site for info & links is Fizmo's.
There are beginner's hills and others at
SAL hills
Yellow hills
There's also an IRC channel at irc://irc.koth.org#corewars
Ant wars looks interesting - pity the event is over
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What a choice...
Java, C++, C# or VB.NET
I wonder why there's so much more prestige attached to the ICFP Progamming Contest -
Re:Guttenberg links
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Good U Penn Article
here.
Not a list, but has a good portion of the books and actually gives inciteful commentary. -
Re:Umm
The sun is not a star it is our god, all praise RA! Bring death upon those who would question him.
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Re:Please fix the language, not the people.
Wee shood be spelling things foneticly.
Note: I'm from BC, Canada, so the spellings that I suggest represent the way that I pronounce them, not necessarily the entire world.
This phonetic spelling thing ought to be successful, then, if everyone pronounces the words differently. Eh?
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Re:The river Nile
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Looks like wine was first...
...but there wasn't a USPTO back then.
The First Beer:
The University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania, analyzed an organic residue from inside a pottery vessel dated circa 3500-3100 B.C. from the site of Godin Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran. Their findings provide the earliest known chemical evidence of beer in the world.
The First Wine:
source Combining archaeology with chemical and molecular analysis, McGovern has carved a niche for himself as an expert in ancient organics--particularly wine. He has already pushed our knowledge of vinicultural history back to Neolithic times (the late Stone Age). Now McGovern is searching in eastern Turkey for the origins of grape domestication.
The scientist lacks the physical evidence to prove his hypothesis that hunter-gatherers made what he calls "Stone Age beaujolais nouveau." But he has shown, through a combination of archaeological sleuthing and chemical analysis, that the history of wine extends to the Neolithic period (8,500-4,000 B.C.) and the first glimmerings of civilization. -
More prior art
Both the KeyKOS factory (US patent 4,584,639) and the EROS Constructor appear to do what MS has apparently patented. The KeyKOS patent was issues in 1986, and expired this year. The design pattern that MS has patented is so fundamental to how EROS works that we don't even emphasize it anymore -- it's old news!
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Re:Three letters: SCP.
Nope, you didn't miss anything as SCP has no incremental option. You could work around that by using a data compression tool to create an archive of just the files that have been changed, then SCPing that and uncompressing over the data mirror on the remote server. That doesn't help much if part of your data set is a big database file of which only a couple of records have changed though.
A far better option would be Unison, which does 90% of what you're looking for, and can be made to work across an SSH tunnel. (Although, as always with SSH tunnels, the setup is a PITA.) -
Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
Salut, Amsterdam Vallon!
Vote for: ceren
Vote for: perdida
Vote for: perdida's sister
Vote for: mercatur
Vote for: taco's wife
Vote for: cowboyneal
Vote for: rustina -
Might give Unison a Try
I've had fairly good experiences with the Unison product. It works similarly to rsync but with a few enhanced features. And I quote...
- Unison runs on both Windows (95, 98, NT, and 2k) and Unix (Solaris, Linux, etc.) systems. Moreover, Unison works across platforms, allowing you to synchronize a Windows laptop with a Unix server, for example.
- Unlike a distributed filesystem, Unison is a user-level program: there is no need to hack (or own!) the kernel, or to have superuser privileges on either host.
- Unlike simple mirroring or backup utilities, Unison can deal with updates to both replicas of a distributed directory structure. Updates that do not conflict are propagated automatically. Conflicting updates are detected and displayed.
- Unison works between any pair of machines connected to the internet, communicating over either a direct socket link or tunneling over an rsh or an encrypted ssh connection. It is careful with network bandwidth, and runs well over slow links such as PPP connections. Transfers of small updates to large files are optimized using a compression protocol similar to rsync.
- Unison has a clear and precise specification.
- Unison is resilient to failure. It is careful to leave the replicas and its own private structures in a sensible state at all times, even in case of abnormal termination or communication failures.
- Unison is free; full source code is available under the GNU Public License.
Anyway, you might give it a look...
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Re:Reducing soldier costs
True, corporations pioneered using other people, usually their "own" governments, to fight for them.
Example: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/united-f ruit.html/ -
Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Re:Counting Citations
Does this type of research really tell us anything?
Sort of. What it tells us is how necessary it is for researchers to cite certain papers for the points they're studying to be understood.
What this research obliquely demonstrates is the obliteration phenomenon - that certain works in physics (though we can only speculate which) are so well-known that it's unnecessary to cite them.
Eugene Garfield's paper on the subject, where he coined the term, is available here (because of the nature of the PDF, Google can't OCR it - sorry). -
Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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Poll: WHICH IS BETTER
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WHICH IS BETTER
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Re:this is truely scary
The problem of course is that, as TheWordOfB (696275) noted, the Prion is an extremely stable molecule. There is no standard method for destruction. At best there are approved disposal methods http://www.ehrs.upenn.edu/protocols/sa_destruct.h
t ml#prions The protein PrPC which is the normal protein has, at this time, an undefined function as explained here:http://www.portfolio.mvm.ed.ac.uk/studentwebs -
Eagles are a plot hole...Take a minute or two and read this
It reminds me of when they use the transporters to solve problems in Star Trek. Sure, you could use them to solve everything, but then the show would be boring.
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Re:Google is not related to Frugal
actually, the number is spelled Googol, and there has been some disagreement over Google's use of it.
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oss and games
This is very cool to have an rts engine available to anyone who wants to add to it. It seems odd that there aren't more high quality, successful open source games (it seems like every computer nerd who ever lived dreams of someday writing a computer game and/or graphics engine). Maybe everyone tries to start from scratch and discovers its too much work.
Stratagus looks like it could be a cool platform for testing computer AI. Pitting one AI player against another could be more fun than playing the game manually, from the standpoint of the developers. Maybe they should have a contest to define the best AI player at some point, like this year's ICFP contest.
-jim
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Re:Berman, future, past, and stealing ideas.
NUKES! BIG FRIGGIN' NUKES! There's only one way to fight a space war before phasers and photons, and that's with Gigawatt lasers/masers and BIG ASS NUKES!
You have obviously not learned the Kzinti Lesson, studied Operation Hard Rock, nor considered the weapons implications of antimatter, which we know the proto-federation has at its disposal in at least modest quantities, or the weapons possibilities of a teleporter. (NB: "Given the assumptions in (I) and (II) you don't really get a society. You get a short war.") Nor, for that matter, realized that some SF implications of 9/11 were considered at least back in 1998, over three years before the plane hit the Pentagon.
SF wars have been considered for for a long time now, and there's many other promising possibilites besides nukes. (And if you think the military doesn't pay attention, think again. They have been giving at least half an ear to what the SF guys are babbling about for a long time now.)
That said, I'm also one of those hoping this temporal cold war thing will end with one last change wiping it out of history, even though they've done that trick before. -
Unison File Synchronizer
I use this (open source) program to bidirectionally sync/replicate my laptop and my desktop machines. As long as I modify different parts of both replicas, it'll move changes bidirectionally. If I modify the same part of both replicas, I can use the GUI to examine the conflicts and resolve it manually. The GUI also shows a summary of the changes the program wishes to make. It even runs under windows and can sync windows directories with unix directories!
It makes my desktop and laptop machines virtually indistinguishable from each other. This means I can and do interchangably use as many as 4 different machines. At the next sync, whatever I was working on gets moved to the other machines. (Unison only supports pairwise syncs, so I sync pairs A&B, A&C, A&D.) One of these machines is in a seperate building.
Since I sync machines with each other regularily, as a byproduct, each is an hours to days old backup of the others. A great freebie offered by a valuable program. I don't worry about dataloss nearly as much as I used to.
Anyone who uses more than one machine regularily should look into this program.
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Re:XIne, Mplayer... & OverlordsBeing a bit out of touch with Earth events recently, I decided to investigate the whole "I for one, welcome our new *.* overlords" phrase and came up with this analysis on Mark Liberman's language Log, along with other bits here.
I hope you find it as moderatly fascinating as I did.
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Re:XIne, Mplayer... & OverlordsBeing a bit out of touch with Earth events recently, I decided to investigate the whole "I for one, welcome our new *.* overlords" phrase and came up with this analysis on Mark Liberman's language Log, along with other bits here.
I hope you find it as moderatly fascinating as I did.
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ENIAC on a chip and a java applet - enjoy!
The ENIAC Java Applet and the ENIAC on a chip project
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Re:Not quite, but OpenAFS would be a good option
AFS is for distributed computing, GFS is for fault-tolerant cluster computing
ah. if you're right about that, then this is probably still not quite what i want.
i've been wanting a distributed, fault-tolerant filesystem to play with for a while now; NFS is getting old and clunky. i want something i can share between several machines, that would keep a local copy on each machine involved, and that could seamlessly tolerate disconnects/reconnects of machines in the cluster. ideally, i'd also like it to do security, authentication and encryption decently.
i haven't found anything. Intermezzo and Coda seem to come closest, but they're both more research project than solid product. OpenAFS seems stuck in the same niche, and all three of them are almost-but-not-quite POSIX compliant. (i'm not really sure if non-POSIX semantics would be a problem or not, but i'm a pessimist; i'd like to take on as few problems at a time as i can.)
GFS seems to hold a lot of promise, and its Sistina heritage is a good sign, but if it can't (easily) replicate files across a network for me, then it's not quite what i'm looking for. ah well, maybe that Unison thingy i heard about can be a poor man's substitute...
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What a stupid question!
I know, there are no stupid questions but only stupid people, but... How to avoid viruses at Windows install time? By avoiding the Windows install time maybe? Seriously, asking "how to avoid viruses at Windows install time" is equally smart as asking "how to avoid viruses at anal sex without a condom time." Maybe consider some alternatives: Debian, EROS, KeyKOS or maybe even OpenBSD would be a good place to start instead of asking loaded questions.
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This is bullshit
This is bullshit, according to Geoffrey Pullum, professor of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Screw paraphrasing: " The trained object-fetching behavior of Rico, the border collie that this German research is talking about, has nothing at all to do with understanding language. The behavior is comparable to what you would have shown if you demonstrated that you had trained your goldfish to swim to a given object in its tank when you showed it a card with a given letter of the Greek alphabet. By all means attempt that too, if you think it would be interesting science. But don't bring it to me for my approval under a headline saying Research Shows Goldfish Can Read Greek, that's all! Unless you actually enjoy seeing the veins standing out in my neck as I hurl some more defenseless chairs and coffee tables and goldfish tanks around the room. "
His post is available here. And for those geeks interested in language, check out the Language Log. -
assembly as a game
This is a bit of a digression, but I'd like to point out that not only is assembly useful to implement games, it can be a game in itself: 7th anual International Functional Programming Contest, CoreWars (though I don't expect them to displace the market share of UT2004)
-jim
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Re:Reduce spacing in default theme
The minimal themes look even better, so I set all the px values to zero.
Here is the jar I modified for my Firefox (Windows) browser at work. Download and replace classic.jar in the firefox/chrome folder.
