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Slashback: Dataplay, XviD, PPC
Pins and needles, pawns and bishops. s20451 writes "It looked grim earlier in the week, but following a fifth game meltdown by Kramnik and a brilliant game 6 by Fritz, the computer has tied the match 3-3. Betting on the computer in game 6 would have brought you a 7-1 return! I'll be on the phone to Vegas."
The new, new, new economy has room for camels. SwiftOne writes "According to their website, The Perl Journal has gotten enough subscriptions to begin online release (the planning of which was previously covered, along with the concerns about not reaching their goal. The first (next) issue is expected in early November."
Maybe it was the 15th-mover disadvantage. melt writes "Dataplay, the Boulder-based manufacturer of quarter-sized recordable discs and drives, finally called it quits on Friday, October 11, 2002. The remaining 120 employees (who have been on furlough for the past few weeks) have been let go and the company has closed shop. They are looking for a buyer for the remaining pieces. Full story at the Rocky Mtn News web site."
Zoom in until you see little canyons ... Twirlip of the Mists writes "IBM's chief scientist for their iSeries family of servers (a.k.a. the AS/400 family) has an article on iseriesnetwork.com describing the somewhat confusing history of the POWER4 microprocessor. In light of recent speculation about a possible relationship between IBM and Apple, this article is of particular interest. It clears up-- at least partially-- some of the complex, incestuous relationships between the PowerPC architecture, the PowerPC processor family, and the POWER4 processor. As an added bonus, there's some talk about the upcoming POWER5 and POWER6 processors near the end. The key phrase (and disclaimer): 'expected to appear in 2004.'"
Shame on Sigma.
Gruturo writes "After almost 3 months the XviD project and website have reopened, though Sigma Designs has not complied yet with all their requests (they still carry their copyright on many modified sources). In these last 2 1/2 months the project still went underway, although unofficially:
B-frames are practically ready, motion estimation algorithms have been improved, work started for Qpel implementation."
Please stop teasing us. If you liked Cryptonomicon, you've probably been impatiently watching the announcements of when the next Stephenson book would appear. wka writes "Previous false starts notwithstanding, Amazon says Neal Stephenson's new novel Quicksilver will be published in January."
And next week, building box-girder bridges. scubacuda writes "Lawmeme has released Part III to their Law School in a Nutshell series (Part I and Part II were previously featured on /.)"
Why? Isn't nickel-sized SD storage small enough with large enough capacity?
Anyone have any good recommendations on geek books suitable for 26+ hours of flying (and a few couple-hour jetlag-induced insomic sessions)? Besides the Slashdot book review section, I mean. Novels and such...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Shame on Sigma
More like shame on me for buying the damn card, what a piece of crap that is... my friend in the DV industry told me his department tested the card and the conclusion was (apart from being crap) that they had really skimped on the hardware acceleration/decoder processor (just so it could do the bare minimum)... looks like they skimped on the 'development' (read. stolen) of the DivX (cough, XVid) implementation and the complete joke they called a 'player'.
The other thing was I had to look when buying it, 'cos NewEgg didn't sell it... only Sigma themselves and CDW sold it (the latter where I got it from). Hmm, NewEgg rules... I must learn to trust my instincts now and think twice to the thought 'Why aren't NewEgg selling it?'. DOH, DOH and thrice DOH! (Shame on me).
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
While most of Dataplay's technology was quite interresting, it's built in DRM may have been it's downfall. They had to initially market to the early adopters (much of the /. set) who are opposed to DRM. Once a technology has been adopted, it would be easier to accept the DRM due to the fact that a majority of the people who owned it wouldn't object.
For chess, yes it is possible and has been since Big Blue. The work now is improving the prediction of what the opponent is going to do; it is easy to get a set of probable moves with 'goodness' fitted to a normal distribution - the hard part is writing a random number generator to pick the most likely move from the distribution.
For Go you need about 10 times as much storage - so Moores law says storing all the moves for about 5 more years.
Wow....judging from the earlier games it seemed like Kramniks methodical defense with black (whatever happened to the much vaunted "Berlin Wall"?)and vigorous attack with white were going to yield a lossless set for the world champion. But now with a 3-3 set and Fritz going 2.5 - .5 in the last 3 matches, it seems that the computer has "turned the tide"...
IMO, this is only because of Fritz being allowed to make changes to itself to edit its openings. Previous matches were usually charachterized by the games falling into a predictable queen sacrifice. But it looks like by changing the openings around, Fritz is preventing Kramnik from forcing the game into a defensive draw.
Also, The last 2 games have been charachterized by risky Kramnik moves that might be very beneficial against humans, but Fritz is able to play essentially perfect defense. To me, it seems like Kramnik has thrown out his very defensive strategy that gave him a 2 game lead in favor of a more attacking strategy.
5 bucks on Fritz.
Why not read a short story or two
His Saddam Hussein Germ Warfare novel is inexplicably out of print.
- Deep Blue was effectively a 10 TeraOp/sec machine. (Since Deep Fritz runs on eight x86 boxes at 4000 mips each at most, DF's hardware is at least 300 times slower than DB's).
- Deep Blue was built with 0.6 micron CMOS and evaluated 200M nodes/sec with 480 parallel chips. A new version built from 0.13 micron CMOS could evaluate 1 billion nodes/sec. A parallel version could evaluate a trillion nodes/sec.
- Deep Fritz's promoters are guilty of false advertising when they claim their program beat Deep Blue in 1995. They could not have beaten Deep Blue in 1995 because Deep Blue did not exist in 1995. The machine they beat was Deep Thought II, a forerunner of Deep Blue with much less chess knowledge, 100 times less raw hardware speed, and 1000 times less effective speed.
- Hsu says he could write a program today that would kick the stuffing out of Deep Fritz, "even in a simul". I presume that he means using Deep Blue-type parallel hardware so it could massively out-search a pure-software implementation like Deep Fritz. With that type of hardware, he's probably right. With pure software, I'd have to ask him to prove it.
- Hsu has a book out about the Deep Blue-Kasparov match, "Behind Deep Blue". It's written for popular audiences and is not very technical, apparently. (I've ordered a copy but hadn't heard of it til seeing the chat transcript).
- The IBM Deep Blue 2 hardware is being donated to the Smithsonian Institution. It's kinda sorta possible that it could be made operational again some day.
Anyway, a bunch of folks on the computer chess newsgroup think Kramnik threw at least one game deliberately just in order to keep the match score from being completely lopsided. That's a pretty serious accusation, but it would explain some things. The loss in the 5th game was a beginner's blunder and Kramnik wasn't particularly in time pressure.Either way, I don't think this match has anything like the quality of the Kasparov-DB2 match.
actually, 500MB removable and cheap storage would be great.
mp3 players, digital cameras, digital books... all of these want small, cheap, media in the 500MB range.
It just wouldn't fly for prerecorded music. (And not only because of their crappy DRM scheme) Music media is dead. I predict that CDs will be the last major music media. SACD and DVD-Audio may have a breif blossom, but for the most part, the current generation of adults are happy with CDs, and the current adolescent generation will wonder why people care about the physical media when you transfer files from your mp3 server to your ipod.
Unfortunately, prerecorded music was exactly the niche Dataplay aimed at.
I was going to say that this would be a perfect match for the 10MP cameras coming out, but I expect those to eat batteries nearly as fast as they eat RAM so they'll be be used mostly in a tethered environment.
This format was dead from the get-go, even if they had wised up and just tried for a raw storage format instead of the dark path of consumer annoyance.
CompactFlash and SD cards hold hostage the storage range from 64Mb to 1GB. There was no way another format was going to come in to unseat them, even one somwhat cheaper.
What is needed is something with about a 100gb storage space in the size of a CF card or smaller, for future digital cameras. That would be enough of a lead to unseat CF and SD, and provide enough room for cheap video cameras as well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It is obscene; that judgement is correct.
But it is also divine.
In fact, you can pick an arbitrary pair of opposite, highly charged adjectives, and both will likely be a fair description of Gravity's Rainbow. So as well as being tedious and boring, it is also challenging and endlessly fascinating. Not to mention deadly serious and deadly humorous. I can't think of a novel that has more influenced my worldview than this one.
A-and how can you say no to a book that has lame calculus humor in grafitti, or a bunch of drunk Army engineers chasing the protagonist, singing limericks about Doing It with the German V2 rocket hardware?
(Hints for the first-time reader of GR: you don't have to understand it the first time through. Hell, you can just skim it. It's still funny and interesting. Also, gin helps a lot.)Smirnoff Ice?! It has a chemical in it which makes you crave it fortnightly... :-)
I drank Caffrey's and Harp and Bass and many "regional" beers/ales often given to Yanks to make them feel they'd had their money's worth. I also enjoyed Stella Artois (ordered simply as "Stella") because it reminded me of what pedestrian American beer could have been. My favorite beer I had while there was a couple of pints I had in a pub called the Leinster Arms. I have no idea what it was called, but it was good, and went well with a generic pub lunch. That I'll probably never have it again is just as well, I suppose, since it was a bit of culture which would likely be cheapened if enjoyed anywhere but then and there.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
I've just recently started encoding all my DivX movies with XviD and found the quality to be greatly superior to the old DIV3 (DivX 3.11, the hacked MS codec). While "P2P-style" 700MB single-CD rips still seem to be a bit heavy on the artifacts with movies longer than 100 minutes, I've found it to be much more tolerable than DIV3 was. If you'd like to try out the XviD codec but you've already ripped (err... backed up) all you DVDs, I hear Don Pablos (it's a mexican resturant... but if you live near one you probably already know that) is giving away free Blockbuster Movie rental certificates with the purchase of certain meals. Yum.
;)
As for DataPlay... People are pretty happy with compact discs as they stand now. I've never heard any of my friends or their friends or anyone I've met in real life ever tell me they had complaints about the audio quality of CDs. Mostly, people seem to think CDs are just too expensive and a few agree they're too easily scratched. I don't know what kind of crack the inventor of these DataPlay discs was on, but "smaller" is not a good primary selling point. For me, I want as much music available as possible at my fingertips and it was a hard drive based player that provided that. Shame DataPlay wasn't into those, the name would have worked.
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.