Slashdot Mirror
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 /.)"
Cogito ergo sum in Slashdot.
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.
Dataplay, the Boulder-based manufacturer of quarter-sized recordable discs and drives, finally called it quits on Friday
Well, can't say I'm surprised. While there are a VERY few uses for drives this small, the demand is pretty dang small. For what I'm sure is much less, you can get much more storage at a resonable size. So while the technology is very, very cool... it realy doesn't have enough people to support it. (Unless it was made by a big manufacturer like IBM that also did many other things...)
Xvid is a lossy compression codec, Mplayer is a program that plays media files, Xvid included.
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!
As cool as quarter size media might be, I'm not entirely sure that is the way the market should go. 3-inch media seem to be a better bet (certainly as far as compatibility goes) and would be far less likely to get lost or get eaten by babies and pets. When I think of the ideal medium, I think of something that can fit into my shirt pocket, but not so small that it get lost in my hair.
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.
Then this guy who says he communicated with the publisher and they indicated that it would be coming out in three parts starting next July, must be telling a story:
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
--sdem
Return triumphant of XviD?
Talk like Yoda, Timothy is beginning. =P
I, however, will just laugh. If, indeed, "everyone" at this company believed in this format, I'm glad to see them tank. There was some sick shit going on there; here's hoping someone incompetent buys them up and kills their wonderful "technology".
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.
PS: The word is deprecated. A java compiler would hate you.
How about the 3 volume 'Art Of Computer Programming' by Knuth.
Not quite a novel, but meaty enough to give you loads of info, or technical enough to send you to sleep (depending on your mood at the time)... or if you still need sleep, you could try hitting your head with the books, I know how the engine noise and people can just keep you completely wired during a flight.
Enjoy your flight.
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Some interesting quotes:
Instead of using a sequence of instructions to perform a common function, the operating system will use a single instruction that causes the entire function to be performed by the POWER5 microprocessor hardware. Examples of these common functions include TCP/IP processing, communications message-passing operations, and virtual memory subsystem operations, to name a few. The interfaces to all of these silicon accelerators will be open so that other operating systems, for example Linux, can take advantage of them.
and
When POWER6 arrives in 2006, it is expected to extend the Fast Path idea to even higher-level software such as DB2 and WebSphere processing. Again, all of the silicon accelerator interfaces will be open, so other software developers wil be able to take advantage of the improved performance.
Bill Gates once said that when a given bit of functionality is sufficiently standardized, it should be part of the OS.
No we will make it part of the CPU.
The law is a weapon of the government, not a protection for the likes of you. Surely you understand that.
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.
Try reading this Kuro5hin story and posted commenst about that exact thing:
2 69
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/7/11/62356/9
If you don't, a computer sucks at Go because of the exponentially larger solution sets involved.
It's also an excellent book in its own right -- it won the National Book Award in 1974, and it would have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize had the board not considered it obscene and overriden the judges' decision.
It has benefits and disadvantages compared to the other major mpeg4 encoders out there: DIVX 4, DIVX 5, and ffmpeg. For decoding, it doesn't matter nearly as much, but it's good to have a lot of encoders around to keep things competitive.
mplayer is not a video codec.
Keep in mind that Amazon has been saying January, 2003 ever since they stopped saying January, 2002 and this was updated AFTER the date that Amazon originally claimed that it would come out. In my experience, Amazon generally is accurate about release dates, but I don't trust them on this one.
May i suggest Rick Steves' Europe Through the Back Door 2003: The Travel Skills Handbook for Independent Travelers His guide books have tons of interesting info on Europe that most people would never think about.
Time for some tasty Shiner Bock!
Score: -1, Incorrect.
MPlayer is a very good media player for Unixes.
Xvid is an open-source mpeg4 video codec. MPlayer competes with Xine. Xvid competes with Divx.
I can't pass up an opportunity to plug, "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". I found it in the philosophy section of my local bookstore a month ago and have been devouring it ever since.
Here's an Amazon Link
Bigger than a nickle, smaller than a half dollar. Glad to help.
Why not read a short story or two
His Saddam Hussein Germ Warfare novel is inexplicably out of print.
Okay:
Dataplay, the Boulder-based manufacturer of quarter-sized recordable discs and drives...
Does this mean the discs are 25% of the diameter of a regular compact disc? Does it mean they are 25% of the area of a compact disc? Does this mean they are the size of a US 25 cent coin?
Even the Dataplay web site acts coy about the actual size, saying things like: "DataPlay is a miniature media that can be used to play, record and store anything digital." (from the FAQ)
Does anyone know how big these actually are (or were)?
Sailing over the event horizon
Hey Geminatron. Nice way to totally plagiarize someone else's post. Why don't you try to write your own comments next time?
Prevent email address forgery. Publish SPF records for y
- 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.
if only there was a standard for lossless audio on 3-inch DVDs.....
Can MLP be run at 44 kHz 16-bit stereo? If so, use the DV/DA standard. If not, use DVD-Video with blank video and PCM audio.
Now just wait for the 3-inch DVD-R blanks to come out.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Aw, man, just another story about Power PC chips... When will we start seeing stories about particle projection cannons?!?
But you have to question it. While it may seem cool to do things like factor polynomials with one instruction, or do TCP packet header filling, how useful is this?
Because you need much more die space for decoding of instructions, it becomes harder to ramp CISC up to higher clock speeds. That's why RISC was introduced.
Now, unless you've been asleep for 12 years, you know that modern x86 CPUs are a combination: CISC instruction set (and benefits thereof) with a fast-path decoder for most commonly used instructions, with a slower conversion for more complex/less used x86 instructions, all of which are crunched through a RISC core which has more registers and other bits to aid parallel pipelining of instructions. So far this has proven to be really great. Transmeta's even taking it a step further by introducing codemorphing, which lets the entire CPU just be a JIT x86 environment running on a VLIW core.
Why are they going this way? It doesn't really seem to make sense compared to the traditional trends in computer processor design.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Not quite right. Even *Deep* Blue couldn't map out an entire game, or even all possibilities in its 25(?) moves ahead. That would constitute perfect play, which is totally beyond the capability of any computer that we could currently conceive of being built. It would stop processing a line of possibility if it looked too bad (like "hmm, if I make this move I lose my queen and two rooks, so let's stop worrying about that one).
I don't understand what you mean by saying that the hard part is writing a random number generator. Random number generation it itself doesn't have anything to do with much. The question is the algorithms used to find the more likely moves.
As for Go needing 10 times as much storage, you are so far off that I worry that you don't know the meaning of the number 10! Each chess move gives about 35 legal options. A player in a Go move has about 200 possible moves on average (the number starts at 361 and mostly goes down from there). After five moves from each player there are about 1.8 billion possible positions in chess -- and 64 trillion for Go. That's a factor of 32,000 more positions, and that's only five moves in. Go games usually have more moves than chess games.
It is really laughable to even suggest that all the possible moves in Go will be stored in a computer within the next 500 years. Though that isn't necessary to beat a human shodan (as I mentioned, chess programs don't evaluate ALL of the possible positions). What's really necessary to beat a human master at Go is to be able to make some judgement on the relative value of different positions. Computers can't currently do that properly, so while a chess computer searches for that perfect move that forces checkmate, the computer playing Go has a hard time understanding what it's supposed to be searching for.
A good article I found and got some numbers from is http://www.anusha.com/times-go.htm.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I've done a lot of research into Combinatorial AI design for my program, Gamazons, which has a branching factor that makes chess look like childs play (the opening move has 3-4k different possibilities). For these types of programs, you've got a few primary factors that make a big difference in how your game plays. You need to search fast & deep, prune out as many paths as you can that won't produce worthwhile results. But then you need really good heuristics that give a value to a board state. You have to be careful that your heuristics are incredibly efficient, because your heuristic function will be run on every node (board state) in the search tree. However, from what I've noticed in my program, the quality of the heuristics is the most critical part of the whole game. It doesn't matter much how deep fast and deep you can search if your searching gives inaccurate values to the board states.
It's the same with chess games. Sure, having lots of big beefy hardware was a nice factor for Big Blue, but the defining factor that really made it shine was the quality of its heuristics. They had on staff a number of grand chessmasters as well as a database of all the big games to develop a good opening book (real chess programs don't start searching & evaluating board states until a good 10-15 moves into the game. They search these out ahead of time and store them on disk as the opening book).
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
Anyone have any good recommendations on geek books suitable for 26+ hours of flying
;-)
26+ hours? Are you coming from Oz or New Zealand?
I'd suggest-- as you might guess from my nickname-- two of Vernor Vinge's novels: A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky. The two are technically a novel and its prequel, but they're really only linked thematically. And they're both outstanding works of science fiction with particular appeal to computer geeks. Both are available in paperback, but they're long enough by far to keep you occupied while you're en route.
Eighteen months ago, my official org-charted job title was "Programmer-at-Arms," inspired by Deepness. These are two really cool books.
I write in my journal
Oops, my link to Gamazons didn't work. Lets see if this one does any better.
Looking for a computer support specialist for your small business? Check out
It's 13 hours each way, and I'll be damned if I'll pay money to fly books all the way to Europe only to sit about reading them while there. Except for those odd in-between hours that first night/morning, I plan on looking at things which are part of a scenic view, not imagining them.
I'd suggest-- as you might guess from my nickname-- two of Vernor Vinge's novels: A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.
Way cool. I'll definitely check them out. Thanks for the suggestions!
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Don't you wish someone would dream up and create a music player, maybe with a little tiny hard drive in it, something like 20 gigs say, and have a nice big screen and make it light and small? Oh, and add a great user interface and a simple wheel to make it work very easy. And sync it with a desktop. And let me put whatever songs I want on it without having to help pay for Valenti's new pool lining.
If only...
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's 13 hours each way....
Earlier this year I got roped into a last-minute business trip from to Sydney. (I live in the US.) Thing is-- and I know this makes me sound like a nerd-- I was just getting started on the fourth Harry Potter book, and I was really digging it. So, yeah, I lugged a giant hardcover book from the US to Australia-- about 24 hours from door to door, because I don't live in Los Angeles-- and back.
Was it worth it? Shit, yeah. The in-flight movies were terrible. I've blocked most of 'em out, but I remember turning off "Zoolander." I actually chose to sit there and stare at the back of the seat in front of me rather than watch that steaming pile of crap. If I hadn't had my book, I would have gone quietly nuts.
Come on, teleportation.
I write in my journal
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.)you can read more about it here
The last time I flew to England it was on Virgin, and I didn't have a book, laptop, palm pilot, anything. Bad idea. You're dead right: the movies were absolutely horrible. I actually found myself playing Nintendo (think Super Mario-era Nintendo) during the flight the movies were so bad. Hell, there were little kids who wouldn't even play it. But it was better than the movies. I don't even remember what was playing and I don't think I want to see "Undercover Brother" this time, either. Which is why I asked for book recommendations. I honestly thought that Quicksilver would be out in time and hadn't even though about what to get.
Come on, teleportation.
The world is an incredibly small place now; I shudder to think what teleportation will do to it. I remember in the early 80's my older brother went to England and we were beside ourselves because he brought back Dr Who stuff, books (I wanted a British dictionary), records (vinyl, kids: Two Tone stuff, The Clash, The Damned, Buzzcocks, etc, etc) and creepers/Doc Martens because we couldn't get them anywhere in Phoenix. We had to make roadtrips to LA for the music and such and even then we didn't get everything we wanted (although we usually got some things we didn't). Remember "imports"? Man, that was the shit when the copy you ordered came in like 19 weeks later. I still have a blue vinyl Captain Sensible Birthday EP a guy carried back in a suitcase for me. Got a red vinyl copy of Strawberries, signed Madness LPs, some Police B-sides, and a bunch of other junk I have to rip someday, too. But now you can get it all off the Net. Or at Sam Goody. There's about four corporations who own everything, and it's the same stuff no matter where you go.
It used to mean going to England or France or Pakistan or where ever meant that you were going to some place that was different than where you were form. You got and tasted and smelled stuff you couldn't get back home. The most popular restaurant I saw when I was last in London was TGI Fridays and the most popular beer was Budweiser. You could hardly get away from Budweiser. One barkeep was telling me that he ran out of it weekly. The Virgin Megastore there had everything I can get here. I did wind up buying a driving game, though. It was right-hand drive. Now, going there is almost like going to Seattle, except everyone sounds funny. I'l have to remember to stay in th epubs and on the back streets.
Once teleportation hits, the world really will be flat.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
You know, it's pretty understandable that some people would get deprecate and depreciate confused. (or is the other way around, and deprecate and depreciate get some people confused?)
: to pray against (as an evil) b : to seek to avert <deprecate the wrath ... of the Roman : to express disapproval of : make little of <speaks five languages ... but deprecate s this facility -- Time> ... novelists -- New Yorker>
: to lower in estimation or esteem : to lower the price or estimated value of : to fall in value
/-sh&-b&l/ /-"prE-shE-'A-sh&n/ /-'prE-sh&-tiv,
/-shE-"A-t&r/ /-sh&-"tOr-E,
Remember deprecation is what happens to old code, and depreciation is what happens to old computers.
And depricated? That's the condition of a BMW after you remove all the lawyers.
deprecate
Pronunciation: 'de-pri-"kAt
Function: transitive verb
Inflected Form(s): -cated; -cating
Etymology: Latin deprecatus, past participle of deprecari to avert by prayer, from de- + precari to pray
Date: 1628
1 a archaic
people -- Tobias Smollett>
2
3 a : PLAY DOWN
b: BELITTLE, DISPARAGE
<the most reluctantly admired and least easily deprecated of
depreciate
Pronunciation: di-'prE-shE-"At
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): -ated; -ating
Etymology: Late Latin depretiatus, past participle of depretiare, from Latin de- + pretium price
Date: 15th century
transitive senses
1
2
intransitive senses
synonym see DECRY
- depreciable
adjective
- depreciatingly/-shE-"A-ti[ng]-lE/
adverb
- depreciation
noun
- depreciative
-shE-"A-tiv/ adjective
- depreciator
noun
- depreciatory
-"tor-/ adjective
For the sake of us outside the US, just how big is a quarter, anyway?
They are about half the size of a dataplay disk, actualy.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
TCP in the CPU!? what crack are these guys smoking? The correct thing to do would be to include hardware in the NIC to accelerate TCP/IP stuff.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
What's really necessary to beat a human master at Go is to be able to make some judgement on the relative value of different positions. Computers can't currently do that properly, so while a chess computer searches for that perfect move that forces checkmate, the computer playing Go has a hard time understanding what it's supposed to be searching for.
Well, this really says a lot more about the people writing the Go playing code then it does about the computers themselves.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Actually, the exponentially larger sets involved are not the main issue. Sure, it makes finding a good move a longer task, but remember Moore's law: computer power grows exponentially too. So, if that was the only problem, we could guaranty that computers would eventually become go experts.
However, the main problem is deeper. It is at the root of the combinatorial game theory that sits behind Fritz' victories: the evaluation function. As mentioned in the article you link to:
Computers are just number crunching machines. If you can't feed them with numbers, them will do you no good. So that's what this evaluation function does: it takes a given board situation, and evaluates its value to the player. These values are computed for all the leaves of the explored moves tree, and are used to prune this tree down. Finally, you are left with the best next move. Therefore, 'best' depends not just on the size of the tree, but also on the quality of the evaluation function.
The bottom line is:
And that is exactly what the problem is. While it is pretty easy to say (compute!) who has an edge on a chess board, we still haven't found a good computational way to do judge the value of a go board situation. Of course experts go players DO have a feeling of a better situation, but that's exactly it: a matter of feelings, not of equations. Until we have put these go feelings into equations, whatever the processing power, computers will just suck at go.
I code, therefore I am.
Although the main XviD site was taken down for 3 months, the community has still been going strong, testing and debugging the codec. You might want to check them out at their forum
Q #131: why does mplayer sucks? :)
A: why not?
Q #132: I can't see any picture, only hear the sound
A: you are blind
Q: #133: I have configured and compiled mplayer, how do I use it?
A: try sticking it up your ass.
Q: mplayer crashing with every files. i've attached output of ls -la /etc/shadow
A: we need also output of cat
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
What geek doesn't like the math, science, logic, and illogic in Alice?
± 29 dB
For those of you wondering where the 'box girder bridge' reference originates...
"How To Do It"The cast:
ALAN
John Cleese
NOEL
Graham Chapman
JACKIE
Eric Idle
The sketch:
(Cut to a sign saying 'How to do it'. Music. Pull out to reveal a 'Blue Peter' type set. Sitting casually on the edge of a dais an three presenters in sweaters - Noel, Jackie and Alan - plus a large bloodhound.)
Alan: Hello.
Noel: Hello.
Alan: Well, last week we showed you how to become a gynaecologist. And this week on 'How to do it' we're going to show you how to play the flute, how to split an atom, how to construct a box girder bridge, how to irrigate the Sahara Desert and make vast new areas of land cultivatable, but first, here's Jackie to tell you all how to rid the world of all known diseases.
Jackie: Hello, Alan.
Alan: Hello, Jackie.
Jackie: Well, first of all become a doctor and discover a marvellous cure for something, and then, when the medical profession really starts to take notice of you, you can jolly well tell them what to do and make sure they get everything right so there'll never be any diseases ever again.
Alan: Thanks, Jackie. Great idea. How to play the flute. (picking up a flute) Well here we are. You blow there and you move your fingers up and down here.
Noel: Great, great, Alan. Well, next week we'Ll be showing you how black and white people can live together in peace and harmony, and Alan will be over in Moscow showing us how to reconcile the Russians and the Chinese. So, until next week, cheerio.
Alan: Bye.
Jackie: Bye.
(Children's music.)
Anybody want a peanut?
a computer sucks at Go because of the exponentially larger solution sets involved
More accurately, computers suck at Go because we don't know how the brain works well enough to program computers to think like people (to intuitively see the gestalt of a game position), therefore we must resort to modified brute force heuristics, and the exponentially larger solution set of Go makes it poorly adaptable to this method of programming.
However, if we did know how to program computers to work like brains, it's theoretically possible that even antiquated 386 level hardware would be adequate to beat us at Go, chess or any other sort of board game.
In a nutshell we are talking about the Holy Grail of computing: A.I.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
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.
Geez... I had never even thought to go back to the classics...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Where Dataplay does (did?) have a cooler formfactor, it was only 500mb and write once.
:) And it's rewriteable! No DRM either :)
Phillips now has a bluelaser system, working prototype, the size of a two euro coin which holds one gig of data
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
Wow! Annotated by Garnder! I'm definitely going to have to get that.
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.
---
DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
These folks missed the boat. Not even IBM can make a go of microdrives, that's why they sold the division. I want one of those 1G models. If these folks can make a compact flash drive that fits their disks, that would be cool. They have a big race to beat falling compact flash prices.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Can SD media hold 500MB and only cost a few dollars each?
What does "depreciate" have to do with anything?
The arguement is whether "deprecate" is spelled "depricate" or "depracate", both of which are wrong.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Mirriam-Webster (the site I linked) offers the same spelling correction.
It's interesting that, of all the moderations applied to your comment, slashdot picks "Offtopic" as the one to display.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Hm, it seems like you just went to the wrong places... really, Budweiser is dogs piss, I fing it amazing that people here in Britain drink it.
Without getting into specialist ales, you should try some bitter like Directors, or Youngs Ordinary. If you have to go for a lager, the most consistently quality is good old Stella, affectionately known as Wifebeater due to its sometimes excessive behaviour altering side effects. Caffreys is good for an almost hangover free 10 to 14 pint pub crawl (may take additional training).
And really, calling TGIs a restaurant is pushing it, eh?
I find it amazing people anywhere drink it. I know a joke which applies here:
Q: Why is drinking Budweiser like having sex in a canoe?
A: Because it's fscking close to water.
Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week...
Without getting into specialist ales, you should try some bitter like Directors, or Youngs Ordinary. If you have to go for a lager, the most consistently quality is good old Stella, affectionately known as Wifebeater due to its sometimes excessive behaviour altering side effects. Caffreys is good for an almost hangover free 10 to 14 pint pub crawl (may take additional training).
I'll give the bitters a go, for certain. And I hadn't noticed the altering effects of Stella. But I'm normally fairly even tempered even in the face of the worst alcoholic adversity. If you're ever in the US, try King Cobra (or any other "beer" which comes in a 40 ounce bottle) if you want a sample of American riot beer.
I really appreciate the pub crawl advice. We're planning on doing a Soho crawl. I'll defintely keep the Caffreys advice in mind (as long as I'm able to, at least).
And really, calling TGIs a restaurant is pushing it, eh?
Yeah, that's certainly giving it something it shouldn't have. I just didn't know the word for "pretentious meat market-ish place which serves awful food and is filled with idiotic, cologne-drenched beeper salesmen either yelling at some inane sporting event on a loud TV or trying to tag the nearest waitress".
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
Hard to say. I personally suspect it displays the most negative, as I've had comments with, say, 3 "Interesting" and 1 "Flamebait" and it displays "Flamebait".
Well, I've been planning to mess with slashcode after this semester is over, I guess that's something to look for.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Yeah, I think so. We just did like you did. Or if I saw a tap handle that had an unknown name on it, I'd ask about it.
It was just really hard to get away from Bud advertising and feel like we were in a "real British pub" and not some US imitation.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.