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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Aw, man, just another story about Power PC chips... When will we start seeing stories about particle projection cannons?!?
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
The size of a US quarter. Imation just started to sell players here. It was supose to be out a year ago.
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...
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.)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...